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It's been ten years since Death From Above 1979 released their debut You're a Woman I'm a Machine, but this post-reunion second album sounds like it could've been recorded in the same year as that breakthrough debut. With The Physical World, Grainger and Keeler haven’t entirely scratched the itch they instigated a decade ago, but they’ve learned to live with the burn, and that’s the next best thing. | It's been ten years since Death From Above 1979 released their debut You're a Woman I'm a Machine, but this post-reunion second album sounds like it could've been recorded in the same year as that breakthrough debut. With The Physical World, Grainger and Keeler haven’t entirely scratched the itch they instigated a decade ago, but they’ve learned to live with the burn, and that’s the next best thing. | Death From Above 1979: The Physical World | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/19801-death-from-above-1979-the-physical-world/ | The Physical World | Desperately trying to scratch an itch you just can’t fucking get at: Ten years later, that’s still the overwhelming sensation that permeates You’re a Woman, I’m a Machine, the 2004 debut by Toronto’s Death From Above 1979. That lack of intimate connection and tactile resolution is echoed in the failed interface hinted at in the album’s title. DFA 1979 just couldn’t get no satisfaction—and when the band blew up in the mid '00s, they promptly imploded, only adding to that nagging tingle. Here was a duo gathering the shrapnel of so many scenes that exploded earlier in the decade—garage rock, stoner metal, dance punk—squeezing them into a tightly wound mass of fuzz and force, only to let it all slip through their fingers.
DFA 1979’s two halves, vocalist/drummer Sebastien Grainger and bassist/keyboardist Jesse F. Keeler, parted ways in 2006. Grainger kept sporadically busy as a singer/songwriter; Keeler moved his electro-slanted side-project MSTRKRFT to the front burner. Now, after an initial onstage reunion in 2011 that marked the mending of broken fences, they’ve delivered The Physical World. So much has changed since You’re a Woman, and so little, too: Julian Casablancas, Karen O, and Interpol are still around, and coincidentally, each of them has even made noise this very week. (It’s enough to make you wonder if they all secretly synced up with each other to enhance their retro-'00s brand synergy.) But it’s been a decade since Grainger and Keeler showed up to that particular party with 12-packs in hand, and they were a little late, arriving just as it was beginning to simmer down. Granted, they helped send it off with a bang; a last spurt of debauchery before everyone either hooks up or passes out, You’re a Woman raged like there was no tomorrow.
The Physical World—wiser and more wary than its predecessor—is that tomorrow, the one that was never supposed to come. It doesn't so much sound like You’re a Woman was 10 years ago as it does 10 months: “It’s the same old song, just a different tune,” Grainger rasps on “Right On, Frankenstein!”, an efficient yet spirited dance-punk procedural that wouldn’t have sounded out of place amid You’re a Woman rockers like “Turn It Out” and “Cold War”. The Physical World is built out of pieces of the band’s own past, but it hangs together beautifully, all sleek musculature and acrobatic riffs. There’s not as much scraping, lunging, or dive-bombing on the album as compared to You’re a Woman, although that doesn’t keep The Physical World’s title track from glitching and spazzing in a fugue of pseudo-metallic collapse: “Go bridge won/ Has strung out/ Build up/ Tear it down,” Grainger wails, resembling a cyborg caught in a robotic purgatory. “Oh no, not again/ I get the feeling this is never gonna end.” The song dissolves in a haze of wheezing keyboard, like some creaking, rickety, steampunk version of itself.
Solipsism and self-recycling aside, Grainger branches out into new territory, at least for DFA 1979: a conceptual arc, if not a narratively coherent one. "Virgins" and "White Is Red" hinge together like a great, two-part TV episode, full of lurid melodrama and teen-angst iconography; summer school, skating in pools, and innocence left in the backseat of a car all pop up in "Virgins", which pounds and writhes with Ted Nugent-meets-Josh Homme swagger. And while the similarly highway-themed "White Is Red" seems like a sequel of sorts—"Frankie was a heartbreaker, I didn’t know it at the start/ She was only 16 when she went and broke my heart," Grainger croons with all the grit of a natural-born balladeer, or at least Brandon Flowers with a better grasp of the Boss— it doesn’t overtax the link. These are loose associations, motifs that float around and occasionally complete each other, the type of subtlety that the Grainger of You’re a Woman wasn’t concerned with. Balling and brooding were his two settings, and he toggled them frantically, never seeming to find what he was looking for, so he's clearly spent the last 10 years doing some growing up.
In a recent interview Keeler did for Stereogum, he talks about his and Grainger's metamorphosis from hormone-pumping post-adolescents to grownups with families and, of all the crazy things, lives. “Back then we didn’t have any kind of life outside of the band,” he says, speaking of the DFA 1979's pre-breakup years. “The band was everything; it was literally all we had. Now we both have lives of our own outside of the music we make together. And that’s really important. Everyone needs to have a life.” Calling The Physical World a work of maturity would be selling the album, and maturity, short: “Cheap Talk” and “Government Trash” zoom like rockets and stomp like dinosaurs, full of snotty, boyish abandon, while “Trainwreck 1979” dabbles in mirror-gazing and mythologizing. The album is, above all, pragmatic—a more judicious application of the band’s mixed-use energy—but it doesn’t do so at the expense of soul.
The Physical World’s most gripping song, “Always On”, paints a dystopian scenario drawn from DFA 1979’s own experience as the objects of expectation as well as the downward spiral of music-industry boom-and-bust. Grainger sneers, “If we brought Kurt back to life/ There’s no way he would survive,” and he’s not only talking about the vicissitudes of the pop world that Kurt Cobain loved and hated, but also of the social-media membrane we’ve all become cocooned in. “Show me something new/ Something I can like,” he begs in singsong horror as he hops across a bed of sharpened hooks, unable to reconcile, consummate, or otherwise bridge the schism between what exists online and what can only be touched by skin. With The Physical World, Grainger and Keeler haven’t entirely scratched the itch they instigated a decade ago. But they’ve learned to live with the burn, and that’s the next best thing. | 2014-09-11T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2014-09-11T02:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Warner Bros. / Last Gang | September 11, 2014 | 7 | 0cbf0377-eb71-4b79-ae90-0c5e495df50b | Jason Heller | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jason-heller/ | null |
Cymbals Eat Guitars' third record is a sprawling, complex, and fascinating document of American indie rock. Marked by loss and indebted to New Jersey heroes the Wrens' own approach, LOSE fixates on small moments of startling lucidity and figures out where they fit into the bigger picture. | Cymbals Eat Guitars' third record is a sprawling, complex, and fascinating document of American indie rock. Marked by loss and indebted to New Jersey heroes the Wrens' own approach, LOSE fixates on small moments of startling lucidity and figures out where they fit into the bigger picture. | Cymbals Eat Guitars: LOSE | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/19723-cymbals-eat-guitars-lose/ | LOSE | “New Jersey ain’t the whole world.” These are clearly the words of someone who never called it "home". It may not be the whole world, but for many of its artists, it’s a universe, one where you can spend an entire career creating rewarding art. Real Estate, Titus Andronicus, and Lifetime are all considered quintessentially “suburban,” and they are nothing alike—and the same goes for Garden State and the movies of Todd Solondz. Bruce Springsteen and “The Sopranos” are revered for their realistic works of fiction, Bon Jovi and "Jersey Shore" less so for their fictional works of "reality"; a fine line exists between archetype and stereotype. Its economy and geography is every bit as contradictory and complex—New Jersey’s wealthiest pockets are stuffed with families fleeing New York City and Philadelphia, while its own metropolises are some of America’s most notoriously blighted. It’s named the Garden State for good reason, while its beaches are a punchline for pollution. The state represents American sprawl and dichotomy crammed into a manageable space—the perfect map for Cymbals Eat Guitars to project LOSE, a sprawling, complex, and fascinating document of American indie rock.
It’s a fitting occurrence, though still surprising. Most bands rep Jersey from the start; in 2009, Cymbals Eat Guitars briefly identified as an NYC band, though their music existed on MySpace and encompassed the Pacific Northwest, drawing heavily on Built to Spill and Modest Mouse. By 2011’s Lenses Alien, they settled in the pop culture void of Staten Island, while the album seemed to take place entirely within Joseph D’Agostino’s head. An often compelling record, D’Agostino has since admitted that it makes more sense if you’re high, but also that its unwieldy songs are almost impossible to play if you’ve had more than two beers.
So LOSE is a homecoming in multiple ways—D’Agostino looks back on his upbringing and New Jersey’s vast catalog of pop culture folklore while the band makes the occasional anthemic moments that elevated Why There Are Mountains the primary purpose of each song. The near-replication of its length and chord progression casts “Jackson” and a sequel to Mountains’ massive opener “...And the Hazy Sea.” However, where the latter exploded on impact and played only on the vertiginous disparity between its volcanic eruptions and minutes of calm, “Jackson” evenly and expertly delivers its peaks in a variety of ways —D’Agostino patiently works towards an arcing chorus worthy of its Elliott Smith influence, while a triumphant guitar solo emerges from the kind of post-rock blur that would typically signal the closure of a Cymbals Eat Guitars song. The riff from “Warning” adds a couple of sour, flatted notes to the jangly progression from “Shore Points,” which soundtracked a leisurely drive down the coast on Lenses Alien. In a thrilling sprint towards a brash chorus, “Warning” recklessly slams on the gas without checking the brakes.
Cymbals Eat Guitars aren’t the same band that made Why There Are Mountains. In fact, they’re an actual band now, rather than a cast of supporting players beholden to D'Agostino's ideas. The Lenses Alien lineup returns with a new drummer (Andrew Dole) and a new rhythmic drive; producer John Agnello lends presence and texture, rendering these topographic songs 3D, while the rhythm section acts as D’Agostino’s OnStar—he’s still free to wander wherever, yet there’s a framework and a destination. When he hits on a tangent, he’s given direction an ultimate resolution, so Cymbals Eat Guitars have the confidence to strike out to stranger territories. “Laramie” manages to span the lonesome crowded west and Muscle Shoals soul before levitating to an astral, pedal-stomping freakout. “Chambers” and “Lifenet” are slices of Staten Island living delivered as slick, heartland radio rock. It's all presented with unity rather than erratic dilettantism; "indie rock" is Cymbals Eat Guitars' domain and they cover its entirety.
And yet, the music is once again outdone by D’Agostino’s lyrics, deeply personal and relatable, referential without being academic, prone to poetic flight and realistic grounding. Lyric writing in rock music—or, really, any genre—rarely possesses the substance and depth displayed on LOSE. During an aborted drug deal in “Chambers”, Wu-Tang Clan get an offhand shout, and Shaolin’s finest would envy the spiced-out, scene-setting vividness given to “Warning”—“Pennants stiffen on the strip/ Wind is whipping through the tinsel fixed to the dealership/And you're looking mighty ghostly just like Bowie on Soul Train/ Wrapped in your sable.”
RZA would also approve of D’Agostino’s writing regimen, which uses a cornucopia of pharmaceuticals as a muse and meditation as a mental exercise. As a result, LOSE fixates on small moments of startling lucidity and figures out where they fit into the bigger picture. During bookends “Jackson” and “2 Hip Soul (Floyd’s Tomb)”, New Jersey’s more obscure, shameful race relations come to the fore—the former evokes a possibly apocryphal band of Native American outlaws during a meditation on the afterlife, while “2 Hip Soul” lends a redneck’s comeuppance a mythical quality high school rumors tend to acquire. A classmate falls face-first into a firepit at a kegger, returning with a load of pills and a compression sleeve under his John Deere hat and Carhartts, potentially karmic retribution for his hobby of carving swastikas into trees and clubbing ostriches with PVC piping at the local zoo.
During “Chambers”, D’Agostino recalls his parents buying him a dog, the subsequent passing of which served in a retrospect as a way “To learn about loss/ The slow education.” His insight captures a different and devastating lesson about death on the stunning power ballad “Child Bride”. D’Agostino’s tender acoustic fingerpicking only serves to make his confessional memories all the more shocking—“You were my best friend/ Until your dad slapped the living shit out of you.” Its title serves as cruel foreshadowing for someone whose path was set as a youth by circumstances beyond his control; an alcoholic mother instigates a sudden relocation, the friend sells off all his possessions, moves south and catches D’Agostino at a show in Orlando with a new girlfriend and a crack addiction. He offers a hit and D’Agostino refuses, because “My heart would explode,” either from the drugs or just from the stark realization of how he and his friend ended up in the same place. The final chorus soars, while D’Agostino lies crushed, realizing he’s been given nothing but opportunity and support—and here he is, wasting his 20s getting high in less unflattering ways.
Yet, D’Agostino thoroughly understands how he and countless others get to this point, and it’s explored in its entirety during LOSE’s thesis statement, “XR”. It’s the song that most explicitly references the death of Benjamin High, D’Agostino’s closest friend and musical collaborator, and the inspiration for the newly introspective and self-disclosing lyrics. The awful coincidence of his last name is used as a sobering double entendre during a beer-raising coda—“High is just a tingling behind my eyes/ Got no serotonin left.” Before he gets to that point, “XR” wraps up an entire adolescence of escape into drugs and rock ‘n roll within 2:30 of rabble-rousing, harmonica-huffing cow-punk. D’Agostino barks through a distorted microphone, “Here I am again at Ben’s MySpace grave,” and traces back to how, at first, drugs are used to accompany incredible, fleeting moments of youth. Then, they become a means of trying to get that feeling back, as a trip to the record store results in buying CDs for “ripping rails, not listening to.” And finally, it becomes a way to push through the numbness of being unable to generate a substitute—“Wanna wake up wanting to listen to records/ But those old feelings elude me.”
Those feelings are most closely associated with the Wrens throughout *LOSE—*D’Agostino and High take a road trip to Philly for a house show and their van-ride duet of “I Guess We’re Done” (“I’ll do the Kev and you can do the Charles”) is recalled on “Laramie”. Cymbals Eat Guitars owe a lot to that band—they described them as “our Beatles”, and Charles Bissell produced Why There Are Mountains. In some ways, Cymbals Eat Guitars got to live the experience the Wrens related on “This Boy is Exhausted” and “Boys, You Won’t”—playing to empty rooms with a complete lack of buzz, taking up deadening day jobs after having blown their college years. They also learned that if you make a record at the level of The Meadowlands, you can foster a fanbase willing to wait over a decade for new music. So even if D’Agostino’s lyrics are rife with death, depression and doubt, LOSE exudes earned resilience, of getting through shit and getting your shit together. Since it's more clear than ever that the Wrens—and Built to Spill and Modest Mouse—aren't currently going to provide those feelings that currently elude listeners, Cymbals Eat Guitars have realized the challenge facing them all along; the result makes the distinction between protege and peer nearly indistinguishable. | 2014-08-29T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2014-08-29T02:00:01.000-04:00 | Rock | Barsuk | August 29, 2014 | 8.2 | 0cc4aa9b-a611-4e92-ae8f-2842758bab93 | Ian Cohen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ian-cohen/ | null |
Each Sunday, Pitchfork takes an in-depth look at a significant album from the past, and any record not in our archives is eligible. Today, we explore Scarface’s deathly personal 1994 solo album. | Each Sunday, Pitchfork takes an in-depth look at a significant album from the past, and any record not in our archives is eligible. Today, we explore Scarface’s deathly personal 1994 solo album. | Scarface: The Diary | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/scarface-the-diary/ | The Diary | There is the fact of rivers—how when water falls, they can only hold so much of their kin close to their bodies before they open their arms and let the waters run free into somewhere, anywhere. The San Jacinto River in Houston is no different. On October 15th, 1994, a series of unique meteorological events joined hands before heading towards Houston, causing the largest rain event in the city’s history. On the west and east banks of the San Jacinto, the waters rose and spilled over. The city of Houston got almost a foot of water, which was mild compared to surrounding areas. Upper Cypress Creek, Spring Creek, and Lake Creek were all subject to endless rainfall, with the flood claiming 17 lives and shutting down Houston and surrounding cities for days. More rivers and creeks swelled, forcing people from their homes, or to the tops of buildings. Children went missing and others drowned.
For anyone who has been through a vicious cycle of weather, it is known that there is a calm directly after the storm, too. To talk about the calm which comes after a turbulent moment makes for a less romantic cliche. The calm after the storm is the one that is eerie. There is ruin, and a cloud of silence—more about a confirmation of what has happened than a signaling of what is coming. It’s the difference between someone might not survive this and there are people to be buried now.
On October 18th, as the rains persisted but weakened, Scarface released his third album, The Diary, into a world where no one in his home city could safely get to the store and hold it in their hands.
If you are going to be a writer who writes about death, I only ask that you honor the fullness of loss and the space left by loss. Rather, that you cut through the mess and define death not only by the person but by the people who perhaps loved that person and by the people who sit in that person’s old room, dressed in their old clothes. Scarface is a writer who writes about death, and by 1994, the rapper born Brad Jordan was figuring out the type of solo artist he could be for years to come. His first two solo albums outside of his success with the underground Houston rap group Geto Boys—1991’s Mr. Scarface Is Back and 1993’s The World Is Yours—were both critical and commercial hits, casting him slightly outside of his group and making him a viable solo star.
By 1994, Scarface was in a position to capitalize off of his momentum while also asking his existing audience to grow with him. His work with the Geto Boys was often steeped in a dark vulnerability. Scarface battled with depression his whole life, even attempting suicide in his youth. While his first two solo efforts had glimpses of this, both albums felt more like a collection of the best songs he could make at the time, without any thought of single narrative structure. The Diary set out to be different.
First, the sonic landscape changed. Though The Diary was only made a year out from his last album, the sound of rap was shifting rapidly in the early ’90s. Sample laws had come into play, cracking down on the uses of other people’s music in rap songs, and forcing producers to figure out new tactics after skating on lax rules through the late ’80s and the first two years of the ’90s. Additionally, Dr. Dre and Death Row Records had cemented their sound with the releases of The Chronic and Doggystyle, introducing a more laid back instrumentation, crafted with live, in-studio musicians re-creating sounds that might have otherwise been lifted from soul and funk samples, like James Brown or Motown records. The first two Scarface albums were frantic, sample-heavy, and brilliant, but a shift in tone was needed. At only 24, Scarface was building towards the rapper he wanted to be for an entire career. His anger, paranoia, and obsession with unraveling a life lost is a common thread throughout his work, but on The Diary, he made the themes palpable and heavy.
I imagine it’s difficult to write about death as something you endure and something you are willing to deliver to others in equal measure. What makes The Diary fascinating is that Scarface raps comfortably about killing with what appears to be little or no remorse, but the difficulty appears in the nuances. On the album’s proper opening track, “The White Sheet,” Scarface outlines visions of gunning down his enemies, in great detail. Still, it must be said that in all music, there is the difference between glorifying murder and using the tools and imagery of murder as a way to present your fearlessness. It’s all a means of survival of wherever it is you come from.
Scarface dragged a razor blade across his wrists when he was 14 years old because he wanted to die, or at least wanted to escape a darkness which felt endless. The thing about surviving an attempt to take your own life is that it is often framed as a failure, on the other side of which is your responsibility to continue to endure living. I am mostly saying that Scarface has his own relationship with death. Yes, he grew up poor and black and among violence. Yes, he knew what it was to kill as a survival tactic, but he also nearly couldn’t find his way to surviving himself. When Scarface raps about killing, it is with a fine lens, with nuance and haunting detail. On “The White Sheet,” he raps about visualizing the mother of someone he’s killed, crying in a hospital waiting room. It is a small detail—one he drops in before quickly jumping to the next image—but it is lasting and haunting. Even in violence, his scope is on the impact it leaves.
The Diary has its tropes, of course: The song about a sexual encounter (“One”), the song about misconceptions of rap in the mainstream media, which ticked up as rap began to seem like less and less of a passing fad (“Hand of the Dead Body”). But its two most interesting tracks are “Mind Playin’ Tricks ’94” and “I Seen A Man Die.”
The former is a retread of the Geto Boys song of the same name from just three years earlier. But with Scarface alone on it, he stretches out the idea of his failures, flaws, and the survival of both. What ties all of this together is Scarface’s voice. It, like him, walks a multi-layered line. His voice is a fashioned brass instrument, a horn played by a rusty but enthusiastic student. He bellows like a hustler turned preacher, or a preacher turned hustler, or anyone familiar with the corner and the pulpit in equal measure. He has a voice that commands attention, which allows him to unfurl his narratives patiently, with the full ears of any listener. His voice particularly hums at a good rhythm on this album, blending in under the bass lines and the waves of drums. It becomes a function of the album’s movements and darkness, in concert with the music itself:
Sometimes I want to end it but I don’t though
They tell me see my pastor but I don’t go
Sometimes being alive is not, alone, worth celebrating. That sounds harsh, but depression is real and worth the weight it rests on the body. I have always appreciated Scarface most in these moments: how he comes to terms with still being alive, despite not wanting to. It’s raw and unfiltered. I’m here, but you can’t make me be excited about it some days, although I’m trying.
“I Seen a Man Die,” the album’s centerpiece, consists of a narrative arc which involves Scarface detailing a person’s failed rehab stint. First, Scarface takes on the role as a storyteller, guiding the listener through a man’s final days. And then, he almost hovers above the song, a ghost himself, shepherding the dead to whatever waits beyond. He goes from the interior of the man’s life, to narrating the end by honing in on all of the small parts of life exiting the body.
I hear you breathin’ but your heart no longer sounds strong
But you kinda scared of dying so you hold on
And you keep on blacking out and your pulse is low
Stop trying to fight the reaper, just relax and let it go
The subtlety in this is the shift of view: in the first verse, Scarface is using the “he” to address the man’s life, as an entry point. By the time the last verse pops up, Scarface has become more intimate, shortening the emotional distance by addressing the man directly with “you,” understanding that the “you” could be anyone we know, or love, or could us. It is a small move, something that only a writer would pull off. Taking a listener from a specific experience to a universal pain that they, themselves, could be a part of.
There is much to be made of how Scarface rendered himself more emotionally vulnerable than people gave him credit for being, despite his open-book approach to writing rhymes. The song is the one on the album where the stakes are raised. There is a defined character, and one must grapple with his leaving.
Scarface has said about The Diary that he wanted to make an album for the people he grew up with in Houston, and I think that this is one of the ultimate goals of a creator who is from a place where a lot of people don’t make it out with an ability to create. You want to make something legible, or touchable for your people, and their people, and the people who didn’t survive. So much of Scarface’s work, particularly after The Diary, feels like it exists so that he, himself, can stay alive a little bit longer, or at least so that he can archive a life that wasn’t always promised. J Prince, the head of Rap-A-Lot Records, told Scarface that there was a ghetto in every city, and therefore, he had to make an album that would resonate in the ghettos of every city. At that point, Houston wasn’t an unknown commodity in rap, but it wasn’t New York or Los Angeles. People had to listen to the lyrics and envision the sprawl, skyscrapers and hot open roads inside of it, and see themselves in it.
This is why The Diary trades so richly on pain and despair with no light at the end of it. I appreciate an honesty which doesn’t offer light at the end of the tunnel, and so it is refreshing to hear a meditation on ideas about darkness and the promise of more, particularly if it is all you have ever known. Every ghetto isn’t the same, but Scarface seemed to know that the missing link in all of these ghettos was conversations about the frightening nature of how to survive them. What was being offered on The Diary was a mental escape route. Someone reaching out two hands and telling you they are ready to catch you if you jump, even if they can’t save you from the large cloud of despair, they can pull you closer to them so that you’re not alone in your ruin.
There was water again in Houston in 2017. Hurricane Harvey tore through the city in mid-late August and early September. The damage was focused on Houston this time. There were 88 deaths directly associated with the hurricane, and 125 billion dollars in damage. When the hurricane hit, Scarface was in his home, just outside of the city. He’d decided to ride out the storm, despite warnings for residents to leave if they could. His home lost power, but was largely unharmed.
The calm after the storm exists, but it’s mostly to shine a light on what has been lost. To call attention to those who didn’t survive, and to push those who did survive to rebuild, even if they don’t feel like they want to go on. Some people sent money from afar and watched the city try to build itself back up before the news cycle zoomed away from it. Some people went to put feet on the ground. Houston is a resilient city, one that has survived more than one drowning. Though it shouldn’t have to wear that resilience as a badge of honor, of course, it does.
Scarface has built a life and career off of resilience. He has not wanted to be alive and then has lived. He has made and remade a career off of an honesty which isn’t necessarily optimistic but remains inviting nonetheless. And so, it makes sense that he is one of Houston’s most notable rappers, the one who is still proud to be there, who still makes music for his people as if he is building a place for them to survive and survive again. The Diary reflects the promise of an imperfect place, and the perils of living inside of it and wanting to stay, despite. A place not necessarily better, but needed, nonetheless. | 2018-03-04T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2018-03-04T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rap | Rap-A-Lot | March 4, 2018 | 9.3 | 0cc545ee-8f23-40f3-9183-2fd7112e0abb | Hanif Abdurraqib | https://pitchfork.com/staff/hanif-abdurraqib/ | |
Delia Derbyshire was an unsung early pioneer in electronic music, and her score for the 1972 film Circle of Light is the longest single piece of recorded music of hers to see release yet. | Delia Derbyshire was an unsung early pioneer in electronic music, and her score for the 1972 film Circle of Light is the longest single piece of recorded music of hers to see release yet. | Delia Derbyshire / Elsa Stansfield: Circle of Light | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22195-circle-of-light/ | Circle of Light | This past March, Liz Harris (aka Grouper) performed a live set of her signature choral drone at MoMA PS1, written specifically to accompany a sequence of 16mm films by the experimental filmmaker Paul Clipson. The pairing of Harris’ compositions—deeply human-sounding works built from tape loops and her layered and manipulated voice—with Clipson’s noisy projections of flickering, dreamy images of things like women in water and moonlit trees conjured a very modern yearning for sensory authenticity, something you’d find in an increasingly inaccessible natural world.
This performance came to mind the first time I watched Circle of Light, a half-hour-long 1972 film that compiles a slideshow-like succession of photographs on glass transparency by British photographer Pamela Bone, set to an abstract soundtrack by Delia Derbyshire. The setup for the two projects is similar, each reproducing an emotional reaction to nature, but their messages are quite different: While Harris and Clipson’s collaboration, emphasizing retrograde analog techniques, comes across as somewhat fearful of technology, Derbyshire and Bone seem fascinated by its potential.
An early pioneer in electronic music, Derbyshire, who passed away in 2001, is something of a cult figure. During a decade-plus stint at the BBC Radiophonic Workshop beginning in 1962, she produced scores and effects for television, including, famously, the original theme for “Dr. Who.” Her laborious and mathematical approach to composition there predated the use of synthesizers and even multi-track recording technology; her output, which at the Radiophonic Workshop went largely uncredited, is an eerie and dense musique concrete that, suffice to say, has stood the test of time much better than the rest of the special effects used on the shows she scored.
Derbyshire also composed under her own name and with David Vorhaus and Brian Hodgson as White Noise, and her soundtrack for *Circle of Light *(made with Elsa Stansfield), just now seeing its first proper release, is the longest single piece of recorded music that’s been recovered from her oeuvre. Bone originally wanted the film to be soundtracked by a reading of her own poetry, but director Anthony Roland pushed in the direction of a non-narrative audio score, introducing Derbyshire. Bone’s color images are of the natural world, but manipulated and layered to emphasize pattern and form. At the surface of Derbyshire’s score are also fragments from nature. Among the collage of sounds she applies are a number of field recordings, including, in the first minute, one of an owl hooting. A whorling texture underneath approximates an insistent wind or a soft tide; a synthesized chirp is reminiscent of a field of crickets on a summer day.
Alongside such recognizable sounds, Derbyshire’s sonic palette includes droning, alien, sometimes-tonal elements. These are fastidiously arranged such that the work, restrained as it is, takes on a remarkable spatial quality. (Among the effects here is a gorgeous stretched and filtered recording of a metal lampshade rung with a hammer, which she famously used in her work on “Dr. Who”). And while you could go on about the various purring and pulsing sounds throughout the release, her subtle pacing is just as key. The work, with its pockets of energy dissolving into washes of texture, creates a world rather than describing an existing one. Her output is often described in terms of its many innovations, but this recording underscores that Derbyshire was an artist skilled at constructing an evocative whole out of pioneering details, one that can be experienced on both technical and emotional registers.
The work is introduced with a brief description by Roland of Bone’s practice, and a brief artist statement by the photographer. “Inspired by nature, and being more responsive to feeling than to thought,” as Roland says, Bone notes that with her work she has set out “to overcome the limitations that photography would impose;” such a thesis could surely be extended to Derbyshire, whose work opens the possibility of sound far beyond imitating life. In a moment when artists like Harris and Clipson use vintage analog media to bring us closer to a ‘real’ that might not have existed in the first place, Derbyshire and Bone’s collaboration is a rich reminder of the mysterious and unnerving potential of both their respective technological mediums and nature itself. | 2016-08-05T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-08-05T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Trunk | August 5, 2016 | 7.2 | 0cca6cd5-0b3a-4572-8f76-aa9e536d721d | Thea Ballard | https://pitchfork.com/staff/thea-ballard/ | null |
The composer, improviser, and trumpet player Jon Hassell, now 77, created Fourth World, Vol. 1: Possible Musics in 1980 in collaboration with producer Brian Eno. Melding minimalism, jazz, and ambient sounds, it is eerie, dreamlike, and otherworldly music. | The composer, improviser, and trumpet player Jon Hassell, now 77, created Fourth World, Vol. 1: Possible Musics in 1980 in collaboration with producer Brian Eno. Melding minimalism, jazz, and ambient sounds, it is eerie, dreamlike, and otherworldly music. | Brian Eno / Jon Hassell: Fourth World Vol. 1: Possible Musics | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/19984-brian-eno-jon-hassel-fourth-world-vol-1-possible-musics/ | Fourth World Vol. 1: Possible Musics | The title Fourth World, Vol. 1: Possible Musics has a brainy and academic ring to it, but according to Jon Hassell, the record is at least 50% body music. "The basic metaphor is that of the north and south of a person is a projection of the north and south of the globe," the composer, improviser, and trumpet player, now 77, explained in an interview earlier this year. "A mind formatted by language and located in the head, compared with the area of wildness and sensuality below the waist where dance and music and procreation reigns."
However, the first time through, Possible Musics—which Hassell created in 1980 in collaboration with producer Brian Eno—you might find that "wildness" and "sensuality" are not the first adjectives that come to mind. It is eerie, dreamlike, and otherworldly music.
Throughout the record, Hassell’s trumpet is processed using a harmonizer effect, producing alien tonalities that seem to slide between the notes of a traditional Western scale. Often, his melody lines sound more like a human voice than a brass instrument. The rhythm tracks—made up of hand percussion and electric bass—are highly repetitive, but also wobbly and destabilized. The result is a sound that melds minimalism, jazz, and ambient sounds, but doesn’t fit comfortably into any of those genres.
Though his name is not invoked as frequently as Eno’s, the last few decades have proven Hassell—who was born in Memphis, Tennessee—to be an influential presence in electronic music and modern composition. Active since the mid-'60s, his background is hard to duplicate. He studied with Karlheinz Stockhausen, played on the first recording of Terry Riley’s "In C", and has performed session work for Talking Heads and Peter Gabriel. His solo work has provided the sonic blueprint for a number of contemporary musicians, as well, including Aphex Twin (See Selected Ambient Works Vol. II) and Oneohtrix Point Never (Returnal) to name a few.
Possible Musics was, in a lot of ways, the first full realization of Hassell's Fourth World concept. Many of the sounds—the freaky trumpet tones, the drifting ambient structures—were already in place on his 1977 debut LP, Vernal Equinox, but while that album is as meditative and mesmerizing as anything he has released, it is clearly identifiable as a jazz fusion record.
On Possible Musics, synthesizers and electronic treatments help to nudge things into less recognizable territory. The music is informed by minimalism, but Hassell's take is very different than the works of Philip Glass or Steve Reich that are linked to that style. For those composers, minimalism often involved rigorous structure and clockwork execution, whereas Possible Musics is conceptually dialed in, but loose and improvisational in its execution. Harmonic motion is limited and all attention is centered around the embellishment of a single melodic line. Hassell is playing lead on these songs, but his performances often blur seamlessly into the backing tracks.
Like Eno’s ambient records, Possible Music is all about mood. However, where Music For Airports sought to reflect a highly impersonal environment, Hassell’s work is intentionally exotic. No specific nation or people is being quoted here, though. Hassell's landscape is an invented one—an imagined culture, where high technology and mysticism are blended together. "John’s experiment was to imagine a 'coffee coloured' world," explains Eno in an essay first published in the Guardian and excerpted for the reissue's liner notes. "A globalized world constantly integrating and hybridizing, where differences were celebrated and dignified—and realize it into music."
In this sense, Possible Musics is an exercise in science fiction. Like the William Gibson book Neuromancer, the record offered an imperfect, but prescient glimpse toward the near future. The subsequent decades have not produced much music like Hassell’s, but the concepts that informed Possible Musics have proven predictive of the way that technology would come to mesh with music-making in other cultures—whether that’s Konono N°1's amplified thumb pianos, Group Doueh’s electric guitars, or any number of global electronic and pop sounds that have been produced using a laptop computer.
And once you acclimate to the weird and warbly tones, there is a certain sensuality to Possible Musics. In Hassell’s desire to crossbreed cultures there’s an implicit act of intercourse going on—a desire for personal renewal and transformation via an "other", be it a nation, culture, or another human being. | 2014-12-03T01:00:01.000-05:00 | 2014-12-03T01:00:01.000-05:00 | Electronic / Experimental | Glitterbeat | December 3, 2014 | 8.5 | 0ccaba16-53be-4546-af3b-427870454919 | Aaron Leitko | https://pitchfork.com/staff/aaron-leitko/ | null |
After switching things up with this year's ambitious LP Underneath the Pine, Chaz Bundick turns toward sweetly catchy and more explicitly funky 80s-tinged dancefloor jams. | After switching things up with this year's ambitious LP Underneath the Pine, Chaz Bundick turns toward sweetly catchy and more explicitly funky 80s-tinged dancefloor jams. | Toro y Moi: Freaking Out EP | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/15785-freaking-out-ep/ | Freaking Out EP | Now that there's little choice but to treat chillwave as an actual genre, it's at risk of the same kind of restrictive codification that's strangled so many of its predecessors. The word has come to mean a specific style-- glowing electronic pop that calls to mind faded photographs. But what initially drew comparisons between such groups as Washed Out, Neon Indian, and Memory Tapes wasn't such an easily identifiable set of musical signifiers. As with most category names that stick, chillwave was a feeling.
There's no better example of the genre's catholic origins than Toro Y Moi mastermind Chaz Bundick. Last year's Causers of This established Toro Y Moi as one of the mini-scene's leading figures, with the post-crash economic reality of lead single "Blessa" ("I found a job, I do it fine/ Not what I want, but still I try") aligning the album with Neon Indian's "Deadbeat Summer" and Washed Out's High Times-- and Bundick's full-length debut had a warmly nostalgic electro-R&B aesthetic, to boot. But by then he had already released 2009's Body Angles tape, which, yeah, presaged Causers with synthy closer "Timed Pleasure", but mostly emphasized scuzzy guitars. And Bundick has said he actually recorded this year's garage-pop "Leave Everywhere" single in 2006. In the meantime, he's given us straight-up dance (his Les Sins project) and an album that expands on the atmospheric funk of Causers using a lusher, more organic instrumental palette (this year's Underneath the Pine).
The definition of chillwave may have to expand yet again. Memory Tapes' solid if disappointing follow-up to 2009's zeitgeist-capturing Seek Magic had more in common than with the sound of this Internet-born subset, but Bundick, along with Neon Indian and Washed Out, continues to embody its spirit, which was always more body-oriented than detractors would care to admit. With the Freaking Out EP, Bundick moves from vaguely funky 1980s-tinged makeout jams to more explicitly funky 80s-tinged dancefloor jams-- think Chromeo. The change isn't as successful as his best work, but it still makes for a plenty rewarding between-albums EP.
Advance mp3 "Saturday Love"-- a cover of a 1985 Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis production for R&B singers Cherrelle and Alexander O'Neal-- is the highlight here, with its sweetly catchy days-of-the-week hook, tinkling two-finger piano, and thwacking neo-new jack swing drum programming. Yearning, bass-limber opener "All Alone" and finger-snapping dance finale "I Can Get Love" even share the strobe-like keyboards present on much of Causers-- the last song has that post-Dilla crackle, too. And "Sweet" applies the chopped up vocals and hazy incandescence of that album to further 80s-style R&B. "Take it easy," Bundick soothes on the title track, another uptempo floor-filler. "Don't worry anymore... Calm down." I mean, how much more chillwave can you get, right? | 2011-09-12T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2011-09-12T02:00:01.000-04:00 | Electronic | Carpark | September 12, 2011 | 8 | 0ccd5e7f-5607-45c0-8dd4-4a67869a9cd9 | Marc Hogan | https://pitchfork.com/staff/marc-hogan/ | null |
After a few false starts, Solange Knowles comes into her own with songwriting and production assistance from Devonté Hynes. True marks the sound of a singer hitting a graceful stride, in her own time and on her own terms. | After a few false starts, Solange Knowles comes into her own with songwriting and production assistance from Devonté Hynes. True marks the sound of a singer hitting a graceful stride, in her own time and on her own terms. | Solange: True | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/17373-true/ | True | When we heard from Solange Knowles four years ago, she was a major-label signee trying to find her footing on a conceptual and vintage-sounding album called SoL-Angel and the Hadley Street Dreams. Then she split with Interscope and resurfaced on the indie circuit, carting Jay-Z and her sister Beyoncé to Grizzly Bear concerts on the Williamsburg waterfront and offering up a cover of Dirty Projectors' "Stillness Is the Move". At cynical first glance, it seemed like Knowles was simply backtracking and rebranding, hoping to claim some available indie turf. But this fall, she released "Losing You", a gleaming and spirited new song that transcended the labels she'd been assigned. Released via Terrible, the label co-owned by Chris Taylor of Grizzly Bear, the sly single hinted at the possibilities open to an artist who eschews a traditional model of pop stardom. True, the EP that follows, delivers on the fresh promise of "Losing You" and marks the sound of a singer hitting a graceful stride, in her own time and on her own terms.
Producers and songwriters in the pop world sometimes lurk in the background, leaving the vocalist to be the face of the project. But Solange upends that model by presenting Devonté Hynes, her co-songwriter and True’s main producer, as a full-fledged partner. His name is credited prominently and he appears hand-in-hand with Solange at listening parties and in press photos. And True, a thematically consistent whole, sounds like the product of a lovingly forged artistic bond. The EP shares DNA with Hynes' solo outlet Blood Orange. Like the best bits of his 2011 album Coastal Grooves, it feeds on humble but compulsively listenable tunes that reference the silken grooves of late-80s pop. But Hynes thrives in a supporting role. "If there's a better voice [than mine] suited to a song-- I usually have a female voice in my head, anyway-- then I would rather her sing it," he told me during an interview earlier this year. "It makes me happier."
Hynes has met an ideal female vocal muse in Solange, who executes each cut with simple grace and yearning naïveté. These songs often reconcile girlish optimism with worldly wisdom as though the two are one and the same. "Maybe I lost you, but I was not done having my fun/ Played around with your heart, now I'm playing around in the dark," she apologizes on "Lovers in the Parking Lot". And on “Bad Girls”, she captures the uneasiness of waking up in last night's smeared makeup and feeling unmoored: "I look down on you, so deep down I know that we're the same/ It's stupid thinking that you would want to come play my game," she sings, ending the EP over a twinkle worthy of a closing scene in an early John Hughes film.
Like much of True, it's the sound of a complicated slow dance during a night's dwindling last minutes, fueled by pounding hearts and racing minds. The record never builds to a huge chorus; instead, its hooks bubble up quietly and quickly, then dissipate as the songs return to their downbeat simmer. Hynes tinkers with non-traditional structures, letting the tunes meander in and out of grooves, but while this occasionally causes True to fall slack ("Look Good With Trouble"), it’s a largely effective approach.
True also benefits from its unorthodox length: At seven songs, it's fuller than most EPs, yet too short to be considered an album-album. Somehow, it works. Why add filler just to call it an album? It's another example of Knowles and Hynes forgoing conventional wisdom and doing things their own way. Seven songs can be the perfect length; a collection of accessible and authentic pop can come out on an indie label; you can reshape the typical producer/songwriter/pop star model; you can create unassuming music that still sounds like a big deal. And ultimately, for Solange, you can retrace your steps and find yourself somewhere entirely new. | 2012-11-27T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2012-11-27T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Pop/R&B | Terrible | November 27, 2012 | 7.8 | 0ccd7646-a017-4f6b-849d-b02d2abc8030 | Carrie Battan | https://pitchfork.com/staff/carrie-battan/ | null |
This new set of unheard songs is gripping and challenging, as to be expected from the the free jazz legend. Using oddball orchestrations, Sun Ra unfurls more complexities of the astral realm. | This new set of unheard songs is gripping and challenging, as to be expected from the the free jazz legend. Using oddball orchestrations, Sun Ra unfurls more complexities of the astral realm. | Sun Ra and His Arkestra: Thunder of the Gods | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/23102-thunder-of-the-gods/ | Thunder of the Gods | Last year, NASA unveiled the Orbit Pavilion, a domed, aluminum chamber that relays sonic information from space. The sound installation maps individual satellite voices in one track and compresses 24 hours of sound into a single minute in another. The two tracks transmit in tandem, creating a haunting space symphony.
These creaks and echoes bring to mind the work of Sun Ra, who did more than just give space a soundtrack; he navigated star clusters at light-speed. Ra’s sprawling discography surveys the whopping expanse of the cosmos. He quantified and catalogued planets through fits and starts in free jazz. When asked what inspired his compositions, Ra explained that his work came from being in tune with the universe. “The world, the way it is today, is the result of the possible that [people] did—it’s a result of the absolute thing. There’s always something else in a universe as big as this.” Ra’s idea of space was that it was vast but not unknowable—that its possibilities were merely a doorway to greater understanding. On the newly reissued Thunder of the Gods, a challenging and gripping reassemblage of oddball orchestrations played with his Arkestra, Ra unfurled the complexities of the astral realm.
Sun Ra’s free-wheeling, interplanetary jazz epics aren’t just the byproduct of a disciplined and rigorous musical education, a virtuosic musicianship, or an astronomer’s curiosity. Much of the bandleader/composer’s deep interest in space stems from a personal close encounter of the third kind: a trip to Saturn in the late ’30s, which Ra recognized as a call to action from another world. The experience, as he perceived it, was wholly changing and entirely instrumental in the music that would follow—his life’s work, an intense and often quirky diagram of space that helped birth Afrofuturism. His catalog is diverse and all-encompassing: Interstellar Low Ways, Art Forms of Dimensions Tomorrow, and Cosmic Tones for Mental Therapy chart constellations with twitchy arrangements anchored by twinkling keystrokes and organ screeches. LPs like Visits Planet Earth and We Travel the Space Ways were more measured and telescopic, hedging toward a magnifying big band sound. But Thunder of the Gods is far more alien in its signals and movements.
“Thunder of the Gods” and “Moonshots Across the Sky” are recordings originally from the 1966 Strange Strings sessions in New York. Strange Strings is perhaps best remembered for Ra “playing” a squeaking door as accompaniment on a 2007 bonus cut—either an act of harmonic experimentation or simply goofball musicianship. But those sessions are best exemplified by “Worlds Approaching”; its grating string playing giving meaning to the LP title and its cacophonous mix simulating a rogue planet’s descent upon earth. Though not truly connected, “Worlds Approaching” shares a similar, frantic energy with its surrounding compositions. Still, these are outliers, even among his strange strings collection. Reed players Marshall Allen, John Gilmore, and Pat Patrick—all largely unfamiliar with strings—picked up guitars, ukuleles, and assorted handmade instruments during those sessions, and the ensemble is most appreciated on “Thunder of the Gods.” For 13 minutes, Ra uses strings as instruments of tension: sawing, creaking, scraping, and whacking.
“Calling Planet Earth — We’ll Wait for You” was later found on tapes from 1972’s Universe in Blue, and the recording got its first official release on the 2014 remaster of the LP. It’s a strange fit on that record, between the title track’s blued-out concept and the swaggering “Blackman” (or “When the Black Man Ruled This Land”) a vision of pharaohs and black sovereignty. “Calling Planet Earth” isn’t a probe of land or color. It’s a translated message broadcast in two parts: contact and invitation. The trumpet burps tap out like morse code. Squawking alto sax and rumbling percussion act as a lead-in to solo oboe runs that erupt and then flatline. The second act is a marvel of sonic impact. Ra’s space organ boots up like a frenzied R2-D2 floating aimlessly through a surging current.
In pieces, on other releases, these recordings are merely mismatched bits. But together, on Thunder of the Gods, they take on new life—deep wave transmissions from across the Milky Way. They’re each slightly askew, bordering on bizarre, yet completely exhilarating. It’s an intergalactic screening turned sci-fi odyssey. There are visions of interstellar travel, premonitions of the moon landing, and parallels to the mythical, relating the scientific with the divine. The intent is clear: “Where human feet have never trod, where human eyes have never seen, we’ll build a world of abstract dreams,” a voice exclaims at the midway point on “Calling Planet Earth — We’ll Wait for You.” Knowing the universe and all of its secrets is a fantasy from an inconceivable future. The way we render its greatest depths and fringes through sound are often merely an attempt to score the intrigue and mystery of the unexplored. Sun Ra dared to imagine outer space as an open channel; not as a window into all that we don’t know, but as a gateway to all that is possible. | 2017-04-13T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-04-13T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Jazz | Modern Harmonic | April 13, 2017 | 8 | 0cd3da5c-342a-4123-8f13-a4c844797720 | Sheldon Pearce | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sheldon-pearce/ | null |
The latest from Kevin Martin's experimental dub project is a series of four EPs collaborating with an outside artist, beginning with this release with Austrian guitarist-composer Christian Fennesz. | The latest from Kevin Martin's experimental dub project is a series of four EPs collaborating with an outside artist, beginning with this release with Austrian guitarist-composer Christian Fennesz. | Fennesz / King Midas Sound: Edition 1 | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21014-edition-1/ | Edition 1 | On London Zoo, the 2008 album from Kevin Martin's experimental dub project the Bug, one of the most nimble and beguiling tracks, "You & Me", was voiced by light-stepping Trinidadian singer-poet Roger Robinson. After that track, Martin and Robinson joined forces as King Midas Sound and followed with the 2009 full-length Waiting for You. Their latest project is a series of four EPs collaborating with an outside artist, beginning with this release with Austrian guitarist-composer Christian Fennesz.
Those familiar with Martin’s brand of concussive dub and Fennesz’s elegant dance between electronic glitches and dulcet guitar washes might be taken aback by the hushed tones of this pairing. There’s very little of Martin’s telltale drum programming, while Fennesz’s singular guitar tone is hard to parse amid the hash of gray static that envelops almost everything here. Kiki Hitomi, who previously lent her voice to both the Bug and a KMS remix, does her best Beth Gibbons impersonation on the melancholic trip hop of "On My Mind", but its one of the few tracks with a discernible pulse. Robinson whispers a line about "hold[ing] each other tight" but everything about his voice on the record suggests the phantasmal, a now-departed ex-lover who returns only in a dream. When he slurs about searching for safe ground on the eerie "Lighthouse" it seems to have been recorded from inside an abandoned one.
Edition 1 mimics the depression and subsequent grind and quiet desolation of a breakup so precisely that it's hard to take in all at once. And while the effect of such distant vocals works early on in the album, by the back half, it just sounds like every vocal was recorded over a poor cell phone connection, tinny and small. Robinson details the depression of a breakup in maddeningly mundane detail, muttering about going through the days in a "weed fog"; subliminal rhythms fade in and out but the expected bass surge never arrives. The album fully comes to life only on the haunting 14-minute instrumental "Above Water".
The dark melodic guitar elements on the record sound like Fennesz, but very little else is instantly traceable to him. Much of his discography involves collaboration with distinct artists like Ryuichi Sakamoto, Jim O’Rourke, and Sparklehorse, but what’s remarkable here is how Fennesz dissolves into the bleak landscape, his signature sound rendered indistinct, a loss of identity that mirrors the album's main theme. | 2015-09-23T02:00:02.000-04:00 | 2015-09-23T02:00:02.000-04:00 | Experimental | Ninja Tune | September 23, 2015 | 6.7 | 0cd3e592-7225-4f6f-a6a6-067742762843 | Andy Beta | https://pitchfork.com/staff/andy-beta/ | null |
While Coldplay will always be more enjoyable than groundbreaking, Mylo Xyloto works because the band once again manages to sound like Coldplay without sounding like any of its previous LPs. They maintain their stadium status grandeur while subtly challenging preconceptions. | While Coldplay will always be more enjoyable than groundbreaking, Mylo Xyloto works because the band once again manages to sound like Coldplay without sounding like any of its previous LPs. They maintain their stadium status grandeur while subtly challenging preconceptions. | Coldplay: Mylo Xyloto | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/15953-mylo-xyloto/ | Mylo Xyloto | "No one knows what it means, but it's provocative… gets the people going." A couple of Chris Martin's good buddies memorably flipped this obscure bit of Blades of Glory dialogue on Watch the Throne to annotate the purchase of Margiela jackets, but it's every bit as applicable to the title of Mylo Xyloto and speaks toward Coldplay's lofty ambitions on it. A new Coldplay album is the sort of thing that's used as a health check for the record industry, and the band is very much aware that they could just release "a new Coldplay album" that would leave everyone involved satisfied-- this is essentially what happened on 2005's X&Y, their fastest seller and also their weakest LP according to many. But being criticized as bantamweight compared to peers like U2, R.E.M., or Radiohead has clearly worn on them-- and truth is, they're all the better for their guilty conscience about a total lack of post-punk credentials. While Coldplay will always be more enjoyable than groundbreaking and their artistic advances seen as smart troubleshooting than divine intervention, Mylo Xyloto works because the band once again manages to sound like Coldplay without sounding like any of their previous LPs, maintaining their stadium-spanning grandeur while subtly challenging preconceptions.
While retaining the studio services and crucial cosign of Brian Eno, it's a relief that their most carefully thought-out work initially sounds less ambitious than Viva La Vida, a record whose orchestral and political bombast felt at the very least a necessary act of aggressive rebranding. Mylo Xyloto is brighter in both attitude and especially timbre, sleeker, more emphatic and up to the task of being a capital-E Event. Though their collaboration with Rihanna on "Princess of China" makes it all the more explicit, when you're at Coldplay's level, pop acts are your competition and Mylo places itself in a lineage of ultra-mainstream rock records spanning from Born in the U.S.A. to Wolfgang Amadeus Phoenix-- swaddled in synths and gilded by state-of-the-art production, but never too off-putting if you still insist that "real music" is played by men with guitars.
Indeed, the militant, pound-the-dashboard beat that powers "Hurts Like Heaven" sounds like the band jockeying for the Boss' nod of approval. It's a remarkably aerodynamic piece of all-purpose inspirational rock that never gets too pushy even with Martin's meaningful/meaningless proclamations ("You use your heart as a weapon/ And it hurts like heaven"), tweaking its classicist template with a slight Auto-Tune on the falsetto harmonies. Likewise, the imperial march of "Paradise" is wheelhouse Coldplay, as is Martin's unfortunate tendency to stretch out syllables for rhymes that really aren't worth saving. But its power has little to do with whatever Martin's going on about (dreaming of paradise, mostly)-- it's all about how they unabashedly flirt with contemporary R&B production, cranking the drums way up in the mix and the massing the vocals on the chorus to overwhelming, Pavlovian effect. They don't want to completely do away with Coldplay qua Coldplay-- they're still four normal-looking guys who introduced themselves with frail post-The Bends Britrock like "Yellow" and "Trouble". But they continually ask, why limit themselves to that?
Of course, some of their limitations aren't really a matter of choice. While there's no shortage of venomous carping at Coldplay's expense, I've never heard anyone complain about Jon Buckland's guitar tone or the rhythm section not being up to snuff. All sonic tinkering aside, Martin is still a full-time target serving as the perfect avatar for Coldplay, undeniably well-meaning, painfully earnest, and lord, does he try. When Martin tells you that Mylo Xyloto is a conceptual love story inspired by the White Rose movement and The Wire, don't you at least believe that he believes it? So he's still a sucker for big parables told like he's the first to come up with them-- the innocence lost on the Muse-like stargazer "Charlie Brown" is documented awkwardly enough ("Took a car downtown where the lost boys meet/ Took a car downtown and took what they offered me"), even before you deal with the use of the Peanuts character as some sort of entry-level embodiment of adolescent purity. Likewise, though it's commendable that a multi-platinum band on its fifth record could make a swooning, waltz-time ballad called "Us Against the World" notable for not laying it on too thick, Martin pops off a line, "Drunken like a Daniel in a lions' den," like someone who's somehow just managed to hear "Hallelujah" for the first time.
Still, the collection of softies is among their best-- the measured beauty of breakup weeper "Up in Flames" and "U.F.O." confidently update the guilelessness of Parachutes through a self-described and self-explanatory "Enoxification." But maybe restraint's not what you're looking for out of a Coldplay album, and if that's the case, none of the ballads have the sort of shameless goosebump triggering of "Fix You" or "The Scientist". Which isn't to say that Mylo lacks populist thrill; it's just trying to mine alternative sources. They've sidled up toward music of more hedonistic ideals before, especially on A Rush of Blood to the Head; Martin's vocals on "Clocks" worked incredibly well filtered through dance remixes, while the ecstatic surge of "Daylight" really needed no translation. And thankfully, the revolutionary rhetoric of Mylo is based on love in this club rather than dope, guns, and fucking in the streets.
The aforementioned "Princess of China" is an insistent, mechanized grind that fits just as easily on Mylo as the next Rihanna album, though it wouldn't be a single-- everyone seems to be taking it just a little too seriously. The important thing is that it'll sound great at the Grammys. And "Every Teardrop Is a Waterfall" will surely work well as a festival closer: As a call to arms, it's pretty much nonsense, Martin's already infamous "I'd rather be a comma than a full stop" threatening to bring "Teardrop" to a dead halt. But then you remember Coldplay aren't just Martin-- it's Will Champion's kick drum guiding its four minutes of skyward propulsion, one of the cruelly underrated Buckland's pealing, major-key guitar leads (think "Strawberry Swing"), and, yes, Martin's wordless cooing coming together in a way that's sui generis Coldplay-- a band on top of a game they really don't have much competition in.
These are the moments I think about when people lament the lack of a monoculture-- so often we speak of indie bands that "should be huge" and songs that "could be hits" in an alternate universe. But with "Teardrop" and "Hurts Like Heaven", there's a thrill of knowing these songs can, should, and will be on the radio that you just can't recreate. With all due respect, while M83 shoot for a similar extroverted exhilaration on Hurry Up, We're Dreaming-- the penultimate electro rush of "Don't Let It Break Your Heart" proves both bands are ever closer to intersecting-- the idea that it could fill arenas still involves wishful thinking. It's still one man's project, whereas Coldplay was built for this from day one. It shouldn't matter, but it does-- while so many bands at their status revert to bloated contentment or some vague idea of rockist salvation, Mylo Xyloto finds Coldplay successfully continuing to explore the tension of wanting to be one of the best bands in the world and having to settle for being one of the biggest. | 2011-10-26T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2011-10-26T02:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Parlophone | October 26, 2011 | 7 | 0ce190f0-c0dd-4f3c-9403-41877e5dde53 | Ian Cohen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ian-cohen/ | null |
Through a collection of songs that range from anxious garage funk to mercurial power pop, the San Francisco experimentalists argue for an urgent remaking of the world. | Through a collection of songs that range from anxious garage funk to mercurial power pop, the San Francisco experimentalists argue for an urgent remaking of the world. | Deerhoof: Actually, You Can | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/deerhoof-actually-you-can/ | Actually, You Can | At the beginning of Can’t Get You Out of My Head, the latest documentary by historian and filmmaker Adam Curtis, is a quote by anarchist activist David Graeber: “The ultimate hidden truth of the world is that it is something we make and could just as easily make differently.” It sets the tone for a sprawling thesis about how we’ve arrived at our current state of global affairs, reminding the viewer that there’s always another path. The film shares the same message at the heart of Actually, You Can, the 18th studio album by San Francisco’s Deerhoof. It’s a record of reimagination, revolution, and reconstruction in the face of a seemingly inevitable status quo.
However, gleaning a clear message from Deerhoof’s music is like drawing water from a stone. Though singer/bassist Satomi Matsuzaki’s lyrics are playfully inscrutable, they contain moments of clarity. Chaotic opener “Be Unbarred, O Ye Gates of Hell” casts wealth disparities and labor rights into the metaphor of who benefits from a household appliance. Next, the shambling guitar-pop of “Department of Corrections” proposes that it’s time to reclaim autonomy from the powers that be: “O jailer, who’s in charge around here? And if not you then is it I? Yeah.” And the anthemic tangle that is “Ancient Mysteries, Described” switches to straight-up power chords for its ode to civil disobedience. Still, for each line that seems decipherable, twice as many are charmingly enigmatic.
The music of Actually, You Can gets its message across much more effectively. With little more than two guitars, a bass, and drums, Deerhoof conjures anxious garage funk, Tejano-infused noise rock, introspective dissonance, mercurial power pop, and just about everything in between. Guitarist John Dieterich has described the record as “utility music that makes you move and motivates you,” and indeed, each of these nine songs contorts with joyous abandon. A song as chock full of dueling riffs and fleeting tangents as “Be Unbarred, O Ye Gates of Hell” could only put people on their feet. Greg Saunier’s splashy and relentless drumming turns art-rock jams “Department of Corrections” and “Plant Thief” into songs that could soundtrack an uprising. Even the dislocated, slow-burning “Our Philosophy is Fiction” still feels like a rallying cry in the hands of a seasoned and uniquely expressive band like Deerhoof. Whatever Actually, You Can may lack in pointedness, it makes up for in raw energy.
Yet with all of the intensity and musical bedlam at work here, the brief sections of calm somehow resonate the longest. There’s something oddly hopeful and pure in the softly strummed verses of closer “Divine Comedy,” where Matsuzaki muses on yet to be realized possibilities for change. The tone of her delivery is flat and her cadence is hard to follow, but they are coupled with tender guitar chords, inviting the listener to dig deeper into the ideas behind this rare emotional break. Such reserved divergences are uncommon on Actually, You Can. So when Deerhoof does step back from their onslaught of prismatic garage band tropes, it’s a welcome reminder that rock & roll spectacle isn’t the only way to inspire change.
Buy: Rough Trade
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Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-10-27T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2021-10-27T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Experimental | Joyful Noise | October 27, 2021 | 7.3 | 0ce41e7e-a84b-42e7-b6f1-56d29839b86a | Patric Fallon | https://pitchfork.com/staff/patric-fallon/ | |
SETTING: Small office in small apartment in small, provincial town.
TIME: Martin Luther King Day. This Year.
AT RISE: Hapless ... | SETTING: Small office in small apartment in small, provincial town.
TIME: Martin Luther King Day. This Year.
AT RISE: Hapless ... | Rilo Kiley: Take Offs and Landings | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/6787-take-offs-and-landings/ | Take Offs and Landings | SETTING: Small office in small apartment in small, provincial town.
TIME: Martin Luther King Day. This Year.
AT RISE: Hapless Reviewer (female, about age twenty-six) sits at desk, drinking ill-advised coffee on mostly empty stomach, and quickly filling an ashtray. She stares helplessly at a computer screen and contemplates a pastel-hued CD cover. The sound of sentimental folk-pop plays softly in the background.
HAPLESS REVIEWER (sighs, lights cigarette): Should a band be derided if their music appears in an episode of a heavily scorned teen drama on the WB?
HER CONSCIENCE (enters from stage left, takes a seat in the broken yellow chair in the corner): This again?
HAPLESS REVIEWER: Yeah. So?
HER CONSCIENCE: No, they shouldn't. Otherwise decent bands have appeared on teen dramas before. Remember when the Flaming Lips played on "90210?"
HAPLESS REVIEWER: But what if appearing on a WB soundtrack is the band's single greatest-- though dubious-- claim to fame?
HER CONSCIENCE: Still, that's pretty harsh. (Lights cigarette.) Incidentally, how do you know that?
HAPLESS REVIEWER: I typed their name into a search engine and "Dawson's Creek" showed up.
HER CONSCIENCE: Oh. Is it any good?
HAPLESS REVIEWER: I dunno. A little contrived. Hard to believe they really sound like that naturally-- the girl, in particular. I could see how it might be a guilty pleasure, and I'm guessing the fanbase is predominately female. But personally, I think it's kind of boring, and a little too self-consciously precious for its own good.
HER CONSCIENCE: Are you talking about the show?
HAPLESS REVIEWER: Oh, god, no. The band! Rilo Kiley. From Los Angeles.
HER CONSCIENCE: How does it sound?
HAPLESS REVIEWER: Well, you can hear it for yourself. This is the first song, "Go Ahead." It has that airy, finger-picked folk thing going on. Pretty, I guess, but the most typical chord progression in the world. And the girl-- Jenny Lewis-- sings in that breathy, pouty little girl way favored by far too many female singer/songwriters these days. I hate that. She adds backing harmonies to give herself a little more substance, but it's hard to take someone seriously when they sing, "If you wanna have your cake and eat it, too/ And if you want to have other people watch while you eat it/ Go ahead." It's not quite campy enough to be twee. Like, it's a tad more upbeat than Ida, but less interesting musically.
HER CONSCIENCE: That's not a compliment, is it?
HAPLESS REVIEWER: Not really, no. And I feel sort of bad pointing this out. Rilo Kiley is kind of a new band and all, but this sounds really amateurish. "Pictures of Success" could be a prom band doing Ida, with all the problems that implies. You know, the questionable sound quality, slightly out-of-tune instrumentation (including a completely irrelevant trumpet line at the end), over-articulated vocals, and an unnatural gentleness that makes you feel a little bit embarrassed. (Pause) Jenny Lewis' vocals really drive me crazy.
HER CONSCIENCE: Well, what about this other singer?
HAPLESS REVIEWER: Yeah, that's Blake Sennett. He sounds a lot like Elliott Smith, but not as good. Still, it's an improvement over the girl. Otherwise, this song is fairly dismissable. You know how some bands can take the whole 60s lite-pop sound and subvert it to amusing and/or ironic effect? Not these kids. It's like Muzak! The Beatles-esque business on "Small Figures in a Vast Expanse" isn't so bad, I guess-- I think the guitars sound better there than they usually do. And I actually find that I don't mind Jenny Lewis' vocals so much when they're overdubbed as backing vocals.
HER CONSCIENCE: Have we heard this song before?
HAPLESS REVIEWER: No. It just sounds the same. Except track ten, "Always." It's not a bad song. I like the new wave intro. I like how over-the-top pop it is, and that it's comparatively loud. Reminds me of Velocity Girl, back in the day. And I'm inclined to believe this is the direction Rilo Kiley should take. But still.
HER CONSCIENCE: You're going to make fun of them, aren't you? For that "Dawson's Creek" business... HAPLESS REVIEWER: It's such a temptation. It's not worth it, though. I can't get a good dig in at Rilo Kiley because they're not bad enough to warrant my ire. I'm not offended, just bored. The worst thing I could say is that this is forgettable and any humor I may find in their connection to "Dawson's Creek" will do little more than remind me of who they are. | 2002-01-22T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2002-01-22T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Barsuk | January 22, 2002 | 4 | 0ce7512f-7957-421c-8df3-bf1468c559b3 | Alison Fields | https://pitchfork.com/staff/alison-fields/ | null |
Velvety, ’90s-inspired deep house and industrial-punk sing-shouting make for a surprisingly complementary contrast. | Velvety, ’90s-inspired deep house and industrial-punk sing-shouting make for a surprisingly complementary contrast. | Pelada: Movimiento Para Cambio | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/pelada-movimiento-para-cambio/ | Movimiento Para Cambio | When Chris Vargas and Tobias Rochman first met as coworkers in a Montreal clothing shop, they clashed—“like oil and water,” Rochman says. But after Rochman’s solo project shared a bill with Vargas’ industrial band Pelvic Floor, something clicked. “We’re both strong-willed individuals,” says Rochman. “It’s better if we’re on the same side.” Together, as the duo Pelada, they fuse Rochman’s lithe house and techno productions with Vargas’ defiant Spanish-language vocals, sung-shouted in a thin yet forceful voice that cuts through the mix like broken glass. On Movimiento Para Cambio, their debut album, the duo’s opposing influences prove surprisingly complementary.
Though punk and dance music make strange bedfellows, it’s not an unheard-of combination: The two styles commingled at the Mudd Club in the late 1970s, engendering a funk-punk fusion that, decades later, would bequeath DFA its founding aesthetic. And in the 1990s, Atari Teenage Riot grafted hardcore punk onto breakbeat hardcore, echoing the Prodigy’s snarling aggression. But the two traditions have rarely yielded a merger quite like this one. Rather than seeking overlap, Pelada exploit the disconnect between their respective backgrounds.
On record, they still sound like oil and water. Vargas’ monotone shout is reedy and insistent, recalling hardcore punk’s classic declamatory style. Instead of responding with a correspondingly harsh sound, Rochman veers in the opposite direction, opting for velvety deep house descended from the lineage of Larry Heard. It’s an interesting proposition: Seduce listeners with reassuring sounds like the Korg M1 organ bass, a staple of ’90s dance pop, then shout them down like the singer at an all-ages hardcore matinee.
The contrast is apparent on the opening song, “A Mí Me Juzgan Por Ser Mujer,” in which Vargas, who uses they/them pronouns, directs their fire at patriarchal instincts and male privilege—the “machitos” demanding more than they deserve. Stuttering chord stabs and breakbeats build to a surging, acid-fueled climax, but the quantized grid keeps the energy in check; Vargas’ chorus, on the other hand, drips with barely contained rage. “They judge me for being a woman/But I was born in this body,” they chant in Spanish, voice rising to a pointed shout; “I didn’t choose it and I don’t know what to do/This is out of my control.”
Many of the album’s best songs are animated by this tension. In “Habla Tu Verdad” (“Speak Your Truth”), Vargas might just as well be standing at the front of a protest march, megaphone in hand, each chanted proclamation fit for a hand-lettered sign, while Rochman channels the brightly colored synth of Midwestern techno from the late 1990s. Sometimes, the two egg each other on. In “Desatado,” Vargas lies back, their voice flat and cool, while Rochmann builds the kind of bleepy, quick-stepping beat you might have heard from Aphex Twin’s Rephlex label in the 1990s. Then, as Vargas breaks into a shout, the music crescendos too, and the beat seems on the verge of pulling apart altogether.
They have other modes: “Granadilla” is a kind of ambient spoken-word R&B, while “Caderona” fuses ’80s electro with reggaeton. Best of all might be the closing “Aquí,” an environmentalist anthem set to the lush chords of Balearic house. The mood is idyllic yet streaked with turbulence: As the steady beats cruise on, they snag and stumble; Vargas’ speaking voice, uncharacteristically placid, is periodically run through shuddering glitch effects. Throughout the album, questions of control are paramount: Who has it, and whom they wield it against. Here, Vargas declares in a matter-of-fact tone, “Nature controls us/Not vice versa,” and the song’s subtly fraught quality—lovely as a sunset, yet disturbed by a hidden undercurrent—feels like the duo’s way of acknowledging our fundamental vulnerability. | 2019-10-12T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-10-12T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Pan | October 12, 2019 | 6.9 | 0ce94267-89d3-4322-be33-bfb12bc85397 | Philip Sherburne | https://pitchfork.com/staff/philip-sherburne/ | |
Thanks to MySpace-driven publicity and a readymade backstory, this young, whipsmart Brit's mix of the Specials, the Streets, and Saint Etienne is positioned to be one of the albums of the summer. | Thanks to MySpace-driven publicity and a readymade backstory, this young, whipsmart Brit's mix of the Specials, the Streets, and Saint Etienne is positioned to be one of the albums of the summer. | Lily Allen: Alright, Still | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/9221-alright-still/ | Alright, Still | At some point soon, the internet-fueled superstar thing will no longer constitute a valid story angle. In the past four years, we've already seen pretty much every possible permutation of how empty keystrokes can beget real numbers. The most infamous examples are just that because they're neatly illustrative of how the net has swiftly undermined the machinations of the traditional system. The cases of Dizzee Rascal, Wilco, and the Arctic Monkeys alone serve as poetic reconsiderations of the practices of entire major label departments (A&R, distribution, and marketing, respectively). The only wing still standing? Publicity. Enter Lily Allen.
For all its ubiquity, MySpace had yet to yield a definitive zero-to-hero prior to Allen, but with "Smile" landing at the #1 spot on the UK singles chart a few weeks back, that's neither here nor there anymore. Since Allen started uploading a mixture of radio-ready originals, nervy covers, and links to blognerd-ready mixtapes to her MySpace page late last year, the 21-year old's profile has grown wilder than a Malcolm Gladwell ringlet. To date, she's racked up 550,000 page views, a recording contract with Parlophone/EMI, and, like her father (British actor/comedian and sometime football anthem dilettante Keith Allen) before her, a #1.
But to say that Alright, Still is interesting because it's an accomplished mainstream pop debut made by somebody who started out with broadband and an internet addiction is perhaps too facile a reading. The other day a friend was talking about a development unique to this era-- the differences between peoples' carefully cultivated online personas and their real-life selves. One might inform the other, or reject it, or reform it, or cannibalize it completely, but there's always a push/pull at the center, and the task of managing and reconciling all that on a personal level is a relatively new thing. It's just a hunch, but I think maybe one of the bonus reasons Alright, Still is compelling is because it inadvertently makes gestures to that whole phenomenon. It's a through-the-looking-glass trajectory that begins with a MySpacer who's got great tunes, good stories, and a funny way with commas, and it ends with a slickly produced pop album that isn't all that far apart from pretty much any other UK female pop singer in terms of packaging and presentation. Somewhere between those two points is truth, somewhere behind it all is real-life messiness, and I think people are enjoying figuring it out, not to mention having another familiar co-ordinate from which to put it all together.
None of which would mean much if Alright, Still wasn't fantastic. Fortunately, it's the kind of debut for which the cliché "great summer album" is happily perpetuated. Clocking in at just over 37 minutes and boasting no fewer than seven potential singles, it's an album made at the intersection of whipsmart British pop like Saint Etienne, the Specials and-– inevitably, given that both write colloquially about things like waiting in club queues and getting stoned–- the Streets. Although she's been beseiged by comparisons to the latter, it's a fair one. Allen might not rap, but she shares Mike Skinner's easy comfort with language; she's confident enough that she never overexerts herself lyrically, but she's not above risking a stupid joke either (witness "Shame for You"s wilting punchline, "Oh my God you must be joking me/ If you think that you'll be poking me"). A significant portion of Alright, Still is dedicated to verbal takedowns, with ex-boyfriends getting the brunt of the abuse, while would-be suitors and dumb girls trail behind at a distant two and three; in the wrong hands, it could all seem so petulant and bratty, but Allen's wit and cynicism sees it through.
Musically, ska, reggae, and calypso are her major touchpoints. From the dub-inflected kiss-off track "Not Big" to the skanking "Friend of Mine", there's not a lot here that doesn't use a horn sample or a guitar chug as its launching off point. As evidenced by the poison-penned "Smile" and the MySpace hit "LDN", Allen's appeal is in the way she combines those spacious, rolling sounds with A+ pop structures. When she operates outside of that comfort zone, the results are generally still of a high order, if not a bit more erratic. "Littlest Things" is a supple piano-tickler that provides one of Allen's sweetest lyrical moments while simultaneously leaving Ms. Dynamite in the dust on the R&B balladeering front, while "Everything's Just Wonderful" is the exuberant bit of cocktail pop that Geri Halliwell unsuccessfully spent her entire solo career trying to procure. Less favorably, the Madchester-flavored anthem-by-numbers "Take What You Take" reveals what Allen might sound like if she ever decided to make a run for the title of Britain's female Robbie Williams. (Perhaps not coincidentally, it's also the source of her weakest lyric.)
It's a shame that sample clearance issues likely prevented two of Allen's wickedest moments, the 50 Cent homage and Grandma Allen diss track "Nan, You're a Window Shopper" and the Origin Unknown-sampling "Cheryl Tweedy", from appearing here. Nonetheless, in terms of a debut record-- and especially given the weight of expectation placed on her to deliver something special-- Alright, Still isn't anything else but a fantastic success. Not only does Allen deliver on the musical promise hinted at in her MySpace demos, she also acquits herself as a genuine personality with wit and attitude to spare. But don't take it from me. You know how to Google-- she always was her own best PR person anyway. | 2006-07-18T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2006-07-18T02:00:01.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | Parlophone / EMI | July 18, 2006 | 8.3 | 0ce9f323-ec40-4b44-b327-155dc2e6cc4d | Mark Pytlik | https://pitchfork.com/staff/mark-pytlik/ | null |
Nick Cave’s cinematic work with his bandmate Warren Ellis is a slight departure from last decade’s trilogy of albums. It’s defined by its stark contrasts, at turns brutal, surreal, and romantic. | Nick Cave’s cinematic work with his bandmate Warren Ellis is a slight departure from last decade’s trilogy of albums. It’s defined by its stark contrasts, at turns brutal, surreal, and romantic. | Nick Cave / Warren Ellis: Carnage | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/nick-cave-warren-ellis-carnage/ | Carnage | Nick Cave sings, “This song is like a rain cloud that keeps circling overhead,” and then pauses before delivering the next line: “Here it comes around again.” This is “Carnage,” from the album of the same name, the first release credited to the duo of Cave and his longtime Bad Seeds bandmate Warren Ellis, aside from their prolific output of film scores. Just before observing the impending storm in his own music, Cave has been sitting on a balcony, perhaps outside a hotel room where a woman sprawls lazily across the bed. (We’ll find him back there later.) The balcony is one of many motifs that recur and refract across Carnage: some bags thrown in the back of a car, a Glen Campbell song, strange creatures by the side of the road, and above all, “that kingdom in the sky.” Together, these repetitions contribute to the sense that the album is less a collection of discrete songs than one long rumination in eight stages—or a circling rain cloud, coming around and around again.
Carnage comes after a remarkable trilogy of Bad Seeds releases, in which Cave and his band—among the fiercest animals in rock’n’roll, when they want to be—approached total stillness. By 2019’s Ghosteen, there were no drums and few recognizable rock instruments. Cave’s formerly narrative songwriting became impressionistic and autobiographical, sometimes seeming to embody the mysteries of life itself. Over crystalline loops of electronics and piano, he reckoned in piercing detail with the death of his teenage son Arthur in 2015, and his own search for redemption in the aftermath. It was, along with everything else, a pinnacle of his artistry, 40 years in. As a musician and as a person, where does one go from there?
For Cave and Ellis, the solution was to jettison even more cargo. They may have created Carnage as a duo partly out of pandemic necessity, but shedding the band also made good creative sense. Given the Bad Seeds’ recent trajectory, and the paring down of personnel, you might expect further exploration of Ghosteen’s meditative minimalism, and at times that is essentially what Carnage delivers. But in its most gripping and audacious moments, the album is much wilder than its predecessor. It draws from the formal language of modern cinema, concerned less with verses and choruses than images, settings, visceral portrayals of extreme emotional states. It begins on a smash cut, with a few lines of a stately Boatman’s Call-style piano ballad interrupted by a dissonant swirl of strings or electronics and an insistent mechanical pulse. Mid-lyric, Cave’s measured vocal takes on a note of terror, as if the floor opened under him and he’s tumbling into a bottomless hole of the mind.
Cave has always been attuned to the power of artifice and character, but here, more than ever, he is acting as much as singing. When he’s not delivering outright spoken monologues, he’s sticking to handfuls of close-by notes, relying on inflections of speech rather than melody for expressiveness. The most memorable part of a given line might be the implied threat beneath the force of this or that syllable, or the anxious way he draws out a particular “uhhh.” If you come to Carnage expecting the conventional virtues of rock or pop, even of Cave’s own earlier work—riffs, tunes, grooves, and so on—you will likely be disappointed. Even for those who enjoy the album, it may be hard to imagine listening particularly often. But, as is the case with plenty of great films, replay value seems beside the point.
Carnage has no plot per se, but its motifs gather force as they pile up and interact, such that listening out of order would do the album a disservice. The story they tell is a version of the one Cave has spent his whole career telling, before and after the tragedy that ruptured his personal life—about our equal capacities for cruelty and love, and the flickering possibility of salvation in a brutal world. “By the side of the road is a thing with horns/That steps back into the trees, and a child is born,” he declaims on “Old Time,” whose throbbing bass and slashes of guitar provide some of the album’s purest musical thrills. In “Carnage,” one song later, “a reindeer frozen in the footlights steps back into the woods.” Of course, headlights are what we generally picture freezing deer in their beams; footlights are more likely to illuminate performers at a theater. That sly inversion reaches back to touch the previous song, and we wonder if the child-giving horned creature by the road is a version of the singer himself.
As ever, Cave uses overtly religious imagery in ways both subversive and devout. The “kingdom in the sky” first appears in the album’s opening lines, where the foreboding music suggests we are doomed never to find it. Its final recurrence comes near the album’s end, in the dreamlike “Lavender Fields,” where a choir urges Cave’s narrator to have faith despite his loss: “Where did they go?/Where did they hide?/We don’t ask who/We don’t ask why/There is a kingdom in the sky.”
The kingdom appears most memorably between these poles, in the delirious coda to “White Elephant,” the album’s centerpiece. Over a sinister rhythm track that nearly scans as hip-hop, Cave gives a thunderous monologue in character as a sort of spiritual embodiment of white supremacy. As protesters tear down statues, his boasts become increasingly deranged. Then a drum fill and another jarring smash cut, this time to a drunken gospel-rock singalong, equally jubilant and grotesque: “The time is coming, the time is nigh/For the kingdom in the sky.” God is many things to many people, this passage suggests, and not all of them good. The album’s catchiest hook becomes an arch conceptual set piece, more unsettling than uplifting.
If Carnage’s feverish first half sometimes recalls David Lynch, its austere second is more like Terrence Malick. After “White Elephant,” the album settles into an extended comedown, both musically and lyrically. The abrupt tonal shifts recede in favor of Ghosteen-ish washes of placid harmony; Cave’s focus zooms out beyond the pained countenances and rictus grins of Side A to encompass entire cosmic landscapes. The second act is slightly less satisfying than the first, if only because it’s more clearly an extension of the last few Bad Seeds albums. But in the world of Carnage, these final four songs offer a tentative but hopeful resolution to the initial chaos. It culminates with a return to the balcony, on a morning with no storms in sight, for now. “There’s a madness in her and a madness in me/And together it forms a kind of sanity,” Cave sings atop drifting synthesizers on “Shattered Ground,” a couplet that should resonate with anyone who has passed through trouble with a partner only to find more on the way. The next line comes as a surprise every time I hear it, with a sudden, choked, almost accidental directness that only heightens its power and apparent centrality. Everything is in those five words: “Oh, baby, don’t leave me.”
Buy: Rough Trade
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Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-03-02T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2021-03-02T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock / Experimental | Goliath | March 2, 2021 | 8 | 0ceddb41-0e71-41b8-9c2d-5b5c963bcf94 | Andy Cush | https://pitchfork.com/staff/andy-cush/ | |
Producer Nigel Godrich steps out with a new band, working with Los Angeles-based producer/drummer Joey Waronker (who also does time with Godrich in Thom Yorke's Atoms for Peace) and Dimbleby & Capper vocalist Laura Bettinson. The trio's self-titled debut is a collection of dark, krautrock-indebted synth pop. | Producer Nigel Godrich steps out with a new band, working with Los Angeles-based producer/drummer Joey Waronker (who also does time with Godrich in Thom Yorke's Atoms for Peace) and Dimbleby & Capper vocalist Laura Bettinson. The trio's self-titled debut is a collection of dark, krautrock-indebted synth pop. | Ultraísta: Ultraísta | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/17124-ultraista/ | Ultraísta | After more than 15 years as a producer with some of music's biggest names, Nigel Godrich has been working with some comparative unknowns in 2012. Earlier this year, he lent his distinctive touch to Brooklyn indie outfit Here We Go Magic's third album, A Different Ship; now comes the debut album from a new band of Godrich's called Ultraísta. The group consists of Godrich and Los Angeles-based producer/drummer Joey Waronker, who've worked together on and off since Beck's 1998 album Mutations, including time in the Thom Yorke's side project Atoms for Peace. Vocalist Laura Bettinson, whom they recruited after seeing a loop-heavy performance from her electronic pop project Dimbleby & Capper, rounds out the band.
Those with knowledge of these artists' CVs won't have much trouble hearing their individual contributions to Ultraísta's smooth, krautrock-indebted synth pop. Waronker's tumbling rhythms are central, while Bettinson's layered vocals weave easily through and around the viscous synths. But it's ultimately Godrich's show, as Ultraísta's electronic squiggles and tight production bring to mind his work on Yorke's own solo set, 2006's The Eraser. Yorke's album had a distinctly gloomy, threatening tone, and Ultraísta feels similarly hermetic and overcast.
Over the course of the record, Ultraísta's atmospheric consistency turns out to be its biggest flaw. Almost every track adheres to the same formula: a complicated drum pattern to open followed by some synths or treated piano and then by Bettinson's voice, which is progressively looped and layered until the track's end. Once you've heard one of these songs, you've heard the entire record. And the dullness is driven home by Bettinson's voice, which is competent but lacks distinctiveness. Here and there she shows some versatility, like when she mixes a whisper with a holler on "Bad Insect" and conveys palpable desperation through on "Our Song". But generally, her smoky vocals sound cut-and-pasted from one of those chillout compilations that's clogged up many a used-CD music store section. She's not really saying much lyrically, either; the album's lyrics were collaboratively written by the trio, and as such they possess a factory-churned facelessness, consisting mostly of clichéd imagery and weightless invocations of passion.
To focus too much on Ultraísta's words, however, is missing the point. The group's clearly more concerned with making great sounds and creating a distinctive vibe than they are with making lasting statements. Taking that into consideration, Ultraísta succeeds on its own low-stakes terms. But while listening to it, I couldn't help but think about another album from a side project spawned by a high-profile British musician-- this year's >>, from Portishead member Geoff Barrow's knotty excercise in rock-deconstruction, Beak>. On that album, there's a genuine sense of discovery and adventurousness, a feeling of purpose that transcends the notion of a space-filling side project. Compare this with Godrich, talking recently to Consequence of Sound on Ultraísta's modest aims: "We've got a reason to be here and essentially it's just the entertainment and the fun of being able to do this-- it's a luxury, really. I mean I could be working at a fucking dry cleaners, you know what I mean?" From this perspective, the question with Ultraísta isn't so much "Why?" as it is "Why not?" | 2012-10-03T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2012-10-03T02:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | Temporary Residence Ltd. | October 3, 2012 | 6.4 | 0ceea941-ffa5-4734-a225-1ae7cff1120e | Larry Fitzmaurice | https://pitchfork.com/staff/larry-fitzmaurice/ | null |
The singer-songwriter’s second album is a raucous, messy, and celebratory song cycle about finding kinship in queer nightlife. | The singer-songwriter’s second album is a raucous, messy, and celebratory song cycle about finding kinship in queer nightlife. | Seán Barna: An Evening at Macri Park | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/sean-barna-an-evening-at-macri-park/ | An Evening at Macri Park | For as long as gay bars have existed in New York, they have lived under threat of extinction. The police brutality of the Stonewall era led to the religious right moralizing of the Reagan ascent, then the mass death and social ostracization of the AIDS catastrophe. In the current decade, iconic spaces like Therapy and Henrietta Hudson have either shuttered or had to resort to GoFundMe to survive the pandemic. Those that endure are not just drinking establishments but crucial lifelines for queer community and activism.
Macri Park may not carry the historic weight of the Stonewall Inn, but for a newer generation of queer Brooklynites, its barstools and drag nights feel like home. One of those patrons is Seán Barna, a drummer-turned-singer-songwriter with an irrepressible literary bent and a knack for fusing together queer New York’s past and present. His second album, An Evening at Macri Park, is a song cycle set in and around the Williamsburg bar, exploring what it means to find family amid “these queens and freaks I didn’t know I needed,” as he sings on “Be a Man.” It’s the kind of concept album that buzzes with a sense of place and character, rendering the United States’ most populous city as a vibrant small town.
Barna named his first album Pictures of an Exhibitionist, introducing listeners to his autobiographical storytelling and the defiantly queer characters who populate his songwriting. His extroversion and fierce need for connection remain hallmarks of his songs. On the rollicking glam standout “Sleeping With Strangers,” Barna seeks refuge in casual sex during a traumatic year, taking stock of a near-death experience with defiance and sass: “I looked death in the face/That bitch gave me a scar.” He sings in an affected croon that shares DNA with Rufus Wainwright’s, though he’s not shy about summoning the ghosts of an earlier milieu of NYC outsiders. On “Sleeping With Strangers,” he namechecks a problematic fave, trying to reconcile Lou Reed’s art with Reed’s treatment of his trans partner. On the downtown fever dream “Benjamin Whishaw Smiled,” he strides through the West Village and eyes the apartment where Bob Dylan once lived. That affordable, artist-friendly Manhattan no longer exists, but Barna is doing his best to keep the city’s bohemian underbelly alive.
Neighborhood bars can be party spots, but they’re also spaces to commiserate and share your sorrows. An Evening at Macri Park inhabits both modes, grief and joy mingled together. On “Disco Nap,” Barna finds solace in dancing, but he also alludes to the pain lurking beneath these nightlife thrills: “I will always hide my bruises with my best pearls,” he wails over Spectorian waves of orchestral grandeur. “The Lonely,” a keening ballad shorn of the album’s boisterous arrangements, is more like the tearful origin story that tumbles out as the bar empties out at last call. It’s about Barna’s memories of his early 20s, a period of mourning his brother’s death and coming to terms with his queerness: sadness and self-acceptance, never too far apart throughout the album.
This is raucous, messy, and emotionally rich music, as any art about queer nightlife ought to be. There are regrettable hook-ups (the darkwave-infused “Erotic Deficiencies” doesn’t quite land), the requisite drunken singalongs (“Thinking of You”), and weirdly triumphant run-ins with the most unexpected people (notably Counting Crows’ Adam Duritz, whose heart-on-sleeve vocals fit nicely with Barna’s aesthetic on “Be a Man” and “Sparkle When You Speak”). Its boozy atmosphere and glam-rock textures sometimes call to mind those great, mid-’70s records of exhausted debauchery, like Harry Nilsson’s Pussy Cats or Leonard Cohen’s Death of a Ladies’ Man. As on those albums, there’s a sense of a songwriter both galvanized and drained by the drunken revelry all around him. But Macri Park’s tone is more celebratory, the work of a queer man carving out community at a watering hole where everyone else is a little bit damaged, too. | 2023-05-19T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2023-05-19T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Kill Rock Stars | May 19, 2023 | 7.2 | 0cf17c95-f586-4fb3-9621-6c0b8643b32b | Zach Schonfeld | https://pitchfork.com/staff/zach-schonfeld/ | |
The prickly singer/songwriter is a little more country than rock'n'roll on this 2xCD effort, which was recorded with a backup group called the Cardinals and features vocal contributions from Rachel Yamagata. | The prickly singer/songwriter is a little more country than rock'n'roll on this 2xCD effort, which was recorded with a backup group called the Cardinals and features vocal contributions from Rachel Yamagata. | Ryan Adams / The Cardinals: Cold Roses | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/42-cold-roses/ | Cold Roses | In late 2001, Ryan Adams was inadvertently anointed the face-du-jour for "alt-country," an idea scraped off the ink-smeared pages of No Depression and tremulously shot into semi-mainstream consciousness by an over-jubilant, rural-romanticizing press: Adams' "breakthrough" record, Gold, turned out to be a lot more alt-rock than alt-country, and its proper, non-demo follow-up, 2003's spastic Rock N Roll, ditched the pedal steel altogether, embracing, instead, overblown riffs and smarmy vocal mugging. Cold Roses, which follows two weepy acoustic EPs (2003's Love Is Hell Parts One and Two), sees Adams trudging back to his country roots, turning up the twang, curling his cowboy boots into cold, east village pavement, and transforming his frantic yawps into star-fed cries.
Even for Adams' most zealous fans, hunting down new material has never been a particularly pressing concern: The two-disc Cold Roses is one of (a vaguely audacious) three full-length releases planned for 2005 (Jacksonville City Nights is slated to arrive this summer, with 29 expected in the fall), and while Adams has never been an especially sharp judge of his own work, Cold Roses suffers considerably from its double-disc conceit. Overstuffed and vaguely monotonous, the album could be easily whittled down to a single sequence of impressive songs; Instead, it's a meandering, occasionally moving series of mid-tempo laments, some more memorable than others.
Despite ample backing by the Cardinals (guitarists J.P. Bowersock and Cindy Cashdollar, drummer Brad Pemberton, and bassist Catherine Popper; with singer-songwriter Rachael Yamagata, formerly of Chicago's Bumpus, taking guest turns on "Cold Roses" and "Let It Ride"), Cold Roses doesn't feel particularly collaborative; followers of Adams' solo work will recognize loads of parallels to Adams' post-Whiskeytown, 2000 solo debut, Heartbreaker (minus the punk throwdowns).
Cold Roses' most palpable reference point may be American Beauty-era Grateful Dead: Excellent opener "Magnolia Mountain" mixes slow, "Box of Rain" melancholy ("If the morning don't come/ Will you lie to me?/ Will you take me to your bed and lay me down?") with Adams' trademark guitar scrapes and sandpapered howls, while "Cold Roses" is packed with giddy guitar noodling and jam-friendly interludes (even Adams' vocals seem deliberately Garcia-infused, straining and paper-thin, careening off into a smoke-filled sunset.) Meanwhile, nearly every bit of electric guitar on Cold Roses sounds as though it was plucked straight from Dick's vault, all wiggly solos and playful licks, unintentional and woozy.
Lead single "Let It Ride" bounces, proudly shuffling through a laundry-list of country requirements: whining steel guitar, longing mentions of Tennessee and Carolina, nods to the Cumberland River and ferryboats, big, lonesome wails. But "Let It Ride" also employs plenty of weird, Ennio Morricone-inspired western guitar whirls, and Adams' coaxing vocals are undeniable, charmingly sincere and innocent: The resulting song is properly engaging, more classic country than alt-anything.
"Cherry Lane" employs honky-tonk yawping and girl-gone words ("The glass/ It hits the floor" is accompanied by requisite glass-shattering sound effects), while the preciously titled "How Do You Keep Love Alive" mopes along, wearied and oddly pretty, half-sung over a languishing piano line. Adams' songwriting proclivities have always flirted with MOR, adult-alternative sappiness, but for the most part, Cold Roses is clever and uncommonly listenable, far less bombastic and contrived than its predecessor. Even lyrically, Adams is modest and cautiously confessional, careful to avoid the cocky caterwauling that invades much of his back catalogue.
Tellingly, Cold Roses is the first Ryan Adams record not to feature a picture of him on the cover; it's increasingly difficult to say exactly when Adams transitioned from bloated media darling to scrappy underdog, but it happened, and he commandeered the passage all by himself, squirming away from the overblown antics of yesteryear and embracing, instead, the staid earnestness of his roots. It's a welcome return. | 2005-05-03T01:00:05.000-04:00 | 2005-05-03T01:00:05.000-04:00 | Rock / Folk/Country | Lost Highway | May 3, 2005 | 7.2 | 0cf1e6b2-027d-4f25-9437-1ac1d0cc2950 | Amanda Petrusich | https://pitchfork.com/staff/amanda-petrusich/ | null |
Brooklyn-based label Orchid Tapes was founded in 2010 by Warren Hildebrand, who's also behind the dreamy Foxes in Fiction project. Boring Ecstasy: The Bedroom Pop of Orchid Tapes serves as a strong introduction to this tight-knit community, and highlights what makes it stand out during a time when anyone with Internet access can conceivably start a label. | Brooklyn-based label Orchid Tapes was founded in 2010 by Warren Hildebrand, who's also behind the dreamy Foxes in Fiction project. Boring Ecstasy: The Bedroom Pop of Orchid Tapes serves as a strong introduction to this tight-knit community, and highlights what makes it stand out during a time when anyone with Internet access can conceivably start a label. | Various Artists: Boring Ecstasy: The Bedroom Pop of Orchid Tapes | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/19254-boring-ecstasy-the-bedroom-pop-of-orchid-tapes/ | Boring Ecstasy: The Bedroom Pop of Orchid Tapes | When the artists releasing music through Brooklyn-based label Orchid Tapes talk about the imprint, it sounds like they are describing a support group instead of a business. “It’s the idea that anything good enough, no matter how much publicity or fans the artist has gathered, deserves love and attention,” said Infinity Crush's Caroline White in a recent interview. “It feels like a bunch of friends.” Boring Ecstasy: The Bedroom Pop of Orchid Tapes serves as a strong introduction to this tight-knit community, and highlights what makes it stand out during a time when anyone with Internet access can conceivably start a label.
A devotion to intimacy and earnestness unites the musicians on Orchid Tapes, and those qualities have been part of the label’s DNA since Warren Hildebrand, who's also behind the dreamy Foxes in Fiction project, founded Orchid Tapes in 2010. Initially, he created it as a way to release his debut album Swung From the Branches in a physical format), but soon Hildebrand connected with other bedroom-based artists via Myspace. Since then, his label's released music from the likes of Coma Cinema and Ricky Eat Acid, whose Three Love Songs served as their first vinyl release earlier this year.
Ricky Eat Acid kicks off Boring Ecstasy with “Can You See It’s Bloom”, a woozy ambient-pop track that is one of two instrumental songs here. The other, Los Angeles producer Meishi Smile’s “Sincerity”, bookends the compilation on a fluttery, bittersweet note. The collection never settles for one particular style, instead letting each artist construct their own world without having to worry what’s happening around them, so the back-porch strumming of Alex G’s “Cards” co-exists peacefully with the drum-machine jitters of Julia Brown’s “Without You”.
The thread that ties many of Boring Ecstasy's contributors together is a neck-breathing closeness. Hildebrand’s contribution as Foxes in Fiction, “Rearrange”, slowly builds up from washes of guitar, but even as the music ebbs and flows, his words float through. Wisconsin-born, Berlin-based artist Yohuna delivers one of Boring Ecstasy’s most memorable cuts with the slow-burning “Badges,” which mixes synthesizers with her stretched-out vocals to create something radiating warmth.
There are missteps: Euphoria Again’s “Change” is one of the most stripped-down numbers here, but it lags, while The Sweater I Gave You’s “Nobody’s Baby” is too cluttered, taking away from the Oregon project’s usual charm. Daniel Abary’s Four Visions makes the noisier approach work better on “Hazy Past”, an appropriately fuzz-tinged song prone to moments of clatter that constantly shifts instead of succumbing to tedium. Infinity Crush’s “Spoiled” is nothing more than White’s singing and some guitar, but she delivers both with unblinking directness, punctuated by self-targeted lines like “I feel like shit/ We know, get over it.”
“Spoiled’s” lyrics touch on the other important aesthetic pillar of the artists affiliated with Orchid Tapes: they aren’t shy about baring their feelings*, so Boring Ecstasy* focuses on love gained and lost, usually against the backdrop of everyday happenings. “What’s the point of the leaves changing color/ I can’t watch them change with you,” Julia Brown’s Sam Ray sings on "Without You", the words out of step with the music surrounding it, underlining the desperation contained within. “The overall idea that we try to go for is releasing music by people who are really dedicated and put a lot of themselves into their music and don't try to follow any passing Internet trends or anything,” Hildebrand told Interview Magazine, and that comes through on Boring Ecstasy, a collection of music from bedroom artists unafraid to lean in close and expose their feelings, all while never sounding one bit alienating. | 2014-04-23T02:00:04.000-04:00 | 2014-04-23T02:00:04.000-04:00 | null | Orchid Tapes | April 23, 2014 | 7.3 | 0cf56e96-84d0-4853-a41a-72a113ae08ff | Patrick St. Michel | https://pitchfork.com/staff/patrick-st. michel/ | null |
The NYC-based singer-songwriter Zachary Cale has released four albums in four years, and they all take place somewhere reliable and soothing. On his newest, he has a full band*,* one that confidently evokes dream pop and country rock, and he luxuriates in their sound. | The NYC-based singer-songwriter Zachary Cale has released four albums in four years, and they all take place somewhere reliable and soothing. On his newest, he has a full band*,* one that confidently evokes dream pop and country rock, and he luxuriates in their sound. | Zachary Cale: Duskland | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/20705-duskland/ | Duskland | Duskland is a good name for a Zachary Cale album. Duskland would be a good name for all Zachary Cale albums. The NYC-based singer-songwriter has released four of them in four years, and they all take place somewhere similar. They are reliable and soothing, like old-fashioneds: Mix a little barely-perceptible organ hum and faraway slide guitars of '90s Yo La Tengo with the reedy voice of Cass McCombs, twist a few melancholic turns of phrase, and you will arrive at the place Zachary Cale is transmitting from. It's an inviting spot.
His last album, 2013's Blue Rider, glides well into this one: You can cue them up and lose yourself in a pleasant haze for a couple of hours and not take immediate notice where they end. Cale probably wouldn't be offended by the suggestion: His 2011 collection was called Noise of Welcome, and so was a song on 2013's Blue Rider. He likes "blue": besides Blue Rider, Duskland has a "Blue Moth". The crisp, palm-muted acoustic strumming pattern on "I Left the Old Cell" is pretty-damn-near identical to the one on "Hold Fast" from Blue Rider. He repeats himself, but it doesn't make his music feel redundant, just identifiable as his own.
Squint into the haze, however, and you'll discern moving parts in these simple and rootsy songs that help them resonate. "Sundowner" has a softly complicated arrangement—organs chime at different levels in the mix, playing different chord voicings, and somewhere in that rosy glow, a steady piano pulses. Cale's solo acoustic playing usually covers all corners of an arrangement, from backbeat and melody to counterpoint. But he has a full band on Duskland, one that confidently evokes dream pop and country rock, and he luxuriates in their sound.
There are some horns on "Low Light Serenade" (another very on-the-nose song title) that might have come from a Matthew E. White production, or Phosphorescent's last album. Cale makes good company with those artists, but his essence feels a little more elusive. Sometimes, that's just because it's often hard to make out what he is singing, even though his voice is mixed high; you can listen to a song multiple times, and only catch a few phrases. His singing is also odd, drawing out notes that don't seem obvious and hitching unexpectedly at others. He sits just far enough away from you. He's close enough to draw your attention, but far enough away to make you lean forward and follow him. | 2015-08-13T02:00:04.000-04:00 | 2015-08-13T02:00:04.000-04:00 | Folk/Country | No Quarter | August 13, 2015 | 7.1 | 0cf6d53d-7fdc-40da-ae10-1f0c15e2b7e4 | Jayson Greene | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jayson-greene/ | null |
Migos are both natural descendents of Atlanta's florid coke rap cottage industry and purveyors of something defiantly stranger. On the surface, Young Rich Niggas appears to traffic in slight, hooky pop rap, but the abundance of aesthetic and lyrical quirks here also genuflect to rap’s frayed outskirts. | Migos are both natural descendents of Atlanta's florid coke rap cottage industry and purveyors of something defiantly stranger. On the surface, Young Rich Niggas appears to traffic in slight, hooky pop rap, but the abundance of aesthetic and lyrical quirks here also genuflect to rap’s frayed outskirts. | Migos: Y.R.N. (Young Rich Niggas) | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/18264-migos-yrn-young-rich-niggas/ | Y.R.N. (Young Rich Niggas) | The guest list for Young Rich Niggas, the new mixtape from emerging Atlanta trap trio Migos, is short but telling: in 19 tracks, there are guest spots from Gucci Mane, trap scene evergreen and early supporter of breakout stars like Waka Flocka and Future whose revolving door Brick Squad collective currently counts Chief Keef and Young Thug as members; Soulja Boy, spirit guide and occasional symbiote for weird rap mainstays like Lil B and Young L of the Pack; and Trinidad James and Riff Raff, whose left-of-center theatrics have brought their authenticity as well as their worth as lyricists into constant review. Migos are both natural descendents of Atlanta's florid coke rap cottage industry and purveyors of something defiantly stranger. On the surface, Young Rich Niggas appears to traffic in slight, hooky pop rap, but the abundance of aesthetic and lyrical quirks here also genuflect to rap’s frayed outskirts.
Young Rich Niggas’ lyric sheet is a vast expanse of trap house platitudes, but Quavo, Offset, and Takeoff’s absurdist humor sets these songs apart from the pack. “China Town” juggles plentiful references to Asian culture-- Honda, Mortal Kombat, Manny Pacquiao-- hilariously failing to hit on anything legitimitely Chinese. Mixtape highlight “Hannah Montana” is a flurry of bald-faced boasts about proficiency at dealing drugs, but the codenames for the product are all culled from white female TV, movie, and pop stars. It’s the song’s chorus that illuminates Migos’ incontrovertible weirdness, though. At the end of each verse Quavo bludgeons the mix shouting “Hannah Montana! Hannah Montana! Hannah Montana! Hannah Montana!” until he’s driven home the principal silliness of the word combo. Migos' choruses work like that a lot of the time: the badgering, hypnotic repetition of “Trapped out the bando” on “Bando” and the comically insistent “Versace/ Versace Versace/ Versace Versace” refrain of “Versace” warp each phrase in your mind until they hit the ear like something other than English, hammering hooks home with the manic urgency of toy commercials.
If that seems like a shaky foundation for an hour-long mixtape, know that Migos’ bag of rhyme schemes is more varied and adventurous than simple catchphrase repetition: Young Rich Niggas houses capable double-time speed trials like “Cook It Up”, brawlers like “Hannah Montana” and “China Town”, the half-baked self-satisfied stunting of “Bando”, dalliances with sung hooks on “Adios” and Auto-Tune experimentation on “Finesser” and “Pronto”. And for all its smart alecky veneer, Y.R.N. is shot through with a palpable darkness that comes to a head at the end of the tape: there's the one-two punch of “R.I.P.”, an ode to Future’s recently deceased Freeband Gang associate OG Double D, and “Thank You God (Outro)”, a rags-to-riches yarn that charts Migos’ progression from childhood adversity (“Daddy was a hospital patient/ Next thing you know he ain’t make it”) to financial comfort that’s couched in the self-flagellating remorse of Offset’s proclamation that he “sinned every day just to get this success.”
Migos’ deceptively simple lyricism favors production that follows suit. Trap’s booming 808s and ticking hi-hats are still present, but where the production of, say, a Rick Ross song is designed to blurt out of speakers like a battering ram pushed it through, Y.R.N. shoots for pared down productions that highlight the strengths of the songwriting. The staccato synth blips on Zaytoven’s “Versace” beat race against the lyrics laid over them. The plodding piano line on “Adios” walks in lock step with its sung hook. Dun Deal fades the foreboding bells and guitars of “Hannah Montana” after each verse, punching up Quavo’s frantic chorus for maximum effect. Guest MCs similarly fold into the songs where they’re featured. Gucci Mane goes along with the gummy Auto-Tune shtick of “Dennis Rodman”, and Trinidad James and Riff Raff’s contributions to “Out Da Gym” are surprisingly reserved. (Drake jumped on a remix of “Versace” last week and coopted the Migos cadence with childlike zeal.) The willingness of Migos’ collaborators to follow their lead feels like a vote of confidence in their sound, a rarity in a time of rap game Frankenstein’s monsters like A$AP Rocky’s “Fuckin’ Problems” and Kanye West’s remix of Chief Keef’s “Don’t Like”, releases that played like pic-stitches of the artists’ famous friends.
Young Rich Niggas finds Migos perfecting their sound even as they bristle at it, and the tape rarely delivers anything resembling a failure. The subject matter can be suffocating in its cavalier depravity, especially on tracks like “FEMA”, which employs a heavy-handed metaphor comparing one’s speed at whipping up crack to the movements of Hurricane Katrina, and Migos’ kingpin fantasies also hit a few sour notes racially speaking. (See: Y.R.N.’s bottomless stream of Latin names for cocaine connects and “China Town”, whose adventures in drug smuggling are periodically punctuated by gross “ching chong” ad libs.) Y.R.N.’s indiscretions are usually, mercifully scant, however, and the group never approaches this material with anything less than an affable, good-natured goofiness. With Young Rich Niggas, Migos have peeled the gruff exterior off of trap and revealed the giddy, catchy party music underfoot. | 2013-07-02T02:00:02.000-04:00 | 2013-07-02T02:00:02.000-04:00 | Rap | null | July 2, 2013 | 7.4 | 0cf95684-5986-4680-a59b-2208f58fcd98 | Craig Jenkins | https://pitchfork.com/staff/craig-jenkins/ | null |
The new Rage Against the Machine/Public Enemy/Cypress Hill supergroup is a harmless if not crass experiment that amounts to a bad cover band playing songs they actually wrote. | The new Rage Against the Machine/Public Enemy/Cypress Hill supergroup is a harmless if not crass experiment that amounts to a bad cover band playing songs they actually wrote. | Prophets of Rage: The Party's Over EP | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22319-the-partys-over-ep/ | The Party's Over EP | Picture yourself this past weekend at the Mohegan Sun Casino in Uncasville, Connecticut. You kicked off Friday night by celebrating Brody Jenner’s birthday at Avalon and then made a preemptive strike against a Patron-induced hangover at Bow & Arrow Sports Bar with some Philly Cheesesteak Egg Rolls dipped in chipotle ketchup. Maybe you had a lucky streak at the slots on Saturday afternoon and blew your winnings at Yankee Candle before an afternoon nap and a chance to see Black Sabbath as part of their “farewell, for real this time” End Tour. And to cap it all off, you watched 75% of Rage Against the Machine, Public Enemy’s Chuck D, and Cypress Hill’s B-Real do rap-metal retoolings of “Shut ‘em Down” and “Killing in the Name,” getting a chance to scream, “Fuck you I won’t do what you tell me!” with 10,000 others in Sun Arena before slumping back to work on Monday.
It does make Prophets of Rage come off as five guys turning some of the most incendiary music to ever hit the radio into a crass if not harmless nostalgia trip, so why not make some “more like profits of rage, amirite?” jokes and file it next to the CBGB Lounge and Bar in the Newark Airport, and the $225 *Unknown Pleasures *T-shirt at Barney’s? Because this would be a grave misunderstanding of Prophets of Rage. “Dangerous times demand dangerous songs,” their website declares, an admirable statement if Tom Morello had any new rage directed at any new machines that have arisen since his band’s 1992 debut. But despite pop music being politically weaponized to a degree unseen since the ’70s, it’s painfully clear that Prophets of Rage believe they alone can fix it. Their shockingly flimsy EP *The Party’s Over *risks nothing and hangs nobody. They’re either ignoring the past 23 years or even worse, they have nothing at all to say about it.
A generous reading of *The Party’s Over—*four reworks of the collective’s best-known songs and a barely-there title track—shows the timelessness of Public Enemy and Rage Against the Machine’s earliest works, music that felt truly dangerous when it bum-rushed MTV with Aerosmith and Meat Loaf videos still in heavy rotation. The systemic pathologies that inspired *It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back *and *Fear of a Black Planet *are still very much intact, and while Rage Against the Machine soundtracked more chest days than May Days, their visceral impact is still undeniable. These inflammatory times grant Prophets of Rage a tremendous opportunity to use their material as proxies for new discussions. “911 is a Joke” could be extended to implicate the utter failure of public services in the neighborhoods where they're needed the most; “Night of the Living Baseheads” might be reconfigured to tackle new forms of misunderstood drug addiction and price gouging; and what would be better than a Rage-style rework of “She Watch Channel Zero?!” a song that already samples Slayer?
But none of this would likely fly at Barclay’s Center, BB&T Pavilion, EagleBank Arena or any of the other monuments to financial oligarchy in which the band currently performs. On what essentially serves as tour promo, Prophets of Rage shut up and play the hits: The Rage songs don’t rage against any specific machine and the Public Enemy songs could pass for Rage songs. The title track and “Shut ‘em Down,” now fused with variations on “Guerrilla Radio,” could just as easily be shouting the praises of the Denver Broncos’ defensive line as shouting down Nike’s lack of investment in black neighborhoods. And while the black militant theater of the S1Ws and the Bomb Squad’s production conveyed a sense of clear and present danger to white America, they’ve been replaced by Dave Grohl giving the Black Power sign in a full-band portrait and Morello doing his “no keyboards, ma” routine. Two decades on, the once innovative guitarist becomes the sound of teens safely working out their angst in suburban garages.
*The Party’s Over *is unlistenable to anyone who has a meaningful relationship with the originals, either due to the suspect politics of Prophets of Rage, or the fact that they’re simply a bad cover band playing songs they actually wrote. Since it’s essentially the same format as Audioslave, one would assume Prophets of Rage would be superior to Audioslave on account of not being Audioslave. Whatever your opinions on the merits of “Cochise” compared to “Fight the Power,” Chris Cornell is more suited to the strengths of Rage’s rhythm section than Chuck D, B-Real or basically any rapper who isn’t Zach de la Rocha. While DJ Muggs and the Bomb Squad made memorable use of metal, Public Enemy and Cypress Hill’s music always came back to funk. Rage Against the Machine could never groove worth shit and everything here is subject to the same militaristic plod and pentatonic riffs that would actually make Prophets of Rage a pretty convincing Lex Luger cover band.
As such, Chuck and B-Real are both overworked and unchallenged, straining like people trying to jog as slowly as possible. Not even taking the shoddy recording of the live tracks into account, the bigger issue is that Chuck D raps like de la Rocha’s simplified sloganeering is beneath him, which it is. Meanwhile, at some point, B-Real figures he’s supposed to take on the Flavor Flav role and can’t seem to decide what to make of the situation. He makes a game attempt to slightly revise the second verse of “Killing in the Name” (“Some of those *up in Congress/*Are the same that burn crosses”), but mostly sounds uninterested in making another rap-metal album 16 years after his last one. No one sounds like they’re having any fun here—Chuck and B-Real can’t even muster a convincing “Motherfucker!” at the end of “Killing in the Name.”
The bigger issue is that while Morello claims, “We’ve come back to remind everyone what raging against the machine really means,” The Party’s Over has nothing to say about Black Lives Matter, Freddie Gray, Trayvon Martin, subprime loans, North Carolina law HB 2, continuing bloodshed in Chicago, or even Donald Trump (indications suggest their live show is no more revealing of their actual platform). The title track makes passing reference to the Illuminati and war machines and that's the only thing they've written in the 21st century. And while “No Sleep Til Cleveland” is indeed a “Fight the Power”/Beastie Boys mashup performed at the Republican National Convention, they didn’t even bother to change the actual hook to “no sleep til Cleveland.”
Mind you, that’s a Beastie Boys song from their Licensed to Ill* *days about drinking and fucking anything that moves while on tour—weirdly apt in this setting, seeing as how there’s far more “Fight For Your Right to Party” than “Party For Your Right to Fight” in Prophets of Rage. Consider that AWOLNATION is, for some reason, their opening act on their “Make America Rage Again Tour,” a meme so played out that the band Filter got to it first. But even if the message of Prophets of Rage is vastly different than Donald Trump’s, they’re engaging in the same exact form of communication—wielding both bullhorn and a dog whistle, yelling as loudly as possible only to people who are predisposed to hear it. | 2016-08-31T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-08-31T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Caroline | August 31, 2016 | 2 | 0cfa670c-dd96-412b-abb0-3f86ced269fc | Ian Cohen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ian-cohen/ | null |
Amid attention from mainstream hip-hop, the Glasgow producer's latest shows he has improved markedly since 2009 debut Butter. | Amid attention from mainstream hip-hop, the Glasgow producer's latest shows he has improved markedly since 2009 debut Butter. | Hudson Mohawke: Satin Panthers EP | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/15685-satin-panthers-ep/ | Satin Panthers EP | Hudson Mohawke's recent output-- a bonkers remix of Wiley's "Electric Boogaloo", a handful of decent edits on his Soundcloud-- has been enough to catch relatively high-profile ears. Not long ago, the Glasgow producer (real name: Ross Birchard) received a ridiculously glowing Twitter shout-out from hip-hop head-knocker Just Blaze, and Chris Brown jumped on an old HudMo track. Still, in a way it's surprising Mohawke has received any level of popularity beyond beat freaks and Warp roster-checkers. His 2009 debut LP, Butter, didn't exactly flow like the melted yellow stuff; it was an unfocused mix of future-R&B pastiche and jumbled funk experimentation.
Good thing for second chances. Mohawke's new Satin Panthers EP shows the kind of improvement that a couple of years in the lab will do for you. His music is still jumbled-sounding, but rather than being sneakily complicated, this record is obviously so; the fact it all works so well is the sneaky part. Mohawke packs in oodles of genre- and artist-specific tics: the hard-hitting repetition of Chicago juke, the sharp melodic tang of Bristol's "purple" scene, the sticky swarm of Los Angeles-era Flying Lotus, the light-cycle chaos of hip-hop producer Lex Luger, and the galloping rhythms of UK funky. Which might sound like the recipe for a total mess, except HudMo combines every ingredient expertly.
One complaint: The EP's 17-minute run time feels too brief. Luckily, Satin Panthers offers more than enough to tide listeners over until a potential follow-up album, whether the double-octave bass line on "Thunder Bay" or the building synth spirals on "Octan". The closing track, a burst of marching-band mania, is called "Thank You", but when all's said and done, there's a lot of gratitude to go around here. | 2011-08-01T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2011-08-01T02:00:01.000-04:00 | Electronic | Warp | August 1, 2011 | 7.6 | 0cfe7e75-da7b-4a79-8384-2d8d45b93dea | Larry Fitzmaurice | https://pitchfork.com/staff/larry-fitzmaurice/ | null |
Following on this three Art Dealer Chic EPs, the young Los Angeles-based R&B singer and songwriter has come into his own. Kaleidoscope Dream is a gem of an album, respectful of tradition, quietly ambitious, and deeply personal. | Following on this three Art Dealer Chic EPs, the young Los Angeles-based R&B singer and songwriter has come into his own. Kaleidoscope Dream is a gem of an album, respectful of tradition, quietly ambitious, and deeply personal. | Miguel: Kaleidoscope Dream | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/17125-kaleidoscope-dream/ | Kaleidoscope Dream | Since his debut in 2010 with the outstanding "Sure Thing", the young Los Angeles singer/songwriter Miguel has been something of a for-the-R&B-heads-only sleeper star. He showed up armed with a guitar, an endearing croon that is both virtuosic and everyman, a coiffed haircut, and a slightly retro sensibility. His voice is an elastic thing that's rarely used to excessive effect; he avoids the histrionic R. Kelly worship of so many of his compatriots in favor of the school of smooth Sam Cooke ad-libs. And though his lyrics are full of silly puns and earnest platitudes, he takes sex very seriously: He's a happily-married man in a genre full of lascivious bachelors, and his best music radiates maturity, self-assured and confident but rarely showy. But despite his obvious talent, he hasn't quite been able to break through to a wider audience.
Miguel's 2010 debut album, All I Want Is You, was flanked with some stellar singles but weighed down by a lack of identity as he flitted from producer to producer. It sounded like he couldn't decide whether he wanted to be a Salaam Remi faux-nostalgia crooner or a smart hip-hop crossover star, and the indecision hung over the record like a cloud (it didn't perform well commercially either). He returned earlier this year with a free trio of EPs under the self-conscious title of Art Dealer Chic, showing a newfound entrepreneurial sensibility and a streak of independence. Those mostly self-produced songs at times sounded like rough sketches, but they made it up for it by sounding personal and liberated from the demands of the industry. Free and widely available, they earned him some well-deserved re-examination. They also contained his best songs to date. And now, with his second full-length, he's delivered on that early promise.
Kaleidoscope Dream starts off with "Adorn", also found on the first Art Dealer Chic EP. It's one of the giddiest love songs of the year, a track where ecstatic infatuation is hemmed in by Miguel's understated vocal dexterity, and this album feels like its proper context. He rockets off into falsetto for irresistibly brief moments, and a new outro spirals elegant, trained vocal gymnastics around the song's chorus. "Adorn" also showcases Miguel's secret weapon: modesty. It's definitively, deceptively simple, a nugget of concentrated sunshine, and not necessarily all that original. But I'll be damned if it doesn't pull you in and make you feel it.
That touch of modesty colors most of Kaleidoscope Dream. There's the tender "Use Me" where he admits being nervous about having sex with the lights on. Even more affecting is the acoustic murmur "Pussy Is Mine", which deflates masculinized hip-hop tropes with insecurity, pleading, "Tell me that the pussy is mine/ 'Cause I don't wanna believe that anyone is just like me." The sentiment turns sardonic on the Ryan Leslie-like jaunt of "How Many Drinks?", where gorgeous falsetto verses are offset by uncertain pleas of "I don't wanna waste my time."
The plush, lightly psychedelic production buffers the record's more barebones moments, and Miguel's precocious vocals take flight on the bombast rather than drowning in it. Standout "Do You..." unfolds in an ethereal cloud of synth, voices streaming like angelic choirs before stumbling into a verse buoyed by its own euphoria. Not many singers could get away with lines like "What about matinee movies/ Pointless secrets/ Midnight summer swim, private beaches/ Rock, paper, scissors/ Wait! best outta three!" It's the stuff of unbearable rom-com montages, but Miguel's playful delivery brings it over. He's the rare vocalist who makes you feel what he's singing about, even when his lyrics can be transparent. When he wants to sound deadly serious, he's on the verge of tears; when he's happy, he's practically laughing as he sings.
Kaleidoscope Dream has elements of the sort of tasteful R&B record that the Grammys love, but much like Beyoncé's 4, it cuts through its own statuesque stateliness with raw emotion reined in by an ever-present sense of professionalism. And it succeeds in part because it sounds like Miguel's album and no one else's. There are no intrusive guest appearances, and the record sounds even less of its time than the first, reveling in its own contextual vacuum with abandon. Though there are some unexpected choices. Like "Don't Look Back", which is propped up by grand synth runs before melting into an interpolation of the Zombies' "Time of the Season". That song's musky psychedelia is a good example of the record's overarching theme, the highly sexualized seen through the lens of the eager and innocent.
When Miguel isn't accompanied by glossy synths, the music is all about intimacy. Take "Arch & Point"-- with a simple rasp, strum, and metronome, it sounds like it was recorded in the very bedroom it's ostensibly taking place in. "When it feels this good then it just comes natural," he insists, and there's not a better ethos for where his career stands at this point. Emerging unscathed from middling mainstream performance, Kaleidoscope Dream sounds, at its utmost, natural and easy, an artist set free to do what he wants and proving himself every bit the unique voice his debut seemed to deny. It's respectful of tradition, quietly ambitious, and deeply personal, a wonderfully considered album from an artist who was starting to seem a lot like a forgotten gem in the wake of mishandled promotion. | 2012-10-04T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2012-10-04T02:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | RCA | October 4, 2012 | 8.4 | 0d029321-fe00-4436-a32d-5f2080610559 | Andrew Ryce | https://pitchfork.com/staff/andrew-ryce/ | null |
For most of the first 45 seconds of Chilean producer Ricardo Villalobos' debut album Alcachofa the only sound is provided ... | For most of the first 45 seconds of Chilean producer Ricardo Villalobos' debut album Alcachofa the only sound is provided ... | Villalobos: Alcachofa | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/8506-alcachofa/ | Alcachofa | For most of the first 45 seconds of Chilean producer Ricardo Villalobos' debut album Alcachofa the only sound is provided by a vocodered voice. But rather than using that device to turn man into the sheen of a playful disco machine, Villalobos' treated vocal on opener "Easy Lee" is murky, weighted down by reverb and doubt. It frequently trails off at the end of words and sentences. It's exhausted. And when the thump and snap of light 4/4 rhythms accompany it, it sounds even more submerged, as if it's trying to keep its head above water.
Villalobos approaches the admittedly wide and increasingly nebulous net of tech-house as if 2002 never happened-- no The Present Lover, no All That Glitters, no Digital Disco, no Total 4. That's certainly not bad, it's just another tangent for this ever-pulsating sound. The odd thing is that even without getting in touch with his inner pop child, Villalobos has landed in the same general area as the Tied to the 80s retro futurists: a delicate mix of nuance and melody. It's sort of the morning-after-- or possibly the walk home from the club, the how soon is now?-- to all of those of shiny, hands-aloft nights out. And Villalobos isn't the only producer taking this route. It's also one traveled by Luciano and the suddenly prolific Matthew Dear, whose Ghostly International releases-- EP1 and EP2, and his upcoming Leave Luck to Heaven album-- all demonstrate a similar approach to tech-house.
The roots of the Villalobos' music-- which can also be found on his own outstanding mix albums Love Family Trax and Taka Take, Perlon's Superlongevity compilation, and a series of 12-inch releases under his own name and as half of Ric y Martin-- lie in the Kompakt label's ambient beginnings and Basic Channel and the rest of the minimalist Berlin crowd. Like the Berliners, he wades through gurgling, delicate pools of dubby bliss. His mix of groove and nuance seems somehow warm and cold at the same time, a very human expression of somber emotions. Its bittersweet tone is compounded by a blend of the familiar (the self-deprecating vocals almost direct house of "What You Say is More Than I Can Say", the late-night speedway of "Y.G.H.") and the unexpected ("Waiworinao"'s chugging guitar, the polyrhythmic "Fools Garden (Black Conga)").
One setback is that the set misses perhaps his most beloved track, "808 the Bassqueen", although that may not have matched the record's tone. What is recycled from previous releases includes "Dexter", lifted from Taka Taka, and the aforementioned "What You Say is More Than I Can Say", which appears here as an edited version of the track, originally released on the Halma 12-inch.
One of the few vocal tracks, the me-against-the-world of "I Try to Live (Can I Live)", perhaps best illustrates the hesitancy, doubt, and weariness that drifts through Alcachofa. There and elsewhere throughout the record, Villalobos seems to be seeking comfort and finding it in small moments, in the nooks and crannies of the sound rather the more traditional heart-pumping moments explored by many tech-house producers over the past year or so. Instead, at Alcachofa's heart beats a more steady rhythm, pumping out fragile melodies painted with small yet precise brushstrokes. | 2003-09-18T01:00:04.000-04:00 | 2003-09-18T01:00:04.000-04:00 | null | Playhouse | September 18, 2003 | 8.1 | 0d039630-ded5-4c45-b96b-fca7f6b41427 | Scott Plagenhoef | https://pitchfork.com/staff/scott-plagenhoef/ | null |
On his first full solo release on Planet Mu in nine years, veteran IDM producer Mike Paradinas looks to the past, pairing jungle breaks with sugary synths. | On his first full solo release on Planet Mu in nine years, veteran IDM producer Mike Paradinas looks to the past, pairing jungle breaks with sugary synths. | µ-Ziq: Magic Pony Ride | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/mu-ziq-magic-pony-ride/ | µ-Ziq: Magic Pony Ride | Thirty years after the release of Warp’s first Artificial Intelligence compilation, the specter of IDM persists. Though the notion of club music made for home listening might feel pedestrian at a time when chilled-out, focus-oriented electronica fuels the streaming industry, the names of the movement’s originators still hold weight today. Aphex Twin’s insignia appears on the cover art of frenzied digicore singles. Gen Z’s new wave of retrofuturist rave producers cite Venetian Snares and Squarepusher as influences. Save for exceptions like Autechre, most of the folks deserving of a spot on IDM’s Mount Rushmore drop new material in infrequent bursts, often adhering to the glitchy palette of their early work. Like veteran jazz artists or jam bands, they work within their brain-tickling, technically proficient wheelhouse—they still churn out good stuff, but it’s functionally dad rock for lapsed ravers.
That’s quite literally the case for Mike Paradinas: father of two, Planet Mu labelhead, and the mastermind behind pioneering IDM project μ-Ziq. The English producer’s once prolific output has slowed to a drip since the mid aughts, as looking after his family and signees has taken up the majority of his time. The expert knob twiddling of Paradinas’ early career has thus been replaced by nudging the cursor on his laptop, an occasional pastime during rare moments of leisure. Magic Pony Ride, his first full record of solo tracks on Planet Mu since 2013, came together last year after his kids returned to school.
Though his fusion of dense, mechanical rhythm and baroque orchestration is almost always recognizable, μ-Ziq’s albums reveal the essence of the tools that shaped them, like a clay impression. During the peak of Paradinas’ productivity in the mid-’90s, works like Bluff Limbo proudly bore the scars of conflict between his Atari ST and analog tape, gritty breakbeats leaving welts. After a rough decade of transition from hardware to Logic plugins, 2013’s Chewed Corners marked the beginning of a creative resurgence. Taking cues from the squad of Chicago footwork producers he’d recently signed to Planet Mu, his production felt looser and more relaxed, with hi-hats blithely scattered across tufts of Reese bass. The music sounded like the macOS interface from which it came: optimistic, silicone smooth, and a bit uncanny, undergirded by a small tinge of lysergic spiritualism.
While Magic Pony Ride retains the gummy textures of his recent oeuvre, it is unusual in its overt nostalgia. Electronic pioneers like Wendy Carlos and Jean-Jacques Perrey influenced μ-Ziq’s work from the start, but here he’s equally fixated on his own back catalog. After finishing up the 25th anniversary remaster of 1997’s Lunatic Harness and pressing an onslaught of archival compilations, Paradinas decided to re-incorporate the era’s jungle breaks on the new record. The decision is charming when it works, but more often feels stiff compared to the material it’s referencing.
True to its title, Magic Pony Ride embraces Paradinas’ sugary side. Synths froth and squeak. Kitschy piano riffs ascend to euphoric heights. Sampled vocals coo. Songs like “Uncle Daddy” and “Turquoise Hyperfizz” contain some of his most unabashedly happy arrangements to date, ironing out the jazzy, occasionally dissonant wrinkles of traditional IDM in favor of pure indulgence. It’s the most exciting of the new developments in Paradinas’ style, merging the plasticky stringed melodies of Planet Mu signee Jlin with the dreamy headspace of Orbital.
The lower end of these mixes feels less inspired. On “Magic Pony Ride (Pt. 2)”, drum fills bob awkwardly beneath squelching synths, merely fleshing out the soundscape where a Lunatic Harness break might have pushed the track into unknown territory. Take the mangled percussion that crops up two-thirds of the way into that record’s now-classic “Brace Yourself Jason,” for instance, which slows things to a lossy, glitched-out crawl before Paradinas rattles off a pseudo drum solo. It’s a jarring detour, but the break reinforces the impact of the song’s melodic theme as it resurfaces one last time. The tracks on Magic Pony Ride may resemble these ancestors at a surface glance, but they lack the adventurous whimsy that earned comparisons to his buddy Richard D. James. “Unless,” which clocks in at a full six minutes, is the record’s most stagnant offering on this front, riding a flat, unadorned bassline for half of its runtime before a single kick or snare enters the fray.
Some of Magic Pony Ride’s best moments take place when Paradinas ditches the breaks altogether. “Picksing,” built around an oddly looped sample of his daughter’s voice, is both eerie and inviting, weaving breathy synths, bouncing keys and chopped vocals to immersive effect. The intro to “Don’t Tell Me (It’s Ending),” likely an homage to Brian Eno’s “An Ending (Ascent),” is also lovely, featuring cute pulses of vocoder that would feel right at home on a PC Music single.
The past 24 years of Paradinas’ work as head of Planet Mu have considerably broadened the horizons of mainstream club culture, introducing his audience to genres like footwork and bubbling house while encouraging the label’s artists to experiment and evolve. So while μ-Ziq ranks lower on his list of priorities than it did in 1997, it’s a little disappointing to hear such a retrospective project from an artist who’s always been down to toy with the sounds of the present. The flirtations with trap and dubstep that appear throughout his latter discography haven’t always succeeded, but they were at least admirable in their willingness to swing for the fences. Look to the remix EP μ-Ziq dropped in April for that missing sense of abandon: In the hands of footwork producers like RP Boo and DJ Manny, his tracks are pared down to the bare essentials, flayed to bits and rearranged into inventive polyrhythmic mosaics. Based on these two releases, Paradinas’ talents as a curator have eclipsed his own musicianship—when you’re surrounded by the future, looking backward can look like regression. | 2022-06-10T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2022-06-10T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Planet Mu | June 10, 2022 | 6.5 | 0d04e5fb-f8d5-4874-8cad-f50c7cf3ed72 | Jude Noel | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jude-noel/ | |
Manuel Gagneux’s latest provocative mix of black metal and black folk music of the South is an absurd union that offers moments of transcendence. | Manuel Gagneux’s latest provocative mix of black metal and black folk music of the South is an absurd union that offers moments of transcendence. | Zeal & Ardor: Stranger Fruit | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/zeal-and-ardor-stranger-fruit/ | Stranger Fruit | Stranger Fruit, the second album by provocative Swiss-American metallurgist Zeal & Ardor, ends with a perfect piece of black metal for 2018. Above an invocation of roaring guitars, Manuel Gagneux begins to sing, his voice bending forward with the urgency of Sam Cooke’s revolutionary soul. “Like a strange fruit out of season, you are bound to die alone,” he starts, his voice floating in and out of a woeful melisma. “You will swing free in the breeze then/You are bound to die alone.” But Gagneux doesn’t stop with a historical lynching; he briskly pulls that terrible past into the worrisome present, noting the senses of isolation, exploitation, and existential anxiety that come with being black (or any sort of outsider, really) in modern America. “They’re coming closer just to kill us,” he laments as a blast beat collapses into a series of doleful handclaps and foot stomps. A mix of au courant “atmospheric black metal” and gripping Southern soul, the music is itself a time machine. A plea for defiance and another piece of proof that black metal’s evolution remains unfinished, “Built on Ashes” is one of the year’s most powerful songs, a real anthem for our era.
Born in Switzerland to a Swiss father and an African-American mother, Gagneux started Zeal & Ardor four years ago as an online dare. Bored, he proposed a game on 4chan: What two seemingly disconnected genres should he try to blend into one song in thirty minutes? Users suggested he fuse black metal with “black music.” (The bigots didn’t put it so politely). Gagneux defied the insult by accepting the challenge in the most extreme way possible—combining black metal with the lumbering melodies of the slave chants and work songs John and Alan Lomax captured during field recording sojourns in the deepest, most dreadful recesses of the South. The eventual result, 2016’s nine-track Devil Is Fine, became one of metal’s most celebrated and debated recent records, prompting both purity tests and accusations of appropriation. Above all, it was a revelation for how the force of black metal could be used to pose entirely unexpected questions.
Stranger Fruit is Gangneux’s fitful attempt to prove that Devil Is Fine wasn’t a fluke, to show that an absurd union may have actual vitality. And it mostly does. A brilliant prelude poignantly pairs rumbling blastbeats to moaned blues, while “You Ain’t Comin’ Back” links post-rock theatrics, black metal dynamics, and a full-choir with Gangneux’s most powerful singing to date. “Don’t let anybody tell you that you’re safe,” he screams late in the song, his nerves completely on edge. Many of these pieces are exhilarating testaments to Gangneux’s vision and conviction. On occasion, though, you can hear the strain of Gagneux trying to figure out how to make this project matter. Where Devil Is Fine was a breathless 25-minute expression of an idea, Stranger Fruit is an explicit 47-minute attempt to expand it. The effort is sometimes awkward, with artful interludes that nevertheless seem unnecessary or didactic hooks that can occasionally stumble toward Godsmack blunder.
Still, amid the mess that the process sometimes makes, Gagneux takes a critical next step on Stranger Fruit. He expands beyond the work songs and spirituals that were his bedrock, fast-forwarding through a century of American racism and resistance to incorporate gospel, country blues, and funk—music that has foundationally pushed back against brutality. Where the clanging rhythms of his first anthem, “Devil Is Fine,” explicitly invoked the chain gang, its Stranger Fruit counterpart, “Gravedigger’s Chant,” heads first for the Saturday dance party with a hint of stride piano and then to Sunday service through an overdriven Pentecostal organ. During the breakdown of “Row Row,” Gagneux swaggers into handclaps-and-bass funk, which remains the rhythm section even as he adds serrated electric guitar. The song itself considers the twin terror of enslavement and of then trying to break from those bonds, how they are distinct symptoms of the same oppression. The funk frames the promise of freedom, the joy of deliverance. “Don’t You Dare” translates a banjo line to the electric guitar and couples it with a field recording of crickets. “Waste” hits the ecstatic falsetto heights of TV on the Radio’s Tunde Adebimpe. These contemporary elements not only bring Zeal & Ardor into the moment but also suggest there’s a lot of room left for Gagneux to explore, more ways for him to create new conversations through heavy metal.
Stranger Fruit also pushes back against the reductive claims of appropriation that Gagneux faced (and smartly answered) with Devil Is Fine. It is clear here that he is not fetishizing or romanticizing the source material or its painful backstory; instead, he is using it to connect the then with the now. In that way, Stranger Fruit recalls Kara Walker’s astounding series, Works from Harper’s Pictorial History of the Civil War (Annotated). Walker plundered historic black-and-white illustrations of the Civil War published by Harper’s Magazine and affixed monolithic silhouettes onto them, meant to convey the context omitted from the images. Dead black bodies lie in the road as army trains pass. A slave cloaked in Spanish moss looms above a river as a boatload of cotton passes. A slave lifts her hands in exaltation as the Union occupies Alexandria, Virginia. Zeal & Ardor complicates familiar narratives and our sometimes-facile understanding of our history by juxtaposing it with modern ideas, causing us to pause and consider what seemingly disconnected strains have to say about the world at large and what we have in common.
Stranger Fruit is an uneven record. But by mixing genres and squaring them against ancient issues that remain tragically current, these songs grapple with past, present, and the possibility of the future by asking two necessary questions: How can art let us understand the problems we’ve overlooked or misunderstood? And how can we begin to fix them? | 2018-06-16T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-06-16T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Metal | MVKA Music | June 16, 2018 | 7.3 | 0d07f827-fd4c-42d7-880c-ca8444623e65 | Grayson Haver Currin | https://pitchfork.com/staff/grayson-haver currin/ | |
Miles had a new girl. Her name was Betty, and she told him all about what the\n\ kids were ... | Miles had a new girl. Her name was Betty, and she told him all about what the\n\ kids were ... | Miles Davis: The Complete In a Silent Way Sessions | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/2199-the-complete-in-a-silent-way-sessions/ | The Complete In a Silent Way Sessions | Miles had a new girl. Her name was Betty, and she told him all about what the kids were listening to. Being a singer herself, she had some connection to the inside world of pop and soul, but mostly, she was just a lot younger than him, and was probably instinctively more drawn to that music than Miles was. It's not as if Miles was completely out of touch with popular trends, but on tour and in the studio as frequently as he was, one could hardly blame him for receiving information second-hand.
Betty told him all about Jimi Hendrix, Sly Stone, and the Fifth Dimension (hopefully in that order), and he was keen to investigate the new sounds. Years later he would brag about being able to put together a rock band that would blow all the others away, but he approached the idiom cautiously and methodically at first. Additionally, Miles was getting insider info from his drummer, Tony Williams. Tony was younger even than Betty Mabry, and although he'd come of age deep inside one of the most popular bands in jazz (even if jazz's popularity wasn't what it had been ten years previous), he had his finger very much on the pulse of hip new music. Tony had especially enjoyed the new funk from James Brown and the boogaloo grooves being played by Jimmy McGriff and Richard "Groove" Holmes' bands. Betty and Tony were playing a key role for Miles Davis in the late 60s, even beyond their personal and performing ones.
The Complete In a Silent Way Sessions release details a six-month stretch in 1968-69 when the various advisors in Miles' life would see their seeds sprout into fauna so full of life and outrageous fertility that the face of his idiom would be forever changed. Of course, the final product of all this investigation and experimentation has been the subject of countless essays on Miles' genius, but it bears closer inspection to reveal that the trumpeter didn't just up and create this music out of thin air. He spent months in the studio rehearsing on tape, midwifing his ideas. In late '68, Miles was a painter using one canvas to try and retry his masterpiece, continually repainting over areas where, though the ideas were fresh and the colors vibrant, the concept was yet immature.
As a palette, Miles chose only the best primaries from two continents. At the time, Wayne Shorter, Tony Williams, and Herbie Hancock were mainstays from his second great quintet. Bassist Ron Carter had become so busy with sessions in New York that Miles had to find a replacement. In between gigs in England, he saw Dave Holland's band opening for Bill Evans. Miles was immediately struck by the young bassist, and sent word via Philly Jo Jones and his manager (Miles had the best connections) that he wanted Dave. Elsewhere, when it became apparent Hancock was going to have trouble making a recording date, Williams recommended the young Boston native Chick Corea as a replacement. This quintet (Davis, Shorter, Williams, Holland and Corea) produced the first tunes on this release in September 1968.
"Mademoiselle Mabry" is a sprawling ode to both Miles' new girl and Hendrix's "The Wind Cries Mary." Miles had started using electric keyboards in the studio almost exclusively by that time, and Corea's relatively conservative figures (when they aren't directly quoting the Hendrix tune), are the dominant timbre in this piece at first. He hadn't picked up the Fender Rhodes piano that would color almost every tune Miles performed thereafter, and the primitive sounds produced here betray the band's uncertainty about where the tune (or their sound) was going. Davis takes the first solo, similar to his exploratory efforts on Miles in the Sky earlier that year, over a non-groove from Williams' toms and Holland's steady, if rather static, low-end line. One of the reasons sets like this are great is that you really get a feeling for the musicians' progress during that time, and if this tune is any indication, things had only just begun to get interesting.
"Frelon Brun" gives a much better idea of the revolutionary sounds ahead. Williams wastes no time in hammering out a hard funk break from the kit, and Corea had apparently already learned the importance of the repetitive chordal vamp to this music. Davis takes a short solo, as if testing the waters, which is followed by Shorter's seemingly more confident strides in funky acid soul. The music actually ends up closer to what the band played after Bitches Brew than anything on In a Silent Way.
Two months later, Miles reconvened with the same musicians, adding Herbie Hancock on Rhodes to form a sextet, to begin the next phase of the trip. The band played music closer to Miles' vision on "Two Faced": mystical, impressionistic soundscapes courtesy of the two-keyboard attack, subtle, though insistent drumming from Williams, and a by-then typically moaning, weary head covered by Davis and Shorter. The band was also not afraid of stretching the tunes out to 10, 15, or 20 minutes if it meant they'd find something useful along the way. Miles (with the help of producer Teo Macero) had discovered tape edits from progressive pop records of the time (Sgt. Pepper being a chief influence), and this tune, similar to "Shhh/Peaceful" and "In a Silent Way/It's About That Time," was constructed from several stop/start fragments.
Later the same month, Miles found yet another missing ingredient in keyboardist (and über-influence on the sound of all resulting jazz-rock fusion) Joe Zawinul. The two men had known each other for several years prior to these sessions, but Miles could only admire the Austrian's playing from afar. Zawinul had made great strides in uniting jazz and soul with Julian "Cannonball" Adderley's band in the mid-60s, even scoring a pop hit with "Mercy, Mercy, Mercy." He also brought an earthy sense of melody and classicism to the mix, and would ultimately become a major architect for the sound of Miles' band.
"Splashdown," a previously unreleased piece of tense, Rhodes-led jazz-funk, was recorded with the first three-keyboard version of the band. However, Zawinul's influence wasn't really apparent until sessions from a couple of days later, when the band played two of his compositions: "Ascent" and the subsequent concert staple, "Directions." The former seemingly caught the band in transition, with its theretofore-unprecedented use of tonal clusters and rootless "comping" from the keyboards, and an absence of any drum pattern at all, save an odd tambourine pulse. "Directions" was another story altogether, as the band busts out of the peaceful into the wild. This was the most "rock" Miles Davis had sounded like up to that point, and the two versions of the tune on this set are very similar to what Miles' concerts would sound like from '69 through the early 70s. Also of note on this session is that drummer Jack DeJohnette made his first appearance with a Miles Davis band in the studio, lending his distinct, high-energy stomp to the proceedings.
The band went on the road for a few months after that, and returned to the studio in February 1969. More changes: John McLaughlin had been recruited on guitar (another Tony Williams recommendation), and Williams had returned on drums. This time around, Miles was looking for what he called a "groove album." The strategy was that the band would play a tune (on this session, "Shhh/Peaceful" and "In a Silent Way"), based on charts, but were free to explore what regions the performance yielded to them. Afterwards, Miles and Teo would evaluate the pieces, and form the "groove" in Miles' head from whatever was on tape.
The original, previously unreleased version of "Shhh/Peaceful" from that session will shock most people accustomed to the legendary In a Silent Way version. First of all, there's an exposition and melodic theme that was completely discarded in the proper version. Also, the famous robotic hi-hat pattern doesn't even begin until almost five minutes in. One of the surprises (some might even say disappointments) of this set is the realization that this music wasn't just the product of Miles' muse; there were hours of sessions and rehearsals before the band, Miles and Teo discovered what it was they were looking for. The humble beginnings of this tune still have much in common with straight jazz, though with a markedly progressive bent.
The same session yielded two versions of "In a Silent Way." The first is very different to what ended up on the album, with a faux-bossanova beat and Holland's light-footed bassline supporting the classic melody line. The second version is the version that was used on the album, with McLaughlin's heavenly solo statement of the main theme, and Miles' delicate answer. The band also performed "It's About That Time" (definitely a fruitful afternoon) in what was essentially the final version, complete with tape edits and loops compiled by Teo.
Two days later, Miles was back in the studio. He had a couple of new pieces, "The Ghetto Walk" and "Early Minor," neither of which ended up on In a Silent Way. The first tune is a hard funk almost-blues featuring Joe Chambers laying down a slinky groove on drums, while McLaughlin, Shorter and Miles give up equally subversive solos. Most interesting is the middle section trip-down, wherein the ghost of the session two days prior sneaks in with a little atmospheric feather float. "Early Minor" is another Zawinul original that's indicative of the kind of hyper-impressionism he would play (with Shorter) with Weather Report shortly after making Bitches Brew with Miles. It's also confusing as to just why this didn't make the cut for the original In a Silent Way release, because it features similar cascading Rhodes figures, and very nice, gentle pulse keeping by Chambers.
The set ends with the LP versions of "Shhh/Peaceful" and "In a Silent Way/It's About That Time." Miles fans didn't get to hear everything that came in between this album and its predecessor, so the sessions documented on this collection will make the leap from the cautious dabbling in rock textures of Miles in the Sky and Filles de Kilimanjaro to the full-blown jazz-opera of Bitches Brew. These recordings seem a lot more logically arranged and planned. This is good and bad: while few people would doubt the genius of Miles Davis as a player, composer and bandleader, it's evident that he was running on blind faith more than once during that time, and that he was learning on the go as much as his sidemen were.
Part of the mystique surrounding this album, for me, has always been that it seemed to come out of nowhere, like a beacon of uncanny originality and visionary foresight. Apparently, it did have roots, and while the music will always be some of my favorite from Miles, I can't honestly say that seeing the blueprints for his magic translates to the same sheer joy as did the end results. But, it's still magic music, and it's still Miles. The worst thing you could ever say about a set like this is that it's almost too educational, and of course, that's not really a criticism, is it? | 2001-11-07T01:00:01.000-05:00 | 2001-11-07T01:00:01.000-05:00 | Jazz | Columbia | November 7, 2001 | 9.5 | 0d0a298d-88e1-4415-b386-b8bf71c46341 | Dominique Leone | https://pitchfork.com/staff/dominique-leone/ | null |
Reissue of the seminal, Brian Eno-curated No Wave compilation. | Reissue of the seminal, Brian Eno-curated No Wave compilation. | Various Artists: No New York | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/2105-no-new-york/ | No New York | Historical reissues plug timelines and help unpack tendencies during eras of revival, but without the original contexts in place, the full-fledged whallop of revelation just isn't there. Even if the listener's approaching the sounds for the first time, they've ineluctably heard the ingredients' echoes. To at least maximize the effects of an aesthetic overlap, the timing of the reissue ought to be dead-on. So, though welcome and much appreciated, thank you, Lilith's officially licensed reissue of Brian Eno's 1978 No New York No Wave sampler, which he did for the Island subsidiary Antilles, has appeared a tad late. (It's more than surprising that sans some Japanese bootlegs, the compilation hasn't yet been given the royal treatment-- hey Rhino, where were you?)
Yes, bands are still exhibiting No Wave tendencies (and thanks to labels like Audika, Acute, and Table of the Elements classic Lower Manhattan music of all sorts is making the rounds again), but it was circa 2002 that the post-No New York moment bubbled most briskly. S.A. Crary's 2004 documentary, Kill Your Idols, covers that time period, pairing grainy live footage and interviews with the old guard (Suicide's Marvin Rev, Glenn Branca, Lydia Lunch, DNA's Arto Lindsay) and '80s noisemakers (Thurston Moore, Lee Ranaldo, Michael Gira) with newer technicolor footage and Q&A;'s with 2002's acolytes, the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Black Dice, Liars, et al. If you missed the film, you still might've caught some of this via the call-and-response of Vice's Yes New York compilation. Also around that time, the resuscitated Ze Records reissued its 1981 Mutant Disco compilation and other samplings on N.Y. No Wave and various James White/Contortions reissues. Soul Jazz provided the even more extensive (and less disco-flavored) New York Noise, 1979-1982 and last year No More Records' popped-up to offer the definitive 32-track DNA on DNA, which includes all of the DNA tracks from No New York. Ditto for Mars' The Complete Studio Recordings: NYC 1977-1978, out on G3G/Spooky Sound in 2003.
No Wave itself sprung up namelessly circa 1977 as a reaction to punk, new wave, and New York City itself. One of No Wave's more outspoken progenitors, Lydia Lunch famously dissed punk as no more than "sped-up Chuck Berry riffs". James Chance has said that "No Wave" came from the name of the compilation, but it's also supposedly first coined by the Soho Weekly News, the "no" turning "new wave"'s glossy dance party into nihilistic shorthand. Whatever the proper christening date, Eno was taken by the scene and compiled and produced No New York, which featured four tracks each from four bands-- James Chance and the Contortions, Teenage Jesus & the Jerks, Mars, and DNA. Eno recorded it lo-fi and cracked to fit with the bands' on-stage ravages. In the original pressing, the lyrics were hidden on the inside of the record sleeve, so you had to take the sleeve apart if you want to sing along. Stylistically, the bands scowled through a paranoid blitz of spastic free-jazz, art noise, jarring vocals, anti-melody, sweaty sexuality, shredding guitar, a technically adept amateurism, and Dadaist deliveries that fucked with disco (check out DNA's synth) and funk to create a sort of mangled punk avant-garde.
When held up to close scrutiny, No New York's stars are more different musically than genre masturbators would have you believe, but they were connected through friendships and shared hangouts like CBGB's and Max's Kansas City. Original DNA member Gordon Stevenson left the band to play bass for Teenage Jesus & the Jerks. DNA's named came from a song by Mars. Lydia Lunch and James Chance were dating-- he quit Teenage Jesus in '78 to do his own thing. Bands who weren't as intrenched in the loop-- Red Transistor, Static, Theoretical Girls-- were left off the comp. The whole thing didn't last very long or produce much of a paper trail. Sumner Crane's brilliant boy/girl quartet Mars released a 1980 live EP and a 1986 compilation, 78+, though the band had dissolved by 1978. Besides last years' compilation-- and impossible-to-find 7"'s-- DNA had only one 10-minute full-length, 1980's A Taste of DNA. Lydia Lunch and James Chance have been better represented, especially Lunch who became a regarded spoken-word artist and author.
This compilation begins with the most accessible participants, James Chance & the Contortions. Skronking through sax-based punk-funk, Chance is often compared to James Brown, but I'd rather look into my magic ball and say "Jon Spencer." Sporting a pompadour and Was (Not Was) suits, he made a suitable poster boy for the movement, and appeared on the cover of the first issue of the East Village Eye. As a performer, he was known for being confrontational, which got him rejected from straight-up jazz circles. Musically, he tends to grab an idea and stick with it, as on "Dish It Out"'s unrelenting bass, drums, guitar, organ, and sax overlay. "Jaded" delves into freer jazz implosions and "Flip Your Face" shreds sounds over mid-tempo beat. His signature tune, "Contort Yourself", isn't here, but Eno's production makes these tracks some of my favorite in the Chance/White/Black oeuvre-- some of the later material felt too slick.
Darker and less colorful, Teenage Jesus and the Jerks were fronted by vocalist/anti-guitarist Lydia Lunch, who was 16 when she joined the band in 1976. Early reviews dismissed Lunch as dreadfully amateur; nowadays, she sounds pretty tuneful screaming her gritty, anti-suburbia salvos. Teenage Jesus was known for frantic, tossed-off 10 to 15-minute sets, but here they keep it molasses slow, Lunch screaming her vocal lines over tribal drumming and minimal fuzziness. The pace pick up for the excellent 34-second rampage, "Red Alert", but otherwise expect a claustrophobic plod.
One of the more intriguing sets comes from the least known crew, the boy/girl quartet Mars. The band's founder, Sumner Crane, who died from Lymphoma in 2003, was one of the true visionaries of this period. You'll find Daydream Nation and Lightning Bolt hiding out in the moody guitar riffs of the excellent opener "Helen Fordsdale"; "Hairwaves" drifts to China Burg's ambient vocals over a fractured and spacious backdrop; "Tunnels" is a Crane-like static; "Puerto Rican Ghost" is shouting, repetitious drum rolls, and all sorts of chaos.
DNA shows up in early guitar/drum/synth form. Later, when Robin Crutfhfield left to form Dark Day, he was replaced by Pere Ubu bassist Tim Wright, and the group became both sturdier and more fucked up. These pieces hit like shrapnel, though Lindsay doesn't display the more crazed (and autistic) vocal exercises of A Taste of DNA's "Blond Red Head" or "Lying on the Sofa of Life" or Mori's drumming-to-something-else-in-a-different-room percussion. On "Egomaniac's Kiss" Lindsay scowls ("trying to eat that self real slow") and rattlesnake shushes along with catchy synth, simple drums. More caustic, "Lionel" and "Size" ride regurgitated synth-- the instruments shift focus halfway through, as if following the fissures of a non-demarcated fault-line. "Not Moving" is Joy Division stuck in a factory cog, slowly quartered.
The most remarkable quality on these recordings is this unselfconscious feel, something painfully lacking in the star-fucking neo-No Wave groups. In Kill Your Idols, it's interesting to see Lunch, Lindsay, and others speak so eloquently about what it was they were trying to do. They have the benefit of hindsight, but as it unfurled and quickly disappeared, No Wave was still a real reaction plugged into a time/place. In part because there's less product, No Wave hasn't been as festishized as punk. Around 1982, bands had disappeared or sub-divided and different fragments of No Wave ended up in places like the Downtown jazz scene of John Zorn, Fred Frith, Bill Laswell, and Elliott Sharp; the noise crews of Swans, Sonic Youth, Live Skull; and dance-punk disco via Bush Tetras, Golden Palominos, Konk, Liquid Liquid, Arthur Russell, and ESG. Compare that and that to Yes New York's already dated cast of the Strokes, Radio 4, Longwave, the Natural History, and the Fever, and you'll realize New York really hasn't seen anything of the likes of these folks (and that includes No Wave's neighbors and offspring) since the last bits of that early, less gentrified Lower Manhattan feedback dried up. | 2005-11-15T01:00:02.000-05:00 | 2005-11-15T01:00:02.000-05:00 | null | Antilles | November 15, 2005 | 8.3 | 0d0e1974-5460-4404-b6f2-b622746e4adf | Brandon Stosuy | https://pitchfork.com/staff/brandon-stosuy/ | null |
The Vermont indie-rock quartet’s debut album pits airy dreamscapes against raw realities, frolicking in the tumult of uncertainty. | The Vermont indie-rock quartet’s debut album pits airy dreamscapes against raw realities, frolicking in the tumult of uncertainty. | Robber Robber: Wild Guess | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/robber-robber-wild-guess/ | Wild Guess | Tell a teenager that their 20s are for “living,” and they might envision flashy movie montages: rooftop parties, sloppy smooches, city lights whizzing by through back windows. Tell the same thing to that same person once they’ve actually reached the age, and they may sigh. Fleeting youth must fight fledgling adulthood at some point—just ask Robber Robber. Since co-founders Nina Cates and Zack James ditched Brattleboro for big-city Burlington, they’ve taken to pitting airy dreamscapes against raw realities, scoring the havoc with searing, expansive indie-rock stompers. On Wild Guess, the Vermont four-piece’s debut album, the carnage is supercharged: Rough-edged songs melt into soupy squalls, with alien truths nestled in heaps of amorphous noise. It’s hectic, bumpy, and full of treasures that reveal themselves over time. It sounds a lot like what growing up feels like.
Robber Robber tread a thin line between hearty indie and rough-edged post-punk, melding the former’s airiness with the latter’s angst. Back in the 2010s, teenaged Cates and James played in a short-lived group called the Snaz, in which off-kilter garage rock buttressed precocious tales of teenage girlhood. Since their departure, the two have made notable additions to their sound—among them, guitarist Will Krulak and bassist Carney Hemler—though Wild Guess confirms they haven’t left any of their scrappy bite in those small-town rehearsal rooms. Perched somewhere above the havoc, Cates wanders through hypnotic epics with an aloof hush, like Trish Keenan testing microphones in the middle of a crowded Guitar Center. Perhaps the best example is “Seven Houses,” a torrential onslaught of downpicking, cymbal crashes, and bass fills that grumble like a starving Godzilla’s gut; for all its tension, there’s respite in her delivery, a wispy narrator frolicking in a bad dream. In the final minute of “Until,” a charming guitar ballad that bridges Crazy for You and Pod, Cates drawls, “Hold on,” until all that remains is a single sickly string obeying her directive to the bitter, distorted end. It’s one of several moments where you feel like you’re in the room with them.
The longer you sit with Wild Guess, the more it might seem to exist in a funhouse, where time and space are freakishly malleable. While Cates deadpans from the corner, her bandmates rumble at the fore, churning out foreign grooves that tick like broken clocks. It’s a disorienting dichotomy, but a rewarding one, too—often, it feels as if the band is inviting you to eavesdrop, to peer behind the mic and pick apart the musical assembly line. This is particularly fun on a track like “Dial Tone,” where guitar and drums make spirited conversation while Hemler’s bass occasionally interjects, a shy friend raising a shaky finger. It sounds like dinnertime in a dysfunctional household—that is, until the overdrive clicks on, and all interlocutors are rasping in unison, holding it for a few fiery seconds before hushing as if nothing happened.
Lead single “Sea or War” rides breakneck percussion into elegiac highs; rather than stack ingredients like the shoegaze it invokes, this song deconstructs at the middle, building back up element by element. You can picture yourself front row at the show, swivel-necking to figure out which sound is coming from where. “Unsteady at the edge and falling in,” Cates sings. Twenty-somethings will be pleased to find that the view from the precipice isn’t all that bad. | 2024-07-29T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2024-07-29T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | self-released | July 29, 2024 | 7.3 | 0d11c11f-a216-498a-83c8-5c25eb722d41 | Samuel Hyland | https://pitchfork.com/staff/samuel-hyland/ | |
Pioneering harpist Dorothy Ashby established the instrument’s place in post-bop jazz. Younger pays tribute to Ashby’s achievements, covering her songs and tracing her influence on contemporary hip-hop. | Pioneering harpist Dorothy Ashby established the instrument’s place in post-bop jazz. Younger pays tribute to Ashby’s achievements, covering her songs and tracing her influence on contemporary hip-hop. | Brandee Younger: Brand New Life | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/brandee-younger-brand-new-life/ | Brand New Life | The community of genre-bending harpists is small. Few have the temerity to tackle the massive but delicate instrument, and those that do must grapple with its tendency to recede into the background. But most who have dragged the harp out of the classical context can trace their roots back to Dorothy Ashby, the pioneering Detroit harpist whose 1968 album Afro-Harping laid the foundation for the instrument’s role in post-bop jazz. And few embody that legacy better than Brandee Younger.
In many ways, Younger’s career mirrors Ashby’s: Each tested the harp’s limitations, blurring genre lines and forcefully establishing the instrument as a lead role in contemporary jazz. And they both became the go-to harpist for pop musicians of their era (Bill Withers, Minnie Riperton, and Stevie Wonder for Ashby; Beyoncé, Lauryn Hill, and John Legend for Younger). But while Younger had Ashby and Alice Coltrane as role models for a Black woman redefining the possibilities of a classical instrument, Ashby had no choice but to blaze her own trail, at a time when civil rights for non-whites was only just beginning to gain traction. Brand New Life is Younger’s tribute to Ashby’s achievements.
Most of the pieces on Brand New Life were originally written or performed by Ashby, including Stevie Wonder’s “If It’s Magic”—one of Younger’s first exposures to Ashby’s playing, before she even knew who she was. And she has the unique honor of being the first to record Ashby’s “You’re a Girl for One Man Only,” a shimmering ballad punctuated by Makaya McCraven’s loose, airy percussion. She transforms Ashby’s “Dust”—composed and recorded for The Rubáiyát of Dorothy Ashby, a 1968 exploration of the Japanese koto—into an infectious easy-listening dub groove with help from Meshell Ndegeocello. “Running Games” and “Livin’ and Lovin’ in My Own Way” provide the clearest evidence of Ashby’s direct influence on Younger, reimagining her original compositions with a modern POV made possible only by the elder’s groundbreaking presence.
Younger says creating the album was “a lifelong dream,” one she hadn’t quite felt prepared to make until now. But Brand New Life merely formalizes an influence on her work that has long been apparent. Younger’s flawless technique allows for a freedom of movement that gives her harp a vocal quality, whether leading a composition or in conversation with a guest vocalist like Mumu Fresh (“Brand New Life”). She pulls off intricate arpeggios that would be difficult—or impossible?—on another instrument. Occasionally her plucks and percussive strikes take on qualities of a guitar or piano, drawing from Ashby’s deep understanding of the harp’s design.
The most fascinating moments on Brand New Life lie in the cross-generational conversation between Ashby, hip-hop, and contemporary jazz. Ashby’s work has been sampled hundreds of times by producers drawn to her infusion of funk and soul into post-bop jazz; Afro-Harping, in particular, shows up on records by GZA, 9th Wonder, Mac Miller, and Flying Lotus. Pete Rock’s flip of “Come Live With Me” on “For Pete’s Sake” was among Younger’s first exposures to Ashby’s harp, evidence that contemporary artists like her and McCraven—who produced and plays drums on the entire record—are students not just of jazz, but of the music it inspired and evolved into. Pete Rock and 9th Wonder’s boom-bap turntablist contributions to Brand New Life do more than just complete the circle of inspiration; they add texture to a feedback loop that grows richer with each new interpretation.
The result is a record that scans as adult-contemporary hip-hop (in a good way!), music fueled by the joy of discovery and the shared love of an artist whose work has remained in conversation across generations. Many post-bop jazz records look to standards for inspiration, but few breathe such life into the legacy they inherit. | 2023-04-14T00:02:00.000-04:00 | 2023-04-14T00:02:00.000-04:00 | Jazz | Impulse! | April 14, 2023 | 7.6 | 0d15e2e7-5c69-4b02-883e-781446362515 | Matthew Ismael Ruiz | https://pitchfork.com/staff/matthew-ismael ruiz/ | |
On her second album as Torres, Brooklyn-via-Nashville singer-songwriter Mackenzie Scott shrouds her voice with feedback and heavier rock instrumentation, created alongside PJ Harvey producer and percussionist Rob Ellis. The sound is like a gauze bandage covering emotional wounds, but Scott lets the red bleed through nonetheless. | On her second album as Torres, Brooklyn-via-Nashville singer-songwriter Mackenzie Scott shrouds her voice with feedback and heavier rock instrumentation, created alongside PJ Harvey producer and percussionist Rob Ellis. The sound is like a gauze bandage covering emotional wounds, but Scott lets the red bleed through nonetheless. | Torres: Sprinter | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/20290-sprinter/ | Sprinter | Questioning what you once held fundamentally true is exhausting, but in every possible way, Brooklyn-via-Nashville singer-songwriter Mackenzie Scott's intense, spiritual sophomore album as Torres suggests that this is work worth doing. Her 2013 self-titled debut felt inherently raw in its stripped-down folk-rock, a sound akin to that of her future collaborator Sharon Van Etten. On Sprinter, however, Scott shrouds her voice with feedback and heavier rock instrumentation, created alongside PJ Harvey producer and percussionist Rob Ellis. The sound is like a gauze bandage covering the emotional wounds, the profound isolation and fear of abandonment, that sit at the heart of Sprinter. But Scott lets a little red bleed through nonetheless, and for listeners, at least, that's a good thing.
An album ago, Scott told what was presumed to be some version of her own adoption story with "Moon & Back"; the song is written from the perspective of a woman who left a letter for the baby she gave up, but no names are given. Though Torres continues to write from perspectives besides her own—and it continues to prove interesting—on Sprinter, any trepidation she may have felt over first-person narrative is pushed aside in pursuit of unflinching honesty. On the album's stunning, solo acoustic closer "The Exchange", Scott is direct where before she was mysterious: "Mother, father, I'm underwater, and I don't think you can pull me out of this," she coos in the chorus. "Blew my per diem on an eighth of Blue Dream/ So I can breathe but I still can't breathe," Scott adds, revealing her coping method of choice—sativa-dominant hybrids. The song's arresting plainspokenness recalls Neko Case's memorable a cappella declaration of abandonment and rejection on The Worst Things Get, the Harder I Fight...'s "Nearly Midnight, Honolulu".
Sprinter splits its mood between depression and rage, mirrored in the album's loud-quiet musical dichotomy that is not unlike that of early PJ Harvey albums. With the aid of her co-producer Ellis (showing off his status as an underrated rock drummer who makes every beat sound crisp), Portishead guitarist Adrian Utley (who recently helped Perfume Genius also reach a musical state as real as it is deeply unsettling), and Harvey bassist Ian Oliver, Scott fully inhabits her loudest moments by inching towards post-rock and synth-rock. The album's crowning achievement, "Son, You Are No Island", forges a mystical through line from Celtic music to Hole's "I Think That I Would Die", to Godspeed You! Black Emperor, to Mica Levi's Under the Skin soundtrack. This song simmers with rage, a stick of dynamite waiting to blow, but it's Scott's restraint in delaying the explosions—first a wall of hardened distortion, then via vocal loops—that hits the hardest.
When she lets her depressive side out, Scott can ramble slightly. On "Ferris Wheel", Scott takes her time meandering through intense pining for another who's "got the sadness too" while an echoing guitar provides a woozy background twang. For such a slow pace, it goes on about twice as long as it needs to (seven minutes). On the flipside sits "Cowboy Guilt", a rare light spot that lasts less than three minutes. Scott captures the thrill of instant interpersonal connection via the quick and steady beat of a drum machine and flourishes of a music box melody.
When Scott can find the right balance of these elements—dark, introspective, midtempo, highly distorted, and in the four to five-minute range—she hits a sweet spot, like on "New Skin" and the album's title track. These are the songs where Scott seems to lay out her thesis statements with a slight nods to theology; on "New Skin", atop a formidable '90s alt-rock build, Scott offers up a conclusion she's come to already: "If you never know the darkness, then you're the one who fears the most." Identity is the thorniest of growing pains, particularly when—like Scott—you come from adoptive lineage and a Southern Baptist upbringing you're now sussing out on your own. Wherever she might be on her own personal journey, Scott sounds on her records like someone getting closer every moment to her ultimate truth. | 2015-05-07T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2015-05-07T02:00:01.000-04:00 | Rock | Partisan | May 7, 2015 | 8 | 0d182d45-ba8e-487e-bc99-d55353103c71 | Jill Mapes | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jill-mapes/ | null |
Russell's most personal and radical statement consists simply of his folksy tenor, cello, and scant electronic microtones-- all lathered with echo, distortion, and reverb. | Russell's most personal and radical statement consists simply of his folksy tenor, cello, and scant electronic microtones-- all lathered with echo, distortion, and reverb. | Arthur Russell: World of Echo | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/6909-world-of-echo/ | World of Echo | At first listen, World of Echo sounds like meaningless dreck that barely wakes up to complete a melody or enunciate a single verse of poetry. And Arthur Russell's legacy has never been richer for it.
This year's mass rediscovery and mythologization of the late Russell-- an Iowan who seemed to be swinging on a tire over the Mississippi, even when in downtown Manhattan-- was remarkable. Russell's various projects-- including Dinosaur L, Indian Ocean, and Loose Joints-- got feted as textbook examples of "mutant disco." His disco was pure clay-- bending, scraping, and glazing its rhythms, harmonies, and vocal arrangements into permanently incomplete sculptures for DJs to puzzle over. Nonetheless, he could still hypnotize dancefloors with dozens of anxious ideas that in the 1980s-- after 1979's white flight from disco-- could only have stemmed from the NYC underground.
Soul Jazz's definitive primer, The World of Arthur Russell, and Audika's studio vault dump Calling out of Context both garnered this very obtuse man some retro dignity, for good or ill. Audika now thankfully reissues World of Echo-- a collection of almost deconstructed, "rough draft" versions of his singles-- in a limited-edition package with a few b-sides and a DVD of music videos and concert footage. Recorded between 1980 and 1986-- the year in which the collection was originally released-- this material still sounds timeless. It's also Russell's most personal and radical statement: Here, he isn't cloaked in any congas and hi-hats, shouting divas, or ring-a-ding-ding Latin keyboards. It's just his folksy, muppet tenor, cello, and scant electronic microtones-- all lathered with echo, distortion, and reverb.
On these tracks, Russell creates beatless dance music that travels through outer space, making the journey his destination. His onomatopoeias and string-work are uncannily percussive and seem to be faintly picked up by radio satellite. His improvisations mine every conceivable sound from his bow and cello's amplified body: hollow thuds, window-washing brushes, chipped strings, knuckled knacks, and the boom of a floor peg dropping on concrete. However, the instrument startlingly duets with his voice, as it breathes along with him and clears its throat during his awkward moments. Whatever lyrics can be understood are stream-of-conscious blurts that exhibit pinhole views of his soul.
The opener, "Tone Bone Kone", is a baffler. Russell huffs alliterations while his cello ransacks a room to chase after a ringing UFO noise. The following, three-part "Tower of Meaning - Rabbit's Ears - Home" is a gently narcotic ballad as he hums perfectly in-tune with his tapestry-weaving chords, uttering odd lines like "I'm watching out of my ear" and letting his vocal tones overpower all semantics. The nine-minute trance of "Soon to Be Innocent Fun - Let's See" drifts through waters that mirror the moonless sky. As Russell seemingly daydreams of escape from the urban din, he shades and trickles melodies instead of fully playing them. "Answers Me" is an afterthought of "Soon" as Russell yelps in the same key, "I'm going where the islands are going," while his cello shakes its head with scrapes and mumbling harmonics.
The same restlessness drives "Place I Know - Kid like You" as Russell drenches his Hendrixian riffs in hydrochloric distortion, as he also does on the backward-looped shimmering of his bluesy space-out, "Wax the Van." That song's textures vaguely would resemble the garage-sold Americana of Sonic Youth's Sister if it wasn't for some tacky synth bloops. "Lucky Cloud" makes better use of the synthesizer as its tweaked swiggles and bare-boned tones fittingly offset growling strings. "Let's Go Swimming" eschews the fidgety Miami electro-funk of the Walter Gibbons mix for a cubistic moment where reverb-polluted drones and squeals give way to flickering chords. Russell then deadpans childlike phrases like "What country are you swimming to?" and "I'm banging on your door in the clear-blue sky" into a muffled whisper. Once the groove picks up, the music ends.
Russell's most poignant moments are when his production's playfulness articulates his fractured thoughts better than any lyrics. On "Tree House", he pits his vocals in different rooms, soaking in their acoustics, as if sneaking into his tree house to play hookey. World's finest moment, "See-Through", lets his cello's high registers criss-cross about to blanket his dazed sighs that fade into an ether like Polaroids left in the sunlight too long. It's a fitting eulogy. | 2004-12-15T01:00:01.000-05:00 | 2004-12-15T01:00:01.000-05:00 | Experimental | Upside | December 15, 2004 | 8.4 | 0d185df9-f57f-4270-8ac8-a6df757e4d78 | Cameron Macdonald | https://pitchfork.com/staff/cameron-macdonald/ | null |
Total Control are five Melbourne men dead-set on pumping life into the spiritual tradition of post-punk exploration with little regard for sonic congruity. It's easy to read into the densities of their new album, Typical System, but it's more satisfying to give yourself over to the record's bleak, peculiar breeze. | Total Control are five Melbourne men dead-set on pumping life into the spiritual tradition of post-punk exploration with little regard for sonic congruity. It's easy to read into the densities of their new album, Typical System, but it's more satisfying to give yourself over to the record's bleak, peculiar breeze. | Total Control: Typical System | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/19438-total-control-typical-system/ | Typical System | Total Control are five Melbourne men dead-set on pumping life into the spiritual tradition of post-punk exploration with little regard for sonic congruity. The lyric sheet for their new album, Typical System, reads like stream-of-consciousness beat poetry; in between songs, it's dotted with manifesto-like musings that don't actually appear on the recordings. "Our fragile subject confuses festivity for a grave militaristic orgy, and pens a carol to document collapse," reads the note following "Bloody Glass", the minimal wave experiment that opens the album. In case you had a shard of faith that Total Control have even a strand of optimistic DNA, here's the misanthropic footnote that follows "Expensive Dog", a dramatic garage-punk blast: "In contrast to barbarous gamblers, the secure and prosperous demand companions of diseased and ill-fated breed. Mongrels prowl outside their gates." Convention is hopeless.
Perhaps these anti-conformist scripts are meta-commentaries on Total Control itself. Since the band's genre-smashing 2011 debut, *Henge Beat—*which fused oddball sci-fi New Wave and subtle beats with punk aggression and ideology—they've amassed a cultish underground following as well as some attention in the music industry. They released a blackened 7" on Sub Pop in 2012, and, had they preferred, Typical System could have been released on a label bigger than tiny Seattle hardcore outpost Iron Lung. "You don't need a safety net," sings Dan Stewart, detached frontman and resident nihilist philosopher, on System's dreary synth-pop banger of a closing track. Whether these are self-subscribed mantras or not remains open to interpretation—but Typical System invites that. Across their discography, Total Control have been so idea-driven that it is hard to not intellectualize what they do. What's the "lonely operation" raging on garage ripper "Systematic Fuck"? Does "Black Spring" refer to the free-associating Henry Miller novel—and does the song's tense, motorik quality imply that its end-times themes actually stretch eternal? Is the title Typical System an allusion to keeping underground autonomy in the face of commercial opportunity? Does it matter?
Such questions are tempting, and it's easy to read into Typical System's densities. But it's perhaps more satisfying to give oneself over to the record's bleak, peculiar breeze. The approach is not hugely different from Henge Beat—they've still got the toolbox you'd imagine from guys who variously play tough-guy hardcore (Straightjacket Nation), primitive garage-punk (UV Race and Eddy Current Suppression Ring), and electronic dance music (Lace Curtain). Above all, Total Control's fair bit of touring since Henge Beat has allowed them more technical muscle, and thus a newfound tactility and energy streak.
Typical System's dynamics surprise at most turns, revealing their strange sense of humor. The soft sax wails of the underwater "Liberal Party" find Stewart deadpanning existentially on a "Broken porch light/ Shattered sense of worth," before leading into the militaristic scream and snarl of "Two Less Jacks", which would not sound out of place on an Iceage record. Total Control benefit immensely from a knack for rhythm—their circling, lurching guitar grooves often simulate the repetition of the minimal electronic found elsewhere. A sense of duality exists within the songs: the opener "Bloody Glass" is galactic and glossy with psychic, pinging beats, but it finds Stewart berating "billionaires," "thieves," and "cowards" alike, as if they are all synonymous. Its dreary delivery makes the imagery all the more sinister: "Spitting on foreign lands/ On bloody stumps/ On glass/ We dance."
Ghosts of new wave's past audibly haunt these songs, and "Flesh War" is Typical System's most straightforward take on that sound. It's the widescreen, mechanical-sounding focal point, with synths soaring soft enough to rest your head on without worrying about getting clawed in the face. But it's not mere retro-styling. "Flesh War" looks for what's left in the endless possibilities of post-punk and says something real through it. The lyrics morbidly mutate: the "breaking" of the day becomes the cynical "break-in" of the day, and a prayer to "news" and "fame" becomes a play to "noose" and "flame." "Carve a space inside your brain," the robotic Stewart sings, "Earn enough of that cruel gaze/ And bear it 'til your back would break." "Flesh War" sounds like commentary on life under the relentless watch of overlords—further proof that electronic pop can be just as subversive as throat-shredding rock and roll. Even with their most aesthetically orthodox track, Total Control's total message is radical. | 2014-06-26T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2014-06-26T02:00:01.000-04:00 | Rock | Iron Lung | June 26, 2014 | 8 | 0d203cd4-0ad5-4026-b6d7-bd4e9e35fd4f | Jenn Pelly | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jenn-pelly/ | null |
On his first album in two years, the New York producer applies an exploratory approach to ambient techno, utilizing elements of dub and post-punk to sculpt a record that feels meditative but never maudlin. | On his first album in two years, the New York producer applies an exploratory approach to ambient techno, utilizing elements of dub and post-punk to sculpt a record that feels meditative but never maudlin. | Anthony Naples: Chameleon | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/anthony-naples-chameleon/ | Chameleon | Anthony Naples kicked off his debut album with a fakeout. The New York producer had made his name in 2012, at just 22, with an effervescent house jam that was ranked among the year’s best dance music, and he wasted no time in reinforcing his club bona fides with a string of EPs that built upon his signature overdriven machine rhythms. But in 2015, a first encounter with his debut LP, Body Pill, was enough to make one wonder if there had been an error at the pressing plant: After two minutes of ambient scene-setting, the first song exploded into mid-tempo drums and ringing chords, almost like an homage to Sonic Youth’s Daydream Nation—albeit crafted at home on a laptop.
The rest of Body Pill returned to Naples’ customary blasted-out house music, and in the years since, with the exception of 2018’s ambient Take Me With You, he has dependably concentrated his efforts on a fairly narrow context—call it music for grotty Brooklyn warehouse parties where the sun is just starting to pry its fingers through dust covered windows. But on Chameleon, his first album in two years, Naples returns to that hard-to-place territory he began mapping out in Body Pill’s first few minutes, in which guitars and drums are swirled into a liquid pool of electronic sound. The result flows together the way a silted river carves branching shapes through a river delta.
A dance producer adopting an ambient-adjacent side hustle during the pandemic might not sound like a terribly novel proposition. But Chameleon, despite what its title might suggest, never resembles the work of a musician defensively morphing his colors to suit a sudden change in the environment. The music’s meandering path has a genuinely exploratory feel; the searching synth-and-guitar counterpoints are meditative but never maudlin. The music’s playful spirit keeps Chameleon refreshingly free of any hackneyed balm-for-troubled-times baggage.
In fact, Naples, plagued by a sense that he had played it safe on his previous album, had already begun work on a new direction by the autumn of 2019. Lockdown afforded him the kind of free time—and maybe even the neuroses—conducive to making more experimental music. Feeling stir crazy, he’d strip the room of everything but a single synthesizer, microphone, and lamp before proceeding to record. To combat writer’s block, he’d pretend that the music was actually being played by other musicians, and he was just the producer tasked with sculpting their output into its final shape.
You can detect traces of those strategies in the stripped-down shape of Body Pill’s songs, and also in the record’s approach to genre, which sometimes feels almost like a kind of role play. Shades of all sorts of unexpected influences drift through the music: the phased guitars of the Cure’s Seventeen Seconds, the feathery strumming of the Paisley Underground, the chunky breakbeats of trip-hop. The album tends to zig-zag between heavier fare, led by electric bass and drum kit, and pools of the purest ambient tone. Dub and post-punk are clear inspirations, but Naples never falls back on obvious tropes. Their influence is felt only glancingly—in the muscle applied to a booming floor tom or a brief burst of analog delay that scatters a song’s parts to the winds.
Many of the record’s most intriguing tracks propose unusual collisions, like the Portastudio equivalent of a Hollywood exec’s elevator pitch. The cosmic shimmer and bluesy soloing of “Massiv Mello,” a blissed-out post-rock epic, suggests Manuel Göttsching’s E2-E4 for the jam-band circuit. “You Got What It Takes” might be Mark McGuire trying out for the Mo Wax roster. And the dazzling “Full O’ Stars” sounds like McGuire’s band Emeralds by way of Carl Craig’s Landcruising or More Songs About Food and Revolutionary Art. Craig’s pioneering approach to ambient techno is all over Chameleon. In the mid 1990s, the Detroit producer masterminded a style of electronic music in which driving rhythms were tempered by powdery textures and dreamy, drawn-out pads, and here Naples picks up that careful balance of opposing influences. Underpinning the churning arpeggios of the nominally ambient “Hydra” is the kind of seismic sub-bass that could shake Berghain to its foundations.
Despite the sketch-like feel of some of the record’s shorter songs, Chameleon feels like a unified body of work, meant to be experienced whole. The back-and-forth dialogue of Naples’ synth and guitar phrases is gestural, tentative; you can practically hear the question mark hanging in midair, and each successive track is posed almost like a response to the one before it, with themes recurring throughout—a monologue in the form of a crowded conversation. What holds it all together is a kind of relaxed restlessness. It’s never hurried or frantic, but yet it constantly changes shape, tries out new sounds, and shifts ideas around the way someone working through cabin fever might doggedly rearrange the furniture in search of clarity. For a record crafted in the claustrophobic doldrums of quarantine, Chameleon suggests almost limitless horizons.
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-10-21T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2021-10-21T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | ANS | October 21, 2021 | 8 | 0d23c5d9-15fa-4d4c-bde6-997e9ba881f6 | Philip Sherburne | https://pitchfork.com/staff/philip-sherburne/ | |
Kehlani’s most mature and thematically challenging album is steamy and committed, more eager than ever to bet it all on love. They’ve never sounded more comfortable in their own skin. | Kehlani’s most mature and thematically challenging album is steamy and committed, more eager than ever to bet it all on love. They’ve never sounded more comfortable in their own skin. | Kehlani: blue water road | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/kehlani-blue-water-road/ | Blue Water Road | Kehlani opens “shooter interlude,” the third track from their latest album blue water road, by loudly clearing their throat. “And I’m keeping all this part, too,” they quickly add. On the surface, it’s an innocuous moment, a bump in the recording process. But the rawness of it—choosing to leave in a blemish, an outtake—sets the stage for honest reflection. Over a bed of swelling guitars, flutes, vocal harmonies, they parrot questions they’ve received from others over the years, voicing requests for money and unasked proposals of marriage. Their interlocutors check their ego (“Don’t forget the favors that I did for you”) while pleading for connection (“Can I come over later and can I overstay my welcome?”). This meta moment is exceptionally vulnerable: Kehlani grappling with other people’s perceptions of them in public. It’s a beating heart on the floor, even by the standards of an artist who’s no stranger to a messy breakup song.
Kehlani has always portrayed love as a kaleidoscope of feeling—the lust, the trauma, stabs at commitment that evaporate like JUUL vapors. In 2020, It Was Good Until It Wasn’t explored bad relationships and one-night stands with the efficiency of spring cleaning, assessing the damage on all sides. blue water road has its share of debauchery—the deep notes when they sing “Call me daddy in front of all your bitches in the lobby” on “any given sunday” are seduction incarnate—but the overall vibes are steamy and committed, more eager than ever to bet it all on love. Kehlani has never sounded more comfortable in their own skin, selling the transition from SweetSexySavage to grown, sexy, and tender.
As opposed to the moodier atmosphere favored by artists like Summer Walker or 6LACK, blue water road has a bubbly tinge. The production, largely handled by executive producer Pop Wansel, is split between aqueous rap’n’b beats and guitar-centered pop arrangements. Even the tracks with a darker musical edge—like the strip-club love story “any given sunday”—are backed by synths and soft ad-libs that pop with champagne fizz. Kehlani’s vocal runs and rapping skill contribute to the lifted mood, expanding and contracting to the scope of each narrative. Their voice flits between the shuffling drums of the Slick Rick sample powering the angsty backseat lust of “wish i never” with the same conviction that drives the platonic remembrance of lead single “altar.” On “get me started,” Kehlani’s voice winds up and down a spiral of hi-hats and synths with hushed grace. Later, during the cheating anthem “more than i should,” their voice is sweet, forceful, moving in lockstep with the bassline.
Kehlani brings level-headed cool to this wide range of love stories, but blue water road is really impressive when it leans into the hopeless romantic hiding within the wounded player. As the album progresses, the backseat flings fade away in favor of sensual metaphors involving fruit and nights lost in their partner’s hair as they plan out a future together. “Being this close isn’t close enough,” they sigh on “melt.” They’ve always handled stories of tension and heartbreak with a delicate touch; it’s refreshing to hear that same care applied to a non-toxic companionship. Take the late-album highlight “everything,” which channels the anxiety and giddiness of a new relationship into one of the best performances of Kehlani’s career. In the song’s second verse, their voice bends around gossamer guitar licks to describe their partner’s attentiveness; the staccato bounce in the delivery of “I match your energy, match your fly perfectly/Lips lock intensively, want you extensively” flows like wine. On earlier albums, Kehlani’s cool façade felt like a defense against romantic uncertainty; now, in the throes of love, they’re unafraid to be endearing and just a little bit corny.
blue water road is Kehlani’s most mature album, as well as their most musically and thematically challenging. Its content is unabashedly queer—especially potent since this is their first release since publicly identifying as a lesbian—in a country bent on supressing non-conforming identities. It expands their sound palette into orchestral pop and easy listening that clash with the synthetic R&B and rap sounds fans have grown accustomed to. It chronicles a loose, nonlinear story that ends with love and comfort, just as the world is slowly coming back around to physical contact. But most importantly, it shows that for all the skin Kehlani has shed over the years, they haven’t even begun to scratch the surface. | 2022-05-04T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2022-05-04T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | Atlantic | May 4, 2022 | 7.9 | 0d2524e7-0dc6-48c6-a0c9-85469348a400 | Dylan Green | https://pitchfork.com/staff/dylan-green/ | |
The former YouTube star’s debut album establishes a decent R&B mood but proceeds to wallow in thin, underdeveloped emotions. | The former YouTube star’s debut album establishes a decent R&B mood but proceeds to wallow in thin, underdeveloped emotions. | Joji: In Tongues EP | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/joji-in-tongues/ | In Tongues EP | Before he made music as Joji, Japan-born George Miller was known for his idiot comedy characters. After he originated the smash viral “Harlem Shake” meme in 2013, Miller built his cult following making YouTube videos as Filthy Frank: a perverted, lonely man with a grating voice who, of course, loves to prank strangers. Miller’s equally horrendous persona, Pink Guy, was a horny, worm-like creep in a hot pink lycra suit who sang gross comedy songs about anal beads and thirsting after underage Nickelodeon stars. Miller himself described Filthy Frank as “the embodiment of everything a person should not be,” and still he racked up millions of views from people who found humor within the most repulsive and dark aspects of the human condition. In other words: He was a YouTube star.
And so naturally, Joji’s trying to break out of the internet box. He now writes and produces brooding downtempo R&B that exhibits a newfound introspection and sincerity. His debut EP, In Tongues, marks a natural progression into a more serious take on musicianship from a former internet comedian. His voice pulsates with soft and woozy vocal chops on top of minimal piano chords, like so many James Blake acolytes before him. And because Joji is a boy of the internet, it’s unsurprising that he seems to be most influenced by cloud-rap producers Shlohmo and Clams Casino—as evidenced by his emphasis on hazy atmosphere, organic samples, and lo-fi drums.
Joji adeptly peels off the pretense of his inane YouTube persona and reveals something tender and slightly more complex underneath. But lyrically, he circles around aimlessly with typical sad-boy subject matter: heartbreak, regret, and drugs. He shame-spirals in the dizzy “Will He,” while wondering about his ex-girl’s new man. In “Pills,” he parrots the clichés of any R&B breakup song birthed from Soundcloud: “I need you back,” flanked by mentions of Xanax and Zoloft. While Joji fails to push boundaries in terms of lyrical content or sonic palette, he does succeed in creating a fairly compelling mood that invites listeners to wallow with him. Unfortunately, the remixes that bulk up the last half of the recently released deluxe version of In Tongues hardly preserve what little emotional intensity Joji has on offer. Dallas EDM producer Medasin brings “Will He” into future-bass territory, while English experimental techno producer Actress upscales “Window” into an unrecognizable form—cleverly chucking out all of Joji’s bland lyrics in favor of some synth bloops. But ultimately, they displace Joji out of the world he’s created for himself—resulting in a hodge-podge of tracks that end as filler material.
Joji announced in December that he was retiring his YouTube channel. He outlined that the years of acting caused numerous mental and physical health issues—including “throat tissue damage” and a neurological condition that brought about stress-induced seizures. But despite its destructive nature, Joji is still very much indebted to his sordid past. His Pink Guy song “Help,” which is presented as a “parody” song about being depressed, curiously mirrors the lyrics on the Joji song “Demons.” And yeah, Pink Guy was making weird songs with names like “Hot Nickel Ball on a Pussy” and “Hentai,” but he was still playing with tropes of present-day trap and experimenting with various vocal styles. And with the freedom of knowing he would probably never be seriously critiqued, Joji made the dumbest tracks that formed the basis of skills that he used to make his first serious EP. Now, he’s just getting a little smarter about how to present all the fucked-up parts of himself.
The same unsettling horniness that drove the core of the Filthy Frank and Pink Guy’s personalities now appear to be manifesting itself in a different fashion within Joji’s material. Joji never gets explicitly sexual on In Tongues, but his songs smack of juvenile emotional dependency, like the 25-year-old man just figured out that relationships sometimes entail more than just trying to bust a nut. And based on how many songs are about the guilt from letting your partner down with your complete lack of emotional literacy, it seems like he couldn’t learn that fast enough. Joji spent a long time representing all the vile and hurtful things about being a human. Now, he’s dealing with the consequences of when that depravity keeps you from experiencing real love and intimacy. Welcome to the world outside of clicking, liking, and subscribing. | 2018-02-28T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2018-02-28T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Pop/R&B | 88rising / Empire | February 28, 2018 | 5.2 | 0d279111-d47d-4088-a622-443d0e8cc3e5 | Michelle Hyun Kim | https://pitchfork.com/staff/michelle-hyun kim/ | |
"I never was a metal head," remarked Colin Meloy in an Earlash interview last July. "It's something in my ... | "I never was a metal head," remarked Colin Meloy in an Earlash interview last July. "It's something in my ... | The Decemberists: The Tain EP | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/2242-the-tain-ep/ | The Tain EP | "I never was a metal head," remarked Colin Meloy in an Earlash interview last July. "It's something in my later years I've come to regret a little bit just because everybody has their stories of when they were a metal head. And it wasn't until recently that I started listening to Black Sabbath and started appreciating it."
Two albums and a six-song Five Songs EP into their career, The Decemberists' are beginning to seriously define their sound; a sudden plunge into, say, heavy metal, seems unlikely. Yet the first movement of The Tain EP, the band's new 18-minute composition based loosely on the 8th-century Celtic Ulster cycle's central poem "Tain Bo Cuailinge", finds Meloy and the others most immediately concerned with-- am I about to say this?-- serious Ur-metal riffage. Granted, Decemberist metal is not going to weigh down the Dominique Leones of the world, but make no mistake: Never has this band sung a flag so black, a maiden so iron.
The opening of The Tain is indeed jarring, though there's always more than meets the ear with this band, and the disc's dark acoustic guitar opening is not without foil: Pay attention to how Colin overdramatizes the dark line with his heavy plucks, disarming its sense of foreboding. When the rest of the band joins him in unison, what should be enough of a killer riff for friendly genocide is undermined by the organ's funny whir and Rachel Blumberg's gentle cymbal taps. In short, the sound is off-kilter, though not without ample deception, and only hints at the level of sophistication to come in the remaining movements.
The Decemberists have consistently proven that they understand the tensions that can be exploited in song: Morbid verses are set to straightforward, "fun" pop instrumentals ("July July"; "Chimbley Sweep"), narration is often not Colin's own, but another's ("Leslie Anne Levine"), inconsequential banalities are granted cosmic musical significance ("Song for Myla Goldberg"), sincerity is performatively lampooned ("I Was Meant for the Stage"). The Tain is no different: In fact, it's easily The Decemberists' most carefully considered and sophisticated effort yet-- to a limited degree, some of Colin's subtle musical humor even depends on cursory knowledge of its bizarre Celtic cycle namesake. In short: the cycle's most celebrated tale is how Queen Medb's army attacks the town of Ulster with the intention of carrying off their great sacred bull, and only CuChulainn, the story's hero, is able to resist the invasion and defend the town. To call a queen, as Colin does, a "salty little pisser," is a brilliant conceit, matched only by his decision to set her raid for a bull (her "shiny prize") to bombastic hard rock hooks.
When the song reaches its third movement, Colin switches the focus of his narrative to how CuChulainn, originally named Setanta, became "CuChulainn", or literally, "Hound of Cullan." As a mournful bassline sways, accompanied by occasional strums of heavily distorted guitar, Colin assumes different points of view with each passing line, and the band swells to an ironic degree of celebration upon the words, "Here come loose the hound/ To blow me down," the moment at which Setanta is attacked by King Cullan's guard dog.
This is not to say that one cannot at all appreciate The Tain without knowledge of Celtic mythology-- though, for me, personally, the interaction between the instrumentation and Colin's lyrics has always been The Decemberists' most fascinating trait. Take The Tain's ghostly fourth movement, by far the entire composition's most poignant melody. Rachel assumes vocals akin to her orphanry on "Chimbley Sweep", this time accompanied by light piano and bowed cello. The accordion finally makes its somewhat tongue-in-cheek appearance at the bridge, fighting with found sounds and music box bells. Meloy reassumes vocals for the fifth movement, which restates The Tain's original theme-- though not before he beautifully overextends himself in lines like, "Darling dear, what have you done?/ Your hands and face are smeared with blood," subjects that last word to a strange guttural contortion.
With each release, The Decemberists grow more sophisticated in their songcraft and subtler in their wit. The result, naturally, is that their releases are increasingly more demanding on the listener. Meeting a record on its own terms, though, is to a large extent a forgotten responsibility. Especially given its disorienting opener, The Tain EP is dense musically and lyrically, a bona fide grower, but certainly worth the effort to unravel it. | 2004-03-04T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2004-03-04T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Acuarela | March 4, 2004 | 7.7 | 0d286114-e92f-49ae-84bb-cca910cdbe9c | Nick Sylvester | https://pitchfork.com/staff/nick-sylvester/ | null |
Covering 50 Cent, Cat Stevens, Faith Evans, and more on steelpan drums should not sound this gimmick-less. It helps that the Bacao Rhythm & Steel Band is, first and foremost, a strong funk ensemble. | Covering 50 Cent, Cat Stevens, Faith Evans, and more on steelpan drums should not sound this gimmick-less. It helps that the Bacao Rhythm & Steel Band is, first and foremost, a strong funk ensemble. | Bacao Rhythm & Steel Band: 55 | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21908-55/ | 55 | The Bacao Rhythm & Steel Band is a pet project of the German instrumental group the Mighty Mocambos, a practiced collective that makes versatile deep funk. Bacao is a vehicle for bandleader and guitarist Björn Wagner's dedicated enchantment with the steelpan drum, which he and three other band members play on a new debut full-length called 55.
Steelpan drums are traditionally hammered out of 55-gallon oil barrels and inextricably linked to Trinidad, where they were invented in the 1930s, borne into the island’s calypso and soca music traditions, and have since been co-opted around the world. The metallic ping a pan makes is entirely unique for an acoustic instrument. With a series of soft strikes, players can conjure a swelling, fluttering effect; with stronger contact a pan rattles. More generally, the sustained notes obscure the player’s attack, as if the sound floated into earshot from a faraway place instead of bursting from an acute mallet strike. Conversely, it’s almost impossible to achieve the sharp briefness of a staccato. It’s a deceptively sensitive piece of metal that is easy to make loud but finicky to get right.
Wagner spent time learning the instrument and commissioning a handmade pan for himself while in Trinidad and Tobago, and Bacao released its first two songs—a pair of Meters covers—in 2007. By the following year, the group had grown more playful with its covers, releasing a stunning instrumental take on 50 Cent’s “P.I.M.P.” that sounds unmistakably like the steelpan riff at the heart of the rapper's original, now with the added appeal of a Caribbean groove and the kind of swampy horn solo expected of a Latin jazz burner.
About half the songs on *55 *are covers, all of which are immediately endearing. Since its invention and because of its timbral distinction, the steelpan has long been an instrument used for unexpected covers of popular songs. 55, which places previous singles alongside new tracks, * *sidesteps pure novelty factor in that the band is an impeccably tight funk outfit to begin with, and the pan is folded in as seasoning. Given that Wagner and his bandmates are recent converts, none of the pan playing on 55 is flashily virtuosic, but they’re deft and restrained use of the instrument—in this case both a single tenor steelpan as well as the lower registered double second pan—is nonetheless the album’s obvious calling card.
“Dog Was a Doughnut,” a delightful rework of Cat Steven’s shifty electronic original, is one of the album’s most sparsely arranged, the pan walking in awkward step with the rest of the percussion instead of standing out front. Bacao is prone to crisp mid-song breaks that frequently center percussive elements like a cowbell as much as a drum kit, but the group has the impressive coordination to move as one as well. The guitar is sometimes tucked into the groove as a jangling or ticking rhythmic element, but on tracks like “Queen of Cheeba,” a constant guitar riff becomes the woozy centerpiece of a psychedelic-tinged Latin jam. Originally a 1980s political anthem from John Holt about marijuana in Jamaica, “Police in Helicopter" digs into heavy psychedelic reggae territory instead. “Scorpio,” an oft-sampled legendary breakbeat track from Dennis Coffey, gets a true-to-form but sped-up rendition here that trades the famously overdubbed guitar motif for the sound of the featured instrument. As a groove-forward band, Bacao are shape-shifters in the best sense.
As the “P.I.M.P.” rendition suggests, Bacao are also molded by hip-hop. On “Round & Round,” they flip the smoothness of Hi-Tek’s wondrous original beat into a lazy shuffle, the pan clunkily plucking out the catchy refrain while the guitar creeps alongside. It’s “Love Like This,” a slinky cover of Faith Evans’ Grammy-nominated Bad Boy-era R&B hit, that takes the cake, accomplishing the rare intersection of unexpected and obvious. Like much of the album, “Love Like This,” which carries a cleaner bassline than the sampled original, is built by the heavy lifting of the traditional rhythm core; the pan then drives it home. The album’s original compositions are mostly impressive themselves: “Bacao Suave” is a horn-heavy, Latin-tinged jam, while “Port of Spain Hustle” offers up the slick-moving rhythm guitar and stabbing horn runs of a disco classic.
Even though the songs themselves are short, at 16 tracks, *55 *runs a touch too long, and some of the band’s early standout singles are sorely missing. Still, steelpan homages this delightfully listenable and yet devoid of schtick deserve credit. Bacao is a fantastic funk band first and foremost—the pan just adds some well-earned panache. | 2016-05-13T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-05-13T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Global | Big Crown | May 13, 2016 | 7.4 | 0d2aab68-f9f5-48b3-8e05-3496ea43d640 | Jay Balfour | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jay-balfour/ | null |
The omnivorous Nigerian rapper-singer makes smoothly effortless genre hybrids that feel like everywhere and nowhere all at once. | The omnivorous Nigerian rapper-singer makes smoothly effortless genre hybrids that feel like everywhere and nowhere all at once. | Santi: Mandy & the Jungle | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/santi-mandy-and-the-jungle/ | Mandy & the Jungle | Santi is the de facto leader of Nigeria’s alté (or alternative) scene, a burgeoning collection of young artists who are defined by a moody, Western eclecticism and by an urge to separate themselves from the mainstream. To listeners in the United States, however, Santi’s music will feel distinctly familiar: It’s in intimate conversation with Views-era Drake, with Benny Blanco and Diplo. Like those artists, Santi makes smoothly effortless composite pop songs that sound like everywhere and nowhere. The 27-year-old Lagosian was raised on the Western music of the late ’90s and early ’00s, along with local music he was exposed to, he’s said, by “the gateman or the house help.” He started out as a rapper, under the name Ozzy B, and slowly incorporated other genres into his music. On Mandy & the Jungle, his sound—an ultra-simple, hyper-processed rap/R&B hybrid—is the sound of the airport lounge, of the antiseptic spaces in between more-exciting locales.
With their sing-song melodies and light dancehall rhythms, tracks like “RX-64 (The Jungle),” “Sparky,” “Maria,” “Turn Down Mami,” and “Where You Been” make their way into your consciousness like air conditioning. They’re the twice-removed second cousins of seasonal favorites by artists like Baby Bash, Lumidee, and Wayne Wonder. Everything here is something you have heard, vaguely, somewhere else: “Murvlana” splits the difference between K-Ci & Jojo and Ryan Hemsworth. “Rapid Fire” includes a sudden, delightful interpolation of J-Lo and Ja Rule. And the guitar chords of “DSM” carry just the faintest echo of “Party in the USA.” This sense of constant recognition and recombination recalls Night Ripper or Feed the Animals. Like those Girl Talk albums, Mandy & the Jungle has no shortage of ear candy; also like those albums, it might make you a little sick after a while.
Santi makes sure to interpolate Nigerian music alongside American hits, but the album never really feels local to anywhere. The songs are uprooted, placeless, all the more so when they refer explicitly to places. “Morocco” isn’t about anything, North African or otherwise. (Though Santi told ID it was about “a man who stumbles upon a land filled with women who appear to have mysterious powers.”) On “Monte Claire,” Santi mentions a big night in Sweden, and the only explanation for his choice of country is either that “Sweden” kind of rhymes with “leavin’” or that Santi’s been listening to Yung Lean. These songs are the sonic equivalents of screen savers, soothing in their artificiality, but disappearing the moment you focus on them.
A few of the guests add life. On “Settle Down,” Ghanaian singer Amaarae says that “she’s swag-surfing off the San Francisco Bay,” which sounds like fun. GoldLink appears on “Maria,” perhaps the catchiest song here, and also avoids getting sucked into the Santi super-synthesis void. There comes a point where eclecticism become more depressing than impressive, and Santi’s music dances on top of that point.
Santi has emphasized that Mandy is a concept album, but the lyrics are all over the place. Lines like “Do you remember the times we had?” or “I can breathe in Morocco” or “Mama’s always chasin’ the cop car, yeah yeah” are meant to float in through your ears with minimal friction or thought. DRAM sounds like the album’s superego on “Demon Hearts,” a familiar lament about digital alienation, double-tapping and backed-up mentions; eventually he dismisses social media in favor of money. A stranger and balder example comes on “Raw Dinner” when Santi says of a woman that “she don’t taste like anything.” Too often, this album doesn’t either. | 2019-06-05T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-06-05T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Global / Pop/R&B / Rap | Monster Boy | June 5, 2019 | 6 | 0d2e9a66-34df-4825-b416-cd0540ffe499 | Jonah Bromwich | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jonah-bromwich/ | |
With a daring assortment of reverential and playful remixes, the drummer and producer carves a niche for himself in the world of contemporary jazz. | With a daring assortment of reverential and playful remixes, the drummer and producer carves a niche for himself in the world of contemporary jazz. | Kassa Overall: Shades of Flu: Healthy Remixes For an Ill Moment | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/kassa-overall-shades-of-flu-healthy-remixes-for-an-ill-moment/ | Shades of Flu: Healthy Remixes For an Ill Moment | When Madlib was granted access to Blue Note’s sacred archives, history inspired the Beat Konducta to create a textbook of sample-led jazz rap destined to be studied by hip-hop producers forevermore. Seventeen years after Shades of Blue: Madlib Invades Blue Note, drummer and producer Kassa Overall seizes upon the same concept, but the circumstances that inspired the making of his “remixtape” are radically different. Shades of Flu: Healthy Remixes For an Ill Moment was assembled as Kassa observed coronavirus quarantine measures in Seattle. The final product is more gonzo in spirit than Madlib’s sanctified opus, but just like his hero, Kassa takes listeners by the hand and walks them through why hip-hop is, and has always been, a continuum of jazz.
If you’re looking for other precursors, Shades of Flu has as much in common with Danger Mouse’s once heavily discussed mash-up record The Grey Album as it does with Madlib’s thesis: It’s similarly raw, underground, and chaotic. Kassa takes apart songs (mostly recorded by friends and collaborators), peers at the components inside, and finds bold new ways to put them back together. Sometimes he’ll fixate on one small snippet of the original—a piano plink, a vocal section—and loop it again and again, like a person hypnotized by a snow globe. His drums frequently drop out of the mix or veer off into wild freakouts. Madlib created smooth music you can easily picture coming out of both antique radios and modern turntables; Kassa’s experiments find a pocket somewhere in between.
Consider his new remix of pianist Sullivan Fortner’s take on John Coltrane and Duke Ellington’s “In a Sentimental Mood.” Taken from his 2018 album Moments Preserved, Fortner’s cover retained the dimly lit film noir vibes of the Duke Ellington composition. Now, here comes Kassa, who flips the track into an electro-jazz mash-up with a thumping beat. Meanwhile, the new mix of Makaya McCraven’s “Tall Tales” sees each instrument fray into the next, amalgamating into a blurry collage that feels equally inspired by the Beatles’ proggy productions and Aphex Twin’s jittering electronica.
That’s not to say Kassa can’t smooth things out when he’s in the mood. He adds a comfortingly familiar boom-bap beat to Jon Batiste’s very delicate cover of “What a Wonderful World,” while retaining Batiste’s doomed chord changes and dark mood. Cécile McLorin Salvant’s version of Steve Wonder’s “Visions” was prototypical lounge jazz—just the piano, the singer’s voice, and nothing else—but Kassa speeds her vocals up to form a lean slice of chipmunk soul that harks back to The College Dropout.
The most fascinating cut might be the reimagining of Miles Davis’ “Freedom Jazz Dance.” Kassa mixes the peppy horn riff with the distinct drum loop and vocals from Busta Rhymes’ “Put Your Hands Where My Eyes Could See,” emerging with an alt-hip-hop number heavily reminiscent of his collaborations with A Tribe Called Quest. It feels like a lost Busta remix, summoned from an era when serving up alternate versions of rap singles was the norm.
Of greatest personal consequence to Kassa must be his remix of Geri Allen’s “Unconditional Love.” The pianist and professor, a personal mentor, died in 2017, and Kassa handles her memory with great love by keeping the original’s swirling piano play and matching it with a hip-hop-style drum break. It’s the closest Kassa gets to adhering to Madlib’s Shades of Blue. Because as it turns out, Shades of Flu isn’t really about Kassa emulating one of his influences, but laying out a pamphlet of his own daring ideas. By illuminating old cuts in new light, Kassa asserts his position as one of modern jazz music’s most audacious futurists. | 2020-06-09T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-06-09T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Jazz / Rap | self-released | June 9, 2020 | 7.5 | 0d3c9358-7fe6-4e24-9ddc-065d7ff3d5b3 | Dean Van Nguyen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/dean-van nguyen/ | |
Operating under the alias Rrose, the Californian Seth Horvitz deploys the time-honored materials of techno to produce something destabilizing and new. | Operating under the alias Rrose, the Californian Seth Horvitz deploys the time-honored materials of techno to produce something destabilizing and new. | Rrose: Hymn to Moisture | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/rrose-hymn-to-moisture/ | Hymn to Moisture | Marcel Duchamp loved aliases, in part for the creative license they afforded. As R. Mutt, he produced one of his most famous pieces: Fountain (1917), an ordinary urinal tipped on its side and signed with the fake name. Rrose Sélavy—a pun on the phrase “Eros, c’est la vie” (“Sex, that’s life”)—was another of the Dada figure’s assumed names; often described as Duchamp’s female alter ego, Sélavy authored various artworks and essays and even sat, clad in feathers and furs, for photographic portraits by Man Ray.
Rrose, the California native Seth Horvitz’s principal musical project over the past nine years, takes from Rrose Sélavy both her name and her gender-flipping, appearing in drag on stage and in press photos. But while this act of borrowing might also seem fundamentally Duchampian, Rrose is not a conceptual project. Horvitz deploys the time-honored materials of techno at its purest—walloping kick drums, flayed hi-hats, undulating waves of synthesizer—in a way that is overwhelmingly immediate, at once bone-shaking and mind-melting. Since Rrose’s first EPs, in 2011, Horvitz has worked techno’s standard tropes into an increasingly elastic form, leaning into the destabilizing effects of repetition and relishing the impact of small changes carried out gradually. This is a music of exacting precision and also profound mystery.
Hymn to Moisture, Rrose’s debut album, is of a piece with much of Horvitz’s work until now, full of ominous low-end throb, churning delay, and synths that buzz like an electrical substation. As familiar as the textures and templates might be, it’s clear from the very first track how far the project has come from the comparatively straightforward sound of Rrose’s early output. The opening “Mine” contains traces of its influences—the pinging lead nods to minimalists like Jeff Mills and Mika Vainio, while the clanging dub delay recalls Basic Channel—but nothing here is business as usual. The complex time signature defies parsing; the way the tingling, twinkling high end gradually dissolves into a dissonant wash of tone suggests a gamelan orchestra being melted for scrap. Driven forward by an insistent double-time bass pulse, the song feels like a forced march into quicksand.
Similarly queasy sensations abound. The malevolent “Bandage” sets microtonal chimes against a bristling bass synth, filters opening and closing like the petals of some hellish flower as the time signature imperceptibly shifts; the ambient “Saliva” and “Hymn to Moisture” forgo beats entirely, luxuriating in the cloudy richness of perpetually shape-shifting synthesizers. It’s not all so dark; “Horizon,” a highlight, channels the cyclical arpeggios of kraut-influenced groups like Emeralds while managing to remain somehow more techno than prog.
Even a nominally club-oriented track like “Columns” refuses to deliver the regular dopamine hits that have become de rigueur in mainstream techno. Stretching faint, dissonant drones over its unsteady pitter-pat rhythm, it’s all about the long view, right down to a foggy outro that lingers for a good two minutes once the beats have gone silent, like steam rising from wet pavement after a summer storm. In track after track, a similar impulse propels listeners across unfamiliar territory, leaving little hint of how they’ve gotten there. Where a Rrose track ends up is rarely anything like where it’s begun.
Where Rrose Sélavy provided Duchamp with an opportunity for the gender play that he found useful in drawing out hidden meanings from familiar objects, Horvitz’s use of gender is less obvious in its ends. Initially, he has said, assuming the guise “was a way for me to subvert the element of the white male techno image, which I was not comfortable representing on stage.” More recently, he has attempted to clarify what Rrose represents: “a persona, a political statement, an exploration of identity, meant to provide some magic in the performance space.”
It is sometimes easier to say what Rrose is not than what she is. But there’s something about the very uncertainty around the alias that suits the music. Although Rrose is a persona, the project doesn’t foreground personality; the artist's self-presentation couldn’t be further from the cult of stardom that typifies big-business techno these days, and the music follows suit. Listen to a track like “Dissolve,” and it’s easy to imagine what dancing to it might feel like: not celebratory, not a party, but a private activity, practically levitating, cocooned in sound and lost in space. At moments like these, Rrose represents a destabilizing force—a decentering of identity and an erasure of all the hierarchies that can make dance music such a plodding, ponderous affair. Hymn to Moisture is an exploration of the limits of perception—an ode to the way that the self, under the right conditions, can disappear into the music. If Rrose is an alter ego, then Hymn to Moisture is an ode to ego death.
Buy: Rough Trade
(Pitchfork may earn a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.) | 2020-01-06T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2020-01-06T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Electronic | Eaux | January 6, 2020 | 7.7 | 0d4a0b7a-46ab-4bb2-a683-c4bac0a54494 | Philip Sherburne | https://pitchfork.com/staff/philip-sherburne/ | |
The Swedish prog-psych outfit slows down the tempo and experiments with a more expansive sound. | The Swedish prog-psych outfit slows down the tempo and experiments with a more expansive sound. | Dungen: Skit I Allt | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/14604-skit-i-allt/ | Skit I Allt | For most of its history, Dungen was the playground of Gustav Ejstes, who for the most part wrote all the songs and played everything on the recordings, then got the rest of the band together to play it all live. 2008's 4, which was actually their fifth album, marked the first time the quartet really played as a band in the studio, and Ejstes settled in as the pianist/vocalist/flautist. That approach continues here, and it seems to have led them in a more pastoral direction that has more in common with Songs From the Wood-era Jethro Tull and the folkier, jazzier end of 1970s European prog than the heavy psych they referenced on earlier records. Where 2004's great Ta Det Lungt had a fair amount of psychedelic punch, especially in its single, "Panda", the music here feels more like a caress.
Maybe that makes sense-- the band's name means "the Grove," after all-- but I'd say the album works best when heard as part of the band's overall output and probably isn't the place to start. The title track (Swedish for "fuck all") is the lead single, and the video emphasizes the group's recent ensemble approach, showing them playing while crammed together in a tiny room. Reine Fiske's harmonized lead guitar part is ultra-smooth and occasionally doubled by flute, which makes it interesting as a sonic throwback but also corresponds with the general lack of energy in the song, which is ultimately fairly forgettable rural psych-rock. Fiske fares better when he's let loose, and his instrumental work is one of the album's highlights. His bizarre lead on "Barnen Undrar", centered around a creative, siren-like hook, takes the song to another level, while his rough leads on the rhythmic "Brallor", one of the album's best songs, add a much-needed crunch, cutting through the sea of reverb. His acid-stained leads on the airy instrumentals "Högdalstoppen" and "Blandband", which finds him dueting with Ejstes' flute, likewise give those tracks a fire they'd otherwise lack.
"Högdalstoppen" sounds as though it's a few spliced excerpts of a much larger jam, which tells me that this could have been a much longer, more indulgent record than it is if the band had decided not to keep it to an economical 34 minutes and 10 songs. There are a few surprises-- for instance, Ejstes' double-tracked vocal on "Soda" sounds almost exactly like Elliott Smith-- but for the most part, Skit I Allt features a gentler Dungen, one that sounds comfortable as a band and perhaps at a bit of a crossroads as to where to take this sound. People who've appreciated the band's last three albums will find time for this once it has a chance to sink in, but it's not essential for people who got a charge out of Ta Det Lungt and passed on the rest. | 2010-09-16T02:00:03.000-04:00 | 2010-09-16T02:00:03.000-04:00 | Rock | Subliminal Sounds / Mexican Summer | September 16, 2010 | 6.8 | 0d4cb967-b9da-4530-91ea-bf07b8418b58 | Joe Tangari | https://pitchfork.com/staff/joe-tangari/ | null |
The Animal Collective member receives production help from bandmate Josh Dibb for his darkly intense solo full-length debut. | The Animal Collective member receives production help from bandmate Josh Dibb for his darkly intense solo full-length debut. | Avey Tare: Down There | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/14764-down-there/ | Down There | Animal Collective's Dave Portner told us in a recent interview that Down There, his first solo album as Avey Tare, grew out of a negative emotional atmosphere: "[The record] primarily comes from being bummed out-- which, I felt like in the past two years, I've had a darker time". And indeed, in terms of both general mood and sound, Down There is among the darkest pieces of music to emerge from a member of Animal Collective. The images of the crocodile on the album's cover and in promotional photos hint at the swampy vibe, but the animal association could be extended further: You can almost see Portner's head barely above water, not exactly drowning but having a hard time holding on regardless.
Produced by fellow A.C. member Josh Dibb, the marshland sonics of Down There feel related to the smeared, strung-out electric confusion of Animal Collective's 2005 album, Feels. But to think too much about the past would be to ignore the album's distinct rhythmic tics. While Animal Collective's 2009 breakthrough LP, Merriweather Post Pavilion, was notable for its big, buzzy beats, here the pulse is more introverted and irregular. So we get the clicking dub of "Ghost of Books" and the Warp-like IDM textures of "Heads Hammock". The clatter of "Lucky 1" is panicked and freaked-out, while the straightforward pulse of "Oliver Twist" smacks distantly like the remnants of a pounding headache. The rhythms are prominent, but they don't exactly seem designed for dancing.
Down There is less accessible than latter-day Animal Collective and harder to wrap your head around, but it isn't a callback to the more difficult sound that marked the band early on. If anything, it sounds like Portner is taking a lateral step away from Animal Collective in order to work out some pressing personal issues on his own. This sense of retreat, coupled with the internally focused, claustrophobic atmosphere, brings to mind the thematic concerns (if certainly not the sound) of Neil Young's 1974 bummed-out classic On the Beach. But unlike Neil, Portner doesn't seem angry at the outside world. He's asking questions of himself, and it seems he's doing so without expecting any easy answers. "Shouldn't I be content with what I got?" he muses in "Oliver Twist", later wondering if "I'm just a thief."
Down There opener "Laughing Hieroglyphic" finds Portner touching on notions of protection and kinship, ideas common to the work of his bandmate Panda Bear's solo work. But here, there's less hope and more personal questioning: "When I get fucked up/ I do the best/ To make myself not fucked up again/ My heart and my lungs do/ Why can't I do the same for everyone I love too?" Malaise overcomes Portner in "Heads Hammock", as the phrase "I don't want to" goes unfinished, swallowed up by echoed gurgles. "Heather in the Hospital", which addresses his sister's bout with cancer, ditches internal narrative almost entirely, using emergency room imagery ("The people bandaged up/ The doctor's making rounds") as emotional armor from that beatific, bluesy shout that runs through the song. The music and lyrics here are cut from the same downcast cloth.
Portner has said that he has no plans to perform this material live, hinting that the feeling of the music isn't something that he wants to revisit every night on tour. And it's true that Down There embodies a mindset that most people are trying to get away from. But there's a fantastical bent to the album that opens up with repeated listening, the dripping, moist "weird hell" vibe that Portner's mentioned in several interviews since. The album's theme of the underworld reveals itself in the beginning of the stately instrumental "Glass Bottom Boat", where one warped voice asks another, "Hey, do you know how to get to that cemetery?" and receives the reply, "Sure, I can get you there. Just step into my boat here." The exchange brings to mind Charon, the Greek mythological figure that ferried souls across the rivers Styx and Acheron and into the deeper recesses of Hades. Portner's on that same boat later on during Down There's standout "Cemeteries", his voice reverberating off the reflecting pool of the hushed production: "Looking back on/ Old days". Throughout the record, the vogue for nostalgia that permeates so much modern indie gets inverted. Sometimes, this record says, the past is better left behind. | 2010-10-25T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2010-10-25T02:00:00.000-04:00 | Experimental | Paw Tracks | October 25, 2010 | 7.9 | 0d4f2bca-bf07-41fe-b428-476c3e96e6e0 | Larry Fitzmaurice | https://pitchfork.com/staff/larry-fitzmaurice/ | null |
Rising, genre-spanning pop star Katy B's debut builds on the promise of her early singles, adding vocal finesse and feminine appeal to UK bass music. | Rising, genre-spanning pop star Katy B's debut builds on the promise of her early singles, adding vocal finesse and feminine appeal to UK bass music. | Katy B: On a Mission | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/15254-on-a-mission/ | On a Mission | Last year, Katy B was widely credited for bringing vocal finesse and feminine pop appeal to an increasingly aggro dubstep-crossover arena. She dropped a fantastic Benga-backed debut single, "Katy on a Mission", that vocally wrung out both elation and longing over his abrasive, buzzing stutter-step. And she kept that streak going with a couple of guest spots on Magnetic Man's self-titled record: The eerie come-on "Crossover" and the ecstatic jungle throwback "Perfect Stranger" were album highlights that proved her voice could breach the barrier of heavy-duty bass and plant its feet firmly atop it. Two UK top 5 hits later-- "Katy on a Mission" and the Ms. Dynamite collaboration "Lights On"-- and members of the English music press started to peg her as the next singer to bring crossover legitimacy to bass music.
Turns out that'd be selling her a bit short. After pairing up with Rinse FM's tastemaker station head Geeneus and co-producer Zinc, Katy B has used On a Mission as a chance to posit herself as a genre-spanning pop singer who isn't tied down to a single thing, no matter how well it suits her. It's a move that makes a lot of sense, since versatility is the key to a good dance album-- let the voice establish itself, and the niche will either find itself or get broadened in the process. "Katy on a Mission", "Lights On", and "Perfect Stranger" reappear here in radio-edit lengths, and these three tracks help define her as someone who can play off dubstep and funky basslines with a tone that drips with cool defiance, stings with melancholy, and still grabs at you when it's being reduced to a skeletal echo. But there's enough stylistic extension here that Katy finds a way to transcend enough signifiers to call herself pop above anything else.
The big standout here is "Broken Record", a four-on-the-floor thump with electro underpinnings and a breakdown that perks up longtime dance fans with a judiciously dropped "Amen" break. It's one of those club-tested/radio-ready tracks that sounds good anywhere, not out of focus-grouped button-pushing but the way Katy sells it: coyly yearning and melodically sweet on the verse, intense and swooping on the chorus, wracked with ambiguity throughout. And then she finds another gear when the song finally shifts into the titular hook near the end-- the way she rolls her delivery of the line "like-a-bro-ken rec-ooooord" is the stuff that song-length buildups were made for. And there's more of that going around on the other new tracks, laid out in a number of different modes-- the trapped yet defiant punchback of opener "Power on Me", the sour resentment of "Why You Always Here", the slyly perilous seduction that drives "Witches Brew". It's a repertoire that gives her the appeal of a 1990s rave diva with contemporary pop-R&B refinement, minus the Auto-Tune.
That alone would make her another noticeably talented if semi-anonymous vocalist. But she also provides a breather from pop's current fascination with vacant navel-gazing. It's not just the nods to decades-old house and jungle that provide a perspective on dance-music culture that predates the tyranny of the David Guetta era-- though Geeneus and Zinc get all the credit in the world for following up Katy's early breakthroughs with a first-rate collection of beats that reunite the disparate splinters of bass music culture past and present. What puts On a Mission over the top is Katy's way of expressing herself with emotions that extend past "wooo, druuunk" into more nuanced and detailed relationships with booming systems and the people who flock to them. As danceable as these tracks can be, the undercurrents of nuanced frustration and uncertainty in Katy's tone-- especially in the surrender of "Power on Me" and the torn-up estrangement of "Go Away"-- amplify the tricky dynamics of relationships and hook-ups to rarefied levels, creating a tension to the music that makes epics out of dissatisfaction. And when she withdraws just a bit for one of the more introspective cuts, a haunting mid-tempo meditation on love and identity called "Disappear", her caught-up bewilderment says softly and resonantly what lesser singers couldn't accomplish with overblown histrionics. A genre-bound narrative might still see Katy B slotted into a narrow role that can't quite contain her, but her voice is doing its best to prove otherwise. | 2011-03-29T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2011-03-29T02:00:01.000-04:00 | Electronic / Rock | Columbia / Rinse | March 29, 2011 | 8.1 | 0d50f1f4-3119-4d26-b137-9aa414c6372f | Nate Patrin | https://pitchfork.com/staff/nate-patrin/ | null |
This four-LP collection spans David Bowie's second-ever BBC session, in 1968, through to May 1972. Unlike other more carefully curated Bowie box sets, Bowie at the Beeb is an anatomy of how he became a rock star. | This four-LP collection spans David Bowie's second-ever BBC session, in 1968, through to May 1972. Unlike other more carefully curated Bowie box sets, Bowie at the Beeb is an anatomy of how he became a rock star. | David Bowie: Bowie At The Beeb | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21558-bowie-at-the-beeb/ | Bowie At The Beeb | Sixteen years after being released on CD, Bowie at the Beeb finally gets the vinyl box set treatment, with some scanty bonus bits: a fantastic 1971 rendition of "Oh! You Pretty Things" where Bowie and Mick Ronson perform as a duo, from the Japanese CD, and a previously unheard version of "The Supermen," from March 1970, where he's backed by the Hype. It's tempting to assume the collection of his early BBC sessions is a posthumous cash-in, except that it was announced in December, three weeks before Bowie's death, thus making it a viable part of his beautifully choreographed stage exit. While the rush to winkle out clues from Blackstar in the wake of his passing felt a bit like pointing out how a magician does his tricks, it's worth asking why he pushed us toward these formative live sessions as he knew his life was coming to its end.
Simply put, perhaps it's nothing more than a show of gratitude toward an organization whose early belief in him never wavered (and whose publicly funded existence is always under threat from Britain's Conservative government). Bowie recalled failing a 1965 audition to work with the BBC, who stated, in their classic patrician tone, "'This vocalist is devoid of personality and sings all the wrong notes.'" And yet they gave him another shot, as Bowie pointed out: "So in your inimitable manner and with tremendous enthusiasm you got me back on for another audition, which I passed the second time around, which gave me freewheeling access to a lifetime of singing all the wrong notes."
This four-LP collection spans Bowie's second-ever BBC session, in 1968, through to May 1972, after which he wouldn't record another until 1991. Rather than a sign of rupture, that 19-year gap is possibly an indirect result of the BBC's support: After Bowie performed "Starman" on the network's "Top of the Pops" in July 1972, his fame rose enormously, leading him to America, tax exile in Switzerland and Germany, and into periods of immense productivity (and, of course, druggy preoccupations). Manager Tony DeFries may not have seen the point in having him do more sessions.
Yet in the early days, back when Bowie was still an earnest Anthony Newley wannabe whose career could never get seem to get off the ground, Auntie's arms were always there to scoop him up and give him another shot. His first chances came from John Peel, and from there he trickled down through Radio 1's primetime slots; by 1970, he was being given hour-long live appearances on the station. It's an appealingly linear type of progress, and a literal one, too; unlike Five Years and other more carefully curated Bowie box sets, Bowie at the Beeb is an anatomy of how he became a rock star.
The first session here (and second, historically) was recorded for Peel in May 1968, and finds Bowie in romantic mode, though bigger ideas are taking shape: the swoony "London Bye, Ta-Ta" characterizes the influx of immigrant communities to London as two lovers who don't make it. "Karma Man" and "Silly Boy Blue" both deal with Buddhism, but the latter gives the very timely fixation a Bowie spin, as he empathizes with a monk who doesn't fit in with his community. By October 1969, there's been a perceptible shift in attitudes: "Let Me Sleep Beside You" and "Janine" are tougher in sound and spirit.
Bowie's February 1970 session with the Tony Visconti Trio—aka the Hype—starts inauspiciously. He covers Jacques Brel's "Amsterdam" competently, and the acoustic "God Knows I'm Good" is a tedious ditty about a woman being caught shoplifting. But then comes "The Width of a Circle," and Mick Ronson's first-ever performance with Bowie. Maybe the subtlety of their work together here is a sign of a tentative new relationship: Ronson's riff is much more muted and ingrained in the mix than it would be on record, but still gorgeous. Their dynamic picks up steam on "Unwashed and Somewhat Slightly Dazed," as Bowie's frustrations at the loss of his father preempt a brilliantly wiggy Ronson solo.
As David Cavanagh's excellent book on John Peel's sessions points out, Bowie was hardly gigging even by 1971, when he had had a bona fide hit with "Space Oddity": "He doesn't have a regular band, his albums don't sell, and he's prone to being in a state of artistic flux." So the hour-long, June 1971 Radio 1 performance by David Bowie and Friends at London's Paris Theater was a huge showcase, preempting the release of Hunky Dory that December. Never mind the size of his ensemble, however; the highlight is a box-fresh, solo rendition of "Kooks," played acoustically just four days after it was written to herald the birth of his son, Zowie.
Bowie always called himself a "tasteful thief," and the permeability of his brain becomes clear on the third LP of the set, which deals with late 1971 and early 1972. Bowie had just returned from New York, where he met Andy Warhol, Lou Reed, and Iggy Pop. In early 1972, his covers of "Waiting for the Man" and "White Light/White Heat" are a little unconvincing, but no matter; the transformative experience has brought out a new ability in Bowie to really sell his own songs live as he never had before, ramping up his infectious, virile energy. You can hear the Spiders From Mars hitting their stride, and a lizardy streetwise quality appearing in Bowie's voice.
Of course, all this nascent rockstardom comes to a head in The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders From Mars, which Bowie previewed live on Radio 1 a month prior to release in June '72, across two separate sessions. By this point, "Starman" had been DJ Johnnie Walker's single of the week, which earned it daily plays, and allowed Bowie to delve a little further back into his catalog for hidden greatest hits: "Space Oddity," and "Changes," where Ronson transforms the original's hammered piano riff. But in the here and now, Bowie's ravishing yowl makes an early appearance on "Moonage Daydream," and you hear him start to reach outward, beyond the intimacy of radio into the visceral performer he would become. His May 22, 1972 session ends with—what else—"Rock'n'Roll Suicide," the last song he would play live on the BBC for 19 years.
As ever, nothing was accidental. Beyond the vinyl reissue of Bowie at the Beeb, Bowie reached out to the BBC one last time before he died. His last round of Twitter follows included BBC 6Music and some of the station's flagship DJs (along with a cheeky parody account: God). The new music industry ecosystems mean that bands are no longer built up by single organizations in the same way that Bowie was by the BBC at the turn of the 1970s, which made the day of his death all the more remarkable. Like thousands of other Brits, I found out by listening to BBC 6Music DJs Shaun Keaveny and Matt Everitt announce the news at 7:08 a.m. Although they were clearly grasping for words, Keaveny landed on the perfect summation of what happens when the value of patronage is recognized and repaid: "David Bowie's music is an absolutely central tenet of what we do here at 6Music." Bowie at the Beeb doesn't always make for essential listening, but it represents a foundational part of British culture, and upholds the importance of public broadcasting as a mutually beneficial relationship. | 2016-03-02T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2016-03-02T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Parlophone | March 2, 2016 | 8 | 0d51a8e3-1318-47ae-a7e1-6c772799e768 | Laura Snapes | https://pitchfork.com/staff/laura-snapes/ | null |
The New York noise ensemble PC Worship's Basement Hysteria is fixated on repetition, but with none of its usual comforting familiarity. The album is bristly, difficult, and unaccommodating. On it, rock'n'roll is a pirated vessel, steered unhurriedly toward doom. | The New York noise ensemble PC Worship's Basement Hysteria is fixated on repetition, but with none of its usual comforting familiarity. The album is bristly, difficult, and unaccommodating. On it, rock'n'roll is a pirated vessel, steered unhurriedly toward doom. | PC Worship: Basement Hysteria | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21142-basement-hysteria/ | Basement Hysteria | The cover of PC Worship’s Basement Hysteria features concentric circles. They appear to be in motion, rippled by an unseen hand. The imagery evokes Peter Saville’s iconic cover for Joy Division's Unknown Pleasures, another picture of linear stability disrupted. For the New York ensemble PC Worship—led by Justin Frye, who’s credited with the cover art—the uncannily destabilized image aptly introduces a full-length fixated on repetition, but with none of its usual comforting familiarity. Instead, Basement Hysteria restates riffs until listeners reach a dissociative threshold, a kind of aural vertigo.
If that sounds something like a tenet of minimalist composition, it’s no coincidence. The members of PC Worship seem like self-taught students of 20th-century avant-garde. The shifting lineup, which Frye has helmed since the late 2000s, incorporates circuit bending, tape manipulation, harsh noise, and field recordings. Their songs do not sound intended for replication. There’s too much improvisation, especially in the braying brass caterwaul, and the home recordings welcome environmental intrusions. And yet, last year’s Social Rust indicated a subtle departure. Still saturated with queasy dissonance, its songs hewed closer to conventional lengths and structures. PC Worship’s latest, however, makes no such concessions.
Basement Hysteria features four songs at over a half hour. The ostensible single, in so far as it was posted ahead of the release date, exceeds 13 minutes. Vital signs like that register less like an album or an EP and more like a statement: If Social Rust flirted with the common indie rock narrative about experimentalism capitulating to accessibility then Basement Hysteria is a harsh rebuff. It’s bristly, difficult, and unaccommodating. Here, rock'n'roll is a pirated vessel, steered unhurriedly toward doom.
Indeed, Basement Hysteria begins with a song called "Done". It’s easy to mistake the horns for a wailing baby. Some pundit babbles on a muddled radio or television. Piano—a detuned, unenthused clang—serves as the dreary pulse of this urban soundscape, but the rest of the album takes place underground. "Where am I/ Where am I/ I’m in my head when I should be outside," Frye groans later in the song, his delivery by that time a weary echo of the sluggish drumbeat. The title track, perhaps the only rudderless inclusion, sounds like little more than one-handed drumming and tuning peg abuse. On "Social Fiction", however, PC Worship compellingly recalls tour-mates Naomi Punk; both bands know the value of a slow, syncopated pummel. Only, Frye’s group textures leaden might with total scree.
The tracks conclude unceremoniously, with a coughing fit, or protracted instrumental decay. Resolution is for pop, or songs intended for an audience; part of *Basement Hysteria’*s appeal is an illusion: listeners are among the privileged few who get invited deep down below. And it’s convincing. A centerpiece of sorts, "My Lens" is a procession of seemingly discrete sections. High tones wail siren-like before a morose, spare passage of acoustic guitar and murmured poetics. It best conveys the simmering mania of Basement Hysteria, where obsession induces befuddlement and simple things grow unnatural features under prolonged examination. | 2015-11-09T01:00:03.000-05:00 | 2015-11-09T01:00:03.000-05:00 | Rock | Northern Spy | November 9, 2015 | 7.8 | 0d522e12-118a-41b8-9e12-34f99c22f016 | Sam Lefebvre | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sam-lefebvre/ | null |
The underrated Odd Future member Domo Genesis' debut is the culmination of his years of consistency, the result of existing on the fringes of his friends’ fame and trying to earn his keep. | The underrated Odd Future member Domo Genesis' debut is the culmination of his years of consistency, the result of existing on the fringes of his friends’ fame and trying to earn his keep. | Domo Genesis: Genesis | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21740-genesis/ | Genesis | It was always difficult to figure out where exactly Domo Genesis fit in with Odd Future. Earl Sweatshirt was its teen prodigy, Frank Ocean its silent genius, and Tyler, the Creator its radical leader. In the beginning, Domo seemed like merely another warm body to justify the "collective" tag; his lethargic, professional weed carrier raps never really complementing the anarchist shouts of his teen rebel cohorts. But eventually he carved out space for himself on sheer tenacity, becoming more technically proficient and simply rapping harder. As the collective dissolved around him, he continued to be its steadiest member.
His Odd Future Records debut, Genesis, is the culmination of his years of consistency, the result of existing on the fringes of his friends’ fame and trying to earn his keep. "If you don’t like this song they gon’ turn my lights off," Domo Genesis painfully reminds listeners on "All Night," and throughout Genesis he raps like it, spitting coiling phrases densely populated with slant rhymes. He spends much of its time searching for answers, trying to piece together a sensible reason to keep rapping. Over the course of the album’s running time, he finds one: he’s logged way too many hours to just quit now.
It’d be easy to discount Domo Genesis strictly as a stoner rapper, especially since his second single, "Go (Gas)," featuring smokers of note Wiz Khalifa and Juicy J, is packed with references to the drug (many from vocal straightedge rapper Tyler, in the vein of his appearance on "Rolling Papers"). But that’d be reductive. Domo Genesis can be a thoughtful writer. His paranoia starts to get the better of him on "Questions," which is a rabbit hole of internal doubt, and he communicates much of the internal conflict with his voice alone, which is cutting and combative. The flute-driven "One Below," a song prefaced by words from his mother, delves into how industry politics have reframed his outlook, rapping jarring lines like "I’ma take all of mine if they’ve got nothing to give/ The lack of inspiration had me chasing broken ideas" and "my life story gotta be worth somebody’s time." If anything, Domo seems to be sobering up.
The subtle, soulful production, from Christian Rich, Sha Money XL, Sap, and Cam O’bi, gives him mellow headspace from which to unspool his musings. When he raps over the elegant vocal chop on "Coming Back," with one of his most tightly wound verses, his bars snap into the pockets left by the sweet, retreating voice. But there are kinks: Sometimes the hooks on Genesis get wonky, there are portions of the record that feel unfinished (like the second half of "Wanderer"), and every now and then Domo will sneak in a groaner. But for the most part, Genesis is a revelation. "I got knowledge for every dollar made, so look at me now/ I'm scared of none of my flaws, they got 'em shook of me now/ So if you ever had a doubt about it, it shouldn’t be now," he raps on "Awkward Groove." Now that the Odd Future bubble has burst, Domo Genesis is finally figuring out his worth. | 2016-03-28T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-03-28T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Odd Future | March 28, 2016 | 7.2 | 0d5441a1-53be-4cdb-bea4-83a58bc29eee | Sheldon Pearce | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sheldon-pearce/ | null |
After a wide variety of projects and releases, Norwegian singer-songwriter Susanna Wallumrød returns with a grim and often stirring extended meditation on religion and mortality. | After a wide variety of projects and releases, Norwegian singer-songwriter Susanna Wallumrød returns with a grim and often stirring extended meditation on religion and mortality. | Susanna: Triangle | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21834-triangle/ | Triangle | Norwegian singer-songwriter Susanna Wallumrød’s career has taken many forms. With her project Susanna and the Magical Orchestra, she made several albums of art-pop composed enough to be interesting yet accessible enough for TV syncs. One might also know her for her deconstructed covers of pop songs akin to those of Stina Nordenstam or Cat Power, or perhaps for her stint of making straightforward alt-rock—on 2011’s underrated Jeg vil hjem til menneskene, which was situated somewhere between jazz and grunge. These days, one’s as likely to know her for her collaborations with Scandinavian artists like Jenny Hval; like many in her circles, Susanna is an accomplished curator of talent, and her first self-produced album, Triangle, features a murderer’s row of jazz and experimental musicians, including Helge Sten of Deathprod and Anja Lauvdal of Skadedyr.
With so many influences to synthesize for a first solo production, it makes sense that Susanna would go big: 22 songs, reprises and interludes and variations on themes, generally on religion and mortality. She’s described Triangle as “soul music for lost souls,” and the first few seconds neatly sum up her idea of this: “Nothing is holy, nothing is sacred,” she intones over a synth pitched like a chant section. Triangle is the sort of fully-realized work that can only come from an artist lost in her highest, headiest intellectual space. It’s also near-monastically austere, nearly 70 minutes long, and a commitment, at best, to take in as an album; in even a mildly uncharitable mood, the unending sparseness will be wearying.
Paradoxically, Triangle is best experienced in short, repeated bursts of close listening. “Burning Sea” conjures waves of feedback that evoke its title, if perhaps too obviously. “We Don’t Belong” is an almost religious meditation on impermanence, Ecclesiastes arranged for solo voice and drone; when the piano comes in, it’s like anxious palpitations, scrabbling back and clinging to earth. “Born Again,” another religion-adjacent track, comes off like a deconstructed gospel song, the piano and brass collapsing where elsewhere they might exult, and Susanna’s words a subtly yet fundamentally tweaked credo: “born again, and again, and again.”
“Death Hanging,” in its original form, was a trio recording with Susanne Sundfør and Siri Nilsen in the vein of Harris/Parton/Ronstadt or Case/Lang/Veirs—folk that floats above and haunts its listener. The Triangle recording is a more traditional duet with Dutch mezzo Jessica Sligter; from her first note, her more harrowing voice amid Triangle’s spare arrangements and soprano lines is instantly arresting. The arrangement, a maelstrom of cello and low strings, works much the same. Death sounds more imminent here. A little more editing and pacing might have made the whole album like this, but given enough time, Triangle has moments of clarity to be found. | 2016-04-27T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-04-27T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | SusannaSonata | April 27, 2016 | 6.4 | 0d57272f-bd0a-4d5b-b7d7-29ce0baf238c | Katherine St. Asaph | https://pitchfork.com/staff/katherine-st. asaph/ | null |
The debut album from Wye Oak's Jenn Wasner and White Life's Jon Ehrens recreates the omnipresent 90s pop that permeated their childhoods with aplomb. Dungeonesse is sparkling, intimate, and not nearly as self-conscious as you might expect, though it could lose the awkward raps. | The debut album from Wye Oak's Jenn Wasner and White Life's Jon Ehrens recreates the omnipresent 90s pop that permeated their childhoods with aplomb. Dungeonesse is sparkling, intimate, and not nearly as self-conscious as you might expect, though it could lose the awkward raps. | Dungeonesse: Dungeonesse | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/18003-dungeonesse-dungeonesse/ | Dungeonesse | "Something that Jon and I talk about a lot is the idea of reclaiming pop music," Wye Oak singer/guitarist Jenn Wasner said as an introduction to their new electro-pop duo Dungeonesse. “Placing it squarely in the hands of, I dunno, say, a couple of regular nerds from Baltimore.” (Jon Ehrens is of the Baltimore band White Life.) Wasner’s quote was a pretty soft sell. With very few exceptions, the best kind of pop music is superhumanly suave and wilts at the first sign of even quasi-academic jargon, so there are a couple of red flags in that sentence: “regular”, “nerds”, “reclaiming.” But luckily, none of these words have anything to do with the way Dungeonesse’s light, infectious, effortlessly cool debut actually sounds. Dungeonesse has none of the awkwardness you might expect from an artist like Wasner (who’s stepping more out of her comfort zone here than Ehrens is) making a self-conscious foray into a totally different genre; surprisingly, she sounds completely at home in the album’s crush-struck vibrancy and retro-90s shimmer. You’d be hard pressed to find the slightest trace of that self-proclaimed nerdiness-- except for the fact that one of the best songs is called “Shucks”.
Wasner and Ehrens wrote the album like a post-dial-up Postal Service-- he sent her tracks, she filled in the lyrics and melodies-- and as a team, they bring out the best in each other. White Life’s neo-new-wave self-titled 2011 debut was solidly catchy if a little faceless, but here Wasner’s husky, charismatic vocals bring his tracks to life. And as for Wasner herself, she’s had a busy and stylistically varied couple of years: since Wye Oak’s excellently brooding 2011 album Civilian, she’s released a few singles with her art-pop side project Flock of Dimes and made cameos on albums from Future Islands and Titus Andronicus, basically becoming the go-to name in indie rock's “elegantly forlorn female voice" Rolodex entry. Which is why it’s refreshing to hear her sound like she’s having so much damn fun on Dungeonesse. Ehrens’ bright and bouyant tracks bring out a lighter side of Wasner: Overtop a cascade of glimmering synths, she’s never sounded as playful as she does on the great lead-off single “Drive You Crazy”, while the Dev Hynes-like beat on the swooning “This Could Be Home” is punctuated with samples of her sighs and laughter.
Dungeonesse’s sound is poised somewhere between the past and present. Their take on the poppier side of modern R&B would sound at home on a playlist with Jessie Ware and Solange, but they’re also trying to reanimate a very specific mid-90s vibe-- think Jock Jams for a private party rather than a whole bleacher-rocking stadium. They embrace their influences wholeheartedly, enough to bring the past vividly into the present moment. It’s pretty amazing how well they get the vibe down: If you played “Cadillac” for someone and told them it was a long-lost would-be dance hit from 1994, they wouldn’t bat an eyelash. But like a few other tracks, “Cadillac” almost sinks under the weight of the album’s most glaring problem: They’ve yet to make a convincing case for why there should ever be a rap verse in a Dungeonesse song. TT the Artist lends a couple of hip-hop Mad Libs lines (“Get-get on up/ Feel the groove”) to the otherwise excellent “This Could Be Home”, and Baltimore emcee DDm’s cliche-ridden verse on “Cadillac” isn’t much more imaginative. Maybe this is just the one place where Dungeonesse studied the 90s dance hit songbook a little too hard; after all, the dude from Real McCoy wasn’t exactly Andre 3000.
It’s funny what a difference a couple years makes. Five years ago, it would have been a lot rarer to hear a singer firmly rooted in indie-folk territory gushing about 90s dance pop and her “youthful fantasies growing up, listening to Mariah Carey and trying to recreate [the] vocals.” But in 2013, that sentiment feels commonplace enough for Wasner’s comment about “reclaiming pop” to almost feel dated. After all, the boundaries that used to separate “pop” from “indie” are corroding from both sides. One example of many? Jenn Wasner has made a very good pop record... and the new Mariah Carey song opens with a warm, fuzzy riff that sounds like something lifted out of a Wye Oak song. | 2013-05-16T02:00:03.000-04:00 | 2013-05-16T02:00:03.000-04:00 | null | Secretly Canadian | May 16, 2013 | 7.7 | 0d652450-601b-46a3-b405-336a5af669b0 | Lindsay Zoladz | https://pitchfork.com/staff/lindsay-zoladz/ | null |
Former Cymbals Eat Guitars frontman Joseph D’Agostino’s solo debut is rangier and more intimate than his former band, but taps similar wells of grief and pain. | Former Cymbals Eat Guitars frontman Joseph D’Agostino’s solo debut is rangier and more intimate than his former band, but taps similar wells of grief and pain. | Empty Country: Empty Country | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/empty-country-empty-country/ | Empty Country | For a band that spent four albums fixating on demises, Cymbals Eat Guitars didn’t dwell too much on their own. The New Jersey indie rock band quietly confirmed their breakup after the fact, nearly two years after a trio of 2017 hometown farewell shows they hadn’t announced as such. The end came, in large part, out of recognition they’d hit their ceiling. After years of playing to shrinking crowds, the band once hyped as indie rock’s next big thing realized “there was nowhere else for us to go,” as frontman Joseph D’Agostino tells it.
Even Cymbals Eat Guitars’ small cult of devotees would have a hard time arguing with that. They were a great band, but a niche one, their music too sour and anxious to sit alongside The National or Edward Sharpe & the Magnetic Zeros on one of Barack Obama’s playlists. They could conjure the rousing, go-for-broke sweep of Springsteen or The Clash, but where those artists’ big songs played liked triumphs, theirs sounded like panic attacks. Between D’Agostino’s squalid storytelling and shell-shocked voice, nobody was going to license a Cymbals Eat Guitars song for a car commercial.
If there’s an upside to the band’s breakup, though, it’s that anything D’Agostino records is going to sound at least a little like Cymbals Eat Guitars, and so it is with the debut from his solo project Empty Country. Patched together with a lineup of friends and family, the self-titled record really isn’t much further removed from Cymbal Eat Guitars than any of that band’s albums were from their predecessors. It thunders a little less and wanders a little more, and although the arrangements are still dense and twisty, they clear room for chiming acoustic guitars, bright pedal steels and occasional strings. The album is vaguely indebted to Americana, but it’s a tourist’s fascination with country, not an aficionado’s.
And D’Agostino’s driving muse, as if the cemetery on the album cover left any doubt, remains death. The glimmering “Marian” opens the record with a half-hopeful song about a 1960s miner who has a vision of his own death in a mine collapse, then foresees his daughter’s adulthood. Queasy and distressed even by Cymbals Eat Guitars’ standards, “Ultrasound” documents an anguished week waiting for his wife’s biopsy results: “Body horror, pace the hall, waiting for the morning call/We tried to sleep, we’re spinning ’round, a shadow on an ultrasound,” D’Agostino sings, sounding near hyperventilation over nerve-racking distortion.
The sweeter the music becomes, the nastier the subject matter turns. Behind its uptempo strum and dulcet strings, the album’s jauntiest number “Becca” is essentially a horror story, a tale of a woman who tricks families into staring at the solar eclipse by handing out fake eclipse glasses. It ends on a note of sheer terror, as its narrative turns to her victims: “Waking in the darkness to their crying kids, feeling for the light switch, they will hear the ocean.” The album’s other great character sketch, the twangy “SWIM,” imagines a Sing Sing prisoner with an especially nihilistic tattoo on his rib cage “of the second plane hitting.” With some reluctance, he concedes his black-out behavior might have hurt someone, and while the character is fictitious, the song’s protest-too-much title (an acronym for “Someone Who Isn’t Me”) makes it clear D’Agostino sees at least a little of himself in his creation.
If Empty Country is a shade less wondrous than Cymbals Eat Guitars’ final records, that’s more feature than defect. Those albums were grand statements, designed to resonate with a vast audience, even if that audience didn’t actually exist. What Empty Country lacks in wild swings for the bleachers, though, it makes up for with a rangy intimacy that buys it a different sort of goodwill. “Come and live it down with me,” D’Agostino beckons on the serene, string-kissed coda to “SWIM.” It’s unclear whether that’s an invite to find redemption or to join him in the slums, but it speaks to how sublime the music is that he makes either proposition sound alluring. | 2020-03-26T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-03-26T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Get Better | March 26, 2020 | 7.6 | 0d681b49-65a0-4ab2-bb67-774e6aa67b10 | Evan Rytlewski | https://pitchfork.com/staff/evan-rytlewski/ | |
On Leslie Feist’s fifth album, sparks of rock’n’roll are balanced with simmering introspection across a collection of patient, lushly arranged songs. | On Leslie Feist’s fifth album, sparks of rock’n’roll are balanced with simmering introspection across a collection of patient, lushly arranged songs. | Feist: Pleasure | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/23100-pleasure/ | Pleasure | In a bizarro universe, Leslie Feist is a fool’s idea of a one-hit wonder—a distinctly aughts success story about the power of digital music providers, ad syncs, and viral videos in breaking quirky Top 10 hits like “1234.” Feist had her chance to take the iPod money and run, but instead of succumbing to her poppier sensibilities—which always felt more like a mask she put on when she wasn’t soothing her melancholy—she dug in deeper on her salt-of-the-earth soulfulness and relaxed-fit rock-guitar chops with 2011’s Metals. Her breakout masterpiece The Reminder made Feist a platinum-selling star in her native Canada, but Metals showed she was not terribly interested in the part. Instead, the one-time Broken Social Scene member was focused on the thoughtful long game, one she continues to play with no particular rush or agenda here on her fifth LP.
Pleasure features a number of songs that stretch towards the five-minute mark, making more sense as part of the whole rather than individually. The title track and “Century” position the album as Feist’s most overtly rock’n’roll record—the former resembling PJ Harvey in her prime, the latter upping the unf before Jarvis Cocker swaggers in, both with one of those triumphantly noisy choirs Feist grew fond of on Metals. The playful French pop, electronic flourishes, and jazzier inclinations that set apart her early work from the indie-pop pack are downplayed across the record, but a number of her signatures remain.
More than half the songs employ nature-related wordplay as a means of gauging relationships and changing mindsets, though the put-a-bird-on-it-ness is not as pronounced as on other Feist albums (she’s trying to cut down). The most striking example arrives with “The Wind,” which begins a little like an Arthur Russell tune, all lo-fi beats and ragged chords. Occasionally her head-in-the-clouds poetry about gaining perspective over time lands on straightforward realizations, as Russell’s often did; “I’m shaped by my storming like they’re shaped by their storming,” she sings, the sound swelling with a lovely horn undercurrent from Colin Stetson. Like many songs on Pleasure, the melody takes time to unfurl before loosely fading out.
These quieter moments are the ones that work best. “Baby Be Simple” is as tender as Feist gets—just an acoustic guitar and a humble plea to take it easy on her, the woman who once declared her ability to feel it all. Pleasure reminds you that Feist’s simmering introspection is the ideal vehicle for the more delicate facets of her voice. She can still surprise with a quick shift from cocked-hip talk-singing to yelps of fury, but her high range breaking through a dark sky like the sun remains the most stunning view.
Continuing to work with fellow Canadian ex-pat Mocky, Feist’s musical arrangements have grown slipperier and more subtle. “Any Party,” with its acoustic riff straight out of a Kinks song, slows way down and drops out almost entirely, eventually building up to a whimsical, barroom singalong. These songs don’t move how you expect them to, and that’s part of their appeal—or the frustration if you’re looking for the pared-down immediacy of The Reminder. Occasionally her “just trust me” approach makes way for a big risk that doesn’t always pay off. She sets up “A Man Is Not His Song,” a folksy ode to the fallacy of songs as diary entries, with field audio of crickets and a passing car radio playing “Pleasure,” then ends it with a snippet of Mastodon’s “High Road” as a comment on the femininity/masculinity at work. It’s a playful idea (and perhaps an inside joke with former collaborators), but it’s jarring and doesn’t fit the album’s easy flow.
On Pleasure, Feist faces middle age with a slow-burning ruckus. She accepts that getting older is growing comfortable with knowing you'll never have all the answers. And she savors the ride nonetheless—like she says, pleasure is what we’re here for—because this is it, this is life. When she finally wonders, on the swirling torch song that closes the record, “When they cart me away, will they say that I died already years ago?” we know the answer. Feist may have hidden away for a while and thought about giving up music before making this album, but a decade since she broke through, she’s settling in like a long-distance runner staring down the horizon she knows will outlast her. She will quietly make her mark in the meantime. | 2017-04-27T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-04-27T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Interscope | April 27, 2017 | 7.7 | 0d69adc8-c427-454a-9a58-d81784cc688e | Jill Mapes | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jill-mapes/ | null |
The reggaetonero’s latest sets him up for even more global success. Its infectious vibe is draped in dancehall with a dash of trap production and nods to salsa, bachata, and Afrobeat. | The reggaetonero’s latest sets him up for even more global success. Its infectious vibe is draped in dancehall with a dash of trap production and nods to salsa, bachata, and Afrobeat. | J Balvin: Vibras | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/j-balvin-vibras/ | Vibras | On his first trips to America as a precocious teen, Colombia’s J Balvin didn’t necessarily understand all the words in the pop songs he fell in love with. But he knew how they made him feel, and he’s been trying to bottle that feeling with his music ever since.
The reggaetonero’s global success has dovetailed with the surge of reggaetón’s popularity in his home of Medellin, Colombia. The scene there has helped bring the genre back into the mainstream, often by taking a more suave approach to a traditionally explicit and misogynist aesthetic, not unlike his contemporary Maluma. But the 33-year-old Balvin has his sights set higher than just being the supreme reggaetonero romántico. And on his latest album, Vibras, we’re finally getting a clear picture of what that sounds like.
Vibras, or “vibes” in Spanish, is defiantly Latin, but it is also in direct conversation with what’s happening in American pop—especially the pop that draws its direct ancestry from hip-hop. If it’s no longer important for rappers to be skilled lyricists, then the vibe rules supreme. Can you ride the beat? Can you nail the melody and make people move? If you can, it really doesn’t matter what words are said. Just set the vibe.
This aligns well with J Balvin’s plans for world domination. If the words are less important than the vibe, then why should the language matter? While Vibras is rooted in reggaetón, the beats are draped in dancehall and a dash of trap production techniques, with nods to salsa, bachata, and Afrobeat. Even for an American audience, it’s hard to classify this as global music when it often feels strangely familiar.
Much of it is produced by Alejandro “Sky” Ramirez and Marco “Tainy” Masis, the former a frequent Balvin collaborator and the latter a Puerto Rican production powerhouse who broke out with Luny Tunes’ Mas Flow: Los Benjamins. They freak beats with roots in flamenco (”Brillo”), toy with some Afrobeat influence (”En Mi,” “Tu Verdad”), and even somehow to flip a dembow beat into a romantic ballad with a little twinge of guitar (”No Es Justo”). Balvin’s duet with Willy William, “Mi Gente,” was one of last summer’s biggest hits, and rocketed into the mainstream when Beyoncé jumped on the remix, prompted by her 6-year-old daughter’s love for the song. And while Vibras certainly sounds like the future of reggaetón, Balvin’s global reach might best be evidenced by album closer “Machika,” which sees Suriname’s DJ Chuckie contribute a little bit of the up-tempo Dutch-Caribbean dancehall style known as “bubbling.”
Throughout Vibras, Balvin’s sensitive but street-savvy personality is on display. Colombia’s answer to Drake, he seeks to seduce, not subjugate, and seems poised to appeal to an audience at least as wide. Though music that tries to appeal to everyone often appeals to no one, Vibras' inclusiveness is a plus. It is the most accurate representation of J Balvin as an artist; he’s not just trying to seduce the women in his songs, but us, the listener, as well.
Alongside Daddy Yankee, Luis Fonsi, Ozuna, and Bad Bunny, Balvin’s success in Anglo markets is evidence of something more than just a “crossover” moment. As Latin culture site Remezcla points out, it raises the question of whether we can truly even consider Anglo music as the dominant culture in the international music market. And much like hip-hop did when it was assimilated into the American Top 40, Latin pop is re-writing the rules of what’s mainstream.
While Vibras is certainly engineered for the mainstream, its diversity is crucial to its identity; a straight reggaetón record softened up for mainstream consumption would feel shallow and cynical. And while the blurring of distinct genres often makes for new, exciting music, in the case of reggaetón it runs the risk of erasing the progenitors in Panama and Puerto Rico who built a counter-culture only to watch it run away from them in the mainstream. And it’s no coincidence that as reggaetón moves from the streets to Spotify, its biggest hits would be delivered by light-skinned artists with family-friendly overtones. But Balvin, who grew up wealthy but was relegated to the slums when his father’s business failed, has long straddled both worlds. On Vibras, he’s poised to take his place on the global stage—mi gente in tow. | 2018-05-31T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-05-31T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Universal Music Latino | May 31, 2018 | 8 | 0d6a5bb9-45cf-4183-9ea3-7d934a08aa52 | Matthew Ismael Ruiz | https://pitchfork.com/staff/matthew-ismael ruiz/ | |
Third album from the intelligent, eccentric singer-songwriter is her first recorded under major-label contract. | Third album from the intelligent, eccentric singer-songwriter is her first recorded under major-label contract. | Regina Spektor: Begin to Hope | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/9043-begin-to-hope/ | Begin to Hope | It's no secret that Regina Spektor has some quirks. As a songwriter and performer, she hoards eccentricities like the Collyer brothers (Google it). She hiccups and yawps, breaks syllables against their grain, beatboxes unself-consciously, belts like Ethel Merman, recites like Patti Smith, coos like Tori Amos, shrieks like a Kate Bush for the McSweeney’s set. And her songwriting, in addition to occasionally folding in snippets of “Hava Nagila”, makes frequent, often humorous use of pop culture references, anachronisms, dream imagery, even made-up words. And yet, these eccentricities allow unfriendly listeners to keep Spektor at a distance, dismissing her feminine presence as cutesily affected while indulging the endless costume changes of Gnarls Barkley and the sniping whine of Conor Oberst.
But eccentricity isn’t her defining characteristic. That would be her native intelligence, which shows through in every note. Spektor is a street-smart songwriter masquerading as a book-smart one, with a self-awareness that can be endearingly goofy. Spektor can profess her love for “November Rain” and paraphrase the Madame de Pompadour without stretching, showboating, or seeming academic.
This quality-- her smarts-- is present in every aspect of her new album, Begin to Hope, except perhaps in its made-for-TV-movie title. Her third full-length and first recorded under her major-label contract, the record was produced by Dave Kahne, who has turned knobs for the Bangles, Paul McCartney, and, um, Sugar Ray. Under his direction, Begin to Hope sounds expensive: There’s a hermetic studio quality to the tones, a studied three dimensionality in the interplay of instruments, and a perfectionism in the mix that suggests a bigger budget and a nicer studio. Elegant beats sculpted from orchestral samples adorn opener “Fidelity” and “On the Radio”, while precisely calibrated synths enter and exit on cue. “Hotel Song” trips along on a snappy drumbeat and a spritely chorus that has the professional bearing of Brill Building pop. On “Lady”, a paean to Billie Holiday, Spektor duets with a mournful jazz band that cuts in and out abruptly like a staticky transmission from the past.
One downside to this crisp production is the loss of place: 2001’s 11:11 and 2003’s Soviet Kitsch both sounded like they could have been recorded in some smoky Bronx bar or in a friend’s living room, but Begin to Hope evokes no particular setting or venue. Nevertheless, Spektor sounds confident and comfortable. Her songwriting remains as testy and idiosyncratic as ever-- as well as ambitious. With all the fanfare and bombast of a battle hymn, “Apres Moi” is a Spektorian epic about the weight of mortality and heritage. She sings from the perspective of a statue, perhaps the one she sung about in “Us”. She rewrites the Beatitudes to instill a little paranoia: “Be afraid of the lame, they’ll inherit your legs/ Be afraid of the old, they’ll inherit your soul”. Then there’s that Madame de Pompadour reference: “Apres moi le deluge/ After me comes the flood,” she sings defiantly, as if the Russians have just defeated her very own Franco-Austrian armies. Spektor sings a verse in Russian, then leads the song to an stirring finale featuring a small symphony led by a rickety drum set. The song would sound like a stunt if it didn’t make so much sense and have so much feeling behind it.
Occasionally, though, Spektor can overdo it. On “That Time”, she recounts a string of friendly reminiscences: “Remember that time I ate only tangerines for a month,” she asks some unnamed companion before intoning, “So cheap and JUI-cy!” At the end she turns the song on its head with the sudden memory, “Remember that time you OD’ed?” The change in tone is a little too obvious and complete, like a movie with a cheap twist ending. Still, Spektor is bold enough almost to sell the song, and on the whole her performance throughout Begin to Hope exhibits new levels of control and direction, reaching a point where the song and the singing are inseparable. | 2006-06-12T02:00:02.000-04:00 | 2006-06-12T02:00:02.000-04:00 | Rock | Sire | June 12, 2006 | 7.5 | 0d6b1a7f-faa1-4735-8be0-8071b64c75a8 | Stephen M. Deusner | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stephen-m. deusner/ | null |
The Swedish band Graveyard's Innocence & Decadence is a proudly welcoming metal record. On it, they synthesize influences like Slayer, Howlin’ Wolf, Motown, Dylan, and Queen into something that is swell-chested, triumphant, and surprisingly human. | The Swedish band Graveyard's Innocence & Decadence is a proudly welcoming metal record. On it, they synthesize influences like Slayer, Howlin’ Wolf, Motown, Dylan, and Queen into something that is swell-chested, triumphant, and surprisingly human. | Graveyard: Innocence & Decadence | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/20914-innocence-decadence/ | Innocence & Decadence | Though they’ve netted comparisons to everyone from Black Sabbath to Thin Lizzy, if there is an analog in the history of hard rock to the Swedish group Graveyard, it is probably Judas Priest. Both bands have roots in blues, both have a fondness for topping caramel-sweet melodies with gravel and tacks, and both know precisely how to ride the edge of bombast and camp without ever becoming the Darkness. On their fourth album, Graveyard root around even deeper in their record collections. In the kind of quote that becomes instantly regrettable, frontman Joakim Nilsson once said that he wanted the band to be a mix of Slayer and Howlin’ Wolf, but on Innocence & Decadence, they also find room for Motown, Dylan, and Queen. What makes the record work is the way they synthesize all of this into something that is swell-chested, triumphant, and surprisingly human, dosing each song with equal amounts of swagger and charm. In a genre that often prides itself on being forbidding, Innocence is a proudly welcoming metal record, throwing open its tattooed arms and carrying off even the darker material with a wink and a smile.
That all-in m.o. is evident from the outset. Opener "Magnetic Shunk" rides in on a deep-set, galloping blues groove, Nilsson’s eye on a woman at the far end of the bar. Instead of shaming or objectifying her for her sexual experience, Nilsson celebrates it—"It’s nobody’s business who you give your kiss"—before devising an almost comically ridiculous come-on: "No need to be gentle, baby, I like it raw/ Treat me like I was crime and you are the law." That kind of loopy wordplay turns up throughout Innocence; on "The Apple & the Tree", whose wandering guitar lead sounds like a distant cousin to "All Along the Watchtower", Nilsson opens singing, "I remember the days I don’t recall." Before the absurdity of the line can be fully absorbed, he’s skated clean into the song’s slow-winding chorus (the lyrics of which suggest the title’s apple might be the same one that turned up in Genesis Chapter 2). The hard-charging "Never Theirs to Sell" is a lean, mean-eyed, fist-pumping anthem of defiance, opening into a double-time, soul-clap break about halfway through that imagines Angus Young sitting in with the MGs.
Though the twin themes in the album’s title turn up in most of its songs, it’s the former that gets the most airtime. On the breathless, roller-coastering "From a Hole in the Wall", while low-end guitars pummel like rubber bullets, bassist Truls Morck sings, "Can you hear a big bird singing somewhere in the back of your mind?/ It’s loud enough to make you wonder/ ‘Can I please hear it one more time?’" Lines like this contribute to the album’s odd sense of sweetness—youth isn’t fetishized as a period of penalty-free rule-breaking, but considered wistfully, as a time of almost ceramic cleanness, before things like pain and disappointment became everyday occurrences. That same sentiment is given flesh, blood, and a broken heart in the straight-up soul ballad "Too Much Is Not Enough", which wouldn’t sound entirely out of place on an Amy Winehouse B-sides comp. Over a wood-fired blues lick, Nilsson mournfully watches a longtime lover walk out the door, before concluding, "I know you tried to keep us together/ But in the end, there was nothing left to keep." The gospel trio that parenthesize his verses provides the necessary dramatic flourish.
Innocence was recorded at Atlantis Grammofon Studios in Stockholm, which is the same place ABBA recorded their earliest material. While it’s not quite the same deep-dive into confectionary pop, Innocence shares both that group’s fondness for immediate melodies and their egalitarian spirit. Theirs is a club where you might get lucky, you might burn the night philosophizing, or you might reconnect with old friends. Best of all, it has a decidedly low barrier of entry: If you’ve ever nursed a drink while thinking misty-eyed about the good old days, you’re in. | 2015-09-30T02:00:03.000-04:00 | 2015-09-30T02:00:03.000-04:00 | Rock | Nuclear Blast | September 30, 2015 | 7.4 | 0d6ead9d-393f-4ece-aa1c-8fae7003a40a | J. Edward Keyes | https://pitchfork.com/staff/j.-edward keyes/ | null |
Challenging but never chaotic, contemplative yet too rigorous to be mistaken for ambient music, the experimental vibraphonist’s solo debut carves out its own place in contemporary music. | Challenging but never chaotic, contemplative yet too rigorous to be mistaken for ambient music, the experimental vibraphonist’s solo debut carves out its own place in contemporary music. | Patricia Brennan: Maquishti | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/patricia-brennan-maquishti/ | Maquishti | The vibraphone is an easy instrument to ignore. Its placid chimes lend themselves to Christmas standards, mall music, and corporate jingles; the vibes’ place in jazz is often traced back to 1930, when NBC hired percussionist Lionel Hampton to play the network’s sound mark on them. Since then, generations of players have coaxed exquisite music from the vibraphone, yet too often the vibes are tacked onto gigantic ensembles, like a maraschino cherry on top of an already sickly-sweet dessert.
Patricia Brennan is no stranger to her instrument—one of the largest and most unwieldy around—feeling small on a crowded bandstand. She’s a member of several excellent big bands and jazz orchestras, yet Brennan shines brighter in small settings, where she can show off her skill as an improviser. In a recent profile in The Wire, the Veracruz-born artist opened up about how, performing in symphony orchestras in her native Mexico as a teenager, she felt as though she didn’t have enough parts to play. “There were moments where I just didn’t really feel like a real musician,” she said. Sparse and spontaneous, her solo debut, Maquishti, features Brennan alone on the vibes and their musical cousin, the marimba: More than a focused exhibition of pitched percussion, the result is full of avant-garde possibility.
Part of the album’s appeal is wrapped in its narrow toolkit. Maquishti is not the first solo outing by a vibraphonist, but Brennan actually performs alone—which is surprisingly rare. Masters of the instrument, including Bobby Hutcherson on Solo/Quartet and Gary Burton on Alone at Last, sprinkled ostensible solo affairs with collaborators or overdubs, as though tacitly acknowledging the difficulty of attracting listeners to the unadorned vibraphone. Brennan skirts these problems by using guitar pedals, and also because her approach is unceasingly modal. Never availing herself of even the hint of a blues pattern or a snatch of familiar melody, Brennan forces us to consider the sonic qualities of the instrument itself.
There’s enough variety, though, to keep things interesting. The shift from the vibes on “Solar” to the duller wood marimba on “Improvisation VI” is subtle yet accentuated by her use of four mallets of graduated size, which shows off the latter instrument’s range. The twinkling “Magic Square” illustrates the vibraphone’s versatility, alternating a piano-like contrapuntal movement with a hypnotic assertion of the main theme. And then there’s the final suite of tracks, which departs dramatically from expectation only to draw the listener back to a more traditional approach, as if it’s a port in an improvisatory storm. On “Point of No Return,” Brennan creates both clicks and glissandos by scraping binder clips against her tone bars, while “Away From Us” filters bowing through a delay pedal to forge a rock-friendly drone. When Brennan picks up her mallets again, on the swelling closer “Derrumbe De Turquesas,” they feel familiar, even comforting.
Such a courageously quiet album as Maquishti occupies a strange space in the modern musical landscape. It’s challenging but never skronky, chaotic, or abrasive, like a lot of improvised jazz can be. It’s contemplative but so compositionally oriented that it won’t likely be mistaken for ambient music. It features an instrument—the marimba—that developed its contemporary character in Mexico, Central, and South America, yet Brennan’s deployment feels far removed from these regions’ musical traditions. What she crafts on Maquishti are unprecedented sounds: warm and sleek, both modern and eternal. You could say that Brennan drags the vibraphone into the 21st century, but her record suggests that mallet-based percussion was always ripe for exploration. We just had to recognize the beauty of one of the most ungainly instruments in the room.
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-01-19T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2021-01-19T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Experimental / Jazz | Valley of Search | January 19, 2021 | 7.4 | 0d748ee3-4c1b-4a6d-8bab-60713044fce4 | Daniel Felsenthal | https://pitchfork.com/staff/daniel-felsenthal/ | |
For their tenth album, the great British art punk band returns to the material that they would have recorded for the album that never ended up following 154, their third LP. Originally heard in muddy, difficult live recordings, the 13 songs on Change Becomes Us sparkle. | For their tenth album, the great British art punk band returns to the material that they would have recorded for the album that never ended up following 154, their third LP. Originally heard in muddy, difficult live recordings, the 13 songs on Change Becomes Us sparkle. | Wire: Change Becomes Us | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/17720-wire-change-becomes-us/ | Change Becomes Us | Only Wire would attempt to make their fourth album after their tenth. At the beginning of their career, between 1977 and 1979, the great British art punk quartet released three perfect albums, Pink Flag, Chairs Missing and 154, each wildly different from the other. Then they splintered, though a bunch of post-154 songs-in-process came to light later, in the dodgy live recordings that made up the bizarre, messy Document and Eyewitness (1981) and 1996's Turns and Strokes.
Since they first reunited in 1985, Wire has had an exceptionally weird relationship to its own past. During their commercial peak in the latter half of the 80s, they refused to play anything from the pre-breakup era, and for the first few years of their current incarnation, they mostly acted as if they'd jumped straight from Pink Flag to the year 2000. At the beginning of this decade, they started looking back in earnest-- not in a "hey, kids, we wrote "12 x U", remember?" way, but in a "cleaning up loose ends" way. 2011's Strays EP contained four pieces that had been kicking around their live repertoire for a long time but had never been recorded to their satisfaction before; the Black Session album that came out last year actually included a few relatively faithful versions of old songs.
And now they've gone back to the material they'd have recorded for the album that never happened after 154. The 13 titles on Change Becomes Us are new, but the songs themselves aren't; they're all more or less newly rewritten versions of the Document and Eyewitness/Turns and Strokes repertoire. It's not the first time they've reckoned with some of those sketches, either. "B/W Silence" and "Time Lock Fog" are respectively adapted from "Lorries" and "5/10," which singer/guitarist Colin Newman previously reworked on his 1982 solo album Not To. "Doubles & Trebles" is a new version of "Ally in Exile", which Wire mutated first into "Art of Persistence" on 2000's The Third Day and then into "I Don't Understand" on 2002's Read & Burn 01; positioned as the new album's opener, its arrangement and lyric (about a solitary agent in enemy territory) explicitly allude to the way "Reuters" introduces Pink Flag.
The Wire of 1980, and the band's members on the solo records that immediately followed the split, were radicals who were trying to pry open the pop-recording form and avoid repeating themselves. The Wire of 2013 have settled on a sweet-and-prickly sound that suits them, and sonically Change Becomes Us is of a piece with Red Barked Tree and Object 47, the other studio albums they've recorded since the 2004 departure of guitarist/texturalist Bruce Gilbert. (These days, his spot is filled by Matt Simms, who's 30 years younger than the rest of the band.)
Considered as a set of songs, though, it's fantastic-- a clear look at the twisty, glittering material that had previously only been a few sparkles of possibility shining through the muck of those difficult live albums. The band who wrote these songs were a couple of years away from becoming hardcore punk icons-- there are hints of that when drummer Robert Grey breaks into a high-speed two-step on "Adore Your Island" and "Stealth of a Stork". And they were so deeply invested in non-obviousness that their lyrics sometimes read like cryptic crossword clues: the hook of "Eels Sang Lino"-- recast here as "Eels Sang"-- is an anagram for "in Los Angeles."
But the Wire of 1979 and 1980 were also developing their enduring fascination with unlikely kinds of beauty, and their 21st century incarnation has built some of their most fetching songs from some of the most ragged and jagged ideas to come from their younger selves. ("Re-Invent Your Second Wheel", sung by bassist Graham Lewis, is a languorous waltz whose DNA has traces of the in-your-face Document and Eyewitness experiment "Zegk Hoqp".) History and transformation are, understandably, recurring themes in the new lyrics on Change Becomes Us, and it's a treat to have this missing link in the Wire story repaired, even if it's as much an anomaly in the present moment as Document and Eyewitness was in its time. | 2013-04-02T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2013-04-02T02:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Pinkflag | April 2, 2013 | 8.2 | 0d7572bc-c764-4af1-9dc3-a523ad049bde | Douglas Wolk | https://pitchfork.com/staff/douglas-wolk/ | null |
With her seventh album, the country star cheerfully exposes her sometimes-chaotic inner life, wearing her heart on her sleeve as she reaches for another shot of tequila. | With her seventh album, the country star cheerfully exposes her sometimes-chaotic inner life, wearing her heart on her sleeve as she reaches for another shot of tequila. | Miranda Lambert: Wildcard | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/miranda-lambert-wildcard/ | Wildcard | Miranda Lambert opens Wildcard with confidence: “I’m finally on the up and up.” It’s jarring to hear her use the word finally here, as she’s seemed to be on a long ascent for the past few years. Following the public dissolution of her marriage to fellow country star Blake Shelton, her 2016 double album The Weight of These Wings debuted at No. 1 on Billboard’s country charts. Last year’s reunion with the Pistol Annies delivered another bout of biting, clear-eyed songwriting from Lambert and her bandmates. With Wildcard, she cheerfully exposes her sometimes-chaotic inner life, wearing her heart on her sleeve as she reaches for another shot of tequila.
Lambert packs Wildcard with her quick-witted, cheeky observations about her world; it’s as if she strode off the set of a Steel Magnolias reboot and headed straight for the studio. Opener “White Trash” contrasts her have-not days with her more glamorous present, while “It All Comes Out in the Wash” offers reassurance that no stain—be it a splotch of Merlot or some messy gossip—is permanent. The songs are warm, funny, and comforting, acknowledging the hassles of existence outside of the upper class while transforming them into sing-along choruses. Maren Morris joins Lambert on “Way Too Pretty for Prison,” which makes for a punchy later-day foil to the Dixie Chicks’ “Goodbye Earl.” Lambert and Morris let their cooler heads prevail upon considering the practical realities of incarceration. “The bars there ain’t got boys to buy us drinks,” for one. The pair flip the traditions of timeless murder ballads: they don’t go through with their crime of passion, but they could get away with it if they really wanted to.
Wildcard hits its hellraiser high-water mark with “Locomotive,” a rollicking number where Lambert draws on a familiar country artifact to make a case for her own unbridled power. She belts every verse before careening into a rapid-fire chorus, while a harmonica imitates the long wail of a train horn in the background. The track’s funky instrumental coda sends it out with a stomp. “Tequila Does,” which arrives late in the album, is a steller last-call anthem. Lambert tempers her casual dismay about barroom wannabe-cowboys (who are “all hat, no cattle”) with a chorus that radiates the warm, rosy glow of one-too-many. Not one to sully her beers with tears, Lambert relishes the prospect of going home alone rather than surrendering to potential disappointment. Lambert’s sleight-of-hand with country tropes distinguishes her as a clever songwriter who honors the music’s history without kowtowing to the hagiography of the genre.
Lambert balances her high-spirited romps with more contemplative numbers, cooling off long enough to reflect without flagging Wildcard’s momentum. With “Settling Down,” she examines the forked road ahead of her as a 35-year-old woman, wondering if it’s better to follow her restless spirit or settle down; a gnarled bassline in the bridge recalls the restless churn of an anxious stomach before Lambert bursts into a sunnier chorus. And though Lambert’s mentions of alcohol across Wildcard are mostly celebratory, she acknowledges the more heartbroken side of such pleasures with “Dark Bars.”
Lambert uses these songs to share some of her reservations about what the next few decades hold for her, but when she takes stock of it all, she lands on a firm conclusion: It’s pretty bitchin’. The heyday of “bitchin’” as a “cool” qualifier came and went with the Reagan administration, but Lambert injects them with new vitality, singing the four-syllable refrain of “Pretty Bitchin’” as equal parts schoolyard taunt and tongue-in-cheek recognition that she does, indeed, have it pretty great.
Wildcard shines in part because Lambert comes across as neither the damsel in distress nor a lone-wolf heroine. The album doesn’t feel “relatable” inasmuch as Lambert and her stable of co-writers (which includes Highwoman Natalie Hemby among other Nashville lights) have distilled common anxieties and insecurities into a batch of excellent country tunes. And though Wildcard is fun as hell, Lambert sounds relaxed, playful, happy, and comfortable throughout. Her “up and up” feels earthly and attainable—it’s not just the Restoration Hardware furniture or the Airstream trailer with white-wall tires. Lambert celebrates the multitudes of being a hot mess, prioritizing the joy of personal growth over lamenting the pitfalls and potholes. Life is, in fact, pretty bitchin’.
Buy: Rough Trade
(Pitchfork may earn a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.) | 2019-11-01T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-11-01T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Folk/Country | Vanner / RCA Records Nashville | November 1, 2019 | 7.4 | 0d7576f1-c2f0-4c66-b6be-b24f0e7ebebc | Allison Hussey | https://pitchfork.com/staff/allison-hussey/ | |
The first album in David Bowie's Berlin Trilogy sees Bowie as a tragic figure. The album's first side is a beautiful futurist ruin, littered with holes left purposefully unfixed, while the blank, instrumental second side feels like a calculated attempt to kill the author. | The first album in David Bowie's Berlin Trilogy sees Bowie as a tragic figure. The album's first side is a beautiful futurist ruin, littered with holes left purposefully unfixed, while the blank, instrumental second side feels like a calculated attempt to kill the author. | David Bowie: Low | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21478-low/ | Low | [Ed. Note: In light of David Bowie's passing, Pitchfork commissioned reviews of several of his classic albums.]
Compared to its predecessors, David Bowie's 11th studio album is noticeably reserved. "I had no statement to make on Low," said Bowie, who could hardly write lyrics at all in the aftermath of his L.A. excesses, let alone fashion another extensive character study like Ziggy or the Thin White Duke. His lyrical gifts were already spread thin, and thinner still when a completed third verse was cut from "Always Crashing in the Same Car," in which Bowie did his very best Bob Dylan impression. Producer Tony Visconti thought it was so creepy, and potentially inappropriate given Dylan's motorcycle accident a decade earlier, that they scrapped it.
Bowie was hardly lucid in 1976, but you bet he knew exactly what he was doing with that verse. The mysterious injuries from Dylan's 1966 accident gave him the excuse to disappear from the rat race for years, whereas the full complement of wounds Bowie sustained in L.A. were proudly displayed for a while: the Station to Station-era diet of cocaine, red peppers, and milk, and the ensuing physical and psychic degradation that led him to endorse fascism, fear the occult, and allegedly keep his urine in the fridge lest anyone steal it. (From a flushed toilet?) When he realized he had to leave Hollywood and kick his prodigious habit, West Berlin appealed for its anonymity, though unlike Dylan, Bowie would make his own recovery a matter of public record. Both artists were escaping paradigmatic American success by retreating into themselves. Where Dylan let rumors of death fester, Bowie opened his hermitage to the world, reinforcing his outsider myth.
The Bowie of this era is a tragic figure: strung out and prone to spending days awake watching the same films on a loop. He was broke from the aftermath of a bad managerial deal and drained by the related ongoing court case, and so paranoid that, after his destitute charge Iggy Pop pushed him in the pool at the residential Château d'Hérouville studio in France, he had it exorcized to avoid being touched by the "dark stains" that he believed lurked at the bottom.
Yet Bowie's sense of purpose was at least somewhat intact. He applied exacting pressure on Iggy to make The Idiot as good as he knew it could be, and brought similar determination to Low, albeit the kind where having very few aims was its own liberating objective. Whatever they made didn't even have to be released, he told his new collaborator Brian Eno, who was brought in alongside Station to Station's crack band to further develop that album's hybrid of electronic R&B.
Low's first side is a beautiful futurist ruin, littered with holes left purposefully unfixed. Two decades after its release, Bowie noted that his crew "really captured, unlike anything else in that time, a sense of yearning for a future that we all knew would never come to pass." Visconti heightens the decay and distills the lifespan of every sound, treating Dennis Davis' drums so that he was playing along to a withered echo of his last strike, like an explosion contained in a tin can. Even Bowie's voice sounds aged and distant. Eno's sharp electronics jostle against the bolshy funk rhythms and Carlos Alomar and Ricky Gardiner's guitars, giving the record a feverish euphoria that hits like too much pseudo-ephedrine and mangles linear time. These swaggering fragments, seldom breaking the three-minute mark, promise bombastic payoffs but then fade out instead. Low's first side feels like having the carpet ripped out from under you by three wizards who have plans to fly it elsewhere.
All this playfulness means that Low's reputation for utter desolation doesn't feel quite right. Bowie is, of course, obsessed with barriers to connection: the sudden instinct that causes him to yelp and back away from someone on "Breaking Glass" ("You're such a wonderful person/ But you got problems/ Oh, oh, oh, oh, I'll never touch ya"), self-imposed isolation ("Sound and Vision") and isolation from the self ("What are you gonna be/ To the real me," on "What in the World"), and a semi-serious plea for lifelong companionship just as his marriage was disintegrating ("Be My Wife"). From the windows of Hansa Tonstudio (where the record was mostly finished, not tracked) the band could see into the watchtowers atop Berlin's dividing Wall. A lot of Low's lyrics were extemporized, but the consistency of these ornery admissions, however fragmented, implies a self-aware desire to push past them, to hunt some trace of optimism.
At the end of side 1 comes the instrumental "A New Career in a New Town," which plots the distance from Bowie's Anglocentric career to his new Teutonic mode, bridging the former's refractory squelched riff and the latter's dreamy gauze with a searching harmonica phrase: a regular substitute for emotion that the human voice can't reach, but a brilliantly strange idea in this context (as well as another Dylan affectation). Here, it's bittersweet, nostalgic but propelled by forward motion, and a resolution to commit to a place and escape his blue room funk. The mostly instrumental second side is a tribute to the people of the Soviet Bloc —Poland on "Warszawa," and East Berlin on the remaining three songs—in which the elusive nature of side 1 subsides and Bowie's persona is subsumed into his and Eno's pulsating sequences.
These were carefully calibrated attempts at killing the author: Eno set out a metronome pulse, and the pair selected a random beat on which to introduce a new musical complement to the central motif. On "Warszawa" that’s an eerily simple piano tune that was inspired by overhearing Visconti’s infant son playing to himself; "Art Decade," mostly Eno’s invention, circles around a ghostly melody worthy of "The Twilight Zone." Bowie shrouds the tune to "Scarborough Fair" inside "Weeping Wall," and a lonely saxophone (played by Bowie himself) eventually joins the cathedral of male vocals and strings on "Subterraneans." It’s credit to their influence that these songs sound pedestrian, even a little ponderous by today’s standards, but the way they conjure lost worlds is still something to behold, like the depths of dank paintings being X-rayed before your eyes.
The perpetual stranger finally finds comfort in a strange land, synthesizing his dislocation (and his love of the expressionist Brücke artists) and that of these broken nations with a tense, beautiful, elemental music that speaks of genuine engagement, and an empathy that seemed impossible on side 1. It makes good on the album cover's subtle joke: a still from Nicolas Roeg's The Man Who Fell to Earth where Bowie’s orange hair fades into the background; the word 'Low' atop a vanishing profile. Bowie's meticulously crafted existence had always offered fans a sense of possibility. By submitting his ego to Low, he was able to create a new one for himself. | 2016-01-22T01:00:02.000-05:00 | 2016-01-22T01:00:02.000-05:00 | Rock | RCA | January 22, 2016 | 10 | 0d778b9d-c257-48ef-b3a1-88549f393c62 | Laura Snapes | https://pitchfork.com/staff/laura-snapes/ | null |
Using a fanciful palette of chintzy synths and other new-age-adjacent sounds, the Latvian producer pays tribute to the moon’s seas—and humans’ capacity for wonder. | Using a fanciful palette of chintzy synths and other new-age-adjacent sounds, the Latvian producer pays tribute to the moon’s seas—and humans’ capacity for wonder. | Sign Libra: Sea to Sea | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/sign-libra-sea-to-sea/ | Sea to Sea | Agata Melnikova is a dreamer. Back when she was putting together Closer to the Equator, her 2016 debut as Sign Libra, she longed to get out of her native Latvia and visit the tropical climates that inspired the music she was making. Lacking the money to travel, she found alternate sources of creative stimulus: BBC nature documentaries and rainforest sounds on YouTube.
On Sea to Sea, Melnikova’s second album, her gaze drifts toward a destination that’s even more remote: the moon—specifically, its “seas.” Collectively known as the Lunar Maria, these volcanic plains have likely captivated people ever since primitive humans looked up at the night sky and first noticed those giant dark patches on the moon’s surface.
A similar sense of wonder runs through Sea to Sea. Each of its nine tracks is named after a different lunar mare, and although we now know the moon to be a place that’s cold, gray, and devoid of life, Melnikova takes a more fantastical approach, evoking a time when people imagined that little green men were roaming around up there. Sign Libra’s music is bright and colorful, though she’s largely abandoned the woozy Balearic sounds of Closer to the Equator. Instead, she’s tapped into the same sort of dreamy, high-gloss new-age palette that artists like CFCF have successfully utilized in recent years. There’s a faint sense of ridiculousness inherent in Sea to Sea’s chintzy synth melodies, plucked strings, and faux woodwinds—even when they're channeling early Ryuichi Sakamoto—but Melnikova’s embrace of their campy overtones is clearly purposeful.
In the video for lead single “Sea of Islands,” she charmingly mugs for the camera, intermittently playing her keyboard and gliding around a surreal, almost Dali-esque set with moves that are somewhere between performance art and ’60s dance crazes like the Swim. The clip for “Sea of Nectar” is even more absurd, as Melnikova, decked out in a beret and white gloves, goofily struts her way through a hypnagogic rave for one, occasionally joined by a disembodied saxophone player. There’s no guile and no cynicism, just a childlike whimsy that makes the music feel almost impossibly light on its feet.
Adding to the otherworldliness is Melnikova’s voice, which is one of the album’s most compelling elements. Rarely using actual words, Melnikova mostly communicates in billowing melodies and shadowy whispers, although she’s not above the occasional burst of baritone or rhythmic nonsense. On “Sea of Islands,” snippets of her voice have been tweaked to sound almost guttural, resembling a didgeridoo or Tuvan throat singer. In contrast, on “Sea of Cleverness” she takes a soulful pop turn whose vocal melody is reminiscent, however coincidentally, of La Roux’s 2009 smash “In for the Kill,” as remixed by Skream.
Overall, though, Melnikova’s presence is a soothing one. Whether she’s gently cooing (“Sea of Tranquility”), getting weird and witchy (“Sea of Serenity”) or spinning her voice into a multi-part devotional choir (“Sea of Fecundity”), there’s something alluring about her voice and its many manipulations. Comparisons to artists like Enya and Kate Bush are tempting, but Melnikova’s choices also recall the mischievous spirit of Grimes’ early work.
That playfulness is ultimately what makes Sea to Sea such a rewarding listen. Although Melnikova certainly isn’t the first artist to revisit ’80s new age and globe-trotting postmodernism, she is one of the few who’s approached them with a genuine sense of humor. Sea to Sea isn’t a joke, but it has been made by someone who seems to realize that there’s a limit to just how serious someone can be while singing atop a spa-friendly suite of pan flutes and gauzy synths. There’s a lot of glee in this music, and Sign Libra seems more than willing to share it.
Buy: Rough Trade
(Pitchfork may earn a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.) | 2020-02-19T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2020-02-19T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Electronic | Rvng Intl. | February 19, 2020 | 7.2 | 0d79884f-f53e-4fc7-9753-66e0d0ebf160 | Shawn Reynaldo | https://pitchfork.com/staff/shawn-reynaldo/ | |
On what may seem like a readymade gag, the psych-folk favorite covers the lost Dave Matthews Band album in full. He convincingly connects his adolescent love to his adult explorations. | On what may seem like a readymade gag, the psych-folk favorite covers the lost Dave Matthews Band album in full. He convincingly connects his adolescent love to his adult explorations. | Ryley Walker: The Lillywhite Sessions | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/ryley-walker-the-lillywhite-sessions/ | The Lillywhite Sessions | Ryley Walker’s music is a stormy, searching amalgam of proggy British folk, primitive guitar, free improv, and Chicago jazz-rock. He draws from a deep well of Serious Record influences, the stuff you discover once you’ve burned through the standard canon. But to get there, you’ve got to start somewhere, and for Walker, the journey began with a single “Two Step.” See, Walker wasn’t raised on Alan Bishop or the AACM; he came up a Dave Matthews fan, perhaps working out the changes to “Seek Up” in the space between bongloads. DMB’s musically omnivorous, improvisationally minded jazz-folk fusion put Walker on his own roundabout path. And on his second LP of 2018—a full-album reimagining of DMB’s largely lost turn-of-the-millennium album, The Lillywhite Sessions—he finds his way back to the source.
DMB’s The Lillywhite Sessions are almost certainly the most widely heard full-length bootleg of this century. In late 1999, Dave and company began working on a follow-up to 1998’s dense, daunting Before These Crowded Streets with longtime producer Steve Lillywhite. But the songs were depressed to the point of being maudlin, which made the air in the studio oppressive. Weeks stretched into months, and the frazzled band reached a detente: The label would fly Matthews to Los Angeles to meet with Jagged Little Pill producer Glen Ballard in hopes of reseting his system. The two went on a tear, writing and arranging an album’s worth of material in about 10 days. Those songs became Everyday, and the work with Lillywhite was unceremoniously abandoned.
But in March 2001, Craig Knapp, the lead singer of a DMB cover band, found himself with a copy of the scrapped Lillywhite work. The songs were a little rough, having come straight off the mixing board with a wonky left-right balance, scratch lyrics, and spaces begging to be filled. Still, Knapp had the new-old LP he never thought he’d hear from one of the United States’ biggest bands. Knapp and a buddy put the whole thing on Napster. There’s no telling how many people heard the sessions, but between DMB’s fiendishly bootlegging fanbase and the sudden ubiquity of CD burners and file-sharing services, it’s certainly in the millions. And for many, the unfinished album’s blue moods became the crowning achievement of Matthews as a songwriter. It is a suite of introspection and unease, a ruminative, whiskey-drowned set that found Matthews wading deeper into his obsession with mortality and melancholy.
Ryley Walker missed The Lillywhite Sessions the first time around; he’s a Stand Up guy. But he’s certainly aware of the long shadow the work cast over the DMB kingdom: The Lillywhite Sessions is the dark Dave record, the diehards’ favorite. These finer distinctions matter little in Walker’s generally Dave-agnostic circles, where the Dave Matthews Band aren’t much more than a punchline, an elevator-jazz ensemble fronted by the yowling human embodiment of a Coexist bumper sticker. But Walker still hears a kind of funhouse-mirror version of all the things he favors in his own music: the instrumental interplay, the tricky dynamics, the self-directed despondence.
Last January, Walker, bassist Andrew Scott Young, and drummer Ryan Jewell—erstwhile Dave fans, all–spent several days holed up in Chicago, working up a tribute to the entire Lillywhite Sessions. On its face, the idea is a pretty good gag: a prog-folk darling, burning off years of cred by warbling his way through “Grey Street.” But not so fast. On the subject of Dave Matthews, Ryley Walker is as serious as your life.
On these 12 interpretations, Walker and company offer a dozen wildly different approaches. Some flatter with imitation; others rearrange the songs’ DNA entirely. But no matter how far Walker strays from the source, he’s made every effort to stay true to the guiding ethos of the band that wrote these songs. He’s made a Dave Matthews tribute album weird enough for the experimental music set but reverent enough for the overprotective DMB fan wondering why this Pig-Pen-looking motherfucker’s got his grubby mitts all over their beloved “Big Eyed Fish.”
Opener “Busted Stuff” has all the serpentine guitars and pinprick rhythms of a Sea & Cake song, the ambling proto-heartbreak of the original now more tense and urgent. “Grey Street” doubles down on the melodrama, landing somewhere in the neighborhood of Xiu Xiu’s spin on “Fast Car.” “Diggin’ a Ditch” is revved-up and blown-out à la Experimental Jet Set-era Sonic Youth, while “Sweet Up and Down” is a stoned groove from the playbook of jazz-funk mainstays Medeski Martin & Wood. The playing here is sharp, intuitive, surprising; across these first four songs, Walker and company manage to sound like four completely different bands.
“JTR” gets going in an awful hurry, with saxophonist Nick Mazzarrella overblowing his way across the verses to get to the song’s downspouting chorus. But about a third in, everything stops, the tether to the original song suddenly cut. Walker and company blow the absolute back out of “JTR,” vibes, sax, bass, and chimes crawling and scraping their way to a spiraling free-jazz fracas. It’s here, in the disc’s most out-there moment, where Walker’s spin on The Lillywhite Sessions truly comes into its own. Walker’s not looking to give DMB some sudden appreciation among the avant-garde set; they are doing just fine without ’em, thanks. But he is seeking a kind of rapprochement between the music he loves now and the music that started him down this path. When he takes the last half of “JTR” way out beyond the bardo, he’s just stretching the DMB ethos—malleable songs, searching solos—to its logical endpoint.
Sometimes that simply means throwing a number against the wall and seeing what sticks. In the case of the divisive “Monkey Man,” he turns it into a swirling five-minute noise collage. With “Raven,” the band dig extra hard into the changes, highlighting the slippery rhythms. Walker’s locating the stray threads in these songs and yanking until they come apart at the seams.
For every upended expectation, there’s a “Grace is Gone,” the quietly wrenching Lillywhite highlight that Walker drapes with tracing paper. The plaintive original is one of the most out-and-out gorgeous moments across the entire DMB catalog, and Walker knows when to leave well enough alone. Much the same goes for the troubled groove of “Big Eyed Fish” and the soused spiritual epic, “Bartender.” While Walker’s Lillywhite Sessions often seem to favor the head over the heart, he goes for the core of these songs, reveling in Matthews’ bleary, brass-rail philosophizing.
Walker’s desire to do something novel with pretty much all of these songs occasionally distorts or otherwise dispenses with their emotional stakes, which could be a sticking point for curious DMB fans. These songs often don’t hit you in the gut the way the original sessions can, opting for a brain-over-body intent. But Walker’s spin on the Lillywhite material didn’t have to be faithful, or even reverent, to work: all it had to be was invested. He and his band have come to these songs with best intentions.
Walker’s Lillywhite isn’t going to make indie rock learn to love Dave Matthews any more than Dave Matthews fans are necessarily going to embrace this indoor-kid version of their illicitly acquired classic. That’s not the point. Walker’s idiosyncratic take is his way of reconnecting the celebrated, cerebral art-folkie he’s become with a past spent dodging beanbags and sucking down Natty Lights in an East Troy parking lot. If you hear a little bit of your own journey in there, hey, all the better. It’s like the man once said: “I will go in this way, and find my own way out.” | 2018-11-26T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2018-11-26T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Folk/Country | Dead Oceans | November 26, 2018 | 7.8 | 0d79b904-966e-4b95-808e-265d2d61fc97 | Paul Thompson | https://pitchfork.com/staff/paul-thompson/ | |
Lange, better known as Helado Negro, teams with the visual artist Kristi Sword for a sprawling and inspired project paying tribute to the Marfa, Texas sky. | Lange, better known as Helado Negro, teams with the visual artist Kristi Sword for a sprawling and inspired project paying tribute to the Marfa, Texas sky. | Roberto Carlos Lange : Kite Symphony, Four Variations | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/roberto-carlos-lange-kite-symphony-four-variations/ | Kite Symphony, Four Variations | Marfa, Texas is famous for its enormous bowl of sky. Just look at it: Here it is glazed pink, here it’s filled with marshmallow clouds, and here it’s spattered like a house painter's drop cloth. In the 1970s, the minimalist sculptor Donald Judd began buying up property in the Chihuahuan Desert town; punctuating its emptiness with his cryptic cement and aluminum boxes, he minted the area’s reputation as a locus of elusive awe. In the decades since, Marfa, with a population of fewer than 2000 people, has become America’s unlikeliest cultural hub, drawing artists from around the world to grapple with its landscape and its light, no matter how quixotic the endeavor might seem. In 2016, after years of planning, the octogenarian artist Robert Irwin completed untitled (dawn to dusk), an empty building meant to channel some of the region’s intangible alchemy of space and shadow. When asked what he hoped to achieve, he said mischievously, “I’m trying to grab a will-o’-the-wisp.”
How do you capture such an expanse in sound? Roberto Carlos Lange, better known as Helado Negro, and the visual artist Kristi Sword went to extravagant lengths to answer that question; the answer they came up with, a multimedia project called Kite Symphony, ballooned to such an extent that its current form is nearly as amorphous, and as difficult to describe, as the object of their investigation. The piece, still a work in progress, currently incorporates sound and light sculptures, handmade instruments, and the wind itself. It’s a lot to wrap one’s head around, but all began simply enough: After an initial research trip in November, Lange and Sword returned to Marfa in March for what was meant to be a three-week residency making art out of kites. But as the pandemic hit the United States and lockdown orders went into place, the couple settled in for an extended stay, and the project evolved.
They transformed mylar kites into “ephemeral sculptures” that react to light and wind. The two artists fashioned kalimbas out of gourds and disassembled toys. Lange recorded sketches on a church organ and finagled access to a baby grand in a shuttered restaurant. Armed with a sheaf of Sword’s graphic scores—drawings meant to be used in place of traditional musical notation—he recruited Texas-raised violist Jeanann Dara and recorded her on site at the Chinati Foundation, Judd’s 340-acre outdoor museum, as she improvised responses to tactile cues: Imagine the sound of a cactus, say, or Express the feeling of wind on your skin. Working out of a local studio, Lange mixed all of these stray sounds together, along with remote contributions from cornetist Rob Mazurek, to yield Kite Symphony: Four Variations—a free-flowing collage that doubles as a snapshot of the project’s sprawl.
Lange’s work has always resisted categorization; after making experimental beat music in the ’00s, he has evolved into an unusual sort of singer-songwriter, movingly examining the nuances of Latinx identity in songs that blur the line between synth pop and folk. But the wordless, beatless Kite Symphony, even more exploratory than previous albums under his birth name, sails far beyond the known coordinates of the Helado Negro universe. Totaling a concise 32 minutes, the album’s four movements bob and weave between purposeful form and pure abstraction. The record opens with a strange, otherworldly sound—part start-up chime, part engine turning over, it might be a radio frequency intercepted from a distant galaxy—and quickly settles into a gentle groove of bright, rounded tones tossed by an incidental rhythm, like agates rolling in the tide.
This is as clearly defined as the music will get; the only constant is that no sound or element retains its shape for long. Birdsong bleeds into dubbed-out chord clusters. Bowed tones duet with scraped metal. Timbres darken like sudden storm clouds; rustling noises suggest the presence of critters skittering in the underbrush. There are expressive, deeply lyrical passages where viola, brass, and piano layer in luminous harmonies; there are also melodies so formless it’s easy to believe that they were created by the wind whipping through rusty gates. Like Hiroshi Yoshimura’s Music for Nine Postcards and GREEN, it is not so much ambient as environmental music, teasingly blurring focus as it slips between foreground and background.
While Kite Symphony is an indirect product of the pandemic, the music is ultimately marked by its lightness of spirit, as if to say, “This too shall pass.” A sense of place is implicit in crickets, distant traffic, blowing winds, and other field-recorded sounds, and perhaps a sense of humor, too: At one point, the music drops out and a buzzing insect takes an unforeseen solo, its wings brushing against Lange’s microphone. But most of the time, it’s anyone’s guess exactly how any of these sounds are being made. The whole thing is a conjuring trick. What’s remarkable is how Lange and his collaborators give shape to something so intangible.
Even when the music is at its haziest, there are submerged rhythms and hidden patterns at work. That’s true on a macro level, too: The final movement builds to a wonderfully satisfying climax as Dara’s multi-tracked viola traces the faintest suggestion of a line against a slowly oscillating drone, like a swallow barely visible against the evening sky. Dara’s playing, in fact, often feels like the music’s lifeblood. There are moments when her bowing rolls from the unmistakably physical sound of horse hair against metal strings to ghostly overtone. It’s moments like these that Lange and his collaborators’ kinship with Robert Irwin becomes clear: They, too, are grabbing will-o’-the-wisps, and Kite Symphony: Four Variations is alive with them.
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2020-07-11T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-07-11T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Ballroom Marfa | July 11, 2020 | 8 | 0d79bc41-9c00-4066-9e37-429161ac915a | Philip Sherburne | https://pitchfork.com/staff/philip-sherburne/ | |
The enigmatic masked country singer follows up his debut with more songs about lonesome souls alone together—and one standout duet with Shania Twain. | The enigmatic masked country singer follows up his debut with more songs about lonesome souls alone together—and one standout duet with Shania Twain. | Orville Peck: Show Pony EP | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/orville-peck-show-pony-ep/ | Show Pony EP | When Orville Peck croons about young men crying, he never reaches the word “cry.” He halts just before it, the silence hanging over what’s implied. On the surface, the enigmatic country singer is steely and collected, assuming the stoic veneer of the American cowboy. He shrouds himself in fringed leather masks, concealing all but his striking blue eyes. He sings about Marlboros in a rich, stately baritone that evokes Roy Orbison and Elvis. But Peck is gay and Canadian, and the glimmering torch songs on his 2019 debut, Pony, underscored the latent homoeroticism of the Old West—the undying commitment between a “lone” ranger and his trusty partner, streaking through ghost towns side-by-side. His outlaw persona toys with contradictions. Country music may be stereotyped as conservative, but Peck is seduced by another facet: its rhinestones and camp, the decadent flair of Gram Parson’s Nudie suit.
For decades, the cowboy has been a beacon for those who see their own loneliness reflected in the figure’s migratory lifestyle and estrangement. Though Orville Peck is a pseudonym, the singer believes it’s his most sincere project, “the most exposed that I’ve ever been.” But the contemporary trend for rodeo aesthetics has encouraged skeptics to receive Peck—a former punk musician who drummed in the Vancouver trio Nü Sensae—as a gimmick. “Call it country (like Lil Nas X did), and you can compel people to talk and listen,” one critic contended. The more “yeehaws” in advertising copy and bolo ties on the red carpet, the less convincing a Western act may seem.
Part of what spared Pony from seeming hollow was its vivid detailing—the velvet gloves of the rodeo queen, the violent sister “strik[ing] gold” on someone’s eyes, the failed love affairs with the rider, the boxer, the jailer. The album’s particularities gave shape to ballooning emotions, the bliss of a heady dare like “baby, let’s get high.” In that context, the cowboy identity seemed less like a gimmick than a metaphor, a matter of emotional and existential framing. By comparison, the original songs on Peck’s latest Show Pony EP are more vague. “Summertime,” the opener, is a wistful callback to a better season, anchored around a sad observation: “You and I/Bide our time.” But the stock coloring of the verses, which talk of “riding into the night” and “chasing the horizon,” pales against the eerie canyon roads and anguished memories of past singles like “Dead of Night.”
Show Pony’s most evocative original is the classic rock winddown “Drive Me, Crazy.” Two truckers ride out their days in an 18-wheeler, “November Rain” on the radio, as Peck relives their relationship with knowing fatalism: “Burning rubber wherever we go/Looking back on the orange glow.” The enduring image of two mavericks weathering the wilderness together recalls a touching observation from the poet Rainer Maria Rilke: that most noble task that two people could undertake is to “stand guard over the solitude of the other.” In Orville Peck’s world, the bond rarely lasts, but you can save the memory for later. He shares a similar comportment with Lana Del Rey, another artist who speeds forward, casting glances at what she’s left in her wake. The spare guitar ballad “No Glory for the West” harkens to Del Rey’s obsession with waning grandeur and the frail seams of American mythology. “Ridin’ past the best/And there’s still no rest,” Peck laments.
The EP’s two wild cards are both tributes to female country stars. The closer is a burly cover of Bobbie Gentry’s “Fancy,” which is interesting as an implied drag performance. But the overwhelming fullness of Peck’s voice becomes wearisome; he sacrifices sprightliness and wit in his delivery for growling power. Accentuated with bells, thuds, tambourine, and a sputtering guitar solo, Gentry’s lively tale about a girl escaping poverty through sex work takes on the melodrama of musical theater. The narrowness—or specificity, depending on your perspective—of Peck’s act already invites charges of being stiltedly one-note; the hamminess doesn’t help.
The Shania Twain duet “Legends Never Die,” meanwhile, is more pop and less “authentic”-sounding than what Peck usually attempts, but it’s truer to his playful vision of country as an outlet for fabulousness and glamour. In the music video, Peck steps onstage at a drive-in theater when Twain prowls forward in a leopard-print catsuit, sparkly fringe dripping down her sleeves—a callback to her iconic “That Don’t Impress Me Much” video. The two singers end up sharing the stage, swapping boasts in a cheeky, confident duet. “Takin’ orders never been my style,” Peck sings lightheartedly. Their tossed-out asides and easygoing camaraderie is delightful. For once, the lonesome cowboy doesn’t seem so solitary.
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2020-08-21T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-08-21T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Folk/Country | Columbia | August 21, 2020 | 6.7 | 0d7a5a43-e6bd-4aa2-9981-549f317d70f4 | Cat Zhang | https://pitchfork.com/staff/cat-zhang/ | |
Already one of the most talked-about and divisive records of the year, Vampire Weekend’s Afropop- and preppy-inflected debut is simple, jaunty, homespun, and—like the early albums from fellow fast-risers Belle and Sebastian and the Strokes were on their release—one of the most refreshing and replayable indie records in recent years. | Already one of the most talked-about and divisive records of the year, Vampire Weekend’s Afropop- and preppy-inflected debut is simple, jaunty, homespun, and—like the early albums from fellow fast-risers Belle and Sebastian and the Strokes were on their release—one of the most refreshing and replayable indie records in recent years. | Vampire Weekend: Vampire Weekend | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/11058-vampire-weekend/ | Vampire Weekend | If there’s anything the happy New York kids in this band have learned from listening to African music, it’s the difference between “pop” and “rock”: Vampire Weekend’s debut album announces straight off that it’s the former. The first sound on the first song, “Mansard Roof,” comes from Rostam Batmanglij’s keyboard, set to a perky, almost piping tone—the kind of sunny sound you’d hear in old West African pop. Same goes for Ezra Koenig’s guitar, which never takes up too much space; it’s that clean, natural tone you’d get on a record from Senegal or South Africa. Chris Baio’s bass pulses and slides and steps with light feet, and most of all there’s Chris Tomson, who plays like a percussionist as often as he does a rock drummer, tapping out rhythms and counter-accents on a couple of drums in the back of the room. And yet they play it all like indie kids on a college lawn, because they’re not hung up on Africa in the least—a lot of these songs work more like those on the Strokes’ debut, Is This It?, if you scraped off all the scuzzy rock’n’roll signifiers, leaving behind nothing but clean-cut pop and preppy new wave, tucked-in shirts and English-lit courses.
This Afro/preppy/new-wave combination has a history—Brits like Orange Juice, Americans like Talking Heads. For now, though, it’s one of the most deservedly buzzed-about things around: People have been chattering over Vampire Weekend ever since a CD-R demo of three of these songs started circulating last year. (Full disclosure: One of the sound engineers of that CD-R now does freelance audio work for Pitchfork.) The excitement isn’t hard to fathom. People spend a lot of time poking around for the edgy new underground thing, convinced that plain old pop songs have been done to death. But Vampire Weekend come along like Belle and Sebastian and the Strokes each did, sounding refreshingly laidback and uncomplicated, and with simple setups that make good songs sound exceedingly easy. (The result being not “this is mind-blowing,” or “this is catchy,” but “I have listened to this, straight through, four times a day for the past month.”)
No surprise, then, that their first hit MP3 would be a song called “Cape Cod Kwassa Kwassa,” which is sly, quiet, and casual in a way that blows away so many other bands who actively try to get your attention. Their label seems to have understood this effect, and so they’ve left these demos sounding as natural as they were: This release just fiddles with the mastering, switches out a few takes in ways you wouldn't much notice, plays with the sequencing, relegates one song to a B-side, and adds a couple of great ones that you can nonetheless understand being omitted the first time.
Most of the credit will wind up going to Koenig, who’s the star presence here. By the second song, “Oxford Comma,” the band is ticking along on little touches of keyboard and the tap of a snare drum, and he’s still keeping the empty space captivating: There’s a little indie yelp to his voice, but mostly he’s relaxed, conversational, and wry. (Not unlike another guy who’s tried on an Afro-suave sound—though Paul Simon never sounded this exuberant.) The person who’ll probably never get enough credit turns out to be Batmanglij, whose pat, classicist keyboard arpeggios lead the way through tempo shifts and transitions, occasionally locking in with some sprightly violin parts. It all comes off as simple, jaunty, and homespun, but there’s a lot of precision lurking beneath—exactly what happens when you combine a music major and indie-pop.
Koenig is smart and lucky, in that he gets to play the preppy angle both ways: Like a guy who’s read a lot of Cheever, he can summon up the atmosphere of kids whose parents use “summer” as a verb and give it all the hairy eyeball at the same time. “Oxford Comma” is spent picking on someone who brags too much about money: “Why would you lie about how much coal you have?/Why would you lie about something dumb like that?” (Then again, there’s nothing more moneyed than having the luxury to find money tacky, and when Koenig adds that Lil Jon “always tells the truth,” you kind of suspect Lil Jon wouldn’t find how much “coal” someone has to be all that irrelevant.)
Later, walking across the Columbia University campus, Koenig drops a detail whose delivery always gets a smile from me, even if its thrust is hard to gauge: “You spilled kefir on your keffiyeh.” Koenig is a detail guy, a happy observer who never much bores you with how he feels; mostly, as befits a recent college grad, he’s singing about location, about where people will go and whether they’ll come back with new faces. In non-album B-side “Ladies of Cambridge,” he can’t decide whether to move there with the girl or mourn letting her go alone; “Walcott” whirls you through Cape Cod and then suggests getting the hell out (“Bottleneck is a shit show/Hyannisport is a ghetto”); the twitchy “A-Punk” sees one person off to New Mexico while another stays near college and finds a place in Washington Heights. And while the faux-African backing vocals on “One” might be the album’s only real misstep, the final line sums up where its concerns are: “All your collegiate grief has left you/Dowdy in sweatshirts/Absolute horror!”
Of course, while Vampire Weekend have certainly benefited from our new music world of internet buzz, plenty of people have found reasons to hate Vampire Weekend from the first note, many of them having to do with their prep aesthetic and Ivy League educations—Oxford shirts, boat shoes, Columbia University. But it just so happens that we’re in a moment where such things matter to people: As interest grows in clean-cut, clever indie-pop, plenty of folks would like to hear things get dirtier, riskier, less collegiate—and in a lot of corners of the indie landscape, they thankfully are. But here’s another odd parallel with that first Strokes record: Vampire Weekend have the same knack for grabbing those haters and winning them over. Bring any baggage you want to this record, and it still returns nothing but warm, airy, low-gimmick pop, peppy, clever, and, yes, unpretentious—four guys who listened to some Afropop records, picked up a few nice ideas, and then set about making one of the most refreshing and replayable indie records in recent years. | 2008-01-28T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2008-01-28T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | XL | January 28, 2008 | 8.8 | 0d7f02a2-695f-41d7-8cf8-e8b5e7ca115a | Nitsuh Abebe | https://pitchfork.com/staff/nitsuh-abebe/ | |
Touching on a variety of extreme-music styles, and sampling from iconic revolutionary thinkers, the Philadelphia grindcore quartet grafts noise onto bull-headed hardcore, to blistering effect. | Touching on a variety of extreme-music styles, and sampling from iconic revolutionary thinkers, the Philadelphia grindcore quartet grafts noise onto bull-headed hardcore, to blistering effect. | Hell to Pay: Bliss | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/hell-to-pay-bliss/ | Bliss | While fusing grindcore and noise is increasingly prevalent in modern extreme music, the two have a long shared history. Contemporary noise developed concurrent to grindcore in the late 1980s and early 1990s, both as forms of “anti-music,” and the metal label Relapse has released music from pioneers of both styles, Brutal Truth and Merzbow. Earlier this decade, Toronto’s the Endless Blockade and Portland’s Knelt Rote were destabilizing grindcore by injecting power electronics. The Philadelphia quartet Hell to Pay graft noise onto bull-headed hardcore reminiscent of Nails and Jesus Piece, the latter of which also features Hell to Pay bassist Aaron Heard and guitarist John DiStefano. Bliss, their full-length debut, uses that hybrid not just to bulldoze through expectations in sound, but also to achieve a higher purpose.
Nailing the combination of blistering grindcore fury with overdriven buzzsaw tone, Bliss sounds like a Kurt Ballou production, though it isn’t. It particularly recalls Nails’ Ballou-produced Unsilent Death, which was more explicit in its HM-2 worship. “Bleed to Me” is the most unapologetically aggro track here, transitioning from straight-ahead crust-grind into floor-punching breakdowns that would fit in with Harm’s Way or Hatebreed. “Static” spasms for 30 seconds before ending with low, pulsating rumbles that lead into “Runaway,” their slowest and densest track. “Runaway” takes from the uneasy tension of Black Sabbath’s “Black Sabbath,” guitars ringing like noises in the wind rather than doom’s meteor-like bludgeon. Hell to Pay draw from metal more slyly and broadly than their overwhelming grind influence suggests; “Starve” takes from the more Slayer-leaning modern thrash of Noisem, reckless yet barely in control, and “Void,” which first appeared as a single in 2014, nearly reaches death metal at its most monolithic.
Throughout, the noise doesn’t bleed into the grindcore too much; it acts more as a segue. This actually works in its favor: Bliss’ penchant for beatdown slams and occasional nods to thrash act as a break from pure speed and make the noise less intimidating. “Smear” is the only track that even toys with more treble-based blasts that would rival their grind foundation. Should noise be uncompromising? Yes, but not everyone can accept a record like Merzbow’s Pulse Demon on first listen.
While Bliss is accessible from a grindcore standpoint, they’re not letting you off easy with a few dopamine-blasting breakdowns and sizzling noise interludes. If their lyrics are generically anti-establishment, a few carefully chosen samples make their intentions clearer. “Thrive” cites Noam Chomsky’s “If the Nuremberg Laws Were Applied…” and “Education Is Ignorance,” adding creepy echoes and low-riding bass. The title track features excerpts from Angela Davis’ 1972 interview from prison and Mumia Abu-Jamal’s “A Life Lived Deliberately,” the latter an especially fitting pick for a Philadelphia band with songs based on oppression. It ends with a recording of “Battle Hymn of the Republic” whose cheery gusto sounds eerily fascist, and creates a provocative contrast with the political discourse that has preceded it.
Hell to Pay could stand to make the connection between their lyrics and samples a little more explicit. Still, opening an avenue for revolutionary thought is commendable. Grindcore and noise, together or on their own, were never meant to have a huge audience, yet that’s no reason to hole up and hide under convention. As Brutal Truth once said, extreme conditions demand extreme responses. | 2018-03-20T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-03-20T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Metal | GTR | March 20, 2018 | 7.2 | 0d7fb8a4-24cf-4880-aeab-846042f2eb9b | Andy O'Connor | https://pitchfork.com/staff/andy-o'connor/ | |
Alt-J's debut album went Top 20 in the UK, and they're favorites to win November's Mercury Music Prize. The Cambridge-based pop band's been described as "the new Radiohead," but that tag ultimately says more about lowered standards. | Alt-J's debut album went Top 20 in the UK, and they're favorites to win November's Mercury Music Prize. The Cambridge-based pop band's been described as "the new Radiohead," but that tag ultimately says more about lowered standards. | alt-J: An Awesome Wave | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/17233-an-awesome-wave/ | An Awesome Wave | It is a contradiction in terms that the band described by some as "the new Radiohead" are prone to statements such as, "Part of the reason [the album] is accessible is because we don't try to go out of the box or be innovative. We just try to play music we like to hear." Where's my "And if anyone else likes it, that's a bonus" klaxon? In Alt-J's case, those are some pre-banking crisis-sized bonuses: Their album has gone Top 20 in the UK, and single "Tessellate" has been all over radio on both sides of the Atlantic for months. They're the favorites to win the £10,000 accolade of November's Mercury Music Prize. As Radiohead would tell you, popularity doesn't preclude you from being experimental, but that Alt-J are being hailed as horndogs for innovation speaks volumes about the neutered, post-Maccabees peerage they've entered into.
The main claim for innovation on Alt-J's debut, An Awesome Wave, is that there's a lot going on. The notion of a male vocal that's halfway between Macy Gray and a goose gibbering over beats discarded from *Eskimo Snow-*era WHY? is certainly a complex notion. Sometimes they sound like Bombay Bicycle Club playing in a submarine. Comprehensible intonation is out of the window, which is probably a good job seeing as very few of the lyrics make any kind of sense. "In your snatch fits pleasure, broom-shaped pleasure," for one. The Cambridge-based, Leeds-formed band thinks nothing of layering on ever more crunchy drumbeats, metallic thuds on the piano, and constellations of sparkle as another knotty rhythm stutters forth: Woody cracks fracture the end of "Tessellate", a cloud of synths smother the final moments of "Breezeblocks", and some incongruous surf guitar twangs over the last seconds of "Taro". But these additions rarely forge any sense of dynamic or structural progression; strip all extraneous sparkle and amplification away, and the songs are exposed for the draining, elongated MOR tunes they really are. This was neatly proven earlier this week when Mumford & Sons covered "Tessellate" in the BBC Radio 1 Live Lounge, the single sounding indistinguishable from their own material.
The most frustrating thing about An Awesome Wave is its tentativeness. Alt-J have also been compared to Wild Beasts, and while there's a superficial similarity between both bands' oddly voiced singers, when Wild Beasts hold back-- as they did on the majestic Smother-- it's because they know that priapism would be inappropriate at that particular moment. In Alt-J's case, there was never any vim to quash in the first place. The second of the record's three interludes is a finger-picked acoustic guitar melody, played over field recordings of... a car park? The bleep of a lorry reversing prompts a woman to comment, "It's good today. It's nice, isn't it?" That rhetorical pleasantry precedes "Something Good" and just as listeners might be about to staple their collars shut for good, the song comes in with a speedy Arab Strap-morose guitar part, and singer Joe Newman uses the language of the bullring ("matador," "estocada") to describe how he's going to vanquish some unwanted lingering feelings. A flurry of piano rises like a tornado in slow motion, promising a break into some much longed-for catharsis, release-- before paling back to reedy acoustic strumming. They dangle the carrot, only for you to reach out and grab it, triggering a booby-trapped cage to fall and make stasis your sentence.
The members of Alt-J have been working on An Awesome Wave for five years, and it shows. It's both overstuffed and messy, and so overworked that what life there may once have been now exists as a kind of primordial paste. When they rise above that, as with the frequent a cappella male vocal harmonies, the effect is startling-- but comically so, given how incongruous these parts are to the rest of the record. "If you give [listeners] a list of influences that come from everywhere and every genre, then there's something for everyone and people seem more intrigued by you as a band," drummer Thom Green told a student newspaper. By that logic, why not throw in some crooning for the olds, a little innuendo for the Rihanna crowd, a cliff face worth of drops just to round out that universal appeal? Cynical, maybe, as Alt-J have proved perfectly popular on their own terms. But if this is what's getting tagged as an "innovative" success these days, then heaven help the weirdos. | 2012-09-28T02:00:02.000-04:00 | 2012-09-28T02:00:02.000-04:00 | Rock | Canvasback | September 28, 2012 | 4.8 | 0d833c8d-447c-4d70-a5a1-78d549326c8a | Laura Snapes | https://pitchfork.com/staff/laura-snapes/ | null |
Tween is a collection of outtakes from the perennially overlooked Baltimore indie rock band's previous two LPs, yet it manages to capture the full scope of their vision. | Tween is a collection of outtakes from the perennially overlooked Baltimore indie rock band's previous two LPs, yet it manages to capture the full scope of their vision. | Wye Oak: Tween | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22048-wye-oak-tween/ | Tween | Wye Oak are somehow best known for being overlooked, just like a number of their Baltimore peers (Beach House, Lower Dens, Future Islands) once were. A breakthrough on the order of “Zebra,” “To Die in L.A.,” or “Seasons (Waiting on You)”—style has naggingly eluded the duo, but they aren’t really chasing after one anyway. Over the past decade, they’ve accumulated considerable goodwill with four cohesive and consistent records of indie rock repellent to hyperbole. *Tween doesn’t appear all too likely to change things—it’s a collection of outtakes culled from the transition period between 2011’s Civilian and the synth-pop rebranding of Shriek *while being presented as a “mini-album,” a format whose intentions still confuse most listeners. And yet, *Tween *is a collection of Wye Oak songs that becomes everything previous Wye Oak albums weren’t: unpredictable, assertive, varied and capable of capturing the full scope of their vision.
Note that these are *outtakes, *not B-sides. Wye Oak’s dream-pop of has never soared to the heights reached by the skyscraping “If You Should See,” and the forward velocity of nominal single “Watching the Waiting” is a new pacesetter as well. It’s hard to imagine anyone hearing these as, at best, the 11th-best songs the duo wrote between 2012 and 2014. I can’t imagine that Jenn Wasner and Andy Stack feel that way either—Wye Oak thought highly enough of the scorched-earth dirge “Trigger Finger” to release it as a maxi-single in 2015.
Due to the narrow artistic parameters of Shriek (mostly: no guitars), every song on Tween has this quality of a gem rescued from the cracks. “On Luxury” is clearly a product of Shriek’s emphasis on electronics*, *but far more percussive and textured to fit amongst the sleeker pop numbers. Likewise, “Better (For Esther)” and “If You Should See” are within the galaxy of ‘80s pop, though they touch on the era’s “big music” of U2 and Echo and the Bunnymen.
Wasner has proven to be a restless artist in and out of Wye Oak, so the decision to switch to bass and synths on *Shriek *was understandable and an easy narrative hook for a band that never provided one. But it wasn’t entirely beneficial, as Wasner happens to be a *really expressive *guitar player and *Tween *makes it clear that she was nowhere near running out of things to say. “No Dreaming” initially could be mistaken for a cut on Beach House’s Thank Your Lucky Stars, but then Wasner pulls it towards opposite extremities with a seasick sway of high-capoed chords and a torrential downpour of noise in the chorus. “Too Right” and “Trigger Finger” are even more physically demanding, feedback-scalded dirges that take on the burnt beauty of a Randall Dunn production. Even when Wye Oak hew towards the traditional indie rock structures of the past, they’ve never sounded this aggressive or downright rude.
This isn’t true of Wasner’s vocals or lyrics on *Tween, *both of which remain unerringly gorgeous and impregnable. The sonic rapture of “If You Should See” clouds an acceptance of romantic stability (“It doesn’t take me by the throat/but it’s an outcome I’ll never have to run from”) and throughout *Tween, *Wasner maintains the composure she’s shown in remarkable duets with Patrick Stickles and Samuel Herring, her spangly pop project Dungeonesse and the shoegaze-indebted Flock of Dimes. The flipside of hearing Wasner comfortably fit into so many contexts is that it starts to feel like Wye Oak is in a no-win competition with everyone’s personal Best of Jenn Wasner mixtape.
That's kind of what Tween provides, which is why it instantly feels colorful and more exciting than any of Wye Oak’s full-lengths—would any of these eight stylistic tangents have as much impact if they were extrapolated to 40 minutes? More importantly, *Tween *offers true catharsis, whether it’s physical release triggered incapacitating beauty or pummeling brutality or just Wye Oak saying “fuck it.” A mini-album of outtakes might not be the protracted breakthrough so many wish for Wye Oak, but as they take their galloping victory lap on “Watching the Waiting,” Tween sure sounds like triumph. | 2016-06-23T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-06-23T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Merge | June 23, 2016 | 8 | 0d839356-ae4c-4249-a58a-5b012b4d04a7 | Ian Cohen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ian-cohen/ | null |
The timing couldn’t be better for AFI’s triumphant comeback; instead, they just sorta came back. This new LP works a “back to basics” operating principle, but it’s a “basics” that doesn’t serve them. | The timing couldn’t be better for AFI’s triumphant comeback; instead, they just sorta came back. This new LP works a “back to basics” operating principle, but it’s a “basics” that doesn’t serve them. | AFI: AFI (The Blood Album) | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22759-afi-the-blood-album/ | AFI (The Blood Album) | Stick around long enough, and once-popular bands will experience a critical reassessment completely independent of their new music. To wit, AFI: their 2003 major-label debut went platinum in 2006 on the strength of teens now old enough to give Sing the Sorrow its due props as some kind of alt-rock masterpiece, one that unified Fuse-punks, emo theater kids, mall-goths, and glam metalheads in a food court flashmob. Tilt your ears a certain way and you can hear Sing the Sorrow’s echoes in contemporaries like Touché Amoré, White Lung, and Deafheaven. During their surprising 2014 Coachella appearance, a sizable crowd witnessed a limber, vigorous performance of their hits that attested to frontman Davey Havok’s wholesome lifestyle choices. And while it’s been over a decade since they’ve appealed to anyone outside their core audience, the same could be said of peers like Jimmy Eat World, Deftones, and even Taking Back Sunday, who all made vital additions to their catalogs in 2016. With a self-titled record whose artwork is a blatant callback to *Sing the Sorrow, *the timing could not be better for AFI’s similarly triumphant comeback. Instead, they just sorta came back.
It’s a shame that The Blood Album missed the Vine era by three days, as it can be very seductive if you catch the right six-second frame: witness the call-and-response gang vocals that burst out of a very special goth episode of High School Musical, at least five choruses that scribble within the framework set by 2003’s “Girl’s Not Grey,” Havok’s “do try this in study hall” flights of poetry, the parts of Jade Puget’s solos that remind you that he has the name and the chops of a guy who’d have graced many a *Guitar World *cover in the ’90s.
Of course, those parts are going to be awesome. You know what else is awesome? Pretty much everything about the video for “The Leaving Song Pt. 2”—the whole Prom of the Living Dead dress code, the capoeira/circle pit choreography, every totally necessary behind-the-back guitar twirl, the close-ups on Havok’s lip ring. This is a clip that gets AFI. If The Blood Album is going to convince anyone who’s checked out since “Miss Murder,” it needs to likewise feel like expert stunt work or at least “The Crow goes crossfit”—we all know when the chorus is gonna come, but Havok needs to bring in the chorus with a roundhouse kick.
Still, at least half of The Blood Album’s songs feel virtually interchangeable and the other half sound like AFI wrote this stuff in the time it takes to play it. Even if all of the reflexively satisfying moments are consolidated into a highlight reel, that still leaves 40 minutes worth of custodial verses, downstroked basslines, and palm-muted chugging that never feel the need to justify their existence. When Havok’s words aren’t doused in purple highlighter, they’re exposed as basically meaningless, or, worse, like any Cure-inspired, vague song about introspection or sputtering relationships you can hear on any average indie rock record. “Am I coy enough? Am I boy enough?,” he whinges, and given that it slow dances to the same mannered waltz, “Snow Cats” could impart the blood oath devotion of “Silver and Cold” if delivered with any kind of flair or dynamics. Produced in-house with the assistance of KROQ-core vet Matt Hyde, nearly everything on The Blood Album plays at nearly the same exact drive-time volume and tempo.
Maybe that was the point. On every album since their commercial heyday, AFI have tried to challenge diehards: Crash Love was a brazen pop record, while 2013’s Burials diversified their wardrobe. The Blood Album presumably promises some kind of “back to basics” operating principle, but it’s a “basics” that doesn’t serve them, let alone recall the pulpier early phase on which they made their name. AFI shouldn’t be expected to resurrect the late, great Sing the Sorrow producer Jerry Finn, nor do they need to hire Marc Webb to blow a video budget that no longer exists for bands like them. The Blood Album just isn’t allowed to be boring.
If AFI wanted to reinvent themselves with streamlined and sober pop-rock, more power to them, but that’s not what The Blood Album does. There are still those moments that simultaneously speak to their strengths (“Hidden Knives”), but also bring up the question, why listen to AFI? This band doesn’t work in any specific musical genre so much as they do smeared-guyliner dramatics that never go out of style yet are in dire short supply right now, the developing of which is its own kind of craft. Without them, The Blood Album is virtually indistinguishable from any of the regrettably-fronted pop-metalcore bands playing in threes at a House of Blues near you. Perhaps it’s all worth it if The Blood Album spurs a rejuvenated interest in Sing the Sorrow and Black Sails on the Sunset, but the triumphant return of AFI is still ready when they are. | 2017-01-12T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2017-01-12T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Concord Music Group | January 12, 2017 | 5 | 0d8552bf-e376-49a0-9f04-d51c589587f3 | Ian Cohen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ian-cohen/ | null |
The Hype Williams producer's first album as a solo artist is a remastered version of a free, 30-minute mixtape he originally released in February. It's the latest reminder that he thinks about pop music very, very differently than you do. | The Hype Williams producer's first album as a solo artist is a remastered version of a free, 30-minute mixtape he originally released in February. It's the latest reminder that he thinks about pop music very, very differently than you do. | Dean Blunt: The Narcissist II | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/17377-the-narcissist-ii/ | The Narcissist II | The Narcissist II is the latest reminder that Dean Blunt thinks about pop music very, very differently than you do. It is the first album for Dean Blunt as a solo artist after several releases with his recording partner Inga Copeland (first as Hype Williams and then as Dean Blunt and Inga Copeland), though Copeland makes appearances here. A remixed and remastered version of a free, 30-minute "mixtape" Blunt dropped in February, The Narcissist II is is the least substantial release in a discography that avoids substance by design. A droopy-eyed, unromantic collage of synthesizers, movie dialogue, and baked vocals, The Narcissist II comments on the ephemerality of modern media consumption by being ephemeral itself.
In particular, The Narcissist II replicates a very specific type of listening: hunching over a laptop, dozens of Chrome tabs open, crawling down a Youtube rabbit hole. You know the drill: locate an obscure track, listen to half of it, click on something "related" in the right sidebar, pause it, tab over to a Soundcloud page... tab back. It is consumption via distraction: do this often enough and you'll encounter no end of noisy vinyl rips and shitty covers. This is the best metaphor for The Narcissist II: distant, half-heard clips; novel, obscure, and impossible. The samples blur into the original until The Narcissist II is the noisy rip, the shitty homage.
This is why, during the course of The Narcissist II, at some point nearly everything will seem like a sample. The simple chord riff that beautifies the title track, the Nuggets-y guitar riff that populates "XXX", the descending organ that buoys "caught feelings"-- anything could be pilfered, because it all sounds familiar. And then there are the elements that actually are stolen: a single, guttural "uhnf!" from Rick Ross, the melody of Biz Markie's "Just a Friend" splayed over "Are You as Good as I Remember", ongoing movie dialogue sketching a nasty domestic dispute. (The latter being the first time, perhaps, that the menace and violence in Blunt's music has been made explicit.) At the start of "Direct Line 2", the harsh, hot sound of a cell phone placed too close to a speaker crackles; I wince every time, and search for my phone on my desk.
The Narcissist II, though, is better at providing an experience than truly memorable music. This is the salty electro-dub of Excepter minus the forgivable nature of generative music, and the flaky, paper mache edits of Ariel Pink minus any obvious affection for the source material. Blunt, always conversant in hip-hop, actually steps up to the mic on the closer, "Coroner", on which he tells you that "That sweet apple-bottom gonna get candied." Blunt's delivery is flat, ugly, and devoid of braggadocio; for the first time I consider that his taken surname might not be wholly weed-inspired. This isn't great music just like addled Youtube-ing isn't a great way to experience art. Like a lot of free internet mixtapes, The Narcissist II is compelling but ultimately shallow, and shallow is a fault, even if that's what Blunt was aiming for. Next tab. | 2012-12-12T01:00:04.000-05:00 | 2012-12-12T01:00:04.000-05:00 | Experimental | Hippos in Tanks / World Music | December 12, 2012 | 5.4 | 0d8c7df3-60c9-4597-9eee-4b5c3ae3ac32 | Andrew Gaerig | https://pitchfork.com/staff/andrew-gaerig/ | null |
On her debut LP, the Miami-born, NYC-based DJ and producer Jessica Gentile honors the nightlife that raised her. She draws on dancehall, Miami bass, and trap, with enough space to breathe and glitter. | On her debut LP, the Miami-born, NYC-based DJ and producer Jessica Gentile honors the nightlife that raised her. She draws on dancehall, Miami bass, and trap, with enough space to breathe and glitter. | Jubilee: After Hours | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22500-after-hours/ | After Hours | After Hours opens like a dream sequence. Seagulls circle the sky, waves crash onto empty beaches. A crackly police scanner reveals a cop and dispatcher discussing arrests. It’s hard to tell if it’s dusk or dawn; twilight tends to warp time. But these are the protean hours that a certain set live for and that Jubilee recreates on After Hours. Where other dance albums often focus on just the club, for Jubilee, everything before, after, and in between is just as important.
On her long-awaited debut full-length, the Miami-born, Manhattan-based DJ and producer née Jessica Gentile pays tribute to the nightlife that raised her. Influenced by countless drives through Miami, the LP takes on a breezy, balmy feel different from Jubilee’s past Mixpak releases. Where her last three EPs (Pull Ova, Jealous, and JMZ Riddim) were harder and more percussive, After Hours is dreamier and more melodic. She still draws on many of the sounds she’s known for—dancehall, Miami bass, trap, among others—but this time, her music is concerned not just with the immediate moment but also with reflections on past ones.
Each track stands as its own memory and its own vignette, but as memories are wont to do, the edges bleed together, so that After Hours also functions like a 38-minute, South Florida-obsessed club mix. On “Stingray Shuffle,” Jubilee playfully references the shuffle that beachgoers do to avoid getting stung in shallow waters. A prickly, arpeggiated motif dances across a pounding beat, reminiscent of Frankie Knuckles’ “Your Love,” except faster and with a Detroit techno nod to DJ Stingray. “Sawgrass Expressway,” named after the expressway that runs through Broward County where Gentile grew up, also draws on house and techno, but with a sparser, more robotic feel. Both tracks are made for the club, but here they suggest spaces outside of it—getting ready beforehand, or barreling down an open road after.
At the club proper, lead single “Wine Up” is a dancehall jam with a chutney soca feel, by way of synthesized dhantal rhythms. A repeating four-note motif gestures toward Gyptian’s “Hold Yuh,” while Bronx-based dancehall artist Hoodcelebrityy demands the room, to “Wine up gyal, w-wine up yuh body!/Wine up gyal, r-r-ride di riddim!” Similarly, on “Bass Supply,” Miami mischief-maker Otto Von Schirach raps, “Swing that ass, swing it round and round!/Pound that shit, on the fucking ground!” Jubilee, meanwhile, interpolates the Miami bass track with an array of effects that she triggers as if playing Bop It—water droplets, slide whistles, unruly springs, 808 cowbells.
All throughout, Jubilee builds a consistent sense of place, shaping a loose narrative. In some ways, the album pivots on the track “JMZ Interlude,” which finds the listener ejected abruptly from the bawdy world of Von Schirach into the busy city streets. Using her 2014 Brooklyn-inspired “JMZ Riddim,” the interlude sketches the familiar scenario of trying to catch a ride to the next spot. Exclamations of “Brooklyn bruk!” cut through the cacophony of honking cars and blaring sirens. By the time the car doors slam shut, a slightly off-kilter stop/walk light starts ticking for what feels like forever. Finally, the ambient “Snooze Button” ushers in a brief daydream and some relief. At least, that’s one interpretation. The narrative arc of the album isn’t entirely clear-cut. But then again, neither are many nights out.
Either way, there’s no denying that After Hours is a meticulously produced affair. Every bass line and syncopated rhythm and subtle inflection fits precisely one into the other. Yet it always maintains enough space to breathe and, very often, to glitter: the same prickly pattern we first hear on “Stingray Shuffle” recurs throughout the record, shape-shifting just so to evoke different images and moods. On “Opa-Locka,” an homage to the city just south of Broward County, bells twinkle like stars over a spry reggae rhythm. The atmospheric “Spa Day” feels like speeding past the ocean, with the sun glinting off its corrugated surface. A slow-winding kizomba groove anchors the track, and 909 toms bounce from one side of the listener’s sonic periphery to the other as bits of conversation float by.
By the end, on album closer “Beach Ball,” swells of ambient noise rise and fall like columns of warm air, buoying bobbing flutes and skittering hi-hats. The tiniest gleam of morning light stains the horizon, easily blotting out any memory of police dispatchers or hungry gulls. Waves lap gently against the shore, and we feel it in our lungs: that these are the hours we live for. | 2016-10-26T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-10-26T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Mixpak | October 26, 2016 | 7.4 | 0d8d4919-532a-4e93-8436-d9c415c7b7c1 | Minna Zhou | https://pitchfork.com/staff/minna-zhou/ | null |
On her debut album, the Toronto singer-songwriter and producer draws variously from gospel, folk, and adult-contemporary influences; no matter the style, every song is a showcase for her powerful voice. | On her debut album, the Toronto singer-songwriter and producer draws variously from gospel, folk, and adult-contemporary influences; no matter the style, every song is a showcase for her powerful voice. | Charlotte Day Wilson: Alpha | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/charlotte-day-wilson-alpha/ | Alpha | Light has always been a precious resource in Charlotte Day Wilson’s music. The Toronto singer-songwriter and producer’s vast voice is like a canyon that the sun can’t access; the percolating soul and quiet storm that surround it flicker like candlelight. “I went to a funeral today just so I could feel something,” she sang on “Funeral,” from her 2018 EP Stone Woman. It’s a particularly bitter line in a catalog that has often traced life’s hard edges.
Her debut album, Alpha, is an escape from the twilight. Darkness once consumed Day Wilson, seeping down into the bottom of her lungs. Now, she’s preoccupied with luster and scope. Her voice—and what a voice, deep and passionate, cast in the mold of Anita Baker—feels less crepuscular, less intimate, and more capable of levitating cars and uprooting whole forests.
Nowhere is this more apparent than on “Mountains,” a stirring gospel number featuring full-throated choral chants, handclaps and foot stomps, and the sound of rain in the background. Day Wilson, raring to add to the sense of grandeur, describes scaling peaks and searching valleys. Yet the lyrics scan as insular and personal, like a classic break-up song. “Mountains” is co-written by one of the kings of the form, Babyface, and gives Day Wilson license to curse her broken heart and even call on the spirit of Travis’ mopey classic: “And when it rains only rains on me.” The teetering-on-the-brink drama is ratcheted up to incredible levels. Day Wilson is the kind of performer who can pull off approaching every one of her hurt feelings like it’s worthy of an Iliad.
A sense of spiritual power defines much of Alpha. The background vocals on “Strangers” are immediately reminiscent of the haunting yet angelic Auto-Tuned voice Bon Iver’s Justin Vernon deploys. “If I Could” is just one song that leans on religious imagery: “I’d bathe you/Wash you of the sins that plague you/Rid you of the burdens, and you’d be free once more,” Day Wilson sings. The body of the artist with the bourbon-soaked lounge-singer shimmer now sounds inhabited by the spirit of a transcendent preacher. This is music for baptizing groups of worshippers in rivers. Yet Day Wilson funnels the evangelism into a focus on the self, always looking inward.
There are more mellow moments to balance the weight. “Keep Moving” is the kind of adult-contemporary song that would have lit up Reagan-era radio: muted drum pads, spacey keyboards, chugging guitars. “Take Care of You,” guest starring Syd, could pass for a Destiny’s Child deep cut. Unsurprisingly, the most traditional soul joint is the team-up with Day Wilson’s occasional collaborators BADBADNOTGOOD: “I Can Only Whisper” features the band’s stoned and surly late-night grooves. There’s more folk-influenced fare, too: On “Lovesick Utopia” and “Adam Complex,” Day Wilson sings over acoustic guitars and other mild orchestral flourishes. Her power isn’t particularly suited to light fingerpicking, but neither are unwelcome to the ear.
It’s been five years since Day Wilson embarked on a solo career after the dissolution of her band the Wayo, but this is her first album, and she uses the space to cover plenty of stylistic bases. It all comes together in a varied and well-sequenced record. But wherever you dip in, you’ll land on her voice—the kind of instrument that stressed-out commuters can reach for to help ease their anxiety in traffic. It would be simple for Day Wilson to cut an album of Stax-style soul tunes or smooth jazz standards and call it a day. The immaculately mixed Alpha is instead built on weighty writing and daring arrangements in which Day Wilson stays front and center, never allowing the production to overshadow her presence.
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-07-09T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2021-07-09T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | Stone Woman Music | July 9, 2021 | 7.6 | 0d9cbb4e-e6ed-4217-b3d5-b75e438353ab | Dean Van Nguyen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/dean-van nguyen/ | |
On his third album in 18 months, the UK hitmaker applies a scrapbooker’s instincts to festival-ready house anthems. But despite the diaristic hints, we learn little about the artist. | On his third album in 18 months, the UK hitmaker applies a scrapbooker’s instincts to festival-ready house anthems. But despite the diaristic hints, we learn little about the artist. | Fred again..: *Actual Life 3 (January 1 - September 9 2022) * | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/fred-again-actual-life-3-january-1-september-9-2022/ | Actual Life 3 (January 1 - September 9 2022) | Dance music is often framed as an escape from the everyday, but Fred again.. treats it more like a scrapbook on Actual Life 3 (January 1 - September 9 2022), his third reality-based album in 18 months. As on its predecessors, Actual Life (April 14 - December 17 2020) and Actual Life 2 (February 2 - October 15 2021), the 29-year-old hitmaker born Frederick John Philip Gibson collages together voice notes from friends, Instagram videos, and samples of important records from his life, offering a (purportedly) personal peek at the comings and goings of a top-level musician/songwriter/Ed Sheeran collaborator.
Diaristic songwriting is an unusual approach for house music, a style that tends to avoid the quotidian in favor of dreaming of promised lands. It worked for Fred again.. on “Marea (We've Lost Dancing),” a 2021 single that sampled a conversation with the Blessed Madonna about COVID-19’s devastating impact on the dance music industry, turning her somber reflections into an anthem that gave comfort during lockdowns and fueled elation as clubs re-opened their doors. On Actual Life 3, the source material includes a live recording of 070 Shake’s “Nice to Have,” which Fred has said is his most listened-to song of the year (on “Danielle (Smile on My Face)”), and his friend Delilah Montagu singing her song “Lost Keys” on Instagram (on “Delilah (Pull Me Out Of This)”).
The album’s backstory is far more remarkable than the results. Fred is an extremely competent producer: His drums, drizzled with the slightest hint of UK garage, swing and punch like they should; his piano melodies are robust with the requisite hint of tenderness; and everything radiates an expensive sheen. But there is nothing discordant in his music, nothing to make you sit up and wonder how the hell he pulled that off. In sound and style, there’s nothing on this record that Disclosure didn’t do a decade ago—or MJ Cole 10 years before that. “Delilah (Pull Me Out of This)” may well feature a vocal taken from a friend’s Instagram video but, beyond a slightly degraded sonic quality, there’s little to distinguish it from a million other vocal fragments throughout dance music history. Equally, it’s nice to know that Fred likes 70 Shake’s “Nice to Have”—but so do the millions of people who have listened to it on Spotify.
What makes this all the more frustrating is that Fred again.. is, by all accounts, a very interesting musician. He’s sung for Brian Eno, made a collaborative mixtape with drill star Headie One, and knocks up ambient sketches on the fly when he can’t find the right tune to listen to. But if these personal quirks do enter Fred again..’s music, they aren’t present here. It would be tempting to call Fred again.. the Ed Sheeran of house music, given his scrubbed-down sheen. But Sheeran at least strikes a personal chord with his legions of fans. Actual Life 3, for all its plundering of Fred’s browser history, feels too imprecise to make the kind of impression that “Marea” once did. The sentiments expressed in songs like “Bleu (Better With Time),” “Berwyn (All That I Got Is You),” and “Clara (The Night Is Dark)” are more Hallmark card than dark night of the soul.
After three Fred again.. full-lengths in the span of 18 months, we’re no closer to knowing who he is or why we should care about his intimately documented life, beyond the fact that he has fashionable friends, likes listening to music, and has experienced his share of grief in recent years. Of the three records, Actual Life (April 14 - December 17 2020) is probably the most interesting, its gently mournful air reflecting the claustrophobic times in which it was made. But three albums of this indistinct sadness—think Burial meets Disclosure as James Blake looks on longingly—is too much. Actual Life 3 clearly couldn’t have been made by just anyone, but it sometimes feels like it might as well have been. The documentary approach to music can work extremely well—Joy Orbison used samples from his personal life on his excellent 2021 mixtape Still Slipping Vol. 1 to create music that burst with familiarity, depth, and insight—but it often feels like Fred again.. is pulling away from the big reveal, chafing at the idea of giving too much away. There’s no essence revealed here. You hope that recording Actual Life 3 was cathartic for him, but for the listener it feels slightly indulgent, with the troublesome hint of a memory card full of vacation photos.
Actual Life 3 has moments of brilliance and will certainly connect with big festival crowds. The distressed ending of “Kelly (End of a Nightmare)” is genuinely exhilarating; “Delilah (Pull Me Out of This)” has an irresistibly white-knuckled, belly-tickling momentum; and “Eyelar (Shutters)” places a beautiful synth-trumpet melody at the center of its laconic shuffle. But music that focuses on reality tends to work best when it is doggedly cinematic or highly relatable; Actual Life 3 is neither, instead frequently slipping into mundanity. Real life is all well and good, but most people get enough of it from just living. | 2022-10-28T00:04:00.000-04:00 | 2022-10-28T00:04:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B / Rap / Electronic | Atlantic | October 28, 2022 | 5.9 | 0da40570-61de-4d26-881f-c17c8cffac54 | Ben Cardew | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ben-cardew/ | |
With Heaven Adores You, the soundtrack to last year's Kickstarter-funded Elliott Smith documentary of the same name, we get sweet, refreshing peeks at the real person behind the Sad Guy cartoon people know best. The endearing scraps, and at least one previously unreleased masterpiece, help rewrite the details of an important story. | With Heaven Adores You, the soundtrack to last year's Kickstarter-funded Elliott Smith documentary of the same name, we get sweet, refreshing peeks at the real person behind the Sad Guy cartoon people know best. The endearing scraps, and at least one previously unreleased masterpiece, help rewrite the details of an important story. | Elliott Smith: Heaven Adores You Soundtrack | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21410-heaven-adores-you-soundtrack/ | *Heaven Adores You* Soundtrack | Years before he moved to Portland and adopted the name "Elliott," Steven Paul Smith was a sunny and unassuming kid growing up in the Dallas suburbs, living a surprisingly all-American existence. He played football; his family went to church occasionally. He played clarinet in middle-school band and was elected Byrd Symphonic Band president in 1982; he cracked up his friends with goofy impressions. His best friend was a fellow "Dungeons & Dragons" obsessive named Steve Pickering (nickname: Pickle), with whom he recorded dozens upon dozens of original songs, sometimes under silly pseudonyms like "Johnny Panic."
In the countless interviews that Smith’s friends and loved ones have granted since his death, this picture—the funny motherfucker, the expert mimic, the shameless clown, the amiable music obsessive—has remained elusive to fans, who only have his music and his public persona to hold onto. But on Heaven Adores You, the soundtrack to last year's Kickstarter-funded documentary of the same name, we finally get some sweet and refreshing peeks at the person behind the Sad Guy cartoon. Take, for example, "Untitled Guitar Picking," from 1983. It is exactly what it sounds like—a couple of minutes of a kid who has listened to some Led Zeppelin and Pink Floyd records working out what it sounds like when you arppegiate some minor chords. (Pickering, who was manning the tape deck, lent it to the filmmakers.) It's completely unremarkable, and yet its presence is unaccountably touching.
"Picking" is one of the few pieces of Smith juvenilia that made its way onto the Heaven Adores You soundtrack: There’s also a version of the edgy, seething "Fear City," included on 2007’s canonical New Moon collection, except here it's "Don’t Call Me Billy." It's the same song, right down to the cadence and harmony of the chorus melody, except with patently ridiculous lyrics: "You can call me Max, or Dave, or Tommy, Ron or Fred/ But just don’t call me Bill, man, cuz I go out of my head." It’s like learning Kurt Cobain wrote a parody version of "I Hate Myself And Want to Die," and it’s both astonishing and somehow healing to hear. These aren’t exactly the most lasting contributions to Smith's recorded works, but like watching the Beatles goof off in the studio in an era when they were purported to have all hated each other, or hearing Biggie rap the "buffoons eating my pussy while I watch cartoons" line from Lil Kim's "Queen Bitch," they help rewrite the details of an important story.
There is much more to Heaven Adores You than endearing scraps, however, and none of them are more important than the version of "True Love" that appears here. The song dates from the early Jon Brion sessions of From a Basement on a Hill, before Brion allegedly confronted Smith about his escalating drug use and Smith packed off, with his then-girlfriend Valerie Deerin and all of the two-inch reels from the sessions, to producer David McConnell’s Satellite Park studio. The song, with its graceful pirouette from major to minor every few bars and Brion’s glimmering mallet percussion in the background, is one of Smith’s few true unreleased masterpieces, and although it has floated around on YouTube for years, it is gratifying to see it on an official Smith release.
Like all of Smith’s material from this period, "True Love" plays on a glassy mixture of beauty and sickness, a sound Smith was chasing out of a love of The White Album but that so many of his friends and fans heard as the sound of rock bottom. His lyrics, in the brutally frank tradition of this era of his songwriting, didn’t discourage any bleak readings: "All I need is a safe place to bleed/ Is this where it’s at?" he croons, allowing the pits and crags in his voice to show. Along with "True Friends/See You In Heaven," it is one of the few missing puzzle pieces from the darker end of Smith’s life story, and having it restored here is a kindness.
For those are really invested in Smith arcana, there are the requisite strange omissions and inclusions to gripe over: Why include an untouched version of Figure 8 album cuts "L.A." and "Everything Means Nothing to Me" when there are so many alternate versions of the same songs being circulated on bootlegs? As the rock version of "Christian Brothers" or the rough-but-still-revelatory version of "Coast to Coast" here demonstrate, Smith was a constant reviser, as alive to the mutability of his musical ideas as anyone this side of Elvis Costello. You could rework his songs over and over and over again; the melodic and emotional DNA that was in them would show through every time.
But traveling in this direction leads always to the same tiresome spot: The rueful zone of What-Ifs, the lingua franca of dead musicians. Let’s clear the air once more, once again using a young Steven Paul Smith recording on Heaven Adores You to do so: "I Love My Room." It is over five minutes long, and Smith recorded and wrote it when he was thirteen years old. It is, without question, the silliest five minutes of music that will ever have the name "Elliott Smith" affixed to it. Here are some of the lyrics: "When I was thirteen, I was in a marching band, there were so many loved ones/ They used to flock around me and tell me all my plans/ They all loved my hands." He absolutely belts it, his voice landing somewhere between John Lennon singing "Dr. Robert" and "Weird Al" Yankovic singing "My Bologna." The song has something like five different sections, several key changes, backing harmonies, the whole nine. This is Smith’s untrammeled musical gift, bounding freely and unencumbered. It is gawky and innocent and heartbreakingly pure. | 2016-02-10T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2016-02-10T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Interscope | February 10, 2016 | 7.3 | 0da848bd-34ac-46eb-9518-51843e9ada49 | Jayson Greene | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jayson-greene/ | null |
Fiddlehead’s second album doesn’t stray far from the band’s foundational qualities: gruff but approachable, intense without being aggro, emo but not emo. | Fiddlehead’s second album doesn’t stray far from the band’s foundational qualities: gruff but approachable, intense without being aggro, emo but not emo. | Fiddlehead: Between the Richness | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/fiddlehead-between-the-richness/ | Between the Richness | Here’s footage of 10,000 or so people hanging on Pat Flynn’s every word at Have Heart’s 2019 reunion show—possibly the biggest hardcore gig ever. Yet it’s probably not that difficult to imagine Flynn at his day job as a high school teacher; the skill sets are pretty similar. Hardcore bands and teachers revered decades down the line both tend to honor teenagers’ inherent distrust of authority as well as their desire for guidance. As life gets complicated in adulthood, clear-cut instruction in making sense of the world is harder to come by. In the wake of his father’s death in 2010, Flynn found himself yearning for a similar desire for clarity, and that’s where Fiddlehead came in. Originally formed as an outlet for Flynn’s grief, the Boston quintet finally released their debut LP, Springtime and Blind, in 2018, wondering if they’d outlived their purpose. Then came marriage, fatherhood, impending midlife crises, a handful of throwback hardcore projects, and now, three years later, Fiddlehead’s vital sophomore album, Between the Richness, wherein Flynn leads a communal reckoning with all of the complicated shit that takes us from our twenties to the grave.
“All the years have changed/Ten folded like a day/Old Death’s dulling sting/To new life blooming,” Flynn howls on “The Years,” grappling with the 10-year anniversary of his father’s death and the simultaneous birth of his own son. At a lean 25 minutes, Between the Richness doesn’t stray far from Fiddlehead’s foundational qualities: gruff but approachable, intense without being aggro, emo but not emo. Fiddlehead claim Archers of Loaf (not Pavement) as a primary influence, and they occasionally show allegiance to the sonic signatures of shoegaze and slowcore—the melancholic guitar interplay of “Joyboy,” the reverb elasticating Flynn’s vocals toward the end of “Loverman”—if not those styles’ timid disposition. Still, Fiddlehead’s “post-hardcore” is more lifestyle descriptor than musical tag. Think of those parents with neck tats pushing strollers. Even if Fiddlehead bookend Between the Richness with an e.e. cummings poem and write lyrics in Latin, they’re not putting on airs; they still aim to win over the old heads who saw them open for the likes of Gorilla Biscuits and Hot Water Music.
Lineage is important to Fiddlehead, though not as much as fostering an active community. The soul of Between the Richness came into being in the 200-cap rooms where Fiddlehead wrestled with their liminal status—not yet a legacy band but significantly older than most of their labelmates on Run For Cover; too punk to be centrist indie but far more polished than whoever is the Have Heart of 2021. Similar to Japandroids on Celebration Rock, Fiddlehead reconsidered their original plan to break up after one record and asked: How could LP2 speak to the people who were yelling out their debut’s lyrics? “With this album I was really trying to ensure that the live experience would be as optimal for outward expression of emotion as possible,” Flynn has said. “Eternal You” briefly recasts Have Heart’s shout-and-point anthems as streamlined power pop before eventually giving way to a spoken-word recitation about friends drifting apart. “Million Times” and “Down University” work up rousing hooks while avoiding the gaudy, winking Buzz Bin mimicry that’s overrun their scene; they’re more in the spirit of beefy post-hardcore acts like Quicksand and Civ who somehow managed to sneak onto MTV.
It’s no slight to call nostalgia a binding thread of Between the Richness—flipping through the formative staples of a boxed-up CD collection will invariably lead to revisiting the major decisions that got you where you are. It’s ironic that Between the Richness came out the same day as an album steeped in the minutiae of adolescence, since it’s often about the same exact thing. “Back to acne high school drama/Cataclysmic sweethearts,” Flynn wails on “Million Times,” a song that interrogates the teenage desires and traumas that haunt adulthood. Flynn has to know that “What’s love if not a war for peace that never ends?” will be his definitive line, equally likely to be tattooed on someone’s neck or used as their high-school yearbook quote. “Down University,” fluent in the language of aspirational education (“Hyde Park! Precious Blood! Latin School! USMA! Emmanuel! BC! Columbia! Graduate!”), slyly plays on Flynn’s dual role as guidance counselor and singer who offers solace to those who’ll never set foot in a hall of higher education.
Despite the record’s hefty concerns and classic “harder, better, faster, stronger” second-LP upgrades, Fiddlehead’s defining quality is their modesty. Springtime and Blind sounded constitutionally self-effacing, trusting a blunt, burly, no-frills style of pop-punk to deliver its emotional payload, tempering the hype that could’ve come from its devastating backstory and sterling pedigree (Flynn and drummer Shawn Costa were both in Have Heart and guitarist Alex Henery is an alumni of soft grunge kingpins Basement). Likewise, Between the Richness doesn’t go out of its way to announce its significance. Instead, Fiddlehead ensure that their fans—whether it’s the same 150 people who saw them in a skate shop, people still stuck at home imagining the experience of seeing “Million Times” live, or the sprawling crowd from Have Heart’s historic Worcester gig—will do the yelling for them.
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Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-05-26T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2021-05-26T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Run for Cover | May 26, 2021 | 7.6 | 0da87c63-28eb-4ba4-a9f4-a08359cafc60 | Ian Cohen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ian-cohen/ | |
Last year, Richard D. James returned with a new Aphex Twin record, ending a prolonged drought. Since then, he's kept busy, and three records into his return, James is sounding more energized than ever. Orphaned Deejay Selek revives his AFX moniker and provides a stark contrast to the labyrinthine twists of Syro. These songs soar with a burly kind of grace. | Last year, Richard D. James returned with a new Aphex Twin record, ending a prolonged drought. Since then, he's kept busy, and three records into his return, James is sounding more energized than ever. Orphaned Deejay Selek revives his AFX moniker and provides a stark contrast to the labyrinthine twists of Syro. These songs soar with a burly kind of grace. | Aphex Twin / AFX: Orphaned Deejay Selek (2006-2008) EP | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/20872-orphaned-deejay-selek-2006-2008-ep/ | Orphaned Deejay Selek (2006-2008) EP | By God, it's looking like Aphex Twin has gone full Energizer Bunny on us—which, given his interest in robots that bang drums, actually makes perfect sense. This time last year, Richard D. James was seven years into an extended hiatus (or nine, or 13, depending upon the alias) when Warp launched a hot-air balloon emblazoned with his logo into the skies over London. Since then, the occasionally press-shy, always unpredictable artist has cranked himself up to a fever pitch, and there's no evidence that he's headed back to his hermitage any time soon.
In the past year, we've been treated to a wealth of new, or at least new to us, music. First there was Syro, Aphex Twin's triumphant return. Then, just four months later, came Computer Controlled Acoustic Instruments pt2, an EP of more abstracted material, inspired by the intersection between robotics and acoustic instruments. Right around the same time, James launched a series of anonymous accounts on SoundCloud, where he unloaded more than 100 previously unreleased tracks from his voluminous archives.
If the title of the new release is to be believed, we're still in archival territory. (To that end, the cover art riffs on Warp's very first release, Forgemasters' "Track With No Name", from 1989.) That the record is credited to AFX and not Aphex Twin is probably significant, although, as with all things related to James, there's room for interpretation. The AFX handle has come to mean different things at different periods: In the '90s, with the Analogue Bubblebath and Hangable Autobulb series, it meant rugged, percussive workouts with a touch of acid. For 2005's Analord series, it came to stand for lyrical, all-analog jams. Orphaned Deejay Selek is closer to Analord and provides a stark contrast to the labyrinthine twists of Syro. These songs soar with a burly kind of grace.
But Orphaned Deejay Selek is no Analord 12. For one thing, many of the Analord releases sound positively lo-fi compared to the eight tracks here. The separation of the sounds in the mix, and the way they stake out a position in space, is nothing short of spellbinding. He's also not kidding about the "deejay" part of the title: These really are some of the most straightforward pieces of music that James has put his name to in years. They're far more focused on rhythm, on that ineffable quality known as the groove, than either of his other recent releases.
James dives right in at 144 BPM on "dmx acid test" and doesn't let up, tearing through five tracks at the sort of tempos that haven't often been heard in techno since the '90s. "acid test" puts twin 303s through their paces while he lays down hissing, snapping electro rhythms; that track seamlessly gives way to "oberheim blacet1b", a slightly more baroque variation on the same theme that gives free rein to his wild, microtonal tunings. "simple slamming b 2" is just what the title suggests, right down to the four-to-the-floor kick drums and rolling, 16th-note hi-hats.
Towards the end he slows down. "NEOTEKT72" riffs on deliriously detuned synthesizers over a loosely funky beat, full of lanky tambourine and cowbell patterns; the closing "r8m neotek beat" recalls the spindly minimalism of 1994's GAK EP. The slowest track here might be the most surprising: "midi pipe1c sds3time cube/klonedrm" bumps away at 100 BPM, with wheezing synth-flutes and sad, sour bongo drums like some half-melted rainforest diorama in a gone-to-seed wax museum.
But the keystone of the entire record is the one with the most understated title: "bonus EMT beats". In DJ parlance "bonus beats" used to mean two- or three-minute filler cuts, often found on the B3 of a standard 12-inch EP, in which the A-side's beat, and maybe its bassline, was given a brief, stripped-down reprise. They were DJ tools, basically, meant to be juggled with. "bonus EMT beats" is clearly a rework of "dmx acid test": it's got the same hard, dry snare thwack, the same staggered kick drum, the same ricocheting rimshots. The bassline's been muted and the reverb pushed way up. It rolls so naturally that it may take you a moment to notice what's changed: the bonus beat is in 5/4 time, whereas the original counts out in four. What's stunning is that James could take a cadence so unusual and make it feel so natural. For nearly five minutes, he wails away like a prog-rock titan on a drum throne. Usually, drum solos like this one make for an easy punchline, and you suspect that James may be teasing us here—breaking it down, building it up, toying with the reverb, refusing us so much as a note of melody, self-indulgent to the max. And on and on it goes. Three records into his return, on the most Spartan cut of the bunch, James is sounding more energized than ever. | 2015-08-14T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2015-08-14T02:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Warp | August 14, 2015 | 8.1 | 0da8f38b-1424-474d-9baf-c52fb0b04188 | Philip Sherburne | https://pitchfork.com/staff/philip-sherburne/ | null |
Odd Future's first nod toward accessibility is still another fascinating, bizarre, expectation-defying piece of work. | Odd Future's first nod toward accessibility is still another fascinating, bizarre, expectation-defying piece of work. | MellowHype: BLACKENEDWHITE | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/14850-blackenedwhite/ | BLACKENEDWHITE | As Straight Outta Compton nears its 25th birthday, it's nearly impossible for gangsta rap music to be legitimately shocking. We've heard thousands of drug-dealing tall tales, bloody murder threats, and clinically minded sex propositions, and these days that stuff just breezes past. If anything, the Young Jeezys of the world are less precise and less disquieting than the Spice 1s of old. So when L.A.'s teenage Odd Future crew snarled its way into the public consciousness earlier this year, the effect was truly jarring-- in part because it was so unfamiliar. Here are 19-year-old kids talking about sniffing coke and giggling about rape-- rec-room shit-talk that stings like a slap to the face. Crew leader Tyler, the Creator gargles kidnapping threats in a burned-out rasp way beyond his 19 years. Earl Sweatshirt, the crew's missing-in-action 16-year-old cult hero, tells you all about the chopped-up girl and cop locked up in the trunk of the car he doesn't have a learner's permit to drive. So when the OF duo MellowHype open their new full-length with a story about blowing off a final exam, it's a relief in a full-body sigh sort of way. Compared to their crewmates, these kids are downright cuddly.
Hodgy Beats, the rapping half of MellowHype, is a Wiz Khalifa stoner-rap type who raps in a high, spaced-out mutter that still makes him sound way more alive than the crew's other resident stoner, the somnolent Domo Genesis. He's not soft-- "ligaments will dissolve" is a typical threat, and he has no problems rapping over gun sounds on a track called "Gun Sounds". On "Loco", he namechecks 1960s Black Panthers with authority. But compared to a nutcase like Tyler, he's actually humane. Tyler makes two appearances on BLACKENEDWHITE. On the first, he leaves six cops dead. On the second, he offers up this: "Fingers in the middle of bitches' bodacious buttcracks/ Enough fuckin' atheist rappers to get a nun slapped." This is Tyler on his best behavior, but these are still the two gnarliest moments on the full-length. They're also the two most immediately arresting. With his laid-back approach, Hodgy can be a weird fit for Odd Future-- a technically sound rapper who can adapt to a lot of different styles but who never sounds like a paradigm-shifter. He's a strong supporting player but not much of a lead. So it's a good thing Left Brain, the other half of the group, is around.
Left Brain, who doesn't rap, is every bit the lo-fi beat experimentalist that Tyler is. The two-minute album opener "Primo" has great little keyboard plinks interrupting smeary synth wooze before everything slows down into a glitched-out, screwed-up crawl. That's a whole lot of movement for a two-minute introductory track, but it's typical of the whole record. Left Brain's tracks always mesmerize, but they never sit still. "Gun Sounds", "Dead Deputy", and "Fuck the Police" all work as muffled, homemade versions of the apocalyptic crunk bangers that Lex Luger makes for Waka Flocka Flame. "Brain" and "Chordaroy" are damaged, decayed takes on the lush, string-drenched yacht rap that the Neptunes have been making for a few years. "Loaded" is frankly jaw-dropping, an evil blaring creep that sounds like what might happen if an ominous synth-drone type like Oneohtrix Point Never tried making rap beats. (Note to Oneohtrix Point Never: Try making rap beats.)
Parts of BLACKENEDWHITE point toward what might happen when the Odd Future kids leave their terrifying self-created universe and engage with the world at large-- something that's almost inevitable now that major labels are knocking down their doors. "Hell" has a beat that's made partially out of someone muttering "what the hell" on a loop, but it also has an honest-to-god R&B chorus, the first I've heard from these guys. After the crew has killed god knows how many women on tracks, bonus track "Based" features C. Renee, the first female rapper I've heard on an Odd Future song. (The R&B chorus doesn't really work; the C. Renee verse absolutely does.)
But even as it nods toward accessibility, BLACKENEDWHITE works as yet another fascinating, bizarre, expectation-defying piece of work from a group of young artists who don't make anything else. And unlike the others, this one features zero rape threats. For neophytes, Tyler's Bastard is still the place to start; he's the group's figurehead and most talented member, and you really have to confront how fucked up these kids are if you have any interest in engaging them. But BLACKENEDWHITE pushes them closer to humanity without sacrificing the weirdness that's so central to their appeal. They're not out of surprises yet, and they probably won't be for a long time. | 2010-11-12T01:00:01.000-05:00 | 2010-11-12T01:00:01.000-05:00 | Rap | self-released | November 12, 2010 | 8.1 | 0dad81af-9374-42b6-9822-1dc1da1360d1 | Tom Breihan | https://pitchfork.com/staff/tom-breihan/ | null |
Not a follow-up (or even a cousin) to their groundbreaking 1981 record My Life in the Bush of Ghosts, this surprising and rewarding pop record has been described by its creators as "electronic gospel." | Not a follow-up (or even a cousin) to their groundbreaking 1981 record My Life in the Bush of Ghosts, this surprising and rewarding pop record has been described by its creators as "electronic gospel." | David Byrne / Brian Eno: Everything That Happens Will Happen Today | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/12151-everything-that-happens-will-happen-today/ | Everything That Happens Will Happen Today | There's nothing like a nice surprise from musicians you love. In 1981, Talking Heads frontman David Byrne and producer Brian Eno united for one of the most fruitful partnerships of the post-punk era to release My Life in the Bush of Ghosts, a groundbreaking record that made prominent use of sampled soundbytes and disembodied voices in place of singing. The album, recorded between sessions for the Talking Heads' essential Remain in Light LP, was released with surprisingly little fanfare, yet pioneered and popularized methods that have since become part of our musical lexicon.
Last April, Byrne revealed that the partnership would be revisited for the first time in 27 years, for another full album. But while Everything That Happens Will Happen Today reunites this iconic duo, the record shares almost nothing in common with its predecessor-- down to the process. Where My Life in the Bush of Ghosts resulted from hours of close collaboration, the self-released Everything That Happens occured when Eno asked Byrne to add lyrics and vocals to a number of tracks the producer had created independently. The two began passing tapes back and forth, and then onto a series of session players and studios until the record was complete. Described by the duo as "electronic gospel," the album is a beautifully melodic, unpretentious offering-- and nothing whatsoever like its predecessor.
One of the first sounds here is an acoustic guitar-- an early sign that this is a very different sort of album from those these two have made together in the past. The disc opens with one of its strongest songs, the expansive "Home", fitting the duo's description. Byrne sings long, drifting phrases to lyrics that temper domestic nostalgia with a bit of honesty. His outlook here is generally positive-- or maybe more accurately, tinged with hope or determination: "Chain me down but I am still free," he sings on the catchy chorus to the fluid "Life Is Long", as Eno's arrangement incorporates understated brass and a wall of keyboards that burst with melody.
Most of these tracks are strikingly immediate, considering the relaxed creative process that brought them to fruition. "Strange Overtones" has a great shuffling beat with a hooky bassline and a giant chorus-- Byrne sings directly about the process of songwriting, mulling what a chorus should do even as he sings it. It's the kind of effortless pop song Talking Heads might be playing today if they'd stayed together. The album does have a few less satisfying moments, though, which tend to come when the easy flow of the music is disrupted. The buzzing synth hook and plodding beat of "Wanted for Life", for instance, feels somewhat out of place amid the billowing textures that surround them, and the echoey, spoken passages of "I Feel My Stuff" are plain awkward.
Still, it's a welcome release from this duo-- the kind of assortment that makes one hope they don't stop here. Byrne will be touring this material without Eno, but hopefully, as Eno accumulates more tracks in the future, he'll remember the off-handed brilliance of this album's best moments and pick up the phone. Whether we're talking about this record in 30 years the same way we talk about My Life in the Bush of Ghosts today is of little consequence-- it's an enjoyable listen in the here and now, which is all an album has to be, even when created by giants. | 2008-09-02T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2008-09-02T02:00:01.000-04:00 | Rock / Electronic | self-released | September 2, 2008 | 7.6 | 0daf4386-3d9d-4376-84b0-55bdf34c4fab | Joe Tangari | https://pitchfork.com/staff/joe-tangari/ | null |
Does Kristin Hersh have the most terrifying voice in rock? Many singers embrace higher drama or shred\n\ their vocal ... | Does Kristin Hersh have the most terrifying voice in rock? Many singers embrace higher drama or shred\n\ their vocal ... | Throwing Muses: Throwing Muses | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/8046-throwing-muses/ | Throwing Muses | Does Kristin Hersh have the most terrifying voice in rock? Many singers embrace higher drama or shred their vocal cords with icier shrieks, but there's an eerie steadiness in Hersh's voice-- an enthrallment that goes deeper than the mere sound of her singing, part crow, part Wicked Witch of the West and part vengeful alternative rock icon. Of all the artists who've invoked the cliché of losing control to their inspiration, Hersh is one of the few to make it convincing; she delivers her most harrowing lyrics with a delicate serenity, and her simplest with a frightening, reeling delirium.
Her voice and surreal images were the key to the success of Throwing Muses, before the group disbanded. Hersh didn't want to break up the Muses, the band she's led since high school: It ended in the mid-90s for financial, not creative reasons. And that's the only way to explain how, when some funding came through, they could reform and cut a new album that sounds like they'd never been apart. Often, critics give a veteran band extra credit when they reunite-- props that were perhaps due long ago and never offered, or just bonus points for not having dropped dead in their autumn years. I can't think of many albums that need fewer crutches than this one. Without rivaling University or The Real Ramona, it's different from, yet far rawer than, anything since their debut.
Fans will suck up the nostalgia as Hersh brings back not just her last rhythm section (Bernard Georges on bass and mainstay David Narcizo on drums), but also founding Muse Tanya Donelly, who adds seraphic harmony vocals. After several years of sporadic collaborations they jumped into the project without even rehearsing: They cut the album in just three weekends with minimal overdubs, giving it a clean and "live" sound that sticks solidly to an unembellished power trio. There are no acoustic tracks, no slow or atmospheric ballads (like University's "Crabtown")-- nothing but torrential, skidding, hard rock, right from the almost anthemic first track, "Mercury", which cuts through different ways of opening the throttle before it wrenches into the chorus.
With such a consistent sound the songs bleed into each other, but Hersh's writing is still intriguingly unpredictable. Some of the songs are catchy almost after the fact-- like the perfect riff and matter-of-fact weirdness of her delivery on "Portia", or the erupting chorus on "Pretty or Not". Others sound like they were Frankensteined together from the verse, chorus and bridge of completely different songs and smoothed out by the guitars: You've got the mood change from dark to ecstatic on "Half Blast"-- if Donelly had written any songs here, this would be the one-- or the way "Solar Dip" jerks between time signatures. And that's not to ignore the grinding dirges like "Speed and Sleep" that just pound themselves into a dark hole.
Throwing Muses skip the production polish that brightened up albums like University, but they've found the perfect sweetener in Donelly's backing vocals. As limited as her contribution may be-- she sticks to backup and only sings on half the songs-- her lines are melodically gorgeous, high and pure against Hersh's lower, somewhat raspy vocals. But her presence alone isn't what makes this so joyous. Throwing Muses are the counterpart-- or maybe the antidote-- to the driven, enraptured solitude of her solo material; they deliver a release and an excitement that's been missing from her work for years. Their reunion is heavy, driven stuff-- as inherently inexplicable as the best, darkest Muses work-- but it's also ecstatic. This band has seized an opportunity that may never strike for them again, and they're celebrating it as though there were no tomorrow. | 2003-03-06T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2003-03-06T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | 4AD | March 6, 2003 | 8.2 | 0dba2d26-b569-4aba-b8af-e11c518c6ab2 | Chris Dahlen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/chris-dahlen/ | null |
Jon Hopkins has hovered around the edges of dance and indie rock for several years, playing with Brian Eno, Coldplay, and King Creosote—and even seeming to take a backseat on his own records. But Immunity, the producer’s breakthrough fourth album, bounds and writhes with its own life force. | Jon Hopkins has hovered around the edges of dance and indie rock for several years, playing with Brian Eno, Coldplay, and King Creosote—and even seeming to take a backseat on his own records. But Immunity, the producer’s breakthrough fourth album, bounds and writhes with its own life force. | Jon Hopkins: Immunity | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/18090-jon-hopkins-immunity/ | Immunity | Jon Hopkins is a respected keyboardist and sonic technician who instills ambient music and acidic techno with a classical sense of composition, but he tends to work around the edges of things: He got started backing Imogen Heap. He’s played keyboards for Brian Eno, a clear influence, on albums such as Small Craft on a Milk Sea. Tagging along with Eno, he wound up co-producing and performing on Coldplay’s fourth album. He also created subtle electro-acoustic atmospheres for the Scottish singer-songwriter King Creosote on the exquisite Diamond Mine EP, and crafted an acclaimed string-based score for the British sci-fi film Monsters. It’s not a shabby cv, but it's not quite a name-making one, either.
This habit of putting himself on the periphery seeped into his own albums—until now. Insides from 2009 was impressive but felt faintly impersonal, streaming by like dazzling but disconnected vignettes in a film. But Hopkins’ breakthrough fourth album, Immunity, bounds and writhes with its own life force. It’s looser and oilier, more limber and dangerous. The aggressive dance tracks darkly obliterate everything else, while the wet and sunny piano-ambient ones wash out into the sounds of wind, waves, and gulls. The latter is impeccably done on “Sun Harmonics,” where the boundary between electronics and coastal recordings dissolves.
Lots of electronic music creates its own hermetic world, but on Immunity, Hopkins finds ingenious ways to let the world in. He created the album’s warm, alive feel by shunning digital perfection in favor of the analog synthesis of original sounds, both electronic and physical. The ambient prelude of the haunting, scrambled glitch-house opener “We Disappear”—a key unlocks the door of Hopkins’ London studio and his footsteps lead in—is more than idle window dressing: He is ushering us into the tactile space that suffuses the record. He drums on desks, plays salt shakers, slows down serendipitous recordings of nearby fireworks, boosts the kick-drummed rattle of a window. On “Form by Firelight,” which sounds like Kanye West’s “Runaway” remixed by Wolfgang Voigt, Hopkins processes beats and melodies right out of the piano, tapping the pedals and striking the strings. Spacious, with carefully shaped resonance, its delay-flickered counterpoint shows off Hopkins’ classical background.
This emphasis on our admission to a physical space naturally makes us feel like we have privileged access to Hopkins’ private emotional space as well. Immunity is said to be inspired by the arc of a night out, and whether or not that matters to the listener, it gives the album a holistic pace and flow, from heroically hurtling along on molten bass synthesizers to hovering gorgeously on gathering ambient breezes. Around the monstrous dancefloor anthems “Open Eye Signal” and “Collider”—the first oozing forward in anticipation, the second climactically crashing down at sharp threshing angles—there is the lyrical ambient landscape of “Abandon Window” and the cunning merger of both styles in “Breathe This Air.” The title track, with a trickle of legato piano turning a rickety rhythm, brings back King Creosote to add discreet vocal colors for a dreamlike conclusion. It all adds up to a remarkably visceral, sensual, confident electronic record that stays absorbing from beginning to end, and should finally catapult Hopkins to stardom in his own story. | 2013-06-06T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2013-06-06T02:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Domino | June 6, 2013 | 8.5 | 0dbbfdf8-cc5d-4997-b303-f179dde810a3 | Brian Howe | https://pitchfork.com/staff/brian-howe/ | |
Brooklyn producer Harry Fraud handles all of the production on Smoke DZA's latest project. Fraud's diamantine, jazzy cuts push Smoke DZA to give one of his best performances yet. | Brooklyn producer Harry Fraud handles all of the production on Smoke DZA's latest project. Fraud's diamantine, jazzy cuts push Smoke DZA to give one of his best performances yet. | Smoke DZA: He Has Risen | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21643-he-has-risen/ | He Has Risen | Brooklyn native Harry Fraud doesn’t have the pop radio presence of the bigger Southern producers, but he’s become a recognized force in the Gothamist lane, working with New York rappers like French Montana, Action Bronson and a favored collaborator, the Harlem native Smoke DZA. Fraud is a hip-hop classicist, spinning sample-based beats from jazz, soul and funk cuts, often over mellow, indica-drenched percussion. He handles all the production on the new DZA album, He Has Risen, assembling a deck of diamantine, jazzy cuts, the sort of beats that often get described as "dusty" but that glint and often dazzle when played.
Smoke DZA, a confident-if-scattershot rapper, has a history of being overtaken by his production. He announces on the opening track here that he’s done with being modest, and on the first couple of listens, it’s difficult to believe him. Everything about his approach, from the low-key mobster shoutouts on “Badabing’s Theme” to the consistent recitation of his smoker’s credentials, signals low stakes. The Harlem rapper’s go-to boast is calling himself Kush God, about the least ambitious superlative imaginable.
DZA’s low-stress attitude functions as a smokescreen, concealing the high quality of He Has Risen, which slowly sneaks up on you. There’s chaff here, though it’s buoyed by the cigar-lounge cool of Fraud’s beats. But on several songs, the Harlemite rises to a level we’ve not seen from him in previous runs, where he’s been content to stay in the lane of the alternately tough-talking and wisecracking stoner. On “The Plot,” he sheds that veneer for real poeticism, evoking a world of “card swipers" and “con artists” where criminality saturates the atmosphere. “Morningside Sunset” is driven by observation-laden bars layered over insolent sax lines, as DZA adds singular details (buying someone a prosthetic leg) to the familiar painting of a kingpin’s life. The closest DZA has ever come to this level of achievement was his 2014 album Dream.Zone.Achieve. But that project featured 21 tracks and almost as many producers. By contrast, He Has Risen is focused, digestible, and perfectly paced.
Make no mistake though; much of this stuff would fall flat without Fraud’s atmospherics. Squeaky brass lines on “Heard Dat” leave the track ringing in your head, while “It’s Real,” a collaboration with The Alchemist, fills negative space with a droning chorus of voices. DZA, like many latter-day New York rappers, is a mild eccentric steeped in too many traditions. Beats like these help him forget what he knows, stretching himself to stranger observations, to broader song concepts. The strange contours of Fraud’s beats on He Has Risen move him off the comfortable grid and onto new terrain. | 2016-03-08T01:00:02.000-05:00 | 2016-03-08T01:00:02.000-05:00 | Rap | Srfschl | March 8, 2016 | 6.9 | 0dbe572b-6f84-41b3-b7f9-0f76b7424565 | Jonah Bromwich | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jonah-bromwich/ | null |
The Calgary-based band Women came to an end with the tragic death of guitarist Christopher Reimer; Matt Flegel and Mike Wallace from the band have picked up the pieces with their new project, Viet Cong. "Cassette", originally a tour-only release, is the group's scrappy introduction to the world. | The Calgary-based band Women came to an end with the tragic death of guitarist Christopher Reimer; Matt Flegel and Mike Wallace from the band have picked up the pieces with their new project, Viet Cong. "Cassette", originally a tour-only release, is the group's scrappy introduction to the world. | Viet Cong: "Cassette" EP | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/19495-viet-cong-cassette-ep/ | "Cassette" EP | The Calgary-based band Women had the enviable ability of being able to shake up a bunch of familiar ingredients and come out the other side sounding like little else. Both their albums, Women and Public Strain, had the air of works made in isolation, with the band members cut adrift from contemporary movements and prevailing stylistic forces. Women ended in acrimony and tragedy, but two of their number, Matt Flegel and Mike Wallace, have picked up the pieces in Viet Cong, where they work alongside Scott Munro (from Women producer Chad VanGaalen's band) and guitarist Daniel Christiansen. "Cassette" is their scrappy introduction to the world; it’s the sound of parts congealing but not yet feeding off one another, as you might expect from something originally put out as a tour-only release. Now it's been buffed up and cleaned out, and with Mexican Summer behind it and Women’s reputation on their backs, it’s no longer the low-key intro it may have been conceived as during the band’s formation.
There’s something welcoming and likeable about "Cassette", from the awkward lurches in style to the desire to stick something out that’s less than fully formed. Women certainly didn’t operate that way, instead creating a world full of chilly remove. Viet Cong appear to be systematically lessening that bite and opening themselves up to their audience, although traces of their former selves remain. It's a process of steadily rinsing out the old to get to somewhere new. On “Bunker Buster” (not included on this release), the nascent Viet Cong impaled themselves on jagged guitar lines, lost monotone vocals, and lines where they “slowly fall through the snow.” So far, so familiar, but there have been changes since then, some of which hint at a future for this band that could outstrip anything that came before.
Viet Cong's songs are complex puzzles. It’s like they hear the direction a song is going in and then purposefully take a step in a different direction, and from that place they try to figure out the least obvious way to get back to where they started. The thrill of listening to them is in hearing how they deliberately hurl obstacles in front of themselves while trying to maintain a sense of forward momentum. “Throw It Away”, one of their strongest songs, begins as a ringer for the Damned’s “New Rose” before diverting into knotty math-rock guitar lines and Wendy Carlos-inspired synth drones. On “Throw It Away” and the similarly clattering “Oxygen Feed”, they’re stern, frantic, driven by a need to get right up in people's faces. Women’s music was sometimes so out of reach it felt like an intrusion to be in the same room as them; in contrast, Viet Cong thrive on audience-performer conflict.
The cover of Bauhaus’ “Dark Entries”, which sounds like a live recording, is a peak for the nihilistic streak that cuts deep into this band. It’s their most forthright performance, strung somewhere between garage rock and straight punk but with a weirdo edge simmering over the top, recalling the mixture of studied mannerisms and unhinged damage that Clinic could produce at their peak circa Internal Wrangler. When Viet Cong deviate from the bloody path there are mixed results. In placid mode they get back to Women’s altered-states take on the Beach Boys, which was never that band’s strongest look (“Static Wall”); and the attempt at digging up cold wave synth tones and substituting fury for furrowed brow crooning is best forgotten (“Structureless Design”). It’s in those moments that the original intent behind this EP comes bruising back into view—it’s the sound of a group of people finding their way, testing out ideas, sketching out the little details but not coloring in the bigger picture just yet.
What "Cassette" ultimately does is throw down a set of directions Viet Cong could head in and allow us to sit back and wonder which will be the strongest thread. As a glimpse of what a band could be it’s fascinating, especially as the songs leave the impression of a group with strong personalities in the mix, all determined to leave a stamp on the music they make. Flegel and Munro have talked about their day jobs, in flooring and cupcake delivery, respectively. At their best, the band reads as a group of people trying to make beautiful and extraordinary art rise from mundane circumstances. On "Cassette" they’re halfway there, feeling out designs, seeing what sticks, nixing what doesn’t. This is a picture of the process of making music, with all its flaws and triumphs intact. | 2014-07-07T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2014-07-07T02:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Mexican Summer | July 7, 2014 | 7.8 | 0dc63393-e6e8-4f05-860d-cb8c7c398ac3 | Nick Neyland | https://pitchfork.com/staff/nick-neyland/ | null |
After a six-year absence and the death of Ol' Dirty Bastard, Wu-Tang return with a psych-tinged record that's divisive-- even within their own camp. | After a six-year absence and the death of Ol' Dirty Bastard, Wu-Tang return with a psych-tinged record that's divisive-- even within their own camp. | Wu-Tang Clan: 8 Diagrams | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/10975-8-diagrams/ | 8 Diagrams | The general consensus seems to be that RZA has lost his fucking mind. Rap critics, bloggers, and comment-box choirs haven't taken to his strange new mutation-- and that would be a problem even without fellow Clan members Raekwon and Ghostface lashing out at him. Rae complained in an interview with Miss Info that the production on 8 Diagrams "is not the vibe I want," saying RZA was turning into some sort of "hip-hop hippie." Ghost has been down on RZA, too, quoted in The Village Voice as saying the producer's "fumbling the ball...his music wasn't sounding like how it was when we first came in."
And then there's the small matter of Ghostface's decision to release his latest solo album, The Big Doe Rehab, on the same day as 8 Diagrams. The Wu agreed to push their album back a week, but that hasn't stopped fans and critics from pitting the two records against each other in a polarizing boom-bap vs. psychedelia showdown. It gives you a clearer idea of why Wu-Tang hasn't released a record in six years: When a couple of MCs have worked together under the same creative catalyst this long, it's hard to get them all to move in the same new direction at the same pace-- let alone nine of them.
Or eight. The death of Ol' Dirty Bastard signified the end of the classic Wu-Tang Clan lineup, even without the internal strife that almost assuredly guarantees we won't be seeing a follow-up to 8 Diagrams anytime soon. Russell Jones' passing isn't the only reason so much of this record sounds the way it does, but it had to have started some kind of domino effect that compounded all of RZA's brooding, spaced-out, and detached tendencies. Nothing here will go down well in the clubs or on the radio. Even the bangers sound melancholy or apprehensive, evoking darting eyes more than bobbing heads. After waiting so long, it's understandable that fans wouldn't want a record like this, where the bleak moments outweigh the triumphant ones.
Of course, in due time-- maybe it'll take years-- 8 Diagrams will sink in as a compelling, well-regarded album. And if this really is the end, it'll be the ideal last chapter and a smart bookend to Enter the Wu-Tang (36 Chambers). The production moves that stick out like nails on a chalkboard to rap traditionalists-- the acid-funk guitars, the melodic r&b hooks, the live instrumentation-- aren't nearly as off the hinges as some of rap's weirder recent detours (this isn't the Wu's The Love Below). Instead, they push the boundaries of what RZA's traditionally done without breaking too far out of character.
"Take It Back" finds RZA revisiting previous work, snatching the same hunk of Bob James' "Nautilus" he once turned into Ghostface's "Daytona 500", but reduces it to a measured, weaving series of sharp jabs. "Rushing Elephants" and "Wolves" refine his cleaned up soundtrack-influenced style (circa The W), drawing from Morricone-esque touches (heist-film suspense horns, eerie Western whistles, ghostly choirs) and putting some workmanlike but effective breaks beneath to keep the pulse heavy. And the way he assembles tracks still impresses, whether piling on thin sample layers (a guitar from Nancy Sinatra's "Bang Bang"; the drum machine taps from There's a Riot Goin' On) in "Windmill" until they sound fully fleshed-out, or pulling out surprise changes mid-way through a track: "Campfire" cuts under the last couple of lines in Ghostface's verse for a brief dub-echo interlude, and the otherwise understated symphonic soul of "Gun Will Go" shifts during Masta Killa's verse to something that sounds like the horn riff to Baby Huey's "Listen to Me" played through an old-timey Victrola at 3/4 speed.
The more experimental tracks show how comfortable RZA's become with bucking conventional wisdom. Prototypical message statement "Unpredictable" piles switchblade strings onto muffled wah-wahs and screaming guitars that sound like Maggot Brain-era Funkadelic scoring a blaxploitation Psycho. (The hook: "Wu-Tang is unpredictable." No shit!) "Stick Me for My Riches" has some crossover appeal-- skittering digital hi-hats, bombastic horns, r&b vocals-- but give RZA credit for the risky move of bypassing radio-friendly Akon/T-Pain/Ne-Yo-level candidates in favor of a 1970s vet, the Manhattans' Gerald Alston. Even 8 Diagrams' most contentious track, the Beatles-interpolating "The Heart Gently Weeps", has precedent, since the Jimmy Ponder soul-jazz cover that acts as its foundation was rhymed over by Ghostface on the circa-Pretty Toney white-label track "My Guitar". (Granted, it didn't have John Frusciante noodling over it or Erykah Badu sounding like a 12-year-old on the chorus.) The only time this mad-scientist auteurism comes close to backfiring is the RZA solo showcase "Sunlight": Even with the intrusive, beat-derailing martial arts fight scene coda and one of Bobby Digital's more impenetrable metaphors ("I've been highly misunderstood by those who've met us/ They had ears of corn and heads of lettuce"), it's a thoughtful meditation that aims to justify Islam as a source of theological insight at a time when America is least receptive to it.
So how do the other MCs ride beats like this? Ghostface makes himself scarce in the record's first half, and disappears completely in the second. He pulls off a few good verses, though, spitting Supreme Clientele-level rapidfire free-association ("This is real talk, shank lullabyes/ Ben Franks, we like Jet Blue, we stay hella high") on "Take It Back", and narrating a chaotic grocery store ambush/gunfight/struggle scenario on "The Heart Gently Weeps". Meanwhile, his partner in disaffection Raekwon shows up on half the cuts, and despite his accusations, there aren't any moments where RZA's production undercuts his style; in fact, pretty much every line he's got-- from the uptempo swagger anthems like "Rushing Elephants" and "Take It Back" to the slowly-paced murder story in "The Heart Gently Weeps"-- is hot to the point where fans could start hoping Cuban Linx II measures up.
Method Man opens the album with a sorta-enh verse on "Campfire" (dude doesn't sound quite right making "SexyBack" references) and then spends the rest of 8 Diagrams recapturing the fire he had on Tical, reasserting himself as the Wu's top shit-talker and sounding cockier and more confident than he has in years. GZA doesn't really kick in much for the record's first half, aside from his sharp and briefly ironic verse ("We criticize producers 'til they joints are right") on "Rushing Elephants", but he's all over the last five tracks, popping up briefly to spit at least four lines' worth of jewels and, more frequently, a full verse that's front-to-back intricate like his chess metaphors on "Weak Spot". Inspectah Deck returns to his usual role as the out-of-nowhere scene-stealer (yet another reason "Take It Back" will be a future classic: "Son, I've seen Hell, fell into the palms of Satan arms/ Don that I am, made 'im bow in the face of God"). Even U-God and Masta Killa, frequently overlooked as lyricists, sound inspired (check "Wolves" as Exhibit A).
Still, there's not much real unity on this album-- which makes the album-closing ODB tribute "Life Changes" that much more affecting. While Ghostface is inexplicably missing, the other seven surviving members each get the chance to give their own brief eulogy for Russell Jones: Meth pours out some vodka before finishing off the bottle himself, Raekwon waxes reflective, Deck blames himself for not stepping in to help Jones with his troubles, GZA, Masta Killa, and U-God describe their grief, and RZA refers back to his verse on "Tearz" ("it's always the good ones that have to die") before reminiscing over ODB's Grammy-crashing and fights with the law. Given how many times this album was pushed back, it wouldn't be out of the question to suspect some quality control issues, but RZA himself said in The Wu-Tang Manual that he tended to gear the overall style of an album based on what time of year it dropped, and 8 Diagrams couldn't have debuted at any time other than winter-- perpetually overcast, dark before the afternoon ends, and freezing your eye water. | 2007-12-11T01:00:01.000-05:00 | 2007-12-11T01:00:01.000-05:00 | Rap | SRC / Universal Motown | December 11, 2007 | 8 | 0dc6fd2c-46f1-4e0c-9d6b-9c324e9693c0 | Nate Patrin | https://pitchfork.com/staff/nate-patrin/ | null |
null | A confession: I have totally fallen for this Gram Parsons mythology. Indoctrinated by years of biased textbooks, hippies' hyperbolic eulogies, and *Entertainment Weekly* features (a Johnny Knoxville/Christina Applegate biopic currently entitled *Grand Theft Parsons* is due next year), I have venerated Parsons to the point where, back in '91, my Parsons figurine necklace saved my life when I should have been shot in the neck. I know he was a narcissistic, condescending, uncontrollable malcontent, probably undeserving of most of my praise. I don't care. Every martyr has his cross. Jesus' was made of wood; Parsons' was made of morphine, booze, | The Byrds: Sweetheart of the Rodeo [Legacy Edition] | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/1059-sweetheart-of-the-rodeo-legacy-edition/ | Sweetheart of the Rodeo [Legacy Edition] | A confession: I have totally fallen for this Gram Parsons mythology. Indoctrinated by years of biased textbooks, hippies' hyperbolic eulogies, and Entertainment Weekly features (a Johnny Knoxville/Christina Applegate biopic currently entitled Grand Theft Parsons is due next year), I have venerated Parsons to the point where, back in '91, my Parsons figurine necklace saved my life when I should have been shot in the neck. I know he was a narcissistic, condescending, uncontrollable malcontent, probably undeserving of most of my praise. I don't care. Every martyr has his cross. Jesus' was made of wood; Parsons' was made of morphine, booze, and Cosmic Morphoid Crazydust (or some such opiate).
A Harvard drop-out, Parsons met Byrds bassist Chris Hillman at an unromantic Hollywood bank, coerced him into joining the Crosby-less band in Nashville, and, amidst quiet feuding with Roger McGuinn, made what is deniably one of the Top 20 country records of all time. Today, no noteworthy reviewer is naïve enough to claim Sweetheart of the Rodeo was the first country-rock album. Instead they'll tell you it was Parsons' International Submarine Band's 1968 album Safe at Home, and maybe that they even have the receipts to prove it. But, while Parsons was more of a heroin addict than a pedagogue, if he's taught me anything, it's that there was no "first" country-rock record. Country has always rocked. When Hank Williams sang, "I'll never get out of this world alive," he paved the way for Sid Vicious. If anything, Sweetheart is vastly less rocking than Merle Haggard's late-60s albums-- Parsons was simply the first to disseminate the rock to North Hollywood and Keith Richards' mansion.
The actual album is a blindingly rusty gait through parched weariness and dusted reverie. It's not the natural sound of Death Valley or Utah, but rather, a false portrait by people who wished it was, which makes it even more melancholy and charismatic. Between the shuffling and galloping are the astonishingly doomed harmonies, McGuinn and Parson's hypnotic and enthusiastic vocals, and countless miles of Lloyd Green's pedal steel. The songs, mostly covers, are equally saturated in sincerity and dedication. McGuinn had originally conceived the album as a panorama of American genres from the turn of the century through the synthesizer era until Parsons and Hillman convinced him to focus solely on country. Still, the diversity is there: a plucking Woody Guthrie, a craggy, grisly Haggard, post-motorcycle Dylan, Stax/Volt genius William Bell. But The Byrds have so totally captured a particular sound that the transitions are seamless. The righteousness of "The Christian Life" is perfectly at home on an album with a song about murdering your wife.
The crucial aspects of this particular release, however, are the extras-- especially since an expanded edition already came out in 1997 highlighting some unreleased master tapes. This new double-disc version is about double the price, and somehow managed to miss a few tracks from the '97 version. It also claims everything's been remastered without sounding at all distinguishable from the last edition. To be fair, the second disc offers six International Submarine Band songs (three of which have never been available on CD), but even these are valuable mainly for historians and best heard in the context of the entire Safe at Home album. Suffice to say, it's an underdeveloped band that can occasionally stun you into submission (the steaming "Luxury Liner", or the waltzing tribute to monogamy and masculinity, "Strong Boy") and other times sound like a disorderly, if endearing, garage-rock band with way too much emphasis on tambourine.
Due to contractual obligations, Lee Hazlewood, founder of the LHI label, took all but three Parsons tracks off the original album-- although, by all accounts, he was the auteur of the entire recording. Parsons has come back here with a vengeance: For starters, 19 of the 28 supplementary tracks feature Parsons on lead vocal. Whether you think this package is worthwhile is entirely dependent on whether you think Parsons deserves this much credit. On the album itself, McGuinn's belabored, satirical vocal on "The Christian Life" is adequate, even beautiful, performed like a pop star who sings odes to woe while showering in hundred-dollar bills. Conversely, Parsons sounds like he's had a bloody nose for a week on the bonus track presented here, giving the song a more sincere read than McGuinn's obvious pisstake. He's also drunk and has the stuttered, cracking delivery of someone who was self-schooled in a sand dune (which is strange considering he was a spoilt egoist). Of course, this begs the question of who exactly needs four relatively-similar sounding versions of "The Christian Life" or "One Hundred Years from Now". Well, I do. I've been listening to those songs on repeat for years now. Finally, I can mix things up a bit.
While there are significant, if not epiphanic, variations in the second disc's working demos and rehearsals, the causal Parsons fan will certainly be satiated by the '97 single disc. If you're a Gram man, on the other hand, listening to the gradual development of the plaintiveness on "One Hundred Years from Now" or the original sluggishness on "Life in Prison" is equivalent to bowing at Parsons' altar. Only die-hards will find the second disc worthwhile. But then, everyone should be a die-hard. | 2003-10-15T01:00:01.000-04:00 | 2003-10-15T01:00:01.000-04:00 | Rock | Columbia | October 15, 2003 | 9.7 | 0dc9e6a0-b677-4449-919e-17ba027e9a47 | Alexander Lloyd Lindhart | https://pitchfork.com/staff/alexander-lloyd lindhart/ | null |
Sex was the thematic preoccupation of producer Patrick Cowley, reflecting the strong connection between disco and gay bathhouses in late-70s San Francisco. Fittingly, the first concrete attempt to canonise Cowley as an electronic music auteur is a compilation of his soundtrack work for gay pornographic films. | Sex was the thematic preoccupation of producer Patrick Cowley, reflecting the strong connection between disco and gay bathhouses in late-70s San Francisco. Fittingly, the first concrete attempt to canonise Cowley as an electronic music auteur is a compilation of his soundtrack work for gay pornographic films. | Patrick Cowley: School Daze | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/18773-patrick-cowley-school-daze/ | School Daze | Few musical legacies are as haunted by the spectre of sex—its pleasures and its consequences—as that of disco producer Patrick Cowley. It begins with the sound itself: the shimmering, orgasmic post-Moroder synth patterns of Cowley’s early 80s dancefloor anthems like “X-Factor” and “Get A Little”, and of course the tantric splendour of his 1982 remix of Donna Summer’s “I Feel Love”. Sex also is the music’s thematic preoccupation, to the point of fixation, reflecting the deep interpenetration of disco and gay bathhouses in late 1970s San Francisco, Cowley’s transplanted home: “Menergy” celebrates “the boys in the bedroom/ lovin’ it up/ shootin’ off energy.” In 1982, Cowley was one of the first public figures to pass away from complications associated with AIDS (before it was even known by that name), a tragic denouement partly captured in the disoriented and shadowed electro-disco of his final album, Mind Warp. It’s fitting, then, that the first concrete attempt to canonise Cowley as an electronic music auteur and innovator comes in the form of a compilation of soundtrack work for gay pornographic films. School Daze collects, for the first time on CD, instrumental work dating from 1973 to 1981, given by Cowley to gay porn production company Fox Studio, the majority finding their way into the films School Daze and Muscle Up.
The standard line on Cowley is that he is a post-Moroder producer, bridging the gap between 1970s euro-disco and 1980s Hi-NRG. It’s a neat story, but there have always been loose ends that it cannot make sense of, like Cowley’s astonishing production work for Sylvester’s 1979 track “I Need Somebody To Love Tonight”, a visionary collision of burbling synthesisers and lilting dub (available footage of the film School Daze features a mind-altering, woozy instrumental remix not included here). Further complications were offered by the reissue of Cowley’s late 1970s work with Jorge Socarros as Catholic, all jerky synthetic new wave whose fusion of Roxy Music and Kraftwerk anticipates the early work of Simple Minds. School Daze completes the picture by tying together all these threads and taking them somewhere else again, suggesting that Moroder was not the origin for Cowley, but the streamlined destination. The “1973-1981” timeframe is as bewildering as was the “85-92” in the title of Aphex Twin’s first Selected Ambient Works: even if this music all had originated from the early 80s, it would for the most part sound amazingly ahead of its time.
There’s a handful of tracks in modes you might expect—“Zygote” is adrenalized cosmic disco, while the title track offers corpulent funk-rock—but School Daze mostly consists of expansive, meditative soundscapes whose ambiguous titles (“Nightcrawler”, “Out of Body”, “Tides of Man”) capture their simultaneous evocation of the intimate and the intergalactic, the immediacy of bodily sensation and the depths of deep space. A few deserve special mention. The 16-minute “Seven Sacred Pools” is luxuriantly expansive ambient dub that could fit onto Orb’s Adventures Beyond the Ultraworld, its heart-murmur bass and multi-tiered synth melodies embracing and decoupling in an eerie underwater consummation. The forbidding “Journey Home” is scraping metallic techno in slow motion, weaving together machinic sound effects with a recurrent didgeridoo bassline with exacting precision. The chiming, swirling “Primordial Landscape” starts off shadowy and restless, fusing Caribbean bounce with funereal dirge, before ascending to the ceiling with iridescent chime loops that prefigure Manuel Göttsching’s proto-techno masterpiece E2-E4. But whereas the electronic music which Cowley flashes forward to is mostly preternaturally bright and sharp, the arrangements here feel flushed and hazy, shadowed by the torpor of dope and the blood-rush delirium of amyl nitrate.
It’s not necessary to frame School Daze by the use to which these compositions originally were put, but it helps. In The Rise and Fall of Gay Culture, Daniel Harris writes that gay pornographers of the 1970s “believed they were filming two people, not in the act of fucking, but of merging, of coalescing, a process that involved the dissolution of their separate physical identities as they melted together, losing their definition as individuals.” Cowley’s music here captures exactly that vibe, its slow tempos, meandering arrangements, and persistent sense of disorientation and self-alienation evokes the world of San Francisco bathhouses rather than dancefloors. To listen is to step down those same long, dark tunnels: physical spaces of random encounters and depersonalised unions; psychological spaces of intoxication and longing. | 2013-12-11T01:00:02.000-05:00 | 2013-12-11T01:00:02.000-05:00 | Electronic | Dark Entries | December 11, 2013 | 8.3 | 0dd289ae-c5bd-490d-b688-521c76476ed7 | Tim Finney | https://pitchfork.com/staff/tim-finney/ | null |
null | *Death Is This Communion*, High on Fire's fourth album, was one of my 10 favorite albums in 2007, and I was far from alone. If you aren't already in the know, though, let this serve as some sort of wakeup call to the Oakland band's best collection to date. Don't worry about arriving late at the party: Despite the music's unrelenting roll, my entire experience with *Death* has been laid back...I listened to it a dozen times before bothering to check the song titles.
After memorizing each track, the shifts in those torching guitar riffs, the names didn't come as much | High on Fire: Death Is This Communion | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/11021-death-is-this-communion/ | Death Is This Communion | Death Is This Communion, High on Fire's fourth album, was one of my 10 favorite albums in 2007, and I was far from alone. If you aren't already in the know, though, let this serve as some sort of wakeup call to the Oakland band's best collection to date. Don't worry about arriving late at the party: Despite the music's unrelenting roll, my entire experience with Death has been laid back...I listened to it a dozen times before bothering to check the song titles.
After memorizing each track, the shifts in those torching guitar riffs, the names didn't come as much of a surprise. For instance, "Fury Whip" is the perfect way to describe the lashing opener. It starts with more than a minute of galloping guitar, drums (note Des Kensel's double bass thumping), and bass from new member Jeff Matz, before guitarist/vocalist Matt Pike tears in with his hoarse chipped-tooth snarl. More than ever before, Pike's singing, not just his guitar playing, is a power onto itself. We already knew from his Sleep days he could pick an axe like a motherfucker, but man...maybe it's the cleaner, bigger, ballsier Jack Endino production, or the proper combination of whiskey and cigarettes and time, but Pike's at the point where his vocal and guitar chords have grizzled and wizened perfectly. (Lemmy, sir, watch your back.)
When discussing Death you need to focus on Pike, but also go back to Endino. To the collection (and Jack's) credit, it ends up a deflating experience listening to 2005's Blessed Black Wings in tandem. At the time of the earlier album's release, it seemed like Joe Preston's bass and Steve Albini's production had given High on Fire their most monumental, thunderous sound to date, but weirdly, it's pretty limp in comparison. Musically, Blessed Black was punkier, and in restrospect, the songwriting just isn't as good.
Outside of production, Death is both streamlined and epic. There are a number of rollicking patterns and shifts to the usual hard-edged rock, like the Eastern-tinged instrumental "Khanrad's Wall", the rising clatter drum solo of "Headhunter", or the jangle that establishes itself behind the smokiness of "Waste of Tiamat". The shimmering acoustic intro jangle to "Cyclopian Scape" offers a whiff of pastoral Sabbathian doom before the riff explosion. High on Fire are getting uncanny at knowing when to insert these sorts of details, but for all the awesome adds to the music, it's the rawest moments that feel the best: From its opening Celtic Frost grunt onward, "Rumors of War" rollicks all bad-ass and overdriven like a mathier spin on Motörhead's "Ace of Spades". The fucking mighty "Turk" reels through War Metal until it slides into groovier (but just as heavy) bong waters and "black psychology": "My cage's walls are closing in on me/ The rage that surfaces is not my soul/ It's like a devil taking control/ The violence lives in me and will not leave/ Like a magician with pain up his sleeve." Pike has said he was inspired by conspiracy theories and H.P. Lovecraft on the album (what metal band isn't these days?), and a number of the songs have that enjoyable occult tinge to their lyrics, though maybe nothing as D&D as something like "Surrounded By Thieves" (OK, minus "Cyclopian Scape"'s reptilian alien race, "lemurian throne," and etc).
In terms of Sleep-- because those terms refuse to go away-- this is High on Fire's Jerusalem. Outside of HoF's ascent, it's interesting to see Pike hit his peak just as his ex-Sleep bandmates in Om moved toward theirs with the appropriately titled Pilgrimage-- they continue chiseling into a sparer minimalist realm, while High on Fire inscribe additional accents into their crusty rock. It's rare to see such a cohesive trio split into two groups that both become so powerful, ascending at the same time with such distinct aesthetics. Here, actually, the title track's vocal lines are kinda Om-- that smearier stoner incantation slide-- but Pike and Co. otherwise continue moving deeper into their amphetamine-laced rock monster. Much less the old dope smoke. So, high on a different sort of fire. If you haven't already, make sure to inhale both. | 2008-01-09T01:00:01.000-05:00 | 2008-01-09T01:00:01.000-05:00 | Metal | Relapse | January 9, 2008 | 8.2 | 0dd53017-d789-4054-ab9e-14406bb0c21a | Brandon Stosuy | https://pitchfork.com/staff/brandon-stosuy/ | null |
Hip-hop relies heavily on the foundation created by the dichotomy of repetition and novelty. This takes many forms, from the ... | Hip-hop relies heavily on the foundation created by the dichotomy of repetition and novelty. This takes many forms, from the ... | N.E.R.D.: In Search of... | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/5748-in-search-of/ | In Search of... | Hip-hop relies heavily on the foundation created by the dichotomy of repetition and novelty. This takes many forms, from the struggle of producers wishing to maintain a semblance of recognition for utilizing old-school techniques, to the desire of new MCs to push the boundaries of lyrical delivery. Recently, this shifting between repetition and novelty has reached a manic pace, to the point where it seems essential fare for a producer to shout over a track or re-use bass sounds and drum patterns to emphasize their signature. In the advertising world, it's called "branding."
The Neptunes are the reigning kings of beat-branding. Throughout their best-known tracks-- from "Superthug" to "Southern Hospitality"-- some elements have remained more or less constant: the bass sound, a gritty, ultimately recyclable sample, and the off-time kick/snare combination that seemed revitalize hip-hop for a minute. But that minute has lasted two years, and the same sounds now cross the board from Britney Spears to Limp Bizkit. Shit is getting ugly, and N.E.R.D. is the truest testament to this fact. Quoth the Neptunes: "In Search Of... seems like a bland title, but for us, it's In search of love. In search of happiness. In search of smiling. In search of that bitch with the big ass. In search of the answer to why my brother smokes crack. It's all of that; it's about being open."
In Search Of... joins Pharrell Williams and Chad Hugo (the Neptunes) with hometown friend Shay. (That hometown, incidentally, is the same Virginia area that brought up Timbaland, Missy Elliott, and Teddy Riley.) This album conceivably brings the group back to their "roots," which, in a letter written by Pharrell on the group's website, heavily emphasizes the AC/DC side of things.
The album has had a relatively tumultuous history-- especially over the last few months-- with a domestic release date pushed back by the Neptunes' decision to re-record the album with the help of some live instrumentation. Over a year ago, the original version of the album was released and garnered exactly no glowing reviews (with the exception of a positive write-up in Rolling Stone). Whether or not this was the incentive for the group to re-record is unclear. The result, however, is an album's worth of hot-to-death Neptunes hooks and bass sounds tainted with the despicable addition of rap-metal drumming and distorted guitar posturing.
To backtrack a bit, when the "original" album came out about a year ago, the first single was the "BET Uncut Video"-worthy "Lapdance," which promised to fulfill Pharrell's promised prophecies of hip-hop as revolution via chorus lines like, "The politicians are lookin' like to strippers to me." See, Pharrell has been talking a lot of shit since the Neptunes began to get some serious props, stressing that doing a beat for Jay-Z was a way of "getting their message out" to the masses.
But somewhere between "I Jus Wanna Luv U" and "Pass the Courvoisier," signals got crossed. Pharrell, Chad and Shay took the drum tracks off most of the album, and added a drummer who could easily have cut his teeth in a Slipknot cover band. While Rap-Metal 101 drums bang away in the background, the basslines are replaced by chugging guitar riffs reminiscent of your high school hardcore band. What remains, though, is the exceptional quality of Pharrell's voice, which, unlike the bass sound, doesn't lose its intensity due to repeated radio exposure. The lyrics here are mostly decent, too, with the exception of "Brain," which, before it was re-recorded sounded clever, and now sounds like a frat house anthem. "Provider" hints at the fact that were Pharrell and Chad born twelve years ago, they'd be bumping this album along with Kid Rock's Cocky.
One of the greatest benefits of being multi-million dollar producers is having access to recording equipment that will make your sounds even more super-flawless. This, coupled with the Neptunes' five years of hitmaking experience, make for a "well-produced" album, which generally doesn't mean shit to me. Chalk it up to an oversight on the part of N.E.R.D. And their acronym speaks the truth, and No one Ever Really Dies, maybe we'll get our hands on a third, less compromised version of the album, where the drummer has been fired and the guitar is being used to prop up the reconstituted drum machines. | 2002-03-25T01:00:03.000-05:00 | 2002-03-25T01:00:03.000-05:00 | Rap | Virgin | March 25, 2002 | 6 | 0dd686a3-7778-4f97-93ce-962580eaec49 | Pitchfork | null |
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This gently melancholic album from the ambient artist Suzanne Kraft offers solace while rejecting the soporific. | This gently melancholic album from the ambient artist Suzanne Kraft offers solace while rejecting the soporific. | Suzanne Kraft: What You Get for Being Young | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22535-suzanne-kraft-what-you-get-for-being-young/ | What You Get for Being Young | There are times—times of year, times in life, times in an election cycle, maybe—that an escape is needed. Or a cushion for a weary head. Or a curtain to block out the world. Ambient music is often good for that. It can be comfort music, security-blanket music, spark-a-joint-and-go-to-sleep music. As Kevin Drumm once put it, in a song title from his 2009 album Imperial Horizon, “Just Lay Down and Forget It” music.
But some ambient music manages to stretch, however gingerly, beyond those fallback modes. It can soothe, yet still make you curious. It can calm and unsettle in equal measure. Brian Eno said that ambient music should be “as ignorable as it is interesting.” But what gets forgotten in that formulation is that ambient music, at least the really good stuff, should also be as interesting as it is ignorable.
You may find yourself replaying a piece of music like that multiple times in a single sitting—not just because it’s appealingly immersive, but because every time it plays, there’s a question that goes unanswered. It might be a question you can’t really articulate. It might have to do with process: how the music was made, or what time signature it’s in, or something more abstruse, like where the notes end and the effects begin. (These aren’t necessarily things you even think about consciously, but you tease them out nonetheless, tugging at them like you might with a bar puzzle while your mind was far away.) Maybe you simply don’t know quite how it makes you feel. And in some circumstances—say, for instance, that you know that you otherwise feel just shit-awful—that openness is a good thing. It creates a space of possibility.
Back in the early years of the decade, Suzanne Kraft—Los Angeles’ Diego Herrera, who today lives in Amsterdam—was making Metro Area-influenced house and disco, springy and dubby and slow, good music for the early or very late hour on the dancefloor. By last year’s Talk From Home, also for London’s Melody As Truth label, he had eased into a more contemplative mode: gentle synthesizers, clean-toned guitar, lilting cadences flecked with the LinnDrum’s telltale ping-pong thwack. Much in the vein of his label-mate Jonny Nash’s group Gaussian Curve, it was airy and spacious, and its final track, “The Result,” hinted at something even more ethereal in its beatless synths and fretless bass.
His new album picks up where “The Result” left off. Across much of it, there is almost nothing there beyond synthesizers, a few stray horns, and faint echo in place of connective tissue. Even the cuts with drums are essentially ambient in feel: In “Bank,” a song reminiscent of both K. Leimer and Shy Layers, a tentative drum groove frames watery synths and tendrils of guitar. Something about its overlapping layers makes it difficult to determine where phrases begin and end, and it sways gently back and forth, like a small craft rocked by waves. “One Amongst Others” moves with a similar sort of fast/slow tempo, and it counts out in five-bar phrases instead of four—a structural quirk that leaves you feeling off balance, even if you don’t realize it. Its cool, brooding chords, meanwhile, also have an unsettled air, shifting back and forth in search of the root note like a cat choosing a place to lie down.
Those are the most substantial tracks. “Fragile” offers just two sets of chords fluttering in counterpoint; quiet, scratchy bursts of distortion emphasize the outer surface of the sound, and a momentary bend in pitch gives the impression that the music is about to slide off the tape entirely. The wintry “Zé” is just muted tones and atonal squiggles that move like startled birds. And “Scripted Space,” warm as a freshly baked batch of muffins, is similarly minimalist, with arpeggios tripping up the scale and trickling back down through the delay chain. The sequence of notes is so fleet and slippery that you can’t quite fix upon them, certainly not enough to sing them back to yourself. The delay functions not as a crutch but as a channel, a conduit—not a way of filling space, but of revealing it.
The bookending “Body Heat” and “Further” are more lyrical—particularly the opener, with its mournful, drifting saxophones—but they’re hardly much more substantial; they seem more like conjuring acts than compositions. It’s striking how much Herrera manages with such meager materials. It’s not that the music is calming, which it is; it’s the way it gets under your skin, the way the ripples on the surface suggest hidden forces below. This short, gently melancholy album offers solace while rejecting the soporific. It is a cushion to fall back upon—one just springy enough, perhaps, to set you in motion again. | 2016-12-01T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2016-12-01T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Electronic | Melody As Truth | December 1, 2016 | 8 | 0ddb49d4-23cd-4b65-a012-77b819d82e0b | Philip Sherburne | https://pitchfork.com/staff/philip-sherburne/ | 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 2000 album from one of the most famous and influential musicians in South Asian history, a spare, heart-rending, spiritually transcendent experience. | 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 2000 album from one of the most famous and influential musicians in South Asian history, a spare, heart-rending, spiritually transcendent experience. | Abida Parveen: Raqs-e-Bismil | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/abida-parveen-raqs-e-bismil/ | Raqs-e-Bismil | You’d think that one of the greatest vocalists of all time might have some notes for rising musicians. But as a judge on the 2012 reality singing competition Sur Kshetra, famed Pakistani Sufi singer Abida Parveen was often exceedingly neutral. When asked in an interview why she avoids sharing criticism despite being appointed as a judge, she responded with her typical wisdom: “Because it’s music, not war.” The journalist interviewing her followed up, asking who she hoped would win the competition. “I pray Allah makes a good decision. That’s all.”
Parveen’s humility and diplomacy are almost comical given her position as one of the most famous and influential musicians in South Asian history. When she was 5, her father chose her over her brothers to become his successor in their family practice of Sufi singing, and by the age of 23, she was named the official singer of Radio Pakistan, the national public broadcaster for radio in the country. Now 70 years old, Parveen, who is often referred to as “the queen of Sufi music,” has released over a hundred albums, received the Nishan-e-Imtiaz—Pakistan’s highest civilian award—and is credited with helping popularize Sufi music and culture among young people in South Asia and around the world.
Parveen’s modesty despite her immense success is part of her religion. She makes music in the tradition of Sufism, a mystical, philosophical expression of Islam that began in the 10th century. Sufism prioritizes spiritual purification, a divine, intoxicating connection with God, and a sense of humility that comes from prioritizing that connection above all earthly desires. In interviews, Parveen often deemphasizes her importance as a person, instead positioning her performances as a means for communing with God. “The truth doesn’t need to be told,” she said in an interview in 2001. “It can only be experienced. Remember, I’m not performing. He is singing through me. It is His song, and it sings by itself.”
Sufism also specifically deprioritizes the role of the singer in music-making. The Sufi practice of sama’—listening to music with the intention of achieving closeness to God—instead privileges the listener. The concept of sama’ has inspired artistic movements across the globe from Turkey’s whirling dervishes to Morocco’s Gnaoua music, which has had an outsized influence on jazz greats in the West like Ornette Coleman and Pharoah Sanders, to name just a couple.
On stage, when Parveen channels the greatness of God, she transforms completely. She sometimes hallucinates while on stage, or brings the audience to tears by singing just a few notes. Nowhere is her singular vocal talent clearer than on her excellent 2000 album Raqs-e-Bismil. The album title translates to “Dance of the Wounded,” and on the record, Parveen conveys burning desire and yearning for God through the subtleties of her singing: the poise with which she delivers a single note, the husky, smoldering tone of her voice, her interplay between precision and fervor. She’s often compared to Nina Simone, whose shows have been described as “having the aura of sacramental rites.” The two artists sing with such dynamism and heart that when you listen to them, you feel transported beyond the limitations of your body and individual perceptions and into a spiritual realm of infinite possibility.
Even though Parveen is such a prolific artist, Raqs-e-Bismil remains one of her most critically acclaimed and impactful albums because of the beauty of the lyrics and how eloquently she delivers them. She also refers to it as her fusion album, undoubtedly among her most sonically adventurous. The arrangements are sparse—often just tabla, strings, and synth—but cohesive, inky, and foreboding. It’s an album fraught with tension: between the earthly and the divine, the beauty of her voice and the devastation of her words, the stylized Urdu and the more colloquial folk language she oscillates between, and the foundations in South Asian classical music and Western influences.
At the time of its release, international audiences were primed to hear it. Western listeners had become increasingly familiar with South Asian Sufi music over the latter half of the 19th century. Qawwali, the most well-known form of Sufi music from South Asia, had been practiced since the 13th century, but started to be used in Indian film music beginning in the 1940s. In 1975, The Sabri Brothers played at Carnegie Hall, the first qawwali musicians to perform in the United States. Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan went on to experiment with the form and collaborate with a number of Western artists including Peter Gabriel, Eddie Vedder, and Michael Brook. His and Brook’s collaborative album, Night Song, was nominated for a Grammy for Best World Music Album in 1997.
When Khan died in 1997, Abida Parveen was seen as his successor, especially in Western media. But as an assessment on Parveen’s talent, defining her as a successor to Khan felt inadequate. She was more his peer than his pupil—she had been singing for four decades when he died— not to mention the two artists also have entirely different musical approaches. Khan’s famous qawwali performances engross the listener in a cacophony of sound. The music generally begins with slow, rhythmic instrumental interludes and meditative vocals, but the performers use hand claps and lively calls and responses between the lead singer and a backing chorus to build to a frenetic climax over the course of 10 to 30 minutes. Parveen specializes in kafi, a sparser, more repetitive form of South Asian music that features only one singer and pulls from regional folk traditions in Sindh and Punjab. Qawwali creates a sense of orchestral grandeur, while kafi focuses on the effect and emotion of the individual singer. It’s the difference between walking through a garden in full bloom and observing the singular beauty of a wildflower.
On Raqs-e-Bismil, she sings kafi as well as ghazal, a third form of South Asian poetry defined by rhyming couplets and highly stylized Urdu language. All forms of Sufi music aspire to remind the listener of the ecstasy of communing with God, but ghazal and kafi do so by emphasizing lyricism and introspection over the fervor incited in qawwali. Raqs-e-Bismil pushes the solitary, contemplative mood to almost unbearably heart-wrenching levels. On Parveen’s album Janaan, released the same year, a bright bamboo flute trill or cascading synth blip sprinkle the mix with whimsy and color. On Raqs-e-Bismil, the arrangements are far more meditative and entrancing. Even compared to other releases like 1997’s Humsafar or 2000’s Ho Jamalo, where the instrumentation is pared back, Raqs-e-Bismil sounds much more lush, cohesive, and immersive. The boisterous spontaneity of those other arrangements is replaced with poised, expansive synth and tabla notes that fill the room like fog.
For the arrangements and lyrical selections on Raqs-e-Bismil, Parveen worked with composer and filmmaker Muzaffar Ali, a collaborator who was just as committed to Sufi mysticism as she was. While working on these compositions, Ali traveled to India’s northern mountainous region and let the natural beauty there inspire him. In his autobiography, he speaks emphatically about this period in his life, and the arrangements that came from it. “I saw in the mountains around me, in the magnificent trees that embraced these mountains, emitting a fragrance as the rains lashed to loosen their embrace,” he wrote. “The mythology became poetry, and poetry became rhythm, and the rhythm, a melody. Each ghazal I chose and composed gripped the soul…They came alive in the monsoon mist rising from the Naini Lake...Poetry is a bridge that helps you cross oceans and mountains. I was doing that in Raqs-e-Bismil.” While driving from the mountains of India down to the capital of New Delhi, he got into a car accident maiming his thumb so badly he had to have skin grafted from his thigh to fix the injury. This experience, he says, is how “pain entered the ghazals of Raqs-e-Bismil.”
It’s an incredibly dramatic account of his life and creative process, but there would be no Raqs-e-Bismil without that kind of emotion. There’s a profound vulnerability to this music because the audience hears Parveen in the middle of her quest. Her devotional practice is ongoing, incomplete, and constantly transforming, and yet she invites us to bear witness to her attempt. As much as she sees herself as a vessel for God, she inevitably evokes the sublime through the prism of the earthly. There will always be the performer, the microphone, the ego, the fallibility that contrasts with the pristine ideal she evokes. And when you as the listener experience the ecstasy that she describes, you have to hold it next to the other realities of your own life: the buzz of your air conditioner, the grocery list you’ve started making in your head, the itch of a mosquito bite. These oppositional experiences don’t deter from one another but rather make both feel more accessible, more intertwined, and more understandable.
Parveen takes many paths towards holiness. There are songs of denial and songs of joy on Raqs-e-Bismil. On “Zahid Ne,” she sings, “The preacher has not yet seen the essence of my faith/He has not witnessed the tresses that hide the beauty of your face.” She briefly enters a frenzied state of unity with God, then defines God as everything that is inaccessible to her. There are fleeting moments of fluorescent ecstasy too, especially in the two kafi songs on the album: “Roshan Jamaal-e-Yaar” revels in a lover’s charm and captivating gaze, comparing it to divine beauty. And though “Ji Chahe” speaks of self-destruction—of losing your sense of self like a moth burning up in a flame—the understanding is that this transformation would be a welcome spell of euphoria.
The writing on many of the ghazals is elliptical, attempting to write around the concept of God, or to define him in terms of what he isn’t. On opener “Yaar Ko Hamne Ja Baja Dekha,” Parveen describes her lover as a series of opposites: sometimes he is hidden, sometimes he is apparent. Sometimes he is a king descending from the throne, other times a poor man carrying his water. Indirect writing often only vaguely gestures at emotion, but on Raqs-e-Bismil, the slipperiness and opacity of Parveen’s interactions with God contrasts with her deep desire for closeness. She is constantly searching, lamenting, and struggling to grasp onto a sense of unity that she knows is achievable but can’t always experience.
In Parveen’s voice, these heady lyrics move from the realm of the intellect to the heart. The emotional range she shows on “Zahid Ne” alone is astounding: She repeats the same melody over and over but changes her delivery every time she returns to a phrase. She is alternately patient, nostalgic, all-knowing, and desperate. The reverb on her voice adds a sense of resonant fullness and poignancy that is buoyed by a gentle tabla beat that progresses steadily and patiently, like the footsteps of a hiker who has found their rhythm halfway through their ascent. Listening to words bloom from Parveen’s voice, I’m reminded of the concept of sonder: the realization that every person you pass on the street has as full a life as your own. Similarly, each word Parveen sings evokes entire universes. Within the span of a single word, it’s easy to imagine the spark of first love, or birth and death of a cosmos.
Parveen generally takes an anti-identitarian stance. She is one of very few professionally singing Sufi women, but she sees herself less as an icon or a source of inspiration than a vessel through which God’s words can be heard. And yet, some of the 21st century’s most innovative artists find inspiration in her work. Pakistani American musician Arooj Aftab reverently cites an encounter with her and Björk lists her as one of her favorite musicians, having recently played her music at a DJ set in Brooklyn. Trans artist Lyra Pramuk relates to her quote about how Parveen feels when she performs: “I’m not a man or a woman, I’m a vehicle for passion.”
Perhaps what these experimental musicians admire about Parveen is less her acclaim or any particular skill she has as a singer, but rather the patience and tenacity she exhibits in her pursuit of transcendence. Going for something greater than yourself is a motivation to keep honing your craft, refining your spiritual practice, tempering your ego. It is the most human desire. In art-making and spiritual practice, perfection is impossible: It’s the act of reaching that is so inspiring. | 2024-07-14T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2024-07-14T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Folk/Country | Living Media India | July 14, 2024 | 9.3 | 0dde3492-b7fc-42c5-aceb-f36882d34c27 | Vrinda Jagota | https://pitchfork.com/staff/vrinda-jagota/ | |
French artist Neige finally fits all his component parts-- arching atmospherics, celestial melodies, suffocating roars-- into one dynamic metal record. | French artist Neige finally fits all his component parts-- arching atmospherics, celestial melodies, suffocating roars-- into one dynamic metal record. | Alcest: Écailles de Lune | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/14164-ecailles-de-lune/ | Écailles de Lune | Écailles de Lune, the second LP from romantic black metallurgists Alcest, is the most fully realized effort to date from its frontman and lone constant Neige. The spindly Frenchman has been a member of a half-dozen bands, from the brittle Peste Noire to the wildly and willfully diverse coed quartet Amesoeurs. Since 2005, Neige has been releasing music as Alcest that ranges from the black metal of 2005 EP Le Secret to the Red House Painters-via-Justin Broadrick 2007 LP, Souvenirs d'un Autre Monde. Now, he's finally fit all of his component parts-- arching atmospherics, celestial melodies, suffocating roars-- into one record. At last, Neige has made an album that plays like one.
At a time when both legitimately heavy bands like Wolves in the Throne Room and Liturgy and electronic acts like Ben Frost and Fuck Buttons are using black metal ideas to build something bigger, Neige lands one of the most cohesive, well-considered experiments yet. He peels apart the layers of black metal-- lacerated vocals, relentless rhythms, overtone-rich guitars-- and applies them to disparate structures and sounds.
On "Percées de Lumière", the rhythm supplies a pace that's nearly krautrock, while the guitars revolve around a minor riff that suggests Slint. So, of course, the metal shifts to the vocals. Neige generally sings gracefully and carefully, but here he screams in black-metal horror. "Écailles de Lune [Part I]", on the other hand, even sounds like a toughened mix of M83 and Sigur Rós, with guitars saturating every space and Neige's voice floating like Jónsi Birgisson's once did. Beneath the surface, however, the militant pacing of drummer Winterhalter and the increasingly sinister note selections of Neige presage something heavier. For the final two minutes, they rage like Scandinavian lords in a high-dollar studio. Thanks to the methodical if subtle way that song develops, moving from staggering rock to twinkling atmospherics to something altogether more intense, it doesn't seem out of place. The same holds for "Part II", which erupts quickly into a brutal rush only to burn itself out, dissolving into a ghastly drone that builds and collapses twice more. The line between the tormented and the gorgeous blurs into an imagined boundary-- tedious to find, delightful to miss.
Several reviews of Écailles de Lune have criticized the album's brevity, noting that, though its six tracks clock in just shy of 42 minutes, "Percées de Lumière" appeared on a limited-edition split last year, while the 108-second instrumental, "Abysses", doesn't warrant mention as a "song." That's an unfortunate dismissal, especially because "Abysses" is as vital as anything else here. Like the best of Alcest's output, it's a ghastly but beautiful hum. Neither an admonition nor an invitation, neither noise nor new age, it confirms the newfound patience and purpose of Neige, who's made an album that's more enchanting than even these last few years of promise have suggested. | 2010-04-29T02:00:02.000-04:00 | 2010-04-29T02:00:02.000-04:00 | Metal / Rock | Prophecy | April 29, 2010 | 8.4 | 0de24240-2e1c-4af4-9c07-b1b6c6147c04 | Grayson Haver Currin | https://pitchfork.com/staff/grayson-haver currin/ | null |
After months of waiting, and several tentative release dates, Amnesiac finally hit store shelves last Tuesday. Since last October, we ... | After months of waiting, and several tentative release dates, Amnesiac finally hit store shelves last Tuesday. Since last October, we ... | Radiohead: Amnesiac | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/6659-amnesiac/ | Amnesiac | After months of waiting, and several tentative release dates, Amnesiac finally hit store shelves last Tuesday. Since last October, we've been hearing that this album, recorded during the same sessions as last year's wildly experimental Kid A, would serve as a return to the band's mid-90's roots. Now we come to find it was all a lie.
Not that it gets me down. As far as I'm concerned, Kid A is Radiohead's defining achievement. A total departure from the conventional rock formats of OK Computer and The Bends, Kid A drew from far more abstract and obscure influences than its predecessors. Whereas previous outings captured echoes of U2 and Pink Floyd, Kid A took what it could use from the Talking Heads, Can, Talk Talk, and modern-day IDM artists, and combined it with Radiohead's irrepressible originality and sparkling, alien production. Whether you liked the end result or not, the fact that they had the balls to challenge mainstream insipidness with such heroic creativity was admirable.
That said, Amnesiac is about as close to The Bends as Miss Cleo is to Jamaican. And within the first ten seconds of its opening track, "Packt like Sardines in a Crushd Tin Box," the band crushes that rumor like a bug in the ground. Sparse, clanging percussion evokes abandoned swingsets. Keyboards whir to sonorous life, humming resonantly. Guitars are curiously marked absent. Production-wise, the track could have nestled cozily alongside Kid A's strangest moments, yet its melody is stunningly more infectious than even that album's height of accessibility, "Optimistic." Amidst chattering synths and twisted metal, Thom Yorke casually insists that he's "a reasonable man," and politely intones the album's most quoted lyric: "Get off my case."
The clattering, confrontational "Packt" segues awkwardly into "Pyramid Song," a sweeping piano-and-strings ballad, whose unusual timing is difficult to nail down until Phil Selway's live drums give perspective on the punchdrunk rhythm. Yorke croons some of his most poetic lyrics since "No Surprises," inspired by passages from Herman Hesse's Siddhartha. Amidst swelling orchestration and Satie-esque piano chords, Yorke croons a dream-like scenario in which he's visited by black-eyed angels, and his past and future loves.
4/4 traditionalists will take an immediate liking to the very OK Computer-ish "Dollars and Cents," whose lyrical content is strikingly similar to the anti-government, anti-corporate themes expressed on the 1997 classic. Jonny Greenwood's minimal, warped guitarwork and distant string arrangements float celestially over brother Colin's menacing basslines and Selway's delicate drumming. "Knives Out" is another OK Computer-style reverbathon, replete with strummed acoustics, chiming electrics, and a not-too-tasteful rehashing of a prominent guitar line from "Paranoid Android." Great melody. However, they've fucking used it before. The song also loses points for containing the line, "Shove it in your mouth." Really, Thom.
Similarly disappointing is "Pulk/Pull Revolving Doors." Powered by a gritty industrial beat, the song's intentional abstractness, for the first time ever, seems forced and caricatured. Thom's MacinYorke vocal treatments never seemed terribly groundbreaking, and here, the gimmick has gone utterly limp. Yorke's lyrical content is also at its most unchallenging, as he educates us on the many varieties of doors that exist, over oafish, programmed beats worthy of a Cleopatra Records sampler. Elsewhere, "Hunting Bears" is a two-minute instrumental clip of aimless guitar noodling that shoots for Neil Young's Dead Man soundtrack but comes off as a cutrate Wish You Were Here outtake. A track like this is meant to segue into a related piece of music; instead, we're flung headfirst into the completely dissimilar "Like Spinning Plates."
If nothing else, Radiohead have always realized the emotional impact of a stunning album closer, and Amnesiac offers two. Sitting side by side, "Like Spinning Plates" and "Life in a Glasshouse" are so vastly superior to the album's other tracks that the album's few misteps are easily forgiven. "Spinning Plates," while a much better fit for Kid A, is nonetheless one of Radiohead's most affecting tracks to date. It opens with a digitally simulated "spinning" sound, disorienting reversed keyboard, and subtle keyboard pings. The song hits its peak when Yorke's indecipherable backwards vocals unexpectedly revert to traditional forward singing during the mournful climax, "And this just feels like/ Spinning plates/ My body's floating down a muddy river."
But if "Like Spinning Plates" would have been a fitting apex for Kid A, "Life in a Glasshouse" is entirely suited to the eclectic Amnesiac. Rather than creating a unique, Frankensteinian amalgamation from fragments of other genres, Radiohead instead target a style of music that hasn't been touched for decades: Edison-era big band. In the process of adapting the archaic jazz sound to polyrhythmic piano chords and rock lyricism, Radiohead touch upon an incredibly unique sound that could potentially inspire an entirely new genre.
"Glasshouse" is most easily (and most often) likened to a New Orleans funeral dirge-- probably because it's not far off the mark. Largely inspired by Louis Armstrong's "St James Infirmary," this track is the least like the others on Amnesiac, and easily the record's winning moment. When, amidst rueful trombone, tumbling clarinet, and the crushingly emotive trumpet of longtime BBC session musician Humphrey Lyttelton, Yorke insists, "Of course I'd like to sit around and chat/ Of course I'd like to stay and chew the fat," and follows it with a minute of wailing "only, only, only... there's someone listening in," the intensity is indescribable.
Despite the heights attained by much of Amnesiac, I prefer Kid A for a number of reasons. Quality aside, the questionable sequencing of Amnesiac does little to hush the argument that the record is merely a thinly veiled b-sides compilation; Kid A played out as a cohesive whole that evoked panic and paranoia as well as surrealism and disorientation. Still, Amnesiac's highlights were undeniably worth the wait, and easily overcome its occasional patchiness. Now if you'll pardon me, I have to go untie DiCrescenzo. | 2001-06-04T02:01:40.000-04:00 | 2001-06-04T02:01:40.000-04:00 | Rock | Capitol | June 4, 2001 | 9 | 0de6602a-01cb-43ec-b6da-0dda2411ed29 | Ryan Schreiber | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ryan-schreiber/ | null |
Picking up where his DJ-Kicks mix left off, the L.A. funk auteur’s newest release explores peace and love through body-rock. | Picking up where his DJ-Kicks mix left off, the L.A. funk auteur’s newest release explores peace and love through body-rock. | Dām Funk: STFU II EP | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/dam-funk-stfu-ii-ep/ | STFU II EP | The neon music that soundtracked the late-aughts Los Angeles club scene has become a global force. But while luminaries like Flying Lotus and Thundercat are recognized for influencing rap and jazz, the maestro of the Funkmosphere party in Culver City, Damon Riddick, gets less credit for bringing the synthesized sounds of the late ’70s and ’80s back to popular music. Years before Daft Punk made “Moroder,” Dâm-Funk was spinning tributes to the Troutman family, helping to make Afrofuturism the future once again.
Toeachizown, Dâm-Funk’s five-LP opus, is now a decade old; it’s been four years since the triple album Invite the Light. Riddick has pivoted from prolificacy to restraint, appropriate for a musician in the latter half of his 40s. These days, he often speaks through others, working with fellow Angelenos like Nite Jewel or arranging tasteful setlists like that of his strong DJ-Kicks entry. Even his new record, STFU II, 38 minutes of new music, gets modest billing: It’s an EP, not an LP, and a sequel to boot.
And it’s a modest release, as Dâm eases into cruise-control over the course of six five-minute-plus tracks (and one 54-second interlude called “Inhale, Exhale”). Moreso than the free EP STFU, STFU II picks up where DJ-Kicks left off: Its pleasures, are in steady, buoyant build; peace and love through body-rock. Nothing is too frantic or heavy, and when the bass appears, it’s as soothing as it is booming.
The first standout is the second single, “Compos Mentis,” and like all the best tracks on the EP, it’s elevated by a synth odyssey that overtakes a repetitious beat. About three minutes in, Dâm extends a stepladder of bass leading up to a land of dreamy pastel synths and fluttering keys, a Balearic overworld in the clouds. If that sounds good, you may also enjoy “Deeper,” on which Dâm throws together a loop worthy of Floating Points or the Field, then overtakes it with an extraordinary extended synthesizer solo, rising slowly in the mix until everything else is background.
Other tracks, though no less pleasant, disappear without leaving much of an impression. Closer “On Code” is the most traditional, G-funk brightened by sun-ray synths. A light-stepping bass shuffles through the opening half of “Ladera Heights,” named for the airport-adjacent neighborhood where Dâm-Funk moved once he started playing parties internationally. Soon enough, though, a well-behaved synth moves the proceedings skyward.
Artists’ promotional statements are often misleading, when not pure gibberish, but Dâm’s advice about how to experience STFU II offers as much insight into the record as anything else: “Just lay back, take a deep breath, stay outta trouble and simply ‘glyde’ for a while,” he writes, referring to his label, Glydezone. STFU II is music for relaxation. It’s a long way from the fierce energetic groove that characterized those Funkmosphere nights on Venice Boulevard. You might find that a bit dispiriting, and while you wouldn’t be wrong, you’d be missing the point. We should all hope to age this well. | 2019-05-23T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-05-23T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | Glydezone | May 23, 2019 | 7.1 | 0de8f197-fcac-45e8-8662-f423b0499f85 | Jonah Bromwich | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jonah-bromwich/ | |
After a so-so LP for dance powerhouse Ultra, Jennifer Lee's TOKiMONSTA project returns with a self-released EP that, at its best, reinforces her capable beatmaking abilities. | After a so-so LP for dance powerhouse Ultra, Jennifer Lee's TOKiMONSTA project returns with a self-released EP that, at its best, reinforces her capable beatmaking abilities. | TOKiMONSTA: Desiderium | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/19858-tokimonsta-desiderium/ | Desiderium | Jennifer Lee has never lacked for inventiveness. With a background in classical piano, the L.A. producer who works as TOKiMONSTA is adept at doling out earworm melodies to ground even her most nebulous beats, but what makes her best tracks stand out is the ability to evoke her own freewheeling, stoner charm while wielding a heavy sonic arsenal. Her 2010 debut Midnight Menu was a solid example of the woozy, cosmic glitch-hop that countless West Coast DJs and producers have mined from Flying Lotus’ near-inescapable sphere of influence—and sure enough, infectious cuts like “Gamble” and “Cheese Smoothie” injected that sound with an undeniable stomp that piqued the interest of the Brainfeeder mastermind himself, who signed Lee as the label's first female artist for her follow-up EP Creature Dreams.
Anchored by jazzy, innovative beat patterns, the dubby, refined weirdness of Creature Dreams proved far more compelling than last year's Haruki Murakami-inspired Half Shadows, her first full-length for massive dance label Ultra. The industry upgrade heralded a shift in Lee’s sound, broadening her distinctive bedroom beats into a grab bag of pop and disco-based hooks and meandering slow-step jams, enlisting a roster of contributing vocalists that included NYC's MNDR and hip-hop legend Kool Keith to varied success.
Lee’s latest, the mini-LP Desiderium, also serves as the launching pad for her new label Young Art. The Arama-featuring “Drive” is a chugging dance track that doesn’t do much to distance itself from its Half Shadows counterparts, but things improve on "Realla", when Lee ratchets up a fleet of distant air horns and a slow-stepping beat that offsets California vocalist Anderson Paak's mostly frivolous contribution. “Open Air” is in a similar vein with a more suitable vocal offering from fellow Californian Joyce Wrice, whose soulful pipes meet Lee’s energetic groove with more balance. Still, none of the three vocal-assisted tracks tread any ground Lee hasn’t already covered to better effect on previous EPs.
While Desiderium isn’t a particularly formidable entry in Lee’s discography, it isn’t without merit. Highlight “Dusty Stars” dances around a looped sample of Aaliyah’s “Miss You” with odd, interesting time signatures and a catchily stuttering beat; “Steal My Attention” is similarly satisfying, using a repetitious chorus that recalls Midnight Menu’s most club-ready jams, while closer “Sakamoto’s Spring”, with a piano backing track reminiscent of the song’s eponymous Japanese composer (whom she collaborated with two years ago on a protest song condemning the reopening of the Ōi nuclear power plant in Japan), is a sprightly counterpoint to some of the album’s more routine embellishments. The highlights on Desiderium prove that, vocal-assisted lowlights be damned, Lee’s beatmaking abilities are still considerable. | 2014-09-25T02:00:03.000-04:00 | 2014-09-25T02:00:03.000-04:00 | Electronic | Young Art | September 25, 2014 | 6.4 | 0def4935-f349-49b0-8e30-2a5a1c509d93 | Eric Torres | https://pitchfork.com/staff/eric-torres/ | null |
On its first album in seven years, the Detroit punk band balances grid-like rigidity with the sense that everything is about to fall apart. | On its first album in seven years, the Detroit punk band balances grid-like rigidity with the sense that everything is about to fall apart. | Tyvek: Overground | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/tyvek-overground/ | Overground | In the seven years since Tyvek’s last album, the Detroit punks went digging through their archive. They reissued a rare 2009 cassette and put out a live album where they dusted off and ripped through some of their earliest songs. Among those deep cuts was 2007’s “Future Junk,” an evergreen gem where Kevin Boyer screams about the daily grind of driving up and down the John C. Lodge Freeway. Tyvek return to the Lodge on “M-39,” a standout banger from their wild fifth album, Overground. Over a cascading and crunchy guitar riff, amid a blanket of unrelenting cymbal smashes, Boyer’s trademark blunt and unflashy vocal performance helps transform the freeway into a psychedelic colony chiseled into cement. He twists the same handful of words into knots so that when he eventually utters the phrase “writ large on the Lodge,” it lands like a punchline.
Boyer offers landmarks and clues, but otherwise his imagery feels like a puzzle with half the pieces sucked up into the vacuum. The guitar sound is choppy and rigid as ever, and there’s a relentlessness to the sequencing that’s been there for the last two or three Tyvek albums. Each song spills rapidly into the next, and rarely does the band ease up. “Return to Format” and “Rhythm / Pattern” are ramshackle as Boyer spits his words percussively while the band careens behind him. There’s a moment on “Going Through My Things” when he appears to suddenly recite the tag of an old shirt: “LOW tumble dry, LOW tumble dry, LOW,” he shouts in the approximate rhythm of a dryer’s spinning drum. Tyvek excel at this strange balance between grid-like rigidity and the sense that everything could fall apart at any moment.
While Tyvek have always been a revolving door of contributors (Boyer notwithstanding), the current incarnation has been steady for a few years now. It’s palpable just how much they’ve locked in with each other. Boyer and Shelley Salant are both on guitar, and many songs reward a close listen for their intertwining, jam-forward leads. The rhythm section is strong, which is expected for two Southeast Michigan DIY scene bosses in their own right, bassist Alex Glendening (Deadbeat Beat) and drummer Fred Thomas (too many bands to list). The most obvious new ingredient is Emily Roll, Salant’s bandmate in the art-punk trio XV. Their saxophone folds in effortlessly, never dominating with an overwhelming skronk or longform voyage. Roll mirrors the pointed and staccato nature of the guitars—a blurt here, a couple supplemental notes there. It’s a new texture and a lightly sour contrast to the main hook. Right in step with Boyer’s songwriting, it’s the most exciting kind of disorienting.
Those are welcome variations on Tyvek’s template, but the final song slows down into unprecedented territory. The band spread out across the seven-minute title track while Boyer offers a subdued spoken-word poem that shares DNA with “The Gift.” Roll’s saxophone adds echoing, ambient jazz atmosphere and the rest of the instruments meander gently. Meanwhile, Boyer half-mutters about his grim surroundings: “How did we get here and more importantly how do we get out?” Those are two of many questions on Overground, though for the most part, Boyer’s interrogations go hand-in-hand with the band’s driving, scattered punk intensity. He cringes at the past in “What Were We Thinking” and prods the tenets of capitalism on “What’s It For” as the band rips through its tried and true attack. When Boyer stops lingering on tense questions and starts wondering about a way out, their collective toil completely melts in favor of something simple and beautiful. | 2023-11-14T00:01:00.000-05:00 | 2023-11-14T00:01:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Ginkgo | November 14, 2023 | 7.6 | 0defed3e-3834-4deb-930c-2c453eb2ae61 | Evan Minsker | https://pitchfork.com/staff/evan-minsker/ | |
The second album from the Chicago singer-songwriter Jess Shoman brings in the band for a noise-country-ish sound that both spotlights and strengthens their vocals. | The second album from the Chicago singer-songwriter Jess Shoman brings in the band for a noise-country-ish sound that both spotlights and strengthens their vocals. | Tenci: A Swollen River, A Well Overflowing | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/tenci-a-swollen-river-a-well-overflowing/ | A Swollen River, A Well Overflowing | Jess Shoman’s 2020 debut album as Tenci, My Heart Is an Open Field, was an indie-folk record that pulled you into an entirely empty space. It moved in slow, cyclical waltzes, bleeding with the unrushed freedom that follows a forfeiture of hope. Shoman and their bandmates stamped the songs with echoes of clomps and clacks rattling into an open room, and they frequently repeated passages several times just to see how it would feel. All of this drizzled around Shoman as they sang in brief snippets as surrendered as “I can’t pretend I’m not a dog tied to a porch” in a voice like warped wood. The album sounded, often sonically and occasionally lyrically, like it was made at the bottom of a well—an image that Shoman returns to repeatedly on Tenci’s fuller, more hopeful second album, A Swollen River, A Well Overflowing.
My Heart was Shoman’s breakout moment as a songwriter, and A Swollen River is foremost a triumph for Tenci, the band. Even though Shoman was almost always accompanied on My Heart, whether by light drumming, woodwind accents, or near-unrecognizable sounds, the album felt solitary through and through; now, Shoman sounds reinforced. Their three bandmates—bassist Isabel Reidy, multi-instrumentalist Curtis Oren, and drummer Joseph Farago—have formed a taut circle and cultivated a noise-country-ish sound that both spotlights and strengthens the vocals. The band sounds remarkably in sync with each step and turn, exhibiting the chemistry of a quartet with rare innate telepathy. Shoman, meanwhile, alternates between serenely reflective and totally vicious. “I’m as quiet as can be,” they rasp on “Be,” and then growls the last word again: “be.” What follows is a captivating sax solo from Oren that perfectly matches Shoman’s messy contemplations on their own visibility or lack thereof in the eyes of another.
Reidy, Oren, and Farago hang back as often as they step forth, resisting the easy “folk artist’s ‘full band’ sophomore album” trap and allowing Shoman’s talent for harnessing silence to flourish and grow. The band’s discretion paired with Shoman’s gift for commanding attention toward an isolated word or phrase recalls some of the defining indie-folk artists of the ‘90s, like Bill Callahan and Chan Marshall. On the mostly acoustic “Great Big Elephant,” which sounds like it was recorded on a remote driveway and follows “Be” with brilliant contrast, the accompanying touch is barely detectable yet just enough to add a sense of grandeur. Even when the band inches towards eerie-nursery-rhyme territory for a couple of consecutive songs in the album’s middle section, they still manage to hypnotize, so that the impending fireworks explode even louder.
And when those arrive, they don’t hold back. On the epic “Sour Cherries,” the band slowly crescendos to a droning, discordant hailstorm, while Shoman breaks out one of their best moves: meditating on a few words over and over in a rotation of voices ranging from anodyne to demonic. “Love is sour cherries,” they repeatedly sing, each time finding a different emphasis and character: “Love is sour cherries/Love is sour cherrries/Love is sour.” The song kicks off a string of highlights to conclude the album, peaking with the guitar-squeal-rich “Two Cups”—a soaring, charmingly odd self-affirmation that feels like the album’s nucleus, and one of Tenci’s best songs yet—then dismounting with the Polaroid-like “Memories,” a pocket-sized folk tune laid over a medley of home recordings from Shoman’s childhood. As Shoman sings about holding onto their memories, behind them is their father pushing them on a swing, their mother warning her children about bugs as they stick their hands in a tree, and Shoman as a child trying to read a birthday card from their grandparents in Spanish. With an increased brightness and confidence in their voice, surrounded by family chosen and unchosen, Shoman has never sounded less alone. | 2022-11-09T00:02:00.000-05:00 | 2022-11-09T00:02:00.000-05:00 | Folk/Country / Rock | Keeled Scales | November 9, 2022 | 7.5 | 0df4c8a5-73c0-4ef3-9411-4b07b645eb97 | Steven Arroyo | https://pitchfork.com/staff/steven-arroyo/ | |
The Queens rapper’s latest album, produced in full by Mono En Stereo, offers few surprises but features plenty of charmingly diaristic, relatable songs that contrast sharply with mainstream rap. | The Queens rapper’s latest album, produced in full by Mono En Stereo, offers few surprises but features plenty of charmingly diaristic, relatable songs that contrast sharply with mainstream rap. | Homeboy Sandman: Rich | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/homeboy-sandman-rich/ | Rich | Homeboy Sandman raps like no one is listening. After more than 15 years in the industry, the dependable Queens emcee has arrived at a songwriting practice that sounds more like journaling than performing for an audience. He’s issued a steady stream of EPs and albums over the last few years, all of them seemingly low stakes, though their quality has been consistent. At the turn of the millennium, Sandman’s rapping could sound a little labored, but in the years since, he’s aged gracefully in the game. He sounds content, grounded, and at peace with his place in the rap landscape—a wise voice in a young person’s genre.
Rich is an album-length collaboration with New York producer Mono En Stereo, known for his work with Prodigy, De La Soul, and Action Bronson. His beats fit Sandman like a glove. The production is summery, largely mid-tempo, and sample-based, lending a timeless quality to the songs. This languid pace works well for Sandman, who these days seems more focused on weaving yarns than dazzling with technique. His bars are elegant in their simplicity and his writing is diaristic and relatable; observations about the mundane are punctuated by occasional musings on the profound. He comes across like an everyman sage, someone searching for enlightenment in the big questions as well as the smallest of actions.
The aptly titled “Off the Rip” provides a representative sample: Over a shuffling, brushed snare beat and a wandering organ line, Sandman prods the corners of his mind at an unhurried pace. He gives himself a mini pep talk as the song starts, insists that doing dishes by hand “is the best way,” expresses an interest in opening a wildlife refuge, and maintains that he is trying to bring his listeners closer to God. It may not be a freestyle in the formal sense, but Sandman’s precise, on-beat rapping unspools with stream-of-consciousness effortlessness.
Only a handful of songs shake the album out of its resting pace, but they tend to be highlights. “Then We Broke Up” uses a funk loop as a springboard for a wholesome and unusually mature breakup anthem. There’s no hurt or resentment here, just the warm glow of cherished memories and the knowledge that even good things come to an end. “Bop” flips a flute-heavy sample into a jerky, chirpy beat, over which Sandman boasts about his mic skills. The instrumental for album closer “Who Are You?” is made of little more than rolling drum fills and stray piano notes; as Sandman calmly navigates the waves, he telegraphs an unshakeable confidence.
In an era where rap albums routinely run 90 minutes or longer and sound engineered for stadiums and strip clubs, Rich is a breath of fresh air. The album clocks in at under 27 minutes, none of the breezy songs overstay their welcome, and Sandman sounds more conversational than performative. There are no guests or conceptual aspirations, just beats and bars. This is rap music for lazy Sundays, backyard cookouts, and aimless drives. There may not be much to distinguish Rich from Sandman’s seemingly endless stream of recent releases, and the banal subject matter—like groceries and grocery shopping, a recurring motif—can sometimes feel a bit on the nose. But Sandman seems to have chosen a niche to fill, and he’s clearly focused on consistency over novelty. When it comes to underground rap veterans who have remained both prolific and reliable, Homeboy Sandman doesn’t have much in the way of competition. | 2023-08-05T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2023-08-05T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Dirty Looks | August 5, 2023 | 6.7 | 0df5595d-2ab2-4199-85e0-67bd2f258f06 | Mehan Jayasuriya | https://pitchfork.com/staff/mehan-jayasuriya/ | |
The Flying Lotus-co-produced second solo album by virtuoso bassist Stephen Bruner is an endearing blend of plainspoken nonchalance and almost limitless musical eccentricity. Bruner channels rich, often complex music through an engagingly human voice. | The Flying Lotus-co-produced second solo album by virtuoso bassist Stephen Bruner is an endearing blend of plainspoken nonchalance and almost limitless musical eccentricity. Bruner channels rich, often complex music through an engagingly human voice. | Thundercat: Apocalypse | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/18156-thundercat-apocalypse/ | Apocalypse | The idea of the instrumental virtuoso has fallen out of favor in some underground music circles. This prejudice is usually based around the idea that anyone who has that much invested in the technical aspects of their preferred instrument has gotten so far up their super-muso ass that there's no emotional engagement in the music itself. Bass maestro Stephen Bruner's found a few ways to avoid that fate: cultivating a sessionman's versatility equally suited to gigs with both Erykah Badu and Suicidal Tendencies, aligning himself with the artsy but down-to-earth Brainfeeder community, and, as Thundercat, putting out solo work that, from the outset of 2011's The Golden Age of Apocalypse, used his chops almost exclusively for a feeling of fidgety joy.
But what's really made Thundercat interesting over the last few years, and what gives his new Flying Lotus-co-produced album Apocalypse such a kick, is the sense that he's completely divorced his music from any sort of pretense. He doesn't put up some kind of esoteric barrier between the vision of a serious artiste and an unwitting audience that supposedly needs to be schooled on what true musicianship is. He's more dealing with a simple set of ideas, emotions, sentiments, and experiences, elaborated upon in a surprising way. At his best, Thundercat has reversed the evolutionary process where technology, experimentation, and crossover made music more complicated-- instead taking prog and fusion as a starting point to be whittled down, rather than a destination to be built up to.
Apocalypse gets immediate real quick. Opener “Tenfold” takes off with the sort of astral-jazz keyboards you might hear on a Lonnie Liston Smith interlude filtered through the TONTO synthesizer. But the real pulse is an insistent pounding, chord-blurring 1-2-3-4 hardcore rumble that offsets Bruner's see-saw falsetto, tersely belting out sonic prayers two or three words at a time. It sets the precedent for an album that brings its catchiest tendencies to the forefront and lets the virtuosic stuff in through side channels. What comes up as a whole is this odd but endearing blend of plainspoken nonchalance and almost limitless musical eccentricity.
If that means Thundercat's music feels a little more traditionally song-oriented than before, he's found a way to keep that unpredictable energy of his intact, filtering it through familiar forms of indie R&B (the Mono/Poly coproduced “Heartbreaks + Setbacks”), electronified soul-folk (“Tron Song”, which feels like Terry Callier gone glitch), and bristling, burbling old-school boogie funk (the straightforwardly danceable “Oh Sheit it's X”). The moments of ramped-up rhythmic hustle remain a prominent feature; the shivery rollercoaster arpeggios and hand-cranked forward motion of “The Life Aquatic” and “Seven” have the feel of some enterprising knob-tweaker attempting to electronically retrofit the Minutemen's anxious energy for a Detroit dancefloor. But everything falls together in a way that settles into a steady groove that stays easy to follow and sink into.
The catalyst for this is that Thundercat's voice is more prominent and freewheeling now, as much of a driving factor in every song it appears in as the music backing him up. Where he falls short (but not very) in melodic range, he makes up for in stylistic variance: he's longing and frustrated in “Heartbreaks + Setbacks”, velvety and dance-drunk on “Oh Sheit it's X”, sky-gazingly ruminative on “Lotus and the Jondy”, warmly intense and motivational on “Special Stage”. More than ever, it feels like he's writing the instrumentation to fit his voice rather than substitute for or distract from it. And for a series of songs split with a dichotomy of channelling rich, often complex music through an engagingly human voice, the messages are unmistakeable.
The OutRun arcade sunniness of “Special Stage” is a key example: the song's message couldn't be more straightforward but the juxtaposition of simple lyrics and complicated music is the whole point. While there's little that seems quotable on paper, little touches of goofiness and first-thing-that-comes-to-mind spontaneity-- the delivery of his “Your purse is nice, baby, is it leather/ Or could it be suede” pickup line on “Oh Sheit it's X”, or the trip-out “straight up seein' goblins” borderline non-sequitir on “Lotus and the Jondy”-- make him the relatable gravitational center in the midst of a busy intersection of sound.
While much of its musical direction is based on Thundercat's collaborative brainstorming with Flying Lotus, the emotional core of Apocalypse rests either explicitly or implicitly under the shadow of the late Austin Peralta, the Brainfeeder musician and keyboardist/pianist on many of the songs on Golden Age of the Apocalypse. While there are specifically direct nods to his untimely passing-- most prominently on the elegaic closing suite “A Message for Austin/Praise the Lord/Enter the Void”-- the idea that Peralta's influence and memory runs through the entirety of this album's lifeblood makes a lot of sense. In some way or another, everything on Apocalypse is about taking stock, figuring yourself out, and making sure that the people that mean something to you know that they do. That it arrives through the conduit of somebody who has an elaborate means to express this, but knows when and how to keep things simple? That's how you translate virtuosity into something that hits you right in the heart. | 2013-06-07T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2013-06-07T02:00:00.000-04:00 | Jazz / Pop/R&B | Brainfeeder | June 7, 2013 | 8.2 | 0df85970-a890-410e-a740-c98a800be807 | Nate Patrin | https://pitchfork.com/staff/nate-patrin/ | null |
Pushing his versatility, ear for production, and lyricism in new directions, Vince Staples' hot streak continues. | Pushing his versatility, ear for production, and lyricism in new directions, Vince Staples' hot streak continues. | Vince Staples: Prima Donna | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22296-vince-staples-prima-donna/ | Prima Donna | Lest you worry that critical acclaim and fame have brightened his outlook, Vince Staples opens the *Prima Donna *EP with a grainy recording of him singing “This Little Light of Mine,” cut short by the sound of a gunshot. Staples barely mumbles the song under his breath, making you lean in close to the speaker; the gunshot that punctuates the track might make you jump out of your seat. This intro provides a handy metaphor for how Staples operates as an artist: He draws you in with vital music, then hits you with the ugly reality. He’s clear on at least this much from the outset on Prima Donna—if you’re here for an uplift, you’ve come to the wrong place.
On his debut full-length, Summertime ’06, Staples proved that he was not just a great rapper but a great album artist, crafting an immersive sound that transcended its production credits. Despite the impressive array of producers who worked on the album (No I.D., Clams Casino, DJ Dahi, Mikky Ekko), Summertime’s feel was uniform, a creaky, humid canvas on which Staples painted his morally ambiguous street tales. Still, while Staples might have just cemented his aesthetic, he’s already looking beyond it. Far from an effortless victory lap, Prima Donna finds the rapper veering off in a number of different directions in search of new sounds to bend to his will.
No I.D. and DJ Dahi return to produce the bulk of Prima Donna’s tracks, though their mandate this time around seems to be sonic experimentation. “Smile” is practically a rap-rock song: fuzzed-out bass, a steady guitar upstroke, an unapologetic solo in its midsection. “Pimp Hand” sounds like a heart monitor wired up to a trunk full of muffled subwoofers. “Loco” matches Staples’ breathless narration of his descent into madness with shrill glissandos; more importantly, it contains some of the EP’s most richly evocative lyrics (“I’m in the black Benz speeding with my black skin gleaming” is a whole poem in a single line).
As much as No I.D. and Dahi push past their own boundaries here, Prima Donna’s two most adventurous beats come courtesy of James Blake. While the English musician has occasionally flashed a deft hand as a hip-hop producer, we’ve never heard anything quite like these instrumentals from him. “Big Time” sounds both airy and dense, cobbling together Atari buzzes, snares that sound like money counters, and stray whirring noises. Atop all of this, Blake slowly piles up layers of skittering drum tracks until the whole thing wobbles like a Jenga tower. Staples raps furiously atop this beat, sketching out a dark counterpoint to Drake’s carefree YOLO meme (“You never know when you gon’ catch a case/Never know when you gon’ catch an eye”) before a plaintive chiptune melody creeps in.
And then there’s “War Ready,” the EP’s strongest cut and one of the most striking songs either man has had a hand in. Blake kicks off the track by flipping a chopped up sample of André 3000’s final bars from “ATLiens” over a bed of bubbling sounds. The song then segues to a skeletal arrangement that consists of little more than a single synth line laid over a steady click-clack beat—an instrumental so sparse it makes the Neptunes sound like maximalists. All the better, though, to fully appreciate Staples’ lyrics, which are as devastating here as they’ve ever been. Expanding on an idea from his Clams Casino collaboration “All Nite” (“My people ready for war”), Staples reaches back into the history of oppression to draw parallels with the present: “County jail bus, slave ship, same shit/A wise man once said/That a black man better off dead/So I’m war ready”. When he delivers the line, “Turned the African into the nigga then they hung him,” it lands with the same impact as that gunshot in the intro.
Hopelessness has always been a throughline in Staples work but Prima Donna puts a finer point on that feeling, both in its songs and interstitial spoken word bits. Staples repeatedly tells us that he’s fed up, he’s tired, he feels like giving up. And can you blame him, an artist who has spent his career cataloging the brokenness around him? On Summertime, Staples studied his own city as a microcosm of America, but here he zooms out even further, inviting you to see the bigger picture. At his best, Vince Staples is an artist who stares hard truths dead in the eye. On Prima Donna, he dares us to do the same. | 2016-08-30T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-08-30T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Def Jam / Blacksmith / Artium | August 30, 2016 | 8 | 0df9c79d-8be3-4f34-a9d8-60d39dd34a9b | Mehan Jayasuriya | https://pitchfork.com/staff/mehan-jayasuriya/ | null |
The Canadian power-pop supergroup's latest full-length is its most consistent, confident, and best album to date. | The Canadian power-pop supergroup's latest full-length is its most consistent, confident, and best album to date. | The New Pornographers: Twin Cinema | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/5773-twin-cinema/ | Twin Cinema | Of all the genres that roam the indie rock biosphere, the one that probably gets cut the most slack is power pop, which eschews influences that peaked in the past three decades, moves within a sonic range between the Ramones and Beach Boys, and whose bands are aware there's a loyal audience waiting to lap up their derivative, harmony-laden, verse-chorus-verse songs. Existing against this dire backdrop makes the New Pornographers look even more singular. It's almost unfair, in a way, given that the Pornographers aren't so much a band as a Davis Cup team of Canada's finest indie singer-songwriters, captained by veteran Carl Newman. When Newman, Destroyer's Dan Bejar, and Neko Case first got together (with, it should be noted, other random Canadians) to record Mass Romantic, it seemed to be a goofy, feverish one-off, like a boozy weekend that accidentally birthed an indie pop classic. When the LP became arguably bigger than any of their individual endeavors, the three reunited for Electric Version, but couldn't keep the momentum rolling, suggesting the project's magic was fleeting.
Twin Cinema doesn't just rebut that notion, it renders it ludicrous. With more developed ideas than Mass Romantic and a more cohesive sound than Electric Version, it's their most consistent, confident, and best album to date. Newman is once again at the wheel for the majority of the LP, furthering the notion that the New Pornographers are just Zumpano with added starpower. But this time Newman folds in the more mature sound he pursued whilst under the name A.C., focusing more on rich, Joe Jackson-style piano than arcade keyboards, and getting a lot of mileage out of the ebow. Newman's characteristic pop gems are present and accounted for ("Sing Me Spanish Techno", "Use It"), but most thrilling are the moments where he expands his sound, be it the disorienting, cyclical chorus of "Falling Through Your Clothes" or the shrilly upper-register, surprisingly funky "Three or Four".
It's a small disappointment that Neko Case's internal vocoder isn't applied to another rave-up, but Newman directs her well through two ballads, the off-kilter "The Bones of an Idol" and the wistful "These Are the Fables". Even Bejar contributes tracks that actually sound like they were recorded with the rest of the band in the room. "Jackie, Dressed in Cobras" may or may not revive the character from his Mass Romantic highlight, but it's a perfect integration of Bejar's acrid vocals into the more hyper Pornographer sound, the corners softened by Case's Children's Workshop harmonies and Newman's piano punctuations.
Yet in the upset of the year, it's drummer Kurt Dahle who practically steals Twin Cinema's show. On prior NP efforts the drums were almost an afterthought. Here the percussion is pushed to the front of the mix, and Dahle's swing and crash put tracks like "The Jessica Numbers" and "The Bleeding Heart Show" over the top. The eight-armed drumming that fills every corner of "Use It", or The Soft Bulletin-esque drum-bash coda to "These Are the Fables" allow Newman to continue his indulgence with the Who (reference "35 in the Shade" with "Boris the Spider"), nicking "Armenia City in the Sky" for the more astral portions of "Stacked Crooked".
The added rhythmic complexity is just one way in which the New Pornographers successfully tweak established formulas and set themselves apart. Sure, at their core, the songs of Twin Cinema have that catchy, melodic something that forces me to reach repeatedly for the p-word, but for Newman & co., instant hummability isn't the endpoint but the foundation. Whether it's weaving in opaque, double-meaning lyrics or sneaking a horn part way deep in the mix, the compositions on Twin Cinema are immediate yet multi-layered. They'd be great in their own right, but by comparison to the plagiaristic, closed-minded, infinitely repeating world of power pop, it's all the more special an accomplishment. | 2005-08-21T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2005-08-21T02:00:01.000-04:00 | Rock | Matador | August 21, 2005 | 9 | 0df9dbc1-97e2-4f05-ab11-f0ce415ed900 | Rob Mitchum | https://pitchfork.com/staff/rob- mitchum/ | null |
After a viral sample made her feathery vocals famous, the singer-songwriter arrives on her own terms with a debut that flits effortlessly between guitar-based soul, alt-pop, and R&B. | After a viral sample made her feathery vocals famous, the singer-songwriter arrives on her own terms with a debut that flits effortlessly between guitar-based soul, alt-pop, and R&B. | Fousheé: time machine | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/foushee-time-machine/ | time machine | Early last year, Fousheé went viral on TikTok by sheer coincidence. In 2019, the New Jersey singer-songwriter—who’d been playing gigs in New York for years and had a short-lived stint on The Voice—recorded a fluttering vocal for a royalty-free sample pack that became the backdrop of Flatbush rapper Sleepy Hallow’s inescapable “Deep End Freestyle.” Fousheé didn’t know about the song until it had begun to rack up millions of views. She took to TikTok to identify herself and rally users’ support to secure a feature credit, granting her exposure to a massive new audience, followed by a record deal with RCA. Now Fousheé is taking advantage of the moment on her own terms with time machine, a debut album that flits effortlessly between guitar-based soul, alt-pop, and R&B. Despite some tepid moments, Fousheé’s skillful vocal delivery and coolly collected personality shine through.
time machine’s pensive frame of mind comes through in its warm, ever-present lead guitar, whether quietly fingerpicked on the fed-up “I don’t love you no more” or lighting “my slime” with rosy chords. Fousheé picked up the instrument after a recent move to Los Angeles, and it has become a reliable partner for her satiny voice. The delicate “my slime” is an especially striking example, using light-footed acoustic guitar and airy backing vocals to disguise lovelorn turmoil. “I would rather be with no one,” she sings in a heady falsetto, before quickly flipping her line of thought: “You make me want to be with someone.” On “candy grapes,” she and Steve Lacy noodle back and forth for seven and a half minutes. The guitars and vocals are loose and rambling (halfway through a melody, Lacy pauses singing to correct it), and eventually the song drifts into a long, wailing guitar solo beneath Fousheé whistle-tone improvisations. It’s indulgent, but the energy is potent, like peeking into a studio occupied by two talented friends.
The album nods to Fousheé’s 1970s and ’80s influences to mixed effect. She delivers a straightforward vocal performance on a cover of Depeche Mode’s “Enjoy the Silence,” paying faithful tribute to Martin Gore’s fragility and torment without adding much, either. She interpolates Carole King with more success on “2 L8,” lifting the chorus from “It’s Too Late” before veering between rapped and sung verses of her own over a ping-ponging beat. Here, the nostalgia feels more personal and gratifying, especially in the memorable kiss-offs that dot her lyrics: “For my sanity I’ll never fall in love again,” she raps, with a spiteful shrug. “I changed your name to ‘Don’t pick up the fucking phone again.’”
That deft balance between Fousheé’s whispery, enticing flow and her aching falsetto is time machine’s greatest asset. She includes her version of “deep end” early on the album, an extended cut that creates a full song around the hopscotching chorus. Recorded at her home, made of little more than a wobbling beat and a trembling guitar line, “deep end” strips down to focus on her breezy vocal switch-ups. time machine doesn’t always flex that same level of agile melody and clever songwriting, but Fousheé’s clear talent nonetheless makes it worth the trip.
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-06-11T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2021-06-11T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | Trackmasters / RCA | June 11, 2021 | 6.7 | 0dfdea98-278d-4168-9e4c-f97a6be842a9 | Eric Torres | https://pitchfork.com/staff/eric-torres/ | |
When No New York was issued in 1978, it should have been fair warning to anyone within earshot that punk ... | When No New York was issued in 1978, it should have been fair warning to anyone within earshot that punk ... | Black Dice: Creature Comforts | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/751-creature-comforts/ | Creature Comforts | When No New York was issued in 1978, it should have been fair warning to anyone within earshot that punk would not be confined to fashion statements or cathartic brattiness. Featuring four bands from Manhattan's lower East Side, the Brian Eno-assembled compilation highlighted an artistic spirit far removed from the "pretty vacant" methodology of punk's first wave; as it happened, the sprawling, confrontational noise put forth by DNA, The Contortions, Mars, and Teenage Jesus & The Jerks resembled nothing so much as similar output by UK second-wave outfits like John Lydon's Public Image Limited or Cleveland-based archetypical post-punks Pere Ubu. That is, their "confrontation" came not so much in the physical power of the music (though it could be abrasive, to say the least) but in the conviction and often awkward, raw execution of their brand of expression.
No-wave was as much art-rock as it was punk, and despite its failure to break into the mainstream, its ideals were permanently stamped onto scores of musicians afterwards. Taking direct cues from the short movement, bands like Sonic Youth and Swans continued the often dark, grating sonic template of no-wave, and ventured even further into conceptual grounds normally associated with modern classical composition or performance art. In some ways, no-wave's successors were merely continuing a long standing New York tradition of eclecticism and the post-modern in rock that had been initiated in the 60s by The Velvet Underground and influenced by composers La Monte Young, Tony Conrad and Terry Riley. However, in the 80s, alongside a budding (and often antagonistic) American hardcore scene and wildly creative strands of post-punk all over the world, what stylistic benchmarks had been attributed to no-wave shattered into countless strands of noise, electronic music and the otherwise indescribable.
Almost three decades after the fact, New York's art-punks seem to have come full circle-- though the landscape of the rock press has not. Liars have been butchered in most mainstream music rags for making "unlistenable" music on their latest album, which, to my ears, sounds more like a tribute to art-damaged post-punk and no-wave circa 1982 than any kind of radical change in direction. Likewise, Sightings and Black Dice draw from noise, experimental punk and perennial New York faves-from-Japan High Rise and Fushitsusha. Not surprisingly, they get fewer Spin props than more melodically stable NYC outfits like the Yeah Yeah Yeahs or The Strokes (both of whom also happen to draw on the early 80s post-punk for inspiration, albeit "new-" rather than "no-" wave).
However, Black Dice, like the best of the original wave of avant-rockers, have yet to lapse into redundant hero worship or watered-down stylistic approximations. Depending on how you feel about perpetual forward motion, the Brooklyn trio (formerly a quartet, now minus drummer Hisham Bharoocha) could be admirably ambitious or maddeningly flighty; thus far, they've established a pattern on their full-lengths of abandoning the previous album's sonic palette for something drastically different. Their earliest releases could veer from spiky, violent impressionism to what Pitchfork's Brendan Reid described as "anti music" in his review of 2001's Cold Hands. When the band moved to the ultra-hip DFA label for 2002's Beaches and Canyons, one might have expected them to dabble in electroclash-- which they sort-of did on the "Cone Toaster" 12-inch, only to immediately switch gears on the hazy, ambient Miles of Smiles EP earlier this year.
Creature Comforts is Black Dice's fourth full-length, and second for DFA. Lo and behold, it doesn't sound like anything else they've released. This record is made from pedals, delay, computers, solemn guitar arpeggios, loops, robot jungle sounds and cosmic ambience. It's almost completely divorced from any strand of rock (or even punk), yet sits comfortably alongside fellow New York trippers Suicide and English provocateurs Throbbing Gristle. There are percussive moments, but no real beats; there are noisy moments, but it's hardly a "noise" record; much of it seems improvised, yet for the most part the album proceeds in a linear fashion, as if one long, strange story is unfolding. Black Dice, apparently unconcerned with establishing their noise-rock niche with peers Wolf Eyes or Lightning Bolt, are content to follow their muse as a matter of practice.
The brief opener "Cloud Pleaser" begins with a simple, folkish guitar line (oddly reminiscent of Van Morrison's "Brown Eyed Girl"), and adds electronic bongos, a dash of xylophone and light buzzing sounds hard-panned to the left and right. The subtly insistent pulse established by the small, electronic orchestra gives the piece a tropical edge even as the sounds suggest a piecemeal, post-apocalyptic Salvation Army setup. "Treetops" takes re-orchestrates that pulse with a ping-pong generator drum and distorted space bubbles. Throughout Creature Comforts, impressions of the jungle-- be they animal calls or tribal pound-- shape the soundscape. The end of "Creature" overflows with a wild, nocturnal frenzy using live percussion to accentuate the desperate, red-eyed cries of assorted robo-beasts jumping and flying about the mix.
The 15-minute centerpiece "Skeleton" rises slowly, with a slightly warped guitar figure, looped over more jungle percussion and unidentifiable humming calls (a human voice?). Like much of the rest of Creature Comforts, "Skeleton" features a surprisingly small number of instrumental elements. Black Dice uses them in a way that not only takes advantage of their skill manipulating electronic sound, but also unifies the album's otherwise disparate segments. The piece glides through several sections of propulsive ambience, each morphing into the next, and when the hi-hat pitter-patter emerges from a collage of looped guitars, the effect is as if stepping out of the jungle into an oasis, even if only for a short moment.
I probably shouldn't be surprised to hear such striking moments of clarity. Black Dice, living up to their track record of ever-diligent experimentation and the embrace of change, as well as a vibrant backdrop of New York pandemonium, have delivered one of this year's most interesting records and proved that you don't have to be noisy to make beautiful noise. | 2004-06-20T01:00:04.000-04:00 | 2004-06-20T01:00:04.000-04:00 | Experimental / Rock | DFA | June 20, 2004 | 8 | 0e023328-ef98-4858-ace0-2016a4cc11a0 | Dominique Leone | https://pitchfork.com/staff/dominique-leone/ | null |
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