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OVO Sound signee Roy Wood$ offers a chilled-out version of trappy R&B on his debut studio album. But he’s yet to find a sound that is distinctly his own. | OVO Sound signee Roy Wood$ offers a chilled-out version of trappy R&B on his debut studio album. But he’s yet to find a sound that is distinctly his own. | Roy Wood$: Say Less | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/roy-wooddollar-say-less/ | Say Less | In a year that saw releases from every artist on the OVO Sound roster, signee Roy Wood$ had plenty to live up to with his debut album Say Less. He first got the spotlight in 2015 with his Exis EP, which was a promising introduction to the 21-year-old singer’s hazy R&B. The youngest of the crew, there was a definitive youthful flavor in his bluntness; songs like the manic “Unleashed” or the more relaxed “Jealousy” were remarkably candid but effective. Much of those qualities carried through the EP and mixtape that followed. Say Less, though, reflects someone still experimenting when he should ostensibly be hitting a more coherent stride.
Wood$ has plenty of clear talent, but here he ventures further into lands that exist outside of the brooding, darker-toned music he’s done up to this point. Songs like “What Are You on?” and “B-Town,” a spirited homage to his Brampton home, have a Caribbean flare that highlight his Guyanese background. “Little Bit of Lovin,” meanwhile, finds him doing his very best Michael Jackson impression. The nod is serviceable and convincing enough to stick, but the funky upbeat production does much of the heavy lifting to truly sell the song. It’s one of several pop-leaning endeavors on the album—the dancey “Something New” feels less inspired—but Wood$ still sounds more comfortable surrounded by his sulky shades of black and purple.
The album’s title track falls squarely in the wheelhouse he established on previous releases, and he thrives there. The song is smokey and it rumbles along; occasional creaking bed springs ad-lib his musings about using sex for company. “Falling in love with women, I don’t know what I see in ‘em/More times I be lonely so I don’t know what I be feeling,” he sings; his tone perfectly matches this sort of bedside introspection. Similarly, the sultry “Bb” works well, and Wood$ uses the space of FrancisGotHeat’s bass-driven production to play up the sexual tension of the lyrics. “Monday to Monday” also rises above the rest as he opens up about poppin’ pills and the pseudo good time (“Narcotics for fun/liquor’s for the pain,” he sings). The synth production, courtesy of FKi 1st, seems to float, providing the perfect backdrop for this sort of escapism.
It’s hard to put a finger on what exactly Wood$ brings to an R&B sound that is already so heavily inspired by Toronto and his own label camp, but his attempts to figure it out are, more often than not, rewarding. He borrows generously from his peers, adding in his own coarse rasp, but it’s not a departure significant enough to truly differentiate himself. When hints of a distinct musical identity do peek out—his accent, the gruff aspects of his voice, or the vigor with which he approaches his subject matter—it makes for memorable moments. “Back It Up,” for example, finds him forgoing the silky smooth vocals for a gritty delivery that becomes more pronounced alongside PARTYNEXTDOOR’s own signature singing. On standout single “Balance,” he plays up his dialect in an airy falsetto that contrasts well with Daniel Daley’s sleekness and PnB Rock’s affected melodies.
Wood$ does an excellent job of creating a chilled-out vibe—the kind of music that could soundtrack any setting, whether it’s time to club or wind down. That’s a fine quality to have, but there’s a sense that something deeper is tucked beneath the layers of his brand of trappy R&B. He’s in great company with OVO and in a position to add his own color to their tapestry, to make a larger impact, but he seems to still be figuring out what his lane will be. Nevertheless, wherever Wood$ is going, the destination seems to be worthwhile, and Say Less is a set of breadcrumbs worth following. | 2017-12-14T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2017-12-14T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Pop/R&B | OVO Sound | December 14, 2017 | 6.3 | dd6b19cf-5638-4afe-a36f-ee5a6b0cf7ed | Briana Younger | https://pitchfork.com/staff/briana-younger/ | |
On her new album, the Canadian artist collages 18th-century pipe organs and cavernous drone music. It is a dark encounter between the past and present, revealing the full range of her gifts as a composer. | On her new album, the Canadian artist collages 18th-century pipe organs and cavernous drone music. It is a dark encounter between the past and present, revealing the full range of her gifts as a composer. | Sarah Davachi: *Two Sisters * | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/sarah-davachi-two-sisters/ | Two Sisters | Sarah Davachi is a master at making otherworldly music that coalesces the past and present. When she was in her 20s, Davachi held a job at the National Music Centre in Canada, a gig that introduced her to tinkering with quaint old synths and harpsichords. On albums like 2020’s Cantus, Descant, Mellotrons swirled around 15th-century pipe organs, sculpting drawn-out vibrations. On 2021’s Antiphonals, vintage synths, organs, and string instruments weaved into meandering meditations. Davachi often draws inspiration from experimental icons like La Monte Young and Pauline Oliveros, and her selection of instruments gives the music a cavernous quality, as if it could fill an empty cathedral. On her new album Two Sisters, Davachi once again explores this resonant mix of old and new, but this time around, she takes on more sinister hues and foreboding melodies. It’s a gripping transformation, one that illustrates the full range of her gifts as a composer, and reveals a darker side of her era-blending music.
Though this is new territory for Davachi, the creepier, hollower atmospheres of Two Sisters feel fitting, especially because her music has always conjured a sense of interiority. Where her past works would soar, this album lurks, like intrusive thoughts bubbling up to the surface. The album’s uncanny sound could be due to one of her influences, Andrzej Żuławski’s 1981 cult horror film Possession, a psychological thriller that inspired the music’s portentous spirit. Throughout Two Sisters, Davachi explores the quirks of alternate tunings, often using just intonation; she employs instruments like strings, carillon bells, and pipe organs—including one from the 18th century—to fuel the project's eerie undercurrent. She also leans into her earlier musical interests, shifting between drone music and Renaissance polyphony.
Even in the tracks that feel more contemporary, Davachi still finds a way to effectively tie her music back to the past. Songs like “Alas, Departing,” which is reminiscent of chant music by 12th century composers Hildegard von Bingen or Pérotin, feel the most medieval. “Vanity of Ages” lands like a standard drone piece, driven by a gently quivering organ that unfolds over almost 10 minutes. Yet the central instrument here is a historical pipe organ from 1742, known as a “tracker” organ; it has a valve that can be pushed in to adjust the amount of air entering the pipes, affecting the pitch and volume of its tones. In execution, its sound is luminous and full, colored with a bit of crunch from Davachi’s tunings.
Two Sisters’ vision feels its clearest when Davachi mixes sounds from each era together, rather than focusing solely on the music’s mechanics. “Icon Studies I” and “Icon Studies II,” both climactic moments on this album, exemplify this cross-pollination by pairing radiant string instruments that rise and fall with hymnal resonance. These tracks tremble like drone music, yet evoke a sense of nostalgia, blending sleek and grainy textures. Here, Davachi builds a bridge between generations, illustrating how well both styles fit together, despite the centuries that separate them.
Davachi’s music is often known for its solemnity, as though it is designed for moments of great solitude. Two Sisters is certainly all of those things, but instead of exploring the comfort of alone time, it presents us with moments of disquiet and uncertainty, reflecting darkness and warmth in equal measure. “O World and the Clear Song” particularly hangs in this balance, radiating in soft waves that are gradually swallowed by jangling bells. Davachi has long shown us that she can write music that celebrates the joy of quietude—now, she shows us she can embrace the fear of it, too. | 2022-09-09T00:01:00.000-04:00 | 2022-09-09T00:01:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Late Music | September 9, 2022 | 7.7 | dd6f747c-ab17-4228-b42e-2479c19f9aec | Vanessa Ague | https://pitchfork.com/staff/vanessa-ague/ | |
Despite outward appearances, this is the new covers record from indie rock legends Yo La Tengo. | Despite outward appearances, this is the new covers record from indie rock legends Yo La Tengo. | Condo Fucks: Fuckbook | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/12819-fuckbook/ | Fuckbook | Though the youthful exuberance that carried their Condo Fucks City Rockers EP and high water mark Straight Outta Connecticut to modern-classic status during their mid-1990s heyday is now noticeably muted, Fuckbook, the latest LP from New London, Conn., trio the Condo Fucks is nevertheless the veteran band's pinnacle... Oh, what the hell am I on about. Fuckbook is, despite outward appearances, the new record by Yo La Tengo. But the bait-and-switch goes a little deeper than pseudonym, itself a (pretty funny!) dozen-year-old joke from the booklet of the band's 1997 effort I Can Hear the Heart Beating As One. See, Fuckbook is a covers record, even more so than 1990's Fakebook (thus concludes the gag portion of our program).
Yo La Tengo touch on about a million things in their music with varying degrees of success; the Condo Fucks, however, only do the one: Fuckbook gathers 11 mostly garage-borne rockers from the likes of the Troggs, Slade, the Kinks, Richard Hell, and others and, from the sound of things, runs 'em all through a shredder. If you've heard a Yo La Tengo record, you've probably heard a Yo La Tengo cover, but rarely if ever like these; so often the band adds its fine-tuned tumble to whatever they interpret, and the results are often reverent and, with some notable exceptions, inessential. But even the least jagged edge of this Fuckbook might give you a papercut. The thing rips-- its closest sonic counterpart is the Stooges' Fun House. You ever think you'd see a sentence like that about a Yo La Tengo record?
This gnarly, live-in-a-room sound isn't unprecedented: You could easily cherrypick a dozen similarly scuzzy rockers from the past four or five Yo La Tengo records proper, albeit with a generally higher production standard. But Fuckbook is leaner than a typical Yo La Tengo record in every way: It halves its predecessor's length and triples its volume, resulting in the most cohesive thing they've released since Painful. But while a singularity of purpose hasn't always worked out for Yo La-- see the sleepy The Sounds of the Sounds of Science or the haphazard live-on-air covers set Yo La Tengo Is Murdering the Classics-- Fuckbook's lazer focus makes it the most immediately enjoyable, endlessly replayable entry in their catalog in some time.
Though not all radio hits, these tunes are clearly familiar favorites to the band-- and, since no Yo La Tengo review would be complete without mentioning Ira's tenure as a rock critic, here's that part; to that end, the song selection's pretty impeccable, too. A false start marks the beginning of their opening take on the Small Faces' "Whatcha Gonna Do About It", and from there it's on; for the next 30 minutes and change, drums pound, guitars spill every which way, and a few voices you might recognize bleat out a tune or two you know by heart. Though they gleefully slop up every song here, quite a few stay close to their source material in tempo and timbre. For most bands, playing it that close to the hip would earn them a mark in the bad column, but even on the most reverent cover here-- the Georgia-sung "With a Girl Like You"-- they sound like they're having a blast, like something like this was just what they needed.
When they start to veer off the beaten path, Fuckbook really gets going. Their take on the Flamin' Groovies' "Dog Meat" actually manages to bring out the surfy central riff even further to the forefront, and James McNew's vocals throughout the disc-- and on their closing cover of Slade's "Gudbuy T'Jane" especially-- are a perfect fit with the material. Ira, a supremely underrated guitarist, gets his best showcase in forever here, and Georgia's as rock solid as ever behind the kit. She and Ira still aren't the most natural singers for this particular stripe of rock'n'roll, but their willingness to go for it adds a lot of Fuckbook's appeal. And, frankly, because the whole thing's so out of character, a lot of the charm of these somewhat unlikely lo-fi heroes-- who, even with Times New Viking, Fucked Up, and Sonic Youth as labelmates might be the single skronkiest band current signed to Matador-- lies in the fact that they just up and did this thing without provocation, and it worked. Sure, it's a covers record and a fairly unambitious one at that, unless "being confusing" and "being loud" are ambitions. And maybe for Yo La Tengo, they oughta be; as much as I'm looking forward to the next one from Ira, Georgia, and James proper, it's gonna have to work awfully hard to match the effortless blast that is Fuckbook. | 2009-03-11T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2009-03-11T02:00:01.000-04:00 | Experimental / Rock | Matador | March 11, 2009 | 8.3 | dd7c72d1-e14c-49f4-b0ca-1e8bace3b9e0 | Paul Thompson | https://pitchfork.com/staff/paul-thompson/ | null |
A pair of Brock Van Wey tracks, plus new ones from DJ Koze and Dettinger highlight the latest version of Kompakt's annual ambient series. | A pair of Brock Van Wey tracks, plus new ones from DJ Koze and Dettinger highlight the latest version of Kompakt's annual ambient series. | Various Artists: Pop Ambient 2010 | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/13863-pop-ambient-2010/ | Pop Ambient 2010 | One decade in, Kompakt's Pop Ambient series can stand tall next to its brother-in-arms Total series as a documentation of the style and form of a singular label. Plenty has changed in 10 years, though, and Kompakt's totem franchises now seem like matters of simple upkeep rather than label highlights or genre events. Kompakt's two major releases in 2009, the Field's Yesterday & Today and Matias Aguayo's Ay Ay Ay, both saw attention from more than dedicated beatheads, while PA09 featured more tracks than ever from outside the label's roster. Perhaps appropriately, there is a chore-like throb to PA10, with many series standbys swapping back in and few draws for the merely curious.
The Pop Ambient series is a little like living in a small town, such that the standards for big news are radically altered. Here's your PA10 headline: 2009's breakout experimental composer, Brock Van Wey, appears twice as bvdub, serving up an EP's worth (21+ minutes) of new music. Other not-as-frequent contributors to the series include DJ Koze (a Total regular) and the rare new production from Dettinger.
If there's a sonic constant this year, it's slowly revolving peals of sound: guitars, pianos, and horns set to slowly lap against background tones. There is an attractive industriousness to Jürgen Paape's "864M", while Koze's "Bodenweich" pairs padded piano chords against slurring electronics. Bvdub impresses twice, first with the haunted vocal patches of "Lest You Forget" and, moreso, with the 17-minute "Will You Know Where to Find Me", which beautifully splices a choral sample into sheets of diva-noise, easily competing with the best of 2009's White Clouds Drift On and On.
Next to bvdub's material, however, much of PA10 seems overly simple. Dettinger's "Therefore" features a two-second rhythmic shard looped for more than five minutes of wearying homogeneity. Marsen Jules' album-opening "The Sound of One Lip Kissing" features huge reverberating pianos that clang and batter to distraction. Old hands the Orb turn in the sleepy "Glen Coe", which wavers and reflects dully. Andrew Thomas and Mikkel Metal, two frequent PA contributors, each offer a track of harmless sound-sculpting.
PA10 arrives as Total 10 did last year: without fanfare or notice celebrating a decade of studious, mostly worthwhile compiling (one could reasonably argue that two regular label-comps per year is celebration enough). Instead, we get another workmanlike volume, one less distinguished and notable than its predecessors. Next year's model will almost surely arrive, just as regular and with as little fanfare; here's hoping it better reflects Kompakt's still considerable import. | 2010-01-27T01:00:02.000-05:00 | 2010-01-27T01:00:02.000-05:00 | null | Kompakt | January 27, 2010 | 5.7 | dd7f67e2-a317-4bd8-bf1d-88106974764f | Andrew Gaerig | https://pitchfork.com/staff/andrew-gaerig/ | null |
Marching Church used to be the solo effort of Iceage frontman Elias Bender Rønnenfelt, but now he has incorporated a backing band and scaled up the melodrama. | Marching Church used to be the solo effort of Iceage frontman Elias Bender Rønnenfelt, but now he has incorporated a backing band and scaled up the melodrama. | Marching Church: Telling It Like It Is | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22602-telling-it-like-it-is/ | Telling It Like It Is | All the world’s a stage to Elias Bender Rønnenfelt, Iceage frontman and Marching Church mastermind. The Dane was sporting a death mask when we first met him in the early ’10s—a grungy Hamlet, flailing and wailing beneath the house lights. Championed by Matador, his band ascended, and in time, those tragic poses became more polished, less garish—and on 2014’s ambitious Plowing Into the Field of Love, downright romantic.
Rønnenfelt attempted to continue Iceage’s momentum after their last album, but his writing failed to open up a clear map for the band’s next steps. Naturally, the musician wrung out his brainstorms into the new Marching Church album instead. This time around, the project’s no longer a solo effort: Rønnenfelt’s formally incorporated his backing band from This World Is Not Enough–a formidable crew featuring members of Lower, Hand of Dust, and others—and his Iceage bandmate Johan S. Weith into the group writ large. Such moves beg the question of overarching intentions, of where Iceage ends and Marching Church begins; despite the confessional undertones of its title, Telling It Like It Is offers little in the way of demarcation–but boy, is there drama.
Last year, the Dane visualized his Marching Church as one man’s luxuriant fantasy, plucked from the pages of Dorian Gray (“What I pictured was me in a comfortable armchair, adorned in a golden robe, leading a band while a girl kept pouring me champagne”). This decadence—manifested in moaned tantrums, eye-rolling Swans worship, and directionless, woe-is-me racket—torpedoed This World Is Not Enough, rendering it a slog. Thankfully, Marching Church’s sophomore effort scales back the melodrama and ramps up the discipline: Rønnenfelt and company are focused on verses and choruses and dynamics, rather than self-indulgent noodling—and in the case of this album, a little bit goes a long way.
The delirious “Lion’s Den” opens with a far-off subterranean rumble—Kristian Emdal’s loping bass encircles a skittering piano line, while the forlorn melodica squeals–before a brittle, clanging backbeat surfaces, kicking off the hypnotic death march over which Rønnenfelt presides, eyes glinting, lips curled. After he’s lulled us into complacency with an otherworldly falsetto, the chorus hits, his voice deepens into his usual bloodthirsty moan, and dread sets in. “In the lion’s den,” he taunts, as if smelling our fear through the speakers, “They still bite after you/They still chase after you/Come on in.” Is Rønnenfelt offering an escape from the beasts’ assault, or is he just another big cat in the big city, peering from behind his disguise?
The beauty’s in the liminality: not just on “Lion’s Den,” but in the album’s broader creative approach, which, however formalistically grounded, seeks to blur the lines between human passion and studio precision through copious overdubbing. “We wanted it to sound like a studio and the instruments, as if the studio became a member of the band,” he told CLRVYNT, “We didn't want it to sound like a realistic live band playing.” Indeed, the album’s inherent connections with the uncanny valley, its inquiries into where the band ends and the cavernous surroundings begin, are more effective dramatic vessels than any of Rønnenfelt’s ham-fisted imagery. It’s hard not to stifle a chuckle at his operatic bellows regarding the act of being “fist-fucked by destiny,” or at the blistering chorus on “Heart of Life,” wherein the Dane offers a compelling impression of Nick Cave after a few too many cocktails—“At the heart of life, shoo-gahh!.” On the other hand, the record's overarching dynamics—the existential tug-of-war between the band’s hypnotic krautrock attack, Rønnenfelt’s vengeful yowls, and the studio’s limitless expanses on the glam-but-glum “2016” and the country-tinged “Calenture” (familiar and yet ever-so-off, like a trip to Westworld)–suggest that the musician’s at least partially aware of his own absurdity, and perhaps, that he’s learning how to weaponize it. | 2016-11-18T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2016-11-18T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Sacred Bones | November 18, 2016 | 6.4 | dd858a4d-0db1-4d10-827a-472683c824b3 | Zoe Camp | https://pitchfork.com/staff/zoe-camp/ | null |
On his debut mixtape, the Brooklyn drill rapper performs with hungry urgency, as if prosperity is around the corner for everyone except him. | On his debut mixtape, the Brooklyn drill rapper performs with hungry urgency, as if prosperity is around the corner for everyone except him. | Bizzy Banks: GMTO, Vol. 1 (Get Money Take Over) | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/bizzy-banks-gmto-vol-1-get-money-take-over/ | GMTO, Vol. 1 (Get Money Take Over) | Brooklyn drill rapper Bizzy Banks comes from a Trinidadian-American family in East New York, a prideful neighborhood at the outskirts of the borough. A short drive or train ride from East New York and things quickly change, as money gets pumped into Brooklyn, but the low-income areas remain the same. It’s like living behind a glass wall in your own hometown, with wealth and good fortune shoved in your face but no way to access it. In the best Brooklyn drill music, you can feel that tension in the rappers’ voices. Why shouldn’t they be able to have nice things and live good, too? It’s right there. And if, nobody is going to help them, they’ll figure it out, by any means necessary.
Since his 2019 breakout single “Don’t Start,” the 21-year-old Bizzy Banks has been capturing this inner battle. Days spent getting fly and tipsy and scoring quick cash will hopefully make up for the violence, trauma, and struggle that haunts him. On his debut project GMTO Vol. 1, he never outright comments on a changing Brooklyn, but you feel it. “Look, serving these fiends for what?/So I can have J’s when I step in the club,” he says on “Top 5,” maybe the best song of his young career. Earlier on the track he raps, “I was raised by the block/I was nine when my father got knocked/I was twelve when my brother got knocked/I was thirteen when I let off that shot,” and it feels like he’s trapped in a world where prosperity is around the corner for everyone except him. This tone is the mixtape’s through line. On “Heartfroze,” weak crooning doesn’t take away from heavy reflections on the paranoia and the pressure he feels on a day-t0-day basis.
Similar to Pop Smoke, the underlying weight of Bizzy Banks’ music doesn’t stop the party. On “Extra Sturdy,” an upbeat Bizzy glides over a beat from A Lau—a Harry Fraud collaborator who has helped diversify the sound of Brooklyn drill production—that sounds like you’re stuck in a funhouse at the circus. Then, there’s “Neo,” where, dated The Matrix references aside, Bizzy’s sharp flow lands somewhere between the rapid-fire G Herbo delivery he grew up on and the stop-start swagger of some of Brooklyn drill’s signature hits (see: “Big Drip”). And, “Cool Off” is ready to ring off at the end-of-the-summer backyard parties throughout New York; he balances a high-intensity verse with a calm and catchy hook.
Though, Bizzy Banks runs into the same problems nearly every Brooklyn drill rapper—except Pop—has faced on their debut mixtapes. Despite the fact that he has one of the better ears in the subgenre for production, there are still some duds: “Quarantine Freestyle” and “Quarantine Freestyle, Pt. 2,” feature the type of routine drill production that can be found any day on the Raps and Hustles YouTube page. Then, he gets poisoned by the common, misguided belief that drill rappers have to learn how to make music other than drill. Which leads to “Hold You,” an unbearable attempt at a J.I the Prince of NY-type club record, and “Beautiful,” a bizarre interpolation of Jesse McCartney’s “Beautiful Soul” and one of 2020’s most unsettling love songs.
But the peaks of GMTO Vol. 1 are high enough to overlook the parts that don’t work. On, “Don’t Start Pt. 2,” the sequel to his breakout song, Bizzy raps empathically “These niggas must think it’s really just music,” feelings he’s been holding in for years are being poured into a single verse. It’s this urgency that unites all the drill scenes, from Chicago to the UK to Brooklyn. Bizzy Banks is going to have all of the fun of a 21-year-old, even as the system works against him.
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2020-09-16T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-09-16T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Atlantic | September 16, 2020 | 7.6 | dd904b2f-5c82-4516-983f-79cf3e389d11 | Alphonse Pierre | https://pitchfork.com/staff/alphonse-pierre/ | |
The latest from the indie rock rapscallion is an often pretty, occasionally frustrating record that was recorded quickly, but still sounds labored over. | The latest from the indie rock rapscallion is an often pretty, occasionally frustrating record that was recorded quickly, but still sounds labored over. | Mac DeMarco: Here Comes the Cowboy | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/mac-demarco-here-comes-the-cowboy/ | Here Comes the Cowboy | In 2015, Mac DeMarco was living in Far Rockaway in the shadow of JFK airport. He hadn’t yet properly crossed over to the mainstream, but in the indie world in which he operated, he’d become something of a slacker icon. He was hanging out with Tyler, the Creator, playing shows to legions of young folks who saw something in him that they could relate to. The mini-album he recorded at home in Rockaway, Another One, was unremarkable if pleasant. DeMarco doubled down on what he’d become known for: syrupy songs about love that were dazed and detached over wobbly guitar licks that sounded like he was going to fall asleep while playing them. There wasn’t much to grab on to. But it was also the point in his career where it became undeniably clear that DeMarco was on to something. At the end of the album, he gave out his address and invited listeners to drop by to hang out. A lot of them actually showed up.
Since then, DeMarco has moved to Los Angeles, and released a spare and unexpectedly deep album called This Old Dog, which helped solidify his spot as indie’s goofball leading man. His new album follows closely in spirit to the endearing and open-hearted of This Old Dog. DeMarco says he named the album Here Comes the Cowboy because he liked using the word “cowboy” as a nickname or term of endearment, which, like many things in the Mac DeMarco universe, is half inside joke, half inadvertent trendsetting. Here Comes the Cowboy is an often pretty, occasionally frustrating record that was recorded quickly, but still sounds labored over. His music evolves in inches: he iterates on the same sound but tweaks it subtly with every release. Lyrics become more direct. Ideas become simplified. The crustiness of his early songs is mostly gone here.
Here Comes the Cowboy arrives at a time when there are more eyes trained on DeMarco than ever before. He’s now famous enough that a cult of personality has developed around him. He will always be the goofy guy with the Alfred E. Neuman smile, whether he’s singing about his relationship with his dad, or writing weirdly moving odes to cigarettes. DeMarco is approachable and never too serious, which means that there’s sort of two Mac DeMarcos: the everyman who is down to drink some tallboys, and the popular artist who makes naive music that sounds unsullied by the unfortunate intrusiveness of the real world.
The album has some genuinely great moments: “Nobody” is gorgeous, lush, and laconic—a slow-burning and burned-out take on a classic California stoner jam. Similarly, “All of Our Yesterdays” is a fluid update of Mac DeMarco’s signature sound: a gentle melancholy so deeply embedded in the track that it takes a few listens to notice that it’s there at all. His music might sound largely the same, but even in DeMarco’s world, time still passes, life continues, and we all fight against getting older, harder, and more cynical.
Frustratingly, what should be appealing about the album—the breeziness and low-stakes, anything-goes atmosphere—is also what makes it impossible to latch onto the bulk of the songs. On “Preoccupied,” DeMarco sounds literally preoccupied. You can virtually hear him staring out the window while he sings his way through half-formed thoughts about opening your mind and filling it with bullshit. The best part is the birds chirping in the background—they give some texture to the oddly sterile world DeMarco has constructed. Stripped down tracks like “K” are fine enough, but never really seem to go anywhere, mainly because they lack the ramshackle aw shucks-ness of his best songs. You’ll find yourself wishing for something a bit more fun, or at least something with a bit more verve to it.
So what to make of “Choo Choo”? The watered-down funk track features an actual train whistle backing up DeMarco’s falsetto refrain of, you guessed it, “Choo Choo.” Is this song a joke? Sure, probably. A song for children? There’s been better. DeMarco is a vocal fan of Modern Lovers’ Jonathan Richman, who found the sweet spot between humor and a kind of knowing sadness. DeMarco can also do this well. On stage, he’s all pranks and jokes; on record he’s largely attempting to get at the core of universal human ideas. “Choo Choo” is neither funny nor insightful. In a different era, it’d be a whimsical stop on the way to the next song. Now, it just feels like a waste of time.
Here Comes the Cowboy doesn’t have any of the quirkiness or heartbreaking details of 2, or the airtight jams of Salad Days, or the refinement of This Old Dog. It sounds nice, but for a lot of its runtime, it also sounds like DeMarco is exhausted, like he’s ready to move on and try something new but is trapped in a creative holding pattern. It’s possible that he’s aware of this himself. On “Little Dogs March” he sings “hope you had your fun...all those days are over now.” Sounds about right. | 2019-05-10T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-05-10T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Mac’s Record Label | May 10, 2019 | 6.7 | dd9f5718-839d-472c-b6f1-45fe6be73d8c | Sam Hockley-Smith | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sam-hockley-smith/ | |
Nine Inch Nails’ veteran film composers provide a techno-driven score to Luca Guadagnino’s love-triangle tennis dramedy, while Boys Noize remixes it into a sleek, pumping megamix. | Nine Inch Nails’ veteran film composers provide a techno-driven score to Luca Guadagnino’s love-triangle tennis dramedy, while Boys Noize remixes it into a sleek, pumping megamix. | Trent Reznor / Atticus Ross: Challengers (Original Score) | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/trent-reznor-atticus-ross-challengers-original-score/ | Challengers (Original Score) | At a recent premiere of Challengers, journalists stopped Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross on the red carpet to ask them about the score, their latest in a stellar run that began in 2010 with The Social Network, and which has bagged them two Academy Awards so far. “We’re used to the world of being in a band where we can control everything and we’re the bosses,” Reznor said. “Working in film, it’s interesting and it’s fun because we’re not the boss, we’re working in collaboration and in partnership with the director.”
Reznor said this coyly, as if the theme of control—having it, wanting it, giving it up—hasn’t been central to his art for decades. Before Ross came on board, Nine Inch Nails was Reznor’s solo act dressed up as a band. He was notoriously detail-oriented, insisting on total creative oversight of things the label would usually handle, like artwork and music videos. Dominance and servitude have been a recurring theme in Nine Inch Nails’ lyrics since “Head Like a Hole,” the first track of their first album.
That one was written when Reznor was broke, in his early twenties, and working as a janitor in a recording studio so he could make his own demos after hours. Some 30 years later, things are different. Reznor is a cult hero, an industry darling, and just a Tony away from an EGOT. Somehow, the man whose most famous lyric is “I wanna fuck you like an animal” ended up scoring a film for Disney—and winning an Oscar for it. If the first act of Reznor’s career was defined by him being the boss, the second has shown him either sharing creative agency or letting others take the lead.
Appropriately, Ross and Reznor’s latest score is for a film largely about control and being controlled. Challengers is directed by Luca Guadagnino, the master of slow-boil eroticism who gave us Call Me By Your Name and Bones and All (also scored by Ross and Reznor). Zendaya plays Tashi Duncan, a tennis star turned coach who spends the movie’s decade-plus storyline as a puppet master to her two suitors, besties turned rivals Art Donaldson (Mike Faist) and Patrick Zweig (Josh O’Connor). After luring them into a three-way kiss in the hotel room scene you see in the trailer, she leans back and watches with a smirk as they make out with each other, then tells them she’ll give her number to whoever wins the next day’s tournament. She dates Zweig, but it fizzles when he balks at the idea of letting her guide his career. Donaldson is a more willing subject. She becomes his coach after an injury ends her own tennis career, and they end up married with a kid and appearing together in Aston Martin ads, a tennis power couple with her at the helm. The story’s climax and central storyline revolves around a match between Zweig and Donaldson that she’s slyly choreographed, and in which she’s dangled herself as the prize—stakes that suit her only by guaranteeing a bit of really, really good tennis.
Challengers is invariably described as hot, sexy, steamy, etc., but there is almost no actual sex in it. The erotic charge comes mostly from Zendaya’s character and the power she has over these two men, on and off the tennis court. The movie’s tagline could have come straight from “Head Like a Hole”: “Bow down before the one you serve.”
Like Donaldson, Reznor and Ross thrive by following instructions, giving us something Reznor acknowledges he probably wouldn’t have thought to do. “Luca said, ‘What if all the music was driving, thumping techno, like a heartbeat that makes the movie fun?’” he recalled. “I don’t know that we would have landed on that on our own.” True to Guadagnino’s brief, Challengers (Original Score) offers a smorgasbord of thumping club sounds, from electroclash (“Yeah x10”) to synth-pop to fast and functional techno. Each one feels like a dutiful genre exercise, but with a sonic signature that that is unmistakably Reznor and Ross’, especially in the way instruments like piano and guitar gel so elegantly with synths and drum machines.
The music works brilliantly in the film, driving the action as much as it follows it, less a backdrop than a bold counterpoint to what’s on screen. Take, for instance, the moment when kick drums start pounding during a dorm-room argument. Or, more generally, the idea of rave music as the soundtrack to a tennis dramedy, a pairing that works so well you probably wouldn’t notice how counterintuitive it actually is. Much like their music for The Social Network, Ross and Reznor’s score opens dimensions to the film that might not have been visible otherwise. Almost every review of Challengers has praised the score specifically—even, in the case of the BBC, when they’re panning the film itself.
Ross and Reznor’s past soundtracks, however inspired, have never quite worked as albums outside the context of their respective films. The music on Challengers stands up on its own better than any music from their other scores, but the record as a whole still has a lumpiness that's symptomatic of the format, with many tracks clocking in at less than three minutes and some appearing and reappearing in multiple versions. Evidently wise to this concern, Ross and Reznor hired the German DJ and producer Boys Noize to create a supplementary mixed (and remixed) version of the OST—no mean feat given the dramatic range in tempos, but one he handles with flair, creating a tight half hour of party rockers, dusted with samples of rackets thwacking and sneakers squeaking on clay. Boys Noize’s mix weaves it all together into a smooth, dynamic arc, and delivers a far more interesting version of “Compress / Repress,” lobbing in some gabber flourishes that shouldn’t work but absolutely do.
“Compress / Repress,” co-written with Guadagnino and sung by Reznor, is one instance where the shared artistic control gets confusing. Historically, Reznor has lent his voice to music that prized sincerity and authentic personal expression above all else. This song feels different: The lyrics flatly complement the themes of the film, and the production is a kind of straightforward synth-pop you’d never get from Nine Inch Nails. For this lifelong NIN fan, to learn the lyrics weren’t all Reznor’s was clarifying and, somehow, relieving; to see him doing another artist’s bidding is strangely humanizing. As a movie theme, it’s fine. As a Nine Inch Nails track, it would be a bit vanilla. Either way, at a screening this week in Berlin, it had a few audience members chair-dancing their way through the final credits. | 2024-05-06T00:02:00.000-04:00 | 2024-05-04T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock / Experimental | Milan | May 6, 2024 | 7.2 | ddb62b36-171d-4b38-ade2-974d920b4e55 | Will Lynch | https://pitchfork.com/staff/will-lynch/ | |
After a prolific period of experimentation, Animal Collective return with an album that achieves a peaceful equilibrium between their immersive 3D soundscaping and innate melodic charms. | After a prolific period of experimentation, Animal Collective return with an album that achieves a peaceful equilibrium between their immersive 3D soundscaping and innate melodic charms. | Animal Collective: Time Skiffs | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/animal-collective-time-skiffs/ | Time Skiffs | Animal Collective navigated their first decade as if lost in some surreal and splendorous dream. From 2000’s Spirit They’re Gone, Spirit They’ve Vanished to 2009’s Merriweather Post Pavilion, the quartet functioned like a perpetually mutating organism, reshaping their sound and character not just album-to-album, but occasionally mid-sentence. But in response to Merriweather’s crossover success, they would spend much of the following decade acclimatizing to the waking world as a festival-ready force that had to concern itself with hitting the back rows. Their records became more over-the-top and in-your-face, and felt less like drifting through a dream than listening to someone manically reenact theirs. Through a combination of solo projects, familial obligations, and transatlantic living, the band that once used the stage as their sandbox was confined to studio-scheduled creativity: Their 2016 album, Painting With, was the first Animal Collective album that didn’t get workshopped in a live setting before being committed to tape.
But since then, Animal Collective have been overcompensating for those limitations in the most wonderful of ways. Even when you factor in pandemic shutdowns, the past half-decade has been one of the most prolific stretches of this group’s career, yielding field-recording experiments, audiovisual projects, and soundtracks that have rekindled their improvisatory impulses. And, Sung Tongs anniversary tour notwithstanding, their live performances once again became communal woodshedding experiences. Beginning with a mini-residency at New Orleans’ Music Box Village in 2018, Animal Collective previewed a bounty of new material, some of which, naturally, has changed quite radically over the years. Following much YouTubed documentation, a handful of extended, more abstract tracks officially surfaced on 2020’s Bridge to Quiet EP. Time Skiffs is the long-awaited climax to this period of prodigious exploration—an album that achieves a peaceful equilibrium between Animal Collective’s immersive 3D soundscaping and innate melodic charms. Call it an Animal Corrective.
With its inviting ambiance, unhurried vibe, and ebullient group harmonies, Time Skiffs readily conjures warm memories of AnCo’s late-2000s halcyon days. But the album possesses a personality and methodology all its own. Over the years, Animal Collective’s free-flowing aesthetic, lovey-dovey sentiments, and fondness for tie-dye have garnered any number of Grateful Dead comparisons, but this is the first record where they sound like an actual jam band. While Noah Lennox (aka Panda Bear) has traditionally used his drum kit to heighten the clamor of the group’s most chaotic moments, here, he plays the steady timekeeper governed by a dubby discipline. The album’s two opening tracks, “Dragon Slayer” and “Car Keys,” are presented as discrete songs, but were performed live last year as a single continuous piece, like interlocking units in the same space-age bachelor-pad complex.
That fluidity extends to the band’s treatment of voices, which has typically emphasized the considerable contrast and ping-ponging interplay between Dave “Avey Tare” Portner’s crazed, contorted exhortations and Panda Bear’s beacon-of-light meditations. Time Skiffs presents a more unified front, thanks in large part to the mediating presence of guitarist and keyboardist Josh Dibb, aka Deakin, the wild-card member who’s drifted in and out of the picture over the past 20 years and who typically plays a non-vocal supporting role alongside synth wizard Brian “Geologist” Weitz. But with Lennox living in Portugal and focused on completing Panda Bear’s 2019 release Buoys, Dibb stepped up to play Portner’s foil at those Music Box showcases. Toward the end of the set, Dibb led a chant that eventually got absorbed into Time Skiffs’ majestic lead single, “Prester John,” now a six-minute dubwise odyssey that’s guided through the fog by Dibb and Lennox’s luminous harmonies, before riding into the sun on an uncharacteristically funky drum break that evokes Steven Drozd’s in-the-pocket grooves for the Flaming Lips. Dibb’s Music Box contributions also included an ambient ballad (working title: “DownDownDownDown”) that’s reborn as Time Skiffs’ gorgeous comedown closer “Royal and Desire,” where the group wraps his melancholic melody in loungey exotica that yields the most downright elegant piece of music Animal Collective has ever produced.
As much as Time Skiffs is a celebration of Animal Collective’s finely tuned musical telepathy and brotherly bonhomie, the group is also well aware they’re releasing it into a turbulent world where people need more than always-have-a-good-time platitudes to make it through another day. The eco-conscious ideologies and existential despair embedded in their stopgap Meeting of the Waters and Tangerine Reef projects seep into the lyrics here: While the aforementioned “Car Keys” begins as a game of hot potato between Dibb and Weitz’s wiggiest synth settings and an overexcited vibraphone, it leads to Lennox’s helpless cries of “How are we doing now?” and follows them up with an even more disillusioned query: “How we gonna know?” But in true Animal Collective fashion, the line between anxiety and ecstasy is often smudged: They couch their most dire prognostications in “Strung With Everything,” a carnivalesque Beach Boys reverie that peaks with the sort of call-and-response breakdown you’d hear in a romantic early rock’n’roll single—though, in this case, the view from Lookout Point has gotten a lot bleaker: “Let’s say tonight, you and me,” Portner excitedly sings, “we’ll watch the sky fall into pieces!”
Time Skiffs achieves its most masterful balancing act between the playful and profound in the seven-minute centerpiece “Cherokee,” a song that began popping up in setlists back in 2019 and immediately felt like a new AnCo classic. That title may raise an eyebrow coming from a band that recently made a point of renaming their 2003 album Here Comes the Indian to a less culturally flippant title, but it’s not a stretch to think the two are somehow related, as “Cherokee” speaks to the process of developing a greater conscientiousness toward your behaviors and surroundings. Inspired by drives around Portner’s home turf near Asheville, North Carolina, the song functions as both surrealist personal travelogue and a cogent commentary on the peculiarities of modern American life, which, for him, include being mistaken for a foreigner by a gas-station employee, pondering the fate of empty mailboxes in a world of smartphones, and, yes, riding around in a Jeep-brand vehicle that appropriates the name of the very Indigenous people whose ancestral land he now inhabits.
“I’ve been driving for a long while/Spent some time in a Cherokee/Learning things,” Portner sings, delivering those last two simple words with a humbled sense of awe. For all their wild-eyed abandon, Animal Collective records have always encouraged us to appreciate and savor the most fundamental yet easily neglected aspects of life—friendships, family, nature, history. Two decades into their journey, that commitment to self-improvement, planetary care, and mutual respect remains their animating force. And if this nightmare of a world gets in the way of pursuing those ideals, consider Time Skiffs an invitation to keep living the dream.
Buy: Rough Trade | 2022-02-04T00:00:00.000-05:00 | 2022-02-04T00:00:00.000-05:00 | Experimental | Domino | February 4, 2022 | 8.4 | ddb81405-bf75-454c-bfc3-9fd084bdf08c | Stuart Berman | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stuart-berman/ | |
The second album from the Philadelphia noise-pop band comes with some great new sounds, but dials down some of the thrill and fervor that made their debut so exceptional. | The second album from the Philadelphia noise-pop band comes with some great new sounds, but dials down some of the thrill and fervor that made their debut so exceptional. | Empath: Visitor | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/empath-visitor/ | Visitor | Even the most adorable noise pop has a lightning-spark fury: It has to if you want to justify the tempo. Maybe that insistence is what inspires the instant devotion to bands like No Age, the Go! Team, Sleigh Bells, bands that burn hot-white if only for a short amount of time. With Empath’s 2019 debut, Active Listening: Night on Earth, the Philadelphia-based quartet set off a new firework of lo-fi sweetness, one that kept close to its punk roots. Active Listening bolstered its opaque mixing and nocturnal ambiance with an impossibly propulsive sound. The band’s second album, Visitor, still embodies Empath’s unique qualities—cute but not childlike, dreamy but not drowsy, candied but not overindulgent—but drifts into a more sedate, syncopated direction, and sheds some of the energy that made the debut so exceptional.
Visitor holds fast to Empath’s off-beat idiosyncrasy. Samples range from Minecraft sounds to Jamiroquai presets; the music video for lead single “Diamond Eyelids” features frontwoman Catherine Elicson graphically birthing puppets of her own bandmates. But the record is centered by the confusing decision to make their sound slower, clearer, and less punk, as if they’ve identified the most crucial foundations of noise pop and set out to specifically undermine them. The journey from wall-of-sound 2016 EP Crystal Reality to today feels like a weighted swan dive into rote clarity. Tracks like “Genius of Evil” merely go through the motions of energized indie pop, and both “Elvis Comeback Special” and “80s” meander sideways with little inspiration. There’s still an unguarded thrill there, but it’s like someone’s switched out a microscope lens that renders Empath more visible: we’re brought into greater clarity, but a crucially clouded enigma is gone.
At the same time, that decision renders Elicson more audible. Her plaintive near-slurring is more immediately intelligible, which works to the band’s benefit. She lilts the entirety of “Genius of Evil” in one accusatory run-on sentence; the conviction in “Paradise” tumbles out of her mouth with the same youthful exigency as the monologue in Drop Nineteens’ “Kick the Tragedy.” Notably, “Passing Stranger” reads like a sequel to 2019’s “Hanging Out of Cars,” as if the latter’s protagonist has grown in real time, and looks back with unclouded eyes. Where the intertwining of death and desire was declared just “another weekend,” the reality of that finality now leads to this scene: “You cried/Until your knees were weak/You would never tell and no one could ever see.”
While in the past Empath songs seemed to exist in the moment, tracking Elicson’s quick-tempered thought processes and emergent desires, she now looks back on external, location-specific memories—low-hanging clouds in New Mexico, escaping on buses in Chicago, the warmth of weeks spent in a bedroom. These unpeopled places evoke the empty, liminal space memorialized by the album’s cover, and the suggestive absence of its titular visitor. In some form, Empath retains that romanticism: quick-tempered singles “Born 100 Times” and “Diamond Eyelids” still feel exhilarating and breathtaking. But for an album where most tracks don’t extend past three minutes, and from a band with such a breakneck spirit, Visitor feels a little too languid.
Buy: Rough Trade | 2022-02-14T00:00:00.000-05:00 | 2022-02-14T00:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Fat Possum | February 14, 2022 | 6.6 | ddc0ecc8-d665-489c-a591-e9d76f4462ed | Zhenzhen Yu | https://pitchfork.com/staff/zhenzhen-yu/ | |
UK band continues to make high-stakes music that excels best when acknowledging its dance-rock present rather than its emotive past. | UK band continues to make high-stakes music that excels best when acknowledging its dance-rock present rather than its emotive past. | Friendly Fires: Pala | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/15463-pala/ | Pala | There's a song on Friendly Fires' eponymous 2008 debut that's called "Jump in the Pool". The lyrical concerns are pretty straightforward (hint: jumping and pools are involved), but what makes it one of the LP's standouts is how its chorus takes the titular advice and just goes for it, changing from peppy polyrhythms to fast, charging lushness in a matter of seconds. It's a melodic shift that's as over-the-top as it is impressively delivered-- but that's kind of the point. Friendly Fires was best when playing to the rafters with romantic electro-gaze textures ("Skeleton Boy") and big, cheesy gestures ("Paris"). They're sensualists who excel under a lack of restraint.
Wisely, the band's sophomore effort, Pala, wastes no time submerging itself into its own indulgent environment. The multi-layered neon pop of album opener "Live Those Days Tonight" only hints at the LP's sonic ambition, as the band's immense co-production with buzz-bin consigliere Paul Epworth lends extra depth to its colorful sonic detail. There's been three years between Friendly Fires and this thing, and they've clearly spent it well by jewelling every last detail with careful precision (the B-movie blast that spools off "Blue Cassette"'s final reel, "Helpless"' backseat chatter and Boards of Canada keyboards).
To an extent, Pala also clears these guys' name on the "rockist dance-dilettante" list. From the galloping UK funky rhythm in "Chimes" to the filtered, bleeping funk of "Hurting", there's an array of styles tried on and, for the most part, successfully worn. Those successes speak as much to the band's listening habits as they do to a sense of maximalist adventurousness.
However, all the signifiers in the world don't change the fact that Friendly Fires are a rock band first-- and a particularly emotive one, at that. The band's three members got their start as teenagers in the never-known vocal-less "post-hardcore" (read: emo) outfit First Day Back. Anyone who's ever had a taste for that stuff knows that once it enters your blood, it tends to stay there, and Pala's high-stakes framework reflects that. Hearts are set on fire regularly (no, not like that), while impassioned pleas "Show Me Lights" and "Pull Me Back to Earth" are exactly as sweeping as you'd expect. It's when the band gets too entrenched in maudlin, dark-hued dramatizing (the too-slow-burn of the title track, "Chimes"' bald-faced falsetto foolery) that Pala's deep-sea diving feels similar to drowning.
Not to worry, though-- they have a sense of humor too, as "Hawaiian Air" proves. As the title suggests, frontman Ed Macfarlane's lyrical concerns focus on a trip to, you guessed it, Hawaii-- only, he spends the entire song detailing his escapades on the flight there ("watching a film with a talking dog," "skipping the meal for a G&T"), barely able to breathe in that tropical oxygen. It's a simple-pleasures zoom-in that belies the album's candy-painted sweep, a sneaky yet sentimental grin amidst all the pleading and sincerity-- 'cause this stuff is supposed to be fun, right? | 2011-05-25T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2011-05-25T02:00:01.000-04:00 | Electronic / Rock | XL | May 25, 2011 | 7.4 | ddcf6b2b-b540-439b-99df-50bba41f5875 | Larry Fitzmaurice | https://pitchfork.com/staff/larry-fitzmaurice/ | 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 a landmark disco and pop album, a dazzling and fabulous collaboration between Chic and Diana Ross. | 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 a landmark disco and pop album, a dazzling and fabulous collaboration between Chic and Diana Ross. | Diana Ross: Diana | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/diana-ross-diana/ | Diana | In the summer of 1979, Chic were simultaneously a colossal success and on the precipice of becoming a footnote in music history. Guitarist Nile Rodgers and bassist Bernard Edwards put out three slinky, disco-funk albums in as many years with platinum records like “Le Freak” and “Good Times” when clouds of smoke billowed out of Comiskey Park in Chicago, where their records and so many others were being destroyed by mostly white rock fanatics. The disco backlash hit full stride, dampening both Chic’s mood and sales and curbing the duo’s momentum as it reached an apex.
Rodgers wasn’t exactly surprised by his group’s seeming downfall. In fact, owing to the group’s sudden, triple-platinum success, he thought it was all but preordained to happen at some point. Always the chameleons, he and Edwards adjusted to the times by making new wave, dance, sometimes even straightforward rock. Yet as the duo segued into production work, crafting the everlasting, celebratory 1979 album We Are Family for labelmates Sister Sledge, Rodgers held on to three childhood idols on his bucket list he still wanted to work with: Barbra Streisand, Mick Jagger, and one Diana Ross. Within a year, he would be writing and producing for one of them, as though with enough confidence—and perhaps a fair amount of cocaine—he could bend the law of attraction at whim.
The chance to work with Diana Ross didn’t come without its own professional risk. By the time diana, their sterling pop-disco collaboration, arrived in the spring of 1980, the legendary Supremes singer hadn’t had a Top 10 hit in four years. The new album would be Ross’ 11th LP, following 1979’s The Boss, a peppy disco record produced by husband-and-wife duo Ashford & Simpson that performed decently on the charts but couldn’t touch the crossover success of her biggest solo hits like 1973’s power ballad “Touch Me in the Morning” and 1976’s swooning “Love Hangover.” Now, on the other side of a divorce from talent manager Bob Ellis and embarking on a fledgling acting career, Ross was determined to find a fresh sound with which to reintroduce herself.
Ross had recently moved with her three children into an apartment in Manhattan to film The Wiz. She grew beguiled by New York’s seductive commotion, whether watching revelers from a private balcony at Studio 54 or ensconced in the darkness of a movie theater by herself. “This was to be my initiation into taking responsibility for myself,” she wrote of the move to the city in her 1993 memoir, Secrets of a Sparrow. Ross had good reason for reclaiming a lost sense of authority: Her most recent film, Mahogany, had been critically panned, and she often felt at the mercy of Motown head Berry Gordy when it came to her music. Ross had already lived many musical lives—auditioning for Gordy and joining the Supremes as a teenager, then reinventing herself twice through her dual solo and film careers. But as the ’80s loomed, she was dangerously close to appearing old-fashioned.
Suzanne de Passe, Motown brass and Gordy’s right hand, had come to the same realization. Having already revitalized Ross’ career in 1972 with the Billie Holiday biopic Lady Sings the Blues (for which de Passe became the first Black woman to receive a screenwriting nomination at the Oscars), she was now intent on doing the same for the diva’s musical career. Chic’s crossover appeal and spare, in-the-pocket grooves neatly fit the bill; though they hadn’t met, de Passe used to run in the same circles as the band in the late 1960s, when she booked acts for Midtown nightclub the Cheetah. She brought Ross to one of Chic’s shows in Santa Monica, where Rodgers and Edwards forged a friendship with the star backstage even as they were both clearly bowled over by her presence. “There was something in the air that bonded us,” Rodgers recalled in his 2011 memoir, Le Freak. “She was almost like a sister.”
Chic approached Ross’ new album with the meticulous ambition of a passion project. Determined not to misrepresent her, Rodgers and Edwards met with Ross in her apartment and asked questions about her life, as though conducting interviews for a documentary. Song ideas bloomed out of these free-flowing conversations: Ross told them she wanted to turn her career upside down going forward (see: “Upside Down”). She had left behind the pain of her divorce and was ready to start anew (see: “Have Fun (Again)”). Even the baby grand sitting in her apartment became a premise (“My Old Piano”) as though each detail of Ross’ life were a symbol of something far greater and more emotional than at first glance.
The resulting vulnerability and craftsmanship Chic brought to diana remains its most enduring quality. The album coasts on simple, engaging rhythmic patterns and undeniable hooks, all given a glamorous lash lift by Ross’ petal-soft performance. They wrote polysyllabic lyrics and staccato chants to emphasize her distinctive enunciation, and introduced horns to round out the new sound with a pop-soul burnish. Through it all, Ross fully invests in the songs’ underlying connections to her life, while meeting Chic’s arrangements with exquisite restraint. “Money won’t be enough/When the going gets tough, it’s rough,” she sings on the strutting “Have Fun (Again),” her gossamer soprano dancing upward, “Try to cuddle with your business/And you’ll see that love is priceless.”
Inspiration for diana came from Rodgers’ tireless nightlife at the time, too. He wrote “I’m Coming Out,” the album’s jubilant, immortal centerpiece, after a night out at the Gilded Grape, a Hell’s Kitchen nightclub he deemed “the pinnacle of trendy sleaze.” While in the bathroom, he noticed a group of drag queens dressed as Ross on either side of him at the urinals—a manifestation of her authority among the gay community that he sought to honor in his own surreptitious way. Ross interpreted the song as an indication of eventually leaving Motown—she would sign to RCA for 1981’s Why Do Fools Fall in Love—but in truth it spoke plainly and openly to her entire queer fan base, a declaration of standing in your truth that cemented her status as an LGBTQ+ icon.
It’s ironic, then, that both “I’m Coming Out” and “Upside Down,” two of Ross’ most enduring songs, caused an irreparable rift in the album’s process. After Ross brought a rough mix of the album to the popular radio DJ Frankie Crocker, she came back to Rodgers and Edwards with a changed outlook. In the wake of Disco Demolition Night, Crocker thought Chic was set on ruining her career with this new set of disco pop (it didn’t help that he’d also pointed out the subtext of “I’m Coming Out,” assuming Ross was coming out on the record herself). Once Gordy also derided “Upside Down,” Motown demanded the demos back and ceased communication with the group, succinctly bringing a rude awakening to a dream collaboration.
They didn’t hear back until Rodgers and Edwards received a new mix of the album in the mail, reworked by Ross and Motown engineer Russ Terrana. The songs were shortened and radio-primed; Ross’ voice was more up-front in the mix and there were new vocal parts spliced together. After devoting themselves so completely to the project, all of their work had been Frankensteined into something slimmed down to appease as broad and commercial an audience as possible. Rodgers and Edwards even sought out an attorney to remove their name from the record in a last-ditch attempt to stand their ground.
Nonetheless, diana was released with the new Motown mix in May 1980 and remains Ross’ best-selling album to this day, lasting on the charts for 52 weeks. The album is a masterpiece of pop and dance music, even without Chic’s punchier mix (both versions of the record are available to cross-compare, released as a deluxe edition in 2003). “Upside Down” topped the pop and R&B charts by September, and “I’m Coming Out” reached No. 5, even after it was clocked as a gay anthem by critics as soon as it was released. That the song prevails today is testament to Rodgers’ canny songwriting and Ross’ infectiously joyous performance, carrying out the ecstatic message over an exacting guitar line and bellowing trombones.
Listening to the album provides endless pleasures, from the loungey deep cut “Now That You’re Gone” to the refined ballad “Friend to Friend,” written as a tribute to the close relationship between Ross and de Passe. Rodgers and Edwards understood how to bring the pop star into their elegant arrangements, where she infused them with her outsize personality. Ross practically transcends time on the buoyant floor-filler “Give Up”—you can picture her swaying and gyrating to the restless bassline in the studio, giving it life with each breathless chorus.
diana represents a union of two generations: Ross’ unfettered sophistication and Chic’s uptown disco-funk, stirred into an instantly enjoyable cocktail. “She represented the perfect blend of soul and style, everything we wanted Chic to be,” Rodgers said of the diva. Their resulting collaboration is still one of the band’s most memorable and all but guaranteed Chic’s long-standing career, a status ensured once Sugarhill Gang sampled “Good Times” for “Rapper’s Delight” and jump-started hip-hop. “I’m Coming Out,” too, was later sampled for a rap classic in 1997 with Biggie’s “Mo Money Mo Problems,” further proof of the album’s far-reaching alchemy.
Ross eventually returned to Motown and teamed up with Rodgers again on 1989’s Workin’ Overtime, but diana persists as their stone-cold classic. The album both set a new bar for her musical career and established a template for the dance and pop music of the next decade, and the next decade, and the next. diana stands out among its peers in the ’80s because it comes underpinned by the intimate bond she formed with both Chic and her audience, delivered with indefatigable grace. Today, Ross still reliably opens her live performances with “I’m Coming Out,” a timeless anthem that continues to resonate with precise, dazzling magic.
Get the Sunday Review in your inbox every weekend. Sign up for the Sunday Review newsletter here. | 2021-11-28T00:00:00.000-05:00 | 2021-11-28T00:00:00.000-05:00 | Pop/R&B | Motown | November 28, 2021 | 9.5 | ddcfc0c1-a4c2-4e32-a29f-c635475e0d7d | Eric Torres | https://pitchfork.com/staff/eric-torres/ | |
The Sigur Rós frontman’s muddled attempt at a pop album is a cathedral of feelings without referents: beautiful, boring, generically uplifting, and deliberately meaningless. | The Sigur Rós frontman’s muddled attempt at a pop album is a cathedral of feelings without referents: beautiful, boring, generically uplifting, and deliberately meaningless. | Jónsi: Shiver | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/jonsi-shiver/ | Shiver | The first words that swim up from the dark, supple electronic void of “Exhale,” which opens Shiver, Sigur Rós visionary Jónsi’s striving but muddled attempt at a pop album: “Breathe in, breathe out.” They’re followed by a consoling mantra of assurances: Everyone’s alright and it’s just the way it is. It isn’t your fault and you can just let it go. It’s as if Bruce Horsby had been hired to write lyrics for Frozen.
It would be unfair to suggest that Jónsi is addressing these complacent platitudes to anything more specific than the solipsistic affirmation proven to forge positive associations with car commercials. But the disconnection of his words from our times is conspicuous, and it characterizes an album that appears cordoned off from any world beyond the self. Shiver is a cathedral of feelings without referents, almost without qualities beyond their enormous size. Its spasms of idiosyncrasy can’t entirely conceal what is basically an artsier, hookless Imagine Dragons—beautiful, boring, generically uplifting, and deliberately meaningless.
Of course, substance was never Sigur Rós’s strength, either; sweeping scale and emotional texture were. The popular Icelandic post-rock group dispersed orchestras into romantic mists and meaning into its own “Hopelandic” gibberish; on Shiver, Icelandic-language lyrics sometimes relieve the numbing banality of the English. Frequent Charli XCX producer A. G. Cook’s hectic Max Martin style is far from a natural fit for the dramatic, drawn-out singing Jónsi prefers, and without the dynamic presence or indestructible hooks of a pop artist, most of the alchemy he discovers with Cook is spinning gossamer into lead.
Jónsi still has a lovely voice capable of large-scale expressive effects, computerized or otherwise, but his monotonously slow and solemn register clashes with this busy, nervously worked-over production. The songs alternate between passages deconstructed to the point of formlessness and passages swarming with overcompensating activity, liberally dashed with pop clichés. Big tumbling ’80s drum hits, singalong nonsense earworms, and lustrous EDM plug-ins burst in and out, but a lugubrious mood steals back over all.
Almost every song has a good part mired somewhere in the longueurs and affectations. If the rest of “Wildeye” had more to do with its anthemic third minute, it might be a banger, but this moment of clarity is cramped by long ranks of noisy drums and a pitiful woo-woo hook that feels like a stem from another song. “Kórall” has a beating heart, though it’s hectored by IDM test patterns and balloon squeaks. “Sumarið sem aldrei kom” is a welcome choral respite, “Hold” shows signs of cohesion, and “Swill” is solid, forgiving some grating dubstep gestures.
But by then, the record may have already worn out all but the most dedicated listeners. Cocteau Twins’ Elizabeth Fraser is wasted on the interminable “Cannibal,” which has a nice little climax that can’t quite shake off the preceding dream-pop slog. In “Salt Licorice,” poor Robyn has to grit her way through a sandstorm of bitcrushed synths before a warm Europop throb finally clears the air and gives her some room to maneuver. The parts of Shiver that strain to be fun and fresh can’t seem to break orbit from the grandiose mass of Sigur Rós, and the album leaves a sense of oppressive profundity in its bulky wake.
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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. | 2020-10-21T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-10-21T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Krunk | October 21, 2020 | 5.5 | ddd3bf6d-b5b8-40e5-8d13-6b1d87b7c406 | Brian Howe | https://pitchfork.com/staff/brian-howe/ | |
The second album from the experimental Korean rap/production duo really starts to come together. They find a catchy, powerful zone to serve up their invective. | The second album from the experimental Korean rap/production duo really starts to come together. They find a catchy, powerful zone to serve up their invective. | XXX: Second Language | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/xxx-second-language/ | Second Language | Last month, a Korean underground rap song called “DDING” landed at No. 3 on the Gaon Digital Chart, the country’s equivalent to the Billboard Hot 100. Virtually all rap singles that debut near the top of the charts feature someone who’s associated with the K-pop industry, or are the product of a concurrent rap reality TV show. That “DDING” forged its path in a manner less corporatized revealed how musical ideas from young American rap had crept into Korea’s public consciousness. While the past few years have seen K-pop singles sprinkle in triplet flows and Travis Scott-indebted ad-libs, non-idol Korean rap was committing more fully: Dbo, a rapper whose admiration for Young Thug is obvious from his unhinged flow and the fact that one of his albums is called Arter 7; Jvcki Wai, the female rapper on “DDING,” who also made a remix of “XO Tour Llif3” and released music beholden to Lil Uzi Vert; and other rappers who attempted to recreate Playboi Carti’s “Magnolia.”
The influx of ATL and Soundcloud rap tropes only made Korean rapper/producer duo XXX stand out further. On last year’s Language, the beats of producer FRNK often had an industrial bent, heightening rapper Kim Ximya’s impassioned and caustic diatribes against a rapacious music industry and its complicit rappers. Second Language features the same fiery lyrics, but the production is less abrasive than before. Instead, there’s an added poignancy to the poppier tracks. “We Are,” for example, discusses the overwhelming dread of life, concluding with a simple decision: “We have to run.” The anxiety of just living is felt in its chipper, fidgeting beat.
One of the most noticeable differences between Second Language and its predecessor is how tightly coordinated Kim and FRNK have become. Previously, their music could seem like patchwork, FRNK’s warped instrumentation a mere backdrop to Kim’s steely flow. These songs are far more bracing because the two are fully in sync. Kim addresses other rappers on the braggadocious “Language,” asserting that “we do not speak the same language”—FRNK responds by cutting up the vocals to drive the point home. On “Bougie,” the lurching beat and bombastic horns act as martial theme music for Kim, his snarling tone only dramatizing it further. The instrumental coda sounds lively because Kim’s spent so much time imbuing it with grandiose energy. Ultimately, the two need each other to avoid sounding nondescript. The instrumental “Intro” is neon-lit and cozy, but a wordless album from FRNK would be far less exciting than what we’ve received. In 2017, Kim released a collaborative album with D. Sanders—the producer behind numerous Isaiah Rashad songs—and the results were stodgy. Across Second Language’s ten tracks, that problem never arises.
On Language, Kim lambasted institutions to proclaim how destructive they were. Here, he aims his vitriol at people in hopes of enacting change. “FAD” finds him curtly declaring “fuck fad madness” before detailing the absurdity of being fashion-obsessed. For him, submission to materialism is symptomatic of indifference toward the greater capitalistic machine at work. Through his music and lifestyle, Kim presents an alternative that he considers necessary for having self-respect. He highlights this on “Scale Model,” initially wondering why someone can’t become a “better man” with “better manners” before ending with assured self-aggrandizing: “nobody can ever touch my pride.” Physical copies of the album come with a note capturing this sentiment of non-conformity as rebellion: “I was invited to the party but I chose my own seat at the table.”
XXX aren’t the only Korean artists making experimental rap—TFO’s ㅂㅂ and Moldy’s Internet Kid are two albums in the same wheelhouse—but the duo’s two albums have an unwavering, identifiable purpose to all the clamor. On Korean streaming services, XXX have lyrics from their albums listed with all curse words self-censored. This allows them to circumvent the 19+ rating that their music would otherwise receive, ensuring that audiences of all ages can hear their work (the process to hear such music when you’re not of age is far more laborious than a simple button click). Because XXX think so highly of their messages, their desire for visibility isn’t just a ploy for increased popularity. On “Ooh Ah,” the album’s most outright catchy song, Kim repeatedly asks, “What about the legacy? Dog, what the fuck are you meant to be?” XXX know the answer, but they want you to be just as certain. | 2019-02-27T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2019-02-27T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rap | BANA | February 27, 2019 | 7.5 | dde58218-8797-48fc-bb38-b351b2804f66 | Joshua Minsoo Kim | https://pitchfork.com/staff/joshua-minsoo kim/ | |
The Los Angeles-based producer retreats to the hills of Tuscany to further the vision of eclectic mix of woodwinds, synthesizers, and field recordings. | The Los Angeles-based producer retreats to the hills of Tuscany to further the vision of eclectic mix of woodwinds, synthesizers, and field recordings. | Anenon: Tongue | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/anenon-tongue/ | Tongue | Brian Allen Simon’s Anenon project has slowly grown out from the electronic beat-scene into the freewheeling modern classical universe, taking cues from every crevice of experimental music in the process. The bookends of this progression, 2012’s Inner Hue and 2016’s breakout Petrol, act as counterweights within Anenon’s discography. Petrol is a culmination, a study in the intersection of intelligent dance music and the melodic repetition of minimalist pioneers like Steve Reich. Anenon framed Petrol through the lens of Los Angeles, using freeway noise in the album’s waking moments to set up a quasi-concept album about the inspiration, claustrophobia, excitement, and dread that comes from living in the sprawling metropolis. On Tongue—Petrol’s follow-up—Simon trades in the sounds of bustling intersections and the beat scene experimentalism pioneered at Los Angeles’ avant-club and de facto Brainfeeder lair Low End Theory for the quiet hills of Tuscany, Italy, where he retreated to record this new LP. Tongue is a reflection of this temporary residence: a meditation on the fragile nature of history, a reverie that glides along in quiet, powerful contemplation.
On its surface, Tongue is a pensive, calming collection of songs—a thesis on the Tuscan landscape Simon decamped to in an attempt to distance himself from the incessant mania touching down in America. But like the archaeological studies that unearthed many of the treasures hidden beneath Italy, Tongue is littered with twists and bold accents that unfurl in his topsoil-mix of saxophone, synthesizers, and found sounds. It’s an album infused with history from its early moments of conception, recorded on the third floor of a 16th-century Tuscan home during April of last year.
“Two for C” begins with the sound of rain and a looping synthesizer that mimics the mechanization of a player piano, before Simon’s saxophone enters with layers of breathy notes. The track’s basic structure is all haze and atmosphere, assembling a cloud that eventually parts to reveal ascending synth flourishes and stark, powerful piano chords. “Two for C” is an outline of Simon’s mission: an album untethered to traditional verse-chorus structure that unveils a larger sonic expansion within each song.
“Verso,” the album’s first single, develops in much the same way. Two piano parts interlock and move straight ahead, slowly allowing for the rise of a church choir to enter the mix. Voices and organ blend to move the tone from affirming to downcast, the re-emerging rain sample makes it sound like a dirge. Tongue is drenched in these moments of emotion, bringing humanity to a modern classical genre that can favor studiousness over the feeling of a great cathartic moment. Anenon combines the technical acuity of mid-century minimalist composers with the ecstatic highs of America’s modern experimental scene.
Tongue straddles the line between esoteric and accessible with ease and grace, a trait attributable to Simon’s self-taught style; he first picked up a saxophone at the age of 22. The dense layers of pianos, synthesizers, woodwinds, and field recordings help create a quiet, gorgeous meditation on the world an ocean away from his home and the city that shaped his style. Tongue could read as a desire to separate his name from Petrol and the Los Angeles it reflects. Rather, the album is the perfect follow-up to Simon’s most successful release to date precisely because it’s so far from his previously inhabited world. The electronics are hushed entirely, instead spotlighting the producer’s arranging and songwriting chops. The album is a rigorous exercise, a whispered rumination, a city take on country life by an Angeleno in Italy. The album unfolds and reveals itself like the rolling hills of Tuscany, the outer-reaching moments tempered by Simon’s delicate touch and deft ear. Tongue creates a world built from the snug comfort of rain and the quiet joy that comes from solitude. There’s no place further from Los Angeles. | 2018-02-13T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2018-02-13T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Electronic | Friends of Friends | February 13, 2018 | 7.5 | ddfab61e-f13e-4de2-b868-ff3dbb5721a2 | Will Schube | https://pitchfork.com/staff/will-schube/ | |
The best songs on Katy B's new album show her caught up in the flow of something so overwhelming she can’t see the beginning or the end of it, time expanding and collapsing with her in its center. | The best songs on Katy B's new album show her caught up in the flow of something so overwhelming she can’t see the beginning or the end of it, time expanding and collapsing with her in its center. | Katy B: Honey | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21848-honey/ | Honey | Katy B’s songs tend to orbit people and relationships, but they’re just as often about rooms, and the way music sounds inside of those rooms, or the way that environmental combinations of music and desire can distort one’s sense of time. "Let history repeat / in parallel lines," she sang on Little Red’s "5 AM," describing not only the small infinities implied by dance music but the recursive structure of desire itself.
On her new album, Honey, Katy B seems to want to sublimate herself even further into the texture of her music, as if to emphasize the distinct rooms she finds herself in; each of the producers and singers she works with on the album receives equal credit with her, and most of them are located deep with the roster of Rinse FM, the radio station/label that’s released each of her records. She isn’t lost so easily. The album’s centerpiece is a collaboration with jackin’ house producer Chris Lorenzo called "I Wanna Be," the instrumental of the which has been floating around the internet since 2014. Katy B gives the diffuse beat gravity and narrative drama; it ceases to be a tightly-cropped brightness and unfolds and shimmers into a complete emotional landscape. "I wanna tell you / but anxiety’s a bitch babe," she sings, unlocking inner melodies and tensions from otherwise iridescent, smooth house.
Where Little Red saw Katy throwing herself into the occasional ballad, Honey is reduced to a pure set of dance music; within these aesthetic limits, though, it may be her most varied record stylistically. On "So Far Away," produced by Wilkinson, drum and bass production gathers and collides together, and Katy weaves through it in deliberate swerves. "Calm Down," written with Floating Points and Four Tet, features strings that saw crisply through the track and then rematerialize in ribbony masses. Only on "Lose Your Head," with grime MCs J Hus and D Double E, does Katy B feel like a hook singer on her own song, which causes it feels drawn from an entirely different order of work. Because of the wide range of producers, the songs on Honey can feel unrelated to each other, and often settle together indifferently.
Oddly enough Honey starts to snap into focus on a track originally released last year as a single by KDA, "Turn the Music Louder (Rumble)," itself a vocal rework of an earlier instrumental; on the album version, Tinie Tempeh is subtracted from the song, and Katy B draws the verses and chorus of the song into a subterranean gravity. Songs like these show Katy B at her best, caught up in the flow of something so overwhelming she can’t see the beginning or the end of it, time expanding and collapsing with her in its center.
As with Little Red, the ideal way of hearing Honey is in its continuous mix, but where Little Red’s arranged all of its album and bonus tracks into a kind of diagram of a long, frustrating night out, Honey’s continuous mix merely places opaque tempo shifts between each song. Regardless, the album feels more connected and coherent when experienced in this way, when the listener is allowed to enter a portal before the next distinct context asserts itself, and where Katy herself feels like she’s stretching seamlessly from one dimension into another. | 2016-05-03T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-05-03T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic / Rock | Rinse / Virgin EMI | May 3, 2016 | 7 | de1acd41-fc24-4078-917d-efbf3294de29 | Ivy Nelson | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ivy-nelson/ | null |
In the age of downloading and streaming, the L.A. alt-rock band still makes albums like it needs to take full advantage of a CD's storage capacity. | In the age of downloading and streaming, the L.A. alt-rock band still makes albums like it needs to take full advantage of a CD's storage capacity. | Silversun Pickups: Neck of the Woods | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/16615-neck-of-the-woods/ | Neck of the Woods | On my local alt-rock station, Silversun Pickups' 2006 single "Lazy Eye" has rightfully become a playlist staple, and not just because the song fits comfortably alongside the repertoire of certain first-generation Lollapalooza veterans known for inflicting violence on large orange fruit. Though it lacks an actual chorus, "Lazy Eye" still packs a considerable emotional charge, thanks to the creeping tension between the song's cool precision and frontman Brian Aubert's efforts to destabilize it, through arrhythmic guitar scraping and an increasingly agitated vocal. Though the song's tone is subdued and serious, I always smirk during Aubert's climactic shriek of the line "everyone's so focused clearly on... such shine," as if he were single-handedly trying to destroy the fun-in-the-sun spirit that defines so much Californian pop music. Which is to say: "Lazy Eye" remains Silversun Pickups' biggest and best song because it's their most human, imperfect, irrational one.
But those endearing qualities have become increasingly difficult to glean from Silversun Pickups these days. The band's third album, Neck of the Woods, picks up where 2009's sophomore release, Swoon, left off, inheriting the task of blowing up Silversun Pickups' hazy-headed pop to more muscular, arena-ready proportions. Which is to be expected: This is, after all, a band whose two albums have sold over half a million copies to date combined, so there's a natural inclination to want to keep hitting the back rows even as they move ever further away. But there's an increasing disconnect between ambition and execution: While Neck of the Woods boasts all the hallmarks of a big-budget, radio-ready modern-rock record-- including a production credit for Jacknife Lee, a guy who knows a thing or two about polishing up once-scrappy indie-rock bands for KROQ contention-- Silversun Pickups have a way of making their most grandiose gestures sound passive and timid. The album's over-the-top but underwhelming nature is best summed up by a line from the aforementioned breakthrough single: "I've been waiting for this moment all my life/ But it's not quite right."
It doesn't help that Aubert's effete voice lacks the domineering, egomaniacal presence to convincingly command his band's bombast. Even those who have allergic reactions to Billy Corgan or Matt Bellamy's prog-rock histrionics would never doubt their sense of bravado, but Aubert has the tendency to pull back right when he should be going for broke. Just as the protracted intro of opener "Skin Graph" finally yields to a satisfyingly gnarly chorus at the three-minute mark, Aubert loses himself in a buzz-killing, ambient detour; when he returns for one final charge through the chorus, the feeling is less one of shock and surprise than "what the fuck took you so long?"
This kind of structural over-tinkering is endemic on Neck of the Woods, an album that Silversun Pickups claim was inspired by horror movies; if so, they're the kind of horror movies where you wait a long time for twists you can see coming a mile away, with the visceral impact all but diluted by a glossy CGI sheen. The album places a premium on foreboding synth atmospherics, dramatic pauses, extended build-ups and breakdowns, and 1998-vintage rock-tronic beats-- and, in doing so, stretches mid-tempo song after mid-tempo song to the five-minute mark and beyond, forsaking the sort of peaks-and-valleys sequencing necessary for maintaining dramatic momentum over the course of an hour-long sprawl. And the clinical, vacuum-sealed production renders even the most Rock Band-worthy moments (the machine-gunned fills on "Out of Breath", the Zeppelin-esque chorus riff of "Gun-Shy Sunshine", the robo-grunge thrust of "Mean Spirits") with a mechanized sterility that keeps the explosions contained.
Neck of the Woods does yield at least one bona-fide direct hit to ensure future Weenie Roast bookings: "Bloody Mary (Nerve Endings)", a gleaming, synth-swathed power ballad that's of a piece with the maximal digi-symphonies of M83's Hurry Up, We're Dreaming. But even as Silversun Pickups continue to dutily follow the Smashing Pumpkins' career trajectory by trading in shoegaze haze for Adore-inspired electro-pop, perhaps the most 90s thing about them is that, even in the age of downloading and streaming, they still make albums as if they need to take full advantage of a CD's storage capacity and give the Sam Goody customer their $22.98's worth. Appropriately enough, many of Aubert's lyrics here bristle with restlessness, fatigue and disappointment-- "I'm still waiting," "I'm already bored," "What am I aiming towards/ A fight that never ends," "Nothing's coming"-- all of which serve to make Neck of the Woods a concept album about the feeling you get listening to Neck of the Woods. | 2012-05-15T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2012-05-15T02:00:01.000-04:00 | Rock | Dangerbird | May 15, 2012 | 4.8 | de1bb324-cd9f-4ab9-8c9a-0012bd32fe60 | Stuart Berman | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stuart-berman/ | null |
The third full-length from Richmond thrash metal crew Iron Reagan—featuring members of Municipal Waste, Darkest Hour, and Cannabis Corpse—is a compact vehicle for nihilistic escapism. | The third full-length from Richmond thrash metal crew Iron Reagan—featuring members of Municipal Waste, Darkest Hour, and Cannabis Corpse—is a compact vehicle for nihilistic escapism. | Iron Reagan: Crossover Ministry | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22850-crossover-ministry/ | Crossover Ministry | Iron Reagan aren’t your typical political provocateurs. Forget fighting the two-party system: The Richmond crew, whose lineup comprises members from latter-day crossover thrash groups such as Municipal Waste, Darkest Hour, and Cannabis Corpse, would rather throw a party of their own, shotgunning beers and riffs while Main Street burns. Iron Reagan’s name may nod to punk’s longstanding war with conservatism, but their music hardly resembles a call to legislative action. It’s more of a drunken primal scream, the kind that issued forth from the throats of millions on Election Night as the Chyrons announced Donald Trump’s stunning victory. (Not that the band were rooting for his opponent: a simple glance at their merch offerings reveals a disdain for authority on both sides of the aisle, Clinton included.) Activism can wait; for now, it’s time to rage.
And that Iron Reagan do, on their new album Crossover Ministry. Like their first two records (2013’s Worse Than Dead and the following year’s The Tyranny Of Will), the band’s latest effort doubles as a vehicle for violent, nihilistic escapism. And it’s a compact one at that, clocking in at 18 tracks in 30 minutes. Songs like “A Dying World,” “Blatant Violence,” and “Bleed the Fifth” retain the same shoot-from-the-hip paradigms that fans have come to expect. Frontman Tony Foresta shouts himself hoarse over chugging chords and snare-heavy backbeats before yielding to his Municipal Waste comrade Phillip “Land Phil” Hall for a free-wheeling solo.
The single “Dead With My Friends” is an exception, then—an Anthrax-laced paean to whiling away humanity’s final moments with good friends and cheap beer. And a few friends take turns at the mic as well. Screaming Females’ Marissa Paternoster does some yelping on “Eat Or Be Eaten,” and David Wood of straight edge hardcore greats Down to Nothing presides over the bludgeoning, 14-second “No Sell.”
Is this approach formulaic? Certainly. Does Crossover Ministry challenge the mores of its genre? Absolutely not. Of course, such is the DNA of thrash metal itself, not only as a descendant of hardcore punk—a style similarly rooted in rudimentary parts—but as the booze-soaked musical equivalent of the reptile brain, which could give two shits about intricacy or subtext. The id manifests most thrillingly (and hilariously) on “Fuck the Neighbors,” which opens with the ring of a doorbell, followed by the entreatments of a dorky neighbor à la Ned Flanders, who asks the band to tone down the racket. Needless to say, Iron Reagan veto that request, eventually erupting in the song’s sophomoric titular chant. It’s the ideal anthem for left-wingers marooned in the Bible Belt, not to mention an apt sketch of our divided, pissed-off republic in the year 2016. But Iron Reagan’s revolution runs on ribaldry. | 2017-02-04T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2017-02-04T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Metal | Relapse | February 4, 2017 | 6.7 | de1e4df0-607e-43c1-a5a2-224aa5e6de27 | Zoe Camp | https://pitchfork.com/staff/zoe-camp/ | null |
Low-key emotional intensity abounds in Elizabeth Powell’s stark, sketch-like reveries, and the new album’s few-frills production exposes just how gut-wrenching their songwriting can be. | Low-key emotional intensity abounds in Elizabeth Powell’s stark, sketch-like reveries, and the new album’s few-frills production exposes just how gut-wrenching their songwriting can be. | Land of Talk: Indistinct Conversations | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/land-of-talk-indistinct-conversations/ | Indistinct Conversations | Tucked away almost halfway through Land of Talk’s fourth album, Indistinct Conversations, is a question that’s also a revelation. Many songwriters try to grab listeners right away; Elizabeth Powell, the long-running Canadian band’s sole constant member, goes for the stream-of-consciousness, the gnomic, the curiously brambled. Emotions aren’t on Powell’s sleeve, they’re simmering under the skin. Or, as the Land of Talk singer and chief songwriter asks on “Love in 2 Stages,” a minor-key meditation on romantic vicissitudes heated up by syncopated stabs of keyboard, “I dig deep, why don’t you?”
Indistinct Conversations is a testament to the tattered ideal that digging deep—for its own sake, regardless of the short-term outlook—can be worthwhile in the long run. After a mostly forgotten alt-rock debut as ELE_K* in 2003, Powell began turning heads with Land of Talk’s first effort, 2006’s wiry and thrilling Applause Cheer Boo Hiss EP. A succession of generally strong albums followed, each with high-profile collaborators and sensitive personal backstories. 2008’s Some Are Lakes was produced by then-boyfriend Justin Vernon of Bon Iver. 2010’s Cloak and Cipher featured Arcade Fire’s Jeremy Gara and followed Powell’s vocal-cord struggles. After a long break, 2017’s Life After Youth, with guests Sharon Van Etten and Sonic Youth’s Steve Shelley, was a musical homecoming informed by Powell’s father suffering a stroke. Land of Talk never quite shone as brightly as those other acts. But they persisted.
With Indistinct Conversations, Powell’s private world is once again in flux, but this time there are no boldfaced names to dominate the narrative. Finally back in a Land of Talk groove after retreating from the music industry between Cloak and Cipher and Life After Youth, Powell has also begun identifying publicly as a non-binary femme, using the pronouns she/they. Aside from a few Montreal jazz-scene friends, the only collaborators here are Land of Talk drummer/keyboardist Mark “Bucky” Wheaton and bassist Christopher McCarron, who both co-produced the album with Powell at Wheaton’s home. Built mainly from Powell’s knotty acoustic guitar explorations and lyrical musings that feel like fragments from an exceptionally perceptive diary, it’s the most satisfying Land of Talk album yet.
The few-frills production exposes just how gut-wrenching Powell’s songwriting can be. Gaslighting is by now a familiar concept, but first single “The Weight of That Weekend” traces the contours of a toxic encounter with devastating aplomb. “Always come at me from a different angle/Make me think I don’t understand/How I’m feeling,” Powell begins, parceling out the words just so. The Americana-ish folk-rock backdrop is understated, enlivened by a smattering of French horn, but the emotional stakes are high enough for Powell to add later, “This is a prayer for love.”
Low-key emotional intensity abounds in these stark, sketch-like reveries. “I feel it like an empty hand,” Powell sings on the coyly titled “Compelled,” describing their lust for a lover who is with someone else—someone unworthy. In their cool deadpan, the evocative comparison sounds as old as time. On “Diaphanous,” the jolt comes with the playful opening rhyme (the title phrase with “half of us”) and then again with the dynamic shift as cascading drums join the gnarled electric guitar and fluttery saxophone. The album may be home-recorded, but the performers are road-tested. The last words we hear from Powell, on the penultimate, acoustic-strummed “Now You Want to Live in the Night,” are devastating in their plainspoken vulnerability: “Have I lost the feeling/What’s wrong with me?”
It’s always felt difficult for Land of Talk fans to explain why this particular relatively down-the-middle indie-rock project was so good. As singer, songwriter, and guitarist, Powell’s voice was always appealing, off-kilter, and expressive, but there was never an unmistakable calling card, like the singular yawp of Hop Along’s Frances Quinlan or the life-or-death majesty of Big Thief. Perhaps the unhurried, existential sighs of Kurt Vile were closer all along. And while this album’s interstitial speech fragments wind up sounding like the guys at the bar during a live solo set, and “Look to You (Intro)” and “Look to You” would’ve been better as a single, soaring opus, these are minor complaints. Indistinct Conversations finally burrows into Land of Talk’s dormant identity, as a band willing to wait out passing trends and realize its own promise. Another flash of psychological truth comes on “A/B Futures,” a rare fist-pumper on this preternaturally subdued record. “You need someone to care for,” Powell insists. “Hey, make that me.”
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Buy: Rough Trade
(Pitchfork earns a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.) | 2020-08-03T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-08-03T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Saddle Creek | August 3, 2020 | 7.7 | de1f2413-59c4-44cf-b7d9-f9d75e88c8ef | Marc Hogan | https://pitchfork.com/staff/marc-hogan/ | |
Yaeji’s first full-length mixtape is a subtle, more insular turn for the producer. It plays like a self-issued challenge to strip away the fluorescence, to find what’s underneath pop catharsis. | Yaeji’s first full-length mixtape is a subtle, more insular turn for the producer. It plays like a self-issued challenge to strip away the fluorescence, to find what’s underneath pop catharsis. | Yaeji: What We Drew | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/yaeji-what-we-drew/ | What We Drew | To grow up in the Asian-American experience and still become an artist is an act of rebellion; it’s a demand to tell your own story despite society deeming you interchangeable and voiceless. It’s a dismissal of the “model minority” stereotype—a patronizing label conferred upon your people for your supposed diligence and submission—and a refusal to reckon with that reduction. To be an Asian American artist also requires an inherent concession: You know that even if you attempt to address the universals in the human experience, your face will always be part of the discussion. Yaeji, a bilingual Korean American producer living in Brooklyn, could not have known that her first full-length mixtape would be released into explosive social frictions, a spate of violence against Asian Americans that would prove the “model” myth a hollow gesture. And yet her music arrives as an openhearted counterpoint, making space for both anxiety and love, offering a timely reminder of the power in subverting expectations of others and appreciating community—the kind you’re born into and the kind you built yourself.
In her short, already thrilling career as a producer, singer, and rapper, Yaeji has toyed with ideas of communication and opacity: She initially sang in Korean instead of English to obscure her lyrics, and still plays the languages like instruments with different timbres and intonations. Her warm, sparkling beats usually nod to deep house, though she often adds a glaze of icy trap languor; when she covered pop hits by Drake and Robyn, she tempered the mania with misty distortion and falsetto chirps. Across her two EPs for Godmode records, Yaeji’s songs were effortlessly chill yet reliably euphoric. Her bass drops and feathery vocals have had such nimble balance and satisfying velocity, they’ve felt purifying as only the best dance music can: between “raingurl,” “drink i’m sippin on,” and that humid cover of “passionfruit,” her 2017 EP2 remains a stalwart DJ cheat code. Even teetotalers know: Any night out is instantly more seductive upon hearing Yaeji murmur, “Mother Russia in my cup.”
For What We Drew, Yaeji’s first release on the venerable UK label XL, the 26-year-old producer could have easily shipped out a full crate of stylish, bacchanal floor-fillers without breaking a sweat. Instead, What We Drew plays like a self-issued challenge to strip away the fluorescence, to find what’s underneath pop catharsis. As a result, it’s subtler yet more resonant, because its peaks have deeper valleys to climb back from; in the tradition of Frankie Knuckles, Sylvester, and other artists who used bright electronic music as conduits of pain, here Yaeji offers smaller, darker meditations on the paralysis of anxiety and the loneliness inside the revelry.
“Waking Up Down,” the tape’s first single, is the soft landing from Yaeji’s past. In a sleight-of-hand, it deploys several Yaeji staples immediately: a rippling, entrancing synth intro; a quick and satiating bass drop; lyrics so laid-back they slouch. But there is friction, too: As she flatly sings an index of minor daily achievements—“I got waking up down/I got cooking down/I got making a list and checking down”—her production feels crooked. Her voice clashes with the synths in dissonant patches; the drums feel pushy, the bass skittish. Soon the chorus, in Korean, confesses how much is truly awry: “It’s not easy/There’s no such thing as easy/If I’m lazy/They all say it’s my fault,” she sings more somberly. Her earlier feats weren’t brags so much as self-affirmations of her ability to function, and that insistently repeated “down” is a plaintive suggestion of where she’s been. Unlike Yaeji’s singles past, it languishes in this unease; the momentum builds but never crests, instead skittering to a halt with nervous, spotlit drums, channeling the lack of resolution in the low, daily thrum of worry.
The satisfying gloss of “Waking Up Down” makes it one of the heftiest dance tracks on What We Drew; elsewhere, Yaeji is even more insular. “In the Mirror” is a clubber’s lament amid the sea of bodies, accepted but alone; by the chorus, she sounds like she’s one tipple shy of following Sia aboard a chandelier. “Why doesn’t it feel the same when I’m in the air/When I look in the mirror/When I’m not a pair?” she sings dazedly over synths that seep outward like black puddles. “When I Grow Up” sounds like a K-pop anthem after a weekend in a Bushwick gutter; its pared-back, chipper synth beat stutters and feints as Yaeji sings in multiple guises—rapid chattering, wide-eyed lilt—about how she’s been “forgotten” and “exposed to the ones that shouldn’t know.”
Elsewhere, What We Drew has a diffused energy befitting of a mixtape—or outtakes, depending on your appetite for circuitous performance art and surreal posse cuts. “The Th1ng” is the former, a meandering spoken-word piece by the London artist Victoria Sin, with a glassy garage beat that nods greatly to FKA twigs’ “Glass & Patron.” “Free Interlude” is the latter and, despite the title, a full-length spasm of a track—a riff on jealousy and neuroses with blips of made-up, Seussian slang. Riding a stormy trap beat, Yaeji has never sounded so afield from pop-house, her voice wrung through processors into a thin, metallic wisp. “My envy/Ripping and biting/Try me and try me,” she raps in Korean, before admitting, “My life is in a weird place.” A series of equally distorted rappers—Lil Fayo, trenchcoat, and Sweet Pea—swoop in like Dadaist motivational speakers: The most insistent, Sweet Pea, proclaims, “I like pink/I like purple/You’re a Shirple.”
Some of her friends’ cameos are more elevating, though—and sincerely uplifting. “Money Can’t Buy,” with the rising Bay Area rapper Nappy Nina, is as satisfying as the quiet pleasures it extols: As Yaeji drawls in Korean, all she wants to do is “eat rice and soup” and then, secondly, “be friends with you,” as a rubbery, strutting beat cuts the cuteness with pure ego. On “Spell,” the Tokyo DJ/producer YonYon sings sweetly in Japanese of “you and I, the magic that binds us,” over a house beat that buzzes and flickers like streetlamps before dawn; Yaeji’s tone is brisker but no less awed as she revels in her life of performance, in being embraced in her purest form: “As if I cast a spell/I read out loud my diary/In front of people,” she marvels.
But while What We Drew is more internalized than past releases, it is not conflicted; rather, Yaeji finds clarity in vulnerability, in the pendulum swing of her humanity. Crucially, the mixtape doesn’t turn its back on one of Yaeji’s strongest traits as an artist: Her music has always been deeply social, and now it is more gregarious than ever in its gratitude for those around her. Some of the best tracks are valentines to the friends and artists who fill Yaeji’s world—and she has been proactive building scenes, from New York to Seoul—and her appreciation for this community feels all the sweeter balanced with her revelations of struggle. Throughout What We Drew, it is a thrill to hear Yaeji sound so proud and connected to the artistic company she keeps and to the heritage that gives her singing even more eloquence. It is sobering to know her struggles, to hear her persevere through them; hearing her shun easier paths, insistent on sharing her complicated truth, makes the party all the better when it arrives. Through the dark, Yaeji reminds us that our narratives are ours alone.
Buy: Rough Trade
(Pitchfork earns a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.) | 2020-04-06T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-04-06T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | XL | April 6, 2020 | 8 | de2a57b2-40cb-40be-93e6-01d6980764d2 | Stacey Anderson | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stacey-anderson/ | |
The cult singer-songwriter's first proper album in 40 years proves that his beloved early recordings were no fluke. Jeff Tweedy guests on this expert singer-songwriter album, which is as dependent upon keen insight as it is upon meticulous arrangement. | The cult singer-songwriter's first proper album in 40 years proves that his beloved early recordings were no fluke. Jeff Tweedy guests on this expert singer-songwriter album, which is as dependent upon keen insight as it is upon meticulous arrangement. | Bill Fay: Life Is People | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/17012-life-is-people/ | Life Is People | You don't need a history lesson to love Life Is People, the third proper album by British singer-songwriter Bill Fay. If you've ever enjoyed the records of Pink Floyd or Randy Newman, Spiritualized or Wilco, the dozen gems here move between similar poles of spartan grace and outsized grandeur. The organ-abetted lilt of "The Healing Day" suggests Jeff Tweedy and Jay Bennett turning the page toward happiness a decade ago, while the gospel choir delivering the mantra of "Be at Peace with Yourself" might make you scan the credits for a J. Spaceman acknowledgment. The flinty "Empires" is a piano-led political tune written from a distance and with a dark, Newman-like wit, where the world's biggest timbers eventually yield to the teeming underbrush beneath. Its warped tones and terse delivery suggest Roger Waters coming back to Earth. Beautiful, patient and poignant, Life Is People is an expert singer-songwriter album, as dependent upon keen insight as it is upon meticulous arrangement.
But a history lesson makes Life Is People that much more meaningful. Bill Fay is 69 years old, and he hasn't released a proper studio album since his second, 1971's brilliant and acerbic Time of the Last Persecution. He'd stumbled into a recording contract with the Decca Nova/Deram imprint. As he admitted to WFMU in an interview last year, labels at that point scooped up an abundance of acts, hoping that at least something would turn into a best seller. "Somebody told me at the time," he said, "that their policy was to throw as many pieces of mud as possible at the wall, and hope that some would stick." Fay's records didn't stick, however, and neither did he. Deram dropped Fay and, in the 41 years since Persecution, he's recorded new material and consistently written new songs but never finished a complete record. Music, as he also told WFMU, was a private family affair for him as a child, with his aunts and uncles playing together and his mom occasionally sitting down at the family piano; he performed several times, but largely it seemed that, after stumbling toward fame through music, he wanted to keep the stuff to himself.
It was too late, though. Based only on the strength of those first two records and reissues, sporadic batches of leaked demos, and a terribly teasing collection called Tomorrow, Tomorrow and Tomorrow, issued 30 years after it was recorded, Fay's cult standing grew. Wilco covered "Be Not So Fearful", the gorgeous affirmation from his debut, and convinced Fay to join them onstage in 2007 and later during a 2010 Tweedy solo set. Then, last summer, Fay returned to a London studio for the first time in three decades with American producer Joshua Henry, a lifelong Fay fan who'd barely been alive for 30 years. With a band comprised of younger studio players and Ray Russell and Alan Rushton, who'd joined Fay for Persecution so long ago, they recorded the bulk of Life Is People in a little less than a month.
And now, back to the present: Life Is People doesn't feel at all like a late-life afterthought from a cult hero. Pointed and urgent but never pushy, Fay's songs offer pleas for redemption in a world drunk on its promise, coupled with a reassuring contentment for simply having lived this life. Fay chastises the way generations have refused to learn from their history, even as we stare into devices that allegedly offer all the answers we'd ever need. On the other hand, "Be at Peace With Yourself" extends existential reassurance-- that is, as Fay offers behind a tabernacle-sized mix of organ and choir arrangements, whoever you are is probably good enough. That's a thought echoed on "The Healing Day", a tender Revelation hymn that depends upon the belief that some cosmic help is always on the horizon. "Every battleground/ Is a place for sheep to graze," Fay sings during one his most eloquent bits ever. "When it all comes tumbling down/ All the palaces and parades."
But the record's two key songs, "The Never Ending Happening" and "This World", provide a crucial bridge between Fay's indignation and optimism. On the former, Fay's voice hang's worn but resilient above a simple, elliptical piano line; in these perfect four minutes, he considers death, God, birth, bird song, and war cries as one continuum. He's happy to have been involved, he admits, to have his tiny narrative shape a much bigger story: "Just to be part of it/ Is astonishing to me." The record's pop standout, "This World" springs from the somber end of "The Never Ending Happening" as if to offer the message that, appreciative as he may be, Fay isn't done quite yet. He and Wilco's Jeff Tweedy trade the verses and share the chorus, their simpatico voices both showing the signs and struggles of survival. (Fay also lands a wrenching solo cover of "Jesus, Etc." here, his voice turning Tweedy's resignation into observational candor.) As they dole out experiences with blue-collar worries and dismiss the corner drug dealer who offers "an easy way out," they sound enthused, as if overcoming the worries of the world is its own substantive reward for living. Though he's a quarter-century older, Fay temporarily lends Tweedy an energy that recalls the transition from Uncle Tupelo to Wilco. They're having fun.
In the past decade, a number of serpentine stories and bittersweet circumstances have revitalized the careers of musicians who, for whatever reason, were swallowed by the record industry and largely ignored by the world. To varying degrees, soul singers like Bettye LaVette, Solomon Burke, and Charles Bradley found ways to turn long flirtations with fame (or abject failure) into real or revived careers with new records on indie imprints. Thanks to collaborations with young producer Kieran Hebden, drummer Steve Reid finally became more than a footnote of rock and jazz history; when Bert Jansch linked with Drag City and Devendra Banhart, the inspiration to Led Zeppelin and what had become New Weird America met a fresh generation of listeners. Life Is People and the tale that accompany it are strong enough to do the same for Fay, to at last make his reputation among many match his legacy among few. "There are miracles in the strangest of places," Fay sings at the start of the title track's seven-minute ascent, setting the scene for the string of tiny triumphs he sweetly lists. At the risk of overstating the case, Life Is People—the work of a 69-year-old family man, and the work of a lifetime—confirms its maker's own thesis. | 2012-08-21T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2012-08-21T02:00:01.000-04:00 | Folk/Country | Dead Oceans | August 21, 2012 | 8 | de2a8d53-050c-4298-b6cf-e36bfc3e12ec | Grayson Haver Currin | https://pitchfork.com/staff/grayson-haver currin/ | null |
17 years since their last effort, Swervedriver return with a record that wisely plays to the shoegaze band’s most formidable strengths. | 17 years since their last effort, Swervedriver return with a record that wisely plays to the shoegaze band’s most formidable strengths. | Swervedriver: I Wasn't Born to Lose You | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/20178-i-wasnt-born-to-lose-you/ | I Wasn't Born to Lose You | Swervedriver inhabit a funny spot within the pantheon of classic shoegazer bands. They were always slightly out of step with their 90’s Creation-era peers, most of whom appeared content to disappear behind a veil of tastefully shimmering feedback and lyrical obtuseness. Swervedriver, on the other hand, were more interested in ripping. Their guitars may have fed back through the requisite number of effects pedals—classic Swervedriver tshirts actually featured a connected bank of effects pedals rather than the band members—but rather than shrink into the feedback, Swervedriver married their guitar haze with nods to poppy psychedelia, American film noir, and songs about fast cars. They had more in common with bands like Dinosaur Jr. and Soundgarden (with whom they toured) than the more ethereal English bands (Ride, Lush, My Bloody Valentine) with whom they were forever lumped. Despite releasing four excellent records between 1991 and 1998, Swervedriver—plagued by label woes, lineup shifts, and bad timing—somehow never quite got their due.
Now, some 17 years since their last effort, (1998’s 99th Dream), Swervedriver return with a record that wisely plays up to the band’s most formidable strengths. Reunion albums can be a tricky and sometimes disastrous business (just ask the Pixies), but I Wasn’t Born To Lose You manages the rare trick of actually enhancing the band’s legacy rather than tarnishing it. Hewing most closely to their most beloved releases (1991’s Raise and 1993’s Mezcal Head), Born is a remarkably unfussy collection of songs that could easily pass—for better or worse—as a kind of lost album from the early 90’s.
Swervedriver’s strength always stemmed from the melodic interplay of guitarists Adam Franklin and Jimmy Hartridge—a collaboration that, at its best, felt like watching a rocket take off at close range and having it subsequently blow up in your face. It’s hard not to use firework metaphors when describing the band’s music, which seems to function best as a series of blinding explosions and brilliant fade-outs. Tracks like “Last Rites” and “Everso” are not-so-distant cousins to the band’s early “Sandblasted”-era singles—overdriven riffs reign supreme and songs build with mantra-like power before collapsing into long passages of looping, blissed-out guitar lines. Lead single “Setting Sun” proves to be an accurate barometer of the record’s overall vibe—a sustained mid-tempo reverie pushed along by Franklin’s characteristically low-key vocals: “Pure solid gold, you’re not alone, hearing unseen sounds from the depths below…”
If there’s a complaint to be had with I Wasn’t Born To Lose You it’s that the record too often errs on the side of restraint. The furious, breakneck quality of classic Swervedriver tracks like "Son of Mustang Ford” and “For Seeking Heat” is largely absent here, eschewed in favor of tracks that aspire to a kind of majestic dreaminess. With the exception of the propulsive “Deep Wound” and scuzz-rocking “Red Queen Arms Race” the record plays like a kind of sustained trance, everything buoyed by a sense of unwavering melody wrung out of guitars that—even when played gently—always seem to be turned up past eleven. “Behold this rhythmic creation, it’s beautiful and true” Franklin sings on “I Wonder?”—a nearly six-minute bit of gorgeously rendered guitar squall that closes the album. It’s a fitting description for the record itself—a collection of songs that may not necessarily venture into any new sonic territory for the venerable band, but ultimately doesn’t really need to. | 2015-03-09T02:00:02.000-04:00 | 2015-03-09T02:00:02.000-04:00 | Rock | Cobraside | March 9, 2015 | 7 | de2f966b-eb85-4fc8-96c6-11c9e90cfa41 | T. Cole Rachel | https://pitchfork.com/staff/t.-cole rachel/ | null |
Patrick Wolf's 10th-anniversary collection is a double album containing new acoustic versions of previously released songs. It isn't quite a greatest-hits compilation, though it's mostly singles and fan favorites. | Patrick Wolf's 10th-anniversary collection is a double album containing new acoustic versions of previously released songs. It isn't quite a greatest-hits compilation, though it's mostly singles and fan favorites. | Patrick Wolf: Sundark and Riverlight | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/17111-sundark-and-riverlight/ | Sundark and Riverlight | Nobody does maximalism like Patrick Wolf. Calling his music theatrical is accurate but only just; if the stage is the metaphor, Wolf's albums call for massive prosceniums, with hundred-strong casts, meticulous set pieces, and props flung in from the wings. The aesthetics may vary, from Lycanthropy's assemble-at-home crafting to The Bachelor's repurposed metalwork to Lupercalia's lavish polish, but the scope is always titanic. If you're a fan, this is likely why: Wolf spares no sound, vocal gnash, or string flourish if there's emotional or narrative payoff to be had. If you're not, there's probably nothing more Wolf could be doing to change your mind. Maybe that's why the main decision he made on his 10th-anniversary album, Sundark and Riverlight, was to do so much less.
Sundark and Riverlight is a double album containing re-recorded versions of Wolf's songs. One disc designated for troubled songs and one for happier ones. In practice, this sorts The Bachelor to the front and Lupercalia to the sunny back porch. It isn't quite a greatest-hits compilation, though it's mostly singles and fan favorites. Nor is it precisely an acoustic album, though that's mostly how these songs differ. It's more like a retcon, or as Wolf calls it, a make-under: stripping the old material of its frippery to reveal how, Wolf has said, it was meant to sound. "There was a conscious rebellion on this album against the digital age of auto-tune and mass produced electronic landfill music," Wolf wrote to accompany the album's release*,* echoing comments he'd made around the release of Lupercalia. It's a curious statement from an artist who's never much relied on or even acknowledged Auto-Tune and one whose music has been thickly electronic (if not exactly mass-produced) since album one. But it's benign. Wolf's hardly the first to anchor this rationale to an unplugged album, nor is he even alone this month. (Tori Amos's Gold Dust, the same idea in the same broad genre, came out within the week.) There's a certain cachet to baroque recordings that New Romantic synthpop doesn't have; it's a play to redefine oneself not as a singer-songwriter but a singer-composer.
If only more composing went on. If this is how Wolf's songs truly look, Sundark and Riverlight is like the thumbnail version: everything compressed, details lost. What might sound cavernous with the right acoustics sounds merely pleasant on recording, taking angst-wracked songs and turning them into something more suited to catches of melodies you'd hear passing a storefront. In these thinner arrangements, Wolf's voice-- among his greatest assets-- sounds overegged, and he knows it; his howls and growls are mostly subdued, as if he's trying to keep it down for the very nice PA lady who just told everyone to turn off their cell phones.
This works when the songs were orchestral ballads already ("London"), or when the details lost cluttered what might as well have been orchestral ballads ("Teignmouth", "Wind in the Wires"). It works for much of the Lycanthropy material, because if you forget Wolf's statements, it's easy enough to imagine this really is how these songs sounded inside his head as a teenager. And it works when Wolf's composing at his normal scale, like "Bluebells", which gets darker when written for cello and piano, or "The Libertine", whose startled-orchestra arrangement is the only unquestionable improvement here.
What's less successful is when Wolf takes exuberant songs and tranquilizes them. If you played the Sundark version of "Oblivion" for someone uninitiated, then the original, they'd think the first was the demo. A lone guitar picks through the bones of The Bachelor's original arrangement; you'd expect the violins at least might have stayed, being both rustic and frantic, but no. And Wolf's vocals, though not tentative, come off like laying guide marks for where the full version would insert guttering or conviction or Tilda Swinton. "Vulture", another Bachelor track, replaces the gnashing percussion, panting strings, and general masochistic frenzy of the original with sedate piano pleasantries; there's no blood left in its dead meat. Lupercalia fares little better. "Together" takes two ideas from the original (the seconds-long classical guitar flourish at the beginning and the curtsying strings at the end) and deflates everything else. "House" excises all the rejoicing strings and most of the joy of the original; it's like a midday nap the day after a besotted honeymoon, which is fair enough as an interpretative choice but far less interesting.
Sometimes the changes are just baffling. "Bermondsey Street" takes a song that worked because of its simplicity, its word-precise juxtaposition of two affairs, and smothers it with noodling spoken-word interludes; it's the exact opposite of what Wolf said he was trying to do. If the goal of Sundark and Riverlight was to prove Wolf's repertoire has songwriting merit beyond the layers of mythology and biography and reinventions, it's an unqualified success; on its own, every arrangement is entirely thoughtful and praiseworthy. It just wasn't necessary. These songs can make it alone, but they could be-- and have been-- so much better. | 2012-10-01T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2012-10-01T02:00:01.000-04:00 | Electronic / Rock | Essential / Bloody Chamber | October 1, 2012 | 6.8 | de32b1f2-5d8a-4d00-8a41-f99c55c817e3 | Katherine St. Asaph | https://pitchfork.com/staff/katherine-st. asaph/ | null |
As Jamaica stood at a political crossroads in 1980, the Wailing Souls worked with famed engineer Scientist on a magical blend of unearthly dub and traditional songcraft. | As Jamaica stood at a political crossroads in 1980, the Wailing Souls worked with famed engineer Scientist on a magical blend of unearthly dub and traditional songcraft. | Wailing Souls: Wailing | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/23024-wailing/ | Wailing | Jamaica had two realities then: a tropical paradise of sandy beaches, crystal blue seas, and feel-good music; the other, a nation overrun by violent drug posses, permanently scarred by a recent history of CIA intervention and subversion, and a deeper historical legacy of slavery and colonization. The question of which reality would prevail seemed to hang heavy in the air in 1980, as the Wailing Souls recorded their album Wailing—an album shaped by its earthly means and sung to the angelic spheres.
At the turn of the new decade, the post-independence euphoria that had defined Jamaica in the 1960s and the strident self-determination that defined the ’70s gave way to a new era of garrison politics, an unprecedented level of political violence (over 800 people killed in Kingston in the months leading up to the October elections), and the bloody consequences of Jamaica’s increasing role in the regional cocaine trade. The utopian vision of Rastafari—the Afro-Jamaican religion that preached a return to nature and repatriation to the ancestral African homeland—was being rapidly eclipsed by the hard local realities of the country’s position as a regional pawn in the Cold War and the effects of global free trade policies.
The music scene could not help but be affected by these shifts. If the ascension of Bob Marley and the influence of Rastafari on roots reggae were dramatic developments of the 1970s, the next dramatic turning point occurred in 1984 when producers abandoned the recording of live bands altogether, in favor of the stripped-down, pre-programmed rhythms of cheap Casio keyboards. These producers initially attempted to replicate the old reggae dancehall sound, but once the music went digital, it rapidly evolved into a radically different animal. Of course, the mechanization of Jamaican music followed a pattern that was already well underway in the United States and other parts of the world. But for those who had listened to reggae for its spiritual or political qualities or its earthy, organic sensibility, something seemed irretrievably lost.
The pre-digital early 1980s were a period of transition between these two dramatic eras of Jamaican music, an interregnum that symbolically began with the death of Bob Marley in May of 1981. Although many groups of the roots reggae era adapted to the new era and continued to make great music, the new style was largely defined by a younger generation of dancehall deejays with names like Yellowman, Charlie Chaplin, Josey Wales, Eek-A-Mouse, Tiger and others whose “slackness” lyrics of sex, ghetto violence, braggadocio and bling helped set the more aggressive tone of the new decade.
This new form of reggae, generally called “dancehall,” was associated with a number of emerging producers including Sugar Minott, Nkrumah Jah Thomas, Linval Thompson and Thompson’s protégé, Henry “Junjo” Lawes. Lawes in particular was on a hot streak during these years, best-known for the string of hits he produced with Yellowman. His unique sound was partially crafted by using the Roots Radics as his session band. The Radics were built around the rhythm section nucleus of Errol “Flabba” Holt, drummer Lincoln “Style” Scott, and guitarist Eric “Bingy Bunny” Lamont (augmented by a number of keyboardists including Winston Wright and Gladstone Anderson), and their sound was stripped-down and stark. Unlike the older, polyrhythmic roots reggae which had developed out of rock steady, the new rhythms tended to be minimalist in construction—at times martially tight and at other times heavy and lumbering—with Scott’s Syndrums garnishing the music with electronic beeps, buzzes and other quirky, futuristic sounds.
But the unique vibe of Lawes’ productions was also a result of them being mixed by Hopeton “Scientist” Brown, a young protégé of King Tubby, the acknowledged master of dub music. Scientist had initially been a mere apprentice at Tubby’s studio, only infrequently mixing until Thompson and Junjo started to use him on a regular basis. But his skills and reputation grew quickly and by 1980, he was mixing most of Junjo’s tunes and dub versions, compiling them on to the series of sci-fi and video game-themed albums that still form the core of his reputation today: Scientist Rids the World of the Evil Curse of the Vampires, Scientist Wins the World Cup, Heavyweight Dub Champion, Big Showdown, Scientist Meets the Space Invaders and Scientist Encounters Pac-Man. Unlike the warmer, more tropical sound of King Tubby’s dub mixing which had dominated the 1970s, Scientist’s treatment of the Roots Radics’ sounded as if he were suspended in the cold, stark spaces between planets, its emptiness only occasionally animated by the fleeting movements of comets, asteroids, and space debris.
Although dub music developed out of reggae as the latter music’s experimental impulse, the two approaches have generally tended to appeal to different constituencies. Inside of Jamaica, dub was most typically used in the dancehalls as a backdrop for the tale-spinning of the sound system deejays. Outside of Jamaica, it tended to appeal to listeners whose ears had been primed by the spacey soundscapes of psychedelic rock. And producers generally encouraged this bifurcation, placing vocal songs on the A-sides of singles and dub versions on the B-sides. But there were occasions when the idea of the song and the dub mix were not necessarily mutually exclusive, and there is a select group of exalted reggae recordings that unite the sonic experimentation of dub with more traditional conceptions of songcraft. The best-known example of this is probably the Congos’ 1977 album Heart of the Congos, a collection of songs gorgeously performed by the Congos and given an equally gorgeous, dubwise production by Lee “Scratch” Perry at the height of his Black Ark studio.
A lesser-known album in the same category is the Wailing Souls album Wailing. The core of the Wailing Souls is the duo of Winston “Pipe” Matthews and Lloyd “Bread” McDonald, generally augmented by one or two additional vocalists as the occasion demands. Friends of Bob Marley & the Wailers since their early days singing together in Trench Town, they were—along with the Abyssinians, the Gladiators, and Burning Spear—one of a number of roots vocal groups that began to record for Coxsone Dodd at Studio One in the early 1970s. The Wailing Souls brought a poignant, yearning sound associated on one hand with musical traditions of the Jamaican countryside and on the other, with African-American soul outfits like the Impressions and the Temptations, who inspired the formation of scores of Jamaican vocal groups. Many of the latter had perfected their gentle harmonizing singing rock steady—the romantic, soul-inspired Jamaican music that, for two or three intense years, set the stage for roots reggae. But by the early 1970s, they had abandoned the smooth crooning of rock steady for a raw, less affected vocal quality, typified by the rough voices of Pipe, Bob Marley, and Burning Spear’s Winston Rodney.
Like the other groups, the Wailing Souls typically sung themes of Rastafarian devotion alongside philosophically-tinged love songs. They cut two albums for Coxsone before moving on to Channel One studio, where they cut a string of excellent records for the Hoo-Kim brothers. Their career took a major step forward in 1979 when they recorded the celebrated Wild Suspense album for Island Records. By the time they began to record for Junjo in 1980, their experience enabled them to blend the romanticism of rock steady and the mysticism and militancy of roots reggae with the new, minimalist dub sound Scientist was crafting for Junjo’s productions. Teaming up with Junjo and Scientist when both were at the peak of their creativity, Pipe’s voice has arguably never been showcased to better effect, and Wailing was to be one of the most special albums of the Souls’ long career.
In fact, the group was initially reluctant to work with Junjo, wary of the gangster element in the producer’s business, not to mention quality control issues. Junjo was one of the producers that made extensive use of versioning—recycling a rhythm track by overdubbing a succession of deejays on it—but the Souls preferred their music to stand alone so that the messages in their song lyrics remained accessible. Furthermore, while the rhythms that Junjo was cutting with Roots Radics undoubtedly hit hard in the dancehall, they sometimes lacked the inventiveness of the rhythms produced by earlier drum & bass teams like Sly Dunbar and Robbie Shakespeare (with Peter Tosh and Black Uhuru), Carlton & Aston Barrett (with Bob Marley & the Wailers) and “Santa” Davis and Fully Fulwood (with Soul Syndicate). But the Souls’ warm four-part harmonies and Rasta themes (filled out on this album by Garth Dennis and George “Buddy” Haye) brought a sonic and philosophical depth to those rhythms that Junjo’s usual deejays never could.
From Scott’s opening drum roll, the entire album is suffused with a feeling of the otherworldly, with the pensive chorus of Bread, Haye, and Dennis mixed like phantoms behind Pipe’s lead vocals, juxtaposed against the stark, hard rhythms of the Roots Radics and spaced-out by Scientist in a haze of echo and reverberation. The lyrics are generally understated, tending toward the poetic, the oblique, and the evocative. The album’s centerpiece is “Who No Waan Come Cyan Stay” (Who Didn’t Want to Come Can’t Stay), a languid, spacey paean of Rasta repatriation. Anyone doubting the emotional power of dub need only let themselves be transported by Scott’s snare chopping up the soundscape like gunshots, his bass drum kicking up thick clouds of reverberation, and Flabba Holt’s bass ringing out with analog delay like a buoy on the sea while Pipe beckons to non-believers one last time as he departs for a heavenly African Zion:
“Oh give us a home
Where the butterflies roam
and the birds sing so sweet…
Who no waan come cyan stay
You can stay, for I am going
It’s so long, so long
I’ve been warning you
Yet you’re trying hard not to accept my word
But when the master’s calling
You will find yourself stumbling
I’ll be waiting by the wayside
Who no waan come cyan stay
You can stay for I am going…”
The other songs continue in the same vein with wistful melodies of love, mystery, foreboding, and Rastafarian devotion. The opener “Penny I Love You” is poetic and philosophical, with the Souls professing their love into the echo chamber and setting the stage for the rest of the album. “Don’t Be Down Hearted” is a jaunty, spiritual exhortation for the Rasta faithful. “Rudy Say Him Bad” is a plea to the gun-toting “rude boys” of Kingston to heed the advice of their elders and renounce their violent ways, lest they “lay down to stay.” “Face the Devil” is rooted in the Biblical book of Revelation, warning of divine retribution and apocalyptic horrors to come. The album closes with the steady, plaintive “Mr. Big More,” with Pipe and the Souls calling out the wealthy for their greed while bemoaning the plight of suffering masses. In true “showcase album” fashion almost all of the songs here are followed by their dub versions, with the vocals entirely removed and Scientist kicking around in the echo chamber, using reverberation and dropping out parts to explore every nook, cranny, and cavern of the soundscape.
The juxtaposition of the Roots Radics’ dancehall rhythms and the rhapsodic voices of the Wailing Souls seemed to encapsulate Jamaica’s arrival at the crossroads of 1980, a moment when the violent changing of the political guard foreshadowed a new era for the island as a whole. In a tense and uncertain season when the smooth harmonizing of vocal groups was giving way to the raucous chanting of the dancehall deejays, the team of Junjo, Scientist, and the Wailing Souls managed to carve an exalted dub cathedral out of the hard rhythms of early dancehall. Casting the group as voices in the proverbial wilderness, Wailing sings the glories of love, while bemoaning the violence engulfing their society and the world, an angelically-voiced clarion call as society gradually arcs toward the dark side.
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Michael E. Veal is the author of Dub: Soundscapes and Shattered Songs in Jamaican Reggae (Wesleyan University Press, 2007). | 2017-03-19T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-03-19T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Global | Jah Guidance | March 19, 2017 | 8.7 | de3b721b-9674-4394-b583-27a932b26ba5 | Michael Veal | https://pitchfork.com/staff/michael-veal/ | null |
The vocal-heavy No Answer is the clearest and most detailed record in Wolf Eyes' vast catalogue. There’s little in the way of buried elements or blurred dissonance; in fact, much of the album could be accurately described as minimal. | The vocal-heavy No Answer is the clearest and most detailed record in Wolf Eyes' vast catalogue. There’s little in the way of buried elements or blurred dissonance; in fact, much of the album could be accurately described as minimal. | Wolf Eyes: No Answer : Lower Floors | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/17968-wolf-eyes-no-answer-lower-floors/ | No Answer : Lower Floors | Dig up descriptions of Michigan trio Wolf Eyes from any time during their 16-year existence, and I doubt you'll see much use of the word “precision.” But their music has always had this quality-- even if it’s sometimes been covered in whirring distortion, brittle cacophony, or psychotic howls. Go back as far as “Half Animal, Half Insane”, from 2002’s Dread, and you can hear them picking and placing their sounds meticulously. Even though the results could feel abrasive or abstract, the attack has never been messy or careless. Most of the time, it’s a precise rendering of Wolf Eyes’ horror-movie visions and hard-edged sonic obsessions.
This knack for precision has reached a new level on No Answer: Lower Floors, Wolf Eyes’ first widely-released album since 2009’s Always Wrong. It’s the clearest, most detailed record in their vast catalogue. There’s little in the way of buried elements or blurred dissonance; in fact, much of the album could be accurately described as minimal. The best example is the longest, a 12-minute dirge called “Confession of the Informer”. Sparse and desolate, it contains only a few sounds at any given moment-- and most of them are distant and fade quickly, like the after-images of a light flash disappearing inside your eyelids.
Why is “Confession of the Informer” more gripping than a standard blast of rising noise? The secret lies in Wolf Eyes’ ability to cook up thick tension with the simplest sonic ingredients. It’s a skill they’ve had for a while, but lately they’ve focused it to a point of perfection. It helps that Nate Young and John Olson-- the group’s only consistent members since 2000-- have worked diligently on this aspect of their music outside of Wolf Eyes, in the sparse sketches of their duo Stare Case, the rangy experiments of Young’s Regression, and the reggae-influenced rhythms of Olson’s Hazel and Henry Slaughter. It also helps that new member Jim Baljo adds a further layer of laser-like clarity in his dexterous guitar playing. (Baljo replaced Mike Connelly last fall, though Connelly and the other former Wolf Eye, Aaron Dilloway, both contributed to No Answer: Lower Floors). All these factors have pushed Wolf Eyes to a peak of efficient power, where a single sound can ripple tension through the rest of a song.
The most powerful of those sounds are Young’s simple yet maniacally exacting beats. It’s fitting that No Answer: Lower Floors begins with one, tearing open the stereo space before other sounds can move in. His beats are the spine of the music, the compass around which all the other noises align. So while droning chords spark the slow-swinging “Chattering Lead”, the beat pushes them and Young’s deadened moans forward. It’s also what gives the song visceral impact, more so than the band’s tactile sheen. That sheen might make you woozy, but it’s Young’s beats that punch you in the gut.
What they don’t do, though, is push the music toward crashing climaxes. Young has recently talked about keeping the Wolf Eyes sound “realistic,” and resisting the temptation to jump from zero to ten at every opportunity. The result of this outlook on No Answer: Lower Floors is momentum that’s primarily implicit. Swells are tenuous and elusive, lurking in shadows without ever jolting into the frame. While Wolf Eyes have often used words and images that suggest the shock of slasher films, it’s this haunting aspect of their music that truly evokes scary movies.
Not that No Answer: Lower Floors is all about negative space. The album’s busy soundscape is much more diverse and rounded than that. In places it offers full-on noise-- take the fire-bomb opening of “Born Liar”, or the siren-like wail of “Warning Sign”, not coincidentally the sole track on the album without vocals. But the fact that Wolf Eyes can do both quiet and loud, fast and slow, or frantic and subdued, is no big deal on its own. What matters is the way they make those polar modes seem united and even indistinguishable. Which is yet another reason why something as subdued as “Confession of the Informer” can feel so vital and active.
This ability to connect opposites explains why, even though they’re often associated with the wave of American Noise that rose last decade, Wolf Eyes have always seemed to occupy their own self-made world. Part of that comes from the way they’re constantly generating releases, both as Wolf Eyes proper and under an endless array of side projects and solo ventures. But it’s also because no one else has swung between extremes so deftly, in a way that makes outer edges meet on a curving continuum rather than sitting on far ends of a spectrum. On No Answer: Lower Floors, this fact, like the music itself, is clearer than ever before. | 2013-04-10T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2013-04-10T02:00:01.000-04:00 | Experimental | De Stijl | April 10, 2013 | 8.2 | de415934-c10d-4f2f-bd5d-d15e5a694fad | Marc Masters | https://pitchfork.com/staff/marc-masters/ | null |
The debut from this 27-year-old artist-turned-“living meme” chases shock and bombast but winds up surprisingly tame. | The debut from this 27-year-old artist-turned-“living meme” chases shock and bombast but winds up surprisingly tame. | Oliver Tree: Ugly Is Beautiful | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/oliver-tree-ugly-is-beautiful/ | Ugly Is Beautiful | Feel sorry for Oliver Tree. For a crumb of our attention, the 27-year-old artist-turned-“living meme” has bathed in a tub of Flaming Hot Cheetos, “smoked” out of giant joints lit by flamethrower, and hung a wrinkly ball sack on his chin for a music video. On some occasions, he sports a sweatsuit patterned like a ’90s Solo Jazz disposable cup. But most of the time, he dresses in his standard uniform. On his head: red sunglasses and an atrociously ugly bowl cut reminiscent of Vector from Despicable Me. On his body: a pink and purple ’80s windbreaker, socks and sandals, and uber-wide JNCO jeans. His persona is dense and unappetizing, like a Twinkie squashed under hot car cushions for weeks. He might strive for iconoclasm, but his aims are very ordinary: He is the umpteenth artist lobbing outrageousness at crowds to provoke a reaction, to sell us something.
For his gimmicks, Tree has been heralded as the “trickster laureate of pop’s viral era” and cast as a Warholian insider skewering the music industry. Of course, the suits love it. “You can’t win unless you polarize people right now,” proclaims Atlantic A&R rep Jeff Levin, who signed Tree in 2017. In interviews, the artist delivers winning jokes like mispronouncing “COVID” as “Coviod”; he threatens to retire, it seems, every other week. In March, Tree declared that his debut, Ugly Is Beautiful, was officially canceled due to the pandemic, and apologized with the arena-sized “Let Me Down,” on which he howls from the perspective of a fan who’s grown tired of his shit. But he returned in May, when a “mysterious hacker” took over his socials and demanded one million Instagram comments in exchange for the album art and release date. He finally dropped Ugly Is Beautiful last week, and like clockwork, announced that he was quitting music to focus on filmmaking.
To a generation that’s been bludgeoned senseless by the 24-hour news cycle, a dude with a bad haircut in a silly outfit might seem unbelievably dull. Anyone who’s seen two seconds of a Jake Paul vlog will yawn through Tree’s monster trucks and burning cars; nothing this novice troll does can obliterate brain cells like “They COVERED My LAMBORGHINI IN PEANUT BUTTER!! (prank).” Still, for an artist chasing shock and bombast, Oliver Tree’s music is surprisingly tame. Ugly Is Beautiful is an amalgam of genres like alternative rock, hip-hop, and electro-pop, with most of the tracks not straying far from what lands on the Hot Rock & Alternative chart. The catchy electro pop-punk opener, “Me, Myself & I,” recalls early 2010s radio favorite Neon Trees, as does keep-your-head-up jam “Again & Again.” Billie Joe Armstrong’s congested groan haunts songs like “Introspective” and “Jerk.”
Ugly Is Beautiful is bloated at 14 tracks, with several recycled singles in the mix. Tree’s voice—always a little shouty, a little whiny—is riddled with distortion, casting a fuzzed-out sameness over even the more left-field selections, like the runway thumper “1993.” After a while, you wonder why he doesn’t hurry up and join Twenty One Pilots. More aligned with his provocateur image is the ominous, bizarre rap “Joke’s on You!” “My whole life was just a joke/But I’m still not laughing,” he moans, channeling a familiar crimson-lipped antihero before leaping into Eminem-style rapping. The reggae-influenced “Bury Me Alive” pivots quickly to West Coast hip-hop. Inspired by the time he took too much acid at Burning Man—“I ended up running naked through the desert for about six hours and nearly died that night,” Tree elaborates—it warns about the dangers of drug abuse, colored with stock tropes about bargaining with the devil.
If you’re lucky as a performer, you can bait listeners with screwy antics, and pray they’ll stick around long enough to discover the Real You. The lyrics on Ugly Is Beautiful indicate deeper struggle behind Tree’s ludicrous facade, touching on the same themes of being an outsider, fucking up, and dealing with negativity, although in the vaguest possible terms. “When is it enough/How bad do you need that stuff?” our modern Marx wonders on “Cash Machine,” a grungy pop-rock lament about materialism. Still, it seems heartfelt. In a recent interview with music personality Anthony Fantano, Tree criticized his label for imposing more and more regulations on his music—demanding first one million social media followers, then two million, stalling Ugly Is Beautiful’s release long past its finish line. “I can’t spend 90 percent of my life dedicated to promoting some fucking shit I made three years ago,” he yelled. The album contains glimmers of a better artist—the way he scoots through genres is interesting, at least—but Tree and his team seem to have internalized the message of a 2018 Vice profile with a URL reading, “Nobody Paid Attention to Oliver Tree’s Music Until He Became a Living Meme.” It’s unclear, as his performance stretches on, how much of it is still of his own volition. The label heads may slobber over how Tree leverages meme culture as “the next credible and viable source of communication,” but they forget how quickly these fads run their expiration date. For every Oliver Tree, there are dozens of others who can take his place.
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2020-07-23T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-07-23T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | Atlantic | July 23, 2020 | 4.8 | de590135-00dd-42b4-acb2-ace41a970c5b | Cat Zhang | https://pitchfork.com/staff/cat-zhang/ | |
The indie band’s 12th album uses a moodier, more subdued palette to get to the heart of some fun topics like fear and ambivalence in the face of environmental and societal ruin. | The indie band’s 12th album uses a moodier, more subdued palette to get to the heart of some fun topics like fear and ambivalence in the face of environmental and societal ruin. | Superchunk: Wild Loneliness | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/superchunk-wild-loneliness/ | Wild Loneliness | You are probably having a bad time right now. You have been stuck at home in fits and starts for so long that it’s increasingly difficult to remember what that didn’t feel like. A bad situation that seemed like it was going to end soon didn’t, and now you’re not sure if it ever will—or if it does, it will surely be superseded by something even worse. Maybe you have some sense of what that even worse thing might be, maybe you don’t, but you’re feeling it hovering regardless. Even if you’re the type to find ways to remain hopeful—and God bless you whoever you are—you may concede that the search is getting a little more fraught each day.
Here’s some welcome good news: “If You’re Not Dark,” the last song on Superchunk’s 12th album Wild Loneliness, is the validating feel-bad anthem you didn’t know you needed. It’s a slow-burn climax dedicated to expressing dismay towards anyone who wouldn’t be having a bad time right now. Mac McCaughan sings with Sharon Van Etten, “If you’re not dark/At least in some little part/What are you on?/Can I have some?” They aren’t mad at you for being oblivious or immune to the inherent confusion or existential angst of the times, they’re just jealous.
The righteous fury of 2018’s What a Time to Be Alive channeled the DIY punk of Superchunk’s early days into some real oh-we’ll-give-you-something-to-be-angry-about-all-right circumstances; being pissed about your boss was merely training wheels for being pissed about institutionalized inequality and white supremacy and the fact that your children are doomed. The album felt of the moment in a way none of their work had been asked to be before; Wild Loneliness somehow one-ups it by doing the same with a far more complicated moment.
Wild Loneliness is a deep sigh after their Trump-era primal howl—an admission that if you can’t change the things you’re rightfully mad about, you should channel what’s left of your energy into hanging out while you can with the people who make you feel less bad. It’s bunker-bedroom pop, salve and comfort for the apocalypse we know we’re already in and can’t really stop no matter how loud we’ve tried to yell. Anger is easy to identify and vent; fear and ambivalence in the face of environmental and societal ruin are harder to pogo to.
It is only natural that the overarching theme for an album largely self-recorded by band members in their own North Carolina homes is the idea of home itself, reveling in the mundane as a lifeboat. With string flourishes courtesy of Owen Pallett, opener “City of the Dead” makes a line like “I’ll still make the coffee/And we still make the beds” feel defiant and jubilant, fighting for the right to feel normal for five fucking minutes. “This Night” is an unfairly catchy late-career peak that turns the potentially numbing familiarity of domesticity into the most romantic thing in the world (“This night is like so many/But I still get a thrill when you ring me”) and an end refrain (“Take me/Take me out tonight”) that makes a night away from the kids sound like high adventure.
The equally hooky “Endless Summer” is the most explicitly doomsday-oriented song on the album, a walk in the woods spent contemplating the looming specter of climate disaster that also happens to be an outright bop despite the circumstances. Navigating between despair and delight within the confines of a fuzzy pop song is obviously nothing new; what does feel new is how often we are caught experiencing and processing both at the same time and the relief in recognizing that as a way forward.
The musical tone across the album is closer to Superchunk 1.0’s 2001 swan song Here’s to Shutting Up and its presciently titled predecessor Indoor Living, making the most of mandated isolation to nurture a moodier, more subdued palette than What a Time to Be Alive’s determined racket, and to rope in a bigger cast of outside (and remote) contributors, including Teenage Fanclub’s Norman Blake and Raymond McGinley, Mike Mills, Wye Oak’s Andy Stack, and Camera Obscura’s Tracyanne Campbell. At the time, HTSU’s slower pace and emphasis of keyboards over guitars felt marked by both possibility and frustration—a band chafing against the yoke of expectations, grappling with how to gracefully entwine the culture and chaos of living in a scrappy rock band in the face of late-onset adulthood.
Half a long career later, strings and horns and acoustic ballads don’t feel like a reaction to or deviation from an established style of clatter, they feel like part of the living room. Superchunk have continually applied the lessons and practices of their youth to less youthful endeavors and in the process turned themselves from a great and admirable and well-loved band into a generationally capital-I Important one. And Wild Loneliness is the natural endpoint of this long interrogation—the product of a band whose confidence in their own reason for being feels like a beacon.
Buy: Rough Trade | 2022-03-01T00:00:00.000-05:00 | 2022-03-01T00:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Merge | March 1, 2022 | 7.9 | de5b7945-dc6c-4095-ba64-4bf08161c936 | Steve Kandell | https://pitchfork.com/staff/steve-kandell/ | |
Rachel's pioneered a blend of modern classical music and post-rock that you can hear in current practitioners Jóhann Jóhannsson and Max Richter. Their 2003 album Systems/Layers is their masterpiece. | Rachel's pioneered a blend of modern classical music and post-rock that you can hear in current practitioners Jóhann Jóhannsson and Max Richter. Their 2003 album Systems/Layers is their masterpiece. | Rachel’s: Systems/Layers | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22606-systemslayers/ | Systems/Layers | When Systems/Layers, the fifth album by Louisville stalwarts Rachel’s, dropped in 2003, it seemed they’d broken through. Elevating their compositions from lovely postmodern takes on classical music to a unique strain of orchestral post-rock, Systems/Layers featured a truly synthesized mesh of chamber music and electronics that sounded like little else. Alas, as Rachel’s had always been more project than band, a period of inactivity followed the record while members worked on other things, and then cofounder Jason Noble fell ill to cancer, dying in 2012. As a result, Systems/Layers remains their final statement, whether or not they’d intended it as such.
In the thirteen years that have passed since that record came out, the little nook of a genre which Rachel’s helped birth—classical sounds with indie sensibilities, film-music moodiness and digital experimentation—has grown into a more easily identifiable vein of music couched under the umbrella term “post-classical” (a term that used to refer to minimalists like Steve Reich and Philip Glass, who modern audiences might likely just see as “20th-century classical”). Promoted by labels like 130701 and Erased Tapes and typified by the commercially successful and recognized soundtrack work of Jóhann Jóhannsson, Max Richter, and Ólafur Arnalds, as well as up-and-coming artists like Resina or Emilie Levienaise-Farrouch, post-classical is now a small but thriving world. And Systems/Layers’ status as a godfather record to the nascent genre is undeniable.
Now the band and their label Quarterstick have finally seen fit to capitalize on these recent trends by issuing the beloved Systems/Layers for the first time on vinyl, their only record not to have had such a release. Though it isn’t common for thirteen-year-old records by small bands to be reissued without a label change, the CD-only Systems/Layers had entered a kind of a quasi out-of-print status as listeners move to a vinyl-and-streaming binary. Thankfully, the small label Quarterstick has leapt in to rectify the situation.
It’s also a fitting tribute to the departed Noble, whose sensibility rings out of Systems/Layers. Each of the five Rachel’s records has a unique voice, guided mostly by which members of the collective had greater hands in the songwriting. Handwriting and Sea and Bells were cowritten by all three core principals—Rachel Grimes, Jason Noble and Christian Frederickson—while Egon Schiele was entirely written by Grimes and Noble’s role was reduced to production. Systems/Layers, with its postmodern merger of music and technology, sounds closer to Noble’s later solo work as Per Mission than anything else in Rachel’s catalog.
Fans who haven’t listened to Systems/Layers in years may be pleased to learn that like all Rachel’s records, it doesn’t sound like it’s aged a day and could just as easily be taken as a new release from 130701. Part of this is due to the engineering and mixing talents of Shellac’s Bob Weston, who guides the band toward a sound that is naturalistic and in-the-hall. On tracks like “Esperanza” or “Packet Switching,” the violins swell and soar so high it feels as if you're looking up at the ceiling from the orchestra level of a concert hall.
Which, to be fair, may have actually been where the sounds were recorded, as much of the album was recorded live with the SITI Company dance troupe in places like Skidmore College and Indiana University Southeast for a performance piece sharing the same name. The exact nature of the compositional relationship with SITI is unclear, but all of Systems/Layers has a blended, ephemeral feel that feels more like a 60-minute sound experiment than the collection of discrete compositions that made up previous records. Many of the cuts—even the more traditional Satie-esque solo piano of “Anytime Soon” or the darting “Arterial”—end or begin with crossfading segues from adjacent tracks. And many of them depart standard structures entirely, such as “where_have_all_my_files_gone?,” which would sound completely at home on Jóhannsson’s latest Orphee, threading an encircling wall of strings into a throbbing synth burble before transitioning into “Reflective Surfaces,” which blends gamelan and voice samples into a cacophonous churn. And on “Last Things Last” the band finally incorporates actual singing (with a guest appearance from Shannon Wright) in a track that in context feels like an intriguing change of pace despite its relative slightness as a stand-alone track.
Best of all are “Water from the Same Source” and “Air Conditioning.” The former offers a stately six-minute representation of Rachel’s formula: gently circulating strings, piano, bass and rock(ish) drumming. It has been featured already in such films as Hancock and La Grande Bellezza and it’s easy to imagine it finding a permanent life soundtracking moments of contemplative emotional transition in film. “Air Conditioning” follows a similar script but is even more condensed: three minutes of nagging, heart-tugging strings via a repeated droning viola riff and soaring violin and cello, before melting away into a hazy fog of samples and found sounds.
One thing that distinguishes Systems/Layers from its modern peers is its unpretentious woolliness, which stands in stark contrast to the grandeur-seeking impulses of Jóhannsson and Richter. There’s a charming innocence and gentle defiance that imbues their music with a modest magic, one that also makes it more comprehensible why the band has remained on the margins.
The reissue wraps by including the band’s final release from 2005, the eighteen-minute outtake collage “Technology Is Killing Music,” which is slotted neatly as the whole of Side 4. Made up entirely of bits of song and sound from the recording of Systems/Layers, it serves as a nice companion to that record and a perfect endpoint for the band, framing a true blueprint for late 2000s and 2010s post-classical. Additionally, the decision to add it rather than stretch out a sixty-minute record onto four LP sides is a generous and welcome choice, allowing listeners to avoid the subtly annoying problem of “2XLP vinyl reissues” requiring an overabundance of record flipping.
It’s uncertain if Rachel’s will ever receive the broad recognition they deserve as forebearers of a vibrant and essential new genre of 21st century music, but it may be that Noble, their easy-going and dearly departed leader, may not have cared either way. For a group who knowingly produced expensive, hand-crafted vinyl packaging for records they knew only a small group of people would buy, sharing their music was always a labor of care and love and provided a kind of satisfaction in and of itself. At least now, it’s all out there. | 2016-11-11T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2016-11-11T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Quarterstick | November 11, 2016 | 8.5 | de606fa2-e2d7-4917-85b5-7e89ddf0d94d | Benjamin Scheim | https://pitchfork.com/staff/benjamin-scheim/ | null |
It's that moment every indie kid irrationally fears: your favorite band gets the call-up to the majors.\n\ Now ... | It's that moment every indie kid irrationally fears: your favorite band gets the call-up to the majors.\n\ Now ... | My Morning Jacket: It Still Moves | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/5531-it-still-moves/ | It Still Moves | It's that moment every indie kid irrationally fears: your favorite band gets the call-up to the majors. Now that they've come to prominence via the California-based indie Darla Records, it's My Morning Jacket's turn to risk their careers and financial stability for a shot at recording a real statement album backed by a serious budget. But something's not right here, or maybe something's too right: Jim James' high, lonesome croon is still recorded in a grain silo, and the band's sound is still a cathedral of reverb, but where you might expect grandiose 40-piece orchestras, bombastic gospel choirs and glossy, state-of-the-art digital effects, you will find only the vast, empty space that has always accompanied the band's instrumentation, allowing each note to resonate indefinitely, unhampered by unnecessary density. Rest assured, the faithful will have no problem kneeling here.
Last year's exploratory Chocolate & Ice EP left quite a few open questions about the band's future direction, many signals of which could be found in the 24-minute electro-funk centerpiece "Cobra". But It Still Moves almost immediately confirms that the spacy Southern psych that My Morning Jacket built their name on remains their bread and butter. "Mahgeetah" is full of the long, drawn-out vocals that made "Can You See the Hard Helmet on My Head?" such an affecting and seemingly meaningful question; it also carries over the texture of that song, building a small epic out of the same elements. The band reacts to each verse differently-- once with explosions of glimmering arpeggios, later with Johnny Quaid's beautiful, understated guitar solo-- before bringing the whole thing to one of those thunderous conclusions that makes classic rock live albums such a guilty pleasure.
"Golden" trots through a glowing haze of reverb on Patrick Hallahan's steadily brushed beat, its lilting finger-picking and ghostly harmonies falling somewhere between The Band's stately Canadicana and The Byrds' "Ballad of Easy Rider". "One Big Holiday" doesn't look like much from the lyrics in the liners, but when James grabs hold of the opening line, "Wakin' up feeling good and limber," and draws it out in his singular way, it feels about a million times more weighty than it probably should. Near the album's midpoint, the reverb reaches such titanic proportions that James' drifting vocals begin to rival Sigur Rós' Jon Thor Birgisson for shear ethereality, particularly on a track like "I Will Sing You Songs". It's like listening in the throes of a lucid dream.
"Easy Morning Rebel" puts your feet back on the ground with its swinging arrangement and Memphis horns (actually played by veteran Stax session men-- one of the rare frills here made available by major label dollars). And then, finally, the band leaves James alone in his silo to close the album with the searching, desperate "One in the Same", a song that finds him seemingly trying to sort fragmented memories into coherent thoughts. When he hits the lines, "It wasn't till I woke up/ That I could hold down a joke or a job or a dream/ But then all three are one in the same," it should put a lump in your throat.
And with that, It Still Moves strums to a close, an album by turns beautiful and possessed, by others raucous and fiery. If you're standing by the record racks trying to choose between this and the band's other major achievement, At Dawn, flip a coin; either way, you win. My Morning Jacket have made the move to the bigs in tremendous style, and as far as I can tell they haven't compromised a thing to be there. If there's one major flaw I could point to here, it'd be the album's length-- 74 minutes is a long runtime for any record, and as a result, the album is usually better off listened to in chunks-- but that's a small concern considering the riches that await inside. | 2003-09-17T01:00:04.000-04:00 | 2003-09-17T01:00:04.000-04:00 | Rock | BMG / ATO | September 17, 2003 | 8.3 | de622773-ecb3-455a-9ff0-fe9426339889 | Joe Tangari | https://pitchfork.com/staff/joe-tangari/ | null |
The New Zealand sister duo offer a self-contained suite of dream pop, folk, and cosmic jazz that’s far more evocative than the few words they sing. | The New Zealand sister duo offer a self-contained suite of dream pop, folk, and cosmic jazz that’s far more evocative than the few words they sing. | Purple Pilgrims: Perfumed Earth | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/purple-pilgrims-perfumed-earth/ | Perfumed Earth | Purple Pilgrims evoke familiarity with a distant world—specifically, the woods of Tapu, the scenic coastal locality on the North Island of New Zealand where siblings Clementine and Valentine Nixon record their music. On Perfumed Earth, the pair spin their songs into myth, offering a self-contained suite of dream pop, folk, and cosmic jazz that’s far more evocative than the few words they sing. The album’s real triumph is in its lush melodies, strands that wind and splay like a carpet of vines. What the Nixon sisters sing is secondary to their rich harmonic brocade.
As on their 2016 debut, Eternal Delight, Purple Pilgrims’ music conveys the region’s misty, fantastical appearance: fluorescent green sulfur pools, spouting waterfalls, and mossy cliffs. Though electric guitars and synthesizers appear throughout, many of these songs elicit an almost mystic appeal. The Nixons seem to inhabit another era; both women wear their hair long, with wardrobes worthy of Stevie Nicks. As they glide between a breathy middle range and unblemished soprano on “How Long Is Too Long,” their voices gently braid with filaments of synthesizer and pillowy bass. It’s hard not to dream up lofty, folkloric imagery to accompany titles like “Ancestors Watching,” a simple dirge that finds the sisters swapping lines of verse.
Purple Pilgrims’ vocals provide more texture than context, but perhaps unintelligible lyrics are to their advantage. On “Sensing Me,” they sing of a man “as smooth as avocado” and ask him: “Where are you from and what’s your sign?/And do you think you could guess mine?”—the type of pick-up line likely to break the spell of even the most pristine beach. One of Perfumed Earth’s best songs has no words at all: On the five-minute astral jazz interlude “Delphiniums in Harmony/Two Worlds Away,” spare guitar frames a lean saxophone, and they trail off together like ripples across a pond. The drifting “Ruinous Splendour” allows experimental composer Roy Montgomery’s de-tuned guitar plucks to balance the Nixons’ coos with a necessary tartness.
This modest collection of songs allows ample time to wander a strange and beautiful place, if only in the imagination. Purple Pilgrims may have no particular destination in mind, but their incantatory voices have the power to transport.
Buy: Rough Trade
(Pitchfork may earn a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.) | 2019-08-13T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-08-13T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Flying Nun | August 13, 2019 | 7 | de656460-c446-454f-99d5-1998af33701f | Madison Bloom | https://pitchfork.com/staff/madison-bloom/ | |
The debut album from the late Oakland pastor is a powerful showcase for his guitar work, his singing, and his ministry. | The debut album from the late Oakland pastor is a powerful showcase for his guitar work, his singing, and his ministry. | Pastor Champion: I Just Want to Be a Good Man | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/pastor-champion-i-just-want-to-be-a-good-man/ | I Just Want to Be a Good Man | Halfway through his debut album, right before he launches into the soulful “To Be Used, By You (I Just Want to Be a Good Man),” Pastor Wiley Champion takes a moment to teach the song to the small band backing him at the 37th Street Baptist Church in Oakland. He runs through the chord progressions, explains the chorus repetitions, and demonstrates the foundational riff before leading them through a song he had performed many times throughout his life. It’s exactly the kind of material that would be excised from a typical live album, but after two nights of sessions, he declined to put any more music to tape. And yet, this bit of filler is revealing, as Champion emerges as a gentle, encouraging instructor who passes along his wisdom humbly. “It’s all simple,” he assures them. “Ain’t nothin’ complicated about it.” It brings you right into the church, where Pastor Champion made music as a vehicle for a higher message.
He’s something of a mystery. While Champion refused to speak about the details of his life, we do have a broad outline of his upbringing in the Deep South and all the horrors that might imply. We know he migrated to California, was involved in street gangs and possibly prostitution, got saved, devoted his life to Jesus, and raised a family. He worked as a carpenter, but also toured extensively as an itinerant preacher in churches and homes. In the late 2010s, he worked with the label Luaka Bop to make a solo album, although it’s unclear how committed he was to documenting his ministry on tape. The producers set up an analog recorder and invited members of the small congregation to attend; it’s not a Sunday morning recording, in other words, but a staged reenactment, which means it can feel staged at times, even a little stiff.
Still, it’s a powerful showcase for his guitar work, his singing, and his ministry. Champion plays rhythm guitar rather than lead and only rarely takes a solo—as though that might draw too much attention to himself and away from God. His chugging, repetitive rhythms are based in secular blues, not dissimilar from the hill country strains in Mississippi or the electrified riffs that blasted out of northern factory cities. He strums and finger-picks like he’s been collecting these songs all his life, learning a new trick here or a technique there, and he matches it with a throaty, soulful baritone that’s surprisingly forceful for a man in his seventies.
And that band, which hadn’t played together until they assembled for these sessions, follows him closely and churns up a joyful noise that makes “Who Do Men Say I Am” and “Storm of Life (Stand by Me)” sound especially volatile. His greatest collaborator, however, might be the congregation itself. “Talk to God” offers a lesson on how to energize a docile crowd, as Champion encourages the audience to sing along and shout back at him. They do so hesitantly at first, but grow more animated as the song progresses, clapping and singing and punctuating his proclamations with hearty affirmations. By the time he winds the song down, that small audience sounds many times bigger.
Champion had a term for listeners who might feel suspicion toward organized Christianity and who might be skeptical of gospel in 2022: “I know you’ve been wounded, you’re calling it ‘church hurt.’” It’s a couplet that he sings in several of these songs, and while he didn’t invent the term, he invested it with deep compassion. He never makes it explicit, but his ministry seems to acknowledge that institutions can damage people, that religion has historically been used as a bludgeon against minorities in America. That only makes his music sound all the more extroverted and his empathy all the more radical. I Just Want to Be a Good Man prizes humility and understanding over shame and scolding: The church should serve the people rather than the other way around. Sadly, Champion died in December 2021, leaving behind this humble album as his final testament. It’s not perfect, but it’s all we have from him. In that regard, it sounds like a small miracle. | 2022-04-05T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2022-04-05T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | Luaka Bop | April 5, 2022 | 7.5 | de682f9c-24a1-4093-a66d-f0a750a667ca | Stephen M. Deusner | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stephen-m. deusner/ | |
Thirteen years after their breakthrough hit, the K-pop icons are now elders in the scene. On their first album in five years, they combine effortlessness with versatility. | Thirteen years after their breakthrough hit, the K-pop icons are now elders in the scene. On their first album in five years, they combine effortlessness with versatility. | Girls’ Generation: FOREVER 1 | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/girls-generation-forever-1/ | FOREVER 1 | Few K-pop songs are as representative of the genre as Girls’ Generation’s “Gee.” An electro-pop sugar rush reminiscent of turn-of-the-millennium idol pop and Shibuya-kei, the 2009 single immediately established the girl group as a force in the industry. That wasn’t the original plan, though. SM Entertainment wanted “Dancing Queen”—a remake of Duffy’s “Mercy”—to be the lead single, but it was pushed back to 2012. That song might have felt like a response to Wonder Girls’ Gloria Gaynor-esque “Nobody”; in comparison, “Gee” was entirely modern, and would cement Girls’ Generation as history makers responsible for the major ur-text of second-generation K-pop cuteness.
The problem was that they couldn’t pull off the shtick forever—if not because their aesthetics needed to match their age, then because they were tasked with being constant trend-setters. The years that followed resulted in a slew of diverse chart toppers, including “Run Devil Run” (originally a Kesha demo), “I Got a Boy” (an imperial genre-hopping masterwork), and “Mr.Mr.” (a slick nu-disco scorcher). Their seventh album, FOREVER 1, is Girls’ Generation’s first in five years, but it feels more like it’s been decades, given K-pop’s countless stylistic detours in the interim. Still, they pull off a concise record that’s among their best, and prove that their solo ventures haven’t stymied their coherence as a group.
Curiously, the key to Girls’ Generation’s success here is that they sound uninterested in being at K-pop’s forefront. They’re elders in the scene now and, much like they did on their previous album, Holiday Night, opt to sound incredibly comfortable—the effortlessness is the point. The title track and lead single showcases this well. It’s all EDM buildups and soaring vocals as they make declarations like, “Girls, we are forever.” Such lyrics may seem inauthentic, since erstwhile member Jessica recently penned two fictional novels hinting at in-group drama, but that doesn’t matter as long as the drums pound and the synths wobble—the current eight-member roster is here to deliver pure pop, and sometimes that means mindless, unrelenting euphoria.
If Girls’ Generation don’t have a particular musical identity on FOREVER 1, it might be because they’re from an era before SM tied specific sonic qualities to their groups. One can trace a throughline in the career arcs of Red Velvet and NCT’s different subunits, but it often felt like Girls’ Generation were constantly adapting to new sounds. The same holds true across these ten tracks. “Seventeen,” for example, is a sweet R&B song about carrying the same giddy feelings for someone after many years, but its repeating piano chords recall “Still D.R.E.” Before long, Hyoyeon starts rapping, and though her technique is shoddy, it’s heartening for the way it embodies teenage silliness and bravado. Then there’s “Villain,” which sounds like their younger labelmates Aespa due to its futuristic sheen and lyrics that retroactively shoehorn the group into the SM Culture Universe. Even though Girls’ Generation sound like they’re being forced to sing about the mythological Kwangya, they’re having enough fun that it goes down easy.
Such chameleonic tendencies are on exceptional display in “You Better Run,” a merciless pop song about revenge. As they sing about kicking someone to hell, proggy synth melodies coarse brashly through the track in unwieldy, circuitous zig-zags. Tiffany’s performance is a highlight; she sells newfound confidence in both anthemic and introspective passages. The album’s final three-track run is also impressive. “Summer Night” is FOREVER 1’s most playful R&B song, using bubbly synths to manifest the cozy feelings of being in love—as they sing of holding hands and locking eyes, you can feel the assurance underlining their honeyed vocal deliveries. “Freedom” treats romance in more musical terms, aiming for smoother, funk-lite grooves to present a relationship’s “perfect rhythm.” “Paper Plane” closes the album on an even more hopeful note, explaining the bright futures that lay ahead for the group’s members. Its bridge employs a flurry of colorful, arcade-ready synths that suggest a mature version of the ebullience characterizing “Gee.” Thirteen years on from their breakthrough hit, and 15 from their debut, Girls’ Generation are as versatile as ever. It’s just that now, their flexibility is a signpost for the unexpected joys of growing older. | 2022-08-12T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2022-08-12T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | SM Entertainment | August 12, 2022 | 7.2 | de71d093-862f-48b0-a9ec-79bf54cdc7be | Joshua Minsoo Kim | https://pitchfork.com/staff/joshua-minsoo kim/ | |
The Miami singer moves through her debut album with a sense of self-assurance that doesn’t allow her to look into the rearview at missteps. | The Miami singer moves through her debut album with a sense of self-assurance that doesn’t allow her to look into the rearview at missteps. | Jenevieve: Division | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/jenevieve-division/ | Division | Jenevieve was born with an old soul. In interviews, she’ll talk about how her library is filled with oldies because of her parents and geek out over Zhané. One of the first songs she remembers hearing as a child is Joe’s “Stutter,” and her enchanting, Anri-sampling breakout single, “Baby Powder,” pulls from that same emotional well. “Baby, don’t feed me false,” the 23-year-old sighs with a heart-piercing coldness. Both songs are snapshots of the exact moment where the singers realized their partners were playing them for fools, but there’s no time for dramatic explanations or Mystikal-assisted reconnaissance missions on “Baby Powder.” Jenevieve shrouds the breakup ballad in aloofness, making it gentle enough for passive listening but tender and revealing on closer inspection.
Division, her debut album, plays out like a tribute to her parents’ collection of burned CD mixes, time-traveling through decades of music with carefully selected references filtered through producer Jean Benz, who also serves as Jenevieve’s songwriting partner. “Medallion” is a slinky hip-hop soul vow of protection; the walking bass of the swooning “No Sympathy” recalls an ’80s Whitney Houston; the aqueous “Exit Wounds” might sound indebted to Miguel or Marvin Gaye depending on the age of whoever’s listening. Rather than aesthetic-scraping gestures, these songs come off as modernized interpretations of the music the Miami singer grew up idolizing. R&B artists continue to mine the late ’90s and early 2000s for inspiration when they aren’t making smoky Trap&B or sliding on slick Soulection-inspired production. Division doesn’t completely escape those trappings, but by looking beyond that timespan, Jenevieve finds a set of sonic textures that shake things up.
Jenevieve learned how to talk about love from the past, but she finds ways to add modern flourishes to her songs and tweak established formulas. On the swaying post-chorus of “No Sympathy,” flashes of Doja Cat appear when she coos “Don’t cry.” When she cuts herself off from rhyming “over” with “Rover” on “Nxwhere,” it’s done with a rapper’s mischievous smirk—she doesn’t want her writing to be that predictable. Mainly, her vocal tone is reminiscent of Syd’s untempered cool. The album opens in the middle of a misty daydream where she sings of a sky on fire, riding into Atlantis, and eternal love. Then the grooving bassline of “Midnight Charm” breaks that dream sequence to talk about something more realistic, like “celestial vibes.”
At times, Jenevieve will come with lines that prioritize vibes and imaginative scenery over tangible descriptions, as if she’s fallen in love with the sound a word makes rather than its meaning. When she sings of “melanin swims,” it’s like listening to a roommate who just got into astrology ramble on about rising signs and zodiac houses. Jenevieve’s woozy style finds a home in the emotive, realist standouts “Blameless” and “Résumé.” It’s on these two tracks where she spends the most time on Earth, speaking directly so her feelings don’t get lost in a sea of metaphors. “Have you ever loved someone?” she asks. “Who put you down and made you feel like you’re not enough?/Dear God, let it go.” Even at their most grounded, her songs drift between fantasy and reality.
Jenevieve moves through her satisfyingly consistent debut album with a sense of self-assurance that doesn’t allow her to look into the rearview at missteps. Following up a song as arresting as “Baby Powder” has to be a little intimidating, but Jenevieve doesn’t seem to be fazed by it. Her whimsical songwriting isn’t as interested in replicating that moment as it is in creating new ones. She sees doves in bright black skies, soulless souls, and mellow eyes that hypnotize, not exes she’s lovesick over. “I have emotions/I can’t describe,” she laments on the lullaby-like closing track, which functions as a sort of ode to the misunderstood and ignored. “It’s hard to see it through these eyes.” Jenevieve spends much of Division lost in her own mind, writing about emotions she’s experiencing at the same time she’s processing them. When given enough time to wipe her eyes, Jenevieve leaves no room for misinterpretation.
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-09-17T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2021-09-17T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | Joyface | September 17, 2021 | 7.4 | de8bf59f-10e8-4bf2-a16e-2d686aed2c52 | Brandon Callender | https://pitchfork.com/staff/brandon-callender/ | |
The latest Warp Records full-length from disheveled mastermind Tom Jenkinson finds him nudging away from the breakbeats with which many listeners identify him and embracing organic textures on a concept album about a rock band's "ultra-gig." | The latest Warp Records full-length from disheveled mastermind Tom Jenkinson finds him nudging away from the breakbeats with which many listeners identify him and embracing organic textures on a concept album about a rock band's "ultra-gig." | Squarepusher: Just a Souvenir | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/12376-just-a-souvenir/ | Just a Souvenir | A decade or so ago, Tom Jenkinson-- the disheveled mastermind behind jazz-cum-drum-and-glitch mishmash Squarepusher-- described his music-making process as a sort of technological vision quest, with the end product "a souvenir of your time in this psychic space." Looks like it's a sentiment that he's taken with him. Over the course of 11 albums, he's been embroiled in some sort of existential conundrum, if not crisis, as he's attempted to reconcile a background in formal jazz with the manic possibilities afforded by sequencing and sound manipulation. A veritable thesaurus of musical experimentation, Jenkinson has pushed a spitfire chorus of fully formed studies in blending fusion with breakbeats, acid with funk. But whether this litany is meant to be enjoyed or simply admired is up for debate. It's true that his work (and of course his bass and drumming virtuosity) is due respect, but the intersection of his hardcore appreciators (tweaked tech-heads and staid jazz appreciators) might just as soon stroke their chins as develop emotional reactions to it.
Just a Souvenir could just bridge Jenkinson's longtime appreciation gap. Heck, it's just about the Squarepusher equivalent to Sgt. Pepper's. Souvenir is ostensibly a concept album, complete with a cockamamie yarn Jenkinson has spun about its woozily constructed device: "a daydream about watching a crazy, beautiful rock band play an ultra-gig" centered around a giant neon coat-hanger. Into his vision enter guitars that can manipulate space-time, Eskimos, chainsaws, and Cro-Magnons. At the conclusion, Jenkinson laments that his memory of the scene is his only souvenir-- add a dash of humility, and you've got a title! And although it's 2004's Ultravisitor, with its ever-present crowd samples, that sounds like a live album, Souvenir leaves distinct impressions of an otherworldly rock spectacle.
True to concept, the record as a whole sounds more organic than any Squarepusher release dating back, perhaps, to Music Is Rotted One Note-- excepting Souvenir's obvious counterexample in "A Real Woman", whose vocoded robot narrator bemoans its cluelessness in the ways of the human female. Jenkinson announces his newfound humanity right off the bat with opener "Star Time 2", which sedately re-imagines the track "Coopers World" that opened his seminal Hard Normal Daddy. The drill-and-bass salvos that slashed across "Cooper" and many of Jenkinson's canvases of old have been toned down or eradicated-- only minimal echoes of the signature Amen Break beat show up, with comparatively little sequenced percussion remaining. Tom still wails on his bass, capably delivering a master class in funky fills, but its delivery through the riffy, frenetic math-punk of "Delta-V" and "Planet Gear" is most surprising. By recasting his relentless, aggressive textures into rock, he's breathed a curious new life into them, imbuing a sort of alien quality to what in less capable hands could have turned out as reruns of someone else's garage rock or funk-punk.
As the languid classical guitar that dots the album brings it to a close, it hits that this 44-minute opus is perhaps more inviting, and more melodic, than anything Jenkinson has done in a long time. It's certainly an easier listen than 80 minutes of Ultravisitor or an hour of Hello Everything. Souvenir, comparatively, is a demure beast of wistful robot voices framing jazz improvisation, alien rock jams evoking the aging belligerence of breakbeats, and pastoral drone backdrops adorned by jerky guitar ballads. But Souvenir isn't just an outlet for nonfans to "get" Squarepusher. By abstractly distilling the principles that guide Squarepusher, the record arrives readymade for the chin-stroking die-hards out there to endlessly theorize about the connection between the music maker, the music, and his/its audience. If indeed music is the only souvenir gained from these trips to the unknown, then this disheveled spitfire, once lost in his little world of glitches and jazz scales, might have unearthed this particular bauble on the journey to meet the rest of us halfway. | 2008-10-28T02:00:02.000-04:00 | 2008-10-28T02:00:02.000-04:00 | Electronic | Warp | October 28, 2008 | 7.6 | de959fa2-23c5-4cfd-82b4-e3a99721245c | Pitchfork | null |
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Portishead's Geoff Barrow and his side project Beak> back European chanteuse Anika on a mix of covers and originals. | Portishead's Geoff Barrow and his side project Beak> back European chanteuse Anika on a mix of covers and originals. | Anika: Anika | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/15014-anika/ | Anika | The most refreshing part about Anika's eponymous debut album is just how unambitious it is. You'd be right to be skeptical of Portishead's Geoff Barrow linking up with another European singer with a deadpan, dramatic voice, but Anika isn't an attempt to capitalize on past glories. Instead, it's a further delving into Barrow's record-nerd fantasies after 2009's krautrock-isms with his band, Beak>. Recorded quickly, and live, Anika preens like high art but eventually reveals itself as a loving and minor pet project.
Barrow and the rest of Beak> back Anika, a Berlin/Bristol-based journalist who stumbles and fusses with a Nico-like charm. She doesn't have a fantastic voice, but she's patient and plays a very specific role-- the emotionally detached European chanteuse-- without ego. That's key too, because this type of muse-pop is usually conducted in the interest of star-making (see: Nico, Brigitte Bardot). Anika and Beak> instead focus on teasing the emotional intricacies out of old songs and styles by pairing them with rougher, niche sonics. The majority of the tracks on Anika are covers, leaning heavily on 1960s pop and folk.
Beak> augment Anika's droll talk/sing with a dubby, beat-driven noir that borrows from minimal wave's chunky rhythms and post-punk's spindly verve. "Terry" and "End of the World" transform teenage naïveté into lingering fear, though the group is better when the strangeness of the material-- Yoko Ono's "Yang Yang"-- is on par with the music's obscure referents. (An exception: an airy, organ-led rendition of Ray Davies' "I Go to Sleep" closes the album on its most tender note.) The group's two original productions-- the paranoid "No One's There" and the punky "Officer Officer"-- are lyrically tenser than their counterparts and not as rewarding, but they allow Beak> to build some noisy, industrial momentum. The group's biggest and most prevalent misstep is a seven-minute cover of Bob Dylan's "Masters of War" (never Dylan's most tuneful or clever song), one they repeat with a dub version (this begs the question: do dub-leaning bands really need dub edits?). Beak> turn it into a call-and-response bass epic but can't escape its ham-fisted politics, however fitting they must seem.
It's tempting to accuse Barrow of formalism-- Anika sounds just that familiar-- but he's earned the right, and moreover, the treatments here are clever and well executed. Beak>'s productions will jar and quiver in a good pair of headphones, and Anika presents herself as a faithful cipher rather than a Brand New Talent. Anika is shortsighted in the best way: it's a tribute, an exercise, the charming kind. | 2011-01-18T01:00:04.000-05:00 | 2011-01-18T01:00:04.000-05:00 | Pop/R&B / Rock | Stones Throw / Invada | January 18, 2011 | 6.5 | de9b6ae6-698f-4a98-a476-b832c8a61b99 | Andrew Gaerig | https://pitchfork.com/staff/andrew-gaerig/ | null |
While Young Thug’s creative choices after about 2015 have had little sway over emerging trends, Punk suggests that the place he now occupies is one that allows him more room to experiment. | While Young Thug’s creative choices after about 2015 have had little sway over emerging trends, Punk suggests that the place he now occupies is one that allows him more room to experiment. | Young Thug: Punk | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/young-thug-punk/ | Punk | Young Thug’s new album, Punk, opens softly and strangely. The acoustic, drumless “Die Slow” was recorded in a Venice hotel room two years ago; before Thug starts rapping in earnest, he notes people “riding past on boats” through the canals below. He goes on, in that ad-libbed intro, to wobble back and forth between pride and shame, reporting that he only consumed one pint of lean on his most recent tour, but that tour kept him from attending his son’s birthday. (Punk occasionally resembles 2017’s Beautiful Thugger Girls, and that birthday aside, in particular, recalls the line: “I’m so busy, it make me feel like I’m in and out my kids’ lives.”) “Die Slow” then gives way to a verse about his brother’s narrow escape from a life sentence and his mother’s brush with death—but that verse is interrupted only six bars in when Thug’s take unravels into an unstructured monologue about his parents’ breakup, a shooting, a hit-and-run, and what sounds like two different sheriff’s deputies.
The monologue is surprising and idiosyncratic in a way that Thug’s writing has seldom been in recent years. (The way he clears his throat before rushing through the detail “a deputy sheriff that my mom was fucking with” is both comic and a little pained.) The quality of his work never cratered—2019’s So Much Fun delivers on its title—but his lyrics have become less distinct, less singular, designer labels enjambed against violent threats in a playful, knowing way. This autopilot continues across much of Punk, Thug and his personal shoppers in suspended animation. What’s fascinating is how he breaks out of the fugue. Where he once overpowered songs by stretching his tics into main vocals or going on dazzling, hyper-technical runs, his best verses on Punk are in step with the album’s often delicate production.
Speaking of which, Punk’s title is a misnomer. Its guitars are often acoustic and almost uniformly gentle. When Thug grows meticulous, he burrows into those guitars. His rolling verse on “Recognize Real” (also drumless) retains both the glee that has always dotted his writing (“I told my teacher I’ma buy more watches ’cause I was tardy”) and his inimitable phrasing, like when he warns that he’s about to take over “like cancer.” On “Contagious,” he raps about swearing to a judge that he was “faking,” then breaks into a strange qualifier: “But I know it’s in my heart, and I feel it, baby.” And while “Yea Yea Yea” plays like a sketch, its disappearing-within-itself focus recalls some of Thug’s most celebrated experiments.
But there are too many songs on Punk. This has less to do with the actual length—it has enough ideas to justify its 63 minutes—than with the way its musical and emotional arcs are flattened, lost in inferior iterations of similar ideas. The notion to break up stretches of acoustic delicacy with more conventional rap beats is an interesting one, but too many songs from the latter group are rote, anonymous: “Droppin Jewels,” “Road Rage,” the tinny “Scoliosis.” The TV movie-climax gloss of “Insure My Wrist,” with its pianos and preening electric guitar, might work as a spot of catharsis were it not a diminished-returns retread of “Peepin Out the Window,” an excellent Future collaboration slotted four songs prior.
Sometimes Punk becomes more animated. “Rich Nigga Shit,” a duet with the late Juice WRLD, has both the album’s most sinister beat (from Pi’erre Bourne and Kanye West) and Thug squawking like a chicken during the chorus. “Bubbly,” which enlists Travis Scott and Drake for the album’s biggest commercial play, is just strange and dark enough to complicate playlists. Perhaps most fascinating is the Doja Cat collaboration “Icy Hot,” which sounds like what Thug’s fans and detractors both thought, in 2013, he might eventually do to pop radio: yank it up into a neon, near-falsetto haze. While Thug’s stylistic descendants (Gunna, Lil Baby, and so on) are at the forefront of pop rap, and while Thug remains very popular, his creative choices after about 2015 have had little sway over emerging trends. Punk suggests that the space he now occupies—one adjacent to but not precisely in rap’s center—is one that allows him more room to experiment.
At its worst, the album sounds like Watch the Throne if “We Are Young” really had been saved for it (Nate Ruess, Jeff Bhasker, and Gunna’s maudlin “Love You More”) or a campfire singalong at Arizona State (the A$AP Rocky- and Post Malone-assisted “Livin It Up”). But it comes to a close in a way that effectively reframes the subdued tone that dominates the album. “Day Before,” a Mac Miller duet so named because it was recorded one day before Miller died in September 2018, seems to be Punk’s acoustic big bang, the Pittsburgh rapper trading verses with Thug over a guitar and little else. It’s eerie and tremendously well-executed. Thug is vibrant and engaged; Miller is “swimming in the linen like the deep end.” But the title pulls the listener out of the song itself and asks them to consider death; what might have seemed, on the album’s A-side, like a soft malaise, now scans as wistful, even mournful. It sounds pretty, and like it’s barely there at all.
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-10-21T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2021-10-21T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | 300 Entertainment / Atlantic | October 21, 2021 | 7.1 | dea47bbe-fc9f-44f0-9cfa-7097f87e4854 | Paul A. Thompson | https://pitchfork.com/staff/paul-a. thompson/ | |
Pop and noise make for strangely suited bedfellows on an album, by turns colorful and crushing, steeped in physical and psychic pain. | Pop and noise make for strangely suited bedfellows on an album, by turns colorful and crushing, steeped in physical and psychic pain. | Black Dresses: LOVE AND AFFECTION FOR STUPID LITTLE BITCHES | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/black-dresses-love-and-affection-for-stupid-little-bitches/ | LOVE AND AFFECTION FOR STUPID LITTLE BITCHES | Like many noise musicians, Black Dresses have a lot to say about pain. Over the last couple of years, the Canadian duo of Devi McCallion and Ada Rook has screamed, rapped, and moaned about the lasting impact of trauma and the indescribable psychic effects of existing in a world that wants you dead. The music that has accompanied those feelings has been appropriately twisted. Their 2018 debut, WASTEISOLATION, felt like pop radio being pulled into a black hole, stretching and destroying the connective tissue that held together the memorable melodies.
Across their many solo efforts and side projects, they’ve often worked with fellow pop mutators like Katie Dey and 100 Gecs’ Laura Les, which might give you an idea of the overwhelming sort of music you’re in for with their songs as a duo. And if it doesn’t, they’ve recently been tweeting about the parallels between Kesha and early Nine Inch Nails, seemingly conscious that their music falls somewhere in the murky Venn diagram between those two wildly different acts.
Since WASTEISOLATION, they’ve released a second full-length album, THANK YOU, as well as a pair of EPs and a smattering of one-offs and side projects. Their music has adopted a variety of tones and moods, but it’s been almost universally heavy, a pool of emotional sludge that they can’t help but coming back to swim in. This prolific run has been exciting to follow for those who appreciates work that interrogates, like, the weightiness of existence, but it’s easy to see how such work might take a toll on its creators. They’ve said recently that they don’t even like to think about the events that inspired their earliest songs. “It’s not useful for me to stew on [the topics that informed earlier records],” they wrote on Twitter earlier this month. “So we moved on.”
That’s the headspace in which they released their third album in two years, LOVE AND AFFECTION FOR STUPID LITTLE BITCHES. The title alone hints at how different their disposition is this time around. Many of the songs are about enduring pain, but they’re also about finding camaraderie and friendship through it all—a reminder that “compassion” comes from the Latin words for “suffering” and “together.” The record opens with a song called “STATIC” that starts, appropriately, with wheezing electronics and a scream shredded enough to induce sympathy pain, but it’s a bit of a fake-out. As McCallion and Rook trade verses, it’s clear that there’s something more complicated going on. The lines that peek through the maelstrom feel almost hopeful. In the chorus, they offer something of a thesis statement for the record: “So fucked up but honestly/I’ve never felt more alive.”
The record is still incredibly heavy. “HERTZ” is a grinding track about enduring a life of physical and psychic pain. On “CARTOON NETWORK,” they wish their real lives were just a TV show so they could just watch the troubling narratives unfold and tweet about them. “DROOL” features a sternum-snapping industrial breakdown that’d make Pharmakon proud. On “MY HEART BEATS OUT OF TIME,” Rook describes her body as a “rotting shell” and the world as a “fucked-up hell.”
But the spirit of the record is triumphant; the crushing sounds are surrounded by more colorful, uplifting moments. They haven’t given up on the gloom or the fuzz, but there’s this feeling that even if the clouds never pass, peace, or something like it, is possible. McCallion puts it nicely on “MUSIC,” a meditation on how their art won’t necessarily deliver them from evil. “The pain’s still loose in my head,” she sings. “But that’s ok.” | 2019-08-31T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-08-31T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | self-released | August 31, 2019 | 7.7 | dea4d2f7-f15e-430a-a500-e5f39ee495f7 | Colin Joyce | https://pitchfork.com/staff/colin-joyce/ | |
Peter Matthew Bauer, bassist and organist in the Walkmen, fuses Eastern spirituality with the sound of heartland rock on his latest solo album. | Peter Matthew Bauer, bassist and organist in the Walkmen, fuses Eastern spirituality with the sound of heartland rock on his latest solo album. | Peter Matthew Bauer: Mount Qaf (Divine Love) | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/peter-matthew-bauer-mount-qaf-divine-love/ | Mount Qaf (Divine Love) | In the five years since the Walkmen released their most recent album, Heaven, bassist and organist Peter Matthew Bauer has been a busy man. During what Bauer has called the Walkmen’s “pretty extreme hiatus,” he has released a solo album (2014’s Liberation!) and launched a hybrid label/management/production company called Fortune Tellers Music. He also began the Laurel Canyon Center for Consciousness Studies, an outlet for exploring astrology and Eastern philosophies. His newest solo effort, Mount Qaf (Divine Love), seems to draw from all three of these ventures.
Unlike Liberation!, which bounced between genres, Mount Qaf (Divine Love) finds Bauer leaning almost entirely on Americana indie rock, skillfully threading his heartland rock’n’roll sound with esoteric lyrics. The decision to maintain a more homogenous sound and modern indie rock sensibility keeps the focus on Bauer’s lyrics, which are where he shines. The result is an album that could variously soundtrack a deep philosophical discussion or the cross-country freight train hopping adventures of a bygone era.
Opener “Wild Light” might recall the likes of Kurt Vile or the War on Drugs, with a tinny guitar riff that builds from subdued to anthemic; its backing piano and handclaps provide a campfire warmth that sticks around for the rest of the album. “Khidr (American Drifter Music)” feels like a cautiously optimistic call to arms, as Bauer sings “Lay down your heart, let it lay broken/Don’t let the doom set in, don’t let yourself give in.” The song’s title is the album’s most obvious reflection of its own duality—and Bauer’s—referencing al-Khidr, a servant and advisor to God in the Quran. On his website, Bauer describes al-Khidr as “that invisible angel or guide that you search for in these moments,” alluding to moments of great uncertainty. This context enriches Bauer’s lyrics, which encourage self-growth, subtly guiding the listener towards a better place.
Not unlike the introspective traveling this album clearly aspires to accompany, there are moments of stillness that can seem contemplative or just a bit stodgy. The hamfistedly titled “Divine Love to Kill Fascism” takes over four minutes to pull itself out of a droning and slow build. For a song seemingly aspiring to something grand, it falls flat, disrupting the record’s momentum right as Bauer is picking up steam. “I Ching (Àlam al Mithal),” named for the ancient Chinese text, trods along for over half of the song. It barely shifts from a pleasant but relatively uninteresting guitar riff while Bauer ruminates on the hexagonal way of thinking taught in I Ching.
The teachings of the I Ching brought about the concept of yin and yang—the idea that things that may seem to be unalike can in fact compliment each other and create a harmonic balance. Bauer’s Eastern wisdom and Western-hearted sound lacks a perfect symmetry, but he strikes an unexpectedly effective balance. Flourishing in his own way outside the Walkmen, Bauer has found a method of combining two dissimilar passions into art that honors them both. | 2017-11-28T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2017-11-28T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Fortune Tellers / Kobalt | November 28, 2017 | 7 | deadc34d-c482-4a06-b27d-4443de62f852 | Pat Levy | https://pitchfork.com/staff/pat-levy/ | |
Full-length debut by Seattle singer-songwriter Jesy Fortino shares certain qualities with early Cat Power and Joanna Newsom, but Fortino's sense of yearning is less romantic and more spiritual. | Full-length debut by Seattle singer-songwriter Jesy Fortino shares certain qualities with early Cat Power and Joanna Newsom, but Fortino's sense of yearning is less romantic and more spiritual. | Tiny Vipers: Hands Across the Void | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/10581-hands-across-the-void/ | Hands Across the Void | Occasionally mentioned in the pre-release press for Jesy Fortino's first LP as Tiny Vipers is her stage fright-- hands trembling while tuning her guitar, that sort of thing. Her trepidation, however, doesn't come from a lack of faith in her material as much as her avoidance of eye contact with the imminent indie inebriants impatiently waiting for a sort of music they're not going to get. Fortino, who included a 30-minute song on an early CD-R, distances herself from the confessional singer/songwriter idiom with more than just her serpentine bandonym, creating music more appropriate for gallery spaces than indie clubs. Hands Across the Void is, in the non-imbibing sense of the term, as sobering as folk music gets: patient, resonant, and perhaps most importantly, curious.
Early copy has also frequently mentioned two predecessors for Fortino's approach: early Cat Power and Joanna Newsom. Chan Marshall is the obvious mark in terms of Void's spaciousness and solitude, and both women do well to push listeners out of their comfort zones, but Fortino's sense of yearning is less romantic and more spiritual. Newsom's Ys comes to mind through "Shipwreck"'s madrigal melody, but the resemblance is superficial, evidenced most clearly in the song's refrain: "We want to struggle and survive/ We want to live 'cause we know that life is beautiful/ Though surreal at times." The distinction lies not in the simplicity of the lyrics, but their qualification-- instead of celebration-- of the world's occasional inexplicability.
Void's music is as gently inquisitive as the artwork that accompanies it. Across a series of six photographs in the packaging, Fortino explores various dimly illuminated locales, accompanied only by a lantern. The record's title most likely refers to the sort of reinforcement that helps with the imperceptible problems of life. Important in that description, however, is Fortino's personal journey. Her accompaniment throughout is deliberate and twilit: a self-taught guitar style foregrounding the metallic thrum of its strings; an ashen voice harmonizing with a younger version of itself, often simply with vocabled "oh"s; inexplicable trills of sound filtering in from nowhere.
On "Campfire Resemblance", Fortino draws an analogy between a campfire's function-- warmth first, then vision-- and that of a lantern, which illuminates only its most immediate surroundings, allowing the cold comfort of careful, measured exploration. The Gaelic-tinged "On This Side" follows, and she searches for the fortitude necessary to dig her way "through the dust": "Ride on my sailors/ Deep in my mind/ I've always believed in you/ Now throw me a line."
Untethered, fire's destructive potential can be devastating, and also transfixing to take in. "Forest on Fire", the first of Void's two epics, traces the continuum of terror and captivation. The last four of the song's six minutes are wordless, occupied only by a simple, climbing and repeating guitar figure and a looming sense of disquiet. The acoustic guitar comes to resemble a resolutely flickering flame slowly morphing into, and eventually overtaken by, swirling, discordant noise. The song devours itself, and there's no good reason to turn away.
Void's liner notes thank "the people of Tibet and their struggle against the Chinese occupation," and Fortino reclaims a Dharmic cultural icon on the nearly 11-minute album summit "Swastika". The symbol's earliest and most widespread incarnation was as a sign of good luck, and a sense of hope pervades the song, which is divided into two equal parts. The first half is a series of Zen-like koans: "If dark were overthrown by the light/ Would the light turn to day/ Would it all turn to gray?" During the second section, the guitar takes on a chiming timbre, accompanied by an otherworldly drone of indistinct purpose: is it a sign of transcendence, or an admonition to pay closer attention? "You got a lot to carry," Fortino informs, "but once you're there, you stay." She refuses to offer any information as to whether that outcome is actually a good thing, but casts a blessing regardless.
Jesy Fortino's music is and will continue to be classified using adjectives like "spare" and "haunting," but those terms fail in terms of its emotional content. The 24-year old is publicly coming to terms with her interpretive skills as well as her own demons, and is doing it through an intensely vulnerable medium to boot. In that regard, Hands Across the Void, in its myriad attempts at radiance, is actually quite inspirational. | 2007-09-05T02:00:03.000-04:00 | 2007-09-05T02:00:03.000-04:00 | Experimental | Sub Pop | September 5, 2007 | 7.4 | deafd02d-4f3b-422d-9c7b-ac45a13d0c65 | Eric Harvey | https://pitchfork.com/staff/eric-harvey/ | null |
On their first new record in 17 years, the music of dub techno pioneers Porter Ricks has hardly changed, and really, that's for the best. | On their first new record in 17 years, the music of dub techno pioneers Porter Ricks has hardly changed, and really, that's for the best. | Porter Ricks: Shadow Boat EP | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22534-shadow-boat-ep/ | Shadow Boat EP | Porter Ricks, the duo of Andy Mellwig and Thomas Köner, weren’t around for long, but they left an indelible stamp on the legacy of what came to be known as dub techno. Ironically, there was never very much dub in their work—not in the way that you could hear it ricocheting through the work of their colleagues Basic Channel, for instance, upon whose Chain Reaction label Porter Ricks released their debut album, in 1996. In Basic Channel’s music, dub is a root, transplanted from Jamaica, that will eventually branch into the full-scale reggae of their later Rhythm & Sound project. In Porter Ricks’ music, dub is less a root than a route, a way of tracing the path a sound can travel through the convoluted guts of the recording studio.
In Porter Ricks’ short, largely bulletproof catalog—save for a few exploratory detours on their second album, into hip-hop and Chicago house, that probably would have been better left untaken—drum machines are run through maze-like circuits until nothing remains but the infrared signature they have left in their wake. Their commitment to conjuring whole worlds out of little more than crackle and echo cast a long shadow, even though they put the project on hold after three short years. Without Porter Ricks, it’s hard to imagine Pole, Shackleton, Burial, or any number of artists working in the most densely crosshatched corners of electronic music. Their last album was 1999’s Symbiotics, a split LP with Techno Animal (the industrial duo of Kevin Martin, later known as the Bug, and Justin K. Broadrick, a veteran of a host of bands like Napalm Death, Godflesh, and Ice) on which their gravelly sound came to resemble something alive and malevolent, their synths’ jagged waveforms glinting like the teeth of a snarling animal.
On their first new work in 17 years, not much has outwardly changed—and really, that’s the best possible scenario. When they called it quits, they were still in the process of pushing their sound forward, so for them to pick up where they left off is a welcome development. Shadow Boat consists of just three tracks, but they cover a considerable amount of ground. “Harbour Chart” creeps ahead at 60 beats per minute, faint kick and hi-hat all but subsumed in a maelstrom of foghorns and static. “Bay Rouge” is faster, a brisk andante of glancing chords and metallic textures. The timing of the release couldn't be more perfect, given the way the track's movements mimic kicking up piles of dry autumn leaves; the whole thing is crisp, chilly, and brooding. “Shadow Boat” is the longest, quickest, and most intense of the bunch, a headlong tumble into a wind-tunnel rave, its synths rattling like a broken screen.
Porter Ricks always excelled at sketching out sweeping, subaquatic expanses—ironically, their name comes from a character on the 1960s television series Flipper, a children’s show about a dolphin, even though there’s nothing cuddly about their music—and that continues to be the case here; the sense of space suggested by all three tracks is immense, practically unbounded. For years, most dub techno records have concerned themselves with nothing more than dub techno itself, but Shadow Boat tackles bigger ideas: Its main subject is the interplay of uncontrollable forces. All three tracks, balancing four-to-the-floor beats with unpredictable explosions of sandblasted tone, explore the tension between steadiness and turmoil. On the one hand, the certainty of timekeeping; on the other, things ripped loose from their fixtures. (“Shadow Boat” would have made a great soundtrack to Alfonso Cuarón’s Gravity, playing the regularity of the spacecraft’s orbit against its spectacularly violent pulverization.) Ultimately, it’s not about chaos, exactly, but something like it: unpredictable, dubwise chain reactions that leave us cowed and awestruck—patterns whose complexity we can scarcely begin to apprehend. | 2016-11-22T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2016-11-22T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Electronic | Tresor | November 22, 2016 | 8 | deb0cd49-f4d0-4c04-b842-5f39dda0816a | Philip Sherburne | https://pitchfork.com/staff/philip-sherburne/ | null |
On its first album in seven years, the Philly band jams and shreds and searches for a groove. | On its first album in seven years, the Philly band jams and shreds and searches for a groove. | Purling Hiss: Drag on Girard | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/purling-hiss-drag-on-gerard/ | Drag on Girard | Back in 2009, Mike Polizze was sitting at home in Philadelphia staring down a pile of solo recordings when he decided to slap the name Purling Hiss on them like a provincial flag. It wasn’t until he got a chance to tour with Kurt Vile that he wrangled some bandmates and turned his one-man psych garage-rock tunes into sprawling jams. Fourteen years and seven albums later, though, it appears Polizze is more at home going solo as a singer-songwriter or reviving his longtime cosmic rock trio Birds of Maya than he is channeling the crunchy distortion of his early project. Drag on Girard, Purling Hiss’ first studio album in seven years, picks up where the classic rock-indebted sound of 2016’s High Bias left off. Along the way, they settle into feel-good grooves and simple riffs that gradually lose their edge.
Recorded with Philly go-to Jeff Zeigler (The War on Drugs, Kurt Vile) on vintage outboard gear, Drag on Girard settles on the scuzzy, faded sound of a nicotine-stained dollar bin find from the ‘70s. The songwriting lives up to the production value, pleasant but lacking much purpose. Purling Hiss lean on rudimentary chord progressions and winding guitar solos, as they have for years, but this time the trio swaps the vibe from kicking back with some friends and a cooler of Yuenglings to the fizzled-out conversations at the end of the party. This lackadaisical approach means songs like “When the End Is Over” and “Baby” play out like brainstorming sessions, no matter how much Polizze’s desert island distortion pedal adds to the mood.
Purling Hiss are at their best when they layer exaggerated garage rock with motifs drawn from classic rock and power-pop. “Something in My Basement” pins up ragged guitar and a blistering rhythm section with vocal harmonies that channel the Beatles. Exuberant opener “Yer All in My Dreams” is Dinosaur Jr. appreciation done right: a blast of feel-good fuzz, unabashed fretboard worship, and disaffected vocal delivery. “There’s a song in every note I play,” Polizze sings, and as the track rides out with a radiantly joyful guitar solo, it’s easy to believe him. On the unexpected slow burner “Out the Door,” an elongated guitar solo, buried in distortion, casts a lonesome shadow over the solemn strums in the foreground. If they’re better known for capturing the bliss of the burnout lifestyle, Purling Hiss are capable of tenderness, too.
If only they kept sight of that potential more often. The album’s highlights can’t help but draw attention to its moments of unfocused filler. On “Drag on Girard,” the most aimless cut, a grimy guitar riff and Polizze’s shouts about driving all night extend to nearly eight minutes, like a jam session waiting for someone to take the lead. In a sense, that’s indicative of Polizze’s creative process: “It’s like I’m fishing. I’m just waiting for something to come along and if it sticks, I caught it,” he told Aquarium Drunkard. Watching an iridescent lure bob in the water is relaxing if you’re in the right mood, and there’s a thrill in witnessing something rise to the surface from below. But for the most part, it’s a lot of waiting for something to happen. | 2023-03-30T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2023-03-30T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Drag City | March 30, 2023 | 6.5 | debb1a2e-15c3-4933-9b60-42dd74d8a9b7 | Nina Corcoran | https://pitchfork.com/staff/nina-corcoran/ | |
The Brighton electronic musician’s third LP belongs to a proud tradition of English satire, plumbing the depths of the nation’s psyche and twisting it to wryly discomforting ends. | The Brighton electronic musician’s third LP belongs to a proud tradition of English satire, plumbing the depths of the nation’s psyche and twisting it to wryly discomforting ends. | Gazelle Twin: Pastoral | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/gazelle-twin-pastoral/ | Pastoral | In Kingdom Come, the final novel by the late British sci-fi author JG Ballard, the London suburbs fall under the spell of fascism. This isn’t the old-school fascism—born from the street, or the ballot box—but the product from a new and unexpected source: that cathedral to consumerism, the shopping mall. On its release in 2006, Kingdom Come felt somewhat fanciful. It functioned as an arch satire of capitalism, but seemed a little too far-fetched to feel like a warning of things to come. In 2018, viewed from a United Kingdom rent in half by the Brexit vote and beset by right-wing demagogues pushing prejudice from behind a mask of populism, it feels, if anything, a little too on the nose.
Two years ago, Elizabeth Bernholz, the Brighton musician who records brittle, unsettling electronic music under the name Gazelle Twin, brought Kingdom Come to the stage in the form of a theatrical performance. Her take on the novel located the horror in Ballard’s vision, but also the pitch-black humor. In it, a pair of power-dressed office workers pounded gym treadmills into the depths of a nightmarish, deserted mall. Bernholz wasn’t on stage as part of the Kingdom Come performances—partly, she explained, as a way of expanding the Gazelle Twin project into new conceptual realms, and partly because she gave birth to her first child shortly after its debut. But Pastoral, her third official full-length, picks up where Kingdom Come left off. Its 14 tracks form a manic state-of-the-nation address that finds Bernholz identifying the dark impulses coursing through the English psyche and then twisting them to her own ends.
The England that Bernholz pictures on Pastoral feels like hell itself: a rainy fascist island of regressive tradition and hate-peddling tabloids, callous and bigoted and drunk on curdled dreams of empire. One by one, she identifies its demons and then embodies them, her voice electronically twisted into a cruel, androgynous leer. “Better in My Day” is about the meanness of nostalgia, that refusal to relinquish cultural capital to younger generations. “Just look at these kids now,” she chants, as drums beat out a queasy, off-center tattoo. “Dance of the Peddlers” is an unsettling confection of trilling pipes and ticking percussion; its lyric interpolates lines from William Blake’s “The Tyger” with allusions to medieval torture and the phone-hacking scandal that embroiled many of the UK’s tabloid newspapers at the start of the decade. “Dieu Et Mon Droit” is a grim vignette of poverty delivered in a twisted operatic tenor: “Eating from bins outside supermarkets/Kicked into the curb like empty Coke cans.”
Pastoral echoes these disturbing themes with a disturbing sound, an uncanny mix of the ancient and the modern. Its production is crisp and electronic, all nervy drums and synthetic textures, but melodies are often played on old English instruments—recorders or harpsichords that are distorted or chopped up. “Over the Hills” mixes dreamy synths with a recording of a puppeteer singing the traditional British folk song “Over the Hills and Far Away,” a romantic paean to foreign invasion. This unnatural mash of signifiers is replicated in Gazelle Twin’s visual aesthetic. In the video for “Hobby Horse,” Bernholz trots out in her new stage costume: a sort of nightmare court jester sporting Adidas Gazelle trainers and riding a hobby horse pilfered from the bedroom of a Victorian child. It’s a genderless getup—all that’s visible of Bernholz’s face is a chilling Cheshire Cat gin—and the whole ensemble is colored in the visceral red of the St. George’s Cross, the English flag that has of late replaced the Union Jack as the favored symbol of right-wing pride.
Anxiety is a thread that runs through Gazelle Twin’s music. Her 2014 album Unflesh grappled with themes including miscarriage, euthanasia, and body dysmorphia. Pastoral is more outward-looking, but Bernholz’s status as a new mother feels key to understanding this record. One touchstone might be the debut album by Karin Dreijer’s Fever Ray project, another record that tackled the headspace of the post-natal experience. Both share a fascination with hideous make-believe, beset with visions of monsters crawling out of the woodwork. Both, too, have used vocal processing to elude or obliterate their makers’ identities. Dreijer applied pitch-shifting effects to make her voice androgynous, but Bernholz goes further, twisting her voice into something not quite human.
If Pastoral fits into any lineage, it’s the long tradition of English satire. There’s a similar spirit in Gazelle Twin’s music—a dangerous mischief, a fascination for the grotesque—to that which you’d encounter in a William Hogarth illustration or a Chris Morris sketch. You will find no comfort here. But it’s the job of an artist to capture something of the tenor of the age they live in, and Pastoral fits the bill: a mad jig along a cliff edge. | 2018-09-17T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-09-17T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Experimental | Anti-Ghost Moon Ray | September 17, 2018 | 7.7 | debe1507-7784-4344-a323-ee987296d84c | Louis Pattison | https://pitchfork.com/staff/louis-pattison/ | |
Paper Days is a four-piece outfit from San Diego with an unadorned "California sound" in an era when the sound of Southern California has become increasingly hard to define. The overarching sound here is wave-washed rock from a bass, drums, and two-guitar configuration. | Paper Days is a four-piece outfit from San Diego with an unadorned "California sound" in an era when the sound of Southern California has become increasingly hard to define. The overarching sound here is wave-washed rock from a bass, drums, and two-guitar configuration. | Paper Days: Fun for Family & Friends EP | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21425-fun-for-family-friends-ep/ | Fun for Family & Friends EP | Paper Days is a four-piece outfit from San Diego with an unadorned "California sound" in an era when the sound of Southern California has become increasingly hard to define. Brothers Niko and Xander Sitaras, Jordan Graham, and Nathan Blake were previously-known as "the band who opened for Mac DeMarco at the show where he was arrested at in Santa Barbara," and now they’ve released a debut EP: Fun for Family & Friends, an ode to the exact kind of synergy with an audience for which that show is remembered.
This isn’t to say that Paper Days are reckless, or that their music is unhinged. Their EP was recorded without overdubs in an homage to the live-show experience; this is a group that wants to sound like they’re in the room with you, playing at a house party the likes of which Paper Days have channelled into something of a mini-cult following in SoCal (thus the name of their EP: Fun for Family & Friends). The overarching sound here is wave-washed rock from a bass-, drums-, and two-guitar configuration. "Kind Guidance" and "Sweet Destiny," the band’s two lead singles, are beach-friendly and melodic, but percussive and turbulent in their messiest moments thanks to Graham’s forceful timekeeping and the synergy between Blake and the Sitaras bros’ kaleidoscopic guitar tones (Xander Sitaras plays bass).
There’s an atmospheric feel in Paper Days’ music, and singer Niko Sitaras uses this context as a means of both poetic conveyance and care-free musing. "I had to be a believer to know when I was wrong," he croons on "Kind Guidance," before rejoining, more explicitly: "You had your back/ Against the wall for me, baby." There’s a slickness to lyrics like this that feels more social than angsty; "Boy"—which is inspired by Caitlyn Jenner—is a reflection on gender stereotypes that still manages to sound fun-loving despite the embedded provocations in the lyrics ("For a boy to be a man/ He’s gotta learn it with his hands"). Here, Sitaras' vocals, which were written collectively by the band, seem to mirror the binaries of the music itself; at points his voice is vigorous and gruff, yet during the bridge ("It’s alright to be okay/ (Are you?)")—it soars up in the register to a high falsetto that is the sonic equivalent of a gentle caress.
The entire EP is loose and layered, with several elements that occasionally feel too cluttered to cohere (cc: "Lightning Cola")—but then again, some of the cuts here, like the title track, are single, raw takes meant to emulate that "living room" feel that often defines small-town bands. Lyrically speaking, Paper Days’ EP could benefit from a stronger narrative arc—something to make each song, with each of their frenetic sonic elements, feel like pieces of a larger puzzle (rather than mini-narratives unto themselves). Paper Days have a personality that asks to be teased out with a more resonant point of view. Instead of being part of Mac DeMarco’s story, he could be part of theirs. | 2016-01-12T01:00:04.000-05:00 | 2016-01-12T01:00:04.000-05:00 | Rock | Lightning Cola | January 12, 2016 | 6.9 | dec0bdfc-9f73-4e6d-bb4c-7356c1aca1d3 | Molly Beauchemin | https://pitchfork.com/staff/molly-beauchemin/ | null |
With the glow-up of a bigger indie label behind them for their second album, the UK punks ride again with burly bravado, but it’s notably the work of artists eager to show that they contain multitudes. | With the glow-up of a bigger indie label behind them for their second album, the UK punks ride again with burly bravado, but it’s notably the work of artists eager to show that they contain multitudes. | Chubby and the Gang: The Mutt’s Nuts | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/chubby-and-the-gang-the-mutts-nuts/ | The Mutt’s Nuts | Chubby and the Gang’s Speed Kills was a joyous debut—one of the most unrelenting rock’n’roll albums of 2020 stuffed with upbeat Oi! rippers that all hinged on the band’s law-defying self-mythology. The London band’s far-left politics amplified the brash caricature they embodied—a switchblade-carrying British gang who pledged to never stop creating chaos no matter how many times they get locked up. With the glow-up of a bigger indie label behind them for their second album, the gang ride again with burly bravado on The Mutt’s Nuts’ opening title track like nothing’s changed. They return in full-on theme-song mode, outright stating the band’s name, proclaiming they’re the best—or more specifically: “The mutt’s nuts”—and letting you know that they do what they want. Frontman Charlie Manning Walker even lifts a phrase from Slim Shady to underscore just how confident he is in heralding the band’s return: “Guess who’s back, back again?”
Their assurance is bold considering just how high they set the bar with Speed Kills—an album full of fire and devoid of duds—and “The Mutt’s Nuts”’ introductory punk rock piss and vinegar is slightly misleading. The band is still rowdy across the majority of the record, and Walker spends a lot of time shredding his voice with harsh shouted performances, but it’s notably the work of artists eager to show that they contain multitudes. When Walker gently sings a loving ode to his city with “Take Me Home to London,” his sentiment and tone land with significance and weight. It’s a beautiful song and a massive contrast to his usual screams about the city’s mayhem. As the album winds down, there are two straight-up pop songs about his deeply broken heart: “Life’s Lemons,” a twinkling ballad that sways like a late-’50s doo-wop record, and “I Hate the Radio,” a swooning power-pop showstopper about hearing an ex’s favorite song. It’s a bittersweet truth—sometimes when you’re the mutt’s nuts, you also feel like dog shit.
The slower, vulnerable, and more subdued songs are some of the best this band’s second album has to offer, which puts the album’s more aggressive material in a difficult spot. There’s this diptych early in the album, “On the Meter” and “Beat That Drum,” which illustrates the respective joy and stress from Walker’s past as a minicab driver. These songs also illustrate the limitations of Walker’s more aggressive vocal style. At its best, his voice is a bludgeoning, angry force lashing out about worker exploitation, crooked cops, and a broken criminal justice system. “Beat That Drum” suffers because the hook is repetitive and Walker’s instrument was wielded much more effectively across several preceding songs.
While The Mutt’s Nuts was never going to slot perfectly into place for anyone looking for Speed Kills 2, a suite of three songs on the B-side scratch that itch. All under two minutes long, they implement the same wildness and breakneck pace that defined their first album. The overwhelming joy in the power chord barrage of “Someone’s Gunna Die” is paired with Walker shout-growling about the casual, routine way people get murdered in the city late at night. Walker elatedly interpolates the Ramones on the anti-work anthem “Overachiever”: “I-I-I-I-I-I-I just wanna have nothin’ to do!” Then there’s the searing guitar solo and sing-along hook from “Getting Beat Again,” a translated cover of the Finnish punks Eppu Normaali’s 1978 song “Poliisi Pamputtaa Taas”—a catchy jam about police brutality in any language or decade.
Between the introductory braggadocio and the closing heartache, Chubby and the Gang spend a couple songs on The Mutt’s Nuts letting everyone know that they, too, lived through 2020. Walker invokes a fiery Minneapolis and urges the listener to “say their name” on the crawling almost-blues “White Rags,” while “Pressure” is a belligerent illustration of a breakdown in isolation that ends with a psychedelic guitar solo freakout. On an album where they expanded their approach, they managed to shed some of the Speed Kills caricature. The old formula was successful, but in subverting it, they embraced their rage and still left room for their vulnerability. It’s like the album’s theme song says—Chubby and the Gang do as they please.
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. | 2021-09-03T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2021-09-03T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Partisan | September 3, 2021 | 7.3 | decc593e-4a4d-491d-9720-d30c88adab9c | Evan Minsker | https://pitchfork.com/staff/evan-minsker/ | |
Adapting a Hans Christian Andersen fable, the Bang on a Can co-founder has produced the most profound and emotionally resonant work of his career. | Adapting a Hans Christian Andersen fable, the Bang on a Can co-founder has produced the most profound and emotionally resonant work of his career. | David Lang: The Little Match Girl Passion | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/13775-the-little-match-girl-passion/ | The Little Match Girl Passion | Composer David Lang, one of the founders of the art-music collective Bang on a Can, made his name in the late 1980s and 90s penning spiky blasts of music that dared you to hang on for the ride. Early works like "Cheating, Lying, Stealing" were statements of intent-- the bristling sort that artistically inflamed young men are prone to making-- and they encapsulated much of downtown New York's hardy oppositional spirit. Twenty-some years later, they are foundational texts for an entire new generation of gleeful polyglots who can't wait to mix their avant-punk, art-rock, electronic, and whatever-else records in with their childhood classical training.
In 2008, this lifelong iconoclast won the Pulitzer Prize for Music for The Little Match Girl Passion. The 35-minute oratorio brought mainstream institutional acceptance to a career defined, at least in part, by its absence, and Lang seemed equally grateful and nonplussed by the honor. The Little Match Girl Passion is a breathtakingly spare and icily gorgeous adaptation of the Hans Christian Andersen fairy tale of the same name, and on the surface it couldn't be further from the punky provocations of Lang's youth. It is scored for only four voices-- soprano, alto, tenor, and bass, with the occasional addition of hand bells and percussion-- and the resulting sound world has more in common with Renaissance sacred music or English madrigals than the hip post-minimalism Lang is known for.
To some of his acolytes, this sort of thing might look suspiciously like softening with old age. But Lang hasn't softened so much as deepened. Over the last 10 years, he's been increasingly pairing his brasher works with hesitant, quietly spiritual pieces that open up onto more expansive internal vistas, and his Passion is the culmination of this tendency. The Hans Christian Andersen fable is fantastically dark, one of those children's stories that still startles in its brutality. The titular little girl is sent out by her abusive father on New Year's Eve to sell matches, but finds herself ignored by passersby. Unable to return home without money, she tries to warm and distract herself by lighting matches, which summon comforting memories of her grandmother's house on Christmas morning. As she slowly freezes to death, the memories and visions become more vivid until they envelop her. She is found dead in the morning, clutching a handful of burnt-out matches but wearing a beatific smile.
Lang has taken this story, with its impossible-to-miss religious overtones, and cast it as a Passion play. The piece is specifically modeled on Bach's St. Matthew Passion, which interrupts the story of Jesus' death with other texts that reflect and comment on the action. This treatment might sound ripe for egregious emotional manipulation, but Lang has nothing of the sort in mind; his gaze is clear-eyed and subdued. In interviews about the work, Lang has alluded to watching the Zapruder film and being struck by how its slow-motion graininess and silence amplifies the tragedy of the Kennedy assassination by placing it behind glass. It doesn't matter which frame of that fated motorcade you see; they are all equally devastating. By breaking up the timeline of the little match girl's suffering with choral lamentations, he has accomplished something similar. From Passion's opening moments-- a slowly accumulating round of voices chanting rhythmic variations on the words "come" and "daughter"-- the tragedy of the story's end is already present.
The work is relentlessly minimal, though it feels too unstuck in time to be pegged as "minimalism." With an almost ascetic discipline, Lang builds the piece out of tiny melodic cells-- four- or five-note fragments that he wraps around each other again and again, until they produce a haunting and evocative hall of echoes. The heart-stopping "Have Mercy My God", for instance, is composed of just two minor chords, broken into five pitches each, which reiterate endlessly and tangle slowly at the edges. Most sections make use of a similar number of notes, the ones that you can find on the piano under one hand without stretching. This humble insistence on economy reinforces the work's theme; Lang seems to be determinedly chiseling away at his music, tuning out outside clamor to hone in on a more elusive inner transmission. In its own quizzical, probing way, The Little Match Girl Passion is as much a devotional piece as the Bach Passion it is modeled on, and with it, Lang has produced the most profound and emotionally resonant work of his career. | 2010-01-15T01:00:01.000-05:00 | 2010-01-15T01:00:01.000-05:00 | Experimental / Rock | Harmonia Mundi | January 15, 2010 | 8.5 | deda73a0-7bd7-4a49-8666-bfef2780b298 | Jayson Greene | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jayson-greene/ | null |
The weirdest of all ATL weirdos returns with more songs about hippos and sex. | The weirdest of all ATL weirdos returns with more songs about hippos and sex. | SahBabii: Barnacles | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/sahbabii-barnacles/ | Barnacles | Of Atlanta’s abundance of rap weirdos, the 23-year-old SahBabii is by far the weirdest. One of his most well-known songs is about falling for a voluptuous anime girl. When he is off in his world, he only really cares about two things: sex and animals. Separately, those two things are fine, but nothing gets him quite so worked up as when they’re put together, as often happens in a Sahbabii song: “And my bitch real thick/I’m fucking on a hippopotamus,” he croons sweetly on 2018’s lush “Squidrific,” sounding like a sedated Young Thug.
Since his 2016 breakout song “Pull Up With Ah Stick,” SahBabii has noticeably been removed from the Atlanta rap scene: he’s only done a handful of features and works mostly with his older brother, T3, and producers he finds online to provide him airy beats that could work in Chrono Trigger. He’s become so unpredictable that when he threatened to retire in 2019, people believed him. But instead he put out Barnacles, another Dayglo rundown of his unrelenting horniness and his favorite animals.
“Giraffes and elephants/Giraffes and elephants/We fucked giraffes and elephants,” sings Sah on the cleverly titled “Giraffes and Elephants.” This is the third song on Barnacles, and it captures Sah, for better and worse. Out of context (or even in it), his lyrics make absolutely no sense. But in SahBabii’s universe, nothing really needs to make sense. His raps don’t feel like they take place in Atlanta or anywhere on Earth, really; it’s a complete demented fantasy.
If SahBabii has anything in common with Atlanta’s rap scene, it’s that everything he says is delivered with complete seriousness. “My pockets pregnant/Nut in her mouth, got her tongue pregnant,” is the hook on “Pregnant,” and it’s sung in the casual cadence most other rappers would use to talk about their favorite pair of jeans or their latest jewelry purchases. But the classic ATL rap dream of designer fashion and fast cars doesn’t mean much to SahBabii. On “Trapezoid,” he’s elated to have found a girl that is built like the shape mentioned in the song’s title (“Small top with a big bottom”). And on “House Party,” Sah reflects about jumping a dude at a party with the warmth of someone remembering their favorite childhood birthday.
It takes a lot, but SahBabii can cross the line and sound like a parody of himself. Typically it’s when his songs are too on-the-nose, like “Purple Umbrella,” where he interpolates the Scooby Doo theme into a questionable hook and delivers such a relentless onslaught of raunchy punchlines that they lose their shock: he compares his latest sexual conquests to Sweet Baby Ray’s sauce, Elmer’s glue, and a waffle cone. Weak production choices suck the life out of his adventure, too: “100 Round Drum” and “Soulja Slim” sound like the kind of rudimentary instructionals you could easily find on any SoundCloud page.
But listening to his music is like binge-watching an animated sitcom; it’s easy to forget the lackluster parts. How could you possibly come away from Barnacles thinking about anything else but SahBabii wailing, “Hippo booty bouncin’/Rhino booty bouncin’/Elephant booty bouncin’” on “Double Dick,” or when he turned a reference to mozzarella sticks into a threat on “Pregnant,” or when he dissed his haters on “Racist” by calling them “rats” and “Donald Ducks”? (The only animals SahBabii could ever speak about negatively.) Yes, SahBabii’s imagination is disturbing, but somehow, the more time you spend with him, he starts sounding kind of wholesome.
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2020-07-15T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-07-15T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Casting Bait | July 15, 2020 | 7.3 | dedcf448-d230-4627-bd45-7ae165d93dbb | Alphonse Pierre | https://pitchfork.com/staff/alphonse-pierre/ | |
Blending prairie guitars and chirruping synthesizes, the Edinburgh psychedelic band's eponymous debut is rendered in two basic colors (natural and synthetic), but the scenarios it conjures are significantly more multifaceted. | Blending prairie guitars and chirruping synthesizes, the Edinburgh psychedelic band's eponymous debut is rendered in two basic colors (natural and synthetic), but the scenarios it conjures are significantly more multifaceted. | Django Django: Django Django | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/16504-django-django/ | Django Django | The artwork for Edinburgh-via-London band Django Django's eponymous debut perfectly sums up the record's basic contrast: the clash of the dustbowl against some futuristic, swirling alien presence. Prairie guitars with heavy-thumbed top strings sidestep and shuffle around chirruping synthesizers, sonar-shaky womps, and krautrock plains in a fashion not dissimilar to Beck's more recent releases. However, one of the joys of Django Django is that even though it's rendered in two basic colors-- natural and synthetic-- the scenarios it conjures are significantly more multifaceted.
There's a boyish sense of adventure and emotion to this album. Following a mechanical introduction that sounds like the theme to a 1980s science educational video, "Hail Bop"'s airless, stabby twang recalls a sci-fi terror sequence-- desperately trying to diffuse a ticking time bomb, or escape a compressing trash compactor. The ensuing burbling synths, arid Dick Dale-indebted guitar and unpredictable squelches recall the kind of landscapes conjured by the Super Furry Animals, rolling hills perfect for boisterous psychedelic trips, with the conspicuously blankly chanted lyrics set among hillocks and vast skies, too. A potentially romantic figure "appear[s] from the hillside... a funny look in your eye," before darting off again in spite of the onlooker having been "waiting here so long."
The scene sets the tone for an album where what appears to be a disintegrating relationship is rarely described in human or adult emotional terms; rather it's as a tricksy Rube Goldberg device where the parties race to reassemble and disassemble the partnership as part of a game of emotional one-upmanship and obstacle-planting. Former single "Default" is a wickedly neurotic stompbox-powered chant with voices intermittently gargling and hissing in cuckoo clock rhythm. "We just lit the fire and now you want to put it out," Dave, Vincent, Tommy, and Jimmy chant. "Take one for the team/ You're a cog in the machine/ It's like a default." The itchy "WOR" starts with a murkily obfuscated motif from "Misirlou", rumbling into a rubbery, lurching funk that sets the pace for another competitive move: "I took a chance on you and it's time to ring the bell."
The unrelenting chanted singing style can make Django Django sound a bit sterile and passionless, building to a brassy sheen that defies the eloquent frustration of a song like "Storm": "You are a storm; you are my little storm/ I watch the wind change to find out where you've been blown." The group has been lazily compared to the Beta Band, largely due to their Fife-born drummer and production whizz David Maclean being the younger brother of John Maclean. But whereas that band married Lennon-like vocal calm with bucolic, occasionally piqued backing, Django Django seem more akin to Hot Chip in approach: a bunch of comparative straights going doolally in a studio, using their dispassionate vocal layering as the foundation from which to paint in entertainingly bold strokes. "Firewater", a song about getting legless on booze in the desert, gambols and struts like a drunk precariously skirting the edge of a campfire; "Skies Over Cairo" gets weirder, the sound of a Saharan-influenced Kraftwerk careering over a huffing rhythm seemingly comprised of samples of recorded water. Despite jangling on past its shelf life, the opening of "Zumm Zumm" fizzes and clanks like an ancient fairground attraction, with hyena yaps punctuating oblique exclamations about unexpected, never-before-seen occurrences.
That same sense of vivacity can't be applied to the song that follows it, "Hand of Man", whose dull country roughage creaks out beneath a numbed appropriation of the melody from the Shins' "New Slang". Thankfully, however, Django Django picks up again with "Love's Dart", a bandy coconut canter which urges that goals-- romantic or otherwise-- can be more than just a mirage if you keep them firmly in mind. Django Django are bursting with ideas and an intriguing aesthetic that would suggest that their own goals are very keenly defined-- the result of working on this album for over two years, perhaps-- with the artwork's simplicity acting as a red herring to their boundlessly imaginative, considered complexity. | 2012-08-31T02:00:02.000-04:00 | 2012-08-31T02:00:02.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | Because / Ribbon Music | August 31, 2012 | 7.2 | dedf0225-272f-4312-8a31-397e554dbf3c | Laura Snapes | https://pitchfork.com/staff/laura-snapes/ | null |
Dreams in the Rat House combines the off-the-cuff hijinks and threadbare fidelity of Shannon and the Clams' debut, I Wanna Go Home with the songwriting focus of their great second effort, Sleep Talk, while exhibiting the fine art of making it all look easy. | Dreams in the Rat House combines the off-the-cuff hijinks and threadbare fidelity of Shannon and the Clams' debut, I Wanna Go Home with the songwriting focus of their great second effort, Sleep Talk, while exhibiting the fine art of making it all look easy. | Shannon and the Clams: Dreams in the Rat House | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/18078-shannon-and-the-clams-dreams-in-the-rat-house/ | Dreams in the Rat House | Oakland trio Shannon and the Clams have a broad musical vocabulary that belies their simple, trad setup. Their sound contains lo-fi's distorted treble, the gruff tumble of rockabilly, the soaring heights of R&B balladry, and the weirdness of mid-60s psychedelia. Their albums have the feel of a freeform AM station whose DJs and programmers get their jollies from being gleefully unpredictable, the kind that wouldn’t think twice about following up a tender oldie like “Oh Louie” with a punkabilly romp called “Cat Party”.
Songwriters Shannon Shaw and Cody Blanchard frequently switch duties as lead singer, sometimes within the same song, which is testament to both their differences and the clarity of their shared vision. They’re singers whose range and timbre often makes it difficult to tell which of them is singing lead (which is more interesting than it is negative), but they're sharp lyricists with very different writing styles. On Dreams in the Rat House, Shaw’s “Ozma” is a touching eulogy about her dearly departed dog, while Blanchard’s “Heads or Tails” is a fictional narrative about a vagabond with a coin in his pocket that he flips whenever he needs to make a critical life decision.
Dreams in the Rat House combines elements of their debut, I Wanna Go Home (particularly the off-the-cuff hijinks and threadbare fidelity), with the songwriting focus of their great second effort, Sleep Talk. Songs like “If I Could Count” and “The Rabbit’s Nose” toy with complex melody and song structure while exhibiting the fine art of making it all look easy. “Rip Van Winkle” takes a generations-old fable and turns it into a monologue from a heart-struck woman waiting for a lover to return to her, and has a glittery lead guitar part and a soaring chorus that combine to far more than the sum of its parts. In the number of years they’ve played together, Shaw and Blanchard have learned how to disassemble the parts and rebuild them in a way that sounds both classic and wild at the same time.
But their chief attribute is how fun their songs sound. They can do sinister, ghastly garage-punk like the Mummies (“Bed Rock”) or throw faux-ghoulish noises that suggest parody but never cross that line (“Rat House”) without coming across as a novelty act. Blanchard and Shaw are dedicated enough to songcraft to the extent that it’s evident they’re not just fucking around.
One common misconception about certain corners of garage rock is that there's a lack of serious-mindedness among its proponents. But there’s a broad line between having a good time and making a joke out of something. When Shannon and the Clams pull out a ballad as affecting as “Unlearn”, it becomes apparent that they’re just as good at tugging heartstrings as cackling after tracking those googly noises in “Rat House”. When they craft a goodbye as poignant in its simplicity as “I Know”, it’s like Shaw and Blanchard know you’re going to realize you’ve underestimated the emotional resonance of their songwriting. And that’s when they know they’ve got you hooked. | 2013-05-21T02:00:03.000-04:00 | 2013-05-21T02:00:03.000-04:00 | Rock | Hardly Art | May 21, 2013 | 7.1 | deeadb08-760e-4c28-9e63-be527f0984ab | Martin Douglas | https://pitchfork.com/staff/martin-douglas/ | null |
Jesca Hoop’s fourth album Memories Are Now sounds like her most complete and refined statement yet, a boisterously declarative album that’s urgent and at times seditious. | Jesca Hoop’s fourth album Memories Are Now sounds like her most complete and refined statement yet, a boisterously declarative album that’s urgent and at times seditious. | Jesca Hoop: Memories Are Now | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22885-memories-are-now/ | Memories Are Now | “Animal Kingdom Chaotic,” the centerpiece of Jesca Hoop’s fourth album, opens with a sound that may take a moment or two to identify. That clacking rhythm certainly sounds like an old-school typewriter rather than a computer keyboard, which may be her slyest joke in a song about life lived online. “I say it is possible,” she sings, then answers herself: “…but your computer says no!” That phrase becomes a testy mantra, its cadence growing trickier with each repetition. As Hoop’s guitar provides a nimble, eye-rolling commentary, sounding more and more like an African mbira, the song resembles a folkie take on Laurie Anderson’s giddily eccentric art-pop arrangements. Computer screens, the implication goes, have turned us into a population of proxies who simulate doing things more than we actually do things.
Hoop can’t be accused of not doing things. In the last ten years, she has released four official studio albums, plus a handful of acoustic compilations, although readers may know her from Love Letter for Fire, her duets record with Sam Beam. But Memories Are Now sounds like her most complete and refined statement yet, a boisterously declarative album that’s urgent and at times seditious. As such, it can be unruly and unfocused, full of ideas half- and wholly formed, the occasional jarring transition, and a few interminable passages (“Simon Says” is just over three minutes, but sounds like it will never end.)
However, from such disorder springs an animating sense of outrage: a readiness to take on the world from every angle of attack. That comes through most boldly on the title track, which opens with a slowly revving guitar and moves at an imperturbable crawl, subdued yet taut and disciplined. Hoop’s vocals are much wilder: “Memories are now!” she exclaims, defiantly. She might be arguing about the temporal displacement of online life (the internet is a recurring character in these songs), where the past and the present fuse together and the future never quite arrives. Or she’s trying to get at something a bit more banal: Every moment is precious and has the potential to become a memory.
Hoop is making memories, whether you like it or not: “I’ve got work to be doing,” she declares. “If you’re not here to help, go find some other life to ruin.” If the melody weren’t so intricately snaky, if the hook didn’t depend on her odd phrasing, that chorus might be the kind of thing you’d chant while marching on the White House—especially when she gets to the line, “Let me show you the door.” Memories Are Now, perhaps more than anything she has done in the past, is closely engaged with the present moment, yet so lyrically and musically idiosyncratic that it never sounds overtly political. The best moments possess a sense of intrigue, a subterranean conspiracy, as though she’s imparting dangerous knowledge to you.
Hoop’s most visceral assault is “The Coming,” which opens with a few measures of ambient guitar noodling, as though she’s gathering her thoughts or summoning her courage. As the song sprawls and contorts, Jesus resigns as Messiah and laments a tenure defined by double standards and misunderstood instructions. If there was nothing but this performance review, the song would be merely clever, but it takes on tremendous gravity the more personal Hoop gets: “I refuse to think that my best friend’s going to hell anymore and condescend to offer her a key to salvation like it’s something that I have and can afford,” she sings, but she’s past singing by this point. Instead, she’s testifying about a “spirit-rattling scare”: the realization that the moral code that has defined America for so long has curdled into something grotesque and virulent. Hoop has the temerity to fight against it, and if you’re not here to help...well, you know. | 2017-02-13T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2017-02-13T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Folk/Country / Pop/R&B | Sub Pop | February 13, 2017 | 7.3 | deecfd75-4266-4cfe-b109-708fd1a87f51 | Stephen M. Deusner | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stephen-m. deusner/ | null |
Bright, noisy, and 10 years in the making, the long-awaited second album from the internet’s original viral pop star leaves little impression beyond smooth-brained confusion. | Bright, noisy, and 10 years in the making, the long-awaited second album from the internet’s original viral pop star leaves little impression beyond smooth-brained confusion. | Uffie: Sunshine Factory | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/uffie-sunshine-factory/ | Sunshine Factory | In early 2006, 18-year-old Anna-Catherine Hartley arrived with her debut single as Uffie, the boastful, baby-voiced novelty rap “Pop the Glock.” MySpace virality led to bonafide underground stardom: Uffie signed to trendy French electro label Ed Banger, and another song, “Robot Œuf,” was included in the soundtrack for a Pedro Almodóvar film. But as her fame inched closer to the mainstream, Uffie disappeared from view. Her debut album, Sex Dreams and Denim Jeans, arrived in 2010—three years behind schedule—with a guest appearance from Pharrell. In February 2012 she announced that she was working on a second album, but just over a year later, she declared her retirement.
Sunshine Factory, Uffie’s long-awaited second album—10 years delayed, to be exact—marks a self-appointed departure. “I’m really getting frustrated with being associated with bloghouse,” Uffie told NYLON (which identified her as “a bloghouse-era icon”). “I know that’s where I started and I know I took a break, but I am putting out substantial work with dope people.” Produced mainly by chillwave heavyweight Toro y Moi, Sunshine Factory steps away from the self-effacing sleaze of Sex Dreams into a purgatorial nightclub haze. Uffie explains it, rather vaguely, as a nightclub-themed fantasy of post-pandemic “escape”: an “alternate reality” in which “all the misfits can gather.” The album’s barrage of incongruous alt-rock guitars and convulsive electroclash synths is dizzying enough to open up a wormhole, but in all its bright, noisy, unfocused glory, Sunshine Factory is undeniably a good time.
Throughout the album, indie rock and shoegaze influences butt heads with electro-house beats and avant-LMFAO lyricism. It works often enough: Though opener “mvp” never builds to the satisfying intensity of its Strokes-esque bassline, its pulsing rhythm is undeniably catchy. At other points, it falters; the shoegaze-y crunch of “prickling skin” falls apart once Uffie’s fuzzed-out vocals enter the picture. Her aughts-core, reverb-heavy sing-raps feel anachronistically out of place, particularly when the instrumentals lean toward ’80s and ’90s indie rock. It’s when Uffie breaks away from these self-imposed genre constraints that her music really takes on new life: The frenzied drums and breakneck babbling of standout “dominoes” imbue the song’s ’00s teen-movie guitar licks and fizzy hi-hats with an unexpected hyperpop sparkle. Peaches’ introductory voicemail embraces the hilarity of being the messiest one at the function: “Hey Uffie…I’m not gonna make it to the party. I got my dick stuck in the door and I can’t get it out! Ughhh.”
Uffie’s lyricism, however, remains scattered at best. Moments of surprisingly blunt lucidity (“I’m not against it/I just don’t want to remember it” on lead single “Cool”) are quickly lost in the pages of her pop culture Rolodex, from which she spits reference after reference as if from a cash cannon. Madonna, Obama, and the Jetsons are but three of her inscrutable shoutouts; “Sophia” seems to nod to Yaeji (“Make it rain girl get it soon”) and SOPHIE (“Shake it up and make a smoothie”) as it simultaneously wipes the dust off the Migos’ “bad and boujee.” Clichés about Bonnie and Clyde, or the urge to “get away” when “things been too crazy,” feel strangely self-serious on an album whose opening line is “We cum at the same time.”
This wavering between don’t-give-a-fuck honesty and debatably intentional genericism makes the album difficult to process. Song to song, Uffie can’t seem to fully commit to a tone or even to pastiche. Album closer “crowdsurfinginyoursheets” zags from tender piano ballad to echoing vocals with all the charm of a Spotify advertisement, before finally veering into a forgettable “lo-fi hip-hop beats” track. Sunshine Factory’s biggest weakness might be its sense of under-commitment to any concept at all—the very thing that once made Uffie stand out. “Pop the Glock” was garish, but Uffie’s first and most lasting impression was that of an artist committed to the bit and unconcerned with the reception. As maximal as Sunshine Factory is, it ultimately feels dilute, leaving little impression beyond smooth-brained confusion. | 2022-05-26T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2022-05-26T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic / Pop/R&B | Company | May 26, 2022 | 5.9 | def8dfcf-5d73-4923-ac14-c65be150151b | Sue Park | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sue-park/ | |
On her fourth album, Divers, Joanna Newsom comes down in size if not scope. A love letter in the form of a reckoning with death, Divers deals with making tangible the huge mass of impending doom about the loss of love. You know, the small stuff. It's a gorgeous record, full of her usual harp wilyness and baroque rhythms. | On her fourth album, Divers, Joanna Newsom comes down in size if not scope. A love letter in the form of a reckoning with death, Divers deals with making tangible the huge mass of impending doom about the loss of love. You know, the small stuff. It's a gorgeous record, full of her usual harp wilyness and baroque rhythms. | Joanna Newsom: Divers | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21097-divers/ | Divers | Joanna Newsom's Divers is an album about a profound love, but it hardly features any love songs. The singer/songwriter recently explained to Uncut that her marriage in 2013 had invited death into her life, "because there is someone you can't bear to lose," she said. "When it registers as true, it's like a little shade of grief comes in when love is its most real version. Then it contains death inside of it, and then that death contains love inside of it." There is only one domestic vignette on the record, towards the end of "Leaving the City", where Newsom and her love go running on a beautiful day. Immediately, though, her high dims: "The spirit bends beneath knowing it must end." 2010's Have One on Me traced the death of a relationship as Newsom tried and failed to defeat a proud man's human nature. On Divers, she attempts to defeat time to stave off death.
To bear the weight of its subject, Divers fits to scale, ornate and roaming after the intimacies of Have One on Me. The arrangements—tackled by Newsom along with eight different musicians, including Nico Muhly, Ryan Francesconi, Dirty Projectors' David Longstreth, and her brother Pete—cover the ground of all her past work in a fraction of the time, making this her most dynamic and exhilarating album. The first half in particular veers between baroque poise, jaunty blues, and rococo beauty, as if searching for answers in disparate places. Landlocked between the dry, acoustic arrangements of "The Things I Say" and "Same Old Man", the lilting harp and piano of the title track casts her lover as a deep sea diver and measures the distance between them, "how the infinite divides." The meticulous internal rhymes in the chorus of "Leaving the City" contract against the tug of her harp, a cascade of tiny parts that form a huge, billowing whole, like tiny bones in a vast wingspan. "The longer you live, the higher the rent," she sings inside the frenzy.
Divers makes a landscape out of this abstract fear of loss. On the courtly "Anecdotes" and "Waltz of the 101st Lightborne", she is part of a battle fought by birds to try and wrest control of time. "You Will Not Take My Heart Alive" is the most Ren Fair piece here, on which Newsom contemplates ascension to some transcendent plane, "[severing] all strings to everyone and everything." Its sister song "A Pin-Light Bent" descends sadly back towards reason and reconciliation of her unsuccessful quest to outrun time. "In our lives is a common sense/ That relies on the common fence/ That divides and attends," she sings with palpable mourning, accepting that her life, "until the time is spent, is a pin-light, bent." Where this kind of cosmic existentialism could come off like a stoner marveling at the moon, Newsom pulls it off with balance of poetry and reason. Her fantastical world is sometimes hard to get your head around, but it brings surreal, sometimes sci-fi delight to a record that's otherwise often lyrically despairing.
Where Newsom's second and third records each overhauled what came before, Divers is a refinement that draws on elements of each of its predecessors. The shapes of her records often get misinterpreted as concepts themselves, rather than the sign of a writer attuned to her work's needs. Ys from 2006 was the five-song suite; Have One on Me from 2010, the three-disc opus. On its surface Divers is more conventional, a single disc where nine of its 11 songs are under six minutes long, but it also happens to be a wild, genuine concept album. The final song, "Time, As a Symptom", ends with Newsom in raptures, commanding white stars, birds, and ships to "transcend!" On the very last burst, she clips the word to "trans—". The first word on opener "Anecdotes" is "sending." It is a perfect loop.
Most artists on their fourth album settle into atrophy, or at least comfort, Newsom delivers such complex, nuanced music, filled with arcane constructions, that she is only her own yardstick. (In a recent interview about Divers, David Longstreth cited The Milk-Eyed Mender as one of the reasons he quit college: "[What] am I doing here if someone is already out there making music like this, on this level?") Her consummate craft is a given; what surprises every time is her ceaselessly renewing sensitivity for life's vicissitudes and the fantastic ways she finds to express them. D**ivers is not a puzzle to crack, but a dialog that generously articulates the intimate chasm of loss, the way it's both irrational and very real. Nothing will stem the fear of a loved one's death, which western culture does little to prepare us for until the very end, but by pulling at the prospect of mortality from every angle, Newsom emerges straighter-spined, and invites you to stand alongside her. | 2015-10-19T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2015-10-19T02:00:00.000-04:00 | Folk/Country | Drag City | October 19, 2015 | 8.5 | def8f48f-36fc-4a7c-8837-e515392a42b5 | Laura Snapes | https://pitchfork.com/staff/laura-snapes/ | null |
Lupe Fiasco's fifth album, Tetsuo & Youth, is the most focused, thoughtful, and satisfying project he's offered since 2007's The Cool. Whatever set the stage for him, he dives back into rapping for its own sake like it's a big dusty novel he's been waiting to pick back up for years. | Lupe Fiasco's fifth album, Tetsuo & Youth, is the most focused, thoughtful, and satisfying project he's offered since 2007's The Cool. Whatever set the stage for him, he dives back into rapping for its own sake like it's a big dusty novel he's been waiting to pick back up for years. | Lupe Fiasco: Tetsuo & Youth | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/20133-tetsuo-youth/ | Tetsuo & Youth | Lupe Fiasco seems exhausted by his own career. "I think I had my peak and now I am coming down in relevancy," he told Billboard recently. "It's not a sad thing for me...I can't compete with a Wiz Khalifa for the attention of a 12-year old." This doesn't make for inspiring promo copy, but there's no arguing that his run has been a wearying one: From 2006's Food & Liquor, which suffered from leaks and a Billboard mishap misreporting his first-week sales, to 2011's reviled Lasers, which his fans had to storm Atlantic’s gates to get released, Lupe is forever swimming upstream, his hands tied behind his back.
Of course, many of Lupe's problems stem directly from Lupe—he was pointing out flaws in F&L even before it was released, and he’s perennially signing off Twitter, announcing his retirement, scheduling and canceling albums. And yet something feels different this time around: If Tetsuo & Youth is any indication, something has shaken loose in Lupe, because it's the most focused, thoughtful, and satisfying project he's offered since The Cool.
What’s shifted? Well, for one, the album serves as the end of his tortured contractual obligation to Atlantic. Even then, he wasn't let off the hook without a fight: Depending on whom you believe, the world might owe Tetsuo's existence to the hacker group Anonymous, which publicly threatened Atlantic if the album was not given a release date. The label's official announcement came swiftly afterwards, and Lupe tweeted a simple "V" as a wordless gesture of thanks.
Whatever set the stage for him, he dives back into rapping for its own sake like it's a big dusty novel he's been waiting to pick back up for years. He opens after an intro track with "Mural", which lets him rap, endlessly, for nine minutes, with no hook. He remembers browsing his brother’s porn stash and contemplating the back pages, where you could find "ad space for rubber girls." He poses enigmatic rhetorical questions like "Now what’s a coffin with a scratched ceiling?" The question has no specific meaning, but the image, and its ghoulish riddle formulation, makes you ponder a lurid scenario for a half-beat longer so that it sinks in.
Fiasco has talked about his love of painting (he painted the album’s cover), and his way with language has always felt painterly rather than writerly, more concerned with how one word shades the next than with literal coherence. The words sound and feel gorgeous, and Tetsuo & Youth bursts with ripe, beautiful lines, like "Sanskrit dance on the page of the dead book," from "Body of Work", or "High as the angel on Dikembe’s shoulder" from "They.Resurrect.Over.New". Following his darting thoughts has always been a thrill, and Tetsuo is a gratifyingly clear transmission.
His longer, more ambitious gambits connect, too, mostly because they preach to no one. He has earned a reputation for sermonizing, but his best songs, like "Hip-Hop Saved My Life", eschew sermons for empathy: Even the KKK member he namechecked on on F&L's "American Terrorist", who "can't burn his cross because he can't afford the gasoline," was worthy of pathos. On Tetsuo's "Prisoner 1 & 2", Lupe examines the prison-industrial complex, wriggling his way into multiple characters' heads, including the prison guard who has to work at the prison "or it's no lights" and feels a pang of jealousy every time a prisoner walks out. On "Deliver", a pizza delivery car serves as a metaphorical vehicle to explore neglected neighborhoods and the semi-mythical status of "the hood." Neither song hits a single strident, or forced, note.
Unfortunately, the same weakness that always hobbles Lupe albums—namely, the music—continues to dog him here. His in-house production team consistently surrounds him with a flavorless, vaguely rock-derived backing, while hook singers like "Australian Idol" winner Guy Sebastian and St. Paul singer/songwriter Nikki Jean croon the anonymous choruses. The placid, flat-footed rhythm is a poor match for Lupe's lively, elastic flow. Ironically, one of his recent "label concession" singles, the spry Ty Dolla $ign-featuring "Next to It", would have livened up the album's sound considerably. It's not on here, leaving Lupe in his own universe. It’s a pleasant place, but often a little flat.
Lupe has always been most exciting when he's somewhere outside his comfort zone, engaging directly with the commercial-rap epicenter he criticizes so shrewdly. He has a naturally subversive mind, but a subversive working outside the mainstream has very little to examine or tweak, and he's thrilling when he’s wriggling on the hook of a big, fat, contradiction—pushing against his audience’s idea of him with Bun B's "Swang on 'Em", for instance, or grappling with magnetism of rap cliches on "Daydreamin'". "Chopper", produced by DJ Dahi, pairs Lupe with Trae tha Truth, Billy Blue, Buk of Psychodrama, Trouble, Fam-Lay, and Glasses Malone, a never-to-be-repeated line-up and a ferocious standout.
Of course, sometimes when Lupe engages with the mainstream, you get strident messes like Lasers' "Words I Never Said". You just never know. He's mercurial, as likely to strike gold on an obviously corporate-mandated single or an inward-burrowing indulgence. It’s tough to imagine his best-case scenario for creating: He always seems to be interrupting himself mid-sentence. In a recent New Yorker profile of Chris Rock, hip-hop critic and author Nelson George affectionately dubbed Rock the "Duke of Doubt," pinpointing the skepticism that makes Chris Rock’s comedy hardy and evergreen. If Lupe has a similar wellspring, it is ambivalence. It's a tricky muse, but every Lupe project has found a way to harness at least 15 or 20 minutes of his fluid, fleeting mind. Tetsuo & Youth is the most generous gulp he's managed in years. | 2015-01-22T01:00:01.000-05:00 | 2015-01-22T01:00:01.000-05:00 | Rap | Atlantic / 1st & 15th | January 22, 2015 | 7.2 | defdbf24-5186-44e5-9d6e-f1ab23cc3320 | Jayson Greene | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jayson-greene/ | null |
On their fourth full-length, Jacuzzi Boys’ ongoing transition from garage rock to slick pop remains hampered by their vacuous attitude. | On their fourth full-length, Jacuzzi Boys’ ongoing transition from garage rock to slick pop remains hampered by their vacuous attitude. | Jacuzzi Boys: Ping Pong | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22573-ping-pong/ | Ping Pong | The fourth full-length by Miami trio Jacuzzi Boys begins with frontman/guitarist Gabriel Alcala imagining a feeling of intoxication from leaving the house while carrying a knife: “These days, everything’s too nice/Walk around, it’s another day/Goin’ out with my lucky blade.” If he has an issue with things being too prettied-up for his liking, he still chose to express himself with a song drenched in a polished, edgeless sheen. And other than a stylized hint of violence, the song’s psychedelic pop exterior and trailing “oohs” leave us with no deeper an impression than a passing daydream.
It’s not like Ping Pong’s sound de-fangs the passion of Jacuzzi Boys, but there’s certainly no sense of danger or even friction hidden in the album’s grooves. In strictly musical terms, Alcala’s smooth vocal facility gave him a “mature” aura early on in Jacuzzi Boys’ career. These days, he’s developed into a more-than-capable singer. The problem is when he asks, “Do you feel what I feel?/I feel it every day,” he doesn’t give us any inkling of what he’s feeling, nor does he really entice us to figure it out.
If Alcala and his bandmates consider their music a kind of blade that protects them and serves as their sword against generic uniformity, they need to be more honest with themselves about how unthreatening their music actually is. The band’s name conjures images of party times in frothing hot tubs, but the music itself has a richness of mood that’s sold short by the band’s vacant imagery, which even had a hint of daft charm when Jacuzzi Boys were barely out of their teens. Now in their early-to-mid thirties, the subject matter has them sounding stuck.
On “Can’t Fight Forever,” Alcala sings, “I don’t know how I really feel/Sometimes it’s really hard to feel,” over a slinking groove that bassist Danny Gonzales and drummer Diego Monasterios deliver with an impeccable balance of push and reserve. You can close your eyes and picture huge crowds bopping hard to the song, but the resignation that underpins and deflates it is actually alarming. “Sometimes, when I’m not fine,” Alcala continues, “I go looking for a cool time/Waking up is a such a trip/Like the sound of a hard whip.”
It’s just that Alcala sounds no more impassioned singing about attraction than he does about antifreeze. When he manages to deliver lines that at least have the potential to intrigue or provoke—“Girls like love and boys like blood” is a phrase Gonzales would repeat to his mother as a child—he and the band squander that potential by making you feel as if their understanding of human behavior derives entirely from 1980s music videos.
Jacuzzi Boys started trading-in their traditionalist garage-rock approach for slickness with their second album, 2011’s Glazin. At times, they’ve come close to straight synthpop. But they’ve navigated that change without actually watering down their music—something so many other bands have failed at. Not unlike the Dandy Warhols did over a three-album run from 1997 to 2003, Jacuzzi Boys have already proven they can keep their feet in guitar-driven rock and pop while maintaining their balance, which would suggest ample possibilities for future work.
Unfortunately, their sun-zapped slacker outlook drags them back, miscasting themselves as a modern-day answer to hollow, overly attitude-conscious acts like Black Rebel Motorcycle Club. They don’t have to. As a rock band swimming against Miami’s dance and Latin currents, surely they have more interesting stories they can tell us. Their own music deserves it. | 2016-11-12T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2016-11-12T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Mag Mag | November 12, 2016 | 6.6 | defffdc4-bb28-4e7b-9d4f-56dd1c4e1c15 | Saby Reyes-Kulkarni | https://pitchfork.com/staff/saby-reyes-kulkarni/ | null |
The Australian band delivers a jarring, dissonant record of non-linear death metal filtered through a necro black-metal screen, with a crisp high end that brings out every jagged turn. | The Australian band delivers a jarring, dissonant record of non-linear death metal filtered through a necro black-metal screen, with a crisp high end that brings out every jagged turn. | Portal: ION | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/portal-ion/ | ION | “Then I bid you farewell, and I fucking wish the best for you,” said ex-Pantera vocalist Phil Anselmo as he concluded his introduction of the Australian death-metal band Portal at the 2014 edition of his Housecore Horror Festival in Austin. It’s not exactly the kind of stage banter likely to get a crowd pumped up for experimental death metal, yet there isn’t much else he could have said to prepare the audience for them. Portal, a nightmarish embodiment of figures that seem barely humanoid, have always been the abstract extension of Australia’s norm-obliterating, sometimes accidentally avant death-metal scene, which includes Sadistik Exekution, Bestial Warlust, and Impetuous Ritual (led by two Portal members, drummer Ignis Fatuus and bassist Omenous Fugue). Their fifth record, ION, dispenses with murk and brings their sound into the sunlight, letting it burn in agony. It is their clearest, and as a result, most terrifying effort.
ION is non-linear death metal filtered through a necro black-metal screen, heavy on a high end that brings out every jagged turn of guitarists Horror Illogium and Aphotic Mote, whose playing resembles Morbid Angel’s Trey Azagthoth if he took guitar lessons from DNA’s Arto Lindsay. Turbulence has long been their forte, though now the choppier edges are much more prominent. They swarm and peck with a chaotic logic only they truly understand, not far off from Luc Lemay’s slashing cross-riffing method on Gorguts’ 1998 album Obscura. Since Portal aren’t submerged in bass as much as before (not that it was a detriment to them in the first place), the Curator’s vocals glide through, his whispers even more ominous. Though he’s the star of Portal’s live show, with his outrageous costumes—most recently his “Bride of Cthulu” getup—he serves a more supporting role on their records, a balm for the rest of the band’s spasmodic outbursts.
ION also reveals what Portal take from modern classical, particularly repetition and atonality. Horror Illogium creates spirals of squalls. “Crone” takes a trance-inducing black-metal passage and strips any ambient pleasantries from it. “Phreqs” is a master class in tension; in the song’s second half, Horror Illogium’s lead floats behind Aphotic Mote’s escalating rhythm, a vocal-less howling driving it off a steep cliff. There aren’t many death-metal bands with that command of dynamics, and fewer who take them to such bizarre ends as Portal do.
Portal are extreme beyond extreme, and they are also genuinely weirder than many of their Australian peers. The exception here is “Spores,” a short, nearly static wall of riff noise that is as close as they get to sounding straightforward. They stay in a consistent mode here, where the rest of ION shudders like a cosmic pinball machine where your brain is the ball. In unconventional metal, it’s often brief moments of familiarity that fuck with you the most. “Spores” makes you think Portal might let up, that they’ll throw in a classic, late-1980s death-metal riff for comfort. But Portal aren’t about reassurance. They are exploring death metal’s possibilities as unconventional and even uncomfortable music. Death metal’s beginnings lay in taking thrash to the next level; in that sense, ION both honors and transcends its origins. | 2018-02-06T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2018-02-06T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Metal | Profound Lore | February 6, 2018 | 7.8 | df021c3d-74ca-46c9-99e4-d735cc787058 | Andy O'Connor | https://pitchfork.com/staff/andy-o'connor/ | |
Dan Lissvik's latest solo album echoes his past glory with the Swedish dance-rockers Studio, but teases when it could fulfill. | Dan Lissvik's latest solo album echoes his past glory with the Swedish dance-rockers Studio, but teases when it could fulfill. | Dan Lissvik: Midnight | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21972-midnight/ | Midnight | With each passing summer, Studio’s lone studio album, West Coast, becomes more of a Dark Tower, an unobtainable beacon forever on the horizon, seemingly never to be reached or returned to. When the Swedish dance duo released that sprawling double album in the summer of 2007, it capped six years’ worth of singles and brought them a great deal of buzz and remix work. Dan Lissvik and Rasmus Hägg were suddenly cast to the front of Scandinavia’s nü-disco and/or nü-Balearic revival, easily lumped in with the likes of Lindstrøm & Prins Thomas, Todd Terje, the Tough Alliance, Air France, and more. It’s a landmark album in which previously demarcated indie rock and left-field dance culture hooked up, the darker and stranger kin of LCD Soundsystem’s Sound of Silver from that same year. But after 2008’s Yearbook 2 culled their remix work for the likes of Shout Out Louds and Kylie Minogue, Hägg and Lissvik split.
Nine years on, West Coast still casts a shadow over Lissvik’s body of work as a solo artist, an expectation that Lissvik himself has nurtured. Even on his 2014 album with his project Atelje, he titled the lead track “Ode to Studio,” though its three minutes wouldn’t quite scratch that itch. At times, Lissvik’s old band seems like that old relationship that haunts him still, replaying those old fights in his head and reminiscing even as he moves on with his life.
Midnight is the result of Lissvik squeezing in recording time amidst the demands of being a new father, when the wee hours were the only time he could get to himself. He even names the eight tracks after each letter in the word. The first third is playful if not quite memorable: “M” utilizes the kind of lounge lilt that Terje dusted off on It’s Album Time, with a zippy organ line and Henry Mancini-like doot-doot-doots for good measure. But despite such lark, there’s a curlicue of guitar that pings like a steel drum and, as the perky bass falls away, a more melancholic plucked bass echoes underneath. “D” also looks back, the keys pneumatic like Gershon Kingsley’s early Moog classic “Popcorn,” while the sleek backdrop brings to mind “Blue Monday.”
But as “N” swoops down, with its slow, throbbing bassline, primitive drum machine pattern, echoing chimes, and flecks of flamenco guitar, you wonder if Lissvik might have pulled a fast one and gone back into an old hard drive to plunder some old Studio session, so dead-on is the sound. It’s one thing for Lissvik to mimic the sound palette of his old band, but what makes “N” stick is that it also conjures Studio’s telltale vibe, which was never so much ‘beach sunset’ as it was ‘darkness at noon.’ The tropes of Balearic–nylon string guitar, dub bass, analog synth, slow groove–give a more foreboding edge, a sunny shore occluded by storm clouds.
It carries on to the second “I,” which even more closely resembles a lost track from West Coast, winding like an island road at night. It carries over to “G,” the album track with the toughest nü-disco beat. Lissvik expertly brings in filigrees of hand percussion, stings of wah-wah guitar and those infinitely echoing wordless exhalations that haunted West Coast tracks like “Origin” and “West Side.” About the only thing they are missing is Lissvik’s insouciant, Robert Smith-like vocals. But then, just like that, Midnight returns to intriguing-but-not-vital terrain with “H,” a brief future-bass type of doodle, and “T,” another breezy nü-disco instrumental. The effect is such that it makes those three middle tracks seem like an aural mirage, West Coast still totemic and distant on the horizon after all this time.
CORRECTION: An earlier version of this article incorrectly attributed Studio vocals to Hagg, rather than Lissvik. | 2016-06-15T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-06-15T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Smalltown Supersound | June 15, 2016 | 6.9 | df023ee3-82a6-48ea-8a61-1db80d2df0b1 | Andy Beta | https://pitchfork.com/staff/andy-beta/ | null |
Phoenix are as decadent and beguiling as ever. Their sixth album is a romantic, glossy, soft-pop ode to sweet escapes and dance floors, though at times their pleasure-seeking falls flat. | Phoenix are as decadent and beguiling as ever. Their sixth album is a romantic, glossy, soft-pop ode to sweet escapes and dance floors, though at times their pleasure-seeking falls flat. | Phoenix: Ti Amo | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/23281-ti-amo/ | Ti Amo | In April, Phoenix teased a bit of music from their new album in a lingerie commercial directed by Sofia Coppola, the wife of frontman Thomas Mars. Unknown at the time, the song turned out to be “Fior di Latte,” an appropriately gauzy synth-pop slow jam that insists, “We’re meant to get it on.” The title refers to the purest Italian gelato, nothing but sweetened cream, and musically, it’s almost as delicious as it is decadent. When Mars sighs, “Fior di latte/Don’t think about it, trigger me happy,” his private language somehow makes sense.
Gelato was reportedly a central inspiration for Ti Amo, the French quartet’s sixth album overall and their third since breaking out with 2009’s Wolfgang Amadeus Phoenix. Formed in Versailles in the late-’90s with close ties to their peers in Air and Daft Punk, the beguiling synth-rock act had long bucked conventions about what a band could be in a way that deserved a bigger audience. They finally got it thanks to the inimitable and, with apologies to Coppola, “lost in translation” feeling of festival anthems like “1901” and “Lisztomania.” The eventual follow-up, 2013’s Bankrupt!, was a fine excuse for Phoenix fans to celebrate their newfound Coachella-headliner status. Four years later, Ti Amo feels like a sugary treat that ought to hold us over for another festival season, though it hints at loftier ambitions.
At its heart, Ti Amo is another meticulously constructed 10-song set of glossy soft-pop romance. Whenever Phoenix get around to release what’s sure to be a stellar best-of comp, a few welcoming standouts from Ti Amo will belong on there. Alongside the overt come-ons of “Fior di Latte,” another highlight is the euphoric “J-Boy,” which packs sonic details as tightly as its airy “Just because of you” vocal hook. Mars’ scattered, dystopian lyrical imagery works almost like a backdrop for a sci-fi music video, while the real drama plays out in video-game burbles and exaggerated Auto-Tune-like vocal effects.
Not all songs on Ti Amo are this memorable, but others come close. “Fleur de Lys” flips a Fela Kuti sample for what might be their most Hall and Oates song yet, with its urgent “no rest ’till I get to you” falsetto. The ennui that often underlines Phoenix’s songs resurfaces on the charming “Lovelife,” whose lines of solitude and regret belie its title. The galloping bassline on “Tuttifrutti” is in the same lineage as peak New Order, though the lofty vocals about “trashing motels” are more in keeping with Phoenix’s earlier blue-eyed soul.
Along with pop’s ephemerality, the gelato on Ti Amo also plays into the what the band has called its “fantasized version of Italy,” a loose theme that carries over into the accompanying videos and the set pieces of their tour. Recorded in Paris against a backdrop of terrorism, ethnonationalism, and refugees in crisis, the sunny, upbeat Ti Amo is thus meant as a “safe haven” in dark times, Phoenix have said. Although Phoenix originally stood out in their native France for singing in English, deciphering lyrics has mattered less in the mélange of their music. Their effortless use here of not only English, Italian, and Spanish but also, yes, French, on an album concerned with the pure pleasure of a Roman holiday, scans as a bold defense of all that is modern, humanist, and cosmopolitan, akin to the optimism embodied by the exclamation point of recently elected French president Emmanuel Macron’s En Marche! movement.
Alas, these songs—sculpted from thousands of hours of recordings—are being asked to do too much to sustain a coherent geographical concept. On the churning title track, with its polyglot message of love, the narrator also riffs self-awarely about flipping between Buzzcocks and classic Italian crooners, between “unsophisticated soft rock” and Beethoven; other lyrics like “open up your legs” and “don’t tell me no” complicate matters discomfortingly. “Via Veneto” mentions a sonogram, but without the payoff in figurative meaning to be found on Wolfgang’s “Rome,” where a relationship crumbles like an empire. And the grim reality of the headlines does seep in, not always as cleverly as with the vanishing reefs and “Kamikaze in a hopeless world” of “J-Boy.” “Role Model” refers to riots outside and its central character is a Machiavellian chameleon at a podium, signing autographs and climbing up a hill. The overall effect is similar to one of those vacations so exhausting you need another vacation.
For all their complexities, Phoenix have typically sounded effortless. And from a stage or streaming playlist, these songs will gel with the music of their last two albums. But the work that went into them, apparently on a 9-to-5 schedule, is palpable. Another case in point is the finale, “Telefono.” There’s a slyly Strokes-like crunch. Mars is singing in Italian. He’s on the phone to a lover in Hollywood, reminiscing about a trip to Rome. He’s as we found him at the end of Bankrupt!—alone, “solo”—but his location is wildly specific: in a studio, in the Italian beach town of Passoscuro. Like the rest of Ti Amo, it’s impressively rococo, but perhaps easier to admire than to love. Don’t think about it, trigger us happy. | 2017-06-08T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-06-08T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Glassnote | June 8, 2017 | 7 | df0412e3-5d3a-4d3c-a17f-e325fd9c1760 | Marc Hogan | https://pitchfork.com/staff/marc-hogan/ | null |
For their new album, Kingston, Penn.'s punk outfit Title Fight signed to Anti- and took an atmospheric turn. The effects-driven fretwork is the record's most distinguishing trait, especially given the absence of the double-time drumming and in-your-face bass parts that dominated the band’s preceding albums. | For their new album, Kingston, Penn.'s punk outfit Title Fight signed to Anti- and took an atmospheric turn. The effects-driven fretwork is the record's most distinguishing trait, especially given the absence of the double-time drumming and in-your-face bass parts that dominated the band’s preceding albums. | Title Fight: Hyperview | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/20173-hyperview/ | Hyperview | Baptized in Hot Water Music, schooled in bicoastal hardcore and post-punk, and supported by pizza-obsessed Tumblr kids and critics alike, Title Fight are living proof of the cherry-picking mores of modern punk bands and their audiences. The group’s formative years—namely, the period spanning from the early slew of EPs in the late aughts to their 2011 debut, Shed—painted a portrait of four working-class kids looking to start some skate-ready ruckus and slap some sense into the Warped Tour set. They proceeded to balance that might with melody on 2012’s excellent album Floral Green, and further refined the approach on 2013’s Spring Songs EP. A decade in, the labels aren’t sticking like they used to. For every "true pop punk" acolyte who groups them with Man Overboard and the Wonder Years, there’s a '90s-inclined listener who considers them the new Jawbreaker, or a former hardcore fan curious to see what’s coming next.
When labels become irrelevant, then so do the expectations associated with them, and it is from this precipice that Title Fight leap into Hyperview, propelled forwards by disarming self-awareness and generous, generous use of the whammy bar. Title Fight have referred explicitly to the album as a work of "guitar music," and the effects-driven fretwork is the record’s most distinguishing trait, especially given the absence of the double-time drumming and in-your-face bass parts that dominated the band’s preceding albums. The boards are again manned by Will Yip, the band’s longtime producer; making a significant departure for an aural engineer typically inclined towards robust, no-nonsense punk, he swathes the chiming guitars in warped, shoegaze-y tones and sticks them at the very front of the mix, optimizing their dissonant effects. The textures are tactile; the steeled, gnashing strumming that opens "Chlorine" feels sharp enough to slice, while the cavalcade of prickly, chiming chords that kicks off "Trace Me Onto You" rushes in from all sides, bristling against the ears like steel wool.
The relentless focus on guitar tone might be too strong, though: on songs like "Mrahc", and "Rose of Sharon", the bleached-out fretwork bleeds into the surrounding sonic space as to render Jamie Rhoden and Ned Russin’s vocals downright inaudible. It’s worth noting that in the case of the album’s delirious closer, "New Vision", the mistranslation actually adds to the experience. Rather, the seamless union of the singer's mumbles and the guitar’s moans constitutes a new language in itself, united in the gloaming. But without a strong vocal presence to bolster slow drifters like "Dizzy", the richness of the guitars steadily overwhelms until there’s nothing left.
That’s a shame, because from a narrative standpoint, Hyperview’s lyrical concerns prove compelling, if only because they’re so relatable. "Trace Me Onto You" approaches the rage-fueled rush of makeup sex as a desperate attempt to reconnect with some form of the "we," thereby legitimizing the "I," a false union whose collapse is chronicled on "Liar’s Love". "Your Pain Is Mine Now", by contrast, seeks resolution in the form of emotional warfare, all Gatling guns and wasted tears. “Burned alive" and "tangled in the dark" at the same time, Rhoden renders the sadness of subject, singer and listener obsolete. His muffled whines of "Cry/ Die/Boo-hoo" are all but engulfed by the flange, a pretty little nihilistic touch.
Some of the hardcore faithful criticize Hyperview as a naked stab at an "indie crossover"—a softer, watered-down version of Title Fight's melodic pop-punk peddled as transcendent, but hollow in character. To a large chunk of fans, the band's signing to Anti- (the Epitaph sister label behind releases from decidedly non-punk acts like Dr. Dog and Xavier Rudd) constitutes both a commercial cop-out and a slight against the kids who wanted to see one of the more promising pop-punk acts grow up into a moshpit machine rather than an underwater emo outfit. Title Fight may be young, muddy, and occasionally clunky with the wordplay, but they’re certainly not stupid: The proper assertion of one’s independence may very well lie in the subtle, steady subversion of genre rather than a grizzled scream or the crash of cymbals. As for the complicated equation balancing volume and dynamics with intent, it's safe to say that Hyperview packs just as much intensity as in past records, albeit with a cooler, softer flame; between "Rose of Sharon", "Mrahc", and "New Vision", even the most skeptical fan will be able to find a slow-burner that captures the thrill of any Shed song. Consistent, concise and stylistically compelling, Hyperview is a good set of tracks, and a worthy crossover attempt at that, provided you’re OK with consulting the lyrics booklet and willing to take a ride on the undertow. | 2015-02-11T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2015-02-11T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Anti- | February 11, 2015 | 7.6 | df177b7b-5e3c-4168-9e28-3ea551275ff6 | Zoe Camp | https://pitchfork.com/staff/zoe-camp/ | 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 a groundbreaking 1988 album, a crucial document in Black rock music with huge, brawny riffs and a complex socio-political message. | 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 a groundbreaking 1988 album, a crucial document in Black rock music with huge, brawny riffs and a complex socio-political message. | Living Colour: Vivid | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/living-colour-vivid/ | Vivid | On February 25, 1989, Living Colour’s Vivid entered the Top 20 on the Billboard 200 chart—an impressive feat for any debut album, but odd for a record that was already 10 months old. Released in May 1988, Vivid took nearly half a year to chart, entering at No. 194 before embarking upon a slow, steady climb that seemed to move one rung at a time. So, on the cusp of Vivid’s leap to No. 16, Living Colour took a well-deserved victory lap—literally.
Making their network television debut that week on The Arsenio Hall Show, the New York hard-rock band delivered the sort of performance that—even without easy YouTube recall—can still be mentally conjured frame-by-frame decades after the fact. Decked out in a matching orange tank top and spandex Body Glove shorts, singer Corey Glover looked less like the typical rock frontman than a guy on his way to the gym, and partway through the band’s electrifying rendition of Vivid’s lead-off crusher, “Cult of Personality,” he decided to get his steps in. After casually strolling off the stage during the second verse, Glover made a beeline for the audience and began running up and down the aisles with his mic like a Day-Glo Donahue, before returning to the stage for some synchronized dance moves and cyclonic hair-whipping as the song raced toward its furious double-time finale. (Arsenio was never known for subtle expressions of enthusiasm, but this might’ve been the first and only time he felt compelled to head-bang his appreciation.) Alas, for many viewers, Living Colour’s bright sartorial choices and mid-song calisthenics routines weren’t the most striking features of the band. Rather, it was the fact that this was all being done by four Black men—an anomaly that, by all historical precedents, really should’ve been the norm.
During the post-war 20th century, Black artists were the agents of rock‘n’roll innovation and subcultural mobilization, from the genre’s early-’50s infancy on through its subsequent mutations into garage, psych, proto-metal, arena rock, punk, and hardcore. But by the ‘80s, that legacy had been all but scrubbed from commercial rock radio and ignored by the nascent MTV. Sure, Michael Jackson could piggyback on Eddie Van Halen’s shoulders to land a Top 20 single on Billboard’s Mainstream Rock chart, and Prince could do the same whenever he revealed himself to be the new-wave Hendrix, but these were rare monocultural pop stars with the clout and promotional muscle to breach industry-mandated genre lines. For more unconventional Black artists—like dubwise hardcore pioneers Bad Brains or ska-punk eccentrics Fishbone—the walls were closing in from both sides, as they were shut out from both the white world of rock radio and the Black mainstream star-making apparatus that favored slick R&B balladeers, synth-funk loverboys, and fashionable rappers.
By 1985, Vernon Reid’s growing frustration with this Jim Crowing of the music industry had reached its breaking point. Born in London in 1958, but raised in Brooklyn from the age of 2, Reid was a musical omnivore who was schooled by his parents’ funk, soul, and rock records. He came of age musically in the fabled early-‘80s New York underground, where post-punk, mutant disco, and experimental anti-pop scenes were separated by only a flight of stairs in multi-level clubs like Danceteria. As a studied guitarist, Reid landed his first pro gig playing with jazz drummer Ronald Shannon Jackson in the fusion ensemble Decoding Society, the sort of group that earned invites to prestigious international festivals like Montreux, but whose hard-charging rhythm-forward style allowed Reid to flex a fleet-fingered dexterity that would put most metal shredders to shame.
Eager to lead his own band, Reid formed Living Colour (its British spelling nodding to his birthplace) in 1983 as a revolving-door ensemble where he could push his avant-jazz proclivities into a more rock direction. Over the next three years, the group served as a sandbox for a host of players (drummer Pheeroan akLaff, keyboardist Geri Allen, and guitarist/bassist Jerome Harris among them) who would go on to populate the credits of countless notable jazz records in the decades to come. But if Reid had corralled a community, he struggled to find an audience beyond his peers—a circumstance that, in 1985, inspired him to form the Black Rock Coalition, a support system of like-minded Black artists who didn’t easily slot into industry-approved genre formats. In a manifesto penned by Reid and Village Voice music critic Greg Tate, the BRC declared: “Rock and roll, like practically every form of popular music across the globe, is Black music and we are its heirs. We, too, claim the right of creative freedom and access to American and International airwaves, audiences, markets, resources, and compensations, irrespective of genre.” Black artists were foundational to rock‘n’roll’s past; the BRC would ensure they’d be part of its future, too.
On a practical level, the BRC provided its members with industry guidance, creative direction, and opportunities to perform together at BRC-branded showcases. With some 20 bands and 60 people initially operating under its banner, it was by no means a given that its founder’s own band would eventually become the BRC’s most visible ambassador. But Living Colour’s trajectory would shift radically when, one evening in 1985, Reid was dragged by his sister to a birthday party in the Upper West Side for a woman who happened to be dating Corey Glover—whose show-stopping rendition that night of “Happy Birthday” to his girlfriend inspired Reid to exchange numbers.
A church-choir kid who found a new religion as a teen frequenting Bad Brains and Cro-Mags matinees, Glover had no prior professional singing experience; at the time he met Reid, he was a working actor, and had just landed his big break with a small role in Oliver Stone’s Vietnam epic Platoon. It would be months before Reid actually reached out to Glover to formally audition for Living Colour, and as the singer tells it, he was only invited to perform with the band several weeks later when another vocalist dropped out of the gig last minute. But whatever hesitation Reid might’ve had about Glover presumably melted away once the singer settled into his new role: Blessed with a commanding, gospel-powered voice that could level city blocks and the magnetic look-at-me charisma of an eager thespian, Glover was the vehicle through which Reid’s outré musical strategies and intellectual lyrical concepts could engage the masses.
If only it were that easy. With Glover on board, Reid locked in his rhythm section: Will Calhoun, a seasoned drummer who was once part of Harry Belafonte’s touring ensemble, and bassist Muzz Skillings, who was well on his way to becoming a firefighter before committing to the group. But while Living Colour’s combination of raw energy and blazing virtuosity made them a word-of-mouth sensation at local haunts like CBGB, the band were turned down by major labels like Elektra and Warner Brothers on account of being too Black for rock audiences and too rock for Black audiences. To break out of that purgatory, they would need nothing less than a co-sign from the most famous frontman in rock history.
Ever the trendspotter, Mick Jagger was hipped to Living Colour while he was in New York recording his second solo album, 1987’s Primitive Cool. Reid joined the sessions through an open audition for guitarists, which led to Jagger attending a Living Colour gig at CBGB. Duly impressed, the Rolling Stone offered to donate some of his spare studio time to the band and record a couple of demos with them. They proved to be the keys to securing a contract with Epic—and those Jagger-produced tracks, “Glamour Boys” and “Which Way to America?” became the first building blocks for Vivid.
While he was certainly appreciative of Jagger’s support, Reid nonetheless bristled at the idea a band as preternaturally talented as Living Colour needed it in the first place. “The fact is we shouldn’t have to have the No. 1 rock star in the world take an interest in us for us to even be signed,” he said. “It really took a lot for Vivid to exist.” But if the Living Colour story up to this point was a perpetual uphill struggle, the release of Vivid couldn’t have been better timed to coincide with a moment when conventional notions of mainstream rock and Black culture were both being overturned. Out west, similarly eclectic bands like the Red Hot Chili Peppers, Jane’s Addiction, and Faith No More were starting to make the leap from college radio to the right end of the FM dial, portending the transformation of alternative rock into the new normal. At the same time, rap was outgrowing its block-party roots to become an outlet for Afrocentric education, documentarian street dispatches, and community activism, promoting a revitalized Black consciousness that was also filtering into the work of emergent filmmakers like Spike Lee. On Vivid, Living Colour bridged the worlds of primal rock and thought-provoking rap without actually making a pro-forma rap-rock album in the basic riffs-and-rhymes sense. Rather, they connected the brawn of Led Zeppelin with the brains of Public Enemy, producing their own vision of a Black CNN rebroadcasted via Headbangers Ball.
The first voice we hear on the album doesn’t even belong to Glover, but rather Malcolm X: “And during the few moments that we have left … we want to talk right down to Earth in a language that everybody here can easily understand.” The sample is taken from X’s famed 1963 address “Message to the Grass Roots,” his fiery rejection of peaceful protest in favor of more aggressive actions against white supremacy. For Living Colour, the quote functions as both a nod to a philosophical forefather and a mission statement for Vivid, where complex socio-political discussions were framed in a language that teens in 1988 could easily understand: anthemic, metal-tinged rock with heft and hooks to spare.
That Malcolm X quote tees up the immortal “Cult of Personality,” where Reid alternates between sledgehammered riffage, Rush-worthy arpeggios, and mind-melting Eddie Van Hazel fretboard acrobatics, while Glover namechecks a litany of political figures from history to illustrate the fine line between charisma and megalomania, and the slippery slope between putting our faith in leaders and being subservient to them. It’s one of rock’s greatest Side 1/Track 1 opening salvos. But given that rock radio was still pumping out pop-metal trifles like Winger’s “Seventeen” and Poison’s “Nothing But a Good Time” in 1988, it’s easy to understand why Vivid’s mainstream incursion moved in slow motion.
Certainly, no other major-label rock band in the late-’80s was chronicling the Reagan-era Black American experience in such, well, vivid detail. While Living Colour were hardly the only band of their era wielding Jimmy Page swagger and John Bonham thunder, no one else was applying them to songs as furious and frustrated as “Desperate People,” an unflinching portrait of addiction’s corrosive, deadening effects on the creative mind (inspired by the death of artist Jean-Michel Basquiat) or “Which Way to America?” a raging critique of the country’s impenetrable class and cultural divides. And where the likes of Guns N’ Roses painted the inner city as a seedy wasteland where innocence goes to die, Living Colour presented it as a place where people lived, worked, and dreamed. Co-written by Reid and poet Tracie Morris, “Open Letter (to a Landlord),” is an equally incensed and heart-rending response to the gentrification of working-class communities, functioning as both a seething indictment of predatory developers and an empowering prayer for the disenfranchised.
But for all its righteous indignation, Vivid can also be a fun, irreverent, at times proudly silly record, even when the messaging is serious. “Funny Vibe” is the oldest song in the Living Colour repertoire and is most reflective of the band’s improvisatory roots, delivering a mid-album jolt of Princely funk, proggy fretboard runs, and cameos from Chuck D and Flavor Flav. However, it responds to the scourge of racial profiling not with anger but incredulity. Inspired by Reid’s experience sharing an elevator with an old lady who conspicuously began clutching her purse tighter, the song remains an appropriately absurdist response to a country still reckoning with its ingrained racism. Less topical but equally upbeat, “Glamour Boys” was the rare rock song of its era to poke holes in the construct of masculinity, taking aim at night-club casanovas who are always dressed like a million bucks, but whose affluent image is really a product of smoke, mirrors, and overcharged credit cards.
It’s easy to see why Living Colour would be leery of such poseurs. There was no easy path to success for this band—everything they achieved came through hard work, dogged tenacity, and relentless self-belief in the face of industry indifference. (In this light, Vivid’s punchy cover of Talking Heads’ Fear of Music creeper “Memories Can’t Wait” feels less like a nod to Living Colour’s own Bowery roots than a reassertion of their guiding principle: “Other people can go home/Everybody else can split/I'll be here all the time/No, I can never quit.”) And that could be why Glover couldn’t confine himself to the Arsenio Hall soundstage that night in February 1989—he needed to deliver the band’s message directly to each audience member, converting them one at a time like a door-to-door preacher.
For a few years there, that persistence paid off: The Arsenio appearance was followed a few weeks later by the band’s SNL debut. In May 1989—a full year after its release—Vivid peaked at No. 6 on the Billboard 200, en route to double-platinum sales, and that summer, Living Colour’s old pal Mick invited them to open for the Rolling Stones’ Steel Wheels stadium tour. But even as they were being welcomed into the rock establishment, Living Colour were once again thrust into a position where their mettle was put to the test. Their co-openers for a handful of Stones dates were Guns N’ Roses, then embroiled in controversy surrounding their song “One in a Million” and its use of racist and homophobic epithets. During a pre-show radio interview, Reid and Calhoun expressed their discomfort with the song, leading to a backstage standoff with the GNR crew and a crudely defensive “I’m not a racist, but…” retort from Axl Rose onstage. At the following night’s show, Reid decisively shut down any further debate on the matter: “Look, if you don’t have a problem with gay people, then don’t call them ‘f*****s. If you don’t have a problem with Black people, then don’t call them ‘n******s.’ I never met a n*****r in my life. Peace.”
In the wake of the GNR showdown, Living Colour seemed to actively recede from the world of mainstream hard rock, perhaps to avoid a situation where they’d ever have to share a stage with someone like Axl Rose ever again. Vivid’s 1990 follow-up, Time’s Up, was a more confrontational collision of Bad Brains-schooled hardcore, doomsday metal, and sacred-cow slaughters that helped land Living Colour a slot among like-minded misfits on the inaugural Lollapalooza tour the next summer. But before long, alt-rock’s shift away from polyrhythmic punk-funk to the more monolithic sound of grunge cast Living Colour to the margins once again. Following 1993’s grimly intense, lukewarmly received Stain, the band split up (at least until 2003’s reunion effort Collideøscope ushered in an ongoing, if highly sporadic, second act).
Given that Living Colour made their greatest commercial and cultural impact with their first album, it’s tempting to confine their story to the turn of the ’90s. And the relatively brief timespan of their groundbreaking first run might explain why this band has yet to be properly canonized by rock’s remaining gatekeepers: The fact Reid was nowhere to be found on the 100 greatest guitarists lists published by Guitar World and Rolling Stone feels like an especially egregious injustice; ditto for Glover on the latter’s greatest singers list. You won’t find Vivid on any best debut albums lists from rock-centric publications of note. And an induction into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame—for which Living Colour have been eligible since 2013—seems less likely with each passing year.
But the legacy of Vivid has a very long tail, extending from Rage Against the Machine and Sevendust to Ben Harper and Gary Clark Jr. to TV on the Radio and Bartees Strange to Brittany Howard and Black Pumas to WILLOW and Soul-Glo. Not all of these artists are necessarily direct sonic descendants of Living Colour, but they’ve all flowed through the cracks in the industry barriers that Vivid breached, and, in their own unique ways, have each inherited the mission of reclaiming Black creators’ frontline position at rock’s vanguard, both under- and above-ground. Just last month, a DIY Black artist with the No. 1 single in America could be seen rocking a guitar on SNL while dressed as a Dead Kennedy—and in moments like these, the way to the America that Living Colour and the BRC envisioned back in the mid-’80s seems a little more clear.
Additional research by Deirdre McCabe Nolan
Correction: A previous version of this review stated that Doug Wimbish invited Vernon Reid to the Primitive Cool sessions and that Muzz Skillings was a wedding bassist. These were incorrect and have been removed. | 2022-11-20T00:00:00.000-05:00 | 2022-11-20T00:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Epic | November 20, 2022 | 9 | df1a04de-37b3-4284-85b2-42c7937beb56 | Stuart Berman | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stuart-berman/ | |
Like Bruce Springsteen's We Shall Overcome: The Seeger Sessions, this album features an elder rock statesman making an effective protest record thanks to a raucously communal approach. | Like Bruce Springsteen's We Shall Overcome: The Seeger Sessions, this album features an elder rock statesman making an effective protest record thanks to a raucously communal approach. | Neil Young: Living With War | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/8856-living-with-war/ | Living With War | Four dead in O-hi-o. Southern man, when will you pay them back? A kinder, gentler machine gun hand. Like many musicians of his generation, Neil Young has never shied away from political statements. However, his views haven't always been easy to pigeonhole as left-leaning, complicated as they are by Nixon-empathy ("Campaigner"), his early-80s support for Reagan, and most recently, his ill-advised United 93 quickie tribute "Let's Roll" (not as lingeringly embarrassing as Paul McCartney's "Freedom", but a stumble nonetheless).
These mercurial politics have a lot to do with Young's impulsive nature; as his manager Elliot Roberts put it in Jimmy McDonough's biography Shakey, "If he watches TV on the road and there's a CNN special on Bosnia, Neil wants do a record and a benefit within two days." With his attention now directed toward the current Bush administration and Iraq war, that M.O. hasn't changed; in fact, the internet's greased distribution wheels have fueled it, allowing Living With War to travel from studio to stream to stores in roughly a month's time.
This fast-track approach has both advantages and drawbacks. Lyrically, Living With War captures all the indignant ferocity and off-the-cuff logic of a blog-post screed: calls for impeachment, "Mission Accomplished" mockery, etc. Obviously, Young's not dishing out well-measured, footnoted policy analysis here, but neither is he bothering with metaphor or subtlety-- it's all direct, literal, and viscerally emotional. It's a bold move: Shooting from the hip opens Young up to a whole list of easy talking-point criticisms ("oh my god, he was born in Canada!"), and the proper-name references almost guarantee a brief shelf life.
But from a musical perspective, Living With War's short gestation benefits Young's performance, inspiring him to make his loudest, rawest release of new material since at least Ragged Glory, maybe even Rust Never Sleeps. With his guitar re-tuned to its characteristic distorted snarl, and the clearly live mix preserving bum notes and sloppy harmonica or trumpet solos, Young returns to the spontaneous recording style of albums like Tonight's the Night that best suits his talents. Coming hot on the heels of the contemplative Prairie Wind, the serrated guitar of "After the Garden" and "Restless Consumer" quickly puts to rest any notion that post-aneurysm, sixty-something Neil was going to slip quietly into retirement.
The album's most effective political statement-- the decision to use a 100-strong choir for backing vocals-- has little to do with the lyrics. As unrehearsed as the main instruments, the choir is used not for pretentious ends, but as a way to turn every song into a mass protest, with Young's distinctive howl falling back into the mix behind the wall of voices on the title track or the centerpiece "Let's Impeach the President". Ironically, preaching to the choir with a choir saves Young's complaints about cable news, photo-ops, and pharmaceutical ads from succumbing to faded-hippie fogeyism.
Alongside Bruce Springsteen's We Shall Overcome: The Seeger Sessions, Living With War is the second album this spring on which an elder rock statesman makes an effective protest record with a raucously communal approach, reverently covering historically heavy anthems along the way ("America the Beautiful", in this case). As a political statement, however, Young's record may be more fleeting, with its topical references to steroids and New Orleans. But despite the press releases, the impulsive politics of Living With War are almost incidental to its success, mere fuel for Neil Young to return to the vicious sound he's neglected in recent times. | 2006-04-30T02:00:50.000-04:00 | 2006-04-30T02:00:50.000-04:00 | Rock | Reprise | April 30, 2006 | 7.6 | df1a0d7d-8f69-4761-8481-c3acad5a47c1 | Rob Mitchum | https://pitchfork.com/staff/rob- mitchum/ | null |
In a departure from the airier meditations of 2017’s Brønshøj (Puncak), the Indonesian duo’s Sublime Frequencies debut explores an earthy fusion of doom and folk metal. | In a departure from the airier meditations of 2017’s Brønshøj (Puncak), the Indonesian duo’s Sublime Frequencies debut explores an earthy fusion of doom and folk metal. | Senyawa: Sujud | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/senyawa-sujud/ | Sujud | Senyawa’s music rises from the belly of the beast and crawls out of its gaping maw. Each wail, drone, and plucked guitar string from the experimental Indonesian duo evokes the feeling of deep-set hunger; every sound contributes to the tension. Instrumentalist Wukir Suryadi and vocalist Rully Shabara delight in exploiting this powerful sense of yearning, employing a spectrum of emotional registers—in one moment hushed despondence and in another punishing solemnity. When the spell finally breaks, what follows is all the more compelling because of the delayed release.
Senyawa’s Sujud, their first album for the Sublime Frequencies label, is an ode to terra firma; it takes its unifying theme from the Bahasa Indonesian word “tanah,” which translates as “soil,” “ground,” “land,” and “earth.” The theme is reflected across many of the record’s song titles: “Tanggalkan Di Dunia (Undo the World),” “Terbertaktilah Tanah Ini (Blessed Is This Land),” “Kebaikan Tumbuh Dari Tanah (Goodness Grows Off Soil),” and “Kembali Ke Dunia (Return to the World).” The duo’s work seems like a reaction to the current environmental crisis: Suryadi builds many of his own instruments out of natural materials, including the electric guitar on the album, and Shabara’s resonant baritone shapeshifts into feral growls and yelps, lending an organic cast to the music. It often sounds as if Senyawa are summoning the deities of nature, undeterred by the wrath that would inevitably follow. Where 2017’s Brønshøj (Puncak) favored airier meditations in which Suryadi’s homemade string instrument, the bamboo wukir, undulated like thick plumes of smoke above Shabara’s throaty incantations, Sujud spasms into offense mode. Now, Senyawa assert their darkness and eventual redemption with newfound temerity.
Sujud begins with an exorcism. Over the course of “Tanggalkan Di Dunia (Undo the World),” both Shabara’s exalted plainsong and Suryadi’s erratic electric guitar fuse, gradually becoming increasingly distorted. Suryadi throws conventional strumming out the window, instead scratching at the strings with frenetic energy. Together, the two sound as though they’re trying to break apart the earth to expose its ravaged interior. The dust eventually settles on “Penjuru Menyatu (Unified Counters),” the turning point of the album, where Shabara’s vocals shed their formerly atmospheric form and take shape as an almost punk-rock shout, lyrics fully enunciated. The song’s gauzy opening melodies breathe in deeply before the thunderous riffs go chugging uphill, Shabara’s wails accelerating, pedal to the floor.
There is no obvious path to deliverance, but Senyawa reach a final state of peace by the album’s conclusion. Shabara’s grainy ASMR vocalizing turns the high-pitched cooing and shoegaze haziness of “Kebaikan Tumbuh Dari Tanah (Goodness Grows Off Soil)” into a tingly, full-bodied listening experience. The album’s impact lingers in these serene interludes; songs like the closing “Kembali Ke Dunia (Return to the World)” would lose their warlord intensity without the dynamic contrast. Those slivers of light only accentuate the stretches of unrelenting darkness. By the end of Sujud, it’s clear whatever folkloric spirits were previously conjured must return to the tanah, and the only way to achieve this is for Shabara to vocally divide himself into a 10-man chanting circle over Suryadi’s frayed guitar until we’re suddenly left with deafening silence.
It’s not so much that Senyawa are unlike anything you’ve ever heard but the way they unify disparate genres under a single umbrella that makes the band’s approach so striking. Sometimes breaking boundaries doesn’t mean creating an altogether unfamiliar sound—rather reworking a bricolage of already existing elements. On Sujud, Senyawa nearly sink to their knees under the heaviness of doom, folk metal, and noise, all the while proclaiming their humble fealty to the earth. | 2018-11-16T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2018-11-16T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Experimental | Sublime Frequencies | November 16, 2018 | 7.6 | df23fcad-87fb-43fe-aca0-5ff7c21d4ab0 | Whitney Wei | https://pitchfork.com/staff/whitney- wei/ | |
Listening to Stefan Kozalla’s latest is an essential experience. He finds the moments that express wistful longing, burrows into them, and then blows it all up to color-saturated widescreen. | Listening to Stefan Kozalla’s latest is an essential experience. He finds the moments that express wistful longing, burrows into them, and then blows it all up to color-saturated widescreen. | DJ Koze: Knock Knock | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/dj-koze-knock-knock/ | Knock Knock | Far away from mundane reality lies the music of DJ Koze. The German producer builds a fantasy world where aesthetic beauty soaked in memory can hold life at bay for an hour or two at a time. Given his dreamy predilections, his music never strives for relevance and it doesn’t care about the shifting fashion of the moment. He’s only competing with himself. Across a handful of albums, not to mention many dozens of remixes and a few full-length DJ mixes, he combines the crunchy propulsion of French touch, the liquid warmth of ’70s soul, the precise structure of Kompakt-style minimal techno, the head-nodding funk of boom-bap, and the nameless desire of dream pop. The thread through it all is a very specific emotional state: Sifting through his library of samples and pieces of original music, he finds the moments that express wistful longing, burrows into them, and then blows it all up to color-saturated widescreen.
Knock Knock, Koze’s new full-length LP, is his first since 2013’s Amygdala, though in 2015 he released a mix for the DJ-Kicks series, and the label he founded, Pampa, put out a sampler in 2016. For listeners, the lines between a new Koze album, a new Koze mix, and a label sampler he’s curated are blurry. Koze bends the rules of each form so that they come close to meeting in the middle. The mix and compilation included many tracks with Koze’s careful and effective edits, and his tweaks made each production sound more like his own. On his albums, he chooses an array of vocalists and essentially creates a sort of “mixtape” with all new music, where individual tracks are heavy with samples and feel as referential as a DJ set.
Knock Knock has a few familiar names among its cast of vocalists: Róisín Murphy, José González, Kurt Wagner of Lambchop, and, a name we haven’t heard in a while, the rapper Speech from ’90s hip-hop outfit Arrested Development. The guests are generally used in ways that fit within the context of their own work—Wagner’s contribution finds him soaked in Auto-Tune, as on the last Lambchop album, for example—but Koze has a way of making the contributors seem like they were born to sing over one of his tracks. And if Knock Knock is a more conventional album than the more psychedelic and twisted Amygdala, it’s also a more affecting one. The fact that some of the guests appear more than once (Murphy gets two turns, as does Sophia Kennedy, the vocalist who released her strong debut album on Pampa last year) lends cohesion, and the production is extra lush.
Some of these collaborations help to situate Koze’s music more broadly as far as genre and scene. “Bonfire” features the sampled voice of Justin Vernon, from the Bon Iver song “Calgary,” and it illustrates something essential about Koze. He may be an in-demand DJ who works the big-room European dance circuit, but he’s also a records-obsessed indie head finding connections between Arthur Russell, krautrock, shoegaze, and disco. Koze’s melodic accessibility differentiates him from his beat-focused DJ peers, and explains why he has many fans who don’t follow the political and aesthetic conversations happening on the global dance floor.
That said, Róisín Murphy’s feature on “Illumination” shows his deep facility with groove, as long stretches of rhythmic tension are gloriously released in short bursts. “Pick Up,” with a swoop of strings and guitar reminiscent of Stardust’s “Music Sounds Better With You,” prominently features a sample of soul legend Gladys Knight, showing how a vocal lead can come from a contemporary singer or someone from Koze’s record collection and the differences between the two can feel irrelevant.
But more atmospheric moments are just as revealing. The gorgeous “Music on My Teeth,” featuring José González, brings to mind the decayed film-strip warble of Boards of Canada or the Avalanches, and its arrival on the album feels like a forgotten dream slowly drifting into a consciousness. Even the one stumble on the record, on “Colors of Autumn,” the track with Speech, captures something important about Koze’s music. Voices for him carry information through phrasing, inflection, tone, and grain; the “meaning” of the lyrics is secondary, which explains why he can use vocalists using different languages so effectively. Speech’s contribution is mired in specificity, with an offhand reference to Spike Lee’s She’s Gotta Have It. Still, it’s far from a fatal turn, and the song’s viscous production is warm and inviting. While the function of each track on Knock Knock is different, Koze finds the connections between them and stitches it all together into a coherent whole.
To get back to the feeling I mentioned earlier, that sense of longing and the power of fantasy: Koze’s music can be melodic and funky and playful, but it’s not often dark or mysterious. It’s a balm, a way to patch yourself up after experiencing the trauma of the world. And there’s something uncanny about the way Koze evokes something so hard to pin down. The best way I can think to describe it is to say that Koze’s music twinkles, and in that gesture, we feel both comfort and yearning. Some of that is his fondness for swooping romantic Disney-style strings (see Knock Knock’s lavish opener, “Club der Ewigkeiten”) and lo-fi filters that impart a feeling of nostalgia, bleaching the colors and upping the contrast like an Instagram filter. And some of that is his general mischievousness—when eyes twinkle, it’s a sign of a connection, signifying both warmth and humor.
But Koze’s twinkle ultimately feels more existential. An object that twinkles moves between bright and dark, representing the beauty of what is in the present moment, but also its fragility and impermanence. You know that in a flicker, it could be gone. The impossibly moving instrumental coda at the end of Knock Knock’s closing track, “Drone Me Up, Flashy,” brings the album’s deep sense of wonder home. Its delicate, high-pitched drone brings to mind Brian Eno’s “An Ending (Ascent)” from Apollo: Atmospheres & Soundtracks; now we’re thinking of space, contemplating it, feeling small and empowered simultaneously. The twinkle also suggests an illusion of scale, and how something so distant and vast can feel so close. A star is among the most massive bodies in the universe and it sits an incomprehensible distance away, but when we see it from Earth, it’s tiny, it’s ours, and we give it a name. | 2018-05-04T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-05-04T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Pampa | May 4, 2018 | 8.8 | df29db18-4e4b-4f91-a03f-1359095c9ad8 | Mark Richardson | https://pitchfork.com/staff/mark-richardson/ | |
Gap Dream's morose new record documents a music nerd's midlife meltdown, over junk-littered garage rock, rudimentary synth-pop, and no-budget prog flourishes. | Gap Dream's morose new record documents a music nerd's midlife meltdown, over junk-littered garage rock, rudimentary synth-pop, and no-budget prog flourishes. | Gap Dream: This Is Gap Dream | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22128-this-is-gap-dream/ | This Is Gap Dream | Credit *This Is Gap Dream for truth in advertising: it never lets you forget that Gap Dream is a one-man-band in his mid-30s living in a vinyl warehouse. 2013’s Shine Your Light *didn’t either, although it documented Gabe Fulvimar uprooting his life in Ohio to move into Fullerton’s Burger Records. Three years later, *This Is Gap Dream *has an understandably more morose tone; “fuck it” has become “what the fuck have I done?” There might not be as much tolerance for this specific kind of existential crisis in 2016, but it can still result in compelling art—*This Is Gap Dream *might strive to be considered with *The Meadowlands, *Local H’s As Good As Dead, or Fred Thomas’ *All Are Saved, *where the depiction of music nerds and their midlife meltdowns can be perversely cathartic and universal due to their unflinching honesty. But *This Is Gap Dream *ends up being *too *truthful, as there’s rarely any indication Fulvimar intended for this to reach an audience far beyond himself.
Though he hits most of the “guy who lives in Burger Records” touchstones—junk-littered garage rock, rudimentary synth-pop, no-budget prog flourishes—the core of most Gap Dream songs is mid-tempo, palm-muted guitar chug. Fulvimar plays every instrument himself, most of which are typically found on demos meant to be fleshed out by an actual band or at least equipment of higher quality—rickety drum machines, guitars textured with granulated distortion, Nintendo samples, his own mutter of a voice. Despite living in a stronghold for rip-roaring rock, Fulvimar appears to be a conscientious neighbor above all.
Then again, *This Is Gap Dream *has an overt hostility towards most forms of *loud *guitar music. “Rock and Roll” quotes Led Zeppelin while imitating the disquieting synth-bounce of later Suicide, while Fulvimar whispers “death rock” repeatedly during the end of “153,” itself trying to one-up the leanness of Wire’s *154**. *He doesn’t have much patience for “artier” indie rock either, as “College Music” moans of “too many soft machines” and snipes at them to “get off your brainwashed ass.”
Fulvimar doesn’t get much relief from lashing out, which is probably the whole point: Shine Your* Light *was borne of his many disappointments with human interaction, but now he can’t even take solace in music. This abject cynicism inevitably becomes suffocating rather than illuminating; despite Fulvimar only having to answer to himself, *This Is Gap Dream *trudges along questioning its own necessity to exist. Are the off-key harmonies meant to *mock *the idea of professionally composed rock music or was there just no motivation for an additional take? These are full-band arrangements, yet the bass often has only a vague familiarity with the prevailing rhythm, so does he really mean for this to sound like a band? Other times the bass completely overwhelms Fulvimar’s vocals; does he believe he has nothing worth hearing or does he believe it really wouldn’t matter anyway? Are the aimless instrumentals included because Fulvimar believes they speak for themselves, or did he just not feel like putting a melody over them?
There might be an answer to all of the above during “24 Hour Token": “This is for the world that I can’t ignore,” Fulvimar sighs, “the one that screams for more.” Once again, maybe the codependency between the low stakes and Fulvimar’s lack of ambition is the whole point of This Is Gap Dream: it’s pretty convincing if the dominant feeling of an existential crisis is wanting nothing more than to just not be bothered. | 2016-07-26T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-07-26T01:00:00.000-04:00 | null | Burger | July 26, 2016 | 5.2 | df2b3949-dfb6-40c2-903a-6be25f13639c | Ian Cohen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ian-cohen/ | null |
The nu-metal heir apparent's latest album is a tremendous step forward while still remaining an acquired, uncompromising taste. | The nu-metal heir apparent's latest album is a tremendous step forward while still remaining an acquired, uncompromising taste. | Ghostemane: ANTI-ICON | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/ghostemane-anti-icon/ | ANTI-ICON | Rap and rock may have become increasingly intertwined bedfellows over the last decade, but it’s still somewhat rare for fusions of the two genres to feel truly organic and authentic. For every Lil Peep, there are a thousand knockoffs for whom guitar riffs and emo flows are never anything more than a novelty, an easy trend to ride, and a ready-made aesthetic to bite until the next one comes along. Eric Whitney, the Florida-born musician known as Ghostemane, is something different, an all-too-rare artist whose synthesis of rap and metal moves beyond pastiche or pure reference to achieve something aggressively new.
Produced and engineered in part by the legendary Ross Robinson and Arthur Rizk (who has worked with Power Trip and Code Orange), Ghostemane's latest album ANTI-ICON sees him truly claiming his throne as the heir apparent to nu-metal. It’s what you would expect from an artist’s proper introduction to the mainstream, a much bigger-budgeted sound than his previous work. The production is unrelenting and heavy, chugging guitars and pounding trap drums, but there’s an expansiveness to the album, eerie moments of ethereality up against scenes from a horror movie. It’s a tremendous step forward, while still remaining an acquired, uncompromising taste.
Ghostemane emerged as part of the sprawling online rap collective Schemaposse, a group headed by former Raider Klan member JGRXXN that also included Lil Peep. Though his work overlaps with the emo-rap of GothBoiClique, Ghostemane has forged his own path, amassing a devoted underground following largely outside of the music industry’s machine, and also outside of the United States—as with so many rappers identified with the “SoundCloud Rap” set, a substantial portion of Ghostemane’s fanbase is located in Eastern Europe.
Most so-called SoundCloud Rap is just as much YouTube Rap—Ghostemane’s cult has grown in large part thanks to his often viral music videos, miniature horror movies that form a nightmarish collage of corpse paint, plague masks, and toxic chemicals (Whitney’s recent videos for “Lazaretto” and “Hydrochloride” were directed by his fiancé, the equally online performance artist and musician Poppy). He’s an artist who seemed to emerge from the ether with fully-formed mythology and aesthetic sensibility. The dark energy that he channels, however, is somewhat removed from your conventional occult metal imagery—unlike so many rappers influenced by the harder shades of rock, Ghostemane is drawn not necessarily to the Satanic but to a kind of grab-bag spiritualism, informed by astrology, witchcraft, New Age symbology, and other dark arts and mystical practices.
As the title of this album proclaims in all caps, Ghostemane’s music resists celebrity culture and the iconography of viral stardom. As Ghostemane raps himself on “AI,” “If you don’t know me by now, I don’t want you to.” The album is covered not with his face or even his name, but a spiked steel helmet, perhaps a visual synonym for existence in the public eye, as much a crown as it is a cage. It’s fitting that ANTI-ICON is an all-out assault on the fame machine because the album was intended to be Ghostemane’s major-label debut; as a recent Rolling Stone profile documents, the deal fell through because Whitney wanted more autonomy and control than the unnamed label was willing to afford. But independence suits an artist who isn’t just disinterested in celebrity but antagonistic toward it—Ghostemane owes an audible and visible debt to Marilyn Manson, but he is even more a creature of the shadows than the self-described Antichrist Superstar.
Tracks like “Sacrilege” and “Hydrochloride” owe an obvious sonic debt to Nine Inch Nails and ‘90s industrial, while other stretches of the album slide away from cyberpunk blasts into black metal (“Intro.Destitute”) or hardcore punk (the first half of “Calamity”). There are more “real” instruments than ever before, full-bodied guitar shreds and pounding blast beats swirling in the same dark cauldron as shards of harsh noise and trap hi-hats. Whitney’s lyrics consistently reflect on anxiety, insecurity, and mental illness, but he simultaneously exudes brash confidence. His voice shape-shifts just as easily, a high-pitched and highly precise chopper rap flow one moment, deep-throated screams and guttural snarls the next. There are inhuman noises of unidentifiable origin like the nauseating gurgles and drips of “Anti-Social Masochistic Rage [ASMR].” He mutates from the pure embodiment of menace, a sleep paralysis demon summoned from Slipknot album covers and Rob Zombie movies to an unguarded, sensitive human being. Album closer “Falling Down” strips it all back to a simple series of chords and Whitney’s voice softening into a hushed, despairing whine.
The most literal representation of Ghostemane’s music appears not in Whitney’s music, but in another avenue of creative expression. In addition to his main, sporadically-updated Instagram, Whitney maintains another account, where he shares his original metalwork. In his visual art, human wreckage and industrial remains—chains, gears, bones cast in iron—melt together into a sharp cyborg whole, a fitting summation for his work’s smelting of disparate styles. Though on its surface his music might be a hybrid form, the unholy soul is pure metal.
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. | 2020-12-15T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2020-12-15T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rap / Experimental | Blackmage | December 15, 2020 | 7.4 | df2cda97-ab11-4505-92a9-d2ef083f02e0 | Nadine Smith | https://pitchfork.com/staff/nadine-smith/ | |
When Terry Riley turned 80 last year, a number of commemorative concerts were played. A couple of the most interesting took place at London’s Barbican Centre and Amsterdam’s Muziekgebouw where James Holden and Luke Abbott were invited to compose live improvisational electronic pieces influenced by Riley’s work. The recordings on Outdoor Museum of Fractals / 555Hz are taken from their rehearsals prior to the concerts. | When Terry Riley turned 80 last year, a number of commemorative concerts were played. A couple of the most interesting took place at London’s Barbican Centre and Amsterdam’s Muziekgebouw where James Holden and Luke Abbott were invited to compose live improvisational electronic pieces influenced by Riley’s work. The recordings on Outdoor Museum of Fractals / 555Hz are taken from their rehearsals prior to the concerts. | James Holden / Luke Abbott: Outdoor Museum of Fractals / 555Hz | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21559-outdoor-museum-of-fractals-555hz/ | Outdoor Museum of Fractals / 555Hz | When Terry Riley turned 80 last year, the requisite ink was spilled, commemorative concerts played, parties thrown. The byproducts of the ongoing retrospective are still spilling into 2016 as he nears 81, and it makes sense, because it’s hard not to think and talk in gushing platitudes when looking at what Riley wrought in the last half century. Even if you don’t know his name, you’ve felt his influence via "Baba O'Riley," Pete Townsend’s tribute to Riley’s modal improvisation and Meher Baba’s spiritual teachings. You could even credit him with one of the earliest remixes, in 1967, with his tape loop manipulations of the Harvey Averne Dozen's "You're No Good." And of course, there’s In C, which in countless performances has become a living, breathing, and self-generating monument to the minimalist floodgate Riley helped open in 1964.
One of the most interesting homages to Riley took place at London’s Barbican Centre and Amsterdam’s Muziekgebouw during April of last year, at a pair of events called Hello Terry Riley. British musicians James Holden and Luke Abbott were invited to compose live improvisational electronic pieces influenced by engagement with Riley’s work. The recordings on Outdoor Museum Of Fractals / 555Hz are taken from their rehearsals prior to the Barbican and Muziekgebouw concerts. In a little over an hour of continuous improvisational performance, Holden and Abbott showcase how making music in the style of Terry Riley could still produce something startlingly new and mesmerizing.
To compose "Outdoor Museum of Fractals" James Holden designed a special sequencer for his modular synthesizer, which works on a perpetually repetitive and purposefully chaotic set of rules, generating a wide range of melodic patterns from even the slightest change in initial input. He claims that the inputs in his system, if mapped in mathematical space, could give you the picture of a fractal—that ubiquitous and eternally mysterious geometrical pattern that naturally occurs in the shape of DNA, snowflakes, ocean waves, the drawings of M. C. Escher, and in the novels of Vladimir Nabokov and David Foster Wallace.
To Holden, the 46 minutes of "Outdoor Museum of Fractals" is a "a very slow tour of some landmarks in this fractal" he created with his co-pilot Camilo Tirado, a tabla player trained in the classical Indian traditions, which Riley drew heavily from in his work. Their two instruments are in constant conversation, as Tirado’s drumming triggers James' arpeggiations. Holden’s use of a sequencer also helps generate more notes and melodies than he could physically play, extending the limitations of his keyboard skills. And if you’ve ever seen videos of Riley playing, Holden’s experiment makes sense, because you quickly realize that very few people have the dexterity and focus to dance between the notes of a keyboard like Riley.
Similar to the best Riley compositions, "Outdoor Museum of Fractals" resembles an exquisitely and almost incomprehensibly detailed model train set, its slow-moving progression unfolding with more and more information and narrative. It’s hard to believe Holden and Tirado’s improvisation sounds as smooth and pleasurable as it does, because Holden’s system is constantly inviting chaos. He described learning how to control his rig as a "blind man feeling around in one small corner with some vague memory of what's nearby."
Abbott’s contribution, "555Hz," is inspired by the numerological and mythological qualities of the number five and an interest in new age theories about the healing properties of specific sonic frequencies. His interest was stoked by Thomas Browne’s The Garden of Cyrus, a Renaissance-era manifesto on intelligent design that attributes fractal-like vastness to the number five’s relation to the organization of natural life, from the structure of honeycombs to the leaves of artichokes. "555Hz" is centered around a sine-wave drone tuned to 555Hz and a modified 26'' gong that echoes and resonate in response to slight shifts in the drone.
"555Hz" veers farther from signature Riley sounds, and more closely mirrors La Monte Young’s exploration of drone, specifically in works like Drift Study. This piece is more caustic and less relaxing, but it’s also lighter and more ambient. In that way it is far more meditative than Holden’s, because the ongoing drone never forces the listener to descend into the music, but rather effortlessly float on its surface. Abbott’s piece is also less steady, its pitches shift more wildly, and the sounds climb up and down more athletically throughout. And similar to Holden’s improvisation, it’s hard not to be impressed by the smooth progression of Abbott's performance. There are many moments where the drone unravels, but Abbott’s ability to paint through the chaos of his sounds with perfectly timed gong echoes and slight shifts in the drone’s tone pulls it all together. I’m reminded of Brian Eno’s description of Philip Glass’ music "as a viscous bath of pure, thick energy" when listening to the two companion pieces back to back. In Outdoor Museum of Fractals / 555Hz, Abbott and Holden have demonstrated quite effectively that electronic musicians don’t have to be just guys pressing play on their computers, but very serious and cognitively engaged composers. | 2016-02-23T01:00:04.000-05:00 | 2016-02-23T01:00:04.000-05:00 | Electronic | Border Community | February 23, 2016 | 7.9 | df3d409e-ae4d-4c59-a235-e7fbf7ac0826 | Kevin Lozano | https://pitchfork.com/staff/kevin-lozano/ | null |
The soundtrack to this largely incoherent film achieves a shaky sense of grace thanks to the dusty music from Neil Young and his backing band, Promise of the Real. | The soundtrack to this largely incoherent film achieves a shaky sense of grace thanks to the dusty music from Neil Young and his backing band, Promise of the Real. | Neil Young / Promise of the Real: Paradox (Original Music From the Film) | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/neil-young-promise-of-the-real-paradox-original-music-from-the-film/ | Paradox (Original Music From the Film) | Neil Young earned the right to pursue filmmaking as a hobby back in the early 1970s. At the time, he was flush with commercial success, and movie studios didn’t balk at the idea of financing a half-baked flick considering they could probably recoup their investment through years of midnight showings. After 1974’s Journey Through the Past and 1979’s Rust Never Sleeps, Young kept making concert movies long after such peers as Jerry Garcia and Pink Floyd got bored, taking a stab at a narrative with 1982’s Human Highway and once again dabbling with the form as late as 2003, when he turned his rock opera Greendale into a feature-length drama. He’s still at it in 2018, starring in Paradox, an ambling, plotless film directed by his romantic partner, Daryl Hannah.
Paradox isn’t much more than a glorified home movie tracing the imagined adventures of Neil Young & Promise of the Real as they adjust to the altitude of Colorado. Armed with some vague ideas but no actual script, the band and crew whiled away the hours horsing around in cowboy outfits, cracking crude jokes, and picking guitars after the sun went down. When all these antics didn’t amount to enough footage for a feature-length movie, Hannah added a midsection of live performances anchored by Young & Promise of the Real tearing it up at the 2016 superstar festival Desert Trip, aka Oldchella, and a solo Neil performance of his ’70s classic “Pocahontas.” This outlier is included presumably because the song loosely adheres to the film’s Old West themes. Or maybe simply because it was kicking around Young’s vaults, waiting to be used.
It’s hard to discern the internal logic that fuels Paradox on screen, but its amiable incoherence achieves a shaky sense of grace on record. Drifting between spooky guitar solos, sweet strums, and half-remembered choruses, this soundtrack occasionally stops for a full-fledged song, but these complete moments feel accidental, as if the fog lifts just long enough to reveal a full landscape. When a finished song does appear, it has the odd effect of grinding proceedings to a halt. That grandiose rendition of “Pocahontas,” recorded sometime in 2005, is by some measure the best individual track here—Young conjures a towering sense of melancholy as he pumps away on an organ—but it’s too weighty for an album that is determined to blow away on the wind. Instead, the song that sums up the album’s charms is an airy version of Willie Nelson’s “Angel Flying Too Close to the Ground” sung by Nelson’s son Lukas. Never intended for camera, the film crew captured the group killing time between camera setups by playing the tune: It is a fleeting moment that just happened to be preserved.
Such transience is at the core of Paradox. During the movie, the prominence of Promise of the Real feels overwhelming, as they prance, crack wise in an outhouse, and discover new ways to mug for the camera. On the soundtrack, their equal footing feels necessary, since they not only invigorate Young—just listen to the spry, winding 10-minute “Cowgirl Jam,” where it’s clear Neil gets a thrill playing with a unit far more nimble than Crazy Horse—but are sympathetic to his old hippie pipe dreams, as they ramble on their acoustic guitars and pluck out dusty blues. Paradox exists as a conduit between a dreamed history and a fantasized future, a place formed of nothing more than fragments that evoke a past that seems more mysterious than the present. If the end result is as light as a feather or as memorable as a breeze, that’s also the point. | 2018-03-28T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-03-28T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Reprise | March 28, 2018 | 6 | df40951f-e4ba-4d80-a0ad-a82f73065a9f | Stephen Thomas Erlewine | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stephen-thomas erlewine/ | |
Reworking improv sessions featuring frequent collaborators like Sam Gendel, Jamael Dean, and Laraaji, the L.A. bandleader and percussionist shows his contemplative side. | Reworking improv sessions featuring frequent collaborators like Sam Gendel, Jamael Dean, and Laraaji, the L.A. bandleader and percussionist shows his contemplative side. | Carlos Niño & Friends: More Energy Fields, Current | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/carlos-nino-and-friends-more-energy-fields-current/ | More Energy Fields, Current | The isolation of the last 15 months must have been hard on Carlos Niño. For years, the L.A. percussionist, DJ, and arranger has gathered together a rotating cast of pals to create a series of records under the name Carlos Niño & Friends. The loose, improvisatory structures of their playing, and Niño’s ingenious ability to stitch the best ideas together into blankets of comforting sounds, give these albums a charisma that smooths over the often difficult nature of the music, which borrows in equal measure from free jazz, new age, and hip-hop. In the same way that you’re able to follow your closest buds to conversational places you wouldn’t dream of approaching with your coworkers, the warmth that permeates Niño’s music disguises just how challenging some of it can be.
More Energy Fields, Current feels colored by recent circumstances. It is more muted and less jumpy than a typical Carlos Niño & Friends record. And while it abides by his typically kinetic production ethos, the spaces through which it wanders are emptier and less populous than ever before. It’s fascinating to hear Niño working in such a blue mode—this is a guy who made a record called Bliss On Dear Oneness, after all. While the music here can sometimes sound unsure of itself, More Energy Fields, Current shows a new side of Niño, and it proves that his abilities as a producer can move beyond the wide-eyed good vibes that have always shined within his work. Pieced together in a time of great distance, More Energy Fields, Current is the sound of Carlos Niño finding—or maybe creating—solace.
As usual, Niño is working with material sourced from an enviably talented group of friends. Frequent collaborators Sam Gendel, Nate Mercereau, Jamael Dean, Jamire Williams, and Laraaji all return, while Shabaka Hutchings is welcomed into the fold for the first time. Most of the material here was recorded in 2018 and 2019 in long improv sessions that Niño edited together over the last year, shuffling and layering with a collagist’s mindset and a pilgrim’s faith in the journey. Hutchings and Dean duet in opener “Pleasewakeupalittlefaster, please…,” the former’s rapidly cycling sax pitched quietly in the mix in a way that makes it feel like steam rising from the clean, clear chords of Dean’s piano. Dean’s playing is nearly funereal, momentarily rimmed with nostalgia’s warmth before going cold again; it feels like he and Hutchings are asking questions they know can’t be answered.
This sense of uncertainty hangs over many of these songs. Gendel always processes his sax through pedals in a way that makes it sound like the notes are being swallowed by the bell of the instrument as he voices them; it’s insular by design. But in the context of “ The World Stage, 4321 Degnan Boulevard, Los Angeles, California 90008,” he, Dean, Niño, and drummer Randy Gloss are like people at the last table on a wedding seating chart: They make tentative conversation without quite falling into a natural rhythm, but the sense of occasion keeps things from feeling tense. Aaron Shaw’s tenor sax on “Now the background is the foreground.” blows from deep down an alleyway, straight from a noir fantasy of a rainy New York night, while the underlit mood of “Nightswimming”’s early moments share something of the sadness of the R.E.M. song of the same name; its synths shimmer like the reflection of water on a tunnel ceiling. While Niño is a master of 3D audio space, his willingness to leave so much blank gives his partners enough room to throw shadows. It can be incredibly moving.
Which is perhaps why the album’s least compelling moments come when it is most tightly composed. “Nightswimming” is shaken from its reverie by a beat from Dean, with the synths whirring like a rotary dial in response; suddenly, we’re in a chillwave song. Everything feels recognizable and all too familiar, as if the dream logic the album has conjured to this point has been banished by the harsh realities of a new day. The album’s players are at their most unified here, but the track paradoxically seems incomplete; the structure is so perfectly built, the lack of vocals gives it the air of an empty house. The opposite happens in “Salon Winds,” where Williams sets his drums on a skipping break and Shaw’s flute chases; the players leave one another too much space and struggle to figure out where to go. The music doesn’t need to cohere particularly well—normalizing the incoherent is one of Niño’s greatest strengths—but the group never produces any interesting points of departure, either.
These are unusual moments for Carlos Niño, when bringing the people he loves together doesn’t result in some kind of magic, and on More Energy Fields, Current, they’re rare. He, Dean, and Laraaji create slow swells of sound in “Ripples, Reflection, Loop,” their tidal energy moving through the fibers of Sharada Shashidhar’s voice even after the playing recedes and her wordless singing takes over. It’s clear that Niño is deeply affected by the waves he makes with his friends; his ability to remember the emotional arc of improv sessions from years ago testifies to how deeply he was listening in the moment. His connection with his fellow players goes beyond the rational, beyond the linguistic. Still, having assembled these songs in the midst of a year of profound isolation, he allowed two clearly spoken utterances to emerge from the mix with no digital manipulation: “please,” in “Iasos 79 ’til Infinity,” and “thank you,” in “Ripples, Reflection, Loop.” Both imply interdependence, mercy, and gratitude, the interaction of two people facing each other, one in need and the other willing to provide. They’re what passes between friends.
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. | 2021-05-13T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2021-05-13T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Jazz / Experimental | International Anthem | May 13, 2021 | 6.9 | df4cdec6-a8a3-4793-a2c3-3004c41a3b66 | Sadie Sartini Garner | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sadie-sartini garner/ | |
After nearly 20 years of playing against their strengths, the Get Up Kids jump on the “adult emo” bandwagon and recapture the punk immediacy of their late-’90s heyday. | After nearly 20 years of playing against their strengths, the Get Up Kids jump on the “adult emo” bandwagon and recapture the punk immediacy of their late-’90s heyday. | The Get Up Kids: Kicker EP | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/the-get-up-kids-kicker-ep/ | Kicker EP | In the second half of the 1990s, the Get Up Kids fostered a thriving DIY punk scene in a landlocked college town, knocked out their debut in a weekend with Bob Weston of Shellac, and turned down major-label offers. Put aside the love songs, and their classic Something to Write Home About can be read as a concept album about the pressure of seeing then-fledgling indie label Vagrant literally bet the farm on their success. But they also wrote concisely and passionately about girls, heartbreak, and trouble with authority, thus setting the norms for 21st-century emo: While the band’s presentation and ethics were overtly punk, their songs harkened back to early rock’n’roll records that functioned as teen pop.
The seven years since the Get Up Kids released their first reunion album, 2011’s There Are Rules, however, have seen the rise of the apparently oxymoronic subgenre “adult emo.” Now in their late 30s and early 40s, bands like Braid, American Football, Brand New, Jimmy Eat World, and Taking Back Sunday are maturing, often with vital results. And that same “adult emo” outlook makes Kicker the most satisfying Get Up Kids release in nearly 20 years.
“We’ve been playing with this idea about how you can translate the ‘emo themes’... into feelings that are relevant to being an adult,” frontman Matt Pryor recently explained. This wasn’t always an option: Many emo acts were brutalized by the early 2000s. The commercial breakthroughs of Jimmy Eat World and Dashboard Confessional, as well as their own drive to transcend their genre tag, led bands drastically change their sounds. Maybe because their name included the word “kids,” the Get Up Kids had it the worst. Produced by R.E.M. mainstay Scott Litt, their 2002 album On a Wire rebranded the band with acoustic ballads and mid-tempo moodiness. Scorned by fans for not sounding enough like “Coming Clean,” the record was mocked by critics because it still sounded like the Get Up Kids. 2004’s similarly mellow Guilt Show failed to change that narrative. Seven years later, after breaking up and reuniting, they released There Are Rules, a competent indie-rock record made in relative anonymity.
While the motivations behind the Get Up Kids’ stylistic swerves are understandable, those three albums add up to nearly 20 years of the band playing against their strengths. Kicker negates that history in about 14 minutes. The four songs on the EP are all uptempo, in major keys, and nearly the same length. The frilliest instrumental touch is a tambourine. In their original incarnation, on tracks as different as “Holiday” and “Overdue,” the Get Up Kids used melody, velocity, and urgency to signify investment and interpersonal unity. Maybe they were having fun on There Are Rules, but on Kicker they effortlessly recapture that old energy. Built on the simple sentiments of their titles, the hooks on “I’m Sorry,” “Maybe,” and “Better This Way” are memorable at first listen. This is how the Get Up Kids flex craft.
Immediacy can have its drawbacks, though, and “I’m Sorry” also shows the other side of the coin. Its verses find guitarist and co-songwriter Jim Suptic promising not to be an asshole, but the imagery he relies on (burning bridges, building walls) is too simple and impersonal to have much of an impact. Luckily, the chorus is enough to sell the song—a rougher, rawer take on the Get Up Kids’ version of anthemic punk. Close your eyes, and it doesn’t sound so far off from their new Polyvinyl labelmates Beach Slang or recent Superchunk.
The EP format has always served the Get Up Kids well—and if Kicker doesn’t prove to be as essential or experimental as Woodson, Simple Science, or Red Letter Day, maybe that’s by design. The band is set to record a new LP for release in 2019, a year that will mark the 20th anniversary of Something to Write Home About. They must sense the nostalgia coming: In the video for Suptic’s triumphant “Better This Way,” an extra is wearing the same T-shirt drummer Ryan Pope sported in the clip for “Action & Action,” a beloved Something single that epitomizes the emo sound and style of 1999. And the hook on the EP’s lead single, “Maybe,” echoes the melody of “My Apology,” another track from that classic album. These small acknowledgments of past triumphs reverberate throughout Kicker: The Get Up Kids have finally reopened a dialogue with their younger selves. | 2018-06-09T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-06-09T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Polyvinyl | June 9, 2018 | 6.7 | df4da7c6-6ba2-4728-a6d4-1a5ad344aa82 | Ian Cohen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ian-cohen/ | |
The minimal techno legend brings his first solo album in five years: four long tracks aimed squarely at the dancefloor, perforated by needle-tipped hi-hats and sharp, serrated claps. | The minimal techno legend brings his first solo album in five years: four long tracks aimed squarely at the dancefloor, perforated by needle-tipped hi-hats and sharp, serrated claps. | Ricardo Villalobos: Empirical House | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/23273-empirical-house/ | Empirical House | Minimal techno doesn’t enjoy the critical acclaim or the popularity that it once did, but that hasn’t sent Ricardo Villalobos in search of greener pastures. Active since the mid-1990s, Villalobos broke through with 2003’s Alcachofa, but it was with 2004’s cryptic Thé Au Harem D’Archimède that he really hit upon his sound. Since then, across projects big and small, he has doggedly pursued the same twisted muse. He continues to tend the same spongy patch of ground that he always has to eke out squiggly forms part Dr. Seuss, part H.R. Giger—weird, biomorphic shapes that pop like suction cups and ripple like seaweed. His last few years’ worth of work has been fairly scattershot—mainly a mixed bag of collaborations and remixes, plus odd gambits like his 27-minute reworking of Oren Ambarchi’s Hubris. His last solo album, Dependent and Happy, was five years ago.
As his most extensive solo undertaking in years—four tracks, four sides of vinyl, nearly an hour’s total running time—*Empirical House *feels like his most substantial release in some time. It’s also a good read on his twin obsessions: otherworldly sound and unwavering groove. Quite unlike the wormy undulations of Safe in Harbour, a 2015 collaboration with his psychedelic fellow-traveler Max Loderbauer, these four tracks aim squarely at the dancefloor, perforated by needle-tipped hi-hats and sharp, serrated claps.
“Widodo,” formerly known to fans as “Rari Lim,” has been floating in sets for a few years now. Like previous hits “Fizheuer Zieheuer” and “Enfants (Chants),” it’s essentially an edit, pairing Villalobos’ crisp drum programming with a long strip of vibraphone solo presumably sampled from a jazz recording. Unlike most samples, this one doesn’t loop; it just floats behind the groove, like a reflection in a puddle. An almost inaudible hint of speech is left running deep in the mix, which makes for a mildly disorienting experience: If you’re listening on your computer, you may find yourself checking for open browser tabs. What makes it a potentially divisive track is the jazzy walking bassline that hurtles through the first two-thirds of the song. It doesn’t quite work; its eighth-note cadence is too straight, its notes too unvarying. It feels like something you'd encounter blaring from an animatronic jazz band at Disneyland.
“Bakasecc” is better. For those who prefer Villalobos when he goes furthest off-piste, this will be the highlight. Save for a muted kick, there are no drums here at all, just a blurry shower of plucked, kalimba-like sounds held together by clicks and pops and squishy burbles. It is a fine encapsulation of a kind of repetitive music that never actually repeats—that is, music in which every bar is as unique as a snowflake, yet when you zoom out, comes to seem hypnotically undifferentiated. It is a mountain stream set to a 4/4 beat.
“Subpad” and “Empirical House,” which both put their focus on sharp, snapping grooves, initially feel more straightforward, but there are strange energies at work. In the former, bright, choppy chords faintly echo “808 the Bassqueen,” a crowd-pleasing classic from 1999, but the real action is way beneath the surface, where faint synthesizer pads, stray piano notes, clinking cutlery, and another low speaking voice pool like water in a leaky basement. Again, you go searching for that renegade browser tab; you might even wonder if Villalobos recorded the whole thing with a YouTube window open on *his *computer and just left it that way. The title track, meanwhile, pairs a restless groove, bouncy as a teenaged boy’s knee, with limpid swirls of Rhodes keyboard; the background is aswarm with hot breath, gravelly hiccups, and indistinct muttering.
Villalobos’ music is druggy, but these two tracks are really druggy. Setting up an irreconcilable tension between foreground and background, they feel like two realities colliding, or maybe one reality being peeled into two parallel strips, trapping listeners in the dissonance like flies in stickum. Both tracks are upwards of 12 minutes, and, from a purely structural point of view, they don’t really do anything in all that time, but that’s the point. Villalobos doesn’t edit or arrange because he doesn’t have to. Like so much of his work, each of these is merely a fragment of a much longer continuum. | 2017-06-01T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-06-01T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | [a:rpia:r] | June 1, 2017 | 7.3 | df4f94d3-a8ee-4c0a-a988-2ee463aa8143 | Philip Sherburne | https://pitchfork.com/staff/philip-sherburne/ | null |
The Austin band’s knowing, sharply rendered indie rock filters life on the road into songs about interpersonal angst and heartland unease. | The Austin band’s knowing, sharply rendered indie rock filters life on the road into songs about interpersonal angst and heartland unease. | Good Looks: Lived Here for a While | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/good-looks-lived-here-for-a-while/ | Lived Here for a While | It’s rough out there for lots of indie rock bands, but Austin’s Good Looks have really been through the shit. The day after they released their 2022 debut, Bummer Year, guitarist Jake Ames was nearly killed in a hit-and-run. The band put off touring while he slowly recovered, and when they did finally hit the road, their van caught fire and they lost everything: gear, instruments, laptops, merch, personal effects, everything. A less committed group might have taken either of these tragedies as a sign from the universe, but to their credit Good Looks are a foolhardy lot. While they don’t address those trials on their follow-up, Lived Here for a While, they play like their lives depend on it.
Lived Here for a While views the world from a blazing tour van. These songs aren’t just about what they see out on the road, but what they leave behind. Lovers grow distant, friends fade away, cities expand beyond recognition. “This used to be a Black neighborhood,” frontman Tyler Jordan exclaims on “White Out”, and few songwriters could make gentrification sound so deftly (or wittily: “Look out! They’re jogging! and they’re bringing their dogs with ’em!”). Whenever they tour, they never return to exactly where they left, which churns up a sense of unease in these songs: The tempos are just a little too fast; the guitars bypass jangle and head straight for the jitters.
Too often, indie self-awareness can come across as self-regarding and off-putting, like a novel about how hard it is to be a novelist. How many listeners can relate to tales of long hauls and empty venues? To their credit, Good Looks never whine about their fortunes, nor do they sound like they’re playing exclusively to other touring indie rock bands. Jordan makes it all relatable, as though touring were no different than any other low-paying gig in late-capitalist America. And he knows that lovers and spouses typically take the brunt of any artist’s frustrations. Jordan is an ambitious songwriter—and occasionally a messy one, as on “Self-destructor,” which lapses into condescension—but songs like “If It’s Gone” and especially “Desert” are distinguished by their generosity toward their subjects. Jordan apologizes rather than throws blame, and hopes it’ll make him a better man. As he sings on “Vaughn,” “Not every single lover has gotta be a sad song.”
Jordan was singing about these subjects on Bummer Year, but these new songs are more acute in their angst, more vivid in their arrangements, more volatile in their performances. As resourceful a songwriter as Jordan may be—with a casual lyricism that can turn a plainspoken phrase into a lighter-raising chorus—Good Looks were never merely his backing band. Racing through “Self-destructor” and churning up drama in “Why Don’t You Believe Me?,” they take the curves a little too fast, but the rhythm section’s taut krautrock beats keep all tires on the pavement. And Ames always has a punchy riff on hard, or a trenchant guitar tone, or a blast of feedback to bolster Jordan’s vocals or wryly undercut him. Self-referential yet also self-critical, they play every song like it’s an argument for why they’re playing that song.
There’s a sharp desperation to Good Looks’ headlong heartland rock, as though they might be trying to outrun something. “I keep driving around, to try to make some strangers love me,” Jordan sings on “Can You See Me Tonight?,” and the line perfectly sums up the Sisyphean life of a touring band. Then he adds the kicker: “By the end of tonight, I’ll sing myself hoarse and I’ll still feel empty.” Without romanticizing their lives, they do manage to find something meaningful in that pursuit, even if it’s just another song to stave off the darkness.
Correction: A previous version of this review included a line about the song “Self-destructor” that could be misinterpreted. This has been amended. | 2024-06-12T00:01:00.000-04:00 | 2024-06-12T00:01:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Keeled Scales | June 12, 2024 | 7.5 | df767fb6-be56-4450-aac9-15bc2ffdb5b8 | Stephen M. Deusner | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stephen-m. deusner/ | |
Not only does The Wailing Wailers highlight the first major recordings of Bob Marley, but the happy, bouncy, optimistic sound is also the sound of post-independence Jamaica. | Not only does The Wailing Wailers highlight the first major recordings of Bob Marley, but the happy, bouncy, optimistic sound is also the sound of post-independence Jamaica. | The Wailers: The Wailing Wailers | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21960-the-wailing-wailers/ | The Wailing Wailers | Legendary records are legendary for different reasons—some for the music and some for the musicians. In terms of The Wailing Wailers, it would be tough to locate folks who don’t know the song “One Love” or the name of the fellow singing this song. Bob Marley is enough of a worldwide superstar that his face and his later lyrics are as familiar to American college students as they are to Ethiopian teenagers.
The Wailing Wailers is not, by strict definition, an album—it wasn't recorded or sequenced as a whole. The Jamaican music industry has traditionally been shaped by singles, so this is effectively a singles bundle that was gathered up and released in late 1965. Not only does this highlight the first major recordings of Bob Marley (and it should be noted that most of the songs have Marley writing credits), but the happy, bouncy, optimistic sound of *The Wailing Wailers *is also the sound of post-independence Jamaica. It is the sound of a music that would soon reach out beyond the island and internationally through the remarkable voices of Bunny Wailer, Peter Tosh, and, most of all, Bob Marley.
In addition, *The Wailing Wailers *emerged from Clement “Coxsone” Dodd’s Studio One, one of the foundational, pioneering recording studios where Jamaican music is concerned. Operative from the 1950s through to the early 1980s, Studio One released ska, rocksteady, reggae, and dancehall over the years. The history of Studio One is key to the history of music in Jamaica and the rise of both reggae and Bob Marley.
Revisiting it now, you can also clearly hear the ways that popular music circulates and crosses borders. The influence of American R&B and pop is evident—there’s a version of “What’s New Pussycat?” here—but also a specificity that places the record smack in the middle of the ska and rocksteady period, a precursor to the reggae that propelled Marley into the stratosphere of fame he found himself in the 1970s. Patwa, the Jamaican language, is a Creole that brings together various linguistic elements and structures stemming from West African languages, such as Twi and Yoruba, English, Spanish, Dutch, and Native American sources. A Creole language brings together all of these elements. Similarly, the musical genres of Jamaica are creolized forms. As case in point, *The Wailing Wailers *brings together multiple influences, at times sounding like 1960s croony R&B as on “I Need You,” skank-ready ska on “One Love” and “Simmer Down,” and then Patwa-inflected proto-reggae on the slightly slower “Rude Boy.”
This past year novelist Marlon James became the first Jamaican to win the Man Booker prize for his novel A Brief History of Seven Killings. The book takes the attempted assassination of Bob Marley as its starting point and zooms out from there, taking in the scope of '70s Jamaica, extending forward to the 1990s. The panoramic scope of James’ book is a demonstration of Jamaica’s international reach and influence. *The Wailing Wailers *is another key piece of the artistic and creative juggernaut that is Jamaica, helping to demonstrate the narrative of reggae and of Bob Marley. With Jamaican creativity in the spotlight, it’s a perfect time to provide access to Studio One again.
*The Wailing Wailers *is the first reissue from Yep Roc Music Group, who have access to the Studio One catalogue, thanks to an agreement with Coxsone’s daughter Carol Dodd, and they are starting as they plan to continue—with reissues of foundational albums (some quite rare) provided in the form of their original release. *The Wailing Wailers *is one that has been available since its original 1966 release, specifically by New England’s Heartbeat Records. Heartbeat lovingly reissued a good number of Studio One releases from 1983 through to the mid-'00s, but changes in the music industry meant that Heartbeat petered out. Yep Roc appears to be ably picking up the trail and providing high-quality LP, CD and digital access as well as involving Jamaican native Chris Wilson, the former A&R manager for Heartbeat. The care that has been put into this reissue is obvious. It’s meant to provide a historical touchpoint by utilizing all original album art and providing the same track listing as the first time around, and now a legendary album will be consistently available to whole new audiences. | 2016-06-04T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-06-04T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Global | Yep Roc | June 4, 2016 | 8 | df795cce-00eb-4668-8f84-a27d669ab826 | Erin MacLeod | https://pitchfork.com/staff/erin-macleod/ | null |
Constructed largely out of cut-up and processed samples of their previous recordings, the noise-metal iconoclasts’ latest album takes the listener on journey through a hell of the Body’s careful making. | Constructed largely out of cut-up and processed samples of their previous recordings, the noise-metal iconoclasts’ latest album takes the listener on journey through a hell of the Body’s careful making. | The Body: I Have Fought Against It, But I Can’t Any Longer. | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/the-body-i-have-fought-against-it-but-i-cant-any-longer/ | I Have Fought Against It, But I Can’t Any Longer. | The Body have never thought of themselves as a metal band. Their last full-length, 2016’s No One Deserves Happiness, was the Portland duo’s version of a pop album, influenced by Taylor Swift, the Weeknd, Russian poet Anna Akhmatova, and various suicide novels, as well as their collaborators on the project, Thou and the Haxan Cloak. “We always saw ourselves as more of a noise band than anything else,” drummer Lee Buford told Thump in 2016.
Constructed largely out of cut-up and processed samples of their previous recordings, the Body’s new album, I Have Fought Against It, But I Can’t Any Longer, combines noise with electronic music. The result falls somewhere between the harsh-noise body horror of Pharmakon’s Bestial Burden and the way Shlohmo turns his emotive synths and beatwork toward grief and loss on Dark Red. True to form, the record hides moments of grace within an impenetrably violent landscape, capturing a rupture at the boundary of what is bearable.
The songs gain intensity as the album progresses, leading the listener deep into a hell of the Body’s careful making. Opening track “The Last Form of Loving” builds from a slow, melancholy prologue—violins to drums to heavy breathing—into a sort of hymn. Chrissy Wolpert, from the Body’s frequent collaborators Assembly of Light Choir, sings of “the light that survives us,” pausing on a moment of peace before “Can Carry No Weight” drops in with a thick drum beat, high-pitched chirp, and singer/guitarist Chip King’s disintegrated screams. The strings that accompany Wolpert’s gothic vocals feel ceremonial and portentous, evoking a ritual before sacrifice or the approach of a monster ready to devour the whole village. On “Partly Alive,” as rolling drums, horns, and layers of King’s blood-curdling shrieks coalesce into a cinematic wave, the thing arrives. Attacks. Spares no one.
The rest of the album roils in a terrifying yet mesmerizing darkness. On “The West Has Failed,” King’s screams are distorted beyond the human, absorbed into similarly mechanized drums—like when the bear in Annihilation screams with a human voice, but over an IDM groove. “An Urn” is the most straightforward dance track on the album, generously deploying three distinct breakdowns, each more brutal and gratifying than the last. It’s cathartic and destructive, like a rave in a collapsing building.
The single “Nothing Stirs” is the album’s massive, chilling apex, pulling together all the sounds that came before it. Built on industrial drums and ambient horror sounds, the track wouldn’t feel out of place as a Tri Angle Records release. Lyrics are important to the Body, but since King’s voice is used mostly as a sonic motif, they rely on guest vocalists to give their words life. On “Nothing Stirs,” Kristin Hayter (aka Lingua Ignota) delivers the lines, “When your love is gone/What is left/At night a prayer for death,” with a distinct bite. The closing refrain, “March on,” soars, breaks, and shatters, as though she is trying to launch the words into the atmosphere with a force they cannot withstand.
The Body have long been obsessed with suicide. I Have Fought Against It, But I Can’t Any Longer is, in fact, a line pulled from Virginia Woolf’s suicide note—and a quote that took on a particular resonance for me when, as I was living with the album, a friend finally succumbed to a debilitating illness.
The album is still a little bit metal in that it is still a little bit campy. But the struggle the Body relate on I Have Fought Against It is largely a prologue to the ultimate resignation, which manifests on the somber closing track, “Ten Times a Day, Every Day, a Stranger,” as engineer and drummer Seth Manchester’s father reads from Czech author Bohumil Hrabal’s novel Too Loud a Solitude. The song is a narrative of chronic pain and emptiness that resolves in sparse piano and silence.
Thinking of my friend, I found myself stopping short of “Ten Times a Day” to avoid its stark implications. It felt easier to stop one track earlier, with “Sickly Heart of Sand”—where Hayter howls Woolf’s words, “I have fought against it but I can’t any longer,” but embedded in the kinetic brutality of her voice is the certainty that one is still fighting. | 2018-05-15T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-05-15T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Metal | Thrill Jockey | May 15, 2018 | 7.8 | df79870e-9c86-4c39-b443-212357d5b4be | NM Mashurov | https://pitchfork.com/staff/nm-mashurov/ | |
The Atlanta rapper’s latest LP is an ambitious and overwhelming experience, a bridge between his upbringing and his place within hip-hop canon and Black history at large. | The Atlanta rapper’s latest LP is an ambitious and overwhelming experience, a bridge between his upbringing and his place within hip-hop canon and Black history at large. | JID: The Forever Story | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/jid-the-forever-story/ | The Forever Story | JID has always been deceptively difficult to pin down; the Atlanta spitter’s reputation as a capital-L Lyricist with a Gatling gun flow often overshadows the rubbery and referential shapes his music takes. Pass him a beat like the slinky “D/vision” and he’ll stagger-step his way around drums while dropping James Harden and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles references; give him room to vamp over the string licks and bubbly snaps of Spillage Village’s “Ea’alah (Family)” and he’ll coo about family barbecues and endless summer violence like a long-lost Dungeon Family affiliate.
On “Raydar,” the second track on his new album The Forever Story, JID explicitly calls attention to his range for the first time in his career: “I got the shit you could play for your mama/I got the shit you could play for the hoes/I got the shit you could sell to the trappers/In Decatur with the ’K and the Colt.” It’s been nearly four years since JID’s last solo project, 2018’s DiCaprio 2, and five since his 2017 breakout The Never Story; the time away has him aching to display tricks old and new. There are verses performed in multiple voices; there are heartfelt ballads; he flexes, digs further into his family history, and shares scattered thoughts on the modern Black experience over songs with multiple beat changes. Forever is an ambitious and overwhelming album, a sprawling and sometimes frustrating bridge between JID’s upbringing and his place within hip-hop canon and Black history at large.
That’s a lot to cover in any context, but it isn’t his first time piecing this together. Forever is a literal and thematic sequel to The Never Story, providing what JID recently described to Complex as “a good piece of [my] origin story.” He’s spoken about his family before, but never with the verve he brings to a story about him and his six siblings fighting a small army outside a New Orleans bar on “Crack Sandwich,” or a dissection of the way his success strains his relationship with one of his sisters on “Sistanem.” Like The Never Story, some tracks are bookended with recordings of family and friends that range from candid conversations to demands for him to drop the album. The scope of the project makes it easy to occasionally lose the plot, but the raps and production are strong enough to draw focus away from its awkward sequencing.
When it comes to pure performance, JID’s voice has rarely been more elastic. He uses the same half-step flow at different BPMs on “Can’t Punk Me” and “Stars,” burrowing through both beats to create exciting vocal pockets in their shuffling beats. He’s also singing more, and his light melodies make for good hooks (“Dance Now,” “Bruddanem”) and full-throated balladry on the heartrending “Kody Blu 31.” One big difference from past records is the number of sly musical references baked into songs. Some are fairly overt—JID mentions looking up to JAY-Z, Kanye West, and Lil Wayne on “Stars”—but others are fainter to the naked ear. “Raydar” begins with a short sample from the Last Poets’ “Mean Machine” that contrasts JID’s war-ready posturing throughout the song. Michael Jackson’s infamous scatting hook from “Wanna Be Startin’ Somethin’” is interpolated on “Dance Now”; the “mommies, daughters, martyrs, callers” hook from “Sistanem” bears a striking resemblance to the opening of OutKast’s “Rosa Parks.”
By creating a new trail using the breadcrumbs of the past, JID and his producers are doing what many of the greats do best. And the beats across Forever are almost uniformly impressive, as executive producer Christo and a handful of others offer up a variety pack of slappers and pretty orchestral arrangements. “Surround Sound” flips the same Aretha Franklin sample used on Yasiin Bey’s “Ms. Fat Booty” with harder drums that pulse like subwoofers in a trunk. Nervy footwork-inspired beats from Kaytranada (“Can’t Punk Me”) share space with melancholic live-band instrumentation from Canadian jazz outfit BADBADNOTGOOD (“Stars”) and Justus League member Khrysis (“Money”).
Forever’s maximalism creates some unfortunate bloat. Third verses whiff about as often as they land; songs like “Surround Sound” and “Can’t Make U Change” turn into endurance tests when their switch-ups don’t justify their length. This also extends to the album’s guest list. Most of the guests slot themselves in nicely, particularly fellow Dreamvillites EarthGang on “Can’t Punk Me” and an in-form Lil Wayne on “Just in Time.” But Lil Durk’s choppy melodies don’t belong over the string arrangement on “Bruddanem,” and the decision to put Yasiin Bey’s otherwise solid verse over a staid beat on the back half of “Stars” instead of the beautiful flutes and clap drums on the front half was a mistake.
Much of this excess clearly stems from JID feeling he has something to prove after four years away. The skits poking fun at impatient fans and his quips about song leaks don’t fully conceal that Forever is JID’s attempt to be a hip-hop ringmaster playing every role in the circus. Even so, his expanded ambition is impressive. JID remains a talented and engaging presence who’s becoming better and better at exposing his heart for anyone willing to touch it. | 2022-09-01T00:03:00.000-04:00 | 2022-09-01T00:03:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Dreamville / Interscope | September 1, 2022 | 7.3 | df7dd9a0-906b-42df-8c05-264b58cfcb6f | Dylan Green | https://pitchfork.com/staff/dylan-green/ | |
Anderson .Paak and Knxwledge’s sly, smooth-talking rap&B sounds older and wiser these days. The duo’s stellar second album layers doubt and insecurity into jet-setting antics and featherbed-plush beats. | Anderson .Paak and Knxwledge’s sly, smooth-talking rap&B sounds older and wiser these days. The duo’s stellar second album layers doubt and insecurity into jet-setting antics and featherbed-plush beats. | NxWorries: Why Lawd? | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/nxworries-why-lawd/ | Why Lawd? | In December 2020, Anderson .Paak and Knxwledge performed at the Double Happiness festival. The show was a livestream and the artists were isolated with no audience except the camera crew. “I hate it, bro. I want the people, I want the sweat,” Paak joked. But NxWorries squeezed plenty of fun out of their barely 10-minute set. Its most striking moment made it directly onto their second album, Why Lawd? “Stop playin’ wit’ my boy Knxwledge,” Paak shouts through reverb’d vocals, hyping up early single “Where I Go,” a smooth jam that equally channels early 2000s Monica and Knx’s WrapTaypes series. When the clip appears in the album version, it sounds grandiose yet humble. Paak and Knx have toured the world, sold out arenas, and worked with plenty of larger-than-life collaborators. But that stripped-back rendition of “Where I Go” contains both the intimacy of a steamy rendezvous and the focused showmanship of a band ready to shut down a 10,000-cap room.
NxWorries’ 2016 debut, Yes Lawd!, was as carefree as a new-age mack daddy rap&B album could be. The billowing thump of Knxwledge’s exhaustive backlog of beat tapes blended well with Paak’s scratchy croon-raps, somewhere between Joe Tex and Black Dynamite with a taste for vegan sausage. Eight years on, with higher individual profiles, how would NxWorries recapture that patent-leather Air Force sheen? The sumptuous Why Lawd? not only succeeds, it expands their vision. The beats are more ambitious, the lyrics more thoughtful on subjects of affection, rejection, and coital bliss. They sound as enamored with having loved and lost as with the future joys and miseries just over the horizon.
Yes Lawd! came to party and dash, but Why Lawd? takes a slightly more grown approach. The first proper track “86Sentra” starts out business as usual, with Paak dangling used cars in front of love interests and rapping about playing the Super Bowl over an ominous organ loop. On “MoveOn,” he contemplates the pain he’s put himself through by living recklessly. Then, as if to put that insight to the test, “KeepHer” fleshes out the story of an ex-wife determined to leave his bullshit for a new paramour, no matter how much money he throws her way. “He don’t love you the way I—/You don’t look good in that Hyundai,” he says, before begging her for farewell sex in the next verse. It’s rewarding to see his slimeball charm turned against him: Paak is rarely, if ever, on the business end of a breakup song.
Why Lawd? savors these contrasts, adding new emotional layers to NxWorries’ jet-setting hijinks. Paak’s trademark smooth-talking Svengali routine is still in effect, but the breezy connects are few and far between; now, affairs are usually followed by the sting of denial or the nagging doubts of age. The dramatic synthwave gestures of “Daydreaming” lead into the 3 a.m. drunken car sobbing of “FromHere,” a rakish torch song worthy of the Stylistics. While this isn’t a concept album, the songs feel connected, as if each were an episode of your favorite romantic dramedy. “HereIAm” plays like a funeral dirge, mournful organs echoing Paak’s melancholic scroll through an ex’s Instagram before bleeding into “OutTheWay,” where rattling drums and pastel synths signal budding new love. These vignettes aren’t just teeming with personality missing from more precisely manufactured work like Oxnard or the soul cosplay of Paak and Bruno Mars’ An Evening With Silk Sonic; they sketch out a portrait of Paak as a father, son, divorcé, lover, and freak aspiring to keep his streak alive.
Knxwledge supplies Paak with some of the most breathtaking production of his career. The beats on Why Lawd? are ornately constructed, each a treasure hunt for the tell that it’s all made from tiny bits of other songs. Knx’s hazy lo-fi aesthetic has always operated at an epic scale, but his love for gospel, soul, and doo-wop has helped his beats grow into more elegant shapes. While many of these confections are refined takes on ideas from his 2020 solo album 1988 or the later volumes in his woefully discontinued Meek Mill remix series, the genre excursions offer the album’s biggest surprises. “Daydreaming,” with its synthwave saturation and closing guitar solo, wouldn’t feel out of place on Miami Vice. “FromHere” and “DistantSpace” don’t sound like homages to the Temptations and Motown; they sound plucked from the shelves of Berry Gordy’s office and looped and drum-tracked to perfection. Knx and Paak wear their reverence to the classics on their sleeves, but Why Lawd? never strays far from its dirty swinging rap&B center.
The two of them could’ve used nostalgia to coast on the legacy of their nearly decade-old debut to turn in a serviceable redux. Instead, Why Lawd? leans into a rawness and fear Yes Lawd! only hinted at. No one is immune to getting curved. Loneliness can supersede all the money and hook-ups in the world. Putting that reality front and center is a bold shift from the first album’s devil-may-care attitude, and makes for caramel-rich music that nods to the duo’s idols while forging its own groove. “Who would ever think that we’d find a hole in the system?” Paak asks over a rattling drum break and guitar riff on “Battlefield,” a song that begins with assured autobiography and ends with a joke involving a fling that lasts barely as long as a Dodgers game. Leave it to NxWorries to find the beauty in the bruises. | 2024-06-14T00:02:00.000-04:00 | 2024-06-14T00:02:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | Stones Throw | June 14, 2024 | 8 | df959060-5487-4c4a-83cd-fe85101aa915 | Dylan Green | https://pitchfork.com/staff/dylan-green/ | |
On Kingston, Penn., punk outfit Title Fight's ambitious new Spring Songs EP, the group softens their sound without forfeiting the hooks or energy of their previous releases. | On Kingston, Penn., punk outfit Title Fight's ambitious new Spring Songs EP, the group softens their sound without forfeiting the hooks or energy of their previous releases. | Title Fight: Spring Songs EP | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/18694-title-fight-spring-songs-ep/ | Spring Songs EP | Title Fight are from Kingston, Penn., an erstwhile coalmining town in the northeast part of the Keystone State that uses Wilkes-Barre as its metropolitan reference point. Though its punk scene is vibrant and tight-knit, to the point of being kinda quaint, a band looking to break out on a national level needs an almost pathological level of ambition. Of course, you need great songs as well and Title Fight have plenty of those. But as a melodic punk band that functions within a realm that doesn’t have much use for typical signifiers of compositional ambition, their drive is trickier to quantify, a “most likely to succeed” kind that can smack as careerism in the wrong hands. The quartet are productive, they respect their elders (Quicksand/Rivals Schools’ Walter Schreifels produced their proper debut LP, 2011's Shed), they roll with the winners (collaborators and tourmates such as Balance & Composure and Touché Amoré), they’ve been on three different labels amenable to their sound at the time and they tour relentlessly. That and they have no time for bullshit—Title Fight’s Twitter account has over 32,000 followers and zero "followings", which makes them look far more focused than antisocial.
So, it’s interesting to see their Spring Songs EP called “ambitious” by onlookers, as if that's a new quality for Title Fight. In a way it’s backhanded, suggesting that their previous influences such as Lifetime or Jawbreaker or Saves the Day were necessarily stepping stones to the trad indie-rock sound captured here. But it’s worth keeping in mind that Title Fight are still barely out of their teens, and you know what? That’s not an atypical listening progression for someone who’s growing up right along with Title Fight. And so Spring Songs does manifest a new kind of ambition, which is the band staking out different territory and hoping their fans come along.
The arrangement makes for a tidy introduction: two songs on two sides, split equally between their two vocalists, Ned Russin and Jamie Rhoden. Moreover, half of Spring Songs finds the vocals lunging out from the newly warm and analog production, the other have them more nestled within the handsomely textured, melodic guitar leads. The permutations allow Title Fight the ability to show just how little they needed to change their overall approach to edge into a new aesthetic. The Rhoden-led “Be A Toy” susses out the musical currency existing between early-90s Merge and mid-90s pop-punk as well as the emotional underpinning—I mean both cohorts were accused of being “slackers," right? And “Be A Toy” finds common ground in a line like “do you regret being used/are you used to it yet?”, trying to get your rocks off while feeling like crap. Meanwhile, “Blush” counters with the rawer-voiced Russin raging over sour guitars for an effect that’s hooky and also jagged—it’s probably what A&Rs had in mind when trying to find that bridge between Nevermind and Dookie.
In most aspects, Spring Songs is the loosest Title Fight recording. Ranging from 2:30-4:00 and removing the BPM and rhythmic strictures of punk, these would all be among the longer tracks on previous LPs Shed and Floral Green. Yet, it’s their tightest, most hook-focused songwriting yet. The spare, midtempo “Receiving Line” gives Russin’s lyrics more sonic space to be heard and as a result, a typically topical Title Fight song allows the listener more freedom of interpretation. You sense the emotional tenor when Russin sings “we drove my car that weekend/ 100 miles barely speaking," and with an understated economy of words, he gives just enough inside information to pique interest rather than full disclosure “‘I’m sorry for your loss’/you probably get that a lot/we didn’t have to talk/you probably get that.” “Evolution” feels like the proper term here, as Title Fight are simply teasing out certain aspects that were present of their previous two LPs, particularly Floral Green. And if there are any qualms to be had, it’s in the sense that you’ll be hearing these again soon, that Spring Songs is a teaser rather than a standalone for a band that would probably feel very lazy if they ended 2013 without a proper release.
But Spring Songs does leave a lot to the imagination and not simply in the matter of “what will the next Title Fight album sound like?” Here we have a rock band on an independent record label, whose sound and work ethic are unmistakably punk. And yet, you’re more likely to hear electro-pop or major-label bands such as Chvrches or Haim called “indie” more often than Title Fight. How is that? Is it because most of time, genre tags are used to described the perceived fanbase than the music itself? If that's the case, Title Fight really are going indie rock on Spring Songs. But even if it reaches people who aren't familiar with their past work, Spring Songs helpfully shows Title Fight as pretty much the same thing they've always been: an ambitious band that makes very good songs. | 2013-11-22T01:00:04.000-05:00 | 2013-11-22T01:00:04.000-05:00 | Rock | Revelation | November 22, 2013 | 7.2 | df9ec346-5da9-47d9-81d9-74ec4b040c46 | Ian Cohen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ian-cohen/ | null |
Ezra Rubin’s debut LP is an earnest and subdued attempt at making his soulful, ominous, post-club productions agreeable to a general audience. | Ezra Rubin’s debut LP is an earnest and subdued attempt at making his soulful, ominous, post-club productions agreeable to a general audience. | Kingdom: Tears in the Club | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22916-tears-in-the-club/ | Tears in the Club | Ezra Rubin (aka Kingdom) is an architect of the post-club sound—a new profile cleaved from caustic synthesizers, herky jerk percussion, and crying on the dancefloor. The melting pot of sounds he and his collaborators in Fade to Mind (Nguzunguzu, Total Freedom) and Night Slugs (Bok Bok, L-Vis 1990) offered pulled from UK garage, dancehall, and diva-driven house that still seems prescient. Rubin, in particular, helped shaped a postmodern vision of R&B alongside Kelela and Dawn Richard that’s influenced everyone from FKA twigs to Justin Bieber. Rubin was staged to make a pop crossover. His debut LP, the delightfully titled Tears in the Club, is an earnest and subdued attempt at making his panoply of sounds agreeable to a general audience.
This is immediately clear from the album’s opening moment, “What Is Love,” a collaboration with SZA. Rubin is no stranger to producing for powerhouse vocalists, but with Tears in the Club he dips his toe into the world of major label team-ups, and the result has neutered the outré aspects of his sound. On “What Is Love,” certain trademarks still pop up—vaporous synth pulses and staccato percussion—but he’s slowed down the normally breakneck pace of his music to somewhere sleepier and almost lackadaisical. In the past, Rubin’s slow jams (Dawn Richards’ “Paint It Blue” for example) had a seething atmosphere just bubbling beneath the surface. With SZA, that feel is gone. This is also true of some of his solo tracks. “Nurtureworld” is a confusingly out-of-focus dance track that spends most of its three minutes finding its proper footing, and the album’s title track is a defanged version of the controlled chaos he once offered.
Yet, Kingdom recovers from these missteps. “Each & Every Day,” his collaboration with Vine star Najee Daniels, adds a shot of bubblegum into his otherwise ominous productions. It resembles what Charli XCX would sound like singing over a DJ Rashad beat. His second song with SZA, “Down 4 Whatever,” benefits from the more vigorous, energetic beat Rubin provides. A solo track called “Into the Fold,” offers a picture of what pop-ified post-club music could sound like—bright whacks of drums and smokey looped vocals mingle well with more experimental elements like a dissonant hiss in the background. But his thesis statement for this album comes on a song with the Internet’s Syd, who might be the perfect vocalist for Kingdom’s attempt at a crossover style. Her slinky voice follows Kingdom’s syncopations beat for beat, and the protean, mercurial change in pace befits Syd’s ability to pitch shift on the fly. It’s a promising peek into what Kingdom could do for a radio-ready artist.
On a recent release, Vertical XL EP, Rubin filled inhuman sounds with soul, and Tears in the Club attempts to take that idea to a mass audience. One wonders if he is unintentionally softening his music for the sake of a breezier product. It’s less a statement of purpose and more of an experiment with an inconclusive hypothesis. Instead of heightening, or focusing the pandemonium he could unleash on the dancefloor, his work is denatured by a fairweather disposition. Even if he never means to, Tears in the Club is a disappointingly genteel work, from an artist known for anything but. | 2017-02-25T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2017-02-25T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Electronic | Fade to Mind | February 25, 2017 | 6.7 | df9f5b05-b8a9-4f07-ad9e-99f1a673831c | Kevin Lozano | https://pitchfork.com/staff/kevin-lozano/ | null |
With their post-return jitters under control, Garbage have solidified that return with Strange Little Birds, their darkest, most intimate LP and the band’s strongest effort in 15 years. | With their post-return jitters under control, Garbage have solidified that return with Strange Little Birds, their darkest, most intimate LP and the band’s strongest effort in 15 years. | Garbage: Strange Little Birds | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21953-strange-little-birds/ | Strange Little Birds | Garbage would sooner risk obsolescence than fake a smile. The industry learned this the hard way in 2001 when they tried to steer the band back to the mainstream following the commercial failure of their third record Beautiful Garbage, released three weeks after 9/11. Hoping for a smooth transition onto the pop-and-rap-glutted charts, label executives approached frontwoman Shirley Manson and producers-slash-bandmates Duke Erikson, Steve Marker, and Butch Vig demanding rapped guest verses and pop hooks. They got the same old Garbage instead: seething, surging, brutal–Billboard potential be damned.
Fifteen years later, Garbage have outlasted the naysayers and jilted ex-lovers. 2012’s Not Your Kind of People* couldn’t match the sonic cohesion and thrills of 1995's self-titled debut *and *Version 2.0, *but as the band’s first effort in seven years, it also provided an oasis for all those jaded by EDM's brainless, bro-y #posivibes. With their post-return jitters under control, the band have solidified that return with Strange Little Birds, their darkest, most intimate LP and the band’s strongest effort in 15 years.
Manson's been happily married for six years (her husband, Billy Bush, co-produced this album and its predecessor), but she’ll never get over misery, her lifelong muse; like all Garbage albums, *Strange Little Birds *obsesses over, romanticizes, and even celebrates sorrow. On the lead single “Empty,” she towers over her bandmates’ roaring void with arms akimbo, underscoring her woe by way of dramatic, elongated syllables; “I’m *sooooo *empty,” she moans, quaking atop Vig and Erikson's steeled groove. “Night Drive Loneliness,” a ballad inspired by a piece of fan-mail thrust into Manson's hand following a Garbage gig in Russia, develops its titular subject as a sensual ritual. Considered in tandem with the track’s slinky lounge arrangement and boudoir imagery (“I got my high heels/and my lipstick/My blue velvet dress in my closet”), Manson's sighing refrain–“My night drive loneliness comes again and again”–hints at a more hopeful subtext: perhaps depression's just another nameless paramour occupying the passenger seat, another car whizzing by in the night.
Of course, the same could be said for love. Every glimpse of romantic bliss on *Strange Little Birds–the galvanizing lust on “Magnetized,” the stolen glances of “We Never Tell”–ultimately dissolves under Manson’s fatalist approach to matters of the heart. Although she’s come a long way from the paranoid interrogations of the Bleed Like Me *era (“I think you’re sleeping with a friend of mine/I have no proof, but I think that I’m right"; “Why Do You Love Me?”) the front-woman still regards love as a rigged game–one she’s happy to play, because she’s got nothing else to lose. Midway through the album, on the funereal choruses of “Even Though Our Love Is Doomed,” Manson soberly proclaims the song’s titular sentiment to deliver a message of hope, not fear: “Even though our stars are crossed/You’re the only thing worth fighting for/You’re the only thing worth dying for.” Elsewhere, “Sometimes” and “Amends”–Strange Little Birds’ respective opener and closer– fashion Manson's philosophy into an olive branch extended to her already-“doomed” loves: “There is nothing you could say/To cause more hurt, or cause me shame/Than all the things that I have thought about myself,” she admits.
*Strange Little Birds *lands less than a year after Garbage’s 20th-anniversary reissue of 1995’s landmark self-titled debut, and while the new album’s sessions predate Garbage’s commemoration festivities, their temporal and stylistic overlap sets it apart from the similarly-styled but unevenly executed band have released over the past fifteen years. Indeed, the sonic parallels between the two albums are frequent, and far from subtle: “Empty” and “Supervixen” share the same glam-industrial DNA, and the dreary “Blackout” employs the same skittering trip-hop showcased in “A Stroke of Luck.” Despite these superficial similarities, repeat spins of Strange Little Birds ultimately belie an older, wiser reincarnation of that youthful rage, not just a cheap retrospective. Twenty years on, Garbage are still grappling with their demons, but they’re disarmingly zen–even ecstatic– about the battle. With material like this, they’ve got a right to be. | 2016-06-10T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-06-10T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | STUNVOLUME | June 10, 2016 | 7 | dfa74282-28ef-4c6f-88a0-1e2882a922af | Zoe Camp | https://pitchfork.com/staff/zoe-camp/ | null |
After a long wait and an intense build-up, Stevie Wonder’s 2005 collab-heavy return is unerringly stately, sometimes bracing, proof that the artist had endured. | After a long wait and an intense build-up, Stevie Wonder’s 2005 collab-heavy return is unerringly stately, sometimes bracing, proof that the artist had endured. | Stevie Wonder: A Time to Love | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/stevie-wonder-a-time-2-love/ | A Time to Love | For an artist who had spent each decade of his life in the public eye, the years leading up to Stevie Wonder’s 77-minute opus, A Time to Love, were uncharacteristically fallow. Steeped in intrigue and plagued by delays, the album’s decade-long development became a story in itself. Though Wonder had long led the way in studio innovation, it appeared the infinite possibilities of the digital age, combined with his notorious tendency for tinkering, had finally begun to overwhelm him. Twice, hard deadlines came and went. Deep tensions formed between Wonder and his longtime label, Motown, who was pouring resources into the recording and counting on the results to help buttress its flagging bottom line.
Sylvia Rhone, Motown’s newly appointed president, was eager to put the label on a more modern footing, and her simmering frustrations with Wonder soon became public. “In time, God will give me what I need to do the album on time,” he told the press, a fairly open-ended, mystical formulation unlikely to comfort stakeholders. Meanwhile, the credits stretched to include everyone from Prince to Paul McCartney, India.Arie to gospel singer Kim Burrell, and even his own daughter Aisha Morris. Wonder had long enjoyed the company and energy of bountiful collaboration, and all these choices made sense with respect to conjuring a career-spanning aesthetic throughline, but the inevitable scheduling conflicts only further complicated the process.
Process was only part of the distraction. When Wonder’s previous LP, Conversation Peace, was released in 1995, he had graduated from a celebrated musician to something on the order of a cultural deity. As boomers came of age and consolidated political and economic power, the music of their youth was increasingly detached from its context and recycled as nostalgic comfort food: Picture Bill and Hillary Clinton capering to “Don’t Stop” at the 1993 inauguration party, or the historical white-wash of 1994’s Forrest Gump. Try as he might, Wonder struggled like many of his peers to unyoke himself from the cultural forces determined to reduce the radical achievements of the ’60s and ’70s to a passive, self-gratifying soundtrack.
In spite of the crass cheapening of the ’60s tumult, Wonder continued to throw his shoulder into righteous activism. His involvement in the USA for Africa project and the campaign to make Martin Luther King Jr.’s birthday a national holiday during the 1980s affected lasting and meaningful change. As other avatars of dissent from the previous era lost interest or principle, Wonder’s steadfastness elevated his reputation ever higher. He traveled the world and was greeted like a foreign dignitary. He was feted with awards and performed at the 1999 Super Bowl. Ten fraught days after 9/11, he played harmonica on “America the Beautiful” during what was essentially a nationally televised wake, accompanying Willie Nelson, one of his only true peers as a chronicler of the overlooked and underserved.
Additional complications abounded in Wonder’s personal life, long a Gordian knot of shifting romantic allegiances that eventually resulted in his fathering nine children with five women with whom he was on variously good terms. There were palimony cases and sundry disputes, and the threat of a tell-all book from a former backup singer that mercifully never appeared. Most painful of all was the 2004 death of his first wife and longtime creative partner, Syreeta Wright, which shattered him to his core and inspired the lyrics to the A Time to Love track “Shelter in the Rain.” (“When all the odds say there’s no chance/Amidst the final dance/I’ll be your comfort through your pain.”) This rich tapestry of backstory was widely reported in the music press, fomenting genuine curiosity about what bounty A Time to Love’s seemingly endless gestation period would ultimately produce.
When the first single finally materialized in the spring of 2005, it seemed like all the waiting had been worth it. “So What the Fuss,” featuring Prince on guitar and En Vogue on backing vocals, is a forceful piece of socially conscious funk, with Wonder’s growling vocals and distorted clavinet convincingly conjuring the mood of early ’70s classics Innervisions and Talking Book. Sounding like the ecstatically fried grooves of Funkadelic’s Maggot Brain experiencing the aftershocks of Prince’s own “Housequake,” “So What the Fuss” simmers with a mix of gospel uplift and lurking menace, always the secret undercurrent of Wonder’s best work. Without an official release date for the proper album, Wonder seemed to relish the rough-and-ready vibe, even vetoing Motown’s first choice for a single, the rather mawkish “From the Bottom of My Heart.”
While Motown’s choice for a single wouldn’t have elicited the same excitement, it would have been a more accurate representation of the work to come. When the album was finally released that fall, it was 77 minutes of unerringly stately, sometimes bracing, and occasionally indistinguishable forays into neo-soul and quiet storm, taking love in all its permutations as an overarching theme. After a lost decade, A Time to Love was abundant proof that Stevie Wonder had endured. And yet, it desperately could have used some editing—it’s at least 20 minutes too long. Or perhaps it should have been two very good Stevie Wonder records, rather than one overstuffed omnibus. But genius works in mysterious and sometimes convoluted ways, and these comforting, contented odes to lasting love feel like an act of generosity and an exercise in unvarnished sentiment.
After the long wait, the delays, and the intense build-up, Wonder’s return was neither late-career miracle nor shell-of-his-former-self parody. Instead, it was an earnest overview of the artist in middle age. Opening track “If Your Love Cannot Be Moved,” a salsa-inflected duet with Kim Burrell, spans six leisurely minutes. Its supple groove and genre fusion seem intentionally designed to reassure listeners that Stevie Wonder, the peerless bandleader and arranger, remained very much in control of his gifts. If anything he may be too much in control. “Sweetest Somebody I Know” is a charming grab bag of go-to-Wonder-isms from the Hallmark-adjacent sentiment to the harmonica solo: It’s lovely to listen to, if light on inspiration. So it goes for much of A Time to Love’s slow-burning first half. “Moon Blue” is pretty but a touch perfunctory to justify its near seven minutes. The title of “From the Bottom of My Heart” pulls its refrain from his ’80s smash “I Just Called to Say I Love You” but fails to improve upon it. It isn’t remotely fair, but is nevertheless inevitably the case with an artist of Wonder’s stature: In his fifth decade of recording, his primary competition was his younger self.
If A Time to Love never quite blows you away, there are still glimpses of Wonder’s sublime ability. The gorgeous duet with daughter Aisha Morris, “How Will I Know,” harkens back to his grounding in the jazz standards of the pre-rock era, conjuring the heartbroken balladry of Billy Strayhorn. “My Love Is on Fire” features a buoyant keyboard hook and robust libido à la the ecstatic horndog loverman jams of 1972’s titanic Music of My Mind. The penultimate track, “Positivity,” is a vaguely silly but ultimately irresistible paean to the profound optimism which has been a lifetime trademark of an artist born into the twin adversities of blindness and poverty. Conjuring a winsome vibe liberally borrowed from the Ohio Players’ “Love Rollercoaster,” Wonder continues asking the big questions: “When the people ask me as an African American/What do I see tomorrow in the human plan/Is it possible for all of the people of the world to co-exist?” His answer is hedging, circumspect, but ultimately hopeful.
At its best, A Time to Love uses its self-referential sprawl to convey the wisdom of a man who’d seen it all. He was no longer the prodigy who helped make Motown an institution, or the visionary shaman of ’70s soul, or the go-to hitmaker of the go-go ’80s. The world keeps on turning, and Wonder changes with it. This music was also an endpoint, at least for the time being. Following the record, Wonder essentially went dormant again. Suffering from health problems that required a kidney transplant, he released no new music for 15 years. Then, in 2020, he surfaced with two singles, released on his own label. Even if the unimpeachable masterpieces are behind him, A Time to Love proved his presence can still elevate us to higher ground. If Stevie Wonder hasn’t given up, then why should we? | 2022-02-27T00:00:00.000-05:00 | 2022-02-27T00:00:00.000-05:00 | Pop/R&B | Motown | February 27, 2022 | 7.4 | dfb91422-01d5-41fb-8acf-91e3de90667c | Elizabeth Nelson | https://pitchfork.com/staff/elizabeth-nelson/ | |
The Detroit producer and fashion photographer's first album for Scuba mastermind Paul Rose's Hotflush label might make you want to take a shower. | The Detroit producer and fashion photographer's first album for Scuba mastermind Paul Rose's Hotflush label might make you want to take a shower. | Jimmy Edgar: Majenta | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/16624-majenta/ | Majenta | The sound of bass music is constantly mutating, and the UK label Hotflush has certainly played a part in that over the last nine months. While many of its recent singles still toy with big grooves, crisp hi-hats, and deep rumble, its releases have taken on a sonic guise that's straightforwardly melodic and, at times, pink-hued and romantic. Last year saw the release of Braille and Machinedrum's self-titled debut LP as Sepalcure, an adventurous record that explored sensual depths while appropriating sonic signifiers from assorted dance sub-genres; this year has brought the open-hearted second album from label head Paul Rose's Scuba project, Personality, as well as Scottish producer Beaumont's Never Love Me EP, which threw lush Italo synths into the mix and came adorned with the kind of artwork that Drive fetishists could get airbrushed onto the back of a leather jacket.
It makes sense, then, that Detroit producer and fashion photographer Jimmy Edgar is releasing his latest record, Majenta, on Rose's label, even if the team-up itself wasn't premeditated. (Edgar says this move came about after a dinner conversation with Rose and Sepalcure's Travis Stewart and Praveen Sharma.) As an under-30 with a career spanning more than a decade, Edgar's music strays just about as far from bass music proper as you can get. He works with a variety of sounds, from the type of techno that's closely associated with his hometown, to seedy, dank electro, to window-fogging, pitched-vocal R&B. Dance music by definition is made to move bodies, and so is Edgar's-- only, in his case, in the type of way that could get someone slapped with lewdness charges.
That is to say, Jimmy Edgar is insatiable. He loves talking about sex, singing about sex, referencing sex. This is a man whose most notable track in his eight years with Warp was titled "I Wanna Be Your STD", and who called his last album XXX (only after he decided to change it from its working title, Deeper). Majenta is similarly soaked in low-art sleaze; just scanning the tracklist ("Sex Drive", "Touch Yr Bodytime", "Hrt Real Good", "In Deep") is enough to make you question whether you really want to hear what the Majenta cut "This One's for the Children" is all about. (Not to worry: it's just your run-of-the-mill "Up with people, down with the system" slice of Detroit techno.)
Suffice to say, Edgar really overdoes it on the sex stuff, moreso than on the other albums he's put out in the last decade. It's not that dance music can't be carnal, but that everyone's idea of what's "sexy" isn't the same, so presenting a specific expression of sexuality as a universal representation is a dangerous tightrope walk. At his core, Jimmy Edgar is a hippie, if a bit of a ridiculous-sounding one (he claims in the album's press release that he's recently "made galactic contact with the community"), but the only way Majenta could bring people together is if they were convening to nervously giggle at Edgar's various trying-too-hard vocal turns, which come across as erotic as reading Fifty Shades of Gray on the subway.
Musically, Majenta initially seems better than XXX, only because the lack of uniformity that plagued the latter LP means that the former's standouts-- the warm, skipping vocal house of "Let Yrself Be", electro-bass near-twins "Indigo Mechanix (3D)", and "In Deep"-- stand out that much more. Unfortunately, more than mediocre tracks or throaty sexual goofs, what does in Majenta is its scattershot nature. There's no flow to the way the album's sequenced, to the point where it seems purely arbitrary. Furthermore, Edgar seems so concerned about skipping between genres that he neglects to refine any one specific sound; even the strongest cuts rarely rise above "nice try." Edgar is clearly aiming for some sort of climax-- spiritually, musically, sexually-- but by the time Majenta sputters to a close, all he's left with is a mess on his hands. | 2012-05-21T02:00:03.000-04:00 | 2012-05-21T02:00:03.000-04:00 | Electronic | Hotflush | May 21, 2012 | 5.2 | dfc5c8b0-1bd0-4d5b-b053-93529d6ce961 | Larry Fitzmaurice | https://pitchfork.com/staff/larry-fitzmaurice/ | null |
Foregrounding sensory disorientation, clashing keys, and confounding meters, the Brazilian musician’s sample-based music investigates the warping effects of cultural and political memory. | Foregrounding sensory disorientation, clashing keys, and confounding meters, the Brazilian musician’s sample-based music investigates the warping effects of cultural and political memory. | Babe, Terror: Teghnojoyg | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/babe-terror-teghnojoyg/ | Teghnojoyg | Babe, Terror is the moniker of the São Paulo-based electronic producer Claudio Katz Szynkier, and the woozy, magnetic music he issues under this alias has attracted pockets of influential admirers. In 2010, Four Tet’s Kieran Hebden reworked one of Szynkier’s pieces, “Summertime Our League,” for an EP of the same name. The Norwegian space-disco producer Prins Thomas and tropicalia legend Caetano Veloso count themselves among his fans, as does the UK producer Daniel Avery, who has turned up alongside him on wax, and the shoegaze band Ride, who included a 26-minute suite Szynkier composed from their own tapes on the Japanese version of their album Weather Diaries.
These are disparate artists, but they share a sculptural approach to music making, a tendency to manipulate sounds like clay. You can imagine what may have excited their imaginations when listening to Szynkier’s information-dense and implication-heavy new album Teghnojoyg, which comes on like an overpowering wave but breaks down into squirming particles the closer you squint at it. As he did on 2020’s disquieting Horizogon, Szynkier composts a pile of antique sounds—dollar-bin disco LPs seemingly spun backwards, snippets of could-be obscure jazz albums, old orchestral 78s—until they give off an alluring, dangerous heat. He cherishes sensory disorientation, and his works often clash meters and keys: Pieces like “Mesopothance” invite the suspicion that you have two tabs open, playing incongruous pieces of music. But they slot together in a pleasingly strange way, congealing into a whole under the intensity of Szynkier’s gaze. This music is so warped and tactile you can almost see it melting.
Szynkier seeks to extract not familiarity from his well-worn sounds, but its opposite. He scrambles and chops his samples until they yield the desired ghosts: On “Congosymphag,” he swirls together some disembodied voices—breathy, soulful vocals that may have belonged to a house record long, long ago, somewhere far, far away—until they seem to suck downward and liquefy in the spinning blades of his sampler. On “Casa Das Canoagens,” an orchestra plays something dark and plangent, a late-Romantic work whose troubled chords hint at the incipient breakdown of tonality. It could be Mahler, Bartok, Strauss, early Schoenberg. But Szynkier defaces it with Vangelis synth squirts that fire neon-pink blotches all over the track, an early-’80s technofuturist vision straight out of Blade Runner set loose in fin-de-siècle Vienna. Somewhere miles away and off to the side, a chintzy drawing-room piano tinkles away at a sentimental melody, maybe Rachmaninoff, oblivious to the chaos around it. The way Szynkier positions these pieces around each other suggests a yearning of some sort, a melancholy spirit of inquiry.
Szynkier has used the world “portal” to describe the sensation he wants his music to evoke, and like many musicians—William Basinski comes to mind—he is obsessed with the warping and eroding effects of memory, both cultural and political. He’s spoken passionately about the outsized effects of COVID-19 on his home country of Brazil under the “pathological capitalism” of Bolsonaro’s far-right government, and called for a reckoning with the resulting psychological traumas. But full-scale societal trauma is too enormous to be faced head on: Instead, it transmutes itself into the fabric of our dreams and nightmares. The music on Teghnojoyg throbs with a sort of jubilant unease, a haunted half-revelry that feels like vibrant ghosts babbling their way down now-empty city streets.
That plangent string writing returns again in the album’s final piece, “Casa das Guineas.” Save for some dark, unnatural notes lurking deep in the bass, the harmonic language now is peaceful, settled, majestic. Some glowing synth patches dot the sky again, another alien landing, but this time Szynkier allows the mood to remain tender, and the key stays major. Somewhere amid the the busy bubbling of the synths, the 18th-century piano, still plinking away, and the heaving orchestra, you sense Szynkier sorting through various pasts for apocalypses both real and imagined, encroaching and still possible, to find where the shafts of light might poke through.
CORRECTION: An earlier version of this review incorrectly referred to the electronic producer Daniel Avery as a member of the rock band Grizzly Bear. | 2023-09-13T00:01:00.000-04:00 | 2023-09-13T00:01:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | self-released | September 13, 2023 | 8 | dfcc002a-9f43-47af-8c31-67e1ff21719b | Jayson Greene | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jayson-greene/ | |
The Hold Steady continue to prove themselves a more convincing classic-rock act than should be possible in 2008, creating a tension between old-fashioned storytelling and self-referential art. | The Hold Steady continue to prove themselves a more convincing classic-rock act than should be possible in 2008, creating a tension between old-fashioned storytelling and self-referential art. | The Hold Steady: Stay Positive | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/11987-stay-positive/ | Stay Positive | The Hold Steady weren't the likeliest candidates for success. Pulling together after the demise of the imaginative, verbose, and mostly overlooked indie act Lifter Puller, Craig Finn relocated to New York to start a new band. Holding to his distinctive poet-lost-at-karaoke delivery, Finn-- like the Replacements and Hüsker Dü before him-- began unashamedly mining classic rock radio for inspiration. Surprisingly, it's the latter group you can hear on opening track "Constructive Summer", and not just in its title's resemblance to one of Hüsker Dü's most celebrated songs.
One of the Hold Steady's most direct and thrilling tracks, "Constructive Summer"'s tempo and edge are borrowed from punk artists like Iggy Pop, Joe Strummer, and Finn's friends in Dillinger Four (in a lyrical reference that will reward all the close Hold Steady readers out there). Here, the Hold Steady retain the successful balance struck by Boys and Girls in America, with Finn again avoiding crowding the band as it continues to grow musically: the ballads are weepier, the rock songs more immediate, the attempts to diversify more striking. While they continue to prove themselves a more convincing classic rock act than should be possible in 2008, there's a tension in this album's lyrics between old-fashioned storytelling and breaking down the fourth wall. Stay Positive is their mostly successful bid to have it both ways.
Stay Positive also returns to the narrative threads that marked 2005's Separation Sunday and Finn's work in Lifter Puller, with murder and mayhem creeping back into the lyrical picture. The polite horn interjections and laid-back blooze licks of "Sequestered in Memphis" are musically joyous, though lyrically the narrator sounds inconvenienced to tell his story-- then hints before the chorus that he's retelling it in a station-house interview, as if he only returns to the chorus a second time at the behest of an interrogator. On one of the band's more ambitious musical diversions, "One for the Cutters", the guitars follow the lead of (no joke) a harpsichord while Finn relates the tale of a college girl who gets high a little too often and starts to party with townies-- no new subject matter there, until she finds out the difference between them and her freshman hookups is a proclivity to stab people.
Songs like "Navy Sheets" or "Lord, I'm Discouraged" are mostly notable for adding new elements to the band's palette, be it new-wave keyboards or uncanny Slash-worthy solos, respectively. Meanwhile, "Both Crosses" adds busy acoustics (with J Mascis on banjo, no less), organ, and whispers of theremin to wrap murky atmosphere around one of the record's central mysteries: The girl haunted by visions of the future (referenced and romanced in the song before, "Yeah Sapphire") overdoes the self-medication for her condition and talks about seeing two crucifixions, one being Jesus Christ. The narrator gets understandably nervous over who will be the second.
Stay Positive's other stories are a little less heavy: The band stretches its comfort zone on tracks like "Joke About Jamaica", adding a little talk-box while nodding to Zeppelin and offering sympathy to girls snubbed by music snobs in its lyrics. "Drive-By Truckers frontman Patterson Hood shows up to sing a bit on "Navy Sheets" and Lucero's Ben Nichols croaks some call-and-response on the chorus of "Magazines", but somehow seems lost. Even as the band grows out of its quirks, its universe seems too impermeable yet to accommodate just any guest vocalist, whether the collaboration looks completely natural on paper or not.
Every Hold Steady record heeds the importance of a killer closing track, but even so, "Slapped Actress" is something special. The band navigates one of its trickier compositions here, with churning, dirge-like guitar chords and a restrained piano performance that complements the song's changes in tone. As his protagonists beat a hasty retreat (to where else but Ybor City again), Finn manages to tie up the lyrical seeds he's planted on the record, and more: In an allusion to John Cassavetes' Opening Night, Finn nods to the fact that being in a touring band can be drudgery ("some nights it's just entertainment, and some other nights it's work"), but finds some new metaphors and new inspiration with Jumbotron-ready lines ("We are the theater," "we make our own movies") that acknowledge these songs belong to the listeners as much as the band.
While its title and lyrics often make Stay Positive sound like a darkest-before-the-dawn kind of record, the themes Finn keeps returning to-- skipping town, starting over clean, resurrection-- all speak to the redemptive power of second chances. When the Hold Steady plead with you to "stay positive," and you consider their unlikely and continued ascendancy, you could do worse than take them at their word. | 2008-07-14T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2008-07-14T02:00:01.000-04:00 | Rock | Vagrant | July 14, 2008 | 8.4 | dfd85e90-dc60-4d53-923e-9837907dc249 | Jason Crock | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jason-crock/ | null |
On their third record, the Philly band has achieved a balance between seething chaos and quietly devastating vulnerability. It’s one of the best punk rock records of the year. | On their third record, the Philly band has achieved a balance between seething chaos and quietly devastating vulnerability. It’s one of the best punk rock records of the year. | Mannequin Pussy: Patience | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/mannequin-pussy-patience/ | Patience | Mannequin Pussy are inherently unforgettable. For starters, there’s the name, conjuring images of plastic clits and keeping the prudes away. (For me, I think of German surrealist Hans Bellmer’s doll project, a series of dismembered female mannequins arranged in fetishistic, voyeuristic, and ultimately unsettling manners). Then there’s the music itself, which summons a different type of terror. Beginning with their 2013 debut Gypsy Pervert, Mannequin Pussy have whipped up breakneck punk tornadoes with equally brutal names like “Meatslave.” But beneath that fury are tender confessionals about love, heartbreak, and trauma, which were explored more deeply on 2016’s Romantic.
On their third record, Patience, Mannequin Pussy have achieved a balance between seething chaos and quietly devastating vulnerability. Working alongside beloved emo producer Will Yip, Patience is their most expansive album yet, and not just because it’s their first to pass the 20-minute mark. Though some songs sprint by in under 60 seconds, most luxuriate in the amount of room they are now afforded. Intricate melodies that were once buried beneath sludge have been polished so that the glimmer shines through the grit. As exemplified by their journey, Mannequin Pussy—guitarist and vocalist Marisa Dabice, guitarist Athanasios Paul, bassist Colins Rey Regisford, and drummer Kaleen Reading—suggest that if patience is a virtue, then so is pop-punk.
Ironically, then, the stories on Patience demand urgency as Dabice struggles to extract herself from toxic relationships or attitudes. Sometimes Dabice’s body is not her own, either because someone has possessed it or she has temporarily dissociated for escape. She recounts this loss with unflinching candor, describing herself being pinned down, shoved against the sink, spit on, and objectified. “When you hit me it does not feel like a kiss like the singers promised,” she murmurs on “Fear + Desire.” Those words, so blasély sung by the Crystals in 1963, were just “a lie that was written for them,” a twisted logic we tell ourselves to survive.
The effect is radically complex, championing the ability for women to be weak and strong, fragile and larger-than-life, often at once. These contradictions are expressed in the title of “Fear + Desire,” which stretches violence into a forlorn expanse that ends in a blast of feedback. The subsequent “Drunk I,” on the other hand, jumps between throat-shredding rage and airy backing vocals so quickly that the song ends before the dynamic has a chance to settle. The biggest moment of catharsis arrives via the slow-burning “High Horse.” As Dabice painfully conjures the details of an abusive relationship—hot breath, a taste that lingers on the teeth—the subdued rhythm section winds tighter and tighter through ambient haze. Finally, her voice blasts off. “I fucked up,” she screams in an eruption of pain and regret. But as a final, crucial gesture of defiance, Dabice proudly reclaims her self-importance. “Your world’s on fire, as I watch up from my high horse/Your world’s on fire, and I walk away,” she howls. That last image, of Dabice calmly strolling away from the burning ruins, is delivered with a softness that lingers on long after the song itself.
Because what happens after you walk away? How do you unlearn self-hate and how do you begin to dismantle the systems that teach and uphold that behavior? This seems to be the part where patience is most crucial. On the gigantic, grungey lead single “Drunk II,” Dabice wrestles with the end of a relationship, drinking and partying to numb her pain. “I still love you, you stupid fuck,” she spits, exasperated and wistful. Finally, after much self-loathing, she comes to terms with heartbreak, realizing that on some level a breakup is an important expression of truth. “Cream” practically crawls out of its skin with pummeling harshness as Dabice promises to treat herself better. “Gonna feel love/I want it to be everything/And unlearn to be like that,” she sings before bursting into a torrent of enraged Spanish.
But even when Mannequin Pussy venture to truly dark places, Patience is such a pure joy to listen to. In its biggest moments, Dabice’s raw edge is matched by equally colossal riffs, explosive energy, and surging momentum. Patience, is without a doubt, one of the year’s strongest punk rock records. Mannequin Pussy prove that there is still so much untapped potential in the genre, and that the people who are doing the heaviest excavating are the ones most often overlooked.
As if to say that there is always light at the end of the tunnel, Patience concludes with some levity. On the hooky “Who You Are,” Dabice gives a pep talk to her younger self, her once scorched-earth attitude replaced by gentle empathy and a surge of gleeful power chords. The optimism pours over to closer “In Love Again,” a hopeful song about starting over and rediscovering the intoxicating thrill of new love. “I’m so happy/Laying here with you/I’m in love with you,” Dabice sings. Her voice fades away and a light congregation of handclaps and keys begin to soothe the wounds that were so raw in the album’s opener. Patience is never easy, but Mannequin Pussy make it worth it.
Buy: Rough Trade
(Pitchfork may earn a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.) | 2019-06-24T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-06-24T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Epitaph | June 24, 2019 | 8.4 | dfdc1c21-90a4-4e74-96bb-fc9dd912ed3f | Quinn Moreland | https://pitchfork.com/staff/quinn-moreland/ | |
The talented young Seattle band plays sly and uncommonly melodic odes to ’70s sleaze-rock on its self-released debut. | The talented young Seattle band plays sly and uncommonly melodic odes to ’70s sleaze-rock on its self-released debut. | Advertisement: American Advertisement | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/advertisement-american-advertisement/ | American Advertisement | A few years ago, Advertisement might be the kind of band you’d catch three times in two days at South by Southwest, vibing to their frayed mid-1970s swagger and impulse-buying a cassette from the merch table despite having no way to play it. At some point in the sweaty haze, you might text your dad, telling him to put down the Greta Van Fleet and listen to this instead.
Such an encounter felt like a relic of the recent past even before the pandemic, but Advertisement’s self-released debut album captures the loose, pleasantly depraved energy of a DIY rock show well enough that you can almost smell the pot fumes from your couch. The band, comprising six childhood friends from the Seattle area, sounds like a rebellion against the city’s ballooning gentrification, armed with rickety instrumental textures and lyrics that evince a sly distrust of American ideals. The members have previously been involved in West Coast hardcore bands like Nasti and Vacant Life, and Advertisement’s 2018 EP reflected that lineage. But on American Advertisement, they slow the tempos and deliver an uncommonly melodic brand of vintage sleaze-rock with frazzled grooves and dueling guitars.
The riffs consummate this transformation, from the slide-guitar grit of “Pretty Money”—an absurdist send-up of capitalism that the band has dubbed “Marxist-cosplay pastiche”—to the melodic wah-wah psychedelia of “Tall Cats.” Wiry-voiced lead singer Charlie Hoffman has mastered the art of sounding like he couldn’t care less, which suits the material well. At times he resembles a young Iggy Pop on a country kick, though the closest Advertisement comes to Stooges-style anarchy is on the breakdown at the end of “Always,” the record’s eight-minute climax. “Freedom,” another lengthy track, rides a krautrock-inspired groove, but its motorik intensity is an awkward match for this band’s cheeky lyrics and irreverent spirit.
Most punk bands wait until album number three or four before they start dabbling in Crazy Horse sprawl and citing the Grateful Dead as an influence, but Advertisement’s attitude seems to be, why wait? They do a fine approximation of Laurel Canyon twang on country-rock brooders like “Days of Heaven” and “Shipwrecked Hearts,” broadening the band’s hard-rock pedigree, and when monotony starts to set in on Side B, the aforementioned “Always” is a welcome jolt.
If you liked The Men more when they rented a cabin in the Catskills and swerved into rustic psychedelia, chances are you’ll like this, too. Advertisement are better lyricists, too, with a knack for surrealist vignettes that distort and pervert American fantasies. Consider the flurry of imagery near the end of “Always,” in which Hoffman calls out to “dressage stallions with erections half-mast” skipping through rings of fire for a cheering crowd. “It’s only the American zen,” the singer mutters, babbling like a prophet as the song accelerates into nightmarish cacophony. In Advertisement’s vision of American zen, grim soothsaying is delivered with a wink and a grin.
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2020-07-18T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-07-18T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Patchwork Fantasy | July 18, 2020 | 7.2 | dfe0a703-d0a4-40da-9558-8c12ee8c3c8d | Zach Schonfeld | https://pitchfork.com/staff/zach-schonfeld/ | |
Thirteen years after his debut album helped open up new possibilities for UK bass music, the Bristol fixture returns with an LP meant to probe the various corners of his musical universe. | Thirteen years after his debut album helped open up new possibilities for UK bass music, the Bristol fixture returns with an LP meant to probe the various corners of his musical universe. | Pinch: Reality Tunnels | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/pinch-reality-tunnels/ | Reality Tunnels | When Pinch’s Reality Tunnels was announced last month, many headlines focused on the fact that it was Bristol producer Rob Ellis’ first new solo album in 13 years. That’s a long time for any genre, but by electronic music standards, it’s a lifetime. When he released Underwater Dancehall back in 2007—incredibly, the same week as Burial’s seminal Untrue—dubstep was still in full bloom, and the genre was only just beginning to open up and give way to what is now commonly (and frustratingly) referred to as bass music.
As imperfect as the term “bass music” may be—especially when it is often used as a catch-all for a wide variety of disparate sounds and styles, most of them with roots in Black cultures from around the globe—there’s no question that Pinch has been one of the genre’s most reliable protagonists. Although he hasn’t released another Pinch LP since his debut, he’s proven to be a remarkably versatile low-end specialist, dropping collaborative albums with Shackleton and dub legend Adrian Sherwood while issuing dozens of solo EPs and building his Tectonic label into a trusted platform for all things bass.
Reality Tunnels is an attempt to synthesize the various parts of Ellis’ career into a single, coherent work. The album takes its name from a concept put forth in Robert Anton Wilson’s 1983 book Prometheus Rising—the author famously described it as an “owner’s manual for the human brain”—which posits that human beings apply subjective filters (“reality tunnels”) to the world around them, giving rise to our individual beliefs, values, and behaviors. In the context of the LP, Ellis sees each track as a different reality tunnel, a portal into a specific corner of his musical universe.
At its best, this makes for some incredible music. Lead single “Accelerated Culture” is an over-caffeinated bass-techno banger that’s on par with anything that Bristol’s celebrated younger generation of producers (e.g. Hodge, Batu, Bruce) is doing. Also impressive are “All Man Got,” a sludgy bit of dubstep with a live vocal turn from veteran grime MC Trim, and “Party,” a mutant dancehall stalker ominously voiced by Killa P—the horns on that one are downright regal. Those tunes are all in Ellis’ bass-heavy wheelhouse, but he steps far outside his comfort zone to deliver one of the album’s best tracks. “Back to Beyond” is a sumptuous piece of ambient with lush strings, angelic vocal choirs, and devotional overtones; electronic music fans often jokingly refer to the club as “church,” but this song wouldn’t be out of place inside an actual house of worship.
Unfortunately, not all the experiments on Reality Tunnels are successful, particularly when guest singers are involved. Album opener “Entangled Particles” is essentially an updated take on Bristol’s trip-hop legacy, complete with jungle flourishes and Ellis’ signature industrial-strength low end, but Emika’s vocals drag the proceedings too far into pop territory; what’s left is the the kind of song that might come on during an especially dramatic scene of whatever foreign crime drama you’re currently binge-watching on Netflix. Then there’s “The Last One,” which features Greenlandic folk singer-songwriter Nive Neilsen; with its melancholy vocals and gently strummed guitar, it strives for Mezzanine-era Massive Attack, but winds up sounding more like Mazzy Star. On its own merits, it’s not a bad bit of fuzzy grunge-pop, but on a Pinch album, it’s something of a non-sequitur.
Ellis does manage to tap into some classic Massive Attack vibes on “Change Is a Must,” which melds gurgling dub rhythms with the soulful lament of Jamaican singer Inezi; it’s more Blue Lines than Mezzanine, but the song is sure to satiate anyone who’s looking for some Bristolian trip-hop magic. Still, it’s difficult to hail the song as essential. Despite the diversity of Ellis’ output over the years, he’s always been an artist who fearlessly pushes music into the future, even as he’s referencing the past. His new album is obviously meant to be a more personal record, but in throwing out his usual rulebook, Ellis seems to have inadvertently wound up splitting the difference between nostalgia and innovation. What’s left is a scattered effort, and one can only wonder what Reality Tunnels might have sounded like if Ellis hadn’t followed so many of them down such sentimental pathways. | 2020-06-20T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-06-20T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Tectonic | June 20, 2020 | 6.6 | dff71102-1b29-401b-8e97-05dd07aa6e8c | Shawn Reynaldo | https://pitchfork.com/staff/shawn-reynaldo/ | |
Animated with a new intensity, the Cornwall band’s fifth album may be its most ingenious and immersive mix of folk and rock yet. | Animated with a new intensity, the Cornwall band’s fifth album may be its most ingenious and immersive mix of folk and rock yet. | Red River Dialect: Abundance Welcoming Ghosts | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/red-river-dialect-abundance-welcoming-ghosts/ | Abundance Welcoming Ghosts | Midway through “Salvation,” Red River Dialect’s headlong foray into psychedelic folk-rock, David Morris yelps out the words, “Iced coffee brain freeze!” It’s an odd moment, marrying a mundane idea with swirling fiddle and a relentless wah-wah guitar, and for that reason alone it could be easily parodied. It’s also a captivating moment, one that anchors the song’s loftier subjects to the everyday world and reveals something essential about Morris as a songwriter and bandleader. Red River Dialect are fascinated by tactile sensations, whether it’s the sharpness of hot metal against your hand or the soft tension of a piano key under your finger. When Morris shouts about brain freeze, you hear the band work together to evoke the chilly stab of adrenaline.
Such physical sensations are important, as they ground the earnest spiritual inquiries animating the Cornwall band’s inventive folk-rock songs. Morris is the son of an Anglican priest; as a teenager he found Buddhism through the Beat poets and went on to work as an interfaith adviser at the University of Westminster in London. Immediately following the sessions for Abundance Welcoming Ghosts, Red River Dialect’s fifth album, he decamped to Nova Scotia for a nine-month stay at Gampo Abbey. The music and the monastery visit may serve the same purpose, as Morris has regularly seeded Red River Dialect songs with spiritual insights and observations. “May I welcome joy when it comes near,” he sings on the jazzy, Pentangular “My Friend.” “May I also laugh about but never doubt it.” There’s a quiver in his voice, slightly more suppressed here than on previous records, that makes the lines sound less like lessons and more like reminders to himself.
Perhaps because the band knew Morris was going to disappear for close to a year, or perhaps because they spent so much time touring behind 2018’s Broken Stay Open Sky, these songs possess a new urgency and intensity. There’s an electric tension to “Blue Sparks,” with piano notes that sound like the hooves of a galloping horse. Even a slower, quieter tune like “Two White Carp” sounds barely contained, as though the players might burst out of the Welsh landscape as Morris paints it. In the tradition of Fairport Convention and Steeleye Span, who mixed traditional English folk songs with contemporary rock sounds, Red River Dialect understand the importance of a solid rhythm section: Drummer Kiran Bhatt and bassist Coral Kindred-Boothby play with a jazzy sense of invention that makes “Snowdon” sound like it’s powered by an invisible engine.
Abundance Welcoming Ghosts may be the band’s most ingenious and immersive mix of folk and rock yet, but it’s also Morris’ most compelling set of songs. He invests small sensations with outsize power, finding joy in sensory pleasures as well as in the mystical inquests that music allows. “Oh, a piano,” he sings on “Piano.” “Open the lid, play a single note, and look out through a new window.” Even as the record is steeped in the long history of British folk music, that balance of the tactile and the spiritual anchors these songs in the present moment.
Buy: Rough Trade
(Pitchfork may earn a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.) | 2019-10-04T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-10-04T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Paradise of Bachelors | October 4, 2019 | 7.7 | dff90d61-12df-4ff7-aa88-f9064d0884f2 | Stephen M. Deusner | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stephen-m. deusner/ | |
The Polish band’s latest shows that they don’t make protest music so much as process music, indulging the ugliest aspects of post-punk and post-hardcore as a means to protect what’s good and beautiful in this world. | The Polish band’s latest shows that they don’t make protest music so much as process music, indulging the ugliest aspects of post-punk and post-hardcore as a means to protect what’s good and beautiful in this world. | Trupa Trupa: B Flat A | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/trupa-trupa-b-flat-a/ | B Flat A | In his life and art, Grzegorz Kwiatkowski has devoted himself to anti-fascism, which, in his native Poland, has become something of a full-time job. As a descendent of a concentration-camp survivor, he’s channeled themes of intergenerational trauma and the banality of evil into celebrated works of poetry that have led to guest-lecturer gigs at universities around the world. As an activist, he made headlines after he and a friend discovered 500,000 discarded shoes in the woods near the Stutthof camp-turned-museum site, where some 65,000 prisoners died during World War II. Despite the international media attention, the museum opted to let the mounds of footwear languish in the forest out of sight—which, for Kwiatkowski, signified yet another victory for a pervasive Make Poland Innocent Again campaign that seeks to downplay the country’s complicity in Nazi war crimes and use the government’s legislative might to erase it from collective memory.
But as a singer and guitarist for Gdansk quartet Trupa Trupa, the scholarly Kwiatkowski finds the visceral, violent emotional release that’s all but necessary when you spend so many hours of your day ruminating on past genocides. Despite Kwiatkowski’s outspoken nature, Trupa Trupa don’t make protest music so much as process music, indulging the ugliest aspects of post-punk and post-hardcore as a means to protect what’s good and beautiful in this world, while shrewdly using psychedelic whimsy as a Trojan Horse to confront historical horrors. On the group’s fifth album, B Flat A, that process has become all the more fraught and grueling, with the band swinging harder than ever to stave off the dual threats of pandemic-induced paranoia and Poland’s ongoing slide into authoritarianism, while also vividly conveying the psychological duress and physical exhaustion of a life locked in perpetual struggle.
Though Kwiatkowski and fellow guitarist Wojtek Juchniewicz sing in English, their words aren’t so easily decoded—they’re delivered more as taser shocks to complement their barbwired riffs, Wojciech Juchniewicz’s cattle-prodding basslines, and drummer Tomasz Pawluczuk’s rampaging rhythms. But the insurrectionary intent is deeply felt nonetheless. With its lockstep drum beat and echoing chants, the opening “Moving” plays like the soundtrack to a movie-montage training sequence of guerilla soldiers preparing for war. In other instances, the cryptic communiques judder with real-world resonance: The aptly named “Twitch” rides a Trail of Dead-style stampede while Juchniewicz shouts, “It’s just a chill/But I’ve got a pill/Go back to work,” effectively summing up the pandemic experience of every low-paid laborer forced to put their health on the line for the economy.
Despite their surface-level similarities, Trupa Trupa don’t slot so easily alongside the current crop of rant’n’roll post-punkers sing-speaking their way through our current dystopia. B Flat A betrays a greater attention to sound design and melodic definition that transcends the genre’s claustrophobic confines and gestures toward something more immersive and panoramic. “Kwietnik” (Polish for “flowerbed”) may begin with a standard Sonic Youthian surge, but the bottom soon falls out of the mix, leaving Juchniewicz’s muted verses to fend for themselves against a muffled throbbing beat, like someone trying to record a slowcore confessional while a techno party rages in the loft next door. With “All and All,” Trupa Trupa shoot Pink Floyd’s “Brain Damage” straight into the dark side of the saloon, yielding a delightfully dazed country lullaby that nonetheless simmers with vengeful fervor. But their most insidious act of subversion comes in the form of “Uniform,” a sweet psych-pop singalong laced with poison. The lyrics amount to a single absurd line repeated ad infinitum—“I’m gonna eat all my uniforms”—but, through Kwiatkowski’s innocent wide-eyed delivery, those words crystallize the blind, eager conformity that fascism encourages, like an eerily cheery Hitler Youth recruitment poster translated into musical form.
Trupa Trupa’s previous album, 2019’s Of the Sun, riffed on similar themes with a more monochromatic palette and lumbering momentum, but the lyrics on that record nonetheless exuded an uncanny optimism—the proverbial flowers poking out of sidewalk cracks. On B Flat A, such silver linings have withered into ash. By the time we reach the closing title track, Trupa Trupa are drowning in the pandemic blues, their pugilistic fury simmered down into a haunted jangle, their righteous rhetoric debased into a blur of indecipherable, overlapping spoken-word verses that sound like they’re emanating from a detuned radio. And yet over the course of its six-minute run, this threadbare track accrues a hypnotic allure, as its melancholy toughens into resilience. It’s a song that seems to suggest our mere survival is a victory in and of itself, for it means we’ve lived to fight another day. | 2022-02-18T00:00:00.000-05:00 | 2022-02-18T00:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Glitterbeat | February 18, 2022 | 7.5 | dffc323d-aab9-41ec-a1c5-7c803e1e4a8e | Stuart Berman | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stuart-berman/ | |
On their lush, formidable debut, the “dream-doom” duo of Tomb Mold’s Derrick Vella and Innumerable Forms’ Justin DeTore illustrate how emotionally boundless metal can be. | On their lush, formidable debut, the “dream-doom” duo of Tomb Mold’s Derrick Vella and Innumerable Forms’ Justin DeTore illustrate how emotionally boundless metal can be. | Dream Unending: Tide Turns Eternal | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/dream-unending-tide-turns-eternal/ | Tide Turns Eternal | It’s been an exceptional time for metal that sounds like the dying cries of an alien planet being sucked into a black hole. Newer bands like Blood Incantation, Worm, and Spectral Voice have all taken the templates of old school death and doom metal and imbued them with a mystical, psychedelic aura, with songs whose thrashing riffs slowly spill into abstract ambience and shimmering post-rock guitars. Toronto’s Tomb Mold forged one of the heaviest totems yet to this stylistic rebirth with their dark, disorienting 2019 release Planetary Clairvoyance, thanks in no small part to the searing guitar work of Derrick Vella. Now, Vella has returned with Dream Unending—a “dream-doom” project with Innumerable Forms frontman Justin DeTore that pushes his guitar work even further outside the typical confines of metal.
One of the most immediately gripping qualities of Dream Unending’s debut, Tide Turns Eternal, is how much of it completely does away with death metal riffage altogether. Instead, the album is lined with lush, echoing 12-string guitars that wouldn’t sound out of place on a Durutti Column or Cocteau Twins record. A professed disciple of moody 1980s acts like the Cure and the Blue Nile, Vella captures those bands’ ability to weave lonesome, chorus-soaked textures into something yearning and warm, shrouding his wilted melodies in a dense haze of reverb and phaser pedals. As a result, Tide Turns Eternal is one of the most sonically diverse metal albums of the year, pulling a rich prism of tones and effects together to create a phantasmal gaze into the genre at its most heady.
The most direct precedent for Dream Unending’s sound is the gloomy, gothic death/doom spearheaded by the Peaceville Three—the trio of Anathema, My Dying Bride, and Paradise Lost, all signed to the UK label in the early ’90s. But where those bands gravitated toward medieval and grandiose aesthetics, Vella and DeTore are reaching for something more otherworldly. Just listen to “In Cipher I Weep,” which opens on an uncanny fretless bassline and gradually stomps its way toward an eerie church organ climax; or “The Needful,” which starts with a spellbinding Floydian guitar intro and ends on a howling solo that sounds like a comet catching fire in the night sky. Vella and DeTore are constantly pushing each other to discover ruminative new territory, using the trudging march of doom metal to explore their most introspective impulses.
Even on the album’s most heavenly moments—like the billowing fog of guitar chords that arrives four and a half minutes into “Dream Unending”— Vella’s riffs never lose the dissonance of his death metal roots, infusing all of Tide Turns Eternal with a sense of anguish and longing, but also hope. As the album reaches the end of its nearly 10-minute closing title track, a gorgeous vocal passage from Alberta singer-songwriter McKenna Rae enters like a light peeking through the mist. Before long, however, Vella reveals his most unvarnished, brutal riff yet, as DeTore joins in with pounding drums and a guttural, earth-sundering roar. It’s as if the entire album is collapsing in on itself: a harrowing final moment on a record that serves as a reminder of how emotionally boundless metal can be.
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-12-06T00:00:00.000-05:00 | 2021-12-06T00:00:00.000-05:00 | Metal | 20 Buck Spin | December 6, 2021 | 7.8 | e00e1038-c58b-4b7a-9f2b-71e4bb5b35f6 | Sam Goldner | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sam-goldner/ | |
The instrumental edition of last year’s cosmic jazz-funk odyssey brings Flying Lotus’ detailed compositions and soundscaping to center stage. | The instrumental edition of last year’s cosmic jazz-funk odyssey brings Flying Lotus’ detailed compositions and soundscaping to center stage. | Flying Lotus: Flamagra (Instrumentals) | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/flying-lotus-flamagra-instrumentals/ | Flamagra (Instrumentals) | Roughly a year ago, Flying Lotus released Flamagra, an expansive, cosmic jazz-funk saga that spanned 27 songs over the course of 67 minutes and featured 10 guest vocalists. His latest offering is an instrumental version of the LP, now scrubbed of vocals from Anderson .Paak, George Clinton, and Tierra Whack, among others. The result conjures ambivalence: On one hand, songs snipped away from their narrator can feel like canned backing tracks. On the other, the pure instrumentals allow FlyLo’s detailed compositions and soundscaping to take the lead role, without competition from other big personalities.
None of the original guest vocalists did Flamagra any harm, but they did risk ejecting you from FlyLo’s wild, sci-fi spiritual journey. The album’s opening minutes chart an undulating course through the cosmos: On the spectacular “Heroes,” we’re jet-propelled by skittering percussion, lightspeed guitar noodling, and radiant chorals. The ride ebbs and flows with the subsequent “Post Requisite” and “Heroes in a Half Shell,” but the appearance of Anderson .Paak’s distinctive voice on “More”—while perfectly suited to the song itself—feels like a sudden call back to earth. The instrumental version does away with those distractions, allowing for a more immersive listening experience.
While Flamagra as a whole is strengthened by the instrumental treatment, individual tracks can suffer. Compared with the richness of surrounding songs, “More” sounds unfinished without .Paak. Tierra Whack’s performance on “Yellow Belly” was a highlight of the original album, twisting and contorting her voice as if shaping a surreal balloon animal. Without her idiosyncratic delivery, the song is just a series of curt handclaps, chimes, and bass couplets. There’s a prominent, palpable absence that was clearly meant to be sung over.
Some tracks are musically fortified enough to stand on their own. While it’s impossible not to miss George Clinton’s warm rasp on “Burning Down the House,” the sturdy, meandering funk holds strong thanks to Thundercat’s titan bassline. The swerve of fretless bass and spangly synths on “Spontaneous” are far more captivating on their own than alongside Little Dragon’s somewhat sanitized soul vocals. Similarly, the Toro y Moi-featuring “9 Carrots” doesn’t lose much without a singer.
One question looms over the Flamagra instrumentals: Why? It’s not a matter of quality, but of intent. Flamagra already featured 17 instrumental tracks in its original release; the decision to strip the voices from the other 10 seems like an afterthought, and occasionally sounds like one. There is also a slight issue of consistency. Why is David Lynch’s spoken word piece “Fire Is Coming” the only guest appearance to remain on the instrumental version?
Perhaps Flamagra could have made sense as two separate albums: 17 instrumentals on one disc, 10 guest-featuring songs on the other. As adjoining chapters in the same book, the two releases would be in conversation with one another. But it’s hard to imagine someone listening to Flamagra as it was re-released to streaming services, with the initial album and the instrumental version back-to-back—not only because of their length, but because of their sequential similarities. The addition of Flamagra (Instrumental) is best suited for the FlyLo completist: It may be more cohesive as a trip, but it doesn’t offer any truly new revelations.
Buy: Rough Trade
(Pitchfork earns a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.) | 2020-06-04T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-06-04T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Warp | June 4, 2020 | 7.6 | e017699a-9a1a-456d-928d-07a7c0383fee | Madison Bloom | https://pitchfork.com/staff/madison-bloom/ | |
On their most purposeful record to date, Kim Gordon and Bill Nace conjure a complete sonic ecosystem where they control the weather. | On their most purposeful record to date, Kim Gordon and Bill Nace conjure a complete sonic ecosystem where they control the weather. | Body/Head: The Switch | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/bodyhead-the-switch/ | The Switch | It feels odd to talk about control when discussing Body/Head. Kim Gordon and Bill Nace’s grinding guitar duets seem primed for letting go, with both members surrendering their musical egos to the flow of their noises and textures. They get out of their own way, carving out ample time for each piece to gestate, grow, and ripen. Dig deeper into their songs, though, and the discipline in Gordon and Nace’s approach emerges. No matter how far they stretch, their tones and rhythms always cohere, making their music as mesmerizing as a hypnotist’s swinging clock.
You don’t have to venture far below the surface to detect that control on The Switch. It’s Body/Head’s most purposeful record so far, as Gordon and Nace conjure a complete sonic ecosystem where they direct the weather. The most stunning example of this power is the album’s shortest track, “In the Dark Room.” Dense and harrowing, it features the kind of dissonance usually associated with sprawling improv. But, in Nace and Gordon’s hands, these unchartable sounds combine like well-defined movements in a symphony. Their guitars rhyme as if they were trading chord changes rather than thick swaths of noise.
This kind of orchestrated synchronicity is a necessity for Body/Head, because their music is more about building moods and weaving textures than about creating surprises. As abstract as their songs often are, they rely on defined structures to maintain their entrancing focus. That’s why, even though The Switch’s heavy sounds can be dizzying, no moment on the album feels random. One key is Gordon and Nace’s mastery of slowness. Their consistently patient approach is a signature, evoking Tony Conrad’s way of concentrating his tuning by playing deliberately slowly, as well as Earth’s decades-long aversion to rushing through a song.
The intriguing paradox of music played at this glacial pace is that it alters your perception of time, so songs can seem to speed up when their tempo doesn’t actually change. It’s a matter of kinetics rather than clock ticks; shifts in a track’s energy, intensity, and volume create the illusion of acceleration. This is especially true of the moments when Gordon sings, infusing adrenaline into Body/Head’s guitar sounds. On opener “Last Time,” her elongated syllables give a curving shape to warped noise. On closer “Reverse Hard,” her rhythmic glossolalia is sparse, but it elicits a chopping guitar response that becomes the song’s pulse.
The best—and most aptly titled—track on The Switch is the hypnotic “Change My Brain.” Here, Body/Head’s reliance on structure is matched by their fascination with texture. Every granule of sound emanating from Gordon and Nace’s guitars is carefully crafted, and the song’s progression is almost solely a product of these delicate variations. The pair builds a rhythm from clipped feedback, then ride it through waves of distortion that change shape in minute, near-pointillist adjustments. Gordon’s most impassioned singing on the album helps here, too, but it’s the pair’s frame accuracy that makes the track so dramatic. The results are far from predictable, but they serve as further proof that Body/Head are fully in control. | 2018-07-13T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-07-13T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Matador | July 13, 2018 | 8 | e0193416-2cbc-4636-b209-104726f32a74 | Marc Masters | https://pitchfork.com/staff/marc-masters/ | |
The battled-tested L.A. rapper’s debut combines technical skill and narrative ambition for a gripping album about broken systems and the drudgery of art always imitating life. | The battled-tested L.A. rapper’s debut combines technical skill and narrative ambition for a gripping album about broken systems and the drudgery of art always imitating life. | ICECOLDBISHOP: Generational Curse | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/icecoldbishop-generational-curse/ | Generational Curse | Halfway through Generational Curse, the debut album by the South Central L.A.-born rapper ICECOLDBISHOP, somebody shoots up a house party. Like so many other things in Bishop’s writing—the deaths of parents and friends, the drugs that rot relatives’ lives and stink up living rooms—the shooting is both an acute event and an indistinguishable part of the ocean it ripples through. As the album’s title suggests, Bishop traces long arcs of poverty, policing, and decay, and pokes at the tension between the individual and the collective, nature and nurture, fate and self-determination. All of this is rendered in vocals that suggest Danny Brown and Suga Free stretched to the dimensions of Saturday morning cartoon characters, a hyperkinetic knot of energy and angst.
There’s an air of predestination to even the most straightforward stories in Bishop’s raps. His mother was pregnant with him while she demonstrated at the 1992 uprisings that followed the Rodney King acquittals; even after his family moved across the San Gabriels and into Victorville, seeking a reprieve from the ambient threat posed by gangs and police, Bishop would drift back down to the city whenever he could, honing his outre style in battles and in makeshift studios. While he’s released relatively little music since first garnering attention with 2017’s portentous “Porch” (“On the front porch, same place where they shot dice at/Same neighborhood [long, beeped redaction] lost his life at”), Bishop’s cacophonous verses make it feel like every year and experience is flooding back on top of one another.
What keeps this onslaught of technique and information from becoming overwhelming is Bishop’s remarkable attention to detail. Sometimes this is reflected through beautifully incongruous similes (on “I Can’t Swim” he brags that one phone call will have his shooters “sliding like the limo curtain”), other times horrifying images, like the veins that disappear from his heroin-addicted cousin’s arms. He warns, on “Last Night,” to watch for partygoers with shoes tied too tightly—those are the undercovers. And an expected juxtaposition between Martin Luther King and violence on a street named after him zooms all the way in: to the Burger King on the corner of MLK and Western (“Til the End”), the same song where he talks about kids shooting at kids by calling a dead body “a stripe on my letterman.” “Went to hell,” he continues, “back to Earth, then went back to hell again.”
For as topically sprawling as Bishop’s songs can be, the construction of each component part is drum-tight. On “Out the Window,” his iambic bounce on the lines “Chopper tucked inside the oven, it don’t even work/Little bro just copped Mercedes, he don’t even work” quickly turn to silk on a hook so delicate that it actually exacerbates the menace of its lyrics. Sonically, the album takes a minimal approach to the rattling atonality of L.A.’s last decade, though it occasionally offers irrepressible G-funk basslines from the ’90s. At the end of “Candlelight,” Bishop identifies the musical lineages as running parallel to the generational curses, singing a lighthearted freestyle full of murder threats. Its playfulness underlines that these are genre conventions— violence as raw creative material—but is interrupted by the appearance of real-life rivals. For Bishop, art imitates life imitating art, on and on, generation after miserable generation.
Bishop likes to invert how life is rendered on an album, where the broad narrative motifs are clear as day but the day-to-day events are shrouded in mystery. The names of gunmen are whispered then dismissed, the status of their victims subject to games of emotionally charged telephone. The most chilling version of this device comes on the eerie, slinking “D.A.R.E.,” where he says of his father’s death: “I was 1 when I heard half of my parents died,” the syntax so alien that it restores power to a trauma that would otherwise be dulled through euphemism and repetition. That reminder courses through Bishop’s music: Just because something is common doesn’t make it any less horrifying. “My cousin died 10 years ago and it’s still shocking,” he raps on opener “Full Fledge,” before returning to the same event as “D.A.R.E.”: “My daddy died back in ’94 and we still crying/Gangbanging, 50 years old, and we still dying.”
Though Generational Curse is in conversation with styles of L.A. rap that stretch back far more than a decade, its closest analogue might be Kendrick Lamar’s good kid, m.A.A.d. city. Curse is less plotty than good kid—necessarily so, as it’s concerned with the way cycles repeat themselves. And yet the warring senses of watching (friends, enemies, each threats in their own way) and being watched (by elders with bad advice and cops with bad intentions) yield albums of young people who have been scandalized and, in turn, learn to scandalize others. But where Kendrick defaulted to the observer’s position, Bishop is more comfortable being active. You imagine him across a cramped car from Kendrick, the good and the bad influence at once, his hand on the wheel but the destination locked in. | 2023-03-30T00:03:00.000-04:00 | 2023-03-30T00:03:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Epic | March 30, 2023 | 8 | e01b5f9c-276c-48fc-aac2-18c550372520 | Paul A. Thompson | https://pitchfork.com/staff/paul-a. thompson/ | |
Released for the first time, a recording of the opening night of Ono’s 1974 Japanese tour captures her at her mischievous peak. | Released for the first time, a recording of the opening night of Ono’s 1974 Japanese tour captures her at her mischievous peak. | Yoko Ono / Plastic Ono Band: Let’s Have a Dream (1974 One Step Festival) | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/yoko-ono-lets-have-a-dream-1974-one-step-festival/ | Let’s Have a Dream (1974 One Step Festival) | Yoko Ono took flight. In August 1974, she touched down in Tokyo’s Haneda Airport to mobs of fans and a constellation of flashbulbs. She was arriving to perform a run of six shows ostensibly pegged to her most recent album, 1973’s uncharacteristically slight Feeling the Space. But the nine months since its release had been a time of upheaval and artistic renewal. Separated from her husband, John Lennon, who had eloped—with her blessing—with a lover, she quietly recorded a new album, A Story, with a blistering centerpiece titled “Yes, I’m a Witch.” Though the album would remain unreleased until 1992, due to problems at her record label, Apple, Ono had been galvanized by its creation process. “When I wrote the song ‘Yes, I’m a Witch,’ I was ready to scream,” she said in 2007. “I think it was important that I came up with that in 1974. I needed to shout it for the good of my mental health.”
Fifty thousand fans showed up to hear Ono let rip on the opening night of the tour, a live performance at One Step Festival in Koriyama, Fukushima; the recording has now been released for the first time, by Idol Japan Records, as Let’s Have a Dream. On stage, Ono banters with the crowd in Japanese before flipping to English to figure out the setlist with her specially assembled Plastic Ono Super Band, which includes the Brecker Brothers and Steve Gadd, the drummer behind the iconic drum fills of Steely Dan’s “Aja.” In the surviving video footage of the performance, she blows kisses to the crowd, struts across the stage in towering platform heels, wiggles her waist, and squats on her haunches while dramatically warbling. As the crowd screams its applause, she stands with arms aloft, like a homecoming Olympian showing off her gold.
On Let’s Have a Dream, “Angry Young Woman” is hardly recognizable from its origins as an earnest message song. Communing with Steve Khan’s intuitive, bluesy guitar, Ono sounds beautifully melodic as she descibes a woman with “three children and two abortions” who rejects mothering for a new life. It’s a remarkable thing to hear a ’70s crowd cheer for a song with such thorny themes; 50 years on, the topic of mothers who reject parenting remains a taboo touched by few. Feeling the Space’s baroque piano and folksy choir always felt like a mismatch for “Woman of Salem,” a parable about the pack-mentality sexism Ono knew all too well. Here she is resplendent and raw, expelling a torrent of female stereotypes as if acid were burning a hole in her throat and the mic were a spittoon. As the song reaches its climax, Ono’s voice curdles. “Help! Help!” she shouts, before her band splinters into carnivalesque disorder, with a flute that flouders like a cartoon bird in a snowstorm. She screams, invoking a murderous mob. “Must kill! Must kill! Must kill!”
Ono’s abrasive vocalizations were inspired by dissonant Schoenbergian opera, Tibetan and Indian singing, and hetai, a Kabuki technique. “It gets to a point where you don’t have time to utter a lot of intellectual bullshit,” she explained. “If you were drowning [...] you’d say, ‘Help!” but if you were more desperate you’d say, ‘Eiough-hhhhh,’ or something like that.” On a storming reimagining of Fly’s “Don’t Worry Kyoko,” her ululations and screams thrillingly clash with piercing brass and the Plastic Ono Super Band’s “Green Onions”-esque R&B, before an arresting climax—“Kyoko! Kyoko! Kyoko!”—where Ono appears intent on expelling every last bit of breath from her lungs.
Just as she seems about to spin off her axis, Ono shifts gears. Two Japanese-language rarities, debuted at One Step, are rockers to rival the best moments on Approximately Infinite Universe. The previously unreleased “One Way Road” is a jazzy strut with smooth sax and woodwind glissandos that make Ono’s singing feel particularly fantastical—at one point, she glides up to the highest point of her register to mimic the flute’s airy vibrato. And “Yume O Moto,” a hopeful ballad previously only available as a Japan-only 7" and in remixed form on 1992’s Onobox, presents a list of impossible wishes that brings to mind the logic-defying invitations of Ono’s foundational Fluxus work, Grapefruit. “I want to caress the New York skyline,” Ono sings in Japanese, “I wanna be blown by the willow in Ginza.” Her voice is sonorous and sincere, coupled with echoing guitar lines that seem to reach skyward.
Reviewing a then-recent Ono residency at the East Village club Kenny’s Castaways, a New York Times critic panned her show as “abrasive” and “confrontational”—as if that weren’t the intention all along. But Let’s Have a Dream shows that’s only half the story, proving Ono’s bizarre genius as well as her warmth, charisma, and downright lovability as a performer. Given that, after her Japan tour, Ono took a break from music until 1980’s Lennon collaboration Double Fantasy, the album feels like a triumphant cap to her early-’70s imperial period. Her music would turn to graver concerns and would, at times, retread familiar ground. Let’s Have a Dream is the sound of Yoko Ono at her mischievous peak; you can’t help but marvel at her renewed rage and feel captivated by her joy at a time where the universe felt approximately infinite, and she couldn’t help but share it.
Correction: An earlier version of this review stated that Light in the Attic Records released Ono’s live performance at One Step Festival in Koriyama, Fukushima. It was released by Idol Japan Records. | 2022-10-08T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2022-10-08T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Experimental / Rock | Super Fuji Discs | October 8, 2022 | 8 | e02132f7-f880-4ceb-ab0d-91ab2821fe83 | Owen Myers | https://pitchfork.com/staff/owen-myers/ | |
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 a lost gem of neo-soul from 1996 made by a nascent phenom from the UK, heralded by Aaliyah and D’Angelo as one of the greats. | 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 a lost gem of neo-soul from 1996 made by a nascent phenom from the UK, heralded by Aaliyah and D’Angelo as one of the greats. | Lewis Taylor: Lewis Taylor | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/lewis-taylor-lewis-taylor/ | Lewis Taylor | Four days in a New York hotel room and Lewis Taylor hadn’t heard from a soul. He took the eight-hour flight from London at the behest of D’Angelo and his camp to work on the follow-up to Brown Sugar and now, no knock on the door, no phone call, nothing. Taylor, a self-described neurotic in his early 30s, could only sit and wait for a life-changing opportunity. In New York, no one had even heard of him; his album—a brooding, confounding R&B record that excited UK music journalists but left his label wondering where the hit was—hadn’t been released in the States.
As a child, he inherited his parents’ affection for the tendon-straining R&B shouters of the American South and the smooth, romantic crooners, especially Sam & Dave and Sam Cooke, and thanks to the trippy album artwork on display in a record shop in Hertfordshire, near where he grew up, he discovered prog and psychedelic rock acts like Edgar Broughton Band, Syd Barrett, and Yes. For his debut album, Lewis Taylor, he borrowed from both these fixations to create guitar-driven, structurally ornate tracks that he then blessed with his voice, a svelte tenor that sounded like it had been honed under the tutelage of Marvin Gaye. D’Angelo wanted some of that.
The promise of shaping the myriad ideas mentioned by D’Angelo’s people over the phone—it was difficult to tell which direction they wanted to go in after the success of Brown Sugar—must have felt far away in the hotel room, even though D’Angelo was supposedly somewhere in the vicinity. Taylor wasn’t in the studio, where he expected to be, where he felt comfortable. Frustration mounted. What was the point of enduring this treatment, such blatant disregard for his time and feelings? After four days, he checked out and returned home.
Taylor’s career is one of the most under-discussed in modern R&B history, and this anecdote, which the artist relayed to journalist and scholar Michael Anthony Neal in a 2006 Pop Matters interview, captures his frustrations and difficulties in microcosm. It’s fitting that the interview has been, for all intents and purposes, lost on the internet, only accessible if you excavate using the Wayback Machine or some other archiving project. Unlike white R&B artists like Jon B. or Rick Astley, who found new relevance in the digital cultural memory through Drake adoration and viral pranking, Taylor never found the means to keep his eclectic catalog alive for subsequent generations. It didn’t seem like he much cared to, either; he was content to have a crotchety underdog’s career releasing oblique R&B records that didn’t try to reenact note-for-note the styles of the past or embrace the genre’s meld with hip-hop. After all, this is a guy who, when asked about being a blue-eyed soul singer in a 1997 interview, responded, “Well I suppose the most unintelligent answer I could give to that is ‘fuck off.’” Eventually, the music industry responded in kind.
Initially, though, Taylor cast a spell. On the strength of a demo that had a touch of Al Green’s vocal phrasing, Taylor signed with Island Records and recorded a masterpiece, the self-titled 1996 debut that gathered a cult audience which included two of the most beloved acts in R&B, D’Angelo and Aaliyah. Neal, a professor of African and African American studies at Duke, went so far as to label Taylor “white chocolate” in an academic journal, meaning a white performer of Black music who “legitimately add[s] to the tradition.” Taylor looks different but still “contains all the ‘flava’ and the texture of the original.” (He wrote it, not me.)
Taylor’s skill should be obvious to anyone hearing his voice and guitar-playing, something like if Marvin Gaye merged with Jeff Buckley. But what to do with him? How to market an uptight, limelight-allergic, white neo-soul singer in 1996, before that branding shorthand became commonplace—and well before you could attach, say, Mark Ronson to the project? Island couldn’t figure it out.
In search of an attention-grabbing breakthrough single, the label took a page from the Pat Boone playbook, encouraging Taylor to cover soul classics like Stevie Wonder’s “Until You Come Back to Me” and the Supremes’ “Reflections,” and passed on a completed album he handed over something that was decidedly more Brian Wilson than Jon B. Unable to solve the marketing dilemma and seemingly uninterested in keeping a hit-less wunderkind on their roster, Island dropped Taylor outright after the release of his second album, 2000’s Lewis II.
The biggest hit bearing Taylor’s name is Robbie Williams’ 2006 cover of the brilliant dance tune “Lovelight”—produced by Ronson, of course. Following in D’Angelo’s footsteps, Chaka Khan left Taylor hanging after extending an invitation to collaborate. Eventually he decided to self-release his records until a boutique label swooped in, even convincing him to book his first U.S. tour in 2006. But he played only one date, a well-reviewed Bowery Ballroom show attended by, among others, Stuart Matthewman, of Sade, before bailing on the entire endeavor and retiring.
In 2016, Taylor explained his decision in a candid, sometimes prickly interview on the blog Soul Jones, saying that his pursuit of music had turned him from an “eccentric, slightly arrogant little nerd to an egotistical self-centered little shit.” And, obviously, it couldn’t have been the result of fame; Taylor said that the transformation began before he released his debut. It took standing on the brink of an international tour to realize that if he didn’t walk away from music, he couldn’t change from what he’d become.
Male insecurity—the perhaps harder-to-claim reality coursing beneath the brash egotistical ugliness—is the great subject of Taylor’s music and there’s no better, more engaging expression of that tumult than his self-titled record. The album begins in media res as we listen in on the pleading, bewilderment, and frustration of a breakup in progress. After a tense, patience-testing instrumental introduction, Taylor's first words are, “Tell me what we’re gonna do/I wanna know how we’re gonna pull through.”
Imagine if Let’s Get It On opened with Gaye’s world-ending divorce song “Just to Keep You Satisfied” instead of the title track—that’s the mood, but with less weary resignation and more agitated confusion and anger. Taylor insisted that the blues—“playing six guitar parts at once and singing on top”—inspired his writing during this period more than anything else, and the genre’s plaintiveness (and occasional meanness) suffused his lyrics, too. About four minutes in, Taylor resolves the musical tension by incorporating the kind of layered doo-wop vocals Gaye sculpted with genius (those velvet ooos and la-la-las), while simultaneously activating full son-of-a-bitch mode, singing, “If we don’t make love, it’s over, baby...If we don’t work tonight/Then we just ain’t right.” Not getting laid one last time makes the split real, especially since she’ll be denied his gusto: “If I don’t get lucky, you don’t get lucky too.” A real gentleman, this guy.
There are many abject flavors on this record and the most satisfying comes via the next song, “Bittersweet.” Aaliyah called it perfect; it should be considered a peak of the neo-soul era, spoken about with the same delight and awe reserved for “Untitled,” “On & On” and “Ascension.” (One of the ironies of Taylor’s career is that, despite his whiteness, he still missed out on commercial success, thus avoiding the disdainful “Elvis Effect” of sanitizing Black music for lucrative, history-erasing white consumption.) “Bittersweet” enacts the taste of its title by moving from gloomy to transcendent. The lyrics describe a relationship the very miserable narrator says he wants to leave but can’t muster the courage to end: “I pick up the telephone to say it’s over/Soon as I hear you talk it’s started all over again.” She laughs at him when they make love. His friends have abandoned him, calling him crazy for putting up with this. He is, in short, down bad.
And yet! Rather than wallowing in self-pity, the song finds ecstasy in agony. At first “Bittersweet” is brittle and ominous—the opening piano noises are stark, like something creaking in the attic. The guitar line is sinuous, paranoia-stoking. At intervals, he triggers a stack of his vocals doing something that sounds like an ugly inhale. It doesn’t seem possible that any sweetness could be extracted from this murk. But by the time the bridge begins, there’s no predicting the evolution of these monstrous, conflicted feelings. The thundering piano chords that bring the chorus back sound like church. “Oh, come on/You got me losing my mind,” he wails, his voice coming from somewhere beyond despair or joy. This kind of bad love isn’t novel subject matter, but Taylor’s execution is ambitious enough to blow your hair back. “Bittersweet” so moved Aaliyah that it compelled her in an MTV interview to ask that Taylor “call a sista: let’s hook up, let’s do something.” She had found a copy of his record in Australia.
The songs on the opening side of Lewis Taylor make surprising choices that keep them dynamic and alive. Not a single one ends in a place you could anticipate from the opening minute, and Taylor crafts consistently stunning endings. Some criticism of his second album focused on his “cerebral, convoluted chord structures,” but such extravagances never weigh down Lewis Taylor. “Whoever,” “Track,” “Song”—all have refrains liable to stick with you for days. The latter is so weirdly skeletal at the start, barely more than his voice, clanging percussion, and some bass, and from that emptiness, a massive hook emerges that he lets ride for the final two minutes. It’s an anthem for suckers in love: “Find me weak, find me strong/I get all messed up whenever you call my name.” Male R&B stars in the ’90s increasingly emulated the bravado of hip-hop, but Lewis Taylor offers a kind of emasculated R&B, more excited by self-destructive feelings than pleasure.
Unable to resist a twist, the back half of Lewis Taylor provides a thoughtful repudiation of all that fit-throwing and floundering, signaled by track six, “Betterlove” (and, later, “How” and “Right”). It’s an easy-going ballad with the kind of last-minute key change that screams love triumphant in the face of adversity. “You teach me and I learn about the way a man should be,” Taylor sings, petulant and self-effacing no more. On “Right,” he puts it as laconically as possible: “She’s right and I’m wrong.”
There was a real secret behind the creation of the album that informed these lessons. The record has been portrayed as a Prince-esque solo effort, the lone genius in a studio brimming over with ideas and technical ability. The liner notes billed his manager and romantic partner Sabina Smyth as the executive producer. This undersold her contributions. In the interview where Taylor cleared up rumors about his retirement, he also spoke about collaborating with Smyth. “She was involved in the writing, the arrangements, sounds and textures, and the production [on Lewis Taylor],” he said. “And I didn’t credit her because I was so insecure, immature and self-involved. I would say that the executive producer credit I eventually gave her on that album is patronizing at best.”
There’s an edge in that last line, a whiff of self-loathing. Patronizing at best—like his past behavior still beckons as a lash to use against himself, even after he’s owned up to his mistakes. The sense memory of an indiscretion stays vivid. The mixture of anger, lust, shame, pride, and remorse channeled in Lewis Taylor is as potent as modern R&B has produced. The genre is often at its best when it grapples with the unsavory complexities of the heart, even if the music isn’t as widely palatable when scraping around in the dark corners of a relationship. Here, My Dear was never as popular as Let’s Get It On. It took time to lure its audience.
This has been the year of renewed interest in Taylor. In January, D’Angelo debuted a radio show with Sonos and played a cut from the Japanese release of Lewis Taylor, a strange and beautiful bonus track called “I Dream the Better Dream,” which sounds like In a Silent Way shaking hands with Music of My Mind. “This motherfucker’s a genius, man,” D’Angelo murmured, in his cigarette-husked voice. The discerning British reissue label Be With Records released Lewis Taylor on vinyl in a handsome edition over the summer. And in June, the most unexpected event: the newly launched Lewis Taylor Instagram teased a new album. “After taking a bit of a break, Lewis and Sabina have returned to the studio,” went the caption.
It’s tempting to read “Bittersweet” as a metaphor for Taylor’s relationship with music: a bad love affair that brings as much displeasure as delight. If making music brought him the kind of stress heard on that record, it’s no wonder he needed some long breaks, some soul-searching. But that turmoil is precisely what makes Lewis Taylor a success. The phone stayed silent, that plum collaboration up and evaporated, the single didn’t garner the audience it deserved—these things cease to matter once you press play.
Buy: Rough Trade
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Get the Sunday Review in your inbox every weekend. Sign up for the Sunday Review newsletter here. | 2021-09-26T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2021-09-26T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | Island | September 26, 2021 | 8.7 | e022356a-a81e-4e59-9d11-e82d8cd77e9f | Ross Scarano | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ross-scarano/ | |
If you haven't had the chance to see the German legends on their recent tours, this 2xCD live album hints at what you missed. | If you haven't had the chance to see the German legends on their recent tours, this 2xCD live album hints at what you missed. | Kraftwerk: Minimum-Maximum | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/4557-minimum-maximum/ | Minimum-Maximum | When Lester Bangs interviewed Kraftwerk for Creem in 1975, Ralf Hütter explained how the band's Menschmaschine concept influenced its concert approach: "We use tapes, pre-recorded, and we play tapes also in our performance. When we recorded on TV we were not allowed to play a tape as part of the performance because the musicians' union felt that they would be put out of work. But I think just the opposite: With better machines, you'll be able to do better work, and you will be able to spend your time and energies on a higher level."
Thirty years later Kraftwerk certainly have better machines, and judging from the fantastic show they put in last week in Washington D.C., they've been spending their time and energy on everything but playing their instruments. The latter-day Kraftwerk live experience is total theater, an intense multimedia spectacle in which the nuts and bolts of who is doing exactly what is not only impossible to determine but completely irrelevant. So it is in a sense odd that Kraftwerk has chosen this time to release their first officially sanctioned live album. Minimum-Maximum is a collection of performances recorded in the last couple years, sequenced to closely reflect the set Kraftwerk are currently touring. Even if Minimum-Maximum is essentially a mixed-down document of whatever pre-recorded sounds the band loaded into the production's computers, it's still an excellent record for three reasons:
1. The Sound
I have Kraftwerk live bootlegs from 1971, 1975, 1981, and 1998, and the sound varies from horrid to passable. Minimum-Maximum, however, is rich, balanced, and full, reflecting the careful pre-show assembly while allowing enough room reverb and crowd noise to let you know it's a live recording. Far be it for Kraftwerk to let substandard sonics soil anything born in the Kling-Klang studio.
2. The Arrangements
While Kraftwerk do less physically live than they once did, their arrangements are constantly being tweaked, so Minimum-Maximum never feels like a playback of familiar records. One need only follow the evolution of "Autobahn" from a trance-inducing jam in the mid-70s that could last up to 40 minutes to the lean, effective version here that seems pop song-length at just under nine minutes. The vocal breakdown in "Autobahn" featuring layers of robots harmonizing on the song's theme (first introduced on The Mix) finds its way into this version, cementing the song's connection with the Beach Boys.
Other shifts in focus are more subtle but still significant. The vocodered vocals on the opening "The Man Machine" are much more prominent, bursting forth from the speakers in a way that seems to command a fully robotic future, even as the songs backing music seems warmer and less harsh than the album version. The beats for "Trans-Europe Express" and the accompanying "Metal on Metal" are thicker and more syncopated, putting the focus of Kraftwerk's railroad homage squarely on the rhythm. The technofied songs from Tour de France Soundtracks have not surprisingly changed the least and, truthfully, "Vitamin" and "Elektro Kardiogramm" can't quite match the classics that surround them. Which leads us to the final reason Minimum-Maximum is worth your time:
3. The Songs
More than anything, Minimum-Maximum gets over because a well-chosen selection from the Kraftwerk catalog is basically unstoppable. The four-song Computer World run on the second disc is particularly powerful, arguing for a steady upward trajectory in Kraftwerk's output through 1981 and also showcasing their deadpan humor. "It's more fun to compute" is the ultimate Kraftwerk line, a t-shirt slogan that pokes fun at the 70s while articulating a pop-culture prescience. Indeed, the mood throughout the live show is upbeat and celebratory-- "Having a Party With Ralf and Florian," if you will. The opening of "Radioactivity" is the only truly heavy moment, with a robotic voice intoning disturbing statistics about plutonium, but even here dance beats kick in roughly halfway through.
Since Autobahn, Kraftwerk have created music in which melody and rhythm become one, and roughly two-thirds of the tracks here are perfect examples of this precise, economical aesthetic. As a career overview Minimum-Maximum far surpasses The Mix. This record's importance in the Kraftwerk story is up for debate, but there's no question it's a hell of a lot of fun. | 2005-06-07T02:01:03.000-04:00 | 2005-06-07T02:01:03.000-04:00 | Electronic / Rock | Astralwerks | June 7, 2005 | 9 | e02c9e43-4697-4087-b256-4868f6c8c95b | Mark Richardson | https://pitchfork.com/staff/mark-richardson/ | null |
With country as her foundation, the versatile singer and songwriter pivots toward classic rock. She sounds less like the honky-tonk rebel and more like the Nashville professional. | With country as her foundation, the versatile singer and songwriter pivots toward classic rock. She sounds less like the honky-tonk rebel and more like the Nashville professional. | Margo Price: That’s How Rumors Get Started | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/margo-price-thats-how-rumors-get-started/ | That’s How Rumors Get Started | Margo Price wasn’t always a country singer. Long before she nodded to Loretta Lynn with the title of her 2016 solo debut, Midwest Farmer’s Daughter, she gigged around Nashville in a variety of bands, playing British Invasion rock with Secret Handshake and soul and classic rock with Buffalo Clover. She proved as adaptable as she was ambitious, fitting her voice to multiple genres and developing an impressive stylistic range that was bound to be underappreciated in Nashville. After a series of tragedies and misfortunes—the loss of a child, jail time for drunk driving, professional inertia—she finally leaned into country music, assembling a barnstorming backing band called the Price Tags to set her woes to a honky-tonk soundtrack.
That’s How Rumors Get Started represents a pivot away from twang toward a more classic rock sound—something closer to Buffalo Clover than her previous two albums. She named Tom Petty and Fleetwood Mac as touchstones, perhaps even hat-tipping the latter with that album title, and recorded in Los Angeles, at the storied EastWest Studios, with a group of session players including Benmont Tench from the Heartbreakers and Matt Sweeney from Chavez and Zwan. Co-producing is her old friend Sturgill Simpson, who sat in with the Price Tags many years ago and has his own strained relationship with country music. What ought to be a remarkable lineup, however, sounds overly constrained on Rumors, which lacks the heroic self-determinism of Daughter and the eccentricity of All American Made.
This isn’t a case of “anything but country,” though. It’s more like “anything and country.” That remains the foundation of her songwriting, but she’s reaching out in new directions, tinkering with different sounds and settings with hit-or-miss results. The flatulent guitars on “Twinkle Twinkle” so strongly recall the bouncy blues-rock of the Black Keys that it just might constitute a casual dig at her old label Third Man and its co-founder Jack White. Much more compelling is “Heartless Mind,” which uses country as a springboard into New Wave. Price’s voice sounds surprisingly comfortable, invigorated even, alongside the drum machine, the bobbing organ, and the processed guitars, at times channeling Marilyn Martin without sounding especially retro. It’s the most animated track on the album, the riskiest but also among the most rewarding.
Primarily, though, Price is interested in gospel music and the drama it injects into her songs. The churchly melodies and jubilant harmonies of the Nashville Friends Gospel Choir lend momentum and road-dog romance to “Prisoner of the Highway,” about the sacrifices you make as a touring musician, but those same elements are a distraction on “What Happened to Our Love?” which erupts into melodrama about halfway through, like a jump scare in a bad horror flick. When Buffalo Clover recorded the slow-burning “Hey Child” for their 2013 album Test Your Love, Price sang it like she was stuck in Memphis rather than L.A., her voice bouncing off the mournful Stax horns. Since then, she has become a more nuanced singer, which is apparent in the quieter moments on this new version, but the slick sound of Rumors sacrifices spontaneity for a scripted climax.
In this West Coast setting, Price sounds less like the honky-tonk rebel and more like the Nashville professional. That can sharpen the ironies as well as the hooks of a song like “Letting Me Down,” with its prickly guitars and concrete details, but on the title track she sounds oddly resigned, even a little melancholy as she confronts someone spreading lies about her. “And here you are, still doin’ you,” she sings. “It never worked out, but it never stopped you.” Those are great lines, rich in their accusations, but there’s no sting in her voice, just a weary resignation. No artist has to bristle constantly, but Price’s outrage at industry double standards made her previous solo albums sound righteous, and her pain at life’s tragedies resonated even if you didn’t know her backstory. Rumors buffs away some of the rougher edges that made her so much more compelling than so many of Nashville’s aspiring singer-songwriters. Those albums made the fight sound worthwhile, but there’s too little fight in these songs.
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Buy: Rough Trade
(Pitchfork earns a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.) | 2020-07-15T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-07-15T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Folk/Country | Loma Vista | July 15, 2020 | 6.3 | e02e92cc-febe-4fdd-8e18-2a3e88d2d952 | Stephen M. Deusner | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stephen-m. deusner/ | |
Out of print for some 15 and 13 years respectively, Drexciya’s first full-length album statement Neptune’s Lair and Transllusion’s debut The Opening of the Cerebral Gate have finally been re-pressed, the latter with bonus tracks never before available on vinyl. | Out of print for some 15 and 13 years respectively, Drexciya’s first full-length album statement Neptune’s Lair and Transllusion’s debut The Opening of the Cerebral Gate have finally been re-pressed, the latter with bonus tracks never before available on vinyl. | Drexciya / Transllusion: Neptune's Lair/The Opening of the Cerebral Gate | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/19824-drexciya-transllusion-neptunes-lairthe-opening-of-the-cerebral-gate/ | Neptune's Lair/The Opening of the Cerebral Gate | In a curious case of happenstance, right as Aphex Twin resurfaces for the first time in a decade with Syro, two of the most crucial pieces of the Drexciya puzzle also reappear on shop shelves. Out of print for some 15 and 13 years respectively, Drexciya’s first full-length album statement Neptune’s Lair and Transllusion’s debut The Opening of the Cerebral Gate have finally been re-pressed, the latter with bonus tracks never before available on vinyl. On the surface, there seems little to connect these early '90s contemporaries—that is, the British cult-of-personality producer and two of the most obscure electronic music makers to ever call Detroit home. But the two acts shared labels, and it’s almost impossible to imagine the idiosyncratic music of Richard D. James without the insular yet profound example of Drexciya.
Masked and anonymous up until the death of James Stinson in September of 2002 from heart complications that signaled the end of the group, the duo of Stinson and Gerald Donald left behind a staggering yet fragmented body of work. The group only released three full-lengths (with both Harnessed the Storm and Grava 4 being released in the months before Stinson’s death), Drexciya’s decade-long run of singles and EPs were singular in electronic music, connecting the likes of Detroit’s Underground Resistance to European imprints like Clone and Tresor.
They also presented a unified vision spanning across those singles and albums, a world of sound that soundtracked a dystopian future while paying tribute to forefathers like George Clinton, the Jonzun Crew, Cybotron, and of course Kraftwerk (see “Aquabahn”). While the excellent Clone series Journey of the Deep Sea Dweller painstakingly compiled and presented four volumes of Drexciyan music, they never quite put together the backstory of the group. Nevermind that they grew up landlocked in Detroit—Donald and Stinson created a warped water world peopled with Darthouven fish men, Stingray battalions, and Lardossan cruisers shaped like giant squids.
And how did such fish men wind up 20,000 leagues under the sea? Why, via pregnant African women thrown overboard during the Middle Passage of course, as brutal a creation story as any in modern music. Couched in such real-world horror is a layer of science fiction queasiness, like touching fish flesh. As an early comp's liner notes described: “Are Drexciyans water-breathing aquatically mutated descendants of those unfortunate victims of human greed? Recent experiments have shown a premature human infant saved from certain death by breathing liquid oxygen through its underdeveloped lungs.”
Drexciya’s bleak outlook was matched by a brutal strain of electro, acid, and techno across those initial 12”s. But what makes Neptune’s Lair and Stinson’s own The Opening of the Cerebral Gate great portals into that waterworld is that Neptune's 21 tracks temper those bludgeoning machinistic beats with other sounds: evocative acid tracks that take you deep inside your own mind, spasmodic electro sprints, strange interludes, and the sort of off-kilter melodic bits that Aphex Twin would soon make his own.
Monk chants and weird voices uttering “Drexciya” give way to the bubbly “Species of the Pod” that leads into the exquisite waterlogged funk of “Habitat 'O' Negative”, “Bottom Feeders”, and “Surface Terrestrial Colonization”. In contrast to the harder tracks that defined their '90s output, the keys and 303s are nudged down from “incapacitate” to “intoxicate.” Even beatless sketches like “Draining of the Tanks”, “Quantum Hydrodynamics”, and closer “C to the Power of X + C to the Power of X = MM = Unknown” offer kaleidoscopic synth washes, nuanced and textured like fragments of shells and sea glass made smooth in the tide.
Even Stinson’s The Opening of the Cerebral Gate offers up a slightly more moderate variation on the Drexciyan template. “Transmission of Life” is built on a furious throb and submarine alarms and the unreal squalls of “Cerebral Cortex Malfunction” sound exactly like its title suggests, but elsewhere Stinson tempers such overdriven tendencies. There’s the flickering keyboards that glide across the electro pulse of “Walking With Clouds”, being at once heavyweight and effervescent. Other standouts like “Do You Want to Get Down?” and “Unordinary Realities” hint at the more downtempo direction he would explore as the Other People Place on the long out-of-print 2001 classic Lifestyles of the Laptop Cafe.
What strikes me about revisiting Stinson’s music a decade-plus after his passing—despite clear antecedents in electro and acid—is how singular his vision was. Struggling with health issues as he finalized Drexciya and other solo projects, the anger and bleak outlook of their earliest output gives way to acceptance and a sense of the sublime. What better way to convey the sense that life is but a dream than to coin an artist name like Transllusion, a play on both "translucent" and "illusion"? That such a sense of humanity can be conveyed via the programming of machines until they begin to sing speaks to Stinson’s genius. In much the same way that—after a decade of near silence—Syro reminds me that rather than the innovative aspect of Aphex Twin’s music, what makes it stand the test of time is its irreducible sense of individuality, it remains the same for Stinson and Donald, and the music they made as Drexciya will endure, even if everything else gets submerged in the rising oceans. | 2014-10-16T02:00:03.000-04:00 | 2014-10-16T02:00:03.000-04:00 | Electronic | null | October 16, 2014 | 8.7 | e03961eb-2bc9-4781-8d5e-3d227132e93f | Andy Beta | https://pitchfork.com/staff/andy-beta/ | null |
The Belgian electro-rock outfit Soulwax have aged gracefully. Over two decades on, they’ve finally found a coherent sound, layering robust synths, dusty live drums, and simple vocal melodies. | The Belgian electro-rock outfit Soulwax have aged gracefully. Over two decades on, they’ve finally found a coherent sound, layering robust synths, dusty live drums, and simple vocal melodies. | Soulwax: FROM DEEWEE | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/23061-from-deewee/ | FROM DEEWEE | If every ’90s alternative act updated their sound as gracefully as the Belgian electro-rock outfit Soulwax, the alternative era might never have ended. Hold the band’s latest full-length up to, say, God Lives Underwater’s likeminded 1998 sophomore effort Life in the So-Called Space Age, and you might think the two titles came out no more than a couple of years apart. On closer inspection, though, FROM DEEWEE gives us a glimpse of what those ’90s acts would sound like today had they managed to loosen up just enough to absorb modern sensibilities.
When Soulwax debuted with Leave the Story Untold back in 1996, their music had some pluck but did little to distinguish itself from the guitar bands flooding the market at the time. Soulwax would go on to reinvent themselves as a Britpop, synthpop, techno, and dance-remix act. They declared their omnivorous tastes on 2005 reworking of Daft Punk’s “Teachers,” which name-dropped a litany of influences from the Cramps to Kyuss to Urban Dance Squad to ELO. By their 2016 soundtrack to the film Belgica, core members Stephen and David Dewaele were basically play-acting from a grab bag of styles. But even when their genre exercises were spot-on, Belgica prodded the question: who is this band?
This time, the Dewaele brothers and their cast of supporting musicians finally have a coherent sound. And while it isn’t exactly revolutionary, FROM DEEWEE reconciles the polarity between Soulwax’s rock and electronic sides. Drawing from a battery of three drummers (including none other than former Sepultura ballast Igor Cavalera), the Dewaele’s marry synths to dusty, boxed-in live drums. That contrast prevents the album from tipping too far into the artificial and also works as a counterweight to how the band self-consciously references the past.
From Deewee hearkens back to those halcyon days where funk, disco, krautrock, new wave, rap, and punk all flowed forth into the same pool. The main melody and wheezing steam-engine groove of “My Tired Eyes” both recall classic Depeche Mode, while “Conditions of a Shared Belief” wears the influence of Eddy Grant’s 1982 smash hit “Electric Avenue” on its sleeve. But even at their most electronically inclined, Soulwax remain a ’90s rock act at heart. Mining the disco era, the Dewaele brothers scuff things up, stopping just short of lo-fi. (The album was in fact recorded live with the band capturing songs all together in one take.)
That’s not to say the Dewaeles give production short shrift here. On the contrary: The production is skilled and meticulous. The synths are rich and robust, and the brothers layer multiple drumsets with a sense of finesse that evokes John McEntire’s classic work at the boards for Stereolab. But compared to the haphazard variety of Belgica, FROM DEEWEE comes across with a uniformity and stylishness that grounds its playful moments, such as the punk drumming that introduces and closes the otherwise gleaming synth number “Missing Wires.” As far-reaching as Belgica got, it lacked the simple majesty of the vocal melodies the Dewaele’s have a field day with this time around.
Soulwax betray their ’90s roots the most with their singing. On “Masterplanned,” the main vocal walks the line between dour monotone and sublime earworm. On the other hand, towards the end of “Missing Wires,” a strobing organ figure touches on the upbeat dance style that countless modern indie bands have built careers on. More nimble than they’ve ever been, the Dewaele brothers manage to stack three different eras of music on top of one another without anchoring their songs to any of them. Soulwax have always been a band in transit from one style to the next. On FROM DEEWEE, they arrive at the settled creative space they’ve hinted at but never quite reached in the past. As “Masterplanned” goes, “Thought the journey was the point of the race/But it seems the destination has taken its place.” | 2017-04-07T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-04-07T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Play It Again Sam | April 7, 2017 | 7 | e04f0fa2-1a43-4d2a-ae9a-236cfc334aca | Saby Reyes-Kulkarni | https://pitchfork.com/staff/saby-reyes-kulkarni/ | null |
After flirting with indie dance, then Calvin Harris and Starsmith-produced EDM, singer Ellie Goulding takes a strong turn toward club-ready synth-pop. | After flirting with indie dance, then Calvin Harris and Starsmith-produced EDM, singer Ellie Goulding takes a strong turn toward club-ready synth-pop. | Ellie Goulding: Delirium | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21180-delirium/ | Delirium | Making a full-blown pop record like Delirium isn't a stretch for Ellie Goulding—she's seen booming, bright-eyed singles like "Lights" and "Anything Could Happen" become Top 20 hits, after all. Even when she was making low-key electro-pop, Goulding’s music has always played heavily with a high drama beyond reality. She’s good at selling stories, constructing big "us against the world" tracks for fans who want songs that play like fairy tales and battle cries like some dancefloor-ready Natasha Khan.
But after flirting with indie dance, then Calvin Harris and Starsmith-produced EDM, Goulding is adding some Swedes to her arsenal for Delirium: Max Martin, Carl Falk, and Peter Svensson, to be specific. And Goulding, who went from being famous only in the UK to performing at the White House, very much deserves at this point in her career to have a third record fit with all the big pop trimmings.
While Halcyon was a dark collection that flitted between club-ready synth-pop and soulful, orchestral ballads, Delirium dives head first into the former with confidence. At times, the record exists in the same '80s-pop wannabe universe as Carly Rae Jepsen’s E•MO•TION or Taylor Swift’s 1989, with gushing vocals and Moroder-kissed synths on tracks like "Codes" and her Fifty Shades of Grey song "Love Me Like You Do". Elsewhere, she inches back to her dance music roots on the sultry house-leaning "Don’t Need Nobody" and the marriage of a scratchy acoustic loop with techno on "Devotion".
But while the best tracks here are the ones that transcend and build on pop trends, a few others merely copy them. "Keep on Dancin’" is a more minimalist sibling to Adam Lambert’s Martin-produced hit "Ghost Town" and while "Something in the Way You Move" might be a mighty fine song in a vacuum, Selena Gomez has already done it with "Me & the Rhythm". The bubbly, "I’m sticking to you like glue" doo-wop of "Around U" feels particularly out of place among Delirium’s darker, deeper tones, playing like a better fit for Meghan Trainor than Goulding. Still, even when the songs here evoke other hits, they’re still bangers in their own right.
And Goulding’s signature vibrato and energy make even the more trend-chasing songs on the album fully hers. Her voice is fullest in the jangly ballad "Lost and Found", where she keeps her straightforward vocals at the forefront. "We got other things we can do with our," she sings flirtatiously in the verses of "Codes", stopping for a beat, before drawing out "tiiime" into a high-pitched lilt, but she moves into a punchy, shouting sing-song for the chorus.
Aside from a little well-done sass ("You were talking deep, like it was mad love to you/ You wanted my heart but I just liked your tattoos") on the album’s single "On My Mind", there’s an adult sophistication to Delirium. Nobody’s shaking off haters, bemoaning that same old love, or asking that you don’t tell your mother that you, uh, made out with someone? Granted, Delirium is fun, but the mood is upfront, Goulding’s romantic propositions more realistic demands than adolescent, yearning questions. A track like "Codes" might be dressed up in sexy language but the sentiment is clear: can we please put a label on this? "When love’s not playing out like the movies/ It doesn’t mean it’s falling apart/ Don’t panic," she assures on the stand-out "Don’t Panic", whose musical-box quality makes it sound like a polished Lights-era throwback. Delirium manages to be a cool, dramatic pop album that rarely hyperbolizes what love is all about. And might I remind you that this is the person who wrote "Burn".
Delirium grounds Ellie Goulding’s penchant for spectacle in tightly-written pop songs. Her evocative storytelling and ability to craft great dance music is all here, but repackaged as something more emotionally tangible, ditching feel-good EDM lyrical logic for realness. And while these songs can sometimes evoke other major players in her genre, she makes Max Martin’s signatures feel personal, making a mature pop record that feels like a natural progression. | 2015-11-05T01:00:02.000-05:00 | 2015-11-05T01:00:02.000-05:00 | Electronic | Interscope / Cherrytree | November 5, 2015 | 7.2 | e05c3d3b-0967-45e9-95c0-062518eefbf5 | Hazel Cills | https://pitchfork.com/staff/hazel-cills/ | null |
On his first album since joining Real Estate, the hesitant singer and lavish sound artist at last puts those elements on equal footing with his songwriting. | On his first album since joining Real Estate, the hesitant singer and lavish sound artist at last puts those elements on equal footing with his songwriting. | Julian Lynch: Rat’s Spit | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/julian-lynch-rats-spit/ | Rat’s Spit | At least historically, it wasn’t surprising when Julian Lynch became Real Estate’s new guitarist in 2016: He and the band’s founders were childhood pals from New Jersey. Though Lynch had relocated to Wisconsin to study ethnomusicology, they’d remained close, releasing records on the label Underwater Peoples and sharing a loose scene. But after firing guitarist Matt Mondanile due to allegations of sexual assault, Real Estate needed a replacement, and Lynch was not only free but also familiar as both friend and guitarist. Musically, however, it made for a strange fit. On his own records, Lynch always seemed amorphous and slippery. His debut, Orange You Glad, turned something like chillwave into a collage, while Mare mixed warped soundscapes with brief bursts of lush instrumentation. It was a mesmerizing experiment at the intersection of acoustics and electronics, but country miles from Real Estate’s backlit guitar reveries.
Lynch has returned at last to records of his own with his first album in six years, Rat’s Spit. Much like the pop of Brian Eno, Lynch delicately blends buzzing electric guitar with a newfound lucidity, his looped acoustics and muffled drums underscoring his soft voice. “Catapulting,” for instance, is a warm and measured start, with Lynch mirroring the melody with careening guitar solos flown in by Here Come the Warm Jets. “Hexagonal Field” has the pulsing percussive undercurrent of Eno’s “St. Elmo’s Fire.” The songs are wound tightly but never suffocating, the compositions busy but never finicky. They’re more adherent to familiar song structures than his previous records, too, as Lynch uses melody to map the movement of these pieces.
In the past, Lynch would go to great lengths to shroud himself in effects or bury himself beneath instruments. On 2013’s “Yawning,” he was almost indistinguishable from the accordion-driven pulse, betraying a startlingly self-conscious approach. Lynch’s music has always been foregrounded in a love of sound, sometimes at the expense of the songs they tried to shape; he would float through tunes rather than push them forward. At times on Rat’s Spit, Lynch is still reticent, but his voice—and his understanding of how to use it as an accent and tool—has evolved. During the muddled noise-pop jam “Peanut Butter,” his singing matches the instrumental timbre and buzzes with the same electricity as the pounding pace.
Many of these songs begin or end in media res, but Lynch fills in the missing pieces with colorful flourishes, like the hummed melody of “Peanut Butter” or the way it occasionally slows, as if a metronome has faltered. On “Strawberry Cookies,” the isolated drops of a rainstick make for a quixotic rhythmic trick, highlighting Lynch’s contemplative tune. He drenches his voice in effects until he becomes an unironic counterpart to Enya. The best and boldest track on the album, it is spiritual in its exploration of the unknown but never mawkish.
For Lynch, Rat’s Spit is an updated statement of intent and confidence, a declaration from an artist who often opted for a whisper. Lynch can be heard loud and (sometimes) clear here, floating among ideas that he finally allows to breathe. Despite the traces of anxiety written into the lines he sings, it’s a welcome respite when so much else has turned to smog. | 2019-01-23T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2019-01-23T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Underwater Peoples / Ya Reach | January 23, 2019 | 7.5 | e05f2ca2-f4b9-445b-a640-66c9ab8b61b3 | Will Schube | https://pitchfork.com/staff/will-schube/ | |
With the help of collaborators, the 76-year-old songwriter takes what would be another great, narrative album set to the familiar rhythms of a country waltz and brings it to new places. | With the help of collaborators, the 76-year-old songwriter takes what would be another great, narrative album set to the familiar rhythms of a country waltz and brings it to new places. | Terry Allen & the Panhandle Mystery Band: Just Like Moby Dick | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/terry-allen-and-the-panhandle-mystery-ba-just-like-moby-dick/ | Just Like Moby Dick | Over 50 years, the multidisciplinary artist and songwriter Terry Allen has received prominent fellowships, had work featured in biennales, and released 12 albums. Two of these, Juarez and Lubbock (on everything), are venerated touchstones of outlaw country, recently reissued by North Carolina-based label Paradise of Bachelors. At this point in his career, nobody would fault him for coasting. But on Just Like Moby Dick, his first collection of original songs since 2013, Allen evolves, bringing new musicians and singers into the fold to create an album whose strongest moments result from its collaborations.
Together, they take what would be just another great, narrative album set to the familiar rhythms of a country waltz and bring it to new places. Folk stalwart Shannon McNally’s warm, worn-in vocals amplify the sadness at the center of “All These Blues Go Walkin’ By” and “All That’s Left Is Fare-Thee-Well.” On the latter, the brittler tones of album co-producer Charlie Sexton tell a story about a relationship—a life, really—that can’t be mended, a wrinkle that refuses to be ironed. Though it’s a tale of futility, it ends with some of Allen’s signature sour optimism: “But somewhere in this old dirt/There’s bound be some gold/Something real that you can feel/Something you can hold.”
Each song on Just Like Moby Dick, even the one about a traveling circus descending on a city of bloodthirsty vampires, casts a tender glow. That’s in large part due to the sensitive and lyrical performances by the members of the Panhandle Mystery Band. Throughout, Lloyd Maines’ slinky slide guitar sets a slow pace from which the other players gracefully follow or depart. On album opener “Houdini Didn’t Like the Spiritualists,” the band dexterously stretches the notes out of their instruments, creating a supportive palette of sounds to surround Allen’s soft and briny singing. We may have heard these string-derived textures from Allen before—“Death of the Last Stripper” is not dissimilar to Lubbock (on everything)’s “The Beautiful Waitress”—but that doesn’t mean they aren’t worth hearing again, especially with a little more rhythm.
Davis McLarty has served as the Mystery Band drummer since 1996’s Human Remains, but his presence is pronounced here. He comes most alive halfway through the album on the militant “American Childhood I: Civil Defense,” one of two tracks where the bass and cello cede control of the rhythm section to the drums. The other is “Abandonitis,” which features Allen’s son Bale on the djembe as a curmudgeonly Allen reminds the younger generation how universal life’s cruelties can be: “Maybe your sister’s in jail/Your brother’s a punk/Your folks are both dead/Or maybe just drunk/Feel all alone/So sorry for yourself/But just stand in line/Like everybody else.”
Abandonment and sorrow are two of the record’s dozen or so related themes; there’s also endless war and the fallibility of memory, topics the satirical “American Childhood” triptych captures with simple, heartbreaking truths. “It’s just the war/Same fucking war/It’s always been/It never ends,” Allen laments bluntly, drawing connections between Vietnam and Iraq. Thankfully, for every devastating literalism, there’s an equal burst of menacingly surreal imagery: a burning mobile home, a gang of murderous pirates, a child riding a squeaky bike through an abandoned town. The tendency for contradictions is evident on “Harmony Two”—a song seemingly about a high-speed chase, set to the sleepy pace of a drifting houseboat. Written by Allen’s wife and collaborator Jo Harvey Allen, it’s characteristic of an outlook on life that falls somewhere between “everything’s on fire” and “it’s 5 o’clock somewhere.”
It’s for this very reason that, at a time when crisis mode feels like the new normal, Just Like Moby Dick is worthy of an earnest listen. Perhaps the serene perspective Allen embodies is only available to those—like fellow songwriters Randy Newman and John Prine—who have lived long enough to witness tragedy become comedy. He doesn’t dismiss the calamities we face; life’s not a complete joke. But when it strikes you with a thousand harpoons, what choice do any of us have but to carry on as best we can?
Buy: Rough Trade
(Pitchfork may earn a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.) | 2020-01-28T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2020-01-28T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Folk/Country | Paradise of Bachelors | January 28, 2020 | 7.6 | e0658e4d-71cf-405f-9632-11db8ee20853 | Abigail Covington | https://pitchfork.com/staff/abigail-covington/ | |
The Irish folk singer’s third album fills out her sound to incorporate elements of jazz, country rock, slowcore, and psychedelia. | The Irish folk singer’s third album fills out her sound to incorporate elements of jazz, country rock, slowcore, and psychedelia. | Brigid Mae Power: Head Above the Water | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/brigid-mae-power-head-above-the-water/ | Head Above the Water | Brigid Mae Power’s music never quite settles on solid ground. The Irish singer-songwriter flits between past and present; between traditional and modern forms; between the heaven in her voice and the earthbound epiphanies of her words. Her last album was called The Two Worlds. I’d say she inhabits a few more than that.
Power emerged from Galway’s bohemian scene, experimenting with the parameters of traditional music in unlit car parks and remote churches. Until now, the echo of open spaces has been a defining feature of her music, her intimate songs bolstered by cavernous reverb and drone. Those textures are less prominent on her third album. Recorded in Glasgow in three days with a band assembled by Scottish contemporary folkie Alasdair Roberts, who co-produced alongside Power and her husband Peter Broderick, Head Above the Water fills out her sound with a broader sweep of instrumentation. There is room for the bodhran, fiddle, and bouzouki, but also the synthesizer, Shruti box, drums, and electric guitar. Roberts encourages a more adventurous spirit to enter the proceedings. Though still rooted in folk—there’s a stunning cover of the traditional ballad “The Blacksmith”—the 10 songs blend elements of jazz, country rock, slowcore, and psychedelia.
Occasionally, the music has real bite, as on the snaking, sinister “I Was Named After You.” More typically, the songs amble dreamily toward their destination, as though following an ancient map on which the coordinates have begun to fade. On “Wedding of a Friend” and “You Have a Quiet Power,” buffeted by cross breezes of pedal steel and Mellotron, Power sounds like she’s fronting a slightly woollier Mazzy Star. “On a City Night” recalls the giddy joie de vivre of some of the lighter moments on Bob Dylan and The Band’s Basement Tapes.
What remains from past albums is the plain beauty of Power’s voice, part of a lineage that includes Anne Briggs, Linda Perhacs, and Beth Orton. It seems otherworldly until you listen to the words. Head Above the Water is, she says, “a continuing tale of everyday survival.” The lyrics merge the poetic and prosaic, recounting past conversations, recalling locations, journeys, small moments, until the whole assumes a cumulative weight.
In “Wedding of a Friend,” a baby’s head lies on her chest, “stuck with sweat.” In “On a City Night,” a quotidian conversation regarding the merits of city vs. country begets a sly love song about giving up things you cherish for the person you want to be with. In “Wearing Red That Eve,” the color of a dress denotes an elemental strength. As the song unfolds lazily over a soulful three-chord pattern, Power rises above the yelled profanities of a group of men on a New York street and ascends to the mountains, where she professes love “for everything and everyone.”
On many of these songs, she tells her story and then breaks into a series of wordless cries which carry their own meaning. Mostly, it sounds like joy. While previously Power seemed to be swimming against a tide of bad luck—she has spoken about her struggles as a single mother and past abusive relationships—there’s an air of breakthrough here, articulated most clearly on “I Was Named After You”: “I was in a battle I could neither win or lose, but time has passed and I can freely move.”
There are some obvious flaws. The uniformity of mood, melody, and texture means the album can drag, and while the spontaneity of the recordings is largely vindicated by the results, it also leaves some loose threads dangling. “Not Yours to Own” isn’t alone in meandering prettily without seeming to care too much about where it’s headed; a more attentive working process might have developed things further. At her best, however, Power lives up to her name. The closing title track, with its glassy beauty, twinkling piano, and soft strings, speaks to her continued progress. An artist at swim, head above the water, “looking across to the shore.”
Buy: Rough Trade
(Pitchfork earns a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.) | 2020-06-04T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-06-04T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Folk/Country | Fire | June 4, 2020 | 7.8 | e0684803-e55b-441e-8d17-136e6497d586 | Graeme Thomson | https://pitchfork.com/staff/graeme-thomson/ | |
The coarse Cobain head-scream of Bully singer, songwriter, and guitarist Alicia Bognanno is its own resuscitating jolt of protest. In a startling shift from the band's easygoing 2014 debut EP, she spends much of Feels Like tearing down the house with her howl. | The coarse Cobain head-scream of Bully singer, songwriter, and guitarist Alicia Bognanno is its own resuscitating jolt of protest. In a startling shift from the band's easygoing 2014 debut EP, she spends much of Feels Like tearing down the house with her howl. | Bully: Feels Like | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/20484-bully-feels-like/ | Feels Like | Alicia Bognanno's coarse Cobain head-scream is its own resuscitating jolt of protest. It liberates Bully's songwriter, singer, and guitarist from the oppressive weight she carries on the Nashville band’s debut album, Feels Like: Worn down by lying jackasses, locked in the "invisible handcuffs" of patriarchal expectation, eroded by the male gaze, her feelings discarded like garbage. Compounding all the external fuckery is a black hole of self-doubt and self-deceit that she’s trying to break through. "My lies settle thicker than my milkshake/ But they both make my stomach ache/ And they’re both slowly weighing me down," she sings on "Brainfreeze", one of her few moments of pristine indie pop sweetness across these 11 songs.
In a startling shift from Bully’s easygoing 2014 debut EP, Bognanno spends much of Feels Like tearing down the house with her howl. She and the band—Clayton Parker on guitar, Reece Lazarus on bass, and Stewart Copeland (no relation) on drums—leave behind that EP’s warm and shaggy take on '90s guitar pop for a tougher, more pointed assault that initially sounds austere. Not that anything has been lost in translation between Bognanno’s mind and her microphone. With assistance from staff engineer Jon San Paolo, she recorded the whole thing herself at Chicago’s Electrical Audio, where she interned a few years ago; in the house style, she refers to herself as the engineer of these songs rather than the producer.
But over time Feels Like’s essential power becomes evident. "I’m just looking for clarity to help me through," Bognanno sings on "Trying", and the relatively spare production allows the emotion of every guitar part to smack harder: On that song, it’s a yearning whine as she sings about her recurring worry that she’s "growing so far from myself." The chorus of "Trash" sounds as if she’s leaping up and down on a broken mattress, pretending it’s the head of the liar who treats her worried-over feelings as something disposable, while the killer "I Remember" races as fast as her memories of a complex, enduring love. Bognanno is fond of making her choruses into stumbling blocks that stall the pace for a moment, but the joyous "Milkman" has a loopy waterslide rush that disguises the deceptively sour lyrics: Already trying to outrun her speeding mind, she also realizes that the more she loves a boy, the more he’ll lie to her.
The '90s nostalgia of Feels Like is undeniable, but the hooks are catchy and Bully are most reminiscent of an under-appreciated band—the Blake Babies circa 1989’s Earwig and 1990 follow-up Sunburn. Melodically, Bully are operating on the same level as Juliana Hatfield and co. after they had taken a massive step up from their shambling 1987 debut, Nicely Nicely, and both bands makeover their beleaguered cries as exhilarating, fun pop-punk. Hatfield could be incredibly self-flagellating; Bognanno is never quite so brutal, but in spite of the shit she shoulders throughout Feels Like, she’s much harder on herself than any of the perpetrators. She’s an anxious introvert with a knack for slipping in sad details as mysterious asides. "I’m not that social anyway," she sings on homebody anthem "Reason", where she admits that one of her favorite hobbies is watching her dog stare at the shed—though she’s happiest hiding out "by the lake, at my dad’s house/ I can take that old bike that my mom left behind a very long, long time ago."
Once she’s shut out the whole world, however, the noise in her head starts to take over. Nineteen years on, she can’t forgive herself for breaking her sister’s arm, she sings on "Six", even though as a kid she slept on her own broken arm for a night to try and make up for it. Time disappears on the moody "Picture", where she balks at having her photo taken—at being fixed in time at the point in her 25-year-old life where she’s trying to figure out how far she is from who she used to be, and which parts of herself she wants to make permanent. Within this explosive, rollicking music, Bognanno is as intimate a songwriter as Courtney Barnett or Waxahatchee's Katie Crutchfield, her attempts at being honest with herself contrasted by the liars who want to sink her with them as they renege responsibility for their own lives.
Feels Like doesn’t reference any specific dates or weather, but it feels like a summer coming-of-age album. Sure, there are the mentions of milkshakes and scabbed knees, along with the way Bully’s untamed punk should soundtrack windows-down freedom in rattling first cars. But there’s also that sense of lonely intimacy with oneself within what can feel like a vast void of time; six weeks where you tempt yourself with the promise of reinvention that you’ll probably never commit to, lay uncomfortably with your regrets, and fret that the future isn’t making itself clear. These are anthems for "all of us and our unpaid dues," as Bognanno sings on "Brainfreeze"; people who, per the album title, are slowly learning to trust their intuition and the weight of an emotion. On "Picture", one finally weighs too heavy on her, but in a good way: "Break before I start to bend," she sings, finding herself in the act of resistance. | 2015-06-25T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2015-06-25T02:00:01.000-04:00 | Rock | Columbia / StarTime | June 25, 2015 | 7.8 | e06d933f-fc77-4cd5-96f6-e45415e60ef5 | Laura Snapes | https://pitchfork.com/staff/laura-snapes/ | null |
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