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Liam Howlett returns with his first album since 1997's smash Fat of the Land was hailed by mainstream media as the future of "electronica." Kool Keith, Juliette Lewis, Princess Superstar, and brother-in-law Liam Gallagher guest. | Liam Howlett returns with his first album since 1997's smash Fat of the Land was hailed by mainstream media as the future of "electronica." Kool Keith, Juliette Lewis, Princess Superstar, and brother-in-law Liam Gallagher guest. | The Prodigy: Always Outnumbered, Never Outgunned | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/6486-always-outnumbered-never-outgunned/ | Always Outnumbered, Never Outgunned | A handful of industry insiders and media outlets expected The Prodigy's third album, 1997's The Fat of the Land, to alter America's pop landscape. Those prognosticators were correct: The album (which, fact fans, debuted at #1 in the same week that Radiohead's OK Computer bowed at #21) was a significant modern rock signpost, albeit not for the expected reasons. At the time, The Prodigy had been billed-- along with the Chemical Brothers, Orbital, and Underworld-- as the leaders of the mainstream media's regretfully named "electronica" movement, a moment in which electronic dance music was going to finally crossover to MTV and radio in the U.S.
However, instead of inspiring you and your band to trade in your guitars for turntables, The Prodigy-- along with unlikely and otherwise unrelated contemporaries such as Korn, Nine Inch Nails, and Rage Against the Machine-- laid the groundwork for the string of mostly limp rap-rock/nu-metal bands that dominated modern rock throughout the late 1990s and into the new millennium. In retrospect, The Prodigy may not have become America's Great Electronic Hopes but "Firestarter" could be the world's greatest nu-metal single, a rousing anthem for the Mook Era that was unfortunately taken to heart at Woodstock '99, the abandoned festival that served as rap-rock's peak in popularity and its cultural nadir.
OK Computer, "electronica," Rage Against the Machine, Woodstock '99-- it may seem like ancient history, but that divide is the uphill battle The Prodigy face after a seven-year gab between records. The good news is that calling the band "they" is more misleading now than it has been in recent years: The Prodigy's fourth album, Always Outnumbered, Never Outgunned, is mostly the work of musical linchpin Liam Howlett. Dancer Leeroy Thornhill left the group years ago, and neither Maxim Reality nor Keith Flint is featured here. Flint's bleating on The Prodigy's 2002 comeback single "Baby's Got a Temper"-- a cringe-worthy attempt at provocation (it's an ode to "date-rape drug" Rohypnol) that is thankfully not included-- may have been his final bow with the group.
Instead, vocals are provided by Kool Keith, Princess Superstar, and Juliette Lewis (among others), a roster that hints that the seven-year wait between records is less a result of going back to the drawing board as it is trying to coax a finished product from years-old ideas. (One could add Liam Gallagher to that list of past-their-sell-date vocalists, but as Howlett's brother-in-law his appearance could be as much a familial decision as a musical one.) Of the guests, only an underutilized Twista lends the album an air of timeliness.
Even more disappointingly, Always Outgunned is a mess of unfocused energy and uncomfortably irrelevant sonics, an odd mix of cartoonish immediacy and tired youth-cult ideas that would be the perfect soundtrack to Itchy & Scratchy & Poochie: The Movie. The results are even more regrettable because they're coming from Howlett, whose string of singles and first two albums with The Prodigy are still crucial and enthralling.
Howlett's run of solid singles does remain intact with "Girls", a delicious red herring of electro and breakbeats that stands head, shoulders and torso above the rest of the album. It leads into Princess Superstar collab "Memphis Bells" and "Get Up Get Off", the next closest things to album highlights. The latter features the yeoman-like Twista, who wisely slows his cadence rather than being tempted to race alongside BPMs which-- although hardly pummeling-- are much higher than, say, a Kanye West or R. Kelly production.
"Hotride"-- one of two Lewis collaborations-- is a heavy-handed re-imagination of The Fifth Dimension's "Up, Up & Away" (no, really) that aims for sexual but simply isn't sexy. Howlett also reaches back into the 1960s on "Phoenix", which liberally samples of The Shocking Blue's "Love Buzz", a vain, lifeless attempt to rub shoulders with the current wave of retro 60s garage rock. It's perhaps the record's most telling moment: long-time innovator Howlett aligning himself with the most necrophiliac elements of contemporary rock. The record's ungainly, knuckle-dragging nu-metal trappings overshadow any other pleasant sonic accoutrements-- the bassline from "Thriller" that loops throughout much of "The Way It Is" or the playful, subtle beats of "Memphis Bells".
"Your time is running out," Liam Gallagher sneers on album closer "Shoot Down", and it's unfortunately a fair warning for The Prodigy themselves. For a record that presumably took seven years to create, Always Outnumbered sounds unsurprisingly outdated but oddly lazy. Perhaps if Howlett officially disbands The Prodigy he can rediscover freedom and inspiration recording under his own name or another moniker, but if this "it goes to 11" take on rap-rock is all he's managed to digest and engage with during his absence, it's possible he needn't bother. | 2004-08-25T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2004-08-25T02:00:01.000-04:00 | Electronic | XL | August 25, 2004 | 3.9 | 0b962a56-e454-4cc0-83dd-df1250bba720 | Scott Plagenhoef | https://pitchfork.com/staff/scott-plagenhoef/ | null |
The Danish songwriter’s ghostly chamber pop experiments form their own foggy landscape, inviting you into a creeping mist where vocals and piano smear together. | The Danish songwriter’s ghostly chamber pop experiments form their own foggy landscape, inviting you into a creeping mist where vocals and piano smear together. | Agnes Obel: Myopia | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/agnes-obel-myopia/ | Myopia | Since 2010, Danish songwriter Agnes Obel has produced ghostly, moody chamber pop with configurations of piano, strings, and her own voice. Myopia, her fourth album, represents a new peak for her lush melancholy. Raised in Copenhagen by musical parents (her father was an instrument collector and former jazz guitarist, her mother a talented pianist), Obel studied music in high school, eventually dropping out to attend a program for budding producers. As with her three previous albums, she wrote, recorded, mixed, and produced Myopia at her home studio in Berlin.
Myopia means “nearsightedness,” a title Obel chose to reflect her insular approach to music. Where some children might keep a private diary, Obel played solo piano: “I always had a different style of music I liked to play just by myself,” she’s said. Myopia lives in this solitude, inviting you into a creeping mist where vocals and piano smear together. Myopia uses vocal manipulation and murky instrumentation for ambient effect, painting the gloom in hues of rich blue and grey.
The effect is present from earliest moments on the album, as on “Broken Sleep,” where Obel’s voice dips in and around plucked strings as she instructs, “Dream me a dream soft as a pillow.” She passes the phrase “dream me a dream” back and forth with herself, alternating between a long e, like dreem, and a short e, like drem. Elsewhere she experiments with textured vocal layering and muddled, rippling warbles. On “Promise Keeper,” pronunciation takes a backseat in favor of delicate vocalizations. At times her voice leaps over itself, like cresting dolphins. When Obel sings the album’s title on “Myopia,” the word simply melts into the rain of compressed drums and strings, barely detectable.
Myopia recalls the gauziness of Grouper, or the poetry of Kate Bush, but the way the album forms its own strange landscape suggests that Obel is more interested in her own musical planet than any shared reality. She’s motivated, perhaps, by what she’s described as a discomfort with social media and the pressure of a culture where “we expect everyone to be open and made of glass.” Myopia, with its atmospheric piano, shadowy vocal effects, and persistent tension, resists this kind of visibility. These songs are obscured like frosted glass, as meticulously pretty and faintly unnerving as a porcelain doll. Though the album ends almost as quietly as it began, Obel’s whispery ambient fog lingers far longer.
Buy: Rough Trade
(Pitchfork may earn a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.) | 2020-02-26T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2020-02-26T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Pop/R&B | Blue Note / Deutsche Grammophon | February 26, 2020 | 7.1 | 0b97c12f-840b-4fc5-9554-c7a9cd48c119 | Ashley Bardhan | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ashley-bardhan/ | |
Glaswegian producer/DJ Alex Smoke excels at making rich, moody techno that isn't exactly meant for dancing. On his latest, Smoke tightly packs a myriad of concepts and ideas, ranging from ontology to lost love, the carceral state to Edward Snowden. | Glaswegian producer/DJ Alex Smoke excels at making rich, moody techno that isn't exactly meant for dancing. On his latest, Smoke tightly packs a myriad of concepts and ideas, ranging from ontology to lost love, the carceral state to Edward Snowden. | Alex Smoke: Love Over Will | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21539-love-over-will/ | Love Over Will | Glaswegian producer/DJ Alex Smoke (aka Alex Menzies) has never made techno you were supposed to dance to. In his more than decade-long career, his mixes and productions have veered far from the main drag of club and dancefloor appeal. More important for Smoke, in all of his work, was emotional exploration. It’s obvious that he has the disposition of a sensitive soul, and on his first outing with R&S Records, Love Over Will, Smoke swings for the fences, trying to complete a vision which could really create a puncturing and memorable experience.
Apparently the title of the album is a playful inversion of British occultist Aleister Crowley’s law of Thelema, a thoroughly ambiguous holy writ. In similarly opaque and broad terms, Smoke has described the album as "a statement on the times we are living in, but with an optimism relating to ways forward that are possible." But does he deliver on such lofty statements? Probably not, but in over 13 tracks and 33 minutes, Smoke tightly packs a myriad of concepts and ideas, ranging from ontology, loss love, the carceral state, and Edward Snowden. The resulting project is contemplative, relaxing, and elegant on a sonic level, but often uneven and clunky lyrically.
The unevenness comes from Smoke’s heavy reliance on his singing, which cannot carry the album's thematic weight. His vocals dominate, featuring in eight of the 13 songs. Throughout, he sings in a low register, mostly in a monotone, and his voice is always Auto-Tuned or pitch-adjusted. Sometimes the vocals are the perfect complement to his sparse, buoyant productions, and at other times they are far too brittle and inflexible to match the rich sounds around him. The freezingly tender and liquid wall of sound in the album’s opener, "Fair Is Foul," favorably recalls Mica Levi’s palette of quavering synths for Under the Skin, but the track is nearly ruined by the interjection of lines like "I never really care about you anyway/ You’re always on the way."
When his songwriting and singing fit together, Smoke comes very close to the emotional resonance he is striving for. In "LossGain," as he whispers "Don’t tell me how I feel when I’m myself," there is an aching sense of strength and affirmation amidst the melancholy. When he sings "All my atoms/ Struggling to fight them" in "All My Atoms," the blunt lyrics propel the energy of the song’s bright keys. Smoke is a sentimentalist at heart, and in the album’s best track, "Dust," he submits to old desires and calls out to a lover: "Don’t want to be with anyone else/ Don’t want to be separate."
Like Holly Herndon and Jam City, Smoke attempts to politically radicalize his music. Unlike the other two artists, he is hesitant to go full hog, and only devotes two tracks to explicitly political themes: "Fall Out" and "Yearning Mississippi." "Fall Out" is partially inspired by the trials and tribulations of hacker folk hero Edward Snowden. As he sings "you’ll never know they’re watching you...you’ll never even see," his voice is drowned out by a landscape of computer sounds, not unlike the ones featured in Laura Poitras' film about Snowden, Citizenfour. As the album’s final track, it serves as an almost cheerful acquiescence to the grand scariness of the surveillance state, in favor of ruminating on less dizzying concerns. For "Yearning Mississippi," he explored ethnomusicologist Alan Lomax’s Cultural Equity Archive and sampled prison songs from Mississippi. This is an interesting detail, but it would be impossible to notice on its own, making the potential critique of the prison system miss its mark.
Overall, Smoke still gets over on his ability to craft rich, moody soundscapes, although almost all the tracks on the album would have worked better as standalone instrumentals. Unlike his last project, Wraetlic, a woefully dreary and depressive piece, Love Over Will projects a hopeful sense of growth for Smoke. The sadness here is somehow more buoyant and more comforting. It leaves a kernel of warmth on otherwise very cold days. | 2016-02-05T01:00:04.000-05:00 | 2016-02-05T01:00:04.000-05:00 | Electronic | R&S | February 5, 2016 | 7 | 0b9825c3-0419-4f39-85a3-913abe5c75d6 | Kevin Lozano | https://pitchfork.com/staff/kevin-lozano/ | null |
Everything about Young Thug remains inimitable. He steeps himself in smooth R&B guitars on his latest, distilling the chaos of young love and lust into vital, undeniable pop. | Everything about Young Thug remains inimitable. He steeps himself in smooth R&B guitars on his latest, distilling the chaos of young love and lust into vital, undeniable pop. | Young Thug: Beautiful Thugger Girls | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/young-thug-beautiful-thugger-girls/ | Beautiful Thugger Girls | Maybe Young Thug is supposed to be caught in a loop, arguing with Lyor Cohen over his recording habits and whether he has to sit politely next to Jimmy Fallon twice a year. Since “Stoner” hit in 2014, Thug has seemed like an ascendent star. But aside from “Best Friend,” which yielded him a Platinum plaque, and “Pick Up the Phone,” which might have been lifted out from under him anyway, Thug has yet to truly break through to the A-list. His only entries into the Top 40 have been the Rich Gang single “Lifestyle” and guest spots on Usher and Rae Sremmurd songs. His three records from 2016 all got kind, if muted, receptions and generally failed to move the chains much at all. For all the breathless adulation, the last eighteen months of Thug’s career have been like Groundhog Day for people to whom Travis Scott owes royalties.
Beautiful Thugger Girls, released with little ceremony last Friday, wouldn’t appear at first glance to be the blockbuster that can change all of this. It came out the same day as 2 Chainz’s album, and Future’s HNDRXX, which is Thugger Girls’ closest recent analogue, has mostly vanished from the zeitgeist, unless a new summer single reveals itself. Nevertheless, this is Thug’s clearest step forward since 2015’s Barter 6, and perhaps his most compelling experiment in pop.
As far back as his formative I Came From Nothing mixtapes, Thug’s music has bent toward chaos, even formlessness. What made Barter 6 so surprising to longtime fans and newcomers alike was how precise and restrained it was. Thugger Girls has all of that record’s control, but swaps out the subtlety for bleeding declarations of love and fidelity. The emotional stakes here seem impossibly high. It also applies the type of focus used on last year’s JEFFERY, where each song aimed to embody the voice of a titular influence. Instead of loosely connected, compelling fragments, each track was self-contained and had a distinct tone. That naming device is gone, but more often than not, the cuts on Thugger Girls work as single-song exercises.
Though it’s been referred to by Thug himself as his “singing album,” Thugger Girls is not a radical departure for him, stylistically speaking. As with most of his material between Barter 6 and now, the question seems to be less what Thug is writing and recording at the given time and more what he’s decided to curate from the archives. Some of these songs date back to 2015 and have been teased on Snapchat and Instagram for nearly as long, and almost all of them have prototypes from earlier in his career.
But these songs are more developed, even when “developed” means reduced to the core elements. The climax of Thugger Girls comes with Thug staring at a screen “masturbating to your nudes” and by the time you get to that moment on the record, it seems like the only possible conclusion. Rather than dress up his basest, most deeply-felt emotions, Thug lays himself out in the rawest form possible. But just as Barter 6 succeeded by paring Thug down to his most minimal, Thugger Girls strips away all the clutter, leaving his best-developed melodies and most evocative songwriting to date.
The clarity doesn’t come right away. The opening tracks, “Family Don’t Matter” and “Tomorrow Til Infinity” play like a brooding, half-sober prelude. Thugger Girls really opens up on its third song, “She Wanna Party,” an exuberant cut co-produced by Rex Kudo, the architect of Post Malone’s “White Iverson.” Where “Iverson” was washed out and wistful, “Party” is unrestrained joy. The same could be said about “Do U Love Me,” where Thug dangles Benzes and Rolexes and hundred-dollar bills, but reserves most of his excitement for his clipped, repeated pleas: “Do you love me?”
Those two songs are split by “Daddy’s Birthday,” a co-production by London On Da Track and the somehow still-producing Scott Storch. Thug pauses for a beat and considers the toll of his career: “I’m so busy, make me feel like I’m in and out my kids’ lives.” This is an underrated aspect of Thug’s songwriting—whether he’s adhering to a bigger concept or mumbling an aside, he goes for compact, declarative phrases that carry all the emotional weight for him. (From Rich Gang’s “Freestyle”: “I ain’t never been in love, I don’t know how pain feels.”) When he says, on “For Y’all,” “I didn’t write this song, I just went right in,” it’s difficult not to take him at his word.
If the A-side feels like a bachelor party planned by Sun Ra, the B-side is more minimal. “On Fire” and “Get High” are tightly wound, the latter blessed by a superb Snoop Dogg verse where he deploys a handful of different flows and calls Young Thug “cuz.” “Me or Us” and “You Said” are what Rebirth could have been if Rebirth wasn’t Rebirth. And “Oh Yeah” sounds like a futuristic funeral dirge; at one point Thug says he’s “drunk off your love, and I just stood by the sink.” We’re used to seeing Thug in motion: leaving thousands of dollars in taxis, crudely repurposing limousine curtains, L-E-A-N-I-N-G. Seeing him rendered inert is entirely new.
But speaking of Future, the elder Atlantan’s appearance on Thugger Girls might go the furthest in clarifying the headliner’s intent. On the hook for “Relationship,” Future says he’s “in a relationship with all my bitches,” which is more or less the conceit of the song, something each rapper can agree on. But Future, who’s eight years older than Thug, quickly adds a second thought: “I need to cut some of ‘em off, I need help.” This has been the thrust of his music for a while now, the drive toward hedonism and the emptiness it leaves you with. Thug’s not there yet; he’s peeling off gleefully mischievous lines like “I got your bitch in a backpack.”
While he does pledge his undying love to his long-time girlfriend over and over again (and has throughout his catalog), at many moments on this record, Thug really does seem capable of being in a relationship with all of those women at once. Beautiful Thugger Girls is a twenty-something bouncing from club to yacht to attic and back again, feeling everything as deeply and as nakedly as possible along the way. These feelings, more often than not, are distinctly ephemeral, where time extends as far back as the Uber to the club and as far ahead as the Uber home. Unfiltered urges (“Fuck me, suck me”) rub right up against grand gestures (“Fall deep in love, love, love with me”). There’s little of Future’s jadedness. If in the past Thug has made everyday experiences seem chaotic and formless, his achievement here is distilling the murky waters of young love and lust into vital, undeniable pop. | 2017-06-20T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-06-20T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Atlantic | June 20, 2017 | 8 | 0b9ec2fb-e317-4b38-aa26-3cc04bd90887 | Paul A. Thompson | https://pitchfork.com/staff/paul-a. thompson/ | null |
On his promising solo debut, the Memphis rapper punches well above his weight class and firmly positions himself as the top dog of the New 1017. | On his promising solo debut, the Memphis rapper punches well above his weight class and firmly positions himself as the top dog of the New 1017. | Pooh Shiesty: Shiesty Season | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/pooh-shiesty-shiesty-season/ | Shiesty Season | About a year ago, Pooh Shiesty was lying in bed when an Instagram DM from Gucci Mane popped up on his screen. He didn’t believe it was real until he hopped out of bed and bolted to his dad’s house to show him the text. Shiesty wasn’t flooding the streets with mixtapes—Gucci had only heard one song of his: the Tay Keith-produced “Main Slime.” But here Gucci Mane was, reaching out with the intent to sign him to the New 1017.
Shiesty made his formal introduction on the label compilation Gucci Mane Presents: So Icy Summer, with immediate standouts “7.62 God” and “Monday to Sunday.” It was clear that Pooh Shiesty was the best in his recruiting class, but a solo record was nowhere in sight. After months of anticipation, the Memphis rapper finally tries his hand at a full-length project with Shiesty Season.
Pooh Shiesty has proven himself to be a supercharged battery on singles, and the massively front-loaded Shiesty Season doesn’t give you a chance to forget that. The opening one-two punch of “Shiesty Season Intro” and “Back in Blood” sets a high bar to clear for the remaining 15 tracks. Pooh and Lil Durk form an Edge & Christian-level tag team on the latter. The combination of a looped piano scale and drums on “Back in Blood” makes for one of the album’s simplest yet most memorable beats. “Yeah, you know who took that shit from you/Come get it back in blood,” Pooh Shiesty taunts, punctuating the line with his signature “blrrrd” adlib. Durk doesn’t just match Shiesty’s bravado—the Chicago rapper takes complete control. “His ass playin’, bitch I’m really icy/Pooh Shiesty that’s my dawg, but Pooh, you know I’m really shiesty,” Durk smugly raps. “Back in Blood” was far from unknown when it was originally released in November, but the music video tossed gas onto the flames, making it his first Billboard charting single and No. 1 on Apple Music Charts after passing “the license girl.”
Apart from Durk, Shiesty stands his ground when sparring against big-name features like his label boss and 21 Savage. The down-tempo “Box of Churches” is a surprising mid-album highlight where he reflects on his come-up and refusal to let go of what puts him at ease. “Know I’m a hood nigga, I mismatch designer with the J’s,” he raps. “Though I’m still posted on the block, eat a box of Church’s before a steak.” He goes right back to talking shit with Veeze and frequent collaborator BIG30 on the following track. Veeze and Pooh may sound like they’re in a competition to see who can lean back the furthest in a recliner while murmuring threats over the brassy fanfare, but their love of wordplay (and gunplay) keep your head nodding.
In the album’s later stretches, you start to notice Pooh Shiesty trying to reuse some of his earlier tricks in hopes we already forgot about them. “Take a Life” is practically a remake of “Back in Blood,” all the way down to the bare-bones production and Foogiano’s own shiesty punchline. “Guard Up” is an awkward clash of styles that nearly throws the album off course; Pooh Shiesty sounds like he’s strumming his Draco like a guitar while walking around a beach. These slight fumbles are the issues you’d expect an artist to have when they’re still experimenting with different styles, but Pooh’s confidence never wavers; he’ll approach even the most routine song with the same intensity he would another.
Despite Pooh Shiesty’s visible growing pains, Shiesty Season punches well above its weight class as his solo debut and cements his position as top dog of the New 1017. It may be difficult for him to escape Gucci’s shadow—it’s easy to imagine a younger Shiesty feverishly downloading Wop tapes off DatPiff. But he’s already growing into his own, rarely leaning on tired clichés, overused bars, and callbacks for writing material. If Pooh Shiesty keeps on this path, he won’t be hearing those comparisons much longer.
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-02-10T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2021-02-10T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rap | The New 1017 / Atlantic | February 10, 2021 | 7 | 0ba2fc24-da17-40c8-a768-93ce27ade4b4 | Brandon Callender | https://pitchfork.com/staff/brandon-callender/ | |
Now back on a major label after an independent stint, this long-developing hip-hop star releases a surprisingly cohesive full-length. | Now back on a major label after an independent stint, this long-developing hip-hop star releases a surprisingly cohesive full-length. | Wiz Khalifa: Rolling Papers | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/15294-rolling-papers/ | Rolling Papers | Hip-hop's era of sport is officially over. East Coast rap battles are irrelevant. Beef is null. Competition is nada. Instead, we are enduring the age of languor, and nowhere is this more apparent than on Rolling Papers, the major label debut of Wiz Khalifa, a long-developing star forged in the Snoop Dogg fire. But whereas Snoop took a decade to mellow into rap's avuncular marketing boss-- 1994's grim, ruthless Murder Is the Case remains an oft-overlooked marker in his career, to say nothing of a stint on No Limit-- for Wiz the journey to calm was never far.
Wiz has managed an unusual trajectory, rising from a modest army brat to a squelched major label deal at Warner Bros. and back to the independent route. He was prolific-- perhaps too prolific, releasing nine mixtapes and two officially sanctioned albums before this major-label lunge. By 2010's Kush & Orange Juice, an exceptionally laidback and tasteful mixtape that made him a star, Wiz solidified his identity: affable smoker, limited rapper, inspirational survivor, melodic genius. And all before the age of 23.
Now signed to Atlantic Records, home to compromised contemporaries Lupe Fiasco and B.o.B, Wiz runs the risk of having his loose, gliding style trampled by this new partner's A&R department. That's not quite the case-- Rolling Papers is a singular document with just a handful of exceptions. The album's lead single, the Super Bowl-adopted anthem "Black and Yellow", is a driving song, but Wiz seems dazed in the delivery. He has never been a complicated writer, but on a song meant to whip up some frenzy, he is shockingly relaxed. "Stay high like how I'm supposed to do/ That crowd underneath them clouds can't get close to you/ And my car look unapproachable/ Super clean but it's super mean."
These are an abysmal few bars from the song, but they (or any of his lyrics, really) do little to explain Wiz's appeal. He does atmosphere, and the team of producers here-- a varied bunch that includes Norwegian mercenaries StarGate, Wiz's in-house crew I.D. Labs, and the Floridian pop-rap savant Jim Jonsin-- has given this album surprising cohesion. It cascades, never rushing into anything. Opener "When I'm Gone" ambles along, a somber piano line playing out softly for nearly a minute before introducing the propulsive guts of the song. Only when Wiz attempts to burst forward, as on disjointed closer "Cameras", is he susceptible to his own limitations. Ambitions low, tone lower.
There's an urge to throw weed metaphors around a Wiz Khalifa review-- it is his love, his leisure, his reason for living. Taking his time is only a product of this blunted life. Which is a boon on "The Race", the best song here, a luxurious, decadent ode to success that couldn't sound more like a vacation. But weed is also his curse. Consider the Sublime-like "Fly Solo", also produced by I.D. Labs, which is pure dorm-room junk. Or "No Sleep", a shameless bid for Benny Blanco-produced house-rap glory. No one could be less suited to this sort of thing than Wiz. Still, if you seek texture and assurance, there are few recent songs as masterfully casual as "Hopes and Dreams" and "Rooftops", the latter of which features his friend and sonic compatriot Curren$y (one of just three guest spots on this album). The rippling opening notes of "Hopes and Dreams"-- a far-off guitar strum, a stuttering drum machine, Wiz's dank voice-- are all vibe, all presence, all persistence. Call it mood music for the mindless. | 2011-04-08T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2011-04-08T02:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Atlantic / Rostrum | April 8, 2011 | 7.2 | 0bae3685-fec8-47d7-aec1-9286a9a9e374 | Sean Fennessey | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sean-fennessey/ | null |
Speedy Ortiz's latest EP features two unreleased tracks from Foil Deer as well as two remixes of “Puffer,” one featuring a verse from rapper Lizzo and one by Open Mike Eagle. | Speedy Ortiz's latest EP features two unreleased tracks from Foil Deer as well as two remixes of “Puffer,” one featuring a verse from rapper Lizzo and one by Open Mike Eagle. | Speedy Ortiz: Foiled Again | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21987-foiled-again/ | Foiled Again | Speedy Ortiz have done great things with the extended play format. 2012’s excellent Sports foreshadowed the big statement that their full-length debut, Major Arcana, would make in 2013. 2014’s Real Hair EP, in between Major and 2015’s Foil Deer, pressing the point that Speedy were to be taken seriously even further. Each of their EPs feature completely new material and usually stand alone as solid little gems. Their latest output, Foiled Again, switches up the routine a bit and acts as an epilogue to 2015’s Foil Deer by serving “Puffer” two ways in addition to a pair of outtakes.
To some extent, “Puffer” was the oddity of Foil Deer, trading hyper, zig-zagging guitars for lurching tension. Singer and Guitarist Sadie Dupuis wrote the song while swimming at Puffer’s Pond in Amherst, where she would listen to Kelis and compose tunes inspired by the “Bossy” queen. “Puffer” was the result, though as she told Pitchfork, it “came out a little more like krautrock” than R&B. Therefore, perhaps it is an act of fate that “Puffer” would be reborn as two slinky, club-ready bangers, perfect for the crew who has always wanted to hear Speedy at their local dance institution.
The first rework is directed by Doomtree collective member Lazerbeak and features Lizzo, with whom Dupuis (as Sad13) previously collaborated for the Google Docs-sponsored song “Basement Queens.” “Puffer” a la Lazerbeak isolates Dupuis’ vocals and places them over smooth dings, snaps, and bells. The track drops for Dupuis’ most complicated verse, the sing-song “Poseying in prose again, Mount Toby friends are make pretend.” Lizzo chimes in throughout the song before offering her own verse near the end, bringing a spark of life to a track that was otherwise becoming forgettably hypnotic.
The Open Mike Eagle remix is built upon the “So I’m the god of the liars” line, with the occasional whisper of “Poseying in prose again.” The remix could work well as a meditation soundtrack, allowing the listeners’ minds to melt away while they consider what being the god of the liars truly means. It’s an underwhelming way to end an EP, but also allows the two original tracks to truly shine.
The title of opener “Death Note” is an allusion to a Japanese manga series about a notebook that kills anyone whose name is written within its pages. Speedy Ortiz leave the supernatural references at the start; the notebooks mentioned in “Death Note” are tools to work through melancholy. There’s an undeniable heaviness to the track, especially when Dupuis seems to corner the unknown subject and pleads, “How often can I say it until you believe?/They were all love letters/These are all love letters to me.” “A death note can be [a] kind of love letter to yourself, “ Dupuis has explained. This paradoxical logic nails, lyrically, what makes Speedy Ortiz so special: their ability to flit between worlds of darkness and light.
“Emma O” continues Foiled Again’s transition into the dark side, especially once one considers that Emm-O is the Japanese judge of the dead. It’s a slow tale of forced time spent with a lover and the ambivalent feelings that follow. There’s a wallowing bit of distortion near the middle of the song like a gray cloud over a cartoon character, just a perceptible reminder that the song is dark. Shortly after comes the line “Your 27, Emma-O you read the masters but you still don’t know about love” which manages to be heartbreaking while also eerily resembling a Belle and Sebastian lyric. Like “Death Note,” which ends with the reassurance that “These are all love letters to me,” “Emma O” ends with the aphorism “I never wanna come for you again/I only want your comfort.” Speedy Ortiz are careful about which lyrics they choose to turn into mantras, and the brief punch offered by those in “Death Note” and “Emma O” are more enriching than “Puffer.”
Foiled Again is a mixed bag. On one hand, there are two great tracks that, for whatever reason, didn’t make it onto Foil Deer and are now seeing the light of day. Then there are the two remixes, one of which is considerably stronger than the other. Combining these four songs results in a strange listen; the two new songs could stand on their own as singles, same with the remixes. Nonetheless, Foiled Again confirms that Speedy Ortiz are exploring new territory, and it will be exciting to see how they break their own molds next. | 2016-06-10T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-06-10T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Carpark | June 10, 2016 | 7.2 | 0baf6d0b-0f35-4560-87c4-853293043e5f | Quinn Moreland | https://pitchfork.com/staff/quinn-moreland/ | null |
Chicago’s Disappears return with a more eclectic album. Here they grab the more anemic sounds of Clinic and Liars, while keeping the forward momentum of their most obvious influences, Spacemen 3 and rough-edged Velvet Underground. | Chicago’s Disappears return with a more eclectic album. Here they grab the more anemic sounds of Clinic and Liars, while keeping the forward momentum of their most obvious influences, Spacemen 3 and rough-edged Velvet Underground. | Disappears: Era | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/18430-disappears-era/ | Era | Chicago’s Disappears would like you to believe that their fourth LP, Era, stands for a new beginning. Well, they’re only half right. The album marries their previous releases in one noisy, polyamorous black wedding that shows promise for the future, but is more a celebration of the past. Think about the band’s 2012 LP Pre Language, and their song "Minor Patterns" where singer Brian Case sneers, “Why bother, it’s been done.” That defeatist phrase must be something that sticks in the craw of young psych acolytes. The well-worn motorik highway now seems too predictable, calling out for more hairpin turns, off-road detours, and above all some better scenery. On Era, Disappears begin to pave a path to transcendence that's a little more varied, grabbing the more anemic sounds of Clinic and Liars, while keeping the forward momentum of their most obvious influences Spacemen 3 and rough-edged Velvet Underground. They know they trade in the business of the past and work within confined musical language, but they play on, middle fingers scratching their eyebrows.
In the macro scope of Disappears’ catalog, Era is the moment when the groove finally locks into place. To call it a new beginning would be a disservice to the somewhat ill-advised territories the band has ventured into, especially with their EP Kone, released earlier this year. Kone's title track seems like a 15-minute flavorless psych wafer in contrast to the spritely but unfulfilling Pre Language. But it all starts to come together on Era: the post-punk propulsion, the protracted kraut rhythms born out of the negative spaces of no-wave, the macabre baritone croons. It’s been done before, but now it’s being done like Disappears.
Era swirls around its centerpiece, the nine-and-a-half minute “Ultra”. It's the song Disappears have been angling toward their career. If Swans ever decided to replace their bolo ties with skinny ties, they might’ve written something like it. After the departure of Sonic Youth drummer Steve Shelley, Noah Leger lends a new energy to the band. He lays back in the pocket right with bassist Damon Carruesco for a rhythm section that sounds like it’s trying to be the extroverted kid but can’t stop sulking in the corner. So often Era sounds like an indictment of dance music with an industrial bent, a Ciroc martini served with a black beetle crawling around the rim.
Placed around the load-bearing “Ultra” is a family of tunes cut from a familiar cloth. “Elite Typical” is the burlier brother with a similar four-to-the-floor beat, while “Girl” opens the album like a starter canon, a one-song best-of compilation of the band’s shorter noise-rock tracks. There was always an unfulfilled desire with their songs on Lux and Guider, that sense that you wish the band would extend these songs out because if they’re just gonna cruise they might as well try to jam. With “Girl”, the band finally writes a shapely rock song in under four minutes.
Case’s sour baritone on Era is the final piece of the puzzle. He mirrors the band and obsesses over oblique phrases like, “Does it end together/ Does it end soon” on “Ultra” or “A new house in a new town” on the closer “New House.” Even with all his lyrical repetition, his words tend to crumble around the music, leaving only hints of something about fists answering first and waking up to a girl's touch. There’s a slice of glam sexuality to it in that disconcerting Birthday Party kind of way, though, like its lyrics, some of the music can veer into the murky waters of unspecificity. When Disappears don't shape their songs, like the unremarkable “Power”, they end up loitering in the space somewhere between air-drumming and space-tripping. Mostly, though, Era showcases all the work Disappears have done cutting and splicing and regathering their sound together to regain their identity. It’s still lurking in the shadows, but finally, it's there. | 2013-08-27T02:00:03.000-04:00 | 2013-08-27T02:00:03.000-04:00 | Rock | Kranky | August 27, 2013 | 7.3 | 0bb05334-b464-48f4-9171-12debb0ad605 | Jeremy D. Larson | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jeremy-d. larson/ | null |
While there’s plenty of his melancholic, drug-induced staples, what you won’t find here is the Atlanta rapper stretching or surprising himself. | While there’s plenty of his melancholic, drug-induced staples, what you won’t find here is the Atlanta rapper stretching or surprising himself. | Future: Future Hndrxx Presents: The WIZRD | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/future-future-hndrxx-presents-the-wizrd/ | Future Hndrxx Presents: The WIZRD | Future’s career has reached its plateau. He’s still popular, still relevant, still scoring hits, and rap, as it exists now, has been remade in his image, with at least three artists on the Billboard charts making their name out of repurposed bits of his style. But the minute you’ve peaked, rap music starts waiting impatiently for you to disappear. Many rappers before Future have faced this moment—T.I. in 2007, Kanye West in 2015—where, as far as their public is concerned, their hero’s story is concluded and they are free to cede the stage. It’s a difficult corner to fight your way out of: There is no obvious adversary and you are still revered around the world. But all that lavish praise must begin to feel suspiciously like someone throwing your retirement party for you.
Future Hndrxx Presents: The WIZRD, Future’s first full-length studio album since 2017’s dual chart-toppers FUTURE and HNDRXX, isn't the first time you sense the relentlessly productive and innovative artist might be treading water. But it is one of the first moments you could be forgiven for wondering when rap’s remorseless current might finally leave him behind. Over the album’s 20 tracks, we are offered top-shelf or near-top-shelf versions of a variety of Future staples: The grinding and amoral banger (“Baptiize,” “Faceshot”); the strangely melancholy anthem about how lonely it feels to customize your Bentley (“Ain’t Coming Back”). The production is muted, minor-key, and consistently beautiful, conjuring the familiar Future Moods: rain-streaked neon signs, drug-induced stupors inside of clubs at 3 a.m. If you are content to live inside this lonely little world Future has made, he is still keeping it nice for you.
What you won’t find on The WIZRD is the sound of Future stretching or surprising himself. There isn’t anything like the divisive, nervy little “la-di-da-di-da” mouse-squeak he tried out on “King’s Dead.” He is running some of these routines back for the tenth or the hundredth time, and there are a few moments on The WIZRD where he sounds downright bored: “Jumpin on a Jet” is a pretty rote rundown of his spoils, a song he has made countless times, and it’s hard to hear any investment in this version of it. He sounds relieved the second it’s over.
Part of this problem is that if you’re playing a depraved heel, you had better play it to the hilt—a half-hearted villain is just an everyday asshole. Future still talks about women in a way that makes it hard to not taste bile in your throat sometimes: “Real fine mixed-breed, I can’t wait to hit it,” he says on “Goin Dummi,” while “Temptation” subjects you to the line “She gave more head than a tumor.” These moments are reprehensible without being compelling, which is another problem Future runs into every few years.
Still, Future’s throwaway images are crushing and vivid. “Fucked around, parked the ’Vette, and didn’t even get back in it,” say, or, “I just took an AK to a dinner date.” “Nobody done notice till the jet was in the sky,” he sings on “Never Stop,” an arresting little snapshot of missed opportunities. He knows how to stick phrases directly into your brain grooves: “Diamonds in the face, crushed up: I can see it.” No one in rap makes you see it quite like Future does. The production is fearsomely potent, and a few of the best tracks turn on the “mid-song beat switch” trick that is popular again, likely thanks to Travis Scott—“Baptiize” and “F&N” turn from pretty to menacing inside one heartbeat, to thunderous effect.
The WIZRD is too long, of course, and not sequenced in any significant way. But at roughly the halfway point, Future indulges in a classic veteran-artist trope, the song where he declares himself a father figure to the sniveling, ungrateful new batch of copycats. The song is called “Krazy But True” and on it, he points out—correctly—that he is the reason for “your socks, rings, and your lean/The way you drop your mixtapes, your ad-libs and everything.” So it’s disorienting and somehow a little deflating when, a few songs later, one of those copycats, Gunna, pops up alongside Young Thug on a track called “Unicorn Purp.” Hearing the three of these artists, one after the other, is like watching a nesting doll of influence unpack itself before you. Later, Travis Scott appears, another artist who sprung partly from Nayvadius’ rib. These are his children, he is their idol, and someday, one of them is going to A.I. him for their survival. | 2019-01-24T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2019-01-24T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rap | Epic / Freebandz | January 24, 2019 | 7 | 0bb0fd1c-5dd9-4bd6-9aa3-081441dc589f | Jayson Greene | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jayson-greene/ | |
The debut album from DMX is the Dante’s Inferno of rap. His infamous stage presence and aggression gave a voice to the voiceless in the streets of New York and overnight changed the course of hip-hop. | The debut album from DMX is the Dante’s Inferno of rap. His infamous stage presence and aggression gave a voice to the voiceless in the streets of New York and overnight changed the course of hip-hop. | DMX: It’s Dark and Hell Is Hot | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22940-its-dark-and-hell-is-hot/ | It’s Dark and Hell Is Hot | Earl Simmons suffered a lonely and abusive childhood where as a troubled kid he would sometimes wander the streets and befriend stray dogs. Uprooted from his native Baltimore at a young age, the Yonkers transplant did several stints in New York’s Children’s Village group home, where he first started fiddling with drum machines and beatboxing as a means of escape. He segued from DJing to rapping as a young adult, taking the name DMX from the drum machine he used. The young rapper made a name for himself on New York’s battle circuit with a commanding voice and overwhelming tenacity. Aggressiveness would become his calling card as an MC, a defense mechanism held over from when the days when armed robbery helped him survive on the streets. His battles to live and cope both in and outside of rap would lead to 1998’s It’s Dark and Hell Is Hot, his haunting debut, a tragically clear-eyed criminal manifesto that dared to greet damnation with defiance and a psalm.
Rocking a skull-embroidered hat, DMX the Great appeared in The Source’s Unsigned Hype column in January 1991, garnering comparisons to LL Cool J, PMD, and Hit Squad’s K-Solo (whom DMX had met in prison). The earliest DMX demos were tedious, without the defining presence he’d grow into. But it was in the ring that he truly built his rep, making an indelible mark on the underground scene with heavily rhythmic flows and a battler’s bluntness. When he traded bars with Jay Z in a cramped Bronx pool hall in the late ’90s, head bobbing violently, cigarette in hand, he proved himself to be a raw, almost boorish alternative to Hov’s shifty slick talk. The energy in the room clearly favored X’s style. Jay would later ask industry maneuverer mutual friend Irv Gotti, “You think he’s better than me?” to which Gotti replied, “If you look in the hood, there’s less niggas like you and more niggas like him.”
The Unsigned Hype column was known for producing deals. True to form, DMX signed to Columbia Records imprint Ruffhouse in 1992 and immediately cut a promotional single called “The Born Loser.” The track introduced his depressive tone, an ominous and confessional space that would later bring life to his most discomforting scenes. But true to its title, it failed to generate any buzz or airplay, and his overbooked label let him off the hook. (DMX claimed he was under-promoted because of groups like Kris Kross and Cypress Hill.) A few years later, Puff Daddy, head of the burgeoning Bad Boy Records, took interest in X and fellow Yonkers corner boys the LOX, but in the end chose to sign the latter over the former, deciding that X had no commercial prospects. “One thing I respect about Puff, at least he told me to my face what he felt,” DMX told “Drink Champs.” “‘His voice is too rough, he’s not marketable.’” DMX returned to the underground scene, emerging on LL Cool J’s 1997 album Phenomenon with a verse on the now infamous posse cut “4, 3, 2, 1.” Buzzing once more, he followed Gotti to Def Jam.
When Gotti pushed for Def Jam to sign DMX in his first meeting, he got laughed out of the room. “I remember when I left the office, [A&R executive] Tina Davis said, ‘if DMX don’t sell, your ass is fired,” Gotti remembered in an interview with Complex. He didn’t seem to fit with the rap moment. This was a year dominated by Puff Daddy and Bad Boy, who landed six of the seven highest-charting rap songs, delivered a huge critical and commercial success in Harlem World, and won Best Rap Album at the Grammys for the 7x-Platinum album No Way Out (famously and controversially defeating Wu-Tang Clan’s Wu-Tang Forever). Putting money behind DMX would run counter to Bad Boy’s “shiny suit” era of glam rap.
But X brought Def Jam executive Lyor Cohen up to Yonkers for an early Ruff Ryder session and convinced him to sign the MC. At the time, DMX’s mouth was wired shut because of an altercation he’d had with some guys he was accused of stealing from. In an interview with DJ Vlad, Ja Rule remembered the ferocity through which he ripped through the wiring: “He had got into a fight or somebody got jumped... and he was rhyming with the fuckin’ wires in his mouth. Crazy shit. Like the shit about to pop. I was like ‘Okay, I like this dude.’” When they left, Cohen turned to Gotti and proclaimed, “We got the pick of the litter.”
Through his connections at Bad Boy (namely, his friends the LOX and Ma$e), DMX began working on his debut album with a producer from Harlem named Dame Grease, a fellow Yonkers product named P.K. (or P. Killer Trackz), and Grease’s unknown protege from the Bronx, Swizz Beatz. Under direction from Irv and Lyor, Grease, P.K., and X worked up a single called “Get at Me Dog” in ’97, and released it in February of ’98. It functioned as an abrasive prelude, but was at least partially aimed at X’s longtime rival K-Solo. They brought the song to Hot 97 DJ Funkmaster Flex, who aired it and added it to the first volume of his Big Dawgs mixtape. It soon took off, peaking at No. 39 on the Billboard Hot 100 that May. Gotti remembers the video as the turning point: “We back to the hood, and X is the leader of this revolution.” Filmed at New York’s Tunnel nightclub, packed, sweaty, and shot in black and white, X’s crusade is articulated in its opening seconds: “Let’s take it back to the streets, motherfuckers!”
“Get at Me Dog” set the stage for It’s Dark and Hell Is Hot, which explores the furthest depths of the human experience. But there is no more fitting introduction to the album than the Swizz Beatz-produced “Ruff Ryders’ Anthem,” a confrontational, fang-bearing mark of ferocity. The song functions much like a warning shot: Cross this threshold at your own peril. “It’s about to get ugly/Fuck it dog, I’m hungry,” he snaps. The song was a defining moment for both DMX and Swizz Beatz, but it almost didn’t happen. Swizz made the song in Atlanta when he was just a DJ and then moved back to New York to join the Ruff Ryders. DMX didn’t like the song initially, claiming it was some “rock’n’roll track” and he needed some hip-hop shit: “I’m not doing that. It’s not hood enough,” he told the producer. But Swizz and other members of the Ruff Ryders team pushed him to make the record, and it became the theme song of a movement.
It’s Dark and Hell Is Hot was not only the springboard for the Ruff Ryders campaign—launching the careers of Swizz Beatz, Eve, Cassidy, and Jin—it was the catalyst for a greater shift on the New York rap scene and beyond. It was a reset button for street rap, setting the stage for runs from 50 Cent and G-Unit and Cam’ron’s Diplomats crew. “Hittin’ niggas with gashes to the head/Straight to the white meat but the street stays red/Girls gave me head for free cause they see/Who I’ma be, by like 2003,” X rapped on the intro. It didn’t even take that long.
Like Dante’s Inferno, DMX’s It’s Dark and Hell Is Hot is a fiendish epic that explores the nature of sin, highlighting acts of violence, wrath, greed, treachery, and lust. The album exposes an internal struggle waged between a man and his demons—a man searching for one light in an all-consuming darkness. He has a talk with god (“The Convo”), but the devil is constantly whispering in his ear and wearing him down. He’s unsure whether his rhyme skills are the product of a contract with the devil (“I sold my soul to the devil, and the price was cheap”) or the generosity of a loving creator. It’s this duality that makes up one of the most gripping psychological studies in all of rap lore: What happens when a God-fearing man makes the devil his ally?
The centerpiece is “Damien,” a winding back-and-forth saga between X and his Hadean accomplice. The album builds to this moment, where X is seduced by his greatest admirer. In the throes of his own greed and pain, DMX embraces wickedness as a fair price for freedom from destitution. By the end, the song becomes a parable about the dangers of giving into desire when Damien coerces X into crimes he doesn’t want to commit: “Either do it or give me your right hand, that’s what you said,” he threatens. “I see now, ain’t nothing but trouble ahead.” Traces of “Damien” can be heard throughout the “Lucy” thread on Kendrick Lamar’s To Pimp a Butterfly, which also examines the points where fame and sin meet. (Kendrick has cited It’s Dark and Hell Is Hot as a major influence.) But “Damien” is even more tightly wound, the relationship more clearly articulated and its energy more affecting. The dynamic “Damien” is a microcosm of It’s Dark and Hell Is Hot, which is either in constant motion or disclosing ongoing conversations—whether internal, interpersonal (“How’s It Goin’ Down”), or divine (“Prayer”).
It’s Dark and Hell Is Hot debuted atop the Billboard 200 in May and was certified platinum by June. DMX quickly released his sophomore album, Flesh of My Flesh, Blood of My Blood, in December of ’98, and it was double platinum by January. In between the two, he starred in Hype Williams’ directorial debut, Belly, alongside Nas, and the film almost immediately became a cult hit among rap fans. So in a grand total of eight months, DMX became the biggest rapper on the planet. His moment was so colossal that in 1999 Jay Z boycotted the Grammy ceremony (the year he won Best Rap Album for Vol. 2… Hard Knock Life) because DMX was not nominated. As Nas remembered in a 2013 interview with Pitchfork, “That was the year DMX took over the world.”
Nearly 20 years later, there is still no album like it. So many of the songs on It’s Dark and Hell Is Hot document violent crimes and the flood of emotions they induce. They move swiftly, jerking around corners and through alleyways, simulating a rising heart rate and a racing mind. His peers were shooting stills, but X was dealing in savage action sequences (“ATF”) and the shadows they cast (“Let Me Fly,” “X-Is Coming”). Everything about the music—from the harshness of his voice, to the murkiness of his beats, to the bruising nature of his flows—was in service of a supreme hardness. In ‘98, the biggest MCs on the New York scene were narrators using radically different sounds to tell their stories. Busta erupted with pure energy. Big Pun enchanted with an effortless fluidity. As Wu-Tang swarmed, Tribe was in the midst of their love movement. Black Star were a conscious voice for hood theorists. Jay Z brought business acumen to the drug trade. All were reporting live, sharing their powerful perspectives from different city blocks.
But DMX wasn’t a rapper in the trenches; he was a messiah in the gutter, painting a portrait of a community laid desolate by corruption, and the sociopaths its conditions were breeding. He was the voice of the street corners and the graveyards, telling stories of the lost and the damned. From on high, he demanded empathy for man, who were cold to murder and unapologetic for their crimes because he knew it’s hard to be good in a world this broken. “There’s a difference between doing wrong and being wrong, and that ain’t right,” he says on “Let Me Fly.” He breaks the moral compass, then drags you into the abyss.
CORRECTION: The original version of this review included a quote by Nas that was misleading, misattributing some of his comments about a Lauryn Hill album. | 2017-03-05T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2017-03-05T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rap | Def Jam | March 5, 2017 | 9 | 0bb88cdb-06b3-42e4-b5a5-67f27cd27ccb | Sheldon Pearce | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sheldon-pearce/ | null |
Producer Dayve Hawk, who has created dreamy electro soundscapes as Memory Cassette, Weird Tapes, and Memory Tapes, arrives with a striking new album. | Producer Dayve Hawk, who has created dreamy electro soundscapes as Memory Cassette, Weird Tapes, and Memory Tapes, arrives with a striking new album. | Memory Tapes: Seek Magic | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/13451-seek-magic/ | Seek Magic | No one ever wants to admit that summer's totally over, but it's even tougher this year considering how fun it all was-- seems like every other day, an evocatively named band would come about and contribute to this glo-fi/dreambeat/chillwave thing that was perfect for those unbearably humid August nights rife with possibility, imagining an alternate universe where the narcotic of choice in danceclubs were Galaxie 500 and Saint Etienne records.
More than a few of these singles came from Philadelphia's Dayve Hawk in the guise of either Memory Cassette, Weird Tapes, or Memory Tapes. To this point, he'd served as something of a microcosm for this sound, which has created intriguingly hazy, wistful but beat-informed one-offs and EPs, but nothing weighty enough to get it past "something we did that one summer," as if it were a road trip or ill-fated romance recalled years later. That was before Seek Magic, a record of achingly gorgeous dance-pop that captures both the joy of nostalgia and the melancholic sense that we're grasping for good times increasingly out of reach.
Initially, Seek Magic's power derives from an intensely personalized ability to unlock hidden chambers in our memory banks. The half-submerged guitars that introduce "Swimming Field" suggest this is as a soundtrack for a restless evening, but between its F-G chord progression and aqueous thumb-piano and panflute synths, I'm reminded of scorching July days vibing out to Wilco's A Ghost Is Born. Instrumental breaks "Pink Stones" and "Run Out" recall the unconventional beauty of Apehx Twin's Richard D. James Album. "Green Knight" smacks of Police's "Wrapped Around Your Finger" in its verse and any number of mid-80s light funk with its guitar licks, the sneaker squeak in the instrumental break is one of the most evocative found sounds I've heard in a while.
Seek Magic is something of an inhabitable universe that proves there's far more to Hawk's sound than a way with reverb and passing familiarity with dance loops. The rubber-smacks-road beat of "Bicycle" would be content to mirror its titular vehicle, but nearly every minute packs some sort of detailed compositional surprise: the widescreen breakthrough where Hawk's androgynous vocals shake lo-fi two minutes in, the bass breakdown that soon rights itself into the second half's backbone, and the choral coda that lays a euphoric vocal sigh over wave-running New Order guitars. By comparison, "Plain Material" is streamlined, but not by much-- the way Hawk's voice hits the fuzzed-out guitar chords, you might think this was an unearthed Flaming Lips track, and at first, it sounds like the first time on Seek Magic that he'll adhere to a standard verse-chorus structure. It does, but only after a drum beat cribbed straight from Organized Noize turns in a bridge of teen screams imported from In Ghost Colours' nastier breakdowns.
And yet in Seek Magic's centerpieces, you sense a nocturnal unease usually attributed to more spare albums. "Stop Talking" could've been content to ride out its gummy bass riff to infinity, but it morphs through so many phases in its seven minutes that the half-time post-rock finale doesn't feel tacked-on. On the following song, "Graphics", Hawk offers an unnervingly lonely sentiment-- "I don't even recognize the sound of your voice, the feel of your touch, you could be alone even though I'm here by your side." Lyrics are mere suggestions through most of Seek Magic, but Hawk lays out an "I can't go on, I'll go on" vibe throughout. One second, he sighs "this is the last time" and immediately thereafter, "one more time, baby, one more time." It's a sentiment that's underpinned great works of art from Daft Punk ("One More Time" natch), F. Scott Fitzgerald (This Side of Paradise), Kanye West ("Why can't life always be this easy?"), and um, Old Milwaukee-- the times where you think "it doesn't get any better than this," and it's simultaneously the happiest and saddest thing you can say. | 2009-09-30T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2009-09-30T02:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic / Rock | Sincerely Yours / Acéphale / Something in Construction | September 30, 2009 | 8.3 | 0bbd9863-6da0-406a-be04-17abf38b4f82 | Ian Cohen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ian-cohen/ | null |
The audacious Detroit rapper with a strangled voice and a penchant for depravity transforms his jagged edges into a compelling and immersive universe. Brown's voice is uniquely suited to conveying wild-eyed, loose-cannon insanity, and the rising note of panic in it makes every mention of snorting crushed Adderall hurt. | The audacious Detroit rapper with a strangled voice and a penchant for depravity transforms his jagged edges into a compelling and immersive universe. Brown's voice is uniquely suited to conveying wild-eyed, loose-cannon insanity, and the rising note of panic in it makes every mention of snorting crushed Adderall hurt. | Danny Brown: XXX | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/15753-xxx/ | XXX | Danny Brown is a Detroit rapper with a strangled yap of a voice that you could politely call "distinctive." Depending on the moment, he either resembles a Doberman whose paw has been stepped on or a cross between Jello Biafra and South Park's Terrence & Philip. For a rapper, choosing an abrasive honk like this as your instrument is an audacious move; it all but demands that you come well-equipped with compelling reasons for your listeners to hang on.
But Danny Brown is an unusually audacious rapper. He proudly rocks skinny jeans that, to hear him tell it, cost him a G-Unit label deal all by themselves, and he has lately settled on the kind of wildly asymmetrical haircut that can invite savage beatings in certain areas. He belongs, in other words, to a proud lineage of mangy underground-rap weirdos. There are many rappers vying to claim this spot, but none of them is as talented or as three-dimensional as Brown, and his latest mixtape, XXX, finds him transforming his quirks and jagged edges into a compelling and immersive universe.
That universe is haunted by drugs, both sold and consumed. XXX's grubby production, laced with trashy electro, evokes a heart-pounding clamminess that will feel instantly familiar to anyone who's weathered a spiky high on cheap stimulants. Brown's voice is uniquely suited to conveying wild-eyed, loose-cannon insanity, and the rising note of panic in it makes every mention of snorting crushed Adderall hurt. To hear him tell it, he is a Hoover for illegal substances; on "Die Like a Rock Star", he catalogs the various undignified ends he expects to meet, invoking Keith Moon, Jimi Hendrix, and others and leering, "Experimented so much it's a miracle I'm livin'."
His penchant for depravity might remind listeners, at least initially, of Odd Future. But Brown's depravity, unlike OF's, comes burdened with real-life stakes; at age 30 (the mixtape's title indicates Brown's age besides suggesting sex and drugs), Brown has lived through some genuinely awful-sounding shit. On "Scrap or Die", he flips the chorus of Jeezy's "Trap or Die" so that it becomes about stripping houses for scrap metal to sell to factories. He takes a perverse joy in grabbing your neck and shoving your face in some vividly unpleasant places: "I done served fiends on they menstrual/ Ain't even had pads, stuff they panties with tissue!" he yelps on "Monopoly". His shock rhymes on XXX are like horrorcore stripped of cartoon fantasy, and they carry the moral weight of experience. On "Pac Blood", he calls his lyrics "shit so personal my mom can't listen to," and you believe him.
If XXX was nothing but debauchery and desperation, it would quickly devolve into an endless slog. Thankfully, Brown is also hilariously funny, an endlessly inventive rapper driven to cook up outrageous variations on standard rap boasts. At one point, he claims to be getting as much pussy as Teen Wolf-era Michael J. Fox; at another, he brags he can "get pussy like loofahs." On "Adderall Admiral", he tells a rapper he is "softer than Flanders' son." In a recent interview with writer Andrew Nosnitsky of Cocaine Blunts, he revealed himself as an omnivorous rap nerd, the kind of guy who went through heavy No Limit and Def Jux phases, and his palpable joy in his craft is infectious. "Words that rhyme together just appear all in my head," he raps on the title track, sounding astonished and grateful. His gleeful love of words not only elevates some pretty heavy subject matter; it also helps distinguish XXX as one of the most compelling indie rap releases in an already strong year. | 2011-08-26T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2011-08-26T02:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Fool’s Gold | August 26, 2011 | 8.2 | 0bbe1ae5-fb31-4fc5-b795-8ee36b3b5551 | Jayson Greene | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jayson-greene/ | null |
The megastar producer enlists Future, 21 Savage, James Blake, and more in a wobbly attempt to create another synergistic pop moment in the animated Spider-Man franchise. | The megastar producer enlists Future, 21 Savage, James Blake, and more in a wobbly attempt to create another synergistic pop moment in the animated Spider-Man franchise. | Metro Boomin: Metro Boomin Presents Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse (Soundtrack From and Inspired by the Motion Picture) | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/metro-boomin-presents-spider-man-across-the-spider-verse-soundtrack-from-and-inspired-by-the-motion-picture/ | Metro Boomin Presents Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse (Soundtrack From and Inspired by the Motion Picture) | There’s a simple reason that “Sunflower,” a single from the soundtrack to 2018’s Spider-Man: Into The Spider-Verse, became an Earth-conquering smash hit: It works outside of the context of the movie. In that film’s opening scene, our protagonist Miles Morales sings the song very off-key before he’s interrupted by his parents. It’s a nifty start to the coming-of-age story that endears him to the audience in a matter of seconds. Other songs tackled the movie’s themes of identity and adolescence in ways subtle and blatant, but without references to swinging, masks, or arachnids of any kind, Post Malone and Swae Lee’s “Sunflower,” a track about two strung-out dudes leading a girl on, took on a life of its own. (It wasn’t even originally supposed to be in the movie: the team initially wanted Miles to sing Childish Gambino’s “Redbone” but after Jordan Peele’s 2017 breakout Get Out used the song in a similar way a year prior, they picked “Sunflower” at the last minute from a batch of already completed songs sent by Republic Records.)
Into The Spider-Verse became an adored modern classic of the superhero genre and its soundtrack, a cohesive if overbearing album in its own right, went on to chart at the top of the Billboard 200, thanks in no small part to the runaway success of “Sunflower.” That left its sequel, this year’s Spider-Man: Across The Spider-Verse, with some humongous Jordan 1s to fill. The film itself comes with more ambitious animation, a more mature plot that deconstructs the Spider-Man character’s archetypal DNA, and a boatload of comic book Easter eggs. For the soundtrack, they’ve come with something equally inspired, at least on paper: Atlanta superproducer Metro Boomin is its executive producer, doing for the Spider-Verse what Kendrick Lamar did for Black Panther and Wakanda back in 2018 (complete with his own in-movie cameo). Fresh off the success of his recently platinum-certified 2022 comeback album Heroes & Villains, Metro takes a serviceable stab at crafting music to swing to.
Metro’s music has always had a cinematic flair to it. Whatever sound he’s toying with, there’s a grand spectacle to his beats that can power a party anthem or bolster a bars-first exhibition. On opener “Annihilate,” co-producer Mike Dean’s synths flood Metro’s canvas of drums and samples like food coloring in a glass of water, creating a foreboding and jumpy digital atmosphere. They bring the same pomp to “Am I Dreaming,” their synthetics meshing well with orchestral string section flourishes—it sounds like an end credits song (which it is) in the best possible way.
For all the excitement, some of the beats skew extra generic, even by soundtrack standards. Synths and drums have been Metro’s bread and butter for years, but even he gets stuck in a rhythmic tar pit every once in a while. The hi-hats and plodding groove of “All The Way Live” sound as catatonic as the Future hook warbling through it, not to mention how the minimalism of “Self-Love” would tip over into sleepy territory without Coi Leray’s chirpy vocals keeping things lively. Metro and his band of co-producers get their best work off when they broaden their horizons with some experiments. They warp guitar strings (“Home”), bounce colorful synths off Afrobeats drum programming (“Link Up”), and punch holes through the middle of beefed-up samples (“Nas Morales”) to dazzling effect. Metro’s eye for direction gives the better songs here a big boost.
Things really begin to wobble when it comes to the features and their many references to crawling walls and slinging webs. Some find a good balance, like A$AP Rocky putting himself in Miles’ shoes on “Am I Dreaming?” (“Count up my ones, lacin’ up my favorite 1s…Kiss my momma on the forehead ‘fore I get the Code Red/And swing by 410, beef patty, cornbread”) or Lil Uzi Vert digging at Spider-Man’s outcast nature on “Home.” Some, like Lil Wayne’s marathon verse on “Annihilate,” pack as many references to spiders and Spider-Man characters into 13 bars as possible (“I give an opp arachnophobia,” “She’ll turn to Spider-Woman if I bite her”) like he’s being watched by a radioactive Sony A&R. Others just barely register—it’s remarkable how bored Metro regulars Offset and 21 Savage sound on their combined five verses across the album.
But the one song where theme and music blend together perfectly is James Blake’s “Hummingbird.” Over a pitched-up sample of Patience and Prudence’s “Tonight You Belong To Me” that eventually pitches down and melts into a gooey drum pattern, Blake coos a story of unrequited love that, while easily applicable to Miles and Gwen Stacy, hits at universal truths about love and acceptance with those ghostly wails of his (“Pen pal on a night shift/She’s who I get away with/Realizing she might/Be all I need in this life”). It’s no “Sunflower,” but it matches the dim intimacy of the scene it underscores while also sounding just as eerily beautiful on its own.
Across The Spider-Verse is a sequel to an IP-driven box-office hit that doubles as an arm of the Sony/Disney/Marvel industrial complex, but it’s also about defying the status quo. It deconstructs the superhero’s relationship to tragedy and features a web-slinging T-Rex. There’s drama and humor in this multiverse of madness, and Metro Boomin’s Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse soundtrack captures those qualities in fleeting doses. Nothing here feels as unorganized as the last Black Panther soundtrack or the shill-tastic hollowness of the Space Jam: A New Legacy companion album. However, only a few songs will live outside their cinematic context, and some land like unfinished leftovers from previous Metro projects. Some strands in the web are stronger than others. | 2023-06-10T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2023-06-10T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Republic | June 10, 2023 | 6.4 | 0bc0ef00-4374-494a-8d1a-4ea81cb17098 | Dylan Green | https://pitchfork.com/staff/dylan-green/ | |
A popular bootleg now receiving official release around its 26th anniversary, this set documents the Clash's famed performance opening for the Who at the soon-to-be-demolished Shea Stadium. | A popular bootleg now receiving official release around its 26th anniversary, this set documents the Clash's famed performance opening for the Who at the soon-to-be-demolished Shea Stadium. | The Clash: Live at Shea Stadium | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/12322-live-at-shea-stadium/ | Live at Shea Stadium | While the Sex Pistols' "no future" became the bumper-sticker slogan of choice for first-wave UK punk rock, their London rivals the Clash built their program on an edict of "no past." As Julien Temple's recent documentary, Joe Strummer: The Future Is Unwritten, illustrated, the titular Clash frontman went to great lengths to distance himself from his well-established pre-punk/pub-band roots, and perhaps as a result, the Clash railed against classic-rock hero worship harder than most, by taking names ("no Elvis, Beatles, or the Rolling Stones in 1977!"), stealing sacred riffs (the Who's "I Can't Explain" bastardized into "Clash City Rockers") and redesigning pop history in their own image (the Elvis-swiped cover art of London Calling). So surely these detractors of "phony Beatlemania" must've had a good ol' laugh at the prospect of conquering one of the key sites of the real Beatlemania.
Of course, it would take a tour invite from the Who to get the Clash into Shea Stadium on Oct. 13, 1982, but in a way that just makes the story all the more rich: the punks meet the godfathers-- the former at the peak of their commercial ascendancy, the latter on the way to the first of many retirements. But while the two bands were born of different eras, both had followed similar trajectories, having each made their own escapes out of garageland to pursue more ambitious musical plans. And yet Live at Shea Stadium (a popular bootleg now receiving official release on its 26th anniversary) marks something more than just the passing of the torch between two generations of kindred spirits; it also documents the first time class-of-'77 punk-rockers graduated to the American stadium circuit, and the pyrrhic victory contained within. The Shea show was not the biggest the Clash ever played in America (that would be the US Festival in 1983), nor the most incendiary (see: the legendary 17-show string at New York's Bond Casino in 1981), but the set most vividly captures the Clash's most enduring qualities: the triumphs and tribulations of being populist punks.
Fittingly, the Clash's Shea Stadium coronation would come in a downpour of very English rain. But where the Who might use such a backdrop to dramatize a typically blustery version of "Love, Reign O'er Me", for the Clash, the soggy weather was an ideal way to make a ballpark feel more like a sweaty dive. Following a humorously crowd-baiting opening spiel from Clash cohort Kosmo Vinyl, Joe Strummer introduces "London Calling" by declaring "welcome to the Casbah Club!" It's the first of many quips that Strummer uses to downsize the stadium spectacle into more club-like dimensions ("shhh… would you please stop talking at the back, it's too loud!"), and he's also careful not to turn his elevated podium into a pulpit; rather than use the spotlight to educate the American masses on the urban unrest that inspired "Guns of Brixton", Strummer simply offers, "If you don't know what's goin' on, just ask the person standing next to you."
Foreshadowing the BBC Radio Global a Go-Go broadcasts that would define his later career, Strummer sounds happiest playing cruise-leader to his band's genre tourism, talking the audience through a live mash-up of Sandinista's rap-rock prototype "The Magnificent Seven" and Willie Williams' reggae standard "Armagideon Time" like he was holding a bus megaphone: "This is a black New York rhythm we stole one night...so while we're here doing our little thing, I'm gonna take you to Jamaica...so hold on, fasten your seatbelts, extinguish all reefers!"
But while Strummer's stage banter frequently highlights the seeming absurdity of the Clash playing a venue the size of Shea, the set list more than justifies their promotion to it, adhering as it does to the time-honoured stadium-rock tradition of playing the hits and playing them often; even the band's current release at the time, Combat Rock, is represented only by its two popular singles (which means there's no "Straight to Hell" to lure in newly arrived "Paper Planes" chasers). Highlighting the staggering procession of classic singles the band had amassed in just five short years, the incredibly well-preserved (or greatly refurbished) Live at Shea Stadium recordings make the contradictory concept of stadium-punk seem like a natural state: if anything, the lock-and-load riffs of "Tommy Gun" and the shout-and-response reworking of Eddy Grant's "Police on My Back" sound like they were originally designed with the bleachers in mind.
Live at Shea Stadium, however, also provides a glimpse into the existential quandaries that would afflict agit-punk progeny from Rage Against the Machine to Against Me! onward: that is, the inherent difficulty of reconciling your activist politics with your growing bank balance. As the lone Clash original featured from their 1977 debut, "Career Opportunities" seems like a particularly odd choice to play at Shea, if only because these sorts of gigs forever distanced the Clash from the dole-line doldrums detailed within (a notion the Clash themselves seemed to have already addressed with Sandinista!'s cheeky kiddie-choir cover version). You can also hear the band's simmering tensions play out in the rather hollow version of "Rock the Casbah", which suffers from both the physical and spiritual absence of Topper Headon, the drummer who came up with the song's rhythm and its indelible piano-rolled hook, but whose chronic drug problems got him ousted from the band on the eve of the Combat Rock tour (to be replaced by original Clash drummer Terry Chimes). As a result, the Clash's most effortlessly funky tune is rendered as a rather joyless, standardized guitar rocker-- one that betrays the flagging enthusiasm that would eventually send Mick Jones packing less than a year later, and force Strummer to deep-six the band for good following 1985's roundly derided Cut the Crap, the only band that matters silenced with barely a mutter.
In a cunning premonition of their own impending collapse, the Clash bid Shea Stadium adieu with their signature cover of the Bobby Fuller Four's "I Fought the Law", the ultimate fight song for those who got no more left in them. The Clash may have showed up at Shea to inherit the Who's torch and create a new model of the thinking person's rock star for the 1980s, but they ultimately flubbed the hand-off-- and a group of Irishmen were more than happy to swoop in from the sidelines and run away with it. | 2008-10-17T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2008-10-17T02:00:01.000-04:00 | Rock | Sony | October 17, 2008 | 7.7 | 0bc220b7-58ef-4d22-859d-089d879d1184 | Stuart Berman | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stuart-berman/ | null |
On his debut album, the talented South London rapper Dave explores family and identity with the unguarded catharsis of a therapy session. | On his debut album, the talented South London rapper Dave explores family and identity with the unguarded catharsis of a therapy session. | Dave: Psychodrama | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/dave-psychodrama/ | Psychodrama | Three years ago, Dave started to gain a reputation for his freestyle videos. The young wordsmith, also known as Santan Dave, would stare into the camera and relay fierce reflections about his tumultuous life, using them as a lyrical crowbar to pry open the doors keeping voiceless Londoners in the dark. On “Thiago Silva” he proved he could hold his own at a grime tempo, and fans soon discovered he played the piano, too. It was difficult to fathom that he was only a teenager. Now Dave is 20, and his debut album, Psychodrama, is one of the most significant bodies of British rap music in a generation.
Psychodrama is a form of psychotherapy in which patients role-play events from their past to heal and make sense of themselves. Dave uses the term as a cathartic glue to bind heavy themes together, bringing listeners into his therapy room while he grapples with societal injustice, industry contradictions, and private pain. The album starts and finishes with songs “Psycho” and “Drama,” respectively, and the latter includes a touching dialogue with his older brother, who is serving a life sentence in prison. This haunting backdrop has long bled into Dave’s lyricism—“Never had a father and I needed you to be the figure,” he cries in the album’s closing passage—but its impact is more closely examined across Psychodrama than ever before. Over 11 songs and much hypnotic piano playing, Dave sets his conceptual limits, and then fills them with an urban opera that blends his desire to exorcize demons with old-soul musical wisdom and youthful performativity.
When the single “Black” was debuted on BBC Radio 1 as Annie Mac’s Hottest Record in the World, it garnered backlash from listeners who missed its nuanced critique of language as a limiting construct on racial identity, expression, and diversity. But the song—on which Dave shares his piano bench with acclaimed producer Fraser T. Smith, whose influence can be heard throughout the album—is not just a proud race anthem. As political and media establishments in Britain continue to fall short in representing ethnic minority experiences (in one recent case, a centrist politician found herself unable to avoid even a basic faux pas), “Black” doubles as a manifesto for responsible phraseology, and against anachronistic stereotyping. “A kid dies, the blacker the killer, the sweeter the news/And if he’s white, you give him a chance, he’s ill and confused/If he’s black he’s probably armed, you see him and shoot,” Dave assesses.
Songs like “Screwface Capital” and “Streatham” stick closely to Dave’s formula of conscious, modern UK rap, delivering hard yet emotionally available odes to the cold city that birthed him. These are highlights for purists seeking thumping beats to match Dave’s anger, and each verse is laced with its own string of intricate wordplay and admissions—sometimes cheeky, often sullen. “Tell me what you know about a bag full of bills/And your mom crying out, saying, ‘Son, I can’t take it,’/And then staring in the mirror for an hour/With a tear in your eye like, ‘I gotta go make it,’” he spits. Softer, poppier offerings like “Purple Heart” and “Voices” will appeal to Dave’s increasingly diverse audience of older fans and newcomers seeking easy access to London’s unforgivingly hardline rap scene. What’s more, by teaming up with afrobeat star Burna Boy and celebrated British-Ghanaian hitmaker Jae5 for “Location,” and fellow London boundary-pusher J Hus on “Disaster,” Dave stretches the album’s reach to absorb upbeat diasporic influence, movement, and color.
But the gravitational pull at the center of this magnum opus is “Lesley,” an 11-minute deep dive into the life and abusive relationship of a woman Dave meets on a train, as if colliding “two different worlds in the same location.” It is a microcosm of Psychodrama’s refusal to contain itself as a work of art, instead reaching for emotional intimacy and therapeutic resonance. By its end, “Lesley” becomes a passionate call-to-action; as Dave puts it, “a message to a woman with a toxic man” who he is “begging… to get support if you’re lost or trapped.” In a world craving artists who use their influence for good, Dave offers a road map for inspired musicians and inquisitive listeners alike.
“Lesley” closes on the disembodied voice of Dave’s fictional therapist, who expresses relief as his client nears the end of the album’s psychodramatic course. “I’m just happy you’re at a place now where you feel you understand your emotions, and are in control,” he says. A different kind of hero’s journey through the musical mind, Psychodrama feels less like a platform for clout than a starting point for self-help and paradigmatic change. | 2019-03-15T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-03-15T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Neighbourhood | March 15, 2019 | 8 | 0bc25de6-53d1-4a2d-a018-981e6cca5b9b | Ciaran Thapar | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ciaran-thapar/ | |
Swedish singer/songwriter is making a name for himself with his Nick Drake-like classical guitar and vocals, and an acoustic cover of the Knife's electro-pop gem "Heartbeats". | Swedish singer/songwriter is making a name for himself with his Nick Drake-like classical guitar and vocals, and an acoustic cover of the Knife's electro-pop gem "Heartbeats". | José González: Veneer | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/3682-veneer/ | Veneer | It's taken two years for the debut album by singer/songwriter José González (Swedish, obv.) to reach these shores, and it's easy to see what nudged it here. González's sparse recordings showcase hushed, double-tracked vocals, haunted imagery, and a clearly gifted classical guitarist. His gripping acoustic cover of countryfolk the Knife's electro-pop "Heartbeats" was even a minor hit in his homeland. An ethereal, sometimes-aloof troubadour, González will sing you to sleep and then dash off under cover of night, leaving only cold-sweat nightmares and an unopened bottle of sweet vermouth.
Yup, two years, and on Veneer, González suggests he'd kinda like to stick around for a few more. Permanence is a pressing concern: With bongos and a hint of bossa nova, "Remain" emphasizes perseverance, while the scant lyrics of handclap-enhanced "Lovestain" complain of the marks you can't just shout out of you heart, maaan. The arrangements are full of Nick Drake-style open tunings ("Stay in the Shade", in particular, can't escape the shadow of that introvert-folk patron saint) and only a forlorn trumpet on closer "Broken Arrow" disrupting the guit/vox/maybe-tasteful-percussion train to Starbucks-comp paydirt.
As with like-minded songstress Emiliana Torrini, González is at his best when he forces a personality onto his faceless raw materials. The distinctive finger-picking on "Crosses", the best original song on the disc, rises like the spires of a Gothic cathedral, giving form to lyrics about a redemptive light in the darkness (any religious inferences, meanwhile, are left entirely to the listener). By comparison, sotto voce opener "Slow Moves" tries a little too hard to sound like its quiet-is-the-new-loud forebears, with a meta-chorus too wispy to hold tight 'til morning: "My moves are slow/ But soon they'll know".
González's aforementioned "Heartbeats" cover is nearly as spine-tingling as the original, if not its frenetic Rex the Dog remix. Echoing M. Ward's "Let's Dance", Iron & Wine's "Such Great Heights", and Frente!'s "Bizarre Love Triangle", González strips the electro-pop down to an acoustic lullaby, laying bare a powerful melody and deceptively evocative lyrics about love, regret and nostalgia. González has also covered Kylie Minogue's "Hand on Your Heart", and the gulf that remains between these must-hears and his self-composed material is significant. González knows a great song when he hears it, and he plays a mean guitar, but in 2003 he was still more raw than the overseas buzz suggested; Veneer is nice, but it may just scratch the surface. | 2005-09-01T02:00:05.000-04:00 | 2005-09-01T02:00:05.000-04:00 | Rock | Mute / Imperial | September 1, 2005 | 7 | 0bc467b4-bb18-4e00-8644-9a986b810830 | Marc Hogan | https://pitchfork.com/staff/marc-hogan/ | null |
One of the key 1990s "Lost Generation" UK post-rock bands gets a 2xCD reissue of its masterful debut album. | One of the key 1990s "Lost Generation" UK post-rock bands gets a 2xCD reissue of its masterful debut album. | Seefeel: Quique: Redux Edition | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/9993-quique-redux-edition/ | Quique: Redux Edition | Being an early 1990s shoegaze band whose big claim to fame is that they "went electronic," it's impossible to talk about Seefeel without also talking about technology. On Seefeel's MySpace page, there's live footage of "Industrious"-- from their 1993 album Quique-- at a Russian festival in '94. The band doesn't quite stand still; bassist Darren Seymour does some kind of spastic dance during the bridge. But something about the basic immobility of the band-- attempting to recreate its pulsing, programmed loops live on stage, a music that pours My Bloody Valentine's oozing pink and purple plasma onto techno's chrome skeleton-- is tied to a long-gone age of implacable MIDI-sequencing, lacking the real-time software flux available to Christian Fennesz or the freedom of movement enjoyed by modern cyborg bands like Battles.
But only a maniac would claim that Kraftwerk's neon lights shine any less brightly because they didn't have Ableton Live, and Seefeel's music continues to sparkle 14 years later, an entire generation having built an ambient-motorik noise-pop aesthetic around Quique songs like "Plainsong". Too Pure finally brings the album back into print after far too long with this double-disc "Redux Edition", and listening now, you'll hear the beginnings of a still-thriving genre that remains slippery and unnamed, purely electronic music with a strange, tangy rock aftertaste-- think Tim Hecker's own post-shoegaze explorations into ultra-violet noise, Nathan Fake's plastic techno My Bloody Valentine homages, M83's heavily sequenced Vangeliscapes, a good chunk of the Darla Records catalog, and the twinkling textures of Mouse on Mars, who sent Too Pure a mash note with their demo after they had become infatuated with Quique. Even starting out in a genre where texture and noise already did much of the heavy lifting, the "rock band" version of Seefeel was just a shadow on the studio wall by the time of Quique, making it kind of proto-IDM before the genre even really had a name.
And in this rock-free space, the eight minutes of opener "Climatic Phase No. 3" actually sound like "Comedown Phase No. 3". It's just the barest tinkling of percussion, a rising and falling bass line to provide a barely audible pulse guiding the track, and the laziest melody Kevin Shields or Robin Guthrie never wrote. Not afraid to name a song "Spangle", that most overused of adjectives when it comes to post-Cocteau Twins' guitar atmospherics, Seefeel's canvas on Quique was the azure 8-bit horizon of a computer game where the band blew pixilated clouds that spritzed digital mist and crafted minimal hooks from just hypnotic smears of faraway feedback and Sarah Peacock's nape-of-your-neck intimate whispers.
Needless to say, if Seefeel's pace gets to, say, mid-tempo, the band's pretty damn worked up. The songs stretch out like groggy limbs after a mid-day nap, and the band is often at its best when it's at its most languid, as on the impossibly sensual and nearly static "Filter Dub". The underrated, understated rhythm work--rarely brought up when critics like me start talking alliterative nonsense about vapor trails and guitar swooshes--scrapes and pulses more than it pounds or strides, often recalling a stiff Kraftwerkian metal-on-metal version of polyrhythmic sway of Polynesian percussion. The silvery splash of the cymbals on "Industrious" is just another harmonic color in the palette; the chittering "Through You" sounds like gamelan recast with Atari-era tools.
In the band's attempt escape rock's orbit, the second disc of nine unreleased tracks and rare cuts melts any remaining physicality away until all that's left is, as the band titles the last track, a "Silent Pool", even removing most of the "techno" from "ambient techno." The "avant garde" mix of "Charlotte's Mouth" mutes the original's percussion until it's the spectral, washed-out blur of an underdeveloped Polaroid, and the eerie "My Super 20" blows barren winds as cold the bleakest tracks on AFX's Selected Ambient Works II or the arctic static of Thomas Koner. Moving to labels like Warp and Rephlex and exploring a more purely electronic sound--guitarist Mark Clifford went on to a long and fruitful techno career as Disjecta and other pseudonyms--was perhaps Seefeel's only option as they forced a rock/techno fusion that the technology of the time couldn't quite accommodate. But while it would have undoubtedly been interesting to see where the band might have gone in the anything-goes laptop age, Quique still sounds timeless. | 2007-05-04T02:00:02.000-04:00 | 2007-05-04T02:00:02.000-04:00 | Electronic / Rock | Too Pure | May 4, 2007 | 8.4 | 0bc88058-4797-4a61-a2b4-fd4ef6121909 | Jess Harvell | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jess-harvell/ | null |
With Excavation, London-based electronic producer Bobby Krlic, aka the Haxan Cloak, offers a multifaceted roadmap of the afterlife. The record, his first for Tri Angle, is about the journey taken after death, and it's bold and domineering, the kind of music that towers over you and casts a giant, intimidating shadow. | With Excavation, London-based electronic producer Bobby Krlic, aka the Haxan Cloak, offers a multifaceted roadmap of the afterlife. The record, his first for Tri Angle, is about the journey taken after death, and it's bold and domineering, the kind of music that towers over you and casts a giant, intimidating shadow. | The Haxan Cloak: Excavation | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/17732-the-mirror-reflecting-part-2-excavation/ | Excavation | Death isn't going to come easy for Bobby Krlic, the London-based producer who records as the Haxan Cloak. At least he has Excavation, a sort of multifaceted roadmap of the afterlife, to guide him. This record, his first for Tri Angle, is about the journey taken after death, making it a sequel to his eponymous 2011 debut, which was themed around someone approaching their final days on the planet. Both albums are imagined, instrumental quests, drawn out through electronic compositions with occasional strings. The first record came close to twisted Wicker Man folk at times. This one plunges into a blackened well and never gets out. There is no light relief from Krlic's malaise, no sense that we won't be here some day and there's a place at the end of it all where we might find peace. Excavation is quite the opposite. It paints death as a terrifying, complex process, full of confounding turns and illogical rhythms.
Krlic isn't exactly working in isolation as the Haxan Cloak; he has peers in Demdike Stare's drone-shaped darkness, and he's in a similar orbit to the digital trudge-to-oblivion practiced by fellow Londoners Raime. But while Excavation continues a theme, it goes to more expansive places than anything that bears vaguely similar properties. It's bold and domineering, the kind of music that towers over you and casts a giant, intimidating shadow. There's a magical quality to it, drawn from its transportive nature. It's hard to imagine this being put together in someone's bedroom or a crappy studio, mainly because it's so far withdrawn from the everyday. Krlic has far grander thoughts in mind. He is, after all, building a whole world here, one full of mysterious scratch marks on walls, bloodstained carpets, or the noose tossed into view on the album's cover.
Excavation is more soundtrack than regular album, pulling on familiar tropes from the horror world such as the sudden escalation of strings that lead to a stony silence in "Consumed". But Krlic doesn't follow a straight path at any point, instead setting muted rhythms in progress and disrupting them just when it feels like you've got a handle on where he's going. The depth is quite extraordinary at times, largely due to the bottomless bass Krlic deploys, helping to depict the afterlife as a relentless slog. In many religions death is seen as a destination, but here it's a struggle, another journey, a new set of circumstances with which to grapple. There's a strong sense of deterioration, of things falling apart. When "Excavation (Part 2)" plunges into the quiet it feels like Krlic's carefully constructed world faded away, only for it to segue into the queasy strings that beckon in the following "Mara" that confirm: yes, you are still here in his personal hell.
It's an album sequenced with a central narrative in mind, and one that's not without glimmers of hope at key junctures. "The Mirror Reflecting (Part 2)" and "The Drop" are key tracks, both deploying lighter textures that symbolize a form of redemption from the sooty gloom that eats at the edges of the Haxan Cloak. They come toward the close of the record, suggesting that some kind of unsteady peace has been made in this particular form of purgatory. It adds a resigned air to the album, a sense of accepting fate no matter how bad it may be. Krlic brings the strings into greater view once again during "The Drop", heightening the feelings of sadness and empathy that slowly guide us away from the inky path of all-out grief and dejection. Still, the bass hits continue to punch in that sinking feeling and the beats add a dramatic flourish, always emphasizing that this is a place of sickness, not security.
With music we like, we often talk about the compulsion to come back to it, that need to hit the repeat button as soon as it's over. But music you need a break from can be equally powerful. Excavation has that air, of a place that actually needs some preparation before entering into it. It's not aesthetically similar to Scott Walker's later works, but it similarly highlights how certain music specifically needs the right time, place, and mood to function. Krlic even seems to know it himself, commenting in his Rising feature about the effects of his nine-hour-straight recording sessions. "Being in that zone for that long can freak you out," he said. Instead, Excavation gains power from gathering a little dust for a while, becoming a dark treat to occasionally sink into. It's not a place in which to seek refuge from life's ills, but rather one in which you can satisfy a perverse need to draw them in closer. | 2013-04-17T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2013-04-17T02:00:00.000-04:00 | Experimental | Tri Angle | April 17, 2013 | 8.7 | 0bca4ea2-93d8-4007-aaf8-3c3fcf382110 | Nick Neyland | https://pitchfork.com/staff/nick-neyland/ | null |
After a string of releases that sometimes felt like hearing Bird think himself in circles, the singer-songwriter relaxes into his most plainly and darkly funny album in a long time. | After a string of releases that sometimes felt like hearing Bird think himself in circles, the singer-songwriter relaxes into his most plainly and darkly funny album in a long time. | Andrew Bird: My Finest Work Yet | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/andrew-bird-my-finest-work-yet/ | My Finest Work Yet | Andrew Bird’s work the past decade has scrutinized on the link between sound and time. He made an acoustic album in a barn; he recorded an instrumental album at the bottom of a canyon, and then another while standing in a river; he toured for years with gigantic spinning gramophone horns; he turned a single song into a seven-track EP by treating it like a film score; he made an actual film score. Along the way, Bird’s image started drifting away from playful fiction-spinner and toward haggard philosopher: sometimes isolating and difficult to follow, always interesting. Around the time that he jolted into a 7/8 breakdown on a sprawling, sorrowful song about physically mutating from tour-life conditions called “Anonanimal,” the Andrew Bird who once promised snacks at the end of civilization was becoming a fading memory.
That irreverent, contentedly existential side of Bird makes a pleasantly surprising return on My Finest Work Yet, his most plainly and darkly funny album in a long time. While its cover art depicts Bird swapped into Jacques-Louis David’s “The Death of Marat,” its music is more Monty Python’s Life of Brian: consumed with human history and equally ready to poke fun at it. It sounds eerily informed by “Always Look on the Bright Side of Life,” right down to its undermining of doom with whistling: “The Earth spins faster, whistles right past ya / Whispers death in your ear / Don’t pretend you can’t hear,” Bird casually drops on “Manifest,” just before offering another of his signature whistling solos. After a string of releases that sometimes felt like hearing Bird think himself in circles, the philosophy professor drops the chalk mid-proof, turns to the class, and cheerily concludes, “We’re all screwed!”
Even those who tend to tune out lyrics can recognize a reinstated directness in Bird’s composing, whether in the ambush of violins on“Manifest”, the straighforwardly beautiful ballad “Cracking Codes,” or the unrestrained “OH”s that hoist up “Olympians.” There are a few filler moments that would fit on any other Bird album—”Fallorun” in particular falls flat—but the rest feel like they share a common attitude of “Why not?”. “Don the Struggle” actually brings back the 7/8 dance breakdown, but this time to serve as a foil to the song’s “Benny and the Jets” stomp. The flip is as clear as Bird’s shrug when he repeats over and over, “We’re all just stumbling down / Through an unnamed struggling town.”
Bird knows how to deploy specificity so suddenly and casually that it tickles—and then how to complicate that reaction. Lines here about J. Edgar Hoover, the Spanish Civil War, and Sisyphus all feel more intended to incite chuckling than chin-stroking. On the latter, which is also the name of the opening track and lead single, he questions the condemned Greek king’s dilemma: “Did he raise both fists and say, ‘To hell with this,’ and just / Let the rock roll?” That image seems more than a little self-referential in light of Bird’s obsessive style of music-making. Here, he takes a moment to set that boulder down, throw his hands up, and grin at the beautiful futility of it all. | 2019-03-25T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-03-25T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Loma Vista | March 25, 2019 | 7.6 | 0bcca503-e728-44c6-ae90-149ec1be1579 | Steven Arroyo | https://pitchfork.com/staff/steven-arroyo/ | |
Overdue for increased attention, this female five-piece specializes in a brash mixture of classic punk, hardcore thrash, and skronky no wave. | Overdue for increased attention, this female five-piece specializes in a brash mixture of classic punk, hardcore thrash, and skronky no wave. | Mika Miko: We Be Xuxa | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/13010-we-be-xuxa/ | We Be Xuxa | A few years back, it would have been hard to predict that a scuzz-punk duo like No Age would gain wide popularity outside of a niche fanbase, or that the band's all-ages homebase the Smell would come to be seen as one of the preeminent breeding grounds for underground rock. Even as the indie paradigm has shifted towards the noisier, it's still difficult to guess which (if any) of the acts in No Age's wake will go on to find similar success. Surely due for increased attention, though, are Smell torchbearers Mika Miko, a female five-piece specializing in a brash (but danceable) mixture of classic late-70s punk, hardcore thrash, and skronky no wave.
Known primarily for the dynamic energy of their stage show, Mika Miko have been operating in some form since the early part of the decade, touring shitloads and scraping together an armful of homemade cassettes and CD-Rs. They embody Smell ideology-- community building, inclusion, steadfast DIY-ness-- and though We Be Xuxa is their first medium-profile release, it's actually the group's 10th official recording. Their brand of industriousness and good-natured punk spirit are fine reasons to like a band (or at least root for them), but the other part of that equation, of course, is enjoying their tunes. And that depends on your outlook: the intentionally basic songs on the 23-minute We Be Xuxa lean heavily on aggression and energy.
For those who like their music brief and stupid-simple (and appreciate the various strains of the punk canon Mika Miko are drawing upon), We Be Xuxa can be plenty of fun. Its best tracks, such as shouty opener "Blues Not Speed", rumble past at a violent clip with just enough time for the band to do its damage and then peel out in the getaway car. The group has a healthy sense of balance, too, and usually knows when to cut its bitterness with sugar, like on the bouncy call-and-response of "I Got a Lot (New New New)". But not all of the record's remaining moments achieve such equilibrium, and since it operates in only two gears-- fast and faster-- there's a tendency for its lesser songs to bleed into one another and become indistinguishable.
Indeed, the similar-sounding "Wild Bore" and "Sex" might as well be one song, and the distinction between neighboring tracks "On the Rise" and "Beat the Rush" doesn't really exist. That's a problem on a record this short, and generally speaking, We Be Xuxa would benefit from more genre variety. Ironically, when the band does occasionally fiddle with other styles-- notably on the very convincing no-wave boogie of "Totion" and their cover of the Urinals' "Sex"-- they produce some of the record's most memorable material. Something tells me, though, that Mika Miko aren't really that interested in deeper genre explorations or crafting a grand concept piece. They're about turning kids onto punk rock at sweat-soaked backyard parties, and that's pretty cool too. | 2009-05-11T02:00:02.000-04:00 | 2009-05-11T02:00:02.000-04:00 | Experimental / Rock | Post Present Medium | May 11, 2009 | 6.5 | 0bce8474-16ef-4c9a-b0f8-adc1f1ba5649 | Joe Colly | https://pitchfork.com/staff/joe-colly/ | null |
The instrumental act's latest album finds them revisiting their circa-05 roots, offering tracks that are as pummeling as they are danceable. | The instrumental act's latest album finds them revisiting their circa-05 roots, offering tracks that are as pummeling as they are danceable. | Holy Fuck: Congrats | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21723-congrats/ | Congrats | The best instrumental acts make it easy for you to imagine what their frontperson might be like, if they had one. Explosions in the Sky would undoubtedly feature an earnest, heart-clutching romantic—it’s not surprising they’re as much of an influence on emo’s 4th wave as American Football. Russian Circles would present as a burly, stoic, type and even without Tyondai Braxton, Battles maintained the impish, playful charm of his vocals from Mirrored. Holy Fuck are tougher to get a read on: They were arguably electro-punk subversives at the outset; they’ve toured with M.I.A., and appeared on the Billboard Dance chart, and since 2010’s Latin, Graham Walsh has recorded Canadian acts that sound nothing like each other or Holy Fuck (METZ, Alvvays, Preoccupations). Although they actually emphasize vocals on *Congrats, *it’s somehow even harder to figure out what Holy Fuck is trying to express.
While *Latin was crisp and kinetic, Congrats *seems to take on at least some of the post-punk griminess of Walsh’s production charges. The bloodthirsty opener “Chimes Broken” emphasizes rumbling toms over snares, undulating bass over abrasive treble; first single “Tom Tom” batters the vocals in delay and echo. It’s notably similar to the fluorescent, toxic murk Liars oozed on Mess, rudimentary electronics and tribal rhythms given a high-end production sheen.
Above all else, Holy Fuck are a *rhythm *band, and much of *Congrats *has them circling back to where they started in 2005, i.e., a dance-punk band in a literal sense, trying to approximate electronic music with live instrumentation (and some non-instruments), to be as pummeling as they are danceable. *Congrats *is a record that rarely lets up, but there’s a sense of humor creeping in somewhere, mostly in the titles—on “Neon Dad,” they imagine themselves as a musclebound chillwave act and the synth-bass of “Caught Up” is a sincere homage to early-'00s DFA.
Holy Fuck never sound out of their element on *Congrats—*the most surprising addition is an acoustic guitar on the “Shimmering” interlude. But even at less than a minute, “Shimmering” somehow exposes the ultimate issue with *Congrats *and perhaps Holy Fuck as an enterprise. It’s not so much that “Shimmering” is the first time *Congrats *repeats itself—as a reprise of the earlier “Shivering,” that’s completely intentional. But as one of the final tracks, there’s the assumption that *Congrats *is meant to be consumed as a whole, that it has some kind of sonic narrative. *Congrats *isn’t incoherent in its diversity, it just never seems to build on itself—the record lacks a definitive peak, and most of the individual tracks tend to just state their main idea fairly early on. Mostly, it’s tough to specify what exactly makes Holy Fuck special or innovative at this late stage in their career, or what they're trying to do with this project besides keep things moving. Of course, that’s a high calling by itself, and maybe Holy Fuck is just the lifesaver who shows up to the party with ice and cups: though it’s functional, *Congrats is *still fun.
*Correction: Due to a tracklisting change, an earlier version of this review misidentified the song “Caught Up” as “Crapture.” It has been amended. * | 2016-06-01T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-06-01T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Innovative Leisure | June 1, 2016 | 6.6 | 0bd0203a-f8a7-4274-ad99-97bf2b5694c0 | Ian Cohen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ian-cohen/ | null |
Too often when electronica mates with jazz, one side gets the upper hand. Either the producer trips, chops, or buries ... | Too often when electronica mates with jazz, one side gets the upper hand. Either the producer trips, chops, or buries ... | Craig Taborn: Junk Magic | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/8257-junk-magic/ | Junk Magic | Too often when electronica mates with jazz, one side gets the upper hand. Either the producer trips, chops, or buries the musicians and masks the flow of their improvisation, or he stands back, letting the musicians run blithely past the light colors or static backdrops set behind them. The Thirsty Ear Blue Series has repeatedly tried to put both sides on equal footing-- or at least to start a wrestling match-- like on last year's sadly dull Antipop Consortium vs. Matthew Shipp. But even when the music works, you can still see the separation: The two camps mix, but don't synthesize.
Then there's Craig Taborn, who approached his latest album as a performer and as the producer. It's hard to believe this is only Taborn's third record as a leader, and his first with electronics. When you flip through his work as a sideman and keyboardist-around-town in New York City, the breadth is overwhelming. With James Carter and on his own Light Made Lighter, Taborn is a methodically swift pianist who can solo like Scott Joplin's piano player plugged into the wrong voltage. He's also acclaimed as a leading Fender Rhodes revivalist, blowing the cobwebs off fusion licks for Tim Berne or Dave Douglas.
But Taborn is most distinctive as a textural player. He's said he follows the example of Sun Ra or Larry Young, pushing his keyboards to see what they can do for him; but Taborn uses the latest technology. If the hypnotic see-sawing of "The Golden Age"'s melody recalls the theme to Close Encounters of the Third Kind, that's just one touchstone for his digital space jazz, which also co-opts Detroit techno and dance beats. But he also constructs immersive spaces, opening up rough-hewn synth backdrops or triggering a deep sonar "ping" that creates the illusion of light-eating depths.
Each track on Junk Magic is crammed to the gills, and then made light by the restlessness and motion that drive the album. Taborn may have spent weeks constructing a machine but he gets to flick the switch right in front of us, and the product unfurls in real-time, even as you acknowledge the overdubbing. This starts right on the opening track, where IDM chirps fly like tacks over the synth lines that pile on top of the piano figure and thick organ chords at the low-end-- wheels spinning within wheels.
Taborn works with a group here, although he easily outnumbers them. Of his three sidemen, The Bad Plus' "dude, holy shit, you've gotta check this guy out" drummer David King is the chief commercial draw. He gives up some freedom when he joins Taborn's cyborg army, but it's worth it to hear the way Taborn bats him around-- as on "Mystero", where he's cut up like a stop-motion photograph. Aaron Stewart joins what you could call the frontline on tenor sax, but microtonal violist Mat Maneri adds the most color, sawing seared lines and rasping soliloquies over Taborn's precision. The musicians submit to cameos on some tracks and get full-contact jams on "Prismatica" and "Mystero", and "Bodies at Rest and in Motion" even starts as a stumbling acoustic piece-- though you know it's only a matter of minutes before the digital insects fly back in.
Impeccable taste keeps this project on track. Taborn sticks to one palette but never uses it the same way twice: Each piece is distinct, even the busiest tracks have a hook or clear melody to hang onto, and best of all, the record is concise, clocking in at just over 40 minutes, which leaves no time for screw-ups. It could've been stiff, crass, or even grotesque; instead, it's a definitive recital, and it throws down a challenge for the rest of the Blue Series. We've spent several records hearing Matthew Shipp flirt with electronica or gently funkify his piano, and the whole time Shipp had the spotlight, Taborn was already on the other side of the moon. Here's hoping people finally notice. | 2004-04-22T01:00:01.000-04:00 | 2004-04-22T01:00:01.000-04:00 | Experimental / Jazz | Thirsty Ear | April 22, 2004 | 8.6 | 0bd9814c-8a31-4c4e-b142-93ef8abd585a | Chris Dahlen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/chris-dahlen/ | null |
California's Bethany Cosentino delivers on the promise of her noisy early singles with a richer-sounding album that highlights the power of her voice. | California's Bethany Cosentino delivers on the promise of her noisy early singles with a richer-sounding album that highlights the power of her voice. | Best Coast: Crazy For You | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/14472-crazy-for-you/ | Crazy For You | Scene-famous boyfriends, a quote-generating Twitter feed, scuffles with bloggers, and the most meme-generating feline since Keyboard Cat got carpal tunnel: Yeah, it's safe to say Bethany Cosentino, who writes and records with cohort Bobb Bruno as Best Coast, is a long way away from her days as a member of drone/psych outfit Pocahaunted. Best Coast's full-length debut, Crazy for You, serves only to increase that distance from the outré-music scene; the brief record delivers on the promise of a strong string of singles released over the past year. Just as Pocahaunted loosely capture the basic feel of dub and reggae, Crazy for You is a meditation on the stickier hooks of classic indie pop, with slight detours into surf-rock ("Bratty B") and countrypolitan balladry ("Our Deal"). While Pocahaunted cover their signifiers under piles of static and delay-triggered noise, Best Coast take the opposite route, slathering honey over every song and letting them drip-dry in the sunshine.
The record's overall gorgeousness has a whole lot to do with Cosentino's voice, which hits every pitch with equal clarity and intention of tone. Good thing, too, since Crazy For You is an especially vocal-heavy record; excluding the bonus track "When I'm With You", there are few moments here where Cosentino's voice isn't featured. She backs herself wordlessly, fills in non-verbal gaps (especially in the California-highway chorus of "When the Sun Don't Shine"), and repeats simple sentiments like mantras ("I wish he was my boyfriend," "I want you so much," "That's not your deal, that's not my deal").
That last function has become a sticking point for many who complain that, as a lyricist, Cosentino lacks a certain depth and overall intelligence. It's true that she's not exactly the Randy Newman of the beach-pop game-- there's a few too many "crazy/lazy" rhyme schemes, and feel free to snicker at the "I wish my cat could talk" line from "Goodbye". But it's easy to miss that, just as these songs are relatively basic in construction, she's never aimed for any sort of lyrical grandiosity-- just feelings, presented as straightforwardly as possible.
Simply put, she knows what she's doing-- and, lo and behold, there's more lyrical complexity to this record than a fault-seeking light listen would glean. Just when you think you've gotten the point of "Boyfriend", Cosentino flips the script and reveals that she isn't just envious-- she feels inadequate, too: "The other girl is not me/ She's prettier and skinnier/ She has a college degree/ I dropped out when I was 17." In "The End", she verges on nihilistic, admitting in the song's chorus that she'll ruin it all permanently for temporary wish fulfillment: "You say that/ We're just friends/ But I want this/ Till the end." She's not being submissive or simple-minded-- she's being honest, and regardless of sweeping appeal, it's endearing that she puts herself out there instead of throwing on some sunglasses and using irony as UV protection.
"Endearing" is the key word that comes to define Crazy for You; while most of the guitar-based indie pop that's made waves over the past few years has been characterized by scenester antagonism and attempts to fit in (Vivian Girls, Crystal Stilts, Beach Fossils), this record is carefree and instantly likable-- even if it doesn't seem to care what you think of it. Just as you don't have to be into bong rips and strains of Indo to laugh at Cosentino's 140-character riffs on Katy Perry and True Blood, even the least indie-inclined of listeners can find plenty to love here. It may be a summer album by design (I mean, for Christ's sake-- that cover), but I'll place my bet that Crazy for You will sound pretty great all damn year, and beyond. | 2010-07-27T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2010-07-27T02:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Mexican Summer | July 27, 2010 | 8.4 | 0bd99927-35ed-44d4-af7c-6ca43d7e1e77 | Larry Fitzmaurice | https://pitchfork.com/staff/larry-fitzmaurice/ | null |
This split EP pairs tracks from two Montreal artists: the ghostly avant-pop project Grimes and the more literate singer-songwriter d'Eon. | This split EP pairs tracks from two Montreal artists: the ghostly avant-pop project Grimes and the more literate singer-songwriter d'Eon. | d’Eon / Grimes: Darkbloom EP | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/15439-darkbloom-ep/ | Darkbloom EP | On her side of Darkbloom, a split 12" with fellow Montrealer d'Eon, Claire Boucher of Grimes sounds like a pop star from a distant planet-- distant enough that "pop star" is an unfamiliar concept there, but close enough to intercept earthly radio signals and press some bootlegs of Mariah Carey's no. 1s. Boucher's music draws upon a diverse collection of influences (Panda Bear, Salem, Alicia Keys) as she experiments with eerie loops and a stratospheric falsetto. (She says that while recording last year's otherworldly Halfaxa, she "practiced" singing in four octaves by listening to Mariah's "Heartbreaker".) While Grimes' previous work found her burying her poppier inclinations beneath dense atmospherics and moody textures, her material on Darkbloom melds all of her impulses into a coherent and confident sound, resulting into some of her strongest tracks to date.
For Grimes, Darkbloom comes on the heels of a prolific 2010. She released two solid LPs: the melodic and intimate debut Geidi Primes, and the darker, more unified Halfaxa. The latter could be classified as bubblegum macabre; songs like "Weregild" and "Sagrad Прекрасный" somehow suggested the skeletons from Daft Punk's "Around the World" video singing Tiffany songs on karaoke night. I liked Geidi Primes even better, a record that filtered the confessional intimacy of lo-fi bedroom pop (as on the standout track "Rosa") through influences including dubstep to synth pop. Boucher's tendency to throw everything in the pot occasionally came off as a lack of unity, but I found its aesthetic miscellany to be one of her debut's charms. "Everybody thinks I'm boring," she sang in a mock-confessional tone on "Zoal, Face Dancer"-- a sentiment that nobody who heard the record could possibly agree with.
Darkbloom, though, announces Grimes' arrival as an avant-pop force. This is largely thanks to the single best song she's ever done, "Vanessa", which channels Lykke Li by way of a blissed-out Donna Summer reverie. "Crystal Ball", perhaps her most upbeat song yet, is also a stunner. Both tracks display a new, cleaner aesthetic for Grimes-- lushness instead of grain, beats that thump rather than pulse, vocals high and clear in the mix. Still, something else entirely makes Grimes unique. There's an eerie, supernatural undercurrent to these songs, and the moody instrumental pieces that surround them.
Chris d'Eon's side of the split, which follows last year's LP Palinopsia, isn't without highlights. His best track is the wistful, R&B-tinged "Transparency", a song about the uneventful sex lives of ghosts. Inspired by his longtime interest in Tibetan music, d'Eon figures himself in the Eastern symbol of the hungry ghost, a specter who's back from the beyond just to see his lover's face. Incidentally, not as great as it sounds: "Do you want be human? Do you want to make love again? I guess that's just the price you're gonna have to pay for transparency." Over the chorus' icy, arpeggiated synths, he comes to the logical conclusion: "Doing this was a big mistake."
In spite of d'Eon's weaker material (like the skittish and schmaltzy "Thousand Mile Trench") his tracks might have made a decent EP, but either way the two sides of Darkbloom don't work particularly well together. Following Grimes' tracks, which favor mood over story and transcend any particular emphasis on lyrics, d'Eon's half feels overly literal and tethered to the material world: His hungry ghost is left searching for a body to inhabit, while Grimes sounds altogether liberated from hers. Undoubtedly, Boucher hits the highest notes on Darkbloom, proving over the course of just five tracks that she's blossoming into a promising artist-- and one who's developing almost more quickly than we can keep track of. "I've moved far beyond that," she's already remarked of this material in a recent interview with Dummy. "I'm working on a full-length, which I kind of feel is my first album." And as the only complaint I've got with her side of Darkbloom is that it's too short, this is indeed cause for excitement. | 2011-05-19T02:00:04.000-04:00 | 2011-05-19T02:00:04.000-04:00 | Electronic / Pop/R&B | Hippos in Tanks / Arbutus | May 19, 2011 | 7.2 | 0bda51ca-3af7-4074-88e7-e8c6e59680b9 | Lindsay Zoladz | https://pitchfork.com/staff/lindsay-zoladz/ | |
The thrilling debut from the Michigan rock band burns hot and bright. It’s a record that’s as melodic as it is physical, where pent-up aggression turns into physical liberation. | The thrilling debut from the Michigan rock band burns hot and bright. It’s a record that’s as melodic as it is physical, where pent-up aggression turns into physical liberation. | Dogleg: Melee | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/dogleg-melee/ | Melee | While the word “melee” would have been truth-in-advertising for the riotous post-hardcore battle royale of Dogleg’s debut album, it’s actually an homage to Super Smash Bros.—a video game as essential to their live show as frontman Alex Stoitsiadis’ onstage cartwheels. The Detroit, Michigan quartet offers free swag to anyone who can beat bassist Chase Macisnki on the Nintendo 64 emulator at their merch table and they haven’t lost a T-shirt yet. Despite their overt gaming references on the album to Pokemon and Star Fox, Dogleg aren’t interested in fantasy or world-building, just the sheer, rejuvenating physical pleasure of controlling a lifelike version of yourself capable of jumping higher, punching faster, and sustaining more damage than any human could.
Though still self-produced and recorded in Stoitsiadis’ house, Melee levels up like Dogleg are clutching some kind of glowing orb that allows them to jump the gap between their rowdy live shows and 2015’s scrappy Remember Alderaan? EP. Dogleg guarantee hyperbolic energy, whether playing in front of a dozen onlookers in an unfamiliar DIY space or the jubilant hometown crowd at Bled Fest captured in the video for the atomic shout-along “Fox.” It’s a testament to their unwavering vitality that “Fox” isn’t an outlier, but surrounded by equally anthemic instances of fighting anxiety with more anxiety.
There are still hints of the gateway bands that served as Dogleg’s early influences. “Wrist” does breakneck jumping jacks until Milwaukee’s Best sweats through its pores, as if the Strokes had spent their late teens in University of Michigan’s Metal Frat instead of a Swiss boarding school. As with most rock music that sounds truly youthful, Melee doesn’t invent new forms so much as connect bands once separated by subtle genre classification. The Gen-Z members of Dogleg use Melee as a synopsis of guitar music made in their short lifetime from bands whose aggression appeared completely at odds with prevailing tastes. In their sound are bands like ...And You Will Know Us By the Trail of Dead and At the Drive In who served as the violent wing of the New Rock Revolution; Cloud Nothings’ Attack on Memory and Japandroids’ Celebration Rock’s referendum on chillwave; an entire decade of Midwestern emo raging against cosmopolitan lifestyle-indie. Melee effectively advocates for a binary of taste: There is rock music that slaps and rock music that does not, the latter of which should not be given any attention.
Melee was more or less complete when Dogleg signed to Triple Crown in early 2019, and in the time since, they’ve tinkered with the mix only to settle on the most obvious production aesthetic: loud and, if possible, slightly louder. From the first engine-revving, “buckle up, motherfucker” riff of “Kawasaki Backflip,” Dogleg are fueled by the perpetually brick-walled waveform, whether through blunt force, sidelong strikes, or the kind of precise combinations of both that make them so formidable at Super Smash Bros. “Kawasaki Backflip” and “Hotlines” live in the exhilaratingly small space between floating and faceplanting. The vocal and guitar melodies chase each other across “Bueno” and “Wartortle,” as Stoitsiadis turns a harsh, melodic bark into an atonal scream every time the band tries to shake him off the trail. “Fox” ends in a full sprint, and after a brief snippet of laughter, “Headfirst” spends its duration somersaulting downhill, the thrill of victory and agony of defeat as one.
While many of Melee’s thrills are similar to contact sports, Dogleg’s decision-making process is painstaking and considered, even if it mostly amounts to “play fast.” The blinkered dedication to velocity becomes an asset. For all of its immediate, point-and-shout, crowd-surfing appeal, the most impactful moments on “Fox” are an ankle-breaking hitch of a drum fill and a bass solo leading up to Stoitsiadis’ triumphant guitar-whee. In the video for “Kawasaki Backflip,” Dogleg break shit alone in a garage until Stoitsiadis takes a sledgehammer to his reflection during the rhythm section’s climactic slam on the brakes.
Melee is filled with similarly counterintuitive hooks: put the beery group vocals at the front of the song, save the strings and horns for the loudest tracks, avoid the mid-album ballad and put the nastiest songs there instead. There are no quiet parts, no calm, no pauses for a group hug, even if there are 13 credited backup vocalists. In the rare moments when there’s any bit of space, someone in the band is still screaming off-mic before plunging back into the fray.
There is no doubt that Melee is emo as hell—Stoitsiadis begins and ends the album lying on the floor in a state of abject depression, framing the choice of fighting back or giving up as the same kind of elemental, apocalyptic ultimatum that echoes through “Born to Run,” “A Praise Chorus,” and “Fire’s Highway.” But spiritually, it’s aligned with subgenres like crunk and happy hardcore, where the lyrics mostly function as prompts for its ultimate goal of sublimating pent-up aggression into physical liberation. If Dogleg’s scope is limited, it’s only in the service of blocking out anything that stands in the way of a singular, superhuman ambition to buck all assumptions about what an ambitious rock album is supposed to do in 2020. Dogleg aspires to nothing short of breaking the first law of thermodynamics: creating energy where none previously existed.
Buy: Rough Trade
(Pitchfork earns a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.) | 2020-03-16T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-03-16T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Triple Crown | March 16, 2020 | 8.6 | 0bdca850-d030-48be-9df5-2fbec3d6c0b0 | Ian Cohen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ian-cohen/ | |
On its Def Jam debut, the veteran hip-hop band avoids wilds tangents and trims some of its freewheeling ways; the resulting record is svelte, smart, lively, and one of the year's most pleasant surprises. | On its Def Jam debut, the veteran hip-hop band avoids wilds tangents and trims some of its freewheeling ways; the resulting record is svelte, smart, lively, and one of the year's most pleasant surprises. | The Roots: Game Theory | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/9364-game-theory/ | Game Theory | The way ?uestlove keeps telling it, that initial meeting with new boss Jay-Z sounds like a fully-hocked saliva rocket in the eye of every asshole who tried to force the Roots to compromise their status as studied hip-hop altar boys in pursuit of the bottom line. Like the tough-ass principal with a heart of platinum, it seems Mr. Def Jam was full of charity, spewing quotables like, "Don't come to me playing a whole bunch of Clear Channel songs thinking I'm gonna be cool with it," and, my personal favorite, "If y'all come here with snap music, I'm snapping y'all the fuck out of my audience."
So the Roots were sent off to make a Roots album...you know, that "artsy shit." For a band known for the occasional indulgence (the $300,000+ price tag to complete Phrenology's horrendously overwrought "Break You Off", a concert mentality that equates excruciating length with awesomeness), such a mandate could have birthed a freewheeling disaster tipsy on its own pretensions. Miraculously, art-hop's highest get concise on Game Theory-- cutting song lengths, spoken-word tedium, and call-and-response nonsense. Fourteen years deep, the Roots avoid the wild sonic tangents of yesteryear, zeroing in on a svelte, safe, and solid take on what we've come to expect from a Roots record.
Light years away from the jazzy bap of their early days, the Roots continue to embrace their band-dom and musical acumen here, with studio guru ?uestlove tweaking with purpose; unlike the sometimes directionless experimentation of Phrenology and the preternatural smoothness of The Tipping Point, each sonic decision sounds measured and precise yet still alive and heaving. Beat-wise, the bounding throb at the center of "Here I Come" pumps hardest, with key-man Kamal striking futuristic synths while ?uest lays down an unrelenting boom that's rewarded with a fizzy solo outro. Wet drums return on doom-y "In the Music", adding grit alongside a horror movie bassline and simmering guitar-- clearly (and thankfully), Scott Storch is nowhere to be found.
Pop music writer Chuck Eddy once described Bruce Springsteen as someone whose "muse can't be separated from his ego; he's too palpably concerned with how he'll be documented in the history books" and the same can be said about the Roots. They sometimes mistake experimentation with progress while preaching holier-than-thouisms to the choir. Both "Take It There", with its over the top piano melodrama and the listless "Livin' in a New World" falter, relying too heavily on questionable texture and knob tricks. Tellingly, though, they are also two of the album's shortest tracks. Whereas such noble risks were once epic, they're now miniaturized-- the Roots have learned from their mistakes. More than ever, the band uses its know-how skillfully, as on the stunning title track, which beefs up Sly Stone's early 1960s song "Life of Fortune & Fame". On the original, Stone all but predicts the paranoia and doubt he'd perfect with 1971's There's a Riot Goin' On. That album's claustrophobic murk is felt throughout Game Theory, and its musical moodiness is echoed by Black Thought, who unpeels himself ever so slightly while charging hard with anger and desperation.
There's been much debate about Thought recently, spurred by recent critical drubbings deeming him dull and uncharismatic. Even ?uestlove chimed in on the Okayplayer message boards, dismissing the hate as a mere "trend." Such rationalizations can't hide the monotonous nonchalance of Thought's natural delivery or his often second-rate bread-and-butter battle rhymes. Though technically proficient, his passivity is the Roots' most noticeable handicap. Game Theory partially solves this problem with a healthy dose of guest shots from old friends Malik B (making a strong return as a non-member after being booted for drug dependence about six years ago) and Dice Raw, along with welcomed mixtape all-star and Philly native Peedi Peedi (aka Peedi Crakk) and newcomer Porn.
All four are gifted with lively styles that juxtapose nicely with Thought's steady cadence. The two best vocal performances on the disc come courtesy of Dice, who annihilates "Here I Come" with a one-eye-open, nervy confessional, and Peedi, who shows off an uncharacteristically tender touch on the warm Illadeph ode "Long Time". Although he gets the dubious distinction of Least Googleable Rapper, Porn haunts with his unique sing/cry style on the hook for "In the Music". Indicative of the LP's troubleshooting nature, Thought is wisely relieved from most of the album's hooks, and he trades in his half-huff boasts for pinpoint post-Katrina polemics that deride Bush, the creaky state of American democracy and the urban drug trap as he plays modern black editorialist.
The Public Enemy-inflected "False Media" finds him voicing Dubya as a multitasking evil empire unto himself ("Send our troops to get my paper/ Tell 'em stay away from them skyscrapers") and it does an excellent job of summarizing five years of fear-heightening boogey-man hunting into a few tidy lines. "Baby", a loose, Jay Dee-esque highlight that serves as a superior sonic tribute to the late producer than the album's well-intentioned but sappy Dilla shout "Can't Stop This", has Thought sing-songing through hallucinatory tales of rape and lust-- it's the pitch-black flip to "You Got Me". The MC's anxious musings become overbearing and repetitive by the album's end, but his bravura bursts on "Long Time", where he tempers his dread with home-grown hope, and especially the convoluted drug-feud terror of "Clock With No Hands", show that getting past his aesthetic pitfalls is a worthy pursuit.
When I interviewed ?uestlove earlier this year about the progress of Game Theory, he admitted that "it's a challenge to not over think" his band's work. Of course, the album is over thought-- it is a Roots album after all, and superfluous embellishments along with high-concept artwork and sequence second-guessing are part of the excitement. But now, the excess brainpower is mostly used to cover-up past blemishes en route to a streamlined product that die-hards can justly revel in. President Carter should be proud. | 2006-08-31T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2006-08-31T02:00:01.000-04:00 | Rap | Def Jam | August 31, 2006 | 7.7 | 0be1e312-4f5c-44f0-93a4-ce8d8136e188 | Ryan Dombal | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ryan-dombal/ | null |
On his eighth album, a skillful Drake struggles to keep it interesting. His familiar concerns, while occasionally sincere or funny, have become quite boring. | On his eighth album, a skillful Drake struggles to keep it interesting. His familiar concerns, while occasionally sincere or funny, have become quite boring. | Drake: For All the Dogs | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/drake-for-all-the-dogs/ | For All the Dogs | Whither Drake, the brokenest man in music? The golden bachelor emerged from pandemic lockdown and unleashed a whirlwind of creativity with three albums that explored Afrobeats, club music, and trap, all while sending his emo fuckboy persona into increasingly darker crevices. Long the jilted lover who lashed out at women in response, his chameleonic melodies—and his endless charisma—often overshadowed his soft emotional outbursts, with bouts of insight on moody ballads of the sort he built his name. “I’m still working on me, and I’m coming back better for you,” for instance, on Certified Lover Boy’s “Fucking Fans,” an empty promise inside a heartfelt journey through his infidelity and remorse.
By Her Loss, though, his 2022 album with fellow wayward son 21 Savage, the sentiment had curdled. By putting famous women in his sights alongside the nameless proles in his contacts, his churlishness became more widely noticed—most specifically on “Circo Loco,” a bass track on which the line, “This bitch lie ’bout getting shots but she still a stallion,” was taken by fans and Megan Thee Stallion herself to mean both ass injections and a sideswipe at the Houston rapper. It also added to the shameful laundry list of male rappers who cast aspersions on whether Tory Lanez, now serving 10 years in North Kern State Prison, shot her.
On For All the Dogs, Drake has yet again doubled down over a melange of styles—drill, underworld R&B, Playboi Carti’s flow—and other than a few flashes of brilliance, the music can’t save him from himself. Despite his agility on “8am in Charlotte” and a tuneful SZA verse on the otherwise mid Men Are From Mars tone poem “Slime You Out,” the meat of this bloated 23-track album are his own grievances and a dearth of topical contrast. Once again releasing an album with the runtime of a feature-length film, Dogs is an unfocused, disjointed listen loosely tied to the undercooked conceit that the album is playing on a fictional quiet storm radio station—BARK Radio—hosted by DJs Snoop Dogg, George Clinton, and, miraculously, the Sade Adu, who shows up to do a brief radio tag.
Another wobbly peg seems to be Drake working through some kind of awful island vacation, which he makes sound like his own emotional Fyre Festival. It appears on the Savage-featuring “Callin For You,” in the form of a skit about flying economy, which is entirely sampled from Rye Rye on “Shake It to the Ground,” the Baltimore club classic she made with DJ Blaqstarr when she was just 15. The lounge-adjacent “Bahamas Promises” addresses “Hayley” with signature Drake corn—“You put the ‘no’ in monogamy.” Whether or not the vacation exists is a question for the tabloids, yet there’s no question Rihanna is the topic of “Fear of Heights,” where Drake demonstrates how hurt he is by making a song about how not hurt he is. “Why do they make it sound like I’m still hung up on you? That could never be,” he raps, protesting entirely too much.
By the time he says “The sex was average witcha”—referencing Rihanna’s “Sex With Me,” a song that came out close to a decade ago—you’re hoping for anyone else to grab the mic, whether it’s young rapper Yeat, who steals the show on “IDGAF,” or even the comparatively relaxing croons of Teezo Touchdown. On “Gently,” Bad Bunny sounds like he dialed in his verse from the Sprinter en route to the Gucci show while Drake deploys his best seventh-grade Spanish on a dembow beat—(“My broski Benito, he needs a bonita,” et cetera)—and yet it’s still a high point far away from Drake’s darkness. The Miami bass banger “Rich Baby Daddy” is clearly the best track on the album, due in part to Sexyy Red’s chorus: “Bend that ass over/Let that coochie breathe”—thank you, ma’am, for your concern for airing out one’s yoni—and SZA singing about her desire for “dick and conversation.”
At times Drake’s breakup bromides are softer and more interesting, as on the celestial “Tried Our Best” with rising R&B singer (and former The Four contestant) JeRonelle, when Drake drops the pose: “I swear there’s a list of places that I been with you, I wanna go without you/Just so I can know what it’s like to be there without havin’ to argue,” he sings earnestly. But by “All the Parties,” which is buoyed by a too-short Chief Keef interlude, you’re rolling your eyes as he interpolates Pet Shop Boys’ “West End Girls,” which might end up costing him some pocket change. Even lines that should otherwise be funny—Drake softly crooning, “Bust that pussy open for a real one” on “BBL Love (Interlude)” like Sinatra gone pornographic—have become dreadfully boring, caught up in what by this time feels like a narcissism spiral with a dash of famous-person insecurity (“Sometimes I think to myself, what if I was somebody else/Would your ass still be here?”). For All the Dogs suggests a magnanimity, a document of inclusive player’s anthems, but if you make it no-skips to the end, it’s clear the only dog in Drake’s world is Drake, and he’s trying to get the Men’s Rights Conference to howl back at him.
Thirteen years into his career, Drake keeps turning the dial of his music away from lovesick bachelor, past vulnerable playboy, and towards vile cretin. Whether this new setting is sincere, performative, or a bit of a troll, it’s at best repetitive and at worst severely off-putting. The effect is that of a man on the street who hollers at a random woman, but retaliates after she politely declines. A good half-hour of For All the Dogs is a slog through his thoughts on wealth, women, and surgical injections, with a few bright but frustrating bits of reprieve, which provide a glimpse into what could’ve been here if Drake only employed a better therapist. “Away From Home” is one of the best cuts here, an accounting of his struggle and come-up over a velvety Björkian, which includes an incredible flex about how Drake has three different friends named Jason (“My life like The Matrix,” he adds.) Yet he also snipes at the multitalented Esperanza Spalding for beating him out for the Best New Artist Grammy a full 12 years ago and, for some reason, blames Michelle Obama for her husband’s annual playlist.
At 36, Drake has risen to become one of the world’s most popular rappers and culturally-defining millennials. He has built an empire on underdog affability, internet-savvy quirks, and definitively changing the way rappers sound, his sensitive croons defying the age of the monotonous delivery and altering the pop landscape for a decade-plus and counting. His endearing qualities—his diaristic, heart-on-sleeve lyricism, his occasional dorkiness, his smart approach to serenade and diss track alike—have kept him rightfully dominant for a good chunk of the century. Yet For All the Dogs caps off a recent persona that sounds like none of it’s fun to him—and he’s dragging us along to be the company of his misery. | 2023-10-09T00:03:00.000-04:00 | 2023-10-09T00:03:00.000-04:00 | Rap | OVO Sound / Republic | October 9, 2023 | 6.5 | 0be7debd-6fc6-462d-bdb7-1b6007728aa9 | Julianne Escobedo Shepherd | https://pitchfork.com/staff/julianne-escobedo shepherd/ | |
The ambient icon and his younger brother, a well-known pianist in his own right, reveal the results of an intimate musical conversation stretching back 15 years. | The ambient icon and his younger brother, a well-known pianist in his own right, reveal the results of an intimate musical conversation stretching back 15 years. | Roger Eno / Brian Eno: Mixing Colours | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/roger-eno-brian-eno-mixing-colours/ | Mixing Colours | Given Brian Eno’s experimental bona fides, there’s something uncharacteristically low-key, and even rather sweet, about this collaboration with his younger brother. Roger Eno, a well-known pianist in his own right, calls it “a back-and-forth conversation,” one that goes back 15 years: He would record musical sketches on his MIDI keyboard, then pass them on to Brian to manipulate. Yet you wonder if the album should have stayed within the family. Mixing Colours won’t harm the Enos’ elevated reputations, but it won’t enhance them, either.
The album’s main problem: an unmistakable blandness that is at odds with the audacity of so much of Brian Eno’s catalog. Mixing Colours couldn’t have been made in the 1970s, when Brian Eno debuted his landmark ambient recordings; MIDI was first released in 1983, after all. But it sounds like it could have been, raising inevitable and ultimately unfavorable comparisons to Eno’s classic work. Ambient 1: Music for Airports was revolutionary in concept, offering music that was “as ignorable as it is interesting” in a way that defied 20th century popular music’s constant demands on our attention. But Mixing Colours is too often just ignorable: pretty, safe, and eminently forgettable.
For all Brian Eno’s claims about Mixing Colours’ sonic palette—he has talked about using electronics to explore the spaces between the “islands” of classical instruments—the album’s musical texture is underwhelming, a world of wipe-clean surfaces and expensive echo that resembles a particularly laconic Air B-side. Most of the 18 songs rely on glowing synth patterns and treated piano, a mixture so subtly inviting you can almost forgive its bromidic surface. It doesn’t help that Mixing Colours begs comparison to Brian and Roger’s collaborative work on 1983’s Apollo: Atmospheres and Soundtracks, whose idiosyncratic character benefited from the metallic dash of steel guitar that Daniel Lanois added to tracks like “Deep Blue Day.” “Quicksilver,” in particular, seems to sport a hole where Lanois’ melodic edge should be.
With stylistic and atmospheric surprises in short supply, Mixing Colours relies on melody to do the heavy lifting. There are some beautiful moments: The second half of “Celeste” has a gorgeous, rolling refrain that topples about like a boat in the breeze, its movements reminiscent of Pep Llopis’ Mediterranean classic Poiemusia La Nau Dels Argonautes. “Desert Sand” is wonderful too, an unsettling piano figure introducing a feathery touch of dissonance, while “Obsidian” has the solemn, slightly pompous melancholy of the best church-organ music.
At times like these, Mixing Colours merits its place on respected classical label Deutsche Grammophon. But on the whole, the album is too inoffensive to leave much lasting impression. Over 18 songs, its initially appealing tastefulness becomes cloying and monotonous. Instead of the dynamism of mixing colors, the album mostly yields just a uniform pastel wash.
Buy: Rough Trade
(Pitchfork earns a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.) | 2020-03-20T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-03-20T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Experimental / Electronic | Deutsche Grammophon | March 20, 2020 | 5.8 | 0be7ecf5-eece-4348-b4e6-aca19db3478b | Ben Cardew | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ben-cardew/ | |
Although the Calgary Flames lost by a single goal in Game 7 of the Stanley Cup Finals-- squandering their chance ... | Although the Calgary Flames lost by a single goal in Game 7 of the Stanley Cup Finals-- squandering their chance ... | A.C. Newman: The Slow Wonder | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/5898-the-slow-wonder/ | The Slow Wonder | Although the Calgary Flames lost by a single goal in Game 7 of the Stanley Cup Finals-- squandering their chance to become the first Canadian team to take home the trophy since 1993-- the vanquished hockey players' country-folk have no reason to hang their collective heads. Among their luminaries, the Canucks can count a bilingual prime minister who speaks in full sentences, filmmaker Guy Maddin, and Vancouver's preeminent redheaded songwriter, Carl Newman, who has just released, by a stride, the best power-pop album of 2004.
Newman worked through his more angular pop leanings in the mid-1990s with Sub Pop indie rockers Zumpano and is now the primary songwriter in The New Pornographers. To place The Slow Wonder's aesthetics in terms that The New Pornographers fans will understand, these 11 tracks blend Mass Romantic's clipped frenetics, Electric Version's spacious tenderness, and the agile twists and turns of Zumpano, effortlessly humbling all three. On The Slow Wonder, the hooks crack apart and multiply, accruing additional catchiness the way the pumped muscles of a spinach-stuffed Popeye give birth to crops of testosterone-filled goose bumps. At one point in "Drink to Me Babe Then", a languid group of whistlers double themselves harmoniously before a quavering electromagnetic guitar blazes overhead; elsewhere, a fading melodian shoots rubber bands at the stars.
Taken as a single document, The Slow Wonder fits together for a taut 34 minutes without lags or rough spots; viewed as collection of singles, all but a couple tracks would justifiably fill the A-side of a seven-inch. From the catchy drum-fill intro of "Miracle Drug" to "35 in the Shade"'s soaring exit guitar, there's not a misfire to be found. Time and time again, Newman showcases a quaint nostalgia and a layered sense of production that often feels similar to the inventive beauty that made The Shins' Chutes Too Narrow such a whopper of a sophomore release. Like the exquisite chamber pop that Richard Davies and Eric Matthews showcased as Cardinal, these songs have a comfortable Kinks-like feel while still sporting their own unique, keenly crafted hooks.
Throughout the album, Newman keeps the palette varied, cramming enough pop muscularity into his two- and three-minute blasts to infuse this genre with the life it possessed in its 70s heyday. "On the Table" makes use of flourishing ragtime piano, a regal trumpet emerges from the fragile tambourine and deep percussion of "The Cloud Prayer", and "The Town Halo"'s sinewy cello propels like a metallic fuzz bass with zero distortion.
On "Miracle Drug", rat-a-tat surf drums gain momentum when interlaced with brazen rock guitar licks and a quirky storyline: "He was tied to the bed with a miracle drug in one hand/ In the other, a great lost novel that, I understand, was returned with a stamp/ That said 'thank you for your interest, young man.'" Instead of Neko Case's swooping country intonations and general high-end foil, Newman harmonizes here with Sarah Wheeler, who adds exultant punctuation to the track's "So why all the history now?" refrain.
Not mere ear candy, The Slow Wonder's playful, often surrealistic libretto riffs on guilt and innocence, victorious defeat, secret agents, boring rich kids, small-town saviors and the onset of revelations. Newman's concerns rest more with relational discourse and struggles than bubblegum and flowers-- fitting for an artist whose press photos show him asleep with a copy of Foucault's Power/Knowledge. Amid the hard/soft tidal wave of "The Battle for Straight Time", Newman chirps in staccato, "O come sweet life, wash clean my hands/ The revolution has been left to chance/ This dawns on me every morning at about three."
Sounding a lot like a track by The New Pornographers, "On the Table" looks at justice as "the deal between the thieves and exits." When "Come Crash", a seemingly pure and dark love ballad enters the picture, it's more a sleepy love story written by J.G. Ballard than the wimpy sentiments of feckless and freckled romantic: "That's luck, she led, we should be dead/ We eyed the wreck. Good god, we said/ She plants one kiss, for the road, on my chest/ Sirens came after we left." In the Guided by Voices-inflected "35 in the Shade"-- perhaps the album's most metaphorically charged track-- Newman plays with Cleopatra and magicians in order to win an argument, all the while trying not to miss his ride home from a bar.
Although not much longer than an episode of Small Wonder, Newman has created a timeless document. These are soulful sing-alongs with grit, pop nuggets that hold up to hours of repeat play in humid bumper-to-bumper traffic, and ultimately, the sound of a great songwriter hitting his stride. | 2004-06-09T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2004-06-09T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Matador | June 9, 2004 | 8.8 | 0bee5f57-6122-4583-80ea-60798bf9c036 | Brandon Stosuy | https://pitchfork.com/staff/brandon-stosuy/ | null |
Swedish troubadour Kristian Matsson returns as a more confident vocalist and a more nuanced and effective songwriter. | Swedish troubadour Kristian Matsson returns as a more confident vocalist and a more nuanced and effective songwriter. | The Tallest Man on Earth: The Wild Hunt | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/14110-the-wild-hunt/ | The Wild Hunt | Pesky comparisons to Bob Dylan have dogged Kristian Matsson throughout his short career as the Tallest Man on Earth. In 2006, his self-titled EP introduced a singer with that familiar croak, a songwriter with a folk-revival revival sensibility, and a guitar player with an impressively agile fingerpicking style. The next year, his full-length debut, Shallow Grave, expanded nicely on those ideas, buffing away some of the rougher edges but emphasizing fully realized and beautifully evocative songs. The Wild Hunt, the second Tallest Man on Earth album and first for Dead Oceans, makes a few specific nods to Dylan at his most earnest and bare-- including a reference to "boots of Spanish leather" on "King of Spain". Ultimately, though, Matsson interprets Dylan, just as Dylan himself interpreted Guthrie. More to the point, Matsson translates him into the Scandinavian countryside, where he sings about changing seasons and quiet, lonely places far from cities. His lyrics are rough and often ragged, more concerned with evoking aching emotions than with making explicit sense. But that coded aspect only makes him sound more urgent, as if he's trying to convince you of something he couldn't possibly put into words.
As with previous albums, The Wild Hunt features mainly voice and guitar, and in this intimate, austere setting-- where the banjo on the title track sounds like an indulgence-- Matsson coaxes a wide range of colors from that limited palette, whether it's the testiness of "You're Going Back" or the exuberance of "King of Spain". His grounding in American Southern traditions is apparent: While not a blues musician per se, Matsson draws important lessons from the likes of Mississippi John Hurt and Bukka White by realizing that his guitar speaks as loudly and as clearly as he does.
His playing is sophisticated but never showy, alternating between spry picking and forceful strumming. Whether due to his tunings or his crisp production, there's something bright and expectant about his songs, so that even at his most forlorn, as on "Love Is All" or "The Drying of the Law [#script:http://pitchfork.com/media/backend/js/tiny_mce/themes/advanced/langs/en.js]|||||| ns", Matsson's heraldic guitar playing generates a certain major-key hopefulness that softly shades the songs. When he switches to an old and battered piano on the teen anthem "Kids on the Run", the effect is not diminished but amplified, as the instrument reverberates uneasily. It's an unexpected moment that colors everything that came before it and paints Matsson as a distinctive and singular artist.
As a singer, he has become much more confident and capable, using that wily, deceptively limited croak with greater nuance and subtlety. The hiccup hook on "Love Is All" sounds like a joyful noise despite the song's tentative tone, and the rawness of his vocals lends gravity to the accusations of "You're Going Back". On the other hand, Matsson sounds warmly generous on "Troubles Will Be Gone" when he sings, "The day is never done, still there's a light on where you sleep, so I hope someday your troubles will be gone." Matsson is both a romantic and a realist, and on The Wild Hunt, he uses the barest of pop-folk settings to give mundane moments-- another break-up, another tour, another change of season, another Dylan comparison-- a grandeur so disproportional that it's difficult not to identify and sympathize with him. | 2010-04-15T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2010-04-15T02:00:00.000-04:00 | Folk/Country | Dead Oceans | April 15, 2010 | 8.5 | 0bf12f1f-d09e-46ac-9bc1-458eda8e05ff | Stephen M. Deusner | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stephen-m. deusner/ | null |
Orlando emo outfit You Blew It! know their strengths. They've committed to making reverent crossover-emo and their new EP Pioneer of Nothing is their most accessible work to date. | Orlando emo outfit You Blew It! know their strengths. They've committed to making reverent crossover-emo and their new EP Pioneer of Nothing is their most accessible work to date. | You Blew It!: Pioneer of Nothing EP | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/20250-pioneer-of-nothing-ep/ | Pioneer of Nothing EP | You Blew It! describe their genre as "1999", and Keep Doing What You’re Doing was a highly enjoyable, high-fidelity rendering of pre-2K indie/emo overlap—airing grievances with agitated, shout-along hooks one minute, begging to kiss and make up over swooning arpeggios the next. As the first major release from emo’s new wave in 2014, the Orlando band’s sophomore LP made a strong case for their scene’s staying power. It did not, however, set the tone for the rest of a year where the genre reclaimed and celebrated its most strident and abrasive qualities, as if to scour away every last dollop of guyliner.
Whereas You Blew It! have dutifully and enthusiastically embraced opportunity to become the revitalized Jade Tree’s most notable signing to date, emo’s official 2014 Hall of Fame inductions (American Football, Mineral, Jawbreaker) all imploded on the verge of their respective breakthroughs. You Blew It!’s affability made them an anomaly even amongst their more challenging, politicized peers—instead of making divisive, experimental spoken-word post-rock, You Blew It! made an EP of Weezer covers. Christian Holden of the Hotelier made brazen pleas for understanding of gender identity and mental health, Tanner Jones got drunk on the Harry Potter ride at Universal Studios. You get the idea. But all this means is that You Blew It! know their strengths—they’re committed to making accessible, reverent crossover-emo and their new EP Pioneer of Nothing is their most committed, accessible and reverent work to date.
It’s also their warmest work yet, and none of this should be surprising. Despite the new label and its brevity, Pioneer of Nothing isn’t actually the quintessential "transitional EP," but more of an arrival, since Keep Doing What You’re Doing was already a transitional album. "Match & Tinder" and "Award of the Year Award" began that record with an electrifying blue streak which effectively ended their adolescent period started on Grow Up, Dude. Five minutes in, they’d already moved on to the record’s core, softie mixtape tentpoles like "Strong Island", "House Address" and "Better to Best", which showcased Jones’ pliable lower register and the most luxurious and luminous guitars in modern emo. This is the only kind of You Blew It! that shows up on Pioneer of Nothing.
And they sound like peers of the late-'90s greats rather than students on the brilliant "Lanai". It’s the kind of masterful accomplishment that can be obscured by the fact that their name is You Blew It!, the casual intricacy and harmonic beauty of American Football and the instantly nostalgic, amber glow of Sunny Day Real Estate’s How It Feels to Be Something On adding textural counterpoint to a Clarity-worthy, gooey pop center. But there’s a bitter edge to the lyrics that carries over from Keep Doing What You’re Doing as Jones expresses another disappointment in a friend who hasn’t moved on—"Don’t be cold/ I couldn’t think of anything less cool/ Than your Saturdays talking trash." "Lanai" is a love song to the music that moves him, but also Jones writing a love song to a more positive version of himself.
The "whoa’s" return on "Bedside Manor", a show-closing, slow-climb ballad that’s been concentrated into a three-minute anthem. "Your Side" follows as Pioneer's most revelatory moment, albeit as the first time in a while that You Blew It!’s ambitions can exceed their reach. Jones has dispatched his bristled higher register and proven he can sing. But there’s a difference between carrying a tune and carrying a song, and he’s not quite up to it here; as a nearly a cappella lament about the emptiness of the bar scene, it’s Brand New’s "Me vs. Maradona vs. Elvis" that can’t quite go there, and deliver the necessary vocal, lyrical or musical catharsis.
In a way, the near-miss of "Your Side" works in the favor of Pioneer of Nothing; otherwise, it might be too promising in a literal sense, giving every to reason to assume You Blew It!’s next album will likely exactly sound like this. Which would raise the question of why they wouldn’t just save "Lanai" and "Bedside Manor" for a record that has excellent odds of being the properly worthy Nothing Feels Good follow-up the Promise Ring never delivered to Jade Tree in light of Very Emergency’s cloying pop-rock and leaping to Anti- for their lush, heartbreaking and misunderstood swan song Wood/Water. Judging by the superlative extramusical qualities You Blew It! continue to demonstrate on Pioneer of Nothing—industriousness, transparency, a lack of hang-ups about the e-word—it stands to reason that they'll let us know their next step when the time comes and that it'll come soon. | 2015-02-12T01:00:03.000-05:00 | 2015-02-12T01:00:03.000-05:00 | Rock | Jade Tree | February 12, 2015 | 6.7 | 0bf84423-7944-473d-b98a-5670318258dc | Ian Cohen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ian-cohen/ | null |
UK quartet follows 2008's fidgety, impulsive baroque-rock debut, Limbo, Panto, with an album that refashions them as a steely art-funk outfit. | UK quartet follows 2008's fidgety, impulsive baroque-rock debut, Limbo, Panto, with an album that refashions them as a steely art-funk outfit. | Wild Beasts: Two Dancers | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/13382-two-dancers/ | Two Dancers | In a day where Hot Topic peddles guyliner to millions of male teenage mallrats, it's hard to imagine a time when glam-rock was truly shocking. But there remains one gender-bending device whose provocative, polarizing power remains undiminished: the falsetto-- a sound that tends to elicit both laughter and skepticism, if not outright hostility. Still, it remains a highly effective weapon in the endless war against safe, overly earnest indie-- and few bands brandish it so wantonly as UK art-pop quartet Wild Beasts.
On the band's striking 2008 debut, Limbo, Panto, frontman Hayden Thorpe unleashed his shrill, glass-shattering shrieks as a means to project both the vulnerability and depravity of his sexually frustrated protagonists, and he didn't care if he went hoarse in the process (you can practically hear his vocal cords disintegrate on the galloping single "Brave Bulging Buoyant Clairvoyants"). Perhaps as a means to avoid chronic laryngitis, on follow-up Two Dancers he's deferring more frequently to bassist Tom Fleming, a deeper-voiced foil in the Nick Cave crooner mold. But that's just a surface indication of the transformation Wild Beasts have undergone in the past year-- in contrast to the first album's fidgety, impulsive baroque'n'roll, Two Dancers sees Wild Beasts refashioned as a steely art-funk outfit that's no less alluring in its austerity.
Granted, some old horny habits die hard-- we're not two verses into album opener "The Fun Powder Plot" before Thorpe hollers, "This is a booty call! My boot, my boot, my boot, my boot up your asshole." But his words feel less outrageous and much more ominous when set against the song's metronomic groove and melancholic jangle-- pulse-tempering measures that keep the cheekiness in check. Likewise, first single "Hooting and Howling" benefits from a patient, linear build that transforms the song from a quiet trill into a heart-racing anthem, with Thorpe's circular vocal and guitar lines burrowing the melody well into memory before the first chorus is out.
Fans of Limbo, Panto's chandelier-swinging flamboyance may be less enthused with Two Dancers' more organized presentation, but it allows Wild Beasts to better achieve their singular balance of aristocracy and anarchy: the debonair funk of "We Still Got the Taste Dancin' on Our Tongues" speaks of class warfare under the serious moonlight ("Us kids are cold and cagey rattling around the town/ Scaring the oldies into their dressing gowns/ As the dribbling dogs howl"), while the two-part title track suite finds Fleming sharing a grim, first-person account of some horrible attack before the song erupts in a tribal, psychedelic surge. He could very well be talking about a public stoning in the 15th century or a gang rape from last week-- and it's not even entirely clear if he's singing from a male or female perspective-- but the lack of specificity makes the transgressions described all the more unsettling, as if they could happen to anyone.
Wild Beasts certainly aren't the first rock band to stand up society's dregs and outcasts, but few others immortalize them on such a wondrous, mythic scale. And in the grand "This Is Our Lot"-- the sort of song everyone wants Radiohead's perpetually imminent "return to rock" to sound like-- we quite literally have an anthem for the ages. Over top a rubbery bassline and shimmering guitar riff, Thorpe tips his tipple to the enduring passion of youth: "We find ourselves dancing late/ Like young reprobates/ By the milky light of the mighty moon/ Find someone to nuzzle you/ And waltz from the room." Of course, come sunrise, those kids will have to clean themselves up and get to work on time. And perhaps the more accessible approach of Two Dancers suggests a greater willingness on Wild Beasts' part to interact with the straight world. But for them, every night is still a full moon-- and when it comes, Thorpe will be ready to howl. | 2009-08-31T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2009-08-31T02:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Domino | August 31, 2009 | 8.4 | 0bf8aba4-870d-4155-9b99-e9f8bf83237c | Stuart Berman | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stuart-berman/ | null |
The New York rapper’s skill and authority are so strong on his latest project it’s like listening to a director’s commentary without ever seeing the movie. It is also marred by his retrograde homophobia. | The New York rapper’s skill and authority are so strong on his latest project it’s like listening to a director’s commentary without ever seeing the movie. It is also marred by his retrograde homophobia. | Roc Marciano: Behold a Dark Horse | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/roc-marciano-behold-a-dark-horse/ | Behold a Dark Horse | Roc Marciano is an artist of humble beginnings who, by will and wit, became one of New York’s finest shit-talking diarists. Almost 10 years after getting signed by Busta Rhymes and set aside in nearly the same breath, he self-produced his stark solo debut. And now, eight years after that, he is a cornerstone in that stark space, with a large enough following to sell digital albums for $30 a pop exclusively on his website. The tale of a Flipmode Squad cast-off becoming one of the most accomplished independent rappers nearly two decades later is as captivating a story as anything that happens in his songs. He has sometimes even tied his unlikely, industry-subverting success story into his imaginative street epics (“Fuck an A&R, I can do way more with an AR,” he brags on “1000 Deaths”). Behold a Dark Horse, his second album of the year following the sequel RR2: The Bitter Dose, folds his two worlds into one. His ability to make listeners see as he sees is second to none.
Marciano doesn’t ever deviate from his formula and he’s had plenty of time to refine the model since 2010’s cult classic Marcberg. But any notion that hearing one Roc Marciano album is like hearing them all is put to rest with Behold a Dark Horse. Nearly 20 years into his career, with his lane more crowded than ever, Marci has made his raps sharper, let his flows whisk through richer samples, and deepened his commitment to the character he plays. “Nobody’s perfect but I’m close/I can’t be cloned, when I was made: after, they broke the mold/It was written in stone,” he raps on a song called “Fabio.”
The same steeliness that powered previous records still powers Dark Horse, but there is a new momentum that props it up as something to behold. Marci has spent much of the ’10s fine-tuning his twisting technique and blurring the lines between throwback pimp iconography and gritty mafioso rap. But now that his legacy is preserved, he’s stepped out of the shadows a bit. Things are less grainy. Marciano (again) produces the majority of the beats here himself, but he laces some of his crispest sample work without losing that stained, cinematic quality, as if he’s restoring an old spool of film to digital. Beats from Q-Tip, the Alchemist, Animoss, and more are slotted in to add just a touch of color. The choicest among them is the Q-Tip-produced closer “Consigliere,” with its sweeping strings and dusty drums, and Marci lets it wash over him as he raps, “You know the forte: Ralph Lauren drawers on but fuck the horseplay/Got sauce for days; you got poor taste.”
The beats are foreboding and gorgeous all at once, but it’s the ways Roc Marciano frames himself inside them that makes Behold a Dark Horse so interesting, how his singular syntax reveals his mind. His Aussie bitch is double jointed and the double barrel joint is pointed at your boyfriend (“Sampson & Delilah”). He’s Huey Newton in the king’s wicker chair with the pistol near and his face is chiseled in the silverware, with care (“Amethyst”). His talk of murder and mayhem and moneymen seems almost mythic. He raps about himself the way other rappers lionize Escobar.
There are many MCs that now occupy the same space in our imagination that Marci once dominated at the turn of the decade. Plenty of these tri-state technicians have similar skill sets. But Ka is never this bold, Westside Gunn never this unflustered, Mach-Hommy isn’t nearly as Machiavellian. Marci’s less animated than Action Bronson but more quotable. He is so blasé reenacting the fanciful excursions in his songs that it makes them feel realer and more thrilling.
The only time Roc Marciano pulls the listener out of his world is when he is reiterating his long-held homophobic worldview. He has an extensive history of homophobic lyrics—not just slurs but also hate speech—across his entire catalog and as recently as RR2: The Bitter Dose. This pattern of behavior has largely gone ignored in the wake of his tremendous skill. But he brings it up so often on Dark Horse, and some of the lyrics are so off-putting, that it almost feels like a secondary mandate. Here’s a guy who is among the most fastidious and cultured street writers of an era still stuck in the stone ages on basic rights. It follows that a ’90s rap purist would hold such a retrograde belief; there is no place for it, in our world or his, and it sullies the experience of the album. For a rapper obsessed with relishing his own good taste and beguiling listeners into his densely packed domain, it’s not just inelegant or distasteful, it’s uninviting and obtuse.
These moments are frequent enough to draw the eye to the seams of Roc Marciano’s illusion on Behold a Dark Horse in what is an otherwise mesmerizing character study. His greatest trick is drawing you in so close that you lose the plot. He fits so much scenery, so much detail, into his frame of vision that anything outside the scope is extraneous. It’s like listening to a director’s commentary without seeing the movie.
Such a bizarre framework only works if your perspective is more powerful than the scenes you’re shooting, and Roc Marciano is among the best at positioning himself as the only reliable narrator. Marci never really makes a case for where his authority comes from or why it goes unquestioned, and he doesn’t have to. His rapping is the case. He strings together multis with a casualness that insinuates and even sells the power dynamics he cites. “You still a child/You need to climb down from the treehouse/Still, even then, we not playing on even ground,” he snarls. Behold a Dark Horse is the first time Roc Marciano feels as in control as he says he is on record, for better and worse. | 2018-09-28T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-09-28T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Marci Enterprises | September 28, 2018 | 7.1 | 0bf901af-a117-4e14-808d-7f7b750e545a | Sheldon Pearce | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sheldon-pearce/ | |
The last Songs: Ohia album I heard was Ghost Tropic. That was the perfect\n\ name for its haunted post-folk ... | The last Songs: Ohia album I heard was Ghost Tropic. That was the perfect\n\ name for its haunted post-folk ... | Songs: Ohia: Didn't It Rain | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/7338-didnt-it-rain/ | Didn't It Rain | The last Songs: Ohia album I heard was Ghost Tropic. That was the perfect name for its haunted post-folk, what with the sharp guitar chords, the percussion rumbling like uncontrollable spirits and Jason Molina's disconsolate wail. But each of his works as Songs: Ohia is a different beast, taking shape around the group of musicians he's currently working with. So I was a bit hesitant when I heard about the new album, which was recorded in Philadelphia with Jim Krewson and Jennie Benford of Jim and Jennie and the Pinetops, amongst other musicians. I wanted more of the Ghost Tropic sound-- a fractured structure just this side of collapse-- but here they were recording songs live in one take, with no overdubs, and garnering comparisons to the warmth of the Muscle Shoals Studio recordings during the 1970s.
Within one listen, Didn't It Rain convinced me that it was worth paying attention to its own terms. Songs: Ohia's compositions have a strange way of warping time for the listener. How else could the opening title track slip by me after nearly eight minutes? It begins in a slow progression of acoustic chords, and almost immediately Molina is singing about the eye of the storm, and those caught under its downpour. The chorus wells up with trilling guitar notes and Jennie Benford providing backing vocals, and Molina warns, "If you think you got it/ They're gonna beat it out of you/ Through work and debt." Calling a recording "intimate" can be cliché, but I swear you can practically hear the floorboards creaking. The song swells and sighs for minutes like a vintage Neil Young ballad, until right near the end when Molina asks the question in the song title.
I thought that Didn't It Rain might be more light of heart, like some of the Palace records Songs: Ohia is often compared to. In the previous song, Molina asks the group audibly to bring it back for another chorus, and it doesn't detract from the music at all. But it seems his tropical depression has lingered, despite titles like "Steve Albini's Blues" and "Cross the Road, Molina." The former lopes along deliberately, the pace set by banjo-like plinks and made more tense by the relative silence that pervades. Molina, Benford and Krewson join together to sing, "See its sulfury shine/ See the big city moon/ 'Tween the radio tower/ 'Tween the big diesel rigs." Reviewers often mention Molina's blue-collar background, but I'm not going to try to prove anyone's cred. Someone (probably Krewson) howls the line "see the big city moon" again, and the last-dime desperation in his twangy voice is authenticity enough.
There's a shared imagery that becomes evident, especially on "Ring the Bell" and "Cross the Road, Molina," two songs in the middle of the album that flow together as a conceptual piece. It's here that Molina might seem too far gone in gloom, as he begs, "Show us how bad we're outnumbered," but the compositions never reach the Gormenghastly nature of "apocalyptic folk" groups like Death in June. There's a bleak beauty in the arc of the amped electric strings, and when the Chicago moon "swings like a blade," Molina may even be painting himself as the Andalusian dog. You can trace the lyrical themes: light, darkness, the moon, fire, Chicago. Those themes are evoked again on "Two Blue Lights," a brief blues piece about the light from a bus and the moon, about hell and your hometown. Is it the scraping sounds of the frets that make it so earthy and uplifting?
I'll throw my cards down now: "Blue Factory Flame" is a classic. Drum-kit percussion enters for the first time, setting a steady 4/4 frame as Molina asks, "When I die, put my bones in an empty street/ Bring a Coleman lantern and a radio/ A Cleveland game and a fishing pole." The black-hearted procession continues as he describes ghostly iron ore ships coming home, and climaxes in the refrain "paralyzed by emptiness." It's as apt a summary of depression's effects as I've heard, and the electric guitar emits a stark, weathered sort of sadness.
Musically, "Blue Chicago Moon" evokes more of that aged Rust Belt atmosphere, but Molina admits that you're not helpless when you're hunted by the blues, and he calls out over and over for you to "try to beat it, try to beat it." From the first song, it seems that Didn't It Rain is intended as a bulwark against sorrow, and that commitment appears again on this last track. The compositions here are elemental, filled with flame as well as steel and stone, and they tie Molina's native Ohio together with his current home, Chicago. In the process of recording another incredible album, he's discovered that light is most visible when it's flickering alone in the dark. | 2002-03-12T01:00:01.000-05:00 | 2002-03-12T01:00:01.000-05:00 | Rock | Secretly Canadian | March 12, 2002 | 8.4 | 0c075f25-9496-45a2-bc49-bee2ef9ee71e | Christopher Dare | https://pitchfork.com/staff/christopher-dare/ | null |
The Gizzard’s abundant crop of fall albums spans custom incidental music, nerdy compositional experiments, and one of the best front-to-back records in their catalog. | The Gizzard’s abundant crop of fall albums spans custom incidental music, nerdy compositional experiments, and one of the best front-to-back records in their catalog. | King Gizzard & the Lizard Wizard: Ice, Death, Planets, Lungs, Mushrooms and Lava | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/king-gizzard-and-the-lizard-wizard-ice-death-planets-lungs-mushrooms-and-lava-changes-laminated-denim/ | Ice, Death, Planets, Lungs, Mushrooms and Lava / Laminated Denim / Changes | Christmas came early this year for the Gizzhive. Beyond embarking on their first North American tour since the pandemic began, the ever-industrious King Gizzard & the Lizard Wizard gifted their faithful with three new records released over the course of four weeks this past October. These arrive a mere six months after the band’s most recent double album, which followed hot on the heels of another record, bringing their grand total of 2022 albums to five, matching the feat they first pulled off in 2017. At this point, being a King Gizzard fan is pretty much a full-time job.
You almost wonder if the Melbourne sextet is actively trying to corner the market: By displaying an equal facility with psychedelia, prog, garage-punk, jazz, kosmische musik, thrash metal, synth pop, and even rap, King Gizzard have essentially become the big-box one-stop for all your musical needs. And as anyone who’s braved Costco on a Saturday can tell you, an abundance of choice is liable to pull your attention in too many directions at once. The decision to unload a trio of records in near-tandem arguably does the greatest disservice to Ice, Death, Planets, Lungs, Mushrooms and Lava, which, if given more room to breathe as a standalone release, would more easily stick out as one of the best front-to-back records in the entire Gizzard catalog.
That may not seem obvious when you’re greeted by the album’s deceptively twee opener, “Mycelium,” a song so immersed in nerdy science-speak, it should come with a complementary head lamp. (Plenty of King Gizzard tunes make you want to take mushrooms; this one encourages you to study them, too.) But the song’s beach-bound vibe ultimately proves irresistible, its aquatic guitar lines, hiccuping reggae beats, and lustrous woodwinds enticing you to join the conga line even as main vocalists Stu Mackenzie and Ambrose Kenny-Smith start analyzing the more grotesque byproducts of human-fungi interactions. And “Mycelium” is a bellwether of more dramatic mutations to come, as Ice, Death, Planets, Lungs, Mushrooms and Lava stakes its claim as the band’s most agitated yet fiercely funky record. The album title may read like a word-cloud summary of the Gizzard’s favorite lyrical topics, but its songs chart new paths to the outer cosmos without leaning on the usual motorik thrusters.
The question of whether or not King Gizzard are a jam band has stuck to this group like the scent of patchouli on a hemp poncho, and Ice, Death justifies the claims of both the yea and nay camps. Certainly, this is one of their loosest, most sprawling records, with almost every track exceeding seven minutes; on the other hand, even the most outré odysseys are less a product of improvisation than intricate arrangement. When the Afrobeat-steeped “Ice V” and the dizzying 13-minute showstopper “Hell’s Itch” settle into their fleet-footed grooves and start introducing new ideas every 16 bars, the effect is less like a band showing off their chops and more like rotating MCs chiming in with a few rhymes on a posse cut. And where past Gizzard epics have embraced a racetrack construction, whipping in and out of recurring motifs at regular intervals, the mischievous “Magma” is built more like a spiral staircase, its guitar accents and frisky rhythms swirling skyward en route to the cataclysmic, wah-wah-splattered finale. Its sequel “Lava” works up to similarly awesome heights, then busts through the ash clouds to reveal a ray of hope. “The volcano is death, the lava is death/Death is life! The lava is life!” Mackenzie repeats with nursery-rhyme glee, summing up the cycle of life that undergirds King Gizzard’s usual apocalyptic premonitions: Our species may be fucked, but the planet will be reborn.
If Ice, Death is an exploratory record that sounds like it was made with little regard for time, Laminated Denim has its eye on the clock. The record comprises two extended pieces of exactly 15 minutes each—i.e., the precise length of the intermissions during the Gizzard’s three-hour sets at Red Rocks Amphitheater, where the tracks debuted over the PA on October 10 and 11. The intermission-soundtrack concept dates back to when those shows were first booked for May 2020, at which point the band recorded two works—the amorphous, electro-shocked instrumental “Timeland” and the cosmic-rock collage “Smoke & Mirrors”—for the occasion. After the concerts were postponed, the band released the unused pieces as this year’s Made in Timeland mini-LP. But once the Red Rocks dates were rescheduled for October, the band suddenly needed new intermission music. Enter Laminated Denim, an anagram of Made in Timeland that also reflects the musical relationship between the two records: Though they share the same temporal parameters, the contents within have been completely reimagined.
In contrast to Made in Timeland’s free-flowing techno doodles, Laminated Denim gives us two linear, conventionally structured, vocal-driven songs that carve out their own lane in the Gizzard discography, somewhere between the ceaseless propulsion of their signature strobe-lit rock-outs and the blissful melodicism that defines their occasional forays into pastoral whimsy. For much of its runtime, first track “The Land Before Timeland” casually choogles along like the Allman Brothers’ “Jessica” as produced by Conny Plank, setting its twinned-lead guitar noodling to a steady, vacuum-sealed drumbeat that stays locked in for the long haul. But no matter how far out it ventures, “The Land Before Timeland” never loses sight of its practical purpose as intermission music: The song comes equipped with a two-minute warning, turning darker and freakier in the home stretch as if to pressure the Red Rocks restroom crowd to piss faster and get back to their seats. The following “Hypertension” (pronounced by Mackenzie as “hyper-ten-shee-yun” in perfectly Liamesque fashion) builds off that unsettled mood, introducing itself as a more restless “Street Spirit” and sustaining that agitated energy for its entire run, culminating in an ascending staccato guitar solo that plays like the climax to “Marquee Moon” at warp speed. Even when removed from their site-specific function, the two pieces on Laminated Denim stay true to their original mission: They each make 15 minutes go by in a breeze.
The group’s final October offering, Changes, is likewise an attempt to revive a previously shelved concept: in this case, a specific chord progression that recurs throughout all seven tracks in different contexts. The band reportedly began working on Changes during the high season of 2017, but never got around to finishing the album because there were always other albums to finish. The end result doesn’t quite resemble a painstaking magnum opus: Changes is the most subdued and modest record of the Gizzard’s October harvest. The album makes its most audacious statement with the 13-minute overture “Change,” which both introduces the woozy Wurlitzer motifs that appear throughout the record and plants seeds for the many forms they’ll take over its duration. Propelled by sun-kissed keyboard melodies, jazz-bar upright bass, and jaunty summertime-stroll backbeats, this constantly shapeshifting track taps into the Gizzard’s inner Steely Dan, imagining an alternate ’70s where Fagen and Becker appealed to acid-eating prog-heads instead of cocaine yuppies.
At times, the attempt to build new songs out of the same chord progression feels less like a bold challenge than a cheeky looky-here: Changes’ second track “Hate Dancin’” seems like it easily could’ve been absorbed into the multi-sectional sprawl of “Change,” as it simply adds a new vocal melody atop the established rhythm bed, organizing its predecessor’s mood-board disarray into a compact three-minute pop song. But on “Astroturf,” those common chords function as a springboard into a twitchy funk workout bolstered by sinister brass stabs—and just when you think Mackenzie is going to start shredding, the band drops in a truly badass flute solo instead. In “Gondii,” we’re treated to the album’s most radical recontextualization, as those familiar progressions get embedded into a synth-powered rocker that transports us far beyond the album’s retro-’70s soul-jazz milieu. “Gondii” is named for the highly transmittable parasite commonly found in cats that, in extreme cases, can cause brain damage in humans and trick rodents into cozying up to their feline predators. In the album’s most inspired moments, the recurring refrains heard on Changes function in a similar way, subtly worming their way into the songs and causing the host to behave in unexpected ways. | 2022-12-21T00:01:00.000-05:00 | 2022-12-21T00:01:00.000-05:00 | Rock | null | December 21, 2022 | 8.1 | 0c0c7aa4-3a9d-4738-80f5-d1d0143d7f3e | Stuart Berman | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stuart-berman/ | |
Kompakt's dependable compilation series, again curated by Wolfgang Voigt, returns with another balm for the post-winter blues. | Kompakt's dependable compilation series, again curated by Wolfgang Voigt, returns with another balm for the post-winter blues. | Various Artists: Pop Ambient 2009 | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/12864-pop-ambient-2009/ | Pop Ambient 2009 | Ah, the Pop Ambient compilation. So reliable, so consistent, you could almost set your watch to the darn thing. Every year, it shows up around the same time with those same Photoshopped flowers. It features the same loose collection of artists (Klimek's back!) who share the same central aim: to rub some ointment on your post-winter blues with the gentle drifts and glides fans of the series have come to expect. The comp is rarely astounding and at the same time, never really disappointing. With a few minor tweaks to their time-tested formula and a couple fresh faces onboard, Kompakt's 2009 installment of its annual ambient-techno roundup is no different.
As he's done in the past, label head Wolfgang Voigt serves as the set's curator. Perhaps encouraged by the warm reception to his (excellent) Nah Und Fern boxset from last year, the Gas mastermind also contributes a handful of new songs to PA09. Sadly they're not his finest. Under his Mint moniker, Voigt presents "Hindemith", a relatively ho-hum concoction of spare piano, horns, and his signature vapor-like hiss. He teams up with longtime pal Jörg Burger for a pair of tracks: a pleasant but mostly forgettable remix of Jürgen Paape's "Ausklang" and "Frieden", a Burger/Voigt original that's easily the best of his three offerings. With deep basslines and active, echoing synths, it's equally soothing and dynamic, just what you want out of a Pop Ambient cut.
In addition to PA mainstays such as Andrew Thomas, Voigt and co. invite some new collaborators into the mix this year, and the album's prime cuts are split between its veterans and rookies. Popnoname (real name Jens Uwe Beyer), a producer who honed his skills on these compilations before venturing into solo material, offers once such standout in "Nightliner". He dunks a mild bass-guitar thump into a warm noise bath to coax an astral, floating quality from the track; the result is a delicious dose of auditory Percocet. Newcomers the Fun Years-- an intriguing inclusion as a guitar-based outfit-- also manage a winner with "I Am Speaking Through Barbara". A sort of post-rock/shoegaze hybrid, the song's organic textures offer satisfying contrast to the digital sounds elsewhere.
Other stretches of PA09 illustrate the series' gradual shift towards the orchestral, a trend that has characterized the past several entries and frustrated some longtime listeners. Such gripes are easy to understand, since a degree of propulsion (some beats here and there) is what sets ambient techno apart from, say, modern classical. That distinction is largely ignored on the disc's front half, though, where Klimek opens with "True Enemies & False Friends (Yesteryears Suite)", a regal-sounding brasswind piece before French composer Sylvain Chauveau drops two avant-classical numbers-- odd additions, since Chauveau's songs are a few years old (dating back to his 2007 Nuage soundtrack) and in a way represent a style that some simply aren't looking for from Pop Ambient.
Anyone bummed by these inclusions could claim that the abundance of non-Kompakt artists included here points to a lack of fresh ideas from the label, and that may be the case. Purists might even argue the venerated imprint's best days are behind it, and, indeed, one listen to any of the four Gas LPs makes many of PA09's tracks feel minor-league by comparison. But Voigt's interest in adjacent styles and willingness to draw from outside his own roster suggests to me that he's still engaged in the form and curious about what his past creations have wrought. And with a few minor exceptions (most notably the Field in 2007), Pop Ambient historically hasn't been the launching pad for Kompakt's hot new acts-- that's what the Total compilations are for. Instead, the series is more of a perennial thank-you note sent to a niche fanbase. If you've made it this far into my review, chances are you're one of the folks who received (and appreciated) the last missive, as you will this one and the next. | 2009-04-02T02:00:04.000-04:00 | 2009-04-02T02:00:04.000-04:00 | null | Kompakt | April 2, 2009 | 6.4 | 0c0f8350-8c20-48f0-a092-7833bc1c3554 | Joe Colly | https://pitchfork.com/staff/joe-colly/ | null |
Twin Shadow's consistently compelling and refreshing debut nods to 80s new wave but doesn't forget the songwriting; Grizzly Bear's Chris Taylor produces. | Twin Shadow's consistently compelling and refreshing debut nods to 80s new wave but doesn't forget the songwriting; Grizzly Bear's Chris Taylor produces. | Twin Shadow: Forget | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/14675-forget/ | Forget | George Lewis, Jr.'s self-described bizarre and lonely childhood forms the backdrop for his work as Twin Shadow, and he uses the sounds of the past as a foundation. But while the 26-year-old Brooklynite's music is steeped in 1980s new wave-- he sometimes takes on Morrissey's vocal tone and phrasing, and threads of British bands like Echo and the Bunnymen and Depeche Mode run through his songs-- Lewis does well by this much-revisited era. Simplicity is part of what carries it over. On Forget, his debut full-length, he mostly sticks with a small collection of synth sounds-- strings, organ, piano, and brass-- along with electric guitar and drum machine. The instruments are clean, shimmery, and carefully placed. With Grizzly Bear's Chris Taylor handling production, this limited palette proves to be more than enough to work with, and each song is immediately distinguishable from the others. Lewis' execution is immaculate, and he manages to make these familiar sounds into something that sounds refreshing and even dazzling.
The hotel-room production is ideally suited to the subject matter, matching the charged emotions of the lyrics. "Yellow Balloon" is full of vignettes from youth-- "If you hear your mama calling/ Get away from me/ Secret handshakes/ The swimming hole"-- and the icy atmosphere, along with a creepy piano line, suggests that these memories aren't necessarily good ones. On another standout, "Tether Beat", a ghostlike synth ranges around in the lower registers as Lewis asks over and over, "Does your heart still beat?" Album highlight "Castles in the Snow" creates a metaphor from the imagery of the title, using sharp hi-hats, handclaps, piercing strings, and bird-like vocal calls to show that everything the narrator touches "turns cold." Tracks like these create a mood that is nostalgic, regretful, and even sinister.
Roughly half the album consists of these slower, dreamier turns; the other half is faster paced and thus better tailored to the live setting (or a high school dance). On these songs, Lewis tackles the same broad subject of love-- forbidden crushes, dance floor flirtations, serious relationships-- with the same overall aesthetic. But he abandons menace in favor of sweetness: the bass on "Shooting Holes" and "When We're Dancing" thumps out locomotive disco beats; pretty flutes and strings accent the excellent dance floor saga "I Can't Wait"; and the sparkling synths on closer "Forget" create a lulling slow dance for Lewis' loaded refrain, "They'll give us so much to forget." Here, Lewis' lyrics are more narrative and romantic, but they're no less witty or poetic.
Taken whole, Forget feels undeniably of the moment, fitting in nicely with the craftsmanship of 80s pop revivalists like the Pains of Being Pure at Heart, Lewis' labelmate Class Actress, and, to some degree, the xx. And like the best of this wave, the album also has a function beyond its danceable beats and electronic fireworks: It is sophisticated enough to withstand close, repeated listening. The songs may be catchy, but their intricacy and thoughtful storytelling makes them stick. And for its impressive sonic sheen, the album's skillful restraint makes it sound better with every spin. Instead of merely evoking an established style, Lewis' songs feel honest and straightforward, so the new wave glances are a vehicle for the songwriting rather than the whole point. | 2010-10-04T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2010-10-04T02:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | 4AD / Terrible | October 4, 2010 | 8.4 | 0c0fe2be-6931-470c-8133-ae20b7c5f4ec | Pitchfork | null |
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Shelved by Elektra Records—ostensibly due to the album's incendiary artwork—less than a month before it was set to be in stores, KMD's Black Bastards is essentially MF DOOM's origin story. It is often hailed as the best rap album that you've never heard. | Shelved by Elektra Records—ostensibly due to the album's incendiary artwork—less than a month before it was set to be in stores, KMD's Black Bastards is essentially MF DOOM's origin story. It is often hailed as the best rap album that you've never heard. | KMD: Black Bastards | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/20382-black-bastards/ | Black Bastards | KMD's Black Bastards (sometimes stylized as Bl_ck B_st_rds) has become one of the more storied albums in hip-hop, and with good reason—its route to consumer ears was at first barred, then clandestine, then piecemeal and underground. But before the album was even semi-properly released, it, by all accounts, birthed MF DOOM, who is perhaps the most revered, enigmatic popular underground rapper of the past twenty years. It's not conjecture or a stretch to say that the Black Bastards story is DOOM's origin story, and without it there's no Madvillainy, no Special Herbs, no reason for Mos Def to make seven cover videos, no metal-faced Villain getting barred from all bars and kicked out the Carvel.
Originally scheduled for a 1994 release, Black Bastards was shelved by Elektra Records—ostensibly due to the album's incendiary and controversial artwork—less than a month before it was set to be in stores. The shuttling itself was reportedly low on ceremony and dialogue, but the conversation around the album was not. Billboard columnists Terri Rossi and Havelock Nelson had taken offense to the Black Bastards project in separate columns; The Source magazine editor Jon Shecter, meanwhile, rebutted with an editorial titled "Corporate Hysteria", writing, "[A]s we've seen over the years, it doesn't take much for the bottom-line bigwigs of big business to flip on hip-hop. It seems inevitable that the raw honesty of many rap records would offend enough of mainstream America to put the product at odds with the company selling it."
Elektra's decision was based in both fiscal and political realities. Much like Epic Records has abandoned Bobby Shmurda in wake of their sister company Sony Pictures Entertainment's email hack, Elektra washed their hands of KMD in no small part because of their sister label and distributor's troubles. Warner Bros. had already suffered a stinging blow in 1992, when shareholders voted to remove Ice-T's "Cop Killer" from his metal side-project Body Count after protracted finger-pointing and naysaying from then-President George H. W. Bush, Vice President Dan Quayle, and co-founder of the Parents Music Resource Center (and future Second Lady) Tipper Gore. This was the struggle that birthed the current version of the black-and-white Parental Advisory label; one that included Dan Quayle pressuring Time Warner to pull 2Pacalypse Now off shelves.
The shelving was the second blow that the group would suffer. A year before, KMD—which had whittled down to a duo, losing Onyx The Birthstone Kid, who performed on their masterful 1991 debut, Mr. Hood—had effectively ceased to exist as a group when Dingilizwe Dumile, aka DJ Subroc, was struck by a car and killed while crossing the Long Island Expressway. Subroc's brother, Daniel Dumile—then known as Zev Love X, now known as MF DOOM—was left to finish the album. It was these twin tragedies that led to Daniel becoming the man in the iron mask; and it's the legend that defines Black Bastards, which is now getting its most glamorous re-release yet, some twenty-one years later.
Given the backstory, it's no wonder that Black Bastards is being treated like a plot device from the Star Wars reboot. This latest reissue fetishizes the album to the extreme—it's a children's pop-up book. (Rare advance copies and copies of copies have existed since the '90s; in 2001 and 2008, it was made available, respectively by Sub Verse and DOOM's own Metalface Records, the latter who is also responsible for this version.) Black Bastards is often hailed as the best rap album that you've never heard, and this newest reintroduction is not likely to change that: It's targeted exclusively towards collectors and archivists—most of whom would already have the music.
Still, it's apropos, given KMD's tone—they released their first album as teenagers and it featured wide-eyed gazes on heady topics, all delivered with the help of excerpts from foreign language tapes, children's audios, Malcolm X and "Sesame Street" characters.
Mr. Hood was whimsical and pointed and prescient—"Bananapeel Blues" hosted a spoken-word mediation on race with a sped-up Gil Scott-Heron sample (from "H2Ogate Blues": "How much more evidence do the citizens need?") that is still embarrassingly poignant today when the cultural spectacle of Black men being murdered by police has become social media snuff porn.
But Black Bastards was so much more and less than its predecessor. It was always a very good record, a promising one—but not a great one. Musically, it sounds like a mid-'90s rap record—copious samples of jazz and R&B over big, dirty drums. It's more angry and less fun that what came before it, but also more intimate and less expansive. Where Mr. Hood focused on the big themes out there, Black Bastards turned inward, dealing with the personal coming-of-age revelations. It's largely the story of two devout followers of Dr. York's Nuwaubianism struggling with the vices of the carnal world. "Sweet Premium Wine" is about their newfound love of alcohol—"I don't drink, I guzzle 'til I'm distorted." On "Contact Blitt", they treat smoking weed the way "Game of Thrones" treats magic— something wondrous but common, like dragons.
At the time of Black Bastards, corporate rap was still in its infancy, and the music industry was deeply entrenched as a trickle-down gerontocracy, one where the voices of power were largely disconnected from the street-level youth that it fed upon. Harder songs on the album, like "Get-U-Now" and "Gimme!", can be seen not only as a response to self and label expectations, but also a document of rap's darkening tone and the rites of passage that both entail. When the album deals with women on "Plumskinzz", it's deeply lascivious: "Damned, I wouldn't want my plum to turn prune/ Unless it be all that, be all that/ It won't matter 'cause black sweet ones come fatter/ I'm kinda, kinda picky with my fruit mix." It's a far cry from the jingly innocence of Mr. Hood's "Peach Fuzz" and as genuinely awkward as burgeoning sexual awareness.
Despite the album's title and artwork, Black Bastards is much less direct about racial politics than Mr. Hood. Where Mr. Hood was incisive and righteous, Black Bastards is searching and confused.
None of this makes it any less worthy of a listen—there's something that's still very real and new about hearing the group move through their emotional spaces. Moreso than listening to the birth of MF DOOM, it's the death of KMD, not just the group, but of both of the guys who made Mr. Hood. And for all of its darkness, there's the unbridled brightness of growing artists still exploring the limits of their medium and textures of their own voices. There's a glee in Subroc's voice when he begins rapping on "It Sounded Like a Roc!": "It's my thing/ Yo, it's my thing/ The way I swing, not even an orangutan can hang/ On my ding! ding!/ Saved by the bell rang/ I talk, yell, whisper, mumble street slang." It's like wacky Nicki Minaj meets To Pimp a Butterfly and it's the kind of rap that just couldn't be released today. Or rather it can. But only in a pop-up book. | 2015-04-17T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2015-04-17T02:00:01.000-04:00 | Rap | Metalface | April 17, 2015 | 8.4 | 0c116fa6-8fd5-4f0c-aee8-c3867d084399 | kris ex | https://pitchfork.com/staff/kris-ex/ | 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 Daddy Yankee’s breakthrough album, the unforgettable year of “Gasolina,” and how the Puerto Rican rapper helped make reggaeton a global sensation. | 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 Daddy Yankee’s breakthrough album, the unforgettable year of “Gasolina,” and how the Puerto Rican rapper helped make reggaeton a global sensation. | Daddy Yankee: Barrio Fino | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/daddy-yankee-barrio-fino/ | Barrio Fino | Maybe you were at a basement party, grinding with a pimply crush in low-rise flare jeans and a belly button ring you couldn’t stop staring at. Maybe, if you were a little older, you were driving around your city with too many friends in the backseat. Maybe, if you were in the Caribbean, you were at a party de marquesina learning what your hips and ass could do. Maybe you heard it at a middle school dance and felt compelled to engage in the ritual of a preteen dancefloor tryst. Maybe you bought it as a ringtone for your brand new hot pink Motorola RAZR flip phone.
Maybe you were in East Harlem, or Humboldt Park, or Santurce, or a suburban strip mall town in middle America. No matter where you lived, there’s a strong chance that at some point between 2004 and 2005, you heard Daddy Yankee announce his arrival in the U.S. mainstream with a crystal-clear introduction: “Who’s this? Da-ddy Yank-ee!” “Gasolina” was ubiquitous back then: That shouted hook, revving engine, and indelible, blistering pre-chorus blasted from every boombox, every passing car window, and every iPod Mini.
“Gasolina” was the dawn of an empire. Barrio Fino, the album it appeared on, was the first reggaeton LP to debut at No. 1 on Billboard’s Top Latin Albums chart, spending 24 weeks in the top spot. In 2005, it won a Latin Grammy for Best Urban Music Album. Within a year of the record’s release, Daddy Yankee had landed a $20 million record deal with Interscope, a sneaker collab with Reebok, a Pepsi sponsorship, and a controversial modeling gig with Sean Jean. If reggaeton was going to go global, Yankee was going to squeeze every cent he could out of it. After all, the man got an associate’s degree in accounting so he wouldn’t be cheated “out of money.”
This is the enduring image of Daddy Yankee: genre pioneer, business tycoon, reggaeton king. On Barrio Fino, Yankee presents himself as the commander of a movement that was poised to assume market dominance. But beyond its commercial impact, which is just one benchmark of its influence, Barrio Fino is also a document of a genre in a moment of transformation. This is an album that carries the knotty histories of reggaeton within it—from its origins as a form of protest poetry, to its transition into a moneymaking global force, to its role in affirming the imagined identity of Latinidad.
Daddy Yankee, born Ramón Ayala, said he imagined Barrio Fino in part as an antidote to reductive portrayals of life in the projects. “The news you see everywhere is always marginalizing [the barrio], or blaming it for things that aren’t its fault,” he said in a 2005 interview. The barrio in question was Villa Kennedy, the caserío, or public housing project, where Yankee cut his teeth freestyling at 13 years old. At 16, he started recording his own mixtapes, hawking bootleg cassettes for $5. In the early ’90s, reggaeton hadn’t quite consolidated into the genre we know it as today; one of its precursors was known as underground, and Yankee was one of its preeminent practitioners. The Puerto Rican government used the music as a scapegoat for the proliferation of gangs, petty crime, and drug addiction. Then-Governor Pedro Rosselló implemented an anti-crime campaign that also targeted underground artists, leading to police raids of record stores that sold their cassettes in February 1995.
By the time Barrio Fino rolled around, Daddy Yankee was a star in Puerto Rico. He’d appeared on DJ Playero’s foundational underground mixtapes in the ’90s and had local hits with solo albums and compilations, like 2002’s El Cangri.com, 2003’s Los Homerun-es, and Luny Tunes’ Más Flow anthology the same year. He knew the sweet spot between bombast and pillow talk, and he knew how to speak about reggaeton’s favorite topic and to its primary audience: women. Above all, he was the kind of rapper who could ensnare you with an irresistible hook, only to stun you with a technically dazzling verse moments later.
But not everyone was a fan of Daddy Yankee—or reggaeton at all, for that matter. Most of the entertainment industry had blacklisted reggaeton, refusing to play it on the radio, in spite of its grassroots popularity. White middle- and upper-class communities in Puerto Rico and across Latin America scorned the genre, associating it with poverty, vulgarity, and Blackness. In interviews around the time the album was released, Yankee wasn’t afraid to point out the irony in the genre’s commercial success, given its previously denigrated status. “When we started, no one wanted to help us. There is racism, classism in Puerto Rico,” he told The New York Post in 2005. Later that year, he elaborated on the prejudice the genre faced in The Washington Post. “The government didn’t understand the subculture. To them, we were just criminals and dumb kids doing this music. We had to prove we were too smart for the system. And we did it.”
El Cangri modeled his career after hip-hop moguls like Jay-Z or Sean Combs, building a kingdom with music at the center. But part of that enterprise was an identity movement, too—a thesis about a generation of young people who saw reggaeton as an affirmation of their heritage, one that would yield the questionable, feel-good promise of representation. “Reggaeton means the same thing to Latino youth as hip-hop does to African American kids,” Yankee told The Washington Post in 2005. “The young kids now, they’re looking at Daddy Yankee and Tego Calderón and Ivy Queen like kids in the American hood look up to 50 Cent or 2Pac.” In his vexed invocation of hip-hop, Yankee creates an ideological distance between Latinidad and Blackness—as if the two are mutually exclusive, or as if young Latines couldn’t also feel kinship with it. In addition to the muddled racial politics, Yankee’s comments back then speak volumes about the marketing, public reception, and stylistic choices of Barrio Fino.
Artistically, Barrio Fino is the ultimate exposition of Daddy Yankee’s gifts. The album slots party tracks right next to political statements; bleeding-heart breakup anthems next to brutal tongue-lashings against his enemies. The first quarter of the album is a perreo fight club. On “King Daddy,” an early avowal of his supremacy in the genre, he snarls a threat to a hater in double-time: “Tomorrow you’ll be food for the birds on the asphalt,” he spits, glass shattering in the background. Producer duo Luny Tunes arrange sputtering snare rolls into machine gun blasts. RIP to their victims.
“Dale Caliente” is a reggaeton shoot-out complete with samples of cocking handguns and sprayed bullets. Daddy Yankee issues a warning to anyone who thinks they’re tough enough to square up, then lusts after a woman who’s igniting the dancefloor with her trembling ass cheeks. Glory and Blacka Nice, an unsung reggaeton diva and a dancehall vocalist, pepper the track with some breathless ad-libs. Neither are credited on the song, a fact that reflects one of reggaeton’s more iniquitous traditions: the excision of its Jamaican and femme contributors. Glory famously sang the “dame más gasolina” hook on the smash hit; she also has features on three other songs here, none of which are credited.
In some moments, Daddy Yankee returns to his rap roots, sidestepping reggaeton altogether. “Santifica Tus Escapularios” is a merciless attack on his foes, recalling the freestyle battles he grew up on. He aims vicious barbs at an unidentified adversary (rumored to be fellow reggaeton trailblazer Don Omar at the time), even referring to his target as a shit-eating vagrant. “Salud y Vida” incorporates tubas from Mexican banda, evoking Chicano rap classics as Yankee casts doubt on a culture obsessed with material things, rather than human life. On the highlight “Corazones,” Yankee gets political. The song tackles the “spirit of death” that devours Puerto Rico’s caseríos, calling for a truce between gangs and decrying the government for not putting enough resources into education.
In spite of his lyrical dexterity, some of these beats rely on predictable conventions of “conscious” hip-hop—theatrical minor-key pianos, church-choir flourishes (it’s like El Cangri strapped on a backpack and fastened it as tightly as he could). But the messages they carry are potent, and only slightly diluted by those choices. Daddy Yankee—the world-weary critic, the caserío documentarian—was always capable of making more than club anthems, even if the radio was hyper-fixated on the party-hard ethos of “Gasolina.”
And while most listeners outside of the Caribbean thought that reggaeton could only be about stunting or bumping uglies, El Cangri demonstrated the genre’s romantic textures, too. “Like You” is a suave R&B-reggaeton serenade delivered in Spanglish, a rare crossover maneuver that invokes Big Pun’s “Still Not a Player.” This is a far cry from the unflinching raunch of earlier reggaeton mixtapes, like DJ Blass’ Reggaeton Sex series, and evidence of the way artists and producers were softening the genre’s roots for radio appeal. The classic “No Me Dejes Solo” features Wisin y Yandel, whose vocal registers make them ideal yelling partners; all three reggaeton vanguards beg a woman to save them from loneliness with their signature barked raps. “Tu Príncipe,” with Zion y Lennox, is a perfect slice of narrative-driven reggaeton, telling the story of a man who longs to be more than just a woman’s friend.
Although he was far from the only one moving the genre in this direction, Daddy Yankee was making strategic, market-oriented artistic choices that happened to feel authentic, too. Stories of breakups and relationship woes may seem like pretty run-of-the-mill thematic fare for reggaeton in 2024, but just two years before Barrio Fino’s release, a Puerto Rican senator launched a campaign against reggaeton’s “dirty lyrics” and lewd content, calling it a trigger “for criminal acts” (Tellingly, the same politician appeared onstage during a stadium show with reggaeton icons Héctor and Tito el Bambino a year later). Romantic tracks were a way to “clean up” reggaeton for the radio, but they also felt like a natural artistic evolution as reggaeton’s popularity surged.
It’s basically impossible for a reggaeton artist not to scream “Latino!” in one of their songs at this point, but back then, the explicit overtures to a shared ethnic identity were newer. On “Like You,” Daddy Yankee appeals to the community twice, summoning all his “Latinos to stand up” and declaring himself “proud to be Latin.” On “El Muro,” he refers to reggaeton as the sound that makes “everyone in Latin America move,” closing out the song with a call for all Latinos to keep perreando. The classic “Lo Que Pasó, Pasó” lifts piano keys and a horn section from Dominican merengue, while “Sabor a Melao” taps salsa legend Andy Montañez as a guest vocalist. As the scholar Wayne Marshall has written, these choices—speaking to a Latine audience, invoking elements of culturally accepted genres like salsa and merengue—helped fuel the perception that reggaeton was the music of a wider community, one with a “recognizably Latin” sound. At the same time, these stylistic changes began to shift its perception as a stigmatized Black genre from the projects.
Even if the Daddy Yankee of 2024 does not look anything like the Daddy Yankee of 20 years ago; even if the reggaeton lion largely abandoned social commentary in his work; even if, in the 2010s, he began to churn out mostly middle-of-the-road pop-perreo hits, including Luis Fonsi’s “Despacito,” perhaps the most diluted version of reggaeton possible—that is until Justin Bieber hopped on the remix and went viral after he flubbed the lyrics in a vaguely xenophobic drunken haze at New York celebrity hotspot 1 OAK; even if he announced his retirement in 2022, only to return to the public eye late last year as a born-again Christian: Barrio Fino is unquestionably an artistic triumph. It captures Yankee at his peak—as an agile lyricist, cultural envoy, and forever hitmaker. The album, along with other reggaeton titans of the era, forced the Latin music industry to re-examine its aesthetics, its business interests, and its biases. And of course, Barrio Fino is also an artistic proposition—a statement about poverty and sex and joy and hardship, and the ways reggaeton has soundtracked all of those realities. In its movements between the dancefloor, the bedroom, and the block, Barrio Fino illustrates the capaciousness—and complexity—of a genre forever defined by transformation.
Additional research by Deirdre McCabe Nolan. | 2024-07-28T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2024-07-28T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | VI / El Cartel | July 28, 2024 | 9.3 | 0c13e3d9-a0cc-4da0-b746-f30008afc611 | Isabelia Herrera | https://pitchfork.com/staff/isabelia-herrera/ | |
Brian Eno’s run of rock albums in the ’70s was an unprecedented achievement in music built on aleatory synth settings, fiery guitar work, subconscious lyrics, and of course, Oblique Strategies. | Brian Eno’s run of rock albums in the ’70s was an unprecedented achievement in music built on aleatory synth settings, fiery guitar work, subconscious lyrics, and of course, Oblique Strategies. | Brian Eno: Here Come the Warm Jets / Taking Tiger Mountain (By Strategy) / Before and After Science | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/brian-eno-here-come-the-warm-jets-taking-tiger-mountain-by-strategy-before-and-after-science/ | Here Come the Warm Jets / Taking Tiger Mountain (By Strategy) / Before and After Science | God, what a mind. What a songwriter, what a singer, what a producer, what a musician Brian Eno was in the days when he was habitually calling himself a “non-musician.” That was one of his many dry jokes: since his skills didn’t have to do with manual dexterity, he figured they fell in a different category from those of the musicians he worked with. Eno had been playing synthesizers in Roxy Music until he quit in mid-1973, but his primary “instrument” was the tape recorder. (At one point, he owned 31 of them.) Between 1974 and 1977, his extensive recorded output included four studio albums of his own songs—the three reviewed here and 1975’s Another Green World.
Eno is one of the smartest artists who’s ever made a pop recording. His is the kind of smartness that can trip itself up through overthinking, or make for art whose interest is mainly formal. But he dodged that bullet thanks to his other great obsession, which is giving up his conscious mind’s control. He had a particular fondness for setting up systems complicated enough that they could take him somewhere unpredictable; he famously never wrote down his synthesizers’ settings, in order to avoid falling into habits with them. Eno often sang his songs before he figured out what their lyrics were, composing them sound-first and word-second so his subconscious concerns could bubble up. “It is important to remember that all my ideas are generated by the music,” he told an interviewer in 1977. “The music is the practice that creates the ideas that generate the discourse.”
Also, he liked to rock out. His first solo album, 1974’s Here Come the Warm Jets, lunges out of its gates with the gigantic tone-bending riff of “Needles in the Camel’s Eye.” It’s a startlingly simple song—its guitar solo is essentially just the major scale you learn at your first lesson—made glorious by Eno’s fanatical attention to details of arrangement and timbre, and by his one-of-a-kind voice, precise and heady, with the long, rounded vowels of a former chorister.
That’s not all Eno got from the church hymns of his childhood. Like his other ’70s rock records, Warm Jets includes a handful of songs that you could easily think were sacred music if you only caught their melodies. The church appeared in his language, too—there’s a slaughtered heifer preceding the long, terrifying Robert Fripp guitar-spasm that’s the centerpiece of “Baby’s on Fire,” and something like an Our Father emerges from the title track’s deep-in-the-mix lyrics. Even the title of “Needles in the Camel’s Eye” is a mangled Bible quote.
Eno might have gone on to duplicate the album-tour-album-tour pattern of Roxy Music, but the Warm Jets tour was cut off early when his lung collapsed. Once he recovered, he worked almost entirely in the recording studio with a new tool he developed in that period in collaboration with visual artist Peter Schmidt: Oblique Strategies. It was a set of “worthwhile dilemmas”: cards containing cryptic instructions. Whenever he hit a creative impasse, he’d draw a card at random and figure out a way to apply it to the situation at hand. The first Oblique Strategy that Eno wrote was “Honour thy error as a hidden intention”—a very Scriptural way of putting it, and another manifestation of his push-pull relationship with control. (Another famous Oblique Strategy: “Repetition is a form of change.” The demand for a repetition of these albums’ original format has changed them into something experientially different: with this latest reissue, they’re double LPs, with each original album side’s sequence split in half and mastered at 45 RPM.)
A smutty stack of playing cards had appeared on the cover of Here Come the Warm Jets; Eno’s next rock album, Taking Tiger Mountain (By Strategy), was inspired by yet another set of cards, a group of postcards derived from one of the Chinese Cultural Revolution’s “model operas.” There’s a touch of peculiar Orientalism about some of these songs (especially “China My China”), a self-consciously mythologized version of what “Asia” might be. For the most part, though, Eno’s lyrics here more generally evoke travel and dislocation—the album’s brilliant in medias res opening line is, “When I got back home I found a message on the door/Sweet Regina’s gone to China, cross-legged on the floor.”
Eno’s main musical collaborator on Tiger Mountain is Roxy Music’s virtuosically flexible guitarist Phil Manzanera, who’s equally at home with the delicate filigrees of “Burning Airlines Give You So Much More” and the arena heroics of “The True Wheel.” But as a loss-of-control freak, Eno was also fascinated by the opposite of virtuosity, and the string section on Tiger Mountain’s “Put a Straw Under Baby” consists of members of the Portsmouth Sinfonia, a group of mostly untrained musicians faking it on classical instruments. (Eno had played clarinet with them and produced two of their albums.) Bassist Brian Turrington gets an arrangement credit for the two-years-too-early-for-punk rampage “Third Uncle,” presumably for the thrilling accident of switching to the “wrong” key halfway through the song.
After 1975’s Another Green World interleaved Eno’s gifts for secular-hymnal songwriting and texture-first instrumental music, he spent a couple of years woodshedding, more or less. He worked with David Bowie on Low and “Heroes”; he oversaw the Obscure Records label’s releases of contemporary classical music. And he tinkered endlessly with the raw materials that would eventually come together as Before and After Science. The legend is that Eno worked on somewhere between 100 and 120 songs for the album, although only the ten that ended up on it have ever surfaced. (There are no bonus tracks on any of the new releases, not even Eno’s non-album singles of the era, the delightfully hormone-crazed 1974 glam-rock yodel “Seven Deadly Finns” and a 1975 cover of “The Lion Sleeps Tonight.”)
Science is his most kaleidoscopic collection of recordings, partly thanks to its large cast of contributors, including returning guitarists Fripp and Manzanera, Cluster’s Möbi Moebius and Achim Roedelius, Can’s Jaki Liebezeit, and yes, Phil Collins, whose lateral-thinking drum groove on “No One Receiving” is some kind of career peak. It also reflects his fascination with the messy new sounds coming out of New York City: the title of the scrambled rocker “King’s Lead Hat” is an anagram of “Talking Heads,” with whom Eno would be entangled for the next few years. (Eno’s clipped, glassy-eyed vocal sounds less like Talking Heads than like Devo, whose first album he would go on to produce as well.) And it nods to the interdisciplinary history of what he was up to: The album came with four Peter Schmidt prints named after particular Oblique Strategies, and “Kurt’s Rejoinder” folds a recording of Dada-affiliated artist Kurt Schwitters into Eno’s jumprope-rhyme absurdities.
But Before and After Science is also the most conceptually elegant of Eno’s ’70s song-albums. He explained that he used “science” to mean “techniques and rational knowledge,” the Ithaca he was always drawn back to and always trying to escape. The first half of the album is splashing toward understanding, and the second half is drifting away from it. Almost every lyric touches on the idea of navigating bodies of water. Its closing hymn, “Spider and I,” is set in a “world without sound.”
There goes the cool jest: that impossible world is the only one in which Eno would be able to surrender his cybernetic practice. Every song Eno created was the product of his experimentation—his techniques to escape technique, his reasoning about how to bypass rationality—but his art as a musician lay partly in evaluating the outcomes of his experiments, deciding which ones were fantastically interesting, and discarding the rest. Determining what work the rest of the world gets access to is the artist’s final bulwark of control. | 2017-08-03T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-08-03T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | null | August 3, 2017 | 9.5 | 0c17d0db-72ae-40d0-8586-84a8cee22fcd | Douglas Wolk | https://pitchfork.com/staff/douglas-wolk/ | null |
L.A.'s DJ Mustard is responsible for more chart hits right now than any R&B/rap producer in recent memory. His first album under his own name is a small, almost humble gesture toward his hometown, a sort of epilogue to My Krazy Life, the YG album produced largely by Mustard that instantly entered the conversation of classic L.A. rap full-lengths. | L.A.'s DJ Mustard is responsible for more chart hits right now than any R&B/rap producer in recent memory. His first album under his own name is a small, almost humble gesture toward his hometown, a sort of epilogue to My Krazy Life, the YG album produced largely by Mustard that instantly entered the conversation of classic L.A. rap full-lengths. | Mustard: 10 Summers | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/19709-dj-mustard-10-summers/ | 10 Summers | DJ Mustard completely owns popular rap and R&B in 2014. Both scenes (where they are separate, and where they bleed together) have long been defined by super-producers, but few—including Timbaland and the Neptunes, whose names can’t help be evoked in this conversation—have had runs as successful as Mustard’s, who has placed no less than 15 songs on various Billboard charts this year. That list includes some of the year’s most enduring songs—from Kid Ink’s “Show Me” to Tinashe’s “2 On”—but more to the point is Mustard’s total and overwhelming ubiquity. It's not uncommon this year to turn on the radio, hit "play" on a playlist, walk into a party or enter a store, and hear a succession of Mustard’s beats. His sound has become so attached to mainstream urban music that it’s almost impossible to decipher where DJ Mustard ends and contemporary rap and R&B begins.
But we should never confuse quantity for quality, and Mustard’s sound is too divisive for him to be hailed as a universal genius like some of his predecessors have been. The criticism of his beats is obvious even to his supporters: they are simple and repetitive, not just individually but when taken together, often just an easily digestible series of pulses and snaps. Recently, a video posted to Reddit that catalogs a series of Mustard-produced singles built around the incessant chant of “Hey!” generated a thousand-comment thread of skepticism if not derision. The criticism—that any idiot with a working brain and two hands could churn out these beats—is not lost on the man himself. “Everybody say it’s so easy to make my beats,” Mustard Tweeted a few days ago. “[Well] take a swing at it you should be rich [in] no time cause I am.” The tweet was punctuated by two emojis that are crying while laughing.
Yet Mustard is nothing if not an innovative producer. His innovations don’t have the creative breadth of Timbaland, no doubt, but they are innovations nonetheless, and they have helped sustain the top-level of an art form that has been floundering commercially for years. One thing Mustard doesn’t get enough credit for is solving the Rubik’s Cube that is black music in the EDM era. Prior to his rise, pairings of rap and R&B with dance music—from successful crossovers like Pitbull, Usher, and Chris Brown to mid-tier artists like Waka Flocka Flame and Just Blaze working the EDM festival circuit—were shotgun marriages borne less out of creative inspiration than survivalist instinct. These collaborations were mostly garish and sad, but Mustard found a way to bring house music (back) to rap and R&B by making it an outgrowth of his own bleepy, up-tempo beats. He did it first with Ty Dolla $ign’s “Paranoid”—which nicks the organ-like keyboard sound of many a ‘90s house song—and then with “Show Me” and Jeremih’s “Don’t Tell ‘Em”, both of which lift parts of actual ‘90s house songs. The latter two have been pop crossovers at a time when most black artists have found a ceiling over their heads, and they have positioned Mustard less as a rap strip-miner and more as a sort of spiritual heir of Afrika Bambaataa and “Planet Rock”.
But most importantly, Mustard has given rap and R&B music a center. The genesis of his sound is in Atlanta club music spanning Lil Jon to Travis Porter and parts of multiple generations of West Coast rap from Dr. Dre to Too $hort to Keak Da Sneak, so naturally, many of Mustard’s early songs acted as a bridge for the contemporary rap scenes in the South and West. But as his popularity has grown, his net has widened: not just from rap to R&B, but also from artists in Atlanta and Los Angeles to others in the Midwest (Jeremih) and East Coast (French Montana, Wiz Khalifa). Whereas producers du jour of recent vintage such as Lex Luger and Mike Will elevated a certain region’s artists over others, the simplicity of Mustard’s beats has proven to be malleable for artists with different approaches and fanbases. Though many are still suspicious of his sound, Mustard is a uniter instead of a divider.
Despite all of that, it’s impossible to forget that DJ Mustard comes from Los Angeles. His music pulls from many places but its heart is L.A. and that blood pumps through its veins. You can hear it in the squelching, rubbery bass on tracks like “Show Me”, YG’s “My Nigga”, and his own “Vato”, but also in the sneering swagger adopted by many of the rappers who slide onto his beats. That Mustard is L.A. and L.A. is Mustard seems to be the motive behind 10 Summers, his first album under his own name. Though the title makes a grand claim—that Mustard will be rap’s overlord for 10 straight summers—the album itself is a small, almost humble gesture toward his hometown, a sort of epilogue to My Krazy Life, the YG album produced largely by Mustard that instantly entered the conversation of classic L.A. rap full-lengths.
Mustard seems to have let his poppier, dancier side dominate his productions as of late, but 10 Summers pulls his sound all the way back to the beginning, with a set of tracks that explicitly connects him to the everlasting influence of Dr. Dre and Snoop Dogg’s G-funk. It opens with a trio of songs that are reverent and distinctive only in the context of contemporary rap, but Mustard and the local rappers that lead off the album—from bigger names like Nipsey Hussle and Dom Kennedy to lesser-known entities like TeeCee and RJ—are skilled and able imitators. The whiny synthesizers and quaking bass of these opening tracks is Mustard’s sound at its most elemental and it sets the table for rapping that often amounts to very good impersonations of Snoop Dogg (the hook on “Low Low”) and Too $hort (the opening verse of “Ghetto Tales”). Though some might have wanted Mustard to piece together a star-studded album, he opens 10 Summers with an argument a certain type of chef might make: that doing the classics really well can be more satisfying than constantly trying to reinvent the wheel.
In fact, it’s when all the big names show up that the album drags a bit. “No Reason”, with YG and Jeezy, is a fun little Frankenstein of “Who Do You Love” and “My Nigga”, but what follows are a pair of tracks with big names that have the stale air of DJ Khaled’s bloated projects. “Giuseppe” is just about the most average Mustard song that either 2 Chainz or Jeezy—both frequent collaborators—have ever appeared on. And “Face Down”—the big ticket item featuring Lil Wayne, Big Sean, YG, and Lil Boosie—is a poorly mastered mess that is far less than the sum of its parts. After the delightfully slinky “Down on Me”—in which Mustard draws another line, this time to New Orleans bounce music—the album dips to its lowest point with the annoyingly squeaky Iamsu! vehicle “Can’t Tell Me”.
10 Summers closes with four R&B tracks—two songs and two interludes, all of which act almost as palette cleansers after the unrelenting hardness of the previous eight numbers. The two full tracks—“4 Digits”, a showcase for up-and-coming vocalist Eric Bellinger, and “Deep”, a radio-ready single if Mustard wants to push it—go down like cold beers on a hot day, memorable for their understated perfection. But more tantalizing are the interludes (which are hopefully previews of full tracks), one from Tinashe and the other from Ty Dolla $ign. They clock in at barely over a minute in total but are deeply tuneful, and they suggest that Mustard has digested the same funk and soul records that inspired a L.A. luminary like DJ Quik and that he’s more versatile than people want to believe.
Both interludes are also presented as random radio dispatches, and on the Tinashe interlude Mustard makes another reference to criticism of his omnipresence. It opens with a short skit in which a man and a woman switch on the radio only to hear a string of Mustard tracks. “I’m tired of this shit,” the man says to the woman as “Paranoid” plays in the background. She flips the dial and we hear T-Pain’s “Up Down (Do This All Day)", to which he responds, “Hell nah, bitch, I’m tired of this nigga.” She turns the dial once more and we hear the new Tinashe track. It’s a fair warning. | 2014-08-29T02:00:03.000-04:00 | 2014-08-29T02:00:03.000-04:00 | Rap | Roc Nation | August 29, 2014 | 7.7 | 0c1a225b-962d-4fa9-ba0d-f2e992a0ad18 | Jordan Sargent | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jordan-sargent/ | null |
Brian Leeds—aka ambient-techno maestro Huerco S.—presents a collection of dubby, foggy dance tracks where mystery feels like the main event. | Brian Leeds—aka ambient-techno maestro Huerco S.—presents a collection of dubby, foggy dance tracks where mystery feels like the main event. | Loidis: One Day | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/loidis-one-day/ | One Day | Six years ago, Brian Leeds—better known as the ambient-techno producer Huerco S.—invented a new alias, Loidis, for a one-off release. A Parade, in the Place I Sit, the Floating World (& All Its Pleasures) shared certain key characteristics with Huerco S. records. It was suggestively murky, dusted with dull glitter, propelled by four-on-the-floor beats that were more implicit than explicit. One track was 10 minutes long; another ran to more than a quarter of an hour, burbling away like an enchanted brook. It seemed to say, Dance or drift off—it’s all the same to me.
The music’s dubby pulse and foggy sound design nodded to a particular set of Y2K-era influences—Basic Channel and their Chain Reaction kin, Jan Jelinek, Vladislav Delay—that were canonical though not, in 2018, particularly fashionable. In the intervening years, those sounds have crept back around, rediscovered by a generation that wasn’t there for the first wave. Artists like Purelink, J. Albert, and James Devane have all been toying with styles associated with the German minimal techno of the early 2000s. Many of these artists, following Huerco S.’s lead, seem inspired primarily by atmospheric qualities. But on Loidis’ new album, One Day, the Kansas City producer dials up the intensity. Leeds’ first full-length under the alias aims straight for the dancefloor with a collection of trippy, springy tracks that seem designed, like a candy-flipping Energizer Bunny, to thump away until long past sunup.
A Parade, in the Place I Sit, the Floating World (& All Its Pleasures) was largely an ambient affair, but One Day’s opening track, “Tell Me,” arrives like a shot across the bow. Its quick-stepping kicks and hi-hats seem designed to match the energetic tempos of 2024’s notoriously demanding dancefloors. The hiccupping bassline pushes against the beat, like a sprinter trying to break out of the pack. In “Wait & See,” which follows, clicky hi-hats rush forward just as impatiently, tripping over their own feet in a headlong dash. “Tequa” is slower and more buoyant, in keeping with the lazy dub techno of 2018’s “A Parade,” but its forceful kick and plunging chord stabs telegraph a determination to dig in for the long haul. Track after track feels like a study in groove science—a little nudge here, a little drag there, and presto: a perpetual motion machine.
Once you sink into the music, you start to notice strange things happening in the pockets around those elastic grooves. Little wisps of tone flicker and are extinguished, regular as clockwork. Whisper-soft percussive sounds duck their heads out from behind other, equally evasive sounds, like bashful voyeurs. The central feature of “Love’s Lineaments” is a set of dubbed-out chords that feel like hesitant answers to the up-for-it bassline. With every repetition, they slide a little bit further behind the beat, notes smearing across the stave. You could get lost in a detail like that, following them as they glide, trying to parse their tangled frequencies. Tracking their motions feels like cloudspotting, or trying to fix one’s gaze on a strange bit of flotsam coming around the river’s bend.
Repetition is Leeds’ trustiest tool. Many of these tracks are little more than a handful of looped phrases spun ad infinitum. But he keeps his hands on the controls at all times, dubbing and filtering and tweaking. The marginal becomes the main event: In “Sugar Snot,” the album’s propulsive highlight, you might come for the gravelly bassline, but it’s the wiggly little drum fills that hold your attention, distracting you from the fact that the track is essentially a one-bar loop stretched out for nearly nine minutes. In “Dollarama,” he works subtractively, using filters to muffle and veil. The song’s glancing dub chords are dead ringers for Basic Channel and their ilk, but I don’t think it’s just a retro thing: In its linear sweep and refusal of the obvious, One Day is a proposal for a different kind of dancing and DJing. It’s the opposite of the jagged, percussive, electricity-zapped, resolutely digital styles of club music that have been in vogue for the past decade, and it’s just as far removed from the giddily pop- and trance-fueled techno that conquered clubs and festivals post-pandemic. The album is too understated to read as a polemic. But One Day is nevertheless a reminder that there’s room for subtlety, drifting, and doubt in dance music. Sometimes, the heart of the music lies in what you only think you hear. | 2024-08-05T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2024-08-05T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Incienso | August 5, 2024 | 7.9 | 0c1b6e83-d07d-495a-bb68-59c76fe787c5 | Philip Sherburne | https://pitchfork.com/staff/philip-sherburne/ | |
Death Cab are experimenting on their latest full-length, focusing less on tunes and melody and more on electronic sound. | Death Cab are experimenting on their latest full-length, focusing less on tunes and melody and more on electronic sound. | Death Cab for Cutie: Codes and Keys | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/15482-codes-and-keys/ | Codes and Keys | Leading up to Death Cab for Cutie's last record, 2008's Narrow Stairs, guitarist/producer Chris Walla claimed that they were taking inspiration from Brainiac and "heavy, sludgy, slow metal," and that the record contained a "10-minute long Can jam." But nothing on the record sounded remotely similar to those references; the jam in question, "I Will Possess Your Heart", actually ran a bit over eight minutes, and I don't think anyone mistook Ben Gibbard for Damo Suzuki. Leading up to the band's latest effort, Codes and Keys, the name-dropping returned, when Gibbard told SPIN that it was keyboard-heavy and "not guitar-based," citing Brian Eno's Another Green World as a hint of what to expect.
The claims of extended experimentation, though exaggerated, aren't as spurious this time around. Codes and Keys does sound different from the rest of the band's catalog. Soft pitter-pattered beats rustle underneath sparse melodies, while layers of extra instrumentation are placed atop already-busy arrangements. Two songs (the metronomic "Doors Unlocked and Open" and the unmoored piano meditation "Unobstructed Views") run well over the five-minute mark; swaths of gentle noise surround even the most straightforward cuts. If you come to this record looking for something as directly engaging as "Cath..." or "I Will Follow You Into the Dark", you're going to walk away empty-handed.
Death Cab still sound like Death Cab, but Codes and Keys is undoubtedly the least "pop" record they've made since breaking through to the mainstream with their last indie-situated effort, 2003's Transatlanticism. So there's new territory for the band explored here, and Walla, along with mixing maestro Alan Moulder, applies a label-money sheen that provides a decent frame for the record's sonic idiosyncrasies. But for a band so identified with exploring feelings and the details of relationships, the record comes off as chilly, diffident, and emotionally distant. The texture-heavy excursions ("Doors Unlocked and Open", "Unobstructed Views", "St. Peter's Cathedral") are adrift and without direction, while early singles "You Are a Tourist" and "Underneath the Sycamore" sound like generic versions of the band from an earlier era.
Indeed, even when the band revisits past glories on Codes and Keys' few highlights, Death Cab weirdly sound like they are imitating themselves. They borrow the baroque Brian Wilson-isms of Narrow Stairs' "You Can Do Better Than Me" for "Portable Television", copy the upward-moving bridge of The Photo Album's "I Was a Kaleidoscope" for the same structural change in "Monday Morning", and lift the basic structure of Plans opener "Marching Bands of Manhattan" for "Underneath the Sycamore". Anyone who's spent the last decade following along will get some warm fuzzies from these flashes of familiarity, but they tend to get stale with repeat listens.
The rudderless quality might owe something to the album's sporadic recording process-- eight different studios were employed, and the members of Death Cab rarely sound like they're in the same room together. Most remote of all is Gibbard. His vocals are frequently treated with effects, creating an alienating space that, excepting the moony-eyed closing hymn "Stay Young, Go Dancing", robs him of his trademark intimacy. Lyrically, he largely plays it safe, engaging in nonsensical rhymes ("When you scream/ Love you seem") and sweeping declarative generalizations. Gibbard's evocative narratives and incisive commentary, always overlooked with this band, are mostly missing.
Over the last decade, both Death Cab and the landscape around them have changed considerably; while they've signed to a major label and topped the charts, the sensitive-guy Pac NW indie rock archetype they launched a decade ago has receded from the conversation. Another sound that Gibbard had a hand in introducing, however, still reverberates: the gentle, electronic bedroom-pop that he and producer Jimmy Tamborello made as the Postal Service. Those sounds never really infiltrated Death Cab until now, but Codes and Keys doesn't approach that project's level of emotional engagement. Here, Death Cab sound miles apart from each other and, ultimately, from us. | 2011-06-01T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2011-06-01T02:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Atlantic | June 1, 2011 | 5 | 0c1d7f88-be2b-4b16-bcb1-1156ae6a53f6 | Larry Fitzmaurice | https://pitchfork.com/staff/larry-fitzmaurice/ | null |
The Philadelphia emo band Modern Baseball’s second album features a wealth of infectious songs that are both sharply observed and sharply written. You’re Gonna Miss It All mostly concerns itself with wasted time, and it's dense with both hooks and lyrical barbs. | The Philadelphia emo band Modern Baseball’s second album features a wealth of infectious songs that are both sharply observed and sharply written. You’re Gonna Miss It All mostly concerns itself with wasted time, and it's dense with both hooks and lyrical barbs. | Modern Baseball: You're Gonna Miss It All | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/18984-modern-baseball-youre-gonna-miss-it-all/ | You're Gonna Miss It All | Modern Baseball’s You’re Gonna Miss It All is a sophomoric album in multiple ways. It’s the Philadelphia band’s second full-length, for one thing. Beyond that, Brendan Lukens recently finished his second year at Drexel University, and he never lets you forget what 21-year-old college students are often like—culturally literate, if not necessarily “book smart,” blurring the line between introspective and self-obsessed, impressed by their capacity for clever wordplay and emotional awareness while knowing both of those qualities conspire to prevent people from saying what they actually feel. And due to the all of the aforementioned, Lukens is kinda full of it, too. He won’t exactly lie to you, but he’ll tell you what he aspires to be while doing the exact opposite. Observe this howler from “Fine, Great”: “I hate having to think about the future/ when all I want to do is worry about everyone but me.”
There’s a fine semantic misdirection here, and he knows it: it’s a song about how much of a pain in the ass it is to have people care about you, and all he really wants is for everyone to worry about someone other than Brendan Lukens. He can do that just fine, great? Along with fellow MB songwriter Jacob Ewald, Lukens frets over the past, future, and especially the present. He thinks about the next five minutes, the next morning, and whether his death will be cool enough to get a mention from Jim Gardner on Channel 6 Action News. And he worries a hell of a lot about himself, and how other people figure into that. It’s a lot to endure because people in Lukens’ situation get drunk most every night, stumble into relationships, and run from their problems. If you’re in this emotionally combustible state, you’ll relate to You’re Gonna Miss It All directly and deeply. If you at least recognize it in retrospect, you can just as easily appreciate its wealth of infectious songs that are both sharply observed and sharply written.
About that last descriptor, Lukens describes himself as “sharp as a tack/ but in the sense that I'm not smart just a prick.” These songs are often funny and can induce wincing recalls of your most embarrassing romantic fuck-ups, but Lukens doesn’t seem all that concerned about being liked or admirable. If he’s pissed at you, he’ll probably just say “fuck you.” If he’s excited about the fact that you sat next to him on the couch instead of ignoring him like the last time you hung out, he’ll add “niiiice” as an aside. He likes metaphor, but he's much better at literalism, so the aspirational poetics of “Notes” don’t hit as squarely as the times where he describes a lonely Friday night as “no better time for exercise wishing you were still my girlfriend.”
Which explains why Modern Baseball have namechecked Tokyo Police Club and Los Campesinos! as formative influences. That much is conveyed through similarly short and spiky songs that don’t quite fit as pop, punk, or pop-punk. You’re Gonna Miss It All mostly concerns itself with wasted time, but it doesn’t waste much itself, dense with both hooks and lyrical barbs. Likewise, Ewald’s nasal, nerdy, and needy vocals bring to mind not only David Monks and Gareth David, but elder prose-songwriting bards like Craig Finn and John Darnielle. To say they can be a dealbreaker is an understatement: upon hearing him pronounce “accoutrements,” “DIY ethics,” and “Mommy and Daddy’s data plan” in the same song or getting a little too Urkel-esque with the hook from “Broken Cash Machine” (“why did I do that?”) some people might flat-out refuse to even reach the bargaining table.
Like pretty much every guitar band these days that doesn’t immediately scan as “indie rock,” Modern Baseball have been lumped into “emo”—and yes, considering Modern Baseball are probably Weezer fans and are caught up in girl problems of their own making, that label sticks to an extent. Thing is, the actual music of You’re Gonna Miss It All is just about everything but emo, mostly some code-splitting of the pop-punk double helix. There’s shout-and-whoa power-pop (“Charlie Black”), prim twee (“Going to Bed Now”), folky punk (“Your Graduation”), all built around sturdy choruses. One thing Modern Baseball do have in common with their trendpiece peers is that they’re getting attention because they’re much, much better at making music than they were two years ago. This is evident in the songwriting, which is more confident and ambitious, but just as importantly, the production. You're Gonna Miss It All was mastered by Will Yip (basically the Steve Albini of this scene) and engineered by Jonathan Low, a guy who’s worked on the National’s records. So needless to say, it’s going to sound a lot more professional than Sports, a charmingly amateur affair that seemed content to be passed around amongst Modern Baseball’s Facebook friends.
And that’s crucial, since Modern Baseball are a band that deserves to engage a wider audience. Nonetheless, Lukens is still dealing in small stakes. He tries to think himself into a relationship he’s trying to talk and drink himself out of. When he does make a move, he worries about sticking around too long because her roommates might hear them. He goes to apartment parties, drinks because he drank the night before, can think of little besides the smell of garlic and coffee on his breath and goes from “living like a king without you” to “living like a piece of shit without you” in about a minute. Considering their common Philadelphia homebase, a fun exercise is to imagine You’re Gonna Miss It All as the other side of the stories told on Waxahatchee’s Cerulean Salt. Of course, the narrators are totally mismatched, but all of their songs are dysfunctional anyway. Kate Crutchfield may be singing about many of the same things, but she sounds wearier, wiser, someone you’d ensure with your secrets and seek out for advice. I don’t know if I’d trust Brendan Lukens to complete a beer run for a case of Keystone Lite, he’d probably come back with a six-pack and a funny story about the girl he met from his old high school along the way—these are the small, relatable pleasures of which a Modern Baseball song is made. | 2014-02-11T01:00:02.000-05:00 | 2014-02-11T01:00:02.000-05:00 | Rock | Run for Cover | February 11, 2014 | 7.2 | 0c2049ad-cd94-4acd-a191-87460099f044 | Ian Cohen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ian-cohen/ | null |
Solange’s fourth album is unhurried, ambient, and exploratory. Using everything from spiritual jazz to Gucci Mane, Solange conjures her hometown with exceptional songcraft and production. | Solange’s fourth album is unhurried, ambient, and exploratory. Using everything from spiritual jazz to Gucci Mane, Solange conjures her hometown with exceptional songcraft and production. | Solange: When I Get Home | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/solange-when-i-get-home/ | When I Get Home | In a T Magazine interview with Solange published last fall, writer Ayana Mathis described the making of the new album as taking the singer back to “a kind of Houston of the mind.” It’s a city that figures heavily in Knowles family mythology as the birthplace of Solange and her sister. At the time of the interview, we didn’t know the name of the record, When I Get Home, which indicates that this is an album about return. Now we have music and an accompanying short film that reconstructs the Houston of Solange’s mind.
It’s not literal objectification of the past so much as a future memory of the city, an ephemeral mental grid. See-sawing bass booms from phantom slabs, wood-grained and candy-painted per local tradition. Synthesizers and samples ricochet off the tall, empty office buildings of downtown Houston, reverberating to the heavens. Black cowboys gallop through the dusk—the clip of hooves a drumbeat. Space refuse is treasure. And snatches of vocals from hometown rappers Devin the Dude and Scarface float like murmurs from passing car windows.
Three years after releasing the soul-baring opus A Seat at the Table, Solange has ditched traditional song structure and world-weary lyrics for a sonically and thematically ambiguous record that feels freer, and less burdened by the white gaze. Although Houston is the beating heart at its core, much like New Orleans pulsed through A Seat, the music’s spectral, free-associative quality suggests that the idea of “home” is less rooted. Solange offers a fundamental lesson of those who leave: Home isn’t something you can possess, it lives on without you. Perhaps she also understands that we can’t trust our memories and so Solange gives her music motion. We slide into this “Houston of the mind,” on a repeated refrain that reinforces the slipperiness of recall: “I saw things… I imagined/Things… I imagined.”
The music is so in motion it’s hard to pin down. Its obliqueness does not give it automatic significance; instead, like in jazz or drone music, engaged listening instigates feeling. Because Solange doesn’t offer a clear thesis like on A Seat at the Table, the onus falls on the listener to get close and make their own meaning. That can be a liberating creative impulse, particularly for a pop star who is widely considered an auteur. Solange and her musical collaborators—for what it’s worth, nearly all men aside from Abra and Cassie—duck and weave through various time signatures, burying Easter Eggs beneath bold keys, Moog magic, and textured drum lines that embellish the omnipresent low end. There are samples, background vocals, and additional personnel credits to people representing Houston’s past, present, and future: from Phylicia Rashad and the poet Pat Parker, to Solange’s young son Julez Smith II, who has a production credit on the interlude “Nothing Without Intention.”
When I Get Home is exploratory, but still kind of glossy. The melodies on “Down With the Clique” and “Way to the Show” could be rearranged remnants from her first album Solo Star, released in her teen pop days. Pharrell, the king of sheen, shows up with his signature four-count intro on “Sound of Rain,” a song that perfectly channels the kitschy, pixelated optimism of late ’90s/early aughts futurism. He also brings his toolkit staples of tightly wound drums and syncopated piano for “Almeda,” an early fan-favorite because of an unexpected feature by a baby-voiced Playboi Carti who raps about diamonds shining through the darkness on a track where Solange heralds Black ownership. We’re in Houston, so only one track hints at the time Solange recently spent in Jamaica. “Binz” is a wall-slapper, waist-winder, booty-popper. The airy three-part harmonies that have been her true calling card since covering the Dirty Projectors’ “Stillness Is the Move” ascend over a dense arpeggiated bassline, and then give way to playful back-and-forth toasting between Solange and The-Dream that echoes the incantations of Sister Nancy: “Sundown, wind chimes/I just wanna wake up on C.P. time.”
Solange is frolicking here, using a freeform template that aspires to the endlessly uplifting magic of Stevie Wonder, the psychedelic pleasures of chopped and screwed music, or the spiritual jazz of Alice Coltrane and the Arkestra of Sun Ra. One of her chief collaborators throughout is John Carroll Kirby, whose solo music could only be described as New Age. Standing on the Corner, a young New York City jazz group, provide some sublime moments of drama and tension—a perfect template for the gestural, post-modern, Kate Bush–esque choreography that Solange prefers.
When I Get Home is particularly beautiful as an ambient piece that’s unencumbered by the emotional catharsis of A Seat at the Table—but it is missing a palpable thesis statement. Fourteen of the album’s 19 tracks clock in at under three minutes, but the patchwork effect suggests a more stream-of-consciousness bricolage than, say, Tierra Whack’s idea-led brevity. She’s got a lot of ideas, but I’m still left wondering what this album can tell us about her aesthetic practice. (Despite its title, the interlude “Nothing Without Intention” doesn’t provide a clue.) But this need for direction only matters because A Seat at the Table felt so urgent.
Here, Solange is unhurried. The album rewards repetition, in listening and in execution. Repetition can cue a meditative state; it can also be code. “I saw things I imagined, things I imagined,” she sings on the opener. “We were down with you, down with you,” she continues on “Down With the Clique.” And by the time she switches up the single phrase repetition on “Almeda,” listing with pride, “Brown skin, Brown face, Black skin, Black braids,” the album is half over and the mood, the dream state, resets.
Some spiritual traditions use repeated mantras or prayers to invite awareness and presence, others as a way to invoke the past or alter the future. Design principles teach that repetition communicates unity and cohesion—enter “My Skin My Logo,” where Solange trades admiring verses with a cooing Gucci Mane, whose name conjures an endless monogram of interlocking Gs. The song itself is childlike and loving; the macho rapper softening his nursery rhyme-flow for something that sounds like an actual nursery rhyme. It’s through repetition that Solange resurrects a timeless, formless Houston of her mind. She uses the device extensively and almost compulsively, trying to remember, trying harder not to forget, and trying even harder to situate these traditions within a wider context of Black music and culture in America. | 2019-03-05T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2019-03-05T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Pop/R&B | Columbia | March 5, 2019 | 8.4 | 0c2347e6-688c-477c-a71c-3a74ada4fd19 | Anupa Mistry | https://pitchfork.com/staff/anupa-mistry/ | |
Made from afar, primarily with the National’s Aaron Dessner, Swift’s eighth album is a sweater-weather record filled with cinematic love songs and rich fictional details. | Made from afar, primarily with the National’s Aaron Dessner, Swift’s eighth album is a sweater-weather record filled with cinematic love songs and rich fictional details. | Taylor Swift: Folklore | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/taylor-swift-folklore/ | Folklore | The phantom pang of missing someone before you ever meet them is an emotion worthy of its own word. That fated feeling of love and the passage of time is the theme that runs between Carly Rae Jepsen’s smash hit “Call Me Maybe” and the National’s antisocial romance “Slow Show”; it’s also the kind of thing Taylor Swift might write about. One of the loveliest tracks on Folklore, the surprise album the singer-songwriter made primarily with the National’s guitarist, Aaron Dessner, stands out for a strangely similar reason: a thread connecting two strangers that exists long before either realizes it’s there. “And isn’t it just so pretty to think/All along there was some/Invisible string/Tying you to me,” she sings on the delightfully plucky “Invisible String,” simultaneously recalling famous lines from Jane Eyre and The Sun Also Rises.
Folklore will forever be known as Taylor Swift’s “indie” album, a sweater-weather record released on a whim in the blue heat of this lonely summer, filled with cinematic love songs in search of a film soundtrack. There are those who already dislike Folklore on principle, who assume it’s another calculated attempt on Swift’s part to position her career as just so (how dare she); meanwhile, fans will hold it up as tangible proof that their leader can do just about anything (also a stretch). While it’s true that Folklore pushes the limits of Swift’s sound in a particular, perhaps unexpected direction, her reference points feel more like mainstream “indie” homage than innovation, taking cues from her collaborators’ work and bits of nostalgia.
At its best, Folklore asserts something that has been true from the start of Swift’s career: Her biggest strength is her storytelling, her well-honed songwriting craft meeting the vivid whimsy of her imagination; the music these stories are set to is subject to change, so long as it can be rooted in these traditions. You can tell that this is what drives Swift by the way she molds her songs: cramming specific details into curious cadences, bending the lines to her will. It’s especially apparent on Folklore, where the production—mostly by Dessner, with Jack Antonoff’s pop flair occasionally in the mix—is more minimal than she typically goes for. Her words rise above the sparse pianos, moody guitars, and sweeping orchestration, as quotable as ever.
After years as pop’s most reliable first-person essayist, Swift channels her distinct style into what are essentially works of fiction and autofiction, finding compelling protagonists in a rebellious heiress and a classic teenage love triangle. In “The Last Great American Dynasty,” she tells the story of eccentric debutante Rebekah Harkness, who married into the Standard Oil family and once lived in Swift’s Rhode Island mansion, as a way to celebrate women who “have a marvelous time ruining everything.” Filled with historical details and Americana imagery, you can see the song play out in your mind like a storybook, but it also effectively makes a point about society’s treatment of brash women. Swift cleverly draws a line between Harkness and herself at the end, an idea she fleshes out in a more literal sequel, “Mad Woman.” Out of all the songs on Folklore, “The Last Great American Dynasty” is the all-timer, the instant classic. It sounds like the latter-day National/Taylor mashup you never knew you needed—textural and tastefully majestic, with Fitzgerald-esque lines about filling the pool with champagne instead of drinking all the wine.
With Folklore’s teen heartbreak trilogy, Swift circles the same affair from each party’s differing view. “Betty” is the story of 17-year-old James trying to win back his girlfriend after cheating, a familiar crime rendered new by the narrator’s genuine remorse and belief in a love regained. It has the youthful hope of a song like “Wide Open Spaces,” yet is noticeably wiser (and queerer) than the high school romances Swift wrote as an actual teenager. First single “Cardigan” is told by Betty, whose disillusionment with James results in a sad, sensuous sound reminiscent of Lana Del Rey, down to the vocal style and casual lyrical quotation of another pop song. But the songs’ overlapping details and central framing device—of a cardigan forgotten and found without a second thought—are pure Swift, an instant memory portal not unlike the scarf in Red’s “All Too Well.” (The cutesy marketing angle for “Cardigan” is reliably Swiftian as well.) And even though “August” is considered to be the third in the trilogy, the record’s most tender, saccharine love story plays out during “Illicit Affairs.” “You taught me a secret language I can’t speak with anyone else,” she sings. “And you know damn well for you I would ruin myself.” The scenes and perspectives evoked by these songs speak volumes about Swift’s evolution as a songwriter.
The theme of Folklore is a very different way of acknowledging that people will talk, an idea that animated 2017’s trap-tinged work of minor villainy, Reputation. Swift knows her own mythology like a model knows her angles, and that’s part of what makes folklore fascinating if you maintain an open mind: a kind of reverse-engineered “mindie” project, it sonically situates her closest to Lana and chamber-pop belter Florence Welch, but may also occasionally remind you of Triple-A radio, Sufjan Stevens if he killed his more ambitious tendencies, or Big Red Machine, Dessner’s duo with Justin Vernon (see: the sparse and soulful “peace”). The album’s actual duet with Vernon, “Exile,” is a little like a Bon Iver take on “Falling Slowly,” the centerpiece of the 2007 folk musical Once: awkwardly dragging until the clouds slowly part to allow something beautiful to build. Swift is playing the long game here, and while there are no wild missteps, the album could use some selective pruning (see: “Seven,” “Hoax”).
It’s worth pointing out that Folklore isn’t a total outlier in Swift’s catalog either, or even her recent work. The tracks with Antonoff shift away from the ’80s electro-pop of 1989 and onward, but they lean into the Mazzy Star swoon of Lover’s title track, Swift’s ongoing fascination with Imogen Heap, and a twinge of the Cranberries. There are interesting images, indelible hooks, and real signs of maturity. In the dreamy “Mirrorball,” Swift likens the relatability trap of fame to a disco ball, singing of fluttering on tiptoes and trying hard to make it look effortless. “August” is a great, lusty Swift summer anthem about forbidden love, where the up-close, white-hot heat of songs like “Style” or “Getaway Car” is traded for wistful reflection in the rearview. Like the rest of us, Taylor Swift knows she’s had better summers before and she’ll have better summers again. At least she’s made thoughtful use of this one. | 2020-07-27T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-07-27T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | Republic | July 27, 2020 | 8 | 0c23f1fc-721a-45cb-810a-b1f0a0079cce | Jill Mapes | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jill-mapes/ | |
British Sea Power evoke an eternal 1984, when bands bridged caustic post-punk and stadium-sized pop. Dismayed by the black cloud of post-Brexit Britain, they designed this album as a beacon of light. | British Sea Power evoke an eternal 1984, when bands bridged caustic post-punk and stadium-sized pop. Dismayed by the black cloud of post-Brexit Britain, they designed this album as a beacon of light. | British Sea Power: Let the Dancers Inherit the Party | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/23058-let-the-dancers-inherit-the-party/ | Let the Dancers Inherit the Party | For the past 14 years, British Sea Power have invited us to escape our current reality by retreating into a past one. Their Chariots of Fire chic is the least of it—British Sea Power records are invitations to unplug and bask in the beauty of nature, learn useful random phrases from foreign languages, and educate ourselves on forgotten events confined to history’s dustbin. (Ironically, this has the effect of prompting you to go online to brush up on the significance of, say, the German term “stunde null,” or investigate what exactly happened on Canvey Island in 1953.) Notwithstanding the occasional forays into film soundtracks and brass-orchestra one-offs, British Sea Power’s music has remained similarly impervious to the modern age. They sound forever ambered in an eternal 1984 when bands like the Psychedelic Furs, New Order, and Echo and the Bunnymen were building a bridge between caustic post-punk and stadium-sized pop.
However, the cruel irony about escapism is that, as the need for it increases during tumultuous times, so too does the nagging guilt of indulging in it. British Sea Power have teetered on topicality before—see: 2007’s pro-immigration anthem “Waving Flags”—but their new album counts as a direct response to their country’s current state, rather than an elaborate reconstruction of a bygone one. Dismayed by the black-cloud mood of post-Brexit Britain, the band designed Let the Dancers Inherit the Party as a beacon of light. It’s an album that emphasizes their most uplifting qualities: Yan Scott Wilkinson’s valorous vocals, guitarist Martin Noble’s glistening, Bernard Sumner-style leads, and—in the case of “International Space Station”—the sort of sweeping, stargazing melodies that imply the presence of a choir and symphony even in absentia. At the same, British Sea Power keep their capacity for epic bombast and dissonant digressions in check, resulting in their most focused, generous record since 2005’s Open Season.
British Sea Power albums have never been lacking for drama, but Let the Dancers Inherit the Party foregrounds a quality that can sometimes gets obscured in their detailed narratives and high-concept execution: emotional candor. The album’s central motivational anthem, “Keep on Trying (Sechs Freunde),” is built from a quirky Talking Heads-style disco groove and a warped German hook—“sechs freunde!”—that Yan lasciviously milks for its phonetic similarity to “sex,” like an over-enthusiastic street hustler trying to lure you into a red-light district peep show. But the phrase “sechs freunde” actually translates to “six friends”—presumably, a statement of solidarity among the band’s current sextet formation—and when Yan hits the cheerleading chorus, the song’s off-kilter essence transmutes into a comforting group hug.
By contrast, “Don’t Let the Sun Get in the Way” is one of the most rousing yet devastating songs in the BSP canon. It’s a shimmering soundtrack for blacked-out bedrooms that casts scenes of depression and prescription-pill addiction atop a turbulent rhythm that coils and crashes like waves into shore. And while Yan consults his trusty Encyclopedia Arcana from time to time, he pulls references with pointed contemporary resonance: The breezy, synth-sparkled “The Voice of Ivy Lee” name-checks a pioneer in the field of public relations—and corporate spin—to make a thinly veiled comment on Brexit-induced discord and bloodshed. “Kings of propaganda,” he sings, “Won’t you take another look at all the things you’ve done.”
As if to stabilize its weighty subject matter, Let the Dancers Inherit the Party is a remarkably steady album, at times to a fault. “You said the world was losing all its luster,” Yan sings on the opening “Bad Bohemian,” and so the group spends the next 47 minutes restoring its shine with gleaming starlit-surfaces, synth smears, and pulse-regulating mid-tempo motion. As such, brother Hamilton’s usual come-down contributions are even more subdued than usual, culminating in a closing, string-quivering reverie, “Alone Piano,” sculpted out of the Velvets’ “Heroin” haze. But while Let the Dancers Inherit the Party may not encourage the anarchic onstage theatrics that have defined the British Sea Power live experience, its cool composure belies a shrewd show of force. In the face of the political upheaval at home and abroad, British Sea Power offer a suitably British response: keep calm and carry on. | 2017-04-03T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-04-03T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Golden Chariot | April 3, 2017 | 7.3 | 0c27ee82-05ec-4f79-99df-237ff226e3cc | Stuart Berman | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stuart-berman/ | null |
Dan Bejar returns with a brilliant and accessible album that draws from the lush sounds of the early 1980s but never forgets the importance of songwriting. | Dan Bejar returns with a brilliant and accessible album that draws from the lush sounds of the early 1980s but never forgets the importance of songwriting. | Destroyer: Kaputt | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/15034-kaputt/ | Kaputt | Every era has a sound. When considering this, it can be easy to forget that the sound developed as a way to express something. Music heard as kitsch years later was once put forth with complete sincerity. I mention this in connection with Kaputt, the new record from Dan Bejar's Destroyer, because the first thing that strikes you about the album is its unusual sound, one for which we've all developed a cluster of associations. The production and arrangements evoke a narrow window of time-- sometime between, say, 1977 and 1984, or between Chuck Mangione's "Feels So Good" and Sade's Diamond Life with stops along the way for Roxy Music's Avalon and Steely Dan's Gaucho. It slides between soft rock, smooth jazz, and new romantic pop. The bass is fretless; the synths have the blocky contrast of a Nagel painting; there are heavily reverbed trumpets and saxophones that almost serve as a Greek chorus, trilling away at the end of every line to enforce the beautiful plasticity of these songs. For Destroyer, this sound is new, and it's there for a reason.
The sound casts Bejar's songs in a very particular light, and reinforces the feeling of the singer as persona. Bejar has always come across this way to varying degrees, sure, and his albums all have their own unique feel-- the rootsy art-pop of Destroyer's Rubies, the MIDI experiments of Your Blues, and so on. But here the persona seems even more sharply defined. Singing these songs, Bejar comes over as the wizened ex-playboy; he's indulged every vice, come through the other side, and now looks on amused. The cover of Leonard Cohen's Death of a Ladies' Man, a record that seems to serve as a spiritual (though not sonic) father to this one, shows this figure in its quintessential form. On that sleeve, we see a man in sharp but slightly disheveled dress, a cigarette dangling from a couple of fingers; beautiful people are seated at the nightclub table, ready for another night of glamor and pleasure.
Leonard Cohen in that image has a sense of swagger, and you want to pull up a chair, have a drink, and hear him hold forth on the topic of his choice. The figure inside the songs of Kaputt understands the allure of this life while understanding equally its futility. On early listens, a couple of lines from the title track jump out and seem to serve as a thesis for the record as a whole. "Wasting your days chasing some girls, alright/ Chasing cocaine through the backrooms of the world all night," Bejar sings, as horns twist around in a bath of reverb. He sounds bemused, but not necessarily judgmental, holding two feelings in mind at once: our reflex to indulge ourselves, and the knowledge that it's killing us.
But this happens on just one level, which is what makes Kaputt so fantastic. It goes as deep as you want to go. People can miss that Dan Bejar is funny as hell-- he seeds his music with lyrical and musical in-jokes, and everyone has their own favorite lines to pluck out of his songs and admire for their concise wit. He likes surprises-- few lyric sheets have as many exclamation points. But the essential quality of all his records is complexity. They are doing a lot of things at once. Kaputt feels rich.
For one, there is the surface beauty of the sound. Some less inclined to the pleasures of the music from the aforementioned era might have an initial reaction to its essential corniness, but once you've tuned in, it sounds beautiful. The songs seem delicate and glassy and shimmering, and Bejar has toned down his quirky voice and sounds relaxed and focused. So it's easy to enjoy bumping the wet, jazzy pop of "Chinatown", which suggests the rainy streets of an old city and new dramas unfolding around every corner. Or wallow in the simple and elegant hook of "Blue Eyes", the way Bejar voice works next to Vancouver singer Sibel Thrasher, a regular vocal presence on Kaputt who sort of serves as the Nicolette Larson to Bejar's Neil Young. But "Blue Eyes" also has sly lyrical references ("your first love's new order," "Mother Nature's Son") and funny put-downs ("I sent a message in a bottle to the press/ It said, 'Don't be ashamed or disgusted with yourselves'"). More than any other Destroyer record, you can just throw this on and it sounds good, and plenty will do well stopping there. But for those so inclined, there's more to explore.
So the lite-jazz style can seem a little funny, but it can also be sad and sexy and joyous. And the writing is dense with references-- to other songs on the album, songs by other bands, to the music business, art outside the sphere of music. "Suicide Demo for Kara Walker" is the most striking example. It's a collaboration with the artist Kara Walker, whose work, among other things, probes the racial history of America. Bejar adapted the words she provided for him on cue cards, and the result is fragmented and dream-like, taking the Destroyer project to a new place. "Wise, old, black and dead in the snow: My Southern sister..." isn't the sort of thing we've heard from him before. An early demo of the song reminded Bejar of the band Suicide, hence the title. That's how things work in his world. Laughs are mixed with grim insights.
Two tracks stick out a bit here. The astonishing "Bay of Pigs", released as a single in 2009, concludes the CD version of this album, and it's the one song that feels out of place. It's longer, proggy, uses different textures, and ultimately seems to be here because it's an amazing song and as many people as possible need to hear it. Fair enough. And the vinyl version of Kaputt also has a side-long, 20-minute ambient track with just a bit of voice called "The Laziest River", which is enjoyable and immersive but not essential. Both indulgences are easily forgivable.
Bands can be brands or concepts that can be summed up in a line or two-- which is the power of brands. It's a good thing in proper doses. But Bejar's essential complexity ultimately feels human. It seems absurd to look for genuine wisdom in music in 2011, when we're constantly gorging ourselves on the all-you-can-eat buffet of post-modern web culture. But Kaputt feels wise. Like a mirror that actually points back at something better. Something you can jam and let wash over you, but also something you can use. It feels funny, tragic, artful, and ultimately true. | 2011-01-24T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2011-01-24T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Merge / Dead Oceans | January 24, 2011 | 8.8 | 0c29194e-122d-4540-b3a7-fbd664c176eb | Mark Richardson | https://pitchfork.com/staff/mark-richardson/ | null |
The Atlanta rap trio Migos return with a sequel to their career-making mixtape, letting loose a relentless volley of absurdist humor and cartoonishly aggressive threats. YRN 2 is an hour of these three bouncing oddball pop culture references off each other, racing breakneck flows through unpredictable turns of phrase. | The Atlanta rap trio Migos return with a sequel to their career-making mixtape, letting loose a relentless volley of absurdist humor and cartoonishly aggressive threats. YRN 2 is an hour of these three bouncing oddball pop culture references off each other, racing breakneck flows through unpredictable turns of phrase. | Migos: Young Rich Ni$$a$ 2 | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21480-young-rich-nia-2/ | Young Rich Ni$$a$ 2 | Since breaking big with "Versace" and "Hannah Montana," the Atlanta rap trio Migos have watched their quirky triplet flow take over radio largely without them. Since then, their struggle to advance from curiosities to superstars has been threefold: They've had to remind everyone who popularized the flow, prove to naysayers that they're great at rapping, and log follow-up hits to galvanize the listener base at retail. Subsequent releases tended to succeed at addressing one of these points at the expense of the others: 2014's No Label 2 was riddled with scathing rebukes for imitators, while the same year's Rich Nigga Timeline was an excellent display of the trio as pure MCs. Last summer's debut studio album Yung Rich Nation reached for hits and succeeded marginally with "One Time" and "Pipe It Up," though the commercial success of the album was hampered by its sequencing and a too-abrupt release campaign borne out of an arrest, incarceration, and tour cancellation. For every advance, it seemed, there was misfortune lurking in the distance.
The Migos' return to the YRN franchise this month might seem like a retrenchment, a rejuvenating dip in familiar waters, but the spirit YRN 2 most shares with its predecessor is its foregrounding of fun and chemistry. With little to prove (except a stake in the ownership of the meteorically popular dab dance), the group lets loose a relentless volley of absurdist humor and cartoonishly aggressive threats. YRN 2 is an hour of these three bouncing oddball pop culture references off each other, racing breakneck flows through unpredictable turns of phrase.
As such, it's possible that this mixtape makes a better collection of verses than a body of songs. These exercises don't always come affixed to easy hooks or inviting beats. The production comes from frequent Migos collaborators Dun Deal ("Hannah Montana"), Zaytoven ("Versace"), Murda Beatz ("Pipe It Up"), and more, but most of the sounds here revolve around dark, minor key melodies. "Chances" and "Commando" have a stark, glacial beauty that recalls early-'80s Cure. Zaytoven's "Bars" beat outfits impish piano with a bassline so deep and flat that half of it sounds like kick drum hits. It suits the trio's lurid plug talk just fine, but doesn't stand to invite anyone in that wasn't already hip to the inner workings of the Migos universe.
That's not a setback so much as a smart read on the group's strengths. While sunnier outings like Back to the Bando's "Look at My Dab" and *Yung Rich Nation'*s "One Time" helped increase the group's national profile, these records don't feel as natural on them: The songs from the first YRN tape that hit did so out of sheer force of personality, not calculated pursuit of urban radio. It happened naturally, which is a difficult set of circumstances to recreate.
Like its predecessor, YRN 2 is a carefree swing between transgressive tough talk and morning-after reflection, and the extremes have never been more extreme than they are here. Early in the record, "Plan B" unveils the group's crass paternity contingency measure: offering sexual partners emergency morning-after contraceptive medication ("I gave my bitch a Plan B cause she was my plan b.") It's a mortifying, too-real glimpse into the logistics of being a nouveau riche party animal in a field where your clout can bend morality to suit your desires and just, honestly, several steps south of fun. On the other end of the tape is the closer "Chapter 1," where the team spells out the specifics of the struggle to make it out of poverty and the precarious business of staying up and out of trouble in gripping detail. It's no coincidence that the latter is perhaps the closest thing YRN 2 offers to a surefire hit; two years on from their first nationwide exposure, the Migos continue to shine the brightest when they're not trying too hard. | 2016-01-29T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2016-01-29T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rap | Quality Control | January 29, 2016 | 7.4 | 0c2b4797-0a15-48f9-bf79-f7f1574244ed | Craig Jenkins | https://pitchfork.com/staff/craig-jenkins/ | null |
Kurt Vile has absorbed a lifetime's worth of 70s FM rock, and the ghosts of Springsteen and others glimmer under the surface of his woozy bedroom pop. | Kurt Vile has absorbed a lifetime's worth of 70s FM rock, and the ghosts of Springsteen and others glimmer under the surface of his woozy bedroom pop. | Kurt Vile: Constant Hitmaker / God Is Saying This to You | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/12953-constant-hitmaker-god-is-saying-this-to-you/ | Constant Hitmaker / God Is Saying This to You | Sometimes an artist pens a song title that more perfectly captures his aesthetic in words than any review could. Thoughtfully, the War on Drugs' Kurt Vile has done this with his solo work via Constant Hitmaker's "Classic Rock in Spring/Freeway in Mind". See? Done. You know exactly how that should sound-- as nostalgic, wistful, and sunlit as the title suggests, with Vile crooning softly into a Jim James-sized cavern of reverb over some finger-picked chords about "riding on your Yellow Schwinn and blasting classic rock in spring." Those are some mighty big signifiers for a twentysomething kid to be throwing around, but Vile knows his way around them like they were living-room furniture.
Kurt Vile (real name, no gimmicks) has seemingly absorbed a lifetime's worth of FM rock, and the ghosts of Bruce Springsteen, Bob Seger, and others glimmer under the surface of his woozy, homemade bedroom pop. Vile recorded the majority of these songs on his own, and the sputter of the cheap drum software and the murmuring vocals testify to the kind of guy who doesn't want to wake up his parents upstairs. Nonetheless, even in this sleepy, abstracted form, there is no mistaking the widescreen Tom Pettyisms of "Freeway", from the wry hiccup of the vocal to the sunshower of jangling guitars that accompanies the track. Constant Hitmaker, his 2008 debut on Gulcher, snagged the ear of an attentive few, and now it is being reissued along with God Is Saying This To You, a limited edition LP, on vinyl. The sound of God Is Saying This To You is slightly cleaner and clearer than the bleary, sound effects-addled Constant Hitmaker, but that only means Vile sounds like he's singing from the bottom of a mineshaft this time instead of from the ocean floor. And it still feels like you're eavesdropping: Vile delivers every line in an amiable mumble, the sort of voice you use when you're humming something to yourself and only know every other word: "Hey girl, come on over, that'll be just fine. Two packs of red apples for the ride home," he murmurs over and over again on "Red Apples", and it sounds like the half-remembered chorus of some John Mellencamp song.
Vile has talked in interviews about his various odd jobs (he sings about operating a forklift on Constant Hitmaker) and his single, unfruitful semester in community college, and it rounds out the portrait suggested by his music: that of the talented but aimless kid in high school, the one who smoked pot every day but read philosophy textbooks in his free time, the sort of guy who identified viscerally with the borrowed blue-collar sentiments of classic rock radio. Kurt Vile channels this hangdog charm effortlessly, scrawling wayward little vocal melodies like the one on "Breathin Out" with the ease of a hesher Bob Pollard. Sections of Constant Hitmaker are bogged down with a few too many pedals-and-loops sound collages, but for most of the ride, Constant Hitmaker/God Is Saying This To You ambles dreamily along a perfect midway point between the disorientingly weird and the comfortingly familiar. | 2009-04-24T02:00:02.000-04:00 | 2009-04-24T02:00:02.000-04:00 | Rock | null | April 24, 2009 | 7.2 | 0c30cdef-9201-4e92-b80f-81d7fc4ce56a | Jayson Greene | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jayson-greene/ | null |
Hatchback's Colors of the Sun was first released in 2008, and its Balearic nu-disco vibe slots neatly into contemporaries like Prins Thomas & Lindstrøm. There's a touch of sunshine and open air here, a surfer's mentality, favoring low-key melodic turns and gentle movements. | Hatchback's Colors of the Sun was first released in 2008, and its Balearic nu-disco vibe slots neatly into contemporaries like Prins Thomas & Lindstrøm. There's a touch of sunshine and open air here, a surfer's mentality, favoring low-key melodic turns and gentle movements. | Hatchback: Colors of the Sun | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/20852-colors-of-the-sun/ | Colors of the Sun | When the Weeknd premiered his latest single, "Can't Feel My Face", on Apple Music back in June, its discofied groove suggested both a "Get Lucky" retread as well as a sign that some eight years on, mid-'00s Scandinavian cosmic disco might have finally wormed its way from blog backwaters on through Cadillac car commercials and into the mainstream. How else to explain a handsome, remastered-at-Abbey-Road, heavyweight gatefold sleeve reissue of an obscure nu-disco album from California's Hatchback, first released to little regard in 2008?
Originally released by Lo Recordings and !K7, Sam Grawe's debut Colors of the Sun has since been resuscitated by upstart UK reissue imprint, Be With Records, whose catalog ranges from yacht rock demiurge Ned Doheny to South African singer Letta Mbulu. But most fascinating are the albums that Be With zero in on from the '00s, when compact discs remained the medium of conveyance and pressing up vinyl was cost-prohibitive. So far, Be With has done vinyl reissues of everything from the Streets' A Grand Don't Come for Free to a Wilco side project to Cassie's prophetic minimalist nu-R&B classic.
Where Hatchback's debut fits in amid this eclectic, baffling roster is hard to gauge. Even as a fan of everything nu-disco/Balearic of that era, I'm only familiar with Hatchback's music via a 17-minute remix courtesy of Prins Thomas (these remixes were almost de rigueur circa 2007). His music occasionally recalls the vintage keyboard squiggles of Prins Thomas & Lindstrøm or else that of Klaus Schulze.
Perhaps Grawe's perspective from Northern California gives such German and European electronic influences a touch of sunshine and open air here, a surfer's mentality informing both his Hatchback persona as well as duo Windsurf. "Everything Is Neu" might wear its krautrock heritage on its sleeve, but rather than the Autobahn, it suggests a leisurely drive down the PCH, detouring from that motorik beat with piano-laced breakdowns suggestive of Michael Rother's post-Neu! albums. "Comets" and "White Diamond" both begin as Cluster homages, before Grawe astutely adds other layers—a laidback guitar figure, a contemplative synth melody—that take the tracks into more rarefied air. And had Boards of Canada decamped for the West Coast from Scotland, they might have made something like "Closer to Forever".
In hindsight, it's easy to see how the album might have not gotten a fair shake, favoring low-key melodic turns and gentle movements rather than the grander moves of his contemporaries. Outside of a 2013 single, there hasn't been much heard from Hatchback since 2011's follow-up, Zeus & Apollo. A quick search turned up the fact that Grawe worked first at Dwell and now serves as editorial director for furniture manufacturer Herman Miller, whose ergonomic Aeron chair I'm currently sitting in as I type this. It makes a certain kind of sense that Grawe gravitated toward modern architecture and design, in that Colors of the Sun suggests an astute sense of craft, even if its expert design becomes almost imperceptible due to its functionality. | 2015-08-07T02:00:03.000-04:00 | 2015-08-07T02:00:03.000-04:00 | Electronic | Be With | August 7, 2015 | 7.3 | 0c358fc7-8494-4f99-b6b6-dadc7056f941 | Andy Beta | https://pitchfork.com/staff/andy-beta/ | null |
Weezy returns to mixtape form, where he shows off his digressive, distracted spirit-- still a huge part of what makes him great. | Weezy returns to mixtape form, where he shows off his digressive, distracted spirit-- still a huge part of what makes him great. | Lil Wayne: No Ceilings | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/13672-no-ceilings/ | No Ceilings | No Ceilings. Nice title. Nice concept, too. Here's Wayne explaining it, on one of his new mixtape's blessedly few skits: "I would love for you to look up into the building and understand that there is no ceilings; there is only the sky." And in his case, it's true; Wayne's potential greatness seems to have no limit-- or if it does have a limit, it's difficult to say what it might be. Wayne's tough to evaluate because he's so very rarely operating at peak capacity. Whereas a classically great rapper (Ready to Die-era Biggie, say) might hammer his concepts straight on until he's bludgeoned them into atoms, Wayne barely ever has any concepts, hopscotching frantically but lazily between ideas and chasing digressions down gopher holes.
Wayne's digressive, distracted spirit is a huge part of what makes him great; even at his Carter II peak, he was always slippery and unpredictable and defiantly weird. But ever since he indisputably became the most popular rapper in the world last year, he's been in a strange zone, trusting his instincts to the point where he's now preparing to drop a whole album of somebody's idea of rock on us. And his instincts are, more often than not, bad. Add that to his purportedly staggering drug use and his upcoming prison sentence, and it's tough to tell just how far he could fall. Wayne's got no ceilings, but he's got no floors either.
And given the increasingly scattered nature of his post-Carter III work, the existence of No Ceilings is just a tremendous relief. After last year's wildly disappointing Dedication 3, Wayne's finally back to something like his Dedication 2/Drought 3 fighting shape and doing what he does best, swiping beats from all the songs on rap radio and rendering the originals obsolete. Pity F.L.Y. and Dorrough after what Wayne did to "Swag Surfin'" and "Ice Cream Paint Job". Beats like those are where Wayne traditionally comes off best; those cheap, tense, springy synthetic tracks make Wayne's berserk rasp sound something like catharsis.
Wayne's got no compunctions about snatching up a middling regional dance-rap mini-hit, and that appetite serves him well. When you throw him on something busier and bigger-budget like Jay-Z's "D.O.A." or "Run This Town", he doesn't sound quite as at home. So it's fortunate that Wayne still has a bug up his ass about Jay. On those two tracks, he just goes absolutely ripshit, throwing slick subliminals at Jay or just laughing Jay's barbs off. At least on mixtapes, Wayne doesn't have Jay's drive to build eternal monuments to his own importance; he's free to just spazz out. So, on "Run This Town": "New Orleans Coroner, his name is Frank Minyard/ Fuck with me wrong, you'll be waking up in his yard." (A Google search confirms that New Orleans' Coroner is indeed named Frank Minyard. Wayne: Backing up his insane threats with verifiable facts!)
In some intriguing ways, the rise of Gucci Mane presents an interesting challenge to this sort of Wayne mixtape. Gucci represents an evolution of Wayne's free-associative style, one simultaneously spacier and more focused. Gucci has none of Wayne's cursory desire for acceptance from NY true-schoolers, and he favors the kind of dinky, catchy budget beats that Wayne loves stealing on tapes like these. Wayne raps over three Gucci tracks on No Ceilings, as well as one from Gucci associate Waka Flocka, but he doesn't treat these tracks like challenges the way he does with the Jay songs. He probably should, since the Gucci songs are the rare mixtape tracks where Wayne can't erase the memory of the originals.
And No Ceilings certainly has its problems. Wayne might never again sound as flat-out committed as he did on Dedication 2. His punchlines don't always carry the same impact, and he's more likely to laugh at his own jokes. He shares valuable mic time with tolerable nonentities like Lucci Lou and Gudda Gudda. He picks a few tracks like the Black Eyed Peas' "I Gotta Feeling", songs that just aren't conducive to great rapping. He swipes a few terrible sex-rap tracks and makes slightly less terrible sex-rap tracks out of them, though even those will dependably include a few appealingly loony lines ("I get it wetter than bass pussy" is supposed to be seductive?). He's not quite the animal he was.
But No Ceilings once again finds Wayne in total control of beats, motivated and sliding freely between ideas. He pronounces "alps" and "stealth" and "milf" like they all rhyme with each other. He's scatological: "I'm on some shit ain't even been out the ass yet." He's haughty: "Elevator in my crib cause it's five floors/ I'm not expecting you to have one inside yours." He's on his half-sensical pop culture shit: "I get big chips; you get Alvins." He's capable of coming up with lines that get stuck in your head for no conceivable reason: "I'm flyer than the highest flying bird around this ho." He's frankly disgusting: "I made the pussy gleek." And with the twin trials of prison and Rebirth looming, it's just enormously gratifying to hear that he still knows how to rap, that he loves doing it. After all, nobody does it like him. | 2009-11-16T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2009-11-16T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rap | Young Money Entertainment | November 16, 2009 | 7.7 | 0c35cf8b-3069-4e49-861d-ecdf05301882 | Tom Breihan | https://pitchfork.com/staff/tom-breihan/ | null |
This new deluxe, limited product is only for hardcore fans; the music, however—both the original LP and this record’s extras—is timeless. | This new deluxe, limited product is only for hardcore fans; the music, however—both the original LP and this record’s extras—is timeless. | Spiritualized: Ladies and Gentlemen We Are Floating in Space B P | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/13984-ladies-and-gentlemen-we-are-floating-in-space-collectors-editon/ | Ladies and Gentlemen We Are Floating in Space B P | “There's a hole in my arm where all the money goes,” moans Jason Pierce at the start of “Cop Shoot Cop...,” the 17-minute closer of Spiritualized’s third album and lone masterpiece, Ladies and Gentlemen We Are Floating in Space. His bedraggled voice drips through the words. He’s an addict, but it’s as if he realizes none of it mattered, anyway—there’s no salvation, no redemption, only cold life and sudden death. One cop lives to kill another cop. (Or a junkie survives only long enough to shoot up again.) The world keeps turning. Just like in his opening line, he quotes John Prine: “Jesus Christ died for nothing, I suppose.”
Since the 1997 release of Ladies and Gentlemen, Spiritualized have recorded three LPs, a handful of singles and EPs, and two double-disc sets called Complete Works. And the noise-gospel rock sprees that followed Ladies and Gentlemen cemented Spiritualized’s reputation as one of rock’n’roll’s best live spectacles. Pierce has also scored a Harmony Korine film, recorded a solo electronics album, collaborated with Spring Heel Jack, and sculpted a mesmerizing long-form drone record with pianist Matthew Shipp. He also almost died, in 2005 of bilateral pneumonia, only to recover and finish a remarkable return to form—Songs in A&E. Yet Pierce unequivocally reached the height of his recorded powers with Ladies and Gentlemen. Bolder than the term Britpop might suggest, more focused than the term psychedelic might imply, Ladies and Gentlemen is one of the great triumphs of the 70-plus-minute CD era. Alternately chaotic and meticulous, thundering and quivering, Ladies and Gentlemen finds power in conflict—between restraint and excess, addiction and isolation, and ultimately, love and hate.
Like most any critical and commercial success, the record has now been repackaged with extra content—specifically, in an ornate limited run meant for collectors and zealots. Ladies and Gentlemen’s treatment as an edition of 1,000 numbered box sets from ATP is outrageous and elegant enough to match its contents: Each song comes on an individual black three-inch CD, the discs sealed inside black blister packaging, like the single tablets of a treatment regimen. Two discs of demos and isolated elements from the finished tunes—those lonesome, blue horns blaring through “No God Only Religion,” for instance—get their own package, too, as does a personalized prescription signed by the doctor Jason Pierce himself. The liner notes take the form of lengthy instructions and technical specs for the medicine—how the pills were made, who made them, and how they should be taken. “What is Spiritualized used for?” asks the silver metallic ink. “Spiritualized is used to treat the heart and soul.”
There’s no better way to put it, really. Ladies and Gentlemen is, at its core, an album about wanting something you don’t have until, as “Cop Shoot Cop...” says, it brings you to your knees. Pierce wants to fill that hole in his arm, or—as it were—the hole in his heart. Kate Radley plays keyboards and sings on Ladies and Gentlemen, and she begins the album with that famous telephone call: “Ladies and gentlemen, we are floating in space,” her voice delivering horrible news with ruinous calm. Her romance with Pierce had just ended. Four days before Spiritualized were to open for the Verve in England in 1995, she secretly married the headliner’s Richard Ashcroft. “All I want in life’s a little bit of love to take the pain away,” Pierce repeats for the album's first minute. Your heart would hurt, too.
Pierce famously denies that Ladies and Gentlemen has anything to do with Radley, telling The Guardian as late as 2001 that “People have this idea that anyone who writes music is bearing their soul.” He cited “Broken Heart,” in which he admits that he’s too busy to actually have one, as an example of playfulness. These songs were mostly written before they called it quits, he’s said, and, after all, it’s only rock’n’roll. But with very vivid words and visceral sounds, Ladies and Gentlemen expresses the extremes of attachment and separation. “I just don’t know what to do on my own/ All of my thoughts are with you,” Pierce sings. But he’s not just hurt—he’s also angry. His band eventually unloads a rock salvo that feels like a fistfight. The drums roil. The piano pounds. If there ever was a melody, the harmonica’s choked the breath from it. By the next number, he’s practically sobbing over a galactic country drift: “Stay with me/Smile all the time/Don’t go.” He’s still addicted to something, and, on “Electricity,” he lets us know how good it felt. “I’m playing with fire, if you know what I mean.”
The rub, of course, is that we don’t know what he means. We can only interpret and internalize for ourselves. Maybe it was Radley, or maybe it was the heroin he smoked and the booze he drank. Hell, maybe he was just being an entertainer. But if you don’t know those feelings, the highs of love and the lows of loss, you’ve fared better than most. This sort of emotional ambiguity makes Ladies and Gentlemen an eternal album, as provocative then as it is now. People haven’t stopped loving and losing and hurting yet, and they won’t, of course. These pleasures and pains can be attached to anything. But what makes this ostentatious reissue—the box costs £125.00, or about $190, plus postage—so interesting right now is that it feels like a souvenir forwarded from another era. Ladies and Gentlemen is an extinct breed of album, a production so lavish that you have to think most record label executives would balk or faint at the thought of funding it in 2010. To wit, New Orleans fixture Dr. John is but a session player here, joining a cast of a dozen players, the London Community Gospel Choir, and a high-profile string quartet. (The record is also being reissued as a single disc, with new artwork, and as a 3xCD set without a lot of the pricy trappings of the more extravagant package.)
That spirit is evident on the demos included here, as well. On Ladies and Gentlemen, “Cool Waves” is a diorama built with weepy vocals, darting flute, schmaltzy strings, building concert bass drums, and a choir that’s just begging for salvation. But its one-minute demo included in this set seems no more complicated than the demos Pierce made with his schoolmates in 1984, his former band Spacemen 3’s first recordings. If the demo is a Polaroid, the album is Avatar. There's no way it could have been cheap.
While Ladies and Gentlemen established Spiritualized as one of the supreme bands of the ’90s, it was by no means an overwhelming commercial success. It earned album of the year honors from NME in 1997 and placed on year-end charts in The Village Voice, Q, and Uncut. But Ladies and Gentlemen charted only as high as No. 4 in England. In the United States, it’s sold slightly more than 111,000 copies—about 20,000 less than Merriweather Post Pavilion. To wit, Sony Music scrapped its plans for this reissue in America, meaning it’s available only through ATP’s mail-order service. The disc did better by the band’s legacy, one assumes, than it did for any label’s bottom line.
After all, it’s an album mostly without a clear hit single, a massive production better enjoyed as a whole than in bits and pieces. Though Spiritualized eventually released edits, remixes, or reworkings of “I Think I’m in Love,” “Come Together,” and “Electricity,” those songs thrive best in the context of the album—in their original, much more grand iterations. “I Think I’m in Love,” for instance, flows brilliantly from “Come Together” and, eight minutes later, its dénouement shapes the perfect non-introduction to the casual piano of “All of My Thoughts.” In the interim, Pierce reveals the breadth of the band’s ideas and influence. The first half combines Spacemen 3’s LaMonte Young–like 20th century composition (with its growling synthesizer drone), dub, soul (with its thick, stunted bass line), American blues (with its twisted harmonica howls), and folk (Pierce’s subtle autoharp strums). The back half is a sassy, baritone saxophone–backed dialogue between Pierce’s self-confidence and his self-doubt: “I think that I can rock’n’roll,” he sings. “Probably just twisting,” he answers. And on “Come Together,” one of only a few Ladies and Gentlemen tunes you’re likely to still hear live, Pierce fancies himself a young man that’s sad and fucked (a word he manages to use five times in as many minutes here) amid references to suicide, heroin, and busted dreams.
Even “Broken Heart,” the album’s ballad and most beautiful moment, clocks in close to seven minutes. It needs every one of them, too, since the song’s overwhelming sadness depends entirely on its length and its ability to establish an atmosphere. This is an album of emotion and empathy, and it’s hard to capture feelings with a format. That’s what ranks Ladies and Gentlemen We Are Floating in Space alongside the best art: Jason Pierce and a big band that included his ex-girlfriend and a whole slew of people that soon became his ex-bandmates faithfully render the cycle of loving anything—the innocent exuberance, the bitter rejection, the episodic denial—in 70 perfect minutes. And even if you can’t afford this version of that achievement, you should have it on hand. One day, it’ll come in handy. After all, “Spiritualized is used to treat the heart and soul.” | 2010-03-02T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2010-03-02T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | ATP | March 2, 2010 | 10 | 0c36904b-4c23-4b52-a60b-3b86ebaf979c | Grayson Haver Currin | https://pitchfork.com/staff/grayson-haver currin/ | |
The powerhouse singer’s voice is chameleonic and present in every guise. Her debut is most satisfying not because she whizzes across multiple genres, but because of the skill she displays at each. | The powerhouse singer’s voice is chameleonic and present in every guise. Her debut is most satisfying not because she whizzes across multiple genres, but because of the skill she displays at each. | Jessie Reyez: Before Love Came to Kill Us | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/jessie-reyez-before-love-came-to-kill-us/ | Before Love Came to Kill Us | The 2010s R&B renaissance gave rise to a lot of little renaissances, one of which is the R&B singer-songwriter. Their arrangements are acoustic and expensively dusty, like a piano whose warped keys are recorded from across an attic. Often the songs are R&B in name only; they sound like—and are intended as—alt-rock or folk. The lyrics might be florid, might be plainspoken, but will always be dead blunt. The first line will catch and bleed like a songwriting garrote, something like, “I should have fucked your friends.”
Jessie Reyez’s Before Love Came to Kill Us begins with this hook. From there, she claws in deeper, addressing her ex in a deceptively sweet croon: “I’m the monster that you made, yeah, you made me/Now I’m just like you, so don’t complain.” She threatens to Goodfella them. On the axis from 0 to Kelis’ “Caught Out There,” Reyez is at the far furious end. And while Before Love Came to Kill Us is technically her debut, it follows several EPs of similarly unsparing music like “Gatekeeper,” a vicious, Clockwork Orange-referencing exposé of sexual harassment by a former producer (whom she later named as Detail). It’s the kind of thing young women are encouraged to quietly write out of their career narrative or else, and a genuine risk.
Before Love Came to Kill Us showcases more of that high-stakes swagger. Reyez’s songwriting is extremely online—on one track she mentally Twitter-mutes a scrub—and extremely death-driven, whether she portrays herself as the death or the killer. Her voice is chameleonic and present in every guise: quirky lilt; delicate head voice; and, often and best, a blown-out, purposefully ragged belt that sounds like it’s trying to claw its way out of the recording. What’s most satisfying about Before Love Came to Kill Us isn’t that Reyez whizzes across multiple genres—these days, who doesn’t?—but the skill she displays at each. No matter the arrangement, she powers across it at full force.
“Intruders,” with shades of Kali Uchis’ “Tyrant,” is as romantic as it is subtly unsettling: “a love song, a war song,” and a metaphor of love as colonialism, of scorching other people’s earth. Equally alluring and disturbing is the woozy 6LACK duet “Imported.” Reyez’s and 6LACK’s vocals slip from background to foreground on the chorus; Reyez’s verses dissolve mid-flirt into nothing. Both artists, though commanding presences, surrender to the anonymity of the affair, singing some variation on “my name is fuck it, ’cause my name is not important.” The album takes its title from “Kill Us,” a power ballad built atop guitar heroics, like something Miguel would do. Best of all is the glitchy, carefree party-starter “Dope,” full-to-bursting with slyly lewd vocals and whoops.
Like all “debut” albums stitched together from various EPs—themselves stitched together from standalone singles and streaming-only tracks—the album has a cursory feel. Much of its best material has been around for years, like the radioactively angry “Kiddo” offcut “Deaf” and the breakout single “Figures,” or a newly remixed version of “Imported”. Sometimes it’s the other way around: Early versions of “Ankles” sent to streaming suggested the track was meant to feature Rico Nasty and Melii, which is either a metadata screwup or the reason the solo version on Before Love Came to Kill Us sounds a little unfinished and thin.
Like many recent pop records, the album is overlong, and the extraneous material tends to be the kind of filler that Reyez is well above. “Love in the Dark” and “I Do” are fusty ballads, and while Reyez sings the hell out of them, she’s also mixed way to the front, as if her producers don’t trust her performance alone to elevate the song. Likewise, “Coffin” is the requisite doo-wop track many an R&B singer has done in the past few years. Reyez revels in its melodrama anyway, drawing up blueprints for coffins built for two—but then 2020 Eminem arrives, an entirely different kind of grim. (Gather ’round the coffin, kids, and let me tell you of a time when the average Eminem verse was at least as funny as 6LACK saying “Six-Lack.”) But all these flaws have less to do with Reyez than the industry she’s in. Throughout, she proves adept at cutting through its BS and noise—by being louder.
Buy: Rough Trade
(Pitchfork earns a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.) | 2020-04-02T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-04-02T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | FMLY / Island | April 2, 2020 | 6.8 | 0c3984ee-fa19-411f-8545-c16890592bc2 | Kathryn St. Asaph | https://pitchfork.com/staff/kathryn-st. asaph/ | |
The soundtrack to the new Cameron Crowe film consists of a song by Sigur Rós, music from Jónsi's solo album Go, and 30 minutes of new material with arrangements by Nico Muhly. | The soundtrack to the new Cameron Crowe film consists of a song by Sigur Rós, music from Jónsi's solo album Go, and 30 minutes of new material with arrangements by Nico Muhly. | Jónsi: We Bought a Zoo OST | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/16104-we-bought-a-zoo/ | We Bought a Zoo OST | You've got very few choices if you're looking for someone with name recognition and vestigial indie cred to score a big-budget holiday movie called We Bought a Zoo. The Flaming Lips have already done their Christmas movie soundtrack (and, yes, even have a song about Christmas at the zoo), and this is a Cameron Crowe film we're talking about, one that's being touted as "from the director of Jerry Maguire," as opposed to, say, "from the director of Almost Famous." So Jónsi it is, and you can't argue with the decision. As frontman of Sigur Rós, his vocals embody wide-eyed wonder without devolving into unbearable twee overload. So We Bought a Zoo naturally manifests as a work of mutual admiration and mutual benefit and everyone comes out of it feeling better about themselves. Which is to say that above all else, the level of risk and likelihood to satisfy is on par with that of, say, a Cameron Crowe movie being released for the holidays.
What Crowe gets out of this relationship is obvious. But if Jónsi actually ever needed an audio résumé to snag more jobs like this one, he could just slap down a USB of We Bought a Zoo and have it speak for his emergence as a unique, bankable commodity post-Ágætis Byrjun. This is partially by design: one Sigur Rós song is included, but it's an epochal one. Much like "Svefn-g-englar" (a major player on the soundtrack to Crowe's Vanilla Sky), "Hoppípolla" has become shorthand for a specific era of Sigur Rós, indicative of their brassier, bolder, and more concise songwriting that came after ( ) stretched their most inscrutable tendencies to infinity.
We Bought a Zoo gets its spark from key tracks off Jónsi's 2010 solo album, Go. Yes, it's hard to separate Jónsi from his day gig, but if We Bought a Zoo gets people to think of Go as far more than something other than a Sigur Rós spinoff, well, hopefully it'll inspire Jónsi to give us more of the same. Despite the greater prevalence of synthetic strings and dance beats, there's something more primal about these songs than those of latter day Sigur Rós. "Go Do" speaks to a universal ideal of action and while time will reveal how "Boy Lilikoi" fits into this particular movie, the childish primitivism would've worked just fine within Where the Wild Things Are (though perhaps with Disney animation rather than brooding browns and grays).
So what's the draw for those of us who already share Crowe's ardent Jónsi fanhood? That's where a shade over a half hour of new music he composed for the film comes in, with tasteful brass and string arrangements courtesy of Nico Muhly. It's heartening to hear about the film's working title and climactic scene being inspired by 2007 live documentary Heima and the director encouraging Matt Damon and Scarlett Johansson to listen to certain Sigur Rós songs to get their energy correct for certain scenes (I expect plenty of beatific, skyward gazing). And certainly, it's exciting to imagine Jónsi coming from Iceland to hunker down with what Crowe calls a "a toy sample keyboard and a head full of ideas." But let's not forget that while Crowe brought Jónsi in for his uniquely whimsical and weighty approach, it's still whimsy-for-hire. So those trebly piano twinkles, elegiac tempos, octave-shifted vocals that hover and haunt like friendly ghosts? They're all here, treated with a bit of textural abrasion and arranged into small, three-minute packages with utilitarian titles like "Sun", "Brambles", and "Humming". Even one of two vocal tracks Jónsi composed specifically for the film hints a little to the melody from "White Christmas". Dude's a good company man.
Of course, it's all lovely and certainly more immediately engaging and compact than Jónsi's mostly-instrumental Riceboy Sleeps multimedia project from 2009. But it also has something going for it more important than gorgeous ambience: the Jónsi seal of quality. Does his work as an arranger and curator rank in the same percentile as his work as a vocalist? Not really, and even if starlit passages like "Sinking Friendships" or the luxuriant title track put in fine work with moving images, they aren't likely to dislodge anything from the upper echelon of his past work. But hopefully, offering the bold and evolving gestures of Jónsi's past decade in a relatively safe and compact design allows the possibility that a moviegoer might come out of the theater curious enough to parlay $10 into a meaningful relationship with Jónsi's music. And if that's the case, I think a lot of us are jealous of those who get to experience Sigur Rós for the first time in 2011. | 2011-12-05T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2011-12-05T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Columbia | December 5, 2011 | 7 | 0c39cd53-ec66-4ddf-ac2f-a610bf5347b2 | Ian Cohen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ian-cohen/ | null |
This New York-based art project made its mark during the first wave of electroclash and now returns with its first full-length album in four years. | This New York-based art project made its mark during the first wave of electroclash and now returns with its first full-length album in four years. | Fischerspooner: Entertainment | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/13013-entertainment/ | Entertainment | It's been nine years since Larry Tee, the man who coined the term "electroclash," put on the first Electroclash festival. Rather than looking at how that scene died, it's interesting to see how many of those festival headliners-- Fisherspooner, Peaches, Ladytron, Scissor Sisters-- survived. (Not to mention that nobody sniffs at later electro-pop bands like Hot Chip, Justice, Crystal Castles, CSS, etc.) Maybe the key for the the duo behind Fisherspooner (composer Warren Fischer and singer/performer Casey Spooner) is that they don't consider themselves "dance musicians" in the conventional sense. "I mean our music isn't really dance music," Fischer told Pitchfork's Tom Breihan in a recent interview. "I don't really know what genre it would lie in. I guess it's kind of like indie pop or pop music."
They always were, and still consider themselves, an art project first (notice he says "our music" rather than "we"). As they said, they get commissioned for dance pieces (the kind performed in concert halls), not for remixes. Their shows are built on spectacle rather than the charisma of any one of their players, including frontman Spooner. Unfortunately for a band that tries to turn glitter and polish into art, Entertainment is a lackluster performance. Here they almost become the indie pop group they claim they've always been, but the irony of their cries against capitalism and artifice ultimately fail without compelling songs to keep them afloat.
Entertainment begins promisingly. Lush opener "The Best Revenge" scans as old Fischerspooner sleaze for its first few seconds, but then the track shudders awake with broken keyboard notes and a dated but delightful horn line-- the kind where you hope someone yells "Blow, daddy!" But no one ever does. "At what cost? There is a price," warns Spooner. He lives by this admonishment throughout Entertainment (the title perhaps evoking that other anti-capitalist "dance" band, Gang of Four). The stance is funny (though understandable) coming from a band you'd always suspect was created exclusively for readers of BlackBook. Some of his warnings-- "Currency can only do so much" ("Money Can't Dance"), "What's real? What's fake" ("In a Modern World"), or "It's no one's fault but our own," from their slippery anti-war track "Infidels of the World Unite", ring insincere, an unfortunate side-effect of Spooner's deadened vocals.
Fischerspooner's bolder attempts at pop, like the flute-backed twee verse towards the end of "Money Can't Dance" and the more personal "Door Train Home", hint at something more interesting. The latter song is unusual here: though Spooner's still deadpan, his specificity and intimate lyrics make up for the rather broad strokes of sawtooth synth and whining guitar from his partner. But there are far too many tracks on Entertainment where both members are sleepwalking. "We Are Electric" comes off particularly half-hearted; Fischer cycles the song's tinny, repetitive synth pattern though different filters while Spooner intones the title line over and over. Both halves play like they were written for different songs with no thought given to how they'd get along.
For a group not making dance music, their danciest tracks are still their best. "To the Moon" coalesces in all the right ways: found audio detritus blends into a likable, warm synth melody and a layered, exultant beat. Slivers of violin and keyboards are inserted into all the best spots, and even Spooner finds an elementary vocal melody before backing out gracefully. It works in this context, for a group that seems all about context. Like, "Danse En France"'s textured, fractured pieces and spoken intro don't work until you know that the song was commissioned for a particular dance company, and is based on a hilarious story of casual sex via boneheaded Americanism. So Entertainment might be music for their performances, it might be for others' dance performances, but it's not for the dance floor. Those halves that don't quite fit? They're begging to be pulled apart and put back together by heavier hands. | 2009-05-08T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2009-05-08T02:00:01.000-04:00 | Electronic | Lo / FS Studios | May 8, 2009 | 5.8 | 0c3b2441-c409-4cae-9867-479beccbde91 | Jessica Suarez | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jessica-suarez/ | null |
Unreleased at the time, the Japanese guitarist's elemental free jazz opus provides the missing link between Albert Ayler, Merzbow, and Acid Mothers Temple. | Unreleased at the time, the Japanese guitarist's elemental free jazz opus provides the missing link between Albert Ayler, Merzbow, and Acid Mothers Temple. | Masayuki Takayanagi New Direction Unit: April is the Cruellest Month | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/masayuki-takayanagi-new-direction-unit-april-is-the-cruellest-month/ | April is the Cruellest Month | Few record labels provided succor for generations of freaks, seekers, and weirdos like ESP-Disk. Founded by lawyer Bernard Stollman in New York’s bustling East Village in 1963 to promote the language of Esperanto, it soon pivoted to another kind of international language—music—introducing to the world the searing, ecstatic jazz of Albert Ayler and Sun Ra as well as the stoned folk of the Fugs and Pearls Before Swine. The ESP catalog still sounds like little else in recorded music, radically obliterating all preconceived notions of what a saxophonist, a jazz singer, percussionist, or rock band might sound like. If only the label had gotten to the singular guitar of Masayuki “Jojo” Takayanagi.
That was the plan back in 1975 at least, when Stollman first encountered the Japanese guitarist and offered to put out a record on ESP-Disk. Takayanagi and band recorded a session in the spring of that year only to lose touch with Stollman over the summer. By fall the label was bankrupt and Takayanagi’s April is the Cruellest Month sat on a shelf, only seeing release on CD in Japan some 16 years later. Now rescued by New York’s Blank Forms label, April attempts to properly answer the big “What if?”s around it and to properly place Takayanagi as paterfamilias for the likes of Keiji Haino, Merzbow, Acid Mothers Temple, Michio Kurihara, and the PSF roster. There’s no need to blow the dust off, as it sounds as vital and unfettered in 2019 as it did forty years ago.
Versed in blues, jazz standards, and modal excursions, but equally comfortable transforming his guitar into a gale-force storm (this particular concert from 1972 highlights his astonishing range), Masayuki “Jojo” Takayanagi got his start in cool jazz bands back in the 1950s. But his development paralleled that of jazz from halfway around the world, in particular the likes of 1960s Coltrane, forever seeking new vistas even as it challenged and alienated audiences. Takayanagi began to explore the sound of feedback as well as the kinds of sounds he could make by lying his guitar on a table top and attacking it with all manner of objects, be it a violin bow or metal. There are aspects of his sound that bring to mind the likes of Western peers like Jimi Hendrix, Sonny Sharrock, Derek Bailey, or AMM’s Keith Rowe, but those players’ sensibilities rarely overlap save in Takayanagi’s work.
By the ‘70s, Takayanagi began to turn away from jazz completely, concerned less with chords and structure and more with conjuring elemental forces. One need only a few opening seconds from a live "Mass Projection" from 1973 to not so much hear as feel Takayanagi. April is the Cruellest Month captures Takayanagi during a fertile, frantic creative outburst in 1975, coming between formidable albums like Eclipse and Axis/ Another Revolable Thing. Had it come out back then, it would have been a mighty triumvirate for Takayanagi and a coup for the Japanese free-jazz scene, putting one of their most incandescent acts on the same roster as Ayler and introducing Japan’s music to the world at large. Similar in structure to Eclipse and Axis, April presents three different approaches across three long tracks gradually increasing in intensity and ferocity. “We Have Existed” features Kengi Mori’s flute, Nobuyoshi Ino’s kinetic bowed cello, and Hiroshi Yamazaki’s careening freeform percussion. Each member scrabbles away at their sound and Jojo’s guitar binds it all together. Approaching 20 minutes, “My Friend, Blood Shaking My Heart” is about as close as one can get to having a cyclone churn through your living room.
In the ‘80s, Takayanagi would collaborate with John Zorn and perform at international jazz festivals, but it was a missed opportunity to not have the Western world know what fierce sounds were arising from Japan. It would take until the 1990s for adventurous listeners to have their eardrums blown out by the likes of Keiji Haino, Les Rallizes Dénudés, and the like. How many budding young American guitarists might have stumbled across Takayanagi and April is the Cruellest Month knowing that they too could push even further into the unknown? Cruelly unreleased at the time, Takayanagi’s sound remains formidable and transformative. | 2019-06-06T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-06-06T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Jazz | Blank Forms | June 6, 2019 | 7.5 | 0c3b2833-5d5b-461f-80c8-cc67811ca7e3 | Andy Beta | https://pitchfork.com/staff/andy-beta/ | |
The dubstep artist follows his critically acclaimed debut with the even richer*,* more complex, and more enveloping Untrue, a record of reverb-heavy and mournful songs that feel almost like beautiful secrets being whispered to a listener. | The dubstep artist follows his critically acclaimed debut with the even richer*,* more complex, and more enveloping Untrue, a record of reverb-heavy and mournful songs that feel almost like beautiful secrets being whispered to a listener. | Burial: Untrue | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/10877-untrue/ | Untrue | If you know the true identity of London dubstep artist Burial, consider yourself a member of a very exclusive circle. Steve Goodman, who runs London's Hyperdub label, knows-- he cuts Burial's royalty checks, after all-- but if anyone else does, no one has yet had the temerity to out Burial's inner Peter Parker. Read an interview or two with the artist himself, and you'll quickly figure out why he's chosen to remain anonymous. Burial's decision not to let a backstory be a part of the music doesn't come across as a strategy calculated to maximize hype, but just the opposite: a means of keeping the music pure, faceless, answerable only to itself-- a closed system.
The critical success of Burial's self-titled first album threatened to derail the project's mystery, however. A collection of tunes recorded at home on a low-tech setup over the course of many years, Burial-- moody, brooding, by turns supple and sullen-- shot to the top of many critics' best-of lists last year. To judge from a recent interview with Burial posted on the Hyperdub website, the attention was more distracting than gratifying. "The first [album] got slightly out of where it belonged," he says, "and I found it a bit difficult to just block things out and make tunes in a low key way again, and it took time to just get back to doing that, and liking it, and doing it fast, and not trying to be a perfectionist. Just trying to dream up tunes again without worrying what people were going to think."
But if it's the reclusive life that Burial seeks, he might just be his own worst enemy, because his new album, Untrue, bests Burial's fans' wildest hopes for the followup. Burial was a worthy, sometimes thrilling record-- an impressive debut-- but it sometimes lost focus, particularly when it attempted to carve out something closer to "proper," clubwise dubstep. But Untrue maintains the style and the vibe of the first album and yet does it better. It's a deeper album-- richer, more complex, more enveloping. The irony is that almost nothing has changed. Burial still makes his beats (at least, so he claims) with relatively lo-fi audio editing software, eschewing the comfort of sequencers and MIDI clocks. His string sounds, which on Burial let many a critic to call his music "cinematic," sound as unabashedly canned as they did last time, and his manipulated vocals-- warped, time-stretched, pitch-corrected-- are just as unabashedly emotive.
Like Burial, Untrue is a homage to UK garage, or two-step-- a short-lived, oft-mourned fusion of breakbeats and house music that peaked in the late 90s before morphing into offshoots dubstep, grime, and bassline house. Thus Burial's beats swing wildly, as though flitting between two tempos in the space of a single bar; jittery hi-hat patterns flash like knives being sharpened, and tooth-cracking rimshots invariably fall on the third beat, dividing time in odd ways. His beats seem to rush, trying to catch up with their own out-of-control forward motion, and then-- crack!-- having caught up, they simply hang there, as though unsure what to do with the remaining time left in the measure. It's a relay race marked not by starter's pistols, but stopper's pistols, leaving an impression at once rigid and woozy.
But what Burial gets wrong is at least as interesting as what he gets right. Where two-step was marked by its precision-- staccato sub-bass, nimble cadences, rapid-fire vocal shots-- Burial smears everything until the songs' moving parts are all but indistinguishable. In "Ghost Hardware", what sounds like the creaking of a swingset grates in the background, as if attempting to tug the music out of its planned arc. On "Shell of Light", piano and strings eddy to a crawl as rain drizzles over muted, multi-tracked vocals. There's nothing on Untrue that's likely to work in the dance club, but that's beside the point. Top-heavy with sad string passages and mournful vocal loops, Untrue is an album meant to be heard at home, in the car, on headphones-- his songs feel almost like beautiful secrets being whispered to a listener.
Thanks to Burial's use of vocals, Untrue is overflowing with earworms, its spongy terrain pocked and pitted until the ground threatens to give way with every step. It's not a pop album, at least not by Top 40 standards, but his voices-- male, female, and ambiguous-- wriggle deep into the listener's consciousness. They're just intelligible enough to stick-- I'm pretty sure that the refrain to "Near Dark" runs, "I can see why I love you"-- and unintelligible enough to resist dislodging. Occasionally paired with scraps of what might be movie dialogue, they recall the haunted intimacy of Luomo's Vocalcity; like that record, they toy with r&b's conventions, heavy with breath and rippling with trills and melisma, some of it digitally imposed.
Like everything in Burial's music, the vocals are supercharged with emotion: Loaded with distance, they often sound like they've been recorded several rooms away from their source. Burial isn't afraid of sidling up next to cheesiness, practically flirting with bathos-- his string sounds are uniformly synthetic and his voices seem expressed in miniature; like Thom Yorke, he raises affect almost to the level of fetish. Burial's all-permeating use of reverb could be a crutch if it didn't work so well. The haze works in his favor, leaving a level of plausible deniability-- you can never be entirely sure that what you're hearing is really there in the track, creating a wonderfully unfinished feeling to the record.
"Sometimes you just want music to stay where it is from," says Burial in his Hyperdub interview. "I love drum & bass, jungle, hardcore, garage, dubstep, and always will till I die, and I don't want the music I love to be a global samplepack music. I like underground tunes that are true and mongrel and you see people trying to break that down, alter its nature. Underground music should have its back turned, it needs to be gone, untrackable, unreadable, just a distant light." Untrue is just that. It quivers like a hissing lightbulb, one that illuminates the tracks scattered around it-- garage, dubstep, soul-- and in doing so smears them into unique shapes. Untrue shows the hunched, unreadable form of Burial's refusenik stance-- back turned, hands shoved in pockets-- and practically commands you to follow. | 2007-11-13T01:00:01.000-05:00 | 2007-11-13T01:00:01.000-05:00 | Electronic | Hyperdub | November 13, 2007 | 8.4 | 0c3d089e-ea06-4413-ba6f-8ed0898125ac | Philip Sherburne | https://pitchfork.com/staff/philip-sherburne/ | null |
While the rapper’s latest of multiple releases this year is too scattershot to sustain itself as a project, he’s landing more darts on the board than usual, and it’s fun to hear him experiment. | While the rapper’s latest of multiple releases this year is too scattershot to sustain itself as a project, he’s landing more darts on the board than usual, and it’s fun to hear him experiment. | RXK Nephew: Make Drunk Cool Again | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/rxk-nephew-make-drunk-cool-again/ | Make Drunk Cool Again | It’s one thing to be a prolific rapper in 2021, but Rxk Nephew attempts to reskin himself with every release. None of the nearly dozen projects the Rochester rapper has dropped this year sound the same, and he clearly relishes laying his non-sequitur raps over as many regional styles as possible. Nephew’s music is breathless and unpredictable; he’ll call out rappers for lying about gang activities one minute and diss a producer while rapping over their beat the next. This tenacity makes him suited to a place like YouTube—where his page is updated frequently—and would theoretically make him a great mixtape rapper, but his ever-growing discography fluctuates wildly like a polygraph test. The drawback to being a loose cannon is not knowing when or if your firepower will blow up in your face.
But Nephew keeps the steady drip of music coming anyway. Make Drunk Cool Again—which isn’t even his latest project—is another left turn in a short career already brimming with them. The beats, handled mainly by producer Rx Brainstorm, swerve from the chopped samples and 808s of Crack Dreams 2 toward swaying synth-funk, house music, and bachata before collapsing into a pile of thrash metal on the closer “Slitherman Solo Set.” While Drunk is still a little too scattershot to sustain itself as a project, Nephew is landing more darts on the board than usual, and it’s fun to hear him experiment.
Much like his brother turned frenemy Rx Papi, Nephew’s appeal lies in his bluntness. Most of his punchlines and stories reframe bizarre scenarios in the most direct way imaginable. On “Peter Gunnz X2,” he makes several jokes and comparisons to Gucci Mane, Joe Biden, and infamous rapper-turned-manager Wack 100 in under two minutes. Other times, like on “Wake Up the Dead,” he’ll pause mid-bar for emphasis and draw out unexpected laughs: “I told myself I’ma quit Henny/Shit... I lied.” Every word is a potential landmine primed to shock and surprise.
What sets Drunk apart from Nephew’s other 2021 projects is the wild variety of beats and new tweaks on older formulas. Slitherman, Nephew’s gravel-voiced alter ego, pops up occasionally to highlight a punchline or to growl out a handful of bars. This works best when Slitherman has the track to himself, like on the sludgy “Slitherman Solo Set,” and only sporadically when Nephew slips in and out of the persona on songs like “Gunnz” and “Dead.” The funk slathered across the album’s first half inspires Nephew to try singing his hooks, and his passable vocals are refreshing in context.
What’s less refreshing is that Drunk can’t figure out how to make all its sounds cohere. The synthetic funk of “Too Tuff Tone Tarantino,” the 2010s EDM-lite of “Time 2 Not Go Home,” the Latin flavor of “Cuban Plug,” and the crunchy guitar riffs of “Slitherman Solo Set” all sound good on their own, and Nephew navigates them well, but each plays like it belongs on a different project. This discord would work better if it said anything about Nephew outside of “He likes lots of music,” which, if you’ve listened to any of his other drops over the last few years, you already know. These are good songs grinding up against each other for the sake of chaos with little rhyme or reason, a valid creative outlet that nonetheless grows more and more tired with each release.
Luckily for Nephew, his personality and still-shocking bars are enough to keep things interesting. Listening to Drunk is like watching a professional daredevil perform their signature trick for the third or fourth crowd of the day: the opening beats generally play out the way you expect, but the element of danger lurking underneath ensures he won’t pull the same move twice. Nephew doesn’t crash often, but even when he does, there’s always something to take away from the wreckage.
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-11-11T00:00:00.000-05:00 | 2021-11-11T00:00:00.000-05:00 | Rap | New Breed Trapper | November 11, 2021 | 6.1 | 0c3e0828-cc22-420a-b6fb-21a68218d02e | Dylan Green | https://pitchfork.com/staff/dylan-green/ | |
The solo guitarist’s fourth album is soft and subtle, approaching the strains of pop while still basking in the solitude of Americana. | The solo guitarist’s fourth album is soft and subtle, approaching the strains of pop while still basking in the solitude of Americana. | William Tyler: Goes West | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/william-tyler-goes-west/ | Goes West | With each new album, William Tyler’s portrait of America gets deeper and more personal. His compositions—always wordless, mostly in major keys—have been written for acoustic guitar (2010’s Behold the Spirit), electric guitar (2013’s Impossible Truth), and an innovative band blending rural folk music and krautrock (2016’s Modern Country). Despite the differences in presentation, his work always conjures a similar image of the country. When Tyler plays guitar, there’s a feeling of hope and forward motion, largely tied to his wildly expressive right hand, which he uses to pluck up bundles of strings like a gardener pulling weeds. He’s a solo guitarist I would call texturally focused, but he’s also the one whose songs are most likely to get stuck in your head. He never aims to dazzle with virtuosity; he’s got too much ground to cover.
With Goes West, Tyler’s fourth solo album, he’s written the prettiest, simplest songs of his career. Compared to the psychedelic epics on Modern Country, these compositions show their cards quickly, with many sticking to traditional verse-chorus structures, and they play like balms. If so many of Tyler’s records have found him loading up the trunk, inviting you into the passenger seat, and heading some place new, then Goes West is more like finding a remote spot to park for a while and taking in the sunset. Accordingly, it’s also his most sentimental work, subtle and emotionally charged in a way that highlights his evolution as a songwriter. In an autobiographical sense, the title marks a turning point: Tyler’s first music since leaving his native Nashville for Los Angeles. But it’s also the closest thing to pop music the 39-year-old composer has ever made.
Leading the band with his trusted, timeworn Martin D-18 acoustic, Tyler has assembled a group with a lighter touch. Griffin Goldsmith’s drums are brush-stroked and lyrical; piano and synth from co-producer Bradley Cook and James Anthony Wallace often resemble wind chimes, or at their more atmospheric, the slow breeze behind them. And throughout the record, Meg Duffy accompanies on electric guitar with a shadow-like effect, suggesting depth and distance to Tyler’s beatific melodies. The album’s strongest moments are also its softest: the elegiac “Call Me When I’m Breathing Again” and “Rebecca,” whose refrain is so sweet and familiar it had me trying to figure out which McCartney song it resembles. Both Tyler and Duffy—who records as Hand Habits and has also played with Kevin Morby and the War on Drugs—have a zen-like melodic sensibility, levitating up the fretboard in glassy, crystalline patterns. Duffy’s most affecting solo on the record cuts the plaintive “Man in a Hurry” in half: It’s bright and fleeting, a burst of lightning in lazy summer rain.
When Tyler lived in the South, he used his music to interrogate a place he’d known since childhood. In these songs, he’s more tentative about the world around him, if no less inquisitive. Working in a line of disparate artists ranging from New Age, folk, and classical—which he recently characterized as “cosmic pastoral”—Tyler has always paired the sprawling sound of Americana with the ugliness that can reside within its expanse. The tension in his work often feels like his way of navigating the dissonance; that so many of his compositions resolve in ringing, open chords becomes a way of summoning peace from deep within. On Goes West, he employs this to a subtler effect. “Fail Safe,” with its lapping drums and waterfalls of trilling harmonies, could soundtrack a TV spot for a beach resort, but it was also inspired by the language accompanying threats of nuclear war. “Virginia Is for Loners” is one of his many tributes to the road but it’s distinct in conjuring mostly the barren vistas along the way, a low cello humming through its lonely refrain.
Tyler is drawn to instrumental music that takes inspiration from distinct historical events, he once explained, “like Hiroshima or the crucifixion of Jesus.” Goes West feels less conceptually united than any of his work—more inspired by the contemplation of history than history itself—but this searching quality adds to its honest, meditative power. Many of the songs feel like visions left intentionally ambiguous, and the record is bound by a pensive, permeating calmness. The closing “Our Lady of the Desert” occasionally threatens to break this hypnotic spell, rising in momentum with jazz lifer Bill Frisell’s lilting, birdsong guitar solos. Where one of Tyler’s earlier compositions might have taken off from here and become airborne, this one rises and falls and fades, ending the album like a deep exhale, a wordless signal that it’s time to keep moving. | 2019-01-30T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2019-01-30T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Folk/Country | Merge | January 30, 2019 | 7.8 | 0c3e430e-ed32-426d-8536-4c7d6f819715 | Sam Sodomsky | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sam-sodomsky/ | |
Rising talent Julianna Barwick has her ethereal, gorgeous EP given a well-deserved wide release. | Rising talent Julianna Barwick has her ethereal, gorgeous EP given a well-deserved wide release. | Julianna Barwick: Florine | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/13735-florine/ | Florine | Julianna Barwick recently told Pitchfork * *that she didn't "think" there was any guitar on her new EP. We can sympathize with her hazy recollection of the specifics-- Florine leaves a lingering impression of unreality in its wake. A breadcrumb trail of piano and synthesizer guide us through the misty forest of Barwick's voice, and we come out on the other side wondering if it really happened. The mood is blissful and bewitching; lost, but somehow secure. Using a loop station and pedals to produce cyclical patterns on the fly, Barwick's work can't help but recall Brian Eno's Music for Airports. Even so, Florine feels bracingly intimate and original, in its hieroglyphic way.
The most cunning thing is how the music seems wordless at first, then divulges gentle commands, both real and imagined-- stay, higher, come back, choose. Because of the album's spare substance, these little imperatives take on a divine weight. And divinity is the spark that gets Florine going. Barwick begins with a halogen hymn, "Sunlight, Heaven", and then builds a cathedral in the sky, "Cloudbank". But when "The Highest" dips into tones of serene lament, her sacred equanimity begins to slide. "Choose" chirrups like Enya doing Kate Bush; "Anjos" spills Glassian waterfalls of piano; "Bode" epitomizes the cherubically neurotic flutter of Florine's second half.
Nothing you can say about Florine directly accounts for its elegiac, magnificent aura. Except maybe this: Barwick has remarked that the album was inspired by her memories of playing music without instruments in church, and the course it charts, out of the choir loft and into the more fluctuant realms of leftfield pop and post-minimalism, could represent... gosh, all kinds of narratives: the loss of received values, the fading of religious conviction, the basic human learning curve from clean myth to murky reality. How fitting that the first song after the opening trio of tearjerkers, at the moment when the spiritual seems to lose ground to the postmodern, is called "Choose". This blend of uplifting sounds and postlapsarian concept might account for the music's sorrowing, joyful, dreamlike impression-- it moves in two directions at once, floating upwards to describe a fall. | 2009-12-03T01:00:02.000-05:00 | 2009-12-03T01:00:02.000-05:00 | Electronic | Florid | December 3, 2009 | 8.2 | 0c406ade-9a3e-4483-b52b-fd86287ba5aa | Brian Howe | https://pitchfork.com/staff/brian-howe/ | null |
Matthew Shipp hasn't reached his teeth-baring potential. Yes, he's the greatest pianist of the modern age,\n\ blending ... | Matthew Shipp hasn't reached his teeth-baring potential. Yes, he's the greatest pianist of the modern age,\n\ blending ... | Anti-Pop Consortium: Antipop Vs. Matthew Shipp | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/208-antipop-vs-matthew-shipp/ | Antipop Vs. Matthew Shipp | Matthew Shipp hasn't reached his teeth-baring potential. Yes, he's the greatest pianist of the modern age, blending diverse atonal qualities with an unequivocal spryness and an effortless range of emotion, and all those other things that come with being a brilliant player. (Free cocktails?) But when you compare the sentiment in a record like Nu Bop to that of most 20th Century composers with a similar vision, Shipp's stuff just doesn't hang on the low end of the friction enough. I want his music to punch me in the face with its dramatic, chaotic authority. He is for the advancement of jazz. He is supposed to be the Edgard Varèse, the Charles Ives of our generation, goddammit, interpreting the city sounds around him through improvisation and a sensitive, reflective ear. Unfortunately, the purpose of his recordings-- evolving jazz by including its urban peers in hip-hop and electronics-- has always stopped a hair short of success. The performances are airtight, but the crust is soft.
As it turns out, one thing that was missing was Antipop Consortium, and more specifically, their unequalled, futuristic, split-atom beats. Up 'til now, Shipp's beat programmers have been all wrong. Past collaborators DJ Spooky and FLAM are decent from an electronic and an emotional standpoint, but what they've offered hasn't ever defied expectations. If Shipp truly wants to advance jazz into the realm of youth-popular urban culture, he's gotta break bread with the crazy funk, collaborate with the most innovative musicians.
Antipop vs. Matthew Shipp opens with a brow-furrowed block of Shipp's piano chords cut into the boom-bap of the bass and hi-hat. It's an imposing, rhythm-heavy intro, and while not a complete song, its neon spritzes of keyboards and backwards-looped cymbals offer a clear theme of what's to come: future jazz in the most definitive sense. From there, Shipp's piano turns backflips all over APC's swimmy, electro-alarms. William Parker's bass and Shipp's low-end counter each other as Beans and Priest holler, "Stereo! Stereo, Stereo! It sounds so fresh, I'll sing it once and repeat!". From here, the mix alternates between rap solos, piano solos, some loose drums, chunks of chords, sample of dogs barking (two breeds), keyboards on the holodeck. Shipp's piano is sampled for melody and rhythm, as much as it solos-- and even the high-end, winky optimism with which Shipp sometimes flirts holds up way deffer as a platform with a little electro street beat.
There's not much of that froufy shit, though; it wouldn't be an Antipop joint without their cold, twitchy vision: "Svp", "Stream Light" and "Coda", specifically, feature their marble-clinking rhythms and bleak, controlled atmosphere, M. Sayyid rapping with a resigned wateriness in his voice, and blooming with heavy-footed atonal melodies. "Monstro City" has a cigarette-burning be-bop vibe, lyrics unfurled like spoken word in tandem with clicky bongo and, yes, more gaping hunks of piano chords, teetering into a dark chasm of a future. This is true-blue street jazz, and you can tell it comes straight from the heart and head.
Okay, but the thing is, this is billed as an Antipop Consortium record-- their absolute last release, as a matter of fact, since they broke up last autumn. (R.I.P!!!) And while this is a step forward for Shipp, for APC, it's a side-step from their gleamingly tricked-out, beat-tweaked and freaky Arrhythmia. Antipop vs. Matthew Shipp is solid, yes, but the experimentation doesn't always work in their favor, and it often dilutes the propulsive fire beneath their final release. Then again, maybe it's appropriate that their last hurrah-- Antipop's final track, "Free Hop", has them melting scratches and turntables backwards over a charged improv session, marking a deflated and untimely end, for eight years was simply not enough. | 2003-02-19T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2003-02-19T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Electronic / Rap | Thirsty Ear | February 19, 2003 | 7.2 | 0c43e9b0-1425-41f6-9f73-720099eff8b2 | Julianne Escobedo Shepherd | https://pitchfork.com/staff/julianne-escobedo shepherd/ | null |
Teaming up with a soulfully minded boom-bap producer, the Brooklyn rapper shapes a warmly nostalgic album around the core tenets of East Coast hip-hop. | Teaming up with a soulfully minded boom-bap producer, the Brooklyn rapper shapes a warmly nostalgic album around the core tenets of East Coast hip-hop. | Apollo Brown / Joell Ortiz: Mona Lisa | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/apollo-brown-joell-ortiz-mona-lisa/ | Mona Lisa | It takes extreme dedication to the old school to keep your references on point. No self-respecting b-boy, after all, raps about data ownership, the Tide Pod Challenge, or “The Conners.” Certainly not Joell Ortiz, who’s less a golden-age hip-hop revivalist and more a hardened industry survivor. There’s a moment on “Decisions” when, in an attempt to assert his lack of interest in keeping up with fashionable young stars, Ortiz name-drops Lil Wayne. No disrespect to Weezy, who just put out his most vital album in years, but that the reference is probably about a decade out of date tells you more about Ortiz than the lyric itself. He goes on to advise listeners on where to buy their CDs, like a rap Jasper Beardly. Street-corner rhymes and grubby beats in 2018? What a time to be alive.
Ortiz’ career so far has been nomadic. That his time on Dr. Dre’s Aftermath Entertainment failed to produce an album is no disgrace—the list of rappers who have struggled to hold the good doctor’s attention is long and distinguished (Rakim, for one). He hooked up with Joe Budden, Royce de 5’9”, and Kxng Crooked to form Slaughterhouse in the collective hope that the spectacle of four beaten-down rappers would be enough to gain some kind of traction. But Mona Lisa feels like Ortiz is done chasing ghosts. Dedicated to the core tenets of East Coast hip-hop, the album finds the Brooklynite incredibly content to bask in a sound as classic as the Mona Lisa in the Louvre. At just 38, he’s only a couple years older than Westside Gunn, one of the contemporary stars of cracked New York rap. Yet on Mona Lisa, Ortiz revels in his elder-statesman status. It’s as comfortable a fit as a pair of silk pajamas two sizes too big.
To achieve this synthesis, you need a producer smothered in the original myths of hip-hop—a chop-up-the-soul symphonist who worships at the altar of DJ Premier. Enter Apollo Brown, the Detroit slinger of throwback boom-bap. Like Ortiz, Brown doesn’t pardon his old-fashioned proclivities, blazing a production style built on dusty samples, quick-hand scratches, and steady drum loops. With a batch of beats that sound like they came off the same production line as No Question, the equally solid joint record he put out this year with Locksmith, Mona Lisa won’t win awards for ingenuity or surprises, but it’s rarely hard on the ear.
Ortiz’s affinity for Brown and this project is confirmed by how strikingly personal his writing is. The whimsical beat of “Reflection” finds Ortiz staring out onto the Hudson River, picturing the rap riches he might have achieved before peacefully reconciling with the career he has had (“My fans don’t expect me on the charts/Guess when you gifted, sometimes you rap yourself into a box”). Sometimes he uses his seniority to spin wisdom like a modern version of Ossie Davis’ Da Mayor from Do the Right Thing. After shouting out his Brooklyn roots on “Grace of God,” he unleashes a reminder of what the borough’s residents have dealt with with since time immemorial: “The police, they did the same shit y’all seeing now, ‘cept camera phones wasn’t out.”
Not everything is as sweet. Ortiz sounds oafish on “Cocaine Fingertips,” which, among other things, has a vile double entendre that refers to cases of child sexual abuse by Catholic priests. Turns out he’s more Gilbert Gottfried than Action Bronson when it comes to oddball humor.
Mona Lisa has few such obvious flaws, yet the album can sometimes feel overly snug. A little more tension would have been welcome—the kind that fellow mature-minded New Yorkers like Roc Marciano and Ka lean towards with their warped orchestration, or the Alchemist, with his affinity for more psychedelic sounds. But it’s hard to grumble too much about an album that speaks the eternal truths of boom-bap with such nostalgic romance. More importantly, it shows us that a clear-minded Ortiz, with no interested in proving anything to you or me, is well worth keeping around. | 2018-10-31T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-10-31T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Mello Music Group | October 31, 2018 | 6.7 | 0c4a2653-d058-4332-a6c4-f3ad30cc751d | Dean Van Nguyen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/dean-van nguyen/ | |
The Microcosm is a sort of European answer to the influential new age comp I Am the Center. Featuring Vangelis, Hans-Joachim Roedelius and others, it draws lines between visionaries of many stripes. | The Microcosm is a sort of European answer to the influential new age comp I Am the Center. Featuring Vangelis, Hans-Joachim Roedelius and others, it draws lines between visionaries of many stripes. | Various Artists: The Microcosm: Visionary Music of Continental Europe, 1970-1986 | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22594-the-microcosm-visionary-music-of-continental-europe-1970-1986/ | The Microcosm: Visionary Music of Continental Europe, 1970-1986 | Nominally, The Microcosm is a European sequel to I Am the Center: Private Issue New Age Music in America, 1950-1990, a heavyweight compilation of American new age music curated by Douglas Mcgowan of the California-based Yoga Records and released on Light in the Attic in 2013. But it’s not quite that simple. In ’70s America, cassettes by artists like Steve Halpern and Iasos became surprise best sellers, and new age became an industry, with a mail order network, its own chart—even, from 1987 onward, its own Grammy Award. But while this sort of music—mellow, instrumental, technologically savvy and concerned with matters of the spirit—certainly existed in Europe, it defied such easy categorization. In The Microcosm’s liner notes, McGowan explains how more than one artist featured refused to be involved if the project carried the “new age” tag. Instead, the collection is subtitled Visionary Music Of Continental Europe, and if that sounds vague, McGowan has set himself the task to prove otherwise, drawing lines between disparate musicians who share a belief in something greater, but are resolutely off on their own trip.
Whereas I Am the Center surveyed several generations, covering a 40-year window between 1950 and 1990, The Microcosm takes a tighter focus. The earliest of these 16 tracks dates from 1970—birth year of pioneering commercial synths like the ARP 2500 and Minimoog—and the latest from 1986, as analog instruments were being superseded by a new generation of digital music equipment. Some names here will be familiar to those even loosely acquainted with experimental European music of the period. The compilation begins with “Creation Du Monde,” a 1973 track by Vangelis, who would later find global fame scoring Blade Runner and Chariots of Fire, but is featured here having just left the Greek prog rock group Aphrodite’s Child to explore more ambient realms. A serene soundscape made from a Hammond organ treated with tape echo, it found its way to soundtrack Carl Sagan’s Cosmos, and thus to the ears of a generation of American youth open to enlightenment from above.
Also present are a number of names typically associated with krautrock—itself a term contested by its creators, but that’s another story. Hans-Joachim Roedelius, formerly of Kluster and Harmonia, is represented by “Wenn Der Südwind Weht,” which sends a blissfully centered melody pirouetting slowly through a soft cumulonimbus of synths. “Brüder Des Schattens—Söhne des Lichts” captures Popol Vuh some years after founder Florian Fricke had abandoned synthesizers as a route to transcendence; instead we hear them crafting a medieval-tinged devotional music with sitar, piano and church choir. Manuel Göttsching’s Ash Ra Tempel were, early on, one of the more fiery and eruptive kraut groups, but “Le Sourire Volé” is in line with the looping experiments of Göttsching’s solo work, guitar and Farfisa organ cast out in shimmering waves.
All great stuff, but even when pursuing spiritual ends, the krautrock groups veer towards studious art music, and the most intriguing material on The Microcosm comes from its more obscure, eccentric figures—a cast of mystics, shamans and oddballs who, in their friendly earnestness and paperback spirituality, feel somewhat closer to the American new age fraternity. Some, like Robert Julian Horky or Ariel Kalma, achieve rich soundscapes through homespun means: the former, a longhaired Austrian flautist, achieved his remarkable, pulsating “Dance for a Warrior” by running his instrument through an Eventide Harmonizer; the latter’s “Orguitar Soir” gently layers plucked guitar, droning Farfisa and the sound of birdsong captured in the Borneo rainforest. Others, like Ralph Lundsten or Gigi Masin, pare their music right back, leaving mere wisps of melody and warm tones that glow like embers.
Mcgowan’s liner notes are an essential accompaniment to this often abstract music, supplying valuable biographical context. Bernard Xolotl, a French-born synesthete and student of sacred geometry, explains his deeply trippy “Cometary Wailing (Night Plateau)” was recorded during a week of “musical transcendence rites” powered by MDMA. Enno Velthuys, whose “Morning Glory” is one of the compilation’s gentle highlights, is described as a “Dutch Syd Barrett,” a ’60s burnout who whiled away his dotage lost in a private world of psychedelic synth exploration. And there is the German-born musician Georg Deuter, whose “Spirales” is plucked from one of his 60 albums of reiki sound healing, made while resident of Rajneeshpuram, a commune in eastern Oregon founded by the Indian guru Osho. (In a dark twist of a very new-age kind, Rajneeshpuram entered the history books when Osho’s followers contaminated salad bars across Oregon with salmonella, poisoning at least 700 people—the largest biological terrorism attack in US history).
In short, good stories. But The Microcosm would stand up without them. New age might be a goldmine, but even a quick survey of the genre demonstrates you need to dig through plenty of fluff to find the good material, and it’s a testament to Mcgowan’s research that nothing here feels hokey or kitschy. If this feels like a slightly less coherent set than I Am the Center, blame the idea of visionary music itself, a category that—by its nature, perhaps—lacks clear boundaries. Still, none of that diminishes the power of the contents. As Robert Julian Horky puts it: “I do my work under any name or label. Time is a River, you know.” | 2016-11-19T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2016-11-19T01:00:00.000-05:00 | null | Light in the Attic | November 19, 2016 | 7.7 | 0c4bcd47-a55c-4c60-b6c6-8e33dae76cf8 | Louis Pattison | https://pitchfork.com/staff/louis-pattison/ | null |
The duo of Elucid and billy woods delivers a moody, unsettling, sharply observed album balancing moments of self-reflection with vivid snapshots of societal dysfunction. | The duo of Elucid and billy woods delivers a moody, unsettling, sharply observed album balancing moments of self-reflection with vivid snapshots of societal dysfunction. | Armand Hammer: We Buy Diabetic Test Strips | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/armand-hammer-we-buy-diabetic-test-strips/ | We Buy Diabetic Test Strips | Backwoodz Studioz engineer Willie Green has said he wants people to have a “physical reaction” when they listen to one of the label’s records. Last year, Green and Armand Hammer’s Elucid assembled a crew of players for a session at the Greenhouse in Gowanus, Brooklyn, with the idea of jamming to beats and following where it led them. It was the first time that Shabaka Hutchings (flute), Adi Myerson (bass), Max Heath (synthesizer), and Hisham Bharoocha (drums) had met; Elucid says that watching their early fumblings give way to grooves with spiritual heft was foundational to the creation of We Buy Diabetic Test Strips, Armand Hammer’s sixth album. By Green’s own rubric, the album is a success—it can feel like being tugged by dozens of different hands yet still being pulled forward.
That organic jam session—in which relative strangers found the funk in their very first meeting—mirrors the way that Elucid and his partner in the duo Armand Hammer, Backwoodz founder billy woods, have collected a slew of eccentric personalities and given them a common purpose. woods has called Elucid Backwoodz’s “secret weapon” as an A&R, and he might be right; it’s hard to imagine anyone else making a record like this sound coherent. woods and producer Kenny Segal’s 2023 album Maps was a vividly evocative tour diary populated by colorful characters, but when the two rappers work together, Elucid lifts woods into the ether.
Armand Hammer’s music can be indecipherable by design, with profundity often camouflaged by abstraction. On We Buy Diabetic Test Strips, they contemplate their inevitable end, often graphically (“Men pregnant with death, frightened at the quickening/It totters on unsteady legs, boy you invited to the christening,” woods raps), yet manage to stave off hopelessness. The two continue to process life’s indignities with absurdist humor and a caustic wit, telling disjointed stories through intersecting narratives that only come into focus when viewed as a whole.
The most unconventional of their guest stars is, of course, JPEGMAFIA, the Baltimore rapper and producer known for his abrasive productions and persona. JPEGMAFIA’s work accounts for a little more than a quarter of the album, but his glitchy, warped aesthetic bookends the tracklist and helps define the mood. He opens the album with a hypnotic synth loop and a vocal sample stuttering in the background; there’s no bass, just a single snare crack punctuated by a landline dial tone. He’ll bury a gentle melody beneath cacophonous yelling, then switch the beat mid-song to weave video game SFX into boom-bap drums and drench the whole thing in reverb (“When It Doesn’t Start With a Kiss”). Even in the slow and quiet moments, chaos lurks in his productions—an interrupted moan, a hair-raising scrape—and it’s fascinating to watch woods and Elucid adapt their flows to meet the challenge.
We Buy Diabetic Test Strips is as much a Backwoodz Studioz showcase as an Armand Hammer album. Over the last decade or so, Backwoodz has steadily established itself as a paragon of the New York underground, an example of how a community and a business can feed off one another. You can see the equity as plain as their publishing splits. Backwoodz’s roster is all over the LP—guest verses from Curly Castro and Moor Mother; production from Steel Tipped Dove, Kenny Segal, Jeff Markey, and Willie Green—resulting in an album that gels despite its idiosyncrasies. It’s fitting that there’s an El-P production credit, as his now-defunct indie label Definitive Jux was to the New York underground in the ’00s as Backwoodz is today: a loose collective of left-of-center artists that coalesced around creative freedom rather than a particular sound, emphasizing transparency in business, if not always their art.
The guests bring a welcome sense of contrast to Armand Hammer’s own styles. Moor Mother’s breathy enunciation floats through woods and Elucid’s more pronounced flows, while Pink Siifu’s monotone straddles the line between lethargic and loquacious. The standout feature is Brooklyn rapper and NYU adjunct professor Junglepussy, who remains bafflingly overlooked even though she’s typically the coldest MC in the room wherever she turns up. She’s credited on two songs—“Y’all Can’t Stand Right Here” and “Empire BLVD”—sounding extremely hot and unbothered, disposing of men and lesser rappers as casually as a chewed-up wad of gum: “Sitting on his face ’til I’m inspired/Why fuck him, I’m a better writer.”
Elucid and woods are no longer young men, and We Buy Diabetic Test Strips is rooted in the existential angst of middle age, when you find yourself decades deep into a career and a family, wondering where to go next. “I am the mud/Waiting for the flood that they said would never come/High-water pants on the shoulders of my elders/I be knowin' better, but ain't done it yet/Some don't know no better and they won't,” Elucid raps on “Trauma Mic,” his voice tinged with the weariness that comes with wisdom.
The two rappers’ free-associative style doesn’t typically emphasize bold-faced themes; their writing is richly imagistic but also cryptic, and they tend to slip laterally from idea to idea and couplet to couplet. But there’s an undercurrent of unease in their references to knocked-out teeth, oxygen tanks shackled to a leg, a suicide bomber’s vest that doesn’t explode. “The aperitif bittersweet, no pleasure/My heart pump ketamine,” raps woods on “Niggardly (Blocked Call),” summing up the anhedonic mood.
The album draws its title from the innumerable signs posted on poles around New York City’s outer boroughs—a symptom of America’s prohibitively expensive healthcare system, which turns insured diabetics into street-level suppliers.. The signs are everywhere yet easy to ignore—windows into a sick world where basic human needs are bought and sold out of necessity. Collectively driven, grim but never nihilistic, We Buy Diabetic Test Strips is Backwoodz’s version of an immune response: a flare-up to fight off the disease. | 2023-10-03T00:03:00.000-04:00 | 2023-10-03T00:03:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Fat Possum | October 3, 2023 | 8.1 | 0c4d345d-2a8f-4350-aed0-35fc9ff7d39b | Matthew Ismael Ruiz | https://pitchfork.com/staff/matthew-ismael ruiz/ | |
The New Jersey producer and Brooklyn rapper’s slanted, rhythmically intricate electronic rap album sounds beamed in from the future. | The New Jersey producer and Brooklyn rapper’s slanted, rhythmically intricate electronic rap album sounds beamed in from the future. | H31R: HeadSpace | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/h31r-headspace/ | HeadSpace | The moment JWords and maassai crossed paths, collaboration was inevitable. After meeting at a showcase in 2017, the New Jersey producer and Brooklyn rapper each felt they’d found a kindred spirit, deciding to unite the former’s knotty production with the latter’s blunt introspection as the duo H31R. On their 2020 debut ve·loc·i·ty, JWords laid Jersey club rhythms and boom-bap drums atop warped loops as maassai unspooled philosophical examinations of self. Their new record, HeadSpace, is a confident expansion of their electronic rap vision, with wonky, alien-sounding songs that feel beamed in from the future.
For HeadSpace, JWords followed the synth-based blueprint of ve·loc·i·ty highlight “toxic behavior,” a flurry of lightning-speed kicks and locomotive hi-hats that charges through soft fog. The songs seem to glow from within: Textured, harmonically rich pulses drive “Backwards” and “Glass Ceiling,” while “Static” and “Train of Thought” feature glassy FM tones. JWords’s percussion sounds are warm and rubbery; bass drums land with a gooey throb and every snare has a satisfying mechanical snap.
It’s the duo’s manipulation of rhythm that makes HeadSpace so entrancing. JWords seems to delight in pushing syncopation to new limits, often starting with a certain sequence only to completely scramble it. The agitated line that opens “Glitch in Time” threatens to wriggle free at any moment, but the song locks into place once JWords adds a rigid latticework of clicks and beeps. “Backwards” fits a loping, atonal synth figure into a stuttering drum pattern, constantly playing with the location of the downbeats. Occasionally, songs end before the groove can fully breathe—the ghostly drum’n’bass of “All Over the Place” could be a sprawling dancefloor jam, but disintegrates after one minute.
As a rapper, maassai is equally beguiling. She subtly stretches and compresses her husky voice, delivering each line with a slight sneer. At first blush, her lyrics read as swaggering shit talk—“I ain’t eat dinner yet/But I’m so full of myself I could skip it,” she boasts on “Train of Thought”—but they’re often cues for deeper self-examination. She frequently alternates point of view, giving her raps a dreamlike, psychedelic quality. “When you scared of me, I’m scared too/You look at me and see you,” she raps on “Reflection,” her voice somewhere between a coo and a growl.
Together, JWords and maassai create songs that feel like expertly assembled puzzles. On “Down Down Bb,” maassai spits rapid-fire lines as JWords’ kicks hang off the edge of each phrase: “Let me get the rhythm of your head/Let me get the rhythm of your feet.” On the closer “Air It Out,” JWords constructs a mechanical churn while maassai repeats certain phrases as if subject to delay, adding swing to the track’s grid. On HeadSpace, two potent solo artists tap into and augment each other’s strengths, practicing a kind of understated alchemy that doesn’t sound quite like anyone else. | 2023-11-17T00:02:00.000-05:00 | 2023-11-17T00:02:00.000-05:00 | Electronic / Experimental / Rap | Big Dada | November 17, 2023 | 7.8 | 0c50adc2-a7ae-4e3f-8e4f-0673f477d708 | Dash Lewis | https://pitchfork.com/staff/dash-lewis/ | |
What was supposed to be a kiss-off alimony payment to his ex-wife shape-shifted into a towering ode to divorce. The maligned and complicated double-LP remains a candid soul confessional. | What was supposed to be a kiss-off alimony payment to his ex-wife shape-shifted into a towering ode to divorce. The maligned and complicated double-LP remains a candid soul confessional. | Marvin Gaye: Here, My Dear | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/marvin-gaye-here-my-dear/ | Here, My Dear | As a teenager in the 1950s, Marvin Gaye learned how to love from doo-wop songs, three-minute odes to innocence that didn’t curdle or grow up or live beyond their own pining harmonies. They were pure, and Gaye wanted to be pure too. “I was in love with the idea of love,” he once said. Which is sweet. But the fantasy of pop music should be just that—a fantasy. Believe it to the letter, and wait for your world to crumble. Vows break. Sadness sours. Divorce looms. Gaye was aware of these perils, but he spent much of his life haplessly wishing them away. His music always told a different story.
Gaye married Anna Ruby Gordy in 1963. He was 24; she was 41. He was an aspiring singer; she was the sister of Berry Gordy, founder of Motown Records. Looking back on the relationship years later, Gaye described it to biographer David Ritz as a mercenary move. “Marrying a queen might not make me king, but at least I’d have a shot at being prince,” he said. “I wanted her to help me cut into that long line in front of the recording studio.”
For a few years, though, Gaye was able to approximate the fairytale love he had always dreamed about. The couple adopted a baby boy. And Gaye’s bounding heart can be heard in his hits of the era like “How Sweet It Is (To Be Loved by You),” where he beams, “You were better to me than I’ve been to myself/For me there’s you and there’s nobody else.” But soon enough, infidelities arose. Fights erupted. Raised in a strict religious household, Gaye had trouble reconciling ideas of love and sex, and though this struggle would lead to some of his most fascinating songs, it also doomed him as a husband.
Complicating matters further was his extreme Oedipus and “Madonna-whore” complexes. He lost his virginity to a prostitute and went on to pay for sex through much of his life (and marriages). Meanwhile, he considered his mother to be the absolute pinnacle of womanhood, to a detrimental degree. “No other woman ever looked as good to me as Mother,” he said. He often referred to Anna as “Mama” as well. So as his wife helped her self-destructive husband become a star with her connections and encouragement throughout the ’60s, she could never be his mythical savior. Nobody could. Gaye described his own conundrum in typically candid terms: “Without Anna, how could I reach my next plateau? With Anna, though, how could I ever be a happy man?”
By the late ’60s, the couple was decidedly on the outs. Gaye was still part of Motown’s hit factory at that point and wasn’t writing his own songs, but he still offered performances that mirrored his emotions. He laced the skulking “I Heard It Through the Grapevine” with paranoia just as he and Anna were cheating on each other. He even recorded something of a breakup album, M.P.G., in 1969, filled with chugging songs that put love in past tense. But Gaye and Anna didn’t get divorced. Both were scared what would happen; Gaye was worried he would fall out of Berry Gordy’s good graces, while Anna, accustomed to the celebrity lifestyle, didn’t want to give up on her superstar husband.
As the ’70s began, Gaye entered his auteur period, breaking out of the Motown mold with What’s Going On. In 1973, at age 33, he fell in love once more, with a 16-year-old named Janis Hunter. A year later, they had a baby together. Gaye and Anna were still married. Finally, in 1975, as Hunter became pregnant with another child, Anna filed for divorce.
She had the right to be fed up, but the timing also made sense in the greater context of American marriage. In ’75, the number of divorces and annulments in the U.S. exceeded one million for the first time, more than doubling the tally from just a decade before. Reasons for the uptick were plentiful: evolving social mores, the declining role of religion, laws that simplified the process, and an overall sense of personal entitlement. In a previous generation, Gaye’s mother considered divorcing her husband, who never really loved Marvin and beat him relentlessly as a child, but she didn’t out of what she called “loyalty and responsibility.” But times had changed. “This is an era in which many Americans are far more concerned with their rights than with their responsibilities,” declared a 1976 New York Times article titled “Divorce Epidemic,” “and also a time when little premium is put upon patience or accommodation to less than ideal situations.”
Though Anna was trying to move forward, Gaye dragged his feet. He was ordered to pay $6,000 a month in alimony and child support, but he refused, allegedly telling Anna: “I’m not going to obey any court order no matter what they try to do me. The only thing I am going to do is take off my hat when I enter the courtroom.” For all the sympathy and understanding of Marvin Gaye’s music, the man could be a boor. He once claimed to be “the last of the great chauvinists. I’ll never change. I like to see women serve me—and that’s that.”
But no amount of ball swinging was going to settle his divorce. Gaye was terrible with money, often investing in bogus schemes and blowing untold sums on pot and coke, so when Anna asked for $1 million, he simply didn’t have the funds. So his lawyer proposed an interesting solution: Gaye would pay $600,000, half of which would come from the advance for his next album, with the other half coming from that album’s royalties. It was an insane idea. Of course Gaye agreed to it.
Recorded in 1977, around the time Gaye’s divorce became final, the singer originally planned to produce something quick and mediocre, but the subject matter was too rich. The result was Here, My Dear, a 73-minute epic and the only double-LP he would ever make. Though birthed from contentious circumstances, the album still retains its power because it’s not just a heated diatribe, a peeved he-said to infinity. Unlike some of Gaye’s real-life actions, the album is nuanced, thoughtful, progressive.
After a scene-setting intro—“I guess I’ll have to say this album is dedicated to you”—the story begins in earnest with, fittingly, a doo-wop song. “I Met a Little Girl” boasts all the longing and vocal stacking of Gaye’s beloved ’50s music, but with the perspective flipped—he’s singing not as a green teen but as a man in his late 30s who has tried and failed at love, and is no closer to figuring it out. Gaye exquisitely sings all of the parts himself, creating an echo chamber of hurt. Though the singer spoke out against the women’s liberation movement of the era, there’s a generousness to his voice and sentiments, and a shared blame. “Then time would change you,” he squeals, “as time would really change me.” The song is nearly zen in its wistfulness, with a sumptuous arrangement and languid pace. Later, on a track called “Anger,” Gaye still takes the longview, condemning the soul-destroying properties of rage rather than giving into them. Perhaps the slow crumble of Gaye’s marriage across more than a decade allowed him a certain distance, and a way to make this very personal album feel like much more than one man’s loss.
Like much of Gaye’s ’70s work, Here, My Dear is a groove album. Voices, instruments, and hooks don’t jump out as much as they lay in the cut waiting to be discovered. Though it can sound redundant at first, its unvaried instrumentation and tempo strengthen the thematic bonds within. Three tracks called “When Did You Stop Loving Me, When Did I Stop Loving You,” are worked into the suite, all with the same easy sax funk, as if Gaye keeps returning to the question in hopes of a definitive answer. Spacious jazz backgrounds make tracks like “Sparrow” and “Anna’s Song” luxuriate in memories and idylls gone by—even when Gaye breaks character by screaming “An-na!” the vamp barely breaks its stride, acting as something of a calming agent.
Here, My Dear is not entirely civil. As in love and life, there is pettiness. “Is That Enough” aims at Anna’s spending habits, with Gaye somehow making divorce-court language sound effortlessly cool: “What could I do/The judge said she got to keep on living/The way she accustomed to.” Meanwhile, on “You Can Leave, But It’s Going to Cost You,” the singer claims that he was essentially held prisoner by Anna’s power and money for all those years, as he ventriloquizes his wife’s demands. “That young girl is going to cost you,” he sings, referring to his girlfriend Janis. “If you want happiness, you got to pay.” There’s a gorgeous hymn of forgiveness that could fit on What’s Going On, a strutting pep talk about getting your shit together, and “A Funky Space Reincarnation,” an out-of-place eight-minute misstep about space sex that has Gaye talking about people getting “plutotized” in a “plutotarium” on, um, Pluto. And yes, that was the single.
But neither the song nor the album was a smash. Here, My Dear peaked at No. 26 on a Billboard chart stuffed with disco acts like Chic, Bee Gees, and Village People in early 1979. Anna, unsurprisingly, was not a fan of the project. In a JET interview at the time, she took the high road, saying, “The things he said, the way the lyrics relate constantly to our personal marital relations, are certainly a violation of many things that I held sacred.” Anna threatened to file a $5 million invasion-of-privacy suit but it never materialized; in 1987, three years after Gaye was shot and killed by his father, she accepted his award into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame.
Eighteenth-century author Samuel Johnson famously said that second marriages are “the triumph of hope over experience.” Which might help explain why, after getting through a tortuous divorce and then recording an album about that divorce, Gaye married Janis Hunter in 1977, mere months after his split with Anna was official. But Gaye’s self-destructive habits had only deepened; by the time of Here, My Dear’s release, at the end of 1978, it was Hunter who was thinking about filing for divorce. “Once we got married, things only got worse,” Gaye said of his relationship with his second wife. “I saw that I’d trapped myself again, but I couldn’t help it.” With his warped expectations of love, it was impossible for Marvin Gaye to fully experience the happy family life he so desired. But there were flashes. One can be heard on “Falling in Love Again,” Here, My Dear’s final full song, where he sounds free and joyous in a moment of satisfaction with Hunter. “So love me, as though there was no tomorrow,” he pleads, trying to freeze a moment of bliss before it’s gone. | 2017-07-02T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-07-02T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | Tamla | July 2, 2017 | 8.7 | 0c516a9d-de8d-4d02-81b2-8d73d463bdd8 | Ryan Dombal | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ryan-dombal/ | null |
The pop singer’s debut is a promising reintroduction that shows her emotional and melodic strengths if she can avoid the clichés of influencer culture and the digital age. | The pop singer’s debut is a promising reintroduction that shows her emotional and melodic strengths if she can avoid the clichés of influencer culture and the digital age. | Kiiara: lil kiiwi | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/kiiara-lil-kiiwi/ | lil kiiwi | In June 2015, a 20-year-old singer named Kiara Saulters uploaded the song “Gold” to SoundCloud under the moniker Kiiara. Its chorus had a trance-like pull, chopping up vocals and splicing them into an indecipherable hyperpop concoction. Within a year, Kiiara had landed a deal with Atlantic, and “Gold” was climbing the Billboard Hot 100 chart, where she found herself in the company of once-rising contemporaries Olivia O’Brien and Halsey. The popularity of “Gold” threatened to define her career, though she already considered it to be old before it had even reached its peak. In the age of viral hits, artists like Kiiara are often forced to milk the moment or risk becoming one-hit wonders, with little room to grow into their sound.
Lil Kiiwi is a promising reintroduction to Kiiara, who, at 25, is now making pop music that grapples with the impulsiveness of her early 20s. Having spent three years releasing one-off singles that experimented with hyperpop, alternative R&B, and rock, she now ditches the chopped vocals in favor of whispered admissions over lo-fi beats and plucky electro-pop. Lil Kiiwi carves out a sustainable space for Kiiara in the modern pop canon, so long as she doesn’t fall victim to low-hanging, predictable clichés.
Kiiara can be a captivating storyteller when she fully commits to the song. Across the album, she takes on the role of a vengeful ex, cuts down the egos of men, and escapes into drugs to avoid confronting her own feelings. Her music is most effective when she reflects on past relationships—the ones that failed, those that could have been, and others that never should have happened. On “Accidental,” she owns up to sabotaging a potential relationship by being dismissive and manipulative, but ultimately deflects and fumbles her attempted apology: “The drugs fucked my head up/Why did you let me?/Why didn’t you come and get me?” She sings about wanting to resist an attraction to danger. But when her lyrics consider the possibility of what could have been had she chosen differently in various scenarios, they’re heavy with remorse and angst.
When Kiiara blames her actions on being intoxicated or emotionally unavailable, her impulsivity is chalked up to her being young and overwhelmed with life; but the haze dissipates as she analyzes these moments and past relationships with maturity. A sense of loneliness echoes throughout “Never Let You” as she yearns for a do-over of her career, relationships, and college. Defeat piles up with each line of the ballad “Empty,” where she resents sacrificing so much of herself for a love that left her drained, and she wonders, “Where were you on my darkest day?”
Rather than bringing the same intensity of these unshielded emotions to her rousing hyperpop performances, Kiiara hides behind the pervasive clichés of influencer culture and the digital age. “So Sick” recruits blackbear to complain about the toxicity of using Instagram to keep tabs on an ex. Elsewhere, Felix Snow haunts the album on the 2017 leftover “Whippin’,” which attempts to replicate “Gold” but sounds stale more than five years later.
Kiiara does better in the company of collaborators who play to her charm instead of watering it down. On “I Still Do,” electro-pop drops bounce as she sings about still loving someone who betrayed her trust. Kiiara could have easily built an album out of the one-off singles released in recent years, but on Lil Kiiwi, she makes a true effort at encapsulating the past five years of her life, how they changed her, and what she learned in the process.
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2020-10-19T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-10-19T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | Atlantic | October 19, 2020 | 6.1 | 0c58db4f-72a2-4f06-9978-615e5a9f4bd0 | Larisha Paul | https://pitchfork.com/staff/larisha-paul/ | |
Conor Oberst retires the Bright Eyes moniker with an LP that sees him returning to Nebraska to record but eschewing Americana and attic-pop for sunnier sounds. | Conor Oberst retires the Bright Eyes moniker with an LP that sees him returning to Nebraska to record but eschewing Americana and attic-pop for sunnier sounds. | Bright Eyes: The People's Key | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/15111-the-peoples-key/ | The People's Key | Late last year, Conor Oberst lost a close friend in Omaha to suicide. At the time, he was close to completing The People's Key, his seventh full-length under the Bright Eyes banner, an album for which he had returned home to Nebraska to record in bursts throughout 2010. Tucked into the album's waning moments is "Ladder Song", a purse-lipped heartbreaker Oberst wrote on piano out of grief. When he sat down later to record the song in the home studio he co-founded with Bright Eyes producer and multi-instrumentalist Mike Mogis, Oberst opted to play it on an old keyboard rather than the grand piano their new setup afforded him. The end result-- eerily similar to "Sunrise, Sunset", a song from 2000's eye-opening Fevers & Mirrors-- sounds very much in tune with Bright Eyes' beginnings: manic and rickety, grave and strangely gripping, Oberst spitting his words up as though it's just as painful to share them as it is to keep them inside. Here, on what the one-time wunderkind has called this project's final ride, its playlist's final addition stands completely alone both sonically and otherwise. "Ladder Song" is not just a bracing tribute, it's a throwback glimpse at how much has changed or not changed at all in the way Oberst has chosen to present himself and his songwriting.
Well over a decade after its inception, it's easy to forget that before Oberst's lyrical abracadabra on 2002's Lifted garnered "New Dylan!" hosannas, the Bright Eyes brand got its first bit of traction amongst emo kids. Leagues of them. Oberst was a pin-up-- his hair always swept perfectly across his sad, massive, Milk-Dud eyes-- fit to erupt in small rooms like those in which he first recorded. In the years that followed *Lifted'*s release, he left behind his handcrafted, attic-pop leanings to fully embrace American roots music. It was a path he hit all the harder as his audience and profile grew. From pure folk to ham-fisted honky tonky to the classic rock of his Mystic Valley band, each subsequent release employed a recording method to match the ambition of Oberst's increasingly dystopian lyricbook. That trajectory reached a pivotal point in 2007's Cassadaga, a cinematic, string-embossed epic that found Oberst in all those modes at once, engaging even further with themes both mystic and apocalyptic. Despite its flaws, that record seemed the loudest expression of what Bright Eyes had seemingly always been about: articulating the world's many weights, as he meant to carry them around. The People's Key, its sci-fi successor, breaks from the narrative. It doesn't articulate much at all.
While a few traces of pedal steel remain, Oberst, Mogis, and recently anointed permanent member/keyboardist Nate Walcott (with few exceptions Bright Eyes' cast tended to revolve) have given the former's songwriting a new sonic skin. Gone is the "rootsy Americana shit" he recently told Billboard he was burnt out on. In its place, the three have settled into a middle space somewhere between the distorted crunch of Oberst's short-lived Desaparecidos project and 2005's electro-pop experiment Digital Ash in a Digital Urn. On the hard-charging "Jejune Stars", new wave synths piggyback power chords, while "Triple Spiral" spikes meatier guitar work with organ and a number of space-bound key flourishes. Walcott's contributions in particular-- like on the hiccupping "Haile Selassie"-- digitize a lot of the pop elements that distinguish Bright Eyes from Oberst's work elsewhere. It's as well-assembled and produced a set of songs as you'd expect from pros like these guys, but unfortunately, much of it tends to ring empty. What's missing is Oberst.
As "Jejune Stars" comes to a close you'll find a short interstitial recording of Denny Brewer, a Texas musician whose husky, some-might-say-batshit musings on other dimensions and extra-terrestrial, ancient reptilian life forms also comprise most of the album's found sound interstitials and intro, a Bright Eyes tradition. In talking about the etymology of the word "pomegranate," he renacts the moment the fruit got its name: "I don't know why it's called a pomegranate, but it looks like a pomegranate. No matter what language you spoke it in, syllables are frequencies." Though his brayed delivery tends to be a tipping point for many, Oberst's lyrical acumen has always been his work's great strength. Whether it was four chords for a love song or three to size up of everything that's wrong with Right Now, he's been able to rule a recording from the start. Omaha, East Village, the simpler the better: Oberst could connect in his own way. But here, he's occupying a frequency all by himself, arranging words that do wonders harmonically, yet mean next to nothing side-by-side. Through and through, this record's overarching themes of "oneness" and connectivity feel painfully blurred by the fragmented, illusory nature with which Oberst shares them. It's as though he's fallen down any and every rabbit hole he could-- Rastafarian imagery makes room for shamanic allusions, futurist tail-chasing, half-baked philosophizing, aimless retrospection, Bono-like levels of evangelizing (see closer "One for You, One for Me"), dead end time travel and one very short, psychedelic walk into a place named the "Land of Tomorrow".
That very last bit comes from opener "Firewall", a song whose sharp-toothed guitar figure and holy shit build can't help but feel hollow once Oberst disconnects as early as he does. When his voice is distorted into barely intelligible warbles during the strummy quiver of "Beginner's Mind" it seems fitting, just as it sounds perfectly believable when, on "A Machine Spiritual (In the People's Key)", he says he'll "float into the ether." None of these songs are quite as overwrought as those found on Cassadaga, a record with enough instrumental soul there at times to carry the load anytime he went rogue. But with the plain exception of "Ladder Song," the slick sonics here make the rest of the pack all the more cavernous and impersonal, a long ways from where the whole story began. Every line is laid with the rich sense of rhythm and texture that he's mastered over the years, but it still adds up to very little: a wildly spiritual record without any spirit. | 2011-02-14T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2011-02-14T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Saddle Creek | February 14, 2011 | 5 | 0c5d81a8-df76-4141-9c88-2d24bf78c165 | David Bevan | https://pitchfork.com/staff/david-bevan/ | null |
The Arkansas doom metal band's stopgap EP features a Black Sabbath cover, a Type O Negative cover, and one original that reinforces their place among the best of them. | The Arkansas doom metal band's stopgap EP features a Black Sabbath cover, a Type O Negative cover, and one original that reinforces their place among the best of them. | Pallbearer: Fear and Fury | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22326-fear-and-fury/ | Fear and Fury | For the last five years, Pallbearer have seemed poised in a very rare position for a doom metal band—on the brink of substantial popularity. First with 2012’s auspicious debut Sorrow and Extinction and even more so with the engrossing follow-up, 2014’s Foundations of Burden, Pallbearer’s high-volume lurch ballooned from an absolute core of rock band accessibility. Within their slow-motion sprawls, you could hear the guitar heroics of the Allmans, the grand arch of Rush, and the arid sizzle of ZZ Top. They weren’t exactly kowtowing to radio standards with songs that always pushed or passed the ten-minute mark, but it wasn’t hard to imagine them landing there or earning an opening slot with a massive band and making mainstream converts that way. At least to date, they remain very much at that brink, a top-notch, highly acclaimed doom band with actual crossover status not entirely out of reach.
Fear and Fury, a delightful stopgap EP from the Arkansas band, brazenly reaffirms that position without actually advancing it. The three-song set is a bit of an odds-and-sods collection, gathering a remastered version of the title tune (previously released as a flexi-disc single with Decibel last year) and two very telling covers. Pallbearer first takes on “Over and Over,” the last song from Black Sabbath’s Dio-lead Mob Rules. And then there’s the absurd and awesome Type O Negative hit, “Love You to Death,” a song where sex and sadism and Satan warp into one surreal chimera. Pallbearer is faithful to both songs but not overly so, steel-plating their smooth pop contours in a way that proves again their understanding of and comfort with melody and approachability.
“Over and Over” becomes tougher in Pallbearer’s hands. The dual guitars are more tense and cautious, creeping with suspicion through the riffs rather than swiveling through them. And the rhythm section lumbers, landing each measure as its own fresh blow. “Over and Over” is a song of deep depression, where the exigencies and exhaustion of life seem more demanding than the rewards. But Pallbearer deftly pose the Dio lament as a threat, a warning shot meant to make you get over it. The way the melody lifts and the solos screech make the song too redemptive for giving up.
Likewise, Pallbearer nails Type O Negative’s theatricality and melodrama during “Love You to Death.” Singer and guitarist Brett Campbell revels in the bombast of the original for the entire song, from the almost a cappella, scene-setting first verse to the wide-angled glory of the chorus. The churning guitars and big drums again add an extra layer of toughness to the original, as Pallbearer stakes its claim as a nominal doom band. But the gigantic refrain and the structure don’t suffer under that weight. Instead, it reinforces them.
The real coup of these covers, though, is how they reinforce Pallbearer’s ability to craft and deliver hooks of their own. Even alongside these proven anthems, “Fear and Fury” stands its ground, with militant, marching verses lifting into radiant instrumental tangles. Clocking in at almost six minutes, “Fear and Fury” is one of Pallbearer’s lone attempts at the radio-ready format, and it mostly makes you wish they’d do it over and over. The monstrous, angled riffs remain, as does a rhythm section that pushes the whole affair forward. Campbell doesn’t soften or lower his voice to make this or any of these songs work. He just fits it into a smaller package for three songs that, taken together, confirm that Pallbearer’s doom is just light enough for liftoff. | 2016-09-21T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-09-21T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Metal | Profound Lore | September 21, 2016 | 7.4 | 0c61d665-d751-44bd-ad40-61d67d2be73b | Grayson Haver Currin | https://pitchfork.com/staff/grayson-haver currin/ | null |
The Gastr del Sol founder melds minds with a Japanese guitarist and electronic musician who shares his skewed approach to songwriting on an album inspired by the work of novelist Atsushi Nakajima. | The Gastr del Sol founder melds minds with a Japanese guitarist and electronic musician who shares his skewed approach to songwriting on an album inspired by the work of novelist Atsushi Nakajima. | David Grubbs / Taku Unami: Failed Celestial Creatures | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/david-grubbs-taku-unami-failed-celestial-creatures/ | Failed Celestial Creatures | David Grubbs has the instincts of a gardener who prefers the thorns to the blossom. In a career that spans more than three decades, he has developed a unique language for the guitar, one that flickers between consonance and dissonance; his hooks are barbs bent at odd angles, his melodies unreliable narrators. His quirks are difficult to describe, which might be why his reviewers over the years have favored adjectives like “elliptical,” “slanted,” and “spidery” (all absolutely correct, by the way).
Grubbs attacks his songwriting in roundabout fashion. Though coherent, it tends to be slightly off, as though he’s taken rock’s classic song forms and run them through a kid’s cereal-box decoder ring. His music flows strangely, a Cubist river of hard lefts and sudden interruptions. It doesn’t sound abstracted so much as distracted, as though you were listening in on a particularly absent-minded thought process in real time. When he sings, Grubbs favors knotty prose constructions and halting cadences delivered in a genial tone that reveals faint traces of his Louisville upbringing.
This style emerged a quarter-century ago on The Serpentine Similar, the first album from Grubbs’ band Gastr del Sol, and he has since pursued it across 14 solo records and appearances on nearly 200 more. His new album, Failed Celestial Creatures, is a duo project, recorded over the course of two days in August 2017 with the Japanese guitarist and electronic musician Taku Unami. But it feels of a piece with Grubbs’ last two records under his own name, Creep Mission and Primrose, both nominal solo releases that each features a handful of guests. On all three albums, Grubbs uses the presence of collaborators to play with drones, repetition, and improvisatory interplay, taking his style to a more intuitive place.
The bulk of Failed Celestial Creatures is given over to the title track, a 21-minute meditation inspired by the musicians’ mutual fondness for the mid-century Japanese novelist Atsushi Nakajima. Notes on the album situate the song within the context of the novelist’s interest in the “failure of ritual,” which might explain its uneasy tug-of-war between mantra-like repetitions, inquisitive melodic deviations, and, ultimately, explosions of chaos. For the first third of the piece, it would be easy to miss the fact that there are two players, with Grubbs’ searching movements wreathed in a luminous fog of electronics. When his guitar is joined by Unami’s, their playing resembles a figure dancing before an enchanted mirror—a tangle of gestures that seem identical but prove, on further examination, to be entirely different. Then the distortion pedal kicks in: The final six minutes are snarling and dissonant, the guitars blackened, out-of-tune frequencies beating the air like bats’ wings.
The remainder of the album finds the two musicians locked even more deeply into their uncanny mirror-play—particularly on “Threadbare 1” through “Threadbare 4,” short, improvised pieces that make an impression as ephemeral as the wind bending high grass. Even for longtime listeners of either musician, it’s difficult to say who is doing what, engaged as they are in a questing yet relaxed mind meld. Only one song, “The Forest Dictation,” breaks from that mold, as Grubbs’ vocals take the lead atop shimmering, gently intertwined guitars. It’s the sort of performance he’s been giving since his days in Gastr del Sol: not quite singing and not quite speech, but some third option hidden in the divide between the two.
The lyrics, inspired by Nakajima’s The Moon Over the Mountain, concern a human-tiger hybrid that dwells in the forest. But, typically for Grubbs, they don’t resemble traditional lyrics so much as a page pulled at random from the library stacks—a text made musical only by virtue of his dry sing-song: “The irreversibly combined voices/Of human tiger/Recited 30 poems, some long and some short/As to their quality/I would not presume to judge.” It’s a magically low-key moment on a magically low-key album, a manifestation of the divine couched in playful but fundamentally level-headed terms. The human tiger’s two unflappable witnesses remain focused on their fretboards, fully immersed in the rapture of their craft. | 2018-05-16T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-05-16T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Experimental | Empty Editions | May 16, 2018 | 7.6 | 0c621aac-0a31-47ad-afb4-14748baa0877 | Philip Sherburne | https://pitchfork.com/staff/philip-sherburne/ | |
The madcap duo’s second album is about many things—junk food, being dumb, the ska revival—but mostly it’s about two savants making pop music sound absurdly fun. | The madcap duo’s second album is about many things—junk food, being dumb, the ska revival—but mostly it’s about two savants making pop music sound absurdly fun. | 100 gecs: 10,000 gecs | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/100-gecs-10000-gecs/ | 10,000 gecs | In the seven years since Laura Les and Dylan Brady first released music as 100 gecs, they’ve been elevated to the patron saints of hyperpop: musically chaotic and poly-gluttonous, profoundly specific and yet totally random, ideal vessels of the 21st-century’s post-pastiche pop culture. Theirs is the sound of a zillion infostreams from the depths of your social feeds shooting into your eyes at once, both poisoned by irony and aware that if you follow irony into its own ouroboros, you will discover the antidote.
As dirtbag omnivores with identical peroxide dye jobs, they’ve been deified by the Discord masses, valiantly representing the depressive, blue-collar, white, queer kids alienated by their small towns for being “freaks.” In the video for 10,000 gecs’ pop-punk lead single “Hollywood Baby,” the lyric “at the crib goin’ crazy” is visualized by Les and Brady lighting fireworks in the kind of shitty house you might rent on the cheap when you’re 23—it’s busted and the toilet probably doesn’t work, but you love it because it’s yours. A few decades ago, a person feeling ostracized in their hometown might have just moved to barely-affordable cities like New York or the Bay. Now they can delve into the warm crevasses of the weird internet, to see and be seen and indulge every impulse.
With 10,000 gecs, Les and Brady have the unenviable task of translating their chaotic hyperpop to a major label, all while pickling their madcap sound experiments just enough to evolve. Underlying this is the fact that they are big-ass music nerds, virtuosic, even—the kind who could have been studio academics with Berklee degrees if they’d made a different choice in the multiverse. 10,000 gecs telegraphs that their potentially larger ambitions—a chart hit in the footsteps of Sum 41, say—may not fundamentally change their ethos, but it has furthered their interest in thrash guitars, ska revival, and pop-punk that generally sounds quantum-leaped in from a turn-of-the-century Hot Topic. You thought you loved computer glitch but, my friends, have you met slap bass?
Opening song “Dumbest Girl Alive” is 10,000 gecs’ big statement piece, turbo-charged with thrash metal riffs and stoned sub-bass, and it dunk-tanks us into what we’re in for. Les, snarling from a depressive perch, frames proper phone etiquette as a mortal threat (“Yeah, I’ll fuckin text you back!”) and shouts out plastic surgery (“I did science on my face”), but also gives us a decent thesis for gecs’ whole thing: “I’m smarter than I look/I’m the dumbest girl alive.” It’s a deceptive anthem, in that it’s so stupid and fun but also melancholy and self-denigrating, with a request to “put emojis on my grave.” It’s followed by a more traditional gecs number, “757,” glimmering with technicolor glitch and further chagrin, as Les voices a conflicted internal monologue: “I’m dumb and hypocritical/I’m taking things too literal/When it was hypothetical.”
On the surface, gecs are the least serious group this side of early-’90s Ween, always game for a deceptively asinine good time. That the few samples on this album come from Cypress Hill, Scary Movie, and Lucasfilm, in the form of the THX Deep Note, tell you all you need to know: The internet is an earwig that has broken millennials’ brains. 10,000 gecs sounds like being hit in the face with pies for approximately 26 minutes, two best friends having the greatest time throwing all the dankest shit from their musical file cabinet at you while you accept your ridiculous fate. It’s a reevaluation of the most declassé and dunderheaded rock genres that roiled the 2000s, positing that when it’s not delivered by misogynistic frat guys, it can be terrific music. 100 gecs are speaking to and for the regressive ids of us all; dumb shit should be inclusive too. This is a discomfiting and liberating revelation for those of us whose hangover from the era is still acute. At least younger listeners hearing these genres for the first time will be spared the green sky.
100 gecs’ aesthetic, of course, is to throw shit at the wall until it slithers down in a slimy, glittery goop. “Billy Knows Jamie,” a paranoid meditation on a homicidal stalker, is a fairly straightforward number based on bass chunking and turntable scratches that sounds a lot like Limp Bizkit until it spirals out into its death-metal outro. “One Million Dollars” is that phrase repeated ominously over a cut-and-paste sound sketch of drum machine, funk-metal bass, grunge guitar, and clipped dubstep, a frenetic warning that a million dollars rules, but actually might kind of suck. On the brilliant “The Most Wanted Person in the United States,” a laff riot written from the perspective of a serial killer on the lam, Brady and Les trade verses about imaginary victims over a pitched-down iteration of dancehall’s iconic Sleng Teng riddim, and include the lyric “I got Anthony Kiedis/Suckin’ on my penis.”
I mean, it rhymes! But as an evocation, it aligns 100 gecs with the boneheaded horniness of early Red Hot Chili Peppers. Sloughing off a large amount of the glitch, gecs seem to aim evermore in that general greasy direction: Primus, Mike Patton, Ween, with all the unevenness that implies. The ska-punk revival joint, “I Got My Tooth Removed,” is more Reel Big Fish than Sublime, but it’s still a good time, even if it conjures mean SoCal boys singing thickheaded lyrics about scene girls. (Its mournful lyrics about dental care—it’s a break-up song about a tooth extraction—are both reclamation and send-up of exactly how ignorant and sexist some of those songs were.) The unifying factor here, as ever, is their cleverness. It’s the type of absurdist sensibility that, if it came from a friend, might inspire you to put your hand on their back and lovingly ask if they’re doing okay. But here, that emotional wall is the gag, like when you want to play the rubbery lullaby “Frog on the Floor” for a small child, except then you’d have to explain what a kegstand is.
In the gecs’ worldview, nothing is serious and yet every chord change is deeply felt, which, after a few listens, may be a bit more interesting in concept than execution. At the same time, this album is so short that you might only come to that conclusion after running it back for the twenty-third time, by which point you’re hitting repeat on the janky car stereo while you’re chain-vaping a nicotine flavor called “Watermelon Brizz Ice,” you’re mainlining Monster Energy drink and moshing solo in your living room until it hurts, you’re copping $600 Collina Strada jeans embellished to look like Ed Hardy’s brainwaves, you’ve got your face entombed in a VR headset and you’re wondering whether you still have a torso, you just want to hug your friends even though they haven’t bathed in weeks. 10,000 gecs is something like astral projection, allowing you to ever-so-briefly shake off the constant doom scroll of life for a hot second of unencumbered fun. In that sense, it’s a perfect outro album for the end of the world, a reminder that in the worst-case scenario, we might as well go out mindless and partying. | 2023-03-16T00:02:00.000-04:00 | 2023-03-16T00:02:00.000-04:00 | Experimental / Electronic | Dog Show / Atlantic | March 16, 2023 | 8.2 | 0c632a8b-14b7-4c20-a59e-8e12b5aa78df | Julianne Escobedo Shepherd | https://pitchfork.com/staff/julianne-escobedo shepherd/ | |
The two Golden State rappers sound like naturals on their funky, easygoing collaborative album with New York producer Harry Fraud. | The two Golden State rappers sound like naturals on their funky, easygoing collaborative album with New York producer Harry Fraud. | Jay Worthy / Kamaiyah / Harry Fraud: The Am3rican Dream | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/harry-fraud-jay-worthy-kamaiyah-the-am3rican-dream/ | The Am3rican Dream | Jay Worthy and Kamaiyah are both California stalwarts committed to keeping tried-and-true West Coast music alive. Worthy’s smooth, almost monotone reflections on street life tend to be couched in stately G-funk and wavy samples, while Kamaiyah’s airy dirty-macking tales usually glide over the bounce of hyphy, sounding like Too $hort with a taste for AutoTune. Both have a penchant for autobiography and fly shit, and when they get together, like on 2020’s “Bullshit” or last year’s “Good Lookin’”, they sound like naturals. It’s as though they should already have five albums and yearly nationwide tours together.
Now they’ve finally released a full-length project,The Am3rican Dream, produced by Harry Fraud. Largely known for his adaptable sample-based production, the New York producer meets his collaborators halfway, offering a mix of traditional East Coast loops and sunny G-funk for their slick pimp talk. This is Kamaiyah’s first time rapping over samples for a full project, and the simmering, mid-tempo beats give her sing-song vocals room to breathe. She soars over the synth rock of “Entrepreneur.” On “Ragtop Riches,” she slinks between twinkling keys and bass as she grills a potential new girlfriend about what her sugar daddy does. The beats don’t coax her to new places lyrically, but it’s nice to hear her stunt over a different backdrop.
Meanwhile, Worthy is fully in his comfort zone, telling straightforward stories about his lifestyle like a mafia don lounging in an easy chair. Every action—hitting rivals in the head with Hennessy bottles, hitting the stroll with sex workers and drug dealers—is rendered in the same amber hue, like he’s living out a movie in real time. That said, his writing lacks the specificity of fellow mack-daddy savants like Larry June or Roc Marciano. His ideas can occasionally grow stale: “Figueroa Fortunes,” where he flies solo over smooth yacht rock guitars, is just a checklist of lust, drugs, and money that sounds labored and awkward.
Their styles may be different, but Worthy and Kamaiyah play off of their contrasting approaches well. Take the triumphant closer “Streetlights,” where they both share success stories over a drumless synth line and a wailing vocal sample. Worthy delivers a ruff-and-tumble recounting of beating federal cases and basking in musical heroes like Oakland rap legend Spice 1. Kamaiyah acknowledges how she went from being a neglected child to major-label hopeful to staunch indie artist who still snagged big-time co-signs. Each verse is inspiring on its own, but the interplay between Worthy’s stoicism and Kamaiyah’s melodies brings both accounts into clearer resolution.
Both Worthy and Kamaiyah are so charismatic and laidback, they seem to not care if you’re listening to them or not. They bring sauce to even the most banal observations, which, on top of Fraud’s consistently plush production, makes THE AM3RICAN DREAM float by in a cool haze. It’s not adventurous, but it sits just right like your favorite New Era fitted. | 2023-10-20T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2023-10-20T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | GDF / Keep It Lit / Srfschl | October 20, 2023 | 6.8 | 0c639a3e-343a-4e9a-9d05-bcc45960ffe3 | Dylan Green | https://pitchfork.com/staff/dylan-green/ | |
After top-shelf work apart-- Lindstrøm's 2008 LP; Thomas' remixes-- the space disco pioneers re-team for a new record that bests their debut. | After top-shelf work apart-- Lindstrøm's 2008 LP; Thomas' remixes-- the space disco pioneers re-team for a new record that bests their debut. | Lindstrøm & Prins Thomas: II | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/13064-ii/ | II | Mellow, smooth, relaxing: In traditional pop music lingo, these are euphemisms for "boring as hell." But traditional pop music lingo never got around to anticipating the downtempo, prog-infused strain of house music that eventually became generally known as space disco. At its best, it's music that throws you off by how calm and airy it feels on the surface, and right when you're about to be lulled halfway to inattention, the rhythms start to build on top of each other and the melodies start seeping into the forefront and you're hooked. You have Norwegian producer, studio wizard, and multi-instrumentalist Hans-Peter Lindstrøm to thank for helping space disco evolve into its current 21st century incarnation, and countryman Thomas Moen Hermansen (aka Prins Thomas) to thank for giving it a serious foothold by joining Lindstrøm on their first, self-titled collaborative album in 2005. After the two producers crafted some of their finest work last year-- the epic Where You Go I Go Too for Lindstrøm; a host of top-shelf remixes for Thomas (including a staggering reworking of City Reverb's "City of Lights")-- the timing's right for a full-length return to their partnership, even if they have some triumphant recent history shadowing them.
Fortunately, II isn't a letdown-- assuming you don't count its lack of immediacy as a disappointment. On the first Lindstrøm & Prins Thomas album, eight out of 13 tracks ran less than six minutes, and most of them gave you a pretty good idea of where they were going right away. Here, only one of the eight songs clocks in under seven-and-a-half, and the standard structure relies on slow-build compositions that stretch out, decompress, and mutate; they don't so much segue from track to track as they melt into each other. And while it might feel a little like a marathon anywhere other than the dancefloor, there's more than enough going on over the course of a track-- instruments warping themselves into new beats, new riffs, and new melodies-- to give it a certain dynamism. Listen to a song as a whole, and it'll sound like a gradual ramping-up from a simple theme into a jammy, psychedelic expansion; listen to it again and zero in on just the percussion or keyboards or guitar and that experience will be brought into a vivid, deep focus. But it still works in a way that never really overwhelms the song's driving rhythmic backbone-- light as some of it may feel, it's still dance music.
The first four tracks on II are more than vivid enough to draw the first-time listener in, even if they defy easy description. Opener "Cisco" is the track that has some people dubbing this L&PT's "rock" move, but its multi-tracked guitars chime and twang over a bongo-accented funk groove with a tone that's about as close to the Alan Parsons Project as Chic were. By the time it hits its full stride halfway through, drenched in towering synthesizers and phase-shifted fuzztones, it's a sturdy embodiment of what makes both producers such kitchen-sink auteurs. That momentum continues over the next few tracks, whirring like an irregularly-orbiting satellite around hyper-dense drums and Moroder/Vangelis atmosphere in "Rothaus", trembling and then briskly trotting beneath the wintry, shapeshifting piano theme in "For Ett Slikk Og Ingenting", and loosening its joints for the crackling energy of the shifty "Rett På", the most tightly-packed song on the record; it sounds like there's about a half-dozen different rhythmic ideas going on at once there, and they all somehow manage to sync.
The last four tracks are a little less frenetic, if no less involved. The final two in particular-- "Note I Love You + 100" and "Flue På Veggen"-- are more than 24 minutes combined, and they both hit an interesting nerve of cross-era aesthetics, particularly in how the former features a mid-70s Fender Rhodes that slowly liquefies into a burbling new-wave synth, and the latter fuses a disco drum machine with haywire analog burbles, wordless vocal melodies, and crystalline chimes. You can kind of imagine the ingredients for this album coming from a number of different sources-- prog rock, krautrock, disco, funk, MOR pop, maybe even some folk here and there-- but at this point there's just so much potential influence it's hard not to hear the whole instead. And it's a hell of a lot of whole, too: It's mellow and smooth and relaxing, sure, but it's also unpredictable and full of little revelations and turns of sound that make it one of space disco's crowning recent achievements. If Lindstrøm and Thomas ever drop a III on us, it'll have a lot to live up to. | 2009-06-01T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2009-06-01T02:00:01.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | Eskimo | June 1, 2009 | 8.1 | 0c674671-d5cd-464e-b64e-7508ae715fdb | Nate Patrin | https://pitchfork.com/staff/nate-patrin/ | null |
A Hard Day's Night is from an era when pop and showbiz were inseparable-- and if it doesn't transcend that time, it does represent its definitive peak. | A Hard Day's Night is from an era when pop and showbiz were inseparable-- and if it doesn't transcend that time, it does represent its definitive peak. | The Beatles: A Hard Day's Night | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/13422-a-hard-days-night/ | A Hard Day's Night | Pop in 1964 was part of showbiz: Once the Beatles hit a certain level of box office, there would never have been any question over making a film. Pop music meant teenagers, which meant fads, which meant the clock was running on the band's fame. The jazzman George Melly, who was writing about pop in the UK press at this time, remembered being convinced several times that the Beatles had hit a peak and their fans would soon desert them. I doubt this was an unorthodox opinion.
A film career might extend the fame a little, and smooth the band's inevitable transition to light entertainment. If the film was an enjoyable romp, so much the better-- John Lennon asked for A Hard Day's Night director Richard Lester on the basis of a comedy short he'd made (later referenced in the film's famous "Can't Buy Me Love" sequence), but Lester had also helmed 1962's It's Trad, Dad!, a snapshot of the British pop world just pre-Beatles (Tagline: "The newest, most frantic fad!"). He knew how to mix music and feelgood filmmaking to commercial effect.
A Hard Day's Night, in other words, is a crucial inflection point in the Beatles' career. Coinciding with their leaving Liverpool and moving to London, this could easily have been their first step on a road of crowd-pleasing predictability: Instead, both film and this soundtrack album are a testament to how fabulous pop can be when you take care over doing it.
The album is most famous now for being the first all-original record the band put out-- and their only all Lennon-McCartney LP. Formidably prolific at this point, the pair had been creating songs-- and hits-- for other performers which must have given them useful insight into how to make different styles work. There's been a particular jump forward in ballad writing-- on "And I Love Her" in particular, Paul McCartney hits a note of humble, open-hearted sincerity he'd return to again and again. His "Things We Said Today" is even better, wintry and philosophical before the surprising, stirring middle eight.
But the dominant sound of the album is the Beatles in full cry as a pop band-- with no rock'n'roll covers to remind you of their roots you're free to take the group's new sound purely on its own modernist terms: The chord choices whose audacity surprised a listening Bob Dylan, the steamroller power of the harmonies, the gleaming sound of George Harrison's new Rickenbacker alongside the confident Northern blasts of harmonica, and a band and producer grown more than comfortable with each other. There's detail aplenty here-- and the remasters make it easy to hunt for-- but A Hard Day's Night is perhaps the band's most straightforward album: You notice the catchiness first, and you can wonder how they got it later.
The best example of this is the title track-- the clang of that opening chord to put everyone on notice, two burning minutes thick with percussion (including a hammering cowbell!) thanks to the new four-track machines George Martin was using, and then the song spiraling out with a guitar figure as abstractedly lovely as anything the group had recorded. John Lennon's best songs on the record-- "A Hard Day's Night", "Tell Me Why", "When I Get Home", "You Can't Do That"-- are fast, aggressive, frustrated and spiked with these moments of breathtaking prettiness.
The Hard Day's Night film itself was also a triumph in its way-- Lester's camerawork capturing the frenzy of Beatlemania and the way the group's music was feeding off it. It had the happy effect of introducing the group's millions of new global fans to their world-- the fire escapes, boutiques, bombed-out spaces, and well-preserved salons of 60s London. In fact the film's knowing dialogue and pop-art cinematography has a level of surface sophistication that the Beatles' records don't approach for another year or two (though they were already far more emotionally nourishing).
Watching the film you're reminded that what the Beatles had set in motion was pop music's catching up with the rest of British popular culture: In art, in TV satire, in film and fashion and literature, the 60s were already a boom time. Pop had been left behind-- tastemakers looked instead to jazz and folk to soundtrack this creativity. What the Beatles had-- accidentally-- unlocked was pop music's potential to join, then lead, the party-- though it wasn't yet a given that they'd be the band to realize said potential. A Hard Day's Night is an album of an era when pop and showbiz were inseparable-- and if it doesn't transcend that time, it does represent its definitive peak.
[Note: Click here for an overview of the 2009 Beatles reissues, including discussion of the packaging and sound quality.] | 2009-09-08T02:00:02.000-04:00 | 2009-09-08T02:00:02.000-04:00 | Rock | EMI | September 8, 2009 | 9.7 | 0c7175cf-9a41-47af-8a50-40e9485c2fc3 | Tom Ewing | https://pitchfork.com/staff/tom-ewing/ | null |
Each Sunday, Pitchfork takes an in-depth look at a significant album from the past, and any record not in our archives is eligible. Today, we revisit the famous ’90s compilation that bottled the essence of commercial new age music. | Each Sunday, Pitchfork takes an in-depth look at a significant album from the past, and any record not in our archives is eligible. Today, we revisit the famous ’90s compilation that bottled the essence of commercial new age music. | Various Artists: Pure Moods, Vol. 1 | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/various-artists-pure-moods-vol-1/ | Pure Moods, Vol. 1 | On weekday mornings, sometime between 1 a.m and 5 a.m., lawless fantasia used to appear on television like a good recurring dream. Today, the rhapsodies are duller, stricter, and more subdued, but in the ’90s, they came in the form of ads for phone sex lines, softcore porn, and low-resolution infomercials that sold the mirage of a life fantastic to a woozy after-hours audience. The colors were always saturated, syrupy, rich as cream; the tones sedate, misty, and mostly libidinal. Whether bored, sleepy, incapacitated, or horny, this tribe—routinely or accidentally—was well acquainted with the call of Pure Moods.
Unexpected, unbidden, and more or less unnecessary, Pure Moods is a piece woven with some wear into the silk of the popular unconsciousness. You may not remember hearing this work, but after watching the commercial, you might find yourself feeling that you’ve always known lines from its script. Swooning and naked in its pride, the 17-song compilation album, advertised in 60-second hallucinations disguised as infomercials, was a warm vat of music that we might today refer to loosely as “new age.” Its carefully selected tracklist—a mosaic made largely up of film or television scores, or trance remixes thereof—seemed engineered to induce a ridiculous sort of fugue state. For some, hearing the album might pang a Proustian memory of falling asleep on a familiar sofa. For others, it can suggest an intensely ambivalent mixture of pity and allure. Pure Moods’ essence is safe, formless, and mostly meaningless, like a piece of art hung in a bathroom. For me, and for many others, it felt like paradise.
Before the shadow of Bezos, before the Zuck, before, even, the contemporary comedy provided for us by the insidiously dippy Elon Musk, there was Sir Richard Branson. In 1970, 22 years before he would publicly weep while selling his record label/airline/mobile-phone/space-tourism conglomerate, Virgin, for over a billion dollars, the rugged and floppy-haired Branson invented the mail-order model of record distribution out of the usual entrepreneurial cocktail of luck and generational wealth. Twenty and lordly, then-helming his small but pop-savvy lifestyle magazine, Student, he noticed the UK’s Retail Price Maintenance Agreement—which kept strict restrictions on the saleable cost of vinyl records—had been quietly lifted. Seizing the sword of opportunity, he quickly took to the back pages of his paper to be the first to offer a good bargain. “Name any record you want,” his ad read, “and we’ll sell it to you 10% to 25% cheaper than anyone else.” A business was born. Branson’s arbitrage paid off well in an unwittingly fertile market, functionally reconfiguring a luxury product into a more petty-bourgeois pleasure. High off the fumes of his boon, he assembled a team from his editorial staff, bought a manor, refurbished it into a recording studio, and christened the effort “Virgin” in honor of his fumbling inexperience in the music industry. It would become one of the largest and most powerful record agencies in the world.
After the first ripe boils of the young label’s hardships had been lanced (Branson was noted for having “no musical taste whatsoever” until enlisting his avant-minded second cousin to arrange a roster of artists for him), Virgin enjoyed a mainstay on the tone and volume of music sales for many years. They held court, especially in the early ’70s, to a certain genre fit for the bookish, acid-dabbling Eurodude who read NME and dreamt of armfuls of warm Eurogirls who did the same. A river of German esoterica gave the label several releases by the psychotropic faerie proggers Faust (who were deftly marketed as “the German Beatles!”) and the rhinestoned scuzz of Tangerine Dream, but the pièce de résistance of Virgin’s inertia lay in a freaky slab of music by a shy 19-year-old composer named Mike Oldfield.
That an album with a title and sound true to the phrase “Tubular Bells” could have eventually sent the world into a mania for two 20-some-minute, mostly repetitive instrumental opuses of glockenspiel and honest gibberish is testament to the strength of Virgin’s aspirational animus. After hearing the mesmeric and thoroughly uncommercial music Oldfield had designed in the wake of a disturbing LSD trip, Branson backed his production efforts in full at the Virgin manor. It was clear that the future mogul yearned to head the most influential label in an industry that he knew incredibly little about. What he did understand, however, was that there was a vested, collective, and profitable desire for music that made audiences feel like connoisseurs of a higher order.
Cannily, Branson invited Britain’s leading tastemaker and radio host, John Peel, onto his houseboat for lunch, during which he played the entirety of Oldfield’s finished two-track, 49-minute Tubular Bells to the captive presenter. Miraculously, Peel adored the record and premiered it in full on his show. “One of the most impressive LPs I’ve ever had the chance to play on the radio,” he purred on his May 1973 transmission. Rolling Stone later called it “a debut performance of a kind we have no right to expect from anyone.” Tubular Bells would launch the Virgin empire by earning the label million-dollar financing from its investors, become the third-best-selling album of the ’70s in the UK, provide theme music for William Friedkin’s 1973 blockbuster, The Exorcist, and sell more than 15 million copies globally. Almost exactly 20 years later, Tubular Bells would lay at both the spiritual and literal centerfold of our Pure Moods.
The full ad for the U.S. release of Pure Moods lives on in accurate fidelity on YouTube, but it would be a shame not to recollect it for you here. First, a call bursts from a black screen. A quick time-lapse of a sunrise fades into a husky, lusty voiceover (“Imagine…a world…where time drifts slowly...”), which lays cozily across a shot of an autumn mountaintop. At least a dozen vignettes ensue. A woman spins in a woven dress as a unicorn gallops into translucence. A faraway man walks through a fast-moving river. The unicorn reappears, newlyweds gaze and grope at one another before a soulful kiss, waves crash onto a dusky beach, a swarm of hummingbirds eject from a cloud—each image t-boned into one another in an effort to inspire a feeling of chaotic, seductive fantasy, soothing by way of arousal.
First released as Moods - A Contemporary Soundtrack in the UK in 1991, the compilation was rebranded as Pure Moods upon reaching the U.S. in 1994. The slightly fatter American version contains songs that are as decadent and suggestive of Tolkienian lore and day spa imagery as the montage in the commercial, each composed by artists that, when written out, sound like a cast of villains and druids. There was Enya, Vangelis, the Orb, Enigma. Together, they formed a New Age Mount Rushmore, chiseled in lavender quartz.
These were tracks and artists never designed to be played alongside one another, tracks and artists, for all intents and purposes, mostly foreign to one another except in essence. Their clunky but satisfying cohesion can be attributed to the cataloguing done by the Virgin heads, who arranged the piece on a lark, “stumbling into the project” as an experiment to determine if an album could be successfully telemarketed and sold far before its release date. The model, deemed “a huge buzz” after selling more than 2 million copies prior to its formal drop, would be replicated five times over with a tetralogy of sequels in the releases of Pure Moods II-IV. Later, it would fuel a variety of spinoff flavors, like Gregorian Moods, Christmas Moods and Tranquil Moods: The Ultimate New Age Collection. (I will freely offer that these should be sold as a box collection, titled, simply, “Mood Ring.”)
No claims were made over precisely what sort of mood Pure Moods would put you in, but the album summoned a particular soul of Virgin’s experimental curios and left-field aberrations that signaled a certain taste, ease, and class of listener. It was something like a lifestyle brand touting self-care avant la lettre. Suitable for the essential-oiled and candlelit bath, the head shop, or for popping into the cassette deck of your Corolla on a summer’s night with the windows down and your children asleep in the backseat, Pure Moods arranged a prefab state that, for the listener, may have summoned a feeling they didn’t know they needed. Likewise, for Virgin, Pure Moods was something of a sample platter made in quiet tribute to the unexpected blessings in their own roster: the artists, tracks, and rogues that had clinched the success of the label in stupefying spades.
At the spine of both the UK and U.S. versions of the album lives the baroque jangle of “Tubular Bells” (though excerpted from its original sprawl to a reduced-fat 4:58). Flanking “Bells” are tracks from Enigma, a louche and late-stage ’90s-era cousin of Oldfield’s success. “Sadeness (Part 1),” the first Enigma single, is a porny, breathy, breakbeaty song, with Gregorian chanting giving way to a French voice pining orgiastically for the 16th-century erotic writer, Marquis de Sade, atop a downy bed of trip-hop. It somehow defies both anarchy and order, any sense of convention, and the usual formula for anything resembling commercial success. Yet, beginning in 1990, it lived on the Billboard charts for five unbothered years, reached the Top 10 in several countries, and made Enigma the most successful act signed to Virgin at the time of its release. (Unintentionally, the Gregorian chanting endemic to the track created a global hunger for sacred Latin monophonic music: In 1994, an unrelated album titled Chant from three dozen Benedictine monks living in a Spanish monastery went double-platinum.)
True to their title, Enigma remained heroically and consumingly atop the charts for the majority of the ’90s. “Return to Innocence”—whose indigenous Taiwanese vocalizations blast at the top of the commercial, responsible for waking thousands of half-asleep American citizens on couches—is a glamorous smoothie of pseudo-erotica, a treatise on nostalgia and self-help. Seemingly custom-made for the proto-Y2K fetish for exploring one’s attitude with slogans across graphic t-shirts, its first four lyrics are just words (“Love...devotion…..feeling….emotion”) both inspiring and completely drained of meaning, at once empty and rich. It enjoyed a No. 1 one position on the charts in over 10 countries.
Non-Virgin releases on Pure Moods share the twin tenets of mild conceptual lunacy paired with baffling commercial success. There’s Enya’s immortal “Orinoco Flow (Sail Away),” which, upon its release, the Los Angeles Times scoffingly noted as part of an album filled with “nothing more than unusually windy New Age music.” “Orinoco Flow” is, in fact, an island archipelago of a song, with choral arrangements as lush and fabulous as the remote wonders it promises. It seems to give off its own aromatherapeutic odor and made Enya—a woman who does not tour, who never has toured, and whose perfectly inverse ratio of near-total reclusiveness and global omnipotence inspired an entire phenomenon known by business students the world over as “Enya-nomics”—one of the wealthiest and best-selling musicians alive today.
There’s the four-minute throb of “Oxygène Part IV,” courtesy of one Jean-Michel Jarre, who once bore ownership of the Guinness World Record for hosting the world’s largest concert (3.5 million in Moscow, 1997). DJ Dado, an agent of chaos, remixed the theme from The X-Files into his “Dado Paranormal Activity Mix,” ascending an already astral, imminently whistleable piece of art into the Burning Man mesosphere of dream trance (a top 10 hit for weeks across Europe). Kenny G, the saxophonist known in most minds as the human incarnation of a scented candle, contributes a satiny number titled “Songbird,” a song that became the first instrumental to reach the top 5 of the Billboard Hot 100 since the “Miami Vice Theme” by Jan Hammer (who is also featured on Pure Moods).
It’s no surprise that so many of these tracks were either born or retrofitted into movies and commercials. From Karl Jenkins’ “Adeimus” (now known as part of an indelible Delta Airlines spot), David Byrne’s “Main Title Theme from The Last Emperor” (self-explanatory) even to David A. Stewart and Candy Duffer’s silken, sax-laden “Lily Was Here” (of the 1989 Dutch film, De Kassière, later to become a mainstay of the Weather Channel “Local on the 8’s” music) these were spectral mood-pieces, if not tailored for, then entirely befitting of, calibrating emotion. When divorced from the screen, scores take on new life when soundtracking yours.
But an album that capitalizes on tracks that would serve as well as closing-credits for a lovesick drama as they would in an airport bathroom does not, necessarily, a serious album make. Even without looking at the melty watercolor cover or hearing the title of the compilation, the songs summon the solace endowed by inspirational posters and cruise brochures that now feel bathetically out-of-touch: blue horizons freckled with soaring birds, pistachio mountaintops, forests of fluff and fungi, images of women with their hair thrown back in smiling rapture. Are these parodies of paradise, or can we see them in earnest? The commercial unhelpfully adds that the album is delivered “direct from Europe,” wherever or whatever that may be.
If you, like I, have struggled manfully to crack the riddle of whether the album is glib, good, or good in its glibness, the idea of camp may be a sound starting point. As Susan Sontag details in her 58-point treatise from 1964, camp is work characterized by a sort of “seriousness that fails.” Or, a unique “spirit of extravagance [that] cannot be taken altogether seriously because it is ‘too much.’” That too-muchness—from the commercial’s art direction to its deliciously sleazy voice-over, promising that this album was specifically “for your way of life”—was enough for mine, and for hundreds of thousands of others. Pure Moods peaked at No. 10 on the Billboard chart the week of July 26th, 1997, the same week the Men in Black soundtrack secured first place.
An inspired and perfect choice, then, that Pure Moods begins its downtempo descent with Angelo Badalamenti’s “Theme from Twin Peaks,” that totalizing Lynchian ballad of too-muchness. Regardless of whether your first encounter with the music was within the hundreds of scenes it was deployed in during the television series, in the later-lyricized Julee Cruise version, titled “Falling,” or, even, within Pure Moods, Badalamenti’s score from a show that—like the album—embodied mesmeric alternate realities, sentimental chintz, and a strangely narcotized, palliative hopefulness, sealed the work tightly with a sad, bassy kiss.
For everything that Pure Moods is, one thing is certain: Pure Moods is not kidding. Pure Moods aimed to sell the awe and wonder of music’s ability to change you. It is work that is genuinely, and for better or worse, peddling you a vague miracle. It is quietly saying that you will feel good for having listened to it. Even if it reeks of patchouli and a joke now, it also reeks of something like purity.
Even those most irony-poisoned among us can wrap ourselves around the fullness of Pure Moods as a pop object that’s completed its natural tour of meaning: a curio first taken in earnest, then as a joke, now as a museum fixture that holds both forces in its heart at once. It also illustrates the great life cycle of art’s journey through critical response—how spectacles are typically born as novelty, laid to rest as cliché, and resurrected as nostalgia.
Watching the ad for Pure Moods today can impart a sort of joyous nihilism by laying bare the architecture of the more complicated—but no less fantasy-enabling—advertising so inherently part of our lives now. And, in an hour when everything feels alien and existence slippery, falling in love with Pure Moods’ lawless pageantry is worth any mild cognitive dissonance it suggests. “People who share this sensibility are not laughing at the thing,” goes Sontag, again. “They’re enjoying it...it is a tender feeling.”
I grew up watching infomercials with the focus of an obsessive. Longform ones, like that of the especially good spot for the Magic Bullet blender (a full 30-minute, eight-actor orgy of disbelief), or that of the Xpress-Redi (in which two people praise a countertop griddle) were especially rich for their steeply-sloped story arcs, climaxing in money shots of satisfied men and women leading their lives with new, happy ease. These half-hour-long paeans to kitchen appliances were absurd moments of absolution; they worked like slow-acting pills against the usual symptoms of childhood melancholy. Their taglines and promises buried themselves inside me like hymns or worms. For the child who slept belly-down in front of a television nearly every night, exhausted by the glow of a screen, these moments felt like satisfying surrender to a particular sort of commercial rapture.
And this is what Pure Moods inspires—rapturous, wild, ridiculous satisfaction, each song over-indexing on its unspoken bond to bring fantasy to an otherwise quotidian life. Like the seconds before losing consciousness, it re-created a floating, near-delirious state as image and song wrapped each other in a duvet of chloroform and melatonin. To so many, Pure Moods guaranteed a feeling so total, so rich, so sedative and decadent, that it approximated, then begat, real beauty. The miracle was the point. To see salvation suddenly offered to you—a proposal to make life easier, more fantastic, purer—was a bargain at $19.99, rush shipping notwithstanding. | 2020-06-28T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-06-28T01:00:00.000-04:00 | null | Virgin | June 28, 2020 | 7.5 | 0c80c68b-d70b-4eb7-b6e4-3ae1f4e7fa6c | Mina Tavakoli | https://pitchfork.com/staff/mina-tavakoli/ | |
As can be gleaned from the cover of her one and only record, Linda Perhacs was a stunning, beautiful love ... | As can be gleaned from the cover of her one and only record, Linda Perhacs was a stunning, beautiful love ... | Linda Perhacs: Parallelograms | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/6521-parallelograms/ | Parallelograms | As can be gleaned from the cover of her one and only record, Linda Perhacs was a stunning, beautiful love child. Anyone who spent the $200-400 necessary to obtain copies of the original vinyl could attest that the music she made was comparably stunning and beautiful, infused with all the trappings of being a late-sixties love child (in the best possible way).
Ace of Discs reissued her album after unsuccessful attempts to track her down, mastering from a poorly pressed vinyl copy. For whatever reason, the first issue on CD was completely unlistenable on headphones, although delightful in the open air. Since that first go-round, Perhacs has come out of her obscure Pacific Northwest woods with quarter-inch reels of the sessions, and now that Ace of Discs comes round again with a vindicating, expanded reissue, the tray card photo reveals: she's still a babe.
Anyway you eye it, this is a magical, sublimely singular piece of gentle folk-psych that belongs with those lone album classics by folks like Skip Spence or Vashti Bunyan (or the countless other souls that only released one record before disappearing into history's communal farms or funny-farm madness, like Elyse). It is a sound so personal and intimate that I can only hear it in the privacy of my own room. Although it's been near-impossible to gain biographical information about her, the experience of hearing her music reveals so much about her soul and mindset at the time that I really don't think I could share it with anyone else.
As mentioned above, she's a love child in every sense, a young woman blossoming into her sensual world. Of the elements, every song culls its images from her forest environment, permeating down into her own physical core. "Chimacum Rain" is not only the forest's silence and that sound of rain washing over her, but the palpable sexual presence of her lover, too. In almost every evocation of a tactile natural image, there is a mysterious man who physically embodies these characteristics, a tension courses through her body as she sings about these near-deities. And as she reaches the bridge with lines such as "I'm spacing out/ I'm seeing silences between leaves...I'm seeing silences that are his," her voice begins to echo within itself, and her sung notes assuage open the aural synesthesia of the words. The diaphanous taste of lysergic acid creeps to the fore, and what was once a moderately played acoustic song about the forest expands into a hallucinatory clearing as her multi-tracked held tones meld with the infinite. As her voice dilates, so does the background, now all electrically-processed source sounds like xylophones and wind chimes, and all is enveloped by a low, distorted drone that would one day sound like Phill Niblock, created by-- as the liner notes so baldly state it-- "amplified shower hose for horn effects."
It's nothing compared to the album's peak, "Parallelograms". Perhaps you fantasize that Joni Mitchell teaches painting and pottery at your high school, or that Chan Marshall mumbles about the Apocalypse poets during English class, but Perhacs teaching geometry is tantrically hot for teacher. To just read the lyrics of "Quadrehederal/ Tetrahedral/ mono-cyclo-cyber-cilia" is to miss how she and producer Leonard Rosenman assuredly layer her heavenly-sung rounds in concentric circles over a cycling guitar-picked figure, a cumulative effect that reveals a dimension scarcely achieved anywhere else in the world of music. Closer to the Mysterious Voices of Bulgaria or Tim Buckley's cellular self-choir "Starsailor" than Melanie or Linda Ronstadt, Perhacs drops us into drifting clouds of reverberating bells, echoing flute, and ghostly effluence, her throat outside of time. That a dental assistant in Northern California could more effectively convey the psychedelic experience through the use of the technology of experimental effects, be it early Pink Floyd, Fifty-Foot Hose, or Buffy Saint-Marie's electroacoustic Illuminations, is, in every clichéd use of the word, mind-blowing.
Other songs deal with girly things like brawny mountain men, dolphins, moonbeams and cattails, the pastel colors of dawn, and the recently-unearthed "If You Were My Man" reveals that she could've gone pop with a Karen Carpenter wispiness. Listening to her home demos and studio notes to Roseman though show that she was cognizant of the sound and vibration she wanted. The tape collage lobbed from "Hey Who Really Cares?" is competent-- if in hindsight, passé-- all disembodied, television voices and a telltale heart beat leading into its pastoral prettiness. Her most folky tunes stand up to the times too, but it's the fact that Linda Perhacs' entire cosmos (and whatever those times entailed) could inexplicably fit inside the confines of Parallelograms that remains the true testament to her beauty. | 2003-08-12T01:00:01.000-04:00 | 2003-08-12T01:00:01.000-04:00 | Folk/Country | Kapp | August 12, 2003 | 8.6 | 0c8374f0-2869-435f-96e0-4fdb0bd5d30b | Andy Beta | https://pitchfork.com/staff/andy-beta/ | null |
The masterpiece from the preeminent minimalist composer is an as-yet-unfinished piano solo played on a piano tuned specifically to elicit unfamiliar emotions from unfamiliar harmonies. | The masterpiece from the preeminent minimalist composer is an as-yet-unfinished piano solo played on a piano tuned specifically to elicit unfamiliar emotions from unfamiliar harmonies. | La Monte Young: The Well-Tuned Piano 81 X 25 6:17:50 - 11:18:59 PM NYC | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/la-monte-young-the-well-tuned-piano-81-x-25-61750-111859-pm-nyc/ | The Well-Tuned Piano | The story of La Monte Young’s solo piano composition “The Well-Tuned Piano” feels infinite. Though he hasn’t performed this massive piece in many years and he has never considered it finished, it is possible to quantify some moments on its timeline. After Young conceived “The Well-Tuned Piano” in 1964, a decade passed before he performed it in concert, and another 13 years went by before he released a commercial recording. The work itself, which he’s played in public over 60 times, takes him up to six hours to execute on a piano that needs a “minimum of a few weeks” to be tuned and ideally remains in its exact location for three months before a concert. The first commercially available recording, a 1987 five-disc box set on Gramavision documenting his 55th performance of the piece in 1981, lasts a little over five hours.
But how long does it take to understand “The Well-Tuned Piano”? Judging by all the literature and analysis surrounding it, the answer could be “forever.” Young’s own notes are long, detailed, and deeply technical. They include a four-page list charting the exact times of over 400 “Themes, Chordal Areas, and Durations,” which bear titles as basic as The Chorale Theme and as fanciful as The Flying Carpet and The Cadence of Paradise. Many others have attempted to explain “The Well-Tuned Piano” too, the most monumental effort being Kyle Gann’s 30-page 1993 essay in Perspectives of New Music, which mapped out its inner workings using numbers and graphs. The mere idea of listening to a five-hour piece of music is daunting enough. But immersion in the legend of “The Well-Tuned Piano” reveals it to be not just a work of art, but a complex mathematical and philosophical system, one to which scholars could devote whole lifetimes.
Despite the piece’s staggering reputation, there is at least one simple idea at its heart: Specific sounds can create specific feelings. Young came upon this idea through his obsession with “just intonation,” the tuning system on which he based the composition. Most pianos are “well-tempered,” meaning each note is slightly off-center so that all 12 musical keys can be played. Young’s version of just intonation, by contrast, is more exact, with the intervals between each string following rigid whole number ratios. It’s difficult to tune a piano this precisely, which is why the process starts well in advance of the performance, and why Young usually plays on specially-modified pianos. As he put it, “The manner in which I play the piece, and how well, is directly inspired by the nature of the tuning.”
But the goal of “The Well-Tuned Piano” is less technical precision than emotional expansion. “It seems to me that each harmonically related interval creates its own unique feeling,” Young says in his box set notes. “Through this system we can, first, catalogue each feeling with its corresponding rational number, and then actually create, store, and retrieve, and finally and most importantly, repeat the feeling, relative to the musician’s ability to tune the intervals.” Even further, because “The Well-Tuned Piano” uses novel and rarely-heard intervals, it could potentially upend conventional notions of which emotions different keys produce. Young suggests it could even induce feelings that have never before been felt in response to music.
The musical path that led Young to “The Well-Tuned Piano” was a kind of avant-garde roller coaster. He studied jazz saxophone at UCLA, soon playing with such stalwarts as Eric Dolphy and Don Cherry. As a graduate student at Berkeley, he experimented with tape and electronic music pioneers Terry Riley and Pauline Oliveros. He moved to New York in 1960 to study with the groundbreaking avant-garde composer of chance music John Cage, later creating conceptual compositions in conjunction with George Macunias’ Fluxus movement (which included Yoko Ono). In the mid-’60s, Young delved into long, sustained tones with the Theater of Eternal Music, birthing a new movement that would soon be known as Minimalism. That group included future Velvet Underground member John Cale and multi-media experimentalist Tony Conrad (whose math expertise helped lead Young toward whole numbers and just intonation). In the late ’60s, just a few years after he conceived of “The Well-Tuned Piano,” Young and his partner Marian Zazeela encountered the work of Pandit Pran Nath, whose perfectly in-tune singing and the emotions it elicited changed Young’s life.
Much of this personal musical history poured into various sections of “The Well-Tuned Piano,” which began life in 1964 as a 45-minute improvisation in Young’s New York loft. Though the piece constantly evolved over the next decades, some portions date as far back as when Young improvised on his grandmother’s piano as a teenager. His studies of other composers influence numerous passages, including some with explicit titles like Homage to Brahms and Hommage a Debussy. And his extensive multicultural knowledge played a heavy role. Young felt his tuning system helped him access the feelings associated with “the modes of such ancient classical systems as the musics of Greece, Persia, the Indian subcontinent, and the Far East,” offering him “an infinite universe of eventual possibilities.”
Perhaps most importantly, Young’s playing in “The Well-Tuned Piano” is an extension of his early saxophone work. The piece begins in the key of E-flat, which he first grew accustomed to on his E-flat sopranino sax. In the ’60s, he devised a method of playing his horn so fast that it sounded like he was creating sustained chords rather than flurries of notes. Young translated this technique to his piano, concocting “clouds” of sound, or as he put it, “extraordinary periodic acoustical beats [that] became suspended in the air like a cloud over the piano.” This is perhaps the most emotionally affecting aspect of “The Well-Tuned Piano.” When Young’s notes coalesce into whirlwinds, dazzlingly alien sounds emerge. “The flow of momentum marshaled the vibrations of air in the room, slowly making the ear aware of sounds that weren’t actually being played,” Gann reported from one performance. “The play of combination and difference tones created astounding aural illusions.” As a result, Gann was convinced that Young was singing—though he never did—and also thought he heard bells, foghorns, and machinery.
While Minimalism is often more about hypnosis than engagement, “The Well-Tuned Piano” is enthralling and rarely a “difficult” listen. Young’s playing is filled with dramatic changes, moving ambiance, and cinematic swells. As critic Robert Palmer wrote, “Unlike much of the work of the academic avant-garde, it is music that asks to be experienced, that seeks to produce an immediate, deeply felt sensation.” Even when he repeats notes for long stretches, Young creates compelling beginnings, middles, and ends. There are lots of stories inside “The Well-Tuned Piano.”
Of course, whether anyone can actually be fully engaged by anything for five straight hours is almost unanswerable. The very concept of absorbing one piece of music for that long seems absurd, requiring a new conception of what it means to listen to an album, much less to just simply listen. Though I’ve owned a CD copy of “The Well-Tuned Piano” for over a decade, I’ve only once found the time to hear it all in one sitting, following along with Young’s roadmap the whole way. I’m not sure how often I was focused completely on the music—I’m not sure the word “focus” even has meaning here—but I do remember how striking the piece’s circular arcs were when heard all together. “The Well-Tuned Piano” is distinctly about themes and variations, filled with tensions, climaxes, and resolutions.
That sets it apart from the more static and repetitive work of Steve Reich, Philip Glass, and much of the Minimalism movement of which Young is often cited as a father. As Gann puts it, “...while both Minimalism and Serialism aim for music devoid of memory or anticipation, Young plays Wagner-like, with constant suggestions of themes past and present.” Gann even insisted this piece shouldn’t be called minimal—his Village Voice review was titled “Maximal Spirit”—although Young was apparently happy to use that name. Ultimately, “The Well-Tuned Piano” sits between traditions and movements. It’s equally possible to hear it as a repetitive work erasing the concept of time, as a narrative in which ideas emerge, dissipate, and return in progressing cycles or an unclassifiable hybrid that feels static and moving at the same time.
The diversity and richness of “The Well-Tuned Piano” come not only from Young’s innovative tuning and compositional structure but from his improvisation. He always performed the piece from memory, without a written score. He saw each chance to play it as an opportunity to advance it, making it a living, unending composition. With each public iteration, he added new sections and changed existing ones. (The piece was well-suited for such expansion: At one point in the 1970s, two major portions were added when Young simply changed one note of his tuning). “I get no satisfaction unless the piece grows,” he once said.
Its evolution might seem irrelevant when listening to a single fixed recording. But this version that was released—which Young titled to include the show’s date and start and end times—was, in fact, one of his most improvisatory. Though he claims that “I would [always] follow the dictates of my muse, no matter how extreme,” Young usually played with a clock at his side, so not to spend so long on any one section that he’d run out of steam for the rest. But during the October 25, 1981, performance, he left the clock at home and was surprised afterwards to find that what usually took him three to four hours to play lasted over five. He called it “not just the longest, but most imaginative and creative realization of ‘The Well-Tuned Piano’ that I have yet played.” A few years later, he claimed that the piece had grown so much that no single performance could contain it all.
With only one other recording to compare it to (a harder-to-find DVD of a 1987 performance, released by Young’s own MELA Foundation), it’s hard to judge if this version is the most imaginative. But it certainly feels remarkably present and immediate, as if Young has discovered and inhabited an infinite, ever-expanding moment. Moods change rapidly given the piece’s scope, and even when he’s traversing slower, quieter passages, tension courses. Often the drama comes not just from its arcs and shifts, but also from the sense that at any moment something new—or something that you haven’t heard in a while—lies just around the corner. That something new might even be a feeling, an emotion familiar yet uncannily novel, tweaked into an outer realm by Young’s devout interval-shifting. If any five-hour work can keep you on the edge of your seat, this is it.
That sounds almost like a magic trick, and it’s tempting to assign a mystical aura to “The Well-Tuned Piano.” Many of Young’s other projects—with their references to dreams, and in the holistic experience of his New York space The Dream House—suggest his creative approach has a spiritual aspect. But when writer Ian Nagoski expressed surprise that Young’s devotion to just intonation wasn’t about the harmony of the spheres, Young replied, “I really work with sound as it appears in the real world.” By doing so, he discovered profundity in concrete things: mathematical equations, thought-out structures, individual sounds as direct catalysts for individual feelings. He found a way into the core of music and its effect on the listener through exacting methods, accessing a reality no other artist ever had, simply by tuning and playing piano in his own singular way. Which means one simple statement he made sums up “The Well-Tuned Piano” perfectly: “Equal temperament reminds one of the truth; just intonation is the truth.” | 2018-02-04T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2018-02-04T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Experimental | Gramavision | February 4, 2018 | 9.5 | 0c88729c-4adc-459b-9b6f-edcf653601ed | Marc Masters | https://pitchfork.com/staff/marc-masters/ | |
England's prestigious Touch label offers this collection of hypnotizing ambient alien drones from experimental guitarist Oren Ambarchi. | England's prestigious Touch label offers this collection of hypnotizing ambient alien drones from experimental guitarist Oren Ambarchi. | Oren Ambarchi: Grapes from the Estate | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/152-grapes-from-the-estate/ | Grapes from the Estate | On a day when your transmission drops to the asphalt and the humidity's enough to fry brains, Oren Ambarchi's resonating, disembodied guitarisms establish a soothing alternate universe. With his third solo project for Touch-- following 2001's Suspension and 2000's Insulation-- the Australian guitarist unwraps the warm chilliness of past efforts, organizing a languid, abstract world of lulling harmonics and slow-drip tones with the on/off attenuation of strings, bells and percussion.
Raised in Sydney, and of Sephardic Jewish heritage, Ambarchi's performed and recorded with labelmate Christian Fennesz, Sachiko M, John Zorn, Keith Rowe, Phill Niblock, Toshimaru Nakamura, Martin Ng, and others. But while he's been performing live since 1986, guitar in tote, I'd prefer to keep Ambarchi as a one-dimensional wraith flittering about my cramped apartment: Nothing like seeing a guy sweating over knobs and cables to drain the magic from twilight overtones.
As is, Grapes from the Estate's ambient clusters navigate a field of emptiness. The first composition, "Corkscrew", would make an ideal soundtrack for one of Bill Viola's single-channel watery videos, especially the moments in which a microscopic lens outlines the surprisingly complex contours of each droplet. The piece consists of electric guitars, but sounds like an echoed tone generator, the occasional circles surrounding a submerged stone, or a fading gong.
"Girl with the Silver Eyes" bulks up with Hammond organ and drums, but casts a similar shadow. The most noticeable difference is a fairly distinguished bass overload. These gentle, heavy pulsations are the only cacophonous wavelengths on this album, and they're pretty minor. Otherwise, at the near-midway point, regulatory brushes and snare wraps surface, followed by an intermittent kabuki melody that rises like an afterthought. The track resolves as the pantomime of a quietly corroding music box unleashes its last gasps.
"Remedios the Beauty" opens with a hook and maintains the "riff" throughout: Mixing acoustic and electric guitars, piano, bells, drums, and the strings of Veren Grigorov and Peter Hollo, it comes off like sheets of crystalline snow spiked with a looped Four Tet yarn or a twangy western Matmos two-step at its center. Entering the pop realm, it's the most obviously musical, least enigmatic of the compositions. Still, it works in setting up the starkness of the final 20-minute "Stars Aligned, Web Spun", which brings the album full-circle. Ambarchi, again alone with this electric guitars, ups the enveloping absence of "Corkscrew", doubling its duration. Over time, the sprawl unfurls like found inhuman frequencies: Ambarchi's patience in allowing calm tones to live healthy, long lives creates a blinking grid. It's what I imagine a black and white Lite Brite would sound like if it were allowed a temporary whisper.
No matter how camouflaged, a guitar is a guitar. Though it may be hard to believe this flickering six-string sunspot emerged from an instrument that established Steve Vai and Yngwie Malmsteen, Ambarchi makes his solo talk without resorting to a single spell-breaking finger-tap, mathy scale, or screeching whammy bar. Wonder what he could do with "Hot for Teacher"... | 2004-07-22T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2004-07-22T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Experimental | Touch | July 22, 2004 | 7.9 | 0c8b0df1-7cdb-4806-bc58-d479aaeb6c33 | Brandon Stosuy | https://pitchfork.com/staff/brandon-stosuy/ | null |
Two-thirds of The Comet Is Coming, plus poet and saxophonist Alabaster DePlume, offer ecstatic anthems for battling fascism, capitalism, and catastrophe. | Two-thirds of The Comet Is Coming, plus poet and saxophonist Alabaster DePlume, offer ecstatic anthems for battling fascism, capitalism, and catastrophe. | Soccer96: Tactics EP | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/soccer96-tactics-ep/ | Tactics EP | For most of a decade, London’s Soccer96 were satisfied with simply being fun. Most every track from the explosive electronic duo felt like another instantaneous celebration: two or three minutes of carousel keyboards and squealing synthesizers, stretched like neon spandex across a skeleton of dancing drums. Soccer96 bestowed these kinetic pieces with puns and playful references, even employing personal aliases that suggested gaming handles. “Our music feels like playing a game,” Danalogue, or keyboardist Dan Leavers, once acknowledged, “on two-player mode.”
Tactics, Soccer96’s first release in two years, is as propulsive as anything from that past. Betamax, or drummer Max Hallett, pairs the spring of prime disco beats with the long-range insistence of krautrock. Danalogue shapes mellifluous melodies that flash out of the dark, like a nightclub’s synchronized lights. Peppered with cowbell and buttressed with bass from engineer Capitol K, these tracks unfurl like extended instrumental mixes of some irrepressible dance hit.
But on Tactics, Soccer96 have added an element so obvious it may seem overdue: a lyrical theme. Working with saxophonist and poet Alabaster DePlume, who’s already released one of this harried year’s most heavenly records, Soccer96 build a three-song suite that excoriates infinite capitalism, lambastes generational apathy, and foretells a perilous revolution. Tapping deep traditions of revolutionary jazz and radical punk, Tactics offers motivational anthems not only for keeping up the fight but for shaming others to join in, too.
Soccer96 exist in tandem with The Comet Is Coming, Betamax and Danalogue’s trio with visionary saxophonist Shabaka Hutchings. After Hutchings sat in for some of their early sets in London’s hotbed of hybridized jazz, they launched their spiritual-jazz-meets-ecstatic-electronics wonder. Hutchings is a master of shaping larger conceptual frameworks for his music. Sons of Kemet’s Your Queen Is a Reptile, for instance, celebrates the stories of Black women while chastising the British monarchy. Shabaka and the Ancestors’ We Are Sent Here by History reimagines the future of utopias by reconnecting with ideas from South Africa.
Soccer96 have now borrowed that guiding principle—that they can sound fun and say something—for themselves. “I Was Gonna Fight Fascism” is a seven-minute sendup of would-be protestors who are too busy, preoccupied, or scared to help save society. Though a trenchant mockery, it’s as delightful as LCD Soundsystem’s “Losing My Edge” or ESG’s “Erase You,” twin predecessors that turn taunts into hooks. During “Children Will Dance,” DePlume evokes the elegant menace of the apocalypse-minded David Tibet as he offers up nightmarish scenarios of exploitation. With its rubber-band bassline and acid-house keyboards, though, the song sounds like a refutation of that doom, a dance one step ahead of the demons.
“Buy It” is the true call to arms here, begging to be stretched for a quarter-hour onstage in front of a sweaty crowd yelling the title back at DePlume in belligerent antiphony. As the drums and circuits tango around him, DePlume recites a sardonic list of the pleasures people try to purchase: sexual satisfaction, a head of hair, a just future, more money itself. “Do you want personal distance from the colonial crimes that made your comfort and nourishment possible? Do what everyone else does,” he commands at one point, smartly breaking his grand self-indictment across the beat. “Buy it,” he sneers, the band joining his Greek chorus of condemnation.
When exasperation overwhelms DePlume, he screams into his saxophone, summoning the brittle pleas of Albert Ayler. Betamax and Danalogue rush like a river beneath him, ushering him toward his next anti-capitalist grievance. This vitriolic liturgy reinforces the little ways we can wound capitalism—that is, we can’t buy happiness, so stop trying. More important, though, it’s a pointed reminder to challenge the broader systems that perpetuate inequality, the final boss of our global video game. At a moment when white folks solicit multi-generational forgiveness by Venmo-ing Black people a few bucks instead of demanding larger conversations about reparations and reshaping policy, “Buy It” feels like theme music for the bigger battle. This isn’t the kind of carefree video-game glee Soccer96 might once have imagined. But their reinvention arrives right on time.
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Buy: Rough Trade
(Pitchfork earns a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.) | 2020-07-06T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-07-06T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Moshi Moshi | July 6, 2020 | 7.8 | 0c8b1d56-107a-40bf-b0c3-8412e1345361 | Grayson Haver Currin | https://pitchfork.com/staff/grayson-haver currin/ | |
This L.A. funk and soul musician, known as a member of Vulfpeck, meanders through a handful of solo joints about love and basketball. | This L.A. funk and soul musician, known as a member of Vulfpeck, meanders through a handful of solo joints about love and basketball. | Joey Dosik: Game Winner EP | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/joey-dosik-game-winner-ep/ | Game Winner EP | As a member of the web-savvy funk band Vulfpeck, the Los Angeles songwriter Joey Dosik is usually off to the side playing saxophone or keyboard. But in a recent YouTube video, the group gathers around Dosik and performs one of his songs, a throwback soul track called “Running Away.” Like many of Vulfpeck’s popular studio clips, the performance is garnished with a dose of music-nerd excitement, this time in the form of a pair of cameos from noted session drummer James Gadson (Bill Withers, Quincy Jones) and guitarist David T. Walker (Stevie Wonder, Marvin Gaye). The dream-team lineup isn’t wasted on Dosik’s song. They take his self-absorbed fantasy that someone out there is thinking of him and turn it into something gorgeous.
Unfortunately, this isn’t the version of “Running Away” you’ll hear on Dosik’s new Game Winner EP, an expanded re-packaging of his 2016 release of the same name. Instead, you’ll find two others. The official “Running Away” is a subdued hum, a victim of production that turns a sweet song into something quaint and soulless. The alternate mix, with just Dosik’s buttery voice and muted drum and bass tracks, splits the difference; the session is so minimal that it reads like a songwriter’s demo and vocal audition in one. To be sure, Dosik has written a very good song, but he doesn’t quite seem sure of what to do with it.
Game Winner has 10 tracks, but only three full original songs. The rest are alternate versions and plodding piano interludes to pad out the EP’s tenuous concept: It’s a set of romantic sketches filtered through a vague basketball metaphor. On the gospel-indebted title track, Dosik sings, “Give me the ball/I’ll hit the game winner/Oh take a chance on me,” wrestling the corniness out of the gesture simply by sounding so genuine. His voice has a serene, plaintive quality. Light as it is, his singing does the heavy lifting throughout.
More than anything, the EP casts Dosik as a deeply mellow writer and performer. With its gentle guitar fingerpicking and twinkling piano riffs, “Competitive Streak” is a blue-eyed soul track that, if you tilt your head, casts Dosik suddenly and creatively as a new-school James Taylor. He’s similarly economical in his writing and has a chipper, pattering melody for even the downest moments. “Couldn’t possibly blame me/More than I blame myself,” he sings. Later on the same song, though, his idée fixe gets the best of him, when he awkwardly blurts out a reference to Magic Johnson and Kareem Abdul-Jabbar.
The final track on the EP’s original tracklist is Game Winner’s most refreshing moment. Predictably, it’s a riff, the remix to “Game Winner.” Dosik uses the more sensual revamp to finally lighten up. “Sit back and enjoy a piece of the remix,” he sings, stepping out of the stuffiness of the previous version. Dosik got his start as a jazz musician, and maybe that’s where he got his inclination to iterate on a good piece. But he could stand to loosen up a little and take risks earlier in the game. | 2018-02-24T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2018-02-24T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Pop/R&B | Secretly Canadian | February 24, 2018 | 6.3 | 0c8e5d3f-c6ff-41fc-a49f-de6891f3e675 | Jay Balfour | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jay-balfour/ | |
So this is it. The great follow-up to Homogenic we've anticipated\n\ since that overcast late-September afternoon in 1997 ... | So this is it. The great follow-up to Homogenic we've anticipated\n\ since that overcast late-September afternoon in 1997 ... | Björk: Vespertine | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/727-vespertine/ | Vespertine | So this is it. The great follow-up to Homogenic we've anticipated since that overcast late-September afternoon in 1997 when we first sat listening to the album for the first time, wondering what she might do next. Somehow, it doesn't seem worth the wait.
Homogenic, still the most innovative and substantial release of Björk's solo career, spilled over with rich melody and sybaritic imagery. Its dense, programmed percussion reflected IDM's infancy (The Richard D. James Album being a frequent point of comparison), yet submerged it in brooding Russian strings buoyed by thumping bass hits and Björk's urgent frustrations. The album's cavernous echoes and masterful arrangements sprang to larger-than-life proportions like the American musicals Selma fantasized about in Dancer in the Dark. Both cohesive and inconceivably modern, Homogenic sounded like the future-music of childhood dreams.
While undeniably beautiful, Vespertine fails to give electronic music the forward push it received on Björk's preceding albums. Rather than designing sounds never before imagined, the album merely sounds current, relying on the technology of standard studio software and the explorations of the Powerbook elite. There are few surprises here for the Björk fan, and fewer for the electro aficionado. Sure, it's nice to listen to, but it rarely challenges like Post's "Enjoy" and "Headphones," or like Homogenic's "Pluto." And what's a Björk album without the ambush?
That said, Vespertine has more than just a handful of charms. The record is gorgeously orchestrated with the Icelander's neon string sections, chiming music boxes, and intricately arranged background Björks. Its production, though never truly groundbreaking, is always beautifully executed with washes of harp, organic synthsounds and majestic, dreamlike effects. Björk hasn't lost her ability to create forested sonic otherworlds, or to achieve an overwhelmingly full sound while maintaining an air of wide, open space. In fact, it could be argued that, texturally, she has mastered her trademarks with this album.
"Hidden Place" opens Vespertine with a glitchy, almost lo-fi melodic loop, paired with the deep sub-bass attack that has dominated the low-end of Björk's music in recent years. "Aurora" begins with rhythmic broomsweeps and awakens with delicate frosted chimes and angelic choirs. "Heirloom" alters between what sounds like a samba preset on a vintage Wurlitzer organ and skittering breakbeats, and is decorated with inverted synthtones and analog keyboards. And these songs, like all the others, are saturated in a thousand layers of whirling, grandiose strings and porcelain pings of fragile concordance.
Yet, Vespertine is riddled with sameness, and the unshakable feeling that you've heard these songs before. And coated in such a delicious sheen, it's easy to miss that the music here lacks a major component of Björk's past recordings; strip Vespertine down to melody alone, and you're left with little substance. Only on occasion does Björk rise above the swelling symphonies and swirling digitalia with a memorable piece of music, and when she does, it seems fleeting. Perhaps it appears for a moment in the repetitious chorus of "It's Not Up to You," or the album's shimmering closer, the Oval-sampling "Unison." But blink and you'll miss it, as it's invariably swallowed whole by the album's vast, ethereal instrumentation.
Glitch wizards Matmos were called in during the Vespertine sessions to co-produce many of the record's tracks. I wonder where they are. Nowhere is their signature sound even remotely traceable. A theory: starstruck by Björk's iconic visage, they lent what they felt she would want, and left the experimenting to their own releases. Clearly, Björk realized that this duo was capable of inventing sounds beyond her wildest dreams, but the end result is typical; not exactly a rehash, but nevertheless predictable.
Still, Vespertine makes for an intriguing listen, and manages to hold its own after hours on repeat. Were it not for the fact that Björk had already visited this terrain so reliably on previous outings, it could very well be her landmark achievement. But with the astounding Homogenic behind her, its melodies timelessly memorable and its production similarly captivating, Vespertine stands only as a pleasant journey back through her usual netherworld. | 2001-08-31T01:00:01.000-04:00 | 2001-08-31T01:00:01.000-04:00 | Electronic / Pop/R&B | Elektra | August 31, 2001 | 7.2 | 0c8e8f68-efa2-4053-b374-fb06fb9cde5c | Ryan Schreiber | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ryan-schreiber/ | null |
Setting Dawn Richard’s agile voice against Spencer Zahn’s lush chamber arrangements, the two musicians push each other into an atmospheric zone that’s new for both. | Setting Dawn Richard’s agile voice against Spencer Zahn’s lush chamber arrangements, the two musicians push each other into an atmospheric zone that’s new for both. | Dawn Richard / Spencer Zahn: Pigments | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/dawn-richard-spencer-zahn-pigments/ | Pigments | Dawn Richard’s music feels as if it’s emanating from a higher plane than ours. Even back in her more radio-friendly days with Danity Kane and Diddy, the New Orleans singer imbued her songs with a rare vulnerability, emerging from the hedonistic landscape of late-2000s hip-hop and R&B with earnest, heartbroken compositions about losing love and finding it beneath the strobe lights of the dancefloor. She’s a singer of big emotions, and even as she’s pushed her solo work further into experimental realms, she has continued to foreground feeling above all else.
Pigments takes this evolution a step further, transforming Richard’s voice into a luminescent mist. Conceived with bassist and neoclassical composer Spencer Zahn after the two collaborated on his 2018 debut, the album captures the sensory, abstract feel of Richard’s solo work, but from an entirely different vantage point. As Richard sings impressionistic songs of love (and self-love), Zahn’s radiant chamber music works like a prism, splitting her voice into beams of pure color. An avowed Mark Hollis fan whose work draws from ECM’s celestial approach to jazz, Zahn crafts some of his most nuanced arrangements yet, each softly strummed guitar and closely mic’d clarinet breathing with effortless ease. Not only do the two of them make a remarkably natural pair—they each bring out some of each other’s best work.
Throughout Pigments, Richard’s voice appears and dissipates, guiding the listener along on a gradual drift downstream. Where Zahn’s instrumentals are often measured and gentle, Richard’s performance is dynamic, regularly growing from a soft quiver to a mighty, all-encompassing wail and back again. After the opening “Coral” sets the stage with a yawning, Gavin Bryars-like hum, Richard materializes on “Sandstone,” imbuing Zahn’s arrangements with enormous power. “Dreamer,” she announces like a specter emerging from a fog, “I want to love like you/I want to see the world through your eyes.” As the song swells to its climax, Richard’s voice fuses with Zahn’s instruments until they become indistinguishable from one another. The duo returns to this swooning psychedelia throughout Pigments: “Vantablack,” in particular, seems almost to melt, Richard’s vocal runs drizzling over Zahn’s shuffling drums like warm sap.
Richard’s greatest gift to Zahn as a collaborator is the way she keeps his music from getting too comfortable. As sumptuous as his arrangements may be, a vocalist like Richard requires heft: After “Cerulean” opens with a hypnotizing wash of synthesizers and saxophones, Richard begins building the song to a gut-wrenching peak. “You can’t choose who you give your heart to,” she declares, and suddenly the doors are flung open, Zahn’s synthesizers thrumming like a cathedral organ at the dawn of the rapture—there’s even a wailing electric guitar solo that somehow doesn’t feel too dramatic. The more relaxed “Saffron” has the feel of an otherworldly late-night waltz, its upright bass and saxophone answering Richard’s repeated question—“Can you save me the last dance?”—with all the theatrical flair of lost lovers singing to each other in the dark.
The tracks where Richard takes a back seat spotlight Zahn’s remarkable maturation as a composer; overcoming the slightly somnolent pleasantness of his previous work, he creates rich, mesmerizing arrangements that subtly shift the mood from piece to piece. On “Sienna,” a quiet clarinet intro slowly gives way to unease as synthesizers begin turning backwards, while blurry vibraphones cloud the frame. After Richard’s intense pleading on “Cerulean,” Zahn’s plinking, icicle-like sounds on “Opal” serve as a serene comedown, returning the music to a hushed place of peace. Details like these make his soundscapes as calm as they are captivating.
Richard has hinted in the past at being enthralled with the worlds of neoclassical and new age—her own father, to whom the album is dedicated, has a master’s in music theory, and Richard has spoken about growing up surrounded by Debussy, Bach, and Enya. As the album nears its end, Richard and Zahn begin to introduce a club-like thump to the music once more, first with a minimally pinging-ponging drum machine on “Crimson,” then in a full-on groove on the get-up-and-move closer “Umber.” It’s these moments when Zahn and Richard come together that make Pigments such a remarkable endeavor, one that combines the properties of both artists’ music until it becomes a pristine, unified feeling. | 2022-11-09T00:03:00.000-05:00 | 2022-11-09T00:03:00.000-05:00 | Pop/R&B / Rock | Merge | November 9, 2022 | 8.3 | 0c8fe86a-26a8-4649-8f71-cddafc85d6a8 | Sam Goldner | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sam-goldner/ | |
The Hot Chip member’s third solo album proffers empathetic pop-house as the cure to what ails us. But in a divided world, politeness only goes so far. | The Hot Chip member’s third solo album proffers empathetic pop-house as the cure to what ails us. But in a divided world, politeness only goes so far. | Joe Goddard: Harmonics | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/joe-goddard-harmonics/ | Harmonics | Feeling down? Weary? Out of sorts? Hot Chip’s Joe Goddard has got you covered on Harmonics, the London producer’s third solo album and a record so relentlessly empathetic it can feel like getting smothered by a pack of golden retrievers.
Goddard has history here. Hot Chip, the group he co-founded with Alexis Taylor, are known for their arm-around-the-shoulder melodies, while his project the 2 Bears, with Raf Rundell, once released the charming “Bear Hug,” a song that literally promised to take you in its arms. Goddard’s 2011 single “Gabriel,” meanwhile, is such a beautifully rendered, deeply felt pop-house song that it almost managed to escape from the charred emotional void at the core of VULTURES 1’ “Beg Forgiveness,” where Ye flipped its chorus into a defense of Chris Brown, of all people.
But Harmonics really is a festival of warmth, from its cordial name down. Goddard designed the record, he says, to be “loving, romantic - and fun,” and this approach extended into Harmonics’ production; Goddard tried not to force meaning onto the music or his collaborators. Certainly, it all sounds very welcoming: The beats largely bounce along at an inclusive 125-ish BPM as the music takes a soothing stroll through the dance styles that have long dominated Goddard’s work, namely house, garage (both UK and U.S.), funk, and soul. The synths shine persistently bright and a stream of guest vocalists pour their hearts out on songs that are heavy on tales of romantic intrigue.
Still, Harmonics isn’t really a happy album—more a wistful one, with a deep strain of “chin up mate” encouragement. Goddard’s melodies tend toward the doleful, and an understated melancholy runs through Harmonics like late-summer nostalgia. Sure, there is romance, but we are far from the happily ever after. “Why do we love then in this world/Why must we try again, hurt ourselves,” Goddard ponders on “Follow You,” a vaguely gothic rock-soul number. The album’s guests don’t sound in much better humor: “Deep inside I know just what to do/But how do I find healing in the song?” Milan-based singer-songwriter Fiorious croons on the gospel house of “New World (Flow)”.
This melancholy dance format produces some beautiful moments. “On My Mind” is the kind of ruminative 2-step that Jamie xx wishes he could achieve, while “Summon,” with former Wild Beast Hayden Thorpe, is a Larry Heard-esque fantasy of deep-house beats and disco introspection. At times, though, the relentless march of default mode boom-tish house and bittersweet synth melodies gets a little stifling—less comforting than simply comfort zone.
What’s frustrating is that there is a more adventurous album trying to escape from beneath Harmonics’ house-y shroud, one where Goddard’s more intrepid collaborators really take the lead. “Miles Away,” with Guinean vocalist Falle Nioke, and “Progress,” with Ibibio Sound Machine, both touch on Afro-house; “When Love’s Out of Fashion,” with British rapper Oranje, detours into hip-hop; and “Revery,” with Alabaster DePlume, has a touch of Underground Resistance-style space jazz to its saxophone groove.
That these are among the best songs on the record is no coincidence. Goddard’s compassionate attitude is a welcome antidote to our divided world, and it does often bear fruit. But little truly great art is made by committee. Harmonics’ collection of relatable songs and interesting ideas could use a stronger hand on the tiller to reach its intended destination. | 2024-07-22T00:01:00.000-04:00 | 2024-07-22T00:01:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Domino | July 22, 2024 | 6.9 | 0c90c330-eb35-4cc6-963e-b6b5f97cac29 | Ben Cardew | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ben-cardew/ | |
Liz Harris’ sparse, 22-minute record follows the trajectory of her 2014 album Ruins to a place that feels even more wind-blown and remote. | Liz Harris’ sparse, 22-minute record follows the trajectory of her 2014 album Ruins to a place that feels even more wind-blown and remote. | Grouper: Grid of Points | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/grouper-grid-of-points/ | Grid of Points | Grouper once said releasing an album was like trying to secretly sink a heavy object in a lake: “Find a quiet corner, gently slip it under the surface, watch the ripples for a moment, and steal away.” She was referring to her end of the process—the immediate aftermath of putting one’s work into the world—but the analogy works the other way around, too. Listening to a Grouper record, meaning generally evades me, or at least the kind I can articulate does; I grasp at an expression of exactly what a song is “about” as it slips through my fingers like water. Sometimes it feels like the record is sinking through me, ending up somewhere deep and unreachable, leaving me with the dazed feeling you get when you die in your dream.
The seven songs on Grid of Points, the latest album from Liz Harris, were written and recorded in a week and a half during a residency in the wide-open space of Ucross, Wyoming in 2014. She describes the process being abruptly halted by sickness, like a sign from the world that the album was complete despite its slightness. Or rather, because of its slightness. “The intimacy and abbreviation of this music allude to an essence that the songs’ lyrics speak more directly of,” Harris writes. “The space left after matter has departed, a stage after the characters have gone, the hollow of some central column, missing.”
Lately, it’s felt as if Harris has taken measures to translate that essence more directly, with as little interference as possible. 2014’s spare and devastating Ruins forewent the layers and layers of effects pedals that made her best-known releases so displacing, focusing on just the piano, her voice, and the ambient sounds of her recording space. Grid of Points follows this trajectory to a place that feels even more wind-blown and remote, its compositions shaped as much by negative space as they are by instrumentation; the mundane sounds of earthly existence—an empty room, an inhale—are not background noise but essential parts of the whole. It is easy to find yourself hanging on to every press of the piano’s sustain pedal, holding your breath as Harris preserves what is left of the note until there is nothing at all.
But where Ruins showcased Harris’ vocals as uncharacteristically legible, Grid of Points burrows back into ambiguity, the vocal harmonies overlapping in foggy indeterminacy even when they are unaccompanied by any other instrument. And yet they are more heavenly than ever, Harris’ melodies drifting in almost liturgical directions; on “The Races,” not even a minute long, her voice sounds as though it’s echoing off cathedral marble. Of its handful of lyrics, I could recognize only three abbreviated lines: “Smells like rain/It is raining/The races.”
Typed out, these lines—and others across the album’s 22-minute span—might as well be haiku poems cloaked in song form. Imposing formal restrictions on one’s work can have a weirdly freeing effect, and it would seem that Harris’ increasingly minimal arsenal of instruments is akin to the best haiku poets’ austere character count—less a strict rulebook than an exercise in expression at its most essential. Sometimes, that includes language itself. For the first minute of “Blouse,” Harris seems to be singing words that are not quite words, somewhere between a heavy sigh and a sob. But the feeling is translated clearly, the ache of the melody saying everything that needs to be said.
The sparseness of Grid of Points creates a sense of hyper-awareness; as such, I’ve found it hard to listen the album seated in front of a laptop, compelled instead to wander out into the world. I recently found myself on the shore of a nearby beach, where my thoughts had turned to death—an event I sometimes imagine should be soundtracked by Grouper’s music as a universal rule. Even as it floats just beyond my literal comprehension, the album seems to be explicitly about grief, though I suspect other listeners might have similarly strong convictions that it is about something else entirely. Grouper records are like that—as though the way Harris sublimates herself into her world leaves space for its audience to become its protagonists. Sitting on the beach, I think a helicopter might be overhead. In fact, the walls of the room in which Harris recorded “Breathing,” Grid of Points’ last song, seems to have collapsed away—a visceral wide-opening. For the album’s final two minutes, the only sounds are those of a steadily oncoming train; and then nothing. | 2018-04-30T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-04-30T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Experimental | Kranky | April 30, 2018 | 7.8 | 0c9476db-0ebe-4d82-afc3-60202ed4de7b | Meaghan Garvey | https://pitchfork.com/staff/meaghan-garvey/ | |
Nas' 10th studio album, featuring production work from NO I.D., Buckwild, Salaam Remi, the late Heavy D, and Swizz Beatz, is his strongest in a few presidential administrations. | Nas' 10th studio album, featuring production work from NO I.D., Buckwild, Salaam Remi, the late Heavy D, and Swizz Beatz, is his strongest in a few presidential administrations. | Nas: Life Is Good | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/16832-life-is-good/ | Life Is Good | Nas has been disappointing people nearly half his life. By now, the passion play of raised and swiftly dashed hopes that occurs whenever he announces a new album has repeated itself enough times to officially qualify as farce. You'd think he'd be exhausted by now, and there were times over his last three sleepwalking efforts when he sounded just that: a guy wearily familiar with his own towering mythology, and increasingly disinterested in living up to it.
But what if Nas stopped fretting about blowing people's minds or disappointing them and just, you know, made a record? It's the kind of question Nas devotees have spent years pondering, and Life Is Good, his 10th studio album and strongest in three or four presidential administrations, is basically the answer. Song for song, it's his most solid, disaster-free album since, well... we won't go there, as comparing Nas albums is like comparing birthdays where your father showed up late instead of not at all. But for once, Nas sidesteps oblivion. Life Is Good finds him avoiding most of his worst impulses, scraping the pseudo-mystical Righteous Teacher patina off his crown and touching back down in the Queensbridge of his sense memory over late-summer-light production.
Life Is Good is so consistent, in fact, that it's disorienting, and those of us with a long history navigating Nas albums will have a lot of pressing questions: What are all these top-shelf beats doing here? Where are the queasy sex jams, the songs rapped from the perspective of heroin spoons or discarded E&J bottles, the choruses about being a Warrior and a Hero? Where is the blindingly ill-fitting Nas Radio Bid? (The lone example, the Swizz Beatz-produced "Summer on Smash", is just inoffensively generic.) But above all: What happened this time?
Part of the answer is clear. The last few years have been turbulent ones in Nas' personal life -- his brutally public split with Kelis, the costly settlement, the embarrassing fiasco with his teenage daughter tweeting pictures of a bejeweled box of condoms in her bedroom. Historically at his best when shaken, Nas has rich material to work with here, and he's more open-hearted on Life Is Good than he has been since God's Son. "Daughters", his sweetly reflective response to the condom-gate that is no less sweet for its slight lyrical awkwardness (he refers to what is presumably Twitter just as "the social network"), finds him examining the responsibilities of fatherhood with fond bewilderment. The song aimed directly at Kelis ("Bye Baby"), meanwhile, is more a good-times remembrance than score-settling. "You screamin' at the racist cops in Miami was probably the highlight of my life," he recalls, the affection audible in his voice.
It's also entirely possible that Nas fans have No I.D. to thank for Life Is Good's quality. In the recent Complex cover story on Nas, I.D. said that he "wanted to make a soundtrack that allowed Nas to be Nas." Mentor to Kanye, a Chicago rap veteran, and the current executive vice president at Def Jam, No I.D. seems to be cementing his role as the Rap Whisperer: He recently guided a deeply confused Common to his first good record in nine years, and it's likely he exercised some of the same gentle-but-firm guidance here. He produces five of 14 tracks on Life is Good, and they all exude the warm TV-fireplace crackle of the best throwback production. You can feel the July city-heat sweat drip off the wooly saxophone on "Stay", while "Back When" flickers like a dim neon sign. The lyrics to "Back When" don't even do much besides gesture at Nas' musty mythology: "check out the oracle bred by city housing," Hollis Ave, Shan, and Marley, "you love to hear the story of how it all got started," etc. But he breathes through it with old-Shakespearean-actor fondness-- he was, after all, there, and No I.D. provides just the right lighting.
The rest of the production list reads as if it were crowd-sourced by exacting Nas purists: Buckwild, Salaam Remi, the late Heavy D (who gave Nas "The Don" before he passed away). Remi's blaring beat for "A Queens Story" is like a louder, more dramatic version of "Get Down", its tension ratcheted up by James Bond-theme horn blurts. There are a couple of playful, possibly shameless nods to Illmatic: On the intro to "Loco-Motive", a suspiciously familiar-sounding subway train rolls over tracks in the distance. Nas dedicates the song to "my trapped in the 90s niggas," a line that could be used against him but that sounds, in the album's context, like playfulness. You can't recapture lightning in a bottle, or age backwards, but you can settle gracefully into strengths. Nas isn't back; he's just here. | 2012-07-20T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2012-07-20T02:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Def Jam | July 20, 2012 | 8.3 | 0c97d170-d6ab-4fca-9400-4e5aa5525c2d | Jayson Greene | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jayson-greene/ | null |
As they enter their second decade, the indie-rock veterans gently expand the borders of their suburban ennui with plush arrangements and new voices. | As they enter their second decade, the indie-rock veterans gently expand the borders of their suburban ennui with plush arrangements and new voices. | Real Estate: The Main Thing | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/real-estate-the-main-thing/ | The Main Thing | When a rock band enters its second decade, fatigue sets in, no matter how successful their previous albums. It’s an existential problem most groups don’t live long enough to face; many that do choose to disband, finding they’ve run out of important things to say or interesting ways to say them. Some veteran acts take a collaborative approach, bringing in outsiders to expand their sound—Yo La Tengo’s annual Hanukkah performances have become a kind of indie-rock showcase, featuring younger artists like Snail Mail, while Conor Oberst found inspiration in kindred spirit Phoebe Bridgers. For Real Estate frontman Martin Courtney, survival similarly required ceding control to new contributors. Their resulting fifth album, The Main Thing, coats their suburban ennui in plush arrangements.
The new vastness of their sound—the sweeping synth that opens the album on “Friday,” not dissimilar to the boot-up chimes of a MacBook; the shrieking strings that introduce “Paper Cup”—reflects not only their outsized ambitions (“We were trying to accomplish making the best record we’ve ever made,” Courtney said), but the physical distance separating the members. As he did on 2017’s In Mind, Courtney recorded their demos from hundreds of miles from most of the band, with only percussionist Jackson Pollis and keyboardist Matt Kallman remaining in their adoptive city of New York. Sylvan Esso’s Amelia Meath, a featured vocalist on “Paper Cup,” composed her own harmony for the part, further broadening the album’s palette.
As a result, the The Main Thing has an ensemble feel, a give-and-take between the musicians that feels more like jam bands than indie rock. The title track—with its freewheeling drum fills and little jazz-fusion-inspired guitar solo—focuses on each player, rather than melting into hazy harmonies. The jammier moments come across as alternately goofy and genuinely self-serious, an appropriate mix for a band helmed by a father of three.
Parenthood is at the forefront of Courtney’s lyrics here. Real Estate has always looked backward; even songs written ostensibly in the present tense were weighted with autumnal melancholia. There’s a slight twist to that formulation on “You,” in which Courtney bemoans the eventual anxieties his children will have to face: “Just dream your time away/I see no better use for it/For soon you’ll be awake/Then you’ll have to get used to it.” Sung dreamily over glassy guitar, it comes off like an oddly practical lullaby, a childhood cautionary tale filtered through the inevitability of adulthood. On “Silent World,” he speaks in harsher terms about his Catcher In The Rye-like desire to protect his children: “Can’t let you wander off/Out in this wicked world.”
Courtney has mentioned a desire to be more outwardly political in his lyrics, in part to justify his band’s continued output during times of national strife. It’s a stretch to say that poeticized anxieties about adulthood, laid out by a pacifying tenor and backed by ornate arpeggios, rise to the level of protest music. But his lyrics instead touch upon a cognitive dissonance—between the personal nature of restless anguish and the broader societal forces that underpin it—that fits nicely with the band’s graceful guitars and rounded basslines.
Elsewhere, despite the band’s claim that producer Kevin MacMahon asked them to carefully consider each word, the writing falls a bit flat. On the Lynch-penned “Also A But,” the glacial track references natural disaster through nuclear war metaphors that sound immediately dated (“Floating atop a mushroom cloud,” he sings as the song peters out). “Falling Down” traffics in shallow witticisms (“The wind’s the only thing that’s fully free”), redeemed only by Courtney’s tranquil delivery.
Growth, on an album-to-album basis, can be difficult to measure for a band like Real Estate. Despite novel collaborations and a lush cornucopia of additional instruments, their basic patterns—open chords, lilting vocals—ground The Main Thing in a familiar context. The most memorable moments come with the small flourishes—a folksy piano accompaniment on “November,” pizzicato violins that swirl into a dramatic crescendo on “Falling Down,” programmed drum beats that blend the outro of “Sting” into “Silent World.” Interviews with the band evoke a palpable pressure to leave an imprint on the world, to make a new record feel necessary, and not simply obligatory. Real Estate doesn’t upend their own foundation; they instead find beauty in filling in its empty spaces.
Buy: Rough Trade
(Pitchfork may earn a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.) | 2020-03-04T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2020-03-04T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Domino | March 4, 2020 | 7.3 | 0c97ea1b-6191-4406-8bdf-42d0a95aee6a | Arielle Gordon | https://pitchfork.com/staff/arielle-gordon/ | |
The Strokes' creative linchpin follows his solid debut Yours to Keep with another tasty helping of power-pop, though on ¿Có**mo te Llama? he sheds the inherent modesty of a solo spin-off and stretches his songs' components across a wider array of styles. | The Strokes' creative linchpin follows his solid debut Yours to Keep with another tasty helping of power-pop, though on ¿Có**mo te Llama? he sheds the inherent modesty of a solo spin-off and stretches his songs' components across a wider array of styles. | Albert Hammond Jr.: ¿Cómo te Llama? | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/11989-como-te-llama/ | ¿Cómo te Llama? | This is the second Albert Hammond Jr. album released since the Strokes' last album, 2006's First Impressions of Earth. The rumor mill may be aching for new Strokes album details, but Hammond-- always pegged as one of the band's creative forces-- is doing his best to ensure our survival until then, and the extra face time's well-deserved. Hammond follows his solid debut Yours to Keep with another tasty helping of power-pop, though on ¿Cómo te Llama? he sheds the inherent modesty of a solo spin-off and aims higher.
Although his songwriting credits with the Strokes are slight, Hammond retains his band's melody-first minimalism. The arrangements here remain just as efficient and inconspicuous as YTK, and Hammond's vocals unequivocally steer the songs, his even-keeled delivery resembling a less id-driven Julian Casablancas. However, Cómo veers from past work by stretching these straightforward components across a wider array of styles and histrionics. You can still distinguish all the Guided by Voices, Beach Boys, and new wave building blocks, but in spots they're re-appropriated for, say, a disco or reggae soundclash.
At times, the added bombast helps trick listeners into thinking they're listening to something more complex than power-pop. Opener "Bargain of a Century" enters with fanfare, bookending its devil-may-care verses with a melodramatic riff that scales Arcade Fire to Hammond-friendly proportions. On paper, "Victory at Monterey" reads like a potential disaster, its disco bassline and piston-pumping Franz Ferdinand riffs running the risk of kowtowing to New York dance-punk douchebaggery. Fortunately, Hammond never lets the focus shift from catchiness to genre fidelity, and the track's an unlikely highlight.
Surprisingly, Cómo only contains a handful of single-friendly, three-minute pop songs. First single "GfC" and "In My Room" make nuanced changes to the formula of YTK singles "In Transit" and "Everyone Gets a Star", but other similarly structured tracks skew Hammond's pop sensibilities. The verse and chorus of "Borrowed Time" sound like totally different animals, shifting harshly from reggae to lead-footed rock. The super-twee "Miss Myrtle" and "G Up" also stumble by deviating too far from the norm, especially when they don't deliver the home run choruses Hammond's led us to expect at this point.
On the whole, Cómo's not a weaker album than YTK, but it sounds like it's overcompensating for its likely increased exposure. A seven-minute instrumental, "Spooky Couch" nevertheless feels tacked on. The inconsistent genre surfing could work if Hammond had greater charisma as a vocalist, but, considering the stylistic pratfalls on First Impressions, eclecticism's never been a strength for him or his kin in the first place. The crazy thing is, these missteps don't hinder the half-dozen or so gems that stay lodged in your noodle long after playing. At a time when indie audiences are demanding more and more esoteric touches like Afro-pop, lo-fi C86isms, or Balearic revivalism, a songwriter like Hammond feels like a well-needed junk food binge. He may not blaze new paths, but his sickening talent, when coupled with all these accessible touchstones, often proves more than adequate. | 2008-07-09T02:00:02.000-04:00 | 2008-07-09T02:00:02.000-04:00 | Rock | RCA | July 9, 2008 | 6.7 | 0ca12a3f-5f31-43ce-ad29-f289efabcfdd | Adam Moerder | https://pitchfork.com/staff/adam-moerder/ | null |
On his eighth solo LP, his first as Father John Misty, ex-Fleet Foxes drummer Josh Tillman has shaken his lonesome, somber tone in favor of something more gregarious, engaging, even funny. | On his eighth solo LP, his first as Father John Misty, ex-Fleet Foxes drummer Josh Tillman has shaken his lonesome, somber tone in favor of something more gregarious, engaging, even funny. | Father John Misty: Fear Fun | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/16597-fear-fun/ | Fear Fun | Even before he joined Fleet Foxes in 2008, Josh Tillman had established a sound that made virtues of austerity and quiet, pitching his songs at a slow pace that at best bristled with prickly intensity or at worst lulled nearly into nonexistence. His albums suffered when the melodies and arrangements were precise and exactingly purposeful, leading Paul Thompson to decry 2009's Year in the Kingdom for its "lonesome, somber tone, one Tillman-- a funny, amicable dude, if you've ever heard him clowning on himself at a Fleet Foxes gig-- would do well to shake on occasion." Whether intentionally or not, Tillman has responded to this kind of criticism with his eighth album and his first under the name Father John Misty. Perhaps freed by the new pseudonym or emboldened by his nearly four-year tenure as a Fleet Fox, Tillman varies things up on Fear Fun, reveals an adventurous palette, and makes what may be his best album to date. He's finally shaken that lonesome, somber tone, and these songs sound all the better for it: gregarious, engaging, even funny.
It can't hurt that he ditched Seattle for warmer, stranger climes. After a period of deep depression, he loaded up his van with shrooms and drove down the coast, finally settling in what he describes as a "spider-shack" in Laurel Canyon. Of course, Tillman is aware of that locale's revered place in pop history and of Greater Los Angeles' less reputable place in pop culture, and he lets them inform Fear Fun musically, lyrically, and conceptually. Even that new moniker, Father John Misty, sounds like a cult leader, keeping his flock sequestered in an old movie set up in the hills. And the lyrics suggest a Hollywood breakdown of epic proportions, loosely recounting his own walkabout with the sort of mischief and humor largely missing from his previous albums. He opens "I'm Writing a Novel" with a great first sentence: "I ran down the road, pants down to my knees, screaming,/ 'Please come help me, that Canadian shaman gave a little too much to me!'" It bodes well for his novel.
Fear Fun isn't merely a step forward lyrically; it also reveals new musical ambitions. Compared to his previous albums, it's positively kaleidoscopic: less content to be moody and pretty and more intent on getting up in your face. Tillman's warped interpretations and strange combinations of SoCal pop history seem to mirror his own narcotized state: With its billowy strings and triangle beat, "Nancy From Now On" could be Laurel Canyon disco, a mad-scientist hybrid that proves a perfect setting for his careening falsetto. "Hollywood Forever Cemetery Sings" is a Sunset Strip stomp slowed down to a near idle, and the countrified "Well, You Can Do It Without Me" finds Gram Parsons' headstone somewhere in Bakersfield. Every song has its own identity, and the album's slightly fractured vibe speaks volumes about the place that inspired it.
If there's a criticism to be made about the music, it's that it sounds a bit too composed and too contained to really sell the drug-fueled anarchy and municipal depravity. The arrangements entertain a rhythmic stiffness that sticks strictly to the beat, without any syncopation to suggest the messy experiences Tillman's lyrics evoke. He really only cuts loose on the rambling "I'm Writing a Novel" and the psych-absurdist "Tee Pees 1-12", which are the album's clear highlights. He's never sounded looser, weirder, or funnier than when he's recovering from a bad, pantsless trip or when he's reading Richard Brautigan to impress a woman. "If I make it out alive from Hollywood and Vine/ I'll build a cabin up in the Northwest," he sings on "Tee Pees 1-12", but hopefully it's an empty threat: By relocating to the land of Kardashians and Orange Housewives, Tillman has discovered his truest subject. | 2012-05-14T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2012-05-14T02:00:01.000-04:00 | Rock | Sub Pop | May 14, 2012 | 7.3 | 0ca21da5-991c-4d93-9f72-6c20a7647d5b | Stephen M. Deusner | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stephen-m. deusner/ | null |
Over flickering jungle breaks and gentle electronic soul, the London singer-songwriter who broke through with Anz’s ebullient “You Could Be” turns her focus inward. | Over flickering jungle breaks and gentle electronic soul, the London singer-songwriter who broke through with Anz’s ebullient “You Could Be” turns her focus inward. | George Riley: Running in Waves | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/george-riley-running-in-waves/ | Running in Waves | It’s rare for a budding artist to use their platform to state primarily what they aren’t about. London singer-songwriter George Riley does this throughout her new record Running in Waves: She doesn’t mingle with fickle or fake people, doesn’t want to sacrifice opportunities for love, and doesn’t pretend to have all the answers. In 2021, Riley received a pop star’s introduction to the world with a standout feature on Manchester producer Anz’s cosmopolitan club smash “You Could Be,” followed shortly thereafter by her own interest rates, a tape. The self-released mixtape presented a freewheeling mish-mash of R&B, jungle, 2-step, and jazz while finding room to explore weighty ideas—Eurocentric beauty standards, the whitewashing of climate activism—that Riley, a graduate in politics and philosophy, managed to tackle without seeming trite.
Executive produced by PLZ Make It Ruins label head Vegyn, Running in Waves is more carefully honed. This time, rather than thinking about societal issues, Riley turns her focus inward. The palette has changed accordingly, favoring lean basslines, soft beds of synthesizer, and solemn strings, all calibrated to foreground Riley’s soft yet forcefully emotive voice.
On “Time,” she lets a laid-back jungle break soundtrack a fantasy of a night out—“I like good guys and nice food/Happy weed and Camper shoes”—but her hedonism hides a warning: “I’m very protective over my space/I don’t let no one in unless I’m satisfied they’re good and humble.” The restrained drum programming and sleek synths on “Running in Waves” frame a simple self-affirmation: “There’s no one else right here/I believe it’s me and me and me and me right here.” On “Sacrifice,” she resists having to give up anything for love; the premise is similar to the Weeknd’s song of the same name, but Riley’s version is more emotionally cutting, backed by humming microwave synths and withering strings that phase into a singular, aching harmony.
The most intimate tracks sound like they were recorded in Riley’s bedroom. On “Desire,” over a clean-lined electro groove and sparkling electric piano, she ventures, “I should stay here for the moment/Shouldn’t run away to be lonesome.” She works through her feelings for an ex on “Delusion,” delivering a confident kiss-off over a muted breakbeat and glowing chords. Riley’s vocals frequently have the intensity of a late-night session recorded while trying hard not to wake the neighbors, yet her lyrics are defiantly self-centered—in a good way. “I’m not denying my wants this time,” she sings on “Jealousy,” a lithe R&B jam; “I wanna see the world, or what’s left of it.”
That forthrightness is a big part of the charm of Running in Waves. Despite the softness of her voice and the undercurrent of self-doubt, Riley is determined to carve out her place, no matter whether she’s singing over jungle breaks or the gentlest soul. As she sings on “Acceptance,” “I trusted my intuition/Hasn’t failed me yet/That is the thing that keeps me winning/So I’m gonna keep on moving.” | 2022-09-27T00:01:00.000-04:00 | 2022-09-27T00:01:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | PLZ Make It Ruins | September 27, 2022 | 7.4 | 0ca5d572-6ccb-4150-affb-2cb7e3dd34ff | Nathan Evans | https://pitchfork.com/staff/nathan-evans/ | |
The Philadelphia band Hop Along's energy comes from punk but their style is indebted to the romantic, middle-American indie of Bright Eyes and Rilo Kiley. Singer Francis Quinlan is a sharp writer who understands the poetry of deflection, and her songs feel like a series of false floors that open to bigger and bigger rooms. | The Philadelphia band Hop Along's energy comes from punk but their style is indebted to the romantic, middle-American indie of Bright Eyes and Rilo Kiley. Singer Francis Quinlan is a sharp writer who understands the poetry of deflection, and her songs feel like a series of false floors that open to bigger and bigger rooms. | Hop Along: Painted Shut | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/20398-painted-shut/ | Painted Shut | The songs on the second album by the Philadelphia band Hop Along seem to have come whirling out of a fairytale, visceral but ornate, outside reality but still scarred by it. Their energy comes from punk but their style comes from somewhere older and more obscure—a Victorian attic, maybe, or the kind of basement where the band’s singer Frances Quinlan got turned onto punk in the first place.
This was ten years ago or so. Quinlan had just graduated from high school and was touring around with a folk record influenced by playful, sharp-witted writers like Joanna Newsom and Kimya Dawson. The record, Freshman Year, felt cute and warm but took dark turns into the nightmare logic of children—one song, called "Bruno Is Orange", is sung from the perspective of a girl who fears that the government is going to put her friend in jail because the two of them kissed.
Eventually, Quinlan formed a band with her brother Mark and a bassist named Tyler Long and assumed a sound that filtered Quinlan’s storytelling through the rough, emotionally unguarded approach of bands like Rilo Kiley or Bright Eyes—bands who turned diary entries into anthems and vulnerability into a shuddering kind of power. Their first album, 2012’s Get Disowned, is a messy world where people stomp on old floorboards for percussion and saw violins like they were made of something stronger than wood. Everything is governed by Quinlan, who sings in the wild voice of someone casting out demons (or having the demon cast out of them). Its second song, "Tibetan Pop Stars", should be etched in titanium and shot into outer space for safekeeping.
Painted Shut is cleaner but just as purposeful. The album was produced by John Agnello, who has also worked with Kurt Vile, Dinosaur Jr., Sonic Youth and the Hold Steady—bands who play full-blooded classic rock with an idiosyncratic slant. (Quinlan once ended an interview by thanking Neil Young and the nature documentarian David Attenborough, both of whom have fascinated stoners and gentlefolk alike for decades.) For as bullish and dramatic as the music seems, the songs here often escalate for several minutes before making a point you think they’ve already made, like a series of false floors that open to bigger and bigger rooms.
Quinlan is a sharp writer who understands the poetry of deflection, of putting herself to the side of the drama instead of in the middle. "Powerful Man" tells the story of a parent hitting their child from the perspective of a teenage bystander: "Your dad told you not to look at me/ Down came the fists hard upon your head," she sings, no special inflection. "I was the only other adult around/ I was the only other adult around." What might’ve been just another routine tragedy becomes an exploration of guilt and responsibility. After all, Quinlan can do something about the situation but the kid can’t.
Painted Shut is being released on Saddle Creek, a label built on the kind of romantic, middle-American indie that made Hop Along possible in the first place—music more indebted to the 1970s than the 1980s, more to the earnest mythologizing of folk than the grandstanding of rock, more to the fantasias of Edward Gorey and e.e. cummings than to the flash of the city; music for rickety houses in college towns and the lonelyhearts who collect in their corners like dust and give each other stick-and-pokes. I’d say it all seems old-fashioned but it has been this way for about 25 years and seems part of a longer continuum all the time, so who knows.
My favorite song here is a dusky, countryish ballad called “Horseshoe Crabs”. “Hey did you hear me, mom? Baby’s headed home,” Quinlan sings. “Against your wishes I went into the woods alone.” She goes on to tell us about concrete things: A pellet gun, a broken nose, a Jackson C. Frank song played for a college kid on his nylon-string guitar. Nothing seems to mean much alone but it accrues a kind of magical importance, a collection of almosts-but-not-quites. Heartbreak here isn't an abstraction but an event, one in which something falls on the ground and breaks and nobody seems to have the wherewithal to put it back together. As for the Jackson C. Frank song, Quinlan barely makes it through, but like all the failures documented on Painted Shut she still manages to sound triumphant singing about it. | 2015-05-04T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2015-05-04T02:00:01.000-04:00 | Rock | Saddle Creek | May 4, 2015 | 7.9 | 0ca84401-b9d6-4963-8cb3-97ccfdd2c32f | Mike Powell | https://pitchfork.com/staff/mike-powell/ | null |
The Chicago footwork producer dials into a captivating, stripped-back style that sets tightly wound rhythms against ominous open space. | The Chicago footwork producer dials into a captivating, stripped-back style that sets tightly wound rhythms against ominous open space. | DJ Manny: Hypnotized | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/dj-manny-hypnotized/ | Hypnotized | Of all the footwork stalwarts to grace the roster of Chicago’s legendary Teklife label, DJ Manny might be the most enigmatic. While his most prominent tracks flip R&B samples and gentle chords into wistful delirium, a glance at his Bandcamp page reveals that he can’t be so easily pinned down. Booming riffs on regional club styles, house, and acid techno sit comfortably next to dozens of footwork EPs and compilations that run from swaggering, battle-ready cuts to moody patchwork swirls. It’s all released at a pace that implies a maniacal efficiency. Hypnotized, his newest album on Planet Mu, is a skeletal, tensile construction that casts its splintering energy conduits in jagged relief.
DJ Manny called 2021’s Signals in My Head an “R&B love type of album,” a blushing, infatuated romp inspired by his relationship with fellow DJ and producer SUCIA!. Hypnotized doesn’t have such an overt theme, asserting its bleak, anxious interiority through stripped-back composition. Manny has never shied away from minimalism—his beats might rattle just one or two drum samples around the traditional syncopated bassline. Hypnotized refines that approach into something approaching outright menace. Tracks linger on gaps and empty spaces, emphasizing silence. “I Can Luv U” opens with the dead ring of MIDI keys, fading into cold, frictionless air, before ramping into an assault of jittery woodblock tones doubled by a buzzing synth lead. “Overnight Flight”’s frosty pad enters and cuts away without warning, weaving through thick, distorted kicks that engulf skittering hi-hats and hurried arpeggiations in their muddy wake. If Signals, flush with feeling and excitement, represented the honeymoon phase, then Hypnotized represents everything after: the chaotic, indifferent highs and lows.
In the album’s most intoxicating moments, DJ Manny abandons the standard footwork playbook to explore new permutations of his core sound. “Lost in Da Jungle” is a breezy atmospheric jungle track that wouldn’t feel out of place in an LTJ Bukem set, splattering detuned halogen chords against a curtain of gently chopped breakbeats. This shift in style is played so straight that it’s almost agonizing, inviting listeners to consider the points of contact and divergence between the genres. “Opera,” while more standard in structure, might be even stranger, setting the haunting, messianic wails of an opera diva beside percussion and spiraling melodies that ascend without resolution.
The conversation around DJ Manny has long focused on youth, prodigiousness, and extraordinary talent. This is an artist who’s been contributing to the scene since he was in middle school, first as a dancer, then as a producer after he picked up a copy of Fruity Loops at 14. Footwork pioneer DJ Rashad, one of Manny’s mentors, once said that “as far as our crew goes, Manny is the future for us.” Hypnotized proves Rashad’s forecast: This isn’t merely a glimpse of the future, but a toolkit for its assembly. | 2023-11-30T00:01:00.000-05:00 | 2023-11-30T00:01:00.000-05:00 | Electronic | Planet Mu | November 30, 2023 | 7.6 | 0ca86738-60bc-45fb-a6ff-d1b455aa19bd | Maxie Younger | https://pitchfork.com/staff/maxie-younger/ | |
On the first Dedication mixtape installment in four years, Lil Wayne and DJ Drama show some of their former spark, but the tape does little to course-correct Wayne’s spiraling career trajectory. | On the first Dedication mixtape installment in four years, Lil Wayne and DJ Drama show some of their former spark, but the tape does little to course-correct Wayne’s spiraling career trajectory. | Lil Wayne: Dedication 6 | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/lil-wayne-dedication-6/ | Dedication 6 | The earliest installments in the Dedication mixtape series have a special place in internet mixtape mythology. The first was a prototype, the second is among the greatest mixtapes of all time, and each one since has helped to cement Wayne’s legacy as an imaginative and unstoppable rap force. Few rappers have made mixtapes more essential to their reputations and discographies, and these not only defined an era but helped to rewrite the rulebook on how to become a superstar in a digital age. (No wonder Chance the Rapper often cites the New Orleans legend as his “biggest inspiration.”)
The tapes revealed a prolific artist at the peak of his powers paired with a DJ that knew how to edit him. “Weezy and Dram’—We are the Mixtape Blueprint,” Drama shouts in the opening seconds of Dedication 6, reminding listeners of their pedigree. Dedication mixtapes are always constructed in the same way: furious, back-to-back one-liners rapped over the beats of the moment—in this case Lil Uzi Vert’s “XO Tour Llif3,” 21 Savage’s “Bank Account,” JAY-Z’s “The Story of O.J.,” Kendrick Lamar’s “DNA.,” and more—a rap gauntlet designed to challenge him and measure his raps against those of his most popular peers. In his prime, Lil Wayne would completely reclaim a beat as his own and there was a sense of ease to the process, like elaborate thoughts were just pouring out of him as though he could go on forever.
The first installment in four years, Dedication 6 is a calculated return to a recognizable brand during the most tumultuous period in Wayne’s storied, two-decade career, both artistically and financially. In this time of turmoil, he returns to the well, mostly rapping about Wraiths, jump-offs, and codeine as a numbing agent. The process seems less like it could go on forever and more like it’s merely running on a loop. Wayne got a lot of mileage out of his raps and isn’t all out of tricks just yet, but he’s slowing. “I been walkin’ on this fuckin’ water for a long time,” he raps on the highlight “XO Tour Life,” pointing to a decade of otherworldly performances. Even he seems to recognize the pace is unsustainable. This is a different Wayne than the one who seemed to unspool endless, enchanting yarns, who had a panoramic understanding of both pop culture and street culture. This Dedication does little to course-correct Lil Wayne’s spiraling career trajectory.
Wayne’s promising run of 2016 features—from Solange’s “Mad” to Chance’s “No Problem”—showed he was still capable. His rapping was less intuitive and his non sequiturs could be grating, but he still has the same instincts. Sometimes muscle memory kicks in and he delivers a devastating string of bars, something as vivid as, “This is that codeine overkill/My mud colder than Soldier Field,” or a new angle like, “You never been in jail, I never been in a Corolla/Then I roll a blunt ‘bout as thick as a Samoan.” But for every punch as delightfully unorthodox as “Boyz 2 Menace”’s “Kush loud as Fred screamin’ ‘Wilma!’ nigga,” there are a handful that are too easy to anticipate or that just don’t connect.
Spontaneity used to be a driving force in Wayne’s world, but the punchlines on Dedication 6 are mechanical and the ideas within are rudimentary or sometimes incomplete. He uncorks some of the most eyebrow-raising conceits on nearly the entire first verse of “Fly Away”—performed over Kendrick’s “DNA.”—as a play on acronyms and letters, fumbling basic premises: Easy (Eazy) like NWA, treating beef like USDA, beating foes up like MMA or getting felt up like TSA. The set-up telegraphs the punch. There are many couplets as stale and stupid as “I got two keys of that Bieber/Call ‘em Justin and Justina.” The only real surprise is that his embarrassing raps can still find new, unexplored levels of embarrassment.
Wayne was once the master of the “so clever it’s hard to believe no one has rapped it before” bar, and there are still some of those mixed in (“Bullet showers lead to bloodbaths,” or, “Treatin’ medication scrips like some Revelation scripts”). But there’s a thin line between the eureka moment of perfectly articulating a concise turn of phrase and just artlessly heaving jokes against a wall. Wayne gets in trouble attempting to connect every idea that pops into his head in this way; when every bar has to be a clever quip, you’re bound to mass-produce clunkers. He ends up with reaches like, “I rob his ass like Robin Givens,” and corny parallels like, “My trashiest hoes clean as fuck.” No song is without several of these bloopers, most songs are inundated by them, and while the tape is more or less a Christmas Day gift for fans, these sequences shouldn’t constantly derail the momentum, especially when the Wayne mixtape blueprint has always been about fluidity and his breathtaking, death-defying stream-of-consciousness.
The raps themselves are hit or miss, but Lil Wayne is still rapping like a man seeking freedom on Dedication 6, fighting to reestablish a dialogue with listeners and to escape from label purgatory. (The mixtape was released exclusively on DatPiff and withheld from streaming, likely because of Wayne’s ongoing battle with Cash Money over his right to make money off his music without the label.) Given all he’s been through and all he’s done, it’s hard not to root for him, and the verses do track better here than on recent projects. He’s locked in on “New Freezer,” “My Dawgs” and “Blackin Out,” where whiny flows either explode into shrieks or dissolve into mumbles. The main problem is simply this: He’s run out of interesting ways to say he’s drugged up and horny. The same patented mixtape formula that made him a star and luminary exposes the limitations of a now one-dimensional method that's wearing thin. | 2018-01-04T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2018-01-04T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rap | Young Money Entertainment | January 4, 2018 | 5.8 | 0cad2e51-ba21-4e6e-bdcd-eb7fe8e5ceea | Sheldon Pearce | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sheldon-pearce/ | |
The Vancouver punk band's fast, threatening 19-minute sophomore record is compulsively listenable due in no small part to vocalist Mish Way's melodic but intimidating approach. | The Vancouver punk band's fast, threatening 19-minute sophomore record is compulsively listenable due in no small part to vocalist Mish Way's melodic but intimidating approach. | White Lung: Sorry | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/16897-sorry/ | Sorry | If you're familiar with the Vancouver four-piece White Lung, it's fair to assume you're a punk in the traditional sense. And that's because over the past six years White Lung have functioned in a distinctly underground and subversive mode. They've trekked Canada and the States on DIY tours through venues so small I inadvertently knocked into a mic stand when I saw them last month, in the stage-less, graffiti-strewn backroom of a dingy Brooklyn tavern. And their fast and frightening 19-minute sophomore record, Sorry, was out earlier this year on the small, hardcore-oriented Canadian label Deranged, which also released some of the first material from a similarly pummeling group, Fucked Up.
But despite White Lung's threatening devotion to the more venomous corners of rapid-fire punk, Sorry is compulsively listenable due in no small part to singer Mish Way's successful pinning of a sweet spot between snarled yells, curled syllables, and melodic but equally intimidating, tobacco-tattered verse. The band's template recalls the earliest recordings by Hole, Babes in Toyland, or L7-- Way is not shy about her affinity for Courtney Love-- but compressed and sped-up to mimic the motions of classic 1980s hardcore. The latter is rooted mostly in the thoroughly relentless, rocket-speed drumming of Anne-Marie Vassiliou through the record's every track, which seems to know only one method of shifting tempo ("faster"). If those aforementioned riot grrrl references sound superficial, consider Way's own description of her band's sound: "like the feeling you get when you pee on the prego stick and it shows you a plus sign."
Way's most compelling moments on Sorry are those in which she's particularly hellish, strong, and lyrically bold. "Wipe that look from your face/ I'll drop you back from where you came," she screams within the first 40 seconds of opener "Take the Mirror", over guitarist Kenneth Williams' subtle but noise-laden post-punk riffage. That fury returns on the hooky "Glue", where Way declares "You're a dead horse riding/ I'm out for you." These moments seem designed for thrashing pit-level shout-alongs, as does the cautionary chorus on "Bag". Elsewhere Way muses bloody and visceral lines that hone on the body, like "Bunny", where she ferociously sings "I'll scrub your liver clean until I die," or "Bad Way", in which she melodically describes a collapsing face and snapping veins over some of the record's most scratched, anxious fretwork.
Sorry has hardly got a distracted moment, but "Thick Lip" stands out as the band's most abrasive, collective assault. It functions like a sonic declaration of war, one that comes into focus as Way's lyrics acknowledge "a pretty young girl" in the back of your mind: "We don't have real heads/ Instead we got legs," she shouts, setting off a tirade of lines that seem to hint at topical criticisms of backwards beauty standards. "I know your big secret/ It's caked on your face," Way wages, and then the killer: "I know that you're better/ Than most of this world/ But your thick dumb lips/ Tell a real dumb truth." Interpret that one as you wish. Way pierces the song with a clear, perpetual shriek-- "WHAT DID HE SAY?"-- that feels like one of her definitive moments. Not every girl is a riot grrrl, but here Way quite undeniably carries a torch for feminist punk heroes of decades past while sounding entirely present.
And so add White Lung to the ever-widening pool of contemporary bands drawing from punk and hardcore but staking their own territory: Iceage, the Men, and Cloud Nothings, for example*.* They might work off old reference points, but White Lung are architects of a raw sound that feels novel and ideal in 2012: inventive, precise guitar textures, palatable pop hooks, and terrifying speed. Recently, Way, who is also a writer, mused on her place in the underground punk scene: "The common understanding [is] that being in a band is not a viable career option," she wrote. "We'll celebrate breaking even after every [self-booked] tour... and that's totally okay with me." Time will tell if that will remain the case for White Lung. For now Sorry is their loudest statement yet. | 2012-07-30T02:00:03.000-04:00 | 2012-07-30T02:00:03.000-04:00 | Rock | Deranged | July 30, 2012 | 8 | 0caf21f6-9ca5-4dad-be04-e187c441c730 | Jenn Pelly | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jenn-pelly/ | null |
Released just before eventual U.S. gamechanger "I Want to Hold Your Hand", this quickie sequel doesn't match its predecessor but doesn't cheat fans either. | Released just before eventual U.S. gamechanger "I Want to Hold Your Hand", this quickie sequel doesn't match its predecessor but doesn't cheat fans either. | The Beatles: With the Beatles | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/13421-with-the-beatles/ | With the Beatles | Would that today's PRs had the honesty of Beatles pressman Tony Barrow. On the original sleevenotes for With the Beatles he cheerfully admits that the group were following the formula of Please Please Me, going so far as to make several track-by-track comparisons. "[Paul McCartney] recalls the numerous Cavern Club occasions when this item ['Money'] brought forth the same type of overwhelming response given to 'Twist and Shout'."
Barrow's notes are direct and descriptive-- crediting each R&B find, noting which tracks were live favorites and who played what. They're an intriguing glimpse of how the band related to its audience in this first shock of pop success: as curious, educated listeners, not the blind screamers of Beatlemania legend. By this point, though, the Beatles were kings of Britain with the world about to follow. Their success was already game-changing: The band who would go on to invent the concept album invented the boy band first. The cheek, the gang mentality, the picking favorites-- all this would be formularized by later svengalis but emerged initially out of Beatle fandom.
So With the Beatles is simultaneously a quickly turned-around cash-in and a record of real generosity and integrity. And if the structure of the album is pretty similar to Please Please Me, the extra studio time is already starting to tell. On McCartney's romantic spotlight, showtune "Till There Was You", producer George Martin builds a wholly convincing soft-focus soundworld around Ringo Starr's bongos. The group harmonies on tracks like their rumbustious "Please Mr. Postman" are even more gorgeously thick. The way the drums rumble in on "Roll Over Beethoven" is a moment of simple joy.
And those are just the covers. With the Beatles starts with aggressive confidence, "It Won't Be Long" taking the "yeah yeah" chants that were the group's early calling card and turning them into missiles. We're back, it says, and it's one of their most thrilling songs. On "All My Loving" the guitars bubble and tumble and the band finds a new way to marry prettiness and drive. "I Wanna Be Your Man"-- Ringo's best early vocal-- has a wolfish, hustling urgency. Not everything the band tries, as writers or interpreters, comes off: draggy girl group revival "Devil in Her Heart" is an obscurity too far, and George Harrison wins a first songwriting credit for the Shadows-esque "Don't Bother Me", but it doesn't get much spark until the guitar solo.
As for "Money", well, there simply is no second "Twist and Shout" in the catalogue, but neither was there any shame in the Beatles trying. And it has its own thrills to offer: Less demonic and frenetic than that previous album-closer but by some way the heaviest thing they'd yet recorded, a quality the remaster brings fully out. Ringo's booming drums, John Lennon's sneer, and the others' banshee backing vocals all create an air of menace, repressed violence: the black leather and Bierkeller vibe of the band's 1961 proving grounds.
It's a superb way to end an album that doesn't quite flow as well as Please Please Me, but never cheats the fans either. A week after its release the band would drop "I Want to Hold Your Hand" and rewrite the entertainment pecking order: For now they were living up to high expectations.
[Note: Click here for an overview of the 2009 Beatles reissues, including discussion of the packaging and sound quality.] | 2009-09-08T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2009-09-08T02:00:01.000-04:00 | Rock | EMI | September 8, 2009 | 8.8 | 0cafecc8-0e64-4f3c-bb9c-09a71b337f0f | Tom Ewing | https://pitchfork.com/staff/tom-ewing/ | null |
With their dusky, languid jazz-rap, the Norwegian duo stakes its own territory in hip-hop’s ever-expanding diaspora. | With their dusky, languid jazz-rap, the Norwegian duo stakes its own territory in hip-hop’s ever-expanding diaspora. | Ol’ Burger Beats / Vuyo: Dialogue. | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/ol-burger-beats-vuyo-dialogue/ | Dialogue. | During the SP-1200’s heyday, jazz samples reigned supreme. Introduced in 1987, the drum machine’s capacity to loop extended, high-fidelity instrumental samples sparked a revolution among hip-hop composers, its burly drums and warm basslines defining an era in rap production. When U.S. copyright law caught up—making the dense layering of Reachin’ and Mecca and the Soul Brother a pricy, if not legally dubious, method—the free-flowing jazz-rap style found a home overseas, where producers continued to mine record crates for horn solos and score their own interpolations. The French rapper MC Solaar, a veteran of Guru’s Jazzmatazz series, found international stardom with an acid-fusion sound; to the envy of their Stateside contemporaries, the British production team Us3 was given run of the Blue Note catalog for 1993’s Hand on the Torch and 1997’s Broadway & 52nd.
To a jaundiced eye, much of hip-hop history can be distilled to these cycles of technological innovation stymied by punitive enforcement: the sampling wars, the file-sharing wars, the streaming wars, the hip-hop police. As European acts eagerly seized the jazz-rap baton, they were often frustrated by the self-referential intricacies of a medium blended from two deeply American traditions. Late-’00s entries by Dela, Funky DL, and Jazz Liberatorz wistfully evoked early-’90s sounds but whiffed on key details, their digitized percussion lacking the SP’s smoky flavor, their earnest rhymes begging for a dose of Guru or C.L. Smooth’s hard-nosed pragmatism. While the Norwegian duo Vuyo and Ol’ Burger Beats occupies the same lineage, mining dusty jazz breaks for their source material, their stylistic initiative and subject matter ensure that their music isn’t entirely backward-looking. Their new full-length Dialogue. stakes its own territory among hip-hop’s ever-expanding diaspora.
Dialogue.’s singularity owes largely to Vuyo himself, a Zimbabwe-born rapper who rhymes in a bemused purr. His relaxed delivery is emphasized by Burger Beats’ shrewd engineering: the vocal delay lends the effect of a staticky landline connection. The instrumentals also have a lo-fi affect, with a cozy vinyl sizzle evident across most of the samples. Rather than overlaying synthetic or filtered basslines, Burger Beats loops stand-up bass chords, rimshots and cymbals left intact, and punches in horns for the choruses. “Dusty Grooves” and “88 Keys” are built around hypnotic guitar blends, Vuyo shifting seamlessly between a discursive drawl, double-time delivery, and languid hooks. A trumpet solo punctuates the first instrumental break on “Schengen Visa”; during the second verse, a flute pipes in with the same grace-noted melody. The songs flow into one another, each nestled within a viscous 40 bpm range.
The whole affair feels like an equatorial vacation, which is to say that Dialogue might have gotten by on ambiance alone—but Vuyo’s inquisitive writing style rewards engaged listening. His couplets eschew narrative structure, but his rich allusions convey autobiographical snatches and diasporic portraits. On “Summer of George,” Vuyo warily scrutinizes identity politics and woke corporatism: “I’m down with the cause brother, Wakanda forever/Put hot sauce on all courses, they makin’ them better/I’ve seen all of Fresh Prince, I’ve listened to rap/I understood early that cheddar means stacks.”
A Jay-Z-quoting pop-culture junkie with intimate knowledge of colonial legacies, he brings a flippant perspective to the culture wars du jour, approaching hip-hop as an outsider without any compulsion to ingratiate himself. The album’s nominal theme is tied together by a series of recorded voicemails from Vuyo’s sister, who offers advice on repairing a rift with their father, a former South African revolutionary. What goes unsaid in the one-sided exchange is the generational gap between Vuyo and his father: What could a biracial, Seinfeld-obsessed, smartphone-tethered millennial possibly have in common with an anti-apartheid activist?
The answer is more than you might expect. Vuyo spent parts of his childhood in Zimbabwe, South Africa, Zambia, and Norway, and at its best, Dialogue.’s diasporic elements make for a hazy, secret-history insularity reminiscent of a Mach-Hommy tape. (The chorus of “Mahershala Ali” threads together scratched vocals from Nas and Big L, which sound like transmissions from another planet.) But his distinctive slang and inflection frame more universal commentary. On “Conflict,” the most overtly political track, Vuyo recalls, “I told my ma, I don’t wanna go back/ ‘Cause when the bomb go off, they assume that he’s black.” That these scenes arrive without context doesn’t really matter; they might as easily be set in Los Angeles as in Lusaka. At times, the duo’s eccentricity feels almost aloof to the wider world, unabashed as they are in their idealism and quirky nostalgia. But in the sense that all hip-hop exists in conversation with ugly American history, Dialogue. is more than up to the task.
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-02-24T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2021-02-24T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rap | Jakarta | February 24, 2021 | 7.3 | 0cb44160-a02f-42e5-8088-aba17b3aaf25 | Pete Tosiello | https://pitchfork.com/staff/pete-tosiello/ | |
Former Prof Murder and Don Cab guys continue to impress with tropical synth-pop that sounds more like Tough Alliance and AnCo than their former acts. | Former Prof Murder and Don Cab guys continue to impress with tropical synth-pop that sounds more like Tough Alliance and AnCo than their former acts. | Tanlines: Settings EP | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/14031-settings-ep/ | Settings EP | Usually when experienced musicians get together to start a new group, traces of their past work can't help but creep back into their songs. But that's not the case with Tanlines, the duo of Jesse Cohen and Eric Emm, who arrive at their new project with pretty diverse backgrounds. Cohen comes from the dance-y post-punk act Professor Murder while Emm spent time in dissonant math-rock bands Don Caballero and Storm & Stress, and interestingly Tanlines don't really sound like any of those groups. What they make now is tropical synth-pop that's more indebted to the Tough Alliance and, to some degree, MPP-era Animal Collective.
Tanlines are more production team than proper band and, not unlike Barcelona electro-poppers Delorean, their style is inspired as much by club music as indie rock. Straddling the line between dance and pop but hewing more towards the latter, Tanlines put together African percussion, swirling guitars, and dancefloor elements inside catchy, effervescent tracks. Their Settings EP comes on the heels of some early singles and remixes for groups such as Telepathe and finds the duo honing in on a fuller, more developed sound.
The record is split evenly between instrumental cuts and vocal tracks, and Tanlines do well with both. The appeal of these songs is primarily sonic (rich, surging arrangements and big clean hooks), so they don't all need words, but when Cohen and Emm do weave in lyrical content, it adds intrigue. The best example is standout "Real Life", where Emm gets wistful over knocking percussion and heaving, squeaky synths. "You might think I'm still that way, it's only natural/ It was a past-life thing, it wasn't anything at all," he laments. If you've ever bumped into an ex who dumped you for doing something stupid, you know exactly what he's talking about.
Tanlines have a strong pop sensibility and a good working knowledge of global club sounds, and it's this balance that makes Settings an enjoyable listen. They're said to have an affinity for Depeche Mode (not so subtly hinted at here on "Policy of Trust"), and while that may seem strange with music this sunny, you can hear pretty clearly in Tanlines' tracks their appreciation for hook-heavy dance-pop of all kinds. Not everything on the EP works as well as "Real Life" (they lose me a bit on the calypso and hip-hop informed "Bees"), but mostly Settings functions as a punchy introduction to what these guys do well. | 2010-03-19T02:00:02.000-04:00 | 2010-03-19T02:00:02.000-04:00 | Electronic | True Panther | March 19, 2010 | 7.6 | 0cb444bf-906b-4bbc-8df9-335950c43b4e | Joe Colly | https://pitchfork.com/staff/joe-colly/ | null |
Besides being a killer garage rock album*, Nonagon Infinity *is constructed as an infinite loop, meaning its final notes connect perfectly with the album’s opening. | Besides being a killer garage rock album*, Nonagon Infinity *is constructed as an infinite loop, meaning its final notes connect perfectly with the album’s opening. | King Gizzard & the Lizard Wizard: Nonagon Infinity | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21853-nonagon-infinity/ | Nonagon Infinity | Since the advent of digital music, all media players have been outfitted with the Repeat function—whether it’s a button on a traditional CD player, or those circular lines you click on in your iTunes app. I’m willing to bet no one has ever activated this feature on purpose, yet it always seems to mysteriously switch itself on. The effect is always jarring, the contemplative post-listen pause rudely interrupted by an abrupt jump back to the opening track. It’s the ultimate useless proof-of-concept innovation, something that exists simply because it can. But as it turns out, whichever technicians invented this functionality were onto something—because they were effectively preparing us for the advent of King Gizzard & the Lizard Wizard’s Nonagon Infinity.
Over the course of eight wildly divergent albums, the Melbourne psych-rock septet have fed the past 50 years of rock history through a paper shredder and seamlessly taped the strands back together in intriguing new patterns, even leaving in the parts (bluesy harmonica slobber, flute solos, jazz odysseys) that more cool-conscious retro-rock revivalists would excise. And through experimenting with myriad sounds, they’ve also started experimenting with album formats. Last year’s Quarters! presented four prog-pop suites each clocking at exactly 10 minutes and 10 seconds. But Nonagon Infinity ups the high-concept ante to absurd extremes. While pieced together from discretely recorded, separately titled songs, the record is mixed to feel like a continuous 41-minute live performance, complete with recurring musical and lyrical passages. And it’s the first album in history to give you a legitimate, practical reason to hit that Repeat button—*Nonagon Infinity *is constructed as an infinite loop, meaning its final notes connect perfectly with the album’s opening.
But independent of that gambit, *Nonagon Infinity *is the Gizzard’s most ballistic, berserker album to date, a merciless, atomic-bomb erasure of the pastoral terrain traversed by its flower-powered predecessor, Paper Mâché Dream Balloon. In their most hot-wired moments (see 2014’s I’m in Your Mind Fuzz), King Gizzard have earned copious comparisons to their former label patrons Thee Oh Sees, and here frontman Stu Mackenzie punctuates almost every chord change with an echo-drenched, John Dwyer-esque “wooo” like a dancehall selector pushing the air-horn button. But on Nonagon Infinity, they assume a more mechanistic precision and sinister, metallic force—all the better to reinforce the lyrics’ '70s sci-fi cartoon-show universe of robots, monsters, and hidden dimensions. Ironically, for an album that functions as a shrine to record-collector rock, *Nonagon Infinity *operates on the same principles as a club DJ set, weaving in and out of different melodic motifs while remaining locked (for the most part) into a propulsive, breakneck rhythm that sounds like Devo riffing on Hawkwind’s “Motorhead.”
When it’s running at peak velocity—which is like, 90 per cent of the time—*Nonagon Infinity *yields some of the most outrageous, exhilarating rock ‘n’ roll in recent memory, on par with modern psych-punk touchstones like Comets on Fire’s Blue Cathedral, Thee Oh Sees’ Carrion Crawler/The Dream and Ty Segall’s Slaughterhouse. It’s a preview of what our not-too-distant future of hyperloop travel will feel like—this is a record that requires protective seat belts, induces G-force ripples in your cheeks and drives fingernails into armrest upholstery. But the band’s gonzo attack never overpowers Mackenzie’s psych-pop accessibility, as he spits out a stream of fragmented hooks like a combusting jukebox of British Invasion singles going on the fritz. If anything, his melodic change-ups provide crucial orientation markers on this endless Autobahn of a record. The band also possess an innate sense of knowing just the right moment to switch things up, like with the loose Krautrock boogie that introduces “Mr. Beat," or the twinned Allman Brothers leads dropped into the “TV Eye”-style surge of "Evil Death Roll," or the Yes-worthy contoro-riffs that overtake “Invisible Face”. (That said, the incense-scented Santana jam that breaks out partway through the latter piece constitutes the record’s only forced detour.)
Ultimately, the question of how the band will reconcile the chugging, roadhouse-razing closer “Road Train” with the album’s motorik opening proves moot—in Nonagon Infinity’s final minute, the Gizzard effectively bring the former to a dead stop and then just quickly work themselves back up into the album’s familiar high-octane groove. At first, it feels like a bit of a cheat—a switcheroo the band could’ve conceivably dropped at any point in this piece, rather than a natural climax they’re working toward. But the instant Nonagon Infinity resets back to its blitzkrieged beginning, the gimmick’s greater purpose is revealed: this is the first album whose intro actually doubles as its crescendo. And *Nonagon Infinity *is overstuffed with so many stomach-tossing thrills that you’ll actually be jonesing to ride the roller-coaster all over again. | 2016-05-04T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-05-04T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | ATO | May 4, 2016 | 8 | 0cb73c73-3707-4848-97e3-25ffe7aac42f | Stuart Berman | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stuart-berman/ | null |
A solid serving of meat-and-potatoes rap, the duo’s first joint project thrives on a sense of comfort and familiarity more often than not. | A solid serving of meat-and-potatoes rap, the duo’s first joint project thrives on a sense of comfort and familiarity more often than not. | Apollo Brown / Stalley: Blacklight | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/apollo-brown-stalley-blacklight/ | Blacklight | Apollo Brown is nothing if not a hip-hop romantic. His fidelity for the grime and grit of rap’s second Golden Age is well-documented, but it goes beyond simply trying to recreate DJ Premier beats. Flourishes across his instrumental projects and over a dozen collaborative albums unearth the passion he puts into his art. Most of them begin and end with the sound of vinyl crackle, a simple but effective way of telegraphing the Detroit producer’s love for the warmth of analog. He recycles drums frequently and creates music using software that’s outdated but reliable. There’s a steady formula at work, but he’s teased interesting ideas from his pet sound for over a decade.
Brown’s work with Brooklyn rappers Skyzoo (2016’s The Easy Truth) and Joell Ortiz (2018’s Mona Lisa) slopes to the soulful bombast of late-20th-century New York hip-hop. On 2013’s The Brown Tape, he infamously retrofitted his drums and samples onto the acapellas from Ghostface Killah’s 2013 album Twelve Reasons to Die. Anchovies, his 2017 effort with Fresno spitter Planet Asia, indulges in the drumless loops popularized by Roc Marciano in the early 2010s. Just this year, he soundtracked an R&B album for the first time, Lovesick, with D.C. singer Raheem DeVaughn. Brown is a stalwart who’s developed a following by not overthinking the straightforward nature of his music, which makes Blacklight, his first full-length with Ohio rapper Stalley, a natural progression for both artists.
As a former Maybach Music Group signee who went independent in 2017 in search of greener pastures, Stalley understands the value of sticking to your guns. He embodies the kind of clever but restrained lifestyle raps that have fueled work by Curren$y and Dom Kennedy since the blog era, and he fits snugly within Brown’s velour atmosphere. “Left Maybach and got a Maybach with them curtains, fam,” he says with reserved pride on the title track. Stalley’s unfazed flows and Brown’s mid-tempo marches gel well musically, and their respective journeys through rap obscurity put them at the same eye level. Their convictions and dedication to craft give Blacklight its sharp perspective and amplify its position as a solid serving of meat-and-potatoes rap.
Meat-and-potatoes rap has enjoyed an extended moment in the sun with the rise of acts like Griselda and albums like Tyler, the Creator’s Call Me If You Get Lost. Brown and Stalley have favored these types of projects for years—no bells and whistles, just beats and rhymes—but Blacklight’s concept of illuminating things otherwise hidden slots neatly into an era of excess and introspection. Though a handful of bars skirt the line between thought-provoking and dad-joke corniness, Stalley’s earnestness and variety make the stumbles easy to ignore. He strides between legacy-building (“I used to stand at Western Union, now I’m signing checks”), coordinating designer outfits with his partner, and deconstructing street politics in the face of loss with dizzying ease. “Humble Wins” and “Lost Angels” are among the strongest examples of the duo’s chemistry, the strut of Brown’s handsome beats pushing Stalley to lay his thoughts bare.
A pair of guest verses from Skyzoo (“Love Me, Love Me Not”) and Joell Ortiz (“Bobby Bonilla”) offer a shift in perspective, but Brown and Stalley largely hold the project down by themselves. Their confidence gives Blacklight’s best songs a sense of weight that wanes a tad near the project’s end. The songs are too well-crafted and sincere to scan as failures, but there are fewer standouts as it moves past its first half. That’s an unfortunate drawback of being a workmanlike artist: every song is nothing less than good on its own, but missing the sweet spot on album length can make lesser songs like “Broad Spectrum” and “Stay Low” blend together. This isn’t a dealbreaker, but it’s worth noting the difference between a good 15-track album and a great 12-13 track album.
More often than not, Blacklight thrives on this sense of comfort and familiarity. Brown’s beats soothe as much as they shake and rattle, anchored by familiar sample choices and boosted by Stalley’s game-for-anything presence. Their commitment to fine-tuning hip-hop fundamentals has earned them each a loyal fanbase, including Power actor Omari Hardwick, who spits a mesmerizing poem on closing track “Omari’s Lament.” Blacklight isn’t an experiment like Brown’s Anchovies or a glossy fast-paced effort like Stalley’s Tell the Truth Shame the Devil series, but the duo plays to their strengths by meeting each other in the middle.
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-11-24T00:00:00.000-05:00 | 2021-11-24T00:00:00.000-05:00 | Rap | Mello Music Group | November 24, 2021 | 7.3 | 0cb8d638-8d21-4ce2-9983-dc89d124aeac | Dylan Green | https://pitchfork.com/staff/dylan-green/ | |
From Indian Lakes’ fourth LP is mood music for the hopeless romantic, overwhelmed by the desire to connect but pining for the confidence to make the first move. | From Indian Lakes’ fourth LP is mood music for the hopeless romantic, overwhelmed by the desire to connect but pining for the confidence to make the first move. | From Indian Lakes: Everything Feels Better Now | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22377-everything-feels-better-now/ | Everything Feels Better Now | Sometimes you just gotta go straight to the elevator pitch: what if the xx came up on American Football instead of Aaliyah? Though his post-production methods put him within the scope of downtempo, monastic R&B, Joey Vannucchi uses the compositional tools of twinkly, technical emo—clean guitar figures criss-crossed in askew time signatures, hopscotching drum rhythms, hushed vocals piecing together desires for someone always out of the frame. It’s hard to tell where the meticulous mood-setting of one format begins and the other ends, but you’ve got 68 minutes on From Indian Lakes’ fourth LP to figure it out: this is Vannucchi’s sound and he doesn’t deviate much from it.
While “the first math rock make-out album” is certainly a novel concept, it’s no gimmick; the singular aesthetic here has been in development for the better part of a decade. The first biographical nugget often told of Vannucchi is that he grew up in isolation and without electricity on a 40-acre parcel of land near Yosemite National Park. There wasn’t much to do besides obsess over music and play drums in a church basement, so it makes sense that his first two self-recorded and self-released albums drew from formative listening staples like Radiohead, but also Death Cab for Cutie and quasi-Christian alternative acts like Copeland, As Tall as Lions, and Lydia that once filled the midsection on Bamboozle festival posters.
Vannucchi’s upbringing makes for a nice story, though From Indian Lakes’ trajectory should be quite familiar to rock fans this point: band from far outside a major media center, too introspective and ambitious to be pigeonholed in pop-punk, finds an audience alienated by both the juvenilia of Warped Tour and painful curation of cool that defined mainstream indie. This is basically how the emo revival happened, and by 2014’s Absent Sounds, From Indian Lakes had signed to Triple Crown, now the home of Into It. Over It., You Blew It!, Sorority Noise, and Foxing, bands representative of the current day’s more thoughtful and enlightened popular emo.
This trajectory has coincided with Vannucchi shearing off every conceivable marker of his alt-rock beginnings until there’s nothing left but the pretty stuff. The blushing fauna gracing the album cover has become a familiar sight in emo’s ongoing progressive, pastoral phase, but nothing has truly embodied humidified, aural verdancy like *Everything Feels Better Now. *Though Vannucchi’s arrangements are intricately crafted, every sound gets subjected to a unifying greenhouse effect, distorted guitars, vibraphones, panning effects and tremolo shudders all becoming soft, yielding textures drooping into each other.
If it’s dream-pop, the emphasis is exceedingly towards the former; though Vannucchi’s bashful, beatific hooks bring “Blank Tapes” and “Happy Machines” to tidal crests, nothing really peaks or crashes. The reverie is only broken up when Vannucchi tries to deliver a *message *and falls back on stock metaphors for the impotence of nostalgia (“Blank Tapes”), indignity of public performance (“It’s my soul you want and a cage for me”), inner demons (“The Monster”) and American dreams (“American Dreams”).
But if Vannucchi’s guileless lyricism can occasionally lapse into diaristic angst, it’s also responsible for the simple, lovelorn ache that defines Everything Feels Better Now and distances it from the burlier entrants in the scene’s soft parade, as well as the Bed, Bath and Body Works of Washed Out or Rhye which it superficially resembles at times. Vannucchi is unquestionably a mash note writer—“when you need to feel someone lying next to you, I can be the one” is a typical sentiment and one that would be cloying if the music didn’t back it up with such welcoming, plush ambience. “I think I’m ready to lose myself in your love,” Vannucchi coos. Fittingly, it takes him until the eleventh track to get to that point. It’s mood music for the hopeless romantic, overwhelmed by the desire to connect but pining for the confidence to make the first move. | 2016-10-24T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-10-24T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Triple Crown | October 24, 2016 | 7 | 0cbedfb9-89a9-49f9-8f8b-25f588d76174 | Ian Cohen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ian-cohen/ | null |
Subsets and Splits