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Released for free on Twitter, the fourth Passion Pit album is a different kind of confessional for Michael Angelakos, who's rediscovering the joy of process rather than the satisfaction of product. | Released for free on Twitter, the fourth Passion Pit album is a different kind of confessional for Michael Angelakos, who's rediscovering the joy of process rather than the satisfaction of product. | Passion Pit: Tremendous Sea of Love | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/23142-tremendous-sea-of-love/ | Tremendous Sea of Love | Michael Angelakos is one of the last guys who needed to do a Reddit AMA. The Passion Pit mastermind has voluntarily shared more intimate parts of his life with the casual music news reader than most people do with their closest friends. He’s spoken with candor about his battles with bipolar disorder and comment section trolls, publicly announced both his divorce and came out as gay in a single podcast with Bret Easton Ellis, and handed over the Passion Pit Twitter account in the name of scientific advocacy. If you smashed that RT, Tremendous Sea of Love showed up in your inbox. If you didn't, it's currently easier to find video of Angelakos receiving an electromagnetic current to his brain than official audio of Passion Pit’s fourth album, one completely divorced from the vestigial “album cycle” that Angelakos has no use for in 2017.
“You’re over the money but under the gun/You came in the front door so where can you run?” he sings to himself on “I’m Perfect,” one of the nine tracks Angelakos pumped onto YouTube under the Wishart Group banner before they disappeared. In both subject matter and execution, Tremendous Sea of Love is Angelakos trying to rediscover the joy of process rather than the satisfaction of product. He said many of these songs were written and uploaded within a day, as if to let us all know that whether he took three years or three hours, it all ends up as data anyways.
As it was in Angelakos’ Boston dorm room, Passion Pit is still a project defined by synaptic synthesizers, blaring falsetto, and relentless major-key melodies. He has never been one to hunch over an acoustic guitar; there are no false starts or tape hiss to signify a more DIY approach. But when he sings about a complicated relationship with his mother over a minimal, staccato string figure on the closing “For Sondra (It Means the World to Me),” he sounds both terrified and freed, finally able to face the kind of raw and confessional songwriting he previously avoided out of instinctual fear.
Raw and confessional are relative for Passion Pit, of course. The extreme dissonance between the hyperglycemic sound of Passion Pit songs and their bitter emotional content should be a starting point, not a revelation. Angelakos said “Take a Walk” is his least favorite song, but it’s still a definitive work in an illustrative way—come for the Doritos Locos commercial, stay for a devastating recount of how the promises of capitalism brought the Angelakos family to America and poisoned its next three generations of men. The full disclosure of Gossamer caused Angelakos to aspire for a well-earned positivity and universality on Kindred, but taking cues from professional, suit-and-tie songwriters like Cole Porter and Irving Berlin (“Holy shit, no one gets to the chorus faster than they do”) led to an album where the stereotype of Angelakos as a jingle writer could’ve stuck.
Meanwhile, no Passion Pit song has ever taken longer to get to the chorus than “Somewhere Up There.” There isn’t a chorus at all, but like Angelakos’ best hooks, the first three minutes can feel frightening and giddy, either a free-fall or a sudden uplift. It’s his idea of a classical suite, stopping mid-air to meditate on Bowlby’s Attachment Theory and ending with a banal phone message from his mother about gardening. No song has done a more convincing job of transposing Angelakos’ centrifugal brain into music and “Somewhere Up There” validates the process of making Tremendous Sea of Love: a stunning artistic achievement and something that would be totally useless to ad execs.
If not a rejection of its predecessor, Tremendous Sea of Love is a reaction to it—while just as streamlined and compact, it lacks the hermetic seal that defined Kindred. When “Inner Dialogue” and “I’m Perfect” abruptly shut down at two-and-a-half minutes, they’re over but not necessarily finished; it’s conceivable that Angelakos could get The Life of Pablo with these songs and add another bridge or pitch-shifted choir. “Hey K” and “You Have the Right” are first-take sequels to the exquisite and ornate “Constant Conversations,” addressing the same person (ex-wife Kristy Mucci), the subject of Angelakos’ crippling remorse and shame, but from a healthier place. “To the Otherside” and “The Undertow” don’t fuss much over their metaphors or really create them at all, but the listener is probably aware that Angelakos is now heading up a potentially game-changing artist’s services group with $250 million worth of funding. Would “I made it to the other side” be any more powerful if it was phrased differently or would it just be more clever?
Whether or not Tremendous Sea of Love actually exists without the legitimizing vestiges of the music business, it relieves Angelakos from the burdens of having to reestablish the Passion Pit brand in the way that peers such as MGMT and Phoenix will once they return. It’s presented as a gift—free of charge, with a targeted audience, but not necessarily an altruistic act. “I wrote this album to tell myself and to tell you that you were always good enough,” Angelakos wrote via a typed, smudged letter that serves currently as his pinned Tweet. “I do not need your money. I just want you, I just NEED you, to listen to me.” On “I’m Perfect,” Angelakos is honest about the coexistence of neediness and grandiosity in his superego: “Tell me I’m so damn perfect/Tell me it all of the time.” But even if you did, Angelakos doesn't sound like he'd believe it anyway. Tremendous Sea of Love isn't perfect, nor is it meant to be; under the weight of the world, we should just aspire to be good enough from now on. | 2017-04-13T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-04-13T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | self-released | April 13, 2017 | 7.5 | cdd89cf4-3d57-4982-9e7a-04497a71d81e | Ian Cohen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ian-cohen/ | null |
The Byrds frontman’s deliriously opulent solo work was misunderstood upon release, but this lavish repackaging restores a spiritual singer-songwriter classic. | The Byrds frontman’s deliriously opulent solo work was misunderstood upon release, but this lavish repackaging restores a spiritual singer-songwriter classic. | Gene Clark: No Other | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/gene-clark-no-other/ | No Other | For those that knew him, there seemed to be two Harold Eugene “Gene” Clarks, each contradicting the other. There was Gene Clark the country boy from Tipton, Missouri and Gene Clark the mid-’60s L.A. rock star and frontman for the Byrds. He had the chiseled looks to earn the nickname “Prince Valiant” and looked every bit the ideal frontman, yet suffered crippling stage fright. While his band took sterling Bob Dylan covers to the top of the charts, Clark penned songs that earned the admiration of Dylan himself. He was humble and quiet, yet since he wrote all the Byrds’ early songs, his first royalty check allowed him to wheel around town in a maroon Ferrari while the rest of the band was still broke. His last songwriting credit for the band during their heyday was “Eight Miles High,” and he departed soon after due to a “fear of flying.” Even with his posthumous cult fandom, Clark’s visionary composite of country and rock doesn’t command the same reverence as erstwhile fellow-Byrd Gram Parsons.
His solo career always seemed snakebit; his albums under-performed while covers of his songs sent the Eagles and Linda Ronstadt towards superstardom. Yes, the Byrds’s 1973 reunion album on David Geffen’s Asylum Records was an all-out critical and commercial disaster, but it was Gene who emerged from the wreckage with the album’s strongest songs and performances, to the point where Geffen gave him a recording budget of $100,000 to realize his masterpiece in 1974.** For one glorious moment, it seemed that Clark’s solo fortunes had finally turned, and you can hear almost every single one of those dollars poured into No Other, a deliriously opulent, rococo work in a decade filled with them. But when it was time to play the album for Geffen, he took one look at the eight songs on the vinyl and yelled at Clark: “Make a proper fucking album!”, throwing the test pressing in the garbage without even listening to it. No money would go to promote the album and No Other tanked, all but ending Clark’s career. One of the most exquisite spiritual seekers in song, Clark was dead by the age of 46, ravaged by alcohol and heroin.
Misunderstood for decades, No Other’s audience slowly emerged. 4AD founder Ivo Watts-Russell revered the album, and supergroup This Mortal Coil (featuring members of Cocteau Twins and Dead Can Dance) covered two Clark songs in the ’80s. In 2014, Beach House, Fleet Foxes, the Walkmen, Grizzly Bear, and Wye Oak convened to perform the album in full. While on the surface it seemed like a curious tribute –those bands’ collective discography has less ornamentation than one song on No Other– the emotional weight of it has resonated with a new generation. “Some of the lyrics [...] just destroy you,” Beach House’s Alex Scally told The New York Times. “There’s something really touching about it.” So it makes sense that this gorgeous and profound reissue of No Other now comes in a lavishly detailed and loving box set on 4AD (Geffen never even bothered to release the album on CD), featuring an 80-page hardbound book, extra sessions, a 5.1 surround mix of the album, and a documentary by Paul Kendall.
Perceived at the time as an example of cocaine-fueled excess, No Other was actually written during a reflective, sober, family-oriented time in Clark’s life. Holed up in Mendocino, Clark slowly pieced the songs together while gazing out at the Pacific Ocean then took the songs to L.A. producer Thomas Jefferson Kaye. While his previous album, 1971’s White Light, was a spare and sublime acoustic set, this album featured seemingly infinite layers. By the time you’ve reached the end of the first song, “Life’s Greatest Fool,” you’ve already been walloped by a galloping backbeat, pedal steel, big gospel choirs, and Clark’s voice hitting a previously unheard high register against the backdrop of 16 supporting players. Every moment on the album finds Clark reaching higher and digging deeper, Kaye’s arrangements goading and challenging him at every turn.
Clark took cues from the spiritual uplift of Stevie Wonder’s Innervisions and the moral squalor of Rolling Stones’s Goat Head’s Soup; fittingly, No Other explores the dichotomy of mankind’s potential for higher consciousness and the luridness of its lower half. Clark hinted that the foreboding slink of “Silver Raven” was about aliens and flying saucers, while the book reveals it was Gene’s nickname for his wife Carlie’s dancing shoes. The delirious “Strength of Strings” is a tug of war between euphoric highs and crippling depressive states, with Clark and backing choir oscillating between the two extremes “on the cosmic range.” Clark was notorious for never picking up a book, and his ideas of the cosmos and Zen philosophy mostly arose in conversation with friends and filtered down into his songs, but they were profound and deeply felt nonetheless.
Throughout, Gene details his struggle to pierce the smog of ‘70s SoCal decadence. The breezy country rock of “The True One” explores the precarity of delusion: “Just walk upstairs and ask/ You’ll be likely directed down/Into the reality/Of what you are doing,” Clark sings, adding: “Sometimes it’s so hard to see/ Which one is the true one.” On the heartbreaking “From A Silver Phial,” his subject is a woman who puts “her faith into the moon and stars” yet finds herself imprisoned in a toxic relationship. By song’s end, her sole means of survival comes from making her master’s “lower self worth while.”
Even soul-seeking has its own perils, as on the album’s eight-minute brooding centerpiece, “Some Misunderstanding.” The lyrics stem from a dream that roused Clark in the middle of the night, meditating on interconnectedness and the dual vision of “every expectation/And...what I realize.” As Kaye erects a mountain of keyboards, acoustic guitars, piano, steel guitar, fiddle, and choir, Clark reaches the summit only to come to the understanding: “If you sell your soul/To brighten your role/You might be disappointed/In the lights.”
The album ends with “Lady of the North,” a sublime ode to Clark’s wife propelled by piano, pedal steel, and an electronically phased violin line that drifts away like a pink cloud at album’s end. But even amid the joyful sounds, there’s a sorrowful undertone, as if Clark himself doesn’t quite believe in the happiness he’s found. When No Other suffered its ignoble fate, Clark never quite recovered; both his career and marriage crumbled soon after. It’s easy to draw a comparison to frustrated country-rock saints like Parsons or Townes Van Zandt. But as Alex Abramovich wrote in London Review of Books about Clark, these songs “carve their own, canyon-sized niche.”
The adoring repackaging covers every facet of the album. No aspect of it goes unexplored, from details on every player to the reason Greta Garbo owned a copy of the album. There are pages devoted to the mansion where the album photo shoot took place, as well as a story explaining how the ruggedly handsome Gene Clark wound up on his own album cover in drag. There are outtakes of all the songs (including a few passes at Clark’s “Train Leaves Here This Morning” that the Eagles had tackled on their first album), but after hundreds of spins of the original, it feels odd to hear these lavish songs strippeddown, like glimpsing the Sistine Chapel through scaffolding or seeing Prince in a pair of sweatpants. The cumulative effect both demystifies No Other while exalting it. Tragically ignored during its time, the album takes its rightful place it alongside Love’s Forever Changes, Judee Sill’s Heart Food, or Van Morrison’s Astral Weeks, bringing together the conflicted, clashing aspects of Gene Clark’s art into a cohesive whole.
Buy: Rough Trade
(Pitchfork may earn a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.) | 2019-11-14T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2019-11-14T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Folk/Country | 4AD | November 14, 2019 | 9.3 | cddb44f6-659a-4b51-884e-a8ab81b535c5 | Andy Beta | https://pitchfork.com/staff/andy-beta/ | |
Featuring Key Glock and newcomers Snupe Bandz and Joddy, this compilation from the Memphis rapper and his associates feels like the culmination of a thoroughly unique career. | Featuring Key Glock and newcomers Snupe Bandz and Joddy, this compilation from the Memphis rapper and his associates feels like the culmination of a thoroughly unique career. | Various Artists: Young Dolph Presents Paper Route Illuminati | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/various-artists-young-dolph-presents-paper-route-illuminati/ | Young Dolph Presents Paper Route Illuminati | Where Memphis rap was once defined by 8Ball & MJG’s somber drug-dealing rhymes and Three 6 Mafia’s dystopic horrorcore, Young Dolph chose a different lane: He fought the stress of being a dealer who was also a user by making crude jokes. Take “I’m Everything You Wanna Be,’’ a standout from 2017’s Bulletproof. The album’s genesis was an attempt on his life, yet on that song, he riffed on everything from selling drugs to family members to dancing like Puffy in Times Square. He brings that same vital balance of levity and darkness to his latest album, Paper Route Illuminati, a collaborative effort with the Paper Route Empire. Although it is a chance to show the talent of his homies, Dolph is still a presence on the record. He is on ten songs out of 13, and the first three, providing both his star aura and his talent for street tales.
This new album feels like a culmination of this career. Yes, the 78-minute runtime is intimidating, but it means we get to spend more time with Dolph and his compelling roster of personalities. On opener “Talking to My Scale,” Dolph starts with a motivated Tupac-on-lean monologue about the fakeness of your enemies and “running it up to the motherfuckin’ ceiling,” then asks an earnest question: “If I sacrifice myself, will I go to jail?’’ It’s Dolph’s gift to casually let you into his life like this, using first-person anecdotes that detail his rise to the top. Key Glock, his most direct descendant, has a similar knack for storytelling, and he displays it on “Mister Glock 2.’’ In a monotone flow, he recounts the things he did to survive his difficult teenage years: “Fourteen, smoking dope, shooting guns/Yeah, fifteen, flipping Os or onions/Sixteen, taking niggas’ money/Seventeen, had juggers jumping/Eighteen, got locked up for hustling.’’ Glock speaks like a kid who has seen it all, and, to some extent, he has; his mom was in prison, and his father came in and out of his life.
The Paper Route team injects their narratives with smooth threats. On “Remember,’’ Snupe Bandz, who might have the thickest Southern accent since Daniel Craig in Knives Out, draws a precise, terrorizing picture of the days when he was on the street: “You gotta die if you play with my pesos/You got to go if you reach for my ice/Play with the mob and we taking your life/I got hitters creeping out through the night/Get caught out of bounds and you know it’s on sight.” On “Trust Nobody,’’ Dolph and PaperRoute Woo, whose voice has more of a formal enunciation, both hand out threats; one dips and the other dives. The album’s most impressive performance comes from Brooklyn rapper Joddy, who dismisses competitors with the biting humor of Lil’ Kim: “All these bird bitches getting pissed off, steady writing diss bars/Worried ’bout me? Sis, worry ’bout your discharge,” she raps, sounding like Regina George. The addition of Joddy to the Paper Route roster is testament to Dolph’s A&R skills; most Southern groups aren’t mixing the car-trunk trapping swagger of Memphis with Brooklyn bullying.
A few days after releasing this March’s Dum and Dummer 2, Young Dolph flirted with retirement. “I hope y’all enjoying the new mixtape. It’s my last project that I am putting out,’’ he said at the time. Thankfully he hasn’t hung up the microphone yet; if he does, his influence will continue to be felt in Memphis rap. He understands that if a community has to share its pain, then its success must be shared as well.
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-08-05T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2021-08-05T00:00:00.000-04:00 | null | Paper Route Empire | August 5, 2021 | 6.8 | cde7f3c3-5758-4241-b48d-1a0f99c4620b | Jayson Buford | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jayson-buford/ | |
Eaters are a collaboration between two young men from Brooklyn, including an engineer who's worked with Parquet Courts and Frankie Rose. Their self-titled LP could be called a rock album, though it features few obviously discernible guitars, and most of its songs are shaped less like songs than like quasi-ambient miniatures. | Eaters are a collaboration between two young men from Brooklyn, including an engineer who's worked with Parquet Courts and Frankie Rose. Their self-titled LP could be called a rock album, though it features few obviously discernible guitars, and most of its songs are shaped less like songs than like quasi-ambient miniatures. | Eaters: Eaters | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/19485-eaters-eaters/ | Eaters | Eaters are a collaboration between two young men from Brooklyn, one named Jonny and one named Bob. Their music is dark without feeling oppressive and modern without ever feeling too slick. Most of their self-titled debut sounds like something that could’ve come out in the late 1970s or early ’80s, a period when bands nominally classified as post-punk started messing around with synthesizers, and peacocks like Brian Eno and David Bowie realized you could make rock that sounded cerebral and far-out without becoming Yes. The palette is gray, the vocals are real Teutonic. Think of it as pocket goth: A sullen, hooded tempest made at manageable scale.
Jonny, who in the interest of being official is named Jonathan Schenke, is an engineer with credits on albums by Liturgy, Frankie Rose, and most recently, Parquet Courts—all young rock bands that approach the idiom of rock music from very different perspectives. (Eaters has also been co-released on Dull Tools, a label run in part by Parquet Courts singer and guitarist Andrew Savage.)
Eaters, too, could be called a rock album, though with the exception of “Through All” and “The Way” it features few obviously discernible guitars, and most of its songs are shaped less like songs than like quasi-ambient miniatures that use the signposts of vocal melodies and propulsive drums to cover up for the fact that all Bob and Jonny really want to do is play with texture. And the textures on Eaters are beautiful: Grim and subdued but so rich you could raise tomatoes in them. More than any melody or song, it’s the sound of the album that keeps me interested. So while I recognize that “Bury the Lines” and “Through All” feel calibrated to be singles, they also feel beholden to convention in ways that weirder, looser experiments like “Icarish” and “This Is Round” don’t.
Along with bands like Merchandise and Total Control, Eaters seem like part of a microshift in indie music away from color and variegation to something comparatively austere. Call it a momentary juke back into modernism as we crest the Aquarian age. Maybe it’s just the comfort of the past—that almost quaint way young bands mine old sounds the way people down in Williamsburg, Virginia keep making candles just like they did in the bloodletting days. The quiet irony of Eaters is that it feels like a period piece for a time in music when so many things felt new. | 2014-06-30T02:00:03.000-04:00 | 2014-06-30T02:00:03.000-04:00 | null | Driftless | June 30, 2014 | 6.4 | cde8ac72-fdee-47e0-8f00-2adfc4e855b1 | Mike Powell | https://pitchfork.com/staff/mike-powell/ | null |
The invaluable Sundazed label reissues this 1968 psych-pop masterpiece, adding 10 tracks worth of audition tapes, B-sides, and alternate takes. | The invaluable Sundazed label reissues this 1968 psych-pop masterpiece, adding 10 tracks worth of audition tapes, B-sides, and alternate takes. | United States of America: United States of America | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/8385-united-states-of-america/ | United States of America | The United States of America was never immortalized by Pepsi commercials or Time-Life 20-disc retrospectives: The band barely lasted two years, released only one album (which Columbia's marketing department sat on its hands to promote), and ended up a cult favorite that would later be speculated as a phantom influence for the Krautrock sound. But 36 years after its release, USA's self-titled album still stands above the work of most of their Monterey-era, psych-rock peers, and this long-awaited reissue tacks on 10 tracks' worth of audition tapes, B-sides, and alternate takes.
The band's deft addition of electronic noise and modulation into what would otherwise be soundtracks for the Beach Boys' California or ham 'n' eggs Anglo-rock was several years ahead of its time. Former UCLA ethnomusicology instructor Joseph Byrd concocted miracles with musique concrete-style tape collages and white noise blurts that veered in and out of the songs like uninvited but still welcome guests. He also tackled a dub-like mixology of tape delays and ring-modulated fade-outs and, best of all, distorted and punch-drunk synthesizers that sound indistinguishable from electric guitars. This was a fresh approach to rock from a unique group of musicians: UCLA students who had studied Cage and Karlheinz Stockhausen but, as Byrd's liner notes claim, were "ignorant" of rock roots. And, although the band does indulge a few moments of awestruck discovery of their instruments' capabilities, the noise generally works with the music rather than simply being fodder from badge-wearing freaks tying to spook the Organization Man.
If USA had an anthem, it was "The American Metaphysical Circus". The track opens with a pleasantly disorienting hodgepodge of sampled John Philip Souza marches and Byrd's faithful kiddie-baiting Ringling Bros. calliope melodies before chanteuse Dorothy Moskowitz arrives with her herbal tea-watered croon, carefully enunciating like a three-nights-of-sleep-deprived mother's lullaby. Meanwhile, electric violinist/ring modulator foreman Gordon Marron emits aurora borealis streaks of police siren wails and bassist Rand Forbes keeps the music resting its head on a bar table all night long.
Byrd's free-association lyrics throughout the album are generally LSD journal entries (e.g. "Lemonous petals, dissident play/ Tasting of ergot/ Dancing by night, dying by day"), satirical toasts to the Good Life ("I got a split level house with a wonderful view, sugar"), or phonetics intended for a jigsaw fit into the music (the Latin choral chant that opens "Where Is Yesterday"). "Hard Coming Love" is a conventional rave-up that would've faded into background at an all-night, acid test show were it not for the UFO-like synth that mysteriously flies through the song's intermissions.
That said, some of the album's synthesizer works haven't aged well and are stigmatized by the "B-flick sound effects" tag that magnifies the wrinkles on so many electro-acoustic pieces from the analog years. The tribal drum whomp that opens the go-go trance number "The Garden of Earthly Delights" is pockmarked by a laser-gun misfire that might've cued a Playboy bunny in Pocahontas drag to jump through a paper wall and shake it for the camera after Hugh Hefner announced his solidarity with the American Indian Movement on The Mike Douglas Show. The patchouli-sprayed ballads "Cloud Song" and "Love Song for the Dead Che" both bloom with rich, East Indian-inspired piano and string melodies, and still breathe without any electronic fingerprints. On the other hand, the pots 'n' pans-banging hootenanny "I Won't Leave My Wooden Wife for You, Sugar" is relieved by its jump-edit to a New Orleans slapstick jazz coda.
The bonus tracks included on this reissue indicate that USA may have aspired to gain prominence in both the mainstream and the avant-garde. "Osamu"-- with its drone-minimalism rooted in composer La Monte Young's Theater of Eternal Music and sparse, dribbling kabuki rhythms-- is the band's most abstract, non-commercial moment. In stark contrast are the Fillmore East-goes-"American Bandstand" pop tune "No Love to Give" and the AOR-ready, organ-pop of "Perry Pier". These songs exhibit one of the reasons why USA broke up so quickly: Byrd wrote that he wanted the band to go "harder," while Moskowitz preferred the "softer" route. That yin and yang is uncannily blended in the band's magnum opus, "The American Way of Love". The three-part medley first thrashes out dirty psych-blues with Byrd advertising the wonders of being a John for cross-dressing prostitutes. Then the music bleeds into a radio station playing escapist Bacharach-pop or "California good-time music," before brilliantly concluding with a sputtering music machine randomly firing samples of the album's previous melodies and utterances. Sadly, too few heard this music when it was first released. | 2004-10-18T02:00:03.000-04:00 | 2004-10-18T02:00:03.000-04:00 | Experimental / Rock | Edsel | October 18, 2004 | 8.9 | cde93ec3-447e-4884-8a77-432d8cf87371 | Cameron Macdonald | https://pitchfork.com/staff/cameron-macdonald/ | null |
Collecting both hits and tangents, this double-disc anthology of Paul Weller’s post-Jam project has a concise narrative punch lacking in 1998’s more thorough box set. | Collecting both hits and tangents, this double-disc anthology of Paul Weller’s post-Jam project has a concise narrative punch lacking in 1998’s more thorough box set. | The Style Council: Long Hot Summers: The Story of The Style Council | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/the-style-council-long-hot-summers-the-story-of-the-style-council/ | Long Hot Summers: The Story of The Style Council | Think of the Style Council’s career as the pop equivalent of a semester abroad: Paul Weller embarked on this journey with the explicit intent of broadening his horizons. He had grown tired of the Jam, the trio that he had led since he was 14, ushering them through the frenzied days of punk and leading them to the top of the UK charts. The Gift, the trio’s last album, was sitting at No. 1 when he decided to pull the plug in 1982, believing there was nothing left for them to conquer. He chose to put childish things away and act like an adult for the Style Council.
Weller enlisted Mick Talbot, a keyboardist who previously played with Jam disciples the Merton Parkas, as his lieutenant, but it was clear from the outset who was in charge. In the video for 1983’s “Long Hot Summer”—their third single and the song that lends its title to this new anthology—Talbot spends his time rowing a bare-chested Weller to a riverside picnic; later, Tabot would literally carry Weller’s bags in the clip for “Boy Who Cried Wolf.” Absurd as the images may be, there’s an endearing playfulness to the videos that’s telling. Weller scowled through most of the Jam, adopting the look intense young men wear when they’re seriously making serious music. Here, he’s cavorting shirtless, so carefree he’s nearly camp, embracing the hint of sexual ambiguity with the same gusto with which he has a beatnik bongo player join their party.
Signifiers were a big deal for the Style Council. The group’s first single, “Speak Like a Child,” shared a title with a 1968 Blue Note LP by Herbie Hancock; they designed the album cover of 1985’s Our Favourite Shop so that it spilled over with the books, fashion, music, and film they cherished most. They swapped punk and mod for jazz and soul as musical touchstones, and the group expanded this obsession through the ’80s, incorporating house and garage to an extent that their record label rejected their final album for veering too far into the dance-music realm. The mysterious, uncredited Cappuccino Kid—widely believed to be Paolo Hewitt, a confidant and biographer of Weller’s until they had a falling out in the 2000s—penned righteous manifestos for the band’s liner notes. They embraced political activism, fighting against prime minister Margaret Thatcher with such enthusiasm it nearly consumed them.
Members of the Style Council—Weller and Talbot officially constituted the group’s lineup, but they retained a fairly stable set of players through the years—later blamed the band’s prominent position on the anti-Thatcher Red Wedge tour in 1986 as halting their momentum. But Long Hot Summers: The Story of the Style Council underscores that they were a band born of the moment who lived for the moment, and that moment had passed by the time the ’80s were half finished. Long Hot Summers differs from the many, many Style Council compilations released over the years by being co-compiled by Weller as part of a Style Council reclamation project that also includes a documentary film for Sky Arts (the movie is rumored to be headed Stateside sometime next year).
In one sense, assembling a Style Council collection isn’t all that hard, since the high points often occurred on singles. During their peak early years, the band gravitated toward singles and EPs over LPs, so their most vibrant music happened here, while the scattershot later albums usually are well represented by their hits. What happens in the margins of Long Hot Summers makes a difference, though. At two CDs (or two LPs), it has room to cover adventures a single-disc hits collection doesn’t, and it has a concise narrative punch lacking in the thorough 1998 box The Complete Adventures Of The Style Council. The extra space here affords the opportunity to underscore how the band directly tackled big societal and political issues: They wrote a swinging jazz number called “Dropping Bombs on the Whitehouse” and delicately urged that the “Ghosts of Dachau” not be forgotten, a sentiment that may hit harder in the authoritarian climate of 2020 than it did in 1985. Unlike so many of their British post-punk peers, the group also didn’t hesitate to absorb the changes brought by ’80s R&B, adapting elastic synth bass and drum machines for their own ends and gamely covering Joe Smooth’s house classic “Promised Land."
At this generous length, the inherent earnest gangliness of the Style Council is readily apparent. Often, the band came across like they had raided their big brother’s closet, trying on suits that didn’t quite fit their frame. Their funk can be stiff, the jazz drifts toward cocktail hour, and they dive into dance without quite knowing whether they can pull off the new sounds. But all this awkwardness is endearing, not alienating. It’s done in the service of self-edification, for one and for another. Weller really did learn several new tricks during this period. He wound up absorbing the impassioned smooth soul of Curtis Mayfield, a progression evident on “Walls Come Tumbling Down!” and “Shout to the Top!”; he learned how to write with a lyrical lightness, a quality that still makes “Long Hot Summer” and “My Ever-Changing Moods” incandescent. He’d retain this nuance as he headed out on his solo career, but the Style Council stands as its own distinctive thing, the crystallization of a moment when the possibilities pop culture offered to a curious and attentive artist seemed endless.
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2020-11-09T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2020-11-09T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Polydor | November 9, 2020 | 7.8 | cdea06af-64d5-4acc-946a-f85d16d7f9ac | Stephen Thomas Erlewine | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stephen-thomas erlewine/ | |
The daring Chicago pop artist explores resilience and hard-won triumphs against a backdrop of hatred and brutality. | The daring Chicago pop artist explores resilience and hard-won triumphs against a backdrop of hatred and brutality. | KAINA: Next to the Sun | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/kaina-next-to-the-sun/ | Next to the Sun | On Pennsylvania Avenue, a few blocks west of the Capitol building, the Newseum hosts a permanent exhibit of five hundred years of front pages, from a 1603 broadsheet commemorating the coronation of James I to the present day’s headlines. Some weeks ago after the election of Donald Trump, a devastated friend and I made our way through that cavernous, low-lit corridor, our fingers tracing centuries of calamity pressed into newsprint and shielded behind glass. At the end of our walk, after all that disease and death and disaster, I felt a burden lift. There was something perversely soothing in this irrefutable reminder that the road behind us had been no less difficult than the road ahead of us would surely be.
The rising Chicago pop artist KAINA writes with this notion in mind, placing her day-to-day struggles in a long tradition of lamentation, bigger than today and bigger, even, than Trump. Her striking lyrics take aim at present-day bigots who clamor for closed borders—“Look how these brown hands cook all your meals/But mama says you want us all to disappear”—but she’s more concerned with the persistence of this foundational hatred, and with the people she loves, who have thrived “through so many moons” and continue to thrive in spite of racist brutality.
The album’s title—along with the sugary expanse of cotton-candy clouds on its cover—makes for a clever bit of misdirection. KAINA spends the better part of “Next to the Sun” interrogating hollow maxims of self-care and searching, instead, for the roots of her community’s resilience. Often, this means flipping an oft-used lyrical symbol into something surprising, even shocking. The sun of the title track is a stand-in for a self-destructive impulse, and KAINA casts herself as Icarus: “Wanna feel it all/The burn and the lesson, the fall.” When she sings the word “bed,” on “Ghost” and “Could Be A Curse,” she calls to mind Tracey Emin’s depressive episodes and disheveled sheets, the furthest thing from standard pop eroticism.
“What’s a Girl” is an even more impressive feat, with KAINA flipping empty, you-go-girl affirmation into a scathing indictment of the impossible expectations to which women of color are held. “What is a girl without ambition? ...What is a soul without the fight?” she sings, even after wearily lamenting that “the fight… never stops.” When the personal is political, it is all too easy for one’s very being to become a battleground. KAINA insists that her strength shouldn’t be measured by her capacity to suffer without flinching, but in her ability to heal, assisted by the people she loves.
It is KAINA’s new understanding of the deep reserves of love within her and in the people around her that closes the record, on the joyous, gorgeous “Green.” Here, she understands love as something irreducible, irrefutable: “Sky could be blue as can be/Grass could be green, green, too/And my love the same, same as them/They’re facts, it’s true.” After an album’s worth of ruminating on isolation, fatigue, and disconnection, “Green” arrives as a hard-won and genuine celebration. KAINA is helped to this realization by a couple of supportive guests: an adorable young relative, on “Joei’s Secret,” who urges her to ignore fuckboys and focus instead on “drawing, or education,” and close collaborator Sen Morimoto, who reaches through the fog on “Could Be A Curse” and comforts her: “You are not the sum of your fears… Just try to sleep.”
This lyrical journey finds a sophisticated mirror in the music. On opening track “House,” the arrangement isn’t so much deconstructed as destroyed; strings and synths ring out in soft, distorted loops, a scrap of a horn riff shatters before it’s even begun, and KAINA’s voice reaches unsteadily through the wreckage. Over the course of the album, sounds slowly cohere until “Green” arrives, an intricate, indomitable piece of Latin jazz. The early songs are no less beautiful for their brokenness, but KAINA’s mission is to reach for more sound, more color, more people to hold in one’s heart. “You like to keep this place empty,” she sings, on “House,” against a spare soundscape. “There’s room for plenty.”
Buy: Rough Trade
(Pitchfork may earn a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.) | 2019-07-19T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-07-19T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | Sooper | July 19, 2019 | 7.6 | cdee673e-779e-4148-bc22-3fde5d47edb2 | Peyton Thomas | https://pitchfork.com/staff/peyton-thomas/ | |
On his third album in seven months, Morrison teams up with jazz musician Joey DeFrancesco for a collection of originals and standards that captures the joy of making music. | On his third album in seven months, Morrison teams up with jazz musician Joey DeFrancesco for a collection of originals and standards that captures the joy of making music. | Van Morrison / Joey DeFrancesco: You’re Driving Me Crazy | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/van-morrison-joey-defrancesco-youre-driving-me-crazy/ | You’re Driving Me Crazy | For those keeping score, yes, You’re Driving Me Crazy is the third album Van Morrison has released since September of 2017, when he delivered the hard-charging blues of Roll With the Punches. In December, he put out Versatile, an amiable collection grounded by standards that found him moving toward jazz. Morrison’s newest release delves even deeper into the genre, pairing the 1960s legend with jazz organist, composer, and bandleader Joey DeFrancesco.
The swift pace Morrison is keeping at age 72 may have as much to do with licensing as it does with inspiration. You’re Driving Me Crazy is the first Van Morrison album to be released on Sony subsidiaries throughout the world (a fact obscured slightly by Versatile, which inaugurated his domestic deal with the label in the U.S. but was licensed to Caroline elsewhere). So, maybe Morrison was running out a contract. But that doesn’t mean he was scrambling to record a bunch of gibberish, the way he did in 1967, so he could leave Bang Records and make Astral Weeks for Warner Bros. Five decades later, he doesn’t seem to be in a rush to get anywhere; judging by Roll With the Punches and Versatile, two pleasurable albums of familiar tunes performed by a crew composed largely of longtime Van veterans, he’s happy right where he is.
You’re Driving Me Crazy adjusts that formula, with Morrison swapping out his usual suspects for Joey DeFrancesco’s hard-driving soul-jazz combo of guitarist Dan Wilson, tenor saxophonist Troy Roberts, and drummer Michael Ode. Joined on occasion by Van’s vocalist daughter, Shana, the quintet knocked out the album in a couple of days, just like acts used to do in the mid-20th-century heyday of Blue Note and Prestige.
Apart from his enduring (and endearing) dedication to making albums that test the limits of how much music can fit on a compact disc, Morrison never pretends to engage with the modern world on You’re Driving Me Crazy. He’s not a throwback, though; he’s carrying on a tradition, and that may be why he sees a kindred spirit in 47-year-old DeFrancesco, who has spent his career extending the legacy of music made before his birth. DeFrancesco started out as a wunderkind, signing to Columbia Records as a teenager in the late 1980s and becoming one of the youngest musicians ever to tour with Miles Davis. Eventually, he settled into a groove as a savvy traditionalist: He’d record a tribute to hard-bop pioneer Horace Silver but had enough of a sense of humor to title a 1999 album Goodfellas and pose as a mafia don on its cover.
This approach makes DeFrancesco an ideal foil for Morrison. Respectful but impish, the organist jabs new retorts into tunes the two know by heart. For his part, Morrison seems inspired by the band, playing with his phrasing so that his vocals mimic a saxophone on a lazy rendition of “Miss Otis Regrets”—whose final stretch finds him elongating his notes, then launching into a string of staccato growls—and happily riding a fevered groove on “Close Enough for Jazz.” The latter is one of several original compositions Morrison dug up from his catalog to sit alongside such warhorses as Eddie Jones’ “The Things I Used to Do” and B.B. King’s “Everyday I Have the Blues”—tunes that have been reliable crowd-pleasers for bar bands since they were hits in the ’50s. Morrison and DeFrancesco don’t reinvent these classics so much as they inhabit them, the sheer verve of the group rendering each one vivid and alive.
On You’re Driving Me Crazy, the songs are essentially conduits for the creation of music. Morrison doesn’t disregard the lyrics; his interpretations are always grounded in the spirit of the original. But he’s clearly thrilled to play with a band as lively and dextrous as DeFrancesco’s, so he positions his voice as another boisterous instrument within the group. There’s a palpable joy to these performances that distinguishes this album from its two immediate predecessors, even as its kinship with Roll With the Punches and Versatile underscores how Van Morrison’s latter-day music is all about the present moment. Early in his career, he searched for truth within his own songwriting. Now, he finds meaning in simply playing music—an act that is by its nature transient but also, sometimes, transcendent. | 2018-04-30T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-04-30T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock / Jazz | Legacy | April 30, 2018 | 7 | cdf11dde-e27e-4ade-b9c6-1ca37aa8dd70 | Stephen Thomas Erlewine | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stephen-thomas erlewine/ | |
This 1977 album was obscure in its day, but it spawned a fervent cult among fans of spiritual jazz, for good reason: The no-frills recording captures a feeling of unearthly magic. | This 1977 album was obscure in its day, but it spawned a fervent cult among fans of spiritual jazz, for good reason: The no-frills recording captures a feeling of unearthly magic. | Pharoah Sanders: Pharoah | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/pharoah-sanders-pharoah/ | Pharoah | Lavish reissues of a single album usually signify the record’s general sense of importance: We need to gather all that’s known about this work, they suggest, every note and outtake, in order to more completely understand its historical moment. The new edition of Pharoah Sanders’ 1977 album Pharoah, which comes in a beautiful box with an expansive booklet filled with essays and interviews, a companion live disc, sheet music, photographs, and more, is trying to correct the record rather than expand upon it.
In the grand scheme of jazz history, Pharoah is merely one LP among the dozens the saxophonist issued between the blistering far-out free jazz of his 1965 debut and Promises, the album he made with Floating Points that was issued in 2021, about 18 months before his death. Pharoah was cut for India Navigation, a small imprint that specialized in the jazz avant-garde, and it sold poorly and was not regarded highly by its maker. Though it made little impact at the time, Pharoah spawned a fervent cult among spiritual-jazz fans, particularly those who enjoy the chase for rare LPs. This reissue, while not cheap, is a bargain compared to the hundreds of dollars one might spend for a beat-up original. And the music itself, which is identifiably the work of its creator but has a highly unusual atmosphere all its own, easily justifies the effort and care that went into the set.
The secret appeal of Pharoah is the quality that ultimately gave Sanders pause when the album was first coming together: As a recording, it sounds crude and homemade, which it was. It was cut in a former factory in upstate New York where India Navigation founder Bob Cummins, an attorney and jazz obsessive, lived with his family. Cummins would put out records by important jazz figures, including saxophonist David Murray and bassist Cecil McBee. But he typically issued live albums and was not an engineer by trade. He and Sanders had trouble agreeing on the details of this project, and in the end, neither man was happy with how it turned out. But the modest recording is perfect for the music, framing a peculiar mood and atmosphere that’s lusty and joyous one moment and haunting and meditative the next.
The side-long “Harvest Time” opens the record with guitarist Tisziji Muñoz and bassist Steve Neil sketching out a two-chord vamp. When Sanders enters, his tone is smoky and relaxed, perfect for a late-night seance. He darts across the melody and fixates on his lower range, where the resonance of his instrument’s reed makes you think of a rumbly congested breath more than a melodic voice. Sanders jumps an octave for some trills and Muñoz joins him, breaking out of his two-chord reverie, and then percussion enters—bowls, bells; you can smell the burning sandalwood—followed by droning harmonium from Sanders’ then-wife Bedria. After 20 minutes that seem to race by, the piece drifts away, as if dispersed by the wind.
“Harvest Time” is so powerful because it contains at least a half-dozen distinct and possibly contradictory feelings at the same time. It’s peaceful but with an undercurrent of unease; it’s warm and welcoming, yet it makes most sense in darkness; it sounds folky and ancient, yet could only be fully rendered following the structural earthquakes of modernism; it comes across as simple and approachable while it’s overlaid with a blurring film of strangeness. The bonus disc that comes with this set contains two live versions of “Harvest Time” recorded when Sanders toured Europe shortly after the record’s release. In some respects, the existence of these live versions, both of which are great, reinforces just how special the initial recordings are. The live takes are much “better” recordings—clearer, less muffled, with a more distinct balance of instruments—and they are well worth hearing. But in emotional terms, they can’t come close to the unrepeatable moments that Cummins captured in the studio.
The second track on the album proper, “Love Will Find a Way,” is another example of the original sessions’ unearthly magic. It would have a long life outside of this recording, even if it never again sounded quite like it does here. At least since his collaborations with singer Leon Thomas starting at the end of the ’60s, Sanders had indulged his love of gospel and R&B, sometimes, as he does here, taking to the microphone himself. His singing voice is untrained and sounds as if he delivered this song off the cuff, but his enthusiasm is infectious, and his voice fits the album’s casual emotions-first mission.
Drums appear for the first time on the record on “Love Will Find a Way,” and the mix is wild and disorienting, with percussion clattering away in the background while Sanders’ singing is way out front. He rips an intense tenor solo over the two-chord vamp, slipping into the reed-splitting overblowing that marked his earlier work. And then, a little over six minutes in, comes the only notable non-Sanders solo on the record, a corker by Muñoz that recalls the color-saturated fractal patterns of an early Santana lead.
“Love Will Find a Way” is 14 minutes of pure jubilation, the sound of a band riffing on a feeling rather than chord changes. The song would reappear as the instrumental title track on Sanders’ next album, a lush excursion into quiet-storm territory featuring vocalist Phyllis Hyman, and Philip Bailey would make it the title track for his 2019 solo album. These later versions confirm that its structure and melody invite a feeling of elegance and smoldering beauty, which makes the festive chaos of the original even more striking.
The final track on Pharoah is the gospel slow-burner “Memories of Edith Johnson,” which features a thick organ, crashing drums, and distant bells and chimes. Slowly unfolding like a time-lapse film of an opening flower, its form reminds me a bit of John Coltrane’s “Welcome,” channeling a related sense of serenity. Sanders wrote the piece thinking of his aunt, whose name is in the title. In an interview included in this set’s book, he talks about the awesome power of her singing, which he heard in church while growing up in Arkansas, comparing her voice to that of Patti LaBelle. Sanders’ own wordless vocalizations on the song, a series of spectral oohs and aahs that convey both innocence and ecstasy, evoke the process of memory itself, how the mind gathers fragments of an event which it then assembles into a coherent whole.
Sanders was very near the end of his life when he sat for the interview where he mentions Edith Johnson, and he lingers on his description of his aunt while his other recollections about the music and recording sessions are relatively brief. His general point is that for certain people and certain cultures—the Black church community he grew up with being a prominent example—music is an integral part of everyday life, something you experience in the moment without necessarily analyzing it after the fact. The homespun Pharoah reflects such a practice. After these sessions finished, he was onto the next gig and back in another studio. To him, this was not a date of particular note. The saxophonist had by this time enjoyed a long life as a performer and bandleader, playing with some of the most important figures in the history of jazz. But gathering people in a room to make raucous and sublime music was his ultimate mission. Few heard Pharoah then and we are very lucky to hear it now, in all its glorious imperfection. | 2023-09-16T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2023-09-16T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Jazz | Luaka Bop | September 16, 2023 | 8.9 | cdf4d612-bdc5-4fe3-a106-6a21379cd7eb | Mark Richardson | https://pitchfork.com/staff/mark-richardson/ | |
The psych-soul singer summons the confidence and exuberance of childhood on an immersive sophomore album. | The psych-soul singer summons the confidence and exuberance of childhood on an immersive sophomore album. | Kadhja Bonet: Childqueen | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/kadhja-bonet-childqueen/ | Childqueen | Childhood used to be a phase. Now, it’s a lifestyle. Whether your inner child seeks coloring books, Capri Suns, or gourmet PB&J, those urges can easily be satiated. This surplus of nostalgia has become so normalized that we have a term for when responsibilities disrupt the sugar rush: adulting. You can only say it with a sigh.
There’s an undercurrent of deep dissatisfaction with adulthood in all this childhood worship, but you won’t find it in Kadhja Bonet’s Childqueen. The psych-soul singer envisions childhood as a becoming rather than a refuge. To be a childqueen is to unearth the pneuma buried beneath adult insecurities and anxieties and self-effacement. The childqueen is not longed for or lost to time; always near, she is summoned. And it isn’t a coincidence that she’s a queen. “We have to be brave enough to bend or break our social inheritance. We have to teach our girls confidence. We have to teach our girls that it’s OK to be seen, to take up space, to use our voices and make mistakes,” Bonet told DIY in 2016, alluding to the gendered undertones of her own struggles with confidence.
Shedding the self-conscious shell of her ornate but bashful 2016 debut, The Visitor, Bonet finds a voice that is expansive and engulfing on Childqueen. It swells, it ascends, it cuts, it carries. Lead single “Mother Maybe” casually sways between warm, balmy coos and surging, sustained shrieks. It is neither an ode to her own mother nor a song of herself, but in it Bonet treats motherhood with wide-eyed wonder, cherishing the mere capacity to produce life. Her voice curls deftly around the shared consonants in “mother” and “maybe,” blurring the words while dwelling on their differences. “Mother maybe/I may be mother,” she chants in the final bridge, scaling her vocal range as she appraises her innate power. The intimacy and joy of her self-recognition feel like a reversal of the movie trope of women looking in mirrors and crying.
Arranged, performed, produced, and mixed by Bonet alone, Childqueen is a labor of willful independence. “Joy” takes full advantage of this autonomy, spinning chunks of frenzied violin, peppy flute, and guitar plucks into a yawning expanse. Even as she sings of lost joy, Bonet’s voice feels unyoked, floating in and out of the foreground. “...,” another near-instrumental, uses flute trills and stabs of bright synths to build to a blissful flicker. “La-lala-la-la,” Bonet sings absentmindedly. Shrouded in her own sounds, she luxuriates in quiet contentment.
By themselves, these flights of indulgence might suggest a narcissistic wunderkind throwing jam sessions in her bedroom, but Childqueen often uses characters’ senses of self to explore relationships and the wider world. “Delphine,” sung from the perspective of an obsessive lover, uses the narrator’s fixation to expose the selfishness that can fuel desire. Bonet pronounces “Delphine” with a skillful, cloying tenderness that becomes sickening as the narrator loses sight of Delphine as a person. “I found your favorite ring/Behind the bed/What’s the matter?/Sweet sweet Delphine,” Bonet sings as Delphine drifts away.
“Thoughts Around Tea” tells the story of a courtship that never progresses due to declined invitations and deferred meetups. As the story briskly unfolds, Bonet focuses on how the main characters, a worker from a city and a farmer from the countryside, are too afraid to leave their respective milieus. “And they would never meet again,” she snaps after their final missed connection. This is the thrill of Childqueen: Bonet lets her imaginative, polymath inner child run free—but she never loses sight of adult reality. | 2018-06-11T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-06-11T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | Fat Possum | June 11, 2018 | 7.7 | cdf5a838-cf43-47dc-b5e7-06d2e0170ba2 | Stephen Kearse | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stephen-kearse/ | |
The latest work from the Norwegian jazz pianist and composer draws inspiration from classical music and folk songs, but the focus remains on the trio’s delicate and muted interplay. | The latest work from the Norwegian jazz pianist and composer draws inspiration from classical music and folk songs, but the focus remains on the trio’s delicate and muted interplay. | Tord Gustavsen Trio: Opening | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/tord-gustavsen-trio-opening/ | Opening | Since Tord Gustavsen’s debut on ECM almost two decades ago, his songs have offered panoramic, highly-detailed images of his home country Norway. The pianist’s compositions are informed by Norwegian folk melodies and performed in unrushed tempos with an extremely delicate touch; the mood often veers toward ambient by way of jazz, occasionally recalling the vast space and looming melodies of impressionist composer Erik Satie. Adding to the atmosphere is his drummer Jarle Vespestad, who has worked with Gustavsen since his debut and whose soft brushwork and shimmering cymbals evoke the morning after snow.
Gustavsen’s latest album, Opening, brings newcomer bassist Steinar Raknes into the fold, replacing the trio’s previous bassist Sigurd Hole. Raknes performs as if he’s played with these musicians for much longer, providing ample counterpoint while establishing his own voice within the trio. He even takes the lead on the mournful “Helensburgh Tango,” switching from the upright to a bowed bass. The 12 songs on Opening draw on sources ranging from Swedish folk music to Norwegian classical, which the trio approach with a delicate interplay. The musical conversation between Gustavsen and Raknes on centerpiece “Stream” is breathtaking, the improvisation from both musicians rich in melody and poured like dual streams of water, alternatingly merging and branching off. Meanwhile, Vespestad sticks to the background with a muted pulse, adding momentum without distracting.
Elsewhere, Gustavsen reimagines 20th century classical music using modern instruments in “Fløytelåt,” a piece by Norwegian composer Gveirr Tveitt. Had the trio performed the song straight, it would’ve been haunting and slow, well within Gustavsen’s wheelhouse. Instead, he transforms it into a surprising highlight, playing the central melody on an electronic instrument whose haunting tone resembles a muted theremin. The texture conjures an eeriness that the trio would not have been able to reproduce on acoustic instruments, and the spectral atmosphere allows Gustavsen some of the album’s most impressive improvisation.
Gustavsen has always had an omnivorous approach to music, interpolating traditional folk melodies and hymns while incorporating different textures and sounds on each release. Whether through the clamorous fusion of “Ritual” or in the mid-tempo groove of “Shepherd Song,” he seems excited by exploring new possibilities within the confines of the trio. Despite these left turns, however, the focus of Opening remains the playing from Gustavsen and the rich accompaniment from his fellow musicians, creating an atmosphere perfect for a walk by a cabin at dawn, with the sun peeking in through the trees. | 2022-04-21T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2022-04-21T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Jazz | ECM | April 21, 2022 | 7.4 | cdf994d5-7cfa-479e-b339-c8cb3dc28a21 | Marshall Gu | https://pitchfork.com/staff/marshall-gu/ | |
At the top of their fifth decade, the Lips rekindle their past romance with Neil Young’s piano ballads, the Beatles’ psychedelic guitar tones, and Bowie’s stargazing anthems on a deeply personal album. | At the top of their fifth decade, the Lips rekindle their past romance with Neil Young’s piano ballads, the Beatles’ psychedelic guitar tones, and Bowie’s stargazing anthems on a deeply personal album. | The Flaming Lips: American Head | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/the-flaming-lips-american-head/ | American Head | Thirty years ago this month, the Flaming Lips released their first game-changing album: 1990’s In a Priest Driven Ambulance. After spending the ‘80s trying to figure out if they wanted to be a prog Replacements or a punk Floyd, the Lips outfitted Priest with an interstellar noise-pop sound that nonetheless retained a distinctly Oklahoman flavor, complete with fairground noises, field recordings of crickets, and strange songs about Jesus. In a Priest Driven Ambulance was also the first installment in what would become a Lips tradition: releasing pace-setting albums at each turn of the decade. Nine years later, their orchestral opus The Soft Bulletin ushered in the band’s imperial phase, while 2009’s Embryonic portended an extended period of wild, anti-pop experimentation. The band’s first album of the 2020s likewise marks another significant change in course; in this case, however, it feels less like the start of a new journey than a homecoming.
In sharp contrast to the Lips’ recent adventures in fairytale fantasias, American Head finds its inspiration in an arcane piece of Oklahoma musical lore. After revisiting the Tom Petty documentary Runnin’ Down A Dream following the rock legend’s 2017 death, Lips ringleader Wayne Coyne became fixated with the story of Petty’s pre-Heartbreakers band, Mudcrutch, with whom Petty spent time in Tulsa in the early-’70s en route to L.A. From that anecdote, Coyne and multi-instrumentalist Steven Drozd envisioned American Head as a work of speculative fiction, reimagining the Lips as the sort of drugged-out local Oklahoman rock band that might’ve hung out and jammed with a pre-fame Petty while he was passing through town.
As it turns out, that mythical ‘70s scenario is really just a roundabout way of getting the Lips back to where they were in the ‘90s. American Head retains some of the symphonic sweep of the Soft Bulletin era and the freaky futurism of their post-Embryonic state, but, at its core, we find the band rekindling their past romance with Neil Young’s piano ballads, the Beatles’ psychedelic guitar tones, and Bowie’s stargazing anthems. Likewise, Coyne approaches his favorite topics—love, drugs, and death—from a less existential, more personal vantage, grounding his narratives in more naturalistic settings. Instead of tunes about killer robots and unicorns with purple eyes, we get songs about people working in slaughterhouses and slinging coke on the side to get by, fond teenage memories of taking quaaludes and frightening recollections of trying LSD, and dramatizations of actual traumatic incidents from Coyne’s early years.
In the 2005 band documentary The Fearless Freaks, we see old home-movie footage of Coyne and his brothers enjoying a typical ’70s all-American adolescence, playing pick-up football with the local longhairs, before a darker narrative emerges—specifically of the drug habit that would land his brother Tommy in and out of prison. American Head feels like it was born from this moment of innocence lost. Though not a narrative concept album per se, each song feels like a vignette from some tragic sequel to Dazed and Confused, where carefree teenage kicks have given way to the unforgiving realities of young adulthood. (And while it’s not an explicitly autobiographical work, tellingly, one of its doomed characters is also named Tommy.)
“What went wrong?/Now all your friends are gone,” Coyne sings on the album’s majestically melancholy opener, “Will You Return/When You Come Down,” and as American Head plays out, that absence takes many forms. On the equally crestfallen “Flowers of Neptune 6,” his old acid-eating pals are getting shipped off to war or thrown in jail; on the moving orchestral centerpiece “Mother I’ve Taken LSD,” his youthful naivete turns to sorrow as he sings of an addict friend taken off to a psych ward and another on life support after a motorcycle crash. But as the album’s title suggests, these sorts of crises are endemic to the American psyche and perpetuate themselves for generations. While these songs may be loosely based on incidents in Coyne’s past, they speak soundly to the country’s current condition, where working-class teens are still often forced to choose between the army, addiction, prison, or death. “Now, I see the sadness in the world,” Coyne sings on the latter track as the strings come in, “I’m sorry I didn’t see it before.” It’s a line that hits especially hard in 2020, when much of the world is both pining to go back to the way things were pre-COVID while having their eyes pried open to the social ills and inequalities that have been festering all along.
But American Head handles this heavy subject matter with a light touch, framing its stories in a magic-realist sunset atmosphere that lends even its gravest songs an earthbound charm. The barnyard sound effects and countrified breakdown of “You n Me Sellin’ Weed”—a folksy ode to young dealers in love—nod to the group’s more playful mid-’90s catalog, as do the dixie-glam guitar slides throughout the record that summon the spirit of the group’s former string-bender Ronald Jones. And for added authentic southern flavor, three tracks feature vocals from Kacey Musgraves, the latest pop star to get roped into the Lips’ supersonic circus. However, in contrast to their previous match-ups with Kesha and Miley, Musgraves serves more as a textural enhancement to the album’s fading-summer milieu, lending her dreamy wordless sighs to the instrumental “Watching the Lightbugs Glow” like someone familiar with the sight, and floating in the background of its companion track “Flowers of Neptune 6” as if beaming in harmonies from the afterlife. Even on their proper duet “God and the Policeman,” she isn’t so much seizing the spotlight from Coyne as playing the angel on his shoulder in a moment of crisis.
American Head hits its emotional peak with the plaintive ballad “Mother Please Don’t Be Sad,” a fictionalized account of Coyne’s real-life experience getting robbed at gunpoint while working at a Long John Silver’s back in the ‘80s; here, he imagines himself getting fatally shot and bidding his mom adieu with “Bohemian Rhapsody”-worthy gravitas, before the song’s hypnotic psych-jazz sequel “When We Die When We’re High” thrusts him toward the white light. But American Head arrives at a calming full-circle conclusion with “My Religion Is You,” which provides a handy yardstick for just how much the Lips have changed in the past 30 years—and how much they haven’t.
On In a Priest Driven Ambulance, the Lips capped off a set of sacreligious psychedelia with a ramshackle yet earnest cover of Louis Armstrong’s “What a Wonderful World”—an early indication of Coyne’s future role as alt-rock’s leading motivational speaker. “My Religion Is You” is an infinitely more elegant performance, yet Coyne’s affinity for simple, optimistic sentiment remains. On the surface, it’s a song of devotion expressed in the language of heretics—”I don’t need no religion,” Coyne sings, “all I need is you.” But, coming at the end of a record that’s largely about grappling with loss and change, “My Religion Is You” is an open invitation for you to hold onto whatever it is—whether it’s Jesus, Buddha, or, in Coyne’s case, family—that can help make this scary world feel a little more wonderful.
Buy: Rough Trade
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Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2020-09-11T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-09-11T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Warner | September 11, 2020 | 7.7 | cdff6493-eb2a-4f5c-b731-4084f2d4023e | Stuart Berman | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stuart-berman/ | |
null | *"Hence the album's titled 1+3+1-- it's a reference to how it was made. He sent us stuff, then we did stuff, then he added the final touches. He did a little bit more editing and production and mixed and mastered it in Berlin."
\--Triosk drummer Laurence Pike to Jasmine Critteneden, December 2003,* Jazzgroove
Call it The Postal Service II. Triosk is an otherwise unknown Australian jazz trio that liken their compositional approach to the loops and "clever layering of sound" of electronic music. Pike's "he" is Berliner Jan Jelinek, of course, easily one of the most consistent and multi-capable electronic | Triosk Meets Jan Jelinek: 1+3+1 | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/8251-131/ | 1+3+1 | "Hence the album's titled 1+3+1-- it's a reference to how it was made. He sent us stuff, then we did stuff, then he added the final touches. He did a little bit more editing and production and mixed and mastered it in Berlin."
--Triosk drummer Laurence Pike to Jasmine Critteneden, December 2003, Jazzgroove
Call it The Postal Service II. Triosk is an otherwise unknown Australian jazz trio that liken their compositional approach to the loops and "clever layering of sound" of electronic music. Pike's "he" is Berliner Jan Jelinek, of course, easily one of the most consistent and multi-capable electronic artists around today, and whose Loop-Finding-Jazz-Records Pike once heard on late-night radio and now credits as one of the trio's primary influences. In fact, in the past, Jelinek samples constituted Triosk's primary sound source: live and on record, the trio play controlled improvised sets atop a collection of loops that emanate from a nearby mini-disc; as the loops change, the trio reacts accordingly.
And indeed, 1+3+1 sounds like a jazz trio not playing alongside Jelinek's material, but atop it. At most times, Triosk overpowers Jelinek's original loops to the point of near-obliteration. Which is somewhat ironic, I guess: On projects such as Loop-Finding-Jazz-Records, Jelinek nominally works with the vinyl physicalities and actual sounds of jazz records, though no one would ever know that jazz was the source material for his clicks and hazy dub atmospherics.
While it's important to an extent to meet the record on its own terms (i.e. Triosk is not simply attempting organic covers of Jelinek tracks, but are using the loops essentially as jumping-off points for their own compositions), Jelinek devotees, of which I am one, may be somewhat disappointed by the great absence of audible Jelinek presence. His minimalism is a compositional one, certainly, and Triosk masters this aspect of Jelinek. That said, Jelinek is not a loop composer in the vein of Philip Jeck or Ekkehard Ehlers; the sounds Jelinek uses are themselves minimal, and the extent to which he can maintain a curious degree of the listener's interest despite this sonic temperament bears witness to his high-horsery. 1+3+1 is not minimalist jazz; it is loop-based jazz, influenced and produced by a minimalist composer, and then given to a jazz trio with post-rock tendencies.
Of course, with post-rock tendencies comes the very real possibility of tedium via unmodified repetitions, and Triosk falls into this rut often. The agility of Jelinek's builds and collapses becomes apparent in contrast, as Triosk gets caught in a loop and always seems to stay in it a minute or so too long before making their next alteration. Opening track "Mis-Leader", while benefiting slightly from the post-Triosk Jelinek production miasma, suffers from this languor, and to a lesser extent "On the Lake" does as well. The deliberate and hazy "Munmorah", which superficially sounds the most similar to Jelinek's ambient output, lacks the degree of Jelinek's subtle modifications.
That said, there are three tracks on 1+3+1 where Triosk and Jelinek meet equally, and we finally understand the vast potential for their alliance. "Track 2" is essentially relentless free jazz run through whatever there is of a Jelinek glitch machine. Jelinek slices up Triosk's passionate outbursts, repackages and resequences them across the pan and in and out of a beautifully dusty mix, and in short, there is never a dull moment, a testament equally to Triosk's chops and to Jelinek's fanciful post-production. "Theme from Trioskinek" bears effectively less Jelinek influence, but seems to represent what the trio intended to come of the other tracks, quickly and seamlessly moving from one loop to the next, never staying on one for too long. "Vibes-Pulse" is all build, finding its beginnings in an audible Jelinek sequence, and then focusing on a fantastically reverbed vibraphone loop until Jelinek's stormy cloud reaches supersaturation and dissipates. It's a shame Jelinek didn't have more to do with this record; 1+3+1's best moments-- when Triosk's wider dynamic and range of possible sound meets Jelinek's agility and degree of subtlety-- are the ones that most clearly betray his influence. | 2004-02-05T01:00:04.000-05:00 | 2004-02-05T01:00:04.000-05:00 | Jazz | ~scape | February 5, 2004 | 7.3 | ce12f7ee-604f-4c80-a781-df51a8221e2c | Nick Sylvester | https://pitchfork.com/staff/nick-sylvester/ | null |
Each Sunday, Pitchfork takes an in-depth look at a significant album from the past, and any record not in our archives is eligible. Today, we explore 1974’s black funk dreamscape from Miles Davis. | Each Sunday, Pitchfork takes an in-depth look at a significant album from the past, and any record not in our archives is eligible. Today, we explore 1974’s black funk dreamscape from Miles Davis. | Miles Davis: Get Up With It | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/miles-davis-get-up-with-it/ | Get Up With It | One autumn in New York, in 1972, the most famous jazz musician in the world tried to take a right turn at 60 mph off the West Side Highway and totaled his Lamborghini Miura. A bystander found Miles Davis with both legs broken, covered in blood and cocaine. Even after the crash, Miles had a bleeding ulcer, a bad hip, nodes in his larynx, and a heart attack while on tour in Brazil. He spat blood onstage, his legs in so much pain he had to work his wah-wah and volume pedals with his hands, and offstage, he self-medicated with Scotch and milk, Bloody Marys, Percodan, and more cocaine. “Everything started to blur after that car accident,” Miles later wrote.
His trajectory up to that point was a blur of a different hue. From teen sideman to Charlie Parker’s bebop revolution to a solo career that’s better compared to Pablo Picasso than other jazz musicians, Miles instigated entire paradigm shifts in music. Or, as he hissed to a matron at a White House dinner in the 1980s: “I’ve changed music five or six times.” Most narratives point to iconic albums like Birth of the Cool, Relaxin’ With the Miles Davis Quintet, Kind of Blue, Sketches of Spain, Miles Smiles and Bitches Brew, but his 1974 album Get Up With It hangs like an ominous storm cloud over them all, the one that fans of his other works might hesitate to name, his last studio album before he fell mute for the rest of the decade. Like Orpheus grieving in the underworld or Marlow going up the river, Miles went to a place that forever altered his DNA. When he finally returned to the studio, he never sounded the same.
Starting with Bitches Brew in 1970, Miles proceeded to drop eight double albums as well as audacious efforts like A Tribute to Jack Johnson and On the Corner, each one deploying a strategy that undercut his audiences’ expectations. With Get Up With It, Miles began the most defiant shift of his storied career, dropping a totemic yet untidy leviathan that rebuffed jazz fans and critics alike. Each song careens between extremes, as Miles presages everything still to come: ambient, no wave, world beat, jungle, new jack swing, post-rock, even hinting at the future sound of R&B and chart-topping pop. For many modern fans, it’s his heaviest era, but Miles himself offers little insight into his mindset of that period, the music barely mentioned in his 1989 book Miles: The Autobiography. Instead, he writes: “I was spiritually tired of all the bullshit…I felt artistically drained, tired… And the more I stayed away, the deeper I sank into another dark world.”
The sessions that comprise Get Up span four years and include a roster that reflects Miles and the transitory nature of his ever-molting priorities: Herbie Hancock, Keith Jarrett, Billy Cobham, Al Foster, Airto, John McLaughlin, Reggie Lucas, Pete Cosey, James Mtume, David Liebman, and many more appear. Behind them sat producer and editor Teo Macero, who shepherded hours of sessions and chaos into something majestic. The stabilizing force, however, was teen bassist Michael Henderson, lifted from Stevie Wonder’s band and dropped in to anchor each iteration of Miles’ groups for the next seven years. Deemed too simplistic a player by the jazz cognoscenti, Henderson’s funk vamps function like simple machines, wedging between the beats to pry open more space, each cycling riff tightening like a screw.
By this point in the ’70s, Miles was moving away from jazz fusion’s popularity to something more primal and sanguinary. His band grew more Afrocentric, and thanks in no small part to his wife of one year Betty Davis (née Mabry), Miles started listening to Jimi Hendrix, James Brown, and Sly and the Family Stone. But he also had an ear tuned to Aretha Franklin, Ann Peebles and—in one of his inimitable turns of phrase—told DownBeat magazine, “If Al Green had one tit, I’d marry that motherfucker.”
Still, beneath all that, another sound was stirring, one that hearkened back to his East St. Louis childhood. Early in his autobiography, Miles talks about “That roadhouse music, or what some call honky-tonk…that shit that they play in black ’bucket of blood’ clubs…the fights that were likely to jump off in those clubs.” Moving towards the downbeat of funk also meant moving to that ur-throb pulsing beneath it like a pulmonary vein. “I was trying to play the music I grew up on now, that roadhouse, honky-tonk, funky thing that people used to dance to on Friday and Saturday nights,” he wrote of his impetus for much of the ’70s. “It has to get down inside your body, up into your blood before you can do it correctly.” So Miles got Hancock, Jarrett, and McLaughlin to submit to the jerky strut of “Honky Tonk” and hopped on “Red China Blues,” a bit of Sonny Williamson-meets big band boilerplate that serve as the album’s obvious outliers.
During these sessions, Miles began to seek an emphasis on rhythm above all else. “Miles left post-bop modernism for the funk because he was bored fiddling with quantum mechanics and just wanted to play the blues again,” Greg Tate posited in his essay “The Electric Miles.” For the remainder of the ’70s, Miles was one of reduction as well as negation. For all of its two-hour runtime, Get Up barely features his trumpet, a trend already reflected in his live shows of the time. After decades of the finest pianists in jazz serving as his sidemen, Miles himself moved to the electric organ.
Miles’ organ playing didn’t have the nuance, shade, and heights of his trumpet, but with the electric organ, vast new chasms opened up to him: seismic drones, durative noise blasts, a sense of deep space and foreboding void that the trumpet otherwise punctures. Dark arts arose from his keys, as Sly Stone’s bassist of the time recalled during one coke-fueled night: “[Miles] got on Sly’s organ and started to voice these nine-note, ethereal crazy chords. Sly…came out yelling, ’Who in the fuck is doing that on my organ? Miles, get your motherfucking ass out…Don’t ever play that voodoo shit here.’”
Rather than run the voodoo down, now Miles could conjure it all by himself. How else to get that vertiginous, heart-strangling fear and magnificent malefic-ness of “Rated X”? Full of dread and a speedball of drums, conga, and tabla, it’s a track that plays with the ideas of no wave, post-punk, and techno at its most brusque. But Macero’s editing style (dropping out the rhythm section entirely and letting the keys levitate in mid-air) also anticipates the modern horror movie aesthetic, the flickering cuts akin to the terror of an approaching tornado, bloody machete, or unmoored jet turbine. For the better part of “Maiysha,” Davis’ keys act as breezy as any other jazz organ trio (think Groove Holmes or Big John Patton), though ten minutes in, lead guitarist Pete Cosey enters and the two hit a tone kin to electrocuting a tomcat.
In Cosey, Miles found a sparring partner unlike any other. There had been the likes of Parker, Coltrane, Shorter, even McLaughlin in the past, but only Cosey could range wider and push Miles deeper, from country blues to Muddy Waters, microtonal tunings to Hendrix at his most atonal. Cosey was an imposing force with his thick shades, towering afro, and an array of pedals and synthesizers that melted futuristic noise and old ghosts together that made him demiurge to metalheads, noiseniks and punks alike. Hearing Cosey and Miles trade solos on the furious “Mtume” is like relishing the bloody spray of each landed blow in a heavyweight fight. Miles veered in tone from lines chopped like a coke rail to higher than a chemtrail. To Cosey, the music warranted such extremes. “That music was about life,” he said in one interview. “It dealt with cleansing. It dealt with rising and falling. It was extremely cerebral, but it was earthy at the same time.”
Get Up With It’s crushing emotional gravity comes from two 32-minute pieces that are unlike anything else in Miles’ catalog, much less the history of jazz, ranging from despair to rage, pride to anguish, ecstasy to abject sadness. There’s the frenzy of “Calypso Frelimo,” which takes its name from the Mozambique political party seeking independence from Portuguese colonial rule. It sounds like a riot in the middle of a block party. Miles layers his wah-wah horn and electric organ into an ebullient Caribbean theme as Henderson holds down the low-end with Mtume and drummer Al Foster. Densely polyrhythmic yet melodically slick, with incandescent solos from Miles, Cosey and tenor saxophonist Dave Liebman race through the din. They never break away from the matrices that band lays down, they illuminate every hectic angle of it.
For a certain generation, the triplet bass figure that Henderson drops ten minutes in feels instantly familiar. It brings up images of your childhood living room as well as a subterranean realm, so closely does it resemble Koji Kondo’s theme for the underworld levels of “Super Mario Bros.” Tate calls the work a “dub fugue,” centering on that cavernous bass throb and a telling juxtaposition of Caribbean elements and European ones that reflects back on the title itself. The massive piece suggests a Pangaea that connects the Caribbean rhythms of reggae and calypso to African-American jazz and back to Africa herself.
And then there’s the elegy of “He Loved Him Madly.” Recorded a month after the passing of Duke Ellington, its title taken from a Christmas card greeting Duke sent to Miles the year before. It both summons the ghost of Duke’s “jungle style” big bands and anticipates the forsaken pall of dark ambient. Assembled from five separate takes, Macero wove the seemingly aimless recordings into a magnum opus, one that Brian Eno later hailed as “revolutionary,” finding in its half-hour descent “the ‘spacious’ quality I was after” for his own future ambient work.
It’s a eulogy to Duke that seems to emanate from across the River Styx. Mtume’s congas flutter like bats across the stereo field, Cosey spins out cobwebs on guitar, with Macero’s spacing suggestive of a gaping void in the center of the piece. Miles looms around C-minor on organ, and when his muted trumpet finally sounds at the midway point, he channels longtime Ellington trumpeter Cootie Williams, seeming both close as a whisper and a distant wail. Erotic and ethereal at once, a second solo comes as the band starts to quicken, only to have it all turn phantasmagoric by song’s end.
Less than a year after Get Up With It’s release, Miles plunged deeper into “another dark world,” one where no sound escaped for the next seven years. Lurid stories abound about his reclusive, sordid, filthy lifestyle holed up in his Upper West Side brownstone during those years, as well as numerous run-ins with the law and fears of his imminent demise in the press. He had burned a bridge, one that had led him to the brink of madness. “You can’t know how terrifying it is to be in the middle of all of that, it’s endless sound,” he confessed to one interviewer at the time. “Music is a curse.”
During that same span, his Get Up With It bandmates also stepped away from that endless sound, instead infiltrating the realms of R&B and pop, scoring frothy hits ranging from “You Are My Starship” to “Never Knew Love Like This Before.” Guitarist Reggie Lucas worked with a new singer named Madonna, writing “Borderline” and producing her debut album. And together with percussionist Mtume, they formed the funk band Mtume, responsible for that ode to gumilingus, “Juicy Fruit.”
The demented, paranoid, self-imposed exile of Miles Davis was a tragedy, a genius turned into a man as shell-shocked as any Vietnam War veteran. When he returned to the studio in 1981 with the turgid and slick The Man With the Horn and his subsequent ’80s work, Miles sounded like a doppelgänger of his former self. He and his band had willingly gone to the darkest places of the soul during Get Up With It and—as he notoriously did to his audiences at his peak—now he willingly turned his back on it. Dipping into elevator music takes on “Time After Time” and “Human Nature,” Miles also continued to play the blues, but a more bloodless version of them. Much like Sly Stone before him, Miles ventured into the heart of darkness with Get Up With It and wrestled with the devil for his gun. But in coming out on the other side of this music, Miles and his band were irrevocably transformed. Or as he would realize near the end of his life: “You don’t change music, music changes you.” | 2018-03-11T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2018-03-11T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Jazz | Columbia | March 11, 2018 | 9.6 | ce1baa69-030f-4573-b1f8-50b1cc143422 | Andy Beta | https://pitchfork.com/staff/andy-beta/ | |
The saxophonist’s soundtrack to the unsettling horror movie feeds off his darkest impulses as a composer, amplifying and mirroring the trauma and fear on the screen. | The saxophonist’s soundtrack to the unsettling horror movie feeds off his darkest impulses as a composer, amplifying and mirroring the trauma and fear on the screen. | Colin Stetson: Hereditary (Original Motion Picture Soundtrack) | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/colin-stetson-hereditary-original-motion-picture-soundtrack/ | Hereditary (Original Motion Picture Soundtrack) | Even before Nicolas Roeg was losing his demons with Mick Jagger and helping David Bowie come back down to earth, left-of-center filmmakers were already reaching out to left-of-center musicians to assist in bringing their strange stories come to life. Today, when word of a Cave or a Reznor or a Greenwood handling the score for some of Hollywood’s most lauded directors comes as no surprise, that kind of news still helps encourage a new class of forward-thinking movie-makers to gravitate toward the fringes of pop music for inspiration. In a little over a year, nü-electronic iconoclast Oneohtrix Point Never scored a gritty, heartbreaking crime drama; Portishead member and Beak> head honcho Geoff Barrow helped the cult-favorite-in-the-making Annihilation shimmer in uncomfortable ways. And of course, the examples don’t stop there.
The most recent and arguably most affecting member of these contemporary avant-garde composers is multi-instrumentalist Colin Stetson, best known for his work with Arcade Fire and the astounding circular breathing technique he applies to bass saxophone. Though it isn’t his first time recording for the screen, Stetson’s score for Hereditary—the much fawned-over debut horror flick from Ari Aster—has audiences holding their breath in fright. Where Stetson’s solo albums use dread and paranoia to undercut his careful attention to post-rock’s sense of limitless possibility, Hereditary feeds off of his darkest impulses.
At its core, Hereditary is a film about grief and the ways a family deals with grief, no matter how toxic or irrational. When Annie (played raw, unhinged and undoubtedly soon-to-be-award-winning by Toni Collette) finds herself un-mourning the death of her frigid, seemingly unremarkable mother sets off a deeply upsetting chain of events, Stetson coolly plays the background. His music rarely jumps or shrieks; it seeps. Reedy wheezes morph into grave moans, keys click and scratch like nails being chewed down to blood, layered clarinets imitate tuned-down strings being run backwards through a rusty pasta roller.
Still, approaching Hereditary on its own terms makes for some tricky navigation. It is functional music, purposely beholden to a larger piece of art. In that sense, it succeeds almost flawlessly—just watch as deformed arpeggios worm their way into the brain of Alex Wolff’s tragically dumbfounded Peter after a terrible car accident. Better is Stetson and Aster’s willingness to let wide-open trenches of silence do much of the heavy lifting throughout the film, only to slowly suck you back down into a dank well of insular terror after the collective exhale has begun. In these rare moments of calm, Stetson’s cautiously beautiful, fairytale-like asides begin to read more and more sinister.
There will be debates over the movie’s payoff (or lack thereof), but it is that scene where we finally hear his cascading saxophone, which is a cathartic payoff in itself. It is the emotional climax that mirrors the film’s charred, disquieting images, and reanimates its very real sense of emotional paralyzation. Much like the film itself, Stetson’s music succeeds because it plays off our basest fears. It’s no real revelation that there’s something in our human nature that longs to know what’s lurking in the shadows. Less ingrained is a willingness to indulge in art the conjures relentless despair, no matter how fathomless. No matter: embrace the suffering; take the plunge. | 2018-06-16T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-06-16T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Experimental | Milan | June 16, 2018 | 7.6 | ce21d000-97f7-4740-b248-114ffb930b9f | Zach Kelly | https://pitchfork.com/staff/zach-kelly/ | |
On this poignant covers album, Steve Earle inhabits his late son’s songs of love and loss as a means of moving through pain. | On this poignant covers album, Steve Earle inhabits his late son’s songs of love and loss as a means of moving through pain. | Steve Earle: J.T. | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/steve-earle-jt/ | J.T. | Just three months after Justin Townes Earle’s death, his father, Steve Earle, announced he was releasing a covers album of his son’s songs. The timeline seemed sudden: From the outside, inhabiting Justin’s songs of loneliness and loss appeared to be an act of emotional masochism. But everyone grieves in their own way, and for Steve those sessions were simply part of his own process, a means of communion and moving through pain. It “wasn’t cathartic as much as it was therapeutic,” he told the New York Times. “I made the record because I needed to.”
JT is not an autopsy, but many of these songs address Justin’s struggle with addiction by necessity: He wrote often about his own demons, such that any cross-section of his catalog will expose dark struggles. “Lord I’m going uptown, to the Harlem River to drown,” goes one of his best and most beloved songs; both father and son sing the lyric with a calm determination that seems to grow with every block north they walk. Drawing mostly from early in Justin’s career—half of these ten covers are from his first two releases—Steve doesn’t attempt any of the songs about him or Justin’s mother, who split not long after he was born. That’s just as well, since that might distract from the craft of the songs and the immediacy of the performances.
Not every song hints at Justin’s fate. Some just have a good story to tell, like “Lone Pine Hill” and “They Killed John Henry,” which reveal a songwriter with an abiding interest in American history and a keen empathy for the people who lived it. Other tunes have a different perspective on country’s favorite subjects: love gone bad, immense loneliness, an abiding desire for human connection. Steve settles into “Far Away in Another Town” like it’s a Texas Hill Country classic, bringing the same gravity and reverence you might hear someone apply to an old Hank Williams tune, and he musters a bluesy dread on “Turn My Lights Out.” (Its refrain, “I know it’s gonna be alright, when I turn out my lights,” is one of Justin’s pithiest and most devastating lyrics.) Only “The Saint of Lost Causes” doesn’t work: its brimstone sermonizing sounds like another songwriter altogether, and is weirdly out of place on this record.
JT plays like an album of first takes. It’s multifaceted in its messiness: a leather hide wrapped around a tender heart. That loose quality plays up the differences between father and son. Justin was a songwriter with a concise sense of melody, a singer with an eloquent approach to phrasing, and a guitar player with a style that gracefully combined traditional folk and rural blues picking. By contrast, Steve has a voice like a gravel driveway, a punk’s steely bravado, and what appears to be an abiding belief that a song’s imperfections are what make it so relatable. To hear Steve sing Justin’s songs is to hear him erase many of those differences and emphasize their similarities: their brutal candor, their emotional rawness, but most of all their shared belief that a sturdy song was the perfect weapon to beat back their darkest demons. “I don’t know where I’m headed, and I don’t care,” Steve sings on one of his son’s earliest songs, “I Don’t Care,” and it sounds like a sentiment that would alarm any father.
JT ends with the set’s only original from Steve, a short remembrance called “Last Words.” It’s the only time he specifically addresses his son’s death, the only time he acknowledges the very real loss that motivated this album. Using their final phone call as a framing device—which means their last words to each other were “I love you” and “I love you, too”—Steve ponders the pain his son felt and wonders what he might have done to ease it in any way. “I don’t know why you hurt so bad,” he sings. “Just know you did, it makes me sad.” The melody is simple and fleet, conveying immense confusion and hurt just beneath the words. It recalls one of Steve’s best compositions, “Goodbye,” but it also brings to mind several of Justin’s songs, as though the father has learned from his son. It’s a fitting farewell on this album, showing the world both the man and the talent we lost.
Buy: Rough Trade
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Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-01-27T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2021-01-27T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | New West | January 27, 2021 | 7.6 | ce235abe-9851-4237-9f11-1dba85779cfe | Stephen M. Deusner | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stephen-m. deusner/ | |
Teneil Throssell’s full-length debut is break-neck techno that tries to transcend the club without turning its back on it. | Teneil Throssell’s full-length debut is break-neck techno that tries to transcend the club without turning its back on it. | HAAi: Baby, We’re Ascending | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/haai-baby-were-ascending/ | Baby, We’re Ascending | There’s rarely a dull moment in HAAi’s high-octane techno because Teneil Throssell is a master of the quick cut. Sometimes she attacks her music with surgical precision, carving out breathtaking pockets of silence before slamming the beat back. At others, she works with a field medic’s intensity, slashing diagonally across mangled breakbeats, then suturing the wound with an overdriven blast of bass. But for all its frequent change-ups, HAAi’s music never suffers from a short attention span. Channeling the hypnotic, tunnel-vision effects of classic Underworld, vintage drum’n’bass, and the early-’00s output of labels like Border Community and Kompakt, it’s a sound as heady as it is physical. Throssell works like a film editor, piecing together stray threads into a form that is cinematic in scope; her cuts always contribute to an overarching sense of continuity.
Born in Australia and based in London, HAAi has been developing her brand of peak-time drama on singles and EPs over the past five years, but her debut album is her most ambitious attempt yet to spin the energy of the rave into something bigger, something that transcends the club without turning its back on it. Pocked with interruptions, trap doors, and fractals, the maze-like shape that it assumes over the course of its hour-long running time replicates the labyrinthine dimensions of an unfamiliar nightclub—its corridors and cul-de-sacs and darkrooms, its moments of exhilaration interlaced with descents into doubt or panic.
Throssell cut her teeth making bangers, and Baby, We’re Ascending hardly lacks for moments of intensity. The very first track is a kitchen blender overflowing with liquefied bits of industrial-strength techno. “Pigeon Barron,” which follows, evokes fellow Mute affiliate Daniel Avery’s dystopian euphoria in concussive drums and vertiginous synth glissandi. And “Purple Jelly Disc” is a white-knuckled rollercoaster that leads from a cavernous techno dungeon to a sunrise beach rave.
But the prevailing mood is ambivalent, the atmospheres frequently murky. The epic “Biggest Mood Ever” uses the voice of Hot Chip’s Alexis Taylor to wonderfully contrasting effect, distorted breakbeats tearing through pastel dream pop like shrapnel through a field of daisies. “I’ve Been Thinking a Lot Lately” drapes pitched-down breaks in gloomy piano reminiscent of the Cure’s Seventeen Seconds, an enveloping fusion that recalls an all too short-lived strain of depressive drum’n’bass that emerged toward the end of the 1990s. And “FM,” a highlight, covers a sullen techno rhythm in Burialesque grit and fog; with a mixdown that tilts dangerously toward the bassy end of the spectrum, it’s boomy yet weirdly distant, like a heaving dancefloor heard through warehouse walls.
More than any individual standout tracks, what’s most compelling is the album’s journey. Beginning with the sound of a tape being slotted into a cassette deck, Baby, We’re Ascending unrolls like a unified suite, and the interstitials—like “Louder Always Better,” a minute-long stretch of elastic sound design followed by 40 seconds of punishing techno—are often as gripping as the anthems. The way individual songs morph makes them often feel like passages snipped out of a DJ mix. There’s a knowing sense of humor to these twists and turns, too: “This concludes Side 1,” intones a robotic voice at the album’s midpoint.
Vocals play a prominent role in roughly half of the album’s songs, and while they sometimes work—UK trans activist Kai-Isaiah Jamal’s spoken-word poetry cuts powerfully through the moody “Human Sound”—they sometimes feel like Throssell is straining slightly for gravitas, pasting emotion on top of tracks that communicate plenty of it on their own. On “Bodies of Water,” her voice doesn’t quite gel with the woozy synths surrounding her; she’s more convincing on the title track, a Jon Hopkins collaboration that replicates the heart-in-mouth feel of raving at its most ecstatic. She’s good on the closing “Tardigrade,” too: The lyrics don’t necessarily scan very meaningfully, but the sound of her voice adds a Beach House-like airiness to the song, which balances gauzy dream pop with Yeezus-grade industrial drums. That mix of opposites is textbook HAAi, and so is the twist that follows: In the song’s final seconds, a gentle fade-out gives way to a three-second burst of drums that’s completely unconnected from anything that has come before, and ends as abruptly as it appeared. In this most cinematic of records, it seems only fitting that Throssell should leave us with a cliffhanger. | 2022-05-27T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2022-05-27T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Mute | May 27, 2022 | 7 | ce24164a-1dfa-46db-a13a-f69558c0fc20 | Philip Sherburne | https://pitchfork.com/staff/philip-sherburne/ | |
Sharing members with Swedish psych-rock monsters Dungen, the Amazing have a similar reverence for the music of the past. But their mix of folk and psych has more going for it than just retro pastiche. | Sharing members with Swedish psych-rock monsters Dungen, the Amazing have a similar reverence for the music of the past. But their mix of folk and psych has more going for it than just retro pastiche. | The Amazing: Gentle Stream | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/16842-gentle-stream/ | Gentle Stream | The Amazing opened their self-titled debut album with an inspired reworking of a song from Fleetwood Mac's little-known post-Peter Green, pre-Buckingham/Nicks period. Named for 1968-72 Mac singer-guitarist Danny Kirwan, "The Kirwan Song" set a precedent for playing spot-the-references that the Swedish band's history-bursting blend of pastoral-England-meets-Laurel-Canyon psych-pop and folk-rock only invites further. Throw in a lineup that includes members of Swedish-language psych-rock monsters Dungen, and you could be forgiven for wondering if liking this stuff requires Talmudic knowledge of, say, the 80s Paisley Underground movement.
It doesn't. Happily, the Amazing's music is less reverent of its post-gold-rush past than might be obvious at first blush. Both on 2009's The Amazing and 2010's equally impressive Wait for the Light to Come mini-album, the band's impressionistically melancholy songwriting and gracefully unspooling instrumentals push toward the sort of poetic textural subtleties associated with post-rock or shoegaze. Simply put, it sounds pretty in headphones-- even if you can't quite make out all that frontman Christoff Gunrup is singing. He does use English, at least, though often here it's the feeling, the overall construction, that matters more.
Reine Fisk, who plays a mean lead guitar in Dungen as well as this band, has said all of the Amazing's records so far are roughly similar in mood, and he isn't kidding. Second proper LP Gentle Stream, out late last year overseas and due for a stateside release this fall on Partisan, by and large sticks to the Amazing's previous tendency to glide between winsome acoustic ballads and brawnier rockers, stretching out with easy-riding guitar solos and thoughtful, Mellotron-touched arrangements. References are still tough to avoid, whether it's Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere-era Neil Young and Crazy Horse on the organ-glazed title track, Nick Drake on the yearning flute- and sax-framed "Flashlight", or Simon and Garfunkel circa "Dangling Conversations" on bastards-rueing "The Fog". But as pleasantly jangly video selection "Gone" and harmony-bursting European-edition finale "When the Colours Change" best exemplify, this album is far richer than retro pastiche.
Gunrup's dewy vocals carry melodies that refuse to dissipate over multiple listens, and the drumming, in particular, makes these songs stand out, with a jazzy, rambling, naturalistic quality, punchy in just the right places. The descending Led Zeppelin riffage of "Dogs" might go on a little too long, and the mostly vocal-based, sub-two-minute "Assumptions" is the only real change-up. But when Gunrup sings, on the languidly shuffling American bonus track "Ghosts", of ways to "drive off the ghosts," he shouldn't be worried. Like other bands such as the Clientele, the Kings of Convenience, and Tame Impala, the Amazing have exorcized their turn-of-the-70s spooks by embracing the evanescent. A fine follow-up, Gentle Stream captures its namesake in soft, skilled hands. | 2012-07-02T02:00:02.000-04:00 | 2012-07-02T02:00:02.000-04:00 | Rock | Subliminal Sounds / Partisan | July 2, 2012 | 7.3 | ce244672-1843-4de8-b8f7-844f1fffb1d9 | Marc Hogan | https://pitchfork.com/staff/marc-hogan/ | null |
On their fourth record, Dominick Palermo leads his dream-pop shoegaze band in a claustrophobic album about his upbringing, and how his music career has brought hope and horror in equal measure. | On their fourth record, Dominick Palermo leads his dream-pop shoegaze band in a claustrophobic album about his upbringing, and how his music career has brought hope and horror in equal measure. | Nothing: The Great Dismal | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/nothing-the-great-dismal/ | The Great Dismal | Domenic Palermo formed Nothing to save himself; four albums in, it seems clear nothing can. The Philadelphia/New York frontman is locked in a perpetual battle with his own self-mythology. Palermo often embraces his abrasive reputation, reclaiming his two-year stint in prison by naming an album after jailhouse jargon and openly discussing his drug and alcohol use in interviews. But as the march of album cycles charged forward, the punk-turned-shoegazer more often expressed exhaustion with facile interpretations of his tortured narrative, the way performing one’s own trauma night after night can lead to complete detachment. Yet, with blind faith, he continues to return to the dark well of his subconscious, turning over the “lingering black cloud” that’s remained past their first three records’ hazy catharsis. The Great Dismal, their fourth record, is an existential commentary on Nothing’s career—a reflection on Palermo’s hometown, his upbringing, and how his music career has brought hope and horror in equal measure.
Beneath the poetic remove of Nothing’s lyrics, there’s a leering sense of realism. For those voyeuristically drawn in by the ghosts of Palermo’s violent past, songs like 2018’s “Blue Line Baby” shaded in its darker colors with concrete details, names, locations. There are specifics on The Great Dismal, too, but they largely draw from a more recent past—the disorientation of endless touring, of finding a bar in Shibuya, Tokyo that feels like home. But those challenges, understandably, feel a bit removed. The band instead finds more success when Palermo waxes philosophical: “Existence hurts existence,” he sings over the album’s shiniest riffs on “Famine Asylum.” It’s an aptly dreary take on Sartre—allegedly the first lines Palermo wrote for the album—and it stands in as a thesis statement for the record. There’s a resilience buried in that declaration, too, as if the act of living is itself a victory over death: “It’s a marvel that my shell has kept its shape,” he sings coyly on “Catch a Fade.” After multiple close calls with oblivion, Palermo finds something like awe in the quotidian drudgery of existence.
Nothing has toed the line between the sharp melodies of their hardcore roots and more delicate swirls of dream-pop and shoegaze, pivoting between the two as their collaborators see fit. On 2018’s Dance on the Blacktop, they took their cues from the sludge savant John Agnello, layering dense guitars and nestling Palermo’s inner lyrical torment within quiet-loud dynamics. For The Great Dismal, they’ve returned to emo stalwart Will Yip, who produced their glassy and gorgeous 2016 record Tired Of Tomorrow. And while Yip’s presence is evident in the record’s spacious compositions—the echoing snap of the drums on “Bernie Sanders,” the ambient cloud of reverb that lingers over “Blue Mecca”—it’s a more hesitant, claustrophobic record than their previous collaboration. Where Tired of Tomorrow began with a fury of cymbal crashes, opener “A Fabricated Life” casts a dense fog over the record from the outset, driven by a single guitar and Palermo’s whispered vocals, percussion never entering the equation. It’s a symbolic gesture, one that reinforces that Nothing is, at the end of the day, Palermo’s voice alone.
As if to drive Palermo’s singular vision home, The Great Dismal sees the biggest lineup change of any Nothing record since the band’s inception. Founding bassist Nick Bassett, of Whirr and Deafheaven, as well as founding vocalist and guitarist Brandon Setta, have both departed the band. In their place, Jesus Piece’s Aaron Heard and Cloakroom’s Doyle Martin step in to fill their respective voids. It’s a subtle but marked shift, lending the dulled weight of Martin’s opiated vocal harmonies to “Catch a Fade” and “Blue Mecca.” And despite Palermo’s recent relocation to New York, Philadelphia makes itself known on the album, with Alex G adding his lilting vocal affectation to “April Ha Ha.” It’s a markedly gentler sound from Nothing, an anesthetized grunge that mirrors their relentless gloom. It’s a logical progression for the band, but it’s hard not to miss their duality, their moments of ragged hardcore intensity; the crisper edges of “Ask the Rusk”’s opening riff are a welcome shot of adrenaline.
Though Nothing is cut from the somnambulant swirls of UK groups like the Smiths and Cocteau Twins, they’ve distilled their critiques into a distinctly American frustration. The Great Dismal takes its name from a giant swamp along the southeastern American coast, what Palermo refers to as a “brilliant natural trap” where only the murkiest survive. The album features one sample, a manic ode to shopping taken from a mall infomercial, and its eerie enthusiasm speaks to the capitalistic hedonism Nothing seems unable to escape. Nothing has established their voice by transforming that anxiety into languid, slanted harmonies. The Great Dismal takes stock of their career, finding vaporous beauty in shrugging off their inner demons.
Buy: Rough Trade
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Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2020-12-02T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2020-12-02T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Relapse | December 2, 2020 | 7 | ce2f76fc-8ef3-4b3a-943e-2298ec9e2e22 | Arielle Gordon | https://pitchfork.com/staff/arielle-gordon/ | |
Ostensibly a side project to Will Wiesenfeld’s Baths, Geotic comes into its own on an album that treats background listening as a springboard into a world of color and texture. | Ostensibly a side project to Will Wiesenfeld’s Baths, Geotic comes into its own on an album that treats background listening as a springboard into a world of color and texture. | Geotic: Traversa | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/geotic-traversa/ | Traversa | Will Wiesenfeld’s swish ambient alter ego, Geotic, makes it to album number 10 (or nine, or 11, depending on how you count some of his early, digital-only output) with Traversa, which should at least graduate Geotic from side project to side project emeritus. The Los Angeles musician is best known under the name Baths, though Wiesenfeld’s shape-shifting electronic signature glistens across both projects. With Traversa, he douses every second in sudsy synth and glimmer.
Wiesenfeld has described the difference between Baths and Geotic as the difference between active and passive listening. At times, Geotic even glorifies and exalts the passive. Traversa hovers at the edge of the background, always ready to distract. Filled with skittering violins, pliable piano runs, and cart-wheeling rhythms, it is Geotic’s most bounding, attention-seeking work.
If last year’s Abysma seemed tailored for domestic enjoyment, then Traversa might be better suited for a sojourn in hilly terrain. The album is invigorating and repetitive in the way that walking is invigorating and repetitive. From the first sly beats of “Knapsack,” Wiesenfeld has made songs that scamper and recede with animal-like curiosity, maybe like the “quiet tree frogs” the song mentions, delightfully. As with the tree-frog hum—where the endless reiteration of their noise creates one flush fog of sound—Traversa gets its productive energy from blending and repetition. Emily Call’s violin and Wiesenfeld’s synth pads are both stretched to start to sound like one another. On “Maglev” (named for the train system that uses magnetic levitation based on a system of repelling), the violin achieves a state of suspension in bending back and forth.
Whether as Baths or Geotic, Wiesenfeld often focuses his songs on an emotional center. His chord progressions can pluck out the most sunken types of melancholy (see “Beaming Husband” from 2010’s Mend). But Traversa’s flickering movements suggest escapism: at the surface, moving quickly. The tangy bassline of “Swiss Bicycle” propels in forward motion as if careening past alpine lakes, wildly content. The album doesn’t stay giddy the whole time, but even the letdowns are gentle. On “Aerostat,” a pillowy kick drum comforts a piano that’s fixated and mournful, though still suspiciously lovely. The song doesn’t seem to be able to stay with the plaintive melody without trying to heal it.
Traversa’s leisure-outing quality comes through in the plush production. The song titles evoke a roving, European mountain vacation—and mirroring a vacation, the album seems cherished but not labored over. What if some grist was applied to these songs? If some of these pieces had worked through their progressions a little further, would the effect take us somewhere more transportive? If there was more elbow grease and some steel wool, would it be even shinier? Traversa wants to please, which isn’t the same as wanting to satisfy.
But a shadow lurks beneath Traversa’s fantasy of endless vacation. “Terraformer” might be a song about colonizing space or it might gesture at the unknowability of a romantic interest, but it does have a palpable twinge of doubt. When Traversa lets some suspicion slip through, it contours the slick, polished façade. It’s a welcome new depth. | 2018-10-26T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-10-26T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Ghostly International | October 26, 2018 | 6.7 | ce3133e5-41f7-4545-87ff-9c8c66c0a6b3 | Maggie Lange | https://pitchfork.com/staff/maggie-lange/ | |
Mike Mills feature film includes the work of Elliott Smith and the Polyphonic Spree. | Mike Mills feature film includes the work of Elliott Smith and the Polyphonic Spree. | Various Artists: Thumbsucker OST | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/7897-thumbsucker-ost/ | Thumbsucker OST | As summer turns to fall in the cinematic season, it has become traditional for studios to wheel out indie coming-of-age films. Since we've been around this block before, we know to expect certain things from the soundtracks of these films, be they focused on teenage crisis, quarter-life crisis, mid-life crisis, or some combination of these infinite crises. Any compiler knows that a delicate mix of childlike whimsy and bittersweet melancholy is a must, not to mention a dusted-off, neglected oldie that summarizes the film's themes, and maybe a few covers, for good measure.
Thumbsucker is clearly aware of these requirements, and given director Mike Mills' illustrious career in music video production, his rolodex should have been more than up to the challenge of filling out the OST. He started by courting Elliott Smith, who was originally pegged to provide all of the film's music. Smith's erratic work rate delayed the proceedings, and his death halted them, forcing Mills to draft in the Polyphonic Spree, perhaps thinking he could at least save the money it would've cost to hire an orchestra.
To their credit, Tim DeLaughter's robed crew are adept at the whimsy part of the recipe stated above, as anyone who's heard their relentlessly optimistic brand of sun-cult music can attest. Though the format doesn't allow the Spree to indulge their usual slow-build dynamics, the band nevertheless finds the space to use all of their many parts, handing most of the vocals to their choir and letting the strings, horns, etc. flit around the borders. But with rarely more than a minute or so to unfurl, the songs lack heft, sounding a little like jingles for correspondence art schools and new-age massage centers.
However, as far as the Spree doing the melancholy part: Eh, not so much. Attempts at gravitas sound overly forced and unnatural for the band, with DeLaughter putting on his best Ben Gibbard impression for "Sourness Makes It Right" and the choral smiles being poorly hidden on "Wait and See". Fortunately, Mills was able to salvage three demo-ish songs done by Smith, tremulous takes on Big Star's "Thirteen", Cat Stevens' "Trouble", and his own "Let's Get Lost". "Thirteen" is clearly the best of these, reverently remade as it is, Smith adding another sedimental layer of sadness to undercut Alex Chilton's already-longing adolescent reminiscences. But as accompaniment to a movie about a troubled teenager and his relationships, it's not the most subtle of soundtracking gestures. Lack of subtlety is something that plagues the entire score, not surprising given the rainbow sledgehammer tactics of the Polyphonic Spree.
In the end, this lack of grace is what keeps Thumbsucker's OST from joining the ranks of excellent indie soundtracks alongside The Virgin Suicides, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, and anything Mark Mothersbaugh has done for Wes Anderson. The Polyphonic Spree, despite attempts to pare down their sound and numbers when appropriate, can't help but be too intrusive for cinematic usage, inserting themselves into scenes like that episode from "Scrubs", rather than providing constructive background color. | 2005-10-19T02:00:02.000-04:00 | 2005-10-19T02:00:02.000-04:00 | null | Hollywood | October 19, 2005 | 5.2 | ce37b36c-df83-41b5-b96d-32afea946e63 | Rob Mitchum | https://pitchfork.com/staff/rob- mitchum/ | null |
Featuring production by M. Ward and boasting songwriting credits from Nick Cave, Neko Case, Justin Vernon, and others, Mavis Staples' Livin' on a High Note is a happy record. Its beneficent energy is refreshing after the cloistered prayer of last year’s Your Good Fortune and two thoughtful Jeff Tweedy-produced records. | Featuring production by M. Ward and boasting songwriting credits from Nick Cave, Neko Case, Justin Vernon, and others, Mavis Staples' Livin' on a High Note is a happy record. Its beneficent energy is refreshing after the cloistered prayer of last year’s Your Good Fortune and two thoughtful Jeff Tweedy-produced records. | Mavis Staples: Livin' on a High Note | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21568-livin-on-a-high-note/ | Livin' on a High Note | From her first performances as a teenager in the 1950s through her era-defining hits in the 1970s and even up to her Grammy-winning comeback albums with Jeff Tweedy, Mavis Staples has created some of the most joyous music ever. For her latest solo effort, however, she wanted something even more exuberant, even more celebratory—something in the vein of Pharrell Williams’ "Happy." "When I heard it, wow, it just lifted me up," she told the Guardian recently. "I told my songwriters I wanted songs just like that, that would make people smile, also because I’ve been making people cry for so long."
Certainly Livin’ on a High Note sounds like a happy album. Featuring production by M. Ward and boasting songwriting credits from Nick Cave, Neko Case, Justin Vernon and others, its burst of beneficent energy is refreshing after the cloistered prayer of last year’s Your Good Fortune and two thoughtful Tweedy records. The tempos on here percolate amiably, with flashes of horns and bold basslines supplied by members of her longtime backing band. Ward doesn’t have much facility for groove, so the celebration often sounds muted and controlled—more studio than church. But he knows to keep things airy and light and to give Mavis’ voice some space to move around.
"I’ve been making people cry for so long" isn't entirely true. But the statement does hint at her own place in the complicated history of civil rights in an era defined by dignity and social progress as well as by systemic prejudice and even outright hatred. She has shared stages with MLK and Southern jail cells with her father and siblings. Livin’ on a High Note nods to that history, especially on the opening track, "Take Us Back," penned for her by Benjamin Booker. As her back-up singers encourage her along ("Mavis, take us back! Mavis, take us back!"), she reminisces sweetly about her early days as a teenager on the gospel circuit: "Chicago wasn’t always easy, but love made the Windy City breezy."
From other artists such a sentiment might sound too pat or prescribed, but Staples’ voice infuses it with affection and joy. "They don’t call me Bubbles for nothing," she declares. Seventy years into her singing career, her voice has lost none of its ecstatic expressiveness and only a bit of its technical agility. She can still swing low into a baritone range, and she can still soar into a churchly higher register. But really it’s the way she shapes her words that makes these songs so distinctive: The way she fawns over a word like "darling" makes you want to wrap the syllables around you like a warm blanket.
It might seem like an odd time for an upbeat message, but Livin’ on a High Note is as well timed as her 2008 live album, Hope at the Hideout, released just a week before Obama was elected the country’s first African American president. Eight years later, we’re deep into a confounding election cycle that has already defined itself by blatant concession to voters’ basest prejudices. At the same time, some of our best artists—D’Angelo, Kendrick, and Beyoncé—are making race and class dominant subjects in pop music, with songs like "Alright" and "Formation" prompting heated discussions about black identity and police brutality.
High Note complements rather than contradicts those bleaker depictions of 21st century America and casually argues for Staples’ legacy as an agitgospel singer. Would we have Beyoncé singing, "I like my Negro nose and my Jackson 5 nostrils" in 2016 without the Staples singing, "I like the things about me that I once despised," at Wattstax in '72? In that regard, the most crucial song on here is also the shortest: "What do we do with all of this history now?" Staples asks on "History Now," penned by Neko Case. Bearing all this weight can’t be easy for anyone, but with that divine voice of hers, in fact, Staples seems uniquely suited for it. And Livin’ on a High Note suggests she may even be happy to have that responsibility, if only because it reminds her that happy doesn’t have to mean complacent. | 2016-02-18T01:00:02.000-05:00 | 2016-02-18T01:00:02.000-05:00 | Pop/R&B | Anti- | February 18, 2016 | 7.4 | ce44b27a-2c38-4d7b-9580-3537618a667b | Stephen M. Deusner | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stephen-m. deusner/ | null |
If Montreal indie rockers Braids' debut Native Speaker drew its power from being the proverbial tip of the iceberg, Flourish // Perish is the iceberg itself, impressive and monolithic. It’s an interesting and daring turn for Braids, retaining the complicated, prog-like arrangements of their past while working within the textures of IDM and minimal techno. | If Montreal indie rockers Braids' debut Native Speaker drew its power from being the proverbial tip of the iceberg, Flourish // Perish is the iceberg itself, impressive and monolithic. It’s an interesting and daring turn for Braids, retaining the complicated, prog-like arrangements of their past while working within the textures of IDM and minimal techno. | Braids: Flourish//Perish | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/18326-braids-flourishperish/ | Flourish//Perish | Musical restraint is often confused with abstinence-- the idea is that artists are constantly warring with a natural compulsion towards adding that extra vocal overdub or drum solo or two-minute coda and should be rewarded for “winning.” Montreal's Braids made restraint feel a lot less theoretical on their 2011 debut Native Speaker and the results were often fascinating. The songs averaged about seven minutes and made no secret about the influence of Animal Collective at their most hormonally charged. But they weren’t defined by indulgence so much as a Hulk-like instability. "Lammicken" had a single, telling lyric-- "I can't stop it." When Raphaelle Standell-Preston’s soft-spoken surrealism exploded into carnal caterwauling and the band’s intricate interplay gave way to washes of free-form noise, you sensed that Braids had to work their asses off just to keep themselves in check, and were doing it for our good and theirs as well. Braids appear to have their impulses under control two years later, and if Native Speaker drew its power from being the proverbial tip of the iceberg, Flourish // Perish is the iceberg itself, impressive and monolithic, cold and impenetrable.
Perhaps it’s not all that surprising, as Montreal has seen a chill come over it since entering 2013 as indie's hottest city-- Majical Cloudz’s Impersonator achieved a glacial, barren beauty, something like sunlight on the Antarctic, while Doldrums disappeared into his laptop with static-laden, cracked pop. Grimes did somewhat likewise, retreating from music and relating her experiences with incisive and invective Tumblr posts. Then there’s Preston, the first in the scene to receive widespread attention; the humid romance of 2010’s Blooming Summer was a distant memory for her side project Blue Hawaii, as Untogether was filled with disaffected, click-and-whir electro laments that could be taken as a commentary on an artistic community that’s grown apart from each other.
On first exposure, it can feel like Flourish // Perish is an extension of Untogether rather than a complement. Pared down to a trio after losing founding member Kate Lee, Braids all but ditched their guitars and got deep into programming and sequencers. As such, Feels has been exchanged for mind music-- the mechanistic Flourish is heavy on turn of the century Warp (Aphex Twin, Squarepusher) and Warp-influenced crossover acts, i.e., Björk ca. Vespertine and Radiohead. Hermetic and kinetic, the band’s production bears the mark of “intelligent dance music”, not because it’s smarter than other electronic forms (as if that could be quantified) but due to its mirroring of cerebral function. The songs here are built from short, synaptic and repetitive firing, tiny loops, short glitches, silvery hooks that corkscrew into your memory.
It’s an interesting and daring turn for Braids, retaining the complicated, prog-like arrangements of their past while working within the textures of IDM and minimal techno. The spaciousness and clarity of Flourish does make it an easy record to return to; while challenging, it’s not a difficult listen. This is crucial, as the underlying rhythm beds rarely give Braids much melodic structure and put the focus on Preston’s lyrics, which are simultaneously more poetic and yet less evocative than her past work.
On Native Speaker, Preston functioned like an anthropologist in the wild, experiencing the strange rhythms and rituals of those around her, journaling the frightening results without judgment. There’s a scientific method to Flourish, where she’s inquisitive, probing and more concerned with challenging her own findings within clinical surroundings. Examples of self-examination and self-recrimination abound on Flourish-- Preston’s ego is a bed too comfortable to leave, her head a lake in which to drown. Yet, she maintains critical distance and for that reason, Braids are a lot tougher to read here. On the whispery morning-after ballad “Girl”, a lover serves as a mirror for the narrator’s inadequacies rather than comfort: “Every day I wake/ To sunlight on his face/ He is so care free/ Why can I not be.” On “Hossak”, Preston acknowledges “a boy knocking outside my window with a slice of pizza” with the eerie absenteeism of someone describing a UFO sighting.
The extraterrestrial quality cuts both ways. Flourish is a purposefully alien and repetitive album, and at the outset, it works-- the fractious, percussive rhythms of "Victoria" and "December'' are hypnotic, as is the overlay of high, diaphonous cooing atop Preston's spoken word during "Freund". But in the second half, the iterance becomes tedious; footholds are few amidst the long stretches of vast electronic tundra and the Perish side B can feel like a sheer drop towards revelatory closer “In Kind".
In a way, it makes you want to try and listen to Flourish // Perish in reverse-- “In Kind” feels like a continuation of Native Speaker, with the same kind of cresting dynamics and the one time where Preston lets off a scream, a satisfying, feral shriek that almost compensates for its lack thereof prior. And there’s also its introductory lyric, “I must have saw a girl/ Who looked a lot like myself ... knowing all the answers/ And it is a problem.” And if that’s the problem of this intriguing but insular album, the solution is found on “Victoria”-- “My father always said/ To get out of my head/ Maybe he meant to see what's next to me.” That’s the first line on Flourish // Perish, and the one that Braids could be wise to heed going forward. | 2013-08-16T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2013-08-16T02:00:01.000-04:00 | Electronic | Full Time Hobby / Flemish Eye / Arbutus | August 16, 2013 | 7.1 | ce52f629-2a7a-432a-ae2c-87452fa6465c | Ian Cohen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ian-cohen/ | null |
A quiet resolve underlies the folk singer’s mesmeric Sub Pop debut, which is her sunniest and most intrepid. | A quiet resolve underlies the folk singer’s mesmeric Sub Pop debut, which is her sunniest and most intrepid. | Shannon Lay : August | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/shannon-lay-august/ | August | August marks a series of milestones for Shannon Lay. It’s her debut for the Sub Pop label, and her first solo album recorded with fellow Angeleno Ty Segall. Its release arrives in tandem with the two-year anniversary of Lay quitting her day job, a coveted turning point not every musician reaches, and one she’s immortalized in the album’s title. Outside of making gorgeous folk music, Lay also plays in the punk quartet Feels and in Segall’s Freedom Band, and the ease between her and Segall is palpable.
Lay demonstrates the comfort and command that only comes from finding your people. The album has a telepathic quality to it, like Sandy Denny working with Richard Thompson and John Wood on The North Star Grassman and the Raven, or Elliott Smith mind-melding with Rob Schnapf and Tom Rothrock for Either/Or. Lay’s lyrics find depth and meaning in everyday moments: “Gone with the day again/I’ve seen so much and there’s more yet,” she sings on opener “Death Up Close,” an album highlight that features garage-pop musician Mikal Cronin blowing rays of light through a saxophone. “I love it/I love you,” Lay concludes, a plain confession whose boldness mirrors the confidence in her full-throated delivery.
The arrangements seem to bloom directly out of her voice, mirroring her mental state. “Nowhere soon/Soon we’ll get to nowhere/And we’ll talk to no one/And not meet them,” she intones on “Nowhere,” and the loping percussion echoes her romantic aimlessness. “I can decide my own way/I can decide which way to go,” she declares on the title track, over a nervous repeated pattern on electric guitar and locomotive drumming.
The album’s most tender moments are heard when Lay honors her idols. “November” considers Nick Drake’s serene and unparalleled voice: “Molly did you feel the sting/Of November songs gone quiet,” Lay wonders, imagining the devastation felt by Molly Drake when her son passed away. “I think of him often/I wonder if he’s listening/I wonder if a voice so quiet could ever really die,” she muses. Her take on “Something On Your Mind” transports the tune from Karen Dalton’s lonely backroads to a sun-drenched front porch, her fingerpicking folding into a barrage of percussion. The cover is a brave and well-meaning gesture, if not an entirely necessary one: Lay’s obvious love of Dalton is heard more subtly and perhaps more successfully through the album’s earthen textures. The fiddle on “August” and “Sea Came to Shore” is straight out of “Katie Cruel.”
At any rate, Lay is able to cover Dalton without losing her own voice. Her vision is clear-eyed, poetic, and for all the ways she channels the greats—Dalton and Drake, yes, but also Vashti Bunyan and current-day figures like Jessica Pratt and Adrianne Lenker—she also chisels her own name in the canon, painting a pastoral Los Angeles where the blazing concrete and wondrous shores and discarded sofas and blooming canyons form a peculiar everyday worth interrogating.
Buy: Rough Trade
(Pitchfork may earn a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.) | 2019-08-27T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-08-27T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Folk/Country | Sub Pop | August 27, 2019 | 7.7 | ce651d8f-4011-4c34-a777-60ae6bcb297e | Erin Osmon | https://pitchfork.com/staff/erin-osmon/ | |
The earliest music of Calgary's Kiesa Rae Ellestad leaned toward folk, and then she hooked up with producer and current collaborator Rami Samir Afuni, who has written and arranged for the likes of LMFAO and Miley Cyrus. The duo's debut is largely made up of attempts to recreate the success of their pop hit, “Hideaway”. | The earliest music of Calgary's Kiesa Rae Ellestad leaned toward folk, and then she hooked up with producer and current collaborator Rami Samir Afuni, who has written and arranged for the likes of LMFAO and Miley Cyrus. The duo's debut is largely made up of attempts to recreate the success of their pop hit, “Hideaway”. | Kiesza: Sound of a Woman | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/19933-kiesza-sound-of-a-woman/ | Sound of a Woman | Disclosure’s Settle wasn’t just the best debut LP of 2013, it was also the best dance-pop crossover record from last year; with no dominant trend in the sub-genre cropping up this year, the Lawrence brothers have dominated 2014 by proxy, too. Their rising success can be found in industry-shepherded superstar collaborations and dance veteran co-signs; they were also responsible for putting the most boring new pop star of the year on the map. All of which has lead to the music industry’s typically craven search to find something, anything comparable when it comes to satiating the fuzzy-boots crowd’s sudden micro-thirst for vocal-driven house. It’s why UK producer Duke Dumont’s ebullient, bursting “I Got U” could be found on U.S. pop radio earlier this summer, and it also explains why the market has been flooded with knockoffs supposedly meant to catch some of Disclosure’s heat. If you thought the glut of post-dubstep singer/songwriter types or tortured alt-R&B auteurs proved tiring, the 4/4 onslaught that mainstream pop is about to undergo could prove even worse.
Recently, the market’s been hit with two new artists in the Disclosure mold: first, there was Gorgon City’s competent, ultimately ineffective debut LP Sirens, and now we have the debut album from Calgary's Kiesa Rae Ellestad, Sound of a Woman. Kiesza's earliest music leaned toward folk, and then she hooked up with producer and current collaborator Rami Samir Afuni, who has written and arranged for the likes of LMFAO and Miley Cyrus. In 2012, Kiesza and Afuni released the single “Oops”, a pop trifle about unprotected sex that mixed bright, MOR synth-pop with the requisite wub-wub elements that marked big-tent dance music at the time; at the top of this year, they hit the pop bullseye forcefully with “Hideaway”, a throaty blast that sounded like the duo’s attempt to remake Robin S.’ “Show Me Love” for the millennial crowd.
A minor U.S. hit that went platinum in four European countries, “Hideaway” was a stroke of low-level pop mimicry genius, and Kiesza and Afuni are clearly aware of its winning formula: Sound of a Woman, a record that proves as generic and bland as the catch-all title that adorns it, is largely made up of attempts to recreate that song’s success, right down to replicating its basic structure. Sometimes, this works: the effervescent “No Enemiesz” finds Kiesza shouting over squiggles and a hollow, pounding beat before hitting a chorus that utilizes her oversinging tendencies effectively, while “Giant in My Heart” blooms into a satisfying 4/4 pulse that carries superficial charms similar to off-brand cereal.
Elsewhere, though, Sound of a Woman fails to spark, as its homogenous textures blend together to rob this music of the personality and emotion it has when done right. Kiesza and Afuni treat house music with all the studiousness of someone reading a textbook, as evidenced by her sorta-viral, sacrilegiously po-faced cover of Haddaway’s “What Is Love”. On one level, they’ve committed cultural thievery of the laziest kind, right down to European dance culture’s obsession with dusty, pre-2000s hip-hop (the shiftless “Losin’ My Mind” and “Bad Thing”, with respective features by American rappers Mick Jenkins and Joey Bada$$). Kiesza and Afuni come across as guests at a dinner party who couldn’t be bothered to bring anything and expect their presence to do the work for them.
So Sound of a Woman’s most memorable moments are when the duo deviate from their established norm: “So Deep” is a brooding, bleeping slow jam that, midway through, breaks into a moderately appealing 2step rhythm, while "Piano” soothes and swerves with the druggy melancholy of certain strains of R&B, building to a pleading, drum-assisted chorus that wouldn’t have sounded out of place on Jessie Ware’s 2012 debut Devotion. They’re capable, pretty songs, and like the rest of Sound of a Woman, they don’t give any clues as to who Kiesza is. | 2014-10-22T02:00:02.000-04:00 | 2014-10-22T02:00:02.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | Island / Lokal Legend | October 22, 2014 | 5.2 | ce6e678d-da2a-4f88-a7fc-9bf43c28b6f6 | Larry Fitzmaurice | https://pitchfork.com/staff/larry-fitzmaurice/ | null |
The Norwegian metal band Kvelertak find the unlikely meeting spot between black metal blast beats and the anthemic power of Van Halen and Judas Priest. | The Norwegian metal band Kvelertak find the unlikely meeting spot between black metal blast beats and the anthemic power of Van Halen and Judas Priest. | Kvelertak: Nattesferd | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21818-nattesferd/ | Nattesferd | Before Metallica basically turned metal into a speed-racing contest, older acts like Accept, Raven, and Metal Church had already embraced fast tempos while keeping one foot planted in what we once called metal but now look back on as traditional hard rock. Sonically speaking, these bands formed a kind of connective tissue between the poofy-haired stuff and the more aggressive styles that arose in part to purge the genre of its focus on backstage hedonism. If they referenced the rock'n' roll lifestyle, though, they tended to do so with a tough-guy attitude, as if partying, sex, and cars weren't the ultimate endgame but the reward for sticking to one's guns and making METAL an all-caps priority for life.
When you hear the modern-day Norwegian sextet Kvelertak ("stranglehold"), it's obvious that they're aiming for the same middle lane as their proto-thrash predecessors. But Kvelertak also embrace the let-the-good-times-roll side of metal as well. (For the record, the band describes itself first and foremost as "rock and roll.") And even though frontman Erlend Hjelvik sings entirely in Norwegian, Kvelertak's third album Nattesferd is so thoroughly crammed with fist-pumping hooks it's easy to get the impression that he's singing about heading out to the highway the whole time. He isn't, but on the first song alone the band manages to marry blast beats to the anthemic power of Van Halen, Dokken, and Judas Priest.
Nattesferd actually covers a lot more ground than Kvelertak's '80s ancestors did, but elements that might otherwise oppose one another blend into the experience seamlessly. Kvelertak's fellow revivalists (the Hellacopters, Bonded By Blood, The Sword, and pretty much any Sabbath-mimicking fuzz-rock band) can be so adamant about faithful replication that listening to them can feel suffocating. By contrast, the overwhelming feeling that comes across with Nattesferd is one of freedom to explore. "Svartmesse," for example, begins with a reverbed, single-string choka-choka-choka guitar line that's initially reminiscent of the Lick It Up-era KISS tune "Exciter" until the song veers into a quintessential New Wave Of British Heavy Metal-style verse. It's hard to imagine such a move in anyone else's hands not falling into either complete camp or embarrassing over-earnestness. In this case, it's fun without making you laugh at—or even *with—*the band.
The same is true of the production. Both Kvelertak's 2010 self-titled debut and 2013's sophomore album Meir benefited from the touch of Converge guitarist/producer Kurt Ballou, who, no surprise, captured the scratchy edges of the band's sound. This time, Kvelertak chose to produce themselves along with engineer Nick Terry (The Libertines, Turbonegro, Robyn Hitchcock). By contrast, Nattesferd hearkens back to a more vintage rock feel. Still, Terry and the band opt for a crisp, vibrant ambience rather than the boxed-in reverbs that were typical of the early '80s.
The CD booklet includes lyrics, which of course won't be of much use for non-Norwegian speakers. But the text for each song is preceded by a cryptic thumbnail summary. Listeners shouldn't expect to get a feel for what the songs are actually about with introductions like "Odin hangs himself from Yggdrasil for nine days so he can uncover the secrets of the world," "A future of despair awaits us. Resistance is futile," and "A traveler ventures into the strange black night with hopes of finding himself a new home." (The album title means "night traveler.") Alas, Google Translate won't help you determine that either, but with Nattesferd Kvelertak exploit an opportunity to create a sense of mystery. More importantly, they back it up with a group of songs that's virtually filler-free and loses little steam towards the end. Even if Kvelertak didn't mean to re-cast the Norse deity Odin as a Camaro-driving rebel burning rubber down the road, Nattesferd makes it exceedingly easy—and enjoyable—to picture him as one. | 2016-05-16T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-05-16T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Metal | Roadrunner | May 16, 2016 | 8 | ce6e8363-89b0-4ebf-91b3-39e96a6ab90d | Saby Reyes-Kulkarni | https://pitchfork.com/staff/saby-reyes-kulkarni/ | null |
The hip-hop legends return for their first album in 12 years and turn a comeback story into more of a claim to their legacy. | The hip-hop legends return for their first album in 12 years and turn a comeback story into more of a claim to their legacy. | De La Soul: and the Anonymous Nobody... | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22353-and-the-anonymous-nobody/ | and the Anonymous Nobody... | De La Soul have been positioned as everything from young hippie weirdos to aging, jaded scolds in the face of their more hardcore contemporaries. But the truth is that they’re just smart, grounded wiseasses whose eccentricities alternately hid or let slip their everyman status. If the clean-cut white yuppie who came in for U2 and came out with De La Soul was positioned semi-ironically at their start, their current position as elder statesmen of rap comes from their crossover eclecticism fine-tuned into a true-to-self versatility. They began showcasing a post-genre adventurousness in the ’80s, opened doors for alt-rap’s next wave in the ’90s, and spent the first half of the ’00s getting Damon Albarn, Chaka Khan, and Carl Thomas to share iPod space. Then they vanished.
Calling De La Soul’s hiatus a disappearance isn’t that much of an exaggeration: In their absence, the new record industry streaming model turned their history of innovative sampling and cultural interpolation against them, and the clearance and rights issues that locked them out of digital distribution posited them as one of the most important, and possibly the last, true holdouts of the CD era. But they had to keep their name out there somehow and found a way around the record business unable to maintain their legacy by funding their music through Kickstarter, just like regular folks (albeit more than $600,000 above most regular folks’ goals). They’ve also come to a phase in their career where an artistic existential crisis is scraping up against the getting-old anxiety that the rest of their Gen X peers are making a big public deal about. And working through that on record might be their most down-to-earth move yet.
*and the Anonymous Nobody... *is their first album since 2004’s The Grind Date, which featured a still-prolific MF DOOM, a still-peaking Ghostface, and a still-living J Dilla. This one features an equally notable and telling guest list: there’s David Byrne organizing an art-neurosis summit on “Snoopies,” there’s Damon Albarn turning “Feel Good Inc.” inside out on “Here in After,” there’s Snoop Dogg (“Pain”) and 2 Chainz (“Whoodeeni”) and Roc Marciano (“Property of Spitkicker.com”) mastering their own cool, dad-jokey versions of Over-35 rap to go along with De La’s version. Their dozen-year absence and the fact that Pos and Dave and Maseo are all going to hit 50 before the decade is out looms over all that, and it turns a comeback story into more of a claim to their legacy.
It’d be easier to shake off that feeling if there was more of a kick to this record. If your impression of “old man rap” is short on energy and long on reflection, this album won’t change that. At times, *Anonymous Nobody *feels more like a matter of necessity than enthusiasm, even if the work put into it proves it’s not. When it sounds tired and bummerish, it’s more in keeping with the hazy enervation of contemporary Drake-casualty rap than the proto-backpacker energy of their old joints. And while their casual, collected deadpan was always key to their delivery, Dave and Posdnous aren’t so much rusty as they are restrained in their down moments, all heavy eyelids and middle-distance stares. The flow’s still there—Pos remains way underrated in terms of disjointed, unpredictable rhyme schemes, and Dave still has a way of injecting that characteristic “huh, how about that” understated sharpness into his words—but the energy’s more stoic than ever.
Which makes sense, given the thread of tribulation and frustration that cuts through Anonymous Nobody, likely their bleakest record thematically since Stakes Is High. All the relationships they bring up seem to have been doomed long ago. “Drawn” and “Memory of... (US)” is all about trying to persist through faded love, depicted damningly as a metaphor for music-biz struggle. When they’re telling ass-chaser tales like “Trainwreck” or Dave’s verse in “Whoodeeni,” it’s all so tenuous that they have to bring in a 67-year-old man character in for an interstitial skit to remind them they need to get less reckless about hookups. If that sometimes lends itself to dated tropes—a “morally pure but naive young girl comes to the big city and gets corrupted” rap like “Greyhounds” sounds bad coming from a bunch of middle-aged dudes, even if one of those dudes is Usher—that's a side effect of dealing with accumulated experience.
There’s still no questioning De La’s greatness with observational abstraction. “Royalty Capes” isn’t just a juxtaposition of opulent-kingdom metaphors and gimme-what’s-mine industry beef, it’s the best type of convoluted wordplay: “I choke the blood out of felt tips/Heavyweights up to the front if the belt fits/The wealth is like ivory toothpicks/One out of each tusk/And must gets bust for each and every hiccup.” And “Pain” runs through its weary streak with been-there resilience, as if to say that if this shit’s a constant, it might as well be your inspiration.
There’s unexpected power in that weariness sometimes, but at low points, the big sinking weight of this record is their laconic flow and beats rarely make a case for themselves. At least when they had to tread water back in the day, they had a danceable electric piano hook to do it over. The live-band production and original musical composition is a good juke around any worries about sample rights, but too often the Rhythm Roots Allstars either keep it a little too tasteful (“Greyhounds” aims for the Miguel/Frank school of sumptuous future-soul and lands in a mattress commercial) or swing at pitches in the dirt (the arena rock of “Lord Intended,” featuring the Darkness’ Justin Hawkins, is easily the most inexplicable thing De La’s ever done). Pete Rock and Estelle just manage to bring that glow to “Memory of… (US),” but when it takes one of the greatest producers ever and an actual Crystal Gem to make a cut sound alive, it’s easy to wish the rest of the album had more to work with.
Fortunately, the tasteful outnumbers the ridiculous throughout the record, and if you don’t expect tectonic shifts in the way live-band hip-hop beats sound, the cumulative effect is at least thoroughly pleasant. And sometimes thoroughly pleasant plus heavy bass is just what you need. And when the energy level spikes on the late-album P-Funk homage “Nosed Up,” it’s live enough to distract you from wishing there was more of it. It’s all kind of what a skeptic might expect from hip-hop’s most enduring outsiders coming to terms with finally being outside the youthful drive that helped break them in the first place. Middle-aged rap has rarely sounded more grown, with all the mixed-blessing perspective that comes with it. *Anonymous Nobody *is kind of a downer, but sometimes that’s what you need, especially when the optimism’s just below that melancholy surface. If De La can find their place again after being gone so long, those clouds have got to break eventually. | 2016-09-03T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-09-03T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | A.O.I., LLC | September 3, 2016 | 6.4 | ce752332-d1ce-4492-8496-ed9bd4fc80f2 | Nate Patrin | https://pitchfork.com/staff/nate-patrin/ | null |
These wildly unpredictable art-rockers infuse the murky experimentation of their last two albums with the raw two- and three-chord rigor of punk, 1960s garage, and early 70s hard rock. | These wildly unpredictable art-rockers infuse the murky experimentation of their last two albums with the raw two- and three-chord rigor of punk, 1960s garage, and early 70s hard rock. | Liars: Liars | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/10588-liars/ | Liars | When Liars released Drum's Not Dead last year, they convinced naysayers that their turn towards dank improvisation on 2004's critically reviled They Were Wrong, So We Drowned was part of some masterplan: It was seemingly the perfect refinement of Drowned's experiments in noise and rhythm. A year later, they've taken another hard-left turn. With the band's expectation-defying back story, the surface way to read the new Liars is that it's the murky, art-damaged sound of their last few albums with the rock reattached. Here, the raw two- and three-chord rigor of punk, 1960s garage (and even pop), and early 70s hard rock reasserts itself over the haunted sound of Drum's Not Dead's tricky, Kraut-ish polyrhythms.
Much of Liars is rhythmically simplistic-- even brutish-- giving it an unexpected caveman thrill after the more cerebral Drum. In some ways, it hearkens back to the beefy punk-funk of the band's earliest material, where they bulked up the skinny-legged skronk of the Gang of Four and James Chance on a meat-and-potatoes diet. But in other ways this heft feels totally new-- classic rock moves melted into a noisy reduction. "Clear Island" and "Plaster Casts of Everything" both throb to the kind of riffs and howling keyboards that go right for the American rock fan's lizard brain.
In essence, Liars is scorched-blacktop biker music played through the art-rock filter of a band that's spent the last few years steeped in the bleak sounds of German new wave and early industrial. The riffs may be shackled to just a few notes, or restrained to a shrieking drone, but these are undeniably songs about the Power of the Guitar, not songs colored by atmospheric flecks of fuzz and feedback. The rhythm section's Mo Tuckerish momentum moves with the muscle mass of ZZ Top and the artless abandon of an upstart punk band. Liars have always been mesmerizing on stage-- even if that's often meant Angus Andrew flailing around in a soiled dress as much as the musicianship-- but Liars is the first time in a long time that live intensity has really come through on CD.
Of course, this being a Liars record, unpredictability is a foregone conclusion, and the band's turn to heavy metal thunder only makes up a fraction of the album's songs. Elsewhere the group shows a flair for grotty pop pastiche that must have previously been buried under all that jagged percussion. "Freak Out" is such a dead ringer for the Spector-spooked feedback-pop of the Jesus and Mary Chain-- right down to winkingly dumb "rock'n'roll" song title-- that it's impossible to ignore and likewise no accident on the band's part. "Pure Unevil" is shoegaze/dream pop if it had been concocted in a damp nuclear bunker rather than a paisley hippie crash pad. The song reverberates with a sickly but seductive metallic echo, with the drums and Andrew's voice coming from the opposite ends of a mile-long sewer pipe and the lonesome guitar zigzagging off the slimy walls between them.
The inspiration behind "Pure Unevil" is less obvious than the outright homage of "Freak Out", but both offer newly tweaked takes on 80s British rock that are echoed in "Houseclouds", where the baggy funk rhythm and creaky organ sound like what might have resulted had the Happy Mondays set sail for Bowie's Berlin rather than the ill-fated Barbados trip that produced Yes, Please. It's these laconic, menacing, and almost pretty moments that leaven Liars, adding skewed hooks to a band more infamous (rightly or wrongly) for willful noise and studio jamming. The murk (dub by way of stoner rock) remains constant throughout and moments of past inscrutability occasionally stop the record dead in its tracks. ("Leather Prowler" and "The Dumb in the Rain" go for that same kind of ethereal menace as "Pure Unevil" and get to the level of practice space dicking around.) But if Liars flowed smoothly, instead of stopping occasionally to worry at its scabs or piss all over the couch, it wouldn't be a Liars album.
Instead, hairy warts and all, the album is another script-flipping overhaul from a band that too often gets forgotten when folks start toting up 21st century rock's front line. Inevitably some will claim the album is a concession designed to appease those who ditched the band when the band ditched the rock. But if it doesn't quite confound like They Were Wrong or thrill like Drum's Not Dead, Liars still finds the band ignoring whatever you thought you wanted or needed from them, and doing what they damn well please. Just don't expect the next one to sound anything like it. | 2007-08-27T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2007-08-27T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Mute | August 27, 2007 | 8.5 | ce7914d3-79ab-408b-9547-f2bdae5e2ef0 | Jess Harvell | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jess-harvell/ | null |
Australian psych rockers Pond share members with Tame Impala, as well as a penchant for arena-sized 1970s rock. Their new album mixes bright synths, campy detours, and grim lyrics. | Australian psych rockers Pond share members with Tame Impala, as well as a penchant for arena-sized 1970s rock. Their new album mixes bright synths, campy detours, and grim lyrics. | Pond: The Weather | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/23161-the-weather/ | The Weather | Because of the success that one-time Pond drummer Kevin Parker has had with his solo vehicle Tame Impala, it’s easy to mistake Pond for a spinoff act—especially since Pond’s music wasn’t released outside of Australia until their fourth album, Beard, Wives, Denim, in 2012. Parker has functioned as in-house mixing engineer since Pond’s 2009 debut Psychedelic Mango, while two of Pond’s three core members—Nick Allbrook and Jay Watson—have in turn served as touring members of Tame Impala.
The two bands share a penchant for grand, arena-sized music that carries the torch for 1970s classic rock. But where Parker is sedate onstage, Pond combine feral enthusiasm with goofy recklessness, their baroque suites draped in punkish basement-show charm. (Think Queen dressed up as the Replacements or vice-versa.) Pond also keeps threatening to release a record that rivals rock’s all-time classics—creatively if not commercially speaking—and their seventh album, The Weather, is a tantalizing attempt.
The Weather opens with a cloudy arpeggiated synth pattern that introduces leadoff track “30,000 Megatons”—an early signpost that points in the keyboard-heavy blue-eyed soul direction Parker pursued on 2015’s Currents. Halfway through the song, filtered robotic vocals tease that Pond is about to follow in the same footsteps, which proves to be especially true for the album’s first half. On numbers like “Sweep Me Off My Feet” and “Paint Me Silver”—both love songs drenched in falsetto and synths—it’s almost hard to tell the two albums apart.
Pond dips into parody on “Colder Than Ice,” with its cliché “c-c-c-cold as ice” chorus and a keyboard bass groove evoking Frankie Goes to Hollywood and countless other 1980s acts who made cheesy videos filled with artificial smoke. Ditto for “All I Want for Xmas (Is a Tascam 388),” which apes the iconic chorus of Bob Geldof and Midge Ure’s 1984 all-star famine-relief song “Do They Know It’s Christmas.” Such campy detours are hardly surprising given that Pond’s work has mostly been about as serious as a spitball fight between junior high students just released from detention.
But The Weather is pervaded by a newfound sense of grimness. On “30,000 Megatons,” Allbrook sounds weary and disgusted with humanity, as he basically calls for someone to push the button and end it all, singing “I look out at the mirror/Look out at the world/30,000 megatons is just what we deserve.” On “Edge of the World, Pt 1,” he croons “We’re all just a waste of good meat/In a godless world” in a stagey falsetto.
Even the syrupy-sweet “Sweep Me Off My Feet” belies the sense of defeat at its core. When The Weather descends into vaudevillian strangeness during its second half, the contrast between words and music becomes especially fertile, as the band stays true to its zany spirit while showing that there's more going on below the surface. Throughout, Parker wisely employs his ear for fine-tuning while playing-up some of the band’s inherent roughness, like when the drums distort towards the end of “Edge of the World, Pt 1.” And on “A/B” (a remake of the band’s own “Elvis’ Flaming Star”), Pond establishes a missing link between Joe Jackson and early Funkadelic via a spazzy punk tempo that feels like it might derail at any second.
The Weather actually does derail—several times, in fact—but nothing can obscure its soaring moments. Rock bands have historically ended albums with songs that build gradually to gigantic climaxes—what Pond multi-instrumentalist Jay Watson once called “cosmic bollocks.” The Weather contains no less than four songs like that and even starts with one, as if Pond had epic moments to spare. For all its disjointedness, the album never wanders more than a few inches away from the sublime. It’s a document of a band knocking loudly on the door of greatness. | 2017-05-04T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-05-04T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Marathon Artists | May 4, 2017 | 7.7 | ce7a39c8-8fd4-4f44-9a24-0f77b9b1e555 | Saby Reyes-Kulkarni | https://pitchfork.com/staff/saby-reyes-kulkarni/ | null |
Where 2013’s cautious Defend Yourself attempted a belated recovery from a disappointing major-label debut, the indie-rock icons’ latest sounds like the work of a band refreshingly free of baggage. | Where 2013’s cautious Defend Yourself attempted a belated recovery from a disappointing major-label debut, the indie-rock icons’ latest sounds like the work of a band refreshingly free of baggage. | Sebadoh: Act Surprised | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/sebadoh-act-surprised/ | Act Surprised | Arriving a good 14 years after its predecessor, Sebadoh’s Defend Yourself, in 2013, was less a comeback than an act of closure, like one of those standalone reunion specials that follow the demise of a beloved long-running TV series. Where much of the indie-rock icons’ celebrated 1990s catalog invited us to eavesdrop on Lou Barlow’s roller-coaster romance with his main muse (girlfriend-turned-wife Kathleen Billus), his contributions to Defend Yourself updated their relationship status one last time with a striking degree of finality. “Someone else has found her way into my soul,” he sang at the top of album opener “I Will”: “Things have changed, no longer need to be with you.” Even if you were a casual listener with little knowledge of Barlow’s personal life, the line still stung, because it also summed up the average Sebadoh fan’s relationship with the band at the end of the ’90s.
The trio’s 1999 major-label debut, The Sebadoh, didn’t just fail to expand its audience, it was a dealbreaker for many longtime fans in an era when making an elaborately produced crossover record was enough to get even the most acclaimed indie-rock band cancelled. While Defend Yourself saw Barlow singing once again with the sort of characteristic candor that inspires tribute songs from veteran emo bands, musically it felt a little shell-shocked, as if memories of The Sebadoh’s Icarian leap inspired a reactionary retreat into a mid-tempo ’90s-indie comfort zone. But on their first album in six years, Sebadoh sound like a band free of baggage, whether personal or professional. Now they just have our raging shit-show of a world to worry about.
Act Surprised assumes the familiar form of Sebadoh’s mid-’90s Sub Pop classics, with Barlow and his habitual foil Jason Loewenstein evenly splitting the songwriting, while accommodating a lone wild-card contribution from the drummer (currently Bob D’Amico, formerly of the Fiery Furnaces). Instead of merely contrasting the tunefully heartfelt Barlow with the more erratic, irascible Loewenstein, the new album finds them mining common topical terrain—namely, the emotional toll of perpetually wading in a sea of misinformation—through their respective personalities.
As they take stock of a polarized culture, Sebadoh are unafraid to wade into gray areas. The deceptively chiming “Medicate” is Barlow’s contribution to the growing dialogue surrounding mental health, but it’s more than just an admission of addiction—when he sings, “Oh, I miss it when the sorrow tempts me again,” he’s questioning whether it’s actually better to feel pain than being drugged into feeling nothing at all. Loewenstein, meanwhile, uses the twitchy “Phantom” and twangy “Raging River” to parrot the sort of paranoia endemic to conspiracy-theorist culture. But he’s not just making a turkey shoot of easy targets—as an admitted enthusiast of UFO cover-ups on the early internet, he’s imagining the kind of tinfoil-hatted wingnut he could’ve turned into had he continued to slip deeper down the dark-web rabbit hole.
To channel our fraught current condition, Sebadoh eagerly reclaim their license to confuse by emphasizing a quality that was far less perceptible on Defend Yourself: their inherent volatility. Though often hailed as lo-fi folk heroes who taught indie rockers how to get in touch with their feelings, Sebadoh were also weirdo hardcore kids raised on Minutemen and Meat Puppets, and those eccentric influences are given more room to run wild here. Barlow’s “Celebrate the Void” may begin as a sluggish anthem of indecision, but it abruptly shifts gears into an exhilarating motorik free fall, while Loewenstein’s “Follow the Breath” finds a common language between needling math-punk guitars and arena-toppling Keith Moon drum rolls.
That sort of inspired energy proves tough to sustain over Act Surprised’s 45-minute run, particularly when the album veers into more temperate 1980s college-rock territory (“Vacation,” “Act Surprised”). But the album’s stellar closing trifecta—comprising the winsome power-pop of “Belief,” the adrenalized, Feelies-esque duet “Leap Year,” and the equally odd and elegiac “Reykjavik”—confirms Act Surprised’s status as the strongest Sebadoh release since 1996’s Harmacy. In a recent podcast interview, Barlow quipped that, extended hiatuses notwithstanding, Sebadoh “will never break up,” and on “Sunshine,” he spells out his recipe for endurance: “I need sunshine/To ignore/I need a room with heavy curtains, double lock up on the door.” With the way the world is heading, the future promises plenty more reason to curl up in the dark. | 2019-05-28T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-05-28T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Experimental / Rock | Dangerbird | May 28, 2019 | 7.5 | ce896d11-8e38-4a1d-a5b0-e321ca0b06d3 | Stuart Berman | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stuart-berman/ | |
The Toronto lo-fi rockers deliver indelible hooks with slacker nonchalance. | The Toronto lo-fi rockers deliver indelible hooks with slacker nonchalance. | PACKS: Melt the Honey | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/packs-melt-the-honey/ | Melt the Honey | Like many frustrated twentysomethings, Madeline Link fled the city and moved back in with her parents in early 2020. Enduring lockdown in the Ottawa suburbs where she grew up, she spent that torturous April writing and recording songs nonstop to ward off the anxiety. A year later, the arrival of PACKS’ full-length debut, the terse, 24-minute Take the Cake, solidified her talent.
A few years later, Link’s solo project, PACKS, has grown into a four-piece band, and she still seems to be riding that prolific wave. Inspired by the warped popcraft of Micachu and the Shapes and the voluminous output of Guided by Voices, Link squeezes out lazily hooky, lo-fi bangers as likely to draw lyrical inspiration from 19th-century literary arcana as from her personal life. She works fast and favors crude, brittle guitar tones that repel virtuosity; “I’m not a perfectionist,” Link told NME. Melt the Honey, an unshowily eclectic record warmed by the glow of new love, is the group’s third and strongest album since signing to Fire Talk in 2021.
Self-recorded with minimal equipment in an eccentric communal house near Xalapa, Mexico, the album buzzes with the spirit of a weirdo songwriter carving out a creative oasis. Songs vibrate with ideas, opening with snatches of band chatter (“HFCS”) and wildlife clamor (“Missy,” a bilingual ode to a stray cat hanging around the premises). Yet Link, who fell in love shortly before making this album, injects these scuzzy creations with a certain sweetness. With its sprightly organ and pleasantly dazed melody, “Honey” milks the confusing euphoria of a new relationship that feels like “seriously what I wanted all this time.” The titular refrain—“Come on, baby/Melt the honey,” Link croons suggestively—refers to the actual honey Link ate while living with her partner in a Chilean beach town. “HFCS,” inspired by high-fructose corn syrup, is a garage-pop sugar rush, while the languid, delicately layered “Take Care” seems to be about treating a partner with more tenderness than you can extend to yourself.
PACKS’ best songs deliver indelible hooks with the nonchalance of a slacker who couldn’t care less. It’s there in the downtuned psychedelia of “Trippin,” which evokes the lethargic haze of Mellow Gold-era Beck, and in the way Link exaggerates the coarse, sloppy qualities of her voice in that charmingly ’90s way on “Pearly Whites.” It’s also there in the way Link likes to repeat vocal refrains until they sound like nonsense syllables: “Fucked up, now you gotta restart/Gotta restart/Gotta restart,” she taunts on “Paige Machine.” The song refers to the fascinating saga of the Paige Compositor, a failed 1800s printing device whose creator, James W. Paige, received financial backing from Mark Twain but doomed his invention with an overcomplicated design and obsessive perfectionism. For PACKS, this seems to be a cautionary tale and guiding philosophy: overthink things and you risk winding up creatively obsolete. | 2024-01-24T00:01:00.000-05:00 | 2024-01-24T00:01:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Fire Talk | January 24, 2024 | 7.3 | ce928a85-c8d3-4d3f-91b1-6ac602c78896 | Zach Schonfeld | https://pitchfork.com/staff/zach-schonfeld/ | |
On her fifth album, the Welsh musician is at her best. The more elaborate and eccentric her music becomes, the more she sounds like herself. | On her fifth album, the Welsh musician is at her best. The more elaborate and eccentric her music becomes, the more she sounds like herself. | Cate Le Bon: Reward | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/cate-le-bon-reward/ | Reward | What does solitude sound like? Reward, the fifth album by Cate Le Bon, offers a strange and beautiful approximation. Le Bon grew up on a farm in rural Wales, and her earliest music—with its humble, organic whimsy—exuded the buoyant charm of someone trying to make a connection. Since then, her work has grown more alien, reflective but devilishly playful: a turn away from the world and into the landscape of her own mind. Increasingly adept at expressing this topography through wobbly, romantic post-punk, she has delved deeper into its recesses and invited more people along with her. The more elaborate and eccentric her music becomes, the more she sounds like herself.
If Crab Day, Le Bon’s 2016 breakthrough, felt like a collage made from cut-out pieces of construction paper, then Reward is like a series of tissue paper flowers, featherlight and diaphanous. She wrote the songs while living alone in England’s mountainous Lake District, in a rented cottage where she played piano late into the night. And while her treatment of these songs is fuller than anything on her previous records, she still turns to refrains you might find yourself singing once the idea of actual company becomes a distant fantasy. “Love you, I love you, I love you, I love you/But you’re not here,” goes one chorus. “You must die a little/You must exercise,” goes another, like an existential to-do list scrawled between dreams.
While Reward is defined by such pillars of aloneness, it is far from lonely. The arrangements are lush and warm and ornate, drawing on breezy synths and keyboards to maintain a patient, crystalline momentum. Like Greek filmmaker Yorgos Lanthimos, Le Bon takes pleasure in blending horror and fairytale, elegance and absurdity, and her music can soothe and disorient in the same measure. The deceptively complex arrangement of mid-album breather “Here It Comes Again” makes it difficult to distinguish between each instrument; they blend into a carousel of bobbing melodies with Le Bon’s plaintive voice conducting from afar. “Man alive,” she sings. “This solitude is wrinkles in the dirt.” You can get lost in it.
With the jagged edges of her recent work smoothed out, her surroundings turn luxurious. When she does roughen things up—the art-punk slink of “Mother’s Mother’s Magazines,” the motorik pulse of “Magnificent Gestures”—the feeling is less pent-up anxiety than unleashed nerves, a colorful parade of fire ants rushing toward you. These songs also serve as runways for the album’s longest moments of uninterrupted musical chaos: descending patterns that derail and don’t stop until the woods becomes too thick to pass through. This is Le Bon’s idea of jamming; her role is the crazed traffic conductor.
Still, her music speaks loudest in its calmest moments, and Reward is an album most remarkable for how it fills its space. The trademarks of her sound—blasts of saxophone, music box percussion, silvery, oblong guitar licks—are still here, but the presentation is more distanced and refined. Note the contented sigh two minutes into “Home to You,” or the brief, elated yip after each chorus in “The Light.” After producing music for Deerhunter and Tim Presley, her bandmate in the duo Drinks, it’s easy to imagine any number of artists turning to her for this kind of open planning in their own work.
While writing Reward, Le Bon attended architecture school to study the art of chairmaking. She described the craft as being both “unbelievably nourishing and really physically hard,” and she seems to have applied a similar discipline to her own songwriting. “The more you feel, the more you have to lose,” she sings in a mournful ballad called “Sad Nudes,” just before the music parts ways and threatens to collapse. This clarity is new from her—a stab at usefulness beyond her tightly-crafted universe. Reality comes crashing in again at the end, during the elegiac closer “Meet the Man.” Accompanied by woozy keys, Le Bon introduces the harshest words imaginable in her music: “Back to life.” You can hear the tug in her voice, the precise moment when a fantasy starts fading to the everyday. Learning to be alone is one thing; next comes finding that solitude in the sad, screaming world around you. | 2019-05-28T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-05-28T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Mexican Summer | May 28, 2019 | 8.4 | ce930de6-28b3-4304-8edf-19bf944002ab | Sam Sodomsky | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sam-sodomsky/ | |
Lee Ranaldo’s latest album is his finest post-Sonic Youth solo effort, featuring collaborations with Sharon Van Etten, Nels Cline, Kid Millions, and lyrics co-written with novelist Jonathan Lethem. | Lee Ranaldo’s latest album is his finest post-Sonic Youth solo effort, featuring collaborations with Sharon Van Etten, Nels Cline, Kid Millions, and lyrics co-written with novelist Jonathan Lethem. | Lee Ranaldo: Electric Trim | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/lee-ranaldo-electric-trim/ | null | In the early goings of Jonathan Lethem’s book Chronic City, an ex-child star called Chase Insteadman and his aging, eccentric pothead-critic pal Perkus Tooth listen—at Tooth’s insistence—to American primitive guitar/banjo legend Sandy Bull. Though Bull’s dronings soothe Tooth’s headaches, they grate mightily on the younger Insteadman; that is, until he and Tooth get nicely toasted on a strain of weed called Ice whilst scouring eBay late into the night for rare vases. Something about the night and the drugs and the cheap thrills finally sparks Insteadman’s interest in Bull’s buzzing, proto-psychedelic thrum.
What’s all this got to do with Lee Ranaldo? For starters, the bulk of the lyrics on Electric Trim, Ranaldo’s third LP under his own name since the dissolution Sonic Youth, were written in collaboration with Lethem, the celebrated novelist/critic. Really, though, it’s that plenty of listeners have been waiting for their Sandy Bull-on-Ice moment with Ranaldo’s solo works. While Kim Gordon’s gloriously gnarly duo Body/Head keeps digging its heels into our skulls, and Thurston Moore continues to play in the sandbox with his own sprawling post-SY material, Ranaldo—with 2012’s Between the Tides and the Times and 2015’s Last Night on Earth—hasn’t enjoyed the same successes.
With and without his band The Dust—including Sonic Youth stickman Steve Shelley, experimental guitarist and critic Alan Licht, and bassist Tim Luntzel—Ranaldo’s solo works are a meandering, somewhat toothless lot, littered with better-on-the-page lyrics and musicianship, perched in a not-unpleasant but hardly inspiring zone between proficient and predictable. This is the same Lee Ranaldo who wrote “Hey Joni” and “Eric’s Trip” and “Karen Revisited.” Was he really going to keep turning out these noncommittal solo LPs?
First, the good news: Electric Trim is easily Ranaldo’s finest post-SY solo effort, a sumptuous, shape-shifting headphone record that proves there’s still plenty of gas left in the tank. Guiding a massive ensemble cast—The Dust plus Sharon Van Etten, Wilco guitarist Nels Cline, Oneida drummer Kid Millions, Ranaldo’s son Cody, and others—through nine expansive, deeply pliable tunes, Ranaldo, Lethem, and Spanish producer Raul Refree have created a dexterous, rambling record, pieced together from scraps of poetry and tiny little flickers of sound. From snaky power-pop to piquant autumnal balladry to the gospel-y back-and-forth of the title track, Electric Trim is a rangy but fluid record, constantly in rearrangement, rarely the same from one moment to the next.
In many ways, it’s classic Ranaldo at a somewhat lower ebb: the offhand, rainwater-grey tenor, the sinuous pace at which these tunes—all but one clocking in over five minutes—unfurl. Lyrically, Ranaldo and Lethem prove fairly sympatico, slinging conversational, Beat-derived abstractions and thumbnail-sketch narratives that leave plenty of room for interpretation. Lethem doesn’t fully curb Ranaldo’s tendency towards semi-guileless lyrics (the less said of the boneheaded body/head splits of “Uncle Skeleton,” the better). Pynchon notwithstanding, there are few if any other working novelists who get rock music quite like Lethem does—his 33 1/3 on Talking Heads’ Fear of Music is one of his three or four best books, full-stop—and he comports himself admirably here.
Ranaldo and company seem to have left plenty of tape running throughout the yearlong, continent-spanning Trim sessions. Songs shift, swell, retract: a steady Shelley pulse will quickly give way to a rattletrap Kid Millions thwomp; late-Beatles orchestral ballasts come sneaking in from the sides; Nels Cline’s writhing leads streak across the sky before dissolving into the backdrop. It’s a rich, multivalent sound, and Ranaldo and producer Refree’s ability to direct all this traffic without causing too many pileups is no small feat.
The gangly lyrics and garish pulse of “Uncle Skeleton” are the set’s one true misstep, but there are certainly some rough patches elsewhere. Opener “Moroccan Mountains” kicks off with a murmuring drone and slides quickly into spoken word. It finds its way into a few overlong verses, tosses out a couple Avey Tare-style yips, then completely flips itself on its head into what passes, on a Ranaldo record, for a pop song. This lends the album a semi-disjointed feel it never fully shakes; as much attention as they’ve paid to arrangement here, there’s a kind of collagist, put-that-anywhere logic to the way the songs themselves progress that can feel haphazard and choppy. It’s no wonder the more straightforward stuff—like the rousing call-and-response of “Electric Trim,” the sweet nothings of “New Thing,” and the delicate sunrises of the Sharon Van Etten-assisted “Last Looks”—fares best.
I caught Ranaldo playing in Chicago just a few days before the inauguration. He introduced the circuitous Lethem collaboration “Thrown Over the Wall” as a kind of accidental protest song, a potential anthem for the gathering resistance. The tune’s a touch too indirect (“We use the sea to hide our submarines/Disguise our faces with dreams”) to fit that particular bill. But it does manage to capture a certain feeling many of us have had since late January, that restless “What now?” malaise that greets the endless tide of ever-worsening news. It’s hard to say if I would have gathered as much if Ranaldo hadn’t spelled it out, but Electric Trim draws you in just close enough to give up a few more of its secrets. | 2017-09-20T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-09-20T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Experimental / Rock | Mute | September 20, 2017 | 6.5 | ce9eca44-7061-4ecc-a376-8fb9d71be8e1 | Paul Thompson | https://pitchfork.com/staff/paul-thompson/ | |
Split between hedonism and hardened street anthems, the Mob Figaz rapper’s first album in more than a decade feels like a time capsule of Bay Area hip-hop as it used to be. | Split between hedonism and hardened street anthems, the Mob Figaz rapper’s first album in more than a decade feels like a time capsule of Bay Area hip-hop as it used to be. | Husalah: H | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/husalah-h/ | H | If the Mob Figaz rapper Husalah had a superpower it would be his self-confidence. It oozes from an open wound that also bleeds depression and survivor’s remorse; the whole point of his music would seem to be to unbandage and give it air. But it’s been so long since he released new music that Husalah followers—mostly hip-hop fans throughout the Bay Area, along with a faithful few elsewhere—have gotten used to feeling nostalgic. It’s not the kind of complicated reckoning with the past that has become common in a culture of comebacks and reissues, but something more basic—more like, Hey, remember Husalah?
Husalah’s last album was 2007’s Huslin’ Since Da ’80s, a sophomore record that cleaned up the meandering roughness of his mixtapes and found him peering back at a life in the streets. Now, after a pair of 2017 comeback singles comes a new album called H. It’s the first Husalah has released since spending five years in federal prison on a drug charge, and the first since his good friend and spiritual counterpart the Jacka was murdered on an Oakland street in 2015. In that time, hip-hop’s poles have reversed several times over, and H is tinged with the creeping feeling that music has become a lonely place of refuge for Hus. Perched atop his own little mountain of Bay Area rap, he sounds like a man preaching out one side of his mouth and shrieking party raps out the other. He hasn’t changed a bit.
The major upshot of Husalah’s radical self-confidence is that he has always sounded unafraid to do fun, weird things with street rap. It helps that he has always been a hell of a rapper: smart and dexterous enough to be a capital-L lyricist, goofy and experimental enough to never seem out of pocket doing something gonzo. But on record Husalah’s most endearing quality might be that he sounds like a guy in love with music. On H he swaggers over a swinging banda sample (“Mi Encanta”), raps at length in blustering but capable Spanish (“Mi Encanta,” “Bad Young Thang”), channels dancehall and reggae, delivers an interlude-like R&B floater (“Million Miles”), and churns out the type of gaudy, emotional hooks that can come only from equal parts pain and a total lack of self-consciousness.
With “M.O.B.,” the 2017 comeback and return-to-form single that presaged this new album, Husalah has crafted one of the best songs in his catalog, a rattling dose of hyphy adrenaline that transforms him into a shit-talking Hulk. “They say, ‘Husalah, would you please stop beastin’?’/I couldn’t give a shit I keep goin’ for no reason,” he gasps in his hilarious, breathy shriek. (Try this record at the gym, on a run, or in the middle of a dead-end task, and you might find yourself suddenly at the finish line.) “Humpin’” is smoother but equally fun and just as bitterly barked. (The title applies mostly to a panel of subwoofers, but also the party and the women that surround Husalah.) In the slick creeper “Bad Young Thang,” our star channels the smooth-toned crassness of Mac Dre. It’s not the only moment that feels like calculated Bay Area torch-carrying: The sole features on H are a pair of appearances from rappers that were also a part of Mob Figaz, the hyperlocal Bay Area rap crew intertwining aggressive street rap and pensive spirituality that graduated Husalah and the Jacka as its biggest stars. Fittingly, “Keep Mobbin’,” featuring a posthumous Jacka verse, sounds like it could have been pulled from a group mixtape recorded more than a decade ago.
If those are the raucous good times, H is just as full of reflective depression and PTSD repackaged as wise, rethink-the-system self-help. “Protect Your Soul” interpolates the chorus to Sade’s “Bulletproof Soul” word for word, flipping the cynical breakup prediction—“I know the end before the story’s been told”—into a hardened street anthem about death. “Second Time Around” packages a set of life stories—a baby born to an addict, a regretful street soldier, a struggling sex worker—into a song so patently emotional that it’s almost maudlin.
Album closer “Pray 4 You” is a clunky banger released many years ago—quintessential Husalah, but not so essential to the album. It’s not the only track that feels rough, if charming, next to the more polished standouts. H’s comeback doubles as a kind of time capsule, and after so many years away, you can hardly blame him for wanting to pack in as much as possible. | 2018-04-12T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-04-12T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | The Artist | April 12, 2018 | 7.2 | cea3c19d-e663-4615-8b16-100189971656 | Jay Balfour | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jay-balfour/ | |
Channeling a wary mixture of dread and hope, the Polish indie rockers tighten the slackness of previous records into a potent fusion of post-hardcore and shoegaze. | Channeling a wary mixture of dread and hope, the Polish indie rockers tighten the slackness of previous records into a potent fusion of post-hardcore and shoegaze. | Trupa Trupa: Of the Sun | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/trupa-trupa-of-the-sun/ | Of the Sun | Like any politically aware artist making music today, Polish indie rockers Trupa Trupa are particularly attuned to the tenor of our times. They understand that to be alive in 2019 is to perpetually grapple with two strongly oppositional states of being: paralyzing misery over looming ecological and social collapse, and whatever emotion it is—some might call it hope—that motivates us to get out of bed every morning, text birthday greetings to friends, sort our recyclables from our compostibles, and publicly shame fascists on the internet. The band’s fourth album, Of the Sun, doesn’t so much directly address the state of the world as vividly conjure the day-to-day sensation of existing within it, forever teetering on the tightrope walk between luminous ugliness and awful bliss.
Of the Sun’s roiling energy is actually the product of fine-tuning and focus. On prior releases, Trupa Trupa were eager to embark on extended flights of psychedelic fancy or let their slack-rock jams messily unspool. But like juvenile delinquents shipped off to boot camp, they emerge on Of the Sun flexing a more militaristic muscle, their wandering experimentalism harnessed into a potent fusion of lurching post-hardcore and shimmering shoegaze.
Trupa Trupa hail from Gdańsk, the Baltic seaside city that was the site of dramatic changes in the 20th century—namely, the first battle of World War II and the rise of Lech Walesa’s Solidarity labor-union movement in 1980. Earlier this year, the city was in the headlines again, when its progressive mayor, Paweł Adamowicz, was stabbed to death at a public event. This cycle reverberates through Of the Sun, as the band attempts to chart a steady course through the turbulence of history, its newly fortified sound serving as protective armor.
Singer/guitarist (and poet) Grzegorz Kwiatkowski has stripped all the fat off his lyrics, reducing his words to staccato sloganeering that’s as brutally minimal as Wojciech Juchniewicz’s basslines. He’s especially fond of riffing on variations of a word in a kind of verbal improv (e.g., “Anyhow/Anywhere/Nowhere man/Nowhere land/No one/Nowhere”), but his surrealist soundbites can be as evocative as they are enigmatic. On the Goo-slathered standout “Remainder,” he turns a simple repeated refrain—“Well it did not take place! It did not take place!”—into a taunting critique of Holocaust deniers; the dub-punk wobble “Long Time Ago” centers on a line—“Long time ago! No one! No way!”—that obliquely echoes the old saw about what happens to those who cannot remember the past.
Trupa Trupa’s trudging, Slintian drum beats, bass-battered grooves, and agitated lyrics mirror the gruelling rhythms of the modern world, and at times, this slow burn of a record begs for more moments of unbridled catharsis like the Wire-y blitz “Turn.” But Kwiatkowski frequently couches his communiques inside alluring, psychedelic melodies that lift you out of the morass. On “Satellite,” images of technological collapse are delivered with a Syd Barrett smirk, while the psych-pop stomp of “Longing” mainlines the hazy-headed rush of the first Stone Roses album.
More than just revel in the tension between medium and message, Trupa Trupa are the rare dystopian post-punk band to embrace optimism and levity as necessary survival mechanisms. Amid the ominous predatory prowl of “Dream About,” Kwiatkowski’s exultant chorus cuts through the grey skies like a sunbeam. “I dream about!/I dream about! I dream about!” he repeats with trembling glee, before the song is overtaken by stormy distortion. We never find out what exactly he’s dreaming about, but that’s not the point: Trupa Trupa may not have the perfect prescription for a better world, but they welcome you to imagine one together.
Buy: Rough Trade
(Pitchfork may earn a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.) | 2019-09-21T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-09-21T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Glitterbeat / Lovitt / Moorworks | September 21, 2019 | 7.2 | cea7f59c-7a32-4c29-bd9c-a56fd1171543 | Stuart Berman | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stuart-berman/ | |
After six years, Derwin Dicker returns to his primary project for a lush, sun-drenched set with a genuine emotional charge. | After six years, Derwin Dicker returns to his primary project for a lush, sun-drenched set with a genuine emotional charge. | Gold Panda: *The Work * | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/gold-panda-the-work/ | The Work | After his last album as Gold Panda, Derwin Dicker thought he might be done with the alias. The UK musician had made three full-lengths under that name, sampling thrift-store vinyl into wistful electronica that caught the light like a field of wheat at the golden hour. But after wrapping the third LP, 2016’s Good Luck and Do Your Best, he considered putting his signature palette out to pasture, along with some shopworn formats. “You know, 11-track albums with an arc, that’s over,” he declared.
For the next six years, Gold Panda mostly went dark as Dicker tried out new ideas. Some of his subsequent output didn’t fall too far from the tree: He and Simian Mobile Disco’s Jas Shaw teamed up as Selling for a 2018 album that, despite the absence of samples, shared Gold Panda’s genial gleam. But as DJ Jenifa, he opted instead for club-ready house bangers. He wandered even further afield as the semi-anonymous Softman, trading his trusty MPC for arcane software tools like Max and Pure Data, and ditching the secondhand wax in favor of bronze temple bells and coolly restrained minimal techno as frictionless and utilitarian as brushed stainless steel.
With The Work, Dicker returns to his principal project—and along with it, some old habits that he said he’d sworn off. Full of luminous harps, winsome vocal snippets, and the kind of gently swung rhythms that Saint Dilla set in stone, The Work is every bit as lush and sun-drenched as its predecessors. It also happens to be 11 songs long, with a neat, naturalistic, dawn-to-dusk arc. (Oops.) But whatever hopes of reinvention he might once have harbored, his return to his wheelhouse is hardly a bad thing; Dicker is, in fact, very good at being Gold Panda.
This sparkling strain of electronica, a lineage that descends through Boards of Canada and Four Tet, is an increasingly crowded lane, and in the hands of a less talented artist, it could easily turn to pastel mush. But despite the laid-back loops and unassuming air, Gold Panda’s music couldn’t easily be confused for mood-based playlist fodder. The grooves are too tangled, the tones too bruised. There’s a genuine emotional charge here, one that goes beyond the obvious nostalgia signaled by the crackle of scratchy vinyl. Clinging to his hangdog chord progressions and weeping-willow keyboards is a bittersweet air that suggests a guy not just idly jabbing at his drum pads but actively grappling with some heavy shit.
That subtle pathos reflects an important phase in Dicker’s life. After years of self-medicating his anxiety with alcohol, he is sober, in therapy, and father to two daughters. The album’s title is shorthand for “putting in the work”—the effort that goes into getting better. You wouldn’t necessarily know any of these biographical details from listening to the album, however; The Work doesn’t wear its mental-health themes on its sleeve. Instead, Dicker pours his energy into sound. Take “I’ve Felt Better (Than I Do Now)”: Despite the title, it’s the most upbeat piece on the album, whipping creamy Beach Boys harmonies into a giddy, house-adjacent anthem that sounds like DJ Koze on pep pills. A sugar rush of smeared chords and unnatural hiccups, it’s a celebration of the simple pleasure of stretching recorded sounds into improbable new shapes.
The first half of the album is particularly inspired. Following the slightly pro forma chimes of the opening “Swimmer,” The Work cracks wide open with “The Dream,” whose jabbing chords and staggered kicks are as jagged as the insides of a geode. “The Corner” pairs a splintered string section—imagine This Mortal Coil’s chamber ensemble chopped into kindling—with a yelpy, lovelorn vocal loop rescued from dollar-bin purgatory. And “Plastic Future” is a model of harmonic and textural economy, its harp melody, sandpapered drums, and ruminative synth arpeggio cycling each other like the elements of a Calder mobile. On the album’s back half, the balance between playfulness and moodiness occasionally tips too far toward the latter; the unguarded garishness of tracks like “The Corner” and “I’ve Felt Better” is missing, and I find myself wishing Dicker had allowed himself to get just a little weirder in these more muted, more indistinguishable tracks. Nevertheless, The Work holds together elegantly, moving from pick-me-up to gentle comedown, and at its peak affording a keen-eyed glimpse of a better self, a brighter world. | 2023-01-11T00:01:00.000-05:00 | 2023-01-11T00:01:00.000-05:00 | Electronic | City Slang | January 11, 2023 | 7 | cea9de46-f54d-480a-8eb3-bd66b7da3088 | Philip Sherburne | https://pitchfork.com/staff/philip-sherburne/ | |
On his new album, the Nicolás Jaar collaborator undergoes a vivid technicolor upgrade but his songwriting doesn’t always leave an impression. | On his new album, the Nicolás Jaar collaborator undergoes a vivid technicolor upgrade but his songwriting doesn’t always leave an impression. | Will Epstein: Wendy | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/will-epstein-wendy/ | Wendy | Around the release of his debut EP, The Beautiful Moon, New York songwriter Will Epstein (then known as High Water) described his changing relationship with Bob Dylan’s music. A lifelong fan, Epstein didn’t really pay attention to what Dylan was singing until adulthood. “The lyrics act like a spell, to summon the spirit,” he said in 2013. “He uses these words to summon this emotion, and I as a listener can experience the spirit without knowing the spell.” The composer, multi-instrumentalist, and longtime collaborator of Nicolás Jaar, has since referred to his own songs as incantations, their circular structures mutating with each rotation. On his new album, Wendy, Epstein leads a cast of contributors through an imaginative blend of cosmic jazz, psych, and 1970s soft rock, but his songwriting doesn’t always stand up to the detailed arrangements.
This is Epstein’s sharpest solo work, following a pair of more hemmed-in releases. His 2016 full-length Crush and last year’s Whims sounded somewhat compressed and coated in a lo-fi haze, the grainy production obscuring Epstein’s arrangements like VHS static. The songs were expanding toward something unique, but they never quite got there. On Wendy, Epstein and co-producer Michael Coleman render every instrument in high-definition, sculpting and sanding each sound as if trying to coax it into a three-dimensional form. The result feels like Eptein crossing over from the fuzzy black-and-white of his past work to full blown technicolor.
In “Will the Morning Come,” a distant clatter scratches at the surface, stirring an otherwise soft and simple piano ballad. The small disturbance—like a wind-rattled porch door—places you in the room with Epstein. It swells into a dry ripple, contrasting his clean falsetto and enriching the song with texture. On “Golden,” multi-instrumentalist Shahzad Ismaily spins bright, brittle webs from his guitar, tangling with Epstein’s saxophone at the song’s climax.
These unexpected details and scene-stealing guest appearances embolden Epstein’s melodies, which can be repetitive and a bit unadventurous. Across most of Wendy’s songs, you’ll hear inventive instrumental flourishes, rarely played the same way twice. Yet Epstein’s vocals loop the same course, without traveling anywhere unexpected. “Oyster Bay” is one of the sleepier examples; Epstein crafts a sparkling plane of prepared piano, body percussion, keyboards, and soprano sax. But his gauzy voice, recalling “powdered glass from cities past,” wears thin. On an album bursting with dynamic instrumental performances, the vocals feel structurally basic.
Epstein’s writing is fairly simple, but compact and vivid phrases cut through here and there. On “Passenger” he sings about a rigid heart, “dancing like a needle in the groove.” The lyrics, which he co-wrote with musician Gryphon Rue, convey the worn path of old habits—the illusion that we’re moving freely when we’re confined to the same cyclical track. Epstein’s voice is pinched tightly into an almost painful key, but the discomfort adds a sense of eeriness, as does the veil of electronics, chirping like microrobotic crickets.
The five-minute opener “Suddenly Rain” is by far Wendy’s best song. Its dense arrangement culminates in a carnival of clanging textures, which pile on with each pass of the chorus. Epstein performs nearly every instrument, save for drums (Coleman) and the blazing guitar solo courtesy of Darkside’s Dave Harrington. It is Epstein’s most Beatles-indebted song, underpinned by layers of wordless harmonies, but their sweetness works well against the off-kilter lyrics, written with poet Maggie Milner. “Salt water kiss/Under the fly strips,” he sings. “Amber strings/Dangling/Little wings.” Epstein contrasts his sun-drenched melody with rough, tactile percussion and creeping piano. It is a rich and kaleidoscopic piece, and it kickstarts the record with the promise of something truly intoxicating. If only all of Epstein’s spells were so effective. | 2023-02-02T00:00:00.000-05:00 | 2023-02-02T00:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Fat Possum | February 2, 2023 | 6.7 | ceb21326-b09c-477d-84c9-72546637cc97 | Madison Bloom | https://pitchfork.com/staff/madison-bloom/ | |
The composer and singer/songwriter Olga Bell joined Dirty Projectors for the tour behind 2012's Swing Lo Magellan and released a profoudly strange and complex album in 2014 called Krai examining her childhood in Russia. Her new EP, Incitation, is more straightforward, evoking FKA twigs and Björk. | The composer and singer/songwriter Olga Bell joined Dirty Projectors for the tour behind 2012's Swing Lo Magellan and released a profoudly strange and complex album in 2014 called Krai examining her childhood in Russia. Her new EP, Incitation, is more straightforward, evoking FKA twigs and Björk. | Olga Bell: Incitation EP | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21089-incitation-ep/ | Incitation EP | Few albums of the last five years provided as profound a feeling of escape as Olga Bell’s breakthrough album Krai. For the Brooklyn-based composer and electronic musician, the effect of its process was the opposite: The piece, meant as a "concert" work and funded by a grant from the American Composers Forum, was her way of re-accessing her earliest memories as a young child in Moscow (she moved from there to Alaska when she was seven), as well as exploring the remotest corners of her ancestral land through extensive research. The fruits of her labor are near-uncharacterizable: Bell melds Russian folk melodies with pop, traditional Eastern European forms with jagged, prog-rock onslaughts, and integrates non-Western vocal styles—from Altai-style throat singing to throaty, piquant harmonies recalling the 4AD tapes of the Bulgarian State & Television Female Vocal Choir.
By embracing a musical world that feels more in line with her present—and self-consciously down to earth—her new five-song EP, Incitation, provides something more immediately parsable than Krai. Like her 2011 full-length Diamonite, Incitation consists of electro-pop music ready-made for one-person performance. Unlike Krai, Bell is not wrestling with demented mirror reflections of herself; the busy and tangled vocal counterpoint is gone. The digital instruments act as extensions of her strong solo voice in the center of the mix—the pointillistic MIDI synth figurations (think Glasser) on the periphery, the booming electroacoustic percussion and subdued bass. Incitation has an economy of purpose and more serious bent than her previous electronic work, in which Bell made a strong break from her years training as a concert classical pianist and paid tribute—in ecstatic, self-aware or outright jokey tones—to her new life as a composer and performer in New York City.
Instead of rushing to keep in time with skittery, double-time drum machines, Bell aims for the austere on this EP, embracing the melismatic melodies and damaged electronic architecture favored by Björk and so many after her. The richly textured drum sampling is the most modern element, indebted to artists like FKA twigs who have drawn threads from R&B toward IDM and other realms of the avant-garde.
The lyrics are epigrammatic, and often solemn: They seem to address either her narrator’s self-doubt, or moments of impasse with a lover. In any case, some other soul or specter is always at play as an antagonist, even if it seems like it’s just Bell moving outside herself. In "Rubbernecker", the simple repeating piano riff forms an eccentric rhythmic relationship with the drum loop, perfectly underscoring Bell’s fraught diary entry of impressions from a recent national fly-over (the refrain: "My soul, how hard you're driving/ Get along/ Watch your own road"). Likewise, on "Goalie", a synth evoking woodblocks hammers nervously away, as gutted, uneven drum beats pull in and out at random. Bell’s melodies come through with pealing clarity, but her emotions seem harder to pin down: "For all the tiny muscles in your hand, you don’t shake like I thought you would."
If Krai was on the verge of being irreducibly complex, Incitation risks cutting to the chase too hastily. The songs make an impression only after several run-throughs, and the appeal of some (the title track and "Pounder I", especially) waxes and wanes across their duration, sometimes feeling too risk-averse. It feels good to be drawn closer by Bell—to be trusted—but one can’t help but wish for some more complications to the narrative. The music is comfortable, hinting in plenty of promising directions but hesitating from going all the way toward them. | 2015-10-19T02:00:02.000-04:00 | 2015-10-19T02:00:02.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | One Little Indian | October 19, 2015 | 7.2 | ceb23c55-e3c2-487c-aa22-3708e0012a80 | Winston Cook-Wilson | https://pitchfork.com/staff/winston-cook-wilson/ | null |
Looking back on 2003, among the sounds that Pitchfork may have undervalued are crunk and the ragga-jungle revival. Granted, they ... | Looking back on 2003, among the sounds that Pitchfork may have undervalued are crunk and the ragga-jungle revival. Granted, they ... | Remarc: Sound Murderer | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/6905-sound-murderer/ | Sound Murderer | Looking back on 2003, among the sounds that Pitchfork may have undervalued are crunk and the ragga-jungle revival. Granted, they weren't ignored-- each of them scored a few reviews and a handful of well-deserved praise. But by the time David Banner got screwed and chopped, the "Meringue Remix" of "Get Low" slipped onto the radio, the Soundmurderer + SK1 12-inches received proper release, and Tigerbeat6 released a handful of records that didn't treat jungle and drill sounds like aural raspberries, it became more clear that these were a couple of the most under-told stories of 2K3.
When it comes to the ragga-jungle revival, the place to start is still where the present meets the past: Soundmurderer's Wired for Sound features a trio of breakneck mixes of some of most ruff, masculine and steely-eyed moments in first-wave ragga-jungle. A tall tale of ragga-jungle's history, Wired for Sound re-cast its rhythmic innovation as all peaks and no valleys, a frenetic series of whipsmart neck-snapping drumbeats which, in the right hands, isn't actually that much of a fib. Fittingly, one of the producers who most heavily features on Wired for Sound is Remarc, who in 1995-97 released ten singles of uncanny power and elasticity on labels such as the legendary Suburban Base, Dollar, Kemet, Labello, and White House. Sound Murderer collects most of those tracks-- many of them on CD for the first time-- on a well-deserved Remarc full-length. (A second compilation of Remarc's work, Unreleased Dubs 94-96, will be released on Planet Mu on CD and 4xLP in late spring.)
Despite the variety and a near-chaotic intensity of Remarc's re-wiring of the empty promise of rave to the sinisterism and dread of darkcore, the origin of each of these tracks lies on the flipside to the Winstons' 1969 top 10 soul hit "Color Him Father". Like many junglists, Remarc built his tracks over the "Amen" break, which is derived from "Amen Brother", a break that is sort of to jungle what "Apache" is to hip-hop: perhaps the integral strand in each sound's genetic code.
Far from the IDM-leaning of jungle's over-ground, more white-washed head music, these are tracks of urgency and dread that appealed to/soothed the paranoia of too many years of drug use as much as it did to embody the thrill of communicative dance music. And yet, it's more sonically stuffed and sophisticated than both its spliff-cloud brethren and the drill-n-bass snobs who later delighted in rubbing sludge over melody rather than marrying them to any great effect. Among the few Remarc classics missing from this comp is perhaps the most extreme, the cold sweat of "Ricky", a track so overcome by drug-induced paranoia that it sounds like an anxiety attack on acetate.
What is here includes some of the most deft manipulations of rhythm of the jungle era, from the drums, sub-bass and congas in your face of "Unity" to the self-explanatory yet still funky title track to already exalted classics such as "R.I.P." and "Thunderclap". The snaps and skitters of Remarc's robust breaks color his tracks without pulverizing them, whether laid alongside the bravado of Jamaican patois or gunshots or more unexpected and docile treats such as or Spaghetti Western whistling or delicate string lines. After years of jungle being associated with too much of the latter and not enough of the former, this is a welcome resurrection. | 2004-01-22T01:00:01.000-05:00 | 2004-01-22T01:00:01.000-05:00 | Electronic | Planet µ | January 22, 2004 | 8.8 | ceb666e3-cf05-4cd5-8c1b-d587eb75a2b7 | Scott Plagenhoef | https://pitchfork.com/staff/scott-plagenhoef/ | null |
The Bay Area rap crew’s collaboration with Hit-Boy catches them in a moment of furious flux. | The Bay Area rap crew’s collaboration with Hit-Boy catches them in a moment of furious flux. | Hit-Boy / SOB X RBE: Family Not a Group | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/hit-boy-sob-x-rbe-family-not-a-group/ | Family Not a Group | SOBxRBE dropped into the rap world like a cartoon fight cloud. Last year alone, they released two full-length albums: the careening Gangin’ and its meaner-sounding sequel. This is not counting any of the solo work by the group’s four members (Yhung T.O., Slimmy B, DaBoii, and Lul G); nor does it include “Paramedic!,” their standout song from TDE’s Black Panther soundtrack. Family Not a Group, a collaboration with the Fontana, California-bred producer Hit-Boy, casts SOB as an act with a durable style that can be transposed into new formats, sometimes workmanlike but usually thrilling, too.
The secret to SOB’s continued success lies in the group’s mechanics: Slimmy, Lul G, and DaBoii rap in different variations on the same urgent bark, while the smooth-voiced T.O. offers the kind of half-R&B hooks that might reasonably wind up on rap radio. It’s a time-tested recipe—dense, uncompromising street rap, glazed with semi-sweet hooks—that evokes everyone from G-Unit to the Hot Boys. It also allows them to take big pop swings without muddying their core identity.
On Family Not A Group, they manage to get away with some moves that that would be trite in other hands. The opener, “Chosen 1,” sounds like the climax of a movie where everybody learns a little something in the end; the song works because from the moment Slimmy opens his mouth, SOB seems both in tune with the beat’s triumphant spine and at odds with its glossy finish. (It also helps that T.O., tasked as always with giving the track its silky hook, is reeling off sparklers like “You can’t talk about no body til you get one.”)
Hit-Boy’s beats mostly adhere to SOB’s established format: propulsive, sparse arrangements juiced with bone-crack percussion. In that sense, Family Not A Group sounds more like Hit-Boy stepping in to do an SOB x RBE album than the other way around. Hit-Boy has always been a more of a collaborator than a signature-stamp producer: He went from producing singular hits like “Niggas in Paris” and “Backseat Freestyle” to helping major artists realize visions of their own. He fumbles here and there, though, like on“WYO,” which is anonymous lounge music.
Despite the album’s title, Lul G appears only once, with an excellent verse on “Both Sides,” suggesting a rift similar to the one that cropped up before the release of Gangin’ II. It’s unfortunate because the best songs here—the woozy, minimal “Stuck In the Streets” and the growling “Young Wild Niggas”—suggest a group still on the upswing. | 2019-04-23T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-04-23T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Def Jam | April 23, 2019 | 7.3 | ceb74253-333c-4d86-8f2d-b5d9e8857cf4 | Paul A. Thompson | https://pitchfork.com/staff/paul-a. thompson/ | |
The Stooges reunite for just their fourth album and first in 34 years. Mike Watt takes over for the late Dave Alexander on bass and Steve Albini serves as engineer. | The Stooges reunite for just their fourth album and first in 34 years. Mike Watt takes over for the late Dave Alexander on bass and Steve Albini serves as engineer. | The Stooges: The Weirdness | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/9995-the-weirdness/ | The Weirdness | The Stooges' first three albums were a perfect triptych. Each record had its own peculiar atmosphere of dread, but when played back-to-back-to-back they form a complementary arc: black-cloud threat (1969's The Stooges) gives way to fiery holocaust (1970's Funhouse) and a post-apocalyptic zombie dance party (1973's Raw Power). Collectively, these records helped spawn every guitar-based subgenre you'll find in a reputable record store: glam, metal, punk, goth, hardcore, indie rock, shoegazer, stoner-rock and noise, and-- through sideman Steve Mackay's fearsome Funhouse sax work-- they even served as many rock fans' gateway to free jazz. There's really nothing more a rock band can or need do in its lifetime. Given that track record, the concept of a fourth Stooges album at this juncture is pretty much doomed from the start.
Sequestered in their home base of Ann Arbor, Michigan, the original Stooges operated in geographical isolation, equally reviled by the pop establishment and the prevailing hippie counterculture, and-- in sharp contrast to their MC5 soul brothers-- almost determinedly oblivious to the turbulent political climate of the time. What made the Stooges such an intimidating prospect was not their aggression so much as their willful indifference to the world around them.
When Iggy changed his surname from Stooge to Pop for Raw Power, there was no small amount of cheek involved in suggesting this self-mutilating drug sponge had aspirations to be a pop idol. But by this point, Iggy is pop: You've seen him in iMac and Motorola ads, on "Deep Space Nine" and in Snow Day, and singing with Sum 41. So by default, the strategy is now to subvert from within; if the old Stooges didn't give a shit about Vietnam, the reformed Stooges-- Iggy plus Ron and Scott Asheton, with Mike Watt replacing the late Dave Alexander on bass-- are at least paying attention to Iraq. But it's this very attempt to infuse the Stooges with some ripped-from-the-headlines currency that ultimately downgrades The Weirdness from being a passable aging-rocker reunion album into an atrocious one.
A big reason why the Stooges' discography has aged so much better than, say, Jefferson Airplane's, is that they avoided topicality and period detail, instead favoring a simple, provocative language-- little dolls with cigarettes and pretty faces going to hell-- that still simmers with deviant suggestion. The Weirdness, on the other hand, is practically begging to be dated, with Iggy dropping sore-thumb references to Dr. Phil, intifada ('cause it rhymes with "Madonna"), the Christian right, "a war with no reason," and The New York Times' Sunday Styles section, while celebrating his return ("rock critics won't like this at all"; "you can't tell me this is not a suave thing to do"; "the leaders of rock don't rock/ This bothers me quite a lot").
No one expects Iggy to act like the chest-slashing miscreant of old, but from a vocal-performance standpoint, there's little difference between this and, say, Naughty Little Doggie. Songs like "The End of Christianity", "She Took My Money", and "Trollin'" revert to the old "I Wanna Be Your Dog" trick of repeating the title until it becomes a chorus, but there's no underlying tension or menace to make them stick. He's never been the most subtle songwriter, but even Raw Power's "Penetration" sounds poetic next to "my dick is turning into a tree" (from "Trollin'"). And when Iggy sings "My idea of fun/ Is killing everyone," he sounds not like a 60-year old punk, but something way less flattering: a 16-year-old one.
As he recently explained to The New York Times, Iggy instructed Mike Watt to simplify his playing and find his "inner stupidity," so any hope that punk's most dexterous bassist would inspire a further exploration into Funhouse's funk/jazz extremities goes unfulfilled. Instead, the songs hew more closely to the straight-ahead slash 'n' bash of Raw Power (ironic, since Ron didn't even play guitar on that one) but with the restraint of older, wiser gentlemen who don't quite hate the world and themselves like they used to.
Though still capable of producing some sinister riffs ("My Idea of Fun", "Mexican Guy"), Ron's wah-wah workouts have lost some of their raygun charge, his fills sounding more typically blues-rocky. Even the return of Mackay fails to provide a corrupting influence, as he dutifully follows the band's lead (see: the Stonesy bar-band jam on "She Took My Money") where he once disrupted it. The only one who sounds like he's been waiting 34 years for this opportunity is drummer Scott-- thanks to Steve Albini's off-the-floor recording, his playing sounds more muscular and limber than the claustrophobic production and caveman beats on the early Stooges records would suggest.
But really, he's just trying his damnedest to kick some life into an album that hideously disgraces the band's original work. When the Stooges opened their South by Southwest set last weekend with a military-strike-precise string of five classics from The Stooges and Funhouse, the ensuing torrent of stage dives and flying beer cans offered convincing evidence they could still give us danger. But that the Stooges can ably relive past glories onstage only reinforces the sobering realization that one of rock'n'roll's most infallible discographies has now been saddled with an unwanted stepchild. | 2007-03-20T02:00:02.000-04:00 | 2007-03-20T02:00:02.000-04:00 | Rock | Virgin | March 20, 2007 | 1 | cebb6f2a-f7ce-4b53-8a27-5878388ec2da | Stuart Berman | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stuart-berman/ | null |
With drumming by Zach Hill (Hella, Marnie Stern), the Sacramento punk-rap outfit offers a bludgeoning slab of hostility on its free mixtape. | With drumming by Zach Hill (Hella, Marnie Stern), the Sacramento punk-rap outfit offers a bludgeoning slab of hostility on its free mixtape. | Death Grips: Exmilitary | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/15583-exmilitary/ | Exmilitary | Energy without insight is monotonous. Insight without humor is preachy. Humor without frustration is toothless. Frustration without humanity is destructive. And humanity without energy is defeatist. If an album operates with the purpose of being a big noisy fuck-shit-up machine, missing just one of those elements can leave you with an overbearing mess, where every speaker-rattling burst of noise or cathartically screamed hook turns you back instead of getting you all riled up. Sacramento punk-rap outfit Death Grips are known for starting frothing mosh pits with a style that seems in keeping with the hardcore-meets-hip-hop confluence that first ran through skate culture a few decades back. Exmilitary, their free mixtape, is a bludgeoning slab of hostility that plays like both sides of a circa-1987 Cro-Mags b/w Just-Ice home tape bleeding through each other.
Exmilitary avoids any of the flaws outlined above, but it's still a potentially alienating album: unnerving when you're not on its aggro wavelength, inviting when you are, and transfixing either way, thanks to the aggregate work of Death Grips' core. The raspy, deliberate MC Ride doesn't so much flow as bellow. Producer/videographer Flatlander and co-producer Info Warrior hit both sides of the audio-visual equation with overloaded noise (check the "Guillotine" video for starters). Additional vocalist Mexican Girl skulks in the background and spits venom for occasional effective emphasis. And Zach Hill, the Hella drummer-- recently heard on Marnie Stern's self-titled album-- provides some of the live percussion elements. But isolating each member's specific contributions seems like a good way to make an overwhelming sound seem flimsier than it really is.
That said, MC Ride might be the most upfront element. His tendency to go hard in the rawest way possible with doomsayer verses has slotted him in a strange no-man's land between Southern and avant-rap. His tangled, diabolical lyrics are wrapped up in lust, drug panic, metaphysical power-tripping, and political agitation, and he delivers them as if every syllable were an exclamation point. And while there's not a ton of nuance, there's a surprising versatility, as Ride's rhymes range from malevolent to anxious to smart-assed. Monolithic and harsh, his voice sounds powerful doubling up the beats to the point where it doesn't even seem like a problem when it's halfway buried in the mix.
The production does its damnedest to capture punk aggression for a hip-hop context without pushing things too far in either direction. Fuck-the-cops anthem "Klink" invokes Black Flag's "Rise Above", the opening scream from Bad Brains' "Supertouch/Shitfit" punctuates "Takyon (Death Yon)", and the beat to "Spread Eagle Cross the Block" is built sturdily around Link Wray's "Rumble". On sex-maniac anthem "I Want It I Need It (Death Heated)", a devastating hijack of Pink Floyd's "Interstellar Overdrive" perfectly conjures up this music's intersection of choppy, riff-heavy beat assault and psychedelic sprawl. Juke-inflected bangers like "Thru the Walls" and "Blood Creepin" blur Exmilitary's stylistic lines, and that's good-- it means not having to worry about scene purity or crossover potential, and focusing instead on just how much ferocity you can take. | 2011-06-30T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2011-06-30T02:00:01.000-04:00 | Experimental / Rap | Third Worlds | June 30, 2011 | 7.5 | cec108ab-8496-405a-94b6-ed758f63c785 | Nate Patrin | https://pitchfork.com/staff/nate-patrin/ | null |
The noisy Baltimore post-punk duo team up with Dan Deacon for an album of ’80s pop melodies and newfound lyrical maturity. | The noisy Baltimore post-punk duo team up with Dan Deacon for an album of ’80s pop melodies and newfound lyrical maturity. | Ed Schrader’s Music Beat: Riddles | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/ed-schraders-music-beat-riddles/ | Riddles | For years, the quickest way to understand why avant-garde post-punk duo Ed Schrader’s Music Beat is a Baltimore institution was watching them perform live. It began as a solo act in which Schrader lugged a floor tom into the room, removed his shirt, and began thwacking the drum while screaming lyrics with an underlit, sinister grin. Come 2010, bassist Devlin Rice joined Schrader and the Music Beat took shape, but their reckless noise still couldn’t be accurately captured on record. Over the past two years, they’ve been working to change that. Schrader and Rice approached electro-pop visionary Dan Deacon to co-write and produce their third album, Riddles, where they enter a world of racing synths, ’80s pop melodies, and sporadic violins. It’s the most unpredictable sound to come from Ed Schrader’s Music Beat so far, and yet somehow, the most unexpected part of it all is how well it suits them.
As a friend and colleague in Baltimore’s music scene, Deacon was a natural choice to help transfer the duo’s notorious energy into expansive recorded arrangements. They retreated to Deacon’s personal studio to collaborate over two years, giving and taking from each other’s expertise. You can hear Deacon’s style, especially that of 2012’s America, all over this album: the gleeful piano fluttering in “Riddles,” the manic percussion buried in fuzz on “Dizzy Devil,” the thick wall of synth on “Kid Radium.” In the past, Deacon’s grandiose ideas occasionally lost themselves in ambition, swirling beautifully toward nowhere specific. Ed Schrader’s Music Beat gives him new parameters to stay within, and he rises to the occasion on Riddles. Even songs he didn’t co-write, like Rice’s mellow instrumental number “Humbucker Blues,” benefit from his role as the album’s producer and mixer, giving Rice’s bass a gentler tone than any Deacon tracked in the past.
But while the album’s surface gloss traces back to Deacon, the deeper change reflected on Riddles has to do with Schrader and Rice’s maturation as songwriters and musicians. They push themselves to try new techniques, from the puckish finger-snapping in “Seagull” to the salsa undertones of closer “Culebra.” On “Dunce,” Rice ditches his garage-style bass playing from their 2014 album Party Jail for a guttural tone akin to Suicide. Meanwhile, Schrader explores deep-bellied vocals every chance he gets. Even the biggest Perfume Genius fan could mistake his liberating hollers on synth ballad “Wave to the Water” for Mike Hadreas.
The cathartic feeling cloaking the album comes from a distinct need. As the three collaborators were making Riddles, each of them suffered a loss, as noted in the album’s press materials: Schrader’s stepfather passed away; Rice’s brother chose to die peacefully after a long terminal illness; and Deacon went through a long-term romantic breakup. They came together at a time of hurting, and used their collaboration to grow in new directions. When Schrader alludes to his complicated relationship with his stepfather on “Tom”—“Wipe the black under eyes just like his face…I’d call my shots but I can’t stand under my feet”—Rice plays a cascading key melody while Deacon adds a celestial element with orchestral arrangements, the two offering support through cushioned instrumentation.
After nearly a decade of unhinged basement-show experimentation, the new musical direction Ed Schrader’s Music Beat take on Riddles is a defining point in their career. By lacing arms with Dan Deacon, the duo throw themselves into an auspicious zone, creating an album that remains introspective even at its wildest moments. The two acts aren’t just collaborating with one another; they’re supporting one another. That difference is what helps them develop as artists in such a rewarding way. And while Ed Schrader’s Music Beat haven’t cut out their past entirely—“Rust” continues their old frenzied energy to a T—figuring out how to work with others to deepen their sound, from Deacon to alto saxophonist Andrew Bernstein to Ponytail drummer Jeremy Hyman, is the most important riddle they’ve solved. | 2018-03-09T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2018-03-09T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Carpark | March 9, 2018 | 7.4 | cec1ce89-abaa-47b1-bb00-4410362b83d2 | Nina Corcoran | https://pitchfork.com/staff/nina-corcoran/ | |
Amid a pandemic, and while recovering from a gunshot wound, the superstar rapper made an album that purposefully celebrates life. Her beats are playful, and her rapping is as sharp as ever. | Amid a pandemic, and while recovering from a gunshot wound, the superstar rapper made an album that purposefully celebrates life. Her beats are playful, and her rapping is as sharp as ever. | Megan Thee Stallion: Good News | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/megan-thee-stallion-good-news/ | Good News | Bullets ravage bodies, and often, the work to mend the injuries they cause are as destructive. Rib cages are cracked open. Victims are sometimes intubated without anesthesia. Limbs are amputated. The instruments surgeons use in the operating room look like they’re made for installing a hardwood floor, not fixing a body. If you’re fortunate enough to survive being shot, your body could be changed forever. You could be paralyzed. You could have to poop into a bag through a hole in your stomach for the rest of your life. One Philadelphia man had to live with a wide-open abdominal cavity, rendering his intestines visible for 11 months.
This says nothing of the emotional trauma of being shot, particularly as a 25-year-old Black woman with no parents but millions of people watching her, some of whom believe she lied about or instigated her attack. Considering the range of disabilities survivors can face, it’s a little miraculous that rapper Megan Thee Stallion could twerk through song after song at a live-streamed virtual concert 48 days after being shot in the foot, allegedly by rapper Tory Lanez.
So on her latest release Good News, after some scathing record-straightening on “Shots Fired” over the same sample Biggie used in his alleged Tupac taunt “Who Shot Ya?” and more nebulous grievance-airing (fake friends and pesky men) over the New Orleans bounce of “Circles,” Megan turns her attention to more pressing matters. She goes from reducing her assailant’s bullets to mere pellets to ribbing someone who she’s fucked so good he’ll want to wear her hoodie. Once she moves on from this summer’s shooting, she rarely looks back. Her beats are more playful and poppier than ever, but anchored in rap and R&B staples. Her rapping is still razor sharp, littered with punchlines and barbs that make your ears perk and jaw drop. Her disposition is unexpectedly chipper. In a year in which a virus, a man, and a cadre of misogynistic spectators could have killed her, Good News is a celebration of life.
When the album ends with the massively successful “Savage Remix,” plus singles “Girls in the Hood,” and “Don’t Stop,” it feels exultant, like confetti falling from the ceiling for an encore at Madison Square Garden. The 14 tracks that precede them are varied—slinky and sexy, dance-routine ready, or throbbing with 808s—which makes sense, given there are more than 14 producers helming Good News, compared to Megan’s usual two, Lil Ju and Juicy J. Here, the pair is joined by high profile beat-makers like Tay Keith and Mustard, as well as Dutch upstart Avedon, who comes out swinging on standout “What’s New.” The producers’ diverse approaches are unified by their optimism, a novel tone for Megan.
The pulse of the album is steadily upbeat, which might appeal to the casual hip-hop fans she’s collected through the viral “Savage Remix” more than those from Make It Hot, Tina Snow, and Fever. Smartly smuggled towards the end of the new releases (almost as if not to distract) is “Don’t Rock Me to Sleep,” a bold sing-along experiment with the same Day-Glo airy synths that Dua Lipa and The Weeknd use to evoke ’80s nostalgia. It’s the kind of song that any of today’s pop stars could make, and it’s ill-fitting on Megan. The similarly poppy follow-up “Outside” works better, maybe because it’s tougher, which feels like a more natural pose for her. “I ain’t for the streets, ’cause bitch, I am the street,” she huffs.
Even as Megan experiments with sounds that appeal to a wider audience, her hip-hop traditionalism remains undeniable. Webbie, Trina, Adina Howard, Juvenile, Naughty By Nature and Eazy-E are sampled throughout, and she does each one justice with her relentless rapping. Megan’s mythos as daughter of a Texas MC—conditioned for the game, and rising to prominence as a fierce freestyler—is now rap lore. She’s in her prime on Good News. “Freaky bitch, I do this/Suck it like I'm toothless,” she offers on one song. “Bitch, touch them toes/Bitch, get that dough/If you in love with your body, bitch, take off your clothes!” she spits in staccato on “Work That.” It’s not that Megan’s raps are profoundly intimate—on Fever, she reminded us that that’s not why she’s here. (“They wanna know ’bout me/They say, ‘Tell me your story’/Only thing you need to know is I’m in love with the money,” she says). It’s that after four years in the game, she can still make bars about good sex, hot girls, and unwaivering confidence sound new.
A handful of hooks scattered across Good News feel insidiously simple but strategic—they’ll stay in your head and roll off your tongue. “Body-ody-ody-ody-ody-ody-ody-ody,” goes one. Her verses though, are like top-shelf spirits, smooth and biting. Whether she’s referencing island-exclusive cognac on a dancehall song with Popcaan (“Intercourse”) or trading disses with City Girls (“Do It on the Tip”), her wit and delivery is nonpareil. This album has the most features of her career and when she gets a rap assist—like on “Movie” with Lil Durk or “Cry Baby” with DaBaby—she does her hardest work, fueled by collaboration (or more likely, competition). In popularity and proficiency, Megan is ahead of her peers across gender.
Even with its smattering of stars, Megan Thee Stallion unequivocally decided her debut album would be hers. Two and a half months after the shooting, her alleged assailant dedicated a release bearing his name to slandering hers, his rage swallowing him whole. Good News, however, is about her own agency. “I still ain’t doing nothing I don’t wanna do!” she barks on “Sugar Baby.” “Don’t fuck me like that, fuck me like this!” she commands on “Cry Baby.” Like always, she locates her power in the bedroom, the mirror, and the recording booth. But unlike her previous works, with their dark and fiery undertones, what she has finally cemented as a studio album bears the victory of spars with death. Two years before Megan was born, Lucille Clifton penned a poem for this very triumph:
come celebrate
with me that everyday
something has tried to kill me
and has failed.
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2020-11-24T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2020-11-24T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rap | 1501 Certified Entertainment / 300 Entertainment | November 24, 2020 | 7.8 | cecba48d-96f5-4c70-886f-596e8d618169 | Mankaprr Conteh | https://pitchfork.com/staff/mankaprr-conteh/ | |
Working with Lil Peep collaborator Nedarb, the Riverside rapper makes 10 songs feel like a great house party right before someone calls the cops. | Working with Lil Peep collaborator Nedarb, the Riverside rapper makes 10 songs feel like a great house party right before someone calls the cops. | Hook / Nedarb: Crashed My Car | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/hook-nedarb-crashed-my-car/ | Crashed My Car | Hook sucker-punched her way into the world with last year’s Bully, which flipped the controversial Rockstar video game of the same name to introduce the Riverside, California rapper as a cut-throat queen bee with acrylic nails and clout goggles. She came across as the toughest kid in the schoolyard, the one who taunted the other kids into fighting but wasn’t afraid to throw down herself—her rap name evokes a punch to the face as much as a tightly written chorus.
Hook finds a natural partner in Nedarb, who executive-produced Bully and shares the billing with her on Crashed My Car. One of the contemporary rap underground’s most prolific producers, Nedarb is a relentless workhorse and hustler, as skilled at finding new talent as he is at crafting beats. Before he produced, Braden Morgan (his producer tag is his name backwards) played in hardcore bands, and his most influential collaborations have been with the members of the emo rap outfit Goth Boi Clique. Ned’s most famous beat is an emotional banger that flips a Microphones song, but his music resists being simplified as “SoundCloud rap”—he’s collaborated with artists as varied as Open Mike Eagle and Alice Glass. He pulls equally from alternative rock, experimental electronic music, and various strains of California rap, but the end result is more mutation than mash-up, synthesizing disparate sources into a distinct and singular sound.
Ned was born in Alberta, Canada, but he lives in Los Angeles, and his production for Hook is distinctly West Coast. These beats are heavy and hyphy, a hard-hitting mix of 808s and deep bass designed to make trunks resound and asses shake. The album’s title offers a sonic motif across 10 tracks—wailing sirens, shattered windshields, frenetic voicemail messages—that keeps the listener on a perpetual razor’s edge.
Hook’s Riverside homebase is located in California’s Inland Empire, an area she describes as “nothing.” As she puts it in an interview with The Fader, “the IE” revolves around house parties, not shows: “If you go to a party in the IE, you’re going to hear a lot of ratchet shit, a little bit a hyphy, a lot of L.A. shit. Basically a lot of shaking your ass music.” That Inland Empire influence spills out of Crashed My Car; the album feels like a house party at its peak, threatening to get shut down at any moment. Hook and Nedarb ride that dangerous line when you’re still having a great time but can sense the paranoia starting to creep in, as the clock counts down on one of your neighbors inevitably calling the cops.
Hook’s delivery is staccato and precise, with little distinction between verse and chorus—as her name implies, her bars are all hook, no filler. Her flow is flanked by overdubs and ad-libs, a cacophonous clone army of chattering voices that mimics the imitators she calls out on “Wanna Be”: “I’m who your sister wanna be/That’s not Hook, she a wannabe.” Up front, she’s confident and calculated, but her vocal parts on the edges sound exasperated, overrun with anxiety and gasping for breath. When she ends “Yes Man” just chanting the words “shit” and “fucking ow” over and over again, it sounds not like a Playboi Carti-esque affectation but like somebody going through a crisis.
The features on Bully felt like overhearing an after-school shit-talking session with the kids you weren’t cool enough to hang with; Hook’s guests on Crashed My Car mostly serve to make her look better. Professional shitposter Zack Fox shows up on the title track for a serviceable, punchline-heavy verse that’s overshadowed by Hook’s more distinctive delivery. When she makes jokes, by comparison, they’re more subdued and don’t sound like rough drafts of tweets—“She said she wanna meet up around noon/But I don’t fuck with 12, so I told her 2.” Minnesota’s Lerado lends a spaced-out drawl to “Awesome,” and LA’s Almighty Suspect appears on “Onion” with a flow as unbridled as Hook’s is bottled. “Onion” sounds like something Sada Baby would spit over, but Sada raps like he’s in a shouting match with the instrumental — Hook is equal parts honey and vinegar, and only needs a whisper to command a beat to do her bidding. Like a car crash or the biggest bully in school, Hook demands you give her your attention—if you don’t, she just might drag you on her next tape. | 2020-02-07T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2020-02-07T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rap | GC | February 7, 2020 | 7.4 | cecc61d1-489f-48b2-b17c-234fc05fe82d | Nadine Smith | https://pitchfork.com/staff/nadine-smith/ | |
The singer-songwriter follows up her gloriously baroque debut with an album that uses deep grooves, politicized self-portraiture, and an eye for everyday cruelty to reckon with life in the Trump era. | The singer-songwriter follows up her gloriously baroque debut with an album that uses deep grooves, politicized self-portraiture, and an eye for everyday cruelty to reckon with life in the Trump era. | Natalie Prass: The Future and the Past | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/natalie-prass-the-future-and-the-past/ | The Future and the Past | In the aftermath of the 2016 election, as nauseating improbability hardened into a reality, Natalie Prass found herself sitting on an album’s worth of songs that felt entirely wrong. Some artists who shared her frustrations were quick to express them in the moment. Setting aside the compositions she had imagined would make up her sophomore album, Prass, too, was determined to respond to Trump. But it took her a bit longer to find the right words.
Arriving well after the collective post-election adrenal spike started tapering off, as exhausted members of the resistance burn out from the stress of fighting the president’s every move, The Future and the Past isn’t a set of protest songs so much as the compassionate self-portrait of a protester who’s in it for the long haul. Prass levels her demands, then gives herself permission to be tired and discouraged—and to indulge in passing moments of joy.
On day one of the Trump presidency, “Sisters” might have made the most sense as the album’s showpiece; with its call for female solidarity and reclamation of the “nasty woman” epithet, the track could easily serve as a pump-up jam for droves of banner-waving women in pink. Now, nested seven tracks deep, “Sisters” feels more like the album’s bedrock. It’s the song into which Prass’ feminism is most clearly etched; she calls out to underpaid women grinding to keep the lights on, women trapped in bad relationships, women praying to be judged by their work and not their bodies. That she performs much of this song with a crew of female backup singers reads as a nod to the power of the collective voice.
On the verses Prass sings solo, her voice floats and rustles the way it did on her self-titled 2015 debut. At first listen, that album, with its delicate but ornate orchestration, offers an aesthetic more suited to her modest vocal style. But on “Sisters”—and throughout The Future—the grooves cut deeper, threatening to overpower her melodies. That contrast has political implications of its own: The tenderness of Prass’ voice poses a challenge to the notion that brute force and bluster are the most effective ways to relay a message.
And while the sonic shake-ups that distinguish The Future from its predecessor are noticeable, they aren’t radical. Prass stands behind the more-is-more philosophy that guided her debut, adding layers of synth, bass, and percussion to fill in the spaces where she’s peeled back woodwinds and strings. Extended intros, outros, and reprises pattern the album like swaths of damask: The lush “Interlude Your Fire” sets a dramatic stage for the sparkling doomsday romance of “The Fire.” Pieces of “Hot for the Mountain,” an eerie (if ambiguous) call to arms, bleed into later tracks.
Prass doesn’t go in for understated lyrics, either—she’ll throw all her weight behind one point until she’s satisfied that she’s driven it home. On The Future’s reproductive rights anthem, “Ain’t Nobody,” she repeats the words, “Ain’t nobody can take this from our hands.” The song sounds upbeat, but the words have the ring of an affirmation strategy; she’s like a college student chanting “I’m not tired” to keep herself awake in the final hours of an all-nighter. Hoards of politicians are working to ensure that she and other women are not what she calls “the sources of [our] bodies’ choices.” Declaring her autonomy on a loop becomes a way of clinging to it.
As she demonstrated on her debut, Prass has a sharp sensitivity to everyday cruelty. Back then, it was the skill that equipped her to paint a riveting portrait of malignant romance. On The Future, it guides her as she zooms out to contend with larger societal strife. As she puts it on “Ship Go Down,” “I’ve always felt the rain/But now a hurricane is pouring on me.” That hurricane is an endless torrent of depressing headlines and empty rhetoric.
Listening as Prass struggles through the muck, what’s clear is that The Future and the Past is really about the present—about finding ways to push through each day without giving over to despondency. This ship may be going down, but these songs are another set of buoys fighting to keep it afloat. | 2018-06-07T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-06-06T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | ATO | June 7, 2018 | 7.7 | ced39507-e90a-4417-948e-7e68fa05c0dc | Olivia Horn | https://pitchfork.com/staff/olivia-horn / | |
Produced in collaboration with Blue Note, a new collection documents some of the artists and sounds emanating from the London cultural institution at the epicenter of contemporary jazz. | Produced in collaboration with Blue Note, a new collection documents some of the artists and sounds emanating from the London cultural institution at the epicenter of contemporary jazz. | Total Refreshment Centre: Transmissions From Total Refreshment Centre | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/total-refreshment-centre-transmissions-from-total-refreshment-centre/ | Transmissions From Total Refreshment Centre | A Parisian whose gateway to jazz and hip-hop was the Beastie Boys, Lex Blondin opened the Total Refreshment Centre in a London warehouse in 2012, creating a space that tripled as a recording studio, artist workshop, and concert venue. Within a few years, the community orbiting TRC became the epicenter of an adventurous jazz scene that couldn’t be confined to Britain. Soon, such acts as the Comet Is Coming and Moses Boyd established an international reputation, helping to seal Total Refreshment Centre’s position in the musical vanguard.
Just as the popularity of Total Refreshment Centre and its associated artists started to crest, neighborhood noise complaints led the Hackney Council to decline to renew its live music license in 2019. The concert stage shuttered but the recording studio and artistic community remained. Blondin and TRC are currently on a mission to popularize the Total Refreshment Centre brand, launching an eponymous imprint and collaborating with Blue Note on Transmissions From Total Refreshment Centre, a seven-track collection featuring musicians associated with TRC. Some of this music was recorded at Total Refreshment Centre, some elsewhere in London or Europe, which means the compilation isn’t so much a chronicle of a scene as a definition of an aesthetic: stylish artifacts repurposed as a vehicle to the future.
In the liner notes, Emma Warren—author of a 2019 book on Total Refreshment Centre called Make Some Space—calls the featured artists “the widescreen young cousins of Guru’s landmark Jazzmatazz,” a reference to the groundbreaking album the rapper released in 1993 after leaving Gang Starr. Guru enlisted such jazz titans as Donald Byrd, Lonnie Liston Smith, and Roy Ayers to record live in the studio, an innovation that yielded livelier results than the British jazz-rap group Us3’s Hand on the Torch, a 1993 record created with free reign to sample from the vast Blue Note catalog. Featuring the U.S. Top 10 hit “Cantaloop (Flip Fantasia),” Hand on the Torch was part of Blue Note’s modernization mission of the 1990s, a project that also produced the Blue Break Beats series, compilations that plucked highlights from funky soul-jazz LPs of the late ’60s and ’70s—and which stuffy jazz fans dismissed upon release.
Nearly 30 years later, sampled loops and the jazz-rap fusion forged on albums like Jazzmatazz are part of the lingua franca of jazz, something Transmissions from Total Refreshment Centre makes clear. None of its juxtapositions are startling; they feel like the natural evolution of a process set in motion years ago. Each track traces a connection to the crate-digging cross-pollination of the ’90s, ignoring perceived borders between dance, experimental, hip-hop, and pop. The proceedings take on a slight air of nostalgia, not for the initial sources but for their rediscovery, the moment when these disparate strands were first tied together. When Miryam Solomon sings sweetly over Matters Unknown’s refurbished bossa nova beat, it doesn’t bring to mind Latin music LPs from the ’60s—it sounds like peak Stereolab.
Transmissions From Total Refreshment Centre is filled with quiet, fleeting moments that vaguely recall something else, particularly if an MC is involved. Soccer96, the duo of Max Hallett and Dan Leavers (who also play in Comet Is Coming), conjure the ghost of Jazzmatazz in a spontaneous collaboration with rapper Kieron Boothe, playing on seedy ’70s funk and hard hip-hop rhythms. Neue Grafik Ensemble—one of the few acts here signed to Total Refreshment Records—team with Brother Portrait on “Black,” a sinewy number that taps into the spookier elements of trip-hop. As trumpeter Byron Wallen intertwines with the sawing drone of Oli Langford’s strings on “Closed Circle,” there are hints of Miles Davis stretching the limits of hard bop just before he delved into fusion on In a Silent Way.
Fusion is at the center of Transmissions From Total Refreshment Centre—not as a musical style but an aesthetic. What’s striking about each of the compilation’s featured artists is how thoroughly they integrate adventurous improvisation to the skittish rhythms. Groove and vibe are present but they’re not the key to the music; exploration is. Even the cheerfully insistent “Isa”—the most conventionally danceable cut—is based on a live improvisation, with Noah Slee overdubbing vocals at a later date. “Isa” is a bit of an outlier, though. Most of the transmissions on this compilation are appealingly monochromatic, such as Resavoir’s clustered, clattering reading of Charles Tolliver’s “Plight” and Jake Long’s “Crescent (City Swamp Dub),” where Tamar Osborn’s elongated baritone saxophone runs give shape to slow, churning funk. This is the experimentation fostered at the Total Refreshment Centre, a sensibility that spilled out into the larger jazz world: alternately smooth and restless, nostalgic yet forward-thinking, both natural and alluring. | 2023-02-18T00:00:00.000-05:00 | 2023-02-18T00:00:00.000-05:00 | Jazz | Blue Note | February 18, 2023 | 7.3 | cedb7fde-2f65-4d77-b75b-879a5001d718 | Stephen Thomas Erlewine | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stephen-thomas erlewine/ | |
The Sacramento rapper spends most of his second album conscience-stricken, trying to explain the difference between being immoral and being corrupted. | The Sacramento rapper spends most of his second album conscience-stricken, trying to explain the difference between being immoral and being corrupted. | OMB Peezy : Preacher to the Streets | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/omb-peezy-preacher-to-the-streets/ | Preacher to the Streets | While OMB Peezy’s debut album, last year’s Loyalty Over Love, was a sort of personalized therapy, this is almost instructional, a running inner-monologue on the keys to making it out and subsequently dealing with withdrawal symptoms that come with not knowing anything else. Peezy has spent most of his life somewhere in the middle of two things—Mobile, Alabama and Sacramento, California, a burgeoning rapper and hustler—and on Preacher to the Streets, he is seeking a more balanced discourse between the angel and the devil on his shoulders.
His style is betwixt and between—a bonding of regional touchstones from Northern California to the deep South. He’s signed to E-40, a student of Juvie and Boosie. More recently, he’s found himself somewhere amid the spring of post-hyphy and the Auto-Tuned warbling of Atlanta trap. The pained howls of his nasally drawl lend themselves to the unnerving sense of doom in his lyrics, which can be subtly complex and are usually piercingly direct, to a point of near discomfort for the squeamish listener. On “Soul Bleed” he yowls passionately, “I’m from a city where the murder rate through the roof/I’ma put it on for the trenches where it’s either get shot or shoot.”
At his most reassuring, OMB Peezy is a cynic. At his more fatalistic, he’s unapologetically nefarious, resigned to his fate to suffer the hell of perpetual violence. He has often written from a place of paranoia and isolation, but personal ordeals, like getting shot after a show in his hometown, have driven him from the honor-bound street code of Loyalty Over Love toward the shoot-first mentality of “Treacherous.” This is not who he wants to be but it’s what the world has made him (“Goin’ down the wrong road and I forgot the way back”), and Peezy spends most of the album conscience-stricken trying to explain the difference between being immoral and being corrupted.
For instance, when partnered with Sada Baby, on his Detroit detour “On Me,” there is a clear delineation between someone shooting for fun and someone like Peezy shooting back to avoid an early death. Peezy grew up around extensions and that’s why he rides with them now; meanwhile, Sada is all the way in England still trapping off a flip phone with five choppers—“and I’ma shoot all them bitches, on my mama,” he raps, excitedly. The latter is a remorseless, thrill-seeking delinquent, the former is a reluctant sinner cornered in a life he wants no part of anymore. It’s a distinction Peezy makes early on, during “Soul Bleed”: “Robbin’ for some food to eat, you robbed ‘cause it was cool.” Though it is to somewhat diminishing returns here, this is the core of OMB Peezy’s appeal; he is a good rapper, to be sure, but he is a remarkable exponent of hood gospel.
The faceless characters that fade in and out of his stories are judged by their willingness to stand by those they have pledged their allegiances to, and his raps are commendations for the resilient few who never fold or broadsides aimed at turncoats. This philosophy suits his raps well; his writing sprawls out in fits and starts as if under the stresses of suspicion and anxiety. He is constantly looking over his shoulder and spelling out the nature of impending threats. The sense is that this death calculus has kept him alive this long but also threatens to alienate him in a way that is just as dangerous. “You can teach ‘em how to cook and they still gon’ watch your plate,” he grumbles on “I’m Straight,” flipping the old proverb about teaching a man to fish into a pessimistic street parable.
Perhaps a bit weighed down by that pessimism, Preacher to the Streets never reaches the intense, often gratifying epiphanies of OMB Peezy’s debut and finds him closer to square one, both emotionally and as a songmaker. Despite dubbing himself a street preacher he is decidedly even less of a storyteller on this installment, opting instead to rely entirely on his ability to convey a truly chaotic and solitary mental state. On “Struggle,” Peezy raps, “You in that struggle, I know it’s hard to make it out, nigga, but look/Keep on grinding, promise you gon’ make it out, nigga,” as if trying to usher others passed a finish line he has already crossed. But they feel a bit like empty words when you realize the doctrine OMB Peezy is preaching is one he himself has yet to apply. | 2019-05-03T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-05-03T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Sick Wid It | May 3, 2019 | 6.8 | ceea1d60-e720-460c-a4a8-705f02a6c908 | Sheldon Pearce | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sheldon-pearce/ | |
In the Red garage-rock band sounds more like juvenile-delinquent Nuggets types than today's marketable hipster revivalists. | In the Red garage-rock band sounds more like juvenile-delinquent Nuggets types than today's marketable hipster revivalists. | The Strange Boys: The Strange Boys and Girls Club | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/13280-the-strange-boys-and-girls-club/ | The Strange Boys and Girls Club | That the basic tenets of garage-rock have not changed in the four decades separating Black Monk Time and Black Lips is not a comment on the music's regressive nature as much as its enduring utility. Whether the war's happening in Vietnam or Iraq, garage-rock is essentially the musical equivalent of a superhero comic book-- it transforms shy, socially awkward young men into fuzzbox-stomping, skirt-chasing, government-overthrowing revolutionaries. The mostly failed attempts in the early part of this decade to reposition the music as a marketable hipster commodity overlooked this fundamental quality-- garage-rock is not a music for the masses; it's the private, fantastical domain of misfits.
And in that sense, Austin, Texas, quartet the Strange Boys come just as advertised, coming on like the kids who sit in the back of the class and would gladly sign up for another hour of detention because it at least gives them something to look forward to. The Nuggets-vintage rudiments are all in place on Girls Club: maximized R&B rhythms and bright Rickenbacker strums; trebly, AM-radio-quality production (making them a natural In the Red addition); and, in frontman Ryan Sambol, a suitably nasal mouthpiece who suggests a young Bob Dylan had he spent more of his formative years in juvie halls than coffeehouses. But the Strange Boys' debut is notable for what it doesn't do-- though their songs are rife with references to guns, death, and terrorism, the Strange Boys do not behave like angry young men railing against the indignities of our time. They're just a little worried and confused, maintaining a steady, roadhouse-blues beat indicative of a band just trying to keep their shit together as the world around them seems to come apart. This sense of uncertainty is perfectly embodied by Sambol, who doesn't know whether he should get fucked up or join a militia-- as he wails on "They're Building the Death Camps": "I'm scared because no one else around me seems scared/ I'd buy a gun and be prepared."
That the Strange Boys never actually blow their tops may prove a liability for garage-rock heads looking for more fierce, swift kicks, especially over the course of a 16-track album that would benefit from a few edits; straightforward bluesy shuffles like "Who Needs Who More" and "Probation Blues" sound like they would hit a lot harder in a live setting than the tempered, lo-fi presentation they're given here. But the Strange Boys are the kind of band that seem weirder and more threatening the nicer they play it, drawing us closer into Sambol's peculiar psyche: "Should Have Shot Paul" is a memo to Mark David Chapman delivered in a jaunty jangle and high-pitched harmonies, and within the graceful, Greenwich Village folk-rock of "Then", Sambol casually recounts the U.S. government's involvement in 9/11 as if it were received wisdom. Even his most graceful, open-hearted songs-- the swooning "No Way for a Slave to Behave" and the standout soul strut "A Man You've Never Known"-- carry a whiff of misanthropy. "Please understand," Sambol sings on the latter track, "it's my job to write songs/ Allow me to do whatever I want." And that is why generations of young men keep going back to the garage-- it's the only place in this world you can do just that. | 2009-07-31T02:00:02.000-04:00 | 2009-07-31T02:00:02.000-04:00 | Electronic / Rock | In the Red | July 31, 2009 | 7.1 | ceeacfba-4481-4ff2-a41b-b7455fa87785 | Stuart Berman | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stuart-berman/ | null |
Eddie Ruscha Jr.'s latest album is the first full-length release for Beats in Space, a new label established by WNYU DJ Tim Sweeney. It's a graceful and intricate record that flashes past with a similar stylistic blur to Ruscha Jr.'s Tropical Psychedelics compilation, tracing trancey vintage synth patterns that circle around one another. | Eddie Ruscha Jr.'s latest album is the first full-length release for Beats in Space, a new label established by WNYU DJ Tim Sweeney. It's a graceful and intricate record that flashes past with a similar stylistic blur to Ruscha Jr.'s Tropical Psychedelics compilation, tracing trancey vintage synth patterns that circle around one another. | Secret Circuit: Tactile Galactics | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/17952-secret-circuit-tactile-galactics/ | Tactile Galactics | Study the erratic career arc of Eddie Ruscha Jr., the Los Angeles resident who records under the name Secret Circuit, and you'd be forgiven for thinking he doesn't care too much about how the outside world views his music. That impression mainly comes from the endless stream of self-released CDs and cassettes he's released under the Secret Circuit moniker, some of which were gathered on the excellent Tropical Psychedelics compilation in 2012. It wasn't always this way; Ruscha played in notable shoegazers Medicine for a time in the early 1990s, and in the Virgin-signed, John Cale-produced psychedelic rock act Maids of Gravity. Those failed glimpses of the limelight appeared to send him scurrying deep underground, only to surface for air again in recent times.
Tactile Galactics has the air of an album with something riding on it, not just for Ruscha, but also for Tim Sweeney, the WNYU DJ who is putting it out as the first full-length LP on his Beats in Space label. Both even admitted to feeling nervous about its release in a recent joint interview about the project. That fear doesn't translate to the music, which flashes past with a similar stylistic blur to the Tropical Psychedelics collection, gleefully pulling a wide range of influences into the mix. Sometimes the tools are different-- there's nothing here that infuses the Martin Denny lilt that lit up "Foggy Twilights" from Tropical-- but mostly it's airy, relaxed electronic work, rarely raising a sweat, often constructed from trancey vintage synth patterns that circle around one another.
It's a graceful and highly intricate record, sometimes taking a baffling amount of twists and turns. The arpeggiated swirl of "Exalter" shifts through so many changes it sometimes resembles a fully electronic take on an old Gong record. Ruscha can play it loose or tight whenever either mood takes him, ending the album with the endearingly sloppy keyboard work of "Milk" and dropping the tighter mood piece "Escargot" earlier in the tracklisting. Earnest vocal tracks occasionally surface-- a new addition to the Secret Circuit sound-- sometimes resembling the clash of earthy and synthetic impulses that Hot Chip like to play around with. That's the place where much of Tactile Galactics lands-- gentle electronic work touched by palpable human emotions, a mix that's often hard to get right, but which seems to come naturally to Ruscha (admittedly after many years of practice).
Those years spent toiling in the studio have also led to a natural cohesion that helps bridge Ruscha's fondness for moving from, say, wild cut-up synth lines that resemble Death in Vegas' "Dirt" ("Parascopic Rope") to the New Age stew of pan pipes and bongo fury that partly make up "Mountains". In lesser hands, Tactile Galactics would sound disjointed, maybe even rashly uneven. But Ruscha is clearly a big picture thinker with a careful ear for making connections. The deliberate choice to keep everything ticking over at 120 BPM throughout acts as the glue that holds it all together, giving this material a meditative feel that's as easy to lie back and get lost in as it is to dance to. It's understandable why Ruscha is so apprehensive about letting this work out in the open after getting burnt by the industry and then spending so long in the dark. Tactile Galactics shows why he's got no reason to hide anymore. | 2013-05-21T02:00:04.000-04:00 | 2013-05-21T02:00:04.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | Beats in Space | May 21, 2013 | 7.3 | cef0e015-ea9d-434c-ae61-3101f320fbc2 | Nick Neyland | https://pitchfork.com/staff/nick-neyland/ | null |
The BROCKHAMPTON star’s latest solo album is an often powerful document by a queer artist who has weathered life’s bruises. | The BROCKHAMPTON star’s latest solo album is an often powerful document by a queer artist who has weathered life’s bruises. | Kevin Abstract: ARIZONA BABY | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/kevin-abstract-arizona-baby/ | ARIZONA BABY | In a move inspired by Shia LaBeouf’s bemusing catalog of durational work, Kevin Abstract recently endured 10 hours on a treadmill on a suburban street of his hometown, Corpus Christi, Tex. While running, the BROCKHAMPTON singer and rapper multi-tasked: He took selfies, signed sneakers, posed with a baby, and mumbled along to the chorus of his recent single, the yearning gay love song “Baby Boy.” Abstract vaguely told one fan that the performance was to teach empathy—indeed, you could interpret it as an allegory for the upstream battle to make it out of suburbia for so many kids—but that didn’t save it from feeling like a stunt.
Abstract’s sincere intentions are more effectively translated within his music. ARIZONA BABY, which he has said he made “out of survival,” is a loose document of an artist who has weathered life’s bruises and is ready to reckon with his religious past. Abstract ran away from home as a teen, and his Mormon family only found out that he is gay from his 2016 “Empty” video, in which he gets a blowjob from a jock. The cover image of ARIZONA BABY suggests an artist newly unmasked: Abstract is shirtless, baring rows of crowded teeth, his skin lacquered as if coated with sweat, amniotic gloop, or some other bodily fluid. On occasion, he delivers on the arresting artwork’s promise.
Gay men are defined by who we love—and who we want to hook up with—and expressing that is a subtle but necessary resistance to the insidious pressure to only show half of our full selves. Abstract’s references to sex have been frequent and gloriously lewd (and lovingly cataloged), but his songwriting has never been as explicit as ARIZONA BABY’s assaulting 90-second opener “Big Wheels.” “I’m a power bottom like a Freemason/Y’all stuck playin’, that’s complacent, I’m cum-chasin’,” he raps, a line that could more likely be found in a song by, say, queercore agitators Limp Wrist than an artist coming off a No. 1 Billboard album with BROCKHAMPTON. Abstract’s ribald humor extends to his religious past in the lurking, gospel choir-sampling “Use Me,” where he raps, “I’m still tryna fuck every Mormon.” Humor can be a powerful device for addressing trauma, and the line could feel victorious. But in the absence of Abstract detailing the complexities of his religious upbringing, the gag lands hollow. It would make for a good tweet.
ARIZONA BABY is a departure from the alt-rock textures of Abstract’s 2016 solo album American Boyfriend, which he once positively compared to an MOR-leaning Chili’s playlist. In a recent Beats1 interview with Zane Lowe, Abstract said that he sought out Jack Antonoff to co-produce ARIZONA BABY alongside BROCKHAMPTON’s Romil Hemnani after he heard Antonoff’s work on Lana Del Rey’s cosmic “Venice Bitch,” leading Abstract to imagine a similar sound for his own music. On guitar-led tracks like “Corpus Christi,” Antonoff’s expansive, trippy instrumentation can feel magic, like when your retinas flood with light after waking from a snooze in the sun. But ARIZONA BABY is often unbothered by memorable hooks, and Del Rey’s influence is a little too literal: At least six of the 11 tracks borrow “Venice Bitch”’s hypnagogic coda, with synths that quiver into the ether.
ARIZONA BABY’s strongest moments are when Abstract turns inwards, with reflective passages often sung in a pitch-shifted register. On the enchanting “Mississippi,” his vocals undergo childlike treatment amid a waterlogged piano line as he asks, as if with a blush, “Do you wanna be my boyfriend?/My Mississippi sunshine?” The lo-fi guitar ballad “Baby Boy” (featuring Ryan Beatty) is undoubtedly the prettiest song he has ever released, a queer, Gen-Z take on a complicated romance in which Abstract describes shaking off a depressive episode to wind up outside an ex’s hotel. He ends the song with a repeated plea for reconciliation, his voice enveloped by swelling strings, as if surrendering to an uncertain fate.
On “American Problem,” a highlight where he raps with the sprightly cadence of ’00s Kanye, Abstract contrasts being targeted by his high school principal for being a “flaming faggot” with finding safety at a Tyler, The Creator show. In contrast to LGBTQ artists who pander to straight audiences, it feels really good to see Abstract not give a fuck about who his proudly queer work is excluding, and allow that attitude to permeate ARIZONA BABY’s mesh of intense vulnerability and chest-puffing defiance. On the album, he raps “I wanna be Paramount.” Well, he’s more A24: at times uneven and, at others, no less than radical. | 2019-05-02T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-05-02T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Question Everything / RCA | May 2, 2019 | 6.9 | ceff0e01-8553-433a-a81c-41e36afa33ed | Owen Myers | https://pitchfork.com/staff/owen-myers/ | |
The California indie-pop band goes bigger and broader, leaving behind some of the more intricate songwriting of their past. | The California indie-pop band goes bigger and broader, leaving behind some of the more intricate songwriting of their past. | Local Natives: Sunlit Youth | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22405-sunlit-youth/ | Sunlit Youth | Between their 2010 debut Gorilla Manor* *and 2013’s Hummingbird, Local Natives garnered a reputation in the indie landscape: dependable, gratifying, though not the most innovative. On Gorilla Manor, their cinematic emotions and soaring harmonies referenced the National’s slow-burning sweep and Fleet Foxes’ wide-eyed, bucolic tumble. With Hummingbird, Local Natives grew up with a more meditative album that dealt with the death of vocalist/keyboardist Kelcey Ayer’s mother. Though the rush of Gorilla Manor was missed, it was hard to knock the maturity and gravity that came with Hummingbird's more gradual revelations.
Sunlit Youth encounters aging, change, and where life has led you. It is, presumably, an album where they continue to employ new textures and approaches. The difference here is that there’s a discomfort to the shift, with some songs sounding like old-school Local Natives tracks with a weak neon facelift, and others sounding like imposters snuck into the studio and got a few tracks on the album somehow, mostly yielding negative results. It’s a growing pains album, but not exactly a rewarding one.
Far from the indie-folk of their earlier days, *Sunlit Youth *leans heavily on the synths and flirts with big-melody pop forms. “Past Lives,” a prime Local Natives composition emboldened by its synth leads, is a moving mission statement for the album. Despite the album’s title, Local Natives write more about the passing of youth, and “Past Lives” finds its way into a steadily intensifying gallop that captures the feeling of life starting to tumble forward as you age. Closer “Sea of Years” lands as if someone said, “We need the epic, swelling finale” and produced a checklist of necessary elements before actually writing it. Yet while the production and instrumentation render many songs on *Sunlit Youth *flat, “Sea of Years” is genuinely gorgeous, another moment where the themes of the album hit home. The instrumental melodies underpinning the chorus glimmer in the heat rather than charge headlong. It’s a convincing depiction of where these guys must be at, making anthems with more of life's baggage hanging around.
Then there’s opener “Villany,” a fluttering and pulsing track where Local Natives successfully inject themselves fully into the realm of synth-pop. There is mission-statement business on that song, too; the key lyric is the recurring refrain of “I want to start again.” Its spiritual partner, “Fountain of Youth” is the grating low of the album, with the answer to “I want to start again” coming in the chorus with, “We can do whatever we want!” Suddenly, the band starts peddling the brand of cloying, faceless indie-pop you’d hear as background annoyance at Anthropologie, or in trailers for a “Grey’s Anatomy” knockoff. Tracks like “Mother Emanuel,” “Psycho Lovers,” and “Everything All at Once” follow suit, conjuring a bastardized fan-fiction in which latter-day Coldplay made an album with the Lumineers. The big vocal refrains of Local Natives used to alternatingly evoke the glow of the West Coast and the real, transformative feeling that can still come from barreling down an endless American highway. Now they sound bloodless and unearned.
Across Sunlit Youth, there are flickers of what Local Natives do well, but the growth of their sound feels forced and awkward. You'll hear the funk excursion “Coins” touted and celebrated as one of the biggest stylistic leaps on the album. But it’s endemic of problems on about half of the album: One of the big draws of Local Natives were their melodies and their intertwined harmonies. Melodically speaking, they stumble on “Coins,” and they stumble on “Masters,” and they stumble on “Everything All at Once.” In the midst of rebuilding their sound, they’re less reliant on the subtle song-building of their past and lean more on big and broad emotions like they’re auditioning for a headlining spot at Sasquatch Music Festival. But in this half-formed state, they come off more like a mainstream rock band who can’t quite nail the big catharsis.
As a result, there’s something sadly anonymous about Sunlit Youth. It’s cloudy, distant, and inert when it should be effervescent. It clubs you over the head with choruses when Local Natives used to be capable of effortlessly lifting you up. As much as they try to sell that “We can do whatever we want!” chorus in “Fountain of Youth,” the song is jarring. They don’t sound like themselves, and it’s hard to believe those words, no matter how loud they sing them. | 2016-09-23T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-09-23T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Loma Vista | September 23, 2016 | 6.3 | cf0b2295-23df-43e1-a736-f973200d091f | Ryan Leas | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ryan-leas/ | null |
A percussionist by training, Moritz Von Oswald has been subverting techno’s omnipresent thump since the early 1990s. On the intriguingly ambiguous Sounding Lines he's joined by master drummer Tony Allen and modular synth guru Max Loderbauer, and the three have a strong and singular shared vision. | A percussionist by training, Moritz Von Oswald has been subverting techno’s omnipresent thump since the early 1990s. On the intriguingly ambiguous Sounding Lines he's joined by master drummer Tony Allen and modular synth guru Max Loderbauer, and the three have a strong and singular shared vision. | Moritz Von Oswald Trio: Sounding Lines | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/20674-sounding-lines/ | Sounding Lines | Moritz Von Oswald has an acute ear for rhythm and an oblique way of expressing it. A percussionist by training, he’s been subverting techno’s omnipresent thump since the early '90s, when he was one half of the Berlin duo Basic Channel and the four-on-the-floor beat’s primacy still remained largely unchallenged. Over the years his beats have grown even subtler as he’s figured out ways to maintain techno’s propulsive needs without falling back on its tropes, and connected it to styles like dub in an attempt to create some sort of abstract, weightlessly chill sonic space.
One of Von Oswald’s favorite tricks is to take the heavy workload that in techno tracks usually falls on the kick drum and redistribute it across the few other instruments in his typically high-minimalist compositions. An inspired sonic engineer, he often enlists keyboard licks or delay effects to carry more rhythmic weight than usual, and as a result his compositions are urgent and danceable but rarely revolve around a 4/4 kick.
Von Oswald’s found an ideal partner in master drummer Tony Allen, who’s been creating trance-inducing works that duck and dive around the beat since his days as Fela’s chief rhythmic architect. Allen’s recently joined Von Oswald and modular synth guru Max Loderbauer in Von Oswald’s namesake trio, taking over for Finnish producer Sasu Ripatti (aka Vladislav Delay) on drums, and their first album together shows that the group’s quickly cohered into something interesting.
The addition of a superstar collaborator, along with S**ounding Lines’ open-ended arrangements and tracks that are numbered instead of named, all suggest the kind of high-powered jam session that usually sounds better on paper than on record, but Allen, Von Oswald, and Loderbauer work well together. Their playing has a loose, improvisatory feel but a strong sense of purpose. Even when they stretch a groove out toward the 10-minute mark they maintain the cohesiveness of a good jazz combo.
Jazz has become one of the Trio’s touchstones, or at least it’s made itself more present on Sounding Lines than on earlier recordings. Clearly a lot of that influence comes from Allen, whose expressive style has its roots in Art Blakey and Max Roach’s frenetic but focused performances. The album opener "1" starts out centered around a happily burbling synth bass line, but Allen’s hi-hat takes the lead for a sizable chunk of the track’s 10 minutes, and his bop-inspired playing is so expressive and so casually virtuosic–and Loderbauer and Von Oswald’s backup is so judiciously minimal–that he easily pulls it off.
Elsewhere the group brings some of its other influences to the front, to varying effect. On "4" they fully indulge their dub sides, and the resulting track works better when you let yourself get caught up in its gently wafting mood than if you focus in on what it’s actually doing. "7", on the other hand, dives headfirst into '70s jazz funk with a cheeky clavinet riff and greasy hi-hats, and manages to strip away the decades of kitsch that those signifiers have accumulated, rediscovering an unexpected vibrancy lurking underneath.
At its best moments, Sounding Lines drifts in an intriguingly ambiguous space where each member invokes the genres they’re best known for playing while bending generously to accommodate their partners—Von Oswald bringing out his underutilized funky side, Allen using his inimitable Afrobeat style to sculpt a techno beat in negative space, and Loderbauer washing the whole thing in warm ambience. The three showcase a strong and singular shared vision, and in the moments where the music pulls you in deep enough to share it with them, it’s a beautiful thing. | 2015-06-11T02:00:02.000-04:00 | 2015-06-11T02:00:02.000-04:00 | Electronic | Honest Jon’s | June 11, 2015 | 6.3 | cf11bbd9-6959-481f-93dc-cce0222e1920 | Miles Raymer | https://pitchfork.com/staff/miles-raymer/ | null |
A new Ray Charles reissue finds the maestro in thrilling form in Switzerland—and those Quincy Jones charts are just gravy. | A new Ray Charles reissue finds the maestro in thrilling form in Switzerland—and those Quincy Jones charts are just gravy. | Ray Charles: Swiss Radio Days Vol. 41 - Zurich 1961 | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22707-swiss-radio-days-vol-41-zurich-1961/ | Swiss Radio Days Vol. 41 - Zurich 1961 | All is not well with Ray Charles’ catalog nowadays. Digital retailers in the US can’t sell or stream the entirety of titles like Genius + Soul = Jazz. Same goes for both volumes of Modern Sounds in Country and Western Music. While the pianist, vocalist, and composer’s essential 1950s sessions for Atlantic Records remain in print, CD editions of his classic 1960s albums for ABC are only available on budget import labels. One exception to that rule—Concord’s five-CD box of the ABC singles, issued in 2011—has already been discontinued. This isn’t remotely fine. But until new distribution agreements are hammered out, that’s where the situation rests.
At least the general scarcity has a way of making a fresh discovery seem all the more exciting. Now, a new entry in the long-running “Swiss Radio Days” reissue series gives us Zurich 1961, a concert that certainly qualifies as thrilling. On this 79-minute gig, captured that year in a Swiss concert hall, Charles’ big band rips into a few tunes he’d already made popular, in addition to songs and arrangements crafted by a certain up-and-coming talent named Quincy Jones. (The two men met in their teens; Jones later gave Charles some arrangements that he’d already released on his own.)
Charles’ band begins this Zurich date with two Jones charts: “Happy Faces” (originally by Sonny Stitt) and then “Along Came Betty” (a Benny Golson composition). The opener leaps out with an urgency that stacks up well against Jones’ original version (as heard on The Birth of a Band LP). Charles isn’t audible on these first two performances, but his band delivers the hard-charging riffs and cooler, finger-snapping rhythms with regal confidence.
Charles’ composition “My Baby” follows, and the track serves as his formal introduction to the audience—as well as that of the Raelettes, a quartet of backup singers. As an ensemble within the larger group, the Raelettes provide suave harmonies and bluesy, solo exclamations. They offer swinging support behind Charles’ lead vocals during the uptempo “Sticks and Stones”—a cover that Charles found success with, two years prior. The only thing dragging this song down is the fact that the leader’s piano is mixed too low. As the crowd’s post-song applause dies away, you can hear a tense bit of chatter from Charles, addressed to an unidentified colleague, as the pianist slides into the introduction of “Georgia on My Mind.” (At one point, it sounds like he says, “I can’t hear, man; I told you.”)
The balance problems are fixed in a hurry. The subsequent performance of “Georgia” is a soulful revelation, as Charles stretches the tune to over six minutes, supported by bass and flute. He teases like hell with his vocal and piano lines, while David Newman’s flute pirouettes in a showier manner. At its close, the full band’s entrance makes for deliriously hot stuff. After you’ve heard this take, you might never need to hear the comparatively chaste studio version ever again.
The rest of the concert repeats this recipe: an extended jam that allows big band members to flex their soloing muscles, and doesn’t always feature direct involvement from Charles himself (including “Blue Stone,” written by Charles’ musical director, Hank Crawford.) Then he swoops in to make everything that much better, as you can hear on a strutting sequence that includes “Margie” and “Hit the Road Jack.”
By this point, all of Charles’s contributions are being mixed properly—and everything is coming up god-level. His high screams and gully-low growls cavort with barroom piano trills during “I’ve Got News for You.” The Raelettes outdo their past work with Charles on a shattering, occasionally hushed “I Believe to My Soul.” This version of “Come Rain or Come Shine,” in a modernized Jones arrangement, is another powerhouse that makes the canonic ‘50s studio reading seem bashful. The blending of styles is so transporting, it can be easy to neglect all that's going on—the flashes of R&B, soul-jazz, gospel, post-bop and blues that pull together. The result is some of the best American pop that’s ever been made. The way things have been going in the world of distribution, this CD will probably fall out of print in a few months. Sleep on it at your own risk. | 2016-12-22T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2016-12-22T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Jazz | Challenge | December 22, 2016 | 9 | cf135c70-5a72-4ea9-8ea2-8dd19c6125b4 | Seth Colter Walls | https://pitchfork.com/staff/seth-colter walls/ | null |
Mixing up elements of kuduro, dancehall, baile funk, and other global sounds, the Berlin-based producer channels the sound of traveling with no fixed destination in mind. | Mixing up elements of kuduro, dancehall, baile funk, and other global sounds, the Berlin-based producer channels the sound of traveling with no fixed destination in mind. | RAMZi: Pèze-Piton | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/ramzi-peze-piton/ | Pèze-Piton | “My music is a big mash of fusions and re-imaginings,” Phoebé Guillemot recently said about the music she makes as RAMZi. That mash is as slippery as anything currently being made in electronic music. Across a series of cassette releases and 12”s, Guillemot has presented sounds from around the world as though mapped onto a wad of Silly Putty. On the nine-track Pèze-Piton, RAMZi makes the most club-friendly iteration of her music yet, signaling a pivot away from its gooier aspects.
Nose flutes, kuduro rhythms, bits of bandoneon, and dubby bass tones all bob to the surface of “MWI Intro” before a sturdier beat overtakes “Backin.” RAMZi has said that she gravitates to kwaito’s 100-bpm rhythms, and “Safe” hovers in that range before a heavier drum pattern drops. Brief bits of German and Portuguese can be discerned, another hallmark of her work. Beyond a surface similarity to Kanye’s sped-up soul productions of the early 2000s, the mix of slowed-down, molasses-like voices and high-pitched chirruping brings to mind the giddy sensation of traveling in another country and sitting down at a café, where conversations swirl around you, none of them quite making sense.
That sense of peregrination with no exact destination in mind speaks to our present moment in music consumption, in which listening takes the form of skipping from tracks on SoundCloud to YouTube videos suggested by friends to whatever tickles us in the moment. It’s an overwhelming array (and amount) of music for any listener and music producer to digest, which seems in part how RAMZi herself approaches it. Nigerian hip-hop, the bewildering modern batida of labels like Príncipe Discos, the spongy dancehall of Equiknoxx, Brazilian baile funk, Ugandan electronic music—all come to mind when listening to her productions, mixed in a way that can feel dizzying.
The title of “Brazili” might evoke the South American country, but RAMZi refuses to make such an easy comparison; the bustling percussion and echoing whoops that make for the album’s most satisfying track could really be from anywhere. “Fly Timoun” is the longest track, and also the one with a hand-drum pattern that makes you drunk in trying to move with it as cowbells and organ slosh around the song’s perimeter. Midway through, RAMZi wanders away from the beat, and the club walls give way to bird calls, dense foliage, and the butteriest pronunciation of the word “chocolate” possible. Rather than stay on the grid like so many electronic producers, RAMZi knows that getting lost in a new place is one of traveling's biggest thrills. | 2018-01-29T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2018-01-29T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Electronic | 12th Isle | January 29, 2018 | 7.7 | cf1a48ad-b76f-4958-8409-8d72f2f8771b | Andy Beta | https://pitchfork.com/staff/andy-beta/ | |
A 149-minute anthology maps the UK producer’s expanding multiverse, gathering nearly every solo tune he released on Hyperdub in a fertile, eight-year run of EPs full of surprises (and vinyl crackle). | A 149-minute anthology maps the UK producer’s expanding multiverse, gathering nearly every solo tune he released on Hyperdub in a fertile, eight-year run of EPs full of surprises (and vinyl crackle). | Burial: Tunes 2011 to 2019 | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/burial-tunes-2011-to-2019/ | Tunes 2011 to 2019 | Over a decade ago, Burial came down to us, mapped a blueprint for a sound, and perfected it. But what followed his remarkable 2006 self-titled debut and the glorious 2007 follow-up Untrue was mostly silence—or, if we were fortunate, the odd collaboration. It looked as if Burial might have said all he intended to. With tabloid newspapers launching campaigns to unmask the then-faceless producer, online communities scrutinizing any breadcrumbs in the trail, and a transfixed music world gazing at him like an oracle, Burial was probably left asking himself whether this was the life he wanted after all.
It transpired that he did. The floodgates opened. While the pined-for third album has yet to emerge, 15 standalone EPs and 12"s did, and you wouldn’t put it past him to drop another while this compilation cools on the windowsill. Much has changed, but Burial’s wily nature remains undiminished. Tunes 2011 to 2019 features every solo Hyperdub cut from that eight-year-span (barring “Rodent,” for reasons unknown). The two-and-a-half-hour comp proves that, for the most part, Burial was successful at outrunning the long shadow that iconic wall cast. Bucking all prevailing logic, the rush actually was better the second time around.
Burial is one of the few active electronic musicians who simultaneously commands the intrigue of professorial types and cultivates a fanbase dedicated enough that, on Christmas Day 2012 in the UK, he was physically outselling Adele, One Direction, and Bon Iver. But idolatry doesn’t last long in electronic circles. The whimsical appeal of an anonymous dubstep superhero rapidly decayed as we turned a corner into the 2010s (on that note, the 2016 Zomby collaboration “Sweetz” is nowhere to be seen). An unusual relationship developed between the audience and Burial—too rare a talent to jettison but too weird an entity to treat sincerely—leading to an obsession that grew both stronger and sillier. It leaves Burial walking an unenviable tightrope. He must live up to his own supersized reputation, while progressing a popular formula—rumpled kicks and bass, maudlin atmospherics, and the dual crackle of vinyl static and rainstorms—familiar enough to be a punchline.
The most inspired stretch of Burial’s second decade came with 2012’s Kindred and 2013’s Rival Dealer, two of the most magisterial EPs in the history of electronic music. The choice of format made for an intriguing gamble. Wishful thinking suggests that they should have been a complete album rather than separate vote-splitters. But it never could have worked that way. Kindred was a line in the sand, brilliantly welding Burial’s signature to the pulse, structure and dynamics of house and techno. With Rival Dealer Burial crossed that line and picked up a personality that went beyond representing an avatar for our moods. Where once there was mostly Pensive Burial, now there is Poppy Burial, Lovesick Burial, Euphoric Burial, Queer Burial, Consolatory Burial, Ambient Burial and even—if you cock your head at a certain angle to “Subtemple”—Burial Gone Fishing.
Tunes 2011 to 2019 lays out this Burial multiverse, telling conflicting stories of a sound that has increasingly functioned as a Rorschach test for listeners. Some saw the turn on Rival Dealer toward big drums, unadulterated human voices, and major-key chord progressions as a sign that he was going soft. Others point to pupil-dilating warpers like “Claustro” and “Rough Sleeper” as a sign that Burial, who professed in early interviews to be a non-raver in spite of how well he captured rave culture’s integral spirit, had since donned Balenciaga, hit an off-location party, and hammered it until daybreak.
As Burial’s output expanded, there have been fewer attempts at alchemy. He used to be deft at gelling numerous styles while leaving the end product sounding unmistakably Burial-esque. Now it’s obvious when he is trying his hand at dronescapes or pinging arpeggiated trance. These experiments might suggest that he was becoming more one-track-minded, but another recurring theme suggests he is an incorrigible commitment-phobe: his tapestries of ideas that never quite came to fruition. The sound of a tape flipping; a cloak of fuzz that swallows one track and coughs out another form; a quick, stapled-on coda—all are now as common in his songs as the skip-and-clank rhythms and pitch-shifted R&B vocals that became synonymous with his name. While listening to Tunes 2011 to 2019, it’s not hard to find yourself wishing Burial would do himself a favor and expand certain snippets, such as the stunning piano trills on “Ashtray Wasp,” that are more powerful than most producers’ entire catalogs. Yet this tendency toward symphonic mini-suites (or, less charitably, a mental block in getting stuff over the line) is one of the quirks that keeps Burial as compelling as ever.
Tunes 2011 to 2019 is as much of an undertaking as you might expect a 149-minute compilation to be. The chronology is a little scrambled, but it is effectively a backward walk from the present day, which means beginning with recent 12"s that few, if any, treat as Burial’s golden age. Sequencing helps illuminate the strengths of ponderous, heavily textured, largely beatless songs—“State Forest,” “Beachfires,” “Subtemple,” and “Young Death”—that felt unremarkable as standalones. The effect is akin to taking a muscle relaxant and watching black waves crashing against a beach in slow motion, a dark night of the sandy soul. Filtered synths on “Nightmarket” arrive like a flare exploding across the milky sky, and “Hiders,” which was Christmassy enough to begin with, is now stirring to the point of hilarity. The first bells are so loud in the mix they resemble the crash of a gong at the end of 40 minutes of tantric deep breathing. Placing 2019’s speed-garage romp “Claustro” after “Come Down to Us” signals a tonal shift from winter wonderland to a basement club at peak time, walls clammy and bodies writhing. After a long and winding road we have reached Bangerville, and the compilation barely lets up from here.
The first half of CD2 is the apex of Burial’s dancefloor material, truly as good as it gets. Angry static buzzes around the margins while basslines churn fitfully. Fractional details—the desperation of cloaked cries on “Kindred,” “Rough Sleeper”’s spurts of stop-and-go motion, tinny drums ticking down to something untoward on “Truant”—now loom massive, accruing intensity as they go. The strobing synths on “Loner” are revelatory all over again: It is one of the best rave anthems of the 21st century, and should be celebrated as such. The three songs from the Street Halo EP, which sounded dolorous upon initial release in March 2011, are positively a relief here. “Stolen Dog,” with a backbeat pliable enough that it found itself wound around Sisqo’s “Thong Song” in the mash-up of the decade, has the becalming effect of a cup of tea after a heavy night out. The wispy “NYC” rounds things off with a whisper, a soft landing to close out a feral run.
In spite of the alien qualities of his productions, Burial has been so widely successful because of how much he gets it. He trained on great intangibles with a marksman’s precision, articulating the smudged highs and lows of nocturnal inner-city life, evoking the feeling of being utterly alone while placated by a strange sense of belonging. Songs like “U Hurt Me” and “Near Dark” were the saddest shit imaginable, yet somehow glinting with hope. Tunes 2011 to 2019 is a far cry from the Burial of 2005 to 2007, but he’s as capable as ever of unlocking those same feelings—just now with a different set of tools.
The last voice we hear on Tunes 2011 to 2019 is that of The Wire’s inscrutable villain Marlo Stanfield: “Don’t rush me on shit. I’ll get at you when I’m at you.” Stanfield goes from being untouchable to considered a diminished force, but fundamentally stays undefeated. Given that all his moves seem loaded in one way or another, it’s easy to imagine Burial wielding this sample with deliberately renewed purpose. He’s there when he wants to be, out of the shadows, often at a moment and in a form you don’t expect. He was the beneficiary of an unrepeatable set of cultural and technological circumstances, but he’s massaged the myth adroitly. It makes following him as fun as any other musician working today—so we remain hooked, even if we kid ourselves that we’re over it.
Buy: Rough Trade
(Pitchfork may earn a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.) | 2019-12-06T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2019-12-06T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Electronic | Hyperdub | December 6, 2019 | 9 | cf20540e-1486-4e03-9393-d9f76b133d03 | Gabriel Szatan | https://pitchfork.com/staff/gabriel-szatan/ | |
Using field recordings and modular synths, the UK-based electronic musician channels the holistic energies of forest bathing. | Using field recordings and modular synths, the UK-based electronic musician channels the holistic energies of forest bathing. | Hinako Omori: a journey… | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/hinako-omori-a-journey/ | a journey… | Is it possible to perceive the natural world as part of our emotional being? For practitioners of Shinrin-yoku (Japanese for “forest bathing”; the term means to immerse oneself in the atmosphere of a forest), the two are inextricable; the self is indistinguishable from nature. a journey…, the debut album from ambient composer and sound designer Hinako Omori, is rooted in this philosophy. Across 10 tracks that seamlessly flow into one another, Omori invites her listener on a participatory journey in which memory and consciousness are configured through forests, oceans, and gardens. In the process, she harmoniously reconciles the self and the natural world.
Since childhood, Omori, who was born in Japan and raised in England, has been collecting soundbites from the natural world. Experimenting with noise—and the act of listening itself—from such a young age led her to study music technology at the University of Surrey before becoming a session musician for several British musicians, including Georgia and Kae Tempest.
Drawing upon several years’ worth of field recordings and synth experiments, Omori created a journey… at a recording retreat at Peter Gabriel’s Real World Studios during WOMAD at Home’s immersive audio series. While there, she took a binaural head—two microphones placed inside a human dummy head—to record the sounds of the surrounding Wiltshire countryside. Binaural techniques tend to result in a 3D simulation of sound, mimicking the aural interaction between our bodies and the environment that surrounds us, producing the illusion that we are inhabiting the same space as the song.
Omori takes an ecological approach to the production of sound on a journey…, which sounds like a cosmic forest in a galaxy of noise. Much of the music on the album was made almost by chance, stitched together from happy accidents made using Omori’s semi-modular synth patches or circular, randomly occurring sounds from her natural environment— flashes of nature that evoke shards of memory. It’s quite remarkable, then, the way that a journey… patches these many fragments together into a coherent, continuous whole.
The album is held together by synthesizer drones that are subtly detuned in order to reproduce so-called therapeutic frequencies; sound imagined as a form of healing. It’s a new-age approach to ambient composition that artists like Jenny Hval have used to interrogate cliché, but there’s no such meta-commentary on a journey…. Omori sincerely commits to the new-age form, but rather than scanning as corny, the transcendent textures appropriately reinforce the album’s grand, cosmic vision.
a journey… comes in and out of being like the birth and death of a planet. On “Spaceship Lament,” Omori gives shape to the atmosphere with the sound of crackling gray noise, dripping water, and coruscating space-age synths that briefly intertwine. The inharmonious sounds of a forest give way to a strong, low-frequency melody that overtakes the entire sonic picture in the album’s title track. “Will You Listen In?” is a meditation on the act of listening itself, and is the album’s most impressive binaural moment. Bird calls drift horizontally, forming their own geography from northwest to southeast, scattering flapping sounds from one ear to the other.
The album invites a deep, openhearted, and immersive listening experience. “Let me be your eyes/Let me guide your light through the darkness/I promise there’s a way,” Omori breathily sings on “Snow,” as her Moog Matriarch plods like a glockenspiel. There are moments that are almost overwhelmingly beautiful: the urgent gust of voice and moonburnt synth on “Ocean”; the quasi-ecclesiastical synth symphonica of “Heartplant.” With deeply warm overtones that drift in and out like sleep, it’s easy to get swept up in a journey…. Omori’s album is like sonic positive reinforcement that inspires a kind of hypnosis with its constant reassurance: Keep moving. It’ll be OK. Nature provides a pathway. | 2022-03-22T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2022-03-22T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic / Experimental | Houndstooth | March 22, 2022 | 7.5 | cf244967-b02d-4d8c-8e17-5c3aca02324c | Emma Madden | https://pitchfork.com/staff/emma-madden/ | |
Gothenburg trio Amateur Hour translate their hometown’s DIY ethos into an hour-long dream-pop epic, balancing lo-fi scuzz with welcoming intimacy. | Gothenburg trio Amateur Hour translate their hometown’s DIY ethos into an hour-long dream-pop epic, balancing lo-fi scuzz with welcoming intimacy. | Amateur Hour: Krökta Tankar och Brända Vanor | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/amateur-hour-krokta-tankar-och-branda-vanor/ | Krökta Tankar och Brända Vanor | In recent years, Gothenburg’s underground music scene has offered a refreshing reminder of the power of the DIY ethos. The city’s musicians are publishing zines, being choosy about their interviews, and releasing albums in tiny batches of CD-Rs. Curiously, the YouTube channel for Discreet Music, the record shop and label that much of this world revolves around, has a lot of its content marked as “made for kids.” One repercussion of this is that you can’t get notifications for such videos; their songs won’t reach your inboxes or social media feeds through the PR-backed campaigns that many celebrated experimentalists rely on today. Instead, this music—often lo-fi, homespun, and without contextual narratives—demands to be sought out and understood on its own terms.
Gothenburg locals agree that the scene’s underground renaissance began with Neutral’s 2014 debut album, Grå Våg Gamlestaden. The duo featured Dan Johansson, a musician who has had different aliases and played in multiple groups throughout his decades-long career. On Amateur Hour, his band with Hugo Randulv and Julia Bjermelind, they reach an arresting midpoint between their ramshackle noise or ambient-folk projects (Sewer Election, Enhet För Fri Musik) and their more popular rock bands outside the scene (Westkust, Makthaverskan). With their third album, Krökta Tankar och Brända Vanor, they aim for an hour-long dream pop epic, doubling down on both the scuzzy production and intimate atmospheres that have made them such alluring figures since their 2016 debut.
The confluence of the raucous and introspective is apparent right from the start. After the introductory ambient wash of “Skeva,” the band employs shoegaze fuzz on “Baby You’re All I Want.” Its percussive taps and genteel vocal melodies recall ’60s girl groups, and they opt for the same trick that made Les Rallizes Dénudés cult icons: bury the pop sensibility in a wall of noise. When the track unfurls into an amp-blown freak-out, it doubles as meditative psychedelia. The same holds true for “Brända Tankar,” which is an entirely instrumental exercise in guitar-driven cacophony, though its second half tones down the volume to settle into a drone indebted to Hindustani classical music.
Many Amateur Hour songs unravel in similarly unexpected ways. Take “Bortom Oss,” which begins with manipulated vocal gargles and periodic, high-pitched tones. Soon, an ambient pad rushes in like a beam of light cutting through clouds, and the reverberating guitar chords that follow buoy the heavenly mood. Most emblematic of this flowering song structure is the 15-minute “...But if Teenage Is Forever You Will Look for Something Better,” which begins as a pop song with alien synth warbles, capturing the joy and strangeness of aimless teenage nights. After two minutes it devolves into a gurgling swamp of tape detritus, percussion, and synth flurries, reminiscent of the longform drones that defined cassette labels throughout the 2000s. But at the 10-minute mark, the melodies reemerge from the muck; after such turbulent clamor, these melodies—representative of youthful comforts—scan as wistful nostalgia. Even though lyrics are hard to parse throughout Krökta Tankar och Brända Vanor, their contemplative emotions ring loud and clear.
Though Amateur Hour’s latest LP clocks in at double the length of their previous albums, its 16 tracks are cohesive. “Drinkars Boning” aims for the Durutti Column with a folksy charm, and it sits nicely alongside “Utan Andetag,” whose processed strings channel a moment of celestial floating. This overarching ethereal feeling suffuses every track. "Tidens Tempo" is little more than a resounding bell and some wind, but the simple addition of a childlike synth melody grants it a beguiling aura. The vocal-driven songs are especially inviting, with the Grouper-esque “Buried Alive” being a standout: Bjermelind’s voice lopes around like a wandering specter over flickering electronics. Listening to Amateur Hour always sounds like stumbling upon something special by chance. When Krökta Tankar och Brända Vanor concludes with a short feedback-riddled outro, this unceremonious end proves apt: Amateur Hour capture the magic of music meant to remain small and private, yet otherworldly. | 2022-09-13T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2022-09-13T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock / Electronic | Appetite | September 13, 2022 | 7.6 | cf27575e-9039-49e1-8edb-e140bf44f1e7 | Joshua Minsoo Kim | https://pitchfork.com/staff/joshua-minsoo kim/ | |
A songwriter best known for her work penning hits for Ariana Grande, Khalid, and Panic! At the Disco claims the spotlight for herself, but she struggles to define what makes her unique. | A songwriter best known for her work penning hits for Ariana Grande, Khalid, and Panic! At the Disco claims the spotlight for herself, but she struggles to define what makes her unique. | Tayla Parx: We Need to Talk | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/tayla-parx-we-need-to-talk/ | We Need to Talk | Of all the female songwriters who have helped pen chart-topping hits, only a handful have picked up the microphone in the 21st century—Julia Michaels, Bebe Rexha, and, perhaps most famously, Sia. But a host of others have been trying to launch their own recording careers for years: Emily Warren (best known for her work with the Chainsmokers), Bibi Bourelly (Rihanna), and Diana Gordon (Beyoncé). Now, it’s Tayla Parx who steps up to bat, attempting to crack the seemingly impenetrable barrier between being behind the scenes and in the limelight.
The 25-year-old songwriter born Taylor Parks is used to lighting up the U.S. top-songs chart, having co-written plenty of hits for pop titans like Mariah Carey, Fifth Harmony, Chris Brown… the list goes on and on. But last November, Parx landed a milestone by co-writing three simultaneous top 10 singles: Ariana Grande’s “thank u, next,” Khalid and Normani’s “Love Lies,” and Panic! At the Disco’s “High Hopes.” (Ebro Darden incorrectly dubbed her the first female songwriter to make the achievement, but Ashanti was the first to do it, back in 2001.) On Parx’s We Need to Talk, the follow-up to 2017’s Tayla Made, her songwriting prowess is evident, falling in line with today’s catchy country-pop and R&B. But without compelling star power and a coherent message, Tayla encounters the same pitfalls that have held back many songwriters who attempt to break through as performers.
The best parts of We Need to Talk arrive in the moments when Tayla Parx’s charisma starts to shine through. The Joey Badass-featuring “Rebound” sounds like an update of Ciara and Bow Wow’s classic 2005 R&B duet “Like You,” except Tayla is scorned instead of smitten. Riffing on a cheeky extended sports metaphor, she flashes a glimmer of sassiness when she sings, “Now I’m Dikembe with the block,” referencing the now retired basketball hall-of-famer. On the album’s title track, Tayla belts melodramatic house-diva runs over a drum’n’bass-inspired shuffle; it’s the song where she sounds like she’s finally doing her own thing.
But these moments where Tayla reveals her own personality are few and far between. The majority of We Need to Talk attempts to replicate the magic of other great pop stars. “Tomboys Have Feelings Too” features the country-pop twang of Kacey Musgraves; the soaring ballad “Easy” sounds like Julia Michaels’ breakout solo single “Issues”; and “What Do You Know” could almost be a vowel-bending SZA banger, if only it had a couple more self-deprecating zingers. Though Tayla’s chameleonic abilities are an advantage when she’s flitting between songwriting sessions for Christina Aguilera and Quavo, that flexibility undermines the cohesiveness of her own album. These songs are all also conspicuously labeled as “interludes,” even though they could be promising, full-fledged singles if they were fleshed out a little more. Instead, they come across as unfinished bits of songs, maybe even rejected pitches that were initially meant for other artists, adding to We Need to Talk’s lack of consistency.
Ahead of the album’s release, Parx hinted in an interview that We Need to Talk would also broach themes of gender and sexuality. “The coolest thing about starting my own album is really getting across my ideas of feminism, my ideas of gender-reversal… Breaking out of all those boxes,” she said, citing “Slow Dancing” as an example of a song in which she blows apart long-established gender roles. But a line like, “I like diamonds, I like pearls/Guess I'm a typical girl/Making love around the world,” isn’t doing much to subvert conventional notions of femininity. Even the music video seems like an apolitical, watered-down version of Janelle Monáe’s “PYNK,” which Tayla co-wrote. Elsewhere, songs with names like “Homiesexual” and “Tomboys Have Feelings Too” hint that Parx might play with ideas of non-heteronormativity, but she never really ends up going deep on her ideas.
Before she wanted to be a solo artist or songwriter, Parx was an actress, starring as Little Inez in the 2007 Hairspray film and going on to appear in Nickelodeon shows like “Victorious” and “True Jackson VP.” In a recent interview, she recalled the difficult transition from acting to songwriting, “I went through this journey of saying, ‘Because I became more successful as an actress first people will see me as an actress who is trying to do music.’” To overcome the “actress” tag, Parx said that she “stuck it out and became a student of my craft.” Now, she has to learn to do the hardest thing an artist can do: discover her own point of view. | 2019-04-08T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-04-08T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | Atlantic | April 8, 2019 | 6.7 | cf2797f1-b56d-43b5-a3f7-745ccfc89b10 | Michelle Hyun Kim | https://pitchfork.com/staff/michelle-hyun kim/ | |
The bandleader, composer, and pillar of Chicago arts and culture follows up the acclaimed 2019 LP he recorded with the Black Monument Ensemble with another grand and luminous statement. | The bandleader, composer, and pillar of Chicago arts and culture follows up the acclaimed 2019 LP he recorded with the Black Monument Ensemble with another grand and luminous statement. | Damon Locks / Black Monument Ensemble: NOW | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/damon-locks-black-monument-ensemble-now/ | NOW | For over 30 years, Damon Locks has been in the middle of Chicago arts and culture. Locks moved to the city in the late ’80s to attend the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, the first of many local pillars that would become well acquainted with the multi-talented composer, musician, educator, and visual artist. He’s worked for cultural institutions ranging from the cherished indie label Thrill Jockey to the world-famous Field Museum where, legend has it, he once planted a cassette of his punk band Trenchmouth in the African exhibit.
His endeavors look different today, but his ethos has hardly changed: Locks uses every connection at his disposal to raise artistic voices from the street level to the eyes of downtown and beyond in the name of healing. He’s worked with the Center for Urban Pedagogy and teaches art at a state prison, as well as at schools all over the city. But today he’s probably best known for fronting the Black Monument Ensemble, a collective of singers and players ranging from ages 9 to 52 that explores what Locks calls “the Black nod,” referring to a private, unspoken acknowledgement between Black strangers in public. With the ensemble, which played a significant role in the meteoric rise of the exploratory digital-jazz label International Anthem, Locks has grown something pure and organic, straight from the ground, and touched the sky with it. Fitting, then, that the ensemble’s acclaimed 2019 debut LP, Where Future Unfolds, was recorded in front of a live audience at an idyllic, colossal greenhouse situated at the center of Chicago.
Its follow-up, NOW, was made amid two challenges. One was logistical: how to safely record an album with a half-dozen singers and a couple wind instrument players in the middle of COVID’s second wave. Locks’ solution was to split the recording into two sessions: the first one outdoors, in the studio’s backyard, for the breath-dependent vocal and instrumental parts, and the second one indoors, with masks and abundant hand sanitizer, focused on rhythm. That meant recording the explosive live drums and percussion of Dana Hall and Arif Smith, but also shaping and producing the beats, rife with samples, loops, and squelching digital accents.
As a result, listening to NOW feels like being in two distinct places. On the one hand, there are several-minute stretches where you feel yourself in the humid yard with the ensemble, the voices of the singers enveloping you and Angel Bat Dawid’s clarinet solo directly in your ear. And on the other, you’re in Locks’ mind, hearing snippets from old films and rhythmic phrases cycling on repeat. There are as many traces of Fela Kuti’s Afrobeat as of Locks’ fellow International Anthem leading minds: Dawid solos on the opener and closer in typically assertive fashion, Ben LaMar Gay appears on cornet, and while jaimie branch is technically absent, her glitchy, beats-over-trumpet project Anteloper seems to have made an impression on Locks. None of this is an extreme deviation from Where Future Unfolds, which also featured film samples and looped rhythms playing against its visceral live-album feel. But Where Future Unfolds felt more like a live album, where NOW plays like a studio creation.
The second challenge had more to do with the album’s spirit: the question of what to say, exactly, at such a dark, solemn, and high-stakes moment in the nation and world. When the ensemble got together for the first session in August 2020, Chicago was still smoldering and the bridges were still up. That session also fell on the anniversary of both Emmett Till’s murder and the 1963 March on Washington, as well as the day of Black Panther star Chadwick Boseman’s untimely passing. How would Locks—a human amplifier, a natural behind a bullhorn—approach this opportunity? He faced some of the same dilemmas as those protesting in the streets: Assembling is not without risk right now, but this message cannot wait.
The answer, he decided, was to honor the present moment—not just the historical moment unfolding before us, but every ticking, mundane second. NOW bleeds with the awareness that tomorrow is never guaranteed. The most self-affirming thing that you can do, then, is to claim your time, to fill it with your own noise. Locks’ lyrics, animated by a six-piece choir, long for an undistracted, unburdened existence. “Keep a space for the colors to process/Your body aches under the weight of the metropolis,” opens the jittering “Keep Your Mind Free.” Even though Locks wrote and composed these songs, they also function as frames for improvisation—a discipline all about momentary essence. Dawid’s and Gay’s solos are dented, beautifully imperfect, and alive in the moment. At times, the beat-crafting feels improvisational, too, as Locks dots these tracks with sounds according to his whims.
One sound, in particular, presides over NOW: the noise of buzzing cicadas, picked up by the outdoor microphones. They enter only a minute into the opener, humming along to the singers calling out for a “forever momentary space,” and return later in the album. They’re hardly an ambient touch—they’re given such prominent space in the mix that they practically serve as a second, competing choir. You could read all sorts of meaning into their appearance: Cicadas spend their spare days on Earth making a primal noise unique to themselves; they call out in congregational songs, rising and falling together and only capturing our attention when acting as an ensemble; their noise might be coming from the studio’s adjacent cemetery, which, by grim coincidence, is the city’s largest. And while it’s probably not safe to assume that any of that was by design, you might still find meaning there, and it emerged because the cicadas were simply a part of that moment: alive, singing, and accepted.
Buy: Rough Trade
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Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-04-13T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2021-04-13T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Jazz / Experimental | International Anthem | April 13, 2021 | 7.7 | cf288dbf-5be8-41b1-8f20-0ee4e27a4d6d | Steven Arroyo | https://pitchfork.com/staff/steven-arroyo/ | |
The Detroit rapper/producer follows up the instrumental The Rebellion Sessions with a solo rap record that confirms him as a serviceable emcee—and a session leader with a sense of purpose. | The Detroit rapper/producer follows up the instrumental The Rebellion Sessions with a solo rap record that confirms him as a serviceable emcee—and a session leader with a sense of purpose. | Black Milk: FEVER | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/black-milk-fever/ | FEVER | It’s bad news for a football player when a scout marks him down in a draft report as having tight hips. The suggestion is a lack of fluidity, a general sense of strain. It’s a weighted assessment generally reserved for skill players, like running backs or wide receivers, for whom looking stiff can forecast injury or inertia. Black Milk used to rap like a skill player with tight hips. His flow can be jerky and the calculated stammer in his delivery can reveal his straining. But a few years ago the Detroit artist seemed to switch positions for the better, slowing down and loosening up to take the load off his raps.
At the same time, over his last few albums Black Milk has sidled into the role of bandleader first and rapper second, to the point that his last record was an entirely instrumental affair. He didn’t play any of the instruments on the meandering The Rebellion Sessions, for which the leader and his band were billed as Black Milk & Nat Turner, but he produced and arranged every song. Freeing himself of the pressure of the microphone—he was always a producer first—seemed like an epiphany, and the album was one of the most gratifyingly experimental that Black Milk has recorded. His new one, a solo rap record called FEVER, confirms he’s still a serviceable emcee prospering as a session leader with a sense of purpose.
FEVER continues the Detroit rapper/producer’s expanding live hip-hop jazz-band tradition and leans into psychedelic neo-soul in the process, something like P-Funk meets the Ummah. Black Milk is using a softer touch with drums than his previously bludgeoning boom-bap productions might have predicted, with a pair of accomplished session players, Chris Dave and Daru Jones, at the center of the mix. Their shuffling breaks—loose but punctual, and never boxy—quietly gas most of the record. The whole album has a warm hue, but the shape and pace of the tracks morph quickly.
Opener “unVEil” tumbles a dreamy reggae step out of the hum of a wavering synth line. Guitar guitar licks are frequently ornamental filigree on top of bulbous bass notes. “But I Can Be” has the rigid loop of a traditional Black Milk beat, but most of the songs take a more open-ended shape and allow room for woozy wandering. In the very middle of the record, a floaty instrumental interlude without any drums captures the muddy palette of the whole thing as warm synths flutter around each other and under a reverberating guitar. On “Will Remain” Black Milk channels a softly bubbling jazz soul, while “Drown” is a swampy funk groove.
Lyrically, FEVER reads like Black Milk has been stewing in political turmoil and is now breaking his silence with calculated thought. “Everybody hot in fever pitch/Heat is rising you can see the temp,” he raps bruskly on “unVEil,” setting the album’s tone. On “Foe Friend” his flow swings naturally across a pair of verses about backstabbing and greed. Throughout, soulful guest vocalists dot the landscape with side chatter and choruses that bleed out of the mix.
“Drown” is a pensive rage against police violence over a sparse, rattling funk groove: “Do you feel like you drownin’?/Walkin’ round black in a world trapped feeling surrounded.” He often still raps in a jittery stop-start flow that can split his words in awkward, unconventional halves—he rhymes “mission” with “quicksand”—but there’s a budding economy to his raps that leaves much of the show to the music. “Laugh Now Cry Later” epitomizes the effect with a groggy and unconnected series of gut checks in spare couplets. It’s the same free-association trick he’s been commanding as a band leader. Less than a minute in, he ad-libs to himself, “Let me try something else,” and changes his course. It’s good to hear him loosen up. | 2018-02-26T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2018-02-26T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rap | Computer Ugly / Mass Appeal | February 26, 2018 | 7.4 | cf29b940-0188-43c2-a563-c58334f2094b | Jay Balfour | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jay-balfour/ | |
The Philadelphia indie rock trio’s debut is gentle in both sound and spirit. Singer Michael Doherty can turn simple moments of reflection into marquee statements with his outstanding voice. | The Philadelphia indie rock trio’s debut is gentle in both sound and spirit. Singer Michael Doherty can turn simple moments of reflection into marquee statements with his outstanding voice. | Another Michael: New Music and Big Pop | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/another-michael-new-music-and-big-pop/ | New Music and Big Pop | Another Michael make songs rooted in empathy and connection. Take “New Music,” the opening track off the trio’s debut New Music and Big Pop, which begins with, “We were up late online talking about new music/And you sent me a link to a song that I’d never heard before.” Who among us has not been in this exact position more times than they can count? But the band’s vocalist and songwriter Michael Doherty digs deeper, and over a softly ruminative melody, this commonplace experience gives way to existential ruminations about ambition, the creative process, and finding meaning in art. “And I want to make something timeless/The time isn’t on my wrist/I am willing to hold myself and put up with this awful loneliness,” Doherty sings before landing on a delicate conclusion: “I’m kind of new.”
Although “kind of new” is really no longer the case for the band. Another Michael began around five or six years ago in Albany as the solo project of Doherty and grew to include guitarist/keyboardist Alenni Davis and bassist Nick Sebastiano. After relocating to Philadelphia, their first record as a trio, 2018’s Land EP, co-mingled their interests in indie rock and pop. Now, New Music and Big Pop pushes this envelope further in more subtle ways. Comprised of 10 songs penned between 2016 and 2018, the record is warm, playful, and self-aware—yes, Another Michael, their eyes knowingly roll.
New Music and Big Pop was recorded outside Ferndale, New York, a site that is reimagined by artist Jaime Knoth on the album’s cover: a tiny rowboat dwarfed by green hills and a sorbet-colored sky. Like this scene, the record carries an innate gentleness in both sound and spirit; one of the band’s Bandcamp tags is simply “nice.” “I’m fine, but I know a lot of people who are feeling a bad way,” Doherty sings midway through the record. Just a few minutes later on a song called “What the Hell Is Going On?”, he reiterates the desire to be a vessel of placidity: “I don’t want to be a bummer in these darker times.” And so Another Michael move forward with a light but direct touch in the easygoing vein of Whitney, LAKE, or Real Estate.
As a lyricist, Doherty is plainspoken and specific, lingering on small details but not forcing their depth. “It’s not often that I notice a sunset/So I point it out again,” Doherty sings on the upbeat closer “Shaky Cam”; sometimes a moment of reflection can be as simple as this. The second of the album’s titular songs, aptly-named “Big Pop,” opens with an effervescent bit of color: “Big pop, lemon drop, sipping the whole way through/Tiptop, circus cop, I’ve got something crazy to tell you.” The lines are silly enough to momentarily border on cutesy, but they provide a nice, light match for a narrative about believing in your own artistry.
This sort of gentle, heart-on-its-sleeve music walks a fine line: too slight and it slips into the abyss of forgettability; too self-referential and it becomes an inside joke to which the listener is not invited; too sincere and its emotional stakes disappear in a puff of smoke; too obsessed with profundity and it loses all meaning. But New Music and Big Pop nimbly avoids all of these traps by letting big questions simply exist. The centerpiece might be the ambitious “Row.” Beginning as a lush, sweeping breath of classic rock about conflict, the song grows to reveal the group’s tight-knit cohesion, bright harmonies, and willingness to put their own spin on a variety of touchstones. Doherty’s springy falsetto gets a moment to flex and gives Justin Vernon and—dare I say it—Shawn Mendes a run for their money; there’s even a hint of Joni Mitchell in the way he sings “California on my mind.” To flashback to the late-night song sharing on “New Music,” it’s easy to imagine passing “Row”— and New Music and Big Pop as a whole—to a friend. It would be a nice thing to do.
Buy: Rough Trade
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Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-03-12T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2021-03-12T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Run for Cover | March 12, 2021 | 7.6 | cf2afd19-97f3-4563-a3fb-3a1708859a23 | Quinn Moreland | https://pitchfork.com/staff/quinn-moreland/ | |
As engineer at Berlin’s Dubplates & Mastering, Rashad Becker has mastered and cut at least 1200 dance, electronic, and experimental albums. It’s no shock then that the first record of his own music-- think Black Dice without beats or Fennesz with the serene poignancy replaced by a prankster-ish sense of play-- sounds great, too. | As engineer at Berlin’s Dubplates & Mastering, Rashad Becker has mastered and cut at least 1200 dance, electronic, and experimental albums. It’s no shock then that the first record of his own music-- think Black Dice without beats or Fennesz with the serene poignancy replaced by a prankster-ish sense of play-- sounds great, too. | Rashad Becker: Traditional Music of Notional Species Vol. I | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/18547-rashad-becker-traditional-music-of-notional-species-vol-i/ | Traditional Music of Notional Species Vol. I | Rashad Becker makes a living with his ears. As engineer at Berlin’s Dubplates & Mastering, he's mastered and cut a massive amount of dance, electronic, and experimental albums (his credits include at least 1200 records). He’s built a reputation for creating great-sounding vinyl, so it’s no shock that the first record of his own music sounds great, too. Traditional Music of Notional Species, Vol. 1 is thoroughly clear and precise. Everything on it is boldly legible, and though there are tons of sounds intersecting and overlapping, nothing is blurry. It’s as if Becker’s mastering his own brain and transferring what he hears in his head with little if any generational loss. It’s all pretty unpredictable, sure, but he’s always in control of his busy mix.
What is surprising about Traditional Music is how singular it sounds. Becker has listened to so much music that it should be impossible for him not to copy some of it. And in fact there are moments that recall other artists (if you need a frame of reference, think Black Dice without the beats, or Fennesz with the serene poignancy replaced by an prankster-ish sense of play). But while you may have heard some of Becker’s sounds before, the way he glues, melts, cuts, layers, and stretches them is unique. So is the effect of all that activity-- I rarely think of other music when I’m listening Traditional Music, since the connections and juxtapositions Becker makes between the sounds themselves are more than enough to occupy my attention.
Much of that attention-grab comes from how concrete Traditional Music sounds, a rarity for work this abstract. There are few sounds here that you’d automatically associate with particular notes, keys, or instruments. But every moment feels real in a tangible, three-dimensional way. Often music like Becker’s can seem dislocated from the material world, cut off from any physical events that might have created the sounds. But Becker’s mix lives and breathes in pointed, often hilarious detail. His sounds actually sound like things, be it growling animals, buzzing flies, distant echoes, whirring sirens, or blipping radars.
It’s up to you to choose which associations work, which makes Traditional Music a kind of sonic mood ring. Think of one track as underwater rumblings and suddenly you can hear bubbles popping, waves rolling, and depth-charges rippling; think of another as a conversation and soon every sound takes on the inflections and innuendoes of human speech. Smartly, Becker refrains from suggesting interpretations, titling half of his tracks “Dances I-IV” and the other half “Themes I-IV”. He seems so thrilled with all the possibilities in sound creation that he’s happy to let you divine the meaning in his madness. The only thing he seems to want you to do is have fun figuring it all out.
Given Becker’s background as an engineer, it’s tempting to see Traditional Music as a kind of sound-effect library or technical demonstration disc, and maybe it is. But if so, it’s similar to Raymond Scott’s early electronic experiments, which were lab exercises that produced engaging music. Scott tinkered with technology and pushed at the boundaries of the medium, but he was out to do more than wow laymen with his toys. His musical sensibility and thrill of discovery birthed pieces that were compelling and often even moving, regardless of how they were created. The same goes for Becker’s music. You can start by gawking at his surprising, hilarious, exhilarating sounds, but you’ll likely find many more reasons to return to Traditional Music of Notional Species, Vol 1. | 2013-09-20T02:00:04.000-04:00 | 2013-09-20T02:00:04.000-04:00 | Electronic | Pan | September 20, 2013 | 7.4 | cf332df1-c831-490a-bebe-241282e7f102 | Marc Masters | https://pitchfork.com/staff/marc-masters/ | null |
On their third duo album, the two longtime accomplices balance free-improv flux with compositional rigor in a suite-like piece for guitar, electronics, and tabla. | On their third duo album, the two longtime accomplices balance free-improv flux with compositional rigor in a suite-like piece for guitar, electronics, and tabla. | Oren Ambarchi / Jim O’Rourke: Hence | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/oren-ambarchi-jim-orourke-hence/ | Hence | In the early 21st century, Oren Ambarchi and Jim O’Rourke were working at opposite ends of the spectrum (and the world). Australia’s Ambarchi came up in frenetic noise bands and self-released his experimental guitar albums, while the U.S.-based O’Rourke was producing Wilco and Stereolab while also serving as the fifth member of Sonic Youth. But at the root, both men’s music shared a mix of patience and steadfastness in their craft. When O’Rourke relocated to Japan in 2005 and returned to his free-improv roots, the sympathies between the two players deepened and they soon found themselves backing artists like Keiji Haino in a deconstructed rock power trio as well as collaborating together.
Their third duo album, Hence, carries on the template established on their 2011 debut, Indeed, and reiterated again on 2015’s Behold: forty-plus minute suites split across two sides of vinyl, each cagily alternating between improv and composition, feeling at once like a squishy amoeba as well as something with an underlying skeleton. As veteran craftsmen and listeners, Ambarchi and O’Rourke display an unusual ability to give a barely perceived shape to assemblages of small, almost incidental moments.
On Behold, Ambarchi returned to his first instrument, the drums, to give the piece a sense of propulsion. So it makes sense that the duo would again use percussion, though this time they recruit Hironori Yuzawa, the Japanese tabla player who goes by U-Zhaan. Fans of early 21st-century electronic fusions might recall that U-Zhaan provided the room-spinning tabla work in Asa-Chang & Junray, giving their already alien sound the distinct sensation of hovering a few feet off the carpet. The three have improvised live as a trio, and there was also a glimpse of their collaboration on Ambarchi’s 2014 album Quixotism, where O’Rourke and U-Zhaan both performed (alongside Thomas Brinkmann and Eyvind Kang) on the album’s flickering 15-minute finale.
Hence’s opening moments seem to pick up where Quixotism’s conclusion receded from earshot. O’Rouke’s modular synths and Ambarchi’s guitar slowly emerge across the first minute and a half before U-Zhaan’s first thrums on tabla make the piece blossom. Ambarchi methodically thwacks at his guitar strings, hammering at harmonics that bring to mind adventurous players like Fred Frith or Henry Kaiser. As he attacks his axe and U-Zhaan adds heartbeat-like palpitations, O’Rourke pulls at all the frequencies like taffy, swatting away some tones and stretching others into queasy new shapes. The second half opens up even wider, slowly introducing new timbres and textures without letting its atmosphere dissipate. The piece has the characteristics of a group improvisation, but O’Rourke’s real-time processing gives it a more coherent and organized feel.
Hence’s pacing is so careful that at times it reminds me of a raga—an impression reinforced by the presence of the tabla—while the subtle mutations of the instruments also bring to mind composers like David Behrman and Alvin Curran, who melded together acoustic elements with electronic processing to achieve an uncanny new amalgam of sound.
While the participants hail from Australia, Japan, and the Midwest, there’s something here that suggests the expansive and disorienting vistas of the American West. U-Zhaan’s pitch-bending tabla, Ambarchi’s whammy-bar work, and the upper frequencies conjured by O’Rourke all contribute to a sensation where the elements of the piece warp, shift, and flutter in and out of focus. Between the twang of the guitar and the space between each sound, Hence starts to take on the shimmering illusion of a desert horizon. | 2018-12-08T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2018-12-08T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Experimental | Editions Mego | December 8, 2018 | 7.4 | cf378b55-d997-4be6-a4ea-da8131f221f3 | Andy Beta | https://pitchfork.com/staff/andy-beta/ | |
The reliable Southwestern indie-rockers’ ninth album is full of impassioned stories about border politics and environmental disasters. | The reliable Southwestern indie-rockers’ ninth album is full of impassioned stories about border politics and environmental disasters. | Calexico: The Thread That Keeps Us | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/calexico-the-thread-that-keeps-us/ | The Thread That Keeps Us | Calexico rarely make explicitly political songs, though circumstances can sometimes make them feel that way. Over the last two decades, the Arizona band’s principals, Joey Burns and John Convertino, have written often about transient workers, the homes that they make and the ones they leave behind; their music, too, crosses borders, blending American folk traditions with styles rooted in Mexico and elsewhere in Latin America. Even more than its predecessors, the band’s impassioned ninth album, The Thread That Keeps Us, is dedicated to immigrant experiences and the pains of displacement. As always, Calexico are more interested in storytelling than grandstanding, but it’s hard to miss the role that border politics and environmental disasters play in the band’s latest batch of character sketches and vignettes. This is an album that pointedly humanizes the disenfranchised people whose voices are too often shut out of policy debates.
Calexico recorded the LP in California, and you can hear the impact of the wildfires that have blighted that state and their native Arizona in the past year all over Thread. Burns fills the record with imagery of falling ashes, smoke-stung eyes and abandoned homes. “Running through fields of flowers and smoke/Leaving behind all that we’ve built,” he sings on the brooding “Voices in the Field,” a song that embodies the album’s tougher tone. “My focus was blurred as the world became consumed,” he sings on “Bridge to Nowhere,” over clenched guitars that conjure the destruction. The emotional subject matter gives the band cover to play to the rafters in a way they don’t frequently do. Introducing the apocalyptic imagery that carries through the album, opener “End of the World With You” announces itself with a gust of pomp and grandeur right out of a Broken Social Scene album, while. The chest-beating “Eyes Wide Awake” is driven by a tense, distinctly “Where is My Mind”-esque guitar riff, building to a dramatic fanfare from the band’s dual trumpeters.
Those tracks offer potent reminders of what an effective meat-and-potatoes indie-rock band Calexico can be, though as is usually the case with Calexico albums, Thread’s most memorable pleasures lie in its worldly tangents and genre fusions. “Flores y Tamales,” sung in Spanish by Jairo Zavala, one of the band’s many crack multi-instrumentalists, lightens the album at its halfway point with mariachi horns and a cumbia rhythm. “Under the Wheels” spins a ghostly reggae shuffle into a gregarious art-funk number with shades of ’80s Bowie, while “Another Space” nods to Bitches Brew with wild scribbles of trumpet and guitar.
Throughout, Thread is noisier and messier around the edges than its predecessors, with an overarching turbulence that creeps into even its more upbeat songs. Even “The Town & Miss Lorraine,” a 1960s sunshine-folk throwback with a chipper orchestral accompaniment, is upended by tragedy: “There’s a bad accident on the interstate/A snake of engine oil reaching out,” Burns sings. And on “Dead in the Water,” the closest the album comes to directly commenting on the Trump doctrine, a blustery antagonist wields his power vindictively, threatening “a new kind of wrath.”
That sense of chaos and danger is what distinguishes Thread from the many similarly far-reaching records that Calexico have released since the late ’90s. They’ve been around long enough that they’ve lost much of their capacity to surprise; at some point, they fell into a pattern of making very solid hangout records, where even their most adventurous stylistic gambits began to feel like a kind of comfort food. This album’s clear stakes, though, make it feel vital in spite of that familiarity. Calexico have made records that sound like this one before, but they’ve never made one with quite this much fight in it. | 2018-01-26T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2018-01-26T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Anti- | January 26, 2018 | 7.1 | cf3b16c0-332a-4b7c-a030-5f170cd5a76e | Evan Rytlewski | https://pitchfork.com/staff/evan-rytlewski/ | |
The Southern gothic band explores small-town violence, wry self-deprecation, and character sketches on its latest record. | The Southern gothic band explores small-town violence, wry self-deprecation, and character sketches on its latest record. | Drive-By Truckers: Go-Go Boots | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/15125-go-go-boots/ | Go-Go Boots | There is a corpse on the Drive-By Truckers' new album, Go-Go Boots. Both the title track and the eight-minute forensic epic "The Fireplace Poker" are about a woman who meets a bloody end at the hands of her husband, who is a preacher. These two songs are the inverse of the true-crime saga "The Wig He Made Her Wear", a standout from the band's 2010 album, The Big To-Do, about a woman in a small Tennessee town who shoots her allegedly abusive husband, a Church of Christ pastor, in the back with a shotgun.
"Go-Go Boots" is the better of the two new songs, not only because it's shorter but because songwriter Patterson Hood is more interested in the aftermath than the murder itself. The pastor's ne'er-do-well son, with a pregnant teenage girlfriend and a job pumping gas, can't confront his father for fear of losing his temper, so his anger just sizzles and fizzles inside him, with no outlet. Hood intimates a sad arc to his life in a single verse, an impressive lyrical trick that lends the song its considerable gravity. By comparison, "The Fireplace Poker", with its curious guitar curlicue wrapping around Brad Morgan's stoic drumbeat, just recounts the details of the crime and sits aghast at a man's capacity for cruelty.
Enthralled by small-town violence (he's reportedly working on a film about a southern crime syndicate), Hood has explored this material before, documenting crime scenes in song and relating blood splatter and gunshot residue in verse while the band draw the chalk outlines on the floor. As always, it's the carefully chosen details that give these songs heft and personality and keep them from becoming redundant. Hood is telling stories that are rare in rock music, if not altogether nonexistent, and the Truckers boast two other songwriters with similarly distinctive styles and subject matter. Mike Cooley writes in a cursory first-person, emphasizing aw-shucks wordplay and wry self-deprecation: "The Weakest Man" is classic AM country at its wryest, while "Cartoon Gold" is his Zevon anthem, set in a dark L.A. bar seen through even darker sunglasses. "I think about you when I can," he laments, "and sometimes when I do I still get caught."
Over three albums (she's been playing for five but only writing songs for three), bass player Shonna Tucker has grown into a sharp, imaginative lyricist, and her one track on Go-Go Boots shows she's absorbed Hood and Cooley's knack for character sketches. "Dancin' Ricky" depicts a dancer out on the floor with a tight shirt and "freedom out in the open," which I read as "tight pants." Rather than depict this person as a fool, she paints a sort of antihero: "Hey Ricky, don't let the Diabetes get you!" Tucker cheers. Tucker may not have written "Where's Eddie", but she sings it like she did, in a performance that's restrained and soulful-- a bit of feminine guile to offset so much masculine songwriting.
Eddie Hinton wrote "Where's Eddie", and the Muscle Shoals Sounds singer and friend of the Hood family figures prominently on Go-Go Boots-- just as prominently as murderous preachers. The band recently recorded two covers of Hinton's songs for Shake It Records' singles series (Afghan Whigs' Greg Dulli has also contributed), and both sides appear on the album, forming a mini-tribute to the troubled artist, whose success never equaled his talents and who died in 1995 largely unknown. Hood doesn't quite have the vocal chops to put across "Everybody Needs Love" as confidently as Tucker sells "Where's Eddie", but thanks to the band's exuberant take, it proves a potent block of southern soul that reveals the Truckers' range and sensitivity beyond the Crazy Horse guitar attack of recent albums.
In fact, Go-Go Boots sounds like a slight retreat from that rock noise, indulging Cooley's country jones as well as the band's more acoustic tendencies. It's a more dynamic record than The Big To-Do, recalling the ramshackle vibe of their first two albums. There's a greater textural range, from the noir ramble of "Ray's Automatic Weapon" to the spidery tension of "Used to Be a Cop", one of Hood's best character sketches. On the heels of Go-Go Boots comes the DVD release of the documentary The Secret to a Happy Ending, which chronicles the period in the mid-2000s when the Drive-By Truckers almost broke up. There's a telling moment when former guitar player/songwriter Jason Isbell asserts that that line-up was the most solid and the most creative in the band's long history of turnovers. It's no reflection on him, but Go-Go Boots goes a long way to proving him wrong, suggesting a band that knows where all the bodies are buried. | 2011-02-18T01:00:01.000-05:00 | 2011-02-18T01:00:01.000-05:00 | Rock | ATO | February 18, 2011 | 7.7 | cf42ebbf-4ea6-4b7b-bcf0-64a3d43557d2 | Stephen M. Deusner | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stephen-m. deusner/ | null |
After some fairly rough—if creatively fruitful—mental times, Dara Kiely brings heavy vibes and great songs to Girl Band's new album. Should you laugh? Holding Hands With Jamie is as discomfiting as Kiely’s mental state. | After some fairly rough—if creatively fruitful—mental times, Dara Kiely brings heavy vibes and great songs to Girl Band's new album. Should you laugh? Holding Hands With Jamie is as discomfiting as Kiely’s mental state. | Girl Band: Holding Hands With Jamie | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21029-holding-hands-with-jamie/ | Holding Hands With Jamie | Girl Band’s debut EP, 2012’s France 98, was good but unremarkable, the sound of four young Irish guys experimenting with dissonance but rarely straying from ten-a-penny post-punk gloom. By contrast, last year’s "Lawman" was the sign of a band that had found their own sharp footing. Writhing, sexy, and strange, the Dubliners soldered frenzied hi-hats to an industrial mess that recalled early Liars, and Dara Kiely had found his yowling voice located somewhere between his apparently unhinged jaw and spirit. The revelation was nothing compared to what the song did for Kiely himself. During a period of poor mental health, the euphoria he experienced from writing the song (which dealt with a recent breakup) triggered within him a superhuman complex. "I had this thing, this, ‘You are your own god, you are your own master’, this extreme idea," he said. "It was the most amazing feeling I have ever had… I thought I could control the weather. Everything."
Kiely spent a while living in a tent in his back garden, and the episode became so severe that his mother took six months off work to care for him, encouraging him to write when he couldn’t do anything else. Eventually, he had a breakdown and checked into a hospital, and emerged, he says, genuinely at peace. The rest of Girl Band had continued to write while he was away, and on Kiely’s return, he fitted observations from his journal to their squall. His wit hadn’t vanished alongside his sense of reason. "The Last Riddler" repeats verbatim the moment where he asked a doctor for their favorite band. Given the reply "ABBA", Kiely presented him with a piece of paper that read "the winner takes it all," along with some cryptic advice: "Think about it." Elsewhere he’s more fragmented: He "snorted a wasp and told them to eff off" on "Pears for Lunch", where he struggles with body dysmorphia and has a self-loathing wank in front of "Top Gear". Acutely attuned to the goings-on of the natural world, he scraps with pigeons, toys with fetid food, and watches a girl “[race] her slugs to the salt lines." His tragi-comic tidbits combine to a universal portrait of idle squalor and degradation that trumps his realist peers, and aligns him with absurdists like Captain Beefheart or cult poet Patricia Lockwood.
Should you laugh? Holding Hands With Jamie is as discomfiting as Kiely’s mental state. "Pears for Lunch" swells with dangerous fearlessness, recalling '90s news reports of bad amphetamines that made hopped-up kids think they were Icarus, while at the end of "The Last Riddler", Kiely’s screams and explosive bursts of roiling guitar and drums give the impression of a man running amok with a chainsaw. "Paul" picks up the conversation between techno and industrial music that Girl Band started on their cover of Blawan’s "Why They Hide Their Bodies Under My Garage" and takes it somewhere utterly godless and glorious: seven minutes of ravenous, gathering violence comprised of screaming guitar, lurching bass, and superhuman effort from drummer Adam Faulkner.
Where this spring’s The Early Years EP—led by "Lawman"—either went hell for leather or slowed the pace entirely, on Holding Hands… Girl Band have mastered suspense. "Baloo" chugs like Battles’ Mirrored retooled from corroded scrap metal; "In Plastic" has a pendulous, borderline romantic quality. They self-produced, and the record often sounds as if it was recorded on the other side of a warehouse wall, like muffled industry contained within a rubbery membrane. This strange distance could be frustrating, but it becomes an integral part of Girl Band’s sound, which feels unique right now. Traces of Liars’ DNA persist, as do similarities to those tireless Texans Shit and Shine, but it’s hard to think of another guitar-based band conjuring fear this exhilarating and volume this rapturous. | 2015-10-05T02:00:02.000-04:00 | 2015-10-05T02:00:02.000-04:00 | Rock | Rough Trade | October 5, 2015 | 7.8 | cf4418be-2e85-4dde-833e-39ee4d0c9d06 | Laura Snapes | https://pitchfork.com/staff/laura-snapes/ | null |
Grime outsider Trim teams up with James Blake and other members of the British electronic music scene for an intriguing, somewhat-cluttered collaborative mixtape. | Grime outsider Trim teams up with James Blake and other members of the British electronic music scene for an intriguing, somewhat-cluttered collaborative mixtape. | Trim: 1-800 DINOSAUR Presents Trim | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22199-1-800-dinosaur-presents-trim/ | 1-800 DINOSAUR Presents Trim | Trim is Javan St. Prix, an East London native who has been active in the UK grime scene for the last decade and a half, most prominently as a member of Wiley’s Roll Deep Crew for a chunk of change in the mid-’00s. He left after a dispute with his compatriot Flowdan, and he’s charted a steady career of mixtape releases in the last ten years that have characterized him as the scene’s preeminent outsider. As opposed to, say, Skepta, his flow is a little more melodic, erring towards spoken word, and leans harder into patois. The producer’s he’s courted have a decidedly weirder vibe also (Mark Pritchard, or Mumdance for example).
He met James Blake not long after peeling off from the Roll Deep Crew, when Blake remixed Trim’s 2007 song “Confidence Boost.” Blake invited Trim to the music video shoot for the the remix, and they’ve kept in touch since. Meanwhile, Blake started 1-800 Dinosaur sometime in 2013, after hosting a club night with his manager and fellow producer Dan Foat. They invited members of Blake’s band Airhead (Blake’s live guitarist, Rob McAndrews), Mr. Assister (Blake’s drummer Ben Assiter), and Klaus (Nick Sigsworth, Blake’s tour DJ) to round out the crew, and a year later they started an ad-hoc record label that mostly released one-off 12-inches. For their first full-length release, they’ve invited Trim to be the voice of a curated selection from the 1-800 crew and friends in the wider circle of left-field British electronic music.
As such, Trim’s newest mixtape and 1-800’s first release is muddled in terms of accreditation. Just look at the title: *1-800 Dinosaur Presents Trim, *which announces immediately that this is a 1-800 Dinosaur project and Trim is merely the vessel. When you listen to the album, this attitude is uncomfortably palpable, as if Trim is a side attraction and the sound studies by 1-800 Dinosaur the main event.
The album only ever feels truly collaborative when the beat feels like something chosen with his voice in mind. In the opener, the Airhead-produced “Stretch,” he rasps his way through lines that mimic poems like Shelley’s “Ozymandias” (“Got me thinking how dare I throw up signs/From such an eroding monument/While they whisper my accomplishments”) in an ear-catching cadence closer to spoken-word. The mix of unapologetic distaste for the state of UK rap and almost-neurotic self-aggrandizement in his lyrics borders on grating later in the album, but in “Stretch” it’s simply fascinating. In “Waco,” also produced by Airhead, the sound thoughtfully suits Trim’s lethargic pace, and counts for one of the most clever instrumentals I’ve heard all year. The percussion slithers around Trim’s voice, breaking out into a fragmented staccato when the song hits its peak.
But other songs, like the James Blake-produced “RPG,” feel totally off-center, almost selfish in how they occupy the same space as Trim’s voice and crowd the frame. Blake’s rough chiptune synths and high-pitched vocal samples are almost unlistenable next to Trim’s baritone drawl, and there are times on this cluttered album where Trim seem so mismatched that I wished the entire set was just instrumentals.
In the face of unsympathetic production, Trim’s lyrics seem blunter, less imagistic, and clunkier over time (“Fuck him this duckling’s ugly and I’ll pop off if you ask for the spinach” from “White Room”). At the same time, his obsession with his ostracization from the “scene” at large can be tiresome. He harps on his individuality in contrast to the rest of the sheeple (“Most man need a collective”), and showcases a kind of unintentionally hilarious unproven swagger as his defense (“My album cover is perfect..I haven’t brought an album out/But I’ve touched a nerve”).
In a recent interview with Complex, Trim even threw some shade at this project, saying that the mixtape has nothing to do with his future work, and that he felt like he had to dumb down for this project to work on what he called “a wider scale.” Elsewhere in this interview he disavows grime completely, saying he would rather be considered part of his own “genre.” Taking his comments in light of this muddled, occasionally fascinating album, it's easy to see that despite all the talent and vision involved, something about this collaboration just didn't work on a fundamental level. | 2016-08-05T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-08-05T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | 1-800 DINOSAUR | August 5, 2016 | 6 | cf458958-4a77-4ad1-bb64-9981eff6cb26 | Kevin Lozano | https://pitchfork.com/staff/kevin-lozano/ | null |
John Darnielle confronts death once more, this time through a series of mortals, spirits, and superheroes. | John Darnielle confronts death once more, this time through a series of mortals, spirits, and superheroes. | The Mountain Goats: Hex of Infinite Binding EP | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/the-mountain-goats-hex-of-infinite-binding-ep/ | Hex of Infinite Binding EP | The Mountain Goats have long employed vivid characters, both real and fictionalized, as conduits for complicated ideas. In the past decade, the band’s lead singer and songwriter, John Darnielle, used an aging goth to tell a story about mortality and a professional wrestler to discuss the brutality of middle age. Then in 2017, he released an EP entitled Marsh Witch Visions all about Ozzy Osbourne. Now the North Carolina-based group is back at it with a new set of mortals, spirits, and superheroes tackling a range of issues on the surprise EP Hex of Infinite Binding.
There’s Dr. Ted Sallis, a cult Marvel character who tragically morphs into a woeful swamp creature named Man-Thing, and Percy Grainger, an avant-garde Australian composer with a penchant for transforming traditional British folk songs into symphonies. These are the strange influences camping out under the covers of “Song for Ted Sallis,” the opening track of Hex of Infinite Binding. Unlike the bulk of the Mountain Goats’ recent work, the four tracks here—all of which were written and recorded at different times and places over the course of the year—aren’t united by a single concept. Instead, themes like death, depression, and existential crises drop by only to reappear later, propelled along by the breathy woodwinds section of multi-instrumentalist Matt Douglas.
Inspired by Grainger’s masterpiece “Lincolnshire Posy,” the soft buzz of the woodwinds on “Song for Ted Sallis” and “Almost Every Door” lift both pieces into meditative dimensions. On the former, the gentle, padded sounds of the bass clarinet transform depressive lyrics like “Wherever my former self went/It was an accident” into spiritual reassurances. Better to surrender to the circumstances of your existence, the tender melody suggests, then to rage against them. The soul of Dr. Ted Sallis may now be lost somewhere inside a swamp monster, but he isn’t gone forever. We can choose to believe, as Darnielle does, that one day Sallis will “be found in the vortex shortly before sundown.”
As will Judy Garland. She is the main character in “Hospital Reaction Shot,” a pleasant tune inspired by a photograph of Garland’s final husband, Mickey Deans, alerting the press of the actress’ death. “Let the tube lights buzz overhead/Tell the papers that you’re dead,” Darnielle solemnly sings. It’s a sad scene, but the delicate guitar-based lullaby unfurling behind the vocals brings comfort to the tragic situation, as does an uplifting string arrangement orchestrated by Chris Stamey and executed deftly by Aubrey Keisel on viola and violin and Leah Gibson on cello. Darnielle’s light touch soothes mourners and suggests, once again, that death doesn’t have to be a destructive force; Judy Garland and Ted Sallis are just energy, and therefore can never be destroyed.
But they can be tested. We all can, and sometimes life, as Darnielle has documented so brilliantly in the past, is sad as hell. A depression sets in on the last track of Hex of Infinite Being, “Tucson Fog,” and it carries a return to Darnielle’s earlier stripped-down, pleading recordings from the All Hail West Texas era. In this case, the acoustic call to arms, rendered even more urgent by a taut violin performance from Keisel, unleashes then defeats the monster inside Darnielle’s mind: “The fog takes shape/Like a golem with a vengeful eye/Limbs like rippling swans’ necks/At least a hundred stories high.” Darnielle has battled this beast before, so channeling Dr. Sallis who once declared, “Whatever you fear is shadow mist!,” he frantically strums his way towards accepting that this too shall pass. Eventually, the fog will lift and reveal that “all worlds are dream and sleep,” and those we fear are missing will live on endlessly as our muses and fixations. In the case of the Mountain Goats, death is just another one of life’s plot twists. | 2018-09-19T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-09-19T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Merge | September 19, 2018 | 7.4 | cf45a996-0037-44c5-b6c6-bb17c5aac81a | Abigail Covington | https://pitchfork.com/staff/abigail-covington/ | |
The Ninja Tune star has assembled his newest album-- his best in seven years-- as if he's decided he's exhausted the possibilities of musical instruments themselves and gone outside with a microphone to find out what sort of ambient sounds would make good beats. | The Ninja Tune star has assembled his newest album-- his best in seven years-- as if he's decided he's exhausted the possibilities of musical instruments themselves and gone outside with a microphone to find out what sort of ambient sounds would make good beats. | Amon Tobin: The Foley Room | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/9945-the-foley-room/ | The Foley Room | For someone with such an uncanny aptitude for evoking a wide range of cinema-friendly mood music, Amon Tobin's potential as a soundtracker seems to have been largely unrealized. What he does have on his resumé-- the scores to stealth-kill video game Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory, a surrealist, morbid Hungarian film about taxidermy, and a car commercial in which a group of presumably nude silhouettes contort their way into the shape of an SUV-- hints at why. Since Tobin makes no distinctions between background and foreground music and tends to wring as much distortion, dissonance, and rhythmic unease as he can from his jazz and orchestral-skewing sample sources, his music tends to evoke a malevolent presence that, whether skulking or charging, easily overwhelms all but the most immersive and eye-catching visual accompaniment.
The irony in Tobin's The Foley Room is that his cinematic ear has spurred him toward different motion picture-derived source material. Paring down his repertoire of bop debris and Ennio Morricone/Jerry Goldsmith evocations, Tobin's assembled his newest album as if he's decided he's exhausted the possibilities of musical instruments themselves and gone outside with a microphone to find out what sort of ambient sounds would make good beats. It makes sense in that the only thing that separates the manipulated sound of a household appliance or the drone of machinery from an electronically generated percussive effect is the element of familiarity; given the way Tobin's samples tend to transmutate traditional orchestration into concussed unrecognizability, manipulating a non-musical effect into a similar state is an inevitable step, one that he initially took in 1998 with Permutation and has been creeping towards ever since.
But while other musique concrète specialists such as Matmos aim to bring specific messages to mind with their thematic choices of sound manipulation, Tobin's approach seems to aim strictly for the aesthetic-- like two slabs of raw steak smacked together to simulate a punch to the head in some 1930s radio serial, the meaning of the medium's less important than how the end result sounds. Some of the effects' usage is a bit self-aware of their non-musical origins: "Kitchen Sink" is just that, a booming series of splashes that sound like elastic liquid dripping into a stainless steel basin and ricocheting its way down the drain; the fuzztone in the metallic drill-n-bass of "Esther's" is boosted by the rumble of a motorcycle engine, "Leader of the Pack" style (a rumble augmented by, and this required looking up, the sound of restless wasps); the title track introduces a few clamorous mess-making tumbles and crashes, shaped into something that sounds like the collapse of a kitchen shelf set to an Art Blakey drum solo.
But not everything is as blatantly laid out: The Robitussin whir that "The Killer's Vanilla" breathes through could be anything from a slowed-down pipe organ to a creaking set of gears passed through a filter or three, not to mention the way "Keep Your Distance" blurs the lines between woodblock-and-cowbell percussion and what seems to be the clamor of a recycling bin tipping over. Since Tobin still uses his share of musical instrumentation (including a memorable Slavic-esque string melody contributed by the Kronos Quartet on "Bloodstone"), figuring where the musician ends and nature or the machinery or the junkpile begins is intriguingly confusing. Supposedly there are recordings of ants eating grass and building acoustics somewhere on this record, but damned if they're easy to pinpoint amidst the beats.
Once the novelty of the record's field recording collage-job settles down, The Foley Room proves to be rhythmically consistent with Tobin's glitchy, post-jungle M.O., if somewhat exploratory; a couple moments flirt with dubstep but get too twitchy and restless to segue all that comfortably into your typical Burial track, and the broken-down carnival dance-rock of "Always" is just close enough to a genuine crowd-pleasing dancefloor number that it's a bit startling when the inevitable diamond-crushing load of distorted bass comes in. In the end, what makes The Foley Room Tobin's best album in seven years is the way his bent for organized chaos manifests as a deft control of every sound that surrounds him: Anything's a beat, everything's a break, and the difference between sound and music is entirely contextual. | 2007-03-05T01:00:02.000-05:00 | 2007-03-05T01:00:02.000-05:00 | Electronic / Jazz | Ninja Tune | March 5, 2007 | 8.1 | cf66824f-14ce-4095-af3b-2c9734d81be7 | Nate Patrin | https://pitchfork.com/staff/nate-patrin/ | null |
The full-length debut from the Philadelphia metalcore band folds in industrial and ambient textures into a brutal sound that’s still, thankfully, based around big, slamming breakdowns. | The full-length debut from the Philadelphia metalcore band folds in industrial and ambient textures into a brutal sound that’s still, thankfully, based around big, slamming breakdowns. | Jesus Piece: Only Self | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/jesus-piece-only-self/ | Only Self | Jesus Piece rage at the nexus of hardcore, death metal, industrial, and ’90s metalcore. They’re part of a new metalcore movement that proves that experimentation and succinct, clobbering riffs can not only coexist, but make for natural partners. On their first full-length, Only Self, they make the case that such should be the new tradition.
Self bolsters the industrial elements that Jesus Piece toyed around with on a 2016 demo and a 2017 split with Florida hardcore band Malice at the Palace. While they are still based around big, slamming beatdowns, the textures are more worked in and they don’t just act as segues. Vocalist Aaron Heard and guitarist John DiStefano are also in Philly’s Hell to Pay, who take similar influences in a more noise-grind direction—it’s a natural progression for them. The rapid-fire bass intro to “Punish” is one of the most intense moments on the album, a fusing of industrial metal’s pulverizing coldness with hardcore’s brisk energy. “Punish” maintains that fury when Jesus Piece switch back, a testament to how, in their short existence and even quicker shift in sound, they can still get all sorts of windmill kicks going. Opener “Lucid” and “Curse of the Serpent” don’t bask in the band’s new direction, and they don’t need to: they’re chunky death metal bursts set to bouncy hardcore tempos—as good of a foundation as any.
“In the Silence” switches between shimmering, submerged cleans and the band’s crushing breakdowns and Heard’s yells take on an abyss-staring personality when confronted by these more placid moments. More than a simple contrast between volumes, the ambient base knocks the metal out of its grounding, lending to an unease that lingers when the guitars roar back in. It has the same vibe as Chicago hardcore band Harm’s Way’s “Temptation” from earlier this year, which also contrasted droney textures with aggressive hardcore. Like Harm’s Way, Jesus Piece see industrial’s fraught marriage with metal in the ’90s as ripe for reinterpretation, giving it new life through hardcore’s immediacy. “Silence” solves the conundrum of being split between wanting to listen to Eno or Hatebreed.
They expand on the template further and chop it in half on the last two tracks, “I” and “II.” “I” is all free, gorgeous noise with soft cymbals distorted into lush puddles, while “II” brings back crunching guitar but at slower paces and a more layered feel, like Jesu stuck in purgatory. At first, it feels anticlimactic to end a metalcore record on a hanging note, no last bash to re-energize and go out in a circle pit of glory. Jesus Piece are not here for the meathead-aversion to change, even if they do enjoy a lizard-brain riff. | 2018-08-30T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-08-30T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Metal | Southern Lord | August 30, 2018 | 7.6 | cf6a5fa8-4c72-4815-bc3e-a1777ce5a591 | Andy O'Connor | https://pitchfork.com/staff/andy-o'connor/ | |
The legendary band's first full-length in eight years is a besotted concept album about the desert, once again revealing the depth of their imagination. | The legendary band's first full-length in eight years is a besotted concept album about the desert, once again revealing the depth of their imagination. | Mekons: Deserted | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/mekons-deserted/ | Deserted | As someone who has stood in the middle of the Texas desert and gazed up at the night sky, I can appreciate the near-drunken wobbliness with which Tom Greenhalgh sings “How Many Stars.” As the Mekons play a gently swaying, not-quite-reggae rhythm, the vocalist/guitarist/founding member sounds like a man overwhelmed by the brilliance of a clear night sky dotted with billions of points of light, and all he can muster in response is a fumbling, not-quite-rhetorical question: “How many stars are out tonight? How many stars? How many stars?” When the rest of the band abandon their instruments to harmonize with Greenhalgh, it becomes a besotted sing-along, which is another way of saying it’s a Mekons song.
The inspiration, according to the song’s author, was not Texas, but a desert on the other side of the globe: the Australian outback. “I was standing out in the middle of nowhere, where there are no lights on,” Jon Langford recently told the Quietus. “Because it’s the other side of the planet, they don’t have the same constellations. Just the sheer number of stars was extraordinary.” Fittingly titled Deserted, the Mekons’ latest album (and their first studio full-length in eight long years) is inspired by these remote places where civilization cannot easily thrive but humanity and wonder can.
Lately, the band has been fascinated with overarching, often charmingly unwieldy concepts. Their last album, 2011’s Ancient & Modern, compared the world of 100 years ago and the world of today, while 2014’s Jura,featuring alt-country Rasputin Robbie Fulks, was not only recorded on that Scottish island but addresses issues of isolation and the weighty history that comes with the dour weather. Deserted was recorded in Joshua Tree National Park in California, and begins with the raucous, recklessly paced “Lawrence of California,” which barely holds together as the band reimagine T.E. Lawrence organizing an insurgent army somewhere in Death Valley. “Harar 1883” offer a bleary vision of poet Arthur Rimbaud hallucinating in Ethiopia. The glam-stomping “Weimar Vending Machine” even traces a handful of sand that ends up in a baggie sold to none other than Iggy Pop.
Rarely do the Mekons get quite as loose as they do on Deserted, alternating between arid, nocturnal atmosphere that seems to emanate from Susie Honeyman’s fiddle and moments of near hysteria, as though their sun-baked brains have gone haywire. These songs take their time to wander about, even getting lost in the vast expanse — sometimes a little too lost, as on the rambling “Mirage.” But even that song reveals the Mekons’ versatility and imagination. There is an intoxicating beauty to the harshness of the desert, an inspiration to be drawn from the hardiness of the life found there—and that pretty much describes this unkillable band. | 2019-04-06T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-04-06T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Bloodshot | April 6, 2019 | 7.2 | cf6f26d6-5046-4950-b28b-148e3cebe964 | Stephen M. Deusner | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stephen-m. deusner/ | |
In ninth grade, I brought some tapes to my school band teacher. It was stuff my then-band had been working ... | In ninth grade, I brought some tapes to my school band teacher. It was stuff my then-band had been working ... | 90 Day Men: Panda Park | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/5808-panda-park/ | Panda Park | In ninth grade, I brought some tapes to my school band teacher. It was stuff my then-band had been working on in my scant, single-mic'd bedroom. We weren't a bedroom pop outfit by any stretch; back then we played dour, emotionally apoplexed emocore. And what we played weren't quite songs, per se: There were chords, and some faint attempts at melodies, but that was about all you could make out underneath the tumescent basslines and audible flying shards of metal from my cymbal crashes. Still, Mr. Rotello put his blistered ear to speaker and carefully considered our laughable concoctions. When it was over, he declared, "I think you guys need a piano."
I like to kid myself and think that if we'd taken his advice, stayed together, and learned to play our instruments, like, really well, we might today sound akin to 90 Day Men, whose piano-driven compositions resonate with Biblical intensity. The fact is, no one does: 90 Day Men are one of the most original bands underground, and their instrumental competency offers something for high school freshman everywhere to admire. The band has been labeled everything from prog rock to "hardcore pop," but so far no one's been able to pigeonhole their sound successfully-- and actually, I think it would be doing the band a disservice to shoo them into any genre or subgenre just yet.
Panda Park, the band's third full-length release in four years, updates a sound that was already intriguing and distinctive on To Everybody and the pompously titled (It (Is) It) Critical Band. By now, the Men have earned the right to sound as pretentious as they did on their debut album, but opt instead for a more honed approach. At a modest 32 minutes, Panda Park is like a French dinner: a tight package of intensely rich compositions, best taken one forkful at a time, accompanied by a gracious interlude to help cleanse the palette and, of course, a decadent finale. But where the band's earlier material was dreary to a point of being downright oppressive, Panda Park utilizes lighter textures to help brighten the milieu. "Chronological Disorder" and "When Your Luck Runs Out" contain sufficient helpings of electronic sugar, making the songs blithely enjoyable, and at times even a bit (gasp!) uplifting.
A naive conception commonly held is that instrumental skill must always upend a song's integrity by superseding everything that makes music meaningful to us. 90 Day Men seem as if they're on a mission to erase that fallacy. But before calling compositionally intricate songs such as "Even Time Ghost Can't Stop Wagner" prog-rock, be aware of the implications. These guys aren't Queensryche: every 32nd note and oddly syncopated melody feels meaningful and integral to the overall piece.
As for the piano, its presence fits right in to the clamorous mix. Like Menomena on last year's I Am the Fun Blame Monster, 90 Day Men gracefully interweave high-volume electronics and acoustic elements. Andy Lansangan's listful keyboard and piano parts often serve as the driving melodic element. In the grandiose chorus of "Chronological Disorder", an ideal side-one closer, he and Case team up for their best "November Rain" impersonation-- which actually isn't such a bad thing: Like all the bold ideas on Panda Park, the move is pulled off tastefully and with just the right restraint. Case's arena rock caterwauling is reserved for a few well-placed choruses, which is symbolic of the huge strides 90 Day Men have made with this album. The band have finally mastered the monstrous proportions of their diffuse talents and arranged them in ways that are wholly satisfying and distinctly unique. | 2004-02-12T01:00:02.000-05:00 | 2004-02-12T01:00:02.000-05:00 | Rock | Southern | February 12, 2004 | 8 | cf7577a3-521d-46ec-ba3b-2c08adc19474 | Pitchfork | null |
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Using samples from thrift store LPs and dollar bins, Deerhunter drummer Moses John Archuleta crafted a diffuse solo effort where sweet melodies gleam from beneath grimy noise. | Using samples from thrift store LPs and dollar bins, Deerhunter drummer Moses John Archuleta crafted a diffuse solo effort where sweet melodies gleam from beneath grimy noise. | Moon Diagrams: Lifetime of Love | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/moon-diagrams-lifetime-of-love/ | Lifetime of Love | “It is all pink candy,” Vladimir Nabokov once said of Maxim Gorky’s short story Twenty-six Men and a Girl, “with just that amount of soot clinging to it to make it attractive.” There’s something of a soot-caked candy quality to Lifetime of Love, the debut album of Moon Diagrams: sweet pop melodies gleam out beneath a gauze of grimy noise, muffled like the sounds of the dancefloor heard from the bathroom stall. The effect is certainly attractive. All efforts to reimagine pop music as a lo-fi endeavor—to warp it, flatten it, to smother it in reverb and distortion—exploit the appeal of that contrast, that incongruity of candy and soot. The risk, as Nabokov believed of Gorky, is that under the likable veneer lurks nothing so substantial.
Moon Diagrams is Moses John Archuleta, drummer and founding member of Deerhunter, who have many times enshrouded buoyant pop songs—think “Memory Boy,” “Vox Humana,” “Nothing Ever Happened”—in a dense, discordant pall. But Deerhunter is chiefly a rock band, and they write substantive, at times conventional rock songs; the cassette-hiss and ambient noodling that enriches their aesthetic are ornamental. Archuleta’s solo work is much more amorphous and diffuse. He doesn’t write orthodox pop numbers and simply twist them a little toward the avant-garde. Rather he seeks out glimpses of pop—snatches of a lovely tune, echoes of an irresistible beat or bassline—and assembles them, hazily, dreamily, into a nebulous pop-noise hash.
Lifetime of Love arrives with a making-of narrative that both contextualizes its sound and amplifies its mystique. Archuleta says he lifted the constituent elements of the record arbitrarily from thrift store LPs and dollar bins, turning remnants of musical glory past into loops and samples. The technique, of course, is hardly novel: crate-plundering has been responsible for some of the most dazzling albums ever recorded, from Endtroducing..... to The College Dropout. But few musicians gravitate to the kinds of sounds that seem to interest Archuleta: ambient whirs, lugubrious synths. The result is not a variegated collage so much as a downbeat, strangely uniform muddle.
And yet the muddle, more often than not, sounds quite good. “Nightmoves,” one of Lifetime of Love’s most emphatic and coherent tracks, is a meandering, largely shapeless six and a half minute slab of minimalist ambient-techno in the tradition of GAS’ Pop—and it’s sublime. The sprawling, atmospheric “The Ghost and the Host”—thumping along to its chintzy drum-machine beat—dithers unvaryingly for nearly a quarter of an hour without overstaying its welcome or exhausting its appeal. Even when morose, as on the understated 11-minute soundscape “Blue Ring,” Archuleta retains a certain command: no matter how long he lets an idea linger, he never seems to let it drag on. You can sense his design guiding the album even at its most indefinite and indistinct.
Lifetime of Love is the product of a decade’s labor. Archuleta began experimenting on his own in 2007, after the release of Deerhunter’s acclaimed Cryptograms, and from those early sessions produced “Nightmoves” and the gentler “Bodymaker.” Then came a memoir’s worth of private turbulence: divorce, drug trips, world tours, alienation. Archuleta claims to have recorded much of the album over a series of “fugue states.” The extent to which all this turmoil manifests in the music itself is unclear: exquisite as a great deal of Lifetime of Love sounds, it is not an album especially rich in emotional depth or apparent meaning. Its merits, not to be shrugged off, are nevertheless mainly superficial—the slight but definite virtues of a decidedly minor record. It is, in Nabokov’s phrase, pink candy. But the soot makes it very appealing. | 2017-07-13T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-07-13T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Geographic North | July 13, 2017 | 7 | cf8b68d7-c770-46a6-9a76-2348ee1aae64 | Calum Marsh | https://pitchfork.com/staff/calum-marsh/ | null |
The Melbourne songwriter’s classic influences guide her toward an album that feels proudly out of time. Its nine songs feel like variations on one stark, psychedelic vision. | The Melbourne songwriter’s classic influences guide her toward an album that feels proudly out of time. Its nine songs feel like variations on one stark, psychedelic vision. | Grace Cummings: Refuge Cove | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/grace-cummings-refuge-cove/ | Refuge Cove | Grace Cummings broke through with a Bob Dylan cover filmed in her Melbourne, Australia home, a performance so brilliant that it earned her a record deal with King Gizzard’s Flightless Records. A few well-placed props in that video provide some visual insight into what makes her debut album Refuge Cove so strange and captivating. There is, of course, a photo of Dylan himself above her right shoulder: an immense influence on her bold acoustic strumming, harmonica playing, and imagistic songwriting. There’s also a Grateful Dead record on the turntable, keying into the more cosmic places she takes those sounds.
The most visible face in the video is her most unlikely source of inspiration: a Rolling Stone cover featuring the late AC/DC frontman Bon Scott, displayed prominently on her shelf. His band’s libidinous ’70s party anthems might seem miles away from her sparse psych-folk, but the two artists have more in common than just where they grew up. Like Scott, Cummings isn’t content to merely sing along to her melodies. She tears her low, surging voice to shreds, braying like she’s beckoning you from the opposite end of a crowded room. It adds an eerie, intense quality to her music—a desperation behind the calm of her arrangements. In another era, she might have fronted her own rock’n’roll warhorse.
Her classic influences guide her toward an album that feels proudly out of time, and its nine songs feel like variations on one stark, psychedelic vision. Many of them are written in open tunings so that the lowest strings rattle pleasantly in the background, complementing the natural movement of her voice and words. In the opening track, “The Look You Gave,” her lyrics summon the ocean, moonlight, and wind through mountains, as her delivery, slow and ebbing, strives to create its own atmosphere. “In the Wind” closes the album at the piano, the gravel in her throat summoning the darkness in her words.
The few musical accompaniments on the record feel spontaneous and half-imagined. The delicate backing vocals and fingerpicking in “Paisley” and the out-of-tune piano in “Sleep” give the sense of something captured just before the feeling was lost. Her lyrics add to this elusive quality. On the album’s shortest song, “Just Like That,” she asks for someone to join in harmony but cuts herself off before she seems to have figured out the melody. A similar sense of uncertainty carries the highlight “Sleep.” In each successive chorus, she compares herself unfavorably to a legend in a different field: artist Brett Whiteley, Big Star songwriter Chris Bell, and Meryl Streep. It might sound like self-deprecation, but Cummings casts it as a kind of affirmation. With Refuge Cove, she’s carved her own path worth following. | 2020-01-03T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2020-01-03T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Folk/Country | Flightless | January 3, 2020 | 7.4 | cf8d9a74-4cd4-45bf-9c96-02215bffcd49 | Sam Sodomsky | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sam-sodomsky/ | |
The enigmatic Los Angeles rapper-producer's latest is a journey of discovery within a world of shadows, and his best and most stimulating music yet. | The enigmatic Los Angeles rapper-producer's latest is a journey of discovery within a world of shadows, and his best and most stimulating music yet. | Zeroh: BLQLYTE | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/zeroh-blqlyte/ | BLQLYTE | The elusive Los Angeles rapper-producer and engineer Zeroh, born Edwin Liddie Jr., has been active for nearly a decade, but he’s been covering his tracks. As Blaqbird, Zeroh, and a few other different names, Liddie Jr. released music for free on Tumblr, eventually linking up with producer Jonwayne, electronic musician Shlohmo, and the Wedidit crew. He became immersed in the L.A. beat scene, sampling Flying Lotus and Georgia Anne Muldrow and working with producers like the late Ras G and Low Leaf. For a while, some assumed Zeroh was the rapper behind the Captain Murphy character because of his connection to Low End Theory, his knack for hiding in plain sight, and his smudging, multisyllabic wordplay.
In many ways, BLQLYTE is a culmination of his many years of experimentation. Created over a six-year span and entirely self-produced, his debut for Leaving Records is a journey of discovery within his world of shadows, and it is his best and most stimulating music yet. In its consideration of the effects of psychoactive drugs on the mind, the album shares lessons learned through introspection, though not in any straightforward manner. Just as a black light often reveals things unseen by the naked eye, on BLQLYTE, Zeroh illuminates the things that go unobserved in dark places.
It can sometimes be difficult to derive any linear meaning from Zeroh’s songs, but their freeform narratives can be riveting just for how they sound. He revels in challenging listeners, and his sentences break apart until they begin to smear. On the title track, his bars dissolve into a phonetic soup (“Hue imbued human suit on two-inch tape/Tried and true like chest techniques”). The deeper you get into any verse, the more unbound it seems to become, and they are even headier when taken in the context of a psychedelic odyssey. “You should be shrooming in the ashram/Superhuman in the strug’/Levitating through the chasm/Cause hitting rock bottom may never be enough,” he raps on “4D.” There is something to be gained for the casual listener, the careful listener, and the mindful one.
More impressive than Zeroh’s improvement as a beatmaker or his sharpened skill as a writer is his evolution as a producer. If there was ever a knock on his music before, it was that nothing bound his projects together, but BLQLYTE shows a gloomy and glitchy personal style forming. The whirring vortex of synths on “Invaluable” sounds like being sucked into an airlock. On “Mudblood,” wheezing electronics and misfiring drums settle into a mosaic, his raps skipping along the edges. Closer “Aquamane” is hushed, rippling, and bottomless; it sounds like the ocean floor. There are a handful of mentions of microdosing, and it feels like Zeroh is trying to induce a mini-hallucination or trigger some sort of breakthrough—if not in you, then in himself. His production is nearly heady enough to pull it off.
Zeroh’s nature is to obfuscate, but here that obfuscation is stylized and purposeful. He wrings meaning from murk, tangible feelings from riddles. “It definitely feels like stuntin’ when you bend/blur the lines and show people what’s possible,” he recently said, and according to this metric, he is definitely stunting across BLQLYTE. In so doing, Zeroh both reintroduces himself and redefines what is possible for his music.
Buy: Rough Trade
(Pitchfork earns a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.) | 2020-04-27T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-04-27T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Leaving | April 27, 2020 | 7.5 | cf969923-0a5d-410f-84e1-24dfbe38bf44 | Sheldon Pearce | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sheldon-pearce/ | |
The rapper’s new mixtape is a jewel of DC street rap, recounting hood epics and hustler origin stories with a potent sense of realism. | The rapper’s new mixtape is a jewel of DC street rap, recounting hood epics and hustler origin stories with a potent sense of realism. | Paco Panama: Southside Sopranos | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/paco-panama-southside-sopranos/ | Southside Sopranos | Decades of neglect and slashed funding have pushed the United States’ public housing system into crisis. Increased privatization, mass renovations, and sweeping demolitions have displaced longtime tenants while fattening the pockets of corporations and landlords, whose agendas treat locals as an afterthought. Nearly every major city in the US has their own horror stories as a result—including Washington, DC, where Paco Panama was raised. He grew up in a project in the southeastern part of town, which he says was torn down around 2020. Paco was rapping before that, but with nothing left to do after it was razed, he started spending more time in the studio. His hustler rap is an unglamorous, morally complex firsthand account of an ecosystem full of drug dealers, addicts, lookout boys, and cops. It’s political even if it’s not heavy-handed.
Paco Panama’s first mixtape of the year, Southside Sopranos, drops him directly into that unrelenting world. Southside Sopranos isn’t quite as weighty as last year’s breakout mixtape The Wire Vol. 1, named after the Baltimore-set HBO show. That’s mostly because of The Sopranos theme, which is showcased in the form of goofy, grating Italian gangster skits by hometown comedian Chico Bean that are headscratchingly more Don Corleone than Tony Soprano. (He wishes he was as funny as Master P’s Black Italian character in the MP Da Last Don movie.) But Paco is a colorful and evocative rapper, stuffing tracks with vignettes of neighborhood dealings and hard-earned life lessons that only sometimes veer into empty clichés. All of these tales are related with the worn-down voice of a longtime bruiser just shootin’ the shit on a stoop; the breezy, soulful tint on the doomsday bounce of DMV street rap helps emphasize that mood.
His stories are vivid and unfurl gradually, making them feel as dramatic as movie clips. Whether he’s lining the interior of his whip with bricks before a long out-of-state drive on “Contraband,” or detailing the intricacies of traphouse shifts on “DC House,” the scenes feel complete instead of blurry. Sometimes he evokes the weathered Detroit duo Los and Nutty, whose dope dealing epics are no doubt a heavy inspiration. But Paco branches out by focusing on the consequences of the lifestyle, one that he’s remorseful about when he’s not hypnotized by hood glory. (It makes sense that one of the first rap songs he knew was Scarface’s psychologically conflicted “Born Killer.”) Occasionally he’s cold-blooded about it all, like when he raps “Fuck yo’ problems, see a therapist” on “Supreme Clientele.” Yet more often than not, you can feel the weight on his shoulders: “Life will fuck you up, you gotta adapt to it/Everyday struggles I had to trap through it,” he says a few bars into “Time Will Tell.” The mixtape runs nearly an hour; the moral complexity of what he has to do to survive rears its head again and again.
His writing has range, too: He can pen a melancholy tribute to his grandmother (“Letter to Granny”) just as well as he can team up with his crew for some small-time flexing (“A-Team”). There are even a few bars that will make you laugh, like on “Evil Genius.” Paco follows up a rhyme about how much “powder” he has with a long breath—as if he’s about to spit something momentous—but actually ends up saying, “Like a nigga got on a pamper.” That range doesn’t extend to love songs; I’m skeptical that he actually cares about any of the relationship issues he gripes about on “Major.”
What takes no convincing is how alive his stomping grounds feel. His depiction is raw and grueling, one with not a lot of hope or ways out, but he raps about it with warmth. On “Extortion,” there’s the spit-shined Benz and the park where he used to get into trouble with the guys. On “Soul Food,” both disturbing and sweet memories are rehashed with the nostalgia of family dinners. In a revolving door of DC street rappers whose city feels as dark and dangerous as Gotham, Paco stands out as the grounded man on the block who takes in the details that are usually glossed over. | 2024-03-06T00:01:00.000-05:00 | 2024-03-06T00:01:00.000-05:00 | Rap | NEWWRLD | March 6, 2024 | 7.4 | cf98d35a-60af-422b-99c1-64ec02195f3d | Alphonse Pierre | https://pitchfork.com/staff/alphonse-pierre/ | |
Spencer Krug takes a detour under a new alias, constructing a suprisingly affecting and dreamlike 20-minute track using the instruments in the EP's subtitle. | Spencer Krug takes a detour under a new alias, constructing a suprisingly affecting and dreamlike 20-minute track using the instruments in the EP's subtitle. | Moonface: Dreamland EP: Marimba and Shit-Drums | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/13899-dreamland-ep-marimba-and-shit-drums/ | Dreamland EP: Marimba and Shit-Drums | Depending on where you conduct your Internet research, the marimba, a wooden-block percussion device with West African origins, may be one of the world's oldest instruments. After migrating to South America with African slaves, it caught on big, gaining its Latin name and becoming the national instrument of Guatemala. When it reached the United States in the early 20th century, the marimba was welcomed into symphony orchestras and jazz ensembles, who appreciate the instrument's deep, resonant sound.
So leave it to Spencer Krug to put an idiosyncratic spin on the instrument on his Dreamland EP, helpfully and truthfully subtitled Marimba and Shit-Drums. As a love letter, Krug's EP, a single 20-minute track, is closer to a novella than a valentine. The result could have been idle indie rock tourism, but Krug clearly spent some time learning his way around the marimba's blocks, making an instrument rarely encountered in rock into an appropriate vehicle for the REM sleep journey the song narrates.
As Krug plays it, the marimba is versatile. At low tones, it sounds like someone dribbling a ceramic basketball around an empty gym. Run a rapid tempo on the high tones, and it sounds like a wind chime caught in a hurricane, or a slot machine symphony. Through the instrumental segments the blocks' woodier vibrations start bleeding together into a gamelan-style pointillist drone. But Krug escapes strictly avant-garde territory, layering melodies until they take on the busy, crowded quality of an 8-bit RPG's dream sequence music.
Still, thank goodness for the shit-drums, which are appropriately named in terms of their fidelity. Every time the marimba waves threaten to engulf Krug, the drums splash in like a life preserver, adding a welcome sonic backbone. The song's most radio-friendly segment is just such a moment-- eight minutes in, where Krug's hazy beach visions are suddenly made urgent by a clattering drum part and geysers of spiraling melodies.
The sloppiness of those shit-drums may be what keeps Krug's composition from being a stripped-down version of a Tortoise epic-- the back half of "Djed" isn't too distant of a cousin. But I'm also reminded, more recently, of Destroyer's "Bay of Pigs", last year's example of an indie icon working with elongated song length and unfamiliar instruments. There's a dream logic to both songs, a sense of progression and narrative despite cut-and-paste lyrics, and each has a slowly unspooling structure that brings to mind a palindrome. There's even a satisfying resolution, where Krug drums the listener back to wakefulness while meta-commentating on the instrumentation by concluding in double-track, "I am making hissing sounds with my mouth."
Those are the moments that make Marimba and Shit-Drums more than just a gimmicky stylistic constraint. Thanks to the contradictions of the marimba-- soft, delicate tones generated through mallet thwacks-- Krug is able to hit just the right emotional note, conjuring an otherworldly and anxious dream-filled night. Like anyone recapping their dreams for you, it's sometimes uncomfortably voyeuristic, but the unusual arrangements make it much easier to take. | 2010-02-05T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2010-02-05T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Jagjaguwar | February 5, 2010 | 7.5 | cf9952eb-dc59-4541-8dc2-a7f22008281e | Rob Mitchum | https://pitchfork.com/staff/rob- mitchum/ | null |
After their longest break in a decade, the acoustic-and-drums duo return with hopes of reorienting their singular sound through the help of more electronics. | After their longest break in a decade, the acoustic-and-drums duo return with hopes of reorienting their singular sound through the help of more electronics. | The Dodos: Certainty Waves | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/the-dodos-certainty-waves/ | Certainty Waves | After a three-year absence, the Dodos singer and guitarist Meric Long has now released two albums in 2018. But the solo project where he swapped acoustic guitars for his late father’s synthesizers is, somehow, not what he calls his “midlife-crisis record.” Instead, that is Certainty Waves, the Dodos’ seventh album. Before Certainty Waves, Long’s midlife crisis was actually having no new record at all. The Dodos took their longest break in a decade after 2015’s Individ and became true 30-somethings almost instantly—day jobs, marriage, fatherhood, getting really into electronic music. Though the usually prolific Long had plenty of ideas for a new Dodos record, he had no unifying direction or theme until the duo revisited their breakthrough second album, 2008’s Visiter, for a 10th-anniversary gig. Like most modern folks suffering through a midlife crisis, he found both solace and inspiration in a younger version of himself that wasn’t so self-actualized but wasn’t subject to so many expectations, either.
This time, the Dodos set out to challenge their stereotype as that acoustic-and-drums duo, so apologies to anyone expecting a new “Fools.” They’re not completely ditching that configuration or simply giving the electronic experiments from Long’s overlooked solo album, Barton’s Den, the second chance of a more familiar setting. At Certainty Waves’ best, the Dodos find new ground between those two poles by thrashing on organic instruments that imitate electro analogs like samplers, drum pads, and keytars. The guitars on “Forum” replicate strings and horns, maximalist signifiers that are otherwise unavailable to a hard-touring minimalist duo. “IF” invokes metal through proggy seizures and Long’s ability to conjure both a saxophone and aluminum siding with his guitar. While Long has previously used loops to mesmerize, he exploits the minute gaps and flaws inherent in the looping process, turning split-second disruptions on “Coughing” and “SW3” into surprising hooks.
But this focus on sound manipulation and contrary motion ends up reinforcing the fussiness that has increasingly tempered the Dodos, even at their most explosive. Midway through the oceanic crest of “SW3,” drummer Logan Kroeber suddenly switches the beat and can’t stop toying with it; it’s interesting if you like counting competing mixed meters, but it needlessly distracts from the biggest chorus here. Certainty Waves stalls thereafter: filled with interesting tones and nifty rhythmic tricks, the album’s second half reflects Long’s period of writer’s block, effectively becoming the longest stretch of any Dodos album without a memorable melody.
Long’s mild-mannered vocals and Kroeber’s jittery rhythms are a constant, so everything remains immediately identifiable as the Dodos despite the synthetic textures interwoven into these nine songs. Ever since Visiter, they’ve absorbed shocks to the system again and again but remained steadfast. The sudden death of Women guitarist and temporary bandmate Chris Reimer informed the muted Carrier, while Long attributes the crackling urgency of Individ to the death of his father. Still, Visiter stands out within their consistently enjoyable catalog for being the least consistent and most surprising—an unalloyed mix of timely African polyrhythms and freak-folk wooliness, bowl-passing ruminations on the existence of God and one-minute shrugs about getting dumped.
Of course, the Dodos could no more replicate the innocent thrills of Visiter than they could will indie rock’s return to a time when nearly all buzz traced to Animal Collective. But Certainty Waves is most rewarding in the rare times it accesses the same plaintive directness that allowed them to risk looking silly on charming trifles like “Park Song” or “Undeclared.” “Now I forget all of the things I tried to remember” would be an accurate assessment of Long’s uneasy relationship with the Dodos’ past if it didn’t show up on “Center Of,” the truest Visiter throwback here—just a casually strummed acoustic guitar, a couple of chirping loops, and a rush of mounting drums, leaving nothing to obscure the light of Long’s soul-searching. | 2018-10-17T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-10-17T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Polyvinyl | October 17, 2018 | 6.4 | cfa0f102-494b-4acb-8200-e71413e8d0cc | Ian Cohen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ian-cohen/ | |
The London producer’s second EP of the year is a nebulous collage of lo-fi R&B, hip-hop, and electronic. It feels like a sketchbook of ideas in search of their final forms. | The London producer’s second EP of the year is a nebulous collage of lo-fi R&B, hip-hop, and electronic. It feels like a sketchbook of ideas in search of their final forms. | Leo Bhanji: Arm’s Length EP | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/leo-bhanji-arms-length-ep/ | Arm’s Length EP | Leo Bhanji prefers to keep his options open. On “Sea Demon,” a typically ruminative track from his new EP Arm’s Length, the London singer and producer preemptively shuts down the idea of a serious relationship: “I’m getting crushes out here but I’m too young,” he insists. The noncommittal attitude carries through his music, a lo-fi collage of R&B, hip-hop, and electronic he produces in his bedroom. He’s blending styles, yes. But it’s also possible he just hasn’t decided on one yet. “I literally just turned 20,” he sang on last year’s “Blade of Hope.” The last thing anybody wants to do at that age is settle.
Arm’s Length is Bhanji’s second EP of 2021, and even more so than its predecessor, Birth Videos, it plays like a sketchbook, early drafts of songs that could be dressed up in so many different ways that he found it easier to leave them mostly naked. Bhanji’s music doesn’t shy from the usual alt-R&B touchstones: He sings with the plainspokenness of Frank Ocean, produces with the tasteful restraint of James Blake, and packages it all with the vaporous ephemerality and purposeful unfinished edges of How to Dress Well.
Yet he folds in enough unexpected influences that his music never feels like a retread. There’s a good bit of Future in both his flow and his capacity for spinning lyrics that might otherwise read as a flex into solemn words of self-contemplation (“Sometimes, I make people feel they picked the wrong side,” he sings on “Polaroid,” his voice offering no clues as to how he feels about that). There’s some debt to King Krule, too, in his rumpled delivery and the occasionally hallucinatory bend of his lyrics, which becomes apparent when he starts rapping about Area 51 on “Nevada.” “UFO searchlights pierce through my closed eyes/Ride on my shoulders/Periscope in the corn/City like a bad dream,” he free-associates.
Throughout Arm’s Length’s bleary 12-minute run, Bhanji tests lanes and tries on identities, unsure of whether he’d rather be a villain or a wounded soul, a playboy or a romantic. Even the lo-fi trappings, so fundamental to his current musical identity, seem as if they might be a placeholder until he figures out his next play. With its bright strummed guitar, the tender closer “Window Up” teases the kind of unabashed pop song he could surely make if he wanted to.
The noncommittal nature of Bhanji’s music simultaneously cuts against it and works in its favor. He’s an impactful enough producer to sustain something truly substantial, but like its predecessors, Arm’s Length feels more like a tease than a statement. Still, as teases go, it’s an enticing one. There’s an intrigue that comes with spending time in the headspace of a musician who writes so candidly about themself yet still feels vaguely unknowable.
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-11-05T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2021-11-05T00:00:00.000-04:00 | null | Dirty Hit | November 5, 2021 | 6.8 | cfa37f99-f231-4752-b72e-e14ff3ef0d1c | Evan Rytlewski | https://pitchfork.com/staff/evan-rytlewski/ | |
Culled from last year’s Marauder sessions with Dave Fridmann, there’s still a sense that the production actively tries to disrupt what Interpol does well. | Culled from last year’s Marauder sessions with Dave Fridmann, there’s still a sense that the production actively tries to disrupt what Interpol does well. | Interpol: A Fine Mess EP | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/interpol-a-fine-mess-ep/ | A Fine Mess EP | Interpol’s brilliance comes in sparks these days. Every album after 2007’s Our Love to Admire, when they stopped being a fascination of indie culture writ large, does have a couple of straightforward thrillers on them. Even their self-titled record’s “Barricade” might stick if you let it. “The Rover” was fine, too, although the album it was on, last year’s Marauder—a loose concept album about saying goodbye to the band’s heyday in the early aughts—was less so.
You can reason with many of Interpol’s misses; every band loses steam at some point. But in a way, Marauder’s failings were more frustrating because they can’t be compartmentalized as the trio simply tripping over themselves. It sounds like producer Dave Fridmann was working against the band’s interest. Paul Banks’ voice sounded gargled when he opened his throat on the hooks, and sometimes Daniel Kessler’s guitar notes puttered out as if it’s him who doesn’t realize he has to really press those guitar strings against the fretboard. Making an album sound waterlogged is not an aesthetic.
On A Fine Mess, there’s a sense that the production actively tries to disrupt what Interpol does well. The most elegant Kessler/Banks compositions play like they’re sizing each other up until they converse and reckon for the climax. On the EP’s opening title track, however, they clash in ugly drunken fisticuffs, sounding like amateurish punk from dudes who are not amateur punks. There are also some blaring keys in the song’s back half that might’ve been a nice psychedelic touch if there was an effort to give them some color.
The stated intentions behind collaborating with Fridmann for the Marauder sessions was the hope of bringing in an intense energy. Fridmann has the resumé, but some things aren’t a good fit. The EP’s five songs were recorded at the same time as the Marauder sessions and his maximalist production approach continues to clash with Interpol’s sleek, compressed tension in their songwriting. “Real Life” has that signature single note riff that’s a staple in most of Interpol’s bangers, but the mix isn’t even aware of the formula. Instead of making sure that guitar line reverberates, the instruments sloppily smoosh into each other. It feels like a work in progress and sounds like a true demo.
Tradition dictates that there be a few lines working through the take-it-or-leave-it nature of Banks lyrics. They straddle the line between poetic quips on interpersonal relationships or emo mad-libbing—that tightrope broadens depending on who you ask. The opener’s “My life is pro-creation/So I make time to rewind those memories and play” has a nice tragicomic ring to it on paper. Maybe the lines, “Falling ashes at my feet/Wasted up in shadows in between/The faces I know, I would die to keep them from harm” on the closer “Thrones” storm through with too much-unwarranted gravitas. But his voice is too distorted and buried under the sonic detritus to bother to give them too much thought. Interpol might still be an exceptional act, but it’s a chore to have to squint this hard to see it. | 2019-05-22T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-05-22T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Matador | May 22, 2019 | 5.6 | cfa8d2bf-2b4b-44f7-b5ee-63fed395e9a1 | Brian Josephs | https://pitchfork.com/staff/brian-josephs/ | |
Mixing electro, funk, world music, and early hip-hop, Javelin made waves with mixtapes and singles; now, via Luaka Bop, they offer their scrubbed-up debut LP. | Mixing electro, funk, world music, and early hip-hop, Javelin made waves with mixtapes and singles; now, via Luaka Bop, they offer their scrubbed-up debut LP. | Javelin: No Mas | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/14115-no-mas/ | No Mas | Even blog bands need an iconic image, and Javelin hit the interwebs with an especially effective one-- a mountain of painted boomboxes, fronting the Brooklyn duo's table of samplers, turntables, drumpads, and various other misfit musical toys. Not only did it look pretty boss as a jpeg, it also was pretty accurate visual shorthand for their sound: Less turntablism, more an FM tuner shoulder-jostling between low-watt stations playing electro, funk, world music, and early hip-hop.
Javelin first parceled out that unique approach with a series of mixes and singles, most of which were hazy and fidelity-challenged enough for people to lump them in with chillwave. But Javelin's genetic code seemed more early-80s than late-60s, and the sound quality seemed like more of a mood-setter than a slapdash affectation. On Jamz n Jemz, Tom van Buskirk and George Langford crafted a cohesive sound collage more in step with the dense travelogues of the Avalanches than any of their basement-electronic peers.
So it actually made sense when musical travel agency Luaka Bop signed them up for their proper debut, No Mas. By the sound of the record, Luaka Bop also gave Javelin a good, long bath, exfoliating away the crackles and hiss and distilling the songs from their interstitial surroundings. The fully groomed result is a segmented hybrid of semi-revised previously released tracks and new music that reveals the duo as a far less exotic product than early scouting may have suggested. "Vibrationz" is still a killer single, but other familiar tunes sound adrift when isolated from a broader mix, such as the 70s montage sequence "The Merkin Jerk", or the glitch-hop of "Susie Cues". Attempts to makeover old tracks are a mixed bag, as the sunny "Intervales Theme" holds up at double the length, while adding vocals to previously instrumental "Mossy Woodland" is an awkward move.
Meanwhile, Javelin's new material fits in well alongside older tracks without doing much to expand the duo's palate. "Tell Me What Will I Be?" is a funk period piece that would turn the Dap-Kings green, "On It on It" summons up all the right robot-leg flashbacks, and "Shadow Heart" has a cinematic, psychedelic sweep that evades being pinned down as just one particular homage. If songs like the overdone retro of "Moscow 1980" and the directionless soul jam "Dep" are less memorable, well, at least they might have a second life as puzzle pieces in a future Javelin collage.
In the end No Mas can't top those longer mixes, which remain van Buskirk and Langford at their sample-heavy, genre-trotting finest. Dressed up and chopped into discrete chunks, Javelin suddenly bear a close resemblance to the Go! Team-- skilled peddlers of vintage party jams, but with a narrow range. Javelin's best tracks may hold up under professional production in a year where many a group's cassette-tape flaws will likely sabotage similar leaps, but trading in their boombox for a proper stereo isn't necessarily an upgrade. | 2010-04-08T02:00:02.000-04:00 | 2010-04-08T02:00:02.000-04:00 | Electronic / Rock | Luaka Bop | April 8, 2010 | 7.2 | cfaa73a3-b2ef-43a6-aadd-46b2ba757e96 | Rob Mitchum | https://pitchfork.com/staff/rob- mitchum/ | null |
The UK singer’s earthy, sumptuous new album explores her ambivalent relationship to fame. It soars when it lets loose. | The UK singer’s earthy, sumptuous new album explores her ambivalent relationship to fame. It soars when it lets loose. | Jorja Smith : Falling or Flying | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/jorja-smith-falling-or-flying/ | Falling or Flying | Earlier this year, Jorja Smith showed up unannounced to a Birmingham club to perform her new song “Little Things” shoulder-to-shoulder with the crowd, radiating effortless joy in her Juicy Couture tracksuit and sunglasses. The song is a career highlight for Smith, who glides breezily over its early-2000s UK funky bounce. As you watch the rowdy clip of her singing it, you almost forget she is one of the UK’s biggest homegrown pop stars. On her unhurried, self-possessed second album, Falling or Flying, she shines in the moments where she exudes this same loose-limbed confidence.
Smith’s 2018 debut Lost & Found was a collection of stylish, socially-conscious R&B and soul that showed off her silky voice, though its pristinely produced ballads could feel a little safe. She found an international audience through her work with Drake, who featured her on his 2017 mixtape More Life. But Smith, who releases all her music on her own independent label FAMM, has often shown reluctance to follow the expected path for a pop upstart, stripping down her sound further on her 2021 EP Be Right Back instead of attempting to repeat the success of her surprise garage hit with Preditah or dancefloor-heating collaboration with Burna Boy. Recently, she moved away from the music industry hub of London back to her childhood town of Walsall, living quietly in a farmhouse.
In Walsall, she’s teamed up with local production duo Edith Nelson and Barbara Boko-Hyouyhat, collectively known as DameDame*, for Falling or Flying. The result is a sumptuous, earthy album that experiments more freely with genre than Smith’s music has before. The first half of the record propels from the springy alternative R&B of “She Feels” and the Afrobeats of “Feelings” to the pop punk of “GO GO GO.” The spaciousness of the production makes it all feel considered rather than overwhelming: Guitars lick at the edges of melodies, ghostly layered vocals soar in the middle distance, and basslines shudder. Smith’s voice is assured and grounded: She reaches far less frequently for belting high notes and runs than she did on Lost & Found, instead sitting back comfortably.
Much of the record explores her ambivalent relationship to fame, though Smith keeps her cards close to her chest. “Ask me about me again,” Smith dares you at the outset, over strident production buoyed by the ring of bicycle bells and clattering percussion. Her cagey lyrics dance around the pressure of being a public figure, imploring you to read her, while refusing to be easy to read. Elsewhere, on the world-weary ballad “Too Many Times,” she contemplates the people who only see her worth now that she's famous, plumbing the smoky depths of her lower register.
Understated moments like this one can be powerful, but more often than not, they take the wind out of the album’s sails. There are a handful of ballads that could have been taken from the Lost & Found sessions, including the sleepy “Try and Fit In,” which slips by prettily without making much of an impact. Smith is a little too comfortable when she leans back in this downtempo mode. The closing piano ballad "What If My Heart Beats Faster?" is the longest song on the record, and feels that way.
As with the bruised defiance of “Try Me,” Smith spends the majority of the album circling vulnerability like a boxer in the ring, by turns acting tough and sweet. (As J Hus puts it on his guest turn, “Badman, but sometimes I want a cuddle”). It's in this tension that she finds magic: See the push-pull of the sultry title track, “Falling or Flying,” where she invites a lover over in the middle of the night while also reminding him that she doesn’t know how she feels about him. Over the chorus's swell of airy handclaps and guitar riffs, Smith sounds carefree as she accepts that after all, ecstasy and panic can feel like the same thing. When she leans into these moments of abandon, it hits like a rush of air to the face. | 2023-10-02T00:02:00.000-04:00 | 2023-10-02T00:02:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | Famm | October 2, 2023 | 7.6 | cfb514eb-b128-4068-ad18-c86bb7fb5d12 | Aimee Cliff | https://pitchfork.com/staff/aimee-cliff/ | |
The Italian rock band has become a global sensation. Their new album is absolutely terrible at every conceivable level. | The Italian rock band has become a global sensation. Their new album is absolutely terrible at every conceivable level. | Måneskin: Rush! | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/maneskin-rush/ | Rush! | There is a listener who has been pulled into the world of Måneskin. I can sense their excitement, their carefree spirit, their urge to bite their bottom lip and pantomime bending a guitar string as an affirmative gesture. I know that, in this massively popular Italian band, this listener has discovered a rare and powerful thing. Måneskin are not just three men and a woman who play traditional rock music and—if you can believe it—all wear eyeliner. To this listener, Måneskin are something far more important: an alternative.
An alternative to what, exactly, is the question. The unlikely global ascent of Måneskin—the word is Danish for moonlight, pronounced MOAN-eh-skin—comes off as a collective unconscious need for something else, a retro, lascivious attitude that feels neither cool nor popular, and therefore stands in opposition to what is cool or popular. Their music may sound like it’s made for introducing the all-new Ford F-150, yet they won the campy, poppy Eurovision contest in 2021. The same year, they went mega-viral on TikTok with their version of “Beggin’,” a song originally written by the midcentury pop group the Four Seasons. Måneskin are from Rome, a city famous for a thousand things before you get to good rock music. “Can they conquer the world?” asked The New York Times. And Rush!, their first album recorded mainly in English, is absolutely terrible at every conceivable level: vocally grating, lyrically unimaginative, and musically one-dimensional. It is a rock album that sounds worse the louder you play it.
Måneskin now find themselves in a position where Rush! must present the questions that justify their popularity: With everything going on in the world, don’t you wish rock music was horny again? Don’t you wish more albums featured Tom Morello phoning in one of his octave-pedal guitar solos? What if we were the first band to sing the words “kiss my butt”? Don’t you wish cologne commercials were longer? Don’t you wish Guitar Center could win a Grammy? What if Max Martin worked with Wolfmother? Remember the band Foxy Shazam? Why is no one talking about how fake and phony Hollywood is? Don’t you think lyrics like “Oh, mamma mia, spit your love on me, I’m on my knees, and I can’t wait to drink your rain” are the kind of thing people are just too afraid to sing nowadays?
It makes for a sweaty and effortful album that always seeks attention and never commands it. The wildest attempt to justify their status as the alternative to something is “Kool Kids,” where frontman Damiano David adopts a faux British accent to deliver a satirical broadside against “cool kids” that sounds like a Tory version of Mark E. Smith shouting over the Vines. “We’re not punk, we’re not pop, we’re just music freaks,” yelps David. “Cool kids, they do not like rock/They only listen to trap and pop,” he continues, hoping for more upvotes on his comment. This is an interesting social grievance from a band who are not just dressed in Gucci, they are dressed by Gucci.
But this is the strange allure of Måneskin, a band so bad that you can’t listen to their music without thinking that, finally, as a culture, we’ve arrived at some inevitable mass Måneskin event. This must mean something. In theory, Måneskin—in their politely iconoclastic, youthful, inscrutably European, anti-mainstream guise—might fit under that rubric Americans once knew as “alternative rock.” It was a genre that conferred—in accordance with the social bylaws of the ’80s and ’90s—that what you liked signaled what you did not like: By owning a Sonic Youth album, you displaced the energy that otherwise would have been consumed by a Spin Doctors album. It was physics, sort of, and you built your identity around it. Maybe Måneskin’s global popularity signals a return to the oppositional force that once rallied the alternative against the monocultural mainstream? Maybe Måneskin’s 6.5 billion streams and counting presages the dawn of a new rock revival?
The issue is that, about a decade ago, around the dawn of the streaming era, “alternative” as we knew it went extinct. Consuming music on streaming services made music a multiversal event, a mass conversion of listening to everything, everywhere, all at once. Genres became siloed, withering on the outside and thriving on the inside. Måneskin’s “Beggin’” ascending the upper reaches of the Billboard charts was not a cultural reaction to anything, it was just an anomaly. It is content without meaning. They weren’t Nirvana here to wipe hair metal off the map. Their success was fuelled by European reality show competitions, algorithms, and cumulative advantage. They are chaos in a vacuum, and we’re left to make sense of a band that sounds like a parody of an early aughts NME cover and whose whole vibe could best be described as Cirque du Soleil: Buckcherry.
Even if you accept the premise that Måneskin are “music freaks” who love “rock,” you’ll be disappointed to learn that nothing else on Rush! gives off that impression. Their primary influence seems to be “Seven Nation Army” chants at a soccer game, followed closely by late-era Red Hot Chili Peppers, followed extensively by nothing. On the unbelievable “Mammamia,” the bass, guitar, and vocals are performed almost entirely in martial unison. It’s a fascinating choice that brings to mind fourth-grade band practice, or migraines. Contrast that with “Read Your Diary,” one of a few somewhat dynamic tracks on Rush! whose enjoyable barroom shuffle nevertheless demands we hear lines about pouring champagne onto your panties and “using my left hand because it feels like you.”
Beginning with the cover art featuring the band’s mixed reactions as they peer up a schoolgirl’s skirt, Måneskin’s libido never achieves that leery, pansexual, transgressive quality they aim for. Every line about orgasms and fluids and oral sex feels like it was suddenly AirDropped to you on the subway. This is not a puritanical sex-negative reaction to songs about fucking so much as a design problem: Rush! was produced by the band along with megawatt pop songwriter Max Martin and a long list of radio hitmakers whose glossy work is insoluble with Måneskin’s uninhibited, over-torqued dick rock. The production sounds so cramped, digitized, and swagless that it seems to be optimized for getting busy in a Buffalo Wild Wings bathroom.
Who is this for? Where is that rapt Måneskin listener? It strains credulity to imagine Rush! will rally the aging nostalgia crowd pining for the days of real music the same way Black Keys or Greta Van Fleet or any other Grammy-core rock act did. Sex-idiot rock—a storied and wonderful genre that bounces around from T. Rex to AC/DC to Van Halen to Jane’s Addiction to the 1975—deserves better than this. But Måneskin arrived, and they are here for you, wherever you are: a band to build your identity around and say, I’m not with the cool kids, I’m with Måneskin. | 2023-02-07T00:03:00.000-05:00 | 2023-02-07T00:03:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Epic | February 7, 2023 | 2 | cfb5348f-6e4e-4571-adae-30dce68027cd | Jeremy D. Larson | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jeremy-d. larson/ | |
The Osaka DJ favors long, gradual mixes and careful pairings. His new mix album for Singapore’s Midnight Shift is a hypnotic descent into ambient, drone, and noise. | The Osaka DJ favors long, gradual mixes and careful pairings. His new mix album for Singapore’s Midnight Shift is a hypnotic descent into ambient, drone, and noise. | ¥ØU$UK€ ¥UK1MAT$U: Midnight Is Comin’ | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/yousuke-yukimatsu-midnight-is-comin/ | Midnight Is Comin’ | Some DJs are party starters; some are storytellers; some are historians, keepers of dance music’s flame. ¥ØU$UK€ ¥UK1MAT$U can be all of these, but he is also something like a combination of shaman, warrior, and trickster. Often shirtless, sweat-slicked, and enviably ripped, the Osaka native (aka Yousuke Yukimatsu) brings an unusually furious versatility to the decks. Or is it an unusually versatile fury? In the first 13 minutes of a special Boiler Room Tokyo session in late 2020, he kicked off with Moby’s 1993 hardcore anthem “Thousand,” whose apocalyptic stabs and accelerating rhythm—its 1,000-plus beats per minute once landed it in the Guinness Book of World Records—suggest the earth is about to swallow the dancefloor whole. From there Yukimatsu feinted sideways into a stretch of squelchy, insouciant bass music, before diving headfirst into the extreme-noise hellscape of Nairobi metal duo Duma’s “Lionsblood.” Over the full hour and a half, he switchbacked across vintage breakbeat hardcore, cutting-edge Tanzanian singeli, the Weeknd’s Daft Punk collab “I Feel It Coming,” and the theme from Rocky before closing with Jamie xx’s dreamily optimistic “Good Times,” the polar opposite of Moby’s hymn for the end of days.
But for all the seismic instability of the terrain, the aura Yukimatsu conjures in his wide-ranging sets is as enveloping as the most linear techno. Done wrong, self-conscious eclecticism can have a way of jolting listeners out of their trance, but Yukimatsu lowers you right down inside the fault line and leaves you vibrating. On his new mix album for Singapore’s Midnight Shift label, Yukimatsu tightens his focus and burrows into his contemplative side. A hypnotic descent into ambient, drone, and noise, Midnight Is Comin’ is one of the most immersive DJ mixes in recent memory. There are no breakbeats, no rave stabs, no pop curveballs. All but one of the tracks, most by relatively obscure Japanese experimental musicians, are exclusive to the mix. The mood throughout is shadowy and pensive; sounds range from dentist-drill buzz to acoustic guitar and angel choir, but they share a slow-burning intensity.
There are hints of Yukimatsu’s noise inclinations in the opening track, “Nagel,” by Orhythmo, a duo with punk and grindcore roots: Ominous clanking and shuffling footsteps lead us into a chamber of rapidly oscillating frequencies, and deep in the mix, a terrifying voice emerges through white-hot distortion, half whisper and half scream. But the mood gradually mellows as the cello-like tones of Ryo Murakami’s “Reminiscence” bleed into the frame, establishing what will become the dominant themes and textures of the mix: long, held tones; graceful, arpeggiated counterpoints; and a foggy, almost mystical air. At any moment, you sense that some fantastical shape might materialize from the murk, yet by and large, there are no major events, no sudden revelations. The atmosphere simply thickens and churns.
Yukimatsu’s blends are almost imperceptible, but they’re also deeply satisfying: When the doleful tones of “Reminiscence” come oozing into earshot, tempering the metallic harshness all around, you can practically feel your pulse slowing. He favors long, gradual mixes and careful pairings where it’s difficult to tease out where one track ends and the next begins. Much of that comes down to his sleight of hand. Outside the fabric of the mix, the rippling noises of Compuna’s “Flowmotion,” like a duet for cicada and helicopter, would seem to have little in common with the gothic ambient folk of French musician Coni’s “Ängelsbäcksstrand,” which even quotes a few lines from Bob Dylan’s “In My Time of Dying.” Yet the way they’re mixed, they feel like two parts of one process, overlapping legs of a single journey.
The switchbacks become more pronounced toward the end. That gently incongruous Coni song, which resembles a doomier This Mortal Coil, melts into Indonesian duo Gabber Modus Operandi’s “Kisah,” which sounds like a strange mashup of religious singing and needle-nosed rave stabs; that track abruptly slips into Osaka producer SPINNUTS’ “Zweimal schlafen atmosphere,” a pitch-perfect evocation of the minimalist dub techno practiced by artists like Pole and Thomas Brinkmann around the turn of the millennium. It is the lone beat on the album, and it is rendered in such chilly, skeletal black and white, it’s more like a techno X-ray than a living groove. Given Yukimatsu’s hell-for-leather club tendencies, this slow, skulking rhythm is a striking display of restraint. From here, he might have gone anywhere; instead, he concludes the mix with a gorgeous unfurling of soft piano chords and gently colored synthesizers. Just like the conclusion to his Boiler Room set, it is the perfect inverse of his opening selection—the kink in the moebius strip that brings us full circle in Yukimatsu’s exquisitely twisted world. | 2022-06-03T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2022-06-03T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic / Experimental | Midnight Shift | June 3, 2022 | 7.7 | cfc19cc8-be7b-4eb5-bbf1-3fe755e1407b | Philip Sherburne | https://pitchfork.com/staff/philip-sherburne/ | |
This 155-minute, three-disc live album documents Kate Bush’s spectacular 2014 live shows, her first in 35 years. She reckons with her legacy through what might seem like an obscure setlist. | This 155-minute, three-disc live album documents Kate Bush’s spectacular 2014 live shows, her first in 35 years. She reckons with her legacy through what might seem like an obscure setlist. | Kate Bush: Before the Dawn | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22467-before-the-dawn/ | Before the Dawn | Kate Bush always exploited technological advancement. In 1979, from just coathangers and Blu-Tack, the trailblazing British pop auteur pioneered the head mic for her vanguard Tour of Life. Her subsequent albums made her one of the earliest adopters of the Fairlight synthesizer that would define the ’80s. Before the Dawn, then, is a surprising throwback: the unexpurgated live album, a document of her 2014 live shows, her first in 35 years. There are no retakes or overdubs bar a few atmospheric FX. No apps, no virtual reality, no interactivity. She’s also said there won’t be a DVD, which is surprising given the show’s spectacular theatrics, conceived by the former artistic director of the Royal Shakespeare Company and a host of designers, puppeteers, and illusionists. The show, and this release, aren’t credited to Kate Bush but the KT Fellowship, in recognition of the vast ensemble effort. Yet in shucking off half the production, this hefty 155-minute, three-disc set (one per “act”) is also the best way that Before the Dawn could have been preserved, allowing it to tell its own story uninhibited by the busy staging.
I went to a show towards the end of the 22-date run, and was overwhelmed by how physically moving it was to see Bush in real life, since for most of mine she’s only existed in videos and BBC clip-show documentaries. The staging didn’t always have the same impact. The sublime Act One, as close to a greatest hits as we got, was stripped back—just Bush at the piano backed by her crack band.
In Act Two, Bush realized her long-held desire to dramatize “The Ninth Wave,” the conceptual B-side of 1985’s Hounds of Love, which documents a woman’s dark night of the soul as she fights for life while lost at sea. While her “husband” and real-life son Bertie McIntosh blithely carried on with domestic life inside a tiny, sloping living room set, a video depicted Bush stranded in dark, choppy waters (now released as the “And Dream of Sheep” video). Moments later, the real Bush reappeared on stage to fight sinister “fish people” who carried her body off through the aisles. The whirring blades and desperate search lights of a rescue helicopter descended from the Hammersmith Apollo’s ceiling, illuminating and buffeting the crowd. Despite some hammy dialogue, it was staggering, and in sharp contrast to Act Three, which focused on Aerial’s second side, “A Sky of Honey.” McIntosh played a landscape painter from ye olden times while a life-size marionette of a jointed-doll simpered around the stage, embracing Bush, who looked on in raptures. At 75 minutes long, it was a sickly, trying accompaniment to one of the subtler achievements in her catalogue.
With the visuals stripped away, some confusing vestiges of the live show remain on the record—mostly the stilted dialogue (McIntosh’s lines as the painter are cringeworthy). But otherwise it flows remarkably well: the prog grooves and piano ballads of the first act setting up the gothic tumult of “The Ninth Wave,” which comes down into the sun-dappled ambience of “A Sky of Honey.” The sound is rich and warm, but rough, too: imperfectly mic’d and properly live-sounding. The arrangements are largely faithful, even down to the synth presets, though sometimes the veteran session musicians form an overwhelming battalion. “Lily” comes out sounding a bit like Christian goth rock, and “King of the Mountain” is a victim of breadth over depth, its dynamics drowned out by every band member playing at once. It’s a shame that the terror of “Hounds of Love” gets swapped for sentimental optimism, but the band recreate that album’s second half to sound as avant-garde and bracing as any current young outsider.
Live albums are meant to capture performers at their rawest and least inhibited, which doesn’t really apply to Before the Dawn. Bush is a noted perfectionist best known for her synthesizer experiments and love of obscure Bulgarian choirs, but her recent work has skewed towards traditional setups that reunite her with the prog community that fostered her early career. With marks to hit and tableaux to paint, the 2014 shows were more War of the Worlds (or an extension of 2011’s Director’s Cut) than Live at Leeds. But never mind balls-out revamps of Bush’s best known songs; with the exception of tracks from Hounds of Love, none of the rest of the setlist had ever been done live—not even on TV, which became Bush’s primary stage after she initially retired from touring. These songs weren’t written to be performed, but internalized. Occupying Bush’s imagination for an hour, and letting it fuse with your own, formed the entirety of the experience. Hearing this aspic-preserved material come to life feels like going to sleep and waking up decades later to see how the world has changed.
“Jig of Life” is the midpoint of Before the Dawn, and its crux. It forms the part in “The Ninth Wave” where Bush’s character is exhausted of fighting against drowning, and decides to succumb to death. A vision of her future self appears, and convinces her to stay alive. “Now is the place where the crossroads meet,” she chants, just as her (then) 56-year-old voice channels her 27-year-old one. Despite her alleged taste for burning one, Bush’s voice has gained in power rather than faded with age. It’s deeper now, and some of the songs’ keys shift to match, but it’s alive and incalculably moving, still capable of agile whoops and tender eroticism, and possesses a newfound authority. When she roars lustily through opener “Lily” and its declaration that “life has blown a great big hole through me,” she sets up the stakes of Before the Dawn’s quest for peace. In Act One, she’s running from the prospect of love on “Hounds of Love” and “Never Be Mine,” and from fame on “King of the Mountain,” where she searches for Elvis with sensual anticipation. She asks for Joan of Arc’s protection on “Joanni,” matching the French visionary’s fearlessness with her own funky diva roar, and sounds as if she could raze the world as she looks down from “Top of the City.”
Rather than deliver a copper-bottomed greatest hits set, Bush reckons with her legacy through what might initially seem like an obscure choice of material. Both Acts Two and Three take place in transcendent thresholds: “The Ninth Wave”’s drowning woman is beset by anxiety and untold pressures, with no idea of where to turn, mirroring the limbo that Bush experienced after 1982’s The Dreaming. That suite’s last song, the cheery “The Morning Fog,” transitions into Aerial’s “Prelude,” all beatific bird call and dawn-light piano. The euphoric, tender “A Sky of Honey” is meant to represent a perfect day from start to finish, filled with family and beautiful imperfections. “Somewhere in Between” finds them atop “the highest hill,” looking out onto a stilling view, and Bush’s eerie jazz ensemble anticipates the liminal peace of Bowie’s Blackstar. “Not one of us would dare to break the silence,” she sings. “Oh how we have longed for something that would make us feel so… somewhere in between.”
Purgatory has become heaven, and in the narrative Bush constructs through her setlist, “A Sky of Honey” represents the grown-up, domestic happiness that staves off the youthful fears explored on Hounds of Love. For her final song, she closes with a rendition of “Cloudbusting,” a song about living with the memory of a forbidden love, which is even more glorious for all the hope that it’s accumulated in the past 30-odd years. Bush’s recent life as a “reclusive” mother is often used to undermine her, to “prove” she was the kook that sexist critics had pegged her as all along. These performances and this record are a generous reveal of why she’s chosen to retreat, where Bush shows she won’t disturb her hard-won peace to sustain the myth of the troubled artistic genius. Between the dangerous waters of “The Ninth Wave” and the celestial heavens of “A Sky of Honey,” Before the Dawn demystifies what we’ve fetishized in her absence. Without draining her magic, it lets Bush exist back down on Earth. | 2016-11-28T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2016-11-28T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Pop/R&B | Fish People / Concord | November 28, 2016 | 8.5 | cfc6e21a-5628-45b1-b3b7-82471b9aa9ab | Laura Snapes | https://pitchfork.com/staff/laura-snapes/ | null |
Little Brother emcee Phonte and Dutch beatmaker Nicolay team up via internet to create one of this year's finest underground hip-hop releases. | Little Brother emcee Phonte and Dutch beatmaker Nicolay team up via internet to create one of this year's finest underground hip-hop releases. | The Foreign Exchange: Connected | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/3321-connected/ | Connected | Until early this year, North Carolina emcee Phonte (Little Brother) and Dutch beatmaking sensation Nicolay had never met, or even spoke on the phone. Making their acquaintance on the webboards at Okayplayer, the two took The Postal Service's album-by-correspondence technique to heart: Nicolay instant messaged beats to Phonte, who dropped verses, and then the Holland native mastered the product. The result, Connected, is a sweltering, improbable 14-track symphony teeming with potent lyricism and subtle, lustrous rhythmatics.
In today's hip-hop landscape, the organic and emotive qualities of classic soul are often bastardized (cf. Jagged Edge) but rarely duplicated. To wit: In its Hit Factory days, Motown churned out classics faster than Beanie Sigel garners arrest warrants. So either Nicolay is a musical genius who simply understands the language of classic R&B; better than most stateside producers, or a Stax Records jetliner crashed in the Netherlands, spilling thousands of LPs on his thatched abode when he was a toe-tapping toddler.
"The Foreign Exchange Title Theme" kicks Connected off with a syncopated harmony, while the welcoming voice of D.C.'s YahZarah wafts, "Thank you for the music, thank you for right now." That "right now" bit is telling, too, as the record revels in the glory of the moment: Urgent, immediate, instant gratification is one of Connected's calling cards. "Nic's Groove", for example, is equipped with sleepy brass, delicious harmonies and a booming bassline. It's like standing in the street during 5 minutes of the dopest house party you weren't invited to-- and when you dare to peek in the window, Nicolay hits his apex on "The Answer", bowling the crowd over with an ephemeral thunder while Oddisee, Ken Starr, and Phonte rock the crowd, the latter claiming, "I applied for the job of rap nigga, but I was overqualified."
But Connected is more than fluid construction and a unique backstory. Embedded in the layered vocal arrangements and popping rhythms are the seeds of a quiet rebellion. While crews like Mash Out Posse or Cocoa Brovaz may alienate newcomers with the furious intensity of their experiences, The Foreign Exchange delivers their triumphs and tragedies with silky surreptitiousness. Connected reads like the diary of the young, black hip-hop hopeful, as Phonte reminds us of the thousands of struggling MCs who sit in the shadow of The Source. He walks us through his money woes on "Happiness" ("Writing mad checks that might as well have 'Spalding' on them"), his girlfriend's pregnancy on "Be Alright" ("My girl was throwing up this morning/ I pray it was something she ate"), and his parents' disapproval of his life on "All That You Are" ("They can't understand how I feel when I'm on the track board turning the knob switch/ My moms keep talking like get a real job shit").
Despite The Foreign Exchange's transatlantic relationship, the record's stripped-down approach is reminiscent of the days when kids hijacked streetlamps to power their block party turntables. Amazingly, this album seamlessly flows without not only that street-level intimacy but without even the assistance of a shared studio. The result is enough to make the most heartbroken cynics fall in love with independent hip-hop all over again. | 2004-09-14T02:00:02.000-04:00 | 2004-09-14T02:00:02.000-04:00 | Electronic | BBE Music | September 14, 2004 | 8.6 | cfd41f92-ac48-41a4-b468-32b7685eb1b8 | Jamin Warren | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jamin-warren/ | null |
Each Sunday, Pitchfork takes an in-depth look at a significant album from the past, and any record not in our archives is eligible. Today, we revisit Ryan Leslie’s breezy and lovestruck 2009 solo debut, a set of virtuoso R&B productions that emerged in a new era of online music culture. | 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 Ryan Leslie’s breezy and lovestruck 2009 solo debut, a set of virtuoso R&B productions that emerged in a new era of online music culture. | Ryan Leslie : Ryan Leslie | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/ryan-leslie-ryan-leslie/ | Ryan Leslie | Ryan Leslie seemed determined to document every second of his life in 2008. It was the era of a trillion rap blogs, and R&B’s Truman Burbank was shrewd enough to recognize a voyeuristic platform like YouTube as the next star-making frontier. Whether there was anything that interesting about him as an on-screen personality was beside the point: He wanted music fans to see the nuts and bolts of how a multi-talented singer, songwriter, and producer makes hits, so he recorded himself daily on a Canon GL2 and edited endless hours of footage into webisodes for his YouTube channel, Ryan Leslie TV.
He noticed the clips that got the biggest reactions were his dramatic beat-making sessions, where he bounced like Tigger around a recording studio. In the most talked-about video, with 5.6 million views to date, Leslie wears shades and zips from one instrument to the next, drums to keyboard to Mac, layering the beat for his slinky single “Addiction” until it sounds like a beeper having an identity crisis. The scene is lighthearted, but in Leslie’s eyes, it carries a certain gravitas. “You’re watching and viewing the moment of creation,” he said in a 2019 interview. It’s “the closest we can get to God.”
By the time his self-titled debut album dropped in February 2009, Leslie had meticulously digitized two-plus years of his life on three one-terabyte hard drives. Hip-hop was becoming extremely online, allowing upstarts like him to broadcast their personal lives and creative process in a new way. The nature of celebrity was about to change forever.
Meanwhile, mid-aughts R&B was in a critical transitional stage, with rougher-edged singers like Trey Songz and Jeremih seizing control from smooth-talking traditionalists like Ne-Yo and John Legend. But despite his best efforts to come across as a playboy in his music, Leslie’s artistic persona always fell somewhere between sweet and pretentious. In a world of over-the-top vocalists in constant heat, the former Harvard a cappella singer brought giddy band-virgin energy. So while R&B’s most flamboyant artist-producer, The-Dream, had established himself as a smash hitmaker with a gift for being spiritually crass, Leslie positioned himself as a digital-minded hybrid mogul: a singing, rapping producer with ambitions to be the next Diddy or Tommy Mottola. His ingenuity lay more in his musicianship and marketing than any semblance of edge.
Harmonizing rappers were suddenly everywhere, but Leslie’s entirely self-produced debut coincided with one in particular, arriving three days before Drake’s soft-era-launching So Far Gone—a mixtape inspired partly by the Toronto rap star’s revelation about how brazenly he and his friends spoke about women in private. Leslie’s boastful talk-rap style was inoffensive by comparison. His lead single and album opener, “Diamond Girl,” a blustery club track, casts him as a casanova searching for a leading lady to help him settle down. It’s a splashy introduction for Leslie, presenting him as a capable rapper and one-person band. But when Kanye West and G-Unit each dropped unofficial remixes, it highlighted the difference between their effortless cockiness and Leslie’s more bookish bravado.
Better than some peers, though, Leslie grasped R&B’s conventional ideals of pleading emotion and sincere desire for companionship. Over 12 tracks, he’s drawn to women with an intoxicating presence, excited about how that infatuation might either grow or rip his heart to pieces. On “You’re Fly,” a carefree, flute-driven serenade about graduating to friends with benefits, he’s optimistic, while the jumpy, mid-tempo “Quicksand” and the warm lullaby “Valentine” anticipate new love. The latter and its sister track, “Just Right,” are the closest to ballads on a mostly buoyant album that’s enticing even if it’s notably impersonal. Though eager to share his creative process in his videos, Leslie wasn’t interested in being that transparent about his feelings.
Instead, he leaned into his music-geek impulses and succeeded in creating a signature sound. His production has a breeziness, marked by synth tones programmed to feel like callbacks to the innocent days of pagers and dial-up. You hear it on records like New Edition’s 2004 single “Hot 2Nite” (a beat Leslie originally made for himself) and Cheri Dennis’ 2007 gem “I Love You,” relics of R&B’s evolution to clubby electronic rhythms. While the spaciness of predecessors like Timbaland and the Neptunes inform Leslie’s production style, he has a knack for calibrating his own earworms to sound like Jetsons gadgets coming to life. His trademark glitzy R&B, just downstream of pop radio hitmakers, is charmingly frivolous in a way that Leslie himself isn’t. He told the Washington Post in 2009, “Show me another artist that, without any engineers, without any famous friends, without any famous instrumentalists, without any famous songwriter, without any famous rapper, is just gonna lock himself in the studio with nothing else but a bunch of equipment, walk in there with thin air and within a couple of hours have something that ignites him to the point that it’s visibly infectious.”
Leslie had the confidence of an Ivy Leaguer who’d been called a prodigy most of his life. Born in Washington, D.C., to parents who were both Salvation Army officers and moonlighting musicians, he learned to play piano by ear. Once, when Leslie was about four, he encountered a soda vending machine. “He put his ear against the box and he listened very intently,” his father later told The Harvard Crimson, “and then he started to snap his fingers and bop his head to the rhythm of the Coke box.” Leslie entered Harvard at 15 with a perfect SAT score, majoring in politics while singing and touring with the university’s a cappella group, the Krokodiloes. But already it was clear he’d rather be making beats. At one point, he spent 30 hours a week in the studio while gigging around Boston. In that same Crimson profile in 1998—Leslie’s senior year—he told the paper that he aspired to be “the hardest working man in entertainment.”
After college, Leslie moved back in with his parents and convinced his dad to buy him $15,000 worth of recording equipment on credit. He scored one of his first placements, New Edition’s “Hot 2Nite,” while interning with a producer who worked for Diddy. He landed more high-profile gigs after signing to Tommy Mottola’s Universal imprint, Casablanca, in 2003, producing filler cuts for mega-stars like Britney Spears, Beyoncé, and LL Cool J. His own planned first album got shelved, but Leslie had already found the artist who’d help him fulfill his mogul dreams. He met Cassie, then an 18-year-old model, at a nightclub in 2004, and they struck up both a working and personal relationship, which was initially kept under wraps.
As the music industry scrambled to understand social media’s potential, Leslie adapted. He used MySpace as a digital billboard, attracting followers with photos and videos of Cassie—and, eventually, a song. That online popularity helped catapult her bubbly 2006 breakout “Me & U” (which Leslie produced) to No. 3 on the Billboard Hot 100, creating a new blueprint. Artists like Cassie and, later, Soulja Boy (whose 2007 sensation “Crank That” broke on YouTube) proved how quickly an unknown musician could turn internet notoriety into offline fame. “Ryan launched and promoted a completely unknown artist who went to No. 1 for seven weeks as a result of a viral experience. Normally, I would think that would be a mountain too high to climb,” Mottola told The Boston Globe in 2008, citing the U.S. Airplay chart. Leslie, he said, was “very plugged into the new technology that’s going to be a critical piece of how music is made and distributed.”
“I’m at 100,000 friends on MySpace and 14,000 plays a day on my little music player,” Leslie told the Globe in the same article, months before his debut’s release. His digital-first approach signaled where the music business was headed, with social media as a primary metric. “I’d love to be at 60,000 plays and half a million friends,” he continued. “In the meantime I can be making records, continuing to be really strongly entrenched in the online video community, releasing behind-the-scenes stuff. And when there’s an insane, incredible demand for my album that cannot be contained anymore, I can put it out tomorrow.”
Diddy noticed the success of “Me & U,” too. He signed Cassie to Bad Boy, calling Leslie the “new-age Teddy Riley.” It was the partnership that nourished a thousand gossip blogs, fueled by rumors that Cassie had dropped Leslie as both a producer and boyfriend and entered a relationship with Diddy. Unlike Usher, who’d drawn on his own messy celebrity dating life for 2004’s career-making Confessions, Leslie didn’t attempt to capitalize on the ensuing love triangle in his music. But he has said his split with Cassie quietly inspired records like “Diamond Girl” and “Out of the Blue,” where he reflexively blames both parties for a breakup over a spiraling ringtone of a beat. “I should’ve been a better friend,” Leslie suggests, then wonders, “What would you do?/If I left you out of the blue?/Would you fight back tears while your heart gets torn to pieces?”
The upbeat mid-album track “How It Was Supposed to Be” explores a similarly tense feeling of abandonment, and on the pulsing “Shouldn’t Have to Wait,” Leslie is guilty of making a woman wait on him to settle down. Then he recovers optimism on odes like “Wanna Be Good” and the fanciful “Irina,” where he falls victim to love at first sight. Alluringly shallow, the album is zippy and playful, an effusive pitch from an artist whose plainest objective as a singer and sometime rapper is to go get the girl.
In June 2009, four months after the release of Ryan Leslie, PC Mag reported that Facebook had surpassed MySpace in popularity for the first time. Twitter and Instagram soon emerged as the next permanent fixtures for artists looking to build a fanbase. Leslie, naturally, maintains a presence on all of them. Coming up in the cosmic stew of social media and streaming has allowed Leslie to, years later, maintain a following and embark on a career as an entrepreneurial spokesperson. In the influencer era, an internet-savvy self-starter no longer needed Diddy-level music fame to operate like a mogul.
The same year as his debut, Leslie released a subtly thrilling follow-up, Transition, inspired by a summer rendezvous, and later recorded a full-on rap album, 2012’s Les Is More. Clips of his old studio sessions still circulate on social media, passed along by a faithful subset of fans like treasure maps leading to a lost gem of an album. Posted in June 2008, a low-resolution video for the making of closing track “Gibberish” shows him taking what looks like a piccolo trumpet out of its case. The song’s concept is ridiculous—Leslie mumbling sweet nothings to convey speechlessness. But it’s also oddly the album’s most sensual moment and one of R&B’s most inventive uses of Auto-Tune’s warbling effects. In the video, Leslie plays his trumpet into the mic in a recording booth and later procedurally returns it to its case. As much as he loved creating, he also seemed to enjoy performing the part of being an artist—no matter how extra it sometimes appeared on camera. Any musician with an online presence now does the same; behind-the-scenes content is de rigueur. But there’s still something endearing about a beatmaker with an ego and a bunch of instruments who cared about showing the work. | 2023-04-30T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2023-04-30T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | NextSelection / Casablanca / Universal Motown | April 30, 2023 | 8 | cfe5c890-36af-44c5-9ca8-ec329fe0d5a8 | Clover Hope | https://pitchfork.com/staff/clover-hope/ | |
The wiry Atlanta, Ga. rock trio Omni sells its nervous energy as a logical way of dealing with the world. Where other bands might smooth things out, Omni finds angles and sharp turns. | The wiry Atlanta, Ga. rock trio Omni sells its nervous energy as a logical way of dealing with the world. Where other bands might smooth things out, Omni finds angles and sharp turns. | Omni: Multi-task | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/omni-multi-task/ | Multi-task | Halfway through “Southbound Station,” the opening song on Omni’s second album Multi-task, bassist Philip Frobos sings, “I’m just waiting on the vibration.” He’s talking about a text message he’s expecting—definitely not about his group’s music. This Atlanta, Ga. trio never hesitates to get things moving. Their sound is all quivers and shakes and spasms, filled with wiry guitar chords, nervy basslines, and jolting beats. Every track is pithy and pointed to a nearly obsessive-compulsive degree. Only one of the album’s 11 songs lasts longer than three minutes, and the band always starts in high gear, revving hard before quickly reloading.
This brand of restless kinetics could induce listener fatigue, but, much like the best purveyors of musical caffeination—Wire, Devo, Talking Heads—Omni avoid tedium by never forcing the action. They sell their nervous energy not as affectation or aesthetic statement, but simply as a logical way of dealing with the world. That was true on their 2016 debut, Deluxe, but on Multi-task they’ve honed their sound to the point where it’s hard to imagine them playing anything that doesn’t take sharp turns or hit abrupt stops.
Omni’s sonic signature is aided by Frobos’ subdued vocals. Compared to the high-strung yelps of Mark Mothersbaugh or the geeky tremble of David Byrne, Frobos’ voice is decidedly deadpan, delivered in a semi-monotone as if he’s the calm center of a musical storm. At times it seems he views the music swirling around him as a surreal dream, and the only way to handle it is to stay cool and go with his band’s jagged flow.
Frobos’ vocal chill is matched by his lyrics, which share Byrne’s knack for treating daily life like an alien puzzle. Many of Multi-task’s songs are about people meeting and relating, and Frobos often sounds perplexed that anyone ever manages to connect. During “Tuxedo Blues,” he begs a comrade to “speak out, say what you mean, without parting the sea”; in “Calling Direct,” his attempts to reach out are so frustrated that he decides he has to “stage a coup to get to you.” Eventually, in the skeptical “Date Night,” he questions the whole concept of shared experience: “When I’m looking are you seeing/Someone in a different light, another being?” All these laments fit music that’s aptly off-kilter, finding angles and divots where other bands might smooth things out.
Many of those angles are the sum of Omni’s parts, as Frobos’ rubbery bass meshes with Frankie Broyles’ guitar playing and drumming (the group were between drummers when recording Multi-task, and have since enlisted Doug Bleichner of Warehouse in the role). But Broyles, a former member of Deerhunter, is often the star, slashing across the songs like a spark plug firing an engine. He’s particularly adept at chopping chords and chiming notes simultaneously, so his complex leads have a visceral thrust. On the herky-jerky “Choke,” his guitar sounds both threatening and joyous, while during the escalating “Supermoon,” he keeps his foot on the riff pedal while also weaving detailed lines. His synergy with Frobos comes to a head on closer “Type,” which displays the strengths of Omni in miniature: dodging momentum, confident swing, rough precision. But then miniatures are what this band does best, building small choices into an exhilarating whole. | 2017-10-05T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-10-05T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Trouble in Mind | October 5, 2017 | 7.2 | cff45373-f2c0-4c0d-b3dc-5e5da537d763 | Marc Masters | https://pitchfork.com/staff/marc-masters/ | |
Surprising and delighting its fans over the course of a fascinating career, this Jagjaguwar band again delivers a successful detour-- a record that consists of one three-part, nearly all-instrumental track. | Surprising and delighting its fans over the course of a fascinating career, this Jagjaguwar band again delivers a successful detour-- a record that consists of one three-part, nearly all-instrumental track. | Oneida: Preteen Weaponry | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/12031-preteen-weaponry/ | Preteen Weaponry | Ever since their epic 2002 song "Sheets of Easter", Oneida seem to evoke something wild and transcendent in the press and the minds of their fans. Eager listeners await each release, ready to have their minds expanded and bodies exhausted, but the band has spent the past few years subtly changing course. After nearly perfecting their distinctive groove on 2004's Secret Wars, the following year's The Wedding was concise, diverse, and often gorgeous, while 2006's Happy New Year felt tentative and even somber (save for a few monster tracks like "Up With People"). Time has proven these records all fascinating and rewarding in their own right, and this year brings another surprise from the band: an album that's not only nearly all-instrumental, but all one track.
Or so they claim. It's not quite one long song, as it's divided into three distinctly different ones with track breaks, though they do flow together fairly gracefully. Whatever fans expected, Preteen Weaponry is neither a definitive statement nor some sort of a Herculean display of ability. It's simply another example of a band that never tires of challenging itself, and nearly always rises to the occasion.
As the first track begins, the drums play loose fills around the edges of the beat, a faraway pulse of guitar keeps the time, and garbled wah-addled noise fills the mid-ground. But as the track comes into focus, the instruments start to discern themselves, the drums take hold of a sophisticated but primal groove, and Oneida start to jam. The layering of sound in this first segment, and how subtly it shifts, is striking: Primal grooves evaporate into faint whispers, inscrutable noise becomes a foundation for sparse and clean guitar notes, then acoustic guitars and incidental organ tones lighten the atmosphere. Divert your attention for more than a minute and you'll forget where the song had just been, and how it got to its present state.
In the second segment, guitars squeal over bowel-shaking bass with sluggish, almost ceremonial drumming. Its one chord is stretched and teased until high and lilting vocals finally kick in, almost chanting, and the guitars scrape and squiggle like a pickup's engine in its last throes. All that fades into the background once the third track kicks off when a few laser-like tones come in and the song shifts to a major key.
Oneida's love of repetition gets them saddled with more than a few krautrock tags, and drummer Kid Millions' work on the final track could actually fit in on a Can or Neu! record. That said, the rhythm is still irregular and askew, with Millions nonchalantly dropping beats as the melody whizzes around him. Soon, all the members intermittently drop in and out of the mix, almost dub-like in the segment's final minutes, as the band begins to use the studio as another instrument. Even if Preteen Weaponry is one more left turn out of many in the band's catalog, it nonetheless reaffirms what makes Oneida stand out: How they take something so endlessly parroted and tempered as psychedelic rock and stretch it, with equal parts discipline and abandon, into something more artistic and, more importantly, unique. | 2008-08-04T01:00:01.000-04:00 | 2008-08-04T01:00:01.000-04:00 | Rock | Brah | August 4, 2008 | 7.5 | cff5f89c-daf5-4713-81bd-bb12d9f178ab | Jason Crock | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jason-crock/ | null |
Post-punk quartet Pop. 1280's new album, Imps of Perversion, showcases a more polished approach. But compared to the apocalyptic clamor of 2012's The Horror, that same crispness and clarity works against the band’s attempts to dredge up the dread. | Post-punk quartet Pop. 1280's new album, Imps of Perversion, showcases a more polished approach. But compared to the apocalyptic clamor of 2012's The Horror, that same crispness and clarity works against the band’s attempts to dredge up the dread. | Pop. 1280: Imps of Perversion | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/18322-pop-1280-imps-of-perversion/ | Imps of Perversion | The front cover of Pop. 1280’s new album features a shot of the Manhattan skyline at night and, thanks to the wonders of Photoshop, some multi-headed mutant monster rising from the waters before it. The scene is apropos on many levels: in both sound and intent, Pop. 1280 very much seem like the product of the notoriously seedy New York City that was eventually washed away by the dual forces of Giuliani and gentrification. Their future-shocked art-punk brutalism hearkens back to the time when Sonic Youth namedropping Philip K. Dick rather than Marc Jacobs, and when Richard Kern’s muse was Lydia Lunch instead of Sasha Grey. And yet more so than any specific aesthetic reference points from that era, what Pop. 1280 most vividly evoke is a bygone 1980s when an after-hours stroll through the Lower East Side could prove more dangerous anything you see on "Fear Factor." But after burrowing toward new depths of depravity on last year’s still-startling The Horror, even these miscreants need to come up for air. And like vampires stepping into the sun, Pop. 1280’s tentative crawl toward the light can be a little unflattering.
That’s not to say Imps of Pervision constitutes a major cosmetic change, or that Pop. 1280’s music now sounds anything like the first half of their name; as far as clean-up jobs go, this one was administered with a crumbling piece of wet toilet paper rather than a hydraulic hose. But compared to the apocalyptic clamor of The Horror, there’s a greater crispness and clarity here that, at times, works against the band’s attempts to dredge up the dread. On Horror highlights like “Bodies in the Dunes” and “New Electronix", Pop. 1280 pillaged forth in unison with a creeping intensity, like a street gang encircling its victim in a swarm attack; by contrast, the clearer separation of Ivan Lip’s spidery guitar lines and Zach Ziemann’s shifting rhythms on Imps’ “Lights Out” and “The Control Freak” defuses their imposing mystique, leaving frontman Chris Bug oddly overexposed-- all the bark without enough bite to back it up. (Furthermore, the latter song’s attempt at examining the more mundane sort of monstrous beings we encounter on a daily basis doesn’t pack the same absurdist panache as their cubicle-bound peers in Pissed Jeans.)
It’s not that Pop. 1280 necessarily need scuzzed-out production to feel convincingly caustic; the corrosively vocoderized “Population Control” is the most aggressively lo-fi song here, but also the most unformed and ineffectual, too. Pop. 1280’s potency is really a function of proper pacing, of allowing sufficient time for the players’ competing parts to cohere into a punishing squall and for Bug to undergo a gradual transformation from simmering unease to strait-jacketed psychosis. And to that end, Imps of Pervision peaks with its torrid middle stretch. “Nailhouse” pounds the deviant groove of The Stooges’ “Little Doll” into submission, with Bug’s increasingly violent fantasias eerily evocative of the current vogue for homemade pressure-cooker bombs; “Human Probe II” and “Do the Anglerfish” are exceptional showcases of Lip’s six-string savagery, unleashing a deep arsenal of caterwauling tones that can drill holes through skulls. Pop. 1280 sustain just enough of that gonzo energy to elevate the more conventionally rendered mid-tempo rockers that make up the album’s back half, however, the morosely monotone closing ballad “Riding Shotgun” suggests they have the aspirations-- if not yet the artistry-- to rise above their sewage-smeared station. Given all the blood, jism, and other bodily secretions the dot Bug’s lyric sheet here, Pop. 1280 are still very much the sort of band that demand a post-listen shower-- this time, though, you just won't need as much soap. | 2013-08-07T02:00:04.000-04:00 | 2013-08-07T02:00:04.000-04:00 | Rock | Sacred Bones | August 7, 2013 | 6.7 | d00e869f-990c-435a-bee0-a161963f3a94 | Stuart Berman | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stuart-berman/ | null |
A new three-disc set surveys the trumpeter’s most critically reviled era. The unreleased studio material is a mixed bag, but a 1983 live recording is revelatory. | A new three-disc set surveys the trumpeter’s most critically reviled era. The unreleased studio material is a mixed bag, but a 1983 live recording is revelatory. | Miles Davis: That’s What Happened 1982-1985: The Bootleg Series Vol. 7 | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/miles-davis-thats-what-happened-1982-1985-the-bootleg-series-vol-7/ | That’s What Happened 1982-1985: The Bootleg Series Vol. 7 | Death, taxes, and “’80s Miles sucks”—as it was, and ever shall be.
For an artist whose discography has inspired so much critical debate, consensus on Miles Davis’ final era is remarkably unified—even the liner notes for That’s What Happened 1982-1985, Legacy’s latest entry in the excellent Bootleg Series, mention the “elephant in the room.” For years, many fans and critics cringed at the thought of Miles trying to update his sound using the slickest, gaudiest aspects of a decade that saw mainstream jazz marginalized even more than it had been the first time Miles tried to fuse a new generation’s music into his own (during the hallowed Bitches Brew era). Was everyone wrong? Was there something of value there? Let’s start from the beginning of the end.
In the summer of 1975, after 30-plus years of performing, Miles retired from music. Ailing health and general burnout meant that he didn’t pick up his horn again until sometime in 1980. In the interim, by his own admission, he kept himself busy with: women, cocaine, cognac, sometimes going out to see shows, women, beer, sleeping pills, the occasional speedball, Percodan, Seconal, a little jail time for failing to pay child support, and a few more women. But even jazz legends come down to earth sometimes. When he decided he’d had enough of the high/low-life (and after some cajoling by Columbia exec George Butler), he pulled together a band, booked some studio time, and proceeded to make up for lost time.
The initial results of the “comeback” yielded mixed results. His first album out of the gate was 1981’s The Man With the Horn, made with two different bands—one featuring keyboardist Robert “Bobby” Irving III and Miles’ nephew Vince Wilburn on drums, and another with guitarist Mike Stern, bassist Marcus Miller, saxophonist Bill “not that Bill” Evans, and drummer Al Foster (the only holdover from Miles’ ’70s groups). As such, the record is caught between Miles’ desire to update his funk-fusion sound of the preceding decade and trying something totally new—in that case, adding snappy funk-pop to his arsenal, even including a track with soul vocals.
Fans were generally happy he was back, but there were chinks in the armor. For anyone who’d followed Miles’ path to that point, two things were obvious: He had some catching up to do in regards to incorporating the sound of the ’80s into his music, and his chops weren’t quite back yet. By his own admission, he hadn’t totally kicked drugs or booze, so it would take the better part of a year playing shows and eventually cleaning up his act before he started sounding like himself again. And, perhaps more importantly, he found Prince.
Miles’ love of contemporary R&B and funk is well documented, as evidenced by his integration of the sounds of James Brown and Sly Stone into his music in the ’70s, but it wasn’t until he discovered the music of Minneapolis’ finest in 1982 that his ’80s comeback truly came alive. The music on the three-disc That’s What Happened 1982-1985 collection captures a period when Miles had found both his chops and his muse, and dove headfirst into the sound of a new era. Gone were the multi-guitar, wah-wah and conga freakouts of the previous decade’s bands, to make room for shorter songs, tighter beats, slappier bass, and even a reclaimed love of the blues. As ever, Miles aimed straight for (what he perceived as) the ears of Black youth, and this time he had the right sound.
Most of the set’s first disc comprises recordings made during sessions for 1983’s Star People, my pick for Miles’ best comeback-era record. However, all the studio tracks presented here are previously unreleased, so fans have plenty of incentive to investigate. “Santana” is a lengthy, mid-tempo funk tune whose snaky, childlike melody is classic Miles (and would later show up in “Hopscotch” on the second and third discs). It begins with the splash of Miles’ bright, discordant synth chord, and though the first half gallops along without much direction, the second (beginning with Miles’ solo) ups the energy, ending with an inspired Stern solo and some great ensemble figures based on the initial melody. At one point the guitar and sax drop out, leaving Miles alone to take short jabs at the melody over a bass and drums drone—it’s both ominous and head-bobbing, and doesn’t really sound like anything else I’ve heard from him. Teo Macero produced these sessions (the last time he ever would for Miles), and it’s easy to imagine him concocting an edit which might have improved Star People.
The two-part “Minor Ninths” features only Miles on electric piano and trombonist J.J. Johnson, an old friend, playing bluesy solo figures. It’s moody and interesting, if something of a non-sequitur. The three-part “Celestial Blues” tracks continue this vibe but lighten the mood by integrating the full band, playing variations on chilled-out, after-hours funk under muted Miles blowing. The two-part “Remake of OBX Ballad” pieces are less interesting, as Miles only plays synth under very smooth, if admittedly tasteful sax soloing from Evans. The first disc ends with two takes on “Freaky Deaky,” done during sessions for 1984’s Decoy, and the only tracks representing that album in the set. They’re fine (if actually less interesting than the bizarre, synth-laden version that eventually appeared on Decoy), but I might have wished for more from those sessions.
Moving chronologically, disc three contains a July 1983 live show that occurred during a break in the Decoy sessions and is the highlight of the collection. By that time, Miles had added guitarist John Scofield, percussionist Mino Cinelu, and bassist Darryl Jones (future Sting, Madonna, and Rolling Stones collaborator) to the mix, and anyone underwhelmed by the trumpeter’s studio offerings of the decade should find a lot to love. There’s nothing slick or malformed here: Straight bangers “Speak (That’s What Happened),” “What It Is,” and “Hopscotch” are right out of his mid-’70s playbook, with frantic tempos, percussion, and, best of all, Miles kicking the shit out of his solos. He’d developed a technique of playing trumpet with one hand, using the other to accentuate his jabbing figures on synth, approximating both Prince’s synths circa Dirty Mind and the brass sections Gil Evans used to arrange for him. That’s fitting, because the melody on “Speak” was itself arranged by Evans, based on an improvised Scofield figure from an earlier session. The set ebbs and flows organically like all the best Miles shows, and as it’s currently his only officially released ’83 performance, fans need to hear it.
Disc two contains tracks recorded during the sessions for 1985’s You’re Under Arrest. Miles planned to do an entire album of pop covers, but ultimately settled on Cyndi Lauper’s “Time After Time” and Michael Jackson’s “Human Nature.” Just as on the Under Arrest versions, the alternate mixes and full studio session versions on this set are solid, if not particularly revealing. The only real draw is hearing Miles blow over the songs, but I wouldn’t say his versions add much to their legacies. (Drummer Foster actually walked out of the “Human Nature” sessions because he was tired of playing the same old pop-powered backbeat, so Miles brought back his nephew Wilburn.) The previously unreleased cover of Tina Turner’s “What’s Love Got to Do With It” fares a little better, if only because its slinky, noir-ish vibe already suited Miles to a tee. Elsewhere, the remake of “Theme From Jack Johnson (Right Off)/Intro” is fun (and actually a variation on “Speak”), but the two takes of “Hopscotch” don’t come close to matching the energy of the live version, and even old cohort John McLaughlin can’t quite save the ’80s-chase-scene feel of “Katia.”
Funnily enough, the peaks and valleys of That’s What Happened 1982-1985 perfectly capture the overall trajectory of Miles’ late discography. The live shows never stopped being awesome, while your mileage will likely vary with the studio stuff. By the same token, anyone writing off his whole decade as a wash is missing out. Whatever you think of Miles’ aesthetic choices, they were always choices made by a vibrant, ever-curious artist. | 2022-09-20T00:02:00.000-04:00 | 2022-09-20T00:02:00.000-04:00 | Jazz | Columbia / Legacy | September 20, 2022 | 7 | d014f11d-edf3-46fc-b9e0-2ac31f9f8cae | Dominique Leone | https://pitchfork.com/staff/dominique-leone/ | |
The latest mixtape from the young Detroit rapper takes scamming to the next level. | The latest mixtape from the young Detroit rapper takes scamming to the next level. | Teejayx6: Fraudulent Activity | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/teejayx6-fraudulent-activity/ | Fraudulent Activity | Teejayx6 is a passionate rapper. It just so happens that his passion is not so much rapping, but scamming, and making money so that he can scam more, and maybe, if he has some money leftover, fund a rap career. The Detroit teenager will do anything to ensure his passions flourish, like illegal purchases of iPhones in his nephew’s name and convincing his younger cousin to sell weed from her lemonade stand. In Detroit, scammer rap is nothing new (see: Bossman Rich and BandGang Lonnie Bands), but Teejayx6’s approach is more direct. Sometimes he’s nervous that he’s gone too far and will be caught, a tension that’s amplified by his anxious, offbeat delivery and fast-paced instrumentals. Teejay always gets away, though, and when he does, he takes the time to reflect on the finer things in life: the strength of his IP address, the VPN that leaves him untraceable, and the social security numbers he’s purchased, like one that belongs to retired NBA player Tony Parker.
Last month, Teejayx6 achieved modest virality through his jaw-dropping collaboration with fellow Detroit rapper Kasher Quon. Since that success, Teejayx6 has been releasing music nearly every day, some better than others, like his surreal scamming tutorial “Swipe Lesson” and the birth of his “Swipe Story” series that’s quickly evolving into a street Ten Commandments. But not much has changed for Teejay: He’s still on Instagram trying to convince his followers to DM their bank accounts and uploads music to YouTube on a whim, like his latest mixtape, Fraudulent Activity.
On Wednesday, Teejayx6 didn’t even wait for the files to finish uploading before posting a screenshot—not even a link—of his mixtape with the caption, “Out now on my YouTube uploading the rest of the songs right now.” Fraudulent Activity itself is simple, seven tracks of Teejay’s crime-riddled tales and punchlines, all hovering around the two-minute mark.
Throughout Fraudulent Activity, Teejayx6 constantly crosses the line, like on the face-palming “Allah,” but when he reels himself in a smidge, his Walmart and Wells Fargo anecdotes are captivating. “Scammed a white lady and she look like Helen Keller,” and “Stole my grandma money I can’t wait to see that preacher,” he says in a deadpan on “Cheat Codes.” And while it’s hard to say, “Yes, I love to hear Teejay rap about finessing old ladies,” I do love to hear Teejay rap about finessing old ladies.
The mixtape’s best track, by far, is “SilkRoad,” an ode to the illicit, now-shuttered, deep web marketplace. Teejay rambles on in a somber tone like he’s lost a loved one: “The feds shut the site down, but I miss Silk Road/They sold illegal shit and that’s the reason I got my first gun.” He uses this opportunity to reflect, like a flashback episode of a sitcom, on the scams that hold a special place in his heart: the time he copied someone’s ID, but was delighted to find out he looks just like them and when he catfished and convinced a boy on Tinder to send him $6,000. Maybe, months from now, we look back at Teejayx6 and Fraudulent Activity and scratch our heads. But, for now, just keep him from within arms reach of your grandmother’s social security check and enjoy the daily ride. | 2019-07-26T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-07-26T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | self-released | July 26, 2019 | 7.5 | d0171977-f434-46bc-8741-238bbc0a8616 | Alphonse Pierre | https://pitchfork.com/staff/alphonse-pierre/ | |
The London singer-songwriter's Danger Mouse and Inflo-produced latest feels like an easy listen at first, but eventually reveals its mournful and even despairing heart. | The London singer-songwriter's Danger Mouse and Inflo-produced latest feels like an easy listen at first, but eventually reveals its mournful and even despairing heart. | Michael Kiwanuka: Kiwanuka | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/michael-kiwanuka-kiwanuka/ | Kiwanuka | “All I want is to talk to you,” Michael Kiwanuka sings on “Piano Joint (This Kind of Love),” as if the “you” had heard otherwise. Intimacy, for him, is fraught, full of potential traps. Anxiety pervades the London singer-songwriter’s third album, but he emerges a stronger artist, thanks to panoramic production by collaborators Danger Mouse and Inflo. What on first or even third spin unfolds as an easy listen eventually reveals itself as a mournful and often despairing work: an album by an artist willing himself to believe people will offer the hope that institutions can’t but steeling himself for disappointment just in case. Doubt is his muse—and burden.
In the three years since Love & Hate, Kiwanuka’s popularity has only grown— the HBO miniseries Big Little Lies picked up that album’s “Cold Little Heart” as its theme song. His take on soul proceeds from the fuzzed-out serrated explorations of the Temptations’ psychedelic era and Terence Trent D’Arby at his most communal. Better still is his voice, which mixes Solomon Burke’s slow-burn urgency with John Hiatt’s gulp.
Kiwanuka mirrors Markeidric Walker’s cover art: grand, regal in its confidence, faintly androgynous. Its best songs are as direct as Kiwanuka’s gaze. The synth-anchored “Solid Ground” almost chokes on its anguish until the strings offer solace. “Piano Joint (This Kind of Love)” presents itself as a prayer in an empty room. “Living in Denial,” change tempos and chords after a couple of exploratory minutes; Kiwanuka treats songs like ecosystems that stretch and flower after sunlight and soil tilling.
Perhaps to keep things from skewing too “retro,” Danger Mouse and Inflo overdo the modernizing touches: the clinkety-clanks and distorted samples that sandwich “Final Days” distract from a chiming lament whose refrain marks Kiwanuka’s peak as a vocalist. They love these ideas so much that its follow-up “Interlude (Loving the People)” give them to you again, all three instrumental minutes of them. But the album offers compensatory pleasures, like “Hard to Say Goodbye,” in which Kiwanuka pledges fealty through and space time to a vague someone he has dared to love—an example of the album’s faint queer undertones. A studio-created ripple sound effect creates a sense of immensity. Always, though, doubt chews away at him: “And if I had a dream/Love would be sunshine for me.”
Offering no blandishments, no expressions of we’ll-get-through-this, Kiwanuka is a nerve-wracked, sustained act of whistling in the dark. Absent, though, is any hint of reveling: a tendency that often leads to soul rot. When Kiwanuka sings, “The young and dumb will always need/One of their own to lead,” he doesn’t volunteer.
Buy: Rough Trade
(Pitchfork may earn a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.) | 2019-11-01T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-11-01T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | Interscope | November 1, 2019 | 7.5 | d0237546-1580-43c8-b173-d5587fc4e6e8 | Alfred Soto | https://pitchfork.com/staff/alfred-soto/ | |
Rastafari: The Dreads Enter Babylon 1955-83*,* Soul Jazz’s most recent in a line of high-quality compilations, provides a window into Kingston’s past, drawing a line directly from Rastafari to the rise of reggae as an internationally recognized type of music. | Rastafari: The Dreads Enter Babylon 1955-83*,* Soul Jazz’s most recent in a line of high-quality compilations, provides a window into Kingston’s past, drawing a line directly from Rastafari to the rise of reggae as an internationally recognized type of music. | Various Artists: Rastafari: The Dreads Enter Babylon, 1955-83 | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/20777-rastafari-the-dreads-enter-babylon-1955-83/ | Rastafari: The Dreads Enter Babylon, 1955-83 | The historic-yet-sadly-dilapidated Ward Theatre in the middle of downtown Kingston, Jamaica is normally closed to the public. But it played host to a unique performance this past June, one that closed the week-long Kingston on the Edge art festival. Bandleader and legendary reggae artist Earl "Chinna" Smith, alongside more than a dozen singers, drummers, members of the Jamaican Philharmonic, and a local opera singer, made up the "Binghistra", providing a combination of Rastafari nyabinghi drumming and classical music.
This concert was hardly the first time the historic Ward had showcased the nyabinghi style. The 4/4 shuffle of its rhythm, which stems from three specific drum sounds (akete, funde, and bass) was first heard in the theatre back in the 1950s, when bandleader Count Ossie, hailing from a Rastafari camp in the hills of East Kingston, was first invited to perform as part of a Christmas variety show. Rastafari: The Dreads Enter Babylon 1955-83, Soul Jazz's most recent in a line of high-quality compilations, provides a window into Kingston's past, acting as a soundtrack to this narrative that reaches back to Count Ossie's first and subsequent performances at the legendary Ward to draw a line directly from Rastafari to the rise of reggae as an internationally recognized type of music.
It is nyabinghi drumming that provides the foundation for reggae, and Soul Jazz makes this argument explicit by kicking off the compilation with Count Ossie and the Rasta Family's "Africa We Want Fe Go", taking the traditional Rastafari nyabinghi chant and drumming and adding electrified reggae bass. This sets the tone for all selections: to demonstrate that link between the spirituality of Rastafari and the development of the unique sound of Jamaican music. Reggae may have developed into genres other than Rastafari music, as any listener to dancehall or lovers' rock reggae can attest, but none of these types of music would exist if it weren't for those origins in Rastafari.
Cementing this fact, a quarter of the tracks feature Count Ossie alongside various drummers and musicians. Tracks with the Mystic Revelation of Rastafari and the Rasta Family provide more traditional approaches, with the "Tales of Mozambique" and "Narration" pairing historical recounting with rich, percussive background. Organist Leslie Butler and vibraphonist Ronald Downer accompany Count Ossie's drum group on two separate tracks that place soulful reggae and jazz sounds alongside the Rastafari rhythms. These were both produced in the early 1960s by Sonia Pottinger, who went on to become a successful reggae hitmaker throughout the 1970s, producing classics such as Ken Boothe's "Lady with the Starlight" and the Melodians "Swing and Dine". Further focusing on the importance of the drum, the compilation contains two tracks with Bongo Herman, a man whose name reveals exactly the talent for which he is known. The bongo complements snippets of harmonized chorus and praises to Ethiopian Emperor Haile Selassie.
The telltale layered drums of nyabinghi are deceptively simple, with their foundational bass hitting on the 1 and 3, but there are improvisational opportunities everywhere, from the creativity of the akete player to the endless variety of chants and songs, spoken word and harmonizations, that can all find accompaniment. And this compilation is full of this rhythmic storytelling, reaching back to the roots of African drumming while demonstrating the innovations of Rastafari.
The mid-'50s mento-sounding "Ethiopia" of Lord Lebby and the Jamaican Calypsonians pairs banjo and bongo bounce with lyrics about the centrality of the East African nation to Rastafari belief. Though there are about 10 years between the late-'60s ska of "Haile Selassie" by Laurel Aitken and the 1970s roots reggae "His Imperial Majesty" by Rod Taylor, both point to the importance of Ethiopia's last Emperor to the Rastafari movement. "Hail the Words of Jah" is a hagiography of Haile Selassie presented in soothing falsetto by Congos member Ashanti Roy and an early drum-accompanied Mutabaruka poem, "Say".
The interesting addition of the youthful voices found on child star QQ's "Betta Must Come", raises some questions about the time range of the title, given that it was recorded in 2005. But it demonstrates how the nyabinghi sound extends into a new generation. The inclusion begs the question of other pertinent additions: Recent reggae revivalists like Chronixx, Kabaka Pyramid, and Jah9, to name but a few, have also kept the sound current. There are artists who gained fame in the 1990s and have claimed affiliation to the Rastafari movement, such as Buju Banton, Capleton, and Sizzla—all who make use of Rastafari rhythms as well as themes. Their absence feels like a missed opportunity.
However, the 40-page-plus accompanying booklet touches on the music post-1983, suggesting that this might be part one of a series of compilations—given the power of the music, one can only hope. The extent of the information provided in the liner notes is as good as can be when the goal is to encapsulate over a century of spiritual, socio-economic, and cultural history, not just of Rastafari, but of both colonial and independent Jamaica and Jamaican music as well. Yes, it's a reasonable introduction, but it might have been an idea to point to some of the many, many additional sources on Rastafari. This would reflect the reality that Rastafari, much like the music of this compilation, is dynamic and varied, consistently resisting any efforts to pigeonhole.
And although the tracklisting jumps around a little between decades, making it difficult to get a sense of chronology, it's clear that Rastafari consciousness has found its way into just about every type of Jamaican music, from drum compositions to calypso, mento, ska, reggae, and beyond. As the title says, "the dreads enter Babylon"—and they leave no stone (or style) unturned. | 2015-07-31T02:00:02.000-04:00 | 2015-07-31T02:00:02.000-04:00 | null | Soul Jazz | July 31, 2015 | 7.5 | d023a8a2-3022-4447-b7f8-167c43570307 | Erin MacLeod | https://pitchfork.com/staff/erin-macleod/ | null |
The capstone to Portland synthesizer musician Daryl Groetsch’s wildly productive year, Dusk runs the gamut of his sound, evoking early ambient classics as it flits between beauty and terror. | The capstone to Portland synthesizer musician Daryl Groetsch’s wildly productive year, Dusk runs the gamut of his sound, evoking early ambient classics as it flits between beauty and terror. | Pulse Emitter: Dusk | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/pulse-emitter-dusk/ | Dusk | Daryl Groetsch is on a streak. In the first five months of 2022, the Portland ambient musician who usually records as Pulse Emitter quietly put out an incredible run of synthesizer albums under his birth name. The long, sighing compositions on these six albums were placid even by Groetsch’s standards, but they engaged the listener rather than simply enveloping them. Groetsch’s classical training informed rich harmonic structures that constantly shifted rather than just hovering in place. And the sounds he used—especially a low moan on the best of the series, January’s Home Again—had a chilly edge that was lonelier and less reassuring than most new-age synthesizer music.
Dusk, Groetsch’s new Pulse Emitter album for Hausu Mountain and the capstone to his enviable 2022 run, leans into this prickliness while rocketing far beyond those albums’ deliberately limited palette. Across the record’s 41-minute run, the sun seems to set as the music transitions from sparkling synth bouquets (“Cloudside Dwellings,” “Chrome Sky”) into darker long-tone pieces with more in common with the Daryl Groetsch Bandcamp releases (“Darkening Forest,” “Snow Diamonds”). This structure gives him the opportunity to flex his full range. Each track does its own distinct thing, which is usually alluded to in the titles—“Snow Diamonds,” for instance, vaporizes crystalline synth shards into an aerosol, while “Fireflies” sparkles with wonder. Yet each contributes to the album’s thrilling, frightening journey from day to night.
A rich evocation of an alien landscape, Dusk is filled with beauty and danger. There are no discernible voices across its eight tracks, but it still feels alive with chatter. The yearning puffs of electric piano on “Temple in the Mountains” are occasionally interrupted by an effect that sounds like a pterodactyl screaming across the sky. “The Road to Thrax” is full of low growling sounds that suggest fellow Portland producer Strategy’s vocal-distortion fantasias. Everything leads to “Mulch,” which closes the album out with six minutes of subterranean noise; its arrival feels inevitable, like the whole album has disappeared into pitch darkness.
Dusk is less emotionally stirring than 2020’s Swirlings, the previous Pulse Emitter album on Hausu Mountain, and only “Chrome Sky” comes close to duplicating the deep longing and sadness of Home Again and its sonorous title track. Yet maintaining a slight remove allows the album to achieve its effect of dwarfing the listener against the overwhelming vastness of its landscape. Groetsch’s blocky synth palette, reminiscent of early new-age masters like Iasos and Suzanne Ciani, helps in this regard. While a sound-design scientist like GAS might attempt a literal transposition of the sound of a darkening wood, Dusk’s limited tool kit posits an abstract idea of such a landscape and then lets the listener’s imagination fill in the blanks.
It’s a bit like an old monster movie whose shoddy effects are somehow more evocative than hyper-realistic CG, and indeed there’s something fundamentally old-fashioned about Dusk. Though it’s only being released on CD and cassette, its brisk runtime brings to mind early, vinyl-era ambient albums like Eno’s Apollo and On Land, as does its ease in transitioning between the prettiest and darkest poles of the artist’s sound. While many latter-day ambient albums sustain a single mood, those earliest entries in the genre were so charged with the possibilities of this new way of listening that they seemed unbound in the sensations they could evoke, flitting between incredible beauty and terror in the span of a few tracks. Dusk is alive with the same feeling of freedom. | 2022-12-06T00:01:00.000-05:00 | 2022-12-06T00:01:00.000-05:00 | Electronic | Hausu Mountain | December 6, 2022 | 7.6 | d0257a07-9e49-469a-90a3-03af3f49c61d | Daniel Bromfield | https://pitchfork.com/staff/daniel-bromfield/ | |
Transforming their past solemnity into swaggering confidence, the Minneapolis-based singer-songwriter and rapper returns with an EP of thunderous club music. | Transforming their past solemnity into swaggering confidence, the Minneapolis-based singer-songwriter and rapper returns with an EP of thunderous club music. | Dua Saleh: Crossover EP | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/dua-saleh-crossover-ep/ | Crossover EP | CROSSOVER is warehouse music; it sounds like the lights are off, or maybe strobing. On previous EPs—2020’s ROSETTA and 2019’s acclaimed Nūr—Sudanese American artist Dua Saleh fleshed out a genre-defying niche that alternated gospel-influenced vocals and languid, poetic rapping over stark synths. Their goal for CROSSOVER was different: “to make music people could dance to.” Saleh’s gift for flow translates into a hypnotic mélange of club anthems with a hallucinogenic delivery. With collaborators including rapper and singer Duckwrth and Bajan American horrorcore rapper Haleek Maul, CROSSOVER introduces a bubblier, more upbeat sound. But even when working with certified pop producers like STINT (NAO, Gallant) and Kyle Shearer (Tove Lo, Melanie Martinez), Saleh maintains the tenacity and sarcasm that has become inextricable from their resonant drawl.
Saleh’s background as a poet shines through on CROSSOVER, where grandiose musings on identity and rebirth (“I can see the future in the fire and the fodder”) hold their own alongside swaggering declarations of sexual prowess. Saleh’s disarming, somnolent tone intensifies each statement until it boils over; even the silliest repeated quips, like “I got them buzzing like a bee,” lodge themselves into the brain. The solemnity of their previous work is transformed into a blustering self-confidence that serves as CROSSOVER’s foundation, even as the EP runs the gamut from austere, house-influenced beats to twinkling electro-R&B.
Incorporating Afrobeats and hip-hop into what Saleh calls “trans-interdimensional pop,” the EP’s first half establishes a thumping, bass-driven club sound grounded in their earlier, rap-oriented work. Boosted by harsh, industrial beats, “fitt” has the hardest entrance in Saleh’s catalog as their boasts about newfound international fame echo over clanging drums: “Boom, Mumbai, wanna feel my grit/People in the Bronx wanna take a trip.” And while Amaarae’s whispery, pixie-like feature provides a refreshing contrast to the brusqueness of Saleh’s chorus, her fluttering vocal belies her confidence: “Every time I do it, shawty pop for me/Feeling like a n**** won the lottery.” On “tic tic,” the EP’s hands-down, arms-up standout, Saleh and Haleek Maul spar in Spanish, Arabic, and patois over a beat that falls somewhere between reggae and grime. Building off the haunted dancefloor energy of “fitt,” “tic tic” is Saleh at their most captivating, carrying an undeniable menace with each bouncing step.
“trash snacks” steers the record towards a glossier, more frenetic plane. Cranking up the distortion on Saleh’s vocals and piling on soapy, glitching synths over reverberating bass, it’s a saccharine anthem that kisses the speakers before blowing them out entirely. The song’s brattiness is a much-welcomed foil to CROSSOVER’s overall thundering swagger, but when Saleh spits, “Don’t you call me baby ’bout your little fucking snacks,” in a baby voice modulated to PC Music-level heights, the venom is instantly recognizable.
Although the closing “fav flav” falls superficially in line with the shiny electropop of “trash snacks,” it’s the EP’s weakest point. While Duckwrth’s suave vocals flow like honey, his unmemorable feature and the song’s relatively tame production are a poor fit; lines like “Hot like Megan’s frame” and “Cartier frames, no shade” match the lighthearted tone yet fall flat, even when Saleh sings along. Saleh thrives when they take risks, so the daring experimentalism of “trash snacks” is where they seem most at home. Synthesizing the macabre and the dainty into sublime club music, their new vision is ambitious and riveting.
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-10-28T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2021-10-28T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | AGAINST GIANTS | October 28, 2021 | 7.6 | d031f1b0-1cb3-4b09-99cd-47ec57fa1e5f | Sue Park | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sue-park/ | |
The South East London singer’s latest EP is a glittering portal into the future that offers up brief glimpses into a glamorously dirty life. | The South East London singer’s latest EP is a glittering portal into the future that offers up brief glimpses into a glamorously dirty life. | Shygirl : ALIAS EP | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/shygirl-alias-ep/ | ALIAS EP | In the remarkably unsexy year of 2020, you wouldn’t expect an artist to evoke the glowing grime of a club so exactly, but Shygirl manages to do it with her latest EP, ALIAS. Similar to 2018’s Cruel Practice, ALIAS finds Shygirl spitting vulgarities like they’re her typical weekend plans, aided by oily bass lines from producers like longtime collaborator Sega Bodega. This time, though, Shygirl’s voice carries a bit more over the muck; the production is bolder and more focused, like throwing a sharpened knife at a wall rather than a smattering of darts.
In general, this EP is about fucking. Shygirl playfully contemplates her parents’ failures in her upbringing as she wonders if you “like what you see,” offers her freakiness “on the bed/on the floor,” and name-drops “your daddy,” who’s calling her on the phone right now. It all might come across as gaudy if it wasn’t so fun. Shygirl’s delivery has a dark-horse quality to it; her voice is buttery soft, but she handles lyrics with venomous precision, knowing when to bite and when to soften.
“Bawdy” is a good example of this skill—Shygirl begins with sharp commands—“grind it right/arch back/hand to thigh”—then practically sighs through the chorus, telling you to “come and get it” while a bursting synth line that sounds like a much hotter “Party Up (Up in Here)” loops. She tends to favor murmuring bass and glimmering synth lines, reminiscent of Amnesia Scanner or the bubblegum bass of Slayyyter.
But Shygirl’s music skews darker, heavier, and oozes a very specific kind of sexuality, the kind that usually gets scared out of women by seventh-grade health classes and angry men on the internet. It’s self-indulgent, and it revolves around Shygirl—her body, how nasty she is, what she wants you to do—not any particular lover, and least of all, romance. She offers up brief glimpses into a glamorously dirty life, detailing nights spent “arse up, titty out” and riding in a “fast car/past all the city lights.” There’s an understated line in “Slime,” a song that lives up to its name, slippery with a taunting trap loop running through it, that encapsulates the way that Shygirl so perfectly evokes party culture.
The 808 bass speeds up, preparing the listener for the moment it drops, and as soon as it does, Shygirl says matter-of-factly from her gut, “She came to fuck.” The line nearly made me laugh the first time I heard it, it’s so blunt yet so vague. We are never given any information as to who “she” is other than the suggestion that she’s “a baddie,” but with Shygirl’s delivery and the track’s grumbling, slithering production, you can’t help but feel like you know exactly what she means. She’s talking about your first night out after a breakup, or when you got dressed up to find a suitable enough ex-frat bro at your local bar, or when you’re in the middle of a sweaty room, you’re dancing with all your friends, and you think you’ll never feel sad again.
“She came to fuck” energy defies gender or context—it’s the concept of having a single goal and the gall to believe that you’ll either achieve it or be completely unfazed if you don’t. It contains the driving forces behind a good party: shamelessness and debauchery. In a year of no touching, these euphoric party moments feel far away, but Shygirl’s endearing hedonism brings that sweaty room a bit closer. ALIAS is a glittering light, a portal into the future and everything you might do.
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2020-11-25T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2020-11-25T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Electronic | Because Music | November 25, 2020 | 7.5 | d03f8c16-9dfc-4252-9292-83de2f4c2120 | Ashley Bardhan | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ashley-bardhan/ | |
The wonderfully anarchic British post-punk outfit tries out a little of everything on their promising debut EP. | The wonderfully anarchic British post-punk outfit tries out a little of everything on their promising debut EP. | Squid: Town Centre | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/squid-town-centre/ | Town Centre | On their signature single “Houseplants,” Squid chronicle the struggle to find decent lodgings on the cheap in London. Rather than grumble along with the rest of us, they dismantled their gear and drove a few hours south to Brighton, where core duo Ollie Judge and Louis Borlase rented an apartment by the sea. Ditching the capital wasn’t necessarily an act of industry subversion, but it stems from the same irreverence that animates their anarchic music. For one thing, they have no frontperson: Lead singer Judge is also the drummer, so if anything he’s a rearperson. As with contemporaries black midi, their frenzied live shows emanate from the drum kit. Guitarists and bassists, typically the phallic standard-bearers, are swallowed up like detritus into a whirlpool, then soundtrack their fight to survive.
“Houseplants” doesn’t appear on this Dan Carey-produced debut EP, but plenty rivals its antic spirit. On “The Cleaner,” a jittery seven-minute duet between Judge and Borlase, an indignant shop cleaner yelps about coworkers who “don’t even know my name” before clocking off to orchestrate his own glory on the dancefloor. “Match Bet,” at first a hurtling indie rock tune, plateaus and re-emerges in a motorik dreamscape, via the portal of a 32-bar cornet solo.
Judge, who is 25 and usually yelling, jerks between bewilderment and martial discipline, defying anything resembling a speaking cadence. His “Match Bet” narrator faces a perilous choice: to cut the “red wire” or the “blue wire” when, “well, they all look the same to me.” The politically disillusioned are an object not of mockery, but of primal empathy. Comparisons between Judge and the barking Brits of early postpunk are there to make—some will find the likeness jarring—but Judge’s rhetorical tone lands closer to David Byrne and his mania of the mundane. (“This is my beautiful house/But I can’t afford to live in it,” he trills on “Houseplants.”) The vocals vamp and contort until circumstances too often presented as normal—encroaching social alienation, preposterous living costs—suddenly appear insane, and we wonder who wouldn’t bounce off the walls in despair.
When it isn’t on the offensive, Town Centre waltzes from Tortoise-shelled post-rock (“Savage”) into oddities like “Rodeo,” a morass of Neu! ambience, shuddering cello, and elliptical spoken-word. Being unselfconscious mostly suits them: Once an audacious young band starts to sound like a little of everything, they’ll eventually go full circle, sound like nothing else. Squid are getting there, avoiding genre constrictions they’d later have to wiggle from underneath. More than the map to a promising destination, Town Centre sounds like a declaration of limitlessness. | 2019-09-09T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-09-09T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Speedy Wunderground | September 9, 2019 | 7.7 | d0509f49-eeb3-474d-b4e6-fda31004c7e4 | Jazz Monroe | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jazz-monroe/ | |
Daniel Lopatin’s latest release is less a conceptual follow-up to last month’s Age Of than a gift to hardcore fans who relish even his odds and ends. | Daniel Lopatin’s latest release is less a conceptual follow-up to last month’s Age Of than a gift to hardcore fans who relish even his odds and ends. | Oneohtrix Point Never: The Station EP | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/oneohtrix-point-never-the-station-ep/ | The Station EP | Until recently, every full-length release from Daniel Lopatin’s Oneohtrix Point Never project possessed a single distinct and unified vision, from commercial-sampling chillwave to thunderous, mutated EDM. But June’s Age Of marked a break from that tradition, even as its conceptual sprawl surpassed that of the phases that came before it. An eclectic record that spanned hermetic electro-folk, doomy sampledelia, and the eerie loveliness of Boards of Canada, Age Of also found Lopatin rifling through his own back catalog for inspiration: If you listened closely, you could hear echoes of the pointillist early-electronic music on R Plus Seven, Garden of Delete’s neon headbanger fare, and the noisy, refracted new age of Rifts. The album didn’t represent a new aesthetic for Lopatin as much as a recontextualization of his previous work within a more pop-oriented vernacular.
Less than two months later, Lopatin has followed up that statement with a stand-alone release of Age Of’s brooding, “Schism”-meets-R&B cut “The Station,” accompanied by three previously unreleased songs. One track, “Trance 1,” dates back further than Age Of; it first surfaced in edited form on 2017’s A Message From Earth, an audiovisual tribute to NASA’s Golden Record Project. Rather than pushing his latest album’s relatively streamlined approach even further, The Station is an EP for hardcore fans who relish digging through Lopatin’s odds and ends. Its 14 minutes of previously unreleased material don’t bear any significant resemblance to the vocal-led title track, and the record makes no discernible overarching statement.
But if you’ve become fascinated with Lopatin’s unique approach to electronic music over the last decade, The Station provides some intriguing material to chew on regardless. “Trance 1” is its highlight, four minutes of zithering synth clouds and gaping drone that perfectly realize the song’s space-is-the-place intentions, while “Monody” pairs Age Of’s occasional forays into medieval harpsichord with a nasty-sounding breakbeat that opens up to reveal Lopatin’s approximation of a proper rave track. The glassy “Blow by Blow” is the collection’s weakest cut, a five-and-a-half minute suite of processed chord-shredding, water-droplet percussion, blasts of static noise, and synthetic euphoria that drifts between moods without quite cohering.
And then there’s “The Station.” Originally written for Usher, its straightforward pop sound makes it a humorously incongruous introduction to the EP’s more abstract material. Still, it makes plenty of sense as a single: It’s one of just a few Age Of cuts that feature Lopatin on lead vocals, for the first time in OPN’s existence, and it uses his singing in a fascinating way. His processed voice slithers in and out of a hypnotic bassline before the music spins out into a state of entropy, with synth lines crashing in and out of the mix as noisy squeals erupt like a DDOS attack on the song's mainframe.
“It’s an open invitation/To try to find the bottom of a bottomless hole,” Lopatin sings, early in “The Station.” Divorced from the themes of modernity-in-collapse that permeate Age Of, the lyric could be interpreted as a summary of Lopatin’s own ongoing mission to find new ways of deconstructing pop music, leaving only warped afterimages in his wake (see also: the title of Age Of’s closing track, “Last Known Image of a Song”). Much of the thrill in following his career over the last decade has come from watching where that protean vision takes OPN from album to album. By now, it’s clear that guessing what lies ahead for Lopatin based on any given release is futile. If The Station fails to offer any clues about his next move, at least we can presume that opacity is intentional. | 2018-07-27T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-07-27T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Experimental | Warp | July 27, 2018 | 6.5 | d0554a03-0f38-4552-b987-d5eef05a1e78 | Larry Fitzmaurice | https://pitchfork.com/staff/larry-fitzmaurice/ |
Subsets and Splits