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The UK singer-songwriter’s 1998 album remains a phenomenon that defies explanation: a modest collection of love songs recorded in his bedroom by an Everyman who was suddenly Everywhere. | The UK singer-songwriter’s 1998 album remains a phenomenon that defies explanation: a modest collection of love songs recorded in his bedroom by an Everyman who was suddenly Everywhere. | David Gray: White Ladder (20th Anniversary Edition) | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/david-gray-white-ladder-20th-anniversary-edition/ | White Ladder (20th Anniversary Edition) | David Gray was once renowned for how famous he wasn’t—a singer-songwriter’s singer-songwriter, denied mainstream success in a way that registered as injustice by his cult of fans and admirers. Abandoned by EMI after 1996’s self-deprecatingly titled Sell, Sell, Sell did the exact opposite, the British musician recorded his fourth album, White Ladder, in his apartment and released it on his own IHT label; the record subsequently achieved the rarefied level of ubiquity where its omnipresence became one of its defining characteristics.
In a snide yet mostly positive review of White Ladder’s 2000 reissue, NME imagined Gray’s “eyes-closed sincerity” soundtracking mortgage ads until the end of time. “A whole generation of couples stared meaningfully into each other’s eyes as they performed their first wedding dance to ‘This Year’s Love,’” The Guardian quipped in 2010. “Without reverting to excessive hyperbole, there wasn't a home in Ireland that didn't own a copy of David Gray's breakthrough album,” one local paper claimed. In a nation that produced U2, the Corrs, and Clannad, White Ladder remains the best-selling album of all time.
By 2001, Gray was on a level with Eminem and Britney Spears—at least in the sense that his music was used alongside theirs to torture prisoners at Guantanamo; Haj Ali, photographed as a hooded prisoner of war in Abu Ghraib, claimed that he was stripped, handcuffed and forced to hear a loop of “Babylon” so loud that he feared his head would burst. Twenty years later, that Gray never really felt as famous or infamous as Eminem or Britney Spears only enhances White Ladder’s aura as an isolated incident that defies explanation: a modest collection of songs about lost love, drinking, and drinking over lost love, by an Everyman who was soon Everywhere.
Adding 1998’s state-of-the-art electronic beats to his sturdy, occasionally sappy folk-pop gave White Ladder an air of novelty, even if it was hardly anomalous during a time when the coffee house and the club converged into a veritable subgenre: Think, for instance, of Everything But the Girl’s Walking Wounded, or Beth Orton collaborating with William Orbit. Though “Sail Away” featured production from Marius de Vries, a collaborator of Bjork and Madonna, White Ladder wasn’t intended as a reinvention. The newly aerodynamic production contrasted with Gray’s endearingly po-faced image, emphasizing what he already was: a self-described sincere guy with a guitar, and also a man slightly out of time, someone watching from the periphery as others less burdened by regret lived, laughed, and danced without care. Paul Hartnoll of Orbital weaponized the four-on-the-floor thump that brings “Please Forgive Me” to a climax into an unlikely Ibiza smash, while the single “Babylon” was given an industrial remake. But on White Ladder, these underlying elements of dance music sounded like they were being experienced from a safe and sad distance, a drum’n’bass track muffled by a midnight cab’s dull engine roar. The synthetic percussion of White Ladder betrays its origins as a home-recorded folktronica album—the hollowed-out trip-hop drums of “Nightblindness” bear the requisite influence of Radiohead’s “Climbing Up the Walls,” while the lightly carbonated shuffle of “Silver Lining” makes Gray sound like he’s suspended in a glass of OK Cola for six minutes.
“Please Forgive Me” was also included in the pilot of Scrubs, more indicative than its club cameos of the album’s future in meet-cute media. Half of its 10 songs were released as singles, so White Ladder clearly worked as a collection of episodes that could be experienced discretely and repeatedly. There’s no linguistic subtext to any song on White Ladder: Recall that Gray’s sincerity and plainspokenness are his main selling points, but the lack of specificity leaves space for emotional interpretation. “This Year’s Love” likely did soundtrack countless wedding dances and many drank alone to it. The pleas of “Sail Away” are either bravely passionate or absolutely desperate; “We’re Not Right” can either be a blithe acceptance of alcoholism’s grim fate or an agent for change. “Babylon” tells a story with a clear conflict and resolution that still leaves room for projection—to tell someone you love them or that you loved them or even that you wish you had told them these things. “If you want it, come and get it for crying out loud,” and whatever it was, you could get it: “Babylon” was a festival anthem disguised as a counterbalance to the monsters of Glastonbury.
The frontloading of its biggest, most unabashedly optimistic hits lends White Ladder a narrative thread: As I always imagined it, here was a skeptical romantic hitting the bars with a precarious hope of finding connection; slowly sulking into the corner while his friends laughed and flirted; bitterly going home to commiserate with his favorite records. It all ends with an unfathomably sad, nine-minute cover of Soft Cell’s “Say Hello, Wave Goodbye” that interpolates Van Morrison’s “Madame George” and “Into the Mystic.”
White Ladder might not exist without Dave Matthews; Gray promoted the album while opening for Matthews, a close friend and a notable influence on White Ladder’s more grating vocal tics—on the title track, when Gray wheezes, “There’s no rhyme or reeeeeason,” a John Popper harmonica solo wouldn’t be entirely unexpected. Eventually, Gray made the relationship officially symbiotic when White Ladder became the inaugural release on Matthew’s ATO Records, the eventual launchpad for similarly rootsy sensations like My Morning Jacket and Alabama Shakes.
A curious thing happened: Gray’s album, clearly adult-contemporary in both sound and subject matter, became a hit with people a decade younger than the 30-something singer-songwriter. “Gap-year students mouthed the lyrics to ‘Sail Away’ as they backpacked around Nepal. Young professionals listened to ‘Babylon’ as they assembled Ikea furniture in their riverside development flats,” The Guardian observed; in the same article, Gray groused at the way White Ladder’s commercial success had led him to be “dismissed as slight.”
To counter that dismissal, the subsequent compilations The EPs 1992-1994 and Lost Songs 95-98 wisely capitalized on Gray’s sudden fame while reminding new fans of his humble origins. The right-sizing of his public persona was made explicit by 2002’s muted and morose A New Day at Midnight, which began with a song called “Dead in the Water.” A New Day at Midnight still sold well, if not quite at White Ladder levels: 4x platinum in the UK instead of 10x, and in America, gold instead of platinum; likewise, the chart success of 2005’s Life in Slow Motion could only be considered disappointing by the standards of White Ladder. Life in Slow Motion was Gray’s last major-label album before Draw the Line brought him full circle four years later, without a label and recording in his own studio (albeit an upgrade from his apartment to a studio once owned by the Eurythmics).
While White Ladder was virtually inescapable in public spaces during the early 2000s, its influence has dissipated in the time since, though it is audible in the crystalline, cosmic folk of Amen Dunes’ 2018 album Freedom. Gray himself suggested that he had paved the way for folk-pop idols like Ed Sheeran and James Blunt. “When I started out, a man with a guitar baring his soul wasn't in vogue at all. Suddenly, it's everywhere!” Gray exclaimed in 2011, despite soul-bearing guitar men being the primary vessel for acclaimed rock music for the past 50 years.
Yet he’s not totally wrong. Man or woman, guitar or no guitar, the world will always be full of people who believe that they’re the only ones truly baring their soul, doing so in a way that brings them constant misunderstanding and disappointment at their jobs and relationships, an exception in a world where dishonesty and artifice are the rule and guys like David Gray get dropped from their label. And then an album like White Ladder comes along to sell millions of copies and offer the hope that living the exact same way can be the best revenge.
Buy: Rough Trade
(Pitchfork may earn a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.) | 2020-02-21T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2020-02-21T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Pop/R&B | AWAL / IHT | February 21, 2020 | 7.9 | c678ad43-2de0-4286-9384-ccc3d15f8ff2 | Ian Cohen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ian-cohen/ | |
Much-missed underground hip-hop producer returns with an offbeat old-school mix taken from the archives of Traffic Entertainment Group. | Much-missed underground hip-hop producer returns with an offbeat old-school mix taken from the archives of Traffic Entertainment Group. | Edan: Echo Party | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/13720-echo-party/ | Echo Party | For a dude who's been pegged as an old-school throwback, Edan's had this odd habit of turning hip-hop chronology into some kind of broken kaleidoscope. Just listen to the congealing synthesizers on "'83 Wildin" or the absinthe jazz piano of "Ultra '88 (Tribute)" from 2002's Primitive Plus and try to figure out just how they might've played in their real-world titular years-- not to mention 2005's Beauty and the Beat, which took its Bomb Squad-in-Beatles-wigs premise to a bewildering, psychedelic extreme. The fact that Edan's only rarely managed to create anything as memorable since then-- indeed, much of anything at all-- has remained one of underground rap's more nagging absences. And his first major undertaking in four years turning out to be a 29-minute mix might feel like more of a stopgap than the long-anticipated follow-up that fans have almost given up waiting for.
Except that Echo Party is, as stopgaps go, completely deranged. Traffic Entertainment Group got the idea to set a mostly idle Edan loose on their old-school hip-hop archives for the purposes of creating a mix, and some two years' worth of mysterious alchemy later, the end result is, for good and bad, one of the weirder attempts to revamp the concept of an early-80s hip-hop tribute. It starts out conventionally enough-- a recognizable post-disco clap-break with some familiar vintage rockin'-it-shockin'-it lyricism, albeit sourced from a 12" with more crackle than a burning sheet of bubble wrap. Then a creaky sounding piece of vintage electronics comes squeaking in like some kind of robotic slide whistle, the introductory break gets backspun into a sort of hissing slurp-beat, and things just go more haywire from there.
Not to say that Echo Party isn't well-constructed. The mix does a surprisingly good job of maintaining a tight, steady momentum for most of its length, and there's more than its fair share of percussive breakdowns-- sourced from hip-hop, funk, disco, and go-go rhythms-- that prove Edan's ear is just as finely tuned to a great straight-up beat-drop as it is to the psychotropic inner-space quirks that've been his calling card. And it's not purely obscurantist thanks to appearances by the fondly remembered Mr. Magic and Spyder-D. But it does seem to draw from some of the odder corners of the epoch: "Rapper's Delight" basslines gone filthy, session-band noodling, raps about ditching this doomed planet for a life in outer space. And there are almost no moments where an MC's line is left unmolested-- lines get flipped and reversed, chopped up into haywire-synapse stammers, and tossed down into dubbed-out concrete bunkers so their voices can justify the mix's name.
And the further Echo Party goes along, the deeper it descends into full-blown chaos, since Edan doesn't just stop at manipulating the sounds that already existed on the wax he had to work with. Aside from pulling a few odd tweaks with tape manipulation and reverb, Edan layers over his own instrumentation-- self-aware sloppy guitars, wobbly drum machines, banks of diseased-sounding synthesizers-- and pours it on to the point where most of the mix's last half diverts from the old-school mix premise and turns into a disorienting, almost grotesque flare-up of distorted fuzz and horror. And yet it still keeps that b-boy pulse going steady-- somehow, against all laws of nature and physics, though you might have to strain to focus on it. You could put together some pretty fucking alarming uprock routines to this. (An aside: the melody to b-boy national anthem "Apache" does appear-- but, along with a brief interpolation of the Rolling Stones' "Miss You"-- it comes via kazoo.)
Twenty-nine minutes does feel a bit short for a full-length-priced CD-- and ferchrissakes, get the CD, because the liner booklet that comes with it is a ridiculously elaborate typewritten transcript of every single thing that happens in the mix and it looks like some kind of rogue producer's shack-concocted manifesto. And this still isn't quite the official third full-length that people have been waiting for; Edan doesn't actually pick up the mic to rap on this thing (though he robotulates his voice near the end to thank you for listening). But if you've ever wanted to hear classic cuts from the dawn of hip hop turned into hallucinogenic setpieces that knock and clang like glitched-up King Tubby, Echo Party should justify whatever the hell it is Edan's been doing with his time over the past four years. | 2009-12-01T01:00:03.000-05:00 | 2009-12-01T01:00:03.000-05:00 | Rap | Traffic Entertainment | December 1, 2009 | 6.8 | c68110f6-e51c-4ec6-ada4-bd96390b5559 | Nate Patrin | https://pitchfork.com/staff/nate-patrin/ | null |
The fourth album from Vancouver hard rock band Black Mountain rolls everything up the band has ever done—the heavy riffs, the prog ambitions, and the pop smarts—into an alternate-universe version of classic-rock history. | The fourth album from Vancouver hard rock band Black Mountain rolls everything up the band has ever done—the heavy riffs, the prog ambitions, and the pop smarts—into an alternate-universe version of classic-rock history. | Black Mountain: IV | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21595-iv/ | IV | For most rock bands, naming an album IV may imply a lack of imagination, but coming from such studious classic-rock scholars as Black Mountain, it's a gesture loaded with significance. As history has shown, hard-rock bands tend to view their discographies like batting orders, and—whether officially or otherwise— a numerically branded "IV" has come to represent the clean-up hitter stepping up to the plate with the bases loaded. It's the moment where bands capitalize on established strengths and set out for parts unknown. And Black Mountain's IV plays the fourth-album role to a tee, rolling up the weed-scented riffage of their 2005 self-titled debut, the prog-sized ambitions of In the Future, and the pop-focussed finesse of Wilderness Heart, all while embracing electronics with a zeal that suggests the band's relationship with modern music has become somewhat less tortured.
But despite its highly evocative title, IV doesn't so much relive classic-rock history as suggest a different course for it. By the late 1970s, many dinosaur rock acts had either gone disco or at least slickened up their sound to compete with it. And through that process, the synthesizer would come to represent a musical cancer to purists, the agent through which the majesty of rock got diluted into nancy-boy new wave and poofed-up hair-metal power ballads. IV, however, reminds us that technologically curious early adopters like Rush, Led Zeppelin, and Pink Floyd were among the original synth-pop bands, using push-button machinery to expand and enhance their fantastical vision rather than cloud it. IV, accordingly, is the sound of a Black Mountain that holds 2112 and "Subdivisions" in equally high regard, that gets as much mileage out of In Through the Out Door as "Black Dog," and that has upgraded its joint-assembly surface of choice from Meddle to The Wall. It presents an alternate '80s where the progressive, guitar-powered rock that dominated the preceding decade successfully adapted to pop's synth-centric shift, instead of becoming an instant anachronism.
But even if Jeremy Schmidt's keyboard rig gets as much of a workout here as Stephen McBean's effects-pedal board, by this point, Black Mountain possess a peculiar personality that transcends their throwback stoner-rock rep. That's in large part due to the singular beauty-and-the-beard dynamic between vocalists Amber Webber and McBean, whose unnervingly calm yet often dread-ridden vocals make them sound like that strange, water bottle-hoarding couple down the road whose end-times prophecies just might be coming true. Secure in that foundation, Black Mountain can confidently send their referentialism into overdrive, pilfering their record collections for musical, lyrical and spiritual inspiration but giving it their own subversive spin.
Sometimes, the nods don't go beyond the titles. "Florian Saucer Attack" manages to pack in shout-outs to two avant icons in its three-word name, though the song itself is an exhilarating, asphalt-ripping robo-rocker that sounds like Webber doing donuts from behind the wheel of the Knight Rider's KITT. "(Over & Over) The Chain," meanwhile, has nothing to do with the name-checked MC5 or Fleetwood Mac classics—rather, its protracted, synth symphony intro lures you into some late-night occult ceremony, with McBean's squealing guitar solo unsubtly evoking the tortured cries of a human-sacrifice candidate being burned alive.
Other quotes are more subtle and sly: the splendorous electro-psych sea shanty "You Can Dream" takes its chorus refrain from Bruce Springsteen's favourite Suicide song; the acoustic-powered goth-pop of "Cemetery Breeding" wraps its meditations on dying friends in an appropriately spooked synth riff straight out of David Bowie's "Ashes to Ashes." But, occasionally, Black Mountain can't resist unabashed homage: from its droning, fever-dream ambience to its slack acoustic strums to its drowsy drum fills, "Crucify Me" is the proud, pouch-baby spawn of Big Star's "Kangaroo." (That said, McBean and Webber's gorgeous, honey-dipped harmonies imagine what could've been had Alex Chilton tightened up the song just enough to get it onto late-'70s soft-rock radio.)
When they first emerged 12 years ago, Black Mountain appeared to be the long-haired, tattooed antidote to fellow Vancouverites the New Pornographers—a supergroup ensemble corralled by a local scene veteran that stripped hard rock of macho cliché just as the New Pornographers gave skinny-tied power pop some extra width. Black Mountain are still referring to that original playbook: like early signature track "Don't Run Our Hearts Around," IV's opener "Mothers of the Sun" is a withering protest anthem sandwiched by a tectonic plate-shifting riff that leaves a greater impression than the verses and choruses. But this time out, Black Mountain redirect their bulldozing boogie into a funky, soul-clapped breakdown and laser show-worthy synth solo, showing how they've progressed beyond simple rock-and-awe tactics. And nowhere is that sense of patience more pronounced than in IV's nine-minute closer, "Space to Bakersfield," an airy, eerie sci-fi lullaby that finds McBean and Webber ominously repeating the song's two-line lyric like adrift astronauts whose oxygen supply is about to run out. Where they once aspired to be your blood-pumping druganaut, Black Mountain now excel at the art of making you uncomfortably numb. | 2016-03-31T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-03-31T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Jagjaguwar | March 31, 2016 | 7.5 | c6853689-7832-4db0-8ebc-a1ae8c445bd2 | Stuart Berman | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stuart-berman/ | null |
Trumpeter jaimie branch and drummer Jason Nazary team up with producer Jeff Parker on an album of electronic jazz fusion and aqueous psychedelia. | Trumpeter jaimie branch and drummer Jason Nazary team up with producer Jeff Parker on an album of electronic jazz fusion and aqueous psychedelia. | Anteloper: Pink Dolphins | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/anteloper-pink-dolphins/ | Pink Dolphins | It’s easy to say that jaimie branch is one of the most exciting trumpeters to bubble up in recent years—much easier than saying just what kind of trumpeter she is. The Brooklyn resident honed her punk intensity and classical training in a Chicago scene where the borders between rock, free jazz, and electronic music are porous, and it shows. Yet her distinctive instrumental voice and spirit of refined anarchy make her work cohesive. She turns tense, dashing themes that wouldn’t seem amiss on an Arcade Fire song into exploded-view drawings of extended technique and free expression, her tone bleeding rainbows at the edges but almost translucently pure in the center.
Though branch has worked with a number of indie bands, including TV on the Radio and Bell Orchestre, she’s best known as the bandleader of Fly or Die, with bassist Jason Ajemian, cellist Tomeka Reid, and drummer Chad Taylor—all of them heavy players in the heady Chicago of Tortoise, Rob Mazurek, Ken Vandermark, Thrill Jockey, and International Anthem. While the quartet’s two acclaimed albums are unruly and roving, full of Dutch angles and long shadows, they are clearly acoustic jazz. Pink Dolphins, by branch and Jason Nazary, is something else, in every sense.
The album’s title comes from the pink river dolphins of the Amazon, partly in tribute to branch’s Colombian heritage but also simply for what she calls their “aquadelic” vibe. (The cover image, which branch painted, resembles a lost Basquiat design for a 1980s Trapper Keeper.) The phrase captures the music much more succinctly than my best attempt, which involved Miles Davis and Anna Meredith making a dance record after microdosing together at SeaWorld. Anteloper is a great name and all, but LSD Soundsystem was right there.
The record comes with the imprimatur of Tortoise, the band that reformatted the free energy of Chicago improv for a general audience. Drummer John Herndon added digital finishing to branch’s painted cover, while guitarist Jeff Parker served as the Teo Macero to branch’s ’70s Miles—an avowed influence, along with the giants of tropicália and funk experimenters like Sun Ra, J Dilla, and the fusion torchbearers Harriet Tubman. Like Macero, Parker stretched the definition of a producer, milling down hours of improvised sessions, soliciting new bits, and adding his own guitars and keyboards until an album emerged. Nazary’s trap kit is mixed with pads that trigger electronic effects and sounds, reinforcing a feeling of vibrational connection. The lengthening tracks are deepening waters, which branch’s solos cut across like proud sails.
With “Inia,” the album opens in an aquadelic mode, gathering something between feedback and whale song into a krautrock theme before branch’s trumpet bursts in with signature bravado. On “Delfin Rosado,” a concise showcase of her intrepid style, she works her way over a mutable landscape of mbira funk and leftfield disco to an emphatic climax of layered, stabbing peals. Her knack for trussing riffs and trills into thrilling off-center patterns is also the high point of “Earthlings,” a trip-hop blues with creepshow synths, sawtooth bass, and branch’s low-slung singing, a mix that sounds like Portishead channeling Ella Fitzgerald.
Nazary, an Autechre fan, pays tribute with the relatively dry and jittery setting of “Baby Bota Halloceanation”; in branch’s periodic improvisation, pauses are held like breaths and you never know if the next run will be a curl of smoke or a slashing beam of 16th notes. It’s an austere prelude for the superabundant closer, “One Living Genus,” which has a little of everything: soft sprays of ambient pads, sunstruck walls of psychedelic color, fragrant breezes of harmony, glitch-hop flute, a twinkle of guitar—is that a didgeridoo? The effect is pristine yet distorted, a sunny postcard horizon twisted like a filter’s cutoff knob. If there were any complaint, it would be that it ends perfectly after nine minutes and goes on for six more. But grant them the decompression after their deep dive turned up such sparkling treasure. | 2022-06-23T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2022-06-23T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Jazz / Experimental | International Anthem | June 23, 2022 | 7.6 | c689a601-3bae-4f56-8455-c6e7d14289de | Brian Howe | https://pitchfork.com/staff/brian-howe/ | |
As Tall Friend, the singer-songwriter Charlie Pfaff makes bare-bones indie rock that processes trauma and recovery. Their modest debut cloaks its hurt in warmth. | As Tall Friend, the singer-songwriter Charlie Pfaff makes bare-bones indie rock that processes trauma and recovery. Their modest debut cloaks its hurt in warmth. | Tall Friend: Safely Nobody’s | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/tall-friend-safely-nobodys/ | Safely Nobody’s | Near the end of Tall Friend’s modest, 16-minute debut album Safely Nobody’s, there’s an exchange that could have been pulled from a much more grandiose work. Singer-songwriter Charlie Pfaff receives a call from the hospital from their mom, who wishes them a happy birthday and says “now you’re all grown up.” It’s the kind of well-meaning platitude that parents share with their kids without thinking much about, but the words land with unintended weight. “But mom,” Pfaff sings, in the small, naked voice of so many K Records artists, “I have been grown since I was small.”
In a big screen adaptation of Pfaff’s life, this would be a moment meant for the Oscar highlight reel, a tearful confrontation that ends with the child spelling out the failings of their parent. Pfaff doesn’t have any interest in big moments, though. Instead they let that exchange speak for itself, leaving the listener to fill in the specifics of their lost childhood. Safely Nobody’s is filled with memories like this, the faintest outline of anecdotes that say everything Pfaff wants them to in a minimum of words, set to bare-bones indie rock that’s just as selective as Pfaff’s prose.
On a record Pfaff has described as “a documentation of me packing up and unboxing many, many years of hurt,” Pfaff’s mother looms the largest. It’s her voice that opens the album, by way of an alarming voicemail that gives some insight into her mental state. She’s called to tell Charlie everything will be OK, a reassuring message that’s undermined by its weepy delivery. “I love you so much,” she sniffles, her voice breaking before she hangs up. It’s only a few seconds long, but it speaks volumes—one can only imagine what life must be like with a voicemail box full of these messages. Pfaff’s dad figures into the album, too, but mostly by way of absence or disinterest. When Pfaff hears one of his free jazz records on “Apoptosis,” it is the sound of rejection (“you loved its chaos, but mine’s just tiring.”)
Pfaff’s themes of trauma and recovery overlap heavily with some of the best emo records of the last few years, and like many emo acts, Tall Friend shares a drive to turn their pain into something constructive—or at least to offer a little consolation to anybody who may be in the same boat. Tall Friend doesn’t share emo’s tendencies toward drama and discord, though. As if to create a sense of security, Safely Nobody’s draws from a more welcoming palette of indie rock. A bit of Chan Marshall’s ache creeps into Pfaff’s voice on the Moon Pix-esque “Natural Things,” while the kinked guitars of “Radio” and “Apoptosis” look to Modest Mouse’s sinewy early records, without ever boiling over the way those albums did. The music is itself comforting, calibrated to offset the sting of Pfaff’s lyrics. Even as it opens old wounds, the closer “Small Space” breezes by with the sunny whimsy of a Pavement B-side.
Like Sufjan Stevens’ Carrie & Lowell, a similarly mournful account of a parent unable to live up to their own expectations, Safely Nobody’s doesn’t cast villains. It cloaks its hurt in warmth and gentle humor, never demonstrating any overt resentment. The album’s arc isn’t toward blame or forgiveness, but rather self-sufficiency. In the final moments of “Small Space,” Pfaff likens themself to a plant surviving whatever conditions the world throws at it, able to “take the harsh light and turn it into energy.” It’s far from a happy ending, but on a record about being failed by the people closest to you, figuring out how to subsist on your own is a victory. | 2017-08-15T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-08-15T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Exploding in Sound | August 15, 2017 | 6.8 | c696cb33-483e-4867-8fcf-1283c622cfff | Evan Rytlewski | https://pitchfork.com/staff/evan-rytlewski/ | null |
It was ahead of its time back in 1982, but now Laurie Anderson's debut (and especially its centerpiece "O Superman") sounds just right for a world gone totally wrong. | It was ahead of its time back in 1982, but now Laurie Anderson's debut (and especially its centerpiece "O Superman") sounds just right for a world gone totally wrong. | Laurie Anderson: Big Science | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/10455-big-science/ | Big Science | "In September 2001, I was on tour and played 'O Superman' at Town Hall in New York City," writes Laurie Anderson in the liner notes to her newly reissued Big Science. "The show was one week after 9/11, and as I sang, 'Here come the planes/ They're American planes,' I suddenly realized I was singing about the present."
"Suddenly?" Methinks Anderson is being a touch disingenuous. On the night of September 11, 2001, Anderson was performing at the Park West in Chicago. The air was heavy with dread, confusion, and anger. Waiting for the show to begin, the crowd was talking amongst itself, conversations running the gamut between those three poles. Anderson herself had allegedly spent much of the morning on the phone with her partner Lou Reed, who was back in New York-- and supposedly sitting on the roof of their building watching the Twin Towers burn-- though she made nary a mention of the day's events once she started performing.
The crowd was dead silent throughout, but when Anderson began "O Superman" you could hear the room shift as the already menacing song took on new layers of eerily contemporary meaning. "Hello? Is anybody home? Well, you don't know me, but I know you. And I've got a message to give to you. Here come the planes. So you better get ready." The lyrics chimed out like an answering machine message sent to the future, picked up several decades too late.
That song's mix of politics, Zen-like aphorism, and sentimentalism hit like a punch to the gut as the nation stood on the precipice of the unknown, and the toll the collapse of the Twin Towers would truly take on this country-- and the world-- hadn't quite settled in. So: "suddenly?" No, surely Anderson recognized the renewed power of her (sole) unlikely hit well before she made it home to New York City. Then again, the almost mystically timeless song was in a way always about the shifting "present." Anderson writes that "O Superman (For Massenet)" was inspired by a composition from Jules Massenet's opera Le Cid, "O Souverain", which in turn reminded Anderson of Napoleon's fall at Waterloo. She had also taken into account the bungled U.S. rescue mission in Tehran. It's a song of military arrogance, failure and the price we all pay, recorded for a modest $500 with an NEA grant. In 1981, it went to No. 2 in the UK.
Big Science comprises songs from Anderson's also quite prescient United States project, a multimedia performance art piece cum opera ("It seemed like everyone I knew was working on an opera," she recalls) that depicted America on the brink of digital revolution and capitalist nirvana, where the dollar trumped tradition and the apocalypse-- cultural, political, technological-- loomed large. In fact, given its themes and presentation, much of Big Science sounds every bit about "the present" as "O Superman" does, and its idiosyncratic execution (with stylistic nods to the minimalists and pal William S. Burroughs) has helped the disc weather the passage of time remarkably well. It's less a document of the early 1980s than it is a dark glimpse of the future recorded at the dawn of the Reagan era.
Anderson's ingenious move, musically, was utilizing the vocoder not as a trick but as a melodic tool. It's the first thing you hear on Big Science, looped in "From the Air" like some bizarre man-machine synth. The rest of the track revolves around a circular pattern of blurted sax figures and hypnotic drums. There's virtually nothing about it that screams its age as Anderson intones a wry announcement from a (caveman) pilot of a plummeting flight. "There is no pilot," she speaks. "You are not alone. Standby. This is the time. And this is the record of the time." It's a metaphor for every frightening thing about 20th (and now 21st century) living you can think of, and in its spare way it's enough to scare you silly.
The gloomy ghost town future-music of the title track sounds like the rueful ruminations of someone who sees the end of the world on the horizon and can't help but to chuckle a little at their impending doom. The austere soundscapes of "Walking & Falling" and "Born, Never Asked" convey a similar chilliness laced with a despair at once aloof and oddly wistful. "Example #22" is like a Can/Yoko/Eno chop-shop, its funky wordless denouement part chant, part celebration of the absurd.
In fact, one of the elements that makes Big Science so special is Anderson's sense of humor. In "Let X=X", Anderson offers, with a wink, "I can see the future, and it's a place-- about 70 miles east of here." It's a perverse punchline to some cosmic joke, and the human element back and forth of "It Tango" does little to dissipate the feeling that on Big Science it's the machines that are getting the last laugh at the expense of their masters. The future was yesterday. The future is now. Welcome to the future. | 2007-08-02T01:00:01.000-04:00 | 2007-08-02T01:00:01.000-04:00 | Experimental | Warner Bros. | August 2, 2007 | 8.7 | c6a3b808-07f5-41ed-80bb-e13d68ef7340 | Joshua Klein | https://pitchfork.com/staff/joshua-klein/ | null |
Channeling slasher flicks and Dante’s Inferno, the Austin band’s second album of 2021 is a roiling cauldron of scorched-earth sludge and hardcore that doesn’t take itself too seriously. | Channeling slasher flicks and Dante’s Inferno, the Austin band’s second album of 2021 is a roiling cauldron of scorched-earth sludge and hardcore that doesn’t take itself too seriously. | Portrayal of Guilt: Christfucker | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/portrayal-of-guilt-christfucker/ | Christfucker | Previous Portrayal of Guilt album titles contained words like “pain,” “suffering,” and “alone.” Not this one, which slaps together the poles of holy and profane into something a rebellious middle schooler might carve into a desk. Christfucker doesn’t wholly abandon the band’s preferred subject matter, but as its title suggests, the agony depicted within is more campy than bleak. The music, uglier and more reliant on brute force than the rest of Portrayal of Guilt’s discography, follows suit. The result is oddly refreshing: an artsy, accomplished band turning their second album of the year into a pulpy slasher flick.
January’s thrilling We Are Always Alone had its fair share of blood, flames, and death, but its comparatively existential concerns—“I am trampled by thoughts, weighed down by memories,” “I think about my life and begin to cry”—are like Thoreau to Christfucker’s Dante. After a brief, noisy intro, the band careens into “The Sixth Circle,” a song every bit as hellish as its Divine Comedy namesake: “Pale bodies line the floor on the night of this ritual/Lured by lust, poisoned by fear/Tortured and beaten.” Ensuing songs tell of tongues caressing wounds, “euphoric pain” inflicted by devils, and sick fantasies of unending suffering. Christfucker wasn’t billed as a concept album about corrupting the messiah through sadomasochism, but it could be.
Meeting vocalist and guitarist Matt King’s lyrics at their repulsive subterranean level are the band’s most earth-scorching compositions to date. It’s always been tricky to define Portrayal of Guilt in terms of genre: Are they screamo? Post-hardcore with sludge and grindcore leanings? They further muddy the waters here, splashing noise, industrial, and black metal into their roiling cauldron of influences. But perhaps more indicative of Christfucker’s character are the elements the band have drained out: The space or gentleness that balanced out past highlights such as “Daymare” and “It’s Already Over” are gone, as are all traces of screamo’s traditionally epic guitar leads. The spindly guitar tone that opens “The Sixth Circle” and “Dirge” and pops up in a few other mid-song transitions could be described as “clean,” but take one listen to that twangy skronk and tell me it isn’t the most ominous sound on the album.
While Christfucker may not be delicate or even very intricate, it’s clearly still the work of a band capable of operating in those modes. Drummer James Beveridge remains one of the most fluid players in heavy music, his finesse apparent when he manages to outfit even the most knuckle-dragging beatdowns with flurries of ghost notes. The more orthodox grooves and song structures give bassist Alex Stanfield a chance to slam the strings like he’s in a D-beat band, and while King isn’t granting us his customary full palette of guitar tones, his riffs are the only thing keeping Christfucker in the realm of melodic music. Contributing to the album’s jagged edges is producer Ben Greenberg (of current tourmates Uniform). He and noise expert Mack Chami fully flex their chops on the intro and the booming “Bed of Ash,” and an undercurrent of their harsh static courses throughout. In an era when so much music sets out to address “these troubled times,” which feel hellish enough, Christfucker envisions a more cartoonish garden of sin and punishment, one deserving of ridiculously fun breakdowns and a “horny” tag on Bandcamp rather than solemn, joyless observations of societal decay.
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. | 2021-11-10T00:00:00.000-05:00 | 2021-11-10T00:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Run for Cover | November 10, 2021 | 7.7 | c6a635b1-8b6e-4034-b18b-85f1851c7eb1 | Patrick Lyons | https://pitchfork.com/staff/patrick-lyons/ | |
The Savannah, Ga. metal band Kylesa have been experimenting with their sound for almost 15 years, sometimes to bland results. But their new, self-produced seventh album, Exhausting Fire, is unique to their catalogue: There are moments on it that could possibly close a John Hughes movie. | The Savannah, Ga. metal band Kylesa have been experimenting with their sound for almost 15 years, sometimes to bland results. But their new, self-produced seventh album, Exhausting Fire, is unique to their catalogue: There are moments on it that could possibly close a John Hughes movie. | Kylesa: Exhausting Fire | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21186-exhausting-fire/ | Exhausting Fire | Kylesa have been experimenting with and expanding their sound for almost 15 years. They've kept moving, which is admirable, but when the Savannah, Ga., band started out, they were already unique: a crusty sludge-punk juggernaut that mixed shout-along male-female vocals into anthems that got your adrenaline going even if you weren't paying attention to what they were saying. As time went on, they added a second drummer, and replaced some of the sludge with pop. They mentioned Built to Spill as an influence, as well as early '90s alt rock and riot grrrl. Vocalist/guitarist Phillip Cope included Beach House and Sleepy Sun on a year-end list. The thing is, as much as they tweaked the metal formula, and copped to quieter listening habits, they still basically sounded the same: even on 2013’s chillier, darker, atmospherically expansive Ultraviolet, Kylesa barreled along like Kylesa, but in a slightly less interesting way.
Which is what makes their new, self-produced seventh album, Exhausting Fire, unique to the trio’s catalogue: On these 10 songs, Cope, guitarist/vocalist Laura Pleasants, and drummer Carl McGinley often sound like a different band entirely. The Cope-fronted “Moving Day” is a mid-tempo death rock song that fits nicely between Killing Joke and Christian Death on a mix tape, and stands out as one of my favorite individual songs of the year. Previously, when Kylesa weren't speeding along, they'd stall. When they got too ambitious, you'd wish they'd get back to packing basements. It's not that anything was offensive or embarrassing—it was just bland.
Here, they’ve sharpened their songwriting on tracks that don’t immediately sound like Kylesa, so you get a nice mix of the familiar fist-pumpers along with curious diversions that work. "Lost and Confused" goes from spaced-out mellow to fist-pumping shout-along, then elegantly keeps the pedal pressed to the floor until an atmospheric coda. It's a geat song, one that's inspired a lot of air drumming at my desk this week. Or the amped-up, smeary "Inward Debate", which shows them subtly working deeper psychedelia into the double-drumming. On the longest track, "Shaping the Southern Sky", the band drifts from rock 'n' roll boogie into a cavernous desert of Meat Puppets tumble weeds that builds, over 2 minutes, to a massive rock punch that's worth the wait. Importantly, on the previously mentioned “Moving Day”, you hear Kylesa crafting a legitimate hook, one that could close a John Hughes movie.
There's a lot that echoes the Pixies here, perhaps because on Exhausting, there’s more of a mix between the vocalists: Pleasants handled most of the singing on Ultraviolet, or at least Cope took a backseat, shouting choruses now and then. She has more range than Cope in a traditional sense, but her voice isn’t that compelling alone—you ultimately need his chanted intonations against her spacier tones to keep things interesting. When they both shout, it's golden; they do that a lot here. And, often when you think a song's boring (see: "Growing Roots"), the other singer joins in and saves the day.
Some can't be saved, which happens when you keep expanding. The first movement of opener "Crusher" feels like a hangover from Ultraviolet, and the nighttime psychedelia of “Falling” limps along for 4 minutes. More often than not, though, the center holds, and it makes Ultraviolet look like a scratchpad for what they ended up doing here: radically shaking up their formula—from the inside out—and coming back with compelling results. | 2015-10-12T02:00:02.000-04:00 | 2015-10-12T02:00:02.000-04:00 | Metal | Season of Mist | October 12, 2015 | 7.4 | c6ae3532-2a7a-47b0-ba43-c31719bf2638 | Brandon Stosuy | https://pitchfork.com/staff/brandon-stosuy/ | null |
Featuring members of Hammers of Misfortune, YOB, and Agalloch, VHÖL are the ideal modern metal band, fusing battle-tested stylistic forms with impressive arrangements and a progressive fire that traditionalists and revivalists can't match. On their second album, the cerebral and the primal stomp heads next to one another. | Featuring members of Hammers of Misfortune, YOB, and Agalloch, VHÖL are the ideal modern metal band, fusing battle-tested stylistic forms with impressive arrangements and a progressive fire that traditionalists and revivalists can't match. On their second album, the cerebral and the primal stomp heads next to one another. | VHÖL: Deeper Than Sky | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21143-deeper-than-sky/ | Deeper Than Sky | VHÖL are the ideal modern metal band—they fuse battle-tested forms of metal with impressive arrangements and a progressive fire that traditionalists and revivalists can't match. Their personel is bulletproof—John Cobbett and Sigrid Sheie hail from San Francisco's prog-power masters Hammers of Misfortune, Mike Scheidt is the vocalist and guitar player behind YOB, and Aesop Dekker is the black metal punker from Ludicra (where Cobbett also played) and Agalloch. All four involved have a rare, vital chemistry, and Deeper Than Sky keeps that fire alive while finding more ways to bend traditional metal formulas. This is the bar metal bands have less than two months to clear if they want to unseat them this year.
One of the strongest tracks on their underrated self-titled debut was "Arising", which added a healthy dose of thrash, Thin Lizzy, and Rob Halford to VHÖL's alien version of black metal. Sky continues in this direction, with Cobbett focusing on the thrashier end of his playing. On opener "The Desolate Damned", he bends a conventional galloping rhythm just enough to render it strange. "3 AM" begins with 30 seconds of straightforward thrash, before VHÖL add choral screams and off-kilter soloing: In VHÖL's world, nothing can ever be simple.
Scheidt is primarily known as a guitarist due to the popularity of YOB, but he continues to stick mostly to vocals here, and it suits the project. He sounds more liberated in VHÖL—there's life to his "OOGHS!," his homages to Tom G. Warrior's signature grunts, and his death-thrash growls. The contrast between his rhythm and lead tones on the title track makes for a trippy thrash experience; VHÖL know how to disorient without obvious weed/space/psych/drugs signifiers. "Red Chaos" draws upon underrated Dallas thrashers Rigor Mortis, in particular their late guitarist Mike Scaccia, who also played in Ministry. Scaccia had an unrelenting rhythm hand that didn't sacrifice detail; Cobbett takes that same approach, creating soloing that isn't layered on so much as it protrudes through the rhythm.
Sky's real gem, though, is "Paino", a d-beat piano instrumental. The idea seems gimmicky in the hands of lesser players, but Sheie and Dekker lock in with each other. Like in his other bands, Dekker provides just enough muscle to elevate Sheie while still making her the center of the song. There are big-bottomed rhythms and soloing that climaxes like the volcano George Lynch posed on for Dokken's "Just Got Lucky" video. Only metal could make this high-minded absurdity work; it's the intersection of straight-faced practice and boundless joy, and it's as much of a metal song as anything run through miles of Marshalls. Leave it to VHÖL to find another dimension to the ever-bountiful combination of hardcore and metal, where the cerebral and the primal stomp heads next to one another. | 2015-10-23T02:00:02.000-04:00 | 2015-10-23T02:00:02.000-04:00 | Metal | Profound Lore | October 23, 2015 | 8.2 | c6bea512-0526-4720-90b5-88044267ce68 | Andy O'Connor | https://pitchfork.com/staff/andy-o'connor/ | null |
With a tendency to drift, the Scottish songwriter’s first solo record in almost a decade is a quiet, graceful collection of autumnal folk music. | With a tendency to drift, the Scottish songwriter’s first solo record in almost a decade is a quiet, graceful collection of autumnal folk music. | Dot Allison: Heart-Shaped Scars | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/dot-allison-heart-shaped-scars/ | Heart-Shaped Scars | Dot Allison has led a peripatetic musical life over the last four decades, working with everyone from Nicola Roberts, of pop sensationalists Girls Aloud, to My Bloody Valentine’s Kevin Shields. This adaptability and willingness to experiment is the mark of a fascinatingly wayward artist whose next turn is rarely what you’d expect. But her classic remains 1993’s Morning Dove White, the lone record by her trio One Dove, a collection of glowing chill-out soul made in collaboration with the late Andrew Weatherall.
Allison mentions Weatherall, who died in 2020, as being “the biggest influence, in a mentor type way” on Heart-Shaped Scars, her first solo record in almost a decade. And if this music sounds a world away from the electronic pop of Morning Dove White, eschewing drum machines and dub bass lines in favor of acoustic guitars and the gentle sounds of nature—a sonic mixture similar to Allison’s 2007 album Exaltation of Larks— it does share Weatherall’s modus operandi of working with sympathetic collaborators to bring out the best in yourself, as well as the DJ’s occasional tendency to ramble. Allison made the album with Fiona Cruickshank, a producer who has worked as “string engineer” for Coldplay and Paul Weller, and Hannah Peel, a composer whose album Fir Wave was nominated for the Mercury Prize. Singer-songwriters Amy Bowman and Zoë Bestel also contributed, while nature itself lent a helping hand on the field recordings of birds and rivers that decorate Heart-Shaped Scars like arcadian gems.
Some of the best moments come when a graceful arrangement creeps its way around Allison’s vocals. Toward the end of “Constellations,” for example, a solitary cello spins around Allison’s voice like sparks off a Catherine Wheel. This is not to underplay Allison’s own role: her whispery voice, more Isobel than Glen Campbell, is like the faded print on a vintage magazine, with an otherworldly edge of authority. On “Long Exposure,” the opening track, she sounds right at the end of her tether, steeping the word “wrecking ball” with a velvety power. This song is Heart-Shaped Scars at its best: a gorgeously autumnal, leaf-thin slice of folk music that sits somewhere between the disquieting rural vibrations of Paul Giovanni’s soundtrack for The Wicker Man and Joni Mitchell’s Laurel Canyon gold.
There are a handful of other excellent songs, notably “Cue The Tears,” which evokes the wistful ecstasy of bucolic freedom, the long escape to the country after Morning Dove White’s big night out. Instead of being carried away by the songs themselves, however, the smaller moments leave the greatest impressions: the fantastically ornate string arrangement on “Forever’s Not Much Time” or the descending vocal melody on “Constellations,” which drops away like a leaf falling to the ground. This ephemeral appeal may have something to do with the album’s lightweight texture. Heart-Shaped Scars has a tendency to drift. Many of these songs could lose a couple minutes in the edit without a great deal of discomfort. The six-plus minutes of “The Haunted” might be great for lying under a tree when you can’t be bothered to change the music, but the song feels stretched for every-day listening. This kind of conundrum is typical of Heart-Shaped Scars’ almost-there appeal. It is an album of quiet delights, but at times it feels like the songs are simply stretched too thin: three-star meals served with five-star service.
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. | 2021-08-03T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2021-08-03T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Folk/Country | SA | August 3, 2021 | 6.9 | c6c33563-55d3-463f-a2f9-08f35fbff745 | Ben Cardew | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ben-cardew/ | |
After two more personnel changes-- including the addition of Karl Blau on bass-- Earth return with a fresh context and complex, counterintuitive choices. | After two more personnel changes-- including the addition of Karl Blau on bass-- Earth return with a fresh context and complex, counterintuitive choices. | Earth: Angels of Darkness, Demons of Light 1 | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/15072-angels-of-darkness-demons-of-light-1/ | Angels of Darkness, Demons of Light 1 | In 1991, Earth reinvented heavy metal. Extra-Capsular Extraction, the debut EP by the Washington state duo, made riffs slow, oppressive, and, perhaps most important, solitary. Suddenly, that clever little device rock bands had used to hook kids for decades was more than an accessory; it was the main event, and it was mean. "Ouroboros Is Broken", the 18-minute monster on the B-side, spewed its riff through distortion, baring claws over the industrial thwack of a drum machine before slowing down and stretching out toward forever. It was loud, punishing, and new; drone metal, the genre, followed.
In 2005, Earth reinvented themselves. After a nine-year hiatus, Dylan Carlson returned with a bigger lineup and, this time, a surprising sound. The slow motion was still there, as were the winding, deliberate riffs. But on Hex; or Printing in the Infernal Method, Earth's monolithic blast had given way to furrowed blues, the volume reduced to a gentle, living-room purr. Two years later, Earth re-recorded "Ouroboros Is Broken" for Hibernaculum, a short album that smartly recast four tunes from the first iteration of Earth in Carlson's new, infinitely arid style. That eight-minute reworking was a revelation, suggesting that not only were Carlson's riffs wonders-- maximum volume, or minimum-- but so were his control and patience. Above a steady drum trot, he bent that old theme with careful diligence, sometimes repeating notes, sometimes omitting them, sometimes letting them radiate. The metalhead knew his jazz and his Jerry Garcia. Here, he wielded those influences perfectly.
The second iteration of Earth has now been recording and touring longer than the first, foundation-shifting phase of the band. You'd be excused, then, for assuming that it's time for Carlson to slip back into the shadows or to again push restart. Rather, on Angels of Darkness, Demons of Light 1, he returns for his fourth LP with drummer Adrienne Davies, whose tasteful, robust, and slow swing has provided essential ballast for Carlson's thinly etched guitar since 2005. Carlson and Davies do make two personnel changes, though, and they prove essential: The K Records polyglot Karl Blau replaces longtime Earth bassist Don McGreevy, while the swelling organ and horns of Steve Moore are swapped for the much more versatile cello of Lori Goldston.
These shifts don't turn Earth into a new band, but they do provide a fresh context for Carlson's guitar. On the brilliantly winding "Descent to the Zenith", for instance, Goldston plays against him ever so gently, pushing against his pull, emphasizing the way his lines keep chasing their own tails. Moore's organ used to make Carlson's ideas sound bigger; here, by contrast, Goldston makes them sound smarter. On the album-closing title track, the quartet makes torpid circles for 20 minutes, the guitar, bass, and cello revolving separately around a melody. It's as mesmerizing as an early Earth marathon, just that much more intricate.
"Father Midnight" is a tease in tension, with Carlson repeatedly sliding back and forth along a melody and Davies occasionally leaning into her snares and cymbals with added oomph. It suggests that Earth are about to break character, to roll suddenly like a rock band, to get loud. They, of course, never do. Goldston and Blau are essential to that feeling, as she runs knotty strands of dissonance through Carlson's staggered figures. What's more, Blau plays bass like a songwriter, meaning that he makes choices and takes chances a simple sideman might miss. On "Father Midnight", he's the tension-baiting free radical. Blau sometimes steps with Carlson, thickening his leads and keeping it simple; but he often steps out of that role with stray notes in spots that don't necessarily belong or truncated progressions that let the band slip past. For a unit recording together for the first time, this Earth makes complex, counterintuitive choices.
It might be tempting to dismiss Angels of Darkness as a showcase for one of the electric guitar's best craftsman. Carlson's finesse, after all, has never been better than on these five tracks. A master of tone with an ear for clarity and subtlety, he makes his rests as evocative as the notes themselves. And given the band's recent, steady gestalt, it's also tempting to dismiss Angels of Darkness as just another new album from the second Earth-- you know, the quiet band that's metal only by legacy and label. This isn't a radical reinvention as much as it's a refinement; the backing band and its leader have never been better. But when has Earth's music not been about hard-fought rewards and slow revelations? In the 90s, Earth's heavy metal offered an escape, a massive shelter of volume and drone. But the intricacies of this Earth-- Carlson's harmonics and harmonies, Davies' careful builds, Blau's unexpected bass maneuvers, Goldston's adventurous versatility-- demand attention and immersion. That is, check in, not out, and you'll rarely hear four players with as much quiet command. | 2011-02-07T01:00:01.000-05:00 | 2011-02-07T01:00:01.000-05:00 | Metal | Southern Lord | February 7, 2011 | 7.9 | c6cd246f-94c4-4c86-8fb2-29e3c9bdc6bb | Grayson Haver Currin | https://pitchfork.com/staff/grayson-haver currin/ | null |
Simian Mobile Disco team up with all-female singing collective Deep Throat Choir for an adventurous full-length that is their first album to prominently feature vocals in nearly a decade. | Simian Mobile Disco team up with all-female singing collective Deep Throat Choir for an adventurous full-length that is their first album to prominently feature vocals in nearly a decade. | Simian Mobile Disco: Murmurations | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/simian-mobile-disco-murmurations/ | Murmurations | Over the last decade, Simian Mobile Disco have charted a singular career by relying almost solely on their own creative impulses. Despite rising to prominence amid the “bloghouse” fad of the mid-2000s, the duo of James Ford and Jas Shaw has remained largely unconcerned with passing trends in electronic music. Their fifth full-length, Murmurations, is a bit of a paradox: It’s easily the most adventurous album they’ve crafted to date. But it also takes the act full circle, connecting their bloghouse-era output with their more abstruse later career.
The album is Simian Mobile Disco’s first to prominently feature vocals since 2009’s Temporary Pleasure, which spotlighted singers like Beth Ditto and Yeasayer’s Chris Keating. But Ford and Shaw abandon their old guest-vocalist approach on Murmurations, collaborating instead with Deep Throat Choir, an all-female singing collective led by British musician Luisa Gerstein. You’ve likely heard Gerstein’s work without knowing it: “Cups,” her a cappella reimagining of the Carter Family's 1931 song “Will You Miss Me When I’m Gone?,” became a top-10 hit for Anna Kendrick after the actress performed it in Pitch Perfect. Along with Heloise Tunstall-Behrens, her bandmate in the psych-rock act Landshapes, Gerstein has songwriting credits on nearly half of the album.
The music on Murmurations isn't nearly as chart-friendly as “Cups,” and that’s for the best. Together, Simian Mobile Disco and Deep Throat Choir craft a hallucinatory sonic world: Vocal swells crest and crash against Ford and Shaw’s signature tick-tock techno. The combination is dreamlike—and sometimes even a bit nightmarish; this is certainly not “easy listening.” Like a virtual-reality headset, the 3D textures of Deep Throat Choir’s echo-laden exultations, layered atop Ford and Shaw’s rabbit-hole rhythms, might make listeners queasy at first. But once you surrender to the album’s off-kilter vibe, it's easy to lose yourself in it.
As is the case with so much art released in the past 18 months, it’s possible to read vague messages of resistance into the lyrics of Murmurations. On “Defender,” for instance, trippy sighs give way to a thrush of timpani rolls and glassy synths, as the Choir issue a chest-beating warning: “I see that you couldn’t care less/Don’t you know I’m a warrior.” But the album’s wordless moments prove just as engaging, from the electric frissons that course through ambient clouds on “Gliders” to the zero-gravity weightlessness of “Murmuration.”
Although they consistently put on a riveting live show, Ford and Shaw’s recordings haven’t always hit the mark in the past. Since Temporary Pleasure, they’ve composed in two modes—steely techno and studio-sound experimentation—adding new flourishes but rarely making those disparate aesthetics cohere. Their latest album marks a career high because it sees them and Deep Throat Choir successfully fusing the halves of Simian Mobile Disco’s sound into one powerful whole. On her stellar LPs Quarantine and Dust, Laurel Halo explored the many ways the human voice can be abstracted within electronic music, and a similar sense of playful inquiry suffuses even the most intense moments on Murmurations.
Earlier this year, Shaw was diagnosed with the rare disease AL amyloidosis. As of early May, his prognosis was still unclear, but the illness has already caused the duo to cancel a planned American tour. A recent interview revealed that their post-Murmurations future is up in the air. Since their bloghouse days, Ford and Shaw have been rewarding those who seek out their trend-agnostic music with sounds that are novel and enjoyable even when they don’t add up to something greater than the sum of their parts. But Murmurations represents a breakthrough. It’s thrilling to imagine where Simian Mobile Disco might go next; here’s hoping they get the chance. | 2018-05-11T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-05-11T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Wichita | May 11, 2018 | 7.5 | c6cf4ffa-99d7-4323-8beb-05a9a3a0242f | Larry Fitzmaurice | https://pitchfork.com/staff/larry-fitzmaurice/ | |
A remarkable archival release captures rare vocal performances that the esteemed nun, composer, and pianist recorded in the late 1970s and early ’80s amid political turmoil in Ethiopia. | A remarkable archival release captures rare vocal performances that the esteemed nun, composer, and pianist recorded in the late 1970s and early ’80s amid political turmoil in Ethiopia. | Emahoy Tsege Mariam Gebru: Souvenirs | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/emahoy-tsegue-maryam-guebrou-souvenirs/ | Souvenirs | Emahoy Tsege Mariam Gebru’s transcendent music is inextricably connected to resistance. The Addis Ababa-born nun, composer, and musician crafted her exquisite oeuvre as a way to give back to her community: The money she made from charity albums and concerts went to the Ethiopian Orthodox Church, orphanages, and others who were displaced and devastated by war in her home country and abroad.
Emahoy’s music is an alchemical blend of styles, incorporating fluttering piano, violin, and organ melodies informed by Ethiopian liturgical tradition, European classical music, and her own melismatic, circular melodies that give and bend at will. She began writing music in the 1940s and continued composing until her death last March, just before her 100th birthday, amid a renewed swell of interest in her work; even corporate overlords like Amazon and Walmart have synced her music in commercials. On the new posthumous album Souvenirs, released in collaboration by Emahoy’s family and Portland record label Mississippi with assistance from historian Thomas Feng, the artist’s astonishing compositions—filled out for the first time with vocals performed by Emahoy herself—strike the soul. Sung in Amharic and taped on cassette in her family’s home in Addis Ababa during a period of political unrest, these wending, inquisitive songs are a nourishing balm and an essential expansion of her available catalog.
Recorded between 1977 and 1985, Souvenirs captures a shift in Emahoy’s songwriting that coincided with a turning point in her life. She and her family were restricted from leaving Ethiopia during the Red Terror, a campaign of repression that followed the overthrow of Emperor Haile Selassie by the Derg regime, a Marxist-Leninist military junta, in 1974. Emahoy had endured war since she was a child, having been born into a wealthy Ethiopian family who were exiled and became prisoners of war following Mussolini’s invasion of Ethiopia in 1935.
Even before the invasion, music had coursed through her life as a twin flame. At age 6, she was sent to a Swiss boarding school where she studied violin and piano before returning to Ethiopia. After the war, she traveled to Cairo to study under Polish violinist Alexander Kontorowicz, honing her skill at rehearsals that could last as long as four hours. She was ordained as a nun in 1948 and spent the next decade at the Gishen Mariam monastery in northern Ethiopia, occasionally returning to see her family in Addis Ababa. In the 1960s she returned to the city and continued to write for piano, organ, and violin. Her first albums, Spielt Eigene Kompositionen and Der Sang des Meeres, were recorded in Germany in 1963 as charity releases benefitting liturgical students in the city of Gondar, where she had relocated. The fruitful run of music, which included timeless songs like “Homesickness” and “The Homeless Wanderer,” became some of her best-known.
By the early 1970s, Emahoy was in her mid-50s and living in Jerusalem, finding deeper inspiration for her music within the holy city and releasing two more albums dedicated to the Ethiopian Orthodox church and an orphanage. Upon returning to her mother in Ethiopia, her musical practice diversified—she dedicated songs to family members, wrote hymns, and performed benefit concerts, broadening her music’s personal and cultural purpose up until the Derg took power. Under this new form of exile, Emahoy crafted Souvenirs. The liner notes observe that this music was likely meant to be private at the time it was made; Emahoy often recorded songs late into the night since the Derg had restricted access to evening liturgy services at the church, and these lightly scuffed reel-to-reel recordings capture errant sounds like birdsong outside of her window, adding a wistful, homespun richness.
Throughout, Emahoy’s songwriting orients toward melancholic, tremulous compositions and lyrics that evoke the natural world as a means of escape. Opener “Clouds Moving on the Sky” yearns for a safe haven, drifting on Emahoy’s melismatic runs that climb, elongate, and shift in tandem with her piano like sunlight passing over grass. “My heart has never stopped missing home,” she sings mournfully, going on to give voice to anyone displaced by war: “Why are we condemned to be tangled in the sins of others?” Her voice arcs around notes, capable of both gliding exuberance and weary contemplation. Over rippling piano arrangements on the stunning “Ready to Leave” and “Is It Sunny or Cloudy in the Land You Live?,” she dreams of travel, but her thoughts never stray far: “I couldn’t see my country’s sky,” she sings in the latter song, her voice rising to an epiphanic high. “Have I really gone so far?”
The music of Souvenirs underlines Emahoy’s pride in the beauty and breadth of life in Ethiopia; here, you easily understand her drive to keep coming home. The highlight “Ethiopia My Motherland” dances along a roaming piano melody as she paints a vivid, loving portrait, describing fields “rolling in green velvet” and trees “draped in yellow and red.” She extends her love to the soldiers, laborers, farmers, and everyone else who make up her homeland: “Could a country be missed like a person?” she asks tenderly. She continues to weave a political thread through the warm, eddying “Don’t Forget Your Country,” which references the Derg regime’s effort to eradicate illiteracy. “Our nation’s literacy campaign made history/When the young, the elderly, and men walk together/It is a great pride for the comrade who taught them,” she sings, affirming the spread of knowledge. The song speaks to Emahoy’s ethos throughout her life: ensuring the safety, wellbeing, and benefit of those within her power to help.
In 1984, Emahoy was able to secure her return to Jerusalem, where she took a vow of poverty and remained at the Debre Genet Monastery for the rest of her life. Souvenirs was recovered from Emahoy’s cell at the monastery among other boxes of cassette tapes. It’s miraculous that the album exists in the state it does—a crucial new inclusion to Emahoy’s catalog that expands on the artistry, fluidity, and beauty of her craft. You can hear it best on “Where Is the Highway of Thought?,” where a recursive piano melody guides a lulling meditation on mortality. Here, she considers that thoughts, unbound by a tangible form, can “make your flesh jealous,” but she finds some peace within the idea. “Thought, who are you?/You never get tired,” she sings, “No matter how far you travel/You never run out of ways.” With Souvenirs, Emahoy’s extraordinary life and music is certain to continue traveling in the same ceaseless manner, transforming countless lives along its path. | 2024-02-29T00:01:00.000-05:00 | 2024-02-29T00:01:00.000-05:00 | Experimental | Mississippi | February 29, 2024 | 9 | c6d1d895-c0e4-45ed-b183-ff21ac04a6a4 | Eric Torres | https://pitchfork.com/staff/eric-torres/ | |
Wilco's 10th album is a largely acoustic affair laden with sweet melodies, autumnal production, and childhood memories that stop just short of nostalgic. | Wilco's 10th album is a largely acoustic affair laden with sweet melodies, autumnal production, and childhood memories that stop just short of nostalgic. | Wilco: Schmilco | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22355-schmilco/ | Schmilco | A few years ago, Jeff Tweedy sang a simple song called “Low Key,” accompanied by his son, on an album he named after his wife and released on his own label. It would be hard to invent a more defining moment for modern-day Wilco. As a frontman, Tweedy’s interests have grown closer to home, his music has become more subtle, and his band has grown more comfortable. They’ve mostly abandoned their past experimental ambitions to focus on sounding smaller, more subdued. It’s telling that their longest and most expansive recent song is a hushed ballad designed to evoke the spirit of a contemplative weekend morning.
Schmilco, the band’s 10th album, is similarly low-stakes. Though it was written and recorded during the same sessions that led to last year’s nutty Star Wars, it has more in common with 2014’s Tweedy side project. It’s a largely acoustic affair laden with sweet melodies, autumnal production, and childhood memories that stop just short of nostalgic. The songs on Schmilco are wistful and quaint, zooming in on bittersweet moments with a novelistic eye for detail. In “Normal American Kids,” Tweedy recounts a suburban adolescence spent awkward, angsty, and stoned. In “Cry All Day,” he spills his guts at an open mic. In “Happiness,” he turns to his mother for approval but leaves instead with fresh existential depression, lamenting that "happiness depends on who you blame” as the band trudges lazily behind him.
With the exception of “Locator”—the only track here that channels Star Wars’ fuzzy, Jim O’Rourke-era flashbacks—Schmilco finds Wilco at their lightest and folksiest. “Cry All Day” hinges on a quiet anxiety – a little bit “Dancing in the Dark,” a little bit “Talent Show.” “Someone to Lose” and “Nope” each harbor a whimsical, bluesy edge; even the chaotic “Common Sense” retains a laid-back groove through guitarist Nels Cline’s glorious, fret-tapping freak-out. Over a decade after Wilco tacked 12 minutes of dialtone noise onto a sparse piano ballad, their idiosyncrasies are now more discreetly embedded into their music—and they still do simple, twangy power-pop better than just about anyone. On another Wilco album, the three-minute gem “If I Ever Was a Child” might fade into the background; here, it’s the sunny peak.
Even if Schmilco isn’t Wilco’s most exciting album, it’s among their most consistent and immediately gratifying. In “We Aren’t the World (Safety Girl),” Tweedy swipes the chorus from one of pop music’s most shameless stabs at universality, then subverts it by directing it at one person. This moment hints at the kind of insularity that Wilco now favors; they opt for intimacy over inclusivity, directness over dynamics. Schmilco is another decidedly minor release from a band whose best work (Being There, Yankee Hotel Foxtrot) once felt like landmarks– but it succeeds in its subtle, freewheeling self-awareness, as hinted by the punny album title and the Joan Cornellà-penned cover art. An illustrator whose surreal, wordless illustrations often depict characters resolving chaotic situations with strange contentment, Cornellà's work is a perfect fit for present day Wilco: they’ve always been low-key, but they’ve rarely sounded so joyful about it. | 2016-09-09T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-09-09T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | dBpm | September 9, 2016 | 7 | c6d45420-2590-4ef6-9198-b5ae4ae6c137 | Sam Sodomsky | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sam-sodomsky/ | null |
The Minneapolis trio’s second album is a thrilling smash and grab, packed with catchy hooks, brat-punk impishness, and irresistible gang choruses. | The Minneapolis trio’s second album is a thrilling smash and grab, packed with catchy hooks, brat-punk impishness, and irresistible gang choruses. | VIAL: burnout | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/vial-burnout/ | burnout | If Olivia Rodrigo ever played the dive bar circuit, then VIAL should be first in line as her tour opener. After forming in high school, the Minneapolis trio has spent the past five years honing its brat-punk sound and getting drunk on the thrill of songwriting as a diaristic purge. VIAL write up-front songs about abortion rights, trying to make friends, and, like any upstanding band that takes pride in its Midwestern roots, soup. No matter the subject, they sound jittery and giggly, like they’re kicking notes to each other in class and trying not to let the squeak of their Dr. Martens oxfords rat them out. Though the trio’s core is punk, they soften their edges with an alt-pop streak that sweetens their revenge songs, much like Rodrigo’s “bad idea right?” or “all-american bitch.”
The band’s second album, burnout, dances its way through aggression and impishness. For every song about no longer recognizing yourself or overcoming a breakup, there’s another about stealing Honda Civics or chronic illness flare-ups. The more melodrama, the better. “ur dad” goes for a gender-swapped “Stacy’s Mom” in the punchy style of the B-52’s, while “friendship bracelet” recounts the downfall of two BFFs with the panache of Be Your Own Pet. You can hear a smile creep on bassist Taylor Kraemer’s face as she puts on her squeakiest voice for a gossipy skirmish on the same song. When guitarist KT Branscom’s pleas to go home morph into a howl on “apathy,” they sustain the note as if a full moon had risen into view. VIAL never sound more present, though, than when plotting revenge. “I hope you trip over your laces and fall on both your faces,” Branscom snarks on album opener “two-faced,” like they can already envision it happening.
The best one-two punch of VIAL’s tongue-in-cheek songwriting arrives midway through burnout. Their tradition of airing out therapy woes through song continues here, after 2019’s “Therapy” and 2021’s “Therapy Pt II.” The third installment of this series is a 40-second tape recording in which drummer Katie Fischer and Branscom act out the beginning of a session to set up “just fine,” the album’s catchiest single. That twofer starts off in jest, but nose-dives into serious venting, with the chorus of “just fine” revolving around a depressive neutrality: “I don’t want to feel good or even happy anymore/I’m quite content with fine.” Branscom’s emotional deflation spirals out of control further when they repeat the phrase “I’m fine” so many times that the words distort with the same intent to lose meaning—and, in flashes, with a similar vocal tone—as Mitski’s “Nobody.” But Fischer’s drumming and Kraemer’s springy bassline keep things jovial, almost mockingly so, with rhythms so upbeat that fans demanded a ska version with former tourmate JER. Zoomed out, “just fine” represents VIAL’s evolution from DIY house show staple to underground TikTok darlings: punk drumming, melodic guitar, and youthful gang choruses that channel Gen Z’s coming-of-age angst.
With cheeky interludes and songs that seem to fly by faster than their already short runtimes, burnout feels closer to an EP than it does a proper full-length. That’s not to say it’s empty; VIAL know the art of writing a catchy hook and the trick of delivering it at 1.5x speed—and they make good on both throughout. burnout is a smash and grab that represents their glow-up from moody teenagers learning Nirvana’s “Territorial Pissings” to young adults confidently leading the crowd in “PISS! PISS! PISS!” chants at their own shows. VIAL are still working through tough subjects like they did on their debut album, Loudmouth, but they’re injecting more brattiness into the mix as they barrel out of control. That dialed-up combo will get your blood pumping like you’re present for the real thing. | 2024-04-03T00:01:00.000-04:00 | 2024-04-03T00:01:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Get Better | April 3, 2024 | 7.4 | c6daf00b-13da-4f2e-a93a-828202b9aff0 | Nina Corcoran | https://pitchfork.com/staff/nina-corcoran/ | |
On Boronia, the Australian duo Hockey Dad are a 2016 version of the Wyld Stallyns, if Bill and Ted had been hypnotized by surf rock instead of metal. | On Boronia, the Australian duo Hockey Dad are a 2016 version of the Wyld Stallyns, if Bill and Ted had been hypnotized by surf rock instead of metal. | Hockey Dad: Boronia | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22263-boronia/ | Boronia | In their videos, the Australian duo Hockey Dad are shown skateboarding, skinny dipping, surfing, playing video slot machines, drinking beer, and hanging out at a place called Windang Fast Chicken. A majority of the songs on their full-length debut, Boronia, are about pining for women who are way out of their league. Basically, they are a 2016 version of the Wyld Stallyns, if Bill and Ted had been hypnotized by surf rock instead of metal.
The 11 songs on the album bounce with the excitement and innocence of two best friends—singer and guitarist Zach Stephenson and drummer William Fleming—doing what they love best (or at least second-best; they do seem to be pretty good at surfing). Producer Tom Iansek captures Hockey Dad’s energy well, highlighting their electric jangle, occasional rushes of frothy distortion and lots of bubblegum-popping claps. Stephenson doesn’t indulge in much lead guitar playing, and he sings with what Fleming has dubbed a “scrawny grommy voice,” a rare nasally rasp that puts him in the strange company of Hamilton Leithauser, Bon Scott, Billy Squier, and Joe Elliott from Def Leppard. The album opens with “Can’t Have Them,” which not only sets the nice-guys-finish-last tone that pops up all over Boronia, but also for music that would sound dangerously derivative were it not for Stephenson’s unique voice. “Can’t Have Them” sounds almost like they lifted the backing track from “Not Too Soon” by Throwing Muses and slapped different vocals on top of it, a la “Ça plane pour moi”/“Jet Boy, Jet Girl.” Elsewhere there are moments indebted to the Strokes, Surfer Blood, and Wavves.
As for the stories of unrequited love that populate Boronia; they get old quickly. Sample lyrics include, “As I slowly lose my cool, Laura treats me like a fool, I can’t help it, she’s too perfect” in “Laura;” “I see her in my dreams, but I don’t think she sees me” in “Raygun;” and the whole of “I Need a Woman,” the chorus of which is “Don’t make me cry, I need a woman in my life.” Come on, guys: You play in a band! Cheer up! These lyrics threaten to drag the rest of the album down if you listen too closely, but Stephenson’s vocal melodies are buoyant enough to keep it all afloat if you’re playing this in the background.
Lyrically, the best moment on the album comes close to the end, when Stephenson puts his romantic pursuits on hold, and indulges in a full-on bromantic ballad. “Two Forever” is a heartfelt message that prioritizes the duo’s friendship over all the women of Boronia. “I don’t need love, don’t need no woman, don’t need that shit, ‘cause I got you, man,” he sings. Sure, it doesn’t read well, but it’s sweet and sincere, and it’s the type of mission statement that if true, could hold this band together as they get better. Hopefully, they will continue to be excellent to each other. | 2016-08-18T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-08-18T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Kanine | August 18, 2016 | 5.6 | c6dea9cb-50f1-413b-bb9c-15a2bd9fc6e0 | Pat Healy | https://pitchfork.com/staff/pat-healy/ | null |
David Bazan reflects on small-town adolescence with an insular and empathetic album about tedium, disappointment, and simmering tension. | David Bazan reflects on small-town adolescence with an insular and empathetic album about tedium, disappointment, and simmering tension. | Pedro the Lion: Havasu | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/pedro-the-lion-havasu/ | Havasu | At age 12, David Bazan moved from Phoenix, Arizona to a town younger than himself. Lake Havasu City incorporated in 1978, evolving from a former Army Air Corps camp to a tourist trap fueled by international jet ski competitions and a brick-by-brick reconstruction of London Bridge. Bazan would be long gone by the time MTV Spring Break filmed on location in 1995. A terraformed community of affordable housing and immediate opportunity, Lake Havasu City held obvious appeal for a family like Bazan’s that would repeatedly uproot itself; Havasu is the second album of a planned Pedro the Lion pentalogy, each entry based in a city where Bazan grew up. On the opening track, “Don’t Wanna Move,” a shy, insecure, 12-year-old Bazan sits in the backseat, staring at pregnant storm clouds and internalizing a newfound sense of betrayal and injustice (“Still keep it hid and grit my teeth like you showed me/Still hope it’s not too late for someone to know me”).
Based around the riff of Phoenix closer “Leaving the Valley,” “Don’t Wanna Move” introduces the most minimal and insular Pedro the Lion album yet, as well as the most provocative: Bazan makes the formative experiences of being 13 years old feel inextricable from the tedium. He had no choice if Havasu was to be honest about the impact of leaving the ninth-most populous city in America for a town of about 24,000. The melodies of “Don’t Wanna Move” and “Too Much” seem to find their footing in real time, tracking Bazan’s awkward development as a social being in his new environment. After nearly three painstaking minutes dissecting the minutiae of woodwind embouchures and middle-school orchestra politics, “First Drum Set” speeds up, righting itself with a rudimentary yet joyous backbeat. It would be a little too cute if it weren’t the first time Havasu shook off the intentional torpor that Bazan attributes to both the 109-degree average summer heat and his own burgeoning awareness of depression.
When Bazan revived the Pedro the Lion project with Phoenix in 2019, following a 13-year hiatus, he tempered expectations by staying firmly within sturdy, midtempo power-trio indie rock. Havasu is even more explicit about setting his experimental leanings aside; it was originally planned as a synth album, a tribute to the barren landscape, prefab architecture, and popular music of late-’80s Arizona. But the crackling, dehydrated tones Pedro the Lion extract from their Les Pauls and austere drums do a better job of conjuring the parched expanse of Lake Havasu City than a Nord Lead ever could. The spindly, searching guitar figures of “Don’t Wanna Move” imagine Spirit of Eden if Mark Hollis sought deliverance in the American Southwest. Based on little more than a droning, four-note figure that repeats through its entirety, “Stranger” mesmerizes like heat refracting off blacktop.
For the most part, Havasu strives to build on Phoenix, a continuity that enriches itself and its predecessor and deepens Pedro the Lion’s backstory. In the band’s first iteration, Bazan was a conflicted man asking a lot of questions and pointing a lot of fingers. Whereas their 1998 debut It’s Hard to Find a Friend took an accusatory tone towards those who would sacrifice their principles for social acceptance, on Phoenix highlight “Quietest Friend” and the new album’s “Own Valentine,” Bazan empathizes with his younger self as someone who used manipulation to fill a void of self-esteem. “First Drum Set” is a sequel of sorts to Phoenix’s “Yellow Bike,” a jubilant awakening to possibilities outside his immediate surroundings; describing music as “sports about my feelings” is one of Bazan’s funniest lines yet and a reminder of its poignance for adolescent outcasts. Phoenix’s “Circle K” now foreshadows a heartbreaking scene on “Stranger” where Bazan again escapes into junk food for comfort, “eating my shame” at the snack bar after being shunned at a couples skate.
If Pedro the Lion 2.0 feels limited by Bazan’s softer, sweeter approach, it’s an indulgence he’s earned. Bazan has spent the past 20 years risking criticism and ex-communication to speak honestly about politics, sex, alcoholism, and God. As evidenced by the 2019 documentary Strange Negotiations, which followed him from house show to house show, he has been revered but not always rewarded. Yet Havasu truly sparks when his indignation returns on “Old Wisdom”: “You’re not allowed to see it/But you always had a choice/Between making a disciple/And knowing your little boy,” he moans, giving a voice to a skepticism towards parental figures (spiritual or otherwise) that his 13-year-old self understood but couldn’t express. Up to that point, Bazan describes himself as a passive participant in his own life, and by the end of Havasu, the Bazans are again packing the moving van, fretting about the security deposit, and demanding young David “keep a flexible attitude” as they head for Santa Cruz. But the simmering tensions have already started to creep in. Though Bazan spends most of Havasu processing his childhood, he’s slowly revealing the man he’d become.
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2022-01-27T00:00:00.000-05:00 | 2022-01-27T00:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Polyvinyl | January 27, 2022 | 7.5 | c6dee36e-da24-49ef-af36-abc490feac49 | Ian Cohen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ian-cohen/ | |
Lupe Fiasco reunites with producer Soundtrakk for a jazzy, subdued album that weighs the challenges and indignities of sustaining a career in the arts. | Lupe Fiasco reunites with producer Soundtrakk for a jazzy, subdued album that weighs the challenges and indignities of sustaining a career in the arts. | Lupe Fiasco: Samurai | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/lupe-fiasco-samurai/ | Samurai | Toward the end of The Last Samurai, Helen DeWitt’s 2000 novel about a single mother and son bouncing around the poverty line as the latter searches for a suitable father figure, that son has a conversation with a brilliant but difficult pianist. “Why don’t you make a CD?” the son asks. The pianist replies: “No one would buy the kind of thing I’d like to put on a CD and I can’t afford to make a CD that no one will buy.” The Last Samurai is hailed by critics and sold well over 100,000 copies. But due to contract math that would make Q-Tip blush, DeWitt ended up owing her publisher money. Before long, the book fell out of print. In the decades since, DeWitt’s fiction has focused on the material lives of artists as they struggle to navigate capitalism and psychological collapse.
Once an ascendant pop star and critical darling with a seemingly clean trajectory, Lupe Fiasco has seen his career has grow similarly tangled in the last 15 years. Since the public feud between him and his former label, Atlantic, over his third album, 2011’s Lasers, Lupe has remained nearly A-list by reputation, but with plummeting chart positions that suggest an audience segmented from the rap mainstream. He’s spoken frequently and eloquently about not only the business minutiae that has complicated his decision-making, but the ways hip-hop—and music writ large—is devalued compared to so-called fine art. (“If I want to read the next book by Helen DeWitt, I can just write it, and read it, and then write another one,” the Last Samurai author told The Believer in 2012. “Painters do that and nobody objects.”)
Samurai, which arrives almost two years to the day after Lupe’s eighth album, Drill Music in Zion, has plenty in common with that project: It’s produced entirely by longtime collaborator Soundtrakk, skews jazzy and subdued, and is slight (even slighter, in fact, at just 30 minutes). Its title was inspired by a moment in Asif Kapadia’s 2015 Amy Winehouse documentary in which the late singer leaves a voice message for producer Salaam Remi describing herself as a samurai battle rapper. For Lupe, the metaphor seems tidy: a motivated master working in relative isolation, honing a blade.
The album is conspicuously breezy. Lupe’s singing voice, a staple of his style as far back as The Cool, has only grown more pliable: See the way he moves between cadences and harmonies on the hook and verses of “Palaces,” each smartly shaped and carefully rendered. Elsewhere he flits, without apparent effort, between other modes of technical wizardry, like the staccato syllable latticework that dresses up pedestrian writing on the second verse of “No. 1 Headband” or the passage on “Mumble Rap” that begins with the line, “With a style similar to riding around looking for an arrest to resist.” It feels as if there’s some great, centrifugal force pushing down on the middle of each bar.
And yet this musical ease seems at deliberate odds with the torture Lupe describes, in first- and third-person, of trying to hack a career in the arts. There are the shows where the “front row the only row” (“Bigfoot”); there is the line on “Outside” where he says, “My business bone is connected to my ethics”—defiant from one angle, quixotic from another. Lupe lapses in and out of Amy Winehouse portraiture, and when he raps, on closer “Til Eternity,” about a beehive that “survived in a wreck,” it’s both a reference to her signature hairstyle and a metaphor that echos the ones he introduces earlier on the album. “We think we’re fortresses, made of stone,” he croons on “Palaces,” “but we’re just palaces made out of flesh and bone.” Despite the loftiness of “palace,” he presents this fragility without romance—or at least, with full knowledge of the forces conspiring to puncture it at every pass. | 2024-07-08T00:02:00.000-04:00 | 2024-07-08T00:02:00.000-04:00 | Rap | 1st & 15th | July 8, 2024 | 7.4 | c6dfbc55-34be-4e42-ad6c-79d66c4f99a1 | Paul A. Thompson | https://pitchfork.com/staff/paul-a. thompson/ | |
Folkie and electro supergroup-- including Bon Iver, Megafaun, members of the Rosebuds, and leader Ryan Olson-- tackle 80s R&B and Lite FM fare. | Folkie and electro supergroup-- including Bon Iver, Megafaun, members of the Rosebuds, and leader Ryan Olson-- tackle 80s R&B and Lite FM fare. | Gayngs: Relayted | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/14188-relayted/ | Relayted | Gripe about hipster irony all you want, but was there ever any point when the indie/punk underground wasn't dealing in smartassed self-parody? There have always been artists who find humor in making certain styles into grotesque caricatures and using them to point out the absurdity, or greatness, in a genre. The punchline works best when the setup's serious enough to work without it. The problem of irony comes when you're dealing with a setup that most people will probably mistake for the punchline itself.
And once you've been tipped to the tone of Relayted, the debut album from the two-dozen-plus-member supergroup Gayngs, well, good luck coming to terms with the slow-jam soft-rock pastiche that's just been dropped on you. Air had a tricky enough sell of it 12 years ago when they tried to convince indie kids that Moog-lounge AM pop was cool. And if the jet-set 1970s fromage of Moon Safari was a tricky kind of chic, imagine it dialed a decade ahead into mid-80s Lite FM fare. If you're not rolling your eyes yet, be patient: You have about 28 seconds before the album's first Skinemax saxophone wail.
But Gayngs take this stuff seriously, and if you concentrate really hard, maybe you could, too. It helps that pretty much everybody involved in the band has bona fides, whether in Minneapolis' electro-pop scene (brainchild Ryan Olson of Digitata; Zack Coulter and Adam Hurlburt of Solid Gold; members of Lookbook) or North Carolina folk-rock (the Rosebuds' Ivan Howard; all three members of Megafaun). That elbow-ribbing saxophone actually comes courtesy of Michael Lewis, from much-lauded Twin Cities jazz trio Happy Apple. And there are a lot of strong voices that fade in and out of this thing, too. P.O.S. absolutely kills it on the tense, Pendergrass-gone-Portishead slow-boil of "No Sweat", with fellow Doomtree alumna Dessa providing an almost subliminal background counterpoint. And the distant, breathy vocal that sounds like it's emanating from the sunset-hued beach of some early Michael Mann film makes leadoff track "The Gaudy Side of Town" sound disarmingly earnest. That's Justin Vernon of Bon Iver. Dude apparently listens to Bone Thugs, go figure.
So we're looking at a lot of serious-artist personnel for an album that might seem pretty conceptually farcical otherwise. And while some aspects of this album seem at least somewhat detrimentally tongue-in-cheek-- word has it that every track was recorded at 69 BPM, which does leaden the energy levels a bit-- Relayted doesn't stumble strictly because of its soft-rock and indie-soul leanings. Far from it: The original core trio of Olson, Coulter, and Hurlburt envisioned some kind of tribute to the legacy of 10cc, which explains all the "I'm Not in Love" vocal reverb and a straightfaced cover of 10cc vets Godley & Creme's 1985 single "Cry". And it sounds credible, even when it's transmuted into jittery, guitar-addled new wave ("Faded High") or Blade Runnerish soul-jazz ("Ride"). It's only when the extended ether-frolic vibe is rattled by some misplaced short-and-sharp pop-length numbers-- the mid-album stretch of "False Bottom", "The Beatdown", and "Crystal Rope" skews a bit too forceful-- that the seams actually start to show.
So Relayted is both better than it had any right to be, given the concept, and about as good as you could expect from the musicians involved. It has all the signs of a gag that got out of hand-- three guys from Minneapolis bantering about soft-rock namedrops who eventually found themselves surrounded by enough smart, likeminded musicians that it somehow wound up destined to sound at least somewhat heartfelt. It's a joke told in reverse, with a potentially cheesy setup that often comes with a surprisingly poignant payoff. Go into this expecting irony, and it might turn your stomach. Take it sincerely, and it'll hit you about a foot higher. | 2010-05-06T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2010-05-06T02:00:01.000-04:00 | Rock | Jagjaguwar | May 6, 2010 | 6.5 | c6f31c29-3e3c-4d76-bdc1-faf4da6582bb | Nate Patrin | https://pitchfork.com/staff/nate-patrin/ | null |
Several years removed from their turn-of-the-decade peak, Delorean's frothy dance-pop has soured somewhat. | Several years removed from their turn-of-the-decade peak, Delorean's frothy dance-pop has soured somewhat. | Delorean: Muzik | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22018-muzik/ | Muzik | Lo-fi bedroom punk, chillwave, Balearic, Hipstamatic, Merriweather Post Pavilion, whatever—just about everything responsible for the indie zeitgeist at the turn of the decade craved a return to innocence. This is why nostalgia for that time feels doubly sad: it’s escapism into a time that was already escapist. The frothy, sugar-spun dance-pop of Barcelona quartet Delorean was emblematic of those years, as captured on Ayrton Senna EP and Subiza. Now that it's 2016, Delorean get with the times and give us a comedown album. I’m just not sure that was their intention.
It sure doesn’t sound like Muzik was meant to do say or do anything radically different than Delorean’s most recent output. Though the production and instrumentation is more purely electronic this time around, Delorean are exactly what they’ve been since their reinvention and breakthrough—a band that retained the earnestness and economy of their emo/indie-rock origins while writing with techno and house tools. Muzik continues to reduce their reliance on swirling ambience, a logical progression from 2013’s Apar, itself a sleeker, more streamlined rendering of Subiza’s screamadelia. And while Ekhi Lopetegi has long been a Ph.D candidate in philosophy, Delorean’s not what you would call lyrical. These are guided meditations on the universal subject matter you’d expect from music of this sort.
On the title track, Lopategi chants “Music’s got a hold on me/It’s shaking the ground where I am,” and it’s surprising that Delorean took this long to engage in this kind of time-honored meta exercise, paying tribute to the songs that made them fall in love with club culture and presumably adding to that canon. And yet, no Delorean single to this point has proven less capable of supporting this kind of sentiment, the synthesizers and percussion so wan and monochromatic, you’d think they were going for a coldwave rebrand.
You can’t call it minimalism when the arrangement tries to trigger the same physical and mental incapacitation as “Real Love” or “Infinite Desert”; it’s more like they’re following an involuntary austerity pledge. After confidently striking out from Delorean’s cocoon of reverb on Apar, Lopetegi has returned but the rest of the band hasn’t, giving Muzik a curiously unbalanced, deflated mix. This isn’t the “alone in the club” feeling captured in crossovers like the Streets’ “Blinded By the Lights”, Jamie xx’s “Loud Places” or dozens of Drake and Weeknd songs. This is the sound of arriving at the club too early and wondering if it’s going to be this dead all night.
That’s the enduring sensation of Muzik, of waiting for something to happen. You wait for some insight into how Delorean’s creative process has evolved over the past three years. “Push” is damn-near an homage to the Side-B deep cuts of Hot Chip’s The Warning and the pitch-shifted vocal overdubs that signify their most recent engagement with electronic music would’ve been dated on Apar. You wait for these breezy beats to build towards a rush, for the arrangements to build rather than cruise. Every song on Muzik is given a functional, imperative title and at a certain point, they all start to feel like placeholder names for stems meant for a subsequent remix, though even their frequent collaboration Pional can’t make an honest jam out of “Muzik.”
Maybe the saddest part about all of Muzik is the inevitability: “Summer of Love,” “Summer of Drugs,” “Deadbeat Summer,” none of it lasts, just more proof of “Endless Summer” as one of pop culture’s most pernicious myths. Even in Delorean’s best songs, the hooks saw this coming: “will we ever meet again?”, “I would never be the same again.” A primary principle of dance music is to live in the moment *because *it won’t last forever, rather than in spite of it. Muzik is what it sounds like when you realize the moment has already passed. | 2016-06-27T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-06-27T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic / Rock | PHLEX | June 27, 2016 | 5 | c6f49a44-da7e-4f6f-8e36-6fbfcb028579 | Ian Cohen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ian-cohen/ | null |
Newly reissued by the BBE label’s J Jazz series, the Tokyo pianist’s 1979 album is more traditional than its contemporaries in the Japanese jazz scene, but it overflows with character. | Newly reissued by the BBE label’s J Jazz series, the Tokyo pianist’s 1979 album is more traditional than its contemporaries in the Japanese jazz scene, but it overflows with character. | Masao Nakajima Quartet: Kemo-Sabe | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/masao-nakajima-kemo-sabe/ | Kemo-Sabe | When pianist Masao Nakajima put out Kemo-Sabe in 1979, Japanese jazz was going through an electric fusion boom. Blue Note imitation was dead; artists dashed toward free improvisation, post-modal impressionism, and deep spiritual jazz. Musicians were transplanting elements of electronic music, rock, Afrobeat, flamenco, and funk into their arrangements; no boundary was being left untested. Against this backdrop, Kemo-Sabe was a stylistic outlier: a classically acoustic jazz album. Not that Nakajima was a staunch traditionalist. He’d once owned synthesizers and a Hammond organ, but he sold them all to fund a formative trip to the U.S. The innovation on Kemo-Sabe comes in the dynamic interplay between the quartet, the airy grooves, and the virtuoso soloing. The tools—piano, bass, drums, and sax—may have been standard, but the results are a reminder of the freewheeling individualism that broke loose in Japanese jazz.
UK label BBE has reissued Kemo-Sabe as part of its wonderful J Jazz series, which covers the relentlessly inventive period in Japanese jazz from the late 1960s to the early 1980s. Its attention turns to Nakajima after the title track was previously included on the compilation J Jazz Volume 3. Born in 1950 in Ōta, a special ward of greater Tokyo, to a councilman father and mother who sang classical music, Nakajima started playing piano at age 7 and became interested in jazz around 12 or 13, when he was exposed to visiting foreign artists on television and radio; Erroll Garner, Dave Brubeck, Oscar Peterson, and George Shearing were among his early favorites. At 16, Nakajima was already the resident pianist in a jazz live house, his clear talent making him well placed for the creative explosion in Japanese jazz that was to come. By the time he recorded the first album under his name in 1979, he already had over a decade of experience as a session player, touring musician, and musical director, and was just back from a year in the U.S., where he worked on Robin Kenyatta’s disco-inspired fusion album Take The Heat Off Me.
Joining him for the Kemo-Sabe sessions was bassist Osamu Kawakami, who had previously collaborated with scene heavyweight Sadao Watanabe. On drums was American Donald Bailey, known for playing on Jimmy Smith’s Blue Note records as well as recording with Roy Ayers; he spent five years in Japan, part of a wave of American musicians picking up work in the happening scene. Though Kemo-Sabe was initially intended for a trio, Nakajima invited Toshiyuki Honda, leader of the popular fusion group Burning Waves, to play flute and saxophone on a few songs. Yet if the quartet appeared to be swiftly assembled from assorted components, the play on Kemo-Sabe is slick and well tuned, melodic and textured, seamlessly moving from dramatic to sensual depending on the steward’s whims.
The record kicks off with the title track, penned by Mike Nock, a New Zealand pianist and then member of Bay Area electric fusion group the Fourth Way. Taking no time to heat up, we’re dropped into the set right as Honda’s sax swoops over Nakajima’s staggered piano keys. The band expertly hits the crescendos of the catchy composition; Kawakami and Bailey get a turn at the forefront of the arrangement over its second half. There’s an immediate change of tone on the velvety noir piano piece “Beloved Diane,” the one Nakajima original, suitable for quiet neighborhood diners when the street lamps light up outside. None of the six songs stretch beyond six and a half minutes, keeping the album moving at a snappy pace.
Like most Japanese jazz of the era, the production on Kemo-Sabe is warm and inviting. Take the rendition of Herbie Hancock’s autumnal smooth-jazz number “Tell Me a Bedtime Story.” Quincy Jones had recorded a version the previous year with Hancock on electric piano; here, Honda’s graceful flute lights the way, fluttering like candlelight.
Though all the players get to showcase their best stuff at different times, Nakajima leaves his own apex for the conclusion: His version of the old Leonard Bernstein number “My Love” places his piano front and center as he caresses the keys. There’s a sense of adventure and romance in his play as he wanders off on his own path before seamlessly finding the melody once more. It puts the seal on a set that deserves consideration in any framing of the era. While his contemporaries were tying tradition up in knots, Masao Nakajima made a record that masquerades as classicist but overflows with character. | 2022-08-09T00:01:00.000-04:00 | 2022-08-09T00:01:00.000-04:00 | Jazz | BBE Music | August 9, 2022 | 7.4 | c6fc71fa-6598-4b1f-9428-d3c919405b90 | Dean Van Nguyen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/dean-van nguyen/ | |
The latest LP from Moon Duo builds on their psychedelic formula—corroded guitars, kraut rhythms, steely grit—and allows them to indulge their most sinister tendencies. | The latest LP from Moon Duo builds on their psychedelic formula—corroded guitars, kraut rhythms, steely grit—and allows them to indulge their most sinister tendencies. | Moon Duo: Occult Architecture Vol. 1 | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22886-occult-architecture-vol-1/ | Occult Architecture Vol. 1 | Four albums deep, Moon Duo have grown somewhat predictable. The collaboration of Wooden Shijps’ guitar-warlock Ripley Johnson and keyboardist Sanae Yamada has always been built on a steady but enjoyable mix of elements: corroded guitars, loopy keyboard lines, krautrock rhythms, and psychedelic strains conjuring both the whirling cosmos and droning abyss. Their new album Occult Architecture Vol. 1 does little to alter the formula, but the key to Moon Duo records has always been the strength of the compositions. And those already onboard with the band won’t be disappointed by the seven tracks here.
Touted as representing the depths and changes of the seasons, Occult Architecture Vol. 1 delves into the bleaker corners of winter and allows Moon Duo to indulge their most sinister tendencies. Like many a great Moon Duo song, opener “The Death Set” is at once swaggering, sexy, and foreboding. Much of their music is low-key cinematic; it’s hard to hear “The Death Set”’s distorted, slow-motion whoosh or its bone-rattling beat and not imagine a character’s dramatic entrance into an unnerving nightclub. Elsewhere, like on “Cold Fear” and “Will of the Devil,” they use queasy electronic textures to flirt with gothier territory.
Well past the lower-fi nature of their earliest work, Moon Duo still don’t operate with a ton of dynamic range. But they use those heart-palpitating rhythms and lacerating keyboard lines to build blown-out, end-times epics littered with subtle twists. Johnson’s death-drive guitars propel “Cult of Moloch” forward unwaveringly, but interjections of synth and a second, spiraling guitar part make the song feel like it’s reaching for spiritual corners of nature. Closer “White Rose”—one long synth ride—has a similar effect, winding down a road into the distance. Moon Duo haven’t gone full-on mystic, however; the new album maintains the steely grit of its predecessor, Shadow of the Sun. Theirs is music still meant for barreling down desert highways in a stolen car, or for the grind and smog of a third-tier industrial city.
That said, Moon Duo isn’t the kind of group to make albums with literal thematic angles. Their style has limits, but discernibility is maybe not the point. Moon Duo’s precise mix of traditions and sounds conjures a nihilistic cool, an image of leather-jacketed outlaws chain-smoking in dark alleyways in seedy cities. Occult Architecture Vol. 1 is a good record that’s at its best when Moon Duo fully give in to these seductive inklings, like on “The Death Set” or “Creepin.’” Sure, we’ve heard the riff from “Creepin'” before, but it’s nice to hear it again. | 2017-02-21T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2017-02-21T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Sacred Bones | February 21, 2017 | 7.1 | c709e49d-222c-46ee-8c5a-36475c4a711c | Ryan Leas | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ryan-leas/ | null |
The artist Terry Allen made outlaw country from the vantage of the art world. Paradise of Bachelors have lavishly reissued his 1979 double album, a dreamscape that sways between country and folk. | The artist Terry Allen made outlaw country from the vantage of the art world. Paradise of Bachelors have lavishly reissued his 1979 double album, a dreamscape that sways between country and folk. | Terry Allen: Lubbock (on everything) | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22440-lubbock-on-everything/ | Lubbock (on everything) | Terry Allen released Lubbock (on everything) via the minuscule Fate Records in 1979, just as the outlaw country movement started to run out of gas. Allen never was an outlaw. He was an outsider, a visual artist who wrote songs on the side and played museums instead of honky-tonks. That calculated distance is evident on his 1975 debut Juarez, where he divides his time between recitations and skeletal arrangements that, at their fullest, featured guitar and piano.
The same can’t be said of Lubbock (on everything), just reissued in a lavish edition by Paradise of Bachelors, which also put Juarez back in circulation this year. Allen recorded the double album in his scorned West Texas hometown of Lubbock, a city he left as soon as he turned 17. Flipping a coin, he and his then-girlfriend—now wife of 55 years—Jo Harvey wound up choosing Los Angeles over New York City, so the two hightailed out to the West Coast, setting up shop and beginning to establish themselves within the art world. Allen’s songs gained some attention, including that of Little Feat leader Lowell George, who had hoped to record Allen’s song “New Delhi Freight Train” for his band’s 1971 debut. George decided to wait, though, until Allen left his bad record deal so that he could actually score some royalties.
Allen broke free from that contract around 1976 and Feat did cut the tune for 1977’s Time Loves a Hero. A year earlier, the country singer Bobby Bare recorded Allen’s song “Amarillo Highway” for his Cowboys and Daddys album. It was then that Allen decided to cut the songs he’d composed since the completion of Juarez—including “Amarillo Highway”—and cooked up the notion that George could produce part of the album, while none other than his art-world friend Laurie Anderson could handle the other. Instead, Allen headed back to Lubbock, the town he abandoned years ago, to record with locals Don Caldwell and Lloyd Maines.
Lubbock music was then in the throes of one its periodic hot spells, spearheaded by Joe Ely, Butch Hancock, and Jimmie Dale Gilmore—a trio who performed as the Flatlanders between 1972 and 1973. By the time Allen got to Lubbock in ’78, Ely was the king of the scene, earning attention for his recent Honky Tonk Masquerade. Ely’s band was pulled into the studio to support Allen.
Ely had been channeling some shit-kicking roadhouse boogie into the plaintive panhandle country of the Flatlanders. And while Allen never deigned to dabble in hardwood floor honky-tonk, Lubbock (on everything) does benefit from a band consciously withholding its full power. They turn Allen’s satirical sketches and odes to art into something robust, full-blooded rambles through the byways of the flatlands of West Texas. Sometimes, the music really does cook. “New Delhi Freight Train” moves along just like a locomotive, and the band works up a groove on “Amarillo Highway,” not coincidentally the album’s two most covered songs.
But usually the group allows Allen to indulge in his sly jokes. Witness the louche lounge sway of “Cocktails for Three,” the beer joint stomp of “Flatland Farmer,” or how “Truckload of Art” hinges on a piss-take on Slim Whitman’s “Cattle Call.” All this derives from Allen knowing West Texas so well he can’t help but snipe. Often, Allen doesn’t bother to hide his contempt at his former hometown, which does goose the performance: he seems to be gaining fuel from a band that allows him to sneer, but also to cloak his occasional tenderness in a woozy waltz.
Such a pointed sense of remove—Terry Allen isn’t a participant, he’s an observer—is one of the reasons Lubbock (on everything) is ungainly called an “urtext” of alt-country, with the other being the music’s rootless rootsiness. As it sways between country and folk, it feels thoroughly specific yet consciously ambiguous: music intended to stray from its home. Influential it may be, but that also seems beside the point. Like any enduring piece of art, Lubbock (on everything) embodies its moment while transcending it. Allen couldn’t have recorded this album at any other point than 1978, after the outlaws opened the door for genuine outsiders in country music, and after singer/songwriters like Randy Newman paved the way for barbed cynicism to be part of the pop vernacular. Decades after the Lubbock of Allen’s childhood has passed, this double-LP is still a powerful dreamscape, capturing a West Texas that may never have quite existed, but Lubbock (on everything) certainly makes it feel like it did. | 2016-10-17T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-10-17T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Folk/Country | Paradise of Bachelors | October 17, 2016 | 8.5 | c70a549e-0162-42d1-b517-443b75c4db7c | Stephen Thomas Erlewine | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stephen-thomas erlewine/ | null |
The second album from the Michigan emo band feels like a product of another era: itching to cross over, but without anywhere to cross over to. | The second album from the Michigan emo band feels like a product of another era: itching to cross over, but without anywhere to cross over to. | Hot Mulligan: You’ll Be Fine | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/hot-mulligan-youll-be-fine/ | You’ll Be Fine | Hot Mulligan are on that emo bullshit. All of it: alternate tunings, capos, and twinkle riffs dangling like loose cardigan threads, but also pick slides and power chords as slick and shiny as a Drive Thru sampler CD. Painfully earnest lyrics about cars, funerals, faded pictures, and cigarettes, but also non-sequitur in-joke song titles. Shouting matches between the yelpy guy and the guy who can sorta sing for real. And that’s all just in the opener of you’ll be fine, the Michigan band’s second full-length. Across the album, they bear the most telling quality of people who’ve given their life to emo: they hate it a little, too. Their targets include the self-aggrandizing scene police, the clout chasers, and the abusers, but most importantly, themselves.
It’s a gift and a curse: Hot Mulligan have undeniable skills, but they lie in a style of music that is exceptionally well-suited to expressions of romantic failures, nonexistent job prospects, and the futility of self-medication. According to singer-guitarist Tades Sanville, he was inspired to write “Feal Like Crab” after taking stock of his career and realizing, “I have almost nothing worthwhile on my resume, and that’s not dope.” A few years ago, he might’ve just used that as a lyric, but Hot Mulligan may now aspire to something like thinking man’s pop-punk, as evinced by the unstoppable chorus: a life that ends “hiding deep in some depressing little hovel in the background of the show you’re watching,” a an exquisitely wrought passage that somehow manages to seem off-the-cuff. But “Feal Like Crab” isn’t going to serve as anyone’s anthem for rising above their station: when the band bursts into the bridge, their idea of orchestral uplift is a single dinky xylophone fighting for space with the saddest possible gang vocals.
“*Equip Sunglasses*” casts its aspersions indiscriminately in all directions, as the rhythm section works the sort of percolating groove that might soundtrack a boy band’s pivot to real rock. Judging from their deadpanning and flexing in the video, they’re aware of the dissonance here, as a bunch of Midwestern dudes beating the Jonas Brothers and 5 Seconds of Summer at their own game. It gives Hot Mulligan the sense of a band out of time: In 2004, this could’ve been their “All the Small Things,” but today, there’s no Warped Tour, no Fuse TV, and Vagrant was last seen putting out Janet Jackson albums five years ago.
You’ll be fine is a lot craftier than Hot Mulligan’s workmanlike debut Pilot, but its immediately pleasing familiarity can work against them. Sanville’s vocal range is almost identical to that of Jesse Lacey or Dan “Soupy” Campbell, with a resigned mutter on one end and a strangulated wail on the other. But Sanville uses the latter voice to begin most Hot Mulligan songs, and usually stays there. you’ll be fine leaves almost no room for ambiguity, and is likely to turn off anyone with even the slightest aversion to emo songwriting tropes.
Though flecked with signifiers of artistic growth—some drum machines here, a little more reverb there—you’ll be fine isn’t exactly a leveling up. It documents a band at a crossroads that could only come along in their early twenties. “Analog Fade (New Bule Sky)” isn’t just about watching the love of your life walk away, but about watching them figure out where they want to go to grad school. “SPS” isn’t just about sinking into alcoholic despair, but about the guilt over how your drinking makes you a bad roommate. “BCKYRD,” the album’s thesis statement, essentially equates adulthood to giving up on your actual interests. “Things don’t get better, just different,” Sanville screams. It’s the closest thing to hope Hot Mulligan can find at this point: they’re certainly a better band than they were, and they seem ready to write about something different next time around.
Buy: Rough Trade
(Pitchfork earns a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.) | 2020-04-04T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-04-04T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | No Sleep | April 4, 2020 | 6.7 | c70af951-2720-41be-bd8c-1eba49f10cb2 | Ian Cohen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ian-cohen/ | |
On their fifth album, the Horrors retool their formula for retro-leaning, riff-laden arena rock in an attempt to reconnect with the “unsettling” spirit of their garage-rock roots. | On their fifth album, the Horrors retool their formula for retro-leaning, riff-laden arena rock in an attempt to reconnect with the “unsettling” spirit of their garage-rock roots. | The Horrors: V | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/the-horrors-v/ | V | Looking back on a decade of releases, the Horrors have mostly endured their name, rather than embodying it. A knowing nod to their favorite schlocky 1960s bands—the Monks, the Sonics, Screaming Lord Sutch—at first it suited them as back-combed, kohl-lined stickmen hailed by the British music press as saviors of garage rock. But when they returned with their second album, the shimmering, krautrock-tinged Primary Colours, the Horrors had become a very different band. Their sound has only grown more polished, euphoric, and populist since, on 2011’s Skying and its similarly glowing follow-up, Luminous, which cracked the UK top 10.
The band were barely college age at the time of their scratchy garage-rock debut album, 2007’s Strange House, and so obviously precocious—particularly bassist and keyboardist Rhys Webb, the mod and psych aficionado growing a collection of vintage synths, and guitarist Josh Hayward, the physics grad with a knack for homebrewed guitar pedals—that they were bound to move on to headier influences. My Bloody Valentine, Can, Tangerine Dream, Brian Eno, and the Cure all became touchstones for a studio-forged sound that has occasionally been criticized as “record collectors’ rock”—a tasteful blend of retro influences that hardly inspires much in the way of horror. So after three albums in that vein, perhaps it’s no surprise that the next stage in their evolution entails the familiar rock‘n’roll journey back to their roots. “We wanted to get nasty,” says Webb of the new record, “and make something that sounded quite horrible and quite unsettling again.”
Any band looking to do that within the parameters of soaring, arena-ready rock could do worse than look to Depeche Mode and the Cure for pointers, and the brooding grandeur of those alternative-pop godheads looms large over V. The band’s basic formula—simple, languid melodies, traditional verse-chorus structures interrupted by guitar and synth wig-outs—hasn’t changed, but the surfaces are grittier, the drums smack harder, and the vocals sit louder in the mix. It’s the first time since Primary Colours that they’ve enlisted an outside producer, handing the job to Paul Epworth, the British studio veteran who’s worked with Adele, Coldplay, and indie heavy hitters like Bloc Party and Florence and the Machine. As a band of accomplished studio nerds, they seem to have tapped Epworth not so much for his production skills as his ear for a huge hit, and on the album’s most anthemic tracks, it’s down to Faris Badwan—previously a slippery, mumbling presence both on- and off-stage—to carry it off. You can almost feel him squirming under Epworth’s gaze.
The opening “Hologram” apparently started out as a 25-minute ambient house track, and its transformation is indicative of the band’s new direction. Psychedelic yet immediate, “Hologram” swaggers forward in a blaze of strobing Tubeway Army synths and cavernous 1980s drums—a very different welcome statement from the three minutes of airy, Tangerine Dream-like noodling that opened Luminous. From there, “Press Enter to Exit” combines submerged dub rock with a feather-light vocal and lashings of post-production faff—haywire electronics, false endings, what sounds like a doorbell—and ends up sounding a bit like late-1990s Ian Brown. “Machine,” the first single, emerges from a tangle of knackered drum machines and white noise that threatens to get really weird, only to resolve into a throbbing S&M groove, a grungy rock moment that guyliner-era Dave Gahan would approve of. And on “Ghost,” a shuddering wall of sound almost recalls Mogwai at their most stately.
Halfway in, there’s no doubt that it all sounds great—but what’s it actually about? Badwan’s lyrics, though more audible than ever, remain frustratingly opaque. “There’s only so far that the eye can see,” he murmurs, as if reciting random scraps from his diary. “Are we hologram? Are we vision?” he ponders. “Breathe your blood diamonds, lifetime is drawing in.” Even with a sharpened focus on punchy hooks and melodies, the band’s potential is scuppered by a basic lack of content. Badwan’s voice is actually stronger than ever, if still a bit drippy and flat in that British art-rock way. But precious few of his lyrics really resonate—he never really exposes himself, never confides in us. As any mega-fan of Depeche Mode or the Cure could tell you, that can be the difference between a band you like and a band you love—a band you’d drive 500 miles to see live, a band whose lyrics you get tattooed on your shoulder. The darkness has to ring true.
The foot comes off the pedal for “Point of No Reply,” a coasting, deceptively chill groove which bemoans a mystery woman “with an eye for revenge.” “You tell your friends I hit you,” Badwan adds, one of the few lines that’s unsettling enough to be memorable. The album’s second half also contains its anthemic pinnacle, “Weighed Down” (“Don’t let love bring you down,” Badwan repeats, as freeways crumble apart and the earth splits in two behind him) and a pair of melodramatic ballads: “Gathering” bolsters its strummed guitars with sweeping strings in a ‘90s Britpop manner, while “It’s a Good Life” would be unremarkable without the knowledge that it’s written about the late Peaches Geldof, whom Badwan briefly dated. “She lay in the dark, but I don’t know who found her,” he sings, imagining the hours after her death, in a rare, unguarded moment.
V ends on a lighters-in-the-air moment with the pounding, sun-blinded euphoria of “Something to Remember Me By,” a finale that channels the saucer-eyed grandeur of main-stage New Order and confirms V as the Horrors’ most ambitious album to date. At the same time, it feels like a wasted arsenal of almost-brilliant songs, a record that lacks the essential quirk found in so many of the band’s touchstones. The Horrors sound more horrible than they have in a long time—but to send a shiver down our spines, they need to convince us it’s all real. | 2017-09-27T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-09-27T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Caroline / Wolf Tone | September 27, 2017 | 7.1 | c711df93-8c5c-4c23-bd74-662954c81aba | Chal Ravens | https://pitchfork.com/staff/chal-ravens/ | |
John Mayer suffers simultaneously from an excess of taste and an oblivious lack of it. It makes his seventh studio album neither sensitive nor scuzzy, just pleasantly bland. | John Mayer suffers simultaneously from an excess of taste and an oblivious lack of it. It makes his seventh studio album neither sensitive nor scuzzy, just pleasantly bland. | John Mayer: The Search for Everything | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/23113-the-search-for-everything/ | The Search for Everything | John Mayer has spent the past decade cultivating a dubious notoriety. In an era somehow populated with multiple David Duke gaffes, he’s the guy whose reputation was tangibly harmed by it.
He also makes music, which is perennially hampered by four problems. One: overcompensating with clever-clever lyrics and interview stunts because of a deep embarrassment at sharing a market segment with Shawn Mendes and Ed Sheeran. Two: a willingness to play PR ball and juice up otherwise bland singles with celebrity gossip, admitting to the New York Times that at the center of “Still Feel Like Your Man” was Katy Perry, a confession certain to please the tabloids. Three: a clockwork fascination with the trends of the times, which in 2017, means yacht-rock smarm with a pinch of Dave Longstreth and James Blake’s falsetto-processing trickery. And, most damningly: a fundamental boringness to his records designed to be offset by a winning personality. He writes musical nonentities that resemble entities when sung by a sensitive troubadour, except this troubadour is off spewing napalm through Playboy’s pages.
All of this would be best left in the past if The Search for Everything hadn’t dredged it up as part of a deliberate tour of contrition—his second. For the public, we get another round of apologies for the antics that supposedly torched his career. The industry gets a course-correction from the studied, Laurel Canyon-inflected folk that actually did torch his career (it’s telling that his last two actual hits were a Katy Perry duet and a Beyoncé cover) into slick soft-rock. It’s a strategy last used by Robin Thicke on Paula, another expensive plea of an album released by a media heel. Like Paula, Mayer’s seventh studio album backfires spectacularly. One never forgets how much and how blandly Mayer doth protest.
He’s undoubtedly a good curator of musicians, and his core trio—including longtime D’Angelo bassist Pino Palladino and veteran studio drummer Steve Jordan—lend the record an understated groove. There will likely be few albums this year so consistently pleasant. But even though The Search for Everything is his admitted attempt to produce megahits again, with a sound adjacent to the slick ’70s yacht rock that’s become an obsession of Max Martin among others, he’s reluctant to commit to anything more than pleasant. The closest is “In the Blood,” with stadium-ish percussion and sunny backing vocals from an uncredited Sheryl Crow, but even that only goes halfway: neither as undeniable as he’s aiming for nor as scuzzy as he probably wants.
Then there’s that old inescapable problem, the part where John Mayer says words. “Emoji of a Wave” is a perfectly fine ballad, with a perfectly fine Cat Stevens lilt and harmonies by the Beach Boys’ Al Jardine. But then there’s the title. Why? Nothing in the song suggests emoji, or anything past 1975. The only explanation is Mayer trying to spritz it up with cheap modernity, which is bad lol. The limply funky “Rosie” is an early-’00s throwback, in the sense that Mayer’s bit about learning (just for her!) the Spanish words for “excuse me” and “I’m sorry” is gratuitous Latin courting. “Roll It on Home” and “Love on the Weekend” are windswept country-pop songs of the kind the Nashville songwriting machine commissions by the dozens, but Nashville would never greenlight overwritten lyrics like “I’ll be dreamin’ of the next time we can go into another serotonin overflow.” (Even Róisín Murphy barely pulled that off, and at least she got the right bonding hormone.)
It’s progress, probably, that Mayer keeps the condescension to a dull sneer, but this also makes everything sound that much more anodyne. “Still Feel Like Your Man” asks how sympathetic can a narrator really be when he begins by bragging about how the prettiest girl in the room totally wants him? It also asks what if, instead of Justin Timberlake, Michael Jackson’s “Love Never Felt So Good” spliced in a frat boy? It’s a remarkable demonstration of Mayer’s fundamental problem: suffering simultaneously from an excess of taste and an oblivious lack of it, a Fleetwood Mac heart and a Jack Johnson brain. If only he could start recording separately from himself. | 2017-04-19T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-04-19T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Columbia | April 19, 2017 | 4.9 | c7214af1-9897-4243-bf25-f2d04a3ff326 | Katherine St. Asaph | https://pitchfork.com/staff/katherine-st. asaph/ | null |
Latest from Pennsylvania scuzz-punk revivalists consolidates their strengths, harnessing their fire-extinguisher splatter into shake-appealing rock action. | Latest from Pennsylvania scuzz-punk revivalists consolidates their strengths, harnessing their fire-extinguisher splatter into shake-appealing rock action. | Pissed Jeans: King of Jeans | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/13360-king-of-jeans/ | King of Jeans | When Pennsylvania scuzz-punks Pissed Jeans released their Sub Pop debut, Hope for Men, two years ago, the album seemed to represent a noble if financially foolhardy way for the label to reinvest their Shins and Postal Service profits. Though Sub Pop, of course, first built its empire two decades ago on caustic, post-hardcore rock, the few signees to mine that tradition since the mid-1990s-- from godheadSilo to Murder City Devils to the Catheters-- tended to have tokenistic standing on an increasingly diversified and commercially viable roster. Pissed Jeans thus appeared to be the latest addition to this lunatic fringe: one that provided a spiritual link to the imprint's storied past, but-- given the limited crossover potential for caterwauling, guttural noise-core-- hardly a foundation for their future.
But two years later, our appetite for absurdist punk-rock seems to be on an uptick. The Jesus Lizard and Butthole Surfers are hitting the reunion-tour circuit, playing venues larger than the ones they filled in their heydays; Fucked Up have scored Fox News-pundit gigs and a nomination for Canada's Polaris Music Prize. Pissed Jeans, meanwhile, have answered this pigfuck-apoolaza with an album that could potentially elevate the band to Sub Pop franchise players. If Hope for Men was distinguished by the canyon-wide chasm between the band's ugly aggression and frontman Matt Korvette's seemingly frivolous lyrical concerns (the potential for a Whole Foods sponsorship remains sadly unrealized), King of Jeans successfully consolidates these two strengths, harnessing the earlier record's sometimes directionless fire-extinguisher splatter into shake-appealing rock action, and cohering Korvette's ramblings into a more complete picture of wage-slave misanthropy and alpha-male inadequacy.
On paper, that latter part might read like the makings of a mid-life crisis record (à la the Wrens' Meadowlands), but the difference is Korvette wears his failure like a badge of honor. And where Hope for Men's carpet-bomb onslaught sometimes obscured the relatable quality of Korvette's observations, on King of Jeans, they're organized into shout-back slogans cathartic enough to keep enraged 9-to-5ers from going postal: on opener "False Jesii Part 2", Korvette answers a litany of social pressures-- from going to the gym to wearing a "tight black shirt"-- with a boisterous holler of "I don't bother!" before celebrating his slothfulness with a playground-taunt chorus of "nyah nyah nyah nyah nyah," all to the steady beat of a tambourine, no less.
No one's going to confuse this with pop music, of course, but Pissed Jeans have certainly become more economical and precise in their attack-- gone are Hope for Men's extended exercises in textural noise terror ("People Person") and piano-blues concrète ("Scrapbooking"). In its place are two-minute Germs infections ("Human Upskirt"), Buttholes blurts ("Pleasure Race"), and crazed Nick Cave cattle calls ("Half Idiot"-- a soulmate to "Zoo-Music Girl"). And in "Request for Masseuse", we hear the closest Pissed Jeans will probably ever get to a slow-jam: over guitarist Bradley Fry and bassist Randy Huth's oozing Iommi/Butler riff, Korvette lists off a series of instructions for his personal-ad pleasure-giver; when drummer Sean McGuinness kicks into the lurching groove 90 seconds in, Korvette lets out the creepiest sigh ever, graphically confirming the ending was a happy one.
But if "Request for Masseuse" represents a rare expression of joy for Korvette, King of Jeans' centerpiece track, "Spent", underscores how fleeting such moments really are. At seven minutes, the song is about three times as long as the average track here, but rather than being the most elaborate piece, it's the most despairingly regressive. Where King of Jeans' more compact tracks provide us the opportunity to scream or laugh along with Korvette's complaints, "Spent" is a 16-rpm Melvins-grade sludge feast that slows down the self-loathing commentary to ensure we feel every second of his agony; after counting off the ways his life sucks ("I went and got my car back/ There's a new noise this time"), he finally loses it when he realizes that even a "cold glass of water... [doesn't] satisfy." Recent history tells us that angry, confrontational music tends to flourish during Republican administrations, but King of Jeans illuminates the problems that plague the working man-- receding hairlines, the inability to relate to girls, the transactional nature of romance, the impossibility of proper cuticle maintenance-- regardless of who's running the country or how the economy is doing. The bumper sticker may say "Yes we can," but the guy driving the leased Hyundai on which it's affixed is still left there staring at himself in the rearview mirror, thinking, "No, dude, I really can't." | 2009-08-10T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2009-08-10T02:00:01.000-04:00 | Rock | Sub Pop | August 10, 2009 | 8.3 | c724c4a6-deaf-465d-a1f0-4334216da73d | Stuart Berman | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stuart-berman/ | null |
Named after her own mother, Ciara's sixth record Jackie doesn't shift Ciara's sound so much as frame it with a redemption narrative, through the lens of motherhood, centered around her breakup with rapper and erstwhile ex Future. | Named after her own mother, Ciara's sixth record Jackie doesn't shift Ciara's sound so much as frame it with a redemption narrative, through the lens of motherhood, centered around her breakup with rapper and erstwhile ex Future. | Ciara: Jackie | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/20555-jackie/ | Jackie | Motherhood has often brought out the best in your fave pop stars. Mariah, M.I.A., Madonna, Kelis, Beyoncé: all have stellar postpartum releases to their names, with some explicitly riffing on the theme, and others signaling a shift—sometimes patronizingly referred to as more 'mature'—in sound. These albums all sound very different, but they form a sort of collective statement that motherhood isn't some aesthetic, thematic or musical purgatory for women. We are not content, these working women say, on being aged out, or matron-ized, by the youth-oriented trajectory of the industry.
"Man, I just delivered a nine-pound, 10-ounce baby. I'm a bad motherfucker," Ciara drawls on "Jackie (B.M.F.)", the explosive intro track on her sixth album, Jackie. Named after her own mother, Jackie doesn't necessarily shift Ciara's sound so much as a frame it with a faint redemption narrative, centered around the birth of her baby and her breakup with rapper and erstwhile ex Future. "You actin' like you upgrading me, I upgraded you/ You and me at Fashion Week in Paris, I put you onto that new," goes the album's first single, the breakup ballad "I Bet". But Ciara's never been much for album-length statements. Instead the ATL-reared R&B pop star, best known for her sensuous, studious approach to choreography, has created a career by rewiring the city's full throttle hip-hop motifs into club-friendly pop.
Jackie doesn't do much to allay the feeling, which has followed her for her whole career, that there's better R&B pop out there. But instead of positioning herself against Rihanna—who is only just starting to really find her vocal strength, and who is decidedly not a dancer—or Beyoncé (ha ha), Ciara is content to be a reliable mainstay, a translator of Atlanta's ever-shifting avant-garde and the constant bringer of high-energy dance anthems. She's innovative within her own framework: Before Beyoncé started dabbling with bars, Ciara was already rapping on 2013's "Super Turnt Up" and the album-less Mike WiLL Made It single, "Wake Up, No Make-Up".
The problems with Jackie, a serviceable record that gets better with multiple listens, is that unlike her previous releases it's more heavily focused on paint-by-numbers Dr. Luke electro. And, an even bigger problem—and this is where Ciara has always faltered—is that it hints at a storyline, but doesn't go deeper. Moms totally care about more than just being moms, but consider that Ciara's records are also too often about nothing at all, and it's hard not to wish she'd gone into more depth. It's an opportunity and, again, on Jackie, she doesn't take it. There's a song called "Lullaby" that's not about a baby but tucking a lover in for the evening. The actual lullaby comes toward the very end, with "I Got You"; she sings "Hush, Little Baby" while Future Zahir gurgles the outro.
There are interesting moments: the hesitant merging of post-ratchet trap and drum and bass on "B.M.F.", the Niles Rodgers-esque retro-soul bounce of "Kiss & Tell", and her beatific, waxy vocal performance on "That's How I'm Feelin'" and "Fly". Both are pillowy Polow Da Don electro-lite bangers—the former featuring Pitbull and Missy Elliott—referencing early Ciara, like the jock-jam energy of "1, 2 Step". For Jackie's deluxe edition, Ciara calls upon Joe Jonas to switch up the dewy, gloriously shady "I Bet", featuring imitation-Future yelps and adlibs. And second single "Dance Like We're Making Love", is a gorgeous, sleek midtempo track, similar to Frank Ocean's "Novocane" but with a bigger, airier hook.
She carried her last album cycle off a slow jam about a very public romance ("Body Party"), but "I Bet" just isn't as strong. Jackie's best moments come on those Polow power jams, when the music imitates the explosiveness of Ciara's movement. What would've made Jackie better than the last album—what would've given her the edge that her peers maintain—is some insight behind Ciara's redemption songs. | 2015-05-08T02:00:02.000-04:00 | 2015-05-08T02:00:02.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | Epic | May 8, 2015 | 6.8 | c7254d76-5cd6-4d4a-9895-48fb027ce3e4 | Anupa Mistry | https://pitchfork.com/staff/anupa-mistry/ | null |
Canadian rave pioneer Tiga Sontag’s fidgety new album features three tracks co-produced by Matthew Dear and a collaboration with Hudson Mohawke. | Canadian rave pioneer Tiga Sontag’s fidgety new album features three tracks co-produced by Matthew Dear and a collaboration with Hudson Mohawke. | Tiga: No Fantasy Required | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21669-no-fantasy-required/ | No Fantasy Required | Canadian rave pioneer Tiga Sontag has a new album out, but he’s not sure that the world needs more albums. Asked in a recent interview with Thump whether albums were still relevant, he replied, "They don’t even matter to me anymore." It could have been a tossed-off or ironic remark; it’s hard to tell. But it’s easy to trace a path between Sontag’s blasé attitude regarding the long play and the shortcomings of his new record, No Fantasy Required.
A veteran of a half-dozen different styles, Tiga has never shied away from trying new sounds. But here, it’s as if he’s can’t find anything that fits comfortably, and from track to track you can feel him rejecting any kind of consistency. As a result, a good portion of the tracks here fall short of the high standards he’s set for himself with his past work. In some ways, the new record is reminiscent of Sontag’s first solo album, Sexor, another fidgety collection of tracks that couldn’t sit still long enough to relax.
That’s not to say there are not some glorious productions on the album. "Having So Much Fun," one of the three terrific tracks here co-produced by Matthew Dear, is a strutting, vintage, electro banger, with steeplechase bass and whistles tailoring an immaculately structured, wryly romantic song. The first two songs on the album "No Fantasy Required" and "Make Me Fall In Love," are gorgeous R&B-tinged electropop, recalling the best work of Hot Chip.
Dear once described Sontag's style as more disciplined and scientific than his own. But their differences seem to help Tiga locate his own personality; as an accomplished remixer, he’s used to expressing himself through the work of others. On No Fantasy Required, he never seems more present than on the Dear co-production "3 Rules," where his love of bass thump and sly sense of humor shine most brightly, particularly during the track’s witty coda.
It’s on the back half that Tiga seems to withdraw from his own album, his sense of humor curdling. Three singles in a row, two of them previously released, weigh down the album, starting with the "Planet E" a much-anticipated collaboration with fellow club bombardier Hudson Mohawke that feels inexplicably tame. "Plush," a version of which was originally released in 2012, is a stylish production, but it sounds claustrophobic sandwiched between two bigger songs here. And there’s no bigger disappointment than the transformation of "Bugatti" (originally released as a single in 2014, featuring Pusha T). It’s elongated on the record, and without Pusha’s snarling ostentatiousness ("Tiga me amigo, we both follow that G code"), there’s no foil for Sontag’s chillier sneer.
That previously successful singles feel stale when forced into position on the album underscores the difficulty of pacing these things. Fifty minutes of music from the same producer is difficult to make interesting without a lot of thought given to pacing and cohesion. In the Thump interview, Tiga said that albums allow you to "release different styles of music" and provide "a nice platform for experimentation." Neither of those statements sounds like it comes from a producer who’s particularly interested in the elements that can make these collections special, nor does No Fantasy Required. | 2016-03-10T01:00:02.000-05:00 | 2016-03-10T01:00:02.000-05:00 | Electronic | Counter | March 10, 2016 | 6.2 | c72b10a8-69da-4208-9b1c-1389437c4b99 | Jonah Bromwich | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jonah-bromwich/ | null |
Fresh off Beyoncé’s co-sign, the house DJ and producer returns with a joyous, collaboration-filled LP that channels the buzzy, late-night feeling when affection and tenderness flow freely. | Fresh off Beyoncé’s co-sign, the house DJ and producer returns with a joyous, collaboration-filled LP that channels the buzzy, late-night feeling when affection and tenderness flow freely. | Honey Dijon: *Black Girl Magic * | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/honey-dijon-black-girl-magic/ | Black Girl Magic | Honey Dijon’s DJ sets are life-giving experiences, each head-turning beat and tempo shift primed for gathering on the dancefloor in communal euphoria. The Chicago-raised house producer has spent decades honing her style behind the decks, a fact Beyoncé duly noted when she recruited Dijon to contribute to this year’s club-ready Renaissance. The music on Dijon’s solo debut, 2017’s The Best of Both Worlds, reaffirmed her curatorial expertise, running from hypnotic deep house to swaggering ballroom with a bevy of guest artists in tow. Follow-up Black Girl Magic expands her vision of eclectic house music built for both the club and the afters. It’s Dijon’s most vivid release yet, jolting and joyous in equal measure as it offers up a passionate expression of Black queer joy.
Black Girl Magic has the good-natured feel of a family affair, filled out with a wide circle of new and familiar collaborators. On the standout “Work,” a strutting jazz-house cut, she recruits Los Angeles singer-songwriters Dave Giles II and Cor.Ece alongside Chicago hip-house legend Mike Dunn; its downpitched hook, decorated with rippling horns, is immediately irresistible. She teams up with longtime co-producer Luke Solomon on several songs, including the satiny “In the Club,” which recasts rap icon Eve in an inspired new role as a house diva over springing synths and a driving kick drum. The pace is often brisk and uptempo, a soundtrack to a decadent night out at a club of Dijon’s own making that weaves messages of community and resilience into each song. When Brazilian drag star Pabllo Vittar and singer Urias break into chants on the disco-laced “Everybody,” you can practically hear the glee and camaraderie radiating through their smiles.
The album’s buoyant music is tempered with lyrics that focus on finding love, whether for yourself or someone else. She lowers things to a simmer on “It’s Quiet Now,” where luminous synth pads cast an air of seduction as Toronto singer Dope Earth Alien summons the strength to break off a toxic relationship: “We try our best to love but all we do is fight,” she chants during the ascendant bridge. “Freedom has a space in the song that someday you and I will write.” Even when Dijon’s music reaches for a gooier sentiment of positivity, she charges it with deeper impact: “Love is a state of mind/It will bring us all together,” singer Ramona Renea preaches on “Love Is a State of Mind” against a spare stomp and sauntering synths. The rudimentary backdrop amplifies the unvarnished appeal of Renea’s affirming words.
Dijon is in her element here, eager to expand house music’s limits. For every pulse-racing dance breakdown, there’s a surprise: “Show Me Some Love” thumps with smoky energy, rooted by a heavy bassline, warped keys, and the mellow vocals of Channel Tres, who provides a laidback foil for Dijon’s punchy production. The song is another prismatic example of the way Dijon’s productions access the buzzy, late-night feeling when affection and tenderness flow as freely as the music pumping from the speakers. “DJ love helped me survive,” the spoken-word artist Kameelah Waheed says over sparse piano chords on the album’s intro, “Love Is.” With Black Girl Magic, Dijon confers the vibrancy of that love to everyone in the room. | 2022-11-28T00:03:00.000-05:00 | 2022-11-21T00:03:00.000-05:00 | Electronic | Classic Music Company | November 28, 2022 | 7.7 | c7319152-aa87-4d37-8c5f-524f23e019e8 | Eric Torres | https://pitchfork.com/staff/eric-torres/ | |
The Sacramento rapper’s new release doesn’t compromise on his bleak worldview, but the music feels warmer and more accessible. | The Sacramento rapper’s new release doesn’t compromise on his bleak worldview, but the music feels warmer and more accessible. | Mozzy: Beyond Bulletproof | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/mozzy-beyond-bulletproof/ | Beyond Bulletproof | Just last year, the Sacramento rapper Mozzy released five projects. Alongside full-length collaborations with Bay Area cannabis tycoon Berner, former MMG foot soldier Gunplay, and Jersey battle rapper Tsu Surf, he also dropped a solo album called Internal Affairs. Few rappers work harder or give more of themselves, but he tends to make his most resonant music when he gives himself time to reflect. Case in point: His latest album, Beyond Bulletproof, comes after a six-month break, and while the lyrics represent another immersion into Mozzy’s seemingly endless loop of bloodthirsty reciprocity, the music feels warmer, less standoffish. This is the first Mozzy album that could feasibly crack the radio, and it does so without compromising the integrity of his storytelling.
The production adds a softer R&B sway to his usual West Coast bounce, with piano chords, lightly fingered guitar riffs, and samples of “Let Me Love You” and “Can’t Let You Go.” The rasp in his voice eases into the occasional singsong, and as the songs grow smoother, Mozzy’s bleak worldview becomes less impenetrable. Here, he establishes himself as an unlikely role model and a champion for the lost and damned. Even his most hostile songs hide moments of tenderness: “Body Count” pads his rap sheet and offers prayers for loved ones in nearly the same breath. The hustle-hard anthem “Off the Muscle” uses brusque bars to impart simple, resonant messages. Through the huffed flows of “I Ain’t Perfect,” he ponders depression symptoms, shows compassion for the hopeless and the homeless, and describes vengeance as a flawed coping mechanism. “On Jesus Christ/Retaliation help me sleep at night,” he raps, but he still sounds weary and weighed down.
God is the only force Mozzy fully trusts in, the only one there for him consistently (“I pray in the mornin’, I go get the dough, then I thank Him at night”). But despite his trust issues, he can be empathetic. On more than one occasion, he sees his aunt’s amphetamine addiction for what it is: a means to numb the pain of abuse. Near the end of “Unethical & Deceitful,” Mozzy lays down his personal code: “I was taught provide for your people/Life without parole, he’d rather die in search of freedom.”
Despite the violence and mayhem depicted in his lyrics, Mozzy is clear-eyed, and at no point do the words feel gratuitously violent or like misery porn. They simply are haunting in their fidelity. If he terrifies you occasionally, that is a testament to his writing. At the end of “So Lonely,” he eulogizes seven fallen friends, and there’s suffering in his voice whenever he raps about responding in kind. Handcuffs rob boys of their innocence, painkillers fail to dull pain, and bodies keep piling up: In his songs, there are no safeguards.
Beyond Bulletproof is the closest Mozzy has come to making his songs accessible. It’s hard to play the victim and the perpetrator all at once, but it’s remarkable how well he manages, and while his evolution into a hood benefactor is ongoing, his songs are already benefiting from the widened scope. It doesn’t have the immediacy of 2015’s Bladadah or the gravity of 2017’s 1 Up Top Akh, but Beyond Bulletproof is a better entry point into his massive catalog, a way to ease into his cruel reality without being overwhelmed by its darkness. | 2020-05-09T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-05-09T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Mozzy / Empire | May 9, 2020 | 7.3 | c731dbd5-606f-40b7-82e4-72de78376b3f | Sheldon Pearce | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sheldon-pearce/ | |
On the Chicago rapper’s latest album, it’s hard to tell whether he is a talented guy who’s just not working hard or a hack with an extraordinary work ethic. | On the Chicago rapper’s latest album, it’s hard to tell whether he is a talented guy who’s just not working hard or a hack with an extraordinary work ethic. | Towkio: WWW. | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/towkio-www/ | WWW. | Rick Rubin is music royalty, but his name hasn’t always been a watchword for groundbreaking taste. For every Run-D.M.C. or Beastie Boys, there’s been an Ed Sheeran, a Linkin Park, an Avett Brothers and now, a Towkio. The Chicago rapper, a close friend of Chance and Vic Mensa, released his debut studio album, WWW. on Rubin’s American Recordings label last week, and if the record is any indication, he’s destined to become the latest exhibit in the Rubin wing of commercially successful but artistically dubious enterprises.
WWW. stands for World Wide .Wav, a sequel to Towkio’s 2015 release, .Wav Theory. That record laid out the rapper’s philosophy of life, essentially, the butterfly effect theory: everything is connected to everything else. It’s a bit of a funny sentiment coming from Towkio because if there’s one thing that defines the record, it’s his clear disconnect with the gang of skilled artists brought on to assist him. With his feints at wisdom and his strange self-absorption, Towkio can feel a little bit like a friend who shows up to hang out after having eaten an eighth of mushrooms. Maybe he is having a transcendent experience but everyone else is checking the time every ten minutes, wondering when he’ll stop explaining the secrets of the tides and want to just, like, watch a movie.
It can be hard to tell whether Towkio is a talented guy who’s just not working hard or a hack with an extraordinary work ethic. He pays little attention to the excellent production he’s gifted throughout WWW., and his lyrics are, for the most part, a deck of platitudes, punctuated by sub-par punchlines and a pettiness that goes poorly with his enlightened posturing. On “Loose,” a tremulous, bouncy little beat from Louis the Child, he ignores the pockets created by the bass, rapping in an inexplicably aggressive tone about how he’s changed, but still breathes the same air as he used to, and is “lookin’ at the game like a daycare.” (Yeah, I don’t know either.) Then, when the beat accommodates his aggression, he can’t keep up and resorts to doing his best imitation of Pharrell on “Lapdance.”
But Towkio has a gift for choosing collaborators and the record is partially saved by danceable beats from Lido, Louis, Knox Fortune, and others, as well as some excellent hooks. Any song with a feature becomes something of a competition between Towkio and his peers: can he ruin the track before they have a chance to redeem it? It’s unclear whether SZA’s performance justifies “Morning View,” a ballad whose meditative opening moment is swiftly punctured by a misplaced falsetto. But she does get a chance to assert herself, using her verse to transport us back into the narrative tangle of Ctrl.
Towkio occasionally flips the script. His first verse on “Forever,” makes the song seem like it’s going to be one of the strongest on the record before his buddy Mensa struts in and sprays crude stick figures over his friend’s lovingly crafted wildstyle. And while the back half of the album is less memorable, that modesty gives Towkio a moment to stop trying to make something epic and simply make something solid. His opening verse on the standout “Hate to Love” is sung, which helps him avoid issues with the beat. He uses it to paint a rough but compelling picture of how a failed relationship pushes a person away from other people and toward drugs.
But the most notable thing about WWW. is how Towkio promoted it. Two days before its release, he “dropped” the record from space, meaning that he rode a helium balloon 19 miles into the stratosphere, listened to his own record, and then parachuted back down to earth. He seemed genuinely worried that he might die during his trip, but that kind of bravery, the brashness of a bold decision and the commitment to carry it out, makes sense for the artist born Preston Oshita, who often seems like he’s looking for shortcuts: to wisdom, to superstardom, to artistic transcendence. On WWW., it feels as if he had no interest in a less flashy but more consistent sort of commitment, the kind it takes simply to make a good record. | 2018-03-01T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2018-03-01T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rap | American / Republic | March 1, 2018 | 5.8 | c737b819-e374-430f-8d16-7113a978b9ba | Jonah Bromwich | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jonah-bromwich/ | |
The Irish singer's first full-length album since 2007’s Overpowered is wildly unpredictable, moving from torch songs to extended disco bangers, and the variety suits her. | The Irish singer's first full-length album since 2007’s Overpowered is wildly unpredictable, moving from torch songs to extended disco bangers, and the variety suits her. | Róisín Murphy: Hairless Toys | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/20518-hairless-toys/ | Hairless Toys | "I didn’t become a pop star, and nobody knows exactly why," said Róisín Murphy of her last full-length album, 2007’s Overpowered. In retrospect, it’s shocking everyone didn’t immediately grasp exactly why. Never mind the talk of career repositioning and the Super Glue-sticky singles and the high-fashion diva-ing—Overpowered may not have been immediate, but it was classic in its own way, and prescient. There’s no shortage of people dissecting her influence on other artists’ gonzo fashion, and many artists are now making dancefloor tracks that embrace house piano and disco tropes, even if they’d fizzle and die if held up next to "Let Me Know". But given the modern dance revival’s rigid stratification of artists into shrugged-away female vocalists and celebrated male producer-celebrities, perhaps it’s for the best that Murphy has shied away from trends, and with a few exceptions, mostly foregone guest spots.
Indeed, Murphy’s output over the past near-decade has been wildly unpredictable, ranging from dance bangers with porno guitars ("Orally Fixated") to an Édith Piaf-inspired EP of Italian art songs not to mention two remix EPs that might have stirred the highest of emotions on the dancefloor, if only people heard them. And Hairless Toys continues this trend. It’s the most cerebral work of Murphy’s decades-long career, and arguably the one with her most creative control yet, letting listeners closer into her head than ever yet keeping them at a distance even there.
The album comes with a few preconceptions. "Gone Fishing" was inspired by the New York ball scene, which, coming from a white Irish woman well after ball culture returned to the mainstream, has the potential to get dicey fast. And Murphy’s rationale for the record—"I envisioned ‘Gone Fishing’ almost as a song from a Broadway musical version of [iconic documentary Paris Is Burning]"—is not so far from Madonna co-opting vogueing into a machine to make herself endless context-free royalties. But "Gone Fishing" is less sonic homage, more earnest expression of empathy. And if Hairless Toys takes anything from that world it’s the subtext: it’s largely an album about confronting one’s failures and anxieties and outsider feelings and mythologizing them.
Sometimes others are invited in. "Exploitation" is nine-and-a-half minutes of circling closer and closer around one obsessive question: "Who’s exploiting who?" The sexual overtones are there if you’re looking for them, the sociological analogies almost make themselves: artists exploiting subjects, or vice versa. But that’s all overly serious for a track this deliberately whimsical: polyrhythms, a cartoon cliff-dive of a guitar riff after the lyric "the depths that they will go," fax-machine noises—all fascinating sounds, manipulated one after the other to make you think they mean something.
"Exploitation" is also the most traditional single on an album mostly concerned with inner pain. "Uninvited Guest" is more typical, describing a quite specific emotional state: the near-agoraphobic inertia—total inactivity from the outside, a deafening restless twitch on the inside—that comes of anxiety and having enough money to stay there forever: "I could get out of my head/ Even all the money I have left, I could buy another day of nothing." The music’s somewhere between synesthesia of the mood and a dark joke at its own expense: hi-hat tremors, backing vocals elbowing through the mix, a bridge to lose time in, a helpless shrug of a whistling line. (Murphy, like just about everyone who shares a genre and gender, has fought off Kate Bush comparisons, and continues to do so; but "Guest", in topic and particularly in its wry gallows humor, is much like an introvert’s "Sat in Your Lap".)
"Exile" is a torch song delivered in a wearied whisper, every note heard through smoke, evoking less the dance floor than a bar that’s 2 a.m. empty. "Unputdownable" is a traditional Murphy extended metaphor—lover as page-turning book—with a mid-track swerve that reveals it not as a love song but something less requited, more unknowable: "I’d open up the book and climb right up out of the town...if you’d allow me to read your mind." (Like much of Hairless Toys, it almost seems like a comment on the record as well.)
It’s heady stuff, but the album’s emotional landscape is sketched so distinctly there’s ample reason to stick with it. There’s also, three-fourths through, a musical payoff. "House of Glass" delivers grand statements, often set stark against the music as if underlined in fire: "We were glass house girls in our plastic wigs and pearls"; "People like us from broken homes never throw stones"; "Little pieces of a broken dream"; "Built a house of glass out of fragments from the blast." Fittingly, it also builds up to the album’s centerpiece: the chords from "Exploitation", the ascending peals from "Gone Fishing", disco guitar licks and swarming background vocals assembled into a fragile yet stunning climax. It’s all gleaming and immaculate from a distance, sharp and shattered if you get too close. | 2015-05-13T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2015-05-13T02:00:01.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B / Electronic | PIAS | May 13, 2015 | 7.4 | c73aaae4-2369-4f5f-9f4d-3b72b0105a74 | Katherine St. Asaph | https://pitchfork.com/staff/katherine-st. asaph/ | null |
The Norwegian producer invents a Vocaloid-inspired feline character and retreats from the spotlit pop of his last album, returning to the introspective hush of his earlier work. | The Norwegian producer invents a Vocaloid-inspired feline character and retreats from the spotlit pop of his last album, returning to the introspective hush of his earlier work. | Cashmere Cat: Princess Catgirl | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/cashmere-cat-princess-catgirl/ | Princess Catgirl | After all these years, Cashmere Cat is still shy. The musician born Magnus August Høiberg has nearly a decade of prismatic productions under his belt, which has led to appearances on the big stages at EDM festivals, collaborations with childhood heroes, and studio time with the biggest pop stars in the world. On some level, Høiberg has had to adjust to the practicalities that this success requires. He once wouldn’t even do in-person interviews, but a few years ago he finally decided to open up about his life story in a music video. One would imagine he’s no longer hiding in a bathroom, as a friend of his once described, when DJ Khaled unexpectedly turns up at the studio.
But as he’s explained in the press materials for his new solo album, Princess Catgirl, he’s been unable to fully shake his reserved nature. To deal with all the attention, he decided to enlist some help from a cartoon cat: Princess Catgirl, the “face” of his music. “She makes me feel safe,” he says. That’s why the last couple of Cashmere Cat music videos have featured an animated cat with a shock of blue hair and traditional Norwegian dress, dancing in desolate locales. She’s the voice, Høiberg implies, behind the chipmunked vocal mutations that are all over this record.
The idea that Høiberg has taken to collaborating with a Catsune Miku of sorts may seem like a silly concept, but it’s telling of where his head is these days. On 9, his debut full-length, he capitalized on his reputation for futuristic pop music. He called up famous friends like Ariana Grande and Camila Cabello to make a brash, extroverted version of his pillowy, reverberant beats. On Princess Catgirl, he’s largely backed off from that approach. There are collaborators here—Benny Blanco, Tory Lanez, SOPHIE, and Francis Starlite, among others, make appearances. But it’s Høiberg and Catgirl that take top billing, an indication that things are more personal and introspective this time around, which has always been his sweet spot.
When the excesses of the EDM boom were at their garish peak, Cashmere Cat’s productions were soft and intimate. Even if they were playful enough to allow him access to that scene, he wasn’t making music for the ragers. “When I was making that music I was thinking more of a girl or a boy alone in their bedroom listening to it than a crowd full of people going insane,” he said in 2017. The seven songs on Princess Catgirl are a return to that fantasy. He favors comfy stuff, textures that you can luxuriate in and use to shut out the outside world. You can hear it in the way the gentle chimes of “EMOTIONS” swell into cloudy, shoegaze-y squalls that sound a little like Slowdive’s electronic experiments or the digital gusts of M83’s early works. “WITHOUT YOU” has a more standard pop structure, but it too is muted and diffuse—a low-lit reimagining of the neon sounds Høiberg might use on his higher-profile collaborations.
The contributions that Høiberg would presumably ascribe to Catgirl herself are minimal but still important to the overall feeling of the record. Throughout there are digital voices that sound conscripted both from twisted samples of pop hits and Vocaloid-like software. Their messages are often limited to just a word or two, but they feel forlorn and weighty nonetheless. The vocals on “FOR YOUR EYES ONLY” and “WITHOUT YOU” resonate with a gravity and tenderness that Høiberg doesn’t always squeeze out of his human collaborators. Even if she’s not real, the feelings “she” expresses definitely are. And if Høiberg needs to pretend that he’s collaborating with an animated cat to access them, then long live the Princess. | 2019-09-26T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-09-26T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Mad Love / Interscope | September 26, 2019 | 6.8 | c73ac9ab-cd40-477f-a78f-d8e38838e588 | Colin Joyce | https://pitchfork.com/staff/colin-joyce/ | |
On their absorbing and endearing new double album, John Dwyer's long-running psych-rock institution verges on self-indulgence for the first time. | On their absorbing and endearing new double album, John Dwyer's long-running psych-rock institution verges on self-indulgence for the first time. | Oh Sees: Face Stabber | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/oh-sees-face-stabber/ | Face Stabber | At their best, Oh Sees songs evoke matter in flux. Their music hints at lurking violence, a lazy simmer always threatening to boil over. They’ve honed this sound for about 15 years under a series of similar monikers—as OCS, The Ohsees, and Thee Oh Sees, among others—with about an album a year since 2006’s Grave Blockers. Despite dabbling in krautrock, psychedelia, and punk, they’ve remained remarkably consistent. This is to say: They sound unfailingly like themselves, and Face Stabber further solidifies their identity—raucous, driving, and atmospheric, a heady brew of weeded-out insouciance and wah pedals.
Songs like “Gholü” and album opener “The Daily Heavy” capture their molten, nervous fury. “Psy-Ops Dispatch” is somehow manic and low-key, an explosion trapped in slo-mo. The cheery mocking vocals recall earlier hits like 2013’s “Toe Cutter - Thumb Buster” and 2011’s “Contraption/Soul Desert,” a pair of righteous anthems that coupled Iron Maiden-style shredding with the sun-bleached ethos of four dudes taking mushrooms in a California garage.
Some tracks sound as if they could’ve been grafted on or Frankensteined together from any Oh Sees record of the past 10 years: see “The Experimenter,” a paint-by-numbers pastiche of riffs and noodly tangents—it feels much longer than its 5:22—and “Henchlock,” the record’s dawdling 21-minute closer. This is one of the first times the band has seemed self-indulgent; Face Stabber runs 20-40 minutes longer than the last three records they released, and this expansion sometimes diminishes its fervor. Whereas Floating Coffin was a clenched fist, Face Stabber can feel like someone flexing in front of a mirror.
The record’s bright spots are dazzling, though. “Scutum & Scorpius,” despite its length, is a cryogenic chamber of spooky synth that rivals a Yes song in its ability to run the tonal and emotional gamut. “Poisoned Stones” dispatches with any throat-clearing and launches immediately into a dystopian, post-apocalyptic banger. The lyrics’ pervasive sense of doom give the album a cohesive, sci-fi appeal, all the creepier for its plausibility. “Baking in the wasteland every night/It really suits you in my eyes,” John Dwyer yelps on “Poisoned Stones.” The imagery—wastelands, surveillance, beasts—cements the tone set by the album art, a ghoulish air-brushed hulk that’s part Dungeons & Dragons, part Disney on too many tabs of acid.
Face Stabber’s menace varies in its conviction. That’s part of its charm—how seriously can a record take itself when its opening track sounds like a choir of rubber ducks? Spontaneity is a live band’s great asset, and that’s hard to convey in a recording studio, but the record is endearing and absorbing even when it stumbles. How do you bottle energy, commit it to a vinyl groove? (Thee) Oh Sees haven’t perfected the art, but they’re never going to stop trying.
Buy: Rough Trade
(Pitchfork may earn a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.) | 2019-08-28T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-08-28T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Castle Face | August 28, 2019 | 6.6 | c73e15a5-c677-4e65-bb78-ea8dc881b932 | Linnie Greene | https://pitchfork.com/staff/linnie-greene/ | |
Faith No More are back with their first album in 18 years, and two decades away haven't softened Mike Patton’s coal-black heart. He’s pissed off and proud of it, picking fights with just about anyone and anything. | Faith No More are back with their first album in 18 years, and two decades away haven't softened Mike Patton’s coal-black heart. He’s pissed off and proud of it, picking fights with just about anyone and anything. | Faith No More: Sol Invictus | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/20339-sol-invictus/ | Sol Invictus | "There’s a lot of stupid things that happen in the world that you can’t control,” Faith No More bassist Billy Gould told Pitchfork. "It’s funny, but it’s not funny. It’s there. But it’s great to have enough of a connection with that mentality where you can interact with it and poke your finger in it a little." That joker’s soul, that urge to poke, can be traced through all of Faith No More's biggest moments, from their stunning hit "Epic" to their genre-defying, commercially unsuccessful (and critically acclaimed) 1992 opus Angel Dust. From the early 1980s through 1997, Faith No More were the reputable carneys, sporting an array of influences and oddities: everything from Madame Butterfly and Nirvana, to Nietzsche and Miles Davis, and even a not-yet-dead fish. And then they went away.
For the past 18 years, fans have waited patiently for Faith No More to wrap up a disappearing act that was the inevitable result of exhaustion, creative differences, and branching paths. Since that time, frontman Mike Patton started his Ipecac label and pursued numerous solo projects, from the poppy Peeping Tom to the experimental supergroup Fantômas to the style-swapping Tomahawk. Keyboardist Roddy Bottum, the group's musical brain, started the bubblegum band Imperial Teen, scored films, and penned an opera about Bigfoot; meanwhile, bassist Billy Gould started Koolarrow Records, and drummer Mike Bordin manned the kit for Ozzy Osbourne. In 2009, the group stirred from its slumber and began performing again. And now, at long last, we’ve arrived at the confrontational Sol Invictus, the follow-up to 1997’s Album of the Year.
Distance and time do not make the heart grow fonder, and two decades haven't softened Patton’s coal-black heart. He’s pissed off and proud of it, picking fights with just about anyone and anything. "Superhero" sees him spewing taunts at beloved authority figures, each syllable hitting with the percussive force of a slug to the jaw. "Leader of man, get back in your cage," he sneers from atop Bottum’s majestic piano strata, a fool cracking his whip at a lowered God. The humiliations continue with "Cone of Shame", which imagines a wrongful lover in a state of depersonalization and animality, while "Black Friday" mocks anyone who’s set foot in a Target at 4 a.m. This commentary is far from subtle, but the ridiculousness is part of the experience, and you can’t help but smile at the return of one of rock’s great contrarians.
The success of Faith No More’s theatrical approach depends on their ability to organize motifs, riffs, shouts, and whimpers into cathartic musical structures. Most of the album’s songs follow a similar dramatic pattern, with the band bookending their frantic (and typically brief) climaxes with unsettlingly calm passages and plodding tempos. The unassumingly simple melodies in "Sunny Side Up" and "Rise of the Fall" are set-ups for the carefully-orchestrated rage that lay in wait, and when it hits right the contrast makes for a fascinating listen, especially on the venomous "Cone of Shame". But over the course of the album, especially during later songs like "Black Friday", "Motherfucker", and "Matador", the recycled dynamics begin to lose their force.
Set aside the negligible opening and closing tracks, and Sol Invictus has just eight tracks spanning 34 minutes, an underwhelming running time considering how long Faith No More have been away. Such brevity could be overlooked if Sol Invictus was accompanied by a significant shift in the band’s sound, but many of these songs feel like retreads. "Superhero" and "Separation Anxiety", while enjoyable, bear the signatures of "Epic" and "Midlife Crisis", with their loping piano lines and bloodthirsty rap incantations. Meanwhile, "Black Friday" and "Sunny Side Up" conjure up déjà vu of Patton’s side projects; "Motherfucker" could be a pumped up version of Tomahawk’s "I.O.U".
There’s nothing necessarily wrong with a band repeating itself. But because Faith No More have such a long history, and their members are responsible for music in a staggering array of styles, it's hard not to expect more, to wish that they might in some way top themselves, or at least change direction. Towards the end of "Cone of Shame", Patton admits, "I’m only happy when I’m pissing you off." Considering Faith No More’s history of confounding and confronting the listening public and the systems of order which influence it, such a statement could serve as the band’s motto. In that sense, maybe holding something back was the plan all along, and a future Faith No More record (one is said to be on the way) will have something more. | 2015-05-19T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2015-05-19T02:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Ipecac / Reclamation | May 19, 2015 | 6 | c73f3d4f-834d-489b-8817-3bc93cf6948d | Zoe Camp | https://pitchfork.com/staff/zoe-camp/ | null |
Three of the five members of Pennsylvania indie rockers Tigers Jaw quit the band before their latest album was recorded, but they stayed on to finish Charmer; as a result, the album comes off like a smooth segue into a new incarnation of the band rather than a sudden, painful break or an awkward growth spurt. | Three of the five members of Pennsylvania indie rockers Tigers Jaw quit the band before their latest album was recorded, but they stayed on to finish Charmer; as a result, the album comes off like a smooth segue into a new incarnation of the band rather than a sudden, painful break or an awkward growth spurt. | Tigers Jaw: Charmer | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/19428-tigers-jaw-charmer/ | Charmer | Tigers Jaw claim to be “equal parts Fleetwood Mac and Brand New”, and what’s surprising is that the claim's true on multiple levels. To a certain extent, Stevie Nicks and Lindsey Buckingham are raging inside of Charmer, the Scranton band’s fourth album—Adam McIlwee, Brianna Collins and Ben Walsh’s harmonies have a glassy, disengaged quality and they’re situated amidst turbulent emotions and turbid guitars. But “equal parts Fleetwood Mac and Brand New” is even more accurate in describing what it was like to be in Tigers Jaw during its recording—like the latter, they're transitioning out of pop-punk and emo into straight-up indie rock, and the entire band was split into Rumours-esque factions while they made the album.
But while three of the five members decided to quit before Charmer was recorded, they did everyone a solid by finishing the album as a parting gift—which possibly explains how Charmer still comes off like a smooth segue into a new incarnation of the band rather than a sudden, painful break or an awkward growth spurt. Though Tigers Jaw have been around for nearly a decade, remaining members Collins and Walsh just recently graduated college, the standard forum where pop-punk kids are not only expected to discover more “mature” and credible sources of independent rock music, but to completely sever themselves from their past. Fortunately, as with their Keystone State neighbors in Beach Slang, Balance and Composure, and Title Fight, Tigers Jaw are beating indie rock lifers at their own game by maintaining the appealing structural songwriting aspects of their roots—melodic quality control, instrumental economy, and the belief this stuff should be MTV-friendly even if that forum isn’t going anywhere near bands like them.
True, you’ve probably heard the descending jangle progression of “Cool” and the minor key power chord riff of “Nervous Kids” hundreds of times in the past year alone, but rarely presented in a manner where the vocals are put so clearly to the fore, presented as a lead instrument rather than something custodially glommed onto fuzzy guitars. Beyond that, Tigers Jaw use sneaky ways to exhibit their pop smarts. Many of Charmer’s songs work the same riff throughout their entirety, with only small variations throughout, maybe a slight chord inversion or a harmonized lead riff or Collins’ pencil-thin synth colorings. But that one riff is usually so sturdy and easy to build off of, the end result is a song with all hook; while the glowing chorus of “Hum” only appears once, it’s more of a resolution than a climax.
Those are the aspects of the album that take after the positive connotations of “charmer”: subtly ingratiating, enjoyable in a low-key kind of way. But Tigers Jaw turn Charmer into something more resonant by teasing out the negative connotations of its title: manipulative, emotionally callow, inauthentic. To put it bluntly, there isn’t a single nice person populating Tigers Jaw’s lyrics, and their varying exhibitions of misanthropic behavior are explained in the opener’s chorus: “It’s a cruel world, but it’s cool.”
It could be read two ways; McIlwee is either conceding to cynicism as a natural state or reveling in it. My guess is the latter, judging from his deadpan disdain when delivering lines like “Don’t you wanna be my perfect bae instead?” and ”I’m out in California now/ And Ari gave me his new car/ And all the girls are so champagne.” Of course, none of Charmer should be taken as an endorsementof that kind of attitude, just a depiction of it. People primarily motivated by their sexual desires and loneliness can be self-absorbed and not all that concerned with their effects on other people. It happens, and it’s not like anyone onCharmer seems happy about it, as its dreary emotional state can be too convincingly mirrored by the music at times. However, those lulls end up creating the simmering tension that gets relieved on “Slow Come On” by a flurry of drum rolls and McIlwee’s vocals just nearing a scream. It’s a chilling example of an asshole revealing his true colors, telling someone who doesn’t turn him on about the kind of person who does—“I don’t even care how mean they are/ So I don't ever take your calls.”
When McIlwee yells, “Why am I so cruel?” towards the end, it’s about as close as he gets to a confession or culpability, acknowledging himself as a man who wants the ones he can’t have, rejects the ones he can and internalizes the resulting loneliness as some kind of perverse pleasure. When his affections are returned, the other is seen as compromised for having sunk to his level. Closer “What Would You Do” is a total outlier, detailing a sad, codependent hookup over lumbering funk like a vintage Afghan Whigs track, while “Frame You” is just as candid—“You couldn’t leave me alone/ Because I was a wreck and you were the savior type.”
All of which makes lead single “Hum” very misleading in retrospect. For one thing, it’s the sole track where Collins takes the lead. Also, when she sings, “You left a permanent scar”, the unforgettable reminiscences of basement shows and long walks home sound like positive nostalgia, or at least a romantic thought amidst the absorbing and near-constant anti-romanticism. Though it’s laced with "Twin Peaks" references, Charmer ends up sounding more influenced by another example of uber-90s television—the one where people stop being polite and start getting real. | 2014-06-03T02:00:02.000-04:00 | 2014-06-03T02:00:02.000-04:00 | Rock | Run for Cover | June 3, 2014 | 7.1 | c743925c-0e13-473a-8b53-8a04093e91b0 | Ian Cohen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ian-cohen/ | null |
Dream a Garden represents a dramatic break for Jam City's Jack Latham, whose 2012 album Classical Curves helped define the concussive Night Slugs sound. Here, jangly guitar licks and reverberant synthesizer predominate, and half the tracks feature Latham's high-pitched vocals. | Dream a Garden represents a dramatic break for Jam City's Jack Latham, whose 2012 album Classical Curves helped define the concussive Night Slugs sound. Here, jangly guitar licks and reverberant synthesizer predominate, and half the tracks feature Latham's high-pitched vocals. | Jam City: Dream a Garden | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/20295-dream-a-garden/ | Dream a Garden | When Jam City's Jack Latham debuted his Dream a Garden material at Krakow's Unsound festival last fall, he scattered an armload of roses across the stage before strapping on a guitar and stepping behind a laptop and microphone. It was a dramatic way of wiping the slate clean, of marking a line between "then" and "now." Previously, he had been known as one of the standard-bearers for the Night Slugs label and its concussive club sound, and his 2012 album Classical Curves is widely regarded as one of the label's high points.
The songs he performed at Unsound bore little in common with his previous material, though, and neither does Dream a Garden, where jangly guitar licks and reverberant synthesizer predominate, and where half the tracks feature Latham's own earnest, high-pitched vocals. The album swims in reverb, phaser, tremolo, panning, and distortion. Where Classical Curves was slick and brittle, equal parts techno and grime, Dream a Garden is sticky and humid; where Classical Curves seemed streaked with graphite, Dream a Garden buckles like moldy carpet.
Latham assembles this sound from a mossy patchwork that proves hard to source: The watery keyboards often recall Cocteau Twins, or a more moth-eaten M83. The guitars—notes bent, signal clean—often evoke funk, or at least an idea of it. In "Proud", the wah-wah hints at Hot Buttered Soul; in "The Garden Thrives", the tone and strumming style recalls Prince's "Sexy Dancer".
Ultimately, though, this sound is all him. To Latham's credit, there's really nothing else out there that sounds like it. The newness of it is exciting, and so is the fullness of his vision; between the narcotic mood and the omnipresent murk, Dream a Garden suggests a maze-like expanse within its borders, perfect for getting lost in. Unfortunately, the album only partly lives up to those promises. The songwriting isn't quite there, for one thing. Chord changes meander, or get tripped up on a single leaden pedal tone. The same elements crop up again and again, and the layers of effects and detuned keyboards eventually turn oppressive; the album isn't much more than a half-hour long, but by the end it feels like chugging eggnog on a summer's day.
And Latham's voice frequently sounds thin and strained, perpetually aiming for notes that are just beyond his reach. He tends to bury it deep in the mix, too, so that it's almost impossible to decipher what he's actually singing. (The lone line I could pick out, from "Today": "And not so long ago/ I was a child with a computer.") "This is a record about love and resistance," declared the press release for the album, and in interviews he has stressed the necessity of finding "different emotional avenues of political expression." Those might be his goals, but sometimes it's not enough to just dream a garden; to get it to actually bear fruit takes planning and hard work, and to have planted in more fertile soil than he has chosen here. | 2015-03-25T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2015-03-25T02:00:01.000-04:00 | Electronic | Night Slugs | March 25, 2015 | 6.5 | c7470199-d528-42ea-90dd-3570dd6348d2 | Philip Sherburne | https://pitchfork.com/staff/philip-sherburne/ | null |
Emily Haines spends much of Metric's fifth album pondering the way the human mind is transformed by artificial versions of natural experiences. She also duets with Lou Reed. | Emily Haines spends much of Metric's fifth album pondering the way the human mind is transformed by artificial versions of natural experiences. She also duets with Lou Reed. | Metric: Synthetica | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/16712-synthetica/ | Synthetica | Emily Haines announced the arrival of Metric's fifth studio album Synthetica with a letter to fans that deliberately spelled out the record's lyrical themes. "Synthetica is about staying home and wanting to crawl out of your skin from the lack of external stimulation," she wrote. "It's about what is real versus what is artificial." This binary is common in contemporary art, to the point that it can seem a little trite, but Haines is too clever to settle into a simplistic "technology is bad" argument. Instead, she spends much of Synthetica pondering the way the human mind is transformed by artificial versions of natural experiences and wondering how to feel fully alive and present in a time of constant distraction.
Haines shares some of her themes with fellow Canadian artist Grimes, but the difference in their style and approach highlights a generation gap between the women. Grimes' Visions is typically described as "post-internet," a term that doesn't quite address Claire Boucher's lyrics as much as her aesthetic, which comes across as the product of a mind that has been immersed in the web since childhood. Her multi-tracked vocals cross and tangle like thoughts that are going in different directions and only take shape in aggregate, with strong emotions scattering rather than spiking at moments of catharsis. Synthetica, on the other hand, comes from the perspective of a singer who can vividly recall her life before laptops and smart phones, and has some frame of reference for how these things have changed the substance of her mind. The music forces itself into rigid shapes; the lyrics are boldly declarative. While Grimes evokes a fragmented, freeform mental state, Haines and her bandmates are constantly seeking definition. Their record is rebellious, vigilant, and a bit uptight.
Metric's music has always been about as precise as their name would imply. Guitarist and producer Jimmy Shaw favors guitar and keyboard hooks that snap into tight, rhythmic grids and tones that add vibrant color while staying within the proverbial lines. The approach has yielded mixed results-- their best material ends up seeming glossy and stylish, while the so-so tunes come out sounding overworked or bland. This is still the case on Synthetica, though the material is more consistently strong this time around. "Youth Without Youth" makes the most of their mechanical tightness by emulating the schaffel stomp of Goldfrapp and Gary Glitter, while "The Void" and the excellent ballad "Clone" successfully contrast cold tones and rhythmic stiffness with particularly vulnerable vocal performances by Haines. "Breathing Underwater" and "Speed the Collapse" may border on generic, but the group steps out of its comfort zone on the opener "Artificial Nocturne", which approaches the motorik bliss of Stereolab songs like "Jenny Ondioline" but frustratingly cuts out before they can fully crest out on the groove.
Haines is a vocalist with limited range, but she's good at conveying character and nuance in her phrasing even when working within her default position of earnest defiance. She switches up her style a bit here and there on Synthetica, putting on a faux-girlish tone on "Lost Kitten", and bringing out a seldom utilized sweetness to balance out the sourness of duet partner Lou Reed on "The Wanderlust". (Yes, somehow Lou Reed is on this record.) Her position is always clear on a lyrical level, but her voice lends a touch of depth and ambiguity to the music, which opens up her "artificial vs. natural" thesis to debate. Synthetica is something of a polemic, but Haines' moments of ambivalence are what make the record compelling. At their best, Metric resist making statements about how technology is changing our minds and culture, and simply ask thoughtful questions about it with the awareness that there are no easy answers. | 2012-06-11T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2012-06-11T02:00:01.000-04:00 | Rock | Mom+Pop / Metric Music International | June 11, 2012 | 7 | c74907e5-efd0-4be6-9757-8626cf6c1610 | Matthew Perpetua | https://pitchfork.com/staff/matthew-perpetua/ | null |
Following the addition of a second guitarist and a move to an actual studio, the Austin band's fourth album is its best-sounding yet, all groovy Texas psych. | Following the addition of a second guitarist and a move to an actual studio, the Austin band's fourth album is its best-sounding yet, all groovy Texas psych. | White Denim: D | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/15589-d/ | D | White Denim telegraphed their entire new album via "Regina Holding Hands", from 2009's Fits. "Regina" sounded nothing like the skronky, speed-addled garage that had earned the Austin band a deal with RCRD LBL, and a lot more like a leftfield take on airy jazz rock. "Breezy" was the last adjective anyone was expecting to use for this band at that point, and the prospect of an full album of such tentative sap would've been enough to trigger the release of the dreaded "cheese" descriptor. Yet with their fourth album, D, White Denim double down on this very approach, and manage to make a pretty good LP out of it. How'd they do it?
By expanding. First, they grew to a quartet, adding second guitarist Austin Jenkins to their lineup. Second, they dropped some coin on better recording equipment, moving from a trailer to an actual studio. And D is easily White Denim's best-sounding effort yet: The band's trademark shape-shifting compositions now feature clean, interlocking guitar lines, and singer James Petralli's voice has smoothed out into a raspy howl. It's also their most consistent album: Rollicking opener "It's Him!" sets the groovy Texas psych template to which the rest of the record hews closely. Along the way, White Denim are able to stir in a new set of psychedelic flourishes-- see the flutes and hippie lyrical mysticism of "River to Consider"-- with the verve of a Fillmore West opening band. Even the post-Maharishi Beatles vibe of closer "Keys"-- complete with strings!-- feels like a perfect extension of a confident band willing to stretch a bit. Who knows: Maybe it's a teaser for the next album?
Personally, I'd prefer White Denim add a bit more choogle to their groove-- more oomph, a bit more low end to complement D's fresh focus on detail and lateral movement. They certainly have the rhythm section for it, and how great would it be for the album's opening triptych to stir in a little "Ramble Tamble"? For now though, this LP's more than good enough. White Denim's inherent restlessness means that all the band's releases feel transitional to a degree, but D's measured restraint points toward the best possible direction for them. | 2011-06-29T02:00:03.000-04:00 | 2011-06-29T02:00:03.000-04:00 | Rock | Downtown | June 29, 2011 | 6.8 | c74db097-4f90-4447-9903-ea393d10b823 | Eric Harvey | https://pitchfork.com/staff/eric-harvey/ | null |
Shrewd beat choices (and Killer Mike) liven up a lopsided collaboration between two longtime Dungeon Family members who still share undeniable chemistry. | Shrewd beat choices (and Killer Mike) liven up a lopsided collaboration between two longtime Dungeon Family members who still share undeniable chemistry. | Big Boi / Sleepy Brown: Big Sleepover | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/big-boi-sleepy-brown-big-sleepover/ | Big Sleepover | Big Boi and Sleepy Brown set the stakes of their joint album early. “We have nothing else to prove,” Sleepy sings with calm assurance on the title track. The line nods to the pair’s extensive list of collaborations as members of the Dungeon Family, and Big Boi and Sleepy Brown’s particular recording history. It’s impossible to see their names together and not think of “The Way You Move,” the seismic 2003 hit that ironically both declared “OutKast is everlasting” and reintroduced Big and Sleepy as dynamic standalone performers. Big Sleepover smartly doesn’t try to recapture that lightning or peddle nostalgia. But it’s built on the conviction that when Big Boi and Sleepy Brown come together, magic happens, a premise that unravels as they struggle to find a groove.
Teased since 2019, the album grew out of frequent touring. “Just being on the tour bus, we were like, hey … why don’t we do some new songs, you know, some brand-new songs, just me and you, a whole album?” Big Boi told NPR last month. That easygoing, open-ended approach characterizes the record, which feels like an extended hangout, the two artists casually trading ideas as friends and family drift in and out the room.
Their chemistry is undeniable. No song feels strained or overloaded, and both artists pull back or step up as needed, be it Big Boi supplying a fleet bridge on electro-funk track “Animalz,” or Sleepy adopting a choppy growl to fit into Big and Killer Mike’s bar clinic on “Lower Case (no cap).” The Dungeon Family emphasis on coherence and harmony is deeply ingrained in both of them.
But instinct hinders them as much as it helps. There’s no particular mission or purpose guiding these songs, leading Big and Sleepy to fall back on limp sex romps and dull player tales that grow increasingly impersonal and perfunctory. “Can’t Sleep” laments the thirst of women who make booty calls, a goofy and undercooked conceit. “Last night, can’t sleep/Girls keep calling me/This girl keep calling me/She keep on partying,” Sleepy sings mechanically on the hook. Is he annoyed? Is he tempted? Does his phone not have a “do not disturb” setting? There’s no drama or tension in Sleepy’s crooning, or in Big’s bitter verse, just old men finger-wagging. “Intentions,” a loungey cut produced by Organized Noize, is just as stifled. After Big Boi’s colorful sex raps, the song flatlines as Sleepy and guest Cee-Lo blandly recite their designs for a potential lover. For a song about lust, it’s weirdly chaste.
Sleepy frequently disappoints in this way, his melodies serving as placeholders and timekeepers. He’s never been the type of performer to steal the spotlight, but he could be counted on for style and flavor. From the pimp strut of “So Fresh, So Clean” to the smooth yearning of “I Can’t Wait” to the icy cool of OutKast deep cut “Spaghetti Junction,” Sleepy has long been a shapeshifter. But here he is often muted and one-note, his waning presence accented by Big Boi’s eternally spry rapping.
The pair’s shrewd beat choices keep the record lively despite its lopsided performances. There’s no outright jams, but funky keys, bass, and guitar pop up throughout, keeping the mood buoyant and loose. The fizzy synths on “Return of the Dope Boi” evoke a robot doing a Doug E. Fresh impression. And the bright, choppy keys on “Doin’ It” have a spirited, almost ragtime sway. The album’s true secret weapon is Killer Mike, whose guest verses light up four songs with verve and humor. Sleepy Brown and Big Boi rarely spark anything as engaging by themselves, but there’s something charming about them still creating spaces for other artists to shine.
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-12-10T00:00:00.000-05:00 | 2021-12-10T00:00:00.000-05:00 | Rap | Purple Ribbon / HITCO | December 10, 2021 | 6.3 | c74f5f30-ab4f-437e-bfd5-c9ea622e58aa | Stephen Kearse | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stephen-kearse/ | |
Swedish folk-pop duo First Aid Kit's third LP and first for Columbia is their grandest and arguably their most consistent release to date, featuring weary songs about transience that approach their conflicts with wiseness and maturity. | Swedish folk-pop duo First Aid Kit's third LP and first for Columbia is their grandest and arguably their most consistent release to date, featuring weary songs about transience that approach their conflicts with wiseness and maturity. | First Aid Kit: Stay Gold | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/19342-first-aid-kit-stay-gold/ | Stay Gold | Outside of high school curricula and motivational posters, Robert Frost is not an especially popular literary influences these days. Two roads diverged in the woods and most people could give a shit. When sisters Johanna and Klara Söderberg named both a song and their third album together as First Aid Kit after Frost’s poem “Nothing Gold Can Stay”, from his Pulitzer-winning 1923 collection New Hampshire, the choice seemed to reflect their youth: The sisters signed their first record contract in 2008 when Johanna was 17 and Klara 14, both around the age when most readers have Frost thrust upon them. On the other hand, the Söderbergs are Swedish, not American. And instead of stopping by woods on a snowy evening, they’ve chosen Frost’s elegy to the natural state of entropy. “Nature’s first green is gold, her hardest hue to hold,” he writes. “So dawn goes down to day. Nothing gold can stay.”
It’s a darker and more fatalistic sentiment than we typically expect from Frost, a sunny reminder than nothing continues in its ideal state. Everything fades. We all die. First Aid Kit understand this inevitability, yet they have the tenacity and optimism to fight against that falling apart. “What if our hard work ends in despair?” the sisters ask on “Stay Gold”, as a guitar plucks out a stoic theme and the percussion echoes against canyon walls. “What if the road won’t take me there?” They’re not jaded—at least not yet. The Söderbergs remain romantics in an unromantic world, not only writing lyrics about fighting the good fight but making the kind of wide-eyed, ‘70s-tinged folk-rock that thrives on soaring vocals, warm harmonies, big choruses, and heart-on-sleeve lyrics.
There’s plenty of each on Stay Gold, their first record for Columbia. It’s certainly their grandest and arguably their most consistent release to date, even if there’s nothing here as undeniable as “Emmylou”, from 2012’s The Lion’s Roar. With its affectionate hook, that song was both a paean to country music romance and a mission statement; ostensibly the lyrics were directed toward a male counterpart, but it sounded more like the sisters were inviting each other to sing along. Stay Gold similarly conveys the joys of musical collaboration—their voices always sound good together—yet they’re not quite so convinced of the merits of the music industry. These are weary songs about transience: touring constantly, missing home, losing friends and lovers. It’s darker than Roar, but also wiser, more mature in its conflicts. First Aid Kit still can’t sell a line like, “Shit gets fucked up and people just disappear,” but they convey the dusty self-assertion of “The Bell” like it’s gospel.
“I’d rather be moving than static,” they sing together on a song called “Shattered and Hollow”, before promising each other, “We are gonna get out of here.” Touring life is a tricky theme for any artist to address, as it potentially alienates an audience that has never hired a booking agent, never had to worry about label contracts, and never had to deal with prying journalists. What’s bracing about Stay Gold, then, is how universal the Söderberg sisters make that life sound. Rather than dwell on the particulars of long days on the road, they pare their experiences down to sentiments that sound more relatable and identifiable, whether it’s leaving home, discovering new places, or defining your own destiny before the gold fades. In a sense, First Aid Kit have managed to establish a touring diary as a metaphor for young womanhood, which makes the music more powerful. “Girls they just want to have fun,” they sing on “Waitress Song”, “and the rest of us hardly know who we are.” The song gallops at a dramatic pace, with that insistent acoustic guitar and ornate filigrees of pedal steel instilling the chorus with a sense of immense yearning.
To record Stay Gold, the Söderberg sisters again flew to Omaha to work with Mike Mogis, who produced The Lion’s Roar. Naturally, the folk-rock reference points remain, even if the duo paint with a broader palette. There’s more color here, like the sympathetic flute on “Fleeting One” and the hoedown momentum of “Heaven Knows”. Mogis’ production sounds shinier, however, more elaborate and dense, with a vague shimmer pervading every note. While it broadcasts a kind of coming-of-age melodrama, this fuller, more self-consciously produced sound undercuts the immediacy of the sisters’ songwriting, such that songs like "Cedar Lane" and "The Bell" seem to be less about working through thorny issues and more about recalling confusions tucked away safely in the past. The music threatens to rob them of their youth, but these two women have the poise and presence to sing like they're still in the yellow woods pondering which path they should take. | 2014-06-12T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2014-06-12T02:00:01.000-04:00 | Folk/Country | Columbia | June 12, 2014 | 7.3 | c762d7de-f63d-44d9-affc-7a2a72ddccd7 | Stephen M. Deusner | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stephen-m. deusner/ | null |
Delfonics founding member and lead vocalist William Hart teams up with Adrian Younge for a surprisingly radical late-career record: Younge places Hart in a stylized version of the past that works as a tribute, deconstruction, and revamp of his band's once-vanguard Philly sound template. | Delfonics founding member and lead vocalist William Hart teams up with Adrian Younge for a surprisingly radical late-career record: Younge places Hart in a stylized version of the past that works as a tribute, deconstruction, and revamp of his band's once-vanguard Philly sound template. | The Delfonics: Adrian Younge Presents the Delfonics | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/17811-the-delfonics-adrian-younge-presents-the-delfonics/ | Adrian Younge Presents the Delfonics | It's almost 20 years since Rick Rubin successfully repositioned Johnny Cash from a fading star in a terminally uncool genre into the walking embodiment of cool with American Recordings. In the interim, the late-career Rubin-style makeover has become just as much of a cliche as the album of standards from the American songbook. A release about a new collaboration between the Delfonics' William Hart, and Adrian Younge, a producer several decades his junior, said that the resulting album was going to be "what the kids call 'hip-hop'"-- which sounds a lot like an unappealing welcome to the rap game Rubin-Cash formula.
Fortunately, it turns out that Younge's approach towards working with an older artist is less like Rubin's and more like Quentin Tarantino's: Instead of aiming for gravitas and youth culture appeal, he's placed Hart in his own stylized and slightly warped vision of the past that's both a tribute to the Delfonics' heyday, a radical deconstruction of it, and something altogether original.
Younge and Hart's album doesn't actuallly sound much like a Delfonics record. In the group's late 1960s and early 70s prime, they were at the vanguard of the Philly sound that replaced the hard-edged funk that girded the popular black music of the time with a slick breeziness that could occasionally border on easy listening. Delfonics records were gorgeously produced, with Hart and his rotating cast of support singers floating layers of vocal harmonies over lush beds of strings and horns.
Younge-- who produced the album, co-wrote all of its 13 songs with Hart, and played a couple of dozen instruments on it-- exchanges all that for a sonic aesthetic that has more in common with the more eccentric strain of soul and R&B records that are so beloved by hardcore crate diggers and producers like J Dilla and Madlib. Instead of the luxe orchestration that was a trademark of peak-period Delfonics, Younge has given Hart idiosyncratic arrangements full of harpsichord, glockenspiel, and the electric sitar, which impart an element of campy psychedelia, but thankfully avoid crossing fully over into kitsch. With a mix that leans heavily on analog grit and high midrange tones, it sounds like the test pressing of a long-lost psych soul record rescued from a storage unit, and achieves a similar kind of retro accuracy that Younge gave to his soundtrack for the 2009 faux-vintage blaxploitation flick Black Dynamite.
For much of the album Hart sings solo, another departure from the Delfonics sound that we're used to. Purists might be consider the move tantamount to sacrilege, but it suits the material. Hart treats Younge's arrangements like an obstacle course, slipping nimbly through them with an agility that belies his age. His falsetto is still as crystal clear as it ever was, even if he has to bend the occasional high note in order to find the right pitch.
There are a number of potential issues with calling this record Adrian Younge Presents the Delfonics: Crediting what's essentially a William Hart solo album to the group could be considered questionable, and Younge taking top billing on the record's title and artist credit is either audacious or presumptuous. And anyone expecting a revival of the Delfonics sound we all know and love very well may walk away disappointed.
Taken on its own terms, though, the record works. And if Adrian Younge's approach to the project becomes the new formula for older artists, then all the better. A musician demanding the respect they're due is understandable, but one taking their reputation and using it to crack open new artistic territory is much more interesting. | 2013-03-13T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2013-03-13T02:00:01.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | Wax Poetics | March 13, 2013 | 7.5 | c7655903-d16e-434f-a2d4-7859a1388484 | Miles Raymer | https://pitchfork.com/staff/miles-raymer/ | null |
Second Toughest in the Infants is Underworld's second, spectacular attempt at making big, important rave music. It marked the last time their blend of ferocity, earnestness, and expanse felt transcendent. | Second Toughest in the Infants is Underworld's second, spectacular attempt at making big, important rave music. It marked the last time their blend of ferocity, earnestness, and expanse felt transcendent. | Underworld: Second Toughest in the Infants | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21265-second-toughest-in-the-infants/ | Second Toughest in the Infants | At this point it seems that Underworld are remembered, at least by casual observers, as the rave act most like a rock band. There's nothing really harmful about this interpretation, but acting like a rock band—a euphemism for "had a frontman"—isn't really what separated Underworld from their peers. After all, the Prodigy and the Chemical Brothers both worked in the album format to great effect, and, like Underworld, their live shows and general demeanor had more in common with Oasis than with, say, Spiral Tribe. In fact, what truly makes Underworld unique, and what coincidentally most closely aligns them with rock bands, is that they took themselves really seriously; their ambitions leaned to the serious and important. Unlike most people—lots of ravers included—they thought these things could be achieved using the rave template.
Second Toughest in the Infants is the band's second, spectacular attempt at making big, important rave music, and their second with young fusionist DJ Darren Emerson helping steer the ship (frontman Karl Hyde and Rick Smith had been making music, in one style or another, since the early '80s). It was reissued for its 20th anniversary this November, in both two- and four-CD editions, remastered and bundled with exclusive and/or unreleased extras. You can see the band posing in the album title, a funny little comment made by Smith's nephew that conveniently reads like poetic word soup. You see this, probably, before you realize the album opens with a 16-minute, three-part suite entitled "Juanita : Kiteless : To Dream of Love" and follows that with a 15-minute, two-part suite entitled "Banstyle/Sappys Curry". There it is, comrades: a heaping helping of Big, Important Music. If you want funny voices and funny haircuts, the Prodigy are in the tent to the left.
The great thing about mid-'90s Underworld is they made this beat-poetry-cum-rave-anthem splice work against the odds. Their secret was to act as if Hyde was not a vocalist at all but rather a particularly charismatic sampler: spitting out short, repetitive phrases that were afforded little more purchase on a track's mix than any other melodic curlicue. As an album, and as disc one of this reissue, Second Toughest holds up marvelously, dominated by the shapeshifting opening tracks but also featuring fan-favorite "Confusion the Waitress" and the stupefying "Pearl's Girl", perhaps the fist-pumping-est epic in a discography chockablock with them. "Stagger", the tormented kosmische saga that closes the affair, betrays the band's album-centric aspirations and beats Thom Yorke to the meandering electro-ballad by a decade.
The band's profile raised considerably with Second Toughest, which roughly coincided with the release of Trainspotting, the film making prominent use of non-album track "Born Slippy.NUXX". The track's popularity, and its association with the movie, perhaps unfairly tethers the band's sound to the '90s, though there's some comfort in remembering a time when music this loopy and progressive could dominate (European) airwaves.
Disc two reproduces all of the exclusive material from the absurdly good Pearl's Girl EP—five long pieces over 35 minutes that would stand as most band's best work even before adding the worthy reworks of the title track—and adds "Born Slippy (Instrumental Version)", which functionally has almost nothing to do with the more famous NUXX version, as well as "Born Slippy.Nuxx (Deep Pan)", an intriguing but ultimately boring remix.
Disc three offers a full slate of unreleased material, some of which ("D+B Thing", "Techno Thang", "D'Arbly St") gives away its throwaway nature by its title. "D'Arbly", meanwhile is seven minutes of downtempo lounge noodling. Only an extra version of "Pearl's" and "Bloody 1", yet another loopy 16-minute epic (Underworld could do no wrong in this format in the mid '90s), rescue this disc. Disc four offers seven (!) different versions of "Born Slippy.NUXX" (often simply titled "Nuxx"), several of them live. The main takeaway here is that you do not, in fact, want Hyde's scintillating vocal melody to continue for the entire runtime, no matter how much you think you love the opening minutes. But the disc also illustrates how much Underworld has in common with a jam band, iterating over long passages, massaging a track into form.
Second Toughest marks the last time Underworld's blend of ferocity, earnestness, and expanse felt transcendent. By the time they returned with Beaucoup Fish in 1998 they seemed more like an institution than a contender. But there's an absolute trove of potent material associated with Second Toughest; lesser bands might've mined this period for two or even three albums. The remasters sound great, and the two-disc version makes exploration reasonable for the unfamiliar, though both the original album and the essential Pearl's Girl EP can be had for a song in your local used bin. For the fanatic, the four-disc version offers a couple of gems and a thorough examination of the genesis of the band's most famous track, i.e. exactly the type of thing you might hope for from a not-explicitly-necessary reissue. Underworld made a point of going deeper, and carrying on for longer, than most bands would dare; they're worthy of a reissue that does the same. | 2015-12-04T01:00:02.000-05:00 | 2015-12-04T01:00:02.000-05:00 | Electronic | Interscope | December 4, 2015 | 8.8 | c76ca9c5-8976-4a75-a53a-2eda7cbd6583 | Andrew Gaerig | https://pitchfork.com/staff/andrew-gaerig/ | null |
Anchored by muted samples and soul-baring soliloquies, the New York rapper’s new album is an impressive, winding meditation on survival. | Anchored by muted samples and soul-baring soliloquies, the New York rapper’s new album is an impressive, winding meditation on survival. | AKAI SOLO: *Spirit Roaming * | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/akai-solo-spirit-roaming/ | Spirit Roaming | “Mob Psycho 100,” the second song on AKAI SOLO’s Spirit Roaming, begins with a sample from an interview with the late Toni Morrison: “How do you get through? Sometimes you don’t survive whole, you just survive in part. But the grandeur of life is that attempt; it’s not about that solution.” As the song unfolds, this wisdom spills into the deep cauldron of AKAI’s emotions and thoughts on resilience. The chopped vocal loop transforms into a tortured chant, as his cathartic, stream-of-consciousness bars trickle out of him. The raps feel almost strained, as if to ensure that the lessons he’s collected on his search for universal truth arrive clearly above the instrumental chaos. “Mob Psycho 100” feels like a portal to the rest of Spirit Roaming: a fractured realm that contains the winding routes of AKAI’s life. Inside, he leads us with impassioned soliloquies and elaborate sample arrangements, rendered with impressive precision.
The beauty of joining AKAI on this spiritual journey is its unpredictability. There’s a pleasant, meandering rhythm to the way the 28-year-old moves through musings on the futility of rap game politics (“For a Few”), the paralyzing nature of existential anxiety (“Demonslayer”), and the balance between protecting his heart and sharing his emotions (“Driftman”). With every topic on the table, AKAI’s ideas can feel daunting and opaque. He’s not completely forthright with the roots of his pain or the ways he’s forged his path. Instead, he chops his worldview into bite-sized morsels to allow for easier comprehension and consumption. He burns through couplets with a nimble, purposeful flow, each line revealing a flash of his hard-won insight: “Not being done in by this vital shit/Dread is not all there is,” he raps over the trudging drum loop of “Demonslayer,” before skirting off to the next idea, forcing you to scroll back to make sure you caught the knowledge he dropped.
AKAI’s consistency here is a blessing and a curse. He settles into a groove among murky samples and esoteric jazz elements, a style that has come to characterize a certain vein of underground New York rap, and the combination makes Spirit Roaming a more uniform project than 2021’s True Sky. Tracks like “Red Butterfly” and “S.O.M.” might appear on a compilation of greatest hits from his label Backwoodz Studioz. On the latter, AKAI’s abrasive rapping slices through the dense production, like an adventurer cutting through jungle vines with a machete. But at times, the beat feels too commanding, and he periodically loses the battle against the cacophonous production. Take the back half of “The Weakest Crest,” which leaves some of his words drowned out by what sounds like a kazoo. Spirit Roaming works best when it strikes a balance between AKAI’s in-your-face rapping, the grating rhythms, and sampled melodies.
Fourteen different producers appear on the album, including his long-time collaborator iblss, D.C.’s WiFiGawd, and the Moreno Valley-based JUNIE. The varied source material that these producers draw on feels like a personal challenge for AKAI, whose subtle tempo manipulations help him find natural chemistry within a wide range of styles. He elongates his words as the beat of “Heart Weary!” awakens, then deploys a staccato flow as the chaotic, truncated piano loop kicks into gear. On “Red Butterfly,” he raps at an unrelenting pace, his lines blurring over a serene beat that feels as if it belongs in a Hayao Miyazaki film.
The closer “Upper Room,” with its sample’s haunting wails, is a fitting denouement. Calling upon Backwoodz duo Armand Hammer and producer Messiah Musik to assist, Armand Hammer’s billy woods and Elucid spit about the loss of loved ones and dealing with regret. In his final speech, AKAI alludes to his mother’s guidance and offers veiled threats of violence against those trying to knock him off his path. It’s as if the trio descended upon the track to arm each other with pearls of wisdom and cautionary tales before they head their separate ways. Spirit Roaming builds toward a seemingly impossible question to answer: How does one trudge through life in the face of mounting external pressure? That query grounds this album, driving AKAI’s ongoing search for the fundamental theories that help him stay alive. The result is a thrilling scavenger hunt, one that reminds us of the small miracle that is survival. | 2022-11-30T00:00:00.000-05:00 | 2022-11-30T00:00:00.000-05:00 | Rap | Backwoodz Studioz | November 30, 2022 | 7.6 | c76deb4c-f72b-46f7-beb7-13bb784664b2 | Matthew Ritchie | https://pitchfork.com/staff/matthew-ritchie/ | |
The New Orleans bounce icon takes a victory lap on her long-awaited second album, one of the most effective party-starting records of the year. | The New Orleans bounce icon takes a victory lap on her long-awaited second album, one of the most effective party-starting records of the year. | Big Freedia: Central City | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/big-freedia-central-city/ | Central City | After over a decade in the spotlight, Big Freedia has become a sneakily unstoppable force. Following years of hard work on the New Orleans circuit, leading to a long-running reality series and her debut album, 2014’s Just Be Free, Freedia appeared on Beyoncé’s “Formation” in 2016 and kicked off a spate of successful, high-profile collabs. Now having been sampled on two No. 1 hits (“Break My Soul,” “Nice for What”) and released a couple of hit-or-miss EPs to fill the gap, Freedia takes a welcome victory lap with Central City, her long-awaited second album. Full of bass-heavy beats, idiosyncratic guest stars, and booming rally cries that extol the virtues of ass-shaking and self-empowerment, it’s easily one of the most effective party-starting records of the year.
Central City is a livewire ode to New Orleans, its title referencing a working-class neighborhood in the 11th Ward that has been home to plenty of musical luminaries, from jazz pioneer Buddy Bolden to hip-hop mogul Master P. Here, Freedia pays tribute to the people and culture that raised her. Over a springy synth and chanted backing vocals on “Life Lessons,” Freedia speaks to how her mother instilled her with the confidence she carries today: “Big Freedia, big Freddie, big heart of gold/I was a choir girl and a mama’s boy,” she raps, “The whole 3rd Ward, they knew my voice… Mama gave ya Freedia, now the whole world blessed.” During the late highlight “NOLA Babies,” she captures the city’s irrepressible spirit with breakneck tempo shifts, record scratches, and air horns. By the end, breathless from the song’s pace, she tosses off an ad-libbed question you’ve already learned the answer to: “And these hoes wanna know what’s going on with the NOLA baby?”
Freedia branches out more than ever, switching between classic bounce and the occasional hard-nosed, industrial grind, often within the same song. The unpredictability gives Central City a sense of constant motion; both the stomping opener “Central City Freestyle” and hip-thrusting “Throw It Back” are bound to go off during live shows, with hairpin melodic turns, thundering handclaps, and call-and-response verses delivered with the precision of a drill sergeant. The more serrated Freedia’s music gets, the more engrossing it becomes: “Pop That” employs an irresistible blend of pitch-shifted vocals, ominous horror movie-style keys, and enveloping bass. On “Bigfoot,” one of her most thrilling shit-talking songs yet, she dips down to a menacing growl while evoking big-drop-era Skrillex. The album is a dizzying collage that’s in service of Freedia having an excellent time; that she stops halfway through for an interlude that remixes the Pepto Bismol jingle only corroborates her playful, anything-goes approach.
Central City reaffirms Freedia’s easy rapport with disparate artists. Oakland rapper Kamaiyah smoothly counterbalances Freedia’s swagger on the ticking “Big Tyme,” while the balmy “$100 Bill” emphasizes feeling opulent in every facet of your life with the help of a honeyed chorus from Ciara and a run of increasingly excellent punch lines. (“Looking like a jet!” Freedia commands, “Gas me up!”). Even Freedia’s more surprising choices work in her favor: R&B legend Faith Evans matches her bravado on the sauntering “Bitch You Want,” brushing each “I’m not to be fucked with” with the featherlight touch of a great ’90s throwback. On “El Niño,” Freedia organizes her most bizarre hometown team-up yet, enlisting Lil Wayne and teacher-turned-rapper Boyfriend for a stadium-sized song built around ridiculous hooks (“I’m about to go El Niño,” “This bitch about to be gone with the wind”) that somehow still win you over.
Like the rest of Central City’s highs, it speaks to her expansive curatorial vision and towering charisma. Though bounce still provides the bedrock for the album’s delights, she expands on the rattling genre in ways that stretch its possibilities. It’s easy to picture the unflappable “Pop That” and closer “Voodoo Magic,” with its celebratory horns and thumping drums courtesy of New Orleans eight-piece the Soul Rebels, providing the soundtrack to countless Pride and Mardi Gras events to come. Central City is a distillation of Freedia’s pump-up talents and endless charm. | 2023-06-26T00:01:00.000-04:00 | 2023-06-26T00:01:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Queen Diva Music | June 26, 2023 | 7.6 | c76df98e-fbdf-4d8a-a262-31f5b4377ccc | Eric Torres | https://pitchfork.com/staff/eric-torres/ | |
On their new five-song EP, Nashville ruffians Diarrhea Planet offer no shortage of boot-and-rally solos and opportunities for downing freshly keyed beers. But once you cut through the tangled fretwork and all those gang choruses, there's a quiet ambition at work here. | On their new five-song EP, Nashville ruffians Diarrhea Planet offer no shortage of boot-and-rally solos and opportunities for downing freshly keyed beers. But once you cut through the tangled fretwork and all those gang choruses, there's a quiet ambition at work here. | Diarrhea Planet: Aliens in the Outfield EP | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/19982-diarrhea-planet-aliens-in-the-outfield-ep/ | Aliens in the Outfield EP | Two songs into Aliens in the Outfield—the latest EP from Nashville ruffians Diarrhea Planet—and Brent Toler is feeling himself: "Why are you chumming with the high class," he asks a young woman of his acquaintance, when "you could be getting with a badass?" One song over, drummer Casey Weissbuch's locked himself in the bathroom, where he's enjoying a few minutes to himself in full view of the mirror. On name alone, it's hard to say just how seriously a person should be taking a band like Diarrhea Planet; and even harder, when they're spitting comically awful game, touting the well-documented virtues of self-love, or trying to cram four guitar solos into two-and-a-half minutes. Still, listening to Aliens in the Outfield, you get the distinct impression that, if nobody else is going to take Diarrhea Planet seriously, they may just have to take up the task themselves. Fear not, DP loyal: the five-song Aliens contains no shortage of boot-and-rally solos, nor opportunities for downing freshly keyed beers. But once you cut through the tangled fretwork and all those gang choruses, there's a quiet ambition at work here, which finds Diarrhea Planet stretching out song lengths and dipping into a darker mood or two.
Recorded with Justin Francis (Anti-Flag, Kenny Rogers), Aliens is Diarrhea Planet's first release since 2013's sophomore LP I'm Rich Beyond Your Wildest Dreams. Francis helps DP maintain a bit more control over the inevitable chaos that arises when you've got four guitars, three singers, and—in Weissbuch—a drummer with roughly seven arms. Not that Aliens is an especially polished recording; tempos still fly forward, and vocals still take a note or two to find their pitch. But, with a little more separation between all those moving parts, DP's frequently squashed studio sound is getting closer to approaching the sweat-spattered energy of their can't-miss live shows.
Chorus-dodging opener "Heat Wave" is a blur, barreling through a couple Jordan Smith verses, a bridge-to-nowhere from the sweet-voiced Emmett Miller, and at least one barnburning solo. "Heat Wave" feels a bit grafted together by spare parts, getting by purely on forward motion; Smith's slippery verse melody and Miller's starry-eyed interlude are no match for the solo jammed between them, and the general apathy at the heart of the lyrics ("I don't give a shit/ And I know that you don't care") don't exactly help the song linger long past the fadeout. Highlight "Platinum Girls" sets Toler's "Two Princes" routine up with a lively little melody or three; atop a melody this blithely catchy, a line like the eternally eager Toler's "though I could never be your nice guy/ I'd proudly be your 20-times-a-night guy" manages, in its fumbling sort of way, to endear.
"Bamboo Curtain" doesn't limit its self-examination to matters of the flesh; Weissbuch's stolen moment finds him "washing away all [his] crazy shit that [he] can't deal with" alongside wads of used Kleenex. While the song's slantwards melody and flickers of neon guitar recall Weezer's Pinkerton-era lonerism, live staple "Spooners" goes for Japandroids-style communal catharsis: "it's all about the drugs, money, power, and getting off," Smith yells, adding "and getting fucked up when you can't get your point across." Between the extended intro, the false ending, and the wordless chorus, the restless "Spooners" seems too busy getting from one place to another to actually settle into the business of being a song for more than a few seconds at a time. So it goes with closer "Peg Daddy", which rides a lengthy post-rock buildup into a yearning chorus; the anticipation's nice, but the song it eventually settles on is your standard-issue existential drama, hinging awkwardly on a slapdash metaphor full of crashing waves and mental prisons.
The uptick in ambition all these take-offs and landings inject into DP's music is certainly admirable, but the execution's not always so dazzling; every one of these songs would do well to push the chorus further forward, not to delay the inevitable by throwing another twinkling guitar on the pile. And between the rough-around-the-edges presentation and the ripcord song structures, there's a certain unfixed quality to these five tracks; you get the feeling, listening to Aliens in the Outfield, that these tunes—spirited, albeit spotty—still haven't quite come to full fruition, that they'll be at their best on some Tuesday night in Omaha, not here as presented on record. And, for whatever it's worth, the more serious notes they've attempted to fold into these songs simply can't match the easy charms of an old chestnut like "Ghost With a Boner". But the real issue with Aliens in the Outfield isn't so much unrealized ambitions or misguided stabs at something like maturity. As with every other DP record before it, it's this: it'll do in a pinch, but up against that beastly live show, the play-at-home version's just no match for the real thing. | 2014-11-20T01:00:04.000-05:00 | 2014-11-20T01:00:04.000-05:00 | Rock | Infinity Cat | November 20, 2014 | 6.2 | c7746eef-82fa-4e7f-a41a-73a0b11fcbcb | Paul Thompson | https://pitchfork.com/staff/paul-thompson/ | null |
The Philadelphia musician Charles Cohen, who's in his late sixties, plays a Buchla Music Easel, an arcane synthesizer built in limited quantities in the 1970s. He is primarily a performer and an improviser, not a recording artist, but Brother I Prove You Wrong is all-new work, and it reflects the lessons he has learned from years of live performance. | The Philadelphia musician Charles Cohen, who's in his late sixties, plays a Buchla Music Easel, an arcane synthesizer built in limited quantities in the 1970s. He is primarily a performer and an improviser, not a recording artist, but Brother I Prove You Wrong is all-new work, and it reflects the lessons he has learned from years of live performance. | Charles Cohen: Brother I Prove You Wrong | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/20546-brother-i-prove-you-wrong/ | Brother I Prove You Wrong | People don't tend to think much about gestures when considering electronic music—that is, hands, and the shapes they carve. Think, for a moment, of a rock guitarist or a jazz saxophonist or a classical pianist. Your mental picture probably involves the splay of their fingers, the angle of their backs, the tilt of their heads. But electronic music is largely disembodied. Imagine a studio, and you'll probably think of someone hunched over a computer keyboard; imagine a live performance and you'll probably think of the same thing.
For the Philadelphia electronic musician Charles Cohen, though, the gesture is everything, even if the gesture itself—flicking a switch, twisting a knob, quickly reconnecting a patch cable—is utilitarian rather than expressive. His instrument of choice is a Buchla Music Easel, an arcane synthesizer built in limited quantities in the '70s. Where the evolution of electronic instruments has been, in large part, an arms race of bells and whistles, the Easel's biggest selling points are its limitations. It does without a traditional piano keyboard in favor of a touch keyboard, which forces the performer to search for modes that go beyond the typical 12-tone chromatic scale. More strikingly, the Easel features only a single oscillator, which means that it's capable of just one sound at a time. The tradeoff is the many possibilities the instrument offers for modulating and manipulating sound in real time. As Cohen explained at a workshop during the CTM Festival last year, "All the action in the Easel is in control. That's sort of a Buchla concept: complicated control over simple sounds, as opposed to many other instruments, where you have very, very complex sounds but only simple control."
Cohen, who is in his late sixties, has been at it long enough to have become a proper virtuoso on the Easel. He is primarily a performer and an improviser, not a recording artist. Two years ago, Rabih Beaini's Morphine label released a decade's worth of Cohen's experiments in a series of LPs that were eventually collected in the double-disc anthology, A Retrospective. But Brother I Prove You Wrong is all-new work, recorded specifically at Beaini's behest, and it reflects the lessons he has learned from years of live performance on the Easel. Whereas many of Cohen's earlier pieces had been made with the use of multi-tracked tape, the Brother tracks were all recorded using just the Buchla and a delay unit, and mostly done in single takes.
It is a curious sound, both spindly and sinewy all at once. In place of long, held tones, the music tends to proceed like a succession of water droplets. The careening blips bring to mind fireflies in a dark cavern or the orbits of subatomic particles; like atoms, the music consists primarily of empty space. The album begins, with "Cloud Hands", as if assembling itself out of nothingness, as arrhythmic whippoorwill trills gradually settle into a gentle contrapuntal pattern that feels, briefly, almost Baroque. The hypnotic "Sacred Mountain" chugs ahead at 85 beats per minute, with a steady 4/4 pulse and an ascending arpeggio that spins like a water wheel. It might almost be techno, and so might "The Boy and the Snake Dance", which, once it materializes out of the mist and locks into a regular tempo, brings to mind the pinging dissonance of Robert Hood.
As spare as the music may be, it's hard to believe that just one instrument is in play, particularly given the way that Cohen uses his sequencer and delay unit to create layers. "Formation of Matter" features sludgy bass formations shrouded in metallic echo; it feels like moving through a fog of iron fillings. The air is heavy with the memory of bells—all tail, no peal—and gossiping modems. In "Beirut", a dubby bassline reminiscent of Pole paces beneath a rapid-fire battery of ring-mod tones. The illusion of fullness is overwhelming.
Cohen has said that he begins his performances by picking up where he last left off, and a similar sense of continuity runs through Brother. Some tracks are explicitly interconnected: In "Visitors of the Sacred Mountain", a faint echo of the previous track's main motif percolates deep in the mix, almost out of earshot, shrouded in brittle, crystalline chirps, like the cries of frozen birds. Mostly, though, the through line makes itself felt in the way Cohen's single-oscillator synth morphs across the course of the album.
It is in constant motion. Otherwise repetitive arpeggios dodge and feint around their indicated paths, ululating pitches rise and fall, and the music's timbre is as mutable as a bead of quicksilver. It sometimes feels like you're listening to the inner life of a dial tone. As it happens, the mind/body duality appears in "Mankind and Mannequins", a groaning, gurgling piece accompanied by a surrealist, spoken-word vignette that asks what the thoughts of a rock and a mannequin might sound like. It is a static scene, a scene of stillness, yet the sound is restless—indicative, perhaps, of the motion inside these apparently inanimate objects. The rock lies inert, the mannequin's hand is crooked just so. But the atoms that comprise the sound of their thoughts are a nonstop swirl. | 2015-05-15T02:00:03.000-04:00 | 2015-05-15T02:00:03.000-04:00 | Experimental | Morphine | May 15, 2015 | 7.6 | c77620e0-5fdf-49e0-83d7-5234734ba953 | Philip Sherburne | https://pitchfork.com/staff/philip-sherburne/ | null |
The solo guitarist’s latest album on the prolific Flower Room label is subtly progressive. It’s celestial without being sleepy, and rarely stays still. | The solo guitarist’s latest album on the prolific Flower Room label is subtly progressive. It’s celestial without being sleepy, and rarely stays still. | Matt LaJoie: Everlasting Spring | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/matt-lajoie-everlasting-spring/ | Everlasting Spring | If the word “stream” hadn’t been so normalized by how everyone listens to music these days, it would be exactly the perfect word to describe Matt LaJoie’s new album. In both its effect and its creation, the gorgeous new Everlasting Spring is streaming. The music feels like an afternoon by a slow-moving creek, surface reflections peacefully changing with the light. Across four one-take improvisations on 10-string acoustic guitar run through a delay loop pedal and reverb, LaJoie’s extended pieces ripple and cascade, grow intricate, and thin out again.
As co-proprietors of Brunswick, Maine-based Flower Room Records, either LaJoie or his partner Ash Brooks have been participants in each of 39 releases they’ve put out since 2017. Between the custom cassettes based on star charts and Bandcamp shots depicting tapes next to crystals, it’s tempting to fold LaJoie and Flower Room’s output into some corner of the New Age revival. But not only does LaJoie display commanding technique on Everlasting Spring, he also evolves his creative voice. There’s nothing raw or folkie about Everlasting Spring—it might be more accurate to file LaJoie’s solo playing under American Progressivist.
There is a lightness of step behind LaJoie’s loops. It’s celestial without being sleepy, and rarely stays still. During the 13-and-half-minute “Showers Over Birch Point,” LaJoie plays in several modes at once to create the sensation of multiple currents. Occasional muted notes on the bass strings make slow ambient bursts of rhythm, mid-range harmonic dots follow at their own pace, and LaJoie solos gently on the highest strings. All accumulate to keep the piece in motion. The 16-minute album-closing “River’s Breadth” is slightly more minimalist, building to a quiet conclusion, in which LaJoie juggles two lead lines, one fast, one slow, each gorgeous.
In part because of the improvised nature of the music, and in part because of Flower Room’s prolific release schedule, there is the sense that one could wander away from the label and new records would just spring eternal without ears to hear them. Dipping further back into the Flower Room’s catalog, LaJoie’s earlier solo releases over the past two-plus years do sound like the same mood altered slightly, depending on the weather. But that underlying source, LaJoie, is the core of these ever-changing permutations throughout the rest of the Flower Room catalog. And while Everlasting Spring is atmospheric, it’s not necessarily background music. It’s proper foreground company, an album to hang out with and fill the room like any other. As blissed-out as Flower Room’s total output is, it changes session by session, moving somewhere between mountain and ocean, with a long way yet to go. | 2020-03-03T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2020-03-03T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Experimental | Flower Room | March 3, 2020 | 7.2 | c77d2fdf-af15-401d-a766-4d951a4b5c7c | Jesse Jarnow | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jesse-jarnow/ | |
Tim Cohen wrote the songs for River of Souls with backup singers in mind. He’s said the only thing that separates his Magic Trick material from his work with the Fresh & Onlys are the two bands’ personnel, but this breezy collection is all about beauty and sheen. | Tim Cohen wrote the songs for River of Souls with backup singers in mind. He’s said the only thing that separates his Magic Trick material from his work with the Fresh & Onlys are the two bands’ personnel, but this breezy collection is all about beauty and sheen. | Magic Trick: River of Souls | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/18841-magic-trick-river-of-souls/ | River of Souls | Backup singers can really impact the DNA of a song, and not always for the better. Take Lefty Frizzell’s 1950 classic “If You’ve Got the Money, I’ve Got the Time”. In its original format, it was a bare bones country standard typical of the Grand Ole Opry’s golden age: fiddle, pedal steel, Lefty’s voice, and not much else. Then, in 1959, he released a new, re-recorded version of the song on The One and Only Lefty Frizzell. It sounded overtly glossy thanks in part to a saccharine choir of backup vocalists. The additional voices added needless commercial sheen, only serving to mar and obscure the original’s charm.
Tim Cohen wrote the songs from River of Souls with backup singers in mind. He’s said that the only thing that separates his Magic Trick material from his work with the Fresh & Onlys are the two bands’ personnel. And he’s not overstuffing his latest album with a full chorus; he works with two female vocalists: Noelle Cahill and Alicia Vanden Heuvel. They provide this album’s primary appeal—Cohen’s baritone counterbalanced by two soft female voices. Sure, he could’ve handed “The Store” over to Wymond Miles, Kyle Gibson, and Shayde Sartin, but by using Cahill and Heuvel’s voices instead, the song’s guitar-centric momentum is somewhat softened. And ultimately, this is a very soft, easily handled album. The idea isn’t to add rough edges; just beauty and sheen.
The lead guitars on the album provided by Tom Heyman often stay clear of any raw, ragged garage punk sounds in favor of a tone more similar to Mark Knopfler’s. There are tambourines and unassuming melodies. As Cohen sings “Come Inside”, the backup vocalists come through with a mild, warm echo. This music is meant to be pleasant and palatable, so with that songwriting goal in mind, the additional voices are well-suited to the material.
But for an album that’s already plenty smooth, Cohen goes all in with his lyrics. The album title River of Souls does nothing to steer the listener away from the words “adult contemporary.” It’s close enough in name to Billy Joel’s 1993 album River of Dreams and is the name of a 1993 Dan Fogelberg album. And the song’s messages consistently lean toward the theatrical. On “You Have to Do”, over a languid organ and some “doo-wahhh” harmonies, Cohen offers a bunch of “wisdom” regarding how a man should keep a woman happy. It plays almost like a scene in a mid-20th century musical: A man, intimidated by his love for a woman, asks his wise friend/brother/father for advice. Then, the savvy narrator (Cohen) sings about how his friend should take action, and of course, two women wander into the frame just in time to sing some well-placed harmonies over his instructions.
With buoyant synths on “Salvation”, with Cohen’s soft moan and the echoing harmonica of “Beloved One”, River of Souls is breezy listening. Right when things start to get a little more bold with the soulful stomp, harmonies, and horns of “My World”, the song dissipates into a puddle of meandering guitars that aim for freeform but wind up feeling more like hotel lobby music. “We like pretty girls,” Cahill and Heuvel airily sing on “Crazy Teeth” over a continuous mid-tempo shuffle that would feel aesthetically appropriate in a transitional “riding from one town to the next” scene of an old western movie. It’s not a cool sounding album by any stretch, but even in the canon of dad rock, it doesn’t stand up. The songs become repetitive, and though the harmonies are well-crafted and the melodies are lovely, there aren’t enough moments that demand attention. After a while, all the sounds on River of Souls run together, a little bland and verging on formless. | 2014-01-09T01:00:04.000-05:00 | 2014-01-09T01:00:04.000-05:00 | null | Empty Cellar | January 9, 2014 | 6.3 | c77eff90-18e9-40e9-a153-e0465d06ba20 | Evan Minsker | https://pitchfork.com/staff/evan-minsker/ | null |
A newly released date from the pianist’s 2016 European tour toggles between dizzyingly athletic avant-garde jazz, foot-stomping ragtime, and a few tender standards. | A newly released date from the pianist’s 2016 European tour toggles between dizzyingly athletic avant-garde jazz, foot-stomping ragtime, and a few tender standards. | Keith Jarrett: Munich 2016 | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/keith-jarrett-munich-2016/ | Munich 2016 | Keith Jarrett approaches the piano the way a star athlete courts the ball—it’s a full-body experience, marked by sweat, facial spasms, and an inability to remain still. Jarrett’s improvisational solo concerts have been characterized by this level of physicality since he began performing professionally in the 1960s, and more than half a century hasn’t hampered his game. We may not be able to see Jarrett’s piano acrobatics while listening to his newly released live recording Munich 2016, but his enthusiasm and vigor are palpable. Recorded on the final night of a European tour, Munich 2016 provides a snapshot of the piano legend in his seventies: energetic, spontaneous, and inventive as ever.
Munich 2016 was recorded at the Philharmonie in the titular German city, home to Jarrett’s longtime label ECM. The acoustics are pristine, and while the room can be heard, the presence of the audience is largely absent from the tape—a good thing, considering Jarrett’s history of walking off stage due to people coughing, sneezing, or producing any combination of involuntary bodily functions. Fortunately for the listener, Jarrett does not police his own: He is so exhilarated by the music that he cannot stop himself from stomping, shouting, and humming off-key throughout the 12-part improvisational suite.
There are three primary styles that shape the pieces on Munich 16: lyricism, the blues, and dizzying avant-garde jazz. “Part I” belongs to the latter camp. With a runtime of over 13 minutes, it is the record’s longest piece, and it undergoes the most drastic temperature shifts—like watching time-lapse footage of the four seasons. There is no breathing space in the piece, and while Jarrett’s right hand spends time tumbling across the higher keys, it is the constant, ominous bass thump that grabs you by the throat and keeps you still. “Part VII” is from a similar school, a brief but daring piece that clocks in at just under two minutes. It is the only track that acknowledges the audience; we hear a quick rip of applause before Jarrett launches into a fearless polyrhythmic composition. Perhaps it is Munich 16’s shortest offering because it is the most exhausting to play.
Jarrett frequently alternates between styles on Munich 16, creating a dynamic sequence that doesn’t wear out any one particular method. “Part IX” is a spirited 12-bar blues, the steady structure of which allows Jarrett to solo wildly with his right hand. The dry keys seem to trip over each other, but Jarrett is too in control to let them drop completely. His atonal groans somehow function as a grounding force for the swift stunt work of his digits. “Part IV” is another blues entry, and perhaps the album’s most jovial track—a foot-stomping ragtime that calls to mind Ramsey Lewis Trio and Vince Guaraldi’s Peanuts compositions.
Jarrett relieves the ear with soft, melodic passages throughout Munich 16, including the final three songs: interpretations of standards “Answer Me My Love,” “It’s a Lonesome Old Town,” and “Somewhere Over the Rainbow.” Jarrett’s grunts are absent from these last three movements, and his spare and tender playing conjures a closeness to the listener, as if you’re lying beneath the belly of his instrument. “It’s a Lonesome Old Town” is the most striking, a woozy nocturne that is so sad, its soft and sweet notes seem to sour as they linger in the air. In the last 15 minutes, Jarrett strips everything back, leaving plenty of space to interpret these beloved songs with the same reverence paid by Nat King Cole, Frank Sinatra, Judy Garland, and countless others. On Munich 16, Jarrett’s talent and ingenuity are self-evident—and so is his passion for the music that shaped him.
Buy: Rough Trade
(Pitchfork may earn a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.) | 2020-01-18T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2020-01-18T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Jazz | ECM | January 18, 2020 | 7.9 | c788abae-ea54-4b1b-a415-496f8befcce9 | Madison Bloom | https://pitchfork.com/staff/madison-bloom/ | |
Showcasing the darker, noisier side of Ron Morelli’s industrial-electronics label, this collection creates a cohesive whole out of jagged contrasts. | Showcasing the darker, noisier side of Ron Morelli’s industrial-electronics label, this collection creates a cohesive whole out of jagged contrasts. | Various Artists: Eminent Domain | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/various-artists-eminent-domain/ | Eminent Domain | The full name of New York label L.I.E.S. is Long Island Electrical Systems. That might seem better suited to a utility company—until you hear the music coming out of it. Over a wide-ranging catalog of sputtering electronics, noise, and on-the-fritz club music, L.I.E.S. brings to mind Throbbing Gristle’s “industrial music for industrial people” slogan, right down to its well-oiled release schedule. A notable early showcase was the 2013 compilation Music for Shut-Ins—a fitting title for its dark, murky, hermetic take on electronic music. With the new Eminent Domain, a self-described collection of “subterranean American electronics,” L.I.E.S. drags some of the underground’s finest basement dwellers into the sunlight, and it’s one of the label’s best compilations yet.
Spread over three LPs and a bonus 7”, the sprawling Eminent Domain works well anywhere you might dive in, but label head Ron Morelli seems to take extra care in sequencing its 22 tracks. There’s a crazed logic in the way their prickly edges connect and clash. The compilation takes its time to open up with atmospheric early tracks like of Prisons’ “Tell Lie Visions,” a scene of choked keyboard torture, before JT Whitfield’s saw-blade synth jam “Bleak Speak” fully straps you in for the funhouse horrors to follow. With few recognizable names, you never quite know what surprises will pop out.
Minneapolis’ noise artist CBN is a great example. With only a few extremely limited-run cassettes, it’s hard to even obtain his work, but the stunning EBM workout “Who Has Time for Tears” may send you in search of more. The track’s propulsive drum machine and ghostly moans build over six relentless minutes before turning to bloody screams and noise that nearly sparkles in its harshness. For many, it will be a memorable introduction, but for Eminent Domain, it acts as another crucial cog, kicking off a seamless B-side as it gives way to FILTH’s prickly, agitated “Crucial Point” before Daniel Holt’s “Near the Window” provides a comedown of doom-laced synths. The three tracks work together to carve their side of the LP into its own unique corner; it’s not the only place on the compilation that this happens.
Los Angeles noise veteran Suzy Poling, aka Pod Blotz, offers another of Eminent Domain’s highlights with “Beyond the Body,” transforming her voice into a wounded electrical signal and threading it through blunt drumbeats and ethereal synths. It’s balanced by L.I.E.S. alum 51717’s “אדגמה”, which approaches ambient music and provides a midway breather, but also cleverly sets the listener up for fake-outs like Skander’s “Running Into Danger,” a blissful soundscape interrupted midway through by hellish percussion. The only genuine moment of peace is saved until the very last track: “The Swan King,” from Hospital Productions regular Lussuria. It all gives Eminent Domain a full-circle finish, making it both a brilliant collection of clashing parts and an organic whole all at once. | 2019-03-02T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2019-03-02T01:00:00.000-05:00 | null | L.I.E.S. | March 2, 2019 | 7.4 | c78ee246-4091-4e87-a2db-9e488dab620a | Miles Bowe | https://pitchfork.com/staff/miles-bowe/ | |
Kate NV and Angel Deradoorian lock themselves in a Cologne studio with an arsenal of synths and a mutual appreciation for the absurd; tongue-in-cheek krautrock hijinks ensue. | Kate NV and Angel Deradoorian lock themselves in a Cologne studio with an arsenal of synths and a mutual appreciation for the absurd; tongue-in-cheek krautrock hijinks ensue. | Decisive Pink: Ticket to Fame | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/decisive-pink-ticket-to-fame/ | Ticket to Fame | Kate NV and Angel Deradoorian bond over shared anxieties like a pair of introverts at summer camp, unearthing every new inch of common ground with a sigh of relief and a much-needed dose of laughter. For Ticket to Fame, their first album as Decisive Pink, the two walled themselves off in a Cologne studio with an arsenal of synthesizers—“one of the Prophets, a modular, a Juno, a Jupiter, a Rodeo, a synth with a bee on it and some synth from the 1980s that Kate knew about,” Deradoorian recalls—and emerged with an album that plays like a road-trip scrapbook: a document of in-jokes, makeshift routines, and eureka moments that’s as bewilderingly insular as it is earnestly charming. From the temporary safety of their bubble, the experimental pop auteurs poke fun at life’s absurdities with the giddy energy of an acid trip cresting its peak.
Ticket to Fame is remarkably unified, stepping decisively on the gas and steering into bright, retro-futuristic synth pop; the duo sticks tightly to the kitschy ’80s sounds that NV so brilliantly engineered on 2020s Room for the Moon. The faux-marimba arpeggios cutting through the frostbitten introspection of “What Where” sound like leftovers from a nature documentary on VHS, and the exuberantly funky post-disco stomp of “Dopamine” feels ripped out of an imaginary Tom Tom Club session, right down to the bleeping, dissonant synths sweeping across the song’s endearingly goofy breakdown.
Though NV is credited with handling the majority of the album’s production (Deradoorian, in turn, is the record’s principal lyricist), she keeps a loose grip behind the boards, allowing some of Deradoorian’s psychedelic krautrock inclinations to slip through. The results are mixed. On one end of the scale are the towering “Haffmilch Holiday” and the speedy, Harmonia-esque “Rodeo,” two perfect slices of Autobahn-ready motorik rock, begging to be taken on a highway test drive. On the other: “Interlude,” which simply runs a single arpeggio through every filter setting and tosses a bit of flute over it. Even more unfortunate is the similarly negligible ambient of “Dusk,” which maddeningly tosses away the chance to end the album on “Dopamine,” a high deserving of the name.
But Deradoorian shines as a lyricist, emboldened by NV to lighten up the moody, soul-searching mysticism of her past work with absurdist humor. Together, the two peel back the sociological layers masking their deepest desires and push each other toward a healthy wariness of all forces—political, technological, or chemical—that might lead them astray. Krautrock manifesto “Haffmilch Holiday” just wants to touch grass—dictators, gossips, and frappuccinos be damned. The sprightly “Ode to Boy” interpolates the core melody of Beethoven’s Ninth to undercut the nervous tension of a new crush. Is he more than just an “ordinary boy” or is she “throwing her heart into the wind?” The jury is out, but as they weave their voices through coda, the joke lands unexpectedly well. Hell is an automated customer service hotline in “Dopamine,” complete with Deradoorian reading out a hilarious, almost eerily realistic product list, anxiously searching for her next fix. “Giant googly eyes”? Sure, but “remote control centipede” just won’t cut it.
Tucked in the middle of the record, “Potato Tomato” feels like NV and Deradoorian have collectively snapped, falling victim to the cosmic joke themselves. The decision to include a track of NV and Deradoorian shouting increasingly ridiculous pronunciations of “potato” and “tomato” at each other initially struck me as an idea best left on the cutting-room floor. But as I sat with it, its white-hot ridiculousness cooled into a cypher for the album itself; a moment of unvarnished ridiculousness that exemplifies the duo’s determination to let the cabin fever of being trapped in the studio—or a body—strike a creative spark. When Deradoorian howls “Mommy!,” NV breaks out in laughter and so do I, submitting to the record’s delirium. | 2023-06-12T00:01:00.000-04:00 | 2023-06-12T00:01:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Fire | June 12, 2023 | 7 | c790bdab-e27a-4517-bffc-e16011b9a40d | Phillipe Roberts | https://pitchfork.com/staff/phillipe-roberts/ | |
At their best, the records of experimental British composer and producer Philip Jeck can make you reimagine the way you hear the world. His first album in five years finds the voices and instruments Jeck once built around slink into the background, ceding instead to an unexpectedly discomfiting vision. | At their best, the records of experimental British composer and producer Philip Jeck can make you reimagine the way you hear the world. His first album in five years finds the voices and instruments Jeck once built around slink into the background, ceding instead to an unexpectedly discomfiting vision. | Philip Jeck: Cardinal | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21183-cardinal/ | Cardinal | At their best, the records of experimental British composer and producer Philip Jeck can make you reimagine the way you hear the world. For most of his career, Jeck has used the record and the record player as both primary inspiration and chief instrument. He processes the static sounds archived on forgotten LPs, sampling and obfuscating the source material until it yields and blurs into new pieces. Though he uses little but effects pedals and processors to transmogrify the music, it can seem at times that Jeck physically warps the grooves themselves, turning concentric circles into Catherine wheels or paisley vectors or interconnected figure eights. If hip-hop’s architects sampled aging sounds to create their own modern world, Jeck uses many of the same tools to create an alternate, individual one that he then invites you to enter.
Jeck had been at this for decades when, 13 years ago, he seemed to find an enviable stride. Released between 2002 and 2008, a triptych of records—Stoke, 7, and Sand—turned his tests into solo turntable symphonies, fully formed compositions meant to be inhabited and analyzed. Jeck merged the audio on the records with the essence of the records, creating new music that popped and cracked beneath the charm of vinyl antiquity. The process seemed to break linear time by giving a universe of lost voices and performances new life at once. You, the listener, went away with Jeck and his record-store finds for a pleasant spell.
But on Cardinal, Jeck’s first new album in five years, that motion and those feelings have calcified a bit. The edges of his sources and samples have hardened, as though he’s confronting the harsh exigencies of the moment rather than escaping to the drift and peace of fantasy. The voices and instruments Jeck once built around slink into the background here, ceding instead to an unexpectedly discomfiting vision. Brittle dins and soft tones, beautiful drones and static shocks participate in a theater of revolving reality and intentional violence.
Jeck indeed created Cardinal with turntables, a technique best heard here through the fractured loop that anchors "Broke Up" or the sunbaked wobble that defines "The Station View". These 13 tracks, however, often feel powered more by their accessories—"Casio keyboards, Ibanez bass guitar, Sony MiniDisc players, Ibanez and Zoom effects pedals, assorted percussion, a Behringer mixer," he lists—than the source records. There are jarring moments, as during the menacing "Brief" or the lurid "Called In", that suggest Jeck has suddenly slammed his palm against a distortion pedal, like some much younger noise lord gunning for the set’s climax. During "Saint Pancras", he seems to shake sleigh bells in the distance; pitted against the neon whirr of his electronics, the addition is strangely disconcerting, like a threat voiced from the lips of a longtime ally.
That is the prevailing sentiment of Cardinal, an album where Jeck’s general sense of wonder slips toward dystopian bewilderment. The move makes for a more fragmented listen than expected from Jeck, whose albums are typically immersive and enchanting. Still, the transition comes with unlikely rewards. Rendered in short spans that overlap until they form casual rhythms, the hovering bass and shredded treble of the terrific, terrifying "…bends the knee 1" recall the successes of the Haxan Cloak’s Excavation. During "Barrow in Furness (open thy hand wide)", Jeck slowly mutates a simple carousel melody until it becomes a dense web of ghastly oscillations, a little like Prurient’s electro phase. Yes, those are surprising references for a British sexagenarian with highbrow bona fides, but again, Jeck’s music has always recast the established world in a singular image. Does it come as any mystery that, now more than ever, he would conjure a setting as or more odious than our own?
Records are now in vogue in ways they’ve never been during Jeck's career. For decades, he repurposed a medium that seemed bound for obsolescence. At times, his use of the LP felt like a moral imperative, a valiant attempt to spin voices and ideas and forms that might be lost. But records, of course, have become such desirable commodities that it’s now difficult to have them made due to an overburdened market that once seemed destined for dismantling. It’s fitting, then, that this is one of the least turntable-centric albums of Jeck’s career, rendered so that you may be able to hear it all without guessing at the signal path at all. Rather than try to stake some here-first claim with vinyl or turn his past with it into new cachet or credibility, Jeck has used the turntable as a platform for exploring larger sounds and asking bigger questions. Cardinal is a break in his once clear direction, and it’s not his most cohesive album. But it is a logical and necessary leap for Jeck, who has always turned at oblique angles so as to reorder the sounds around him. | 2015-10-23T02:00:04.000-04:00 | 2015-10-23T02:00:04.000-04:00 | Experimental | Touch | October 23, 2015 | 7.6 | c7911e5a-8b06-4168-9b8d-318129a06128 | Grayson Haver Currin | https://pitchfork.com/staff/grayson-haver currin/ | null |
Blawan and Pariah’s hardware-centric techno duo returns with its debut album, trading some of the distortion of early releases for a funkier, slipperier sound that still bangs. | Blawan and Pariah’s hardware-centric techno duo returns with its debut album, trading some of the distortion of early releases for a funkier, slipperier sound that still bangs. | Karenn: Grapefruit Regret | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/karenn-grapefruit-regret/ | Grapefruit Regret | Karenn’s Grapefruit Regret is not designed for home listening. There’s no grand concept at work; the LP’s title literally stems from an unfortunate breakfast order. There are no ambient sketches, no cross-genre experiments, no high-profile guest appearances. This is a confident, no-nonsense affair: eight tracks of machine techno squarely focused on the dancefloor.
Although this is their debut album as a duo, Karenn’s Jamie Roberts (aka Blawan) and Arthur Cayzer (aka Pariah) have been playing together for nearly a decade. Both are products of the fertile post-dubstep scene of the late 2000s and early 2010s, in which the sounds of the UK’s hardcore continuum intermingled with house, techno, and R&B, giving rise to artists like James Blake, Floating Points, and Joy Orbison. But Roberts quickly diverted from his peers. In both his solo work and with Karenn, he embraced a particularly British strain of dark, industrial-leaning techno championed by acts like Surgeon and Sandwell District.
From the beginning, Karenn have been rooted in live performance, gradually sharpening their sound and taming their small fleet of gear. Early Karenn efforts, while banging, were also endearingly crude: Grotty creations like “Auflen Whip” sounded like they’d been forged by a blacksmith. Stark, raw, and largely devoid of funk, the music was full of static, hiss, rattling drums, and distorted synths; the duo’s lack of polish was part of its charm, and Karenn’s music tickled both machine fetishists and techno fans with an itch to get rowdy on the dancefloor.
In recent years, however, Karenn has turned down the volume. Following a single 2014 EP on their She Works the Long Nights label, they stopped releasing records. The studio break seems particularly prescient in retrospect; they pressed pause just as electronic music was becoming overrun with dark, industrial-flavored techno soundalikes. Even Karenn, who continued to perform live, noticed the shift; speaking recently to The Quietus, Roberts observed, “Things got quite aggressive over the last couple of years, so bro-y."
Karenn’s return in 2019 has been comparatively lighthearted. They’re still making serious techno, but some of the darkness has been stripped out, and the music’s presentation has been downright silly at times. Kind of Green, the duo’s first release in five years, was announced as “five slices of pudding for your pet fowl.” Since then, Karenn have released Voam Club Archive Volume 1, a collection of tunes extracted from live recordings, and now Grapefruit Regret, recorded this summer in Berlin. In the span of less than a year, Karenn—a project that some assumed might never produce another record—have become downright prolific.
Grapefruit Regret might be the cleanest thing they’ve ever done. While analog crunch is still a part of their palette, it’s no longer one of the music’s defining features. “Lemon Dribble” opens the album with little more than bristling static and a moodily winding bassline; the kick drum is distorted, but once it drops, the track becomes a focused—and surprisingly groovy—techno exercise. No one is going to confuse them with Derrick May or Underground Resistance, but Karenn’s sound has gotten funkier, and a lot less harrowing than it used to be.
The change suits the duo, and explains how a track like “Strawbs”—which ups the tempo to a galloping 150 BPM—can feel so lithe. At that speed, a lot of techno begins to either sound cartoonish or feel like an unrelenting juggernaut, but “Strawbs” is positively bouncy, its wriggly rhythms offset by airy, meditative pads. “Peel Me Easy” takes a similar tack, reflecting Karenn’s newfound willingness to add a bit of color.
Karenn fans looking for techno screamers won’t come away disappointed. “Kumquat” is an unrelenting face melter, its bleeping synths almost joyously insistent. “Crush the Mushrooms” is similarly manic, but it’s also one of the more irreverent tracks on the LP, employing crunchy, almost robotic synths that sound like a warped take on Daft Punk. Even the gloomy closer “Taste Yourself,” easily the LP’s most contemplative track, is optimized for the dancefloor. It’s unlikely that anyone, Karenn fans included, will repeatedly consume the album from start to finish; it’s just not that kind of record. But the two producers are doing something special together, and Grapefruit Regret reflects their confidence after nearly a decade in action. They may have taken their time to get here, but it’s clear from the way they’ve loosened up that Roberts and Cayzer are moving forward in exactly the manner that they see fit.
Buy: Rough Trade
(Pitchfork may earn a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.) | 2019-12-07T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2019-12-07T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Electronic | Voam | December 7, 2019 | 7.4 | c79946b0-f7aa-4c22-aa64-901b950f7f56 | Shawn Reynaldo | https://pitchfork.com/staff/shawn-reynaldo/ | |
No longer content with merely capturing the sound of four wildly talented musicians in a room together, the Australian “future soul” group transforms on their vibrant and psychedelic third album. | No longer content with merely capturing the sound of four wildly talented musicians in a room together, the Australian “future soul” group transforms on their vibrant and psychedelic third album. | Hiatus Kaiyote: Mood Valiant | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/hiatus-kaiyote-mood-valiant/ | Mood Valiant | The Australian quartet Hiatus Kaiyote are hyper-professional players, prone to the type of musical indulgences most appreciated by audiences of tuition-paying jazz performance majors. Luckily, they also have a knack for breezy neo-soul that is as inviting as it is impressive. At the center of their sound is guitarist and R&B vocalist Nai Palm, and the success of Hiatus Kaiyote songs depends on the way her bandmates accompany her singular, heroic voice. At their best, particularly on stage, they accentuate her melodies with propulsive, inventive rhythms. But in the studio, they have struggled to sound equally compelling. The performances on Nai Palm’s 2017 solo debut, Needle Paw, only underlined this issue. With her accompaniment stripped to just acoustic guitar and vocals, she sounded freer.
On Mood Valiant, Hiatus Kaiyote creeps closer to a unity of virtuosity and feeling. No longer content with merely capturing the sound of four wildly talented musicians in a room together, they transform into something more expansive and psychedelic. The fundamentals of their sound—like the twinkling Rhodes electric piano that shows up in the brief and tender “Sip Into Something Soft”—are still present. But the band soon ventures into new territory. On “Chivalry Is Not Dead,” keyboardist Simon Mavin juggles synths that creak and yawn. Bassist Paul Bender and drummer Perrin Moss are characteristically locked in, guiding us through kaleidoscopic sounds. In the hookier moments, Hiatus Kaiyote sound like songwriters and performers in equal measure, living up to their self-appointed genre of “future soul”: husky, cyberpunk R&B, with Nai Palm’s molten voice at its core.
This is the first Hiatus Kaiyote album that doesn’t sound like merely a recorded live set; you can hear them using the studio to expand their vision of what the band can be. It is the most vibrant they’ve ever sounded on record. In several winning moments, they introduce string arrangements from Brazilian composer Arthur Verocai, bringing a regal spirit to lead single “Get Sun” and the piano ballad “Stone or Lavender.” On the riotous, mid-album highlight “All the Words We Don’t Say,” Hiatus Kaiyote are in their bag. The precision and intensity of the music veers toward dubstep, with a grinding half-time lurch punctuated by Moss’ massive kick drum.
For all the dynamism of their music, Hiatus Kaiyote have only a couple of lyrical moods: sultry or ecstatic. Nai Palm is an endearingly stoney lyricist, and, sure enough, she starts off “Chivalry Is Not Dead” with an erotic verse that sounds like it was inspired by a blazed viewing of a nature documentary: “If I were a leopard slug,” she sings, “I would reach out with the blue rose of ours, wrapping myself around you.” Digging more deeply into these feelings—not to mention the genderfucked reproductive practices they imply—could be a worthy next step. But even when she pares down her lyrics to simple paeans of love, lust, and devotion, her voice animates the words with pathos and meaning. On their best album yet, Hiatus Kaiyote shine by building an architecture around these emotions, coming alive when they allow themselves to be more than just a great band.
Buy: Rough Trade
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Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-06-28T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2021-06-28T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock / Jazz | Brainfeeder / Ninja Tune | June 28, 2021 | 7.3 | c7a4bcad-5f29-4a89-88b5-1755cd021582 | Adlan Jackson | https://pitchfork.com/staff/adlan-jackson/ | |
On their most engaged album in a quarter-century, Martin Gore and Dave Gahan find that familiar sounds can offer several new ways forward. | On their most engaged album in a quarter-century, Martin Gore and Dave Gahan find that familiar sounds can offer several new ways forward. | Depeche Mode: *Memento Mori * | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/depeche-mode-memento-mori/ | Memento Mori | Depeche Mode had nearly finished their fourth full decade and 14th full-length before a Martin Gore-Dave Gahan cowrite finally made an album. That was “You Move,” a throbbing bit of tossed-off electro pop nestled near the center of 2017’s Spirit, a political quagmire of topical indignation. Amid that sloganeering, “You Move” was not an entirely auspicious debut, notable mostly for how it framed Gahan and Gore’s threadbare relationship. During those sessions, third member and interstitial glue, Andy Fletcher, had to be physically removed from the studio so his more famous former chums could freely vent. “If you give me something you and I can play,” Gahan soon taunted on their song together. “Let me ring your bell.”
The pair’s second cowrite, though, feels less like an obligation or a marriage-counseling exercise than the dawn of a new dynamic. “Wagging Tongue” arrives early into Memento Mori, the band’s most engaged album in more than two decades, Gore’s sunbeam sequencers a perfect foil for his golden-voice goth. It’s an elliptical tale of risk, alienation, and—slowly, unsteadily, improbably—renewal. “I won’t be persuaded,” they sing together near the end, Gore’s harmony as wavy as his totemic golden hair. “Kiss your doubts goodbye.”
The doubts that Memento Mori would even exist were enormous. Just before the trio reconvened in Gore’s Santa Barbara studio (and only after Gahan overcame his entrenched reluctance to reconvene at all), Fletcher died suddenly at home in London, the primary vessel from his heart having ripped apart. Fletcher, only 60, had been the band’s indispensable “vibe tech,” the oil inside its hot engine. Though he didn’t write or really even play, Fletcher served as the intermediary for the often acrimonious pair who did, especially when Gahan began itching to put songs of his own on Depeche Mode’s Gore-penned albums. Without him, they wondered, could they function without falling apart? “We kind of had to… really decide, are we going to finish?” Gore recently told MOJO. “Or do we carry on?” They chose the latter, finding new ways to work together, if not discovering altogether new sounds.
This darkness and doubt—always Depeche Mode’s perpetually renewing lifeblood—permeate Memento Mori’s best songs. Opener “My Cosmos Is Mine” unspools over a mosaic of shattered static and cryospheric synths. In elegant Scott Walker finery, Gahan aces the role of the narrator who’d rather be lied to than given more bad news. There’s a whiff of The Wall’s politics here, especially when chants of “No war!” arrive, but its animating question is symptomatic of grief itself: How much more can you handle, mortal? “Don’t stare at my soul,” Gahan sings, as steady and loaded as the serpent waiting to strike. “I swear it is fine.”
That croon returns for closer “Speak to Me,” a gorgeous bit of Gahan-shaped melancholia that begins like some beatific church hymn but exits beneath a barrage of cursed noise. It’s a devoted love song hamstrung by self-loathing, Gahan worried he’s not good enough for anyone but himself. Along with the mid-album Nick Cave-and-a-drum-machine fever dream “Caroline’s Monkey,” these frames hold Memento Mori in a sort of permanent pallor. This record is more concerned with surviving than succeeding—ironic, then, that this brooding triptych is as new and open-ended as Depeche Mode have sounded this century.
But Depeche Mode became superstars by lighting up the dark, by turning individual despair or nihilism into sing-alongs to be shared. They try that here, with a separate trio that winks at their crowning achievements, albeit indirectly. “People Are Good” and “Never Let Me Go” not only share the first half of their titles with two of Depeche Mode’s most titanic hits but also their anthemic ambitions. Ebullient, danceable, and deeply disappointed, “People Are Good” is the confession of a recovering pessimist realizing maybe he was right, that our very nature ensures our doom. The swift and slicing “Never Let Me Go” swivels on the brand of anxious guitar hook that’s long been the band’s secret weapon. It underscores the facade of neurotic self-confidence Gahan offers so well, begging for love while pretending he is already love incarnate.
The Gore-Gahan cowrite isn’t the only collaboration here. Gore wrote a third of the album with Psychedelic Furs whiz Richard Butler, introducing a new vulnerability to Depeche Mode’s long-hermetic world. (For his part, Gahan wrote with the touring band, producer James Ford, and engineer Marta Salogni, an intriguing sound artist herself.) The pair’s work on “Ghosts Again”—the first single, the first time Depeche Mode have neared the sound of a real hit in many years—convinced Gahan that returning to the fold was worth the bother. It is deliciously unfussy, its fluorescent keys and four-on-the-floor insistence giving Gahan space for a little carpe diem proselytizing, clear of the chaos. It somehow finds the crossroads of Katy Perry’s “Firework” and New Order’s “Bizarre Love Triangle,” then shoots up its own signal flare for the living.
That is, alas, as close as Memento Mori gets to a smash, to reaching one of those undeniable highs that seeps into your psyche by merely existing, à la “Just Can’t Get Enough.” This is absolutely Depeche Mode at their best since Ultra, but there’s probably nothing here that introduces them to an entirely new audience, unlike Ultra. Still, “Soul with Me” is the only true miss, less mid-album fermata than full-on slog: a slow dance of shuffling drums, tremolo guitars, and elementary end-rhyme. Its maudlin sense of self-pity runs counter to the unlikely endurance tale that is Memento Mori, an album that almost died with Fletcher in London.
After more than 40 years, it is astonishing and redeeming how rarely Depeche Mode have been embarrassing. Yes, they’re a quarter-century removed from their last megahits, but they’ve never deigned to the menial tasks of senescence—cruise ships, state fairs, full-album tours. Rather than play it safe and demure when neo-Nazi droog Richard Spencer claimed Depeche Mode for the right, Gahan went all in, dubbing him “a very educated cunt … the scariest kind of all.” They’ve suffered addiction, abdication, near-death, and, now, death itself, but they’ve never made a truly awful record by chasing trends they’d already missed. For all their dependable despair, Depeche Mode thrive more on persistence and self-respect.
Memento Mori is, ultimately, a manifestation of both. Rather than end with a friend’s death and, consequently, a relatively forgettable album beset by personnel issues, Gahan and Gore chose to get closer and try again. Memento Mori is not the hooded masterpiece of Music for the Masses or the hits cache of Violator. But it does signal that there are new ways yet for Gahan and Gore to at least approach their old magic. Given their peak-and-valley past, perhaps that’s old news. In the end, as Gore wrote and Gahan sang in 1982, maybe people are basically the same. | 2023-03-23T00:02:00.000-04:00 | 2023-03-23T00:02:00.000-04:00 | Electronic / Rock | Columbia | March 23, 2023 | 7.1 | c7a5da93-111f-498a-b04f-f6dda73d2c52 | Grayson Haver Currin | https://pitchfork.com/staff/grayson-haver currin/ | |
I'd like to begin this review by congratulating Tindersticks on making it for over a decade with the same ... | I'd like to begin this review by congratulating Tindersticks on making it for over a decade with the same ... | Tindersticks: Can Our Love... | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/8074-can-our-love/ | Can Our Love... | I'd like to begin this review by congratulating Tindersticks on making it for over a decade with the same six members. Most bands don't even make it the full ten years, much less with all members intact. I've been trying to think of other bands who have done it and after a few minutes of staring around at my record collection, Fugazi, Radiohead, and REM are the only names I've come up with, and even REM doesn't have Bill Berry anymore.
Aside from those, you have revolving doors like Yes and Fleetwood Mac, both of whom have had over twenty members over the years, and short-lived outfits like the Sex Pistols, who couldn't stay together long enough to complete their first US tour. So, it's a testament to the strength of the band that Tindersticks are still at it after all these years, democratically crafting some of the best music in Britain. And it's equally impressive that their quality has hardly suffered at all in the process.
The music of Tindersticks has changed a lot in the last few years, absorbing 70's soul into their signature gutter ballads, and dropping the "melo" prefix from the drama. Gone are the 70 minute-plus double-albums and ear-rattling dissonance that characterized their early music, replaced instead by concise, slow-core R&B; with an inky black center. Still, it would impossible to mistake this for any other band, and old fans will likely be delighted with what they hear.
The opener, "Dying Slowly," is the most direct musical link to the band's past, recalling the string-drenched pining of their third album, Curtains. Stuart Staples' murky baritone calls out the refrain, "This dying slowly/ It seemed better than shooting myself," with characteristic exhaustion. The strings swell and subside like the conversation in a crowded bar. It's an elegant introduction to an album that finds Tindersticks further embracing the soul influences they first toyed with on 1999's Simple Pleasure.
A case in point is the title track, a bubbling stew of wah-wah guitars, Hammond organ and passionate vocals that plays like Marvin Gaye's "Let's Get It On" at half-speed, only with Here, My Dear sentiments in the lyrics. Even after all this time, Stuart Staples can't seem to win at the game of love.
"Sweet Release," the album's eight-minute centerpiece, follows, displaying the band's uncanny ability to play an extremely long song and make it feel too short. Dickon Hinchliffe's violin swirls around Staples' molasses-thick vocal and David Boulter's gorgeous organ lines, as the twelve-member string section comments from the wings. It makes for a song that easily lives up to its title.
Part of what makes Tindersticks so easy to connect to is the way they manage to make even the most minute suffering and pain seem universal. When Staples sighs, he's sighing with you, and when he says "I," it could be anybody who's ever been through a messy breakup or felt the sting of rejection. And that's why his plea of "Don't ever get tired of waiting for me" on "Don't Ever Get Tired" hits a nerve-- everyone needs someone they can depend on, and Staples just wants it to be the woman he loves.
"People Keep Comin' Around," a duet between Staples and Hinchliffe, offers perhaps a little insight into why Tindersticks have been able to last so long-- all six members are genuinely unselfish musicians. Bassist Mark Colwill and drummer Alasdair Macaulay lay down a relaxed but funky groove as Boulter and guitarist Neil Fraser lay back, playing only when necessary. Hinchliffe's higher octave is animated, but never hogs the spotlight, letting the band ride the groove, while Hinchliffe's rich string and horn arrangements fill in the gaps. It's telling that the band offers equal billing to the string and horn players in the album credits, acknowledging their contributions as equal to the end result.
In fact, the only faltering point on the entire album actually comes when Staples strikes out on his own for the puzzling "Tricklin'," a two-minute vocal round with minimalist organ accompaniment that doesn't really serve as much more than filler. But when the whole band is engaged, the results are frequently stunning, and always engaging.
The final twist on Can Our Love... comes with the closer, "Chilitetime," where, for once, hope seems to be the order of the day. "She has my love/ She needs something more/ But time is mine," Staples sings as Hinchliffe's violin cries out behind him. And that's where the ellipsis in the album title comes in, I think. It leaves the thought "Can our love..." incomplete and allows you draw your own conclusions. While things are definitely bad, there may yet be a way out.
Despite the open-ended nature of its sentiments, "Chilitetime" pulls the album to a strong close, effectively capping this latest journey through the dark folds of the brain and the heart. At 45 minutes, Can Our Love... is Tindersticks' most concise album yet, and it sacrifices nothing in content. Eight songs may not seem like much for a full album, but it's all this band needs to make a fully rewarding listen that only gets richer the more you visit. | 2001-05-21T01:00:02.000-04:00 | 2001-05-21T01:00:02.000-04:00 | Rock | Beggars Banquet | May 21, 2001 | 8.1 | c7a6146d-f2ba-499d-8fdb-5b64c8ee9237 | Joe Tangari | https://pitchfork.com/staff/joe-tangari/ | null |
Four new vinyl reissues offer a thrilling survey of Paddy McAloon’s idiosyncratic journey as a pop songwriter. | Four new vinyl reissues offer a thrilling survey of Paddy McAloon’s idiosyncratic journey as a pop songwriter. | Prefab Sprout: Swoon / From Langley Park to Memphis / Jordan: The Comeback / A Life of Surprises | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/prefab-sprout-swoon-from-langley-park-to-memphis-jordan-the-comeback-a-life-of-surprises/ | Swoon / From Langley Park to Memphis / Jordan: The Comeback / A Life of Surprises | At first, Paddy McAloon thought he had to invent his own chords to write songs. As a result, the earliest music by his band Prefab Sprout can sound comical and haywire, like a jazz band entertaining themselves at a cocktail party before the guests arrive. As McAloon continued refining his voice, he earned comparisons to Elvis Costello and Steely Dan, but his heroes were people like Michael Jackson and Prince, Stephen Sondheim and George Gershwin. He dreamed of writing songs that the whole world could sing along to—but he wanted to do it his own way.
Four new vinyl reissues offer a thrilling survey of his journey as a pop songwriter. The series comprises the band’s 1984 debut Swoon, 1988’s commercial peak From Langley Park to Memphis, 1990’s double album Jordan: The Comeback, and 1992’s The Best of Prefab Sprout: A Life of Surprises. These reissues—which feature subtly improved artwork and sharp remasters from McAloon and his brother Martin—leave out but orbit around Steve McQueen, their 1985 masterpiece that remains the ideal entry point to their catalog. It was a breakthrough for the band members, marking their first collaboration with producer Thomas Dolby, whose playful, surreal touch helped define their characteristic sound. Dolby even helped curate that album’s tracklist, choosing songs from a stockpile that McAloon had amassed since forming the band with Martin in County Durham, England in the late ’70s.
Several of those songs predated Swoon, their scrappy debut, whose post-punk edge would be abandoned for a smoother, more sophisticated sound. While Swoon was unrepresentative of the band that Prefab Sprout would become, it set the template for how they’d navigate the pop world. The brothers were joined by multi-instrumentalist and vocalist Wendy Smith, who accompanied McAloon for wordless refrains and non-sequitur exclamations that took pleasure in twisting expectations. McAloon was beginning to write eloquently about heartbreak and adulthood (“Cruel,” “Elegance”) but he was also having a blast addressing questions that most songwriters might find trivial: What is the life of a celebrity chessmaster? When was the last time you played basketball?
After Swoon and the critical acclaim that followed Steve McQueen, the band recorded and shelved a quieter follow-up (Protest Songs, eventually released in 1989) before setting off to make something that capitalized on their newfound momentum. At the time of its release, the cinematic From Langley Park to Memphis was largely overshadowed by its first two tracks: the semi-novelty hit “The King of Rock and Roll” (which arrived with a fittingly absurd music video) and the Springsteen-referencing “Cars and Girls.” As a one-two punch, they rightfully stand among Prefab Sprout’s most recognizable songs, and the rest of the record is just as catchy and complex.
McAloon was now penning his own version of standards (“Nightingales”), reverb-coated alt-rock anthems (“The Golden Calf”), and dramatic singalongs that could find a second life on Broadway (“Hey Manhattan”). His writing favored narrators in sad, autumnal stages: “All my lazy teenage boasts are now high precision ghosts/And they’re coming ‘round the tracks to haunt me,” go the opening lyrics to “The King of Rock and Roll,” imagining the life of an older touring musician, every night singing the same meaningless words that he wrote decades ago. And yet the music sounds colorful and hopeful and alive—everything seems to sparkle, right down to the glossy band photo on the album cover.
With that photo, lovingly filtered here to look slightly more artful, the band signaled that they were pivoting away from their underground beginnings. Released at a time when American indie bands like R.E.M. and the Replacements were beginning to make bids for larger audiences, McAloon was making a similar leap, even if he still preferred staying out of the spotlight. While his songs were newly poised for radio and MTV, he remained wary of fame, setting on a reclusive path that would span the rest of his career. “This isn’t meant to sound snobbish,” he told Melody Maker at the time, “but I’ve never felt a part of any community… I don’t go out and look for like-minded people and I’ve never found anyone on the planet who fits the bill.” From Langley Park remains the band’s closest brush to stardom, but McAloon kept finding new ways to push himself.
On Jordan: The Comeback, the most ambitious Prefab Sprout album and one of their greatest, McAloon created his own mythological world to blend into. The cast of characters are drawn from the Bible (including star turns from Michael the Archangel, Satan, and God himself) as well as rock history. A suite of songs in the middle of the album imagines Elvis Presley, having faked his death and retreated to the desert, dreaming of the perfect comeback song to launch his next act. McAloon, meanwhile, was also searching for the follow-up for his own biggest hits. “Wild Horses” is a romantic fantasy whose sleek arrangement still sounds fresh, while “The Ice Maiden” offers one of the most memorable lyrics in his songbook: “Death is a small price for heaven.” It was a comeback album obsessed with comebacks, from rebound relationships to resurrections. Less commercially successful than Langley but just as rewarding, it’s a work so layered that, decades on, it still seems to hold new secrets.
When it came time to compile Prefab Sprout’s career highs into an album-length primer, A Life of Surprises didn’t quite capture the full picture. The picks from Jordan are less meaningful stripped of the album’s purposeful sequencing, while the one selection from Swoon sounds jarringly out of place in the non-chronological tracklist. Not to mention, “Bonny,” a stunner from Steve McQueen, is nowhere to be found. What the set does provide, however, are two essential non-album cuts that lend fitting closure to this era of the band’s career. The glittery, pulsing single “If You Don’t Love Me” would later be reimagined as a piano ballad by Kylie Minogue, bringing McAloon’s unlikely pop dreams to reality. But it’s “The Sound of Crying” that really shows how far he had come, pairing one of his most gorgeous melodies to a strange, brilliant vision of the world in flux. “Sometimes I think that God is working to a plan,” he sings, his voice breathier and softer with age. “And other times I’m sure that he is improvising.” Lamenting a chaotic universe, he casts a higher power in his own image: obsessive and inscrutable, observing us from somewhere that he can’t be reached, and searching for a tune.
Buy: Rough Trade (Swoon) (From Langley Park to Memphis) (Jordan: The Comeback) (A Life of Surprises: The Best of Prefab Sprout)
(Pitchfork may earn a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.) | 2019-09-28T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-09-28T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic / Rock | null | September 28, 2019 | 8.2 | c7b4fc6b-1c8d-4549-9ccc-c3b7c8fc426a | Sam Sodomsky | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sam-sodomsky/ | |
With a stacked guest list, the 23-year-old singer’s latest mixtape showcases his curatorial instincts even as it cruises through a familiar landscape of soft, shapeless R&B. | With a stacked guest list, the 23-year-old singer’s latest mixtape showcases his curatorial instincts even as it cruises through a familiar landscape of soft, shapeless R&B. | Khalid: Scenic Drive | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/khalid-scenic-drive/ | Scenic Drive | Khalid crooned his way to the Billboard charts by insisting just how chill he is. He wants to talk; he wants you to “come and vibe”; his music is shapeless and innocuous, mild enough to blend into any top-hits playlist. A Khalid album is low-stakes by definition. His latest project, Scenic Drive, sets expectations even lower: This is a tape, he proclaims, setting the scene with a gauzy intro that spins the radio dial between snippets of his past hits and ends with Alicia Keys assuring, “We’re here tonight to provide the vibes.” It’s a flimsy premise, one that Khalid and a bevy of featured artists—nine guests in 29 minutes!—fulfill with soft, stolid R&B. The music is lush and low-key, slipping out of your headphones before you even realize it’s playing.
Scenic Drive is a concept record, and Khalid goes all in on driving metaphors, murmuring about roads and back seats and Lamborghinis. The theme is less architecture and more, as Khalid might say, a mood; the songs meander, Khalid’s voice undulating in layers over sparse, twinkling beats. It’s hard to pinpoint the slippery subtext or to find deeper meaning in a line like, “I’m the one you need to be around, ’cause I won’t bring you down.” Sometimes, just being is the whole plot: On “Present,” Khalid asks a love interest for permission to “be present,” winding his way through pick-up lines that sound like they could’ve been generated by a meditation app. But you don’t listen to a Khalid song to parse it closely.
On the more interesting songs, Khalid glides to the background as another artist draws the spotlight. The singer QUIN commands the chorus on “Brand New,” trading raspy verses with Khalid over plush pulses of guitar. Ari Lennox and Smino take over the title track while Khalid harmonizes, “Give me a feeling.” The Drake-adjacent producer-singer duo Majid Jordan swirls a hint of tropical house into “Open”; rapper J.I.D adds texture to the otherwise bland, boy-band-inspired “All I Feel Is Rain.” You get little wisps of Khalid, reminders of his presence—a gravely hum, an earnest introductory platitude (“Gotta live in the moment,” he sings on “Retrograde”). But it’s his curatorial instincts that are most prominent in the selection of guests and the way he meshes them into the squishy soundscape.
There’s no gravity to Khalid’s songs, sonically or thematically; even when he approaches the idea of heartbreak, it’s from a careful distance, or quickly and tidily resolved. This default sunniness is part of what fueled his rise in pop, but after four projects in the past five years, it would be refreshing to hear him take a risk. He no longer writes so explicitly about youth as he did in 2017 with “Young Dumb & Broke,” but he hasn’t matured as a singer or lyricist, either. Scenic Drive feels like a detour because it is: Khalid announced his next studio album, Everything Is Changing, last summer. For now, though, he seems content to take a step back, sounding like he’s singing and shrugging at the same time.
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2022-01-04T00:00:00.000-05:00 | 2022-01-04T00:00:00.000-05:00 | Pop/R&B | Right Hand Music Group / RCA | January 4, 2022 | 5.6 | c7b6348e-2a68-46df-a7e3-56c6d3f6761e | Dani Blum | https://pitchfork.com/staff/dani-blum/ | |
Alongside a roster of guest vocalists including Jennifer Castle and Meg Remy, the psychedelic Toronto outfit allows their exploratory and pop-focused impulses to work in tandem. | Alongside a roster of guest vocalists including Jennifer Castle and Meg Remy, the psychedelic Toronto outfit allows their exploratory and pop-focused impulses to work in tandem. | Badge Époque Ensemble: Self Help | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/badge-epoque-ensemble-self-help/ | Self Help | On their 2019 debut album, Toronto’s Badge Époque Ensemble named one of their instrumentals “You Can Build a Palace, or You Can Please People”—a title that speaks to the ever-fraught tension between capitalism and socialism in the current geopolitical landscape, but also to the aesthetic tug-of-war playing out within the band itself. Founded by Max Turnbull —the avant-rock chameleon formerly known as Slim Twig, and the creative and matrimonial partner of U.S. Girls’ Meg Remy—Badge Époque Ensemble was originally an outlet for him and his fellow Toronto DIY veterans to indulge their love of acid rock, funk, jazz, prog, and other early-’70s record-collector subgenres. At the same time, they’ve shown themselves to be, if not pop-friendly, then at least pop-conscious, whether packing complex compositions into tidy four-minute packages or using classic-rock touchstones as a jumping-off point into the great beyond.
But on their third release in just over a year, Badge Époque Ensemble refuse to choose between free-form psychedelic explorations and pop pleasures. With Self Help, they prove they can have it both ways, by allowing their experimental and melodic tendencies to work more in tandem rather than in opposition. Each of the group’s previous records has featured a vocal cameo, but here they’ve assembled a veritable Toronto dream team of lead singers that includes Remy and indie-folk enigma Jennifer Castle alongside returning collaborators Dorothea Paas and James Baley (who also delivered the disco-tinged hook on U.S. Girls’ 2018 single “Pearly Gates”).
Collectively, their presence transforms Badge Époque Ensemble from the sort of group that would’ve gotten played on an overnight pirate-radio broadcast in 1971 to one that could’ve conceivably snuck onto an AM station’s Top 40 countdown. And with the singers in tow, Badge Époque tap into the spiritual uplift and righteous activism coursing through popular music at the time. “Sing a Silent Gospel” is a gorgeous swirl of Fender Rhodes chords, Ethio-jazz sax melodies, and conga fury that’s anchored by Remy and Paas’ alternating vocals. And when the song transitions into an elaborate instrumental passage halfway through, it doesn’t so much drift away from its sturdy melodic foundation as fortify it, with the band eventually locking into a climactic circular progression that acquires cyclonic force. Baley’s street-soul empowerment anthem “Unity (It’s Up to You)” slides even more fluidly between formalism and freedom, with guitarist Chris Bezant intuitively using the singer’s extended high note as a launchpad into a wah-wahed solo as if he were finishing his sentence.
But where these songs feel like extensions of Badge Époque Ensemble’s sound, centerpiece track “Just Space for Light” is the kind of move that would’ve been hard to imagine this band attempting a year ago. Guided by Alia O’Brien’s elegant flute lines, the song begins as a windchimed, candlelit quiet-storm stunner, with Castle seizing the spotlight as if she were performing on a primetime awards-show telecast. And while the song’s sudden shift into an acid-funk groove feels jarring at first, Castle retains her calming presence throughout, guiding you safely through its twists and turns.
Despite the focus on melody, Self Help still affords Badge Époque Ensemble plenty of space to stretch out and freak out. The 10-minute “Birds Fly Through Ancient Ruins” is a creeping exercise in desert-scorched dub that turns downright apocalyptic near its climax, as if the landscape were being covered in ice. In response, the closing instrumental “Extinct Commune” triggers the slow thaw. As a solo-piano showcase for Turnbull, the track is Self Help’s extreme outlier, landing somewhere between an early-‘70s Elton John demo and after-hours jazz-bar improvisation. Yet in its own subtle way, it soundly reaffirms the album’s mission, blurring the line between pop classicism and free exploration until they’re one and the same.
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2020-11-21T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2020-11-21T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Jazz | Telephone Explosion | November 21, 2020 | 7.6 | c7be1069-dbf7-4e8e-aec0-c030e55210c7 | Stuart Berman | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stuart-berman/ | |
The pop star returns with a restrained, slightly scattered, but emotionally generous album that cycles through the collapse of one relationship and into the hopeful beginning of another. | The pop star returns with a restrained, slightly scattered, but emotionally generous album that cycles through the collapse of one relationship and into the hopeful beginning of another. | Ariana Grande: eternal sunshine | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/ariana-grande-eternal-sunshine/ | eternal sunshine | As Ariana Grande rounded out the final year of her charmed and tumultuous 20s, it would have been more than enough for her to simply reflect on the previous decade. Taken together, the whole supercut of her meteoric rise, milestone achievements, high-profile relationships, confrontations with angels and demons, and widely heralded moments of grace under fire, would have provided Grande with more than enough material for a capstone album. But as her Saturn returned, and the much-referenced astrological event came to pass, Grande was forced to face down some of her most personally challenging news cycles to date. Since 2020’s Positions, Grande married discreetly and divorced publicly, began production on the movie adaptation of the musical Wicked, and sparked a new romance (and almost immediate controversy) with her co-star, Ethan Slater, Broadway’s very own Spongebob Squarepants.
Grande’s career has been presented to us as a chain of successive breakthroughs, whether making a full-throated bid for pop glory (My Everything), persevering through almost unthinkable degrees of heartbreak (Sweetener), or fully embracing her adult sensuality (Positions). Like Taylor Swift, the singer has been able to maintain a mass following by time-stamping each era with different boyfriends, makeovers, and most crucially: lending the decisive final word to all the back-biting and petty gossip. On eternal sunshine, Grande takes a widely publicized moment of personal upheaval and chisels it into the a-ha! moment of her discography. Loosely billed as a “concept record” about her divorce and the personal revelations her Saturn return inspired, sunshine is a slightly scattered, but emotionally generous collection of music that cycles compassionately through the collapse of one relationship and into the hopeful beginning of another.
Drawing inspiration from the 2004 Michel Gondry film Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind—a surreal romantic comedy in which people can elect to have unwanted memories erased as a form of therapy—Grande concerns herself with the residual feelings and tortured thoughts that linger long after a breakup. Over an understated guitar strum and faux-romantic strings on “intro (end of the world)”, she introduces the record’s central theme by immediately ripping into a series of blunt, rapid-fire questions: “How can I tell if I’m in the right relationship?/Aren’t you really supposed to know that shit?/Feel it in your bones and own that shit?” She announces her breakup moments later with the Studio 54 strut of “bye,” but the song’s triumphant kiss-off almost immediately doubles back on itself with dislodged memories, delayed anguish, and brutal recriminations on the following tracks.
As a “concept record,” eternal sunshine isn’t nearly as cohesive of a divorce record as, say, Adele’s 30, but Grande smuggles in some interesting threads regardless. The meta-narrative of the public and media as her fickle and unappreciative lovers is a subtext that runs throughout eternal sunshine, with “yes, and?” as the most full-throated clapback against parasocial mouthbreathers speculating on her private life. Grande clearly relishes her ability to twist the knife as a songwriter. Some of her most shocking and funny lines come through as she plays up the spectacle of her divorce for all its horror: seemingly referring to her marriage as a “situationship” (“don’t wanna break up again)”, alluding to cheating (“eternal sunshine”), flagrantly spreading disinformation (“true story”), and finally providing us with the gorgeous couplet “Your business is yours and mine is mine/Why do you care so much whose **** I ride?” It’s to her credit, that she’s not only lived up vocally to the initial Mariah comparisons, but has a strain of surreal humor and outright weirdness that informs so much of her music.
During a production lull on Wicked brought on by the SAG strike, Grande flew to New York and reassembled her usual cast of collaborators including Max Martin, Shintaro Yasuda, and Ilya Salmanzadeh, albeit with the notable absence of her longtime songwriting partners, Tayla Parx and Victoria Monét. The record is split between the pillowy, mid-tempo R&B that we’ve come to expect from Ari and some interesting but shaky left turns. The leak and subsequent TikTok virality of her song “Fantasize” inspired Grande to release her own take on ornate Y2K production with “the boy is mine,” an excellent, precision-engineered track with stuttering, flashy synths that leave enough atmosphere for her voice to soar. Other genre flourishes are less successful. The orchestral disco of “bye” feels one-dimensional set against the mirror ball radiance of her voice and the alt-rock strum of “imperfect for you” suggests we’re getting an anthem but barely crests above a lullaby.
In contrast to Positions, where Grande flaunted the full extent of her range with whistle notes and filigreed melisma on nearly every track, eternal sunshine is an exercise in restraint. Apart from the scorching R&B fireworks of “true story,” there is very little outright belting on display, but her talent as an arranger shines with some absolutely gorgeous harmonies across the board. On songs like the title track and “we can’t be friends,” Grande adopts an aching tone that’s reminiscent of her heroine, Imogen Heap, communicating both a bruised strength and highlighting her underappreciated ability to convey more subtle colors with her voice. The latter track’s knockoff Robyn beat wouldn’t be as nearly as affecting without Grande’s gorgeously wounded performance, and what she makes out of “Know that you made me/I don’t like how you paint me, yet I’m still here hanging,” as if she were being pierced by her ex’s misunderstanding in real time.
Grande’s lyrics don’t always rise to the sophistication of her vocals, she occasionally settles for stock phrases (“I’ll play the villain if you need me to”) or scrambles for syllables (on “don’t wanna break up again” she rhymes “codependency” with “therapy”). Between Monét and Parx’s absence, her newfound enunciation, and the more obviously canned Max Martin instrumentals, a less generous interpretation would be to wonder if the limits of her songwriting didn’t constrain the more vocal pyrotechnics. But taken from another angle, it’s interesting to regard her choices as a step toward becoming a fundamentally different kind of singer. In an interview with Zach Sang, Grande emphasized the importance of distinguishing between herself as a person and a pop star, and this more subdued, less showy register could very well be the ticket, a carefully considered adaptation for protecting her hard-won sense of self. | 2024-03-11T00:01:00.000-04:00 | 2024-03-11T00:01:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | Republic | March 11, 2024 | 7.2 | c7beaf10-f784-4cb8-b0cf-6671db215820 | Harry Tafoya | https://pitchfork.com/staff/harry-tafoya/ | |
After two relatively tame records for Blue Note, the fearless guitar innovator renews his focus on the atonal and edgy with an ambitious, astonishing work. | After two relatively tame records for Blue Note, the fearless guitar innovator renews his focus on the atonal and edgy with an ambitious, astonishing work. | The Nels Cline Singers: Share the Wealth | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/the-nels-cline-singers-share-the-wealth/ | Share the Wealth | Although the veteran jazz and rock guitarist has long been celebrated for his fearless exploration, Nels Cline has a traditionalist streak, too. Perhaps it was the weight of the label’s history, but his first two records for Blue Note were two of the most conventional of his long career. His take on a romantic standards album, 2016’s Lovers, found him channeling his inner Bill Evans and Jim Hall, while 2018’s Currents, Constellations, with his dual-guitar quartet Nels Cline 4, offered more freeform improvisations yet eased off on the pedals and electronics that enable Cline’s more hallucinatory vamps.
Both were skillful records, the work of a prodigy living up to his reputation. But depending on what you seek out a Nels Cline record for, they were also both a little tame. For his third album for Blue Note, Share the Wealth, Cline offers a more comprehensive summation of his tastes, with renewed emphasis on the atonal and edgy. Cline has always saved some of his wildest fusions for the Nels Cline Singers, an ensemble he’s led since before he joined Wilco and earned the adoration of a wider pool of indie rock fans, and for these sessions he doubled the size of that trio, welcoming keyboardist Brian Marsella, percussionist Cyro Baptista and saxophonist Skerik — all assertive players who aren’t shy about redirecting these pieces.
Cline’s reverence for Blue Note’s history remains, and at its most lyrical, the set conjures echoes of the label’s ’60s post-bop releases, thanks in good part to the addition of Skerik’s tenor sax. But mostly the ensemble is interested in coloring outside the lines, and they play for impact as often as they do for grace. “Spiral” opens the record with a heady raga, bruised purple by Skerik’s convulsive sax. Cline’s coppery guitars take on a tinge of post-rock on “Beam/Spiral,” and that piece crescendos like a post-rock song, too, breaking open to reveal the album’s most jubilant refrain. “Princess Phone” and “The Pleather Patrol” recall the thick, shambolic grooves of Cline’s sometimes collaborators Medeski, Martin and Wood.
Cline had never gigged with this six-piece iteration of the Singers before, and his original plans for these sessions were to splice them into an experimental collage. It turns out there was no need: The players built in so many dramatic pivots, twists and breaks that they didn’t have to pipe them in after the fact. The 17-minute centerpiece “Stump The Panel” plays out as a series of skronky, off-balance movements that approximate the kind of sharp edits that Teo Macero patched into On the Corner. It peaks halfway through with a spacey, trip-hop drum breakdown, then closes with a naked metal riff, a jagged edge at odds with Cline’s usually meticulously tuned guitars.
Even for a Cline record, Share the Wealth’s scope is astonishing. Like many of his albums, it’s a big work, running 80 minutes, but it’s long because it needs to be—packed any tighter, these songs would be too busy, the flood of ideas too harried. For all their audacity and hunger to dazzle and surprise, Cline’s ensemble never forgets to let even the album’s showiest pieces breathe.
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2020-11-13T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2020-11-13T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Experimental / Jazz | Blue Note | November 13, 2020 | 7.6 | c7c0edfb-1dd5-4e87-9816-cce204cce45c | Evan Rytlewski | https://pitchfork.com/staff/evan-rytlewski/ | |
On their first joint album, the veteran producer’s relaxed tempos and the San Francisco rapper’s coolheaded flows slide together with easy fluidity. | On their first joint album, the veteran producer’s relaxed tempos and the San Francisco rapper’s coolheaded flows slide together with easy fluidity. | Larry June / The Alchemist: The Great Escape | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/larry-june-the-alchemist-the-great-escape/ | The Great Escape | Larry June raps like he’s guiding a meditation, his voice rarely rising above a soothing monotone. In another timeline, the prolific San Francisco rapper might have been a self-help expert, using the power of mindfulness to help others manifest their goals. The flexes in his lyrics are often material, but just as important are the lines about drinking green juice and waking up early for a little walk. Scroll through the comments section of any of his YouTube videos, and you’ll find fans explaining how his music inspired them to start a business, eat healthier, or buy a nicer car. He’s smooth and charismatic, making music to soundtrack the uncomplicated pleasure of going for a drive on a sunny day.
June gravitates towards breezy, post-hyphy beats, so it was a bit of a head-scratcher when he hinted at forthcoming collaborations with The Alchemist back in 2021. For the past decade, Al’s been moving away from the hard-nosed, New York classicism of his early career into a trippier zone, slathering piano stabs and chopped samples with tape echo effects and creeping drones. He’s made incredible records with Roc Marciano, Boldy James, and Armand Hammer, none of which have the microdose-in-the-smoothie vibe that June has been perfecting. But The Great Escape, the pair’s new joint album, works astonishingly well. June’s laid-back approach helps Al settle into a less brooding mood. His production functions as both a complement and challenge, giving June’s unwavering chill a prestige rap sheen and eliciting some of his best performances.
The two mesh together so seamlessly, it’s hard to believe they were initially unsure of how to develop a common sound. In an interview with Rolling Stone from earlier this month, Al said he was a fan of June, but he was “kind of different…I was like, ‘I don’t know how we could find a bag.’” They connected through a mutual collaborator, the Los Angeles rapper Jay Worthy. When June hopped on the neon-lit easy listening number “Rainy Night in SF,” a song Al and Worthy were working on, it all clicked. The beats that Al supplies for The Great Escape are lush and hypnotic, full of acid jazz Rhodes pianos (“Art Talk”), muted funk guitars (“Summer Reign”), and cheesy lounge horns (“Solid Plan”). Al’s main talent—beyond an impeccable ear for samples—is his ability to fully inhabit a rapper’s world. For June, he keeps the tempos relaxed, the sounds luxurious, and the drums crisp, leaving plenty of space for his creative partner to stretch.
For all of June’s magnetism, he’s never been especially adventurous on the mic. He knows what works and sticks with it, placing phrases between beats like garden pavers. Still, June sounds invigorated on The Great Escape, toying with his delivery in unexpected ways. The subtle shifts in flow and enjambment reveal him to be a much more adept technician than his previous work has suggested. June only raps in his indoor voice, but the way he adopts a Phonte-like bounce on “Orange Village,” or cycles through tumbling internal rhymes on “Turkish Cotton,” gives his typically coolheaded style a welcome tension.
June peppers his bars with rich, evocative details, making his art feel like much more than lifestyle rap. He’ll easily spend $1,000 on candles or $500 on a salt shaker. His passion for cars goes beyond namechecking luxury automakers; he extends that appreciation for opulence to must-have accessories, like ceramic brakes and a push-button parking system. These moments feel immersive, setting him apart from other rappers whose entire brands rest on describing their wealth. Take Wiz Khalifa, who shows up on “What Happened to the World” without much to say, apart from the vague proclamation that he made so much “last week, [he] can’t speak on it.” Meanwhile, Larry brags about his money, but never comes off as hollow or sneering. He exudes a palpable sense of gratitude, rather than a spend-it-while-you-got-it nihilism; in the end, the approach makes him more interesting and relatable.
The Great Escape isn’t flawless; this is an album with a Big Sean verse, after all. The candlelit crooning of “Ocean Sounds” feels better suited to June’s last album, Spaceships on the Blade, which possessed a much more romantic sensibility. The beats on “What Happened to the World” and “Exito” are a little too similar, slightly slowing the album’s momentum. That said, the songs are still vivacious and frequently gorgeous. It’s a joy to hear these two expand their comfort zones into each other’s orbit, finding ways to both affirm and broaden what they do best. | 2023-04-03T00:02:00.000-04:00 | 2023-04-03T00:02:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Empire | April 3, 2023 | 7.4 | c7c44651-24ff-4789-8416-cfd5abe8a8e1 | Dash Lewis | https://pitchfork.com/staff/dash-lewis/ | |
The women in the Seattle pop punk group Chastity Belt met and formed in college, and their debut is sly and charming about college, and fresh-out-of-college concerns. No Regerts breathes some of the same untroubled air as the first Vampire Weekend album. | The women in the Seattle pop punk group Chastity Belt met and formed in college, and their debut is sly and charming about college, and fresh-out-of-college concerns. No Regerts breathes some of the same untroubled air as the first Vampire Weekend album. | Chastity Belt: No Regerts | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/18426-chastity-belt-no-regrets/ | No Regerts | The women in the Seattle indie group Chastity Belt met and formed in college, and their debut is sly and charming about college, and fresh-out-of-college concerns-- how dumb the objects of your sexual desire can be; which parties suck, because of whom and what can be done about it; fucking and drugs, and how great and lousy both make you feel; the regressive fun to be had shouting the word "vagina." "Are we having fun?" lead singer Julia Shapiro asks repeatedly on "Seattle Party", and No Regerts is a great album by smart kids who are smart enough to understand how pressing that question is.
The vibe on No Regerts (the typo is intentional) is sprightly and relaxed. The members taught themselves their instruments, and you can hear uncertain hands and excellent, sophisticated ears in their playing. Lydia Lund's rhythm guitar is slightly hiccupy but confident; Gretchen Grimm's drumming is simple, but patient and sensitive and casually slack, like drumming is just one of several things she's doing at that moment. On "Black Sail" and "Seattle Party", her soft puff of a beat stretches the song out pleasingly in the center, like the band is all crowded in the middle of a trampoline.
No Regerts breathes some of the same untroubled air as the first Vampire Weekend album; it would sound excellent listened to from a pool raft. Lead singer Julia Shapiro has things on her mind, though, and her lyrics are often sharply humorous. Everything she says is so obnoxious, funny, and sad, but she's never mean: "Your tattoos are so deep/ They really make me think/ And your life has been so rough/ You've really been through so much," she deadpans on "Seattle Party". Her mockery is the gentle kind that actually might be aimed at drawing someone out: "If you dance, if you dance, the girls won't give you a chance/ you're a real cool guy, you won't look us in the eye," she teases. You get the sense the narrator wouldn't mind if the guy decided to start dancing.
You can hear the same goofily sarcastic warm spirit in the politics-of-sport-fucking "James Dean", ("Oh boy, when I fuck you, you make me feel like a prostitute/ yeah, when you fuck me, I make you feel just like James Dean.") And then sometimes she is gleefully puerile; there is a song called "Giant Vagina", and you suspect the chance to shout the chorus might the only reason the song exists. On "Nip Slip", she whispers the title like it's "Je T'aime", and then helpfully adds, "I can see your nips." There are silly moments on No Regerts that cut down on its replayability, but there are also dusky, gorgeous songs like "Black Sail" and "Happiness", which latch onto and hold a pink-skies melancholy for their running time. The album's slightness is part of its overall appeal, though. No Regerts sounds young and callow and smart and horny all at the same time. Playing it feels like a night out. | 2013-08-20T02:00:03.000-04:00 | 2013-08-20T02:00:03.000-04:00 | Rock | Help Yourself | August 20, 2013 | 7.5 | c7d16f23-dd4a-4563-952d-5fda943ed388 | Jayson Greene | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jayson-greene/ | null |
Blending electric guitars, beats, rock, and rap, DJ Shadow's new album finds him back in the mode of crowd-pleasing genre consumption à la UNKLE's Psyence Fiction. Problem is, the particular music he draws from here in no way plays to his strengths. | Blending electric guitars, beats, rock, and rap, DJ Shadow's new album finds him back in the mode of crowd-pleasing genre consumption à la UNKLE's Psyence Fiction. Problem is, the particular music he draws from here in no way plays to his strengths. | DJ Shadow: The Less You Know, The Better | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/15900-the-less-you-know-the-better/ | The Less You Know, The Better | Everyone is sick of hearing about how DJ Shadow will never top Endtroducing…, most of all Shadow himself. But what about those of us still holding the torch for Psyence Fiction, his insanely hyped, tragically flawed, and surprisingly enduring collaboration with James Lavelle as UNKLE? With hindsight, the buzz surrounding that release seems quaint, but it came along during a time when CD storage towers were still proudly manicured physical manifestations of their owner's listening habits. Meaning it was worth sitting through all 13 false endings of "Lonely Soul" and the wackest Beastie Boys verses ever put to wax because you certainly weren't getting peak performances from Kool G Rap, Badly Drawn Boy, and Thom Yorke on a single disc anywhere else. The good news then is that the bullishly titled The Less You Know, the Better finds Shadow back in that same mode of crowd-pleasing genre consumption. Problem is, you'll think it's even better news if you've still got that same exact CD collection from 1998.
The Less You Know isn't really a record that has you asking "What was he thinking?" out of exasperation so much as genuine and concerned curiosity. After all, it's not like Shadow releases new music for any old reason. He puts out records sporadically and titles his albums like manifestos. And his collaborators seem to know they're not part of some tossed-off project-- even the singer-songwriter contributions here sound like they're deferentially acknowledging the boss. Like every DJ Shadow album, it's a statement of some sort.
But whether The Less You Know was intended to reestablish Shadow as a musician, as a producer, or even as someone with decent taste, he misfires on all counts. Judging from this year's I Gotta Rokk EP, you could assume he had traded his turntables in for guitars and then decided to buy the turntables back. But as deep as his understanding of beat-driven music is, he's got a total tin ear for rock proper, and as such, and The Less You Know plays like a DJ-Kicks curated by a particularly unadventurous KROQ jock. Bad enough that the palm-muted guitar chug of "Border Crossing" finds Shadow trying to recreate "She Watch Channel Zero!?" by getting his fingers dusty digging in crates of Godsmack records. But as worrying as the conceptual aspect is, the execution is inexcusably half-assed for someone of Shadow's sample-chopping acumen. It's simply a weak guitar sound, the sort of RAT Distortion lick you can hear at the nearest Sam Ash, and like many of the cuts here, there's a perfectly decent 20-second intro that gets looped into becoming the entire track.
But as an instrumental, I suppose it's worlds better than the acoustic-slappin' folk-n-beats combo "I've Been Trying"-- I envy those who hear it and can't immediately identify the Incubus song that sounds exactly like it (spoiler: "Drive"). You can call "Sad and Lonely" feminized blues haunted by CGI ghosts or whatever you choose; just know that Moby tired of it nearly a decade ago. All of which is just a long way to say that The Less You Know is the kind of forward-thinking excursion that inevitably donates its sole hip-hop track to Talib Kweli. Credit where it's due: at least he and Posdnuos resist the temptation to turn in "Why Hip-Hop Sucks in 2011", but over papery jazz-rap that could've been the softest track on any Soundbombing comp, the two kick the sort of polite, earnest, and flair-free 16s that come to them as effortlessly as college student union checks. The name of the track? "Stay the Course", of course.
Mind you, that's just the first half and before Shadow starts throwing out bleeding chum ostensibly meant to distract you from The Less You Know's deep-seated and fundamental problems. Take the 28-second pit stop of "Going Nowhere" ("slowly we are getting nowhere, and that is a pleasure") or the four minutes of Beat poetry that simply had to be included for comic relief or at least a preapproved mocking point for critics, a track called "Give Me Back the Nights". Funny thing about "Nights" is that it's actually the best thing here, a brief and haunted dub workout that earns a pretty cheap accolade of "cinematic," but at least achieves its intended purpose. It works far better than "Enemy Lines", five interminable minutes of watery flange guitars and a vague awareness of witch house, or "I Gotta Rokk", whose glammed-up monotony actually has less to do with T. Rex than it does with the likes of Propellerheads, Freestylers, Wiseguys, or any other big-beat late adapter who owes their ad royalties to the invention of the word "electronica."
He at least hasn't lost his ear for drums-- the actual sound of the percussion on The Less You Know is often fantastic, all kinds of crisp snares and satisfying crackle giving you the hope that some intrepid beatmaker might be able to salvage some of this for his own devices. But outside of a good drumbreak, what is Shadow actually bringing to the table here? Featuring Yukimi Nagano, "Scale It Back" is the kind of cosmopolitan electro-pop that could just as easily have been a B-side on the latest Little Dragon album. Unfortunately, the same applies to the Aqua Net stiffness of Tom Vek's Flock of Seagulls rip "Warning Call", which could've just as easily have been an A-side on his last album. Which raises the question: Why does he care about these songs, when they deign to say so little? Better yet, why does he think you should?
Perhaps you've noticed that the word "hyphy" hasn't been used up until now, which some might take as a sign that The Less You Know simply has to be better than The Outsider, his widely disliked excursion into Bay Area hip-hop that's aged about as well as, um, hyphy itself. But at least that showed some sort of interest in the contemporary, not to mention the balls to say he's moved on from Endtroducing.... And whether or not he's made one of the most influential electronic albums ever, I think Shadow has the right to be a working producer who doesn't have to show us how he feels about dubstep or Brainfeeder. After all, dude's on Verve, a label that certainly allows an artist the freedom to not give a shit about what the kids are into. But The Less You Know can't even be staunchly retro, or staunchly anything. Its only commitment is to a subtle antagonism, and it ignores pretty much any worthwhile development in pop, rock, electronic, or hip-hop music since the turn of the century. | 2011-10-06T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2011-10-06T02:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Island / Verve / A&M | October 6, 2011 | 4.5 | c7d2d88e-686e-47b4-94e0-203663bb4504 | Ian Cohen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ian-cohen/ | null |
Stones Throw's new anthology documents how pioneering hip-hop artist Egyptian Lover paved the way for acts like N.W.A. and stretched hip-hop into more experimental territory. | Stones Throw's new anthology documents how pioneering hip-hop artist Egyptian Lover paved the way for acts like N.W.A. and stretched hip-hop into more experimental territory. | Egyptian Lover: Egyptian Lover 1983-1988 | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21804-egyptian-lover-1983-1988/ | Egyptian Lover 1983-1988 | The email address Egyptian Lover lists on his Facebook profile, like Egyptian Lover himself, is a cipher and a time capsule, and not just because it exists on the ancient servers of former dial-up titans AOL. His handle is egyptianlover661, where 661 is a reference to DMSR-661, the catalog number for the first record a young Greg Broussard ever put out on his own Egyptian Empire label back in 1984. "DMSR" was a reference to his idol Prince’s 1999 "D.M.S.R." (Dance Music Sex Romance). The record was called "Egypt, Egypt," and it became a hit and a West Coast hip hop/electro staple. In making it, Egyptian Lover drew on both Prince (May He Rest in Peace and Reign in Purple) and Kraftwerk. He combined the melody from Kraftwerk's "Trans Europe Express" that Afrika Bambaataa had sampled on "Planet Rock," flipping it and inserting it into his own electrofunk framework, with the addition of some heavy breathing à la The Purple One.
"Egypt, Egypt" along with 21 other tracks have now been compiled, smartly sequenced, and packaged into 1983-1988, a 4-LP Stones Throw anthology that charts the Lover’s reign over West Coast hip hop during that same time. The anthology itself contains the majority of Egyptian Lover’s On the Nile album (including "Egypt, Egypt") with a couple of fresh re-edits from Stones Throw’s Peanut Butter Wolf ("Yes, Yes, Yes" and "My Beat Goes Boom"), 12" singles, never-released material, and others—all taken from the original master tapes. The anthology is mostly chronological, and the accompanying booklet contains a track-by-track breakdown as recounted by the Lover himself. (Full disclosure: Pitchfork contributor Jeff Weiss wrote the liner notes.) There aren’t any big sonic shifts or tracks that speak to particular "phases" the Egyptian Lover went through, mainly because for the years between '83-'88 and for the entire 30 years he’s been in the game, he’s primarily only had one phase and overarching sound: old-school electrofunk—that '80s 808-driven, Parliament- and Kraftwerk-inspired, breakbeats-referencing, futuristic-yet-analog pastiche that laid the foundation for everything from g-funk to techno to Miami bass that followed.
Egyptian Lover has remained similarly faithful over the years to his persona as a freak-a-holic pharaoh blasted forth from that bend in the space-time continuum known as his mind. His origin myth begins in high school, by which time he was already making and selling his own pause-button mixtapes to other students under his Egyptian Lover moniker. Broussard says he got his name in part from Rudolph Valentino, the famous white actor who played an "Arab sheik" in The Sheik, during that vibrant era of racist 1920s black and white films. The young Greg Broussard was drawn to Valentino’s savoir faire. Additionally, growing up in South Central Los Angeles in the '70s and '80s, he was drawn to King Tut, who represented to him a kind of mystique, power, and escape. Hence "Egyptian Lover" was born.
Not long after graduating high school, the young Lover was invited to join the ranks of Uncle Jamm’s Army, the top LA dance party crew at the time. KDAY Radio bumped them constantly, and at their peak, they filled up 10,000-capacity sports arenas. The Egyptian Lover became Uncle Jamm’s star DJ, spinning, scratching, and wreaking freaky havoc on dancefloors across LA, alongside Unknown DJ, Cli-N-Tel, Chris "The Glove" Taylor, and Ice-T, among others. The latter two, along with Egyptian Lover, can be seen working their magic at the infamous Radio Club (later Radiotron) in the landmark West Coast hip hop documentary Breakin’ N’ Enterin’. Not accidentally, Lover had also been hired to score the film, and two of those tracks are featured on the anthology: "Egyptian Lover Theme" and "Spray It Super AJ."
These LA mobile dance party crews, including World Class Wreckin’ Cru and LA Dream Team, were where a number of prominent West Coast DJs, producers, and MCs got their start. World Class Wreckin’ Cru, which included a young Dr. Dre, along with fellow future NWA member Yella, followed swiftly in Uncle Jamm’s steps in producing electro hits like "Surgery" and "Juice"—but only after Uncle Jamm’s had already changed the game a year earlier by being the first LA crew to press to vinyl, producing hits like "Dial-A-Freak" and "Yes, Yes, Yes," which now find their place on 1983-1988.
Since then, Egyptian Lover’s sound hasn’t changed a whole lot, but in the 30-some years he’s been in the game, he’s been able to manipulate a lot of different sounds out of the machines he uses. Often, this has meant his beloved 808 in various combinations with turntables, a mic, vocoder, and SH-101 bass synth (among others). Clocking in at just under 2 minutes, "What is a DJ if He Can’t Scratch" is a quick flex on all the DJs who can’t scratch, MCs who can’t rap, and beats made without live claps. A more minimalistic and rhythm-focused cut from his debut album On the Nile, the track shows off EL’s scratching techniques, including his ability to play a record backwards entirely on-beat. By contrast, "I Cry (Night After Night)" from the same album, is the most melodic and Prince-ly pop song of the lot and even incorporates electric guitar. Egyptian Lover whimpers, recounting his nightly walks staring up at the stars, looking himself in the mirror, and bemoaning an unrequited love interest. Over '80s drum smacks, he programs high, breathy, Prince-inspired call-and-response vocals and twinkly bells that ornament his raps, which are equal parts horny and humorous.
Lover also wasn’t afraid to stretch hip-hop into more experimental territory. The track "Electric Encounter," which was never actually completed until the making of this anthology, is basically a conceptual electronic number set to a hard funk beat. "Gears (gears), belts (belts)," recites a chipmunk voice, running through a long list of "computer" parts. "Plugs (plugs), switches (switches), nuts (nuts), and bolts (and bolts)." Over the course of the song, this computer’s desire for an electric encounter burns through its inner circuitry, and a heavily distorted hardware meltdown ensues, resulting in a gloopy puddle of busted wires and melted transistors.
This tendency to blur the lines between human and machine, reality and fantasy, and present and future is a hallmark of Egyptian Lover’s particular imagination—as well as of electro more broadly. "Kinky Nation," originally released on One Track Mind (1986), lays out Lover’s vision of his kingdom come. It’s a sexual paradise guarded by a robot with a talk box for a voice, who greets visitors at the gates with a mechanized, "Wel-come-to-the-kin-ky-na-tion." Like many of Broussard’s songs, "Kinky Nation" also leans on old popular cultural depictions of Ancient Egypt–which have often relied on exotification, or even cartoonification, and which even today affect popular (mis)understandings of modern Egypt and Egyptians. On "My House (On the Nile)," as on "Kinky Nation," EL describes his sex pad on the Nile, complete with camels out back and Egyptian women for whom "there’s no substitute." To be sure, Egyptian Lover injects a lot of humor into his music, but sometimes, as in the box set’s recent infomercial or in his songs about bellydancers, the way the exoticism plays out can feel questionable or off-color.
That said, Egyptian Lover’s imagination is still colorful in other ways. On that same "My House (On the Nile)" record, he talks about getting freaky on his 50-foot waterbed flanked by solid gold speakers, from which blast the very song he’s singing. "Dial-A-Freak," an early track from his Uncle Jamm’s days, is all about phone sex, an exercise in pornographic imagination if there ever was one. And on 1983-1988’s final track, "I Need A Freak," a remake of (unfortunately named) electro group Sexual Harassment’s single of the same name that Egyptian Lover then put on his 1994 Back From The Tomb album, and which now features additional synth work by Dam Funk, he raps, "In these times of hate and pain, we need a remedy to take us from the rain…I need a freak!" In the liner notes, Egyptian Lover mentions that when he first heard the song back in the day, he thought it sounded like Prince. So it seems only right that this is the note this anthology should end on. | 2016-05-04T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-05-04T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Stones Throw | May 4, 2016 | 8 | c7d9893b-10f5-4ee3-b92a-76bd6d6678c5 | Minna Zhou | https://pitchfork.com/staff/minna-zhou/ | null |
Kool Keith offers a belated sequel to Dr. Octagonecologyst, which changed underground rap forever by abandoning any connection to the genre’s concrete-narrative roots. | Kool Keith offers a belated sequel to Dr. Octagonecologyst, which changed underground rap forever by abandoning any connection to the genre’s concrete-narrative roots. | Dr. Octagon: The Return of Dr. Octagon | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/9157-the-return-of-dr-octagon/ | The Return of Dr. Octagon | When Rakim made his triumphant return to the New York stage a few months back, the stage was so crowded with admirers-- everyone from Kool Herc to random nobodies-- that the man himself was barely visible. Off to the left of the stage, a naggingly familiar figure in a bright-orange jacket struck poses. "Kool Keith in the house!" Rakim yelled, and it was like: Oh, right, Kool Keith is a rapper.
Keith isn't doing much rapping these days. On The Return of Dr. Octagon, he's mostly ranting beatnik spoken-word stuff about aliens and Richard Gere and trees going extinct. It's getting more difficult to remember the fact that back in the 1980s this guy was one of the first to weave surrealist gobbledygook into old-school boast-rapping, and that he changed underground rap forever with the first Dr. Octagon album by abandoning any connection to the genre's concrete-narrative roots.
The difference is that both Critical Beatdown and Dr. Octagonecologyst were both rap albums. The Return of Dr. Octagon is something else entirely. Case in point: "A Gorilla Driving a Pick-Up Truck", wherein Keith mumbles about a primate motorist in a fake dusty-cowboy voice over eerie slide guitars and harmonicas: "I was moving fast/ He got up in front/ The gorilla looked at me and passed/ He was on my ass." It could be a Buck 65 parody, but after a few listens, it starts to sound like the work of another black man with O.G. outsider-artist ranter-status and a white fanbase whose giggly appreciation never moves too far from look-at-this condescension: Wesley Willis. Of course, Willis's mental problems were well-documented, while Keith's are just a rumor. But it's still a little troubling to hear Keith leave rap alone and get completely unhinged ("Get off the ship and walk to motherfucking 42nd Street like a motherfucking sailor"). It's like Keith has realized that a huge chunk of his fanbase could really give a fuck about rap, that they just want to hear the funny weird black guy say funny weird stuff. It may be a shrewd move on Keith's part, but it makes for an oddly deflating listen.
There's a world of difference between Dr. Octagonecologyst and The Return, and most of the divide comes from the production. On the first LP, Keith's lyrical insanity was balanced out by the RZA-esque sensibility of Dan the Automater, who anchored Keith in hip-hop without tying him down to it. On The Return, the Germany-based production trio One Watt Sun replaces Automator and abandons his minor-key synth zooms and damaged piano-rolls for brittle, artificial electro and kitchen-sink eclecticism. It's not all bad; "Trees" has a nice synth-bounce, and "Al Green" rests on an itchy, jumpy disco bassline. But more often than not they lean way too hard on obnoxious blurting keyboards and tinkly lounge-jazz pianos, and so we mostly get Keith ranting over halfassed IDM.
On a couple of songs, they chop up Keith's vocals into word-fragments, unfathomably using the album's longest track to showcase the nonexistent skills of Princess Superstar, who I didn't even realize was still trying to rap. The Return is supposedly a Kool Keith album, but four of the 14 tracks are skits, two mangle his vocals so the producers can show off their DJing, and one is a Princess Superstar song with Keith on the hook.
Keith himself is responsible for all of the album's good moments. Even when he's in unhinged-rant mode, Keith's imagery often remains lucid. And so the album's best song is "Ants", where he comes off frantic but omnipotent, comparing the humans infesting Earth to ants in a colony, enthused and disgusted at once: "Ants work together, jerk together, do concerts together, cry and get hurt together." It's dense and fascinating stuff, a tantalizing glimpse of what might've happened if Keith hadn't treated the reemergence of his most popular persona like an easy payday. | 2006-06-28T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2006-06-28T02:00:01.000-04:00 | Rap | OCD | June 28, 2006 | 4.3 | c7da008f-645f-4b27-86c7-4fafc7f0904f | Tom Breihan | https://pitchfork.com/staff/tom-breihan/ | null |
Latest from the should-have-been hip-hop star is rumored to be a deal-closer with Geffen, and from its bare packaging to its idle rhymes, it feels like one. | Latest from the should-have-been hip-hop star is rumored to be a deal-closer with Geffen, and from its bare packaging to its idle rhymes, it feels like one. | Mos Def: True Magic | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/9738-true-magic/ | True Magic | There's more than a little griping in hip-hop circles these days, and not just from disgruntled older listeners, hungry for something "fun" that resembles the refracted memories of their youth. Fans are hungry for an MC they can genuinely admire-- one who doesn't resort to moral backpedaling, misogyny, foolishness, or even guile. An honest guy, but not just an everyman. A super-everyman. In many ways, Brooklyn's Mos Def (née Dante Smith), should have been that guy. With his third solo album, True Magic, that dream is all but over.
It's been rumored that this is a deal-closer, the last album Mos owes Geffen Records, the label that inherited him when Rawkus Records folded in 2002 and was rolled into Interscope Records' vast empire. Mos, who's best known now as an Emmy-nominated actor, or concurrently "that guy from the Denali commercial," seems to have lost any interest in a music career, at least one under Geffen's umbrella. Everything about this album is half-assed: From the bafflingly bare packaging to the at-times miserable mix, True Magic is a mess. Experimentation has been an organizing principle for Mos for some time, from the jagged riffs and polemics of "Rock N Roll" from his debut Black on Both Sides to the psych noodlings and bluesy crooning on his last album, the uneven and only slightly less calamitous The New Danger. Here, experimentation isn't even on the radar.
These songs feel blah-ed out, packed with idle rhymes that sound as if they've been sitting in a notebook that never should have been opened. Take this nugget from "Undeniable", a song nominated for a Grammy this year, one presumes because Mos carries some sort of artistic clout: "These jokers don't want none/ And all the pretty mamis want some/ Tell 'em come." Thrilling.
The production doesn't help often, either. "Murder of a Teenage Life" is turgid and off-key-- death knells for a rhymer-- while "Fake Bonanza" is the sort of aimless, generic production that gives boho rappers a bad name. Some tracks here would be decent fodder for a C-level mixtape, like "Crime & Medicine", a note-for-note remake of GZA's "Liquid Swords", minus the Genius' lyrical bite and intensity. Also included is the much-maligned "Dollar Day (Surprise, Surprise)", his Hurricane Katrina missive released last year. Messily rhyming in an odd twang over Juvenile side project UTP's "Nolia Clap", Mos received a pass for the song, as his heart is clearly in the right place (at least he dissed Bono), even if his ear seemed waterlogged. But to include it on a proper album is a poor move.
Still, Mos Def is an engaging figure that has long radiated the charisma, if not the work ethic, to grab the mantle hanging above his head. "U R the One" is a lovelorn, confused wail-- the grown continuation of his own "Ms. Fat Booty". He raps: "When we met your face was so brown, your ass was so round, of course I'm so down/ Wish I knew then what the fuck I know now/ Couldn't read the signs of the road: SLOW DOWN." It's one of the few symbols of growth here. Even the simplistic and poorly recorded "There Is a Way", a song with just two lines, has verve-- even some uplift-- in its rally-cry sloganeering.
For years, it seemed as if Mos' songs had ideas and that those ideas had vision (assuming we can all ignore "New World Water"), woven smartly with a bookish, booming flow. And suddenly, as his acting profile grew, his musical output faltered. Many of the songs that leaked prior to True Magic's release aren't included here, offering some a glimmer of hope that Mos is holding that stuff close to the vest for his first post-Geffen project. Still, the apathy here signals some sort of finality. Whether it's the end of a chapter or a book is unclear. | 2007-01-04T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2007-01-04T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rap | Geffen | January 4, 2007 | 4.5 | c7db6c99-1198-4cee-b82f-e0370e02b1bb | Sean Fennessey | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sean-fennessey/ | null |
On her debut album, the Brooklyn-based producer and singer smartly and subtly remakes her sound, meshing R&B and New York drill in melodically refined and technically daring ways. | On her debut album, the Brooklyn-based producer and singer smartly and subtly remakes her sound, meshing R&B and New York drill in melodically refined and technically daring ways. | Hawa: Hadja Bangoura | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/hawa-hadja-bangoura/ | Hadja Bangoura | Hawa has never been shy about her ambitions. At 10 years old, the Berlin-born, Guinea-raised, and Brooklyn-based artist enrolled in the New York Philharmonic’s youth composer program and was, for a time, the youngest composer in the orchestra’s history. She quit the program when she was 15 because, she says, she “couldn’t make gay music in the Philharmonic.” Instead, she turned to rap and R&B, bringing her prodigious abilities and world-beating attitude with her. “My goal isn’t to be the best, it’s to take out the best,” she said in 2018. “It’s go big or go home.”
Hawa’s debut EP, 2020’s the One, showed signs of an artist still discovering the scope of her talent. While she proved herself to be a deft vocalist, able to beautifully bend notes in half and rap in messily precise patterns, the project’s often bland trap-pop production and cliched songwriting rendered it repetitive, suggesting unfulfilled promise. Still, if you lingered on any song long enough you’d likely catch a glimpse of Hawa’s immense, jarring talent: in her tenacious growl on “Frick,” for instance, or her gorgeous ad libs on “Get Famous.” It’s gratifying, then, to see her string together more than just great moments on her first full-length, Hadja Bangoura. Across its brisk 18-minute runtime, Hawa smartly and subtly remakes her sound, meshing R&B and New York drill in melodically refined and technically daring ways.
The production here is primarily courtesy of Hawa and her go-to producer, Tony Seltzer, as well as frequent collaborators Swaya and SYN. The sonic architecture is constructed from soft, solemn keys and skittery, re-pitched vocal chops; siren FX and sweeps sometimes creep into the mix, too, adding urgency to the album’s otherwise moody melodies. Even when drill-inspired drums stampede over the rest, like on the brilliant “Trade,” in which stacks of Hawa’s voice are sampled, distorted, and sped-up, there’s an emotionally cutting core anchoring these songs. The raw drums on “En Route” threaten to blow the beat open, but the jazzy electric piano and Hawa’s swooning harmonies convey a desperate longing that courses throughout the record like a curse.
Hawa’s emotive instincts are her key strength as a vocalist. Though her lyrics contain very few specificities or long lines of tension—the record’s most legible scenes depict raunchy sex or violent heartbreak—her delivery signals the commitment and resolve of someone for whom each syllable denotes life and death. “What do you want from me?” Hawa pleads in a stunning, anxious cry on lead single “Gemini.” It’s a brash, mesmerizing song that deepens with each listen; at first it scans as a trunk-busting revitalization of drill, then a raucous R&B ballad, and then, finally, the torturous and haunting sound of someone drowning in despair. On “Credits,” Hawa pesters a lover with a simple taunt: “Wouldn’t you like to know?” As the question repeats, her voice sinks further into a slab of distortion, panning right, then left, then trailing off in a tail of reverb. There’s no macro theme or emotional arc to contextualize what the song means, per se, but there doesn’t need to be. The best songs on Hadja Bangoura nuzzle beneath your skin, make you ache—replicating the immediacy of the feeling itself.
The back half of the album abandons drill experimentation and leans further into traditional R&B structures. “Ain’t U” boasts memorable melodies and bold production choices while also feeling slightly unfinished, like a demo waiting to be further fleshed out. So do “Progression” and “7 Deadly Sins Lust,” whose minimalism could use a touch more intricacy to achieve their full potential. At her best, Hawa appears unstoppable, like her goal to be the best artist in the world isn’t so far-fetched. Hadja Bangoura is a massive leap in the right direction, but its execution and attention to detail aren’t quite on the level of Hawa’s ambitious vision. | 2022-11-08T00:02:00.000-05:00 | 2022-11-07T00:03:00.000-05:00 | Pop/R&B / Rap | 4AD | November 8, 2022 | 7.4 | c7dba687-df5e-4591-a3a7-4ba0dbb25dee | Brady Brickner-Wood | https://pitchfork.com/staff/brady-brickner-wood/ | |
On 1995’s Daydream, the spectacular pop vocalist fine-tuned her songcraft. The album redrew the boundaries of what a Mariah Carey song—and a pop song—was supposed to sound like. | On 1995’s Daydream, the spectacular pop vocalist fine-tuned her songcraft. The album redrew the boundaries of what a Mariah Carey song—and a pop song—was supposed to sound like. | Mariah Carey: Daydream | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/mariah-carey-daydream/ | Daydream | Mariah Carey pranced through a slow-motion trainwreck in Times Square last New Year’s Eve and there was neither shock nor disappointment. Her instrument has been notoriously temperamental for well over a decade in the best possible conditions, let alone live on stage in the December cold. Her short setlist was ambitious at best and begging for trouble at worst. Laid low by technical problems, a failure to prepare, or some combination of the two, she tried to remain a good sport. She probably never should’ve taken the gig, though Carey’s career has been characterized by desperation and mismanagement for much of this decade, and she’d been reduced to hawking failed buzz singles and C-grade reality shows well before self-destructing in front of millions of viewers.
No matter how she got there, Carey found herself in an ignominious position for one of the greatest pop stars of the last 30 years. She’s sold enough albums to afford a new chaise longue every day until the sun burns out; when “Despacito” finally fell out of the No. 1 spot on the Billboard Hot 100 this summer after 16 consecutive weeks, it had only just managed to tie a record Carey and Boyz II Men set two decades ago with “One Sweet Day.” She may reject being called the “queen of Christmas,” but it’s a title she earned by co-writing the greatest contemporary holiday song in “All I Want for Christmas is You.” Her biggest hits have cumulatively spent well over a year on top of the charts. Her dominance gave her the reach she needed to become the most influential pop vocalist and writer of her generation.
The critic Sasha Frere-Jones outlined the two linchpins of Mariah’s legacy in an astute 2006 piece in The New Yorker, published after she defibrillated her career with the release of “We Belong Together.” Frere-Jones called Carey’s 1990 debut single “Vision of Love” the “Magna Carta of melisma,” and while its influence has finally started to wane, it remains the gold standard for pop stars who care about the craft of singing. You can hear her ghost in Adele and Sam Smith, in Bruno Mars and Demi Lovato. It took Carey three and a half minutes to lay down the terms by which pop virtuosity is still defined: power, range, and versatility, all of which she possessed for the first decade of her career.
Her second stroke of genius was ultimately more impactful. Carey did more than any other artist to bridge the gap that once separated traditional pop and hip-hop and R&B. She fused genres and sounds that were otherwise distinct, encouraging future artists to find and meet her somewhere in the middle. The aftereffects trickled down through the teen-pop icons and R&B crossover acts of the late ’90s to the stars shaping contemporary music: Beyoncé, Kanye West, Drake. (And Claire Boucher, of course: “The first time I heard Mariah Carey it shattered the fabric of my existence and I started Grimes.”) When Taylor Swift taps Future and Ed Sheeran for a posse cut and Rihanna hops on a N.E.R.D. single to rap alongside Pharrell, they’re walking a trail Mariah helped blaze. Her fifth studio album, 1995’s Daydream, played host to some of her purest pop songcraft, but it also pushed the boundaries defining what a Mariah Carey song was supposed to sound like.
In retrospect, Carey’s omnivorousness was hiding in plain sight: she’d gotten Carole King and members of C+C Music Factory to share space on the tracklist of 1991’s Emotions, and her ebullient 1993 smash “Dreamlover” sampled Stax-era soul via Big Daddy Kane. She had the diverse listening tastes you’d expect from someone who grew up in and around New York City with a classically trained opera singer for a mother and a black Venezuelan father. (”I’d get home from school, and she would have, like, five friends over who were jazz musicians,” Carey told Vibe in 1996, “and I’d end up singing ’My Funny Valentine’ at two in the morning.”) The album version of “Fantasy” would’ve represented another step towards the sound of hip-hop on its own: sampling Tom Tom Club’s “Genius of Love” lent the song a laid-back bounce that wasn’t too far from G-funk.
And yet everyone other than Mariah was still shocked when Carey worked with Puffy Combs and Ol’ Dirty Bastard on the “Fantasy” remix. Her label wasn’t exactly psyched: “Everyone was like ’What, are you crazy?’,” Carey told Entertainment Weekly in 1997. “They’re very nervous about breaking the formula. It works to have me sing a ballad on stage in a long dress with my hair up.” Puffy couldn’t believe it either: it “bugged [him] out” when she asked to work with O.D.B. “She talked about Wu-Tang and Notorious B.I.G. and Mobb Deep—everybody who’s hot,” Combs told Vibe in 1996. “It was like talking to one of my friends.” The surprise in his voice is palpable, even on the page.
Carey was the only one with the vision, and it paid off: the “Fantasy” remix is still lean and cool, like one of those Nestea commercials where beautiful people fall backwards into interdimensional pools when they take a swig. By stripping the original “Fantasy” down to its skeleton, Puffy created space to appreciate Mariah’s complex vocal runs; O.D.B.’s ragged, comic energy is the perfect contrast to her adolescent dreaming. Hearing it now, it’s one of those songs where you can imagine pop shifting in real time as it plays. And Carey knows she had the last laugh: “They laughed at me at the label when I played them my ’Fantasy’ remix with Ol’ Dirty Bastard,” she told Rolling Stone in 2006. “But you can’t explain to someone who didn’t grow up on hip-hop and who’s wanting to listen to the GoodFellas soundtrack exclusively that this is hot and it will be a classic.”
Daydream is at its most satisfying when Carey directly interfaces with R&B and hip-hop. “Underneath the Stars” is a tribute to ’70s R&B legends like Minnie Riperton complete with vinyl crackle, and it’s a display of the subtlety Carey’s detractors liked to claim she lacked. Gliding over a glistening Rhodes organ, she remembers an easy young love that slipped away. Lying with her lover on a warm summer night, she’s “a bundle of butterflies/Flushed with the heat of desire.” This is recurring imagery in the Carey discography, but it’s never rendered with more finesse than it is here. The accompanying vocal arrangement is delicate and imaginative; her whistle register is a garnish, not the main course. The final product is one of her greatest hidden gems.
She dipped into the opposite end of her range for “Melt Away,” a syrupy collaboration with Babyface that sounds like it could’ve been written for Toni Braxton. Carey’s voice is so rich during the song’s first verse that it tripped up some listeners: “A lot of people who wrote about the album thought that was Babyface singing at the beginning,” she laughed to Vibe. She’d come to lean on the sultry bottom half of her range as time and age made it tougher to reach the stratosphere, and “Melt Away” makes for an elegant early proof of concept.
Daydream also marked the start of Carey’s long, fruitful working relationship with the producer Jermaine Dupri. While the buoyant “Always Be My Baby” was a bigger hit—it was the third and final Daydream single to reach No. 1—it’s album cut “Long Ago” that now sounds like the shape of things to come. The songs have similar bones: there are moments in each where all you hear is Mariah singing over rock-solid piano chords, and the simplicity is almost surprising given her taste for the ostentatious. But “Long Ago” weds those chords to a rugged beat, and Mariah flows over it with the ease of someone with a genuine appreciation for hip-hop. (She could’ve gone even rougher: “I remember the first track we tried to do, she wanted to sing over Wu-Tang’s “C.R.E.A.M.,” Dupri told Genius last year.) Carey made this seamless blend of pop and hip-hop the core of Butterfly, and it served as the foundation for her late-career reinvigoration nearly a decade later.
Daydream is still interesting when Carey isn’t breaking new stylistic ground. She may have been showing off a newfound versatility on “Long Ago” and “Melt Away,” but she was also still near the peak of her powers as an athletic vocalist, and she put that athleticism to work powering daring arrangements and stunning modulations. “One Sweet Day” may be built around a killer hook, but that’s not what sticks with you on repeated listens—it’s the song’s ecstatic second half, in which Carey and Boyz II Men use that sturdy chorus as the foundation for gymnastic riffs and clusters of harmony. It’s not just showmanship, it’s an expression of communal grief that transcends lyrics and musical structure. (Carey wanted to write a eulogy after the producer David Cole, a collaborator and close friend, passed away in early 1995.) Their performance transforms an elegy into something joyous, a celebration of life and whatever might unite us after it. And while no other song on Daydream can match the emotive power of “One Sweet Day,” Mariah’s performances are uniformly strong no matter the context. “I Am Free” is a gospel workout, complete with an organ and the support of a mini-Mariah choir; dewy weeper “When I Saw You” is rescued by her melismatic belting; Ariana Grande would eat her ponytail for a ’50s waltz as potent as “Forever.”
The only Daydream ballad that’s an unequivocal failure is Carey’s cover of “Open Arms,” and that’s in part because it lacked Mariah’s pen. Carey came into her own as a writer on Daydream: she showed off her fabled vocabulary without leaning on the self-aware quirk of her later work, and almost every song is bolstered by at least one stunning piece of imagery. “When I Saw You” opens with a description of a lover that takes on cosmic significance: “Soft, heavenly eyes gazed into me/Transcending space and time.” (She touches on the power of “dawn’s ribbon of light” in the second verse.) The bridge of “Melt Away” opens with a “cloud of reverie” and ends with Mariah “rhapsodizing.” And she describes the love she feels throughout “Underneath the Stars” as “so heady and sublime,” a phrase that also happens to describe Carey’s lyrical stylings.
Daydream wasn’t just transitional in a musical sense. We know now that it was the beginning of the end for Mariah’s innocence, a moment that has some gravity given we’re talking about a star who likes to refer to herself as “eternally 12.” Her marriage to former Sony Music chief Tommy Mottola was crumbling, and she would look back on their relationship later and reflect on how it was governed by abuse and control. She didn’t know it then, but her absolute commercial zenith would soon be in the rear-view mirror. The instability of Rainbow and the full-blown breakdown of Glitter weren’t far away. Only closer “Looking In” hints at the darkness looming on the horizon: “She smiles through a thousand tears/And harbors adolescent fears/She dreams of all that she can never be.” It’s a startling final statement, but you still leave Daydream with effervescence in mind—sweet, stirring, and dominant, a tour de force from one of the greats at the top of her game. | 2017-12-10T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2017-12-10T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Pop/R&B | Columbia | December 10, 2017 | 7.9 | c7dd52bd-d1a7-4586-ba89-099a3cc72d77 | Jamieson Cox | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jamieson-cox/ | |
On a disorienting and adventurous new album, the Mexico City hardcore band raises hell in pursuit of a better world. | On a disorienting and adventurous new album, the Mexico City hardcore band raises hell in pursuit of a better world. | Malcría: Fantasías Histéricas | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/malcria-fantasias-histericas/ | Fantasías Histéricas | When Malcría scrawled “What the fuck do you want?” in Spanish across an early EP, the title was less an insult than an invitation: They raised the question with the goal of kindling listeners’ determination. Malcría come from a long line of hardcore bands that find bottomless energy within their anger, and since breaking onto Mexico City’s scene in 2014, the trio has scoffed and stomped and screamed in pursuit of a better world. Lately, their anger spawns from the recognition that the future their generation was promised no longer exists.
On Fantasías Histéricas, their second album, Malcría try to imagine a reality where misery and paranoia can be escaped, but they find the task impossible. Singer-bassist Baldo Crudo, guitarist Alan Di González, and singer-drummer GG Androide drop right in on opener “Una Vez Más,” warning that decadence and blind devotion have led us astray. A flurry of D-beat drumming and Crudo’s yelped vocals morph through tempo change-ups, a hair metal guitar solo, and excerpts from the Spanish dub of John Carpenter’s In the Mouth of Madness. On “El Monumento,” Androide admits his fight against the status quo is in vain: He’s growing older and more fragile each day, just like everyone else. By the time he acknowledges there’s a limit to his romanticism on “Utopía y Fracaso”—“No tiene caso imaginar una sociedad donde no haya mal/El mundo ideal es irreal” (“There’s no point in imagining a society where there is no evil/The ideal world is unreal”)—he’s already scratched his throat trying to scream it into existence.
Malcría write their lyrics as a group, and Crudo and Androide take turns singing them. Throughout Fantasías Histéricas, their voices stab each word with the rhythmic motion of a tattoo machine. The two spit out warnings and twist vowels with a similarly charred tone; panic and fear have a way of reducing us to equals. The dynamic interplay between their ever-so-slightly different vocals only adds to the album’s disorienting rush. While they don’t adhere to nihilism per se, Malcría find little comfort in ideas like personal liberty or even work-life balance. If you don’t ignore these sources of false hope, the band warns, you’ll get sucked into a black hole. “Toda fantasía tiene su precio” (“Every fantasy has its price”), Crudo reminds on the title track, as Di González shreds with thunderous volume and the muddy, crunchy distortion of grunge. On closer “Todo Es Aquí,” Malcría barrel over the finish line with synchronized riffs that sound like Rudimentary Peni overlaid with Poison Idea. At a whopping three minutes, it’s by far the longest song on the record.
Even with the breakneck pace—eight songs in just 15 minutes—Fantasías Histéricas offers more space to breathe than 2019’s El Reino De Lo Falso, which never slowed. Malcría’s latest feels more melodic and adventurous, a byproduct of the musicians embracing their varied experience: Crudo handles his bass with a jazz hand, Di González incorporates the gloom of death metal and black metal, and Androide keeps his hardcore drumming tight with ample practice. Take “Precipicio,” where Malcría pummel a power chord before picking it apart into a gnarly, caustic spread of gothic punk, never losing sight of their hardcore roots. This blend of styles mirrors their lyrical focus on the risk and thrill of living a precarious world. “Quiero enfrentarme al tiempo y fracasar por la eternidad,” screams Androide “¿Qué tan cerca puedo llegar?” (“I want to face time and fail for eternity/How close can I get?”). With Fantasías Histéricas, Malcría channel that disenchantment into the search for something better. | 2024-01-12T00:00:00.000-05:00 | 2024-01-12T00:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Iron Lung | January 12, 2024 | 7.2 | c7dd9e4b-b514-4825-9a4c-68b28c05a1ca | Nina Corcoran | https://pitchfork.com/staff/nina-corcoran/ | |
Cult favorites Mock Orange return with an eighth album that reconciles their later alt-country leanings with their Midwestern emo roots. | Cult favorites Mock Orange return with an eighth album that reconciles their later alt-country leanings with their Midwestern emo roots. | Mock Orange: Put the Kid on the Sleepy Horse | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21880-put-the-kid-on-the-sleepy-horse/ | Put the Kid on the Sleepy Horse | The most recent spate of “Best Emo Albums of All Time” lists makes an admirable attempt to legitimize a style of punk rock that has spent the past two decades derided as something you’re supposed to grow out of. But the inclusions unintentionally serve as the best counterargument: Dear You might be the only time you see a band’s *fourth album in there. Nearly of all the classic emo bands either spectacularly implode in their early stages, devolve into sustainable mediocrity or are Fall Out Boy. But after launching some of the leading figures of emo’s 4th wave, Topshelf Records has served as a continuing ed lab for elder statesmen: in 2014, Braid sounded as contemporary and vital as ever on their Will Yip-produced No Coast *and also shed some light on the oft-overlooked Jazz June when they released *After the Earthquake *months later. With their *ninth *release and first in five years, Mock Orange is in the same place the Velvet Teen were on their 2015 Topshelf comeback All is Illusory: previously unclassifiable to their detriment, they’re now given a new, flattering context in which to be understood.
Looking at it now, Mock Orange’s convoluted trajectory could actually serve as the basis for a tragicomic mockumentary of late-'90s emo. Their first two LPs were produced by Mark Trombino and J. Robbins and released on a label that was destroyed by George Lucas in a copyright infringement suit. After the turn of the century, they evolved into a kind of floral, orchestrated indie rock that the Get Up Kids, the Promise Ring and Saves the Day used to effectively end their commercial peaks. 2004’s sync-friendly *Mind is Not Brain *somehow found them within reach of MTV2 airplay and major cable shows and fittingly, they toured with Rogue Wave, that era’s definitive “shit luck” band. On their next two albums, they dabbled in literate, NPR-indie and more or less went alt-country. And now, here’s Put the Kid on the Sleepy Horse, which was put in jeopardy after a nearly fatal hard drive failure. Seriously, always back things up, kids.
After all that, it’s natural that Mock Orange would spend *Put the Kid *trying to assess whether the bullshit has been worth it. Single “High Octane Punk Mode” probably would’ve been sarcastic even in their early days, but the lightly chiding tone fits within what is otherwise midtempo, “The O.C.” indie mode. Ryan Grisham relates how his desire to expand his social circle and listening habits even the slightest bit are still seen as betrayals in his community, reflecting on the blinkered view within hardcore that only becomes apparent once you step outside of it: “the safety pin floats way out, but never really goes away.”
As with *No Coast, Put the Kid on the Sleepy Horse *finds itself in an existential and geographic liminal space, between adult responsibility and spiritual upkeep, between major media centers. And yet, while Braid felt marooned even in Chicago, Mock Orange is based out of Evansville, Indiana, a corridor between the Midwest and the South—bordering Kentucky, equidistant from Chicago and Tupelo, Mississippi. Twenty years in, they’ve finally reconciled the strident, universal yearning of their earlier, midwestern emo phase with the twang of 2011's *Disguised as Ghosts. *Surprisingly, they’ve dropped any vague sense of alt-country for straight-up southern boogie: the blown-out riffs on “Window” and “Too Good Your Dreams Don’t Come True” sound like they are one Dan Auberbach cosign away from KROQ airplay.
And yet, while this is undoubtedly the greatest eighth album from any band ever tagged as emo, *Put the Kid on the Sleepy Horse *itself lacks the true standout moments that would explain what earned Mock Orange their cult status to begin with. The most intriguing hook occurs on “Nine Times,” where brash slide guitars and shifty rhythms pivot into a stately march on the chorus. Elsewhere the choruses cruise rather than soar, and Grisham’s lyrics cut your skin but never draw blood. Brief insight into scene politics aside, most of his judgment is directed at himself for his artistic intransigence. Of course, there’s a cheat code for dealing with this, which is to write about writer’s block: “There was a time when all my lines kept pouring out, now they’ve gone missing,” he sings, lamenting the “dead end verses on my back.” After the self-deprecating “Too Good Your Dreams Don’t Come True,” the final song is titled “Tell Us Your Story” and it's final line is “I fear I’ve stayed too long.” But the song itself is the first time on the album Mock Orange sound triumphant, so while that might have been his fear, it was worth the past five years to push through it. | 2016-05-25T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-05-25T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Topshelf | May 25, 2016 | 6.5 | c7e82fb0-3dc6-4054-ad88-edd2dedbe2b5 | Ian Cohen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ian-cohen/ | null |
The Bronx rapper drags himself back and forth between agony and breakthrough on his latest record, the fullest and most realized album of the 20-year-old’s career. | The Bronx rapper drags himself back and forth between agony and breakthrough on his latest record, the fullest and most realized album of the 20-year-old’s career. | MIKE: Tears of Joy | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/mike-tears-of-joy/ | Tears of Joy | It’s easy to get lost in MIKE’s Tears of Joy: the baritone voice, the abstract bars, the unrecognizable sample chops that lift you into his painful world. The Bronx emcee has kept his personal life close to his chest, only revealing small bits here and there, mainly his deep emotional and spiritual connection to his mother. Tears of Joy is a magnetic and loving tribute to his mother, who passed away recently. After years of shadowy raps, MIKE is at his most vulnerable in the face of tragedy, able to turn grief and frustration into an album rich with both musical and individual growth.
Much of MIKE’s writing has come off as a stream of consciousness, but on Tears of Joy every bar has a purpose. “Sittin’ with my head in my hands, hold it in” and “Trippin’ why my eyes always damp, roll a spliff,” he says defeatedly on the album’s intro. On the following track, “Whole Wide World,” he sounds like he’s sleepwalking, stuck in a state of gloom. “Shit scary, but I stay spinnin’/Lookin’ through obituaries with your name in it,” says the 20-year-old in a heavy voice, over an Ohbliv beat that feels like you’re stuck eternally in the waiting room at the dentist.
MIKE’s music is a mood, always attempting to drag itself through the melancholy to seek a brighter outlook. On “Ain’t No Love,” he warmly reflects over a dreamy Ted Kamal production, perfect for a Sunday morning: “With my moms that type of stress is soothing/Really wrapped around your arm while the weather gruesome.” Then, long-time collaborator Adé Hakim laces MIKE with a head-knocker of a beat and he stumbles into that new outlook. “I remember I was blinded, I can see now,” he says heartily on “Planet.” His feelings are an endless back and forth: breakthrough followed by agony; agony followed by breakthrough. And he often just opts to numb that uncertainty by smoking his days away: “Why you always see me high, it’s hard to come down.”
But MIKE shines brightest when he takes over the production reigns under his beat-making alias DJ Blackpower. It’s like these songs specifically were recorded in a room, alone, with his eyes shut, picturing both the past he misses and the future he dreams of. There are times when he realizes that his youth has just been ripped from him and moments when he’s keeping his feelings stuffed in a box, but the way he weaves in his rich vocal samples and the steady bounce of the drums gives off a feeling of joy even at his most bleak.
The album’s finale—the horn-laden, Navy Blue-produced “Stargazer Pt. 3”—is both crushing and cheerful. MIKE raps in a voice that sounds like he’s trembling, seconds away from tears. He’s still grieving and maybe he always will be, but those better days are within reach. That hopefulness has been the core of MIKE’s music since he was just a promising Bronx teenager with an affinity for words, searching for the voice he’s finally found. | 2019-06-28T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-06-28T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | 10k | June 28, 2019 | 8.3 | c7e9fa87-4eea-4ed6-abfc-a85be958659e | Alphonse Pierre | https://pitchfork.com/staff/alphonse-pierre/ | |
Half the fun of any new Matmos album lies in its concept: Here, Drew Daniel and Martin Schmidt attempted to telepathically communicate their intentions for this record to a group of subjects, whose responses are woven into Marriage. The scientific approach resulted in an antic, lively record. | Half the fun of any new Matmos album lies in its concept: Here, Drew Daniel and Martin Schmidt attempted to telepathically communicate their intentions for this record to a group of subjects, whose responses are woven into Marriage. The scientific approach resulted in an antic, lively record. | Matmos: The Marriage of True Minds | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/17630-matmos-the-marriage-of-true-minds/ | The Marriage of True Minds | Matmos has made a career-long game of devising increasingly outre frameworks for its records. Half the fun of any new Matmos album, in fact, is in discovering its motivational concept: examination of the sounds of an operating table, for example, or the folk music of the Civil War. And yet the conceit for The Marriage of True Minds, their ninth full-length, just might top them all; if its hypothesis were true, you would hardly need this review to tell you what to expect of it, because you would already know.
Briefly: The members of Matmos, Drew Daniel and Martin Schmidt, conducted parapsychological experiments on a series of test subjects that sound oddly similar to those from the opening scene of Ghostbusters: They attempted to telepathically communicate their intentions for this record to their subjects, who then reported any images or sounds they thought they received. Their input is woven inventively throughout True Minds; On "In Search of a Lost Faculty", you can hear these participants struggling to describe visions of triangles (a startling number of them report having received images of triangles, actually) while Daniel and Schmidt surround them with ringing chimes. The concept seems designed for ethereal, mystical music, but Matmos doesn't really do ethereal or mystical: The Marriage of True Minds hits harder and feels more joyfully physical than anything Matmos has done in years.
Daniel and Schmidt sometimes give off the impression that they are eggheads, forensic scientists of sound, but Matmos' music, at its best, has always been fun, and The Marriage of True Minds is no exception. With some judicious excisions of its scary and disturbing parts, most of it would make an excellent soundtrack for a kindergarten classroom. "Very Large Green Triangles" starts out with some heavy, irregular stomping, transitions into some four-on-the-floor pummeling, and then lurches to an abrupt halt as if signaled by a cartoon traffic cop's hand. "Mental Radio", with its sploshing puddle sounds and clattering layers of percussion, sounds like a conga line sent across across a wet, dirty subway platform. "Ross Transcript" opens with the sound of a radio flitting between stations, landing briefly on a syrupy bit of Muzak before plowing forward, cycling through a menagerie of funny sounds, including baaing sheep and babbling, indignant chatter seemingly recorded on the planet Tatooine.
There are still occasional bursts of discomfort-- Daniel and Schmidt have cast-iron stomach for cringe-inducing sounds, and it wouldn't be a Matmos album if you didn't occasionally wince. The dry, squeaky violin that briefly saws away on "You" hits the ear like a dentist scraper touching an exposed nerve ending. "Ross Transcript", in addition to the funny noises described above, also samples a bit of what sounds a lot like choking and spluttering. Their music has always had an antic, morbid cast to it, like a Grimm's fairy tale with all the ghoulish aspects slightly accentuated, and The Marriage of True Minds is maybe the most confident they've ever been at balancing the two sides of this equation.
There are many songs on this album, for instance, that you could actually dance to, rather than just think about doing so. The stomping, crunching, tactile feast of itching guitars, hand claps, and zooming interstellar synths that is "Tunnel", for instance, is an NYC no-wave disco done as a splatter painting. "E.S.P." starts out with a parodic, goofy recitation of the lyrics to the Buzzcocks' song "E.S.P." in growling, black-metal style. Then, after thrashing through some doomy down-tuned metal guitars, it lifts off into a fizzy, joyful coda, a hootenanny swarmed by genetically engineered fireflies. I didn't make the connection to the Buzzcocks song until the fourth or fifth listen, as I was too absorbed in the music itself. The best compliment you can pay Matmos' music, then and now, remains that in the moment, it didn't matter to me in the slightest. | 2013-02-22T01:00:01.000-05:00 | 2013-02-22T01:00:01.000-05:00 | Experimental | Thrill Jockey | February 22, 2013 | 7.5 | c7f1c9c2-be70-4f24-9714-c16fde118cb0 | Jayson Greene | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jayson-greene/ | null |
Fat White Family sound just like they look—diseased, drug addled, utterly corrupt. Their debut album is getting a belated North American release after gaining a swell of attention in the UK. It represents the shambolic beginnings of something, full of directions tried and discarded and barely fleshed out. | Fat White Family sound just like they look—diseased, drug addled, utterly corrupt. Their debut album is getting a belated North American release after gaining a swell of attention in the UK. It represents the shambolic beginnings of something, full of directions tried and discarded and barely fleshed out. | Fat White Family: Champagne Holocaust | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/19630-fat-white-family-champagne-holocaust/ | Champagne Holocaust | Fat White Family sound just like they look—diseased, drug addled, utterly corrupt. The fact that they live above a London pub that stages exhibitions of rectal hand insertions, all while serving Sunday lunch to families, is an almost too-perfect addendum to their bio. Champagne Holocaust is the band’s debut album, a no-budget affair originally released on Bandcamp and now getting a belated North American release after gaining a swell of attention in the UK. The nucleus of the six-piece band is two Northern Irish brothers, Lias and Nathan Saoudi, plus guitarist Saul Adamczewski, formerly of failed indie-punk outfit the Metros. If the album sounds like it cost about 10 of their English pence to record, then it probably did—but that’s all part of Fat White Family’s squalid charm, where rampant idiocy, intelligence, and deranged humor combine.
A cursory look at this band’s early press leaves little doubt that they know how to play the game, with one attention-seeking spectacle after another giving them all the scrutiny they need. Bodily fluids gush forth from the stage when they play, their manager is a tweed-clad fellow named Robert Rubbish, and they even gained note for a mundane stunt to mark the death of Margaret Thatcher. It speaks volumes for how exhausted the corpse of rock & roll is that such antics can still prick the attention, but at least Fat White Family appear to be as genuinely unhealthy and depraved as their records and shows suggest. They’re even topical, with one of their best songs, “Cream of the Young”, taking an unflinching approach to pedophilia, just as their country is sinking in a mire of celebrity related scandal relating to the topic.
It’s unlikely that Champagne Holocaust will be the album Fat White Family is best remembered for—this is the shambolic beginnings of something, full of directions tried and discarded and barely fleshed out. Lias owes a huge debt to Ben Wallers of Country Teasers for both lyrical inspiration and execution, plus a dose of Mark E. Smith and, perhaps more surprisingly, a soupçon of blue-eyed funk and the wistful psychedelic folk of Shimmy Disc outfit Bongwater. It’s distinctly backward-looking in outlook and sound, but that scarcely matters when the force of Lias’ songwriting obliterates the indie template they often take as their starting point. “Who Shot Lee Oswald?” amusingly imagines a series of culprits for the title’s crime, including Andy Warhol and the Velvet Underground, and gloriously devolves into sonic and lyrical chaos that’s just on the right side of stupidity. “Was it a secret government within the American government?” Lias asks at one point.
The place Fat White Family are coming from is just as confusing as the stylistic turns this record takes. They’re part drug addled lunatics hell-bent on blocking out the world, part angry Situationist operatives looking to kick up a shitstorm of trouble as the world disintegrates around them. If contemporaries such as Sleaford Mods also find humor and anger in the wider state of things, Fat White Family are just as likely to turn everything inward and examine their own failings. “If my mind was clean I’d be fine,” is a key lyric on the raggedy “Borderline”, but instead, we get a distinctly unclean vision of life, with Lias at his best when depicting sordid sexual encounters. Most of those gain a grubby strength from the minutiae he picks up on—the “five sweaty fingers on my dashboard” in his paean to car fellatio, “Is It Raining In Your Mouth?”, being his greatest chant-along moment to date.
In some ways it’s fitting that Champagne Holocaust can’t hold together as a coherent piece, especially when the primary working mode of this band takes disarray as an important requisite to function. The back half is especially weak, leaning into cheery, jangly guitars that don’t have a natural place (“Bomb Disneyland”) and redundant Syd-era Pink Floyd pastiche (“Garden of the Numb”). This version of the record wisely adds one of their strongest moments, “Touch the Leather”, as a final rallying call, with Lias again immersed in a pit of sexual degradation that appears to be the best reflection of his naturally soiled state of being. The video for the song—Lias, missing teeth, his face wrinkled beyond his years, mouthing words in slow motion while his brother moons the camera—illustrates the mix of low-level living and base humor this band has sunk into. It’s not pleasant, maybe not even relatable for many, but it works simply because it’s so vivid in its depiction of a life permanently on the cusp of falling apart. | 2014-08-13T02:00:03.000-04:00 | 2014-08-13T02:00:03.000-04:00 | Rock | Fat Possum / Trashmouth | August 13, 2014 | 6.6 | c8048301-0c5f-4140-92e7-3ab68ec018d6 | Nick Neyland | https://pitchfork.com/staff/nick-neyland/ | null |
Pop and R&B melodies meet shambling, C86-style song structures on the eclectic Toronto band’s first album since 2011. | Pop and R&B melodies meet shambling, C86-style song structures on the eclectic Toronto band’s first album since 2011. | Bernice: Puff LP: In the air without a shape | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/bernice-puff-lp-in-the-air-without-a-shape/ | Puff LP: In the air without a shape | In the days before GarageBand, a great deal of indie music was recorded over a few rushed days in cheap studios and pushed out on vinyl with barely any post-production. Bernice, a Toronto group led by singer-songwriter Robin Dann, often sound like a throwback to that glorious, shambling era of the Pastels, Sarah Records, and C86. There is a ramshackle charm to many of their songs, which lollop along at their own sweet pace. And the band’s commercial ambitions are perhaps best summed up by the seven-year gap between their debut album, What Was That, and its follow-up, Puff LP.
Where Bernice differ from most indie shamblers is in their broad-minded approach to songwriting. While few C86 acts betrayed influences more diverse or mainstream than the Smiths, Bernice take their cues from electro, jazz, soul, pop, and R&B, with Dann recently naming Brandy, Sade, and Katy Perry’s Teenage Dream as touchstones. This eclecticism sets up a fascinating musical conversation in which melodies that lean toward R&B and pop—genres whose orthodoxy wouldn’t accept a shamble unless it was Auto-Tuned, double-tracked, and sonically boosted to within an inch of its life—meet Bernice’s loosened song structures.
The single “Passenger Plane” has a soaring chorus that you could imagine Perry bellowing, hurricane-lunged, at the center of a million-dollar music video. But Bernice treat the hook as though it were a nervous hamster, swaddling it in paper-thin layers of synth melody. On “St Lucia,” another fabulous chorus is subverted by a rhythm that sounds permanently on the verge of toppling over. The drums on “Glue” suggest a Canadian exchange student tapping out rhythms on pots and pans outside a tourist attraction for beer money, rather than the perfectly polished, corporeal thump of R&B.
Despite this purposeful raggedness, the songs never feel unfinished: “Glue” also sees the band show off a knack for embellishing their songs with unlikely details, including chirps, burbles, and clicks of indeterminate origin. Ideas surface as light, individual touches rather than piling up in full-bodied, radio-friendly layers. “He’s the Moon,” the best song on the album, is the clearest example of this trade-off between detail and simplicity. Much of the song consists of a simple bassline and Dann’s swooping, Björk-style vocals, to which the band adds subtle trimmings like the occasional clatter of a drum-machine clap, patches of static, and a woozy recorder riff.
Despite the strong songwriting, Puff doesn’t court—and seems unlikely to win over—a broad audience. Dann’s labored low notes on “David,” which recall a prepubescent boy dressed up in a suit to buy cigarettes, might make you wish Bernice had smoothed their rough edges just a bit. The album’s lyrics periodically verge on twee, in lines like, “Red and orange and yellow and blue/I am rubber and you are glue,” from “Glue.” There are moments, too, when the idea-rich Puff becomes idea-laden; “Boat” tosses and turns like the titular vehicle, its melodies too insubstantial to carry so much instrumental folly.
But this willingness to confound is, in part, what makes Bernice special: The band records quietly alluring music in a world of grandstanding blowhards and hides brilliant pop melodies in the shadows of obscurity. Puff may sound as slight as its name suggests—but this idiosyncratic and inventive record is anything but lightweight. | 2018-05-26T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-05-26T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | Arts & Crafts | May 26, 2018 | 7.5 | c81623e7-eb43-4444-9387-72a0d8484ec6 | Ben Cardew | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ben-cardew/ | |
Ian MacKaye and Amy Farina have a new band with an old friend—Fugazi bassist Joe Lally. Their debut is a shrewd distillation of some of the United States’ most insidious issues. | Ian MacKaye and Amy Farina have a new band with an old friend—Fugazi bassist Joe Lally. Their debut is a shrewd distillation of some of the United States’ most insidious issues. | Coriky: Coriky | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/coriky-coriky/ | Coriky | It is both cruelly ironic and fitting that Fugazi bowed out after 2001’s The Argument, just as the U.S. was entering a perpetual state of war, both in the external, militaristic and ideological senses. As the unwavering moral compass of the underground—not to mention the most impassioned, inspiring, and adventurous post-hardcore band of their time—Fugazi had spent much of the late ’80s and ’90s opening our eyes to the abuses of power, income inequality, and toxic masculinity that have only seemed to become more pervasive in the 21st century. In times of crisis, we look for heroes to rally around—or even just to provide a quality protest song—but Fugazi were never interested in being those kinds of saviors. They were sharing the blueprints that exposed the fallacies of the system, but their retreat affirmed that the task of changing the world is on all of us.
And yet when, during George W. Bush’s first term, Ian MacKaye debuted the minimalist, melodic indie-rock duo the Evens with ex-Warmers drummer (and wife) Amy Farina, it felt a bit like Clark Kent opting to live as a mortal while Metropolis plunged into chaos in Superman II. Though his insights were as sharp and critical as ever, MacKaye had essentially traded in Fugazi’s bullhorn for tin cans and string, resulting in music that was more intimate and threadbare. The Evens’ low-stakes, homespun quality was further reinforced when the band was put on the backburner after the couple became parents, resulting in a six-year gap between 2006’s Get Evens and 2012’s The Odds, and mostly silence since.
Now, in the midst of the most tumultuous election year in American history, MacKaye and Farina have resurfaced with a new band featuring an old friend—Fugazi bassist Joe Lally (fresh from playing in jazz-punk power trio the Messthetics with fellow Fugazi alumnus Brendan Canty). But in terms of career aspirations, they practically make the Evens look like shameless self-promoters. Formed in 2015, the new group existed for three years as a private affair; they played their first show in 2018 before they had even settled on a name, announcing it at the bottom of a community-bulletin email from Washington, D.C. activist group Positive Force. Not surprisingly, Coriky sound like they could’ve popped up in 2003 as the logical bridge between the nimble, jazz-inflected rhythmic undercurrents and artful dissonance of latter-day Fugazi and the more congenial pop sensibilities and song-sketch scrappiness of the Evens. But if Coriky sound more emboldened and agitated than the Evens ever did, exhibiting the focus and fury the times demand, they’re less interested in addressing the current state of the nation than in probing the insidious issues and attitudes that afflict America no matter who’s sitting in the Oval Office.
As ever, MacKaye shrewdly distills macro calamities to personal, almost prosaic vignettes. “Clean Kill” takes the concept of “office drone” to its most literal extreme, indicting a modern military apparatus where triggering drone strikes halfway around the world is just another mindless desk job, complete with coffee breaks and idle chit-chat. The perverse normality of the scene is framed by an uncanny sing-along hook—“it’s a clean kill, but it’s not clean”—that captures both the callous efficiency of the gig and the mental toll exacted on the operators. “Have a Cup of Tea” zooms out to implicate the country as a whole: As the song locks into a “Suggestion”-like lurch en route to a similar conclusion (i.e., “we are all guilty”), MacKaye explains how authoritarian violence—and bourgeois indifference to it—is simply the American way: “It’s in our mind/It’s in the Constitution/It’s in our house/It’s in our hands/It’s in our eye/It’s in our blood/It’s in our DNA.”
When you hear MacKaye barking those words with jugular-popping force alongside Lally’s stalking bassline, it’s tempting to close your eyes and imagine it’s 1991 with the White House looming in the background. Coriky abounds with similar displays of Fugazi-fan catnip, like the “Give Me the Cure”-style build-up of “Inauguration Day” and the start-stop funk and frenzied guitar scraping of “Say Yes.” But as the vocal interplay on the latter song illustrates, Farina’s presence lends Coriky a personality all their own. Where MacKaye and Farina often worked in humble harmony with the Evens, her sassy and soulful performances here position her as a more mischievous foil, playfully poking holes in the patriarchy (“Too Many Husbands”) and the shocking regularity of shootings in American classrooms (“Jack Says”).
In moments like these, Coriky present chronic disappointment as a psychic survival tactic, offering odd reassurance that things have always been fucked. (On the cheeky “Hard to Explain,” MacKaye seems to equate right-wing trolls with Minor Threat stans who still resent him for abandoning hardcore dogmatism to pursue Fugazi’s open-minded experimentalism: “Your position is you want me to fix/Something that you said I broke in 1986.”) But they’re not about to let their complaints harden into complacency. Atop the doom-blues groove of “Last Thing,” Farina, MacKaye, and Lally solemnly sing in unison: “The last thing we ever wanted was a war/But we found it much too easy.” It’s the sound of D.C. punk’s most seasoned footsoldiers declaring their return to active duty.
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Buy: Rough Trade
(Pitchfork earns a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.) | 2020-07-16T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-07-16T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Dischord | July 16, 2020 | 7.8 | c81686d8-09ab-44b3-9b9d-10454448ce4e | Stuart Berman | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stuart-berman/ | |
On their debut album, the elusive R&B act signed to Drake's OVO Sound treats sex not as a social transaction but a serious act—something that can make you see things that aren't there, that can be a balm for life's rough edges, that can show you the worth of looking beyond yourself. | On their debut album, the elusive R&B act signed to Drake's OVO Sound treats sex not as a social transaction but a serious act—something that can make you see things that aren't there, that can be a balm for life's rough edges, that can show you the worth of looking beyond yourself. | dvsn: Sept. 5th | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21756-sept-5th/ | Sept. 5th | There's power in quiet, strength in silence. You can find it in the yawning spaces between beats on D'Angelo's "Untitled (How Does It Feel)"; in the skeletal longing of Prince's "When Doves Cry"; in the flickering throb of Depeche Mode's suitably named "Enjoy the Silence"; in Elliott Smith's "Angeles," which countered music industry excess with stark strums and whispered venom. Bits and pieces of Smith's cautionary tale are woven into "Angela," the penultimate track from dvsn's debut album, Sept. 5th, and though the depressive singer/songwriter doesn't seem like an obvious reference point for this lusty R&B project, the sonic nod makes a certain kind of sense. They both know emptiness. They both allow for holes in which listeners can fill in their dreams, desires, sorrows.
In his book Every Song Ever, music critic Ben Ratliff makes note of the intimacy that can arise from spareness. "Open space, whether in a park or a poem or a song, is first an element of design," he writes. "And then it is a sign, a signifier, or a symbol." Part of Drake's OVO Sound roster, dvsn—pronounced "division"—take this idea of austerity-as-symbol to several extremes: in their gaping slow jams, yes, but also in their artwork, which is dominated by big division signs, and their public face, which has thus far been almost entirely faceless. No videos. No press photos. No needy guest shots from their famous boss. But even following in the fog of one-time enigma and fellow Torontonian the Weeknd, dvsn's elusiveness doesn't seem like a gimmick. It feels assured. It understands that, in the face of digital endlessness, restraint is just as important as creation.
We do know a few things about dvsn. Sept. 5th was executive produced by two of Drake's most vital collaborators, Paul "Nineteen85" Jefferies and his mentor, Noah "40" Shebib, and also marks the the proper debut of Toronto vocalist Daniel Daley. All three men are around 30 years old, and the album speaks to their experience as artists—and their resoluteness as R&B innovators who come from a city that still has trouble sustaining a contemporary urban radio station. Which is to say: The dvsn sound did not come together overnight. Jeffries and Daley have worked together for at least six years, and their early collaborations are flimsy Usher knock-offs, gaudy and green. "Early on in my producing, I would just layer on every single sound I wanted to hear," Jeffries recently told Fader. "Getting all my dreams out on just one song." Compared to those tracks, dvsn's songs sound like photo negatives, selfless and vast.
Daley's delivery has matured as well, trading in "Idol"-style runs for sturdy melody lines that service nothing but the song. All of this can be heard on "Hallucinations," in which Daley's featherlight falsetto is often screwed down with effects to literally halt any extraneous embellishments while also offering up more breathing room. On "Too Deep," which lovingly references Timbaland and Ginuwine's 1999 hit "So Anxious," an unnamed female choir gets most of the spotlight, with Daley chiming in for whispered accents here and there. This grown-up musical strategy is also reflected in the way dvsn approach their songwriting raison d'être: sex.
Sept. 5th uses contemporary sounds to explore the positive and meaningful aspects of carnality. This puts the album in a sort of limbo: It feels much more adult compared to the casual, hip-hop-indebted come ons of R&B up-and-comers Tory Lanez and Bryson Tiller, but it's not as indebted to the genre's traditions as artists like Anthony Hamilton or Jill Scott. If neo-soul found 1990s artists taking inspiration from '70s masters, dvsn's neon soul puts a Blade Runner sheen on '90s and 2000s classics by the likes of R. Kelly, Aaliyah, and Ciara. There's no rapping here; the word "bitch" is never uttered. Some of the album's best moments also feature female voices along with Daley's. This is not corny music, but it is respectful, even sweet at times. It treats sex not as a social transaction but a serious act—something that can make you see things that aren't there, that can be a balm for life's rough edges, that can make you realize the worth of looking beyond yourself. These songs are consensual in every sense of the word.
And in that sense, Sept. 5th can be read as a kind of romantic guide for people who are beginning to stare down their twenties in the rearview, who are considering investing a big chunk of themselves into another person. As dvsn tell it, there will be plenty of heat—the languid "In + Out" is exactly what you think it is—but also a few complications. "Try / Effortless" has Daley struggling to put his pride aside as he considers a commitment; "Another One" is a cheating song that only deals with the act's existential aftermath; grand finale "The Line" is a seven-minute proposal that lingers in the comfort and ecstasy that love can bring. "At the end of it all I'm coming back to you," Daley concludes, as a woman's voice echoes in the cavernous expanse around him.
The project's purposeful anonymity has a few drawbacks. Though Prince is a clear influence, dvsn barely hint at the idiosyncratic kinkiness or sense of play that drives so much of that icon's music. And aside from the album's title, there's a slightly frustrating lack of specificity to be found in these songs; perhaps this is meant as a generous sign of universality, but it can also come across as unimaginative. Then again, considering the unseemly baggage R&B fans are presented with while listening to R. Kelly or Chris Brown, dvsn's namelessness can offer its own relief. "In art, the confident gesture, loud or quiet, is of highest importance," Ratliff writes in his book. "By extension, the acknowledgement of the human behind it… is secondary, if relevant at all." This group is wise and capable enough to eschew nearly every shortcut of today's personality-first music culture and dial into the silence between the noise. It's what confidence sounds like. | 2016-04-05T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-04-05T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | Warner Bros. / OVO Sound | April 5, 2016 | 8.3 | c81f0faf-f559-48e9-988f-bc25c91b2258 | Ryan Dombal | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ryan-dombal/ | null |
The latest album from the long-running English band is one of their most sensuous and sunlit, playing on new shades of hope, love, and melancholy. | The latest album from the long-running English band is one of their most sensuous and sunlit, playing on new shades of hope, love, and melancholy. | Tindersticks: No Treasure But Hope | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/tindersticks-no-treasure-but-hope/ | No Treasure But Hope | Stuart A. Staples opens Tindersticks’ latest album with a note on the nature of beauty, a subject they’ve been pursuing for nearly 30 years now. “For the beauty, give me something to ease,” he sings delicately over Dan McKinna’s mournful piano, which sounds suited to a funeral rather than a new beginning. “For it’s the beauty that’s got its claws in me.” It’s an invasive virus, one that overwhelms your body and soul, that elicits malignant symptoms. Few bands—maybe the Bad Seeds?—have been as interested in the capital-R Romantic notion of beauty as Tindersticks, who set their lush, intricate, often unabashedly beautiful arrangements against dark, pained lyrics about ugly, messy emotions. They’ve thrived on that tension, but on No Treasure But Hope Tindersticks find a way to assuage the pain. It’s one of their most contented and effusive albums, and as a result one of their most immediately accessible.
Or, as Staples sings just a few songs later, “There’s a new kind of beauty that I’ve never seen before.” That song, “Pinky in the Daylight,” is something new for Tindersticks: a genuinely sweet declaration of love with no attendant grim irony. The band pulls out all the stops, indulging a dramatic key change, a sensuous pause at the crest of a refrain, a call-and-response of “Yeah, he loves you.” They want you to see the seams of the song, to consider how such overwhelming emotions—love and tenderness, awe and inspiration, hope and calm—are conveyed in music.
Staples wrote most of these songs while staying on the Greek island of Ithaca, and there’s a lot of that world on this album, from the map motif of the artwork to the trilling bouzouki that nods to rebetika music of the early 20th century. And there is sunlight in these songs, breaking apart the darkness that has become so familiar in the band. Even a song called “The Amputees,” which may comment on Staples’ experience as an Englishman living on the Continent, hinges on the sincere declaration, “I miss you so bad,” which changes phrasing and therefore implication each time he repeats it. Staples has always drawn on the techniques of American soul singers, but to his credit, he knows the limitations of his distinctive voice, and especially on “The Amputees” he knows how to deploy it to understate his message.
With all that light, however, shadows remain. “See My Girls,” the record’s longest song as well as its most daring, is sung from the perspective of a shop owner whose daughters send him postcards from around the world. Those postcards form a flipbook showing the glories and the dangers of the world, “the slanty pillars of Park Güell” in Barcelona along with “the killing fields of Cambodia.” But the song is more an expression of the father’s unending concern, which makes it a very different kind of love song—world-weary, but no less potent.
Buy: Rough Trade
(Pitchfork may earn a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.) | 2019-12-05T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2019-12-05T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | City Slang | December 5, 2019 | 7.8 | c820be09-21b4-4607-ae5f-c0441c4f2e78 | Stephen M. Deusner | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stephen-m. deusner/ | |
Recorded in his final months and released 10 days after his death, the Tragically Hip frontman’s final album is a farewell and a testament, at once wistful and playful, urgent and defiantly hopeful. | Recorded in his final months and released 10 days after his death, the Tragically Hip frontman’s final album is a farewell and a testament, at once wistful and playful, urgent and defiantly hopeful. | Gord Downie: Introduce Yerself | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/gord-downie-introduce-yerself/ | null | The Tragically Hip’s popularity in Canada is about as easy to explain to Americans as bagged milk. The old-fashioned rock band’s success seems almost unaccountably spectacular: sold-out nationwide stadium tours; two albums diamond-certified and a dozen more platinum; 16-time recipients of the Juno, the Canadian Grammy. And yet their success has remained confined to the homeland. In 1992, the Hip’s fourth album, Fully Completely, was the number-one record in Canada, and Billboard insisted the band was “now poised for international recognition.” It never happened. Abroad, the album flopped. By the late 1990s they no longer even had an American label. Last August, the Hip filled the nearly 20,000-capacity Air Canada Centre in Toronto three nights in succession; a scalped ticket cost thousands. When they performed in New York the year before, it was at the 2894-seat Beacon Theater. Many attendees, one presumes, were ex-pats from the north.
So when Gord Downie—lead singer, lyricist, and charismatic frontman of the Hip, but also poet, activist, actor, accomplished solo singer-songwriter, and altogether one of the most illustrious men in Canadian pop-cultural history—died last month of glioblastoma multiforme, an aggressive and virtually unbeatable form of brain cancer, Americans were understandably mystified by the extent and depth of their northern neighbors’ grief. It is hard to convey to outsiders what Downie meant to his compatriots. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, upon learning of Downie’s passing, was compelled to issue a statement of mourning to the nation. “When he spoke,” Trudeau said, “he gave us goosebumps and made us proud to be Canadian. Our identity and culture are richer because of his music, which was always raw and honest—like Gord himself.”
I mention this at length because it is essential to understanding and indeed appreciating Introduce Yerself, Downie’s final, posthumous solo album, released just 10 days after his death. Like David Bowie’s Blackstar and Leonard Cohen’s You Want It Darker, Introduce Yerself is the kind of confrontation with mortality afforded uniquely to artists who know or sense they’re near the end: It’s a farewell, a testament. The album was recorded over two wildly productive four-day sessions at Downie’s Bathouse studio in small-town Bath, Ontario, as Downie endured the often brutal effects of his illness and its treatment—memory loss, frailty. The process was a minor miracle of last-ditch vigor: 23 songs in all, many laid down in one take. “We were documenting how he was feeling, very quickly,” said Broken Social Scene’s Kevin Drew, who produced the album. “There was an urgency that pushed us to create as much as we could.”
That urgency looms over Introduce Yerself, even seems at times to haunt it. “In my life of get and get/I’ve got more than most, and yet,” Downie sings on “Wolf’s Home,” movingly. His reflections of regret are painful enough, but in the song’s final seconds one hears him sigh, almost beyond the range of the mic, and take a greedy draft of water. It’s a moment of profoundly wretched candor—a glimpse of weariness committed by mistake to tape. On the delicate, piano-forward title track, Downie relates the story of forgetting the name of a driver he could tell he ought to recall: a mild lapse, probably familiar to almost anyone. But knowing what one does of his condition, of the misery of his failing memory, the story gains a tragic dimension. Much of the power of Introduce Yerself derives expressly from woeful circumstance, perhaps inevitably. Listening, one is acutely aware of how much Downie still had to say—and how little time he had left.
But it would be a mistake to characterize Introduce Yerself as despairing. Downie was an unrepentant optimist, and remained playful even at his most wistful and pensive. On stage, in concert, he played the howling maniac, the madman unhinged: He would rant and rave, improvise lyrics, toss his microphone around and pick it up with his feet—and continued to do so as his illness did its best to enfeeble him. That puckish exuberance is very much in evidence throughout Introduce Yerself, happily. “You Me and the B’s” is a spirited paeon to “the mistakes, the slumps, the streaks” of the Boston Bruins, replete with percussion by hockey stick (really). “My First Girlfriend” is an ode to an old flame—in particular to her “sophistication” and her bikini. And of course, the upbeat “Spoon” is about seeing Britt Daniel and company live: “We sat in the back row/Deerhunter opened the show.”
The record’s prevailing theme, if it isn’t apparent already, is reminiscence. Downie has said that “each song is about a person,” and while he scarcely uses proper names, the abundant “you”s and “we”s feel unmistakably specific. “I say ‘I love you’ into your dark, unwavering eyes/That show caring, concern, disapproval, despair,” he sings with evident strain on “Faith Faith,” the album’s most overtly sentimental ballad. “But you’ll never leave me, never doubt me, never look elsewhere.” Downie’s lyrics generally have an ironic edge; in this case, as he was separated from his wife, it’s safe to assume one isn’t meant to take the romantic fervor in earnest. Mostly, though, the recollections are fond. “Bedtime” immortalizes a precious memory of rocking his baby to sleep. “Love Over Money,” a distinctly Kevin Drew-ish indie-rock jam, glories in Downie’s triumphs with his band.
From beginning to end, Introduce Yerself is ardently, defiantly hopeful, even as Downie’s fate casts the record in a more melancholic light. True to his career-long reputation, he proves a paragon of warmth and generosity, democratic in spirit and comradely in temper. Downie spent his last year and a half not resigned to defeat but buoyant with enthusiasm. Tellingly, while his nationwide farewell tour last summer took an enormous toll on him physically, watching him perform, you would have had no idea he was ill. The man was irrepressible. His defiance and ebullience were the fuel that urged him on until the very end.
To hear Downie tell it, he never cared that the Hip failed to find success in the United States. He was irritated to be so frequently defined by that lack. “[Interviewers] always ask us about our success or lack of success in the States, which I find absurd,” he said in 1997, plainly vexed. “All we’ve ever wanted to do was be successful on our own terms, which is to have a body of work become undeniable, to be known for 50 songs rather than one.” In Canada, if not elsewhere, the oeuvre endures; to the entire country it seems the Hip are eternal. But if Downie’s music should remain largely obscure, that would be most unfortunate—not because he merits fame, but because he so keenly fought to forge connections. He meant Introduce Yerself as a communal experience, and with it he aspired to connect to the world. | 2017-11-17T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2017-11-17T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Arts & Crafts | November 17, 2017 | 7.4 | c82302d4-b5d6-490f-8a2d-3f8575431d8e | Calum Marsh | https://pitchfork.com/staff/calum-marsh/ | |
The latest from the Detroit rapper is impressively self-produced and features as many showy passages as clunky stumbling blocks. | The latest from the Detroit rapper is impressively self-produced and features as many showy passages as clunky stumbling blocks. | Royce 5'9'': The Allegory | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/royce-59-the-allegory/ | The Allegory | From Eminem sidekick to Dr. Dre ghostwriter, from major-label hit-chaser to backpack powerhouse, from deliriously drunk shit-talker to soberingly woke preacher, Royce 5’9” has played them all. In his 20 years of funneling characters into hip-hop, there’s never been a stretch of track where the Detroit rapper couldn’t outrap anyone around him.
All of which puts Royce beyond a certain type of criticism. He has made great music many times before, but sometimes the issue is everything but the rapping. His last solo album, 2018’s The Book of Ryan, was more inwardly focused, a self-aware autobiography that also functioned as a late-career reckoning. His latest, The Allegory, doesn’t coast on that same goodwill. Instead, Royce looks outward as a heavy-handed attempt at converting his listeners to woke enlightenment. There are plenty of redeeming moments here, but it’s hard to shake some of the straight-faced proselytizing.
The anti-vaccination lines on The Allegory—and there are several—might have been chalked up as trivial goofy-horrorcore lyrics on an old Royce mixtape, but that’s a luxury he abandons here early on, staring into the camera at the beginning of the album to declare: “This is the allegory of the cave theory by Plato, this is the first chapter.” On one hand, you can’t take that seriously; on the other, he’s taking himself seriously—too seriously. Still, Royce wants it both ways. “Present picture: a guy battles sexuality in tight apparel, eyeshadow/That’s not deep, I’m shallow,” he raps on that same introduction. In other words: here’s something vaguely offensive, but I don’t really mean it. Right? Wink. Yikes.
Not everything is this clunky. If anything, the album is so dense that it’s best moments can feel buried. The many guest spots help lighten things up, even when they’re grimy. On “FUBU,” Conway the Machine shit-talk sounds breezy over a sinisterly kooky boom-bap beat alongside Royce’s complexity. On “Overcomer” Westside Gunn raps chilling street raps like “Where I’m from driveby’s overrated/If you got five bodies then you famous” that require no decoding. Vince Staples and G Perico inject their own nasally, jumpy energy on “Young World.”
Royce also produced every bit of music on The Allegory, a first for his career. His beats are generally chunky sample flips and simple loops, but he also has an ear for a good sound. But if you’re listening to a Royce album it’s because you want to hear the guy rap. To his credit, Royce has the rare effect of a rapper’s extreme technical ability making him seem limber instead of rigid. There a handful of moments on The Allegory of sheer delight where Royce barrels both forcefully and elegantly into a complex rhyme scheme and makes it seem easy.
You’ll have to brush aside some of the missteps (a well-intentioned Eminem skit is a clumsy grappling with white privilege and hip-hop as a Black art), but you’ll hear vulnerable catharsis about his father on songs like “Hero” alongside the more steely lyrical attacks. The best moment on the album might be the most light-hearted, when Royce pokes fun at a career misstep on a song called “Rhinestone Doo Rag.” (He tells his younger listeners they’ll have to Google it.) It’s an exercise in humility from a guy often pointing a finger and seriously overexplaining. It’s funny and lands better when he’s the butt of the joke. Plus, he’s rapping his ass off. | 2020-02-27T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2020-02-27T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rap | eOne / Heaven Studios, Inc. | February 27, 2020 | 5.8 | c82d5d1e-d961-462f-989b-0b91c87650c6 | Jay Balfour | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jay-balfour/ | |
A calm breeze blows through the songwriter’s latest album, a road-ready set of tunes forged on the long journey to relaxation. | A calm breeze blows through the songwriter’s latest album, a road-ready set of tunes forged on the long journey to relaxation. | Jason Isbell and the 400 Unit: Weathervanes | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/jason-isbell-and-the-400-unit-weathervanes/ | Weathervanes | Jason Isbell and the 400 Unit launched their supporting tour for Weathervanes, Isbell’s eighth collection of original material, three months before its release, a tacit admission that these songs were built for the long haul. An exacting craftsman, Isbell constructed Weathervanes with tunes that benefit from familiarity: They’re filled with open spaces for a band to explore on stage. On record, these songs reveal their intricacies slowly, the measured, almost leisurely pace suggesting that Isbell is confident that his audience will stick with the album as they learn its subtle pleasures.
The calm breeze blowing through Weathervanes comes as something of a relief. As portrayed in Running With Our Eyes Closed, a recent documentary that chronicled the making of Reunions—the album he released at the dawn of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020—Isbell sometimes treats his craft as a burden, a trait that can carry some personal pitfalls. During those sessions, he sometimes appeared consumed with the prospect of living up to his own high standards, a worry that sparked marital strife between Isbell and Amanda Shires, the singer-songwriter and fiddle player who occasionally doubles as a member of the 400 Unit. Shires is credited as a guest performer on Weathervanes, the same billing that harmonica player Mickey Raphael, a legend from Willie Nelson’s Family band, receives for his spot on the lovely “Strawberry Woman.”
Though he’s worked with producer David Cobb since 2013’s breakthrough Southeastern, Isbell produced Weathervanes himself (Matt Pence provided additional production on a handful of tracks). He chooses to emphasize performance as much as the songwriting, a decision that shines a light on the 400 Unit’s chemistry. Weathervanes has its share of intimate moments, such as the gently rolling “Strawberry Woman” or “Cast Iron Skillet,” where the understated acoustic setting makes the narrator’s misguided life lessons (“Don’t drink and drive, you’ll spill it”) all the more unsettling, especially when Isbell murmurs, “That dog bites my kid, I’ll kill it.”
The 400 Unit excel on the quieter songs, conjuring the ghost of John Prine on “Volunteer” and Bruce Springsteen at his most reserved with the subdued train-track rhythms of “If You Insist.” Still, they sound best when they crank up their amplifiers, relying on texture as much as volume. Take “Death Wish,” where the band vamps on a minor-key riff, ratcheting up the tension as Isbell’s narrator sounds increasingly desperate. They pull off a similar trick on “Save the World,” which is as urgent and disturbing as a news bulletin. As Isbell struggles to process his thoughts in the wake of learning about another school shooting—“Balloon popping at the grocery store, my heart jumping in my chest/I look around to find the exit door, which way out of here’s the best”—the 400 Unit accompany his emotions by playing with controlled anger.
Weathervanes’ unsettled moments wind up making the sun-bleached vibe of the rest of the album feel earned: It takes some effort for Isbell to relax. That mellow feeling is crystallized by how “Middle of the Morning” cannily crosses Van Morrison’s “Into the Mystic” with the Allman Brothers Band’s “Midnight Rider.” Such nods to Isbell’s forefathers are deliberate: “When We Were Close,” his salute to the late Justin Townes Earle, is propelled by a riff that recalls Tom Petty at his most Floridian; it comes within spitting distance of such wild-eyed Southern boys as .38 Special. Isbell and the 400 Unit aren’t revivalists, though. They specialize in synthesis, blending styles and eras so they feel familiar yet fresh, a trick encapsulated by “This Ain’t It” and “Miles,” the pair of open-ended, open-road jams that close the record. Weathervanes itself sounds forged from the endless miles the 400 Unit have logged over the past decade: It’s a snapshot of a band humming at cruise altitude, keeping focus not on the destination but the journey. | 2023-06-08T00:02:00.000-04:00 | 2023-06-08T00:02:00.000-04:00 | Folk/Country | Southeastern / Thirty Tigers | June 8, 2023 | 7.5 | c8379927-4808-4027-a97b-6dd1adfbdc0f | Stephen Thomas Erlewine | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stephen-thomas erlewine/ | |
Jadakiss's first LP in over six years features Jeezy, Puff Daddy, Future, and others. At a point in his career when he should be completely free from commercial expectations to make whatever music he wants, one of the world's best and most frustratingly aimless rappers ends up in the same no-man's land he always does. | Jadakiss's first LP in over six years features Jeezy, Puff Daddy, Future, and others. At a point in his career when he should be completely free from commercial expectations to make whatever music he wants, one of the world's best and most frustratingly aimless rappers ends up in the same no-man's land he always does. | Jadakiss: Top 5 Dead or Alive | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21281-top-5-dead-or-alive/ | Top 5 Dead or Alive | Jadakiss' first LP in over six years had its title as far back as 2010, when "Top 5 Dead or Alive" appeared on The Champ is Here 3 as a teaser for a record due later that year (and then in 2012). Like the original Champ is Here mixtape, 3 proved far superior to Kiss tha Game Goodbye and Kiss of Death, but it was bittersweet all the same for highlighting Jadakiss' strengths (spitting raspy punchline bars over someone else's beats) and admitting to his weaknesses by omission (putting actual songs together, getting those beats for himself). Impressive first-week sales notwithstanding, no one expects Jadakiss to be a commercial force anymore, which would presumably work to his advantage. Without the temptation to cater to a non-existent audience clamoring for him to make pop songs, you'd figure the boundaries between "album" and "mixtape" would no longer exist. This is kinda true of Top 5 Dead or Alive; the problem is that one of the world's best and most frustratingly aimless rappers ends up in the same no-man's land he always does.
The good news is that Jadakiss' typical means of scoring a chart hit is completely outmoded in 2015, so there aren't any chintzy Neptunes beats, unctuous R&B hooks or blatant attempts to recreate "Why" in its entirety. Yeah, Future shows up on the "street single", but he did the same favor for Uncle Murda this year—don't confuse his appearance for a guarantee of any kind of chart success. While Jadakiss can wild out on his own terms__,__ the gothic turn-up of "You Can See Me" is a long way from the Tunnel; for not a single second are we led to believe that We the Best producer Lee on the Beats, Future and Jadakiss were ever in the same room, let alone the same frame of mind here.
Otherwise, Jadakiss continues to show why he was a perfect fit to do player introductions for the Brooklyn Nets back in October—Top 5 Dead or Alive is likewise an intermittently entertaining, but dead-end collective of big-money heavyweights long past their prime. Puff Daddy's yelling spree on "You Don't Eat" might as well have been sourced from a Bad Boy conference call in 1996. On "Kill," Lil Wayne continues his path towards tragicomic, Neil Hamburger-esque performance art: "She a Cancer, I hit her with that chemo dick" would be a prime candidate for Weezy's preeminent sad trombone line of 2015 if he didn't just quote Smash Mouth on No Ceilings 2. While Jeezy occupies a similar "veteran hardhead" ground as Jadakiss at this point, "Critical" doesn't try to find common ground; instead, it's the kind of hyperactive hi-hat beat that predates Thug Motivation 101 with Jada on a double-time Dirty South flow that interrupted "who's the best MC?" discussions during the late 90s in New York.
Despite its street-level money, power and respect rhymes, almost all of it feels divorced from reality, free of any kind of narrative grounding or personal disclosure: "you can call me Paul/ long as Peter pay," "If you ain't in the circle, for a square I'll get you lined" are typical punchlines that generate a smirk and disappear completely, mildly impressive feats of wordplay that only have meaning within the format's strictures. You might as well be watching Jadakiss solve crossword puzzles.
There are brief indications that Top 5 Dead or Alive was workshopped within the past three years. There's a track about smoking weed and, wouldn't you know, Wiz Khalifa is on it instead of Redman. The chorus of "Jason" gives brief mentions to Eric Garner and Ferguson. Otherwise, Jadakiss has to remind you of a time when "top 5 dead or alive" was something fans of mainstream rap actually discussed: "Synergy" is the requisite give-n-go tandem rap with Styles P and it's flagrantly modeled after "We Gonna Make It", right down to the cadence of the hook. Even if there isn't the requisite track here in the style of "Why," Jada can't help but invoke its most infamous line (the one about Bush knocking down the towers). In the most desperate recall of his glory days, Jadakiss spits, "you heard my name on the last verse of 'Ether,'" which is technically true but feels like the equivalent of a boxing judge taking credit for Ali/Frazier.
Beyond muddled aims, extremely confusing and tone-deaf skits also seem to be a constant on Jadakiss projects. "Ahaa Interview" is a Madd Rapper-style Q&A where a salty veteran claims he's going solo over his resentments towards Jadakiss. You'd swear this was a scorched-earth attack on Sheek Louch, except the guy shows up two tracks later. I mean, Puff Daddy is here too, so I guess he didn't take "Rape'n U Records" skit to heart either. More importantly, a patron who sure sounds a lot like Busta Rhymes starts complaining about how heads don't check for "bars" anymore and now it's all about dancing and wearing blouses. You'd swear this was a diss against Young Thug, who's frankly been packing more inventive wordplay into a single verse these days than Jada does on the entirety of this "rapper's rapper" album. | 2015-12-02T01:00:03.000-05:00 | 2015-12-02T01:00:03.000-05:00 | Rap | Def Jam | December 2, 2015 | 5.5 | c83ca3e6-125f-49d9-8c36-1acdaca1a55e | Ian Cohen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ian-cohen/ | null |
Scum-rock, psychedelia, and drones collide on the latest full-length from NYC’s PC Worship, but Buried Wish errs towards a more skeletal sound. | Scum-rock, psychedelia, and drones collide on the latest full-length from NYC’s PC Worship, but Buried Wish errs towards a more skeletal sound. | PC Worship: Buried Wish | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22920-buried-wish/ | Buried Wish | PC Worship are a few chromosomes shy of their own DNA strand. But the NYC band’s shakiness has long been key to their shredded charm. Since 2009, frontman Justin Frye has led shifting lineups through genre calisthenics rigorous enough that their repertoire encompasses way-out freak-flag jams, garage punk shimmy, and a Fraggle Rock cover, among other oddities. PC Worship stumble and shamble the way collectives like Harlem’s No-Neck Blues Band or Finland’s Avarus might if Captain Beefheart were sitting in. The PC Worship Experience is uncertain, splintered, alive, and never lacking in bristling forward momentum.
This makes the first song on Buried Wish a bit of a head-scratcher. No-tempo “Lifeless Rain on an Empty Moon” rubs together brass drones at peculiar angles before a zig-zagging sample burst. It’s tranquil, if uneasily so. Revisit the opening cuts from 2013’s Beat Punk, 2014’s Social Rust, or 2015’s Basement Hysteria—this is a sedate starting-point for PC Worship, signaling Frye’s move towards a more spacious sound.
Buried Wish does find moments to rollick. Stoner metal dirge “Back of My $$$” crawls forward like lava under the weight of gnashing guitars. Grease fire psychedelia and 1980s Lower East Side scum-rock collide on the sneering, accessible “Blank Touch.” Almost everywhere else here, though, the band embraces the spare or the stripped back.“Tranq,” a piano curio that morphs into a pummeling krautrock interlude, achieves the effect of its title.
The title track gently hoists a sitar-like frequency higher and higher up into the stratosphere before allowing it to plummet back down to earth in a storm of effects. Vertiginously anemic, the delirious “Help” thumbtacks atonal string whinny with spoken word. “Torched” carpets spindled guitars with constantly erupting drum rolls, like Standards-era Tortoise sound-checking. The cumulative tone at work here—aided by sharp production and stark arrangements—is one of calm, wary digression.
“Perched on the Wall” and “Flowers & Haunting” mark Buried Wish’s most radical departures, foregrounding Frye’s weary, blunt voice. Stung by glancing electric blues riffs, “Perched” stumbles and lurches languidly, a dazed quest for meaning that may or may not be there to be found. “Flowers & Hunting” strands Frye with an acoustic guitar and a pedestrian field recording to plaintively string together one daft couplet after another: “Unfortunate, and pleading/Incapable of breathing/Enraged and retreating.” The words mumble and tumble out, honest and pure in a way that mirrors, if inversely, his band’s splayed-tone. On the darkest of days, they’ll bear repeating. | 2017-03-03T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2017-03-03T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Northern Spy | March 3, 2017 | 7.3 | c844ace6-e409-414c-bad8-e6c5e0e2369a | Raymond Cummings | https://pitchfork.com/staff/raymond-cummings/ | null |
Maryland singer-songwriter Jordana Nye’s bright, gauzy indie pop puts a sharp percussive edge on familiar melancholy. | Maryland singer-songwriter Jordana Nye’s bright, gauzy indie pop puts a sharp percussive edge on familiar melancholy. | Jordana: Face the Wall | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/jordana-face-the-wall/ | Face the Wall | What happens when homespun synth-pop outgrows the bedroom? In Jordana Nye’s case, the cozy, lo-fi harmonies of her early Bandcamp tapes seemed to bloom in a hundred directions at once. Her 2020 breakthrough Something to Say to You played like a sampler, mapping possible futures in stylish electro-pop, earnest piano ballads, or fuzzy experimentation. Just 19 upon the album’s release, the Maryland native flashed unassuming brilliance as a producer and songwriter, mastering a breadth of styles without committing herself to any of them.
One can’t dine out on precociousness forever. On the follow-up, Face the Wall, Jordana and co-producer Cameron Hale collapse the disparate elements of her earlier work into a bolder, brighter soundscape. The instrumentation is still largely synthetic, the vocal effects gauzier than ever. As on Something to Say to You, sharp percussive flourishes contrast the tracks’ hazy layering. On “Pressure Point” and “Get Up,” heavy drum patterns throw the delicate choruses and instrumental breaks into acute relief; the rushing drums and one-note bassline of “Play Fair” animate a series of stop-start transitions.
There’s an evasive quality to Jordana’s performances dating back to her high school-era demos. Often her verses begin in media res, with vocal tracks washing over the instrumentals in soft waves. On Face the Wall, her lyrics maintain a bedroom-tape abstraction: “Catch My Drift” and “Difficult for Now” have sweeping, second-person dedications in place of narratives, weighting down the warm melodies. The record’s most compelling moments are those when Jordana shakes the ambivalence and emerges from the wings. The standout “Go Slow” evokes a familiar melancholy, yet it’s her most forthright affirmation to date: “Focus has never been a friend of mine, half the time I’m not sure if I’m flying/I’ll try, for certainty that I might find/Nothing works unless I take the time.”
If Jordana has a tendency to blend into the wallpaper, it’s largely due to her songs’ structural complexities. The cagey pre-chorus of “Catch My Drift” unleashes a euphoric hook, further refined by a breakdown bridge worthy of an arena-rock finale. On occasion, Face the Wall defaults to sunny ’90s touchstones—the chords of “To the Ground” make it a dead ringer for Shania Twain’s “You’re Still the One”—but not enough to distract from the production duo’s vision. With its sparkly guitar, call-and-response chorus, and chunky hip-hop drums, “I Mean That” plays like a Sugar Ray B-side you never thought to seek out.
Face the Wall bolsters Jordana’s resumé with a cohesive full-length, suspending the polymath approach for a more professional-sounding statement. It’s an accomplished record that, given the variety of Jordana’s catalog, feels short on surprises; having mastered the nuances of production and songwriting, she’s still finding ways to make her voice ring clear. Yet her melodies are dynamic, her ballads immune to adolescent melodrama: the toughest hurdles are behind her. | 2022-05-25T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2022-05-25T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock / Folk/Country | Grand Jury | May 25, 2022 | 7.1 | c846266b-de50-4f07-8b64-0a4514e2e090 | Pete Tosiello | https://pitchfork.com/staff/pete-tosiello/ | |
With the song of the summer belt around her waist, the Memphis rapper collects on the “F.N.F.” fame with a rowdy, promising debut EP. | With the song of the summer belt around her waist, the Memphis rapper collects on the “F.N.F.” fame with a rowdy, promising debut EP. | Glorilla: Anyways, Life’s Great… EP | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/glorilla-anyways-lifes-great-ep/ | Anyways, Life’s Great… EP | Nike might’ve fired GloRilla for posting videos turning up to Beyoncé with her best friend, but where the sports brand saw a nuisance, millions of others saw a star. The brazen optimism it takes to turn a retail shift into a virtual concert is just part of what makes the 22-year-old rapper so enticing. Raised in Memphis, Glo was a choir girl who got into mischief with rowdy kids in her neighborhood. Off the heels of the crunk anthem “F.N.F. (Let’s Go)” and Cardi B-assisted throat punch “Tomorrow 2,” the patron saint of newly single women and rabble-rousers turns lemons into mace and gold chains on her debut EP.
Anyways, Life’s Great… is a crash course on faith, which must feel like a birthright for someone named Gloria Hallelujah. “Every day the sun won’t shine/But that’s why I love tomorrows,” she affirms like a preacher. Mary J. Blige, the prophet of divorce anthems, couldn’t help but rap the lyrics to Glo’s debut single. Written during a 60-day man cleanse, “F.N.F.” was conceived from heartbreak and delivered by a blunt. You get the sense that even if her credit score dipped to the 300s, and she had just walked in on the love of her life cheating, and totaled her car all in the span of 24 hours, she would still find a silver lining: “Pussy good, check!”
While people fervently pit female rappers against each other, GloRilla has emerged as a diplomat. Camaraderie is front and center in her music videos, live performances, and collaborations. It’s not a Glo production without a cameo from her best friend and day-one collaborator Gloss Up. Her friends even accompanied her when she got signed to her label, chanting her song on Yo Gotti’s private jet like they were also getting signed. She talks about falling out with her girlfriends with unparalleled grief: “So many hoes done switched on me I’m starting to hate the friend word/Calling me dat shit is like da white folks saying da N-word.” Fellow Memphian Niki Pooh’s verse on “Get That Money” is a ladies-know-your-worth shoulder grab: “If you can ask for ass then I can ask you for ya cheese/Now come on sista sis let’s keep it real.” North and the South collide on “Tomorrow 2” as Cardi lacerates and Glo rubs salt in the open wound: “Fake bitch, that’s why my friend fucked on your nigga/Both you bitches pussy, I think y’all should scissor,” the Bronx native hisses. At times Cardi dominates the track, but Glo remains an energizing host.
As someone who managed to make a children’s book sound like a ransom note, she’s a gangsta rapper at her core. She walks the path paved by Three 6 Mafia’s Gangsta Boo and La Chat—two women who infused ’90s Southern rap with androgynous raunch. Glo’s stomping delivery over floor-rumbling drums, pianos fit for the Undertaker, and crisp snares could provoke the meekest of souls to smash car windows. But beneath her infectious toothy grin, there’s pain. “When they treat you like the strongest it make you the weakest,” she muses over sentimental keys. “If I ever asked for help that mean I really need it.” Her abortion, life in poverty, and the domestic abuse she’s witnessed all factor into her music and make the cathartic element of “F.N.F.” that much more potent. Glo’s off-the-cuff rant about betrayal over “No More Love”’s bed of plaintive R&B heightens the despondency, although her voice almost reaches a bark. Closing the album with a call from an incarcerated loved one, she’s jovial as he showers her in praise. Then the automated “one minute remaining” disrupts their intimate conversation, but they continue to laugh despite the looming reminder of the forces working against them.
In just two singles, a handful of collabs (including link-ups with Gloss Up, Aleza, Slimeroni, and K Carbon), and now an EP, Glo broadened rap’s palette with her distinct husky voice, gritty bars, and party-starting magnetism. A handful of these songs exhibit similar instrumentals and flow templates, but the rock-inflected “No More Love” and poppy “Get That Money” hint at a budding versatility. Lyrically, she’s agile and disarming: “Poppin’ shit, you would think I went to school for chiropractin’.” Decorum is miserable. GloRilla is merciless. | 2022-11-17T00:02:00.000-05:00 | 2022-11-17T00:02:00.000-05:00 | Rap | CMG / Interscope | November 17, 2022 | 7.5 | c859766f-b5ac-485c-a122-314a6edc8a79 | Heven Haile | https://pitchfork.com/staff/heven-haile/ | |
Reworking his past material as jazz instrumentals, Bryan Ferry's The Jazz Age is a self-consciously 1920s collection, openly meant to evoke Louis Armstrong, early Count Basie, and the initial mass popularization of the form. | Reworking his past material as jazz instrumentals, Bryan Ferry's The Jazz Age is a self-consciously 1920s collection, openly meant to evoke Louis Armstrong, early Count Basie, and the initial mass popularization of the form. | Bryan Ferry: The Jazz Age | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/17383-the-jazz-age/ | The Jazz Age | Bryan Ferry works steadily, recording, releasing, and (only if necessary, perhaps) touring new albums, even if he remains unable to step out from what was established on earlier work. But then Ferry seemed born to both reinterpret and to look backwards. His solo career started one year after Roxy Music's own debut full length with These Foolish Things, a collection of soul, jazz, and rock'n'roll standards often revisited in utterly surprising ways. By the time of his third solo album Let's Stick Together, Ferry combined yet more covers with reworkings of Roxy's own material just a few years after it had been written and recorded-- his preference for focused contemplation and his particularly male vision of love, lust, and wariness came to the fore.
All told, he's done six albums of covers and revisions over 40 years' time. The Jazz Age is the seventh out of 14 solo efforts total, though Ferry acts as co-producer and general driving force rather than performer. In fact, for the first time since Let's Stick Together, Ferry's own material is the subject of reworking: all selections are his work ranging from Roxy's debut single "Virginia Plain" to "Reason or Rhyme", a song from Ferry's previous solo album Olympia. To a degree, The Jazz Age's roots lie in 1999's As Time Goes By, where Ferry recorded jazz and pop songs predominantly from the 1930s. Five out of The Jazz Age's eight performers reappear from the earlier work along with others such as regular Ferry collaborator, trumpeter Enrico Tomasso. But The Jazz Age, a collection of instrumentals performed by the Bryan Ferry Orchestra, is more self-consciously 1920s, openly meant to evoke Louis Armstrong, early Count Basie, and the initial mass popularization of jazz.
If there's an inescapable element of perverseness about The Jazz Age, it's the sense of flattening a life's work into pastiche, down to the fact that the album is mixed and produced in non-hi-fi mono, something definitely not the case on As Time Goes By. It doesn't matter whether the source material is a frenetic explosion like "Do the Strand", a clipped mood piece like "Love is the Drug" or "Don't Stop the Dance", or contemplative songs like "Avalon". The resultant energetic but never too disruptive presentation turns everything into something which sounds like it could be coming out of the Victrola at a party at "Downton Abbey" by the time the show hits season five. The album is hard to immediately see as anything but a studied curio by a famous name deliberately out of sync with nearly everything around it, unless one wants to talk about Hugh Laurie's tribute to New Orleans and the blues.
The internal trick of The Jazz Age is that Ferry's orchestra also deftly avoids simply sounding one-note despite the uniform presentation and ambience. At points the arrangements are almost specific responses to the originals. "The Bogus Man" here shrinks from 10 to two minutes long, hinting at second line comedy before the funeral's actually been completed, while "I Thought", a slow, stately number from 2002's Frantic, and his utterly poised 1985 hit "Slave to Love" both become peppy dance numbers. But whatever prompted the various reinterpretations, surprises turn up one by one, almost always enjoyably so. "Avalon” kicks off with a rhythmic strut that's far more New Orleans than Newcastle, the crystalline theatricality of "Reason or Rhyme" mutates into a one-room-over and slightly boozy speakeasy swing, and "Virginia Plain"'s dramatic pauses showcase notably friendlier sounding solos.
Meanwhile, a telling break from Ferry's other work lies in the total absence of his most famous calling card-- his voice, with it his lyrical concerns and image. If anyone is the lead "voice" throughout it would be Tomasso or saxophonists Alan Barnes and Richard White, whose various solo turns on a number of songs take the place of the singing. As a result, it becomes a strangely affecting blend-- Ferry is here almost by implication, a certain unavoidably melancholic sigh that emerges in hints in the arrangements, even at their merriest.
The end result is actually the most atypical Ferry album of them all. It's something that seemed-- only after it was announced-- obvious that he would do but never actually did. It's also something he may never do again. It may not be an extreme reworking of song forms or a sudden return to action, perhaps simply another chapter in the various indulgences he enjoys, but in numerous ways, The Jazz Age is Ferry's most radical work yet. | 2013-02-07T01:00:01.000-05:00 | 2013-02-07T01:00:01.000-05:00 | Electronic / Rock | BMG | February 7, 2013 | 7.4 | c85c2eb2-a3f0-4b07-8468-7b59197f0657 | Ned Raggett | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ned-raggett/ | null |
After touring with Harry Styles, the Nashville songwriter returns with another showcase for her clear, expressive voice and exquisite sense of melody. | After touring with Harry Styles, the Nashville songwriter returns with another showcase for her clear, expressive voice and exquisite sense of melody. | Madi Diaz: Weird Faith | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/madi-diaz-weird-faith/ | Weird Faith | Falling in love can be beautiful, but isn’t it kind of absurd and mortifying, too? This paradox is at the heart of Weird Faith, the new album from Nashville singer and songwriter Madi Diaz. She approaches it with an impeccable sense of melody and a series of potent questions, the kind that run like a third rail underneath a new relationship’s honeymoon phase (and, often, its decline): “Do you think this could ruin your life?” “How well do you wanna get to know me?” “Is it hard to love me?”
Diaz got her biggest break as a solo artist a couple years ago, after releasing 2021’s stellar History of a Feeling. But her resume runs much deeper: A Berklee dropout, she moved to Nashville, then L.A., then back to Nashville to work as a songwriter, contributing to tracks for artists like Kesha and Little Big Town and writing music for soundtracks and commercials. All the while, she was writing and recording solo albums that struggled to find their footing. History of a Feeling kickstarted a dramatic shift in her trajectory. That record documented the end of a long-term relationship, which coincided with the start of her ex-partner’s gender transition—a complex, nuanced denouement that she captured in perceptive, charged, and occasionally excruciating folk-tinged indie-rock songs. From there, things took off: her first solo tour in almost a decade, TV bookings, and tours opening for indie icons (Waxahatchee, Angel Olsen) and even a pop megastar (Harry Styles, whose touring band she briefly joined).
Though Diaz has played for stadium-sized crowds, Weird Faith is not a record of bright lights and pyrotechnics, but a document of particular, personal idiosyncrasies—like a domestic fantasy that ends with death on the swooning “Kiss the Wall,” or the way she turns every teenager’s favorite lewd party game into an ode to complicated coexistence on “KFM.” Her lyrics dig into details, zeroing into some particularly strange moments in relationships: the weirdness of continually running into your partner’s ex (“Girlfriend”); the painful middle of a slowly fizzling romance (“For Months Now”). Diaz doesn’t veer much from the straightforward production that marked History of a Feeling, but she knows how to add layers of sound to inject a little catharsis, like the brief, fuzzy squall in “Kiss the Wall” or the kaleidoscopic overlay of voices towards the end of “God Person.”
Diaz’s voice is resonant and emotionally rich—sometimes pleading, sometimes dejected, sometimes a gentle whisper and occasionally a powerful belt—and her ear for melody is exquisite, filling her songs with crisp, memorable hooks. This combination helps make even her broadest gestures, like the waltzing breakup ballad “Don’t Do Me Good,” a duet with Kacey Musgraves, feel lived-in but not overworked. This is particularly true of the moving title track, cowritten with Americana stalwart Lori McKenna. It’s an ode to continuing to believe—not just through the awkward beginning of love but also through the trials and heartbreak that can follow—that vulnerability is worth the risk. This theme could land Diaz in Hallmark-card territory, but the song’s intimacy and restraint—just Diaz’s warm and weary voice and an acoustic guitar—make it instead feel like a gentle pep talk from an older sister. Hoping for love after getting burned a few times can be absurd and mortifying in its own way; here, Diaz makes a compelling case for it anyway. | 2024-02-12T00:01:00.000-05:00 | 2024-02-12T00:01:00.000-05:00 | Folk/Country | Anti- | February 12, 2024 | 7.3 | c8607fec-e8a7-4252-93cb-c3db4dd06581 | Marissa Lorusso | https://pitchfork.com/staff/marissa-lorusso/ | |
Konx-om-Pax is the project of electronic musician Tom Scholefield. His second LP Caramel fondly invokes nostalgia for the rave era, playing like the faded tracers and seared after-images that remain. | Konx-om-Pax is the project of electronic musician Tom Scholefield. His second LP Caramel fondly invokes nostalgia for the rave era, playing like the faded tracers and seared after-images that remain. | Konx-om-Pax: Caramel | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22087-caramel/ | Caramel | There’s no exact English translation for the Greek phrase Κόγξ ὀμ πὰξ, though it has been repurposed by English occultist Aleister Crowley and by Italian composer-mystic Giacinto Scelsi. “Light in extension” or “Light rushing out in a single ray” is the rough translation of Konx-om-Pax, which is also the handle for animator, graphic designer and electronic music maker Tom Scholefield. Scholefield’s visuals have informed many artists over the years, be they as cover art for Oneohtrix Point Never and Rustie, videos for Mogwai and Hudson Mohawke, or as part of Lone’s live show.
His debut album Regional Surrealism was for the most part slow and downcast, but his four-years-in-the-making follow-up Caramel embodies the project name by embracing that notion of “light” in all its manifold meanings. As he recently stated in an interview, “this record was almost a therapy…an attempt to be aggressively positive.” It’s also about the flashing lights of the bygone rave era, and much like Jamie xx, Special Request, Lone et al., Scholefield approached his music as an homage and idealization of an era that ended well before he could experience it. As he admits in the same interview: “[It’s] kind of an imaginary nostalgia because I was just a kid at the time.”
That fantasia of rave’s lights and strobes informs Caramel. Like these aforementioned acts, it's not so much about replicating those sounds—much less the ferocious drum programming—but rather the faded tracers and cornea-seared after images that remain. So while there are beats and thumps embedded in Konx-om-Pax’s tracks, they are secondary to the neon hues that wiggle atop them, bright as gummy worms. That sense of distance can make a tape-hiss heavy track like “Video Club” sound like dance music going chillwave, its infomercial-style melody and laser sounds a bit too on-the-nose. But on “Perc Rave,” Scholefield changes up that strategy, dropping a lashing rhythm that would scan as furious, if it didn’t sound like it was emitted by a drum machine left by the side of the road to sputter.
Throughout, Konx-om-Pax toggles between the bliss of dance music and the visceral surge of noise, suggesting he’s taken the lessons of both Lone and Mogwai to heart. Some tracks even embrace that dichotomy: the first half of “Oren’s Theme” is a woozy loop of “ooo baby” as all manner of Aphex chimes blip about it. But just as it’s about to turn whimsical, belches of great noise overtake it, allowing just enough of those chimes back in to strike a balance. “Mega Glacial” suggests the Fairlights, Mallets and Bamboo mix as filtered through Boards of Canada’s murky melodicism.
Too often, the album’s melodies suggest end credits, so that you might mistake the album winding down even at the midway point. And sometimes when the drums rise in the mix, it’s not to move your body but more to remind you of the underlying theme, distracting from the other textures. But for all of the album’s moments of luminous noise and rave earmarks, Caramel is at its best in its quieter moments, with “At the Lake” and “Rainbow Bounce” layering arpeggiated melodies until they shimmer like oil on a puddle. It’s fitting that its most gorgeous track is entitled “Radiance.” Beatless but gridded by what sounds like gently stroked rebar, Scholefield layers these blurry sounds carefully, the effect not unlike sunrise after a rave has wound down, when dawn light imbues everything with its glow. | 2016-07-18T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-07-18T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Planet Mu | July 18, 2016 | 7.4 | c8642740-c615-4c41-a728-c25123e70060 | Andy Beta | https://pitchfork.com/staff/andy-beta/ | null |
On Keep on Your Mean Side and No Wow, the Kills managed to take a classic rock template and turn it into something more modern and audibly dangerous; here, the band pushes those edges even further. | On Keep on Your Mean Side and No Wow, the Kills managed to take a classic rock template and turn it into something more modern and audibly dangerous; here, the band pushes those edges even further. | The Kills: Midnight Boom | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/11302-midnight-boom/ | Midnight Boom | Stylish, sexy, and simple, the nouveau-garage clatter of the Kills has magnificently sat on a line between base and brilliant. They've traded in a bluesy, overdriven sleaze that's served many a duo well in recent years, blurring the edges between their tandem vocals, staccato guitars, and vintage drum machines. On albums such as Keep on Your Mean Side (2003) and No Wow (2005), they managed to take a classic rock template and turn it into something more modern and audibly dangerous. Midnight Boom pushes those edges even further, and has its own kind of swagger that stands apart from anything they've done so far. Despite hammering on its titular phrase like it's a lip gloss for sale, opener "U.R.A. Fever" manages to sound like an XTRMNTR outtake that substitutes seduction for violence, with a slinky backbeat made from equal parts purring bass and jarring phone noise.
Many Kills reviews suggest romance in between the two principals-- Alison "VV" Mosshart and Jamie "Hotel" Hince; the masterfully sustained tension of their previous music practically invited the guesswork. But in comparison, Midnight Boom is limp. The album's beat-heavy inclinations are supposedly inspired by playground chants (specifically a film documentary called Pizza Pizza Daddio), which is easy to pick out from handclaps and martial drumbeats that run through almost every track here. But that same inspiration extends to the sing-song vocal melodies, and much of the lyrics. Now, lyrically, the Kills never had to do any heavy lifting; so long as the words sounded vaguely sexy and/or badass, they fit perfectly. However, the tawdry cheerleader chanting of "Cheap and Cheerful" quickly move past intriguing to inane, and the wordless chorus of "Getting Down" recalls all the inspiration and verve of the Greg Kihn Band. They just don't write 'em like that anymore, and with good reason.
The saving grace of Midnight Boom is the Kills' desire to break these songs open and see how they work, what makes them tick. The beat-first approach is just window dressing on tracks like "Cheap and Cheerful" (despite some production help from Armani XXXchange of Spank Rock; maybe the remix will fare better), but others like "Tape Song" jump from coy and insinuating to the album's most blistering chorus. Throughout, Mosshart's vocals are fuller and reflect more character than before. On one of the best rock songs I've heard so far this year, "Last Day of Magic" trades the stiff pinball plink of its verses with a tease towards catharsis on a tantalizing two-chord chorus that gets a little longer with each return, until it's finally revealed unmolested as the song's melodic anchor in maybe the last half-minute. By the time you get the full impression of the song, it's over. It's a great trick of rearranging that pulls back the curtain dramatically, but nearly every other song on Midnight Boom seems to be waiting for this kind of moment, losing it to a pile on the cutting-room floor. | 2008-03-20T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2008-03-20T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Domino | March 20, 2008 | 6.8 | c877598f-9348-4faf-a75e-e27271f8df44 | Jason Crock | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jason-crock/ | null |
Mourning in America and Dreaming in Color is where the political agitation of The Undisputed Truth and the social humanism of Us intersect, and there's no vague platitudes or defeatist cynicism here. Ali is a man with a purpose and zero interest in holding back. | Mourning in America and Dreaming in Color is where the political agitation of The Undisputed Truth and the social humanism of Us intersect, and there's no vague platitudes or defeatist cynicism here. Ali is a man with a purpose and zero interest in holding back. | Brother Ali: Mourning in America and Dreaming in Color | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/16941-brother-ali-mourning-in-america-and-dreaming-in-color/ | Mourning in America and Dreaming in Color | When it comes to giving a fuck, Brother Ali just doesn't give a fuck. He will run up in foreclosed houses in North Minneapolis with a crew of neighborhood poverty-fighting activists and end up in the back of a squad car for it. He'll antagonize his tour sponsors when they get cold feet about his lyrics, like in 2007 when Verizon cut off their endorsement in the wake of "Uncle Sam Goddamn". And when given the opportunity to hide behind somebody else's "post-racial" melting-pot narrative that portrays him as some kind of cultural outsider ("the blind albino Muslim rapper!"), he publicly owns up to his place of white privilege, keeping full recognition of the advantages he was given even as he holds pride in adhering to the tenets of what's still treated in America as a minority faith. He has all the work ethic and self-respect of someone who doesn't worry about what other people think, and all the community awareness and sense of justice of someone who can't picture anything more important than what other people think.
As much as he's solidified his place in the indie rap game, Ali always seems like he's in the process of working out new things-- how to best balance out his roles as an artist and an activist, how to reflect on his past and learn from his mistakes and conflicts, and how to translate each new phase of his life and his experiences into work that maintains the precarious balance between being imposing and being humble. Mourning in America and Dreaming in Color is where the political agitation of The Undisputed Truth and the social humanism of Us intersect, and there's no vague platitudes or defeatist cynicism here. Ali is a man with a purpose and zero interest in holding back, someone so attuned to what it takes to move a crowd with his voice that he trusts in its power to let some complication and nuance support all the confrontational honesty.
Which is a good thing, because when Mourning in America gets political, at least in the early goings, there's not much in it to make well-meaning liberals feel better about themselves. The America that frustrates Ali is one that still has something to pull for, as he puts it in the Cornel West-featuring leadoff track "Letter to My Countrymen". With the idea that it's hard to want to better a country you're too defeated to see the good in, he sees hope in the potential of its citizenry from the ground up-- "It's home, so we better make the best of it/ I wanna make this country what it says it is". That it isn't what it says it is gets broken down severely in "Mourning in America", taking off from the familiar rhetorical device of contrasting first-world militarization and guerilla insurgency-- "terrorism is the war of the poor" and "warfare's the terrorism of the rich"-- to also get down to the essence of how that mindset doesn't even need another country's involvement, and how it eats America at the core with shoot-first police and for-profit prisons. And just as he stands looking at American society as someone who's in a position to benefit from its injustice but doesn't want to, he does the same with pop music for "Won More Hit", breaking down the music industry's entrenched exploitation of black artists and tearing at it from the inside. These are the words of someone who wants himself and his country to be exceptional and powerful and successful without somebody else needing to suffer to make that happen-- any other victory would be pyrrhic.
Of course, there's that something in Ali's voice that makes being preached to feel rousing instead of tedious. He builds verses that, while rich with wordplay, never let cleverness get in the way of clarity. Not that he doesn't get clever-- the bait-and-switch jokes of "Need a Knot" are a bit corny but sly nonetheless, even when the clean-cut punchlines to the narratives about how he used to "move white" or "chop green" play their hands. And there's always the notion he practices-- that making every word and sentiment crystal clear not only gets the message across but the raspy yet booming impact of his flow too. So when he uses that voice and that lyrical bluntness to lay his personal life bare, it puts a resounding weight behind it, one that feels honest to a fault. Detailing how he had to cope with a grueling, crew-fracturing tour itinerary upended by his father's suicide and the death of close friend/fellow Minneapolis rap mainstay Michael "Eyedea" Larsen in "Stop the Press" turns what could have been straightforward autobio into a clash between vulnerability and willpower. And "All You Need", where he has to address his neglectful ex-wife and tell his son why his mother isn't around anymore, does a grown-man job of placing the blame where it stands but makes sure to keep empathy in the picture: "I know you wonder why your mother does the things that she do/ Well, it's not 'cause she doesn't love you/ It's because she grew up in something they call 'foster care'..."
Mourning in America and Dreaming in Color is more of a refinement than a deviation for Brother Ali, even though there's one prominent change that could set off questions-- the departure of longtime producer ANT, who was unavailable while on tour with Atmosphere. Taking his place for full production duties is Seattle's Jake One, who maintains the Rhymesayers family connection and should have all the cred he needs solely on the back of White Van Music collaboration "The Truth". That precedent's met well on this slate of beats-- not too distant from the vibrant soul of Us, but a bit more upfront and varied, versatile conceptually (the pseudo-trap of "Need a Knot") and characteristically (the seething heavy funk of obligatory step-to-this-mic-and-get-fucked-up cut "Say Amen"). And Ali adjusts his flow and cadence accordingly-- he flips more variations on his delivery than any of his previous releases, and any illusions that he's one-dimensional in any respect are finally and fully eliminated on this album. That doesn't just go for his voice or his lyrics or his subject matter; it feels true to the man himself. If that means working out how much of his politics are personal and vice-versa, so be it. He contains multitudes. | 2012-09-19T02:00:03.000-04:00 | 2012-09-19T02:00:03.000-04:00 | Rap | Rhymesayers/Warner | September 19, 2012 | 7.9 | c878ee4d-6136-4070-a80e-d6d695d9de69 | Nate Patrin | https://pitchfork.com/staff/nate-patrin/ | null |
Ann Arbor producer follows two well-received instrumental albums with a set dominated by guest MCs, including contributions from Beans, Wildchild, and Guilty Simpson. | Ann Arbor producer follows two well-received instrumental albums with a set dominated by guest MCs, including contributions from Beans, Wildchild, and Guilty Simpson. | Dabrye: Two/Three | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/9203-twothree/ | Two/Three | Tadd Mullinix (aka Dabrye) is a multi-monikered, hip-hop-hungry, electro-leaning music producer. You know, like Scott Herren (aka Prefuse 73). But since Prefuse crashed hard with the guest-ridden debacle Surrounded By Silence last year, there's now room for a "next Prefuse," whether anybody wants one or not. When I saw Dabrye open for Prefuse back in 2003, most of his solo set was low-key and passable. Then, near the end, he started to lace his synth-heavy, moon-boot beats with bits and pieces of sampled raps, at which point the crowd went nuts (relatively), nodding their heads with a measured amount of intensity. Now, Dabrye is running with that energy, following up his two nice enough instrumental albums with Two/Three, which-- like Surrounded-- features many real-life hip-hop vocalists. And-- like Surrounded-- the outcome isn't nearly as ecstatic as one would hope.
The producer's singular Timbaland-meets-the flipside of Low rumble is more focused and intricate than ever, but his underground MC guests continually falter with convoluted rhymes that rust up Dabrye's menacing robot bounce. At the jump, when Lootpack alum Wildchild proclaims "It's time to take a stand...speak for those who don't have a chance to speak," he's ostensibly talking about (to?) the "youth," but his anti-flow quickly turns into a blithering mess when coupled with Dabrye's tricky undulations. Then there's Kadence, who spends 96 percent of his waking life practicing the "furrowed brow" in the mirror while reading No Logo and taking notes. Those notes eventually turn into raps like: "I'm gonna keep spittin' this shit until people internalize it/ It's all a matter of what you subjectively circumscribe to/ Envisioned through designer sunglasses you hide behind at night/ Signifier of a colonized mind." Signifier of a polite mind that's trying to hide closed eyes is more like it (i.e., dude is an instant drowzer). "Can a rapper be socio-philosophical and still affect y'all, is it possible?" he whines on "Encoded Flow", as if it's our fault he's not Chuck D. And then Beans, who is contractually obligated to appear on every indie-rap producer's "MC" record through 2017, shows up and does his little non-sequitur tinkle, purposely missing the bowl and thinking it's really cool. It's not.
Hope comes from the unexpected talents of Detroit's Guilty Simpson, a favorite of the late Jay Dee. Simpson isn't a prodigy and his verses are being graded on a curve against the rest of album's bullshit bunch, but still, there's a sense of release when he bounds onto "Special" with a sly gangster lean: "I'm tired of being humble/ From here on out I'm brash/ Hot dog with extra flash." As Dabrye's creepy crawler bass bubbles and scatters, the MC shows what Two/Three could be if the rappers were chosen based on entertainment value rather than how hard they're trying to save rap with big words. There's a natural cohesion between the producer's wicked slithers and brutish barbs like "You ever seen a hundred crooks on the grind that'll put it through your window when you look through your blinds?" Here's hoping Simpson and Dabrye get to hook up again in the future.
The record's last track, "Game Over", is another reason to believe in Dabrye's futuristic vision. The rhymes from Motown heavies Jay Dee and Phat Kat are generally inane ("Who keeps the fuse lit?/ New shit!") but the hometown bully vibe-- and the track's Dilla-inspired sparse drag-- is appealing. The beat, a grittier twist of Dabrye's own "This Is Where I Came In" from 2002's Instrmntl, could be the mind-tweaker's finest hip-hop moment yet, with Martian pulses, sinister chords and pitch-bending cartoon noises morphing into something funky and vicious. If he can stay away from wordy know-it-alls hell-bent on disrupting his groove, Dabrye has the potential to make an album as gripping as Prefuse's One Word Extinguisher. As for now, all we can do is wait on an instrumental version of Two/Three...and an enterprising fan to mash it with rhymes worthy of its diabolical creep. | 2006-07-18T02:00:04.000-04:00 | 2006-07-18T02:00:04.000-04:00 | Rap | Ghostly International | July 18, 2006 | 5.2 | c881d135-511c-4446-9f8c-f0dc70f58f76 | Ryan Dombal | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ryan-dombal/ | null |
Buoyed by Afrobeats producer Sarz’ nostalgic, ’80s-influenced production, the Nigerian-born, London-based singer turns his attention to romance, exploring a gentler side of his voice. | Buoyed by Afrobeats producer Sarz’ nostalgic, ’80s-influenced production, the Nigerian-born, London-based singer turns his attention to romance, exploring a gentler side of his voice. | Sarz / Obongjayar: Sweetness EP | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/sarz-obongjayar-sweetness-ep/ | Sweetness EP | On last year’s soul-baring Which Way Is Forward?, Obongjayar brought a light touch to weighty subjects like racism, war, and the desperation of making ends meet. One of the most striking things about that record is how the Nigerian-born, London-based artist, aka Steven Umoh, manages to express such lofty ideas with such graceful economy. He has a poetic ear—“The night had us drinking soap/To wash off the ugly,” he sings on “Frens”—and an angelic voice, husky and sweet.
But Sweetness, a four-track EP with Afrobeats producer Sarz, whose credits include records with WizKid, Drake, and Skepta, shows a different side of the singer. The most immediate difference is thematic: In place of songs about self-knowledge and social ills, Obongjayar turns his attention to romance. He rhapsodizes about a lover on the title track, his voice slipping into falsetto as he sings, “Taste like strawberry, mango, pineapple juice,” tapping into the age-old conceit of comparing an object of affection with inanimate objects. On “Gone Girl,” he bemoans the growing distance between himself and his partner: “Baby, lately when I hold you, you’re/Missing, I wish you were here,” he sings mournfully, before slipping into a ghostly chorus whose repetition of the word “zombie” faintly echoes Fela Kuti’s incendiary classic.
But the more important changes are stylistic. Obongjayar’s husky voice has mellowed, developing a whispery flourish. Perhaps that’s a reflection of his newfound vulnerability, or perhaps it’s a response to Sarz’ influence. On previous records, Obongjayar favored minimalist production that made voice the center of attention. But Sarz’ beats, while smooth, are more muscular. In taking over the console, Sarz has allowed Obongjayar to stretch out and explore the nuances of his voice.
The mood is surprisingly nostalgic. The first three songs borrow heavily from ’80s R&B. “Sweetness” is built around chiming keys and staccato synth bass; the moodier “Gone Girl” loops Obongjayar’s falsetto around a slow yet driving 4/4 beat; “If You Say” sounds inspired by early Sade. But the closing “Nobody” breaks from the template. Sarz’ crisp percussion returns to the fore, balancing dembow syncopations with a steady house groove. The change in style seems to have had a liberating effect on Obongjayar, who rises to the occasion with some of his most playful verses on the record, lyrically (“Body like sin/She put it on me/She make an angel catch a felony”) but also tonally, as he dances around the spaces in the beats. If Sweetness’ first three tracks sent Obongjayar and Sarz looking to the past for inspiration, on “Nobody” they are doing what both do best: mapping out a new musical future.
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-08-17T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2021-08-13T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B / Rap / Global | Metallic Music/1789 | August 17, 2021 | 7.4 | c886fbce-9dfa-4974-a55f-67c64e812b01 | Otolorin Olabode | https://pitchfork.com/staff/otolorin-olabode/ | |
This intimate, conversational EP from East London R&B producer/singer Azekel isn't reinventing the wheel. But his attention to detail is rare, and results in a record that feels impulsive, risky, and polished all at the same time. | This intimate, conversational EP from East London R&B producer/singer Azekel isn't reinventing the wheel. But his attention to detail is rare, and results in a record that feels impulsive, risky, and polished all at the same time. | Azekel: Raw, Vol. 1 | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/20686-raw-vol-1/ | Raw, Vol. 1 | The soulful, electronic R&B that Azekel makes has been undergoing a renaissance in the last few years. With Raw, Vol. 1, however, the self-produced singer winnows out a slice of this familiar territory and advances it with a distinctly British sensibility. Not only is Azekel doing all the singing, songwriting, production, engineering, and mastering on Raw, but standout singles like bass-heavy "Chronophobia" and "Mad About the Boy" suggest that there is a quintessentially London R&B sound, and that this, more specifically, is it.
The EP has an intimate, conversational atmosphere. Production flourishes peek out from every corner of the mix, from the purposeful, jolting radio fuzz on early single "New Romance" to the errant sirens and clips of presumably real DJs talking about Azekel on "Late Intro". Interludes like this make the EP sound like a late-night mood mix on the BBC—all vaporous voices and distant chatter over smooth, immersive ambience, crafted to sound incidental.
Raw Vol. 1 has a pretty solid narrative arc for an EP—from roiling statement singles like "Chronophobia" to the reflective closer "Sold My Love". Lyrically, however, Raw favors the oblique, with Azekel singing ingratiating lines ("I've been watching you watch me"; "Sweet love, I've paid my dues") that occasionally feel redundant. The downtempo soul of "Holy Matrimony" provides the best example of the vocal styling that sets Azekel apart: the lilting falsetto, the tremolo, the manifold ways his voice molds and shapeshifts to underscore the production, rather than the other way around.
There is room in this spacious music for small, experimental touches that don't announce themselves—from the harmonious, intergalactic fade out on "Holy Matrimony" to the womping bassline on "Chronophobia", which is later underscored by a beat that sounds like someone clicking their tongue. It's a unique touch that's characteristic of Raw, Vol. 1—Azekel isn't reinventing the wheel, but his attention to detail results in something rare: a record that feels impulsive, risky, and polished all at the same time. | 2015-08-12T02:00:04.000-04:00 | 2015-08-12T02:00:04.000-04:00 | Electronic | Thunderlightning | August 12, 2015 | 6.2 | c8914502-5e71-4505-89d0-788bca23df2e | Molly Beauchemin | https://pitchfork.com/staff/molly-beauchemin/ | null |
Alice Coltrane’s newly reissued Lord of Lords capped off a trio of richly orchestral albums in the early ’70s. It is a slow-building, cosmic, unnerving throbbing organism of sound. | Alice Coltrane’s newly reissued Lord of Lords capped off a trio of richly orchestral albums in the early ’70s. It is a slow-building, cosmic, unnerving throbbing organism of sound. | Alice Coltrane: Lord of Lords | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/alice-coltrane-lord-of-lords/ | Lord of Lords | Most artists who devote themselves even fleetingly to religious music don’t do it well enough to earn many converts. Dave Brubeck’s oratorios have nothing on “Blue Rondo à la Turk” and Bob Dylan’s evangelical era is overshadowed by his earlier work. But Alice Coltrane’s devotional music—particularly World Spirituality Classics 1: The Ecstatic Music of Alice Coltrane Turiyasangitananda, released last year, a decade after her death—now earns more plaudits than the string of albums she recorded in quick succession for the Impulse! label in the late 1960s and early ’70s, just before she foreswore secular life, moved to California and established an ashram in the Santa Monica Mountains.
The last of those albums, 1972’s Lord of Lords, is now being reissued on vinyl by Superior Viaduct and it may be the most ecstatic record she made. The music—unnerving, slow-building, a throbbing organism of sound—is cosmically cinematic. Lord of Lords was the final and most fully realized installment in a trio of albums—the others are 1971’s Universal Consciousness and 1972’s World Galaxy—that put Coltrane’s jagged orchestral arrangements alongside her dark, rumbling piano, arpeggiated harp, and Wurlitzer organ. (Bassist Charlie Haden and drummer Ben Riley are relegated to the sidelines.) These works represent a radical turn away from Coltrane’s previous records, which for the most part operated very much in line—stylistically and spiritually—with the kind of modal, swing-oriented jazz popularized by her husband and occasional bandmate, John, who died in 1967.
It isn’t fair to Alice’s work to speculate as to whether she was furthering John Coltrane’s legacy with Lord of Lords. None of the stuff John did in his brief but productive life suggests that he would have gone in this direction—and we’ll never know for sure. Density, however, was something he seemed to think a lot about toward the end of his life—witness The Olatunji Concert—and Lord of Lords is nothing if not dense. That’s mostly because the orchestra—at 25 instruments strong, way larger than any string group she’d recorded with before—exists to provide melody as much as texture. The violins, violas, and cellos work in unison, putting forth lines that smuggle in gospel phrasing, like a Duke Ellington composition but more abstract.
This album is less deliberately expressive than the stuff Coltrane had already recorded, including the blues-drenched “Turiya and Ramakrishna,” from her 1970 album Ptah, the El Daoud, and “Gospel Trane,” from her 1968 solo debut. Lord of Lords consists of three searching, original compositions alongside two covers: “Going Home,” the spiritual based on a section of Dvorak’s “New World” Symphony, and “Excerpts From the Firebird,” which incorporates some of the melodies from Stravinsky’s suite. In the liner notes, Coltrane writes of “receiving a visitation from the great master composer,” nearly a year after his death in 1971. In the vision, Coltrane recalls, Stravinsky brought her a vial of clear liquid, which she drank. “Divine instruction,” Coltrane writes, “has been given to me throughout the entire arranging of this music.”
By the time she made Lord of Lords, Coltrane was moving away from jazz and heading toward a kind of spiritual music that used drones and chanting and lots of organ. She had recently traveled to India with her guru, Swami Satchidananda, and she was on her way to becoming a full-blown swamini herself. But she never entirely abandoned her roots. Coltrane was reared on gospel music in Detroit churches and mentored for a time by Bud Powell—and on Lord of Lords you can hear the vestiges of bebop in her fleet-fingered organ improvisations. Whether or not Coltrane’s influence extends into modern jazz, however, is harder to discern. Her music was, philosophically speaking, focused on the universality of being—a “totality concept,” as she called it—but it didn’t actually sound all that universal. Lord of Lords is an especially stark example of the single-mindedness—the oneness—of Coltrane’s vision. | 2018-06-26T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-06-26T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Jazz / Experimental | Superior Viaduct | June 26, 2018 | 8 | c8941075-f308-43f7-a482-031a93bd0931 | Matthew Kassel | https://pitchfork.com/staff/matthew-kassel/ | |
The full-length solo debut from the former Crystal Castles singer is a dark, extreme pop record about abuse, power, and regaining control. | The full-length solo debut from the former Crystal Castles singer is a dark, extreme pop record about abuse, power, and regaining control. | Alice Glass: Prey//IV | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/alice-glass-preyiv/ | Prey//IV | Recovery doesn’t follow a predefined path. For survivors of domestic violence and abuse, there can be an expectation to play the perfect victim: to heal quickly and quietly, to sublimate their own personality into a model of strength, resilience, and grace. For Alice Glass—who left Crystal Castles in 2014 and in 2017 issued a statement alleging abuse at the hands of her former bandmate Ethan Kath—the process of recovery is manifested through vivid depictions of body horror, resentment, and revenge. Glass uses her solo work to enact violent fantasies over glitchy synthesizers and drum loops, painting a bleak and bloody picture of womanhood. In other words, as she puts it on her debut solo album PREY//IV, “Watch the hunter be the hunted.”
PREY//IV is Glass’ full-length follow-up to 2017’s eponymous EP, which communicated the panic and anxiety of a violent partnership through rushed, pitched-up squeals and the mechanical lurch of muscular basslines. Now, her words have a clearer target. Power, in its many permutations, burns at the core of the record. She often twists her perpetrator’s words against him, a perverse form of exposure therapy: “You’re not worth believing,” she mews on the shuddering “Pinned Beneath Limbs.” She returns to that approach, emboldened, on “Fair Game,” a terrifying highlight where Glass takes on the persona of her abuser. “I’m just trying to help you,” she sneers flatly, before twisting the knife: “You’re insane.”
Glass examines all sides of her own survival, from chilling memories of her abuse to nuanced excavations of her murky subconscious, rendering the contradictory desires born from cruelty. Glass plays up the deviant nature of dominance and submission on “Everybody Else,” sounding a bit like a haunted doll covering “I’m a Slave 4 U” as she sings about being tied up and losing control. During a spoken word passage on “The Hunted,” she stands over her captor, savoring their role reversal: “Now, when you’re suffering/I’ll smile.” PREY//IV is also a reflection of the ways she’s turned her abuse inwards, featuring images of self-harm scattered throughout: “Did you forget my own knife could cut me?” she sings on “Baby Teeth.” Just because she’s escaped doesn’t mean she’s no longer hurting.
As on her EP and recent one-off singles, Glass collaborated on these brooding and explosive songs with producer Jupiter Keyes, formerly of noise rockers HEALTH, and leans more heavily on beat drops and blown-out basslines than its predecessor. Glass spent the years following the release of her EP participating in a growing community of alternative ravers through Los Angeles club nights like HEAV3N and remote events like Club Quarantine, where she befriended producers like Dorian Electra and SOPHIE. Her sound has moved with her toward the dancefloor: “Baby Teeth” evokes the dark thump of Lady Gaga’s “Poker Face”; “Pinned Beneath Limbs” sounds like a SOPHIE deep cut via the tremor of the industrial punk of a Posh Isolation record.
Like her avant-pop contemporaries, Glass sees pop as a genre of extremes—whether that’s bubblegum cheerleader chants (“Love Is Violence”) or breakbeats that reverberate like they’re meant to break your speakers (“Witch Hunt”). But she incorporates spookier sounds to match her grisly subject matter—a toy piano on “Everybody Else,” a growling wild animal on “The Hunted,” crackling static at the opening of “Fair Game.” Glass’ voice adds an acrid putrefaction to her pop. She’s called early riot grrrl singers an inspiration, and her snotty screams on “Suffer and Swallow” and “Love Is Violence” echo Kathleen Hanna’s Valley Girl venom. At the same time, she also calls voice actor E.G. Daily, who played Tommy Pickles in Rugrats, one of her favorite singers, and uses little coos as a foil to her jagged edges.
On PREY//IV, Glass finds a voice that was silenced and distorted by abuse and manipulation; if anything, her first solo full-length can feel overwhelming, boiling over with so many vocal and musical experiments that don’t always cohere. Rather than sever her ties to her former band, she frames the record as a reclamation of her art from a cycle of abuse. The Roman numeral “IV” in the title is a reference to her previous band’s trilogy of albums, a gesture to show how she views the record in conversation with her work in Crystal Castles, rather than a rebirth; it’s only natural that there’s lingering trauma in such continuity. PREY//IV opens and ends with wordless incantations over windswept synths, like a cold front blowing in. The rest of the album, then, is the vicious storm—unpredictable, unruly, and destructive to everyone in its path, even its creator. | 2022-02-23T00:00:00.000-05:00 | 2022-02-23T00:00:00.000-05:00 | Electronic | Eating Glass | February 23, 2022 | 6.9 | c8a08f3a-18ec-452f-a15b-92be62ebcdd5 | Arielle Gordon | https://pitchfork.com/staff/arielle-gordon/ | |
Jeff Tweedy's minimal production lets Richard Thompson's strengths shine on the intimate, thoughtful, complex, and rewarding Still. | Jeff Tweedy's minimal production lets Richard Thompson's strengths shine on the intimate, thoughtful, complex, and rewarding Still. | Richard Thompson: Still | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/20682-still/ | Still | Decades into his career, Richard Thompson remains a perennial critical favorite, favorite of other musicians, and cult hero; his guitar work (hybrid picking, bizarre tuning, and soloing that never feels too self-indulgent) is unparalleled and his songwriting taut, brainy, dry and dark. Still is no departure for Thompson—it's a solid, stark record, expanding on and refining themes that wend their way through his significant oeuvre. But it brings a further depth and resonance to territory that will be familiar to longtime fans, and it's vivid enough to serve as an entry point for those new to his work. For a veteran like Thompson, it's hard to ask for more than that.
Recorded with Wilco's Jeff Tweedy at his Loft Studio in Chicago—Tweedy also contributes backing guitar and vocals on some tracks—Still feels extremely present and immediate. There's no studio frosting; it's like listening to Thompson and his band perform directly in front of you with no other noise or distractions. (Considering the many overwrought production missteps of the Mitchell Froom years of his career, roughly 1986-1996, Thompson has no doubt learned that spare production allows the unique beauty of his guitar work, solos that thread through the songs like copper wire, and the quality of his songwriting to shine.) The folk backbone that Thompson has carried from his initial background with Fairport Convention is still strong and evident on tracks like "She Never Could Resist a Winding Road", and he plays musically with the historical connections between British folk, Appalachian folk, and the blues on "Patty Don't You Put Me Down".
The characters in Thompson's songwriting are always struggling, never satisfied. They squabble, they leave, they ache, they are hollow, they frustrate one another, and they are unbelievably cruel to one another. This makes the occasional moment of tenderness and empathy, when written with honesty, seem less maudlin or manipulative than genuine. "No Peace, No End" is ferocious, all teeth and claws. Much in the tradition of "Al Bowlly's in Heaven" and "Gethsemane", two personal-political classics from Thompson's oeuvre, it's about the scars of war on both the soldier and the world around him. "Broken Doll" uses the incredibly heavy-handed imagery of a doll that can't be mended to describe a woman who has endured unnamed and unspeakable trauma, but as Thompson's male protagonist struggles to love a woman who hurts immensely because she deserves it and does not ask any reward for himself for doing so—material that in less deft hands would cause immediate and permanent eyerolling—he finds a bloody sincerity that makes the song stark, real, and kind.
The gender dynamics of Thompson's songs can arch toward the uncomfortable territory of Troubled Women Toying With Men, or Troubled Women As Romantic And Uncomplicated Objects, but his male protagonists are always presented as just as flawed as his females, and there's always an air of deep self-deprecation. In "All Buttoned Up", a woman refuses to fuck her male partner for reasons unknown, and he's incredibly pissed off about it, but he stays with her —because she's really great otherwise, and he cares about her.
The biggest weak spot on Still is his throwaway goofball song—in the tradition of "Two Left Feet", "My Daddy Is a Mummy", and other such live crowd-pleasers, it's a song about a pirate with the misfortune to actually be named "Long John Silver". "Beatnik Walking", in which Thompson pokes gentle fun at himself and his loyal fanbase (grown-up original hippies and jazz fanatics), is much lighter and more enjoyable, as is "Guitar Heroes", an ode to the artists who shaped Thompson's style and to the love of the instrument itself. One clunker on an album full of gems doesn't drag everything else down, though, and Thompson deserves all our respect—he's been through the major-label wringer, found his place where he can be celebrated as he deserves among his independent fans, and is still making complicated, thoughtful, intricate, resonant music on his own terms many decades deep into his career. | 2015-06-24T02:00:02.000-04:00 | 2015-06-24T02:00:02.000-04:00 | Folk/Country | Fantasy | June 24, 2015 | 7.5 | c8a1c741-f7fe-4c68-84e5-bfa225ca4f7f | JJ Skolnik | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jj-skolnik/ | null |
The prolific Australian psych-rockers deliver a thrash-metal concept album that doesn’t shred hard enough to stave off its overwhelming campiness. | The prolific Australian psych-rockers deliver a thrash-metal concept album that doesn’t shred hard enough to stave off its overwhelming campiness. | King Gizzard & the Lizard Wizard: PetroDragonic Apocalypse; or, Dawn of Eternal Night: An Annihilation of Planet Earth and the Beginning of Merciless Damnation | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/king-gizzard-and-the-lizard-wizard-petrodragonic-apocalypse-or-dawn-of-eternal-night-an-annihilation-of-planet-earth-and-the-beginning-of-merciless-damnation/ | PetroDragonic Apocalypse; or, Dawn of Eternal Night: An Annihilation of Planet Earth and the Beginning of Merciless Damnation | A melodic motif emerges a few minutes into PetroDragonic Apocalypse; or, Dawn of Eternal Night: An Annihilation of Planet Earth and the Beginning of Merciless Damnation, the 24th studio album by the olympically prolific Australian rockers King Gizzard & the Lizard Wizard. A descending lead guitar flits across proggy opener “Motor Spirit” for just a few seconds, like a passing thought, and then, three tracks later, re-emerges as the theme of the more straightforward “Witchcraft.” The band has pulled off this trick before, to extremely fun effect. On their mid-pandemic companion albums K.G. and L.W., a lurching fipple fanfare started things off like the tattered end of thread on a spool and proceeded to spin around for well over an hour, changing color, never breaking. By the middle of the sprawling statement, the riff suggested outlandish associations—vaseline-smeared hammered dulcimer, Bollywood-biting Backstreet Boys—before landing, organically, on the same simple melody where it started.
If K.G. and L.W. are what it sounds like when King Gizzard’s constant-motion-as-muse approach works perfectly, then PetroDragon Apocalypse is the flip side: the odd dud that comes from never letting up. A spiritual continuation of their thrash-dabbling 2019 album Infest the Rat’s Nest, PetroDragon takes their thrash- and speed-metal worship one big step backward: a goofily operatic crash makeover that’s fun for maybe one spin but offers few reasons to revisit. It’s an unfortunately one-note album, even though it technically contains so, so many notes.
Where Infest at least took an earnest stab at paying homage to the band members’ teenage metal heroes, tracing yet another new identity with originality and some grippingly gritty highlights, PetroDragon Apocalypse dive-bombs into outright camp. On “Supercell,” frontman Stu Mackenzie growls out a first verse with several vague allusions to The Wizard of Oz, then delivers a biblical second verse before a call-and-response chorus propelled by a double kick drum coasts through a few times, uninspired. The very next track, “Converge,” does much of the same, with Mackenzie’s vocals once again clinging to various monotones for several measures on end, directing attention to the obligatory falsetto wails and blast beats. All of that happens before “Gila Monster,” the baldly incoherent story’s introduction of the beast and the least serious track of all, in which Mackenzie rhymes “I’m the gila” with “Godzilla guerilla,” among other shards of psychobabble, before the song ends on a boilerplate-y (though still impressive) speed solo.
On the last two tracks, which each stretch for more than nine minutes, King Gizzard finally flex their talent for switching things up and catching you off guard, instead of just brandishing their metal bona fides. “Flamethrower,” the album’s closer, ends by briefly and intriguingly imagining a thrash album that’s both blippy and sinister, but it’s too little, too late for PetroDragon Apocalypse. The whole thing might be the soundtrack to the Star Trek: A Klingon Challenge Interactive VCR Board Game. It sounds like what Buzz McCallister was rocking out to while feeding his tarantula.
Despite its razzle-dazzle, this is the rare King Gizzard release that actually sounds like it was composed as quickly as it was. According to singer and bandleader Stu MacKenzie, the narrative arc of PetroDragon and even the song titles came first; each of the album’s seven songs was then co-written from scratch in a day. “I guess we kind of made the record backwards,” he said, explaining, “It’s about humankind and it’s about planet Earth but it’s also about witches and dragons and shit.” By its very nature, a thrash concept album requires some suspension of intolerance for the overwrought, but give me the ones that go all-in on their concepts over one that makes me feel like I’m supposed to be smirking along. King Gizzard might have copped out this time, but such a misstep has little bearing on whether their next one will hit its mark: Their whole m.o. is to never stay in one place for longer than a blink—and part of that entails motoring through the occasional, inevitable miss. | 2023-06-23T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2023-06-23T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | KGLW | June 23, 2023 | 5.4 | c8acaa11-6540-49ec-a7a6-e055dffe53b0 | Steven Arroyo | https://pitchfork.com/staff/steven-arroyo/ | |
The alt-R&B singer Mila J is Jhené Aiko's sister. Her collection of covers from R&B singers and groups feels perfectly selected, but lacks the sort of personal depth to progress the project somewhere beyond the amusing. | The alt-R&B singer Mila J is Jhené Aiko's sister. Her collection of covers from R&B singers and groups feels perfectly selected, but lacks the sort of personal depth to progress the project somewhere beyond the amusing. | Mila J: COVERGIRL | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21430-covergirl/ | COVERGIRL | The difference between a well-executed cover song and recorded karaoke is all in the details. A truly great cover retains the essence of the original while transforming it. We've seen this done well throughout the years: Aretha Franklin's unmatchable wail on Carole King's "A Natural Woman," Whitney Houston's matter-of-fact depth and gravitas on Dolly Parton's "I Will Always Love You." On her Covers album, Cat Power infused enduring rock songs with melancholic heft, occasionally mutating the source nearly beyond recognition. In every case, great cover artists use another song to pull something intangible out of themselves.
That is a why Mila J’s COVERGIRL never quite hits the mark. The collection of covers from R&B singers and groups feels perfectly selected, but lacks the sort of personal depth to progress the project somewhere beyond the amusing. After years spent collaborating with other artists (Trey Songz, Omarion) and performing under a different stage name, Japallonia, Mila J (born Jamila Akiko Aba Chilombo) returned in 2014 to release her debut EP, M.I.L.A. The collection—featuring a collaborator on nearly every track—was a commendable if slightly forgettable collection of atmospheric tracks.
It's difficult to not draw comparisons to her sister, Jhené Aiko, but a quick listen to M.I.L.A. and COVERGIRL clarifies the differences. Aiko, despite her limited vocal range, has a confidence to her aesthetic: She understands just what kind of music she aims to make and surrounds herself with the right creators to help make it. On M.I.L.A., Chilombo’s tracks drown under the weight of its production and its collaborators, feeling less and less like an introduction to Mila J as the EP progresses.
In some instances, like the cover of Sade's "Sweetest Taboo," the production wraps itself too tightly around the original. In fact, it draws your attention to the more progressive construction of the original: Sade’s "Sweetest Taboo," (and really, the group’s entire catalog) survives and translates to numerous generations because it is so secretly challenging and charismatic and weird. Chilombo's cover, while technically "correct," strips from the ingrained eerie heart of the original, but doesn't replace it with anything else.
Consider another recently released mixtape (Erykah Badu’s But You Caint Use My Phone), which features a number of covers and reworkings of telephone-themed tracks. That record was brilliant and biting, digging deep conceptually to critique and cherish it's inspiration as well as dive into the psyche of Badu. Audiences should want the same from Chilombo. What COVERGIRL tells us most about Chilombo is that she is a music fan. | 2016-01-15T01:00:03.000-05:00 | 2016-01-15T01:00:03.000-05:00 | Pop/R&B | self-released | January 15, 2016 | 6.5 | c8b72d3f-3736-4b9b-9486-5d41b263489c | Britt Julious | https://pitchfork.com/staff/britt-julious/ | null |
Subsets and Splits