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Traxman practically wrote footwork's rulebook over the last three decades. The second volume of his Da Mind of Traxman series is trimmer and more muscular than its predecessor, even as it maintains his signature playfulness. | Traxman practically wrote footwork's rulebook over the last three decades. The second volume of his Da Mind of Traxman series is trimmer and more muscular than its predecessor, even as it maintains his signature playfulness. | Traxman: Da Mind of Traxman Vol. 2 | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/19346-traxman-da-mind-of-traxman-vol-2/ | Da Mind of Traxman Vol. 2 | As footwork’s gained a certain cachet of “cool” over the past handful of years—swelling gradually from regional curiosity to global movement—there’s been a refreshing lack of “cool” surrounding Traxman. It’s not the fact that he’s been in the game longer than just about anybody: he practically wrote the rulebook, DJing and producing over three sprawling decades of mutations that Chicago house’s DNA underwent, gradually percolating into juke and abstracting into footwork and blurring the lines between all of the above. There’s a cheeky-yet-deadly earnest wink to much of his work, the kind that sits parallel to irony but couldn’t be further from it; in a sphere that rewards overt humor—see DJ Rashad and Freshmoon’s doofily hysterical “Everybody”, built around a meme from the TV show "Intervention", or snarky DJ Slugo numbers like “Wouldn’t You Like To Be A Hoe Too”—Traxman’s sense of humor has persistently tended towards kitsch. He’s not into the long sell, since people are supposed to stay dancing while listening to this stuff, remember?
The first volume of Da Mind Of Traxman, his 2012 Planet Mu debut and arguably the first great solo footwork full-length, reveled in these kinds of tenderly shlocky moves, forgoing esotericism for pointedly ham-fisted and ultimately democratic gestures—ideologically, the precocious lovechild of Dilla’s samplemania and 2 Chainz’ knee-slappy dad punchlines. For the owner of one of Chicago’s most renowned record collections, encyclopedic and meticulously organized, Traxman’s never been one for going over his audience’s heads, even when shit gets weird. That would be inefficient, and besides, he can do weird all by himself; that album’s most surreal moment, “Let There Be Rockkkkk”, was built from a cock-in-hand AC/DC sample.
Da Mind Of Traxman Vol. 2 is trimmer and more muscular, even as it maintains his signature playfulness. Where its predecessor threw the whole fridge in the blender and delighted in making his friends drink it, here Traxman seems interested in doing more with less, probing the limits of each individual component, experimenting with song structure. Samples misbehave and are duly punished, though there’s an obvious tenderness with which they’re handled even as he brutalizes them. Sticky, honey-coated bursts of Rhodes and horns and xylophones over-eagerly trip on each other, threaten to fall out of sync, then jump back in line on opening track “Time Slip”. “Let It Roll Geto” is an ungodly mash of chopped “Sunglasses At Night”-y synth arpeggios and ghostly, gargled mermaid-soul, all of which gets shoved around by stuttering ghetto-house vocal tics, exponentially accelerating into barked orders like a long-lost Tae-Bo video where Billy Blanks tries PCP.
Footwork cuts typically end up either "garish" or "great", with very little room in between those two poles—and there’s certainly a bit of the former here too. “Bubbles” aims for restraint but grows mind-numbingly repetitive, and not in the transcendent, mantra-like sense of footwork and juke at its most effective (like, say, “15416”, hypnotizing in its deceptive simplicity). “Tha Edge Of Panic” starts off intriguingly enough, a gracefully gut-wrenching sequel of sorts to “Let There Be Rockkkkk”, but unravels into brutal hysteria, a nightmare of roid-rage grindcore. That’s the tax for taking these kinds of try-anything-once risks, one that’s fairly inevitable in an 18-track album of any sort, but especially with footwork. By their nature, footwork tracks tend to exist in and of themselves, specific tools in a set moreso than cogs in a unified machine; in heavy doses, they can overwhelm a casual listening session (namely, while multi-tasking and sober).
All the same, continuing to classify footwork as a primarily functional art form in 2014 presents something of a paradox. At its core, the claim rings true, and always will—above all else, this is music for dancers who want to be challenged and DJs eager to oblige—but it can also be limiting, particularly taking into account the past four or so years of full-length releases that have aimed not to alter the genre, but to let it transcend its intended context for a bit. It begs the question: what exactly does a great footwork album—a whole greater than the sum of its parts—entail, if it’s even possible? Double Cup, the late DJ Rashad’s 2013 magnum opus, is proof enough that it is; at the very least, it’s the closest a footwork full-length has gotten to perfection. Da Mind Of Traxman Vol. 2, for the most part, is a stellar collection of songs—playful, ballsy, informed by the past but living very much in the present—but they’re songs that relate more as cousins than as siblings. | 2014-05-22T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2014-05-22T02:00:01.000-04:00 | null | Planet Mu | May 22, 2014 | 7.5 | 095724d1-0824-4381-9f65-61c51b8ccdcc | Meaghan Garvey | https://pitchfork.com/staff/meaghan-garvey/ | null |
Royce 5’9” has done his most visible rapping as a plus-one. Trying to move beyond that supporting role, he loads his sixth solo album with big-time producers, skits, and careful introspection. | Royce 5’9” has done his most visible rapping as a plus-one. Trying to move beyond that supporting role, he loads his sixth solo album with big-time producers, skits, and careful introspection. | Royce 5'9'': Layers | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21829-layers/ | Layers | Royce 5’9” (formerly Royce da 5’9”) has done a lot of his most visible rapping as a plus-one. His first appearance for many was on Eminem’s The Slim Shady LP as one half of Bad Meets Evil on a song of the same name. He caught his second wind years later as one of the senior members of the major label castoff Voltron that is Slaughterhouse (with Joe Budden, Crooked I, and Joell Ortiz). Most recently, he’s functioned as DJ Premier’s rapping partner in PRhyme. Royce is an excellent supporting character, but things never came together for any of his solo records, which tend to drag.
His sixth studio album, Layers, isn’t much different, albeit not for lack of trying. Royce checks all the boxes on paper here, fully loading it with big-time producers, skits, and tons of careful introspection, the typical keys to a success for any traditionalist rap album. But this lyrical marathon falls short by any conceivable benchmark, unable to really get going or sustain momentum until the very end. There’s also plenty of rapping about how good at rapping he is, which is almost always boring.
The main difference between Layers and past Royce records is supposed to be the newfound commitment to full-fledged storytelling, and it’s easy to hear those gears turning on songs like "Startercoat" and "Misses." On the former, he defends 2Pac's place in history, in response to the omission on Billboard's Greatest Rappers of All-Time list from last year (“If Pac ain’t on your list then you ain’t fucking logical”), using a UNLV Starter jacket as a symbol for the influence Pac had on him. On "Misses," he writes about his relationship with his wife, implying it’s difficult being a married rapper. While these are functional stories with interesting plot points, they also prove he has a knack for overthinking (and oversharing), which torpedoes some of the strongest technical rapping on Layers. On “Tabernacle,” he tells the heartbreaking story of losing his grandmother and meeting his newborn son within hours at the same hospital. But he is incapable of building suspense or changing his tone, and what should be an epic tale is reduced to the songwriting equivalent of turn-by-turn navigation—taking readable steps toward a predetermined destination. He’s prone to rapping in bulk, and thus wants to narrate every detail of a story in a linear timetable, telegraphing outcomes; sometimes it’s like a nonfiction book on tape.
When he isn’t attempting to retell his story in extreme detail, Layers is still packed wall-to-wall with Royce's filler-filled rap style, relying heavily on knotty, tightly-packed cadences. This can be dazzling, like on “Off” (“Look in the sky there's a fly sorcerer/ Eyeballing me from a flying saucer/ And my mind is like a full clip/ And my competitions' magazines are running low like the Source and Vibe offices”), and it can also be cringe-worthy, like on “Wait” (“My son got on them 350 boosts Kanye West is dressed in Bape/ Askin' me questions 'bout gettin' to second base/ Wifey textin' SMH”). Then there are outliers like "Shine," where he takes a swing at singsong raps and misses, and "Hard," a song that doesn't even know what story it's trying to tell.
That doesn’t mean that Layers is a complete misfire, though, or that Royce doesn’t have outings where he rattles off some truly impressive performances. The verses on “Gottaknow” are clinical. The Rick Ross and Pusha T-featuring “Layers” and the somber “America” are clear standouts. The album ends strong, from "America" to closer "Off," but much like most of Royce’s solo catalog, there aren't many songs on Layers that really reward replaying or close listening. | 2016-04-15T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-04-15T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Bad Half Entertainment | April 15, 2016 | 6.4 | 095a7e20-cb5f-44bb-9fb4-1b7bc2445cfc | Sheldon Pearce | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sheldon-pearce/ | null |
Moses Sumney has a gorgeous voice that is as intricate as it is intimate. His latest EP comes and goes too fast, but is still a welcome window into the electro-soul folk singer's private world. | Moses Sumney has a gorgeous voice that is as intricate as it is intimate. His latest EP comes and goes too fast, but is still a welcome window into the electro-soul folk singer's private world. | Moses Sumney: Lamentations | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22429-lamentations/ | Lamentations | Moses Sumney came to the 2016 Pitchfork Festival with a guitar, some effects pedals, and not much else. He truly didn’t need more than his voice—a wafting, pitch-perfect falsetto that floats around space before tunneling deep into your soul. I remember watching his performance from the crowd, mesmerized by how he constructed such a gorgeous mosaic without over-the-top theatrics. Sumney stood up there alone, cracking a few jokes along the way, unpacking his methodical blend of electro-soul and folk. His vocals are so strong that he never has to form actual words; Sumney’s voice is its own instrument, a stunning mixture of Prince and Bilal, set against a rustic sonic backdrop the likes of Beck and Sufjan Stevens.
Over the past few years, though, Sumney hasn’t given us much to absorb. He’ll drop a song or EP here and there, but not yet a full-length album. But when Sumney does put out new work, it tends to stick with you: “Seeds,” a lo-fi campfire song, has a transformative quality that kicks in when the chorus hits. “How can I reconcile the seed/Once sown but never grown in me?” He follows the question with an exasperated moan, as if crushed under the weight of self-imposed pressure. On “Everlasting Sigh,” Sumney brightens the mood, emitting a regal aesthetic: “If you’re a god, made from a god/Let your whispered word be divine.” Sumney is an intricate writer who pens fiercely introspective songs, all of which play like the innermost thoughts of a fiercely private man. They’re sometimes weaved within layers of synthetic sound, forcing you to lean in a little closer to decipher the meaning.
On “Worth It,” a highlight of Sumney’s new five-track collection Lamentations EP, the singer takes on an alien-like quality, filtering his voice through a heavily-pitched vocoder to effuse a supernatural energy. The video is equally resonant. In it, Sumney mostly lurks in the shadows, reaching out toward a mysterious figure that he eventually holds in his arms. Despite the visual and aural effects, “Worth It” is a love song on which Sumney grapples with his own self-worth. “You accept all I do,” he croons, “but I don’t know if that is wise.” Sumney isn’t saying anything that hasn’t been said by other musicians, but when he sings it, his voice feels much closer to the words.
“Lonely World,” with its resounding bounce and layered wails, might be Sumney’s best song yet. It features Thundercat on bass but, in this instance, he disappears within Sumney’s majestic vocal arrangement. The song builds quickly, each note piled atop the next, composing a massive wall of noise. It’s the clear centerpiece of Lamentations, which in turn is an album that offers another brief glimpse into Sumney’s world. But in what’s become the norm for him, the music breezes by too quickly, leaving just another snippet of the singer's potential. Maybe that’s the idea? Who knows. Sumney is elusive that way. | 2016-10-07T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-10-07T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | self-released | October 7, 2016 | 7.4 | 095bee20-d441-4d00-8779-ac7906357408 | Marcus J. Moore | https://pitchfork.com/staff/marcus-j. moore/ | null |
On his promising debut, the Nigerian star has figured out exactly how he wants to sound, but he hasn’t quite nailed what he wants to say. | On his promising debut, the Nigerian star has figured out exactly how he wants to sound, but he hasn’t quite nailed what he wants to say. | Rema: Rave & Roses | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/rema-rave-and-roses/ | Rave & Roses | Despite capturing the world’s attention in 2019 at just 19 years old, Nigerian Afropop star Rema has shown virtually no growing pains in the past few years. With the bubbly Afrobeats crowd-pleaser “Dumebi,” from his self-titled debut EP, Rema turned his melismatic ad-libs, teenage locs, and dangly earrings into an immediate signature. Subsequent singles have leaned more towards sub-Saharan rhythms, holding court with the best of Afropop’s elder statesmen, but he’s also dabbled in emo-trap to remind us that he is a millennium baby after all. Just shy of his 22nd birthday, Rema now sports some visible tattoos, and based on how explicit his lyrics have gotten, he’s in the throes of a sexual awakening.
Even with these changes, Rema sounds just as confident and irrepressibly youthful as ever on his debut album, Rave & Roses. Shepherded by plush and detailed production that spans romantic Afropop, booming dembow, hedonistic synthpop, and hints of amapiano, Rema’s vocals play double dutch with the beats, showing off a spirited playfulness and incredible skill. Here, he finds unexpected notes in the nooks and crannies of the arrangements, spinning them into catchy hooks, charming micro-runs, or layering them to create harmonies that fuse together with such parity, either one could serve as the main melody. It’s a promising debut that functions as a showcase for an artist with grand ambitions reveling in the capabilities of his own talent.
Nigerian producer London has production credits on all but two of the album’s 16 tracks, and the synergy between the duo is palpable. The production feels tailor-made for Rema’s voice, and every song plays to his strengths. The unrushed percussive stride of “Dirty” and its soft sax lines make his horny whine sound appealingly sultry, reminiscent of WizKid’s latest album. “Calm Down,” a supreme earworm, takes the staccato delivery Rema introduced in “Dumebi” and builds the whole chorus around it; his vowels ricochet against a deceptively simple guitar loop, providing a foundation for the beat to crest and fall like the bubbles in a soda bottle. On “Soundgasm,” an early album single and obvious hit, the guitar reappears, where it provides cushion for Rema’s impressive falsetto to climax with ease.
Rema shows significant range without feeling like he’s pandering to trends. “Jo” is almost impossible not to get up and dance to and feels like an ode to the P-Square heyday of Nigerian pop, with its uplifting melodies, propulsive rhythm, and generic, lovestruck lyrics that sound like they were made up on the spot. “FYN” gets its juice from a hip-hop groove, while “Carry” toys with amapiano’s trademark log drum. But the biggest stylistic jump comes on “Addicted,” where Rema channels both Travis Scott and the Weeknd, with vocals doused in studio effects and propped up by ’80s pop drums.
Critics of Rema and Afropop as a whole insist on pointing out a lack of lyrical depth. Rema anticipates this criticism on “Are You There?” and gets candid about why he chooses to make party music. “I no fit focus on the negativity inside my country,” he contends with chest-pounding energy over a beat Bad Bunny would fight to have. Rema acknowledges the ambivalence we all struggle with, bearing witness to a broken political system and simultaneously ignoring it in the pursuit of good times. The observation feels especially poignant coming from Rema, who during the height of anti-government protests in Nigeria, in since-deleted tweets, called on the state to investigate the mysterious circumstances surrounding the death of his father, a former senior member of a major political party.
That said, the irony of Rema’s pushback is that the song itself demonstrates that he can go deeper lyrically. A few lazy rhyme schemes (on “Calm Down,” he wants to say hello to a mellow girl dressed in yellow) prevent great songs from being excellent. And sometimes the raunchy energy that permeates the album can feel a bit silly and unconvincing, like a middle schooler lying about their sexual exploits. References to “sloppy sloppy” (“Dirty”) and likening clitoral stimulation to killing a bug (“Soundgasm”) would be funny if he didn’t sound so serious.
Rema has figured out exactly how he wants to sound, but he hasn’t quite nailed what he wants to say. Maybe these are his growing pains. Regardless, Rave & Roses barely suffers for it and remains a stellar debut for an artist so early in his career. If anything, it shows that the best is yet to come. | 2022-04-12T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2022-04-12T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | Mavin / Jonzing World / Virgin | April 12, 2022 | 7.2 | 095ddd0e-9939-493a-ab0a-84d508b646c2 | Jessica Kariisa | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jessica-kariisa/ | |
Even though Buffy the Vampire Slayer had worn itself out by the time it ended, only a year later, it ... | Even though Buffy the Vampire Slayer had worn itself out by the time it ended, only a year later, it ... | PJ Harvey: Uh Huh Her | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/3759-uh-huh-her/ | Uh Huh Her | Even though Buffy the Vampire Slayer had worn itself out by the time it ended, only a year later, it's startling how quickly the premise-- that a young girl can fight and defend herself just as well as a man-- has vanished from the airwaves. Just the next year, two of the biggest television events were the biopics of Elizabeth Smart and Jessica Lynch, two young, helpless girls who exist only to be rescued. We got a flashback to what we were missing when the Buffy spin-off Angel ended its own run. In one scene, a red-faced demon stalks up to a skinny, defenseless-looking brunette and taunts, "Take your best shot, little girl"; the brunette, unimpressed, reels around and throws a fist right through the chauvinist demon's face, killing him instantly.
PJ Harvey's fans are waiting for her to do much the same thing. Every time a new album's announced, part of her audience hopes she'll step up again as the loudest, boldest female guitar hero. It's not that Harvey sounds tame these days: Her confidence on stage and her edgy glamour have kept pace with her voice, which she has developed into one of the most powerful and seductive in rock. But the blaring guitars of Dry and unusual meter of Rid of Me were a quicker fix, and without them, Harvey's studio work grew cloistered and difficult.
Since 1995's To Bring You My Love, each of her albums has turned off some chunk of her fanbase. The subtle character studies and trip-hop backdrops of Is This Desire? struck some as cold or dissonant, and her John Parish collaboration, Dance Hall at Louse Point, is (wrongly) dismissed as erratic and avant-weak, even as it showcases her most striking vocals-- at turns chilled and self-absorbed, shriekingly gruesome, or tortured by rapture. And Stories from the City, Stories from the Sea won Britain's Mercury Music Prize, but even some diehards called it slick and easy; and post 9/11, Stories actually sounds creepy, whether for the references to helicopters over New York, the song "Kamikaze", or that duet with Thom Yorke, which is hairlessly erotic like newts 69'ing.
Now, four years later, Uh Huh Her-- with its guttural title, punk-ugly cover and its advertised guitar-focus-- is billed as a "return to form." But even if guitars dominate Uh Huh Her, the album ignores all expectations. Harvey plays everything but drums, and you can recognize her rough and earthy tone on the electric, played like she's molding clay. But even the buzzing distortion is focused and spare, mounted the way a collector hangs a precious Japanese sword. It actually resembles Radiohead's Hail to the Thief, a guitar album that also succeeded because of its mood-- not because the mood saves the songs, but because the terse, simple writing makes the album so intimate.
The scenes of sexual tension and crisis here resemble those of Is This Desire?, but this time they don't require names or places. "The Pocket Knife" resembles a folk murder ballad, with a simple, perfect guitar part and lyrics like, "Please don't make my wedding dress/ I'm too young to marry yet/ Can you see my pocket knife?/ You can't make me be a wife." Harvey murmurs "The Desperate Kingdom of Love" over a gentle acoustic, and the delicate imagery enhances a straight-up love ballad; and if the final song, "The Darker Days of Me and Him", promises recovery after a bad break-up ("I'll pick up the pieces/ I'll carry on somehow") the tone stays grim, and Harvey's not patting herself on the back for knowing better.
Yet as careful as the atmosphere sounds, Harvey's ready to tear it apart at any time. "Cat on a Wall" actually sounds murky and misplaced, but "The Letter", the album's first single, builds in sharp bursts and terse riffs under the shrewd sexual imagery: "Take the cap/ Off your pen/ Wet the envelope/ Lick and lick it." And the two-minute tantrum of "Who the Fuck?" devolves into the caveman-talk promised by the album title-- for example, the bridge: "Who/ Who/ Who/ Who/ Fuck/ Fuck/ Fuck/ You." Britain's Guardian newspaper cites this as proof that Harvey's a "certified lunatic," probably because they don't get the concept of "catharsis."
By the time you hear the accordion-and-guitar interlude, or the full minute of seagull calls, it's clear that Harvey isn't making a "rock" record per se. And maybe to preserve the mood, Harvey doesn't give us her most striking material. Outside of a few tracks like "The Letter", "Pocket Knife" or "The Desperate Kingdom of Love", the album is stronger than the sum of its interludes. But if you take it as a whole, Uh Huh Her is deeply engrossing: Harvey has never explored the minimal-verging-on-primitive side of her music so thoroughly, or captured so exactly the sound of a mood swing.
And once again, unlike many of her peers and fellow 90s veterans, she refuses to categorize herself. Her recorded work shows her not as a diva singer, or a rock goddess-- no matter how much her fans, or the world, want that-- but as an artist, who will seize the world or retreat from it completely if it serves her ends. Harvey has never recorded a weak record, or even a transitional album; nothing set the audience up for this disc, and we may wait another four years until she's satisfied with the next one. And that one probably won't sound like Dry, either. | 2004-05-31T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2004-05-31T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Island | May 31, 2004 | 7.6 | 09612f7b-87ab-4bd3-ace7-270a740c048a | Chris Dahlen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/chris-dahlen/ | null |
The Glaswegian band recently signed to Atlantic, and the State Hospital EP seems a strange experiment in this context. It's never too far from what you might expect from them, yet often comes off as unnecessarily simplified. | The Glaswegian band recently signed to Atlantic, and the State Hospital EP seems a strange experiment in this context. It's never too far from what you might expect from them, yet often comes off as unnecessarily simplified. | Frightened Rabbit: State Hospital EP | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/17097-state-hospital-ep/ | State Hospital EP | Intimacy is the first thing that comes to mind when thinking about what makes for a great Frightened Rabbit song. It's true in multiple senses of the word-- much of their work is concerned with physical coupling or the pain derived from the lack thereof, and even when shooting for hackles-raising anthems, they're never playing for the cheap seats. Grand as they were, "The Modern Leper", "I Feel Better", and "Skip the Youth" still came off like an animated barfly keeping the regulars enrapt with their latest tale of romantic futility. But when thinking about their superficially pleasing qualities-- Scott Hutchison's handsomely burred vocals, their scrappy acoustic interplay, and unapologetically heartsick emoting-- you start to wonder if there's any reason that couldn't be as popular as softbatch, Stay-Puft stadium filling like Snow Patrol or Mumford & Sons. S**hould they be as popular? The Glaswegian band is signed to Atlantic now, and the State Hospital EP is a strange experiment in this context, never too far from what you might expect from the band, yet presented in an emotionally and sonically cohesive way that makes the songs here come off as unnecessarily simplified.
It would be easy enough to attribute that to the rich, luxurious production of State Hospital, but The Winter of Mixed Drinks was a pretty glossy album, even if it couldn't completely suffuse the activity of Frightened Rabbit's musicianship. State Hospital continues the trend of redistributing the depth of the rhythm section on The Midnight Organ Fight to everywhere else and often it detracts from their more immediate talents-- Grant Hutchison's stick-breaking drumwork, the nimble guitar-picking of his brother Scott and Andy Monaghan. This stuff is easy-paced, pure hangover balm, in the mode of "Poke" or "Good Arms vs. Bad Arms".
While State Hospital lacks for pure visceral pleasure, Hutchison can still convey such a deep, muscular ache in his vocals, indicating that Frightened Rabbit still know their strengths. The title track is a rare example of Hutchison writing about a lack of fulfillment from the other side of the sexual divide and problems that go deeper than an inability to get one's rocks off-- in this case, presumably a girl born into poverty with the attendant pall of domestic abuse, emotional detachment, ineffective schooling, and the lack of expectations thereof. Her skin and blood are "thicker than concrete," and as "State Hospital" wells up, the indignities do as well-- the death blow occurs as Hutchison reveals her fate "to keep warm the arms of a plumber/ Bloody and balding/ Who just needs a spine to dig into/ Just for the head and a hand for the holding." By "Boxing Night", Hutchison is back playing the victim as hi-hats and backup vocals jangle nervously, finding the hopelessly lovesick narrator "at home/ With a drink to ill health/ Just me and these walls and a beaten up chair." In a previous live version of "Boxing Night", he was "drinking to death."
It's an auspicious start to State Hospital even if it doesn't display how Hutchison can turn some less admirable human qualities-- bitterness, sarcasm, alcoholism-- into endearing and often funny little songs. The only humor on State Hospital is supplied by Aidan Moffatt's stein/torch-passing guest spot on "Wedding Gloves" ("A melting of morals/ A solder of souls/ As sexy as lace/ But with just as much holes"). This is Frightened Rabbit sounding as emotionally meek and needy as their name might suggest, which gets a bit grating towards State Hospital's back half, where it gets hitched to some worryingly perfunctory songwriting.
Frightened Rabbit have always had a thing for big, soppy metaphors-- the biblical self-loathing of "The Modern Leper", baptismal rebirth on "Swim Until You Can't See Land". They weren't necessarily clever, but Frightened Rabbit made those their own through sheer commitment. Too much of State Hospital feels like songwriting exercises on loan, asking to borrow a feeling. "I might never be normal again" is the climactic admission in "Home From War", and it's not enough of a payoff to endure the latest tour of duty in "Love Is a Battlefield". Meanwhile, "Off" finds Frightened Rabbit stealing from their own supply-- "Off" is nearly the exact same song as The Midnight Organ Fight's "Old Old Fashioned", stripped of its spirited folk-rock stomping and charming specificities.
Title aside, The Winter of Mixed Drinks gave us the indication that being perpetually soused and sex-starved was starting to wear on Frightened Rabbit as artists and people-- Hutchison admitted that he couldn't make another "breakup record" after The Midnight Organ Fight, one of the finest of recent vintage. But did opening for Death Cab For Cutie teach them the lay of the land? Let's not forget that band's Atlantic debut (and best-selling record) was the aching, insular and glassy Plans. Whether Hospital finds them following the same path, at least for now it indicates the triumphs of "Living in Colour" were short-lived, or at least strangely ill-fitting for Frightened Rabbit's next, and likely less intimate phase. | 2012-09-27T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2012-09-27T02:00:01.000-04:00 | Rock | Canvasback / Atlantic | September 27, 2012 | 6.1 | 0963e3c6-fdf0-4832-be92-2ed3a08181ac | Ian Cohen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ian-cohen/ | null |
This second, much improved La Sera collection finds Katy Goodman translating what she brings to Vivian Girls into top-shelf songwriting. | This second, much improved La Sera collection finds Katy Goodman translating what she brings to Vivian Girls into top-shelf songwriting. | La Sera: Sees the Light | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/16511-sees-the-light/ | Sees the Light | It's impossible to imagine Vivian Girls without "Kickball" Katy Goodman. Her high harmonies take a number of the songs from sloppily catchy to pop-friendly. Her bass playing often provides the most hummable melodies. At shows, while frontwoman Cassie Ramone plants herself at stage right, practicing strangulation on the neck of her guitar and testing the limits of her reverb pedals, Goodman can be found stage left, stepping to the mic for those aforementioned harmonies, jumping up and down, and smiling broadly. As gratifying as all of that sounds, Goodman had the understandable impulse to create things on her own: Last year found her taking the reins on a self-titled album as La Sera with mixed results. It was a pretty album, one that felt speckled with glitter, and it was faithful to the girl-group bliss for which her main group is known, but at times it felt a little too faithful-- catchy but lacking a distinct identity, airy and pleasant almost to the point of superfluousness.
These problems have been more than corrected on on her sophomore La Sera collection, Sees the Light. Take "Break My Heart" and lead single "Please Be My Third Eye". Delivered at warp speed and full volume, both songs are punchy punk numbers that sound like well-produced takes on Goodman's short-lived All Saints Day project. But while those older songs clearly invited comparisons to the buzzsaws-cutting-through-corroded-metal sound of Vivian Girls and plenty of bands that came in their wake (particularly early Dum Dum Girls), these new tunes benefit from how Goodman separates herself from the pack. Her smooth alto-- pushed refreshingly high in the mix-- is a perfect fit for some of the record's other tracks. Here, the elegant, almost ethereal singing contrasts with the fuzzy distortion in a way that's infectious and unique. There are other departures as well: "Drive On" adopts a spaghetti-western guitar line that plays out dramatically, and "How Far We Come Now" is measured and heavy-- both sonically and emotionally-- sounding like a grunge band covering Carly Simon.
As a result of Goodman's knack for classic pop melody and structure, even the songs that bear a resemblance to La Sera are an improvement. They burst with personality and feeling: Closer "Don't Stay" carries a particularly lonely drift, while the blooming arrangements and Shop Assistants-indebted feel of "I'm Alone" nestles closely to the same C86 and twee comparisons her Vivian Girls bandmate so vehemently rejects. Songs like "Love That's Gone" and "It's Over Now" coast gorgeously with an acrimonious undercurrent. These ballads find Goodman dismissing herself from a relationship in a way that's heartbreakingly apologetic, the musical equivalent of sending a Dear John letter attached to a floral arrangement.
At a lean half-hour, there's no room for filler here. Every song on Sees the Light is exquisitely crafted and overflowing with personality. It's a record so enjoyable and expertly sequenced that it demands repeat listens before it's even over. But most importantly, it shows Katy Goodman can translate what she brings to Vivian Girls into top-shelf songwriting. | 2012-04-17T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2012-04-17T02:00:01.000-04:00 | Rock | Hardly Art | April 17, 2012 | 7.5 | 09775b4d-7d19-410e-ae8a-cb0812369bef | Martin Douglas | https://pitchfork.com/staff/martin-douglas/ | null |
Carrying forth the Southern sound of Saint Cloud, Katie Crutchfield does it again. Her dazzling, piercing songwriting is perfectly in tune with the band behind her. | Carrying forth the Southern sound of Saint Cloud, Katie Crutchfield does it again. Her dazzling, piercing songwriting is perfectly in tune with the band behind her. | Waxahatchee: Tigers Blood | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/waxahatchee-tigers-blood/ | Tigers Blood | Before Saint Cloud, the scale of Waxahatchee’s music matched the intimate venues it was often found in—living rooms full of friends, small corner stages, crowded basement venues with iffy plumbing. But on her 2020 album, which Katie Crutchfield recently estimated doubled the size of her audience, she burned the fog off of her arrangements and raised her voice. The sound that emerged was closer in spirit to Americana than late-’90s indie rock.
Sometimes background changes can have startling effects: Framed in this light, Crutchfield sounded a bit more like her hero Lucinda Williams, the tang foregrounded in her vocals. More bluntly, she sounded like a “star,” a cheap and transactional term that nonetheless describes a unique phenomenon. There was suddenly miles of space around her, and nowhere else to look but directly into her eyes.
Tigers Blood continues the work of clearing room for this new, 8-foot-tall version of Crutchfield. Saint Cloud producer Brad Cook is back, surrounding each instrument with a wooly ball of room tone as substantial as the felt pads of a piano. Crutchfield’s character from Saint Cloud returns, as well, a complicated, warmly combative woman bristling at specific grievances. One of the most indelible hooks on Saint Cloud came from a song called “Hell,” in which Crutchfield sang, “I’ll put you through hell.” Her voice was rueful and affectionate, convincing you both that she did exactly as she said and that for whoever her target was, it was worth it.
Joining her this time, on guitars and backup vocals, is the Asheville singer-songwriter MJ Lenderman, whom Crutchfield first invited to contribute to lead single “Right Back to It” and then asked to stay for the duration. You can hear why. Over Phil Cook’s banjo on “Right Back to It,” Lenderman and Crutchfield sound like their own version of Gillian Welch and David Rawlings, lifelong musical partners instead of first-time collaborators. Like most indie rock artists in the 2020s, Lenderman’s music enjoys an easy affinity with roots-rock tempos and temperatures, and his rangy harmonies slot neatly behind Crutchfield’s voice across multiple songs.
Most of Tigers Blood is powered by the same roughly strummed acoustic guitar that lit Saint Cloud, with the electric guitars relegated to playing in either soft shuffles or piquant licks. These decorative fills put semicolons, dashes, and full stops on Crutchfield’s endlessly barreling thoughts. Her mind is alive and humming, and her language leaps out at you with its hunger. The repeated refrain of “Bored”—a song about trying and failing to keep yourself still—is, simply, “I get bored.” But the way Crutchfield sings the words sounds like a death sentence, and it’s the only moment across Tigers Blood’s 12 songs where that warm voice constricts and turns thin with fear.
The song’s mid-tempo chug summons memories of Sheryl Crow’s “If It Makes You Happy,” another barroom rocker played for the 11 a.m. crowd. These are back-porch arrangements, but Crutchfield is not a back-porch type. She is a city dweller at heart, eager to get right up close to people, the better to observe their faults and turn those crosshairs back on herself. The lyric sheet to Tigers Blood brims with avid self-recrimination: “I get caught up in my thoughts/For lack of a better cause/My life’s been mapped out to a ‘T’/But I’m always a little lost,” she confesses in “Lone Star Lake.” At one point, she describes herself as “overly confident,” rhyming this word with “my skin is airy thin”; at another, she seethes that “all my life I’ve been running from what you want.”
Her furious and tangled diction—running from what you want?—made me think of Elvis Costello, an otherwise distant stylistic cousin. As with Costello’s songs, it often feels like you are desperately hanging onto an impassioned, self-justifying argument between two people you do not know. There’s both too much and not enough information in a line like, “There’s a lock on the door that costs more than my car, babe” or, “You swerve to hit a dead deer/A girl like that would bore you to tears, baby” for you to parse the meaning. Nonetheless, the emotional specifics feel somehow both maddening and familiar. Crutchfield writes like someone who feels a rock in their shoe and needs you to feel it, too.
There is a trick Crutchfield uses, both on this album and the last, where she hollers the word “I” and stretches it across multiple syllables. The first person becomes just “ahh,” a primal yodel that swallows everything else. She did it on Saint Cloud’s “War” and “Can’t Do Much,” and she repeats it here on the chiming “Crowbar” and on “Bored.” On the stunning late-album acoustic ballad “365,” she turns the word into a sharp intake of breath, the involuntary sound of sudden pain. In Crutchfield’s songs, the self, and its messy relation to others, is a battlefield, one capable of inflicting real and grievous harm. She has spoken openly about her journey to sobriety, which may have inspired some of the songs’ subject matter. But anyone who has fought a battle with themselves will feel a chill of recognition at hearing Crutchfield’s war cry of “I”: It is the sound of introspection as rite and ritual, a cleansing and savage weapon to be brandished, respected, even feared. It is exclusively hers, and now it is big enough for the whole world to hear. | 2024-03-22T00:02:00.000-04:00 | 2024-03-22T00:02:00.000-04:00 | Rock / Folk/Country | Anti- | March 22, 2024 | 8.8 | 0979b2ef-c5f7-4990-b352-7daac145fe1f | Jayson Greene | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jayson-greene/ | |
Metal supergroup, led by Mick Barr, creates something for fans of black metal, noise, and drone to all love. | Metal supergroup, led by Mick Barr, creates something for fans of black metal, noise, and drone to all love. | Krallice: Dimensional Bleedthrough | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/13840-dimensional-bleedthrough/ | Dimensional Bleedthrough | Dimensional Bleedthrough, the second album from New York metal supergroup Krallice, is the sort of record that should find favor in at least a half-dozen listening circles. Its relentless squall-- rapidfire drums, riff-and-raze guitars, and back-and-forth electric bass, plus the serrated screams of co-founder Mick Barr-- could appeal to devotees of classic black metal bands Burzum, Immortal, and Emperor. The distended shapes Krallice's pummel takes might work for fans of U.S. black metal marathon men Wolves in the Throne Room. Or for those who get lost in the massed guitar works of Rhys Chatham and Glenn Branca or in the overtone hysteria of composers like La Monte Young, "Untitled" flits around one note. Darkly radiant and completely mesmerizing, those eight minutes of drumless glow feel like a musical cocoon, an alternate version of Barr's work on Orthrelm's OV. And for noiseniks, there are harsh, finessed impasses, too, like the prelude to "Aridity", where feedback and split octaves howl and groan.
What's more, Barr and Colin Martson (Dysrhythmia, Behold... the Arctopus), comprise a fairly infallible guitar duo. Their playing here is as complex as it is controlled and deliberate. Sidewinding riffs and rapidfire progressions scream above the dense rhythm section. Dimensional Bleedthrough's seven pieces twist and halt, lurch and sprint, shifting rhythms and directions without warning. It seems like a shoo-in as a new favorite for prog and math-rock zealots. And, for those living for death metal, there's "The Mountain". At three minutes and 14 seconds, it's the album's shortest track by nearly a third and its most direct by a mile. Bassist Nick McMaster takes the vocals this time, spitting the words above a brutal churn, his deep, irascible bellow recalling Suffocation and Cryptopsy.
Whereas Krallice thrive at a rarified intersection of death and black metal, noise abandon and prog precision, pedestrian grit and academic commitment, it seems a lot of listeners might be afraid-- or too territorial-- to follow. At times, it seems too mathematical for metal kids, too tough for the avant-garde set, and too oriented for the noise dudes. It eschews those pretty passages that have long been Wolves in the Throne Room's popular bait, and it's certainly not setting out to terrify, either.
Forget all of that, though, and keep listening-- closely. Dimensional Bleedthrough isn't and doesn't aim to be a headphones masterpiece. Its 77 minutes are almost uniformly brutal, and digesting it at such close proximity is bound to fatigue. But it is arranged and engineered to offer more than the benchmarks of second-wave black metal, or even the shock-and-tone tactics of a lot of noise and industrial acts. Notice the way the guitars pull against each other within the first two minutes of the splendid title track, tugging each other through the riff's hairpin turns, or how one guitar veers into a skuzzy, distorted counter to introduce Barr's vocals nearly four minutes in. Or listen for the way the progression of "Autochton" slides with Barr's growled glissando, especially in the first minute. It's those details-- and, of course, Krallice's gargantuan sound-- that make Dimensional Bleedthrough bigger and better than most other metal hybrids around. | 2010-01-21T01:00:04.000-05:00 | 2010-01-21T01:00:04.000-05:00 | Metal | Profound Lore | January 21, 2010 | 8 | 0979d68b-19b3-4d83-8de0-63a328f81ba6 | Grayson Haver Currin | https://pitchfork.com/staff/grayson-haver currin/ | null |
The Austin duo’s hushed and unassuming double album is a capstone to their career so far, a scrapbook of moments of love and loss from a life well-lived. | The Austin duo’s hushed and unassuming double album is a capstone to their career so far, a scrapbook of moments of love and loss from a life well-lived. | Hovvdy: Hovvdy | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/hovvdy-hovvdy/ | Hovvdy | Countless playlists and anthologies have collected the greatest songs about a first kiss and a last goodbye; mourning a parent and becoming one yourself; best friends and mortal enemies. As for the cultivation of these relationships, there’s a 256-page book trying to reteach people how to hang out, but pop music isn’t going to be much help. Hovvdy isn’t going to tell you how to navigate these things either. On one song, they’re letting loved ones know that their time together mattered, and on the next they’re setting boundaries. They might reach out to a friend in quiet agony or chastise themselves for not doing so earlier. They’re figuring it all out as it comes, just like the rest of us, and the endlessly generous Hovvdy doesn’t attempt to be a manual for living, but a scrapbook of moments of love and loss from a life well-lived.
A band’s self-titled fifth album can either announce a complete rebrand or a reassertion of identity. Hovvdy is something in between, the culmination of co-songwriter/vocalists Charlie Martin and Will Taylor's decade-long process of refining and broadening their sound. 2016’s Taster introduced the duo as “pillowcore,” which, like all genre coinage, was silly and also quite descriptive. Taster accurately predicted a future where slowcore, Buzz Bin blockbusters, rootsy bedroom-pop and station-wagon country became the primary colors of indie rock—they’ve since earned the respect of heavy-hitters like Zach Bryan and boygenius. Hovvdy’s music was charming, not crucial, nostalgic without evoking any specific era or age of their own, content to offer a shoulder if someone else wanted to spill their guts.
Despite its relatively supersized specs—19 songs, nominally a double-album—Hovvdy doesn’t see itself as an epic. It doesn’t sprawl; it stretches its legs, kicks its feet up. The boldest experiments all ended up as singles; “Forever” is contented adult commitment in sentiment, MTV Spring Break in sound as Martin experiments with a half-rapped cadence over Dust Brothers record scratches. In a good pair of headphones, the riff of “Jean” imagines “Jessica” getting a microhouse cuts-and-clicks treatment. The giddy and gooey “Every Exchange” is part “Butterfly Kisses,” part “Fireflies” and all heart. “Til I Let You Know” is initially a spare sketch in the middle of Hovvdy until it gets reprised as the album’s climax on “Bad News,” recalling any number of bloghouse bangers that gave someone their third wind in the late aughts.
Hovvdy has released albums called True Love and Billboard for My Feelings, but they never quite embodied those concepts as wholly as they do on “Meant,” which recasts their cover of Coldplay’s “Warning Sign” as proof of concept for their own Klieg-lit power ballad. A singles-only version of Hovvdy would still be seven tracks and a sci-fi lark where the band time travels across the last 25 years of recombinant alt-rock. Within the greater fabric of Hovvdy, they are joyous peaks, proof of how songs mocked in a more self-conscious time can be rehabbed and heard anew through a cunning needle drop, a class reunion, or just through the ears of a kid.
After 17 tracks, Hovvdy is ready to reveal its thesis statement: “We’ll do a whole lot of talking/Don’t a lot have to happen,” Martin sings on the aching “Angel.” In moments like these, Hovvdy’s primary artistic analog might not be other musicians so much as Richard Linklater—another Lone Star sentimentalist who lets his work unfold at life’s pace, cobbling together a series of scenes and characters that vaguely resemble a plot. Linklater’s films are often considered comedies, though from an older, more cynical perspective, they might actually be psychological horror films with the prospect of adulthood looming offscreen like an invisible, airborne monster. The video for Hovvdy’s finest song, 2019’s “Ruin (my ride),” was their “party at the moon tower” minus the buzzkill brawl, with Martin, Taylor, and their friends doing an increasingly drunken Texas two-step late into the summer night, living out the happy future that no one in Dazed and Confused or Everybody Wants Some!! got to see for themselves.
Yet the five years since has rendered “Ruin (my ride)” a bittersweet memory as well. Hovvdy are no longer the inseparable buds implied by the album cover—Martin lives in St. Louis, and Taylor in Nashville. Though Hovvdy toggles back and forth between lead vocals, the perspective is fairly consistent, earnest optimism spiked with just enough conflict to make it all feel earned. Taylor and Martin’s vocals top out at a frustrated exhale, yet they know how to bite down on expressions of absence—“I swore you left town, maaan” or “My bad I ghosted again.” Martin rues the limitations of his brotherly love on “Bubba,” and when he repeats “God I hate it,” it has the jarring impact of a black metal howl.
In talking about Hovvdy to another longtime fan, I speculated that you could make a drinking game out of every time they say “love” or “light,” or the name of a family member, or a local landmark, or a Southern interstate. It was meant as a joke, but that’s kind of the point of Hovvdy; taking the time to truly savor the warm glow of a friendship maintained over time and space, service to the suffering rendered gladly, or just a day where you took the long way home just because that’s what your teenage self might’ve admired. It’s almost too easy to quote the climactic line from Linklater’s coming-of-age opus Boyhood: “The moment is constant, the moment seizes us.” But Martin and Taylor don’t think in opuses, in grand gestures and proclamations, in magic or illusion. Hovvdy simply slows down time just long enough to capture the beauty in the moments that always threaten to float away if they’re not captured immediately and cherished. | 2024-04-29T00:02:00.000-04:00 | 2024-04-29T00:02:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Arts & Crafts | April 29, 2024 | 8.3 | 097c1f15-5df0-4197-aef5-efc1a7e84187 | Ian Cohen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ian-cohen/ | |
The California foursome follow their pop-punk breakthrough Never Hungover Again with the more grown-up and measured Cody. | The California foursome follow their pop-punk breakthrough Never Hungover Again with the more grown-up and measured Cody. | Joyce Manor: Cody | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22477-cody/ | Cody | In 2014, Joyce Manor released a truly amazing pop-punk record called Never Hungover Again, which positioned the Torrance, California foursome as kin to pop-punk greats like Blink-182, Weezer, and Jawbreaker. Like those groups, they share the same penchant for suburban ennui, self-indulgent melancholy (“I hate the way I feel like dying when I’m alone”), and loud anthems cherished by quiet people.
But for their fourth record, Cody, Joyce Manor decided to change their process a bit and take a few risks. They replaced drummer Kurt Walcher with Jeff Enzor and teamed up with producer Rob Schnapf, who has worked with Elliott Smith, Guided by Voices, and Saves the Day. They holed up with Schnapf for two months and made a tight, complex record that still manages to cram 10 songs into about 25 minutes. A telling detail is frontman Barry Johnson’s admission that Cody is influenced by Dear Nora, a Portland indiepop project led by Katy Davidson. Though it seems safe to say that very few Joyce Manor fans listen to Dear Nora (maybe they heard the name in a Girlpool song), the former’s newfound affinity for the gentle band is not that much of a surprise: at Cody’s core is a deeper degree of tenderness than they have displayed before.
Joyce Manor’s songs follow a pattern of communicating through brief emotional blasts. In every two-minute story, the stakes are high, and this pushes each track to discover some sort of clarity by the conclusion. On Cody, these realizations are rarely happy, and Joyce Manor ask their fans to follow them to a darker place than before. Take the would-be epiphany at the end of “Last You Heard of Me”: “And in the moment I see everything/Start to finish sad defeat/Shivering lying naked next to you/And that’s the last you heard of me.” Even opener “Fake I.D.,” which comes off as the silliest song on the record with its “What do you think about Kanye West?” line ends on the sobering final note, “Because my friend Brandon died/And I feel sad/I miss him he was rad.” The reference to the late drummer of Wyoming’s Teenage Bottlerocket is also a plea to look past the surface and see the pain coursing beneath everyday existence. “Fake I.D.” itself shows off the lessons learned from their time with Schnapf—it’s abrasive, swaggering pop that sounds modern rock radio-ready but not far from Joyce Manor’s first three records.
But all sort of bands can work with that Big Studio Money and emerge with an excessive mess. Joyce Manor know themselves, they know their audience, and they know better than to overdo the production. If anything, they’ve slowed down and pulled back. For the first time, a Joyce Manor album includes an acoustic track and a song over four minutes. The former is a quick duet about addiction between Johnson and Phoebe Bridgers called “Do You Really Want to Not Get Better?” On the opposite end of the spectrum, “Stairs” thumps along patiently as Johnson gripes, “Yeah, I’m 26 and I still live with my parents/Oh I can’t do laundry/Christ I can’t do dishes.” Johnson wrote those words when he was 19 but came to re-appreciate them while on an acoustic tour with Hop Along’s Francis Quinlan (whose mug appears on the cover of Never Hungover Again). Lyrically, the revamped track verges into creepy territory, as its narrator becomes overcome with protective paranoia for his love: “You are like a magnet for all evil ’cause there is so much good inside you.”
Cody finds a more grown-up Joyce Manor, but every track contains enough blunt expressions of existential despair to tie them to their angsty past. “I feel so old today,” Johnson declares on “Eighteen,” and then immediately after on “Angel in the Snow” he muses, “How come nothing amazes me?” These might sound annoying, but buoyed by the immediacy of their music, they simply feel honest. When you watch videos of Joyce Manor concerts, it’s easy to see that the audiences connects with the band, as if they’ve never had the words to express what they are feeling. Those same people will not be disappointed with Cody; there’s a lot of cathartic emotion to revel in. Joyce Manor have proven that they are ready and willing to grow, but they’re still open to saying, “this song is a mess but so am I.” | 2016-10-12T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-10-12T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Epitaph | October 12, 2016 | 7.7 | 097edbef-87fe-47d3-9469-566892837328 | Quinn Moreland | https://pitchfork.com/staff/quinn-moreland/ | null |
null | Earlier this month, I flew across the country to see Norway's Supersilent play their first North American concert, at the Great American Music Hall in San Francisco. Maybe I made the trip to remind myself that there are still bands worth making big, expensive trips for; maybe I was just excited for the experience of watching the band in person. The quartet plays completely improvised music that's wrestled into shape by four distinct musicians; on record, it's difficult to tell how the players interact. At the show, I felt like a car-illiterate driver popping his hood just to stare at | Arve Henriksen / Strønen/Storløkken: Chiaroscuro / Humcrush | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/11836-chiaroscuro-humcrush/ | Chiaroscuro / Humcrush | Earlier this month, I flew across the country to see Norway's Supersilent play their first North American concert, at the Great American Music Hall in San Francisco. Maybe I made the trip to remind myself that there are still bands worth making big, expensive trips for; maybe I was just excited for the experience of watching the band in person. The quartet plays completely improvised music that's wrestled into shape by four distinct musicians; on record, it's difficult to tell how the players interact. At the show, I felt like a car-illiterate driver popping his hood just to stare at the engine: I wanted to watch the pieces working together, even if I wouldn't know what was going on inside of them.
If Supersilent has a frontman, it's Arve Henriksen, who sat on stage between keyboardists and noise generators Ståle Storløkken and Helge Sten. In addition to playing trumpet into one of two mics (one had more distortion than the other), Henriksen also sings wordlessly, high and close to how I'd imagine an adult castrati would sound. Unlike a chamber singer, he sounds untrained, airy, and wholly naked: a broken plea stops your breath.
Henriksen has rarely used his voice on recordings with Supersilent, but it becomes a crucial instrument on his new solo disc, Chiaroscuro. After working in monk-like solitude on his first album, Sakuteiki ("a treatise on garden making"), he collaborates on Chiaroscuro with two notable Norwegian musicians, percussionist Audun Kleive and sound artist Jan Bang. The thick but passive atmosphere they create warmly blankets Henriksen's trumpet and vocals.
The album's most striking moment is its first track, "Opening Image". After a trumpet performance on which he struggles for breath-- making the brass instrument sound almost like a reed or a bamboo flute-- Henriksen emits a pure cry. It's such a personal revelation that you'd think professional training would ruin him-- not because it would strip away his beauty but because you'd know what to expect from note to note, and that would ruin the importance of his telling it to you.
Chiaroscuro could have been a late '70s ECM date-- from Kleive's ambiguously world influences to the enveloping moods to the sameness of the songwriting. It's so obviously beautiful that you don't feel challenged but right when you drift off, it creeps up on you: Kleive plays an inventive pattern-- for example, the hand drums on "Parallel Action"-- or a melody starts to sink in. If the album had more variety or used these fragile-sounding elements less cautiously, this would be an exceptional session.
At the concert, Henriksen also revealed a rougher side, first singing garbled scat vocals into his trumpet, and then using actual words, which was unexpected from an act as abstract as Supersilent. During a skronky noise piece, Henriksen screamed at us about the recent election: "OHIO! OHIO! WHY?! MOTHERFUCKER!" It may have grounded the musical flights but in blue state-housed Frisco, everyone loved it.
On the other hand, Ståle Storløkken almost disappointed me. On the Supersilent albums, it's hard to separate Storløkken's contributions from Sten's. He usually reveals himself by playing melodic synth lines while Sten sticks to brutally neutralizing tones that can raze any assertion down to an ambiguous grey. Storløkken is more colorful, so in this context he risks being banal by trumping the band's subtle compromises: His loudest riffs on 6-- the solos on "6.1" and the dominating statement that ends "6.4"-- suit the pieces, but just barely. In concert, Storløkken locked in brilliantly with Sten when they played loudly but in the slow sections, he almost started to noodle-- to play lines that were merely pretty.
But maybe I had an eye on him because I had just heard Humcrush, his new duet with drummer Thomas Strønen (Food). Humcrush gallops like a circus-- the first track is called "Acrobat"-- and it doesn't mind easy gestures: For example, the track called "Japan" sounds stereotypically Japanese. Both men use electronics to generate layers of beats, with Strønen adding rhythms that sound like playing cards on a window fan, but the live (in the studio) recording keeps even the densest textures frantic.
I love Storløkken's signature analog synth, even though every time I hear it I picture a little plastic spaceship being pulled across a movie screen on a wire; when Storløkken deploys it, he smears fusion-like lines across the top, while at others times-- like "Sport'n Spice"-- he uses a quick, digital jabbing sound to grapple head-on with Strønen. While different moods emerge, Humcrush is one of the least reflective discs in the Rune Grammofon catalog: It breezes by instead of lingering, which is not a bad thing when you're listening to such proficient musicians dance each other in knots.
Henriksen, Storløkken, and Helge Sten (as Deathprod) all released solo or duet records this year, and while each one has its strengths, Supersilent remains greater than the sum of their parts. The unique tension between their players creates something unique and frequently awesome. The humanistic, almost New Age-y Henriksen and the grimly neutral Sten especially become stronger when their different approaches are at odds with one another. But together or by themselves, live or on record, the members of Supersilent still have more to reveal, more corners they haven't explored. Hell, next time I might even fly to Oslo. | 2004-11-21T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2004-11-21T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Global / Jazz | null | November 21, 2004 | 7.1 | 0984e61d-cfaf-4e45-934c-f45ec9d2ffb7 | Chris Dahlen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/chris-dahlen/ | null |
Django Django see themselves in the lineage of late-'60s, early-'70s pop weirdos, but they listen like modernist samplers and crate diggers. The songs on their second album present themselves as physical challenges, a demonstration of what Django Django can do rather than what they have to say or how they feel. | Django Django see themselves in the lineage of late-'60s, early-'70s pop weirdos, but they listen like modernist samplers and crate diggers. The songs on their second album present themselves as physical challenges, a demonstration of what Django Django can do rather than what they have to say or how they feel. | Django Django: Born Under Saturn | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/20509-born-under-saturn/ | Born Under Saturn | On their Mercury Prize-nominated self-titled 2012 LP, Django Django revived a very specific "sound of the future", defined around 2000 by a cluster of "forward-thinking" UK rock bands like Super Furry Animals, Clinic, Simian, Badly Drawn Boy, and the Beta Band, and ushered it into the present day. Django Django's hodgepodge approach and affectless harmonizing made the Beta Band reference, in particular, hard to avoid (it probably didn't hurt that drummer/producer David Maclean’s brother used to be in Beta Band). But as a jumping-off point, these influences are limited, and the possibilities of the sound taper off the second you start to repeat yourself or lose your sense of irreverence. On Born Under Saturn, Django Django fall into both traps.
Even so, their range of raw skill is impressive. The songs present themselves as physical challenges: Can Django Django give Stereolab’s "Metronomic Underground" a jamband reworking? "Giant" says "yes." Can they repurpose surf-guitar riffs without actually making surf-rock? "Shake and Tremble" pulls off that trick. Can the juddering bassline of Big Boi’s
"Shutterbugg" coexist with monklike harmonies? "First Light" answers in affirmative. But can Django Django juxtapose starched-stiff British accents against vibrant Caribbean rhythms? There’s a thirteen-minute stretch stuck right in the middle of Born Under Saturn, from "Reflections" to "Shot Down", that emphatically states "no."
More so than their woolier debut, Born Under Saturn is a demonstration of what Django Django can do rather than what they have to say or how they feel. The almost-constant harmonizing of Vincent Neff’s staid vocals surround these songs in a case of stained glass, lovely but nearly impenetrable. Hammer away enough at the album and some kind of center emerges: "High Moon" might be about restorative nocturnal powers, "Shot Down" might be a crime narrative, and maybe the album title is meant to suggest a motif of planetary influence and rebirth that gets vaguely touched upon throughout.
But Neff lends not a speck of vibrato, grit or inflection to anything, and thus, not a speck of urgency or instability or any emotional resonance. The busy arrangements and serious frontloading make Born Under Saturn’s 54 minutes a demanding investment, and the effort it takes to simply get any sort of visceral pleasure out of it makes it feel twice as long.
And so the best record Django Django may end up putting their name on is 2014’s Late Night Tales compilation. It tells you everything about the band that Born Under Saturn does: they see themselves in the lineage of late-'60s, early-'70s pop weirdos, but they listen like modernist samplers and crate diggers—witness the inclusion of Bob James’ endlessly resourced "Nautilus". A telling and exciting three-song stretch includes Massive Attack’s supervillainous cover of John Holt’s rocksteady classic "Man Next Door", TNGHT’s "Bugg’n" and Stankonia deep cut "Slum Beautiful". All of those acts have likewise been lauded for their omnivorous artistry and loved because their songs have distinct character and hooks. Django Django are clearly inspired by them, but when I think about how they fit amongst their most frequent comparisons in the UK Class of 2000, I remember SPIN's infamous pick for album of the year: something that also packed an incredible amount of musical information in a small space but was only as lovable as its input. It was "your hard drive", and unfortunately, that might be the best likeness for Django Django. | 2015-05-05T02:00:03.000-04:00 | 2015-05-05T02:00:03.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | Ribbon Music | May 5, 2015 | 5.6 | 0985e088-d883-4bd7-96e2-7047dc00a064 | Ian Cohen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ian-cohen/ | null |
Even when she’s singing about self-loathing, the 18-year-old pop star and dancer exudes a swagger. Her full-length debut proves she’s capable of transcending online virality. | Even when she’s singing about self-loathing, the 18-year-old pop star and dancer exudes a swagger. Her full-length debut proves she’s capable of transcending online virality. | Tate McRae: i used to think i could fly | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/tate-mcrae-i-used-to-think-i-could-fly/ | I Used to Think I Could Fly | Tate McRae’s a tortured romantic, burdened by bad lovers and friends who don’t understand her. Despite being one of the most egregious “indie pop voices” in recent memory, she’s a strong singer, as comfortable slinking across broody pop-trap as she is belting over piano-driven ballads. Her sound is sandwiched somewhere between Billie Eilish and Olivia Rodrigo, and, like Rodrigo, McRae revels in heartbreak, surveying the pop landscape to see which style best suits her sad-girl anthems. Her full-length debut, i used to think i could fly, announces McRae as a legitimate pop star capable of transcending the online virality that launched her career, but she’s often too beleaguered to take it all in. “You say I should be on top of the world/But I’m not feeling much,” she sings on “go away,” and the admission seems intended to resonate beyond celebrity and reach any number of people struggling to find a silver lining.
Like so many before her, McRae was discovered on YouTube. A competitive dancer and content creator living in Calgary, she found her initial breakthrough at 14, when she posted a video of an original song, “One Day,” which has since amassed almost 40 million views; the official release was certified gold in Canada. The song spurred a label bidding war won by RCA, which vowed to support McRae’s dance career and, for her first EP, gifted her a song co-written by Eilish and Finneas. She landed a hit in 2020 with “you broke me first,” a triumphant trap-infused ballad that tore through TikTok in the early months of the pandemic. But the song’s stratospheric success—a billion streams and counting across all platforms—didn’t translate to megastardom. Without the Disney Channel fame and off-camera love triangle that bolstered Rodrigo’s “drivers license,” McRae’s song appeared to be just another viral smash. It was good, maybe even great, but the lack of narrative momentum stifled her bid for placement beside nascent icons like Eilish and Rodrigo.
i used to think i could fly proves she has more big songs in her. Working with a team of hitmakers including Greg Kurstin, Charlie Handsome, and Blake Slatkin, McRae tries her hand at the type of pop suited for an Abercrombie store—AI-generated pop-punk, Kid Laroi-style soft trap, etc. She’s adept at sliding between sounds, exuding a swagger even when singing about self-loathing. Standouts “hate myself” and “feel like shit” both manage to extract meaning from suffering. On the latter, McRae’s voice soars with anguish, capturing the theatrical agony of a breakup: “I won’t lie, I thought I might die…And maybe I’ll get used to it, but right now I just feel like shit.” It can be cathartic to give into grief, even if the concession is fleeting, and McRae’s acceptance of this pain reads as vaguely empowering.
The album’s not always so introspective. Often, empowerment comes in the form of vindication as she thrashes exes for being spineless and stupid. On tracks like the “Ride Wit Me”-interpolating “don’t come back” and the alt-rock-inflected “what would you do?”, McRae’s almost giddy with bitterness, shifting her sadness into sneering resentment. “Never left your dad’s basement/Now you’re mad that I made it,” she sings on “i’m so gone,” feigning pride to momentarily mask the debilitating hurt she expresses throughout the record. There’s an authenticity to this sort of self-delusion; McRae’s nursing her ego, convincing herself she’s superior to her ex. It’s only when her language becomes impersonal that the empowerment turns trite. On the painfully flat “boy x,” heartache warps briefly into narcissism: “There’s a billion of boy x, but, babe, there’s only one of me.” On an album stuffed with incisive insights into failed romance, moments like this feel out of step.
In a recent interview with Zane Lowe, McRae discussed the difficulty of developing an artistic identity as an industry-anointed pop star: “I probably did a million writing sessions this summer with a million different people,” she said. “That was the hardest part—actually having the confidence to speak up and [say], ‘No, no, no: this is what my album’s about.’” Apart from some missteps—like the excruciating Finneas-produced “i still say goodnight”—i used to think i could fly soars with confidence, a record that remains absolutely sure of itself even as McRae’s emotions vacillate between bravado and self-immolation. | 2022-06-02T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2022-06-02T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | RCA | June 2, 2022 | 6.8 | 09893ab2-d908-442a-a2da-ec68c6ae3815 | Brady Brickner-Wood | https://pitchfork.com/staff/brady-brickner-wood/ | |
After many delays, Game returns with an utter mess of an LP, one heavy on guests (Drake, Rick Ross, Tyler, the Creator) and light on inspiration. The perverse thing about The R.E.D. Album is that amidst this unsightly storm of star power is the backbone of what could've been a coherent album. | After many delays, Game returns with an utter mess of an LP, one heavy on guests (Drake, Rick Ross, Tyler, the Creator) and light on inspiration. The perverse thing about The R.E.D. Album is that amidst this unsightly storm of star power is the backbone of what could've been a coherent album. | The Game: The R.E.D. Album | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/15759-the-red-album/ | The R.E.D. Album | When Game got himself kicked out of G-Unit in 2005, he effectively became a ward of the record industry. He existed, so somebody needed to take care of him. That responsibility fell on the shoulders of the Interscope/Geffen tandem, who, like bad foster parents, decided to remedy their problems with him by throwing unseemly amounts of money in his direction. In theory it might make sense, as Game's career has long been based on a simple formula: Surround him with artists more talented and famous than him, provide him with an envious selection of beats, then get out of the way and hope for the best. Up until about 2009, you could actually tack "profit" onto the end of that list, but the last few years haven't been too kind to rap's foremost tragic clown.
Game last released an album three years ago, and like The R.E.D. Album, it seemed destined to be a commercial failure. But along came "My Life", a Lil Wayne collaboration that became Game's biggest hit since 2005, and so the project, and his career, were salvaged. But that was a time when pretty much anything Wayne touched ended up making somebody some money, unless you were Brisco or Cassie. It was the Lil Wayne Feature Bubble of 2008, and unfortunately for Interscope, Game has turned out to be Pets.com.
The R.E.D. Album arrives in stores as a monument to the twisted logic and dire business practices of the modern rap industry. It has cycled through as many "lead singles" as the total number of radio hits that Biggie had in his whole career (yes, including posthumous releases). Its Wikipedia page could almost be printed and published as a 33 1/3 book. At a mere 21 tracks long, and featuring 17 different artists, the final product is one speedboat away from being a DJ Khaled album. Guests include Drake, Young Jeezy, Snoop Dogg, Rick Ross, Lil Wayne twice, Dr. Dre five times, and Nelly Furtado, who must've wandered into the wrong recording studio and froze up like George Costanza when she tried to find an excuse to leave. It's almost as if the rap and R&B world got together to do a benefit album, although considering the state of Game's career, that might not be too far off.
On one side of the coin is a work that's an utter monstrosity, and whose best moments appear very sporadically. The other side is an album that is almost-- almost-- too big to fail. Where some collaborations here feel like the result of Game spinning a prize wheel and taking his stuffed Lloyd, "Heavy Artillery" (featuring Ross and Beanie Sigel) and "Speakers on Blast" (with Big Boi and E-40) sound like they were conceived with consideration to how the artists might sound together and how the tracks would fit into Game's gritty aesthetic. In what might be the album's two greatest successes, "Martians vs. Goblins" finds Game putting on a worthy audition for Odd Future (complete with a hilarious Lil B crack) and "Drug Test" rides a beat that thrillingly turns the clock back to when G-Unit wasn't merely an investment firm.
The perverse thing about The R.E.D. Album is that amidst this unsightly storm of star power is the backbone of what could've been a coherent album. A number of tracks lean on soulful production that provides an appropriate (though maybe too on-the-nose) backdrop for Game's hyper-personal verses. Others dip into storytelling or flesh out a bit of Game's personal history. At the very worst the album wouldn't feel like one of those fake leaks that haphazardly packages together an artists' singles and random features into one large .rar file. But of course, Game's whole career is based on the hypothesis that he can't sell records on name or talent alone. So instead, the album smothers itself in R&B choruses sung by people like Chris Brown and Mario, and nobody wants to hear that, including, surely, Chris Brown and Mario.
The R.E.D. Album will likely fade into obscurity immediately upon arrival, but if it doesn't raise some eyebrows around major label offices, then this is a failure of not just one person, but also of an entire industry. As Watch the Throne lords over the genre, its antithesis is here: a strategically and artistically directionless album, built around a desperate, forgotten MC, foisted upon a public that has made it very clear that it wants nothing to do with him. Game told MTV's Shaheem Reid that the album's title referred to his re-dedication to hip-hop but, in a taunting, delicious bit of irony, it more appropriately reflects the project's balance sheet. We can pretend the album never existed, or better yet, joke about it for years to come. Jimmy Iovine, on the other hand, isn't so lucky. | 2011-08-29T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2011-08-29T02:00:01.000-04:00 | Rap | DGC / Interscope | August 29, 2011 | 4.8 | 098dbba9-2c6b-48d8-973f-cecf6ab25cc0 | Jordan Sargent | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jordan-sargent/ | null |
The songwriter’s latest great long ode to himself is at once bloated and transcendent, boring and mesmerizing. | The songwriter’s latest great long ode to himself is at once bloated and transcendent, boring and mesmerizing. | Mark Kozelek: Mark Kozelek | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/mark-kozelek-mark-kozelek/ | Mark Kozelek | “The Mark Kozelek Museum” appears on Mark Kozelek’s new album Mark Kozelek, his latest collection of songs as Yelp reviews. It is a ten-and-a-half minute inventory of Mark Kozelek heirlooms: crystals taken from a chandelier at Jim Morrison’s Florida State University house, the “innocent memory” of hearing “I just fucked my favorite lead singer” during a consensual tryst in the ’90s, a guitar solo in the style of Yes’ Steve Howe, an experiment with the melodic qualities of the word “diarrhea” and a backstage encounter with his “brother in music” Ariel Pink. “No one can accuse me or Ariel Pink of ever being boring,” he croons and “The Mark Kozelek Museum” is by turns psychedelically boring and mesmerizing. It’s about nothing and also somehow everything.
Mark Kozelek is nearly an hour and a half monument to nothingness. Can even the most diligent curators of the Mark Kozelek legacy justify its existence after five releases of nearly the same exact style in 2017 alone? As he reaches a prolificacy that would give Robert Pollard a stress ulcer, the challenge lies in discerning the incremental differences between one dispatch of songs about sandwiches and Scarface and boxing and another.
The most important thing to know about Mark Kozelek is that it really is truth in advertising—whereas all of his collaborations were essentially Kozelek doing his thing over exactly what you’d expect (distended doomgaze with Jesu, post-rock abstraction with Jim White and Ben Boye), here it’s just him and his latest new toy, looping devices that allow him to recreate the thump of his drum machines on album highlight “Live in Chicago” and stretch “diarrhea” into a ten-second rhythmic bed. It is kind of a pretty word when stripped of its meaning.
At least for now, it appears that he’s lost interest in the 8-bit synths and boom-bap that turned some of Common as Light and Love Are Red Valleys of Blood into appointment listening, the closest thing we’ll ever hear to an actual Sun Kil Moon rap album. That record’s tenuous adjacence to hip-hop results in this self-titled album’s most self-mythologizing moment—Kozelek happens upon someone listening to Common as Light and Love on Spotify, who not only doesn’t recognize Kozelek, but Kozelek doesn’t recognize it himself. This whole delirious exchange is a result of Kozelek being in the grips of a sunstroke caused by him getting a little too careless, dancing in his backyard with his weed whacker (commemorated on “Weed Whacker,” naturally).
It has a lot of competition for this album’s moment of peak of absurdity—he quotes a stray line of 2Pac dialogue from Biggie & Tupac because he runs out of words following a riff about Al Gore’s thoughts on Donald Trump, a fan working at a bookstore jokes about them going to Panera Bread and another patron calls their bluff by saying there actually is one in San Francisco now. Kozelek ends up getting kicked out the store. It’s a long story itself and a longer story about how it fits perfectly into the gorgeous devotional “My Love for You Is Undying”—it takes about 13 minutes to tell it.
And yet, the idea that we’re supposed to be laughing at Kozelek underestimates the cagey brilliance that often accompanies these songs. On “Live in Chicago,” the specific resonance of playing his own song, the heartbreaking “Needles Disney World” in Orlando is soon overshadowed by the uncomfortable introduction of a song giving tribute to the Pulse nightclub victims a year after the fact. Most songwriters would struggle to find the proper metaphor or conceptual framework to honor the victims of gun violence and our desensitization to its regularity without sensationalizing it—Kozelek trusts common language over poetry, looking at the hearty succulents that serve as memorials and “the contrast of the beautiful Florida sun and its laws supporting guns.”
Who else is writing songs about the way a devastating sports outcome can affect the local economy? Kozelek claims to be too ignorant of football to comment on the Saints’ catastrophic playoff loss that happened about four months before this album’s release, but he’s able to rattle off a reminder of their contributions to food and music as consolation (specifically, “crawfish etouffee and Phil Anselmo and Lil Wayne”). Sure, the personification of the San Francisco fog on April’s ”Lost Verses” was heartbreakingly gorgeous, but saying it’s “like [how] Bon Scott’s soul hovers over Perth” and “like a bunch of grandmothers moving through Woolworth’s” is something no one else would even attempt.
About 75 minutes in, Kozelek introduces the penultimate song with a line from the Mark Kozelek Lyric Generator: “Eating a po’ boy at Mothers next to a photo of a young Riddick Bowe,” The photo inspires some soul-searching about the nature of his itinerant lifestyle, the resonance of A Confederacy of Dunces, and a treasured art deco lamp, which spins off riffs that are touching and tragicomic—his New Orleans home used to be decorated solely with that lamp and his mattress, and after years of lighting his songwriting, book-reading, and lovemaking, it ends up breaking due to an unnecessary window inspection. He’s bummed out and his girlfriend demands he do something with his day—which brings him right back to the first line and explains why he’s eating a po’ boy at Mothers next to a photo of a young Riddick Bowe—the structural integrity of “Young Riddick Bowe” is pretty fucking mind-blowing for a song that sounded made up on the spot.
Moments like these explain why Mark Kozelek backs up its creator’s boast of never being boring despite lacking anything in the way of traditional hooks or dynamics. I have absolutely no idea where any of these songs will be 20 seconds from now, which is how it holds my attention constantly, in contrast to the times I find myself zoning out during traditionally-structured three-minute songs that attempt to be memorable. It’s a quality that Benji had to an extreme degree, so why does it feel like “Young Riddick Bowe” will suffer the same fate as “Philadelphia Cop,” “Butch Lullaby,” “Needles Disney World” and the other songs from 2017 that seemed equally revelatory at the time and forgotten by the time he released his next project? As with any recent Mark Kozelek record, it’s easy to feel cheated here—he has a voice that maintains an actorly mastery of modulation and inflection, his observational genius and constantly evolving guitar playing inspired younger acts like Joyce Manor, Snail Mail and Phoebe Bridgers that could not be further removed from the stereotypical “guys in tennis shoes” he mocked only six years ago. Imagine if he could apply these gifts into these things called songs, or even if he downshifted production to two albums a year like in his 2012-2014 rejuvenation period.
But at this point, Kozelek clearly is someone who believes songwriting characteristics like verse/chorus alternation or cadence or repeated hooks are vestigial things that prevented him from the most direct and freeing form of communication—everything he releases now is a new Mark Kozelek album, but also his de facto Twitter feed, a bonus disc of stage banter, a beautifully-soundtracked podcast, an Instagram, a Yelp elite account. Despite Kozelek’s technophobic rep, Mark Kozelek is a thoroughly modern album, one doesn’t separate the art from the artist but collapses the two completely. | 2018-05-16T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-05-16T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Caldo Verde / Rough Trade | May 16, 2018 | 6.8 | 09912119-c860-4731-807f-4df7d0b108cc | Ian Cohen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ian-cohen/ | |
Possessed by a genuine love of classic dark electro and vintage electronics, the new Italians Do It Better label reimagines the Italo-disco of the 1970s and 80s as stark, retro-futurist noir electro. Sparse, skeletal, and consumed by a constant sense of creeping dread, After Dark is the sleek soundtrack to lives of moral ambiguity in post-urban shadows. Rising stars Glass Candy, the Chromatics, and Mirage appear. | Possessed by a genuine love of classic dark electro and vintage electronics, the new Italians Do It Better label reimagines the Italo-disco of the 1970s and 80s as stark, retro-futurist noir electro. Sparse, skeletal, and consumed by a constant sense of creeping dread, After Dark is the sleek soundtrack to lives of moral ambiguity in post-urban shadows. Rising stars Glass Candy, the Chromatics, and Mirage appear. | Various Artists: After Dark | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/10351-after-dark/ | After Dark | A compilation like this has been a long time coming. In 1997, Holland-based DJ/producer I-F basically invented electroclash with his underground dance hit "Space Invaders Are Smoking Grass". Two years later, he helped catalyze the ongoing Italo-disco revival with one of the genre's most essential compilations, Mixed Up in the Hague, Vol. 1, a DJ mix that pulled together defining cuts like Mr. Flagio's vocoder-fronted "Take a Chance" and Klein & MBO's "Blue Monday"-influencing "Dirty Talk". Since then, other DJ mixes such as Morgan Geist's Unclassics have kept vintage Italo on turntables, while I-F's Italo-focused Cybernetic Broadcasting System has deepened the canon for real devotees.
2007 may be remembered in some circles for its dance-rock hybrids: Klaxons and Justice, "nu rave" and "blog house," each ably filling in for the dance-punk and electroclash of previous trend cycles. But it's also a year when significant numbers of contemporary artists have embraced Italo's Giorgio Moroder-styled synth arpeggios and brought them into the new millennium. Sweden's Sally Shapiro and Cloetta Paris are breathing new life into the wispy synth-pop of Italo singer Valerie Dore, while the UK's Kathy Diamond is making beardo synth-pop with producer Maurice Fulton. The enigmatic Black Devil Disco Club's 28 After could've been made any time in the past 30 years. In the icy winter afterglow of Shapiro's Disco Romance, Portland, Ore. acts Glass Candy and Chromatics helped keep Pitchfork HQ's Italo love aflame with their first releases for Italians Do It Better, a new label from Troubleman Unlimited founder Mike Simonetti. Viva Italia.
On After Dark, the fledgling imprint assembles mostly vinyl-only or previously unreleased tracks by its current roster, which also includes Farah, Mirage, and Professor Genius. Produced in substantial part by Glass Candy guitarist Johnny Jewel, the comp is practically a Mixed Up in the Hague for present-day Italo, only with the darker ambiance its title implies. Where its precursor could at times play up Italo's proclivity for cheese (once experienced in the U.S. via minor Eurodisco hits by the likes of Falco and Taco), this album wisely eschews ironic winks and kitsch-for-kitsch's sake. Shapiro might find an indie pop romance in Italo, but After Dark lovingly re-imagines the style as retro-futurist noir-- a sleek soundtrack to lives of moral ambiguity in post-urban shadows.
The best tracks on the compilation embody that eerie slant on the old Italo throb/pulse without letting an air of minor-key reflection lapse into air quotes. On the extended 12" version of Chromatics' "In the City", the crackle of vinyl, distant synth swoops, skeletal drum patter, and singer Ruth Radelet's narcoticized murmurs about "midnight workers" and a "concrete river" evokes rain hitting sidewalks. Glass Candy's Italo coming-out, "I Always Say Yes", is conspicuously absent, but their hazy "Rolling Down the Hills (Spring Demo)" opens the disc with horns and singer Ida No's deadly cold vocal presence.
After Dark's other acts approach the compilation's dusky Italo aesthetic from similar perspectives. New Jersey-based Professor Genius homes in on the dystopian synth work of Vangelis and the upbeat expressiveness of Alexander Robotnick on instrumentals "La Grotta (Demo)" and album-closing "Pegaso". The vocoder makes its sole appearances on two tracks by Italy's Mirage ("Lady Operator", "Lake of Dreams"), but Mirage uses the instrument to enhance singer Julius' alienation, not to dish cheap nostalgic thrills. Texas-based Farah keep up the metronomic beats and analog cascades, but "Dancing Girls (Suite 304 Demo)" adds a section sung in Persian, while the spoken-word monologue of "Law of Life" sounds like a scripture reading from a church of the damned. It's one of the few moments on After Dark that seems stilted as much as reverent.
For plenty more reverence, look to the album's cover versions. Though occasionally distracting, After Dark's updates of older compositions are good signposts: Glass Candy's relatively direct take on Kraftwerk's essential 1981 "Computer Love", or a lavishly orchestrated rendition of Paris-based Eurodisco group Belle Epoque's 1977 "Miss Broadway" (later sampled by rapper Special Ed on 1990's "Come On, Let's Move It"). Not quite a cover, but Mirage's remix of Indeep's 1982 classic "Last Night a DJ Saved My Life" adds evocative Italo synths to the original's spare, post-disco bass line and early hip-hop vocals.
In addition, both Glass Candy and Chromatics cover songs by ex-DNA member Robin Crutchfield's Dark Day, particularly suiting Glass Candy's shift from no-wave to disco. A tinny analog synth rotates through slight arpeggio variations without giving way to a shift in mood on Glass Candy's cover of "The Chameleon", haunted by suicide and unnamed attackers. The steady snare thwack and detached atmospherics on Chromatics' version of the catchy "Hands in the Dark" suggest Chromatics' MySpace quote-- "Night Drive"-- fits them even better than it does Jan Hammer riffer Kavinsky's recent "Testarossa Nightdrive", though here it's surely a drive headed toward despair.
So there it is: Italo survived electroclash. And the recent explosion of Italo disco-inspired acts culminating (for now) in After Dark probably suggests the style will survive current indie-dance trends as well. In an interview for Australia's Rave Magazine, Simian Mobile Disco's James Ford (who produced the latest releases by Klaxons and Arctic Monkeys) says of his own dance-pop outfit's swooning single "I Believe": "We've been getting into loads of slow, dreamy disco stuff-- the Emperor Machine, and a pair of bands in particular called Chromatics and Glass Candy-- and it partly came about like that." Just don't look for Justice to follow suit quite yet. | 2007-06-22T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2007-06-22T02:00:01.000-04:00 | null | Italians Do It Better | June 22, 2007 | 8.3 | 09915a5d-f40f-46f0-aa8d-048b538fb42c | Marc Hogan | https://pitchfork.com/staff/marc-hogan/ | null |
In 2004, Katy Davidson infused her indie-pop project Dear Nora—an influence on the likes of Girlpool and Joyce Manor—with a windswept folk sensibility. Her most complex album is newly reissued. | In 2004, Katy Davidson infused her indie-pop project Dear Nora—an influence on the likes of Girlpool and Joyce Manor—with a windswept folk sensibility. Her most complex album is newly reissued. | Dear Nora: Mountain Rock | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22730-dear-nora-mountain-rock/ | Mountain Rock | At the turn of the millennium, the Pacific Northwest’s embrace of grunge and riot grrrl was quietly being replaced by a soft introspection that arose from the area’s lush and cool environment. Led by bands like the Microphones, Mirah, and Little Wings, this scene recognized the vastness of the world and explored their place within it: “But I’m small, I’m not a planet at all/I’m small, I’m small, we’re all,” sang Phil Elverum on 2001’s The Glow Pt 2. They appeared in each other’s projects, released each other’s music, and generally evolved together as a community.
Katy Davidson became embedded in this world after moving to Portland in 1995 to attend the liberal arts college Lewis & Clark. It was there, in the summer of 1999, that she formed Dear Nora alongside her classmates Marianna Ritchey and Ryan Wise. Crafting speedy jangle-pop that cherished emotional earnestness, the early Dear Nora sound was strikingly similar to the music of their Magic Marker labelmates Tullycraft, All Girl Summer Fun Band, and the Owls. After releasing a debut LP, We’ll Have a Time, in early 2001, Davidson moved to San Francisco where she continued performing and touring under the Dear Nora moniker.
To construct her second album, Mountain Rock, in 2003, Davidson retreated to her birthplace of Arizona. There, her childhood home was a geodesic dome built by her father on the side of a mountain in the Sonoran desert. Returning to Arizona allowed Davidson to unlock an innate intimacy. (Joan Didion once said of her own native California, “I am easy here in a way that I am not easy in other places,” and the sentiment seems to apply.) Coloring this natural bliss, however, is terror. The songs of Mountain Rock were penned in response to George W. Bush’s election, 9/11, and the early days of the Iraq War. A sensation of impending dread floats through them. Take the first words sung on opener “The Lonesome Border, Pt 1”: “I know it’s gonna be a strange time/Well it can’t possibly be any stranger than the present/’Cause now it is said, there’s a change/And I sensed the change in me.”
Then there is “People, Don’t You Know?,” which feels like a 40-second brief of the 2015 New Yorker article “The Really Big One,” about a mega-quake that will devastate the Northwest. (“And won’t it be weird/When the dust storms appear/And all life is obliterated,” Davidson sings with a shrug). On “Hung Up,” Davidson buckles under existential worry: “That I will never change/That I am not changing.” Perhaps it’s the struggle to see oneself during a period of surreal transition that helps make Mountain Rock feel so pertinent in 2017.
Communing with the desert changed Dear Nora’s sound from sing-song indie pop to windswept, serene mysticism. The reissue is composed of 20 barebones tracks (there are three new additions) that recall the folk sensibilities of the Roches, Judee Sill, and Elverum, but it also contains traces of the Beatles’ dreamy dissonance found in Rubber Soul or Revolver. There’s certainly a psychedelic vibe to Mountain Rock—not in the “turn on, tune in, drop out” sense, but in the willingness to submit oneself to introspection. Davidson’s focus on the spartan acoustic guitar allows her to replicate small moments, like wind whistling across rocks, the movements of a bird. Every pluck feels purposeful—microcosmic echoes of the world slightly shifting its weight. This effect is heightened by the atmospheric, instrumental interludes scattered throughout: “Living Song” is a mesmerizing drone, “West Nile!!” is an extraterrestrial-sounding guitar loop, “The Climb” is a sleepy piano piece. “Departure Song” is a spare improvised track recorded among the steel curvature of a Quonset hut, which gives the song its vast, cavernous reverberations.
Mountain Rock is largely one tranquil note, but what a beautiful note. The rare moments of tonal difference are not disruptive; rather, they fit the varying moods of life. “Give Me Some of Your Love” is a rare upbeat moment on the album—a blast of twee that Davidson claims in the liner notes is meant to be mocking—but it’s difficult not to take everything on this album at face-value when there is so much apparent vulnerability. “Here We Come Around Again” is another lighthearted track, though it is upfront about its emotional omniscience.
“Oxygen & the Mellow Stuff” is Mountain Rock’s peak. The chorus comes together in a huge way; it recalls nature, like a geyser exploding or a sunrise. It draws a direct line to the charmed beltings of indie-pop duo Girlpool, who referenced Davidson’s project on their 2015 album Before the World Was Big (with a titular song, “Dear Nora”). In quieter moments, like on the wispy “You Are a Bear,” Mountain Rock points towards successors like Girlpool and New York’s Frankie Cosmos; they deliver lines so intimate they necessitate a scrunched face and closed eyes. In 2016, heart-on-sleeve punkers Joyce Manor also listed Dear Nora as a guiding light for their album Cody, and while these nods did not necessarily galvanize the reissue, they attest to Dear Nora’s still-growing influence. Mountain Rock earns it, an album devoted to the inner self and the struggle to find one’s place. As a teenage Susan Sontag once wrote of Fritz Busch’s compositions, “If I could always hear them, how resolute and serene I would be.” | 2017-01-16T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2017-01-16T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Orindal | January 16, 2017 | 8.3 | 0994a712-3b6c-4171-9395-6d2166ff9e63 | Quinn Moreland | https://pitchfork.com/staff/quinn-moreland/ | null |
Natural Information Society is a shifting collective led by bassist, composer, and improviser Joshua Abrams, and they turn out to be the perfect collaborators for the drifting, new age-inspired Bitchin Bajas. Automaginary feels thoroughly modern, but also ancient. | Natural Information Society is a shifting collective led by bassist, composer, and improviser Joshua Abrams, and they turn out to be the perfect collaborators for the drifting, new age-inspired Bitchin Bajas. Automaginary feels thoroughly modern, but also ancient. | Bitchin Bajas / Natural Information Society: Automaginary | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/20959-automaginary/ | Automaginary | It would be tough to find a more cosmically inspired pairing than Natural Information Society and Bitchin Bajas. So, it’s a happy coincidence that both happen to reside in Chicago.
Natural Information Society is a shifting collective led by bassist, composer, and improviser Joshua Abrams. A long-time presence in the Chicago jazz and experimental music community, he's spent the past five years releasing albums—including Natural Information, Represencing, and the recent double LP Magnetoception—that have concentrated on meditative, pulse-driven music. Rather than a traditional upright or electric bass, on these records Abrams favors a three-stringed North African lute called a guimbri. The instrument’s percussive but rubbery tone provides a foundation for fluid and hypnotic embellishments on percussion, guitar, autoharp, and harmonium.
Lead by Cooper Crain—of Chicago-based krautrock revivalists, Cave—Bitchin Bajas’ music draws inspiration from the minimalist and new age records of the late '60s and '70s. On last year’s Bitchin Bajas and this year’s Transporteur EP, the group crafted patient and serene zone-out music that made heavy use of vintage synthesizers and tape loops.
As a collaboration, Automaginary flatters both parties. Bajas’ music often relies on the embellishment of looped phrases, be they short keyboard figures, guitar riffs, or abstract sounds. Working with an improvising ensemble allows the band—represented here by Crain, Dan Quinlivan, and Rob Frye—the chance to operate in a more dynamic setting. Throughout the compositions musicians drop in and out, switch melodies, or shuffle the phrasing of their riffs, allowing the music to feel organic and alive in a way that’s tough to replicate with a static loop. In turn, Natural Information Society’s scope is expanded through Bajas’ tastefully curated collection of old keyboards, whose hazy tones reinforce the music’s airy and meditative sensibility.
On the nearly 20-minute drone opener, "On No Fade", bowed upright bass tones slowly give way to humming keyboards and piano flourishes. The music is melodic, but never in a concrete or hummable sense and while it gradually increases in density, the band avoids a clear climax. It’s very peaceful listening. The subsequent compositions are more in line with Abrams’ recent records. The guimbri is at the center of the music, providing a pulse to guide the other musicians. The music grooves, but never quickens—maintaining a steady and consistent energy throughout. There are no solos and while the players wander and evolve their lines, they always remain in complementary positions to one another.
Bajas and Abrams both find serenity amid perceived stasis—making music that sounds repetitive, but is constantly undergoing subtle scene shifts and mutations. More than that, both make music that sounds strangely timeless. The lack of complex harmony helps to diffuse Abrams’ relationship to much modern jazz and while Bajas' music pays homage to a certain group of composers, those musicians were looking back toward even older traditions. Automaginary works because both excel at making music that feels thoroughly modern, but also ancient. | 2015-08-31T02:00:03.000-04:00 | 2015-08-31T02:00:03.000-04:00 | Experimental / Jazz | Drag City | August 31, 2015 | 7.9 | 099a3c11-2707-4579-bbd1-ee80bbd3da69 | Aaron Leitko | https://pitchfork.com/staff/aaron-leitko/ | null |
On a pair of interlinked albums—one performed with a jazz quintet and the other with a string quartet—the composer-guitarist finds new context for her singular style. | On a pair of interlinked albums—one performed with a jazz quintet and the other with a string quartet—the composer-guitarist finds new context for her singular style. | Mary Halvorson: Amaryllis / Belladonna | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/mary-halvorson-amaryllis-belladonna/ | Amaryllis / Belladonna | When recounting her origin story, Mary Halvorson often emphasizes a piece of advice she received from two early mentors, Joe Morris and Anthony Braxton: The most important thing is to find your own voice. More than perhaps any other guitarist working today, in jazz or elsewhere, she has succeeded at that deceptively simple aspiration. Hear her play once and you’ll recognize her anywhere: as a soloist, as a leader or accompanist in any number of ensembles, in duos with players from the worlds of avant-garde improvisation or warped indie rock.
On one hand, her tone is clear and declarative near the point of affectlessness, maintaining a sense of calm deliberation even as she spins out increasingly elaborate melodic fractals, stoic in the eye of her own gathering storm. On the other, aided by her trusty Line 6 DL4, she turns the guitar into something slippery and alien. Individual notes seem suddenly to lose their footing, ringing confidently at first, then slipping and wobbling out of tune. Licks pile up on top of each other until they become a single undifferentiated mass, iridescent and oozing out past the margins. When recording, she generally places one microphone on her amp and another directly on her unamplified strings, capturing both sounds at the same time. The effect establishes an unlikely holism between her two approaches to the instrument: bringing out an uncanny quality from the quietude of her clean playing, and grounding her more boisterously outré passages in a certain naturalism.
As a composer and arranger, Halvorson treats each of her albums as an opportunity to create a new context for her singular voice as a guitarist, a practice she continues with Amaryllis and Belladonna, a pair of records released simultaneously and intended as a “modular and interlocking” pair. On Amaryllis, she follows an existing throughline in her catalog toward ever-larger ensembles, leading a newly established quintet—Patricia Brennan on vibraphone, Nick Dunston on bass, Tomas Fujiwara on drums, Jacob Garchik on trombone, and Adam O’Farrill on trumpet—and augmenting the core group with the Mivos string quartet on the album’s second side. On Belladonna, she strips away the jazz band, leaving only her guitar and the strings. By releasing them as separate-but-related projects, Halvorson allows listeners to find their own path through an imposing collection of music: Take each disc on its own, or both together as a double album, in whichever order you choose. I prefer Amaryllis first, then Belladonna, hearing the former as a raucous culmination of Halvorson’s recent bandleader albums, and the latter as a first glimpse of the misty and uncertain territory on the other side.
Amaryllis begins in media res, as if you’ve just wandered into a rehearsal space where Halvorson and the band started jamming an hour ago. Vibes, bass, and drums circle a confounding groove: funky, but with an elusive downbeat, inviting you to dance and then repeatedly pulling the rug out from under you. Halvorson’s guitar joins with a stuttering, asymmetrical line that sounds like a skipping record. Is this the main theme, or just a bit of pointillistic improvisation? Then the horns join her in emphatic unison, and a melody that at first seemed disjointed comes to sound inevitable, even a little triumphant. Halvorson’s compositions often work this way, playfully undermining and deconstructing themselves as they go, unsettling your expectations about what’s a tossed-off thought and what’s the main event.
Halvorson is an inventive and generous arranger, organizing Amaryllis in such a way that it never feels like a mere vehicle for dazzling solos, though there are plenty of those. She has a painterly approach to sonority, attuned to all the rich colors at the ensemble’s disposal. Many of the album’s most beautiful moments come with the dramatic addition or subtraction of a particular instrumental shade, like the way her guitar drapes Garchik’s trombone with gauzy reverb on “Night Shift,” offering an eerily sensuous counterpoint to his brassy declamations. On the title track, guitar and bass charge manically while the horns offer a relaxed countermelody; if it weren’t for Fujiwara’s powerhouse drumming keeping everyone corralled and headed in the same direction, you might think they were playing two different pieces entirely. Later in the same track, strafed on all sides by shards of percussion and mangled guitar, O’Farrill rides a four-note figure up and down the range of his trumpet. The effect is purely analog, but it resembles one of Halvorson’s delay-pedal excursions in the way it turns a stray gesture into a furious idée fixe.
Belladonna removes the buttress of Amaryllis’s horns and rhythm section. At times, the guitar and string quartet move like a single amorphous organism, untethered from any particular pulse. At others, one voice will offer a steady ostinato as a home base for the others to wander away from and return to at will. Melodic lines drift in and out of focus and cohesion. Allow your attention to soften for a while and you may return to find that a figure you’d taken for granted as simple accompaniment has emerged at some point as the music’s central focus. These qualities were all present on Amaryllis but are even more pronounced here, the sparser instrumentation allowing the music to dissolve almost completely before coming together again.
The spectacular “Haunted Head” begins with a three-note line on Halvorson’s low strings. When she adds a couple of higher pitches, the violins immediately take them up too, sounding as one with the guitar, providing her percussive picking with ghostly sustain. These sorts of unison lines are all over both albums, and by now—“Haunted Head” is Belladonna’s penultimate track—we know that Halvorson will likely complicate the simple gesture as the piece goes on. Sure enough, as the figure repeats, the strings slowly grow more dissonant, floating further away from the key the guitar has established. But they remain locked in with its rhythm, preserving the illusion that you’re hearing a single mutating voice, rather than the gradual building of a chord.
For 10 minutes, the piece proceeds in this way, taking a previously established element and elaborating on it unexpectedly, bringing the music someplace new. Halvorson’s initial low-string line eventually becomes the seed of a soaring melody for the entire ensemble, then the cello picks the initial version back up in pizzicato while Halvorson takes a jaunty solo. Music that began as vapor, sparse and spectral, has become a sort of alien parlor dance, joyous and irrepressible. And thanks to the way Halvorson embeds a bit of each previous gesture within the next one, the shift has happened in a way that feels natural, without a single jarring left turn.
Amaryllis and Belladonna are distinct statements; one could hear either album on its own without a sense that something is missing. But they are most powerful when taken together, like a landscape and its reflection in rippling water. The clearest moment of synchronicity between the two comes with a rupture at the end of each: Halvorson clicking on the distortion pedal and starting to burn—finishing with a solo whose intensity far exceeds anything that’s come before, clearing a path toward whatever’s next. | 2022-05-18T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2022-05-18T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Jazz | null | May 18, 2022 | 7.5 | 099e150e-6366-478f-a330-bd61544e6b90 | Andy Cush | https://pitchfork.com/staff/andy-cush/ | |
With sincere, resolute songwriting and a more accessible sound, the latest album from the New York quartet feels more suited than ever for the ecstasy of a crowded club. | With sincere, resolute songwriting and a more accessible sound, the latest album from the New York quartet feels more suited than ever for the ecstasy of a crowded club. | Parquet Courts: Sympathy for Life | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/parquet-courts-sympathy-for-life/ | Sympathy for Life | Even at its brawniest, Parquet Courts’ music has always explored questions of knowledge and the self, freedom and desire, responsibility and autonomy. Where some bands might sink in such existential quagmires, the New York quartet have only been propelled by their inquiries. With every album since their 2012 breakthrough Light Up Gold, their aperture has widened, allowing them to take in blues, western noir, and even some dub. Though the lyric sheet is still loaded with questions about the often unreasonable nature of life in the 21st century, on their latest album, Sympathy for Life, Parquet Courts abandon the fiction of certainty, take the elevator back to street level, and get the people moving.
They’ve flirted with drum machines and dance rhythms before—see, for example, their unsettlingly weird 2018 performance on Ellen—but the big beats on Sympathy for Life feel more suited than ever for the ecstasy of a crowded club. Much of the album was written during lengthy jam sessions that the band later stitched into coherent tracks, giving it a starry sense of possibility they’ve previously reached for but have never quite been able to grasp. Co-frontman Austin Brown leads the way, continuing to push his bandmates beyond the kraft-paper textures of their early records. The group luxuriates in the open space of the title track, allowing drummer Max Savage’s acid-house beat to pump until its three minutes feel as dilated as a 12" dance mix. A coda of switchbacks and mild sound-collaging turns co-frontman A. Savage’s “Trullo” into the kind of song the Beastie Boys tagged onto their mid-period records, bongos and all. Producers Rodaidh McDonald and John Parish give the band a much broader sound field—this is the first Parquet Courts record you’ll want to hear on good headphones—and they take full advantage of the space, Brown’s vocals wandering its edges in “Plant Life” while a melodica and piston-pumping beat keep the song grounded.
Like any good groove, the songs on Sympathy for Life are powered by tension. The album balances critique and celebration, allowing each to spill into the other. In “Application/Apparatus,” Savage frames a rideshare driver as an “operating mechanism” at the mercy of both the instructions given by their phone and the larger systems of war, migration, and capital that forced them into the car in the first place. The song glides by on a beat so precisely engineered and so brightly spangled with noise, it takes several listens to internalize the linguistic and ethical complexity of the story. Even then, it’s hard to deny the pure rush of joy that comes when the drum machine pushes the beat into overdrive. Both songwriters are interested in how it feels to have your sense of self manipulated by technology, how a pristine feed of recommended shows, music, and products can be both flattering—if you like interesting stuff, you must be interesting—and dehumanizing at the same time. “Algorithm waltz sets the pace/Indicates an authentic taste/Tell me what I love,” Savage sings in “Just Shadows.” He frog-marches his words through a melody so jaunty and upbeat it feels like he’s leading a sarcastic parade, the song’s forced cheeriness mirroring the way it can feel to scroll the Instagram Explore tab, searching for a jolt of adrenaline.
As he often does, Savage writes about wandering through New York City, hoping to shake loose some bit of understanding. Twice he decides to take in a movie. Wherever he goes, he’s hounded by his chosen isolation—“How many days of life will I spend underground?” he asks—even when it offers him solace, as when he wanders into La Monte Young and Marian Zazeela’s Dream House, removes his shoes, and centers himself among the glowing pink and purple lights and the buzzing microtones. At home, he runs out of things to watch and is both debased and liberated by the experience, his empty queue making him feel “like an inmate that’s finished his term.” Throughout Sympathy for Life, he’s chased by the specific dread that comes when you try to get a clear view of yourself in the reflection of a dark screen.
Though Savage’s attempts to come to grips with himself provide some of the album’s greatest moments of insight, they have a strange way of feeling almost beside the point, vestiges of a way of life both he and the band are in the process of shedding in an attempt to become more open-hearted. When Savage connects the impulse behind the consumerist present to the brutality of the colonialist past in “Homo Sapien”—both have been “hardwired to your desire”—Sean Yeaton’s bass drops with the realization; it’s a level of emotional awareness that goes beyond the righteous anger they cultivated on Wide Awake!. These songs aren’t merely interested in how bad things can be, they’re searching for liberation in syncopation.
Compared to the rest of their catalogue, Sympathy for Life feels broadly accessible—“Plant Life” suggests Lorde isn’t the only artist who’s been spinning Screamadelica—but that accessibility seems driven by a sense of responsibility. “No city, it’s all community,” Brown sings between calls to action in “Marathon of Anger,” a stark contrast with Human Performance’s “One Man, No City,” which carried essentially the same message but padded it in self-conscious snark. Sympathy for Life treats it more like a mission statement: The places we live aren’t just the sites of our consumption, they’re also the spaces we share, and that means we have to understand and help one another. “We’ve got the power,” they sing together, and they mean all of us.
It can be strange to hear a band who made their name by refusing to be pinned down sound so sincere and resolute. But like Talking Heads before them, the move from punk to dance has meant not only an expansion of what Parquet Courts sound like, but also of what they mean, who they are, and, crucially, who they want to be for. Though the band may still have their hangups, this album shows they know when to stop thinking and when to start moving.
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Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-10-25T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2021-10-25T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Rough Trade | October 25, 2021 | 7.6 | 099f1d7d-7bc0-489c-a4a8-e212a2fada6a | Sadie Sartini Garner | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sadie-sartini garner/ | |
Multi-instrumentalist Jay Watson tours with Tame Impala. Compared to that band's IMAX-scaled productions, his latest solo record G**lamorous Damage is like the 8-bit, Nintendo video game adaptation of a blockbuster film—an offshoot that can’t possibly match the grandeur of its esteemed affiliate, but possesses a quirky charm all its own. | Multi-instrumentalist Jay Watson tours with Tame Impala. Compared to that band's IMAX-scaled productions, his latest solo record G**lamorous Damage is like the 8-bit, Nintendo video game adaptation of a blockbuster film—an offshoot that can’t possibly match the grandeur of its esteemed affiliate, but possesses a quirky charm all its own. | GUM: Glamorous Damage | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21324-glamorous-damage/ | Glamorous Damage | As a multi-instrumentalist for the touring lineup of Tame Impala, Jay Watson has rode shotgun on Kevin Parker's accelerated ascent from acid-rock purist to synth-pop aesthete. But Watson's pursuits outside that band have veered in all sorts of directions. His other group, Pond, is the unbridled id to Tame Impala's steely superego, a band that feels no shame in giving songs titles like "Heroic Shart" or compunction in flipping between blown-out narco-rock and new wave in the space of two releases. Likewise, in just a year, Watson's solo alter ego GUM has hot-wired the grotty psych-pop of 2014's Delorean Highway into the block-party prog of sophomore effort, Glamorous Damage.
What ultimately unites Watson's constellation of bands is a desire to divorce '60s psychedelia from period details and infuse it with other temporally dislocated sounds, be it '70s art rock, '80s electro, or '90s lo-fi. Compared to Tame Impala's IMAX-scaled productions, Glamorous Damage is like the 8-bit, Nintendo videogame adaptation of a blockbuster film—an offshoot that can't possibly match the grandeur of its esteemed affiliate, but possesses a quirky charm all its own. And where Tame Impala's super-sized sound swaddles Parker's intimate lyricism, GUM's downsized dimensions can barely contain Watson's eccentric, multi-voiced personality.
Watson may double down on cheeky '80s signifiers here—arcade-game laser blasts, boombox beats, falsetto hooks, high-pitched cathode-ray frequencies—but they're the foundations that support his freakery, like the skull-piercing synth drone that overwhelms the Princely funk of "Anesthetized Lesson". Where Delorean Highway featured a wobbly but ultimately faithful cover of Genesis' 1980 pop crossover hit "Misunderstanding", Glamorous Damage deviously twists synth-pop until it turns into prog-rock: The brief opening snippet "G.U.M." introduces a budget Chemical Brothers bass groove that reappears in extended form as "R.Y.K.", where it ultimately serves as the canvas for a splatter of Kraftwerkian synths and smeared guitar solos.
Glamorous Damage succeeds so long as that impulsive energy is given enough space; when Watson stays locked in a single gear—like on the pastoral goth of "Greens and Blues", or the Ariel Pink Floyd reverie "She Never Made It to Tell" or the spoken-word title-track throwaway—the album stalls. Of course, even GUM's most fanciful gestures will feel modest next to Tame Impala's interstellar overdrive. But there's enough synthetic psychedelic splendor on Glamorous Damage to soundtrack a DIY planetarium laser show under the covers with tinted flashlights. | 2015-12-09T01:00:02.000-05:00 | 2015-12-09T01:00:02.000-05:00 | Rock | Spinning Top | December 9, 2015 | 6.7 | 09a6659e-e162-4fe6-b9f6-bb5252eef4b0 | Stuart Berman | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stuart-berman/ | null |
A new compendium of music Lou Barlow and John Davis created for the 1995 cult film Kids brings a piece of prescient indie rock experimentation—and sleeper hit “Natural One”—to streaming in full. | A new compendium of music Lou Barlow and John Davis created for the 1995 cult film Kids brings a piece of prescient indie rock experimentation—and sleeper hit “Natural One”—to streaming in full. | The Folk Implosion: Music for KIDS | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/the-folk-implosion-music-for-kids/ | Music for KIDS | No album screams “1995” like the soundtrack to Kids, Larry Clark’s voyeuristic, vértité-styled document of New York City youth gone wild, aka the Euphoria of its time. While Kids is best remembered today as the film that unleashed the anarchic sensibilities of screenwriter Harmony Korine and introduced Chloë Sevigny and Rosario Dawson to the big screen, its soundtrack signified a distinctly mid-’90s musical moment when the dusty veneer of hip-hop began filtering into the hermetic, bedroom-bound sound of DIY rock. This was a post-Beck landscape of beats and bongs, where the Beastie Boys were leading alt-cultural arbiters and Kim Gordon was launching streetwear. Still, even as this rhythm-driven sea change was pulling in noisemakers like Jon Spencer and the Butthole Surfers, it was strange to find Lou Barlow standing at the center of it.
For much of ’90s, Barlow was indie rock personified: the bespectacled avatar for the genre’s scrappy energy, resourceful ingenuity, and unfiltered expressionism. Following his infamous ouster from Dinosaur Jr. in 1989, Barlow poured his creative energies into a number of home-recording pursuits, the most notable of which—Sebadoh—eventually evolved into a potent fuzz-pop power trio. By 1994’s Bakesale, the eccentric tape-manipulation strategies that initially defined the Sebadoh catalog had given way to the streamlined songwriting and heartfelt address that would turn Barlow into an emo icon, but his penchant for mischief would find a new outlet. Around the same time, he and fan-turned-friend John Davis introduced the Folk Implosion, whose very name—a self-deprecating riff on Spencer’s braggadocious Blues Explosion—advertised its low ambitions. The duo’s 1994 debut, Take a Look Inside, was built on the same rickety foundations as Sebadoh’s earliest records, but its quirk-punk song sketches felt closer in spirit to the lo-fi lunacy of Ween. Nothing about this venture suggested it would soon be the incubator of Barlow’s first and only Top 40 hit.
But after developing a pen-pal relationship with fellow outsider-art aficionado Korine, Barlow and Davis suddenly found themselves in a proper studio—Boston’s Fort Apache—scoring scenes for what would become Kids. Flanked by TV/VCR set-ups, the duo took full advantage of the facility’s instrument inventory (saxophone, synth, vibraslap) and ventured down musical dark alleys inspired by the film’s gritty urban milieu. As they swung between dubby dirges, Satie-sampling beatscapes, and cabaret-jazz squawks, they hit a bullseye with “Natural One,” a psych-funk confection that momentarily transformed Barlow from indie rock’s foremost sensitive soul into its unlikeliest dancefloor seducer. Despite not actually appearing in the film, the song became the centerpiece of the soundtrack album, and its surprising chart success would make Kids’ musical companion a staple in every discerning college student’s 5-disc CD changer.
As an underdog victory story and an exemplar of alt-rap aesthetics, the Kids soundtrack has long stood as the ultimate mid-’90s time capsule—a fate reinforced in recent years by its spotty availability on streaming services. In its original incarnation, the Kids soundtrack resembled a Barlow-curated mixtape, with various Folk Implosion pieces complemented by songs from Daniel Johnston, Slint, and Sebadoh. The album’s release through Polygram subsidiary London Records made it the first major-label-affiliated product on Barlow’s CV, though the Folk Implosion never signed to London directly. In the ’90s this was a coup: They could benefit from a big label’s promotional muscle without being under its thumb. In the streaming era, however, old soundtracks featuring various artists affiliated with multiple labels face a complicated path to our listening queues (and those that make it often appear with key tracks grayed out due to digital-rights issues). Kids’ fragmented history on DSPs—with different partial permutations of the record available on different services and in different regions, if at all—has diminished the commercial high-water mark of Barlow’s career into a faded, did-that-actually-happen memory.
Music for KIDS rights that wrong, by filling the hole in the Folk Implosion’s digital catalog and clearing the way for the long-overdue addition of “Natural One” to your Essential ’90s Alternative playlist. But this is not a reissue of the original soundtrack album; rather, it’s a collection of all the music that Folk Implosion created in this period, including tracks heard in the film, stuff that got left on the cutting-room floor, songs that would find their proper home on later releases, and a couple of alternate versions that uncork the material’s latent club-hopping potential. (Few words so expediently transport you to a specific time and place like remix credits for UNKLE and Dust Brothers.) Taken as a whole, Music for KIDS is less a totem to Clark/Korine’s cult flick than an illuminating glimpse into the evolution of Barlow’s very own proto-Postal Service—a beat-driven side project that, for a brief moment, outshone his main gig.
At the very least, this collection reaffirms that Folk Implosion deserved to be a two-hit wonder. “Nothing Gonna Stop” takes the “Natural One” template and jacks up the pulse: Davis’ drums lock into a sampled Silver Apples bass loop to forge the missing link between those ’60s hypno-psych innovators and the after-midnight breaks of DJ Shadow, providing a relentless, pulsating counterpoint to Barlow’s slackadasical rap-speak. By comparison, the incidental instrumentals lack the same sense of frisson, either ending too soon (the strung-out psychedelia of “Jenny’s Theme”) or going on too long (the bongo-powered, synth-blitzed jam “Nasa Theme”). But by liberating these recordings from ’90s purgatory, Music for KIDS highlights their uncanny prescience: The stark, stalking “Crash” points the way to a post-rock future, while the collection’s other Silver Apples tribute, “Simean Groove,” feels like a blueprint for the sort of wiggy, percussive workouts that Caribou would master years later.
As Barlow tells it, the success of the Kids soundtrack had no significant impact on the Folk Implosion’s long-term commercial fortunes (or lack thereof), but they did emerge from these sessions a changed band. You can hear it in the rhythm-forward tracks here that would later surface on 1997’s Dare to Be Surprised, an album situated at the precise midpoint between songcraft and soundscaping. Where a track like “Burning Paper” may begin as a typically fraught first-person address from Barlow (“I wrote you a letter but I threw it away”), its percolating beats, slinky groove, and chanted hooks position it as a forerunner to 2000s indie pop/R&B crossovers like Dirty Projectors’ “Stillness Is the Move.” But most impressive is “Insinuation,” which blows up the boom-bapped indie-pop sound of the Kids soundtrack to an even grander scale, by rolling the duo’s churning guitars and dramatic string drones into a tense, slow-burning masterwork. As the ’90s wound down, indie rock would gradually outgrow its roots as punk’s geeky younger cousin to mutate into a more sophisticated, richly textured artform, and in hindsight, the Folk Implosion’s Kids experiments provided a distant early warning of the shifting tides. For years, streaming obstacles have tethered this music to its time. But now, Music for KIDS sounds way ahead of it. | 2023-09-09T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2023-09-09T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Experimental / Rock | Domino | September 9, 2023 | 8 | 09a8cd98-1d28-4eeb-b17e-c23fde94c612 | Stuart Berman | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stuart-berman/ | |
As they pare away at their sound, Wand move further away from psych-rock and closer to true psychedelia. | As they pare away at their sound, Wand move further away from psych-rock and closer to true psychedelia. | Wand: Laughing Matter | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/wand-laughing-matter/ | Laughing Matter | The visual language of psychedelia is awash with tie-dyed skies and third eyes, but nothing is so psychedelic as emptiness. On their fifth album in six years, Wand demonstrate their understanding of this truth. Their first three albums came out in a neon blur, spilling over with ideas, but as they slowed down, their music opened up. They used the extra time between releases to subtract, not add, and Laughing Matter continues the band’s elevation via excision. Though a few Byrds-like pastoral flourishes remain, the tough, slinky rhythms and vast negative spaces of the first two tracks, both stunners, set the album somewhere closer to the world of Can.
Opener “Scarecrow” is primitive yet sleek; it sounds like Evan Burrows is playing his drums with dinosaur bones. There’s a sinister elegance to the vocal and the sidewinding melody, offset by the nervy synthesizers. Second track “xoxo” offers a similar off-kilter trance, but this time with a pitch-slider effect that evokes Clinic. The grooves in both are deeply syncopated yet feel brutally, hypnotically flat.
But the softer folk elements of 1000 Days also flourish, usually with the predictable elements hollowed out so something strikingly weird can take their place. “High Planes Drifter” is a beautiful, lonesome ballad shot through with erratic horse hooves. In “Wonder,” a filthy, blown-out riff opens up into a dewy idyll, like Jon Spencer were having a gentle shroom epiphany. “Evening Star” wrangles no-wave guitar skronk into something between Rufus Wainwright and Pavement. Whatever form the songs take, the careful removal of extra elements distinguishes them. As they pare away at their sound, Wand move further away from psych-rock and closer to true psychedelia. | 2019-04-18T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-04-18T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Drag City | April 18, 2019 | 7.5 | 09a9e54b-9281-477c-8bf4-8ea606b13310 | Brian Howe | https://pitchfork.com/staff/brian-howe/ | |
Anyone hoping that ANTI might be Rihanna’s opus, some grand declaration of intent, is likely to be underwhelmed. ANTI is a fun and conflicted pop record, at its most interesting when it’s at its smallest and most idiosyncratic. If the album has a narrative arc, it’s about disappointment: the ways in which the people you trust can still come up short in the end, and how lonesome that can feel. | Anyone hoping that ANTI might be Rihanna’s opus, some grand declaration of intent, is likely to be underwhelmed. ANTI is a fun and conflicted pop record, at its most interesting when it’s at its smallest and most idiosyncratic. If the album has a narrative arc, it’s about disappointment: the ways in which the people you trust can still come up short in the end, and how lonesome that can feel. | Rihanna: ANTI | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21540-anti/ | ANTI | Part of Rihanna’s appeal is aspirational: survey the photographic evidence, and she seems to spend a pretty good chunk of her time wearing jewelry on yachts, smoking terrifically robust marijuana cigarettes, and making goofball faces at jokers trying to stealth-snap pics of her as she parties deep into the night.
Yet somehow, those hijinks don’t lessen her seriousness; they merely amplify it. Rihanna’s sureness regarding her presence in the world—in the work that she’s made, in the ways in which she has earned the right to palm a cocktail and chill on a beach—is bold and motivating, like Actual Confidence always is. Hearing her deliver a line like "Don’t act like you forgot/ I call the shot-shot-shots" (from 2015’s "Bitch Better Have My Money") with a kind of preternatural calm—it’s hard to imagine anything ever feeling better than that. It is hard to imagine anyone inhabiting a pop career with more ease or aplomb.
Still, ANTI—her very-long-awaited eighth LP—arrived tentatively, almost meekly. The build-up, of course, was extraordinary. There’d been rascally fake-outs, three singles (none of which made it onto the actual album), whole social media accounts teasing its release. Then, last Wednesday afternoon, a track listing appeared (that a gang of disembodied song titles still constitutes a noteworthy breach surely indicates something about our desperate times), followed by the announcement that ANTI would be streaming exclusively on Tidal for its first week of release (who cares)—two meager dribbles of intel that were quickly overshadowed, perhaps rightly, by Kanye West hollering about pants.
Then, suddenly, the album appeared in full. Anyone hoping its delayed release might suggest something about its ambition, that the three-years-in-the-making ANTI might be Rihanna’s opus, a grand declaration of intent, is likely to be underwhelmed. ANTI is a rich and conflicted pop record, at its most interesting when it’s at its most idiosyncratic. It’s not crammed with bloodthirsty, dance-oriented jams and feels distinctly smaller, more inward-facing than her previous records, as if it were intended as a kind of spiritual stock-taking, a moment of reckoning for both Rihanna and her fans. Her grainy, mesmerizing voice is paramount here, the sun in ANTI’s universe, the thing everything else orbits: "I got to do things my own way, darling," she announces over a stuttering, distorted beat in opener "Consideration," a prickly collaboration with the R&B singer SZA. The sentiment feels deliberately placed, meant as a way to read everything that follows.
Ironically, if the album has a narrative arc buried underneath the fuck-off, broad-strokes empowerment now so omnipresent on pop radio, it’s about disappointment: The ways in which the people you trust can still come up short in the end, and how catastrophically lonesome that can feel. It’s also about self-isolation, and how being good at being on your own ("I can be a lone wolf," she sings on "Desperado," her vocals deep, crackly) can become its own kind of albatross, a cage that bars from the inside.
The dancehall and dub-indebted single "Work" hints at an intimacy in what is otherwise a fairly transactional Rihanna single: Drake is here, sounding weirdly buttoned-up and too articulate, like a grown man wandering onto the beach in a pair of ill-fitting jeans. The hook is Rihanna babbling about getting it done—"work-work-work-work-work-work"—her vocals devolving into something more instinctive than language, as if it gushed forth from some underground spring instead of her throat. But the words suggest that another Rihanna, a more wounded and wary version, is hovering nearby.
Do we need access to that girl? Maybe not—there’s plenty here that feels high-stakes and revealing. Rihanna talks more convincingly about sex than almost any other pop star, and some of ANTI’s most striking tracks are also its nastiest: "Love on the Brain" is a retro-leaning doo-wop jam with a crew of backing vocalists that takes an unexpected turn toward the dark: "It beats me black and blue, but it fucks me so good," Rihanna chants, her voice suddenly flinty. Her deployment of "it" feels deliberate, painting her partner as a disembodied force, less a person than a ghost she can’t escape.
"Yeah, I Said It," co-written and co-produced by Timbaland, is a crawling, steamy ode to two people slamming up against a wall (literally): "Yeah, I said it, boy, get up inside it/ I want you to homicide it," Rihanna purrs over a sparse, hazy beat. "Never Ending," which nicks a vocal melody from Dido’s "Thank You," is a gooey, vulnerable dirge that reiterates how Rihanna experiences love, how it helps her navigate and recognize her physical self, the way she feels its absence physically: "I knew your face once, but now it’s unclear," she sings. "And I can’t feel my body now."
But it’s "Higher," the record’s penultimate track—it really should be its coda—a two-minute imploration to a distant lover, asking him to just come over, already, that feels the most revelatory. The track was co-written by Bibi Bourelly, the 20-year-old electropop artist from Berlin who also wrote "Bitch Better Have My Money." "This whiskey got me feelin’ pretty, so pardon if I’m impolite," Rihanna sings, her voice raked, raspy, desperate over collapsing strings. Whatever had been holding her together until then—it broke. "I wanna go back to the old way," she admits. "But I’m drunk and still with a full ashtray, with a little bit too much to say." And then, as if it had never happened—as if she deleted the text, pulled the blankets up and went to sleep—the song ends, unresolved.
Correction (2/1/16 at 11:44 a.m.): The original version of this review misquoted a lyric from “Work” that has since been removed. | 2016-02-01T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2016-02-01T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Pop/R&B | Roc Nation / Westbury Road | February 1, 2016 | 7.7 | 09b06014-c934-4cc2-bc5d-dca02c0d80c1 | Amanda Petrusich | https://pitchfork.com/staff/amanda-petrusich/ | null |
On his debut album, Toronto R&B singer Daniel Caesar looks to gospel for a roadmap to the complexities of romantic love. | On his debut album, Toronto R&B singer Daniel Caesar looks to gospel for a roadmap to the complexities of romantic love. | Daniel Caesar: Freudian | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/daniel-caesar-freudian/ | Freudian | Daniel Caesar knows gospel. Twice on Freudian, the Toronto R&B singer folds in interpolations of well-known gospel songs: On “Hold Me Down,” he refashions the familiar melody and wispy soprano of Kirk Franklin’s “Hold Me Now” into a testament to romantic loyalty, and a few songs later, on “We Find Love,” he does it again with Kyle David Matthews’ “We Fall Down.” These instances are more than merely Easter eggs for gospel music fans; they’re also emblematic of the synergistic relationship between gospel and R&B, which Caesar embraces throughout his debut LP.
The line between the two genres can be thin: Their similar tempos and lyrical themes lend themselves to interchangeability (see, for instance, the shift from Musiq’s “Love” to Trin-i-Tee 5:7’s “Lord”). It’s no surprise many singers have dabbled in both. In Caesar's world, love is a holy experience sullied by human imperfection. As often as he basks in the beauty of romance, he repents at the altar of a broken heart, performing with an unflashy sincerity more in line with spiritual offerings than R&B melodrama.
Freudian opens with his breakout single “Get You,” a saccharine honeymoon-phase jam featuring Kali Uchis. “Best Part,” which features H.E.R. is equally dulcet. The warmth of those two songs stands in stark contrast to a song like “Loose,” a poetic vent about letting go that’s backed by celestial organs and is reminiscent of one of Frank Ocean’s interludes. Similarly, the piano-driven ballad “Blessed” finds Caesar trying to make amends for his shortcomings (“Yes I’m a mess but I’m blessed to be stuck with you”). His cottony voice, complete with falsetto flourishes, adds emotional depth to his lyrics.
On past projects, Caesar has generally worked alone, but with Freudian, a number of key collaborators help bring the album into focus. The features are a who’s who of female artists remaking soul music in their own images: Kali Uchis’ retro groove, Syd’s chilly futurism, H.E.R.’s updated traditionalism, and Charlotte Day Wilson’s folksy elegance. Providing balance to Caesar’s narrative, they serve as the subjects of his fawning and the elusive lovers to whom he atones. The quiet heroes, though, are CaDaRo Tribe, the go-to choir throughout Freudian. The trio offers its angelic vocals on five of the six songs without features, each time to different effect. On “Neu Roses (Transgressor’s Song),” they lay down throwback street-corner harmonies (complete with the infamous nayhoo). On “Hold Me Down” and “We Find Love,” they’re the melodic foils that make the samples work. Together, the generous spread of women’s voices makes the album feel like a continuous conversation across the seasons of a relationship rather than a one-sided musing.
Caesar’s balance between sacred elements and secular sentiment—an opposition brought to life by Toronto natives and frequent collaborators Matthew Burnett and Jordan Evans, who produced all of the songs—is what sets him apart. There’s something visceral about the sound of an organ or a polyphonic choir, or admitting to a lover that they “saved [your] soul like Jesus.” Put those things next to bluesy guitars and expressions of carnal desire, and the result feels as contradictory as love itself—divine and discordant at the same time. This is right where Freudian lands.
In doing so, Caesar desparts considerably from the atmospheric R&B that Toronto is known for, to say nothing of the wildly popular “trap&B” style. Synths and 808s are replaced with pianos, guitars, and choral arrangements; some vulgarity remains, but he never gives in to shallow simplicity. There’s much here that blends well into this 1990s-obsessed era, but Caesar’s gospel background is his not-so-secret weapon. While he’s surely not the only contemporary R&B singer who grew up in the church, he doesn’t shy away from bringing the full range of his influences to his music. Caesar’s willingness to use all of the tools at his disposal—to explore his own id and superego right alongside love’s heaven and hell—elevates his craft. “Isn’t it nice?/Human sacrifice/I hate consequences/that shit’s too expensive/you keep chasing delight,” he sings, achingly, on the hidden track that closes the album. “I take the easy way out every time/I don’t deserve my own life.” Caesar’s honesty only drives home Freudian’s power: These are gospel truths that sinners and saints alike can get behind. | 2017-08-26T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-08-26T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | Golden Child | August 26, 2017 | 7.3 | 09b06d69-b2bf-4af4-b217-b294256436d5 | Briana Younger | https://pitchfork.com/staff/briana-younger/ | null |
At just seven songs, Tinashe’s newest album is as stylish and focused as a runway walk. | At just seven songs, Tinashe’s newest album is as stylish and focused as a runway walk. | Tinashe: BB/ANG3L | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/tinashe-bb-ang3l/ | BB/ANG3L | Independence looks good on Tinashe. With former label RCA firmly in the rearview, she’s been free to indulge: On 2019’s Songs for You and 2021’s 333, her first albums to be self-released, she swapped out the moody sonics and went all-in on genre experimentation (drum’n’bass on “Shy Guy,” retro-futuristic funk on “Perfect Crime”), swapping between singing and rapping with hedonistic fervor. She’s been in a constant honeymoon phase since striking out on her own, and her latest project, BB/ANG3L, maintains that spirit while making a few tweaks. At only seven tracks, it’s less sprawling but just as confident: as stylish and focused as a runway walk.
Romance is evergreen in R&B, but Tinashe handles each side—messy sneaky links, brash come-ons, throbbing heartbreak—with care. She’s either cozied up with or thinking about a paramour on each of these songs, flitting between love, lust, and inhibition. On opener “Treason,” she’s running red lights, willing to risk it all for a new lover. Two songs later, on the wavy single “Needs,” she’s demanding top from a fling before immediately creating distance: “Don’t call me,” she coos with a smirk. “I can’t be ya one and only.” Against producers Royce David and JonnyMade’s breezy hyphy swing, she sounds like she’s giving orders from a beach chaise.
Tinashe can play all these roles, but BB/ANG3L skews warm and seductive—the kind of songs you might hear in the champagne room or the private suite instead of the strip club. “Uh Huh,” a slow-burning, velvet-sheeted sex jam that sounds airlifted from an mid-aughts Mariah Carey album, is most blatant, but the feeling comes through in the livelier cuts too. “Talk to Me Nice” moves at a steady clip, but Tinashe’s whispers and head voice land like breath on the nape of neck. On “Gravity” and “None of My Business,” her voice is subsumed by soft swells of ambient synth. She’s giving herself over to the moment in more ways than one.
BB/ANG3L is her most streamlined work to date, a lean and eclectic showcase in the vein of projects like FKA twigs’ 2022 mixtape CAPRISONGS. “Treason,” produced by North Carolina’s Machinedrum, and “None of my Business,” co-produced by Royce David and Platinum Libraries, backdrop Tinashe’s balladry with bubbly synth arrangements. “Gravity,” produced by Finnish ambient-techno savant Vladislav Delay, sounds like an homage to Kelela’s Raven. Its angelic harmonies and frenetic drums dovetail nicely with the nervy energy of Nosaj Thing and Scoop Deville’s work on “Talk to Me Nice” and Machinedrum’s footwork-esque beat on closer “Tightrope.” But whether icy, seductive, or lovelorn, there’s an earnestness to every song that keeps BB/ANG3L down to earth. “I want it to feel like this album is whispering in your ear,” Tinashe said in an interview with Dazed. It’s that sense of intimacy, combined with her thriving confidence, that makes BB/ANG3L so potent. | 2023-09-14T00:02:00.000-04:00 | 2023-09-14T00:02:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | Nice Life | September 14, 2023 | 7.6 | 09b1bca2-9849-4522-a81a-eba880ce2af4 | Dylan Green | https://pitchfork.com/staff/dylan-green/ | |
null | It's rare that any artist gets her studio discography reissued all at once, but such is the case with alt-country belter Neko Case. Mint Records is reissuing her debut, *The Virginian*, which it originally released in 1997; the Vancouver-based label also put out her early records with Maow as well as side projects the Corn Sisters (with Carolyn Mark) and, yes, the New Pornographers. In addition, U.S. label Anti- is reissuing last year's *Fox Confessor Brings the Flood*, as well as two of her previous albums, 2000's *Furnace Room Lullaby* and 2002's *Blacklisted*, both of which were originally released by | Neko Case: The Virginian / Furnace Room Lullaby / Blacklisted / Fox Confessor Brings the Flood [Bonus Disc Edition] | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/11628-the-virginianfurnace-room-lullabyblacklistedfox-confessor-brings-the-flood-bonus-disc-edition/ | The Virginian / Furnace Room Lullaby / Blacklisted / Fox Confessor Brings the Flood [Bonus Disc Edition] | It's rare that any artist gets her studio discography reissued all at once, but such is the case with alt-country belter Neko Case. Mint Records is reissuing her debut, The Virginian, which it originally released in 1997; the Vancouver-based label also put out her early records with Maow as well as side projects the Corn Sisters (with Carolyn Mark) and, yes, the New Pornographers. In addition, U.S. label Anti- is reissuing last year's Fox Confessor Brings the Flood, as well as two of her previous albums, 2000's Furnace Room Lullaby and 2002's Blacklisted, both of which were originally released by Bloodshot Records. Of the four albums, only Fox Confessor gets any bonus material-- a sampler disc with one new track and four old ones, which reinforce the retrospective aspect of this set. Neither Anti nor Mint is simply reselling Case's music; instead, in an unintended partnership, they're repackaging her as an established career artist, one whose previous efforts deserve your attention as well as your money.
Generally considered the redheaded stepchild of Case's canon, The Virginian is an eclectic collection of original material and covers that hews closely to the alt-country model of the late 90s, with two country-swing numbers that haven't aged particularly well ("Honkytonk Hiccups" and "Karoline") and some sparsely arranged ballads that have ("Jettison" and the title track). Covering songs by Loretta Lynn and Ernest Tubb, Case takes vocal cues from Lynn Anderson, Kate Pierson, and all those punk singers she emulated in her previous punk bands. Her rollicking cover of the Everly Brothers' "Bowling Green" and her 10-story take on Scott Walker's "Duchess" feature some of her highest-flying vocals, the kind so bold and surefooted they sound almost too easy, like anyone can do it. Modest but punchy even ten years later, The Virginian retains much of its feisty charm, but Case's subsequent albums would abandon this joyful musical release for darker matters and lonelier sounds. In this sense, The Virginian is a useful complement to Anti's re-releases, because it shows not only how far Case has come in 10 years, but what was lost and what was gained along the way.
Furnace Room Lullaby (which is, incidentally, the only Case album that hasn't been reviewed previously on this site) sounds weightier than its predecessor, each song touched by personal tragedy. "Whip the Blankets" and "Mood to Burn Bridges" are rare rave-ups that feature the road-tested Her Boyfriends and a fierily defiant Case, but as fast and as fun as these songs are, they're propelled by a peculiar desperation that streams through every song, even the breezy "No Need to Cry" and the Tacoma-loyal "Thrice All American". This sense of unspecified loss culminates on side one with "Twist the Knife", which showcases Case's close dynamic with Her Boyfriends, and on side two with "South Tacoma Way", a tearjerker that eloquently evokes the aimlessness that follows deep grief. Case's startlingly soulful performance and the songs' lyrical specificity make Furnace Room Lullaby both a fiercely local album and her most satisyfing collection.
If Furnace Room Lullaby sounds inspired by real heartbreak, then Blacklisted considers death as an abstract concept, a nocturnal entity that haunts interstates and plane crashes and demands moody music with few hooks. Dropping Her Boyfriends from the bill, Case wrote almost every track herself-- in fact, the only songs she doesn't get sole credit for are the two covers. This new development is important, as it signals a shift in her music from country-soul numbers with concrete imagery and more-or-less traditional structure to less defined songs with impressionistic lyrics and even bleaker themes. On "Deep Red Bells" and "Lady Pilot", Case intently fashions new mythologies from the Pacific Northwest soil, a fascinating project that serves these songs well. However, with Calexico (and some of her former Boyfriends) accompanying her with just the right amount of eeriness, Case's songs ramble repetitively or cut off abruptly. Blacklisted is unsettlingly open-ended in a way that demands multiple listens but lacks the pay-off that Furnace Room Lullaby so easily achieves.
Despite their notably different approaches to the same source material, Blacklisted and Furnace Room Lullaby seem intrinsically linked, right down to their covers depicting Case as a ravished victim of some unspoken violence (now rendered in digipak form instead of so-yesterday jewel cases). Neither of these reissues contains bonus material of any kind, and although there's a wealth of obscure Case releases from which to draw such enticements (including her home-recorded Canadian Amp EP), there's something reassuring about their austerity. These albums will someday deserve deluxe, deeply researched, multi-disc editions, but for now these reissues preserve the works in their original state, with no inferior tack-ons to diminish the impact of those final notes on those final songs.
In this foursome of reissues, only Fox Confessor gets a bonus disc, which has five tracks but only one new song-- "Behind the House", which appeared in a different form on Live from Austin, TX earlier this year. Despite its classification as a demo, the song sounds wholly developed even at this reportedly early stage, with a one-two drumbeat and tremolo guitar underscoring her reverb-swathed vocals. "Behind the House" is a spiritual sister to "Deep Red Bells" and especially "Star Witness", a Fox Confessor stand-out whose fatalistic tone and lucid lyrics evoke car-crash death scenes like half-formed memories. There's an intriguing rustic-goth tone to Case's country, a murky twilight mood that draws from the soulfulness of Lullaby and the weirdness of Blacklisted and here is perfectly executed by her backing band, which includes the Sadies and Calexico. The album's sparkliest bauble, however, is Garth Hudson's piano, which curlicues throughout "Margaret vs. Pauline" and the rumbling gospel "John Saw That Number". Despite Case's fearless performances on "Dirty Knife" and "Maybe Sparrow", Fox Confessor often pours on the atmospherics too thick, giving it a truncated, unfinished feel too similar to Blacklisted. It is an album with more great moments than great songs, capping the first decade of a career that promises to have many more of both. | 2007-11-09T01:00:01.000-05:00 | 2007-11-09T01:00:01.000-05:00 | Folk/Country | null | November 9, 2007 | 7.3 | 09b35000-f496-4f56-84bc-118518d2afd2 | Stephen M. Deusner | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stephen-m. deusner/ | null |
Moving beyond his label’s grounding in UK soundsystem styles, the Wisdom Teeth cofounder shows newfound devotion to melody, texture, and feeling. | Moving beyond his label’s grounding in UK soundsystem styles, the Wisdom Teeth cofounder shows newfound devotion to melody, texture, and feeling. | Facta: Blush | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/facta-blush/ | Blush | A year on from first being told to down tools and go home en masse, people in the UK find themselves in the perverse situation of comparing lockdowns. Despite the nearing possibility of being able to do things like go to the pub or dance in a club, there’s a creeping nostalgia for the not-so-distant days of sourdough starters and DIY haircuts. London-based producer Facta, aka Oscar Henson, will remember those early days of the new strangeness with an acute affection. Working reduced hours at his day job (the magazine he works for had paused its monthly print runs) meant he was able to focus for a while on something else. Namely: sitting on his balcony, drinking coffee, and writing an album. The result, Blush, sounds exactly like that blissful setting.
Facta launched his Wisdom Teeth label (co-founded with his friend K-Lone, whose own debut LP was one of last year’s highlights) in 2014. It served as an outpost not just for his own productions, but also those of a nebulous cast of acquaintances with a shared interest in the unexplored creases between soundsystem staples like dubstep, grime, UK funky, garage, and jungle. This brief, nameless, yet productive movement was always more about trying new things than being restrained by tempo or technical prowess. Wisdom Teeth’s output has embodied this same considered omnivorousness, and the soundsystem influences are all present on Blush too (in the Silkie-esque pulse of “Verge,” the joyous funky lurch of “On Deck,” or the almost autonomic weave of “Blush”).
More significant, though, is Facta’s own newfound devotion to melody and, for want of a better word, feeling. Tracks like “Iso Stream” and “Blush” are almost generative in the way each element swirls in and out of the dance, led by nothing more than melodic curiosity. There’s a tendency to be a little noodly at times—opener “Sistine (Plucks)” risks veering into video-game loading-screen territory—but this matters less than it otherwise might in the album’s broader, exploratory context. A select palette hems the thing in, and he shows a conscious effort to thread each track together, maintaining a kind of reverence for the album format in the process. Vibraphone, delicate but expansive pads, and intermittent fizzes of white noise appear throughout. “Iso Stream” and “Diving Birds” (a collaboration with Parris) are both visited by the same cooing vocal sample: chopped like a garage hook, but soft and folksy in its timbre. The drums are delicate and organic, rather than being engineered to exacting club-system specs, and the songs themselves cast off the structural expectations of DJs dependent on neat intros, drops, and breakdowns.
Blush unfurls slowly, like the first spring blooms. And just like those buds poking up through the soil, it’s guided by its own small sense of daring exploration. This is most typified by “Brushes.” The track glides on an exquisite groove, building and building like a maximalist trance record, but with all the bluster stripped out—leaving, instead, wire-brush synths and gorgeous, gloopy kick drums. Just like snowdrops in March, the result is something modest in its own beauty—and all the more charming for it.
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-04-02T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2021-04-02T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Wisdom Teeth | April 2, 2021 | 7 | 09b52be4-6310-472f-ac13-66d68651457a | Will Pritchard | https://pitchfork.com/staff/will-pritchard/ | |
After the relative darkness of Arm's Way, Islands welcomes back original member Jamie Thompson and makes a welcome return to the sound of their debut. | After the relative darkness of Arm's Way, Islands welcomes back original member Jamie Thompson and makes a welcome return to the sound of their debut. | Islands: Vapours | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/13485-vapours/ | Vapours | When Jamie Thompson and Nick Diamonds started their second post-Unicorns collaboration-- the first was Th' Corn Gangg, remember?-- it made perfect sense that they should call it Islands. With breezy calypso rhythms, honeyed country-acoustic guitars, bubbly/silly synthesizer effects, and summery melodies, their debut, Return to the Sea, was a wonderful getaway soundtrack, obscuring its death-haunted lyrics with bright arrangements and rich, coconut-scented production. On Islands' second album, however, storm clouds descended: Arm's Way found the band down a member-- Thompson amicably departed before its recording-- yet ballooned into a six-piece, and the bloat was audible. Melodies (previously the shivery highlight of their songs) were buried in meandering guitar solos, baroque, melodramatic strings, and gloomy, silvery keyboards for a dark, proggy effect that bled the band of much of its fun and levity.
The good news is that the clouds seem to have parted; on their third album, Islands are sunny once more. Perhaps it's due to the return of Thompson, back in the fold after his one-album hiatus, or just a product of stripping the instrumentation down to its most basic structure (in many cases, just synths, drums, and guitar) in service of memorable tunes, but Islands have made a welcome return to form. While those hoping for Return to the Sea's Afro-Caribbean flourishes and guest rappers will be disappointed, Vapours' comparably spare synth-pop is replete with the juicy hooks and major-key bounce that were so lacking from their last effort.
The album kicks off with "Switched On"'s repetitive shimmying guitar figure, squishy 1980s synths, and swooning, hiccuping vocals. The title track struts like a peacock, showing off a big, swaggering chorus ("It's the bassline in your mind/ It's a sexy way to cry/ You know I've had my share of doubt/ Until I saw the vapours in your eyes") over a four-on-the-floor stomp and brassy, confident horns. And "Tender Torture" is not only the most lyrically literal interpretation of Islands' earlier beachy ethos but also, with its whirring suction-cup synth effects and gooey "ooohs," the apex of their futuristically sweet sound. That's not to say Islands have given up their penchant for darkness-- after all, we're talking about guys whose main lyrical concerns have long been bones and ghosts. Moody numbers-- like "No You Don't" with its spare percolating keyboards and lyrics that warn, "Don't buy dope from a man you don't know"-- still abound. But built as they are on tightly wound mechanical beats and free of rococo arrangements, these murkier moments feel more visceral for their restraint.
What made Islands' debut so thrilling (and saved Arm's Way from its grandiose ambitions) was the expansive, creative way they wrapped up their classic pop hooks in unexpected instrumentation or imaginative production. And Vapours, though more stripped down than either of its predecessors, continues in that tradition. Surely, many criticisms of the album will include a mention of Islands' Auto-Tuned "Heartbeat", but with organic, galloping guitars and whimsical synth flourishes underscoring their most vulnerable vocal melody, Diamonds' mechanized voice adds a dash of synthetic style and keeps things from devolving into the realm of the overly sentimental. Though there is an overall whiff of the 1980s about Vapours, it sidesteps the traps of either sounding trendily vintage or indistinguishable from the rest of today's Reagan-era impostors. It works best, however, to think of the album as a return to Return to the Sea, only, as its title suggests, in a hazier, less opaque form. It's as if that album's liquid-y tracks have evaporated, leaving only wispy traces of synthesizer melodies and quirky pop choruses wafting through the air. | 2009-09-28T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2009-09-28T02:00:01.000-04:00 | Rock | Anti- | September 28, 2009 | 7.8 | 09b52c5c-c65f-46d0-b4de-217a351afd7e | Pitchfork | null |
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Speedy Ortiz's Sadie Dupuis steps out with a self-produced solo album that's all about positivity, in all caps and probably punctuated with multiple exclamation points. | Speedy Ortiz's Sadie Dupuis steps out with a self-produced solo album that's all about positivity, in all caps and probably punctuated with multiple exclamation points. | Sad13: Slugger | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22611-slugger/ | Slugger | While working on Speedy Ortiz’s last LP, 2015’s Foil Deer, Sadie Dupuis was emerging from an abusive relationship. But rather than reflecting on the experience, Foil Deer was a concrete decision to grow stronger. “I’m not going to write any songs about this person because they’re a piece of crap who doesn’t deserve my mental energy,” Dupuis told Pitchfork at the time. Slugger seems to be still processing past pain but it takes “Raising the Skate”’s “I’m not bossy, I’m the boss” mentality and multiplies it by 100: what results is a guide to loving oneself, surviving, and supporting others.
This empowering attitude should not come as a surprise for any fans of Speedy Ortiz. While touring Foil Deer, the band started a “help hotline” to encourage safety and accountability at their concerts. That same year, they raised money for Girls Rock Camp Foundation through an all-ages tour. But sonically, Slugger is 180 degrees from the scuzzy guitars and tangled wordplay of Speedy; Foreboding simmering is replaced by sparkling keys, dissonance is made danceable, and maybe there’s a keytar in there, who knows. Dupuis wrote and recorded the songs that would form Slugger over a two week period while living in the Fishtown neighborhood of Philadelphia. Her original concept was to home-record each song before entering a studio and allocating each song to a different producer. Luckily, Dupuis avoided what could have been a chaotic collage and decided to produce the album herself, adding an additional layer of autonomy to a record all about positivity, in all caps and probably punctuated with multiple exclamation points.
In some ways, Slugger is more accessible than any Speedy release. “I wanted to make songs that were the opposite of ‘Genie in a Bottle’ or ‘The Boy Is Mine,’” Dupuis has said, and Slugger definitely succeeds in this mission. Its messages are loud and clear and little is left unexplained. The downside of this is that sometimes listening to Slugger can feel like being hit over the head. Considering that every two minutes an American is sexually assaulted, this explicitness is perhaps not a bad thing, but there’s a fine line between showing and telling, and Slugger does a lot of the latter.
Take lead single “Get a Yes,” a giggling and shimmering number that spells consent out quite plainly: “I say yes if I want to/If you want to you’ve gotta get a yes.” This message perhaps seems obvious to anyone listening to Slugger; that doesn’t mean it’s not an important idea to express. “Just a Friend” works in a similar way. “Put to bed your old ideas about my friend Ben,” Dupuis chirps over a swirling sea of blips before demanding, “If you’ve got a girl who says she’s just got a friend, then you should just believe.” The song concludes with the tongue-in-cheek call to “objectify these boys,” an idea that is unfortunately left at the end. “Hype” is a protest regarding labeling and pitting women against each other. “‘Cause I just wanna hype my best friends, man. I just wanna hype my best girls.” Slugger’s transparency raises the question “just what is the album trying to accomplish?” Is it simply offering anthems to an audience who already believes and agrees with these politics? Is there anything wrong with that?
The less instructive and more oblique songs on Slugger include “<2” and the infectious “The Sting,” the former of which sounds like it could be a Speedy song. “Krampus (In Love),” which was previously released as a demo, is a holiday jingle that feels applicable and listenable year-round with truly poignant lines and imagery like “If beauty is a terror, will the snow cover the evidence of love as something beautiful?” Closing track “Coming Into Powers” is perhaps the most interesting track, a literal “fuck you pay me” declaration of empowerment. Ithaca, NY rapper Sammus joins Dupuis at the tail-end of the track, offering a welcome change in tone.
“Sure, there’s sexiness to mystique, but when it comes down to it, it’s a really dangerous way to interpret what someone wants,” Dupuis told DIY magazine. Seemingly in protest against this mode of thought, Dupuis has left little within Slugger for listeners to unpack. One of Speedy Ortiz’s strengths is that beneath all the instrumental layers, there’s a narrative puzzle to unpack. Sad13’s Slugger solves its puzzle for you, but in the hope that you will be able to go at it alone in the future. | 2016-11-17T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2016-11-17T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Pop/R&B | Carpark | November 17, 2016 | 7.4 | 09b7eeaa-21da-4ef8-bcf2-20a14fa7740c | Quinn Moreland | https://pitchfork.com/staff/quinn-moreland/ | null |
Trumpeter Wadada Leo Smith's latest is an expansive and politically charged suite that pays tribute to official national parks as well as cultural zones not yet recognized by government decree. | Trumpeter Wadada Leo Smith's latest is an expansive and politically charged suite that pays tribute to official national parks as well as cultural zones not yet recognized by government decree. | Wadada Leo Smith: America’s National Parks | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22497-americas-national-parks/ | America's National Parks | Though trumpeter Wadada Leo Smith is a leading maestro of abstraction, he loves a straightforward concept as much as anyone else. Over the last decade, he’s composed The Great Lakes Suites, as well as the expansive Civil Rights-themed project Ten Freedom Summers (which drew from avant-jazz and modern-classical languages). For his 2016 album with pianist Vijay Iyer, Smith wrote a tribute to the African American contralto Marian Anderson.
Musical dedications are now as much a part of Smith’s process as the experimental nature of his fiery improvisations. But these historical shout-outs are not just creative prompts that he uses to get his writing hand going. Smith’s monuments often develop into sly editorials. When the composer extends his Civil Rights-era meditation to include 21st-century events, it’s his way of diagnosing the lingering nature of vintage prejudices.
America’s National Parks clearly fits in among these trends in Smith’s latter-day output. The double-album contains the veteran jazz quartet that helped power Summers, and adds in the impressive cello work of Ashley Walters. While the ensemble’s size is smaller than that of the group that recorded Summers, this lineup has the same jazz-plus-classical range of instrumental attack. And Smith’s commentary resides in his choices of grounds to celebrate. These include national parks already in operation—like Yellowstone—but also hallowed cultural zones not yet recognized by government decree.
The title of the opening movement, “New Orleans: The National Culture Park USA 1718,” references the pre-American nature of the city’s founding by the French Mississippi Company. Yet the loping quality of the opening groove shows that Smith is commending this location as a potential national park on the basis of its relationship to jazz. The tempo is slow, and sometimes makes way for beat-free stretches of sound. But overall, it still has a finger-snapping, swinging feel—thanks to the way bassist John Lindberg and drummer Pheeroan akLaff emphasize the underlying pulse.
At first, the mood occupies a middle ground between celebration and solemn observation—as Smith’s trumpet switches from bright lines of heraldry to subtler harmonizing with Walters’ bowed cello lines. Then, a few minutes in, a faster beat arrives. Smith responds with a muted-trumpet solo full of pristine, bluesy poise. Eventually, the pianist (and excellent composer) Anthony Davis gets a lengthy feature that closes with an impressionistic, dreamy cadenza. At this juncture, the opening track is barely half over—and it’s already given listeners a trio of distinct, memorable worlds.
As with other ambitious projects from Smith, America’s National Parks wants your focused attention, and your time. But the rewards it offers can make those substantial requests feel justified. The most dramatic mix of styles comes during the half-hour piece “The Mississippi River: Dark and Deep Dreams Flow the River—a National Memorial Park c. 5000 BC.” Grim piano chords and ominously bowed strings suggest a potential for violence, before the album’s most powerful stretches of free-improv bashing make good on the threat. (Smith describes this “park” as “a memorial site which was used as a dumping place for black bodies by hostile forces in Mississippi.”)
Elsewhere, the stark, sometimes violent majesty of the natural world is conjured by imposing blocks of atonal modernism, during “Sequoia/Kings Canyon National Parks: The Giant Forest, Great Canyon, Cliffs, Peaks, Waterfalls and Cave Systems 1890.” And a tender beauty is fostered in the chamber music writing of Smith’s most abstract, conceptual idea in this series: “Eileen Jackson Southern, 1920-2002: A Literary National Park.” (Southern was the Harvard musicologist who wrote The Music of Black Americans, among other important works.)
The album isn’t quite the overwhelming achievement that Ten Freedom Summers was, though the refined ensemble playing of Smith’s newly convened “Golden Quintet” is consistently ravishing. And the duration of the set gradually proposes a unique charm. Once you travel all the way to a monument, you don’t take a quick look and then leave. In similar fashion, these extended tributes create a persuasive argument regarding the attention still due to a nation’s history, and its cultural variety. | 2016-10-17T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-10-17T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Jazz | Cuneiform | October 17, 2016 | 7.9 | 09b9f4fc-4804-4a5b-a497-2b899f75107d | Seth Colter Walls | https://pitchfork.com/staff/seth-colter walls/ | null |
R.E.M.’s most unstable album never quite arrives in any one sound for more than a track at a time. Born of a chaotic and stressful tour, it translated not only the energy of their shows but the transience and unreality of life on the road. | R.E.M.’s most unstable album never quite arrives in any one sound for more than a track at a time. Born of a chaotic and stressful tour, it translated not only the energy of their shows but the transience and unreality of life on the road. | R.E.M.: New Adventures in Hi-Fi (25th Anniversary Edition) | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/rem-new-adventures-in-hi-fi-25th-anniversary-edition/ | New Adventures in Hi-Fi (25th Anniversary Edition) | At what point is a band officially cursed? R.E.M.’s 1995 world tour, a grueling 11-month sojourn that was also their first tour in six years, certainly made them appear so. At a show in Switzerland, drummer Bill Berry suffered a brain aneurysm and collapsed onstage. A few months later, just as Berry had recovered enough to drum with the band again, singer Michael Stipe and bassist Mike Mills each required surgery for different ailments. Somehow not completely defeated by the experience, the band entered the studio as soon as the tour ended, excited to finish an album they’d stubbornly begun during the ill-starred trip; they’d been capturing new songs during soundchecks and performances and in the bleary hours between them, hoping the music would translate not only the energy of their shows but the transience and unreality of life on the road.
One song, “Be Mine,” was written and recorded on a tour bus in the middle of the night, and the original recording is included on the bonus disc of the 25th anniversary reissue of R.E.M’s 1996 album New Adventures in Hi-Fi. While the version on the record ended up being a full-band studio recreation, it’s the bus recording that channels the half-asleep, delayed awareness of time and reality brought on by a long drive through nowhere. You can hear it in the quietness of Stipe’s vocal, singing as if he’s trying not to wake anybody up, accompanied only by Buck’s guitar, the drone of an organ, and the sounds of the bus moving through a world turned upside-down and emptied of people.
New Adventures is the most displaced R.E.M. record, never quite arriving in any one sound for more than a track at a time, humming through a harsh and unforgiving landscape like wires between electrical towers. The material’s only unified by the half-conscious state in which much of it was made, where a song as muddy and slippery as “Undertow” can hang near the glow of “E-Bow the Letter”’s lamp-lit dusk. Most of the album and its B-sides were taken from or built on top of recordings from the ’95 tour; “Zither,” a short, frothy instrumental that could accompany a faint figure ambling down a desert road, was recorded in a bathroom at the Spectrum arena in Philadelphia, and the most furious and punkish compositions on the record, such “The Wake-Up Bomb” and “Departure,” sound like lightly cleaned-up live recordings. As quickly as R.E.M. were committing new work to tape, they were also stretching out, covering Jimmy Webb songs like “Galveston” and “Wichita Lineman”—the latter of which appears on the new reissue—reaching for records that also felt pulled from the wavering air of the road. Like New Adventures, these songs embody the feeling of driving through vast stretches of nothingness, eagerly awaiting the arrival of the next moment because the current one is intolerable.
This aspect of the road seeped into Stipe’s lyrics as well; all of the obsession with image and artifice in the Monster era dissipates in a desert of abstraction on New Adventures. “This fame thing, I don’t get it/I wrap my hand in plastic to try to look through it,” Stipe sings on “E-Bow the Letter,” the album’s first single and as lonely and alien a thing as R.E.M. ever recorded, Patti Smith’s voice welling like tears in the chorus. Stipe’s writing throughout the album is made up of disconnected phrases that feel untethered from anything larger, like the fragment of CB radio chatter that leaked onto the tape when they recorded “Be Mine.” The words proceed from a nameless and singular mood, a fragmented insomniac haze where all life’s endeavors seem to amount to a shadow slipping across an uninhabitable desert. Though it was written rapidly in the studio, the opener, “How the West Was Won and Where It Got Us,” feels haunted by the tour, a disordered sequence of dramatic events that Stipe keeps out of focus: “I made a mistake/Chalked it up to design/I cracked through time-space, godless and dry.” And when Stipe writes in character, continuing a tradition he started on Monster, the songs are full of people trapped in fugue states, ricocheting between feelings of frustration and loss that religion and its alternatives can’t entirely repair. One of his tenderest and most ambiguous sets of lyrics, “New Test Leper,” is told from the perspective of a talk show guest going through either a half-hearted religious conversion or a nervous breakdown, desperately trying to be heard in a room where the hostile and embarrassed responses of the host and the audience are so inevitable they might as well be scripted.
At the center of the record is “Leave,” the longest song in the R.E.M. catalog, where Stipe’s voice sounds like it’s fighting to be heard amid a torrent of sirens and overdriven guitar riffs, while an e-bow, a guitar effect used throughout the record, vibrates a sound out of Buck’s strings that hangs in the air with the eerie shimmer of car exhaust. Stipe’s lyrics get even more fragmented in this section of the record, like they’re being obscured by whorls of static: “Shifting the dream/Nothing could bring me further from my old friend time.” An alternate version of the song, released on the soundtrack for A Life Less Ordinary in 1997 and also included in the new reissue, hushes it down to a sleepy trip-hop pulse, a photonegative of the original with all its darks and lights reversed. It’s like trading the loneliness of a crowd for the loneliness of an empty room—they’re just variants of a single alienation.
Affixed to their roughest-edged and most unstable record, the title New Adventures in Hi-Fi always felt a little sarcastically posed. It might’ve been better served by a title from an earlier R.E.M. album, Document, as it’s undoubtedly a document of the 1995 tour and the exhausted but inspired band they were afterward. The reissue hammers this home by incorporating several early live versions of album tracks that are fascinating for being only a few missing lyrics away from their final incarnations; they display the band’s confidence in the material, in what they were managing to create out of chaos and catastrophe.
New Adventures is also a document of a band that effectively ceased to exist after its recording. On the first day of sessions for their 1998 album Up, Berry, no longer willing to endure the grind of touring after his aneurysm, decided to quit, and the remaining members had to reshape their sound around the absence of their founding drummer. They’d do so by bringing in electronic textures and Beach Boys-influenced harmonies, both in their way tributes to Berry, the post-punk skip he placed in the band’s pulse, and the chamber music-like constructions he brought to their songwriting. But for all the individual merits of the R.E.M. albums after New Adventures in Hi-Fi, for better and often for worse, they were never the same.
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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. | 2021-11-06T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2021-11-06T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Craft | November 6, 2021 | 9.3 | 09ba8ec0-16b6-4686-9f1b-a4717eaa4656 | Ivy Nelson | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ivy-nelson/ | |
If you’re into neat categorizations, the Londoner Louis Carnell is a grime producer. But his debut album, billed as “a personal portrait of anxiety,” squirms out of all such neat categories. With it, he's succeeded in making a statement that's not just a flexing of experimental techniques, but something rich and human, too. | If you’re into neat categorizations, the Londoner Louis Carnell is a grime producer. But his debut album, billed as “a personal portrait of anxiety,” squirms out of all such neat categories. With it, he's succeeded in making a statement that's not just a flexing of experimental techniques, but something rich and human, too. | Visionist: Safe | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21051-safe/ | Safe | Louis Carnell, if you’re into neat categorizations, is a grime producer. But his debut album Safe squirms out of all such neat categories. Hailing from suburban south London, Carnell is of grime’s second generation, scholarly about its history but not hidebound by its rules. His more conventional productions have leant towards the energetic and darkside—see his 2013 track “Snakes”, the murky swing of its beats accompanied by the crack of gunshots. But increasingly, Visionist has shed conspicuous genre trappings and shucked off layers, too, tending towards something more minimal, introspective and haunted. His two I’m Fine EPs, released on the New York-based label Lit City Trax in 2013 and 2014, were ethereal and virtually beatless, barely grime at all. They explored, said Carnell, the five stages of grief—the journey from denial to anger to acceptance, known to psychiatrists as the Kübler-Ross model. About the precise nature of his loss, though, Carnell was keeping schtum.
Since, Carnell has joined forces with Bill Kouligas of the Berlin-based label PAN to create a new sub-label Codes—a sort of reboot of his earlier label Lost Codes, dedicated to outliers in the grime matrix. And now the debut Visionist album appears on PAN, and comes with a theme not unlike I’m Fine—billed as “a personal portrait of anxiety” that traces the onset and passing of a panic attack. This subject came as a little bit of a surprise, as I interviewed Carnell in 2014 and he struck me as coolly self-assured in that way that you might easily read as arrogance. Still, reflect on the crisp meticulousness of his music—those deft flurries of icy melody, vocal samples diced as if by scalpel—and perhaps you can perceive a telltale tension in his hand, a yearning for precision and control.
As with the I’m Fine EPs, Safe finds Carnell working extensively with the human voice. Broadly, his approach with vocals recalls that of Burial: both filch acapellas from pop and R&B records before bending them out of shape and turning them to new ends. In Burial’s productions, though, vocal lines generally remain vocal lines, while what Carnell does with them feels rather more baroque. On Safe, these voices are assembled as melody lines – cloned, layered and pitched way up until they form a fluttering polyphony, or glitter like jewels in a crown. (Perhaps a closer reference point for Carnell’s sampling technique would be Fatima Al-Qadiri’s Asiatisch; indeed, the pair collaborated on an earlier Visionist track, “The Call”, their breathy melodies arranged as point and counterpoint).
The track titling—“Tired Tears, Awake Fears”, “Let Me In”, “Constraint”—indicates something of the territory that Safe seeks to cover, a landscape in which love equals imprisonment and feelings skirted or repressed. Around beautiful melodies, Carnell arranges more dissonant sounds to imply pain or unease. On the opening “You Stayed”, a diva's cry is encased in a prison of cascading, pointillist melodies and queasy timbres. On “Victim”, metallic percussion pounds without mercy, while up in the higher registers, synthesized strings sketch out a sad elegy and voices curl into gasps, sobs and whimpers. Sometimes, vocal lines repeat themselves, numbly circling as if frozen in some kind of Stygian limbo—see the closing refrain of “Too Careful To Care”, a cry of “In my head…” that repeats over and over, pitched alternately high, low and midrange, as if in search of some sort of escape route. Elsewhere, Carnell’s disembodied cries strike more graceful notes, as if their wordlessness allows them to softly alight on truths over which mortal sentences clumsily stumble.
Key to Carnell’s style is a sense of spaciousness, although Safe is more filled out, less minimal than the I’m Fine material. Still, it is seldom predictable. The breathtaking, gothic “1 Guarda” moves forth on ticking hats and dull rumbles that sound like rotating granite pillars, and where there are beats, they upset expectations. Floor-trembling bass bombs erupt spasmodically throughout “Constraint” and "Safe", while “Let Me In” rolls forth on the sort of booming trap undercarriage you might expect to hear blasting from a passing jeep—although everything above that is a mirage, a weave of woozy strobes and hiccupping voices. Here and there, Carnell does pare things right back, and this is where Safe is at its very prettiest. “Sleep Luxury” is a washed-out grime lullaby adorned by twinkling harp and the ripple of running water, while the cold chimes of “Sin-cere” appear to fantasize a music box sculpted wholly from ice.
This year has been a banner year for producers working at grime’s outer reaches. On the one hand, the likes of M.E.S.H. and Rabit have released records that intensify grime’s alien skitter into something harsh, mechanical, and abstracted. In parallel, the “weightless” tendency, pioneered by Mumdance and Logos’ Different Circles imprint, pulls away layers, lifts grime off the road and into the stratosphere. Safe draws on elements of both, but more than any of his peers, Carnell has succeeded in making a statement that feels not just a flexing of experimental techniques, but something rich and human, too. Perhaps its closest recent antecedent is Arca’s Xen, another record dealing with the desire to shed one’s skin, slip free of this prison of the flesh. Diaphanous of texture but heavy of spirit, Safe revolves upon this tension, the pressure point of a soul under strain. | 2015-10-09T02:00:03.000-04:00 | 2015-10-09T02:00:03.000-04:00 | Electronic | Pan | October 9, 2015 | 7.9 | 09bfc7b1-6a4a-428a-856a-da0c3170a5fe | Louis Pattison | https://pitchfork.com/staff/louis-pattison/ | null |
The new album from L.A. producer Jason Chung, aka Nosaj Thing, is more open-ended than usual, bringing collaborators like Zuri Marley, Blonde Redhead’s Kazu Makino, and Steve Spacek into the fray. | The new album from L.A. producer Jason Chung, aka Nosaj Thing, is more open-ended than usual, bringing collaborators like Zuri Marley, Blonde Redhead’s Kazu Makino, and Steve Spacek into the fray. | Nosaj Thing: Parallels | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/nosaj-thing-parallels/ | Parallels | Los Angeles electronic producer Jason Chung was never necessarily a loner, but he’s spent the last few years using his Nosaj Thing moniker as a way to try on an extroverted lifestyle. For the first time in his career, Chung has said he decided to become more sociable, and his fourth album, Parallels, captures that change. The Parallels sessions were a chance to make opposites attract: beauty and dissonance, love and regret, soul and machine.
With opener “Nowhere,” that means partnering meditative piano with a rushed phone call. The voice, presumably belonging to Chung, discusses the album title, but fittingly, the audio sounds more like a voicemail, one of the few forms of audible speech that allows someone to converse without actually interacting in real time. Few of the album’s other conjoined thematic proxies come across as clearly.
Chung’s usual trademarks—savvy collaborations with indie rockers like Blonde Redhead, austere dance beats, and a distinct, personable anxiousness—are still present, but he stops centering songs around them. Instead, he tries new sounds, many of which latch onto vocalists to find their groove, like the bass-heavy pop gloss of “Way We Were” and the brooding soul of “All Points Back to U.” The prior features Zuri Marley, who Chung met while singing backup vocals during a Blood Orange show, which might explain the mellow keyboards and flirtatious tone. The latter features UK electronica artist Steve Spacek, and Chung spins the song into a dizzying soul groove with 4/4 kick drum that centers around Spacek’s neo-soul delivery. Even the collaboration with Blonde Redhead’s Kazu Makino on “How We Do” sees Chung mixing opposite flavors, dropping trap-like synth behind her raspy whispers.
On Parallels, Chung sounds less concerned with deciphering his own musical identity than letting collaborators help steer him. Just look at his “Light” series—a collection of numbered tracks, ranging from “Light #1” to “Light #5,” that appeared on all three of his previous albums—which comes to a sudden halt on Parallels. In the past, this series served as a measuring stick for Chung’s stylistic growth from glitch hop to electronic minimalism.
In the place of “Light,” Chung inserts a handful of subdued pieces that float aimlessly. “TM,” a muted flash of bright synth, whirrs peacefully in no particular direction. “Get Like” is primed for a rap remix, but without lyrics over it, the sobering instrumental plays out like a faceless SoundCloud beat. The malleable nature of these songs could be a plus for DJs who want a flexible album. But when Chung takes a stance, like he does with the bite-sized vocal samples used on “U G,” he can offer melodic layers to rival the flow of Caribou’s darkest dance numbers. When looking at the reserved tracks spread across Nosaj Thing’s albums, it becomes clear that the vocalists on 2013’s Home pushed Chung towards his softest songwriting, whereas the vocalists on Parallels remind Chung to up his edge—something Parallels could admittedly benefit from more of.
When Chung takes the time to really carve out grand, hook-free minimalism with mesmerizing detail, it can pay off: The pitched, breathy exhales on “Sister” make it sound like a Holly Herndon B-side. But across Parallels, he seems so committed to the possibility of an open-ended project that he gets lost in the mix—where once he was a maestro of controlling space. Still, these subtle and intentional shifts suggest Chung could make a more focused album in the future, if only because it will be coming from a clearer headspace. | 2017-09-18T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-09-18T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Innovative Leisure | September 18, 2017 | 6.4 | 09c2983e-c3f7-4a70-9093-3ad3a130f53f | Nina Corcoran | https://pitchfork.com/staff/nina-corcoran/ | |
A departure from his recent work with Gorillaz and Rocket Juice & the Moon, Dr Dee is the stately, melancholy soundtrack to the opera Damon Albarn wrote for director Rufus Norris. | A departure from his recent work with Gorillaz and Rocket Juice & the Moon, Dr Dee is the stately, melancholy soundtrack to the opera Damon Albarn wrote for director Rufus Norris. | Damon Albarn: Dr Dee | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/16585-damon-albarn-dr-dee/ | Dr Dee | There was a very specific moment in Damon Albarn's career when he decided to think of England for a living. The year was 1992, and Blur were touring the U.S. in support of their underperforming debut, Leisure, a relatively tepid guitar-pop record of vague lyrics and the occasional explosive hook. Missing his homeland and repulsed by the self-serious, omnipresent grunge sound, he returned to England two months later with the intention of making music that was proudly, flagrantly British. It proved to be a good look for the band: with the release of their next two albums, the solid Modern Life is Rubbish in 1993 and the sparkling Parklife in 1994, Blur transformed their image from late-era Madchester tag-alongs to pop's most incisive inquisitors of the British way of life. This was in great part thanks to Albarn's character-driven lyrics: Rubbish's no-name 20th-Century Boy and 20th-Century Girl and Parklife's Tracy Jacks (a sad sack civil servant who cracks one Tuesday morning and bulldozes his own house) warned of what could happen without the promise of tomorrows, the thrill of spontaneity, and a belief in a rather optimistic strain of anarchy it was not off base to call magic.
Two decades later, Albarn is exploring the idea of Britshness through a character and a form that's decidedly less modern. A departure from his most recent work with Gorillaz and the afro-inspired Rocket Juice & the Moon, Dr Dee is the stately, melancholy soundtrack to the opera Albarn wrote for theater director Rufus Norris. Dr Dee had a brief preliminary run in Manchester last year and will run again during the Cultural Olympiad this summer, but in the meantime Albarn-- never one for a second of downtime-- holed up with the BBC Philharmonic Orchestra and recorded the tracks for what's being nominally presented as a solo album.
As far as British anti-heroes go, John Dee is a good deal more spectacular and complex than, say, Tracy Jacks. Dee was a brilliant, controversial visionary of the Elizabethan era, a gifted mathematician with an unerring belief in magic. Throughout his long life he fell in and out of favor with the court; at one point during Mary's reign he was arrested for charting the queen's horoscopes, while three years later Queen Elizabeth appointed him her scientific advisor and asked him to choose her coronation date based on her star chart. A firm believer in the occult who late in his life made attempts to communicate with angels, Dee's life was a combination of prestige, failure, and misunderstandings, and the tone of Dr Dee makes it clear that Albarn finds luxuriant depths of melancholy in his character. On the lush, downcast "The Moon Exalted", he is accompanied by the porcupine-bristle of a harpsicord as he sings, "It's a powerful thing/ The morning I awoke to find you'd gone/ The moon was rising higher than the sun." In recent years, Albarn's retired the bratty stacatto that characterized his Britpop hits, and his voice has taken on this wonderfully droopy, lead-balloon quality. With nary an upbeat moment over the soundtrack's 50-minute run, Dr Dee makes use of this stylistic evolution; it's without a doubt the biggest bummer of a record he's made since 13.
Like the large majority of Dr Dee listeners, I have not seen the opera. It garnered pretty good reviews over its first run, but the most common criticism seemed to be that it was a tad impenetrable; viewers who went expecting a clear, linear narrative found Albarn's collection of impressionistic tableaus hard to follow. And if those were the complaints of people who actually had a visual element to guide them, you can imagine that listening blindly to the soundtrack is not exactly a cake walk, comprehension-wise. Still, there's some enjoyment in getting lost in Albarn's gloomy melodies and the occasional immersive scene (the fluttering voices of "Coronation" in particular), if you are content to let go your hopes of any kind of narrative mastery. To me, oddly enough, the closest pop analog to Dr Dee is a (much more sedate) Frog Eyes record-- the frenzied, King Lear-inspired pantomime Paul's Tomb: A Triumph is never entirely subsumed by the fact that I have no idea what the hell is going on. I could say the same for most of Dr Dee.
But therein lies the problem: Presented apart from its visual component, what is the Dr Dee soundtrack, exactly? There are pop elements to Albarn's compositions here, but they won't be quite enough to hold the attention spans of his less patient fans. And on the other side of the coin, Albarn's pop-star background keeps Dr Dee from scaling more operatic heights. In the end, the Dr Dee soundtrack is a deeply felt but difficult to love entry into Albarn's entirely singular discography. A Renaissance man to a point that occasionally confounds his less adventurous listeners, it should be no great mystery why Albarn finds Dee-- who was, after all, the man who coined the term "Britannia" in the first place-- a worthy subject. | 2012-05-07T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2012-05-07T02:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Parlophone | May 7, 2012 | 6.7 | 09c3ebe4-ba03-4c68-9001-0dc34b34e207 | Lindsay Zoladz | https://pitchfork.com/staff/lindsay-zoladz/ | null |
Having scored a U.S. Top 10 hit, and performed at Prince William's wedding reception and Barack Obama's Christimas tree-lighting ceremony, the release of Ellie Goulding's second album, Halcyon, couldn't be timelier-- nor more varied a collection. | Having scored a U.S. Top 10 hit, and performed at Prince William's wedding reception and Barack Obama's Christimas tree-lighting ceremony, the release of Ellie Goulding's second album, Halcyon, couldn't be timelier-- nor more varied a collection. | Ellie Goulding: Halcyon | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/17171-halcyon/ | Halcyon | "This is quite cool. But it's a bit late!" So said British singer-songwriter Ellie Goulding in The New York Times earlier this month, after being told that her single "Lights" had become a hit in the States. It's taken two years-- years during which Goulding has been constantly, fervently touted as the next big UK breakout-- for the London pop star to catch a break on these shores. "Lights", a bonus track from the debut album of the same name, follows a string of five not-quite-crossovers.
It's increasingly common for bonus tracks to become sleeper hits, thereby resuscitating albums and digging artists out of their midchart quagmires. (Nicki Minaj's crossover was largely the doing of bonus track "Super Bass" from 2010's Pink Friday.) "Lights", co-written by Biff Stannard, who penned many a hit for the Spice Girls, was also issued as a single. That release came with the featherweight original, a wobbly Bassnectar remix, and a Fernando Garibay dance mix that sounded a lot like his last big project, Lady Gaga's Born This Way. All styles sounded perfectly plausible, and all received airplay. Radio-ready dance-pop? She'd be neither the first nor last to make that pivot. Dubstep? She likes it enough to hang with Skrillex, as anything written about Goulding in 2012 inevitably mentions. Polite folktronica? It worked for Beth Orton. Her po-faced cover of Elton John's "Your Song"? It worked for, um, Birdy. Rebloggable covers of Active Child and the Weeknd? Why the hell not?
The charitable interpretation of this is that Goulding's got a lot of ideas to play with. The cynical interpretation is that she's being opportunist, flinging herself into five potential genres in the hopes that one will take root. This isn't to say Ellie Goulding's music is anonymous. She has an instantly identifiable voice that can flip from soprano trills to scrappy yarls within a single verse, and she never sounds, like some of her peers, over-anxious to pass a BRIT School vocal jury. Sometimes she leaves her voice more or less alone, but more often she tweaks it, chops it up into snippets, loops it.
And so we've arrived at a place where Ellie Goulding has scored a Stateside hit, performed at Prince William's wedding reception and Barack Obama's Christmas-tree lighting ceremony, and has now dropped this perfectly timed album, Halcyon. She's calling Halcyon a breakup album in interviews, but the guy whose dumping really matters is Starsmith, who produced most of Lights. Apart from a few bonus tracks, he appears here just once, on the aptly titled "Dead in the Water". His best substitute here is Jim Eliot of Kish Mauve; he's no Stannard, but he's gone the rounds: stately dance for Kylie Minogue, angstful electro for Ladyhawke, assembly-line hits for "Pop Idol" winners.
"Anything Could Happen" is essentially a Passion Pit song without the emotional torment, from the stadium balcony-high synths down to the earnestness. ("After the war, we said we'd fight together/ I guess we thought that's just what humans do.") The claps and stomps and pleading of "My Blood" and "Only You" are clearly trying to emulate fellow Brit Adele, but if that experiment doesn't work, Goulding's got plenty of others. "Figure 8" and "Hanging On" are the pop-step songs, the ones that sound like they come from the same musical universe as Chase and Status. If those are too niche, a bonus track and likely single brings in Calvin Harris, sounding exactly like he always does.
These songs work better than the more traditional folk-leaning tracks, at least. Those underpinnings always existed beneath the club lights in Goulding's music, but mostly, her ballads are somnolent and give too much rein to her drippier lyrical impulses: "I feel a lump in my throat, and this is far from joy," for example, or rhyming "houses" and "rouses" on the title track. She's better off when her voice and sonics take the forefront: the choral swells throughout the otherwise straightforward "Explosions", the way "Don't Say a Word" churns up drama around mostly repeated lyrics, or the whistle-register baubles strewn throughout "Atlantis". Goulding can certainly inhabit a soundscape. Her next step is to inhabit just one. | 2012-10-24T02:00:02.000-04:00 | 2012-10-24T02:00:02.000-04:00 | Electronic | Polydor | October 24, 2012 | 6.6 | 09c6b778-ffba-405f-9f6f-8a1437abe2e1 | Katherine St. Asaph | https://pitchfork.com/staff/katherine-st. asaph/ | null |
The veteran guitarist has created an effortlessly detailed album, full of tradition and experimentation that spans generations. It lives at the vanguard of new jazz music. | The veteran guitarist has created an effortlessly detailed album, full of tradition and experimentation that spans generations. It lives at the vanguard of new jazz music. | Jeff Parker: Suite for Max Brown | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/jeff-parker-suite-for-max-brown/ | Suite for Max Brown | Jeff Parker always writes parts that sound unassuming at first listen and unavoidable by the fifth. It’s the X-factor that the guitarist and master collaborator has brought to every project on his long and still-growing list of projects, jazz or rock or otherwise: Tortoise, Isotope 217, the recently reunited Chicago Underground Quartet, his solo work as a bandleader, his work as a soloist, and his supporting contributions for countless others. Despite his ability to do backflips with a guitar, his best-known lick from Tortoise’s 1998 song “TNT” is more like a heel-click—an easy, humble gesture, perfectly timed and placed.
It’s a preternatural thing, of course, but it’s also a skill that he’s cultivated by changing up his scenery and embracing the unfamiliar. A few years ago, while splitting his time between his longtime home of Chicago and his new home of Los Angeles, Parker connected with the players at International Anthem, a new collective of jazz-raised, boundary-challenging musicians based in Chicago. Some of them were exploring the intersection of live improvisation and modern digital recording—loops, samples, beats—which was an area that had fascinated Parker ever since Madlib’s jazz-ensemble project Yesterdays New Quintet blew his mind over a decade ago. Parker had been messing around with these elements for years during occasional DJ sets, thinking about how they could apply to his own playing, and had accumulated several hours of experiments. With this new label, he saw the right opportunity to formally release those results. He turned them into his 2016 album The New Breed, some of the most soulful and beat-driven music he’d ever put out under his own name and his first release for International Anthem.
What Parker tapped into on The New Breed, he blows wide open on Suite for Max Brown, a mesmerizing follow-up and informal companion piece. While his electric guitar remains a highlight, Parker builds out a fast-slashing range of ideas using dozens of other sounds and instruments, most of which he plays himself. They’re disparate in color and texture, pronounced and often short, each one elbowing or sliding its way in front of the one before it, impatient to steal the show. As a player and composer, Parker shines throughout. As an arranger, he catches fire.
Suite for Max Brown is a place where a 26-second, Dilla-indebted loop of an Otis Redding sample and 10 minutes of a jazz quintet weaving around what sounds like someone stacking plastic cups can share a tracklist; each is equally meaningful. He’s less of a specialist and more open to breadth than ever before. “Del Rio” opens with vintage-Korg cloud cover, which parts to reveal an easy-stepping melody that Parker plays on the African mbira—which in turn tees up a warm gust of wind in the form of a big, swooping guitar lick. That last move is one that Parker makes a few times on Suite: entering on guitar at just the right, unexpected moment of a tune. It’s as smooth and elegant as calligraphy; it sounds like he’s literally signing these new ideas with his signature instrument.
“3 for L” is a slow swing soaked in L.A. sunlight and leans closer to Parker’s more traditional jazz-bandleader side, but the crafty, mysterious percussion work of Jay Bellerose adds an extra dimension. Bellerose sounds like he’s fixing a bicycle in slow motion, assessing the clicks and clacks of its gears shifting up and down while Parker sits off to the side, narrating the process with his electric. It sets the table for the casual shiver of “Go Away,” the album’s turn-it-up moment, which inconspicuously lifts the bassline from an earlier song and reframes it with a different, more driving energy. Zero in on any one element in the mix here—like the light, instantly combusting pop of the handclaps, which hide in plain sight like they’re part of a selective-attention experiment—and the song suddenly becomes an entirely different thing. It’s like looking at a photo mosaic from several feet away, then putting your face right up to it.
His inspiration, however, runs deeper than adventure. Parker’s father, Ernie, passed away while he was making The New Breed, which was named after a clothing store that Ernie owned and featured on its cover a photo of him outside of it, smiling. (The New Breed is now also the name for the group of supporting musicians here, which, in addition to Bellerose, includes old friends Makaya McCraven on drums and Rob Mazurek on piccolo trumpet.) Parker decided to dedicate this next one to his mother, whose maiden name is Maxine Brown and whose portrait graces the cover here. This folds in an extra layer of emotion to every odd pluck, rattle, or whoosh, knowing that the album is essentially a hand-crafted gift of appreciation for his mom. Parker’s sweetly interpreted cover of a jazz piece from her generation, John Coltrane’s “After the Rain,” feels especially baked with love. It has no beat or time; it just glows for a little while, gratitude spilling out from his fingertips and through his amplifier.
That familial thread ties Suite to its predecessor in one more graceful way. Parker’s daughter, Ruby, who sang the last track of The New Breed, “Cliche,” also sings on the opener here—the only lyrics on either album. Her words on “Build a Nest” pledge allegiance to appreciating the process of creation as its own reward, and not just as a means to a destination. “Everyone moves like they’ve someplace to go/Build a nest and watch the world go by slow,” she sings as Jeff slowly drums alongside her, his kick beats dragging like they’re attached to a parachute. He drops in some piano plinks and some muffled backing vocals. And together, with the help of some friends, they build a nest from which to watch the world.
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(Pitchfork may earn a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.) | 2020-01-24T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2020-01-24T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Jazz | International Anthem / Nonesuch | January 24, 2020 | 8.4 | 09c72e17-f73f-41a8-92f9-c37edc9f768e | Steven Arroyo | https://pitchfork.com/staff/steven-arroyo/ | |
The dense and complex follow-up to Good Kid, M.A.A.D City is wry, theatrical, chaotic, ironic, and mournful, often all at once. | The dense and complex follow-up to Good Kid, M.A.A.D City is wry, theatrical, chaotic, ironic, and mournful, often all at once. | Kendrick Lamar: To Pimp a Butterfly | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/20390-to-pimp-a-butterfly/ | To Pimp a Butterfly | Kendrick Lamar’s major-label albums play out like Spike Lee films in miniature. In both artists’ worlds, the stakes are unbearably high, the characters’ motives are unclear, and morality is knotty, but there is a central force you can feel steering every moment. The “Good and Bad Hair” musical routine from Lee’s 1988 feature School Daze depicted Black women grappling with colorism and exclusionary standards of American beauty. Mookie’s climactic window smash in 1989’s Do the Right Thing plunged its characters into fiery bedlam, quietly prophesying the coming L.A. riots in the process. In these moments, you could feel the director speaking to you directly through his characters and their trajectories. Lamar’s records, while crowded with conflicting ideas and arguing voices, have a similar sense of a guiding hand at work.
Lamar’s new album, To Pimp a Butterfly, doesn’t explicitly bill itself as a movie like Good Kid, M.A.A.D City did, but the network of interlocking dramas explored here feels filmic nonetheless, and a variety of characters appear across the album’s expanse. The opener, “Wesley’s Theory,” turns the downfall of action-star-turned-convicted-tax-dodger Wesley Snipes into a kind of Faustian parable. Snoop drops by on “Institutionalized”; Dre himself phones in on “Wesley.” The mood is wry, theatrical, chaotic, ironic, and mournful, often all at once: On “For Free? (Interlude)” an impatient woman ticks off a laundry list of material demands before Kendrick snaps back that “This dick ain’t free!” and thunders through a history of Black oppression, spoken-word style, as if to say, “This money you crave, it’s blood money.” The album is dotted with surreal grace notes, like a parable: God appears in the guise of a homeless man in “How Much a Dollar Cost,” and closer “Mortal Man” ends on a lengthy, unnerving fever-dream interview with the ghost of 2Pac.
The music, meanwhile, follows a long line of genre-busting freakouts (The Roots’ Phrenology, Common’s Electric Circus, Q-Tip’s Kamaal the Abstract, André 3000’s The Love Below) in kicking at the confines of rap music presentation. There’s half a jazz band present at all times; pianist Robert Glasper, producer/sax player Terrace Martin and bass wizard Thundercat give Butterfly a loose, fluid undertow every bit as tempestuous and unpredictable as the army of flows at Kendrick’s disposal. The rapper’s branching out, too, exploding into spastic slam poetry on “For Free?,” switching from shouty gymnastics to drunken sobs on “U” and even effecting the lilt of a caring mother on “You Ain’t Gotta Lie (Momma Said).” It turns out Kendrick’s new direction was every direction at once.
Despite all this, he’s still toying with a narrative on the sly: Just beneath the surface lies a messianic yarn about avoiding the wiles of a sultry girl named Lucy who’s secretly a physical manifestation of the devil. Kendrick refuses to dole out blame without accepting any, however, and on the chaotic free jazz excursion “U” he turns a mirror on himself, screaming, “Loving you is complicated!” and suggesting his fame hasn’t helped his loved ones back home. Kendrick’s criticisms, as they did on Good Kid, come with powerful, self-imposed challenges. As Bilal quips on the chorus to “Institutionalized”: “Shit don’t change until you get up and wash your ass, nigga.”
Kendrick’s principle of personal responsibility has treaded dangerously close to respectability politics lately, especially after a prickly remark about the Mike Brown shooting in a recent Billboard interview that seemed to pin the death on the victim, but To Pimp a Butterfly avoids that trap. (Mostly.) “Complexion (A Zulu Love)” is a tender note of appreciation for women of all skin tones with help from North Carolina rapper Rapsody (whose slickly referential guest verse contains a nod to “Good and Bad Hair”). This is an album about tiny quality of life improvements to be made in the face of seemingly insurmountable odds. It might not be the message we want in a year where systemic police and judicial inequality have cost many the ultimate price, but that doesn’t bankrupt it of value.
To Pimp a Butterfly pivots on the polarizing lead single, “I.” Upon release last autumn, the sunny soul pep talk came off lightweight and glib. When it appears deep in the back end of Butterfly, though, “I” plays less like the jingle we heard last year and more like the beating heart of the matter. To push the point, the album opts for a live-sounding mix that ditches out midway through, giving way to a speech from the rapper himself. In tone, the speech is not unlike the legendary 1968 concert where James Brown waved off security and personally held off a Boston audience’s fury after news broke that Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. had been assassinated. “How many niggas we done lost, bro?” Kendrick shouts over the crowd. “It shouldn’t be shit for us to come out here and appreciate the little bit of life we got left.” Underneath the tragedy and adversity, To Pimp a Butterfly is a celebration of the audacity to wake up each morning to try to be better, knowing it could all end in a second, for no reason at all. | 2015-03-19T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2015-03-19T02:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Top Dawg Entertainment / Aftermath / Interscope | March 19, 2015 | 9.3 | 09c9543e-7477-455f-9dae-f428998c0d17 | Craig Jenkins | https://pitchfork.com/staff/craig-jenkins/ | |
On her debut album, the American musician works entirely with recordings of her own voice, processing and layering largely non-verbal sounds to explore the very fiber of her being. | On her debut album, the American musician works entirely with recordings of her own voice, processing and layering largely non-verbal sounds to explore the very fiber of her being. | Lyra Pramuk: Fountain | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/lyra-pramuk-fountain/ | Fountain | When Lyra Pramuk was a child, her parents insisted she go to two different churches every Sunday. It made for a long day and so, as she explained on a recent podcast, she joined a choir at one of them as a way to kill time. Singing soon grew into a way of life and, as she got older, led her to classical training. At university, however, she felt conflicted by the expectation to pursue a traditional operatic or choral career path; inspired by the pop artists she listened to outside of class (Björk, M.I.A., Missy Elliott), she was interested in using her voice as an instrument in more experimental ways. Looking back at her time in children’s choirs, she realized that the archetype of the prepubescent child with a voice as pure as “a bell” represents a “fetishized sound.” On Fountain, the composer and producer’s debut album, Pramuk explores her voice—and her spirituality—with a considerably more holistic outlook.
Each and every sound on Fountain sprang from the same source: Pramuk’s voice. The rhythms, the melodies, the textures—it’s all her, even the bits that don’t sound like her, or even human. Along with using recognizable performance techniques like vibrato and humming, Pramuk heavily processed many of her largely non-verbal vocals, manipulating and layering them to create an orchestra of herself—a technological excavation of her own body’s resonant possibilities inside a tender vision of a post-human future. On occasion, Pramuk leans toward the wistful meandering of Arthur Russell, albeit wordlessly (for example, in the warm glow of lead single “Tendril”); at other times, she evokes the primal world-making of Anna Homler, who devised her own non-verbal vocal technique that involved “exploring the body like a cave.”
The voice, like the self, is fluid, not fixed. Depending on the time of day, the weather, your age, hormone levels, the amount of sleep you got, how you’re feeling, and countless other variables, your voice can sound different—sometimes marginally so, sometimes radically. Pramuk’s extensive vocal recordings and reimaginings, then, weave a spectrum of situational factors into the fabric of Fountain, rendering it the most personal of documents. The line “You say it best when you say nothing at all” comes to mind, a phrase that illuminates the emotional fluency of Pramuk’s often wordless vocals.
“Xeno” sounds like a folktale. It builds from a vulnerable mew (like that of a young creature trying to feel its way through a new world) to a vibrating wall of sound; unscalable and ambiguous. On the austere yet grounding “Cradle,” Pramuk casts herself as a cello, using her computer to stretch her voice into the shape of a bow soberly meeting its strings. It’s the closest she gets to a chamber choir on the album, anchoring her creative progression in her musical beginnings. “Gossip,” on the other hand, feels like a playful tribute to her adopted home of Berlin. Dozens of vocal bits and bytes arrange themselves in crosshatch, creating a scene of harmony and happenings, of exchange and excitement. In spirit rather than sound, “Gossip” makes me think of Pramuk’s longtime collaborator Colin Self and his 2018 song “Quorum,” which features artists Martine Syms and Diamond Stingily enacting the exhilaration of a video chat with a close friend. Gossip is a bonding agent. It’s not only the information that knits people together, but the way it is shared: with laughter and in the kind of intimate tones reserved for one’s nearest and dearest.
Not that anyone needs to be told that the voices of loved ones buoy the spirit. Or that spirituality is deeply rooted in one’s own being and experience. In form and in practice, Pramuk’s debut album generously looks inward to illuminate the multiplicity of the self. Fountain is too rich in scope and meaning to be reduced to just a salve, but there’s no doubt it’s an oh-so-timely reminder that the body is a site of infinite possibility.
Listen to our Best New Music playlist on Spotify and Apple Music. | 2020-03-25T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-03-25T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Experimental | Bedroom Community | March 25, 2020 | 8.2 | 09c95585-03ce-4be4-ade3-8dd765aa003f | Ruth Saxelby | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ruth-saxelby/ | |
Sam Gendel’s smoothly psychedelic debut is dominated by the guitarist and saxophonist’s tip-toed melodies and hushed voice. | Sam Gendel’s smoothly psychedelic debut is dominated by the guitarist and saxophonist’s tip-toed melodies and hushed voice. | Sam Gendel: 4444 | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/sam-gendel-4444/ | 4444 | Sam Gendel was a saxophonist first and guitarist second. “My heart belongs to the saxophone, but guitar is my secret lover,” he told an interviewer a couple years ago. With both instruments at his side, he works primarily in a psychedelic jazz trio alongside drummer Kevin Yokota and guitarist Adam Ratner. Under Gendel’s direction, the group performed as Inga until recently, when they began releasing music under Gendel’s given name. Separately, Gendel plays support in Moses Sumney’s trio, and has just recently released his own wholly solo material of one-take live recordings of saxophone and wavedrum loops preserved to his iPhone voice memo app. Gendel has spent the last couple years as a searching musician, and his debut full-length for Terrible Records, 4444, sounds exploratory but sure of itself.
It wasn’t until some later Inga recordings that Gendel began singing, and he’s extended the effort on 4444, a smoothly psychedelic record dominated by hushed voice. Gendel barely plays the saxophone here, instead streamlining a guitar style he’s been developing over the years. In that way, 4444 feels like a simultaneous exploration of a pair of tones. Most every moment and accompanying sound on the album pays service to his settling into both.
Gendel sings quietly and at a pattering pace reminiscent of his guitar playing, where his muted staccato attack sounds like tiptoeing over the fretboard in socks. He sometimes sings in unison with his guitar for a silvery effect, and Yokota’s percussion seems to double instead of define his trajectory. All of this sounds smooth but dense, wrinkled with a passionate and meditative meticulousness instead of a detached technicality.
If the playing is grounded, Gendel’s lyrics tend toward floaty, guileless pietism. On “No Place For This” he sings, “Anger is not an answer,” his voice lifting upwards and more loudly at the end of the phrase. At the end of the album, a hidden track begins with a withered home recording of a child belting out lines from Bill Martin Jr. and Eric Carle’s famous children book Brown Bear, Brown Bear, What Do You See? Gendel carries forward the lyrical device of trading perspectives, trying to see the world through other eyes as a sort of radical awareness. At another point, he borrows lines from the Native American poet-activist John Trudell, channeling the late artist’s existential exasperation. “Look at us, we are healing/Look at them, their medicine is patented,” Gendel sings. On “DAVE” he instead sounds dire and a little corny in his ruminations. “The drones are reigning hellfire on the Dalai Lama/As English majors have a fight about the Oxford comma,” he bites, and later, “The aliens were gonna visit but they’re gonna wait.”
That song is also the album’s funkiest fusion, plodding along at a start-stop pace that eventually gives way to the album’s dizziest and busiest moment, Gendel’s sax panting circles in the background. Elsewhere, it sounds like Ratner that plays a gliding solo of elongated single notes on “Lof” while Gendel doodles a mantra in the background. Similarly, the open strumming on “Portrait Orchid Gun” by Brazilian guitarist Fabiano do Nascimento at the end of the album feels like an abrupt program change. These small moments position Gendel’s muted tone as the centerpiece from which things deviate.
Gendel channels a spiritual mysticism in both his music and the way he talks about it. His lyrics shape a vague, flower-child politics and his sounds are cerebral and psychedelic. For 4444, he encourages listening to the record in reverse tracklist order as a sort of secondary study. Doing so doesn’t flesh out a conceptual revelation from the lyrics, but restaging the tracks does reposition the album’s pace and sense of direction. In reverse order, instead of expanding outward, Gendel’s music starts expansive and then narrows in, drilling down meditatively. It’s a strange effect that playing 4444 backwards sounds even more like an artist settling into their voice. | 2017-11-29T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2017-11-29T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Jazz | Terrible | November 29, 2017 | 7 | 09cce6c6-6e79-4815-b1d0-631123630a02 | Jay Balfour | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jay-balfour/ | |
My philosophy has always included the tried-and-true motto, "You have to take the good with the bad, and the bad ... | My philosophy has always included the tried-and-true motto, "You have to take the good with the bad, and the bad ... | PJ Harvey: Stories From the City, Stories From the Sea | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/3756-stories-from-the-city-stories-from-the-sea/ | Stories From the City, Stories From the Sea | My philosophy has always included the tried-and-true motto, "You have to take the good with the bad, and the bad with the good." More and more, though, I'm beginning to wonder if there aren't some holes in that philosophy. Good and bad are, by definition, polar opposites, but whoever first penned this motto forgot to mention the center of the spectrum: things that are neither good, nor bad, just... there. Do you have to take that as well?
After hours of internal deliberation, I've decided you don't. Bland, middling music can often be more offensive than something genuinely awful. If you're hearing something bad, at least emotions and feelings are evoked. Average music, though, just fades into the background. You feel nothing, so you virtually hear nothing; the frequencies are wasted on your ears. You could have used that time to hear something that at least causes some kind of reaction.
With each album, Polly Jean Harvey moves gradually from the barrage of passion of her previous work into the central category. 1993's Rid of Me captured her in her raw environment, setting fires and creating primal rhythms with just her electric guitar. On her fifth solo release, Stories from the City, Stories from the Sea, she may be maturing, or more vulnerable, or more vulnerable to her maturity. But regardless, the sheen gets slicker and her music gets duller as the time passes.
As inspiration for this album, Harvey spent six months in New York, fully shedding her old wolf's skin for a more stylish, expensive wool-lined jacket. The record begins with "Big Exit," a track that shows Harvey posing as a bored Patti Smith. Granted, the chorus hook is one of her best in recent memory, but even that moment emits a vague feeling of by-product familiarity. "Good Fortune" sustains a similar but even more banal pop sound, with Harvey distinctly recalling Chrissie Hynde, both musically and vocally. And "A Place Like Home" and "We Float" further the tepid attitude, replacing the live drums of the first two tracks with cheap, glossy programmed beats that would feel right at home on a Des'ree record.
The lyrics on Stories from the City are just as average as the music-- so average, perhaps, as to seem much worse than they actually are. On "Big Exit," Harvey feels intimidated by this crazy world, singing, "I want a pistol in my hand/ I want to go to another land." On "This is Love," she barely elaborates on the already mundane title, adding this seemingly non-sequiturial commentary: "Does it have to be a life full of dread?/ Wanna chase you 'round the table, wanna touch your head." Most of the rest of her prose is similarly culled from an elementary rhyming dictionary.
Stories from the City does have a couple of songs interesting enough to almost save it from the desert of mediocrity. "One Line" provides a pleasant musical backdrop for once, with rhythmic muted guitar, a sustained vibraphone, and ethereal background vocals by Thom Yorke. Yorke then takes a gorgeous turn at lead vocals in "This Mess We're In," continuing with a similar cadence, with Harvey singing the chorus over Yorke's wordless crooning. And "Kamikaze" has enough actual aggression and feeling to make it the record's only real standout, featuring a live duplication of a frantic, jazzy jungle beat, rough guitars, and a vocal performance that comes her closest to resembling passion since To Bring You My Love.
But three good songs do not a record make. In the end, Stories from the City ends up just slightly to the right of the dead middle ground. A shame, too, since Harvey once used space and dynamic to make exciting music. Now, more often than not, she uses music to make empty space. Optimistic as I am, though, I'd like to look at it this way: as far between as the moments of enjoyment may be, they're still there, which proves Harvey still has a little bit of the knack left. She may now appreciate style over substance, but she surely still loves making music, even if her sense of conviction is less powerful than it used to be. | 2000-10-31T01:00:02.000-05:00 | 2000-10-31T01:00:02.000-05:00 | Rock | Island | October 31, 2000 | 5.5 | 09d17150-c87c-4795-bf4a-44fef7b9e669 | Pitchfork | null |
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All across his 10th album, the more things change, the more Eminem stays the same. | All across his 10th album, the more things change, the more Eminem stays the same. | Eminem: Kamikaze | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/eminem-kamikaze/ | Kamikaze | Released without prior announcement, only a tweet from the rapper saying that he “tried not 2 overthink this 1,” Kamikaze stands in one sense as a no-bullshit return to basics after the pop-minded bloat of last year’s lackluster Revival. It’s also the endlessly self-mythologizing star’s latest excoriation of journalists, perceived rivals, and just about anyone else who thinks his music sucks now. His career has become an exhausting feedback loop, and Kamikaze flies straight into that downward spiral.
Ever since his bedrock trilogy of albums—1999’s The Slim Shady LP, 2000’s The Marshall Mathers LP and 2002’s The Eminem Show—vaulted the battle-tested Detroit MC to a Grammy-winning commercial juggernaut, Eminem has alternated between gritty boom-bap reboots and slick crossover plays as his cultural impact has waned. Like 2009’s grisly Relapse after 2004’s solipsistic Encore, or 2013’s violently recidivistic The Marshall Mathers LP 2 after 2010’s clumsily motivational Recovery, Kamikaze is Eminem’s latest act of stubbornness in the face of change. Though Kamikaze might part ways with the polish and Beyoncé-grade guests of Revival, it’s yet another empty, intermittently tone-deaf onslaught of technical rap prowess and humorless juvenilia from an artist who once controlled the zeitgeist with ease.
If rap more closely resembled a purely athletic contest, Eminem would still be an Olympian. As a deployer of internal rhyme schemes and sly vocal deliveries, he continues to operate on a rarefied plane, whether spitting in frenetic double-time or sending up today’s sing-songy approaches. “Get this fuckin’ audio out my Audi yo, adios,” he declares on opener “The Ringer,” stringing together something textually clever but utterly meaningless. And when Eminem repeatedly insists he writes his own lyrics, well, what an accomplishment. If what happened with Jay-Z’s likewise-crotchety “D.O.A. (Death of Auto-Tune)” back in 2009 is any guide, Eminem’s hyper-articulate attacks on mumble-rap might mark not the death of a trendy style as much as its inescapable takeover. When Eminem compares himself to Muhammad Ali, on a joylessly bludgeoning track titled, yes, “Greatest,” the breathless wordplay sounds like it would be a lot of work to duplicate, but he seems to miss out on what’s remarkable about both Ali and, at its best, music. Eminem doesn’t do transcendence.
While Eminem’s verbal dexterity has remained intact, his shortcomings have grown more glaring with the passage of time. When he isn’t unleashing his id, he has, at times, veered toward power-ballad treacle, and “Stepping Stone,” a maudlin tribute to his former group D12, is the prime offender here. When the demons do emerge, the songs aren’t memorable enough to overcome the latest tinges of homophobia and misogyny from a 45-year-old who either knows better or is outrage-trolling for the attention he doesn’t need. Instead of trying to evolve with the culture, he’d rather Make Rap Great Again. On the execrable “Fall,” which has already been disowned by guest vocalist Justin Vernon, Eminem carelessly lobs an anti-gay slur at Tyler, the Creator. Multiple references to domestic violence, on two separate tracks, fail to earn their jokey presence. And while Eminem has long delighted in being impish, the many times Kamikaze presents the idea of someone having a dick in their mouth as the ultimate insult is not only socially dubious but artistically bankrupt and above all: boring. No-holds-barred wordplay is part of hip-hop’s DNA, but this isn’t a reissue from another era or grassroots subcultural expression; it’s a rich and famous and not coincidentally white, straight man in 2018, asserting that he’s about to “rape the alphabet.”
When Eminem complains in one breath about how he wasn’t duly rewarded for an anti-Trump freestyle he did last year, and in the next takes the Trump-like step of labeling the media as his enemy, it’s hard to tell whether his obtuseness is willful or just clueless. In one skit, he goes so far as to intimate that he’s driving to a critic’s house, which isn’t really funny anymore, either. For all of Marshall Mathers’ perpetual outsider posturing, Kamikaze is a tie-in with the upcoming movie Venom, an offshoot of the multibillion-dollar Spider-Man franchise. “Venom,” the closing track, is a rousing-enough recap of Eminem’s career arc, with appropriately slithery rhyme patterns, told through the Marvel story’s device of an alien entity that can enter someone’s bloodstream and become a part of them forever. It hints at how much Eminem might have to gain if he could stop being defensive about his legacy and settle into becoming a legacy act. Ditch the new songs with their schtick and it’d be a perfect late-career highlight to include in a Super Bowl halftime show we might one day endure or a Las Vegas residency he might one day settle for. | 2018-09-06T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-09-06T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Aftermath / Shady / Interscope | September 6, 2018 | 5 | 09d179ee-d807-4f7a-99cb-306aede46f76 | Marc Hogan | https://pitchfork.com/staff/marc-hogan/ | |
Produced entirely by Kanye West, the spare and serrated solo album from Pusha-T is a near-airtight exercise in flair and focus. | Produced entirely by Kanye West, the spare and serrated solo album from Pusha-T is a near-airtight exercise in flair and focus. | Pusha T: Daytona | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/pusha-t-daytona/ | Daytona | Sometimes the conveyor belt of hype and rumor slows down long enough to spit out something fully formed. Daytona appears as the long-awaited Pusha-T album we’d all been told to anticipate; his last full-length, 2015’s Darkest Before Dawn, was meant as a teaser to this, the major work. It’s unclear whether there are remnants from early drafts of the album that’s been delayed year after year, or if these songs sprung entirely from the Wyoming of Kanye West’s imagination.
In either case, Daytona is Pusha’s best work as a solo artist, a tightly wound record that doesn’t recapture the highs of peak Clipse, but finally makes ideal use of the now middle-aged rapper’s considerable skills. At just seven songs and 21 minutes, it shirks the bloat and radio concessions of Darkest Before Dawn and, to a greater extent, his 2013 solo debut, My Name Is My Name. The beats—sample-heavy and produced entirely by Kanye—are uniformly excellent and let you see the seams: It’s like an album full of “Bound 2”s, without the sentimentality. And while the slew of G.O.O.D. releases slated for June threatens to swallow everything else alive, Push included, the spare and serrated Daytona should hold up as a near-airtight exercise in flair and focus.
The business has shifted several times since the rapper’s heyday with Clipse and the Neptunes in the mid-2000s—rapping about coke is no longer the shortest route to the genre’s cutting edge—but the memory of that second Bush term gives Pusha’s wheelhouse a certain highbrow appeal; JAY-Z knew he needed to tap into something similar on 2007’s American Gangster to correct for a disastrous, buttoned-up comeback album.
But unlike Mr. Carter, Pusha-T does not have an expansive list of topics, nemeses, styles, and tics. He raps, sometimes wittily and sometimes gravely, about: selling drugs and buying luxurious things with the profits; the peril and paranoia that comes with selling drugs; guilt; and, sometimes, his grudges against Lil Wayne and Drake.
This leaves Pusha open to charges of being one-dimensional, but, really, he’s a specialist: His writing has as much stylistic and syntactical variety as most of his peers, and few are operating at anything close to a comparable level more than two decades into their careers. It’s simply enthralling to hear him twist his tongue around passages like, “Angel on my shoulder, what should we do?/Devil on the other, what would Meek do?/Pop a wheelie, tell the judge to Akinyele/Middle fingers out the ghost, screaming ’Makaveli’”; whether the subject matter is played out is beside the point.
Pusha has made a career being an outlet for celebrated producers’ weirdest beats. There’s nothing on Daytona as avant-garde as the synth-drenched “Trill,” but the tracks here skew grim and steely, luring him into custom-fitted pockets. (Daytona comes out nearly 13 years to the day after Common’s Be, where Kanye pushed his Chicago mentor into lusher, more soulful spaces that were similarly ideal.) Kanye’s involvement in the album comes with its drawbacks: He reportedly paid $85,000 for a last-minute cover art change to a macabre and misguided picture from the late Whitney Houston’s bathroom and drops a MAGA-hatted verse that asks if he’s “too complex for ComplexCon”—unlike most of Pusha’s raps, Ye’s is so tethered to the news cycle that it yanks you out of the illusion. But their musical chemistry is undeniable. The oafish opening to “Hard Piano” aside, the writing on Daytona is knotty and strong, with texture and grit and plenty of tight turns. The album is, in many ways, a years-late payoff of the promise shown when Ye and Pusha performed “Runaway” at the 2010 VMAs.
As creatively in-sync with Kanye as Pusha seems to be, he defaults more than once into Jay’s lyrics. On “The Games We Play,” Pusha lapses into Reasonable Doubt, specifically that run from “Politics as Usual”: “Ain’t no stoppin’ the champagne from poppin’/The drawers from droppin’, the law from watchin’.” On that JAY-Z song from more than 20 years ago, the next line is a curt and disgusted “I hate ’em.” Pusha doesn’t end his verse there; he locks back in and nods to his producer: “With ’Ye back choppin’...” “Politics as Usual” was Jay playing the coolheaded hustler, the one who could barely be bothered to come to the studio. But the next time Pusha quotes Jay is on Daytona’s closing song, “Infrared,” and by that point, he’s channeling Jay in weary, skeptical industry observer mode. The song opens with the same line (“The game’s fucked up, nigga’s beats is banging/Nigga, your hooks did it”) that Jay used to open Kingdom Come. It’s clear how Pusha sees himself: yanked from hustling into the record industry but uncompromised in his ethics.
Pusha wastes little time on “Infrared” before diving back into his shots at Drake; there’s a Quentin Miller reference and at least one other jab about ghostwriters, and in context, the anecdote about Jay needing that Annie sample to match Grammys with Will Smith seems pointed.
The real venom is saved for Baby and Wayne, though. Pusha thanks Rick Ross—who appears earlier on Daytona—for holding Baby’s feet to the fire for his alleged exploitation of Cash Money artists: “Salute Ross ’cause the message was pure/He see what I see when you see Wayne on tour/Flash without the fire/Another multi-platinum rapper trapped and can’t retire.” It’s withering, and while it’s likely rooted in fact (the details of Wayne’s lawsuit against Cash Money were unbelievably bleak), it serves primarily to cast Pusha as the savvy one, the one who could face boardroom or back-alley obstacles and come away unscathed. That’s not the whole story, of course. But what Pusha has done is carve out his own corner of rap where he can reign as king for as long as he wants. | 2018-05-25T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-05-25T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | G.O.O.D. Music / Def Jam | May 25, 2018 | 8.3 | 09d51b6e-0447-451b-9ec2-4bd4a1064556 | Paul A. Thompson | https://pitchfork.com/staff/paul-a. thompson/ | |
A year after Street Halo, the London producer returns with another three-track EP, and this collection pretty much breaks every Burial precedent there is. | A year after Street Halo, the London producer returns with another three-track EP, and this collection pretty much breaks every Burial precedent there is. | Burial: Kindred EP | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/16292-kindred/ | Kindred EP | When last year's Street Halo came out, it was met with the same breathless hysteria that has greeted every new morsel of Burial music since Untrue. But you couldn't help but feel that the ghostly two-step master had become a little predictable. Even as the producer experimented with house music on the title track (which he had done previously on "Raver" and "Versus"), it felt as if he were re-using the same sounds and effects. A year later, and with still no sign of a third album, we're treated to another three-track EP. But unlike Street Halo, Kindred, currently available digitally only, breaks nearly every Burial precedent there is, from the 12-minute-long tracks to an new sound design that feels consummately richer than the genius of his earlier work.
Of the three, "Kindred" (12-minute symphony No. 1) will be the most recognizable to Burial die-hards, featuring that same clanking metal-on-metal garage skip-and-swing. But this time something just feels heavier, harder, more devastating. Burial's been credited since the beginning as a prophet tying together UK genres old and new, but there's never been a better argument than "Kindred", which hints at the agility of jungle with the lead-footed heft of dubstep as seen through elliptical garage beats. They tumble and timestretch like vintage Metalheadz underneath smouldering Reese basslines, and the vocals lack Burial's usual phrases, instead choking out syllables smothered by the aural ash and soot that seems to soak the recording in a humongous, unearthly rumbling. As a whole "Kindred" sounds bigger than anything he's done before, an infinitely detailed behemoth that lumbers and shakes the ground beneath it with every little stroke of movement.
"Kindred" is basically a suite in itself, a new kind of tumult that only heightens Burial's usual wrenching sorrow, an ambitious new venture repeated in Kindred's other two tracks. "Loner" outdoes the sad-sack ecstacy of Untrue's similarly housey "Raver"-- for one thing, it's a lot faster-- but it's coated in MDMA residue, its chugging kick-and-snare pattern and almost prog-house pumping chord progression drowning in gloss. That chemical energy lends its fatalism an almost heroic sense of momentum, moving and moving and never quite getting anywhere but into the same empty, desperate silence that swallowed "Kindred". It's a well-timed track, navigating the same obsession with house and techno that's gripping the entire bass music world and turning it into something distinctly Burial, perverting house's speedy metronome (and prog house's politics of bliss) into profound, otherworldly sadness.
But as impressive as those two tracks are, there's no real way to prepare for "Ashtray Wasp", also built on a broken house lope. This time it's overloaded with funereal synths and arpeggios that twirl frantically in anguish as if they had nowhere else to go, saturating the cloudy soundscape with particulate matter so intricate it's a wonder all this sound data can be contained in a single mp3, nevermind a groove in wax. The fluttering effects are only further confused by the bleary smudge of it all, cinematic and grand but stuck in Burial's world of canned frequencies: The locust-swarm effect of the filters is impossibly stirring, far more visceral than perfect clarity ever could have been. It falls apart about seven minutes in before reconstructing into an even more decayed beat, violently wedged apart by static-- recalling the most challenging work of the Caretaker and his vinyl experiments. "Ashtray Wasp" suggests a structural intricacy and awe-inspiring execution from one of electronic music's mopiest producers, and the result might be his definitive track.
It's hard to talk about Kindred-- whether in the context of electronic dance music or just in the Burial discography itself-- without resorting to superlative terms, because it really is just that impressive. It's easy enough to take a talent such as Burial for granted, but Kindred is like a convenient slap in the face, a wake up call. Never before has his music possessed this much majesty, this much command, this much power: The pathos here has moved from sympathetic to completely domineering. The amount of dialog around Burial can be a little hard to swallow sometimes, especially when the guy himself seems so resistant-- or at least indifferent-- to the ongoing intellectualization of his music. But what we get on Kindred isn't some loner unknowingly making genius out of samples from Metal Gear Solid on his Playstation. You might not think of refinement when you think of Burial's productions, but just try to imagine it, and you'll get an idea of the kind of glory that Kindred carries. It still might not be the follow-up to Untrue that everyone's been waiting for, but format feels completely irrelevant. When those beats fall into place on the title track, nothing else matters for the next 30 minutes, until the crackle and fizz of "Ashtray Wasps" finally fades away. Then you put it on again. And again. And again. | 2012-02-15T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2012-02-15T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Electronic | Hyperdub | February 15, 2012 | 8.7 | 09d67c8e-0957-47dd-aacb-db9c46da194a | Andrew Ryce | https://pitchfork.com/staff/andrew-ryce/ | null |
Each Sunday, Pitchfork takes an in-depth look at a significant album from the past, and any record not in our archives is eligible. Today, we revisit the gnarly, psychedelic, and insurrectionary sound of the Portland punk band’s best album. | Each Sunday, Pitchfork takes an in-depth look at a significant album from the past, and any record not in our archives is eligible. Today, we revisit the gnarly, psychedelic, and insurrectionary sound of the Portland punk band’s best album. | Wipers: Youth of America | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/wipers-youth-of-america/ | Youth of America | When Greg Sage roars “it’s no fair” midway through Youth of America, the vowels long and colicky, it’s not exactly a noble moment. Complaining about unfairness rarely is, because even if it’s accurate, it’s still a badge of comfort. “No fair” are petulant words, stagnant words, the conclusion of people who have set up camp in their perceived burdens. “No fair” is not a phrase of a revolution, because fairness is built on shifting sands; it’s not as steely a protest as “unjust” or “wrong.” And the people to whom life truly has been cruelest don’t have the time to complain about it; they’re too busy trying to outmaneuver the system that failed them. Now that’s no fair.
Ronald Reagan talked about fairness a lot. When he wasn’t dismantling corporate accountability, scorning the AIDS crisis, or staging pre-Trumpian dog-whistling rallies, he loved to harangue his audience about what was truly fair. “With the idealism and fair play which are the core of our system and our strength,” he intoned in his January 1981 inaugural address, “we can have a strong and prosperous America at peace with itself and the world.” In his second inaugural address, in 1985, he talked with a sepia-toned sentimentality about generals dying at Valley Forge, Lincoln pacing the White House, and a lonesome Wild West settler singing the song of America, one “hopeful, big-hearted, idealistic, daring, decent, and fair.”
When Portland’s Wipers released their second album in May 1981, the shadow of Reagan’s conservatism was only beginning to spread. But the writing was on the wall: He’d spent his first 100 days shoving through so many revisions to tax policy and restrictions on federal power, he was accused of effectively squashing the concept of an activist government full stop. The sense of selfishness was demoralizing. An anticipatory static filled the air; the specter of “no future,” that familiar credo of punk, wore a Windsor knot.
By this time, also, the “youth” in question had already heard plenty of punk—enough for its most stinging, mutinous qualities to have calcified into a formula. Punk, while still radical in its political messaging, was moving decisively in one direction: shorter, faster. Not everyone was pushing out 21 songs in 35 minutes, like the overachievers in Wire, but bands were doggedly dispatching songs quicker than the punk class before them; this included Wipers’ 1980 debut, Is This Real?, which followed all the spiny punk tropes and, upon release, sank without a ripple. Down in Los Angeles, a movement was brewing around Black Flag, who were about to shift the median with their debut album, Damaged, and its songs barely over the 3-minute mark.
It didn’t take a Rimbaud scholar to see that gloomy, 10-minute, Krautrock-inspired songs would be a tough sell in the early-’80s punk economy. But Sage, a scientific-minded contrarian—he’d started building recording equipment and playing guitar in the third grade after seeing a movie about Thomas Edison—tested his hypothesis anyway. And on Youth of America, Wipers all but acknowledge the absurdity of their approach. You hear every roll of the dice, and the slight inhale of disbelief after they land; it builds the train while it’s already in motion, laying each link of track just before derailment.
Punk had never quite shown its seams like this before, its questioning of itself and its construction; it had never felt like such a righteous search for answers that was more concerned with asking the questions. The simultaneously thriving post-punk and no wave scenes had also taken mallets to the conventions of punk, but they’d had no problem casting aside the politics and guitars, as well. In Youth of America’s six grim, unhurried songs, Sage is weighed by his own dilemmas and asks them overtly: How can he change? What of this world is worth saving, and what possible advice can be wrung from that stone for the next generation? What can be said of this violent country as it enters a new era of turning that contempt inward? Why did he take on this role, anyway, and when will he finally cross the rubicon where his listeners need to save themselves by rebelling against him, already a geriatric punk at 29 years old?
Mirroring Sage’s outlier status: Portland itself. Far removed from the switchboards of American punk—New York, D.C., L.A.—the Pacific Northwest wouldn’t become a rock destination for another decade. Until a Wipers superfan named Kurt Cobain threw a baby into a swimming pool (and copied Sage’s penchant for flannel), the scene was off the grid; it was filled with D.I.Y. savants like Sage who disdained conformity and showed it with clever, cutting music they had no intention to scale. (When the Seattle scene exploded in the early ’90s, and A&R execs descended on seemingly every band in a 200-mile radius, Sage still refused to follow the “grunge” slipstream, famously turning down an opening tour slot for Nirvana.) It was truly a place of creativity for purpose, not product.
To understand Youth of America, it’s best to start at the conclusion. “When It’s Over”—a clear mission statement on the album across a blasphemous six minutes—is, in many ways, the most insurrectionist track on the album: It opens with over three minutes of an anxious, abrasive instrumental. Sage’s guitar wields full narrative reign—his chords open brashly, in the type of rapid churn that Buzzcocks and Stiff Little Fingers mastered. But then, in a surprising upheaval, he adds longer, musing tones that challenge the air over Dave Koupal’s bass and Brad Naish’s drums; soon the guitar has its own wandering spirit, its own melodic refrain, building its power in a direct nod to motorik momentum. The instrument is a clearly defined character, demanding its own experience.
Hearing it feels like opening a window and letting cool air rush in—there was space in punk songs for this, all along? For a full single’s worth of exploratory eloquence from a lead guitar? And for all its wandering, the guitar’s thick, tetchy distortion never wobbles; Sage built his own recording equipment to achieve that steadiness, including his own vacuum tube direct boxes.
Minutes into “When It’s Over,” when the guitar cedes to Sage’s voice, the transition is abrupt enough to almost feel bashful, a second-guessing of the kind of ego that allowed that irreverent open; piano supports his low, Bauhaus-worthy gothic grumble, so deep the ear must strain to make out his laments. “In the land of dreams, I find myself sober/Wonder when it’ll all be over,” he moans. When the guitar skitters back in, it’s at first noisy yet deferential to the words, clanging back on its first motif with tinny, sinister restraint; it feels like a dramatic battle between instrument and vocalist, a battle for the soul of the track—and perhaps the listener’s, too. The stakes rise and never resolve; Naish adds a clawing, claustrophobic pulse. The guitar ultimately regains its full audacity—mirroring Sage’s voice while it also gains intensity, screaming, “Will you be laughing when it’s over?”—and the song ends on its miserable questions, asked at a fever pitch. Nothing is solved. Tensions end flared.
Of the available ways to convey numb detachment from society—many already explored by the inaugural ’77 punk class, from self-identified brothers from Queens to trussed-up hucksters from London—the exhausted disdain in Sage’s voice stands apart. His words on the comparatively poppy “Taking Too Long” offer more of a quiet, paternal disappointment than a scolding. “What was coming from the sky?” Sage demands. Missile or omen, the result is immutable: “You never, ever change your mind.” It’s almost graceful at times in its sour melody, a pinch of sugar dissolving into acid. Throughout the song, it feels like some active condemnation will follow—what was the point of punk if not to call out hypocrites overtly?—but it never comes.
Of course, posting questions and passing judgments alone can backfire. Sage seems to acknowledge this on “Pushing the Extreme,” which has a taunting, declaratory quality absent from much of Youth of America. It’s macabre in a slightly cartoonish way, and makes its most obvious overtures to fully igniting a class war. “Through your mirror there is such vanity/Through the light, it broke to me,” Sage sings, scolding some Patrick Bateman wannabe over ghostly percussive mixing that shoots cymbals around like shrapnel. The sentiment is mirrored with even more gothic intonation in the unapologetically bratty “No Fair,” in which Sage mutters at the rising ruling class—“Take a piece of our lives, didn’t think we’d care?”—over Koupal’s bleeding basslines. In 1981, all the ascendant yuppies—their avarice, selfishness, and pinstripe suits—were prescient targets. This was well before the era would earn its “Decade of Greed” shorthand for its many braided strains of gluttony. And the approach also cuts succinctly into Sage, Koupal, and Naish’s overriding ethos of Youth of America: Rise up now or face your doom.
There’d been many hollow promises of better futures by the ’80s, but the decade’s problems demanded swift and decisive rebellion. In Youth of America’s title track, Sage yells to a generation, his voice raw and unaltered, “The walls are coming down/The walls are crumbling down on you.” It’s somehow simultaneously modest and hubristic to suggest his most useful role is at a lectern, that he is the one who must awaken that fury in others. Amid the deep, convulsing distortion of bass and guitar, he adds a stark political science lesson: “They attack you from the right side/Down the left side.” But that distance quickly collapses: “It is time we rectify this now/ We've got to heal it now.”
The track likewise threatens to collapse on itself midway, in spirals of funhouse feedback and ghostly echoes of melody that suggest psychotropics and exhaustion in equal measure. The post-punk freefall stretches and seethes for nearly two indulgent minutes before the floor drops out, leaving only minimal bass and guitar; Sage stomps back to the mic to intone more civics: “The rich get richer and the poorer get poorer. Now there’s no place to go,” he mutters dourly. The track’s remaining five minutes are an inversion of the kraut- and psych-rock leanings from earlier in the record, when repetition bred power. In “Youth of America,” pointedly, repetition only underscores the futility of inaction: What could these kids expect, if they did nothing? More of the same diminishing returns: Sage groans the title, and his guitar sputters out strangled, pitiful half-lives of the previously robust melody. Koupal and Naish’s rhythm section’s stevedore bass section falters. The third act crumbles exactly as the narrator predicted, leaving the audience to stew in their own complicity. It’s a frantic prophecy of undoing that simply wouldn’t translate to brevity; “Youth of America” defends every moment of its 10 minutes and 27 seconds, maintaining its fearsome intensity and leaving an ominous chill in its wake.
For all of Youth of America’s vigor, its informed despair and pleas for action, the plundering decade ahead continued apace. Wipers’ refusal to follow the punk tides came at a cost; audiences slept on the album in America and most of Europe, despite John Peel’s ardent support; Sage moved to Arizona for no other reason than he liked how it looked from the freeway. Moored in the still-sleepy Pacific Northwest scene, ahead of its time and removed from any notions of commercial viability, it would take years for the record’s now-devoted cult to assemble. But then, sparking widespread, telegenic insurrection isn’t exactly a fair rubric for an album; revolution can be less an eruption than a lighthouse beacon, shining in every direction until it exposes those brave enough to make the journey. The liberation from dark authority Sage begs for isn’t owed; it must be achieved through hardship. Listening to Youth of America today, it still feels like the roar of incoming unrest, of the better world that will have space to rise once we refuse to bow to undeserved power. And each of us must ask ourselves: Are we still young enough to challenge the old guard?
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Get the Sunday Review in your inbox every weekend. Sign up for the Sunday Review newsletter here. | 2020-07-19T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-07-19T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Park Avenue | July 19, 2020 | 9.1 | 09db77d9-d17c-4afe-94d4-03903c55f239 | Stacey Anderson | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stacey-anderson/ | |
On her fifth solo album, the Stereolab principal highlights the contradictions at the heart of her music, pairing deceptively sweet arrangements with unsparing socio-political critique. | On her fifth solo album, the Stereolab principal highlights the contradictions at the heart of her music, pairing deceptively sweet arrangements with unsparing socio-political critique. | Laetitia Sadier: Rooting for Love | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/laetitia-sadier-rooting-for-love/ | Rooting for Love | Laetitia Sadier is a master of deceptive sweetness, smuggling unflinching politics into an indie-rock landscape not known for its ethical fortitude. In Stereolab she wrapped lyrics about war, capitalist collapse, and fascism into soaringly groovy pop songs, while Little Tornados, her group with filmmaker David Thayer, tackled exploitative economic systems over honeyed guitar licks. Her juxtapositions have never sounded more jarring—or uncomfortable—than they do on Rooting for Love, Sadier’s fifth solo album and first since Stereolab reunited in 2019.
“Don’t Forget You’re Mine” exemplifies the record’s subversive audacity. It is, ostensibly, a gentle pop song; its dulcet melody, bright chord changes, and lush strings are reminiscent of the lounge music and ’60s pop that were among Stereolab’s myriad influences. But the lyrics—written by Véronique Vincent, of veteran Belgian experimentalists Aksak Maboul—paint a sickening portrait of femicide, leading to the stomach-churning line “A good slap is what you need/A good slap is what you want/Take that, take that/Get up, get up, babe.” The contrast between musical mood, lyrical darkness, and Sadier’s almost standoffish tone—a model of cool, melodic mystery—is genuinely unsettling, a reminder of the singer’s long history as a politically charged disruptive force in modern music.
This isn’t the only moment that recalls Sadier’s storied past. Stereolab covered so much ground over their two-decade recording career—try to name a genre that the band didn’t dabble in—and Sadier, as the band’s singer, songwriter, lyricist, and co-founder, was so integral to their sound that trying to move her solo work from under Stereolab’s shadow feels like an awkward parlor game. Perhaps realizing this, Sadier leans into her history on Rooting for Love: The album’s palette of humming synths, wandering bass, gentle vibraphone clatter, and intricate backing vocals suggest Stereolab with the guitars turned down.
“Panser L’inacceptable” hints at the space-age Gallic pop of Mars Audiac Quintet; “La Nageuse Nue” reflects the jazz-influenced dreaminess of Dots and Loops, and “Une Autre Attente” assimilates Margerine Eclipse’s wounded drive. Straying further afield, “Who + What” has a modish trip-hop beat not atypical of Stereolab, exactly, but not quintessential either, while “The Inner Smile” rides out on a thrilling flute freak that suggests (very) early Kraftwerk, rather than Stereolab’s more typical kosmische influences Neu! and Can.
The songwriting is distinguished by its bite and brevity. “New Moon” boasts a chorus as sharp as biting down on a lemon, while the gorgeous about-faces of the shifting chord changes of “Une Autre Attente” suggest the twists and turns of a classic Hitchcock film morphed into a perfect pop package.
What leaves a lasting impression, though, is the quiet fury of an ideologically engaged, masterful pop dramatist who understands the power of understatement and artful contrast. “Cloud 6,” the album’s closer, has a similar force to “Don’t Forget You’re Mine.” A gently cycling keyboard melody serves as a base for vibraphone, strings, and a coiled circle of backing vocals, as Sadier sings about power and pocket knives, before killing the song—and the album—stone dead with the venomous closing line “I’m not fucking around/You’re halfway dead.” It’s a magisterial mic drop by an artist who never lost faith in the power of pop to shock and delight. | 2024-02-24T00:00:00.000-05:00 | 2024-02-24T00:00:00.000-05:00 | Experimental / Rock | Drag City | February 24, 2024 | 7.5 | 09dbbe85-3d33-451a-bff5-3bfa6ddf3a32 | Ben Cardew | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ben-cardew/ | |
Algiers mix the soul-powered activism of early '70s Motown with the proto-punk fury of the MC5, the synth primitivism of Suicide, and the Biblically charged drama of the Bad Seeds. On their Matador debut, they project the righteous indignation required of all great protest music. | Algiers mix the soul-powered activism of early '70s Motown with the proto-punk fury of the MC5, the synth primitivism of Suicide, and the Biblically charged drama of the Bad Seeds. On their Matador debut, they project the righteous indignation required of all great protest music. | Algiers: Algiers | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/20412-algiers-algiers/ | Algiers | Algiers are a heavy band, though not so much in sound as in effect—they’re getting shit off their chest and piling it directly onto yours. Raised in the American South, they personify the foot-stomped physicality, call-and-response communiques, and outsized oration of the church, but their music is the anti-gospel. Rather than promote uplift, out-of-body ecstasy, and communion with the heavens, Algiers weigh you down with the burden of American history, a despair born of centuries of systemic oppression, and the soul-crushing futility of hoping for a change that never comes. Though they project the righteous indignation required of all great protest music, their music doesn’t so much represent a raised fist as a shoulder aching from the stress of trying to keep it aloft.
On their website, Algiers present a crazy quilt of musical and philosophical touchstones, which include everyone from Malcolm X and Angela Davis to Alejandro Jodorowsky and Basquiat to Public Enemy and Ian Svenonius. Their music is likewise a pastiche of transgressive rock signifiers: the soul-powered activism of early '70s Motown, the proto-punk fury of the MC5, the synth primitivism of Suicide, the biblically charged drama of the Bad Seeds. But if the 11 songs on Algiers’ self-titled debut draw from familiar record-collector reference points, they’re radicalized by the context in which they’re being presented. Algiers are hardly the first biracial band to emerge from the indie-rock industrial complex, however, they are distinguished by their eagerness to make discussions of race the foundation of their ideological agenda, the gasoline-soaked fuse that sets their songs alight. For Algiers, signing to Matador isn’t just a means to reach more people; it’s an opportunity to thrust the modern African-American experience in the faces of an audience who rarely have to grapple with it.
Though steeped in Southern tradition, Algiers could not exist without all mod cons: with frontman Franklin James Fisher now based in New York, and guitarist Lee Tesche and bassist Ryan Mahan situated in London, the trio pieced the album together through transatlantic file swaps, atop bed tracks built through programmed beats or their own hyperactive hands and feet. But while the band have taken the somewhat inevitable step of recruiting a proper drummer—Bloc Party’s Matt Tong—for their current North American tour, the songs on Algiers hardly feel like rough sketches begging for full-band embellishment. The brittle beats are crucial to establishing the album’s often suffocating atmosphere: on the mournful opener "Remains", a chain-gang stomp provides a none-too-subtle evocation of America’s slave-trading past, while Fisher’s anti-television invective highlights the modern form of captivity that’s replaced it; the we-shan’t-overcome dejection of "Blood" is chillingly framed by a tambourine rattle and handclap that feel like lashes from a whip. "Four hundred years of torture, four hundred years a slave," Fisher seethes on the latter song, as Tesche’s spasmodic guitar squeals emit sparks. But the noise ultimately relents, and the beat goes on, all while Fisher ruefully repeats the line "all my blood’s in vain."
Though Algiers’ debut is dropping in the midst of a flashpoint in American race relations, Fisher’s lyrics avoid ripped-from-the-headlines reportage for a more existential angst. These songs were written before Ferguson and Baltimore, but they ultimately exist to remind us that such flare-ups aren’t the shocking aberrations that news networks make them out to be, but the inevitable, recurring spillover of a frustration that’s been simmering for centuries and will continue to in perpetuity. Accordingly, the savvily sequenced Algiers ebbs and flows between moments of gritted-teeth tension and furious release, its solemn, confession-booth ruminations offset by heart-racing, steeple-toppling rave-ups—like "And When You Fall", "Old Girl", and the planet-rockin’ "Irony. Utility. Pretext."—that fulfill the prophecy of a power-music electric revival anticipated by some fellow Atlantans 15 years ago. While their messaging can sometimes be overshadowed by pulpit-thrashing theatrics (see: the provocatively titled but erratic "Black Eunuch"), Algiers can also harness their jittery energy to sublime effect: the piano-powered dub strut "But She Was Not Flying" contrasts the album’s most relaxed, easy-going rhythm with Fisher’s most incendiary, exasperated vocal performance, representing the mid-album peak where Algiers truly find their groove.
Despite their gravely serious demeanor and fierce intellect—this band doesn’t so much give interviews as present thesis defenses—Algiers ultimately value accessibility: from the participatory hand-clapped hysterics to their callback-ready refrains to their conflation of church congregations and circle pits, these songs beg for audience engagement and strength-in-numbers support. And if the album proves unrelentingly pessimistic in its worldview, Algiers do at least leave us with the faintest of silver linings. As the closing untitled instrumental takes the form of a thick, disorienting ambient fog, an early-'70s sample of Chicago pastor T.L. Barrett leading his Youth for Christ choir in an exultant chorus gradually fades into the mix and eventually overwhelms the track, as if to chase away the album’s dense, dark cloud cover with a ray of light. Algiers are never so naive as to assure us that a change is gonna come but, as that brief denouement suggests, in their hardened hearts, they haven’t completely given up on the possibility. | 2015-06-01T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2015-06-01T02:00:01.000-04:00 | Rock | Matador | June 1, 2015 | 7.7 | 09deeddf-d702-41bc-a393-e8445ce279e5 | Stuart Berman | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stuart-berman/ | null |
Where 2021’s Half God was a farewell to the Manhattan of Wiki’s youth, the follow-up lacks that record’s deliberate agenda, channeling its freewheeling energy into a free-associative writing style. | Where 2021’s Half God was a farewell to the Manhattan of Wiki’s youth, the follow-up lacks that record’s deliberate agenda, channeling its freewheeling energy into a free-associative writing style. | Wiki / Subjxct 5: Cold Cuts | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/wiki-subjxct5-cold-cuts/ | Cold Cuts | The most enigmatic element of Wiki’s raps, dating back to his teenaged years with the New York revival outfit Ratking, is a sleight of hand bordering on caginess. As a narrator, Wiki proudly personifies his hometown; as in the work of earlier Downtown fixtures Joseph Mitchell and Lucy Sante, it can be unclear whether he’s testifying for himself or on behalf of his nine million neighbors. It goes beyond his inflection, his hyper-local references, his day-in-the-life chronicles and not-in-my-backyard territorialism. On his most vibrant outing, 2017’s No Mountains in Manhattan, these cohered into a kinetic panorama, a bustling cityscape of sights, sounds, and scents. When he reduces his scope, it can be difficult to separate Wiki from his environs: Even if he’s the loudest, most animated man on the street, he’s still a man on the street.
A half-Irish, half-Nuyorican man raised on the Upper West Side, Wiki attended prep school in Brooklyn before settling in Chinatown; his most introspective raps probe the contradictions of home and identity, though his habit of evoking New York via aesthetic touchstones—the clatter of the F train, the gooey melt of a bacon, egg, and cheese—can feel reductive, especially given the insular spaces he occupies. If 2021’s Half God was a farewell to the Manhattan of his youth, the album’s tension lay in its bitterness, Wiki’s abiding wish to wrest back the city from gentrifying arrivistes. The follow-up, Cold Cuts, is both a concession and a step forward in which Wiki and producer Subjxct 5 cut a path through the rubble of de Blasio’s New York.
Half God was a difficult record not so much for its anger as for its politics. Surveying the city’s ferocious churn, Wiki defaulted into wary nativism, voicing a decades-late plea for authenticity. Cold Cuts lacks its predecessor’s deliberate agenda, channeling its freewheeling energy into a free-associative writing style. Its structure is an inversion of Telephone Booth’s minute-long snapshots: Unbroken by hooks, Wiki’s long-winded monologues are shaped by internal rhyme schemes rather than narrative trajectories. On “Jersey Sub,” a half-remembered NBA broadcast frames Wiki and Subjxct’s origin story; around the four-minute mark, Wiki reverts to more familiar territory, expounding on Northeastern weather patterns and Keith Murray’s Jive catalog.
Even the most straightforward tracks are suffused with kaleidoscopic dissonance. Where “Butta Leather” is on its surface an earnest ballad, its pivots reveal a squalid underbelly, volleying between intimate confessions and graphic sex fantasies. On “The Fonz,” Wiki’s gnarled verses unfold like oral history, careening asides disclosing his characters’ uneasy alliances. There’s a Kendrick-esque wistfulness to Wiki’s adolescent flashbacks—grade-school pals inevitably diverge into shitty adulthoods—but the song’s lived-in quality is a function of its visual referents. His cooked Wallabees are “butter-colored, prob’ly smothered, stained wine on the sides”; an old neighbor “went from the sloppy little jit to papi with the lisp, gold poppin’ out his lip.”
Like all of Wiki’s music, Cold Cuts drifts through a hazy past, yet its collaborations avoid rose-tinted melancholy. Subjxct 5 approaches Swizz Beatz and Dame Grease’s turn-of-the-century production with academic reverence, emulating their synths and bass drums on “Bones” and “Evergreen.” While Subjxct is an adept mimic of their imposing tempos and glossy instrumentals, his mixes lack their digitized precision, playing like DIY tributes to New York’s blockbuster era. “Ricky” recalls the Neptunes’ stuttering guitars on “Luv U Better”; “One More Chance” follows the “Hard Knock Life” formula with a choppy snare and choral sample. Subjxct barks interstitial ad-libs like a young Kay Slay, further rooting his arrangements in the early 2000s.
In spite of the shotgun approach, Wiki takes the occasion to document New York’s ongoing desecration. Although “Come Home” is a rigorous municipal dispatch, it’s burdened by the weary ambassador schtick. After stilted attempts to interrogate his own ambivalence, Wiki arrives at a diagnosis of spiritual decline: “This city, it brings the most pretentious, we all feel we got the most perspective, but is it so?/Could be broke, no diploma, still walk around with our nose up, like we know something y’all don’t.” He imagines the city through an immigrant’s eyes, then bemoans the proliferation of $20 avocado toast. His grievances land with a sullen flatness—but mostly, his attempts to condense New York’s essence into four-minute rap songs feel increasingly futile.
Wiki’s autobiographical material goes down easier than his man-of-the-people raps, although the stream-of-consciousness creates a glancing effect. “My Life” features some of Cold Cuts’ most intricate rhymes, recalling youthful indiscretions and his indoctrination into rap music (“It was Biggie, it was Christopher, that got me through high school/‘Suicidal Thoughts’ got me, I was suicidal”). The memoiristic fragments are piercing, his distinctive language delivered with a casual matter-of-factness. But they’re pieced together like a mosaic, relayed in jittery narrative leaps like a stand-up doing crowdwork. Across six and a half minutes, the gut-punch climax never materializes; as ever, it’s tough to distinguish Wiki from his surroundings and influences.
As tethered as Cold Cuts is to the Y2K era, its supporting cast places it on the cutting edge. In place of his usual collaborators—wordy old souls like Your Old Droog, Lansky Jones, and Remy Banks—a roster of abstract performers embellishes Wiki’s idiosyncrasies. The preternaturally breezy YL floats through the opening verse of “Ricky”; a muttering Big Ouee all but ignores Subjxct’s drum pattern on “Phone Calls.” On “Silent Meeting,” Wiki trades road stories with DJ Lucas, an erratic rapper from rural Massachusetts. Their frenetic back-and-forth is enrapturing, and it’s humbling—after all these years—to hear Wiki play the straight man.
Tri-state rap evolves in cycles of fragmentation and recombination: today, scenes coalesce around affinity as opposed to neighborhoods or traditions. Ambassador that he is, Wiki is happy to meet Papo2oo4 and Hunnaloe on their turf, nerding out over long-extinct designer brands and unsung DatPiff triumphs. More flamboyant and less technical than Wiki, these rappers have adopted his eccentricities—unpretentious nostalgia, quixotic seediness, feverish grins belying latent gloom—and pushed them in bolder, weirder directions. This is where New York’s headed; Wiki is wise to tag along. | 2022-11-03T00:02:00.000-04:00 | 2022-11-03T00:02:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Wikset Enterprise | November 3, 2022 | 7.2 | 09df2305-f1f9-4586-affc-d69bc32317bf | Pete Tosiello | https://pitchfork.com/staff/pete-tosiello/ | |
The ferocious 21-year-old shapeshifter comes through with one of the hardest rap records of the year. | The ferocious 21-year-old shapeshifter comes through with one of the hardest rap records of the year. | Rico Nasty: Nasty | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/rico-nasty-nasty/ | Nasty | Rico Nasty is happy to try on different skins in order to become comfortable in her own. Like Eminem, Nicki Minaj, or MF DOOM, she compartmentalizes aspects of her personality—her softer side, her anxious side, and her unapologetically brusque side—as a coping mechanism, playing different roles wherever necessary: mostly the pop-trap femme Tacobella and the nu metal rap rager Trap Lavigne. Through these characters, she explores a greater range of sounds, dabbling in bedroom pop, melodic trap, and a bruising style of forechecking rap, drawing inspiration from Grimes, Rihanna, and Slipknot. Her sixth mixtape and first under Atlantic Records, Nasty, is her most complete performance yet, an unrelenting, elbow-throwing mosh-rap record about defending your turf.
Trap Lavigne’s punk edge dominates Nasty, but the tape offers a head-spinning mix of singsong escapades and violent thrasher anthems. It aggregates her personas to present a clearer self-portrait; it feels like a conscious decision to sequence the delicate “Why Oh Why,” her most bashful song, and the growler “Rage,” her most unflappable one, back to back. After four years on the mixtape circuit, she finally achieves equilibrium here, balancing her light and dark sides, at various points self-conscious, thoughtful, humbled, combative, fearless, audacious, and vitriolic.
Rico likes to use her raps to pummel her foes into submission, and it’s impossible to ignore the sheer force she can muster. But the real heaviness comes from the way her writing complements her cadences as she constantly shifts the weight of her flows. She can bark like a drill sergeant or expand into a caricature, but the emphasis is dictated by the dynamism of her rhyme schemes, as on this passage from “Rage”: “I don’t seek shit for a reaction, want action, I’m snappin’/Stop with the racket, Balenciaga my fashion,” each phonetic sound snapping into the next. It’d be all for naught if her lyrics didn’t facilitate these sort of performances; Rico is as precise in her writing as she is a commanding presence. On “Hockey,” she delivers pragmatic advice through staccato phrases stressing each word: “Make sure that you be careful, ’cause somebody’s always watching/You’ll be surprised what people do when they ain’t got no options.”
Rico’s songs are often about proximity. This can be literal (people invading her space, guys attempting—and usually failing—to get at her) or figurative (window shoppers watching her pockets, the widening gap between her and her competitors). A song like “Trust Issues,” makes apparent her desire to keep people at arm’s length. “If you lookin’ for me, I be everywhere you can’t go,” she raps, later adding, “I got trust issues, don’t nobody get too close.” She has a self-described “sixth sense” for fake bitches and broke niggas. She is usually thinking about or attempting to figure out where others are positioned in relation to where she is, and she often navigates these spaces with either a brolic sense of indestructibility or a shrugging nonchalance. These frequent negotiations of space are exhilarating, like watching an apex predator discovering its place in the food chain.
Her wig-splitting flows are only bolstered by Kenny Beats, who produced nearly half the mixtape. His work can vary, incorporating everything from scuzzy guitars to playful synths, all with hi-hat-heavy seismic drum kits that quake beneath Rico’s rumbling voice. On the opener, “Bitch I’m Nasty,” Rico surges into the space vacated by his whirring noises. “Countin’ Up” transposes and interpolates Noreaga’s “Superthug,” darkening the original Neptunes synths to accommodate Rico’s snarled barbs. Elsewhere, the beats provide a splash of color. “Pressing Me” feels slick enough to be right at home on Rae Sremmurd’s latest. As it buzzes in an out of focus in her rearview, Rico seems only moderately inconvenienced by the parade of her rivals’ exes and boyfriends presenting themselves before her.
Rico’s style is punchy but there are more than jabs; while many of Nasty’s best moments are its, well, nastiest, it can also be sweet and sassy. On “Oreo” she slips in and out of Auto-Tune: “Before you cross a bad bitch, boy you better look both ways,” she warns. The Chipmunk hook on “Won’t Change” is reminiscent of Nicki’s lively Barbie turns. On “Ice Cream,” she compares thirsty dudes in her mentions to kids at an ice cream truck, ignoring their advances unless they can “sponsor” her. Carefree and brazen, the song opens with all-time impudence: “With some white bitches screaming YOLO/Lemonade for the shade, Jesus saves, I don’t.”
But Nasty’s most vulnerable song comes toward the end: “Why Oh Why” is a sugar trap confection that encourages people to pursue their dreams while wondering aloud if that pursuit is really worth it. “I been havin’ mood swings, sayin’ shit that I can’t take back/I got all this money but I wanna go back,” she sings on the track, wary of the lurking fame monster but resigned to her path. “They keep on askin’ where the old me at/For the last time, she ain’t never comin’ back.” It’s a moment that shows personal growth often comes at a price. But across these 14 songs, Rico Nasty shakes off haters—and her own self-doubt—by refusing to settle for less. | 2018-06-21T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-06-21T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Sugar Trap | June 21, 2018 | 8 | 09dfb997-2542-4caa-a2c9-b8e3e0f9b674 | Sheldon Pearce | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sheldon-pearce/ | |
The former Wild Beasts singer embarks on a new direction on his soul-searching solo debut, stripping back his songwriting to a reverent hush. | The former Wild Beasts singer embarks on a new direction on his soul-searching solo debut, stripping back his songwriting to a reverent hush. | Hayden Thorpe: Diviner | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/hayden-thorpe-diviner/ | Diviner | The British singer-songwriter Hayden Thorpe released “Diviner” in late February 2019, just a year after the final performance of his band Wild Beasts. From its stark opening chords and breathy first line—“I’m a keeper of secrets, pray do tell”—the song sounded markedly personal. With little more than his stately countertenor and humble piano, Thorpe harnessed the energy of quiet solitude and proceeded to pitch that emotion skyward until the music felt bathed in a dim light. After more than a decade with Wild Beasts, “Diviner” pointed to a different direction for Thorpe.
That eponymous single opens Thorpe’s debut solo album, which is fitting not just because it was the first song he wrote after Wild Beasts announced their split; it is the central thesis and shining example of his solo music. This 10-song collection was written largely at home on his own piano, which he’s referred to as a “totem.” But you could also think of the instrument as his anchor.
Diviner is wholly rooted in stripped-down songwriting and reverent hush; its tonal range is decidedly limited. Thorpe and producer/collaborator Leo Abrahams do flesh out some of the piano pieces with muted guitar, drums, and electronics, in an attempt to break Diviner out of its two dimensions: “Straight Lines” adds an understated funk to what’s essentially an elegy for the inevitable end of all relationships. But the layering of contrasts doesn’t always work. Songs like “Earthly Needs” and “Love Crimes” varnish Thorpe’s piano with the kind of disco-pop patina that marked 2016’s Boy King, yet there’s nothing quite so brash or ornate here, so instead we get what sounds like a hopelessly introspective Boy George singing about “emotional jujitsu” and “living a life of love crime.” Chalk it up to the pitfalls of unabashedly baring one’s interior life while writing a pop album.
Thorpe makes up for his more dubious sojourns when he lets his anchor steady him. The second half of Diviner ditches the opening half’s attempts at levity and delivers some of the record’s most impactful music. The conviction of “In My Name” is audible in its ringing chords and whispers. His unusually expressive vocal melody brings depth to “Anywhen,” while the piano suggests the rippling pulse of a Nils Frahm performance. Such standouts aren’t entirely devoid of their own small shortcomings, like the awkward line, “Now when I think of us, I pretty much self combust.” But there’s a charm to these lyrics that’s distinctly Thorpe’s; even a loaded word like “collusion,” sung with a kind of dejected swagger, is freed from its obvious overtones.
Diviner is concerned with the passage of time and reckoning with the past, and parts of it are rooted quite deeply in Thorpe's own history. His 2013 cover of “Goodbye Horses” and Wild Beasts’ Boy King closer “Dreamliner” are early incarnations of the sound he explores here. The idea for a solo album came to him while playing the piano at his father's house, which he'd learned on as a boy; the fluttering ambient piece “Spherical Time” dates back to a composition he started at the age of 16. “A world is waiting for us outside,” Thorpe sings at the album’s end, on “Impossible Object,” as if acknowledging that he’s spent too long cooped up in his head. He has spoken of Diviner as “a self-help album,” and to that end, some of its songs are so intimate that their meanings seem all but impossible for an outsider to parse. But in the moments when he decides to push his music out into the light, Thorpe's self-searching takes on a shape we can all recognize. | 2019-05-25T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-05-25T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Domino | May 25, 2019 | 6.8 | 09e1bc1f-cede-4927-8f76-04dd94e21651 | Patric Fallon | https://pitchfork.com/staff/patric-fallon/ | |
The English folk maven sounds spry as ever, leading a light-footed exploration of traditional forms that also tips toward classic psychedelia. | The English folk maven sounds spry as ever, leading a light-footed exploration of traditional forms that also tips toward classic psychedelia. | Shirley Collins: Heart’s Ease | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/shirley-collins-hearts-ease/ | Heart’s Ease | Shirley Collins celebrated her 85th birthday on July 5, and even during the COVID-19 pandemic, her neighbors unrolled a polite but lively celebration of their local heroine. Circled by onlookers, an accordionist, and Morris dancers outfitted in bells and traditional garb, Collins sat in a shaded doorway, applauding the scene with enthusiasm. It was a fitting tribute to a woman who has dedicated her life to preserving English folk culture.
This convivial spirit reverberates across Collins’ new record, Heart’s Ease, her second after a break from music that lasted for nearly 40 years. Her absence was marked by the heartbreak of infidelity, but after reclaiming confidence in her voice, she returned in 2016 with Lodestar. On Heart’s Ease, Collins is spry as ever, leading a light-footed exploration of English folk traditions that also tilts toward classic psychedelia.
Heart’s Ease is soft but crisp, like freshly laundered sheets stretched along a line. Collins sounds at ease across the album, a typical hodge-podge of English folk styles: a traditional favorite (“Barbara Allen”), a working song (“Canadee-I-O”), a cheery dance number (“Orange in Bloom”). But Collins’ liner notes shape an autobiographical arc. She sang a version of “Rolling in the Dew” as a schoolgirl, and she learned opener “Merry Golden Tree” from Almeda Riddle while assisting Alan Lomax on his field-recording trip through the American South in 1959 and 1960. She adapted “Whitsun Dance” from a poem by record producer Austin John Marshall, inspired by his empathy for the elderly widows who gathered to dance at the Cecil Sharp House, the English folk music preservation organization where she often performed. In using Heart’s Ease to transmit other semi-forgotten bits of history, Collins covertly tells her own.
Heart’s Ease is beautifully rendered, presenting Collins’ voice in reverent focus amid acoustic guitars, mandolin, and the occasional fiddle. “Sweet Greens and Blues,” an exemplary number about savoring a quiet and happy life, gets a playful lift from a touch of slide guitar in the background. Picking in his typical rolling style, guest guitarist Nathan Salsburg adds another sylvan layer. Collins sings the frosty “Locked in Ice” with such somber clarity as to make the song sound autobiographical. The tune’s backing drifts of whispery cymbals and spacey electric guitar recall the haze of old memories, giving the song a slight psychedelic wriggle.
Britfolk aficionados have enthusiastically embraced Collins’ return to the public field, and the relaxed warmth carried over from Lodestar to Heart’s Ease affirms that she’s glad to be here. Having spent her life preserving the who-when-why of songs from history’s further reaches, she uses Heart’s Ease to apply that scrutinizing lens to herself. The impression she leaves is rich: Collins waits until the end of the album to stretch out with “Crowlink,” inspired by her own seaside ruminations. The piece recalls the woolier corners of 1971’s No Roses, her marvelous psych-rock foray with the Albion Country Band (an outfit that included her former husband). Her voice emerges amid the sounds of seabirds, crashing surf, and hurdy-gurdy and harmonium drone, winking at a sense of adventure undiminished by advanced years.
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Buy: Rough Trade
(Pitchfork earns a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.) | 2020-08-07T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-08-07T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Folk/Country | Domino | August 7, 2020 | 7.6 | 09e41754-c885-403b-9cfd-581a7a5a260e | Allison Hussey | https://pitchfork.com/staff/allison-hussey/ | |
After roughly a decade of slowly built, home-studio sonics, this well-liked band rides off into the Modesto sunset with the release of this album. | After roughly a decade of slowly built, home-studio sonics, this well-liked band rides off into the Modesto sunset with the release of this album. | Grandaddy: Just Like the Fambly Cat | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/3550-just-like-the-fambly-cat/ | Just Like the Fambly Cat | For the latest and apparently lastest in Grandaddy's catalog of creatively spelled album titles, frontman Jason Lytle turned to Ma Joad. "We was always one thing-- we was the fambly-- kinda whole and clear," says The Grapes of Wrath matriarch. "An' now we ain't clear no more." Modesto, Calif.-based Grandaddy, hailing from the same illusory promised land barely endured by John Steinbeck's Okies, retravel their signature space-pop terrain on fourth and final album, Just Like the Fambly Cat, demanding and often rewarding attention like so many prose poems about goddamn turtles.
Throughout Fambly Cat, Lytle's slow-build home-studio sonics offer subtle textures, whether the sad-eyed Atari beeps and Books-ish spoken-word samples of opener "What Happened..." or the dolorous opera singer pledging never to return in bittersweet finale "Shangri La (Outro)". Wherever there's a man inventing a guitar-based crunchy cereal, Lytle'll be there. Wherever a starchild's strumming acoustic and Peter's robbing Paul to pay Korg, you'll see Lytle's formerly bearded mug.
It's all vaguely familiar, but Lytle's fine-grained production pops a freshmaker or two into the mix. Tracks fold and refold onto themselves, sprouting unexpected codas, like the "Wicked Game" acoustic-guitar noodles at the end of energetic teenage-dream slapstick (and first single) "Jeez Louise", or the growl'n'yawp pet sounds at the end of the hazy "The Animal World". Four songs clock in at over six minutes, each featuring leisurely escalating swoonscapes rather than proggish movement changes or noodly improv. So the honeyed verses of "Where I'm Anymore" melt into a lush, 1970s AM-pop "meow-meow" chorus, which in turn eddies into surging guitar.
Lyrically, there's some endearing nonsense about the journey of a lost cat, but clearly it's Grandaddy that's really moving on. In his sweetened, beatific falsetto, Lytle describes faded summers, ironic ice cream trucks, fear of failure, and a prodigal son's love for his mother, once dipping into the dark void ("Nothing rad/ Nothing right/ Nothing I'll feel tonight") of pathological intoxication. Sometimes it's as if Lytle is singing out of nostalgia for a future that never came true: A world where Grandaddy ironed out its inessential bits and made an album comprising solely the band's many moments of glossy low-key bedazzlement-- where Pete Yorn and Saves the Day opened for them.
"I don't wanna be the story of the guy who tried," Lytle sighs flatly on "Guide Down Denied", the turning point of the album. From here on, the songs find silver linings and beguiling hooks. Simple truths come hard-earned, given depth by Lytle's luminous instrumental touches: "You don't have to be alone anymore," he suggests on "Campershell Dreams", and it's like a fucking revelation. Energetic "Disconnecty" looks ambiguously at solo flight, while "This Is How It Always Starts" shimmers into whiskey oblivion, before doom-laden "Shangri-La (Outro)" confirms, dude's never coming back.
No grapes, no wrath, but, like Steinbeck's lil' novel, Just Like the Fambly Cat is a quest for hope. On the disc's catchiest song, perky "Elevate Myself", Lytle finally ceases his self-torture, eschewing the pop conveyor belt in favor of self-actualization: "I'd rather make an honest sound/ And watch it fly around/ And then be on my way." It's not how the world ends, but it's how a fambly-- of men, of fans, and of robots-- quietly crumbles. No more false Shangri-La: Like any self-respecting technophobe savant, Lytle's moving to Montana. | 2006-05-09T02:00:15.000-04:00 | 2006-05-09T02:00:15.000-04:00 | Rock | V2 | May 9, 2006 | 6.8 | 09f10259-f40d-4f05-9dd2-e7cecdee1bf0 | Marc Hogan | https://pitchfork.com/staff/marc-hogan/ | null |
What could’ve been a victory lap for two Southern rappers on top of the game was instead a transcendental funk fantasia, an unequivocal commercial and artistic triumph. | What could’ve been a victory lap for two Southern rappers on top of the game was instead a transcendental funk fantasia, an unequivocal commercial and artistic triumph. | Outkast: Stankonia | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/outkast-stankonia/ | Stankonia | They always had chips on their shoulders, a grievance born of their distinctive authorship mixed with the civic pride of scrappy underdogs. They were André “3000” Benjamin and Antwan “Big Boi” Patton, but they went by an increasing array of colorful names—like Possum Aloysius Jenkins and Daddy Fat Sax—which seemed to exist only to expand minds and expectations while capturing the ideas that emanated from their craniums. They had emerged from southwest Atlanta with styles that were unforeseen, but quickly copied—the Kangol hats they wore in the video for “Southernplayalisticadillacmuzik” were soon seen atop the domes of Sean “Diddy” Combs and the Notorious B.I.G. after having been out of vogue for years. On the intro to Stankonia—their fourth album, a thrill-pushing auricular splattering of mindfunks and ideascapes—they mimicked those copying them by playfully reinterpreting the Atlanta “bounce” that had been spreading as the distraction of babies. Big Boi exhaled smoke and lamented, “Niggas ain’t even from the A-Town.”
Identity and location—and defining and observing the two on their own terms—have always been key with OutKast. All of their albums began with a disembodied intro track as a prelude, followed by a State of the OutKast declaration that proved that, as André would famously go on to say at the 1995 Source Awards, “the South got something to say.” Tellingly, André confessed, “I gots a lot of shit up on my mind,” on “Myintrotoletuknow” from their 1994 debut Southernplayalisticadillacmuzik. Their voices spat out harsh rhymes and stretched out melodic moments, but they also spoke about things widely and deeply, respecting and commenting on everything going on hip-hop, largely by ignoring everything going on in hip-hop. Their sonic brashness and directness had Public Enemy’s Chuck D in its DNA, their fashion had antecedents in the Grandmaster Flash & the Furious Five meeting Afrika Bambaataa’s Soul Sonic Force, the subversive whimsy of De La Soul and A Tribe Called Quest were their forebears, giving the group a musical intensity and breadth incomparable to any other major hip-hop act before or since. Those are weighty statements, but OutKast was OutKast—singular, inimitable, and unpredictable.
Their debut was an album bursting with the funk descended from the Isley Brothers, Isaac Hayes, and Curtis Mayfield in a way that was smoother than Dr. Dre’s G-funk stylings, more organic than Puff Daddy’s wholesale sampling of ’80s R&B, and more fluid and adventurous than hometown icon Jermaine Dupri’s sleek soul and pop arrangements. It was the music of Southern hip-hop, the “country rap tunes” pioneered by the late Pimp C, outfitted to a weary worldview that was cautious and specific about local dealings and paranoid about the greater world, but ultimately hopeful on universal levels—or, at least as hopeful as “Crumblin’ Erb” while “niggas killin’ niggas” can be.
Southernplayalisticadillacmuzik was a revelation to hip-hop: Two dope boys in a Cadillac rapping just as well as, if not better than, just about anyone around them, sharing untold tales of Atlanta slums and Georgia red clay and opining on race in a way that introduced the concept of the Dirty South a year before they’d give it a name with the Goodie Mob. OutKast’s arrival was as eye-opening as N.W.A.’s had been in the late ’80s and their next project, ATLiens (1996) quickly vaporized any notions of sophomore slumps song-by-song, rhyme-by-rhyme. With their third album, Aquemini (1998)—a total fuck-you to any ideas of limitations on what a street-rooted hip-hop album could sound like, think like, and talk about—they ascended to rare air: musical acts who have been able to pull off a hat-trick of commercial and critical hits with their first three releases.
In this way, 2000’s Stankonia was set up to be a victory lap—the group really had nothing left to prove. Each album had further refined their mastery; each one was a tour de force in its own right. But where Aquemini seemed to be rejecting most radio leanings with sprawling jam-session numbers like “SpottieOttieDopaliscious,” “Liberation,” “Synthesizer,” and “Chonkyfire,” Stankonia found OutKast catering to a mass market without seeming to give it much thought. The album’s two most indelible hits—“So Fresh, So Clean” and “Ms. Jackson”—are unrepentant earworms that feel like natural extensions of the group’s sound, not crossover attempts. Both songs are full of layered and complex intonations: “So Fresh” simply speaks on haberdashery and hoes, while “Jackson” went on to win a Grammy, despite being a somewhat heady and sincere dedication to their baby mama’s mamas. Produced by their longtime collaborators and mentors Organized Noize, “Jackson” is one of the best radio singles they’ve ever produced as a duo.
It has to be mentioned that the group, along with their longtime DJ, Mr. DJ, had begun handling the bulk of their production with Aquemini and it sounded as if their longtime producers, Organized Noize—who had stunned on Goodie Mob’s debut, created one of TLC’s defining songs with “Waterfalls” and produced En Vogue’s biggest hit, “Don’t Let Go (Love)”—had actually been holding the duo back musically. Stankonia was an orgy of sonics leftover from Lee Perry’s Black Ark and George Clinton’s Mothership that sounded like drugs without sounding druggy. It was the acoustics of outer space talking about inner spaces; a self-driving Tesla in the body of a Cadillac Fleetwood; it was Wakanda. It’s no coincidence that former OutKast satellite Killer Mike’s group with rapper-producer El-P, Run the Jewels introduced the fictional nation in the first trailer for Marvel’s Black Panther—OutKast was at once retro and futuristic, veteranized and new school, otherworldly yet street, out of time and timeless, and their impact is evident in the biggest rap acts of today, from Migos to Kendrick Lamar.
There is so much going across Stankonia—the coordinated confetti of noises on “Gangsta Shit,” the uneasy meditation of teen pregnancy that is “Toilet Tisha,” the playful lasciviousness of “I’ll Call Before I Come,” the melodic menace of “Red Velvet,” the skits that spoke in metaphors to the subconscious via hood tongues, the arrangements and progressions that felt capricious, but totally natural. The backing tracks weren’t soundscapes as much as they are aural murals graffitied on the cosmic underpasses where abandoned tricked-out space shuttles rest, stripped of their Brougham rims. It was music that was tangential to crunk, a predecessor to trap, indebted to hip-hop, electro, funk, rock, and anything alternative—the type of music that usually succeeds on intellectual levels and rewards nerds, but not readily equating to an album that would sell more than 4 million copies. Yet OutKast is probably best defined by defying parameters and expectations.
Stankonia is easily the group’s most expansive and abrasive effort. It’s more accomplished than their biggest seller, the double-disc Speakerboxxx/The Love Below, which lacks the tension and dichotomy of André and Big Boi locked in a studio, warring with each other and themselves to the extent that created numbers like “Humble Mumble,” Stankonia’s breakbeat-ish, Caribbean-tinged track where Big Boi admonishes a simp with “Sloppy slippin’ in your pimpin’, nigga/You either pistol whip the nigga or you choke the trigger,” before André recalls speaking with a rap critic: “She said she thought hip-hop was only guns and alcohol/I said ‘Oh, hell naw!’/But, yet, it's that too.”
OutKast had always consisted of a politically conscious pimp and a spiritual gangsta, but on Stankonia, those identities came to the fore with a greater distinction that paradoxically allowed them to sound closer together than they had since their inception—even as André sat out songs like “Snappin’ & Trappin’” and “We Luv Deez Hoez.” On Stankonia’s first proper song, “Gasoline Dreams” Big Boi raps about their clout and the limits thereof—“Officer, get off us, sir/Don’t make me call [my label boss] L.A. [Reid], he’ll having you walking, sir/A couple of months ago they gave OutKast the key to city/But I still gotta pay my taxes and they give us no pity”—while André throttles out a brainy hook: “Don’t everybody like the smell of gasoline?/Well burn, motherfucker, burn American dreams.”
Stankonia is an album about many things and full of epigrams; so ahead of the curve that one of its many double entendres—“I got a stick and want your automatic”—is now a bona fide triple entendre. It’s about sounds as smells and music as sex, but mostly it’s about two black kids from Southwest Atlanta, boogieing with chips on their shoulders, making Molotov cocktails of songs that sound like a revolution’s afterparty. It’s peppered with personal narratives and small slips of autobiography, and it tackles big ideas both directly and obliquely. But, ultimately, it sounds like two artists going pop on their own terms while trying to make sense of, and change, the world around them. Closing in on two decades after its release, Stankonia remains loud as bombs over Baghdad and humble as a mumble in the jungle. | 2018-02-11T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2018-02-11T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rap | La Face / Arista | February 11, 2018 | 9.5 | 09f229e9-4de1-4edc-bdd4-f73399cba6ec | kris ex | https://pitchfork.com/staff/kris-ex/ | |
Andrew Taggart and Alex Pall isolate the essential elements of their EDM-pop style and cut out everything else, including guest features. The result is easily their most enjoyable front-to-back listen. | Andrew Taggart and Alex Pall isolate the essential elements of their EDM-pop style and cut out everything else, including guest features. The result is easily their most enjoyable front-to-back listen. | The Chainsmokers: So Far So Good | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/the-chainsmokers-so-far-so-good/ | So Far So Good | The Chainsmokers carry themselves like a startup company. They talk like finance bros, call venues “properties,” and have admitted getting laid is as much of an impetus for their career as anything else. Yet Andrew Taggart’s songwriting has always stood at a right angle to the crass commercialism of their overblown EDM-pop. He doesn’t write about mindless hedonism and all-night hotel parties but unglamorous hookups, backyard brawls, and the feeling of walking in the club and thinking everyone hates you. They’ve smartly aligned their writing with pop-punk and emo, whose mainstream revival was just underway when the duo put out their full-length debut Memories… Do Not Open in 2017. It’s not for nothing that “Closer,” their biggest and best song, name-drops Blink-182—nor that Blink-182 would return the favor by appearing on “P.S. I Hope You’re Happy” from 2019’s World War Joy.
The Chainsmokers’ fourth album, So Far So Good, is their first with no features, which might seem like a cheap ploy for authenticity. The guest-heavy hits from Memories were as much triumphs of A&R as anything else, so what better way to prove that you’re a real band than to ditch your famous friends and do it yourself? (Well, not entirely: Akon, T-Pain, and Chris Martin are credited songwriters.) Yet So Far So Good is their first album that seems to stand outside of the zeitgeist. Though they’ve chalked the album’s content up to post-tour burnout and depression, they haven’t yoked it to any prevailing trend in confessional pop music but have instead chosen to burrow deeper into their own sound. It’s as if they’ve isolated the essential elements of the Chainsmokers style and cut out everything else. The result is easily their most enjoyable front-to-back listen.
The core Chainsmokers style, per So Far So Good, consists of chugging synthpop verses and sticky-sweet drops. Usually, these elements combine into songs that sound massive enough to dominate pop radio or hangar-sized clubs, yet So Far So Good sounds weirdly…small. The dynamic range is flattened, so the drops on songs like “Riptide” and “Maradona” feel like part of the song’s fabric rather than payoffs after endless anticipation. Songs meander and take the scenic route: “Maradona” slows down spectacularly in its second half, like “Nights” on steroids, while “Cyanide” concludes with more than a minute of nebulous synths and garbled Auto-Tune. The duo might scoff at So Far So Good being their “pop” rather than their “club” album, but this is their first album whose tracks might feel out of place at one of their Vegas residencies.
To spend a whole album with Taggart, never the most likable or tactful of pop frontmen, might seem exhausting. Yet he, too, seems to be looking inward along with his band’s sound. While he bellowed and over-pronounced his lyrics in the past, reinforcing the Chainsmokers’ connection to pop-punk, he prefers a croon or a falsetto here, as if he’s trying to sound like Swae Lee. Gone are odious half-apologies like “Honest” or manipulative guilt trips like “You Owe Me.” When he’s begging a girl to come back on “I Love U,” he’s begging like a Temptation, not playing a sociopathic mind-game. He hasn’t suddenly abandoned his douche-bro persona: this is a man whose idea of self-care is flying to Italy to find his “Maradona energy,” and how much you can empathize with him depends on how much you can empathize with that. But So Far So Good is the rare “mature” pop turn where the artist actually seems like he’s growing up. | 2022-05-17T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2022-05-17T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Disruptor / Columbia | May 17, 2022 | 6.1 | 09f33e1a-1a85-4e60-ac41-5e07ab2c94b8 | Daniel Bromfield | https://pitchfork.com/staff/daniel-bromfield/ | |
What happens after you set the world on fire? On six Blue Note LPs following landmark albums The Shape of Jazz to Come and Free Jazz, the mercurial saxophonist endeavored to find out. | What happens after you set the world on fire? On six Blue Note LPs following landmark albums The Shape of Jazz to Come and Free Jazz, the mercurial saxophonist endeavored to find out. | Ornette Coleman: Round Trip: Ornette Coleman on Blue Note | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/ornette-coleman-round-trip-ornette-coleman-on-blue-note/ | Round Trip: Ornette Coleman on Blue Note | Ornette Coleman revolutionized modern jazz with the six records he released on Atlantic Records between 1959 and 1961. Liberating improvisation from the confines of chordal changes—a shift accentuated by his omission of the piano, an instrument that had been an anchor in hard bop—the alto saxophonist pushed jazz into mercurial territory. His habit of allowing his tone to drift off center, as he found the space between notes, heightened the music’s melody-forward spontaneity. Producer Nesuhi Ertegun convinced Coleman to name his Atlantic debut The Shape of Jazz to Come, a title that carried a sense of prophecy. Indeed, an entire subsection of jazz would name itself after Free Jazz, the 1961 album where Coleman encouraged two quartets to tangle with each other. Groundbreaking at the time, the Atlantic albums can sound relatively conventional to modern ears; many musicians inspired by Coleman’s sense of exploration kept venturing further out. Such is the fate of a pioneer: Innovations become part of the shared vernacular.
Conversely, the six albums Ornette Coleman made for Blue Note between 1965 and 1968—two live sets, three studio sessions where he was a leader, and another where he was a sideman—still sound unusual, surprising in their sound and conception. Much of their oddness lies in the fact that it took a while for Coleman to re-emerge after releasing Ornette on Tenor in 1962. Coleman retreated from the spotlight after closing out his Atlantic contract, exhausted not from the act of creation but the nature of the record business. He spent those years in seclusion, woodshedding, pursuing a primal sound on his alto while teaching himself trumpet and violin.
Coleman’s work for Blue Note still carries a visceral jolt. Maybe these experiments and exercises don’t have the gravity of Coleman’s Atlantic records but their oddness is often invigorating, especially when they’re heard as a distinct body of work, as they are on Round Trip: Ornette Coleman on Blue Note. The box set is part of Blue Note’s boutique vinyl reissue series Tone Poet, an all-analog line curated and produced by Joe Harley and mastered by Kevin Gray of Cohearent Audio. As the first box set in the Tone Poet series, Round Trip is in keeping with the imprint’s emphasis on cult classics, rarities, and curios—the kind of records Coleman released on the label.
Coleman dispatched with the classic first, releasing the two-volume At the “Golden Circle” Stockholm, a live set recorded with his Ornette Coleman Trio in December 1965. Supported by bassist David Izenzon and drummer Charles Moffett, Coleman sounds vigorous and unpredictable here, his tone deeper and edgier than on the Atlantic sessions, which were three years in the past at the time of its recording. The first volume of At the “Golden Circle” Stockholm bristles with energy; the rhythm section provides a propulsive kick that allows the saxophonist to circle between melodic phrases and out explorations. On the second set, Coleman introduces his rudimentary trumpet and violin on “Snowflakes and Sunshine,” and, coming after the full-blooded first set, the effect remains jarring: By using these instruments as noisemakers, he aims to unsettle, and he succeeds.
Trumpet and violin are at the forefront of The Empty Foxhole, a 1966 set that marked Coleman’s first studio session for Blue Note. He enlisted his old colleague Charlie Haden on bass to round out a trio that featured his ten-year-old son Denardo. At the time, many observers believed the decision to record with Denardo was little more than a stunt, yet the boy’s playing, while rough, suits Ornette’s unschooled trumpet and violin explorations. The elder Coleman’s violin may grate, but his trumpet playing has a raw, visceral quality that enlivens The Empty Foxhole even if the album remains a curio: a record where the pursuit means more than the destination.
Comparatively, the last two albums Coleman led on Blue Note feel much more grounded. Culled from the same 1968 date, New York Is Now! and Love Call amount to a passing of the torch of sorts, as John Coltrane’s bassist Jimmy Garrison and drummer Elvin Jones support Coleman and tenor saxophonist Dewey Redman. Where Coltrane spent his last albums pushing at the outer reaches of the free jazz Coleman pioneered, Ornette spends his time with Garrison and Jones returning to Earth, grounding their improvisations in a heavy blues mode that allows him to dig into a fierce interplay with Redman. The earthy approach benefits Coleman’s trumpet more than the violin, which is heard only in passing on New York Is Now!. Both albums contain exciting passages yet feel strangely terrestrial, as if the music is chafing against its constraints.
That can’t be said of the real gem of the bunch, New and Old Gospel, a 1968 album by the steely hard-bop saxophonist Jackie McLean. One of the few established jazz artists to enthusiastically embrace Coleman’s adventurous sounds, McLean edged into out territory here without abandoning blues architecture, a tension that thrives on the side-long medley “Lifeline.” Much of the crackling tension lies in the exchanges between the saxophonist and Coleman, who plays trumpet on the entire record. Coleman’s visceral horn complements McLean’s flinty style, making for a robust and invigorating session.
As a collected work, Round Trip isn’t as satisfying or nourishing as Beauty Is a Rare Thing, the classic Rhino box containing all of Coleman’s Atlantic work. It’s nevertheless challenging, its willful detours and half-realized ideas provoking genuine emotional reaction; they may not have always hit the mark, but Coleman wound up with records that still feel alive and human. As a box set, there’s no denying Round Trip is a luxury item, providing exquisite remasters and handsome packaging that almost seems at odds with the feral music inside. It’s a testament to the power of this misshaped, heartfelt music that it still sounds vital and when presented as a high-toned audiophile set.
Buy: Rough Trade | 2022-02-05T00:00:00.000-05:00 | 2022-02-05T00:00:00.000-05:00 | Jazz | Blue Note | February 5, 2022 | 7.8 | 09f60eab-efea-413b-aca6-5f218c55895b | Stephen Thomas Erlewine | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stephen-thomas erlewine/ | |
The self-described “poor man’s Traveling Wilburys” features members of Franz Ferdinand, Grandaddy, Band of Horses, Travis, and Midlake in an effort to collectively seize upon their best traits. | The self-described “poor man’s Traveling Wilburys” features members of Franz Ferdinand, Grandaddy, Band of Horses, Travis, and Midlake in an effort to collectively seize upon their best traits. | BNQT: Volume 1 | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/23202-volume-1/ | Volume 1 | It’s been 17 years since Travis took home NME’s Artist of the Year award, right smack between two album releases that sold millions in the UK alone. Some 15 years have passed since the characters took a shopping break during their fight against zombies in Danny Boyle’s 28 Days Later to the tune of Grandaddy’s “A.M. 180.” Nearly 13 years ago, Franz Ferdinand’s “Take Me Out” topped the Village Voice’s Pazz & Jop poll for singles, becoming an alternative radio staple in the process. And barely more than a decade has passed since Band of Horses made “The Funeral” their first single, eventually reaching ubiquity through features in movies, television, and a particularly inescapable commercial for the Ford Edge.
For Midlake, the fifth band associated with new supergroup BNQT, there isn’t a similar time peg to note a crest of success. Since forming in 1999, their career arc has been slower and steadier than all the aforementioned artists, with bandleader Eric Pulido describing a workmanlike cycle of “write, record, tour, repeat” that can be seen as both a privilege and a vocational rut. So, while touring Midlake’s last album Antiphon, Pulido conceived of BNQT. He would share songwriting duties on the new project with the leaders of bands he had met over the years, each crafting two songs apiece from their respective camps and piecing the elements together both remotely and inside a studio in Denton, Tex.
BNQT (pronounced “banquet”) is not a push outside the comfort zone for those involved, but further indication of restlessness from a collection of indie rock lifers, each of whose primary acts made their dent in the blog-rock boom and find their relevance dimming. At that, the optimistically titled Volume 1 serves more to elaborate on its characters than it does to recapture past glory. Midlake’s McKenzie Smith, Joey McClellan, and Jesse Chandler are the chameleonic house band, taking cues from the songs’ originators and finding cohesion in fully-realized arrangements. But it’s the songs themselves that are thin. Pulido is the only artist bringing A-level material with his vaguely-psychedelic “Restart” and his best nod to buoyant ’70s AM radio “Real Love.” They are a pair of songs geared specifically as singles, despite the lack of platforms for such singles to thrive. Travis’ Fran Healy steps out as a caricature of collective recording, with “L.A. on My Mind” begging for a sync with its titular geotag, hand-clap rhythm, and flexing guitar bravado. Band of Horses’ Ben Bridwell doesn’t fare much better, as “Unlikely Force” is content with personality-free breeziness and “Tara” buries Bridwell’s best asset, his voice, with muddy harmonies and an uninspired vocal performance.
It’s only Grandaddy’s Jason Lytle and Franz Ferdinand’s Alex Kapranos that find success under the BNQT banner. Lytle’s usual recordings are so deeply insular that there is something to be gleaned from hearing him apart from his busted-keyboard sonics. His whisper-singing stands up to the orchestration of “Failing at Feeling” and “100 Million Miles” is one of the only songs of the collection that dares to drift beyond classic rock nostalgia. Kapranos, on the other hand, gleefully swims in the opportunity to get weird. Just the word “banana” rolling off his tongue on “Hey Banana” argues for adding smoked-ham lounge singing to his resume.
“I think we could all use a restart,” Pulido claims on the album opener, a song that readily admits that he’s “older now” and “broken but soon on the mend.” It’s a sentiment that could umbrella all five songwriters that have never struggled with maturity but are now toiling with getting old. Where lesser people might simply buy sports cars, musicians do these hapless projects that are more fun for the artists involved than for the listeners, like their own boring social scene. So when Pulido describes BNQT as “a poor man’s version of the Traveling Wilburys” in a press release, there’s some solace in everyone knowing where exactly where they stand. It gives the project the inability to disappoint. Aim low enough and you’ll never fail. | 2017-05-02T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-05-02T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Bella Union | May 2, 2017 | 5.8 | 09f81d52-42a8-40ae-bb79-d538e2295310 | Philip Cosores | https://pitchfork.com/staff/philip-cosores/ | null |
Last September's weary, autumnal Elysium didn't offer much hope for the future of Pet Shop Boys. So, it's a surprise that Electric is their most immediate, jubilant record in at least a decade. | Last September's weary, autumnal Elysium didn't offer much hope for the future of Pet Shop Boys. So, it's a surprise that Electric is their most immediate, jubilant record in at least a decade. | Pet Shop Boys: Electric | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/18268-pet-shop-boys-electric/ | Electric | Last September's weary, autumnal Elysium didn't offer much hope for the future of Pet Shop Boys, so it's a bit of a surprise that they've whipped up its sequel in under a year. (Or, rather, its companion, including some songs they started at the earlier sessions). It'se even more of a surprise that Electric is their most immediate, jubilant record in at least a decade-- a return to a couple of elements of their work that had been lying fallow for too long.
Most notably, this is the first time in a while that Neil Tennant and Chris Lowe have borrowed from what's going on in dance clubs in the service of pop songwriting, with help from veteran producer Stuart Price. ("Shouting in the Evening" even nods to dubstep.) Electric isn't quite electrifying in the way that Very and Introspective and "What Have I Done To Deserve This?" are, but nearly every track has a moment or two that ignites seemingly long-gone enthusiasm.
Sometimes, that's because the Boys are using specific tricks that have worked for them before. "Love Is a Bourgeois Construct" is another in their string of modified classical pieces, taking its countermelody from Henry Purcell's King Arthur (by way of Michael Nyman's "Chasing Sheep Is Best Left to Shepherds"), and its sour-grapes premise from a line in a David Lodge novel. And "Thursday" might have recalled 1986's "Love Comes Quickly" even without a synth-bass-and-bells introduction that makes it sound like that song's fraternal twin.
The one thing Tennant and Lowe arguably do better than anyone else, though, is queering pop-- finding ways to recast seemingly sexuality-neutral musical ideas as specifically gay. "Bolshy"-- slang for "uncooperative" or "belligerent," roughly-- isn't ordinarily a gendered word, but it sure is in the song by that name here, and its connotation of Bolsheviks fits in with the Pet Shop Boys' fascination with all things early-Soviet. Electric's sole cover is a brilliant recontextualization: "The Last to Die" is a 2007 Bruce Springsteen song, whose chorus quotes John Kerry's 1971 condemnation of the Vietnam war. Tennant and Lowe scarcely change a word of its lyrics, but arranged and sung as a Pet Shop Boys song, it abruptly and unmistakably becomes a song about gay culture's transition from the AIDS crisis of the "West End Girls" era to its current focus on domesticity. That's quite a feat.
In place of the leavetakings of their past few albums' final tracks, Electric ends with "Vocal", a fantasy of hearing exactly the kind of music you've always wanted to hear, in the perfect club. "I like the singer/ He's lonely and strange/ Every track has a vocal," Tennant muses in his lonely, strange voice. It's a bit unusual to hear so many vocal tracks in a club these days, he knows, but he's imagining that his songs could save some kid the way other people's songs once saved him. | 2013-07-23T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2013-07-23T02:00:01.000-04:00 | Electronic | Kobalt | July 23, 2013 | 7 | 09fbb0dc-9fe5-4009-919e-7e76fd69297b | Douglas Wolk | https://pitchfork.com/staff/douglas-wolk/ | null |
QOTSA's sixth studio album foregrounds an aspect that's been lingering in their music since the beginning: beneath all that volcanic riffage, Josh Homme has always been a sucker for a pretty pop song. He's abetted here by the likes of Sir Elton John, Alex Turner, and James Lavelle. | QOTSA's sixth studio album foregrounds an aspect that's been lingering in their music since the beginning: beneath all that volcanic riffage, Josh Homme has always been a sucker for a pretty pop song. He's abetted here by the likes of Sir Elton John, Alex Turner, and James Lavelle. | Queens of the Stone Age: Like Clockwork | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/18087-queens-of-the-stone-age-like-clockwork/ | Like Clockwork | Deep into the new Queens of the Stone Age album, Josh Homme blithely declares, “I blow my load over the status quo.” Missions statements don’t come cockier than that. But Homme can get away with it because the status quo he’s referring to could easily be his own band. Since launching Queens of the Stone Age from the ashes of the almighty Kyuss in 1998, Homme has treated hard rock and metal as soluble materials; his band’s music is mercurial, its membership highly fluid.
By QOTSA's unconventional standards, a six-year layoff between albums doesn’t even feel like an unusually long hiatus, but more like the natural amount of time it takes for a new incarnation of this ever-shifting band to settle into place. Of course, Homme was never far from the headlines in the interim: He’s done everything from form a new band with a member of Led Zeppelin to produce an underrated Arctic Monkeys record to survive a near-death experience. Along the way, the Queens have shed long-time members (Joey Castillo, whose departure was announced partway through the ...Like Clockwork sessions; he appears on four tracks) and reacquainted themselves with some old friends: Songs For the Deaf-era sticksman Dave Grohl, go-to growler Mark Lanegan, and, most surprisingly, Nick Oliveri, who was ousted from the band in 2004 (and in the ensuing years, narrowly avoided jail time for domestic violence, drugs, and firearm-related offences). All the while, Homme lined up a guest list for ...Like Clockwork*--* including Scissor Sisters' Jake Shears, Arctic Monkeys’ Alex Turner, U.N.K.L.E.'s James Lavelle, and even Sir Elton John-- that threatened to make the band’s previous revolving-door records seem grossly under-populated.
But if all that suggests a return to the scatterbrained lunacy of the band’s early-2000s releases-- and the band’s exodus from Interscope to Matador would seemingly encourage a left-field foray-- ...Like Clockwork presents another curveball__.__ Queens of the Stone Age’s first album for an indie since their debut is actually more polished and melodically focused than anything they ever released on a major__;__ you’d be hard pressed to classify 80 per cent of it as hard rock. But ...Like Clockwork simply foregrounds an aspect that’s been lingering in the Queens’ music since the beginning: beneath all that volcanic riffage, Homme has always been a sucker for a pretty pop song.
Queens have flashed their softer side before-- see: Rated R’s “In the Fade”, or Era Vulgaris’ “Make It Witchu”-- but there’s always been a self-consciousness about their slow jams, like someone not unsubtly dimming the lights and pretending to stretch their arm to sidle up closer to their date. ...Like Clockwork, however, is more committed in its intent to invest the Queens with extra grandeur and grace, and all of the aforementioned guests are essentially accomplices in Homme’s regal aspirations. (In other words, you’ll need liner notes to figure out most of the cameos). And don’t expect any party-crashing intrusions like “Quick and to the Pointless” from Oliveri; his duties don’t extend beyond backing vocals on a few tracks, as if his return to the group is on a probationary basis.
Fittingly for a band that’s spent the past few years retooling itself, it takes some time for Queens to shake off the cobwebs and get back to full strength: The leaden, one-note trudge of “Keep Your Eyes Peeled” makes for a rather listless re-introduction, "I Sat By the Ocean" doesn't fully deliver on the seedy promise of its "Telegram Sam" strut, while “The Vampyre of Time and Memory” strains too hard in its attempt at an early-70s John Lennon piano ballad. But like Jack White (with whom Homme occasionally shares custody of keyboardist Dean Fertita), Homme knows how to reinvigorate well-worn classic-rock influences by filtering them through his peculiar personality, and this is where ...Like Clockwork really comes alive: The monstrous groove of “If I Had a Tail” imagines how Zeppelin would have turned out if they had survived disco, while the moonage-daydreamy verses of “Kalopsia” are deviously upended by a Ziggy-wiggy, stardust-covered crunch. Bowie looms large on another album highlight: “Smooth Sailing”-- the song of load-blowing bravado-- assumes a Scary Monsters-style robo-funk bounce to bolster brilliantly nonsensical lines like, “I’ve got bruises and hickeys, stiches and scars/ Got my own theme music, plays wherever I are.”
Queens haven’t fully abandoned brawn and ballast (combustible lead single “My God Is the Sun” is up to their usual paint-stripping standards), but those qualities are now being harnessed for greater emotional impact, particularly on the penultimate “I Appear Missing”. It's a power ballad that perfectly bridges the divide between Queens’ hard and soft extremes, pitting Homme’s crestfallen melody against a sleeping giant of a chorus that proves to be as raging as anything in the band’s repertoire; when Homme shifts to falsetto for the song’s calamitous closing minute, it’s less a show of cheekiness than vulnerability. Homme initially chose his band name to subvert the machismo inherent to hard rock and__,__ more than any of their records before it, ...Like Clockwork feels like the ultimate realization of that mission. To invoke an old glam proverb, it kicks like a mule even when it dresses like a queen. | 2013-06-03T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2013-06-03T02:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Matador | June 3, 2013 | 7.3 | 09fd0705-08e1-459b-b0ec-c5d8031f0452 | Stuart Berman | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stuart-berman/ | null |
Because it’s not beholden to some overarching conceit, the latest album from the Toronto-based singer-songwriter sounds looser, a bit wilder, more lackadaisical in a sadsack sort of way. | Because it’s not beholden to some overarching conceit, the latest album from the Toronto-based singer-songwriter sounds looser, a bit wilder, more lackadaisical in a sadsack sort of way. | Andy Shauf: Wilds | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/andy-shauf-wilds/ | Wilds | Andy Shauf’s most recent records were concept albums about social anxiety, vividly conceived and self-contained. In 2016, the Saskatchewan-born, Toronto-based singer-songwriter released The Party, a collection of songs all set at the same get-together and filled with awkward encounters and bouts of crippling self-doubt. His follow-up, 2020’s The Neon Skyline, sat with the denizens of his favorite bar for one night, eavesdropping on their conversations and laughing at their tortured pick-up lines. Both have gained added poignancy now that such gatherings are much more fraught. Wilds, his surprise-released new album, was originally intended to take a similar shape: he wrote a handful of songs that followed the Skyline barflies forward a few years, just to see where their lives took them. He soon abandoned that idea and instead started writing about one character’s ex-girlfriend, a woman named Judy. But that longer character study got scrapped, too.
Wilds combines those two ideas into something that’s neither/nor. It’s not strictly a sequel, but it’s not completely unrelated either. It’s all part of the Andy Shauf Extended Universe. Despite such tortured origins, the album works surprisingly well. Because it’s beholden to no overarching conceit, the music sounds looser, a bit wilder, more lackadaisical in a sadsack sort of way, its arc less predetermined and its themes emerging more organically. By ceding control, Shauf allows the songs to wander wherever they want, paying their tab at the Skyline and heading out into the world.
Even as he extends his universe, he pares his songs down to their barest bones. Shauf has described it as a collection of demos, but that might actually be underselling it, because there’s as much wit in his playing as in his songwriting. Forgoing the lush sound of previous albums, Wilds is lovingly, wryly minimalist, and he arranges these instruments—most of which he played himself—as though blocking a short play with a small cast. An electric guitar punctuates his worries on “Call” with a single funereal strum, then disrupts “Green Glass” with a riff as unruly as a cowlick. And the rhythm section seems to be mocking him on “Jeremy’s Wedding (Wilds),” especially that “Walk On the Wild Side” bassline. It’s a fine setting for his distinctive voice, which chews on his consonants and wrings his syllables into unusual shapes.
Shauf can be clever, but like John Darnielle—another writer given to self-imposed songwriting conceits—he’s never merely clever. There’s always some dark fear or gnawing anxiety just under the surface of his songs. “Jaywalker” is like one of those gruesome old highway safety films, except the danger here is reckless moping rather than reckless driving. “Jaywalker with your head hung down, never saw it coming,” he sings over a marching beat, “it” being the car that slams into the protagonist who is so lost in his worries that he’s oblivious to oncoming traffic. He’s less concerned about the root of such melancholy and more interested in its effect in the real world. The humor underscores the pathos, and vice versa.
There’s a hint in the lyrics that the doomed jaywalker is actually Judy’s forlorn ex, the same guy who narrated “Where Are You Judy” on The Neon Skyline, and it’s not a stretch to think he’s nearly killed just as he’s leaving that bar. All of these songs and their wayward characters are connected, but you don’t have to be familiar with any of Shauf’s previous albums to find something relatable and powerful in these new songs. You don’t have to map out that social network to be struck by the desperation of the lotto-playing lovers on album opener “Wilds (Judy)” or by the sadness of the unanswered questions on album closer “Jeremy’s Wedding (Wilds).” At heart these are songs about living with the weight of sadness, about the accumulation of severed relationships and missed connections and regrets both big and small. Change all the names and the album can still hit you like a speeding car.
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-10-01T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2021-09-30T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Anti- | October 1, 2021 | 7.6 | 0a00385d-d0db-4df1-9de3-bc3d32d94874 | Stephen M. Deusner | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stephen-m. deusner/ | |
This grimy new EP from the Gary, Indiana producer has the unfinished edge of a sketch, pointing toward the dancefloor while showcasing her twin forces of invincibility and vulnerability. | This grimy new EP from the Gary, Indiana producer has the unfinished edge of a sketch, pointing toward the dancefloor while showcasing her twin forces of invincibility and vulnerability. | Jlin: Embryo EP | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/jlin-embryo-ep/ | Embryo EP | Jlin’s music is rooted in the rhythms of Chicago footwork the way an interstellar mission begins on Earth—it provides the origin point, yes, but as the mission expands ever outward, that shrinking blue dot in the rearview hardly seems relevant. In the years since she broke through to a mass audience with 2015’s Dark Energy, her work hasn’t so much changed shapes as hurtled through light years. 2017’s Black Origami conducted a survey of drum sounds and rhythmic patterns so complete it played like a curtain call for every percussive sound on Earth. The score she composed for Wayne MacGregor’s 2018 ballet Autobiography had more in common with Philip Glass than RP Boo. By now, the Gary, Indiana producer is less a musician than a one-woman genre, absorbing and repurposing whatever dark energies she finds.
And yet, despite her reinventions, there is a pit of bad feeling residing at the center of her work—an alkaline edge of fear, a mingling of arousal and mortal terror—that is inextricable from footwork. She carries this shadow from project to project, even as she furiously sheds skins, accepting commissions from the Met and the Kronos Quartet and collaborating with modern dancers. Footwork battles often resemble bodies contorting themselves through minefields, celebrations of invincibility that carry inside them admissions of extreme vulnerability. These twin forces—vulnerability and invincibility—face off in Jlin’s music like competing weather systems, and you can hear them roiling from the first seconds of her new EP, Embryo.
By her own admission, she wrote these pieces in between commissions, and they have the unfinished edges and openness of sketches. It’s fun to listen to her toying with corroded sounds, degraded outputs: Jlin’s never sounded quite this grimy before. The title track is shrouded in blasts of distortion, like modular synths with a faulty wire, while the thudding beat seems to open a hole beneath your feet. It points towards a dancefloor that some of her recent music has angled away from—you could dance to Black Origami, but with so much furious cross-cutting motion, finding and following a pulse sometimes felt like driving into a blizzard.
The tools here are more tarnished, the world the music conjures danker and more septic than usual. The pistoning drums on “Auto Pilot” and the sepulchral silences surrounding them suggest Detroit techno, a genre where the metaphorical landscape looks a lot like Jlin’s hometown of Gary, Indiana—post-industrialized, made of more emptied-out buildings than people. This sense of solitude is crucial to Jlin’s music: “I have never been to a Chicago footwork battle, ever,” she declared to Red Bull Music Academy, with something like pride. She was too busy working 96-hour work weeks and making tracks in her bedroom.
The final track on the EP is called “Rabbit Hole,” and it starts with a few early-techno blurts into dead space before beginning its descent. The track mimics the act of rabbit holing itself, which has become internet shorthand for the lonely and monomaniacal acquisition of absurdly specific knowledge. Rabbit holes are tiny, cramped, dark, and by nature, they can only accommodate you. You have to emerge to share anything about what you learned—but the act of learning it will forever belong only to you. That is how Jlin’s music explodes in your synapses: a thousand tiny, lonely revelations, yours alone.
Buy: Rough Trade
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Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-12-10T00:00:00.000-05:00 | 2021-12-10T00:00:00.000-05:00 | Electronic | Planet Mu | December 10, 2021 | 7.4 | 0a060e35-01cf-4365-9518-3f1f07aee22f | Jayson Greene | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jayson-greene/ | |
Originally released as a limited-run cassette, this collection of synth pieces from the former Emeralds member is a staggeringly beautiful career highlight. | Originally released as a limited-run cassette, this collection of synth pieces from the former Emeralds member is a staggeringly beautiful career highlight. | Imaginary Softwoods: Annual Flowers in Color | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/imaginary-softwoods-annual-flowers-in-color/ | Annual Flowers In Color | The cult-favorite trio Emeralds—comprised of John Elliott, Steve Hauschildt, and Mark McGuire—spent the late 2000s fusing drone, New Age and kosmiche better than any band of their time. Despite putting out more than 40 projects before disbanding in 2012, Emeralds left behind a lingering sense of unrealized possibilities—strands of which its members have been exploring in their solo careers. Though Elliott continued with projects like Mist and Outer Space, his focus has increasingly shifted to running his label Spectrum Spools, an off-shoot of Editions Mego that trades in the cutting-edge club sounds of Container and Second Woman and experimental gems like Donato Dozzy Plays Bee Mask and Motion Sickness of Time Travel.
If Elliott’s own solo output slowed, the success of his label always felt like an understandable trade-off — but there may be another reason. Annual Flowers In Color is the album he has been writing, editing, living with and returning to since the final days of Emeralds. The album is credited to Imaginary Softwoods, a moniker that stretches back to 2008 and often explores the side of Elliott’s synth work that might have been crushed under the weight of Emeralds’ drones. The album originally surfaced in 2016 as a small-run cassette collecting unreleased material, but he kept pruning the recordings over the years. Now released in finished form nearly a decade after its earliest recordings, Annual Flowers emerges from its chrysalis a wounded, staggeringly beautiful statement that feels like a new high point in his career.
This new edition is expanded by a lush remastering for vinyl, but it’s just as noteworthy for what’s removed—nearly a third of the original album. He trims some tracks to brief interludes and omits others altogether, but each decision enhances the original’s cathartic power. “Cloud Damage” opens with Angelo Badalamenti-style organ that swells before being swallowed up in a hard-cut instant by the chiming, chromatic synth loop of “Positive Ruin Court Garden.” The effect is jarring, but not unpleasant, like being awakened from a nightmare by birdsong.
The pieces set the stage for “Aura Show,” the first of two epics, where Elliott generates synth waves so soothing that the pensive melody of its second half feels like a spontaneous discovery every time. It compliments “Another First/Sea Machine,” which builds hypnotic ripples of arpeggios over a nearly 11-minute arc that peaks with the kind of endorphin-pumping rush that defined Does It Look Like I’m Here’s best moments. What sticks out most is Elliott’s care in framing his tracks with the subtlest elements: the quiet rattle of what sounds like a stalling motor, a spoken-word snippet by Japanese artist Yuri, or the gentle room-shaking rumble of a passing train running through heartbreaking closer “The Imminent Collapse Department,” a haunting fusion of music-box melodies and crumbling sound design that recalls Broadcast’s final work with The Focus Group.
Even the tracks cut from Annual Flowers (all of which are remastered and included as digital bonus tracks) are quite good, which only makes Elliott’s editing job more difficult. “Positive Ruin” and “Aura Show,” tracks that flow perfectly together, were originally separated by the lively “Multiple Discovery” and “Calendula,” but their absence ultimately strengths and focuses everything around it. Elsewhere, the mournful synth flickering through “The Geranium Room” is cut down to a minute-long interlude, a crucial choice that reframes it as the heart of the album. It all creates a gravity-shifting power that makes the album sound like it couldn’t have been constructed any other way. What may have begun as demos and sketches in 2011, and an overlooked highlight in 2016, has aged to perfection in 2020. | 2020-04-13T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-04-13T01:00:00.000-04:00 | null | Mineral Disk | April 13, 2020 | 7.9 | 0a094356-f126-4764-80f1-664946d66149 | Miles Bowe | https://pitchfork.com/staff/miles-bowe/ | |
Los Angeles folk musician Kayla Cohen turns a two-month spell in the New Mexico desert into a meditation on place, nature, and the passage of time. | Los Angeles folk musician Kayla Cohen turns a two-month spell in the New Mexico desert into a meditation on place, nature, and the passage of time. | Itasca: Spring | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/itasca-spring/ | Spring | “Who knows where the time goes?” Fairport Convention’s Sandy Denny sang in the late 1960s, and in the five decades since, folk musicians have continued to pluck their way toward an answer, their music an acoustic yardstick for life’s seasons. In the measurements taken by contemporary troubadours like Meg Baird or Daughter of Swords, change is both incremental and cyclical, and Itasca’s Spring is further evidence that certain sounds quaver through the years like sunlight, impervious to a world that would hurry it along.
Steered by Los Angeles’ Kayla Cohen, Itasca traffic in dreamy, vaporous ballads anchored by acoustic strumming and occasional strings or piano, each added layer a complementary gilding. Cohen spent two months recording the album in a century-old New Mexico adobe, and Spring is both a product of and tribute to these origins. Like the desert, the record’s structure feels like a symbiotic balancing act—each component part placed just so, lest the whole system come apart. In the particularly lovely “Cornsilk,” Cohen sings of going to “think across the Rio Grande,” swimming in the canyoned river where you can “put your feet out under the sky” and “there are traces in the air of your time laid bare.”
Cohen’s most salient talent is evocation—trapping place, weather, and physical presence like a butterfly pinned beneath glass. Every track is reverent, as hushed as a church penitent. This proves particularly effective when she wrestles with binary oppositions: natural versus artificial; the solitude of the desert versus participation in the manufactured world. “Watched the white flower bloom/The land of harvest here,” she sings on “Comfort’s Faces.” “Thought it was a good luck charm/But a silk flower instead.” With assists from fellow psych and folk practitioners including mix engineer Chris Cohen and drummer Marc Riordan (Sun Araw), the record gives the distinct impression that it was shepherded into existence by a team of people vibing on the same high, natural or otherwise.
Though picturesque, the record meanders, and the pace can feel drowsy. Its consistency is one of its few weaknesses, and it teeters occasionally between meditation and sluggishness. Opener “Lily” falls into this liminal ground, as does “Blue Spring,” and while these tracks don’t seem pointed towards anything particularly urgent, their instrumentation (like the rest of Spring) remains rich and resonant, each component part augmenting the others.
Surely Itasca won’t be the last outfit to metabolize the natural world through a set of strings and a collection of images, navigating life’s metaphorical seasons in order to be more present in its literal ones. The desert might seem sparse to a cursory traveler, but look longer and harder and it’s a teeming landscape, exemplary of birth, death, and the time passing in between. So too is Spring, which imbues a much-used musical frame—the folk travelogue, an earthy meditation on the state of things—with novel horizons.
Buy: Rough Trade
(Pitchfork may earn a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.) | 2019-11-02T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-11-02T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Folk/Country | Paradise of Bachelors | November 2, 2019 | 7 | 0a0cc6a4-456f-48e1-9e27-33992a15ceb5 | Linnie Greene | https://pitchfork.com/staff/linnie-greene/ | |
The 17-year-old digicore producer’s debut centers them as a vocalist and songwriter, mapping out feelings of insecurity and loneliness against production that is perpetually in motion. | The 17-year-old digicore producer’s debut centers them as a vocalist and songwriter, mapping out feelings of insecurity and loneliness against production that is perpetually in motion. | Jane Remover: Teen Week | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/dltzk-teen-week/ | Teen Week | Editor’s Note: Jane Remover came out publicly as a trans woman in 2022. This review is presented as it was originally published in 2021 and uses their prior artist name and pronouns.
Back in January, dltzk’s “52 blue mondays” tore through the digicore scene like a comet. The SoundCloud-based community, which emerged in the late 2010s from online rap circles but pulls from a wide range of influences, has seen its profile rise in the last year, with co-signs from Charli XCX, Phoebe Bridgers, and Trippie Redd. On “blue mondays,” dltzk (pronounced “delete Zeke”) ropes what feels like 25 moving parts—sampled screams, waves of synths, drums that snap like chattering teeth—into something unwieldy and beautiful. Their voice is bitcrushed and blown out but cuts through when it matters most, like a perfectly snarled, “Fuck you, let me do me.” The song is a bomb site, noise so noisy it sounds ambient, a massive piece of digicore architecture that, at the end, comes crumbling down—how could it not?
“blue mondays” is the centerpiece of dltzk’s immersive debut Teen Week, which charts a course from where this “post-genre” music comes from to where it might go. It also serves as an introduction to dltzk, the 17 year old from suburban New Jersey. A prodigious producer who cut their teeth making type beats and lending a hand to other artists, dltzk centers their voice as a vocalist and songwriter here, mapping out feelings of insecurity and loneliness through evocative images. On the gorgeous ballad “cartridge,” dltzk is triggered by a tweet that reminds them of their dad. “Sorry I’m not what you wanted, I know you can’t try again,” they sing, over a delicate 8-bit composition you might hear while leaving home in an old Pokémon game.
Home—both in its online and IRL forms—occupies a central space on Teen Week. Both worlds come together on the soaring closer “seventeen,” where dltzk sings about spending their days scrolling and feeling jealous of artist friends with bigger followings, but also about being perceived disdainfully at school. They sink into their sweater with the A/C off; they’re “mad over tiny letters.” When they sing, “I wish I blew up like yesterday,” it’s less about material aspiration than it is about becoming.
Much of this album is about that process of leaving people, places, and past selves behind. In conveying how they feel, dltzk sometimes leans into rote Tumblr fodder—“If you died on social media would anyone know?” goes one line. More often, though, their words are strikingly personal and affecting. It helps that dltzk sings with the kind of feathery warble that makes Drain Gang’s Ecco2k sound so honest and compelling. (Teek Week pays direct homage to Ecco2k several times, sampling his 2019 song “Blue Eyes.”) Occasionally their admiration turns to limp imitation, like on “let down” and “dysphoria,” but other times, it carries the intimacy of someone giving you a personal concert.
A key element of “52 blue mondays” and several other songs on Teen Week is the Amen break. One of the most historically significant drum loops, it’s recently reached digicore producers, who’ve taken to weaving it into their glitchy compositions like it’s an energy-boosting cheat code. Digicore’s fascination with dance music isn’t new, but this particular flavor of breakbeat craziness, likely inspired by internet drum’n’bass artists like Sewerslvt, steps away from the pure chaos of canonical songs like “Pressure” and “movinglikeazombie” towards enveloping, atmospheric textures that feel more in step with the scene’s Plugg origins.
When dltzk unleashes it, it’s as powerful as ever. The two-song run of “beast friend” into “woodside gardens 16 december 2012” is electric; the latter practically explodes into an Amen break after two minutes of delirious buildup. dltzk has a strong ear for motion, assembling sound in structures more akin to escalators than conveyor belts. With each track, they push this genre further from its roots towards something more complex, more definitively of its own substance.
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-03-11T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2021-03-11T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Experimental / Pop/R&B | PlanetZero | March 11, 2021 | 7.2 | 0a0ce773-abdd-431e-87a4-5e9414f2f7b0 | Mano Sundaresan | https://pitchfork.com/staff/mano-sundaresan/ | |
The Japanese ambient pioneer’s well-deserved revival continues with a reissue of this 1986 cult classic, which feels like an inviting frame in which to project your own feelings. | The Japanese ambient pioneer’s well-deserved revival continues with a reissue of this 1986 cult classic, which feels like an inviting frame in which to project your own feelings. | Hiroshi Yoshimura: GREEN | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/hiroshi-yoshimura-green/ | GREEN | In 1967, the Canadian composer and philosopher R. Murray Schafer wrote, “The ear is always open.” He didn’t mean metaphorically: Unlike the lidded eye, the ear cannot close itself off to unwanted stimuli, leaving us particularly susceptible to intrusive sounds. Schafer’s observation turned up again in the liner notes to Hiroshi Yoshimura’s debut album, 1982’s Music for Nine Postcards, a contemplative ambient soundtrack composed for Tokyo’s Hara Museum of Contemporary Art. Echoing Schafer’s preoccupation with the rising volume of the industrialized world, Satoshi Ashikawa, whose Sound Process label first released Yoshimura’s album, wrote, “Presently, the levels of sound and music in the environment have clearly exceeded man’s capacity to assimilate them, and the audio ecosystem is beginning to fall apart.” Encouraging a “more conscious attitude” toward sound, he offered Yoshimura’s music—delicate Rhodes figures trailing pastel shadows, their spiraling as aimless as a slowly twisting mobile in a large, empty room—as a kind of palliative.
Yoshimura, who died of cancer in 2003, was a polymath par excellence: composer, designer, historian. Most of his work existed in the overlap between sound, architecture, and everyday life, including installations and commissioned work for museums, hotels, runway shows, an aquarium, a sports stadium, the Tokyo and Kobe subway systems, and Osaka International Airport. Yoshimura’s activities made him one of the central figures of kankyō ongaku, or environmental music, a homegrown style that drew upon Erik Satie’s “furniture music” and Brian Eno’s ambient investigations, as well as centuries-old ritual traditions, to fashion a new kind of site-specific sound uniquely suited to Japan’s post-war economic boom.
Yet listeners outside Japan remained largely ignorant of Yoshimura’s legacy until the past decade, when people like Spencer Doran, of the Portland, Oregon, duo Visible Cloaks, began advocating for his work. In 2017, Doran and Maxwell August Croy’s Empire of Signs label reissued Music for Nine Postcards, helping kick off what has become a broad revival of formerly obscure Japanese ambient and electronic music; Doran also curated Light in the Attic’s 2019 compilation Kankyō Ongaku: Japanese Ambient, Environmental & New Age Music 1980-1990. GREEN, originally released on Kazuo Uehara’s AIR Records in 1986, is not just a welcome addition to that retrospective catalog; a cult classic of growing acclaim (a YouTube upload of the album has been played more than two million times in just four years), it is crucial in fleshing out the portrait of a musician that many Westerners are only beginning to understand.
Many of Yoshimura’s early releases were soundscapes designed to heighten listeners’ perceptions of the spaces around them. Music for Nine Postcards, written with the Hara Museum’s luminous interior in mind, was inspired by scenes glimpsed from the composer’s window—a kind of landscape drawing in sound, translating the movements of clouds and tree branches into simple, gestural motifs. In his notes to 1983’s Pier & Loft, the muted soundtrack to a fashion show held in a warehouse on the Tokyo Bay, Yoshimura wrote obliquely of nostalgic views of a disintegrating city. Cosmetics maker Shiseido commissioned 1984’s barely there A・I・R (Air in Resort) as the sonic complement to a fragrance, while 1986’s lulling Soundscape 1: Surround was distributed as the almost imperceptible soundtrack to a tastefully designed line of prefab homes.
All of these recordings share certain sonic characteristics: They tend to be soft, unobtrusive, and meditative, dissolving like sugar on the tongue. But GREEN is different: lush and layered, with a sense of purpose that makes it unique in Yoshimura’s catalog. The shift in complexity is palpable from the very first track, “CREEK,” in which mallet-like arpeggios rise from a thrumming, struck-bamboo pulse like a flock of colorful birds bursting from the rushes. It feels more elaborate than Yoshimura’s previous work; it feels more musical, with a greater emphasis on harmonic surprise.
This sense of movement ripples across the album, but it remains quietest at its center: The stretch of songs across “SLEEP, “GREEN,” “FEET,” and “STREET” reprises the abstracted mood of Music for Nine Postcards—an impression reinforced by the fact that “FEET” and “STREET” are essentially variations on a theme. Still, even at its most sedate, GREEN boasts an inviting array of timbres and textures. In one song, the gentle bite of an overdriven Rhodes keyboard jumps to the fore; in another, a buzzing FM bass tone bristles faintly. Yoshimura favors pentatonic scales and tends to avoid major or minor thirds, and as a result, GREEN often feels like an inviting frame in which to project your own feelings. Happy, sad, blue, agitated: It welcomes all comers, promises serene uplift when needed, and offers to sand the edge off any unwanted extremes.
Curiously, all of GREEN’s song titles share an assonant ee sound. The titles were written in English on the original sleeve, along with a cryptic acrostic descending down the musical stave: “Garden River Echo Empty Nostalgia/Ground Rain Earth Environment Nature.” In the liner notes to the original release, Yoshimura wrote, “GREEN does not specifically refer to a color. I like the word for its phonetic quality, and song titles were chosen for their similar linguistic characteristics. I hope that this music will convey the comfortable scenery of the natural cycle known as GREEN.” By treating “green” as a phoneme, Yoshimura taps into the musicality of language, which lies beyond mere signification. However anyone else might hear this music, Yoshimura clearly believed his pieces belonged to the key of ee, and developed an evocative synesthetic world to accompany his mental images of that sound.
If Satoshi Ashikawa saw Yoshimura’s work as a necessary corrective to the modern world’s persistent and worsening din, perhaps this is an opportune time to reconnect with the Japanese composer’s work. Numerous reports have detailed the ways that the world has quieted during the pandemic. With fewer cars on the road, seismologists can detect earthquakes from further away; even in the busiest cities, birdsong is once again audible. This pause opens up a space for Yoshimura’s music to fulfill its purpose: recalibrate our relationship with the sonic world around us.
When GREEN was licensed to the American new-age label Sona Gaia for release on CD and cassette, the sounds of running water and birdsong were added, presumably as a selling point for the American market. Light in the Attic’s reissue restores the original edition, which, Doran says, is the version that Yoshimura preferred. Light in the Attic plans to reissue the adulterated “SFX Version” on streaming platforms this summer, alongside the original; eventually, you can compare for yourself. For a long time, the Sona Gaia version was the only one I knew. But in the past couple of months, I’ve been listening to the Light in the Attic reissue, sans nature sounds, while sitting outside on my porch, where the music mingles with the actual sounds of birds, neighbors’ voices, and the breeze through the trees, plus the occasional motorcycle revving rudely, a few blocks away. These sounds turn out to be the perfect complements for Yoshimura’s music, opening up its dimensions. The ear is always open, and all the world’s a stage.
Buy: Rough Trade
(Pitchfork earns a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.) | 2020-06-27T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-06-27T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Light in the Attic / Water Copy | June 27, 2020 | 8.8 | 0a0e4fd9-ed40-4f8b-a46c-4615caf4b320 | Philip Sherburne | https://pitchfork.com/staff/philip-sherburne/ | |
After languishing on Island Def Jam, this Odd Future member and Justin Bieber songwriter (!) put out his debut R&B LP for free via Tumblr. | After languishing on Island Def Jam, this Odd Future member and Justin Bieber songwriter (!) put out his debut R&B LP for free via Tumblr. | Frank Ocean: Nostalgia, Ultra. | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/15172-nostalgia-ultra/ | Nostalgia, Ultra. | Frank Ocean is a 23-year-old New Orleans-born, Beverly Hills-based singer who's in the gleefully hedonistic hip-hop collective Odd Future Wolf Gang Kill Them All. Frank Ocean is also known as Christopher "Lonny" Breaux, a songwriter who has helped pen tracks for Justin Bieber, John Legend, and Brandy over the last few years. He's the latest example of why the major label system is crumbling at the knees of Twitter and Tumblr, too. After getting signed to Island Def Jam about a year ago, the label proceeded to ignore him. Until February 16, that is. That's when Ocean decided to give away his debut album, Nostalgia, Ultra, for free on his Tumblr.
Venting about his decision to drop the record his own way, he took to Twitter on March 1: "i. did. this. not ISLAND DEF JAM. that's why you see no label logo on the artwork that I DID. guess its my fault for trusting my dumbass lawyer and signing my career over to a failing company. fuck Def Jam & any company that goes the length of signing a kid with dreams & talent w/ no intention of following through. fuck em. now back to my day. i want some oatmeal and toast. brunch swag."
The mini-rant sums up this singer's demeanor well-- openly passionate and heartfelt, but also attractively off-center and humble. Nostalgia, Ultra finds Ocean singing over a mix of original pop-leaning R&B beats courtesy of big-ticket producers like Tricky Stewart (Rihanna's "Umbrella", Beyonce's "Single Ladies (Put a Ring On It)") and Midi Mafia (50 Cent's "21 Questions", Justin Bieber's "Down to Earth") as well as some eclectic remakes of songs including Coldplay's underrated 2009 single "Strawberry Swing", MGMT's "Electric Feel", and, most surprisingly, the Eagles' "Hotel California". Ocean's experience within the major-label hit machine comes through-- his casually hook-y voice is akin to Usher or Jamie Foxx's, and at least three of the album's songs could (and should) slot in comfortably on a R&B or even Top 40 radio station near you any day now. There are distinct elements of Drake's melancholic paranoia and The-Dream's high melodrama, too. But there's also a heady surreality surrounding Nostalgia, Ultra that makes it unique. The cover-- showing a bright orange 1980s BMW (Ocean's "dream car") hidden in plain sight amidst lush greenery-- is perfectly indicative of what's inside.
The record is held together by tiny interludes named after 1990s video games in which the unmistakable sounds of a cassette player rewinding, fast-forwarding, and stopping are heard. The old-school touch lends Nostalgia, Ultra the feel of a personal, friend-to-friend mixtape rather than one made by a name-dropping hip-hop DJ. The impressionistic, fingerprint details don't stop there. On the brief segue "Bitches Talkin'", a loving snippet of Radiohead's "Optimistic" is heard while Ocean sincerely laments how "all bitches want is Jodeci, what the fuck?"-- not exactly the type of sentiment you'd expect to hear on any sort of R&B album.
Meanwhile, Nicole Kidman's adulterous bedroom soliloquy from Stanley Kubrick's Eyes Wide Shut can be heard underneath the murderous "Lovecrimes", adding a sense of manic dread. The film is once again referenced on the nightmarish, Stewart-produced "Novacane", which has Ocean losing his senses in the company of a wannabe dentist/porn star he met at Coachella. And if that sounds kind of ridiculous, that's probably the point; the atmospheric track almost reads like a knowing parody of Kid Cudi's fame-as-drug diatribes. The shout outs to Kubrick's mysterious and lusty final masterpiece aren't just artsy braggadocio-- they make sense within Ocean's trickily complex world, too. Like on brooding highlight "Swim Good", where he steers his Lincoln Town Car straight into California's crashing waves. "I'm about to drive in the ocean," he sings, heart-battered. "I'ma try to swim from something bigger than me." He lightens up on the self-reflexive pop winner "Songs for Women" and the MGMT-sampling Garden of Eden fuck ode "Nature Feels", but, no matter the mood, this songwriter is always quick to add fine particulars that make his songs his songs.
At 23, Ocean is a few years older than his mostly-teenage friends in Odd Future. And his maturity is apparent not only in his vastly more laid-back style but also in how he deals with the underlying sense of abandonment and rejection that ignites much of Odd Future's bloody, cuss-laden vengeance. "Fuck a deal, I just want my father's e-mail so I can tell him how much I hate him in detail," seethes crew leader Tyler, the Creator on the title track of his album Bastard. Ocean grew up fatherless too, according to his wrenching revamp of Mr. Hudson's "There Will Be Tears", but he handles his feelings differently. "My friend said it wasn't so bad/ You can't miss what you ain't had/ Well, I can-- I'm sad," he wails, letting his guard down completely. And the fact that Tyler and Frank are smart enough to see their thematic kinship beneath all the aesthetic disparities bodes well for both. | 2011-03-04T01:00:01.000-05:00 | 2011-03-04T01:00:01.000-05:00 | Pop/R&B | self-released | March 4, 2011 | 7.8 | 0a0eabd3-9a35-4ad7-9e53-c717acb03362 | Ryan Dombal | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ryan-dombal/ | null |
This Kentucky-born singer-songwriter is a quester, intrigued by the metaphysics of spiritual experience and wondering aloud if the Bible and a handful of ’shrooms will lead you to the same religious epiphany. Regardless, there are no extraneous sounds or ideas on his new album, nothing that’s not battened down to a carefully structured set of lyrics and melodies. | This Kentucky-born singer-songwriter is a quester, intrigued by the metaphysics of spiritual experience and wondering aloud if the Bible and a handful of ’shrooms will lead you to the same religious epiphany. Regardless, there are no extraneous sounds or ideas on his new album, nothing that’s not battened down to a carefully structured set of lyrics and melodies. | Sturgill Simpson: Metamodern Sounds in Country Music | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/19386-sturgill-simpson-metamodern-sounds-in-country-music/ | Metamodern Sounds in Country Music | Sturgill Simpson saw Jesus juggle flames and met the devil in Seattle, or so he sings on “Turtles All the Way Down,” the opening track on his second solo album. Just when you think he’s slinging the same Biblical imagery Johnny Cash foretold on “The Man Comes Around,” Simpson adds that he “Met Buddha yet another time/And he showed me a glowing light within.” Rather than parrot the same Christian ideology that most country musicians consider integral to the genre, this Kentucky-born singer-songwriter is a quester, intrigued by the metaphysics of spiritual experience and wondering aloud if the Bible and a handful of ’shrooms will lead you to the same religious epiphany. This isn’t country music to put on when you want to stare at your hand for three hours—well, it is, but it’s more than that.
Simpson’s true subject isn’t the “reptile aliens made of light” who “cut you open and pull out all your pain,” although that’s a great line for a country song. Instead, he’s much more preoccupied on “Turtles” and throughout the nine songs that follow, with a much more earthly and everyday emotion: “Love’s the only thing that ever saved my life.” Perhaps it’s because his steely voice turns surprisingly tender when he sings that line, or perhaps because his Mellotron player provides a bed of strings as nebulous as the Milky Way—but somehow Simpson pulls it off without sounding pretentious, schmaltzy, or dangerous.
With a sharp mind to match that Hag burr of a voice, Simpson not only owns the best name in current country music but comprehends the genre as a vehicle for big, unwieldy ideas about human consciousness and the nature of life. He got Pope portraitist Jason Seiler to do the cover art, and Carl Sagan and Stephen Hawking are thanked in the liner notes. Nashville rarely sounds so trippy as it does on Metamodern Sounds in Country Music, whose title alludes to Ray Charles by way of Seth Abramson. It’s heady stuff, and potentially insufferable, too, if Simpson wasn’t able to keep everything down to earth. He favors clear melodies, careful structures, and riffs that draw on Nashville and Bakersfield traditions without sounding revivalist. Nothing else on Metamodern is quite so bold or quite so dense as “Turtles All the Way Down,” but Simpson comes across as a man deeply dissatisfied with the easy answers country music typically passes along as wisdom.
As “Long White Line” dissipates into a blast of spacey distortion, Laur Joamets’ slide guitar sounds like a spacecraft taking off, but the song itself is tightly structured and moored to some dusty honky-tonk on Planet Earth. Only on the penultimate track does he really blast into the cosmos: “It Ain’t All Flowers” begins as a stark self-reckoning at the bathroom mirror, then dissolves into a bizarre sci-fi jam full of backwards guitars, parallel-universe synths, and fragmented drum beats. Immediately after that song fades, Simpson launches into the hidden bonus track, “Pan Bowl,” which drops us back in some remote Kentucky holler. It’s the most traditionally nostalgic moment on Metamodern Sounds, full of soft-focus memories of four generations of Simpsons, and the acoustic austerity only underscores sharpness of the songcraft and the vividness of the details. He may be a big thinker, but when it comes to the primacy of the song in country music, Simpson is a traditionalist. There are no extraneous sounds or ideas here, nothing that’s not battened down to a carefully structured set of lyrics and melodies.
As a result, the best moment here may be the most unlikely: a cover of the 1988 post–New Wave hit “The Promise” by When in Rome. Simpson slows it down to a crawl, yet this isn’t one of those reinterpretations that purports to find deeper meaning through a more tasteful “Mad World” reimagining. The melody is tricky, especially divorced from that familiar piano line, but Simpson delivers it with gentle stalwartness, testifying powerfully to the magnitude of love. The Mellotron string section swoops in to add some earthly drama to an emotion that might just explain the entire universe. | 2014-05-16T02:00:03.000-04:00 | 2014-05-16T02:00:03.000-04:00 | Folk/Country | High Top Mountain | May 16, 2014 | 7.7 | 0a100fb3-e4f9-4050-a744-9df629ecc7cb | Stephen M. Deusner | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stephen-m. deusner/ | |
The Bronx rapper’s full-length debut leans into a hard-nosed drill sound and features some of her most dynamic and abrasive bars to date. | The Bronx rapper’s full-length debut leans into a hard-nosed drill sound and features some of her most dynamic and abrasive bars to date. | Ice Spice: Y2K! | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/ice-spice-y2k/ | Y2K! | Ice Spice has described the year and a half between “Bully Freestyle” and “Munch” as taking “forever,” but things have moved a little faster since her breakout single: trending on TikTok, charting on Billboard, PinkPantheress collab, Nicki Minaj collab, Barbie soundtrack placement, Taylor Swift collab, four Grammy nominations. All of this has happened on the back of startlingly little music—last year’s Like..? EP essentially tripled the size of Spice’s discography with its 11-song deluxe version—but those songs have generally pointed towards a smoother, more emotive strain of NYC hip-hop, equally influenced by the Bronx and Top 40. Whether barrelling through a soul drill beat in her On The Radar freestyle or swooping and floating in AutoTune over the sparsely whirring “be a lady,” Ice Spice has mixed boilerplate tough talk with tossed-off vulnerability, positioning herself as relatably aspirational (or aspirationally relatable).
Where Ice Spice has so far been happy playing the wide-eyed protagonist of a raunchy teen movie, Y2K! suggests that perhaps she’s been waiting to get mean this whole time. Save for a pair of DayGlo singles, these diabolical tracks thump, roil, and seethe their way into testing the limits of your subwoofer. Gone are the coyly romantic maneuverings of “Boy’s a liar pt. 2” and “Gangsta Boo;” ditto the softened ambient grooves of “In Ha Mood” and “Actin a Smoochie.” Following in the footsteps of “Munch (Feelin’ U)” and “Deli,” the instrumentals on her debut album are abrasive and unapologetic, and Ice Spice attacks them with her most dynamic vocals to date: whispering and barking, shouting and sneering. Having earned her pop laurels, Ice Spice comes across as totally uninterested in convincing her unbelievers or even feeding her fans: She just wants to drill.
Incredibly, Y2K! succeeds even though her much-maligned “lyricism” has only gotten worse. Ice Spice has always been able to sell groan-inducing punchline bars (“I’m standing on shit like a floor mat” or “He eat it up like Pac-Man”) through committed delivery, but her fixation on a new nickname pushes the limits. Scatological rhymes are pretty blase for hip-hop, but “I’m Miss Poopie but I never smelt” and “I’m Miss Poopie like I need a diaper” are the sort of claims that would get you laughed out of daycare. Spice has said that she wants her lyrics to be “super simple” and “digestible,” but that can veer into insipid repetition, whether on interminably chanted hooks (“Oh Shhh…”) or recycled rhyme schemes (“clappers” and “slappers” is a go-to). Three-quarters into the album, she throws off the clunker, “Bitches switchin’ but they wasn’t trans.”
Ice Spice has never been much of a lyrical rapper, but these moments are extra frustrating on Y2K! because they distract from a genuinely exciting and ambitious album. Individually, any one song here could be analogized and explained. This verse shows the Nicki Minaj influence (“Phat Butt”), this beat sounds like the Opium label (“Plenty Sun”), this track lowkey gives Kay Flock (“Gimmie a Light”). Collectively, this album sounds like nothing her peers could make, swerving from one sonic inspiration to the next. Even when bars are fumbled, Y2K! finds its footing thanks to Ice Spice’s agile and adaptable flow, assembling simple syllables into unusual cadences.
At each turn, Ice Spice stretches her distinctive lower register to new timbres. There’s the 40-grit rasp of “Bitch I’m Packin’,” where Ice Spice wheezes, “His bitch ride it really good but I got better knees,” and the booming Young Chop soundalike “Popa,” where she affects a drawl that brings to mind Young M.A and Bktherula. She sounds incredibly annoyed demanding men sign NDAs before she cheats with them on “Plenty Sun,” then pops up like the demon emoji on “Did It First,” somehow managing to sound even less apologetic about infidelity than Mr. “Lucky for me I deleted the message” Central Cee.
Drawing on drill’s decade-plus history between Chicago, New York, and London, as well as trendier Jersey club and rage beats, Y2K! doesn’t just surprise from track-to-track, but recasts the poppier singles as irregular components of a cohesive aesthetic vision. The silly Mike Dean synth breakdown on “Phat Butt” makes more sense as a Graduation-indebted album intro; tucked near the album’s close, a cheat code Sean Paul sample feels less like nostalgia bait than a flag proudly repping her sample-drill and Caribbean roots. Day one collaborator RiotUSA is behind the boards on every track, and Y2K! is a testament to the strength of their long-running creative partnership. Its weakest moments are those featuring outsiders—Gunna and Travis Scott just get absolutely rinsed here.
What makes Y2K! so instantly memorable is Ice Spice’s refusal to be pigeonholed. Undaunted by the scrutiny of Swiftie affiliation or the pressure of living up to her previous sales peaks, Spice doubles down on the sounds she loves without compromise or quarter. A non-zero number of fans turned this album on because of PinkPantheress and “Karma (Remix)” only to be met with some of the gnarliest 808s on the planet. She already knows her Munchkins love the bops: Now she wants to see them mosh. | 2024-07-29T00:01:00.000-04:00 | 2024-07-29T00:01:00.000-04:00 | Rap | 10K Projects / Capitol | July 29, 2024 | 7.6 | 0a124760-ab5d-4382-9f78-0929022d936f | Vivian Medithi | https://pitchfork.com/staff/vivian-medithi/ | |
Pretty Girls is the most fulfilling 2 Chainz album to date. He switches on a dime from dark to hilarious to laid back, cooly landing punches while lounging at the yacht club’s VIP section. | Pretty Girls is the most fulfilling 2 Chainz album to date. He switches on a dime from dark to hilarious to laid back, cooly landing punches while lounging at the yacht club’s VIP section. | 2 Chainz: Pretty Girls Like Trap Music | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/2-chainz-pretty-girls-like-trap-music/ | Pretty Girls Like Trap Music | The last song on Pretty Girls Like Trap Music opens with a disembodied voice, no introduction, no instrumental. "As I met 2 Chainz a few minutes ago—as I gazed into his face—I felt that I was in the presence of royalty," the voice says. The voice goes on: “There’s a certain power presence that he gives off.”
This voice is not from a polite radio DJ, or from an eager Def Jam employee. It belongs to Louis Farrakhan, the longtime Nation of Islam leader, which means there’s exactly one degree of separation between Tity Boy and Malcolm X. When the minister finishes, 2 Chainz raps, "‘Cause you got a deep title, don’t mean that you deep," laments his “codeine kidney,” points out that he willed the Bentley truck into existence, and recalls his mother’s issues with addiction. He mulls over the NBA career that could have been. And when he finally pauses to catch his breath, he says to the audience, “Right now, if you hear this, you’re a miracle. I want you to know that.”
Trap music’s roots date back to the early Clinton years, and it's been a presence in rap’s mainstream in various forms since at least the beginning of the first Iraq war. In the 2010s, it became the dominant commercial mode for rap, with other regional sub-genres—drill, for example—mutating its meanest, grandest elements into something new. Pretty Girls certainly falls within trap’s ever-expanding parameters, but it's supremely laid back, nearly 180 degrees away from the maximalism of the Flockaveli and Lex Luger era. This is trap music that your uncle will dance to while he barbecues, taunting you and spilling sauce on his white linen suit.
And that's appropriate: 2 Chainz is 39 years old. Barely over a minute into the album, he barks at you to get off his lawn; at another point he fires shots at quote-unquote mumble rappers. Mercifully, these are the only two moments of grousing. The Tity Boi from Pretty Girls is a motivational speaker, a testament to grit and hustle and the power of self-belief, Tony Robbins if Tony Robbins was friends with Raekwon. This is the culmination of an eight-year second-wind. It’s also the most complete 2 Chainz album to date, and places him where he belongs: in the upper echelon of rappers from this era.
The tone on Pretty Girls is a little bit darker than last year’s insane, freewheeling Daniel Son; Necklace Don. The absurdism is still there, but there’s a pernicious sobriety that never goes away. Take "Poor Fool," where Swae Lee channels 2 Chainz’s mom on the chorus. Tity raps about how addictive the rice at Benihana can be and says he should have a tattoo on his stomach that says “PRAWNS ONLY”; he also pleads with his mother to quit smoking and sighs, “If I’m not successful, ain’t nobody gon’ come and console me.” This is the song where he namedrops Scarface, then clarifies: he’s Al Pacino and Brad Jordan in equal measure.
Part of this is the perspective that comes with age. To jump back to trap’s first heyday: Let’s Get It: Thug Motivation 101 begins with Jeezy walking into his kitchen, hitting the lights, and seeing marble where there once were cockroaches. That record’s arc was powerful but short—the roaches were gone and there was too much money coming in to worry about stashing some Raid for a rainy day. Pretty Girls Like Trap Music opens with a kitchen tour, too, but where Jeezy saw cash machines and million-dollar advances, 2 Chainz sees ghosts. "This a new kinda kitchen," he raps, “marble countertops, see-through fridge/Three-thousand for the microwave, touch-screen stove.” Which all seems very luxurious, sure, until the turn: “Please don’t make me relapse/Make me start back trapping.”
That song, "Saturday Night," is itself a balancing act between promethazine habits and chauffeurs with questionable etiquette. At one point, 2 Chainz asks three rapid-fire questions (“Have you ever seen a homicide? Have you ever seen your partner die? Have you ever been traumatized?”) and then coolly details his bracelets for the day. There’s no hand-holding. Even a shot at his one-time label boss, Ludacris, comes and goes without being made into a parable about self-reliance. For long stretches, Pretty Girls is the sorting of venting you might hear if you were eavesdropping on someone’s therapy session, so long as that person had razor-edged pop instinct and said things like, “Used to drive a Porsche till I found out it was made by Volkswagen.”
Speaking of Jeezy, Thug Motivation 101 comes back on Buddah Bless’s thunderous "Trap Check," which opens with a sample from “Get Ya Mind Right” (and closes with one from T.I.’s “ASAP”). 2 Chainz also pays tribute to Wayne, his long-time friend and collaborator, mentioning him on “Good Drank,” “Saturday Night,” and “4 AM,” where he raps, “I dropped Collegrove out the sky/In a group with the best rapper that’s alive.” When Nicki Minaj shows up, for an extended appearance on “Realize,” she calls herself “Dwayne Carter of the North.”
While the guests acquit themselves nicely in supporting roles, the guy at the top of the marquee isn’t budging. 2 Chainz is "all up in the crowd, Frank Lucas fur coat" (“Door Swangin”); he “moved that blow out like we were Afrocentric” (“Burglar Bars”). On “OG Kush Diet,” a song buried deep on the album that would be filler in almost any other case, he’s mourning his friend’s death all while he cackles in the yacht club’s VIP section.
That’s the sort of focus you simply can’t fake. Pretty Girls Like Trap Music’s penultimate song, the one before Farrakhan, is a Pharrell duet that sounds as if it was parachuted in from another, much softer album, one you’ll hear in a fast casual restaurant seven years from now, just like the penultimate song from The Blueprint 3. 2 Chainz is exactly the same age today that Jay Z was in 2009. But where Jay was running out of steam, 2 Chainz sounds like he’s finally hitting his stride. If not royalty, then the next best thing. | 2017-06-16T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-06-16T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Def Jam | June 16, 2017 | 8 | 0a13cb4d-fe89-4816-be70-9e737cdd00ce | Paul A. Thompson | https://pitchfork.com/staff/paul-a. thompson/ | null |
As U.S. Girls, Meghan Remy makes haunted highway songs packed with eerily infectious hooks. Her newest record playfully appropriates the debauched excess of glam rock to achieve its own singular vibe. | As U.S. Girls, Meghan Remy makes haunted highway songs packed with eerily infectious hooks. Her newest record playfully appropriates the debauched excess of glam rock to achieve its own singular vibe. | U.S. Girls: GEM | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/17222-gem/ | GEM | Meghan Remy makes haunted highway songs. Her records, which she releases under the name U.S. Girls, conjure a moment deep in the bleary-eyed hours of an overnight drive, when you've stumbled upon an eclectic radio program hosted by somebody too hypnotizingly weird to be trusted with a primetime slot. (If they belong in any David Lynch movie, it's Lost Highway, no doubt.) The plural noun in her moniker is Remy's droll idea of a joke; you can tell without peeking at the liner notes that this is a project born of solitude and isolation, a catalog of one person's varied enthusiasms. But Remy has a way of teasing out the common undercurrent in all her source material, creating a surprisingly cohesive sound out of no wave's corrosion, glam rock's hedonism, and pop's direct, gut-wrenching emotion. She's also got a gift for eerily infectious hooks: the melodies (on tracks like "Island Song", "State House (It's a Man's World)", and a deliciously creepy cover of "The Boy Is Mine") that bubbled up out of the smoggy ambience of her last and best record U.S. Girls on Kraak felt uncanny, imagined, too good to be true. You'd wake the other people in the car to listen, if only you were entirely sure you hadn't hallucinated them.
Despite her lo-fi leanings, Remy's music has always given off a warped glamor. But what makes Gem feel like a such step forward (and such a straight-up enjoyable romp) is the way it playfully appropriates the debauched excess of glam rock to achieve its own singular vibe. The terrific "Slim Baby" (an ode to co-producer Slim Twig, who makes records that share Remy's fascination with the theatrical) takes a T. Rex-worthy riff and a bleacher-stomping beat, but as ever, Remy finds a way to filter the familiar through her own idiosyncratic sensibility, slowing the tempo to just a hair below calisthenic. The result's an infectious and oddly sweet song ("My slim baby, won't you be just a little more close to me?") that moves like a cheerleader on Quaaludes. But even when she's doing her best Bolan, Gem's structure echoes no glam-related reference point more than Here Come the Warm Jets. It's uncannily early Eno in its attention to texture, love of affect and-- most of all-- its spirit of genre-hopping adventure. A sound collage of gurgling vocal samples preceded by an unexpectedly buoyant rendition of "Down in the Boondocks"? Sure, says Remy, why the hell not?
On repeated listens, though, elements that initially scan as haphazard hodgepodge take the shape of something deliberate. With the ghosts of glam rock and pop crooners past as her guides, Remy's free to play around with different personas, characters, and genders. She dreams of being Jack the Ripper in a mesmerizing cover of Brock Robinson's "Jack", while "Rosemary" is a yearning, sea-sick elegy for the title character's affections. Her music doesn't gesture toward a deeper meaning below its surface so much as it glories in the weirdness, pleasure, and resonance on the surface of things. Which is how Remy's voice-- which sounds like Elvis' sneer caked in cherry red lipstick-- can be as simultaneously cartoonish and deeply affecting as it is on songs like "Rosemary" or her ode to her own project's isolated process, "Work From Home".
Perhaps just as much as she channels the theatrical androgyny of Bolan or crooner Billy Joe Royal, U.S. Girls makes me think of Cindy Sherman's photographs. They make similar inquires into identity, artifice, and the underbelly of glamor, and, like U.S. Girls, they conjure a state of being that seems like an ever-so-slightly off-kilter version of reality. "Rather than being about understanding," Jerry Saltz wrote in a review of the photographer's recent retrospective, "[Sherman's pictures are] about coming to grips with the state of mind that produces them." The same could be said of Meghan Remy's songs. You're tempted to call them Lynchian, but they're singular and personal enough to warrant their own adjective. Remyesque? | 2012-10-23T02:00:04.000-04:00 | 2012-10-23T02:00:04.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | FatCat | October 23, 2012 | 7.7 | 0a187366-0f6d-4297-9196-e7beea073a34 | Lindsay Zoladz | https://pitchfork.com/staff/lindsay-zoladz/ | null |
Bloc Party vocalist Kele Okereke’s second solo album represents an even more headlong dive into dance music than 2010’s The Boxer. On it, he’s swapped aggression for subtlety, embracing lush, seedy big-room house music. | Bloc Party vocalist Kele Okereke’s second solo album represents an even more headlong dive into dance music than 2010’s The Boxer. On it, he’s swapped aggression for subtlety, embracing lush, seedy big-room house music. | Kele: Trick | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/19782-kele-trick/ | Trick | More than a few eyebrows were raised last year when Bloc Party lead singer Kele Okereke released a two-track EP of functional dance music, Heartbreaker, on London club-house institution Crosstown Rebels. On the surface level Okereke’s stepping out as a dance producer was curious; it's not every day one of the more visible faces of 2000s UK indie steps behind the boards and starts churning out honest-to-God dance music on an honest-to-God dance label. But when it comes to explaining their existence alone, Heartbreaker and this year’s Crosstown-released Candy Flip EP make more sense when situated in what Okereke’s been up to over the last six years. Bloc Party’s 2008 effort, Intimacy, flirted with dancey textures to varied effect; two years later, Okereke stepped out on his own with proper solo debut The Boxer, a grab-baggy collection of aggressive dance-rock that, at points, presaged the stomping fare that Skrillex and other American dubstep auteurs would popularize a few years later.
The Boxer wasn’t a very good album, but it was a hell of a lot better than Bloc Party’s defeated-sounding fourth record, the 2012 effort Four. A brittle, dry rock record that sounded as if the guys who made the youthful, comparatively bright Silent Alarm seven years previous were battling a wicked hangover, Four made the breakup rumors that surrounded Bloc Party at the time sound appealing. It also suggested that, at least for the time being, Okereke had fallen out of love with rock music, an assumption bolstered by his second solo album, Trick. The record represents an even more headlong dive into dance music than The Boxer, with a decidedly different tone: Okereke’s swapped aggression for subtlety, embracing the type of lush, seedy big-room house music that, fittingly, Crosstown Rebels has made its name on.
Trick is, by far, the most listenable and, at points, enjoyable music Okereke’s made this decade. Rock musicians dipping their toes into electronic waters isn’t new, but rarely do they make the transition sound effortless, and even more rare is the musician who can capably turn out stuff that sounds like it’s been blessed by the scene’s fixtures. That Okereke can claim success on both levels is, in itself, a small victory; compositionally, the ten tunes are sound and smooth, and if they were played for a listener under the false guise that Okereke simply contributed vocals to an established producer’s tracks, that listener would be none the wiser.
That said, the mode of dance music Okereke is working in on Trick is one frequently criticized by both dance aesthetes and genre newcomers as sounding faceless, and so it follows that Trick is nice with atmosphere, but largely a non-entity when it comes to hooks. The few memorable hooks it has, too, are unfortunately the album’s weaker points: “Year Zero”’s insistent, whining chorus isn’t made better by Okereke’s somewhat cringe-worthy lyrics. Okereke’s vocals have long possessed a stridency that worked well in the context of Bloc Party’s spiky, stylish post-post-punk, and when he breaks into the upper register in more subdued environs like the soft clicking thump of “My Hotel Room”, the effect is grating. There are moments of vocal subtlety as well, though, that fare much better: dusky closer “Stay the Night” radiates sensuality, Okereke’s upper register taking on a tone that’s a few shades darker to match his surroundings.
Trick is a curious solo album because Okereke is more than content to take the backseat on his own tracks. Yasmin Shahmir, who’s previously collaborated with post-Disclosure UK house-pop duo Gorgon City, laces the percolating opener “First Impressions” gracefully, while vocalist Jodie Scantlebury takes the lead on the wistful, winding “Closer”, one of a few highlights and a tune possessing a chorus that smacks of something Todd Terry might have come up with in the early 90s. These inspired collaborations, along with more textural moments like the snappy diva shouts embedded in “Silver and Gold”, suggest that Okereke’s a capable, considerate producer that, next time around, might do even better with more time behind the boards and less in front of a microphone. | 2014-10-16T02:00:02.000-04:00 | 2014-10-16T02:00:02.000-04:00 | Electronic / Rock | Kobalt / Lilac | October 16, 2014 | 6 | 0a1b257d-9e8c-443e-8dc3-936161e46533 | Larry Fitzmaurice | https://pitchfork.com/staff/larry-fitzmaurice/ | null |
The Chicago-bred singer and producer’s homegrown R&B meditates on hurt, longing, and self-protection, embracing the kind of resolute realness that can only happen outside the major label gaze. | The Chicago-bred singer and producer’s homegrown R&B meditates on hurt, longing, and self-protection, embracing the kind of resolute realness that can only happen outside the major label gaze. | KeiyaA: Forever, Ya Girl | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/keiyaa-forever-ya-girl/ | Forever, Ya Girl | Ever since an artist once known as Lonny Breaux decided to defy his label Def Jam and deliver his debut, Nostalgia, Ultra, straight to the internet, the textures of popular R&B have become increasingly homegrown. Whether it’s the lithe heartbreak workout of LE1F affiliate Rahel’s 2015 album Alkali or the collaborations of singer Alexandria and producer Ethereal, there’s been a bounty of music for those who crave soulful vocals over beats from somewhere underground.
On her debut album Forever, Ya Girl, the Chicago-bred, New York-based singer/producer/multi-instrumentalist KeiyaA merges Earl Sweatshirt-ish grime and the grit of deconstructed club with hints of psych and funk. It’s easier to find a singular sound when you’re working on your own, which KeiyaA did almost entirely—she poses for Instagram portraits cradling a microKORG synthesizer—with occasional production assists from rapper MIKE under his DJ Blackpower moniker. It’s even more natural to work mostly alone when your lyrics are laments on loneliness.
“Who is supposed to ride or die for me if not I?” she asks on “Negus Poem 1 & 2,” but not with a de rigeur sense of self-empowerment. It’s one of the many inquiries into the disquiet of being alone that KeiyaA proliferates through discordant synth lines and disembodied voices. She uses that POV to turn the music of others on its head, too. “Forreal???” opens with, “Before I put this pussy on your sideburns/I need to check in with my heart and mind,” a reference to Nicki Minaj’s verse from the Young Money bubblegum bedroom cut “Bed Rock” that turns shock-baiting coquettery—Nicki follows her sideburn remark with, “He say I’m bad, he probably right”—into a self-affirming mantra of protection. When KeiyaA covers Prince’s funky kiss-off “Do Yourself a Favor,” she quiets it to the volume of an internal monologue by someone still enmeshed in a painful end.
On one of the album’s highlights, “Hvnli,” KeyiaA sings, “Gone for so long, I prefer to spend time alone with my pain/Gone for so long, I can barely recall, the last my phone rang.” Its stinging specificity is only part of what makes it so special. She builds on that hurt and longing by speeding up synths in places, repeating the lyrics in plainspeak with alternating intentionality, hanging on to the lines, “I can barely afford to eat/But my love is heavenly,” as a reminder of what soothes. It’s an embodied sound, imbued with the knowledge of what it’s like to fuck up and be fucked up and live to sort through the psychic trash of both things being true. This resolute realness, the album’s plurality of wanting—whether privacy (“I! Gits! Weary!”) or pineapple-pear juice (“I Want My Things!”)—can only happen outside the major label gaze.
KeiyaA seems to be telling the listener that, too, in her use of samples from a TV commercial for the 1986 compilation Hey Love… (The Classic Sounds of Sexy Soul). In the ad, three men and three women sit on separate couches, bored at a small house party, until the host puts on a new album he’s just received in the mail. Pairs form and begin a stilted slow dance to songs like “Betcha by Golly, Wow” by the Stylistics and “Yes, I’m Ready” by Barbara Mason. Before the 800 number fills the screen, one of the partiers says, “Fantastic album, man. Let me borrow it.” The host replies, “No, my brother, you’ve got to buy your own.” When KeiyaA samples their dialogue at the end of “Way Eye,” leading into “Rectifiya,” it’s not just a reference to some of her genre forebears, but a truth about working in your own creative ecosystem: The sound on Forever, Ya Girl belongs to her.
Listen to our Best New Music playlist on Spotify and Apple Music. | 2020-04-22T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-04-17T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | Forever Recordings | April 22, 2020 | 8.2 | 0a1f653e-0034-4346-b80f-45e3ff85966e | Claire Lobenfeld | https://pitchfork.com/staff/claire-lobenfeld/ | |
On his third record for 4AD, John Darnielle axes his fictional sketches and explores his own personal life, specifically an abusive stepfather. | On his third record for 4AD, John Darnielle axes his fictional sketches and explores his own personal life, specifically an abusive stepfather. | The Mountain Goats: The Sunset Tree | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/5456-the-sunset-tree/ | The Sunset Tree | Oh me oh my, The Sunset Tree has thrown me into a mini-crisis. That might seem like a big statement for such a small record, but rewind a decade: That's me, there, in a "Welcome to the Inland Empire" silk-screened Shrimper tee, unwashed hair, and horn-rimmed glasses, obsessing over the Mountain Goats' The Hound Chronicles cassette while stacking loaves of bread at a Southern New Jersey convenience store. Every night I'd steal a Snapple and drive home through the pines and deer alleys in my broken Chevy Impala with the windows down, blasting the Mountain Goats, Paste, Nothing Painted Blue (or whatever), on my tiny portable boom box.
That teenage idealism followed me to college, too, when I gave the by-then hard-to-find Hot Garden Stomp cassette to a friend because he carried a picture of John Darnielle in his wallet-- I felt he deserved it. For years, the Mountain Goats' Sweden was my main signifier for that country. Whenever I saw the Swedish flag, I'd hum "The Recognition Scene". But as 2000 rolled around, I'd forgotten Darnielle existed. (Actually, in a way I thought he'd transformed himself into Rick Moody, or they were somehow a ghost-writing tag team.)
My general loss of interest isn't meant to dismiss or simplify Darnielle's accomplishments. It's just that after memorizing the shivers induced by "the most remarkable thing about you standing in the doorway is that it's you and that you are standing in the doorway" perhaps I've already experienced the apex of Darnielle's poetics at my own personal ideal time/place. I no longer even own a car or a boom box and I rarely steal iced tea from the local bodega.
And no, I'm not a low-fi purist, so it doesn't at all bother me that he's upped the production. In fact, the accompaniment of Peter Hughes, John Vanderslice, Franklin Bruno, Scott Solter, and Maldoror fan Erik Friedlander open things up here (as on his last few records), allowing Darnielle more space to take some breaths, work on atmosphere, introduce catchy piano trills, some distorted grinding noises, and cello swells.
But yet my first few listens to The Sunset Tree, the Mountain Goats' third 4AD full-length and follow-up to last year's We Shall All Be Healed, left me cold, even though Darnielle axes his fictions and explores his own personal life, specifically an abusive stepfather.
As one would hope from a songwriter as smart as Darnielle, "The Sunset Tree" comes from a 19th-century religious song, "The Tyrolese Evening Hymn" and as reported in Pitchfork news some time ago, "Darnielle says he took it from a scene in Samuel Butler's semi-autobiographical novel The Way of All Flesh, where a clergyman beats his young son bloody because of a speech impediment that prevents the son from enunciating clearly while singing the hymn." Still, even as said stepdad chucks a glass at mom's head and young JD runs up into his room to hide the shouts with dance music, the familiar staccato of those comforting cadences lulled instead of enlightened.
Something I subconsciously learned when I was younger that I'm just now understanding is that the Mountain Goats' sound best after obsessively replaying each track until they become as familiar as your own personal memories. Accordingly, after a thousand and one listens, while I can still do without much of the second half of The Sunset Tree, on its first four songs Darnielle locates a stride, crafting a perfect four-part diorama. It's quite an accomplishment.
Opener "You Or Your Memory" is a lonely motel-room, bare-foot epiphany fueled by St. Joseph's baby aspirin, Bartles & Jaymes, and a mirror. "Broom People" develops the domestic scenery for the album's drama: '36 Hudson in the garage, junk in an unattached spare room, "white carpet thick with cat hair," dirty dishes, lots of ice cream in the freezer, "friends who don't have a clue/ Well-meaning teachers," suicide notes in a spiral-ring notebook, and the girl who makes him feel alive: "In the long tresses of your hair I am a babbling brook."
With a fast-car thematic that's an odd collision between Tracy Chapman's urgency and the romanticism of Jawbreaker's "Chesterfield King"-- and brandishing the triumphant chorus, "I'm gonna make it through this year if it kills me"-- "This Year" finds 17-year-old Darnielle breaking free from his "broken house" on a Saturday morning to play video games "in a drunk haze" while holding hands with a girl named Kathy. Of course, teenage celebrations come to an end: "I drove home in the California dusk/ I could feel the alcohol inside of me hum/ Pictured the look on my stepfather's face/ Ready for the bad things to come."
Then there's the wonderful "Dilaudid", a coil of nervous energy and teenage thrill-seeking. Darnielle's backed by a full-on string crew and the bows are used in a quick/jaunty way, matching the machine-gun rate of hi claustrophobic and creepy salvos (i.e. teen horniness fueled by pain killers): "Hike up your fishnets, I know you. If we live to see the other side of this, I will remember your kiss, so do it with your mouth open. And take your foot off of the brake, for Christ's sake."
After that, besides a cleaning-out-my-closet sing-a-long "Up the Wolves", The Sunset Tree loses steam. The late-period references to Kurt Cobain's suicide feel cheap and easy. Pieces of it go by unnoticed. Bits either blend into one another or wander. Oddly, at times it seems like Darnielle works more movingly and astutely when he's inventing his tales rather than partaking in personal anecdote and/or trauma. Then again, invention often possesses a more beautiful narrative arc than retreating to your bedroom to block out a parental argument. Really, though that first quartet is a wonderful example of what Darnielle can do when he's on-- draw characters and plot better than just about anyone holding a guitar. | 2005-04-24T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2005-04-24T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | 4AD | April 24, 2005 | 7.2 | 0a205c26-7361-4258-bc3d-ca405a4f1596 | Brandon Stosuy | https://pitchfork.com/staff/brandon-stosuy/ | null |
Of Montreal's 13th record, dealing with the fallout from Kevin Barnes' separation from his wife, is his most straightforward and least inscrutable release in some time. | Of Montreal's 13th record, dealing with the fallout from Kevin Barnes' separation from his wife, is his most straightforward and least inscrutable release in some time. | Of Montreal: Aureate Gloom | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/20314-aureate-gloom/ | Aureate Gloom | The two records couldn’t sound more different, but in some ways Of Montreal’s 13th album Aureate Gloom resembles the band’s peak, Hissing Fauna, Are You the Destroyer? Both showcase Kevin Barnes’ singular talent for unspooling his emotions and wrapping them around narcotic musical fantasias, and both feature a woman named Nina. Eight years ago on Hissing Fauna, Nina Aimee Grøttland, aka Nina Twin, was Barnes’ newly reconciled wife as he struggled with an imbalance of brain chemicals, drugs, and love. Eight years later, Barnes and Grøttland have separated, and now he wonders if perhaps the natural order of the world is imbalance.
Hearing Barnes sing about Grøttland—somehow a part of every Of Montreal album, lyrically or otherwise, since *Satanic Panic in the Attic**—*anchors Aureate Gloom in reality. On Fauna, Barnes strangled his heart inside of "The Past Is a Grotesque Animal", an opus about his strained relationship with Grøttland. Now Barnes tempers his feelings with melancholy, and instead of some catastrophic metaphor, we get, simply: "You never did me wrong, we just been together too long, babe."
Which is to say, while there's still plenty of Barnesian lyrical rhapsodies here, there's also a refreshing ease, helped in part by the backing group he's been using since 2013’s lousy with sylvianbriar. No longer a dusty, paisley San Francisco band, they’ve become '70s New York art punks. This is thoroughly an electric guitar album, and references to Talking Heads and Television abound (the guitar riff on the verse of "Last Rites at the Jane Motel" is a direct homage to "Marquee Moon"). Set against this wiry, mid-gain pastiche, Barnes' voice adopts a glittery, damaged glam rock tone that falls right in with the musical palette.
This consonance, coupled with Barnes' starkly personal lyrics, make this album one of the least inscrutable in their catalog. Aureate Gloom feels like it belongs in our universe, not some spartan funk galaxy borne out of the recesses of Barnes' mind. "I’m grieving for you, my love" he sings, so innocently, on "Virgilian Lots" before adding, "And I don't understand what's going on." It is straight up shocking to hear Barnes at a loss for words. Of course, just after his bemusement, he falls back on psycho-Marc Bolan patter on "Monolithic Egress". In a series of admissions and realizations (including what sounds like a specific reference to the dissolution of pet names, "I’m not a different man ‘cause you now call me some fucked up name") Barnes beats his chest around an ever-shifting garage rock template. It jumps from a fried take on Zeppelin’s "Immigrant Song" to a kaleidoscopic, proggy psych dream, and inside-out and back around again.
This bounding, perforated punk sound is enjoyable on its own terms, though you wonder what could’ve been if this band didn’t work so modularly in fits and starts. A highlight, "Empyrean Abattoir", starts with Barnes' hushed singing, slowly building with his signature three-part harmonies, carrying the song fluidly until we get to the skittering 5/4 section and Barnes' emotions get the best of him. He sings, now with more distortion on his mic, "Now it’s just a system of subtraction." Which, yes, breaking up is just a system of subtraction, but it’s not exactly a graceful turn of phrase. For every disarmingly honest moment, in other words, there is an equal and opposite moment where Barnes obfuscates, to unclear ends. These sudden shifts make it fun to follow Kevin Barnes, but difficult to get close to Kevin Barnes.
Of Montreal's concept has migrated as erratically as the tempo shifts and time changes on Aureate Gloom, so much that it’s hard to find their natural center now. So, our attention spans drift away. By the time the chaos of the bitter closer "Like Ashoka’s Inferno of Memory" comes on like an overcooked Bowie tribute, it’s hard to feel connected to the soul of this group. Even though Barnes is trying so desperately to figure out what’s happening in front of him, it’s a barbed mess behind him. Ultimately the music becomes another mask, another thing Barnes is trying to untangle, in a great chapter in the lengthy, wonderfully ornate Of Montreal compendium. That’s the paradox with Of Montreal: the more they create, the less you know them. | 2015-03-04T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2015-03-04T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Polyvinyl | March 4, 2015 | 7 | 0a2447d7-80e2-4bed-9e37-8253f910110a | Jeremy D. Larson | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jeremy-d. larson/ | null |
Swerving away from party-pop irreverence, Kesha collaborates with Rick Rubin on a spare and eccentric album about coming to terms with ambivalence. | Swerving away from party-pop irreverence, Kesha collaborates with Rick Rubin on a spare and eccentric album about coming to terms with ambivalence. | Kesha: Gag Order | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/kesha-gag-order/ | Gag Order | Kesha was embattled from the beginning. On her 2009 debut, she played a hard-partying dirtbag and became a glittery avatar of harmless depravity; critics, missing or ignoring her quasi-feminist lampoon of male behavior, wrote her off as an untalented attention-seeker. More recently, Kesha’s biggest fights have played out in courts of law rather than of public opinion, and her foes have been more fearsome. Still, her affect—at least the one she put into music—remained largely unyielding. “I’ve decided all the haters everywhere can suck my dick,” she declared on 2017’s “Let ’Em Talk,” a cut from the first album she released after unsuccessfully suing Dr. Luke, her former producer and mentor, over allegations of sexual and emotional abuse in 2014.
That album, Rainbow, was notably vague in its references to Kesha’s legal predicament; its core message is one of self-love and self-determination, haters (and unsympathetic judges) be damned. But in opting to “just let ’em talk,” Kesha invited the question of what she herself was withholding—a question that is bolded and underlined by the title of her fifth album, Gag Order. Kesha’s claims against Dr. Luke have been dropped or dismissed, and his countersuit for defamation is set to go to trial in July. “There’s so many things I said that I wish I left unsaid,” she sings on one new song. Speaking out has never seemed so perilous.
And so the Kesha of Gag Order is changed—still working in bold, chaotic gestures, but with the color drained from her palette. The survivor’s vim of Rainbow and youthful bacchanalia of its successor, 2020’s High Road, are gone; this Kesha is feeling her age, processing her trauma, relinquishing hope and then digging deeper in search of some more. “Only Love Can Save Us Now,” an anomaly, starts off with a glimmer of bygone times, with Kesha brat-rapping over a gimmicky cash register beat. But the first verse ends with a coffin-nailing declaration that reverberates across the record: “The bitch I was, she dead, her grave desecrated.” Tonally and spiritually, Gag Order recalls another album made by a pop star in the wake of a high-profile conflict with a powerful industry antagonist. The old Kesha can’t come to the phone right now, etc.
The production of this record—which Kesha made with Rick Rubin and various returning collaborators including her mom, songwriter Pebe Sebert—trends dark and stormy, powered by rumbling synths that sound like tornado sirens, or like a sandworm is lurking somewhere nearby. Played through the right set of speakers, the bleak and faithless opener “Something to Believe In” hits the chest harder than it hits the ears. This music shudders and roils; the way it lingers in the body feels potent on an album loaded with allusions to foundational trauma (though, per its title, much remains between the lines). “You don’t wanna be changed like it changed me,” is Kesha’s refrain on “Eat the Acid,” a song held together by an ominous drone. The lyric echoes a warning, once offered to Kesha by Pebe, about the risk of taking LSD: The mind can be expanded to the point of rupture. But innocence can be lost in more ways than one, and Kesha is certainly missing hers: “I remember when I was little/Before I knew that anyone could be evil,” she sings wistfully on “Happy.”
It feels like part of what Kesha is giving up is an idea she’s always championed: that pop music is galvanizing, collectively validating, full of the promise of the night and the dancefloor. On Gag Order, “we” dissolves into “I.” The beats, when present at all, tend to sink and trudge like stilettos in mud; nothing begs to be played on the radio or at a party (the bouncy “Peace & Quiet” comes closest). But the overall maturation of the work brings welcome changes. Kesha’s lyrics, as subtle as a hammer, feel more startlingly raw than lazily underwritten. Her voice, which she has often wielded like a blunt instrument, is used more delicately, smudged through filters and applied in rich, textural layers, in the mold of singers like Feist or Fiona Apple.
Even passing familiarity with Kesha’s previous work is enough context to make all these shifts jarring, and she leans hard into that sense of disruption, pushing it to the limit with her more eccentric choices. “The Drama” takes a haunted carnival ride through a demented key change before arriving at an outro, co-written with Kurt Vile, that sounds like a vintage pet food jingle spliced with a Ramones interpolation—which is to say, like psychosis. Kesha incorporates a number of spoken interludes: The mystic and cult leader Osho, the neo-pagan priest Oberon Zell, and the New Age philosopher Ram Dass are among the voices heard across the record, holding forth on cycles of grief and healing and the triumph of love. In Rubin—as much a guru as he is a producer—Kesha’s found a collaborator willing to indulge her spiritualist tangents. But neither the ideas nor the audio clips feel fully integrated into a broader theme of the album.
Her ambivalence is more potent. On “Hate Me Harder,” the record’s inevitable power ballad, Kesha is once again sticking it to the haters, but now her message is flecked with masochism. With its gradual crescendo and insistent pulse, the song sounds like it’s heading towards a rousing final chorus, but instead ends a cappella, a calculated retreat rather than a full-throated triumph. “Fine Line” scrutinizes the high-wire act of celebrity and all its treacherous binaries. “Don’t fucking call me a fighter,” Kesha snarls, flinching at the empowerment language she herself has used. It’s not that the label’s inaccurate; it’s that it reinforces an unfair expectation of strength.
“Fine Line” ends with something like a thesis statement: “There’s a fine line between what’s entertaining and what’s just exploiting the pain/But hey, look at all the money we made off me.” It’s a line that collects all the demoralizing losses and pyrrhic victories of the past decade of her life and centers not the story but its protagonist, who—despite this record’s sonic mutations and the declaration of her own death—remains recognizably herself. Kesha, as ever, dares us to call her too loud, too messy, or too much. | 2023-05-18T00:02:00.000-04:00 | 2023-05-18T00:02:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | Kemosabe / RCA | May 18, 2023 | 7.1 | 0a244d82-b9fa-415e-92a5-7dcf8ae2a754 | Olivia Horn | https://pitchfork.com/staff/olivia-horn / | |
Producer Prince Paul and Digable Planets rapper Ladybug Mecca contribute to this fusion of NYC-style hip-hop and Brazilian music. | Producer Prince Paul and Digable Planets rapper Ladybug Mecca contribute to this fusion of NYC-style hip-hop and Brazilian music. | Brookzill!: Throwback to the Future | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22478-throwback-to-the-future/ | Throwback to the Future | Even if it never became prominent and frequent enough to occupy the same trend-space as dancehall or Bollywood did, the intersection of hip-hop and Brazilian music has provided some indelible moments over the years. Dilla stirring up Stan Getz and Luis Bonfa’s early ’60s bossa nova for the Pharcyde’s “Runnin’,” Mos Def building “Casa Bey” around a cut from Brazilian funk powerhouse Banda Black Rio, Wanderlea’s tropical quiet storm “Lindo” finding its way into a grip of ’10s beats peaking with Isaiah Rashad’s “Smile”—even Black Eyed Peas in their prototypical Cali backpacker days knew the strength of a good Jorge Ben loop. So the surface notion of BROOKZILL! (all-caps/exclamation point theirs) as a melding of Brazilian musical influence with American hip-hop isn’t the most unprecedented idea, even if it benefits from the more direct engagement with a Brazilian artist.
Rodrigo Brandão, who raps under the name Gorila Urbano, was introduced to the creatively restless producer Prince Paul in São Paulo about a decade back. And over time their collaborative interests drew in longtime Paul cohort/producer/3 Feet High and Rising host Don Newkirk and Digable Planets’ Ladybug Mecca, the Portuguese-speaking daughter of two Brazilian expat jazz musicians. Given three Brooklyn-based artists with an unbreakable connection to ’90s rap bohemia and another, Brandão, whose previous trans-American collabs last year included indie favorites Del the Funky Homosapien (3rd World Vision) and Anti-Pop Consortium’s Beans (Takara & Brandão), you’d be right to expect Throwback to the Future to feel like an artifact of a time—and a style—that seems more defiantly earnest, if only in retrospect.
That owes a lot to the flows both MCs use, which are breezier and simpler than modern fans might be used to and older heads might admit an ambivalence towards. That in itself isn’t a problem, but it does make the record feel a bit more fleeting than it means to be. Ladybug was the velvet scalpel of Digable Planets, cool and precise and right to the point even in abstraction, and she keeps up that smooth demeanor here—sometimes to the point where her laid-back energy level gets drowned out by the production’s bottom-heavy analog funk touches. That can be a strain for an MC who’s more listenable than quotable here; as someone who can catch the mood of childhood nostalgia (the Del-featuring “Maralém”) or remembrances of those lost (“Saudade Songbook”) with a straightforward energy less reliant on lyrical flash, the musical qualities of her voice don’t always get their due. That goes double for Brandão, who raps with a sleepy purr and would rather murmur than shout, even on uptempo cuts like the banger closer “Let’s Go (É Noiz)!”.
Which is a shame, since the production transcends sun-drenched post-Tropicalia funk—it’s a deeper invocation of the titular throwback, the saudade of something absent that will never come back no matter how much it’s pulled apart and rebuilt. Paul and Newkirk’s music walks the line between old samples and new constructions: beats from albums that coincided with the mid-’60s to mid ’80s reign of Brazil’s military dictatorship, reconfigured to try and envision a brighter future that wound up collapsing under this summer’s fiasco of the Olympics and the impeachment of President Dilma Rousseff. It’s a party vibe that doesn’t entirely know the party’s about to end in the worst way. But while it lasts—through the Afrobeat fusion of “Mad Dog in Yoruba” and the upfront yet faraway-sounding horn blasts in “Macumba 3000” and the baile/bossa simmer of “Todos Os Terreiros”—it’s enough to make you wish the background music was up front. | 2016-10-11T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-10-11T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Tommy Boy | October 11, 2016 | 6.2 | 0a247054-8ad2-4325-9316-8ad2e35c88a8 | Nate Patrin | https://pitchfork.com/staff/nate-patrin/ | null |
Fatima Al Qadiri, who has recorded under her own name and as Ayshay, returns with a strangely beautiful album that is hard to classify. The music references her childhood in Kuwait and the first Gulf War, but through a synthetic lens inspired in part by video games. | Fatima Al Qadiri, who has recorded under her own name and as Ayshay, returns with a strangely beautiful album that is hard to classify. The music references her childhood in Kuwait and the first Gulf War, but through a synthetic lens inspired in part by video games. | Fatima Al Qadiri: Desert Strike EP | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/17312-desert-strike-ep/ | Desert Strike EP | Fatima Al Qadiri's greatest strength as an artist is her ability to conceptualize a world-- typically a sci-fi fantasy that blends the physical, the spiritual, and the technological-- and beautifully render it with beats. On the 2011 EP Genre-Specific Xperience, she envisioned an atmosphere of dark luxury and conjured a kind of underground new age embodied by the gothic Tropicália of songs like "Hip Hop Spa". This follow-up EP, befitting its title, moves into exquisitely violent terrain. "It's named after a Sega Megadrive game from 1992, based on Operation Desert Storm from the first Gulf War in 1991," Al Qadiri told Ruth Saxelby. "The record is dedicated to this sci-fi period of my childhood-- surviving the invasion of Kuwait, the war, and then playing a video game based on those events a year later." It's her best and most affecting work yet.
With Desert Strike, Al Qadiri creates a new mood and aesthetic while maintaing the essential character of her music. The basic construction is similar to that found on Genre-Specific Xperience and WARN-U, the EP she released under the name Ayshay: Tracks are built using pointedly synthetic versions of steel drums, spectral chanting, organs, and horns, but despite the almost cartoonish texture, the result feels more like sacred music. Topical elements reinforce the militaristic cast-- song titles like "War Games" or "Oil Well" and sounds of weapons cocked or shells clinking on the floor are not exactly subtle-- but they shade the tone of the project instead of defining it. Each arrangement is a carefully constructed exercise in urgency and tension, from a bloodthirsty kickdrum right out of the gates on the title track to the faux horns on "Ghost Raid" ballooning in and out in a way that could menace a band of spirit-possessed army tanks. But in spite of the music's inherent ties to aggressive themes-- war, violence, international strife-- it is not abrasive. Al Qadiri can make this stuff sound uncannily feminine and soothing.
Highly conceptual music always comes with limitations, and it's is difficult to imagine hearing Desert Strike EP outside of a private listening setting. But Al Qadiri makes the specificity work. It's one thing to mine the internet for scattershot cool sounds and throw them all at a wall in the hopes that some will stick; it's another thing to imagine an insular parallel universe and build it from scratch. On the evidence of Desert Strike, Al Qadiri has got a few more worlds in mind, just waiting to come to life. | 2012-11-07T01:00:05.000-05:00 | 2012-11-07T01:00:05.000-05:00 | Electronic | Fade to Mind | November 7, 2012 | 7.9 | 0a2acc80-bcee-401b-a107-2f7affad0508 | Carrie Battan | https://pitchfork.com/staff/carrie-battan/ | null |
Each Sunday, Pitchfork takes an in-depth look at a significant album from the past, and any record not in our archives is eligible. Today we explore the radical underbelly of Nirvana’s 1992 compilation Incesticide. | Each Sunday, Pitchfork takes an in-depth look at a significant album from the past, and any record not in our archives is eligible. Today we explore the radical underbelly of Nirvana’s 1992 compilation Incesticide. | Nirvana: Incesticide | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/nirvana-incesticide/ | Incesticide | In the living room of his tiny, late-’80s home in Aberdeen, Washington—the small town where it has been said there is nothing to do but “smoke pot and worship Satan”—Kurt Cobain filled a bathtub with half a dozen turtles. They are model beings for shy, hardened people: wise, solitary, with wearied eyes, and the envious ability to escape inside of themselves completely. “Turtles basically have this ‘fuck you’ attitude,” Cobain explained in Michael Azerrad’s 1993 biography Come As You Are: The Story of Nirvana. Giving voice to his aquatic comrades, he went on, “I’m stuck in the tank, I’m miserable, I hate you, and I’m not going to perform for you.” Being a classic water sign—sun in Pisces, moon in Cancer—Cobain naturally related: Those tough exteriors were facades for an overwhelming sensitivity to the merciless world, a feeling Cobain voiced with every note.
Nirvana spent seven tortuous years and three hard-candied albums bottling the feeling of first seeing that this world is bullshit. Siphoning colossal power out of classic rock and delivering it back to the disempowered, Nirvana voiced the precise moment at which innocence is revealed to be merely a myth. No band before or since has made contempt so catchy, disenchantment so explosive, or disaffection so affecting. Negativity became a genre, a frisson of excitement, and an odd comfort. Nirvana’s beautiful melodies made ugliness a virtue. Sex Pistols said “no future” but for Nirvana things were worse. “No recess,” Cobain convulsed on “School,” from 1989 Sub Pop debut Bleach. “You’re in high school again.” Hell on Earth is not to come. It is right fucking now.
We call that teen angst, but it is not only for teenagers. It hums in the background of life, flavored by the sour taste of knowing that things are mostly unfair. At any time, any age, it is possible to feel utterly disconnected, misunderstood, maladjusted, an alien dropped to Earth, suspicious, sullen, hands in pocket, headphones on: Nirvana. A Nirvana song is a coming-of-age line in the sand endlessly redrawn. It is an excavation of all the frustration below a quietly jaded heart. A Nirvana song is a reality in which you never fell off your skateboard. It is a Walkman that is a portal to some semi-universal misfit energy across time and space, an invitation to smoke weed as far away from the human race as you can manage on a Wednesday, the combustion that occurs when sequestered pain is finally unleashed. It has no gods and no masters. Cobain’s voice became a friend in the heads of lonely people on difficult terms with society everywhere, screaming but also subliminally whispering you are not alone.
Incesticide was released on December 15, 1992, a year and three months after Nirvana—Cobain, fellow Aberdeen weirdo Krist Novoselic, and ex-hardcore kid Dave Grohl—became one of the biggest bands on Earth ever. It’s an unlikely appendage to the globe-smashing Nevermind: Instead of rushing out another LP to further propel Nirvana to the extreme edges of perilous fame, they slid their fans a mixtape. Incesticide is raw sparks to Nevermind’s pop explosion, collecting Peel Sessions, covers, demos, four different drummers, vocal sounds like dying feral animals, unabashed feminism, and yeah, a devil-horn-saluting cock-rocker called “Aero Zeppelin.”
The band’s label, DGC, didn’t intend to promote Incesticide much, clearly considering it a low-stakes time-buying placeholder. Nirvana took advantage of that. Allegedly the band only put it out because Cobain got to make the devastating cover painting and pen the thousand-word essay for its legendary liner notes, which were an indictment of toxic masculinity, a corrective of the exploitative media, and an ode to the underground. Incesticide embodies the free space of punk more than any Nirvana album: part outsider visual art, part punk fanzine, thrillingly raw.
It arrived at the end of a batshit year for Cobain and Courtney Love, who were married that February, just over a month after Nevermind hit its zenith, knocking Michael Jackson out of the No.1 spot on the Billboard charts. Their 1992 devolved from there. The press tortured the Cobains in the months leading up to the birth of their daughter; then followed a custody battle with Child Protective Services. It was the year Cobain wore a “Corporate Magazines Still Suck” shirt on the cover of Rolling Stone and a hand-drawn Flipper tee on “SNL.” By the end of 1992, he wanted to call the next Nirvana LP I Hate Myself and I Want to Die, which had become his standard response when asked, “How you doing?”
Incesticide tells a different story: It forms a snapshot of Nirvana pre-Nevermind, the same band you see goofing around in a cha-cha line with Sonic Youth and dramatically eating grapes in David Markey’s classic tour doc 1991: The Year Punk Broke. In a hypothetical biopic of early Nirvana, these are the early songs that would soundtrack the deadpan humor of their ascent—ranging from ecstatic punk-pop to a maniacal, grinding noise, all united in crudity. Cobain felt Bleach was compromised because he had to avoid overtly poppy material in order to appeal to Sub Pop; he thought Nevermind’s slickness was “closer to Mötley Crüe record than it is a punk record,” embarrassing; and the confusion over the Steve Albini-helmed In Utero production is well documented. Incesticide has less baggage. No matter how gnarled the music gets, it inevitably feels lighter because when these songs were recorded, things were not yet so complicated. It’s humbling—as if Nirvana wished to shuttle back down to Earth and deliver the message, “We are not superhuman. We are passionately covering Devo.”
The opening “Dive” and “Sliver” are Nirvana pantheon. The songs comprised the B- and A-sides of a classic pre-Nevermind single on Sub Pop, intended as a preview of their new poppier direction. (At the time of Incesticide, Sub Pop was planning its own Nirvana B-sides comp, allegedly to be called Cash Cow, but Geffen bought them out on that.) Cobain wanted “Sliver” to be “the most ridiculous pop song that [he] had ever written.” With its manic sideways hop and rudimentary harmonies, it is a hilarious caricature of one, containing the exaggerated naivete and cool simplicity of Olympia bands that Cobain loved, like Beat Happening and the Go Team. Our ’90s punk prophet revs through the words “ice cream” and “mashed potatoes,” giving voice to a boy who is left with his grandparents for a night, watching TV and feeling abandoned. Cobain said he got a K Records tattoo as a reminder “to stay a child,” and Nirvana never reached for that more than on “Sliver.” It was recorded in July ’90 when their Seattle peers Tad were on a dinner break from the studio; Mudhoney’s Dan Peters drummed. It took one hour and delightfully sounds like it.
A complementary meditation on childhood, “Dive” finds Cobain begging “pick me pick me” and swiftly deducing that “everyone is hollow”—as if transforming, within seconds, into the demonic child he painted on Incesticide’s cover, a spirit already ravaged in youth. In the crests and punches and crashes of “Dive,” Cobain shows all the contours and shapes he could carve with his voice. “Dive in me,” he sings with the self-awareness that he will be analyzed. Like the best of Nirvana, “Dive” validates pain while tacitly pulling you out from beneath it, depressive and buoyant in each breath, making the sunken feeling soar. The unassuming “Stain,” similarly, is like a one-song Nirvana blueprint: When Cobain 180s from the lilting “staiiiin” into a metallic roar (“STAIN”), you can hear him working through all the seemingly disjointed sounds in his head—the brain that, in one early Nirvana bio, listed the nearly a capella indie band Young Marble Giants as an influence directly alongside Slayer.
Not everything on Incesticide is of such life-affirming caliber, to be clear, but it’s all a blast to play. A blistering handful of its deep cuts are among Nirvana’s earliest songs: “Beeswax,” “Mexican Seafood,” “Hairspray Queen,” “Downer,” “Big Long Now,” and “Aero Zeppelin” were from their first demo, recorded January 23, 1988, with Seattle scene fixture Jack Endino. The demo was cut and mixed in one afternoon; Dale Crover of Melvins drummed, and Cobain paid the $152.44 studio bill with money from his janitor job. There’s a flash of spiraling, raging post-hardcore in “Downer” (a Bleach bonus track), but it is maybe generous to say there are a few duds among all this testosterone-fueled ennui. The lyrics to “Mexican Seafood” are plain nasty (index: “yeast infection,” “vomit,” “fleas”), the riffs prefab. As Cobain wrote in a press release about the amusingly irreverent “Aero Zeppelin”: “Christ! Let’s just throw together some heavy metal riffs in no particular order and give it a quirky name in homage to a couple of our favorite masturbatory ’70s rock acts.” It’s like the pop antagonists in Nirvana were trying to reveal themselves as unspectacular, to debunk the myth of male genius.
Like any thoughtful punk, Cobain pondered anarchy. The “Smells Like Teen Spirit” video starred cheerleaders with anarchy-A jackets. The 1979 teen revenge fantasy film Over the Edge—which concludes with delinquent kids setting their school ablaze amid a PTA meeting—all but defined his personality. He considered selling Nevermind with radical-political essays. But the greatest manifestation of Cobain’s anarchic sensibility was undoubtedly in his commitment to dispersing his own power. He took any opportunity to diffuse the spotlight onto his lesser-known inspirations, shouting out dozens of bands in the Incesticide liner notes, on T-shirts, with opening slots, and especially via covers.
Incesticide features three, all recorded on John Peel’s BBC show. Nirvana’s full-sprint take on Devo’s “Turn Around”—the B-side to “Whip It”—gave Cobain the chance to invoke Bob Dylan (“Who said don’t look back? Don’t believe em!”), and feels like a symbol of proud nerdiness. There are also two covers from Glasgow twee pop band the Vaselines, “Molly’s Lips” and “Son of a Gun.” The Vaselines are a band you’d worship if you were interested in deliberately unpopular culture, things that sweetly validate the wrongness in your life. Cobain loved the askew, droll, befuddlingly cheery Vaselines so much he named his daughter Frances after the band’s Frances McKee. That glee circulates through these sunny, arresting bits of high-wire noise-pop. To Cobain, punk was a synonym for freedom—bands that said life is cheap, eat the rich, fuck the police; bands on the margins, deliberate anti-virtuosos, like square pegs never to fit into a circular world. In the Incesticide liners, he wrote, “We just wanted to pay tribute to something [punk rock] that helped us to feel as though we had crawled out of the dung heap of conformity. To pay tribute like an Elvis or Jimi Hendrix impersonator in the tradition of a bar band.” Nirvana’s covers distilled that admirable ambition.
In Cobain’s journals from this time, in between lyric drafts and notes to “call thurston,” there is one page that pops out, full of revolutionary zeal. In a letter to Bikini Kill drummer Tobi Vail, Cobain details his music-industry plot to infiltrate and subvert, to “sabotage the empire by pretending to play their game.” The piece reflects the influence of riot grrrl on his thinking. He writes, for example, about the hypocrisy of a school that teaches girls how to deal with rape culture instead of teaching boys about consent. He writes about how sexism had to be “blown wide open” in order to begin to “expand on all other –isms,” because no matter how you break it down, at the top still sits the white, corporate, irredeemable man. “It’s almost impossible to de-program the incestually-established, male oppressor, especially the ones who’ve been weaned on it thru their families...like die-hard NRA freaks and inherited corporate-power mongrels,” Cobain wrote. “But there are thousands of green minds, young gullible 15-year-old boys out there just starting to fall into the grain of what they’ve been told of what a man is supposed to be, and there are plenty of tools to use. The most effective tool is entertainment.”
These are the seeds of how Kurt Cobain became the most famous punk feminist in music history: how he went on to play for millions of “MTV Unplugged” viewers while wearing a T-shirt for San Francisco band Frightwig (their 1984 debut included the pugnacious “My Crotch Does Not Say Go”), how a Nirvana benefit show raised $50,000 for Bosnian rape victims, how Cobain named their hit single after a phrase coined by Kathleen Hanna, how Nirvana posed for press photos in front of a public installation by conceptual artist Jenny Holzer broadcasting the insurrectionary message “MEN DON’T PROTECT YOU ANYMORE.” For years, I was put-off by how male Nirvana could sound. But when I consider their aero-zep leanings as bait for the boys that Cobain mentioned in his journals—when I hear his mission to “suck em in with quality entertainment and hit em with reality”—its weight registers clear as day.
Incesticide collects some crucial, germinal entries of Nirvana’s feminism. The wound-up, savage, but emasculated lurch of “Beeswax” was originally released on the groundbreaking 1991 compilation Kill Rock Stars. How’s this for a mangled hook: “I got my dingaling spayed!” Kill Rock Stars was the first full-length music release on the foundational Olympia feminist punk label of the same name. It opened with Bratmobile’s sing-song “Girl Germs” (“You’re too cozy in your all-boy clubhouse!”) and placed Nirvana square in between a brooding Bikini Kill manifesto called “Feels Blind” (“Your world has taught me nothing”) and the fiery minimalism of Mecca Normal. Nirvana is tethered to the riot grrrl context, and the label certainly benefited from their contribution. Kill Rock Stars sold 25,000 copies; the label’s founder Slim Moon was able to release music by Bikini Kill and Unwound with the money.
A feminist ethos also infused Cobain’s songwriting. The breezy pop-punk of Incesticide’s “Been a Son” tells the story of a girl whose parents wish she were born a boy—a comment on how patriarchy sees women as second-class citizens, on how it dictates what it thinks women should be. Nirvana placed the startling folk song “Polly” at the center of Nevermind, which appears on Incesticide as the plugged-in ripper “New Wave (Polly).” “Polly” was inspired by the horrific story of a 14-year-old girl who was kidnapped on her way home from a punk show at Tacoma’s Community World Theater (where Nirvana played early shows) in June of 1987, and brutally raped and tortured. As a slow, acoustic ballad, “Polly” insisted you hear its gruesome words. This lesser, compacted, neutrally-sung version was recorded on the BBC. “Polly” was originally titled “Hitchhiker” and, if not directly inspired by the 1978 song “Hitch Hike” by Swiss punks Kleenex (another Cobain favorite), then it is at least in a lineage with that earlier song, which is similarly about the price women can pay for adventures in public.
On Incesticide, “Polly” includes a disturbing footnote: In 1991, a girl was raped by two men while they sang its lyrics, as the liner notes report. This sickened Cobain. “At this point I have a request for our fans,” he wrote to close the liners. “If any of you in any way hate homosexuals, people of different color, or women, please do this one favor for us—leave us the fuck alone! Don’t come to our shows and don’t buy our records.” Punk is an open door; when Nirvana arrived at it, the entire world was on the other side. With the world hanging on their every word, Nirvana told the world to wake up or fuck off.
The liner notes are the single most incisive document we have of the total intervention Nirvana staged on popular culture. Five hundred thousand people bought Incesticide within two months of its release, and in order to get to the life updates from Cobain, they had to first read 500 adoring words about the humble feminist punk band the Raincoats. Based in London, the Raincoats were only beginning to play their instruments upon forming in 1977; a quietly eccentric band who charged the air and hallowed ground in 1980s Olympia; who, like Nirvana, interpreted punk as a possibility, not one sound. Cobain bore a striking resemblance to Raincoats bassist Gina Birch—two punks with blonde mops of hair, drowning in shaggy mohair sweaters—bizarre, really.
He wrote of his quest to find the Raincoats’ long out-of-print 1979 debut at the Rough Trade shop in London. A Rough Trade employee advised him to visit guitarist and singer Ana da Silva at her cousin’s antique shop, where she worked, and though Ana was busy, she offered to mail an LP over if she could find one lying around. In a few weeks, it came: “that wonderfully classic scripture,” as Cobain called The Raincoats. “It made me happier than playing in front of thousands of people each night, rock-god idolization from fans, music industry plankton kissing my ass, and the million dollars I made last year,” he wrote. “It was one of the few really important things that I’ve been blessed with since becoming an untouchable boy genius.” Books say Cobain was painfully shy; The Raincoats was introversion as punk.
I hear traces of The Raincoats play out on Incesticide. “Polly” has a clear precedent in the UK band’s ominous “Off Duty Trip,” which similarly chronicled the rape of a woman by a soldier in a Northern Ireland park. Cobain evoked the seismic anguish of “The Void” every time he sang. And rarely have I heard a song capture the feeling of lovesickness with such nauseating truth as the Raincoats’ “In Love”—but the guttural churn of Nirvana’s “Aneurysm” comes close.
The final track of Incesticide, “Aneurysm” is the apex of this compilation and Nirvana’s career. It is a shrill romantic exorcism, and like The Raincoats, it builds episodically: a tense, elongated, thrashing lead-in—each note like a glance over some deviant edge—giving way to the relief of just simmering drums, before an eruption of slashing noise and vulnerability. “Love you so much it makes me sick”—Cobain seems to curl his body around each syllable, the song’s guiding principle. What better word than aneurysm could describe the unpredictable, corporeal shock of infatuation that just dies? What makes the feeling dissolve? When Cobain beckons “Come on over and do the twist,” he evokes original teenage kicks, however cloaked in metaphor that may be. Nirvana’s dance craze is pogoing, which he incites.
“Aneurysm” never fails to put the stupidest grin on my face, and I cannot hear it without flailing every inch of my body to its squirming emotional upheaval, without jerking my shoulders to its torrential feedback of the heart, as if succumbing to every knot and crevice of this punk song could save my life. At all the peaks of Incesticide, a Nirvana song is the same: music for outsiders among outsiders, a thread of connection among the disconnected, a friend screaming loud enough to reach inside your shell, empathic enough to ensure it doesn’t break. | 2018-07-01T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-07-01T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | DGC | July 1, 2018 | 8.7 | 0a2e3d8b-1585-4e9a-89b8-cd220691248b | Jenn Pelly | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jenn-pelly/ | |
The duo’s third album is a nostalgic indie-pop rumination on suburban teenhood that thrums with hopeful energy. The best songs are like dispatches from a cracking cocoon. | The duo’s third album is a nostalgic indie-pop rumination on suburban teenhood that thrums with hopeful energy. The best songs are like dispatches from a cracking cocoon. | Hovvdy: Heavy Lifter | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/hovvdy-heavy-lifter/ | Heavy Lifter | Heavy Lifter, the third album by Austin “pillow core” project Hovvdy, is a frothy Y.A. bildungsroman of a record, suspended in the moment between first discovery of love and first brush with heartbreak. Will Taylor and Charlie Martin dig through the detritus of youth with frank empathy for the people they used to be. They sing of leaving a small town and “moving to the coast” as though it’s the solution to their problems, and not another problem waiting to happen. They sing to a “friend” they’d clearly like to be more than a friend. They sound, in short, as though they don’t know what they’re in for.
The best songs on Heavy Lifter are like dispatches from a cracking cocoon. “Cathedral,” the record’s lead single and best song, finds emancipating joy in the realization that it is “brighter than before, outside” of a repressive church. The song begins in a pew, bent into a posture of prayer; it ends with the cathedral’s doors flung open. Vowing on the chorus to “never come back here” and instead “stay with our friends,” Taylor and Martin repeat the words in a kind of ecstatic chant. “Feel Tall” makes literal the personal growth that first love can inspire: “Any little thing you want, any little thing at all/Want to make you feel tall.” On “Watergun,” expressions of devotion tilt from the naive proclamations of a little kid toward a newfound, grown-up understanding of love as an act of service. A promise to “gladly dry the dishes” lands with exceptional poignancy.
What distinguishes this record from any number of other nostalgic indie-pop ruminations on suburban teenhood is the sparkling optimism Hovvdy carry with them. They don’t long to escape, but to accept the good with the bad. Hopeful energy thrums through cuts like “Keep It Up” and “Mr. Lee,” which mine mundanity for joy. The album is not without grey moments of post-adolescent malaise—particularly the devastating “Pixie”—but Hovvdy veer away from self-destruction, instead homing in on connection and intimacy.
These songs are grand, inviting backdrops against which the listener can set any number of paper dolls. This is the record’s greatest strength, and also where it stumbles. Hovvdy remind me of many artists I’ve loved, especially the underappreciated folk-pop savants Page France. But with the exception of a few skittering, programmed drums, they don’t innovate on the sound of last decade’s indie pop as much as imitate it. The lack of specificity in their songwriting means that they never quite eclipse their influences. The world they depict is always a bit blurry, like someone’s smeared Vaseline on the lens; any two people in small-town North America could occupy the vague starring roles.
This shyness makes a certain amount of sense, given the youth and inexperience at the heart of the album’s story. But the real gut punch arrives at the record’s end, in the final verse of “Sudbury.” As the singer dreams of graduating from “front yard catch” to the Texas Rangers, he recites the street address of a childhood home. That house, and the patch of yellow-green grass that made sports stardom feel possible, couldn’t belong to anyone else. Taylor and Martin are at their finest here, trading the ubiquitous for the unique, declaring who they were and who they wished to be.
Buy: Rough Trade
(Pitchfork may earn a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.) | 2019-10-18T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-10-18T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Double Double Whammy | October 18, 2019 | 7.4 | 0a3009af-5473-4a40-85f9-54064e15d7eb | Peyton Thomas | https://pitchfork.com/staff/peyton-thomas/ | |
Nirvana's scrappy Sub Pop debut is reissued with a 1990 live show as a bonus, and their legendary 1992 set at Reading is finally given a DVD/CD release. | Nirvana's scrappy Sub Pop debut is reissued with a 1990 live show as a bonus, and their legendary 1992 set at Reading is finally given a DVD/CD release. | Nirvana: Bleach [Deluxe Edition] / Live at Reading | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/13686-bleach-deluxe-edition-live-at-reading/ | Bleach [Deluxe Edition] / Live at Reading | The line between cool and uncool has never been less defined: We live in a world where Hall and Oates have become as influential to emergent indie-rockers as Joy Division, and Journey's "Don't Stop Believin'" has become as much of a hipster-bar last-call anthem as "There Is a Light That Never Goes Out". And yet, even in an era of omnivorous musical consumption and boundless genre tourism, the sight of a computerized Kurt Cobain belting out Bon Jovi's "You Give Love a Bad Name" in a recent Guitar Hero 5 demo reel was enough to revert the good/bad taste divide back to 1988 borders. For Nirvana fans, the Guitar Hero scandal was more than just a case of a dead rock-star's visage being exploited for the sake of peddling product. Few artists treated record collections as an extension of personal politics quite like Cobain; having him sing a hair-metal hit is not just contrary to his musical taste, but his entire value system. (Though one can't help but wonder what a guy who once skewered alpha-male behavior in a song called "Mr. Moustache" would make of indie's current facial-hair fetish.)
And yet, Cobain was no stranger himself to challenging accepted notions of cool. When it first emerged 20 years ago, Nirvana's debut album, Bleach, represented an equally heretical notion to some indie aesthetes: Flipper-grade sludge-punk molded into Beatles-schooled pop schematics. By 1989, indie rock was already making a rightward shift across the radio dial-- Dinosaur Jr. had covered Peter Frampton, the Butthole Surfers were dropping in not-too-subtle Black Sabbath and Zeppelin references-- but rather than using post-hardcore noise to desecrate their traditional FM-radio influences, Nirvana used it to give their dinosaur rock more teeth. In Cobain, they had a frontman with uncommonly melodic instincts, but shot through a voice that sounded like it was coughing up blood; in Krist Novoselic, a bassist who could hit the heretofore untapped sweet spot between Paul McCartney and the Melvins.
But unlike most rock bands who divided pop history between before and after, Nirvana's impact was not immediate. Upon its release, Bleach was a modest indie rock success at 40,000 copies sold, and the album's low-budget legend-- it was recorded for a scant $600, footed by the band's temporary second guitarist, Jason Everman-- often overshadows the music within. At that point, Nirvana had yet to divest itself of its Pete Best: drummer Chad Channing, whose scrappy style wasn't fully suited to the band's growing propensity for crater-inducing stompers. (Three Bleach tracks-- "Floyd the Barber", "Paper Cuts", and "Downer"-- were actually helmed by Melvins thud-master Dale Crover, and you can really tell.) And the album's first single-- a cover of 1960s Dutch-popsters Shocking Blue's "Love Buzz"-- is more emblematic of the dementoid new wave that Nirvana would indulge in on their future B-sides than the metallic Pixies-punk that would turn them into stars.
But rather than unfairly compare it to the platinum sheen of sophomore release Nevermind, Bleach is best appreciated today as a snapshot of a specific time and place, of a Seattle scene bubbling up before it turned into a media adjective: In the Aero Zeppelin grind of "School" and the Mudhoney-quoting scum-bucket thrash of "Negative Creep", you have the perfect audio manifestation of the stark, exhilarating black-and-white Charles Peterson photos that captured late-80s Seattle like a series of strobe-light flickers (and which populate much of this reissue's 52-page photo booklet). Original producer Jack Endino's new remastering job gives Bleach a much-needed boost in fidelity, but there's an intrinsic, primordial murkiness to this album that can't be polished-- while Axl was welcoming the masses into the Sunset Strip jungle, Nirvana dragged the Sub Pop set into the bleak, chilly backwoods from which they came.
Though briskly paced, Bleach is a front-loaded record, the maniacal/melodic contrasts of its stellar first half-- anchored by the epochal anti-love song "About a Girl"-- ceding to the more period-typical grunge of its second. The bonus live performance included here (recorded in 1990 at Portland's Pine Street Theater) suggests as much, mostly ignoring Bleach's side B to showcase important transitional tracks: the scabrous pop of "Sappy" (later to emerge as "Verse Chorus Verse" on the 1993 No Alternativecompilation); "Dive", a blueprint for Nevermind's plutonium-grade rockers; and "Been a Son", which bears the influence of Cobain's beloved Vaselines (whose "Molly's Lips" is covered here). It's a testament to both Endino's live-in-the-room production style and Nirvana's raucous onstage energy that Bleach and the bonus concert set sound like they were cut in the same session. But the concert also presents Nirvana in a light that the band's subsequently troubled and tragic story so rarely affords them: a simple, playful power trio who could lay waste to a drunk club crowd on a Saturday night.
Two years and one Dave Grohl later, the circumstances couldn't have been more different for Nirvana. Amid rumors of Kurt'n'Courtney drug problems and inter-band acrimony, the trio took to the stage for their headlining Sunday-night appearance at the Reading Festival, effectively cementing their status as the biggest-- and most gossiped about-- rock band in the world. If Bleach contains just trace evidence of the band that would, almost overnight, force radio stations to flip formats and record stores to open up "alternative" sections, the Live at Reading CD/DVD provides formidable evidence of perhaps the last rock'n'roll band to transform the monoculture in its own image. And yet, despite Cobain's cheeky show-biz entrance-- rolled onto stage in a wheelchair by music journalist Everett True, singing a line from Bette Midler's "The Rose", and then mock-collapsing-- the Reading set shows a band that hadn't changed all that much fundamentally from that Pine Street Theater gig two years previous.
Cobain's newly acquired, generational spokesmen duties didn't make him any more fond of engaging the audience with stage banter, ceding emcee duties to the jovial Novoselic during guitar changes. And even when playing to the biggest audience of their career, Nirvana blast through the 25-song setlist with a barrel-down, no-bullshit intensity that suggests it didn't matter if they were playing to 100 people or 100,000. And most pertinently, both concerts capture the band at crucial, between-album turning points: where the Pine Street Theater set shows a band burnishing its pop appeal, Live at Reading betrays Cobain's eagerness to tear it down, dispensing with the obvious Nevermind hits by the mid-set point, while reserving the encores for seething covers of 80s California punks Fang's suitably sardonic "The Money Will Roll Right In" and the Wipers' "D-7". In retrospect, the concert crystallizes the moment when Cobain stopped serving his servants and started serving himself, pointing the way to 1993's notoriously caustic In Utero.
Given its long-standing popularity as a bootleg, you can't help but wonder why Live at Reading wasn't officially released back in the mid-90s instead of the live compilation From the Muddy Banks of Wishkah; certainly, Reading makes for a more appropriate, electrified complement to the band's other career-defining performance, 1994's Unplugged in New York release. And for the sake of squeezing the entire set (save for "Love Buzz") on a single disc, the Reading CD excises pretty much all of the DVD's between-song interactions (most notably, the goof on Boston's "More Than a Feeling" that precedes the similarly riffed "Smells Like Teen Spirit") and key contextual interludes that reveal the tumult leading up to this triumphant performance (e.g., a heartfelt plea from Cobain to have the crowd shout a conciliatory "We love you Courtney" in the wake of her receiving the Yoko treatment from the British tabloids). But the CD's career-spanning tracklist-- touching on the best of Bleach, most of Nevermind, choice singles and B-sides ("Sliver", "Aneurysm"), three In Utero previews ("Tourette's", "Dumb", "All Apologies"), and the aforementioned covers-- actually makes it a far superior, more comprehensive introduction for Nirvana newbies than the band's 2002 greatest-hits compilation. Like the Who's Live at Leeds or Cheap Trick's At Budokan, it's an indispensible document of a legendary band at their most invincible.
And even if you're the sort of Nirvana die-hard who's been sitting on an audio bootleg of this gig for the past 17 years,you really need the DVD-- for a band whose visual legacy mostly amounts to a handful of stylized videos and the lowkey Unplugged special, Live at Reading effectively grants you side-stage access to the band in their mosh-pit-stoking, drum-set-toppling prime, putting you as close to the action as the band's mysterious friend Tony, who's seen flailing onstage throughout the show like an epilpetic Bez. Like the Bleach reissue, the Live at Reading packaging is heavy on photos and other scrapbook visuals, but entirely bereft of liner-note reminiscences and analysis-- because lord knows we don't need another essay-length rumination about Nirvana's cultural import and Cobain's conflicted relationship with stardom. The most lasting images on the Live at Reading DVD-- from the 60,000-strong pogo pit, to the blood sprayed on Cobain's pick guard at set's end, to the awkward but poignant post-show meeting with a young, leukemia-stricken fan-- tell you everything you need to know. | 2009-11-11T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2009-11-11T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | null | November 11, 2009 | 8.5 | 0a3020a6-b44a-44c0-9116-eaca7d8fd249 | Stuart Berman | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stuart-berman/ | null |
Each Sunday, Pitchfork takes an in-depth look at a significant album from the past, and any record not in our archives is eligible. Today, we revisit the 2000 debut of Jill Scott, a neo-soul chronicle that brought love and sex to the everywoman. | Each Sunday, Pitchfork takes an in-depth look at a significant album from the past, and any record not in our archives is eligible. Today, we revisit the 2000 debut of Jill Scott, a neo-soul chronicle that brought love and sex to the everywoman. | Jill Scott: Who Is Jill Scott?: Words and Sounds, Vol. 1 | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/jill-scott-who-is-jill-scott-words-and-sounds-vol-1/ | Who Is Jill Scott?: Words and Sounds, Vol. 1 | In the late ’90s and early aughts, before Tumblr and other social media sites became havens for all visions of gender and expressions of bodies, it would have been easy to think that sex was purely the purview of conventionally attractive, thin, young straight men and women. For the MTV generation, love was the reward for being hot and hetero.
Film and television reinforced this message (“The Bachelor” and “Extreme Makeover” took it to the extreme), but so did music. From boy bands, who socialized young girls to puritanically fixate on love and relationships, to hip-hop, which was the domain of hedonists. This was the era that gave us Akinyele’s “Put It in Your Mouth” and Khia’s “My Neck, My Back,” released about six years apart, with the Nas and Bravehearts’ “Oochie Wally” surfacing in between.
To be regular, average, normal was in defiance of that era’s celebrity maximalism. It was a healthy body image and enthusiastic consent; it was the freedom to be wholesome instead of pitching moralistically between abstinence and nastiness. Regular was the quiet that filled the room after turning off a blaring celebrity entertainment show. It had ties to people and places and ideas, instead of decamping for New York or L.A. It was fat people loving skinny people, and vice versa. It was queerness beyond sex. Normal was variety and divergence; it was something other than the bleached blondes, video vixens, six-packs, brooding faces that filled our screens. But in this environment, who could be sure how average people did it? When Jill Scott released her debut album, Who is Jill Scott? Words and Sounds Vol. 1 in 2000, there were still too few chronicles of what love and sex were like for the “average” woman.
It began with the lead single “Love Rain.” The first verse documents the courtship rituals of two regular young people from Scott’s hometown of Philadelphia: long walks, long talks, and a lot of sex, all of which accompanies the rapid demise of summer love. Verse two opens the dams: “Love slipped from my lips, dripped down my chin and landed in his lap,” she sings, briefly tucking her airy soprano away in favor of breathing out the words in syncopated puffs of hot breath. The graphic lyric delivered a jolt. This was the same year that Dead Prez released the #sapiosexual anthem “Mind Sex,” and here was Scott lolling in allusive pleasure. The jiggy era was also at full speed, dousing pop culture with images of masculine, capitalist virility. But this wasn’t a cumshot; this was, as Scott wrote it, love.
What Scott offered was the perspective of a “regular” woman standing in her sexuality. Of course, Scott is beautiful. Her body language is open. She is ample and walks with meaning. Her smize confirms it. But she presented as an alternative to a world swayed by thinness, by straight hair, by whiteness. Not to make it about her body, but Scott made it about her body. “There are some really fine women with heart and mind and soul and body, who want a man with the same qualities,” she said in a Washington Post interview near the end of her debut year. “Not all of us are 5-foot-9 and perfectly slim, with big boobs that sit up in the air. In fact, none of us are like that.”
On Who Is Jill Scott?, the singer channeled the feisty funk of Betty Davis’ Nasty Gal and the soft-lensed romance of Minnie Riperton’s Perfect Angel. She found ways of putting bass in her soprano voice, and sighing at the opposite end. Love was to be found in others, but also in oneself: “He Loves Me (Lyzel in E Flat)” documented her real-life partnership with the relatable passion and intensity of many heady beginnings, and “One Is The Magic #” presented solitude as liberation. “The Way” is a peek at the way women schedule their lives around sex. She tells a girlfriend she’s passing on the club for a visit from her man; “As much as I like to shake my thang on the dance floor/I got another nasty, freaky, just right way in mind/Tonight I’m gonna beat the high score.” Scott’s stories of love and mutually pleasurable sex countered the inequitable hedonism of Puffy’s shiny suit rap, big-dick rock bands, and the weaponized testosterone of boy bands.
And Scott also populated her music with images of regular people. The ever-present chorus of friends offering loving, ribbing commentary on each other’s lives, children scampering across playgrounds and playing clapping games, old folks sitting on porches or playing dominoes, dudes hanging out on the corner, the smell of cooking wafting into a neighbor’s window. Who Is Jill Scott? situated the musician’s inner world within a neighborhood, brimming with people living their lives, and celebrated the social fabric of her community. It was a head-nod in passing, a shout across the street, and the mixing of generations.
Videos for songs like “A Long Walk” and “Gettin’ In The Way” brought those images to life, and situated Scott as the girl-next-door for a different side of America. The latter video opens on a shot of a man in the shower—hair braided, muscular, deep brown, dripping wet—and cuts to Scott, who’s casual in a red headwrap and button-up denim shirt.
Women in pop culture have always been coded, but for 20 years the parameters for black women were even more banal: beloved artists like Trina, Foxy Brown, and Lil’ Kim were tagged as raunchy, singers like Mariah Carey or Destiny’s Child were prim and unattainable divas, and those that covered up—like Da Brat and Missy Elliott—were subject to speculation regarding their sexuality. Even Erykah Badu’s introspection was seen as somehow other. Today, beautiful and talented women like SZA, Jorja Smith, Nao, Noname, Cardi B, and especially Rihanna, are beloved for their relatability—for the ways in which they speak directly to other black women. But in the context of the compartmentalized ’90s, where you were either a diva or vixen, conscious or pop, a feminist or wholesome, Scott’s ability to be simultaneously femme, sexual, black, soulful, messy, and experimental—or simply just the kind of woman you might see at the market squeezing lemons—stood out.
In her 2000 book that gave voice to Gen X’s hip-hop feminists titled When Chickenheads Come Home To Roost, Joan Morgan wrote, “Trying to capture the voice of all that is young black female was impossible... This book by its lonesome won’t give you the truth. Truth is what happens when your cumulative voices fill in the breaks, provide the remixes, and rework the chorus.” Who Is Jill Scott? is a submission in service of these truths. A song like “Gettin’ In The Way” reveals the damage of the patriarchy on relationships between women, but the track that precedes it affords Scott more nuance. “Exclusively” is the giddy internal monologue of a person basking in morning sex over a Fender Rhodes and lazy drums, on her way to get orange juice. The cute new girl flares up Scott’s “women’s intuition, some kind of insecurity” and sniffs at her—investigating the scent of Scott’s morning romp—and asks, “Raheem, right?” Scott responds as the music falls away: “Right.”
At the turn of the century, Philly was vibrating. Musicians such as the Roots and Musiq Soulchild were pioneering alternative ideas in hip-hop and R&B. Beanie Sigel was rolling with the Roc. The Million Woman March, a grassroots event in support of black women, families, and community, drew hundreds of thousands of people to the city in 1997. Allen Iverson was with the Sixers and his playing and unmitigated swagger had sports media frothing.
Scott didn’t just benefit from this energy, she absorbed and helped sustain it through her music. Keen-eyed fans know Jill Scott’s name from the liner notes of the Root’s fourth album, 1999’s Things Fall Apart. Alongside a pre-fame Scott Storch, she co-wrote the Philly band’s breakout single, “You Got Me.” When Storch met Scott, she was working at an Urban Outfitters in Philly. Two years later, their finished song for the Roots, featuring Scott on the hook, was derailed by the band’s label. Scott would be swapped for Badu, then the high priestess of neo soul, who already commanded a large fanbase. (There was no bad blood between the two). It became a Grammy Award-winning song, and the Roots took Scott on the road so fans knew that ‘Jilly from Philly’—who announced herself at shows by spelling out her full name as a jazzy riff—was here to stay.
And Scott’s attention to conversations and consciousness in her particular community and black America at large solidified her music as being of the people. She wrote about hip-hop, jazz, reparations, Abrahamic religious texts, soul food (and what collards do to your bowels), the noted and imprisoned activist Mumia Abu-Jamal, diasporic ideation, going to the market, and late nights on the phone. Her music does center heterosexual relationships and a pointed reverence of black men, which some might argue veers toward internalized misogynoir, a term the queer feminist writer Moya Bailey developed to describe the specific nexus of racism and misogyny affecting black women. But that doesn’t mean that the images and affirmations of under-represented communities and ways of life weren’t important, or that the candor of lyrics like “Alone to the bone/Although the night before/You were in my home my body/My dome,” and “So many times I define my pride through somebody else’s eyes/Then I looked inside and found my own stride” weren’t affecting for a generation of young women.
In late 2001, Scott released Experience: Jill Scott 826+, a live double album that contains recordings from her “Words and Sounds” tour. The relatively tidy compositions of her debut become big, sprawling, deconstructed suites, where she explores the full range and power of her voice. She plays with her phrasing, extending syllables, scatting, improvising, or just letting the rapt audience shout the lyrics for her. On Experience, Scott recreates neighborhood chatter and babble by letting the audience serve as her inner voice, the locals hanging over the gate wishing you well on your day. She talks to them, and they talk back. Regarding the stand-off in the music video for “Gettin’ In The Way,” she makes this point: “We have this thinking that as soon as we see somebody with a natural, they’re automatically positive.” The crowd hoots and laughs appreciatively for Jilly from Philly, who stays keeping it real. | 2019-04-14T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-04-14T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | Hidden Beach | April 14, 2019 | 7.7 | 0a320034-1d5b-4811-ac2d-61ff303f6031 | Anupa Mistry | https://pitchfork.com/staff/anupa-mistry/ | |
Channeling acid electronica, Kabbalah, and motherhood, Madonna’s 1998 reinvention stripped away the controversy of her past and became one of her most unexpectedly successful albums. | Channeling acid electronica, Kabbalah, and motherhood, Madonna’s 1998 reinvention stripped away the controversy of her past and became one of her most unexpectedly successful albums. | Madonna: Ray of Light | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/madonna-ray-of-light/ | Ray of Light | Today is Madonna Day in the Pitchfork Reviews section; in honor of her birthday, we reviewed four of her key records.
There was no reason Ray of Light should’ve been such a hit. After the collapse of grunge in the mid-90s, the music industry had begun to lean into the perky pubescence of Backstreet Boys and *NSYNC. 1998 was the year that “TRL” launched on MTV, and soon after, Britney Spears would release her teasing teen debut, ...Baby One More Time, catalyzing a string of young women—like fellow teens Christina Aguilera and Mandy Moore—to overrun the charts with coy love songs. But in the eye of this gathering storm of adolescence, Madonna, then 39 years old, released Ray of Light—and it became the best selling studio album of her career since Nielsen began tracking retail, a record it still holds. How did a monastic and austere album about emotional and spiritual maturity by a woman and new mother strike such a chord?
Madonna was still in full control of the serpentine pop instincts that had helped her masterfully navigate more than 15 years in the business. Her last studio album had been 1994’s Bedtime Stories, an alluring and accessible collection of mostly R&B, produced, in part, by Dallas Austin and Babyface. Bedtime Stories had been its own soft reinvention after the fetishistic and controversial era of Erotica, and it was a big deal: the Babyface-produced “Take a Bow” spent seven weeks atop the Billboard charts, her longest-ever run at No. 1. Presumably hoping to recreate that magic, Madonna turned to Babyface again at the outset of the Ray of Light sessions. But past success never presumes future performance for Madonna, and she abandoned Babyface after, as he put it diplomatically to Q, she “changed her idea about the album’s direction.”
It was another song on Bedtime Stories that offered the biggest clue into the Ray of Light to come: the Bjӧrk-assisted title track, “Bedtime Story,” a new age song on which she sings of relaxing “in the arms of unconsciousness,” and her deepest yet exploration of avant-garde electronica. After ditching Babyface, Madonna sought out William Orbit, an English producer best known for a smattering of understated ambient albums. Madonna liked Orbit, as she said in an unfortunately clumsy way, for “fusing a kind of futuristic sound but also using lots of Indian and Moroccan influences and things like that.” He would end up co-producing every song on Ray of Light but one.
Orbit’s work throughout gives Ray of Light a unified tonal consistency, a kind of cohesion that masterworks are made of. He has a light touch with techno textures, both relaxed (flashes of acoustic guitar ground some of the most digitized moments) and danceable—after all, it can’t be a Madonna album if it can’t work in the club. “Drowned World/Substitute for Love” opens the album with bleary sound effects that pulse like the sound of sonar. This submerged quality of sound will become the bleary canvas for the album’s philosophical manifesto, as clear a declaration as can be imagined of the new Madonna that we will meet on the album. Here, she not just embodies her reinvention, as she had done with previous creative shifts, but goes ahead and describes it in full detail. There is no missing the point.
In the hangover from the hedonism that was her early ’90s era, Madonna gave birth to her first child, Lourdes and had begun to embrace yoga and the Jewish mystical practice of Kabbalah. Gone is the wry kinkiness and, at least according to her, the addiction to the spotlight, replaced with wisdom and patience and a powerful maternal instinct. “I traveled ’round the world, looking for a home/I found myself in crowded rooms, feeling so alone,” she sings on “Drowned World.” “Now I find I’ve changed my mind/This is my religion.” It is a moving song, arguably the album’s best. In the music video, as she says these last words, she is seen smiling and hugging a toddler who has her back to the camera, a girl we assume to be Lourdes. Maybe those pulsating beats that open the album evoke not so much a world under the sea, but a child’s heartbeat heard through amniotic fluid, or even the sound of this new version of Madonna being gestated. Whatever they mean to you, Madonna, once more likely to embrace a near-naked man in one of her clips, manifests as a publically doting mother right before our eyes.
Reinvention, thanks to the template that Madonna set, is almost a cliché ritual in pop, like a motion that must be gone through for every star who needs a hook upon which to hang their new album. So too is self-discovery: How many times have you heard an artist claim that this album, the newest one, is her or his “most personal one yet”? But on Ray of Light, Madonna is so all-in committed to her metamorphosis that it’s hard not to believe her. “Nothing Really Matters” is a Buddhist-lite song about living in the moment and discarding the selfish motives of stardom. Even the notable love songs on the album, like the transcendent “The Power of Good-Bye,” are about turning away from the chaotic romantic entanglements that once characterized her public life and lyrics. “You were my lesson I had to learn,” she sings, as if all the turmoil she sang of on past albums had just melted away.
With what’s happened to the culture since, it’s easy to bemoan Madonna opening up the floodgates of this airy, sacred lifestyle: Ray of Light has to be in some ways to blame for Goop and the countless other millionaire celebrities—everyone from Jessica Alba to Dr. Oz—who preach the gospel of wholeness and wellness, sanctimonious and Instagram spirituality. And yet, on Ray of Light, Madonna sounds so confident and alluringly in control of her powers, you might be able to overlook the more dubious moments, like “Shanti/Ashtangi,” in which she recites a hymn in Sanskrit over a techno-pop beat.
Madonna had recently taken voice lessons for her role in the musical Evita and, as she put it about her work prior to improving her technique, “There was a whole piece of my voice I wasn’t using. And I was going to make the most of it.” Her newly trained voice explodes out of the speakers on the title track, the character of her upper register suddenly like crystal. Though “Ray of Light” is “a mystical look at the universe and how small we are,” it’s also just one of the strangest songs in history to ever become a radio smash, a sugar-high piece of acid-club psychedelia. She also exposes a certain vulnerability that had not been on display in the heady days of Erotica. “Mer Girl,” which closes the album, is a tender psalm about the death of her mom. It ends the album on a remarkably reflective and unresolved note, while also pointing to the reason Madonna has needed to be so many different people across her life to begin with: “I ran and I ran,” she sings. “I’m still running away.”
Madonna played a large role in reopening mainstream American music to the club sounds of Europe in ways that have reverberated since. You can hear Ray of Light in artists as disparate as Britney, who worked with Orbit years after Madonna on “Alien,” to the adventurous producer and vocalist Grimes, who called Ray of Light a “masterpiece.” It is important, in 2017, to reveal something serious about yourself and the world through your work if you are a pop artist, and much of this can be traced back to Ray of Light, not to mention Janet Jackson and George Michael, who in the years before also made ambitious and weighty records.
If I have one major gripe with Ray of Light, it’s a certain dissonance that this born-again Madonna causes in me that other reinventions did not. As a young gay man, I had been ennobled by Madonna’s earlier hedonistic pride, excited by her exaggerated glamour (though also aware of its problematic aspects: her provocative image, particularly in the song and video “Vogue,” heavily cribs from black and latino gay culture) and defiant sexuality. There are times I feel a bit confused listening to Ray of Light as she all but dismisses her prior escapades, referring to them as a “silly game” on “Drowned World.” Perhaps it’s unfair to lay this responsibility at her feet, but I had always felt that Madonna’s liberated vision of life, in part, reflected my own, a life that, because of any number of circumstances or choices, might not involve kids and a family and red brick home, or any of the traditional domestic and spiritual touchstones venerated on Ray of Light. This is not a knock at her, really—life is complicated and filled with phases, something that Madonna’s career has come to symbolize.Maybe, too, it’s nice to have a fantasy of peace after the tumult that is our twenties and thirties, even if it’s mostly just that: a fantasy. I’m certainly not there yet, but it’s perhaps reassuring to hear Madonna—content on the other side of chaos—let us know that all the breakups and late nights and insecurities will someday culminate in stability.
Of course, we know how it ultimately ended. Just one album later, the disco-tinged Music, Madonna would admit to feeling trapped by the quieter life. “I feel like an animal that's, like, ready to be sprung from a cage,” she’d tell The Face at the time of the release of Music, which, with its winking attitude, helped her keep up with the vampy Britney, by then fully ascendant and coming for her crown. “I’ve been living a pretty low-key domestic existence and I miss things.” So much for all that. For a brief shining moment with Ray of Light, Madonna became Her Holiness, the sage of synth pop. And the world heeded the call. | 2017-08-16T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-08-16T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | Warner Bros. | August 16, 2017 | 8.1 | 0a33eeb1-0fab-4d36-8497-e194e3428f1f | Alex Frank | https://pitchfork.com/staff/alex-frank/ | null |
Kelela’s rapturous second album is a masterful display of tension and release, centering queer Black womanhood through blasts of heated dance music and ambient comedowns. | Kelela’s rapturous second album is a masterful display of tension and release, centering queer Black womanhood through blasts of heated dance music and ambient comedowns. | Kelela: Raven | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/kelela-raven/ | Raven | In the six years since the groundbreaking Take Me Apart, Kelela’s vaporous body music has become a singular force. The insatiable allure of new romance, power dynamics that shift like quicksand, celestially minimalist club and R&B: This is the strong gravitational pull of Kelela’s world. Her preternaturally relaxed aura has become such a quietly commanding force that when she went relatively silent on social media after Take Me Apart, fans clung to her occasional, errant likes on social media as crucial signs of life.
But while her music was gaining a life of its own, Kelela herself spent time battling writer’s block, reclaiming her privacy, and re-establishing boundaries. The global pandemic and Black Lives Matter uprisings in 2020 sharpened her intention as she worked: Sick of dealing with the lip service paid to Black women and widespread misogynoir, she studied and reflected on films, essays, and works by academics and artists such as bell hooks, Kandis Williams, and Shaadi Devereaux. She sent a document to colleagues and friends asking what they’re doing to advance Black women and other marginalized people she shares community with; it led to a personal and professional restructuring that Kelela called “an act of self-care.” “Ultimately I’m working to be in alignment with myself. What that has looked like for me is speaking up to make sure I’m in partnership with Black people.”
The period of introspection casts Raven, Kelela’s second full-length, in a newly energized, restorative light. After anatomizing fractured relationships on Take Me Apart, Kelela centers queer Black womanhood through blasts of heated dance music and ambient comedowns. A new calm surrounds her intricate sound, forming an oasis from the problems of everyday life while simultaneously breaking down those problems with clarity. Listening to Raven leaves one breathless at the scope of Kelela’s enveloping music, offering several vantage points from which to witness new, head-spinning takes on R&B.
A roster of electronic producers and kindred spirits bring Raven’s innovative sound to life: Asmara of Nguzunguzu, LSDXOXO, Bambii, Kaytranada, Junglepussy, and more co-conspirators pepper the album with winding rhythms that draw from drum’n’bass, garage, Baltimore club, and further strains of Black electronic music. Built as a continuous mix, the record plays like a night out at a hazy, secluded club whose corners are primed for a heady blend of seduction and epiphanies on the dancefloor. The midpoint highlight “Contact” places Kelela’s delicate melodies over a scuffed jungle beat and warped synths that give way to a Dionysian rush of lust. Raven thrives in those straightforward dance moments: “On the Run” is driven by a dewy dancehall groove, a natural element for Kelela’s self-possessed, sexy come-ons. The breakbeats and brisk guitar that drive “Missed Call,” in line with a spate of artists working with the ’90s club hallmarks recently, give an added charge to the album’s front half.
To establish a more tranquil, soul-bearing afterglow, Kelela recruited OCA, the ambient group comprising Yo van Lenz and Florian T M Zeisig. (She previously included their sparse, abstract music on her 2019 Aquaphoria mixtape, a precursor to Raven’s drifting, pensive moods.) Yo van Lenz and Zeisig limn the album with pockets of reverb and minimalist sound design: On “Divorce,” co-written with Shygirl and the figurative painter Janiva Ellis, glassy synths and a buzzing bassline give Kelela an empty space to fill, delivering one of the most peaceful vocal performances on the album for an expression of brittle self-reflection. The slow-building, dreamlike “Holier,” meanwhile, is submerged in muted, rattling bass, with spare synth notes that weave in and out around Kelela’s clear-eyed resolve: “Though it troubles my heart/Don’t want to cover the scar,” she sings as though floating at zero gravity, “So I go where they hold me down.” It’s one of several instances on the album that speaks to nurturing self-care by standing in and with the community that grounds you when you need it most.
Raven’s lyrics circle images of water, from mist and pouring rain to stormy clouds and dripping sweat. The album’s connective tissue is found in the sound of rushing waves, or a sharp inhalation breath after coming up from the water (“Divorce” even ends with what sounds like the steady beep of a diver’s sonar radar fading out of earshot). For Kelela, water becomes cathartic, almost baptismal. The title track is the album’s panoramic zenith, building on keys and an oscillating synth line: “Through all the labor/A raven is reborn,” she sings, shifting the prophetic symbol of death into one of reinvention. Kelela’s graceful interrogations of her emotions have always been one of her music’s greatest pleasures, but here it leaves a long-lasting impression. The song accelerates into an ecstatic breakdown with fragmented, strident synths and pressurized beats that break through with the rush of a barreling subway car. It’s freeing and exhilarating, a rattling shock to the system that channels a deep well of irresistible power.
Kelela’s command over her voice is more dexterous on Raven, leaning into serpentine, delectable melodies. She metastasizes emotions with subtly complex vocal phrasing and aching background ad-libs, outfitting Raven with a velvety, laidback effortlessness. On the standout two-hander “Closure,” she sings about still holding on to a needling infatuation after being ghosted in an ethereal falsetto over plucked tones and a warped undertow before a guest verse from Newark rapper Rahrah Gabor, who injects the song with a slick, instantly memorable jolt of energy (“You like ’em brown,” Gabor spits, “You ain’t another Clayton Bigsby”). Kelela is a master of tension and release, giving a swift dose of propulsive euphoria before gently ebbing back. The luminous “Sorbet” is the best example of the latter, all slow-motion lust with airy backing vocals and a hypnotic, swirling beat. “Nowhere to go now/Let it melt away,” she pleads as the song reaches its transcendent, reverb-soaked climax.
Raven begins and ends with a sigh. “Washed Away” and “Far Away” are Raven’s axis points, lifted by Kelela’s improvisatory vocals and a resounding synth line that form a beatific prayer. They exemplify the album’s delicately sublime appeal—Kelela’s music is hydration for the soul, seductive and relatable even as she continues to refine and evolve her sound. You can be drawn in by Raven’s all-encompassing atmosphere, but it’s even better to lose your whole self in it.
Listen to our episode on Kelela’s Raven on The Pitchfork Review podcast | 2023-02-13T00:03:00.000-05:00 | 2023-02-13T00:03:00.000-05:00 | Pop/R&B | Warp | February 13, 2023 | 8.4 | 0a34fd15-1d99-490b-bdd9-9050e9066eb5 | Eric Torres | https://pitchfork.com/staff/eric-torres/ | |
On his fifth record since returning from hiatus in 2010, Oval's Markus Popp shows a side of, well, pop to his music that has often dwelled below the surface but never so overtly above it. | On his fifth record since returning from hiatus in 2010, Oval's Markus Popp shows a side of, well, pop to his music that has often dwelled below the surface but never so overtly above it. | Oval: Popp | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22442-popp/ | Popp | With over twenty years of record-making behind him, Oval’s Markus Popp had long established his bona fides as a legend of the strain of electronic music that used to be called IDM. But once he returned in 2010 after a near-ten year absence from recording, he seemed liberated, as if the distance had granted him freedom from the monolithic formula of his first decade of work. With the self-referentially titled Popp, his fifth record since his return, he has delivered his most consistent and well-rounded collection since 2001’s Ovalcommers, showing a side of, well, pop to his music that has often dwelled below the surface but never so overtly above it.
Though it’s only been six years since releasing the double-disc O and Oh EP, Popp represents a third new iteration of the Oval sound since his return from retirement. On those two releases Popp applied new techniques to generating music that lead to tracks that ultimately sounded like brighter, more austere versions of his older records like ‘98’s Szenariodisk. Oval 2.0 came in 2013 in the form of the two self-released, collaborative records Calidostópia! and Voa, which saw Popp break new ground in pairings with a number of South American musicians. Though the uneven results alternated from the “eh” to the sublime (such as on Voa’s incredible “Drift” with Agustín Albrieu, which sounded like Oval plus Thom Yorke-meets-David Sylvain), they represented a big shift in sound and ideas and were his most song-based work since contributing to Gastr del Sol’s final record Camofleur in 1998.
On Popp, he takes things in yet another entirely new direction, one that manages to play with the past in a way that feels entirely interested in the future. Warm, sunny and frenetic, Popp represents his closest play toward actual pop music that Oval (or any of Popp’s other monikers) has ever made, even more so than Calidostópia! and Voa.
Two big factors contributing to the shift in feel of Popp are the use of drums and vocals, albeit sampled. Beginning immediately with album opener “Ai,” Popp lays down a choppy 4/4 rhythm that combines samples and actual drumming into a tower of beat that feels like standing beneath a rainbow-hued waterfall. Around the edges are the clipped coos that lend to an unexpectedly club-like feel. Popp is no longer playing with these sounds to provide texture, but to create a woozily busy form of futuristic dance music.
The rest of the album continues in this way, working hard to create an almost uninterrupted wall of sound. But the best of Popp begins midway through, as he shifts his gaze slowly from house and rave music to classic-era Warp Records IDM. “Ku” has a playful steel drum synth line that would sound at home on any of Plaid’s records, but laid over a storm of beats far busier than they would ever program. Better still is the halycon “Sa,” which channels Tri Repetae and LP5-era Autechre in its use of nagging, industrial machine-like melodies that churn while the song lurches slowly backward and forward to conclusion. Unlike much of Popp, “Sa” builds gently from quiet solemnity to cacophonous, triumphant joy in a way that is both reflective and redemptive.
Popp wraps with the rapturous and sunkissed “Ve,” which somehow stretches out gloriously and seems to end too soon. It’s worth noting that each of Popp's eleven cuts fall between 3:20 to 4:30 minutes long; gone are the 1-2 minute “ringtone” sketches of O or the lengthy drone extensions of past works like 94diskont's classic “Do While.” The focus he displays across the record over its 44 minutes, which never drag, is impressive, and the inspired post-pop composition of Popp easily provides the best argument yet for its creator’s continued relevance, not just as a legend but a creative force in electronic music for the next decade. | 2016-10-25T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-10-25T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic / Experimental | UOVOOO | October 25, 2016 | 7.5 | 0a35e2a2-1bba-4492-b8fd-44b6747c1d37 | Benjamin Scheim | https://pitchfork.com/staff/benjamin-scheim/ | null |
Body/Head is the minimalist duo of ex-Sonic Youth bassist Kim Gordon and experimental guitarist Bill Nace. On their intoxicating first full length, where both play guitar and Gordon sings, the duo treat a limited palette as a challenge, like the straitjacket a magician dons to prove he can break free. | Body/Head is the minimalist duo of ex-Sonic Youth bassist Kim Gordon and experimental guitarist Bill Nace. On their intoxicating first full length, where both play guitar and Gordon sings, the duo treat a limited palette as a challenge, like the straitjacket a magician dons to prove he can break free. | Body/Head: Coming Apart | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/18471-bodyhead-coming-apart/ | Coming Apart | The musical approach Kim Gordon and Bill Nace chose for their duo Body/Head seems intentionally restrictive. Both play only guitar. Their songs are slow and sometimes static, an effect enhanced by the near-total absence of beats (and, in concert, by the slowed-down films projected behind them). Gordon sings mostly in monotone, spreading her words out in a glacial rap or moaning them in a breathy whisper. The mood is similarly confined, sticking to a strident heaviness through serious lyrics and dirge-like guitar.
This limited palette could feel claustrophobic, or just boring. But on Body/Head’s first full-length album Coming Apart, the duo treat it as a challenge, like the straitjacket a magician dons to prove he can break free. (Not coincidentally, the album is named after a 1969 movie set in a single apartment and shot from a single camera angle). In nearly 70 minutes of music over two LPs, Gordon and Nace burrow deep into their narrow sound, mining it for more variety and emotion than it should rightfully hold. The effect is subtle-- at first the music feels aimless, in search of something vague and elusive. But give Coming Apart a few listens, and distinctive shapes emerge. Eventually, the duo’s dedication to a specific point of view becomes intoxicating.
That dedication shows up most strongly in the conversational guitar work of Gordon and Nace (himself a veteran of many excellent collaborations). Oddly, the duo chose to pan their individual sounds to opposite sides of the stereo space. But rather than making them feel disconnected, that tactic gives their interplay a call-and-response synchronicity. When one of them hits repetitive chords or plucks two-note patterns, the other weaves long tones or dense distortion; at other times, one’s left turn into dissonance inspires the other to find melody in the noise. (The chiming quality of that noise sometimes recalls *Evol-*era Sonic Youth, but there are many other evocations in the pair’s timbres.) The timing of these actions and reactions makes Coming Apart surprisingly engaging-- though all 10 pieces were mostly improvised, many have an arc that’s thoughtfully song-like.
Even more engaging is Gordon’s singing, which is as expressive as anything she did in Sonic Youth, and often more so. She stretches out syllables, expands phrases, and melts her voice into the rising guitar lava. At times it seems she’s simply exploring the way words sound, treating them like physical objects sliding up her throat and pouring off her tongue. At other points, the concrete meaning of her lyrics is all that matters. So when her simple yell of the title in “Actress” turns urgent, it suddenly sounds like the most important word in the world.
Gordon’s voice also provides an entry point into tunes, which can otherwise be a bit forbidding. But it’s also easy to get lost in them, much the way the most intense work by Jandek or Scott Walker can take on the quality of a dream. As in dreams, time on Coming Apart becomes a moving target, and sometimes seems to disappear altogether. As a result, these songs often feel longer than they actually are-- but this is the rare case where that’s a strength rather than a weakness.
Still, given the music’s endless feel, closing Coming Apart with its two longest tracks is risky. But Gordon and Nace manage to find new ideas in these elongated settings. 17-minute closer “Frontal” is like an album unto itself, gradually moving from distant echoes to the duo’s most aggressive tones. Its predecessor, “Black”, is even more mesmerizing. It’s ostensibly a cover of the traditional folk song “Black Is the Colour (Of My True Love's Hair)”, but Gordon was likely inspired by one version in particular: the radical take recorded by singer Patty Waters and her free-jazz group in the late 60s.
Gordon doesn’t get as frantic or desperate sounding as Waters; in keeping with the album’s tone, her interpretation is darker and heavier. But it’s just as radical. Waiting almost seven minutes before singing, Gordon reworks simple stanzas into zombie mantras, eventually duetting with herself in a chorus of abstract hums. The re-imagining is typical of her career, which has featured more detours than she’s perhaps been given credit for. Count Coming Apart as another fascinating step in that journey, and Body/Head’s musical path as one that she and Nace will hopefully follow for a long time. | 2013-09-10T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2013-09-10T02:00:01.000-04:00 | Rock | Matador | September 10, 2013 | 7.7 | 0a38e1be-a450-4d35-927b-500913b61144 | Marc Masters | https://pitchfork.com/staff/marc-masters/ | null |
The 1975’s second album has a much more distinct and iconoclastic character than their slick debut, drawing from the effervescent polish of early ’80s Hot 100 pop. | The 1975’s second album has a much more distinct and iconoclastic character than their slick debut, drawing from the effervescent polish of early ’80s Hot 100 pop. | The 1975: I like it when you sleep, for you are so beautiful yet so unaware of it | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21412-i-like-it-when-you-sleep-for-you-are-so-beautiful-yet-so-unaware-of-it/ | I like it when you sleep, for you are so beautiful yet so unaware of it | Last November, the 1975 frontman Matt Healy took shots at Justin Bieber’s “What Do You Mean?” “‘When you nod your head yes but you wanna say no’—can we stop talking about girls who don’t know what they want?” he despaired. “Can we stop talking about nothingness? No one’s asking you to inspire a revolution, but inspire something.” Like some of his provocative Manchester forebears, Healy has a giant mouth on him, but unlike them, he doesn’t seem interested in tearing others down, just demanding more. This neurotic want drives his music, which in turn inspires wildly conflicting feelings: fervent adoration on one end, intense rage at the other.
The ire directed at the 1975’s very existence seems odd, considering their self-titled 2013 debut was basically inoffensive pop-rock pitched somewhere between Phoenix, the Strokes, and Jimmy Eat World. But there is something deeper at work in the objections, and Healy’s rebuke of Bieber provides a hint: Although the group approaches their work with a level of ambition and self-seriousness usually reserved for rock bands like, say, Radiohead—The 1975 is 16 songs long, with three ambient interludes, including a glacial choral opener called “The 1975”—they have the look, feel, and requisite huge teen girl fanbase of a boy band.
Pure pop has been a cool palette for left-field artists to play around with for a few years now, but the boy band model has remained terminally uncool. Hurts are maybe as close as it’s come; if PC Music really want to be transgressive, perhaps they should give it a shot. Even One Direction tried to escape the genre’s sanitized connotations toward the end of their existence, when they were allowed to manifest a little authorship along with their stadium rock dreams. The 1975 don’t wear matching suits or sell branded trinkets to the under-10s, yet after years of playing to nobody, they became a boy band by virtue of a voracious social media fanbase—not that they seemed happy about it at first. Once they realized the extent of their audience’s adulation—and indignation when they reshot the monochrome video for “Sex” in full color after signing to a major—they played around with them, pulling disappearing acts and refashioning their iconography.
Everything about I like it when you sleep, for you are so beautiful yet so unaware of it indicates that the 1975 have embraced girl love, color, and their boy band potential. Healy likes to talk about his band as a post-modern project that creates as people consume, but this ultimately isn't that radical when it comes to pop music, always the magpie. When you sleep… has a much more distinct and iconoclastic character than their slick debut, drawing from the effervescent, percolating polish of early ’80s Hot 100 pop that they flirted with on “Heart Out.” Single “Love Me,” for instance, flagrantly splices Bowie’s “Fame” and “Fashion.” The resemblance to acts like Scritti Politti, INXS, the Police, and Hall and Oates also makes it feel like the X-rated cousin of Taylor Swift’s 1989 and Carly Rae Jepsen’s E•mo•tion—despite Healy’s brash exterior, his primary mode is lovelorn and yearning.
That doesn’t mean that When you sleep… is consistent by any stretch. It’s 75 minutes long, which could mostly be solved by trimming the four (!) lengthy ambient tracks on the record. It opens with a darker reworking of “The 1975” (!!) that evokes Sigur Rós; “Lostmyhead” sounds like M83; the title track Bon Iver and Everything Ecstatic–era Four Tet. Their stab at emulating Brian Eno’s “The Big Ship” is pretty good, except that it is called “Please Be Naked” (!!!). But, man: when compared to the UK’s current crop of milquetoast electro-balladeers, the 1975’s unabashed pomp and seeming imperviousness to ridicule make you want to kiss them.
It helps, too, that When you sleep… can be enormous fun. “She’s American” is all slap-bass fizz and clenched-fist vocal delivery; “The Sound” is pumping, uber-camp piano house. Although their sound is clean-cut, Healy’s lyrics are anything but: On the debut, Healy was coke-addled and fucked up, but When you sleep… finds him trying to reform, a process hobbled by the circumstances of his new superstar life. Like a lot of When you sleep…, his lyrics dip perilously from inspiring to embarrassing. For every neatly zeitgeist-capturing couplet like, “I’m just with my friends online and there’s things we’d like to change,” from “Love Me,” there's something like, “Caught up in fashion—Karcrashian panache and a bag of bash for passion” from the same song, which only makes Healy sound like the trustafarian street poet that he already slightly resembles.
“Love Me” is nothing, though, compared to its counterpart, “Loving Someone,” which will vindicate anyone who decided to hate the 1975 on principle. Musically it’s an outlier—it has the sweet, compressed insectlike burble of Baths or Bibio, and is the most synthetic thing here. Healy switches from singing to sort-of rapping, Lily Allen–style, in forensic, anguished detail about the superficial example that the world shows to young people. Steady yourself: “Charlatan telepathy exploiting insecurity and praying on the purity of grief and its simplicity/But I know that maybe I’m too skeptical/Even Guy Debord needed spectacles/You see, I’m the Greek economy of cashing intellectual cheques and I’m trying to progress/But instead of selling sex, I think I should be loving someone.” It’s like something Neil Tennant might have written if he had embraced the ludicrousness of mid-’80s pop instead of subverting it, and thank God he did.
Dropping Debord’s Society of the Spectacle is a massive “look at me!” clanger, but Healy substantiates the song’s agonies with unvarnished accounts of how he’s fallen prey to these pressures. He often sings about his mental health: “Ugh!” is West Coast funk R&B lite about addiction, while “The Ballad of Me and My Brain” is pure stadium Sting in which he searches for his mind; he figures he might have left it in a supermarket, where it’s “flirting with the girls.” He searches for a higher power on “If I Believe You,” a Biblical, Michael Jackson–indebted slow jam gilded with a gospel choir. The closing lines are silly on paper—“If I’m lost, then how can I find myself?”—but buried in Autre Ne Veut–style ecclesiastical synth washes, his earnestness becomes surprisingly affecting.
In “Loving Someone,” Healy asked who would “show the kids that they matter.” It’s a trite line, but unlike so much “be yrself” Hot 100 pop, the 1975 never coddles the listener; instead, they respect their audience by believing them to be capable of handling everything they sing about, from coke psychosis to dead grandmothers (“Nana”) and post-natal depression (“She Lays Down”). They give them the credit to find the Easter Eggs hidden in their music, from melodies that echo old material (“The Sound” calls back to “She Way Out”) to sequels of first album situations (“A Change of Heart” follows on from “Robbers”). Perhaps their greatest tribute is that the 1975, despite being in their mid-twenties, are just like them: messy, earnest, vulnerable, unedited, gaudy. For Britain’s biggest young guitar band to ditch laddy machismo, embrace the boy band ideal, and run on feeling rather than posturing—that feels kind of radical. When you sleep… can be far too much, but it’s not cynical. | 2016-02-25T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2016-02-25T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Dirty Hit / Interscope | February 25, 2016 | 6.5 | 0a39fa31-c686-42a0-a2a0-bcd311565741 | Laura Snapes | https://pitchfork.com/staff/laura-snapes/ | |
The upstart English pop-punk star’s second album buries his charm in clumsy genre experimentation, clichéd lyrics, and unearned bluster. | The upstart English pop-punk star’s second album buries his charm in clumsy genre experimentation, clichéd lyrics, and unearned bluster. | YUNGBLUD: Weird! | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/yungblud-weird/ | Weird! | At first glance, Doncaster, England native Yungblud has all the makings of a rock star. Twenty-three-year-old Dominic Harrison looks like an approachable yet high-fashion weirdo, using the magnetic appeal of pop-punk to speak to the troubles of an anxious generation. His first album, 2018’s 21st Century Liability (which followed a brief stint on the Disney Channel), employed the Twenty One Pilots model of using hip-hop elements to discuss mental health in varying shades of cynicism. But it was an energetic debut delivered with exhilarating recalcitrance, and Yungblud began amassing a loyal following that calls itself the Black Hearts Club (or BHC for short). His second album, Weird!, feels like an ode to his audience of self-identified misfits, but it isn’t as boundary-pushing as his look—and too often, it’s a shallow imitation of more popular songs you’re already tired of. Pop-punk isn’t dead, but Yungblud’s charm gets buried.
It’s a problem unique to his music: In interviews and on social media, Yungblud is forthcoming about his own struggles; he addresses fans intimately, with a palpable, infectious excitement that mirrors his increasing popularity. What’s missing is the connection between Yungblud’s amiability and his actual songs. Instead of thoughtfulness, Weird! delivers the type of third-eye-opening phrases that your middle-school boyfriend might have texted you after his very first beer: “Not gonna waste my life, ’cause I’ve been fucked up/’Cause it doesn’t matter.” It’s almost impressive how Yungblud manages to reduce serious topics to Hallmark Channel clichés, like on the acoustic ballad “mars,” which attempts to sensitively convey the story of a transgender fan with a rehash of David Bowie’s “Life on Mars?” and original lines like, “Yeah, this story told too many times, it makes me sad.”
Musically, Yungblud is swallowed by his own penchant for maximalism, screeching unintelligible phrases over crashing drums with unearned punk bluster. He co-opts distinctive sounds from all over the map, but he doesn’t really know what to do with them: “acting like that” is a less catchy version of Metro Station’s “Shake It,” “superdeadfriends” combines a poor impression of the Beastie Boys with a reference to Frank Ocean’s “Super Rich Kids,” and “cotton candy” is just Post Malone’s “Circles” with higher sugar content. The shoddy genre experimentation quickly grows frustrating, replacing Yungblud’s unique bombast and earnestness with intrusive questions about where you’ve heard that song before. It’s harder to care about Weird! when the album is busy reminding you how great Channel Orange is.
A really good pop-punk lyric creates a liberating rush of kinship, puts angry, honest words to that gross feeling you’ve been hiding: Think of Tom DeLonge crying out, “Where are you?/And I’m so sorry,” or Joyce Manor’s Barry Johnson floundering through life until he finally spews out, “One perfect night’s not enough/It’s just a constant headache.” The uncreative homages that clog up Weird! also blunt Yungblud’s star power, but he is capable of this type of vulnerable lyricism when he puts his mind to it on “it’s quiet in beverly hills.” By comparison to the rest of the album, the emotional effect is jarring: Yungblud’s voice shifts to the sort of tenderness you reserve for intimate conversations with close friends, and an acoustic guitar twangs lovingly underneath. Sounding a bit rueful, he sings, “I don’t want them to believe that I am different.”
It’s the album’s most honest moment: Yungblud without the bravado, just a regular, insecure 23-year-old in search of acceptance. This is the embarrassing universal truth smothered by the rest of his loud attempts to convince his listeners that he’s strange and proud. Yungblud has all the tools in hand—a loyal following, a fan’s clear love of music, and a beguiling ease in the public eye. If he knew how to use them, he wouldn’t have to work so hard.
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Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2020-12-17T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2020-12-17T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Locomotion / Interscope | December 17, 2020 | 5.5 | 0a39fe91-3049-44f6-8fe3-7c55994aeaca | Ashley Bardhan | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ashley-bardhan/ | |
After a 12-year absence, the singer-songwriter returns with a raw, unadorned celebration of survival. | After a 12-year absence, the singer-songwriter returns with a raw, unadorned celebration of survival. | Nina Nastasia: Riderless Horse | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/nina-nastasia-riderless-horse/ | Riderless Horse | Note: This review includes details of suicide and abuse.
Nina Nastasia’s cryptic lyrics used to read like horrible mysteries she warned against solving, protecting the listener by sparing the details. “We never talked about the thing we witnessed,” she sang on the opening lines of 2003’s Run to Ruin, honoring that silence by lasting the entire album without elaborating. Where other songwriters’ power came from specifics, Nastasia drew hers from obfuscation.
On Riderless Horse, her first album after a 12-year absence, she’s no longer disguising the traumas she’s writing about. As she now discusses openly, for more than two decades she was in an abusive relationship with her late manager and creative partner Kennan Gudjonsson, which degraded to such a degree that she eventually retreated not just from music but from the world. “We didn’t want anyone to see how ugly things could get, so we increasingly isolated from our friends and family,” she wrote in a statement accompanying the album. For a time she was all but confined to the small New York City studio apartment they shared.
Gudjonsson had been there quite literally from the beginning of her career (that’s him alongside her on the cover of her 2000 debut Dogs, which he helped finance). He introduced her to producer Steve Albini, who became her go-to collaborator and one of her biggest evangelists. Gudjonsson’s fingerprints are all over her first six records, from the funeral accordion accompaniments to the haunted string accents—all his creative decisions, Nastasia says. It’s a variation of a story that’s played out with sickening frequency throughout music history: He helped her realize the greatness he saw in her. He also controlled and abused her.
In January 2020, Nastasia left him. The next day he died by suicide. That’s more grief and trauma than one album could ever process, so Riderless Horse doesn’t try to be the definitive account. Instead, over its unadorned 34 minutes, it simply documents why she had to leave—and sometimes, in the process, why she stayed. In plainspoken lyrics, with only her sparse, acoustic guitar accompanying her, she captures not only their fights (although she says Gudjonsson was never physically abusive, these songs are thick with images of bruises, blood, and broken bones) but also moments of tranquility and tenderness. “I will go with you wherever/Digging holes for buried treasure/End the day with just our dirty feet,” she sings with unexpected affection on “Blind as Batsies.” She’s volunteered herself for a delicate task, memorializing the man she loved while exposing his demons.
There’s a way you expect an album born of these circumstances to play: fragile, grief-stricken, almost oppressively sad. But Riderless Horse rarely lingers on pain. More often the album is a celebration of survival, with Nastasia occasionally sounding euphoric about her new sense of freedom. “Oh, the water is fine and I feel like I’m happy for the first time,” she beams on “Lazy Road,” one of several hopeful, soft-picked folk tunes. Decades of cramped existence in New York have done nothing to curb her gift for conjuring the boundless skylines and inviting back porches of Appalachia.
The album never breaks its focus on Nastasia’s voice, which is as raw and radiant as ever. On “You Were So Mad,” it soars with defiant fury. Albini’s lovingly bare production remains, but all the embellishments of its predecessors—the nocturnal accordions, the skeletal drums, and cautionary strings—have been peeled away, as if to underscore Gudjonsson’s absence. She doesn’t need them. Riderless Horse is Nastasia’s seventh album, but in a sense it’s a debut. For all its anguish, it’s underpinned by the joyful realization that she’s finally free to record on her own terms.
If you are experiencing suicidal thoughts or know someone who is, we recommend these resources:
National Suicide Prevention Lifeline
http://www.suicidepreventionlifeline.org
988 | 2022-07-29T00:02:00.000-04:00 | 2022-07-29T00:02:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Temporary Residence Ltd. | July 29, 2022 | 7.8 | 0a406c0a-f98f-4af0-9be1-32499a19864a | Evan Rytlewski | https://pitchfork.com/staff/evan-rytlewski/ | |
Buoyed by a fresh coat of synths and a streamlined energy, the Decemberists’ latest is a curious middle-of-the-road album, teasing a number of directions without committing to any of them. | Buoyed by a fresh coat of synths and a streamlined energy, the Decemberists’ latest is a curious middle-of-the-road album, teasing a number of directions without committing to any of them. | The Decemberists: I’ll Be Your Girl | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/the-decemberists-ill-be-your-girl/ | I’ll Be Your Girl | Late on I’ll Be Your Girl, there’s “Rusalka, Rusalka / The Wild Rushes,” a narrative suite based on an old Slavic parable about a mermaid who seduces men only to trick them into drowning. Over eight minutes brimming with dramatic tension and florid prose, Colin Meloy profiles two victims, one a willing sacrifice aroused by his fate, the other naïve and unsuspecting. “Your brow tressed in flowers, pale in a liminal moon,” he sings, setting up each death with the patience of a master storyteller, relishing the suspense until the track finally erupts into fits of grandiose, polyphonic folk.
The Decemberists used to live for these sorts of epic, carefully scripted flights of historical fantasy. A decade ago the band might have even dedicated an entire album to this murderous mermaid—you can almost hear the Baltic instrumentation and picture the lithographed cover art—but here the song is just a pit stop on an album that otherwise avoids the excesses of yore. Since hitting peak fancifulness on 2009’s The Hazards of Love, the Decemberists have streamlined their music into something more direct and less fussy. Rather than carry on like the world’s most overqualified LARP convention house band, they’ve adopted a nomadic approach, running with whatever muse that presents itself at the moment. It’s a bittersweet tradeoff: They had to evolve to keep things fresh, even though whatever they do next is unlikely to be quite as memorable as what came before.
Even more so than the two albums that preceded it, I’ll Be Your Girl is a grab bag, teasing a number of directions without committing to any of them. As part of their drive to shake things up, the band subbed out longtime producer Tucker Martine for John Congleton, an indie ringer and chameleon who feeds on sonic extremes. It’s not the most natural fit—his best projects, like his bristly collaborations with Xiu Xiu, St. Vincent, and Swans or his own unnerving albums with Paper Chase, have more of an edge to them than anything in the Decemberists’ catalogue—but pairing him with a fellow music obsessive like Meloy presents some intriguing possibilities. If any combo can conjure an aesthetic that's novel and specific, it should be this one.
The record presents its boldest idea upfront, with a run of opening tracks that tease a potentially radical synth-rock reinvention for the group. Meloy has cited New Order and Depeche Mode as influences, but the vast, rolling synthesizers on “Once in My Life” are closer in spirit to Berlin’s “Take My Breath Away” or Pretty in Pink-era Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark, reference points that aren’t nearly as glamorous on paper but are far more interesting in execution. For a while, there’s an almost subversive thrill in hearing those gaudy, artificial synthesizers bleed through the group’s once folky, acoustic sound. Within a few songs, though, the shock of the new wears off, and the band begins to default to familiar influences. Three consecutive songs give off strong whiffs of R.E.M.: “Severed” (it’s got a moody, “Driver 8” sort of vibe), “Starwatcher” (very Document), and “Tripping Along” (the album’s Automatic for the People moment).
I’ll Be Your Girl is intermittently political in its own way, even though beyond the special thanks to Special Counsel Robert Mueller tucked into the liner notes, it only addresses politics in the broadest sense. Instead, Meloy captures the general frustration that the world is just kind of shitty right now. “For once in my life…could just something go right?” he sings, invoking the first of the album's many Charlie Brown-isms. He takes that same chipper nihilism to silly extremes on the record’s most confounding inclusions: a pair of “fuck everything” anthems inexplicably executed like kids songs. The sickly sweet “Everything is Awful” is basically a novelty romp—Meloy’s answer, perhaps, to that manic theme from The Lego Movie—while “We All Die Young” sets a dopey Jock Jams beat to a Kidz Bop cheer-along.
Taken on their own, those songs aren’t too much of a stretch. Plenty of Decemberists fans have aged into parenthood, and it’s really not hard to imagine a future where like They Might Be Giants, another favorite of the “Wait Wait... Don’t Tell Me!” set, they begin recording kids albums. Judging
from I’ll Be Your Girl, they’d probably be great at it. But the fact that they’ve basically sandwiched a
couple of kids tunes into the same album as a suite about a killer sex mermaid only highlights how confused and directionless this band is right now. Where they once specialized in meticulously plotted albums, now they mostly seem to be winging it. They’re still making some alluring music, yet their albums have never sounded more disjointed. | 2018-03-19T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-03-19T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Capitol | March 19, 2018 | 6.1 | 0a44ca42-c115-47de-8e77-9e416858822d | Evan Rytlewski | https://pitchfork.com/staff/evan-rytlewski/ | |
On Big Bossin Vol. 1, Detroit underground hero and Texas-based producer Cardo Got Wings work together to make a smooth, technicolor tribute to classic LA gangster rap. | On Big Bossin Vol. 1, Detroit underground hero and Texas-based producer Cardo Got Wings work together to make a smooth, technicolor tribute to classic LA gangster rap. | Payroll Giovanni / Cardo: Big Bossin Vol. 1 | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21981-big-bossin-vol-1/ | Big Bossin Vol. 1 | If Detroit underground hero Payroll Giovanni and Minnesota-born, Texas-based producer Cardo Got Wings swerved any further West on Big Bossin’ Vol 1, they’d splash down into the Pacific. The pair’s panoramic portrait of a mid-level hustler leans so heavily on classic LA gangster rap, Bay Area hyphy and hood movie mythology, it’s impossible to picture these narratives taking place anywhere else but California. Call it Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas music—a nostalgic throwback to a time when pop culture was loaded with images of palm-treed pavements, side-held pistols and fingers curled into a ‘W’ that comfortably files alongside Kendrick Lamar and DJ Mustard’s modernized takes. Chance the Rapper’s gospel-swathed Coloring Book has been called the sound of the summer, but it’s *Big Bossin’ Vol 1 *that’ll fill the Lowriders with octane.
Payroll’s a member of Doughboyz Cashout, whose contract with Jeezy’s CTE World imprint has more or less come to nothing, but the group has countered the stasis with concrete-tough mixtapes that bite like the Michigan winter. On Big Bossin’ Vol 1, Cardo brings in the sun. Behind the boards on all 18 tracks, his beats are built to feel like westside classics, with melodic synthesizers, silky vocoders, sour whistles, James Worthy-sized handclaps and female background vocals.
The emcee proves the perfect foil for Cardo’s grooves. His relaxed flow is slowed a couple of knots as he sinks into the beats, evoking the swagger of Too $hort and the smoothness of the late Mac Dre–if the two West Coast legends had been compelled to rap about selling drugs on every song. Pitching himself as a rags-to-riches neighborhood baron, Payroll chronicles a life of drug deals, bright jewels and warm pistols. But Big Bossin’ Vol 1 is more self-aware pastiche than hard-boiled realism. There’s no creeping menace, ten crack commandments, or cutting moral center.
The outline might be familiar, but Payroll brings his own literary deftness. His fluid rapping is matched with a close eye for detail and sharp turn of phrase. “Sell Something” sees him lay out an origin story as he recalls finding an eighth-ounce of cocaine at age 15: “It was like the crack gods were like, ‘Here young dog’,” he spits wryly. On “Day in the Life,” he recycles the concept of Ice Cube’s “It Was a Good Day,” replacing the basketball games and Goodyear Blimp with police sightings and handguns. Moving from the mundanity of his morning routine, to the tension of almost gunning down two innocents, Payroll’s storytelling paints pictures in clear technicolor.
“Successful” is the clearest iteration of Payroll and Cardo’s collaborative sparkle. The beatmaker recycles the opulent keys and fat bassline previously gifted to Nef the Pharaoh on pop number “Betta Run.” In Payroll’s hands, it’s reimagined as a brash hustler’s anthem. The rapper plays the grinning Don, laying out by his pool in the Cali sun, counting the fruits of the come-up. It’s a sound as timeless as a Bukowski novel; as iconic as the Hollywood sign. Together, the duo have coaxed out their respective strengths on Big Bossin’ Vol 1. At a time when the West is enjoying a creative surge, a couple of young outsiders are helping to carry the weight. | 2016-06-06T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-06-06T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | self-released | June 6, 2016 | 8 | 0a44fe98-c991-4fc3-8427-c12378164ef8 | Dean Van Nguyen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/dean-van nguyen/ | null |
On their third LP, Moon Duo make psychedelia for the city, with even its more ascendant moments coated by a thin veil of industrial grit. | On their third LP, Moon Duo make psychedelia for the city, with even its more ascendant moments coated by a thin veil of industrial grit. | Moon Duo: Shadow of the Sun | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/20316-shadow-of-the-sun/ | Shadow of the Sun | Psychedelia has two speeds: Either it elevates you into an altered consciousness, or it lulls you to sleep like so much television static. With Shadow of the Sun, their third full-length effort, Moon Duo often approach the former state, and only occasionally slip into the latter. Singer-guitarist Ripley Johnson and singer-keyboardist Sanae Yamada are joined on record by drummer John Jeffrey, and the consistent use of live drums—Jeffrey was only added to the band’s full-time roster after their 2013 European Tour—does a lot to imbue the winding, floating sound with some physical power.
Although Shadow of the Su**n is rooted in psychedelia, there are elements of proto-punk all over it, darkening the songs and making them more human. "Wilding", the album's standout opening track, resembles one of Jonathan Richman’s more uptempo songs, tinged with a tinny Haight-Ashbury tambourine and some wigged-out synths. Johnson’s solos, which can occasionally wander, are concise and focused here, setting an energetic stage for what’s to come.
Shadow of the Sun is psych for the city, and even in its more ascendant moments, a thin veil of industrial grit, leaning towards krautrock, keeps the record from ever really floating skyward. Their last LP, 2012’s Ralph Waldo Emerson-inspired Circles, hinted at a relationship to nature. But unlike fellow drugged-out craftsmen Brightblack Morning Light, whose hazy, shimmering songs are all palo santo and desert light, Moon Duo’s creepy synths and razor-sharp guitars never venture into more magical realms.
None of the songs on Shadow of the Sun sound new, but the familiar sounds create an atmosphere of safety that allows the more unexpected elements of the record all the more noteworthy. Occasionally, as on "Night Beat" and "Zero", the synths reach horror-movie levels, toeing the line between new wave and pure camp. The riff to "Slow Down Low" is more Bethany Cosentino than Jerry Garcia, and the song’s precise, languid gentleness accomplishes what psych does at its best; it transports the listener to that place just outside of reality, where it’s ok to drop out and just float for awhile. It’s a shame that this effect isn’t more consistent throughout Shadow of the Sun, but in the moments when the campy, dirge-like darkness lifts, it shines bright. | 2015-03-04T01:00:02.000-05:00 | 2015-03-04T01:00:02.000-05:00 | Rock | Sacred Bones | March 4, 2015 | 6.6 | 0a477406-2bbd-4a1e-962a-d145f49afe97 | Maud Deitch | https://pitchfork.com/staff/maud-deitch/ | null |
Sirens is a thoughtful study in contrasts, both musical and political. It's only Nicolas Jaar's second LP, but it is the mark of an enduring electronic composer. | Sirens is a thoughtful study in contrasts, both musical and political. It's only Nicolas Jaar's second LP, but it is the mark of an enduring electronic composer. | Nicolás Jaar: Sirens | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22444-sirens/ | Sirens | There are only about 45 seconds left on Nicolas Jaar’s new album Sirens when something astounding happens. Heralded by a selection of drums and birdcall synths, a gospel cry arrives, shrouded in distortion and punctuated by sharp arrhythmic drumming. The most useful words to describe this are the silliest and most hyperbolic: awesome, transcendent, timeless or more accurately, out-of-time. It begs for pretension, for the vocabulary of divinity and “high art,” for references to religious philosophers and poets of the West that you barely remember from college, Milton and Kierkegaard, Eliot and Blake. And though there are many similarly striking moments on Sirens, this one stands out for its brevity and particular beauty. It is a moment thoroughly earned by the album that precedes it, and in less than a minute, it’s gone.
This moment—a supernova flash of prodigious skill—can be seen as something of a stand-in for Jaar’s career to date. In 2011, when Jaar was just 21, he released his debut album, Space Is Only Noise**, introducing a downtempo combination of psychedelia and dance music that vaulted him into the vanguard of the world’s electronic artists. The record came alive in a room, its amorphous body emerging from the stereo, its limbs unfolding into every corner. His ability to conjure up what seemed like an extra dimension in his music made you aware of the tautology: space was noise, but he made noise seem like space.
The next year Jaar revealed the depth of his talent for collage with his Essential Mix for BBC Radio 1. These mixes are often superlative, but his felt more personal than most, even as it showcased his interest in referencing the texts of others. In one of many sophisticated in-jokes, Jaar, who is Chilean-American, introduced the operative sample from Jay Z’s “My 1st Song,” with Jay Z’s own voice. That vocal prepared listeners to hear the Black Album* *closer before Jaar dropped the original version, “Tu y Tu Mirar, Yo y Mi Cancion,” by the Chilean band, Los Ángeles Negros, in its place. The mix was filled with moments like these—jam-packed with allusions but still absorbing for those who didn’t catch the references.
And then, Jaar shrank away from center stage. In 2013, he started his own label, Other People, partly to foster the careers of his musician friends. Jaar is a generous collaborator—artists like Dave Harrington, his partner in the duo Darkside, have been eager to credit his willingness to help them with their own work. But the instinct to work with others may not have been purely selfless. Jaar felt enormous pressure to replicate his early success. In an interview with Pitchfork in 2013, he confessed that he was scared of releasing music that wasn’t up to those standards:
“For the first five years of making music, I did it because I had fun,” he said. “When it started to get real, I was like, ‘Now if I put out something else and it's not as good as what I did before, people will start thinking I suck.’”
So Jaar produced others’ projects and made critically acclaimed records with Harrington under the Darkside moniker. But slowly, over the last two years, he’s been creeping back toward the microphone, using his own name. First there were some extraordinary singles. Then, last summer’s Pomegranates, a slippery alternate soundtrack to an old Russian film. Then *Nymphs—*an uncollected EP, maybe?—excellent, but difficult to evaluate holistically.
*Sirens *represents a full reemergence, as close as he may ever get to kicking over the mic stand. He doesn't reveal many new tricks, but his knowledge of his own palette is masterful in every moment. More poetic and thoughtful than ever before, Jaar maintains an ability to fit seemingly disparate sounds together as if they were always meant to find each other. Add the strands of political expression that are gathered on *Sirens, *often cloaked in odd textures, in Spanish, or in cryptic lyrics, and you have a record as compelling as any of Jaar’s other works.
It opens with the track “Killing Time,” which feels like entering a labyrinth, or maybe a pyramid, something forbidding and funereal. The sound of a flag waves in the wind, keys like jagged wind chimes shatter on the floor. Nico is patient, but understands the need for progression, and though slower songs like this may linger in silence or briefly lavish attention on a particular effect, riff, or drum sound, they never stop moving.
“Killing Time,” is silent, respectful, matching its lyrics (“We were just waiting…”) And then “The Governor” which shares a post-punk edge with another song, “Three Sides of Nazareth,” jolts the record into sudden motion. Those two tracks, with their driving rhythms and clear lyrics, are the easiest to glom on to on first listen. The words are more or less affixed to the music, in contrast with other tracks like “Killing Time” and parts of “No,” where lyrics seem to dwell in the spacious labyrinth evoked by the sound. On those tracks, you’re never sure exactly where you’re going to stumble upon a sudden string of words, of thoughts.
"The Governor" is fast and loud and urgent. When I listened to it out of sequence, I wondered whether those qualities were imposed on “The Governor” because it's only fast and loud and urgent in comparison to “Killing Time,” or whether it actually is those things. These are the kind of thoughts that psychedelia provokes at its best, and Jaar adores these puzzles. It’s his obsession with setting up dichotomies and resolving them that places him firmly in a Western tradition. He’s able to work a kind of alchemy upon the raw elements of his music, making one thing into its polar opposite: hard into soft, ugly into pretty, slow into fast. Like the word “sirens” itself, (the ancient temptress, the modern alarms), his music is able to evoke opposing ideas at the same time.
These contradictions give Sirens its strength, particularly during the album’s centerpiece, the song "No." It’s the only segment of music on the digital version of the album that includes a musical element not written, recorded, performed, mixed, and produced by Nico. (It’s a Chilean harp piece, “Lagrimas,” by Sergio Cuevas.) This section helps us to understand the mystery at the heart of Sirens, represented by the line of Spanish lyrics adorning its cover. The end of “Leaves,” the entirety of “No,” and the beginning of “Three Sides of Nazareth,” orbit around two conversations. The first seems to be a recording of a young Nico speaking with his father, the artist Alfredo Jaar. They discuss a statue being attacked by lions.
The words of “No” are in Spanish, and they contain the second discussion, which serves as a parable that illuminates the first. An unhappy neighbor approaches Nico, and they discuss multiple contradictions—the far and the near, the inside and the outside. But the core of their conversation are the words from Sirens’ cover: “Ya dijimos no pero el si esta en todo.” This translates as: “We already said no but the yes is in everything,” a reference to the Chilean national plebiscite, a 1988 referendum on democracy in the country. In the referendum, on whether Chile should continue to be ruled by General Augusto Pinochet, who had seized power about 15 years earlier, voting “no” was voting “yes” to democracy.
But if, as Jaar sings, “The yes is in everything,” the idea is that we don’t need to see the future to know that nothing ever really changes, that the cycle continues whether you vote for democracy or not. In turn, it suggests that the statue under discussion between little Nico and Alfredo, (whose own complicated politics are worth noting) could very well have been of Salvador Allende, who Pinochet ousted.
There are plenty of extraordinary references on Sirens that I’m sure I missed. But, as with the Essential Mix, as with any collage, being ignorant of any of these things hardly lessens the weight of the music. What you pick up from the album is a real suspicion of power*, *from “The Governor” (“All the blood’s hidden in the governor’s trunk”) to “Killing Time” (“Money, it seems, needs its working class.”) And at the same time, Nico, through the music, exercises his own power, pulling on his listeners and compelling them to move, dance, think, and engage with one another, or sometimes to sit silently and take it all in.
Nico's aversion to authority reaches a climax with that last track, “History Lesson,” which ends with those 45 transcendent seconds that I’m still failing to put into words. “History Lesson” takes its cues from old soul and doo-wop, like the Beach Boys at their most psychedelic. Think “Feel Flows” and those unfolding, enveloping missiles of soul.
The music on “History Lesson” is almost laughably gentle at first, and Jaar employs a trick favored by both John Lennon (“Run for Your Life”) and Paul McCartney (“Maxwell’s Silver Hammer”), juxtaposing inviting music with disturbing lyrics. Here’s how his history lesson starts: “Chapter one: We fucked up/Chapter two: We did it again, and again, and again, and again/Chapter three: We didn’t say sorry.” And so on. The words are a harsh rebuke of any political system. But the music is tender. And the track is bleak and funny, and naïve and wise, and political and personal. It feels like everything all at once. It feels like Sirens. | 2016-09-29T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-09-29T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Other People | September 29, 2016 | 8.7 | 0a4b00e8-79b3-439a-8cbe-0b12121aa68f | Jonah Bromwich | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jonah-bromwich/ | null |
America's boldest pop star once again crafts a solo album that veers between the vanguard and the insipid. | America's boldest pop star once again crafts a solo album that veers between the vanguard and the insipid. | Gwen Stefani: The Sweet Escape | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/9703-the-sweet-escape/ | The Sweet Escape | Is there another mainstream pop star who flits between lights-on likeability and pouty-lipped empty vesseldom as dramatically or frequently as Gwen Stefani? In the three years since abandoning the MTV rock ghetto she inhabited with No Doubt, and her subsequent self-reinvention as a certifiable pop celeb and fashionplate mogul, she's been doing wind sprints between these two incompatible personae. Nonetheless, since going solo with 2004's patchy but single-rich Love.Angel.Music.Baby., Stefani's remained above the fray of the ongoing clusterfuck between commerce and art-- and she's done it by brand-building in both the abstract sense (via her quest for pop cultural memes) and in the more traditional sense (with her clothing line L.A.M.B. scoring bonus cross-promotional hits with every in-song mention).
Of course, Stefani also deserves credit for her gutsy musical choices. The spazzy, overcaffeinated electro of past singles like "What You Waiting For?" and the sparse drumline squibbles of "Hollaback Girl" suggest she's not content to merely rack up hits; she also wants her game to be the freshest around. That's a desirable instinct in a pop star, and despite her predilection for hijacking what feels like every single empty space on The Sweet Escape to play her own hypegirl ("How sick is this?" she beams in the intro to "Breakin' Up", minutes before declaring "Don't Get It Twisted" "the most craziest shit ever"), her single-minded interest in smuggling the weirdest sounds onto TRL results in some of The Sweet Escape's finest moments.
Case in point: Lead single "Wind It Up", which wraps a "Lonely Goatherd" yodel sample from Stefani's beloved The Sound of Music around a wriggly Neptunes beat. As mainstream singles go, it's an absurd-sounding concoction that skates perilously close to the edge of utter ridiculousness, but something about the sheer nerviness of the idea ultimately sees it through. If I had to guess at a single from this year that eventually ingratiated itself to the highest number of first-time haters, this would probably be it, and in Stefani's world, that's like the Holy Grail. Unlike most pop singers, Stefani aims to win you over with oddity. (There's a reason Alice in Wonderland was her last album's most recurrant theme.)
It's a high-risk, high-reward strategy, but most of The Sweet Escape's other gonzo pop songs yield some degree of payout. "Now That You Got It" surfs on a loping hip-hop beat and a staccato piano sample while Stefani splits wailing time with a chorus of alarms. The Neptunes-produced "Yummy" earns Best Song status by moving from a skeletal rhythmic backbone and resounding "Milkshake"-pinching triangle hit into a spiralling melody line that sounds like a Sherman Brothers outtake. Also, "Don't Get It Twisted" sounds like reggaeton-polka.
Thing is, it takes real time to wring genius out of the obscure and unseemly, and time is not a luxury that Stefani the entrepreneur affords herself. As such, most of The Sweet Escape's problems arise as a result of her schedule-dicated slog back towards middle ground. With the exception of the spazzy, Akon-produced doo-wop track "The Sweet Escape" and the Keane-penned "Early Winter"-- which proves that Stefani still has the ability to elevate an otherwise ordinary rock song to another level-- everything else here has the vague whiff of tossed-off album fattener. The unofficial sequel to "What You Waiting For?", "Orange County Girl" boasts another self-writing lyric ("Don't know what I'm doing back in the studio/ Getting greedy cause he said he had another sick flow/ So I had to hollaback cause I didn't get enough/ Still feel the Wonderland, Alice and the tick tock") that, in a Charle Kaufman-aping stylee, mistakes meta for content. Elsewhere, "4 in the Morning" and "U Started It" exhume the ghosts of S Club and Debbie Gibson respectively, in turn destroying the mallpop cred that Stefani accrued with L.A.M.B.'s impeccable "Cool".
By now you get the point. One step forward, three steps sideways, one step back, The Sweet Escape continues in Stefani's proud tradition of being caught somewhere between the vanguard and the insipid. Considering this is the same person who once rolled out "Hollaback Girl" and the Harajuku girls in one fell swoop, it's not the least bit surprising, but the pockets of brilliance here are compelling enough to warrant holding out hope that Stefani's best as a boundary-pushing pop singer still lies ahead. | 2006-12-07T01:00:01.000-05:00 | 2006-12-07T01:00:01.000-05:00 | Pop/R&B | Interscope | December 7, 2006 | 6.5 | 0a4c7561-9752-490a-8d97-d1813170e510 | Mark Pytlik | https://pitchfork.com/staff/mark-pytlik/ | null |
The grime producer teams up with a host of rising MCs for a bleak and energizing album that tries to imagine a better future. | The grime producer teams up with a host of rising MCs for a bleak and energizing album that tries to imagine a better future. | East Man: Prole Art Threat | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/east-man-prole-art-threat/ | Prole Art Threat | Prole Art Threat takes its name and credo from a Fall song; according to Anthoney Hart, who produces grime under the name East Man, the title is “a reflection of working-class creativity and how the establishment marginalize us and (perhaps on a subconscious level) see us as a threat.” To that end, he works with others to build an autonomous zone, inaccessible to the powers that be. Bare spaces and micro drum hits form its otherworldly terrain. Spend time with it, and you’ll get a sense of what type of world he and his collaborators would like to see.
East Man’s futuristic approach to grime is to strip the already elemental genre to its sparse essentials. His beats jitter out of empty space, full of unpredictable decisions. Bubbling clicks and dulled drum hits permeate the album, and the BPM rarely falls below 130. Every now and then, the vaporous reflection of one voice will float over the original for fractions of a second, giving the MC another chance to be heard. When Brazilian rapper Fernando Kep features on “Ourobouros,” even though his sped-up intonations and singsong rhymes are unique, he locks right into the mix.
Three collaborators from 2018’s Red, White, & Zero—Darkos Strife, Lyrical Strally, and Eklipse—guest here, and their precise rhymes match the liquid propellant of East Man’s music. Newcomer Ny Ny falls upon the percussive orbitals of “Who Am I?” with a sense of purpose, moving deftly around a morphing structure made up of wood-paneled knocks and phasers, maintaining stability through boasts and dares: “I’m out of the box, they can’t box me in/I’m orthodox so unique it’s a sin/I walk my own path, best believe I will win.” East Man’s productions throw up constant obstacles, like bass that drops out without warning, and echoed clatters that slice through the vocal tracks. It adds drama to the performances: any rapper who can sprint through this minefield untouched is ready for whatever dystopic future awaits.
In the liner notes to Red, White, & Zero, the writer and theorist Paul Gilroy argued that for young people in London, “The scale on which life is lived has shrunk.” It’s clear that the horizon is even more limited now than when he wrote those words two years ago; it’s tough to imagine large-scale change when you’re stuck inside your own home. On Prole Art Threat, East Man and his collaborators reject the defeatism that comes from this realization. East Man’s productions are built out of sparse material, while the improvisatory zeal of his collaborators leads them to find novel ways to communicate. Together, they seem to say that change can only come from ditching what doesn’t work, while constantly searching for what does.
Buy: Rough Trade
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Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2020-08-13T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-08-13T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap / Electronic | Planet Mu | August 13, 2020 | 7.4 | 0a5a28ab-1526-4a53-807e-66982e763f2e | Hubert Adjei-Kontoh | https://pitchfork.com/staff/hubert-adjei-kontoh/ | |
U2's first collaboration with Brian Eno and Daniel Lanois comes across as a transitional album of the highest magnitude. | U2's first collaboration with Brian Eno and Daniel Lanois comes across as a transitional album of the highest magnitude. | U2: The Unforgettable Fire [Deluxe Edition] | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/13654-the-unforgettable-fire-deluxe-edition/ | The Unforgettable Fire [Deluxe Edition] | The first song on 1984's The Unforgettable Fire is called "A Sort of Homecoming"-- not just "A Homecoming". And that shade of uncertainty-- that "sort of"-- is key. Compared to U2's first three albums-- and almost everything that has come afterward-- The Unforgettable Fire is marked by a sketchy in-between-ness that works as a gracious foil to the the band's natural audacity. It's sort of stadium rock, sort of experimental, sort of spiritual, sort of subdued, sort of uncharacteristic, sort of brilliant, sort of a classic.
After their first major breakthrough with 1983's War and its anthems "Sunday Bloody Sunday" and "New Year's Day", U2 could have easily continued to perfect the fist-pumping, flag-waving arena battle cry. Instead, they sought out producer Brian Eno, a bold choice for a band looking to parlay semi-success into something Springsteen-ian. While Eno is now seen as a go-to stadium savior (see: Coldplay's Viva La Vida), back then he was still the guy who coaxed magnificent weirdness out of David Bowie and Talking Heads, to say nothing of his own work, which ranged from prog-rock insanity to elegant wallpaper. The U2/Eno braintrust has since become one of the most out-and-out successful in rock history, but The Unforgettable Fire finds the pair-- along with frequent conspirator Daniel Lanois-- feeling each other out and testing limits. The album ebbs and flows along the spectrum between the spiky, post-punk U2 of old and the impressionistic, Eno-assisted U2 they were yearning to become.
Not only were U2 and Eno an odd match musically, but their personalities clashed in a remarkable way as well. The album's interpersonal drama plays out on a half-hour making-of documentary originally released in 1984 and included in this reissue along with the remastered album and a disc of requisite B-sides and live cuts. While U2 were caricatured as honest and hardworking Irish boys who never met a stone-faced portrait they didn't admire, and Eno was the aloof London aesthete who openly mocked rock convention, you can watch the two subtly influencing each other throughout the intimate documentary. For example, after Bono is seen roiling himself into a frenzy while improvising over "Pride (In the Name of Love)"-- screaming, sweating, and flailing like a wounded lunatic in the recording booth-- Eno is nearly left speechless before he utters a totally sincere understatement for the ages: "I must say, this track is really bringing something out in your singing." The producer's unflappable cool often leads to a fatherly kindness that goes lengths to explain his lasting appeal.
The documentary, much like the album itself, humanizes U2 while fueling the idea that this band's head was completely up its own ass in the 80s. "I believe the songs are already written, and I think the less you get in the way of them the better," says Bono at one point in the film, explaining his muse, "The minute you take up that pen... you start interfering with the song-- I don't know if that sounds too spiritual." And while I'm not sure if the idea that God is writing your songs is truly "spiritual," it does sound quite presumptuous. But that's also the beauty of this band; whether in ironic or world-saving mode, their ambition is boundless. This can lead to garish stadium extravaganzas, but it can also birth something like "Bad", The Unforgettable Fire's centerpiece and one of the grandest arena-rock songs ever written.
There's no half-assing "Bad". After years of radio repeats, the track seems commonplace, which is a testament to just how much U2 have burrowed their way into the world's collective musical memory. Because this six-minute monoculture moment chronicling the torment of heroin addiction has no discernible chorus. Its hook is a burning build passed down from the Velvet Underground's "Heroin". But whereas that song ends with Lou Reed smacked up and despondent-- "And I guess I just don't know," he mutters-- "Bad" is the sound of revelation, recovery. "I'm wide awake!" belts Bono, triumphant in the face of isolation, desolation, and pretty much every other -ation there is. Once again, U2 put a patently cool underground icon-- this time it's Reed-- through their mega-band filter and end up with a song that sounds just as strong in record-collector headphones as it does to 100,000 fans physically forced to clap along by some primordial urge.
The Reed tribute is cemented on the live version of "Bad", filmed at Live Aid and included in this package, where Bono introduces the song with a little "Satellite of Love" and ends it riffing on "Walk on the Wild Side". In between, the possessed singer jumps down from his high perch onstage to slow dance with a fan, effectively bringing some punk-inspired spontaneity and compassion to an event that typified notions of classic rock heroism. The performance single-handily upped U2's stock in the global rock realm, and it's easy to see why.
So The Unforgettable Fire isn't U2's biggest commercial success (that would be The Joshua Tree) or its most rewarding artistic coup (Achtung Baby), but without it those records would not exist. It's a transitional album of the highest magnitude. The hits-- "Pride", "Bad"-- still hit, and even its sometimes-derided abstractions like "Promenade" and "Elvis Presley and America" contain enough mystery to keep unraveling 25 years later. The opener tells of an ambiguous return. And "A Sort of Homecoming" would come to define this band's fascinating internal struggle between sticking to what they know and venturing toward something undiscovered. | 2009-11-02T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2009-11-02T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Mercury | November 2, 2009 | 9.3 | 0a5a389d-6adf-4c49-8328-2fe85318975f | Ryan Dombal | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ryan-dombal/ | null |
After years of personal squabbles and legal woes, a Nirvana box set is finally released. Originally slated for Christmas 2001, the three-CD, one-DVD With the Lights Out compiles demos, B-sides, radio performances, and other rarities. | After years of personal squabbles and legal woes, a Nirvana box set is finally released. Originally slated for Christmas 2001, the three-CD, one-DVD With the Lights Out compiles demos, B-sides, radio performances, and other rarities. | Nirvana: With the Lights Out | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/5811-with-the-lights-out/ | With the Lights Out | Above my desk I have a postcard-sized picture of Kurt Cobain, a garish, iconic (and, appropriately, ironic) portrait on black velvet that someone gave me as a birthday gift a long time ago. Recently, my 13-year old brother-in-law pointed at it and asked, "Who is that?" I told him it was Kurt Cobain. "You know, the lead singer of Nirvana." This kid is a music fan. He digs Eminem, Jay-Z, and Kanye West, in particular, but Linkin Park and P.O.D. are also in the mix. He'd never heard of Nirvana.
Journalist Neil Strauss tells a similar story in the book included with this odds 'n' sods box set, of polling teenagers in a California record store and realizing only about a third of them had knowledge of Cobain & Co. Usually, this sort of unscientific rock crit device involves bands like The Replacements and is meant to demonstrate that, despite perceived greatness among fans, the group in question was denied access to the big time. But Nirvana was the global rock band for a few years not so long ago, so if it's true that Generation Z is ambivalent at best, well, that seems a little strange-- especially considering how much every popular American rock band-- the P.O.D.s and Linkin Parks, for example-- owe them.
After allowing Nirvana to lie fallow for almost a decade following the release of the live album From the Muddy Banks of the Wishkah, Dave Grohl, Krist Novoselic, and Courtney Love are now working to reverse this trend. A box set containing a promised mother lode of unreleased recordings was first discussed a few years ago, but it was delayed by legal squabbles. Eventually, Love was granted her wish to release an eponymous best-of complete with "You Know You're Right", considered the cream of the then-unreleased crop. Nirvana did little to bolster the band's legacy, though, and with its lone new song, the collection-- otherwise pulled from a tiny catalog-- was most often discussed to explain the appeal of illegal file-sharing.
Now the long-awaited box arrives, bearing three music discs, a live DVD, notes by Strauss and Thurston Moore, a wonderfully obsessive recording history (though no discography), and ugly metallic packaging that would have made Cobain, an accomplished visual artist, throw up. Only nine of the set's 51 tracks have been previously released (though many have been bootlegged), and those are culled from B-sides and compilation appearances. It's a scruffy hodgepodge of solo acoustic and full-band demos, radio shots, and live recordings, hugely variable in terms of sound, songwriting, and performance quality.
So, first, the bad news: Those hoping for a trove of overlooked gems will be disappointed, as too much of With the Lights Out sounds like nothing so much as a dull-edged instrument lifting flakes of material from the bottom of a barrel. Simply put, there's enough good stuff here for a solid single disc. Beyond padding the release to box-set length, why include a sub-Barlow stab at four-track tape manipulation ("Beans"), two versions of "Polly" to go with the four already released (every Nirvana record on Geffen except In Utero features this middling song), two demos of "Rape Me" showcasing Cobain at his self-conscious worst, and a number of live tracks that sound like they were recorded on overused speech cassettes? If tossed-off experiments and poorly recorded demos of familiar songs are fair game, one imagines the Nirvana vaults stretching into bottomless "Dick's Picks" infinity.
Still, the live and demo overkill can't erase Cobain's status as a great songwriter and (usually) one of rock's best vocalists, so there's still a fair amount of content here to enjoy. "If You Must" and "Pen Cap Chew" immortalize pre-Bleach Nirvana as self-loathing, drop-tuned stoners-- endearing qualities that never quite disappeared from their better known recordings. "Even in His Youth" has that classic combination of short, tense verses with a defusing swoop of chorus. And 1991's "Old Age" is loose and midtempo, showing Cobain stretching himself melodically, breaking free of the clipped phrases and soft/loud style that was serving him so well at the time.
Elsewhere, "Verse Chorus Verse" is a completely different song than the one released under the same name on the No Alternative compilation (that one was originally called "Sappy", and is also included here), but shows a similar easy restraint. The nine-minute instrumental jam on "Scentless Apprentice" was also worth rescuing, showing the lumbering riff monster Nirvana could summon when in the mood. Additionally, versions of four Leadbelly songs, including "Where Did You Sleep Last Night?", document Cobain's strange obsession with the early folk singer.
Oddly, despite its big holiday marketing push, this is probably a set for the Nirvana fanatics in search of a complete picture of the band, particularly because many of its pleasures are purely historical. There's no definitive date on the horribly recorded rehearsal demo of "Smells Like Teen Spirit" but it's interesting to note that the structure of the song, down to the tiniest detail, was already complete. And Cobain's off-the-chain scream is completely exhilarating despite the bad sound. Same goes for "Dive", which remains powerful though the band is ragged and Cobain can't quite muster the vocal power of the Incesticide version.
About 20 of these tracks are solo acoustic demos, offering a leering look into Cobain's creative process. One thing we learn is that he wasn't a good acoustic guitarist, at least not when he was sitting at home on whatever he was on. The sloppy strumming on "Sliver" and "Pennyroyal Tea" is distracting, but not nearly as disconcerting as the solo demo of "Rape Me", on which Cobain seems to be struggling to maintain consciousness. This is where the box set makes you feel a little gross, pawing through the musical equivalent of Cobain's journals, listening to things he never intended to release.
The DVD, on the other hand, includes some more lighthearted voyeuristic moments that are the highlight of the box. The first nine tracks are given over to a 1988 rehearsal at Novoselic's mom's house, and it's a huge kick to see Cobain and Novoselic so young and goofy, hanging out with a few neighborhood dudes and jamming like any other local band. For whatever reason, Cobain sings facing a wall with his nose two inches from the simulated wood paneling. They have a ball with Zep ("Immigrant Song"), but then they bust out "About a Girl" and we remember that this is not your everyday garage band. When they crank up the strobe light and hold a bottle of Rainier up to the camera, it's adorable enough that you might feel inclined to hug somebody. Fittingly, most of the remainder of the DVD features pre-fame shows and miscellaneous tour footage; technically, it's generally of poor quality, but enjoyable nonetheless.
Though With the Lights Out is in many respects unsatisfying and shows Geffen to be rudderless with their handling of the Nirvana legacy, in the end, it's nearly enough that it documents so much material we haven't heard a million times before. And despite the complete predictability and heavy-handedness of closing the set with the solo demo of "All Apologies", the effect is still emotionally devastating. When Cobain was numb on heroin he missed the comfort in being sad, and if nothing else, With the Lights Out brings us back to this nourishing place. | 2004-11-23T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2004-11-23T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Geffen | November 23, 2004 | 6.3 | 0a5da16d-df34-45a7-b21b-d05742d0f2e5 | Mark Richardson | https://pitchfork.com/staff/mark-richardson/ | null |
Latest from the prolific and influential avant-folk artist is something of a summary record, demonstrating most of the range he's shown over the years. | Latest from the prolific and influential avant-folk artist is something of a summary record, demonstrating most of the range he's shown over the years. | Six Organs of Admittance: Luminous Night | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/13352-luminous-night/ | Luminous Night | Ben Chasny is one of the more prolific musicians of the last decade. He's released one or two albums each year since 1998 under his Six Organs of Admittance banner, plus a bunch of EPs, one-offs, and 7"s, and because that didn't keep him busy enough, he's also worked with Comets on Fire, Badgerlore, and Current 93. It could be argued that he's done more than anyone to establish, develop, and fuel this whole modern freak-folk thing, even if his profile has never risen as high as some of his peers'.
Luminous Night continues Chasny's association with Chicago's estimable Drag City label, and it's something of a summary record, demonstrating most of the range he's shown over the years, from pretty acoustic guitar ramblings to ambient noodling, droning psychedelic horrors, acid folk tunes, and rumbling noise. It's heaviest on the middle three and has an overall dirge-like quality that wears a bit thin at times. The record opens with a fake-out of gorgeous acoustic plucking on "Actaeon's Fall (Against the Hounds)", a sound that harks back to School of the Flower. This is joined by jazzy flute and an even prettier surfed-out guitar before everything stops for a breath and comes back in on a decidedly more medieval note, the flute joining a viola on a positively ancient-sounding melody that occasionally lapses back into surf-jazz for a couple seconds.
Taken in the context of the whole album, "Actaeon's Fall" plays something like a palate cleanser for the extended exercise in existential dread that follows. Chasny's oddly deadpan, almost British-accented voice makes a good instrument for brooding, and he almost makes a point of separating his brand of acid folk from his hippie forebears by confronting his personal failings head-on, declaring, "I'm a vengeful man," on "Anesthesia" as harshly droning guitars crowd in around him. He wraps himself in thoughts of death on "Ursa Minor", singing, "Love can't keep death at bay/ Good people dying everywhere/ When shadow's your doctor the price you pay/ Is asking if god is even there."
Chasny is careful to cut through the pallor of the densest tracks with small splashes of color, like the tabla that drives "Bar-Nasha" or the piano that wafts through the electronic haze of "Cover Your Wounds With the Sky". Eyvind Kang leads "River of Heaven" with a haunting viola solo played in a style that sounds half European Renaissance and half Syrian. Genuinely haunting moments like that forgive some of the album's more egregious indulgences in drifting noise and intentional obfuscation (see the brown guitar squall in the middle of "Enemies Before the Light"). But really, half the fun of Six Organs is hearing Chasny get away with being over-the-top on the strength of his sheer talent. Luminous Night doesn't challenge School of the Flower or The Sun Awakens for Six Organs' best albums, but it is a solid addition to a big catalog that gets more interesting all the time. | 2009-08-10T02:00:02.000-04:00 | 2009-08-10T02:00:02.000-04:00 | Experimental | Drag City | August 10, 2009 | 6.9 | 0a618c9f-c170-4f00-ab8b-b3892150f8c4 | Joe Tangari | https://pitchfork.com/staff/joe-tangari/ | null |
The Canadian band’s third album is a wistful and familiar soundtrack to winter malaise. | The Canadian band’s third album is a wistful and familiar soundtrack to winter malaise. | Living Hour: Someday Is Today | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/living-hour-someday-is-today/ | Someday Is Today | Living Hour hail from Winnipeg, Manitoba—a city they describe as an “inland island that floats on infinite prairie ground”—and their lush pop songs speak as much to their own rural isolation as the universal, endemic kind. It’s a duality that shows up in many forms on their third album, Someday Is Today, which nods at mid-aughts indie while trudging into cathedral pop akin to Beach House. The terrain isn’t new, nor is it particularly varied. But at their best, Living Hour offer a soundtrack to malaise that feels both timeless and timely.
Built on Sam Sarty’s smoky vocals, the strongest songs on Someday Is Today lead with magnetic atmosphere and melodies, venturing briefly into fuzz and dissonance only to return to an earworm. Though these songs were recorded over a seven-day span in the depths of winter, as temperatures dropped to negative 30, many have the warm quality of a story whispered over dark liquor in a corner booth, confessional and intimate. “December Forever” opens with a progression of insistent chords and plinking keys before introducing a catchy, hummable refrain: “You get what you want/Make it an afterthought,” Sarty sings, somewhere between resignation and disdain. Slow-burning opener “Hold Me in Your Mind” soars rafter-high on reverberating keys and cinematic, carouseling harmonies, with eerie descriptions of headlights, satellites, and surveillance. The warbling final notes could be emanating from a UFO or the console of a car parked across a dark, empty lot.
Other tracks evoke a 20-year-old indie pop heyday that feels pleasantly familiar. “Feelings Today,” a duet with Jay Som, hearkens to fellow Canadians Broken Social Scene, while the duet on “Exploding Rain” pays homage to Yo La Tengo’s And Then Nothing Turned Itself Inside-Out. But Living Hour’s lyricism studs these recognizable sounds with unexpected gems, lending songs like “Lemons and Gin” additional luster. “A hundred watts in every bulb above my head/Dandruff on each shoulder again/I’m staring at the frozen meat with polished floors,” Sarty sings, establishing a physical landscape that feels as freezer-burned as her emotional one. Winter comes up often, fittingly for a prairie record. “I remember walking home on ice,” Sarty recalls on “Middle Name,” while the title of “December Forever” is less an endorsement of the month than a lament.
Elsewhere, the potency falters and the emotional through-line gets derailed. “Miss Miss Miss,” with its “Sexual Healing” drum machine intro, is a weird bossa nova paean to a nightclub, a tonal disjunct from the material that bookends it. “Hump,” meanwhile, rests on a strange middle ground between sludgy minimalism and brightness. Living Hour often tow a successful line between disaffectedness and melancholy, but the record’s sharp edges arrive when they lean too far in either direction, reading as lethargy or sentimentalism. Still, to everything there is a season, and Someday is Today mostly succeeds in its paeans to frostbitten numbness, its flatness as wistful as the rolling plains and as familiar as the freezer aisle. | 2022-09-02T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2022-09-02T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Kanine | September 2, 2022 | 6.2 | 0a6729b5-80b2-4f83-bb09-15334e8b61e0 | Linnie Greene | https://pitchfork.com/staff/linnie-greene/ | |
Gwen Stefani's first solo album in a decade finds her keeping up with new pop sounds while writing from a new perspective: the quintessential divorcee, fresh off a messy split. | Gwen Stefani's first solo album in a decade finds her keeping up with new pop sounds while writing from a new perspective: the quintessential divorcee, fresh off a messy split. | Gwen Stefani: This Is What the Truth Feels Like | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21647-this-is-what-the-truth-feels-like/ | This Is What the Truth Feels Like | For a generation of quirky girls, No Doubt’s Gwen Stefani was the Grimes of 1995. She had the kind of look that parents hate (her hair was pink, or blue, or no-way-that’s-natural blonde, her midriff was perpetually exposed) and a punk-ish sneer, and she was at her finest when she was all riled up. She was also, crucially, a product of the post-grunge alternative landscape, in which an Orange County ska band could edge up their sound and land a song on the Top 10 for 15 weeks. As popular music tastes shifted, so did Stefani—and shrewdly, for a time. She first tested the solo waters in 2000, duetting with Moby on the deadpan banger “South Side” before moving on to an even more unlikely partner in crime, Eve, with “Let Me Blow Ya Mind” (i.e. the “Fancy” of 2001). Around this same time, No Doubt’s new wave sheen turned towards Jamaican dancehall, which made Stefani’s own pivot towards hip-hop feel more natural. In hindsight, that hip-hop lean—like Stefani’s other acts of cultural appropriation—was questionable taste-wise, not least because it encouraged Fergie. But like much of her career up to that point, Gwen had enough attitude to pull it off.
Stefani’s first solo album, 2004’s* Love. Angel. Music. Baby., had a few legitimately great singles, the kind of radio hits that take a surprisingly long time to wear out. She also drew inspiration from unexpected places; one of those songs reinterpreted Fiddler on the Roof for the Juicy Couture crowd, another singlehandedly ensured that the word “bananas” would never again be misspelled by millennials. Her 2006 Neptunes-assisted follow-up, The Sweet Escape*, was essentially a dashed-off photocopy of its predecessor without the hits; given that weak showing, and then the eventual No Doubt reunion, it started to feel like Gwen solo was no longer a priority, at least until she joined the cast of "The Voice." No one joins "The Voice" if they’re just trying to hawk their (mostly tasteful) clothing line. By the time a concrete announcement heralding Stefani’s solo return arrived, she had repositioned herself towards the current mainstream once again.
So who is Gwen Stefani in the year 2016? You might say she’s an ageless pop star dealing with her personal drama not just in the tabloids, but on record. While this is a familiar and effective strategy for selling albums, it’s also a jaded way to perceive This Is What the Truth Feels Like, in part because Stefani—who co-wrote every song—seems to be genuinely torn over her own identity here. Long forgotten is the novelty that initially came with watching Gwen go full “TRL” and bring her inspiring weirdness to the masses. Here, she plays a different kind of role model: the quintessential divorcee, fresh off her messy split from Gavin Rossdale. Stefani forces herself to look forward as she navigates the thrill and insecurity of dating for the first time this millennium (ostensibly hand-in-hand with he who shall not be named), but sometimes, she just can’t help looking back in anger and regret.
As she did on her first two solo albums, Stefani spends a bit of time trend-hopping through current Top 40, from the spacious trap-lite of “You’re My Favorite” to the Bieber-hits-the-islands vibe of sext ode “Send Me a Picture” to “Asking 4 It,” where Fetty Wap slur-raps the album’s sole feature atop an unconvincing beat. These are decent tracks that affirm her ability to keep up with big pop of the moment (or rather, of a year ago), but musically, they are unremarkable, and fail to match the unique specificity of her early solo hits. There’s only one “Gwen Gets Back On the Horse” song that really works—second single “Make Me Like You,” a disco confection that captures the deliciously complicated feeling of falling hard when you least expected.
Stefani’s focus on the good times alternates with songs where she expresses cartoonish anger by awkwardly rapping and shouting non-sequiturs (“Naughty,” “Red Flag”), and neither mode plays to her strengths as a songwriter and signature vocalist. Her best songs are the ones in which she is audibly upset—sometimes pissed off, sometimes sad, but best-case scenario, both. No Doubt’s “Don’t Speak” was a heartbreak anthem with a twinge of anger, but with Truth lead single “Used to Love You,” Stefani—now 20 years wiser—flips it. “You can keep all the memories,” she tosses off nonchalantly, but still she sheds a tear as she backs out their driveway for the last time. It’s a rare moment on the album where you can pick out Stefani from a sea of other pop singers.
“Used to Love You” might be the greatest song Stefani has been involved in since “Don’t Speak,” at first twinkling all sad-sweet like Dev Hynes DJ’ing a prom slow-dance in an ‘80s teen flick. But by the end of the song, it has grown into something resembling a secular take on “Like a Prayer"'s climax, its sheer size threatening to teeter over the top. As the strings and the choir build around her, Stefani curls her voice up into a bow to emphasize the “used to” in “used to love you,” conveying both vulnerability and strength as she often had two decades ago. More than a decade has passed since Gwen Stefani first went pop, but it’s the fleeting moments like this—where she reminds us why we used to love her—that redeem This Is What the Truth Feels Like. | 2016-03-21T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-03-21T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | Interscope | March 21, 2016 | 5.9 | 0a685a55-8619-47ba-bd52-ffda65a98201 | Jill Mapes | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jill-mapes/ | null |
Originally credited to the Costello Show, this is a newly reissued and expanded version of the 1986 LP that saw Declan ditch the Attractions and return to his pub-rock roots. | Originally credited to the Costello Show, this is a newly reissued and expanded version of the 1986 LP that saw Declan ditch the Attractions and return to his pub-rock roots. | Elvis Costello: King of America | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/1626-king-of-america/ | King of America | Back in the midst of the Thatcher era, it must have been startling to see Elvis Costello staring back from the 12-inch-by-12-inch black-and-white LP cover of King of America, looking much older than the young rabble-rouser on the cover of 1983's Punch the Clock. Instead of the enormous Buddy Holly specs that had been his trademark for years, he continues to sport a pair of understated wire-rimmed spectacles that-- along with that facial hair-- lend his visage a grave, almost academic air. Bedecked with an ornate crown and an embroidered jacket, he hides his recognizable features behind a bushy beard, and his weary eyes manage a wary look.
More surprises awaited eager listeners: On the spine, the artist was listed not as Elvis Costello and the Attractions, but, more puzzlingly, as the Costello Show. Similarly, the songs were credited to Declan Patrick Aloysius MacManus, the acoustic guitar parts to The Little Hands of Concrete. In fact, the name Elvis Costello was barely mentioned in the packaging at all, as if MacManus needed a vacation from his alter ego.
These oddities heralded an even more dramatic change within the vinyl grooves. King of America was MacManus's first album without the Attractions since his debut (they appear on only one track, "Suit of Lights"). Instead, through co-producer T-Bone Burnett, he had corralled a strong roster of impressively pedigreed studio musicians (he calls them "my jazz and R&B; heroes" in the new liner notes) that includes Jim Keltner, Mitchell Froom, and Tom "T-Bone" Wolk, as well as Ron Tutt, Jerry Scheff, and James Burton from Elvis Presley's T.C.B. band. They lent the songs a professional albeit occasionally slick feel and helped MacManus realize his country and R&B; ambitions.
What wasn't different, however, was the barbed wit and acid humor that infuse songs like "Glitter Gulch", "Jack of All Parades", and "Brilliant Mistake". Costello's career to this date is often idealized as perfectly angry-- Costello the scourge-- but it contains a very human number of mistakes and miscalculations committed, on his own admission, by a very confident artist and a very confused man. The 31-year-old singer's anger and outrage had been diluted with disappointment and experience: the band was in turmoil and on the verge of breaking up (and would after one more album); MacManus's marriage had recently ended; he had been playing innumerable live shows to counter legal woes; his previous album, GoodBye Cruel World, had been a flop (he refers to it as his worst).
The result of all this angst is a complex and conflicted album that, despite all the spit and polish, sounds lively and raucous. Intense romantic embitterment informs the wordplay of "Lovable", the willful caution in "Poisoned Rose", and the extended metaphor of "Indoor Fireworks", which is all the more devastating for MacManus's straight-faced delivery. Likewise, the idea of America-- his adopted homeland, if only temporarily-- simultaneously repulses and attracts him. On the powerful "American Without Tears", he compares his own loneliness and alienation with that of two World War II G.I. brides, as Jo-El Sonnier's accordion plays over the chorus.
Not knowing exactly what to do with such a bristly, ruminative album, Columbia Records unenthusiastically released the cover of "Don't Let Me Be Misunderstood" as the first single, then promptly forgot about King of America, as did most listeners. A proper (and final) Elvis Costello and the Attractions album, Blood & Chocolate, was released before the year was out (on which Costello credited himself as Napoleon Dynamite). Rykodisc unearthed King of America almost a decade later, and Rhino is reviving it two decades later as the final installment in its ambitious and generous reissue project. While many of the 21 bonus tracks-- including the A- and B-sides of "The People's Limousine" / "They'll Never Take Her Love from Me" by the Coward Brothers, Costello's side project with T-Bone Burnett-- were included on the Rykodisc version, the real finds on this edition are the seven live tracks from one of MacManus's few shows with the King of America band. They fare respectably on the album track "The Big Light", but the band, especially guitarist Burton, blaze through covers by Waylon Jennings, Mose Allison, and Buddy Holly.
King of America may not have sounded like anything else Costello had done before, but it bears a striking, even disheartening, semblance to almost everything he's done since. In the ensuing years he has worked hard to excerpt himself from the British punk movement and to indulge his obsession with prepunk styles like classical (The Juliet Letters, Il Sogno), cocktail-lounge jazz (North), country (The Delivery Man), and Brill Building pop (Painted From Memory). This musical restlessness-- along with almost everything the middle-aged Costello has been criticized for, such as his practiced delivery, his overly calculated songwriting, and his obsession with backing musicians and collaborators-- has roots in King of America, his first and finest assertion that he has a life apart from the Attractions. For many who were initially baffled by that cover image of MacManus, this album is the beginning of a long downfall; for others, it's merely Act II in a very long, very prolific career that is unusual for having so much buried treasure. | 2005-05-08T01:00:04.000-04:00 | 2005-05-08T01:00:04.000-04:00 | Rock | Columbia | May 8, 2005 | 8.7 | 0a6ee46d-d2d8-469d-b148-e6f1e39494f0 | Stephen M. Deusner | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stephen-m. deusner/ | null |
Subsets and Splits