alternativeHeadline
stringlengths 2
551
⌀ | description
stringlengths 2
700
⌀ | itemReviewed
stringlengths 6
199
| url
stringlengths 41
209
| headline
stringlengths 1
176
⌀ | reviewBody
stringlengths 1.29k
31.4k
| dateModified
stringlengths 29
29
| datePublished
stringlengths 29
29
| Genre
stringclasses 116
values | Label
stringlengths 1
64
⌀ | Reviewed
stringlengths 11
18
| score
float64 0
10
| id
stringlengths 36
36
| author_name
stringclasses 603
values | author_url
stringclasses 604
values | thumbnailUrl
stringlengths 90
347
⌀ |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Last year, the seminal American composer and arranger put out Arrangements, Vol. 1 on his Bananastan label. He has now reissued 1968's towering Song Cycle, 1972's calypso-themed Discover America, and the 1975 songbook record Clang of the Yankee Reaper. | Last year, the seminal American composer and arranger put out Arrangements, Vol. 1 on his Bananastan label. He has now reissued 1968's towering Song Cycle, 1972's calypso-themed Discover America, and the 1975 songbook record Clang of the Yankee Reaper. | Van Dyke Parks: Song Cycle / Discover America / Clang of the Yankee Reaper | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/16765-song-cycle-discover-america-clang-of-the-yankee-reaper/ | Song Cycle / Discover America / Clang of the Yankee Reaper | If you've heard any of Van Dyke Parks' solo records in your life, your first reaction was likely some variant on "I don't get it." That's okay, you weren't supposed to. At the time of their release (the late 1960s and early 1970s), Parks was part of a crowd of mercurial genius weirdos wandering record-label halls; of this group, Parks could easily have been voted Least Likely to Succeed. (He probably would have volunteered himself for the honor.) The records he issued under his own name had a cheerful Mt. Olympus aura about them: They sat contentedly in rarefied air, budging for no one but graciously welcoming any travelers who hazarded the journey.
Over the ensuing decades, this is where they've remained: known vaguely by reputation, name-checked for erudition, never playing at parties. Every five years or so, some devotee does some of Parks's publicity work for him; Joanna Newsom hired him to orchestrate Ys and spoke with awe of listening repeatedly to Parks' Song Cycle while Ys fermented in her mind. But otherwise, Parks' solo records have always seemed destined to be known more for their influence, celebrated more for the big ideas they dislodged in the minds of others rather than for themselves.
Recently, however, Parks has begun attending to his own solo legacy. Last year, he put out the compilation Arrangements, Vol. 1 on his own Bananastan label; it was a reintroduction of sorts, and a prudent place to begin. Immediately ingratiating and full of pop songs, Arrangements hinted at the knottiness of Parks' vision. Still, as a primer for Song Cycle, Discover America, and Clang of the Yankee Reaper, which Parks has now reissued, Arrangements is adequate only insofar as dipping your toes in a wading pool is preparation for leaping from a cliff into a raging sea.
1968's Song Cycle is the big one, the one with the capital-R Reputation. Perfumed, florid, over-crowded, the album is Parks' attempt to synthesize 100 years' worth of American music on borrowed studio time. The album cost a staggering amount and sold next to nothing; with this gesture, he cemented his artistic reputation and sank his career like a stone. Warner Bros. heralded Song Cycle with a panicky flop-sweat flourish disguised as a marketing campaign.
The standard line on Song Cycle is that it's impenetrable, and it can be. But it depends what you're listening for. If you approach it expecting a tuneful singer-songwriter album, then you're going to be continually deposited on the top of your own head. If, however, you're looking to take a midnight stroll through a Civil War memorabilia museum, where every figurine and placard suddenly springs to life and begins singing, then you'll feel right at home.
Part of Song Cycle's bum rap for seriousness is earned-- the name itself suggests something too weighty to consider itself a mere "album." But once you adjust to its mannerisms, Song Cycle is a freewheeling, often goofy listen, a down-the-rabbit-hole take on American music that reimagines bluegrass on a symphony-hall stage, showtunes up in Appalachia, and the sturm-und-drang rumblings of Romantic-era classical orchestras facing off against a squeezebox. Richard Henderson, in his 33 1/3 book on Song Cycle, called the album "Charles Ives in Groucho Marx's pajamas," and it captures the antic spirit of an album whose working title, before Song Cycle, was "Looney Tunes".
Parks doesn't corral all of this mess so much as rattle around cheerfully inside it. You might get lost in a thicket at some point-- maybe when the orchestra dissolves into pedal-steel guitar, which dissolves into chirping birds on "Palm Desert". Or when "Public Domain" fades out for the fourth or fifth time, or when a wobbly 78 starts playing in the middle of "By the People". But no matter where you are, Parks is ambling just around the corner, like the Cheshire Cat, offering clues. The sixth song on the album is called "Van Dyke Parks": It is a recording of the gospel hymnal "Nearer My God to Thee", accompanied by the sound of rushing water. What could this possibly mean? Would it help to know that "Nearer My God to Thee" is traditionally assumed to be the last song played by the band on the deck of the Titanic? No?
This inscrutable bone-dry wit is as encoded into Parks' music as his evident love of beauty. His singing voice has a peculiar quality; high and sweet and chipper and fey and dripping with ill will, he plays the part of the wiseguy pipsqueak wandering around a grand manor, surveying the grand artifacts with skepticism. He built the place, but to hear him, you would think he not only had nothing to do with the construction but finds the whole display mildly distasteful. The lyrics of Song Cycle are full of starving artists and privation: "Widows face the future/ Factories face the poor," he remarks jauntily on "Widow's Walk". Parks is merely a bohemian with an empty refrigerator; these songs are too nice for him. This tension-- a distrust of finer things, a respect of their power; an appreciation of their beauty, an understanding that the finer things are inherently ridiculous-- gives Song Cycle its melancholy depth, corroding its sheen like acid rain on a sculpture.
After Song Cycle, Parks disappeared back into his arranging work for four years. It wasn't until 1972 that he dared put out another record with his name on the sleeve. Discover America begins, as Song Cycle did, with a brief clip of someone else's music. On Song Cycle, it was Steve Young hollering the bluegrass staple "Black Jack Davy". On Discover America, it is the Trinidadian calypso artist Mighty Sparrow complaining merrily about the perseverance of aging prostitutes in a song called "Jack Palance". (As in "she got a face like.") The song fades out, and a recorded voice blurts in, dryly, "here are all of the natives of Parnassus, Pennsylvania." Whatever Parks learned from the commercial fiasco that was Song Cycle, it wasn't to tone the weirdness down.
The presence of Mighty Sparrow isn't a red herring; Discover America is a Van Dyke Parks calypso record, suffused with wooden marimbas and the cheery ping of steel drums, and overlaid with at least two or three layers of distanced weirdness. Parks treats calypso with the same forensic fascination and trickster spirit he applied to Song Cycle; track four is called "Steelband Music", and Parks uses it as a "Young Person's Guide to the Orchestra" opportunity, asking us eagerly to pay attention to "the prominent notes on the tenor pan." "The Four Mills Brothers", a cover of a Depression-era standard, has more helpful, record-collector advice for us: "The best crooner is Rudi Valli/ But for voice control visit Bing Crosby."
For Parks, discovering America is inseparable from discovering its music. Even more than Song Cycle, Discover America is a vaudevillian stage, across which Parks parades a series of acts. "Occapella" and "Riverboat" are rumpled, mellow Allen Toussaint covers. "Sailin' Shoes", a song written by Little Feat's Lowell George, adopts a ripe, heavy-lidded sway to describe a woman doing a dance "so rhythmically" underneath "a cocaine tree." Parks seems about as unconcerned with the sordid leer of the lyrics here as he does the genteel misogyny of the father-son advice song "Be Careful"; they are all just songs to him, and songs are blameless.
On his following record, 1975's Clang of the Yankee Reaper, the bit players and special guests claim the stage. The album contains only one original Van Dyke Parks composition-- the title track. The rest is a lovely and generously selected songbook record, ranging from the calypso of Mighty Sparrow's "Pass That Stage" and Sandpebbles' "Another Dream" to Irving Caesar's Tin Pan Alley tune "You're a Real Sweetheart". All lovely songs, with lovely performances, but otherwise, it is the least-essential of Parks' first three records. It emerged from his brain, which means it is warped, both structurally and psychologically, but on a scale of more Van Dyke Parks to less, in which Song Cycle is a steep 10 and Discover a more manageable seven, Clang is a mild six. The thrill is in the disorientation, in the genial free fall; Clang offers hardcore seekers of this particular thrill only a gentle breeze in the face.
To accompany these reissues, Van Dyke Parks recently performed a show at London's Barbican Theatre. He opened it with a wisecrack about his career, as if to squirt bug spray at anyone with the nerve to canonize him: "We're here to celebrate anonymity-- what Faulkner called 'the authority of failure,'" he cracked. He said something similar to me, in passing, when I spoke to him briefly a few years ago. The repetition leads me to believe it's something of a cocktail-napkin line for him, a droll quip he's cultivated for dinner parties that suggests a deeper worldview. It may be a defense mechanism, a way of handling an illustrious career overshadowed by rock stars. It may also be a curious kind of armor: Van Dyke Parks, the wag who spoke in tongues. I hope that with the reissuing of these seminal records, that Parks won't have reason to pretend to be anonymous and misunderstood for much longer. | 2012-07-05T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2012-07-05T02:00:01.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | null | July 5, 2012 | 9 | cb5b0bee-68bf-425a-8fba-01ef188f2182 | Jayson Greene | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jayson-greene/ | null |
Arca’s ambitious musical cycle concludes with four albums spanning reggaeton, club experiments, and tender synth lullabies. It’s a slippery, unwieldy, mind-bending collection of sound design that drives home the ur-theme of all her music: transformation. | Arca’s ambitious musical cycle concludes with four albums spanning reggaeton, club experiments, and tender synth lullabies. It’s a slippery, unwieldy, mind-bending collection of sound design that drives home the ur-theme of all her music: transformation. | Arca: KICK ii / KicK iii / kick iiii / kiCK iiiii | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/arca-kick-ii-kick-iii-kick-iiii-kick-iiiii/ | KICK ii / KicK iii / kick iiii / kiCK iiiii | Arca’s music refuses to be contained. From the very beginning, it has thrived on its intractability. Her first two EPs, 2012’s Stretch 1 and Stretch 2, oozed beyond category, harbingers of an elasticity then creeping into the fringes of electronic music. The Venezuelan-born electronic musician was equally cavalier about format: On the 2013 mixtape &&&&& and 2016’s Entrañas, she strung together bewildering assemblages of rhythms and textures into maze-like 25-minute suites; on 2020’s @@@@@, she mapped an even more labyrinthine path through a single-track collage more than an hour long. Later that year, she used an AI to generate 100 versions of her song “Riquiquí.”
She has swung from amoebic abstractions to spleen-crushing club experiments and from tender arias to Kevlar-coated reggaeton, sometimes in the course of a single album. She speaks of her work in terms of quantum states; a proudly nonbinary trans woman, she celebrates her own multiplicity, and as an artist, she revels in the right not to have to choose. It’s right there in the title of &&&&&: andandandandand—not this or that but everything all at once. Four new albums, released across four consecutive days in late November and early December—KICK ii, KicK iii, kick iiii, revealed in a staggered series of announcements over the past couple of months, followed by the surprise kiCK iiiii—offer a sprawling, multidimensional picture of that everythingness.
Last year’s KiCk i heralded a new phase in the Barcelona-based musician’s career. Arca was no stranger to pop music’s periphery, having collaborated early on with Kanye, FKA twigs, and Björk, but KiCk i felt like the first major step toward reinvention as a pop star in her own right. The sound design was cleaner and more pristine; in place of the airy falsetto of 2017’s Arca, her vocals shouldered to the front of the mix, particularly on club-centric songs like “Nonbinary,” “Mequetrefe,” and the Rosalía collaboration “KLK.” Though her rhythms shuddered as violently as ever, they focused more narrowly on reggaeton and trap-influenced grooves. There was no shortage of variety, but it felt as if she had tamed some of the chaos, gotten used to saying “or” instead of “and.” Volumes two through five complicate the picture once again. Their 47 songs testify to Arca’s giddy penchant for excess, and the way the four volumes tangle together reinforce the idea that she is uninterested in following any path for long—even one of her own design.
Outwardly, each volume has its own character, and although those distinctions tend to blur as you go deeper into each disc, KICK ii is generally identifiable as the reggaeton album. Following an eerie, abstract intro in the form of “Doña,” a witchy invocation set to skittering FX, the first three proper songs delve into crisp, clipped percussion arrayed into loping dembow rhythms. All three feel like clear extensions of KiCK i’s “Mequetrefe” and “KLK,” but they also stand on their own: Swimming with plangent synth melodies that recall ’90s trance, they move with an aquaticism that contrasts with Arca’s fiery vocal takes. Variously shouting out Prada heels, her beloved “transformistas,” and the “gringos” and “güeros” throwing bills in the air, Arca cuts a larger-than-life figure bestowed with a voracious desire. (Fellow Barcelona-based Venezuelan expat Cardopusher co-produced all three; Boys Noize also contributed to “Tiro.”) In “Rakata,” she comes off as a metaphysical poet of horny-on-main: “Que me como al mundo ya/Con estas ganas de follar ya” (“I could devour the world now/With this urge to fuck”). It’s worth noting just how funny she can be; repeating the syllable “ya,” she adopts a sing-song tone that bounces like a slow-motion yo-yo. In “Tiro,” she commands listeners’ attention in clipped, staccato tones—“Tacones negros, falda beige/Labios rojos, mira, mírame” (“Black heels, beige dress/Red lips, look, look at me”)—in between reeling off Venezuelan place names, as though she could upend North/South geopolitics by the sheer force of her sexual magnetism.
They’re among the fiercest songs in Arca’s catalog to date. “Luna Llena” and “Lethargy” are slower and sultrier, suffused in Harold Budd-esque piano and processed vocals; the beat of the latter consists of little more than plunging bass and samples of hissing breath. From there, KICK ii fragments into sketch-like mutations; after that initial trio of bangers, the abstract “Araña,” “Femme,” and “Muñecas” feel like three interstitials in a row. Still, the dizzying swirls of piano and voice on “Confianza,” another Cardopusher co-production, show that Arca doesn’t need more than a minute or two to make her mark; the song’s ambient finale might be the most satisfying 30 seconds of music in the whole set, and would have made a fantastic finale to KICK ii. Instead, she follows with “Born Yesterday,” a Sia collab whose belted vocal feels better suited to an EDM topline circa 2011. The shift midway through from glitch beats to turbocharged four-on-the-floor is the rare case where Arca’s maximalist instincts miss the mark.
Where KiCK ii is the (mostly) reggaeton disc, KicK iii is dedicated to experimental club beats influenced by the IDM of Arca’s youth. Pairing the risk-taking instinct of her best music with the swaggering confidence she projects as a kind of cyborg diva, it is the best of all five albums in the set, and one of her strongest full-lengths to date. She comes charging out of the gate on “Bruja,” a bluntly percussive ballroom anthem featuring some of her most audacious lyrics (“Hissy fit throw it up bitch bounce back/Get it wet, pull it, rip it, stroke, tranny cumming hard, till my chochi pulses raw”). As on KICK ii’s most dramatic tracks, her flow—octaves cracking, Rs rolling—overflows with sass. But after the helium-voiced trap/breakbeat hybrid “Incendio,” things quickly turn thrillingly strange once again. “Morbo” rumbles like a bulldozer in a pachinko parlor; “Fiera,” strafed with erratic drum patterns, just barely avoids ripping itself apart, less a song than an avalanche. The chiming “Skullqueen” pays homage to drill’n’bass-era Aphex Twin; a few tracks later, the Max Tundra collaboration “Rubberneck” returns to the waterlogged piano that comprises one of the set’s throughlines, but the springy beat is pure UK bass.
The mind-bending sound design drives home the ur-theme of all Arca’s music: transformation. Synthesized sounds take on the dimensions of real-world objects; acoustic signals like piano or voice transmogrify into iridescent, wormlike shapes. “My 2,” KicK iii’s antepenultimate song, consists mostly of processed vocals that whiz like loosed balloons and bleat like melting kazoos. It’s a swarming, sludgy sound, like a beehive in a tarpit. But the collection’s sheer surfeit of ideas also makes it harder for standout moments like this to rise to the surface. The lurching “Intimate Flesh,” which follows, sounds like something we’ve heard from Arca many times before; its familiarity dulls the senses, which is a shame, because “Joya,” which closes out the set, is one of the best songs of the entire five-volume series. “Te quiero decir/Eres una joya entre los hombres/Siento tanto amor,” she sings in her most clarion falsetto. (“I want to tell you/You are a jewel among men/I feel so much love.”) A spiritual kin to Björk’s “Hyperballad,” it’s one of the most dulcet, heartfelt songs Arca has made, and it deserves more breathing room.
If confidence is the unifying thread of the swaggering KICK ii and KicK iii, tenderness comes to the fore on kick iiii, as Arca takes stock of the changes she has undergone and celebrates the self she has birthed. “Now there was no need to look back/Everything she had was right there inside of her/Beckoning to see,” she announces on kick iiii’s opener, “Whoresong,” her voice a Windex smear over rain-spattered piano. On “Witch,” No Bra’s Susanne Oberbeck croons through Auto-Tune about “merging multiple monsters” over glistening pools of piano. And on “Alien Inside,” Garbage’s Shirley Manson gives a dramatic spoken-word performance over a shoegaze rumble that sounds like Tim Hecker taking a sandblaster to M83. Citing “the first death” and “the last birth”—themes that recur across the album—Manson intones, “The first time you recognize the alien inside/In the face of abject misery/Remember posthuman celestial sparkle/A mutant faith.” “Mutant faith” is not a new concept in Arca’s work; she used the phrase as the title of an improvisational performance piece at New York’s The Shed in 2019. But here, it sounds less like an abstract concept than a supernatural force distilled into sound.
kick iiii contains some of the most contemplative songs in the series—like the Oliver Coates collaboration “Esuna,” a mournful swirl of strings and plaintive vocal harmonies—but the widescreen intensity of “Alien Inside” fuels two more of the set’s boldest songs. “Queer” is a regal, fist-in-the-air anthem set to a gargantuan gothic trap beat. “I got tears, but tears of fire,” Planningtorock sings over titanium synths and bear-trap drums: “Tears of power, tears of power/I got tears like a queer/Queer power.” A protest song in the plainest of terms, it’s one of a few tracks here that feel likely to become fan favorites, even rallying cries. The unequivocal nature of the song’s message combined with its innocent imagery and Yeezus-grade beat are refreshingly original. And on “Lost Woman Found,” Arca leans into her quantum states to sing a song of herself. The melody is soaring, almost melodramatic; the swirls of synth and white noise are forbiddingly dense. Yet her lyrics are as intimate and direct as she’s ever been. After years spent “walking towards the light,” she declares, “I finally have something to say:/You can find out on your own/What it means to be mutant/What it means to recognize the alien inside the abject.”
kiCK iiiii, released without advance notice the day after iiii, is the most understated of the five volumes. “Pu” is a lovely little synthesizer lullaby, like a music box from the future. “Estrogen” is a lyrical piece for harpsichord and reverb, “Ether” a pensive piano etude. The beatless ambient techno of “Amrep” wouldn’t sound out of place alongside early Oneohtrix Point Never. These songs don’t grab you by the lapels; they’re soft and sweet, expressions of intimacy and vulnerability that feel diametrically opposed to the over-the-top visual universe that Arca and Frederik Heyman have devised for the project, with its phantasmagorical dioramas full of two-headed skeletons and sphinx-like sculptures towering over the naked bodies of fallen men. Against the preceding volumes’ most attention-grabbing moments, they may risk getting lost in the shuffle, but perhaps that is part of their charm, too: The whole fifth volume feels like an Easter egg in a video game—a sparkly basket of jewels collected from the crevices of Arca’s more imposingly monumental works.
As Arca’s stature as a cult icon has grown—as her project has become simultaneously more personal and larger-than-life, towering on forbidding prosthetic stilts or colossal plinths—her music has become more idiosyncratic. Her pop collaborations, like the one with Sia, feel less distinctive than most of her work; the bulk of the new albums reflects a protective, hermetic energy, as though she were refocusing her efforts on her own evolution. She speaks of the Arca project in terms of world-building; on the new albums, it’s a world that grows inward, not outward. That can make approaching these four volumes, taken together, a daunting prospect: For all the songs’ evident variety, their repetition of familiar moods and core techniques causes much of the material to blur together.
But the excess is the point. For Arca, part of recognizing “the alien inside” is embracing all parts of herself—“merging multiple monsters” into an unsteady union. Just as KiCk i coincided with her public coming-out as transgender, these albums flesh out the continuing story of her becoming, in all its complexity. Perhaps the best way of approaching the five-volume series is as a single playlist with all 59 tracks on shuffle: a maze-like course obeying no logic but its own, a perpetual process of discovery. As she sings on “Whoresong,” realizing that “everything she had was right there inside of her” all along crystallized a new ability: “To encounter the unknown time and time again/A bloodlust for beauty.” Slippery and unwieldy and all the more fascinating because of it, this collection drips with that messy, scarlet-streaked desire.
Listen to our Best New Music playlist on Spotify and Apple Music. | 2021-12-07T00:00:00.000-05:00 | 2021-12-07T00:00:00.000-05:00 | Experimental | null | December 7, 2021 | 7.4 | cb5c0682-ed11-463a-a9bc-a842a4c4d621 | Philip Sherburne | https://pitchfork.com/staff/philip-sherburne/ | |
The Verve’s blockbuster third album—newly reissued in a five-disc expanded edition—has come to be seen as the swan song for Britpop’s cultural hegemony. But in 1997, it felt like a step forward. | The Verve’s blockbuster third album—newly reissued in a five-disc expanded edition—has come to be seen as the swan song for Britpop’s cultural hegemony. But in 1997, it felt like a step forward. | The Verve: Urban Hymns | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/the-verve-urban-hymns/ | Urban Hymns | By 1997, Britpop’s clashing titans were diverging in sharply different directions—Blur with the discordant experimentalism of their self-titled album, Oasis with the overblown and obvious Be Here Now. That opened up a big lane for Wigan, UK misfits the Verve to swoop in and conquer the nation with their blockbuster third album, Urban Hymns—a record that has come to be seen as the swan song for Britpop’s cultural hegemony, but at the time suggested an intriguing next stage in its evolution. It boasted all the anthemic grandeur of Oasis at their Wembley-baiting best while spinning away from Britpop’s traditional 1960s rock/1970s punk axis for a greater emphasis on lush atmosphere and deep groove. As such, it was the rare Britpop album that could be embraced by those who were turned off by—or had outgrown—the genre’s unabashedly retro indulgences and two-fingers-aloft, cigarettes ‘n’ alcohol hooliganism.
But even when they were on top of the world, the Verve were always on shaky ground. Urban Hymns was the surprise third act for a band that seemed doomed after its second. Their most successful single up to that point—1995’s string-swept ballad “History”—doubled as an epitaph, with the notoriously embattled relationship between frontman Richard Ashcroft and guitarist Nick McCabe triggering the band’s demise just before it snuck into the UK Top 30. Ashcroft, bassist Simon Jones, and drummer Pete Salisbury would swiftly reconvene with a new guitarist (their old school chum Simon Tong) to begin work on a record that, for a time, seemed destined to become an Ashcroft solo release. But the singer quickly realized his vision would be incomplete without McCabe’s six-string sorcery, and after inviting his old foil back into the fold and reformulating the group as a five-piece, the Verve’s comeback narrative was in motion.
However, even with McCabe back at Ashcroft’s side, his hallucinatory guitar squall would prove less of a defining feature. On the Verve’s first two records, McCabe was the engine that rocketed the band to the stratosphere—but on Urban Hymns, the Verve achieve their heady cruising altitude on a cloud-bed of cosmic funk grooves, hip-hop-schooled beat science, and elegant orchestration. Where, in their early days, an ominous ambient piece like “Neon Wilderness” might get stretched out to a 10-minute excursion, on Urban Hymns it functions as a brief, sides-bridging interlude, a foggy flashback to the band they once were. Strobe-lit, wah-wah-splattered jams like “The Rolling People” were now the exceptions rather than the rule.
McCabe’s presence is barely perceptible on the album’s crowning achievement, “Bitter Sweet Symphony,” a glistening, swan-ice-sculpture of a song that injected Britpop with a healthy dose of boom-bap. (Alas, this monster hit wholly lived up to its name when the band was forced to fork over the royalties from their biggest hit to the Rolling Stones and their iron-fisted rights-holder Allen Klein for sampling an orchestral version of “The Last Time” without the proper clearance.) Urban Hymns’ other towering peaks—celestial, lighter-waving sing-alongs like “The Drugs Don’t Work,” “Sonnet,” and “Lucky Man”—likewise use windswept strings and tasteful ambient shading to fill in the space where McCabe’s heavenly storms used to rage.
At the time, Ashcroft was still fueled by enough underdog insolence and the maniacal self-belief that he could make even those soft-rock songs hit hard. Equal parts boho Bono and Jagger swagger, he wasn’t merely content to earn song dedications from Noel Gallagher, he wanted to overtake him at the top of the charts. At the same time, as “The Drugs Don’t Work” unsubtly suggested, he was eager to put his Mad Richard reputation to bed—and for much of Urban Hymns, he sounds less like the barefoot shaman of old and more like someone easing into a pair of slippers.
In the wake of possibly the only British space-rock soap opera in history, Ashcroft had married Spiritualized keyboardist Kate Radley in 1995, and in stark contrast to the psych-jazz meltdowns her ex-boyfriend/bandmate Jason Pierce unleashed on his own 1997 opus, Ladies and Gentleman We Are Floating in Space, the prevailing mood on Urban Hymns is one of sunrise-summoning renewal. The album’s second half is mostly given over to clear-eyed statements of devotion like “Space and Time,” “One Day,” and “Velvet Morning”—the relaxed, contented sound of Britpop entering middle age (the net result of which was a slew of younger bands—Coldplay, Starsailor, et al—who would emerge already sounding like genteel old men). Even when the Verve momentarily revisit their primordial roar on the closing “Come On,” with Ashcroft screaming “fuck you” to no one and everyone, it’s ultimately an expression of joy rather than psychosis.
As this five-disc expanded edition reveals, Urban Hymns could’ve easily wound up an even mellower record. The sessions yielded enough material to fill another album, and for the most part, the Verve made the right calls to hold it back. Many of the Urban Hymns holdovers are less compelling versions of the songs that made the final tracklist: acoustic ballad “So Sister” is “The Drugs Don’t Work” without the dark-night-of-the-soul reckoning; “Echo Bass” and “Three Steps” are medium-heat psych-funk workouts that never reach the roiling boil of “The Rolling People.” (Notable exceptions include “Never Wanna See You Cry,” which makes for a fine “Sonnet II,” and the nocturnal voodoo soul of “Monte Carlo.”) And then there’s the slick, celebratory folk-rock of “This Could Be My Moment,” which even in light of Urban Hymns’ sunnier disposition, represents a swerve into MOR too far.
But if those outtakes present the Verve at their most pedestrian, the wealth of bonus live material here serves to restore some of their formative mysticism. Urban Hymns represented millions of people’s first contact with the Verve, and the band used live appearances to bring the newbies up to speed on their previous travels—like on a 1997 BBC Evening Session where they dip into moody, mercurial versions of A Northern Soul’s “Life’s an Ocean” and ’92 debut-EP cut “A Man Called Sun.” And while including the band’s entire May 1998 set at Wigan’s Haigh Hall (i.e., The Verve’s own Oasis-at-Knebworth moment) plus a whole ’nother disc worth of random live tracks from the era may seem like overkill, the recordings capture a band committed to elevating concerts to holy communions, no matter the venue. Even when the Verve were playing to a thousand or so people at Washington D.C.’s 9:30 Club shortly after Hymns’ release, they were already envisioning the 30,000-plus that would greet them a half-year later in their hometown.
For all the inter- and intra-band drama that fueled its creation, Urban Hymns ultimately centered around a very basic, universal theme: live for the moment and give it all you got, because we’ve only got one shot at this thing called life. It’s a sentiment that would seem terribly cornball and clichéd—if the Verve’s subsequent history didn’t so thoroughly reinforce its veracity. Less than a month after their Haigh Hall coronation, a disgruntled McCabe left the band once again, prior to a North American summer arena tour. What should’ve been a victory lap instead became a funeral procession, with Ashcroft and co. dutifully going through the motions alongside a session-player replacement before calling it a day once again. Of course, as the lyrics to “Bitter Sweet Symphony” attested, the Verve had at that point become well accustomed to life’s cruel twists and unforgiving ironies. Like the resuscitated heart-attack victim who had cheated death once, this was a band that knew it was living on borrowed time. But this collection is a testament to what can happen when you make the most of it. | 2017-09-02T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-09-02T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Virgin | September 2, 2017 | 8.6 | cb629d44-8eec-4c88-a884-f3ac6aad6894 | Stuart Berman | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stuart-berman/ | |
The British rockers’ third album peels away from the talky post-punk pack, emphasizing melody, ramshackle piano, and reflections on friendship. | The British rockers’ third album peels away from the talky post-punk pack, emphasizing melody, ramshackle piano, and reflections on friendship. | Shame: Food for Worms | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/shame-food-for-worms/ | Food for Worms | It’s unlikely that the executives at Adderall manufacturer Teva Pharmaceuticals keep tabs on the UK’s vibrant post-punk scene, but they’ll probably be hearing about Shame soon enough. The South London band’s third and finest album, Food for Worms, reaches an emotional apex on a song called “Adderall,” a wrenching tune about watching a friend “pop and slip away,” consumed by their addiction to prescription drugs. In the bridge, lead singer Charlie Steen’s gruff bark blooms into a hoarse plea fraught with helplessness: “I know it’s not a choice/You open up the doors/Then you hear another voice.” It’s the closest thing to a power ballad these young Brits have made, fueled by a reserve of empathy and catharsis that only fleetingly bubbled to the surface on their previous albums.
Five years ago, Steen and his bandmates were barely out of their teens when the youthful rage of their debut, Songs of Praise, made them darlings of the UK music press. With 2021’s Drunk Tank Pink, they embraced a knottier post-punk sound: spiky rhythms, sprechgesang, free-associative road poems, the works. “We were trying to be too clever,” drummer Charlie Forbes recently reflected. The band was classified with a restless new wave of (mostly) British and Irish post-punk weirdos who talk more than they sing and have cryptic names that sound like military codes—Black Country, New Road; Dry Cleaning; Fontaines D.C.; Squid—but Shame never quite felt a part of that crowd. Their songs had choruses. They chafed at the “post-punk” label; Steen was more influenced by Bob Dylan than Public Image Ltd.
Now, on Food for Worms, their heart-on-sleeve earnestness further distinguishes this band from the detached non-sequiturs of Dry Cleaning’s Florence Shaw or the agitated hysteria of Squid’s Ollie Judge. Recorded live in the studio to better capture their festival-stage energy, the album has a rousing, communal spirit that melts shards of icy post-punk into warmer forms, like the wah-wah psych-rock euphoria of “Six-Pack,” or the roiling frustration of “Yankees,” a sour ballad in which Steen exorcises a deeply toxic relationship (“When you’re down, you bring me down/And that is love, so you say”). “Fingers of Steel,” with its ramshackle piano and tales of twentysomething malaise, is like the Hold Steady for disaffected Brits who like wonky tunings.
The songwriting is the group’s sharpest to date. They can still whip up the staccato panic-attack special (see: “Alibis”), but that’s no longer the main attraction, nor the most compelling material. “Adderall” is the centerpiece of Shame’s newfound spirit of generosity: It doesn’t snuff out the band’s prior intensity, just nudges it in a new direction.
As it happens, “Adderall” is also emblematic of the record’s loose theme: friendship and its discontents. Steen was chatting with a pal after a show when it occurred to him that popular music mostly centers around love, heartbreak, or the self. “There isn’t much about your mates,” he realized. Food for Worms is a corrective, mired in the mid-twenties realization that you can’t always get through to a friend who needs help. “Fingers of Steel” wrings anthemic pain out of this predicament, toggling between empathy and aggravation over a friend’s depression, while “Different Person” evokes the anxiety of watching someone close to you morph beyond recognition. “You say you’re different, but you’re still the same!” Steen yelps, as though desperately trying to convince himself.
Speaking of different, Steen’s vocals have evolved. He barked and talk-sang his way through Drunk Tank Pink, an approach that worked, but which he admitted was borne out of an insecurity with his lack of training. This time, Steen tries something revolutionary: He sings. He hired a vocal coach, who encouraged him to channel vulnerability instead of detachment. So we get surprising standouts like “Orchid,” a stirring, waltz-time ballad in which Steen croons in a dry tenor that’s half Matt Berninger and half Bernard Sumner. It’s another grief-flecked tune that summons the weight of a boyhood friendship grown distant: “I know you hide behind yourself,” Steen repeats. “But I want you back to me.” Food for Worms acutely captures the feeling of taking stock of interpersonal detritus from your formative years and realizing that the relationships you expected to last forever often fade.
If the disaffected talk-singing of the band’s contemporaries evokes isolation—an abstract poet muttering to herself about hot dogs, say—Shame’s new songs are defined by an intrinsic sense of togetherness. Songs like “Fingers of Steel” and “Adderall” are heightened by swelling, call-and-response vocal parts. The LP staggers to a close with the Pogues-like “All the People,” a six-minute singalong of brotherly love. It’s fitting that an album so steeped in the joys and agonies of friendship captures its sounds, too. Food for Worms finishes with a cheerful snippet of studio chatter. Isn’t that the youthful promise of joining a band in the first place—to be surrounded by your best mates day and night; to hope your shared love and creativity never fade? | 2023-02-24T00:03:00.000-05:00 | 2023-02-24T00:03:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Dead Oceans | February 24, 2023 | 7.7 | cb62d29e-2b18-48fa-bed9-e8bb5d35843c | Zach Schonfeld | https://pitchfork.com/staff/zach-schonfeld/ | |
Gucci Mane is conservative when it comes to change, and it takes a few spins through Trap God before the differences between it and past records come into focus. But once they do, they cohere into a portrait of an artist in the midst of an aesthetic metamorphosis. | Gucci Mane is conservative when it comes to change, and it takes a few spins through Trap God before the differences between it and past records come into focus. But once they do, they cohere into a portrait of an artist in the midst of an aesthetic metamorphosis. | Gucci Mane: Trap God | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/17397-trap-god/ | Trap God | It isn't until the 20th and final song on Gucci Mane's third mixtape of the year, Trap God, that you run into a verse based around Gucci making car noises with his mouth. This may seem like an insignificant detail, but in Gucci terms, this marks a major evolutionary event. Facial tattoos notwithstanding, he's cautious and conservative when it comes to change, and it takes a few spins through Trap God before the differences between it and past records come into focus. But once they do, they cohere into a portrait of an artist in the midst of an aesthetic metamorphosis.
Gucci isn't prone to the kind of daring innovations that have made Kanye the rap-game Apple Inc., a market-dominating behemoth who drops a zeitgeist-altering product about once a year. He's more like a niche company that builds devices for hardcore gamers, and offers a larger selection of goods that differ from each other only incrementally, but which aim at satisfying the needs of a more specialist crowd.
And if anything, Gucci's been almost too consistently good at delivering. Ever since he first started getting attention on a national scale in 2009, during an especially prolific period where he put out eight LPs' worth of material in a 12-month span, he could be counted on to release albums, mixtapes, and guest verses at such a blinding rate and that so reliably hit all of the marks his audience has come to expect-- the car noises, the "s'Gucci" ad libs, the good-but-not-incredible lyrics peppered with the requisite number of punchlines-- that they tend to blur together.
Trap God has the lyrics and the punchline frequency (as well as the nasally congested, marble-mouthed flow), but it's short on the trademark Gucci vocal tics. In fact, sometimes it seems like there isn't enough Gucci in general-- not counting the brief "Intro", there are only four tracks that don't feature a guest rapper or singer, and three of them come in the back half of the record. And on some of the tracks he doesn't feel completely present, an effect that's exacerbated when he teams up with Meek Mill, Rick Ross, and his former protégé Waka Flocka Flame, three artists with outsize personalities who are currently at the top of their respective games. And the tracks where he comes out unambiguously on top-- including the handful alongside newly signed 1017 Brick Squad second-stringer Young Scooter-- the matchups feel lopsided.
The bright side is that Trap God's best songs are among the best in Gucci's catalog. Probably not coincidentally they also tend to be the ones where Gucci challenges himself the most. On the chiptune-inflected "Suckaz" (produced by Shawty Redd) and "Act Up" (produced by T-Pain, who also provides a killer vocal on the chorus), he sounds energetic and loose, hovering weightlessly over the beat. And when he squares off with Waka Flocka and internet mixtape sensation Kirko Bangz on the 808 Mafia-produced ode to no-strings-attached sex, "Fawk Something", he comes through with a remarkably profane verse that includes a brief and totally hilarious swing at impersonating a dancehall rapper.
When Gucci puts his mind to writing a chorus these days, he's coming up with better stuff than he ever has before. "Rolly Up" may have the most irritatingly unshakeable hook this side of Jibbs' "Chain Hang Low", but the back-to-back cuts "Money Habits" and "Crazy" are spiked with eccentrically catchy, off-key candy pop passages that suggest he might be the spiritual heir to Ol' Dirty Bastard at his karaoke-crooner best. Still, while Gucci Mane's recently been stuck in a particularly enjoyable rut, a rut is still a rut. It's good to see him start to pull himself out of it, even if it's slow going, inch by inch. | 2012-11-07T01:00:01.000-05:00 | 2012-11-07T01:00:01.000-05:00 | Rap | self-released | November 7, 2012 | 7.2 | cb674486-da5d-4732-a632-c74f09b7340d | Miles Raymer | https://pitchfork.com/staff/miles-raymer/ | null |
My initial thought was that, with Point, Cornelius had made an album not\n\ of songs but of machines: twittering ... | My initial thought was that, with Point, Cornelius had made an album not\n\ of songs but of machines: twittering ... | Cornelius: Point | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/1607-point/ | Point | My initial thought was that, with Point, Cornelius had made an album not of songs but of machines: twittering little trinkets and gewgaws, clockwork formalist tricks, hooks, and grooves, tiny snazzy robots covered with push-buttons and blinking lights. I was mostly wrong about this. But back when I didn't know that, I was all set to talk about Cornelius's Other Half-- Takako Minekawa-- and, more importantly, her collaborators in Dymaxion, who are, by my estimation, past masters of the sonic trinketry, the clever formalist motorik grooves, and the whole concept of "songs" as basically Rube Goldberg devices-- these things where you watch Tab A snap ingeniously and unexpectedly into Slot B, and then watch the whole machine teeter back and forth. The trick is that while everyone was trying to meld rock genres and dance genres by throwing blippy textures and drum loops under crunchy guitars, some people decided to use the tools of rock but organize them using the structures of dance or IDM.
Point isn't really as like that as I thought, but let's pretend-- just for a second-- that it is: you couldn't possibly ask for anyone to do that stuff better than Cornelius does. Like him or not, he's pretty much the master of this sort of thing-- evidence is littered from his late-period albums with Flipper's Guitar to solo records like 96/69 to tracks like "Mic Check" and "Magoo Opening" from Fantasma, his more "proper song"-oriented U.S. breakthrough. Evidence is abundant on Point, as well: one need look no further than the moment where "Bird Watching at Inner Forest," a sweet, jaunty samba, suddenly and masterfully disintegrates into "I Hate Hate," a whirlwind of sliced-and-diced cartoon prog that sounds like Aphex Twin making mincemeat of a track by the Fucking Champs. If you're going to talk about someone who can produce-- someone who can slap together shimmery organic instruments with the same agility as the world's best glitchmeisters and laptop guys-- Cornelius really should be mentioned.
And he's gotten a lot better at this than he was on Fantasma, a record that, in retrospect, sounds a little too eager to please-- all the tinny, busy layering and the near-constant bells and whistles now look a little like a hyperactive fourth-grader given free reign at the school talent show. Point backs off. It's more efficient, and thus more minimal: Cornelius has learned where a couple instruments and a couple tricks can do the work of ten of each. It's also a lot smoother and more languid-- the bulk of it actually qualifies to be called "subdued." The cleverness, technical mastery and ping-pong stereo effects are all there in spades, but this time they're all much more mellow than you'd think. Listen right and you'll hardly notice them, because you'll be wrapped up by the thing I initially completely missed-- some of these tracks are just plain lovely as songs.
That's right: you could very satisfyingly listen to Point while casting Cornelius as some kind of modern-day Esquivel, a master of arrangement and studio technologically and virtually everything that makes you cup your hands over your headphones and be just plain wowed by the stuff that's coming out of them. But the thing is that Point, like the IDM records it shares some of its formalist leanings with, gradually reveals itself to contain some song forms that are, without qualification, quite beautiful and expressive, and in completely non-trinkety ways. It sounds as if he's been listening to more bossa nova-- subtle acoustic guitar rhythms are all over this record. It sounds as if he's made a conscious effort to turn his vocal harmonies from chirpy amazements to swooning, dreamy soft-touches. It sounds as if he's basically loosened up, and figured out where subtly funky flows and immersive, bubbly drifts are way more agreeable than hyperactive flashes and non-stop banging. He has, in many senses, mellowed out.
And there's what's good about Point. Cornelius comes across as some sort of über-hipster from the glossy fashion mags, a cultural curator, a buzzy Japanese pastiche guy making music that feels like Bandai pocket games-- I've no doubt that a lot of you will hear Point somewhere and be turned off by precisely this quality, and I'll admit that before throwing Point on I sort of feared that it might be just another totally mid-90s reiteration of that heavily explored model. But Point isn't all about playing with trinkets and baubles. "Point of View Point" develops from an airy bounce into some delicious, dynamic, sweeping chord changes. "Drop" teases you by offering and then withholding a beautiful groove that sounds like Antonio Carlos Jobim taking a stab at writing funk, and then "Another View Point" finishes the job. "Tone Twilight Zone" is the equivalent of a Boards of Canada pastoral played live. "Brazil" applies singing-Macintosh software to a gorgeous laid-back ode with an oddly country-and-western chorus breakdown, and "Fly" is a flat-out prog single, in the best possible way.
Cornelius has done well, and he's done it subtly and unassumingly. If you've spent the last six months feeling inclined to listen solely to alt-country records, this may be Officially Not Your Bag. But it's a handsome little bag, and undoubtedly, some people will take great, great pride in wearing it out. | 2002-01-31T01:00:02.000-05:00 | 2002-01-31T01:00:02.000-05:00 | Electronic | Matador | January 31, 2002 | 7.8 | cb69ca47-db55-4424-8874-0d31f27a9cdc | Nitsuh Abebe | https://pitchfork.com/staff/nitsuh-abebe/ | null |
Reports didn't exactly come flooding in, but apparently Vogel's field research for Busca Invisibles took place in discotheques ... | Reports didn't exactly come flooding in, but apparently Vogel's field research for Busca Invisibles took place in discotheques ... | Cristian Vogel: Busca Invisibles | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/8482-busca-invisibles/ | Busca Invisibles | Reports didn't exactly come flooding in, but apparently Vogel's field research for Busca Invisibles took place in discotheques and salubrious Brighton boites. Vogel actually left his studio and went out and danced! As a member of the Cabbage Head Collective (founding member Si Begg aka Buckfunk 3000), Vogel's early forays into musical self-expression were tape loop weirdness and Beat-inspired cut ups. But if you've ever been to Vogel's hometown of Leamington Spa in the British Midlands, you'd know what a disturbing effect such a place can have on a growing lad.
So, with his parietal lobe ringing with his neo-Stockhausen ditties, Vogel abandoned being a Cabbage Head and headed south to the seedy coastal resort of Brighton, home of the cheeky wink, donkey rides across the beach, and shameless one- night- stands with skanks from all over the United Kingdom. Vogel probably told his folks that he was moving to Brighton to get a degree in 20th-century music; not to soak up the low-rent sleaze of his new home and fall in with a no-good bunch of twisted techno heads.
Six months after handing over his first cup- a- noodle- bespattered rent check to his landlord, then-unknown local DJ Luke Slater picked up on Vogel's experimental sound and spread the word around to such an extent that abstract dance maven Colin Dale was soon dropping Vogel's "Aux Culture" DAT into his sets. Dave Clarke followed by signing Vogel to his Magnetic North label and the pair combined Clarke's jazz-imbued rhythm programming with Vogel's passion for outlandish analog noise. By 1994, Europe's techno big boys noticed dear Cristian, and the Frankfurt-based, Gilles Deleuze-worshipping, Mille Plateaux label, known for the abstract experimentalism (and Germanness) of its techno releases, released the superb Beginning to Understand and the disorientating live and improvised knob tweak-a-thon Specific Momentum.
And once Mille Plateux had him, Berlin's mighty club-friendly Tresor label had to have him, too. Vogel's albums for Tresor are geared towards the dance floor, a prerogative that doesn't always bring out the best in Vogel, and Busca Invisibles bears out this criticism. Vogel excels when he generates warped, mechanical tones from his analog equipment and when he complements these alien shrieks and snarls with downtempo dub percussion. Beginning to Understand's "Scuba Dub" is the paramount example of Vogel's skill: it begins a dark blob of sound which uncoils into a squirming slug of a track, which leaves indelible slime trails. But nothing on Busca Invisibles matches it. See, in order to get the kids dancing, Mr. DJ can't offer them weird-ass noises plucked from the patch cords of some twentysomething Morton Subotnik. Vogel's unique when he's concentrating on contorting sine waves, and on Busca Invisibles he showcases this talent. Just not to the extent that he does on his albums for Mille Plateux.
Don't get the impression that Busca Invisbles is a stinker of a dance record. Just as Neil Landstrumm's Bedrooms and Cities release took on the champagne and Versace sounds of speed garage and unfashioned them into raw machine music, Busca Invisibles throttles nu electro and should remind Warp Records that the future and present of electronic music is not Jimi Tenor's lounge porn. Given the choice between the Venga Boys and "Sarcastically Tempered Powers," I know which I'd hurl myself around a club to.
The opening to "Shoe Renouncing Soul" teases with untainted tones before Vogel lets loose his greasy beats and a severely spiked bass line. He starts "Slices of Sink" by aping Underworld's "Bruce Lee" before stomping his hallmark analogia all over the twitching spread; all the while it sounds like he's having tons of fun putting these tracks together. For this reason, Busca Invisbles is a lighter listen not only than his other albums, but also than the output of his Brighton buddies, Justin Berkovi and Jamie Lidell. As the album's title indicates, Vogel may still be seeking the invisible, but you get the impression he got a clear idea where to continue looking. | 1999-03-23T01:00:05.000-05:00 | 1999-03-23T01:00:05.000-05:00 | Electronic | Tresor | March 23, 1999 | 7.9 | cb75dddc-4812-49b4-99b2-c4e3b229f511 | Paul Cooper | https://pitchfork.com/staff/paul-cooper/ | null |
Night Beds' debut Country Sleep was a modestly successful, kindly received batch of folk-friendly indie rock. Winston Yellen has followed it with a 65-minute opus where he sounds like the Weeknd in Dixie, and it’s a free-fall captured in painful slow-mo. | Night Beds' debut Country Sleep was a modestly successful, kindly received batch of folk-friendly indie rock. Winston Yellen has followed it with a 65-minute opus where he sounds like the Weeknd in Dixie, and it’s a free-fall captured in painful slow-mo. | Night Beds: Ivywild | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/20867-night-beds-ivywild/ | Ivywild | Don't let that score up there fool you—Ivywild is a must-listen, invigorating in the ways albums can be when they're so daring you can hardly believe what you're hearing. Really, when was the last time you encountered a record that took legitimate, potentially career-altering risks? Most of the time, an artist's "bold new direction" manifests in well-placed interview quotes and imperceptible effects on their actual music. Or, "challenging art" will come from outsiders of whom such abrasiveness is expected. Or, it'll be a hard left from a pop star or critical darling who gets the benefit of the doubt and is assumed to be one step ahead of the game.
Winston Yellen is none of those things: his Night Beds debut Country Sleep was a modestly successful and kindly received batch of folk-friendly indie rock that figured to set him on the path of quietly successful, critically acclaimed labelmates such as Phosphorescent or Bowerbirds or the Tallest Man on Earth. He's followed it with a 65-minute opus where he sounds like a Weeknd in Dixie approximately 85% of the time and becomes the first guy to actually earn the distinction of "PBR&B." We often talk of artists switching lanes or taking a leap of faith—Ivywild is a guy skydiving without a parachute, firmly believing he can stick the landing if he just times it right.
It's a free-fall captured in painful slow-mo, perversely gripping in the way it allows you to share Yellen's tunnel vision; there are many times where you might also think, "yeah, I can totally see how he might've pulled this off." He flexed raw skill and potential on Country Sleep, particularly a rangy, chameleonic voice—in a dusky lower register, he sounded like Ryan Adams, he could also channel makeout music mystics like Jeff Buckley or Devendra Banhart and when it went straight up alt-country, well, he also sounded like Ryan Adams. But he nonetheless possessed a rare assertiveness that puts him in a position to succeed when taking on pop and R&B.
He's also been blessed with legitimate inspiration. Yellen endured a hard breakup, the subsequent, requisite heat-seeking tailspin, and an artistic course correction that found him being more honest about his tastes. In addition to the Weeknd, he's gone heavy on James Blake, Burial, D'Angelo, Kanye West, Flying Lotus, Dilla—no one should act surprised, let alone outraged that any 26-year old is seeking inspiration from these acts.
Whatever the temptation may be to question an alt-country dude from Nashville about appropriation, put it aside because the major flaw of Yellen's planning stage is more simple. Pop, hip-hop, R&B, and electronic music have an expectation of being contemporary and even futuristic forms, whereas Night Beds works on a two-year album cycle. Notice that his frame of reference more or less cuts off at 2013—even if Ivywild were a flawless integration of his influences, it likely would have sounded dated mere months after Country Sleep. Moreover, all of the aforementioned have styles that are so distinct and proprietary, any slight deviation could be taken as parody.
And Yellen emerges from his immersive listening having integrated the most easily parodied aspects, mostly those of Abel Tesfaye—toggling between a wounded moan and a needy yelp at tempos which progress with the excruciating stubbornness of a hangover, utilizing drug metaphors which would've been better off as similes or just direct references. And, of course, any trace of levity can only be provided by the listener, a humor derived from Ivywild's utter lack of humor. More deadening than the suffocating arrangements and production or the nonexistent hooks is a tiresome perspective that goes beyond the Weeknd and connects to a celebrated lineage of male authors who assume an inherent profundity in treating a psychosexual crisis of mid-twenties masculinity as miserably as possible. Maybe it's meant to accurately mirror Yellen's state of mind during its creation, maybe the utter lack of catharsis or even sensuality is meant to drive home the destitution of it all.
Either way, Yellen still takes it upon himself to express Ivywild's conquests as burdens; drink and drugs must take on overwrought, sacramental connotation ("Five quarts won't harm us/ But these lines always cross us"). Elsewhere, the pillow talk fails on a fundamental level. For example, delivering "If I give all my time/ Can I live in your thighs?" in a Thom Yorke-ian whimper should make everyone who criticized Radiohead's lack of carnality apologize for their position. Or, Yellen emphasizing his isolation on "Sway(ve)", which slow-grinds with two left feet; there was no one who either could or would talk him out of not only making a song called "Sway(ve)", or using that incompatible portmanteau as a hook. That's also the only way to explain the chorus of "Eve A", which either scans as "E A I O U" or "Eve A, I fuck you" and it's actually both. There's nearly a half hour left after that. What more do you need to know really?
Ivywild wasn't created in seclusion—more than 25 people contributed, including Yellen's brother Abe, a YouTube find, and whoever's responsible for the strings, horns, samples, and harmonies that clutter the admirably confrontational, six-minute opening gauntlet of "Finished". Regardless of the help, Yellen has been granted the leeway of not just an auteur, but a genius. In the context of Night Beds' previous work and Yellen's twang, the concept of Ivywild itself is alluring, promising an actual midnight in the garden of good and evil—a mysterious, verdant sprawl suffused with the palpable humidity of the American South, hot-blooded backsliders battling against the repression of self, of religion and social mores. Or, "Ivywild" could just as easily be the name of a college bar in Yellen's part-time home of Nashville—whatever its aim, this album reminds you that Vanderbilt frat bros are probably dry-humping to "Can't Feel My Face" as we speak. | 2015-08-06T02:00:02.000-04:00 | 2015-08-06T02:00:02.000-04:00 | Rock | Dead Oceans | August 6, 2015 | 3.2 | cb7a7711-9fc4-45ad-a2c7-3fe49ee01690 | Ian Cohen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ian-cohen/ | null |
Andrew Bird's latest release is his third album of pop originals since getting married and having a son, and a happy domesticity informs it. | Andrew Bird's latest release is his third album of pop originals since getting married and having a son, and a happy domesticity informs it. | Andrew Bird: Are You Serious | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21751-are-you-serious/ | Are You Serious | At the bottom of a canyon, most men would howl. Isolated in the wilderness, unshackled from the pretense of civility, a yelp of primal kinship is supposed to rumble deep within, an exulting return to base instinct. Unless Jack London novels and Reese Witherspoon movies have lied to us, anyway.
But when Andrew Bird went native last year, he didn’t so much as whisper. Instead, he clambered down into Utah’s Coyote Gulch and recorded Echolocations: Canyon, an instrumental folk-classical song cycle that scarcely rose above a purr. In an atmosphere where every sound carried magnitudes, the Chicago singer-songwriter remained slight; it was some of his most experimental and ruminative work, in a dense catalogue that has folded in chamber-pop, rustic Americana, swing and Romani rock. (Not to mention, Echolocations boasted some pinnacle twee titlework: "The Canyon Wants to Hear C Sharp" is a hairsbreadth from a Zach Braff script note.)
Since releasing his first album in 1996, Bird has been a consistently gentle hand that belies a fitful mind, his sharp-edged intellect making invariably lovely inlets. This is a classically trained multi-instrumentalist who devotes equal attention to his violin and guitar onstage, a voluble and arcane lyricist who whistles full solos with the blithe, pitch-perfect clarity of a damn angel’s piccolo. But while Bird could putter along on smug displays of his technical prowess, the sort he nodded to in his earliest records, he only grows more inclusive with age. Like Punch Brothers and Sufjan Stevens, he slots his conservatory chops into increasingly accessible pop melodies, aiming for kinship over virtuosity.
Are You Serious is Bird’s first traditional album since 2012’s Hands of Glory—save Echolocations and a Handsome Family covers disc, and the lolling I Want To See Pulaski at Night EP. It’s deceptively straightforward at first, unfolding genially as more guitar-driven rock than he’s attempted before, almost a sidestep of ambition with freewheeling frayed ends. But it’s still got all of Bird’s standby elements—the esoteric wordplay, the many stratas of strings—subtly edited into economy. "Capsized," the opening track and lead single, is a bit of a red herring, vigorous and barnburning; it’s no ear-shredder by any means, but next to the tranquility of Bird’s most recent fare, it’s My Bloody Valentine. Guitars corrode Bird’s lamenting voice, which adds a nü-country hitch to his grousing; guest Moses Sumney sands the edges with sweet harmonizing. (The excellent guitarist Blake Mills also sits in with Bird’s band throughout.) "Saints Preservus" is one of scant instances of Bird’s whistling; it’s an eerie, light flourish here, capping pizzicato strings.
This is also Bird’s third album of pop originals since getting married and having a son, and a happy domesticity informs it. But Bird’s hectic mind, which once likened love to "assured asphyxiation," still can’t leave well alone; in "Valleys of the Young," a brawny power ballad, he opens with the cerebral skirmish, "Do you need a reason we should commit treason/ And bring into this world a son?" Crashing guitars offer the resolution, an openhearted expanse that nods to Pulaski at Night. In "Bellevue," a lovely, swooning ballad and the album closer, he is thunderstruck—"Now I found someone who can slake my thirst/ In a land beset by drought"—but it’s forebodingly titled, sharing a name with one of the country’s most infamous psychiatric hospitals.
The album’s most curious track is "Left Handed Kisses," a thorny duet with Fiona Apple. It posits Bird as the jaded bard and Apple the sentimental muse, albeit one sapped by his cynicism; she addresses it directly in lyrics that only grow more self-referential. "The point your song here misses is that if you really loved me/ You'd risk more than a few 50-cent words in your backhanded love song," she warbles, delivering that mouthful with improbable serenity. By the time the coda kicks in, appendaged with his cry, "Now it's time for a handsome little bookend," the meta musings have become a wearying knot. It’s an example of Bird’s puppyish energy—why write a mere love ditty when you can slam through its fourth wall like the Kool-Aid Man? – and one of two times on Are You Serious that Bird gets a bit self-congratulatory in his cleverness. The other is the title track, which jostles spaghetti western-leaning strings with Bird’s drawls of, "You used to be so willfully obtuse/ Or is the word abstruse?/ Semantics like a noose/ Get out your dictionary." The accuser manages to be a healthy amount of both in that quatrain, an irony that likely doesn’t escape him.
The album’s best melody lies in the violin crests of "Roma Fade," conduits of real wonder; Bird opens giddily, then interrupts himself with a tourettic burst of creepiness: "You may not know me but you feel my stare," he intones, as even the guitars shudder to an apprehensive stop. Then he backtracks to the slightly more tender notion, "If she sees you, it changes you/ Rearranges your molecules." For a fastidious artist who once explained his fairly hippie-dip songwriting strategy as "Does the universe need to hear this again?" it’s a telling line. Still curious, still appraising, Bird offers an intellect remarkably porous to change. | 2016-04-06T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-04-06T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Loma Vista | April 6, 2016 | 7.2 | cb81a974-06f9-4ca2-9197-15c69a197d3a | Stacey Anderson | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stacey-anderson/ | null |
Tim Cohen, frontman of the Fresh & Onlys, is at his most modest and self-effacing here, building quiet, quirky songs out of acoustic guitars, soft percussion, and accents of piano and synth. | Tim Cohen, frontman of the Fresh & Onlys, is at his most modest and self-effacing here, building quiet, quirky songs out of acoustic guitars, soft percussion, and accents of piano and synth. | Tim Cohen: Luck Man | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22741-luck-man/ | Luck Man | Tim Cohen is something like the West Coast Robert Pollard. Cohen’s songwriting is earthier and darker than the work of the Guided by Voices frontman, but it is a useful comparison: Both are hugely prolific, fiercely independent rock ’n’ roll lifers—bedroom auteurs with a taste for tape hiss and eccentric pop songs. If you know Cohen at all, you likely know him as the frontman for the Fresh & Onlys—a band that, along with Thee Oh Sees, Sonny and the Sunsets, Ty Segall, and others, defined the San Francisco garage-psych explosion of a few years back. But, as is true with Pollard and GBV, Cohen’s main project can’t keep up with his bounding creative urges, so he funnels his songwriting into side bands, notably Magic Trick, which has released around four records in the last five years, and his solo work.
Luck Man is Cohen’s fourth LP under his own name (if you count 2011’s Tim Cohen’s Magic Trick), and the most polished and most mature of the bunch. But compared to the wide-angle jangle pop of the last two Fresh & Onlys records—2014’s House of Spirits and 2012’s excellent Long Slow Dance—Luck Man is a decidedly bare-bones affair. Cohen is at his most modest and self-effacing here, building quiet, quirky songs out of acoustic guitars, soft percussion, and accents of piano and synth. The touchstones are early Belle and Sebastian (minus the preciousness), early Van Morrison, Smog, and the self-titled Velvet Underground record.
Musically, Luck Man has its moments—the stark fingerpicking on “Bedfellows,” the harmonies (courtesy of Magic Trick’s Noelle Cahill) on the chorus of “John Hughes,” the bittersweet piano riff that slowly closes out the record. But ultimately the music is little more than a delivery system for Cohen’s words and ideas—as is his flat, affectless baritone. It’s Cohen’s distinct blend of whimsy, black humor, and wisdom—and his refusal to take himself too seriously—that make the record work. (Cass McCombs, it should be noted, uses similar tools to equally great affect.)
Cohen is an expert at pairing genuine longing with absurdist humor, such that you can’t entirely tell the difference between the two. “I Need a Wife” is a gorgeous little ballad about love’s uncertainties—before it explodes with Cohen’s manic recitations of the song’s title: “Now I need a wife! I need a wife! I need a wife!” Does the guy actually need a wife? No idea. Does he like the way the jarring echo effect on his vocals makes his words spiral out into infinity? Most definitely.
Cohen is obsessed with death, its inevitability and consistency; he knows the dirt will cover us all. But he delivers that message with levity and wit—he doesn’t want to scare us away. “Breathe and die, is all you have to do,” he reminds us on the jaunty “Breathe and Die,” hoping that we’ll take solace in such straightforward tasks. The record is suffused with the surreal and otherworldly (“I dream in melody,” Cohen told an interviewer last year). On “Wall About a Window,” Cohen hopes to escape to the “bridge of limbs” and the “forest of palms”; On “Sunshine,” he’s “throwing airplanes at the moon” against a “velvet-covered night.” Cohen suggests that a wild imagination is one of our best defenses against mortality and the ravages of time. (Pollard, age 59, would surely agree.)
Darkness and anxiety threaten to overwhelm Cohen throughout. On “Meat Is Murder” he describes waking up in the middle of the night crying, his hands covered in blood. But in the end, Luck Man shows us how we can survive life’s countless indignities by reminding ourselves of its many small (and not so small) pleasures: a cloudless sky, a lazy morning, a long walk with a good friend. And the way “love can free the laughter from within [our] lungs.” | 2017-01-17T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2017-01-17T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Pop/R&B | Sinderlyn | January 17, 2017 | 6.5 | cb84a69e-3faa-4340-80e9-7eab7dfda2e0 | John S.W. MacDonald | https://pitchfork.com/staff/john-s.w. macdonald/ | null |
Retaining all of the light-hearted surreality that made its first two records so bewitching, the UK synth-pop duo makes the sound of grief and joy glimmer on the dancefloor. | Retaining all of the light-hearted surreality that made its first two records so bewitching, the UK synth-pop duo makes the sound of grief and joy glimmer on the dancefloor. | Let’s Eat Grandma: Two Ribbons | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/lets-eat-grandma-two-ribbons/ | Two Ribbons | Jenny Hollingworth and Rosa Walton have spoken candidly about how the cracks in their lifelong friendship formed the basis of Two Ribbons, their new album as Let’s Eat Grandma. The pair have been close since they were small children, but while touring their second album together—2018’s I’m All Ears—they started to feel pulled in separate directions. Hollingworth, who also experienced a devastating loss when her boyfriend, musician Billy Clayton, passed away from a rare form of cancer in 2019, told The Guardian that she felt they were “fundamentally misunderstanding each other in some way.” Like the title song's core image—of two fraying ribbons, distinct yet tied tightly together—they wrote the album’s songs separately, for the first time in their collaboration.
But despite this individual process, the result is their most cohesive project yet. They have evolved dramatically since they emerged in 2016 when they were still teenagers. Their debut, I, Gemini, was an intriguing, deliberate mishmash of grunge-y psychedelia and disarming nonsense rhymes, with their higher, softer voices leaning into each other in such a way that made them indistinguishable. On I’m All Ears, their sound took a more forceful shape through a collaboration with the producer SOPHIE, and they moved beyond oblique, nonsense lyricism towards a vivid impressionistic style.
Two Ribbons retains all of the light-hearted surreality that made their first two records so bewitching, but out of necessity, the songwriting is braver. This is not an “ordinary pain,” as Walton sings bitterly on the dramatic ballad “Insect Loop,” but a feeling of being yanked apart. Even when the album is ostensibly upbeat, there’s angst between the synth stabs; on “Levitation,” Walton sings of breaking down in the bathroom, then going out dancing to forget about her “catastrophic Saturday” in a frank, diaristic style that avoids the cliché of simple misery. On the glimmering, joyful crush song “Hall of Mirrors,” there are gloomy images that linger: shivering on the London Overground, writing secrets on bathroom walls, watching the rain in an airport boarding lounge.
The record is punctuated by similar mentions of movement, transition, and turbulent weather. Walton opens the gently rolling, new age song “Sunday” with the declaration, “We took the long way ’round the mountain” before depicting an epic journey under moonbeams and an endless sky, only to discover that she feels further away than ever from her traveling partner. On the spare, guitar-driven title track, Hollingworth delicately compares the movement of relationships in her life to the “the rains that come down in October.” Like these rains, and the fields and rivers that dominate the visual landscape of this album, there's nothing more natural than the inevitable ebb and flow of people in and out of our lives.
Dual-process theory, a model of grief counseling, claims that grief doesn't follow a logical trajectory of five stages—it’s an ocean that comes in waves, a process of “oscillation.” Grievers are constantly thrown between periods of feeling OK, even hopeful, and periods of acutely feeling the loss of the past. As Joan Didion wrote in her memoir The Year of Magical Thinking, “in the version of grief we imagine, the model will be ‘healing.’ A certain forward movement will prevail.” In reality, grief is an “unending absence,” a “relentless succession of moments.” Walton and Hollingworth's take on grief and growth is exactly this: a sequence of moments, bright and bleak and powerful.
Nothing is tied up neatly, but in everything, there’s an immense sense of space. A breeze blows through wind chimes in the background of “Sunday,” birds chirp throughout the interlude “In the Cemetery,” and fireworks blow “Happy New Year” wide open. Instead of a more trite narrative of healing, Let’s Eat Grandma give us folk-rock howls and transcendent disco that’s spiked with sadness, all bearing a glimmer of hope. | 2022-05-02T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2022-05-02T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | Transgressive | May 2, 2022 | 7.7 | cb87d12a-ce0c-4d27-9aaf-bf2f495ac752 | Aimee Cliff | https://pitchfork.com/staff/aimee-cliff/ | |
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 Björk’s second album, the foundation for one of the most consequential careers in pop history. | 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 Björk’s second album, the foundation for one of the most consequential careers in pop history. | Björk: Post | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/bjork-post/ | Post | Inspecting the inner mechanics of her television set, Björk’s face lit up with wonder. “It looks like a little model of a city, all the houses and trees, and here are the wires, they really take care of all the electrons…” It was 1988, and Björk was two years removed from the dissolution of her gothy post-punk band KUKL, which released music on the UK punk label Crass. But as the lead singer of art-rock tricksters the Sugarcubes, she still looked the part. In the interview clip, Björk explains that an Icelandic poet once made her painfully afraid of her television—a TV program can hypnotize you, the poet said, going “directly into your brain and you stop judging if it’s right or not, you just swallow and swallow.” When she read the scientific truth about television in a Danish book, she was much more calm. As the segment concludes, Björk looks into the camera: “You shouldn’t let poets lie to you.”
Not unlike the music Björk would proceed to make—going solo with 1993’s Debut—the effect of this footage is a little bemusing, quite soothing, entirely spellbinding. Björk is fearless, funny, slyly political, absurd. She is drawing an unlikely intersection of technology and intimacy, embodying what would become her eternal promise: It is possible to be both weird and understood.
By her second record, 1995’s Post, Björk had become well-acquainted with the bustling cosmopolitan energy of cities. She had relocated from Iceland to London in the early 1990s as a 27-year-old mother of a 6-year-old son, but her Arctic home was always with her. Björk attended music school in Reykjavík from ages 5 to 14—her precocious introduction to experimental electronic composers such as Stockhausen and John Cage—and released her first album at 11; her “hardcore hippie” mother did the psychedelic cover art.
But nature was her ultimate teacher. Björk said Iceland itself, not other singers, shaped her voice. It is an extreme landscape of glaciers and volcanoes, of barrenness and eruptions, endless daylight in summer and mostly darkness in winter. Walking 40 minutes to school, a young Björk entertained herself by singing: sneaking down to the moss on the ground to whisper a verse, running up a hill to unleash a chorus loudly against the wind. Björk absorbed the peaks and valleys, light and dark, twists and turns of her reality, arriving nowhere conventional. When she sang in accordance to the moss and the hills, perhaps it was a result of studying Cage in school: music was everywhere.
Instinct became Björk’s personal law, and boundlessness became her key. Maybe it was the punk-surrealist in her, saying doors are only locked if you believe them to be, that what exists inside your mind is already real. “I’m going hunting for mysteries [...] I’m going to prove the impossible really exists,” Bjork sings on Post’s austere “Cover Me,” each note aglow with a sense of discovery.
Björk saw Debut and Post “like twins, the first and second born,” as Rolling Stone reported in ’95, and she said both were “a celebration of the unpredictability of life,” like a “greatest hits of [her] musical passions” to that point. They could together be called The London Years, existing in the historical lineage of art reflecting the experiences of women in cities, seeking adventures: Björk called the protagonist of Post “that wide-eyed girl from the country, but she’s been in the city for a while… she’s consuming the city and the city is consuming her.” Having previously played with rock bands—the Sugarcubes toured with U2 and Public Image Ltd—Björk found “there was absolutely no creativity in rock venues.” Yearning to meet artists pushing sound to reflect the moment, she ventured into rapt underground London dance clubs, where she found collaborators in Nellee Hooper, Graham Massey of 808 State, Howie B, and Tricky of the Massive Attack milieu. Björk fused the abstracted atmospherics of this avant-dance zeitgeist—IDM, trip-hop, techno, house—with all the parts of herself: the episodic melodies of late-’70s Joni Mitchell, the guttural edges of Meredith Monk’s extended vocal techniques, a voice on par with the supreme emotional greats of history, Edith Piaf on ecstasy.
The Post sessions began at Compass Point Studios in the Bahamas. There, Björk could sing outside the way she did as a child: snaking the long wires of her microphone and headphones down to the ocean, into caves, or under a bush beneath the stars. Electricity communed with Earth. “I was crying my eyes out with joy,” Björk once said of the Bahamas sessions. “It was completely outrageous.” Upon returning to London, Bjork went on her own mission to “bring the album alive,” adding bagpipes, trumpet, saxophones, dulcimers, harp, an orchestra, and a brass band to the productions, re-recording some songs entirely.
She wanted every song to be a shock, to work in wildly contrasting styles. “My musical heart was scattered at the time,” Björk once said, “and I wanted the album to show that.” Post is far greater than the sum of its parts—the sensory rush of dance music meeting pop storytelling, spontaneity mixed with ambition. Björk explodes her interior world into the role of the extrovert. If you took the “punk” out of “post-punk” that Björk previously made, but retained its ethos of eclecticism; if you left the “modern” off “postmodern,” but kept its spirit of bricolage; you arrive here: Björk, singular, Post. Maybe the only appropriate modifier is an absence of one, a Cagean blank space, a gesture towards possibility.
Although Post contains some old-fashioned heartache, its defining romance is an unconventional one: a pure love for music. The somnambulant dream song, Post’s closer “Headphones,” chronicles in real time all the ways music can rearrange a person—in its lyrics as well as in the euphoric fracturing of its dubby production by Tricky, who was especially close to the “headphone” music of his Bristol hometown (à la Massive Attack, Portishead). “I like this resonance/It elevates me/I don’t recognize myself/This is very interesting,” Björk intones. “My headphones/They saved my life.” Björk wrote “Headphones” about falling asleep to mixtapes from her collaborator, Graham Massey; she pulled the words from her diary.
This uncanny passion for sound is felt everywhere on Post. It’s in the scorched industrial march of “Enjoy,” in the grandeur of the strings on “You’ve Been Flirting Again.” It’s in the crackling trip-hop melancholy of “Possibly Maybe,” in the cool free jazz that rustles beneath “The Modern Things,” in the gleaming harpsichord of “Cover Me” (the vocals of which were recorded in a cave full of bats). And it’s especially present in the deliriously fun big-band blast of “It’s Oh So Quiet”—Björk’s madcap cover of the wartime tune from Hollywood star Betty Hutton, which she recorded with a 20-piece orchestra, manifesting her deep-rooted love for musicals. In a 1995 “AOL Chat” interview, a fan asked Björk where the idea for “It’s Oh So Quiet” came from, and she said that her live music director Guy Sigsworth “found it in a truck stop”—on a cassette comp—“and it became the tour anthem of last tour. Turned us on before the gigs.” It’s a cover that only a true pop maniac would go through with and only a pop maestro could pull off. The song explodes from Björk’s pin-drop whispers to throat-shredding wails—alongside blaring brass, the sheer loudness of Björk’s singing is a visceral delight. “Oh, what’s the use of falling in love?” Björk sings on the comedown, before raving up with an answer again.
Björk has called her work “modern folk songs,” and each one tells a story. This idea keeps in the Icelandic tradition of sagas. “Isobel” is one of Björk’s most epic tales, gesturing towards introspection and self-knowledge. The folkloric lyrics—“My name Isobel/Married to myself”—were written with Björk’s frequent collaborator, the Icelandic poet Sjón, a man who was inspired to refine his English to better understand David Bowie’s lyrics. In the documentary Inside Björk, she describes the titular Isobel—named so to echo “isolation”—as a force of a woman who retreats completely from the muchness of the world. Growing up in a forest, she comes to see that “the pebbles on the forest floor were actually baby skyscrapers.” As Isobel becomes a woman, she finds herself in the big city, where she clashes with civilization and returns to the forest. “There she would collect moths and train them to send out her message [...] a message of instinct,” Björk said. The moths flew before the faces of people “functioning with too much logic [...] and go, ‘No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no’ til people click out of this state of being sensible.”
Of course, Björk’s music is a testament to what is possible when logic and practical sense are not guiding principles. But she hardly withdrew. Björk said she had a total of three days off in 1993 and 1994 combined—she had become a legitimate star. In the face of the chaos of fame, “Army of Me” summons resilience, as if Björk knew exactly what she would be up against in the years to come. (In 1996, a fan tried to mail a bomb to her house.) She said “Army of Me” was written as an ultimatum to her own brother, to regain control of his life, lest he “meet an army of me.” Björk scratches at the depths of her voice, and the industrial backbone of the song, the crashes and shrapnel, fortify the task. “Army of Me” is proof that being the most obvious misfit in the room often requires being the toughest, too.
The double-time techno of “Hyperballad” begins with a glint. But it hones its strength. It’s a work of surrealism, narrating the tale of a woman who wakes up early at the top of a mountain, and throws “car parts, bottles, and cutlery” off its edge. She wonders what it would be like to throw herself off, too, her body slamming against the rocks, her eyes open all along—as a kind of catharsis, an emotional purging, in order to deal with people later: “I go through all this/Before you wake up/So I can feel happier/To be safe up here with you.” Her melody rises and tumbles, a slow spiral; the suspended rapture of the beat catches her in air.
If Debut’s “Human Behavior” was an ultimate outcast anthem—“If you ever get close to a human and human behavior, be ready, be ready to get confused”—then “Hyperballad” feels like a triumphant appeal to exist cooperatively alongside other people. Björk did this not only in her hyper-collaborative albums but in her entire project of making pop music, trying to reach all kinds of people at once. “Everything’s geared toward self-sufficiency. Fuck that,” Björk told punk historian Jon Savage in Interview. “For me, the target is to learn how to communicate with other people, which is the hardest thing, after all. What you should be doing is learning how to live with other human beings.” Car parts, bottles, cutlery, technology, and political superpowers are no match against this outreaching feeling, this ethos of interconnectedness that lives inside “Hyperballad,” inside of Björk in general, and it is an instinct inherent, ever crucially, in the survival of humanity.
“All the modern things/Like cars and such/Have always existed,” Björk sings on “The Modern Things.” “They’ve just been waiting in a mountain/For the right moment.” Not unlike the 23-year-old who dissected a television with love and awe, there’s a fantastic tinge of hope to this idea and to the whole of Post, an invitation into her profound exploration of places not yet traveled, to acknowledge the magic in the fact that there are sounds you might love that you can’t currently fathom. Twenty-five years later, you don’t need to scroll far through Björk’s Instagram feed to find the most audacious young popular artists alive, the likes of Arca and Rosalía, heeding that call, crowning her “queen.”
With Post, Björk set the bionic foundation for one of the most consequential careers in pop history. Here is where Björk became a perennial gateway drug, not to one sound but to the unknown, which is to say the future. She would soon leave London for the south of Spain and then New York, recording her two towering masterpieces—1997’s Homogenic, which Missy Elliott once gleefully likened to “Mozart at a rap show,” and the introverted microbeats of 2001’s Vespertine—crystallizing the totality of her vision. What other artist could successively collaborate with Wu-Tang Clan, interview Estonian minimalist legend Arvo Pärt, and appear on “MTV Unplugged” accompanied by a man playing a table of drinking glasses? In another era, maybe Bowie, which is just right—it was Bowie, after all, who inspired Björk’s immortal swan dress. By the end of the ’90s, the world would know the only answer: Björk. | 2020-03-08T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2020-03-08T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Electronic / Pop/R&B | Elektra | March 8, 2020 | 10 | cb8e3eb7-78bd-4839-a9b5-0ed9a3d08e2d | Jenn Pelly | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jenn-pelly/ | |
The Korean DJ’s contribution to the storied mix series looks beyond the dancefloor, offering a tantalizing peek at her influences. | The Korean DJ’s contribution to the storied mix series looks beyond the dancefloor, offering a tantalizing peek at her influences. | Peggy Gou: DJ-Kicks | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/peggy-gou-dj-kicks/ | DJ-Kicks | The histories of fashion and techno are frequently intertwined—just ask Raf Simons, who debuted his Spring/Summer 2020 collection at Paris Fashion Week with pieces that paid tribute to the legendary R&S Records—and that’s especially true for the DJ and producer Peggy Gou. Born in South Korea and now based in Berlin, Gou cut her teeth studying at London College of Fashion before turning to dance music. Fashion school is rooted in learning history before adding your own spin, and Gou brings that wisdom to her music. Her tracks are extremely reverent to foundational elements of techno, house, and electro, but she pivots each one into her own point of view.
She traces that lineage with her contribution to !K7’s vaunted DJ-Kicks series. Instead of replicating her party-turning abilities, Gou uses the space to create something more like a scrapbook of her loves and influences. The usual suspects of her sets, like Pearson Sound and Kyle Hall, make the tracklist, but certain choices feel like more pointed looks into her taste. Hyperdub founder and bass-music mastermind Kode9 doesn’t seem like a natural fit for Gou’s sunny, melodic style, but his droney “Magnetic City,” a b-side from a 2007 Soul Jazz split, finds a home among the crunchiness of Sweden’s Dorisburg and British rave luminaries Shades of Rhythm. IDM mainstay Aphex Twin also makes an appearance, but it’s with the squelchy Drukqs track “Vordhosbn”—one of the few choices that deviates from the steady heartbeat of bassline hypnosis and minimalism that bumps throughout the mix.
The most revealing artifact from Gou’s biography comes in the form of her sole contribution to the tracklisting, a cross-continental joint-loosener called “Hungboo,” the first song that Gou ever produced. Crafted in the style of pansori, a traditional South Korean style of storytelling performed by a singer and a drummer, “Hungboo” emphasizes Gou’s interest in reinterpreting deeply entrenched forms. The same goes for the title, which references Hungbu and Nolbu, a Korean folktale that teaches empathy and generosity. The moral is mirrored with inclusions like “Epirus,” a warmer from up-and-comer Deniro, as well as “Pert,” from Italian duo Hiver, which debuts on the mix, and JRMS’ “3,” a recent staple of Gou’s sets that will be released later this year via her new imprint Gudu.
The label is just another of Gou’s prodigious accomplishments. Since 2016, she has become the first Korean woman to DJ Berlin techno institution Berghain and the first Korean to be tapped for a BBC Essentials Mix. With her DJ-Kicks, she becomes the first Korean person at the helm of another benchmark in dance music. But it’s not just these distinctions that makes the mix an achievement. Here, Gou’s studied craftsmanship coalesces with her tastemaking abilities. It’s most meditative in its unwavering commitment to methodical bass. Gou has always appeared to have an old soul and with this endeavor, it’s on full display.
Buy: Rough Trade
(Pitchfork may earn a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.) | 2019-07-02T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-07-02T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | !K7 | July 2, 2019 | 7.1 | cb905fe6-2f93-46a5-a6ee-cda439fcd40b | Claire Lobenfeld | https://pitchfork.com/staff/claire-lobenfeld/ | |
The Minneapolis synth-pop band teams up with a Berlin-based orchestra in an attempt to reckon with the trials of our time. | The Minneapolis synth-pop band teams up with a Berlin-based orchestra in an attempt to reckon with the trials of our time. | Poliça / s t a r g a z e: Music for the Long Emergency | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/polica-s-t-a-r-g-a-z-e-music-for-the-long-emergency/ | Music for the Long Emergency | You have to admire Poliça’s willingness to break their own mold. In 2016, with two albums’ worth of hazy breakup songs under their belts, the Minneapolis five-piece abruptly pivoted into political consciousness and traded some of their rock instincts in for a smattering of pop motifs. The resulting album, United Crushers, faltered at times, but it was a good-faith effort to engage with the national mood. Poliça read the room and responded accordingly.
Poliça’s latest album is the product of another reinvention. In merging with s t a r g a z e, the Berlin-based orchestral collective led by conductor André de Ridder, they’ve more than doubled their lineup. With all those extra bodies in the room, the deep, dark chasms that fractured their earlier work, separating singer Channy Leaneagh’s voice from producer Ryan Olson’s rumbling synths, begin to fill in. The resulting sound feels new, to be sure, but mostly in the sense that it’s not fully ripe. Though challenging and, in its best moments, quite exciting, Music for the Long Emergency ultimately resembles a first draft. Its most compelling ideas are knotted up with its worst, and the whole thing could use a thorough edit.
Like its predecessor, Music for the Long Emergency postures as a political album. Its title nods to the turmoil of the Trump era, and its lead single, “How Is This Happening,” is a ten-minute dirge that Leaneagh wrote the day after the 2016 election. On the album, it’s sequenced towards the end, and it delivers some vivid moments, largely courtesy of s t a r g a z e’s string section. They brood, first hovering on single, sustained notes as if unsure how to proceed, then sinking into snarling cluster chords as panic sets in. Leaneagh, meanwhile, repeats the titular question that occupied many minds that November, and issues an elegant call for resistance. The song’s lengthy outro heaves and shudders in time with militant percussion. It’s an effective portrait of dystopian paranoia.
Its closest thematic analog on the record is “Cursed,” the song that immediately precedes it, and easily the most jarring track of the bunch. With its thrashing percussion and invective against unnamed political overlords, delivered via a guest turn from Minnesota rapper Crescent Moon, “Cursed” steers far into Rage Against the Machine territory—just with dramatic guitar subbed out for dramatic strings. The song feels outdated and clumsy, and some of Leaneagh’s lyrics are so vague as to be meaningless (“Cursed with a cure/Cured with a curse”). This is reinvention in the extreme. The song is unrecognizable as Poliça’s, to the extent that you might wonder if it’s there by accident.
What’s even more perturbing is that “How Is This Happening” and “Cursed” constitute a blip in an album that’s actually, by and large, devoid of politics. Opener and standout “Fake Like” is an airy ode to a crush who plays hard to get, embellished with chirping pizzicato strings. “Marrow” could be a stormy come-on or a conflicted kiss-off—it’s hard to tell—and it contains one of Leaneagh’s most forceful vocal performances, though it’s undermined by the laughable literality of the lyrics (“Marrow/I can feel you in my bones”). On “Speaking of Ghost,” Leaneagh reaches for bygone love in a brass-infused séance. Nowhere in this sequence does Poliça’s claim that the album reflects on “the strange and sudden darkening of our times” feel particularly true.
In the same statement, Leaneagh seemed interested in exploring the implications of this personal/political contrast: “You can be going through tragedy, never-ending wars, but you still also are dealing with human relationships and love and romantic troubles.” She isn’t wrong, and if Poliça had spent more time thinking through that conflict, Long Emergency might have been a more coherent album. But as the group continuously ping-pongs between sounds and ideas, it becomes difficult to tell which of the tensions that manifest—between electronic and acoustic, between varied vocal styles, between the depth of the sound and shallowness of the lyrics—are intentional pieces of a conceptual framework, and which are the unexpected byproducts of Poliça and s t a r g a z e’s experimental mode of writing.
One of the most tangled songs on the record is its closer and title track, another epic that stretches toward the ten-minute mark. For a song that purports to respond to emergency, it lands remarkably lightly. Leaneagh sings about being “seeped in deep/My madness,” but her delivery is carefree, and the song’s grandiose piano chords suggest triumph, not crisis. This uncertain resolution raises all sorts of questions: What, actually, is the long emergency? Is it over? Were these songs meant to be curative? Moments later, Leaneagh begins repeating the words “Lost as I am/Lost as I can be.” As a last word for this album, it’s all too apt. | 2018-02-14T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2018-02-14T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock / Jazz | Totally Gross National Product / Transgressive | February 14, 2018 | 5.2 | cb965366-add2-4255-94f9-80c388d07af4 | Olivia Horn | https://pitchfork.com/staff/olivia-horn / | |
The third album from the trio is far and away their best. Intimate, multidimensional, and wide-ranging, the songwriting shines with personality and a great curiosity for melody and style. | The third album from the trio is far and away their best. Intimate, multidimensional, and wide-ranging, the songwriting shines with personality and a great curiosity for melody and style. | Haim: Women in Music Pt. III | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/haim-women-in-music-pt-iii/ | Women in Music Pt. III | It’s well known that the only three people who take long walks through the streets of Los Angeles are Haim. The image of the trio striding or line-dancing their way around the city is indelibly linked to their music: cool, confident, full of momentum. The videos to accompany their third album, Women in Music Part III, nod to the strolls of the past and add in a few new twists. In “Now I’m in It,” directed again by Paul Thomas Anderson, bassist Este and guitarist Alana carry Danielle (lead vocals, production, guitar) on a stretcher; when Danielle is revived and joins her sisters for their signature walk, she casts a knowing glance straight to camera. In another video, they’re trailed by a gloomy saxophonist; in another, they stand rooted to the spot. These videos show the evolution of Haim, whose songwriting on WIMPIII is likewise more nuanced, more self-aware, and frequently darker than ever before.
The biting satire of the album’s title is something of a red herring for its explicitly personal content. In interviews, each sister has described a personal trauma that she brought to the studio. Alana has spoken of the grief she suffered when a best friend passed away at age 20, and Este has talked about the low points of living with Type 1 diabetes. Most felt is Danielle’s deep depression; she traces its origin to when her partner (and co-producer) Ariel Rechtshaid was diagnosed with testicular cancer in 2015.
Historically, Haim’s lyrics have been conversational and straightforward: emotionally incisive, sure, but usually vague enough that you could easily place yourself inside them. On WIMPIII, though, Danielle writes in vivid scenes, pulling you inside her personal depression fog. She blinks awake and finds herself at the wheel of her car; she watches TV and stares at the ceiling; she goes to the boulevard and can’t stop crying. On the stomping country-rock of “I’ve Been Down,” she sings about taping up the windows of her house, adding sardonically, “But I ain’t dead yet.” Elsewhere, the sisters cut and paste the most offensive interview questions they’ve faced from music journalists (“Do you make the same faces in bed?”) into a candid folk song that channels the spirit of Joni Mitchell.
Danielle was also inspired by André 3000’s solo album The Love Below, an exploratory record that sewed together disparate genres with uninhibited slapstick humor. While WIMPIII is more theatrical than Haim have been before—there’s the gasp that opens the underwater rock song “Up From a Dream,” the “you up?” voicemail skits on “3 AM”—the most obvious similarity is in the band’s newfound musical fluidity. With signature production touches from Rostam throughout, these songs shift gears, often eschewing Haim's usual summery rock to find the right genre for the mood, sometimes containing different shades within the same track. “All That Ever Mattered” peppers Danielle’s vocals with distorted screams and a mumbled interjection of “fuck no,” before pirouetting away into a glam-rock guitar solo. “3 AM” and “Another Try” flirt with falsetto-driven funk and R&B, and “I Know Alone,” a song about depression-scrolling and sleeping through the day, contains dusty echoes of UK garage.
Not every song feels like a pioneering event. “Don’t Wanna” could have lived on any of Haim’s three albums: a tight pop-rock song built around an irrepressible guitar lick and an oblique story of a relationship in trouble. But their most exciting trips go off the beaten path, like the crystalline sad banger “Now I’m in It”—a song that wouldn’t have sounded out of place on Taylor Swift’s Lover. This may be the first Haim album that steps out of its retro groove long enough to draw parallels with other contemporary pop music, specifically Rechtshaid and Danielle’s recent work with Vampire Weekend. Having long since proven their chops when it comes to writing a breezy 1970s-style rock song, they now sound comfortable enough within their niche to push beyond it.
WIMPIII is bookended by two songs about L.A., both featuring a saxophone and wistful “doot-do-do” backing vocals. On the first, “Los Angeles,” Danielle describes falling out of love with her hometown. But in the final song, “Summer Girl”—while its melody hits a similarly melancholic vein—she interpolates Lou Reed as she sings about the relief of coming home to L.A. from tour to be with her partner. She’s anguished when she sings that she’s “thinking ’bout leaving” the city, but hushed and reverent on a later line when she reflects on how much she misses it: “L.A. on my mind, I can’t breathe.” Placed beside each other, the two songs take on new dimensions. It’s Haim as we haven’t quite heard them before: not just eminently proficient musicians, entertainers, and “women in music,” but full of flaws and contradictions, becoming something much greater.
CORRECTION: An earlier version of this review omitted the production work of Rostam. | 2020-06-25T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-06-25T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Columbia | June 25, 2020 | 8.6 | cba086b7-4bd2-438a-94e1-c792db89b7fc | Aimee Cliff | https://pitchfork.com/staff/aimee-cliff/ | |
Most of the songs on this four-track EP are just fine. One is a boorish, boring misfire that should have stayed in the vault. | Most of the songs on this four-track EP are just fine. One is a boorish, boring misfire that should have stayed in the vault. | Jeremih: The Chocolate Box EP | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/jeremih-the-chocolate-box-ep/ | The Chocolate Box EP | Jeremih has spent nearly a decade working hard to exceed his own limitations. After breaking out in 2009 with the catchy but formulaic hit “Birthday Sex,” the Chicago R&B singer followed a fairly typical release schedule for a few years. Then, in 2012, he dropped Late Nights with Jeremih—a lush, filthy gamble whose best moments, like the smooth, Mike WiLL-produced “733-Love” and the spectral Skype sex song “Fuck U All the Time,” proved that he was more than an above-average pop-R&B singer, raising expectations that he’s still trying to live up to.
He’s since chased the success of that self-released mixtape to varying results. His 2014 collaborative EP with Shlohmo, his Late Nights studio album from the following year, and his 2016 holiday tape with Chance the Rapper are the bright lights in Jeremih’s career. On those releases, he’s shown an open mind and an adventurous spirit in a time when many of his peers would rather tether themselves to trends. But there are also entries in Jeremih’s discography that are a little sloppy, like Late Nights: Europe, a mixtape with scattershot studio mixing, inconsistent sound quality, and a tedious Lothario tone that hasn’t aged well in the past two years. The Chocolate Box, a four-track EP he’s released in anticipation of a new full-length, is another one that could have stayed in the vault.
The songs here are just fine, mostly. Opener “Cards Right” is slick and sweet, and “Forever I’m Ready” is a de rigueur rap-singing cut, à la Tory Lanez or Travis Scott, with inoffensive but eye-rolly lyrics about how his paramour is a “bad girl like RiRi.” “Nympho” offers a reprisal of the ghostly textures of Late Nights with Jeremih, but not enough of a future-facing evolution of the sound to make it exciting. All of these failings, though, are minor compared to the EP’s true blemish, an ode to midnight blow jobs called “SMTS.” This is an acronym for “suck me to sleep,” which you will know well by the end of the song, because the entire falsetto hook is Jeremih repeating the line over and over again: “She must’ve sucked me to sleep/Bad bitch suck me to sleep/Savage, suck me to sleep… Had to make a song how she suck me to sleep.” Did he? His boorish and almost bored delivery suggests that “SMTS” would have been better left as a studio in-joke.
There is a lot of room in modern pop for explicitly pervy music that doesn’t alienate its audience. Ty Dolla $ign, for instance, can make a lyric like “I used to love these hoes, but now I love this money” sound tender because of his husky, romantic delivery. But if you’re going to turn “locker room talk” into balladry, your technique needs to involve something more appealing than desperate falsetto chirping.
With a little gruffness, or even a more Migos-informed style of delivery, “SMTS” could have been a salacious, blush-worthy party cut. Instead, it’s just awkward—and there’s far too much competition for the king of Filthy Sex Jam Mountain these days for Jeremih to get over with something like this. When his projects are well-considered, or made with hyper-focused collaborators, he can be the most enchanting man in the room, which is reason to look forward to MihTy, his upcoming duet tape with Ty Dolla $ign. With The Chocolate Box, Jeremih just underscores the fact that some ideas are better kept to yourself. | 2018-03-17T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-03-15T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | Def Jam | March 17, 2018 | 5.2 | cbb2acc9-64a0-4db7-a8fd-81d459793175 | Claire Lobenfeld | https://pitchfork.com/staff/claire-lobenfeld/ | |
The Lisbon producer’s solo debut takes the spiky, polyrhythmic sound of Portuguese batida and bends it toward a sleek dancefloor sensibility, making for Príncipe’s most accessible release yet. | The Lisbon producer’s solo debut takes the spiky, polyrhythmic sound of Portuguese batida and bends it toward a sleek dancefloor sensibility, making for Príncipe’s most accessible release yet. | DJ Lilocox: Paz & Amor EP | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/dj-lilocox-paz-and-amor-ep/ | Paz & Amor EP | In dance music, small and localized scenes rarely stay intact for long. The favela sound of funk carioca, once picked up by Diplo, spread well beyond Rio; moombahton quickly left DC and grew into a worldwide sound; and after decades underground, Chicago footwork became a global force. That Lisbon’s Príncipe label has nurtured the vibrant and febrile batida scene rising from the city’s African immigrant community for over seven years while keeping its rhythmic sensibilities intact—and undiluted—is remarkable. Providing a nexus where African rhythms like kuduro, batida, kizomba, funaná, and tarraxinha can intermingle with house and techno, they’ve made plenty of fans: Thom Yorke has repped for DJ Nigga Fox, labels like Warp and Lit City Trax have put out batida records, and last year Nídia produced the frenetic “IDK About You” for Fever Ray’s Plunge. This sound remains as wildly innovative and compelling as it was at the start, with the label’s roster having been allowed to mature and evolve without any pressure from the outside world. That isolation can be a double-edged sword: The music’s spikiness can seem baffling to outsiders and casual listeners. But Paz & Amor, the label’s 23rd release, might be one of the best gateways it has opened yet for newcomers to explore this peculiar Afro-European sound.
Of Cape Verdean descent, DJ Lilocox has been affiliated with the Príncipe imprint since 2013, both as part of the Piquenos DJs Do Guetto collective and the duo Casa Da Mãe Produções, but Paz & Amor marks his first proper solo release. The five-track EP presents the most formidable iteration of batida to date; it’s a release that retains all the show-stopping muscle and grace of DJ Nigga Fox’s Crânio from a few months ago with a streamlined approach that might be more readily embraced in house, bass, and techno circles. In just a handful of tracks, Lilocox shows off a wide array of styles, revealing how thrilling batida can be when melded to modern dancefloor sensibilities, without losing one iota of its livewire energy.
“Vozes Ricas” puts Lilocox’s rollercoaster polyrhythms front and center, a tumble of shakers, rattles, claves, and barrel-sized toms topped by pressure-ratcheting tympanum rolls. Lurking behind all these thundering beats are the title’s “rich voices,” a dark and tumultuous choir that Lilocox slides and stretches around an array of shifting rhythmic patterns.
That push and pull—between tension, drama, heightened emotion, and rhythmic release—is dance music’s métier, but batida’s dizzying beats can sometimes obscure that sense of play. It takes the steeliest of DJs to slip the music of Nigga Fox or DJ Firmeza into a set, as most of their productions move as predictably as spilled BBs on a dancefloor. Lilocox is well versed in tricky styles like funaná and tarraxinha, but Paz showcases his ability to pull also from tribal house, South African gqom, even Brazilian samba, and make them all cohere. The tough and skeletal “Ritmos e Melodias” has the fidgety buzz of gqom and the slipperiness of UK funky, but Lilocox makes it yield to his syncopated thwacks. “Fronteiras”—with its glowing synth chords, flecks of piano, and crackling percussion—rides a house groove that brings to mind Ron Trent’s classic Prescription sides: sensuous, contented, and deep.
“Samba,” per its title, builds itself up from a nimble samba pattern. But soon Lilocox fusses with it, detonating dubby drums and claps alongside a nervy bit of acoustic guitar; for the first half, he entirely forgoes the kick and the bassline. And while almost all artists on Príncipe watermark their music in some manner, branding the beat with their names in a fashion akin to DJ Mustard or DJ Khaled, Lilocox doesn’t shout out his own name until two-thirds of the way through the EP, punctuating the track before letting all the fidgeting drums take over. It’s as if to suggest that Lilocox’s batida is so distinct, so wholly his own beat, that it’s impossible to mistake him for anyone else. | 2018-05-29T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-05-29T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Príncipe Discos | May 29, 2018 | 7.8 | cbb62061-eaa2-4905-bce1-662b7f97f896 | Andy Beta | https://pitchfork.com/staff/andy-beta/ | |
The third album from indie/psych/folk quartet Quilt offers a rebuttal to all those people who argue that every artist steals. Some, like Quilt, know the difference between stealing from and honoring their influences. | The third album from indie/psych/folk quartet Quilt offers a rebuttal to all those people who argue that every artist steals. Some, like Quilt, know the difference between stealing from and honoring their influences. | Quilt: Plaza | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21408-plaza/ | Plaza | When a band reaches into its box of old demos on hitting the third-album mark, that’s usually a sign that either the ideas have started to run low or that the musicians are no longer getting together to write songs as often as they once did. Likewise, groups of songs spanning several years often fail to hang together as a coherent whole. The third album from indie/psych/folk quartet Quilt might come from old demos, but it bucks these common trends by showing that disparity can serve as a creative asset.
Like a kind of musical Bermuda quadrangle, the convergence of pop-leaning indie rock, psychedelia, vintage British folk, and Americana has lulled many a band to sink into generic facelessness. Not so here. The only times Plaza comes across as less than convincing are the moments where Shane Butler and company tip their hand a tad too heavily, such as on closing number "Own Ways," which falls just short of featuring faux English accents and sounds like Quilt’s musical answer to a '60s mod costume party.
Elsewhere, though, they steer clear of slavish recreation, cleverly revealing new wrinkles in the arrangements from one song to the next. When Anna Fox Rochinski and Butler throw in a key shift on opener "Passerby" that evokes a sitar-like, resonator guitar tone, it’s as if they hit the whammy bar on the song itself during playback. It’s a trick they manage several times throughout this new set, where the entire band, which also includes drummer John Andrews and new bassist Keven Lareau, will suddenly go slack before the arrangement as a whole automatically snaps back like a guitar returning to its default string tension. At these times, usually the band will be cruising along at a pleasant pace before swerving toward a jagged, seemingly out-of-place chord or element, and the overall effect is like a friend suddenly tousling your hair.
On "Roller," Quilt re-reappropriates Elastica’s appropriation of Wire, but instead of returning the angular guitar riff to its rightful owner, tosses it into a dreamlike backdrop of keyboards and Rochinski vocals that smudge out in trails of thickening reverb, simulating our semi-conscious day-to-day train of thought as it focuses on banal tasks then blurs into daydreams until those nagging bits of reality pull our attention back down to Earth. If you were to stop and take stock of how many times your mind does this in the course of a single day, you’d likely be surprised because the process unfolds so smoothly that you mostly don’t even register that it’s happening. Quilt executes these transitions with similar ease.
On the chorus of "Your Island," for example, Rochinski’s reverb-drenched vocals scrape the upper stratosphere of shoegaze—only without typical shoegaze instrumentation. It’s as if the band stripped a Lush tune of its vocals and transplanted them in a stripped-down, downtempo song that could have been written by the Duke Spirit. "O’Connor’s Barn" marries Whip-Smart-era Liz Phair’s cottony impressionism with the slightest touch of a Pavement-styled guitar hook circa Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain. "Padova" excavates the experimental streak that seemed so promising about Gomez before that band surrendered to slick pop, while "Hissing My Plea" emulates the strings that Beck stole from Funkadelic’s "If You Don’t Like the Effects, Don’t Produce the Cause." Elsewhere, jangly nods to Fairport Convention and barebones Americana rear their heads as well.
In all of these cases, though, Quilt either significantly expands on or reframes these references, bringing substance, character and a modern production sheen to older ideas. They have always been a quietly stylish band, with diligently crafted songs, savvy arrangement instincts, and a discreet, almost unassuming way of asserting their own voice while embracing influences. Without even trying, Plaza offers a rebuttal to all those people who argue that every artist steals. Wrong—some, like Quilt, know the difference between stealing and honoring. | 2016-03-01T01:00:03.000-05:00 | 2016-03-01T01:00:03.000-05:00 | Rock | Mexican Summer | March 1, 2016 | 7.7 | cbbd4c26-0247-4fff-9f6c-09b17dd0a8ed | Saby Reyes-Kulkarni | https://pitchfork.com/staff/saby-reyes-kulkarni/ | null |
The idealistic, politically-minded Scottish indie-pop band gloss up their sound on album three. | The idealistic, politically-minded Scottish indie-pop band gloss up their sound on album three. | The Spook School: Could It Be Different? | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/the-spook-school-could-it-be-different/ | Could It Be Different? | In 2015, Scottish quartet the Spook School met with Against Me!’s Laura Jane Grace to discuss the realities facing transgender artists in the music industry. Spook School singer/guitarist Nye Todd, who had come out as transgender about a year earlier, was eager to ask Grace how fans reacted to her 2012 revelation. “People have been very supportive of me in general,” Grace said. It was a crucial conversation: For Nye, whose Twitter bio notes that he “writes songs about gender and being v queer,” the politics of the marginalized are inseparable from the music he makes. The rest of Spook School, comprising guitarist/vocalist Adam Todd (Nye’s brother), singer/bassist Anna Cory, and drummer Niall McCamley, accepts this as a shared cause. At another point in the video, McCamley insists that when attempting to understand members of the trans community, “the most important thing is to listen... to let these people have a voice.”
The Spook School take that mission literally. Their 2013 debut, Dress Up, and their 2015 follow-up, Try to Be Hopeful, were full of similarly progressive dialogues about LGBTQ hardships. And while the music on those albums felt optimistic, the production retained enough grit to balance their rose-tinted melodies. They were frill-free and raw records, allowing the Spook School’s songwriting to sparkle through the scuzz. The production on the group’s third LP, Could It Be Different?—the band’s second collaboration with producer Matthew Johnson of Hookworms—buffs out that grit, leaving a record so shiny it’s blinding.
Opening track “Still Alive” starts the LP off with cloying guitar riffs and squealing feedback that sound borrowed from Epitaph Records’ back catalog. Even with the Spook School’s sloppy charm scrubbed away, though, the songwriting holds up: “Still Alive” is a feisty anthem taking aim at haters, particularly the bigots that want to make you “feel small.” It’s criminally catchy, and if it doesn’t make your brain sing “Fuck you, I’m still alive!” for days, your hippocampus may be in need of a tune-up.
The Spook School excel at crafting irresistible power-pop moments like this. “Less Than Perfect” and “I Hope She Loves You” could inspire even the most rigid crowd to pogo as one. The latter song opens with a drumroll before bursting directly into its sing-along chorus (“And I hope she loves you/Like I couldn’t do”). The bizarre “Best of Intentions” winks at the Buzzcocks and XTC, with a tangy lead guitar part and Nye’s pitchy, half-spoken delivery providing one of the few times on this album that the band’s delightful quirks aren’t shellacked beyond recognition. Occasionally, the Spook School’s influences are too on-the-nose—like when the record gets tangled up in “High School” and “teenage hopes.” Singing about adolescence may have worked for the Undertones 40 years ago (as it worked for Nirvana and Blink 182 in later decades), but in 2018, coming from musicians in their mid-twenties, it feels hackneyed.
As lyricists, the Spook School are most effective when they tackle the bleak and routine. On the glum ballad “Alright (Sometimes),” Nye offers self-imposed ignorance as a coping mechanism for reality. “I said let’s pretend the world’s all right/Let’s pretend we’re doing fine,” he suggests before (almost) finding comfort in a companion: “But with you I feel all right/Sometimes.” It’s one of the record’s most candid moments, and yet the song itself is bit of a snoozer, following a verse/chorus/bridge/coda recipe with little energy or improvisation. A similar problem plagues “Bad Year,” which does a fine job of verbally rendering despondence; unfortunately, the melody sounds worn out, too. “I admire your optimism/But sometimes I just need to feel it,” Nye shrugs, his words floating atop a diluted indie slow dance. These few duds are missing both the honesty and the dynamite hooks of the band’s best work, like the trans-positive “Body,” where the brothers Todd get personal: “Do you like the way you look naked?/I don’t know if any of us do/And I still hate my body/But I’m learning to love what it can do.”
The Spook School are idealists at heart. Their inclusive lyrics and perky guitar pop mirror the change they hope to summon in the world. Adam Todd has said that Could It Be Different? was written “from a place of feeling like everything definitely isn’t alright now.” Perhaps they figured dark times call for bright music, but this overly polished record often feels like a missed opportunity. | 2018-01-29T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2018-01-29T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Slumberland / Alcopop! | January 29, 2018 | 6.8 | cbc3476f-d00c-45d3-bcca-89600c3b7617 | Madison Bloom | https://pitchfork.com/staff/madison-bloom/ | https://media.pitchfork.com/photos/5a5e527a73f0ef18803bdd00/1:1/w_800,h_800,c_limit/%20Could%20It%20Be%20Different?.jpg |
After the hard left turn of Oxnard, Paak sinks back into the bubbly smooth grooves that got him noticed. | After the hard left turn of Oxnard, Paak sinks back into the bubbly smooth grooves that got him noticed. | Anderson .Paak: Ventura | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/anderson-paak-ventura/ | Ventura | Last year’s Oxnard was Anderson .Paak’s first hard left turn. Working more closely with Dr. Dre, who gave him his original career boost on his own 2015 Compton, he jettisoned his warm, ingratiating funk in favor of sexed-up self-indulgence, hot-buttered excess, and hard-edged rapping. The project sold well but sparked such lingering criticism among fans that even his mom had to clap back at haters. After spending nearly three years working on his Malibu follow up, he took less than a year to redress it with Ventura. The soothing soul palette is back, this time coloring love songs and their sweet nothings, and Paak settles into his old polished grooves in search of comfort.
Unlike the Internet, whose genre hybrids are seamless, or Smino, whose future-funk and soulful raps are effortlessly malleable, Paak’s songs can be traced directly back to their sources: the funk rock of Parliament-Funkadelic, the smooth, gliding strokes of Frankie Beverly & Maze, the glowing visions of Stevie Wonder, lush Dre-era G-Funk, the eclectic neo-soul of Sa-Ra. The Oxnard native is constantly showing his work, for better and worse. He is capable of imitation, if not flattery, in the form of a patchwork reimaginations. But he traces sounds of the past so finely that his own work disappears.
Malibu got over on its earnest, introspective writing, which anchored its wide-ranging soul in something idiosyncratic and personal. Ventura doesn’t have as sharp of a perspective, but his generous personality still shines through from time to time. The gorgeous “Yada Yada” ponders the end of the world before settling somewhere this side of YOLO: “Our days are numbered, I’d rather count what I earn.” On “Good Heels,” Jazmine Sullivan plays a side chick who locked her things in Paak’s apartment. His girlfriend’s on her way there and he’s off in the Palisades with the key. His solution: She has to climb up the fire escape and break in. It’s an amusing and charming little vignette.
Then, there’s “King James,” Paak's ode to black resistance and political action. “What we built here is godly/They can’t gentrify the heart of kings,” Paak sings. He follows the threads of activism in professional sports to community organizing, and a salute to service becomes a call to action. “We couldn’t stand to see our children shot dead in the streets/But when I finally took a knee, them crackers took me out the league/Now I’m not much for games but I play for keeps/And we salute King James for using his change/To create some equal opportunities.” It’s in these spaces that his songs come alive and become more than serviceable soul cosplay.
Despite featuring several prominent rap producers, Malibu was like a hip-hop sampler with soul at its center. Oxnard hewed closer to rap in form and function, and suffered for it. Betting bigger on Paak’s abilities as a rapper proved risky; where his raspy squawk of a singing voice always communicates fervor, he strains as a rapper. Ventura seems acutely aware of this and rebalances accordingly. The leisurely grooves of “Winners Circle” and opener “Come Home” provide ample room for Paak and the chorus fleshing out his harmonies to breathe.
The raps here, including the André 3000 verse, appear largely in the form of breakdowns or sections all to themselves. These moments often come as pleasant surprises, usually delivering statements of purpose (on “Chosen One,” a song otherwise about finding a perfect partner, he takes a second to offer: “To label me as The One, debatable/But second to none, that suit me like a tailored suit”) and they foreground him as a soul singer and bandleader first and foremost.
Those who were hoping for a “return to form” from Anderson Paak will likely be delighted by Ventura, which bears inside it all the hallmarks of his breakthrough. This tune-up album, at the very least, restores the underlying feeling of his signature stuff. But there, too, lies its flaw: it’s a hollow effort lacking in any real distinguishing characteristics. The album never becomes more than the sum of its sounds. | 2019-04-12T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-04-12T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | 12 Tone | April 12, 2019 | 6.9 | cbc7732b-91f0-4d4a-a24e-ccce98b168ef | Sheldon Pearce | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sheldon-pearce/ | |
Toronto's Lindi Ortega is a country outlier in a city better known for indie rock. She toured as a back-up singer for Brandon Flowers and eventually signed with Last Gang Records, releasing solo albums to a slow-growing audience. Her latest, Faded Gloryville, may be her biggest yet. These songs highlight her innate ability to peel back the layers of country convention and find weird new emotions underneath. | Toronto's Lindi Ortega is a country outlier in a city better known for indie rock. She toured as a back-up singer for Brandon Flowers and eventually signed with Last Gang Records, releasing solo albums to a slow-growing audience. Her latest, Faded Gloryville, may be her biggest yet. These songs highlight her innate ability to peel back the layers of country convention and find weird new emotions underneath. | Lindi Ortega: Faded Gloryville | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/20908-faded-gloryville/ | Faded Gloryville | On her sixth album in 15 years, Toronto native Lindi Ortega sounds like she’s been through the industry wringer. After laboring for years as a country outlier in a city better known for indie rock, she self-released two albums and a handful of EPs in the 2000s, weathered one ill-fated major-label signing, then toured as a back-up singer for Brandon Flowers. At the beginning of this decade, she signed with Last Gang Records, releasing two well-reviewed albums that introduced her studiously forlorn vocals and twang-goth sound to a slowly growing audience. And yet, on her latest album, she sounds like she knows the best part is behind and now she’s living in a lonely place called Faded Gloryville.
Ironically, Faded Gloryville might be Ortega's biggest record yet, one that feels well timed amid a boom of semi-traditionalist female country singer-songwriters. She's never quite as witty as Kacey Musgraves or as bold as Nikki Lane, and she doesn't have the ability to immediately shatter your heart the way Ashley Monroe can. Instead, she has a shrewd, quiet self-awareness: "I ain't the girl you're looking for... I ain't the girl for you," she sings sweetly on "I Ain't the Girl". Even though the song is sung to a clean-cut, buttoned up would-be suitor, you get the sense that she might be speaking directly to you, the listener, and wondering why the hell you're even bothering with her.
That's not low self-esteem or fake humility. Instead, one suspects that it has more to do with always being on the edges of the country industry. Ortega is a Canadian with Irish-Mexican blood and a sartorial style that's more Stevie Nicks than Loretta Lynn. Rather than small towns, she sings about big cities, especially on the standout "Run-Down Neighborhood", which finds a sturdy friendship taking shape in the sort of neighborhood where people drive through without stopping at red lights. "Hey, you can have some of my weed if I can smoke your cigarette/ I might be running low, but I ain't out just yet," she sings brightly.
Most of the time Ortega sounds spry, even excitable, singing with a knowing wink underscoring the fatalism of the songs. Even the grim details of a hard-luck life can't keep her down. "Run Amuck" begins as a typical lament about an unfaithful guy, but the second verse reveals that her man is chasing something besides skirts: "Uppers and downers, coffee and cocaine," she sings, then adds, "Egg in a frying pan, this is your brain." In just a few words and a clever rhyme, Ortega stages an intervention and nods at the hokey inadequacy of interventions.
There's more than a little rage driving that song, just as there's more than a little sadness nipping at the edges of "Ain't the Girl". Even if this isn't her most cohesive or inventive album (that would be 2012's Cigarettes & Truckstops), these songs highlight her innate ability to peel back the layers of country convention and find weird new emotions underneath. Ultimately, she makes Faded Gloryville sound not so much like a place of diminished opportunity, but endless possibility. | 2015-08-11T02:00:02.000-04:00 | 2015-08-11T02:00:02.000-04:00 | Folk/Country | Last Gang / Grand Tour | August 11, 2015 | 7 | cbc976e4-ac1f-42f8-a2df-fb2a5b700e58 | Stephen M. Deusner | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stephen-m. deusner/ | null |
Tamaryn's new album moves from the denser shoegaze thickets of Tender New Signs and The Waves into a pure, sugary dream-pop world. No longer competing for sonic space with a heavy wash of guitar, her voice, even drenched in reverb, becomes the focus. | Tamaryn's new album moves from the denser shoegaze thickets of Tender New Signs and The Waves into a pure, sugary dream-pop world. No longer competing for sonic space with a heavy wash of guitar, her voice, even drenched in reverb, becomes the focus. | Tamaryn: Cranekiss | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/20981-tamaryn-cranekiss/ | Cranekiss | Tamaryn’s Cranekiss is a big step for the project, a move out of the denser shoegaze thickets of Tender New Signs and The Waves into a pure, sugary dream-pop world. It features the kind of glossy production made popular in the 1980s and '90s by John Fryer of This Mortal Coil in his myriad productions for 4AD, Mute, and Beggars Banquet—Cocteau Twins, Xmal Deutschland, Clan of Xymox, Chapterhouse. Tamaryn herself is the only constant between her past two albums and this one, changing instrumental personnel (here she works with Shaun Durkan of Weekend) and production credits (Jorge Elbrecht of Violens, who has also worked with Ariel Pink and No Joy) from her previous incarnation.
No longer competing for sonic space with a heavy wash of guitar, Tamaryn’s voice, even drenched in reverb, becomes the focus. There are serious pop hooks on this record—opener "Cranekiss" has a chorus that will alight inside your skull, flutter its wings a bit, and set to making a nest—and her voice sounds much less constrained, more ebullient and full, than on previous recordings. Many of the songs on Cranekiss are about uncompromising female desire from varying perspectives (the first single "Hands All Over Me" and "Softcore", which samples both porn simulacra of female orgasms and the peep show scene from Paris, Texas, stand out), a joyous thing in and of itself, and the theme of Cranekiss overall seems to be freedom, expansion, exploration.
There are moments when Cranekiss seems a little too hewn to the '80s and '90s ethereal/goth sound it’s an obvious homage to—the sonic Cocteau Twins references throughout the first half of the record can sound a little heavy-handed, and any of the tracks would have fit in seamlessly on the classic Hyperium Records Heavenly Voices compilation. There is value in exploring the particular styles that made you fall head-over-heels for music in the first place, though, and while Cranekiss hardly breaks new ground it has a sense of playfulness to it, a sort of sparkling and infectious enthusiasm. Tamaryn has said that making this album was a "very, very pleasurable, inspiring, fun experience unlike anything I’ve ever done before," and that’s palpable upon hearing it.
Amid all the swirl and shimmer, there are some tracks that feel more rooted—"Fade Away Slow", a goth taffy-pull of a song near the close of the album, probably has the most low end on an album that likes to pull away from the earth overall. It unwinds deliciously, unpeeling layers of itself to nearly break down before spinning into a lovely bridge and a recall chorus. Because some of the tracks are so airy, a call down to close out the record, like closing out a ritual, seems like a necessary respite.
Cranekiss firmly establishes Tamaryn’s pop songwriting chops. It also indicates a willingness to play with new instrumentation—the synths, drum triggers, and sampling are all new to Tamaryn's palette—and a willingness to play with established style and form. It's a beautiful, heavily textured, highly sensual record, heady sugar on the tongue. | 2015-09-01T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2015-09-01T02:00:01.000-04:00 | Rock | Mexican Summer | September 1, 2015 | 7.4 | cbc9cf21-c551-4a1d-b295-bf793fe6043c | JJ Skolnik | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jj-skolnik/ | null |
The rapper’s new album is a poignant meditation on embracing the present moment, showcasing his labyrinthine flows and deep reverence for the craft of hip-hop. | The rapper’s new album is a poignant meditation on embracing the present moment, showcasing his labyrinthine flows and deep reverence for the craft of hip-hop. | Cavalier: Different Type Time | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/cavalier-different-type-time/ | Different Type Time | Somewhere in Brooklyn, New Orleans, or Oakland, there’s a corner apartment with a window propped open. A slight breeze gently pushes the curtains aside to let the sunshine in, noises from the street below sneaking behind it. Thin ribbons of smoke from a smoldering cone, either weed or incense (but probably both), perfume the room while a gust of wind flutters notebook pages full of long-forgotten observations. There’s an undeniable wisdom that lives in moments like these, cultivated through the simplicity of attuning to the sights, smells, and space around you. If you tap into that energy, you might even bridge the past and present, connecting with something larger than yourself.
That sense of spirituality permeates Different Type Time, Cavalier’s sumptuous and sublime new album. It’s in the record’s hushed mysticism: Characters perform honey jar spells or clutch copies of the Circle 7 Koran to their chest; some form of God is always present in the margins of songs, appearing as a Black woman, a mother, or the buds of a cannabis plant. It’s in the warm, beatific production Cavalier chooses, every gossamer string, lilting guitar, or sparkling piano loosely orbiting around crisp, unobtrusive drums. On “Pears,” he raps, “It’s vibrational, ain’t it” four times, using repetition to tune in to higher frequencies. Throughout the album, Cavalier constantly harmonizes with the cosmos to ground himself within the chaos.
Cav is originally from Brooklyn, but landed in New Orleans about a decade ago. He and his frequent collaborators Quelle Chris and Iman Omari were previously bicoastal, convening to work on music in New York, Omari’s hometown of Los Angeles, or whatever West Coast enclave Quelle was living in at the moment. Cav and Omari eventually settled in NOLA, where the pair made 2015’s LemOnade EP and 2018’s Private Stock, the latter of which has become something of a minor cult classic among contemplative underground rap fans. Those records reflected the pair’s new Southern home, including Omari’s take on warm jazz and Cav’s ruminations on NOLA’s struggles with gentrification and police brutality. For Different Type Time, Cav recruits a new slate of producers, expanding his palette but retaining his previous works’ humid thrum. He’s still concerned with his surroundings but turns further inward, the record playing like conversations between different eras of himself.
It’s hard to catch the depth of Cav’s writing upon first listen, as he frequently employs double entendres and clever innuendos, burying them in thickets of labyrinthine flows. It can be outright dizzying, like the brain-frying wordplay in the middle of “Doodoo Damien:” “Flex on the rest of you bitches and that ain’t gender ‘pacific’/That’s all coast, almost kings—Edward, King James, not Olmos/That’s American me, where Eric B. for President set precedence with me.” He finds the connective tissue between disparate thoughts, his verses resembling a heat map visualization of the brain’s firing synapses. Over the slow-motion calypso rhythms of “Come Proper,” Cav invokes the writer bell hooks, wishes his exes well, and stubs out a joint in an overflowing ashtray—all within the first eight bars.
On the Quelle Chris-produced “Flourish,” amidst a flurry of self-confident boasts about his skills and wardrobe, Cav takes a moment to contemplate the difference between optimism and hope, noting: “My granny cops new lotto tickets while the doom clock’s ticking.” He’ll often interrupt his own knotty stanzas with calming images, as if he’s reminding himself to drop his shoulders and unclench his jaw. By the end of “Can’t Leave It Alone,” when he’s worked himself into a tizzy debating the internal pressures of his perceived potential, he pauses to prune a bonsai tree. In between pondering death and sex on “Yeah Boiii,” he peels a Satsuma orange.
Throughout the album, Cav grounds himself in the craft. He’s a self-professed hip-hop nerd, peppering verses with allusions to Cooley High and Bob James’ perpetually sampled “Nautilus,” or repurposing lines from Ol’ Dirty Bastard, A Tribe Called Quest, or Jay-Z songs. The backlit boom-bap beat that producer foushou. provides for the mid-album highlight “Told You” prompts Cav to find a pocket like a young Nas, creating an introverted, alternate-dimension version of “The World Is Yours.” Though he’s undeniably a student of the ’90s golden era, Cav shows clear reverence for that sound without overtly trying to recreate it. When he does have the rare wistful old head moment, it comes off as charming, never scolding.
The only two guest rappers, credited as Unhoused Brothers in the liner notes, are men Cav met serendipitously while traveling to cities where his producers lived. One has his own song, “Baby I’m Home,” while the other appears at the end of “Told You” and “Axiom / My Gawd.” Both of these encounters occurred on the same day—the first moments before Cav left Detroit, the second shortly after he landed in Dallas. Cav has said in interviews that he made Different Type Time as a reaction to the breathless oversaturation and mindless overconsumption of the streaming age. The inclusion of these recordings on an album six years in the making solidifies Different Type Time as a poignant meditation on presence: The world moves too quickly, and there’s too much to process at any given time, but if you’re able to slow down—even for just a moment—you’ll find insight to gain and beauty to experience, folding into the cosmic energy that surrounds us all. | 2024-04-26T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2024-04-26T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Backwoodz Studioz | April 26, 2024 | 8 | cbcab54d-01c9-49db-851b-63a3414c3a8f | Dash Lewis | https://pitchfork.com/staff/dash-lewis/ | |
Bryson Tiller’s sophomore album leans heavily on ’90s R&B samples. It sounds luxurious, but Tiller’s come-up narrative and good-guy pose are starting to lose their power. | Bryson Tiller’s sophomore album leans heavily on ’90s R&B samples. It sounds luxurious, but Tiller’s come-up narrative and good-guy pose are starting to lose their power. | Bryson Tiller: True to Self | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/23339-true-to-self/ | True to Self | Bryson Tiller knows his origin story. Since the breakthrough success of his 2015 debut album, *Trapsoul, *the Kentucky-born R&B singer remains committed to that come-up narrative. He worked at Papa John’s, threw a song on SoundCloud that grabbed Drake’s attention, turned down the offer to sign to OVO, and instead signed with RCA and ended up with two Top 40 hits (“Don’t” and “Exchange”). *True to Self, *Tiller’s sophomore album, which was surprised-released a month early, tries to offer new dimensions to that story arc while reconstructing the dividing lines between R&B and every other genre.
Over the last year, Tiller’s R&B peers PARTYNEXTDOOR and Tory Lanez tried to find new roots in dancehall, and the Weeknd went further into the pop machine. On *True to Self, *Tiller isn’t so much of a globalist. Instead, on “In Check,” he samples Brandy’s mid-’90s hit “Missing You,” then further gambles by putting samples on the album from Faith Evans, Ice Cube, Mary J. Blige, and Tweet. The album’s credits read like a ’90s old-school station in much the same way ’70s and ’80s funk and soul provided the backbone of hip-hop and R&B two decades ago.
More precisely, Tiller’s roots can be found in Bobby Brown or the post-new jack swing machismo of Jodeci, rather than the buttoned-up slickness of a Boyz II Men or Babyface. “Don’t Get Too High,” an early album highlight, uses an uncredited Travis Scott sample from his 2014 song “Backyard,” as Tiller talks down to a former fling, “Woah, you make me feel how I make other bitches feel/Like you be cool without or with me here.” There is just the slightest hint of self-awareness that shows Tiller can see through his own nonsense.
Before the lines of R&B and rap fully blurred, a rapper on an R&B song would bluntly state its emotional themes, while the singer would only offer hints. Tiller’s generation has streamlined the workflow, so he turns on a dime from the struggling ex-boyfriend to an aggressive rap star. But it’s Tiller’s pettiness, rather than romance, that drives True to Self, as he adjusts to the trappings of fame. “Somethin Tells Me” hinges on that tension as a bedroom drama morphs into a lament on the grief caused by fame and success. Tiller reveals little more about these privileged concerns than Drake has already done over the last decade—in fact, he sounds the most comfortable at the shallow end of the emotional pool.
The 1998 SWV hit “Rain” is sampled on the opening interlude of *True to Self *to try and establish a new tone for Tiller’s world. Rain is a powerful trope in R&B: Justin Timberlake’s “Cry Me a River” video, the raindrops on Trey Songz’s 2010 album Passion, Pain & Pleasure, New Edition’s late ’80s hit “Can You Stand The Rain,” and Prince’s classic “Purple Rain.” Rain stands for emotional change and vulnerability and *True to Self *tries its best to follow through on that idea. Except, he struggles to let his guard down, and ironically, operates best when he keeps it up. Tiller comes off not as the passionate lover, but as the sappy everyman—too bland and full of tropes to be the new hero pouring his heart out in a thunderstorm. Maybe that's why his personal narrative that he holds so close feels wrung dry. | 2017-05-31T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-05-31T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | RCA | May 31, 2017 | 6.6 | cbd6cde8-43b7-486e-a880-4f243bae7060 | David Turner | https://pitchfork.com/staff/david-turner/ | null |
The Northampton, Mass. quartet Potty Mouth are among a crop of bands expanding the idea of "pop-punk" in 2013. Their debut LP, Hell Bent, inches the feminist punk quartet towards more profound songwriting than last year's great Sun Damage EP. | The Northampton, Mass. quartet Potty Mouth are among a crop of bands expanding the idea of "pop-punk" in 2013. Their debut LP, Hell Bent, inches the feminist punk quartet towards more profound songwriting than last year's great Sun Damage EP. | Potty Mouth: Hell Bent | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/18417-potty-mouth-hell-bent/ | Hell Bent | Potty Mouth don't shake the foundation of guitar rock, but they do inject it with attitude, playing the Ladyfest-aligned basement scene while also transcending it. Dreamt up at women's-only Smith College, in Northampton, Mass., bassist Ally Einbinder and drummer Victoria Mandanas had already played the punk scene, allowing Potty Mouth a driving energy, while Phoebe Harris, also a visual artist, didn't own a guitar. Abby Weems, a recent high school grad, fronts the band with deceptively simple lyrical play-- her Liz Phair-style monotone is clear and literal, underscoring the direct quality of their pop-punk poetry. At times the guitars weave like early ramshackle post-punk, but Potty Mouth's upbeat surf fuzz could be likened to any number of fast, barebones 70s and 90s punk bands who were learning as they went. You could imagine them covering Buzzcocks, Jawbreaker, or maybe Excuse 17.
With that, Potty Mouth are among a crop of bands expanding the idea of "pop-punk" in 2013-- see Don Giovanni and Salinas Records' back catalogues for other recent examples-- disassociating the mind-numbing skate-and-weed culture that has often surrounded that descriptor. The difference was well exemplified this spring, when Potty Mouth and the likeminded Aye Nako played within the bright gallery walls of New York's New Museum.
Hell Bent inches Potty Mouth towards more profound songwriting than last year's great Sun Damage EP. The lyrics focus primarily on the many facets of what it means to be young-- desire to ditch smalltown life, irresponsible choices that bring on "The Spins," feeling infinite-- but what makes Hell Bent such a glorious Rookie-era superlative of feminist punk today is the sense of confidence and personal conviction Potty Mouth's songs conjure. This appears most strongly as Hell Bent opens and closes. "The Gap", which references the unconventional post-high school gap year, is about searching for more than you've been handed and believing in yourself. The slow-building closer "The Better End", shout-sung by guitarist Phoebe Harris, reconciles a bitter breakup ("Go ahead/ Kiss your friend") while feeling assertive in walking away: "Here's the thing/ I'm the best," Harris screams, "I know it's hard/ To digest."
More often than not, though, the songs on Hell Bent center on confusion, uncertainty, and frustration within contexts like friendship, identity, or dreaming. "Damage" charges forward with the grey melancholy and earnestness of early emo, as Weems grapples with feeling helpless in a dire situation. On "Sleep Talk", she fears what might seep into her subconscious at night-- "I have this feeling that I'll wake up and wanna talk to you"-- coasting over one of the record's best hooks. "Shithead", meanwhile, is an angsty reprieve, as Weems hollers funny disses at a seemingly boy-crazed ex-friend-- "You're possessed by a dick/ And your mind's in a ditch"-- like fellow Western Mass resident Kim Gordon's suggestion on Sonic Youth classic "Becuz", but entirely unkind, and largely unforgiving.
“Black and Studs” is the best Potty Mouth song yet-- a commentary on searching for your own essence within a punk subculture where individuals still tend to conform in certain ways. "What happened to you to make you wear black and studs?" Weems sings, before turning this exceedingly catchy question onto herself, with airy echoes harmonized underneath. Although "Black and Studs" is the band's only song to get critical on punk politics, it feels like a potent extension of an overarching idea that guides Potty Mouth-- in interviews, they've been vocal about the values they aim to incorporate into the makeup of their band, as well as the ageism and sexism they've faced. In doing so, Potty Mouth have functioned under the golden rule of writing songs in relatively simple structures while keeping the narrative of their band strong.
Potty Mouth also hail from an exciting moment for smart guitar rock in their collegiate hometown-- along with Speedy Ortiz (spot frontwoman Sadie Dupuis in the video for "The Spins") and California X, they're doing a fine job romanticizing Northampton, leaving 20-somethings everywhere wondering if they'd not be better off enrolling in Amherst's grad school and plugging in without looking back. Hell Bent, while elemental, sounds sincere and grounded but free-- a self-assured debut of principled pop-punk that leaves room for growth. | 2013-09-25T02:00:02.000-04:00 | 2013-09-25T02:00:02.000-04:00 | Rock | Old Flame | September 25, 2013 | 7.8 | cbdd1c75-97f1-4dee-929c-99a9972a38ce | Jenn Pelly | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jenn-pelly/ | null |
On his new EP, Vic Mensa opens up like never before, airing his mistakes and fears. | On his new EP, Vic Mensa opens up like never before, airing his mistakes and fears. | Vic Mensa: There’s Alot Going On | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21998-theres-alot-going-on/ | There’s Alot Going On | Vic Mensa went very quickly from playing in a band with his friends to crawling on national television with Kanye West to signing to Jay Z’s label. Until now, he hasn’t had much time to take it all into account. On There’s Alot Going On—remarkably, just the Chicago rapper’s third solo release—he finally catches up. The results brim with pain, anger, and confusion, but there’s also plenty of confidence and ambition. Throughout the EP, which is the best and boldest thing he’s made so far, he airs out his mistakes and fears, adding depth to well-produced, invigorating music.
Mensa has consistently been the second-highest-profile member of SaveMoney—the Chicago collective that boasts Donnie Trumpet, Joey Purp, Towkio, and most prominently, Chance the Rapper. At first, he followed closely in Chance’s footsteps, with his 2013 mixtape INNANETAPE often sounding like a knockoff Acid Rap. But he spent 2014 exploring the intersection of house music and hip-hop, resulting in the excellent “Down on My Luck” and plenty of SoundCloud gems. By 2015, he had taken a sharp left-turn toward post-Yeezus aggro-rap. He was definitely not Chance Lite anymore, but his music lacked personality, with high profile collabs (“U Mad” with Kanye and “No Chill” with Skrillex) and aesthetic taking precedence over substance. He seemed like a second-in-command in search of a role to embody: Was he an ODB or a Beanie Sigel or an A$AP Ferg?
With There’s Alot Going On, you can hear him settling into himself, and he opens up like never before.* *The first track “Dynasty” pairs boasts with a beautiful grandiose instrumental, before the affair gets immediately darker. “16 Shots” is dedicated to Laquan McDonald, the 17-year-old Chicagoan who was shot to death by a city police officer on a highway in 2014. It’s an appropriately angry song with distressing imagery, like a little girl—young enough to have braces—being forcefully shoved to the street by cops. No matter how many listens, the song’s ending will always be sickening and unbearable, as one of the McDonald family’s lawyers, Jeffrey Neslund, describes the murder in plain detail, with just the hum of a bass making it even more ominous. “16 Shots” is not the EP’s best song, but it is its clearest, setting the mood for the entire record.
“Danger” and “New Bae” showcase Mensa as a gifted pop artist. The songs are thunderous yet reserved, allowing his vocals to hold as much weight as the beats. Standout “Liquor Locker,” with a surprising but welcome uncredited Ty Dolla $ign feature, is a cry for help disguised as a smooth acoustic come-on. Mensa doesn’t just want D’USSÉ (a Jay Z favorite), he needs it to free himself from pain, and just wants a partner in his escape. Ty$, meanwhile, is similarly desperate: He promises the best sex ever, but seems to be unable to stand.
The closing title track is a stark admission of depression, addiction, physical abuse, and entitlement. Mensa sings a very pretty hook (“Know I never die/We live forever in my mind/And I sanctify/We live forever, still that life”), but it’s more of a diary entry than functional rap song: For the most part, he ditches any discernible rhyme scheme and punning. But again, it’s a necessary moment for Mensa, as a person and an artist, and has a captivating narrative arc. “There’s Alot Going On” is the most vital song on the EP. It leaves no stone unturned, no minute unrecalled. Vic Mensa likely will no longer ignore his past, as he had on many faceless songs in the past couple of years; he can finally grow toward a promising future. | 2016-06-09T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-06-09T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Roc Nation | June 9, 2016 | 7.5 | cbea6fb9-9695-4d99-a706-a43dab5edda7 | Matthew Strauss | https://pitchfork.com/staff/matthew-strauss/ | null |
A 1974 recording from a largely forgotten downtown artist loft space captures some fierce players putting their talents toward a questing, incandescent strain of jazz. | A 1974 recording from a largely forgotten downtown artist loft space captures some fierce players putting their talents toward a questing, incandescent strain of jazz. | Alan Braufman: Valley of Search | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/alan-braufman-valley-of-search/ | Valley of Search | In 1974, after Village Voice jazz critic Gary Giddins slagged their fellow Berklee alum David S. Ware in newsprint, a few musician friends residing at a little-known artist loft space at 501 Canal Street goaded Giddins with mimeographed posters. If he really wanted to hear what was happening in downtown jazz, they taunted, he should visit the building’s first-floor performance space. Giddins took the bait and caught reedsman Alan Braufman’s band, writing a positive review that noted the group’s “kaleidoscopic densities.”
By the early 1970s, those incandescent strains of jazz, as exemplified by John Coltrane, were in sharp decline. While plugged-in fusion acts were topping the charts, forward-thinking players practicing “black creative music” were no longer drawing bar-friendly crowds to clubs. For players and fans who deemed such music “as serious as your life” (a phrase subsequently used as the title of Valerie Wilmer’s excellent book about that era) they began to gravitate toward downtown loft spaces like Ornette Coleman’s spot on Prince Street, Sam and Bea Rivers’ Studio Rivbea on Bond Street, and late Coltrane drummer Rashied Ali’s own Ali’s Alley. But there’s little documentation of what was cooking at 501 Canal Street save for the lone record credited to Braufman, 1975’s Valley of Search.
There’s nothing to suggest that Valley of Search, the second release on the revered India Navigation label, attained grail status among collectors or was heavily in demand, and Braufman never released an album as leader again; there are no canonical drum breaks fetishized by latter-day beat producers, though Four Tet’s Kieran Hebden did slot “Rainbow Warriors” in his Just Jam set in 2013. But with players like Kamasi Washington, Shabaka Hutchings, Nubya Garcia, and Makaya McCraven initiating a groundswell of interest beyond the confines of the jazz community, the moment is ripe for rediscoveries.
While the sleeve denotes nine selections, Valley of Search really moves as two sidelong suites. Across these large-scale pieces, the first takeaway might be that Braufman is often eclipsed by his excellent sidemen. That’s no knock against him: The album features one of the 1970s’ most formidable bassists in Cecil McBee, a nimble and foundation-deep heavyweight who could be both lyrical and primal as he held down the low end for Pharoah Sanders, Jackie Mclean, Andrew Hill, and Charles Lloyd. The extra percussion and whistles that add to the din come from Ralph Williams, a future collaborator of Wadada Leo Smith.
Making Valley of Search especially noteworthy for jazz historians is an early appearance from Gene Ashton, known today as Cooper-Moore, who continually adds curious new textures throughout the session. Soon after the recording, Ashton decamped to Virginia, but he reemerged in the late 1980s as one of the most electric and eclectic players on the downtown scene, playing with artists like William Parker and Susie Ibarra. Here, he shows flashes of his multifaceted genius and acts as a catalyst for the album’s unique energy. His dulcimer playing gives opener “Rainbow Warriors” its uncanny African folk edge; his chanting of the Bahá’í prayer “God sufficeth all things above all things” leads to a fiery outburst from the band; his dense, choppy piano chords power the climactic “Love Is for Real.”
Braufman’s alto and flute provide the emotional resonance on the album’s final two pieces. His careening, drunken playing on “Little Nabil’s March” is a fine foil to the lurching martial beat behind him. On “Destiny,” he and his band muster a lucidity that is perhaps not as dense as Valley of Search’s other chaotic peaks but quite evocative, drawing on the roiling emotions of something like John Coltrane’s “Alabama,” luminous and sorrowful at once. It verifies Giddins’ impressions in that early press clip and reveals Braufman’s sense of the kaleidoscopic. | 2018-07-10T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-07-10T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Jazz | Valley of Search | July 10, 2018 | 7.2 | cbed068b-9e8c-4d77-bcca-9628e824b1ae | Andy Beta | https://pitchfork.com/staff/andy-beta/ | |
American Wrestlers is the home-recorded project of Gary McClure, and his album boasts some of the virtues of his circa-2011 Fat Possum labelmates: the dog-eared alt-rock melodies of Yuck; the lo-fi, low-end thump of Youth Lagoon; the oddball psych odysseys of Unknown Mortal Orchestra. | American Wrestlers is the home-recorded project of Gary McClure, and his album boasts some of the virtues of his circa-2011 Fat Possum labelmates: the dog-eared alt-rock melodies of Yuck; the lo-fi, low-end thump of Youth Lagoon; the oddball psych odysseys of Unknown Mortal Orchestra. | American Wrestlers: American Wrestlers | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/20285-american-wrestlers/ | American Wrestlers | Using a drum machine to replicate a live backing band tends to have the opposite effect, making solo home recorders sound even more isolated. Case in point, American Wrestlers’ self-titled debut. As of now, it’s Gary McClure’s project and his alone, but the songs won’t require a lot of maintenance to be ready for the road: guitars, bass, piano and vocals are layered about the same way they would have if American Wrestlers were just four guys in a cheap studio. But there’s always that rigid, so on-the-beat-it’s-actually-off thwack of a snare, a bass drum that sounds like a blown subwoofer and the occasional hint of McClure hitting the power switch on the thing—all reminders that American Wrestlers is McClure starting a rock band with his imaginary friends.
Until about a month ago, American Wrestlers was in fact a pointedly anonymous project, an attention-seeking tactic that went out of fashion right about the time Burial went public. The music feels a few steps behind the times as well, but that's a major component of its charm. Perhaps coincidentally, the album shares some of the best qualities of Fat Possum's major 2011 releases: the dog-eared alt-rock melodies of Yuck’s debut; the lo-fi, low-end thump of Youth Lagoon’s The Year of Hibernation; the (also formerly incognito) Unknown Mortal Orchestra’s oddball psych odysseys.
Regardless of the promo-cycle theatrics, the songs themselves tend to make strong first impressions. McClure leads songs off with breezy guitar leads, memorable titles become indelible lyrics, choruses make satisfying, expected leaps. And despite its disheveled exterior, McClure’s lyrics generate positive energy out of bad vibes: "There’s No One Crying Over Me Either" and "I Can Do No Wrong" respectively turn self-pity and a lack of introspection into superpowers.
There’s no simple genre tag for American Wrestlers, though singles "Kelly" and "I Can Do No Wrong" imagine an alternate history where Phoenix started their career as Tascam 4-trackers. The grubby production appears to be a product of necessity, the natural result of McClure’s rudimentary equipment and skills rather than an allegiance to lo-fi aesthetics, but it still lends American Wrestlers a distinct character: The 12-string sparkle of "I Can Do No Wrong" gets toned down just enough to not be blinding. And had the singles been given a properly sync-ready production, you might already be tired of hearing them from a commercial for macrobrews or luxury sedans.
The highlights of American Wrestlers reveal themselves immediately, but elsewhere on the record McClure demonstrates a curious ability to bury concise hooks in otherwise-doughy or unfinished songs. The contrast between the southern rock lead of "Holy" and its passages of National-esque piano is intriguing on first exposure; it is not enough intrigue to sustain a six-minute song on its own. "Wild Yonder" evokes the ear-turning pitter-patter of Sparklehorse’s balladry and would’ve served as a nice shift in tone had it been three minutes, but it goes on for nearly twice that long.
This pattern repeats itself on the album's Side B, when "Kelly" is followed by "Left" and "Cheapshot", 18 minutes of music that you can hear straining for "epic" but fail to generate any real volume dynamics or textural motion. These shots at a bigger sound only end up fully demonstrating the limitations of McClure’s compositional methods.
It's in these moments where it occurs to you that the biggest problem with a solo project is that there's no one there to tell you "no." At some point during the ponderous stretches of "Wild Yonder" or "Cheapshot" or "Left", perhaps McClure would've noticed someone else in the band starting to drift off or suggested that maybe he should get to the chorus more quickly. "I Can Do No Wrong" may be a highlight on American Wrestlers, but the title sentiment is his project's Achilles heel. | 2015-04-06T02:00:02.000-04:00 | 2015-04-06T02:00:02.000-04:00 | Rock | Fat Possum | April 6, 2015 | 6.9 | cbeebfa0-732a-47e5-b5f8-a720d3a4c368 | Ian Cohen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ian-cohen/ | null |
The songwriter Sophie Allison has built a following with her Bandcamp bedroom recordings, but on this new record, she upgrades to a full band, giving her mournful songs a little extra drive. | The songwriter Sophie Allison has built a following with her Bandcamp bedroom recordings, but on this new record, she upgrades to a full band, giving her mournful songs a little extra drive. | Soccer Mommy: Collection | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/soccer-mommy-collection/ | Collection | For any songwriter with an achy heart and some basic recording software, Bandcamp has become a bit like what LiveJournal was a half generation ago: a network of sensitive souls, broadcasting feelings they would never share in person. Of course, most of these songwriters never find much of an audience, but Soccer Mommy’s Sophie Allison is among the relative few who have built a real following through the site. For the last couple of years, she’s provided listeners a play-by-play as she’s internalized the rejection of one unrequited love after another over a series of lonesome EPs with titles like songs from my bedroom and songs for the recently sad.
Allison’s voice has the same captivatingly mournful quality as naturals like Julie Doiron and Elliott Smith, so she’s well suited for this territory. Increasingly, though, she’s begun pushing back against her reputation for “sad girl music,” both in interviews and in the studio, where the upgrade to a full band has given her songs a little extra drive. Her latest release and first for Fat Possum, Collection catalogs that shift, reworking six tracks from her Bandcamp recordings and packaging them with a pair of new songs, “Out Worn” and “Allison.” For every mopey track, there are one or two peppy ones.
She doesn’t overdo it. An occasional stab of synthesizer is the closest these songs come to pomp, and the production is still scruffy around the edges, hi-fi only by the standards of her early self-recordings. But the improved fidelity lets her words and voice come across clearer than they did from the bedroom, revealing how much more elegant Allison’s wordplay is than it can seem at first blush, and her gift for detailing conflict with the economy of a young adult novel. Every song introduces an untenable situation, with Allison stuck in a rut, questioning a relationship, or hung up on an unavailable crush.
She’s especially prone to that last scenario. After a cute stranger brushes against her on the street on “Try,” she’s consumed by the fantasies that flood her brain. On the similarly light and jangly “Benadryl Dreams,” those kinds of fantasies wear her down as she curses the unknowing object of her desire with the album’s best line: “You’ve been spending all your time living on the backsides of my eyes.” And on the sobering “3 AM at a Party,” she casts herself as that most enduring of romantic movie archetypes: the best friend that the oblivious guy really ought to be with. “I wish you never got your heart so broke,” she sings, “I wish you didn’t sleep with her when you were drunk.” Here Allison doesn’t even allow herself to get her hopes up. “You deserve better yet you’ll never see,” she laments.
Especially on Collection’s more riff-centric tunes, Allison can’t help but invite comparisons to Jay Som’s Melina Duterte, another sharp, personable songwriter who got her start self-recording dreamy music in her bedroom. But where Duterte has fleshed out that very common sound into something completely her own—her latest, Everybody Works, is an expansive, nostalgic imagining of a pop album distinguished by some spectacularly creative productive choices—Allison isn’t there yet. She hasn’t figured out how to take full advantage of the studio, or how to create a sense of place with her music now that she’s left the bedroom behind. She’s got the songs, but she’s still piecing together a vision.
There are signs she’ll get there, though. The record’s best tune is one of the new ones, “Out Worn,” a DTMFA (“dump the motherfucker already”) anthem where she plays to the crowd like never before. Its proud chorus hits like an awakening: “I’m sick of living in the eye of a storm,” Allison sings, her voice suddenly flushed with determination. “I want the feeling of being admired/You only taught me to be out worn.” The only song on Collection with a clear resolution, it feels like a turning point: The moment she vowed to stop being a passive player in her own songs and started taking action. If it’s a sign of what’s to come, it’s an exciting one. | 2017-08-05T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-08-05T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Fat Possum | August 5, 2017 | 6.7 | cbefdfea-6d4f-43a1-84dd-d058dd792d41 | Evan Rytlewski | https://pitchfork.com/staff/evan-rytlewski/ | null |
Sunderland band shares a family tree with Futureheads and Maxïmo Park but plays buzzing indie pop rather than herky-jerky post-punk. | Sunderland band shares a family tree with Futureheads and Maxïmo Park but plays buzzing indie pop rather than herky-jerky post-punk. | Field Music: Field Music | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/3344-field-music/ | Field Music | By now, the beaches of Sunderland, England, must be redolent with post-punk herky-jerky. To be sure, native sons Field Music have much in common with the Mackems that came before-- not least their members, who include one former Futurehead plus a current Maxïmo Park drummer-- but rather than assail us with angularity, the region's latest exports aptly prefer prettiness. Indeed, "You're So Pretty", their 12-song, 38-minute debut's art-pop finale, is the album's best track, and also its buzzing, ornamented, just-too-brief-enough synecdoche.
That song, like the album's other epiphanies, is a sparkling construct of whirring guitars, eccentric percussion, windmill-tilting bass, and Andrew Moore's piano embellishments. Dual lead vocalists Peter and David Brewis swap quixotic, often-falsetto harmonies as indebted to Pet Sounds as to "Hounds of Love". The lyrics tend toward the commonplace, which if not beside the point pretty much is the point: "You're so pretty/ I could talk to you all night", chime the Brothers Brewis, their sweet-nothings granted the wings of soaring melody.
Second single "You Can Decide" is the band's most immediately compelling track, with copious oohing, spastic handclaps, and eloquently stuttering chorus: "So if you know, you know, you know/ Let me." "Got to Write a Letter" benefits from slippery acoustic guitars and fairly sharp wordplay, though none as adroit as "I've given up thinking" from the album's rare sad song, the still-sun-dappled "Like When You Meet Someone Else". Opener "If Only the Moon Were Up" introduces a smattering of Revolver horn oompahs and GeoHa guitarisms ca. Abbey Road. I still say stupendous first single "Shorter Shorter" was, true to its name, the latter album's flip-side shortened, haunted and harried by imminent mortality. Meanwhile, the band's self-consciously complex, maximalist arrangements and Sparks- or even Yes-like vocal heights call up that suddenly-not-dirty (if prefixed with "hyper") word: prog. I'm just saying.
After their first two singles, it's hard not to be let down by good-enoughs like the ambitious, briefly cacophonous "Tell Me Keep Me", string-laden "Luck Is a Fine Thing", and staccato, saxophone-blearing "17". More ephemeral than Clor, more cerebral than the Rakes, Field Music has, like the Magic Numbers, fashioned a distinctive voice and near-perfect arrangements, but the songs hint at greatness nearly as often as they achieve it. Pretty is pretty nice, but the promise of true beauty makes tough critics of us all. | 2005-08-15T02:00:02.000-04:00 | 2005-08-15T02:00:02.000-04:00 | Rock | Memphis Industries | August 15, 2005 | 7.6 | cbf474f8-bc88-4c8c-903a-c4531221ef35 | Marc Hogan | https://pitchfork.com/staff/marc-hogan/ | null |
Bing & Ruth is a project led by pianist and composer David Moore, who’s been working in a variety of avant-classical mediums for a decade now. This gorgeous new album is heavy, trippy, and surprisingly tactile. | Bing & Ruth is a project led by pianist and composer David Moore, who’s been working in a variety of avant-classical mediums for a decade now. This gorgeous new album is heavy, trippy, and surprisingly tactile. | Bing & Ruth: Tomorrow Was the Golden Age | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/19887-bing-ruth-tomorrow-was-the-golden-age/ | Tomorrow Was the Golden Age | Tomorrow Was the Golden Age, the beautiful second LP from Bing & Ruth, isn’t “ambient music.” You wouldn’t be at fault for thinking as much, though: at first approach, the New York City ensemble’s music is the kind that seems to do the most when you’re not paying attention to it, a series of swells and rustling melodic passages that unfurl patiently. At times, it sounds quite sparse, with just a central melody orbited by distant tones; Bing & Ruth have clearly taken their time on these recordings, but by no means is this “slow” music meant for background listening. Instead, Tomorrow Was the Golden Age teems with life the same way an inanimate city skyline is filled with people unseen to the naked eye. This music moves, almost constantly, and even when Bing & Ruth are seemingly sitting still, their gears are whirring, however silently, on a different plane.
The project is anchored by pianist and composer David Moore, who’s been working in a variety of avant-classical mediums for a decade now (you can preview a variety of his smaller releases on his Bandcamp page). Bing & Ruth’s first album, the 2010 LP City Lake, was reminiscent of Sufjan Stevens’ own classical diversions, a series of bright pieces that occasionally employed the human voice in tandem with chamber-ensemble arrangements. The debut was a relatively straightforward release, but Tomorrow Was the Golden Age isn’t; aided by the addition of a tape delay tech, the record’s nine compositions take on a trippy, halo-effect shape, every sonic abstraction and bent tone radiating a strange, benevolent glow. For a suite that could be called “minimalist,” Tomorrow Was the Golden Age proves surprisingly tactile, a shifting variety of textures that move from mossy to feather-delicate.
For Tomorrow Was the Golden Age, Bing & Ruth narrowed down their ensemble—two upright bassists, two clarinets, a cellist, the tape-delay tech, and Moore on piano—but while City Lake had a larger scope, this new record feels heavier by design. Credit is due to clarinetists Jeremy Viner and Patrick Breiner, whose bent notes are integral to this record’s many complexities; on opening track “Warble”, they add a sense of dread to Moore’s rustling, overlapping piano figures, aiding greatly in the subtle melodic shifts taking place. On “Reflector”, their instruments sound like ghosts heaving deep sighs in the wind, pushing and sustaining against a decaying piano.
“Reflector” is one of a few moments on Tomorrow Was the Golden Age where the melody that’s explored, deconstructed, and lingered-upon ends up sticking with you long after the track is over. The sense of humanity found in these compositions, and the broad range of emotions they convey—longing, contemplation, muted joy, confusion, a quiet but deeply felt ecstasy—go a long way to make Tomorrow Was the Golden Age accessible. At times, you can hear the New York trappings in Bing & Ruth’s music—conceivably, this music could soundtrack busy city streets, or the metropolitan sprawl’s dawn-hour emptiness. But Tomorrow Was the Golden Age, one of the finest left-field releases of the year, transcends geography, inviting you to close your eyes and build your own richly detailed world. | 2014-10-23T02:00:02.000-04:00 | 2014-10-23T02:00:02.000-04:00 | Experimental | Rvng Intl. | October 23, 2014 | 8.1 | cc06d100-8061-43d6-ac2b-b9d757c1aee3 | Larry Fitzmaurice | https://pitchfork.com/staff/larry-fitzmaurice/ | null |
The corrido icon’s charisma shines on this sprawling double album, but La Doble P’s pop-star turn is less convincing. | The corrido icon’s charisma shines on this sprawling double album, but La Doble P’s pop-star turn is less convincing. | Peso Pluma: ÉXODO | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/peso-pluma-exodo/ | ÉXODO | Let’s start with the Edgar mullet: the haircut that has kids all across Mexico walking into barbershops and demanding the “Peso Pluma.” This is just one of the idiosyncrasies that has made Hassan Emilio Kabande Laija the man of the moment in mainstream Spanish-language music. There is the expensive jewelry and designer clothing—Richard Mille watches, Christian Dior shoes, Maison Margiela jackets—that he regularly namechecks in his songs. There is his lanky physique. And then there is his voice: a scratchy, sometimes grating croak or rasp, depending on his mood. That singular voice sings about lots of things: popping bottles of Dom, carrying bricks of coke, assassinating enemies, hooking up with Russian models. You know, an average Tuesday.
Over the last year, the 25-year-old Mexican singer of Lebanese descent has racked up a list of chart and streaming records as long as a CVS receipt, ushering música mexicana to unprecedented commercial heights. ÉXODO, his fourth studio album, is a victory lap of sorts; the LP celebrates how far the movement has come, with Pluma taking homies, cousins, and fellow trailblazers like Natanael Cano, Junior H, Tito Double P, and Eslabon Armado along for the ride. But the album is also a bona fide attempt to cement Peso Pluma’s versatility—and the longevity it promises—in the industry. ÉXODO confirms he’s one of the most charismatic corrido performers of our time, but as for his ability to shapeshift across genres and flows, Peso Pluma the pop star still has some convincing to do.
The crackle of Peso’s voice is the molten core of ÉXODO. Its peculiarity is a blessing, but in some moments, it can also be a curse. His coarse growl is especially effective on the bare-knuckle norteño “La People II,” which seems to be written from the perspective of Joel Enrique “El 19” Sandoval Romero, a sicario and security chief for the Sinaloa cartel who was arrested by the Mexican government in 2014. Pluma and his guests snarl viciously as they recount tales of battling police officers, the national guard, and the military to protect their bosses (ostensibly Ovidio Guzmán López, a high-ranking leader of the Sinaloa cartel and the son of El Chapo) from capture. Peso assumes the voice of El 19, asking his associates to take care of his “land, his family, and his parents,” presumably while he’s locked up.
The debate about artists’ roles in glamorizing narco culture didn’t start with—and won’t end with—Peso Pluma. Too often, narcocorrido stars have become ideological scapegoats for the federal government’s failure to curb violence; other times, artists have denied they have any sociocultural impact at all. The discourse is fraught, but one thing is certain: Pluma excels when he performs the mythos of narco culture, no holds barred. It places him firmly within the genealogy of his forebears, like his late idols Chalino Sánchez and Ariel Camacho, who showed a similar talent for passionate storytelling, even as they romanticized narratives of murder and revenge. La Doble P reimagines that tradition on “Put Em in the Fridge,” a cold corrido-trap beat built on a blaring horn loop. He tries on a squeaky but bellicose cadence for size, bragging with Cardi B about moving kilos and calling on shooters to put their enemies on ice. Cardi’s gift for rapping athletically in both Dominican Spanish and English makes her a natural collaborator here; the pair goes bar for bar in a thrilling, peacocking display. It’s also a sublime example of Pluma’s talent for redefining his musical heritage for the present day.
Sometimes, Peso’s vocal left turns are electrifying; other times, he struggles to hit the mark. On the eminently catchy “Bruce Wayne,” he likens himself to the superhero billionaire with gravelly self-assurance, only to switch into biting, Pusha T-style raps two minutes in. On “Me Activo,” he shifts his voice into a serenade-like tone reminiscent of his performance on Kali Uchis’ “Igual Que un Ángel.” But elsewhere, the elasticity of Peso’s voice is less convincing. Despite a superb Ric Flair sample, the ballad “Ice” suffers from the more abrasive, nasally textures of Peso’s voice when he strains to reach a higher register.
It’s particularly tough to hear La Doble P struggle in his ventures outside of corridos tumbados. That’s not to say he isn’t capable of adapting successfully. Take the single “Bellakeo,” a sexy reggaeton entanglement with a drilling dembow riddim that contains spiritual echoes of Plan B. But ÉXODO is littered with unfortunate miscalculations. “Gimme a Second,” with Rich the Kid, feels like a throwaway B-side from the already middling Future and Metro Boomin album; Pluma’s appearance starts off strong with a low, sinister bridge, but then he forcefully tries to squeeze his squeaky voice into one of Atlanta’s distinctive flows. “Pa No Pensar,” an emo trap ballad with corrido undertones, boasts a grippingly morose vocal performance, but it’s marred by cookie-cutter lines about overindulging in alcohol and weed to escape reality (I’ll stay for Quavo saying “This good mota,” though). And, “Peso Completo,” with the reggaeton legend Arcángel, falls into the trap of pure mimesis. Though the artists share a trademark rasp, one of Arcángel’s creative tics is artful over-enunciation; Pluma straight up apes that technique here, resulting in a poorly executed facsimile.
The idea of flaunting his versatility is admirable. But that message might have been more efficiently conveyed if ÉXODO didn’t frequently feel like a slog. The first eight tracks are nearly indistinguishable, coalescing into a lyrical and melodic blur of tololoche strums, money, and women. Even if the album format has been downgraded in the streaming era, ÉXODO works neither as a coherent LP nor as a no-skips playlist. Like many other major pop albums of the 2020s, it would have benefited from a careful edit and a more varied track order.
But when Peso Pluma decides to shine, he’s radiant. “Vino Tinto,” with Natanael Cano and Gabito Ballesteros, is a graduate-level seminar in the corrido tumbado form. All three singers push their voices to the limit: They bellow, they growl, and they harmonize, transmitting the yearning and suffering that undergirds the best corridos—even if they are talking about drinking red wine and waiting for the molly to hit, not your local folk hero’s war battles. When Peso belts out “Ando relax,” he elongates and then punctuates the “a,” as if his vibeyness is some supernatural force rising from within. It’s the corrido prince at his most magnetic, capturing all the style’s thorny contradictions in a single breath. | 2024-06-24T00:02:00.000-04:00 | 2024-06-24T00:02:00.000-04:00 | Folk/Country | Double P | June 24, 2024 | 6.9 | cc084985-fe19-42fe-a361-9e200a9e1fb5 | Isabelia Herrera | https://pitchfork.com/staff/isabelia-herrera/ | |
Two decades later, Metallica reunite with the San Francisco Symphony for a chiefly fans-only document that adds more needless orchestration to already orchestral metal songs. | Two decades later, Metallica reunite with the San Francisco Symphony for a chiefly fans-only document that adds more needless orchestration to already orchestral metal songs. | Metallica / San Francisco Symphony: S&M2 | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/metallica-san-francisco-symphony-sandm2/ | S&M2 | For the first 11 minutes, Metallica’s S&M2 is almost completely indistinguishable from its predecessor. There’s the slow fade-in on the sound of applause and the ominous opening arpeggio of “The Ecstasy of Gold,” the soaring Ennio Morricone film cue that has opened Metallica concerts since 1983. Next, the furious instrumental “The Call of Ktulu,” with a string section whipping at the band like crosswinds battering a ship. You might check to make sure you didn’t load up the original S&M, a 1999 live album documenting a pair of collaborative concerts with the San Francisco Symphony, which opens with the same one-two punch. But you’ll be relieved to reach track three, a majestically blown-out rendition of the 1984 classic “For Whom The Bell Tolls”—not that it didn’t appear in essentially the same arrangement on S&M, but on that album it was track 14.
So it goes with much of S&M2, recorded live with the San Francisco Symphony in September 2019. Of the 20 pieces of music here, more than half appeared in a similar form more than two decades ago on the first S&M. One of the new tracks consists of the orchestra playing a movement from Prokofiev’s “Scythian Suite”—introduced by SFS music director Michael Tilson Thomas earnestly explaining why the piece reminds him of heavy metal—without Metallica’s involvement at all. It is difficult to fathom for whom this album is an exciting prospect. In a different speech, also left on the record for no clear reason, drummer Lars Ulrich spends a minute and a half shouting out the members of the Metallica Club in attendance at the show (“I see our Polish friends over here…”), emphasizing the notion that this is for fans only. But any fan deep enough to be interested in S&M2 has surely heard S&M already.
For attendees of the concerts themselves, who may have loved the original S&M, the setlist similarities were probably not a problem. But as a recorded statement, S&M2 is eerie, almost pathological in its attempts to recreate an album that was never a major entry in Metallica’s canon in the first place. If you’ve got a thing for self-punishment and too much time on your hands, listen to dueling versions of a particular song from the two albums and try to spot the differences. My favorite is “The Memory Remains”: same line of lyrics dropped for the crowd to fill in, same weird grunted backing vocals, different hilarious ad-lib from James Hetfield to introduce Kirk Hammett’s guitar solo: he used to say Ahhh, suck it!, and now he’s going with Misterrrrr Hammett! When the crowd sings the song’s central melody like a football chant over an extended orchestral outro, I wondered if they’re singing so confidently because they heard the crowd do the same thing on the first album.
If these were 20 of the hardest-ripping Metallica performances ever put to tape, it wouldn’t matter so much that we’ve heard most of this stuff before. But that is not generally the case. The album suffers from the same primary problem that plagued the original S&M: Metallica’s best songs, intricate and ambitious though they may be, are not actually well suited for the additional orchestrating they get here, precisely because they are plenty symphonic already. When a guitar player like Kirk Hammett is shredding a multipart solo, you don’t want to hear a delicate countermelody in the second bassoons. The band, especially Ulrich, has occasional trouble keeping time with the orchestra, which is understandable. Reconciling a rock band’s internal timekeeping with an orchestra’s external conductor is probably difficult, but that doesn’t make it sound any smoother when Ulrich seems to change tempos every other measure on “The Day That Never Comes” and “Moth Into Flame,” two of the newer cuts included here. Hetfield makes the puzzling choice to deliver many lyrics with the arch theatricality of a carnival barker or Disney villain, heightening the sense that you are not hearing a rock concert, but a lousy production of Metallica: The Musical.
The album’s greatest moment by far is “(Anesthesia) - Pulling Teeth,” a solo originally performed by founding Metallica bassist Cliff Burton, who died in a bus crash in 1986. On S&M2, it is performed on electric upright bass by Scott Pingel, the San Francisco Symphony’s principal bassist. To begin, he plays “Anesthesia” like the symphonic musician he is, bowing cleanly and gracefully, drawing out the bootleg-Baroque sensibility of Burton’s arpeggios. (If you weren’t paying close attention, you might think you were hearing a Bach cello suite.) Then, he kicks on distortion and wah-wah pedals, and begins digging into the strings like his life depends on it. Though it’s the sound of only one instrument, the rumble that ensues is somehow more immense than all the ensemble performances we’ve heard so far. It is a poignant tribute to Burton, but also a “classical” reimagining of Metallica’s music that goes beyond the most obvious possibilities of what such a fusion might mean. For a few minutes, S&M2 is as heavy as Kill ’Em All or Ride the Lightning. Then the band comes back in.
Buy: Rough Trade
(Pitchfork earns a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.)
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2020-09-01T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-09-01T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Metal | Blackened | September 1, 2020 | 5.2 | cc1060db-de19-4703-9f36-7e5fe09aab7a | Andy Cush | https://pitchfork.com/staff/andy-cush/ | |
The omnivorous Japanese band’s Sub Pop debut exudes a newfound sense of serenity, even as they remain committed to exuberant self-love. | The omnivorous Japanese band’s Sub Pop debut exudes a newfound sense of serenity, even as they remain committed to exuberant self-love. | CHAI: WINK | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/chai-wink/ | WINK | The Japanese quartet CHAI excavate joy from every crevice of life: a ping pong match, a box of donuts, the moles on your face—nothing is spared from their ecstatic gaze. Their first two releases, 2019’s PUNK and 2017’s PINK, radiated positivity and playfulness, while also challenging the pressure they felt as young Japanese women to be seen as cute all the time. At their live performances, they wore avante-garde matching outfits and performed effusive, blocky choreography, and their songs channeled the same energy: loud affirmations and saccharine hooks that erupted from hectic arrangements and kinetic riffs.
But last year, when the pandemic forced them to stop touring and stay in, CHAI slowed down, adopted new hobbies like pottery and a dog-themed Instagram account, and decided to make the kind of music they enjoy listening to at home. The band members exchanged music via Zoom, worked for the first time with outside producers (Mndsgn and YMCK), and listened to a lot of rap and R&B. They’ve cited Mac Miller’s gingerly optimistic song “Good News” as inspiration for their songwriting, and the influence is clear: WINK exudes a newfound sense of confident serenity, even as the band remains committed to exuberant self-love.
Compared to past CHAI songs, these sound less like mandates or inspirational anthems than daydreams, light-filled messages of sweetness and support. “Donuts Mind If I Do” opens the album in a haze of synth and layered vocals that convey an immediate sense of ease. The way the band sings, “Hello, hello, would you like/Any donuts, sugar?” feels casual, as if they’d simply stumbled upon a tray of free desserts. On “Nobody Knows We Are Fun,” CHAI chant, “Go! Go! Go! Everybody wake up now! Have fun!” On past albums, they would have shouted the words over a caffeinated drumline, yelling in the face of anyone who dared to doubt their capacity for a good time. Here, the vocals sound transmitted from the bottom of the ocean. The album even includes a lullaby, “Wish Upon a Star,” a slinky, minimalist ballad written as a sleep balm for band member Kana.
Though their delivery has mellowed, CHAI maintain the unwavering commitment to self-love and community that makes their music so endearing. On PUNK, they celebrated the virtues of curly hair, having lots of friends, and eating lollipops, dumplings, and beef. On WINK, food—a symbol of beauty, desire, and more abstract concepts like longing and confidence—is the primary motif of their joy. The body becomes a site of pleasure and curiosity on “Maybe Chocolate Chips,” where moles decorate the skin not as flaws but as sugary treasures. The sensual love song “Karaage” envisions the members of the band as a meal of fried chicken waiting to be eaten. On “It’s Vitamin C,” CHAI ask, “What’s good for you? What’s good for me?” and find their answer in “yummy kiwi fruit/yummy orange juice.” Consume enough healthy fruit, they say, and no mistake can hold you back. In domestic spaces, women are often expected to cook as a means of caring for others, but rarely are they encouraged to take the same pleasure in eating. It’s affirming to see these four women so explicitly link the love they feel for themselves to the foods they enjoy.
The mood on WINK is more consistently pleasant than memorable, and it’s hard not to miss the frenetic energy of CHAI’s first two albums. When the hazy mood occasionally breaks—like the rage punctuated by slippery synth blips in “END” and the 8-bit video game sounds of “PING PONG!”—it’s a welcome change of pace. Still, there is something thrillingly strange about hearing a band find fulfillment in the sheen of a glazed donut, or longing in the salty succulence of a salmon ball. It’s easy to get protective over your happiness, especially when it feels fleeting or hard-earned. But CHAI generously extend their wonder-filled perspective to anyone who will listen. In turn, they ask us to find our own joy, wherever and whenever we can.
Buy: Rough Trade
(Pitchfork earns a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.)
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-05-24T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2021-05-24T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Sub Pop | May 24, 2021 | 7.5 | cc13f55a-8939-4482-a113-ff1939af488f | Vrinda Jagota | https://pitchfork.com/staff/vrinda-jagota/ | |
Three years after a brush with the YouTube algorithm turned him unexpectedly into a minor indie-pop star, Nicolas Muñoz still sounds unsure about what to do next. | Three years after a brush with the YouTube algorithm turned him unexpectedly into a minor indie-pop star, Nicolas Muñoz still sounds unsure about what to do next. | Boy Pablo : Wachito Rico | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/boy-pablo-wachito-rico/ | Wachito Rico | If social media is good for one thing, it’s making people famous very quickly. No longer must artists claw their way through arenas of authenticity and endure demands that they conform to the tastes of the powerful. No more do they need the co-signs of a thousand petty tyrants at record labels here and nightclubs there. Musicians in the age of social media need only engage with raw consumer demand, and in that freedom they’ll find something real, and share it with us listeners. Or so we’d hope.
Boy Pablo's video for “Everytime” went crazy on Youtube, and it's easy to see why: skater boys smirking in streetwear on the banks of a drifting river in Norwegian twilight. At the end, there’s a dog on a boat. It's a vibe; people, young people especially, go nuts for that sort of thing. When Nicolas Muñoz, the Chilean-Norwegian 21-year-old behind Boy Pablo, released the Soy Pablo EP tens of millions of views later in 2018, it was full of more songs like “Everytime.” The mopey, dopey lyrics retained their winking melodrama, but the novelty wore off.
In Boy Pablo’s debut full-length, Wachito Rico, Muñoz dips back into the same rapidly-depleting well: Stratocasters jangle, synth pads yawn, major seventh chords are tossed out with abandon. The album is filled with nearly indistinguishable third-hand indie-pop songs, with titles like “i hope she loves me back,” “hey girl” and “leave me alone!” Sadboys should at least be able to convincingly sound sad, but Wachito Rico can’t transcend the emotional blankness lurking beneath its zeitgeisty sound. Boy Pablo’s previous discography revolved around unrequited pining, and on this record, he finally gets the girl. But Muñoz can’t seem to come up with anything more interesting to say about the object of his affection than that she’s hot (“Honey”) and he likes hanging out with her (“Nowadays”).
Muñoz’s big brothers in the indie-pop frat house have their respective charms. Alongside the irony and bawdiness, Mac DeMarco offers thoughtfulness and fun; there is a beating heart beneath Real Estate’s wistfulness, and their lush guitar sounds are crafted with care. Even Two Door Cinema Club sound like they sincerely want something. Boy Pablo, meanwhile, seem to have transmuted DeMarco’s mischief into pure condescension for their young audience, and sonically copied Real Estate’s whole fucking flow, word-for-word, bar-for-bar. In the times he attempts to prove he has more to offer than mere virality, Muñoz manages to disrupt the monotony only briefly, mostly by pushing new Latin-American influences to the fore. “Te Vas / Don’t Leave” builds from Spanish guitar and voice to a production of synths and artificial strings, and Muñoz finally pushes himself, approaching something like conviction.
How much is fair to expect from a young indie-pop band? Who should really be blamed for an album like Wachito Rico? Mr. Muñoz, who is frankly too young to sound this jaded? The YouTube algorithm? Mac Demarco, for not raising his failsons strictly enough? Maybe it’s all of us who have humored this type of indie for too long. Social media has truncated the path from the bedroom to the festival stage. We can continue to hope that the absence of the stodgy, gatekept spaces that used to lie between will allow for shocking, unruly artistry. Wachito Rico, though, is a warning against complacency: Bored boys, with a few synth presets, can still stumble their way to stardom.
Buy: Rough Trade
(Pitchfork earns a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.)
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2020-10-28T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-10-27T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | U OK? | October 28, 2020 | 4.1 | cc16cc79-3183-49ad-8f84-024cd79f2bf4 | Adlan Jackson | https://pitchfork.com/staff/adlan-jackson/ | |
Channeling sugar-rush synths and bracing noise, the Philadelphia producer continues his quest to make pop music stranger and more head-spinning—and to test listeners’ ability to follow the twists and turns. | Channeling sugar-rush synths and bracing noise, the Philadelphia producer continues his quest to make pop music stranger and more head-spinning—and to test listeners’ ability to follow the twists and turns. | Body Meat: Year of the Orc EP | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/body-meat-year-of-the-orc-ep/ | Year of the Orc EP | Christopher Taylor’s vision of pop music embraces extremes. The Philadelphia producer and songwriter has made room in his albums as Body Meat for sugar-rush synth programming and bracing noise; kaleidoscopic vocal melodies and teeth-chattering percussive contortions; ecstatic dancefloor revelations and existential despair. It’s chaotic, overwhelming stuff, which is part of the point. Taylor has said his music is deliberately meant to test the limits of pop, along with his audience’s ability to keep up with all the twists and turns. “How loose can I go with this idea?” He wondered in an interview. “And how far can I push it until people start jumping off?”
Body Meat’s Year of the Orc EP seems designed to underscore this philosophy, continuing Taylor’s push to make pop music stranger, more head-spinning, even a little uglier. Slamming together disparate genres and disjointed melodies, and ignoring assumed rules of song structure, Year of the Orc asks a lot of listeners, but there’s just enough that feels familiar to grasp onto amidst the sea of noise. Taylor is an avowed fan of trap, Timbaland’s post-millennium pop experiments, and the heart-skipping rhythms of Portuguese dance label Príncipe Discos. Tracks like “This Is Something” sound like all of these things at once, and none of them at all. Bubbly Auto-Tuned melodies burst over delirious collages of jittery samples, blistered synth lines, and overlapping, hopscotching rhythms. Listening can feel jarring, like you’ve left tracks playing in a few different browser tabs at once.
It’s fitting music for the muddled headspaces and anxiety spirals that Taylor describes. A lot of his vocals get clouded out in the haze of vocal effects and stuttery electronic experimentation, but what does poke through echoes the tumult of the production. The opening “Twigs” is impressionistic and unsettling, full of abandoned half-thoughts and elliptical mantras. Through a cloudy arrangement, Taylor murmurs about “scream[ing] at the void and the vortex,” a tone-setting thought for much of what follows. Even on the relatively optimistic-sounding “4700”—which marries yearning R&B vocals to slivered rhythmic contortions that’d sound at home on a Brooklyn flex track—Taylor sings about suffering and mortality. “This Is Something” traces spiderwebs of worry over an instrumental that sputters in unpredictable fits and starts.
There’s a lot of pain in these songs, but part of what makes Body Meat’s music so compelling is that he makes a lot of room for tranquility, too. Amid the turbulent production there’s also “Stand By,” a digital funk love song as tender and romantic as any of Brent Faiyaz’s sleepy ballads. On “Ghost,” the distorted chorale that ends the EP, Taylor sings of finding renewal in loss. “I see a new self but I breathe just the same,” he sighs.
That track features the ambient composer Laraaji, who has often preached that peace is always around us, even in the midst of turmoil. “Right where we are is a whole ocean of peace, perfection, oneness, eternity,” he said in an interview last year. That philosophy sounds paradoxically in tune with Body Meat’s music. On Year of the Orc, Taylor trudges through the chaos, echoing the absurdity of a troubled world, yet somehow he finds stillness. It’s a bold aim for a musician who purports to make pop music. He dreams big and invites you to join him in his reveries.
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-04-06T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2021-04-06T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Experimental | self-released | April 6, 2021 | 7 | cc22e765-7708-4ba1-b405-fc10cc142f78 | Colin Joyce | https://pitchfork.com/staff/colin-joyce/ | |
The latest from Toronto's self-professed hardcore purists animates eleven songs in a style that, what with its limited vocabulary, usually lends itself to sets of four or five. | The latest from Toronto's self-professed hardcore purists animates eleven songs in a style that, what with its limited vocabulary, usually lends itself to sets of four or five. | Career Suicide: Machine Response | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22939-machine-response/ | Machine Response | In the early to mid-2000s, Fucked Up and Career Suicide were cousin groups in the Toronto punk scene. They performed together and shared members Jonah Falco and Mike Haliechuk, and each sounded inspired by the lurch and throttle of 1980s American hardcore. But Career Suicide skewed bratty (sampling punk sendup Repo Man) where Fucked Up went didactic (sampling anti-fascist speeches). And on albums released in 2006, their paths sharply diverged: Fucked Up’s expansive Hidden World foreshadowed the musical ingenuity and conceptual bombast to come, while Career Suicide’s reverent hardcore sounded more bracingly combustible than ever on Attempted Suicide.
Machine Response, Career Suicide’s first release since 2008 (aside from a prelude EP of the same name that appeared late last year), shows the rewards of their craftsman-like commitment to a familiar form—hardcore not as a template to expand, or as a style to flee, but as a sort of aspirational ideal. That means the songs are punchy and concise, animated by Falco’s blocky riffs and Martin Farkas’ breathless bark. And it means that though the album careens in expected ways, its delight is akin to watching the staged implosion of a skyscraper: spectacular for its expenditure of energy in the service of wreckage, and no less impressive for occurring right on schedule.
Unusually stirring hardcore is more often ramshackle, the result of expression outpacing skill. Experienced players, meanwhile, frequently sacrifice individual personality to cultivate a sense of imposing might; that’s why so much self-consciously extreme hardcore sounds so antiseptic. Machine Response, however, slots into neither category. The band members manage to give highlights such as “Tighten the Screws” and “Break Away” a palpable groove, to swing despite inhospitably brisk tempos. They animate eleven songs in a style that, what with its limited vocabulary, usually lends itself to sets of four or five.
It’s a somewhat contradictory position: exercise creative invention, but mind the strictures of what Machine Response’s promotional material calls “purist hardcore.” Not all of the songs adhere: A bleating horn on the mid-tempo “Taking You With Me” evokes Rocket From the Crypt, while the sauntering gait and singsong refrain of “No Walls, No Curtains” sound indebted to late-1970s punk. They don’t undermine the album, just the band’s professed purity. For Falco, who writes the music, it’s tempting to view Career Suicide’s formal conservatism as a respite from the mercurial whims of Fucked Up.
Still, in certain circles, a new Career Suicide is more exciting than a new Fucked Up album. (Farkas supposed, in a recent interview, that the bands hardly share listeners anymore.) This has a lot to do with how critics tacitly devalue hardcore. The style is appreciated, even fetishized, as a background from which bands progress and deemed noteworthy once left behind. It's a paternalistic idea keeps hardcore locked in the past and illegitimate in the present. Career Suicide’s Machine Response is one brazen rebuttal to all of that, a swaggering wager on a simple style’s enduring, essential thrills. | 2017-03-04T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2017-03-04T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Deranged | March 4, 2017 | 7.5 | cc301a13-f819-4391-8829-e99061c11e32 | Sam Lefebvre | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sam-lefebvre/ | null |
No Stairway is an album comprised solely of manipulated field recordings taken from a Guitar Center, and that somehow doesn't even make it unique—there are two such projects currently floating around. For his part, Danny Greenwald, working under the name Glassine, took samples from a couple of stores and produced a glimmering, soothing album from the results. | No Stairway is an album comprised solely of manipulated field recordings taken from a Guitar Center, and that somehow doesn't even make it unique—there are two such projects currently floating around. For his part, Danny Greenwald, working under the name Glassine, took samples from a couple of stores and produced a glimmering, soothing album from the results. | Glassine: No Stairway | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/20803-no-stairway/ | No Stairway | No Stairway is an album comprised solely of manipulated field recordings taken from a Guitar Center, and that somehow doesn't even make it unique. There are two such projects currently floating around, both by artists who seem not to have heard of each other before beginning their work. Noah Wall, who has been a conceptual artist since the late '90s, garnered some notice earlier this year for his project Live at Guitar Center, which he recorded by surreptitiously wandering and capturing sounds in his local Guitar Center, archiving the furtive soloing and jamming of the customers testing amps, plinking at keyboards, fumbling out drum rolls. It was a noisy, blasting mess, and purposefully so, meant to evoke the sort of public-space cacophony that could make any agoraphobe tense up.
Danny Greenwald, working under the name Glassine, arrived at the same idea, completing his project a full year before Noah Wall's was released. He took his samples from two Guitar Centers, one in Brooklyn and another in Baltimore, where he lives and works, and produced a glimmering, soothing album from the results, with the jokey title No Stairway. The coincidence is remarkable, and Patient Sounds, the label issuing No Stairway on cassette, noted the remarkable fact of the two projects' coexistence in its press release.
But apart from the freaky timing, the two albums feel mostly like a testament to the sneaky centrality of a place like Guitar Center to much of young American musical life. For millions of instrument-playing kids, Guitar Center was a sort of local YMCA, an imperfect but important testing ground for life pursuits and passions. If Noah Wall's project felt a bit like an encroaching panic attack in a mall, Greenwald's feels like the dream of someone who fell asleep in the food court bench. It is murmuring, mostly soothing, verging on ambient. Greenwald is a composer, and he treats the samples he has collected as clay, conscripting them into a different context than they came from.
Truthfully, you can learn nothing about the nature of Guitar Center, or what it's like to spend time there, from listening to Greenwald's album, and that is a good thing. You can squint at the deep, hollow knocks of percussion on a track like "Human Shield" and imagine they came from amps being plugged in, microphones being clumsily brushed. But to do so seems to miss the point of listening entirely. This is an album to dilate the senses, not sharpen them. No Stairway is woozy and dreamlike, a collection of undulant and wordless pieces that pulse gently in free space. If the album has a genre, it would be somewhere between experimental dub—those reverberant percussive hits can't help but evoke sound-system associations—and new age. The fact that all of these sounds were compacted out of an unruly stream of data is impressive, and even a little bewildering, but the knowledge proves unnecessary.
The revelation of No Stairway turns out to be hearing how Greenwald coaxes these scuffs and shuffles so that they bloom quietly into pop songs. "Hornet With a Halo" and "Sunruse Bench" have lovelorn, sighing melodies, and sound like what Caribou might be doing if he worked in lo-fi cassettes. The radiant ripple of keyboards on "Human Shield" turn out to be several layers of sound stacked on top of each other, some patched through old synths and played again and some looped. It is a remarkable simulation, built painstakingly from a thousand scraps, but it rings out in space as simple and immediate as a hand pressed down on keys. The major-key melodies are warm, generous, and refracted through a fisheye-lens mix so that they feel slightly love-drunk. If you've ever closed your eyes in a room full of family and friends, letting the chatter blur so that you sense the surrounding goodwill more than you pick out the words, then No Stairway will have an uncannily familiar feel.
Like many late-'90s big-box music retailers—Sam Goody, Tower Records—Guitar Center is a relic of a different, largely pre-Internet commercial era. Wandering into one today, you feel the same sense of impending economic doom you get from pushing open the glass doors of a Best Buy or Radio Shack. It has been in grave financial trouble for years, and is on pace to die a slow, ignominious death. Projects like Greenwald and Wall's, then, provide a slight redemptive note to the timeline, quiet reminders that millions of music-loving souls passed through those big doors at one point or another. | 2015-08-20T02:00:04.000-04:00 | 2015-08-20T02:00:04.000-04:00 | Experimental | Patient Sounds | August 20, 2015 | 7.2 | cc413ec9-532e-4140-a47f-3bd3be2a38c0 | Jayson Greene | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jayson-greene/ | null |
After many years spent experimenting with arcane, home-built electronic devices, the Portuguese musician returns to his guitar for a gorgeous ambient suite informed by drone music and vintage jazz. | After many years spent experimenting with arcane, home-built electronic devices, the Portuguese musician returns to his guitar for a gorgeous ambient suite informed by drone music and vintage jazz. | Rafael Toral: Spectral Evolution | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/rafael-toral-spectral-evolution/ | Spectral Evolution | Rafael Toral has returned to Earth. The jet plane on the cover of his 1994 debut, Sound Mind Sound Body, signaled his skyward trajectory, and he spent the rest of the decade surfing on clouds of guitar. Each new release dissolved a bit more of Brian Eno’s long ambient tones into My Bloody Valentine’s rapturous haze until Toral’s sound faded into the stratosphere. Toral knew he had escaped gravity: The last sound on 2001’s Violence of Discovery and Calm of Acceptance was grainy background noise from a Space Shuttle webcast. He had gone as high as the guitar could take him.
To survive out there untethered to his instrument, Toral founded his own Space Program, a rigorous 13-year project that required inventing his own devices: glove-controlled sine-wave generator, light-controlled portable amplifier, electrode-controlled oscillator. He wanted to combine jazz with electronic music without borrowing from either tradition—as he put it, “making music from scratch.” Daunted by his own ambition, Toral felt his way through this concept like he was navigating a cathedral blindfolded. He didn’t initially perform his new music in public for fear of baffling his audiences, he said, since “it was impossible to demonstrate that each [instrument] is like the tip of one among many networked icebergs.” Still, he worked with enviable discipline, performing Space Solos and in Space Quartets and Space Collectives, honing his craft across a growing constellation of releases until his audience understood the scale of the enterprise.
The Space Program ended in 2017 when Toral decided to combine his ambient guitar work with the improvisational tactics he had developed with his own instruments. Spectral Evolution is the result. Toral’s machines chirp, croon, and howl over a base of shifting guitar hum, responding to one another like extraterrestrial species. The whole 12-part suite unfurls like a gorgeous symphony, as if the entire Space Program only served as preparation for translating a work of cosmic complexity into a language we humans could understand.
The album is a chiasmus, the second half mirroring the first. Fold it down the middle and each section meets its counterpart: “Changes” and “Changes Reprise,” “Descending” and “Ascending,” “First Short Space” and “Second Short Space.” This structure develops organically across the record’s 47 minutes, as song-like forms emerge from, and dissolve into, ambient lulls. The “First Long Space” is a slow drift that would fit squarely into Toral’s 1990s discography if it weren’t for the electronics soloing over top. From this harmonic bed arises the crescendo of centerpiece “Fifths Twice,” which again makes way for electronic devices to flutter and buzz over the “Second Long Space.” Tides of guitar are pulled across the record again and again by the retreating celestial bodies of Space Program instruments.
Toral has said that “Everything in the Space Program is jazz… except the music.” He labeled his improvisational system “post-free jazz electronic music,” an attempt at imagining how free jazz would have developed from the late 1960s had the pianos and trumpets been replaced by Theremins and oscillators. But he believed that his invented instruments moved too freely and unpredictably across the frequency spectrum to operate in standard Western tuning. Spectral Evolution conquers this impasse, deploying jazz changes that he previously thought were impossible. “Changes” takes up chord progressions from George Gershwin’s “I Got Rhythm,” which evolve slowly in the background as Space Program instruments compete like frantic soloists over top. “Take the Train” is based on Duke Ellington’s “Take the ‘A’ Train” and features an instrument startlingly like a trumpet, playing not only in tune but with a melodically inventive style. Still, neither of these jazz standards are recognizable; their changes simply inform the album’s dense harmonic backdrop. Spectral Evolution’s relationship to jazz is something like that of Piet Mondrian’s Broadway Boogie-Woogie to the hustle and bustle of New York City itself: a beautifully austere abstraction formed from an alien perspective.
That perspective is hard-earned. After 13 years in space, Toral returns with knowledge gained from a near-vacuum, gathered only through experimentation and close observation of his strange instruments. If the Space Program consisted of transmissions from the cosmos, Spectral Evolution is an explosive re-entry into the atmosphere, a homecoming announced with a blindingly brilliant streak across the sky. | 2024-02-26T00:00:00.000-05:00 | 2024-02-26T00:00:00.000-05:00 | Electronic / Rock | Moikai | February 26, 2024 | 8 | cc43dc23-c59e-4427-a7f3-5348b4283eb0 | Matthew Blackwell | https://pitchfork.com/staff/matthew-blackwell/ | |
Working with a grab bag of producers, the once-hyperlocal rapper serves up cold lines that lack the pizazz of his best work—at least until an old favorite returns. | Working with a grab bag of producers, the once-hyperlocal rapper serves up cold lines that lack the pizazz of his best work—at least until an old favorite returns. | Action Bronson: White Bronco | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/action-bronson-white-bronco/ | White Bronco | Witnessing Action Bronson’s grass-roots rise felt like watching a beloved food cart get wildly popular. Back in 2010, Bronson was an aspiring rapper from Flushing, Queens. He turned culinary references learned during his days as a chef into braggadocio fodder. Why boast about cash and cars, after all, when you can assert superiority by rapping about pairing roasted bone marrow with lightly toasted rosemary bread, all drizzled with the appropriate vinaigrette? With his knack for outlandish phrases (like casually describing himself as “heavy bearded like I’m Jesus”), the rapper’s charisma soon endeared him to an audience broader than the underground heads who leapt at early tracks like “Shiraz” and “Imported Goods.” Those songs’ lo-fi videos starred Bronson himself, puttering around his neighborhood to buy olives and prosciutto from Arthur Avenue. He become an indigenous flavor with exotic appeal.
Bronson is now a world-recognized brand. Identified by his fantastical ginger beard and penchant for shorts in all seasons, he claims a couple of TV shows on the Vice network, a cookbook, and a role in Martin Scorsese’s upcoming The Irishman. Brooklyn eateries name menu items for him. As with any successful franchise, though, scaling up can risk diluting your appeal, even if the packaging gets slicker. The 26-minute White Bronco, Bronson’s ninth full-length project, largely lacks the piquancy and depth that made him matter.
White Bronco opens with “Dr. Kimble” and a sleazy, guitar-wrestling beat from one of Bronson’s longtime cohorts, Harry Fraud. Bronson’s flow is silky and laid-back, with little pizzazz to the lines: “I cop cars and crash ’em/Next day the same thing/Next day Beijing.” Bronson might be jetting around the world, but the details of the itinerary are less evocative than when he was dropping by neighborhood delis and dropping hometown lines: “Straight from Flushing/Where the birds are hanging dead in the window.”
Unlike earlier albums that benefited from Bronson pairing with one producer—like his 2011 studio debut Dr. Lecter with Tommy Mas, or Blue Chips with Party Supplies—the potluck approach here gives White Bronco an uneven feel. Daringer’s slinky title track—which also features Bronson’s in-house band, the Special Victims Unit—jars against Samiyam’s psyche-rock sinew on “Telemundo.” Knxwledge’s soulful, string-infused work for “Picasso’s Ear” belongs on an entirely different album than the synth-layered electro of Fraud’s “Swerve on Em,” which includes a throwaway verse from A$AP Rocky. This mix does does little to elicit instant-vintage rhymes. On “Telemundo,” for instance, Bronson treads water with lines like, “About to get this paper like Judge Judy/Told my baby, ‘Come do me’/All these drugs just run through me.” They lack the humor and flair of a guy who has bragged about installing a Jacuzzi on the 7 train and using lion’s neck as a secret ingredient.
Tellingly, White Bronco’s punchiest moment comes when Bronson is reunited with Party Supplies, a producer who’s said they have collaborated by searching YouTube for phrases like “a 100-acre burgundy carpet” until unearthing a quirky gem to loop. Party Supplies’ beats have a scuzzy immediacy, as if he’s just stumbled across something to sample and is in thrall to that feeling of discovery. Based around a spunky take on “Tramp,” the short “Irishman Freestyle” has Bronson snobbishly informing us, “Don’t drink gin and tonic/Only natural wine, to be honest.” A few lines later he is “butt naked with the Uzi on Broadway,” telling the gawkers, “My haircut is like Dominican folk art.” This is the absurd, laugh-out-loud stuff that takes you back to the essence of Bronson—and offers an acute reminder of the old flavor missing from much of White Bronco. | 2018-11-06T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2018-11-06T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rap | Empire | November 6, 2018 | 5.1 | cc480709-6e8d-4733-829d-18d1874866ef | Phillip Mlynar | https://pitchfork.com/staff/phillip-mlynar/ | |
The Columbus, Ohio-based musician approaches fingerstyle guitar with first-take energy and unassuming home-recorded production. | The Columbus, Ohio-based musician approaches fingerstyle guitar with first-take energy and unassuming home-recorded production. | Matthew J. Rolin: Matthew J. Rolin | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/matthew-j-rolin-matthew-j-rolin/ | Matthew J. Rolin | In the 60-some years since John Fahey christened his self-taught approach to fingerstyle guitar “American Primitive,” generations of new players have aspired to the mesh of rustic mystery and technical excellence he brought to his surrealistic country blues. Columbus, Ohio-based guitarist Matthew J. Rolin, however, was already deep into his own take on the sound before he heard of Fahey. Inspired by later refractions of Fahey’s influence rather than the original source, Rolin’s crooked path to solo guitar bypassed the rural affect and music-school stuffiness of many fingerstyle disciples. His work transfigures American Primitive’s backwoods vibes into something decidedly DIY.
Rolin’s exploration of folk guitar began in experimental circles. In addition to his solo work, he’s collaborated with Detroit noise band Wolf Eyes and performs alongside dulcimer player Jen Powers in the pensive electro-acoustic improv group Rolin/Powers Duo. His self-titled album is his third proper full-length, joining two slightly more polished sessions that swim amid a Bandcamp page filled with phone-recorded live jams and one-off cassette releases. While his new release is Rolin’s most fully-realized work to date, it maintains his raw first-take energy and unassuming home-recorded production.
The moving “One Day I Will Be Free” opens the album with organ drones and field recordings of distant sirens and rushing traffic that give way to a wash of acoustic 12-string. Ringing chord clusters fade in and out of intricate fingerpicking, cycling through phrases of free sprawl and doleful melodic figures that build into an immersive meditation. The song wanders reflectively for 11 and a half minutes, but it comes off less like a contemplative creekside stroll than a haggard walk home after missing the last bus.
Much of the album lives in similar emotional territory, tempering joy with frustration. Other than the occasional found sound snippet, a tambourine on “Cold Rooms,” and Jen Gelineau’s violin scratches on finale “Blue Columbus Moon,” Rolin’s solitary guitar is almost always the only instrument. The blare of a passing jet all but overpowers the music in the beginning of “Two Fourteen”; once that interruption fades, a bath of muddy tape delay drowns increasingly discordant playing. The competition of pretty acoustic guitars with noisy disruptions recalls Joan of Arc’s early experiments dismantling folk music. While Rolin hardly qualifies as emo, he shares a distinctly midwestern melancholy. Restless, dissatisfied melodies swaddled in tape hiss make even his brightest compositions sound weary.
While the rainy spirit and homespun quality of Rolin’s music separates him from more academic fingerstyle contemporaries, he can’t quite be classified with other unplugged noise dudes, either. There are echoes of Bill Orcutt’s shattered blues in the dizzy rumble of “Rivets” and a stripped-down reading of Ryley Walker’s freefalling astral pop on “Neverendingness,” but Rolin’s songs never ramp up or even attempt to launch. Instead, they trudge steadily forward. A soft argument between hope and defeat runs through the album, and Rolin presents it with the calm resolve of someone who’s probably sat alone with an acoustic guitar as the first of five acts at a basement gig. Unconcerned with virtuosic technique or reincarnating the ghosts of past guitar heroes, Rolin’s overcast instrumentals convey the reality of his own encounters with folk blues. | 2019-11-15T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2019-11-15T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Feeding Tube | November 15, 2019 | 7.4 | cc495f22-2222-4cc6-93a2-fd8fc8aef888 | Fred Thomas | https://pitchfork.com/staff/fred-thomas/ | |
Panda Bear's Crosswords EP consists of one song from this year's Panda Bear Meets the Grim Reaper remixed, an updated version of a bonus track from 2012's Tomboy, and three songs from the Grim Reaper sessions that didn’t make the cut. | Panda Bear's Crosswords EP consists of one song from this year's Panda Bear Meets the Grim Reaper remixed, an updated version of a bonus track from 2012's Tomboy, and three songs from the Grim Reaper sessions that didn’t make the cut. | Panda Bear: Crosswords EP | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/20991-crosswords-ep/ | Crosswords EP | Ever since his proper debut, 2004’s mostly forgotten (but still quite good) Young Prayer, Noah Lennox’s solo work has followed relatively narrow parameters. Where his first record was acoustic and much of it was recorded live in a room, his music since has mostly consisted of him singing over loops, constructing songs from other songs. The fact that the backing tracks mostly consist of processed samples gives Lennox a wide palette to work with, and he’s able to keep his music varied by how he approaches texture and arrangement. He’s also good at making music in this format, no question. But there are limitations to the approach, in terms of dynamics and song structure—the amount of empty space and variations in terms of volume are kept to a minimum, and when Lennox’s melodies are less engaging, his songs tend to bleed together.
Melody was decidedly not a problem on Panda Bear Meets the Grim Reaper—in fact, it was the most tuneful Panda Bear album, filled with songs that felt familiar because they sounded like classics that somehow also managed to be surprising. But the Crosswords EP, consisting of one song from Grim Reaper remixed, an updated version of a bonus track from 2012's Tomboy, and three songs from the Grim Reaper sessions that didn’t make the cut, isn’t up to the same standard. It’s reasonably pretty and it’s always welcome to hear new material in this style, but songs like "No Man’s Land" and "Jabberwocky" don’t stand out in a catalog that is by now pretty extensive; there’s never a moment where you stop breathing for a second to zero in on the way Lennox skips up an interval, no tunes that won’t leave your head. These are solid and enjoyable tracks in Panda Bear’s style, and hearing them here, untethered from an album that has more of an arc, they never become much more than that.
When working as Panda Bear, Lennox essentially makes comfort-food music, songs that come off as gentle and created with care that bring warm feelings, so it feels wrong to use the word "comfortable" in a pejorative sense when discussing his work. But the five songs on the Crosswords EP sound like tracks that come easily to him, songs he knows how to make without stretching himself. The most distinctive is the closer "Cosplay" whose lyrics, oddly enough, mostly consist of Lennox singing variations of "Marijuana makes my day." Live versions of it floated around last year, and it’s been stripped of some of its initial samples but still retains an appealing bubbly texture. Even though the words are goofy and obvious (has any Panda Bear fan ever thought otherwise?), it’s the one place where the album stops being good background music and makes you take notice. | 2015-09-04T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2015-09-04T02:00:01.000-04:00 | Electronic | Domino | September 4, 2015 | 7.1 | cc510747-78b8-47fd-9e3b-0322cb9aa390 | Mark Richardson | https://pitchfork.com/staff/mark-richardson/ | null |
Save for a few intimate highlights, Ben Gibbard continues to move in lockstep with his band's bigger, bolder, more arena-ready sound. | Save for a few intimate highlights, Ben Gibbard continues to move in lockstep with his band's bigger, bolder, more arena-ready sound. | Death Cab for Cutie: The Blue EP | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/death-cab-for-cutie-the-blue-ep/ | The Blue EP | 2018’s Thank You For Today was Death Cab For Cutie’s first album completely divorced from guitarist/producer Chris Walla and the first where they didn’t really try anything new. Offering proficiency and easy nostalgia over emotional investment, it was a safe-bet vote for fan service over the flawed experiments of Kintsugi and Codes and Keys. On its best (or at least its most familiar) moments, longtime fans could close their eyes and briefly forget that “Black Sun” ever happened.
The dullest Death Cab single in their history by a wide margin, “Black Sun” was the band’s attempt to endear themselves to KROQ neighbors Muse and Imagine Dragons, inflating their lyrics with meaningless portent and their arrangements with blown-out solos and production befitting a guy named Rich Costey. The disconnect with Gibbard’s bashful vocals made “Black Sun” the equivalent of a Duplass brother donning a CGI-sculpted muscle suit for a Marvel movie.
And yet on The Blue EP, Gibbard seems to have taken the commercial reception of “Black Sun” as a mandate for more of the same. Where he used to find indirect ways to sneak brute force into his writing, here he moves in lockstep with the band’s bolder sound, writing in the biggest and broadest strokes. A rock band gets big enough and they eventually write a song like “Before the Bombs,” which pits an anonymous couple against some unspecified atrocity in an unnamed part of the world. What is “the only thing” the bombs couldn’t take away from the doomed lovers? I’ll give you one guess.
Meanwhile, “Kids in ’99” offers a retelling of the Olympic Pipeline Explosion in their hometown of Bellingham, Washington. It has an obvious precedent in “Grapevine Fires,” a highlight from 2008’s Narrow Stairs, their last near-great album. But where the latter slowly smoldered, “Kids in ’99” leaves little room for Gibbard to expand beyond a disappointingly dispassionate, literal rendering of the event—he’s “thinking ’bout those kids back in ’99” without ever indicating what he thought, or why. “Man in Blue” is more in line with Thank You For Today, melodically sweet and lyrically inert and proof their robust sound isn’t going anywhere, regardless of who’s behind the boards. (They produced this one themselves.)
Every Death Cab EP contributes at least something essential to their catalog, and “To the Ground” nearly compensates for the rest of Blue’s flaws. Death Cab have long been fixated on Krautrock, a style of music that relieves Gibbard from having to be the focal point for a band that’s basically just him in the public eye. So it’s surprising that “To the Ground” contains some of his most vivid lyrics since Transatlanticism, as he watches a totalled car become one with the earth: “Down in the charred remains/Stripped the chassis clean/And the bramble grew through the frame/’Til it swallowed everything.” “Blue Bloods” is likewise a best-case scenario for late-period Death Cab, reconciling the underrated mean streak of Gibbard’s work on Barsuk with his current budget: “All these East Coast blue bloods that come out west/And I watch them argue about who loved you the best,” Gibbard sings, his thoughts “tied together like boulders with a piece of twine.” It’s a nice metaphor for a concept that never quite holds, and a tease at the ever-elusive “return to form.” Could Death Cab For Cutie make a whole album like this if Gibbard really wanted to?
But you know who doesn’t seem to miss old Death Cab For Cutie? Ben Gibbard. He sobered up in 2011 and took up “ultrarunning,” and now he’s a magnetic presence in peak physical shape leading a hit parade on stage after years of being an inessential live act even during their artistic peak. He can ignore Codes and Keys altogether. He’s been on a Chance the Rapper album. “Northern Lights” might recall the band’s glory days about as much as Silversun Pickups do Smashing Pumpkins, but it gets regular spins on alt-rock radio because it’s the new Death Cab For Cutie single. If Gibbard can’t or won’t access the emotional stakes that might help Death Cab’s new music transcend mere brand stewardship, I don’t blame him.
Buy: Rough Trade
(Pitchfork may earn a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.) | 2019-09-11T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-09-11T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Atlantic | September 11, 2019 | 5.9 | cc598789-d0ff-4334-9775-7bb9a3457d6b | Ian Cohen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ian-cohen/ | |
J Mascis' second proper solo album suggests that the Dinosaur Jr. frontman's entering a new, quieter phase in his career, as his work with the acoustic guitar receives an increased amount of attention. Pall Jenkins of the Black Heart Procession, Ken Maiuri, and Mark Mulcahy join him on this quiet collection of tunes. | J Mascis' second proper solo album suggests that the Dinosaur Jr. frontman's entering a new, quieter phase in his career, as his work with the acoustic guitar receives an increased amount of attention. Pall Jenkins of the Black Heart Procession, Ken Maiuri, and Mark Mulcahy join him on this quiet collection of tunes. | J Mascis: Tied to a Star | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/19532-j-mascis-tied-to-a-star/ | Tied to a Star | Ever since Dinosaur Jr. reconvened nearly a decade ago, J Mascis has favored his Martin almost as much as his Jazzmaster. In fact, if you don’t count reissues of the band’s 1980s albums, his acoustic output has nearly matched the three full-band albums that each justified the reunion and then some. Released in 2006, Live at CBGB’s: The First Acoustic Show made stripping down for a legendary venue sound suitably punk, even if it remains the textbook definition of “For Fans Only.” Much more essential is Several Shades of Why from 2011, Mascis' first true solo album of new material, which featured mainly just Mascis and his Martin. It’s a quiet, gorgeous collection of fragile indie folk tunes made all the more powerful by his wounded-old-man croak, his dexterous picking, and his overall sense of restraint. And now there’s Tied to a Star, which picks up more or less where Several Shades of Why left off*.*
In other words, we may be entering a new chapter in Mascis’ career, one where the Martin and the Jazzmaster receive equal play. This isn’t, thank god, a case of an aging musician making a last-ditch stab at mainstream success by turning self-consciously serious; these albums are still too weird for that. On the other hand, his acoustic material does sound relatively limited, as Mascis is not quite as expressive on the acoustic as he is on the electric. When he plugs in, he can bend notes into a language that is both new and familiar, conjugating active verbs from punk and metal, translating concrete nouns from blues and folk. He’s one of the few guitar gods whose technical prowess never sounds like an end in itself, but simply a means of getting his point across. Which is not to say that he doesn’t occasionally showboat, but that he showboats with great purpose.
When he unplugs, however, Mascis can be a little less communicative and compelling. Several Shades of Why worked because the setting emphasized his vocals and lyrics, both of which are occasionally drowned out by Dinosaur Jr.’s infamous din. Moreover, his playing showed a different approach to the instrument, as though he had relearned the guitar and devised new strategies to put his songs across. As a result, the music balanced a potent world-weariness with a new creative spark, and the songs succeeded precisely because they weren’t adequate vessels for the emotions he was trying to exorcise. It was a lovely, lonely album full of delicate melodies and tenderhearted, albeit somewhat elusive, sentiments.
By contrast, Tied to a Star lacks some of that album’s sense of discovery and precariousness. It’s much more confident and cagier, which may have to do with the fact that this isn’t strictly a Mascis solo record. He corralled a loose backing band for a four-man acoustic jam, including Pall Jenkins of the Black Heart Procession, Ken Maiuri, and Mark Mulcahy. Instead of lonely, quiet folk, we too often get strummy chumminess, which places Star uncomfortably close to ‘90s jam-band territory. The opening chords of “Every Morning” have a bouncy insistency that portends a Sister Hazel song, while the instrumental “Drifter” churns a vaguely Middle Eastern groove that might emanate from post-Jar of Flies alt-rock radio.
Fortunately, there’s more to Tied to a Star than those questionable touchstones. Most of these songs hit the same vein as Why, framing Mascis’ singing and playing as idiosyncratic rather than anonymous. In fact, the best moments are those when he ditches the band altogether. “Come Down” underscores his gentle intro with a looming wall of distortion, as though reluctant to let the listener get too comfortable. Opener “Me Again” and “Stumble” showcase Mascis’ wounded-old-man vocals and especially his strong falsetto, serving as a good reminder that his voice has somehow gotten better with age. Over a quiet, spryly picked guitar theme, his voice meshes well with Marshall’s on “Wide Awake”, conjuring a lonely, late-night mood: two lovers on opposite ends of the telephone line. Only the intrusive crash cymbal on the bridge breaks the spell, but the song recovers on Mascis’ fluid guitar solo—which is played on electric, for what that’s worth.
In fact, almost all of the solos are electrified, which shows just how limited the Mascis + Martin set-up can be. He’s a figure of such towering goodwill in the indie world that it’s tempting to excuse or explain away his missteps. Certainly, Tied to a Star stumbles whenever the band sit in on a song, but his cohorts aren’t necessarily to blame. What’s truly disappointing about this uneven album is the fact that they could find no other mode of playing together besides the old, the familiar, and the unwelcome. There’s nothing embarrassing here, just a few miscalculations amid some typically strong material, but Mascis has proven that he can muster more joyous ingenuity and imagination than he does on Tied to a Star. | 2014-08-28T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2014-08-28T02:00:01.000-04:00 | Rock | Sub Pop | August 28, 2014 | 6.4 | cc5b109a-7ade-48c9-94ac-d13563b4cdd8 | Stephen M. Deusner | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stephen-m. deusner/ | null |
The Chicago psych-rock band Axis:Sova indulge a fever for propulsion on Motor Earth, pairing thick waves of scuzzy guitar with the mechanized pulse of a tinny Roland drum machine. | The Chicago psych-rock band Axis:Sova indulge a fever for propulsion on Motor Earth, pairing thick waves of scuzzy guitar with the mechanized pulse of a tinny Roland drum machine. | Axis: Sova: Motor Earth | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22479-motor-earth/ | Motor Earth | The first thing you’ll notice about Axis: Sova’s Motor Earth is a curious juxtaposition: the sound of a full-fledged psych-rock band playing alongside a tinny drum machine—raw, arena-sized power paired with pint-sized snares and kicks. The sonic contrast wasn’t always so conspicuous. Last year’s Early Surf relied on a drum machine too, but the record was an experimental solo affair—frontman Brett Sova wailing away on his fuzz-damaged guitar as he wandered through a handful of hazy, half-formed ideas laid down on a Tascam 8-track cassette recorder. Amid all that lo-fi murk, the drum machine made sense: just something to keep time while Sova futzed around with his guitar pedals.
For Motor Earth—Axis’ second album for Ty Segall’s Drag City imprint God? Records—Sova assembled an actual band, including touring buddies Tim Kaiser on guitar and Tyson Thurston on bass, and significantly improved the production quality, ditching tape hiss for a sharper, beefier sound. Sova also turned in a batch of more or less identifiable verse-chorus pop songs; the band’s unremitting racket now makes room for a few solid hooks. Even Sova’s voice, largely an afterthought on Early Surf, has emerged as a real melodic weapon.
So why not get a proper drummer? It’s a valid question, and yet it overlooks the Chicago band’s primary appeal (at least in its current iteration): mechanized, unthinking propulsion—an attribute that rock bands, guitar-based and not, have used to great effect over the decades, from Suicide to the Kills. And anyway, Axis: Sova with a regular kit would be just another Hawkwind nostalgia band. Sova thinks his greatest asset is his beloved ’73 Telecaster, but it’s that Roland Rhythm Arranger pulsing underneath.
Which is not to say that he’s a slouch with a wah-wah pedal—Sova didn’t name his band after Hendrix’s Axis: Bold As Love for nothing. He and Kaiser have a hell of a good time on opener “Love Identity,” tag teaming on glammed-out T. Rex riffage and molten Sonic Youth klang for a fever-dreamy eight minutes. Motor Earth never tops that track’s ebullient first few minutes—listening to Early Surf, who would have ever thought you could sing along to these guys?—but they certainly try. “Violent Yellow” packs an album’s worth of guitar moves into a hot little mess of teenage paranoia and lust. And “(Like an) Intruder” is the record’s most giddily propulsive moment: the Stooges riding shotgun on a Suicide track. “Treat me like an intruder,” Sova begs, in a clear homage to Iggy Pop’s indelible line: “Now I wanna be your dog.”
There’s a flip side to Sova and Kaiser’s six-string obsession: Motor Earth is one of the few guitar-nerd records in recent memory that would be better served with the instruments set lower in the mix. The guitars so dominate the rhythm section that it sometimes sounds like Sova and Kaiser are playing along to a Roland drum machine app on an iPad. Maybe unavoidably, Motor Earth is a one-note affair. Axis plug in and ride the scuzz-rock train for an unwavering 41 minutes. When the band wants to change things up, they simply ditch the pretense of songwriting altogether, drench the proceedings in acid feedback, and keep the train roaring down the track.
And yet the record’s pleasures are no less potent for their blunt simplicity. Listening to closer “Routine Machine” you get the uncanny sensation that Sova and co. wrote the song in real time as they recorded it. As if the boys simply pressed play on the drum machine, grabbed their guitars, picked out a Sabbath riff or two, and kept layering vocal melodies on top of each other until everything fell into place—or fell gloriously apart, depending on your point of view. | 2016-10-22T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-10-22T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Drag City / God? | October 22, 2016 | 6.7 | cc86ee01-1d7d-40d2-97de-cc0e391c11c6 | John S.W. MacDonald | https://pitchfork.com/staff/john-s.w. macdonald/ | null |
Dave Porter’s latest album as Avey Tare is ambitious and inspiring. His painful, deeply personal, and intimate songs never are in constant search for new sounds and emotions. | Dave Porter’s latest album as Avey Tare is ambitious and inspiring. His painful, deeply personal, and intimate songs never are in constant search for new sounds and emotions. | Avey Tare: Eucalyptus | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/avey-tare-eucalyptus/ | Eucalyptus | Whether out of a creative need to one-up themselves or a conscious effort to hold on to the wider audience they’d built up in the wake of Merriweather Post Pavilion, each of Animal Collective’s last few LPs have been busier, zanier, and more eager to awe the last. By last year’s Painting With, all that forced jubilation had begun to sound cloying or even pandering, which, ironically, is the last thing anybody wants from this band. That may explain why increasingly some of the best Animal Collective music has come not from their group efforts but from their many side projects.
Recorded with Animal Collective part-timer Josh Dibb, Avey Tare’s Eucalyptus could never be accused of pandering—no album as slack and rickety as this has sights on the masses—yet in some ways it embodies a romantic ideal that’s nearly as sure-fire as Merriweather’s imagining of a perfect pop album: the reclusive, personal record, written seemingly with no expectation that anybody will even hear it. That it’s steeped in pain and heartbreak only further heightens its mystique. Dave Portner’s last solo album as Avey Tare, Down There, had its share of sorrows, too, but that album was unmistakably a studio creation, an efficient 35 minutes of tunes and rhythms. Eucalyptus is near twice the length but has less to prove. Unafraid to meander, it finds a golden ratio between inspiration and indifference.
Like this spring’s Meeting of the Waters EP, the album pivots away from the synapse-frying maximalism of recent Animal Collective releases and returns to the primal spirit of the group’s formative records. On Waters, Portner and Brian “Geologist” Weitz took the live-in-the-wild aesthetic of those early albums to new extremes, recording it near the Amazon River, where the rustling rainforest served as a sort of incidental backing band. Eucalyptus’ origins aren’t nearly so dramatic. As Portner tells it, he wrote the bulk of the album in his bedroom in 2014, sapping inspiration per usual from his surroundings, in this case, the rugged terrain of California’s Big Sur mountains.
Even from the bedroom, Portner finds ways to convey the sounds of nature, but here they’re staged and artificial. The porcelain-fragile “Selection of a Place” first appeared as a “Rio Negro Version” on the Waters EP, set to a backdrop of cooing birds and chirping insects. With no wildlife to provide the white noise, for the Eucalyptus version Portner turns to electronics to replicate that hiss, closing the track with a blare of digitized bird calls. Similarly on “Coral Lords,” a treatise on marine ecology with the fidelity of a ham radio broadcast, a whoosh of dead-air static stands in for the sound of rushing water.
Though its songs are lightly augmented with overdubs and outside voices, as well as the faintest outlines of orchestrations from Eyvind Kang, Eucalyptus retains its air of bedroom intimacy. The joyful standout “Jackson 5” feels like a shoebox diorama of the full-blown carnival that Animal Collective might have built it into, and it’s all the more affable for it. Likewise, the cattle-ranch country romp “Ms. Secret” downplays its inherent audacity, with Portner keeping a straight face as he adopts a ridiculous loose-jawed drawl. The album’s riskiest vocal performance, though, belongs to “PJ,” where he imagines an encounter with a departed friend. “Was on a beach and met PJ/But he died on a winter’s day,” Portner warbles, in the high, fluttery voice of a villager from an old Casper cartoon, shell-shocked by their brush with the beyond. He sells both emotions, the lurid giddiness of sharing a ghost tale, and the very real grief of losing someone you love.
The sense of loss is even more overt on Eucalyptus’ closing track, and the one that cements the record as an uncharacteristically personal work, “When You Left Me.” Portner even directs its closing verse at himself. “Gonna say that I’m thankful that all the years passed away/Avey, give me wisdom of your many years to come/Hear me even though I’m distances away,” he sings, echoing the hopes of any romantic who’s longed to preserve their bond with an ex. Life usually doesn’t work out that way, yet nonetheless there’s an optimism underlying Portner’s account of separated lovers who still have a lot to learn from each other. “Wanna bask in your ritual, finding the perfect day,” he repeats, pleadingly, turning it into a mantra that brings Eucalyptus full circle. How poetic that an album that devotes so much time to searching and seeking concludes with a vow to continue doing exactly that. | 2017-07-25T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-07-25T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Experimental | Domino | July 25, 2017 | 7.6 | cc873d2d-e557-44d7-930c-d7503eeb8394 | Evan Rytlewski | https://pitchfork.com/staff/evan-rytlewski/ | null |
Six years after their scrappy debut, the pop-punk band Potty Mouth return with an arena-sized follow up that sounds like a major-label effort without all the compromises. | Six years after their scrappy debut, the pop-punk band Potty Mouth return with an arena-sized follow up that sounds like a major-label effort without all the compromises. | Potty Mouth: SNAFU | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/potty-mouth-snafu/ | SNAFU | Potty Mouth’s scrappy debut full-length, 2013’s Hell Bent, sounds like it was recorded in a practice space, so the upgrade on their sophomore album SNAFU is immediately obvious. The drums are mixed to arena size, and the surfaces gleam with studio polish, thanks in part to engineer Courtney Ballard (Good Charlotte, All Time Low, State Champs). Like pop-punk icons Blink-182, Potty Mouth started out in punk before discovering their knack for glossier, more melodic pop songwriting. SNAFU, arriving after six years of label limbo, aims for a Buddha to Enema of the State leap — they even offer their own “What’s My Age Again?” with “22,” a song about not wanting to “wake up 22.” The opener “Do It Again” evokes the hard-charging “Dumpweed,” and if they aren’t cracking the kinds of juvenile jokes that Tom DeLonge and Mark Hoppus did, the energy is similar: youthful determination and self-deprecation.
After establishing the band in Northampton, Massachusetts, singer-guitarist Abby Weems, bassist Ally Einbinder, and drummer Victoria Mandanas saw their lives as musicians speed up while working on new music. Potty Mouth signed a record deal, released a grunge-tinged self-titled EP, and toured with bands like Beach Slang and Against Me! In 2016, they moved to Los Angeles to record a new batch of songs. But suddenly, their relationship with their label turned sour after the label requested they try a different sound, jeopardizing Potty Mouth’s creative control and their future. Instead of clinging to the deal, Potty Mouth chose to part ways, essentially rebuilding a new set of resources on their own. From this situation, the album title arrived: SNAFU, or a “Situation Normal All Fucked Up.”
The album’s opening string of songs lean into their choruses, sounding a little too indebted to acts like Veruca Salt and Garbage. But once the Green Day-like squeal of guitars on “Liar” kicks in, Potty Mouth find their stride, as if motivated by each other’s delivery. SNAFU is filled with moments like these, where the joy of jamming with best friends results in irresistibly catchy hooks. They blow a raspberry at the end of “22,” a reminder to not take themselves too seriously, while the impromptu collaborative origins of “Fencewalker”—a song Weems co-wrote with the Go-Go’s Gina Schock, one of her personal idols, after they invited Potty Mouth on tour—serves as a reminder that they deserve to be taken seriously, too. It’s a fine line of knowing one’s worth, and they balance it well on SNAFU.
Instead of toughening up on this album to prove they can go big musically without the guidance of a major label, Potty Mouth embrace what makes them stand out as a unit and as individual members. Weems’ shows off her aggressive guitar tones and a sneering falsetto on “Dog Song.” Einbinder grounds “Plastic Paradise” with her guttural bass and sugary backing vocals. And then there’s Mandanas, giving Travis Barker a run for his money with quickening drum fills on “22” and the hollow echo of floor tom hits on “Massachusetts.” The energy is gleeful and unencumbered, even when the sound feels fit for bigger stages. They sound like a major label band without any of the compromises.
Potty Mouth decided to release SNAFU and an accompanying comic book on Get Better Records, a DIY record label co-run by Einbinder and her partner. Their audacity paid off: By way of declaring independence, Potty Mouth found both their bravado and secured their future. “They said, ‘Give us more of that something outré to sell,’” Weems sings on the flashy “Smash Hit.” It’s her suckerpunch of a response that sounds more gleeful than anything else on the album: “Oh well, mademoiselle.” | 2019-03-05T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2019-03-05T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Get Better | March 5, 2019 | 7.2 | cc914301-94b4-4b56-805e-a845d914b5b1 | Nina Corcoran | https://pitchfork.com/staff/nina-corcoran/ | |
Inviting producers like Kaytranada, James Blake, and DJ Paul into the fold offers a refreshing canvas for a rapper whose technical prowess and stark songwriting deserve a varied landscape to thrive in. | Inviting producers like Kaytranada, James Blake, and DJ Paul into the fold offers a refreshing canvas for a rapper whose technical prowess and stark songwriting deserve a varied landscape to thrive in. | Freddie Gibbs: $oul $old $eparately | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/freddie-gibbs-soul-sold-separately/ | $oul $old $eparately | Freddie Gibbs’ gruff, menacing voice has the innate ability to blend with its background. It’s part of why his last three records—Alfredo, Bandana, and Fetti, produced either by the Alchemist or Madlib—felt more like snugly fitting puzzle pieces than curious experimentations. When he bares his soul about the costly pressures of trying to maintain his rap independence on “Skinny Suge,” he’s draped by the Alchemist’s usage of a heavenly guitar progression from German artist Volker Kriegel, to the point where it’s impossible to separate the emotionality of the lyrics with the romantic sample.
Settling into a groove with legacy producers whose names ring out in the annals of rap history made it difficult for Gibbs to buck expectations as to what his projects could sound like. The thrill of surprise dissipated with each album’s hyperfocus. You begin to expect the peaceful nature of David T. Walker strings on “Something to Rap About” or the Sylvers’ angelic shrieks on “Palmolive,” relying on only Gibbs’ nimble flow and cadence variances to make each song feel unique. Now Gibbs departs from the comfort zone that he’s built for himself on $oul $old $eparately, inviting in producers like Kaytranada, James Blake, and DJ Paul into the fold. It’s a refreshing canvas for a rapper whose technical prowess and stark songwriting deserve a varied landscape to thrive in.
Understanding that change is difficult for people, Gibbs provides fan service early in the album to listeners he’s picked up in recent years. The Alchemist’s two-faced, jazz suite on “Blackest in the Room” feels as though it could be ripped from Fetti. Instead of blistering through the track, Gibbs employs a methodical flow that creeps along a dreamy Michel Ripoche sample, rattling off references to Black iconography “Training Day Denzel” and Fred Hampton with a measured fury. The track is a proverbial layup: “Black Forces so his brain ain’t leave a stain on my shoe,” he raps, pairing brutal depictions with the serene vocal sample to create a haunting juxtaposition with a sinister aura.
Even though Gibbs strays away from the Alchemist and Madlib, he retains the soul that’s set him apart from much of rap’s mediocrity and malaise. Instead of a uniform set of boom-bap production that sounds like Blaxploitation flick soundtracks, there’s a grab-bag of sounds for Gibbs to mold. “Grandma’s Stove,” with its musings on his public perception as a “deadbeat daddy” and drugs as a form of escapism, draws additional sensitivity from the somber drumbeat and Musiq Soulchild’s crooning. Kelly Price’s angelic vocal runs on the intro “Couldn’t Be Done” coincide with triumphant horn sections and a pitched-up Norman Feels vocal loop to give the song a celebratory, gospel-esque tone. The James Blake-produced “Dark Hearted,” with its continuous vocal echoes and murky piano beat, makes Gibbs’ bars about homicide and abandonment feel like bad memories he wishes to flush away. His voice dives in and out of the pockets with precision, skillfully playing with the cadence to craft a symphony with the track’s intermittent hi-hats.
Part of Gibbs’ allure stems from his unflinching honesty, turning $oul $old $eparately into a mediation on how his life has morphed with stardom. It’s a double-edged sword: It gets him into a laundry list of beefs outside of his raps that get old rather quickly, while also making it possible for him to address the reputation he’s earned in his songs. Much like how his music interacts with his controversy, you have to make an effort to sort through the nonsense in the vignettes, like when the polarizing Joe Rogan appears in a voicemail at the end of “Rabbit Vision.” But when he homes in on his own words and self-critiques, he’s razor sharp. He combines the groovy rhythms of the Madlib production with his conspiratorial ramblings as a cover on “CIA,” hiding the album’s thesis in the final track. “I did this album off pages ripped out my diary/Confessions and hard lessons, killers confide in me,” he spits, considering how he’s matured and grown over the years. “Rabbit Vision” is a personal sermon, with the J.U.S.T.I.C.E. League’s rousing piano production granting Gibbs the space to reflect on his life journey. He deals in the concrete, refusing to sensationalize his drug-slinging escapades and numerous bouts with public figures.
The album’s sound meanders through regional influences, taking on the form of whoever guest stars on the track with ranging success. Moneybagg Yo’s visit on “Too Much” feels generic and stale, with the pounding bass and braggadocios bars destined to become club background noise. “Lobster Omelette” could have been a standout on God Forgives, I Don’t, as he and Rick Ross’ delivery drips with luxurious energy, deserving to be listened to from a giant pink hotel on Miami Beach. The ascending harp scales of “Gold Rings” provide a beautiful foil for Gibbs and Pusha T’s abrasive verbosity, ensuring that the duo’s shooting percentage remains pristine. Even the other legends that appear are equally as motivated as Gibbs: DJ Paul, Raekwon, and Scarface all maintain their established, elevated quality. Through it all, Gibbs displays an unwavering comfort among legends—the balance between technical agility and hard-nosed intensity ensures that each beat he floats over, whether it be DJ Paul’s horrorcore stylings or DJ Dahi’s whirring electronic beeps, feels familiar, never foreign.
For the past six years, Gibbs’ consistency has manifested in cohesive projects that often blended easy-listening production with in-your-face raps into an intoxicating combination. By electing to embark on a variety of sonic directions, he’s challenging the listener to remember the days of Shadow of a Doubt and ESGN, allowing for his raps to take precedence by deviating from production expectations. At its core, $oul $old $eparately is a full-circle exhibition that allows Gibbs a minute to rest on his laurels: His comfort zone is whatever studio he finds himself in. | 2022-10-05T00:02:00.000-04:00 | 2022-10-05T00:02:00.000-04:00 | Rap | ESGN / Warner | October 5, 2022 | 7.7 | cc952f35-d3dc-4c79-9bc3-8a3529e9fd11 | Matthew Ritchie | https://pitchfork.com/staff/matthew-ritchie/ | |
The young Maryland rapper presents a deft, stylish, and unique introduction to his career. | The young Maryland rapper presents a deft, stylish, and unique introduction to his career. | Innanet James: Quebec Place | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22446-quebec-place/ | Quebec Place | A name like Innanet James gives a lot away. The Maryland rapper is a byproduct of the rap web, a post-regional stylist who built his base almost entirely online. He owes much of his success to a single email sent to Pigeons and Planes, which led to his breakout single, “Black,” going viral across the blogosphere. He owes his entire career to Lil Wayne, whose online mixtape Da Drought 3 inspired him to rap. As he was building his web presence in the early ’10s, he remained active locally. Under his first moniker Sails Martin, he caught an early break and became a member of GoldLink’s Squaaash Club. But when that relationship deteriorated, he rebooted, deleting all of his early music from the internet and becoming Innanet.
His debut EP, Quebec Place, named for a residential street in D.C., cashes in on the cachet he’s earned online. It’s a well-curated selection of electro soul cuts that borrow sounds from across regions to tell stories about home. He raps about paying his mama’s bills, feeling safe at his granny’s house, and treating Montgomery County like the sandbox adventure game Saints Row. On “Jams,” he recounts being a small-time local artist, rapping, “Lost a couple friends, I ain’t McConaughey, I ain’t trip/Well I did, on the beat to tell them they ain’t shit/Sike nah, I’m in Maryland ‘cause really I ain’t rich/Where you learn real quick how real it can still get.” Things happen quickly in his raps and ideas are constantly overlapping. Nuggets about his Maryland upbringing are hidden in generalities.
Despite being influenced by a wide range of artists, among them Wayne and Cam’ron, Quebec Place is still heavily indebted to what's happening locally in the DMV—Wale, GoldLink, and go-go—which is especially evident in the cadences on “Frequency” and the bounce on “Flavour.” He distills the scene into a bubbly brew while sampling sounds from outside sources. There are traces of Ghostface in James’ writing and on “Black” his inflections mimic Vince Staples, but he isn't defined by any of his influences. His phrasing is distinct and his wordplay is incredibly elastic, perfect for his free-associative raps. On tracks like “622” and “Summer,” thoughts unfurl in snippets. His verses split and break in weird places, and he’ll randomly lean in on an off-beat, creating space that he then slingshots through to reestablish his rhythm. He has an innate sense of time and tempo, and he has strong pop rap instincts, too.
Quebec Place is a sampler of Innanet James’ unique talents, and he begins to find his footing on songs like “Jam,” where he goes toe-to-toe with DMV rapper Chaz French, both building off each other’s energy. “Girls” is a cross between Jay Z’s “Girls, Girls, Girls” and Ludacris’ “Pimpin’ All Over the World,” a cross-country roll call of his flings. He’s constantly taking cues from those before him and those around him all while becoming more comfortable in his own skin with each breath. On some tracks, he bursts through with reckless flows dictating the pace (“Frequency”); on others, he settles in, carefully stretches each syllable, packing them into open spaces (“622”). The EP builds to its closer, “Paint,” which takes a smooth soul sample and flips it into something sleek and modern, as James bounds into walls of rubbery synths. In its lyrics, he surveys his past and future, hoping to one day become a beacon of the community that made him. Quebec Place, which outlines his humble beginnings, is another good start. | 2016-10-03T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-10-03T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | self-released | October 3, 2016 | 7.5 | cc96a0b4-e7cd-4f29-9db1-21eb20c346c7 | Sheldon Pearce | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sheldon-pearce/ | null |
On Kiid, her first full LP, Mal Devisa’s voice is raw, collected, and honest, scaling heights that you may have forgotten were there. | On Kiid, her first full LP, Mal Devisa’s voice is raw, collected, and honest, scaling heights that you may have forgotten were there. | Mal Devisa: Kiid | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22217-kiid/ | Kiid | Deja Carr’s voice is a force of gravity, an instrument of rare range and seemingly limitless capacity for empathy. When she howls, her vocals clip into the red, and her rapping jolts you straight awake. On Kiid, her first full LP, her voice is raw, collected, and honest, scaling heights that you may have forgotten were there.
Mal Devisa is Carr’s solo moniker. She grew up in the Bronx and, at five, moved to the college town of Amherst, Mass. Carr seems to have absorbed the intellectual rigor that is the oxygen of such a place—the societal critique in her songs and interviews is razor sharp—as well as its heart. (“I’m definitely a small town person,” Carr once said. “When I go to the city I’m like, ‘Why is no one returning my smile?’ It’s kind of sad.”) At 12, Carr attended a Girls Rock Camp lead by a former member of the ’70s outfit Fanny and started a funk band called Who’da Funk It; the group lasted until Carr was 17, and a year later, in 2014, she released her first music as Mal Devisa. Her debut EP included a cover of Feist’s “Honey Honey” as well as a remarkably classic-sounding blues ballad called “Daisy,” which appears here.
Kiid pairs that enormous, smoldering voice with spare instrumentation—Carr is mostly accompanied by her rumbling bass, with occasional piano, drums, and beats. The minimalism of the music is a foil, highlighting how thundering Carr’s alto can be. Rhythm is her primary instrument, and it follows that her grandfather was the New York City-bred jazz drummer Bruno Carr, who recorded with Aretha Franklin and Ray Charles. Warmed with tape hiss, Kiid was released with no label after a successful Kickstarter campaign, and it accordingly ascribes to its own genre-skewing logic. Brilliantly sequenced, it contains two sets of five mostly acoustic tracks, capped by a booming rap song at the end of each side—declarations of unwavering autonomy, bars that leave foes present and historical in the dust. Carr’s commanding songs have the wide-open, recursive feeling of jazz and blues. The bass guitar, plucked and strummed, makes Kiid feel tactile and alive.
No matter the style, the spirits of Nina Simone and Billie Holiday lurk in all of these songs. Carr’s borderless voice has a similar way of luxuriating in every note. You would not be mistaken for hearing shades of Merrill Garbus, too. (Carr has a tUnE-yArDs tattoo.) The mesmerizing “Sea of Limbs” is performed so starkly that you can feel the dimensions of the room it was recorded in—the darkness and the tables and chairs and caverns of space. “If you swim in a sea of limbs/Don’t be surprised when someone tries to grab you,” Carr sings, wringing the stoic resolve out of such images as “Poseidon and his golden rage” and “skin like a tidal wave.” On the tender “Everybody Knows,” Carr’s melismatic singing twists syllables into sublime shapes. “Everybody knows that my heart grows deeper than the water,” she sings. “I will make a road map out of my heart.”
There are more aggressive moments on Kiid, too. The clattering, densely layered “In My Neighborhood” is grounded by sinister industrial electronics. It sounds like an anti-gentrification anthem: “Girl don’t shut your eye/This is called the world,” she snarls, “Don’t look hip enough?/That’s cause I’m not hip enough/In my neighborhood.” Kiid ends with “Dominatrix,” one of the album’s two exhilarating rap songs, erupting all of its frustration into a restless flow. It is a jarring final purge, a menacing wrecking ball of feminist defiance: “I’m a dominatrix when the bass kicks/I’m eating up the spirits like the shackles on the slave ships,” she raps. “I’m better off being a queen in size 16 jeans… or the only black woman slaying science on TV.” These moments, and particularly the boiling-point of “Dominatrix,” underscore the more quiet rage that is simmering all along.
The starry penultimate track “Forget that I.” is just Carr and piano, as if there is a sole light beaming down on her: “I am more than what you think of me/I fight fires in the dark/In the beauty of it all/I forget that I have lied/I am holding onto my own life.” Songs so precisely about survival are rarely so full of grace.
In interviews, Carr has expressed the inspiration she’s drawn from the Black Lives Matter movement; she once evoked the lyrics to “Forget that I.” when discussing the colorblindness that permeates America, the forces that make it easier to “reject people that don't look like us.” “I know for a fact that everyone is more than what I see when I look at them,” Carr said, “and maybe more than what they see when they look at themselves.” These realities naturally charge all of Kiid. Even its abstract lyrics feel politicized: On “Live Again,” when Carr repeats its titular refrain—“Why do we live again?”—the answer seems to ring out in the song's echoes.
Kiid’s opener “Fire” distills her power into its most heartbreakingly simple expression. She sings of “fire in the brains” of all those trying to make sense of our painfully nonsensical world. “Does it kill you to know that we’re all dying?” Carr sings. “It kills me to know.” Musically, it sounds classic—wise, like an old soul—and yet “Fire” is the sound of this very moment. Her lyrics ponder grave injustices, process immense breaches, and yet they are searingly lucid. Perhaps this is what makes Mal Devisa so profound: For 30 minutes, there is nothing between you and her voice. | 2016-08-16T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-08-16T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | self-released | August 16, 2016 | 8.1 | cc9c88cf-33c4-4562-8616-891d702c8e5f | Jenn Pelly | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jenn-pelly/ | null |
On the ambitious new album from Ukrainian metal prodigy Markov Soroka, songs boil in their own misery. His dismal riffs and atmospheres bubble over until there’s nothing left but smoke. | On the ambitious new album from Ukrainian metal prodigy Markov Soroka, songs boil in their own misery. His dismal riffs and atmospheres bubble over until there’s nothing left but smoke. | Tchornobog: Tchornobog | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/tchornobog-tchornobog/ | Tchornobog | In 2009, a Ukrainian teenager named Markov Soroka began composing the album that would become Tchornobog, named after the demonic deity described as the Slavic god of evil. The project was inspired by a vision: “I witnessed—without any hope of my eye closing,” he wrote, “The terrible sensory overload of the black vomit of Tchornobog.” Over seven years later, Soroka—now 21 years old, the metal prodigy behind one-man bands Aureole and Slow—asks you to bear witness alongside him. The album is a series of long, genre-defying compositions in which Soroka plays nearly every instrument, inviting like-minded artists to add the occasional saxophone, cello, or background vocals. The ambition inherent in every second of Tchornobog is its driving force.
Spanning four tracks in over an hour, Tchornobog might initially seem easier to admire than it is to actually listen to. But deeper listens reveal it to be a dynamic collection of focused and expressive extreme metal. The lurching 20-minute opener “The Vomiting Tchornobog” drags itself forward with a crushing physicality. But around the three-minute mark, a surreal, reverb-drenched array of horns burst into the mix to accompany the low-end blasts from Soroka’s guitar. It’s a bone-chilling moment from a composer whose primary goal is to disorient and overwhelm.
Despite taking apparent influence from the structure of Yes’ Tales From Topographic Oceans, Tchornobog’s music is largely uninterested in progression. Soroka’s songs don’t really evolve over their epic runtimes; they boil in their own misery, his dismal riffs and atmospheres bubbling over until there’s nothing left but smoke. The tracks on Tchornobog mostly follow a similar pattern, separating two crushing halves with a slow, ominous breakdown. The moments that subvert the formula are welcome, like the jazzy interlude in the penultimate track “Non-Existence’s Warmth.” Ten minutes in, piano and mournful horns fade into the mix like a funeral procession rerouted through a desert. When their refrain is echoed in a starry post-rock outro, Soroka offers the album’s most transcendent and human moment.
While maintaining his cryptic persona, Sokora has revealed that the album partially consists of “meditations as an escapism from less than favorable situations from a troubled childhood.” The emotional intensity of the music is clear, even if Soroka keeps a distance, obscured further by somewhat monotonous production. The album’s impenetrability, however, is part of its appeal. You could imagine any of these songs being released as a standalone EP and garnering acclaim for the suffocating landscapes they invoke. Taken together, they feel like a deep unburdening from one of metal’s most promising and mysterious figures. “I believe that everyone has their own Tchornobog that they are constantly wrestling with,” he’s explained, “This is mine.” You get the sense his battle has only just begun. | 2017-08-03T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-08-03T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Metal | Fallen Empire / Voidhanger Records | August 3, 2017 | 7.4 | cc9f2161-1bdf-4b8c-a2f8-97bf69484a37 | Sam Sodomsky | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sam-sodomsky/ | null |
iLoveMakonnen's latest falls uncertainly somewhere between mixtape and album, flipping between his established styles. All of the Makonnen sounds are here, but they are a little thinner, and more grating. | iLoveMakonnen's latest falls uncertainly somewhere between mixtape and album, flipping between his established styles. All of the Makonnen sounds are here, but they are a little thinner, and more grating. | iLoveMakonnen: Drink More Water 6 | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21707-drink-more-water-6/ | Drink More Water 6 | Fame on the Internet, particularly at the nexus where music and memes are consumed, accelerates in dog years. It’s been fewer than two calendar years since "Tuesday," but the once-ubiquitous summer 2014 jam feels positively ancient in a world full of Lil Yachtys, Lil Uzi Verts, and Kodak Blacks. Particularly troubling is the shuffling pace of iLoveMakonnen’s output since then—following up his solid eponymous debut EP with a mixtape, Drink More Water 5, that, while slight, was just enough to float interested parties. (It helped that it was free.) November’s iLoveMakonnen2 was good, but it wasn’t hard to squint and wonder if the appeal was fading just a tad.
This is a standard dilemma for an artist like Makonnen at this crossroads, but he exacerbates the problem by frequently flipping between wildly different personalities—brash trap-rapper, which feels a little hollow; emotional rap singer, which suits him better; and an off-key pop artist, which might actually be his best mode ("Tuesday" was neither rap or R&B, after all, but essentially a pop song).
He refined the balance of all of these elements on Drink More Water 5, but it seemed unlikely to connect with anyone not already into what he’s doing. The sixth installment straddles a frustrating line between straight-up mixtape (which would temper fan expectations, somewhat) and an official album (because it is for sale on iTunes). Like everything else he's done since 2014, it feels inherently insecure, the movement of someone unsure how to keep pushing forward. All of the Makonnen sounds are here, but they are a little thinner, and more grating.
Constant experimentation doesn’t mean an artist is getting better, and consistency is not a crime. But the trap-rap songs have grown tiring, and the songs of that stripe here, like "Big Gucci" and "Sellin," are more chores than bangers. When Makonnen decides to stretch and aim for an alchemy of pop songwriting and emotive singing, he’s still more than capable of producing something that can be direct and moving. The best song here is the one that nails this dynamic the sharpest, the Sonny Digital-produced "Want You," which rides a beat not entirely unlike "Tuesday" for a good two-and-a-half minutes. (Speaking of biting yourself, "Uwonteva" is nothing more than a way-worse retread of the fun "Trust Me Danny.")
The mild psych touches on the ballad "Turn Off the Lies" (geez that title) punch up the track, but it can’t help but feel a little staid, a too-late seasoning on a dry piece of meat already turning rubbery. At 11 tracks, it's longer than 2 and lacks the experimentation of Drink More Water 5, and it drags. The tape just kinda ends, with no resolution. And that damning lack of resolution is something that's haunted Makonnen for these two long years—sure he can put together memorable hooks and a sometimes head-turning lyric ("I take you to the movie and I treat you like a groupie—and you don’t mind"), but it's starting to feel one-dimensional. | 2016-03-22T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-03-22T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Warner Bros. | March 22, 2016 | 6.2 | cca86afa-386e-4424-a7bc-e382b83e1afa | Matthew Ramirez | https://pitchfork.com/staff/matthew-ramirez/ | null |
A decade-plus after splitting from Cash Money, Juvenile reunites with Birdman for a shockingly strong late-career-reunion record. | A decade-plus after splitting from Cash Money, Juvenile reunites with Birdman for a shockingly strong late-career-reunion record. | Birdman / Juvenile: Just Another Gangsta | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/birdman-juvenile-just-another-gangsta/ | Just Another Gangsta | Juvenile is in a strange place. The Pen & Pixel-inspired covers, sample-free beats, and signature ad-libs of his prime era are ubiquitous on Soundcloud, but the New Orleans vet’s own steady output over the past 13 years has gone largely ignored. Reality Check, his underrated album from 2006—the first one he released after an acrimonious and very public split from Cash Money—is the last time he seemed to command a national spotlight, and the four LPs he’s released since then (one more under Atlantic, and then one on E1 followed by a pair on some combination of J. Prince ventures) have come and gone rather quietly.
Birdman, meanwhile, has spent a not-insignificant part of this decade in court. Despite having one of the greatest catalogs in the history of rap music, Cash Money has long been the subject of rumor, innuendo, and lawsuits. (Through all this, Baby’s persisted as one of his era’s sharpest A&R’s –– the high-water mark this decade being Tha Tour Pt. 1, the incomprehensibly good mixtape that paired Young Thug and and Rich Homie Quan, neither of whom have released any other music through Cash Money Records.) Given that Juve split from his original home a decade and a half ago, and given that his departure is widely seen as the rupture that spelled the end of its golden era, it’s sort of shocking that he would team back up with Birdman and CMR for a late-career reunion. What’s maybe less shocking is that the record is extremely good.
Juve’s always been a gifted writer –– he can make cold-blooded threats sound funny, but more importantly, he's as good as any rapper since Biggie at letting shame and sorrow bubble beneath his verses without them explicit. He also has that once-in-a-generation voice that makes everything sound like the blues. Both those skills are on full display here. There’s “From Tha Block,” a slinking summer anthem full of organ stabs and references to Juve’s lawyer and his similarities to Matlock; there’s “Broke,” which treats insurance fraud the way folk songs treat factory closings. The way he stretches words like “uzi” and “D’usse,” on the hook for “One Two,” turns them into pointed, pained scraps you can’t get out of your brain.
This is nominally a collaboration album, but Birdman is deployed appropriately—as a capable but limited supporting player. Just Another Gangsta smartly declines to pander to the rap radio of the moment, sticking with a sound palette that flatters Juve, but does make some shrewd casting decisions: the closing song, “Dreams,” features a rising Memphis rapper with an elastic voice named NLE Choppa, and “From The Bottom” has an excellent turn from a young Louisianan named Jay Lewis, who for some reason goes uncredited. It would be tempting to frame Just Another Gangsta as the beginning of a renaissance for a legendary rapper and for the sound and era he represents, but the truth is smaller, less mythic, and more invigorating: Juve never stopped being this good, he just needed the right opportunity. | 2019-04-10T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-04-10T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B / Rap | Cash Money | April 10, 2019 | 7.6 | cca9de54-6aea-40d1-a24a-e1e390a02f13 | Paul A. Thompson | https://pitchfork.com/staff/paul-a. thompson/ | |
The ten sparse protest songs on Neil Young's strange and scrappy new album address the dissemination of fake news, the mistreatment of America’s indigenous people, and the water crisis in Flint. | The ten sparse protest songs on Neil Young's strange and scrappy new album address the dissemination of fake news, the mistreatment of America’s indigenous people, and the water crisis in Flint. | Neil Young: Peace Trail | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22654-peace-trail/ | Peace Trail | “Things here have changed,” announces a computerized voice at the end of Peace Trail, the scrappy and strange new album by Neil Young. The song is called “My New Robot” and it might be about a recent divorcee taking comfort in the presence of “Alexa,” the voice-activated feature of Amazon’s new household device Echo. But those four words at the end, which introduce a barrage of online sounds (requesting to swipe your card, enter your pin number, your mother’s maiden name) hint at the bigger picture behind the record. As a songwriter, Neil Young has always thrived in shaky times. Whether it’s the deflated hippy dreams of his mid-seventies Ditch Trilogy or the road-weary breakup anthems that comprised 1992’s Harvest Moon, Neil’s best work often feels like a gut reaction to turbulence.
More than any album since 2006’s Living With War—the Bush-era treatise that called for impeachment and looked to Obama as a beacon of hope—Peace Trail is a product of its time. Its ten sparse protest songs address the dissemination of fake news, the mistreatment of America’s indigenous people, and the water crisis in Flint. As suggested by his open letter about Standing Rock, Young remains a vigilant and thoughtful observer, staying up to date on important issues and fighting for what he believes is right. And while the songs on Peace Trail are unquestionably timely and occasionally poignant, Young’s songwriting-as-immediate-response sometimes fails him. His musings throughout the album often scan as non-sequitur sentimentality (“Up in the rainbow teepee sky/No one’s looking down on you or I”) or just plain non-sequitur (“Bring back the days when good was good”). You get the sense his goal here was to finish the songs as quickly as possible (maybe so he could perform nearly half the album at Desert Trip Festival), when a few more days of editing might have resulted in a more powerful listen.
The same hurried approach Young takes with the lyrics, however, actually benefits the overall sound of the record. After last year’s Monsanto Years, Young has ditched his Promise of the Real backing band, whose tentative roots rock recalled, at best, a small town Crazy Horse cover band. On Peace Trail, he’s accompanied by two session musicians who mostly make themselves scarce. Most songs feature only Neil’s acoustic guitar along with unobtrusive bass and delicate, brush-stroked drums. It results in an album that feels refreshingly unlabored and current. On two tracks, Young even adopts an Auto-Tune vocal effect (maybe something he picked up from jamming with D.R.A.M.?). On Earth, the bizarro live album he released earlier this year, the effect was used as a commentary on inorganic food; on Peace Trail, it’s no joke. In the nearly-spoken-word “My Pledge,” Young’s Auto-Tuned harmonies aid the inscrutable narrative (which seems to connect the voyage of the Mayflower with our attraction to iPhones and maybe also the death of Jimi Hendrix?) with a disorienting layered effect.
Two of the most effective songs on Peace Trail happen to be the ones least directly associated with the headlines. “Can’t Stop Workin’” offers an insight into Young’s creative process, borrowing a chord progression from his estranged colleague David Crosby while also hinting at a possible reunion: “I might take some time off,” he sings, “for forgiveness.” “Glass Accident,” meanwhile, uses breaking glass and the dangerous mess it makes as a metaphor for lack of accountability in the U.S. government (“Too many pieces there for me to clean up/So I left a warning message by the door”). Even more than the disquieting, if distractingly literal, narratives of tracks like “Show Me” and “Indian Givers,” these songs examine Young’s values at this stage in his career and illustrate his strength in communicating his concerns. And while Young’s voice has certainly never sounded older than it does here, there’s something youthful about his energy. Besides the fact that his two-album-a-year-clip keeps him in pace with your Ty Segalls or John Dwyers, his music is guided by a restless determination to cover new ground and speak his mind. “Don’t think I’ll cash it in yet… I keep planting seeds ’til something new is growing,” he sings in the title track: it’s long been both his gift and his curse. | 2016-12-08T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2016-12-08T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Reprise | December 8, 2016 | 6.7 | ccb0ad15-0e63-4485-9698-8a818d1cfba1 | Sam Sodomsky | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sam-sodomsky/ | null |
The long-running Minnesota band’s 11th album is a distillation of their manifold strengths, largely comprised of pastoral accounts of American beauty curdling into something coarser and sadder. | The long-running Minnesota band’s 11th album is a distillation of their manifold strengths, largely comprised of pastoral accounts of American beauty curdling into something coarser and sadder. | The Jayhawks: XOXO | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/the-jayhawks-xoxo/ | XOXO | Minnesota’s durably excellent Jayhawks have existed long enough to run the gamut from insurgent roots-rock heroes to their current stature as pantheonic middle-age warhorses, all without ever changing much about their Poco-meets-the-Faces first principles. More than three decades from their debut, XOXO, the band’s 11th studio album, is a distillation of their manifold strengths, executed with the subtle precision of a one-time power pitcher who now gets by on off-speed stuff and guile.
XOXO is largely comprised of pastoral, shopworn accounts of American beauty curdling into something coarser and sadder, the personal indignities of aging merging with the endless discouragements of our cultural and political moment. The haunting ballad “Homecoming” penned by founding member and functional bandleader Gary Louris, strikes a fatalistic note in an opening couplet that could apply to everything from climate change to encroaching mortality: “Yeah, the room is closing in/The air is getting thicker/It’s hard for me to breathe.” Elsewhere, “Ruby,” written and sung by keyboardist Karen Grotberg, is a piano-based character sketch evoking Van Morrison’s Veedon Fleece by way of Sandy Denny’s enchanted folk, an opulent melody suffused with last-day-of-Summer melancholy.
The number of different voices featured on XOXO reflects the more collaborative measures taken during the Jayhawks’ writing process, with all four members taking on lead vocal duties at different points over the course of the LP’s 12 tracks. It’s a calculated risk that winds up working, suggesting something like the Byrds’ brilliantly successful full-scale reinvention Sweetheart of the Rodeo or even the Lindsay and Stevie version of Fleetwood Mac. When the seething Grotberg composition “Across My Field” gives way to the insouciant disco of Louris and drummer Tim O’Reagan’s “Little Victories”, it has the character of a quiet evening at home that suddenly turns into a debauched shore leave weekend.
One Jayhawks anomaly is their periodic weakness for ersatz chamber music taken to unrewarding ends. On XOXO it appears in the form of the ponderous four-and-a-half-minute “Illuminate”, a song apparently dedicated to making monkeys of Trump supporters while simultaneously making a very thin, or at least elliptical case against him. Much better is O’Reagan’s unambiguous “All The Young Dudes” sequel “Society Pages,” a psychedelic public service announcement that asks the ultimate litmus question: “Are you here/For all the young queers?”
While the prevailing mood of XOXO is world-weary resignation, sprightly tracks like the Burrito Brothers-style scarlet woman homage “Bitter Pill” and the exhilarating Radio City-inspired power trash of “Dogtown Days” go some lengths to demonstrate that the Jayhawks remain rough and ready as ever. Long purveyors of old-soul music, they've now persevered long enough to render their timeless melodies with the finely-honed perspective of genuine old souls. XOXO is a battle-scarred but unbroken collection, worthy of being filed alongside venerable mid-career milestones like Wildflowers and Time Out of Mind. Once counted as standard-bearers for the prefabricated genre known as “Americana,” the Jayhawks’ mosaic of woozy memory and wooly panache now comprises a version of American music all their own, stretching out endlessly like a Midwestern summer's night.
Buy: Rough Trade
(Pitchfork earns a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.)
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2020-07-20T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-07-20T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Sham | July 20, 2020 | 7 | ccb4656d-8d96-4ef2-aebd-03e41b7b2d3f | Elizabeth Nelson | https://pitchfork.com/staff/elizabeth-nelson/ | |
Shimizu’s long career has encompassed jazz fusion, city pop, and the omnivorous experiments of his group Mariah. This unreleased 1984 album showcases his electronic work at its most experimental. | Shimizu’s long career has encompassed jazz fusion, city pop, and the omnivorous experiments of his group Mariah. This unreleased 1984 album showcases his electronic work at its most experimental. | Yasuaki Shimizu: Kiren | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/yasuaki-shimizu-kiren/ | Kiren | Yasuaki Shimizu’s endless curiosity has fueled decades of tireless creative endeavors. As a child, he learned to play multiple instruments—violin, clarinet, piano, guitar, percussion—but landed on the saxophone as his primary vehicle for expression. Ornette Coleman and Rahsaan Roland Kirk would influence his playing, but he soaked up all the musical education he could. Radio in hand, he’d dial in from his home in the Japanese countryside to hear sounds from across the world: chanson and flamenco, rock and canzone, music from Africa and music from the Middle East. He loved it all, but could just as easily walk to nearby rice paddies and revel in the insects orchestrating their own song. Nothing was off limits, which meant everything could inspire. As he grew older, local record stores would import more sounds from overseas. He never dared emulate them, though: “[I] had no interest in imitating that genius,” he once confessed. “I perceived it more as a way to expand my own sonic vocabulary.” He was determined to carve his own path.
By the late 1970s, Shimizu’s musical voraciousness allowed him to work in a variety of modes. He was part of hard-bop and jazz-fusion ensembles, contributed to classic city-pop records like Taeko Ohnuki’s Sunshower and Minako Yoshida’s Monochrome, and produced pop albums for singers like Yumi Murata and Naomi Akimoto. There was the Saxophonettes, originally conceived as a solo project to create moody renditions of American jazz standards. He also had his band Mariah, which served as an especially productive testing ground—their four records contain everything from prog-rock epics to dreamy exotica, new-wave freak-outs to art-pop brilliance. The LPs under his own name are numerous, but Kakashi and Music for Commercials are major standouts: The former is a thrilling crystallization of his poppier, melodic inclinations while the latter is a collection of ambient vignettes that feels like a proto-Donuts. Somewhere in the middle of all this is Kiren, a hitherto unreleased studio album from 1984. Another testament to his unbridled ambition, it’s mesmerizing for newcomers and longtime fans alike.
Kiren stands out for more than just its sonics. Unlike most of Shimizu’s releases, it wasn’t intended for a record label. Instead, it was the product of the freedom he had while collaborating with Aki Ikuta, the late producer who was instrumental to his music’s sound. You can hear his boundary-pushing ideas on “Momo No Hana.” It begins with an extended passage of queasy ambience before Shimizu throws in additional noises to subvert expectations: high-pitched synth tones, a spectral growl, and a noise that sounds like a warped Banjo-Kazooie voiceline. Then there’s an instrument that recalls his affection for Indian classical music, and then a plunderphonic loop that anticipates Oneohtrix Point Never’s Replica shockingly well. “Ore No Umi” is just as bewildering. It has this chintzy guitar loop low in the mix. A marimba quietly enters, and then the song charges forward with a minimalist pulse. Like the glam-rock pastiches found on early Mariah records, “Ore No Umi” thrives on a winking playfulness, though here it’s with a riff on Steve Reich—Shimizu approximates his ideas for a single element in this tapestry of layered rhythms. Anchored by a tumbling beat and bursts of sax, it’s triumphant and fun and a revelatory depiction of Shimizu’s ingenuity.
As Shimizu recently told Bandcamp Daily, he considers Kiren part of a trio including Kakashi and Mariah’s Utakata no Hibi. He was on a real hot streak at this point in his career. On these three albums, recorded between 1982 and 1984, Shimizu was increasingly coming into his own; Kakashi is more progressive than the jazz excursions of 1981’s IQ-179, and Utakata no Hibi is considerably more cohesive than the first three Mariah records. One could compare those two LPs to other new wave-inspired art-pop acts from Japan—Chakra or Haniwa-Chan or Jun Togawa’s Yapoos—but with a stronger emphasis on rhythm, atmosphere, and texture, rather than pop songwriting. Kiren might be considered a culmination of these ideas, but funneled into a wholly instrumental album. He describes it as “the dance inside the image of myself,” and on the longform percussion-based jam “Kagerofu,” its patient unfurling and rhythmic insistence feel like he’s peeling back layers to get to his musical core.
Shimizu’s musical identity, though, was constantly expanding. Even on this dance-focused LP, he arrived at his goal from different angles. “Peruvian Pink” is one of the grooviest songs, but it barely contains percussion. Instead, its foundation is a slick bassline and a repeating synthesized warble. As he plays sax in varying degrees of intensity, the music becomes increasingly cinematic, like a slow-motion montage via deconstructed boogie. “Ashita,” on the other hand, takes the post-punk tendencies he’d explored in the past and makes them tastefully carnivalesque, letting squelching rumbles and marimba melodies take center stage. Elsewhere, “Asate” employs a robotic lurch while “Shiasate” shoots for exultant, regal glory.
Across these seven tracks, Shimizu homes in on a sound that bridges his numerous interests. He looks back fondly on this era: “At that time, I could recognize that all of the various scattered elements I had been interested in since I was a child were collecting together inside of me, and becoming a single organic material.” His description of this album as living is illuminating—particularly given that it remained hidden from public ears all these years. Shimizu spent his entire life invigorated by sounds from around the world; with Kiren, he was able to partake in this ecosystem, to contribute something that was unmistakably his own. | 2022-03-16T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2022-03-16T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic / Pop/R&B | Palto Flats | March 16, 2022 | 8.1 | ccbd6d87-dc9e-48cf-9b55-182646ce3dbe | Joshua Minsoo Kim | https://pitchfork.com/staff/joshua-minsoo kim/ | |
On her solo debut, the Norwegian electronic musician uses synthesizer and piano to sketch suggestively abstracted scenes veiled in fog. The songs can feel like they’re transcribed from a forgotten language. | On her solo debut, the Norwegian electronic musician uses synthesizer and piano to sketch suggestively abstracted scenes veiled in fog. The songs can feel like they’re transcribed from a forgotten language. | Anja Lauvdal: From a Story Now Lost | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/anja-lauvdal-from-a-story-now-lost/ | From a Story Now Lost | In the decade or so since she graduated from the Trondheim Conservatory of Music, Anja Lauvdal has built up a formidable discography: The Norwegian pianist and electronic musician has played in more than a dozen groups, backed Jenny Hval in the studio and on stage, and racked up a slate of duo and trio recordings that tug at the frayed edges of jazz. But to find her fingerprints on a record, you have to know where to look for her. Her keys are the connective tissue in the music of Skadedyr, a 12-person collective of jubilantly unbridled free improvisers; on Finity’s Jazz på engelsk: Finitys Destiny, she ducks beneath tuba and saxophone, blocking chords and smearing digital pads on a set of smoldering Destiny’s Child covers. In a trio formation like Moskus she’s easier to pick out, but her contributions—on synths, cembalo, vocoder, piano, and what’s credited simply as “samples”—are so mercurial that keeping up with her is like trying to get a bead on a fast-moving octopus. Even on a duo record like this year’s All My Clothes, with the drummer Joakim Heibø, her touch is slippery and sparing, as though determined to resist being pinned down from track to track—perhaps even from note to note.
From a Story Now Lost, Lauvdal’s solo debut, offers the chance to witness her musical ideas up close, but she remains a mysterious presence. Across 10 tracks totaling barely half an hour, she uses synthesizer and piano to sketch suggestively abstracted scenes veiled in fog. The title suits the music and the mood: These 10 instrumental pieces feel like songs transcribed from a forgotten language, or dreams whose unraveling only accelerates as you strain to piece them together.
It’s not a completely solo affair; American experimental musician Laurel Halo sits in the producer’s chair. The two artists worked in tandem on the album’s creation, with Lauvdal recording sketches and improvisations that Halo would then rework and send back for the Norwegian musician to iterate upon once more. With a CV that ranges from club tracks to filmic ambient to compositions for piano and electronics, Halo is just as versatile as Lauvdal, and her presence here is no easier to pinpoint. That could well be by design; this is, after all, Lauvdal’s show. But these pensive, unstable pieces feel in keeping with Halo’s own predilection for hazy shapes, particularly as evidenced on her 2020 Possessed soundtrack, or in her World Without Heroes, a set of fluid, meandering interpretations of Ursula K. Le Guin’s translation of the Tao Te Ching.
The album begins with a softly unfurling chord of unclear provenance; in the background, there’s a faint metallic clanking, like the lid rattling on a boiling pot. A subliminal hint of melody stirs just below the surface of long, languid synthesizer tones. Things rarely get much more definitive than this, and every time they do, entropy quickly reasserts itself. In “The Dreamer,” a boldly declarative theme suggests a half-remembered film score before plunging back into the murk, shrouded by birdsong, crickets, and what might be the clanking of cowbells in the pasture. Much of the album, in fact, feels like it takes place behind a scrim of white noise and August ambiance.
There’s a worn, crinkly feel to texture of the music, as if the tape had been pulled from its reels, wadded up, and left in a dank basement for a season or two before being smoothed out and fed back into the machine. Repetition is at the heart of many of these tracks—the skipping tones of “Fantasie for Agathe Backer Grøndahl” vaguely recall Oval or Jan Jelinek—even though Lauvdal’s loops tend to morph as they go, mutating with every jittery repeat. Even in the absence of obvious melodies, Lauvdal’s meditative, softly rounded tones have a way of working themselves into your mind. The smeared pipe organs of “Darkkantate” evoke dusty beams of light illuminating mossy pews in a ruined abbey. The ruminative piano of “Clara” recalls Grouper but without such an intense feeling of despondency—it’s less morose than simply lost in thought.
Ultimately, From a Story Now Lost’s emotions are as ambiguous as its amorphous shapes. In “Xerxesdrops,” which taps into a similar affective register as Harold Budd and the Cocteau Twins’ The Moon and the Melodies, a watery, wandering piano melody traces circles over sluggish, detuned synths; it might sound sad if you want it to, but in another mood, it could also pass as airy, hopeful, or simply distracted, mirroring the toe-scuffing shuffle of an absent mind. From a Story Now Lost offers a provocative update to Brian Eno’s hoary maxim about ambient music: Forget about the balance between ignorable and interesting—perhaps ambient also ought to be as stone-faced as it is steeped in feeling. | 2022-11-01T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2022-11-01T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Jazz | Smalltown Supersound | November 1, 2022 | 7.3 | ccbddd74-ff4a-411f-a37b-736b782ac128 | Philip Sherburne | https://pitchfork.com/staff/philip-sherburne/ | |
The Brazilian songwriter Erasmo Carlos remains beloved at home, but he hasn’t been widely heard outside Latin America. These three early ’70s LPs have been given new life thanks to Light in the Attic. | The Brazilian songwriter Erasmo Carlos remains beloved at home, but he hasn’t been widely heard outside Latin America. These three early ’70s LPs have been given new life thanks to Light in the Attic. | Erasmo Carlos: Erasmo Carlos E Os Tremendões / Carlos, ERASMO... / Sonhos E Memórias 1941-1972 | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22908-erasmo-carlos-e-os-tremendoes-carlos-erasmo-sonhos-e-memorias-1941-1972/ | Erasmo Carlos E Os Tremendões / Carlos, ERASMO... / Sonhos E Memórias 1941-1972 | Over the last half century, few countries have had as many international recording stars as Brazil. The famed names of its rich musical traditions have the same renown as its rock-star soccer players: Gilberto Gil, Caetano Veloso, Gal Costa, Milton Nascimento, Tom Zé, Elis Regina, Flora Purim, Jorge Ben, Carlinhos Brown, Seu Jorge, Marisa Monte to name just one possible dream-team XI. An artist who didn’t quite resonate abroad—who never glittered in the yellow national-team jersey, so to speak—is Erasmo Carlos. At 75, Carlos remains beloved at home, but he hasn’t been widely heard outside Latin America, which is a shame. As we’re reminded by these reissues of his work from the early 1970s, his talents were enormous.
Three of his albums—Erasmo Carlos E Os Tremendões (from 1970), Carlos, ERASMO... (1971), and Sonhos E Memórias 1941–1972 (1972)—have been given a new life thanks to Seattle label Light in the Attic. A smart essay by Allen Thayer, along with his detailed liner notes and translated lyrics, provides valuable context for the package.
Born in 1941, Erasmo Carlos first gained fame with Roberto Carlos as co-hosts of the musical television show “Jovem Guarda” (young guard), which debuted in 1965 and was aimed at teenagers enamored with American rock’n’roll and the British Invasion. Erasmo, no relation to Roberto, was a heartthrob; he sported a new haircut on every magazine cover he graced. In 1968, though, “Jovem Guarda” was canceled. Times were a changing and Erasmo was at sea. “No one wanted to know me,” he said in a 2006 interview that Thayer cites.
But Carlos still had his guitar and his voice, a fantastic and versatile one. He left São Paulo and returned to his hometown, Rio de Janeiro, where the new Música Popular Brasileira and Tropicália—a creative movement to counter the CIA-sponsored military junta that grabbed power in 1964—were fomenting. Despite his teeny-bopper reputation, Carlos still had street cred among the new, edgier players on the scene, like Caetano Veloso. This was in part because of his Rio roots and in part because he had talent, much of it still undeveloped at that point.
That’s where the story of these records begins. And what a new beginning it was. Though these albums were among the least commercial and least “successful” of Carlos’ career, he is in full soul-baring mode during these years, as if he has nothing to lose. He mixes all the genres of the place and time (pop, rock, folk, samba, bossa nova, psychedelia, soul, funk) within a feijoada of horns, flutes, strings, distorted guitars, and vocal harmonies.
His 1970 effort Erasmo Carlos E Os Tremendões starts out soft with “Estou Dez Anos Atrasado” (“I’m Ten Years Too Late”), which has a goofy bombast not unlike the theme from the original “Batman” series. But the remaining tracks on the album are magnificent, filled with surprising twists and vocal leaps. “Gloriosa” boasts a catchy melody and full string arrangement, organ, flutes, and fuzzy guitar, while the gentle ballad “Espuma Congelada” ends up in distorted Tropicália territory by way of Sgt. Pepper’s. The effervescent “Coqueiro Verde” reflects Erasmo’s umbilical attachment to samba. “Teletema,” a simple ditty written for a telenovela, is a quiet showcase for the wonderful textures of Erasmo’s voice, a gift that carries all three of the recordings. He almost whispers though it—“Soft/Celestial body/Goal, half/My sanctuary/My eternity/Illuminated/My way finally”—and reveals a vulnerability and depth.
The slow tempos of “Menina” and “Vou Ficar Nú Para Chamar Sua Atençao” are perfect vehicles, too, for his keen sense of phrasing. Carlos does a gorgeous version of “Saudosismo,” penned by Veloso—who, by 1970, was in exile in London after a short prison stay in Brazil. (The song could be read as a middle finger to government authorities, who, as Thayer writes in the notes, would surely have been made aware of its existence.) It’s juxtaposed, oddly, with the familiar and patriotic “Aquarela do Brasil,” which could work as well in a documentary on the pro footballer Pelé or a Varig airline commercial. Still, Erasmo’s rendition is irresistible.
Carlos, ERASMO..., out the following year, saw a slight shift from Erasmo’s 1970 effort. It was co-produced by Manoel Barenbein, who had helmed the landmark Tropicália album just a few years prior, and featured several of its backing musicians. Carlos, ERASMO... also included “De Noite Na Cama,” written specifically for Erasmo by Veloso while still in exile. “Masculino, Feminino” is a beauty, a slow duet with the angelic-voiced Marisa Fossa that has the feel of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden—if there were red wine and Marlboro Lights. In “É Preciso Dar Um Jeito, Meu Amigo” (“Gotta Find a Way, My Friend”), written with his old partner Roberto Carlos, Erasmo has drive and urgency in his voice: “But I’m ashamed/With the things I’ve seen/But I will not be silent/Accommodated in comfort/As so many out there.” Meanwhile, “Agora Ninguém Chora Mais” is a Jorge Ben original that’s reinvented as a driving, plugged-in, harmonized group chant: “The whole world cried/But now no one cries anymore/Cry more, cry more.”
Sonhos E Memórias 1941–1972 is the most focused and measured of the three albums and serves as a kind of personal diary (Carlos was born in ’41). There are photos of Jimi Hendrix, Mick Jagger, John Lennon, and Andy Warhol on the cover, and (perhaps more importantly) a team shot of Rio’s Vasco da Gama soccer club. In “Bom Dia, Rock’N’Roll,” Carlos references Elvis, the Beatles, Chuck Berry, and Carole King and James Taylor. The music is anchored by a rhythm section that would become the jazz fusion trio Azymuth, who gained momentum later in the ’70s and into the smoother jazz ’80s. With exceptions like “É Proibido Fumar” and the second half of “Sábado Morto,” which takes an unexpected vocal turn, Sonhos E Memórias 1941–1972 feels less chance-y than the previous two albums.
After all, it was risk that got Carlos to this point. On his 1970 album, when he was at his lowest, he recorded what became a hit song, one that brought him renewed notice and enabled future work and creative freedom. “Sentado à Beira do Caminho” (“Sitting on the Side of the Road”), perhaps a wink to an American classic, is majestic. Erasmo, backed by little more than an organ and an acoustic guitar, sings as if he’s speaking directly to us, and, in the process, reassuring himself: “I can’t stay here anymore and wait/That one day suddenly you will come back to me... I’m sitting on the side of a road that has no/end.” And then this, a fulfilled wish: “I need to get this over with/I must remember that I exist/I exist, I exist.” | 2017-03-07T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2017-03-07T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Global | null | March 7, 2017 | 9 | ccc82253-8deb-4271-94c6-81a2586052d0 | Michael J. Agovino | https://pitchfork.com/staff/michael-j. agovino/ | null |
The fourth album from the California indie rock icon features some of her strongest songwriting, sung gorgeously and told with piercing detail. | The fourth album from the California indie rock icon features some of her strongest songwriting, sung gorgeously and told with piercing detail. | Jenny Lewis: On the Line | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/jenny-lewis-on-the-line/ | On the Line | Good storytelling is in the details. Not long into her fourth solo album, On the Line, Jenny Lewis introduces a narcoleptic poet from Duluth, with whom she spars over everything from Elliott Smith to grenadine; a father who used to sing a little ditty about all the years he threw away on heroin; an East Side girl called Caroline, to whom a lover is bitterly lost. There’s mention of Candy Crush, Slip’N Slides, Rambo, Marlboros, Meryl Streep’s tears, Dorothy’s ruby slippers, Don Quixote, the rivalry between the Beatles and the Rolling Stones, the bridge in La Crosse, Wisconsin, a couple different kinds of fancy cars, one disgusting-sounding drink, and a truly staggering amount of illegal drugs.
Bursting with all this specificity, which fuels vivid scenes and impressionistic turns of phrase alike, On the Line ushers in something that has long been gestating in its creator, bit by bit with every “Does He Love You,” “Rabbit Fur Coat,” and “Aloha & the Three Johns”: Jenny Lewis has reached her troubadour phase. She’s telling tales like never before, singing live in the studio while charismatically leading a band that includes elder statesmen like Benmont Tench and Don Was, not to mention cameos from Ringo Starr, Beck, and Ryan Adams (recorded before the allegations against him emerged). Acid Tongue, from 2008, and 2014’s The Voyager shed more of that twee sensibility from Lewis’ Rilo Kiley days, edging her a little closer to a skeptical Stevie Nicks for old millennials. That journey continues with On the Line.
Something consistently wonderful about Jenny Lewis’ music, going back to Rilo Kiley, is how quickly she allows her protagonists to get carried away into daydreams, tangents of emotion, and imagined declarations. Sometimes this manifests musically, like when a song goes from lo-fi black and white to technicolor and cinematic in a flash. On the sprawling ballad “Dogwood,” she starts off so quiet you can hear ambient studio noises. She entertains a moody, Johnny Marr-ish guitar interlude, then floats into a stop the song, I just gotta sang moment, complete with warm layers of her own vocals and the percussion emitting a kind of subtle “boom.” Then poof, the memory falls away, and she’s back to just her piano and her far-away voice and her simple observation that the dogwood trees are in bloom again. How natural it sounds, Lewis playing the piano that Carole King recorded Tapestry on, quietly resigned to the fact that two human bodies in motion will stay in motion, bullshit be damned.
On the flip side of On the Line, there are a couple of songs that trade stark lucidity for abstraction, and their frivolity stands out precisely because of their position next to some of the strongest songwriting of Lewis’ career. The track preceding “Dogwood,” “Do Si Do,” splits the difference between Tame Impala and modern-day Beck (he produced it, along with two others here) and finds a catchy sweet spot musically, but the lyrics lapse into non sequiturs that don’t entirely land (“This ain’t no ghetto, Jo/You’re on the payroll!”). And closing track “Rabbit Hole” feels slightly clichéd, from the central metaphor of going down Alice’s rabbit hole with an ex to the familiar but unplaceable melody to the pop-rock production style that seems a half-decade or so too late.
There has always been a certain amount of skepticism surrounding Lewis’ more overt attempts at hit-making (see: 2007’s Under the Blacklight), and part of that stems from her uncanny ability to do both: write classic pop songs that will forever lodge themselves into your brain and pepper them with lyrics (and aesthetic markers like an emo sensibility or a chintzy drum machine) that are unshakeable in their specificity and proximity to your own concerns. Half just doesn’t seem enough, especially since Lewis gives it all in the album’s best moments. “Wasted Youth,” among the handful of songs that reckon with family demons in light of Lewis’ estranged drug-addict mother’s battle with cancer, is a plucky piano-pop tune haunted by rock’s weary soul. This manifests in a catchy, slightly eerie chorus about addiction: “I wasted my youth on a poppy, doo doo doo doo doo doo just for fun,” sings Lewis, stretching into her falsetto with a disarming delicateness.
When it’s time for the album’s toughest scene, though, Lewis stays cool and more importantly, funky. On “Little White Dove,” relaxed-fit bass grooves and stuttering drums propel a surreal hospital visit, wherein the daughter must be the bigger person and forgive the ailing mother. “I’m the heroin,” she sings, a little detached, leaning into the homonym. It is from this kind of seemingly simple line that Jenny Lewis often wrings the most emotional truth. That, too, is another sign of good storytelling. | 2019-03-25T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-03-25T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Warner Bros. | March 25, 2019 | 8 | ccda6646-39b8-40ec-a7ef-7c1087219afa | Jill Mapes | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jill-mapes/ | |
After dropping last year’s Piñata with Madlib and two subsequent EPs, Freddie Gibbs is back with his third full-length studio album. Shadow of a Doubt features over a dozen wide-ranging names contributing beats, from Canadian hitmaker Boi-1da to 808 Mafia’s Tarentino, and his roots and aspirations have never been clearer. | After dropping last year’s Piñata with Madlib and two subsequent EPs, Freddie Gibbs is back with his third full-length studio album. Shadow of a Doubt features over a dozen wide-ranging names contributing beats, from Canadian hitmaker Boi-1da to 808 Mafia’s Tarentino, and his roots and aspirations have never been clearer. | Freddie Gibbs: Shadow of a Doubt | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21274-shadow-of-a-doubt/ | Shadow of a Doubt | Freddie Gibbs doesn’t believe in resting on his laurels. After dropping last year’s Piñata with Madlib at the helm — the rapper’s most commercially and critically successful project to date — he could have taken some well-deserved time off. Instead, he toured non-stop and played festivals, put out two EPs The Tonite Show with the Worlds Freshest and Pronto, and last but not least, became a father.
Now with little advance notice, and a raised middle finger to Q4 release schedules and anyone foolish enough to be making their best-of year-end lists early, the pride of Gary, Ind. is back with his third full-length studio album. A quick scan of the credits reveals the biggest difference between Shadow of a Doubt and his last LP—instead of one singular producer, there’s over a dozen wide-ranging names contributing beats here from Canadian hitmaker Boi-1da to 808 Mafia’s Tarentino. While the final result is less cohesive, and could benefit from trimming two or three songs, there’s no denying Gibbs’ versatility.
If there’s any question as to whether or not acclaim has mellowed the man who frequently refers to himself as both "Gangsta Gibbs" and "Freddie Corleone", look no further than the two tracks that bookend the record. The sparse, atmospheric "Rearview", which opens with a "Welcome to Los Angeles International Airport" P.A., sees the rapper offer up a bullet point summary of his career to date before dismissing would-be copycats with trademark precision. In contrast, "Cold Ass Nigga" sees Gibbs with two feet on the gas, with frequent Kanye West collaborator Mike Dean providing a suitably urgent, glitchy trap beat. It’s nothing like anything else in Gibbs’ vast catalogue (its closest spiritual companion might be "Old English", his 2014 track with A$AP Ferg and Young Thug) and it’s proof that the 33 year old is still more than willing to push himself out of his sonic comfort zone.
His lyrics capture the pursuit of the American dream like a Scorsese screenplay (drugs, sex, and all-too-frequent bloodshed included). He’s hardly the first artist to incorporate a sample from "The Wire" into a song, but he’s one of few able to do so without it coming off cliché or rote (Boi-1da and Frank Dukes’ sinister piano loops greatly help). Another highlight is the understated, introspective "Insecurities" produced by Dukes and Montreal’s Kaytranada (who teamed up with the rapper this year for the menacing one-off "My Dope House").
As for the record’s handful of guest spots, Gibbs has picked a mix of newcomers and veterans who complement but never overshadow him. Rising Miami-via-Toronto emcee Tory Lanez contributes a bleary-eyed hook to dealers’ anthem "Mexico"; elsewhere, L.A. R&B singer-songwriter Dana Williams propels "McDuck". On "Extradite", the Roots’ Black Thought’s politically charged verse is sharply juxtaposed with Mikhail’s bright, jazz-influenced production, which eventually gives way to dialogue taken from a fiery speech on Ferguson by Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan. Then there’s "10 Times", featuring Gucci Mane floating over the beat like plumes of blunt smoke (perhaps Gibbs’ own "Freddie Kane OG" strain), before West Coast veteran E-40 swoops in to gleefully extol the virtues of a woman "thicker than a buttermilk biscuit."
On the outro of "McDuck", we hear an excerpt from an interview he did with Snoop Dogg this past summer discussing Gibbs’ background. "You just sound like you not from nowhere," says Snoop to which the rapper replies, "I created that sound." The cover artwork of Shadow of a Doubt might depict Gibbs’ face half-cloaked in darkness, but his roots and aspirations have never been clearer. | 2015-11-20T01:00:01.000-05:00 | 2015-11-20T01:00:01.000-05:00 | Rap | ESGN | November 20, 2015 | 7.8 | cce0eeb4-ebcb-4906-82de-12d8d4ce3317 | Max Mertens | https://pitchfork.com/staff/max-mertens/ | null |
For a band whose legacy rests on the restless sprawls of their catalog, Can could also turn improvised uncut cloth into something stunningly concise. This new comp shows that lesser-known side of Can. | For a band whose legacy rests on the restless sprawls of their catalog, Can could also turn improvised uncut cloth into something stunningly concise. This new comp shows that lesser-known side of Can. | Can: Can — The Singles | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/can-can-the-singles/ | Can: The Singles | Some seven minutes into “Dead Pigeon Suite,” a meandering 12-minute recording that Can had never released until 2012’s The Lost Tapes box set, the freeform jam suddenly snaps into focus. Drummer Jaki Liebezeit’s drums transform into a Möbius Strip-R&B groove as hammered on an oil drum. Singer Damo Suzuki’s asthmatic exhales and ad hoc nonsense turns into a shout: “Hey you, you’re losing you’re losing you’re losing you’re losing your Vitamin C!” Later, the band would go back to the tapes and trim this portion down into “Vitamin C,” one of the heaviest b-boy breakbeat jams ever conjured—lifted by everyone from Spank Rock to U.N.K.L.E, that telltale tom roll bobbing up on the soundtrack to Inherent Vice and Netflix’s short-lived “The Get Down.”
For a band whose legacy rests in part on the relentless, restless, sidelong sprawls of their discography—from Monster Movie’s “Yoo Doo Right” through the greater part of 1971’s Tago Mago to Soon Over Babaluma’s “Quantum Physics” and “Chain Reaction”—the 23-track comp The Singles shows a lesser-known aspect of the band. In fact, Can’s biggest breakthrough came not on kosmische mind-melters like “Aumgn” but rather via a three-minute toe-tapper entitled “Spoon.” It became the theme for a television thriller mini-series, unit-shifting hundreds of thousands of copies and landing them on the pop charts. Moments like “Spoon” and “Vitamin C” showed that—albeit briefly—Can also had a knack for turning bolts of improvised uncut cloth into something stunning and concise.
The comp opens with original singer Malcolm Mooney’s farewell moment, castrato-shouting “Soul Desert” on the plodding A-side and revealing the group’s mellow, soulful (and short-lived) side on “She Brings the Rain.” Soon after, Suzuki entered the fold, providing the perfect foil for the likes of bassist/producer Holger Czukay, guitarist Michael Karoli, keyboardist Irmin Schmidt, and Liebezeit. For as high as that core group could take their spontaneous combustions, Suzuki and his pidgin yips kept the group within the earth’s gravitational field. He could turn a random phrase into a hook and something songlike would soon usher forth from the band, as on “Vitamin C.”
During their peak years—spanning from Tago Mago through Ege Bamyasi and Suzuki’s swan song with the group, 1973’s Future Days—the band operated at a supernatural level and could do no wrong, which The Singles all but confirms. Yes, the band made double-digit transportive epics during that span, but even jaunty cast-off tracks like “Shikako Maru Ten” and “Turtles Have Short Legs” show Can could shake you down in three minutes as well. The former is a svelte, snaking groove, its meter just tricky enough to avoid easy imitation. “Turtles” is a giddy, plinked piano shout-along, even if you can’t follow Suzuki’s lyrics.
It’s odd to have Can’s totemic works like “Halleluwah,” “Mushroom,” and “Future Days” cut to fit a 45—about as strange as saying that, in addition to his large canvases, Jackson Pollock also dribbled expertly onto cocktail napkins. “Halleluwah” is criminally spliced from 18-minutes to 3:38, but its magical polyrhythmic powers somehow remain undiminished. Still, such truncation puts the track in with the likes of other drum-heavy grunters of the era like Titanic and Barrabas.
Can happened upon another hit with 1976’s “I Want More.” It has little of the turbulent, gorgeous chaos of their glory days, the careening gibberish of Suzuki replaced by androgynous munchkin chants. But hearing Liebezeit stomp out a chrome-plated glam beat is a delight in and of itself, worth the extra minutes of “…And More.” Considered away from the rest of their discography, the serpentine progressive moves of “Splash” and percolating hard-rock “Vernal Equinox” are enjoyable sides. The same can’t be said, however, for the blues-rock grunt of “Don’t Say No.”
For a band that, for a time, conjured all manner of brilliance in either 3- or 20-minute increments, it’s especially agonizing that it was soon reduced to something as insipid as their 1978 single, “Can Can.” (You can almost imagine the thought process: “Let’s have Jaki lay down a 19th century can-can beat and we’ll just call it ‘Can Can’—because we’re Can and we can.”) The Singles traces both Can’s genius and how they ultimately ran out of ideas, losing all of their Vitamin C. | 2017-06-17T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-06-17T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Experimental | Mute / Spoon | June 17, 2017 | 6.4 | cce3c3f9-f2d0-4f21-83c2-5b51a799ebb5 | Andy Beta | https://pitchfork.com/staff/andy-beta/ | null |
In the 40 years since the young Swedish composer's first proper release, the two-part, fifty-minute composition has become a cult minimalist classic. Its textures and humanity remain deeply absorbing. | In the 40 years since the young Swedish composer's first proper release, the two-part, fifty-minute composition has become a cult minimalist classic. Its textures and humanity remain deeply absorbing. | Ragnar Grippe: Sand | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/23065-sand/ | Sand | The painter Viswanadhan Velu was born in a small town in Kerala, India, but made his way to Paris around the late 1960s. Following a car accident in Germany in 1976, he returned to India and traveled along the coast, collecting the sand that would form the basis of a new body of work. Viswanadhan’s art—non-representational, but, by his description, not abstract, either—has a searching quality and is broadly concerned with the elemental; in sand, he says, he found “the dichotomy between matter and meaning of being.”
Ragnar Grippe, a young Swedish composer who was trained as a cellist, landed in Paris around the same time, where he studied musique concrète with Pierre Schaeffer at the Groupe de Recherches Musicales. With the avant-garde composer Luc Ferrari, another figure adjacent to that community, he founded the studio l’Atelier de la Libération Musicale. Grippe, who drew inspiration from a number of the visual artists he met through the Cité des Arts residency, befriended Viswanadhan while the artist was working on his sand paintings. When that series was slated to go on view at Galerie Shandar (home to an eponymous record label that released numerous key minimalist works by the likes of Charlemagne Palestine, Terry Riley, and La Monte Young), the composer was asked to write a piece to accompany the exhibition. Sand, released in 1977 on the Shandar record label, was Grippe’s first proper album, and in the four decades that followed, the two-part, fifty-minute composition became something of a cult minimalist classic.
Sand opens tentatively. A variety of sounds introduces themselves over a mechanized-sounding tonal rhythm, including soft whistles, scratchy tape, bells, and fits and starts of electric guitar. It takes several minutes for anything to stick, until a wandering melody pushes respectfully through the gentle chaos. The techniques of musique concrète—represented, in particular, by that recurring mechanical percussive texture, which becomes the backbone of the composition—are foundational; Grippe approaches sound with a sense of curiosity, and without a rush to drive the piece with melody. But as Sand progresses, it develops some sense of narrative absent from the more aggressively abstract work of his GRM colleagues.
Grippe moves at an even keel through a series of sonic landscapes, ranging from futuristic, even proggy organ phrases to melodies rendered in a new-age vibrato. Sand dabbles, too, in the more colorful modes of Grippe’s American minimalist peers, using copious repetition and sometimes edging into psychedelic territory. Part 2 casts aside the base rhythm for a moment in favor of maraca, and other instrumentation remains distinct throughout: a recorder flutters in and out, emerging most purposefully in the loosely-woven final moments. It becomes an anchor as the composition unwinds itself to rest. Grippe’s piece has a strong sense of personality, and its humanity is deeply absorbing. Electroacoustic experimentation needn’t be lovely to be gripping, but here, it’s both.
Images from Viswanadhan’s exhibition at Shandar are difficult to source, as is any anecdotal documentation of how this score matched those paintings, so I’m reluctant to over-determine the relationship between the two, or to speculate how they may have activated one another formally. But the painter’s probing relationship to abstraction—a far cry from, and perhaps a direct rejection of, the Greenbergian quest for purity that characterized the avant-garde that preceded it—resonates in Grippe’s work here. Rather than reconstitute his journey, Viswanadhan used raw material he accumulated along it to create something new. And while Sand doesn’t describe an experience, per se, it hums with experience nonetheless, reveling in a strange sense of discovery. | 2017-03-29T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-03-29T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Experimental | Dais Records | March 29, 2017 | 8.1 | ccebcca6-4c2b-4a91-bc54-a1df29a80f2d | Thea Ballard | https://pitchfork.com/staff/thea-ballard/ | null |
The Toronto dance-punk duo’s new album sees them embracing maturity, bringing in more reflection, more funk, more production finesse, and—crucially—more hooks. | The Toronto dance-punk duo’s new album sees them embracing maturity, bringing in more reflection, more funk, more production finesse, and—crucially—more hooks. | Death From Above: Outrage! Is Now | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/death-from-above-outrage-is-now/ | Outrage! Is Now | Though they were actually just broken up for five years, the gap between Death From Above’s 2004 full-length debut You’re a Woman, I’m a Machine and 2014’s The Physical World inevitably saddled the latter album with a decade’s worth of expectation. This time, with their new album Outrage! Is Now arriving three years after The Physical World, it may seem as if Death From Above, now back to their original name, have settled into a more routine working rhythm. But since getting back together in 2011, the Toronto dance-punk duo has been tentative about its future, offering little more than a we’ll-see-what-happens outlook at every step.
Perhaps as a way of curtailing anticipation this time, bassist/keyboardist Jesse Keeler and drummer/vocalist Sebastien Grainger didn’t even announce Outrage! Is Now until three weeks before its release date. Nevertheless, judging from some of the new lyrics, Grainger and Keeler might still be just as conscious of the passage of time—and their music’s place in it—as they were on The Physical World. “There’s gotta be another [...] generation/Ready for a revolution/Or a change of station,” Grainger sings on “Never Swim Alone.” And on the title track, he adds, “I’m out of rage/Maybe it’s my age [...]/Suddenly I don’t belong/To anyone/Or anything.”
If Grainger is indeed singing from his own point of view there, then it’s all the more remarkable that Outrage! Is Now makes such a convincing case study against the axiom that artists lose their edge as they age. For a pair who once lived by a Get-in-the-Van ethic and now find themselves somewhat bewildered about their transitions into settled lives of marriage and home ownership, Death From Above now sound more vital than ever.
Fans of the band’s early-2000s output should know that Keeler and Grainger no longer just bash their way through their songs in ephedrine-fueled fits of twentysomething angst. At this point, it would be foolish and disingenuous of them to try. Part of what contributes to the new material’s impact is the band’s ability to embrace their age and make it play into their existing strengths. In fact, the basic formula of vocals, distorted bass/keyboards, and drums remains pretty much the same as before. But Grainger and Keeler actually enhance the gut-punching character of their music by tempering themselves.
On Outrage! Is Now, they add manifold contours they had only touched on with their last album: more reflection, more funk, more production finesse, and crucially more hooks. When album opener “Nomad” gallops into its chorus, for example, the bass and drums momentarily stop advancing, making room for Grainger’s reverb-soaked voice to carry across the open space. The effect is not unlike when a cinematographer pans up from the ground to a wide-angle view that’s clearly intended to take the audience’s breath away. And more than half of the album’s 10 tracks contain spots where Grainger shows a penchant for sing-along melodies—the kind that, on earlier albums, he’d almost seemed to stumble on by accident.
When Death From Above formed, the original intention was to write bass and drum parts simple enough that other people could learn them while Keeler and Grainger played more complex guitar parts over top. That never happened, and instead the duo came to wear simplicity, speed, and volume as their badge of honor. Outrage! Is Now does suffer in spots from uneven pacing. The bouncy, piano-pop hook of lead single “Freeze Me” might have flowed better if it didn’t prematurely halt the momentum of “Nomad,” for example. But it’s a testament to Death From Above’s growth that they can afford three songs with traces of Bowie’s iconic “Fame” groove on the same album (“Statues,” “Never Swim Alone,” “Caught Up”) without actually repeating themselves. With Outrage! Is Now, Death From Above join the rare breed of artists who are able to capitalize on their maturity without betraying the spirit of their youth. | 2017-09-11T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-09-11T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Warner Bros. / Last Gang | September 11, 2017 | 7.3 | ccf14cb6-61c6-4cea-a470-872db8c652f2 | Saby Reyes-Kulkarni | https://pitchfork.com/staff/saby-reyes-kulkarni/ | |
A new compilation celebrates the grey but lush “samba sujo” of São Paulo, with strands of native samba, post-punk rumble, Afrobeat, and blasts of avant-jazz. | A new compilation celebrates the grey but lush “samba sujo” of São Paulo, with strands of native samba, post-punk rumble, Afrobeat, and blasts of avant-jazz. | Various Artists: Desconstrução | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22238-desconstrucao/ | Desconstrução | On the eponymous opening track of his 1968 debut, small town Bahian boy Tom Zé sang of his adopted hometown São Paulo with ambivalence. “São São Paulo quanta dor/São São Paulo meu amor” went the chorus, alternating between pain and affection in describing the smokestacks and traffic jams of the sprawling megalopolis, its bustling populace of eight million described as “crowded loneliness.” While the most populous and industrious city in Brazil, culturally São Paulo has always stood in the shadow of Rio de Janeiro. It was known as samba's grave.
But as the compilation Desconstrução proves, the musicians clustered around São Paulo’s current “samba sujo” (dirty samba) scene relish their hometown’s pallor. For those struck by the sound of Elza Soares’ A Mulher do Fim do Mundo from a few months ago, this twelve-track comp culled from the early days of the Goma Gringa Discos label is the next logical step in exploring modern Brazilian music. It features a similar cast of players and musicians from Soares’ album, including saxophonist/arranger Thiago França and Rodrigo Campos. And much like Soares’ late-period masterpiece, Descontrução places songs wild with fusion against contemplative and arresting moments of quiet.
From Campos’ hushed and simmering noise ballad “Ribeirão” to the roiling acid-rock tinged conjured by trio Metá Metá on “Rainha Das Cabecas,” each act expertly navigates through these influences to produce an exhilarating array that escapes easy classification. Most acts rotate through a stable of players, be they Juçara Marçal, Kiko Dinucci, Marcelo Cabral, Romulo Fróes, Sérgio Machado, Campos, or França, which the press release states “are not a movement, [but] togetherness in motion, always linked from one project to the next.” Almost any selection here contains strands of native samba, post-punk’s rumble, Afrobeat’s driving rhythm, blats of avant-jazz that seem to dilate space, as well as flashbacks to ’60s Tropicália, itself a mutation of Brazilian pop music interacting with outside influences.
But it’s one thing to just jump from influence to influence, and another to make each gestural leap and genre shift feline and graceful. Thiago França’s contributions might be the most deft of the set, “Space Charanga” bringing to mind the open-ended, exploratory jazz of Kamasi Washington or Charles Mingus’ own Cumbia & Jazz Fusion. It’s tight and lyrical, able to fly up into fiery spiritual jazz stratosphere while also staying firmly grounded in rhythm. Meanwhile “Na Multidão” is a quicksilver track that avoids drums entirely, drawing its pulse from filigrees of electric guitar and upright bass, punctuated with quick jabs of brass and droning woodwinds.
Serving as elder statesman for this clutch of musicians is Vicente Barreto, whose career—much like Soares—dates back to the early ’60s and also include many vicissitudes of fortune. Barreto collaborated with everyone from Vinicius de Moraes to Tom Zé on his 1978 album Correio Da Estação Do Brás. The guitars blare like sirens and grow increasingly anxious, but Barreto’s gravitas keeps the song from flying apart. The comp’s most gorgeous moment shows another side of Metá Metá. The trio’s hushed “Obatalá” brings to mind everything from early ’00s freak-folk to Gilberto Gil’s ethereal “Futurível.” With little more than a wordless whispered vocal and a plinking guitar figure that hovers over flutters of saxophone, they evoke an unspeakable beauty. Both guitar and horn teeter on the edge of extended-technique noise. But as their atonal din grows, the group strikes the perfect balance, conveying something sublime amid such noise, a bloom of color amid the gray. | 2016-09-13T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-09-13T01:00:00.000-04:00 | null | Goma Gringa | September 13, 2016 | 8.3 | ccf2bf72-1e1b-4c21-bced-030f000cf1a5 | Andy Beta | https://pitchfork.com/staff/andy-beta/ | null |
Seattle trio's second album is a guitar-heavy collection of family snapshots and pretty, lo-fi messes. | Seattle trio's second album is a guitar-heavy collection of family snapshots and pretty, lo-fi messes. | BOAT: Let's Drag Our Feet | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/10384-lets-drag-our-feet/ | Let's Drag Our Feet | Boys with perpetual colds who can kinda-sorta sing, hand claps of the generic indie variety, and the unfettered production made most odious/ingenious by Wolf Parade are three features of BOAT's second album on Magic Marker. This lengthy collection of fuzzy, crackling lo-fi jams does little more than their debut to convince us of the band's merit, but I mean that as a compliment. Their viscous sound, with each instrumental part given equally muffled or tinny weight, at times yields some heavy little rock lullabies. The makeshift, ad-lib familiarity of the songs are, as is often the case with this genre, what makes them accessible and enjoyable; for the melodies to dig to a more sophisticated depth is an added bonus; and for them to avoid the anemic desperation of Spencer Krug is all right, too.
As members of Seattle's prolific rock scene, BOAT differentiate themselves most explicitly with songs like "The Ferocious Sounds of Lobsters and Snakes/Mom, Dad, Me and You", the first part of which has been floating around the Internet for a couple of years. Here, it takes on a re-recorded cleanliness, the tempo slowed just slightly and the guitar itching for a more substantial role than the easy two-note plucks in the chorus. The lyrics here, as elsewhere on the album, are comfortingly cliché: "Don't you know, everything will be all right/ Don't you know, everything will be just fine." The song is dead simple and inexplicably addictive.
Such conciliatory ruminations appear in many tracks, but are often unintelligible thanks to the band's penchant for basements. But when the words want to reach us, they really do, albeit as adorably stupid adages: "All I want's a telephone that rings for free," "There's a lightbulb in your head/ If you break it you'll be dead," or a helpful suggestion about not being able to fall asleep if one drinks too many sodas. The lyrics are often role-playing in nature, particularly suggestive of an adult borrowing the voice of his parents to speak to his childhood self. Less enjoyable are the "ooh"s and handclaps of "Illustrate the History (When I Grow Up)", a sound too many times tried and sold, and which here says nothing new. More interesting is what follows, "The Whistle Test", which howls a little higher, a bit like Man Man's meowing habit, then slows to a trot for a closely recorded chorus with long keyboard notes that enhance the longing mood. Both the song's colorations, which alternate several times, are sophisticated, the faster portion letting the drums take the spotlight with a quick, complicated rhythm that settles down for the pleasantly dreary chorus.
The cheap production of these songs still allows for invention and different shades from the same instrumentation: the wall of noise of the synths in "Period, Backlash, Colon", the pretty vocals on "A Phone that Rings for Free", or the effects on the lovely closing minutes of "Gold Veins (This One Hotel)". Often what collects the drunken mess of the songs into an elegant pile, as in the case of "Veins", is D. Crane's vocals, which have the dexterity to volubly pack themselves in or stretch out over the course of the instruments' finicky tempos. But there are only a handful of songs that really delve immediately into our mind's ear and stay there, the rest still benefiting from their intra-song variety and general subversion to predictable structure. Showmates of the Shaky Hands, BOAT offer fewer hits but more keepsakes, with many of their songs becoming more adhesive as they simmer and soften over time. | 2007-07-06T02:00:03.000-04:00 | 2007-07-06T02:00:03.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B / Rock | Magic Marker | July 6, 2007 | 7.4 | ccf3aafd-3db6-47ff-9a22-11c847793a42 | Pitchfork | null |
|
Assisted by the Fall’s late Mark E. Smith, the German experimental musician explores a fusion of abstract electronics and spoken word that has little precedent in his work with Mouse on Mars. | Assisted by the Fall’s late Mark E. Smith, the German experimental musician explores a fusion of abstract electronics and spoken word that has little precedent in his work with Mouse on Mars. | Jan St. Werner: Molocular Meditation | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/jan-st-werner-molocular-meditation/ | Molocular Meditation | The final words that Mark E. Smith speaks on Jan St. Werner’s Molocular Meditation might be the most mundane thing that the phlegmatic leader of post-punk legends the Fall ever recorded: “I think that’s the lot, Jan. Thanks.”
The comment was directed at St. Werner, the producer and musician known best as one half of electronic duo Mouse on Mars, letting him know that Smith was done recording. Arriving after nearly three minutes of synthesized clangs and what sound like faulty oscillators having a heated debate, it’s an odd postscript from a singer and poet known for fiery invective and grumbling insults.
Everything else leading up to that aside is pure Smith. His coda comes at the end of “VS Cancelled,” a gentle nose-thumbing at Domino Records, the label that released the sole full-length by Von Südenfed, a collaborative project between Smith and Mouse on Mars. In the song, Smith reads an email from Domino’s general manager Jonny Bradshaw, who is dropping the group from the label. “I’m afraid it looks like we won’t be able to pick up the option. I told you times were tough.” Smith punctuates that last sentence with a rueful laugh.
One trait Smith shared with St. Werner was a penchant for reinvention. That was often by necessity for the Fall founder, considering the dozens of people who logged time in his band during its 40-year existence. But throughout the respective careers of both men, each project often seemed to begin with a clean slate, completely ignoring what came before. Likewise, Molocular Meditation has little precedent in the discographies of either artist, whether separately or together.
The album’s centerpiece is its title track, a re-edited version of a sound piece commissioned by Manchester, England’s Cornerhouse that premiered in 2014. The 20-minute work was originally conceived for multi-channel sound, which meant being in a room surrounded by St. Werner’s freeform electronic trills and hums while Smith’s growling voice spat out blank-verse poetry: “The first problem of young American males/Public speaking according to the talking ducks of Russian television/You can throw all this behind you/This is a better life here.”
Even in this mixed-down version, St. Werner’s music is enveloping and exciting. He responds to Smith’s word spouts by either buttressing them with synth wobbles or matching a frizzy melody to the rhythm of the speech, in the vein of the Books’ “Be Good to Them Always.” Or he will help punctuate a word by hitting it with an extra jolt of sound, so that when Smith draws out the syllables saying “immobile,” he’s paired with a groaning keyboard line.
Smith’s work here is more lucid than anything he did on the last few Fall albums or his guest appearance on Gorillaz’ Plastic Beach. Maybe that has to do with not having to worry about melody or keeping up with a band, but he sounds hale and inspired, evoking the spirit of William S. Burroughs’ recorded work in his delivery and unmistakable drawl.
The rest of Molocular Meditation comes from work that St. Werner was doing around the same time that he was constructing the Cornerhouse piece. Smith is also a central part of “Back to Animals,” but laid beneath waves of bioluminescent sound and rhythm. “On the Infinite of Universe and Worlds,” a commission by Finnish festival Music Nova, is less interesting: an array of arpeggiated patterns that leaves an itchy, unresolved feeling inside.
St. Werner kindly lets the late Smith have the last words on this album, and it is, again, the ideal farewell for the singer and poet. He sounds positively tickled to be throwing up two fingers at Domino Records and mocking the superfluous details in the email (“I’m in Switzerland at the moment”). It’s the perfect punctuation mark to finish the story of a truly unique collaboration. | 2020-02-21T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2020-02-21T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Electronic | Editions Mego | February 21, 2020 | 6.8 | ccf530ce-dbd9-4912-ae4f-b402732fc3cd | Robert Ham | https://pitchfork.com/staff/robert-ham/ | |
When emcee Fly Anakin and producer Tuamie connect inside a sound infatuated with the hip-hop of the past, it becomes a launch pad to new life. | When emcee Fly Anakin and producer Tuamie connect inside a sound infatuated with the hip-hop of the past, it becomes a launch pad to new life. | Tuamie / Fly Anakin: Emergency Raps Vol. 4 | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/tuamie-fly-anakin-emergency-raps-vol-4/ | Emergency Raps Vol. 4 | It would be easy to hear the lush, crate-digging loops of Tuamie and the tongue-twisting bars of Fly Anakin and write off Emergency Raps, Vol. 4 as two twentysomethings who grew up watching too many episodes of “Rap City.” And though Fly Anakin—ringleader of the Virginia-based label Mutant Academy—is the same emcee who once said his dream was to “rap on an unreleased RZA beat from like ’95-’97,” this too is selling the producer/rapper combo short. Because when the two connect inside a sound infatuated with the hip-hop of the past, it becomes a launch pad to new life.
Fly Anakin, though capable, doesn’t pack his verses with lyrical gymnastics. The Richmond, Va. rapper is aware of a current climate that rewards brevity and straightforwardness. His rhymes are precise and purposeful. He shines on Emergency Raps, Vol. 4 with his imagery, like when he uses his nasal voice, begging for a breath on “Murray’s” to descriptively outline his journey from braids to waves: “Tried to brush it out but that don’t work/It take finesse, caress, that open palm flow breaking your neck.” In that same verse, he seamlessly transitions from his most vivid bars into flexes: “I had the 360s in about three days.” That boast was effective enough to make me stressfully recall memories of my lengthy year-long journey watching YouTube hair gurus, brushing, and not missing a night without the durag tied air-tight, to reach similar success.
Anakin’s detail isn’t a skill that could just be picked up from studying the legends of the genre, it’s a gift. Whether he is showing his appreciation for Method Man’s spot on “Shadowboxin’” by dropping in Easter eggs like, “I haven’t had a nightmare since the Wes Craven” or settling into Tuamie’s head-knocking drum-kicks and creamy soul flips on “Karl Kani” to spit about why he never lets his guard down (”I’m insecure for my own protection”). Anakin knows he’s good, which contributes to an immensely cocky presence on the mic.
Throughout Emergency Raps, Vol. 4, the old soul of Tuamie lives in his loops. Though the influence of beat-making icons like Pete Rock and DJ Premier are present, it doesn’t constrain the ATL-bred producer’s creativity—Anakin isn’t being deceitful when he boldly claims on “Katomate” that he has the “best beat selection in the underground.” Tuamie is a puppet master, knowing exactly what he wants out of the rappers he selectively chooses to grace his beats. On “HolOnHolOn,” he deliberately raises the energy level of Anakin by forcing him to compete with an overpowering vocal sample. Then on “Gold Accord” Tuamie digs into his dirtiest drums and excites Anakin into responding with his grimiest raps. And on a whim, Tuamie can surprise and utilize a gospel choir sample on a beat like “Travolt Pt. IV” ready to soundtrack a reverend exiting the Sunday morning service.
If Fly Anakin has any glaring weakness it’s finding a way to create sticky hooks and make them pop. But to Anakin and Tuamie, choruses are meaningless. This is an album about the raps and a producer in his own space flexing his sampling chops. They don’t want to soundtrack your party, they want you to put your headphones on, and take note at two artists aware of their strengths and mastering them together. | 2019-02-05T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2019-02-05T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rap | Mutant Academy | February 5, 2019 | 7.5 | ccf6476f-44a1-4ace-a168-1fdb20c35b0c | Alphonse Pierre | https://pitchfork.com/staff/alphonse-pierre/ | |
null | null | Mark Lanegan: Bubblegum | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/4679-bubblegum-with-mark-lanegan-band/ | Bubblegum | That Charles Bukowski has been dead for over 10 years now is almost hard to believe-- partially because he's had more posthumous work hit the shelves than anybody this side of Tupac, but more so because of the enormous influence he continues to exert over contemporary poets and lyricists. I think it's safe to speculate that former Screaming Trees vocalist Mark Lanegan has spent his share of time on a barstool, between the pages of the Black Sparrow Press.
But Lanegan is no Chinaski-come-lately, and he's got the voice to prove it. As scratchy as a three-day beard yet as supple and pliable as moccasin leather, Lanegan's voice has evolved into a remarkable instrument, one that couldn't have been earned by easy living. It's a voice that redeems him a lot of sins, which is fortuitous because on Bubblegum his songs weave precariously between heartfelt depictions of the seedy life and hardboiled cliche.
On previous solo albums, like 1998's Scraps at Midnight or 2001's masterful Field Songs, Lanegan explored various pre-rock forms like blues, gospel and country to mesmerizing effect. But his recent cameo with Queens of the Stone Age seems to have revived his tooth for the harder stuff, so with the help of guests like Greg Dulli, Dean Ween, Stone Agers Josh Homme and Nick Oliveri, and, yes, Izzy friggin' Stradlin, Bubblegum features a partial return to Lanegan's grungier days of yore. The seamy din generated by this revolving ensemble provides a well-matched backdrop for the relentless parade of petty violence, drug deals gone sour, and squalid love affairs portrayed in these songs.
That's not to say that the whole thing comes off perfectly. Noisier tracks like "Can't Come Down" or the clanking "Methamphetamine Blues" sound undigested and vaguely dated-- almost as though they were written for Girls Against Boys' FreakOnIca album, which is about as succinct a definition of "misfire" as you could want. "Methamphetamine Blues" is particularly rough, as Lanegan briefly goes Ian Astbury on us, calling out to his female back-up singers, "Rollin' children, keep on rollin'." (They respond by calling him "daddy.") I keep waiting for him to belt out, "C'mon li'l sister!" here, but alas, he leaves me hanging.
Fortunately, these occasional clunkers are more than outnumbered by the album's highlights, which include a pair of smoldering duets with PJ Harvey-- "Hit the City" and "Come to Me"-- either of which could slip unnoticed as a bonus track onto Uh Huh Her. It's also hard to not be delighted by "Sideways in Reverse" and "Driving Death Valley Blues", Lanegan's most bare-knuckled rockers since the demise of his former band. Additionally, he has few peers, particularly in his age bracket, when it comes to tackling moody, blues-infused numbers like the opening "When Your Number Isn't Up" or the Tom Waits-ish "Like Little Willie John".
Throughout Bubblegum, Lanegan proves himself adroit at navigating the back alleys of Babylon, but after the record's umpteenth reference to loaded shotguns, '73 Buicks, and goin' cold turkey, one can't help but think he might eventually want to take a stab at some new material. So far, his voice has proven to be well-suited for whatever use he has put it to; hopefully next time he strays a little further afield to better stretch its limits. | 2004-08-29T02:00:02.000-04:00 | 2004-08-29T02:00:02.000-04:00 | Rock | Beggars Banquet | August 29, 2004 | 7.2 | cd013271-f320-4118-84b6-78e40d715937 | Matthew Murphy | https://pitchfork.com/staff/matthew-murphy/ | null |
The composer and jazz multi-instrumentalist explores the myth of the American cowboy through an immigrant's lens on his genre-blending latest. | The composer and jazz multi-instrumentalist explores the myth of the American cowboy through an immigrant's lens on his genre-blending latest. | Sunny Jain: Wild Wild East | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/sunny-jain-wild-wild-east/ | Wild Wild East | On January 23, fire engulfed the archives of the Museum of Chinese in America. Over a century of accumulated history—some 85,000 artifacts—could have been swept away like dust: film reels, old records, typewriters, wedding dresses, copies of the first English-language Chinese American newspaper. About a third of its archive was eventually recovered, but the disaster underscored the collection’s irreplaceability. MOCA’s founders, Jack Tchen and Charlie Lai, had initially salvaged items from dumpsters; apparently, the owners didn’t view their junk as worthy of preservation. As the cultural critic Hua Hsu observed last year, “Immigrants have not tended to regard their own lives as rising to the status of history.”
Something of the museum’s humble approach to memorializing—accumulating the residue of ordinary life, building it into something consequential—is expressed in Sunny Jain’s Wild Wild East, the first release in the Smithsonian Folkways’ Asian Pacific America series. Like several recent albums by artists of color that reimagine the American cowboy, it discards the romantic myth of a white gunslinger galloping across Western plains. Instead, it claims that the true spirit of the cowboy—his courage, resilience, and relentless pursuit of freedom—is embodied by immigrants. Jain’s ancestors migrated from Rajasthan to Western Punjab, and then during the 1947 partition of India, fled to Eastern Punjab in one of the largest mass migrations in history.
In the 1970s his parents emigrated to Rochester, New York, where he absorbed his siblings’ fervor for “Rush, Ice-T, and guitar ‘gods’”; he listened to his mother’s Jain bhajans (devotional songs); he discovered jazz legends like Max Roach and John Coltrane. Since then, Jain has become part of a rich heritage of South Asian American artists—and Asian American artists more broadly—who put Western jazz and other black music in dialogue with Eastern classical traditions. Wild Wild East, which combines influences from Bollywood music to surf rock, testifies to how second-generation immigrants form their own distinctly American identity.
Plunging into the cowboy theme, the album immediately conjures the arid frontiers of Ennio Morricone, the composer behind some of the world’s most iconic spaghetti western scores. Wild Wild East’s opening track, “Immigrant Warrior,” is cinematic almost unto parody, triumphant horns galloping with heroic resolve. But after a minute, the narrative begins to fray. Electric guitar whines and sputters, unchaining itself from the melody, until the composition snaps back to the victorious march. Other disturbances come later in a sensuous saxophone passage that flows into low, accelerating drum beats. Jain seems to suggest that there are spaces of possibility within these ruptures, signs of trouble within the smooth continuum of history.
Many of these compositions are intellectually thrilling to unravel, even while stifled by the album’s lofty concept. Wild Wild East is indebted to R.D. Burman’s vibrant, Morricone-influenced soundtrack for the 1975 “curry western” Sholay, but Sholay is imbued with a sprightly mischief and whimsy that Wild Wild East doesn’t quite reach. It’s really that the omnipresence of Morricone’s ghost can grow tiresome. “Wild Wild East” and “Aye Mere Dil Kahin Aur Chal” are invigorated by Ganavya’s wistful singing and Jain’s electrifying dhol rhythms respectively, but they would have benefited further from the sort of jubilance Jain unleashes with his dhol-and-brass band Red Baraat.
The album’s most frustrating song is “Red, Brown, Black.” Its opening cymbal crash is akin to the protagonist of a teen drama plugging his guitar into an amp to signal that he’s about to rock the high school auditorium. “Embarrassed of my culture from the get-go/Hip-hop raised me with best flows,” L.A. based rapper HASEEB boasts. Though well-intentioned, his subsequent acknowledgment that “black culture taught me how to say it with my chest though” is a superficial bid for cross-racial connection. As the album’s only English language-based song, it becomes an overly simplified attempt to summarize the release’s 42-pages of meticulously written liner notes on personal and global history. Then again, this record’s geographic and historical scope is so ambitious that its flaws reveal the difficulty of balancing cultural rigor with accessibility.
It’s worth remembering that the cowboy—tall, imposing—is revered not for who he is, but what he represents. Lionizing the immigrant in his place may be, on one hand, a long-overdue recognition of those who have been overlooked by history. But, more cynically, it can be a shiny valorization of one overbearing ideal for another. The most sincere moments on Wild Wild East are the ones least weighed down with meaning: After Pawan Benjamin’s solemn reflection on the bansuri flute in “Blackwell,” Alam Khan loosens the mood on the sarod. In “Wild Wild East,” shimmering walls of sound feel like floating face-down in a pool and watching light patterns dance on the floor. These small moments of peace feel more radical than any grand statement. | 2020-02-25T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2020-02-25T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Experimental | Smithsonian Folkways | February 25, 2020 | 6.8 | cd086550-c156-45e4-b961-fa746c84478e | Cat Zhang | https://pitchfork.com/staff/cat-zhang/ | |
Martha Brown goes from Charli XCX band member to pop singer on her debut, tackling intergenerational trauma and the painful path to self-understanding with a melodic bubblegum sound. | Martha Brown goes from Charli XCX band member to pop singer on her debut, tackling intergenerational trauma and the painful path to self-understanding with a melodic bubblegum sound. | Banoffee: Look At Us Now Dad | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/banoffee-look-at-us-now-dad/ | Look At Us Now Dad | Before she played synths for Charli XCX on Taylor Swift’s 2018 Reputation tour, Martha Brown was failing to get by in Los Angeles as a musician transplanted from Melbourne. Her career-aiding spot in Charli’s band saved her from moving home, and she used what she earned from the tour to finance her debut LP, Look At Us Now Dad. Although the title might evoke the image of a daughter beaming with pride at having made it, Brown, who performs as Banoffee, actually uses parts of her debut to examine deeper concepts, like intergenerational trauma and the painful path to self-understanding.
Enlisting features from electro-pop singer Empress Of and rapper CupcakKe, Brown aims for a melodic bubblegum pop sound with industrial undertones—a well-established trend in queer music. On “Chevron,” a downtempo lament sung at rock bottom, she asks the album’s persistent questions: “What am I doing? Why am I here?” The song arrives at the album’s midpoint, rejecting an easy redemptive arc in favor of a steady landscape of ups and downs. To her credit, Banoffee never settles on answers to those questions but never gives up the pursuit of them, either.
The interludes “I Lied” and “I Let You Down” offer a graceful view into the album’s focus on reconciliation—with relationships, with the self, and with the past. Bookending the album, they contain the same lyrics: Banoffee sings about lying to a dying loved one, telling them that she’s doing well in an effort to spare them worry. While “I Lied” introduces deception into Banoffee’s role as a narrator, “I Let You Down” reframes her lies as promises to herself. Over synths that buzz like insects circling a light, she allows herself the possibility that one day those lies might become truth.
On the album’s second half, Banoffee probes the connection between her own psychological battles and her father’s, whose tumultuous childhood included a forced separation from his alcoholic parents. “Permission” is an intensely Auto-Tuned account of assault, and Banoffee’s quivering voice rises to a broken yell as she flips perspectives from perpetrator to victim. “I was young and never wanted/To touch a man or be a woman.” Despite the cyborgian vocals, the song has a shuddering, human ache, taking a cue from similarly produced tracks on Charli XCX’s Pop 2 mixtape like “Backseat” and “Lucky.”
On the closing title track, she attempts to wind her own emotional experiences together with her father’s. The song, the longest on the album, addresses her father directly as well as the suffering he inherited: “What was theirs is yours, and now it’s mine.” The placement implies closure, as if the song proves that there’s some new way forward for the two of them. Instead, it introduces the album’s most interesting material right at the end. If she had threaded it more steadily throughout, the album would have been a more keen statement than the respectable pop offering that it is.
Buy: Rough Trade
(Pitchfork may earn a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.) | 2020-02-26T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2020-02-26T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Pop/R&B | Cascine / Dot Dash | February 26, 2020 | 6.8 | cd090f19-0432-4e7d-8766-405c08d61566 | Colin Lodewick | https://pitchfork.com/staff/colin-lodewick/ | |
Steeped in the Memphis underground tradition, the Young Dolph associate’s latest album is full of hard-working hustler music that never lets up. | Steeped in the Memphis underground tradition, the Young Dolph associate’s latest album is full of hard-working hustler music that never lets up. | Big Moochie Grape: East Haiti Baby | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/big-moochie-grape-east-haiti-baby/ | East Haiti Baby | Before his senseless murder, Young Dolph took the defiant independence he maintained during his career and extended that support to a younger generation of hungry artists. The first of Dolph’s Padawans was his cousin Key Glock (who is a certified star in his own right), but Paper Route Empire has managed to expand its ranks into a tight-knit family that soldiers on despite the loss of its mentor. East Memphis native Big Moochie Grape stood out on this year’s Long Live Dolph tribute album with “In Dolph We Trust,” a dark and driving banger with an ornate beat built out of the skeleton of “Carol of the Bells,” and he makes a more extended introduction with his new project East Haiti Baby.
Flipping “Carol of the Bells” is a Memphis tradition. Since the holiday staple has been retrofitted into multiple beats by DJ Paul and Juicy J, its presence on Big Moochie’s breakout song places him in the city’s lineage. Moochie’s approach to making music is heavily steeped in the Memphis underground tradition, and his songs beg to be heard on the most powerful sound system you can find. Moochie first built his reputation as a rapper in Memphis by taking his tracks to the club right after he recorded them. It’s meant to be experienced as much as it’s meant to be listened to.
Big Moochie Grape’s punctuated flow is reminiscent of Project Pat’s. Moochie’s delivery isn’t overcomplicated, but it’s still effortlessly intricate, a rhythmic pitter-patter that’s slightly clipped while softened by his Southern drawl. Even Key Glock has his slower, more romantic numbers, but there’s no room for sentimentality in Big Moochie Grape’s world—his words come to us uncut and raw. Moochie doesn’t lose himself to despair despite the odds against him, and keeps his head up by focusing on the work, whether that’s spitting or serving. Big Moochie is tough enough to mostly stand on his own, but brothers-in-arms Key Glock and Kenny Muney come through with features, and there is a posthumous verse from Dolph on “Fun.”
The beats on East Haiti Baby are unsurprisingly the product of Bandplay, the architect of Paper Route Empire, whose sturdy drums gave Dolph and Glock a strong foundation for their flows. There’s a similar blueprint to every beat, but Bandplay mixes in unsettling keys and glistening bells that add a touch of Gothic darkness. A rare trace of soulfulness can be heard on title track “East Haiti Baby” courtesy of a sample of Blackstreet’s “No Diggity,” which interweaves Moochie’s flow with a soft background hum.
Many of the songs here have a hook built around a comparison between the artist and an unrelated pop culture icon, like the Biggie-indebted “Christopher Wallace” and the humorous “Joe Biden.” On “Rick Flair,” Big Moochie Grape most directly conceives of himself as a pro wrestler pulling no punches, and he makes scattered references to Hulk Hogan and Mick Foley throughout the album. Though there’s a slightly throwback flavor to Moochie’s sound, it’s not self-consciously referential like Duke Deuce’s crunk revivalism. Unfortunately, certain bars are an unwelcome throwback to some of the more regressive elements of classic Southern rap, in the form of some hard-to-miss homophobic slurs.
Unlike the countless rappers who have pilfered from Memphis over the last decade Big Moochie Grape doesn’t need to directly remake classics or recreate old sounds. East Haiti Baby captures the spirit of the city and its rap scene on a more existential level: It’s hard-working hustler music that never lets up, with a beat that never sleeps. Big Moochie Grape makes soundtracks not just for grinding, but for surviving. | 2022-06-08T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2022-06-08T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Paper Route Empire | June 8, 2022 | 6.8 | cd0accac-83d4-4970-b1c9-3993ce7eabcd | Nadine Smith | https://pitchfork.com/staff/nadine-smith/ | |
Since their humble beginnings on Premiers Symptomes, their 1997 debut\n\ EP, Air haven't striven for much more than ... | Since their humble beginnings on Premiers Symptomes, their 1997 debut\n\ EP, Air haven't striven for much more than ... | Air: The Virgin Suicides | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/74-the-virgin-suicides/ | The Virgin Suicides | Since their humble beginnings on Premiers Symptomes, their 1997 debut EP, Air haven't striven for much more than to bring a French flavor to spacy electronic pop. Even back then, this was by no means an original concept. Hundreds of bands-- Stereolab, Dimitri from Paris, Komeda, etc.-- preceded Air with Bacharachian melodies and Moog hisses scattered throughout their albums like trademark logos. But while their predecessors carried themselves on kitsch value and band-of-the-moment media praise, Air seemed somehow more serious about their music.
Is the world really interested in another Air release, though? Premiers Symptomes and Moon Safari, while intriguing albums for their genre, were somewhat similar in mood and direction. Both showed a band whose intent was to create instrumental French space-pop, and not much else. And with the "French space-pop revolution" pretty much over and done with, what could a new Air record possibly offer that the duo hasn't already accomplished?
Well, from the sound of The Virgin Suicides, the score to Sofia Coppola's directorial debut, Nicolas Godin and Jean-Beno\xEEt Dunckel have a bit more to achieve before their 15 seconds tick to a close. Though the record does aim for the same kind of prog-rock atmospherics as their earlier releases, Air have managed to alter their sound this time out, drawing from a wider array of rock influences, instead of limiting their scope to Perrey and Kingsley.
Godin and Dunckel have a larger arsenal of instruments here. The bulk of the equipment implemented still seems to be a diverse assortment of analog keyboards, but Air also incorporate those dependable traditional rock instruments, guitar and bass. It's a marked improvement from the synth surplus of their previous material. The band also seems more influenced by the melodic psychedelic rock of the late 60's and early 70's than before. There are distinct nods to Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon and especially the Beatles' Abbey Road. The Beatles' influence is most notable on "Bathroom Girl," "Cemetary Party," and "Highschool Lover (Theme from 'The Virgin Suicides')," during which several of the drum fills and guitar squalls sound almost directly snatched from Abbey Road.
Of course, The Virgin Suicides has its dry moments, but surprisingly, they're few and far between. For the most part, the album showcases Godin and Dunckel's dramatically improved songwriting skills. The majority of these 13 tracks actually feature a true rarity for rock music these days-- unpredictable chord progressions. And the album undeniably serves its purpose: it's a film score. The fact that it holds your attention, despite being created solely as incidental music, says something about the guys playing it. Whether we want to admit it or not, Air are pretty good at what they do. Still, the backlash is well underway at this point, and it seems doubtful they'll hold up quite as well by the time their "official" follow-up to Moon Safari sees release later this year. | 2000-02-29T01:00:02.000-05:00 | 2000-02-29T01:00:02.000-05:00 | Electronic | Astralwerks | February 29, 2000 | 7.2 | cd0df7f6-3308-4859-92aa-0d129ad3b1ee | Ryan Schreiber | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ryan-schreiber/ | null |
Despite the fact that there's still some old reliable structures underpinning Do It!, this new album might be Clinic's most adventurous since Internal Wrangler. | Despite the fact that there's still some old reliable structures underpinning Do It!, this new album might be Clinic's most adventurous since Internal Wrangler. | Clinic: Do It! | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/11335-do-it/ | Do It! | More than almost any group out there, Clinic make you question how integral change is to a band's vitality. If you don't own any of their music, buying all their albums and listening to each and every one of their songs in alphabetical order (an undertaking that'd take less than four hours, B-sides included) wouldn't tell you much less about their career's arc than a chronological study would. The formula they hinted at on 1997 debut single "IPC Subeditors Dictate Our Youth" and got down to a science on 2000's Internal Wrangler has expanded only slightly, and while there've been some noticeable shifts in production style (especially on 2002's crisp and glossy Walking With Thee), there's not much that sonically separates a decade-old Clinic song from what they're up to today.
But maybe there's just not enough room for any other ideas: Clinic's aesthetic has already incorporated snatches of punk, doo-wop, garage psych, Krautrock, hard bop, mid '70s Miami disco, the film scores of Ennio Morricone, Augustus Pablo-informed dub (complete with melodica), Phil Spector girl-group pop, a few decades' worth of rockabilly, and antediluvian European folk music. It's all contained in an intricate frameworkt hat risks falling apart entirely if it's tweaked too much, and if that means that the same rhythms and melodies and moods keep cropping up in familiar ways, well, at least that sound hasn't gotten any worse. And while it's pretty easy to predict what you'll hear on their new album Do It!, especially if their last couple albums (the water-treading but enjoyable Winchester Cathedral and the slightly weirder, slightly better Visitations) are any indication, it's not the kind of predictability that results in disappointment.
Despite the fact that there's still some old reliable structures underpinning Do It!-- the aforementioned parade of references wrapped around their playbook of big cabaret stomps, swing rhythms, shoegaze drones, and waltz-time R&B-- this new album might be Clinic's most adventurous since Internal Wrangler. Clinic songs are usually recognizable as such within less than 10 seconds, with or without the buzzing wail of lead singer Ade Blackburn, and that's still the case. Usually the giveaway relies on a combination of Carl Turney's organically metronomic drumming-- heavy clomping gallops or delicate cymbal rides, depending on the mood-- and Hartley's guitar, which sounds like nearly nobody else in rock, whether he's coaxing slow strums, sharp twangs or fuzzed-out violence out of his instrument. But they often find themselves in uncharacteristic contexts; there's a couple of surprising moments of acoustic demi-blues, like the freight train rattle of "Tomorrow" (think Led Zeppelin's "Bron-Y-Aur Stomp" with hints of Internal Wrangler track "T.K.") and the 3/4 swoon of "Mary& Eddie", which eventually explodes into a foghorn-accompanied burst of trapeze-act acid rock. And there are other curveballs: Opener "Memories" makes like it's going to be one of their burlesque-rhythm boogie numbers (i.e. "2nd Foot Stomp" and "Vertical Takeoff in Egypt"), but dips into a smart little bit of summery Beach Boys organ for the chorus, while "Free Not Free" bookends and interrupts an otherwise-tranquil bit of slow-dance reverie with a brief, snarling riff that sounds like some unhinged class-of-66 garage band scoring a bullfight.
Blackburn, still murmuring half-intelligible lyrics with the same spooky whine, has aced a perplexing syntax that gives these songs a labyrinthine, off-putting sense of psychological unease: "Knowing the chapters here that you close/ Fill in the gaps as half your mind is gone" ("Emotions"); "See yourself outside your skin here/ See yourself outside you for miles" ("Free Not Free"); "You stitch who you always wanted/ Now your thoughts begin to fray" ("High Coin"). And even when they stick to their old blueprint-- "The Witch (Made to Measure)", "Emotions", and "Winged Wheel" sound a bit like 10 other songs they've already done, except better-- Clinic play with a renewed sense of the same eerie raucousness that drew people to them in the first place; this would be an easy second-album recommendation for a new fan after they've initially discovered and absorbed Internal Wrangler. Clinic could still stand to stretch their legs just a bit more-- it's still inexplicable for a band this savvy about groove-minded freakouts that they've never recorded a song longer than four and a half minutes-- but any band that's staved off stagnancy while still sounding more or less like they did a decade in the past shouldn't worry too much about messing with a good thing. | 2008-04-07T02:00:02.000-04:00 | 2008-04-07T02:00:02.000-04:00 | Electronic / Experimental / Rock | Domino | April 7, 2008 | 7.7 | cd0e54fc-ce24-47d1-948f-dc8e560841f9 | Nate Patrin | https://pitchfork.com/staff/nate-patrin/ | null |
With killer beat selections and a fresh sense of focus, the New York rapper’s latest project exudes the unnerving calm and clarity that come with years of refinement. | With killer beat selections and a fresh sense of focus, the New York rapper’s latest project exudes the unnerving calm and clarity that come with years of refinement. | Junglepussy: JP5000 | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/junglepussy-jp5000/ | JP5000 | Every Junglepussy project begins with a statement of intent. “Want Some Mo’,” the opener to her 2014 debut Satisfaction Guaranteed, turns a one-night stand into a celebration of her prowess in the bedroom and on the mic. “Spicy 103 FM” and “State of the Union”—the intros to her 2015 album Pregnant With Success and 2018’s Jp3—use breakups as a platform to reclaim power over her narrative. On 2020’s Jp4 starter “Bad News,” she predicts that for all the influence she’s exerted over the game, the world won’t “give me props until the casket drops.” Eight years into her career as an independent New York polymath with a taste for genre-bending and Trader Joe’s, she was tired of waiting for her due respect.
“Critiqua,” from her latest project JP5000, is the first opener since her debut not to start on the defensive. Her voice is collected and focused into a deep alto that cuts across producer Bohemia Lynch’s thudding drums and banjo plinks to address the critics and exes: “Earn my respect, held down the day shift/Pregnant with success/And you know what they did?/Tryin’ to test something so sacred.” Adversaries are within Junglepussy’s sight, but her claims unfold like self-actualization more than targeted gripes. Though the whip-smart energy of her past work is gone, she doesn’t sound tired or spent; she sounds content, even happy, to make her own crown. The thousand-yard stare bars add an air of nonchalance without diluting her searing wit or sense of purpose.
Junglepussy has never shied away from a melody or hook, but Jp3 and Jp4 featured nearly as much singing as rapping. Aqueous riddims like “Ready 2 Ride” and the bouncy pep of “Morning Rock” lend themselves to airy vocals, a vibe that JP5000 quickly jettisons. In a similar spirit as flex-worthy projects like Tyler, the Creator’s Call Me If You Get Lost and Milwaukee rapper Lakeyah’s My Time, the emphasis is back on beats and bars alone. On the surface, JP5000 is the closest thing to a mixtape Junglepussy’s ever released—its five tracks are lean, loose bursts of energy. But she’s already released some of the fiercest and most pleasingly indulgent music coming out of New York in the last decade. What’s different here is the focus granted by her vocal shift, firm without rising above indoor volume. It gives her ever-present barbs an icier feel than usual: “Don’t give me side-eye as I shapeshift,” she asserts on “Movie Screen,” unbothered and above it all. It sounds like she could clear a room with a smirk.
Tone adjusted, Junglepussy’s words exude the unnerving calm and clarity that come with years of refinement. “Movie Screen” bubbles and snaps with thoughts of perseverance before pulling the rug out from under the haters anyway (“Keeping you mad at me is such an easy plan”). “Foreign Exchange” depicts a relationship that begins in the crowd at a Highline Ballroom show for the titular band and deteriorates into cheating and social media posturing (“Are you typing about ‘Protect a Black woman’?/Don’t have a clue, just clout”). On “Raqueletta,” she’s lusting after a European boy toy, sending him perfume-scented letters and counting the minutes until “big dude make my problems micro.” These songs aren’t private thoughts, yet they share an intimacy akin to internal monologues or drafted DMs. There’s a noticeable lack of sex raps compared to Junglepussy’s earlier work, but her other modes—tender, vicious, vulnerable—receive room to expand and round out the Jp Experience.
That experience is aided by some of the best beats Junglepussy has ever chosen. All five are loops with deep drums on the downbeat, but they each dovetail with Jp’s voice in distinct ways. Nick Hakim pits an operatic violin sample against twinkling keyboards on “Movie Screen,” creating a horror-flick soundtrack for Jp to slash to ribbons. Bohemia Lynch and New York-via-Baltimore producer Suzi Analogue bend synths into patterns that strobe and seethe on “Foreign Exchange” and “Raqueletta,” respectively. Virginia producer Døøf mixes horns and wind chimes into the cocksure strut of closing track “Mystical,” another opportunity for Jp to assert her earned self-reliance.
JP5000 revisits well-worn topics in the Junglepussy songbook—claims to her legacy, short-lived romance—but they’ve never landed quite like this, and her evolution mirrors the morphing traditionalism of New York’s underground scene. When, at the end of “Mystical,” she announces, “You stuck on the damn trends/I’m top of the mountain, meditating topless/I transcend,” the words linger like an incantation: Junglepussy is inviting the world to revel in her self-fulfilling prophecy. | 2022-02-08T00:00:00.000-05:00 | 2022-02-08T00:00:00.000-05:00 | Rap | self-released | February 8, 2022 | 8 | cd1991a2-7b09-4112-8d51-36b9c587b2dd | Dylan Green | https://pitchfork.com/staff/dylan-green/ | |
The sound of Godspeed’s radical fury takes a sideline on their impeccably composed sixth album. It contains their most melodic and powerfully positive-sounding music to date. | The sound of Godspeed’s radical fury takes a sideline on their impeccably composed sixth album. It contains their most melodic and powerfully positive-sounding music to date. | Godspeed You! Black Emperor: Luciferian Towers | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/godspeed-you-black-emperor-luciferian-towers/ | Luciferian Towers | “An end to foreign invasions. An end to borders. The total dismantling of the prison-industrial complex. Healthcare, housing, food and water acknowledged as an inalienable human right. The expert fuckers who broke this world never get to speak again.” Godspeed You! Black Emperor’s demands are firm, but, you know, fucking fair.
These demands come attached to a press release for the band’s new album, Luciferian Towers—a title that recalls the fiery horror that befell London’s Grenfell Tower and the gruesome class inequity that disaster exposed just weeks before the album was announced. Song titles include “Anthem for No State” and “Bosses Hang.” Fire courses through the “context” provided by the band in a press release: “We recorded it all in a burning motorboat.” “The wind is whistling through all 3,000 of its burning window-holes!” “The forest is burning and soon they’ll hunt us like wolves.” By the sound of it, post-rock’s most overtly political and unapologetically powerful band seems ready to toss the ravenous zombie corpse of neoliberalism on the pyre for good and all.
Seen in that infernal light, the sound of Luciferian Towers is the last thing you’d expect. The pulverizing, prophet-of-doom riffs that characterized Allelujah! Don’t Bend! Ascend! and Asunder, Sweet and Other Distress, the band’s previous two albums, are gone. So are the six-to-ten-minute stretches of drone—the anxious calm before those records’ storms. Ominous field recordings—a one-time Godspeed sonic standby, already pared down to a minimum on Allelujah! and eliminated entirely on Asunder—are again nowhere to be found. The album barely even hits minor-key territory until six tracks in, before resolving the melody into a more uplifting mode within a couple of minutes. If you’re looking for Lucifer, search elsewhere.
There’s always been this other side to Godspeed, perhaps best summed up in a t-shirt slogan from the Allelujah! era: “MORE OF US THAN THEM, AMEN.” Godspeed’s music is undergirded by its musicians’ radical leftist politics (I mean, look at that press release), and that means there’s hope rather than despair at its heart—a belief that collective struggle against our overlords is a battle worth fighting instead of a foregone conclusion to surrender to. It’s this spirit that animates Luciferian Towers, the band’s most melodic and powerfully positive-sounding album to date. One glance at the world around us offers a persuasive argument that it’s the spirit we need.
“Undoing a Luciferian Towers” [sic] feels like the warm-up before the workout. The slow-tempo waltz twirls its way through the constant hum of guitars into a rousing melody a film score might associate with a downtrodden hero. The band’s dual drummers Aidan Girt and Timothy Herzog pound away beneath it, while guest musicians Craig Pederson on trumpet and Bonnie Kane on sax and flute trill away above, filling every available space with joyful noise. “Fam / Famine,” an interlude between the album’s two longest compositions, reprises the melody in a more atmospheric form later on.
The tripartite “Bosses Hang” is even more of a showcase for the band’s anthemic abilities. Like “Undoing a Luciferian Towers,” it too centers on a simple but stirring hook, one so warm and crowd-pleasing that it recalls the great big all-in-this-together refrains of ’90s alt-rock radio staples. Part one introduces the melody, unfurling it slowly and waving it back and forth like a banner on a barricade. Part two shifts away to a five-note pattern that increases in speed like the highland-reel closing crescendo of the Who’s “Baba O’Reilly,” before going full tilt and reintroducing the main melody like a returning redeemer in part three. It’s a much less complex effort than previous Godspeed suites, but their skill as musicians and composers helps them find riches in the simplicity.
The album closes on another three-part composition, “Anthem for No State.” It’s the angriest, heaviest song on the album, but not in the metal mode of Allelujah! standout “Mladic” or Asunder highlight “Peasantry or ‘Light! Inside of Light!’” There’s a Morricone standoff feel to the guitars when they finally kick into high gear in part three; the drums and strings groove and swirl rather than pound and screech during the final minutes. Somehow, the band makes these disparate parts feel inevitable in their connection. No one working in this genre does that better.
But impeccable as it is, Luciferian Towers has a disappointing lack of fury. Throughout their long career, guitarist and ostensible mastermind Efrim Menuck and his many collaborators have crafted a sonic profile of pure terror. It was a huge sound, abrasive but enveloping, the kind that swallows up your entire aural landscape. Public Enemy’s Bomb Squad had it in their heyday. So did the Luxa/Pan Productions team of Al Jourgensen and Paul Barker during the industrial-metal peak of Ministry and its many side projects. It’s hard to watch Godspeed walk away from that menacing magic, no matter how skilled they are at the flip side of their sound. You want them to knock down towers, but for now, they’re building shelter amid the ruins. | 2017-09-21T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-09-21T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock / Experimental | Constellation | September 21, 2017 | 7.3 | cd2227df-783e-4132-b9c1-dfb744a42b86 | Sean T. Collins | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sean-t. collins/ | |
Like a glass of water after 10 shots of whiskey, ILLFIGHTYOU's CASHINTHEBATHROOM EP chases this year's glut of serious-minded spring and summer hip-hop albums. Two years after their debut, the appeal of ILLFIGHTYOU is even more apparent—they sound effortless, and they're clearly having a blast. | Like a glass of water after 10 shots of whiskey, ILLFIGHTYOU's CASHINTHEBATHROOM EP chases this year's glut of serious-minded spring and summer hip-hop albums. Two years after their debut, the appeal of ILLFIGHTYOU is even more apparent—they sound effortless, and they're clearly having a blast. | ILLFIGHTYOU: CASHINTHEBATHROOM EP | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/20827-cashinthebathroom-ep/ | CASHINTHEBATHROOM EP | It's tempting to suggest there's nothing subtle about Tacoma's ILLFIGHTYOU. Everything you need to know about them is in their name, right? All caps, no spaces. (As opposed to all caps with spaces.) The three members are named UGLYFRANK, Khris P, and EvergreenOne. Both of their releases, and all songs on each, are tagged in the same ALLCAPSNOSPACES fashion. A casual listen reveals a sound that's part-West Coast shit talk, part-Pharrell layered beats, and all brash. You can probably almost hear a song based on these ingredients in your head right now.
And maybe your estimation wouldn't be too far off, but what you would miss would be how charming and fun their music has consistently been, from even before their 2013 self-titled full-length when they were just frequently-hilarious dudes with a Tumblr. Like a glass of water after 10 shots of whiskey, ILLFIGHTYOU's CASHINTHEBATHROOM EP chases this year's glut of serious-minded spring and summer hip-hop albums. Two years after their debut, the appeal of ILLFIGHTYOU is even more apparent—they sound effortless, and they're clearly having a blast.
Khris P and UGLYFRANK trade verses with the temerity (if not complexity) that made Clipse so much fun, or the 2014 model of Rich Gang so electrifying. And ILLFIGHTYOU's sound definitely owes a lot to not just Clipse, but a lot of mid-'00s Pharrell work: think of the line Fam-Lay toed between menacing and joyful. FRANK grounds the music with a delivery that's both deadpan and knives-out (the first verse on the album includes vivid images like "sniffing coke up in the movie theater" and "I'm angry and hella faded, I'm flipping vehicles back") but also works as Khris's logical foil: Khris has a naturally mercurial voice and he covers more territory, delivering the line "stacking turkey burgers on my damn plate" and bragging about having your girl in his mentions all in the same verse. His flow is so natural that "Oracle" fades with him still rapping: The sense you get is of having caught a tantalizing glimpse of a guy with better things to do than rap this effortlessly.
"FLASH" is the best song here, opening with Bill Paxton's famous line from Aliens, "game over, man, game over!" It contains my favorite line, Frank's "Had a dream I got murked and bought a ticket to heaven/ Nah I woke up, popped a perc and I purchased another necklace," which somehow interpolates a dark, self-effacing Kanye line from "Can't Tell Me Nothin'" into something even darker. The line is punctuated by Khris yelling "hey!" in the background, underlining how much fun these guys are having trading verses. And then the chorus riffs on Tribe's "Award Tour" just because it can. The recipe is simple, but potent: casual irreverence with a pinch of nihilism.
In 2015, with the Internet bubble of "weird rappers" giving way to either novelty hits like "CoCo", the pop appeal of "Trap Queen", or whatever the Awful Records guys feel like doing, ILLFIGHTYOU occupy an interesting middle space: their in-house produced beats knock and sound 0f-the-moment, but the in-jokes and hooks have an almost throwback appeal to them. It's helpful to have someone around to remind you that rap doesn't have to be so dark to make an impression or communicate something meaningful, and in this context ILLFIGHTYOU are surprisingly refreshing. When the last time you heard it like that? | 2015-07-27T02:00:03.000-04:00 | 2015-07-27T02:00:03.000-04:00 | Rap | self-released | July 27, 2015 | 7.1 | cd244536-77de-4fd5-9e6f-a308a49f6edf | Matthew Ramirez | https://pitchfork.com/staff/matthew-ramirez/ | null |
On a fun but monotonous EP, the Detroit dance-music duo stops the clock at the party’s peak. | On a fun but monotonous EP, the Detroit dance-music duo stops the clock at the party’s peak. | Snow Strippers: Night Killaz Vol.1 EP | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/snow-strippers-night-killaz-vol1-ep/ | Night Killaz Vol. 1 EP | You’re in the club so late your limbs have melted into sweaty spaghetti. You could collapse from exhaustion, but the lights and fog and music keep you levitating. Snow Strippers songs are based solely on evoking this tremulous state of perpetual climax. Like 100 gecs and Frost Children, the Detroit duo continues in the hipster tradition of rediscovering and rewiring the discarded passé. Their focus: lurid, cheap-sounding EDM pop. Their music’s been called electroclash, but it’s more like electroflash: vocal electronica overclocked to a shrill and peaky breaking point.
Vocalist Tatiana Schwaninger and Graham Perez, a producer with a past life making beats for underground rappers like SoFaygo, have worked as Snow Strippers for a couple years now. This spring’s breakout April Mixtape 3 is like a Dance Dance Revolution soundtrack for moonwalking cyborgs: a strobing blitz of neon melodies and tinny shrieks. Their music slots nicely into a zeitgeist of Crystal Castles reappreciation and viral hits like laura les’ “Haunted,” but they also took pleasure in mutating their core sound in intriguing ways, like mashing the vocals with robotic ad-libs or slowing the pace to a glistening stomp-trot. On the duo’s new EP Night Killaz Vol. 1, they juice their garish dance sound even more, showcasing the music’s overheated thrills as well as its diminishing returns.
Snow Strippers’ music is a piñata of pastiche, modeled after the gothic unease of SALEM, the shivering chaos of Crystal Castles, and the campy heart-rush of DJ Sammy. But it’s also seamless and stupidly fun. Even neurotic genre purists who scold PinkPantheress for trilling over UK garage classics will get swept up by Snow Strippers’ tidal wave of hardstyle kicks and pleading vocals. Detonating with a blinding shock, “Just Your Doll” will whip anyone in blast radius into a frenzy. “Cautious” throttles like a deep-fried Cascada song, Schwaninger’s helium-high cries fluttering like’s she running from an evil monster. At its best, the music smacks with the greasy goodness of 3 a.m. pizza.
The issue is that Snow Strippers don’t have anywhere else to go. They landed on one strong idea—but only one. After the hypnotic first half, the tape fizzles out into a hazy locked groove. The lightshow synths of “Just a Hint” and “Touching Yours” sound exhaustingly similar, and Schwaninger’s vocals dissolve into a shiny-silver blur. Even “Comin Down” doesn’t offer a reprieve from the onslaught. Where the original electroclash scene deployed snarky humor and prurient imagery against the cushy mainstream club cultures of the time, this music isn’t rebelling against anything. The duo seems to have little to say, an artistic manifesto that boils down to: It’s a laugh, it’s euphoric, let’s get lit on a dark street. But when it stops being fun, the music turns into a rave-by-rote charade. | 2023-12-04T00:02:00.000-05:00 | 2023-12-04T00:02:00.000-05:00 | Electronic | Surf Gang | December 4, 2023 | 6 | cd391e57-da7e-4403-9aae-2c2b5c8f9dbb | Kieran Press-Reynolds | https://pitchfork.com/staff/kieran-press-reynolds/ | |
The Sunny Day Real Estate leader's 1996 solo debut is often viewed through the prism of his Christian rebirth. Sub Pop's reissue reveals how its orchestral grandeur helped shape indie rock's future. | The Sunny Day Real Estate leader's 1996 solo debut is often viewed through the prism of his Christian rebirth. Sub Pop's reissue reveals how its orchestral grandeur helped shape indie rock's future. | Jeremy Enigk: Return of the Frog Queen | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/jeremy-enigk-return-of-the-frog-queen/ | Return of the Frog Queen | In the annals of rock music's early flirtations with the internet, an incident from the career of Sunny Day Real Estate stands as prophetic of the echo chamber we know today. In December 1994, the band's frontman, Jeremy Enigk, responded to rumors of an imminent breakup by posting an open letter. While SDRE were being celebrated as the best thing to hit the Seattle scene since grunge, Enigk was coming out as a born-again Christian—and the words he used in dropping that bombshell left a mark as indelible as his band's emo masterpiece, Diary on his career.
“Jesus isn’t anything that I want to compromise with, for He is far more important then [sic] this music, financial security, or popularity could ever be,” Enigk wrote. “So the idea of breaking up has been talked about." The Jesus stuff stuck with fans and the press alike, and speculation that it was the reason for SDRE’s split—just months after the letter and more than half a year before the release of their second album—dominated the rumor mill. Over the years, this collective obsession with Enigk’s faith has drowned out everything else he’s said about his mental state in the mid-’90s. “It’s not that I was unhappy back then," he reflected in 2006, "but I definitely was a younger man… reaching for the unknown, I guess, trying to find my place." That quest defines his peculiar 1996 solo debut, Return of the Frog Queen, an album that finds a spiritually awakened Enigk summoning the courage to reach beyond the blunt, soul-baring music SDRE had released and toward thematic grandeur his bandmates weren't yet prepared to grasp.
Christianity was never why Enigk left the band; it was how he began his journey of self-discovery. And Frog Queen—with its half-baked mysticism, charming introspection, and lofty musical ambitions—was the first milestone. Any celebrations of faith or a higher power were largely unrecognizable as such. "Songs that I’ve written about God, I am singing about in a language of my own heart, not one of an organized structure," Enigk once explained. The lyrics on Frog Queen have a poetic bent; the rhapsodic, soul-searching verses of “Explain” seem designed to stick in the subconscious. But some of the other songs scan as nonsense.
Written and recorded around the time of SDRE’s disbandment, the album exchanged the increasingly anachronistic sound of a rock band splitting the difference between Rites of Spring and U2 for timeless influences like Neil Young, Nick Drake, and Red House Painters. Acoustic guitar waltzes and intimate, unhurried musings replaced stark loud-quiet contrasts. A 21-piece orchestra filled a background once occupied by reverb and delay pedals. And production by Greg Williamson, who would go on to produce SDRE's transcendent comeback record How It Feels to Be Something On, gave Enigk's wispy croon enough space to expand and contract at will.
If Frog Queen was, on some level, a message to his former (and future) bandmates, the takeaway seemed to be, "It's not you—it's me." Yet the album feels anchored to the foundation of SDRE. Soft, swaying ballads like "Abegail Anne" and downtrodden odes like "Call Me Steam" are well suited to composer Mark Nichols' delicate arrangements, but Enigk's version of chamber pop still employs plenty of the vocal distortion and guitar pounding for which his band was known. At its best—from the quiet ache of "Lewis Hollow" to the anthemic splendor of "Shade and the Black Heart"—Frog Queen sounds like the unplugged record SDRE never made.
In less successful moments, the album reflects the limitations of a young songwriter deliberately leaving his comfort zone. "Carnival" is a strange combination of boilerplate guitar chords, overproduced vocals, and disorienting orchestral motifs. The plodding "Lizard" oversells its awkward verses, then overshoots the emotional mark during its brief crescendo, aiming for drama but delivering histrionics.
Frog Queen made an impression on those who heard it upon its initial release, in July of '96. CMJ described it as mysterious, enchanting, and “purely spiritual,” while otherspraised its originality. Sebadoh's Lou Barlow called it his favorite album of the year. But it didn't sell so well at first—at least not compared to SDRE releases—and wasn’t repressed. Instead, it became a cult classic and a footnote to Enigk’s long career, often mentioned in the samesentence as bassist Nate Mendel's departure to join the Foo Fighters or Hoerner’s move to a farm in rural Washington. Like many relics of pre-Web 2.0 indie rock, Frog Queen remained an underground favorite, its mythos proliferating through mix CDs, AIM away messages, and local scene forums.
Spotify curators and YouTube influencers may not have been clamoring for Sub Pop’s new reissue of the album, but its long absence from the cultural conversation has only made the experience of discovering or revisiting it more powerful. An record whose trackable influence seems lost to the archives of the Wayback Machine, Frog Queen helped define a sound that became ubiquitous in indie rock for years following its release. The rough-edged perfection of “Explain” is bound to speak to Neutral Milk Hotel cultists who pored over In the Aeroplane Over the Sea. Fans of Grizzly Bear’s Yellow House will surely recognize its predecessor in the pastoral folk-pop, sparse orchestration, and simple studio flourishes of "Call Me Steam" and "Return of the Frog Queen.” Although it doesn’t reach the heights of SDRE’s greatest albums, Enigk's labor of love deserves to live on—not just as a turning point in his life, but as an inspiration to younger risk-takers looking to make deeply personal, unabashedly flawed music of their own. | 2018-06-02T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-06-02T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Sub Pop | June 2, 2018 | 7.8 | cd3fad68-e2b2-472e-acf6-12627dbbb24b | Patric Fallon | https://pitchfork.com/staff/patric-fallon/ | |
The pair’s debut collaboration is an amorphous, droning flood that sounds like the advent of the end times. In its hopeless sound world lies a poignant condemnation of colonial violence. | The pair’s debut collaboration is an amorphous, droning flood that sounds like the advent of the end times. In its hopeless sound world lies a poignant condemnation of colonial violence. | Kevin Richard Martin / KMRU: Disconnect | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/krm-kmru-disconnect/ | Disconnect | Disconnect opens like a pit slowly forming in your stomach. A featureless, windswept expanse emerges from the silence, and distant booms ring out on the horizon. The first sign of life is far from reassuring: a chorus of sighs and exhalations, the universal sound of hopelessness. “Differences” and the subsequent “Arkives” never really pick up momentum, only accumulating more shades of gray as they sprawl onward across double-digit runtimes. These two tracks comprise half of Disconnect on their own, and Kevin Richard Martin and KMRU spend the remainder of the album stripping them down and peeling back the layers in classic dub fashion—until they resemble errant puffs of smoke escaping from a Rhythm & Sound track.
Anyone familiar with the works of the two artists shouldn’t be surprised by how grim their debut collaboration sounds. Martin is best-known for the mind-melting dubstep he makes as the Bug, but he’s recorded much of his best work over the last decade in a more ambient register, including his nerve-wracking solo album Sirens and the great Concrete Desert with drone legends Earth. KMRU, born Joseph Kamaru, broke out with 2020’s Peel on the late Peter Rehberg’s Editions Mego label, and has since amassed an eclectic if generally monochromatic catalog. These are musicians who thrive in blasted, apocalyptic sound worlds; Disconnect is a natural extension of both of their repertoires.
What’s a surprise on Disconnect is the inclusion of Kamaru’s vocals. His spoken-word passages expand on a theme he previously explored on his 2022 album Temporary Stored: the theft of African artifacts by Western museums and archives. “African traditions are passed across through apprenticeship and other oral traditions,” the Kenyan-born artist explains on “Arkives,” as opposed to the Western emphasis on written documents deemed “ontologically concrete.” On both albums, Kamaru argues that the keeping of African artifacts in Western museums distorts their meaning and purpose, as many of these items are “more than just objects” in their own cultures.
Martin first discovered Kamaru through a documentary and was attracted to his musical sensibilities as well as the quality of his voice. Across the four versions of “Differences” and “Arkives” that constitute the album’s second half, Martin chops Kamaru’s voice into tiny fragments, emphasizing the “ark” part of “archives”: It’s an appropriate choice for a record that sounds like the first showers of a cataclysmic flood. At first, it might escape a casual listener’s notice that these are six variations on two songs, not because the versions are radically different from each other, but because the sound palette is so consistent and so subdued that it all eventually blurs into an amorphous miasma.
What’s curious is that Kamaru’s vocals on “Arkives” are smeared in megaphone filters and delay effects that occasionally make them hard to understand. That initially seems like a strange decision for an album that’s consciously trying to make a point about colonial violence, but by presenting Disconnect’s two core tracks as mutable materials rather than as treatises written in stone, the two artists honor the malleability of tradition through the very medium they work in. Dub treats songs as living, breathing, changeable entities. Disconnect gets its message across through Kamaru’s words and through the music itself, whose darkness feels less oppressive thanks to the creators who speak life into it. | 2024-06-22T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2024-06-22T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Experimental / Electronic | Phantom Limb | June 22, 2024 | 7.3 | cd467c54-5857-4e64-a0c5-24bb154771e4 | Daniel Bromfield | https://pitchfork.com/staff/daniel-bromfield/ | |
With nods to the likes of Miles Davis and Pharoah Sanders, the inventive Canadian band sets aside its affinity for hip-hop and kindles a love of classic jazz. | With nods to the likes of Miles Davis and Pharoah Sanders, the inventive Canadian band sets aside its affinity for hip-hop and kindles a love of classic jazz. | BADBADNOTGOOD: Talk Memory | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/badbadnotgood-talk-memory/ | Talk Memory | BADBADNOTGOOD are sometimes dubbed “alt jazz,” a quick and easy tag, but not without truth. It was at a jazz program at Humber College in Toronto where the band came together and discovered a mutual affinity for hip-hop. Two early albums, BBNG and BBNG2, reinvented well-known rap songs as post-bop and lounge jams, connecting the two great American institutions from the opposite direction as jazz-head rap artists like Guru and Freestyle Fellowship. By 2015, BBNG had recorded a joint album with Ghostface Killah—the stoned grooves of Sour Soul gave Tony Starks his most replayable project of the last decade—and their résumé includes work with Kendrick Lamar and Tyler, the Creator, two more artists who enjoy amalgamating jazz and rap. After the dusty jukebox-soul and electronica of 2016’s eclectic IV, the band’s latest album, Talk Memory, is its tightest turn yet, presenting a group often defined by proximity to modern hip-hop in the idiom of more classic jazz sounds.
That doesn’t mean Talk Memory feels passé. The band deconstructs classic sounds, peers at their components, and rebuilds them with their own original parts. The velvety play and mildly psychedelic grooves are still present, but Talk Memory is also BBNG’s most compositionally complex record to date: It draws you in with vibrant hooks and melodic flourishes, then begs you to return and fully absorb its subtleties. Nine-minute opener “Signal From the Noise” eases the album to life with sounds beamed in from the cosmos, the spirit of Sun Ra looming overhead, before a simple but stirring piano riff emerges. The electric guitar underpinning the arrangement is indebted to Miles Davis’ plugged-in masterpieces of the 1970s, and the whole thing evolves into a cascading, polychromatic performance. Elsewhere, Leland Whitty’s swirling, kaleidoscopic saxophone leads “Open Channels,” a spiritual jazz number that nods heavily to Pharoah Sanders. The band that once saw antique sounds as something to be twisted and reformed now travel in the same lineage.
BADBADNOTGOOD made Talk Memory without founding member Matthew Tavares, who left the band in 2019. Because the core trio—Tavares, bassist Chester Hansen, drummer Alexander Sowinski—appeared in such harmony and typically shared credit, it’s always been more about the group dynamic than any soloist or bandleader. In the absence of Taveres’ synths, Hansen now provides an array of piano, organ, and synthesizers. With longtime collaborator Whitty on his second album as a full-time member, the band transitions into a post-Tavares existence without a palpable sense of loss.
The guests, though, are an undeniable asset. Three songs (plus one reprise) feature veteran Brazilian composer Arthur Verocai and his cadre of string instruments. BBNG’s music has always felt smoky and dim-lit, but Verocai’s arrangements add scope and romance to the cinematic “City of Mirrors.” The way the flowing strings complement the band on “Love Proceeding” approaches smooth-jazz serenity. Like Bird’s “bebop with strings” approach on Charlie Parker With Strings, or Kanye West’s recruitment of Jon Brion on Late Registration, Verocai brings extra wingspan to these compositions. Later, Terrace Martin’s alto sax leads the epic closer “Talk Meaning,” supplemented by Brandee Younger’s dreamy harp. The extended band plays fervently but never loses control.
The presence of the guests inspires BBNG to up its own game. “Unfolding (Momentum 73)” opens with the ambient sounds of Laraaji’s electric zither. A swirling keyboard melody plays beneath as Whitty—a melodic and inventive saxophonist in incredible form throughout the album—freewheels up top. Then, in a seamless transition, Whitty’s instrument begins to mirror the fluttering melody that has been present throughout. It’s an incredible sleight of hand that encapsulates the smoothness and imagination of these arrangements. BADBADNOTGOOD are known for turning tradition inside out, but Talk Memory is not just their finest album—it’s evidence of the historic appreciation that roots their reverence.
Buy: Rough Trade
(Pitchfork earns a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.)
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-10-11T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2021-10-11T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Jazz | XL | October 11, 2021 | 8 | cd4c66c4-1b86-4fb9-b876-2dc14ccad61f | Dean Van Nguyen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/dean-van nguyen/ | |
The appreciation of Madlib and Freddie Gibbs' new collaboration Piñata depends on the range of your hip-hop tastes and your familiarity with both artists' deep cuts. Funk-fusion and soul jazz breaks bubble and blister in the heat and Gibbs states the facts as he sees them. | The appreciation of Madlib and Freddie Gibbs' new collaboration Piñata depends on the range of your hip-hop tastes and your familiarity with both artists' deep cuts. Funk-fusion and soul jazz breaks bubble and blister in the heat and Gibbs states the facts as he sees them. | Madlib / Freddie Gibbs: Piñata | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/18930-freddie-gibbs-and-madlib-pinata/ | Piñata | The appreciation of Madlib and Freddie Gibbs' new collaboration Piñata depends on the range of your hip-hop tastes and your familiarity with both artists' deep cuts. Madlib's Remixes albums put his beats in a street-rap context, giving his esoteric, dusty-sample imprint to cuts like Kurupt's "Who Ride Wit Us" and the Noreaga verse on "Misery Loves Company". And while Gibbs has thrived when his voice cuts through updated G-funk or soul-chromed Southern bounce, he's also sounded at home on the boom-bap-leaning East Coast beats of Statik Selektah (Lord Giveth, Lord Taketh Away) and the more blunted second half of Baby Face Killa. The team unofficially known as MadGibbs is a somewhat unexpected pairing, maybe a bit outside the usual, but the notion of Gibbs spitting over Madlib's dank obscuro-soul breaks became easier to understand before Piñata even came out.
The question, then, isn't whether Gibbs and Madlib make a compatible match, but what that match winds up motivating Gibbs to say. Piñata isn't a major lyrical departure from the last-real-gangsta-standing attitude that's kept Gibbs defiantly his own unfiltered self over the last five years. But his tendency to let the beat inspire certain facets of his writing has resulted in a record that, true to the underheard yet memory-stirring undercurrents of Madlib's production source material, is fueled by a certain kind of grown-man reflection. There's a deep awareness of how the embattled dealer from Gary has and hasn't changed on the way to becoming an L.A.-based enthusiast's favorite—renowned enough to get Scarface and Raekwon on his record, but for reasons that run deeper than just having famous co-signs. Many of Gibbs' lyrics on Piñata ride a line between pride in his own resilient hustle and ambivalence about what he did to succeed—maybe not guilt, but at least a concerted effort to confront his colder impulses. His stories of a talented man making his way in a bleak environment are brought up without either glamorization or moralizing, but they still feel human. Funk-fusion and soul jazz breaks bubble and blister in the heat, throbbing like a running man's pulse, and Gibbs states the facts as he sees them.
Gibbs is nothing if not an anti-bullshit activist, even if it means casting the occasional doubt upon himself or staring down his own contradictions. There's a great line on "Deeper" where he abruptly gets introspective after he confronts a woman who got pregnant by another man while Gibbs was in jail—"Maybe you's a stank ho, maybe that's a bit mean/ Maybe you grew up and I'm still livin' like I'm sixteen"—and a taut verse on "Broken" that address the supposed irony of having a cop for a father ("I'm a crook and you crooked, that's all we had in common"). Those are just a couple highlights; so many of Piñata's best moments are fueled by this sense that Gibbs knows he did wrong but also knows that letting any remorse slip would've potentially made him look weak. There's also a bit of triumph in there somewhere, not in the fact of what he's done and seen, but in the basic fact of his still being around to relay these things. This is a record that sounds really lived-in, in both the sense that it's been steadily labored over and the sense that it's focused on the personal details that come with years of weighted memories.
There are other cuts that focus more on the man Gibbs is now than the situation that made him, and they don't lack for urgency, either. "Real" is Gibbs' Young Jeezy dis track, which stands out as razor's-edge wrath in a hip-hop world that mostly sticks to subtweeting and passive-aggressive maneuvers; that it's based in actual creative grievances and personal fallout instead of just hearsay and general disrespect only makes the lacerations deeper. Paired together, "Lakers" and "Knicks" draws a straight line from his current pilgrimage-paying L.A. transplant status back to the early-days nickel-bag hustle that first proved his motivation. Even when he's doing a smoker's anthem—the blissed-out "High," featuring a characteristically hyperactive Danny Brown—there's an efficiently punchy energy that makes him sound ready to take on all comers. It's the same kind of energy that puts him on the same level as Chef ("Bomb") and Mr. Scarface ("Broken") when it comes to vivid crime-life narrative, lets him play virtuoso shit-talk mentor to Domo Genesis and Earl Sweatshirt ("Robes"), and has him leave such a dominant impression that it makes the otherwise-solid title-track closer seem like a mood-breaking outlier simply because it goes too many bars without his voice.
The way Gibbs uses that voice in the context of the production that deserves special attention here. Gibbs' acknowledged debt to 2Pac is paid back with a versatile, musical flow that seeps into and builds up the structure of the Madlib beats beneath it; his tendency to use the same intonation for both intricately tight-knit verses and simple, to-the-point hooks highlights just how skilled he is at both. He went in and challenged himself to rap fluidly over under-quantized drums and succeeds to the point where it feels like he snaps them into place himself. And that'd be noteworthy enough if this didn't double as some of Madlib's most inspired production since his Beat Konducta 00s—with Gibbs' deep resonance sinking into spaced-out synth-prog ("Bomb"; "Uno"), air-suspension glide R&B ("Robes"; "Shame"), and butterfly-knife-wielding splatter-flick funk ("Scarface"; "Real"). He even gets in the spirit of the comedic interstitial skits that're Madlib's stock in trade; while the blaxploitation dialogue and trailer snippets are fitting enough (and add some faded film-grain quality to the proceedings), the goofy kazoo-synth tag at the end of "Robes" where Gibbs mutters barbs aimed at industry-dependent fools is its own justification for the teamup on just about every level. It doesn't matter if Gibbs and Madlib were once considered artists playing to different audiences -- united in their uncompromising, independent-as-fuck visions, they put together something hardcore hip-hop heads on both sides should feel. | 2014-03-13T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2014-03-13T02:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Madlib Invazion | March 13, 2014 | 8 | cd4ec4fd-3b6d-476c-89c8-1df01a100930 | Nate Patrin | https://pitchfork.com/staff/nate-patrin/ | null |
The Ottawa-Gatineau grindcore quintet Fuck the Facts can often switch styles two dozen times in a single song—often in the span of two minutes or less. But the real coup of their excellent new self-released album, Desire Will Rot, is an almost supernatural instinct for cohesion. | The Ottawa-Gatineau grindcore quintet Fuck the Facts can often switch styles two dozen times in a single song—often in the span of two minutes or less. But the real coup of their excellent new self-released album, Desire Will Rot, is an almost supernatural instinct for cohesion. | Fuck the Facts: Desire Will Rot | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/20790-desire-will-rot/ | Desire Will Rot | If you'd walked up to even the most ardent extreme metal fan in 1987 and posed the question "How far do you think this music can go?" chances are you'd have gotten a blank stare in response. At that time, Napalm Death, Carcass, Unseen Terror, and others had significantly upped heavy metal's ante by combining thrash and death metal with hardcore, crust- and anarcho-punk at inhumanly fast tempos to create what would eventually come to be known as grindcore. This new movement represented a kind of logical endpoint beyond which it seemed impossible to push. After all, how could music get any heavier than the unremitting abrasion of Napalm Death's first two in-studio appearances on the John Peel show?
So, as much as this music shook up existing boundaries, it made sense to assume that grindcore would flame out as a novelty trend after about five years due to lack of innovation. And yet, almost three decades later, we have to marvel at the breadth of a genre that has done the opposite of stagnate. Modern acts like Cephalic Carnage, Pig Destroyer, Antigama, and many others have brought myriad new dimensions to the form, and they continue to infuse metal with a sense of limitless possibility. Among them, Fuck the Facts has become so adept at stretching grindcore's parameters that one almost detects a sense of gamesmanship in the way the Ottawa-Gatineau quintet switches styles two dozen times in a single song—often in the span of two minutes or less.
The latest Fuck the Facts offering Desire Will Rot begins, seductively enough, in fairly standard full-blast mode. But it isn't long—28 seconds, to be exact—before the band's penchant for nuance rears its head. Double-bass drum volleys, pogo-inducing "death'n'roll" crunch reminiscent of Entombed, crossover thrash riffs, powerviolence, guttural hardcore, Yngwie Malmsteen-worthy guitar solos, and jazzy off-time grooves all come to brief fruition before melting away into whatever complementary shade of metal the band chooses next.
This segmented approach has typified metal since (if not before) Death’s Chuck Schuldiner employed jazz fusion-loving members of Cynic for 1991’s death-prog classic Human, but it isn’t staggering technical agility alone that distinguishes Fuck the Facts as exceptional. The real coup here is that Desire Will Rot never gives you whiplash because it doesn’t actually contain hairpin turns. Take a moment to let that sink in: to make this music flow to this degree requires an almost supernatural instinct for cohesion. That instinct, on display in spades here, is what arguably positions Fuck the Facts at grindcore's cutting edge. This is all the more impressive considering this album was actually recorded three years ago.
Originally intended for release as the main-course companion to the 2013 EP Amer, Desire Will Rot does bear some similarities to the style and tone of Amer’s seven songs, but it leans far less in the straight-ahead melodic-metal vein the band first explored on 2008’s Disgorge Mexico. Even those who are well familiar with Amer or the FTF catalog as a whole wouldn’t immediately think to connect the two releases. Desire Will Rot was conceived and recorded just two years after Fuck the Facts solidified its current five-piece lineup in time to make the joint LP/EP set Die Miserable and Misery (both released on the same day in 2011). The recent split-LP with Fistfuck, released this past May, gives us a glimpse into where FTF might be headed in the future, but it’s easy to see why the band is pushing Desire Will Rot, easily the more expansive of the two titles, as its quote-unquote actual new album.
Desire Will Rot captures a band that spent significant time gelling and growing as a creative unit. Where Fuck the Facts started out as a quasi-solo vehicle for bandleader-guitarist-engineer Topon Das, these days every member is expected, even required, to contribute to the writing process. It’s not often that we can describe a three-minute song as "epic," but the winding twists and turns of a tune like "Solitude" suggest that a bunch of cooks can work together in the same kitchen without stepping on one another’s toes. Indeed, this five-piece incarnation marks the latest in a series of significant milestones in the band’s history, namely: the addition of frontwoman Mel Mongeon in 2002 and Mathieu Vilandré’s later switch from guitar to drums. Each of these changes has drastically increased the band’s pool of assets.
Mongeon, although she now shares vocal duties with bassist Marc Bourgon, remains one of grindcore’s most instantly-recognizable vocalists. Her lyrics hint at a sense of unease within the realm of identity that never explicitly references a worldview shaped by Quebec’s relationships with the rest of Canada and the U.S. Nevertheless, a hazy feeling of clawing for one’s place permeates this music and sets Fuck the Facts’ brand of angst apart not only from other grind acts, but also its own early work, which was characterized more by Das’ sardonic sense of humor. Not to be overlooked, Mongeon’s artwork makes the physical copy of Desire Will Rot worth owning for those who like the music enough to seek additional overtones in her sumptuous—even dazzlingly—grim, visuals.
Vilandré, meanwhile, serves as the ultimate dual-threat weapon. Ever since he moved behind the kit for 2006’s Stigmata High-Five, his precise, assertive style elevated Fuck the Facts from a dirty little underground act to upstart world-contender status. On Desire Will Rot, though, his drumming reaches a level of fluidity that’s rare even among the genre’s elite. Vilandré also contributes guitar parts, and his understanding of guitar no doubt contributes to this album’s seamlessness as Das and second guitarist Johnny Ibay’s parts spill forth in an endlessly churning outpour of riffs. By the time the album arrives at "Circle", its four-part ambient denoument, those riffs have touched on so many elements that the presence of cello, piano, and noise atmospheres hardly seems foreign or unexpected. Grindcore, as Fuck the Facts prove so ably on Desire Will Rot, can apparently accommodate any ingredients provided the artist has the imagination to support them. | 2015-08-21T02:00:04.000-04:00 | 2015-08-21T02:00:04.000-04:00 | Metal | Noise Salvation | August 21, 2015 | 8 | cd4f5b91-91ca-4219-a3b2-565f6de79b09 | Saby Reyes-Kulkarni | https://pitchfork.com/staff/saby-reyes-kulkarni/ | null |
Across two long, imperceptibly evolving tracks, the veteran drone duo delivers a pair of luxuriant tonal sound baths. | Across two long, imperceptibly evolving tracks, the veteran drone duo delivers a pair of luxuriant tonal sound baths. | Growing: Diptych | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/growing-diptych/ | Diptych | As part of the Olympia punk scene in the late 1990s, Kevin Doria and Joe DeNardo knew how to make the most out of minimalism. Their two-decade about-face as Growing, from aggressive noise veterans to contemporary drone trailblazers, has stretched that rubric into some blissful territory. Formed in 2001, Growing began by taking the essential disembodiment of ambient music and—as their name hinted—fleshing it out. The dense drone sculptures and Earth-like amperage on albums like 2004’s Soul of the Rainbow and the Harmony of Light catered to doom heads and seekers of deep listening alike. Later albums such as Vision Swim veered off into a thousand different directions, but with Diptych, they return with focused vision, once again intent upon widening a portal to vast, amorphous worlds.
Like their last LP, 2017’s Disorder, the album comprises two tracks of around 20 minutes apiece. The hulking body of treated guitars, oscillators, and modular synthesizers of opener “Variable Speeds” hits like an overture. Conjuring creases of light cast onto metallic strata, it’s a luxuriant tonal sound bath. Where fellow noise anatomists such as Tim Hecker and Ben Frost might opt for erosion, Growing’s mottled patterning around a single chord builds up and outwards, like tinted ribbon being swathed around a towering pylon.
Auditory illusions abound, especially on “Down + Distance.” Filtering slow, methodical organ reminiscent of Kali Malone (in this case, effect-heavy guitars) with the swarming depths of Loscil, ricochets of sound invoke everything from distant choral music to the faint drift of roadworks. It’s all imagined, of course, but their careful psychoacoustic interventions wonderfully disrupt even the thought of living in a noise-cancelling world.
The duo’s catalog on Bandcamp features an anomaly among more obvious genre tags: “living music.” You could be forgiven for assuming it to be some furtive scene, but it is—by virtue of their inputting it—Growing’s very own nanogenre. Tracing the naturalistic psychedelia of their Kranky years to the organic feel of Disorder, whose drawn-out tremolo feels like whole-body breathing, the term checks out. The duo’s live-wire ambient predated the advent of brainwave entrainment—tones and frequencies that some claim can induce sleep, focus, and maximum efficiency—and now, the immersive, subtly pulsing sedation of Diptych feels almost like the closing of a circle.
In 2006, DeNardo—who is also a filmmaker, cinematographer, and photographer—spoke of the potential for discovery in the genre he and Doria continue to push forward. “Drone is one of those sounds that can communicate a lot of subtlety,” he said. “Pare everything down to one note and there’s a lot of harmonic ephemera.” The longer that note is sustained, the more details from the depths come to light. Fifteen years on, Diptych bears out the merits of that approach. By paring down and zooming in, it’s the most wide awake their living music has felt in years.
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-05-04T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2021-05-04T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Experimental / Metal / Rock | Silver Current | May 4, 2021 | 7.4 | cd5783ad-7c03-4e50-b4bf-fb4283f88382 | Brian Coney | https://pitchfork.com/staff/brian-coney/ | |
In the mid-1990s, Alex Chilton entered a Memphis studio to track a collection of deep R&B and pop covers. The results were fascinating and frustrating in equal measure. | In the mid-1990s, Alex Chilton entered a Memphis studio to track a collection of deep R&B and pop covers. The results were fascinating and frustrating in equal measure. | Alex Chilton: A Man Called Destruction | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/alex-chilton-a-man-called-destruction/ | A Man Called Destruction | Alex Chilton’s mid-1990s cover of the R&B novelty hit “What’s Your Sign Girl” opens with the once and future Big Star singer-songwriter playing a loosey-goosey lounge-pop guitar lick in clear defiance of the professionally tight rhythm section. The moment is gorgeously goofy, like Pavement covering Steve & Eydie, but then the vocals come in. “Capricorn, Sagittarius, Aquarius, Pisces, Gemini, Aries,” Chilton sings, trying his damnedest to make each astrological mouthful sound as melodious as they did on Danny Pearson’s 1978 original. “I’m a Capricorn, we believe in life and living, we trip on love and giving.” The song is still goofy, but no longer gorgeous. Rather, it’s grating and aggravating, like a B-side promoted to album cut.
Of course, Chilton’s obsession with astrology was legendary, going back to the 1960s, when he was a teen heartthrob singing “The Letter” and “Cry Like a Baby” with his first band the Box Tops. According to Chilton’s biographer Holly George-Warren, he would often refer to star charts to make professional decisions, including whether or not to give interviews: “We see this in stars who become popular at such a young age,” George-Warren said. “They can’t really process everything.” Was “What’s Your Sign Girl” intended as a commentary on his own reputation? Or is he playing the song straight? Chilton was a master of the inscrutable, yet A Man Called Destruction doesn’t always make the enigma especially compelling.
A Man Called Destruction is a collection of deep R&B and pop covers by a range of artists that includes New Orleans soul singer Chris Kenner, 1960s Italian rocker Adriano Celentano, L.A. pop duo Jan & Dean, and Polish composer Frédéric Chopin. There have been rumors that Chilton chose these tunes to thwart fans wanting something more in the vein of “The Ballad of El Goodo” or even “Holocaust”—something, that is, more like Big Star, a cult rock band that was in the early ’90s being reassessed as a major influence on acts as diverse as R.E.M., Teenage Fanclub, the Posies, and the entire Paisley Underground scene. Certainly Chilton had a strident contrarian streak that might compel him to zig instead of zag, but others claim these are songs he had grown up with, had loved, and simply wanted to sing with no regard for commercial viability. Maybe both sides are right, even if they romanticize the man in different ways.
Chilton had explored these sounds and genres before, most notably in the 1970s, when he and other locals—including local singer-songwriter-oddball Tav Falco and producer Jim Dickinson—were affectionately deconstructing Memphis music history, taking apart old rock and blues tunes, figuring out how they work, and then making them move differently. That interest motivated his first solo records, in particular 1979’s Like Flies on Sherbert and 1981’s Bach’s Bottom, both of which remain as defiant and weird as ever. But those records were the province of cratediggers in the ’90s, out of print and completely overshadowed by new Big Star reissues and a brief reunion chronicled on Columbia: Live at Missouri University 4/25/93. Clichés, Chilton’s first release after that wave of renewed interest, was an odd acoustic collection stemming from a tour of the Netherlands he made with Townes Van Zandt and Guy Clark, among other, un-likeminded singer-songwriters.
But a contract with the revived Ardent Records allowed Chilton to return to the Memphis studio where Big Star had recorded its three albums. It gave him the opportunity to assemble his own band, which included players from Stax and Hi Records as well as a jazz pianist whose biggest gig was in the lobby of the historic Peabody Hotel downtown. Released in 1995, A Man Called Destruction was his first real Memphis album in years, even taking its title from a nearly forgotten local figure: Howlin Wolf’s pianist William “Destruction” Johnson, so nicknamed for his emphatic style of playing. As Bob Mehr notes in the liners, that title may also refer to Chilton’s penchant for professional self-sabotage: “Most fans and critics took the title as a winking self-reference, an allusion to his reputation as a consistently mercurial and sometimes troublesome talent.”
Chilton had a fine ear for talent and corralled a band that couldn’t have turned in a bad performance. He emerges as a fine guitarist, whipcracking his riffs on the rambunctious instrumental “Boplexity,” and his energy on Celentano’s ’59 hit “Il Ribelle” is infectious, as though he knows you’re grooving to his twangy but fluent Italian. Opener “Sick and Tired” rolls along on a second line drum rhythm, evoking the Big Easy by way of the Bluff City. “New Girl in School,” a Jan & Dean B-side co-penned by Brian Wilson, churns up a chugging momentum over which Chilton’s falsetto soars. There’s something intriguing and endearing about these songs and these performances, when Chilton emerges as completely ingenuous in his affection for these disparate forms of pop music.
Elsewhere, that outsider naivete sounds strained or calculated; especially when he ventures into the kind of blues made popular on Beale Street. The band kick up a bit of seediness on “Devil Girl,” yet Chilton’s vocals lack bite and humor, even when he’s singing about her “cloven flip-flop.” A bonus track featuring double-tracked vocals and more cries of “Hail Satan!” sounds much more occultish, even a bit dangerous. “You Don’t Have to Go” makes Eric Clapton Unplugged sound like John Lee Hooker at his most lowdown, and “It’s Your Funeral,” based on Chopin’s funeral march, is a punchline lacking a set-up, although the previously unreleased “Why Should I Care/It’s Your Funeral” does provide a pretty good one, with Chilton caterwauling the tune from the 1960 film The Entertainer.
In that film, Laurence Olivier plays an embittered song-and-dance man named Archie Rice, whom Chilton cited as an influence in an interview with MTV News in 1999: “Archie Rice just kept coming up for me… Because that’s how I felt… Dead behind the eyes.” Chilton would make “Why Should I Care” a staple of his live shows in the late 1990s, when he was reuniting the Box Tops, but he never included it on an album or compilation until now. That song and its reference point reveal so much about Chilton’s state of mind at this stage in his career, whereas he’s elusive as ever on A Man Called Destruction. Each artistic decision could be interpreted in wildly different ways—as affectionate interpretation or piss take—which makes him something of a cypher on his own album, a blank entity into which listeners can foist their own ideas about the man called Alex Chilton. Destruction is, appropriately, fascinating and frustrating in equal measure. | 2017-08-29T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-08-29T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Omnivore | August 29, 2017 | 6.7 | cd587901-2a00-4bab-8452-aa2c88ee598c | Stephen M. Deusner | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stephen-m. deusner/ | |
Air's soundtrack to the restored version of Georges Méliès silent film Le Voyage Dans la Lune (A Trip to the Moon) finds the duo trying to bring some artistry back into their music. | Air's soundtrack to the restored version of Georges Méliès silent film Le Voyage Dans la Lune (A Trip to the Moon) finds the duo trying to bring some artistry back into their music. | Air: Le Voyage Dans la Lune | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/16255-le-voyage-dans-la-lune/ | Le Voyage Dans la Lune | Notions of cool figure strongly in the world of Jean-Bénoit Dunckel and Nicolas Godin of Air. "Philip Glass is really harmonious to me: the harmonies are really simple, really amazing, really cool," said Dunckel, in a recent interview with the pair for Pitchfork's 5-10-15-20 series. "They were using guitars and bass but in a mechanical way, as if they were using a sequencer," said Godin, of the Strokes' first album, before adding: "That was very cool." The members of Air have always been immaculately turned-out, both in person and on record. Their music rarely has a hair out of place. Sometimes this works in their favor. The impeccably shaved-down prog tendencies of "How Does It Make You Feel?" from 10,000 Hz Legend shows how effective it can be to take the wilder whims of a genre and thoroughly de-clutter them.
That sense of nonchalance, executed with total control, has long been Air's M.O. It's a kind of stoicism shared with artists like Ron Mael of Sparks and Chris Lowe of Pet Shop Boys.-- a rigid, and admirable, commitment to a singular strain of projected being. When Portishead became a coffee-table favorite, they disappeared for years, overhauling their sound with the jagged lines of Third. Air went in the other direction. They were too locked-down in the detached journey they were committed to, resulting in bland and dispassionate albums like 2009's Love 2. This record, a soundtrack to the restored, hand-colored version of the classic Georges Méliès silent film Le Voyage Dans la Lune (A Trip to the Moon), is a diversion of sorts. It offers Air a chance to bring some of the artistry back into their music, to work at rediscovering the elegance within the sleek surface drift they often lackadaisically flop into.
Le Voyage Dans la Lune is less light than its predecessor. There's a brawny thickness to the guitar line in "Astronomic Club", a spine-tickling ghostliness passing through "Décollage", a pile-up of electronics marching with resolve on "Sonic Armada". It's never less studied than Dunckel and Godin's prior work, but it feels like Méliès' imagery may have inspired them to rediscover the playful side of their personalities-- the side that once prompted them to release a remix album titled Everybody Hertz. By the time they got to Love 2, the understated joy of songs like "Kelly Watch the Stars" had all but vanished, replaced by vapid and overly serious stodge like "So Light Is Her Footfall".
After coasting in half-realized bliss for so long, Dunckel and Godin appear to be reaching into the past in order to go forward. In the 5-10-15-20 interview, Godin talks about the curse of making "shit records" after you turn 40. Here, his coping mechanism for that, on a handful of tracks, at least, is to pluck a few ideas from the playful Air on prior records. "Parade" is all bright Paddy Kingsland-inspired analog synth bursts, chirping birdsong, and ruptured drum parts that bring the track to a stuttering halt. But it's a retrogressive step, something this band has done before but better, fuller, and with a greater sense of direction. Here, it feels like a pleasant yet unremarkable switch back to the past, the sound of Air staring into a half-empty well of ideas, on the verge of becoming their own tribute band.
It's a shame, because the collaboration with Victoria Legrand of Beach House on "Seven Stars" seemed to bode well for this album. The percussion-heavy frame provides the edge that prevents the softer intonations from becoming too fluffy. There's a marrying of militaristic thrust, snug vocal cooing, and a gloriously silly spoken-word countdown halfway through. For a minute it feels as if there are a few cracks in the veneer, which is generally the space from which all the best Air material's gathered. When they lower their guard and open their music up to unexpected elements, it causes the professorial approach to melt away. It makes sense that Dunckel was a mathematics teacher. Air's songs often sound like formulas spread out upon a page, with its makers puzzling over them, trying to figure out why they don't quite add up.
Elsewhere, Le Voyage Dans la Lune is an unsteady mixture of partially inspired notions reaching for a purpose. It's a bountiful collection of loose ideas, hanging in the breeze without forging forward in any meaningful direction. "Who Am I Now?" is representative of the problem, with Au Revoir Simone providing nebulous vocals that touch on the kind of spectral folk the Ghost Box label so effectively delivers. But this feels like a facsimile of that work, and a poorly made one at that. It's too calculated, too studious. It's music reduced down to its raw components with all the mystery torn out. There are parts of the record that get back to the potential this band once possessed-- a slight return to interlacing all the best parts of Moog demonstration records, hoary old prog moves, and extravagantly deluxe production techniques. But back then they made it seem so easy. Here, it feels like they're trying too hard. | 2012-02-08T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2012-02-08T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Electronic | Astralwerks | February 8, 2012 | 5.7 | cd5fab4c-4509-41c9-857c-87d72815b728 | Nick Neyland | https://pitchfork.com/staff/nick-neyland/ | null |
Using pitched-down vocals, the Australian singer-songwriter finds new folds and textures in traditional pop songwriting with the help of producer Tobias Jesso Jr. | Using pitched-down vocals, the Australian singer-songwriter finds new folds and textures in traditional pop songwriting with the help of producer Tobias Jesso Jr. | Emma Louise: Lilac Everything | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/emma-louise-lilac-everything/ | Lilac Everything | Emma Louise’s enchanting new album Lilac Everything is the product of a handful of successful gambles. The Australian singer-songwriter tried to break herself out of a funk by booking an impulsive flight from Melbourne to Mexico, where she found the inspiration she needed to write most of Lilac Everything. She sent a cold pitch with demos attached to Tobias Jesso Jr., the pop balladeer who’s transitioned to working behind the scenes since releasing his debut album Goon in 2015, and he liked them so much he agreed to produce her album in full. And when Louise and Jesso were just about to finish their sessions together, she asked him to pitch her vocals down, dragging them out of her natural soprano range and into a full, creamy baritone. This series of bold moves has led Louise into uncharted territory; the stark, solitary crooning of Lilac Everything is a far cry from the art-pop that filled albums like 2016’s Supercry.
Louise first played with pitching down her voice while recording her first album, but the idea sat on the shelf until Lilac Everything was nearly complete. “I didn’t want it to be like another character or anything like that,” said Louise in a recent interview. “I recorded it on tape and we slowed it down and I called that voice ‘Joseph,’ and I was like, “I want to do a whole album like this one day!’” She doesn’t sound unrecognizable, but the lower pitch imbues her singing with a dense, mournful quality. (I heard the elegant “Never Making Plans Again” and thought about Adele’s robust lower register, a fitting touchpoint given the diva’s work with Jesso on 25 highlight “When We Were Young.”)
While Louise may not have written and recorded with Joseph in mind, there are a few moments on Lilac Everything in which her original tracking taps into her new voice’s masculine potential. She lags behind the beat and peppers verses with wordless ad-libs on “Falling Apart,” inhabiting a relationship that’s inching towards failure; when she opens “Wish You Well” by sighing “There she is,” you can imagine some bearded loner daydreaming about a woman until the perspective shifts midway through the verse.
The heart of Lilac Everything is the sort of sturdy, elemental pop songwriting that made Jesso a minor star a few years ago, and as a producer, he’s happy to get out of Louise’s way until she reaches an emotional climax. Songs like “Falling Apart” and “Mexico” spring from austere verses—the former little more than a tip-toeing bassline, the latter hanging on diaphanous synths and distant piano chords—into fuzzy, blown-out choruses, and they feel like hard-earned moments of catharsis. The heartbroken melody of “Never Making Plans Again” is afforded space to gracefully unfurl. The clouds even part just as you’re starting to feel sleepy: “Gentleman” is a jaunty, sample-flecked take on a Joni Mitchell travelogue, and the deliberate pacing of “Shadowman” is disrupted by spasming electronics.
Louise’s writing is at its most impactful when she’s fighting to make sense of an ending. What are you supposed to do and say when a relationship has run its course? Sometimes you can see clouds on the horizon: “I feel like one of us is gonna end up far behind the finish line,” she concludes on “Falling Apart.” “I can see it shaping up/Could be some kind of disaster, but I can’t help but wanna see it through.” She finds the grace to wish a lover happiness on “Wish You Well,” even as she admits she’d embrace a fantasy if it meant another chance; on “Mexico,” she has to flee across the ocean to find the peace she’s seeking. And on “Never Making Plans Again,” she’s compelled to give up the careful life she’s led—one spent drawing up strategies “in the schoolyard dirt”—and embrace impulse, if only because she can’t hurt any worse than she does now.
Lilac Everything represents its own kind of ending, albeit a happier one. Louise has made an album on which Joseph takes the lead, and she made it in collaboration with an artist she deeply respects. But you can’t chalk its success up to a vocal gimmick or a star’s touch behind the boards: her writing and singing has never felt this dramatic nor plumbed this depth of emotion. That new level of quality is going to serve her well, even if this ends up being Joseph’s final moment in the spotlight. | 2018-09-19T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-09-19T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | Liberation / AWAL | September 19, 2018 | 7.6 | cd604405-ede3-47d2-b15b-192a621b158f | Jamieson Cox | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jamieson-cox/ | |
The titanic drone metal duo returns with Steve Albini for an enormous, meticulous, back-to-basics album that shows just how compelling those basics can be. | The titanic drone metal duo returns with Steve Albini for an enormous, meticulous, back-to-basics album that shows just how compelling those basics can be. | Sunn O))): Life Metal | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/sunn-o-life-metal/ | Life Metal | Sunn O))) albums have tended to be summits where the luminaries of noise and volume gather for electric communion. Almost as soon as the duo of Greg Anderson and Stephen O’Malley moved beyond the simple amplifier worship of their early days, they began recruiting peers to help build audacious records, as high on concepts as they were on decibels.
Noise paragon Merzbow added to the early bedlam, while misfit rock demigod Julian Cope read a poem that inserted Sunn O))) into a continuum of pan-cultural myths to begin their awesome if inchoate White volumes in 2003. Anderson and O’Malley infamously locked Xasthur’s Malefic in a coffin for their breakthrough LP, Black One, and recruited a few of their own idols for 2009’s elegantly textured Monoliths & Dimensions. They’ve made records with Boris, Scott Walker, and Ulver and employed black metal icon Attila Csihar of Mayhem as their lead speaker and performance artist in residence for a decade. Sunn O)))’s liner notes scan like the weirdo metal equivalent of some fantasy sports roster.
Sometimes, though, all those guests have clouded out the essence of Sunn O))). Anderson and O’Malley share a rare chemistry; they are able to work through extended riffs at famously testudinal paces and high volumes with absolute control. But Life Metal—the first of two Sunn O))) albums planned for 2019—rectifies the oversight. On four tracks that invoke metaphors about landscapes carved by geologic deep time and references to the music of the spheres, Anderson and O’Malley foreground their seismic relationship and their shared ability to make 12 or 25-minute spans of slow-motion drone feel like a historic religious ritual.
To be clear, Anderson and O’Malley are not alone here. Life Metal’s easiest sales pitch is the presence of producer Steve Albini, whose ability to make very loud records is fabled. In this partnership that’s as obvious as it is overdue, Albini captures the pair with perfect detail, so that you can practically feel their fingers crawling down their guitars’ necks at the end of “Aurora.” Silkworm’s Tim Midyett galvanizes the drones with his aluminum-neck bass, and longtime contributor T.O.S. Nieuwenhuizen again adds electronics. There is a trace of pipe organ, luminous and ominous, from minimalist composer Anthony Pateras beneath “Troubled Air,” too.
Perhaps most striking is Icelandic cellist and composer Hildur Guðnadóttir, who hesitantly sings verses borrowed from ancient Aztec poets during the colossal opener “Between Sleipnir’s Breaths,” her voice chipped into the drone like a petroglyph on a canyon wall. She also provides a steady cello hum on the colossal 25-minute closer, “Novae.”
But these are all Easter eggs that you’ll find in later listens. Again and again, what’s immediately striking about Life Metal is Anderson and O’Malley’s astonishing grace and dexterity with such heavy decibel loads. “Aurora” employs a classic Sunn O))) stratagem: cycling through the steps of a riff and webbing together the spaces between notes with rays of decay and feedback. Each note lands as another stomp to the chest, each roaring gap between them like an attempt to massage away the pain. For all the talk about Sunn O)))’s subterranean tones, the guitars here seem to sparkle with overtones and harmony. It’s the sensation of stumbling through a cavernous room in search of a light switch and instead finding a glowing James Turrell installation tucked in a corner. At its best, Life Metal can be breathtaking by surprise, with stunning moments nested inside expected settings.
One of the many running jokes about Sunn O)) is that anyone with the right gear and enough patience can make this music, slowly droning on in gradually shifting lockstep. And sure, in the late 1990s, when Sunn O))) was a bit of an excuse to get high and play low, maybe that was true. But O’Malley has spent the last several years playing and premiering the delicate music of composer Alvin Lucier, where tiny differences in pitch and time create hypnotic pulses so faint you doubt they’re there. Sunn O))) have rarely sounded as delicate as the later spans of “Novae,” their guitars wrapping around Guðnadóttir’s cello with the patience of a boa constrictor. It is a testament to O’Malley’s expanding music résumé.
Sunn O))) excel at sloganeering to the point of propaganda, using their particular obsession with volume as a sharp branding tool. Their maxim, for instance, has long been “Maximum volume yields maximum results,” while assorted T-shirts ask “Ever breathe a frequency?” or remind us to “Praise Iommi.” But Life Metal underlines the point of it all: These four pieces are best suited to take over a room, to fill a venue as massive as the sound itself and, in turn, to be felt. They vibrate, pulse, and quiver. In a time where we experience so much media on a seemingly microscopic scale, from earbuds to smartphone screens, Life Metal takes up a large space, where devastating waves of sound that make actual ceilings crumble somehow become a restorative listening experience. Depending on what you need, Life Metal is, at maximum volume, a shield or a cape, a timely exercise in either retreating from the outside world or squaring up to it without blinking. | 2019-04-25T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-04-25T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Experimental / Metal | Southern Lord | April 25, 2019 | 8.4 | cd621b49-93c0-46fb-9d59-6dde8c172c4a | Grayson Haver Currin | https://pitchfork.com/staff/grayson-haver currin/ | |
The new album from the ambient baritone guitar and turntable duo is the most fully formed and expressive to date. Its recurring themes and phosphorescent textures evoke an engaging kind of ambiguity. | The new album from the ambient baritone guitar and turntable duo is the most fully formed and expressive to date. Its recurring themes and phosphorescent textures evoke an engaging kind of ambiguity. | The Fun Years: Heroes of the Second Story Walk Up | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/23034-heroes-of-the-second-story-walk-up/ | Heroes of the Second Story Walk Up | Think of the Fun Years as Ratatat, only inverted. Like the feline-sampling Brooklyn bros, the bicoastal duo emerged a little more than a decade ago, offering the allure of an oddball instrumental configuration—a baritone guitarist with a sharp melodic sensibility and a crucial producer with a knack for situating that sound in some deeply absorbing context. But where Ratatat favored samples and beats and athletic themes, the Fun Years instead sprawled, sculpting soundtracks for the gloaming and for daybreak, or music to be played between Ratatat’s up-all-night anthems. Isaac Sparks used turntables to create haunted landscapes populated by soft drones, disembodied voices, and textural phantoms, overlaid by Ben Recht’s circular guitar lines, which always suggested some deep, unspoken longing. The Fun Years were a salve for when the lights weren’t quite out, but the party was inarguably over.
The engrossing new Heroes of the Second Story Walk-Up at long last perfects that premise and promise. It is the most fully formed and expressive of the Fun Years’ ten albums to date and an immersive emotional Rorschach test, where each moment scans differently depending on what you bring to it. A forty-five-minute suite of seven interwoven pieces, Walk-Up moves like a long piano sonata, where each movement seems to comment on the same subject but never in quite the same way. The approach enables an emotional breadth and accessibility that can be rare in these arcane corners of instrumental music, making Walk-Up the kind of record you want to crawl into and inhabit for a spell.
During the second movement, for instance, the guitars chime as though marching toward some grand post-rock climax. Just beneath, though, there’s a teeming bed of strained static and hiss, lurking in wait. The signals grow and eventually overtake those guitars, crawling across them and forcing them into submission, like ivy spreading over stone ruins. By the time Recht’s guitar creeps through the electronics for the third movement, they’re anxious and desperate, with tense minor notes reflecting prior failures. But they begin to harmonize with Sparks’ choir of electronics, shaping a two-player symphony that somehow sounds hellish and heavenly at once. And are those deep bass drum clips pounding beneath part five—aptly dubbed “Deepest Xylophone”—the sound of approaching thunder or a calming pulse? Walk-Up’s ambiguity is its most rarified accomplishment, an instrument that lets you take your own temperature just by listening.
The Fun Years have been working at this admixture for years, devoted to the perfection of a singular sound and form. They’re clear descendants of Touch Records and producer-composers such as guitarist Christian Fennesz and turntablist Philip Jeck, for whom timbre has sometimes seemed like the compositional pinnacle itself. But they’ve learned over time to give these ethereal sounds structure and motion, so that listening to a series of drones and spirals feels more active than merely drifting. On Walk-Up, they unlock what has made Tim Hecker astonishingly popular in recent years—textural phosphorescence that’s occasionally overpowering and always open to interpretation.
As the needle or the cursor nears the end of Walk-Up, you may start to anticipate some rhapsodic finish, some radiant climax that pulls all the emotions of the first forty minutes into one honed point. That expectation is understandable, a vestige of the quintessential post-rock and soundtrack scripting that also inform the Fun Years. But Recht and Sparks avoid the temptation of tidiness, choosing instead to stay true to script and let these feelings fade into the middle distance as one. Recht militantly strums one sharp chord again and again, as Sparks’ circuits run their course and empty into a series of fantastic glissandi that stretch, in the end, like an auditory ellipsis. It is a pragmatic conclusion, an honest admission that all these conflicting urges and experiences are only mercury, anyway. There is no triumph, no transcendence, no abject despair—or, depending on your momentary outlook, a little bit of all of it. | 2017-03-24T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-03-24T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Spring Break Tapes | March 24, 2017 | 8.1 | cd6c2346-0a5e-402b-ba4e-97484b389923 | Grayson Haver Currin | https://pitchfork.com/staff/grayson-haver currin/ | null |
The leader of a new pack of fully modern jazz singers explores the historical context and modern possibilities of every song she sings, even the deepest American standards. | The leader of a new pack of fully modern jazz singers explores the historical context and modern possibilities of every song she sings, even the deepest American standards. | Cécile McLorin Salvant: The Window | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/cecile-mclorin-salvant-the-window/ | The Window | When the jazz vocalist Cécile McLorin Salvant sings “Somewhere” on her fifth album, The Window, she approaches the American standard with complete knowledge of its monumental past—and its possibilities in the present. Over 60 years after its debut as a central number in West Side Story, “Somewhere” stands among the last century’s most-covered numbers, as one generation after another finds beauty to its promise of a place where they might fit in. So how does an artist in 2018 make “Somewhere” sound new? That’s the question Salvant and pianist Sullivan Fortner pose. After Fortner sneaks a few bustling bars of West Side Story’s “America” into the intro (a wink to the crowd at New York’s Village Vanguard, where this cover and another quarter of the album were recorded), the pair interrogate the tune and its guarantee of a safe haven.
Arguably the leader in a resurgent scene of fully modern jazz singers, Salvant makes great tonal leaps throughout “Somewhere.” She sounds playful at the beginning, as though acknowledging the convention of past jazz masters interpreting it. But soon, she sings those two syllables like they’re a grim punchline. Near the end, she imbues it with the melancholy of a daydream she knows will never come true. Salvant understands the song as quintessentially American, an aspirational immigrant tune—“Somewhere… we’ll find a new way of living.” To make it sound relevant for our moment, she introduces the idea that “somewhere” might actually be anywhere but here.
Among Salvant’s most distinguishing artistic traits is how she makes those tonal shifts not just exciting but meaningful. Her craft is undeniable, but built into her craft is the freshness of encountering each tune as though for the first time, figuring it out in the moment from one note to the next. She sings in conversation with every song, its lyrics, and its historical context. Salvant accomplishes that not only by using her voice to comment on lyrics while she delivers them but also by developing a diverse, daring repertoire. On The Window, she sings French cabaret, American showtunes, pop standards, and deep soul and blues cuts. She covers Nat King Cole and Brazilian songwriter Dori Caymmi, Cole Porter and jump blues pianist Buddy Johnson. She savors the spaces between styles, between lines, between notes.
Take The Window’s first two tracks. Salvant opens with a gently psychedelic cover of “Visions,” from Stevie Wonder’s 1973 album, Innervisions. Fortner introduces the song with a set of vertiginous piano chords, as though leading us down a dark staircase into a basement nightclub. Salvant remains on the street, dreaming of a place—another somewhere—where “hate’s a dream and love forever stands…. Or is this a vision in my mind?” She never answers the question, but her voice has the steadiness of someone who wants to believe. Salvant follows it with “One Step Ahead,” a love song from an early Aretha Franklin record. The shift from social issues to romantic maneuvering seems jarring at first. But Salvant finds new implications in the song, not only by increasing the tempo to a full sprint but by placing it in the new context of this moment in American history. “I’m only one step ahead of heartbreak, one step ahead of misery,” she sings with an almost frantic determination.
Salvant has found a fine match in Fortner, a New Orleans native who has played with the likes of Wynton Marsalis, John Scofield, and Paul Simon. He doesn’t accompany her so much as join in the conversation she’s having with these songs, occasionally even arguing with her about them. He toggles between the blues and jazz and classical figures with dizzying fluidity during “I’ve Got Your Number,” while his tectonic bass chords for “By Myself” make it seem like the ground is constantly shifting beneath Salvant. And when it comes to songs, it is: Salvant sings with the understanding that no tune is ever set in stone, even one as frequently sung as “Somewhere.” On The Window, she excels at keeping every possibility open all at once. | 2018-10-04T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-10-04T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Jazz | Mack Avenue | October 4, 2018 | 7.8 | cd7e68b5-5384-42db-a39e-e5af150c0c61 | Stephen M. Deusner | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stephen-m. deusner/ | |
Heems and Riz MC follow up last year’s politically charged Cashmere with an EP that shows off their range with a loose and playful energy. | Heems and Riz MC follow up last year’s politically charged Cashmere with an EP that shows off their range with a loose and playful energy. | Swet Shop Boys: Sufi La EP | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/23298-sufi-la-ep/ | Sufi La EP | On Swet Shop Boys’ debut LP, Cashmere, the duo of Heems (ex-Das Racist) and Riz MC (Rogue One, a couple episodes of “Girls”) broached issues affecting the South Asian diaspora. Suffused in their rhymes were passionate threads about racism that Heems and Riz tackled with nuance, empathy, and humor. Perhaps most importantly, they also wrote bangers in the process; cuts like “T5,” “No Fly List” and “Zayn Malik” were clearly built for car stereos more than dissertation workshops.
With the Sufi La EP, Heems and Riz have now turned their attention to lighter fare. They draw more inspiration from Kid ’n Play than Public Enemy across six tracks of mostly party-rap powered by Redinho’s South Asian sample flips. Riz and Heems still have dense, double-time bars and unhurried punch lines, respectively, though Riz hangs back a bit on these songs, while Heems ventures out on his own. The most noticeable difference, though, are the lower stakes—a loose, playful energy that treads a thin line between heartfelt camaraderie and just fucking around.
Despite these ambitions, Sufi La still has plenty of high points. The EP’s lead single, “Thas My Girl,” manages to stick the landing where the duo’s previous attempts at party anthems failed. The aptly-named opening number, “Anthem,” serves as a theme song of sorts, with Heems bragging about Riz’s successes (“He went from acting unruly, now he acting in movies”) and screaming “fuck the Pet Shop Boys” with all the swagger of a cartoon villain. Riz tries to match his bravado but toward the end of his verse, can’t help but dip into self-reflection, wondering if he’s been held back by his ethnicity or benefitted from its novelty (“I think, what if I was fairer skinned, had less of the melanin?/Would I get more work or would I not be worth anything?”). It’s a signature Swet Shop Boys move: a string of boasts followed by a contemplative sigh.
“Birding,” a solo Heems endeavor, is easily the goofiest song on the EP and one of its best, even without Riz to play foil. Inspired by the Mughal emperors’ pastime of birdwatching, the song’s minimal beat, built from little more than a bird call and shuffling drums, feels like an airy response to the current flute-rap zeitgeist. Heems ends nearly all of his couplets here with a species of bird, finding both obvious puns (“I’m on the block like I’m coke or heroin/Fit very colorful, tricolored heron”) and more tongue-in-cheek constructions (“She don’t like you, she said you was a peasant/She said I’m classy like a ring-necked pheasant”).
Not every track on Sufi La clicks. “Zombie” sounds like a sequel to the tabla-heavy “Half Moghul Half Mowgli,” though its central conceit—immigrant-hating nativists cast as the walking dead—feels a bit ham-fisted. Album closer “Need Moor” also falls a bit flat as the pair provide meta-commentary on their own lifestyle, weaving a cautionary tale about what unchecked greed and libido can do to a touring musician. It’s a fine rap song, but their observations on fame feel rather pat compared to, say, Vince Staples’ recent explorations of the topic.
Sufi La can’t help but feel a bit unrefined next to the group's more polished full-length. The rapping here is noticeably less sharp, so much so that it’s easy to imagine many of these songs didn’t make the cut for Cashmere. But Sufi La serves as a reminder that Heems and Riz MC have range—that neither fit neatly into a box as joke-rapper or conscious-rapper. But just like the rest of us, Swet Shop Boys sometimes need a break from politics. | 2017-05-31T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-05-31T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Customs | May 31, 2017 | 6.9 | cd8460e0-c2e5-46ca-9c47-9f1958e7b2f4 | Mehan Jayasuriya | https://pitchfork.com/staff/mehan-jayasuriya/ | null |
On his debut LP ilp, producer/singer Kwes’ gentle songwriting sensibilities are unable to keep up with his exploratory beat making and the result is too often a mismatch. | On his debut LP ilp, producer/singer Kwes’ gentle songwriting sensibilities are unable to keep up with his exploratory beat making and the result is too often a mismatch. | Kwes: ilp | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/18674-kwes-ilp/ | ilp | For most of his career, the British producer and singer Kwes has done his work in the background. He mixed records for the xx in their early days and produced for his friend Mica Levi, Hot Chip’s Joe Goddard and Mercury award winner Speech Debelle. He was talented enough to catch Damon Albarn’s ear and was one of the musicians selected to travel to the Congo for the DRC Music project, comfortably collaborating without the pressure that comes with being center stage.
The spotlight shifted onto Kwes in 2012 when he released “B_shf_l”, a hyper-endearing R&B song that helped to break him as a solo artist in early 2012. But even after that, Kwes continued to focus on collaboration, working with Bobby Womack and the British songstress Eliza Doolittle as well as staging a series of operas in collaboration with Peroni brewery. Meanwhile, his music itself has ended up in some surprising places, most recently turning up as a sample on Pusha T’s "Who I Am".
Kwes, then, seems capable of working at a faster clip for and with others than he can as a solo artist. His debut album, ilp, has been about four years in the making, partly due to a six or seven month period of creative block. Records that take a long time to make often result in an enormous patchwork of influences and ilp is no exception: the record reflects a whole host of sensibilities, from the pastoral electronica of early Four Tet, to the traditional R&B of Jessie Ware and the delicate production sensibilities of someone like Sampha, as well as more recently absorbed ties to Oneohtrix Point Never and Brian Wilson. On ilp, Kwes is trying to solve a tough creative riddle: How can an experimental producer with a love for so many different styles of music emphasize his earnest, understated songs while still allowing himself the freedom to explore?
One strategy that Kwes employs is the seemingly straightforward pop song, rebuilt from the ground up. This approach is epitomized by “B_shf_l", which appears again here to open the album. The song remains magnificent: its real accomplishment is using the experimental electronic music Kwes favors to recreate and recontextualize the feel of classicist pop. It’s only once you focus pretty closely that you realize “B_shf_l” is like nothing you’ve ever heard before. “Flower” and “Rollerblades” are "B_shf_l"’s cousins, well-meaning pop songs that don’t quite have the snap of that first single.
Kwes combines his two very different skill sets most successfully on the album’s two longest songs, both of them anthemic, metaphysical explorations nestled in thorny, elaborate musical structures. “Cablecar” is an eight minute treatise of found sound and heartbreaking writing, a delicate, difficult song that slowly reveals itself over the course of multiple listens. And “Purplehands” takes its operative idea from the Brian Wilson influence that Kwes has been talking up recently, with an exploration of food and colors serving as an elegant way to talk about love.
But ilp falters on its shorter songs. Kwes frequently talks about the need for restraint and it’s clear that’s something that he struggles with in his own work. His songs have habit of getting mired, or lost entirely within the context of his ambient, occasionally overwrought music. A good example can be found in the transition between “Flower", and “Hives"; The former is a startlingly delicate love song, the latter a static-driven instrumental. Both tracks are worthwhile but they require wholly different modes of listening and the transition from one to the other is off-putting.
The problem with ilp then is that it's not sure what kind of experience it wants to give you, be it pop or ambient, easy or difficult listening. Kwes the singer is too often overwhelmed by Kwes the producer—he places his voice in the background much of the time, allowing instrumental techniques to obscure, rather than illuminate, the subject of his songs. “Broke” is devastating lyrically but while the music adds to the atmosphere at the beginning of the song, the two elements soon lose track of one another. The track loses momentum as a result, and ends up feeling incomplete.
It can feel difficult to criticize an artist as flagrantly sincere and musically talented as Kwes—this is a guy who caps off his debut album with song dedicated to the love between his grandparents, after all. But as it turns out, those two qualities, the earnestness of the lyrics and the shifting quality of the music, combine to eventually thwart ilp’s success*.* Kwes’s gentle songwriting sensibilities are unable to keep up with his exploratory beat making and the result is too often a mismatch that ends up leaving the listner at a loss. | 2013-10-24T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2013-10-24T02:00:01.000-04:00 | Experimental | Warp | October 24, 2013 | 6.3 | cd8780eb-fb0b-4580-a5fa-cc8615467183 | Jonah Bromwich | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jonah-bromwich/ | null |
After a raft of free mixtapes and years after “Teach Me How To Jerk” blew up on MySpace, Audio Push return with their first for-sale release. | After a raft of free mixtapes and years after “Teach Me How To Jerk” blew up on MySpace, Audio Push return with their first for-sale release. | Audio Push: The Stone Junction | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21825-the-stone-junction/ | The Stone Junction | Oktane and Price of Audio Push got their first taste of the music biz and misnomers back in the MySpace era when their dance-inspired song “Teach Me How To Jerk” blew up on the social networking site. Teenagers at the time, the two kids from Southern California’s Inland Empire region were swept up in a major label feeding frenzy and signed to Interscope in 2009. Articles popped up describing jerkin’—a descendant of clowning and krumping before it—as a “movement” and Audio Push (then known as “The P.U.S.H.”) also became reluctant representatives of the SoCal’s dance scene.
Dancing was a part of their lifestyle but not central to it. Like many other kids from their neighborhood, they jerked but they also skated and gangbanged and prayed and—most importantly—rapped. This multi-faceted, seemingly contradictory existence is the crux of their content. In the years since their debut single they’ve been dropped and re-signed (via Hit-Boy’s HS87 imprint), and released 11 free mixtapes and EPs that have showcased their versatility. They’ve shown they can do everything from romantic rap to grimy boom bap to turn-up anthems and have collaborated with a who’s-who of artists including Lil Wayne, Travis Scott, Wale, Joey Bada$$, and G-Eazy. What they’ve yet to do, however, is have breakout success. The Stone Junction EP, their very first for-sale project, is a declaration of their intention to change that without compromising their positive “good vibe” message.
Realizing that versatility can be a liability—especially in an industry that prefers its musicians to have easily identifiable sounds—Audio Push has enlisted some of Atlanta’s premier producers to complement their distinctively Californian approach to rhyming. The beats are high energy, juxtaposing the duo’s lyricism with 808s and synths. “They wanna put me in a box/ The industry, the enemies and the cops,” raps Price on the Slade Da Monsta-produced, “BBQ Spot.” The formula works throughout the EP—the music lending intensity and urgency to their assertions of MC supremacy and descriptions of the everyday struggle.
Beyond beats, they get assists from ATL on the mic too: Kap G joins in for some trap-inflected wordplay on the one the album’s standouts, “Vámonos,” and Two-9’s Jace helps to slam the door shut at the end of the seven-song EP on “Same.” Still in the midst of adrenaline-pumping songs like these it’s that second half of “Hard” that teases Audio Push’s potential to make even greater, emotive music. At the 2:34 mark, the ominous, unmistakably ATL thump of producer Ducko McFli’s beat gives way to glistening piano chords and swirling strings and things get emotional. What was an aggressive backdrop for bravado becomes a vulnerable, heartfelt verse from Price: “It’s hard to see you not be yourself/ It’s hard to see you with someone else/ Hard to know your heart was broken/ And you find it hard to grow/ Wth me, and it’s hard to cope,” he confesses to some unnamed ex-lover. A brief glimpse of what’s in store, tucked away in a brief project. A moment that shows just how tough being tender can be. | 2016-04-27T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-04-27T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Interscope / HS87 | April 27, 2016 | 7.1 | cd902ac8-6ba7-4202-8ff1-a0d24660ad91 | Timmhotep Aku | https://pitchfork.com/staff/timmhotep-aku/ | null |
The Detroit rapper’s debut album aims for a mix of transparency and commercial ambition, but he struggles to hold his own amid so much high-stakes production. | The Detroit rapper’s debut album aims for a mix of transparency and commercial ambition, but he struggles to hold his own amid so much high-stakes production. | Tee Grizzley: Activated | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/tee-grizzley-activated/ | Activated | As in the church, hip-hop’s most arresting moments lie in the testimonial. Almost hookless, they’re explosively delivered biographies charged with a palpable sincerity. Cardi B’s confessional on Invasion of Privacy opener “Get Up 10” lends the project its urgency, and Meek Mill’s story on “Dreams and Nightmares (Intro)” is synonymous with Philadelphia’s. Detroit’s Tee Grizzley borrowed heavily from the latter on his breakthrough, “First Day Out,” even using that midway turn from awe to brutalism.
While all three rappers may argue for capitalism as a salve for trauma, Grizzley stands out for the way the specificity of his verses pushes a sense of empathy to the forefront. Even his severe flexes (“Hit the Rollie store with the Rollie on”) are built on memories and personal shorthand for around-the-way friends. Activated, his debut album, starts just as intimately. We voyeuristically listen to a haunted Grizzley in mid-conversation: “Look at the bottom, I had to make it/I had to.” It augurs a hard-won truth.
Grizzley has spent his time in the spotlight trying to perfect a mix of transparency and commercial ambition. He was mostly successful in his prior solo outing, My Moment. On Activated, he further commits to the radio campaign, even going so far as to place Chris Brown on two songs, apparently buying into the myth that a feature from the singer guarantees a hit. On “Fuck It Off,” Brown delivers an aggressively by-the-numbers I’m-living-my-best-life hook that concludes, “You think I work this hard to fuck it off?” It’s clean and impersonal—Grizzley’s antithesis.
But Activated’s radio sensibility often dilutes his rawness and technical gifts rather than amplifying them. Grizzley’s plain-spoken delivery tends to convey a sense of catharsis when he decides to sprint off-beat. But here he’s cumbersome running into the high-stakes soundscapes, quickening to a halt with clunkers like, “While you niggas talking down, I’m up bitch,” on “Too Lit.” On “2 Vaults”: “Stacks big and green I call my pockets the new Hulk.” Grizzley isn’t completely out of his league within Activated’s cinematic scope—the staccato he uses to deliver “Think shit/Sweet/You gon’/Bleed” punctuates a should-be banger in “Don’t Even Trip”—but he’s shooting at a lower percentage here.
The high-stakes production—a mix of melancholic piano loops, brooding synths, and aggressive bass—undoes Grizzley, too. Save for the occasional exception, like the G-funk-infused “Low,” a lot of the palette here is, well, Meek Mill type beats. It doesn’t help his case that a lot of the hooks are barely above-competent half-mantras. “Bag” is well-intentioned, but the inspiration is lost within Grizzley’s synthetic singing voice. The same’s the case for the contemplative “I Remember,” where Grizzley can’t quite emote despite relaying his very real experiences with poverty. (It’s featured rapper YFN Lucci who delivers the poignancy: “I wonder why the real don’t live long”).
But Activated mainly suffers because too much of it lacks Grizzley’s photographic vision. That gift does pop up on the autobiographical album closer “On My Own,” where Grizzley walks us through stealing from his own friend, now deceased, to whom he can only offer, “Rest in peace.” Poverty is a cycle that robs its victims of absolution. But Grizzley still finds a glimmer of solace by the end: “When I finally get married, can’t no other bitch fuck me,” he swears with an impish laugh. It’s a childish ending line, but a sincere one. If the trauma can be vivid, so can the joy. | 2018-05-14T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-05-14T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | 300 Entertainment | May 14, 2018 | 6.4 | cda67709-b44d-42a5-95ad-1e552e5ec8d5 | Brian Josephs | https://pitchfork.com/staff/brian-josephs/ | |
Shugo Tokumaru’s songs barrel towards joyous cacophony at full tilt. On his latest LP, he expands his one-man chamber-pop sound with drum tracks from Deerhoof’s Greg Saunier. | Shugo Tokumaru’s songs barrel towards joyous cacophony at full tilt. On his latest LP, he expands his one-man chamber-pop sound with drum tracks from Deerhoof’s Greg Saunier. | Shugo Tokumaru: TOSS | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/23080-toss/ | TOSS | Japan’s Shugo Tokumaru has always been a maximalist working on a miniature scale; he constructed his early albums using over 100 different instruments. His recent TOSS single “Lita-Ruta” is composed with a similar logic. Its makeup includes xylophone, ukulele, sax skronk, handclaps, drumsticks tapping on a desk, harmonies evoking the Beach Boys, a possibly broken jack-in-the-box, and a spiraling harpsichord melody recalling Mark Mothersbaugh’s arrangements for the Rushmore soundtrack. If it all sounds a little overwhelming, that is very likely the point.
For TOSS, Tokumaru switched up his usual one-man chamber-pop formation. He’s made recordings of other musicians, cut them up, manipulated them, and sequenced the results throughout his compositions. Aside from his own playing, Tokumaru’s primary materials on TOSS are drum tracks contributed by Deerhoof’s Greg Saunier. In using these snippets, Tokumaru has infused many of TOSS’ songs with a bit of Deerhoof’s rhythmic DNA, which is immediately apparent in the restless, twitchy energy of songs like “Lita-Ruta.”
TOSS boasts plenty of songs like this, where Tokumaru barrels toward joyous cacophony at full tilt. “Lift” opens like a child-sized spaceship taking off, before introducing pitched-up, Dan Deacon-like chipmunk vocals. “Vektor” is a classic Tokumaru anthem, in that it finds his fingers flying up and down the fretboard with various percussive sounds in hot pursuit. “Bricolage Music” lives up to its name, assembling a beat from droplets of water and the clatter of silverware. The opening of “Taxi” sounds like Tom chasing Jerry across a xylophone, while the curiously-titled “Cheese Eye” pushes the cartoon metaphor further, laying out the soundtrack for an entire imagined “Looney Tunes” episode.
It would be exhausting to maintain this frantic pace for 11 straight tracks. Instead, Tokumaru fills the album’s midsection with placid ballads like “Route” and “Hikageno.” Like all Tokumaru songs, they are meticulously arranged and recorded, but they are also a bit sluggish. More successful are pared-down tracks like “Dody,” which veers toward Fahey-like American primitive guitar technique, and “Migiri,” a moment of somber beauty.
Despite the nuance behind all of these songs, it’s hard to call most of them catchy or even memorable. The fidgety songwriting is part of the problem; many melodies only get a few moments of airtime before being supplanted. The sonic world of TOSS also lacks any kind of meaningful tension. Its cover art—a cartoon of a humanoid figure holding a hammer, tears streaming out of its smashed glass face—hints at a more complex idea, a guro-kawaii intermingling of the cute and the grotesque. That’s the sort of line Deerhoof used to skirt so well, writing a whole record about a bloody “Milk Man” who kidnaps children and hides them in the clouds. Earlier Tokumaru albums like Night Piece and L.S.T. employed bent tones and dissonance to similar effect, complicating his almost oppressive cheerfulness.
TOSS, however, like all of his recent work, mostly sticks to just two gears: jubilant and hushed. There’s a long line of Japanese pop artists working in a variety of mediums—Yoshitomo Nara, Takashi Murakami, Kyary Pamyu Pamyu—who blur the divide between art and commercial product by surfacing the undercurrents of sadness and fear in cartoons. Shugo Tokumaru, a fellow traveller, increasingly seems content to trawl the surface. | 2017-04-25T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-04-25T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Experimental | Polyvinyl | April 25, 2017 | 6.3 | cda97a20-b3c1-4008-8fc9-11617163970d | Mehan Jayasuriya | https://pitchfork.com/staff/mehan-jayasuriya/ | null |
When the world comes to whatever ignominious end we choose, Happy Songs for Happy People will be playing somewhere. It ... | When the world comes to whatever ignominious end we choose, Happy Songs for Happy People will be playing somewhere. It ... | Mogwai: Happy Songs for Happy People | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/5367-happy-songs-for-happy-people/ | Happy Songs for Happy People | When the world comes to whatever ignominious end we choose, Happy Songs for Happy People will be playing somewhere. It'll be the instrumental soundtrack to everyone's collective thoughts of anger, resentment, acceptance, and then, ultimately-- after everyone's had time to reflect and make peace with whatever the hell it is they're trying to reconcile at that particular moment-- it'll also be the soundtrack to great big letdown of, y'know, the world ending. Tidal static washes will engulf the land; thunderous guitar peals will split the sky. As the Four Horseman gallop by, blasting this album at ear-splitting levels from their totally sweet sound systems, everyone will brace themselves for the dénouement; folks will all be waiting for that final burst of insight to make sense out of everything, and then guess what? Nothing. It's all over, just like that. Get your coats and go. All that storm and stress, and for what? Bummer, dude. At least it was exciting here and then.
Still, what a gyp. For the amount of energy Mogwai spend painstakingly carving out wrenching emotional turmoil, lush interludes, and haunting Slint impressions, they've had no idea where to take it since the sensory overload of 1997's Young Team. More intrinsically left-brained types might have used all that overpowering intensity of purpose to cure cancer, or debt, or Staind; Mogwai, on the other hand, have a languishing surplus of potential. On their debut, they did the only thing they knew how: buried the listener deep under cascading avalanches of sound, using immersion to distract them from anything as trivial as a lack of direction. Following the praise heaped on Young Team, though, they seem to have found an unhealthy amount of restraint; subsequent albums (Come On Die Young, Rock Action) fell into a disconcerting pattern of majestic swells and faint departures. Hell, Rock Action barely even swells.
\t Some would say they "tightened up"; I'd say "stiffened." No matter how it's described, tighten something enough (any old thing, really) and common sense tells you it'll break. The good news is Mogwai may have learned that lesson just in time for Happy Songs for Happy People, but don't break out the earplugs just yet: if Rock Action put you to sleep, don't rely on Happy Songs... to get you up in time for a morning meeting. In many ways, this album is even more reserved than past efforts; at no point does anything surpass even the mild-mannered blast of "You Don't Know Jesus". The difference is that much of the extraneous instrumentation that sandbagged Rock Action is left behind, which means the measure of the meticulous craftsmanship that was beginning to hamper Mogwai is gone as well .
A lone organ or piano often carries the melody through the album's quiet stretches, and the percussion is usually barely audible; for the first time, Mogwai have the delicacy necessary to stir without resorting to violent upheaval, as well as the added power of a lighter touch. It's a subtle distinction, maybe, but with every album, Mogwai is more and more about the details: the organic rise and fall of "Moses, I Amn't" is a cathedral dirge simplified to an unprecedented degree (by Mogwai's standards). Sparsely layered organs, strings, and exceedingly sparse, hollowed-out drumstick hits rise in waves that never quite crest, for once in perfect harmony with Mogwai's mournful undertones. It bleeds quietly into "Kids Will Be Skeletons", which in turn transitions into the brief crescendo of "Killing All Flies"; the sweep is almost effortlessly natural.
The song titles should give away what the wryly ironic album title doesn't. Surprise!-- this is a pretty goddamned grim album. Every time I hear Mogwai, I'm struck by what a miserable portrait they paint of Scotland, full of skeletonized children, dead flies and such; as usual, Mogwai's Happy Music... evokes similar imagery. The problem is that, in spite of much of the album's comfortable ease, the quieter tone and brooding atmosphere are burdened with even less interest in taking these songs somewhere, anywhere. We're left lost, mired in Mogwai's omnipresent gloom.
Only the closing duo of "I Know You Are, But What Am I?" and "Stop Coming to My House" mercifully (and critically) avoid this. From "I Know You Are...", it's a steady progression through to the gradual dissolve of the final track's epic finish, offering closure (finally) with a sample of some very happy children (its emotional weight is adequately deflated by the carefree kids). I guess that's the joke, really: these so-called "happy people" must like uninterrupted spans of soul-crushing gloom in between rounds of concentration camp footage. Honestly, though, it's a rare, honest-to-god conclusion from these guys, and it at least punctuates the album in a clever manner if the rest of the songs don't fare as well. Mogwai still can't seem to figure out where they're going, but that problem is only extended over these tracks, as whole songs build on one another. The Stephen Kings of menacing post-rock, it seems that in absence of Young Team's glorious cacophany their tremendous build-up often comes to nothing. And it sounds as though they've come to terms with that. | 2003-06-18T01:00:02.000-04:00 | 2003-06-18T01:00:02.000-04:00 | Rock | Matador | June 18, 2003 | 7.1 | cdbce2ae-d3cc-4f4f-919a-3d1df5e731d6 | Eric Carr | https://pitchfork.com/staff/eric-carr/ | null |
Thirty years after stepping into the spotlight, the Portishead singer reintroduces herself with her debut solo album. History weighs heavy on her songs, but she takes pains to avoid her musical past. | Thirty years after stepping into the spotlight, the Portishead singer reintroduces herself with her debut solo album. History weighs heavy on her songs, but she takes pains to avoid her musical past. | Beth Gibbons: Lives Outgrown | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/beth-gibbons-lives-outgrown/ | Lives Outgrown | Beth Gibbons has made inactivity into an art form. In Portishead she sang as if hanging onto the microphone for dear life, her voice the embodiment of languorous misery. Her recorded output since then has arrived at a snail’s pace and her reputation has grown with each fallow year. Following the release of Portishead’s Third, in 2008, Gibbons has performed Górecki’s Symphony No. 3 with the Polish National Radio Symphony, featured on Kendrick Lamar’s “Mother I Sober,” and done precious little else in public. Gibbons does nothing that she doesn't have to and she does it in her own sweet time, which makes the arrival of Lives Outgrown feel like a revelatory occasion.
So why did Lives Outgrown bring Gibbons out of her shell? And why now? “People started dying,” she said. Three full decades after Portishead first appeared on the scene, she reintroduces herself with an album inspired by goodbyes, informed by the kind of perspective that’s only possible by looking backward. She added, “When you’re young, you never know the endings, you don’t know how it’s going to pan out.” At the heart of Lives Outgrown is a push and pull between past, present, and future, with Gibbons delving into her personal history for inspiration, while studiously avoiding the palette that made Portishead so beloved.
Stylistically, Lives Outgrown approaches folk music, thanks to its acoustic guitars and strings; but it feels denser, louder, and more exploratory, like stumbling across a junkyard deep in the forest. Unusual textures abound: In “Tell Me Who You Are Today,” producer James Ford (of Simian Mobile Disco) strikes piano strings with metal spoons; for another track, he and Gibbons spin whirly tubes over their heads, in search of the perfect creepy tone.
Melodies of endless melancholy and lyrics of pointed depth, reminiscent of Gibbons’ work with Portishead and (briefly) Rustin Man, her duo with Talk Talk’s Paul Webb, reflect the singer’s period of self-reflection. Lives Outgrown has moments of crushing relatability, as she tackles subjects like motherhood, anxiety, and menopause, her unvarnished humanity a world away from the otherworldly rage she inhabited on Third. “Without control/I’m heading toward a boundary/That divides us/Reminds us,” she sings on “Floating on a Moment,” striking a beautifully sparse rhythm and tone, while the opening couplet of “Ocean” (“I fake in the morning, a stake to relieve/I never noticed the pain I proceed”) distills years of dull suffering into two elegant lines. Her melodies are strong as iron: The elegantly inevitable “Floating on a Moment” and cathartic album closer “Whispering Love” are among the best songs that Gibbons has put her name to.
Gibbons’ voice makes comparisons to Portishead inevitable—and there is, perhaps, a tang of Adrian Utley’s spaghetti western guitar in the opening bars of “Floating on a Moment.” Occasionally, she makes veiled references to her past, with phrases that seem to mirror lines from elsewhere in her catalog. On the whole, though, the singer makes a concerted effort to outrun her musical history. Gibbons said that she wanted to get away from snare drums and breakbeats—both key elements of the Portishead sound—while recording Lives Outgrown, with the drum lines of collaborator Lee Harris (formerly of Talk Talk and a contributor to Gibbons and Rustin Man’s Out of Season) instead hammered out on toms and bass.
This percussive roll is complemented by an inconspicuously cosmopolitan mixture of sounds. Unusual groupings of instruments are packed into devious musical layers, like the viscid concoction of bass clarinet, bass, cello, Farfisa, harmonium, recorders, “fuzz flute,” violin, singing tubes, and bowed saw that is daubed over “Beyond the Sun”. This darkly sylvan stew has little of Portishead's cinematic high drama; its abstruse angles and woodland heavy metal are closer to Tom Waits’ discordant masterpiece Swordfishtrombones than the clean guitar lines of Out of Season. Gibbons also employs backing vocals for the first time, their sparing use bolstering, rather than radically altering, the album’s makeup, although the children’s choir and wobbly recorder on “Floating on a Moment” and “Beyond the Sun” give the two songs an unsettling air of innocence lost.
The arrangements, largely by Gibbons and Ford, luxuriate in the slightly unreal edge of music once removed. Much of the instrumentation (for example, the sweeping, almost Middle Eastern string lines on “For Sale”) could have been written at any point in the last century, although the rejection of the snare drum’s rebellious crack nudges Lives Outgrown into a parallel universe where rock’n’roll never really took root. Verses are punctuated by wild brass skronk (“Beyond the Sun”) and violins scrape across the percussive surface like nails on a blackboard (“Burden of Life”). These leftfield choices underscore the courageous and subtly unusual nature of Gibbons’ album, which hides its eccentricity behind her deathless voice and sympathetic lyrical insight. Lives Outgrown may have taken agonizingly long to arrive, but it bears the mark of more than a decade well spent, a singular talent reborn in surprisingly spiky glory. | 2024-05-17T00:01:00.000-04:00 | 2024-05-17T00:01:00.000-04:00 | Experimental | Domino | May 17, 2024 | 8 | cdca5b7c-0cbe-41f1-a11c-70884f00b87a | Ben Cardew | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ben-cardew/ | |
The Virginia producer lays out chopped loops for the surrealistic rapper Koncept Jack$on, whose narrow-eyed presence plays off the rest of the Mutant Academy crew. | The Virginia producer lays out chopped loops for the surrealistic rapper Koncept Jack$on, whose narrow-eyed presence plays off the rest of the Mutant Academy crew. | Tuamie: Emergency Raps, Vol. 3 | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/tuamie-emergency-raps-vol-3/ | Emergency Raps, Vol. 3 | Mutant Academy is built on the sort of hip-hop that emphasizes precise lyricism wrapped in crime mythology. For the Richmond, Virginia collective, making a song a song is an afterthought—hooks arrive as more of an exit route than the centerpiece. Slang talk might come too rapidly to decipher in real time, and that exclusivity becomes a shared source of pride for enthusiasts—in Pusha-T’s words, if you know you know. Emergency Raps, Vol. 3 is so real that a durag packet, the biggest hallmark of black men’s hair care behind a brush, serves as the project’s cover.
Helmed by the collective’s producer Tuamie, the Emergency Raps series stars each of Mutant Academy’s four core rappers. Following efforts from laidback straight-talker Henny L.O. and flow-focused Big Kahuna Og, Vol. 3 centers on the group’s most impressionistic member, Koncept Jack$on. Though his reference points are well within concrete-jungle street rap’s ethos, but his eccentric touch and the speed with which he tosses images at you press into surrealist territory. The album’s most potent example is the hallucinatory second track, “Plant Based.” Koncept takes us through a series of disjointed scenes in a brisk two minutes; he’s first forced to kill a clerk to avoid being identified, and, without giving much more context, makes his way through boasting about how his “mind’s eye can fry your whole genes” and triumphs with “complimentary alkaline water we find through concubine daughters.” He’s James Joyce in a wave cap.
Many of Koncept’s verses unfurl like a set of mini-anthologies. Their sense of continuity lies in his narrow-eyed presence and tangly internal rhyme schemes. “The Bitch in U” paints himself as a cozy boy and enforcer with that technical ability as his throughway (“Fuck your ego bro I’mma beat your ass in front these people/Hold the reefer while doing so”) Even familiar tropes feel renovated through Jack$on’s tongue-twisting phrasing, like on the casual boast “Fellows drink Amaretto with scotch, yo/Stilettos my hoes rock” on “Lost Cause Bros.” Though he’s exceptional on his own, Koncept performances tend to work better as songs when he’s bouncing off of a collaborator. Emergency Raps’ most dynamic moments occur when he’s sparring with groupmate Fly Anakin’s shrill shit-talk (“It’s My Life”) or weaving as Nickelus F bullies his way through punchlines (“Wet Ear Yungin’”).
Save for the cloudy “Plant Based,” Vol. 3 features Tuamie quieting his psychedelic urges for mainly sepia-toned two-bar loops. The tighter approach works in a way that feels very specific to Koncept, tethering his knotty tales to familiar grounds as well as doing most of the emotional heavy-lifting. The standout example is Emergency Raps opener “Stokley Wit Me,” where Tuamie’s simple but sultry vocal loop gives Jack$on’s hard-living missives a luscious mood. Tuamie’s soulful quality also links Koncept and Mutant Academy to the sound of East Coast hip-hop’s lineage.
Speaking of whom, Koncept Jack$on brings to mind fellow stream-of-conscious stylist Ghostface Killah. Even as the lines flew over the head, Ghostface’s verses were compelling because he sounded as bugged out as the bugged-out shit he was saying. Koncept’s furious monotone doesn’t carry that color, and his pace combined with Emergency Raps’ 27-minute timespan hardly give his ideas room to breath even as Tuamie’s production lets him be the star. A better entry point to Koncept’s hood funhouse is last year’s looser, 18-track Panama Plus, another collaboration with Tuamie and Fly Anakin. Emergency Raps is the digestible, Coogi’d-up supplement. | 2018-08-09T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-08-09T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Mutant Academy | August 9, 2018 | 7.3 | cdccc0ab-475a-4711-8414-9b66d237f867 | Brian Josephs | https://pitchfork.com/staff/brian-josephs/ | |
World-building takes precedence over the music on this Melbourne producer’s concept album, a nuanced retelling of the 1850s Victoria gold rush made up of MIDI banjos and artificial sounds. | World-building takes precedence over the music on this Melbourne producer’s concept album, a nuanced retelling of the 1850s Victoria gold rush made up of MIDI banjos and artificial sounds. | A.R. Wilson: Old Gold | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/ar-wilson-old-gold/ | Old Gold | Andrew Wilson is like the friend who’s always blasting you with obscure Wikipedia articles, each one more baffling than the last. He brings a propulsive yet ambiguous energy to his new-age releases as A.r.t. Wilson and his catchy ringtone-funk jams as Andras Fox, lending these records a mysterious air through cryptic titles and vibe-heavy instrumentation. Of particular fascination to Wilson is the baggage that comes with his hometown of Melbourne: “I like teasing out small contradictions in how Australians record and present music,” he told DJ Mag in 2020. “For example, why use the call of the common Eurasian loon bird within studio tracks, when we have the greatest diversity of songbirds anywhere on Earth here in Australia? Why call our music Balearic when we have over 50,000 kilometers of unique coastline of our own?”
To this end, his latest release as A.R. Wilson, Old Gold, takes a deep dive into a specific quadrant of Australian history: The Victorian gold rush of the 1850s. For Australia, this period is generally attributed with placing Melbourne on the global stage; the colony’s exploding economy brought roughly 90,000 new immigrants each year at the boom’s beginning, and confirmed Australia as the gold-producing juggernaut that it remains today. In Wilson’s hands, the gold rush is not a simple tale of colonial prosperity; he shifts the focus to the starvation of the panhandlers on the plains and the wrongful displacement of Aboriginal groups. He spins this yarn using the most barebones palette imaginable, all lonesome MIDI banjos and artificial crickets chirping, plinking his way through a history lesson one Casio vignette at a time. It might not be Wilson’s most developed music, but it makes up for it in sheer imagination.
Above all, Old Gold is an exercise in world-building, a task Wilson takes to like a LARPer to a foam sword. “Moonlight Flat” canters along on a metallic, twangy stomp that conjures up images of Final Fantasy coal mining towns, while tracks like “Raisins” and “A Long Day In The Saddle” could’ve come straight off the Oregon Trail with their comically fabricated acoustic guitars and Spaghetti Western castanets. There’s an undeniable kinship between Old Gold and recent online micro-genres like comfy synth, especially in the way that they both use cheap bedroom instruments to sketch out playfully juvenile scenes. Like much of the work that comes out of the comfy synth/dungeon synth communities, Wilson’s songs have a goofily medieval flair to them, as on “Metal, Want, Die,” which starts out as a sad ragtime piano roll before shifting into a weeping Renaissance-Faire-ready guitar lament. Rather than building into any kind of climax, Wilson simply lets his melodies waver in their lo-fi languor, like a digital music box caught on a twinkling loop.
Clearly, Old Gold is not for everyone. It wouldn’t have hurt for Wilson to vary his palette a bit (even if only to add detail to this miniature picture of 19th-century Australia), and there’s an inescapable sense that you probably could have made this music yourself. Depending on your point of view, that simplicity could either be a turn off or a refreshing embrace of DIY pluck. Either way, it’s hard not to be charmed by the silliness of Wilson’s vision, as well as the nuanced approach he takes to understanding this period rather than purely romanticizing it. If nothing else, the record is certainly a whimsical addition to Andrew Wilson’s eccentric world. | 2022-02-03T00:00:00.000-05:00 | 2022-02-03T00:00:00.000-05:00 | Electronic / Folk/Country | Impatience | February 3, 2022 | 6.5 | cdccdff1-b678-493a-aec9-02e58759b6ae | Sam Goldner | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sam-goldner/ | |
This eight-track stopgap EP-- which doubles as a bonus disc on the obligatory Viva fourth-quarter deluxe edition-- allows for an assessment of Coldplay's 2008 "We Are Edgy" campaign. Jay-Z guests. | This eight-track stopgap EP-- which doubles as a bonus disc on the obligatory Viva fourth-quarter deluxe edition-- allows for an assessment of Coldplay's 2008 "We Are Edgy" campaign. Jay-Z guests. | Coldplay: Prospekt’s March EP | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/12467-prospekts-march-ep/ | Prospekt’s March EP | With this year's Viva La Vida or Death and All His Friends, Coldplay tried to be cool. They brought in Brian Eno to refine their bombast. They tried Bowie-style funk and shoegaze. They wore military duds that made them look like Arcade Fire. Everything seemed to be in place. But there was a problem: Coldplay's idea of cool and the cultural reality are two different things. This eight-track stopgap EP-- which doubles as a bonus disc on the obligatory Viva fourth-quarter deluxe edition-- allows for an assessment of Coldplay's 2008 "We Are Edgy" campaign. Can one daffy Brit and his personality-averse band bring the notion of cool closer to them?
Ostensibly, Coldplay know cool when they see it. They tapped operatic indie-rockers Shearwater and L.E.S. revivalist Santogold to open their world tour this year. Chris Martin is friends with Kanye West and Jay-Z, who contributes a verse on the Prospekt's March remix, "Lost +". Still, they lack the spontaneity, innovation, and effortlessness that usually accompanies edge-cutting phenomena. Take their recent performance on "Saturday Night Live": For a guy who's played to millions of fans at shows, festivals, and on TV, Martin came off like a clutzy ham not unlike former "SNL" mainstay Mary Katherine Gallagher. He was startlingly out of breath and made an effort to act out each of his simple couplets, all while yipping and hooting like a man poking fun at Tourette's syndrome. It was awkward, but kinda endearing. (Defamer: Coldplay's 'SNL' Freak-Out: Easy-Listening Performance Art, Awful, Or Both?)
So when calm and collected artists like Jay-Z cite Coldplay as their favorite band, they're subconsciously subverting the same untouchable aura that bolsters their own coolness. It makes little sense, but it's worked for them thus far. On the overall hipness scale, Coldplay isn't close to, say, TV on the Radio, but in a weird way they're bringing a bumbling DIY aesthetic to emotional arena rock. And, just as Viva did an admirable job of troubleshooting the band's lazy weaknesses while expanding their sound, Prospekt's March offers a truncated version of their svelte and marginally progressive new formula. If this is the best Big Rock has to offer this year, we're doing okay.
As far as money-making mini-releases go, Prospekt's March is relatively noble, i.e., no quickie dance remixes, only one "single edit" ("Lovers in Japan") and one piddly 48-second instrumental ("Postcards from Far Away"). All in all, half the EP is made up of completely new material that could've easily made the original Viva. Talking about the EP a couple months ago, Martin quipped that the new songs "might be considered too catchy or too heavy for Coldplay songs." The heavy Coldplay song may seem like an oxymoronic concept, but "Glass of Water" makes a good case for the band turning up the volume more often. Granted, the whole thing centers around one of the very few Meaning of Life clichés Martin has yet to utilize (bet you can't guess exactly how much water is in that glass!), but the hook's brash guitars render his words unintelligible anyway.
With Eno behind the knobs, everything sounds pristine, impeccable. "Prospekt's March/Poppyfields" could pass for a latter-day Radiohead ballad (except Martin replaces Thom Yorke's doom with hopeful pleads of "I don't wanna die"). With its micro-funk verse and symphony chorus, "Rainy Day" feels stiched together, but it's uniquely humble. "I love it when you come over to my house," sings Martin, taking a break from explaining death and all his friends for a moment. Mostly instrumental Viva intro "Life in Technicolor" is morphed into a full-fledged song here-- and it in turn exposes the main obstacle in the way of Coldplay's desire to replicate U2 at their height.
Simply: Chris Martin needs to consider his lyrics more. He's smart; he can do better than "don't you wish your life could be as simple as fish swimmin' 'round in a barrel when you've got the gun." While Bono hasn't written an astounding lyric in ages, there was a time when his universal maxims rang true and felt close. Martin has shown flashes of this type of talent, but his consistency isn't where it needs to be in order for Coldplay to elevate to the supreme stadium-filling, critic-salivating level they so desire. With their revised sound and twitching energy, these sensitive lads are primed for something even bigger than their current little-kid-in-a-big-arena shenanigans. A few elegant, cringe-proof words couldn't hurt. | 2008-11-25T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2008-11-25T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Capitol | November 25, 2008 | 6 | cdd1150e-cc4f-4791-a0ee-1772f9536b98 | Ryan Dombal | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ryan-dombal/ | null |
Like Olivia Rodrigo if she were raised on P!nk, 26-year-old singer Arabella Latham writes shiny, uncynical pop songs full of sarcasm, screw-ups, and young-adult heartache. | Like Olivia Rodrigo if she were raised on P!nk, 26-year-old singer Arabella Latham writes shiny, uncynical pop songs full of sarcasm, screw-ups, and young-adult heartache. | Baby Queen: Quarter Life Crisis | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/baby-queen-quarter-life-crisis/ | Quarter Life Crisis | Arabella Latham has the resume of someone who’s had an awesome start to her 20s. The South African singer-songwriter, who records as Baby Queen, made the BBC Sound of 2022 shortlist, then followed up by hosting a video-game music show for the Beeb with, it must be said, some pretty deep cuts. She was crowned the sound of the Netflix young-adult series Heartstopper, appearing first on the soundtrack, then in a cameo. She’s toured with pop’s reigning It Girl, labelmate Olivia Rodrigo. Courtney Love called her music “immaculate.” These are the sorts of successes one might expect from an artist who stormed the music industry with an Excel spreadsheet of every music blog going. On record, however, Baby Queen is a scrappy outsider, singing about how she alienates her friends, can’t get her shit together, and makes “art-pop music about the drugs I’m using.”
Baby Queen is, in short, having a quarter-life crisis, a phrase Latham hadn’t encountered until she was midway through making her album and well into one of her own. The reason we have a phrase for this particular stasis, of course, is because lots of twentysomethings experience it—including those who write songs. And Quarter Life Crisis has plenty of millennial counterparts, like Colleen Green’s burnout anxiety on I Want to Grow Up, the bitter stoner teen-pop of short-lived aughts band Shut Up Stella, or P!nk’s second album Missundaztood—an album that is to Baby Queen and her peers what Britney is to the bubblegum-bling girlies.
In interviews, Latham has mentioned the “parameters” of the Baby Queen project, and the sorts of songs that do and don’t fit them: “I could sit down at a piano and write a song that’s not hyper-satirical and cynical, but would it feel like it’s quintessentially Baby Queen?” Yet she and longtime producer King Ed are clearly drawn to shiny, uncynical pop, and out of the dozens of songs Latham recorded for Quarter Life Crisis, that’s largely what made the cut. The first sounds on the album—the choral pings of “We Can Be Anything”—suggest that Latham’s logged some serious hours with the least cynical song ever: “Don’t Stop Believin’,” as performed on Glee. The single builds into an anti-nihilistic fantasy of the best possible outcome of crying at a party (“Which is not unusual of me”), receiving and then spreading the epiphany that your whole life is ahead of you: Think Girls via Zombo.com. The onslaught of optimism is undeniable—even if you can imagine the saccharine commercial it might soundtrack.
Quarter Life Crisis is full of such exuberance. “Dream Girl” is a surging bisexual “Jesse’s Girl” in which Latham pulls both sides of her personal love triangle into one commingled crush. “Love Killer” has a sassy flow and campy one-liners (“The only man I find attractive is the Grim Reaper!”) that aren’t TikTok but “TiK ToK”—isn’t it beautiful to reach a point in pop music nostalgia where one can acknowledge “clear Kesha influence”? This kind of post-teenage songwriting, by nature, risks straying into the realm of “I am 14 and this is deep.” Latham mostly avoids this, but not always. “Kid Genius” has huge hooks, but its shallow satire—social media bad, school uncool—doesn’t totally work as irony, and definitely not as sincerity. “Die Alone,” a resigned ballad delivered in an introvert’s whisper, is a dead-even mix. Great lines, such as a chorus where Latham manages to wring pathos out of the words “Mario and Princess Peach,” coexist with Hot Topic-isms like “everybody’s got somebody, I’ve got ADD.”
Crucially, Quarter Life Crisis never feels insincere, because as a songwriter, Latham appears able to pull from genuine self-loathing. Sometimes all it takes is piercing the arrangement with a quick “fuck,” a trick she does twice on the sparkling, ABBA-esque “Grow Up” and radio-ready waltz “Quarter Life Crisis.” Latham has a talent—best heard on The Yearbook cut “Raw Thoughts”—for recreating with startling accuracy the kind of internal monologues that arise when you’re so catastrophically wasted that your thoughts take on the rhythm of the music around you. On “23,” she ricochets between berating herself and daring the party to get on her level; between the kind of flirting that’s really just propositioning a rando, and the kind of thoughts a more sober-minded song would probably not admit, like how that rando sort of looks like her. And on “Obvious” and “A Letter to Myself at 17,” both power ballads, Latham lets the years catch up to her to devastating effect, extending compassion to her past self even if she can’t quite extend it to herself in the present. | 2023-11-14T00:02:00.000-05:00 | 2023-11-14T00:02:00.000-05:00 | Pop/R&B | Polydor | November 14, 2023 | 6.7 | cdd82baa-25c2-440a-bb25-0a5a191cc2a6 | Katherine St. Asaph | https://pitchfork.com/staff/katherine-st. asaph/ |
Subsets and Splits