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Nina Revisited… A Tribute to Nina Simone, which arrives at a time of renewed interested in the pianist and singer's life and art, was co-executive produced by Ms. Lauryn Hill and features interpretations by Hill along with Usher, Mary J. Blige, Common, and others. | Nina Revisited… A Tribute to Nina Simone, which arrives at a time of renewed interested in the pianist and singer's life and art, was co-executive produced by Ms. Lauryn Hill and features interpretations by Hill along with Usher, Mary J. Blige, Common, and others. | Various Artists: Nina Revisited… A Tribute to Nina Simone | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/20753-nina-revisited-a-tribute-to-nina-simone/ | Nina Revisited… A Tribute to Nina Simone | Nina Revisited… A Tribute to Nina Simone is an incredibly difficult project to come to terms with. That's partially due to an inability to come to terms with Simone, whose penetrating breadth and pointed sagacity, to this day, remains a source of both comfort and discomfort to listeners. It's also because the project—co-executive produced by Ms. Lauryn Hill, largely produced by Robert Glasper, and featuring almost a dozen key artists—doesn't seem to ever come to terms with itself. It's a tribute to Simone's legacy, but in many ways, it's not.
Revisited arrives at a time of renewed interested in the pianist and singer's life and art, and as a companion piece to the must-see documentary W**hat Happened, Miss Simone? (Seriously, stop binging on whatever you're binging on via Netflix and push play.) In the past decade, the flame of Simone's heritage has been kept burning by Verve Records' Verve Remixed series, most notably on 2006's Remixed and Reimagined, which put the vocal stems of her RCA recordings through the mixers and production tools of a variety of DJs. The project featured renditions that not only updated a timeless artist, but also fostered inquiry about the voice, the phrasing, the poise that stood undaunted by all of the technology-assisted musical changes.
By contrast, Revisited relies on contemporary singers updating Simone, and sometimes not doing the High Priestess much proper worship.
There's issue to be taken with the choice of songs here. Numbers like "Ne Me Quitte Pas", "Sinnerman", "My Baby Just Cares for Me", and others, while being staples of Simone's live sets, are not her original numbers, reducing much of the album to covers of covers. Sometimes these work. Gregory Porter's rendition of "Sinnerman" translates well, but that's because Porter's voice—plaintive but confident—is suited to this kind of material, as he showed on the stirring "1960 What?" from his 2010 debut, Water. And the severely under-appreciated Alice Smith provides that album's best number with "I Put a Spell on You".
Haunting and pleading, "Spell" is not just a song, it's a moment of abject desperation—picture the Weeknd on his second night in an in-patient rehab facility, curled up in a corner with debilitating withdrawal symptoms, and you’re close. If it doesn't make sense to describe this song by using another singer as metaphor, that may be because it makes no sense to pay tribute to Nina Simone with a Screamin' Jay Hawkins song. Regardless, Smith owns the fuck out of "Spell", much the same way Jimi owned Dylan for "All Along the Watchtower" and Bobby Shmurda took "Jackpot" from Lloyd Banks to make "Hot Nigga". If there's any justice in this world, no one will ever cover "I Put a Spell on You" again, whereas Usher's Salaam Remi-produced take on "My Baby Just Cares for Me", might as well be a Sinatra tribute.
For her part, Ms. Lauryn Hill—who perhaps introduced an entire generation to Simone with the Fugees' "Ready or Not" when she rhymed that "while you imitatin' Al Capone/ I'll be Nina Simone/ And defecating on your microphone"—provides five songs here (six, if you count that she's credited with producing the remake of Simone's "African Mailman" instrumental). These are a mixed bunch. "Ne Me Quitte Pas" feels like a self-indulgent exercise to prove that she can sing in French; her remix of "I've Got Life" finds her not singing, but rapping—and pretty unconvincingly at that. In the same way that this project is sure to leave listeners wondering why Simone was important as a singer, "I've Got Life" leaves one wondering why Ms. Hill, full of empty narcissism and wordy pedantry, was very important as a rapper. Yet, when she's not sounding like a newcomer doing a poor L-Boogie impersonation, she comes through with a pitch perfect cover of "Feeling Good", and by the time she's running through riffs near the end of "Black Is the Color of My True Love's Hair", all is forgiven and we're reminded that Ms. Hill—a Black woman with classical aspirations, a dark-skinned Black girl posed as object of beauty, a pop culture fetish figure striving to be a social agent—has always been a generation's Nina Simone.
Still, what's missing here is Simone's voice. Even though it appears on the album's final number—full and deep and wide and light on "I Wish I Knew How It Felt to Be Free"—her metaphoric voice has been muted, akin to the way Kanye West covered her up with AutoTune on Watch the Throne's "New Day" and sped it up for "Blood on the Leaves", which turned "Strange Fruit", one of the most piercing songs in American history, into a mishmash about sidepieces and drugs and being down for your n-words. Simone's true endowment to culture is the steadfast way she engaged social issues and activated protest and love in her music. There's little of the fire and compassion that Nina Simone embodied on Revisited. (For that, it's urged that you check out 2008's excellent Protest Anthology, which mixed her more political numbers with contextual interview snippets.)
What is here is Jazmine Sullivan's "Baltimore", which while not a Simone original, should have, for obvious reasons, been put to much greater effect. "I'm never gonna come back here/ 'Til the day I die/ Oh, Baltimore/ Ain't it hard just to live," Sullivan sings strongly, but safely. It's personal, not political and it's disheartening. The album's most poignant political moment comes from Common, who breaks out of his placating Black coffee shop rap on "We Are Young Gifted & Black" to spit, "Mississippi, goddamned/ Ferguson, goddamned/ Staten Island, goddamned/ Baltimore, goddamned," but without the inclusion of Simone's signature "Mississippi Goddam", the line is sure to go over the heads of many.
With this shaping up to be the year that Nina Simone truly gets revisited—in addition to this album and the aforementioned documentary, there's a controversial biopic coming later this year—it's less important that this album do the job by itself of capturing Simone. (To be fair, not even What Happened, Miss Simone? does that.) Nina Revisited… A Tribute to Nina Simone seems geared towards introducing a contemporary to the High Priestess of Soul, and how well it does that remains to be seen. The album's inability to get it right is a testament to America's inability to come to terms with Blackness and Black genius, which was always at the core of Simone's struggle. In that sense, it's the perfect tribute album—just not in the way it intended to be. | 2015-07-09T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2015-07-09T02:00:00.000-04:00 | null | RCA | July 9, 2015 | 7 | c8ba2ac8-b85a-4755-80bd-331bb92c60f9 | kris ex | https://pitchfork.com/staff/kris-ex/ | null |
On their second album, the Vaccines have created a record about a rock band treating their job with the checked out disinterest of an office drone, doing the bare minimum to get by, learning nothing, and being scared to death by the obligations that come with appearing to give a shit. | On their second album, the Vaccines have created a record about a rock band treating their job with the checked out disinterest of an office drone, doing the bare minimum to get by, learning nothing, and being scared to death by the obligations that come with appearing to give a shit. | The Vaccines: Come of Age | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/16991-come-of-age/ | Come of Age | The Vaccines are not joking. Just joking; they are joking. That seemed to be the takeaway of their debut, What Did You Expect From the Vaccines?, the title of which wisely tried to curry favor with the listener by shifting the focus from the unyieldingly competent lad-rock within to what the Vaccines wanted to be seen as their utter lack of complicity in being swept up by perfunctory hype. Maybe they had a point: Even if they were heralded by NME as the "Return of the Great British Guitar Band," their relationship with the press seemed like less a torrid love affair than a blind date based on type ("you two will so get along").
A year later, it's not surprising that Come of Age is pulling all the same tricks both musically and philosophically. On leadoff track "No Hope", Justin Young sings, "I don't really care about anybody else/ When I haven't got my own life figured out," and it's clear that the title points to a reprise of the debut's self-reflexive copouts. On Come of Age, the Vaccines prove they've done nothing of the sort. What they have done is create a quasi-concept album about a rock band treating its job with the checked-out disinterest of an office drone, doing the bare minimum to get by, learning nothing, and being scared to death by the obligations that come with appearing to give a shit.
As before, the music on Come of Age is wholly uncomplicated yet capable of winning listeners over by deftly straddling a very fine semantic distinction. Can you tell the difference between the figurative "you've heard this before" and the literal "you haven't heard this before" and want music to embody both? There's absolutely nothing the Vaccines do that hasn't been approved, market-tested, and confirmed over the past 30 years of British rock that warily views any encroachment of electronic music, hip-hop-- basically anything not evolving from the Jam-- as a threat. The faster numbers barge in with a "Brianstorm"-like whirl of drum rolls and tremolo picking, then immediately taper off. The slower ones pick and choose from any number of song structures you vaguely remember from whatever Drums or Strokes album you listened to last. Not a single band member seems capable of doing anything without the other three's approval: Vocal melodies move completely in lockstep with well-worn progressions, and occasionally just mimic the bass root notes. There's an occasional spray of surf rock, but otherwise Come of Age is utterly subservient to Young's lyrics.
The established templates make Come of Age catchy at the very least, even if Young treats his gift for sticky choruses like "No Hope" and "Aftershave Ocean" like something that would make him feel guilty if he decided to sell insurance for a living. It's fine that this is music driven by personality rather than innovation, but Young lacks the charm to be likeable or even the swagger to be unlikeable either. As a result, Come of Age becomes an inverse Portnoy's Complaint where the narrator morbidly fixates on the utter meaninglessness of every single one of his thoughts. Let him tell it: "I could bore you with the truth about an uneventful youth/ Or you could get that rap from someone else." "So let's go to bed before you say something real/ Let's go to bed before you say how you feel." "I'm no teenage icon/ I'm no Frankie Avalon/ I'm nobody's hero." "You can't hold a gun to my head/ Because baby I would just refuse." Even spread across the entity of Come of Age, it would be a disconcerting admission of serious writer's block or more likely crippling laziness. Those lines are all within the first four songs.
It goes on like this, as evidenced by "Bad Mood"'s surely self-aware taunt, "You look disappointed in me/ I'm not as thoughtful as you thought I'd be." More revealing is "Weirdo". Stylistically, it's the most outré inclusion on Come of Age, if only because its juddering bassline recalls Pixies and they're American. But the Vaccines pretty much reject any of Frank Black's lyrical lessons as Young pleads, "I'm not a weirdo," to win a girl's heart. You look further down the tracklist and, surely, a song entitled "I Wish I Was a Girl" is willing to cop to something? Sorta-- Young moans, "Life is easy when you're easy on the eye," and you might even overlook the deflating misogyny of that statement and find relief in the fact that he finally says what's been implied the whole time: He envies people who are expected not to have anything to say.
Which quite obviously renders the regular-guy shtick the Vaccines play on Come of Age as total bullshit, especially since you can purchase a deluxe version with bonus tracks and an entire extra disc of live cuts. It's as oily and slick-talking as any political figure trying to ascend to a position of tremendous power while convincing the populace they're "one of us," an easier path to take than simultaneously exhibiting leadership and empathy. But not even the soft bigotry of low expectations can suffice here since Come of Age hardly feels escapist. In fact, it's even more of a dystopian nightmare than Kid A or an El-P record: The Vaccines draw us into a universe that revolves entirely around Young, and if he's got nothing to say, his only possible conclusion is that nobody does. | 2012-09-10T02:00:04.000-04:00 | 2012-09-10T02:00:04.000-04:00 | Rock | Sony | September 10, 2012 | 4.2 | c8c3615f-be43-4717-a625-3ce4443affc4 | Ian Cohen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ian-cohen/ | null |
Three musicians in their early twenties draw on the hedonistic rock'n'roll blueprint of the 1960s and 1970s on their beautiful, dazed debut LP. | Three musicians in their early twenties draw on the hedonistic rock'n'roll blueprint of the 1960s and 1970s on their beautiful, dazed debut LP. | The Shacks: Haze | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/the-shacks-haze/ | The Shacks: Haze | It’s not easy to bring back the mood of a bygone era without coming across as a copycat, but that doesn’t stop new artists from trying. Take the Shacks, a trio of early-20s New Yorkers (singer-bassist Shannon Wise, guitarist-producer Max Shrager, and drummer Ben Borchers) who use British blues and rock bands of the 1960s and 1970s—the Animals, the Kinks, Fleetwood Mac—as their chief stylistic blueprints. On their full-length debut, Haze, they succeed in recreating a feeling of hedonistic rock‘n’roll bliss, but often end up with a Summer of Love-style dream that’s blithe verging on ignorant.
Haze is successful in showcasing the Shacks’ broad tastes, which also have room for everything from yé-yé and “Partridge Family” pop to honky-tonk waltzes. Their instrumentals feel like a collection of special effects the band wants to impress you with, and many of them are in fact impressive. On the title track, Wise’s haunting, mysterious vocals and Shrager’s banjo lick beckon the listener down a rabbit hole lined in shag carpet. That song eases into “Birds,” an escapist, “Tusk”-like tune about leaving NYC (“I left the city because my brain was fried”) that is one of the album’s most dynamic and animated moments. It’s also the third track on the album to promise a getaway, which raises the question: What are the Shacks running from? There’s no answer to be found in the silky crawl of “Sand Song,” where Wise’s dreamy vocals articulate free-floating worry without emoting the feeling at all.
That’s par for the course on Haze, an album that’s as beautiful and anodyne and dazed as a Petra Collins photograph or the poppy field scene in The Wizard of Oz. Much of the whimsy comes from Wise’s vocals: Throughout the album, she sounds like she’s cupped a hand over your ear to tell you a cosmic secret. Sometimes that approach works, as on the sensuous, endearing lead single “Follow Me,” but when she sings about faded love on “Blue & Grey,” she just sounds tired. “The way you make me feel is so good/But I can’t explain it,” she sings on “So Good,” only adding to the impression that the Shacks are stuck in a vague kaleidoscopic reverie.
On the surface, all these songs sound charming, but the magic dissipates when you pay attention to what Wise and Shrager are singing. Whether they’re harping on floral metaphors for love (“Let Your Love,” “All Day Long”) or cryptic scenes of mental fogginess (“Haze,” “My Name Is...”), the Shacks’ imagery is either cliché or confusingly nebulous. Haze is structurally elegant, but its vintage visions are hollow.
At their best, Wise’s distinctive voice and Shrager’s beautifully detailed co-production combine for a mesmerizing portrait of youth and desire, evoking scenes from a dusty psychedelic western to a wine-stained post-breakup bubble bath. Yet these moments are muddled again and again by lazy lyrics and mediocre, monotone moods. There’s nothing wrong with a narcotic high that can’t be put into words, but the Shacks haven’t figured out yet how to keep it going without killing the vibe. | 2018-04-04T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-04-04T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Big Crown | April 4, 2018 | 6.1 | c8cf19f7-5c1f-4074-8c91-c12f047c7e47 | Margaret Farrell | https://pitchfork.com/staff/margaret-farrell/ | |
With little to talk about aside from his girlfriend Halle Bailey, the YouTuber-turned-artist delivers an album that treats rap like just another piece of content. | With little to talk about aside from his girlfriend Halle Bailey, the YouTuber-turned-artist delivers an album that treats rap like just another piece of content. | DDG: Maybe It’s Me… | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/ddg-maybe-its-me/ | Maybe It’s Me... | In just about every DDG interview, the Pontiac, Michigan rapper whines about an issue that we should all be sympathetic to: YouTubers aren’t being taken seriously as rappers. I feel his pain in my chest just writing it. It’s exactly what we need: more “content creators” in the hip-hop landscape.
DDG is part of a wave of popular YouTubers, streamers, and TikTokers who are boxing, wrestling, acting, podcasting, singing, and of course, rapping (because if you have enough followers, nobody really questions anything you do). He started posting videos in the mid-2010s while still in high school, and reached the million-subscriber mark in 2017—mostly through pranks, reaction clips, and vlogs documenting his relationships. To keep the content machine humming, he decided to become a bonafide rapper. After releasing a few diss tracks directed at other YouTubers, he dropped his first EP, Take Me Serious, in 2018. On its cover, he leans on a balcony and gazes into the distance—that way, you know he means business. By 2020, he scored a minor hit, “Moonwalking in Calabasas” with Blueface, a track that is basically just a knockoff of Gunna and Lil Baby’s Drip Harder singles. He apparently made an impression on someone, because the next year he joined the XXL Freshman Class. He’s really had a tough go of it. Won’t someone finally give this YouTuber his respect?!
Using the same wave-riding approach he applies to content creation, DDG slaps his name on music styles that are already proven to work. On Maybe It’s Me…, his extremely incurious new album, he rips off essentially every mainstream rapper you can think of. Rodeo-era Travis Scott? Sure. The intro, “Famous,” even has a sham Mike Dean guitar solo. Playboi Carti? Yep! “This Summer” is a Whole Lotta Red carbon copy so lacking in personality it could give Ken Carson’s X a run for its money. Drake? You betcha! “Hard on Myself” has all the ingredients of the OVO honcho’s AM/PM series—trust issues, emotionally destructive screenshots, cloudy beats, a very serious rapping voice. The swagger jacking is so blatant that it’s hard to figure out which lyrics, if any, are true to his experience. Please, convince me that you’ve heard of rappers who aren’t Rolling Loud headliners.
In the brief moments that DDG does let us into his life, things don’t turn out much better. On “Famous,” in an irritating, Auto-Tune-assisted croon, he breaks down the insecurities he has dating his girlfriend, Halle Bailey, the R&B star who played Ariel in Disney’s recent live-action remake of The Little Mermaid. “When you shoot your movie do these niggas turn you on?/When you leave the set, do y’all still text each other phone?” he asks, throwing a fit over a trend-chasing garage breakdown. Even though he’s trying to be vulnerable by opening up about how he feels watching Bailey kiss dudes on screen, it’s laughable to hear him rap about this chaste, kid-friendly movie like it has the sexual energy of Basic Instinct.
Other than dating the latest Disney princess, DDG doesn’t have a whole lot to rap about. He complains a bunch about fame on “Rizz,” but not with any feeling or interest. He doesn’t need the same emotional complexity as Future post-Ciara breakup, but c’mon, stop trying to look cool and be sincere about the difficulties of being in a relationship that is also tabloid fodder. “Rambo” is compelling, not because it’s that great, but because his shrill Don Toliver impersonation is spot-on. Maybe Bailey can get him a gig doing voice work on The Little Mermaid 2?
Then there are the three versions of “I’m Geekin”—one solo, another with LuhTyler, and a third with NLE Choppa and BIA—all of which appear consecutively on a 12-track album. It’s a passable song, with a sleek instrumental by Earl on the Beat that was probably sent to Lil Yachty first, but it is in no way strong enough to justify three versions. Yet it has a little bit of traction on TikTok, so three versions it is. This is what happens when you view rap as having the same low barrier to entry as vlogging and reaction videos. Maybe It’s Me… cares little about rap songs as art; it positions them as deliverables that will ensure the checks from sponsors and advertisers keep clearing. Here, rap culture is nothing more than a means to brand-building. | 2023-07-19T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2023-07-19T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Epic | July 19, 2023 | 3.1 | c8e53c9f-401d-4e3c-a9ee-da545201496a | Alphonse Pierre | https://pitchfork.com/staff/alphonse-pierre/ | |
The Nashville-based William Tyler's second album for solo guitar in three years offers a lovely, rangy meditation on open-string drones, though Tyler has an uncommon way of making tangles of picked notes ring out like the melody of a searching pop song. | The Nashville-based William Tyler's second album for solo guitar in three years offers a lovely, rangy meditation on open-string drones, though Tyler has an uncommon way of making tangles of picked notes ring out like the melody of a searching pop song. | William Tyler: Impossible Truth | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/17780-william-tyler-impossible-truth/ | Impossible Truth | The Nashville-based William Tyler is obviously an amazing guitar player, but it takes some accumulated hours with his music before you begin to notice and savor his deeper qualities. Making an album of wordless solo guitar compositions that remains interesting for its duration is hard, demanding a range of subtle skills far beyond nimble fingers-- a fine, exacting ear for color, an intuitive sense of momentum, a mind for musical structures. These are fragile musical gifts, difficult to cultivate and even harder to point out, and they become even more fragile when the focus bears down on a single instrument: You are painfully exposed, both as a player and as a musical mind.
Impossible Truth is Tyler's second richly satisfying and absorbing record of solo guitar in three years. His finger-picking offers a lovely, rangy meditation on the power of the good old open-string drone, and if you listen closely, you can hear his searching intelligence animating every note. The cobwebbed cycle of chords that make up the center section of "Cadillac Desert" are played like an inner monologue, dimming and surging like a gas lantern. Tyler employs some of the same back-up instruments here as he did on 2010's Behold the Spirit; wisps of pedal steel guitar, stand-up bass, vibes and xylophone, softly glowing horns. But his guitar remains the single waveform bouncing through your headphone-space for nearly all of Impossible Truth's 54-minute running time, and it never once grows tiring.
Once you're fully immersed in Tyler's world, you'll probably stop thinking of his music as "solo guitar." He has an uncommon way of making tangles of picked notes ring out like the melody of a searching pop song. Many of the Impossible Truth's pieces trace the contours of a mood that feels similar to the Beatles' "In My Life": wistful, valedictory, touched by fatalism. "We Can't Go Home Again" opens with two chords that pirouette mournfully from major to minor, before easing with into a series of variations on a pentatonic theme that grow in forcefulness and confidence over three-and-a-half minutes. By the end, it feels a ringing refutation of the title's gloomy proposition. "A Portrait of Sarah", a tribute to Tyler's girlfriend, Sarah Souther, opens small-scale, singing a particularly romatic and sweetly ascending tune that eventually kicks into a romping double-time. It's a heart-filling moment, one of the only expressions of boundlessly personal joy on Truth. If there were words to this song, they would cheapen the feeling.
It also helps that Impossible Truth, like Behold the Spirit, is gorgeously recorded. Tyler's lines resonate a sonic space that sounds cavernous and chilly, like he's recording in a drafty, empty church. Although Tyler claims he was trying to escape John Fahey comparisons with this record, through the lived-in confidence of his playing and the sense of folkish ease settling into his compositions, he moves closer to the bracingly simple beauty that Fahey's music embodied. His strummed open chords on "Country of Illusion" even hint teasingly at Fahey's version of "Joy To The World," from the Christmas classic The New Possibility.
But as he moves closer to Fahey's spirit, Tyler sounds more and more like himself. Every melody he plays, like the one that opens "Last Residents of Westfall", somehow feels as it if was always there, a rare musical quality that only settles in after years of weeding out the quotations that have crept into your playing. Once you've reached this rarefied air as a player, whatever your musical mind touches will come out transformed, and Impossible Truth is music of almost metaphysical calmness, in which Tyler's guitar surveys inner vistas and notes their vastness with a kind of Zen detachment. | 2013-03-22T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2013-03-22T02:00:01.000-04:00 | Folk/Country | Merge | March 22, 2013 | 8 | c8e69df3-70f3-4b69-9726-d84c1ba83b9e | Jayson Greene | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jayson-greene/ | null |
DJ Richard's debut LP is one of house and techno's best records of the year. Equal parts American and European, analog in feel, melancholy in mood, rough around the edges, and yet still unmistakably elegant, Grind is as expressive as techno gets. | DJ Richard's debut LP is one of house and techno's best records of the year. Equal parts American and European, analog in feel, melancholy in mood, rough around the edges, and yet still unmistakably elegant, Grind is as expressive as techno gets. | DJ Richard: Grind | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/20878-grind/ | Grind | From its cover, DJ Richard's Grind looks like a certain bombed-out species of noise record. It's got a black-and-white color scheme and an elegantly austere design, in the center of which a neatly centered photograph of a bridge rises, bleached and brittle as a wishbone, from a wintry thicket of trees. Those familiar with Rhode Island may recognize the structure as the Claiborne Pell Newport Bridge—and what is Rhode Island if not a longstanding hotbed of unorthodox electronics?
But Grind is not a noise record, even though its darkly lustrous synthesizers could probably serve as the foundation for a pretty blistering Prurient track. Like the Rhode Island native’s previous EPs for New York’s White Material label, DJ Richard’s debut album strikes a balance between house and techno: analog in feel, melancholy in mood, and rough around the edges, yet still unmistakably elegant. More than his previous singles, Grind serves as a bridge between European and American styles, perhaps as a result of his relocation to Berlin. Its patient, four-to-the-floor rhythms, consonant tones, and twinkling details are of a piece with German producers (and Dial regulars) like Lawrence and Roman Flügel, and the wistful shimmer of "I-Mir" and "Vampire Dub" echoes Kompakt’s resident sentimentalist, Superpitcher. But his unvarnished drum machines and torn-up textures have more in common with the brawnier approach favored by scrappy domestic crews like L.I.E.S., while his crisply jacking grooves go straight to the Midwestern root.
Far more than a formal exercise, though, the album is as expressive as techno gets, tracing a path from sullen mood pieces to bittersweet melodies to something that feels cathartic. It was recorded after two years spent living in landlocked Berlin, which might explain the vaguely coastal theme that surfaces in titles like "Savage Coast", "Waiting for the Green Flash", and "I-Mir" (the latter two are references to an atmospheric optical illusion occasionally seen at sunset). Above all, Grind comes across as a meditation on homesickness and distance; that’s particularly true of the album’s bleakest tracks, which are rooted in coldwave and dark ambient.
The album opens with a lowing foghorn dirge that brings to mind the bilious drones of Christoph de Babalon’s 1997 album If You’re Into It, I’m Out of It. It's one of several beatless, atmospheric tracks that help set the album's pensive tone: "Waiting for the Green Flash" sounds like a pitched-down approximation of the beatless closing minutes of Sonic Youth's "Expressway to Yr Skull", all brooding bell tones and trembling harmonics, while the monolithic "Ejected" sounds like a synth player's tribute to microtonal minimalists Tony Conrad and Phill Niblock. At first blush, these tracks might seem static, but turn them up loud enough and zero in on the shifting contours of their frequencies, and they truly come alive.
His beat-oriented work benefits from the same richness and subtlety. "Nighthawk", "Savage Coast", and "Bane", in particular, are examples of how to sculpt and layer relatively simple analog sounds so that they really sing. Richard's taste in synthesizers leans towards soft pads that beg you to sink into them, and he has a knack for contrasting those airy patches with tough, cutting drum hits that leave welts where they land. On "Nighthawk", a stretched and sandpapered wail in the background is both harsh and enveloping—a tactic that goes to the heart of the producer's keen sense of balance. He favors stuttering drum programming that suggests a mechanical kind of funk, and he is skilled at arranging contrapuntal lines into complicated but elegant orbits. Despite the outward simplicity of his productions, there's always something to tip their intensity levels subtly into the red. On "Screes of Gray Craig", it's the slight detuning of three or four separate synthesizer parts, so that they vibrate wildly in combination. And in the closing "Vampire Dub", a relaxing cut suffused in dreamy chords, it's the eerie, atonal bleating that burbles on like cosmic background radiation. Still, even at their most roiled, Grind's waters invite extended immersion. It's both one of the year's most sumptuous techno long-players and a masterful example of an unusual, bare-knuckled strain of ambient music. | 2015-09-14T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2015-09-14T02:00:01.000-04:00 | Electronic | Dial | September 14, 2015 | 8.1 | c8e80d9c-4114-47b2-b395-64c3e2ec1d2c | Philip Sherburne | https://pitchfork.com/staff/philip-sherburne/ | null |
Pearl Charles' debut EP is bursting with blues-rock and blissed-out psychedelia. Charles tugs at these sounds with her smoky alto, which gives off the kind of sensuality we associate with Lana Del Rey. | Pearl Charles' debut EP is bursting with blues-rock and blissed-out psychedelia. Charles tugs at these sounds with her smoky alto, which gives off the kind of sensuality we associate with Lana Del Rey. | Pearl Charles: Pearl Charles EP | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/20864-pearl-charles-ep/ | Pearl Charles EP | The hazy dreamworld of Pearl Charles' eponymous debut comes primarily from the '60s and '70s. The EP is bursting with blues-rock and blissed-out psychedelia. Charles is not a frontwoman whose voice soars over her band—she favors shadowy harmonies. Bedding every track with cooing "ooh"s and "ah"s, she buries her strongest writing in the midst of splashy drumming and cutting power chords. "What can I say to make you walk away?/ And make you understand that I don't wanna hold your hand?" she sings on "What Can I Do", rejecting the Beatles' decades-old proposal with indignance.
Charles' record takes cues from movements all over the American map. There are hints of Southern folk and alt-country, Midwest Americana, and West Coast acid rock. She tugs at these sounds with her smoky alto, which gives off the kind of sensuality we associate with Lana Del Rey. The femme fatale described in "Idea to Her" sounds like she could have been plucked from Del Rey's songbook, Charles' voice similarly toothsome and her tone nearly as coy. The seductress role looks good on Charles, and she takes it on again alongside driving rhythms on the rootsy "I Ran So Far". She coaxes her lover to trust her with their secrets, but in such a way that both she and the listener know she's lying through her teeth. When she vows, "Won't tell nobody else," it's easy to picture thick smoke curling away to reveal a devilish grin on her face.
When she recedes from the spotlight, the EP gets a little vague. "Night & Day" is Pearl Charles' most diverse cut, with a jaunty surf-rock chord progression leading into a twinkling piano glissando into spiraling, bluesy guitar lines. But Charles hits a snag, relying on the arrangements to carry her through dull lyrics and tedious "dum-dum, dum-dum, dum-dum"s. On the prismatic psych-folk track "Indian Burnout", Charles leans into then out of her words, singing with a slight Southern drawl recalling Emmylou Harris. It's a shaky ride but a magnetic one that doesn't reach for heights that would overpower it or push things too far.
The missteps are small and forgivable, especially considering her affinity for unexpected—but measured—choices. There are small but potent style decisions in many of these songs—rolling, ominous piano notes on "Idea to Her", rubbery, countrified strings on "I Ran So Far". It bodes well for a future full-length release. Here's hoping she continues to cultivate clear-sighted songwriting and an ear for worthwhile risk-taking. | 2015-08-03T02:00:02.000-04:00 | 2015-08-03T02:00:02.000-04:00 | Rock | Burger | August 3, 2015 | 6.8 | c8f65908-c3df-42b5-862f-71a6491876e5 | Tess Duncan | https://pitchfork.com/staff/tess-duncan/ | null |
Cate Le Bon and Tim Presley sound blissfully removed on their second album as a duo, in a quizzical world of their own creation. This one’s best played late at night. | Cate Le Bon and Tim Presley sound blissfully removed on their second album as a duo, in a quizzical world of their own creation. This one’s best played late at night. | DRINKS: Hippo Lite | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/drinks-hippo-lite/ | Hippo Lite | It is increasingly impossible, these days, to feel truly alone. But Cate Le Bon and Tim Presley found a way, and on their second record as DRINKS it shows. Le Bon and Presley are each psychedelic geniuses of the 2010s: the former, a wondrous Welsh singer-songwriter and soon-to-be producer of Deerhunter’s new album; the latter, one of the sharper writers to emerge from the homespun California garage rock scene. For Hippo Lite, they retreated to a commune called Saint-Hippolyte-du-Fort in southern France, a place known for its ancient fountains and silk museum—with, they mention, no wifi. DRINKS sound blissfully removed, in a quizzical world of their own creation. For that reason, Hippo Lite is best played in the late, isolated depths of night.
Hippo Lite is an album of peculiar grace: a mini-odyssey in quiet post-punk experimentation, brought to life with playfulness, eccentricity, and sly compositional sophistication. Madcap ideas are caught in mind-warping feedback loops. Batshit humor is mixed with the heart-tugging beauty of lovely, fingerpicked ballads. Atonal strings are lit up by strands of clever melodies, sung alternately by Le Bon or Presley. All of Hippo Lite’s strange sounds—a baby crying, a typewriter, a creaking door, ribbiting frogs, an inspired shaker—make it sound like a dada sound collage assembled in secret. For every classical element, there is a punk guitar, rudimentary beat, or wonky shout. Things that are “right” are constantly complicated by things that are “off.” Once you spend enough time inside the fragmented world of Hippo Lite, you’ll be caught wondering which is which.
As on many fantastic post-punk albums, space is liberally employed, and you feel as though you are listening in on DRINKS as much as listening to them—a witness to a process happening in the next room. Hippo Lite can be thrillingly episodic, like the oddest edges of the Raincoats’ Odyshape or contemporaries such as Palberta. For Presley’s part, perhaps his daring tastes were honed as a member of the Fall in 2006. (He impressed the infamously cantankerous Mark E. Smith with his lack of ego: “I’ve never met a guitarist I really like,” Smith wrote of Presley in his memoir. “He’s alright though.”) Describing DRINKS’ process, Presley has said in interviews that he’ll bring an idea and Le Bon will deconstruct it: “She’ll flip an idea upside down and look at it from a totally strange perspective... She comes out of Mars with ideas.” “Blue From the Dark” sounds like a twisted music-box. The slowly fragmenting piano figure of “When I Was Young” recalls an old black-and-white home movie. Surreal images lurk in every corner—when Presley mutters “do not mince words” on “Leave the Lights On,” it’s a riot.
The proper songs on Hippo Lite are the droll kind you might imagine DRINKS’ Drag City labelmate Mayo Thompson digging conceptually—honoring absurdity, stoicism, and humor at once, with an ethos of askew minimalism. Their wordplay is clever and often poetic. In the Le Bon-sung merry-go-round of “Real Outside,” it is immediately clear that “real” is qualifying “outside,” as in, it seems, outside society. “I wanna rest in the letter/Written outside/Your house,” Le Bon sings, a typically puzzling image. On the somnambulant “Pink or Die,” she recalls Nico with a line of especially elemental power: “Hallelujah nights/Winter sounds sincere/I am the color of here.” The closer, “You Could Be Better,” feels subtly political as Presley lists out all of the things you “could be” (“picture,” “ladder,” “bible”) and proclaims “everything edible eats you alive,” perhaps a way of saying that everything happens so much.
At the center and peak of Hippo Lite is “Greasing Up,” a staid and swaying folk tune, a composed foil to the freakery of its surroundings. “Greasing Up” sounds older than it is, and it rings of discovery in process, like finding a perfect book in the attic that you did not know was there, caked in dust. “If I decide/To come back to life,” Presley sings solemnly, “To be wide-eyed/Motion in mind/Cousins outside.” It comes over like an ode to their practice and to the willingness to stay inspired—and with that, to all creative practice that perseveres for its own sake. At a point, Presley conjures the lyrical image of “an orchestra/playing with you,” and there is not one present, but what a moving suggestion. “Greasing Up” carries a similar elegance, set only slightly aslant by the discordant drone that hums underneath.
“The world is absolute nonsense,” Le Bon said in 2016 around her excellent Crab Day album. “And things can be important to you, but you should never expect them to be important to other people.” There are grains of truth in that. Hippo Lite, however, feels like a precise instance of outsiders in communion—and the mysticism that occurs when weirdos help magnify the unconventional beauty of this absurd existence together. | 2018-04-23T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-04-23T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Drag City | April 23, 2018 | 8 | c8fb80c6-439c-4343-bb96-5a44c2cd5566 | Jenn Pelly | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jenn-pelly/ | |
So I'm playing with my new office chair right now. The floor of my apartment is wood-finished and extremely ... | So I'm playing with my new office chair right now. The floor of my apartment is wood-finished and extremely ... | Doves: The Last Broadcast | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/2430-the-last-broadcast/ | The Last Broadcast | So I'm playing with my new office chair right now. The floor of my apartment is wood-finished and extremely warped, so there are all kinds of little bumps and valleys to roll over. Combine that with the fact that all the ball bearings and wheels are brand new and heavily viscous and I could amuse myself doing this for quite a while. I guess it's the simple things that give you pleasure after a long day at work, juggling projects and trying to get out of there at five. My job is pretty hectic and I usually come home all wound up, so it's good to have these little diversions to help myself. Tonight the stress has me feeling particularly goofy.
Normally I wouldn't think of Manchester's Doves as an appropriate soundtrack for this kind of mood, but that's largely because until very recently I was only familiar with their first album, 2000's dark, murky Lost Souls. On that record, the band showed their facility with dark, claustrophobic textures and muted melodic statements, only occasionally indulging their impressive pop sense. And while their latest offering, The Last Broadcast, could hardly be called a wholesale revamping of their sound, it concentrates mostly on elements that the trio kept very subdued on their debut.
For one thing, while Lost Souls was certainly nothing to sniff at, the band sounds infinitely more comfortable and confident here, placing more faith in their writing and relying less on production to put forth their ideas. The record still abounds with thoughtful audio details, mind you-- but here they're almost always employed in the service of melody. Even the exceptions to that rule-- the short instrumental tracks like "Intro" and "Where We're Calling From"-- build tension while moving toward the catharsis of the next fully-fleshed song.
"Where We're Calling From" is a dense wall of swirling guitars and keyboards, growing ever thicker until finally evaporating, leaving the initial strums of "N.Y." in its place. "N.Y." is exultant in its first verse, all crashing guitars and soaring vocals. The instrumental midsection is one the band's finest moments, cut through with an unobtrusive string section and some surprisingly dynamic interplay. "Let's go while we can/ Put your finger on the map/ Who cares where it lands," sings Jez Williams as the song gathers steam behind him. It's one of several tracks that makes The Last Broadcast a brighter, and in some ways more accessible, album than its predecessor.
Elsewhere, the band lay down a ream of excellent songs beginning with "Words," a steadily chugging confection of astral guitar, vocal harmonies and glockenspiel that does a remarkable job of boring a limited melody straight into your memory. It's followed by the loping, seven-minute "There Goes the Fear," which is a strong candidate for one of the band's best songs yet, its bounce befitting the subdued melody and diving, almost country-ish slide guitar that swoops in the background. Doves have always been a band who could come out swinging with a powerful pop song when they wanted to, and this just proves that they should do it more often.
A few songs naturally point back to the band's original direction, such as the haunting, noir "Friday's Dust," with its crystalline strings (arranged by Sean O'Hagan and Marcus Holdaway) and strange production. Devoid of percussion, the song floats along almost like something Talk Talk might have produced in their later years, replete with ghostly clarinets and odd smatterings of brass. Of course, "Pounding" bounces right back with a... well, pounding rhythm and a sterling melody, as well as some spirited rhythm guitar.
The boys get downright proggy on the intro to "The Sulphur Man," with sweeping strings deceptively setting the stage for what turns out to be a relatively modest song, albeit one cut through with all sorts of inventive little flourishes, like the strings that rise in the verses, threatening to overtake the vocals before abruptly backing down and retreating to the background, only to attempt another coup a few seconds later. It's those details that make a good song great, and that's what makes The Last Broadcast an easy record to come back to-- chances are you missed an awful lot the first few times you listened.
"Caught by the River" closes things on a high note, riding out on a sturdy acoustic guitar frame adorned by the band's usual sonic fireworks and pushed forward by some very economical drumming. To the listener's benefit, the electric guitar parts aren't so economical, and the band masterfully layers soaring leads, ultimately ending on a glowing bed of reverb and clean guitar. It's a fittingly dramatic end to an album that's full of drama, without the tiresome excess-- a healthy balance if you ask me. Watch your toes while I chair-speed back to the stereo to give it another spin. | 2002-06-06T01:00:01.000-04:00 | 2002-06-06T01:00:01.000-04:00 | Rock | Capitol | June 6, 2002 | 8 | c904378e-04db-405c-83e5-952e26f1c5d8 | Joe Tangari | https://pitchfork.com/staff/joe-tangari/ | null |
The pop star attempts to be all things to all people, offering an overstimulating mix of sounds and a message of self-flagellation disguised as empowerment. | The pop star attempts to be all things to all people, offering an overstimulating mix of sounds and a message of self-flagellation disguised as empowerment. | Meghan Trainor: Treat Myself | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/meghan-trainor-treat-myself/ | Treat Myself | Meghan Trainor’s latest album, Treat Myself, includes the tapping sound of a coconut opener used as an instrument, the word “genetics” spelled out in a chant, and a children’s choir. It does not include the song “Treat Myself,” a jangly slew of saccharine self-indulgence released in a blitz of singles that preceded the album. For that, you’ll have to buy the extended version, available only at Target.
Treat Myself was originally scheduled for release back in August 2018, but Trainor pushed it back because she couldn’t stop writing songs, vowing not to release it “until I get everything out of my head and recorded in the studio.” The result is an album that tries to be all things to all people, a sonic overload that bludgeons the listener with bastardized “empowerment” for 15 songs. Treat Myself is clogged with oozing ballads, contaminated funk, and garish shudders of EDM. The closest thing to a mission statement is “Babygirl,” a glitchy, throbbing wail whose chorus goes “Love yourself! Love yourself! Love yourself! Love yourself! AHHH!”
If you ask Meghan Trainor, she might say she makes feel-good songs, anthems for boss-bitches-in-training who yearn to “have it all,” as she croons. But in Trainor’s world, having it all tends to center around male approval. She catapulted to fame in 2014 with “All About That Bass,” a catchy-enough jingle assuring the masses that men do, in fact, like butts. Feminists condemned the song for its not-so-subtle messaging (your body is acceptable, but only because men want to fuck it), and Trainor later announced that she didn’t consider herself a feminist—a sentiment she doubled down on with followup single “Dear Future Husband,” which painted a housewife fantasy in which marital happiness hinges on the wife buying groceries. (Two years later, with a new album to promote, she changed her mind.)
Much of Treat Myself relies on the idea of female duplicity; instead of dismantling the trope, Trainor’s lyrics capitulate to it. “I’m crazy but I’m sweet,” she warbles on “Blink.” “Evil Twin” is more explicit: an apology from Trainor for the “crazy bitch” side of her, which makes her “make my bad decisions, but I’m innocent.” Where Lizzo and other pop stars who capitalize on the commodification of female empowerment have embraced the unruly, unlikable woman—“100% that bitch, even when I’m crying, crazy”—Trainor is left constantly placating: for hesitating to take a compliment, for daring to get drunk, for being both too much and too little. This is self-flagellation disguised as motivation, a Peloton instructor prompting you to pedal faster until you hurl.
Confusing production choices make the album even more exhausting. “Nice to Meet Ya”, the most tolerable track, is engineered to be a banger, with tingling drums and a mediocre Nicki Minaj verse, but its whisper of a chorus is harsh and irritating. “Wave” starts off with panoramic piano and titanic vocals before a gaudy EDM pulse kicks in, turning it into something like a Cascada remix for a middle school dance in a sweaty gym. Trainor relies on ostentatious background vocals throughout, which oscillate between gospel-inflected harmonies and cartoonish carols. (She’s said they were inspired by visits to Kanye West’s Sunday Services.) Droning “dum dum dum”s grate against bass drops; choruses droop under the weight of so many voices. “I miss the way we used to funk,” Trainor chirps over “Disney on Ice”–meets–disco beats, in “Funk,” a song so charmed by its ability to substitute “fuck” for “funk” that it repeats the sentence six times in the first twenty seconds.
The oddest moment on the album is the song “Genetics,” which seems designed to provoke controversy. “How you get that bod? Is it from God?” Trainor trills alongside The Pussycat Dolls, then spells out the titular word like a cheerleader for eugenics. It’s especially jarring after a string of songs about how earnestly Trainor is working to improve herself (including “Workin’ on It,” a muted song that seems genuinely well-intentioned). You want to root for her throughout the record, hearing her croon about lost love and never being asked to dance; you want her to love herself for something other than the sake of attracting someone. Aiming to uplift women is an obvious good. But maybe true empowerment means we can demand more from those who claim to speak for us. | 2020-02-06T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2020-02-06T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Pop/R&B | Epic | February 6, 2020 | 4.1 | c9054cff-216d-4f8f-adab-82165d803f82 | Dani Blum | https://pitchfork.com/staff/dani-blum/ | |
The Numero release includes some of Laraaji’s breathtaking, newly discovered zither and kalimba odysseys. It reaffirms his preeminent role in ambient history. | The Numero release includes some of Laraaji’s breathtaking, newly discovered zither and kalimba odysseys. It reaffirms his preeminent role in ambient history. | Laraaji: Segue to Infinity | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/laraaji-segue-to-infinity/ | Segue to Infinity | Well before Brian Eno recruited Laraaji for the third installment of his epochal Ambient series, 1980’s Day of Radiance, the man born Edward Larry Gordon already had his own fully formed sound. Still, Laraaji’s origin story is often retold through his connection to the British musician. As the story goes, one day in 1978, Eno went walking in Washington Square Park and came upon a man strumming away on a zither. He dropped a note into his case, inviting him to a recording session, the fruit of which became Day of Radiance, his first album under the Laraaji alias. But before that fateful encounter, Gordon had already released Celestial Vibration earlier in the year, a record whose luminous, phaser-drenched sound and sprawling, side-long pieces shared a sensibility with the nascent ambient movement—right alongside contemporaneous releases like Harold Budd’s The Pavilion of Dreams and Eno’s own Ambient 1: Music for Airports. Numero Group’s four-LP box set Segue to Infinity essentially quadruples the length of Celestial Vibration with newly unearthed material from the era, somewhat incredibly discovered by a college student on eBay in 2021. It should definitively put a nail in the coffin of the narrative of Laraaji as a street busker who was simply “discovered” by Eno, instead cementing him as an preeminent figure in ambient and new-age music’s history.
The development of ambient seems inevitable given how much music in the ’60s and ’70s was unbounding itself from rhythm. Eno himself cites Miles Davis’ 32-minute dirge “He Loved Him Madly” as a proto-ambient text, and Ambient 2 collaborator Harold Budd was influenced by the post-Coltrane school of spiritual jazz. Laraaji, who studied at Howard University and immersed himself in the New York City folk scene after graduating, would’ve been fully conscious of the jazz and modern classical music that still form the backbone of ambient and new age. The latter is a term Laraaji embraces, unlike many other composers blending these influences into non-denominational spiritual music at the time. With some great guided meditation and reiki albums under his belt, the composer has never wavered in his faith in the healing power of music.
The eight pieces on Segue to Infinity embody this heritage, most explicitly the title track, which follows the custom of Coltrane’s later work, using a flute less as an instrument and more as a vessel for the power contained in the player’s breath. The 30-something Laraaji’s sound is rougher around the edges, less blissful than it would become on later works like Essence/Universe or Unicorns in Paradise. “Bethlehem,” one of the two Celestial Vibration tracks, starts by making the physical impact of Laraaji’s zither playing inescapably clear, eventually surrendering to a wash of distortion. Even more dramatic is “Koto,” whose scratchy first few minutes should pique the ear of fans of guitar destroyers like Tashi Dorji or Bill Orcutt. The tracks on Segue to Infinity, especially on the first two discs, toggle so dramatically between the harmonic and percussive extremes of Laraaji’s sound that in digital format, it’d be hard to tell where each track ended or began, if not for brief snippets of studio dialogue at the beginning of “Ocean” and “Koto.”
On vinyl, Segue to Infinity is one track per side over four LPs, yielding a total runtime of three hours. It’s a perfect fit for Laraaji’s music, once again displaying his tendency to stretch his compositions over individual sides of whichever format he’s using (for example, he explored the expansive possibilities of the cassette by releasing his excellent 1981 album Unicorns in Paradise as two tracks, each over 40 minutes long). According to the liner notes, Laraaji himself doesn’t seem entirely sure of the circumstances of these recordings—most likely, they’re outtakes from the Celestial Vibration sessions at ZBS Studios—but the fact that each track hovers between 18 and 25 minutes suggests his taste for side-long compositions had already developed. Segue is a fearsomely symmetrical and compact compilation, and despite its great length, the quality of the music never flags.
Of the newly discovered tracks, the most breathtaking are the three “Kalimba” performances, on which Laraaji loops simple arrangements on the titular electric thumb piano. Initially, these pieces seem like cousins of Steve Reich’s Marimba Phase, until the echoed layers and resonating kalimba keys create interlocking patterns that resemble chicken-scratch funk rhythm guitars. It’s astounding how much sound Laraaji creates with such a small instrument, and equally remarkable is how much musical history is folded into compositions that float by like a daydream. Like the rest of Segue to Infinity, it speaks to the fierceness of Laraaji’s vision even at this early stage in his career—and proves that the person Eno saw in Washington Square Park wasn’t just a potential co-conspirator, but also a kindred spirit. | 2023-02-11T00:00:00.000-05:00 | 2023-02-11T00:00:00.000-05:00 | Experimental | Numero Group | February 11, 2023 | 8.8 | c91174ab-2c65-4399-ba0c-683de224edcc | Daniel Bromfield | https://pitchfork.com/staff/daniel-bromfield/ | |
Following the deaths of two core members, the pioneering Florida metal band searches for celestial answer to earthly woes. It’s as close to a return-to-form as they’ve ever made. | Following the deaths of two core members, the pioneering Florida metal band searches for celestial answer to earthly woes. It’s as close to a return-to-form as they’ve ever made. | Cynic: Ascension Codes | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/cynic-ascension-codes/ | Ascension Codes | Cynic’s music has often been eclipsed by the band’s mythology. Half its members were also part of the Florida death metal legends Death, appearing on 1991’s classic Human just after finishing high school. While touring Europe with Death, authorities impounded their gear, and upon their return home, Hurricane Andrew razed their rehearsal space, further delaying Cynic’s debut album, 1993’s Focus: a perfect, iconoclastic slab of robotic-voiced jazzy death metal. They broke up almost immediately after its release, and when they returned with 2008’s follow-up Traced in Air, their softer, proggier sound alienated some fans. In the 2010s, Cynic have been an ongoing question mark: Virtuosic bassist Sean Malone cycled in and out of the band, while drummer Sean Reinert departed in 2015, at which point he and singer-guitarist Paul Masvidal were in public disagreement over the group’s very existence.
In 2020, the tale turned tragic for the Miami metal band: Reinert died suddenly in January and Malone died by suicide in December. With two-thirds of the core group gone, a comeback album seemed unfathomable. But Masvidal’s mystical worldview led him to embark on a final trek to find closure. He reaches into the past to channel and honor his fallen co-creators with Ascension Codes, as close to a return-to-form as we’re going to get from Cynic.
It’s a big gamble after Cynic’s 2014’s album Kindly Bent to Free Us, a misstep in extricating the band’s remaining traces of death metal. That album was so listless—even with contributions from Reinert and Malone—that their once singular sound now felt more suited for a local Guitar Center. But on Ascension Codes, Masvidal makes a few mathematical re-calculations: It’s a respectable—if flawed and often inscrutable—entry in a catalog that was seemingly defunct.
Most prominently, Masvidal re-inserts the metal back into Cynic: double-bass-drum attacks, chuggy riffs, and growled background vocals fuse once more with the jazz-prog that began to stand alone on recent recordings. “Mythical Serpents” opens with a furious riff and an extended guttural scream, while the furious blast-beats that close “Elements and Their Inhabitants” feel, briefly, like a new dawn for Cynic. These vintage moments, however, are in short order, and they are often overshadowed by Masvidal’s reliance on metaphysical whimsy.
Masvidal uses discretion in filling out the remainder of the band. He doesn’t attempt to find a replacement for Malone, whose labyrinthine runs on the bass guitar and Chapman Stick chiefly characterized Cynic’s complex sound. Keyboardist Dave Mackay’s bass synth is a sufficient simulacrum on most songs, but on tracks like “The Winged Ones,” the absence of Malone’s low-end aches like a phantom limb. Reinert is also irreplaceable. Instead of doing Focus cosplay, Matt Lynch’s peculiar jazz-metal playing (listed as “drumscapes,” in the liner notes, naturally) is paramount here. His cymbal work is exceptional, evoking splashy waves on “Mythical Serpents” and blasting off quick drum-and-bass interludes on “Aurora” and “Diamond Light Body.” Elsewhere, Masvidal leans on collaborators with contributions like “holographic-reptilian-voices” and “crystal bowl attunements,” particularly on the numerous ambient interludes (referred to as “codes) throughout.
As a singer, Masvidal splits the difference between the robotic sound of Focus and the clean vocals of Kindly Bent to Free Us. On Ascension Codes, he sings as if he’s half-human and half-machine, a synthesis in keeping with the lyrical themes. “I am the veins of a human hand,” Masvidal declares on “Mythical Serpents” after painting a picture of a fractalized star birth, “pregnant by an Annunaki in a holographic field.” It’s not exactly new territory, but contextualized within the deaths of Reinert and Malone, his pain transforms from heady to visceral as he searches for a celestial answer to his earthly woes.
His quest comes to a head in the penultimate track, “Diamond Light Body.” The song showcases Cynic’s astonishing fluidity: There’s a proggy intro, multiple synth interludes that evoke the arcade classic Out Run, a guitar solo that almost careens off the road, a breakbeat section, and a thunderous doom metal finish. It’s enough to induce whiplash, and that’s before considering some of Masvidal’s lyrical acrobatics. For a band that has shrouded itself beneath an impenetrable cloak, however, what appears to be Masvidal’s final astral projection as Cynic has never felt more welcoming and human.
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-12-03T00:00:00.000-05:00 | 2021-12-03T00:00:00.000-05:00 | Jazz / Metal | Season of Mist | December 3, 2021 | 6.9 | c91b6995-fd7a-4b50-a17f-c8371d93bac0 | Chris O'Connell | https://pitchfork.com/staff/chris-o'connell/ | |
On his fifth album, Ruban Nielson accompanies some of his strongest songwriting and performances to date with foggy production that makes the whole thing feel like a long, rummy sigh. | On his fifth album, Ruban Nielson accompanies some of his strongest songwriting and performances to date with foggy production that makes the whole thing feel like a long, rummy sigh. | Unknown Mortal Orchestra: V | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/unknown-mortal-orchestra-v/ | V | Ruban Nielson, a meticulous indie rock auteur, was born into a family of musicians. As a young boy, he would watch his parents play gigs at resorts all across the Pacific, at once aware of the grotesquery of the tourist industry and enjoying the pleasures of island life—especially its music. Following the exuberant vulnerability of 2015’s Multi-Love and 2018’s Sex & Food, V, which was partially recorded in Hilo, Hawaii, figures as Nielson’s return to his past, and to the gorgeous sonics and breezy sadness of a childhood spent in paradise. Accordingly, there are big, ripe melodies that burst with bittersweet juice and are arguably among the best Nielson has ever written. But so much of this double album is lost in the fog of his production style, which, in its attempts to avoid being excessive, comes off as evasive and overly fussy. It ultimately makes V feel like a long, rummy sigh.
Nielson’s songs have always been at odds with the way he chooses to record them. The faux-fi production he helped to forge—sweet vocals sung through grimy mic filters, songs squeezed with ear-popping compression—became one of the defining aesthetic markers of the indie rock of the last decade; the clipped and redlining drum sound of a UMO type beat will telegraph 2010s bedroom rock to future generations in the same way gated reverb connotes the megahits of the 1980s. Nielson’s best songs of the past few years, like Multi-Love’s title track, the flashing disco of “Can’t Keep Checking My Phone,” and even his cover of the Grateful Dead’s “Shakedown Street,” work with these restrictions by pressing beyond them, as if their funkiness and charisma couldn’t be confined to the basement in which they’d been recorded.
To maintain this balance, the songs themselves either have to be strong and cohesive, embodying some kind of emotional urgency, or else fully embrace their own peripatetic nature and pursue vibes at all costs. On V, Nielson often hits upon a great idea—the brilliantly constructed melody and pleasingly stupid lyrics of 9-to-5 jam “Weekend Run”—only to stall out or double down. The choppy bossa nova that kicks off “The Widow” seems to offer limitless possibilities, but the instrumental song doesn’t seem to know what to do with them and settles for a bland verse-chorus-verse arrangement, begging for a vocal track. The knotty melody of “Guilty Pleasures,” and the elegant way it resolves into a dusky chorus, is nearly blotted out because it sounds like it’s being played on a turntable with an unbalanced tonearm. It feels perverse, or at least very un-punk, to wish that the guy who made “Ffunny Ffrends” would clean up his new songs, but the patina of authenticity the production is meant to provide is wearing thin.
What makes V particularly frustrating is the knowledge of how good it could have been if Nielson had tightened the tracklist and given the remaining songs the sunlight they deserve. “Meshuggah” pits a slurping bassline against a bit of late-night tuxedo funk that lightly recalls Sam Sparro’s “Black and Gold,” while Nielson rips a sticky, questioning guitar solo through the middle of “The Garden,” a mid-’80s Don Henley pastiche that cooly shifts to absorb the outburst. The hapa-haole ballad “I Killed Captain Cook” winningly retells the story of the colonialist’s untimely end in Kealakekua Bay, and the playing is intricate and lovely, flecked with foam and softly swinging. Nielson’s vocals are stunning, full of brass and wavering like a muted trumpet. It’s startling to be reminded how good of a voice he has.
His strengths are even more evident on “That Life.” In the lyrics, he’s standing near the pool at a resort, just outside the scene, surveying the tourists sipping cocktails; jaguars lurk nearby; the next blow-up is just around the corner. For the duration of the song, though, things are at peace. The guitar makes it all work, the way it flicks between cheery and mournful, sometimes holding both at once and frequently spilling outside the meter like gin over the glass of a guy trying to carry three drinks back to the cabana. “That Life” is just a slice of something, barely even a moment, but it’s loaded with unspoken sadness. It’s among the very best songs Nielson has ever written.
Nielson’s gift for melody is undeniable, and many of the tracks here have a strange tendency to seem more interesting once the record’s over. Like humidity, the music can seep into your walls and soak them without your being aware of it. What this means is that V is often more affecting as a memory than it is as a present encounter, a notion that dovetails quite nicely with the nostalgia at the album’s core, sure, but also suggests that a bit more presence would’ve better served V’s songs. Whether intentional or not, Nielson’s characteristic haze makes the album comes across as self-conscious and blurry, as if he doesn’t want to align himself too closely with the glossy AM gold sounds that artists like the War on Drugs and Tame Impala have embraced more openly—and that the songs here so obviously draw from. Run through that obfuscatory filter, and absent the verve and pop of UMO’s previous work, V can feel remote and insular without the charm of being coy. There’s just enough shown here to leave you craving a more direct experience of the world Nielson is spinning. | 2023-03-17T00:02:00.000-04:00 | 2023-03-17T00:02:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Jagjaguwar | March 17, 2023 | 6.7 | c9275260-dd48-497d-8f4c-fccb47a18763 | Sadie Sartini Garner | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sadie-sartini garner/ | |
Mississippi native's debut on Animal Collective's Paw Tracks imprint finds him working in the realm of schmaltzy barroom pop with a style that's sometimes evocative of Jens Lekman or Stephin Merritt. | Mississippi native's debut on Animal Collective's Paw Tracks imprint finds him working in the realm of schmaltzy barroom pop with a style that's sometimes evocative of Jens Lekman or Stephin Merritt. | Dent May & His Magnificent Ukulele: The Good Feeling Music of Dent May and His Magnificent Ukulele | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/12725-the-good-feeling-music-of-dent-may-and-his-magnificent-ukulele/ | The Good Feeling Music of Dent May and His Magnificent Ukulele | By now you may have heard that young throwback crooner Dent May was discovered by Animal Collective during the recording of Merriweather Post Pavilion in Oxford, Miss., and subsequently signed to the group's Paw Tracks imprint. That fact has a lot of folks excited about the newcomer, but May is not your typical A.C.-related artist. In fact, on the wide spectrum of musical styles he's probably as far away from labelmates Black Dice and Excepter as, um, David Banner or Taylor Swift.
The Mississippi native offers here a kind of modern-day lounge act-- approaching his material as part sentimentalist, part jokester-- and sings in a manner closely reminiscent of indie pop vocalists like Stephin Merritt and Jens Lekman. May shares those gents' strong grasp of melody (his songs are nothing if not hook-laden) but unlike them he is a strict genre specialist. For this record, at least (allegedly there's a dance project in the works under his Dent Sweat alter ego), he functions entirely within the boundaries of the schmaltzy barroom pop and suburbanized island music of the 1950s and 60s. ("Meet Me in the Garden", all tiki torches and umbrella drinks, might as well be the soundtrack to a backyard cookout thrown by Mad Men 's Betty Draper.) Combined with his tongue-in-cheek lyrics, it can be a lot of shtick to swallow at once.
Since it's inseparable from the album's content, one really has to buy into the persona May is selling in order to enjoy The Good Feeling Music of Dent May and His Magnificent Ukulele . That's much easier to do with a fellow like Jonathan Richman (with whom May shares an innocent-guy outlook and is often compared to), because his naiveté comes across as genuine and is leavened with humor. But May's attempts at winking cultural criticism often undercut his authenticity. On "College Town Boy", he awkwardly pokes fun at the academic set, singing, "Since graduation day he feels like a fraud, he still regrets he never studied abroad." Yikes. Prompting more winces on "You Can't Force a Dance Party", May revisits a hipster get-together gone awry: "All the way from Brooklyn, Sally came to see me", he says, but laments spoiling the fun by being "in the corner reading poetry and prose."
If you can look past these cringe-inducing moments, The Good Feeling Music occasionally lives up to its title. One of the record's most charming cuts is "Oh Paris!", which finds May doing his best Morrissey atop strumming ukulele (yes, it is omnipresent) and "shoo-be doo-be" backing vocals. Just as pleasant is his reverential take on the Four Preps' 1957 classic "26 Miles (Catalina)", a wise cover choice since it fits snugly within his aesthetic. Alongside "Meet Me in the Garden", these songs represent a sufficiently enjoyable portion of the record. But to compare May again to one of his peers, there's nothing on par with Lekman's "Black Cab" or "Maple Leaves" here. At this early point in his career, May's tunes, while positively catchy and at times a lot fun, just don't have that kind of depth. They also lack heart, and that seems harder to forgive. | 2009-03-03T01:00:04.000-05:00 | 2009-03-03T01:00:04.000-05:00 | Rock | Paw Tracks | March 3, 2009 | 5.5 | c9280b3f-bff0-4c06-aa9c-ca202ce0e64b | Joe Colly | https://pitchfork.com/staff/joe-colly/ | null |
Drawing on Mediterranean folk, Georgian laments, and the 12th century mystic Hildegard von Bingen, the Catalan duo’s debut album is musically unique yet emotionally familiar. | Drawing on Mediterranean folk, Georgian laments, and the 12th century mystic Hildegard von Bingen, the Catalan duo’s debut album is musically unique yet emotionally familiar. | Tarta Relena: Fiat Lux | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/tarta-relena-fiat-lux/ | Fiat Lux | The first second of “Stabat mater,” track four on Catalan duo Tarta Relena’s Fiat Lux, is a moment of such elusive, illusory beauty that you wish it could go on forever. It’s not immediately obvious what the diaphanous, fluttering sound is, or if your headphones might be playing up. But when the sound is repeated after a brief flurry of vocals, Helena Ros and Marta Torrella’s voices united in immaculate harmony, the penny drops: Tarta Relena have made a feature out of their breathing, converting what most singers regard as a musical by-product into a captivating highlight of their highly rewarding debut album.
This attention to detail is typical of Tarta Relena, if we can say anything is typical of two musicians who once dubbed their music “progressive Gregorian” and who tackle everything from traditional Georgian song to a composition by 12th century Benedictine abbess Hildegard von Bingen on Fiat Lux. Throughout their small but impeccable catalog, Tarta Relena have exercised exquisite control over their music, in both the refined telepathy of their vocal synthesis and the sparse musical touches that accompany it. Fiat Lux is an album where every breath counts and every note is precisely deployed, the duo’s voices supported by a fine-spun mesh of electronic touches and hairline effects from producers Juan Luis Batalla and Òscar Garrobé.
“El suïcidi i el cant” employs a cavernous electronic bass for exactly four notes at the song’s halfway mark, their perfectly weighted melodrama forewarning a turn in the song’s emotional heft, like dark clouds briefly blotting out the sun. The song’s second half sounds positively furious, Ros and Torrella’s vocals filled with the volcanic anger that the bass foretold. “Esta montanya d’enfrente,” similarly, uses the faintest puff of electronic sound, a ringing in the ears of the song’s background, to add texture to the duo’s gorgeous vocal coupling, edging this traditional Sephardic song into the 21st century on the finest of musical beds.
Tarta Relena’s arcane choice of material might make their music appear dry or academic, the work of librarians and archivists rather than poets and provocateurs. But a fast-beating heart runs through the record, and the ultimate payoff is a sly pop edge that is more evident on Fiat Lux than in the duo’s previous work. “Me yelassan,” the traditional Greek song that closes the record, edges its way into a hand-clapping beat that plays off swinging drums and bass like a Rosalía hit, or the Diwali riddim that dominated dancehall in the early 2000s. “El suïcidi i el cant” is an adaptation of traditional poetry by Pashtun women from Afghanistan and colored by the “terrible August” of 2021, when Taliban forces took control of the country. But the song’s wildly catchy melody is underpinned by a scuttling electronic beat that brings it to the edge of pop music, even as the song spins its searing musical tale. There is even a touch of self-effacing humor in the title of “Relatable content,” a wordless sonic interlude that leads into the record’s final stretch.
Perhaps Tarta Relena’s greatest achievement on this gripping album is that their work sounds both musically unique and emotionally familiar, reaching through centuries of tradition and geographical divide to connect on a human level, like an ancient Egyptian hangover cure or a crude Sumerian joke. Fiat Lux feels timeless, a finely detailed work of archeological adventure, where the emotions excavated run deep.
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-12-30T00:00:00.000-05:00 | 2021-12-30T00:00:00.000-05:00 | Experimental | La Castanya / The Indian Runners | December 30, 2021 | 8 | c931cde8-e82e-440c-a1f5-3041113a83e2 | Ben Cardew | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ben-cardew/ | |
I See You, the third album by the xx, attempts to incorporate everyone’s talents into a new version of their sound, one true to their roots but richer and more varied. | I See You, the third album by the xx, attempts to incorporate everyone’s talents into a new version of their sound, one true to their roots but richer and more varied. | The xx: I See You | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22727-i-see-you/ | I See You | The xx’s self-titled debut remains one of the great sleeper hits of the last decade. No one—including, it’s fair to say, the xx themselves—expected that their murmuring blend of turn-of-the-millennium R&B and C86 indie pop would go on to sell a million copies and become hugely influential. But from the beginning, the London trio had a lot going for them. In Romy Madley Croft and Oliver Sim, they had two songwriters conversant in the primal language of heartbreak and loss, whose vocals, though limited, conveyed anguish. Madley Croft’s guitar lines did a great deal with very little, the single notes carving deep feeling out of broad subjects. And producer and programmer Jamie xx, with his unerring ability to find rhythms that fit with emotions, made sure each tune got its perfect beat.
Coexist from 2012 was a decent re-statement of the debut’s animating ideas, but the prevailing story of the xx in the years since that debut has been the rise of Jamie xx. The most exciting music coming out of their camp—from one-off singles like “Far Nearer” and “All Under One Roof Raving” to his 2015 breakthrough In Colour—belonged to him. The xx was all about working within limitations, with a prescribed set of sounds and themes; Jamie xx’s solo music was built around samples, and was, accordingly, wide open, bound only by his adventurous ear. I See You, the third album by the xx, sounds like an attempt to incorporate everyone’s talents into a new version of their sound, one true to their roots but richer and more varied.
On their first two albums, the xx limited their arrangements so that the songs could be performed live. But here, Jamie xx’s samples form the backbone of several songs, allowing them to move into territory that would be impossible with a guitar/bass/programmed-percussion set up. An early single, “On Hold,” even cops a mangled hook from a Hall and Oates song. It’s a quintessential Jamie xx sample, easily recognizable the moment you hear it but taking a moment to place, allowing your memory to fill in the blanks as the song moves and changes around it. Heard on its own late last year, “On Hold” sounded slightly forced, but it makes perfect sense as a brighter, poppier part of a record that takes the essential xx subject of uncertain love to near-concept album status.
As much as the expansive production helps move things forward, this is in many ways Madley Croft and Sim’s album. Both have grown as vocalists. Neither has tremendous range or depth, but they’re clever and resourceful singers, able to shape meaning through subtle inflections and shifts in phrasing. Sim’s approach is more face-to-face and straightforward—he seems like he’s holding up his end of a conversation—while Madley Croft seems like she’s talking to a mirror, trying to steel herself to share her feelings with the world. The delivery of every line is considered, as the pair tug at the edges of lines to get the expression just right. “I just don’t re-mem-ber,” Sim sings, drawing out the final syllable in “Say Something Loving,” imparting an additional touch of longing without overreaching; “Here come my insecurities/I almost expect you to leave,” Madley Croft sings in the same song, nearly summing up the record’s lyrical concerns in a single line.
The defining characteristics of these voices are helplessness, fear, and hurt; the xx sound quite far from the indie pop of their debut stylistically, but they retain their connection to that world because they still traffic in shy introspection and vulnerability. For the narrators of these songs, there’s a constant war between how the world sees them and how they feel inside, and self-love isn’t part of the equation. On “Performance,” Madley Croft sings about keeping up appearances, giving the illusion that everything is OK when she’s dying inside. “Brave for You” is a tribute to her deceased parents, but it could be about anyone who believes in you more than you believe in yourself. All the existential wrestling—interior vs. exterior, the promises and betrayals—happens in the closest of spaces; “My name on your lips/Your air in my lungs/Drowned in oxygen,” sings Madley Croft on “Lips,” sketching out just how close and intimate this world is.
“Performance” and “Brave for You” both feel like classic xx songs—they are naked and spare, with hints of strings and Madley Croft’s guitar and a whole lot of silence. About a third of the album works with stripped-down, open arrangements like this, while others make judicious use of samples and layers of synths and sequencers. “Dangerous” opens the album with a startling blast of a horns that returns on the chorus as a counterpoint melody. “A Violent Noise” has a winding and surging cluster of arpeggiating notes that explode at all the right moments—something of a Jamie xx trademark—and the production brilliantly traces the emotional arc of the song.
As an album, I See You has the eerily seamless wholeness of the self-titled debut, a smooth and polished object with no visible edges. If it came apart, you would almost certainly never be able to put it back together again. As such, each individual song seems most realized in the context of the album, as it builds on or tweaks or develops what came before and hints at something to come, and the closing “Test Me” ties it altogether. The song’s production is breathtaking, one of Jamie xx’s masterpieces, all Eno-like suggestion, and the words are both simple and move the record’s narrative forward. “Test me,” both Madley Croft and Sim sing, “see if I break,” suggesting an unspoken strength that might have been there all along. | 2017-01-12T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2017-01-12T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Electronic / Pop/R&B | Young Turks | January 12, 2017 | 8.4 | c933fab4-2b6a-40c1-8e78-126f45e77caf | Mark Richardson | https://pitchfork.com/staff/mark-richardson/ | null |
A live recording from New York’s the Kitchen captures a rare kind of improv synergy between the versatile composer-percussionist and a pianist who rose to fame in Anthony Braxton’s quartet. | A live recording from New York’s the Kitchen captures a rare kind of improv synergy between the versatile composer-percussionist and a pianist who rose to fame in Anthony Braxton’s quartet. | Tyshawn Sorey / Marilyn Crispell: The Adornment of Time | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/tyshawn-sorey-marilyn-crispell-the-adornment-of-time/ | The Adornment of Time | The composer and multi-instrumentalist Tyshawn Sorey has been spoiling audiences in a variety of jazz and classical scenes over the last few years. It’s easy to assume that he’s always in a recording studio somewhere: documenting his excellent trio; working as a percussionist in bands led by colleagues like Vijay Iyer and Steve Lehman; producing expansive, multi-hour pieces that engage with drone-music mysticism. But that substantial discography is hardly the whole story.
His recent song cycle, “Cycles of My Being,” was written for the tenor Lawrence Brownlee (and has played at Carnegie Hall and Opera Philadelphia). A 2018 appearance at New York’s Jazz Gallery, during which Sorey performed on a modified piano alongside the saxophonist Hafez Modirzadeh, was a reminder that his work as a keyboardist has not been given enough attention. A few months later, a production of Sorey’s dramatic work inspired by Josephine Baker, with a text by Claudia Rankine, proved mesmerizing on the steps of the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s grand staircase.
Yet even as his reach has broadened, Sorey has also kept working in more intimate formats. His latest record, a duo set with the veteran pianist Marilyn Crispell, is a freely improvised meeting recorded live at the Kitchen, a longtime New York experimental haven.
The album’s first act—particularly its first 20 minutes—is dominated by hushed and haunted timbres from both players. Approximately half an hour in, we get the first hint of tumult, a mood that develops, thrashes around, crests, and subsides over another quarter hour. An extended, closing coda brings to mind the beginning section while also highlighting the distance these performers have traveled.
On the surface, this might seem a standard free-improv sequence, and therefore less notable than Sorey’s hyper-conceptual projects. But this composer lives to mess with surface-level thinking. And thanks to his distaste for categorizing music—particularly when it comes to genre definitions—listeners should always be prepared for ambition and thoughtfulness, no matter the format.
Not surprisingly, across this unbroken 64-minute improvisation Crispell proves to be an ideal partner for such a non-hierarchical musical mind. Her own rise to prominence came, during the 1980s, as the pianist in saxophonist and composer Anthony Braxton’s “classic” quartet (a group whose recordings Sorey remembers admiring as a teen in the liner notes for this album).
During those vintage, marathon performances, preserved on albums like Quartet (Birmingham) 1985, Crispell often played one of Braxton’s notated solo-piano pieces while the band’s other members played parts from other Braxton works. The collage-style results tended to be bracing, but always in a musical fashion—in part due to Crispell’s keen ability for listening intently amid a whirlwind.
Crispell’s responsiveness is still in elite, extraordinary shape here. Her percussive, avant-jazz technique gets plenty of room to roam during a section of high-drama pummeling; check out the swinging density she produces 34 minutes into the set.
But her feel for momentum is also present during many of the performance's quieter passages, during which the pianist’s ideas clearly inspire choices made by the drummer. (It helps that Sorey’s kit is outfitted with gongs and other forms of pitched percussion, the better to merge with melodies coming from Crispell’s instrument.) In these moments, The Adornment of Time doesn’t merely present two talented musicians in a room, improvising at the same time. Instead, the album makes good on ideals at the heart of the free-improv tradition—including equality and adaptiveness—that are often paid lip service, if not always easily heard. | 2019-10-02T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-10-02T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Jazz | Pi | October 2, 2019 | 8 | c939a26d-9191-4d5b-b107-d7d86c77019a | Seth Colter Walls | https://pitchfork.com/staff/seth-colter walls/ | |
So, then, seven years later Domino reissues In the Aeroplane Over the Sea and the arguments can begin anew. I ... | So, then, seven years later Domino reissues In the Aeroplane Over the Sea and the arguments can begin anew. I ... | Neutral Milk Hotel: In the Aeroplane Over the Sea | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/5758-in-the-aeroplane-over-the-sea/ | In the Aeroplane Over the Sea | So, then, seven years later Domino reissues In the Aeroplane Over the Sea and the arguments can begin anew. I've talked about this album with a lot of people, including Pitchfork readers and music writers, and while it is loved in the indie world like few others, a small but still significant number despise it. Aeroplane doesn't have the near-consensus of top-shelf 90s rock artifacts like, say, Loveless, OK Computer, or Slanted and Enchanted. These records are varied, of course, different in many ways. But in one key respect Aeroplane stands apart: This album is not cool.
Shortly after the release of In the Aeroplane Over the Sea, Puncture magazine had a cover story on Neutral Milk Hotel. In it Mangum told of the influence on the record of Anne Frank's The Diary of a Young Girl. He explained that shortly after releasing On Avery Island he read the book for the first time, and found himself completely overwhelmed with sadness and grief. Back in 1998 this admission made my jaw drop. What the hell? A guy in a rock band saying he was emotionally devastated by a book everyone else in America read for a middle-school assignment? I felt embarrassed for him at first, but then, the more I thought about it and the more I heard the record, I was awed. Mangum's honesty on this point, translated directly to his music, turned out to be a source of great power.
In the Aeroplane Over the Sea is a personal album but not in the way you expect. It's not biography. It's a record of images, associations, and threads; no single word describes it so well as the beautiful and overused "kaleidoscope." It has the cracked logic of a dream, beginning with "King of Carrot Flowers Part 1". The easiest song on the record to like on first listen, it quietly introduces the listener to the to the album's world, Mangum singing in a muted voice closer to where he left off with the more restrained On Avery Island (through most of Aeroplane he sounds like he's running out of time and struggling to get everything said). The first four words are so important: "When you were young..." Like every perceptive artist trafficking in memory, Mangum knows dark surrealism to be the language of childhood. At a certain age the leap from kitchen utensils jammed into dad's shoulder to feet encircled by holy rattlesnakes is nothing. A cock of the head; a squint, maybe.
Inside this dream it all begins in the body. Moments of trauma, joy, shame-- here they're all experienced first as physical sensation. A flash of awkward intimacy is recalled as "now how I remember you/ how I would push my fingers through your mouth/ to make those muscles move." Sometimes I hear this line and chuckle. I think of Steve Martin in The Jerk, licking Bernadette Peters' entire face as a sign of affection. Mangum here reflects the age when biological drives outpace the knowledge of what to do with them, a time you're seeing sex in everything ("semen stains the mountaintops") or that sex can be awkward and unintentionally painful ("fingers in the notches of your spine" is not what one usually hopes for in the dark). Obsessed as it is with the textures of the flesh and the physical self as an emotional antenna, listening to Aeroplane sometimes seems to involve more than just your ears.
Then there's the record's disorienting relationship to time. The instrumentation seems plucked randomly from different years in the 20th century: singing saws, Salvation Army horn arrangements, banjo, accordion, pipes. Lyrical references to technology are hard to fix. Anne Frank's lifespan from 1929 to 1945 is perhaps the record's historical center, but the perspective jumps back and forth over centuries, with images and figures sucked from their own age and squirted out somewhere else. When "The King of Carrot Flowers Part 3" mentions "a synthetic flying machine" our minds leap to something like Leonardo da Vinci's 15th Century drawings of his helicopter prototype. The image in "Two-Headed Boy" of a mutant child trapped in a jar of formaldehyde is pulled from Dr. Moreau's industrial age island. The radio play powered by pre-electric pulleys and weights, the nuclear holocaust in the title track. What's it all about? Mangum offers an explanation for these jarring leaps in a line about Anne Frank in "Oh Comely," where he sings, "I know they buried her body with others/ her sister and mother and 500 families/ and will she remember me 50 years later/ I wished I could save her in some sort of time machine." If you can move through time, see, nothing ever really dies.
Seven years it's been, and whether Mangum has had personal trouble or somehow lost his way with music, it's not unreasonable to think that we've heard the last from Neutral Milk Hotel. I hope he does, but he may never pick up the guitar he set down after "Two-Headed Boy Part Two." Even so, we have this album and another very good one, and that to me is serious riches. Amazing to think how it started, how at the core of it all was guts. I keep thinking of "It's Alright Ma, I'm Only Bleeding," and one of Dylan's truest lines: "If my thought-dreams could be seen/ They'd probably put my head in a guillotine." Aeroplane is what happens when you have that knowledge and still take the risk. | 2005-09-26T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2005-09-26T02:00:01.000-04:00 | Rock | Merge | September 26, 2005 | 10 | c941f305-86db-4975-8fe8-8d281ae0dd67 | Mark Richardson | https://pitchfork.com/staff/mark-richardson/ | null |
Hot Chip’s singer sounds caught in an irresistible haze on his latest solo LP, making music that’s more deluxe than usual but far scruffier than his main band. | Hot Chip’s singer sounds caught in an irresistible haze on his latest solo LP, making music that’s more deluxe than usual but far scruffier than his main band. | Alexis Taylor: Beautiful Thing | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/alexis-taylor-beautiful-thing/ | Beautiful Thing | Alexis Taylor’s new album, Beautiful Thing, begins with a slightly muffled, boompty beat, part throbbing of the heart and part pounding of a speaker heard through a bathroom door. “I’m dreaming another life,” Taylor sings, his voice quavering sweetly. “Won’t you meet me out of your mind?”
Taylor has spent the last 15 years or so dreaming things up. As the lead singer of Hot Chip, he imagined working-class British versions of American R&B (their 2004 debut, Coming on Strong), disco abandon (2008’s “Ready for the Floor”), and ’90s diva house (2015’s “Need You Now”). Around and between those albums, Taylor formed the improvisatory trio About Group with members of This Heat and widescreen junglists Spring Heel Jack. As a solo artist, Taylor has variously fancied drones; amiable odes to old pros like Paul McCartney and Todd Rundgren; and most recently a collection of straightforward piano-man twinklers.
Snatches of his discography waft throughout “Dreaming Another Life,” the opener to Taylor’s fourth solo album, as if before this dream he’d fallen asleep counting sleeves of his old records. It’s hypnotic but unsettled, stumbling from a warm passage of ambient house to loops of squalling noise to a glittering sheet of treated guitar. “The changes are hard to hear,” he sings, “but I know they hide in here/I’ll pull them together soon/Somewhere out of this thick air.”
The title track arrives like a thunderstorm through billowing curtains. Created, along with most of the album, in concert with DFA co-founder Tim Goldsworthy, “Beautiful Thing” boasts a bed of acid supporting unfurling swaths of noise, little winces of keyboards, and warm fluffy clouds of piano. “I try to reach you/But our love is undefined,” Taylor sighs, his voice caught in reverb. As with “Dreaming Another Life,” the song again and again starts to congeal, yet can’t quite become tangible. It’s the sound of Taylor caught in an irresistible haze, failing to slough away the sleepiness.
Taylor picks up the kind of shrugging boogie Christine McVie once put down for mid-album highlight “Oh Baby,” a kind of anxious paean to cohabitation. “There is nothing greater than the sight of you just dreaming free,” he sings as the chorus rises and falls, “and if I close my eyes I know that I will lose you when I wake.”
And so, for the rest of the album, he sort of decides not to, tossing and turning in the throes of sadder songs. “Deep Cut” is a kind of “Nightshift” for the unemployed; “Roll on Blank Tapes” is something like if the On-U Sound System attempted a sea chanty; “I Feel You” approaches the grace of Antony and the Johnson’s “You Are My Sister” or “Thank You for Your Love,” without the aura of trauma.
The layers of sound Taylor presents are sumptuous, full of tossed-off licks of piano and guitar that gather into motifs more deluxe than his recent solo work but far scruffier than Hot Chip. Tucked into them, Taylor’s lyrics make strange but welcome bedfellows. Often, he uses the language of music-making as a metaphor for connection. In the stately vocal showcase “A Hit Song,” he sings, “I need a high note/A moment to clear throats/Of all who have lost hope/And need a response.../And I know there is something left to lose/And high notes don’t always reach the truth.” There’s a catch in his voice like a dull sun through the blinds, capturing the moment of waking up and reaching out to find the pillow’s vacant after all. | 2018-04-20T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-04-20T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Domino | April 20, 2018 | 6.8 | c94302fc-a858-4a2d-9864-b290849b1690 | Jesse Dorris | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jesse-dorris/ | |
Four years after their debut, the D.C. band regroups as a duo for a more electronic guitar-pop album that keeps their preternatural sense of melody but sands down a few of their more unique touches. | Four years after their debut, the D.C. band regroups as a duo for a more electronic guitar-pop album that keeps their preternatural sense of melody but sands down a few of their more unique touches. | Flasher: Love Is Yours | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/flasher-love-is-yours/ | Love Is Yours | The three original members of D.C. band Flasher were uniquely intertwined—subtract or swap a player, and you risk drastically altering or destroying what made them so special in the first place. Their acclaimed 2018 debut album, Constant Image, was marked by a spring-loaded post-punk exuberance, their shared lead vocals, and patchwork-style lyrics written collaboratively as a trio. A few years after the album was released, bassist Daniel Saperstein departed the band, leaving guitarist Taylor Mulitz (formerly of Priests) and drummer Emma Baker to reform as a duo on their second album, Love Is Yours. The first iteration of Flasher was such a democratic and balanced three-piece that this situation raises the question: How do you move forward when an integral piece of you is missing?
Love Is Yours arrives four years after Constant Image, but Mulitz and Baker aren’t trying to replicate the magic. Instead, they opt for a more contemplative sound. Their first LP was so springy that, at times, it sounded like the coil might break. But their deliberate pace this time around means there are no tracks that verge on self-destruction. Like its predecessor, they utilize a lot of strange guitar and synth textures, giving the record a bumpy, staticky feel. Mulitz and Baker’s oh-so-smooth vocal arrangements come to the front and are a big highlight, providing a gauziness that pairs well with their sawtooth guitar tones and clamorous background ambiance.
Their electronic experimentation is more prominent on Love Is Yours—the album opens with a series of percussive hisses, and muffled frequencies are peppered throughout the album. On the latter half of “Damage,” Flasher pivot towards dark, whooshing electro-pop, and the instrumental “Pink” is a hypnotic blitz of contorted synths. Baker also takes on more lead vocal duties than before, excelling especially on the tender, wistful refrain of album opener “I Saw You” and the tongue-in-cheek punk delivery of the verses on “I’m Better.”
While Constant Image grappled with coping mechanisms amid the pervasive, immaterial tension that nags at the human spirit, Love Is Yours is about how to nurture (or discard) relationships that keep you sane during rough times. “Damage” and “Tangerine” capture the act of untethering from manipulative people, the former seemingly with a more clear-cut postmortem and closure, the latter with deeper, more emotional wounds. The title track describes the life-affirming connection that can result from a long-term partnership (“You got me missing what I didn’t know I need”) but also the landmines that appear once you know someone so intimately (“I’m steps behind you, saying the wrong thing again”). It communicates the frustration of not being on the same page with other people, but for all the record’s melancholia, the album ultimately revolves around an admirable devotion to oneself. “Give yourself back/Self-respect is knowing the odds/And seeing the cause and effect/And how could it be,” Baker sings in the album’s opening lines.
What Love Is Yours lacks is the same level of potency and lyrical sharpness as their debut. Gone are the explosive climaxes, the exhilarating pace and buoyancy that made Constant Image feel like such a strangely joyful listen. The way Flasher perpetually added and subtracted sonic layers on their first album also feels more seamless and impactful than on Love Is Yours. Their new lyrics don’t possess the previous record’s humor or clever wordplay and although they gain warmth through direct, vulnerable writing, they lose the satisfying connection they once had between their anxious guitar lines and agitated lyrics. Ignoring the shadow of its predecessor may be difficult, but Love Is Yours is still a compelling album of off-center power pop and is proof that the long-held bonds of Baker and Mulitz remain just as strong. | 2022-06-17T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2022-06-17T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Domino | June 17, 2022 | 6.8 | c9447bc7-85ba-4f33-90b0-e50508bf884b | Lizzie Manno | https://pitchfork.com/staff/lizzie-manno/ | |
The Australian singer is a hedonistic pop hero on an album that pulls together club nights, tender moments, last-call horniness, and eclectic samples with remarkable finesse. | The Australian singer is a hedonistic pop hero on an album that pulls together club nights, tender moments, last-call horniness, and eclectic samples with remarkable finesse. | Troye Sivan: Something to Give Each Other | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/troye-sivan-something-to-give-each-other/ | Something to Give Each Other | On his 2015 debut, Blue Neighbourhood, Troye Sivan pitched himself as a dreamy outsider torn from the pages of a YA novel, taking in the world with a wide-eyed gaze that saw far beyond small-town limits. But rather than settling for Lorde imitation or soundtracking John Green adaptations for the rest of his life, Sivan gradually shed his youthful preciousness and adopted a more adult perspective. 2018’s Bloom graduated out of the suburbs and into other peoples’ bedrooms, with anthemic pop songs about bottoming and hooking up with older men for the first time. The music was still booming and melodramatic, but its writing was distinctly more funny and lived-in, dispatches from an artist who’d matched observation to experience by actually fucking around and finding out.
Enter “Rush,” the electrifying, sex-addled lead single to his third album Something to Give Each Other. The song hit like a jolt of poppers and cut through any prior notion of who the singer might be. It immediately reintroduced Sivan as a libertine pop hero, combining hazy, impressionistic lyrics with a breakneck house beat and roaring, homoerotic football chants. Encouraged by his best friend and collaborator, Leland, to “go make a fucking hot video… [and come] out with your dick swinging,” Sivan decamped to Berlin with the filmmaker Gordon von Steiner for a week’s worth of shooting and partying. The final music video is a tableau of lockstep choreography, polymorphous perversity, and nightlife mischief in all of its dank glory. The placid, angel-faced expression that fronted the cover of his debut record had been wiped off and replaced with a lusty pout, with any trace of preciousness long since sweated off on the dancefloor.
Something to Give Each Other was conceived after a break-up during a period of extended singleness. Bloom’s starry-eyed expressions of love are replaced with a much more open conception of romance and sexuality, where intimate connection forms spontaneously. Long-distance yearning bleeds into last-call horniness on “What’s the Time Where You Are?” when Sivan rounds out the chorus by crooning “I’m right on top of this groove/but God, I wish it was you.” On “One of Your Girls” he serenades a straight guy into hooking up, riding a boy-band hook straight out of *NSYNC with a lascivious hot girl wink. And no amount of repeat listens will ever diminish the off-the-charts boldness of the heartfelt plea in “How to Stay with You” to: “Turn my bussy out.”
Something to Give Each Other is a showcase for some dazzling eclecticism. Ideas that couldn’t possibly work on paper are executed skillfully and to often gorgeous effect. Want to hear Jessica Pratt’s heartbreaking warble over a dance beat? Behold the achingly downcast “Can’t Go Back, Baby.” ¿Quieres Troye en español? See the sultry “In My Room.” “Got Me Started” bookends its propulsive two-step beat with a sample snatched from Bag Raiders’ “Shooting Stars,” aka from that years-old meme. Although initially grating, its wiggling synths build upon the song’s romantic pining in a way that feels funnily reminiscent of Overmono’s sample-heavy take on UK garage.
In recent interviews, Sivan has given off the impression of having settled gracefully into his celebrity, the kind of artist who’ll plainly state that since all their dreams of stardom came true early they now have little left to prove. It’s the kind of unburdened attitude that scans as glamorous rather than unambitious, an opportunity to leverage his secure footing at the heart of the mainstream to take on outré projects, flex his good taste, and otherwise let his freak flag fly. The whole project of Something to Give Each Other feels like a masterclass in curation, a melange of niche humor, arthouse references, and inspired experiments bound up in the freedom to be any kind of pop star he wants to be. From the samples to its reference-laden music videos—“Got Me Started” crams Wong Kar-wai allusions, Denis Lavant’s cathartic sprint from Mauvais Sang, and getting yeet’d into the space of three minutes! “One of Your Girls” is ’90s Calvin Klein by way of “Video Phone” and Xtina at her most nasty. Something to Give Each Other turns a buffet of references into easily digestible ear candy.
The record’s vibe is so cohesive that when the album dips, it’s noticeable. “Still Got It” tracks the smoldering longing after a hook-up with an ex but feels like an aesthetic hold-over from Bloom, with its mournful organ-drenched instrumental and extended outro sapping the pent-up energy and momentum from the brilliant four-song run that precedes it. By contrast “Can’t Go Back, Baby” covers similar emotional ground but wields its muted, minimal thump and brilliantly bizarre sample to telegraph permanently broken trust and the loss of a shared dream to much greater effect. Sivan matches its haunted ambiance with hushed vocals that pine and twist over a relationship, not belting but fully inhabiting every sensitive spot of the song’s bruised feeling.
Much of Something to Give Each Other scans as less of a reinvention than a gradual honing of Sivan’s craft. He’s slightly scaled down the soaring, anthemic volume for a sound that he can more fully command. Whether he’s falling in or out of love, going out, or reflecting on the night before, Sivan sounds more credible than ever, pairing a newfound swagger with a heady rush of emotion. He’s his own drug, and it’s such a hit. | 2023-10-16T00:03:00.000-04:00 | 2023-10-16T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | Capitol | October 16, 2023 | 8 | c9479d57-57b2-4022-92ef-bfb168b47145 | Harry Tafoya | https://pitchfork.com/staff/harry-tafoya/ | |
Leaving behind the singer-songwriterly stylings of his previous project, Coldair, Tobiasz Biliński taps the pristine sonics of 1980s sophisti-pop, but it’s often too bloodless for its own good. | Leaving behind the singer-songwriterly stylings of his previous project, Coldair, Tobiasz Biliński taps the pristine sonics of 1980s sophisti-pop, but it’s often too bloodless for its own good. | Perfect Son: Cast | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/perfect-son-cast/ | Cast | Tobiasz Biliński’s Perfect Son is a descendant of sophisti-pop, a British style from the 1980s that wielded the polished and pristine elements of jazz and soft rock as a reaction against punk. Though few people besides music critics actually use the term, sophisti-pop’s influence lingers: Last year marked the 30th anniversary of Talk Talk’s post-rock god particle Spirit of Eden, while the 1975’s “Love It if We Made It” was explicitly modeled upon the Blue Nile’s “The Downtown Lights.” The “sophisticated” part refers to the traits that elevate albums like Perfect Son’s Cast above the fray, regardless of trends: arch lyricism, fussy melodies, and unblemished musicianship on lavish equipment. Cast embodies all of these qualities perhaps too well—it’s surely a curious fit on a label like Sub Pop.
As Perfect Son’s debut, following a string of records Biliński released as Coldair, Cast stresses themes of self-discovery and transformation, and it does manage a more intense physical experience than it initially lets on. The full-band drop on “Reel Me” is a satisfying HD wallop, while “Promises” and “My Body Wants” are callbacks to the brief, pre-millennial merger of big beat and Britrock. There’s enough blunt-force low end and percussive jolt to give the impression of a much nastier and heavier album, if Cast wasn’t so beholden to production values that warrant a 70% marginal tax rate. But Biliński mostly nods to trip-hop without the drugs or industrial without the kink and abrasion. In that sense, Cast is also rooted in late-1990s singer-songwriter records where the flavors of edgier genres were simply misted on like essential oils.
I assume the point of it all is that Biliński’s blue-eyed soul vocals are in constant combat with his red-blooded desires—“Fill your lungs/Feel love and feel lust,” he sings over the mechanical shuffle of “It’s for Life.” His lyrics frequently scan as elemental and carnal: He admits to “murderous thoughts” on a saintly stretch of “So Divine” and is engulfed by a “wildfire I cannot tame” while he goes “off the rails” during the trans-European metronomy of “Promises.” But Biliński is can only tell rather than show: a song actually called “Lust” declares, “I am turned over/I parted with bad blood... I’m filling up with lust,” and something’s either lost in translation or just a misunderstanding of how desire really works.
If you’re going to use the word “perfect” in your band name, it helps to have a developed sense of irony. Despite their considerable differences, Perfect Pussy and A Perfect Circle do share a subversive streak. Perfect Son, not so much. Everything about Cast, from its high-end synths and imperious production to Biliński’s alabaster vocals, is superficially flawless and taken at face value; most of one’s time with the album is spent looking for cracks, hooks, or anything resembling a personality. The thing about perfection in art isn’t just that it’s unattainable—it’s also uninteresting. | 2019-02-16T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2019-02-16T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Sub Pop | February 16, 2019 | 5.6 | c954f3ac-abef-4d09-92fc-c8859aa3a6c9 | Ian Cohen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ian-cohen/ | |
Perennial Long Island noise-rockers return with their first album in 14 years, as detailed and cacophonous as they've always been. | Perennial Long Island noise-rockers return with their first album in 14 years, as detailed and cacophonous as they've always been. | Controlled Bleeding: Larva Lumps and Baby Bumps | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22260-larva-lumps-and-baby-bumps/ | Larva Lumps and Baby Bumps | Since their 1983 debut Knees and Bones, the Long Island-based Controlled Bleeding’s 30-plus albums have spanned a dizzying array of genres including noise, industrial, no wave, prog, psych, dub, and jazz (just to name a few). Likewise, Larva Lumps and Baby Bumps—the band’s first album since 2002, and also their first since the deaths of key members Chris Moriarty and Joe Papa—cuts a wide swath through musical styles. But at this stage of a four-decade career defined by relentless exploration, it would be too easy for Controlled Bleeding to rest on the audacity of its kitchen-sink mentality alone.
Bandleader Paul Lemos imagined the album's grotesque cover art (by musician/visual artist Gregory Jacobsen) would fit the music because he found it “simultaneously beautiful and revolting.” But even if *Larva Lumps *contains its fair share of sonic provocation, its deeper allure lies in the band’s ability to rein in and unify their musical appetites. For someone who appears to have first resorted to noise because of his limited musical skills, Lemos has grown into a seasoned bandleader who can extract near-miraculous levels of flexibility from his supporting cast while also keeping it raw, like a compromise between the trebly chicken-scratch sound of classic Chrome and the layering of modern Swans.
If you were to play this album on shuffle along with the band’s back-catalog, it would be difficult to distinguish the new material from the old. Larva Lumps’ gaunt, boxed-in production sounds mistakable for a low-budget indie-label recording from the late ’80s or early ’90s—the kind that just couldn’t be mastered to sound very “full” on CD. That said, the band is undeniably patient, even where latter-day members Chvad SB, Mike Bazini, and longtime drummer Anthony Meola’s programming lean more towards youthful passion than refinement.
The psych-rock of opener “Driving Through Darkness” sets the tone for the rest of the album. Over a hypnotic, uptempo groove, jousting organ and guitar lines recall ’60s garage stylings that Can would have bastardized decades ago, or Obits would have done this century. Lemos and company could easily have settled for a genre exercise. Instead, the song surpasses its own stylistic trappings as it ramps down towards its conclusion. When the drums drop out and Lemos drops twinkling harmonics over a gurgling bass line, it’s a rather convincing impression of Yes’ Steve Howe at the beginning of “Roundabout.”
That decision at the end of “Driving Through Darkness” underscores the subtlety and taste that Controlled Bleeding sustains throughout Lava Lumps' two-disc sprawl. (The first disc contains studio material recorded over a four-year stretch, while the second disc consists of live-in-the-studio recordings helmed by underground production icon Martin Bisi). On roughly a third of the album—“Carving Song,” “Swarm,” and the 23-minute noise opus “The Perks of Being a Perv”— the band uses high-pitched static as if it were a weapon. Light years away from the unbridled retching of Knees and Bones, however, these tunes actually hold together thanks to Lemos’ tight arrangements.
As a seasoned composer, Lemos never allows the songs to lose their pulse or their sense of space, and his affinity for both becomes even more apparent when you measure the noise- and rock-oriented tunes against the melodic ones. On “As Evening Fades,” for example, he laces a picturesque piano loop with clean-toned guitar work that verges on new-age jazz. A younger act with something to prove might not have been able to resist marring the song with uglier sounds. Larva Lumps has plenty of those, but Lemos clearly understands the value of not forcing them into the picture. It allows even the most caustic moments to reveal the beauty at its core. | 2016-08-27T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-08-27T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Experimental | Artoffact | August 27, 2016 | 7.4 | c966cebf-cb82-4c6c-99bd-a255078d6c99 | Saby Reyes-Kulkarni | https://pitchfork.com/staff/saby-reyes-kulkarni/ | null |
North Carolina neo-bluegrass outfit write uncommonly affecting songs as they stumble through country, bluegrass, orchestral pop, and early Beatles-style pop-rock. | North Carolina neo-bluegrass outfit write uncommonly affecting songs as they stumble through country, bluegrass, orchestral pop, and early Beatles-style pop-rock. | The Avett Brothers: Emotionalism | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/10778-emotionalism/ | Emotionalism | The Avett Brothers' Emotionalism is the most contrived record I've heard this year. It's also one that, like my kitchen table, I've returned to, compulsively and without expectation, for comfort and familiarity. My stupid little bromide, maybe. And what the band-- two brothers and a friend from Concord, North Carolina-- lacks in subtlety, they make up for with embarrassing persistence: Song after song, stumbling through country, bluegrass, orchestral pop, and early Beatles-style pop-rock, they never waste a chance to harmonize or wail, to loose one beat-down sentiment after another, to back-pat or console.
In a world so full of cynicism that it's invisible-- and one in which anti-cynics invariably look like thorough dopes-- it's hard to talk about Emotionalism, their fifth studio album, in a way that isn't hyperbolic. It could stand to be 15 or 20 minutes shorter. Some of the songs, like "The Ballad of Love and Hate", are ham-handed without sounding humble, allegories stuffed with pulpit wisdom and so bent on supplying a moral that the characters become abstractions. The Avett's heroes, like the Replacements', aren't clever or nuanced-- they're most instructive when puking, bawling, or both. Or, like the narrator in "Will You Return?", an unwitting bubba to whom shit just happens: "I open my eyes/ And here's what occurs/ A pretty little girl/ With pretty little curls/ Leans on my mind/ Leans to the side."
When Emotionalism is good, it's intrusively good, a kind of stop-and-pause experience that will probably inspire inscrutable phone calls to people you care about-- "I just wanted you know how blessed I am," and so on-- which, in turn, will inspire concerned questions from said loved ones about alcohol intake (blame the last thirty years, which made a cultural victim of earnestness). And drunk it is, most of the time-- messy in sentiment, swooning, impulsive. It's that spirit that offsets the album's contrivances. It's not grisly-- some of Emotionalism shows off how irritatingly middlebrow and non-committal alt-country can be-- but it's not too mannered, either. And the Avetts probably get shot by both sides as a result.
So play the perfunctory cynic through the opening ruminations of "Die Die Die", come to flinch at the aw-shucksisms of "Paranoia in B-Flat Major" ten minutes later, cry like a bruised teenager by the time you hit "Salina", and then find the wherewithal to glorify your bad decisions by "Pretty Girl from San Diego". Emotionalism is the analyst who probes the reluctant patient until he splits like a melon. | 2007-11-12T01:00:04.000-05:00 | 2007-11-12T01:00:04.000-05:00 | Rock | Ramseur | November 12, 2007 | 7.5 | c966d7bc-cceb-457e-a82b-5fa979c637db | Mike Powell | https://pitchfork.com/staff/mike-powell/ | null |
Blue Broderick’s new power pop record sets her gentle thoughts against the most immediate rock Diners has ever attempted. | Blue Broderick’s new power pop record sets her gentle thoughts against the most immediate rock Diners has ever attempted. | Diners: Domino | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/diners-domino/ | Domino | Across Domino’s twenty-five minutes, Blue Broderick wanders through a Los Angeles beach, makes a plan to address the leaks in her bedroom ceiling, and idly waves a pen over an empty notebook. It’s her sixth album as Diners, and her first in power pop mode. Through it all, she avoids any trace of the style’s two most combustive emotional fuels: self-pity and spite. The chief thrill of Domino is in Broderick setting her probing interiority against the most immediate rock Diners has ever attempted.
Over the last few years, Broderick has shown adeptness at filtering the mellower sounds of the ‘70s—jaunty Nilssonian electric piano, West Coast AM Gold smoothness—through earnest bedroom pop. On Diners’ previous album, 2022’s Four Wheels and the Truth, she dipped a toe into the rowdy waters of power pop. Here she dives in, skinny tie and all—and with a checkered cover that echoes a cult classic. Joining her on this excursion is Portland-based producer/multi-instrumentalist Mo Troper, who has become something of a power pop ombudsman, interrogating the genre and its fastidious proponents in print and on record.
The two are great company on Domino. The songs are lean but fully developed; Jack Shirley’s mix is as crisp as Diners’ beloved sodas. The details on opener “Working on My Dreams” are typically sharp: the counterpoint riff that foreshadows the chorus, the four-on-the-floor snare thwack, the glammy strut on the two distinct bridges. The subsequent title track crosses ‘65 Beatles with Big Star at their most magisterial. The guitar moments have particular resonance, whether they are the valedictory, Southern-rock smear on the ballad “I Don’t Think About You the Way I Used To” or the drawling handoffs on the slow-strutting “Painted Pictures”.
None of this comes across as mere stylistic exercise. Broderick borrows from the playbook but isn’t buried in it: The snap and drive of these songs serve as edges against which she can hone her thoughts. The meaning of success is a recurring theme: opportunities both missed and misdirected. “Even now I can forget that I’m not here for competition,” the recent L.A. transplant sings on “Domino.” On the blithely skippy “So What,” Broderick refers to golden tickets and winning numbers, only to tear them up on the chorus: “So what would I want it for? So what would it do?”
But she sings it with more rumination than rue. Working in a style that’s consumed with unrequited longing—for a crush, for the perfect riff, for a mythical time when jangle and chime ruled the charts—she finds profound comfort. On “Someday I’ll Go Surfing,” Domino’s emotional center, she considers taking up a new hobby. “I’d have to find a board, and I’d have to find a shore,” she muses, “Without many locals ‘round who’d rather I’d have just stayed at home.” The guitars peal; the backing vocals swoop down in a plaintive warble. Not for a second does Broderick sound out of place. | 2023-08-25T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2023-08-25T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Bar/None | August 25, 2023 | 7.3 | c9682170-2e53-4151-9726-c0f4c9013f9a | Brad Shoup | https://pitchfork.com/staff/brad-shoup/ | |
A sort of sequel to 2000's The Covers Record, Cat Power's Jukebox reaffirms what Chan Marshall has gained during her 21st century musical growth spurt, and what she's lost. Among the artists she tackles: Hank Williams, James Brown, and Billie Holiday. | A sort of sequel to 2000's The Covers Record, Cat Power's Jukebox reaffirms what Chan Marshall has gained during her 21st century musical growth spurt, and what she's lost. Among the artists she tackles: Hank Williams, James Brown, and Billie Holiday. | Cat Power: Jukebox | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/11064-jukebox/ | Jukebox | A lot of water has gone under the bridge since Cat Power's last covers record in 2000. In the intervening eight years, she has undergone a musical and characteristic evolution that's as surprising as it may have been necessary. Following her 2004 album You Are Free, which perfected her music's transformation to scrawled blues folk, she appeared on Handsome Boy Modeling School's otherwise vanilla White People. Her track, "I've Been Thinking", was a risky gambit that moved beyond the introverted waif persona of previous albums and revealed a new facet of Cat Power: credible soul singer. The point of "I've Been Thinking", which still holds up, is its sultriness; it's a striptease on a dare, complete with smoky ambience, a halting chorus, and an unbelievable spoken-word passage. Speed it up, add a flashier beat, and the song could be a Beyoncé hit.
That track signaled a newly emboldened Marshall, as she began to refine her emotionally precarious live shows. For her next album, The Greatest, she would return to Memphis, the birthplace of her 1996 Matador debut What Would the Community Think, to fully embrace soul music, recording with members of Al Green's Hi Records band. Her trajectory is familiar, but the unspectacular Jukebox, a sort of sequel to The Covers Record, reaffirms what she's gained during this musical growth spurt, and what she's lost.
Marshall has become a confident and charismatic vocalist, with subtle nuances and deft combinations of phrasing styles. She's no powerhouse like Aretha Franklin or Irma Thomas, but she sings well in a low, smoky croon, just a notch above conversational. I would have loved to see Marshall wander a few blocks south of Hi and end up at Stax, either recording with the MGs (how natural she would sound with Steve Cropper) or maybe with Isaac Hayes circa Hot Buttered Soul (who could do orchestral wonders with her songs). Instead, Marshall has moved a few decades forward, assembling a band of 1990s contemporaries for Jukebox. Jim White, the Dirty Three drummer who backed her on Moon Pix, and Judah Bauer, late of the Jon Spencer Blues Explosion, pound out dramatic accompaniment, but are never quite as smooth, as supple, or as inventive as her Greatest band.
Marshall uses these covers albums not so much as a personal mixtape but as a state-of-the-career address. Like The Covers Record, a more self-critical work that traced her own influences through rock and folk, Jukebox exposes the roots of her newfound soulfulness. At a time when genres seem discouragingly fragmented and crossovers few and far between, Jukebox is admirably diverse, straddling country, blues, R&B, folk, and showtunes. Few other albums, at least in the indie realm, will skip so effortlessly from Hank Williams to James Brown, from Billie Holiday to Janis Joplin, from Jessie Mae Hemphill to the Highwaymen.
Marshall sounds most comfortable with the country songs. Changing the pronouns in Williams' "Ramblin' (Wo)Man", she instills the song with a bluesy drama that's all grit and wanderlust. Similarly, she plays up the erotic twang in the Highwaymen's "Silver Stallion", stripping the song it to its barest acoustic accompaniment. I doubt Merle Haggard or Johnny Cash considered the sexual implications of a line like, "Just a touch of sadness in his fingers/ Thunder and lightning in his thighs"; they were talking about a horse, but Marshall gamely emphasizes the entendre*.* Marshall even covers herself again, as she did on The Covers Record: Her new band generates some bluster on the Jukebox reworking of "Metal Heart", originally a standout track on 1998's Moon Pix, but never exhibits the dynamic and control of the original.
Aside from the supremely awkward reinterpretation of "New York New York", the soul covers are the least impressive here. Marshall's pleading doesn't sound credible or committed on James Brown's "Lost Someone" or George Jackson's "Aretha, Sing One for Me". She doesn't savor these songs the way she savored "(I Can't Get No) Satisfaction" and "Sea of Love" on The Covers Record. The woman who got such an obvious kick out of doing her best Bob Dylan on "Stuck Inside of Mobile with the Memphis Blues Again" on the I'm Not There soundtrack is largely absent here, even on the sluggish cover of Bob's Christian-era "I Believe in You".
It's worth noting that Jukebox's best moment comes not with a cover, but with a Cat Power original-- and fitting, too, that it's a mash note to Dylan. On the epistolary "Song for Bobby" she recounts in conversational lyrics her youthful infatuation with Dylan and how her professional love for him blurred into something like romantic affection. The song is funny, endearing, and even revealing. Still, a covers album like Jukebox should reveal new facets of a performer in its selection and interpretation of favorite songs. That's how (and why) The Covers Record worked. But eight years later, only "Song for Bobby" tells us anything new about Chan Marshall. The rest of Jukebox doesn't even say much about Cat Power. | 2008-01-21T01:00:01.000-05:00 | 2008-01-21T01:00:01.000-05:00 | Rock | Matador | January 21, 2008 | 5.7 | c968a1b2-4521-488a-a9ed-9e9254dbcb22 | Stephen M. Deusner | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stephen-m. deusner/ | null |
Elbow slides from engaging to naval-gazing on their third full-length. | Elbow slides from engaging to naval-gazing on their third full-length. | Elbow: Leaders of the Free World | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/2720-leaders-of-the-free-world/ | Leaders of the Free World | Guy Garvey name-drops his mum on two of Leaders of the Free World's 11 tracks-- first time she makes an appearance is on the title track ("Your mum don't sleep!/ The friends you keep!/ I didn't raise a thief!"), and the second comes into play when "The streets are full of Goths and Greeks" and Garvey hasn't "seen [his] mum for weeks." Manchester-according-to-Elbow is the creepiest of locales-- take Asleep in the Back's "Any Day Now" and its broken record mantra: "Any day now, how's about getting out of this place?"-- so yearnings to crawl back to mummy or hit the road or, well, both, are understandable. Trademark Elbow is the languorous, brooding sort typified in 2001's Asleep in the Back and 2004's Cast of Thousands, but the band's third LP, Leaders of the Free World, leaves dankly gorgeous torpor mostly behind.
George W. Bush is at least partially to blame, if only for the title track, which references him near-explicitly: "Passing the gun from father to feckless son/ We're climbing a landslide where only the good die young." The song's primary gripe is fair enough: "The leaders of the free world/ Are just little boys throwing stones/ And its easy to ignore 'til they're knocking on the door of your homes." The idea that America's president is "spoilt, nasty, selfish little shit for brains" (says Garvey to the BBC) is nothing new, but Elbow's take is problematic: World affairs are easiest to tune out when said affairs don't directly concern themselves; by confessing so, Elbow inadvertently declare accusatory kinship to "little boys throwing stones."
The rest of the album flounders apolitically, as well. It's dull, for one thing. Why, pray tell, did Elbow decide to start sounding less like Radiohead rip-offs and more like midlife-crisis Travis? Leaders still intimates "Creep" in places, but it also garners new Brit bloke alignments: Past comparisons to Coldplay were probably undeserved, but present ones make sense. These guys are flirting with the seductively pointy fingernails of adult contemporary's harmless-but-gooey clutches.
Gone is the charming fog of Elbow-rock, replaced by cheery caveats against partying too hard ("Picky Bugger"). Brevity has never been their strong suit, but this is Elbow at their dullest shoe-cum-navel gazing. Complaints that tempos never changed on previous albums were valid circa Asleep in the Back, but irrelevant now: Speeding up hardly helps captivate. If the plan was to bait with catchier hooks, and exhume sentiment with slower, choir-backed ones, it flops ponderously. Fast song/slow song switch-offs seem contrived and go to show: Elbow do best when going with their (preferably gloomy) gut. | 2005-09-07T01:00:04.000-04:00 | 2005-09-07T01:00:04.000-04:00 | Rock | V2 | September 7, 2005 | 6.2 | c9750478-8162-495b-9dd0-22056c908447 | Pitchfork | null |
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Bjarki is a closely watched new techno producer from Iceland with a deft touch for big, dumb ragers. On the first of 3 new releases this year, he treats old-school techno with classic-rock reverence. | Bjarki is a closely watched new techno producer from Iceland with a deft touch for big, dumb ragers. On the first of 3 new releases this year, he treats old-school techno with classic-rock reverence. | Bjarki: b | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22042-b/ | b | Bjarki, a producer from Iceland about which little else is known, is precocious even by the standards of European techno, in which new phenoms emerge before most Americans start driving. He has appeared early and often on Nina Kraviz’s burgeoning Trip label, and she has thrown her considerable taste-making weight behind him, featuring him prominently in mixes. Last year’s “I Wanna Go Bang” was a smash, the kind of “duh, of course”-techno track that immediately had everyone wondering how, in more than 30 years of making kick drums go “bum-bum-bum-bum,” no one had arrived at this particular combination of “bum bum” and hook (a sample from a mid-90s DJ Deeon intro): “Sometimes I feel like/I wanna go bang.” Bum-bum-bum-bum.
It seemed for a moment like Bjarki would be the hero European techno needs, making the kind of stoopid ragers that his peers were either too proud or too ambitious to regularly produce. Some tracks just need to exist, even if sampling a Chicago institution like Deeon is ballsy. But his entry in Resident Advisor's closely watched podcast series was an hour of his own unreleased tracks, an act of DJ solipsism usually reserved for more established and/or idiosyncratic artists. This year brought the announcement of three separate full-length releases on Trip—not albums, Bjarki maintains—an expunging of his archives that begins with Б (a cyrillic letter “romanized using the Latin letter B”), 13 rave tracks that have been making their way into Kraviz’s sets.
In its breadth and manner Б reveals something about Bjarki that a clutch of early tracks could not: he’s a staunch classicist, tidily moving through techno’s paradigms. Bjarki transitions easily between low culture—hoover bass, squiggly acid—and high—moony synth pads, sci-fi escapism, fussy IDM—resulting in something like a Noah’s Ark of tropes. Б is an oddly conservative collection, suggesting not a desire to bang the box but to make sure the box is neatly packed and properly labeled (witness the following track titles: “Here It Comes Can You Feel It 92 Hoover 2,” “Opalocka Acid Groove 12 Bit Mix,” the blatant Aphex-ism that is “Midi 14-Aug-2”). Bjarki finds a middle ground in which his music seems neither dated nor current; listening to Б is a little like watching a decade-old action movie with a sky-high budget.
There’s plenty of talent on display here, as Bjarki proves himself adept at all of these different styles. There's the ominous percussion of “Bbbbbbbbbbb render 2”; the grimy, erotic bassline of “It’s My Thing,” the easy way “The Lover That You Are” shimmies between bleary-eyed post-rave comedown and nervous tics. He’s naughtiest, and most potent, when incorporating short little vocal loops, which seem to bring out his most aggressive, percussive moments. But there's also too much limp mid-tempo breakbeat (“Son of a Son,” “Can a Man”) and silly mimicry, like the faux drama and cockpit ephemera of “As You Remember.”
You might alternately call Bjarki’s sound “timeless,” but I wonder about the value of timelessness in track-y techno. Great DJs can re-contextualize the old tracks, make us hear them anew; plenty of others can make us go bang by weaving together the current, however marginally different that current might sound at any given moment. This is how techno works, and even if you think it all kind of sounds the same, it tends to sound the same in clusters. Techno could use a lot of things—more diversity and more humor chief among them—but it probably doesn’t need the kind of overt classic rock gestures Bjarki is making here. Bjarki has two more collections coming this year, and has already proven himself a prolific producer with real talent, but Б doesn't take him, or us, anywhere. | 2016-06-28T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-06-28T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Trip | June 28, 2016 | 5.8 | c976f4f0-801e-411e-9017-cee4e2ed7036 | Andrew Gaerig | https://pitchfork.com/staff/andrew-gaerig/ | null |
Gucci's record released while incarcerated; despite the name-- the sequel to his best 2009 tape-- it's being treated as much as an LP as a mixtape. | Gucci's record released while incarcerated; despite the name-- the sequel to his best 2009 tape-- it's being treated as much as an LP as a mixtape. | Gucci Mane: The Burrrprint (2) | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/14144-the-burrrprint-2/ | The Burrrprint (2) | "My jewelry game is at an all-time high right now," says Gucci Mane, over the phone from prison, on the intro to The Burrrprint (2). I'm sorry, but that's frankly hard to believe: The only jewelry he's wearing on the mixtape cover is a pair of handcuffs. Still, if that cover is to be believed, he has no trouble getting access to lobster, cell phones, and pink bottles of champagne while in prison. At no point do we learn how he opens bottles of pink champagne while he's got handcuffs on. It can't be easy.
The Burrrprint (2) is the latest example of a long tradition: A rap album that comes out while the guy who made it is in jail. (And in this case, it really is an album rather than a mixtape, at least in the sense that his label is trying to rack up at least a couple of bucks by selling the damn thing in actual stores.) And while the bulk of the mixtape consists of tracks that Gucci recorded before starting his year-long parole-violation prison sentence, we still hear a whole lot of phoned-in missives from the imprisoned Gucci. He even recorded one song, "Intro (Live From Fulton County Jail)", from an actual prison phone. It's still very much a Gucci Mane song, not concerned with anything much deeper than his yellow Lamborghini with the butter rims. Even locked up, Gucci refuses to turn introspective. No matter what, he's determined to give us more cheap synthetic beats, more loopy word choices, more big choruses, more dizzy celebrations of materialistic pleasures. In other words, he's doing exactly the same shit he did before he went to prison. He's not even working out! "No push-ups, but I'm still looking good as a motherfucker," he tells us.
As a straight-up Gucci mixtape, The Burrrprint (2) comes nowhere near the panache of its predecessor. The original Burrrprint, itself a sequel of Gucci's The Movie mixtape, was pretty much straight murder from end to end. On this one, though, filler abounds. Gucci's memorable punchlines come less often, and his choruses don't stick quite so easily. Gucci's cadences are less inventive, wheezier, more tired. Gucci's guest rappers are bigger stars than usual-- Ludacris, Rick Ross, Trey Songz-- but they add less than longtime collaborators like energetic mushmouth Wacka Flocka, who gets a couple of good moments. Considering the insane volume of material Gucci recorded before going to prison, it's pretty amazing that he wasn't on autopilot earlier, but it's still disappointing to hear him at something less than full speed.
But even when not at his best, Gucci continues to fascinate, partly because his voice has rap's best flattened-out party-dude bounce, and partly because you never know what kind of absurd word combinations he'll come up with next. (Some of my favorites from this one: "Your girlfriend says my earrings are erotic," "to a hood chick, Gucci's voice is euphoric," "I got so much jewelry on that I think I need a clone.") "Shining for No Apparent Reason" has maybe the best Gucci song title ever. And some complete tracks are worthy entries in the Gucci canon, like the rumbling Ludacris collab "Atlanta Zoo" or the spare synth-whistle showcase "Boy From the Block". Best of all is the nine-minute posse cut "Coca Coca", on which Gucci rounds up six of his frequent collaborators (OJ Da Juiceman, Yo Gotti, Nicki Minaj, etc.) and takes every last one of them to school.
But the real takeaway from The Burrrprint (2) is that Gucci is going to continue to make these ecstatically ignorant bangers just as soon as he's able. "Worst Enemy", the closing track from Gucci's The State Vs. Radric Davis album, hinted at a more thoughtful and introspective Gucci, and that Gucci never returns here. Instead, any moments of reflection come almost by accident, as when he interrupts the brag-fest "Do This Shit Again": "I got acquitted for murder, it was purely self-defense/ I hope they don't try to do that to me no more, don't wanna do that again/ Walking out my jail cell, don't wanna go through that shit again/ Thirty K at King of Diamonds, watch me throw that in the wind." And still the image of bills floating through the air is what lingers. When Gucci gets back out of prison and returns to crafting images like that, it'll be a good day. | 2010-04-16T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2010-04-16T02:00:01.000-04:00 | Rap | Warner Bros. / Asylum | April 16, 2010 | 6.4 | c978620f-d2c2-4efb-80d9-e06b8ac0a372 | Tom Breihan | https://pitchfork.com/staff/tom-breihan/ | null |
The Houston singer’s debut blends pop, alt-R&B, and soul into a polished and pensive account of growing into young adulthood. | The Houston singer’s debut blends pop, alt-R&B, and soul into a polished and pensive account of growing into young adulthood. | Peyton: PSA | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/various-artists-psa/ | PSA | Peyton Booker’s songs burst with youth. As Peyton, the Houston singer moves through the world with starry-eyed wonder, wringing joy and novelty from mundane experiences. A trained vocalist and violinist with a choir background and deep ties to Houston’s music scene, she takes a refined yet playful approach. Her debut PSA is a pensive and lighthearted account of the trials and delights of young adulthood, its sunny, carefree music harkening to the days of R&B as the soundtrack of coming of age.
Peyton has been surrounded by music her whole life: Her grandmother Theola Booker was a Grammy-nominated gospel singer who once gave childhood piano lessons to Beyoncé. Peyton herself is a former member of Milky Wayv, a since-disbanded collective of Houston producers, keyboardists, and singers. Her work harnesses this lifetime proximity to music, straddling genres and styles with cool fluency. PSA melds dream pop, alt-R&B, and soul, a blend that manifests the album’s themes of change and becoming.
The production varies between lush and neat, the arrangements rich but never overshadowing Peyton’s shimmering harmonies. The colorful synths and celestial imagery bring to mind the fantasia of Prince and the futurism of Erykah Badu (the album cover evokes that of New Amerykah Part One), but the only time Peyton makes a direct nod to her influences is when she covers “Pure Imagination” from Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory—which actually is weirder than it might sound. Peyton’s version is more quiet storm than show tune, her breathy whispered harmonies wafting through an abyss of acoustic guitar and dulled percussion.
Like “Pure Imagination,” many of PSA’s songs meditate on a single emotion. “IRLMB” is pure infatuation, relishing the rush of fresh romance. “I really love my baby,” Peyton sings with possessive delight, elongating the syllables in “baby.” For “Perfect Peach,” a candied funk track, she’s sweetly yearning, comparing a paramour to ripened fruit. “Every night I see you/In my wettest dreams,” she coos, sounding more happy than horny. It’s as if the idea of this person is as appetizing as their actual presence.
Peyton’s ruminations are sometimes uninspired. Her vanilla references to Picasso and Civil Rights figures on “Ppl Say” underscore the vagueness of the gossip the song cites. “They say you’re just a dreamer, but did Martin lose hope?” she sings, going full Hallmark card. Picking through the pieces of a breakup on “What Did I Do,” she’s just as cliché. “Don’t make me a villain/I’m your superwoman,” she pleads. In moments like these, Peyton’s embrace of youth feels like a lack of perspective more than one still taking shape.
Highlight “It’s Been So Long” is more grounded. Over a bed of twinkly synths and soft keys, Peyton sings of death as if experiencing it for the first time. “How could you go to heaven/Without telling me goodbye?” she asks, her voice cherubic and plaintive. The shock is only temporary, the grief turning into acceptance as the song builds, but Peyton doesn’t make the shift feel inevitable. Throughout PSA, she channels the insurgency of growing up without exalting it. Her music is the rare agnostic document of youth, presenting it as neither tragedy nor primacy. One day you’re young, and then you’re not.
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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. | 2021-07-26T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2021-07-26T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | Stones Throw | July 26, 2021 | 7.1 | c978b813-23b2-4733-8062-ecd2edb965c2 | Stephen Kearse | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stephen-kearse/ | |
Captured during a festival set inside a 13th-century church in the Netherlands, this live album of songs about death allows listeners to revisit their private grief. | Captured during a festival set inside a 13th-century church in the Netherlands, this live album of songs about death allows listeners to revisit their private grief. | Mount Eerie: (after) | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/mount-eerie-after/ | (after) | Death is real. That is the invocation of Mount Eerie’s A Crow Looked at Me and the new (after), a live recording that captures songs from Crow and the subsequent Now Only, the exquisite LPs on which Phil Elverum documented his candid thoughts after the 2016 death of his wife, Geneviève Castrée. A crew member surreptitiously recorded Elverum’s set at the 2017 Le Guess Who? festival in the Netherlands, prompting Elverum to consider, in a new way, the mutual contemplation of solitary grief with people outside of the concert hall. A live album consisting entirely of songs about death, (after) in turn invites listeners to consider our own stories and how they might feel to a room full of strangers.
Though not religious, Elverum often plays venues that underscore his music’s spiritual imagery, which positions nature as a sort of secular take on the sublime. He even served as the recording engineer at The Unknown, a Catholic church converted into a Washington state studio. (after) finds Elverum again in a place of worship, the 13th-century gothic church, Jacobikerk, in Utrecht. With its late Medieval grandeur, the venue becomes another instrument for Elverum, his words and acoustic chords reverberating from stone walls and rib-vaulted ceilings. Though Crow and Now Only are spare records, Jacobikerk makes the versions on (after) sound hollow but full. Elverum’s voice, impossibly soft, fills the space with solemn clarity.
But the most striking thing about (after) is that, even after so many performances, these songs sound as raw as they did when Elverum first committed them to paper and tape. As on A Crow Looked at Me, “Ravens” unspools nakedly before us, elegant and heartbreaking. His uneasy phrasing transports us to the mossy place where he once grieved for Geneviève. When the song ends, you hear a pregnant pause in the room, the audience hesitating before it claps. Do you applaud someone else’s confessional grief? As the show continues, the concertgoers trade solemnity for enthusiasm, recognizing that, for tonight, they’re all in this together.
The songs of Now Only, written shortly after the release of Crow but largely unheard at the time of this November 2017 show, are particularly affecting here. They tend to be more overtly self-aware than the songs on Crow, the music more expansive. (after)’s version of “Distortion” omits the initial roar of electric guitar from Now Only, but the the song’s core is elevated. Elverum sings about how his life and travels had informed his feelings for Geneviève. “My complex intentions and aspirations do not matter at all/In the face of the crushing flow of actual time,” he sings, putting both Geneviève’s death and this strange endeavor of performing songs about her into perspective. “Now Only” itself stands out here, too, because it’s Elverum’s funniest song and the one that directly addresses his experience playing live. He takes stock of his own feelings, first questioning how anyone could experience tragedy so acute and, then, at his most darkly comedic, lists ways that people die every day—being hit by trucks, getting cancer, for no obvious reason at all. “And some people have to survive,” he reminds us. “And find a way to feel lucky to still be alive.” Otherwise sealed in wax, these songs, now living, form a new dialogue between performer and fan.
This exact dynamic is what I pondered when I saw Mount Eerie play a similar set last year in a Brooklyn synagogue. What did we hope to gain from watching Elverum play these songs? Elverum himself has asked these questions: “What is this? Is it entertainment? What is applause for? What kind of ritual is this?” he wrote about (after). When I was in college, my dad died after two years of chemotherapy and radiation. In Elverum’s performance, I heard thoughts from that experience articulated better than I’d ever managed, with an agonizing weight I’d felt but never quite put into words. His experience as he watched Geneviève “turn from alive to dead right here in our house” echoed my own. The empty rooms and fading sunsets of their home in Anacortes, Wash. afforded me a new vocabulary for considering my own grief. The effect recalled mourning at a funeral, where emotions become waves that expand and contract communally. Sobs and sniffles echoed through the room that night. As with any funeral, there was laughter, too.
Not everyone heard such concerts—or will hear (after)—the same way. I overheard conversations between concertgoers who seemed baffled by Elverum’s choice to tour these songs at all. Why would anyone choose to do this, someone asked. Others used words like “heavy” and “brutal,” as if they were at a black metal show. Even Elverum has marveled at the absurdity of it all, the choice to relive the most horrible moments of his life so many times. But listening to (after), I began to wonder about the motives of the audience: Did the individual tragedies of the attendees collectively legitimize our presence? And if so, what must one endure to pass muster?
To answer that concert-goer: Who knows, really, why Elverum decided to share these songs with us? It doesn’t matter. What matters is that there was an audience to bear witness. When that crowd claps on (after), there’s a tenderness to the applause, a gratitude you can hear coming back at Elverum as he finishes each song. You can hear it even if you didn’t see the tour, even if you’re just listening to (after) on headphones as you walk in the rain. It’s the sound of hundreds of people thanking this man for sharing his story, because in it they see parts of their own. Or they know that his grief may someday become a blueprint for navigating theirs. | 2018-10-01T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-09-29T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | P.W. Elverum & Sun | October 1, 2018 | 8.1 | c9874475-a21f-45f7-9cd9-3b31fff15a41 | Nathan Reese | https://pitchfork.com/staff/nathan-reese/ | |
Tara Jane O'Neil's first solo LP in five years finds the ex-Rodan bassist, painter, constant collaborator, and tireless solo experimenter carving scenery out of sound. It's quite possibly the finest merging of the chameleonic O'Neil's song-based work and her more experimental side. | Tara Jane O'Neil's first solo LP in five years finds the ex-Rodan bassist, painter, constant collaborator, and tireless solo experimenter carving scenery out of sound. It's quite possibly the finest merging of the chameleonic O'Neil's song-based work and her more experimental side. | Tara Jane O’Neil: Where Shine New Lights | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/18918-tara-jane-oneil-where-shine-new-lights/ | Where Shine New Lights | "What you love is made of wind," Tara Jane O'Neil muses a little more than halfway through Where Shine New Lights, her first solo LP in five years. The deeply naturalistic Lights finds O'Neil—ex-Rodan bassist, painter, constant collaborator, and tireless solo experimenter—carving scenery out of sound. Yet it's the record's very next line that really gets to the heart of Lights: "you will not be this shape again." Lights, her first LP for Kranky, is quite possibly the finest merging of the chameleonic O'Neil's song-based work and her more experimental side. But combing through the catalog for comparison-points doesn't quite get at what makes Lights so striking. Lights is a peculiar thing: impeccably designed, with every thrum positioned just so, yet entirely malleable, different every time you come across it.
Lights, like much of O'Neil's solo work, occupies a space between traditional songcraft and more experimental fare, weaving ghostly drones and incidental noises through hushed, unhurried post-folk. Throughout Lights, O'Neil brings the two sides as close as they've ever come before, meticulously plotting out every earthy strum and faraway clatter. Swirling opener "Welcome" bleeds a increasingly ominous whoosh into the heavy-lidded, borderline groovy "Wordless in Woods", which makes its way into the slowpoke folk-pop of "This Morning Glory". Each move is unhurried, each note is placed just so. But, for all the precision of the arrangements, Lights is the farthest thing from rigid. O'Neil's been careful to leave space in these songs, to let them unfurl at a ruminative pace, to burrow secrets way down in the mix. It leaves Lights feeling practically habitable, a good place to get some thinking done.
O'Neil casts an optimstic glow over much of Lights, but its tone is always in flux. "Bellow Below as Above" is an ominous, shapeshifting, just-before-sunrise dirge that slowly climbs its way into a gnarled sort of beauty. Little instrumental exhalations complicate the haunting Brit-folk of "Elemental Finding", while the oblong near-slowcore of "The Signal, Lift" unwinds over a bed of whispering cymbals, growing more intense by the minute. O'Neil's a fine lyricist—look no further than "Elemental Finding"—but much of Lights' vocalizing is wordless, evoking feelings rather than spelling them out. Lights is rarely less than beautiful, but between the often-sparse arrangements and impressionistic singing, these abstractions require patience on the listener's part. Give Lights your total concentration, and it opens up completely; start flipping through your phone, and it vanishes into the air. But it's that very pliancy that makes the album so easy to return to; it's harmoniously balanced, yet as liable to change along with the quality of the light, a distressed folk record on one listen, and a sumptuous, swirling exploratory drone record the next. O'Neil's certainly made her share of enrapturing, enveloping music. But I'm not sure she's ever made one quite as transportive—or, for that matter, as alive—as Where Shine New Lights. | 2014-01-24T01:00:03.000-05:00 | 2014-01-24T01:00:03.000-05:00 | Folk/Country | Kranky | January 24, 2014 | 7.9 | c98b3f82-1ee7-4706-882a-9020994496db | Paul Thompson | https://pitchfork.com/staff/paul-thompson/ | null |
Swedish star follows her Youth Novels with another record that captures the complex, contradictory, and intense yearning of young adulthood. | Swedish star follows her Youth Novels with another record that captures the complex, contradictory, and intense yearning of young adulthood. | Lykke Li: Wounded Rhymes | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/15167-wounded-rhymes/ | Wounded Rhymes | To date, Lykke Li's biggest exposure was her song "Possibility" appearing on the Twilight: New Moon soundtrack. From a producer's standpoint, her inclusion was a no-brainer: Not only was her debut titled Youth Novels, but it captured the intense yearning of youth, which is also an aim of the Twilight series. Few indie artists seemed as well poised as Li to vocalize Stephenie Meyer's heroine's point of view. As the singer herself told Pitchfork recently, "I like that age when you feel misunderstood and still believe in the pure idea that love conquers all"-- perhaps the most concise and astute explanation of that franchise's appeal.
That is, however, only one aspect of Li's considerable appeal. As vampire franchises go, she has much more in common with Buffy Summers than the shrinking Bella Swan: Li can kick serious ass, yet even at her toughest, she nurses a persistent desire for a normal and secure life, which-- if her second album, Wounded Rhymes, is any indication-- involves intense love, great sex, and weird dance moves. Li proves a rich and compelling character in her songs, which are dark but also complex, contradictory, and, thank goodness, still rough around the edges.
Like Joss Whedon's show, Wounded Rhymes is an album of stark, scintillating contrasts: between fantasy and reality, between the powerful and the vulnerable, between the brash and the quiet, between the rhythmic and the melodic. Audacious anthems jostle next to heartbreak ballads like "Unrequited Love", with its simple guitar and shoo-wop backing vocals. Dense, busy numbers give way to emotionally and musically stripped tracks like "I Know Places". "I'm your prostitute, you gon' get some," she sings on "Get Some", a come-on so blunt that it's become the talking point for this album. As a single, the song brazenly grabs your attention, but in the context of this album, alongside such forlorn songs, it becomes a desperate statement, disarmingly intimate in its role-playing implications but also uncomfortably eager to shed or adopt new identities to ensure a lover's devotion.
Rather than adjust or reconcile them, Li lets all those contradictions ride, having grown more comfortable in her musical skin. While there are no highs here quite as high as Youth Novels' "Little Bit" or "Breaking It Up" (and no low nearly as low as "Complaint Department", though "Rich Kids" comes pretty damn close), there is a sense of cohesion missing from that debut, as well as an understanding that a record can be a document of a particularly tumultuous time and place. To write these songs, Li spent long months in New York and Southern California, spending a great deal of time alone in the desert. The result is depressive without being depressing, dark without being bleak, as it rejuvenates, refines, and redirects her eccentricities.
The biggest moments on Wounded Rhymes take the form of slower ballads, whether stripped down like "I Know Places" or grandiose like "Sadness Is a Blessing". But they gain their power in contrast to the more upbeat tracks like opener "Youth Knows No Pain". Dropping some of the coy affectations of Youth Novels, Li proves a surprisingly dramatic singer with a powerful voice and strong phrasing, able to render the emotional pain of "Sadness Is a Blessing" as somehow exultant-- a transcendent state of being.
Like any good vocalist, she knows when to bow out and let the music speak for her. "I Know Places" cuts off early to set up a long, dreamy coda that acts as both a quiet promise of escape and an album intermission that sets up the penultimate "Jerome", which seems to synthesize every single emotional and musical urge on the album. Both ballad and banger, the song sheds its elements until only the thunderous heartbeat rhythm remains. That moment bleeds into the finale, "Silent My Song", a nearly a cappella closer that swells and fades dramatically. "No fist needed when you call," Li sings. "You silent my song." It's a devastating statement, yet ultimately an untrustworthy one: She has harnessed her heartache and her happiness to amplify her voice, not to lose it. | 2011-03-03T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2011-03-03T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Pop/R&B | Atlantic / LL | March 3, 2011 | 8.3 | c98d81cf-6d42-4cde-81f6-8a7592f829f8 | Stephen M. Deusner | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stephen-m. deusner/ | null |
On their latest album, New Zealand's Trust Punks leave behind jangly pop for a plunge into acidic post-punk, while their lyrics cast a jaundiced eye at a crumbling society. | On their latest album, New Zealand's Trust Punks leave behind jangly pop for a plunge into acidic post-punk, while their lyrics cast a jaundiced eye at a crumbling society. | Trust Punks: Double Bind | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22064-double-bind/ | Double Bind | When first introduced, Auckland, New Zealand’s Trust Punks were a sum of their parts. A melding of jangle riffs to a subtle but present darker undercurrent, they were in debt to the less pristine parts of the Flying Nun sound (understandable, as the band did arise from the ashes of indie rockers Grass Cannons). Since the release of their debut Discipline in 2014 though, Trust Punks underwent a transformation. Their eyes narrowed as they took in their surroundings, their worldviews darkening with strains of pessimism and disdain. Their new album Double Bind now reflects all of that, filled with newly discovered distortion, off-kilter melodies, and affirmation of post punk as the new core of the band.
It’s all right there in the startling, disorienting lead single “Leaving Room for The Lord,” which offers the band's best impression of the Fall at their most agitated and pulls it off. Lead singer Joe Thomas opens it literally shouting “Post punk!” as brittle, metallic guitar riffs bounce off one another and the rhythm section pounds into an off-balance vortex. “Good Luck With That,” with its relentless charge and fuzzy angular guitars, sounds like the Feelies covering 100 Flowers. “Pig” draws so much from Wire’s 154 that it feels like it could be a lost song from that session, rediscovered and remastered. The album ends with “Bank of God,” which pulls from This Heat’s “Health & Efficiency” and stretches some of the catchiest melodies on the record into a nearly nine-minute jam that eventually fades to pedal-warped static.
Like This Heat did, Trust Punks are using dissonance to cloak their dive into political and social critique. Double Bind is filled with heaved bile at the world these New Zealanders have inherited. “Good Luck With That” is a takedown of the prison industrial complex; “Paradise/Angel-wire” touches on antipathy towards immigrants, ending with a sample of an Australian government agent telling refugees in need of help to go back home. Songs like “Riding It Out” are more opaque with their targets, but even those cases lines like “Cut the guilt out of your veins to make the world a safer place” are delivered with such vivid anger they feel specific.
Ultimately, Double Bind’s flaws only appear when the album holds itself back and revisits older territory. “The Reservoir,” with its lackadaisical strumming and glockenspiel-filled chorus, completes the cycle of the band’s debt to post-punk predecessors Women. It is a good song, but feels like something the band would have done in their past. The same goes for the penultimate track “Beneath the Commons,” a five minute guitar and vocal swirl that nearly manages to bring the whole momentum of the album to a screeching halt. Drawing so much from their past style, it can’t help but betray that Double Bind is a transitional record. It’s one filled with great, art damaged ideas as the band plunders from the best, but the band is still grafting new influences and ideas into their system, seeing what sticks and what is rejected. | 2016-07-14T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-07-14T01:00:00.000-04:00 | null | Spunk / Faux Discx / Wharf Cat | July 14, 2016 | 6.9 | c98fcc19-dedd-48a3-b665-ecc41f04a2b4 | David Glickman | https://pitchfork.com/staff/david-glickman/ | null |
Dan Boeckner is over a decade into his career, and he’s spent most of it playing in bands (Wolf Parade, Handsome Furs, Divine Fits) whose appeal was at least partially based on their interpersonal dynamics. In his new band, he's out front on his own. | Dan Boeckner is over a decade into his career, and he’s spent most of it playing in bands (Wolf Parade, Handsome Furs, Divine Fits) whose appeal was at least partially based on their interpersonal dynamics. In his new band, he's out front on his own. | Operators: EP1 | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/19708-operators-ep1/ | EP1 | Dan Boeckner is over a decade into his career, and he’s spent most of it playing in bands whose appeal was at least partially based on their interpersonal dynamics. He was the lapsed paladin writing woolly Bruce Springsteen homages along mana-crazed warlock Spencer Krug in Wolf Parade, a band whose contributions to the halcyon days of '00s indie rock are now rather underrated; his work in Handsome Furs with ex-wife Alexei Perry hung on the implied sexual tension between his chugging riffs and her icy, frenzied synth lines; and as the co-leader of Divine Fits, he pitted his raw, heart-on-sleeve growl against Britt Daniel’s cooler, detached yelp, and ended up stealing the album’s best moments. Given that rich collaborative history, Boeckner’s first EP with his new band, Operators, makes for a slightly disconcerting listen: for the first time in a long time, he’s alone at the front, a lead voice who’s spent his career defining himself against the voices of others. Based on the short and tidy EP1, Boeckner isn’t going to dramatically change the formula that’s won him fans and critical acclaim now that he’s the only one steering the ship. Its five songs are an extension of the gruff, melody-driven rock he’s been making for a decade, granted an electronic bent and license to hit the dancefloor.
Operators’ sound is clearly derived from a long-running line of smart, populist bands that blurred the boundaries between electronic and rock music: New Order’s mechanical precision and sturdy rhythms, Depeche Mode’s ambitious, dramatic stadium goth, and the ragged, crate-digging electro of the DFA label’s early period. These influences have always been present in Boeckner’s music—Handsome Furs was synth-pop, just set in an alternate timeline where the Soviet Union became the dominant world power, and Wolf Parade deployed vintage synths with wild-eyed glee—but they’ve never been as explicitly rendered as they are on EP1. The EP’s sprawling penultimate track, “Ancient”, is a good example: Boeckner is backed up by synths that misfire and slowly rise before cresting and plummeting—it’s a drop, real and earned—into a filthy, swaggering little groove. It’s a show of good faith on Boeckner’s part: it’s one thing to pay lip service to the idea of bridging contemporary rock and dance music, and quite another to actually get people moving. He seems honestly invested in the concept. There’s a welcome physicality to the music, too, helped along by the reliable contributions of Divine Fits drummer Sam Brown and keyboardist Devojka. These songs gobble up space and hit hard.
The qualities that help EP1 hang alongside Boeckner's other, more prominent work are its unabashed sincerity and total investment in the idea of relevant, visceral rock music. Perhaps the EP's heart-on-sleeve pursuit of greatness isn't a huge surprise, given the band's creative core—we're talking about a guy whose finest moments are ripping, raw songs called "This Heart's on Fire" and "My Love Is Real"—but either way, it's endearing. Rather than feeling born out of boredom or trend chasing, EP1 radiates a reverence for its major influences, and a real excitement in its brightest, loudest moments. When the lurching, buzzing "Book of Love" splits open with a minute left and births a gorgeous, spiraling keyboard melody, you can almost see the band grinning and launching into their parts with renewed vigor; the same feeling is generated when lead single "True" first falls into its lockstep groove, or when the band kicks out the jams on the aforementioned "Ancient". Their joy is infectious, and it helps paper over some of the EP's cheesier moments. The repeated question "Who put the ancient code in your bones?" on "Ancient" might be the goofiest lyrical query this side of "Are we human or are we dancer," but it's easier to forgive when it's delivered with energy and enthusiasm. That's what makes this first effort from Operators a worthwhile exercise: it's a chance to hear a veteran like Boeckner taking mild risks and having fun. | 2014-08-11T02:00:03.000-04:00 | 2014-08-11T02:00:03.000-04:00 | Rock | self-released | August 11, 2014 | 6.8 | c993ba8f-e4e2-49a9-a67e-d07eb6a6bc98 | Jamieson Cox | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jamieson-cox/ | null |
Shackleton’s first solo full-length in nine years is stripped of some of his customary idiosyncrasies, but it remains heady, beaded-curtains, incense-in-the-air music, filled with occult mystique. | Shackleton’s first solo full-length in nine years is stripped of some of his customary idiosyncrasies, but it remains heady, beaded-curtains, incense-in-the-air music, filled with occult mystique. | Shackleton: Departing Like Rivers | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/shackleton-departing-like-rivers/ | Departing Like Rivers | Shackleton’s work is so diffuse and so challenging that finding an entry point can be like feeling out a foothold in a sheer granite wall. His last solo full-length, 2012’s Music for the Quiet Hour/The Drawbar Organ EPs, sprawled to more than two hours. His earlier work, astonishing as it often is, still reflects the dubstep roots he would eventually shed in order to make his best and most unclassifiable music. And his recent output has been mostly in tandem with other artists: an album of goblin chants with Anika, a free-jazz excursion with Polish clarinetist Wacław Zimpel, a collection of eccentric prog-dub poetry with opera firebrand Ernesto Tomasini. All of this stuff is profoundly idiosyncratic and rarely makes for an easy listen; none of these albums could really be said to be “representative.” It adds up to one of the most daunting catalogs in electronic music.
Departing Like Rivers, Shackleton’s first solo album since Music for the Quiet Hour, feels like a re-introduction. It traverses seven tracks in 63 minutes, hardly a casual commitment but a lot easier to experience in one sitting. More subdued than most of Shackleton’s work, it bypasses a lot of the potentially alienating moments that sometimes result from his determination to go out on a limb. The hokey spoken-word passages that tripped up Music for the Quiet Hour are mostly absent, and there’s nothing as potentially divisive as Tomasini’s gravitas-laden quaver. But if some of the fringes of Shackleton’s sound have been shaved away, the center is intact, pulsing like the heart of a malevolent sun about to go supernova.
This is heady, beaded-curtains, incense-in-the-air music, heavy on bells, hand drums, and far-off metallic scrapes. The air is always thick with the residual decay from a struck cymbal or gong, and something is usually droning ominously in the background. A litany of apocalyptic sampled voices (“the sky is about to burst”; “overwhelming fornication, overwhelming growth”) gives the music an occultist, Coil-like mystique. The producer claims to have incorporated bits of old British folk songs into these tracks, and though you’d need an encyclopedic knowledge of the Child ballads to pick them out, something still seems ancient about this music, as if Shackleton has opened a portal to the foggiest parts of Britain’s past.
A sense of something faintly unwholesome lingers. The sequencer at the end of “Something Tells Me / Pour Out Like Water” is tuned so strangely that the notes seem to curl like wilted flowers, and the bell that tolls in the background signals the arrival of something dreadful. When another sequencer shows up at the end of “Transformed Into Love” and begins slipping out of time with its counterpoint, it’s almost humbling to see how even that most rigid and mechanical of instruments can’t help but get caught in Shackleton’s undertow. The hand drums lumber on, as if soundtracking a grueling march to the battlefield; the bass attacks the music from all sides, and they rarely work together to drive the music forward. One element floats atop the other like oil and water, and yet everything is absorbed into a vast, pulsating orb of sound.
The 13-minute “Something Tells Me / Pour Out Like Water” starts the album mid-sentence with a jolt of bass like a door slamming behind the listener, and from there, there’s nowhere to go but forward. In the frequent absence of a groove, the music maintains momentum through its linear structure, and it plays like an arcane ritual unfolding in real time, each step performed precisely in sequence. On first listen, you might simply marvel at all the sounds on display. After a few more spins, the underlying structure of what initially seems like an amorphous suite becomes more obvious. “Something Tells Me” and “Pour Out Like Water” blur together at first, but once the initial effects on the brain wear off a bit, you can stand back and see them as two separate pieces separated by a yawning void of metallic noise.
Why not just split “Something Tells Me / Pour Out Like Water” into two six-minute tracks instead of one 13-minute monster? I suspect Shackleton just liked the impact of that 13-minute runtime. Grander, proggier, more forbidding: these are always positives in the Shackleton universe, and whether you prefer Departing Like Rivers to his earlier work depends on how much your interest in his music has to do with the challenge it offers. Departing Like Rivers can feel a bit like The Shackleton Reader, compiling all the best bits of his last decade of music into a (comparatively) quick and easy package. It’s the best album to recommend to newbies, but there’s the risk that a first-timer will decide it’s the only Shackleton they need, which would be a shame.
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-09-22T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2021-09-22T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Woe to the Septic Heart | September 22, 2021 | 7.6 | c9972ab3-6b00-4eaf-a047-871205e4f6c9 | Daniel Bromfield | https://pitchfork.com/staff/daniel-bromfield/ | |
Weezer reflects on their own capricious history, using a blunt force the likes of which they’ve never deployed before. | Weezer reflects on their own capricious history, using a blunt force the likes of which they’ve never deployed before. | Weezer: Weezer (The Black Album) | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/weezer-weezer-the-black-album/ | Weezer (The Black Album) | In 1998, two years after Pinkerton debuted to poor reviews, Rivers Cuomo retreated to a one-room bedsit beneath a Los Angeles freeway. He painted the walls and ceilings black, and on the windows, he layered black bed-sheets over thick fiberglass insulation. Devastated by the negative response to Pinkerton, and frustrated by an unproductive spate of rehearsals, he withdrew from his band, and then from the world. For months on end, he hid in his unlit bedroom, depressed, never going outside, never speaking to another human being. “I’d start to have some of the darkest thoughts and fears and feelings,” he said. “I’d think, ‘Man, maybe I’m never going to get out of this.’”
Similar stories abound of songwriters so adept at articulating sadness they became suffused in the feeling. These stories don’t often end happily. But Cuomo is a marvelous anomaly: he emerged from his depression, sought help via psychotherapy and meditation, and reunited with his band to create, over several decades, an immense body of work. The only small wrinkle in this narrative is that body of work is famously reviled among fans and critics alike. On this latest album, Weezer reflects on their own capricious history, using a blunt force the likes of which they’ve never deployed before.
Actually, “blunt” might be an understatement: Cuomo chants, “Die, die, you zombie bastards” a dozen times. It’s a forceful rebuke of Leslie Jones and her ilk. When, on the same track, he sings, “Music saved my life,” the platitude lays plain an ugly truth: Weezer’s masterpiece was produced during a period of painful dysregulation and remains mired in racist bigotry. Fans who clamor for a second Pinkerton are propping up an emotionally stunted corpse; Mitski is shoveling loam onto his grave. Throughout Weezer (The Black Album), Cuomo pleads with listeners to follow him past Pinkerton, and out of that dark apartment. “I lived my life,” he sings, “and that’s much better than hiding in a hole.”
Weezer’s foremost lyrical priority, then, is to shuck the expectations of their perennially disappointed fanbase. The band attacks this project from every angle: cynical sneering at the pressures of commercialization (“Can’t Knock the Hustle”), wistful longing for artistry without an audience (“High as a Kite”), and the aforementioned open death threats of “Zombie Bastards.” The production, too, rarely bears even a passing resemblance to the power pop that first endeared Weezer to listeners. They’ve enlisted TV on the Radio’s Dave Sitek to draft a set of soundscapes that range from bossa nova to Blink-182. In an era where recommendation engines swaddle listeners in cozy familiarity, it’s refreshing to see so much stylistic variation from track to track.
But this striving for the new and different comes at a cost. There’s no emotional throughline on The Black Album, no grand statement that continues from one track to the next. The songs never blur together, but they also don’t tell a story as the sum of their parts. A sense of tonal whiplash ensues, and the album’s highlights are best enjoyed in isolation. “Byzantine” goes down like a bubbly flute of champagne, a sweet, slinky narrative of infidelity spilling out over a laissez-faire lounge beat. On “The Prince Who Wanted Everything,” co-written with rhythm guitarist Brian Bell, Cuomo sings knotty lines like “all the courtiers will genuflect,” clearly relishing each and every syllable that clicks between his teeth. And “I’m Just Being Honest,” a genuinely hysterical ode on the pitfalls of constructive criticism, lands like Weezer doing a spot-on Lonely Island parody of themselves: “I listened to it, but halfway through it, I had to quit; your band sounds like shit.”
Elsewhere, The Black Album stumbles when Cuomo opts for universality over specificity. “Living in L.A.” smothers its interesting ideas under broad brush strokes. “Piece of Cake” is a shallow, plodding re-tread of the White Album stand-out “Do You Wanna Get High?” The album’s final track, “California Snow,” borders on disastrous: over skittering, “Sicko Mode”-esque drums, Cuomo spits, “This is the definition of flow! Nobody cold as this!” and then he sings about cocaine for three and a half minutes. Cuomo’s songwriting on substance abuse, once so direct and delicate, sinks to maudlin depths here; the invocation of Judas in this song’s bridge can’t match the bruising betrayal conveyed in, “You cleaned up/Found Jesus.”
In recent months, Weezer’s been focused on light-hearted, crowd-pleasing viral videos: Finn Wolfhard donning a wild glam-rock mullet to play a teenage Cuomo, Weird Al suiting up in bowl cut, cardigan, and Buddy Holly glasses. At first blush, the band’s new video for “High as a Kite” appears to be more of the same, with Cuomo wearing a red sweater and greeting a crowd of pre-schoolers for a taping of “Mister Rivers’ Neighborhood.” But as the band’s performance gathers steam, the dark subtext beneath the song’s optimism reveals itself. Smiles slough off the toddlers’ faces, giving way to wobbly pouting. Their parents knit their eyebrows, weary, visibly distressed by the rock’n’roll carnage unfolding. The final shot all but defines the current moment of Weezer: The audience has cleared out entirely, leaving a vast expanse of empty black seats and bare black walls. On the soundstage, Weezer stands triumphant in the wreckage, soaked in light. | 2019-03-04T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2019-03-04T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Atlantic | March 4, 2019 | 5.7 | c99add36-0737-4406-9a67-90a9727685fc | Peyton Thomas | https://pitchfork.com/staff/peyton-thomas/ | |
A collection of the late soul singer’s covers of songs by Janet Jackson, Prince, and others reveals her remarkable ability to reinterpret classic sounds while refusing to be relegated to the past. | A collection of the late soul singer’s covers of songs by Janet Jackson, Prince, and others reveals her remarkable ability to reinterpret classic sounds while refusing to be relegated to the past. | Sharon Jones and the Dap-Kings: Just Dropped In (To See What Condition My Rendition Was In) | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/sharon-jones-and-the-dap-kings-just-dropped-in-to-see-what-condition-my-rendition-was-in/ | Just Dropped In (To See What Condition My Rendition Was In) | In 2002, Sharon Jones and Daptone Records co-founder/bandleader Bosco Mann claimed that they were suing Janet Jackson over the song “What Have You Done for Me Lately.” The label issued a press release accusing Jackson of copyright violation and alleging that her 1986 hit single was actually written in 1969 by Jones and Mann: “The original recording, ‘a much raunchier version,’ had been only a regional hit on the soul scene in the early seventies and had fallen into relative obscurity by the time Jackson had recorded her pop version fifteen years later.” It just so happened that Daptone was selling a 7" single with Jones’ version on the A-side and the Dap-Kings’ instrumental on the B, both of which are convincing in their analog production and gritty groove.
Never mind that Mann (aka Gabriel Roth) was born several years after he allegedly co-wrote the song. The name of the law firm—Dewey Cheatham—revealed the whole thing to be a clever hoax engineered to promote the single, taken from Daptone’s first full-length release, Dap-Dippin’ with Sharon Jones & the Dap-Kings. Nearly 20 years later, their cover of Jackson’s hit is less significant for how it sounds than for the way it pitched Jones as an artist removed from time and wronged by the music industry. Which wasn’t too far from the truth: Jones, who died of pancreatic cancer in 2016, had been working day jobs and singing in wedding bands for decades before making her recording debut (singing backup for Lee Fields) in the mid 1990s. She brought to that session, just as she would to Daptone, a stylistic approach and set of techniques from another era, and Jones spent the rest of her life not just defining retro soul for a new generation, but defying the retro part of that label.
Covers were always a significant part of Jones’ repertoire, a means of connecting her to the past and also linking the past to the present, and that gives Just Dropped In (To See What Condition My Rendition Was In) the weight of a career retrospective. It might even reveal more about Jones than a greatest-hits collection would, emphasizing her decisions about which songs to sing and how to sing them. She had remarkable range vocally and stylistically. While her take on “What Have You Done for Me Lately” ultimately sounds uncharacteristically tentative, turning Jackson’s icy staccato into a rhythmically limp hook, she had more luck with subsequent covers, navigating established soul classics and usually holding her own against the originals. She conveys a sense of staunch determination on Fontella Bass’s “Rescue Me,” as though she’s not the one who needs saving. And she strips the breathless singing and lush production from the Marvelettes’ “Here I Am Baby,” replacing them with a rawer vocal and a sinewy guitar groove. It sounds like you’re sitting in their practice space with them.
But the non-R&B covers—the songs that make her and her band push themselves—are more daring and perhaps more satisfying, in particular “This Land Is Your Land” (included on the digital version but not the vinyl). Originally released as the B-side of her 2004 single “What If We All Stopped Paying Taxes?,” it’s become one of her signature tunes, a work of democratic funk conveying both patriotic pride and civic outrage, especially when she gets to the verses typically omitted from Woody Guthrie’s song. Less popular but just as powerful is her reimagining of the Wailers’ deep cut “It Hurts to Be Alone.” (Often credited to Bob Marley, it was written and originally sung by Junior Braithwaite.) The Dap-Kings wisely downplay the Trenchtown pulse and teen romanticism of the original, giving it a loose, late-night sway to match the adult regret and restraint in Jones’ voice.
Just Dropped In similarly reveals much about the business of being in a band and running a label—like how Jones and Daptone supplemented their albums and tours with extracurricular projects. Many of these covers weren’t chosen by the band, but commissioned. The band recorded Stevie Wonder’s “Signed Sealed Delivered I’m Yours” for a bank commercial, and their reading is straightforward right down to the electric sitar. Similarly, they did a note-for-note cover of Gladys Knight & the Pips’ 1964 single “Giving Up” to use as a Dr. Dre sample, although it was ultimately discarded. These songs sound a bit too faithful to the originals, and you wonder what the band could have done with them if they’d been given more freedom to cut loose or open them up to other possibilities.
Seven years and innumerable shows after the Janet Jackson hoax, Jones recorded another iconic hit by another idiosyncratic ’80s artist. Punchy and provocative, her cover of “Take Me With U” was a standout on Spin magazine’s 2009 Prince tribute Purplish Rain, showcasing what sounds like a completely different band. They drive it like they stole it, adding a sharp guitar motif to frame the action and a corkscrew baritone sax riff to push the song along at a frenzied clip. There’s nothing tentative about Jones’ performance, which is forceful and agile as she navigates the tricky rhythms, and her delivery of the line “you’re sheer perfection” nearly out-raunches the song’s auteur. It doesn’t have all the baggage of previous covers, but it stands out for the sheer joy they take in upending pop history.
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. | 2020-12-03T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2020-12-03T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Pop/R&B | Daptone | December 3, 2020 | 7.2 | c99b4fce-1c59-42b2-8b2a-4a15122c0350 | Stephen M. Deusner | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stephen-m. deusner/ | |
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 ’90s alt-rock band’s debut, a tender and sincere record that made the band famous while they grappled with tragedy. | 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 ’90s alt-rock band’s debut, a tender and sincere record that made the band famous while they grappled with tragedy. | Gin Blossoms: New Miserable Experience | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/gin-blossoms-new-miserable-experience/ | New Miserable Experience | The guitarist who wrote the album’s biggest songs isn’t on the cover of Gin Blossoms’ New Miserable Experience, but the tour van he once poured sugar into the gas tank of is. By the time the band had finished their long, uncertain climb to the top of the charts, they’d fired Doug Hopkins, and he spent the rest of his short life rueing their success and decrying their betrayal. He’d founded the group and written half their album, including the two achingly personal hits that made them famous. They were profiting off of not only his work but his experiences—his suffering, fuck-ups, and humiliations.
New Miserable Experience went on to go quadruple platinum, and the album cover was just the last in the endless series of do-overs and recalibrations it took to make the record such a sleeper hit. A first pressing of the CD featured uninspired artwork of the Arizona desert, a nod to the band’s roots in Tempe, Arizona, a college town far off the music industry’s radar. The revised cover, while similarly junky, was at least more personal, reflecting the band’s faces in the windshield of the van in which they’d logged years on the road while they waited to see if their long-shot record deal with A&M would pan out.
By 1992, that deal was looking like a bust. A first attempt to record a full-length had failed, yielding instead only an EP of usable material, Up and Crumbling, which was released in 1991 to little notice. The sessions for New Miserable Experience had also been a debacle, largely because of Hopkins’ worsening alcoholism, and the meager sales and lackluster reviews that greeted the album upon release suggested A&M had funded another flop. But the label, likely sensing the opening created by the zeitgeist-shifting success of Nirvana a year earlier, remained committed to breaking their single “Hey Jealousy,” an incongruously upbeat romp about a fuckup drunkenly trying to reconcile with an ex under the guise of needing a place to crash. A&M commissioned three videos for the song, each with a vastly higher budget, before one finally passed muster with the gatekeepers at MTV.
Perhaps it was fitting that it took a few tries to make the “Hey Jealousy” video stick, since the song itself was a redo. The band had recorded it years prior on their 1989 independent release Dusted, in a far more shambolic form that belied their early debt to the Replacements, with a blitzing cadence and a basement punk band’s sense of rhythm. That they buried the song as track 9 on the back of the record suggests they hadn’t fully realized what a gem they’d written. New Miserable Experience producer John Hampton certainly did. Spruced up with a slower tempo that accentuated the euphoria of its riff and the sting of its lyrics, the song’s major-label makeover crunches, sparkles, and soars. It’s such an undeniable hit that you have to wonder why it took so much arm-twisting to make programmers play it.
New Miserable Experience beefed up the band’s guitars just enough that Gin Blossoms could pass as part of the early-’90s modern rock boom, although at its heart their sound was a throwback to the crystalline jangle of ’80s college rock, with a heartland tinge that felt old-fashioned in the wake of grunge. Their true differentiator was the blue-eyed lilt and unabashed softness of frontman Robin Wilson, an uncommonly tame singer during an era of furious, loud ones. Compared to the cage match roars of Kurt Cobain, Layne Staley, and Chris Cornell, Wilson sang as if he was serenading a baby bird he was nursing back to health with an eye dropper.
Yet that tenderness, that wimpy sincerity, was key to the friction at the foundation of their sound: Their guitars were pretty and their vocals were sweet, but they sang about the kind of hard living mostly found in Charles Bukowski novels and old country songs. Ahead of acts like Third Eye Blind and Matchbox 20, Gin Blossoms had recognized a market for deceptively sordid minivan music. That lived-in, flaws-and-all realism elevated them over most of the flood of tame, light alternative and post-grunge bands that followed in their wake—bands like Tonic and Sister Hazel, which never had the same understanding of how a pleasant song can still capture shittiness and moral ambiguity.
The hard-fought breakthrough of “Hey Jealousy” is the kind of story that A&R loves to tell, one that reinforces the idea that with a little patience and persistence—and, yes, an expertly deployed promotional budget—a deserving song can find its audience. But there was far uglier behind-the-scenes work involved in launching Gin Blossoms, too. Midway through the sessions for New Miserable Experience, the label concluded that for the band to have any chance at functioning, Hopkins had to go. The group had been recording at Memphis’ famed Ardent Studios, where their idols Big Star had recorded their holy trinity of albums, and Hopkins was cracking under the pressure, drunkenly flubbing solos in futile pursuit of a perfect take. His tremens had become so violent he could no longer play sober.
Hopkins’ condition had made touring untenable, as well. “Doug was like having this big anvil you had to drag around with you,” Wilson later recalled. “It’s like, ‘Oh, we gotta go to the gig? Well, I gotta go pick up my big anvil.’ And then when the gig’s over, it’s like, ‘Oh shit, I can’t leave yet. I gotta go get my anvil.’” The specifics of Hopkins’ dismissal and its aftermath vary depending on the account, but they’re all ugly. The feud between the guitarist and his former bandmates played out in public; once Hopkins was kicked out of a Tempe club for punching Wilson in the face. In the detail most likely to cast the band as villains, they pressured Hopkins to sign away a chunk of his publishing royalties to the guy they replaced him with. Hopkins needed the $15,000 or so they owed him, so he did. “I understand why they fired me,” he lamented in a 1992 interview, “but did they have to get so fucking cold and ruthless about it?”
The cruel ubiquity of “Hey Jealousy” tormented Hopkins, who was consumed by depression and resentment as the single flooded the airwaves. When he received a plaque in the mail after the song went gold, at first he hung it proudly—what musician doesn’t dream of a gold record?—but two weeks later he smashed it. The song itself, Hopkins insisted, he’d never cared about that much; he barely remembered writing it. That wasn’t the case, however, with the album’s follow-up single.
Another showcase for Hopkins’ vividly dejected storytelling, “Found Out About You” didn’t disguise its melancholy behind sugar rush guitars. A chronicle of being utterly wrecked by a philandering girlfriend, its anguish was front and center, alongside a foreboding churn to match the paranoia of its whispered rumors and nagging thoughts. In an echo of “Hey Jealousy,” “Found Out About You” also includes an uninvited visit to an ex’s place, but this time the scene plays out not as romantic comedy but horror: “You know it’s all I think about/I write your name, drive past your house/Your boyfriend’s over, I watch the lights go out.” Hopkins was proud of the song and had dreamed it could be a hit, but not under these circumstances. Any further success for his old bandmates was just more salt in the wound.
In December 1993, just as “Found Out About You” was taking hold on the radio, Hopkins bought a gun and killed himself. His family had understood he was nearing the end—both his mother and sister had used their last visits with him to say goodbye—but his former bandmates would never have the chance to make peace with him. He died despising them. At his memorial service, a woman approached Wilson with a final message from Hopkins: He wanted the band to know it was him who’d poured sugar into their gas tank.
The band didn’t talk about it much at the time, but the guilt and the grief must have been unbearable. Their success would always be shadowed by Faustian reminders of their loss. It couldn’t have helped, either, that so many of Hopkins’ songs were about the very addiction that killed him. He foreshadowed the end within the first lines of New Miserable Experience’s opener, “Lost Horizons”: “I’ll drink enough of anything to make this world look new again/Drunk, drunk, drunk in the gardens and graves.” Those are heavy words to sing night after night.
Hopkins hadn’t been Gin Blossoms’ only songwriter, and they proved that they could write hits without him—maybe not smashes, but solid hits. Wilson and guitarist Jesse Valenzuela drafted “Until I Fall Away,” a wistful ballad soothed by blissful guitars, while Wilson penned the radiant “Allison Road,” whose sunny jangle was the album’s most explicit callback to early R.E.M. Both deftly balanced bubblegum and pathos, the work of songwriters with a deep understanding of how to make a pop song stick without cloying. But on their 1996 follow-up album Congratulations I’m Sorry, its title a nod to the circumstances of their success, it was clear they were working around the absence of their ace. Where the great songs were supposed to be, there were merely good ones.
Gin Blossoms broke up shortly after, in part to belatedly process the shock of everything they’d been through. Then they got back to it. Since regrouping around the turn of the century, they’ve carried on as a workhorse touring act, sharing ’90s nostalgia packages with bands like Everclear and Sugar Ray and headlining county fairs and gatherings like Canton, Ohio’s Pro Football Hall of Fame Enshrinement Festival Ribs Burnoff or the Mid-South Great Steak Cookoff at Southland Park Gaming and Racing—wherever masses are charring meat outdoors, there’s a chance Gin Blossoms could be there. It’s not a bad living, really. There are acts with bigger audiences, greater stature, and more recent hits, but in truth the average working band would envy playing for dependable, appreciative crowds as consistently as Gin Blossoms still do.
Perhaps the most remarkable thing about the band’s gutting backstory—aside from the sheer, gobstopping sadness of it all—is how divorced it is from the popular notion of the group. These days the band will talk about Hopkins with any journalist who asks, but no matter how many times or how vividly it’s told, his story never sticks: Every article about his death always presents it as new information, a lurid piece of trivia you never knew about an act you never thought much about. It’s as if the bitter details cut too harshly against their docile image to become lore. If listeners rarely consider them as a tragic band, it’s because it’s much more gratifying to think of them how they’re most widely known—as just the Gin Blossoms, a group unburdened by expectations of coolness or relevance, whose meek demeanor disguises some undeniable riffs, and whose signature earworms, despite decades of exposure, somehow never seem to burn out. Some bands are defined by their tragedies. Others simply carry on in spite of them.
\ | 2024-03-03T00:00:00.000-05:00 | 2024-03-03T00:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | UMD | March 3, 2024 | 8.1 | c99c9a59-c174-4ae0-a8f3-6a11e9041825 | Evan Rytlewski | https://pitchfork.com/staff/evan-rytlewski/ | |
The expanded reissues of albums from R.E.M.'s I.R.S. years continue, as the brilliant follow-up to Murmur is augmented with a 1984 live show. | The expanded reissues of albums from R.E.M.'s I.R.S. years continue, as the brilliant follow-up to Murmur is augmented with a 1984 live show. | R.E.M.: Reckoning [Deluxe Edition] | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/13130-reckoning-deluxe-edition/ | Reckoning [Deluxe Edition] | Given their vast and varied catalog, it's sometimes easier to imagine R.E.M. as a discography than to picture them as a flesh-and-blood band. Ironically, it may be R.E.M.'s insistence upon operating as a fully democratic entity that has allowed them to shapeshift so completely and convincingly. Whether crafting a subdued folk song or an over-the-top glam rock stomper, R.E.M. have always embraced their chosen approach completely, even if it means former drummer Bill Berry laying low for an acoustic number or singer Michael Stipe handing off a lead vocal to bassist Mike Mills. On their sophomore LP, Reckoning, those polymorphous tendencies find root as palpable, electrifying, yet-unexplored potential. And with this aptly named reissue, Reckoning finally gets the "Deluxe" treatment (and much-needed remaster) that it deserves.
This comes as no surprise; the "Deluxe" reissue of the band's debut full-length, Murmur, was revelatory, breathing astonishing new life into a 25-five-year-old album. Greg Calbi's expert remastering job cleaned up the album's notoriously murky sonics and revealed previously unheard detail and force. This newfound clarity made Murmur seem much more purposeful, lifting the proverbial veil on an album made by record nerds who understood the common ground between the Soft Boys, Gang of Four, and the Velvet Underground. Reckoning couples the energy of Murmur with the experience of a group that has spent a few years touring and recording, documenting that crucial moment when a band's ideas and ambitions are overtaken by the unique chemistry of its players.
Finally, with this remaster, "Harborcoat" makes for a fittingly explosive opener. Many of the best songs on Reckoning follow the formula set forth on this debut track: a methodical verse followed by a sly turnaround into a cathartic chorus. Bill Berry's drum parts are at times virtually indistinguishable from song to song, and Michael Stipe tends to sing verses and choruses in the same respective registers. But Reckoning is far from formulaic-- instead, it is host to a kind of determined minimalism, each song building via subtle variations in performance and instrumentation. "Discipline" is not a word that gets thrown around a lot when discussing rock music, but it is key to Reckoning's success.
Case in point: As with countless songs written before and after it, "So. Central Rain" takes up the simple phrase "I'm sorry" as its chorus. But the combination of Stipe's strong-yet-unmistakably-fragile voice, Berry's nervous drumming, and the melodic interplay of Mills' bass and Peter Buck's guitar imbue these well-worn words with remarkable force and meaning. For all the arty, pretentious gestures the band was given to, Reckoning shows that they were not afraid to embrace the universal, to transfigure clichés rather than ham-fistedly avoiding them (see also "Everybody Hurts").
As with its predecessor, Reckoning finds R.E.M. touching upon different styles while working within a fairly consistent aesthetic. The latter half veers a bit towards Americana, without sacrificing any of the momentum built over the album's stunning opening tracks. Slight embellishments go a long way towards highlighting the band's versatility-- a propulsive piano line in "(Don't Go Back to) Rockville" elevates the homespun whimsy of Stipe's voice, and hand percussion on "Time After Time (Annelise)" hints at the more understated turn the band would take with Fables of the Reconstruction.
The live disc included in this reissue (a 1984 performance at Chicago's Aragon Ballroom) demonstrates how well these songs work without any such production flourishes. While the raw energy of the live show included in the Murmur reissue is toned down a bit, it is fascinating to hear the band grow more sure-footed in both performance and arrangements. It is also interesting to hear how the band's live approach seems to have been absorbed back into their studio recordings; Stipe's trademark live vocal tics are present throughout Reckoning.
Declaring Reckoning to be R.E.M.'s "best" album sells short just how many different kinds of great albums R.E.M. have released. But, more so than any other R.E.M. record, Reckoning is unified and energized by the very restlessness that has driven the band to explore so many different ideas and identities. It is this paradoxical engine of transparency and mystery that has made the band so unique, regardless of the particular approach they choose to take for a given record. Any way you look at it, this is R.E.M. | 2009-07-02T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2009-07-02T02:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Interscope / A&M / IRS | July 2, 2009 | 10 | c9a382d2-7775-4293-902a-529bc8a74759 | Matt LeMay | https://pitchfork.com/staff/matt-lemay/ | null |
With tightly packed bars and adaptable, uncanny flows, the Atlanta rapper’s latest is precise and loose at the same time. Pi’erre Bourne and Coupe’s beats are showcases for his originality. | With tightly packed bars and adaptable, uncanny flows, the Atlanta rapper’s latest is precise and loose at the same time. Pi’erre Bourne and Coupe’s beats are showcases for his originality. | Young Nudy: Rich Shooter | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/young-nudy-rich-shooter/ | Rich Shooter | Many of the game-changing Atlanta rappers who’ve emerged in a post-Gucci Mane world have traced a similar career arc: Future, Young Thug, and 21 Savage each stood out as distinctive voices, with unpredictable flows and endless mixtape tracklists that gradually distilled into a more chart-friendly container over time. Atlanta’s younger generation, from Lil Baby to Lil Keed, owe their existence to the experimentation of their elders, but many of the city’s newer stars have adapted to a mainstream pop vernacular more quickly. Young Nudy stands out in this regard: He’s remained singularly committed to himself, uninterested in making playlist-baiting earworms, and frequently eschewing features where other rising artists thirst for them.
Between more chart-oriented, guest-focused albums like Sli’merre and Dr. EV4L, he’s stood alone on projects like Anyways and Faded in the Booth. In an era when artists so often speak of hip-hop as a stepping stone to larger stardom, Nudy looks more like a rapper’s rapper, primarily a lyricist and vocalist, despite existing in a subgenre that’s frequently misconstrued as somehow anti-lyrical or “post verbal.” While other rappers are thinking in singles and playlists, Nudy still paints in bars and mixtapes. His delivery is more like a palette or moodboard than a clear transmission, a spectrum of emotions that come through in the way he compresses, stretches, and shapes his words.
At times his voice is incredibly directed and driven, at others closer to what skeptics might decry as mumbling. But that occasionally more restrained, less enunciated register gives him a kind of mystique: a quiet crooner with a hat tipped down low. He regularly credits 21 Savage as a formative stylistic influence, and there’s an obvious lineage, but Nudy’s bars are considerably more dense, and the sometimes quieter register forces you to pay attention. Tracks like “Battlefield” and “Bodies on Bodies” showcase his talent for intricate, tightly packed bars, delivering multiple mini-rhymes within a single rhyme in a ping-ponging, sing-song flow. He’s precise and loose at the same time, unloading words composed to piggyback off one another yet energized and organic enough to feel improvised.
Nudy is the kind of rapper who benefits from close collaboration with regular producers—he needs artists who know him and trust his instincts, rather than skewing to formulas or presets. The beats on Rich Shooter are largely supplied by Pi’erre Bourne and Coupe, but the circle also includes frequent collaborators 20Rocket and Mojo Krazy, as well as jetsonmade, the beatmaker behind the familiar drum patterns of most of DaBaby’s hits. Though Pi’erre Bourne has become an auteur in his own right, he and Nudy are a perfectly matched team, both with a sound that’s boundary-pushing but still accessible. Bourne’s beats are like subtle ensembles, an automated backing band that enhances the ambience but never overwhelms it. The Future-assisted “Trap Shit” is built around a wiry high-pitched synth line, but beneath it lie inscrutable layers of feedback and noise, cradling the beat like barbed wire.
Coupe-produced tracks like “How They Label Me” and “Bodies on Bodies” weave in gentle strums and background riffs, but the guitar gives Nudy’s aching verses a gentle bluesy flavor rather than pushing them into rap-rock territory. Though the lyrics are often dark and painful, Nudy’s voice has a lightness that’s augmented by his fondness for softer instrumental elements, which at times almost approach indie pop, like the gliding synths of “I Can’t Change” and gentle keys and clean guitar line of “Addicted.” Though he takes shades of horrorcore from 21 Savage as well, Nudy is more than capable of sillier modes. “How I Eat” sees him slide into a squeaky, helium-addled flow, while “Green Bean” has a vaguely chiptune-like beat.
Nudy’s fond of contrasts and subtly ironic juxtapositions, like “We Do Not Give Up,” which jolts you to attention with a round of machine gun fire before breaking off into a Future-like tropical pop number that’s nonetheless a heavy story of beef turned violent and comrades locked up. The album’s features are evenly split between Nudy’s ATL elders—Peewee Longway, Gucci Mane, Future—and his own peers he wants to put on, like 21 Lil Harold, 2FeetBino, Cristo4L, and 4L Quan. Listen to a run of Nudy’s solo tracks and you’ll become accustomed to residing in his universe; the guest appearances remind you how unique and uncanny he is, an aerosol-huffing space alien compared to the deeper and more classical drawls of Peewee and Gucci. As the title of “Can’t Clone Me” puts it bluntly, while Young Nudy might share stylistic DNA with the godfathers of Atlanta trap, he’s a true original, evolving too quickly to ever copy.
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-08-12T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2021-08-12T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | PDE / RCA | August 12, 2021 | 7.8 | c9ad3cc9-50df-49b8-bfcc-c0b1cb5c3aa6 | Nadine Smith | https://pitchfork.com/staff/nadine-smith/ | |
The Atlanta label home to Migos and Lil Yachty overstuffs their new compilation with lackluster raps from stars who seem to be stuck in a loop. | The Atlanta label home to Migos and Lil Yachty overstuffs their new compilation with lackluster raps from stars who seem to be stuck in a loop. | Various Artists: Control the Streets, Volume 2 | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/various-artists-control-the-streets-volume-2/ | Control the Streets, Volume 2 | Quality Control, the label that brought us Migos, Lil Yachty, City Girls, and Lil Baby, is looking to reassert its authority. A lot has happened since they dropped the first Control the Streets in 2017. That was the year Culture swept America and Yachty became a brand. On Vol. 1, the title seemed like a commandment: The label was planting its flag and asserting its dominance. With Vol. 2, it sounds more like an attempt at crowd control, like trying to wrangle a disinterested mob.
It doesn’t help that Quality Control’s once-promising roster has mostly scattered to the winds. After following up their biggest-ever album with a bloated, underwritten snoozer, Migos split for three bad-to-mediocre solo albums between October of last year and February of this one. Lil Yachty was brainwashed by the Funk Flexes of the world into abandoning melody and joining the cypher. The wave that City Girls were riding in the aftermath of Drake’s massive hit “In My Feelings” died down; one member is currently serving a two-year sentence for credit card fraud and the other has come under fire for homophobia. The label’s brightest remaining prospect, Lil Baby, is still trying to prove he doesn’t sound like a one-dimensional Young Thug clone.
As a result, the sequel has the reek of desperation. Migos are trapped in a loop: They keep doing and saying the same things, recycling their flows, winding up in the same situations. “Everybody know that I’m trappin’/Everybody know that I’m gettin’ it,” Quavo raps on “Stripper Bowl,” and that’s the problem. Yachty raps exclusively about getting blowjobs and how broke his haters are. Which is fine, but does he have to sound so lifeless? Everyone on the roster suffers the same problem; their raps are completely unimaginative. The Migos party trick of constantly rearranging their flows is no longer an effective diversion.
The most colorful performances are delivered by outsiders: Megan Thee Stallion takes City Girls’ finesse rap to the next level on “Pastor,” comparing the money she squeezes out of her suitors to paying tithes. Tee Grizzley, with the home court advantage (on a Helluva beat that sounds absolutely Detroit), dunks on Yachty again in a rematch. On the “Intro,” Gucci Mane outshines the four QC stars, claiming he signed Hoodrich Pablo Juan just because he had designer drugs. DaBaby and Gunna take turns showing Offset up; Young Thug is like a peacock amid pigeons.
But of course, on an all-star project spanning 36 tracks, something or other is bound to work. It’s largely well-produced, thanks to an assemblance of elite talent, including Metro Boomin, Southside, Pi’erre Bourne. Murda Beatz, Wheezy, Mustard, Tay Keith, and many others. There are a couple of good performances here and there, but no choice cuts, just songs left on the cutting room floor during sessions for recent solo albums and filler tracks from lower-ranking artists on the QC roster. The longer the comp goes on, the more obvious it becomes that nothing is happening. | 2019-08-21T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-08-21T01:00:00.000-04:00 | null | Quality Control | August 21, 2019 | 5.9 | c9b1054a-ca4d-4fa3-a51f-c37e7a931bd7 | Sheldon Pearce | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sheldon-pearce/ | |
The Bronx-based Dominican crew offer a more lighthearted take on the drill sound with their debut EP. | The Bronx-based Dominican crew offer a more lighthearted take on the drill sound with their debut EP. | Chucky73 / Fetti031: Sie7etr3 EP | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/chucky73-fetti031-sie7etr3-ep/ | Sie7etr3 EP | Drill music is having a moment in New York City. Brooklyn’s Sheff G, Fivio Foreign, and the late Pop Smoke pulled beats from up-and-coming UK producers such as 808Melo and AXL Beats to capture the sounds of the streets far from the borough’s third-wave coffee and artisanal mayo shops. But uptown in the Bronx—light years away in the NYC universe—a crew of Dominican rappers have put their own spin on the genre defined by urban grit and grime.
Spitting Spanish flows over sparse beats from Latin producers, the Sie7etr3 crew’s take on drill is decidedly more light-hearted than their forebears in Chicago or their peers in Brooklyn. They still shoot low-budget crew videos on the block, and they’re certainly not immune to gangster tropes, but they’re also more likely to be smiling than mean-mugging, and have been known to brandish Nerf guns in place of Glock 9s. The 8-track Sie7etr3 EP is a succinct intro into the world of its namesake E 173rd St, and very likely the most danceable drill music you’ll ever hear.
Those buoyant rhythms are the most compelling element of Sie7etr3’s music. The synthetic horns and bells on tracks like “Colombiana” and “Brazilera” lend the productions an inherently Latin flair, giving them a loose sense of movement you won’t find in Chicago or London. Sie7etr3 is new enough that their style is still evolving; early songs like “Wini” and “Wili” evoked a shadowy mood belied by all the smiling in their videos, but newer tracks like the opener “Kili” display a newfound refinement that hints at untapped potential.
Posse cut “Tili” stands out as the EP’s strongest, featuring four crew members flexing their individual skills and styles over a bouncy piano melody that represents the crew’s most sophisticated production to date. And while the group’s de facto leader Chucky73 holds down the closing verse, it’s Dglo73 who shines here, showing off his range as both an AutoTune crooner and a rapper. Sie7etr3 is essentially a showcase for the budding label of the same name, but also a vehicle for Chucky and Fetti031, its two most evolved lyricists. Both have deep, compelling voices. But while Fetti’s monotone drone perfectly suits the medium of drill, Chucky’s limber flow and lyricism hints at greater potential as an MC, using the repetitive drill beats as a platform to show off his nimble-tongued delivery.
Latin trap’s biggest stars—Bad Bunny, Ozuna, Anuel AA—all hail from Puerto Rico, but the style was pioneered uptown in New York’s clubs, by Dominicans, which makes Sie7etr3’s viral successes that much more satisfying. And as strong as it is, the Sie7etr3 EP offers only a glimpse of the crew’s potential, a tasting platter of the hip-hop the Bronx is serving up in the new decade. There are certainly better rappers, in English or Spanish, but you would be hard-pressed to find a crew having more fun. | 2020-04-29T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-04-29T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Sie7tr3 the Label / Caroline | April 29, 2020 | 7.2 | c9b11602-1bbe-4234-b6b8-0521515b8e82 | Matthew Ismael Ruiz | https://pitchfork.com/staff/matthew-ismael ruiz/ | |
Mixing metal and noise with ritualistic howls, the Indonesian duo’s seventh album is a thrilling, at times ecstatic serenade to the collapse of civilization. | Mixing metal and noise with ritualistic howls, the Indonesian duo’s seventh album is a thrilling, at times ecstatic serenade to the collapse of civilization. | Senyawa: Alkisah | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/senyawa-alkisah/ | Alkisah | The end of the world has always lurked in Senyawa’s explosive mix of metallic bombast, ritualistic howls, and industrial-strength clamor. But the seventh album from this Indonesian duo is genuinely apocalyptic. Alkisah—which means “Once Upon a Time”—tells a linear story of Armageddon, from civilizational collapse to failed attempts at rebuilding to a final, mass-destruction doomsday. As singer Rully Shabara barks out mushroom clouds and instrumentalist Wukir Suryadi hammers heavy beats and heavier chords, using tools he built himself, everything seems to crash and implode around them, as convincingly cataclysmic as the best CGI blockbusters.
Yet somehow Alkisah is nowhere near morose. The constant pressure in the duo’s playing—every note here feels like it has to happen as soon as possible—mines the tension of global emergency. As a result, the music’s dark detonations are more likely to keep you on the edge of your seat than sink you into gloom. In many spots, the duo sounds genuinely ecstatic: The pummeling rhythms of “Menuju Muara” reach exertion-induced euphoria; “Alkisah I” wrings epiphany from one repeated chord; and closer “Klimat” paints judgement day as a frenetic uprising of earthquakes and prayers. For Senyawa, the world has to end with a bang, not a whimper.
Such explosions come from the musical friction between Shabara and Suryadi. The band’s name means “chemical compound,” and many styles interact throughout their songs (no wonder 44 different labels decided that Alkisah fit their catalogs). It’s as if they’re two radioactive elements dumped into a beaker, causing a push-and-pull that resists one-person dominance. This stick-rubbing aura evokes Japanese prog-punks Ruins, grindaholic noise-rockers Lighting Bolt, and Beijing-based low-end riders Gong Gong Gong. But their strongest parallel is NYC post-punk pioneers Suicide, who similarly mixed invented instruments—namely Martin Rev’s keyboard/drum hybrid—with intense singing and ominous theatrics, drawing on musical antecdents while steadfastly standing outside them.
Senyawa create a similar thrill, triggering the feeling that you’ve heard these sounds before but never imagined them put together this way. Of all the genres the duo taps into, the forest-shaking doom of heavy metal is most responsible for giving the music its gravity. That’s especially true when things get lower and slower, as in “Istana,” which stretches howls across Sunn O)))-worthy bass rumbles, and “Kabau,” a meditative mesh of chords that comes off like a translated Metallica ballad. Lyrically, the latter track has a cut-and-paste quality, composed out of ancient proverbs from the West Sumatran language of Minang. But in action, the song flows smoothly upward, like a river scaling a mountain.
Grandiose images like that are easy to imagine when listening to Alkisah. Its rhapsodic tones and end-times themes suggest the duo is gravely serious. But Senyawa are not averse to humor—a few moments here indulge in over-the-top absurdity—and their narrative about humanity’s evaporation has an oddly hopeful bent, as if the end of civilization might finally unlock something greater than all of us. Perhaps that’s a futile hope, but when couched in the exhilarating waves of Alkisah, Senyawa make it actually sound possible.
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Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-03-23T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2021-03-23T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Experimental | Phantom Limb | March 23, 2021 | 7.8 | c9b77186-9754-42cd-8553-e9c07faed22d | Marc Masters | https://pitchfork.com/staff/marc-masters/ | |
Once united in their status as industry misfits, the four-man supergroup has reassembled for a fan-service album that hinges upon a certain taste for bars. | Once united in their status as industry misfits, the four-man supergroup has reassembled for a fan-service album that hinges upon a certain taste for bars. | HRSMN: The Last Ride | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/hrsmn-the-last-ride/ | The Last Ride | If you were listening to rap in 1996, you may have spent an inordinate amount of time thinking about Cesare Borgia. On “B.I.B.L.E. (Basic Instructions Before Leaving Earth),” the gobsmacking finale of Liquid Swords, Killah Priest cited the Valencian nobleman as the subject of a centuries-old hoax: “The white image of Christ is really Cesare Borgia/And uh, the second son of Pope Alexander,” he affirmed. On “Nature of the Threat,” an eight-minute secret-history lesson from his cult debut Soul on Ice, Ras Kass spouted a competing theory that Constantine I “commissioned Michelangelo to paint white pictures of Jesus/He used his aunt, uncle, and nephew.” By 1999, setting aside doctrinal differences, the two rappers had joined forces with Kurupt and Canibus—themselves hyper-literate occupants of hip-hop’s seedier outskirts—and announced HRSMN, a supergroup project based on Revelation’s Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse.
Like Slaughterhouse a decade later, the HRSMN were united in their status as industry misfits. The group promised deliverance for listeners wary of Y2K armageddon and R&B-inflected crossovers—but a completed album was shelved and soon attained mythic status on rap message boards, Detox for the tinfoil hat crowd. Rumors of a reunion effort eventually petered out, and the HRSMN resumed erratic solo careers. But sometimes the arc of history bends toward conspiracy theories. Facing rising sea levels, a once-in-a-century pandemic, and an actual plague of locusts, the HRSMN has reassembled, incredibly, for The Last Ride. For any listeners still craving doomsday visions relayed in multisyllabic rhyme schemes, this record may be the ultimate fan service. Does Ras Kass rhyme “remarkable” with “unmarketable”? Yes! Does Canibus rhyme “give me space” with “Iditarod race”? Of course, he does! Is there a song about centaurs? You bet! Does Killah Priest insinuate that COVID-19 was a man-made bio-weapon? As surely as the pope is Catholic.
Appreciation of The Last Ride hinges upon a certain taste for bars. We’re talking bars like, “I smell the blood like Nosferatu/Inhaling visible death like CO2”; and like, “You somebody that I’m dying to meet/So I can spread your body parts on the street.” The songs coalesce around broad themes, which discourages the sort of free-associative punchline barrage you might find on Royce da 5’9 albums. Still, it’s curious to ponder that The Last Ride’s mishmash of disjointed pop-culture references, battle rhymes, and big words used for the sake of big words was once considered the apex of hardcore lyricism. It’s so over-the-top, so eager-to-please, that when Ras Kass lays a brick like, “Undefeated like the internet… Tossin’ salad with the vinaigrette/I get arugula with the intellect/Introspect, from where the street code and Islam intersect,” you want to pat him on the back and give him a gold star anyway.
An album comprised of five-and-a-half-minute eschatological posse cuts has every reason to be laborious. But Killah Priest floats over the drum patterns with his imperious preacher man flow, and Canibus packs more snarling, knotty verbiage into a few bars than most rappers do in their careers. The production is better than it needs to be, even if there’s hardly anything on The Last Ride resembling a melody. Over a rugged piano loop, “Centaurs” (they’re horsemen, get it?) has a pass-the-mic verve you only get from MCs eager to outdo one another; the understated snare on “Champion” lends the air of a schoolyard cipher. The quartet’s tales of relationship woe make “Love N War” a bit of a wild card, but the “Love Is a Battlefield” interpolation actually goes hard.
Ironically, it’s the supergroup conceit that holds the HRSMN back. What’s engrossing about Soul on Ice and Heavy Mental is how thoroughly they excavate their subjects’ beautiful, twisted minds; you could lock four geniuses in a room, but together they’d never create anything as vibrantly gnarled as Tha Streetz Iz a Mutha. The Last Ride is like one of those busy Renaissance paintings with a dozen events unfolding at once, heaps of cataclysmic images stacked on top of each other, entire songs’ worth of ideas packed into 16-bar sprints: “Apocalips Now” finds the MCs groping around for endless synonyms, yielding something akin to JAY-Z’s “Monster” verse. Kurupt is particularly bad in this setting—left adrift by the spacey percussion on “Morticians,” he resorts to a haranguing delivery and rhymes “elegant” with “elephant.”
It goes without saying that conspiracy theories carry a different weight than they did during the HRSMN’s heyday. When Ras Kass said AIDS was man-made in ’96, it was a barbed reaction to the U.S government’s indifference toward a virus ravaging poor communities; trafficking in COVID-19 lab-leak conspiracies lets those same institutions off the hook. But in the context of the mid-’90s—decades before alt-right podcasters could whisper in the president’s ear—Ras Kass and Killah Priest were at once offbeat entertainers and valiant soothsayers, conscious not only of ancient history but the ways in which that history was still playing out. They were young men immersed in scripture and civil rights texts, lavished with record deals for their ability to hold forth. Who could say that theirs wasn’t rare, precious knowledge?
The Last Ride should have been an event album—had it arrived 20 years ago, it might have featured appearances from GZA and Wyclef instead of Planet Asia and Wais P. That there was ever demand for this record points to a time when the major label rap landscape was weirder and wordier. But this is what you wish your favorite over-the-hill rappers would do in 2021: book studio time with a few like-minded vets and let it rip. If there’s a quaintness about lyrical vigilantes banding together against the onslaught of wack MCs, it’s because that battle was either lost or deemed irrelevant ages ago. But the HRSMN never conceded.
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-07-01T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2021-07-01T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Fat Beats / Cre8yte | July 1, 2021 | 6.7 | c9c6b784-5a76-4335-8102-fd0eaea096a1 | Pete Tosiello | https://pitchfork.com/staff/pete-tosiello/ | |
The Chicago rapper’s collaborative album with Hit-Boy is confident and playful, balancing her lyrical prowess with more vulnerable, R&B-influenced material. | The Chicago rapper’s collaborative album with Hit-Boy is confident and playful, balancing her lyrical prowess with more vulnerable, R&B-influenced material. | Dreezy: Hitgirl | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/dreezy-hitgirl/ | Hitgirl | Dreezy has always been a hard grafter with formidable potential. Arriving to the mic with authoritative braggadocio, vivid lyricism, and playful puns, her serrated raps and effortless wit reflected her earlier years studying poetry. Whether it’s her oft-celebrated feature on Hitmaka’s “Thot Box” remix, the reflexive “Spar,” or her razor-sharp loosie “Beatbox Bday Freestyle,” her true-to-form technicalities as a lyricist have granted her access to writing sessions with J. Cole and Kanye West. Still, it hasn’t all come easy, and she’s faced obstacles cultivating those moments of buzz into a holistic breakthrough. “Body,” Dreezy’s 2016 duet with Jeremih and her first song to reach the Hot 100, showcased her singing—elevating her profile while sidelining her rap talent. She’s attempted to rectify that in recent years, but with an inconsistent release schedule and few standalone moments, she never quite found her stride in the mainstream.
Her latest pivot aligns her with quintessential hip-hop producer Hit-Boy, known for sparking much-needed life into Nas’ latter-day discography. Their 10-track collaborative album, HITGIRL, marks Dreezy’s first as a newly independent artist. Big Dreez believes in the “hit girl” moniker wholeheartedly, declaring herself a “top five” woman in rap (and not five) across the menacing opener “They Not Ready.” Seamlessly slithering in and out of an array of flow patterns across three minutes, Dreezy’s sometimes subdued but foreboding cadence makes for a rousing listen. Although she’s mighty here, the faster flow wedged into short spells across her first and second verses leaves more to be desired.
Since her first viral release in 2014, a take on “Chiraq,” Dreezy has embodied the city that raised her. Following the same approach of personifying the city and tributing it, she throws “another one up for the South Side” on “Vibez.” Here, she draws upon both the good and the bad in a matter-of-fact drawl. “I’m from that city where catchin’ a body a way to get famous,” she warns on “Sliders.” This isn’t an admission made in shame but a vehicle to acknowledge her growth. It’s these moments of transparency that illuminate where exactly Dreezy’s ambition originates.
When she addresses romance and relationships, Dreezy speaks openly about her position and circumstances both in and out of the booth. Hit-Boy’s production throughout speaks to the pair’s growing synergy. On “Easy,” Dreezy’s vivacious delivery blossoms as she makes it known that she’s not afraid of men and she’ll stand beside peers of any gender and call out those who’ve wronged her. It’s a poignant display of duality that women such as Lil’ Kim and Trina have never shied away from: combating sexism in rap and romance alike as they maneuver across, around, or over men to achieve what they want. As she echoes that sentiment, Dreezy extends a bold lineage.
Hit-Boy’s years of experience with R&B titans (Mariah Carey, Mary J. Blige) make him an ideal collaborator to draw out Dreezy’s melodic side. Both vulnerable yet authoritative, “21 Questions” evokes joy and innocence. “What if yo’ pops think I’m a thot? And mama says that she hate me?” she asks. Hit-Boy’s softer drums and synths allow the questions and what-ifs breathing room; the production drifts alongside Dreezy’s slackened flow as she siphons off self-doubt. She’s more than capable of holding her own in this lane of thoughtful, R&B-imbued hip-hop—a fact highlighted by a lifeless-sounding repeat appearance from Jeremih on “In Touch” that fails to muster the animated spirit of his 2010s features.
HITGIRL exemplifies a complimentary collaborative effort between a seismic producer and a seasoned rapper. Dreezy is able to experiment in sound, presenting R&B as another vehicle for her talent, but by no means her whole offering. Hit-Boy’s soundscapes are still enthralling a decade into his career and on HITGIRL, he provides something Dreezy previously lacked: a consistent instrumental canvas. Hungry for new approaches, Dreezy bets big on her ongoing quest for evolution. | 2022-06-01T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2022-06-01T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Empire | June 1, 2022 | 7.3 | c9c8f1b4-dad3-4e18-9a68-a2d09c425d5a | Nicolas-Tyrell Scott | https://pitchfork.com/staff/nicolas-tyrell-scott/ | |
Filtered through warped hip-hop beats and garbled samples, Damon McMahon’s self-produced sixth album is a characteristically oblique apocalypse tale about living for today. | Filtered through warped hip-hop beats and garbled samples, Damon McMahon’s self-produced sixth album is a characteristically oblique apocalypse tale about living for today. | Amen Dunes: Death Jokes | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/amen-dunes-death-jokes/ | Death Jokes | Amen Dunes’ music is persuasive, but it’s not always clear what it’s trying to persuade you of. Since the release of his confrontationally noisy debut album, DIA, 15 years ago, Damon McMahon has continually refined the remit of his sound—shaving away the haze, juicing the elements drawn from pop and classic rock—but kept the narratives relatively oblique. Listening to his last album, 2018’s Freedom, felt a little like trying to read a Great American Novel by holding it up to a reflecting pool: ideas about loss and familial ties cut through, even if entire sentences were tough to string together. It was a personal record, but rarely a clarifying one; you got the sense that McMahon would rather keep his lyrics obscure than boil down his ideas into something digestible.
The ideas on Death Jokes, his self-produced sixth album, are clearer. He is blunter and more forceful with specific meaning on this album than ever. Broadly, it is an apocalypse tale, in which humanity’s final moments on Earth are plagued by the same ills that have stalked us for centuries: hatred, greed, puritanism. Misunderstanding is a recurring theme, as is loneliness, specifically the kind that arises when the state fails to take care of its citizens. For all this pessimism, though, McMahon’s take on life, which he returns to again and again on Death Jokes, is simple and optimistic: “Some day we lose it/So use it.”
These ideas are filtered through warped hip-hop and rave beats, although the peculiarities of McMahon’s phrasing and melodies—his music is always surging or undulating, rarely taking a streamlined route—mean that Death Jokes sounds quintessentially Amen Dunes. Whether bleating over a sputtering 909 on the Lil Peep-inspired “Rugby Child” or singing an electro-reggae lullaby on “Purple Land,” McMahon is at a point in his career where he could never be mistaken for anyone else, and although Death Jokes is filled with odd details, like the minimal techno interlude “Predator” or the garbled lo-fi samples at the end of “Boys,” the muscular melodic lines that emerged on Freedom and 2014’s Love still come through.
That connection with the rest of McMahon’s music is welcome, because Death Jokes can be hard to parse, and would seem hammily provocative in the wrong light. It opens with a sample of a Woody Allen joke, and on the stunning, nine-minute penultimate track “Round the World,” essentially the final song before a track made entirely of samples, he sings about kids “getting stoned/On their phones/They’re so lonely and don’t know why.” But McMahon never seems like he’s tut-tutting or finger-wagging so much as appealing for forgiveness and generosity. On “Mary Anne,” a pastoral country ballad addressed to one of the women who sexually abused him as a child, he sounds compassionate (“In Purgatory, we both got lost/When we meet again, we will catch up love”) but terse (“I know you say who we are is the same/Well we aren’t the same.”) Other songs, like “Boys” and “Rugby Child,” are portraits of violent people driven by forces they can’t fully control. It doesn’t feel like McMahon is exalting victimhood, or condemning some vague concept of “cancel culture,” as much as trying to find shades of gray in an increasingly black-and-white world.
He says as much on “Round the World,” a fraying epic that blooms from resolute pessimism about society’s failings into a song that’s maybe not hopeful, but at least helpful. Its lyrics—about greedy strivers and curious old friends and mystical piano geniuses—feel like they were written by an old-timer parked at the pub, offering their stories to anyone willing to listen. And as anyone who’s had their ears chewed by an old-timer at the pub knows, there’s generally a kernel of wisdom nestled among the cantankerousness. On “Round the World,” it’s a simple maxim for living out the end of your days: “Here’s to keeping it old fashioned/You can skip your next life/When it’s all gone, you’re gonna wish you had some old fashioned around.” Put it on your tombstone—wouldn’t that be a laugh? | 2024-05-13T00:02:00.000-04:00 | 2024-05-13T00:02:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Sub Pop | May 13, 2024 | 7.6 | c9d052f5-d78e-453a-9c8c-ee2fb55949c6 | Shaad D’Souza | https://pitchfork.com/staff/shaad-d’souza/ | |
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 an underappreciated icon of new wave and his best album, a clinic in lean, sardonic, emotive pop songwriting. | 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 an underappreciated icon of new wave and his best album, a clinic in lean, sardonic, emotive pop songwriting. | Graham Parker: Squeezing Out Sparks | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/graham-parker-squeezing-out-sparks/ | Squeezing Out Sparks | There was a time when Graham Parker was hotly tipped to become a household name. This was the mid-’70s, after Bruce Springsteen had released Born to Run and every record executive under the sun was on the lookout for the next charismatic, revved-up folkie possessing a sizable vocabulary and the true spirit of rock‘n’roll. Parker fit this bill, sort of. He was spindly with a thinning hairline, archetypically British, and never took off his shades, which made him appear more nearsighted than cool. But he was also great. His dual 1976 releases, Howlin’ Wind and Heat Treatment, heralded the emergence of a street-tough soul singer with genuine literary chops. Here was a gas station attendant from the miraculously named working-class London exurb Deepcut, channeling the mystic-reverie of early Van Morrison and the comically embittered broadsides of Highway 61 Revisited-era Bob Dylan. Graham Parker was a force of nature.
Alongside his extraordinary backing band the Rumour, Parker was embedded in England’s pub rock scene, which set the template for British punk by stripping down and souping up the garage and folk rock of the ’60s—a functional bridge between the Faces and the Sex Pistols. He was endlessly compared to his ascendant contemporary Elvis Costello, with whom he shared an acidic wit and a simmering rage. If you had asked a knowledgeable fan or clued-in critic in 1979 whether Parker or Costello would have the more notable career over the long term, the wagering would have been 50-50 in either direction.
With the enthusiastic backing of a new label Arista and featuring the production of industry legend Jack Nitzsche, Parker’s fourth album, Squeezing Out Sparks, was a conscious attempt to consolidate his lofty critical reputation into a commensurate audience. Featuring a harder sound calculated to emphasize his connection to punk, the finished product seemingly succeeded by any conceivable metric. It was 10 lean and sardonic songs performed with razor’s-edge menace over 35 minutes, which back-burnered Parker’s reputation as a traditionalist and situated him at the head of rock’s Angry Young Man club.
It’s difficult to talk about Squeezing Out Sparks without first discussing the elephant in the room. “You Can’t Be Too Strong” is the kind of song you hear once and know you’ll never forget, and you definitely don’t know how to feel about that. This might be because you find the song deeply moving, or strange and mysterious, or strongly compelling or vaguely reprehensible; it might very well be any two or three of those options operating in tandem. Following the fireworks of the album's opening salvo, it’s stripped down and noir-blue: four verses of sliding doors and strange imagery landing on the achingly beautiful and frustratingly non-committal title refrain. It’s a song about abortion—or at least an abortion—an issue area where the cultural needle skips off the disc and the room fills with white noise. It looms over the album’s legacy like a Rorschach test.
There is a lot happening in “You Can’t Be Too Strong.” There is bracing language, some of which verges on Cronenberg-esque body horror: “The doctor gets nervous/Completing the service/He’s all rubber gloves and no head.” There is palpable, almost ecstatic relief: “I ain’t gonna to cry/I’m gonna rejoice!” And there is pained contemplation of what might have been: “Don’t give it a name/Don’t give it a place/Don’t give it a chance/It’s lucky, in a way.” What is not conveyed over the song's runtime is any clear conception of Parker’s own views on the matter. Like the fragmented story songs of Bob Dylan’s Blood on the Tracks, “You Can’t Be Too Strong” seems to regard the termination of an unwanted pregnancy through a prism of evolving temperaments and perspectives, none given any particular weight over the other.
The chorus furthers this slippery game: Does Parker mean to say that life is a bitter furnace and no amount of armor is too much to endure it? Or does he mean: Yes, life is hard and you must be tough but not so tough that you might harm something innocent in your zeal for self-preservation? I’ve been listening to the song for two decades and I still can’t decide. I suspect he wasn’t sure himself. With the debate over reproductive rights reaching its polarizing zenith with the Supreme Court’s draconian ruling this summer, “You Can’t Be Too Strong” feels more resonant and disturbing than ever. For better or worse, few songs jangle the nerves quite so forcefully.
It's a bellwether for an LP that bristles with personal and political anxiety. The bracing and poignant opener “Discovering Japan” is all guilt-sick colonial-exploitation set to a killer riff, anticipating the Clash’s “Straight to Hell” by three years. “Local Girls'' is a poisoned confection anchored by a nagging hook landing someplace between “Under the Boardwalk” and “Under My Thumb.” Third track “Nobody Hurts You” ups the ante further still, with its escalating series of gag lines, half-issued threats, and general self-negation suggesting something like the Buzzcocks following a few more sessions of Freudian analysis than were absolutely necessary. Taken together it’s some of the most swaggering, riveting, catchy, and complex rock‘n’roll music ever issued.
As if punchdrunk from its own exertions, side one ends with “Passion Is No Ordinary Word,” a chugging bad-romance fantasia wed to a spiraling snakebite riff which warily backtracks from the every-aperture-open vulnerability of “You Can’t Be Too Strong” by claiming he was only kidding: “This is nothing else if not unreal/When I pretend to touch you/You pretend to feel.” It’s a great tune, but Parker as nihilist is totally unpersuasive; if anything, he cares too much. He's the bruised fallout from the collapse of hippie utopianism, a humanist confronted by an increasingly inhumane context. He won't get fooled again.
The second side is uniformly excellent, but it’s one of those LPs like Marquee Moon or Music From Big Pink where the level of bone-deep investment required of the first half almost inevitably renders everything that follows as an exhalation. “Saturday Nite Is Dead” is a deliriously funny bare-knuckle brawler that affectionately updates Elton John’s “Saturday Night’s Alright (For Fighting)” with bad news. “Love Gets You Twisted” sounds like the Yardbirds and screws itself into a million different lyrical iterations on the titular conceit. But the closer “Don’t Get Excited” is ultimately perhaps the album’s most revealing moment with respect to Parker’s overarching temperament. An Irish goodbye to his own banquet, typified by if-you-don’t-love-me-then-I-don’t-care sentiments like “You try to reach a vital part of me/My attention span is dropping rapidly.” It’s one part J.D. Salinger and one part Johnny Paycheck, a strangely preemptive hedge on the brink of his own star turn. You can’t fire him—he quits.
Squeezing Out Sparks was so good that critics tripped over themselves with superlatives. It won 1979’s influential Village Voice Pazz & Jop poll, prevailing over heavy hitters such as Neil Young’s Rust Never Sleeps, Talking Heads’ Fear of Music, and Costello’s Armed Forces. They were a great band making the right record at the right time—and then, nothing happened. Despite critical rhapsody and heavy promotion Sparks reached only No. 18 on the UK album charts and topped out at No. 40 on the U.S. Top 40.
Since then, Parker’s career has been a series of fits and stops. He’s made many records for many labels, some brilliant, some lackadaisical, but none of them less than interesting. Always a treasured favorite of influential fans, Parker has turned up in strange places, such as the time when Judd Apatow made him the MacGuffin for his 2012 mid-life crisis opus This Is 40. Apatow’s summation of Parker’s casting is both telling and poignant: “I knew I needed somebody who would be comfortable being in a movie playing someone who was having a lot of problems selling records.” Parker lives in upstate New York and still plays a killer live show. The enigma of his stalled trajectory lingers somewhat bitterly amongst his diehard fans, but in retrospect, it’s easy to understand.
As popular music, politics, and advertising began to blur in the artificial product-placement glow of the 1980s, Parker was going the other way, producing ever knottier and more nuanced story-songs which seemed to question the veracity of everything surrounding him. To say he was out of step with the onset age of pumped-up Cold War jingoism and runaway consumerism is to wildly understate the point. Whereas Springsteen would use gated drums and keening synths to smuggle his working-class ethos into a mainstream culture that frequently misunderstood him, and Costello adapted enough to produce chart-worthy confections in the spirit of the times like “Everyday I Write the Book,” Parker was never willing to tailor his sound to the moment. His well-known truculence when dealing with labels did not help in keeping his commercial prospects afloat, either. Squeezing Out Sparks quietly remains one of the great records you’ll never see on a consensus-driven best-of-the-decade list. If Elvis Costello wanted to bite the hand that feeds, Graham Parker chewed the whole arm off.
Fame is a weird destiny and so is obscurity. Both seem to recognize and claim their own. Given its low profile, a final irony of Squeezing Out Sparks is that its bleak landscape of back-stabbing political operators, avaricious grifters, and dead-eyed consumption is a prescient vision of the corporate-tech nightmare of today. Parker always knew the truth. | 2022-08-21T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2022-08-21T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Arista / Vertigo | August 21, 2022 | 8.8 | c9d0aa79-d28c-4c2a-b744-15316683b293 | Elizabeth Nelson | https://pitchfork.com/staff/elizabeth-nelson/ | |
After 2019’s celebratory, cathartic album Resonant Body, this 20-minute EP cleverly subverts club convention in pursuit of higher states of consciousness. | After 2019’s celebratory, cathartic album Resonant Body, this 20-minute EP cleverly subverts club convention in pursuit of higher states of consciousness. | Octo Octa: She’s Calling EP | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/octo-octa-shes-calling-ep/ | She’s Calling EP | Maya Bouldry-Morrison has spent most of the past two years holed up in her New Hampshire log cabin, exploring the ritualistic nature of club music—the way it can lift you into heightened states of being, for example, or serve as an equalizer on a sweaty dancefloor. During that time, the DJ and producer, known as Octo Octa, released several projects born from her own spiritual experiences, some of which were more liberating than others. Since coming out as transgender in 2016, she has used elements of classic house and techno to engage with radical ideas around identity, freedom, community, and love. Her 2019 EP For Lovers meditates on intimacy, with slow-burning tracks inspired by deep, physical connection. And her celebratory album Resonant Body spins gleefully into rave’s open arms.
Her newest EP, She’s Calling, is the final piece of this transcendental puzzle and invites us to join her in journeying inward—to heed the calls of our inner spirits and seek a higher consciousness. It’s heady stuff to tackle in a little 20-minute disc, but nobody said psychedelic music must drag on. Besides, there’s something approachable about this tight, unstuffy format that feels digestible and just right.
It helps that Bouldry-Morrison is a master at nesting far-out ideas in the comfort of dance music. By grounding her expansive productions in the sticky stylings of house, techno, and UK rave, she’s able to coax us further into the depths of our subconscious. In her hands, even the most disorienting U-turns seem natural and exciting, like a detour you were destined to have. When the tracks eventually reach peak trip, they feel less like tumbling down a rabbit hole and more like uncovering a universal truth.
Of all the releases in this series, She’s Calling is the most eager to subvert conventional club frameworks. The songs burst with dizzying, mismatched sound effects—old-school record scratching, ecstatic acid squelches, and woodsy buzzes and chirps—and seem to zig-zag, fizzle, and balloon without warning. But there’s a reason Bouldry-Morrison has brought these disparate sounds together. When the smoky, strobe-lit warehouse shuffler “Goddess Calling” joins forces with what sounds like an Esalen drum circle, she uses shimmering, stuttering synths as connective tissue. As you listen to these two scenes seamlessly converge—skittering rave-y echoes into hypnotic tribal drums—the distance between them starts to dissolve. By spins four, five, and six, it feels like they’ve been connected all along.
On “Find Your Way Home,” Bouldry-Morrison hits the gas. With the charge and zeal of a deranged Uber driver, she picks you up in one place and drops you off across town. The joyride in between—an immaculate eight-minute blur of throwback breakbeats, distorted chanting, and lounge-y house, capped off by an engulfing acid breakdown—is remarkably smooth given the territory it covers, a testament to the meticulousness of her work. The song, written pre-pandemic, was meant to soundtrack her own inner journeys and help listeners access new psychedelic frontiers. Now, after a disorienting year in quarantine, it feels more like a tribute to our collective mental fortitude.
“Spell for Nature” isn’t billed as a song but an evocation—her summoning of a meaningful, mind-altering memory. Details are scarce, but we’re told the experience revealed something “enveloping and eternal,” a presence Bouldry-Morrison had always suspected was there. Using poetry to narrate this metaphysical interaction, she re-casts nature in goddess form. “There’s a light in the center of the woods/A bright fire seen through the trees,” she says over chiming piano. “You’ve been listening your entire life/She’s calling.” It’s deeply moving to hear the artist’s voice on tape—stripped back, undistorted, calm, a reminder of how far she’s had to go to get here. Committed to song, her experience is given new weight, transformed from a fleeting epiphany into an enduring personal affirmation.
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-02-12T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2021-02-12T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Electronic | T4T LUV NRG | February 12, 2021 | 7.7 | c9d782ce-22b3-4e63-8006-ff7aec63626c | Megan Buerger | https://pitchfork.com/staff/megan-buerger/ | |
Fusing influences from improv and minimalist composition with its customarily exploratory post-rock, the L.A. band sounds more assured than ever: playful, funky, even willing to flex a bit. | Fusing influences from improv and minimalist composition with its customarily exploratory post-rock, the L.A. band sounds more assured than ever: playful, funky, even willing to flex a bit. | Young Jesus: Welcome to Conceptual Beach | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/young-jesus-welcome-to-conceptual-beach/ | Welcome to Conceptual Beach | “Every record needs a thesis, needs a crisis or campaign,” John Rossiter croons on “Root and Crown,” the introductory single for Young Jesus’ fifth album, Welcome to Conceptual Beach. Over the past several years, Rossiter’s “Conceptual Beach”—an idea he has likened to his “internal landscape”—has taken on elements of all three. Rossiter initially used it as a fictional framework for personal journaling while he transitioned from Midwestern slacker to erudite Los Angeles bookstore clerk. He created a zine bearing the title during his first tour with the current Young Jesus lineup, in 2016, then used the name for an event series where attendees watercolored and discussed local politics over improvisatory jams—a proper incubator for 2017’s exploratory S/T and its muscular follow-up, The Whole Thing Is Just There. Both albums were collections of open-ended post-rock that teased a future masterpiece while challenging the idea of canonization itself. Welcome to Conceptual Beach marks a soulful fusion of their emo past and heady present, invoking art rock and improvisation while sounding like nothing else.
In the past, Young Jesus tapped into the spiritual and theoretical constructs of astral jazz and minimalist composition, but the sounds were outside of their grasp. Opener “Faith” is everything Young Jesus songs are—elliptical, brimming with ideas, about seven minutes long—and a lot of things they never were before: playful, funky, even willing to flex a bit. It’s Purdie shuffle and Pink Floyd, Auto-Tune croak and plaintive prayer, Santa Cruz acid rock and Laurel Canyon folk.
Both S/T and The Whole Thing Is Just There felt like products of an initial burst of unbridled creative momentum—the work of a band passionately pursuing new approaches to compositional form, but not always concerned with translating that excitement to people not in Young Jesus. In contrast, each song on Welcome to Conceptual Beach has an accessible core to which it can return, allowing Young Jesus to scrutinize their exploratory impulses without lapsing into fussiness or formlessness. Where most bands might use a chorus or bridge to signify a change in direction, Young Jesus decrescendo, leaving blank space for mindfulness. It’s at these points where the marathon jams, open-ended live shows, and philosophical woodshedding transform into telepathic communication, signaling where the song might go next.
Young Jesus consistently prefer to veer from established courses toward previously unexplored vistas: Rossiter modulates from mystical incantations to motivational speaking over the span of “Meditations,” harmonizes over breezy yacht rock in “Pattern Doubt,” and stumbles into a bustling jazz club during “Lark.” Occasionally, they’ll break down a jam into constituent parts and rebuild with slightly different angles: The melodic motifs and themes of decay and rebirth on “(un)knowing” reimagine Radiohead’s “Let Down” as dejected slowcore until Rossiter vows to grow wings with startling, octave-bounding vocal leaps. “Lark” remixes the regal procession of its first half into an elegiac post-emo coda, the type that once earned Young Jesus comparisons to American Football when no one really knew what to call them.
But Young Jesus’ most profound achievement isn’t that the album sounds more like jazz fusion than indie rock. Rather, it’s Rossiter’s continued willingness to reckon with all phases of his life through a lyrical vulnerability that’s rare in their headier and often instrumental influences. “I felt the only life’s the one you lead alone,” he confesses on “Magicians,” looking back on a painful period of living too deeply in his own mind. When he muses, “Every critic’s got some things they’re not proud of,” Rossiter includes and indicts himself; a typical interview finds him scrutinizing the relics of his aimless early twenties that remain on streaming services for posterity—for example, 2010’s Young, Innocent & Hairy, a reflection of getting shit-faced drunk and listening to Bright Eyes and the Good Life in his parents’ garage, bearing no resemblance to the guy who actually got signed to Saddle Creek.
Though Young Jesus’ trajectory is frequently viewed through Rossiter’s personal evolution, each member of the quartet shares a vision for continual learning: Respectively, they footnote interviews with reading syllabi, contribute to prestigious literary journals, and teach college courses on Sun Ra. “It’s not enough to hate the world we live within,” Rossiter screamed at the end of The Whole Thing Is Just There’s “Deterritory.” Now, in every expression of hard-won serenity, Rossiter reflects on the struggles he has documented for years, asking questions that were once seen as frivolous, insular, or even pretentious: How can music shared among a small community be a model for society? What is the purpose of art to begin with? Welcome to Conceptual Beach has the answer: to conceive of a better future by embracing the unknown.
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. | 2020-08-18T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-08-18T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Saddle Creek | August 18, 2020 | 8.1 | c9f359ee-dfc8-42c9-a602-4e4cb0157036 | Ian Cohen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ian-cohen/ | |
Working under his new alias DVA [Hi:Emotions], Leon Smart smears the edges of the human and artificial, the organic and the electronic, as if trying to sketch out the dimensions of a digital self. | Working under his new alias DVA [Hi:Emotions], Leon Smart smears the edges of the human and artificial, the organic and the electronic, as if trying to sketch out the dimensions of a digital self. | DVA [Hi:Emotions]: NOTU_URONLINEU | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/dva-hi-emotions-notu-uronlineu/ | NOTU_URONLINEU | Leon Smart might not quite have the profile of Hyperdub’s bigger names, the likes of Laurel Halo and Burial, but it’s hard to think of a figure more emblematic of the UK label’s mission to short-circuit the familiar rhythms and grooves of dance music. As DVA, Smart came up through London’s grime scene, producing for figures like Wiley and becoming a familiar face at Rinse FM, where he was an energetic presence at the helm of the former pirate station’s Grimey Breakfast Show. For all this, Smart’s own productions have increasingly shunned category, exploring a liminal space between grime, house and UK funky—a space that, for want of a better term, we might as well call Hyperdub music.
This is Smart’s first full-length album going under new handle DVA [Hi:Emotions], and it marks a break of sorts from what has come before. For one, there is a broad concept here—one encompassing, among other things, techno-futurism, corporate branding, and the interface between humans and machines. With this shift into conceptual territory comes a shift towards abstraction. These are not straightforward club tracks; Smart says he composed them in the dark, illuminated by the glow of his computer monitor—a process designed to emulate his early experiences as a music listener, headphones on beneath a duvet after lights-out. NOTU_URONLINEU is seldom functional, in that way that great dance music can often be, but it uses its conceptual grounding as a springboard to explore all manner of strange hybrids and surprising possibilities.
The album’s sound is initially rather alien—relatively sparse, often light in bass frequencies, and characterized by twitchy rhythms, synth washes and all manner of blips and whooshes that ping around in the high registers. It can be body-moving stuff—most obviously on enjoyable “DAFUQ,” a cartoonish melding of TNGHT-style horn blasts, dubstep lollops and angelic arpeggios. Elsewhere, tracks combine unusual textural and rhythmic motifs. “SUZHOU” and “B IT” contain fragments of familiar genres—the frantic repetitions of footwork, the glossy sheen of vaporwave—but wriggle free of any familiar niche. Sometimes a voice will float through the mix, dispensing corporate soundbites and endorsing a fictional product line called “Hi:Emotions” with uncanny-valley chirpiness. “Have you ever been lost in translation or misunderstood in emails?” asks one. “Have you had a friendship end over the tone of your texts?”
In the hands of some, this sort of conceptual conceit might be the seeds of a grim sci-fi dystopia; the robots taking over. But NOTU_URONLINEU explores its themes with delicate nuance, smearing the edges of the human and artificial, the organic and the electronic, as if trying to sketch out the dimensions of a digital self. “ALMOSTU,” featuring guest vocalists Rae Rae and Roses Gabor, is quiet storm R&B going out to a lover who may be merely virtual; while a particularly slippery eight-minute track titled “NOTU_URONLINEU” lines up slashing rhythms, blasts of modular synth slurry and an unexpected but delightful segment of Rhodes piano played by collaborator Danalogue that gives the track a twinkly jazz-funk flavor, like Herbie Hancock popping up in the middle of an Autechre workout. Throughout the track, a relationship drama plays out. “What’s wrong? I know something’s wrong,” it begins. It ends: “I don’t love you anymore.” It goes on to say, “I knew that wasn’t gonna sound good.”
NOTU_URONLINEU feels of a piece with recent concept-powered projects like Kode9’s Nothing or Logos, Mumdance and Shapednoise’s modular project the Sprawl—a sort of speculative fiction in sound, mapping out a space of future possibilities. It feels somewhat embryonic in places, as if some of its ideas remain fragmentary or incomplete. But, importantly for an album grappling with ideas of identity, we never lose sight of Smart amidst his concept. Wait a few seconds after the album’s closing track (excluding the brief bonus song) and we’re beamed right into his studio, can hear him sniffling and exhaling as beats ping from the speakers and one of the album’s sales drones delivers a pitch: “Have you ever made up a song in your head but didn’t have the skills to execute it?” It’s tempting to imagine Smart posed this very question to himself, before rolling up his sleeves and resolving to do something about it. The result is a vision of a prospective future both strange and alluring, a journey through virtual spaces and experimental technologies that, at heart, feels human after all. | 2016-10-12T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-10-12T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Hyperdub | October 12, 2016 | 7.1 | ca074874-a21a-4b83-9d3c-7eea10805536 | Louis Pattison | https://pitchfork.com/staff/louis-pattison/ | null |
Channeling the stark sound and fatalistic worldview of vintage Southern rap, the New Orleans duo takes grim pleasure in grappling with substance abuse and mental illness. | Channeling the stark sound and fatalistic worldview of vintage Southern rap, the New Orleans duo takes grim pleasure in grappling with substance abuse and mental illness. | $uicideboy$: Long Term Effects of SUFFERING | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/suicideboys-long-term-effects-of-suffering/ | Long Term Effects of Suffering | Of the many rappers who followed the aesthetic formula laid out by SpaceGhostPurrp and Raider Klan—lo-fi samples, hotboxed ’90s nostalgia, and an atmosphere that evokes witch house as much as horrorcore—few have built as stable a career as $uicideboy$, the New Orleans-born cousins Ruby da Cherry and $crim. With no radio hits and little in the way of mainstream American press, the duo has amassed a substantial following, to the tune of hundreds of millions of streams and collaborations with Travis Barker and Korn’s Munky. As their status has grown, so has their focus, and their once prolific release schedule has slowed. Their work hinges on a central question: When you’ve defined yourself by a professed desire to die, how do you sustain a thriving career based on your trauma? Long Term Effects of SUFFERING makes it clear that the anguish is no gimmick, but rather part of an almost Zen philosophy: For $uicideboy$, all of life is suffering, and it’s in that suffering that their work finds its meaning.
Ruby and $crim, who are both in their thirties, are older than most of their artistic peers. At the age that Lil Peep or XXXTentacion were dealing with sudden fame, Ruby and $crim were broke and trying to get their shit together, which might be why their music is so effectively cathartic: Though they often rap about celebrity, they have experienced what it’s like to be an adult without any kind of success, not just fighting the demons in your head but struggling, in a very real, material way, to survive.
Ruby spent his teen years playing in punk bands, and both cousins grew up under the influence of the local Cash Money, but they were drawn to different kinds of rap music as they grew older, a binary that’s fairly evident in their music: Ruby stuck to the classics, crediting more lyrically driven artists from Wu-Tang to Souls of Mischief as touchstones, while $crim fell in love with the head-banging hi-hats and gun sounds of Waka Flocka and Chief Keef. Their first mixtapes, adorned with memes like R. Buddy Dwyer’s on-air suicide or Bill Clinton playing the saxophone, feel almost more like the blunted blog rap of Big K.R.I.T. or Jackie Chain, just delivered in a slower drawl, with archetypal boasts about cocaine bumps, hit-and-runs, and hook-ups. Across subsequent releases, the flows sharpened, the production grew more composed, and the subject matter took on a more personal focus. $crim has been particularly vocal about his struggles with opioid addiction and substance abuse, and on Long Term Effects of SUFFERING, the group’s past tapestries of violence have given way to more genuinely felt songs like “Life Is but a Stream~,” which tearfully expresses how the side effects of addiction can drive away the people you love.
$uicideboy$ are more than capable of straight-up buck-wild tracks like “WE ENVY NOTHING IN THE WORLD.,” essentially a disconnected series of nihilistic images of extreme violence. But the duality in their work also allows space for positivity. Pain brings with it the possibility of healing, and on “The Number You Have Dialed Is Not in Service,” they offer wary words of encouragement to the desperate, despite the song’s punchline: When $crim, feeling suicidal, calls his therapist, the only answer is a dead-end intercept message. Suicidal thoughts are a constant presence on Long Term Effects of SUFFERING, and their bars are filled with images of psych wards and alienation. But despite their hardcore reputation and fatalistic lyrics, the pair effortlessly ease into lighter modes: “Smile at my casket/I’m at peace with my death,” croons $crim on “Forget It,” over a syrupy beat of almost Drain Gang-like trance pop.
$uicideboy$ are enthusiastic sample flippers who regularly return to the well of classic Memphis rap for sonic inspiration, but it’s no longer just imitation; they’ve grown confident and skilled enough to break out of the confines of their established sound. There are obvious Southern rap vocal samples across songs like “Degeneration in the Key of a Minor” and “Avalon,” but more left-field flips as well, like the subtle interpolation of the Counts’ “Love Sign” on “Lighting the Flames of My Own Personal Hell.” Over time, their beats have grown from simpler drum patterns stitched to Southern rap samples into more fully realized constructions, as likely to throw in a fluttering jazz sax or subtle xylophone as a trap hi-hat.
More than any of the usual names that get trotted out when discussing SoundCloud rap or emo rap, $uicideboy$ share the most with Lil Ugly Mane, who they’ve been known to sample. Both artists take vintage Southern rap as a kind of foundational pastiche but shape it into a found-sound collage of esoteric and experimental influences, finding a parallel between the violence of Southern rap and the often physically violent form that mental illness can take. When $uicideboy$ most deliberately ape the scary movie sounds of Memphis rap, like on “If Self-Destruction Was an Olympic Event, I’d Be Tanya Harding,” it’s mostly to create a sense of discomfort and unease. On “Materialism as a Means to an End,” the bass ricochets back and forth between the right and left speakers, making for a banger that feels like it’s mid-nervous breakdown.
As with Lil Ugly Mane, and any white artist who borrows so liberally and obviously from Black music, there’s a very real question of appropriation to chew on, especially considering the legal action Three 6 Mafia took against the duo over uncleared samples. But $uicideboy$ aren’t just pilfering rap history: The group has also come under fire for sampling deadmau5 without clearance and regularly flip contemporary artists like Denzel Curry, Lana Del Rey, and even themselves. They frequently sound less like a Southern rap tribute act than a dizzying pastiche of pastiches.
Though their music has often been described as “horrorcore,” they have flatly rejected that label. There are no concept songs from the point of view of Chucky here, no absurd gore, no John Carpenter flips. Three 6 Mafia used the imagery of slashers and demonic possession to express their condition as inhabitants of a society in which they had little to no power over their lives due to racial and economic oppression. $uicideboy$ are similarly unsparing in their reminder that, for many Americans, reality is shaped by violent and destructive forces beyond our control.
Substance abuse and its material causes are the ghosts in the rafters of modern rap, but $uicideboy$ invite them into the blunt rotation, directly confronting the pain that haunts so much of the genre. Detractors have claimed that artists like $uicideboy$, like so many rappers and rock stars before their time, as well as so many of their creative peers, glamorize mental illness and addiction. Every generation tends to believe that history will end, or at least peak, with its passing, but SoundCloud rap—or emo rap, or whatever you want to call it—and its audience belong to an era when our fate seems scientifically sealed. Faced with that grim prognosis, $uicideboy$ ask: What’s wrong with taking a little pleasure in your own demise when it’s all but set in stone?
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Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-08-20T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2021-08-20T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | G*59 | August 20, 2021 | 6.7 | ca288f8a-714b-4071-8981-58f773b3780f | Nadine Smith | https://pitchfork.com/staff/nadine-smith/ | |
The San Antonio-based musician brings newfound expression to her customary field recordings, folding richly harmonic elements into her typically cryptic palette of clatter and hum. | The San Antonio-based musician brings newfound expression to her customary field recordings, folding richly harmonic elements into her typically cryptic palette of clatter and hum. | claire rousay: a softer focus | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/claire-rousay-a-softer-focus/ | a softer focus | For claire rousay, ambient composition is not just a studio practice; it concerns real bodies in physical space. As a percussionist turned sound artist, the San Antonio-based musician has put out a whopping 19 releases since 2019, many featuring dizzying noise and free jazz that demonstrate her focus on live performance. Her work has increasingly incorporated a broad variety of sounds from unlikely sources; records like 2020’s a heavenly touch wrung haunting beauty from processed field recordings and tender piano arrangements, while both and it was always worth it used rich, textural electronics to induce ASMR-like effects at the lowest threshold of audible perception. On a softer focus, she captures a newfound intimacy, one that’s grounded and personal while still feeling otherworldly.
Like much of her work, the album is at its core a collection of field recordings, which she manipulates in ways that bring out latent emotions bound up within the audio. Its first track, “preston ave,” features sliding and clicking sounds from what appears to be a typewriter or cash register, with gentle brushes against the microphone that establish a soft, equanimous feeling. These non-tonal elements spill over onto “discrete (the market),” where rousay introduces organ chords, bowed harmonics, and threadbare piano phrases that feel carefully, expertly composed. Each line enters with a clarity of intention once foreign to rousay’s music, with a net effect that’s among the most striking moments of her career so far.
rousay often uses the voice as a compositional tool, and here, her processed vocals provide a stark point of contrast to the meditative elements of the album. A short, climactic pause in “peak chroma” gives way to warbling, pitch-shifted vocals as rousay sings about loss and the fallout of a relationship. The track invites immediate comparisons to the alien vocals of Daniel Lopatin, Andrew Weathers, and other ambient musicians using Auto-Tune, even as rousay seems to resist drawing attention to the lyrics themselves. On “stoned gesture,” the vocalist’s breathy singing rubs up against abstract clatter as the track sinks downward into a melancholy stupor. Warm, reflective, and dreamlike, the piece taps into an expressive dimension refreshingly at odds with stone-faced sound-art orthodoxy.
Few of the sounds on a softer focus are exactly new; rousay simply captures aspects of 21st-century auditory culture that others see as blemishes, foregrounding what might otherwise be discarded. On “diluted dreams,” powerful winds flicker over what sounds like an earbuds microphone to create a kind bristling, low-volume noise, one with immediate emotional valence for anyone who’s taken an outdoor phone call on a particularly brisk afternoon. Other sounds are more difficult to place, leaving space for speculation in the gaps between more clearly defined recordings. Around three minutes into “peak chroma,” a series of churning metallic tones coincides with a particularly cathartic synthesizer passage, and the entire track eases into meditative drift. Even the most chaotic moments lend structure and feeling in ways that suggest a true step forward within her catalog. Nothing is off limits, yet everything works within the context of the album, as rousay unearths modes of expression that make it hard to remember a time when ambient music sounded any differently. Through it all, rousay somehow makes this progression feel completely natural.
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Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-04-21T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2021-04-21T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Experimental / Electronic | American Dreams | April 21, 2021 | 7.6 | ca333845-ce2d-44ef-b2a0-a74c7f12714c | Rob Arcand | https://pitchfork.com/staff/rob-arcand/ | |
The Disco’s of Imhotep is dance-music outsider Jamal Moss's most approachable collection to date while not diluting his music’s signature oddity. | The Disco’s of Imhotep is dance-music outsider Jamal Moss's most approachable collection to date while not diluting his music’s signature oddity. | Hieroglyphic Being: The Disco’s of Imhotep | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22145-the-discos-of-imhotep/ | The Disco’s of Imhotep | One of the ironies about the recent “outsider house” wave—a faddish piece of dance music terminology to describe any club music that is self-consciously lo-fi or rhythmically off-kilter—is that its practitioners, being mostly straight white males, were rather more insider than those who built house music in the first place. You could not accuse Jamal Moss of this. The music Moss produces as Hieroglyphic Being—and under a variety of pseudonyms and collaborative ventures including the Sun God or Africans With Mainframes—shares an interest in degraded sonic textures and damaged rhythms. But Moss has genuine outsider credentials. Born in Chicago, he spent a period of the 1980s homeless, traded his TV for a pair of turntables touched by the hands of deep house godfather Ron Hardy, and played his first paying gigs as part of a sound therapy program, spinning records for the physically and mentally disabled. Moss is a direct link back to house mecca the Muzic Box—and through his interest in Afrofuturism, spirituality, and science fiction, his work offers a route forward, too.
By and large, Hieroglyphic Being’s music has been a little too roughshod and unusual to trouble the mainstream. But The Disco’s of Imhotep marks Moss’ long-playing debut for Ninja Tune (through their imprint Technicolour), his biggest label yet, and it finds him successfully squaring the circle. It’s his most approachable collection to date while not diluting his music’s signature oddity. Unlike last year’s collaborative LP We Are Not the First, which linked Moss with former Liturgy drummer Greg Fox and members of Sun Ra Arkestra for an improvised ensemble piece, The Disco’s of Imhotep is angled straight at the dancefloor. At its root, it’s four-to-the-floor club music, but of a fluid and organic nature, too wild to be corralled into a Pro Tools grid. Moss calls the style “synth expressionism” or “rhythmic cubism.”
On “Sepulchral Offerings,” melodies cascade from the skies, kickdrums morph and warp, and waves of hi-hat and cymbal swing into frame, veiled in distortion so they hiss like rattlesnakes. Moss’ productions often have the sense of being loosely tethered, their intricate layers barely clinging together. Here at least, though, the sense of slip and slide works beautifully; in jazz, they call this swing.
The other thing that Hieroglyphic Being has derived from jazz is his sense of mysticism, his music’s appeal to a sort of cosmic consciousness; the album’s title nods to an ancient Egyptian physician thought to have ascended to godhood. Moss discusses his songs not in the modern parlance of bangers and sick drops, but as “Frequencies and Vibrations...to Heal the Mind and Body and Enrich the Soul.” This is no puff. At its best, The Disco’s of Imhotep feels spiritually nourishing. Ringing chimes and the tones of an unearthly choir glitter within the fabric of “The Way of the Tree of Life,” while “Spiritual Alliances” winds together gauzy synth soundbaths, G-funk melodies, and slappy percussion; it bumps along at a frisky 130bpm or thereabouts, but its predominant feel is one of beatific stasis.
Elsewhere, Moss lets a little chaos creep in. A brief interlude named “Heru” imagines the electric zither meditations of Laraaji’s Day of Radiance invaded by the sort of industrial beats favored by Shapednoise or Regis. “Nubian Energy” is a wild jackin' house that apparently lets several tape loops run concurrently, leading to a cacophony of clapping hands, shrieks of ecstasy, and a voice that deliciously repeats the words “Getting hot up in this motherfucker!” Still, here even grotty noise is turned to blissful ends: that tape hiss that runs through “The Shrine of the Serpent Goddess” wafts around like fine mist blowing off a waterfall.
If there is anything about The Disco’s of Imhotep that jars, it’s in the editing. Often these tracks feel too much like mere excerpts from longer improvisatory jams, sometimes curtailed too early. The wriggly wormhole techno of “The Sound of KMT” could comfortably sprawl out to 10 minutes plus, but cuts out after just three brief minutes; it leads you to speculate how this record might sound if the material was teased out further.
All the same, there is something appealing about Moss’ dedication to recording live, on the fly. Listen to “Crocodile Skin” and you can visualize the track exploding from a tangle of equipment in real time. Recently, the idea that dance music could be something genuinely transcendent or mind-expanding feels diminished—deemed a little gauche, perhaps, in an era when techno 12-inches are marketed as “DJ tools,” and mixes can be Shazammed down to a list of track IDs. All this merely magnifies Moss’ achievement. Sweaty and ecstatic, elevated and pure, The Disco’s of Imhotep weaves quite the spell. This might be the most accessible Hieroglyphic Being album to date, but Jamal Moss remains out there on his own. | 2016-08-01T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-08-01T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Experimental | Technicolour | August 1, 2016 | 8 | ca48b849-eeca-4481-901e-09bcf7aadb5f | Louis Pattison | https://pitchfork.com/staff/louis-pattison/ | null |
Raekwon’s reflective new solo LP is his first to feature zero Wu-Tang Clan members. Amid its casual braggadocio and nimble wordplay, The Wild surveys the Chef’s experience and legacy. | Raekwon’s reflective new solo LP is his first to feature zero Wu-Tang Clan members. Amid its casual braggadocio and nimble wordplay, The Wild surveys the Chef’s experience and legacy. | Raekwon: The Wild | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/23145-the-wild/ | The Wild | If there was any question as to where Raekwon stands with the Wu-Tang Clan in 2017, consider this: In the 23 years since he burst onto the scene with his brethren on Enter the Wu-Tang (36 Chambers), the Chef has released seven solo LPs. His latest, The Wild, is the first to feature zero Clan members.
His understandable frustration with the way the RZA has guided the Clan in the past has left him searching for a new voice, and the music industry’s rapid release cycle paradigm led him to make a few awkward attempts at reinvention. Rae has struggled to keep up with the expected output of a hip-hop artist in the mixtape era; his handful of recent mixtapes contained more forgettable moments than memorable ones. It’s been eight years since his stunning comeback sequel to Only Built 4 Cuban Linx…, prodding the question: Does Raekwon have gas left in the tank?
The Wild’s answer is a definitive yes. Eschewing the bloated roster of features from his last LP (2015’s Fly International Luxurious Art) for just a few collaborators, The Wild is a 16-course meal representative of the Chef’s experience and legacy. Raekwon has always felt like the spiritual progeny of Slick Rick—an expert at vividly painted story raps—though his rhymes are perhaps laced with more vitriol. On one of the album’s strongest tracks, “Marvin,” Rae tells someone else’s story, crafting Marvin Gaye’s biography in three verses, from the Moonglows to Motown to his tragic murder at the hands of his father. Over a soulful Banks & Hampton sample, Cee-Lo’s croon soars over the hook, lending the track a somber gravitas.
Throughout The Wild, amid the casual braggadocio and nimble wordplay, Rae is often in a reflective mood, considering past mistakes and the crazy risks that young hoods take in the streets. “That used to be me, young, ruthless, and carefree/Until I seen the bigger picture, shifted, my way of thinking/That 25 to life is real, so is the casket once it close on you,” he raps on “Visiting Hour.” It’s a refreshing perspective from one of Mafioso Rap’s biggest stars, taking the tone of a wise uncle who’s been there, done that, and knows better.
The luxurious Rick Ross aesthetic Rae tried on for F.I.L.A. and his Unexpected Victory mixtape seemed to suit him poorly; if The Wild feels like a return to form, it’s because he’s embraced the way his growl adds grit to ’70s soul-sampling productions. The producer Xtreme freaks no less than three such samples on the record’s lead single, “This Is What It Comes Too,” laying some Al Green strings on top of some Melvin Bliss drums, working in a yelp from the Ohio Players’ “Ecstasy” that sounds almost instrumental in its new context. It’s nothing groundbreaking, but serves as the perfect platform for a middle-aged Raekwon—an expertly cooked boom-bap beat with enough energy to let him flex rhyme skills that rival any of the young bucks currently dominating the airwaves.
Raekwon’s recent surge of productivity proves he’s not one of those “stuck in the ’90s” cats—he seems to genuinely want to evolve. At 47, he’s still trying out new flows. His stutter-step delivery on “You Hear Me” loses impact with its mushy enunciation, but the fact that he would take the risk is commendable. A quick glance at a recent list of his favorite hip-hop records of all-time—rooted firmly in the golden and silver ages of hip-hop—reveals what inspires him most. When Raekwon leans into those sounds and themes, the rhymes that flow through him are evidence that this OG can still hang with the best of them. | 2017-04-14T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-04-14T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Ice H2O / Empire | April 14, 2017 | 7.4 | ca4df55d-b787-486b-8e77-17fbf84998fd | Matthew Ismael Ruiz | https://pitchfork.com/staff/matthew-ismael ruiz/ | null |
The Richmond-based artist collides big riffs, sweet melodies, and thick fuzz into crisp, cathartic songs about life’s uncertainties. | The Richmond-based artist collides big riffs, sweet melodies, and thick fuzz into crisp, cathartic songs about life’s uncertainties. | Dazy: OUTOFBODY | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/dazy-outofbody/ | OUTOFBODY | “Am I Joey? Am I John?/Maybe Dee Dee? Maybe Tom?” James Goodson wonders on “Choose Yr Ramone,” smuggling in the thesis statement of his debut album as Dazy: We may never quite figure out who we are, but the music of our youth will keep us grounded. It’s not just a namecheck—the Virginia musician channels the New York punk pioneers in his own artistry, reducing rock’n’roll to its starkest, swaggering pleasures. An average Dazy song strings together anthemic choruses, anticipatory verses, and life-giving electric fuzz, making a show of its own crumbling stitchwork. But Goodson isn’t following a formula so much as he’s reverse-engineering our need for the equation. OUTOFBODY cracks open the big riff rulebook to understand why we use it, uniting the comfort of hook-happy songcraft with the everyday stressors that compel us to hit play again and again. The result is a record of arena-sized power pop built from the small, mounting anxieties you wouldn’t think to express out loud, but might be the reason you’re screaming along to Dookie on the morning commute.
A lot of that deeper resonance is built into the project’s own origin. Where other people keep a diary, Goodson, an indie publicist by day, has long funneled his quotidian soul-searching into a private catalog of pop euphoria. The idea for Dazy came from years of overthinking the proper way to invite listeners in. It took some stockpiled drum machines, the foolhardy confidence to record guitars straight into pre-amp, and one pandemic-born impulse—release singles as fast as the microphone in Goodson’s spare bedroom could capture them—to coalesce that trepidation into a quick and noisy one-man-band aesthetic. He assembled these tracks for the 2021 compilation MAXIMUMBLASTSUPERLOUD: The First 24 Songs, a dam-busting sugar rush that was an expression of his massive mental block. Instead of working through indecision, the content dump simply overpowered it.
Halfway through OUTOFBODY, Goodson puts words to that initial creative trepidation—one his debut triumphantly transcends: “I am always waiting on me/Consistently debating.” It’s noticeable what some judicious editing has done for Dazy’s music, even if it hasn’t actually changed much from last year. Aside from two tranquil cool-downs, the project’s default register remains a whirring buzzsaw attack. But whittling Goodson’s archives into 12 tracks affords each earworm crucial space to ensnare your mind without snagging their collective adrenaline. OUTOFBODY also finds ways to shift gears without slowing the tempo. Note how the Madchester-esque percussive outro to “Ladder” shuttles its energy directly into “AWTCMM?,” or the way that “Deadline” surges to life, pivoting off the dying synth fade-out that caps “Rollercoaster Ride.”
But what distinguishes Dazy’s debut isn’t just thoughtful pacing. From its first line—“Is that my voice leaving my own mouth?”—OUTOFBODY also offers a clear thematic frame: the rock album as therapeutic check-in. Throughout, Goodson sings about feeling “back and forth,” “up and down,” turned “inside out,” and shaken up. These feelings of dislocation aren’t physical, of course, but abstract, gesturing to the way adulthood scatters notions of identity. Perhaps that’s why OUTOFBODY is careful about giving away so little of Goodson. Befitting of all the distortion, these songs rarely present intelligible scenarios, simple emotions, or even other people, and instead work their uplifting hooks through inward-gazing lyricism. It’s a challenging, perhaps alienating twist on power pop—a rock form very nearly engineered from the need to construct a singalong chorus out of every possible human name.
But don’t accuse Goodson’s conceptual aims of obscuring his subgenre’s delights. If anything, they do the opposite. By offering its existential themes as fist-pumping fodder, OUTOFBODY makes an earnest plea for the cathartic utility of rock at its most shamelessly overt. By the time album closer “Gone” has warped its Oasis-style marching band psychedelia into a bittersweet lament for “nights that slip right past your eyes,” the import of Goodson’s approach is unmistakable. Music is all we have to hold onto—the only anchor we have against the “time relentless” he sings about on “Choose Yr Ramone.” Sometimes, the songs we love remain the same because you and I don’t. | 2022-11-02T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2022-11-02T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Lame-O | November 2, 2022 | 7.4 | ca4ec595-20f4-4152-b68f-da72de097366 | Julian Towers | https://pitchfork.com/staff/julian-towers/ | |
On its warm and reflective new album, the Bay Area duo offers the most plainly pretty songs of its career. The stakes are high but the mood is anything but tense. | On its warm and reflective new album, the Bay Area duo offers the most plainly pretty songs of its career. The stakes are high but the mood is anything but tense. | The Dodos: Grizzly Peak | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/the-dodos-grizzly-peak/ | Grizzly Peak | The Dodos’ music moves in lean, agile sweeps, like a conversation between two friends who know each other well enough to develop their own shorthand. Whether on stage or on record, singer and guitarist Meric Long and drummer Logan Kroeber appear equally relaxed in their brisk exchanges, matching each other’s stoicism to the point that it’s easy to overlook the speed, stamina, and sharpness of their dialogue. There’s a lot of movement between them, little of it wasted, much of it flying under the radar. These qualities also apply to the path of the band itself. Over their 15 years together, and especially since the indie-folk duo’s beloved sophomore LP, Visiter, their consistency has been easy to take for granted.
This history comes into focus on Grizzly Peak, the band’s warm and vaguely elegiac eighth album, which could also be their last one. As Long recently revealed in an NPR story by Pitchfork contributor Grayson Haver Currin, he’s been afflicted by rheumatoid arthritis, perhaps exacerbated over the years by his athletic playing style. Though its lyrics don’t explicitly point to finality, Grizzly Peak sounds like a concerted burst of creative energy on approach to a resting point. The stakes are high, but the mood is anything but tense: Similar to the last album by the Walkmen, another remarkably consistent band with whom the Dodos once shared stages, there’s a hint of celebration within the big-hearted charge, manifested in some of the most plainly pretty songs the band has ever made.
Long kicks off the album on a reflective note: “Slowing down was not what I had planned/But here we are,” he sings over light touches of bouncing orchestral strings on “Annie,” as un-frantic a song as the Dodos have opened an album with since Visiter’s “Walking.” When Kroeber’s drums enter during the chorus, his hits are spacious and gigantic—basically the opposite of the intricate, scampering patterns that he and Long honed into the Dodos’ rhythmic fingerprint. Those trademarks appear on Grizzly Peak, too, but by the time that the hushed waltz “The Atlantic” comes in with a pattering, barely detectable beat under a solitary synth, there’s an inescapable sense that things are different this time: less hurried, as if slowing down to reassess the big picture. Long’s words, gently sung at near-lullaby volume, don’t exactly dispel that feeling: “I’m talking low but I’m thinking loud/Should I get away from this?”
Despite their consistent two-man core, it’s been a long time since the Dodos have sounded like only two people on an entire album, having developed a taste for selective overdubs on their Phil Ek-produced third LP, Time to Die. On Grizzly Peak, produced by Long, the song structures are simpler (with at least one notable exception in the crooked, vintage-Dodos skitter of “Quiet Voices”), but the additional frills remain: Strings, synths, and novel effects enter to usher songs around a corner. On “The Surface,” a satisfying harmony breaks out between two voicings of the same acoustic guitar: one with a crystal-clear fidelity and one that sounds so compressed it’s unrecognizable. This kind of production choice might come off as gratuitous to those who love the direct, in-the-room feeling of “Confidence” or “Undeclared,” but Long gives each additional piece a careful, prolonged spotlight that suggests they have meaning that not everyone will hear.
As poignant as it would have been to hear the Dodos revert to a live, strictly two-man setup, these lighter songs aren’t smothered by an occasional extra layer. Sometimes, they make the song: Halfway through “Sustainer,” Long spills a couple raspy electric guitar chords over the song’s ticking, delicate acoustic frame, creating a thin sheet of distortion offset by the elegance of a few bright piano chords in the final minute. “I know what you want, but I don’t know if I can give it back,” he sings, and it’s as close to pure sadness as the band allows themselves on Grizzly Peak; “Hopeless isn’t a place I can be,” he concludes seconds later, resolved and without hesitation.
Since veering away from his more sing-songy and diaristic early work, Long’s lyrics have hovered between specificity and abstraction. This evolution led to a new weapon for his songwriting: stepping fully onto the “specific” end for one isolated moment, emboldening a lyric through contrast. One of those moments punctuates “With a Guitar,” when Long acknowledges how ingrained his instrument has become in his identity: “I never had much to say, but I always said it with a guitar.” It might seem pedestrian, but when framed by Grizzly Peak’s constant allusions to rest, zooming out, and looking back, his words feel levels deep. Distilling the feeling of being intuitively drawn to a craft and shortchanging his own skills as a lyricist, it’s a line good enough to have sustained the song all on its own (although the preceding line, “I guess I’ll have to fight you with a guitar,” is pretty funny, too). If Grizzly Peak is indeed a resting point for the Dodos, it’s comforting to hear that they’re still smiling as they ease up.
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2022-01-04T00:00:00.000-05:00 | 2022-01-04T00:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Polyvinyl | January 4, 2022 | 7.4 | ca5bac48-4965-4396-8ce5-a4e27564db18 | Steven Arroyo | https://pitchfork.com/staff/steven-arroyo/ | |
The Canadian country singer trades his solitary fare for a new set of stories, and a backing band that cuts in and out like a dance partner. | The Canadian country singer trades his solitary fare for a new set of stories, and a backing band that cuts in and out like a dance partner. | Colter Wall: Western Swing & Waltzes and Other Punchy Songs | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/colter-wall-western-swing-and-waltzes-and-other-punchy-songs/ | Western Swing & Waltzes and Other Punchy Songs | Canadian singer-songwriter Colter Wall hasn’t needed much more than his singular voice—a charred, whiskey-soaked baritone that belies his years—to tell colorful tales of the western frontier and the folk heroes who populate it. Across 2017’s self-titled debut and 2018’s follow-up Songs of the Plains, he kept the arrangements sparse, letting his voice pull focus. There was no pressing need for a full backing band when his primary instrument filled a space so completely.
With his new album Western Swing & Waltzes and Other Punchy Songs, Wall trades that solitary fare for a new set of stories—and a new way to tell them. Recorded with a full band, Western Swing moves away from Wall’s unvarnished veneration of the Wild West and swings wide the barn doors. This here’s a party.
While Dave Cobb produced Songs of the Plains, here Wall takes the reins. Cobb honed Wall’s instincts, stripping his songs down so that they felt like campfire tales traded after a long and lonesome ride. But Wall doesn’t press in quite so tight. His penchant for “atmospheric feel” sounds different: He leaves ample space, layering and texturing each track so the band never overshadows his voice—instead, they cut in and out like dance partners. Odd squeaks bleed through at times, as on “Talkin’ Prairie Boy,” when it sounds as though someone inadvertently opens the studio door. Wall leaves that sound in, as well as his resolute chuckle at the end. Those choices bring Western Swing & Waltzes closer to a live album, further reflecting the hoedown charm the backing band adds.
On Song of the Plains, Wall focused his songwriting on wide Canadian vistas and the time—and solitude—it takes to traverse them. But Western Swing & Waltzes gets closer to embodying that capacious sensation. The title track unfurls like a map, an ode to Wall’s native Saskatchewan. “East of beautiful Alberta/North of old Montan’,” he sings about the province, situating it not just physically but spiritually—as a descendent of traditional folk and country’s storied lineage.
Wall has regularly sung of the rugged prairie landscape that reared him, but on “Western Swings & Waltzes,” he seems more satisfied to nod to it rather than keep it in sight. It’s a framing song, setting the milieu of the following tracks and their resplendent “punch”: “It’s Western swing and waltzes in Saskatchewan tonight,” he sings, while the band line dances around his voice with fiddle, pedal steel, DeFord Bailey-esque harmonica, and piano. The scuffs and scratches lacing their imaginary dancefloor feel palpable.
Western Swing & Waltzes includes only a handful of original songs from Wall, who covers Marty Robbins’s “Big Iron,” Stan Jones’s “Cowpoke,” and Lewis Martin Pederson’s “High & Mighty,” as well as two traditional songs, “I Ride an Old Paint” and “Diamond Joe.” Wall keeps the locomotive pace of “Big Iron,” but eschews the original’s polish and backing harmonies, giving his voice new land to roam. Under his thumb, Jones’s “Cowpoke” sheds its upbeat tempo and technicolor flare. Wall’s voice works in tandem with the song’s harmonica and pedal steel to elevate the high lonesome yodel of the original into something scorched and reverent. Having showcased his distinctive voice in ways sparse and spare, he now fills out the room.
Buy: Rough Trade
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Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2020-09-10T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-09-10T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Folk/Country | La Honda | September 10, 2020 | 7.6 | ca5c4776-164d-45e4-a42c-fbb88fa5c91d | Amanda Wicks | https://pitchfork.com/staff/amanda-wicks/ | |
Ipecac indie hip-hop group return with another set of verbal bluntness and sonic brutality, helping to color the fringes of rap with musical and political gusto. | Ipecac indie hip-hop group return with another set of verbal bluntness and sonic brutality, helping to color the fringes of rap with musical and political gusto. | Dälek: Gutter Tactics | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/12595-gutter-tactics/ | Gutter Tactics | In 2008, few things pushed the buttons of American insecurities more effectively than the sermons of Reverend Jeremiah Wright. Forget that most of the speeches the media and political opponents of Barack Obama got hysterical over were made years ago, in 2008 Wright was your bogeyman, and news coverage ensured his "God damn America!" refrain will echo down through the ages. Wright caused millions of knees to jerk with those words when they were dug up and aired, but I've thought all along that he got a bum deal in a media that wants to smack you with a sensation and would prefer it if you didn't bother to think deeply. That's not to say that I think America should go straight to hell of course, but I at least think his comments come from somewhere intellectually and emotionally honest, and taken in their context-- whether you believe Wright is a raging, aging relic, a traitor, or a righteous prophet-- are a powerful exercise of the First Amendment.
The duo behind Dälek apparently agrees, as Dälek (the MC the band is named for) steps back and gives the opening verse on Gutter Tactics to the Reverend, playing a long excerpt of a sermon in which he enumerates a series of American atrocities against Native Americans, blacks, and others, riding a slow crescendo in which he reminds his parishioners that many of the people who die under our bombs are just ordinary folks trying to live their lives and put food on the table. Listening, I think it's not so much the content of his message that makes us shift in our seats so much as the bluntness and lack of a leavening agent, the part where he says, "Well, America has its faults, but when you get right down to it it's a pretty great place." He never provides the counterargument, and in that respect, he could probably join Dälek full-time, because verbal bluntness and sonic brutality are basically their stock in trade.
To Dälek and the band's producer half, Oktopus, dystopia isn't some abstract future; it's what we're living in right now, and though I'm sure that on at least some level they were happy to see a member of a minority elected President, they aren't letting on here. They say as much on "No Question", Dälek rapping, "A black president don't ensure the sunshine/ A rich president represent his own kind/ As it stands now, the blind lead the blind." Even if you don't share their cynicism, the conviction of the delivery sells it anyway-- Dälek are as methodically effective as ever, their signature blend of simple beats, carefully sculpted noise, and straightforward flow still highly unique after more than a decade. The vocals and lyrics, as always, play a much more secondary role than in basically any other rap group, with the little bits that stand out coherently above the mix providing about all the parts of the picture you need to construct the whole.
"Los Macheteros/Spear of a Nation", for instance, calmly chronicles the injustices delivered upon Nelson Mandela by the Apartheid government of South Africa amid a hellstorm of processed drums and cascading sheets of feedback, with bits of muffled dialogue and South African choral music crying out from the depths. On the other side of things, "A Collection of Miserable Thoughts Laced With Wit" is actually quite pretty, dappling an echoing beat with smears of backward keyboard and piano. The vocal is buried and processed, used more as a rhythmic tool than a lead or focal point. While the intensity of their earlier records is still mostly intact, Dälek have hit on a more spacious, open method for arranging their sounds, so that even a pounding dirge like "Who Medgar Evers Was..." feels more inviting than assaultive. There's no "Black Smoke Rises" endurance test here.
Of course, it wouldn't be a Dälek record without at least one track decrying the state of hip-hop, and "We Lost Sight" provides that. Still, I've never bought the idea that Dälek was rap for people who hate rap. Some people who aren't normally crazy for hip-hop will undoubtedly enjoy this album, but I think it's primarily for people who believe that hip-hop is a broad canvas that demands people who color in the fringes, and Dälek do that, musically and politically. The opening Wright sample is a hard look back at a year most people would already rather forget, but it's a perfect intro for Gutter Tactics, an album that draws much of its strength from the same well of outrage and disaffection. | 2009-01-27T01:00:02.000-05:00 | 2009-01-27T01:00:02.000-05:00 | Rap | Ipecac | January 27, 2009 | 7.6 | ca5e1c52-3aa2-4496-ad9e-80d34a2c8f51 | Joe Tangari | https://pitchfork.com/staff/joe-tangari/ | null |
Jeezy's first album in three years is intermittently enjoyable, even if it completely cuts against the presumed goal of presenting Jeezy as an elder statesman of the South along the lines of Bun B or Scarface. However, Jeezy's recent legal troubles add a strange weight to what Seen It All could have been: had it been autobiographical, it may have been even more inherently sad than it already is. | Jeezy's first album in three years is intermittently enjoyable, even if it completely cuts against the presumed goal of presenting Jeezy as an elder statesman of the South along the lines of Bun B or Scarface. However, Jeezy's recent legal troubles add a strange weight to what Seen It All could have been: had it been autobiographical, it may have been even more inherently sad than it already is. | Jeezy: Seen It All: The Autobiography | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/19786-young-jeezy-seen-it-all-the-autobiography/ | Seen It All: The Autobiography | With few exceptions, the release of a major-label record from a hip-hop veteran tends to be inherently sad, a merciful end to its struggle for existence. It carries constant reminders of the indifference it faced in numerous record label offices: catchphrases and namedrops that would’ve been timely had the record dropped a year or so ago, big-name producers appearing as courteous gestures and for quick paychecks, a tracklist riddled with guest verses and collaborations that somehow seem reverent and disrespectful at the same time. As with Jeezy’s previous LP, 2011's Thug Motivation 103: Hustlerz Ambition, all of these things are present on Seen It All: The Autobiography. Similarly, the fact that it’s any good at all might be a greater testament to Jeezy’s skills than his albums that are actually great on their own terms.
You might’ve noticed that Jeezy's dropped the “Young”, but that’s the only time the transitional nature of Seen It All is entirely his doing. The guy is in a spot that makes executive decisions more difficult: he’s still bankable, but not an A-lister. He calls out Def Jam's endless meddling by name in “Me OK”, all while threatening to drop his album on Atlantic. But since it’s the hottest track here, the bosses ostensibly let it slide. Moreover, Jeezy struck up a valuable alliance with DJ Mustard and even if you don't remember a single track from TM103, it still sold 233,000 copies in its first week.
He’s given tracks from Mike WiLL Made-It and Drumma Boy, which barely sound that different from what Shawty Redd provided Jeezy on Thug Motivation 101: Let’s Get It. But their beats lack that record’s assured sound. Jeezy’s more respected than influential right now—the sound of Atlanta rap bears more in common with the vocal and lyrical unorthodoxy of his former rival Gucci Mane or current collaborator Future—making Jeezy a classic rock riffer in a post-punk world, which means he’s lasted long enough to possibly appeal to the purists who dismissed him back in 2004.
It’s not necessarily an insult to call Jeezy a punchline rapper at this point. That’s what he’s always been, really—his bars were all slogans, ad-libs, and smart/dumb similes that were delivered so confidently, you could only briefly eye-roll before ad-libbing right along with him. He made light of this on The Recession’s “Word Play”, which silenced the “lyrical” heads with half a bar—“I’m way too intelligent/ To play with my intelligence.” And here, Jeezy delivers a host of howlers with the aplomb and lack of quality control you’d expect from a stand-up working out new material. He’s got birds like Chick-fil-A; however, he’s on the block on Sundays, unlike Chick-fil-A. He boasts about having a cooking show on Netflix called “The Best Bricks”, which, come on—at least call it “House of Birds” or "Orange is the New Crack". He also rhymes “Plaxico” with “Texaco” like Gucci Mane, and “Atlantic” with “Atlantic” like Rick Ross, so you're left reminiscing about a time when all three rappers were all actually still beefing and making great music.
This makes Seen It All intermittently enjoyable, even if it completely cuts against the presumed goal of presenting Jeezy as an elder statesman of the South along the lines of Bun B or Scarface. It’s a transformation that’s occurred by circumstance rather than growth; the dude doesn’t tell stories and, while pithy, he doesn’t spit wisdom. Jeezy’s music is post-triumph and visceral, channeling the power of what it feels like to be Trapper of the Year four years in a row even if you're doing concentration curls or a heavy load of laundry, or you're just enduring a long commute back from your office job.
And that’s still the case, as Seen It All: The Autobiography doesn’t deliver on either one of its titular promises. Here’s what we can tell about Jeezy’s life: he experienced much success as a drug dealer prior to rapping, he has a lot of guns and has fallen out with friends over money, and he really thinks you should try Tequila Avion because it's fucking awesome. Given the number of times it's mentioned, Seen It All could pass for a longform Avion commercial; you'd think the first 35 years of Jeezy's life were mere prelude to being named a "Multicultural Advisor" for the brand.
Which results in Jeezy being shown up by every rapper who’s willing to offer something close to full disclosure. If not remorse, Lil Boosie shows the real consequences of his jail sentence on “Beez Like”, bemoaning how he missed the first time his daughter had her period. And though he has nothing to gain by doing so, even Jay Z is willing to name names and get specific about his days herbin' 'em in the home of the Terrapins.
Otherwise, you've heard it all on Seen It All*:* there’s something called “Been Getting Money” and you could probably come up with 85% of it in your head before your first listen. (I’ll spot you “ft. Akon” as a hint.) Conversely, a Jeezy track named "Black Eskimo" could never live up to what you think it might sound like. There’s a six minute song with Rick Ross and the Game, which is no fun now that they’re all getting along with each other. The deluxe edition contains “Fuck the World”, which features R&B seat filler August Alsina and is only notable for being a Jeezy love song that isn’t as embarrassing as “Tear It Up”.
But none of this really seems to matter right now, because a 38-year-old man was shot and killed at a Wiz Khalifa concert and Jeezy was recently held in custody with five of his associates on $1 million bail. It will inevitably be used as a “teachable moment” about Jeezy and hip-hop as a whole and make Seen It All a footnote, but those are the least of the problems presented here—a man is dead and Jeezy may have had something to do with it, and even shittier is that you’re reminded of Jeezy’s other, very disturbing 2014 run-in with the law. So maybe the vagueness of Seen It All actually works in its favor: had it been autobiographical, it may have been even more inherently sad than it already is. | 2014-09-05T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2014-09-05T02:00:01.000-04:00 | Rap | Def Jam | September 5, 2014 | 6 | ca64e56c-ad8e-40c3-a71a-78aaba18a76f | Ian Cohen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ian-cohen/ | null |
On his full-length debut, the 24-year-old singer’s chameleonic tenor pierces through the Dirty Hit template and finds a natural fit in pouty pop-rock and gauzy trip-hop. | On his full-length debut, the 24-year-old singer’s chameleonic tenor pierces through the Dirty Hit template and finds a natural fit in pouty pop-rock and gauzy trip-hop. | No Rome: It’s All Smiles | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/no-rome-its-all-smiles/ | It’s All Smiles | It was Matty Healy’s sticky earworm of a hook that introduced us to No Rome in 2018. On “Narcissist,” No Rome lays the groundwork, spinning rhymes and stringing together brief reflections on taking acid and alienating himself. Healy’s back-up coos and earnest cry—“I’ve been seeing somebody”—formed a compelling endorsement of this soft-spoken, R&B-influenced Gen Z newcomer. The track, off No Rome’s RIP Indo Hisashi EP, ushered him into the 1975 universe with subtle, polished swagger.
No Rome, born Guendoline Rome Viray Gomez, had been releasing lo-fi tracks on SoundCloud from his hometown of Manila in the Philippines when Healy emailed and invited him to the UK. He signed to Healy’s Dirty Hit label almost immediately; Healy told Zane Lowe that Rome became “a bit of a muse” and that the two shared “parallel” ideas. In 2019, Rome, Healy, and the 1975’s George Daniel drew on that overlapping vision for No Rome’s second EP, the sparkly and brooding Crying in the Pretty Places. This past year, Charli XCX joined the now London-based artist for a one-off single. With his debut LP, It’s All Smiles, No Rome sets out to prove himself as not just a muse or collaborator but a key player in this realm of glossy and emotional left-of-center pop.
Dirty Hit began as a home for the 1975 when no other label wanted them, and it’s grown into a mini pop powerhouse in recent years, signing beabadoobee, Wolf Alice, the Japanese House, and Rina Sawayama. Most of its artists are young, with a shared affinity for slick production, dreamy synths, and the 1990s—a bedroom haze of alt-rock. Excellent albums have come out of the Dirty Hit braintrust, along with some derivative and underwhelming ones. Healy and co. are smart to bet on No Rome and It’s All Smiles gives him a lot to work with: He can croon, sing-rap over a skipping beat, or stretch across an ambient drone. In line with Dirty Hit’s underdog vibe, the album presents an outline for a fresh alternative sound, one that’s undeniably current without relying on major labels or TikTok trends. It’s solid pop with an experimental slant.
A hopeless romantic, No Rome spends much of the album delivering melancholy-tinged love songs and spottily recounting scenes from a party as if he’s just coming to. He remembers doing lines on the table and playing Prince to get someone’s attention; he fixates on her words and believes the sun doesn’t shine without her. The lyrics are simple, immediate snapshots of longing, but the production choices make them glow. Just when a song threatens to glide into easy listening, a skittering drumbeat shakes you awake.
Opener “Space-Cowboy” is busy with pitched-up vocals and glitchy modulations that could’ve been plucked from A Brief Inquiry Into Online Relationships. There are echoes of Healy’s vocal cadence on “How Are You Feeling?” and shades of co-producer BJ Burton’s signal-distorting past work with Kanye West and Bon Iver in the moody guitars and fuzzy bass of “ITS *N0T* LOV33 (Winter in London).” At times these familiar notes can make the album sound a bit generic. But its range—not quite genre-spanning, but wide enough within the critically acclaimed pop quadrant—is gratifying. No Rome has described his style as “shoegaze R&B,” a vibe best realized in Frank Oceanic croons and widescreen synth-scapes on “Issues (After Dark)” and “Remember November / Bitcrush*Yr*Life.” Sunny reverb and shout-along refrains on more traditional pop numbers like “When She Comes Around” are big and rousing enough to fill a medium-sized room.
No Rome could probably command a bigger one: His chameleonic tenor pierces through the Dirty Hit template, a natural fit for pouty pop-rock or gauzy trip-hop. But eventually It’s All Smiles starts to run out of steam. Its songs are ambitious compared to radio pop, but too safe to really stand out; it’s a cinematic album in search of a climax. And while No Rome’s vocals scale up to the bolder flourishes, his lyrics come out undercooked, especially on sparser tracks like “I Want U.” The lack of balance doesn’t entirely register on a cursory listen. But as valuable as the 1975’s mentorship has been, No Rome will need more purposeful songwriting and less expected reference points to truly stand alone.
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-12-06T00:00:00.000-05:00 | 2021-12-06T00:00:00.000-05:00 | Pop/R&B | Dirty Hit | December 6, 2021 | 7.1 | ca67ab8b-3f8a-4985-b7a7-8c51d287bf8f | Julia Gray | https://pitchfork.com/staff/julia-gray/ | |
Kool Keith’s second act was inspiring, and it came from a relentless willingness to redefine himself. His newly-reissued collaboration with Dan the Automator was a rap album of unprecedented oddity. | Kool Keith’s second act was inspiring, and it came from a relentless willingness to redefine himself. His newly-reissued collaboration with Dan the Automator was a rap album of unprecedented oddity. | Dr. Octagon: Dr. Octagonecologyst | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/23101-dr-octagon-dr-octagonecologyst/ | Dr. Octagonecologyst | Around 1995, Kool Keith’s path was unclear. After the demise of his legendary New York crew Ultramagnetic MCs, he spent many of his early solo years out in California. Rap had never paid him or his crew the recognition they deserved, and Keith’s place within it seemed unstable. Collaborator Kutmasta Kurt had been working with him on an album for Capitol called Sex Style—a porno-chic concept record that the label continually back-burnered. Keith needed something else to get his voice out there in the meantime.
Inspired by his West Coast relocation, Keith cut another track and sent the tape to hip-hop radio tastemakers like Stretch & Bobbito and Sway & King Tech. His name wasn’t on it; still, his voice was recognizable enough that people knew it was him. But the lyrics—with a space-doctor, scato-gyno-urological theme, and co-penned with an NYC cohort named Sir Menelik (as “Chewbacca Uncircumcised”)—were completely preposterous. “Wax in your inner ear, doodoo in your outer ear/Two cows a zebra will jump through your atmosphere,” goes the project’s titular cut. The DJs assumed it was more fitting to bill the track to the only name listed on the cassette: Dr. Octagon.
The positive reception for “Dr. Octagon” caught the attention of Dan Nakamura, aka Dan the Automator. A young producer who had been learning on the job, he mastered early Solesides Records by the likes of DJ Shadow and Latyrx in his studio The Glue Factory (or as his parents knew it, their basement). Keith and Automator wound up doing a couple albums’ worth of collaborations in ’95 and 1996—a host of their bicoastal boom-bap joints can be heard on the after-the-fact collection A (Much) Better Tomorrow—but it’s Dr. Octagonecologyst that really shook people up. Hip-hop could be weird, but how weird could it get? The level of oddity within Dr. Octagonecologyst had yet to be explored. And we wouldn’t be getting this nice deluxe reissue of the album if that weirdness hadn’t aged well.
At a time when 1980s vets were accustomed to fall-offs, Kool Keith’s second act was inspiring, and it came from a relentless willingness to redefine himself—even if it meant being someone else. On the album, he’s credited as Dr. Octagon throughout, even if his dissociative, Thelonious Monk-timing bars are consistent with his other guises. Few MCs have been as comfortable in their absurdity, their convention-trashing, or their absolute fearlessness in trying new things on the mic. Dr. Octagonecologyst is where Funkadelic at their most “Icka Prick”-pornographic is rerouted into intergalactic g-funk, a place too cold for drop-top Impalas. Cronenberg body horror dominates throat-clenching medical-procedure narratives, like “Waiting List” and “Blue Flowers.” Residual Sex Style fantasies drive “Girl Let Me Touch You,” and “I’m Destructive” pushes threats of cruelty to the point of total goofiness. But when Keith is on the mic, he never lets up for a breather. Even at their most meter-defying and non sequitur-prone, his lyrics are memorably pungent in pretty much every line.
As Automator produced with a singular defiance, all that strangeness found its ideal pairing. No slight to Ced Gee and the Ultramagnetics, but this is where one of the great unconventional MCs found his most adventurous co-experimentalist. Nakamura was a keen-eared cratedigger and a trained violinist—that’s him splitting the difference between reverie and nausea on the “Blue Flowers” loop. He paired obscure yet on-point samples with more recognizable classic drum loops (including a nod to Ultramagnetics-popularized “Synthetic Substitution” on “Wild and Crazy”) and raw, ugly keyboards. It gave Dr. Octagonecologyst the feeling of a traditional hip-hop record sent through a bath of acid—lysergic or corrosive, take your pick.
On the more accessible cuts, he takes familiar, contemporaneous concepts and scuzzes them up. “Earth People” pairs Whodini 808s and fizzing analog synth sounds, resulting in a horror-psych mutation of classic Dre. It also features DJ Q-Bert’s then-new idea of running his turntables through a wah-wah pedal for a mind-warping scratch outro. The album’s less conventional moments show how Automator could have a hard time thinking of this as a hip-hop album at all, despite it showcasing an all-time rapper’s-rapper. Coyote howls dropped like Bomb Squad Maceo horns during “On Production.” Headnod beats bumped skulls into musique concrete Moogs on “Biology 101,” ratcheting up the uncanny elements of Keith’s presence. But Keith and Automator linked up their sensibilities so well that even their jokey, free-associative skits became indelible. Say it with me now: “Oh shit, there’s a horse in the hospital!”
The additions to this reissue of Dr. Octagonecologyst don’t dilute that feeling, either. The three previously unreleased tracks are in keeping with the album’s space-perv aesthetic: “Astro Embalming Fluid” sews together headknock beats, silver-plated synth burbles, and manic mid-freakout astronaut lyrics. “Redeye” finds common ground with Roger Troutman and Master P before going into zoological player mode. And “I’ll Be There For You” posits the Doctor as some sort of extraterrestrial savoir in a track that would’ve made for a strangely uplifting respite. Apart from that, the two Automator remixes—a somewhat more “professional” sounding guitar on “I’m Destructive” and a lesser version of “Wild and Crazy” with a subtler synth bassline—hint at directions that Dan might’ve taken these tracks with a few more years of experience. In these cases, the happy accidents of amateurism win out over the older-and-wiser versions.
Dr. Octagonecologyst’s afterlife is nearly as weird as its conception and its essence. Seemingly destined for cult status, it instead spread like wildfire, becoming an indie-rap essential—even as both parties were en route to newer things. By 1997, when Dr. Octagonecologyst’s major-label push made it the single weirdest thing to ever have the DreamWorks name attached, both its MC and its producer were on to the next thing. Their respective careers would lead Automator to a string of alter-egos—Handsome Boy Modeling School with Prince Paul, Deltron 3030 with Del the Funky Homosapien, and most notably Gorillaz with Damon Albarn. Meanwhile, Keith would kill off Dr. Octagon for Dr. Dooom, only to resurrect him again for an inside-out, meta-alter-ego: Mr. Nogatco. Whether they’re inspired by its precedent or pushing back against it, both artists wound up permanently routed towards definitive careers by Dr. Octagon. And even considering its 1990s origins, Dr. Octagonecologyst still feels as much out of its time as it does out of its mind. | 2017-05-24T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-05-24T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Get on Down | May 24, 2017 | 8.7 | ca69e672-f579-4245-a795-9bb631477cb1 | Nate Patrin | https://pitchfork.com/staff/nate-patrin/ | null |
The Chilean band Föllakzoid specialize in the pillowy sort of rock music designed to shield you from the world for a while. At its best, their music gains allure by gradually stacking up moments of powerful suggestion. | The Chilean band Föllakzoid specialize in the pillowy sort of rock music designed to shield you from the world for a while. At its best, their music gains allure by gradually stacking up moments of powerful suggestion. | Föllakzoid: III | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/20364-iii/ | III | The Chilean band Föllakzoid specialize in the pillowy sort of rock music designed to shield you from the world for a while. Huge, looping riffs stretch across deeply repetitive percussion, creating an atmosphere somewhere between trance and stupor. The word "psychedelic" is never far away when reading descriptions of the band, but three albums into their career, they’ve explored many colors on that particular spectrum. Beginning with outward-facing, Josh Homme-indebted rock on their eponymous debut in 2009, they switched to something closer to krautrock on 2013’s II. Here, they tighten their sound, cutting out the meandering themes and occasionally sloppy riffing. There are only four songs, but extra details emerge slowly on repeat listening.
German producer Uwe Schmidt, better known as Atom™, has been brought in as a collaborator, bringing the discipline of his immersively repetitive electronic music with him. He’s also credited with playing a Korg synth that belonged to Kraftwerk during the 1980s. Föllakzoid can’t let go of their roots entirely—at best, they’re channeling the LSD-laced guitar patterns of Loop and Spacemen 3; at worst, vocalist Juan Pablo Rodrigues leans too hard on foggy vocal effects that recall Brooklyn psych also-rans (and labelmates) Psychic Ills. They’re most effective when working somewhere between their rock instincts and Schmidt’s concise approach. Opener "Electric" recalls a more-guitar heavy version of LCD Soundsystem’s "Get Innocuous!", where a patient build combines with a subtle layering of elements to deliver the album’s most transcendent moment.
Föllakzoid barely shift course over the 45-minute III. The riff that dominates the closing "Feuerzeug" is only a breath away from the one that towers over "Electric". "Piure" is the best example of that here, mixing up backward-masked electronics, menacing ambient noise, and a guitar churn that sounds like it was played by Can’s Michael Karoli. In general, the album treats its journey as circular, a path of tiny incremental steps that eventually leads us back to where we began.
In 2014 Föllakzoid played a set at Primavera Sound, leaving behind this video memento to mark the occasion. The beginning is marked by the reading of a poem by the Chilean writer Vicente Huidobro, which is heavy on birthing and religious imagery, where each line is so dense in implication it’s easy to just disappear into it for a while. It’s a handy comparison for the type of feeling Föllakzoid try to convey in their music, where their vaguely epic songs—only one track here, the nine-minute “Feuerzeug”, is less than 10 minutes in length—gain an allure by gradually stacking up moments of powerful suggestion. It doesn’t always reach the level of spiritual purity it could, but there’s a touch of steel and a sense of pacing that was missing from Föllakzoid’s prior work, positioning III as a gateway for a much a deeper dive into altered states. | 2015-03-30T02:00:03.000-04:00 | 2015-03-30T02:00:03.000-04:00 | Rock | Sacred Bones | March 30, 2015 | 6.5 | ca6a4ecd-1815-4a36-b983-e84cf5dc04d4 | Nick Neyland | https://pitchfork.com/staff/nick-neyland/ | 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 first album Yoko Ono recorded after the death of her husband, a brittle and gorgeous capsule of hope triumphing over grief. | 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 first album Yoko Ono recorded after the death of her husband, a brittle and gorgeous capsule of hope triumphing over grief. | Yoko Ono: Season of Glass | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/yoko-ono-season-of-glass/ | Season of Glass | They wouldn’t stop playing “Imagine.” In the immediate aftermath of John Lennon’s murder on December 8, 1980, Yoko Ono lay staring at the ceiling of her apartment in the Dakota building in Manhattan while the inescapable sound of the song she’d co-written with John—a credit he’d denied her for years—leaked in on a nightmare loop, played by mourners congregating on the street below. “What I learned,” she said later of this time period, “was that I didn’t have much control over my destiny or fate.” After 24 hours, she got up, shakily, groping for a tape recorder. As the vigil continued below her—composed largely of the Beatles devotees who until this moment had been her greatest tormentors—Ono hit record and howled the first words that came into her mind: “I don’t know why/It was getting so good for us.” Precisely one day after she’d held her husband’s dying body in her arms, she’d written her first song about the experience.
That song, called “I Don’t Know Why,” was harrowing and plainspoken. “You bastards!” she wailed. “Hate us! Hate me! We had everything!” her voice trailing off into a sob. The “bastards” could be anyone standing in front of the world she and John envisioned—war profiteers, for sure, as well as politicians, corporations, the usual suspects. But it’s a fair bet that, for Ono, more than a few of those “bastards” were standing outside her building.
Ono had always treated trauma as raw material. In 1964’s famous Cut Piece, she invited audience members to scissor off pieces of her clothing while she stood motionless. On “Baby’s Heartbeat,” she incorporated tapes of her miscarried child’s fetal heartbeat. Ono’s fearlessness in confronting the dark places in her psyche is a large part of what traditional audiences hated about her, but she made it a lifelong mission to choose the idea that terrified her most and then pursue it. “For art,” she once said, “I would do just about anything.”
So when Ono headed back to the studio in March 1981, barely three months after Lennon’s death, it was entirely in character. The band that she and John had hired to record their comeback record, 1980’s Double Fantasy—the album that was meant to reintroduce the couple to the world—was assembled and ready to work. Ono still had songs left to record. Her life with John was over; her lifelong work as the widowed “Mrs. Lennon” was just beginning.
Ono fashioned her fifth solo album, Season of Glass, as a survivor’s statement, a kiss from the Dakota’s balcony to the mourners below. For the cover, she photographed Lennon’s blood-smeared wire-rimmed glasses on the table of that balcony, placed next to a half-drunk glass of water, the foggy view of Central Park’s trees and the Manhattan skyline behind it. She framed this as an act of demystification—“This is what John is now,” she said pointedly—but it was just as easy to see the bloody glasses as the presentation of a relic, the mortal remains of a pop-cultural saint.
The world might have imagined what Yoko Ono in mourning would sound like—shrieking, moaning, howling—yet this was not the face she turned to the world. On “Goodbye Sadness,” “Toyboat,” “Silver Horse,” and “Mother of the Universe,” Ono sings in gorgeous, long-breathed melodies, often multi-tracked in harmony, while the music gently rocks and sways, offering muted variations on her husband’s beloved doo-wop and soul ballads. It is, in a word, glassy—smooth, brittle, transparent. She was no longer using her voice as a “warrior” might wield a sword, as she once put it. These were lullabies to hope, delivered with the beatific calm of a dying opera heroine’s final aria.
Rubberneckers or armchair psychologists could easily impute trauma. Perhaps this was the sound of shock, numbness, resignation. The lyrics are full of unanswered prayers: The “Silver Horse” that arrives to bear her away someplace beautiful has no wings, while the tiny triangular sail on the horizon turns out to be just a toy boat. But one of the most fascinating things about Season of Glass is that apart from “I Don’t Know Why” and the savage “No, No, No,” the majority of it was written years earlier, at a time when Ono was not the Dear Leader’s widow but the most hated spouse in the history of popular music. The album is less a eulogy than a piece of unfinished business, and any relation to John’s murder are mostly tricks of the light.
The heart-rending opening ballad “Goodbye Sadness,” for example, stems from Lennon’s infamous mid-’70s “Lost Weekend, ” a bender that lasted more than a year. After Ono sent him packing, Lennon disappeared into drinking and drugs, getting shitfaced with Warren Beatty and Jack Nicholson and sleeping with the paramour Ono had handpicked for him, May Pang.
The wistful second track, “Mindweaver,” cannot help but scan, in context, like posthumous mythmaking (“He was a mindweaver…”). But Ono wrote it in 1980, when Lennon was in Bermuda, and the song depicts their relationship at its most exhausting and draining (its original title was “Mindfucker”). The lyrics to “Extension 33” might seem coarse or shocking in the context of John’s murder—“Once I had a love, it nearly killed me/But now I have my freedom”—but the song dates from the same mid-’70s time period as “Goodbye Sadness,” when Ono briefly exited the toxic cloud of Beatledom and, as her 1975 album title had it, was Feeling the Space.
Save for the exception of the gunshots that ring out at the beginning of “No, No, No,” these songs didn’t spring from Lennon’s murder, but they did pointedly address his absence. Yoko Ono was five years ahead in everything—in conceptual art, staging loft concerts, punk rock. Now, ironically, she was five years ahead of her own grief. If John Lennon seems maddeningly alive in these songs, it’s because when she wrote them, he was.
Season of Glass hit No. 49 on the Billboard charts, the highest of any of Ono’s solo records. Critics who had spent the previous decade sneering at Ono suddenly found themselves full of charitable things to say: Stephen Holden called it her “most accessible and assured album” in Rolling Stone, while Mark Cooper, writing for Record Mirror, said that “Yoko has made a record of fragility, grief, and ultimately, of great human strength.” That same year, Double Fantasy, which alternated songs between John and Yoko, won the Grammy for Album of the Year.
The gimlet-eyed Ono was far too attuned to savage ironies to let this reversal pass by unnoticed. “For 10 years I was the devil, and now suddenly I’m an angel,” she noted. “Did the world have to lose John for people to change their opinion of me?... If it brought John back, I’d rather be hated.” She was aware, no doubt, that had John not been killed, Season of Glass would likely have been just another Yoko Ono solo record, dismissed savagely by critics when it wasn’t outright ignored. She wasn’t saying anything that she hadn’t said before; this time, the only difference was that people were, momentarily, listening.
For much of the ’70s, she and John had been carrying out a public conversation about gender roles. It was loud, heated, and messy, and for a good portion of the decade, the public seemed to barely tolerate it. After the dissolution of the Beatles brought a premature end to the greatest pop-cultural show on Earth, John and Yoko became something like the decade’s equivalent of a hate-watch. John wrote songs to and about Yoko on every album, and Yoko returned with songs of her own.
But did anyone, really, listen to her half of the conversation? The press treated Ono’s presence like an insult, upon which her albums heaped injury. Beatles kids had not taken kindly to this severe new stepmom—her frightening ululations, her weird macrobiotic diet—nor did they much enjoy being exposed to Dad’s lustful zeal for her: Did they really need to put the nude pictures everywhere?
With the Beatles, the psychosexual lines were always blurred. Ono always suspected that her husband’s feelings for his songwriting partner, Paul McCartney, were more intense and tangled than a simple best friend, and Lennon both made disturbing offhand comments about his Freudian lust for his mother and clung to Ono in ways that were unmistakably childlike. On the morning of his death, Anne Liebowitz photographed him clinging to his wife, nude, in the fetal position, a pose Lennon said summed up their relationship dynamic “perfectly.” Just as Beatles fans saw their idols as some combination of older brother, parental figure, and sex object, John worshiped Yoko, calling her “Mother” while also sketching erotica of her.
Now that this conversation had been violently silenced, it suddenly seemed precious in retrospect. Before, Ono had been an obstacle, blocking access to the Great Man; now she was his only living representative. Overnight, she found herself transformed from, as she once said from the stage while introducing the song “Coffin Car,” “this ugly Jap who stole your monument or something from you” to Lennon’s emissary—“the keeper of the wishing well,” she called it. If the world ever wanted to know anything of John Lennon ever again, it would have to go through her.
The day that Lennon was shot, he and Ono had been working on a song of hers called “Walking on Thin Ice.” It was a freezing blast of post-punk, a song so alien to the world of the Beatles that it takes effort to remind yourself that it’s John Lennon playing guitar on it, wrenching gasping sounds out of a 1958 Rickenbacker. The song’s inspiration came from Lennon’s Bermuda visit, when he went downstairs to some hip club and saw people losing their minds to the B-52’s’ “Rock Lobster,” a song full of the same blood-curdling cries that Ono had unleashed to a sea of frozen faces during Plastic Ono Band’s live concerts. When the final session wrapped for “Walking on Thin Ice,” Lennon could be heard saying: “I think you just cut your first Number One, Yoko.”
“Walking on Thin Ice” doesn’t appear on Season of Glass; it was released as a single, instead, three weeks after Lennon’s assassination. (It did eventually make it to No. 1, in remixed form, although it would take 22 years to get there.) The omission of “Walking on Thin Ice” from Season of Glass feels like a glitch in the historical record. The song straddles the same uneasy divide as the album, gesturing towards a future that contained no Lennon, no McCartney, and really, no more ’60s at all, made by one of its last living representatives.
“Walking on Thin Ice,” along with Season of Glass’s “No, No, No,” lived in the same chilly meat locker that hosted a new generation of British bands, like Joy Division, who formed in the deindustrialized grayscale town of Salford, an hour away from Lennon and McCartney’s Liverpool. These people had no picaresque “Penny Lane’’ to fondly gaze back on, no nourishing childhood memories of hope, and their music reflected it. Lennon, for all his fondness for tart-tongued comebacks and surface shocks, would probably never have been able to bear a band like Joy Division. This was music that never even knew contentment existed, let alone exhibited a desire to strive for it. Contentment, meanwhile, was the only thing Lennon’s songs ever yearned for, and his best late-period solo work often sighed with it—“Borrowed Time,” “(Just Like) Starting Over,” “Watching the Wheels.”
If Lennon was unable to participate in the future that he saw coming, to his continuing frustration, he had a surprising eye for spotting it. He grasped early the significance of the conceptual art that Ono helped pioneer with her work in Fluxus. He heard the violent, shuddering energies she unleashed onstage, even if he could only gesture toward them on his own—“Mother” is a classic, one of his most powerful solo songs, but the screaming he assays on the coda is a bunny-slope ride compared to the shrieking, face-first cliff plummet that his wife uncorks on “Don’t Worry, Kyoko (Mummy’s Only Looking for Her Hand in the Snow).” He played guitar on all these songs, even the ones where she was directly rebuking him for his occasionally shameful behavior, as on “Death of Samantha.” Indeed, for all his possessive rages, his bursts of machismo, Lennon was, in the end, just a fan.
“No No No” and “Walking on Thin Ice” pointed forward to the increasingly bleak decade Lennon would never see: Thatcherism in his homeland, Reaganism in his adopted one, the AIDS crisis sweeping through the artistic demimonde of his and Ono’s downtown New York scene. Lennon, prone to depression and easily discouraged, would likely have foundered in this bleak climate. But Ono was prepared to breathe in it.
The collision of future and past lasted up until the grisly moment Mark David Chapman dropped to one knee and fired five shots at Lennon’s back, sending Lennon staggering into the lobby of the Dakota, shouting “I’m shot!” while Ono screamed for help. As he fell to the ground, the finished tape of “Walking on Thin Ice” fell from his hand, skittering across the lobby floor. | 2023-02-19T00:00:00.000-05:00 | 2023-02-19T00:00:00.000-05:00 | Experimental | Geffen | February 19, 2023 | 8.8 | ca6d0e1c-96a3-4eaf-a5e5-b41d21d77c75 | Jayson Greene | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jayson-greene/ | |
Marina Lambrini Diamandis' second album is a high-gloss record made with Dr. Luke, Stargate, Greg Kurstin, and Liam Howe, and dressed in layers of philosophy, mythology, and blonde wigs. | Marina Lambrini Diamandis' second album is a high-gloss record made with Dr. Luke, Stargate, Greg Kurstin, and Liam Howe, and dressed in layers of philosophy, mythology, and blonde wigs. | Marina and the Diamonds: Electra Heart | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/16579-electra-heart/ | Electra Heart | In Marina Lambrini Diamandis' oft-cited comeback interview with Popjustice last August, she introduced the concept that would lead into her second album: that of Electra Heart, a kind of not-quite-alter-ego/character/affectation/cinematic simulacrum that would feed into the follow-up to her 2010 debut LP as Marina and the Diamonds, The Family Jewels. Representing Greek tragedy, the "loss and failure" side of the American Dream, a daddy complex, and the vacuity apparently lingering inside us all, over six months prior to the eventual release of the LP there was very much a feeling of Marina over-complicating the whole affair: trying to dress up the high-gloss record that she had made with Katy Perry's collaborators (seemingly at the behest of her major label) in layers of philosophy, mythology, artifice, and blonde wigs. (There's a babyish song here called "Hypocrates", misspelled for seemingly no good reason, and with no reference to the philosopher in the song.) It must have stung like billy-o when Lana Del Rey came along and executed precisely what Marina was aiming for, hardly having to open her much-discussed mouth in order to explain herself whilst Marina tied herself in conceptual knots. In short, Electra Heart bears no profound relationship to Greek mythology or philosophical thought beyond exploring situations of basic human pathos (or lack thereof), but its rare affecting moments are heavy with tragedy.
The Family Jewels was disliked by many for its vaudevillian Sparks-like gaucheness, Marina's self-aggrandizement and cock-a-hoop vocal (though there's no doubting the chops of a song like "Hollywood"). But there was a sense of personality to the music as well as Diamandis' deep, hiccupy voice, and a promising sense of audaciousness that's been all but lost here. Working with Dr. Luke, Stargate, Greg Kurstin, and Liam Howe, the songs on Electra Heart fall into three basic categories: the bland, swampy banger (sub-category: "Lies"' Skrillex-lite), a regal, electronic strut falling somewhere between Depeche Mode at their poppiest and the Doctor Who theme tune, and very cloying, nursery rhyme music-box ballads. The campy ding-dong of "The State of Dreaming" is as close as Electra Heart gets to fun, with huge church bells whooshing from side to side in the mix like a pantomime dame testing the trajectory of her ball gown skirts. Relegating great early single "Radioactive" to the bonus tracks on the deluxe version of the LP is nearly as daft as some of the waffle that Marina comes out with here.
Marina really, really wants you to know that she's into pop culture, though the lazy, meaningless strings of references that comprise a good chunk of the songs here aren't any kind of postmodern comment on the Tumblr-ification of society, but just plain bad songwriting. The bombardment of archetypes and clichés is exhausting: "Beauty queen of a silver screen" persuading someone to buy her "a big diamond ring" on "Primadonna"; the titular "Homewrecker" (where excruciatingly bad spoken word verses clash against a pretty triumphant chorus) whose "life is a mess, but I'm still looking pretty in this dress." "Teen Idle" is just horrible, a glitchy ballad that sounds as though it was recorded in a church, where she wishes to be a "virgin pure/ A 21st century whore," "a prom queen fighting for the title/ instead of being 16 and burning up a bible/ feeling super super super suicidal," a chorus of Marinas echoing "super." She wishes for "blood, guts, and angel cake" because "I'm gonna puke it anyway," a weird preoccupation of hers that also crops up in "Homewrecker" ("girls and their cosmic gourmet vomit"), continued from "Girls" on her debut. But as for ending the ego, Marina does seem obsessed with ideas of finality and death-- knowing "where I will belong/ When they blow me out" on the quavering, celestial "Fear and Loathing"-- seemingly finding solace in the reliability of microcosmic, compact celebrity tragedies, perhaps in the face of the parts of this album that ring desperately true.
"You only ever touch me in the dark/ Only if we're drinking can you see my spark," she sings on "Lies". "The only time you open up is when we get undressed," she laments on "Starring Role", which glimmers like clashing porcelain before a stuttering, empowering chorus where she refuses to be a supporting cast member in an alluded-to love triangle. "Doesn't mean that I am weak," she asserts on "Power & Control", repeating, "I am weak, I am weak, I am weak" in an increasingly ephemeral voice. "Every day I feel the same/ Stuck, and I can never change/ Sucked into a black balloon/ Spat into an empty room" goes "Living Dead", a snappy, taut Soft Cell-like number. It feels like shaky ground to say that these vulnerable moments are Electra Heart's finest, catchiest, and hardest-hitting songs, Marina's soaring vocals packing some genuine emotion, picking up on themes of self-loathing that don't need blasé allusions to bulimia in order to indicate emotional emptiness; where the often transcendent states of sex and alcohol collaborate for profoundly dispiriting experiences. Her honesty, at least, is empowering. Whilst there's no getting past some of the duller and more unbearable material on this record, it's a real shame that it's come hamstrung in this unnecessary concept, ready for people to laugh when Marina fails to pull it off. If she'd made a record full of songs as unaffected as these four, Electra Heart could be one of the year's most acclaimed pop albums. Let's hope there's a next time. | 2012-05-04T02:00:03.000-04:00 | 2012-05-04T02:00:03.000-04:00 | Rock | Atlantic / 679 | May 4, 2012 | 5.9 | ca719358-6c54-444b-91bf-baf3658cfc1c | Laura Snapes | https://pitchfork.com/staff/laura-snapes/ | null |
Their first album in three years, the latest from Silver Jews finds songwriter David Berman in a more focused mode, writing lines that seem to straighten out some of his bent lyrical aesthetic. Nashville's Mark Nevers (Bonnie "Prince" Billy, Lambchop, the Clientele) produces. | Their first album in three years, the latest from Silver Jews finds songwriter David Berman in a more focused mode, writing lines that seem to straighten out some of his bent lyrical aesthetic. Nashville's Mark Nevers (Bonnie "Prince" Billy, Lambchop, the Clientele) produces. | Silver Jews: Lookout Mountain, Lookout Sea | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/11916-lookout-mountain-lookout-sea/ | Lookout Mountain, Lookout Sea | "In 1984, I was hospitalized for approaching perfection." As first lines of an album go, this one, the opening shot fired on Silver Jews' 1998 album American Water, is among the greats, up there with Raw Power's "I'm a street-walking cheetah with a heart full of napalm" and Straight Outta Compton's "You are now about to witness the strength of street knowledge." It's an especially great line coming from Silver Jews' David Berman because "perfection" as a concept has little place in his universe. In this landscape, flubbed notes exist alongside amazing guitar solos (when Berman's buddy Stephen Malkmus is around, anyway), shirts are untucked, keys are more suggestions than rules, some of the best lyrics in rock history are interspersed with unapologetic groaners (I could kiss the guy who wrote, "Come to Tennessee/ 'Cause you're the only ten I see") and characters are often flawed to the point of paralysis.
Perfection being what it is for Silver Jews, and Berman being so comfortable with that notion, it's easy for fans to gloss over the rough patches. I have a feeling I'm not alone when I say that on every SJ record-- save American Water, almost-- I still skip around a bit. The nature of Silver Jews allows for inconsistent albums, even though the records appear infrequently. Two or three or four duff tracks on one record is nothing to get worked up about, and they may even add to the ramshackle charm. And so while Lookout Mountain, Lookout Sea, the first Silver Jews album in almost three years, has the usual small handful of eh-to-just-OK tracks, it also feels different from prior Silver Jews albums in a way that's hard to put a finger on.
Part of it could be the lack of knockout songs. There are no instant entries to the SJ canon, nothing here that knocks you on your ass, not a single "How did he write that?" moment. And this problem is there from the beginning, the opening, where SJ have always killed: Where Tanglewood Numbers grabbed us by the throat with "Punks in the Beerlight" and The Natural Bridge turned a chair around and sat us down to explain "How to Rent a Room", Lookout Mountain opens with the plodding and dull "What Is Not But Could Be If". You feel like you just tripped and fell awkwardly into the album.
It doesn't help that the production is oddly harsh and distant-sounding; where Berman sounds best clear and uncluttered, so that it seems like he's engaging you in conversation, on this record his voice has a weirdly persistent metallic reverb clinging to it, like he's broadcasting from inside a tin can and you're straining to connect with him. Something about the sound makes him sound a bit uneasy, stiff, and a touch less confident. Busy Nashville producer Mark Nevers handled a chunk of the recording and all the mixing, and the warmth he's been known to give albums by Lambchop, Bonnie "Prince" Billy, and the Clientele is missing here. Berman's bassist and vocalist wife Cassie is, as she was on Tanglewood Numbers, far too high in the mix. There were some weird choices made in the studio.
I shouldn't dwell on the production, since this band started out as the lo-ist of the lo-fi, recording white noise-packed songs on answering machines-- and besides, you listen to Silver Jews for words. But an album that finds Berman in a more focused mode lyrically, writing lines that seem to straighten out some of his bent lyrical aesthetic, would do well to come with a more welcoming sound. In any event, there are still good songs with quotable lines here, thankfully, and the tunes throughout are solid. The lengthy, bouncy, Dylan-y "San Francisco B.C.", in particular, is packed with lyrical nuggets: "We had sarcastic hair/ We used lude (sic) pseudonyms/ We got a lot of stares on the street back then" and "She said, 'You don't make enough to provide for me'/ I said, 'What about the stuff that we-- quote-- believe?'" are two. (I love how you can picture the fingers in the air setting aside the word "believe.")
If the focus throughout seems to move away from stringing together rich, penetrating images, Berman is still skilled enough with words to make him do what he wants them to. The peppy, rushed "Aloysius, Bluegrass Drummer" is a surreal short story, with a title character who is a dishwasher at a restaurant "Open 'til the end of time" and who falls for a girl "all strung-out on hard street fat." And then the weary countrified lament "Strange Victory, Strange Defeat"-- which wonders about the "handsome grandsons in these rockband magazines" who have supplanted "the fat ones, the bald and the goateed"-- works pretty well, even if the second half of the song doesn't stick. The closing track, "We Could Be Looking for the Same Thing"-- a cozy ballad that finds David duetting with Cassie-- strips the lyrical flourishes back almost completely: Lines like "Where the days turn the weeks into months of the year" and "I've been around some and I've seen enough to know/ We could spend happy lives, inside the days of you and me" could have been written by any number of singer-songwriters. That seems purposeful: Berman seems to have something specific that he wants to get across, and he's OK saying it in what, for him, is a direct way.
With both Lookout Mountain and Tanglewood Numbers, there's been discussion about these records being made after Berman's time staring into the abyss, when he survived a suicide attempt, worked through a serious drug problem, got married, started touring, and generally got his shit together. So it's tempting to hear some of the differences with this record-- the tamer imagery, the more even keel, the highs that aren't so high-- as somehow mirroring the changes in Berman's personal life. For me, though-- since I never knew how tough Berman had it while enjoying his records up through Bright Flight, never had a clue as to depths of his suffering, and never heard his music in that context-- it seems wrong to start thinking about such things now. Instead, I prefer to think of Lookout Mountain as an album of pretty-good songs from a guy who has written some unbelievably great ones, and will, more than likely, write some more of that quality down the road. There's never been any kind of definable arc with the Silver Jews, no movement toward a fixed point; it's more about keepin' on keepin' on. Once perfection is off the table, and you're just doing the best you can with what you have, there will be moments like this. | 2008-06-18T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2008-06-18T02:00:01.000-04:00 | Rock | Drag City | June 18, 2008 | 6.7 | ca79c7a2-12b5-45f4-8eb5-119d0655cb91 | Mark Richardson | https://pitchfork.com/staff/mark-richardson/ | null |
On her second album, Boston singer-songwriter Ellen Kempner constructs affecting narratives filled with grief and hope. | On her second album, Boston singer-songwriter Ellen Kempner constructs affecting narratives filled with grief and hope. | Palehound: A Place I’ll Always Go | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/a-place-ill-always-go/ | A Place I’ll Always Go | Imagine you have gone weeks eating TV dinners and suddenly you find yourself in the grocery store’s produce section. You handle the apples and peaches simply because you have forgotten what fruit feels like. The aisles are well lit and bursting with life, but still your mind turns to the loved one you’ve recently lost, then to all the emotional baggage attached.
Scenes like these, with a tactile rush of vulnerability, are what Palehound’s leader and songwriter Ellen Kempner does best. You can feel the moment she describes because her songwriting is all about feel. And this grocery-aisle epiphany—as heard on her new record‘s best song, “Feeling Fruit”—is marked by Kempner’s sweetly picked guitar, which seems to rot from the inside. As she hums and whispers to herself, the mounting musical tension slowly boils off. It’s a tiny crushing sadness rendered in technicolor, suspended for what seems like forever in a song that’s only two and half minutes long.
The 23-year-old Boston rocker’s sophomore LP is ripe with loss. In one of the record’s other memorable scenes, found on “If You Met Her,” Kempner recalls a moment she shared with a young friend who died suddenly, arguing at a Dunkin Donuts while eating blueberry glazed pastries. Delivered over an infectious jangle and cheerily unflinching beat, the song has a bittersweet ache. Kempner tries to make sense of it all and comes to few conclusions, other than knowing her friend would love her new girlfriend.
For all the grief here, there’s also light. While Kempner was mourning her loved ones, she also happened to fall in love for the first time and fully embraced her queerness. This struggle between moving forward and being tugged back, by actual memories and by the muscle-memory of anxiety, is central to A Place I’ll Always Go, giving it more of a thematic center than her 2015 debut, Dry Food.
Kempner’s project has matured in more ways than one as she’s bubbled up through Boston’s DIY scene. Dry Food was lo-fi and grungy, like it had a little dirt under its fingernails (in a great way); A Place I’ll Always Go is cleaner, the guitar crunch glinting and the production having room to twirl. There are echoes of earlier bands, with songs that brings to mind Smith Westerns (“Turning 21”), Beach House (“At Night I’m Alright With You”), the Strokes (“Flowing Over”), or Wilco (“Room”). But Palehound have always sounded like variations on classic indie rock, arranged around Kempner’s unique whisper of a voice and way of seeing the world that draws out the moodiness. This undercurrent distinguishes the project, and makes Kempner worth following.
There is a lot of music about anxiety in the air these days, but Ellen Kempner’s voice is specific and visceral. It's the work of someone who can't hold it in, an emotion she captures quite well on “Flowing Over.” Lucky for us, her nervous, oversized heart knows not to tell, but instead show. | 2017-06-23T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-06-23T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Polyvinyl | June 23, 2017 | 7.3 | ca7e74c9-26bb-4bb8-80f7-a193bbdec923 | Jill Mapes | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jill-mapes/ | null |
The Finnish experimental electronic producer and legendary Jamaican rhythm section team up in search of an elusive balance between their distinctive styles. | The Finnish experimental electronic producer and legendary Jamaican rhythm section team up in search of an elusive balance between their distinctive styles. | Vladislav Delay / Sly Dunbar / Robbie Shakespeare: 500-Push-Up | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/vladislav-delay-sly-dunbar-robbie-sh-500-push-up/ | 500-Push-Up | When French provocateur Serge Gainsbourg decamped to Jamaica in 1978 to cut a reggae record, the befuddled rhythm section of drummer Sly Dunbar and bassist Robbie Shakespeare didn’t know quite what to do with the singer. “It was quite tense,” producer Philippe Lerichomme recalled in the Gainsbourg biography A Fistful of Gitanes. At least, it was until the two parties realized that the one French song all Jamaicans knew was Gainsbourg’s softcore classic, “Je T’Aime... Moi Non Plus,” kicking off a strange collaboration that lasted four years. In the decades since, Sly & Robbie have provided the bedrock to any number of distant visitors, from Grace Jones to Carly Simon, Joe Cocker to Bob Dylan. They first teamed up with Vladislav Delay (aka Finnish producer Sasu Ripatti) in Norway for 2018’s warped dub fusion album Nordub, alongside trumpeter Nils Petter Molvær and guitarist Eivind Aarset, and subsequently toured together. Whether or not they were familiar with Ripatti’s dubby body of work, they made fast friends.
In January 2019, Ripatti decamped to Kingston to again work with the bass and drum legends, stripping things back to essentials to create 500-Push-Up. Working with little more than Sly & Robbie’s in-studio jamming, some overheard chatter, and atmospheric field recordings, Ripatti then took things back to his home studio on the tiny Finnish island of Hailuoto to refine further. On paper, it sounds tantalizing: dub techno’s smoggiest practitioner teaming up with as foundational a rhythm section as Jamaica (indeed, the world) has ever produced. But it never quite emulsifies.
Neither side rests on their laurels, but they frustratingly stagnate somewhere in between their two signature styles, the rhythms not wholly entrancing, the haze not absolute. 500-Push-Up follows a basic—redundant, even—pattern: Let Sly & Robbie lay down an unchanging pulse while Ripatti conjures noisy frequencies around it. At a certain density, draw it all back down. Robbie’s bass gets noisy and gnarled on “(522),” but it’s irritating rather than visceral, like Delay’s bracing return Rakka was earlier this year. No matter the amount of clanging metal and electronic effects Ripatti triggers on “(521),” Sly’s drums stay locked down like a concrete foundation in a hurricane. Which should be a thrilling sound, only Ripatti does little to shape the track into coherence. The digital detritus Ripatti dumps atop “(514)” sounds like an entire video game arcade glitching, the noise growing denser as Sly & Robbie rumble somewhere underneath it.
Ripatti draws on the austerity of classic dub productions by King Tubby and Keith Hudson, but he still manages to clutter up the dub, yielding undistinguished din. It takes nearly two minutes for “(513)” to get going, as studio chatter runs on and on (though there are some choice bits like “Sasu, you gonna get riddim confuse, bloodclot!”). A gluey white noise thickens around the elements to the point of opacity, sirens arising and metal gnashing somewhere in the smog, with Robbie’s migraine throb carrying on through it all.
At the most intriguing moments, they strike a balance. On “(520),” Sly & Robbie yet again lock into some distorted, snake-charming low end while Ripatti conjures a UFO’s whirring, the whole thing churning and thickening into a haze. It makes you wish for the immersive depths that made Entain, Multila, and Anima such brain-erasing explorations. Messy but not mysterious, lackadaisical rather than spacey, 500-Push-Up never quite plays to its parties’ obvious strengths.
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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. | 2020-08-31T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-08-31T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic / Global | Sub Rosa | August 31, 2020 | 6.6 | ca813d8d-a0e2-4145-b22c-b7a1855cb6ae | Andy Beta | https://pitchfork.com/staff/andy-beta/ | |
On the duo’s first album in 10 years, Omar Rodríguez-López and Cedric Bixler-Zavala mellow out, abandoning their unhinged prog opuses for a kind of airy, Caribbean yacht rock. | On the duo’s first album in 10 years, Omar Rodríguez-López and Cedric Bixler-Zavala mellow out, abandoning their unhinged prog opuses for a kind of airy, Caribbean yacht rock. | The Mars Volta: The Mars Volta | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/the-mars-volta-the-mars-volta/ | The Mars Volta | From the very beginning, the stadium-sized, major-label version of the Mars Volta never made any sense. The duo spent its first 10 years defined by an emotive improvisational style that was both technically proficient and utterly chaotic, a self-described “free-jazz entropy” that felt wholly out of place on alternative rock radio, never mind MTV and the Billboard charts. Bandleader Omar Rodríguez-López admitted as much while promoting their third album, Amputechture, in 2006: “We expected the band, from the beginning, to fail.”
But it’s that dissonance and artful madness that drew people to them, colored in no small part by a bewilderment that music like this had even escaped the underground at the turn of the century. Between the Mars Volta’s formation in 2001 and their breakup in 2012, Rodríguez-López and Cedric Bixler-Zavala made music propped up by tension and intense pressure, waging sonic battles that they didn’t always win. But even after dissolving the band, they were never far apart, playing on each other’s solo projects, reuniting their previous band, At the Drive-In, and forming yet another one, Antemasque. Their new self-titled album is their first as the Mars Volta in 10 years: Recorded in secret to evade the watchful eye of a vengeful cult, it is a look toward the future from artists seeking to shed the burden of their past.
From the first notes, it’s clear the Mars Volta have mellowed out. The Latin percussion that once propelled their compositions toward the brink is now softened with a light funkiness, creating a sort of airy, Caribbean yacht rock. Tempos have slowed, tracks are much shorter (only two extend past four minutes), and the absence of tension offers a clarity often missing from their early work. The music is pleasant and inviting, punctuated by subtle flourishes rather than violent attacks. The relatively standard pop structures lift the veil created by their more characteristic wonky time signatures and lyrical abstractions; this is as vulnerable as they’ve ever been together.
Yet the same clarity that makes The Mars Volta the band’s most “accessible” record to date also reveals a darkness to Bixler-Zavala’s lyrics that hasn’t always been easy to decipher. It’s not the first time that Bixler-Zavala has sung in Spanish, but it does feel like the first time he actually wants us to understand what he has to say. Even at the band’s high-water mark, when he was writing about a friend’s overdose, subsequent coma, and eventual suicide, Bixler-Zavala’s impressionistic language served as a barrier between himself and the listener; you might have felt the pain and torment, but deciphering the narrative was difficult. His lyrics here are both direct and autobiographical, fueled by the seething rage that can only come from the pain of seeing someone you love suffer. “And if you want, I can bury him out by the Salton Sea in an empty grave,” he sings on “Vigil.” “The past has a way of coming clean.”
A fair amount of that clarity comes from the very public court case in which Bixler-Zavala’s family is currently embroiled. Chrissie Carnell Bixler, Cedric’s wife, is one of four women to accuse actor Danny Masterson of rape; Masterson is awaiting trial on three counts and faces 45 years in prison. The women and Cedric would later sue the Church of Scientology (of which the Bixler family were members) for allegedly surveilling and harassing them in Masterson’s defense, even going so far as to kill two of Carnell’s dogs. The ordeal has dominated the couple’s lives, and the compounded trauma, fear, paranoia, and righteous pursuit of justice loom large throughout the album.
It’s clear that Scientology had a profound effect on the band, as well. Cedric Bixler-Zavala initially looked to the church for support in (successfully) kicking his $1,000-a-week weed habit, but Rodríguez-López admits that Bixler-Zavala’s adoption of “absolutist” ideas ultimately led to the Mars Volta’s hiatus. That they only felt free to return to the Mars Volta once Bixler-Zavala got a peek behind the curtain of the religious cult is evidence that the story of the Mars Volta is that of two men who have loved each other for decades and are compelled to create together.
While much criticism of the Mars Volta has proceeded from an ill-defined concept of “self-indulgence,” this record—free of the noodling, non-linear song structure, and mad lyrical ravings that inspired so much derision—feels like their most intentionally self-indulgent. Abandoning their extremely specific aesthetic in favor of a more streamlined, personal approach, it’s nearly impossible to contextualize within the rest of the band’s oeuvre: More than just a new direction, it feels like the work of a completely different group, and with so many to choose from, it’s not immediately evident why they chose to label it a Mars Volta release. The previous iteration of the band thrived at the border of brilliant and unhinged, and The Mars Volta is too conventional to be called their best work. But it is certainly their most honest: a sober tale written by survivors, the first uneasy step into unfamiliar territory. | 2022-09-22T00:03:00.000-04:00 | 2022-09-22T00:03:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Clouds Hill | September 22, 2022 | 6.5 | ca8a7c9e-2aee-4fd6-b515-42909b04864c | Matthew Ismael Ruiz | https://pitchfork.com/staff/matthew-ismael ruiz/ | |
An artist known for his photographs turns his hand to music; his hazy, lo-fi productions strive for the analog warmth of his portraits, but they lack his pictures’ intimacy and empathy. | An artist known for his photographs turns his hand to music; his hazy, lo-fi productions strive for the analog warmth of his portraits, but they lack his pictures’ intimacy and empathy. | Nathan Bajar: playroom | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/nathan-bajar-playroom/ | Playroom | Nathan Bajar’s pictures evoke intimacy through haziness. Just take a look at the Brooklyn artist’s stunning portraits of Lakeith Stanfield, serpentwithfeet, or his own extended family in the Philippines, each imbued with soft, blurred lines and the warm tones of vintage film stock. With a delicate touch and apparent talent for bringing out the tenderness in people, Bajar casts his subjects in a nostalgic glow. His affinity for the warm and romantic extends to his lo-fi funk music, which he ornaments with tape hiss, soothing electric guitars, and weathered drum loops. This attention to detail is apparent in the psychedelic and sprawling production on his debut album, playroom. But it’s hard to know what he’s trying to get across besides just a dreamy vibe.
His taste and his craftsmanship are self-evident: playroom’s layered production is a pleasure to listen to, and it synthesizes a variety of influences. The reverb-washed guitars resembles those in Mac DeMarco’s slacker rock, the funky basslines recall Kali Uchis and Steve Lacy, and the woozy beats sound like they could have been made for the soul-sampling New York rappers MIKE and Medhane. There are also intriguing auxiliary moments sprinkled throughout the project, like the video-game bleeps and bloops in “playroom (lover’s paradise),” the Funkadelic-esque adlibs on “purple hearts,” and jagged saxophone solo and sweeping string parts of “camille.” It’s the kind of album that you could put on repeat and find something new with every listen, as little instrumental bits peek out from the swirling, nebulous tracks.
But Bajar’s lyrics aren’t nearly as evocative as his production. On “the view,” he tries to justify his wandering eye in the tritest of terms: “Wasn’t going to touch/Just enjoying the view.” Then there’s “silver surfer,” whose quasi-romantic lyrics might be found scrawled in a seventh grader’s notebook: “Are you riding/If you say no, girl/You’ll give me the blues.” “purple hearts,” which has a catchy hook and fun, off-beat ad-libs, never quite lives up to its potential because the vague lyrics fail to elucidate the story he’s trying to tell. “Didn’t mean to waste your time/Our love was war/Taking eye for eye,” Bajar sings, using tired language to describe a moth-eaten subject. Though Bajar’s low-key approach helps him achieve nuance in his photographs, it actually ends up doing the opposite in his music.
A handful of songs on playroom are about Bajar’s late father, who passed away suddenly last summer. On “the table,” Bajar reflects on his death: “My father now lives in the sky/One last seat at the table,” he sings with a meandering melody and a thick layer of harmonies that partially obscures his diction. Though it’s a touching tribute, Bajar doesn’t give his words the space to be heard, and too many instruments clamor for attention. With all his experience masterfully capturing other people’s humanity, Bajar seems hesitant to sharpen the focus on his own. | 2019-07-08T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-07-08T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | In Real Life | July 8, 2019 | 6.6 | caa5c1fa-0dd8-4c64-8886-439587d4259b | Michelle Hyun Kim | https://pitchfork.com/staff/michelle-hyun kim/ | |
Minneapolis rapper P.O.S is still all about his consciousness, and usefully motivated by anger. But on Chill, d**ummy, he embraces a freed-up feel, with some grooves you might hear in a club. | Minneapolis rapper P.O.S is still all about his consciousness, and usefully motivated by anger. But on Chill, d**ummy, he embraces a freed-up feel, with some grooves you might hear in a club. | P.O.S: Chill, dummy | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22800-chill-dummy/ | Chill, dummy | Focusing on trauma has always been a central plank in P.O.S’s artistic platform. He comes by the obsession honestly. That same instinct is a hallmark of the punk tradition, long cited as an inspiration by the Minneapolis rapper. Whether you prefer to apply sub-genre labels like “conscious” or “backpack” to the art of rhyming, it’s obvious that engagement with uncomfortable concepts has been key for a rich lineage of idiosyncratic MCs (both popular and not). P.O.S has called Aesop Rock his favorite rapper; the latter’s mix of emotional vulnerability and technical confidence is a clear influence.
When P.O.S approaches a mood of raw celebration, the route often runs through a hardcore group chant, premised on some opposition to the zeitgeist. This aesthetic has a way of pushing uncomplicated exuberance so deep into the background that it disappears from view. And that demotion of one of hip-hop’s most expressive, universal modes creates a tension with rap’s mainstream, no matter the season.
On his last record, 2012’s We Don’t Even Live Here, P.O.S took shots at a wide array of then-current trends in rap. The disses were on-brand, but the synth-heavy instrumentation sounded less distinct than the punk-rap style that made 2009’s Never Better such an energizing listen. Frivolity can be pretty easy to call out. Creating a suitably attractive alternative tends to be more difficult.
With Chill, dummy, P.O.S avoids retreating into the program of Never Better, while also one-upping his prior outing. His own production—and that of his collaborators—pushes more decisively into some grooves that you might actually hear in a club. There’s even a hint of sensuality, thanks to the slinky, bass-heavy motif that drives “Faded.” It’s new-enough ground for P.O.S that you can hear a bit of a giggle in the mix, right after the first appearance of “I want your body on me.” Though for the balance of the track, the seduction is played for real—Justin Vernon’s guest vocals are some of his best, too.
The lyricism remains captivating throughout. Rapping from the post-op vantage of a harrowing, ultimately successful kidney transplant, P.O.S is still all about his consciousness. But his latest internal critiques prove far more interesting than his evergreen complaints about meme culture. The sometimes prideful concept of “staying in your lane” gets a healthy kick during the chorus of “Lanes,” as P.O.S wonders whether staying true to his style may have stunted his growth. (“I been doin my own thing so long/Or is it/I been in my own way so long.”) This line of thinking leads to one of the most experimental tracks P.O.S has ever created: the eight-minute-plus album finale “sleepdrone/superposition.” He covers a lot of ground here, with grim, sustained synth tones as well as a Kathleen Hanna feature: “You’re supposed to be happy to be alive,” she sings. “You’re supposed to be lucky to be alive.”
Other topics include the killings of Mike Brown and Eric Garner, a general sense of futility, and the concept of “superposition” in quantum physics. That last idea is obviously fairly complicated. But at root, it has to do with multiple, simultaneous potentials for particles of matter: a discovery with clear poetic implications for an artist focused on states of development. The track itself can become almost anything, at any time—courtesy of pivots in rhythm and vocal cadence. In the end, it’s as rousing as P.O.S’s best work, even though it sounds little like anything he’s given us before.
Not everything on the album works on this high level. A couple of the guest-heavy tracks (like “Bully”) feel more muddled in their intent. But the overall tenor of the album has a satisfying, freed-up quality. As P.O.S raps on “Pieces/Ruins”: “Same dude new guts/Literal and figurative lost a couple fucks.” And while he’s openly experimenting with his ideal resting heart-rate, P.O.S is still usefully motivated by anger—a reality you hear clearly on the industrial-tinged opening track “Born a Snake.” It’s healthy to try out new patterns and engage in self-critique, but not everything needs changing. | 2017-01-27T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2017-01-27T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rap | Doomtree | January 27, 2017 | 7.4 | cab3f81e-e4f1-4317-aa4f-39c7a535d9c9 | Seth Colter Walls | https://pitchfork.com/staff/seth-colter walls/ | null |
The hushed and lovely Maryland indie pop outfit's first official release was recorded straight to tape, and the resulting sound world is a reward in itself for hardcore cassette fans. These are warm, reassuring-- if mordant-- songs that recall Elliott Smith, or K Records-era Modest Mouse. | The hushed and lovely Maryland indie pop outfit's first official release was recorded straight to tape, and the resulting sound world is a reward in itself for hardcore cassette fans. These are warm, reassuring-- if mordant-- songs that recall Elliott Smith, or K Records-era Modest Mouse. | Julia Brown: To Be Close to You | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/18017-julia-brown-to-be-close-to-you/ | To Be Close to You | For a while, Maryland singer/songwriter Sam Ray was in a group called Teen Suicide that was intensely loved by a few. Ray grew weary of the melodramatic band name, apparently, and all it implied, so Teen Suicide perished, and the hushed and lovely indie pop outfit Julia Brown was born. Ray introduced his new band to his fans with a defensive flourish: "If you liked Teen Suicide 'cause of pop songwriting you'll probably like the new band but if you just liked the really over-dramatic drug addict depression catharsis stuff you'll be disappointed and I'll be glad," he wrote on the Teen Suicide Facebook page. He probably didn't need to issue such a ringing pronouncement; Julia Brown, while softer, explore similar darkness with a sweet sadness that does, in fact, feel grown-up.
To Be Close to You is their first official release. It was recorded straight to tape, an act of aesthetic devotion that ensures singular focus on things like incidental sounds: In between songs, you hear doodly guitar moments, muffled coughs, the muttering and teasing of his band mates. Tape hiss isn't a background element here, it's an instrument: on some songs, it's practically the lead singer. "Recorded at various places over a long period of time," the liner notes indicate, and you can hear, in the busy shuffling of the players and the constantly changing room-space, the tape player being plopped in a series of bedrooms.
For lo-fi or home-taping pop aficionados, this kind of sound world is a reward in itself, and for hardcore fans, To Be Close to You will be instantly inviting. The sound has the blotted, bleedy edges you associate with the tape medium; every sharp edge smoothed out, every sound muffled and half-swallowed. To Be Close to You streams by in a soothing murmur that registers as intimate above all.
The sound is so warm and reassuring that you initially miss the complexity and craft of the music. But on repeated listens, you hear a serious songwriter's mind at work. The glimmering riff on "Library" is based on a simple chord progression, but Ray's dense, arpeggiated playing locates a hypnotically cyclical tune in it that is almost as catchy as his unassuming vocal lead. When the song launches into double time, a sawing viola traces the arc of Ray's melody before he sings it. There are surprising corners to stumble on in the arrangements: the brooding "i will do this for the rest of my life" ends with some skirling backwards guitars, while "i was my own favorite tv show the summer my tv broke" ends in a little pink-blue sunset of viola, cello, glockenspiel, and harmonium. "Virginia" is built on a rickety saloon piano in 3/4 time. A few of the songs repeat themselves in acoustic demo form, just in case you like them better that way, and to give you a better sense of how they were built.
It's also a pleasure to eventually discover Sam Ray's dark, sometimes-mordant lyrics, which are also lying just beneath the cottony yawn of the tape. The bleak "how I spent my summer" opens with a brief recorded clip of someone muttering "I was doing heroin in my car and listening to 'Genius of Love'," the word "heroin" scrambled slightly. The lyrics depict someone reeling from a loss they cannot process: "I will move your clothes from one side of the bed to the other/ I will stay in your bed all day/ Whatever it takes/ Taking Valium." "i will do this for the rest of my life" turns on the shrugging refrain, "I guess you mean more to me than nothing," sung in an upward lilt that sounds like the sentiment from a construction-paper Valentine. In the song's coda, Ryan Wilson mutters "I'm trying not/ To feel anything" repeatedly.
The sweetly unassuming kind of home-made pop music that Julia Brown make is easily overlooked when it is untethered from its home base; so much of indie-pop's magic resides in its locality, and in the connections forged by flyers, 7-inches, and shows. In their Baltimore stomping grounds, Julia Brown seem like they're a big deal. In the great sea of the internet, where one small bauble after another can be plucked and cast back just as quickly, this stuff can have a harder time standing apart. But To Be Close to You rewards any undivided attention you are willing to give it. Ray's gift is as substantial as his touch is light, and at its best To Be Close to You hearkens back to the spirit of some of the broken-hearted, scrofulous sweeties of the Pacific Northwest during the 90s: Elliott Smith, for instance, or Modest Mouse during their K Records years. Ray indicated recently that he had hit the limits of lo-fi recording techniques, and was looking to expand outward: His vision seems big enough to accomodate whatever canvas he works on next. | 2013-04-25T02:00:02.000-04:00 | 2013-04-25T02:00:02.000-04:00 | Rock | Birdtapes | April 25, 2013 | 7.9 | cab71196-1ee9-4899-84bb-65ee6d3be401 | Jayson Greene | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jayson-greene/ | null |
A drum-free but otherwise identical new version of Random Access Memories brings the saga of Daft Punk’s 2013 album to a curious, unfulfilling end. | A drum-free but otherwise identical new version of Random Access Memories brings the saga of Daft Punk’s 2013 album to a curious, unfulfilling end. | Daft Punk: Random Access Memories (Drumless Edition) | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/daft-punk-random-access-memories-drumless-edition/ | Random Access Memories (Drumless Edition) | What are we doing here? Honestly, what are we doing with this “drumless” edition of Daft Punk’s Random Access Memories? What possible lessons can we learn from 2023’s second re-edition of Daft Punk’s third-best album, in which every sonic detail is the same, other than the absence of drums? Why on earth did Daft Punk, one of the savviest musical duos in modern memory, choose to release a largely superfluous album, when they could have simply ridden the residual good vibes of RAM’s 10th anniversary reissue from earlier this year? Why would anyone choose to listen to Daft Punk’s meticulously crafted fourth studio album with the work of two of the world’s best session drummers wiped from the surface?
In the absence of an official explanation, speculation has thrived. Some fans claim that RAM Drumless is intended for DJs and producers who want to create their own RAM mixes and bootlegs, a logical enough idea that doesn’t account for the pricey Drumless merch or the major-label system and its outright revulsion for copyright-busting fan-made remixes. The big news is that Random Access Memories (Drumless Edition) really is just that: Random Access Memories with the drums removed. There’s no slinky disco hi-hat on “Get Lucky,” no explosive snare fills on “Contact,” no gentle cymbal taps on “Within,” not even a click track on “Giorgio by Moroder.” If this were another group you’d suspect a radical art prank, a sardonic comment, maybe, on the importance of drums to the house and techno music with which Daft Punk made their name. But Daft Punk don’t seem the type.
Stripping the glossy RAM productions of their percussion does give other musical elements room to breathe—the bass, for example, feels a lot more prominent on “Giorgio by Moroder,” and you can really pick out how Todd Edwards’ brilliant microsample patchwork on “Fragments of Time” relates to the song’s bass and guitar lines. My own theory around Random Access Memories is that Daft Punk’s fourth album is, in effect, two records: a disco/soft rock/house album that houses the radio hits and a much more interesting, proggy, swirly record that lies alongside. By and large, the disco tunes—“Get Lucky,” “Lose Yourself to Dance,” “Instant Crush”—sound bereft of life in their Drumless versions, a low-carb diet beer watered down within an inch of its life. But the prog-leaning songs—“Within,” “Beyond,” “Motherboard,” etc.—fare a lot better.
At times the transformation is revelatory. “Beyond” and “Motherboard,” in particular, feel the breath of new light on RAM Drumless. Shorn of their percussive shuffle, the two songs’ Drumless versions allow the astral swoon of Greg Leisz’s pedal steel guitar to drift to the surface, creating a blissed-out ambient country music to rival The KLF’s classic Chill Out (or, indeed, RAM’s Japanese bonus track “Horizon”), while the subtle orchestral touches in both songs feel flush with vivid color. The cat’s cradle cobweb of acoustic guitar and increasingly elastic one-note bassline that briefly surface in “Motherboard (Drumless Version)” are enough to make this the definitive version of the song, even if it took a decade to get there.
There are exceptions to the disco/prog rule of thumb. The sprawling “Touch” should thrive when detached from percussion and allowed to dissipate. But removing the drums from the song’s upbeat middle section robs “Touch” of its shape-shifting, sun-blessed heterogeneity, making it a one-paced beast. On the other hand, Panda Bear collaboration “Doin’ It Right,” an electro-pop number that fit awkwardly on the original Random Access Memories, finds its home as a minimal, hypnotic pop duet on RAM Drumless, driven by the textual interplay between Daft Punk’s robotic backing vocal and Noah Lennox’s childlike (and largely effect-free) voice.
A drum-free album is really pushing the limits in a music business that has never been shy about overselling fans on albums they already own. At its worst, Random Access Memories (Drumless Edition) feels like a concept album so theoretically pure that it didn’t need to exist, a joke without a punchline. But brief moments of drumless enlightenment and acoustic revelation are just about enough to rescue it from the vast cosmic bin of pointlessness. Neither victory lap nor walk of shame, RAM Drumless is a curious, unfulfilling end to the RAM saga. And while a Drumless Version of RAM 10th-anniversary bonus track “Infinity Repeating” would be an intriguing prospect, now, surely, is the time to let Daft Punk’s fourth studio album take a well-earned rest. | 2023-11-16T00:02:00.000-05:00 | 2023-11-15T00:02:00.000-05:00 | Electronic | Columbia | November 16, 2023 | 5.4 | cab7340c-5585-46aa-a3bc-ee2962b491a8 | Ben Cardew | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ben-cardew/ | |
Ambitiously remaking a 2002 ambient-glitch album with clarinet, vibraphone, cello, and other acoustic instruments, New York composer Joseph Branciforte discovers new depths in a minimalist classic. | Ambitiously remaking a 2002 ambient-glitch album with clarinet, vibraphone, cello, and other acoustic instruments, New York composer Joseph Branciforte discovers new depths in a minimalist classic. | Taylor Deupree: Sti.ll | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/taylor-deupree-still/ | Sti.ll | Why remake a classic? Comparison to the original is likely to cast even an extraordinary achievement in a bad light. Or so thought the composer and engineer Joseph Branciforte when Taylor Deupree approached him with the grandly ambitious—or perhaps wildly misguided—idea to create an acoustic version of his 2002 album Stil.. That record was a high water mark of the glitch movement, born of the moment in the late ’90s when personal computers became home studios. Deupree endlessly looped a handful of electronic samples slightly out of sync, allowing tiny digital artifacts to phase in and out of time like a Steve Reich composition at microscopic scale. Stil. is remarkably warm-sounding and emotive for such resolutely digital music, but impossible to imagine being played by actual humans. And yet, on October 10, 2021, Deupree sent an email to Branciforte requesting just that: “not sure if you’re familiar with the album... it’s very very repetitive... and i’d want it all played... not played for a bar and looped in pro tools.” Branciforte reluctantly agreed—on the condition that he could back out if it didn’t work.
Though it’s Deupree’s name on the spine of Sti.ll, Branciforte is the mastermind behind the scenes. Only after they began did Deupree reveal that he no longer had the mix files for Stil.. Branciforte would have to rely on the finished recording itself for his transcriptions, a daunting task that required painstakingly isolating different frequency ranges for each track. Branciforte then recruited an ensemble of expert instrumentalists to pull off his exacting scores, including Madison Greenstone, whose extended techniques for clarinet are largely responsible for the album’s timbral character, and Ben Monder, a guitarist whose initial response to the proposal was simple: “That is a terrible idea.”
Let’s put those doubts and misgivings to rest. Sti.ll works. The track that convinced Branciforte to keep going was “Temper,” Stil.’s busy, gyrating, IDM-inspired third track. He set about transcribing it for clarinet, dividing it into 16 layers and meticulously notating each one (an example of his extreme precision: Layer 11, titled “beeps,” has a tempo of 56.48 bpm, a level of specificity likely not perceptible to the human ear and certainly not playable with any degree of accuracy). Greenstone replicated the song’s thrumming static and jittery clicks with a range of techniques. For one layer, she used the clarinet’s keys to create percussive thumps of bass, and for another she continually pushed water through the mouthpiece to simulate the track’s crackly undercurrent. The results were revelatory: This was “Temper,” but it was something else too, a contemporary classical composition of arresting beauty.
The otherworldly hum of “Stil.” also gets a single-instrument treatment. Branciforte translated the piece for vibraphone, playing with different rhythms, mallets, and microphones. Once these layers are stacked, the track begins to hover, and then to float. Soon, the listener is levitating too. “Recur” is more complex and required extra instrumentation, including Christopher Gross on cello, Laura Cocks on flute, Sam Minaie on double bass, and Monder, now enthused, on acoustic guitar. It lurches along at two different tempi, sounding like a glitching CD even though played live.
On Stil., “Snow/Sand” consists of a single loop repeated for 15 minutes, though its length changes throughout. The musicians on Sti.ll recreate this woozy effect through sheer attentiveness and patience, with chiming vibraphone and finger snaps marking the phrase’s shifting boundaries. If ever there were a time to loop a track in Pro Tools, this would be it. But the refusal to do so defines Deupree and Branciforte’s approach—there is no cheating here. So why remake a classic? Branciforte found out only after he’d finished recording. Sometimes, if you set out to do the impossible, you actually achieve it. | 2024-05-18T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2024-05-18T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic / Experimental | Nettwerk / Greyfade / 12k | May 18, 2024 | 7.7 | cac33cf4-9578-4903-918e-cd73a3595a3d | Matthew Blackwell | https://pitchfork.com/staff/matthew-blackwell/ | |
Composer, designer and programmer Tristan Perich uses very small objects—microchips—to pose very big questions about art, music, and the state of the “album.” | Composer, designer and programmer Tristan Perich uses very small objects—microchips—to pose very big questions about art, music, and the state of the “album.” | Tristan Perich: Noise Patterns | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22130-noise-patterns/ | Noise Patterns | The last two major releases from New York composer, designer, and programmer Tristan Perich only really “ended” only when the three-volt lithium watch battery powering them gave out. In 2010, Perich’s 1-Bit Symphony connected a silver cell, an ON/OFF switch, a fast-forward button, a volume knob, an eight-inch audio jack, and a one-bit chip with beautiful arcs of black wire, all permanently affixed inside a transparent CD case.
Flip the switch, and the chip generated five occasionally transcendent pre-arranged movements, music that hinted at Philip Glass composing for a RadioShack centennial. Forget to push the switch back to the left, though, and “Movement 5” would never stop, its overloaded drone suggesting a broken church organ whose sound stretched to the sky, forever and ever. Perich’s new Noise Patterns—which applies the same high design to the sounds of, say, Merzbow rather than the masters of ecstatic minimalism—turns the same infinite trick: Keep your headphones plugged in and never kill the switch, and “Section 6” will eternally wash you in a flood of pulsating static, as if you’ve been integrated into and obliterated by the simple circuit itself.
This is, of course, Perich’s clever approximation of a classic vinyl feature—“the locked groove,” or a short snippet of music at the end of a record’s side that repeats until the needle is lifted. In 2007, Perich debuted with 1-Bit Music, the first self-described “circuit album,” a colorful and less seemly tangle of wires that played 11 tracks from inside a CD case. Questions of categorization appear paramount to Perich; his triptych of related releases—1-Bit Music, 1-Bit Symphony, and Noise Patterns—tease the binary between “album” and “instrument” in ways that the similar Buddha Machine or even Brian Eno’s Bloom could not.
In an era when our sense of the album is loosening, or where Kanye West can continually tweak a playlist and still call it by the same name, Perich moves in the opposite direction. He permanently fixes his parts to one platform (in the case of Noise Patterns, a sixteen square-inch black matte circuit board, cradled for convenience in a cardboard-lined CD case) and completely exposes the innards and limitations of his operation. You can control the output, but only to a limited extent; each moment has been meticulously built, evidenced by the printout of Perich’s code that accompanies the board. Like its predecessor, Noise Patterns makes and contains the sound all at once. It is programmed, but its very physical nature provides the illusion that it is somehow playable, too. This is defiantly offline media that still feels mutable.
Even without its itinerant conceptual or engineering trappings, Noise Patterns is a fascinating record that produces a lot of sound with a very small source. Perich never peels the glitch-and-hiss mayhem too far from the meter, so that even the harshest passages here pulse and throb with interesting rhythms. He’s constantly splitting or slowing them, quickening or collapsing them. At one point, “Section 3” hits a deep but brief four-on-floor groove before pivoting between short rests and big blasts of static in separate channels; it feels a little like an EDM drop, a swollen reservoir of sound suddenly being emptied across a still scene below. “Section 1” suggests the ever-expanding, ever-contracting pulse music of Steve Reich, rewritten for a dystopian world of strobe lights and antiquated electronics. “Section 5” recalls the colossal industrial quakes of Author & Punisher, another inventor and musician that has recently used customized objects to test boundaries between the player and the played, the input and the output.
For the last decade, Perich has used very small objects to pose very big questions about art, how it’s made, and how it’s perceived. His one-bit obsession has spawned performances or recordings with percussion duos and pianos, string quartets and accordion quintets, chamber ensembles and viola trios. At a time when an overabundance of sounds, processors, sequencers, and effects can be harnessed with a single cell phone, let alone an actual laptop, Perich has elected to see how much musical versatility and adaptability he can get from a simple bit attached to a circuit board, an almost laughably rudimentary premise. Noise Patterns is cacophonous proof that he’s not finished turning such demanding ideas into surprisingly delightful, diverse music. | 2016-07-28T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-07-28T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Physical Editions | July 28, 2016 | 8 | cac36b47-77c9-4de6-a926-5b0c3db8a2b7 | Grayson Haver Currin | https://pitchfork.com/staff/grayson-haver currin/ | null |
On the latest album from his ambient alter ego, Baths’ Will Wiesenfeld uses fuzzed-out guitars and tape-warped textures to conjure a blissful sense of refuge. | On the latest album from his ambient alter ego, Baths’ Will Wiesenfeld uses fuzzed-out guitars and tape-warped textures to conjure a blissful sense of refuge. | Geotic: The Anchorite | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/geotic-the-anchorite/ | The Anchorite | Will Wiesenfeld loves anime, manga, video games, cartoons—all media with the potential to open up a fantasy world. The Southern California producer often seems to see his music the same way, not least on his 2017 Baths album Romaplasm, a definitive combination of his taste for high fantasy and his gift for gripping romantic and erotic narratives. If that record was like one of the Ghibli or Pixar films Wiesenfeld holds dear to his heart, his releases under the more prolific Geotic name are like hardbound books of concept art, showing the landscapes he’s capable of conjuring before he populates them with his characters. His new Geotic album The Anchorite creates a small and pleasant patch of woods within this universe.
An anchorite is a religious recluse, and accordingly, Wiesenfeld creates an atmosphere of sylvan solitude across these 12 tracks, keeping his vocals to a hushed and wordless murmur at the margins of the music. In the foreground is an omnipresent field of static, which Wiesenfeld uses not to obscure his music so much as to create a rugged and spiky texture; the crackles and pops reach out of the mix like the grasping branches in Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. Electronics are deployed sparingly, and what few drums Wiesenfeld uses tend to plod like thick workboots through mud. The primary instruments are electric guitar, treated with effects so it sounds a bit like Bibio’s, and piano, which Wiesenfeld sidechains on “The Wood of Corridors” so it seems as if it’s being consumed by an avalanche. It sounds a little bit like folk music, but not quite.
The wood-hewn textures are the most striking thing about The Anchorite, but once it’s over, the melodies are what you’re most likely to remember. Wiesenfeld has a strong pop instinct, and “The Going” and “The Monastic Quiet” are plenty catchy. The music rarely strays far from major keys, and it never hints at much mystery or danger, instead preferring to inhabit a place of certainty and peace—the perspective of the anchorite, perhaps, who has spent a long time here and sees it as a place of refuge, not secrets. Those who like their ambient moodier might find it a tad saccharine, but those on the same wavelength of artists like the Album Leaf, Eluvium, Ulrich Schnauss or Adam Young’s Port Blue project will find more than enough to enjoy.
The Anchorite is most intriguing when it takes us into the more overgrown thickets of Wiesenfeld’s mind. “The Injury” is a lovely backwards guitar sketch that suggests that if ML Buch ever makes a Suntub remix album, Wiesenfeld should be one of the first names she calls up. But even after all the different effects heard across the album, “The Lime of Stars” comes as a shock, erupting into a dense wall of overdrive halfway through, as if Wiesenfeld’s character has suddenly taken a wrong turn into the enchanted woodlands of the black-metal imagination. A few more moments like that might’ve helped The Anchorite feel more expansive, but even at 50 minutes, the album seems finite: a small patch of land with defined borders, sketched lovingly by Wiesenfeld in the margins of the ever-expanding map of his world. | 2024-02-29T00:00:00.000-05:00 | 2024-02-29T00:00:00.000-05:00 | Electronic | Basement’s Basement | February 29, 2024 | 7 | cac73707-84db-4ee0-9385-b5d76379ae5d | Daniel Bromfield | https://pitchfork.com/staff/daniel-bromfield/ | |
Singing in English and Mandarin, the Berklee-educated vocalist and experimental musician uses oddball pop melodies, distorted breaks, and swirling drones to explore themes of anxiety and selfhood. | Singing in English and Mandarin, the Berklee-educated vocalist and experimental musician uses oddball pop melodies, distorted breaks, and swirling drones to explore themes of anxiety and selfhood. | otay:onii: 夢之駭客 Dream Hacker | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/otay-onii-dream-hacker/ | 夢之駭客 Dream Hacker | Lane Shi sings with the voice of a shapeshifter. Flitting from croon to shriek with ritualistic caprice, the Haining-born vocalist played Boston basements with Berklee art punks DENT before graduating in 2016; these days, her voice is the driving force behind Flenser-affiliated Elizabeth Colour Wheel, projecting powerfully over their sludgy din. DENT’s “Eyeballs” is early proof of the needly extremes to which she can push her instrument, prefiguring the visceral screams that feature heavily on Sightless Pit’s “Flower to Tomb,” released earlier this year.
With her solo project otay:onii, Shi often employs a gentler, almost brittle vocal delivery. Her previous two albums, NAG and 冥冥 (Míng Míng), melded bilingual lyrics with electronic experiments and atmospheres, pitting human fragility against technological imperfection. This fragility is physical: A tour-fuelled smoking habit once led to nodules in her vocal cords, bringing her face to face with the contingency of her own voice. But it is also spiritual, manifesting in meditations on the tenuousness of her cultural identity. Born and raised in China but moving to the U.S. at 16, she found her connection to her mother tongue weakening as she began work on 2021’s 冥冥 (Míng Míng). Her latest record, however, comes after a three-year stint in China during the COVID-19 pandemic—the first time she’d been back in 13 years. On 夢之駭客 Dream Hacker, she offers a more optimistic outlook, using oddball pop melodies, distorted breakbeats, and swirling drones to transform her anxieties into a renewed sense of self.
That self has a whimsical—and scatological—side, as it turns out. “W.C. 公共廁所” begins with a fake-out, with Shi’s voice in full ceremonial form, a distorted ball of nails hurtling through cavernous space. Through the noise, even Mandarin speakers might be hard pressed to confirm that yes, she’s indeed singing about shit. But then the beat drops, and along with it, the fart sounds—and surprisingly, it actually works. Singing from the perspective of a toilet as a “home” for excrement, it might be a double-edged jab at Western notions of the “shithole country,” and quite danceable to boot. It’s a testament to Shi’s ability as a practicing sound designer-slash-artist, having done her fair share of tinkering at Berklee as well as for exhibitions in Beijing and New York, to transform weird sounds in potent ways.
Other tracks on 夢之駭客 Dream Hacker channel a similar carnivalesque feeling, in opposition to the solemnity of 冥冥 (Míng Míng). On “Overlap 重疊,” Shi’s voice floats alongside ’80s stadium-rock drums, tabla, and a synth progression from an abandoned carousel ride. Singing of growth and decay, she teases out a tension between light and dark that lurks throughout the record, just one of many axes along which Shi situates her sound and themes. By the final track, “Good Fool 愚美人”, however, these tensions have resolved to a message of love. Between mind and heart, it’s the latter that has the final say: “矮小與偉大 / 只不過 / 一波來去 / 愛的呼吸” (“The lowest and the greatest are all but waves that come and go from a breath of love”). On 夢之駭客 Dream Hacker, Shi slips between ruptures in voice, electronics, and identity, finally finding what was inside all along. | 2023-02-21T00:02:00.000-05:00 | 2023-02-21T00:02:00.000-05:00 | Experimental | Bié | February 21, 2023 | 7.4 | cacd00b8-9b71-4de5-9b9f-08882f7cc202 | James Gui | https://pitchfork.com/staff/james-gui/ | |
Across three discs of rough-hewed yet honeyed music, this three-disc set captures the cosmopolitan scene of Africa’s post-colonial Upper Volta in the 1960s and ’70s. | Across three discs of rough-hewed yet honeyed music, this three-disc set captures the cosmopolitan scene of Africa’s post-colonial Upper Volta in the 1960s and ’70s. | Various Artists: Bobo Yéyé: Belle Époque in Upper Volta | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22593-bobo-yeye-belle-epoque-in-upper-volta/ | Bobo Yéyé: Belle Époque in Upper Volta | They may appear to be hardy and resilient, but music cultures are fragile things, threatened by drastic shifts in society and political climates. Tropicalia, for one, lasted less than a year in Brazil due to punitive measures like AI-5 instilled by the junta. Club culture in New York City was starved to near extinction in the 1990s by then-mayor Rudy Giuliani’s reinstatement of a severe and obscure cabaret law. And when a coup brought Thomas Sankara into power in Africa’s Upper Volta in 1983, he changed the country’s name to Burkina Faso and installed drastic changes, including a city curfew and a law preventing musicians from charging money for concerts. Almost overnight, the vibrant music scene in Bobo Dioulasso evaporated.
Were it not for the vinyl records pressed (and photographs snapped) during the short-lived existence of post-colonial Upper Volta, there would be almost no trace of the rough-hewed yet honeyed music made by the Voltaic musicians of the 1960s and ’70s. After centuries of colonial, tribal, and political clashes, these decades saw a country only recently freed of French colonial oppression, struggling to find footing with their own slippery national identity (the region is home to over 60 ethnic groups). When Upper Volta achieved full independence by 1960, it marked the beginning of a rather peaceful time in the country, which allowed the cosmopolitan music scene a chance to take root and flourish. While Numero Group has a knack for unearthing micro soul scenes in U.S. cities and weird private press albums from dollar bins, the deluxe audio and visual packaging of Bobo Yéyé: Belle Époque in Upper Volta marks their first foray into the motherland. It also makes for a worthwhile exploration of the landlocked African country, oft-times overshadowed by neighbors like Mali, Ghana, and Niger.
The influence of French colonialism is evident from the start. Upper Volta’s earliest orchestras took cues from a band comprised of French colonial businessmen and Western instruments like the guitar, trumpet, and saxophone. American R&B, rhumba from the Congo, and (as the title suggests) the yé-yé of French ’60s pop—the bands of Upper Volta drew on all of it. No doubt, the titan of African pop, Franco Luambo’s O.K. Jazz—from the Republic of the Congo and the biggest African star on the continent—had a considerable influence on one of the earliest and most prolific bands to arise in the new country, Volta Jazz.
Founded by bandleader Idrissa Koné, Volta Jazz is one of the savannah’s greatest musical exports, releasing a full-length album and some 20 singles during their lifespan. Their output is collected on the first disc of this set and is boisterous and simmering in equal measure, drawing on their native Bobo heritage and mixing in the many rhythms from outside their borders—most crucially, the Cuban music that found its way into the country on 78s. The upbeat rumba “Air Volta” displays an exuberance that threatens to outstrip the fast pace, the horns and electric guitar racing around the hand percussion breakdown at the center of the song. “Mousso Koroba Tike” displays the stinging guitar tone of late ’50s American R&B transposed to a rollicking African polyrhythmic backdrop. Meanwhile, the gentle ballad “Djougou Toro” shimmers like a desert mirage, with Dieudonné Koudougou’s steel guitar rippling in ever widening circles.
As the ’70s wore on, Volta Jazz member-turned-bandleader Tidiani Coulibaly groused that the ensemble had not evolved beyond their supper club tuxedos and repertoire to keep up with the changing times. And so, he broke off and formed his own group with five other Volta Jazz members called L’Authentique Dafra Star de Bobo-Dioulasso, who comprise the second album on this set. Dafra Star was a more nimble ensemble and ranged widely (even touring in Mali and Canada), utilizing the traditional timbres of the ballaphon and mixing it with Cuban tumba drums, the double-picked guitars of Zoumana Diarra and Soma Bakary, and electric organ. The tricky interplay of ballaphon, horns, and percussion on “Dounian” anticipates the kind of post-rock tropes that Tortoise would deploy decades and continents later, while “Si Tu Maime” is a slow-burner of a ballad with dramatic organ accents.
Okay, heretofore unknown music—from a country we might not be able to easily pinpoint on a map of Africa—dusted off and compiled for consumption is no novel thing. And as much as I enjoy the groups here, I might sooner reach for sets from Franco, Balla et ses Balladins, Rail Band, Star Band de Dakar, or Golden Afrique for future listening pleasure. But where Bobo Yéyé excels beyond those is in how it widens our gaze, showing us not just the music of Upper Volta, but the people who got gussied up on a Saturday night to sweat and dance to it. In this way, it makes for one of the most personable African reissues of the past decade.
Parallel to the establishment of Koné’s Volta Jazz group, his cousin Sory Sanlé got his hands on a camera and set up a makeshift studio, documenting the bands and their fans. Along with the 3xLP/CDs, Numero included an 144-page hardbound book of Sanlé’s black and white portraiture, which makes it an indispensable document. In the introduction, Sanlé writes that the Voltaic used to throw photographs of people away once they had died, thinking they were pointless if the person wasn’t present. But then there was a shift: “People began to understand that by looking at old photos, the person was recreated... without photos, it’s like nothing happened.” Sanlé’s intimate photos show his friends and neighbors as fierce and innocent, defiant and bizarrely posed, cool and ridiculous. They catch his subjects in the act of becoming. The participants of Upper Volta’s music scene dress up as soldiers, as distant cousins of the Jackson 5, as tribespeople, as gangsters and b-boys, as musicians trying on different identities, making their presence known, if only for the blink of a shutter. Were these their actual roles in society? Or were they just trying on costumes for play? In looking upon these stunning photos, it’s more fun to just enjoy the enigma of these individuals.
Writing about the Mali photographers Seydou Keïta and Malick Sidibé last year in The New York Times, Teju Cole noted that such African portraits offered “a vivid record of individual people, largely shorn of their names and stories but irrepressibly alive… ripostes to the anthropological images of ‘natives’ made by Europeans in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.” Cole added, “Something changed when Africans began to take photographs of one another.” That statement extends to Sanlé’s own eye, and the Bobo Yéyé collection as a whole. While their country’s golden age lasted less than 20 years, the look, attitude, and sound of the Voltaic remains, even if the culture that originally nurtured it is no longer. | 2016-12-10T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2016-12-10T01:00:00.000-05:00 | null | Numero Group | December 10, 2016 | 8.4 | cace4896-a393-4844-94fb-c7c80dd9832f | Andy Beta | https://pitchfork.com/staff/andy-beta/ | null |
Balancing the familiar sweetness of her vocals against bruised club beats, the debut EP from Kero Kero Bonito’s Sarah Midori Perry traverses newly dark emotional terrain. | Balancing the familiar sweetness of her vocals against bruised club beats, the debut EP from Kero Kero Bonito’s Sarah Midori Perry traverses newly dark emotional terrain. | Cryalot: Icarus EP | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/cryalot-icarus-ep/ | Icarus EP | Cuteness brings out dark things in people. If you’ve ever wanted to squeeze something adorable until it bursts, you’re not alone—there’s a direct correlation in our brains that links seeing cute things with violent urges, an emotional redirect that serves as an outlet to deal with our intensely affectionate instincts. But there’s more to it than that: On some level, being confronted with innocence is a reminder of how sweet it is to not yet know how painful the real world can be. That innocence is something to be admired and protected, but it’s also something we yearn for, crave, and even mourn. It’s enough to make you want to grab something cute as tightly as possible and pinch it by the cheeks.
For most of Sarah Midori Perry’s musical career, this multifaceted understanding of cuteness has remained buried beneath the surface. With Kero Kero Bonito, she’s occasionally tucked more mature subject matter into the band’s kawaii-lite style, be it the end of the world on their Civilisation EPs, or the destruction of her childhood home on Time ‘n’ Place. But the music itself has always been a smiling ray of sunshine, cheerful as a Saturday morning cartoon. While half of KKB’s production team emerged from the transgressive PC Music collective, the band’s own mission seemed to strip away the layers of horror and irony coursing through that label’s hypercute aesthetic, presenting something more pure and sincere in the process. If the music hasn’t been as groundbreaking, they’ve made up for it with ear-wormy hooks and joyously bouncy production.
Icarus arrives like an ominous cloud spreading across the KKB universe. Until now, Perry has primarily used her Cryalot moniker for skull-rattling happy hardcore DJ sets—but on her debut EP under the name, it’s a vessel for sounds and emotions more gutwrenching than anything she’s touched on with Kero Kero Bonito. Instead of singing over a miniature symphony of Donkey Kong Country MIDI flutes, she and producer Jennifer Walton opt for something a little more “Ponyboy”: screeching nu-metal sub-bass thrashes and stomps its way through these songs, while bruised club beats provide a searing anchor for Perry’s childlike vocals to glide overhead. It’s as though she’s swapped out her colorful graduation gown for a shopping spree at Dolls Kill. Fortunately, this new skin hasn’t come at the cost of her knack for earnest, touching pop songwriting.
As with all her music, Perry performs Icarus as if she were narrating a fairytale, albeit one much gloomier in tone. Conceived during a period when Perry was experiencing intense depression, Icarus is filled with references to angels and demons, to eternal spirals of damnation and redemption. The EP takes the form of a song cycle revolving around its titular Greek myth, but in contrast to the story’s origin as a cautionary tale, Perry recasts Icarus’ flight as a powerful moment of self-actualization. “Let me touch the sun/Wanna have it all/I don’t care if I fall/I accepted it all,” she sings over a pounding beat on “Touch the Sun,” swelling to a moment of heavenly club catharsis while glitched-out replicas of her voice cyclone all around. It’s Perry’s biggest dancefloor track yet, made all the more intense by how her silk-soft voice counterbalances the eruptive sounds happening all around it.
This contrast between dark and light is key to the best moments on Icarus, particularly when Perry leans fully into her new fascination with metal. The verses on “Hell Is Here” are peaceful and inquisitive, with Perry and Walton adorning the song’s J-poppy melody in cooing harmonies and gently twinkling piano. Before long, the chorus brings everything crashing down, with gutturally screamed vocals and a rubbery, wobbling bass tone that would make Datsik proud. Though Perry isn’t the first artist to navigate the intersection between experimental club music and screamo, she shows enough mastery of tension and release to make it satisfying (she pulls off a similar trick on “Labyrinth,” a tender power ballad whose glitching, yeule-y intro explodes into a cybernetic wall of rich, blasting synth chords).
The record’s inversion of the Icarus myth never approaches anything as profound as it seems to suggest (the final track “See You Again,” essentially a five-and-a-half-minute dramatic monologue, has no business being the longest song), but as with Kero Kero Bonito, Perry’s biggest strengths as Cryalot don’t lie in her innovation, but in her craft. The best moments on Icarus feel as if they were tailor-made to be spun at the next HEAV3N party, but Perry transcends the project’s trendy exterior with the same legitimate vulnerability that’s made her a cult star in the first place. In exploring the scarier sides of her cutesy approach to pop music, Perry uncovers emotional depths that once seemed unattainable in her main project, prodding at an unsettling underbelly that she’s never let us see so fully before. Perhaps it’s a good thing that she finally decided to let those violent urges out. | 2022-08-31T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2022-08-31T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | AWAL | August 31, 2022 | 6.8 | cadc0af5-4d31-496a-a23b-f17fb3e74c45 | Sam Goldner | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sam-goldner/ | |
Reaching back to the 1950s, this collection highlights the New York School composer’s fragmented, conversational style, as well as his music’s patient, intuitive qualities. | Reaching back to the 1950s, this collection highlights the New York School composer’s fragmented, conversational style, as well as his music’s patient, intuitive qualities. | Christian Wolff: *A Complete Anthology of Solo and Duo Violin Pieces * | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/christian-wolff-a-complete-anthology-of-solo-and-duo-violin-pieces/ | A Complete Anthology of Solo and Duo Violin Pieces | Since he began composing in the 1950s, Christian Wolff has made the embrace of the unexpected a central part of his work. As just a teenager studying with John Cage, the Nice-born composer became the youngest member of the influential New York School, a group of composers exploring indeterminacy and chance. Instead of dictating exactly how their music should be performed, these composers left crucial decisions up to the players; no two presentations of the same piece would sound the same. These tenets have colored Wolff’s compositions, which have an openness to letting the music go wherever the performers choose to take it. That’s especially evident throughout A Complete Anthology of Solo and Duo Violin Pieces, a new compilation of Wolff’s work for solo and duo violin that highlights the freedom inherent in his music, as well as the connectivity and communication that drives it.
Recorded by String Noise, the New York-based duo of Pauline Kim Harris and Conrad Harris, A Complete Anthology of Solo and Duo Violin Pieces surveys Wolff’s works for violin, zig-zagging between periods of his career. “Bread and Roses,” a solo violin work from 1976 that exemplifies of Wolff’s use of protest music, opens the album; 1950’s “Short Suite” and “Four Small Duos” come just a couple of tracks later, representing some of his earliest indeterminate works. Later on, we’re dropped into Wolff’s present: “Small Duos for Violinists,” composed in 2021 for String Noise, highlights the fragmented, conversational style he’s recently championed. When placed side by side, these pieces illustrate the twists and turns of his compositional life, but also reveal his persistent interest in writing patient, intuitive music.
Throughout “Duo for 2 Violins” (1950), Wolff’s first composition written under the tutelage of Cage, each violinist trades notes back and forth, exploring the patterns that can be formed with just three notes that are a half-step apart. It feels simpler than what he’d compose later on but shows a spark that would carry throughout his practice. The music often hovers in place, playing with varying textures almost imperceptible changes. Buoyant plucks erupt from long, bowed tones, moving from grainy to taut and back again. Forgoing dramatic vibrato in favor of a direct, resonant sound, Wolff finds meditation and grace within restriction.
Later pieces, like “Six Melodies Variation” (1993) showcase a wider range. A tribute to Cage composed in 1993, this piece finds inspiration in his mentor’s 1950 work “Six Melodies” and the music of William Billings, an American composer whose music appeared in Cage’s “Cheap Imitation” pieces. Springy plucks and effervescent bowing tumble out and fall into restful pauses, as in his earliest duos. But here, each violinist explores the highs and lows of the instrument, employing squeals and rumbles in equal measure. The music is structured around intricate, delicate counterpoint driven by each player’s interaction with the other.
Wolff’s solo works convey a sense of interiority, asking the violinist to dig deep to convey the feeling of the music. In “Bread and Roses,” whose melody comes from a protest song that was sung during the 1912 textile strike in Lawrence, Massachusetts, Wolff abstracts and distorts his source material, exploring the violin’s ability to play rich rolled chords and wispy, high-pitched sounds. Performed here with an appropriate defiance and vigor, it feels akin to the yearning of a solo Bach sonata, requiring the violinist to pack each note with feeling, whether the most vibrant double stop or the gentlest harmonic.
But Wolff’s ideals come through strongest in “Small Duos for Violinists,” which he composed for String Noise in 2021. Here, he finds power in economical ideas: Each duet is a tiny snapshot built from small motifs, which the players develop by reacting to and with each other. It often scans as a conversation, with one violinist playing a pattern and the other following with repetition or a response. At times, they link together in counterpoint, but their lines often feel at odds, like two people talking over each other, until each comes together at a point of resolution. A deep communication drives the music and helps give the piece its spirited voice, fully leaning into the composer’s long held interest in counterpoint, listening, and social music-making.
Much of Wolff’s music is guided by serendipity. Nowhere is this clearer than during the fleeting 28 seconds of “Small Duos for Violinists 7,” an arresting moment that features a series of open chords that shine like a beam of sunlight. They appear in near stillness after earlier chatter, wading through dissonances and never quite resolving. It’s the greatest surprise on a winding record, a movement that seemingly appears from nowhere and quickly falls back into the ether. Wolff has spent his career embracing the unknown and the beauty that emerges from it in performance. More than 70 years in, he’s still finding more. | 2022-12-07T00:01:00.000-05:00 | 2022-12-07T00:01:00.000-05:00 | Experimental | Black Truffle | December 7, 2022 | 7.4 | cae0c607-1311-4b83-9833-0cef22cbbe86 | Vanessa Ague | https://pitchfork.com/staff/vanessa-ague/ | |
Backed by beats ranging from wistful chipmunk soul to oppressive, bell-rattling NWA jacks and hypnotic electro bounce, Cam'ron bids adieu to Roc-A-Fella. | Backed by beats ranging from wistful chipmunk soul to oppressive, bell-rattling NWA jacks and hypnotic electro bounce, Cam'ron bids adieu to Roc-A-Fella. | Cam’ron: Purple Haze | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/1791-purple-haze/ | Purple Haze | Less than a week after the early-December release of Purple Haze, Jay-Z became the president of Def Jam Records, and that company made arrangements to seize control of Roc-A-Fella Records, the subsidiary that Jay started with his onetime friend Damon Dash. Dash left the label completely, announcing his plans to start another label called Roc-4-Life. Cam'ron, Dash's friend and one of Roc-A-Fella's flagship artists, attempted to leave the label as well, saying that Roc-A-Fella hadn't given Purple Haze an adequate promotional push-- which is strange considering the album had been in stores for less than a week.
Cam's departure from Roc-A-Fella is still in doubt. But if he isn't contractually obligated to stick it out with Def Jam, this is the end of an era-- a time when a word-twisting surrealist amoral prince had the resources of rap's most successful imprint at his disposal-- and Purple Haze is its last document.
Purple Haze creates its own world both sonically and lyrically. The beats range from wistful chipmunk soul to oppressive, stripped-down, bell-rattling NWA jacks to hypnotic, muted electro bounce. But whether the producers are dishing out the swirling operatic vocals of "Killa Cam" or the chopped-up hair metal guitars of "Bubble Music", they add up to a frozen, prismatic creep, a slow, hard, cinematic bed for Cam's magnetic flow.
And Cam's flow is a thing of beauty. His bored, arrogant voice rolls syllables around until he's hit just about every possible permutation, transforming hard consonants into thrown rocks and idly toying with drug metaphors like they're Rubik's Cubes. In Cam's world, he's the king of Harlem, moving kilos, dispatching foes, and throwing around money with Machiavellian cool. Cam has the warped eloquence of an MF Doom even when he's bragging about violence ("Observe, cock, and spray/ We hit you from a block away/ Drinking saki on a Suzuki in Osaka Bay") or conspicuous consumption ("I park in the towaway zone, chrome/ I don't care; that car a throwaway, homes").
Occasionally, he veers off into pure gibberish: "Wreckx-N-Effect, zoom zoom, poon poon/ Since the movie Cocoon, had the Uzi platoon." The ugliness of Cam's world is never more evident than when he's talking about women: "Any girl I get, I totally open 'em/ Brain and they legs, cokin' and dopin' 'em". Cam's misogyny comes through the speakers like a slap; it's jarring and frightening and sad. But Cam isn't heartless; a few of the songs have an air of weary lamentation, like Tony Soprano driving home after killing his cousin, wondering how it came to this: "I give you a earful, it's tearful/ Told my mother I hustle, and she said, 'Be careful'.
Purple Haze is like a Takeshi Kitano gangster movie; every moment of transcendent musical or linguistic beauty is shadowed by the spectre of death, an end so inevitable that Cam doesn't even let it get to him anymore. There's no sense of joy or exhilaration in his spending and shooting and fucking, but it's the only thing he knows. | 2005-01-26T01:00:02.000-05:00 | 2005-01-26T01:00:02.000-05:00 | Rap | Roc-A-Fella | January 26, 2005 | 8.7 | cae31731-b81a-488a-88fd-c24a8cb4aadd | Tom Breihan | https://pitchfork.com/staff/tom-breihan/ | null |
The London producer’s latest EP is both his least dancefloor-minded release and his most satisfying by design. | The London producer’s latest EP is both his least dancefloor-minded release and his most satisfying by design. | Joy Orbison: Slipping EP | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/joy-orbison-slipping-ep/ | Slipping EP | Peter O’Grady is smitten with the plasticity and inherent gibberish of the voice. Yes, the South London producer adopted the handle Joy Orbison (a play on the dramatic ’60s crooner and “Caruso of Rock”), but it’s all right there on 2009’s “Hyph Mngo,” the dubstep anthem that introduced him to the dance music world. Built from the giddy thrill in toggling between “ahh” and “ooo” as it climbs to a precipitous drop, it remains one of the defining tunes of the 21st century, creating a playground for the likes of James Blake, Jamie xx, and Floating Points along the way.
What followed was unrivaled dominance in electronic music worldwide, a string of smash singles that came to define EDM. Or rather, that’s what could have happened had O’Grady not instead spent the past decade dodging easy labels, preferring to take every available detour. He eschews most interviews, gigs only when he feels like it, and has never dropped a proper debut album, instead releasing a string of collaborations with Boddika and exploratory EPs on Hinge Finger, the label he runs with Will Bankhead. His most recent EP, Slipping, caps a prolific 2019 that’s found him providing gurgly g-funk to spoken-word artist James Massiah’s “Ride for Me” and making a peak-hour anthem with Overmono. Each celebrates the voice in a different way.
Slipping is both his least dancefloor-minded release and his most satisfying by design, reveling in the kind of freedom that comes from loosening expectations. It opens with guest vocalist Infinite’s soulful “ooooo,” which gets truncated and run through again, the tape still running as he takes another stab at the elongated vowel. Other little sounds skitter around: the rustling of the mic, a clink like a lighter knocking against a pint glass, O’Grady stifling a giggle and saying “again.” It’s not a perfect take, but after about 30 seconds he runs with it anyway, triggering a deep globule of bass and percussive elements that aim towards a stepper beat, only to scatter like spilled mercury. Rather than a stab at a proper club banger, “Burn” feels like O’Grady hanging out with his mates, the end result pleasantly slapdash and happenstance.
That casual feel carries across Slipping. The cover art features O’Grady’s nan and a young O’Grady slumbering on the couch, giving the impression of a more personal release even if the details are kept vague. “W Dad” is exactly that: his dad chatting away in a manner that recalls Aphex Twin’s ability to weave the sound of quotidian home life into exhilarating tracks without missing a beat. While there’s a sense of pop structure, the vocals stumble in from all directions, overheard rather than centered. Hear how Orbison’s beat slushes around Keyah/Blu’s slurred “fuuuck you, dahling” on “Under,” making it the perfect downtempo R&B singalong after a pill and two flutes of champagne.
Slipping smears everything together, pairing gnarled noise and dancehall riddims on “Breathe In,” or overheard radio and close-mic’d whispers on “Walworth Waltz.” The sounds briefly cohere into songs before oozing apart again, making Solange’s influence clear—O’Grady is a fan of When I Get Home. As the producer explained in a recent interview, the mercurial nature of this work allows him to “get close to where I want to be… [even though] I don’t think I actually even know where that is.” Slipping entices because of that intangible quality: not quite knowing how to say it but letting it out anyway. | 2019-12-20T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2019-12-20T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Electronic | Hinge Finger | December 20, 2019 | 7.9 | cae7bff3-2651-4392-9753-571e0168813f | Andy Beta | https://pitchfork.com/staff/andy-beta/ | |
Stranger to Stranger is arguably the best album of Paul Simon's uneven post-Graceland solo career. His reliably melodic songwriting is buoyed by his most adventurous arrangements in years. | Stranger to Stranger is arguably the best album of Paul Simon's uneven post-Graceland solo career. His reliably melodic songwriting is buoyed by his most adventurous arrangements in years. | Paul Simon: Stranger to Stranger | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21978-stranger-to-stranger/ | Stranger to Stranger | Of all the baby-boomer heroes to make it past 70, none have been old longer than Paul Simon. Raised in Queens to first-generation Hungarian-Jewish immigrants, he copyrighted his first song, “The Girl for Me,” with Art Garfunkel when he was 14, an indication both of his preternatural ambition and a belief that art is as much a business as it is a means of self-expression. He never rebelled, never played to fashion, never seemed as interested in the dangerous divinations of rock‘n’roll as in the quiet diligence of songwriters from the 1930s and ’40s, who kept short hair and bankers’ hours. He has claimed that he tried to be ironic a few times, but it didn’t work. His first crime is mildness; his second is thinking. He might be your parents’ favorite musician, but your grandparents probably thought he was a pretty decent guy too.
The same qualities that made Simon seem square as a younger artist made him durable into—and beyond—middle age. His second solo album, Paul Simon, invented the literate, introverted style we now call indie-folk, and beat Oscar the Grouch by two years in suggesting that melancholy isn’t a weakness, but a form of insulation against even worse emotional weather. In the ’80s, when Bob Dylan was making kabuki disco albums and Simon’s other ’60s peers—the Rolling Stones, for example—were getting lost in the open ocean of too much encouragement, Simon recorded Graceland, an album whose South African sound was both middlebrow and radical, universally likable and yet alien to Simon's typical audience. (For further listening on this subject, visit the compilation The Indestructible Beat of Soweto, released just around the time Graceland came out. It endures.)
Simon’s lyrics, which had always been less about people being free than people getting by, were maturing: He was more aloof now, but funnier, too. Take this, the first verse of a song called “Gumboots”:
"I was having this discussion in a taxi heading downtown/Rearranging my position on this friend of mine who had a little bit of a breakdown/I said, ‘Hey, you know, breakdowns come and breakdowns go/ So what are you going to do about it? That’s what I’d like to know.’”
Twenty years earlier, he would’ve zeroed in on the breakdown and thrown an orchestra at it; now it was relegated to a couple lines on an album with a host of other problems to compartmentalize. Here was someone stepping into the tempered disappointments of being 40 like they were shoes bought just a little too soon. This, he recently told a class at Yale, is when Simon says he was finally comfortable admitting he was an artist.
Simon’s post-Graceland career has had its embarrassments, but as with a lot of older, canonized artists, critics seem to take an unusual kind of glee in magnifying them, when, near as I can tell, he bothers the public far less than the rest of his graduating class. There was The Capeman, a musical about the Puerto Rican gang member Salvador Agron, which is one of those sub-middling projects nobody would’ve heard about if it wasn’t coming to us from Paul Simon, but since it was coming to us from Paul Simon, people heard about it a lot more than they needed to. (Several writers—myself included, I admit—have noted how unconvincing Simon is when using the word “fuck,” which he attempts several times on the soundtrack.) There was 2006’s Surprise, which found him working with Brian Eno, an artist of related but incompatible genius whose deference to atmosphere tended to wash out the quiet precision of Simon’s songs.
So Beautiful or So What from 2011 was a lot better, and, for an artist of Simon’s stature, surprisingly weird—the sound of an elder statesman settling into his own idiosyncrasies, seemingly unconcerned with legacy or relevance. More than anything, Simon in the ’00s reminds me of the Brazilian singer Caetano Veloso, himself a national treasure whose albums have only gotten leaner and more enigmatic as he keeps making them.
Which brings us to Stranger to Stranger, a compact, often jittery album populated by schizophrenics, disenfranchised teenagers, musicians locked out of their own gigs, and some kind of avenging werewolf coming to kill the rich. I’ve always attributed part of Simon’s enormous popularity to how good he is at teasing out life’s silver linings, at softening disappointment with bittersweetness, regret with nostalgia. Even his saddest songs contain the implicit bromide that life goes on.
Here, things feel less reassuring, more open-ended. Several of the album’s songs—“Street Angel,” “In a Parade,” “The Werewolf”—are bemused and overstuffed, rickshaw rides down busy, unfamiliar streets with people you can’t quite get a read on. Even the album’s friendliest moment, a light, West African-style folksong called “Cool Papa Bell,” is shadowed by lines about “the thrill you feel when evil dreams come true.” (It also contains Simon’s most convincing use of the word “fuck” yet.) Here, Simon’s voice—always boyish, always a little bit distracted—takes on the ominous warmth of Albert Brooks in Drive, who isn’t slitting your wrist until he is.
The shift here is from wisdom to prophecy, from certainty to contingency. Musically, it’s his most adventurous album since Graceland, filed with strange rhythmic kinks and a junkyard’s worth of barely identifiable sounds. Simon’s appropriation of new styles has often had the unfortunate effect of making it seem like he’s domesticating them, making them palatable for the king’s court. (This was, of course, a big debate around Graceland.) Here, he gets as close as he’s ever been to the romantic ideal of kids gathered on a corner banging on what they found in the alley, or of the weird old guy bumping down the road in a wooden cart filled with treasures unknown, from the chimes of “The Clock” and the accidental ambience of “In the Garden of Edie” to the vocal sample on “Street Angel,” flipped and processed to make it sound like a clogged drain. (The sample comes from the Golden Gate Quartet, a proto-gospel group who Simon also sampled on So Beautiful or So What, and who invented what in my estimation is the safest anti-depressant on the market.)
Simon has claimed inspiration in part from the American composer Harry Partch, who envisioned a scale that broke up the customary 12 tones into 43, creating slippages and interstices and little gradations of sound that might seem like dissonance to Western ears but that have an oblique, mysterious beauty. Simon borrows a couple of Partch’s homemade instruments here—the zoomoozophone, the chromelodeon—but also borrows a little of his spirit, of a transient life, of quick fixes and no clear plan. My favorite lyrics sound thrillingly unwritten, raw footage of wit in action. Consider it a corrective to a career of smoothing things over: Stranger to Stranger is unpasteurized, mongrel music.
Simon has always been subject to criticism for a certain kind of exceptionalism. Two of his biggest songs, “I Am a Rock” and “Sounds of Silence,” deal with characters who wear their alienation like badges, dark lords of their own personal libraries left with no choice but to turn their faces heroically away from the sheeple who surround them. This was a guy who responded to the news of his partner going to work on a movie in Mexico by writing a song called “The Only Living Boy in New York,” never mind the other 6 million people living there.
As his career wore on, the alienation mellowed into casual arrogance. By 1983’s Hearts and Bones, which Simon himself has acknowledged as an artistic dead-end, he had become the kind of guy who shows up at the party but never has a good time, bored by life but willing to smirk at it, who thinks he’s better than you but is too polite to say so.
We see some of that guy on Stranger, just as we see him on every Paul Simon album—that’s part of what makes it a Paul Simon album. The musician on “Wristband,” for example, who draws an analogy between his own frustrations getting back into the VIP area and what poor people must feel on the brink of a riot. Personally, I see it as satire, the portrait of someone who has mostly lost touch with reality but still has to answer to it eventually. My guess is many will see it as condescension.
Then again, pop has always been nicer to artists who portray struggle than relative ease, more welcoming of emotional engagement than emotional detachment, and increasingly hostile both to intelligence and ambiguity. Simon is all these supposedly bad things and worse. For every one of him, there are 10 guys waiting to stuff him into a locker—that’s how it is, and probably how it’ll always be. “It turns out to be a great thing for me, I don’t worry/I don’t think,” he sings at the beginning of “Cool Papa Bell.” “Because it’s not my job to worry or to think. Not me. I’m more like—every day I’m here I’m grateful.” Anyone familiar with Simon's music knows he must be talking about someone else; his genius is being able to sell the line anyway. | 2016-06-09T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-06-09T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Concord | June 9, 2016 | 7.2 | caecc527-0211-4a31-ab02-4f9cdf534788 | Mike Powell | https://pitchfork.com/staff/mike-powell/ | null |
The British rapper’s third album is likely to be his most polarizing: He trades rapping and electronic beats for ballads and rage rock. The results are largely underwhelming. | The British rapper’s third album is likely to be his most polarizing: He trades rapping and electronic beats for ballads and rage rock. The results are largely underwhelming. | Slowthai: Ugly | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/slowthai-ugly/ | Ugly | Good luck trying to ignore Slowthai. Over the course of his short yet eventful career, the British rapper has never shied away from bold choices, audacious pronouncements, or confrontational antics. He’s the type of guy who can walk into an awards show as the “hero of the year” and become the most hated man in the room by the time he’s escorted offstage by security. This antagonistic stance hasn’t just made headlines, though: From the moment he dropped the hard-nosed “T N Biscuits” in 2018, it was clear Slowthai would become one of the biggest personalities in English rap. He was quickly named the “voice of a generation” (he seems to prefer “Brexit bandit”) after dropping his debut album, 2019’s Nothing Great About Britain, which addressed the UK’s overlapping political crises through street-level tales. The follow-up, 2021’s TYRON, felt like an intentional retreat—more personal, less political—though it was unusually focused for a double album and only served to fortify his fanbase. With album three, the rapper born Tyron Frampton squares up for a fight with that very fanbase. What better way to upset rap fans than with a rock record?
Two caveats worth mentioning about Ugly: The record doesn’t abandon beat music entirely, and there’s plenty of precedent for Slowthai’s detour into rock. He was one of the first British rappers to embrace the blown-out, aggressive sounds of SoundCloud rap, a movement with plenty of punk in its DNA. He’s peppered his albums with throbbing post-punk instrumentals, jumped on stage with IDLES, and even covered Elliott Smith (poorly). So while the kids moshing at his shows won’t be scandalized to hear guitars on these songs, they may be surprised by the album’s overall shape. Ugly features as much singing as rapping, a number of slower ballads, and little of the grimy futurism that defined Slowthai’s compelling early work.
Slowthai takes a lot of big swings on Ugly and a few of his experiments connect. Album opener “Yum” is the closest thing here to a traditional Slowthai song and its bacchanalian subject matter (“I won’t stop ’til I’m in a coma”) and industrial gallop play to his strengths. “Feel Good” aims for the dumb fun of mall punk and hits the mark with chipmunk vocals, a bouncy bassline, and a repetitive chorus. “Sooner” splits the difference between synth-pop and sock hop: The jaunty instrumental undercuts Slowthai’s self-deprecating muttering and lends the album some welcome verve.
As a rapper, Slowthai has plenty of technical ability and charisma but the same can’t be said for his singing. One of his signature moves is to change the pitch of his voice mid-line, a trick that makes for an unmistakable rap delivery but sounds like poor pitch coming from a singer. The result is that many of the songs on Ugly feel almost like karaoke performances. “Falling” aims for Pixies but is sorely missing Black Francis’ impassioned mania (the title track, which features Irish post-punks Fontaines D.C., pulls off this sound more successfully). “Tourniquet” answers a question no one asked: What would a Radiohead ballad sound like with hardcore vocals? “Never Again'' weaves a tale about a chance encounter with an ex that ends in tragedy—it’s clearly meant to be the record’s poignant centerpiece. But the song, which features choruses sung by Ethan P. Flynn and verses rapped by Slowthai, feels disjointed and awkward, like an imaginary, shelved collaboration between David Bowie and Mike Skinner.
Ugly’s worst song isn’t even a rock song. On “Fuck It Puppet,” Slowthai contorts his voice into various shapes while rapping over a dry, boom-bap beat. But the song’s conceit—Slowthai engaging in a shouting match with the suicidal voice in his head—brings to mind his least flattering comparison: Eminem. In the years following Slowthai’s debut, SoundCloud rap mutated into “rage rap,” a subgenre that dials up the (almost exclusively) male aggression in a manner that’s clearly indebted to Slim Shady. But that sound is now already past its sell-by date and its principal architects are moving on. It would be perfect timing for an artist as thoughtful as Slowthai to interrogate or at least complicate rap’s infatuation with male anger. Instead, on songs like “Fuck It Puppet,” he just lets the rage flow.
This lack of vision is what makes Ugly so disappointing. Slowthai’s work as a rapper is far more dynamic and vital; there’s no real sense for why these songs needed to be rock songs. On Nothing Great About Britain, Slowthai’s anger—against institutions, injustices, and his own rough upbringing—felt righteous and representational. Here it feels vague and nihilistic (“I’m sick of thinking there’s a reason I’m here/We’re just puppets in a simulation,” he muses on “Ugly”), far less nuanced than the reflective bars on 2021’s TYRON. It’s possible to make heavy music that directs its anger toward worthy targets, tackles introspection with maturity, or doesn’t rely on rage for catharsis at all. Ugly sounds like something far less interesting: the sort of generically angsty guitar music that only a ’90s major label executive could love. | 2023-03-08T00:02:00.000-05:00 | 2023-03-08T00:02:00.000-05:00 | Rap | Method / Interscope | March 8, 2023 | 5.5 | caf5e24c-e878-4306-a1f8-0f06cda02f03 | Mehan Jayasuriya | https://pitchfork.com/staff/mehan-jayasuriya/ | |
For 1980’s End of the Century, the Ramones abandoned their tough, fast and loud dynamic to work with Phil Spector. It was one of the oddest pairings in punk history. | For 1980’s End of the Century, the Ramones abandoned their tough, fast and loud dynamic to work with Phil Spector. It was one of the oddest pairings in punk history. | Ramones: End of the Century | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22291-end-of-the-century/ | End of the Century | The Ramones’ debut 1976 album was a perfect, explosive introduction. The Queens band stripped rock‘n’roll back to the studs with powerful, fucked up songs about huffing glue, Nazis falling in love, and bat fights. It didn’t chart well in the U.S., but they had a cult following, and when they toured England, Johnny Rotten and Joe Strummer showed up. Two more classics followed: Leave Home and Rocket to Russia. With just three albums, the Ramones canon was strong and their formula was unwavering. This was punk's ground zero.
Then, Tommy Ramone resigned as the band’s drummer—life on the road wasn’t treating him well—and decided to do what he did best: produce Ramones albums. With Marky Ramone behind the kit and Tommy behind the boards, they made 1978’s Road to Ruin. For all its high points, it was their weakest effort and biggest commercial flop to date. Contemporaries like the Talking Heads and the Clash were about to reach new heights; the Ramones decided that a change was in order. For 1980’s End of the Century, they dumped Tommy—their guiding hand in the studio since day one—and hired Phil Spector.
Consider that for a minute—the beacons of rock‘n’roll restraint hired the “wall of sound, little symphonies for the kids” wildcard. Marky Ramone described the producer rolling up to his hotel room with a cape, bodyguard, bottle of kosher wine, and unprompted tirade about the 1966 death of Lenny Bruce. He was an untethered, erratic, odd man, and that’s sugarcoating it heavily. This was the same Phil Spector who kept Ronnie Spector locked in a closet, shot a bullet into the ceiling of John Lennon’s studio, and held a gun to Leonard Cohen’s neck.
It’s amazing to think that anyone would hire him at that point, but they had their reasons: Sales were slipping, Spector persistently offered his services, and their label was willing to pay the legend’s rate. If the Ramones were interested in becoming more popular, why not roll the dice with a guy who made “Be My Baby” and “You’ve Lost That Loving Feeling”?
After he reached his creative and commercial peak in the ’60s, Spector briefly left the business when Ike & Tina Turner’s “River Deep —Mountain High” failed to become a bigger hit. He returned to the game at the request of the Beatles. He was responsible for finishing up Let It Be (to the disdain of Paul McCartney) and co-produced two of the best solo Beatles albums: Plastic Ono Band and All Things Must Pass. There was the aforementioned fraught Leonard Cohen album Death of a Ladies’ Man. His other projects, with their huge production value, weren’t all that visible—records with Cher (including a Nilsson collaboration), Dion, Ronnie Spector, and Darlene Love.
Given his penchant for schmaltz, there was no reason to expect Spector to show interest in punk. But at the urging of close friends Dan and David Kessel (sons of Wrecking Crew legend Barney Kessel and fans of L.A.’s punk scene), Phil saw the Ramones at the Whisky a Go Go in 1977. Every time the Ramones came through L.A. after that, he’d attend their shows, meet them, and give them the same line: “Do you guys wanna be great or good? ‘Cause I’ll make you great.”
Spector’s infatuation with the band definitely made sense. The Ramones were loud, back to basics rock‘n’roll in an era of disco, yacht rock, prog, the Eagles, Journey, Boston, and Kansas. Their song structures were simple and the harmonies were there. Early ’60s pop was a key part of the band’s DNA—some of their first covers were “California Sun,” “Let’s Dance,” and “Surfin’ Bird.” It was gnarly music unafraid of being pretty, and while their nuts-and-bolts songs appealed to Spector, he also loved how irreverent they were. (For reference, ctrl+F the word “fuck” in Spector’s 1969 interview with Rolling Stone—dude had a filthy mouth.)
While Marky Ramone described Spector as a drinking buddy and friend, his bandmates had a far more acrimonious relationship with the producer. Dee Dee and Phil hated each other. The bassist and songwriter was taking lots of sedatives at the time, which may have contributed to his paranoia about Spector’s guns. In his memoir, he told a story about Phil pointing a gun at his heart before forcing the band to stay all night at his house while he sang them “Baby, I Love You.” Marky would later deny stories about the Ramones being threatened or held hostage by Spector, though Dee Dee always remained firm in his account. The drummer confirmed that multiple guns were present throughout the recording process: Spector apparently carried four on his person at any given moment, which doesn’t include what his bodyguards had on them or the turrets mounted to his house.
Johnny, the band’s general who instituted fines for lateness, was not a fan of Spector’s studio perfectionism and verbal abuse. One of the most famous scenes from the album’s sessions transpired when Spector forced Johnny to play the opening chord of “Rock‘n’Roll High School” repeatedly for hours on end. It was an attempt to get the same sustained chord effect from the “Hard Day’s Night” intro, and it was taking forever. This band was used to bashing out albums quickly, and now, they were being asked to draw everything out—to ponder the resonance of every chord. At some point, after appearing to grow increasingly agitated with Johnny’s performance, the producer started laying all of his guns out on a table in the studio. “After he shot that girl, I thought, ‘I’m surprised he didn’t shoot someone every year,’” wrote Johnny.
Joey was clearly the reason why Spector wanted to work with the band at all. Phil loved Joey. The first time Phil met the gangly frontman, he showered him with praise, calling his voice “one in a million.” David Kessel hypothesized that the two hit it off over rock history and their common “New York street-corner” upbringing. Spector would refer to the band as “Joey and the Ramones,” which obviously irked Johnny (who especially hated the producer saying “it’s all you, Joey”). There were private, late night vocal coaching sessions, and at least two different people present for their interactions claimed that Phil saw Joey as “a male Ronnie Spector.” It’s hard to fathom what that means, especially considering Phil’s horrific relationship with Ronnie, but that vague insight helps explain why Joey ended up singing one of the most famous Ronettes songs.
Even with a full understanding of End of the Century’s context, “Baby, I Love You” is jarring. Coming directly off the scorched earth “fight for fun” mercenary basher “Let’s Go,” the B-side of the record opens with this lavish, white gloves string section. Joey’s voice teases, pouts, and pleads; everything feels saccharine. The Ramones had tons of success with ballads in the past. “I Wanna Be Your Boyfriend,” for example—Johnny’s guitar sound was still tough, and Joey’s performance, while sweet, was stiff. Now, assisted by Spector’s wall of sound arrangements and hours of vocal coaching, Joey was singing his heart out—hitting high notes and emoting broadly. No other Ramones appear on the track, which means there’s no Johnny Ramone guitar crunch or nearly-flat Dee Dee Ramone harmonies to offset Joey. It’s all billowing, pillowy softness: wedding music.
It’s the most plain example of Spector’s influence over the band’s sound, and it illustrates his narrow understanding of what made the Ramones great. Yes, Joey Ramone was a treasure whose instrument was unrivaled, and in that sense, Spector was right to try and pull out the best performance from the singer. But his focus on Joey seemed to undercut how he approached the rest of the band, who were readily swapped out with session players. “To this day, I still have no idea how they made the album End of the Century or who actually played bass on it,” Dee Dee quipped in his book.
Several times throughout the record, songs are forced to face the bar set by previous versions. Spector’s “Rock‘n’Roll High School” lives in the shadow of the original Ed Stasium version from the film. Next to the comparably crisp, direct original, Spector’s wall of sound vocal recordings gives the track a soupy, echoing effect—not the ideal soundtrack for Riff Randall blowing up her school. Then, in a move highlighting the band’s status as students of the game, they wrote sequels to Ramones songs. (There are several precedents in rock history for the sequel song: Buddy Holly’s Peggy Sue got married, Lesley Gore got her revenge on Judy, Chubby Checker twisted again like we did last summer, and so forth.) “The Return of Jackie and Judy” is a subpar Ramones song that continues the narrative of a great Ramones song. The same thing happens on “This Ain’t Havana,” which is a goofy, worse flip of “Havana Affair” that’s built around Joey singing the word “banana.”
The Dee Dee and Richard Hell-penned “Chinese Rock” was already recorded, masterfully, by Johnny Thunders and the Heartbreakers in 1977. Early on, Dee Dee’s bandmates rejected the song because they wanted to avoid recording more drug songs. (This begs the question: Why draw the line at Carbona, glue, and daddy’s dope?) When they were picking out songs for End of the Century, the Ramones came around on the song, which makes sense—it’s one of Dee Dee’s best. It’s easily the best example of the band’s old instincts kicking in, as the End of the Century version is faster, heavier, and more frantic than the Heartbreakers’ original. Frantic is a good look for “Chinese Rock,” especially because “everything is in the pawn shop” is a perfect line about living in junkie squalor.
The narrative about End of the Century is convenient if you just look at “Baby, I Love You” and “Chinese Rock”—that the ballads are lousy and the aggressive punk songs rule. It’s not that simple. “Danny Says” is the best song on the album and maybe one of the best ballads in Ramones history. It’s a gentle, beautifully performed song where Joey complains about touring. The thrill of meeting fans at record stores and hearing their songs on the radio is nothing compared to having a full day off. This is the exact zone where the Ramones work best—where sentimentality is cut with cynicism and where Joey’s cooing vocals are met with Johnny’s beefy guitar.
Spector labored for about six months on the album’s mixing, and right to the very end, he was drunk and abusive. Some of his work paid off, with songs like “Do You Remember Rock‘n’Roll Radio?” sounding appropriately enormous and triumphant with its sax skronk, radio announcer, and pulsing organ. Elsewhere, it seems like he was just overthinking it, and in the process, undermining a lot of what made the band powerful to begin with. Throughout “I’m Affected,” there are these big, thunderous drum fills that momentarily eclipse everything else. Where a few chords from Johnny could break up the melody and move the song forward with power and authority, Phil instead opts for a big production moment that swallows the band’s guitar sound. It’s a detail, but one that makes an otherwise powerful band sound feeble.
The Ramones had worked longer and harder on End of the Century than any album before it. They dealt with Spector’s fits, drunken rage, and firearms. Aside from Marky, the band wasn’t excited about the final product. Johnny hated “Baby, I Love You” and talked about how embarrassed he was by the song. The album technically did its intended job—it charted higher than any Ramones record that had come before it. Granted, it peaked at No. 44 and was outshone on the charts by the band's peers (the Clash’s London Calling, Blondie’s Eat to the Beat, etc.)
The album also marked Spector's unofficial retirement; he would stop working in the studio pretty much altogether after the death of John Lennon. His final production credits came on a 2003 Starsailor album, and that same year, he was arrested on suspicion of Lana Clarkson’s murder. He went to prison in 2009. Marky Ramone made an appearance in the courtroom to support his old friend.
It’s a record that sits at an interesting crossroads—the post-Tommy Ramones seeking the guidance of an almost-retired, wildly unpredictable, potentially dangerous Phil Spector. The result is a disorienting album with broad jumps in quality and tone from song to song. Where the first Ramones albums could shift seamlessly from ballad to banger (from “I Wanna Be Your Boyfriend” to “Chain Saw”), End of the Century never seems to find its connective tissue. It had some of the Ramones' flimsiest songs, and too often, key Ramones weren’t involved in their creation.
On “Do You Remember Rock‘n’Roll Radio,” Joey seems to summarize his conversations with Spector—a song about how good rock music used to be. This conceit is where the Ramones lose the narrative. On early efforts, they condensed “California Sun” into a punk rock blast—using the language of the past to create something contemporary and vital. Their cover of “Baby, I Love You” is a museum piece—a pound-for-pound attempt to relive Spector’s golden years. The Ramones even romanticize old Ramones songs, revisiting their own mythology instead of carving out new narratives. “It’s the end, the end of the ’70s,” sang Joey. The Ramones lamented the end of their most unstoppable era, and then they refused to move forward. | 2016-10-23T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-10-23T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Sire | October 23, 2016 | 6.4 | cafd77a6-ca79-48ac-917e-f18d28c40785 | Evan Minsker | https://pitchfork.com/staff/evan-minsker/ | null |
Mirabella Karyanova’s debut EP for Nina Kraviz’s Trip label pairs playful Russian-language vocal manipulation with woozy electronic pop modeled after minimal techno’s trippy specifications. | Mirabella Karyanova’s debut EP for Nina Kraviz’s Trip label pairs playful Russian-language vocal manipulation with woozy electronic pop modeled after minimal techno’s trippy specifications. | Shadowax: nikolai reptile | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/shadowax-nikolai-reptile/ | nikolai reptile | If the shady Russian spies from “Stranger Things”’ telekinetic netherworld made electronic pop, it might sound a little like nikolai reptile, Shadowax’s debut EP for Nina Kraviz’s Trip: mysterious, disorienting, and faintly ridiculous. This is a record that dares you to understand it, safe in the knowledge you will never quite get the measure of its shifting sands.
For some, initial confusion may be shaded by the Russian-language vocals, the work of Mirabella Karyanova, whose recordings as Ishome mix ambience, techno, and IDM. But there is something in nikolai reptile’s wonderful whirl of disorientation that goes beyond language into the very timbre of the voice. The chorus of the brilliantly topsy-turvy title track uses the call and response between a somber, apparently male voice and a clipped female tone as its understated but powerfully sticky hook. “What About Me” wrings maximum discomfort out of a ghostly whistle and stuttering vocal effect; “Ochen” is an exercise in the rhythmic potential of the larynx, with vocal samples clipped, layered, and shifted until they spray like hits from a drum.
This vocal manipulation is reminiscent of Shadowax’s previous excursion on Trip, “I Want to Be a Stewardess,” a sulphurous, coiled highlight of the 2018 compilation Don’t Mess With Cupid, ’Cause Cupid Ain’t Stupid. But where that track built to a frenzy of boiling breakbeats, the first three songs on nikolai reptile are marked by an economy that is comparable to the best minimal techno—yet here that precision is compressed into four-minute pop songs rather than stretched paper-thin over k-hole epics.
These three tracks consist of little more than vocals, bass, and drum machine, each element there because it has to be, rather than for unnecessary effect. Such restraint allows the listener to revel in the brilliance of the individual ingredients Karyanova has assembled: the undulating bass tone on “nikolai reptile” that swarms like a cloud of hungry locusts; the shuffling drum pattern and percussive bass echo on “What About Me”; the gulping kick drum on “Ochen.” Each creates its own sublime, if unlikely, hook; each is just the slightest bit silly, like the best pop music should be.
Just as you think you’re getting to grips with nikolai reptile, though, it changes gear abruptly. Closing track “Mortal Talking” sounds like a mischievous clone of 1990s acid trance: all galloping kick drums, clattering snare rushes, sinus-clearing hi-hats, and spiraling TB-303 lines. Dusted with an inkling of Karyanova’s vocal trickery and rhythmic invention, it’s sufficient to suggest the song belongs on the EP even without a clean connection with the other tracks.
Such a radical left turn may come at the expense of the EP’s overall listenability—my fingers tend to hover over the skip button as “Mortal Talking” comes into view—but after “I Want to Be a Stewardess” and 2018’s A & B EP, where Karyanova covered old-school Russian hip-hop in a skeletal tech style, it only enhances the producer’s burgeoning reputation as a mastermind of beautifully erratic moves. Much like “Stranger Things” itself, nikolai reptile is a brew of unlikely individual ingredients, but its heart bleeds pure pop. | 2019-08-30T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-08-30T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Trip | August 30, 2019 | 7.8 | cb079985-5527-4c7e-b9c7-1443661728a7 | Ben Cardew | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ben-cardew/ | |
The comedian and musician brings his dry absurdity and taste for 1970s singer-songwriters to a novel venture: a fake breakup album. | The comedian and musician brings his dry absurdity and taste for 1970s singer-songwriters to a novel venture: a fake breakup album. | Tim Heidecker: What the Brokenhearted Do... | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/tim-heidecker-what-the-brokenhearted-do/ | What the Brokenhearted Do... | As a singer-songwriter, Tim Heidecker maintains an intimate connection to mankind at its most pathetic. This extends to the most powerful men—his 2017 set of protest songs about the president—to the most mundane. On 2016’s In Glendale, he set music to the kinds of banal stories you reserve for lulls in conversation around people with whom you have very little in common: the time you ran into a celebrity in Los Angeles, that morning when you were too hungover to go into the office. Where Tim Heidecker the comedian is interested in exploding these familiar scenes with surrealism, nihilism, or his trademark is-he-even-kidding-anymore dickish persistence, his songwriting presents adult life in the dry, unromantic scenes it’s mostly filled with. The joke is that there is no joke; start getting used to it.
A breakup album seems like the logical next step for this fascination. It helps that Heidecker’s musical influences—Los Angeles heroes like Randy Newman, Harry Nilsson, and Warren Zevon—are known for making their ugliest thoughts sound clever and sweet. Produced by Foxygen’s Jonathan Rado to sound like the spur-of-the-moment brainstorming session that it probably was, Heidecker’s latest album, What the Brokenhearted Do…, captures vignettes of the newly divorced in all their moments of crisis and stasis. You sense that he sourced his pain from a long history of classic rock bummer anthems, and there’s something inherently entertaining in hearing him carve out a space among them.
Of course, there’s one thing that all those breakup albums have that Heidecker does not: actual heartbreak. He’s been clear about this record being “non-autobiographical.” It was inspired by a rumor spread by right-wing trolls about his wife leaving him, and the pain in the songs rarely feels like more than just a writing prompt. In the place of emotional specificity or raw nerves, he gives us spot-on genre exercises (the On the Beach drag of “Finally Getting Over,” the sunny jangle of “Insomnia”) and a few keyed-in moments of inspiration. “When I Get Up” is an incessantly upbeat pop song that makes a point of going nowhere. As with his brilliant comedy series “On Cinema at the Cinema” and “Decker,” Heidecker’s dry delivery and the seemingly strict template belie how much craft is actually going on under the surface. The pose of rudderlessness and effortlessness, as always, suits him.
Spreading this mood across 11 folk-rock tracks, Heidecker seems to take a “Well, how hard can it be?” approach to songwriting—an openness to cliché, stream-of-consciousness, and the first rhyme that comes to him. It’s a tendency that also shows why he is particularly gifted at parodying (and forecasting) the late-career work of artists like Bob Dylan. (“As great as he is,” Heidecker once observed, “He only has so many moves.”) His own songwriting takes similar short-cuts, as he limits his scope to the immediately visible and moves as swiftly as possible from one idea to the next. In the music video for “When I Get Up,” Heidecker plays himself pitching an elaborately choreographed visual accompaniment, only to be told that the budget is not nearly big enough to accommodate the concept. “We’ll figure something out,” he mutters in defeat, conceding to the low stakes of this type of project as a whole.
Even with its humble aspirations, Brokenhearted makes a compelling case for Heidecker as a musician, beyond his more recognizable creative outlets. His career has long been defined by an instinctual drive to not repeat himself; as soon as one of his ideas starts to gain traction in popular culture, he’s often moved onto something new, in a different medium, with different collaborators. This deep-rooted adventurousness and indifference to popular perception actually aligns him more with fellow indie artists on Jagjaguwar than any comedian he came up with in the ’00s, and by this metric, Brokenhearted is his fullest musical statement yet. In mining songwriting’s most fruitful subject matter for its most unglamorous revelations, Heidecker leads us toward a punchline consistent within his catalog: it’s a breakup album, with all the heart scooped out. | 2019-06-07T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-06-07T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Jagjaguwar | June 7, 2019 | 6.5 | cb10b3d0-5ce9-4e10-ab17-7ea06ab16f07 | Sam Sodomsky | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sam-sodomsky/ | |
The pair’s second record of lo-fi rap collaborations is technically bulletproof, the bars masterfully patterned and relayed with gusto. Still, the songs don’t always fulfill their potential. | The pair’s second record of lo-fi rap collaborations is technically bulletproof, the bars masterfully patterned and relayed with gusto. Still, the songs don’t always fulfill their potential. | Pink Siifu / Fly Anakin: $mokebreak EP | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/pink-siifu-fly-anakin-dollarmokebreak-ep/ | $mokebreak EP | Fly Anakin is a marvel to behold, the kind of lightning-in-a-bottle technician who makes you drop what you’re doing to better absorb his enunciation, syllable placement, and superhuman breath control. Panama Plus, his 2017 outing with fellow Richmond, Virginia rapper Koncept Jack$on and producer Tuamie, was the best sort of scene record, a distinctive DIY showcase for a group of eager upstarts. His Mutant Academy crew has since unleashed a torrent of collaborative tapes, cultivating a spontaneous sound built on rough soul samples. FlySiifu’s, last year’s full-length collaboration between Fly Anakin and Pink Siifu, was one of the collective’s most deconstructed efforts to date, with 22 short, discursive tracks approximating a dorm-room haze.
For his part, Pink Siifu is a trenchant songwriter and a creator of ambitious, genre-fluid concept records. He’s also somewhat enigmatic; his rap delivery is laid-back nearly to the point of abstraction. The contrast between his muted presence and Fly Anakin’s breakneck bars could be a compelling Thunder-and-Lightning routine, but lack of structure made FlySiifu’s hard to pin down. It’s a problem that’s plagued Fly Anakin’s recent work—he’s an unforgettable performer, yet the songs themselves don’t leave much of an impression, with a combination of choppy loops and free-associative bars hanging in dull suspension. Even “Live at the Barbeque” had a hook.
The pair’s 10-track follow-up $mokebreak adds a number of guests to the equation, which helps break the monotony. But often, it’s a case of one step forward and two back. The songs are longer and more lethargic than virtually everything on FlySiifu’s. “3 Dope Boys” and “Remote Relocation” have bright chords and evocative samples, but the marathon verses feel interminable; the Chuck Strangers production “Oatmeal” has a chorus, but, alas, no drums. Fly Anakin in particular sounds compromised by the slackened pace—he’s starting to resemble Pro Zay and SeKwence, a pair of raspy oddballs who until recently were lesser disciples.
With features from Mavi, Yungmorpheus, and Richmond natives 3waySlim and Big Kahuna OG, $mokebreak assembles a pretty staggering amount of talent. These guys are collectively way too good at rapping for the record to be a total letdown, and from a technical perspective it’s bulletproof, the bars masterfully patterned and relayed with gusto. Still, these songs aren’t really about anything—not only are the verses incohesive, the bars themselves feel disjointed. “Tha Divide” is a five-and-a-half-minute mélange of sex raps and battle rhymes; you could transpose practically any of the couplets and it wouldn’t make any difference. One wonders if continuity was yet another casualty of coronavirus, if distance prevented the collaborators from effectively bouncing ideas off each other.
In the wake of Earl Sweatshirt’s Some Rap Songs, a flood of bookish rappers embraced the lo-fi aesthetic, finding the style apt for somber autobiography. Neoclassical acts like Roc Marciano and Griselda have long used one- and two-bar samples as stripped-down templates for colorful theatrics, ensuring their performances remained in the spotlight. But there’s a fine line between minimalism and disregard, and it’s a little perplexing that rappers as meticulous as Siifu and Anakin consistently opt for such anonymous production. At times it feels like a deliberate rejection of frilly gimmicks, their ability to redeem sludgy breakbeats further proof of their brilliance. Just hearing them rhyme is all the proof anyone should need.
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-04-01T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2021-04-01T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Lex | April 1, 2021 | 6.3 | cb1af69b-12a8-4edc-b14b-8060412f10f0 | Pete Tosiello | https://pitchfork.com/staff/pete-tosiello/ | |
Though containing music that goes back to 1985, Music For Installations is hardly a retrospective in any traditional sense. It’s more a whimsical line connecting ideas in Eno's own personal Long Now. | Though containing music that goes back to 1985, Music For Installations is hardly a retrospective in any traditional sense. It’s more a whimsical line connecting ideas in Eno's own personal Long Now. | Brian Eno: Music for Installations | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/brian-eno-music-for-installations/ | Music for Installations | Not long after Brian Eno coined the term “ambient music” in the late 1970s, he generated another Eno-ism with an extended lifespan, one with an appropriately slower dissemination.”I want to be living in a Big Here and a Long Now,” the producer wrote in a notebook. He thought of his then-recent recordings as sound “suspended in an eternal present tense.” Perhaps unconsciously channeling Baba Ram Dass's brand/mantra, Be Here Now, the always-conceptual Eno began to expand his sense of scale. Two decades ago, Eno helped start the Long Now Foundation, working to connect the present moment to the far-extended arc of human history. One project was the 10,000 Year Clock, for which he created patterns for the clock's chimes, each to be rung once and never repeated.
By the mid-’90s, the period representing the general starting point of the six-disc Music for Installations, Eno's “ambient” work had largely fallen under the subtly different rubric “generative” (that is, music that is created according to a system of algorithms, only partly under its maker’s control). Each piece here represents its own individual slice of one possible Long Now, with Eno providing the finely considered coordinates so that the music itself can run infinitely, changing into new patterns like a river or an ocean. Grown from mid-’80s experiments with four tape recorders looping cassettes of differing lengths, Music for Installations contains what are essentially field recordings from a series of different environments, each its own universe. Filled with gorgeous washes of bells and drones and unidentifiable luminous shimmers, deep vibrations moving across widescreen stereo fields, one might imagine them all as separate galleries and vestibules in a vast museum, each filled with light and sound, running constantly as night and day change outside and the seasons pass. Though Music for Installations contains sound created for specific situations and places, as a box set, it might be used to step outside of time.
Of course, a streaming service might still label all of the above as “ambient,” part of the new chill-out economy seemingly driving Spotify to its own kind of generative musak. But what Music for Installations proves beyond a doubt is that, to paraphrase Chevy Chase, he's Brian Eno and they're not. Though containing music that goes back as far as 1985 (”Five Light Paintings”), Music For Installations is hardly a retrospective in any traditional sense. It’s more a whimsical line connecting ideas in Eno's own personal Long Now.
Eno is everywhere and nowhere in this music, much of it not so much performed by him as willed into existence, like a character from a science fiction novel who dreams in sound. On several of the longest pieces, such as the 44-minute 77 Million Paintings, low rolling notes played sparsely at long intervals seem to indicate melodies unfolding too slowly for immediate comprehension, perhaps even direct continuations of the similar motifs from 1978's Ambient 1: Music for Airports. Released in DVD editions in 2006 and 2007, 77 Million Paintings constitutes the audio accompaniment of a generative video program Eno created. As he recounts in the liner notes, when he first set it up, he began to document individual frames of it with a still camera, shooting off some 800 pictures before surrendering to the ephemerality. The feeling of listening to Music for Installations is often similar. Its pieces are beautiful and always different, and yet always the same, generic without losing character.
Much of it is resolutely not chill-out music. The nearly 40-minute piece “I Dormienti” is filled with a ceaseless moving richness that's hard to reconcile with the idea of machine creation. High-frequency electronic tones and clusters of upper register piano notes flutter between percussive samples of vocalist Kyoko Inatome, amid other layers. Composed for a joint installation with the sculptor Mimmo Paladino in the subterranean space beneath London's Roundhouse, the music is perhaps more suited for the kind of contemplation that goes along with quietly freaking the fuck out, an accompaniment to Paladino's haunted work as it was seen in the darkroom, pieces displayed on the floor like strange creatures preserved after a Pompeii-like disaster.
The set's final two discs don't actually contain music for installations, except in ever more conceptual ways. Making Spaces was a CD sold at installations, and little of it feels generative in composition or structure, though the liner notes don't clarify. In the context of the box set, it feels not only like a separate, hidden Eno album of its own, but a brilliant one, demonstrating that Eno is still perfectly capable of seizing the means of production. The nine pieces feel less like spaces and more like the objects inside, sculptures with distinct shapes and boundaries and artistic intentions. The unearthly “New Moons” features a sparsely strummed guitar part with defined chords (and even a bridge), aglow from start to finish, perhaps one haunted vocal away from fitting perfectly onto the song-based album some strata of Eno fans always want dearly. “All the Stars Were Out” contains a background flutter that could equally be the sound of crickets or the flicker of a film projector, but is just one more expressive tone carved out by Brian Eno. Each of the tracks contains its own inventions and deployment of color-forms or unexpected tonal voices or structural turns.
The set-concluding Music for Future Installations, meanwhile, is perhaps the box's cheekiest conceit, music for new places, new situations that haven't yet happened.”I often find it helpful to have an alibi for making a piece of music,” he observes, and the seven discs of Music for Installations might serve many contexts. Music For Airports was never for airports (though it certainly is capable of providing calm inside one), and the function of Music for Installations is wherever the listener might like to install it, less about the purpose of the music and more about the listener's desired level of engagement. But no matter what level of engagement one chooses, Eno will be there, too.
The set's 60-page liner notes are filled with documentation, though it's sometimes unclear which recordings correspond to which installations, if any. More, though, it acts as a Little Red Book of Eno-isms, where he lays out one deeply awesome hot take after another.”I thought of television as a light source rather than a narrative source,” he writes about his video installations, “at that time the most controllable light source that had ever been invented.” (I… had never thought of it like that.) No matter how vibed-out the music may get, there is always the sense of a voice and mind behind it. Even when trying to abdicate the order and arrangement of the notes being played, Eno's control over sound remains at a practically spiritual level. “Eno is God,” ran the early ’80s graffiti, and depending on how you define his domain it might still be true, manifesting in the smallest of breezes and the tiniest of bleeps. | 2018-05-07T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-05-07T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | UMC / Opal | May 7, 2018 | 8 | cb2237f5-640c-4a65-b1bf-24d6536969a9 | Jesse Jarnow | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jesse-jarnow/ | |
On his debut album, the UK producer attempts to shake the shackles of “lo-fi house” in search of a more nuanced understanding of dance-music nostalgia, but he can’t quite escape the shadow of his influences. | On his debut album, the UK producer attempts to shake the shackles of “lo-fi house” in search of a more nuanced understanding of dance-music nostalgia, but he can’t quite escape the shadow of his influences. | Ross From Friends: Family Portrait | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/ross-from-friends-family-portrait/ | Family Portrait | Early in Chris Marker’s freewheeling 1983 film Sans Soleil, an unseen narrator muses: “I will have spent my life trying to understand the function of remembering, which is not the opposite of forgetting, but rather its lining. We do not remember. We rewrite memory much as history is rewritten.” In that light, lo-fi house’s curious way rewriting memories of dance music makes more sense. As nostalgia for electro, breakbeat, and 1990s house continues to infiltrate modern dance music, there’s something quaint about the hazy productions of artists like DJ Seinfeld, DJ Boring, and Ross From Friends. Just as their wince-worthy handles and titles evoke ’90s pop culture, their fuzzy, fussy sound laments the loss of VHS tapes and cassettes. As Ross From Friends (aka Felix Clary Weatherall) put it in one interview: “I do it because I’ve gained a real love for the old-school sound, where it really just sounds worn-out and knackered, and it’s got a lot of character. Everything’s very crushed and compressed.”
Yearning for eras beyond their reach is the bane of most dance fans’ existence, whether they missed out on the Paradise Garage, the Second Summer of Love, or a warehouse show last weekend. But with Family Portrait, Weatherall’s Brainfeeder full-length debut, he also pines for something else from the past: his own parents’ courtship and relationship to dance music. His father built his own soundsystem in the late 1980s, staging hi-NRG dance parties at various squats around London before embarking on a European trip with a friend of a friend who would one day become Weatherall’s mother. For Weatherall, then, mining rave history isn’t academic, it’s personal. Still, as he has matured in his productions, Weatherall has created ever more highly textured tracks, moving beyond that “old-school sound” for something denser and more contemporary. But with all of Ross’ attention to detail on Family Portrait, sometimes the tracks don’t fully cohere or else their sentiment feels half-baked.
Playing contrasting textures off each other makes for some strong highlights. “Project Cybersyn” twines digital chirrups and underwater gurgles; the drums sound like thumping on wet cardboard, and the track feels both sleek and soggy all at once. And that’s before Weatherall deftly slots some ’80s saxophone into the mix. At a time when woeful thinkpieces posit the saxophone as a corny novelty, Weatherall thankfully doesn’t deploy it with a wink; instead, he makes the most of its piercing timbre. “Parallel Sequence” also pulls from curiously textured sounds—a dinky distorted melody, a beat that sounds like it’s sculpted out of ice crystals—to create a poppy confection as the end result.
Too often, though, Weatherall’s intricately layered details just don’t add up, leaving elements stacked up for the sake of it. There are high-pitched squeals, quadruple-time toms, and misty synth washes all in play on “Pale Blue Dot,” but rather than blending, they ultimately cancel one another out. The tropical lilt of “The Knife” shows off Weatherall’s knack for crafting catchy earworms, but his heavy-handed way with the filter scatters the drama rather than heightening it.
In looking back on electronic music’s history, Ross From Friends emulates some of its finest practitioners, albeit imperfectly. The slow, shaken bells on the title track bring to mind Four Tet’s Rounds, but without the same sort of wistfulness. And while Weatherall conjures the eerie, childlike chimes and subliminal whispers of Boards of Canada on “R.A.T.S.,” he can’t quite pull off their sense of the uncanny. Worse still, “Wear Me Down” attempts to do Burial as a paint-by-numbers exercise: There’s a spectral vocal sample ribboning through the track, muffled and distorted programming, beats that accelerate and then dissipate, heaps of negative space haunting it all. But despite such surface qualities, Weatherall doesn’t come close to his inspiration’s heart-quickening depths. It’s moments like these that lead you to wonder just what Ross From Friends’ core sound actually is. Family Portrait dreams big, yet doesn’t dig beneath the surface of these memories. Too often, we’re left with the lining. | 2018-07-28T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-07-28T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Brainfeeder | July 28, 2018 | 6.5 | cb2e8ea1-60bd-4d15-a8aa-140861fc5809 | Andy Beta | https://pitchfork.com/staff/andy-beta/ | |
Like a distant Canadian cousin of Blitzen Trapper, this Montreal three-piece spins shaggy songs into expansive, genre-bending symphonies. | Like a distant Canadian cousin of Blitzen Trapper, this Montreal three-piece spins shaggy songs into expansive, genre-bending symphonies. | Plants and Animals: Parc Avenue | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/11201-parc-avenue/ | Parc Avenue | Montreal's music scene is like a clown car: just when you think it couldn't possibly have room to contain any more talent, some more emerge. The City of Saints can already lay claim to Billboard chart-toppers (Arcade Fire), Polaris Prize winners (Patrick Watson), punky Francophone ambassadors (We Are Wolves), no-wave revivalists (Les George Leningrad), noise rockers (AIDS Wolf), rappers (Gage), electro-funk party-starters (Chromeo) worldly indie pranksters (Islands), plus all the members of Wolf Parade and their many side projects. And now it can add ambitious, sun-baked trio Plants And Animals to the ranks of its growing community of celebrated musicians.
Like a distant Canadian cousin of Blitzen Trapper, this three-piece spins shaggy songs into expansive, genre-bending symphonies. And though last year's too-brief * With/Avec* EP hinted at Plants and Animals' expansiveness, it didn't fully prepare listeners for Parc Avenue, a sprawling collection of rootsy melodies, majestic arrangements, and classic rock riffs that owes as much to jam-band psychedelia and it does to delicately orchestrated chamber-folk.
The album kicks off with "Bye Bye Bye", which sounds, initially, like a Coldplay ballad led by Neil Young. But, mere seconds into the song, it explodes into a choral epic built on a foundation of jaunty pianos and embellished with plangent autoharp runs and bursts of stately brass. Tellingly, the track's infectious climax is more satisfying because it comes in fits and starts, its anthemic build interrupted several times by quiet interludes of noodley folk.
That, in short, is Plants And Animals. They offer up explosive, Polyphonic Spree-sized choir choruses, 1970s AM radio guitars, cozy folk balladry, and rambling stoner boogie-often in the course of one song-- and switch between them with little warning. Many of their songs clock in at over five minutes long, but that's all the better for them to pick up steam, stylistically mutate, or expand. "Faerie Dance", which also appeared on the EP, explores multiple genres and tempos within its seven-minute run. Its dreamy opening is marked by ethereal backing vocals, but then gives way to a wiry, disorienting guitar melody that churns in opposition to melodramatic strings. Just when you've given in to its post-rock vertigo, a lackadaisically strummed guitar pushes the tune into slacker-blues territory à la * Mellow Gold*. Likewise, the album's centerpiece, "Mercy", marries a Phish-like guitar vamp and jazzy, cymbal-heavy drumming to Go-Team!-ish cheerleader chants and handclaps. Saxophone belches add some welcome hard-edges to the loosey-goosey jam, and singer Warren Spicer offers, as counterpoint to the chipper cheering, a growling Sean Connery impression.
Spicer's lithe tenor, in fact, proves malleable over the course of the album, adapting to dispassionate talk-singing, raggedy country warbling, and arty, dramatic vibrato. His Beck impersonation on "Faerie Dance" is followed by "Feedback in the Field", on which he cops a convincing Tom Petty accent ("Somethin' in the air to-nye-ite"). "New Kind of Love" begins like a spare Iron & Wine ballad, but builds to theatrical, Arcade Fire levels of orchestral splendor. And on "Sea Shanty"-- which starts out like Ryan Adams' "Amy", minus the confessional self-pity, and evolves into meandering Lynyrd Skynyrd-style Southern rock-- Spicer is able to affect a honeyed croon.
From its scrawled, lower-case liner notes (complete with mistakes and cross-outs) to its sound, everything about Parc Avenue feels homemade. Its analog recording, which took place, in part, in Spicer's apartment, crackles with warmth and intimacy, and because the guest artists who fill out these orchestrations (including Arcade Fire/Bell Orchestre's Sarah Neufeld) are friends of the band, a sense of camaraderie prevails. Plants and Animals may not be the first band to put Montreal on the musical map, but, with this album's there's-no-place-like-home vibe, they are certainly the first to celebrate it so warmly. | 2008-03-13T02:00:02.000-04:00 | 2008-03-13T02:00:02.000-04:00 | Rock | Secret City | March 13, 2008 | 8 | cb326a5c-793e-4d47-86ae-82c65fae47c6 | Pitchfork | null |
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One of the leading drone artists of recent years offers this massive, two-hour, 12-song cycle of drones and textures. | One of the leading drone artists of recent years offers this massive, two-hour, 12-song cycle of drones and textures. | Kyle Bobby Dunn: A Young Person's Guide to Kyle Bobby Dunn | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/14946-a-young-persons-guide-to-kyle-bobby-dunn/ | A Young Person's Guide to Kyle Bobby Dunn | To picture the effect of the music on A Young Person's Guide to Kyle Bobby Dunn, close your eyes and imagine that you're driving across Antarctica. You begin on a flat, white plain, and you watch the landscape go by. It's so unchanging, it's hypnotizing, and you notice changes only when you look away for a second and then refocus. The ground gets rougher, maybe slopes. Something appears on the horizon, mountains in the distance. The angle of the sun changes, and with it the quality of the light. It's actually that last bit that is closest to the experience Dunn provides on his best extended works. If you were to watch the same spot on the ground all day, its appearance would vary greatly over time, but not in such a way that you'd register the changes as distinct moments when something was suddenly different.
It may seem as though I'm comparing listening to his music to watching paint dry (and to some people, that's probably what the glacially shifting 17-minute drone "Butel" will seem like), but it really is interesting, involving music for fans of ambient drone. The sound sources for this music are brass, strings, and guitar, plus piano on a couple of short tracks, but it's hard to distinguish which source you're hearing at any given time because Dunn uses a computer to thoroughly distend, reshape, and smear these sounds until they result in new timbres of his own creation.
Four of the 12 pieces on Young Person's Guide originally appeared on the download-only album Fervency (the "young person's guide" title of this release seems like a self-conscious joke about our instant-archive culture, and may also be a King Crimson reference), and they're here inserted into a massive, two-hour, 12-song cycle of drones and textures. The eight extra tracks are from the same sessions that produced Fervency, and they are far from padding. I think this actually works better than that album precisely because of its much longer running time, and the shorter, more active pieces on the entirely new second disc help balance the longest, stillest tracks. There is a certain element to this supremely patient music that requires immersion for the listener to really draw maximum satisfaction from it, and positioning these four familiar tracks as a much more expansive work accomplishes that. Think Stars of the Lid's sprawling double-disc albums for a point of comparison.
I don't think Dunn's work here will do much to pull in listeners who haven't enjoyed drone music in the past-- it's too committed to the form and takes stasis too seriously for that-- but for drone fans this stuff is catnip. On the second disc especially, the injection of muted broadcast samples and rougher textures offers a welcome evolution of Dunn's style, one that he's also tentatively explored on the Rural Route No. 2 EP. As an expansion of Fervency, Young Person's Guide fills in what in hindsight was a very incomplete picture of where Dunn was as an artist during the recording, and in the process becomes his definitive statement so far. | 2011-01-12T01:00:04.000-05:00 | 2011-01-12T01:00:04.000-05:00 | Rock | Low Point | January 12, 2011 | 7.5 | cb34ec08-95fc-412d-aad7-27969e507a59 | Joe Tangari | https://pitchfork.com/staff/joe-tangari/ | null |
The Brooklyn rapper’s official debut is focused on creating the type of inoffensive watered-down drill that would make a certain mayor happy. | The Brooklyn rapper’s official debut is focused on creating the type of inoffensive watered-down drill that would make a certain mayor happy. | Fivio Foreign: B.I.B.L.E. | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/fivio-foreign-bible/ | B.I.B.L.E. | If a politician in Chicago, the UK, or New York is craving attention, an easy way to get it is to declare war on drill. Enter Eric Adams, New York’s new photo-op thirsty mayor, who earlier this year, claimed his son, who works at Roc Nation, showed him drill videos, and the “displaying of guns, violence” left him disturbed. In response, Mayor Adams said his new goal was to get the subgenre banned from social media platforms, blaming the style for deeply rooted issues he’d rather ignore and using recent deaths of drill rappers like Chii Wvttz and TDott Woo as mere props. Of course, after erasing all nuance, Adams moved on once he got the attention he really wanted when a picture of himself alongside New York rap staples and popular drill stars went viral.
In the photo, seated to the right of Adams is Fivio Foreign, the popular East Flatbush, Brooklyn rapper who’s become the unofficial spokesperson for New York’s take on the Chicago-born style. It’s not because his music is particularly that great, though he’s had some incredibly memorable moments: the 2019 ad-lib barrage “Big Drip” is one of the most fun hits of Brooklyn drill’s creative apex, and his Funk Flex freestyle and guest verse on Kanye West’s Donda showed off some lyrical chops. But mostly, he’s built himself up by smoothing out the rougher edges of drill and becoming the rapper who artists outside of the subgenre hit up to sprinkle their record with the distinct flavor. Drake did it. Mary J. Blige did it. Nas did it. Kanye did it a couple of times.
Similar to Pop Smoke’s overly polished posthumous albums, Fivio Foreign’s official debut B.I.B.L.E. is completely focused on creating drill with crossover appeal. The idea sounds fine, but too bad the execution is full of boring radio-friendly R&B hooks, samples coasting on nostalgia, and records that sound like drill on the surface but soften the subgenre’s personality. The Destiny’s Child-flipping “What’s My Name” is the most glaring example, clearly influenced by the Bronx’s wave of viral sample-driven drill singles like B Lovee’s “My Everything” and “IYKYK,” but unlike those tracks, Fivio and Queen Naija lean so heavily on the original that they’re damn-near doing karaoke. (Apparently, to clear the sample, Beyoncé left a note to make it less vulgar.) Also added to the list of things nobody ever asked for is Fivio’s romantic side. Pop Smoke pulled it off because he had this slightly melodic delivery that made everything he said sound smooth. I can’t say the same for Fivio. On “Love Songs,” he recruits Ne-Yo for a jarring revamped version of the singer’s 2005 hit “So Sick,” and on the Chlöe-assisted “Hello,” he has the charm of a catcaller as he flirts with a girlfriend by using his catchphrase (“Baby, you viral”).
When he wants to, Fivio can rap pretty well. “On God” may sound like Donda scraps, down to the gospel choir outro and the quiet, moody production, but the way Fivio’s flow tumbles as if he’s kicking a freestyle and can’t stop is hard. “Feel My Struggle” is the best pure drill cut on the album; he gets fairly introspective over AXL’s jumpy bassline. The generic Vory chorus on “Change On Me” could go, but the dramatic hi-hat-fueled buildup sets the stage for Fivio’s breathy delivery.
Besides a handful of catchy verses, though, there aren’t enough standout moments on B.I.B.L.E. The song I can’t get off my mind is the New York homage “City of Gods,” a more annoying variant of “Empire State of Mind,” which was already annoying in its own right. Just downgrade Jay-Z to Fivio; replace a tolerable Alicia Keys hook with a grating one; touch it up with drill’s signature elements like the sputtering drums and gliding 808s; cap it off with Kanye’s weirdly out of place headline-addressing verse. And you have the type of inoffensive watered-down drill that would make Eric Adams happy. | 2022-04-13T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2022-04-13T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Columbia | April 13, 2022 | 5.2 | cb352efb-6a34-4ebf-b023-07f2da9a11d4 | Alphonse Pierre | https://pitchfork.com/staff/alphonse-pierre/ | |
Girlpool's sound gets bigger on their sophomore LP, but Cleo Tucker and Harmony Tividad’s voices still sit center stage in all their vulnerable glory. | Girlpool's sound gets bigger on their sophomore LP, but Cleo Tucker and Harmony Tividad’s voices still sit center stage in all their vulnerable glory. | Girlpool: Powerplant | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/23213-powerplant/ | Powerplant | Outside of their native Los Angeles DIY scene, Girlpool first became known for eerie nursery rhymes about standing up to slutshaming and getting eaten out to American Beauty. Still teenagers, the best friend duo of Cleo Tucker and Harmony Tividad spoke bluntly in dull-knife harmonies and punk primitivism. It was the power of small sounds taking hold. By the arrival of their debut 2015 full-length, Before the World Was Big, their songwriting had turned towards introspection—being young but feeling old, brimming over with equal parts hope and fear, and simply marveling at (to borrow a phrase) how strange it is to be anything at all. With just a guitar, a bass, and two voices, there wasn’t a single place to hide in their music.
Though the intensity of Tucker and Tividad’s bond has always seemed bigger than some percussion and feedback, Girlpool have properly beefed up their sound, recently adding drummer Miles Wintner. In turn, their sophomore LP Powerplant sounds a little more like everyone else, echoing second-wave emo sourness (“Your Heart”), Britpop jangle (“She Goes By”), and classic alt-rock loud-quiet-loudness throughout. But Tucker and Tividad are wise enough not to abandon what makes them distinct—that unsettling magic that exists between them when they sing, the harmonic equivalent of The Shining’s Grady twins. Breeders songs would highlight Kim and Kelley Deal’s telepathic harmonies but were rarely mixed to sound as though the compositions revolved around the voices. Girlpool have fleshed out the music but thankfully, the voice in all its vulnerable forms still sits center stage.
Under the cover of noise, Tucker and Tividad are more comfortable indulging their poetic inclinations. On Before the World Was Big, they would often pair an abstract scene or turn of phrase with tiny mantras (“Do you feel restless when you realize you're alive?” goes their best), before peppering the whole thing with their friends’ names or other lyrical tchotchkes. The proper names and loose imagery remain, but now Girlpool’s lyrics feel less tangible out the gate. The text feels more open to interpretation like, “I know I’m the weekend selling Sunday morning” (from “Kiss and Burn”). Clever one-liners still pop—from, “I’ve had crumbs in a bag in my pocket all week,” on “Corner Store” to, “I faked global warming just to get close to you,” on “It Gets More Blue”—but there’s fewer of them, devoid of Girlpool’s more dogmatic or revealing sensibilities early on.
Certainly there’s less pressure now to hang a song on their lyrics alone. Yet the emotion evoked by their spare words is like crystal behind the fingerpicking that shifts to sludgy feedback, piano lines that add cheery bursts, and drums that fill in around a feast of vocal dissonance. Lead single “123” takes hold about a minute in when Tucker and Tividad start shouting their lines, but it’s a slight drum roll that builds up the stunning, swirling tension just beforehand. “Soup” is the album’s best example of a song that wouldn’t have worked nearly as well on Before the World Was Big; it likely would have been little more than deadpan vocals rising slightly over the course of two minutes, before retreating back to a hopeless whisper about how it turns out life can be a lot. But here when they hit the climax, the guitar lines drop out as they shout, “Can you feel it?” Immediately afterward, a surge of distortion basically answers the question.
In obvious ways, Girlpool’s world has gotten bigger with Powerplant. But the thing about growing up is that the overflowing possibility of it all can make you burrow deeper into personal crevasses, forcing you to consider what you really care about. No longer teenagers, Cleo Tucker and Harmony Tividad seem no less overwhelmed by the world, but their methods for coping have changed. Noise can help. So can a little opacity. What Girlpool seem to crave is a moment just to be, together. “Tell me you are here/I hope I’ll find you/Static somewhere,” Cleo and Harmony sing as the album closes, their voices finally in clear harmony. | 2017-05-12T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-05-12T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Anti- | May 12, 2017 | 8.3 | cb36aafa-fa59-48d5-8ec4-aae5409880ec | Jill Mapes | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jill-mapes/ | null |
The Norwegian avant-gardist’s most atmospheric and filmic album draws on several traditions: vampire movies, the cross-hairs of art and pop, and the lineage of artwork made of menstrual blood. | The Norwegian avant-gardist’s most atmospheric and filmic album draws on several traditions: vampire movies, the cross-hairs of art and pop, and the lineage of artwork made of menstrual blood. | Jenny Hval: Blood Bitch | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22314-blood-bitch/ | Blood Bitch | When the feminist artist Judy Chicago showed her painting Red Flag in 1971, she set the precedent for a subject of art that now has a rich lineage: menstrual blood. Red Flag was a photolithograph that closely depicted a woman removing a used tampon from her vagina. At the time, moon-cycles were so hushed and taboo that Chicago said many people had no idea what they were seeing. Period art has since taken many forms. The disarray of Tracey Emin’s 1998 “My Bed” installation included stained underwear. The 13 abstract canvases of Lani Beloso’s 2010 “Period Piece” were thickly painted with her own blood. And let us not forget, more recently, the punk singer Meredith Graves mixing her blood into the vinyl of Perfect Pussy’s debut record. In 2000, the artist Vanessa Tiegs coined a term for this field: menstrala.
There is a long history of abject art that makes use of corporeal waste. Julia Kristeva articulated this in her book Powers of Horror: “These body fluids, this defilement, this shit are what life withstands... on the part of death,” Kristeva wrote. “There, I am at the border of my condition as a living being.” But period blood is different. According to Kristeva, it “threatens the relationship between the sexes” because it “signifies sexual difference.” And so, in threatening men, the stigmas surrounding menstrala have not waned. This year, the artist Rupi Kaur posted on Instagram a poised self-portrait with a central red stain—and it was twice removed, “accidentally.”
The Norwegian avant-gardist Jenny Hval takes on the possibilities of musical menstrala with Blood Bitch. In an artist’s statement, she called Blood Bitch “an investigation of... blood that is shed naturally... the purest and most powerful, yet most trivial, and most terrifying blood.” With that, Blood Bitch, her sixth album, deliberately enters two other great traditions: vampire movies and—as with all of Hval’s work—the timeless cross-hairs of art and pop.
No contemporary artist sings words like “sublimation,” “clitoris,” or “soft dick rock” with such enveloping elegance or unfettered ease. On Blood Bitch, Hval continues with her subtle deliveries of “abstract romanticism,” “subjectivity,” and “speculum.” Her voice is at once extremely musical and coolly flat; occasionally, she whispers. On “The Great Undressing,” even as Hval makes a cogent metaphor between capitalism and unrequited love (“it never rests”), the yearning in her voice recalls Lana Del Rey. (In 2015, at least once, Hval’s touring troupe of singers, dancers, and performance artists did an unusual cover of “Summertime Sadness” that I will not forget.) Hval’s “Period Piece” weaves melodies like gorgeous latticework as she describes a sterile scene in a gynecologist’s office but turns it into her own personally transcendent experience. “Don’t be afraid,” she beckons, “it’s only blood.”
Collaborating again with noise producer Lasse Marhaug, as on 2015’s Apocalypse, girl, Hval was drawn to reflect on her roots in Norwegian metal (in interviews, the duo have even noted ties between Darkthrone’s black metal classic “Transilvanian Hunger” and Blood Bitch’s lush, rolling penultimate track, “Secret Touch”). Though there are patches of harsh noise to be found, Blood Bitch parallels black metal more by its atmospheric nature, how it feels as though the record is thematically all-gravity and yet physically floating. The arrangements employ repetition, with recurring motifs and menacing synths that move in concentric circles. A subtle siren blare anchors “Female Vampire” and carries over “In the Red,” replete with the sound of incessant panting, as if someone is running in fear. On the former, Hval sings directly of “a strange slow rhythm, not exactly creating a rhythm, in and out of focus, vulnerable,” underscoring the nonlinear textures of Blood Bitch’s sound. At its most featherlight, Hval’s music is still positively saturated with ideas, all pulp, marrow, and (indeed) blood.
Combined with copious interstitials and its horror premise, Blood Bitch is Hval’s most filmic album (which is saying something considering Apocalypse, girl listed characters from Bergman’s Persona in the credits) as well as her most conceptual and surreal work. It’s also slyly hilarious, adding levity to her repertoire. “The Great Undressing” starts with a meta piece in which Hval’s bandmates discuss the record itself—a classic expository scene. (Zia Anger: “What’s this album about, Jenny?” Annie Bielski: “It’s about vampires.” Anger: “No!” Bielski: “Yeah... Well, it’s about more things than that...”) Hval evokes true modern horrors, not just fantastical ones. On “Ritual Awakening,” she sings, “I clutch my phone with my sweaty palm,” soon flipping the object as “the coffin for my heart... It’s so loud/And I get so afraid.” Machines lock us. Whether it’s Anger deeming vampires “so basic!” or Hval singing of “useless algorithms,” Blood Bitch sounds fiercely present.
Blood Bitch is also more a montage than any of Hval’s records. “Untamed Region” includes a sample of the British filmmaker Adam Curtis describing the disorienting power-trip of Russian politics: “It sums up the strange mood of our time,” Curtis says alongside choral sighs, “where nothing makes any coherent sense.” “Untamed Region” moves into a stately passage in which Hval vulnerably and assuredly dissects her own period, touching the blood. More extreme is “The Plague,” which goes from tabla taps to a distressed, vampiric Hval summoning skyward, “I don't know who I am!” It’s all cut with horror organs and absurdist dialogue (“Last night I took my birth control with rosé!”) before ghastly noise bleeds into a faint dancefloor banger. “The Plague” is like a repository of ideas, as if precisely documenting an active mind.
“Conceptual Romance” is Hval’s best and loveliest song, and its genesis point is clear. Hval has often cited Chris Kraus’ 1997 theoretical novel I Love Dick as her favorite book. The text celebrates the interior intellectual life of its narrator, a failed experimental filmmaker, in the context of a peculiar love story—she’s become obsessed with a man named Dick and she writes letters to him. It began one night, when she believed she had “conceptually fucked” him (through conversation). She turns her fixed “infatuation” into an art project. When Hval sings of her “combined failures,” when she sings “I understand infatuation/Rejection/They can connect and become everything/Everything that’s torn up in your life,” it’s like she is writing her own love letter right back to Kraus (which Hval herself affirmed in a recent Wire feature). Hval said she was inspired by karaoke on Apocalypse, girl, and “Conceptual Romance” could be a result. Her most lucid writing casts the spell of dream logic. “Conceptual Romance” is Blood Bitch’s lightening bolt moment, but it throbs with grace, like a procession of clouds.
“Why do people still not get it when we [women] handle vulnerability like philosophy, at some remove?” Kraus writes in I Love Dick. It’s a fine summation of Hval’s music. More than any of the musicians to whom she is often compared (Laurie Anderson, Björk), Hval is a clear disciple of Kraus. On paper, Kraus moves fluidly from reference to reference, dense with ideas; Hval’s music is like this, too, and never more than on Blood Bitch. Like *I Love Dick—*which tends to draw lines, life before reading, life after—it is primarily about female genius and voice. “I need to keep writing because everything else is death,” Hval sings on “The Great Undressing,” “I’m self-sufficient, mad, endlessly producing.” Blood Bitch conveys the visceral euphoria of creation. Blood, it reminds us, is not only a life force—it’s where we begin. | 2016-10-04T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-10-04T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Experimental | Sacred Bones | October 4, 2016 | 8.3 | cb37a394-3064-4fd8-8550-3f31bce15e38 | Jenn Pelly | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jenn-pelly/ | null |
Avant-garde pianist Vicky Chow releases an album full of roving, tense compositions from modern-day composers, blending her traditional piano with blurs of digital effects and percussion. | Avant-garde pianist Vicky Chow releases an album full of roving, tense compositions from modern-day composers, blending her traditional piano with blurs of digital effects and percussion. | Vicky Chow: A O R T A | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22637-a-o-r-t-a/ | A O R T A | Pianist Vicky Chow has been building a discography focused on modern classical sounds ever since completing her studies at Juilliard and the Manhattan School of Music. She appeared on a release from John Zorn’s Tzadik imprint, and interpreted the music of John Cage. More recently, she made a star turn on a Steve Reich album. Though Chow is obviously a virtuoso when it comes to acoustic work, she has also shown an interest in pieces that employ electronics. Her premiere of Reich’s “Piano Counterpoint” required her to play against pre-recorded parts; Chow’s recording of composer Tristan Perich’s Surface Image found the pianist threading notes in between 40 channels of chirping, 1-bit sound.
Due to that resume, it’s hardly a shock to discover that Chow’s sophomore album for the New Amsterdam label involves electro-acoustic setups. A O R T A features pieces from six up-and-coming composers, each of whom pushes the limits of the instrument in some way. Christopher Cerrone’s “Hoyt-Schermerhorn” has an icy profile, at first, as softly played progressions creep slowly into the piano’s highest reaches. But when a rising figure in a low octave is introduced, Chow’s playing communicates the effusive release embedded in those notes (even as the overall harmony remains melancholic). Unusually dense layers of sustain are the product of an electronic patch created by the composer. But even when Cerrone’s digital design asserts itself more clearly—via glitchy, refracted notes—the center of the piece holds.
Another winner is Molly Joyce’s “Rave.” The work starts out sounding anything but exultant, sporting motifs that seem emotionally mismatched. (In the score, Joyce’s description of a tempo as “controlled but on the edge” seems appropriate.) As the composition develops, Joyce’s lines achieve an odd syncopation, and ultimately a sense of balance strong enough to suggest a club-influenced feel.
There is a potent sense of physicality in Chow’s performance of that piece—one which also carries over to Andy Akiho’s “Vick(i/y).” Written for Chow and fellow pianist Vicki Ray, Akiho’s prepared-piano opus stretches the range of the instrument by calling for the direct strumming of strings inside the piano’s body. That technique isn’t a new one. But Akiho’s use of it here serves percussive and melodic ends that prove structurally satisfying, when traditional-sounding lines sprout and shoot away from the modernist opening material.
The rest of the hour-long program isn’t quite on the same level as those compositions, though the pieces are all worth hearing. Jacob Cooper’s “Clifton Gates” is a clever homage to John Adams’s famous minimalist composition “Phrygian Gates.” Jakub Ciupinksi’s four-movement “Morning Tale” has moments of dramatic propulsion. Two movements from Daniel Wohl’s “Aorta” contain the composer’s typical blend of jabbing aggression and dreamy fluidity. Though without a full performance of the work, its impression is necessarily muted. Chow handles these composers’ various electronic setups with grace, never letting the tech overwhelm the particular aesthetic. Arrangement eccentricities aside, the most notable quality of A O R T A is the pianist’s deep, evident investment in these consistently rewarding pieces. | 2016-11-26T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2016-11-26T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Experimental | New Amsterdam | November 26, 2016 | 7.3 | cb3f0a89-73f4-424a-b1d0-13592399a244 | Seth Colter Walls | https://pitchfork.com/staff/seth-colter walls/ | null |
The former Pearl Harbor issues their first LP as Puro Instinct; it needs more headbanging and/or ecstasy. | The former Pearl Harbor issues their first LP as Puro Instinct; it needs more headbanging and/or ecstasy. | Puro Instinct: Headbangers in Ecstasy | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/15089-headbangers-in-ecstasy/ | Headbangers in Ecstasy | If they haven't been already, Puro Instinct, formerly Pearl Harbor, are a profile in your local alt-weekly waiting to happen; a pair of very young sisters (Skylar Kaplan is 16, Piper 23) who dropped high school for independent study and rep second-tier shoegaze influences make for pretty easy copy. But who are they exactly? It's a question that largely goes unanswered on their debut LP, Headbangers in Ecstasy, a record whose most distinguishing quality is the fact that it really doesn't have one: Whether you wish to parlay Puro Instinct into a discussion of precocity or whether they're truly about their Russian cultural references ("Stilyagi" loosely translates to "style hunter," or, if you prefer, "hipster"), Headbangers in Ecstasy won't do anything to get in your way.
Despite the chorused guitars and laggard dream-pop tempos, the facile comparison to fellow L.A. labelmates Best Coast are warranted. Like Crazy for You, there's a hovering sense of simplicity and nostalgia that isn't based in a certain era so much as Southern California, an area that produced Ariel Pink and then unsurprisingly had no involvement whatsoever in chillwave. But the contrast is also pointed, since whereas Best Coast indulged in classic formulae aiming for the radio of beachgoers, Headbangers in Ecstasy is made for poolside lounging-- and as attractive as that sounds, its actually the LP's biggest weakness.
This is the sort of music that is best served by immersion, and the songs are stretched too wide and shallow for you to dive in headfirst. It's pointless to argue whether or not the wafer-thin sound was the best production Puro Instinct could afford at the time considering similarly minded documents like Real Estate or even Beach House cunningly flipped their shoestring budgets, turning stray amp buzz, flubbed takes, and shabby mic settings into positive atmospheric contributors. Meanwhile, Headbangers is distractingly fragile: Skylar's arpeggios and soloing have the pinched treble of early Cure but none of its bite; Piper's unhurried deadpan muddles melodies, begging for more harmonies or reverb for support; and you can hear a bass at points, though its presence is all but theoretical. The "KDOD" radio interludes that pop up sporadically throughout Headbangers in Ecstasy attempt to present the record as a wholly conceived musical experience, but they're every bit as good at jolting you out of the torpor caused by dream-pop nodding off.
And that's a shame considering the occasional strength of the Kaplans' songwriting. The choral harmonies of "Lost at Sea" have a squinting beauty to them. Then there's the curiously hyped "Stilyagi", whose swooning chorus lines are proper Stevie Nicks but fittingly the impact of its major talking points are nearly imperceptible-- Ariel Pink's production is detectable only by the credits, and trying to parse the lyrics will most likely confirm that the title was chosen for its implicit coolness rather than its actual meaning.
But the bigger problem is that the second half of Headbangers takes its structural cues from "Stilyagi", nearly every song sleepwalking through non-committal melodies without either much headbanging or ecstasy. Titles like "California Shakedown" and "Luv Goon" exert an aggressiveness that's aspirational at best considering their owners. You can tell by the intentional garishness of that airbrushed cover that Puro Instinct have both the youth and self-awareness for more promising things, but right now Headbangers in Ecstasy is the image's sonic embodiment: pretty, vacant. | 2011-02-17T01:00:02.000-05:00 | 2011-02-17T01:00:02.000-05:00 | null | Mexican Summer | February 17, 2011 | 5.8 | cb4125fb-4bd4-467c-9449-fb85ea786011 | Ian Cohen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ian-cohen/ | 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 Shakira’s big crossover record that revealed her fascinating, idiosyncratic songwriting and created a rift among her fans. | 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 Shakira’s big crossover record that revealed her fascinating, idiosyncratic songwriting and created a rift among her fans. | Shakira: Laundry Service | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/shakira-laundry-service/ | Laundry Service | In early 2001, Shakira was holed up on a farm in Uruguay, surrounded by her close family and a herd of cows. She’d just spent the last three years touring and performing across Latin America, establishing herself as a pop goddess with a rockera edge. Now she was convalescing in a quieter place, trying to write an album for an English-speaking audience that would somehow preserve the spirit of her trenchant pop-rock—all without forsaking the legion of Latin American fans that made her a pop luminary. It seemed to be an impossible task.
Over the next year, Shakira would confront this challenge head-on, embracing the totality of transition. The video for “Underneath Your Clothes” was the Colombian singer’s self-aware introduction to Anglo audiences. In the opening scene, a thirsty journalist chases after her through the Palace Theater in Los Angeles, her newly blonde—but still tousled—braids silhouetted under an oversized Brixton cap. He asks, “Shakira, Shakira: What’s it like to crossover and sing in English?” The rockera launches into a breathless monologue in Spanish about music’s ability to create a spiritual connection between spectators and performers, about the poetry of music beyond the artificial borders of language. As she walks away, the reporter begs, “Oh, but in English!”
It’s unlikely that such a calculated, performative exchange would appear in a Latinx artist’s English-language debut today. But back then, industry conventions dictated that Shakira be explicit in her approach. As she told MTV’s Making the Video, “I wanted that scene so badly in the video, because it’s something that is daily bread in my life lately.” Today, listeners around the globe are a bit smarter, less receptive to such overt maneuvers when artists are navigating new audiences. But we have only begun to challenge these stale tropes—and question the fantasy of “boom” narratives, where Latinx artists appear and disappear every few years based on their legibility to Anglo audiences.
That clear-eyed intentionality at the beginning of “Underneath Your Clothes” was the crux for her metamorphosis into an international supernova. Long before the Beyoncé collaboration, the World Cup anthem, and the forays into watered-down reggaetón, Shakira Mebarak Ripoll proudly used her versatility in her favor. As she told Colombian daily El Tiempo in 2001, “Fusion offers me the opportunity to remove any type of label people want to place on me. It gives me freedom...I don’t want to be tied to a specific style and become the architect of my own prison.”
She’d learned those lessons the hard way. Her first two albums, recorded as a young teenager and released only in Colombia, were comprised of lackluster, forgettable pop ballads. The records flopped, the former selling less than a thousand copies. At 15, Shaki moved from her hometown of Barranquilla to the capital of Bogotá, enduring an ill-fated stint on a telenovela. While her acting career didn’t pan out, she immersed herself in a wide range of U.S. and British rock styles, like the Cure, Led Zeppelin, and Aerosmith, all while maintaining her childhood love for belly dancing, a product of her Lebanese roots. In 1994, it seemed she’d finally found her calling. She recorded the original song “¿Dónde Estás Corazón??” for the Colombian rock compilation Nuestro Rock; the track’s success led her original record label Sony to allow her to write an entire rock album, which would become Pies Descalzos, released in 1995, followed by ¿Dónde Están Los Ladrones? in 1998. Pies Descalzos sold nearly 4 million copies worldwide, while ¿Dónde Están Los Ladrones? went multi-platinum. Both records spawned international tours and hit singles, securing Shakira’s future as a Latin American pop diva.
The albums also served as harbingers of the mutability of Shakira’s pop identity. On ¿Dónde Están Los Ladrones? executive-produced by her then-manager Emilio Estefan, Shakira smashed up mariachi horns and traditional doumbek drums, developing a reputation as the irreverent leader of Latin American rockeras, one who paraded her trumpeting yodel over songs about heartbreak and allusions to government corruption. Through intimate, rhapsodic lyrics, Shakira captured the attention of clever sadgirls across Latin America and its diaspora. But it was only a matter of time until she’d have to accommodate two legions of fans—one that worshipped her for her candid, political introspection, and another that demanded she conform.
After the release of a Grammy-winning MTV Unplugged album in 2000, Shakira was ready for something new. In early 2000, Freddy DeMann, the force behind Madonna and Michael Jackson’s careers, took over her management. Sony suggested she recruit Gloria Estefan—the pop powerhouse and wife of her ex-manager—to translate the lyrics of ¿Dónde Están Los Ladrones? into an English album for her U.S. debut. All of these maneuvers fell squarely into the pop crossover formula of the early 2000s: appoint a well-known manager in the Anglo world, hire the Estefans to be involved somehow, and record English versions of already wildly popular songs.
But after some tutoring, Shaki grew more comfortable with English, and she called off the translated version of ¿Dónde Están Los Ladrones? to write a brand new collection of songs instead. Though she knew how to speak conversational English, Shakira wanted to cultivate a more literary approach to composition, so she studied the work of Walt Whitman and Leonard Cohen. She spent a year writing at the farm in Uruguay, as well as a rented house in the Bahamas, creating new material that would eventually make its way to Laundry Service.
In the fall of 2001, the album finally saw the light of day. Opener “Objection” is a plea for the collapse of a love triangle, blending B-52’s guitar licks with Argentine tango’s bandoneón. The anti-drug hymn “Poem to a Horse” weaves a fervid horn section with riffs seemingly lifted from a Nirvana B-side. “Te Dejo Madrid” features a gnarly harmonica solo alongside Shakira’s trembling vibrato, which was once described as the “bleating of a goat” by her second-grade classmates. This brand of musical pastiche has garnered Shaki acclaim, but it’s also made her the target of satire. Tracks like “Ready for the Good Times” demonstrate the pitfalls of such collage—a feel-good hook like “I’m ready for the good times/Now that I’m not alone” isn’t enough to redeem the uninspired, disco-laced beat or the sticky chorus.
It is in her meditations on erotic power that Shakira excels. “The One,” “Fool,” and “Underneath Your Clothes” put her diaristic sensibilities on full display. She draws on her own romantic torment, crafting raw paeans to her lover, or heartfelt reflections on surrendering herself to intimacy. Through power ballads and post-grunge vengeance, Shakira empties her body, harnessing anguish and devotion and tracing a blueprint for so many young people’s journeys of femme self-discovery. And while many of these songs iterated on similar ideas, her inimitable warble threaded all of these musical endeavors together, often leaving an even greater imprint in English. Between these album cuts and her hits, Laundry Service is a formidable compendium of Shakira’s sonic and corporeal world.
But it was “Whenever, Wherever” that transformed Shaki. An ode to her then-partner Antonio de la Rúa, the son of the deposed Argentine president, “Whenever, Whenever” immortalized her capacity to appeal to pop and rock audiences alike. The song incorporated Andean instruments like the quena pan flute and charango strings into the pop world, foreshadowing her career as a perennial shapeshifter. The video seemed to air on a loop on MTV; in it, Shakira belly-danced in an earthy halter top, sporting blonde tresses and writhing in the mud—prompting all of us to replicate her moves in our own bedroom mirrors.
The Anglo press had no idea how to parse an artist like Shakira. They drew endless, flimsy comparisons to both Britney Spears and Alanis Morrissette, which confused even Shakira at the time. Her name—Arabic for “full of grace” or “full of gratitude”—produced tongue-in-cheek but abhorrent one-liners. “Shakira, not to be confused with Shaquille O’Neal, ‘Shock the Monkey’ or anything involving your moneymaker or the shaking thereof...” went one Rolling Stone piece; Entertainment Weekly claimed the album was “enough to incite another anti-WTO rally.”
Many publications were preoccupied with Shaki’s lyrical idiosyncrasies. Reviewers described her English-language lyrics as “imponderable,” “odd,” and “curious,” and were disapproving of her eccentric “non sequiturs” and “lyrical clunkers.” Of particular frustration among critics was the couplet, “Lucky that my breasts are small and humble/So you don’t confuse them with mountains” from “Whenever, Wherever.” A 2001 Rolling Stone review stated she sounded “downright silly” in English, claiming that her magic was “lost in translation.”
In the late ’90s and early ’00s, when the careers of artists like Ricky Martin, Jennifer Lopez, and Marc Anthony were in full bloom, it was difficult for Anglo critics to decipher the differences between Latin Americans and U.S.-born Latinos, who grew up speaking and writing in English. Today, this obsessive focus on language feels archaic and embarrassing; the internet has since expanded the boundaries of musical consumption and helped to erode long-held myths around language barriers. But the album’s mixed reception is evocative of the pressures Latinx artists faced 20 years ago. As one reviewer from The Guardian observed, it falls on critics to open themselves up to the lyrical sensibilities of Spanish: “Ripoll is not struggling with the intricacies of English, just expressing herself in a singular and puzzling way. Good for her.” Shaki seemed in on the joke, too; in 2001, she told El Tiempo, “Sometimes I say typical phrases in Spanish in English-language songs, and for Americans, that proves novel and interesting. That makes the process entertaining.”
Despite some lukewarm critical reception, the album fared well commercially, debuting at No. 3 on the Billboard 200. But it also introduced a deeply racialized debate around Shakira’s malleability and authenticity in the pop industry, one that captured tensions and conflicting desires between Latinx, Latin American, and Anglo audiences.
Among her diehard Latin American fans, Laundry Service had its share of detractors. Many labeled her a sellout, claiming her newly blonde hair, transition to English, and new look meant she was abandoning her essence as an incisive rockera and transforming into a whiter, sexier version of herself, one palatable for Anglo audiences. A 2001 story on Shakira for the Los Angeles Times cited a message board in which a fan wrote, “She’s got to dye her hair blond and bare her body—which she said a decent woman would never do—just to succeed in the United States. She doesn’t care about what we’re going through. She just cares about conquering the Anglo market.”
At the time, Shakira dismissed the criticism, telling the Post, “Maybe people think I dyed my hair blond to meet a certain requirement of the Anglo market, but I didn’t. The first time I dyed it, I dyed it red. I just like to go to extremes.” But for the Shaki devotees, Latin America’s pop queen was no longer for the people—she was transforming into somebody else, for somebody else. Like many young women in the music industry before her, Shakira faced constant sexualization and exotification. Anglo audiences no doubt drooled at the sight of a writhing woman with an accent in the “Wherever, Whenever” video. But, as cultural critic Pier Dominguez notes, some have argued Shakira exploited these tropicalizing tropes of Latinas, buying into collective fantasies for greater visibility, even as she put her musical eclecticism on display.
These kinds of authenticity debates are inscribed in the very fabric of pop music (think Madonna and voguing, or Miley Cyrus and twerking, or countless other stars). For decades, white U.S. artists have mined black aesthetics for “creative inspiration,” obstructing their originators from the credit and visibility they deserve. Shakira may have been using the structures of white U.S. pop against itself, but that is hardly subversive—her identity as a white, blonde Latina facilitated her explosive entry into the English-language market. Her whiteness allowed her to play off and against these tropes, particularly through the mediums of movement and dance, furthering her ascent to the upper echelons of pop, where black and brown Latinas were denied access.
Still, Laundry Service helped forge a path for other Latina stars to follow—releasing a mainstream pop album with both Spanish and English-language tracks no longer seemed unthinkable. It also laid the groundwork for Shakira’s legacy as a pop chameleon; every new reinvention, whether it was the electro-pop ditties of She Wolf, the merengue-rock thumpers of Sale El Sol, or the soca-tinged “Waka Waka,” can be traced back to the hybrid vision initiated on Laundry Service.
In 2020, as conversations about equity and representation seep into new pop cultural spheres, listeners might interpret this kind of musical tourism as appropriation. Crossover stories like Shakira’s seem like a relic of the past, a transparent marketing tactic laid bare by the music industry’s ceaseless grind. Even though we exist in an increasingly globalized landscape, we’re still consumed by the same feel-good narratives of cross-cultural exchange, where the mainstream success of a Latinx artist is lauded as an antidote to political and social oppression. Look no further than the collective reception of “Despacito,” which many celebrated as a salve for Latinx communities (excuse me while my eyes roll into the back of my head) in our endlessly xenophobic political climate. Laundry Service exhorts us to rethink the utility of the crossover narrative—who it is designed for and who it liberates, if anyone. | 2020-02-02T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2020-02-02T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Pop/R&B | Epic | February 2, 2020 | 7.6 | cb4997fb-3bf0-4d54-a6d4-0b3cf775a988 | Isabelia Herrera | https://pitchfork.com/staff/isabelia-herrera/ | |
The 80-year-old folk artist returns with an album that is as sparse as prairie grass, even as it teems with a rich, Appalachian greenness. M.C. Taylor of Hiss Golden Messenger produces and contributes, along with Brad and Phil Cook of Megafaun. | The 80-year-old folk artist returns with an album that is as sparse as prairie grass, even as it teems with a rich, Appalachian greenness. M.C. Taylor of Hiss Golden Messenger produces and contributes, along with Brad and Phil Cook of Megafaun. | Alice Gerrard: Follow the Music | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/19660-alice-gerrard-follow-the-music/ | Follow the Music | Alice Gerrard turned 80 this July, and while that shouldn’t necessarily matter when it comes to assessing the singer/banjoist’s new album, Follow the Music, it's worth taking into consideration. Ageism is a real thing in the music world, and that reality is made all the more tragic by the fact that so many of our best artists get better with time. Sadly, ageism is still the safest of all bigotries to harbor; the quest for the new and novel never relents, especially in music. It's ironic, then, that Gerrard is new and novel to most contemporary listeners; despite the fact that she’s been recording for half a century—a discography that includes historic records with Hazel Dickens, such as the duo’s Smithsonian Folkways’ anthology Pioneering Women of Bluegrass—she’s known primarily in folk and bluegrass circles.
Follow the Music might change that, if ever so slightly. The album was produced by M.C. Taylor of Hiss Golden Messenger, who also plays on the record, and Brad and Phil Cook of Megafaun contribute, as well. These are artists whose own work, while never strictly traditional, understands and engages with the folk idiom; that engagement becomes intimate on Follow the Music, but it never creeps into overfamiliar territory. Taylor and the Brothers Cook mostly fade to the background, leaving Gerrard plenty of clear air and open space in which to thrive. Taylor in particular is used to working with legends: As a member of country-rock revivalists the Court & Spark, he enlisted the help of the Byrds’ Gene Parsons (on 2001’s Bless You) and folk-rock icon Linda Thompson (on 2004’s Dead Diamond River).
To Taylor’s credit, you barely know he’s there: Follow the Music is as sparse as prairie grass, even as it teems with a rich, Appalachian greenness. “Bear Me Away” glides on a twangy drone, as much of a plea for release as a surrender to eternity. The metaphysical underpinnings of the album can’t be ignored, nor should they be: this is spiritually harrowing stuff, from the eight-minute, a cappella paean to predatory lonesomeness “The Vulture” to the almost cosmic resignation of “Goodbyes”. Gerrard’s songs cast long shadows; “Wedding Dress” quivers with violin and Gerrard’s spry yet stately banjo, while her similarly arranged reworking of the standard “Boll Weevil” takes on a sinister, at times lascivious symbolism. “I seen a spider runnin' up and down the wall/ He must be going to get his ashes hauled,” she sings, and the potency of those delivered lines is enough to the ruffle the spine.
As strong as Gerrard’s gifts as an instrumentalist remain, it’s her voice that consumes Follow the Music. On the honky-tonk romp “Teardrops Falling in the Snow”, she weaves her narrative through the loping rhythm with an easy yet aching cadence, holding notes until they strain from the weightlessness. That masterful, effortless tension—not to mention her ability to veer from breezy to steely at the drop of a chord—makes the album’s title track as much of a ghostly confession as an abridged autobiography. But it’s “Foolish Lovers Waltz” that draws the ear the closest, a feather-soft shuffle in which Gerrard exhales, “Whirl, twirl, spin faster now/ They know they’ll never fall/ But the piper always plays his tune/ In the foolish lovers waltz”. The arc of youth to adulthood to middle age and beyond is bound up in that whirl, and it’s as close as Gerrard comes to meditating on her own longevity. But it’s enough to make Follow the Music a strong case as to why audiences and artists alike would do well to follow her. | 2014-09-29T02:00:04.000-04:00 | 2014-09-29T02:00:04.000-04:00 | null | Tompkins Square | September 29, 2014 | 7.4 | cb531099-791b-400c-9bff-2c2406b591ad | Jason Heller | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jason-heller/ | null |
The French label Antinote has spent five years carving a niche in the electronic music landscape with a sonically and geographically diverse roster, which this compilation neatly surveys. | The French label Antinote has spent five years carving a niche in the electronic music landscape with a sonically and geographically diverse roster, which this compilation neatly surveys. | Various Artists: Five Years of Loving Notes | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/23329-five-years-of-loving-notes/ | Five Years of Loving Notes | In five years, the Parisian label Antinote has quickly carved out a quirky niche for itself in the electronic music landscape—one that is not beholden to the popular French filter house sound that many still identify with the country. The Antinote catalog might not even scan as dance music, depending on what title you pull from it. The label has included the turbid techno of IUEKE’s Tapes (its first release), the winsome analog twinkle of Syracuse, and the fuzzy boogie of D.K. At times, its sound hearkens back to the Balearic 1980s or else Stereolab during their experimental Duophonic prime and Momus during his Le Grand Magistery years in the 1990s. Antinote’s insouciance with regards to genre applies to borders as well, in that most of its roster hails from outside of France, making for an international cast of eclectic producers.
A wide emotional and genre range from around the world can be most readily grasped on Five Years of Loving Notes, the label’s five-candle cupcake to its fans. The neatly-arranged, 14-track compilation kicks off with the delectable minimal bleep-pop of “+371” from mysterious group Domenique Dumont, who delivers vocals en francais even though the country calling code referenced in the title is for dialing Latvia. Slap bass wobbles around a soft purr, bits of static, and blips from an old dial-up—putting it in company with the likes of Jlin’s “1%” and Laurel Halo’s “Moontalk” for best use of bygone 20th-century telephone noises in 2017.
While Thai-born, Paris-based producer Dang-Khoa Chau has a few releases on the noisy L.I.E.S. imprint, with his D.K. moniker he delivers “Market Session” here, a marimba-laced track that evokes the same smoggy dub as Peaking Lights. Meanwhile Antoine Kogut & Nico Motte’s “Jungle Dweller” is a warped take on 21st-century exotica, right down to canned lion roars and macaw cries. Even stranger is Motte’s own solo track, “Cap De Creus,” which moves at a snail’s pace. Using only finger snaps for a beat and a keyboard set to “door chime,” at first it feels like a West Side Story number set in white sands. But as a synth swells like a sunrise near track’s end, it suddenly turns luminous.
Across a handful of tracks on the back half of the comp, the beats build up some momentum. Leonardo Martelli’s “03 23 (Notte)” brings to mind early Autechre, though the ad nauseam vocal snippet about “25 joints” soon makes it redundant, one of the comp’s few tracks that fails to engage. IUKE’s “Giza” brings to mind his first release for Antinote, which featured tracks rescued from some cassette tapes that the artist (born Gwen Jamois) had stashed in his flat from back in the early ’90s. And while “Giza” is a new production, it still retains that distorted tape feel, a hypnotic throb of drums and claps that sound as if the machine is about to chew up the tape, approaching a breakbeat but never quite getting there.
Düsseldorf artist Tolouse Low Trax—aka Detlef Weinrich, also drummer for long-running band Kreidler—delivers the comp’s most enchanting and irreducible track. A longtime DJ at Dusseldorf’s revered Salon des Amateurs—which Resident Advisor once opined was “where strange music thrives”—Low Trax embodies such strangeness on “Raut.” It’s a low-slung, throbbing, and squelching track that seems to be filled with little metal BBs rattling around at the fringes. “Raut” snakes through dark wave, primitive synth electro, and many other possibilities, never quite beholden to any one sound. Fittingly, the German’s contribution best encapsulates this French label’s unslottable aesthetic. | 2017-06-07T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-06-07T01:00:00.000-04:00 | null | Antinote | June 7, 2017 | 7.6 | cb53b8e2-7b03-4efb-92fb-8beff9079151 | Andy Beta | https://pitchfork.com/staff/andy-beta/ |
Subsets and Splits