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Prophecy is a live record capturing a 1964 performance by free-jazz pioneer Albert Ayler, one month after his epoch-defining Spiritual Unity. His trio crackles with life here, seemingly aware that they were ushering in a new era. | Prophecy is a live record capturing a 1964 performance by free-jazz pioneer Albert Ayler, one month after his epoch-defining Spiritual Unity. His trio crackles with life here, seemingly aware that they were ushering in a new era. | Albert Ayler: Bells/Prophecy | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21345-bellsprophecy/ | Bells/Prophecy | Albert Ayler’s music was defined by its excesses. He played tenor saxophone with too much vibrato and too much feeling, outlining melodies that were too simple and too catchy before descending into skronky noise that was too harsh and too unsettling. Where jazz had been defined by its relationship to form, with musicians practicing their craft within established idioms or inching beyond them to create something else, Ayler’s music was too amorphous for any container, a volatile liquid churning and splashing and running over and generally making a glorious mess.
Ayler’s epochal studio recordings were made for the tiny ESP-Disk label in 1964 and '65. The first released was Spiritual Unity, and it was immediately recognized by those who heard it as a landmark. Five years earlier, saxophonist Ornette Coleman had reconfigured his group so that it no longer contained a piano, the first crack in the fissure that would soon become free jazz. By de-emphasizing chord changes, which provide the harmonic foundation for improvisation that had defined jazz since its inception, Coleman opened the music to new possibilities but also created confusion: If you could play virtually anything when you soloed, what made one player or one composition better than another?
On his early recordings, working with the trio of bassist Gary Peacock and drummer Sunny Murray, Ayler helped clarify the answer to that question. The general shape of Prophecy, a live record capturing a date in June 1964 and reissued here in expanded form, hews very closely to that of Spiritual Unity, which was recorded in the studio one month later. Ayler’s trio begins a given piece by playing one of the sing-song melodies that were pouring out of him during this period, melodies often based on simple folk songs from Western Europe. These fragments are so simple and memorable, in fact, that they are pretty much the definition of what we would now call earworms, the kind of tunes you might hear a five-year-old humming—think "Patty Cake" or "The ABC Song"— or else melodramatic march songs, like Ayler’s "Spirits Rejoice," based on the French national anthem "La Marseillaise." Much of the tension in Ayler’s early work comes in waiting for these theme statements to splinter and fall apart and be pulled into unrecognizable shapes. Once that happens, beauty clashes with ugliness, lines between joy and mourning dissolve, and the music becomes a torrent of undifferentiated emotion.
Despite his music’s structural freedom, technique was essential to Ayler’s art. He had a booming, bottom-heavy tone reminiscent of the honking sax players who dominated 1940s and '50s R&B, but he could also reach to the shrillest higher registers, and he played with an ultra-wide, quavering vibrato that brought to mind the ecstatic trembling of gospel music. Bassist Gary Peacock alternated droning bowed lines with a spindly single-note attack, and Murray moved drumming away from its timekeeping role and, leaning heavily on his cymbals, into the realm of pure texture. All this comes together here on "Ghosts," Ayler’s definitive piece—he recorded it over and over during his early years, both live and in the studio, finding new possibilities every time he deconstructed its jaunty opening theme. Prophecy presents both the "First Variation" and "Second Variation" (Ayler’s song titles were often confusing, with the same titles sometimes used for different pieces), which both found their way to Spiritual Unity. The trio crackles with life as they present the song here, seemingly aware that they were ushering in a new era.
The original Prophecy consisted of five tunes; this expanded version presents those alongside the rest of the music recorded that evening, which initially appeared on the Holy Ghost box set in 2004. Having it all together in one place makes sense. The other music included on this reissue is the 20-minute piece "Bells," which was recorded live in 1965 and initially released as a one-sided EP. Though they have been paired together on CD for some time now, there’s no particular reason for "Bells" and Prophecy to be considered together, but early Ayler has been re-released and re-packaged steadily in the CD era.
If Prophecy found Ayler at the dawn of his game-changing new sound, "Bells" hinted at where he would go in his middle period, expanding his band and stringing together longer pieces built from smaller parts. (Though presented as a single piece, "Bells" is a number of shorter tunes that flow into each other.) Adding alto saxophonist Charles Tyler and his brother Donald Ayler on trumpet and switching Lewis Worrell for Peacock on bass, "Bells" explores how Ayler’s music worked in an ensemble. In another year he would add strings to his then-current touring band and they would become a bizarre and supremely moving sort of chamber orchestra (the peak recordings of this band can be found on The Complete Greenwich Village Sessions). "Bells" has hints of that development; it’s an essential snapshot of the moment if not quite one of Ayler’s essential releases.
One of the most telling sounds on this release exists outside the music. As "Ghosts (Second Variation)" ends in an impassioned stream of notes from Ayler and moaning vocals from one of his sidemen and he re-states the opening theme, we hear the applause of the audience, which sounds like it’s coming from 10 people tops. It’s true that this is Ayler at the start of his career, but it hints at the lonely road walked by an artist who sees the world differently. Ayler had a huge raft of great music ahead of him, but also a lot of heartache. | 2016-01-18T01:00:01.000-05:00 | 2016-01-18T01:00:01.000-05:00 | Jazz | ESP-Disk | January 18, 2016 | 8.4 | 04ef79cc-b872-4783-b7ae-af066e44bc08 | Mark Richardson | https://pitchfork.com/staff/mark-richardson/ | null |
Marking a blunt break with the filigreed maximalism he nailed on My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy, Kanye's sixth solo album trades smooth soul and anthemic choruses for jarring electro, acid house, and industrial grind while delivering some of his most lewd and heart-crushing tales yet. | Marking a blunt break with the filigreed maximalism he nailed on My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy, Kanye's sixth solo album trades smooth soul and anthemic choruses for jarring electro, acid house, and industrial grind while delivering some of his most lewd and heart-crushing tales yet. | Kanye West: Yeezus | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/18172-kanye-west-yeezus/ | Yeezus | Look at the song title "I Am a God" and it seems like easy blasphemy-- Kanye West's update of John Lennon's "more popular than Jesus" shocker from 1966. But just as the Beatle's proclamation was fuller and wiser in context-- "I believe that what people call God is something in all of us," Lennon would later explain-- "I Am a God" is not simply the latest self-important blast from one of pop culture's pre-eminent egoists. For starters, the track sounds less triumphant than breathtakingly vexed, crashing in with a gnarled dancehall vocal sample and paranoid sawtooth synths that aim to destroy. Here, Kanye raps about loyalty, respect, threesomes, and, yes, croissants with the urgency of someone being chased by a 30-ton steamroller. The song is pierced by a series of primal screams, pixelated outbursts that are only briefly able to halt the beat's heaving evil. In Kanye's hands, being a god sounds stressful as hell, something we can all relate to, and the song's apparent inspiration is a passage from the book of Psalms: "I have said, Ye are gods; and all of you are children of the most High."
These are the immeasurably lofty stakes Kanye deals in on Yeezus, his sixth solo album. His intensity here has a heightened desperation as he howls into the void, but the Chicago native has always been beguiled by the view from above. Take "Jesus Walks", where he references another Psalm while gasping from on high: "I walk through the valley of the Chi where death is/ Top floor, the view alone will leave you breathless." Then, on "POWER", he contemplates leaping out of the penthouse, "letting everything go." In a way, Yeezus is the panicked sound of that ensuing free-fall, a rush of angst and despair with absolutely nothing left to lose.
The album is something of a razor-sharpened take on 2008's distressed 808s & Heartbreak and marks a blunt break with the filigreed maximalism Kanye so thoroughly nailed on My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy. In hindsight, the latter record-- with its ingratiating GOOD Fridays buildup, endless guest list, and uncharacteristically apologetic interview sessions-- was his attempt at recapturing a superstar-sized American audience after a slew of entertaining-yet-questionable PR incidents. Except it didn't exactly work: While Twisted Fantasy was universally lauded and went platinum, it still stands as Kanye's worst-selling album to date, failing to produce a top 10 single. But even if it wasn't a chart smash, the intricacy and durability of Twisted Fantasy incubated the Cult of Kanye to an extreme level. "I’d rather piss a bunch of people off and make myself happy than make everyone else happy and be pissed off inside," he told VIBE around the release of 808s. Yeezus doubles-down on this exclusionary philosophy: "Soon as they like you, make 'em unlike you/ 'Cause kissing people ass is so unlike you."
For Kanye, there's purpose in repulsion. And on Yeezus, he trades out smooth soul and anthemic choruses for jarring electro, acid house, and industrial grind while delivering some of his most lewd and heart-crushing tales yet. This is willful provocation that Ice Cube, Madonna, and Trent Reznor could all be proud of. Some of the record has him tackling the same issues he's been rapping about since The College Dropout, albeit with a fire-eyed stare. On his debut's "Family Business", he poignantly lamented a jailed cousin's absence at the Thanksgiving dinner table in a manner "so sweet, like a photo of your granny's picture." On Yeezus, he's still addressing the plight of incarcerated black men, but now he's incensed. With "New Slaves", he confronts us with vulgar stereotypes while exposing the prison-industrial complex for the deeply systemic racist sham that it is.
Meanwhile, XXX creeper "I'm In It" sounds like a dancehall orgasm mired in quicksand and makes previous come-ons like "Slow Jamz" come off like Disney theme songs. "The kids and the wife life, but can't wake up from the nightlife," says the new father on that track's knowingly button-pushing final verse. "I'm so scared of my demons/ I go to sleep with a nightlight." Kanye told The New York Times he's recently reached a new level of Zen, but this is the opposite of beach-chair music. Perhaps the album's most explicit lines are the blurry fantasies of a confessed porn addict who's described his daughter's mother as a "superstar all from a home movie." Without much room for levity, Kanye's complicated and distrustful view of women is unrelenting on Yeezus. And while there's no real excuse for flat oafishness like "eatin' Asian pussy, all I need was sweet and sour sauce," many of the album's most powerful moments have him broken down, insecure, and bloody, railing against an ineptitude with the opposite sex.
Album pinnacle "Blood on the Leaves" tells a nightmarish story of divorce and betrayal, all while samples of Nina Simone's pitched-up "Strange Fruit" and TNGHT's demonic "R U Ready" horns play yin and yang to the protagonist's alternately sorrowful and furious headspace. "Hold My Liquor" and "Guilt Trip", meanwhile, find Kanye trying to restate his manhood while his emotions crumble around him; if he's not drunk and swerve-y, trying vainly to reconcile with an ex, he's hoping to brag himself out of being dumped. Caustic humor shows up now and then, buoying certain lines or tracks like "Send It Up" and "Bound 2", but it's often fleeting. As on "Runaway", there's something palpably sad about the men in these songs, which twists them away from misogynistic assertions of power toward feelings that are ultimately more self-destructive. As contemporaries like Jay-Z, Beyoncé, and Justin Timberlake increasingly devote their music to largely winning tales of contentment, Kanye is unwilling or unable to settle for settling down.
This discomfort is essential to his enduring appeal. For instance, instead of working with giant phone companies to guarantee commercial success, a la his big brother, Kanye's now making a point out of rejecting corporate sponsorship. Whether it's a meaningful stance or a blindly contrarian move is up for debate. But after recent tensions between hip-hop and corporate America, visceral and disturbing lines like "put my fist in her like a civil rights sign" put Kanye beyond the reach of mainstream brands hoping to siphon his credibility. As he told the Times, he's not disinterested in the idea of big companies or big money-- he compared himself to Steve Jobs, after all-- but he wants control.
The restlessness spreads to his aesthetic and collaborative choices. Rather than relying on known hitmakers to augment his music, Kanye solicited ideas from exciting up-and-comers including Hudson Mohawke, Young Chop, and Arca. And even veteran producers involved in the project, like Rick Rubin and Daft Punk, were seemingly chosen not for their name recognition but their history of rule-breaking. In the mid-1980s, Rubin veered away from the colorful, party-starting tones of early rap music and created bare, hard beats for LL Cool J, Run-D.M.C., and the Beastie Boys-- a perfect fit for Yeezus' less-is-more snarl. And though Kanye's blaring, digitized assault couldn't be further from Daft Punk's naturalistic, groove-based Random Access Memories, the artists share a basic philosophy. As Daft Punk's Thomas Bangalter recently said of their new record: "We had the luxury to do things that so many people cannot do, but it doesn't mean that with luxury comes comfort."
The idea extends to the how Yeezus treats the human voice. Running with the confounding hook from last year's "Mercy", dancehall patois is scattered throughout, bringing with it that music's sense of menacing confrontation. And Bon Iver's Justin Vernon shows up on a few tracks, using his voice to give the darkness an angelic tint. Expanding upon the cracked vocal experimentation on Twisted Fantasy's "Blame Game", Kanye's own voice is often shadowed by pitched-down ghouls. And though he could've likely chosen any rapper on earth to guest on the riotous "Send It Up"-- probably the most likely, if not only, chance Yeezus has for a rap-radio hit-- he chose Chicago's relatively unknown King L. His presence, along with that of fellow Chi-town driller Chief Keef, makes the message clear: America may want to ignore these young black men from the gang-strewn South Side, but here, they have a voice.
All of these unlikely choices demonstrate how cohesion and bold intent are at a premium on Yeezus, perhaps more than any other Kanye album. Each fluorescent strike of noise, incongruous tempo flip, and warped vocal is bolted into its right place across the record's fast 40 minutes. The precise approach runs through Yeezus' guerrilla-style promotion, too, which found an army of dark vans lighting projections onto buildings around the world, itself a boots-on-the-ground reaction to today's InstaTweet brand of music dissemination. I went to one of these impromptu happenings last Saturday night, in the middle of Manhattan. At 1:20 a.m., the words "NOT FOR SALE" lit up on the south side of the Louis Vuitton building. A few guys ran across the street with Christmas-morning glee, snapping photos. Then, Kanye's starkly-lit visage appeared to recite "New Slaves"'s anti-consumerist lines as cabs streaked by the luxury stores below. His was the only black face to be seen across the jumbo ads lining an eerily desolate 5th Ave. The van soon closed its doors and drove away; the culture bomb’s flash was over in an instant, but the reverberations were just starting to spread. | 2013-06-18T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2013-06-18T02:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Def Jam | June 18, 2013 | 9.5 | 04f00db0-ee9c-4f7c-b8a1-22ecccc9cd56 | Ryan Dombal | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ryan-dombal/ | null |
With a sci-fi concept and a psychedelic sensibility, the NiNE8 Collective member brings a mix of funk, ska punk, grunge, dance, and indie that’s part London, part L.A. | With a sci-fi concept and a psychedelic sensibility, the NiNE8 Collective member brings a mix of funk, ska punk, grunge, dance, and indie that’s part London, part L.A. | Lava La Rue: Starface | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/lava-la-rue-starface/ | Starface | On Lava La Rue’s jangling new-wave jam “Push N Shuv,” the future collides with the past. La Rue’s vocal takes, recorded when the artist was 21, are a time capsule marking the exact moment they sowed the seeds that would become their debut album. The vocals intertwine with a piercing flute melody, which adds a dash of sci-fi surrealism to the otherwise retro funk groove. On STARFACE, the record that arrives five years after those vocals were recorded, La Rue continues to catalyze the old and the new. The result is a glistening mixture of psychedelic funk, ska punk, grunge, soul, and indie rock.
La Rue—whose stage name is an anagram of their birth name, Ava Laurel (also spelled Aiwa Laurel)—was born in west London in 1998. Raised primarily by their Jamaican grandmother, they entered foster care in their teen years. Surrounded by the punk heritage of the West London estates they lived in, they started a DIY band of their own named the West Borns, which they’ve described as an aspiring “all-girl band version of the Clash.” Later, in school, they met fellow musicians Lloyd Macdonald and Jess Smyth—now known by stage names Mac Wetha and Biig Piig—with whom they formed the NiNE8 Collective. NiNE8 represent a radical proposition in a world of nepo babies: independent, working-class Gen Z artists who insist on splitting all profits equally between them, prioritizing community and collaboration above solo success. Alongside their work with the collective, La Rue has collaborated with artists including Clairo, Deb Never, and Vegyn on their own music—releasing a clutch of EPs blurring their indie, punk, and rap influences since 2017—as well as directing visuals for other artists, including Wet Leg.
Lava heralded a hallucinogenic new era with their 2022 EP Hi-Fidelity, a mellow collection of breezy, trippy funk. On STARFACE, they lean further into that psychedelic sensibility, this time with bolder, braver melodies and a flair for the dramatic. The record hangs around a concept—an alien lands on Earth and learns about the destructive nature of human relationships (or as La Rue puts it, a “lesbian Ziggy Stardust”)—but following the narrative isn’t really necessary to enjoy the record’s plush, omnivorous sonic world. Written and recorded between London and L.A., the record has its feet on the rain-spattered concrete of La Rue’s childhood homes and its head in sunny California skies: Flecks of drum’n’bass and ska bump shoulders with soul, funk, and R&B.
In keeping with La Rue’s collaborative spirit, STARFACE is full of features. Their NiNE8 peers take turns offering uneven but spirited verses on the bass-driven “Fluorescent Beyond Space”; Biig Piig’s feather-light delivery over a rush of Tame Impala-style synths makes a particularly dreamy impression. La Rue also looks outside the collective for creative input, conjuring a queer fantasy with K-indie star So Yoon on “INTERPLANETARY HOPPIN,” and romantically reimagining pirate-radio sounds with Malaysian-Irish artist Yunè Pinku on “Second Hand Sadness.” Meanwhile, on the muscular “Poison Cookie,” La Rue recruits New Jersey rapper Audrey Nuna for a rock anthem with real superhero fight montage energy.
Fusing so many voices and genre elements can sometimes feel chaotic, but for the most part, La Rue makes it cohere. At 17 tracks long, STARFACE is hardly short on effervescent musical ideas, but it sags under the weight of its alien metaphors by the time you make it to the woozy outro of “Celestial Destiny.” Some of the record’s more on-the-nose hooks—“So many humans, and where’s the humanity?” La Rue sighs on “Humanity”—don’t live up to the gravitas promised by their sweeping grunge guitars and luxurious vocal layers. But elsewhere, as on the smooth funk of “Better,” which features Californian bedroom-pop star Cuco, La Rue uses that concise, plain-speaking style to distill hard-won wisdom into a perfectly simple pop hook: “It will not feel this way forever.” It’s clear that Lava La Rue’s ambition as an artist burns brightly. Right now, its light and heat is overflowing, a little messy and uncontained; but the stardust is unmistakable. | 2024-07-20T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2024-07-20T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | Dirty Hit | July 20, 2024 | 6.9 | 04f068dc-5f2c-491d-9b6f-531daee2775e | Aimee Cliff | https://pitchfork.com/staff/aimee-cliff/ | |
Occasionally, copywriters paint themselves into corners. Years ago, some Michigan\n\ salaryman decided Kellogg's Wheats were just too large ... | Occasionally, copywriters paint themselves into corners. Years ago, some Michigan\n\ salaryman decided Kellogg's Wheats were just too large ... | Joan of Arc: The Gap | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/4270-the-gap/ | The Gap | Occasionally, copywriters paint themselves into corners. Years ago, some Michigan salaryman decided Kellogg's Wheats were just too large to handle for an accelerating American culture. Born soon were the Mini-Wheats, painted in glucose shellac for a still further accelerating American culture.
As time passed, the old culture-accelerating pedal was kept firmly to the floor, and before long, Americans demanded a cereal that could at least fit on a spoon or be poured directly into a mouth held agape. Kelloggs' marketing department already had their Mini-Wheats; where could they go from there? Consulting the office Thesaurus, Kellogg's thinktankers fiddled with Bantam Wheats, Lilliputian Wheats, Teeny Wheats, and Microscopic Wheats. Caffeine-burned and frustrated, they finally realized they'd exasperated their Wheats scale decades earlier. The marketers threw in the towel and went with "Spoonsize." Lesson learned: consider the future before throwing adjectives at a product.
If only I'd taken more Marketing classes or gotten past page four of Tony the Tiger Was Hunted and Killed for the Medicinal Purposes of His Ground Penis: The Downfall and Mis-Marketing of Kellogg's Cereal in Late 20th Century Asian Markets, I might have learned from this modern fable in regards to my continual critical relation to Joan of Arc. Live in Chicago, 1999, the predecessor to The Gap, struck me as "horrible," "abysmal," and perhaps, "the worst record I've ever heard." How could I fail to consider another album?!
Yet, Tim Kinsella and Joan of Arc are back with the minimal, random The Gap. Live in Chicago, 1999 was certainly "abysmal," but that word implies a "bottomless," "fathomless," or "infinite" depth of horrible. How can one proceed further than the infinite? But let's skip all this classification and reification of "horrible" and cut to the chase: Joan of Arc make unlistenable faux-art records.
Tim Kinsella has embraced ProTools editing and David Grubbs in a similar technology/hero fetish as Harmony Korine with his digital camcorder and Dogme 95 directors. Both jet-haired, unwashed-looking pretenders name-drop John Cassavetes and Assata Shakur-- Kinsella in the title to The Gap's brief drone instrumental, "John Cassavetes, Assata Shakur, and Guy Debord Walk into a Bar..."; Korine in his tossed-off, cut-and-paste "novel," A Crackup at the Race Riots-- while wrapping their hollow ideas in whatever formless movement currently licks the lobes of the Village Voice.
Lightweight absurdity runs throughout their work with intended irony, but true humanity is never injected to raise the work even a half-notch above pure absurdity. Thus, song titles like "(You) [I] Can Not See (You) [Me] as (I) [You] Can", despite whatever in-jokes or winking, merely frustrate. "Another Brick at the Gap (Part 2)" (there's no part one) and "United Colors of the Gap" similarly hint at satire, but offer quiet wank. The silhouettes against white that comprise the record's packaging fittingly sum up its empty ingredients.
There are two discernable songs on The Gap-- the first and the last-- which are interchangeable. Gentle, haphazard acoustic and/or clean electric guitar pickings trickle over rodent percussion. With the aid of computer editing, the music's spinal matter is spread even thinner. Consider it the first Free Emo record. "Freemo," if you will. The scatterbrain blips and digital hum follow no pattern which would imply a floating, associative stream-of-consciousness concept. But the music is being associated to nothing other than overused post-rock/emo clichés, and is arguably unconscious to begin with.
"(You) [I] Can Not See (You) [Me] as (I) [You] Can" abruptly cuts into awkward silence throughout. The sound of sneakers in a dryer rumbles underneath. Welcome to the future! Of music! Somewhere in the middle of the utterly indistinguishable tracks 3 to 7, a lifelike police siren rises. Perhaps Tim Kinsella realizes his crime, but it's neither amusing or interesting. Jeremy Boyle, playing the "Computer," erodes each track into near nothingness, which is frankly a step up from the previous record. Kinsella's lyrics remain refreshingly absent for the most part.
Joan of Arc comprise a tiny, relatively new niche in underground music. A so-called "art band" on a disrespected, bleached, college-boy pop label that impresses few Wire subscribers, the Arc will never shake their whiny emo roots. Nor do they deserve to. Kinsella might remain the token "difficult" artist in the indie pop collection of University students, but Joan of Arc are as Chicago, low-class, unknown, and unappetizing as Green River cola. The Gap will be their Spoonsize Horrible album. | 2000-08-31T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2000-08-31T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Metal / Rock | Jade Tree | August 31, 2000 | 1.9 | 04f0b79c-1ded-498e-bc26-34d0b9d6b14a | Brent DiCrescenzo | https://pitchfork.com/staff/brent-dicrescenzo/ | null |
Two French DJs evoke heartbreak and desolation in a compilation of little-heard gems. | Two French DJs evoke heartbreak and desolation in a compilation of little-heard gems. | Various Artists: Sky Girl | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22118-sky-girl/ | Sky Girl | It’s hard to believe that this compilation was first sold at the impeccably cool Colette boutique in Paris: it has the intimacy of a handmade mixtape, so private and confessional that it could only have been meant for one person's ears. However, this 15-track set was culled by two deep-digging Parisian DJs (Julien Dechery and DJ Sundae), not a heartbroken soul seeking solace in the most lonesome sounds in her record box.
Sky Girl sees wider release this month, thanks to the efforts of the upstart Australian label Efficient Space–and on the surface, there’s little to tie these songs together, though most come from private press albums and one-off singles. They span the 1960s through the early 1990s, Christian folk to exotica to minimal wave. Some songs are propelled by rattled tambourines, others by drum machines, but the beats rarely rise above a murmur. Bosom-heaving strings garland Joyce Heath’s “I Wouldn't Dream of It” while Bruce Langhorne’s 1971 track “Leaving Del Norte” casts a spell with only a dobro in his hand. (The New York folk musician Langhorne is the most recognizable artist here; he soundtracked Peter Fonda’s ethereal western The Hired Hand and was the inspiration for Dylan’s “Mr. Tambourine Man.”)
A folk current does run strongly throughout. Some such ethereal elements bring to mind Vashti Bunyan’s Just Another Diamond Day and Linda Perhacs’ Parallelograms–two obscure, hushed albums that spurred on the freak-folk movement. Linda Smith’s naïf strums and whispers on opener “I So Liked Spring” could bridge the gap between C86 and the K Records roster. But how to classify “Wild Dream,” wherein a lounge band slinks behind Joe Tossini’s affected croon about a rainbow speaking to him in outer space? (It’s hard to even catch that bizarre line over the arcade blips that overtake the song.) Contributions from never-known acts like Some of My Best Friends Are Canadians, Angel, and Karen Marks sound like they borrowed Young Marble Giants’ organ for an afternoon and cut a lone single before vanishing into selective memory. In fact, YMG are the comp’s clearest comparison: spare and haunting music rendered by humans interacting with tape and drum machines, singing clinically as they skirt around unnamed emotional depths.
It’s that ineffable sense of longing, loss and melancholy that gives every song on Sky Girl its haunted pall. Lyrical allusions suggest the intangible, be they dreams, ghosts, or the loss of love. That these small songs actually made it to tape, rather than fading into mist, seems an achievement in itself. Each song doubles as a confession made to the corner of a room.
Sky Girl’s rarest track best exemplifies its overall sentiment: “Sarra,” singer Gary Davenport’s 1983 ode to a girl he was so obsessed with that it dissolved both his relationship and his band. He sat on the pressing so that no one would ever hear it, and it hasn’t been released until now. Only when a friend convinced him to post a few copies online, decades later, did it come to the Sky Girl DJs’ attention. It’s a standard pop song in which every sonic element, from vocals to rattle, sounds cloaked in the base emotions of unrequited love: dejection, yearning, despair, detachment. One pained question of Davenport’s seems to speak also for Sky Girl’s long journey to our ears: “I am drawn into the mist/What is real and what is myth?” | 2016-07-30T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-07-30T01:00:00.000-04:00 | null | Efficient Space | July 30, 2016 | 8.2 | 04f14056-b5a0-4892-9ef5-4115cad08d10 | Andy Beta | https://pitchfork.com/staff/andy-beta/ | null |
The Newark rapper, Newark producer, and Bronx drill rapper join forces for a 27-track mixtape that fires on all cylinders. | The Newark rapper, Newark producer, and Bronx drill rapper join forces for a 27-track mixtape that fires on all cylinders. | Defiant Presents / Sha EK / Bandmanrill: Defiant Presents: Jiggy in Jersey (ft. MCVertt) | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/defiant-presents-sha-ek-bandmanrill-defiant-presents-jiggy-in-jersey-ft-mcvertt/ | Defiant Presents: Jiggy in Jersey (ft. MCVertt) | At the forefront of the ongoing club rap explosion is Newark’s Bandmanrill, who alongside producer and longtime collaborator McVertt has worked hard to combine Jersey club’s pep and sped-up samples with the moody theatrics of drill. In 2022, he found a kindred spirit in Sha EK, a more aggressive Bronx drill rapper around the same age. Their chemistry is evident on their joint single “Who You Touch,” where both keep pace with producer EMRLD’s triple-time kickdrums and shimmering guitar, their grit and enthusiasm rubbing off against each other.
Teaming up with Defiant Records, the trio of Bandmanrill, Sha EK, and McVertt commemorate all that club rap and drill have to offer with the 27-track mixtape Defiant Presents: Jiggy In Jersey. For a project of such length, there’s surprisingly little filler. Bandmanrill and McVertt fire on all cylinders, delivering rhymes that are vicious, funny, and reflective when they need to be. The beats are fast-paced and eminently danceable: McVertt is a playful, adventurous tinkerer whose talents show through on tracks like opener “Face Down,” where his jungle gym of a beat gives the verses of A$AP Ferg and Sexyy Red superhuman pomp. Or “Respectfully,” where he’s bouncing plinking synths and bubble pops off of EK’s barks against haters.
It’s a singular, fun vibe that the rest of the album’s producers don’t always match; there are only so many combos of a kick drum pattern and ominous synth line that you can hear before you’ve got the gist. Producers Aston Kain and GKRS come closest to McVertt’s adventurousness on “Fanned Out,” cutting the drums out from under a trilling sample, only to gradually add them back in, ratcheting up the tension with every bar.
Several tracks are remixes of Bandman and EK’s earlier solo and group hits. One of the more successful repeats is of Bandman’s single “Mr. D.C.T.,” which gives Crystal Waters’ immortal house staple “Gypsy Woman (She’s Homeless)” that trademark Jersey club stomp; the new version is bookended by a killer guest verse from Brooklyn rapper Maiya The Don, who pops off with spicy wordplay. Meanwhile, Chicago drill rapper Lil Zay Osama tries to hold his own on “Never Want to Be Them, Pt. 2,” but his marble-mouthed raps are overwhelmed by the beat. Better is “Jiggy In Jersey Pt. 3,” a remix where McVertt abandons the minimal thumps of the first two versions for droning synths and drill 808s. It’s one of a handful of times that all three marquee acts appear on the same song and proves just how potent they are as a unit.
Both club and drill music have been watered down in the mainstream since the breakout of their biggest stars, and that’s double true of the East Coast fusion on display here. But imitators can’t touch Mcvertt’s springy, breakneck productions or EK and Bandman’s marathon sprints, which they make it seem as easy as a walk to the corner store for grabba. Hardcore fans shouldn’t be concerned: Jiggy In Jersey gets it directly from the source—no artificial rhythms or preservatives to be found. | 2023-08-16T00:01:00.000-04:00 | 2023-08-16T00:01:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Defiant / Warner | August 16, 2023 | 7.5 | 04f250ea-3e9b-4241-b147-f5bddad70018 | Dylan Green | https://pitchfork.com/staff/dylan-green/ | |
One of the most exciting new voices in hip-hop makes her proper full-length debut, doing a lot of singing and not nearly enough rapping. | One of the most exciting new voices in hip-hop makes her proper full-length debut, doing a lot of singing and not nearly enough rapping. | Nicki Minaj: Pink Friday | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/14898-pink-friday/ | Pink Friday | Over the past few years, Nicki Minaj has been one of the most exciting new voices in hip-hop. She's delivered a stream of song-stealing or song-saving guest verses, one dynamite mixtape (Beam Me Up Scotty) and another, as good, unofficial one (Barbie World), and generally displayed a swagger, unpredictability, and ferocity not heard from a female MC in years. Little of that, however, is on her long-awaited debut album, Pink Friday.
Minaj turned a lot of heads by coming out of the gate as a supremely confident, powerful MC in any one of the many guises she has chosen to inhabit. She's been most often bracketed with Lil' Kim, but those comparisons are more about image and sexuality than her music; at her best, Minaj on the mic is far closer to the free-spirited, without-a-net work of Missy Elliott. She displays a wide range of talents, stuffing her verses with complex internal rhymes, agile shifts in character and voice, and twisted, offbeat wordplay. Avoiding easy categorization on her mixtapes and guest verses, Minaj has played the coquette, the powerhouse, the lady, the diva, the rapper's rapper, the fembot, and the comedian. She's posed as Rihanna on the batshit awesome "Saxon", played the harajuku Barbie on "Beam Me Up Scotty", and shapeshifted into battle rapper mode on "Itty Bitty Piggy". And while she plays fast and loose with her past, her inclination to slip into a number of characters is the work of a creative former theater kid rather than a myth-making rapper.
And then her debut mainstream single, the rhythmically militaristic "Massive Attack", stiffed-- failing to chart on either the U.S. pop or rap charts. A few months later, the Annie Lennox-sampling hip-hop ballad "Your Love"-- a track she recorded a couple of years ago, most likely as a demo-- became an accidental hit, rising from an online leak to radio. And so now the woman who stole Kanye West's "Monster" from her all-star cohorts spends the bulk of her solo debut singing instead of rapping, leaning on recognizable and often corny 1980s/90s samples, and fronting a series of midtempo songs that inevitably lean into the string-led chorus so popular in R&B these days. In short: The most unpredictable voice in hip-hop decided she wanted to be like everyone else. Fortunately, even when she's aiming down the middle of the road, she's at least better than almost anyone else.
Minaj will get praise for her depth of skills, but this album isn't about showing off a range of talents-- it's about leaning on the ones that have worked in the marketplace. Oddly, she comes out of the gate with the album's most aggressive and most successful run of tracks, so livening up the clattering Swizz Beatz production "Roman's Revenge" that you're tempted to try to repeatedly get through it, even knowing that it contains Eminem recycling his Shady-circa-99 persona. The Bangladesh production "Did It on 'Em" is the record's best track, one of the few times Minaj goes to toe-to-toe with a huge beat. Minaj is upstaged by Drake and Kanye West on "Moment 4 Life" and "Blazin'", respectively, but these tracks-- plus the Rihanna collaboration "Fly" and the solo ballad "Save Me"-- are the best examples of what Pink Friday is rather than what many of us wanted it to be. That quartet of songs is proof that, even with commercial concessions, Minaj could have knocked out a great pop record, though one with anemic singles like "Check It Out" and "Right Thru Me" was never going to be it.
The gulf between Minaj's public persona and her music here reminds me of the criticism laid at the feet of Lady Gaga-- that for all of her high-culture namedropping, wearable art, and big event videos, Gaga's music rarely reflects the full range of her conceptual constructions. Gaga's emergence has certainly stylistically loosed up America's top female stars. Alongside the emergence of Minaj and Ke$ha, Rihanna, Katy Perry, and even the often conservative Beyoncé have enjoyed the license to be more flamboyant and delightfully cartoonish. In most cases, however, their music is in line with current fashion rather than setting it. (That said, the artist here closest in line with the the sound of today's top 40, Rihanna, is also the most consistently excellent; while it's Ke$ha, the one most forging her own path, who is irredeemably awful.) It's almost as if this generation of pop starlets is content to play outsized personalities at awards shows, photo shoots, and videos, yet stay within a sleepy comfort zone on record. Seeing Minaj fall into this rut is particularly disappointing.
The inclination here is to blame the label, but a song like "Dear Old Nicki" reads almost as a defense of what she's done on this album, and that's more disappointing than the actual record. (Perhaps not surprisingly, all four of the bonus tracks spread across different versions of the LP are rap songs; two of them-- "Blow Ya Mind" and "Muny"-- are among the best songs on the record.) A letter to her "old," unhinged, more restless persona, Minaj excuses the decisions she's made on this record because of the money she stands to make from it. "You was underground, and I was mainstream/ I live the life now, that we would daydream," Minaj the R&B star tells her more creative self. It's a deflating song on what, despite being a good modern pop album, is a depressing Nicki Minaj album. | 2010-11-24T01:00:02.000-05:00 | 2010-11-24T01:00:02.000-05:00 | Rap | Universal Motown / Young Money Entertainment | November 24, 2010 | 6.5 | 04f383ef-6ca2-4109-b400-eb1af6f1bb9e | Scott Plagenhoef | https://pitchfork.com/staff/scott-plagenhoef/ | null |
It is not, strictly speaking, a good record—Eminem hasn’t made one of those in a decade—but his latest boasts enough technical command and generates just enough arresting ideas to hold your attention. | It is not, strictly speaking, a good record—Eminem hasn’t made one of those in a decade—but his latest boasts enough technical command and generates just enough arresting ideas to hold your attention. | Eminem: Music to Be Murdered By | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/eminem-music-to-be-murdered-by/ | Music to Be Murdered By | The thing you have to remember is that Eminem was on Rawkus’ second Soundbombing compilation. Before he ever shook hands with Dr. Dre and Jimmy Iovine, Marshall Mathers battled Project Blowed members and Chicago’s future candidates for alderman. This, after all, was a nasally white rapper from Detroit with a rhyming dictionary and a taste for horrorcore. His first EP from 1997 was sort of staggering, but didn’t exactly scream “TRL.”
If you ran the simulation a thousand times, it would never spit out the actual results: the tens of millions of records sold, the merchandising and the Academy Award and the million little cottage industries. But that’s what happened, and so by 2000, the nasally white rapper from Detroit with a rhyming dictionary had a diamond-selling album that pissed off Bill Clinton and his former group The Outsidaz in equal measure.
It’s tempting to dismiss the endurance of Eminem’s career as the half-life of celebrity, and the man himself as a relic from the Clinton- and Bush-era boom years. But Music to Be Murdered By, released without warning last week, is defined by a certain kind of defiance, and even a peculiar integrity. It’s a messy, sometimes lucid example of a hyper-technical style of rap that fell out of favor and is now creeping back into vogue. It is not, strictly speaking, a good record—Eminem hasn’t made one of those in a decade—but it boasts enough technical command and generates just enough arresting ideas to hold your attention.
It opens with a long notebook dump called “Premonition,” in which Eminem vents his frustration with critics—he correctly notes that he’s been mocked for sounding too tame and too angry on consecutive records—and fans who want him to chase trends driven by rappers half his age. His concessions to this real or imagined pressure have, in the past, been disastrous: 2018’s Kamikaze wastes a Tay Keith beat on a middling “Bad and Boujee” riff, and his adoption of the Migos’ triplet flow on 2017’s Revival (“I conned her into/Ripping the condom in two) was ineffective, to say the least. That’s why it’s so striking when the same fixation yields radically more interesting results here. “Premonition” is followed by “Unaccommodating,” a duet with the inhumanly charismatic 27-year-old Young M.A; “Godzilla” pairs Eminem with Juice WRLD, who tragically died at 21 last month. On both songs, the younger performer sounds freer and looser than the headliner, but each ranks among the most effective cuts.
Eminem sounds even more engaged when fixating on rap from another era. (This is, of course, the guy who has been posing for pictures in King Sun shirts and doing his most inspired rapping over old Black Moon beats.) There’s the moment on “Premonition” when he relitigates a Rolling Stone review of LL Cool J’s Bigger and Deffer; elsewhere he name-checks King Tee and Chi-Ali. “Yah Yah” is built around a sample from “Woo-Hah!! (Got You All In Check)” and makes superb use of a hook from Q-Tip and a verse from Black Thought, who raps about borrowing an eyepatch from the Detroit rap power player Hex Murda. And Eminem’s final verse on the album comes alive when he mocks the idea of listening to “a 40-some bar Lord Jamar verse,” then continues to diss the one member of Brand Nubian—he correctly identifies him as the group’s weak link—who didn’t appear on Soundbombing II.
But it’s impossible to talk about Music to Be Murdered By, like it was impossible to talk about Kamikaze or Revival or The Marshall Mathers LP II before it, without talking first about technique. Eminem once rapped like a drugged-out rubberband, lurching between conversational rhythms and breathtakingly difficult passages. Lately, he just raps...fast. At its worst, this means enduring endless cascades of shout-rapping in the droning, arrhythmic machine-gun style that (generally white) rappers with a fraction of his talent so often utilize, long runs of double- and triple-time flows that bludgeon the song and exist for their own sake. (In one of the handful of genuinely funny moments, he says “I am the top-selling—who cares?/Stop yelling, then stop dwelling.”)
And yet—while it never approaches the schizophrenic rhythms of a “Kill You”—Murdered By does feature some genuinely astonishing technique. On the back half of his verse on “You Gon’ Learn,” he begins rapping on the back half of the beat but never quite slides off into the next measure, and ends by calling a truce with the rappers who he says “can’t even figure out where their words should hit the kick and the snare.” (“You Gon’ Learn” is one of three songs that features a reinvigorated Royce Da 5’9”, who acquits himself excellently on all three; his presence is a frequent reminder that dense, syllable-obsessed rap is adaptable to nearly all eras and production styles.)
The irony is that versions of the verbose, precise style that Eminem favors here have become very popular over the last decade. One just needs to listen to J.I.D, or the more ambitious J. Cole records, or Kendrick when he says things like “legalize your homicide” to grasp the appetite for wordy, athletic rapping in the mainstream today. His influence on Tyler, the Creator and Earl Sweatshirt has been well documented. Even Juice WRLD, whose popular singles would seem to borrow little from Eminem, was in fact another stylistic descendent: This is a video of him freestyling nimbly over the “My Name Is” beat (“Eminem, Wayne, and Drake damn near made me”). All of this makes it frustrating when Eminem frequently lapses into finger-wagging at the kids on his lawn.
In 2004, Eminem wrote and recorded an entire song from the perspective of Triumph the Insult Comic Dog, a puppet that had a recurring bit on Conan O’Brien’s late-night shows. The most damning thing there is to say about Eminem’s work since 2010 is that it often makes you miss that sort of specificity. It is maddening that someone who’s exhibited such talent and wit, even on his worst records, defaults so often to the mawkish, mid-tempo stadium rap that has plagued his albums since the comparatively unhinged and anti-pop Relapse. The emotion behind the Skylar Grey-assisted “Leaving Heaven” feels earned—the song is in large part about the death of his estranged father—but it sounds as if it’s been crafted specifically for a video-game trailer. The album is at its worst when it’s at its blandest, especially when it grapples with failed romance (“In Too Deep,” “Farewell”). There is also an almost unbelievable song called “Stepdad,” a murder fantasy about killing a stepdad with a hook of “I, I haaaaaaate/My, my, stepdaaaaaaaad.” But that is such a perfect marriage of subject to form that it might circle all the way around and become transcendent.
The headlines generated by this album deal almost exclusively with “Darkness,” which uses a series of double entendres to tease the reveal that it’s a song written from the perspective of the Las Vegas shooter. Its video ends with a plea for listeners to vote and “help change gun laws in America.” Well-intentioned though it may be, “Darkness” cuts against Eminem’s strengths as a writer and as a vocalist. His best work is brash and irreverent, even when dealing with serious subject matter: See the way he once rapped almost gleefully about the addiction that nearly killed him, or recall the time he taunted, eight months after 9/11, the kinds of kids who would be conned into enlisting. While he still shows the capacity to surprise and exhilarate as a rapper, too many of his songwriting’s eccentric edges have been sanded down and replaced by what is comparatively automatic or, worse, anonymous. On one song, he describes himself as a cross between Blueface and the Boston Strangler—a level of absurdity that Music to Be Murdered By aspires to but achieves only in fleeting moments.
Buy: Rough Trade
(Pitchfork may earn a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.) | 2020-01-25T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2020-01-25T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rap | Shady / Aftermath / Interscope | January 25, 2020 | 5.5 | 04f53cde-09d6-45d7-bdb1-eadc1251b3c1 | Paul A. Thompson | https://pitchfork.com/staff/paul-a. thompson/ | |
Bruce Springsteen’s 18th record, High Hopes, is a collection of new recordings of songs he's been playing for 10 or 12 years. They're essentially outtakes from The Rising, Magic, and Working on a Dream*,* but Springsteen re-recorded them with producer Ron Aniello—often with Tom Morello on guitar—and sequenced them into an album. | Bruce Springsteen’s 18th record, High Hopes, is a collection of new recordings of songs he's been playing for 10 or 12 years. They're essentially outtakes from The Rising, Magic, and Working on a Dream*,* but Springsteen re-recorded them with producer Ron Aniello—often with Tom Morello on guitar—and sequenced them into an album. | Bruce Springsteen: High Hopes | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/18833-bruce-springsteen-high-hopes/ | High Hopes | Back in 2000, Bruce Springsteen debuted a new song called “American Skin (41 Shots)” at a concert in Atlanta. It was, he claimed, inspired by the death of Amadou Diallo, an unarmed West African immigrant who was shot 19 times when four New York City police officers mistook his wallet for a gun. The song was a deeply empathetic response to the tragedy, as a famous rock star tried to see the world from the point of view of both the police officers who work rough neighborhoods and the African American residents who find themselves in danger for even the most harmless actions. Even before many people had actually heard it, “American Skin” sparked controversy, as New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani and Police Chief Howard Safir publically condemned both the singer and the song. Particularly egregious was the reaction of Bob Lucente, the head of the State Fraternal Order of Police, who called Springsteen both a “dirtbag” and a “floating fag.”
For his part, Springsteen weathered the uproar stoically. He explained in interviews that the song wasn’t necessarily anti-cop, but he didn’t shy away from making it a permanent addition to his setlists during that tour. A studio version was released to radio stations, but the song wasn’t available commercially until the following year, when it appeared at the beginning of disc two of 2001’s Live in New York City. In the decade since, it has collected dust as a footnote in Springsteen’s late-career catalog—a reminder, when you needed one, that he could still write a powerful and topical song. In 2009, however, he revived “American Skin” and began dedicating performances to Trayvon Martin, and that sad new relevance is ostensibly the reason the song appears on Springsteen’s 18th album, High Hopes, a collection of new recordings of songs that he has been playing for 10 or 12 years. Essentially these are all outtakes from The Rising, Magic, and Working on a Dream**, but Springsteen re-recorded them with producer Ron Aniello and sequenced them into a standalone album.
The Boss has a famously deep archive of quality songs from throughout his career, so there’s no reason to scoff at the concept behind High Hopes. Fans have been bootlegging these songs for years now, which means the album is aptly titled: There are high hopes for studio versions of almost all of these songs, especially “American Skin”. The new version, though, has stiff competition. The performance on Live in New York City gains its power from the concert setting, with the E Street Band alternating vocals to create a sense of community and Clarence Clemons’ sax solo sounding like a heartfelt eulogy. The studio version from 2001 duplicates that arrangement, only without Springsteen telling the crowd, “We need a little quiet.”
But, unfortunately, the High Hopes recording of “American Skin” highlights everything that’s gone wrong with Springsteen’s music in the 21st century. It’s garish and melodramatic, with a cluttered arrangement and slick production that distracts from its message. The song open with Springsteen singing "41 shots," but his vocals are distorted and distant--a cheap effect. There is some industrial percussion that would have sounded dated in 2000, and there is Tom Morello’s guitar solo, which could have been cribbed from some third-tier 80s power ballad. In 2013, the song is too aware of its own import, which means it strains for the same sense of gravity that once came easily. Live, Springsteen was able to play up the contradictions and colliding perspectives fueling the country’s race problems, even implicating himself in the process, but now his outrage has curdled into something like dulled resignation.
Springsteen has struggled in the 2000s to find the best musical vehicle for his thoughts on the state of America. Live, the E Street Band can be a powerhouse, as the sexagenarian continues to exude charisma and energy on stage. The studio, however, is another thing. Nebraska aside, Springsteen has never been a minimalist, but his recent output has been maximalist in all the wrong directions. Rather than the Spectorian wall of sound he perfected on Born to Run and The River, he now dabbles in studio gimmicks that sound both expensive and dated: vocal distortion, caked-on production, pots-and-pans percussion, inert drum loops, a puzzling fascination with Celtic flourishes. On High Hopes the thick arrangements distract from the good songwriting and conceal the bad, often to the extent that it’s impossible to discern which is which.
The result is an album that often sounds salvageable but continually trips over its own ambitions and good intentions. On “Heaven’s Wall” the gospel choir overwhelms the song completely, disrupting the careful cadence of the verses and any nuance the lyrics might carry; rather than righteous, it comes across as self-righteous. “Harry’s Place” is all setting and no story, with details borrowed from an Elmore Leonard novel. Most tragic may be the closing cover of Suicide’s “Dream Baby Dream”, which begins promisingly with Springsteen’s gravelly voice and an accordion mimicking the New York duo’s gutter drone. It’s a quietly powerful moment, but you just know he’s going to do something to ruin it. And sure enough the song builds to a manufactured climax full of corny drum loops and gloppy strings.
Springsteen is too much of a control freak to escape blame, but perhaps most culpable is Tom Morello, who is apparently a member of the E Street Band now. For the last few years Morello has grown seemingly embarrassed by his rap-rock history with Rage Against the Machine, when making his guitar sound like a turntable carried some cultural weight. He does share with Springsteen a few populist heroes, namely Woody Guthrie and John Steinbeck. Otherwise, they apparently have little in common beyond their politics, and Morello sounds awkwardly fitted to these songs. He shreds gracelessly through the cover of the Havalinas’ “High Hopes” and clutters “Heaven’s Wall” with squall and distortion. When his guitar isn’t disruptive, it’s simply superfluous. Often it’s just dumbfounding: his solos on “The Ghost of Tom Joad”—which gets a passable cock-rock makeover that owes a debt to Rage Against the Machine’s cover—sound like David Gilmour sitting in with Cinderella.
An unwelcome presence, Morello is simply the most obvious of many elements on High Hopes that just don’t work. It’s all the more unfortunate given that there are actually some redeemable songs here, along with some brief glimpses of Springsteen the rock'n'roll storyteller. Even as he eclipses 60, he’s one of the few rock veterans still concerned with actually rocking, which he does convincingly on “Just Like Fire Would” and “Frankie Fell in Love”—two negligible songs that you might dismiss on a better album. Here they sound actually feisty and even ribald, with a fire that is squelched on the more serious numbers. I can’t tell if those highs actually redeem the album somewhat or make it even more of a disappointment, but I do know that the out-in-the-streets details of “Frankie Fell in Love” are more humane and meaningful than the grandiose philosophizing of “Hunter of Invisible Game”. Instead of trying so hard to live up to the times, perhaps he just needs to work on capturing a moment. | 2014-01-13T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2014-01-13T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Columbia | January 13, 2014 | 4 | 04f71dc1-03b3-41c6-87ed-44b206ea063b | Stephen M. Deusner | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stephen-m. deusner/ | null |
Departing from the high-impact electro of his Galaxian alias, Scottish producer Mark Kastner explores more contemplative strains of ambient and IDM. | Departing from the high-impact electro of his Galaxian alias, Scottish producer Mark Kastner explores more contemplative strains of ambient and IDM. | Kas: Like Sunlit Threads | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/kas-like-sunlit-threads/ | Like Sunlit Threads | Not three minutes into Like Sunlit Threads, the Scottish producer Mark Kastner tells us he’s disappearing. Amid the hum of rainforest fauna, his voice pitched down, he describes feeling as though he’s “turning to smoke” and becoming “the faint wisp of a cloud.” The words come from the Zen master Thich Nhat Hanh’s diary Fragrant Palm Leaves, which sometimes makes nothingness sound less like a blissful state of mind than a weird holiday from yourself. Perhaps this is the trip Kastner has in mind. His previous music, under his Galaxian alias, has been anything but meditative. On EPs like Blowback and NU-1000, a 2016 collaboration with DJ Stingray, Galaxian established a high-impact electro sound of face-rippling speed and intensity; he performs in a fighter pilot’s helmet, and his music often mimics an especially risky set of barrel rolls and nosedives. On Like Sunlit Threads he adopts a new alias, Kas, and gives us something more varied, and far more subtle: a nihilist’s guide to mindfulness.
This idea is most clearly expressed across the album’s ambient passages. On tracks like “Last Silence,” a cyberpunk-adjacent air of lowlife gloom mingles with spiritual yearning. In a similar mode, “Outwardly Attaching,” a piece suffused in stargazing awe (and unlikely French horn) emits campfire warmth. But a spike of anxiety is never far away. In “Self-Aware Field Pt. 1,” slo-mo nausea crescendos with murder-hornet strings; “Pt 2” guides a queasy sinewave tone toward a frozen summit of glassy keys and stern bass chords. These austere, suspenseful pieces are reminiscent of Andrei Tarkovsky’s mystic atmospheres. The railroad chug of “Last Silence” brings to mind this scene from the 1979 film Stalker, which also happens to illustrate a transition from one world to another.
Writing in Fragrant Palm Leaves, Hanh describes encountering a moment of clarity as a “battlefield,” the site of a struggle for personal growth between his old and new selves. Listening to Like Sunlit Threads, you could say Kastner loves the fight as much as the revelation. “Holographic Matrix of Information Totality,” a beat maze of vulcanized surfaces and coil-sprung percussion, is a great example of Kastner’s typically morose yet thrill-seeking sound, a sort of doom funk that could also describe a kindred spirit like Christoph De Babalon. But similar tracks on Like Sunlit Threads are, notably, a notch down from the ultra-manic likes of Galaxian’s “Glasgow to Detroit”—a standout on Helena Hauff’s Kern mix of last year—whose car horns and bumper-crimping pile-ups suggested a rough commute for everyone except a Gumball Rally driver.
On the excellent “Mystery Beyond Mystery,” Kastner sounds inspired by the chance to shift down a gear. Where the track’s god-ray pads and needlepoint pulse might normally prime an explosive breakdown, Kastner simply lets all that pent-up energy leak. There are other surprises, too. From “In the Absence of Becoming” on, Kastner dapples the music with a guarded optimism, if not happiness. That track’s glazed digi-string harmonies, especially, suggest a close-to-nature spirit redolent of fellow Scots like Boards of Canada or Firecracker Records. And “Deeply Rooted Peace” is a real beauty, with more Hanh-sourced monologue echoing over oneiric chords that rise and swirl like a flock of starlings. On this tender capstone to Like Sunlit Threads, Kastner sounds at home in a gentler kind of oblivion.
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-02-26T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2021-02-26T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Electronic | Ilian Tape | February 26, 2021 | 7.3 | 04fa3ae9-cd21-4858-a1f7-9bdf7c795b1e | Ray Philp | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ray-philp/ | |
Nevermen is a trio consisting of TV on the Radio's Tunde Adebimpe, Faith No More's Mike Patton, and Doseone. Nobody's accusing this group, who have been working since 2009, of being short on ideas, but flitting from one chrome plaything to another gets exhausting quickly. | Nevermen is a trio consisting of TV on the Radio's Tunde Adebimpe, Faith No More's Mike Patton, and Doseone. Nobody's accusing this group, who have been working since 2009, of being short on ideas, but flitting from one chrome plaything to another gets exhausting quickly. | Nevermen: Nevermen | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21449-nevermen/ | Nevermen | Back in 2009, Idaho poet-rapper Adam Drucker (aka Doseone, also of Themselves and Subtle) announced the birth of a hydra known as Nevermen, a collaboration between himself, Faith No More's Mike Patton, and TV on the Radio's Tunde Adebimpe. The trio of frontmen were to be joined by visual artists the Chapman Brothers, two members of the Young British Artists movement, whose job was to translate the music to a visual medium. Seven years of silence later, the Chapmans are out, along with the project's multimedia ambitions. But not this 10-track album; they've kept their word.
Nevermen may only be a trio (and a trio of frontmen, natch) but each member of the group brings an unexpectedly diverse stylistic palette to the record. Adebimpe represents the weird-yet-relatable world of indie rock, while Doseone offers lyrical abstractions like "barbed wire on pollen" and "man hands on fire" as if they've been on his mind for days. And, of course, there's Patton: As the ringleader of a hard rock band known for genre experiments—not to mention a chronic collaborator who's worked with everyone from Norah Jones to Dan the Automator—there's nothing the chameleonic Patton can't do, and his fingerprints are all over Nevermen: on "Non Babylon"'s extended, faintly-operatic outtro (a freakout that wouldn't feel out of place on Faith No More's recent Sol Invictus), on the carnal, Slick Rick-referencing "Treat Em Right" (the chorus? "Treat 'em like a prostitute") and all over the mixing boards, which belie Patton's penchant for sinister contrasts (glitzy funk against distorted industrial samples, seas of guitar strata that engulf all rhythm and melody).
Indeed, Nevermen's a very Patton-y album, coming off alternately as the poppy spiritual descendent of Mr. Bungle, or, on the weaker tracks, an unfocused, ornery answer to Peeping Tom—but where Patton yowled all over those releases, he's less of a vocal presence on Nevermen, which gives Adebimpe and Doseone's voices more attention. Rather than encourage his partners' cartoonish mischief, Adebimpe acts as referee, constructing his melodies to act as both common ground and common sense. As with TV on the Radio, his role in Nevermen lays in function rather than finesse, clarity over crescendoes—so it doesn't come as a huge surprise that his humble hooks on tracks like "Mr. Mistake" and "Tough Towns" rely on chirpy, garden-variety melodies. Were it not for Adebimpe's restrained, ever-so-atonal hook, "Shellshot" would collapse under the weight of its own edginess long before the ghastly Linkin Park outro; a similarly glam, glib refrain redeems "Treat Em Right," and his adamant "to the hell NO!" on "Dark Ear" is the closest Nevermen come to a fist-pumping, lighters-up moment.
Nobody's accusing the band of being short on ideas—after seven years, they've assembled an extensive playbook indeed—but flitting from one chrome plaything to another gets exhausting quickly, especially when the toys in question are post-grunge, glitchy rap-rock (remember Flobots?), and impassable swathes of steel-wool synths. Imagine three demonic, wailing brats yanking you by the wrist through the toy store, straining in every direction to grab every last bauble off the shelves and shove it in your face: That's what listening to Nevermen is like. The album's best songs ("Tough Towns," "Fame II the Wreckoning," "Treat Em Right") temper the stream-of-consciousness and ramp up the atmosphere instead. When they resist the urge to troll (tell me a sardonic chorus that goes "Just like a tactical maniac/ I WANNA SHOOT YOUU" isn't trolling), Nevermen possess a deadly grace befitting Doseone's beloved hydra metaphor; for now, those necks are tangled. | 2016-01-27T01:00:01.000-05:00 | 2016-01-27T01:00:01.000-05:00 | Rock | Ipecac | January 27, 2016 | 5.8 | 04fb2e89-bc8d-45e9-837c-7c9902ca7ed4 | Zoe Camp | https://pitchfork.com/staff/zoe-camp/ | null |
Lorde captures emotions like none other. Her second album is a masterful study of being a young woman, a sleek and humid pop record full of grief and hedonism, crafted with the utmost care and wisdom. | Lorde captures emotions like none other. Her second album is a masterful study of being a young woman, a sleek and humid pop record full of grief and hedonism, crafted with the utmost care and wisdom. | Lorde: Melodrama | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/lorde-melodrama/ | Melodrama | “Fluorescent”—has there ever been a better descriptor for first love? When Lorde sings it to the empty space beside her on “Supercut,” toward the end of her shining record Melodrama, we share a bit of her noted synesthesia: We see that bright, electrode glow of possibility, feel its siren shine on our faces. That neon is too beautiful to last, though; its buzz requires an effortful chemistry.
But when it is gone, the rest need not pale by comparison. The same could be said for one’s teenage years, which the 20-year-old Ella Yelich-O’Connor exits so graciously on this album. That formative era is a fraught time for girls, a dizzying span in which they’re most sought for beauty and cultural cachet yet their perspectives are forcefully minimized. Hear a song from a singer who taps their first euphorias, but know it’s merely real adults’ “fetishization.” Try to understand your ever-changing physiology, then have a porcine politician insist that it’s not yours to protect. And the growing pains feel endless; while it is horrible to be a teen girl who isn’t taken seriously by society, it’s even worse being a young woman unsure what to do with the autonomy that threatens it.
Melodrama is Lorde’s study of being a young woman finding her own conviction in unsteady circumstances. Sometimes, this also involves being single—a breakup and a raucous house party serve as thematic through-lines—but romance is only part of the album’s script. In the difficult, exhilarating course of the record, written largely when Lorde was 18 and 19, her true reward comes with her embrace of self. As a nod to her clearest pop forbearer, her peace is in accepting that she will, sometimes, end up dancing on her own.
Like her 2013 debut Pure Heroine, Melodrama is a work of sleek self-possession, packed with bursts of peculiar rhymes and production that confound expected song formulas. However, while Heroine cast off the trappings of materialism atop spacious trip-pop, Melodrama catches the mist off of New Wave rhythms that befit the name. (Bleachers’ Jack Antonoff, in his first production for Lorde, leaves a pliant and romantic thumbprint throughout; Heroine veteran Joel Little also returns.) Its first single and opening track, “Green Light,” casts a long shadow in its anthemic bliss. There’s a reason Max Martin called the New Zealander’s approach “incorrect songwriting”—by no Top 40 rubric should her song fire off, within its first 60 seconds, a spectral synthesizer wobble, a strident line of house piano, a subterranean vocal plunge, and an apropos-of-nothing gear shift that feels like storm clouds ebbing to the sun. Her lyrics, too, occupy an underexplored space; reams have been written about volatile breakups and last-call debauchery, but Lorde rages in a self-aware hedonism, reckless in grief yet knowing that tomorrow her heart will begin to heal. (“But I hear sounds in my mind/Brand new sounds in my mind,” she exults, after thoroughly mocking the bastard in falsetto sing-song.)
This breakup continues to provide fodder in her keening, Kate Bush falsetto warble on “Writer in the Dark” and the creaky, atonal electronic rasp of “Hard Feelings/Loveless.” When she sways alone in “Liability,” wondering if she’s too complicated to find love, it is heartrending and uncomfortably relatable. But the album is no saccharine journal entry by any means. Her party has pills, dresses rumpled on the floor, no absence of profanity, and a sense of humor, too: the moxie it takes to not only acknowledge your extravagant emotional contortions, but wink at them drolly by calling the whole thing a Melodrama.
Her percussive delivery, both in her smoky lower register and lean falsetto, cuts sharpest in the bacchanalian bangers. “Sober” folds humid brass into a stutter that lightly recalls her Heroine hit “Royals,” along deft turns of phrase that suggest even in her imbibing, she’s too sharp to turn off self-scrutiny (“Midnight, lose my mind, I know you’re feeling it too/Can we keep up with the ruse?”). She’s a touch self-deprecating in the height of the party (“Homemade Dynamite”) and tenfold pensive as it wears down (“Perfect Places”). The record’s bittersweet trajectory feels not unlike Yeah Yeah Yeahs’ Fever to Tell, intent on capturing both the carousing and the come-down in one breathless spree.
And the places Lorde goes on Melodrama really are special, particularly “The Louvre.” This track, in its gleaming synths and heartswell harmonies, captures an immersive bliss, a shared frequency of love just as irrepressibly grandiose as its sound. It’s the kind of connection that, even once it’s gone, lightens your bones forever. Whatever the next “Gossip Girl” is—whatever soapy serial next attempts to harness the teen zeitgeist with plush fabrics and sharp cheekbones—“The Louvre” will probably soundtrack its climactic moment. But as Lorde’s voice rises in it, awed in adoration as she whispers, “Well, summer slipped us underneath her tongue/Our days and nights are perfumed with obsession,” whatever’s onscreen can’t match her luminosity. It’s not enough to say Lorde is one in a generation. Really, it’s amazing this is the first time she was a teenager for how good she was at it. | 2017-06-16T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-06-16T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | Republic / Lava | June 16, 2017 | 8.8 | 04fd9ffe-a31e-4b48-bcd1-c38971c59cc3 | Stacey Anderson | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stacey-anderson/ | null |
Curated by and largely featuring Kendrick Lamar, the soundtrack is a diverse, daring, and holistic pairing with the blackest movie in the Marvel Comic Universe. | Curated by and largely featuring Kendrick Lamar, the soundtrack is a diverse, daring, and holistic pairing with the blackest movie in the Marvel Comic Universe. | Various Artists: Black Panther The Album | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/various-artists-black-panther-the-album/ | Black Panther The Album | The film Black Panther is not the first black blockbuster, or even the first black superhero movie, but there has never been a movie on this scale directed by, written by, acted by, and designed by black talent. In the wake of campaigns to diversify cinema and disrupt the Hollywood hegemony by hiring more people of color, lofty expectations have been placed on a film of this magnitude. Helmed by Ryan Coogler (Fruitvale Station, Creed) and starring Chadwick Boseman, Michael B. Jordan, and Lupita Nyong’o, the film has put blackness to the fore and there are hopes that this production will build on recent wins like Moonlight and Get Out to usher in a more inclusive industry. It’s quite a bit of pressure for a man in a panther suit.
Black Panther follows T’Challa (Boseman), protector of his homeland Wakanda—a fictional African nation—fighting to earn his recently inherited kingship. The verdant Wakanda produces Vibranium, an ore that makes the country the most technologically advanced civilization on Earth and a world leader in weapons manufacturing. But the self-sufficient nation has remained hidden from the rest of the modern world for generations. T’Challa is tasked with handling Wakanda’s transition out of the shadows and Kendrick Lamar has been tasked with bringing rap to Wakanda.
Coogler, who always wanted to work with Kendrick on a project, essentially got a full-length Kendrick Lamar album out of it. Kendrick and Top Dawg CEO Anthony “Top Dawg” Tiffith curated and produced the album with in-house producer Sounwave, and they sat down with the film’s composer Ludwig Göransson to work some songs into the score. Coogler selected Lamar because the themes in his music—foremost on that list: blackness as an identity, spirituality, power dynamics, self-doubt, and the onus of kingship—align with those in the film. Some of the music is from the movie, some is merely inspired by it, so don’t expect to see Wakandan tribal dances performed to 2 Chainz one-liners. But despite all its moving parts, and its by-the-numbers singles, Black Panther The Album is finely-tuned, aware of its audience, its objectives, and the stakes.
Black Panther The Album is at its best when channeling Wakanda’s innovative spirit and self-sustaining ethos, characteristics we have already come to associate with Kendrick. He is one of the most ambitious MCs there is, a rapper of nearly unlimited potential who operates like a well-oiled machine. Kendrick has five official features on the album, but he appears somewhere on every track. Being a soundtrack for a Disney-backed superhero movie, it was never destined to possess the boldness and urgency of his solo work, but it often feels monumental. When it isn’t radical in its sonics (like incorporating the robotic whines of James Blake into a calypso-ish tune on “Bloody Waters”), it’s radical in its casting, enlisting diverse guests and forming unlikely pairings with mostly wondrous results.
The opening title track finds Kendrick at his most explosive. The beat erupts beneath him as he draws parallels between his own internal conflict and T’Challa’s, weighing the burdens that come with being a leader of people. On the audacious “King’s Dead,” Kendrick takes on the role of T’Challa’s nemesis, Killmonger, shirking those same duties. “Who am I? Not your father, not your brother/Not your reason, not your future/Not your comfort, not your reverence, not your glory,” he fires off. Each song works as a movie narrative device at its most rousing.
Some tracks sidestep experimentation and big ideas for more generic and pop-friendly vibes. There have to be some hits, after all. Even with an amended SZA verse, “All The Stars” is still underwhelming, its artists acting as stand-ins, supplying heavy-handed plotting and everyman cliches. The flute-led “Big Shot,” with its whiny sing-song and forgettable Travis Scott verse, is a misfire. And the album-closing tag-teamer, “Pray For Me” with Kendrick Lamar and the Weeknd, is just a watered-down reanimation of the Tesfaye’s recent solo work—Starboy-lite. These may look like big-budget set pieces, but they come off as set dressing.
Elsewhere, though, when untethered to story or chart-landing constraints, the album is hugely satisfying. There’s the slapping, DJ Dahi-produced “Paramedic!” which introduces the Vallejo foursome SOB x RBE to the world with punchy raps that jump up out of the pockets. “X” opens amid amped-up shit-talking (”Not even Kendrick can humble me,” Schoolboy Q chants, defiantly), then inverts the beat for the silky 2 Chainz verse. Ab-Soul delivers some of his best raps in years on “Bloody Waters”; in his solo work, he can get bogged down spelling out his more zany concepts, but here he simply follows the script provided for him, uncorking his signature wordplay.
While TDE and friends perform at high standards, Africans rule Black Panther The Album and dictate the pace of every track they land on. Self-professed gqom queen Babes Wodumo is in her element on “Redemption,” doing call and response and swaggering through her verse. Johannesburg alt-rapper Yugen Blakrok steals the show on “Opps,” outmaneuvering K. Dot and Vince Staples: “Spit slick, attack is subliminal/Flowers on my mind, but the rhyme style sinister/Stand behind my own bars, like a seasoned criminal/Gotham City Streets, I’ll play the (Riddler)/Crushing any system that belittles us,” she raps. Sjava sings his whole verse in isiZulu on “Seasons,” as the rapper Reason and Sacramento native Mozzy break down racial inequity. With its rotating international lineups, the TDE cultural exchange program delivers collaborations as enriching as they are surprising.
The tie-ins to the film can be tenuous, but Kendrick and company bring 50 minutes of big-time team-ups and crossovers scanning black music across three continents: rap, R&B, gqom, Afro-soul, and pop from South Africa, throughout California, London, Texas, and Ethiopia by way of Toronto. The album is a sampler of the film’s broader vision of black excellence. It’s fitting that this slightly convoluted, sometimes generic offering largely delivers on its promise, much like the larger comic world it now occupies. A fun, rap-centric album is now Marvel canon. In their first roles as bit players, the TDE roster delivers a product benefiting the whole. Their effort is one befitting the Marvel Cinematic Universe, and its blackest entry. | 2018-02-12T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2018-02-12T01:00:00.000-05:00 | null | Top Dawg Entertainment / Aftermath / Interscope | February 12, 2018 | 7.5 | 04fdc4d4-28f3-4c5f-be11-1804105cfd5c | Sheldon Pearce | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sheldon-pearce/ | |
The sprawling second album from the crystal-voiced singer-songwriter is a riot of moods. Moses Sumney widens the scope of his work and takes full account of his self, warts and all. | The sprawling second album from the crystal-voiced singer-songwriter is a riot of moods. Moses Sumney widens the scope of his work and takes full account of his self, warts and all. | Moses Sumney: græ | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/moses-sumney-grae/ | græ | Last December, Moses Sumney debuted a video for a love song called “Polly” from his newly announced double album græ. It was about as unadorned a video treatment as possible: Sitting in front of his computer’s camera in a black t-shirt, framed by a white wall and some guitars, Sumney stared into our eyes while the song played. He did not lip sync as usual. Instead, he took a few deep breaths and began to weep, tears running down his cheeks. Every so often he gulped for air, but otherwise he remained still, and he never broke eye contact. Halfway through the song, he brushed his tears with his palm, a radiant smile escaping, his eyes warming. As the song played, its chorus stripping back longing to its pulsing root—"see see see see me"—he seemed to pass through something elemental and emerge on the other side, transfigured.
This facility for naked emotional connection is a kind of superpower, for good or ill, and Sumney has wielded his with grace. It’s the most significant of his many, many gifts, including his astonishing singing voice, which can plead like Prince or ascend to ANOHNI or Thom Yorke heights. He’s been overwhelming new converts ever since he opened for the R&B trio KING in 2013. He spent the next several years deciding what to do with the vast possibilities his talent afforded him. Sidestepping a cresting wave of industry attention better known for ruining careers than starting them, he waited until 2017 to release his starlit debut Aromanticism on the indie label Jagjaguwar.
That album, though decked in swirling string and horn arrangements, was quiet, intimate, and burned with the intensity of a few glowing embers. The most significant element in the mix, after his voice, was silence. He seemed at rest, drawing in one great breath and waiting for the moment to exhale. There was more to come, the album hinted, more to say, but not yet.
On græ, he lets out everything inside of him. The album is bigger, in every sense—longer, for starters, a 20-song double album that Sumney saw fit to release in two parts (the first half of the album appeared in February, the second arriving only this week.) Where Aromanticism was intimate and sleek, græ is rangy, sprawling, a riot of moods from lustful to angry to broken-hearted. He has summoned a battalion of collaborators, including production from Daniel Lopatin, basslines from Thundercat, saxophone from Shabaka Hutchings, horn parts from the English art-rock group Adult Jazz, writing credits from James Blake and author Michael Chabon. The camera lens zooms out from dewdrop to mountain range. Everything Sumney’s ever done or tried to do is here.
“Virile,” the single that preceded “Polly,” is in many ways more representative of the album’s omnivorous ambition. In the video, Sumney convulses across the fog-swirled floor of a meat locker, his body as flawless as a marble statue while carcasses swing behind him on hooks. The lyrics are a withering send-up of the pointlessness of toxic masculinity in a world where the body inevitably turns “to dust and matter.” “Cheers to the patriarchs,” he sings bitterly over bludgeoning stabs of guitar from Noah Kardos-Fein of the NYC noise-rock duo Yvette and string arrangements from Rob Moose. Like Perfume Genius’ Mike Hadreas, Sumney mingles the cerebral and the carnal, eroticism and disgust, until the sensations are indistinguishable.
He also shares Hadreas’ yearning to escape his own shell. On “Gagarin,” which interpolates a piece by the late Swedish pianist Esbjorn Svensson, Sumney sings in a pitched-down voice of wanting to “surrender my life to something bigger than me.” (The title is a likely reference to the Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin, the first man to travel to outer space.) Sumney's voice pours like tar onto the sound of a jazz piano and eventually the whole track turns ectoplasmic. The final minute sounds like the birth of a universe, with synths streaking like stardust before melting down amid the formless cries of Sumney’s digitally altered voice. The HD sheen of the mix—you can practically see the air tremble around the cymbal splashes—is a bold contrast with the formless abstraction of the music, like a private-press 1970s new age record remastered by Dr. Dre.
Though he might not harbor their commercial aspirations, Sumney shares some of the precision and remove of auteur figures like Dre or Trent Reznor. He controls every aspect of his art, from his flyers to the art direction of his videos, and so his music arrives seemingly whole and untouched from a different universe. It also means his work can feel a little cool to the touch, even when his lyrics are strictly autobiographical (“I had two dogs in 2004” is a good representative lyric). His voice is an instrument of pure beauty, a falsetto so dazzling he could trace a cathedral with one syllable. It also tends to turn his words into color, mere vehicles for him to cast light and shadow against the wall. The music is gorgeous, an empty word that often points to the missing thing in Sumney’s work: The stray hair, the smudged line, the wrinkle on the outfit that proved somebody once wore it.
Running through the album are the sampled vocals of the Nigerian-Ghanaian author Taiye Selasi, whose ruminations on multiplicity and identity glue together the album’s edges. “I really do insist that others recognize my inherent multiplicity, Selasi says on “also also also and and and.” “What I no longer do is take pains to explain it or defend.” The dreamy piece culminates in a manifesto of sorts: “I am aware of my multiplicity, and anyone wishing to meaningfully engage with me or my work must be, too.”
These pieces probe the album’s underlying consideration: How to account for your whole self, not just the pieces that you feel comfortable offering to others. For Sumney, the most precious commodity is space—space to test out your voice when no one else hears it, space to struggle your way towards self-definition. Despite his emotional transparency, Sumney seems a little ambivalent about unbridled self-expression: “Bystander” is a wry ode to the wisdom of keeping your mouth shut. “Honesty is the most moral way/But morality is grey,” he observes, in one of the album’s most tenderly sung lines.
The most powerful moments on græ examine the distance between this wariness and the loneliness it produces. “I am not at peace with dying alone/But I am not at war either,” he sings on “Neither/Nor,” a negation that might be Sumney’s most resounding statement of self. His music is unique in the chilly way it yearns for warmth; he can often be coy, flirtatious, beseeching. “Sometimes I want to kiss my friends/You don’t want that…do ya?/You just want someone to listen to ya/Who ain’t tryna screw ya,” he croons on “In Bloom.” The stacked harmony vocals bear down on the line “Sometimes I want to kiss my friends,” and it proves as indelible, and maybe more meaningful, than his ideas about patriarchy or creative sovereignty.
For all of græ’s high points, for all the elasticity of its ambition, Sumney’s most exalted work still happens at the emotional distance of the “Polly” video. “Polly,” like all of Sumney’s most devastating and resonant music, exists only by the grace of his calloused hands fingerpicking a simple pattern and his voice, which does more to generate cosmos than all the prodigious talents on græ combined. The album highlights—lullabies like “Lucky Me” or “Me In 20 Years”— come from a place where Sumney often finds himself: his glittering voice, resplendent and alone, aching in solitude. This is the range of the coffeehouse whisper, his hand atop yours on the table. This is still where we feel him most.
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Buy: Rough Trade
(Pitchfork earns a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.) | 2020-05-15T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-05-15T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Jagjaguwar | May 15, 2020 | 8.6 | 050506ba-c2af-40c8-9702-62c00a830f69 | Jayson Greene | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jayson-greene/ | |
The Documentary 2 is the sequel to the West Coast rapper's 5 million-selling breakout debut. Featuring Future, Drake, Kendrick Lamar, Dr. Dre, and others, it continues the strategy of that album and his subsequent ones: hitch the Game to the greatest possible number of bandwagons and hope it moves. | The Documentary 2 is the sequel to the West Coast rapper's 5 million-selling breakout debut. Featuring Future, Drake, Kendrick Lamar, Dr. Dre, and others, it continues the strategy of that album and his subsequent ones: hitch the Game to the greatest possible number of bandwagons and hope it moves. | The Game: The Documentary 2 | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/20903-the-documentary-2/ | The Documentary 2 | This year marked the 10th anniversary of The Documentary, meaning it's also been a decade of the Game reminding us he was once involved with a record that sold 5 million copies. "Involved with" feels like the right terminology: Given that the production credits alone list Dr. Dre, Scott Storch, Kanye West, Cool & Dre, Havoc, Just Blaze, Timbaland, Hi-Tek, Jeff Bhasker, and Buckwild, it would be extremely misleading to say Game "made" The Documentary. He’s tried to reverse his subsequent free fall with an exhaustive array of desperate, attention-seeking tactics, and calling his new LP The Documentary 2 could be the final Hail Mary: if he’s mortgaging the goodwill from his most successful record on something that’s no different than LAX or The R.E.D. Album or Jesus Piece, there won’t be a Documentary 3.
The Game’s last three LPs debuted, respectively at #2, #1, and #5, even with all of the dud singles that embedded their ignominious future prospects right into the first listen. Most would consider that a pretty decent run all things considered, but those albums all were modeled after *T**he Documentary—*hitch the Game to the greatest possible number of bandwagons and hope it moves. That continues on The Documentary 2, which features Drake, Kendrick Lamar, Future, and Kanye West. But they don’t really show fealty to or chemistry with the Game—he’s more like the rich kid in high school whose parents are always out for the weekend. "100", the Drake feature, is Game’s first charting single since "Celebration" in 2013, and it’s a pleasure to hear Drake spit one of his hardest verses of 2015 after sounding like the walking dead on What a Time to Be Alive; about two minutes in, you forget the Game’s actually on it, and as for "Mula", Kanye sounds like he could’ve recorded his part in the time it takes to tie a pair of Red Octobers.
The one contemporary superstar who does sound happy to be here is Kendrick, and The Documentary 2 is best when it remembers what the Game is good at: making West Coast gangsta-rap records. Even if it still sounds like he’s learning new flows on the fly, the rapping on a Game album is about as important as the dialogue in a Fast and Furious movie—the funniest parts are wholly unintentional, as are the moments of emotional resonance. You’re here to see a bunch of famous dudes play with expensive toys. This is pretty much the sole purpose for "Standing on Ferraris", which features Diddy and is about exactly what it promises.
Once more, the Game is in the right place at the right time—it’s a good year to make a West Coast, pop-gangsta rap record. Dr. Dre gave this his blessing, so we don’t get the Game spending the requisite 50% of The Documentary 2 or so explaining Doc’s absence. And the usual dream team (Jahlil Beats, Mike WiLL Made It, Boi-1da, will.i.am, Hit-Boy, DJ fucking Premier) recreates the lush, filmic production that defined To Pimp a Butterfly, My Krazy Life, and Compton—mid-song beat switches, segues, and well-placed samples make The Documentary 2 sound like a record that was conceptualized in advance rather than the usual "failed singles + Lil Wayne features" conglomeration.
But since The Documentary 2 is longer than most actual documentaries (to say nothing of the upcoming bonus LP The Documentary 2.5), the Game is given room to try on any number of identities: overcompensating Blood nostalgist (he would immediately correct this sentence to "overbompensating"), wounded alpha male emo-rapper, well-meaning but extremely awkward "socially conscious Game". What doesn’t pop up is *Doctor's Advocate-*style lone wolf Game; 50 Cent went bankrupt this year and when he gets mentioned, instead of going for the kill shot, the Game sorta wishes G-Unit could get the band back together.
It’s just as well that the Game shows as much love as possible—The Documentary 2 solidifies him a grade-grubbing student of hip-hop, one with far more resources and drive than natural talent, but a student all the same. This year, we’ve seen Dirty Sprite 2 and Fetty Wap both top Billboard with a singular sound, street singles, and hands-off A&R’ing—these records are both namedropped here. But like The Documentary, the sequel is a highly enjoyable tribute to old-school, cash-flush, crowd-pleasing, too-big-to-fail hip-hop album making, which can actually sound novel in 2015. The biggest lie he keeps telling is that any album he makes is definitely going to be his last. Can’t leave rap alone—the Game needs it. | 2015-10-15T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2015-10-15T02:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Entertainment One / Blood Money | October 15, 2015 | 7.2 | 0506e0f1-5f35-4761-a842-0e6952efd9ef | Ian Cohen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ian-cohen/ | null |
Radiohead's latest album is their shortest to date, offering eight new tracks that feel like small but natural evolutions of previously explored directions. | Radiohead's latest album is their shortest to date, offering eight new tracks that feel like small but natural evolutions of previously explored directions. | Radiohead: The King of Limbs | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/15149-the-king-of-limbs/ | The King of Limbs | Now that the music on In Rainbows has had four years to outshine its launch mechanism, it's easy to forget that the album originally came bundled with an honest attempt to solve a business problem. The pay-what you-think-is-fair system wasn't just Radiohead being magnanimous, it was using their popularity and their newly won independence to ask what might have been the single most important question facing a shaken music industry: What is an album in the download era actually worth to fans?
Announced on Monday of last week and then chucked out to rabid fans like flank steak a day ahead of schedule, the band's eighth album dispenses with the honesty-box pricing model but still finds them using their influence to interrogate the terms around how we consume and relate to music. Containing a slight eight tracks across 37 minutes, The King of Limbs is Radiohead's first album to clock in under the 40-minute mark, falling into that limbo between a modern full-length and an EP. What's more, it feels like it stops short intentionally, almost confrontationally, as if Radiohead are trying to ask a new kind of question about their music.
"None of us want to get into that creative hoo-ha of a long-play record again," Thom Yorke told The Believer in August 2009. "It's just become a real drag. It worked with In Rainbows because we had a real fixed idea about where we were going. But we've all said that we can't possibly dive into that again. It'll kill us." This wouldn't be the first time that a member of Radiohead publicly fantasized about disowning the album format, but it might have been the most convincing. How better to unburden themselves of the stress of making more records in the mold of The Bends, OK Computer, Kid A, Amnesiac, and In Rainbows than by simply changing the terms of their engagement?
Radiohead's eighth record, The King of Limbs, represents a marked attempt to create a considered and cohesive unit of music that nonetheless sits somewhere outside of the spectrum of their previous full-length discography. And that's not to say that it doesn't ripple with the dazzling sonics or scenery that have become the band's stock in trade, but just that, unlike so many of their milestones, there's no abiding sense of a band defying all expectations in order to establish new precedents.
Instead, we get eight songs that feel mostly like small but natural evolutions of previously explored directions. Opener "Bloom" announces Radiohead's return with a scattershot sequence of chewed-up drum loops and peeling horns that dissolve into a rhythmic tangle. "Morning Mr. Magpie" re-casts an old live acoustic ballad in a more anxious light, its once-sunny disposition frozen into an icy glare. With its crumbling guitar shapes and clattering, fizzing percussion work, "Little By Little" sounds dilapidated and rundown. Meanwhile, "Feral" contorts Yorke's voice into a reverb-infused, James Blake-like wriggle that pings around the stereo channel against a mulched up drum pattern that sounds sharper than glass.
In this more rhythmic first half of the album, electronic percussion figures in heavily as usual, but also with heightened emphasis on drummer Phil Selway's uneven time signatures. The previously well-rounded band dynamic, meanwhile, feels like it's been reduced to a miniaturized version of itself. This isn't the band that ripped through "Bodysnatchers"; these guys play with a precise, almost scientific restraint that suits the twitchy anxiety of these songs well.
Things open up on the softer, dreamier second side, as rhythms recede and more traditional song structures take over. "Lotus Flower", the lead single presumably for having a chorus and not being a ballad, finds Yorke delivering a series of slippery hooks in slinky falsetto mode. Album highlights "Codex" and "Give Up the Ghost" follow, the former a narcotized cousin to "Pyramid Song" that features woozily flanged piano chords, long, plaintive horn trills, and Yorke at his most evocative; the latter an acoustic, guitar-led call-and-response that finds him piling falsettos into a gorgeously ramshackle wall of harmony. Last is "Separator", a clear-eyed, mid-tempo closer that mixes 1990s–era Radiohead with a touch of Neil Young-inspired guitar work and ends on a sweet and easy note that's miles away from the complicated clatter it began with. Compared to such a dense first half, there's something satisfying about all the open space in the album's final stretch; before you know it, the record's breezed by. It's a nice packing trick, one that makes the album feel even lighter than its 37 minutes.
So: eight tracks, each of them worth your time, and yet The King of Limbs is still likely to go down as Radiohead's most divisive record. A trawl through message boards and social networks leaves the impression that many disappointed fans are still struggling to make sense of the gap between the greatness of the thing they got and the genius of the thing they thought they might get. It's in that gap, when assessing the album overall, that it's easy to get tangled up. This is well-worn terrain for Radiohead, and while it continues to yield rewarding results, the band's signature game-changing ambition is missed. | 2011-02-24T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2011-02-24T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | XL / TBD | February 24, 2011 | 7.9 | 050c87db-6259-4dd0-be9e-cfb73e4f6ab5 | Mark Pytlik | https://pitchfork.com/staff/mark-pytlik/ | 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 Ashanti’s assured blockbuster debut, a lynchpin record for the new era of pop and R&B at the dawn of the century. | 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 Ashanti’s assured blockbuster debut, a lynchpin record for the new era of pop and R&B at the dawn of the century. | Ashanti: Ashanti | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/ashanti-ashanti/ | Ashanti | By the early 2000s, every rapper, producer, and label with a weekly Billboard subscription had a new formula for a Top 40 hit: Get a rapper and a singer together to make a song for women. Murder, Inc. arguably had the slickest cheat code, pairing the label’s flagship artist Ja Rule’s surly love-laden raps with a sweet R&B voice like Christina Milian or a soulful gospel tone like Lil’ Mo. Around this time, a 19-year-old Ashanti met Murder, Inc.’s excitable co-founder, Irv Gotti, who, back then, didn’t want an upstart singer from suburban Glen Cove, Long Island, on his hardcore rap label. Instead, he enlisted her as an in-house songwriter and guest vocalist. Despite what Gotti told her in their initial meeting—that he wasn’t “an R&B dude”—he kinda was. His breadwinner, Ja, was a cosplaying 2Pac moonlighting as millennial rap’s Keith Sweat. His new secret weapon was an affable former high school track star who softened Ja’s aggressive balladeering.
Ashanti spent her early Murder, Inc. days writing for her life at Crack House Studios in Manhattan’s SoHo, surrounded by dice-rolling men—the little sister among “a den of wolves,” as Gotti described. She was the sweetie in a room full of so-called gangsters. Her voice wasn’t all that soulful or acrobatic. It was featherweight and more coy than cool, never at risk of overshadowing a song’s lead, which made her the perfect companion for rappers aiming to create sticky street anthems.
Millennial pop soon alternated between two distinct sounds: Ja Rule’s freaky outbursts and Ashanti’s gentle coos. She got her big break singing the hook on Big Pun’s posthumous 2001 single, “How We Roll.” From there, it was a full-on blitz. She sang background vocals on Ja’s monster Jennifer Lopez duet “I’m Real,” a summery jam built on a sample from Rick James’ 1978 weed ode “Mary Jane.” She backed Fat Joe’s crowing serenades on “What’s Luv.” Ja Rule plucked Ashanti again for his sophomore album’s second single, “Always on Time.” His semi-mushy, gaslight-ridden version of romance opens with Ashanti’s soft vocals setting up a toxic love story, complementing Ja’s bearish declarations about swinging dick and running on belated Jesus time. The song peaked at No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100 and set Murder Inc.’s low-key young hitmaker up for a smooth transition from utility player to solo star. The charts might’ve belonged to Ja, but he was no Ashanti.
By the time Ashanti’s self-titled debut dropped in April 2002, she was already a household name. The combination of her breakthrough solo single, “Foolish,” hitting No. 1 for 10 weeks, and “What’s Luv” at No. 2 made her the first woman to simultaneously occupy the top two spots on the Billboard Hot 100. The pop landscape was eager for a voice as sleek as Aaliyah’s after her death, and Ashanti thrived in the mid-tempo zone. Sometimes, too mid. Shortly after her debut dropped, over 20,000 people signed an online petition against her winning Soul Train’s Lady of Soul Award, citing her lack of “singing ability and stage presence.” Her vocals weren’t striking enough to blow out stadiums, but with no major rivals in her path and Beyoncé’s solo debut still a year off, Ashanti sat comfortably on her perch as America’s sweetheart.
Contemporary R&B was full of lush spins on the genre—an amalgam of classic soul from the likes of Angie Stone, Alicia Keys, and Raphael Saadiq; the boyish radio-ready charm of artists like Usher and Mario; and forward-thinking singers like Kelis, Amerie, and Truth Hurts. By May 2002, hip-hop and R&B collaborations made up about a fifth of the top 50 songs on Billboard’s Hot 100 chart. Half of those records featured Ja, Ashanti, or both. It’s not a stretch to say Murder Inc.’s success likely influenced the Recording Academy’s creation of a new Rap/Sung category that year, later renamed Best Melodic Rap—Ja’s Case-assisted single “Living It Up” lost the inaugural award to Eve and Gwen Stefani’s “Let Me Blow Ya Mind.” Jay-Z and R. Kelly’s platinum-selling joint album, Best of Both Worlds, released earlier that year, further crystallized the trend.
Gotti prematurely dubbed Ashanti the Princess of Hip-Hop and R&B, positioning her as a successor to Mary J. Blige. But of course, the princess title was rooted in binary thinking. “Irv was like, ‘This is our princess. She’s not our bitch and ho. She’s our princess,’” Fat Joe recalled in 2003. Though Ashanti herself aspired to blend rhythm and blues with tough hip-hop beats like Blige, the blues part is much more subdued on Ashanti’s debut, which focuses more on surface melodrama and soft, curling melodies than a deep exploration of personal trauma. Her songs touch on darker aspects of relationships while still playing it safe stylistically—not as gorgeously raw and somber as an album like My Life but looking to capture a similar melancholy.
Ashanti’s solo album was released just two months before the premiere of American Idol, the singing competition show that could catapult new talent onto the pop charts. Her origin story would’ve fit right in with the heartwarming packaging of Idol contestants: a suburban Black girl whose father was a singer and whose mother, a former dance teacher, discovered her singing Blige’s “Reminisce” while vacuuming and thought it was a voice on the radio. By age 6, Ashanti was singing in church and local talent shows. At 14, she got her first record deal with Jive in 1994, but when the label tried to steer her toward pop, she rebuffed. She passed up Princeton and Hampton University scholarships to continue chasing her dreams and moved to Atlanta for a second deal with Epic’s subsidiary, Noontime. Label shake-ups again left her shelved and back in New York, where she had the fortuitous meeting with Irv Gotti that landed her at Murder, Inc.
Ashanti saw those formative setbacks as preparation for the boot camp that was Murder, Inc., where Gotti would have his artists battle each other for beats and recognition, like a rap version of ROTC. Whoever wrote the hottest lyrics got to claim the beat. At one point, Ashanti recorded a reference track for Jennifer Lopez’s “I’m Real” remix, written by Ja. (In an epically petty move, Sony Music’s head, Tommy Mottola, had apparently tasked Gotti with crafting a hit song for J. Lo to keep Mottola’s ex-wife, Mariah Carey, from the No. 1 spot.) Unbeknownst to Ashanti, Gotti kept her background vocals in the song’s final mix, fueling the infamous myth that Lopez had tried to pass Ashanti’s voice off as her own. Ashanti co-wrote another J. Lo record, “Ain’t It Funny (Remix)” and lobbied to keep the song for herself. She could’ve been stuck stunting as a cameo queen while her work helped legitimize J. Lo’s “Jenny from the Block” persona, but those records quietly set the stage for Ashanti’s string of hits.
Still, it wasn’t until Ashanti delivered another chart-topper that Gotti fully committed to signing her to Murder, Inc. Her breakthrough solo single, “Foolish,” was a soap opera without a plot, an engrossing tale of self-destruction about craving the comfort of a bad relationship. Gotti effectively took the HOV lane to the top of the charts, using a loop from producer 7 Aurelius that was originally created for Brandy and featured the same DeBarge sample as the Notorious B.I.G.’s hit “One More Chance.” While this fusion of old and new sounds effortless on “Foolish,” the execution is clunky throughout Ashanti’s debut. Her intro blends snippets of her star collabs into an EPK-like medley with a screwed male voice announcing, “And now, for our featured presentation…”
Despite their sometimes captivating sense of ease and simplicity, the album cuts never quite match the pomp and circumstance of her debut single. “Foolish” bleeds into its counterpart, “Happy,” a sparse, sunlit ode to Ashanti discovering the love she’d been searching for all her teenage life, with airy flutes that sound like she’s kicking her feet up on a swing. On “Leaving (Always On Time Part II),” the sequel to her and Ja’s breakout hit, he reprises his role as the cheating lover attempting reconciliation. “Call” finds Ashanti rephrasing the sentiment a third time: “When you call, I’ll be right there,” a clumsy attempt to squeeze the last bit of juice from a single idea.
Gotti’s blatant attempt to brand Ashanti as Blige’s heir apparent plagues tracks like “Scared” and “Rescue.” The former is a gloomy groove where his voice lurks in the background like a devil on the shoulder while Ashanti debates letting go of a tumultuous relationship. The latter track repurposes the creeping keys from “Leaving” into a gloomy plea for escape. Gotti reappears as a bruised ex in a subsequent skit, leading into the moody breakup record “Over,” which follows all the back-and-forth contemplations from the previous songs to its logical conclusion. On “Baby,” Ashanti drops her voice to a compelling lower register, a yearning tone that cuts through the album’s vague narratives. Gotti shamelessly ripped the exact rhythm and “Mary, Mary, Mary…” melody from Scarface’s 1997 single “Mary Jane,” laced over producers 7 Aurelius and Chink Santana’s keys to create an operatic ballad about being sucked into a love jones. In recalling his own ingenious move in BET’s 2022 Murder Inc. documentary, Gotti says with a smirk: “Not only did we take the beat, I had Ashanti take Scarface’s flow.”
The back-end sequel “Unfoolish” picks at the same scab as “Foolish” but with a dusted-off Biggie verse from “Fucking You Tonight.” The song was meant as a promotional single to assuage listeners. On the album, it’s used as a narrative full-circle moment to show Ashanti’s growth: “Proud to say I will never make the same mistake,” she sings. On the sentimental follow-up, “Dreams,” Ashanti sings, “Dreams are real/All you have to do is just believe.” Such was her style—a little bit cheesy, a little bit sweet.
Of course, a raging bull named 50 Cent soon ran Ja Rule off the charts and the streets, effectively ending the Murder Inc. dynasty. A federal indictment accelerated the label’s collapse. Still, Gotti retained control of Ashanti’s masters up until two years ago when she announced she was re-recording her debut to reclaim ownership of the album and break free from Gotti’s control. Only recently have they both addressed their once-rumored romantic relationship, though Ashanti avoided defining it as such. She told Angie Martinez in 2023, “Manipulation played a heavy part in me and Irv’s situation.” Gotti, meanwhile, came across as a power player who got so emotionally involved with one of his artists that his other signees, Charli Baltimore and Vita, felt neglected on the roster. While Gotti claimed he conceived “Happy” during a post-coital shower, Ashanti later clarified that she wrote the song in a Long Island parking lot.
Gotti’s heavy hand is the main reason Ashanti’s debut feels programmed into oblivion. But despite its predictability, the album has a certain sonic purity that marks a shift in both sound and thinking for the industry at large. The rise of hip-hop and R&B collabs seemed like the natural order of the universe, an inevitable merger of two rapidly commercializing music genres carrying the New Jack Swing era’s momentum. Rappers today who might’ve once needed a soul singer to sweeten their sixteens can belt their own hooks. SZA has credited Ashanti’s minimalist style as a key influence on her own fluid sound. The genres are now cosmically intertwined. But for better and worse, Ashanti’s debut solidified an algorithm that’s since reached a point of singularity. | 2024-07-21T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2024-07-21T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | Murder Inc. / Def Jam | July 21, 2024 | 7.2 | 050e119f-f852-42f4-84d8-8743ebd5640c | Clover Hope | https://pitchfork.com/staff/clover-hope/ | |
The mysterious Japanese producer Shinichi Atobe has recently revived his shimmering ambient techno project. This striking new album focuses squarely on dancefloor energies while amping up the emotion. | The mysterious Japanese producer Shinichi Atobe has recently revived his shimmering ambient techno project. This striking new album focuses squarely on dancefloor energies while amping up the emotion. | Shinichi Atobe: From the Heart, It’s a Start, a Work of Art | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/23300-from-the-heart-its-a-start-a-work-of-art/ | From the Heart, It’s a Start, a Work of Art | It might not feel like it now, at a time when the internet has rendered so many mysteries of the era moot, but from the mid 1990s until not long after the turn of the millennium, Berlin’s Chain Reaction label was among the most cryptic operations in electronic music. Label heads Moritz von Oswald and Mark Ernestus, better known as Basic Channel, kept a defiantly low profile, and the label’s artists trafficked in a dizzying array of aliases; some, like the solo project known simply as Various Artists (Torsten Pröfrock, aka T++, Erosion, et al), continue to flummox databases decades later. The label’s sound didn’t exactly lend itself to transparency, either: grainy dub techno emphasizing collective ethos over individual ego, in which shadows and murk threatened to drown out techno’s steady footfall.
Chain Reaction’s most enduring mystery came with its penultimate release, in 2001: Ship-Scope, a near-perfect EP of shimmering ambient techno credited to one Shinichi Atobe, a total unknown. Unknown he remained: Chain Reaction gave up the ghost two years later, and Atobe dropped out of sight, seemingly for good. Many listeners assumed that he was really another Chain Reaction artist in disguise. Then, in 2014, Demdike Stare’s Sean Canty and Miles Whittaker, allegedly following a tip from the Basic Channel office, claimed to have tracked down the artist at home in Saitama, Japan; they came away with an album’s worth of unreleased material, some new and some archival. The result, Butterfly Effect, built upon Ship-Scope’s dream-world architecture with a tantalizing assortment of styles, from glistening, minimalist house to dissonant musique concrete to lumpy rhythm studies poised somewhere between Dettinger and Burial.
Whoever Atobe may be—and the promise of an upcoming live debut in Japan suggests that maybe he really is just a reclusive dude—the past few years have found the project definitively revitalized. Since Butterfly Effect, he has released a Ship-Scope reissue, the mini-album World, and the short Rebuild Mix 1.2.3 EP, a remix project in which Atobe’s hand obliterated all traces of the original. From the Heart, It’s a Start, a Work of Art fleshes out his catalog with 40 more minutes of music, and it is uniformly striking stuff. While not as wide-ranging as Butterfly Effect, it is richer and fuller than World, and though it retains ambient music’s atmospheres, it focuses squarely on dancefloor energies while amping up the emotional content.
That’s particularly true of its two most substantial cuts. In “Regret,” bright chords reminiscent of DJ Sprinkles flare over a bare-bones boom-tick rhythm, with hi-hats chirping like crickets. In “Republic,” a flayed open hi-hat suggests peak-time techno at its most severe, yet watery synths and midsection-caressing sub-bass suggest almost shoegaze-like vibes. Both tracks are little more than static loops, all but unchanging over the course of their nearly 10-minute run, yet their hypnotic repetitions and naïve melodies wrap you up in a kind of cocoon.
It’s hard to put your finger on exactly what it is that’s so enveloping, and so moving, about Atobe’s work. Some of it comes down to his tonal sensibility. Like “Rainstick” and “The Red Line,” from his debut EP, his best tracks here seem to emanate a rosy glow, and his chord progressions, simple as they are, are masterful exercises in tension and release. Not everything is such a wistful reverie, though. “The Test of Machine 2” sounds like an etude for melting wind chimes, while “The Test of Machine 1” hammers uneven kick drums over a backdrop of bell tones and mechanical clatter, like a fax machine eating an old Jeff Mills cassette.
For many, the most fascinating material here will be a trio of songs that builds upon the Shinichi Atobe mystery. Before Chain Reaction ever released Ship-Scope, claim Canty and Whittaker, Atobe recorded a three-track EP that was cut to acetate—a vinyl-like material, often used for dubplates, more susceptible to wear and tear than the wax used in commercially released records—in an edition of five. The original EP was never released, but three tracks on the new album have allegedly been remastered directly from those crumbling acetates. “First Plate 1” is a luminous dub techno sketch that certainly sounds like it could have been recorded in 2000, with a muted, compressed quality reminiscent of a seventh-generation cassette dub. The vinyl crackle is even thicker and creamier on “First Plate 2,” a deliciously dubby stepper that suggests a more narcotic take on Basic Channel’s Maurizio project. And on “First Plate 3,” surface noise settles over a resonant dub-techno roller like a low mist hugging the countryside.
The story raises more questions than it does answers: Why were only five acetates made, and then no records pressed? Why didn’t they utilize the original master disk for the reissue, or, better, the original DAT or digital file? And why, if they really did work off of such a damaged acetate, did they choose to emphasize all that surface noise, rather than minimizing it? It’s impossible to tell how much of the sound design is intentional, and how much is a result of the alleged remastering process. But as with William Basinski’s The Disintegration Loops or Burial’s “Distant Lights,” the degraded sound quality becomes an integral part of the music’s emotional experience. Wherever and whenever the music has come to us from, it wears all the signs of a great journey. And as with bards of yore, it’s the storytelling, not the veracity of the tale, that keeps us rapt. | 2017-06-03T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-06-03T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | DDS | June 3, 2017 | 8.1 | 050f4be4-7253-4c14-8e25-a8edde747207 | Philip Sherburne | https://pitchfork.com/staff/philip-sherburne/ | null |
Featuring several of his acolytes, So Much Fun remains a triumphant showcase for the iconoclastic Young Thug and one of his best albums to date. | Featuring several of his acolytes, So Much Fun remains a triumphant showcase for the iconoclastic Young Thug and one of his best albums to date. | Young Thug: So Much Fun | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/young-thug-so-much-fun/ | So Much Fun | Before he turned 25, Young Thug had already reshaped the way we looked at rappers and birthed an entire subgenre in his wake. Between 2014 and 2016, the Atlanta-born space alien released the premier collaborative album of the 2010s, the rare trilogy that wasn’t a disappointment, and his opus, Barter 6. So what would come after his first quarter-century? Young Thug didn’t know.
First, he tried to get weirder—a nearly impossible feat after he slipped into the mainstream with 2013’s deranged and innovative 1017 Thug—flipping himself into a country singer on 2017’s Beautiful Thugger Girls. Then, he successfully parlayed his talents into the pop world by laying down vocals for Camila Cabello and Post Malone. BTG set the acoustic-tinged blueprint for his apprentices Lil Baby and Gunna, and the pop songs broadened his visibility. But still, Thug never needed to throw on a cowboy hat or aim his music at the masses—his coos and ad-libs over the trap snare and 808-heavy sound of Atlanta were more than enough. Thug just needed to be himself, and that’s exactly what we got with his latest project, So Much Fun.
Young Thug rarely leaves his comfort zone, but he’s able to add a melody, a flashy ad-lib, or a new flow that keeps the sound fresh and pushing toward new ground. He develops a natural connection with Pi’erre Bourne throughout the project, as the super-producer gifts Thug four beats that sound like he locked himself away in a submarine specifically to lace Thug with something futuristic and beachy to talk his shit over. “Surf” immediately jumps out: We get Thug screeches, sass, and some of his best ad-libs in recent memory (“Totally dude”). “I’m Scared” is just as good, with Thug and 21 Savage bonding over their mutual love of terror. “Lethal weapon, let it rip from out the top of the drop to his scalp,” says Thug, in the same tone as he talks about his favorite pair of custom Nikes.
On the album, Thug takes some time to pat himself on the back, aware of his own widespread influence. With guests on most songs, each of his Atlanta rap sons get some swings in, but Thug makes sure to show them they’ve still got a ways to go. On “Hot,” he educates Gunna on how to expertly flex one’s jewelry over triumphant Wheezy-produced horns. His most accomplished pupil, Lil Baby, makes him proud on “Bad Bad Bad,” as his unrelatable boasts about real estate and foreign whips are on par with Thug. Lil Keed is still in the midst of being groomed, but the two share a connection in their vocal similarities, trading helium-pitched deliveries on “Big Tipper.” Even when Thug dips outside of his immediate circle of influence, he’s just as comfortable, clearing the runway for Nav to list off his favorite pairs of Gucci tube socks and getting caught in a battle with Lil Uzi Vert about who wears the tightest pair of jeans. (It ends in a draw.)
But despite all the collaborations on So Much Fun, the album is about Young Thug. He might not mystify as he did in the early stages of his career, when he was stumbling into new flows and deliveries at an inhuman pace, but now he’s able to wield the madness with ease, satisfying in many modes. He’s got the single aimed for the Billboard charts with the J. Cole and Travis Scott assisted “The London,” as well as the hard-nosed Southside-produced Atlanta street hit, “Pussy.” And then, there’s a song like “Light It Up” that has the bizarre ad-libs and sudden melodic outbursts. At the core, he’s rapping as good as anyone, like he always has. After years of rappers trying to be the next Young Thug, there’s still only one. | 2019-08-21T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-08-21T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | 300 Entertainment / Atlantic | August 21, 2019 | 8.4 | 05119b72-09e7-497f-a665-f2b750e1ac0f | Alphonse Pierre | https://pitchfork.com/staff/alphonse-pierre/ | |
The impish artist’s fourth record attempts all of the same tricks that made his music so compelling earlier in his career, but with far less success. | The impish artist’s fourth record attempts all of the same tricks that made his music so compelling earlier in his career, but with far less success. | Alex Cameron: Oxy Music | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/alex-cameron-oxy-music/ | Oxy Music | Alex Cameron is just as much a musician as he is a performance artist. He takes on personas—usually that of a sleazebag everyman, the kind of guy who frequents strip clubs and casinos on weekday afternoons. His work is deliberately provocative, deliberately transgressive, and rarely serious. In an era of indie music that can sometimes feel so self-consciously woke that it suffocates, Cameron can feel like a breath of fresh air. He’s a latter-day Harmony Korine character: Alien in Spring Breakers playing Britney Spears on a piano with white-guy cornrows and grills, or the titular Beach Bum walking around the pool in a pink marabou bathrobe. On 2016’s lo-fi opus, Jumping the Shark, Cameron gave off the vibe of a down on his luck wedding singer performing Suicide b-sides. On 2017’s Forced Witness, he penned a propulsive, weirdly moving ’80s synth-pop ballad that involved rhyming “Down Syndrome Jew,” with “the real estate crew.” His music, at its best, is a slightly problematic—but needed—reprieve from the status quo, a good laugh.
Oxy Music is a different beast, but it doesn’t try to be. Cameron’s fourth record attempts all of the same tricks that made his music so compelling earlier in his career, but with far less success. The sleazebag bit has grown old and the character-study work attempts to be transgressive but is actually just trite and, crucially, not particularly funny. The ’80s sound palette that gave so much life into his earlier records now has lapsed into pastiche. “Sara Jo,” has a catchy melody, blasts of saxophone, and chintzy synths. But it is catchy in the way that a song in the grocery store is, something tinny and distant. You’re singing along while figuring out the calorie content of S’Mores Pop-Tarts, even though you don’t know the lyrics. Which, by the way, involves Cameron singing the phrase, “Who told my brother that his kids are gonna die from this vaccine?” a bunch of times.
Maybe the one funny thing about the record is its name. It’s Roxy Music minus the “R”, an homage to the drug known as Oxycontin. It’s pretty edgy stuff, which is a grim caveat of his less than compelling social commentary to be found within. Cameron tries to show that he is a) totally not woke and not interested in being PC but also b) not like, a total nihilist, he’s totally a cool, self-aware, caring dude. Look no further than “Cancel Culture,” which is both a critique of cancel culture and a critique of people who think cancel culture is bad. “Lily-white/But I use ebonics when I’m online,” Cameron croons in a falsetto, “Because everything’s dope/And I can barely hide it, baby.” He’s calling out hypocrites and culture vultures with the kind of air of someone who thinks he’s enlightened, but the meta nature of the song makes it feel even more slimy than if it actually had something novel or interesting to say about cancel culture—which it doesn’t.
The thing is, Cameron wants you to think he’s totally in on the joke. You see, these songs are supposed to sound bad. But the self-awareness really only carries you so far in an album that sounds like Costco-brand Roxy Music on purpose. The spartan production is some of the weakest in Cameron’s career, mostly consisting of cheap-sounding software plugins and maybe a handful of vintage synthesizers. More than anything, it takes on the quality of a short story written by a young student trying to cram as many neon lights, bongs, uzis, blow jobs, g-strings, and jokes into 10 pages as possible. For how clearly smart, ambitious, and upsettingly tuneful Cameron is, it’s a pity that he uses his talent for these exercises in sophistry, music that feels so vacuous and fleeting that it becomes one with the very modernity it seeks to lampoon. I guess that’s pretty funny. | 2022-03-14T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2022-03-14T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Secretly Canadian | March 14, 2022 | 5 | 0512a598-60af-4e59-9e62-94a246e2527e | Sophie Kemp | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sophie-kemp/ | |
From modern classical to disco classicism, Peter Zummo shadowed Arthur Russell's cello lines with his peerless trombone work. His first album of solo compositions, from 1985, has been reissued on vinyl by JD Twitch of record obsessive DJ duo Optimo. | From modern classical to disco classicism, Peter Zummo shadowed Arthur Russell's cello lines with his peerless trombone work. His first album of solo compositions, from 1985, has been reissued on vinyl by JD Twitch of record obsessive DJ duo Optimo. | Arthur Russell / Peter Zummo: Zummo With an X | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/16730-zummo-with-an-x/ | Zummo With an X | It's safe to assume you've heard neglected New York City trombonist/composer Peter Zummo without realizing it. As the renaissance of the classically trained cellist/Buddha-pop enthusiast/leftfield disco auteur/cowboy-shirted indie-folk trailblazer Arthur Russell has swelled to include many lovingly rendered reissues, a big biography, and impressionistic documentary, so too does Zummo's nimble trombone work subliminally reach more ears. That's him delivering the booming Skatalite-like horn line on Russell's Paradise Garage staple "Go Bang #5", adding cumulous soundclouds to the heavenly "In the Light of the Miracle", and foghorning amid the cello fuzz of "The Platform on the Ocean".
From modern classical to disco classicism, Zummo shadowed the man's singular cello lines with his own peerless trombone work, and no matter Russell's genre or interval leaps, he remained the closest of collaborators. So it makes sense that Russell would repay the favor on Peter Zummo's first album of original compositions, 1985's Zummo With an X, with one side devoted to a seven-sectioned piece entitled "Instruments" from 1980 and another composition from 1985 entitled "Song IV" taking up the other. Out of print on vinyl since its release (though the CD reissue from 2006 tacks on "Lateral Pass", another 25 minutes of lovely music), JD Twitch of the record obsessive DJ duo Optimo has taken it upon himself to reissue the album on vinyl. No doubt, it's a piece of music that's close to his heart.
And let's be real here, it's certainly not because of "Instruments". Beyond the Glass-Reich Titans of Minimalism Industry that overshadowed most of the late-1970s/early-1980s modern classical scene of New York City, previously ignored works continue to surface to varying grades of astonishment and cosmic justice, be it the efforts of composers like Jon Gibson, Yoshi Wada, Charlemagne Palestine, Dickie Landry, or Peter Gordon's Love of Life Orchestra. "Instruments was my answer to a militaristic sort of minimalism that had become popular at the time," writes Zummo in the original liner notes. "I had a much freer-flowing notion."
Yet in listening, it's difficult to hear such openness. Rik Albani's trumpet duets with Zummo's trombone in repetitious two-note phrases while Bill Ruyle's marimba sometimes percolates in the back and Russell's cello is all but impossible to discern. The composition is dryly segmented by half-steps, sixths, sevenths, whole steps, and the like. They move in and out of phase, yet rather than explore the rich tonalities that can occur from such phasing and overtones, it simply never manifests. Perhaps not enjoying the nuances of such composition exludes my ears from the piece, but throughout it feels more like the rote practice of scales than some exploration of freedom.
Then again, on the original CD issue of Zummo With an X, "Song IV" is positioned first, and rarely has there been an instance in the past five years where I have ever needed to hear something else besides "Song IV"'s quiet majesty. In a temporal world where Don Draper's statement that the human condition is one where "happiness is a moment before you need more happiness," Zummo's "Song IV" is pure manna, the sound of sublimity that erases the need for more sound. Tangentially, it's a 20-minute trio recording from 1985, yet such numbers feel feeble against its sound. There is no gauge of duration or where it slots in the discographies of its participants. There's a softness, a fragility to "Song IV", much like magnetic filaments or crystal structures, things that would dissolve if touched or dissected. It would be the sound of a Rothko painting, were such canvases portals denoting nirvana rather than the void.
Its closest relation would be to Indian classical music, what with Bill Ruyle on tabla and Russell's cello tuned "like one of the low 'sympathetic' strings on a sitar," according to Zummo's liner notes on the CD reissue. Russell's bow taps out beats that dovetail with the tabla's patter in such a manner that sends shivers down the nervous system. But it's as Russell's cello scrapes (and their attendant bit of electronic processing) intermingles with Zummo's muted trombone, close-mic'd so that every breath and growl can be felt that makes my arm hairs stand on end.
"Song IV" feels without beginning or end, as if it's this state entered into rather than something structured and composed, and in its universe, so many tiny, amazing epiphanies happen. There's the way that Russell's wordless mumbles conjoin with what Zummo calls "lip multiphonics," or how a certain cello line will suddenly scale upward, or when Zummo sings through his horn an octave above Russell's own voice. And most beautiful of all, it's the sound of two dear friends in deep conversation, both in this world and beyond it. | 2012-06-12T02:00:03.000-04:00 | 2012-06-12T02:00:03.000-04:00 | Experimental | Optimo Music | June 12, 2012 | 8 | 05147153-7e7c-4a8f-83dc-a9a6d09d8756 | Andy Beta | https://pitchfork.com/staff/andy-beta/ | null |
Foregrounding her voice for the first time against airy, otherworldly beats, the Brooklyn producer’s new tape is her most lucid and surprising to date. | Foregrounding her voice for the first time against airy, otherworldly beats, the Brooklyn producer’s new tape is her most lucid and surprising to date. | Anysia Kym: Truest | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/anysia-kym-truest/ | Truest | “I don’t want to tell you what I’m feeling,” Anysia Kym sings on “Test Your Patience,” and for a while, she might have been talking to us. The first few years of her career were spent playing drums for Blair, a Brooklyn band that braved cramped rehearsal spaces by day and threw shows with heavyweights like Wiki by night. Since departing the group in 2022, she’s lugged her percussive penchant into airy, otherworldly territory—less concerned with fringe rock’s fucked-up realities, and more infatuated with the hazy hypnagogia that strings shabby days together. On 2022’s Soliloquy and 2023’s Pressure Sensitive, she tossed artful alley-oops to the likes of MIKE, Niontay, and Jadasea, setting the table for some of her collaborators’ most psyched-out plays. After years of being a pass-first producer, Truest marks her first foray into pure scoring—solo tracks, only one feature—and shows flashes of a star in the making.
If Kym’s discography is a collection of dreamscapes, the songs on Truest are lucid: No longer watching other characters brave her worlds, she waltzes through the house she’s spent years constructing. Like much of her earlier work, these songs come from a place of wistful longing; unlike anything she’s released before, they spotlight Kym’s singing voice, which claims a well-deserved spot in her woozy world. Album opener “Hesitations (Intro)” recalls dreamy R&B contemporaries like Liv.e and keiyaA, modulating and multiplying Kym’s murmurs to match the “faded,” “sedated” state she sketches out. Her chops—literally, chops—as a producer by now are familiar, but she foregrounds them in sinuous new shapes. “Test Your Patience” begins as a head-bopping saunter, until, within two minutes, Kym is gliding over a breakcore beat-switch, the way psychedelics might make you glide over grimy earth. “I’m convinced that this could be appealing,” she sings. She isn’t wrong.
Truest is the first Kym release to feature multiple producers besides herself, which makes for compelling, if peculiar, extensions of her palette. The 454-produced “Pool of Life” is fast and futurist, a groove-heavy Goldilocks zone between FAST TRAX 3 and The Velvet Rope—picture Janet Jackson in the studio with Nintendo devs. Skater-slash-rapper Na-Kel Smith has long favored pitched-up vocals and brash bass; over his frenetic beat for “Owed2Me,” Kym’s voice is in tinnitus territory, not controlling chaos so much as contributing to it. But as tripped-out as it is, and disarming as it may be for longtime listeners, it’s promising to see her take new risks, exploring others’ creative worlds instead of shrinking back into her own. Between Blair and now, she’s lived a few different artistic lives: punk-adjacent drummer, prolific hip-hop producer, soulful R&B singer. Seeing her surprise isn’t necessarily surprising.
The only featured artist on Truest is MIKE, godfather of the Brooklyn DIY enclave Kym spent the past several years studying, then sprouting from. Two years ago, on her debut solo tape, she enlisted him for a brief track called “Real Love”—less a full-fledged collaboration than a temp check, with MIKE rapping for a minute or so, as if feeling out her approach, then letting the beat ride out. There’s a full-circle moment here as both artists—and, now, both vocalists—immerse themselves on “In Doubt.” Kym’s production is far heavier than it was then; while the bassline swoops beneath her, she’s way up high, serenading a lover who no longer has to peer behind a drum kit, or sleuth out track credits, to see her. When the beat switches and MIKE comes in, it’s revelatory: the protégé playing host to the mentor. | 2024-03-26T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2024-03-26T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B / Electronic / Rap | 10k | March 26, 2024 | 7.6 | 05166a28-c8fb-43bd-b5c1-4e5699c8cbf2 | Samuel Hyland | https://pitchfork.com/staff/samuel-hyland/ | |
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 influential debut from the SoCal band, a pop-punk spark that spread like wildfire in the Tumblr era. | 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 influential debut from the SoCal band, a pop-punk spark that spread like wildfire in the Tumblr era. | Joyce Manor: Joyce Manor | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/joyce-manor-joyce-manor/ | Joyce Manor | Joyce Manor emerged from the beer-soaked ecosystem of basements and bowling alleys that has sustained SoCal pop-punk for nearly a half-century. But Barry Johnson knows who was truly responsible for the legend of Joyce Manor, ten entirely quotable, all-hook songs in 18 minutes, megaphoned by the new vanguard of punk tastemaking: “16-year-old and 17-year-old girls, with septum piercings and green hair,” sharing gifs, lyric quotes, and glitchy live videos. In other words, “Tumblr,” in case it’s unclear what exactly he’s getting at. And in being the first definitive punk album of the Tumblr era, Joyce Manor set the course for its foreseeable future, anticipating a decade of social media and streaming trends that rewarded immediacy and the perpetual bite-sizing of attention spans.
In 2011, they were simply a band that everyone could agree upon: The hardcore kids appreciated Joyce Manor blasting through at least three songs by the time they refilled their Solo cup, while the nerds latched onto the early forays into folk-punk, ska, and songs that wondered if fish have periods. The Defend Pop-Punk and emo revivalist wings were unified by a band who viewed Jawbreaker, blink-182, Green Day, and Weezer as equals in shaping the sound of California pop-rock.
All of these typically warring sub-factions would deem Joyce Manor “elder statesmen” at this point, a band dignified by their longevity. Yet they already sounded over it on Joyce Manor, resignation the subtext of every song—resignation at being post-teen, post-punk, or, if you prefer, just too old for this shit. Johnson was already in his 20s when Joyce Manor formed in the South Bay suburb of Torrance, shaped by its provincial adolescent Americana: He first met bassist Matt Ebert through a local bowling league, not far from Del Amo Fashion Center, once described as “America in mall form.” They later reconnected on an Orange County Ska message board. The initial bond with guitarist Chase Knobbe, then a 16-year-old employee at Gable House Bowl, was consecrated with ill-gotten Joose in a Disneyland parking lot.
Three years later, Joyce Manor begins like most SoCal punk albums, with another shitty day in high school. “Orange Julius” is a quintessential Joyce Manor song, just one long verse that modulates in intensity, allowing a brief glimpse of gang vocal catharsis before cutting it off. Johnson has explained it as a song about “falling in love with your bully/tormentor,” and falling in love with something you hate might be the most consistent throughline of Joyce Manor’s music. When Johnson writes about a crush, it results in “See How Tame I Can Be.” There are many, many Joyce Manor songs about the fear of being stuck in the South Bay and none that really consider what it might feel like to leave.
Johnson and Ebert saw firsthand the futility of using SoCal punk as a proxy for full-scale revolution or even a vision for an escape. To this day, Joyce Manor practice in the same converted garage in a quiet, residential patch of Torrance. The availability of this space could be seen as an act of kindness from the homeowner, the former guitarist of the Last, a Los Angeles power-pop act that released three albums on SST, the legendary label run by Black Flag’s Greg Ginn. When Lost royalties weren’t paying the mortgage, the homeowner eventually took a corporate job at Hewlett-Packard and attended the sort of national conferences attended by Hustler Honeys. The garage walls are still plastered with dozens of centerfolds autographed for his teenage son.
In 2011, the thought of getting a corporate gig or, say, being three albums deep on a legendary Los Angeles punk label like Epitaph was equally unappealing to Johnson. Most of the band’s origin story leading up to Joyce Manor rests on Johnson slowly being prodded into action against his will. Three years prior, folk-punkers Andrew Jackson Jihad (now AJJ) asked Johnson if he was available to play a gig with his erstwhile hardcore band Fever Kids. They had just broken up, and Johnson bluffed when asked about his new project’s name (“Umm…Joyce Manor?”). He quickly cobbled together a couple of songs to play Joyce Manor’s first gig, as an acoustic duo. Johnson had a formidable work ethic as a songwriter but no interest whatsoever in the grunt stuff of DIY punk; it was Ebert making the flyers, inviting friends to shows, booking gigs, and ultimately convincing Johnson to take Joyce Manor as seriously as the rest of the band did. “That was a stupid fucking idea as far as I was concerned [back then],” Johnson reflected in 2018. “I’ve got rent and shit. We’re not gonna go on some Tom Sawyer adventure with my life, I’m 24.”
It’s kinda surprising that Joyce Manor even made punk music at all. They repeatedly cited Morrissey and Weezer as primary influences; artists that are invariably discovered by teenagers who think they’re too clever to be miserable but feel miserable because they’re too clever. But Joyce Manor were either uninterested or incapable of trying to be among the hundreds or even thousands of SoCal bands actively trying to sound like either of them; the jaunty shuffle of “Ashtray Petting Zoo” is vaguely reminiscent of “Is It Really So Strange?” and that’s really about it. The Weezer comparisons are almost entirely attributable to “Leather Jacket’ and “Beach Community” trudging at a midtempo 6/8 time, slumping along like a nerd saddled with an overstuffed backpack on one arm because that’s how the cool kids wear it.
They also exclusively wrote very short songs and spiked alt-rock melodies with day-drunk surrealism, like a SoCal Guided By Voices that exclusively drank alcopops. While searching for a lost Nokia cell phone in “Beach Community,” Johnson is taunted both by police and streets that “count backwards.” The non sequitur titles of “Ashtray Petting Zoo” and “21st Dead Rats” also function as their hooks, working equally well as images of corporeal decay or just phonetically cool words to shout. None of Joyce Manor’s previous songs scattered throughout demos and splits and Johnson’s notebooks were off-limits, so Joyce Manor ostensibly could’ve been their Bee Thousand, a clearinghouse of ideas for a prolific songwriter who just couldn’t bear to let any idea go to waste. But Johnson was skeptical about anything that passed for a “lifestyle,” whether dictated by indie’s self-deprecation or punk’s self-delusion. When asked about Guided By Voices’ tendency to stuff several dozen tracks on each album, Johnson scoffed, “Don’t you wish they wouldn’t?”
Joyce Manor fit the demands of slapdash shows that could get cut off at any time—every part had to be the good part. Any other band that wrote a chorus as sticky as the one on “Beach Community” would’ve repeated it at least a second time; as is, it’s the big chorus and the big coda all at once. “Leather Jacket” might as well be all chorus, but the real hook is the rare Ebert lead vocal on the bridge that drives home the tremulous anger borne of high school betrayal.
Even after a decade of consistently escalating acclaim, I can’t think of too many bands that sound like Joyce Manor because how would anyone go about doing that? Their songs are almost impossible to parody because no one element feels separable from the whole. Like every album that came after, Joyce Manor is a testament to their excellence in un-punk qualities of editing and restraint. This is most evident on the songs that Joyce Manor salvaged from the “maybe” pile. On their 2/15/09 demo, “Stir Crazy” was a frenzied folk-punk burner about a friend lapsing into cocaine addiction. Two years later, they slowed it down, put it to an assured shuffle, sanded off the grit on the vocals, and it became “Ashtray Petting Zoo.” “Constant Nothing” and “Leather Jacket” are culled from the previous years’ Constant Headache EP and given tidier production. The band’s signature song, “Constant Headache,” itself did not appear on that EP.
There’s a possible alternate history where Joyce Manor, like many punk LPs of its ilk, ends after nine songs and about 15 minutes—and I have little doubt that it would still be an album we talk about 10 years later. But Joyce Manor aren’t headlining 3000-capacity rooms without “Constant Headache,” which portended much bigger things despite being the least ambitious song on Joyce Manor. There’s a single melodic line that repeats throughout the entire thing and it sounds like someone trying to remember “Don’t You Want Me” and failing to get past the second bar. Most of it requires no more than two chords at a time, played in a strumming pattern and tempo suitable for a teen within their first three guitar lessons. It peaks with Johnson shouting “entirely fucked” as the band drops out. But “Constant Headache” is exactly the song it needs to be in order to fully convey the persistent, nagging resignation that high school memories of getting drunk or getting laid for the first time have set a standard you will never, ever live up to.
The early and still persistent comparisons to Jawbreaker make sense thanks to “Constant Headache”—a California band making gruff, quotable, and sticky songs about being in the scene, but not quite of the scene, hovering slightly above it. Yet, that analogy always felt like projecting a bygone era’s ethics onto a band that never had much use for scene politics or politics of any sort. “Yeah, your dad/He was a cop who punched you right in the head/You said, ‘Fuck you, Dad! I hate you!’ and that's just what you meant,” Johnson shouted on early single “House Warning Party,” which eventually got resurrected as a “lead single” of their rarities compilation Songs From Northern Torrance in 2020. In the current moment, “Your dad was a cop/I bet his dad was a cop/Yeah but you're no cop, you see” can be read as an astute observation about genetic pathology, or that cops are state-funded shitty dads equating violence and discipline. Judging from Joyce Manor’s earliest shows, it served as a cathartic prompt for wimps finally gaining the confidence to tell their dads to fuck off.
Joyce Manor’s lyrics weren’t intended as words to live by, but lifestyle accessories in their own way—readily available for high school yearbook quotes, inside jokes, or content for the emergent forms of microblogging that were instrumental in their success. Throughout the previous decade, emo and pop-punk had become synonymous with the logorrheic, proudly overdramatic and Blingee’d garishness of Friendster, LiveJournal, and MySpace. As the leading figures of that era were starting to recede from rock radio, grittier and more nimble scenes were emerging alongside social media platforms that favored short, pithy expressions of manageable anxiety. Or, as Johnson described the subject matter of Joyce Manor: “Boredom, repeating the same mistakes over and over, eating too much candy, sexual depression, regular depression, fifteen VHS tapes for five dollars, that sorta thing.”
But these trivialities served as a jumping-off point for Johnson’s gift of capturing the casual cruelty of social interaction. Or, he’s just very good at writing about jerks (Exhibit A: “The Jerk”). In books or movies, jerks are given space to slowly accumulate microaggressions, to let social facades chip off until their true colors are revealed. But Johnson can cut right to it, beginning “Call Out” with the unofficial motto of The Jerk: “I would say I’m sorry, but I’m not sorry.” “The one you are ain’t the one that I’m after,” he sneers later on, and yet, he was able to spend years of his life playing the part: sitting by the ocean, riding on the handlebars of her bike. Joyce Manor spends most of its time in that precarious space between high school and confirmed adulthood, where people look at the relationships they’ve made, fostered mostly by proximity and superficial interests, and judging whether making new friends is even worth the hassle.
Nearly a year removed from their most recent gig, Joyce Manor took requests on Twitter to offer a one-sentence synopsis of each song—examples from Joyce Manor included “riding in a car going to a party feeling bad,” “unable to change,” and several of them were just: “not sure.” The 10 songs were built from this kind of exercise from the start, each concentrating itself into a tagline: “I walked in to find what’s worse than the worst of all time,” “I realize it’s true, everything reminds me of you,” “I rode a wave of emotion I can’t begin to place,” “I’d really like to know what it takes to say ‘I am strong,’” and the line that has prompted more Tumblr quotes than any other, “I just lay there in protest entirely fucked/It’s such a stubborn reminder one perfect night’s not enough.”
Less than a decade later, they got awfully close to that perfect night: Joyce Manor headlined the Hollywood Palladium as a career capstone in 2019, joined by Jeff Rosenstock and AJJ, the first guy who paid them for a gig and the guys responsible for their first gig, period. They were all preceded by emo upstarts awakebutstillinbed, hyped by Johnson as “a once-every-ten-years band.” Joyce Manor alone wasn’t a revolution when it arrived in 2011. It was simply one of the first central nodes amid the interrelated scenes of “feeling stuff” music that was still bubbling underground before they displaced finicky art-rock as the primary form of guitar-based indie rock—emo, pop-punk, confessional singer-songwriters, all of the things that teenagers are supposed to get out of their system. As thousands of emo teens and indie rock 40-somethings shouted along with Johnson about feeling totally washed on the encore-closing “Leather Jacket,” it’s abundantly clear why Joyce Manor will endure when TikTok and whatever replaces it goes the way of Tumblr: feeling too old for this shit never gets old.
Get the Sunday Review in your inbox every weekend. Sign up for the Sunday Review newsletter here. | 2021-04-04T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2021-04-04T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | 6131 | April 4, 2021 | 8.5 | 0516e17a-a52a-479c-9c72-ed9fdb4203a1 | Ian Cohen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ian-cohen/ | |
Written and produced in Los Angeles with Andrew Hung of Fuck Buttons, Beth Orton's latest is anxious, playful, and sounds little like anything the singer/songwriter has done before. | Written and produced in Los Angeles with Andrew Hung of Fuck Buttons, Beth Orton's latest is anxious, playful, and sounds little like anything the singer/songwriter has done before. | Beth Orton: Kidsticks | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21917-kidsticks/ | Kidsticks | Beth Orton has been considered a singer-songwriter folkie for so long that it can be hard to remember that her career began quite differently. She got her start singing on William Orbit's chillout project Strange Cargo, and she lent her voice to two songs on the Chemical Brothers' Exit Planet Dust, placing her smack in the middle of British pop's volatile post-rave milieu. When her 1996 breakout album, Trailer Park, appeared, it balanced plaintive acoustic guitars and barroom piano with trip-hop beats and atmospheric electronic detailing. That unusual fusion had a lot to do with producer Andrew Weatherall, whom Orton hired after he wedded acid house to bluesy psych rock on Primal Scream's Screamadelica. But Trailer Park ended up being an outlier in Orton's catalog. On subsequent albums she progressively dialed back the electronics, and her last full-length, 2012's starkly acoustic Sugaring Season, wrapped itself snugly in the warm, homespun mantle of folksingers like Nick Drake and Sandy Denny.
Kidsticks returns to her electronic roots, but not necessarily in ways that anyone might have expected. Written and produced in Los Angeles with Andrew Hung, of the noisy, psychedelic synth-mashers Fuck Buttons, it often sounds little like anything Orton has done before. The record's sequencing plays up its strangeness, placing its most unexpected songs right up front. “Snow” leads off with caterwauling counterpoints and flanged electric guitars over a trashcan drum corps; “Moon” follows with dance beats and a warbling keyboard melody that's a dead ringer for a sound from David Bowie's “Ashes to Ashes.” Orton, meanwhile, sounds like she's channeling Johnny Cash, lending to the impression that part of the album's genesis may have simply been Orton and Hung swapping the aux cord, constructing a virtual mood board of favorite songs as they sketched out Kidsticks' idiosyncratic sound. That might how the dubstep-inspired bass throb of “Petals” snuck through, not to mention the peppy new wave pastiche of "1973." Fortunately, most of these songs are far more than the sum of their influences: “Petals” may start out sounding like Massive Attack, but by its guitar-and-drum-duel finale, it burns like a church on fire.
It helps that Orton and Hung have enlisted a crack group of musicians, including bassist Bram Inscore, jazz drummer Guillermo E. Brown, percussionist Lucky Paul, and George Lewis, Jr. of Twin Shadow on guitar; Grizzly Bear bassist Chris Taylor also turns up on a couple of songs, and the soundtrack composer Dustin O'Halloran contributes string arrangements to a few more. Their contributions are subtle but key. The rolling “Wave” crests atop a deceptively potent rhythm section and surging wah-wah guitar; “Flesh and Blood” gives her pastoral tendencies a loose, jammy makeover and adds lilting, one-finger synth lines. The scope of her collaborators' resumes—Inscore has played with Beck and Charlotte Gainsbourg, and Brown has a long history with David S. Ware and Matthew Shipp's groups, while Paul can be found sitting in with Chilly Gonzales and Mocky—says something about Orton and Hung's approach here: Kidsticks is less a roadmap to a given destination than a net for catching vibes.
As for Orton, loosening up suits her well. You can tell how much she's enjoying herself by all the ways she experiments with her voice. She takes on three or four different styles in “Snow,” alternately cooing and yelping, playing head voice off chest voice. On “Wave,” her delivery frays around the edges, inseparable from the throat that produced it; every crack, every quaver feels like a proud badge of her years on the planet. She's just as physical on “Flesh and Blood,” but here, in contrast, she sounds absolutely luxurious, with a texture like crushed velvet.
Lyrically, the big themes hold sway. She fixates on celestial bodies and planetary forces: suns, moons, stars, seas, smoke, snow, waves, weather. She swims through a liquid sky on "1973"; lilacs turn to teardrops in "Petals." But she also has an ear for small, lovely details, like "corduroy legs running up the stairs," the image that gives shape to “Corduroy Legs,” a delightful, boundless expression of parental love. And if her lyrics sometimes read like the work of someone who's coming off a lost weekend of tarot cards and John Donne, she also knows when to strip back: In “Falling,” she sings, with devastating simplicity, “Now my phone book / Is filling up with dead friends / And I wonder / Who would answer if I called them.”
Throughout it all, a picture emerges of Orton that's anxious, playful (“You got a certain way, I swear, of sticking it in,” she leers on “1973”), and even supremely relatable. There are love songs here, and falling-out-of-love songs, and sometimes it takes a while to tell which is which. The twist in a song called “Falling” is that she's “falling backwards from your arms”; in “Dawnstar,” she sings, “Our love is gaining speed,” but she also admits, “I am thankful that what I have is enough.” Escape velocity is for the young, I think she's saying; once you reach a certain stage in life, you're happy just to keep going. And if this all sounds like a case of lowered expectations, the strikingly beautiful “Flesh and Blood,” the album's peak, turns simple acceptance—of “whatever this is,” as she sings, over and over—into something approaching ecstasy.
Looking back on Trailer Park, Orton told The Quietus in 2009, “I thought, well, if I really am a singer… I must create my own thing and do it, only then will I prove it. But even today I'm still proving it to myself.” But on Kidsticks, she no longer sounds like she has anything left to prove, which is precisely what's allowed her to make the riskiest album of her career. And she sounds like she's had the time of her life making it, too. | 2016-05-31T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-05-31T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Anti- | May 31, 2016 | 7.6 | 051e49df-77b1-480a-a449-832fea777e36 | Philip Sherburne | https://pitchfork.com/staff/philip-sherburne/ | null |
On the strongest album of their unlikely second act, the Swedish melodic death metal band lets their weirder side take the reins. | On the strongest album of their unlikely second act, the Swedish melodic death metal band lets their weirder side take the reins. | At the Gates: The Nightmare of Being | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/at-the-gates-the-nightmare-of-being/ | The Nightmare of Being | At the Gates became one of the most influential bands of the Swedish melodic death metal boom by boiling their sound down to its essence. Their 1995 album Slaughter of the Soul funneled its gut-punch riffs, venomous vocals, and sugar-rush melodies into pop-adjacent song structures, unwittingly spurring the early ’00s metalcore explosion led by bands like Killswitch Engage and Darkest Hour. To make Slaughter, At the Gates had to subdue the experimental impulse that ran through their earlier work, and just as they were beginning to reap the rewards of that transformation, they broke up. Now, three LPs into a once unthinkable second act, we can finally hear the promise of the more exploratory band that could have been.
The Nightmare of Being is At the Gates’ second album with bassist Jonas Björler as their primary songwriter, following the departure of his twin brother, Anders, in 2017. It was Anders who first pushed the band to write more approachable material back in 1993, and in his absence, At the Gates have started to sound more like those exuberant teenagers who put an extended violin solo on the first song on their debut album. While 2014’s At War With Reality and 2018’s To Drink From the Night Itself tried to split the difference between these esoteric inclinations and their more streamlined sound, on The Nightmare of Being, their weirder side claims a decisive victory: It is their best, most diverse, and most provocative album since reuniting.
Nearly every At the Gates record has incorporated non-metal instrumentation to some degree, but on The Nightmare of Being, those parts feel just as integral as the churning guitars and pummeling drums. At a key moment in “The Paradox,” Björler underpins a particularly throat-ripping scream from frontman Tomas Lindberg with a plink of piano, where his brother once might have put a chugging riff. Anders Gabrielsson’s snaking saxophone emerges from the center of “Garden of Cyrus,” picking up the lead melody from the guitar and building in intensity as the band thrashes around him. “Touched by the White Hands of Death,” one of the more straightforward songs, complements its furious death metal assault with a string quartet, flute, clarinet, bassoon, and tuba. None of these parts sound like mere window dressing, nor do they undermine the essential death metal-ness of the album.
Björler’s impressive songwriting and arrangements wouldn’t have the same impact without Lindberg’s signature rasp at the front of the mix. As his work with punk-aligned acts like Disfear and Lock Up suggests, the veteran singer’s take on death metal is rooted in hardcore—more staccato bark than guttural growl. This style is hard on the vocal cords, and over the past decade, Lindberg has often sounded totally spent, both onstage and in the studio. Nightmare, however, is the strongest vocal performance he has given on an At the Gates album since he sang about his “22 years of pain” on Slaughter of the Soul. Of course, he doesn’t sound that young anymore, but he’s learned to weaponize his exasperation and exhaustion.
That effect is enhanced by Lindberg’s lyrics, which are fixated on the philosophy of pessimism extolled by fatalistic thinkers like Thomas Ligotti and Eugene Thacker. “Cosmic Pessimism,” a bouncy, krautrock-inspired track, takes its lyrics directly from Thacker’s book of the same name, in a surprising act of interdisciplinary collaboration. The key tenets of philosophical pessimism are that humanity is doomed, the planet is inhospitable, and the universe is indifferent. That sounds bleak on its face, but for At the Gates, embracing the philosophy helped put their art into perspective. “Pessimism is, weirdly enough, comforting,” Lindberg told Revolver in a recent interview. He went on to explain that the pandemic helped him appreciate the small things and warned against setting goals that will only end in disappointment. From that view, making an album is a laughably low-stakes affair, and Lindberg would likely make fun of the idea that The Nightmare of Being is somehow life-affirming. Yet its power, both in spite and because of its core ethos, is undeniable.
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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. | 2021-07-08T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2021-07-08T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Metal | Century Media | July 8, 2021 | 7.5 | 051f4456-6392-41e7-a714-6d846a71318e | Brad Sanders | https://pitchfork.com/staff/brad-sanders/ | |
In the year before he died, Mark Linkous hit the studio with Steve Albini. Fourteen years later, those unreleased sessions reveal a bittersweet cocktail of beauty and torment. | In the year before he died, Mark Linkous hit the studio with Steve Albini. Fourteen years later, those unreleased sessions reveal a bittersweet cocktail of beauty and torment. | Sparklehorse: Bird Machine | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/sparklehorse-bird-machine/ | Bird Machine | Mark Linkous was a devotee of the work in progress. Under the banner of Sparklehorse and until his death by suicide in March 2010, the Virginia songwriter crafted a series of exquisitely fractured indie-rock albums that suggested a distrust of anything too polished, guided by an inherent belief that the silence and static were as crucial as the words and music. In order to achieve this balance, Linkous developed a meticulous process in his home studio that involved finding just the right busted vintage equipment to layer against his tender vocals, close enough to the mic so you could hear the breath between each line. With each successive album, the process became so intensive that it seemed like a miracle anything ever got released.
That is, until Bird Machine. As the first decade of the 2000s drew to a close, Linkous reached a breaking point and decided to change directions. The plan was to hit the studio with noted punk naturalist Steve Albini and bash out some simple tunes that wouldn’t drive him, or any of his collaborators, crazy, all in an effort to rediscover his initial spark. He revisited his favorite records by the Kinks and wrote music that would translate easily to a live rock show. “The songs are not quite as clever,” he said at the time, “and I’m not laboring forever over every lyric.” For an artist so clouded by doubt and perfectionism, pain and self-deprecation, the new approach sounded a little like therapy.
Instead, Bird Machine was destined to become the greatest labor of love in his catalog: Only now is it finally getting released, miraculously, 14 years after he started making it. Completed by younger brother Matt Linkous and Matt’s bandmate and wife, Melissa Moore, the record is composed of recordings Matt discovered in 2017, rounded out with guest appearances from Grandaddy’s Jason Lytle and Matt and Moore’s 19-year-old son, Spencer. With the same collage-like, bittersweet atmosphere as the best Sparklehorse albums, Bird Machine conveys an uncanny thrill—like revisiting an exact replica of some safe haven you frequented as a child. But where those records carried the unflinching vision of a single auteur, this one plays through a foggier, more distant lens.
In a sense, there was always a posthumous quality to Sparklehorse records, even when the man behind them was still with us. He often sang about and from the perspective of ghosts, a word he pronounced in a sweet, Southern falsetto that made its central vowel sound as soft as a muted horn. Early on this record, we get a whole song about this type of haunting with “Kind Ghosts,” where he surveys his past for any comforting omnipotence: “Oh where were you, my kind ghosts, when I needed you?” As with Elliott Smith’s From a Basement on the Hill, many lyrics could be read like grim premonitions, but they are so consistent with the imagery throughout his catalog, it is mostly just a comfort. I am not sure, for example, what Linkous means when he sings about a “hummingbird and quasar,” but from him, it’s hard to imagine a more romantic phrase.
These familiar turns make Bird Machine a comfortable fit in Linkous’ catalog, and you can easily connect the dots to his past work. The essential tracks will largely come down to which side of his songwriting you connect with the most. The woozy psych pop of “Daddy’s Gone” also appeared on 2010’s Dark Night of the Soul, a record he was working on with Danger Mouse and David Lynch around the same time as this project. While I prefer that album’s version, a duet with the Cardigans’ Nina Persson, this rawer solo take has a more visceral quality, where imagery of a dog eating cake connects to the title track of 2001’s masterpiece It’s a Wonderful Life. The crunchy alt-country of “Chaos of the Universe” draws a straight line to the burst of noise that interrupted one of his first great anthems on 1998’s “Chaos of the Galaxy/Happy Man.”
When Linkous wrote that song, his major label suggested it could be the big single, which only made him more hell-bent on corrupting it with an MTV-proof wave of fuzz. Back then, the label might have been pushing Linkous to make something more like Bird Machine, where even burnt-out, droning lullabies like “The Scull of Lucia” feel equally aimed at solitary headphones and live, swaying audiences. This record, in fact, might boast Sparklehorse’s highest concentration of catchy melodies, from the seasick breeze of “Evening Star Supercharger” to the gospel balladry of “Falling Down” and “Hello Lord.” You can hear what he was drawing from those Kinks records, how their sunny choruses melt into his nightmarish kaleidoscope.
A constant through Linkous’ catalog was the pairing of his most optimistic lyrics with his saddest melodies, giving the sense of a constant battle to transcend the darkness. There’s a similar quality at play in these songs, where the heaviest, thrashiest performances are also the most beautiful. Maybe it’s because you can hear glimpses of a way out: the garage-band throwdowns Linkous had in mind, music he could play live and start shedding his reputation as some sad bastard holed up in a studio. These songs also happen to be the moments when Linkous gets most direct as a lyricist, trading his mystical, abstract universe for a more candid approach. One song is called “I Fucked It Up,” and it’s a blown-out, junkyard spiral of all the ways he’s sabotaged himself—personally, professionally, creatively. He knows it’s a cautionary tale, but through his distorted, gnarly delivery, Linkous makes it sound a little triumphant, owning his underdog story while it’s still his to tell. For the rest of us, it’s another stirring reminder that nobody could fuck it up like him. | 2023-09-14T00:03:00.000-04:00 | 2023-09-14T00:03:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Anti- | September 14, 2023 | 7.6 | 051fa879-4a08-45b6-8138-9ce1ebf57b45 | Sam Sodomsky | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sam-sodomsky/ | |
Demi Lovato has long sung about rebirth. On Holy Fvck, she enacts it by jettisoning the pop-R&B palette that has defined her records for a decade. | Demi Lovato has long sung about rebirth. On Holy Fvck, she enacts it by jettisoning the pop-R&B palette that has defined her records for a decade. | Demi Lovato: Holy Fvck | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/demi-lovato-holy-fvck/ | Holy Fvck | Demi Lovato could have drawn from her own comeback playbook. The singer, whose battles with addiction and mental illness have been widely documented and dissected since they first sought treatment in 2010, has historically returned from rehab with a solemn message about their struggle. In 2011, it was with “Skyscraper,” a raw power ballad about rebuilding a collapsed life. In 2020, following a near-fatal overdose, it was with “Anyone,” a plea for compassion debuted, through tears, at the Grammys. Both on that stage and in the video for “Skyscraper,” Lovato performed in a chaste white dress, signaling contrition and rebirth.
If you didn’t already know that Demi went back to rehab, she’ll be the first to tell you. “Demi leaves rehab again” is the opening line—delivered with a sardonic bite, like she’s trying to snatch the words away from haters and gossips—of “Skin of My Teeth,” the lead single from her eighth album, Holy Fvck. Sometime after releasing last year’s Dancing With the Devil…The Art of Starting Over, an ultra-exposed document of self-reinvention after self-immolation, Lovato quietly went through another round of treatment. Seemingly, question marks still hover around the matter of their own survival, a central preoccupation of their music: “I’m alive by the skin of my teeth,” goes the refrain. But rather than don the white dress, this time Lovato suits up in latex and leather, grabs a spiky guitar, and borrows from Hole. Go to hell enough times and eventually you come back hardened.
Holy Fvck fulfills its promise of sweaty, angsty excess with a tour through pop-punk and adjacent genres. Opener “Freak” sets the tone with sludgy metal guitars and fits of guttural screaming, plus an appearance by Yungblud—like Lovato, a Disney Channel alum with an alternative streak—whose gritty voice roughs up the track like sandpaper. Across the album, Lovato’s idea of transgression is working abrasive sounds into songs about pleasure and pleasurable hooks into songs about pain and death, plus some punctuating “fuck!”s, just because. Rather than tapping current pop-punk kingpin Travis Barker, Lovato stuck with returning producer Warren “Oak” Felder, whose work for Alessia Cara and Lizzo is noticeably light on headbangers. But this is no half-hearted rebrand: On Dancing with the Devil, Lovato sang about rebirth, and on Holy Fvck, she enacts it by jettisoning the pop-R&B palette that has defined her records for a decade.
The sounds Lovato is gravitating to—hurtling, cymbal-heavy drums, rumbling electric guitars, bridge breakdowns—have regained their currency in recent years, as pop-punk has acquired new mainstream acolytes in Machine Gun Kelly, Olivia Rodrigo, and Willow. Lovato positioned this album not just as her pop-punk album but as her homecoming—a return “to my roots,” as she wrote on Instagram. It’s true that her musical interests have long been edgier than her public persona might suggest. As early as 2008, Lovato confessed her fascination with metal to Rolling Stone; during press for Holy Fvck, she recalled crowd-surfing at a performance by the Norwegian black metal band Dimmu Borgir as a young teenager. The music she herself made around that time, with its lightly thrashing guitars and love-it-or-leave-it spunk, was about as raucous as she could get away with in the conservative Disney ecosystem.
It’s genuinely exciting to see Lovato enter chaos mode on Holy Fvck, opting to break shit rather than publicly mend herself. Frankly, there’s a lot for her to be mad about. They excoriate the much-older actor with whom they became involved at 17 (“Numbers told you not to/But that didn’t stop you”) and tear into the rigid standards of beauty and behavior to which women and femmes are held (especially oppressive for someone, like Lovato, whose gender identity is fluid). Friends lost to addiction wander through her mind, and the pressure of being a “real model” weighs her down.
Within the anger, there’s plenty of room for humor and irreverence. “Substance” pops off, bemoaning the artifice of contemporary life with cheeky wordplay (“Am I the only one looking for substance?”) that helps save the song from its hand-wringing generalizations. It also helps that Lovato sounds so good. Their voice has always been something of a blunt instrument, undeniably mighty but imprecise. Here, that looseness is an asset—just try to imagine someone like Ariana Grande, Lovato’s more technically rigorous peer, wailing her way through a chorus about her own decaying corpse with all the messy grandeur of a Mentos-and-Diet-Coke geyser. Lovato is an approachable powerhouse, the kind you can sing along with, and Holy Fvck’s megahooks offer plenty of opportunities.
At times Lovato pushes the irreverence to the extreme. You already knew that from the cover, which has her posing in bondage on a mattress shaped like a cross. Lovato loves mixing the sacred and the profane—on the title track, which likens their body to communion, as in the literal body of Christ; on “Heaven,” a barely veiled masturbation hymn with a skipping kick drum and a celestial choir; and definitely on “City of Angels,” a ribald “christening” of Los Angeles that climaxes with an outrageous pun on Disneyland’s Splash Mountain. It’s not just laughs: Lovato was of the generation of faith-oriented Disney stars who wore promise rings, and has pointed to the role of Christian purity culture in her reluctance to speak up about a sexual assault she survived as a teenager. The middle finger she extends here is warranted, but even with those biographical footnotes in mind, when she’s called herself a sinner, a heathen, a serpent, a sexorcist, and “ungodly but heaven sent” all by the album’s midpoint, you start to wish for just a little more subtlety.
But somewhere between the Holy and the Fvck of it all is something sweeter. In the extended metaphor of “Wasted,” Lovato tries to bottle the intoxicating feeling of infatuation with a new crush. The love-as-drug trope is certainly loaded for them, but choosing to couch love in terms of their destructive former vices scans as a gesture of self-acceptance—a recognition that who we once were is just context for who we’ve become. “Smitten and hopelessly lost in this feeling,” Lovato arrives at the closer with her demeanor softened, and her palette, too. “4 Ever 4 Me,” more Goo Goo Dolls than Blink-182, wraps Lovato in acoustic chords and bittersweet strings as they sing to a new partner about wanting to meet his mother. In some ways, this feels like a segue, a hint that adult contemporary is the center to which Lovato will ultimately return. But it doesn’t undermine the album’s essential spirit. Planning for forever when every day is a fight—that’s defiance. | 2022-08-19T00:04:00.000-04:00 | 2022-08-19T00:04:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | Island | August 19, 2022 | 6.5 | 05203004-8bbc-4950-90a9-c8beba9d307c | Olivia Horn | https://pitchfork.com/staff/olivia-horn / | |
Torrance, California, pop-punk outfit Joyce Manor have gained a reputation as one of the most popular and interesting bands in their realm, and their third record is their most ambitious and diverse album, as weird as it is instantly enjoyable. | Torrance, California, pop-punk outfit Joyce Manor have gained a reputation as one of the most popular and interesting bands in their realm, and their third record is their most ambitious and diverse album, as weird as it is instantly enjoyable. | Joyce Manor: Never Hungover Again | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/19507-joyce-manor-never-hungover-again/ | Never Hungover Again | Pop-punk has certain stylistic rules about song structure and topicality that detractors often refer to as cliches, and it’s much easier to break these rules than to do something notable within them. The latter explains how Joyce Manor have grown to be one of the most popular and interesting bands in their realm: Yes, they’re from Torrance, California, and write 90-second, hook-filled songs called “Orange Julius” and “Leather Jacket.” They also take prog-like liberties with format and assume their subject matter is as fascinating as science fiction. They take pride in their given aesthetic, and the quartet’s third LP, Never Hungover Again, is a pop-punk cliché itself: the one where an ascendant, dearly beloved band signs to a big label, hires a hotshot producer and, oh shit, are those keyboards? The successes of Never Hungover Again are numerous, and the foremost is how Joyce Manor’s most ambitious and diverse album is just like their other ones—10 songs, 19 minutes, every second as weird as it is instantly enjoyable.
Assuming you’re approaching this record as a self-identifying “indie-rock” fan, there isn’t a single “legitimate” precedent that will walk you through this—maybe “west coast Lifetime” comes close, considering Barry Johnson’s perpetual slur, self-deprecation, and goofy earnestness. Joyce Manor are a stylistically comprehensive band and this record is a consolidation of their talents, accomplishing the difficult task of welding the straightforward charms of their increasingly canonical self-titled debut and the ambition of Of All Things I Will Soon Grow Tired, a record praised at the time for its relatively experimental leanings and in retrospect for having the fortune of being produced by “the Sunbather guy” (even though numerous Deafheaven songs are longer than the complete running time of Of All Things).
Of All Things’ “Bride of Usher” was typical of that record’s dilettantism, Joyce Manor playing a Smiths song by cribbing Johnny Marr’s leads and their rhythm section’s bounce; it felt as much of a cover as their actual take on the Buggles. The remarkable “Falling in Love Again” reverses and imagines if the Smiths wrote a Joyce Manor song—Tony Hoffer (Beck, M83, Air) adds a glycerine sheen to the slashing guitar chords and maxes Johnson’s vocals to a state of high school high drama; you can believe the title is being played straight or you can hear lines of Moz-like ambivalence (“Hope you don’t think that I care/’Cause I do I just don’t know if I should feel this bad about you”) as being par for Joyce Manor: Falling in love again is just the first step to the preferred resting state of falling out.
This is how Joyce Manor operates: In the past, beach communities, toothaches and model train sets were merely symbols and mirrors for Johnson’s infinite sadness. So while “End of the Summer,” “Heated Swimming Pool,” and “Heart Tattoo” are indicative of Joyce Manor’s suburban purview and are about the exact things they promise, Johnson’s subtle and powerful insight allows him to expose new angles and multitudes in the mundane. “The Jerk” is, yes, about being a jerk and also watching the titular movie and learning “that stuff don’t work." In both “Christmas Card” and “Heart Tattoo,” love can only be legitimized by pain—“I want it to hurt really bad/That’s how I’ll know it’s real.” Johnson’s lyrics are conversational, keg-side and half-pipe ruminations taking on a heft and layered meaning that likely escapes everyone involved until they’ve had a chance to mull them over alone: “Never really had a drug phase/So you think you’re fucking miserable now?,” “I always knew you'd join the army,” “I wish you would’ve died in high school/So you could be somebody’s idol.”
But if you want to hear Never Hungover Again as a summer record, Joyce Manor mask their depressive streak with chiming, fake 12-string riffs, mid-tempo jangle, group harmonies, and basically everything that can be crammed into pop-punk without turning it into plain ol’ “indie-rock.” Most bands working on a two-minute time limit tend to strip things down to the most rudimentary aspects and Joyce Manor can do that—the strict tense verse/explosive chorus template of “Victoria” is proof enough, though it’s an outlier that reflects how unconventional the band’s songwriting is throughout. The velocity of Never Hungover Again has an illusory effect where you can hear these songs as having been isolated from lengthier ones—the strange riff that bisects “Schley” sounds like it was excised from a long-winded solo, “Catalina Fight Song” is a 64-second perpetual crescendo that’s missing the expected, vestigial four-minute run-up, and “Falling in Love Again” churns tempestuously through near shoegaze synth ambience without ever hitting a predictable peak.
Upon first listen, the brevity of Never Hungover Again can sound less effective than, say, trying to hammer to home a chorus for the third time. But once you stop trying to label what should be a hook and focus on what is, the ingenuity of each song’s design and the ear-turning nature of every maneuver speaks to Never Hungover Again’s inexhaustible quality, the kind of album you can play three times in a row without any part wearing out its welcome.
Yet, the broad appeal of this record somehow makes it a more precarious sell than something that can be easily pegged; pop-punk literalists may reflexively hear the slick production as a betrayal and compliments such as “smart” or “crafty” as backhanded against its visceral, pleasure-seeking genre, similar to “conscious rap” or “intelligent dance music”. Meanwhile, it may be seen by indie fans as less substantial than Perfect Pussy, United Nations, White Lung, Cloud Nothings, and the Hotelier, who have revitalized their modes of punk in 2014 with heavy albums that nobody would call “fun.” Joyce Manor make punk music for the other 99% of waking life when you’re not functioning at peak intensity—for getting drunk, being bored, falling in love, feeling like shit, and wondering if your best days are behind you before heading out to a pool party you’re pretty stoked about. The optimal balance of maturity and immaturity is right there in the title, so throw on Never Hungover Again when you’re still looking to get into dumb shit, but you just want to be smarter about it. | 2014-07-21T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2014-07-21T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Epitaph | July 21, 2014 | 7.8 | 0520fabb-2120-410e-a12d-ce22844728cf | Ian Cohen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ian-cohen/ | |
The 1975 emerged in 2011 as the third-wave emo band the Slowdown, then quickly disappeared. A couple years later, the rebooted Manchester group’s spit-polished self-titled full-length aims for the gleaming synth rock of Phoenix and M83. | The 1975 emerged in 2011 as the third-wave emo band the Slowdown, then quickly disappeared. A couple years later, the rebooted Manchester group’s spit-polished self-titled full-length aims for the gleaming synth rock of Phoenix and M83. | The 1975: The 1975 | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/18467-the-1975-the-1975/ | The 1975 | The saga of the 1975 is odd and protracted: Once upon a time, in 2011, there was a perfect Jimmy Eat World mall-emo anthem called “Sex” by a Manchester band called the Slowdown. The black-and-white video showed four telegenic people with perfect haircuts performing near a carefully placed Johnny Cash poster, clearly a month or two away from fulfilling their destiny on the cover of several American magazines.
Except that never happened, and, in fact, it seemed that someone had made a number of mistakes—the band may have actually once been called Drive Like I Do, or maybe the Big Sleep, and in fact already might not be called the Slowdown anymore. Anyway, they disappeared immediately—their SoundCloud, their Bandcamp, and even that video came down unceremoniously, all before they had even begun to assume their rightful one-hit wonder status.
A couple years later, we find ourselves facing a complete reboot. Hi, we’re the 1975, and this is our brand-new song “Sex,” this same group of people are now telling us. To which we can only shrug, and say: OK, guys. Emerging from this long, bewildering gestation, they now have the overcompensating brio of a band that is making its first impression for the second time—their band name, album name, and first song are all “The 1975.” “Sex” has even been completely re-recorded and given a new, fumbling-teenagers-in-lust video treatment.
They’ve also retooled their sound. In this incarnation, they have stepped away from third-wave emo and aim for the gleaming, modular synth rock of Wolfgang-era Phoenix and M83’s Hurry Up, We’re Dreaming, which ironically makes them less distinctive now than it would have in 2010. Produced by Mike Crossey, who has worked with Arctic Monkeys and Two Door Cinema Club, their spit-polished full-length is a throwback to the sort of CD-era pop rock album everyone remembers buying at least once: the one with the re-recorded single surrounded mostly by less-developed, vaguely similar stuff.
There are still a handful of serviceable pop-rock singles: “The City,” built on a big, blocky drum loop, has a bit of the forlorn romanticism of Bloc Party circa “I Still Remember.” “Heart Out” opens with a ringing synth figure, punctuated with “hey!”s, that feels like a built-to-scale replica of M83’s “Midnight City.” Matthew Healy’s pinched vocals hit that ice-cream-headache sweet spot between pretty-boy quaver and adenoidal yelp, and the version of “cool” he seems to be gesturing towards feels endearingly carbon-dated and translated from a few different languages into English. There is a lot of overt leering in their lyrics, but no sex or grease or danger anywhere in the music, even on “Sex,” which is here and is still their best song by miles.
The song, along with precious few others on The 1975, boasts a secret weapon sorely missing elsewhere: a middle eight. For such a pop-oriented band, the 1975’s songwriting has turned out remarkably stiff, cloistered, and unimaginative. The production, which is glistening and brilliant, usually points to what the band might have accomplished with more sophisticated chops: The skipping synths and handclaps that open “M.O.N.E.Y.,” or the itchy guitar figure fidgeting near a blocky drum beat in “Talk!,” work up a gently caffeinated fizz. But the songs zip along the tight lines established by their opening seconds and refuse to budge, not a bridge in sight for miles. The fizz fades quickly, and the effect, over the course of the album, is a little like a promising new band introducing and re-re-introducing itself to you. There is some value in figuring out what to say next. | 2013-09-12T02:00:02.000-04:00 | 2013-09-12T02:00:02.000-04:00 | Rock | Dirty Hit / Interscope | September 12, 2013 | 5.9 | 05247a5d-ad1d-4db7-a656-f18b0c1acbd8 | Jayson Greene | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jayson-greene/ | |
The songs on J Dilla's signature production opus, released the week of his death, are miniature lessons in how to take sample-based music and use it to build elaborate suites from the nagging little pieces of songs that stick with you long after you've last listened to them. While Donuts is best experienced as a self-contained album, Stones Throw has gone to the unusual step of reissuing it as a box set of 7" singles, complete with bonus material. | The songs on J Dilla's signature production opus, released the week of his death, are miniature lessons in how to take sample-based music and use it to build elaborate suites from the nagging little pieces of songs that stick with you long after you've last listened to them. While Donuts is best experienced as a self-contained album, Stones Throw has gone to the unusual step of reissuing it as a box set of 7" singles, complete with bonus material. | J Dilla: Donuts (45 Box Set) | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/17510-donuts-45-box-set/ | Donuts (45 Box Set) | If the six years since Donuts was released has taught us anything, it's that a great album can be a sort of open-ended puzzle that can be solved from multiple angles. It's become James Yancey's signature production opus, even though the path that led him to it was laid down by a lifetime of collaboration, workshopping, and constant production in the service of other people's voices. It's the last work he created in his lifetime, released the week of his death, and yet it still feels like his music hasn't run out of time yet, whether that's down to periodic dives back into his vaults, or via the artists that've picked up inspiration and run with it to new places. It's a widely praised favorite for so many people, and yet there's something about Donuts that feels like such an intensely personal statement. Even attempting to engage with it objectively, setting aside the direct experience of the man who made it, doesn't entirely break through its mystique.
But as music, the role Donuts occupies is something more than the weight of its rep or impact-- or even the circumstances in which it was created, as hard as it is to separate the idea of the album's sound from the motivation of a prolific creator knowingly constructing his final work. As an album, it just gets deeper the longer you live with it, front-to-back listens revealing emotions and moods that get pulled in every direction: mournful nostalgia, absurd comedy, raucous joy, sinister intensity. There's all kinds of neat little tics and idiosyncrasies, pushing Dilla's early 00s beat-tape experiments and exchanges into compositions that tinker with Thelonious Monk's off-kilter timing and Lee Perry's warped fidelity. The songs on Donuts are like miniature lessons in how to take sample-based music and use it to build elaborate suites out of all those nagging little pieces of songs that stick with you long after you've last listened to them. There's little else in Dilla's catalog quite like it; at points, it sounds like he was busy quickly unlearning everything he'd taught himself just so he could have the experience of relearning it all again one last time.
While Donuts is best experienced as a self-contained album, Stones Throw has gone to the unusual step of reissuing it as a box set of 7" singles, a format that initially comes across like a boutique novelty at the expense of practicality. If anybody owns a scuffed-up old jukebox and wants to stock it with records that recreate the feeling of recalling jumbled-up memories and mulling over them for a while, then sure, this would work great. And it's hard not to appreciate the symbolism of issuing this album on 7" records, considering that the hospital bedside setup Yancey used to create a significant portion of Donuts consisted of a SP-303 hooked up to a portable 45 turntable. But is there a reason to chop one of the last 10 years' purest can't-listen-to-just-one-track experiences into pieces, especially when the target audience for this reissue likely already has a version they don't have to keep flipping over?
Well, think of it this way: What's your favorite song on Donuts? Breaking an album like this into its component tracks puts a new viewpoint on a record that's always been easy to see as a whole, and the limitations of three minutes or so per side gives individual moments more weight on their own. The rhythms of the isolated tracks can feel truncated and abrupt in this new context-- without anything to segue into, side-enders like "Workinonit" and "One Eleven" flip off like a light switch-- but it still fits the suddenness and in medias res editing of the album's handmade, conversational feel. And it only serves to elucidate how much Dilla could do in such a limited amount of space. He could fit a lot of off-beat meter-shifting, loop-upending false starts and jump cuts, subtle slow-build dynamics, and double-back surprises into the little 50-to-80-second vignettes. That's plenty of time to set up expectations, only to twist them around a thousand degrees.
There's also some clever sequencing to the sides that lets new thematic possibilities appear. Of course "Airworks" and "Lightworks" share a side to themselves, and as consecutive tracks they felt like weird companion pieces in the middle of the original album. On record, that odd pairing-- a hiccupy series of tics drawn from L.V. Johnson's classic Chicago soul, transitioning into a cheerfully odd rework of Raymond Scott's late 50s musique concrete corporate jingles-- forces those two cuts into closer quarters and highlights their shared tendency to loop vocal phrases and backbeats into knots you can't untie. Same goes for "Two Can Win" and "Don't Cry", which consecutively showcase Yancey's knack for building classic hip-hop beats out of solitary 70s R&B nuggets. The choppy yet lush elegance of "Dilla Says Go"/"Walkinonit" and the heartbroken please-stay pleas of "Hi."/"Bye." stand out in isolation, too.
But even without that benefit of new juxtapositions, it's still eye-opening to take each little set of songs as it comes and not sweat getting to the next one, pinpointing the inimitable technique and sample-sourcing scope of Donuts through certain distinct moments. Just pull out "Geek Down" and note how Dilla took one of the most recognizable samples in hip-hop, ESG's "UFO", and found something surprising and obscure to lay it over: a 2002 7" retro-funk b-side called "Charlie's Theme" released in limited numbers by an incognito Geoff Barrow and Adrian Utley from Portishead. That's in keeping with the other moments where he's clearly working with some well-used building block that every sample-based producer should know their way around-- Mountain's "Long Red" ("Stepson of the Clapper"); Malcolm McLaren's "Buffalo Gals" ("Workinonit" and "The Twister"); the Beastie Boys' "The New Style" ("The New")-- and still finds a way to fit that piece into something uniquely his by drawing from an encyclopedic catalog of under-utilized funk and soul deep cuts. Even the ubiquitous siren he lifted from Mantronix feels like Dilla's sole property now-- maybe because Kurtis never thought to lay it over a mobius-strip revamp of Kool and the Gang album track "Fruitman" ("The Diff'rence") or a tense, staggered piano loop cut from Martha Reeves' mid 70s post-Motown solo debut ("Thunder").
If you need any extra incentive, the box set packs in some bonus material. There's a medley of tracks that share sources with Donuts instrumentals "Anti-American Graffiti" and "Geek Down", which were originally slated for MF DOOM and Ghostface showcase "Sniper Elite & Murder Goons". The track shows both MCs still in post-Madvillainy/Pretty Toney form, DOOM twisting internal rhymes at a ridiculous clip, Ghost still verbally sprinting like he's coming off "Run". And "Signs", originally a Fan Club release, tacks on a stand-alone postscript that hints at some of Donuts' brilliance, but mostly just provides a pretty straightforward (if appealing) instrumental break based off a needly organ riff and that old Syl Johnson "Different Strokes" grunt. The rarities are enticing, the packaging is immaculate, and the format is intriguing. But above all else, this reissue provides a good excuse to revisit an old favorite in a new light, and in the end it's still a classic no matter how you hear it-- on 45, CD, MP3, or just running through your head. | 2013-01-16T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2013-01-16T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rap | Stones Throw | January 16, 2013 | 10 | 052565c4-c307-4ff8-afe2-64b28bbd2e6b | Nate Patrin | https://pitchfork.com/staff/nate-patrin/ | null |
Nine years after his first solo LP, and on the heels of an unprecedented glut of increasingly remarkable mixtape and internet leaks, Lil Wayne produces Tha Carter III, the epic culmination of a lifetime of eccentricities. This is Wayne's moment and he embraces it on his own terms. | Nine years after his first solo LP, and on the heels of an unprecedented glut of increasingly remarkable mixtape and internet leaks, Lil Wayne produces Tha Carter III, the epic culmination of a lifetime of eccentricities. This is Wayne's moment and he embraces it on his own terms. | Lil Wayne: Tha Carter III | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/11608-tha-carter-iii/ | Tha Carter III | "Where the fuck is my guitar?"
Lil Wayne is a terrible guitarist. Just incredibly bad. The fact was evident at this year's Summer Jam, when he spent two and a half interminable minutes noodling and crooning all by his lonesome while a stadium full of New York's most devout hip-hop fans looked on bewildered. "Is he really playing the guitar right now?" giggled a teenage girl. "That's not a chord or anything!" Still, she recorded Wayne in all his tatted-up Tracy Chapman glory for YouTube posterity just the same. While everyone else on the day's bill-- from Alicia Keys to Kanye West-- filled their shortened, festival-style sets with hits and finely-tailored theatrics, the audience's most anticipated act took the opportunity get his Guitar for Dummies on; Lil Wayne is, as he likes to say, "different." Always has been.
Earmarked as a gifted elementary school student in New Orleans, he became the token prodigy of his hometown's Cash Money clique at the age of 16, spitting pipsqueak gangsterisms over skittering Mannie Fresh beats. And, opposed to the typical rap flame-out trajectory, Wayne got better-- and stranger-- with each album. Now, nine years after his first solo LP, and on the heels of an unprecedented glut of increasingly remarkable mixtape and internet leaks, we get Tha Carter III, the epic culmination of a lifetime of eccentricities. This is Wayne's moment and he embraces it on his own terms. Instead of hiding his bootleg-bred quirks in anticipation of the big-budget spotlight, he distills the myriad metaphors, convulsing flows, and vein-splitting emotions into a commercially gratifying package that's as weird as it wants to be; he eventually finds his guitar but keeps the strumming in check.
"I pay my dues, you keep the difference."
As the major music industry continues to wheeze and splinter, Lil Wayne's spitball marketing plan for C3 is an unprecedented masterstroke. Over the past couple of years, he's given away more worthwhile free music online than most artists of his stature ever release officially. Using the mixtape market as a free-for-all training ground, Wayne expanded his persona, voice, and talent while presumptively killing off thousands of wannabe MCs hoping to charge five bucks for some garbage CD-R. For that alone, he deserves thanks. Wayne set the definition for a Web 2.0 MC-- his output pours through computer speakers at broadband speeds. And while stellar tapes like Dedication 2 and Da Drought 3 offered-up plenty of hidden darts for sun-deprived message board nerds, his Just Say Yes policy toward any and all guest invitations (Enrique Iglesias? Why not!) provided maximum visibility and chiseled his radio-friendly chops. Piggybacking on hits by Chris Brown and Lloyd undoubtedly did wonders for his giggling teenage girl fan base, but a lesser-known assist appears to have had an even bigger effect on the new record.
"Gotta work everyday/ Gotta not be cliché/ Gotta stand out like Andre 3K."
One of the few satisfying tracks on OutKast's bungled Idlewild album was a woozy bitchfest called "Hollywood Divorce" featuring Lil Wayne. In hindsight, the invite feels like an act of sanctification. The song's a lesson in winning idiosyncrasies-- Andre, Big Boi, and Wayne are all salty, but they make sure to side-step pessimism (Big Boi deems rumor mongers "M&M's with no nuts"). Traces of the South's most genre-bursting, P-Funk-worshipping ATLiens can be heard all over C3, from Wayne's staccato phrasing on "Mr. Carter" to the extraterrestrial fetishism of "Phone Home" to the eclectic unpredictability of it all. The musical open-mindedness also lifts C3 above regional niches-- the #1 hit "Lollipop" sounds more like it was born on Jupiter than anywhere on earth. While Wayne isn't quite ready to produce something like "Hey Ya!", don't be shocked if you see him held up by a pair of leprechaun suspenders in the not-so-distant future.
"I've done it before, please don't make me do it no more."
C3 is Wayne's most absurd album to date but it's also his most personal. "Shoot Me Down", with its "Lose Yourself"-style guitar chug and ominous hook, has the rapper looking all the way back to age 12, when he accidentally shot himself with a .44 Magnum while toying with the gun in a mirror. "Two more inches I'd have been in that casket/ According to the doctor I could've died in traffic," he rhymes on "3 Peat", possibly referring to the day in 2001 when a disgruntled groupie shot at his tour bus, planting a bullet in his chest. Such details add even more gravitas to his grizzled, elastic timbre, which suggests an impossibly hoarse (and high) David Ruffin at times. "All I ask is don't take our love for granted," sings a perfectly sympathetic Babyface alongside Wayne on the lush ballad "Comfortable", the line coming off more like a saucer-eyed plea than a threat. And the LP's best track doubles as its most crazed and pained.
"Playing With Fire" is a full-on faux-metal stunner that hearkens back to Bad Boy's cinematic peak. On it, Wayne reaches Ghostface levels of paranoid distress: "I'm doin' the same shit Martin Luther King did/ Checkin' in the same hotel, in the same suite, bitch/ Same balcony like assassinate me, bitch!" His claims of MLK grandeur are far-fetched, but his impassioned delivery makes them seem more believable than one would think possible. Apparently, those Biggie and Pac references are getting to his codeine-addled brain-- after all, at 25, Wayne is now older than both legends were when they were gunned down. The implicit danger of carrying on such a legacy only adds to the rapper's dramatic reading, and his anguish burns as hot as his punchlines.
"I think everybody gonna like this one...I got one!"
Considering his running-faucet leak rate, there are bound to be fanboy quibbles about the intricacies of C3's tracklist (e.g., the buoyant web gem "La La La" should replace "La La" and its braindead Busta Rhymes verse, and what about the hazy "I Feel Like Dying" or the promising speed-soul track "3 a.m."?). But considering there are probably several hard drives stuffed with syrupy odes featuring Wayne's dubious auto-tuned howl, the final tally is exquisitely balanced and considered. After dozens of listens, the record's overflowing minutiae-- from Fabulous and Juelz Santana's overachieving cameos to Wayne's hilariously apropos kinship with "Macho Man" Randy Savage-- still feels limitless. Just as the record's cover playfully skews the Ready to Die/Illmatic baby-picture formula with Photoshopped tattoos, Wayne updates what it means to be the best rapper alive here. Gangster dandy. Fender-slinging sex god. Intergalactic prankster. It's all in him. | 2008-06-12T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2008-06-12T02:00:01.000-04:00 | Rap | Cash Money | June 12, 2008 | 8.7 | 0525d0f2-4bf8-49ca-8bc4-6f6907bba687 | Ryan Dombal | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ryan-dombal/ | null |
Vince Staples' first full-length for Def Jam is brilliant. The Long Beach rapper expresses complex ideas in plain, hard sentences, ones that can be handed to you like a pamphlet. His rapping is conversational, but these are the conversations you have when all optimism has been burned away. | Vince Staples' first full-length for Def Jam is brilliant. The Long Beach rapper expresses complex ideas in plain, hard sentences, ones that can be handed to you like a pamphlet. His rapping is conversational, but these are the conversations you have when all optimism has been burned away. | Vince Staples: Summertime '06 | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/20719-summertime-06/ | Summertime '06 | Summertime '06 crams 20 songs inside an hour and when it ends Vince Staples is somehow still mid-sentence. The heavy-lidded, preternaturally calm Long Beach rapper has always seemed to have a remarkable amount on his mind, with more to say than he has room for: The last line on "Taxi", the final track of his first full mixtape, 2011’s Shyne Coldchain Vol. 1, ended in a similar fashion, with a freezing bucket of water—"Tried praying for forgiveness, but God told me to shut up"—before the music simply stopped.
In those days, Staples seemed studiously laconic, like his friend Earl Sweatshirt, whom he is still often mentioned alongside. What’s been remarkable to watch is the way Staples has leaned forward—bigger songs, bigger statements, greater urgency–as Earl bled into the cracks in the walls of his mind. Earl doesn’t know or care if you are in the room, which is part of his appeal; Vince Staples’ eyes are boring right into you.
Staples has become an increasingly powerful communicator, and on Summertime '06, his lines are sharp enough that every word digs into meat: "I hate when you lie; I hate the truth, too." ("Jump Off the Roof"), "In the Planned Parenthood playing God with your mom's check/ You ain’t even been to prom yet" ("Surf"). Like Chance the Rapper drained of hope, Staples expresses complex ideas in plain, hard sentences, ones that can be handed to you like a pamphlet: "No matter what we grow into, we never gon' escape our past," he states simply on "Like It Is". His rapping is conversational, but these are the conversations you have when all optimism has been burned away.
The album is split into two sides, making it technically a double album. But double albums are usually unwieldy, and Summertime '06 is breathtakingly focused, a marathon that feels like a sprint. The production bangs and clanks throughout with a septic, rusted, retooled-buggy persistence, which Staples matches. On "Lift Me Up", he chants the song’s title over and over again, but his voice is thin and tired, and the music heavy and slow. It’s the sound of someone working for uplift who knows in their bones just how much misery lays along the road.
Summertime '06 was overseen by Dion "No I.D." Wilson, one-time mentor to Kanye and the force behind all of Def Jam’s best projects for years now. No I.D. seems to grasp the essence of every track he works on; music that has borne his attention almost always emerges with its worldview clarified. On Summertime '06, he turns an album produced largely by himself, DJ Dahi, and Clams Casino into one tense, seething organism, making it difficult to isolate which songs these wildly different musicians worked on. The sound is cold and brittle, full of little blurts of percussion that resemble nervous fidgets. The basslines are often played by a groaning distorted electric guitar, and songs like "Dopeman" have the crackling alkaline energy of a Neptunes production. There are forlorn melodies, played on keys, that sometimes sneak in behind songs like "3230" or "Might Be Wrong", and they provide the undercurrent of what all this hard-nosed realism might cost you.
By now, it’s clear that Summertime is not "fun," and at no point do you suspect you’ve been invited to a party. But the sound submerges you in the itch of Staples' mind. He is a devotee of realism, in its simplest definition. Keeping it real, for him, means clearly documenting everything he sees, removed from the clouds of hope or pain or pity. He marvels at the loneliness of his job as a rapper, translating his life to those who don’t live it: "All these white folks chanting when I ask them ‘Where my niggas at?’/ Going crazy, got me going crazy, I can’t get with that/ Wonder if they know I know they won’t go where we kick it at?" he raps on "Lift Me Up".
The voices you hear on the album that don’t belong to Staples—the voicemail on "Might Be Wrong", hooks whispered by art-rapper Kilo Kish—feel like echoes or ghosts. He raps often about crimes he’s committed, but the songs don't have the cinema of street rap. His attention to detail purposefully drains the adrenaline out of the scenario and leaves a quotidian focus on the smallest facts of the situation—"Four deep, five seats, three guns," he observes on "Get Paid", and this is almost all you get. "The sheets and crosses turned to suits and ties/ In Black America, can you survive?… No hopes and dreams, just leave us be, we leaning on the Bible," he laments on "C.N.B.", an expression not so much of defiance as a simple plea for peace. Sometimes, nothing feels as real as simple weariness, or wariness.
There is one true moment of tenderness on the album. "Summertime" has some oddly voiced guitar chords, which Clams Casino surrounds with his trademark soothing hum of synths, like a buzzing air conditioner behind yellowed drapes. Staples half-sings in an exhausted monotone. "Look at the sun, all we need to see to know our freedom," he offers. "My teachers told us we were slaves/ My momma told me we was kings/ I don’t know who to listen to/ I guess we somewhere in between/ My feelings told me love is real/ But feelings here can get you killed." It’s a love song, or the closest thing to that Vince Staples allows himself to make—an allowance that love might exist. There’s nothing in the song’s deadpan knock, its arrangement, or in Staples' voice, that gives away the warmth. It is just there, like the sun the song’s characters stare at to know their freedom. | 2015-06-29T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2015-06-29T02:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Def Jam | June 29, 2015 | 8.8 | 0526c493-2500-4560-a889-7abb874a1e32 | Jayson Greene | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jayson-greene/ | null |
If the previous two New Pornographers records sometimes had a procedural air about them, the vim and vigor of Brill Bruisers forcefully reasserts just how important and therapeutic the enterprise is to all involved. The band's never felt like a purely retro exercise, but Brill Bruisers feels like their most contemporary recording to date. | If the previous two New Pornographers records sometimes had a procedural air about them, the vim and vigor of Brill Bruisers forcefully reasserts just how important and therapeutic the enterprise is to all involved. The band's never felt like a purely retro exercise, but Brill Bruisers feels like their most contemporary recording to date. | The New Pornographers: Brill Bruisers | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/19722-the-new-pornographers-brill-bruisers/ | Brill Bruisers | The evolution of New Pornographers hasn’t been measured by changes in their core sound so much as in energy level, with a discography that can essentially be plotted alongside a DJ console’s BPM lever. And since their 2005 masterwork Twin Cinema—an album that perfectly balanced their formative power-pop freneticism with loftier, widescreened ambitions—that lever has been gradually sliding down, with Challengers from 2007 and Together from 2010 emphasizing more patiently paced set pieces that tiptoed the fine line between gracefully decompressing and killing the buzz altogether. But even if such gambles cost them a few ADD-addled admirers along the way, you get the sense the New Pornographers would soldier on at their own leisurely clip even if no one was listening. Because, for the principals involved, the New Pornographers are less a band than a holiday resort, “a vacation from rock'n'roll music, inside rock'n'roll music,” as resident siren Neko Case once put it. And boy, do they ever need it now.
Since the release of Together, the band’s principal songwriters have experienced the highest of highs and lowest of lows: Dan Bejar produced his most immaculate, universally acclaimed Destroyer album to date with Kaputt; conversely, bandleader A.C. Newman and Case each released sobering, uncharacteristically introspective solo records written in the aftermath of deaths in their respective families. So if the previous two New Pornographers records sometimes had a procedural air about them (with each vocalist checking in to collect their three-song rations), the vim and vigor of Brill Bruisers forcefully reasserts just how important and therapeutic the enterprise is to all involved. And that album title is brilliantly apropos for both the song-factory connotations and intimations of violence: here, the New Pornographers resemble not so much a supergroup as a gang, wielding hooks like shivs, guitar riffs like machine guns, and synths like laser beams. The opening title track isn’t just a blown-out bubblegum pop song made from a box full of Bazooka Joes—it’s a swarming, instantly thrusting you into a dizzying flurry of “bo-ba-ba-bo” harmonies coming at you from all sides. The steady beat of latter-day New Pornographers may remain, but it’s delivered with the force of a body check.
While greatly indebted to pop movements of the past—from ’60s psychedelia to ’70s glam to ’80s new wave—the New Pornographers have never felt like a purely retro exercise, their best songs too jacked-up and exuberant to lapse into studious classicism. But Brill Bruisers feels like their most contemporary recording to date, and a great deal of credit for that lies with the person who, historically, has been the one least likely to be mentioned in a New Pornographers review— Blaine Thurier—and fellow keyboardist Kathryn Calder. In contrast to Together’s cello-dramatic sound, Brill Bruisers foregrounds their playing, not to opportunistically recast the band as au courant synth-pop, but to restore the forward momentum that was in scarcer supply on recent records, from the starbursts that propel Case’s daydreamy turn on “Champions of Red Wine” to the zippy oscillations that power Bejar’s triumphant “War on the East Coast” to the meaty tones that lend the authoritative march of “Backstairs” (the band’s most imposing rocker to date) a little extra spring in its goosestep.
Thurier and Calder's elevated roles speak to the more integrated teamwork in effect on Brill Bruisers; while tracklists on past records could be easily segregated by singer, there’s a greater degree of vocal trade-offs and harmonic interplay that heightens the communal, celebratory sense of occasion. And with the Fleetwood Mac attack of “Fantasy Fools”, the delirious “Dancehall Domine”, and Tommy-sized closer “You Tell Me Where”, the New Pornographers deliver the sort of pure pop head rush they haven’t unleashed in years. (Bejar is an especially feisty mood, hurtling himself into his trio of heart-racing contributions like a drunk who’s just found out the wedding he’s at has an open bar—all the while, in true contrarian fashion, showing up to the New Pornographers’ most modernist album yet with a batch of songs that require harmonica solos.) As ever, the exact meaning of the songs are evasive, but their ascendant arcs readily cast them as underdog anthems for whatever great challenge you face.
Within such a maximalist context (not to mention a bulky 13-song tracklist), acoustic-tempered, middle-geared songs like "Marching Orders" and "Wide Eyes" can't help but pale next to the aforementioned showstoppers. But Brill Bruisers' most revelatory, parameter-expanding songs are actually the most stripped-down: Calder’s quick-hit “Another Drug Deal of the Heart” serves the same reprieving function here that Tobin Sprout’s minute-long melodic morsels did on Guided by Voices’ classic mid-’90s records, while Newman’s “Hi-Rise”—boasting a circular harmony assembled from clipped vocal tics—imagines what the posthumous, animatronic line-up of his band will sound like at a 22nd-century intergalactic tiki-bar residency. As legend has it, when recording the New Pornographers’ 2000 debut, Mass Romantic, Newman’s primary instruction to Case was to “sing like a robot”; with the futurist sound of Brill Bruisers, the whole band embraces a more electric version of itself—bulked-up in chrome-plated armor, firing on all cylinders, and ready to steamroll anything in its path. | 2014-08-25T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2014-08-25T02:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Matador / Last Gang | August 25, 2014 | 7.7 | 0527d9ee-9be7-4b5d-8361-f10f7132ec7b | Stuart Berman | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stuart-berman/ | null |
Manage your expectations: This record may combine the electronic music giants Richard D. James and Mike Paradinas, but it's really just a playful, occasionally inspired time capsule of the 1990s. | Manage your expectations: This record may combine the electronic music giants Richard D. James and Mike Paradinas, but it's really just a playful, occasionally inspired time capsule of the 1990s. | Mike & Rich: Expert Knob Twiddlers | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22298-expert-knob-twiddlers/ | Expert Knob Twiddlers | Richard D. James is like the Miles Davis of electronic music: Both started young and had inventive, deeply personal styles. Both created a few genres and perfected others that were already well-trod. Both were wildly prolific, then took long breaks and basically disappeared when they were functioning at exceptionally high levels. And both made very little music that was less than good.
So you might consider Expert Knob Twiddlers to be James’ version of Quiet Nights. A collaboration between James and his friend Mike Paradinas, who has worked as μ-Ziq (and many other names) and founded the Planet Mu label, it’s the rare James-related release that is just OK. It’s also one of the less interesting things Paradinas made during his excellent ’90s run. The fact that it wasn’t all that common in shops and was a rare collaborative release from James gave it a bit of an aura that, two decades later, doesn’t stand up to scrutiny. It sounds like two friends who enjoy making music together having some fun and entertaining themselves, without much thought for quality control.
Though it’s a low-key record that doesn’t pretend to be about innovation, Expert Knob Twiddlers is interesting as a time capsule. It was recorded on relatively crude equipment in 1994, when both James and Paradinas were working at an early peak and releasing massive amounts of music under a variety of names, and it was released in ’96, when James was basically a superstar as Aphex Twin. In every gesture, it feels tied to the mid-’90s, offering Mike and Rich’s version of the Gen X nostalgia that was everywhere at the time. (Just look at that album cover.) Many of these tracks either sample from or are the creators’ versions of ephemera like ’60s spy film soundtracks, easy listening records, off-kilter funk, advertising jingles, and the like—a jumble of kitschy loops that could have come from Keyboard Money Mark, Sukia, or any number of lesser artists making music in that decade with cheap gear and samples. There’s very little to distinguish these playful genre exercises, well constructed as they are.
Not to say it’s a bad record, just one of little depth. Expert Knob Twiddlers is marginally improved in this reissue, complete with additional unreleased tracks from the initial sessions, a fuller-sounding remastering, and a new sequence that suggests a bit more variety than is actually here. There are occasional moments of inspiration, like the tense and jittery “Vodka”—which appears a second time in a new, less interesting mix—or “Bu Bu Bu Ba,” a slow and dreamy number with a pleasant melody. But too many tracks are along the lines of “Winner Takes All” and “Giant Deflating Football”—essentially, just a single string loop and occasionally a breakbeat, repeating for almost six minutes with small accents placed here and there. Listening to the album is a matter of expectations. Set aside that it pairs two giants of electronic music and enjoy it for what it is: a collection of well-rendered DJ tools for your next lounge music night. | 2016-09-30T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-09-30T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Planet Mu | September 30, 2016 | 6.6 | 0528dad7-bdd7-4c9e-8a61-c26953c3af5a | Mark Richardson | https://pitchfork.com/staff/mark-richardson/ | null |
There's a case to be made for Tangerine Dream as being among the most\n\ historically important experimental German ... | There's a case to be made for Tangerine Dream as being among the most\n\ historically important experimental German ... | Tangerine Dream: Journey Through a Burning Brain (Anthology) | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/7930-journey-through-a-burning-brain-anthology/ | Journey Through a Burning Brain (Anthology) | There's a case to be made for Tangerine Dream as being among the most historically important experimental German bands from the early 70s. Beyond the fact that their mastery of all manner of synthesizer technology predated the digital boom in the 80s, they're arguably the grandfathers of ambient music (despite what the church of Eno may preach). Edgar Froese's outfit began as one of many rambunctious noisemakers in Berlin in the late 60s, but has survived as one of the most long-lived groups in rock. Of course, the group has tweaked their sound considerably over the years, and this curious set, containing one disc of early 70s pieces, and two of mid-80s live tracks, makes clear that not every chapter in Froese's manual is required reading.
The first disc in the box contains the most interesting music, by a considerable margin. Covering the underrated early period of the band on Ohr Records (1970-73), the sounds are spacey, spacious and determinedly sprawling. "Genesis" and "Cold Smoke" are both taken from the band's first release, Electronic Meditation, the only record to feature future kosmiche icons Klaus Schultz and Conrad Schnitzler (later of Kluster). Similar to their peers Guru Guru, Ash Ra Tempel (also featuring Shultz) and Amon Düül II, Tangerine Dream were, at this point, about freeform mind-expansion, and that alone: "Cold Smoke" rumbles and skirts via heavily reverbed crashing drums, maniacal violin, post-Hendrix guitar ejaculation and even an excitable vagrant shouting cosmic obscenities in the distance. "Fly and Collision of Comas Sola" and "Sunrise in the Third System" are taken from the group's second album, Alpha Centauri, with Chris Franke and Steve Schroyder replacing Schultz and Schnitzler. Keyboards began to play a greater part in the arrangements (as well as flute here), but the general ticket was still an acid-laced blur.
In 1972, Tangerine Dream released their early masterpiece, Zeit (featuring Peter Baumann, and completing one of the most longstanding of the band's lineups), and because Castle Music felt the need to whip me into submission with two discs of live meh from the 80s, only one track from that double LP is included. That's too bad, because "Origin of Supernatural Probabilities" represents a command of sound on par with the greatest studio masters. The opening guitar chords sound as if they were recorded under two feet of water, and when the synth begins to babble and whales begin to cry, I'd as soon sport gills as leave my stereo. Simply put, 70s electronic music does not get better than this-- unless you count their follow-up, 1973's Atem, of which two pieces are included on this set: The Mellotron-soaked nature hymn "Fauni Gena" and an atypical vocal (of sorts) track "Wahn", also featuring primal percussion akin to that on the first record.
Now, skip forward about 10 or 12 years to the mid-80s, when Tangerine Dream had become quite a different beast. Gone were the psychedelic trance-outs and echo chambers, replaced by big light shows and Jan Hammer's drum machine. In fact, Froese and company were still playing psychedelic music, but what that meant 20 years removed from the era was much different; they were providing escapists soundtracks for the overstressed and nostalgic alike, far from the boundless "mind-expansion" of a bygone time. And yes, I absolutely abhor those crystalline, programmed 80s beats-- Mannheim Steamroller at Christmas is one thing, but I will not stand idly by and listen to men who once tripped like kings through the nether regions of consciousness play crowd-control for yuppies.
That said, if you don't pay attention-- and that's the real difference: early Tangerine Dream was good for escapism and repeated, detail-obsessed listening-- some of this works as decent background pitter-patter. Not surprisingly, the better tracks are the longest: the 22-minute "Poland" begins as a practically unlistenable exercise in new age pep, but does have scattered moments of old-fashioned krautrock whim, particularly during the parts that forgo dance beats for drone. And it's not as if Tangerine Dream + dance music is a necessarily bad concept (why hasn't there been a movement to remix these guys, a la Kraftwerk's The Mix or Can's Sacrilege?), but this stuff is perilously close to skincare instructional video soundtracks. Just when I thought it couldn't get worse, disc three drops "Song of the Whale", parts one and two! Wow. In summary, skip this set and check out the early Tangerine Dream records instead-- they're all being remastered (with bonus tracks!), hopefully making Journey Through a Burning Brain obsolete sooner rather than later. | 2003-02-13T01:00:02.000-05:00 | 2003-02-13T01:00:02.000-05:00 | Electronic | Sanctuary / Castle | February 13, 2003 | 4.9 | 052a729d-020d-4e66-9dfb-b5785e2c4bc4 | Dominique Leone | https://pitchfork.com/staff/dominique-leone/ | null |
null | The Beach Boys come up sometimes in discussions of Animal Collective, which would seem very strange if you caught the group on the wrong record. When they get noisy and decide to experiment, they're more Bryn Jones than Brian Wilson, but both this year's exceptional *Sung Tongs* and the less-heard 2003 live-in-the-woods document *Campfire Songs* had those familiar high-pitched and intertwined harmonies. Animal Collective's relationship to the Beach Boys is unusual, though, as they don't seem particularly inspired by Wilson's compositional sense. More than anything, Animal Collective taps directly into the thing that made the Beach Boys a 20th Century | Panda Bear: Young Prayer | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/6141-young-prayer/ | Young Prayer | The Beach Boys come up sometimes in discussions of Animal Collective, which would seem very strange if you caught the group on the wrong record. When they get noisy and decide to experiment, they're more Bryn Jones than Brian Wilson, but both this year's exceptional Sung Tongs and the less-heard 2003 live-in-the-woods document Campfire Songs had those familiar high-pitched and intertwined harmonies. Animal Collective's relationship to the Beach Boys is unusual, though, as they don't seem particularly inspired by Wilson's compositional sense. More than anything, Animal Collective taps directly into the thing that made the Beach Boys a 20th Century American version of sacred music. It's an approach in which voices say more with music than they ever could with words, and it's why the Beach Boys transcended their dorky lyrics as easily as Animal Collective transcend unintelligibility.
Key Collective member Panda Bear (Noah Lennox) conceived Young Prayer, his first widely available solo album, in response to the death of his father, in the very house where the man passed away. Though it's Panda solo, Young Prayer is easily identifiable as an Animal Collective release in the Campfire Songs and Sung Tongs mode, and other Collective members contribute here and there. I asked Lennox once if any particular Animal Collective member was the "pop guy," prone to push the band to a more tuneful and accessible direction, and he denied the existence of such a creature. Comparing Young Prayer side-by-side with the Avey Tare split EP on Leaf, however, Panda fits the profile.
There are no song titles on Young Prayer, but it seems destined to be the kind of cult record, like Aphex Twin's Selected Ambient Works Vol. II, for which listeners will make up their own. Actually, everything about it suggests cult; it's the kind of record that will have a profound impact on a small number of people, be ridiculed by a few more, and never be heard at all by almost everybody. Young Prayer is incredibly personal and naked, but it's also unique, and it will doubtless disappear and be rediscovered periodically as years pass.
Though Young Prayer is extremely accessible and consists mostly of voice, guitar, and piano, the "tunes" are hard to source. No folk or pop music I can name is structured quite like this. In an odd way, Young Prayer seems inspired by Gregorian chant, as notes seem bent in accordance to a mysterious logic recorded in some dusty scroll. The inspiration of the mass is most prevalent on Track 7, where the deep, aquatic echo seems as if it were achieved by having Lennox sing on one end of the Sistine Chapel into a microphone posted at the other. The final track, in which Lennox sings at the bottom end of his range, sounds even more like a monk channeling a biblical precept in Latin, and augmented by two overlapping piano lines inspired by classical minimalism (the Reich homage is reminiscent of the piano line from Stereolab's "Blue Milk"). It's hard to imagine a more lovely or appropriate closer.
The arrangements are simple as can be, with the majority of the nine tracks (it's a perfectly short album at just under 30 minutes) consisting of acoustic guitar and voice, and the sequencing is superb. As the second track ends at an emotional peak with the word "rejoice," the minute-long guitar and piano interlude lightly carried the listener to the next, more emotionally exhausting song. And after the fourth track, which is the most evocative of Campfire Songs of anything here, with its unsteady acoustic banging and singing that seems design to disappear quietly into the night sky, a summer camp chant-and-clap canon follows to bring us back down to earth.
Where Campfire Songs was filled with odd overlapping harmonies, Young Prayer finds Lennox typically using a single track for vocals, alternating between a quavering tenor and an even more unsteady falsetto. The fearlessness of his singing here, as Lennox navigates odd runs and subjects his melodies to unusual effects, is the heart of Young Prayer. He's a good singer, no question, but fortunately, he refuses to compose within his limitations. Moments such as the tail end of the first track, when he jumps up an octave to finish the phrase "how you will know me" (my best guess-- the diction makes precise lyric decoding exceedingly difficult) at a point a note above his falsetto range, lends a layer of incredible poignancy.
If Brian Wilson's ultimate goal was to create a "teenage symphony to god," Panda Bear and the rest of Animal Collective realize that the liturgical part of that equation was most important. Lyrics may be hard to make out and budgets are far too low for symphonies, but the god part they have down, and those moments in life we get close to but can never quite explain inspire every note of Young Prayer. | 2004-09-29T01:00:02.000-04:00 | 2004-09-29T01:00:02.000-04:00 | Electronic | Paw Tracks | September 29, 2004 | 8.5 | 052acefb-d725-4077-a82b-27ea04b18639 | Mark Richardson | https://pitchfork.com/staff/mark-richardson/ | null |
The clarinetist and saxophonist Ken Thomson, whose roving works include covers of Björk and Meshuggah, records an album of minimalist chamber music full of feints and surprising paths. | The clarinetist and saxophonist Ken Thomson, whose roving works include covers of Björk and Meshuggah, records an album of minimalist chamber music full of feints and surprising paths. | Ken Thomson: Restless | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22518-restless/ | Restless | Like plenty of ambitious musicians in New York’s classical community, the clarinetist and saxophonist Ken Thomson has multiple artistic guises. He’s part of Asphalt Orchestra, a puckish street marching band that dances its covers of Björk and Meshuggah through the heart of the Lincoln Center complex. Slow/Fast is a vehicle for Thomson’s proggy approach to jazz writing and improvisation. Most recently, Thomson was inducted into the Bang on a Can All-Stars, a modern classical group that has recorded a Pulitzer-winning piece by Julia Wolfe, and commissioned new works by Tyondai Braxton and Christian Marclay.
Given those varied commitments, it’s impressive that Thomson has time to develop his chamber music on the side. In these pieces, you can tell that he’s firmly a member of the contemporary post-minimalist scene. Though there are also traces of his other interests. Thaw, Thomson’s 2013 album for the string quartet known as JACK, balanced sections of instrumental aggression alongside a movement flush with lyricism (and a hat-tip to jazz pianist Don Pullen).
That album presented two longer-form, multi-movement works. And on the first composition, Thomson sat in with the string quartet as a bass clarinetist—thereby suggesting a link to the rest of his discography. But Restless represents a full and complete break from Thomson’s identity as a performer. The four-movement composition that gives the album its title was written for cello and piano; the three-movement “Me Vs.” is for piano solo. One mark of the album’s success is that it’s still recognizable as one of Thomson’s projects, despite the fact that he never plays a note himself.
The opening section of “Restless” starts with slowly mutating piano arpeggios that whip up a grim mood, along with some vibrato-heavy writing for the cello. Fairly standard textures, when it comes to minimalist-influenced music. But by the track’s midpoint, Thomson’s harmonies are full of feints and surprising paths away from the opening material. The way some piano chords syncopate with the cello part provides an unsettling bounce, right at the moment when Thomson gives a long, brooding line to the latter instrument. (Cellist Ashley Bathgate and pianist Karl Larson give powerful performances here.)
The piece’s second movement, “Forge,” initially indulges in the harder-riffing attacks that Thomson has proved adept with in other contexts. Though instead of letting the punkish grind carry this whole section, the composer quickly softens the dynamic level. When used well, restraint can also shock.
“Me Vs.” likewise navigates between stormy realms and zones of prettiness, as gentle phrases gradually emerge from dense, atonal chord clusters in the first movement (subtitled “Turn of Phrase”). When the pounding dynamics return—as a listener has ever right to expect will happen—elegant use of the sustain pedal is there to remind us of the emotional distance traveled. The second movement (“Another Second Try”) offers a gently discordant, pensive quality, before the finale combines all the work’s diverse approaches. (The last movement also adds some technically arduous runs that Larson pulls off marvelously). Overall, the unique synthesis of dissonance and consonance makes the music feel personal—and like a worthy expression of Thomson’s core concerns as a musician, whether he’s holding an instrument in his hands or not. | 2016-11-15T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2016-11-15T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Experimental | Cantaloupe | November 15, 2016 | 7.9 | 052de074-6f3a-4dc5-9560-53964e19c79e | Seth Colter Walls | https://pitchfork.com/staff/seth-colter walls/ | null |
Ariana Grande’s third album finds the 22-year-old pop star embracing a Sasha Fierce-like alter ego, with the help of Future, Nicki Minaj, Lil Wayne, Macy Gray, and others. | Ariana Grande’s third album finds the 22-year-old pop star embracing a Sasha Fierce-like alter ego, with the help of Future, Nicki Minaj, Lil Wayne, Macy Gray, and others. | Ariana Grande: Dangerous Woman | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21892-dangerous-woman/ | Dangerous Woman | “You need a bad girl to blow your mind,” Ariana Grande taunted us in 2014 on “Bang Bang,” her smash-hit collaboration with Jessie J and Nicki Minaj. In that crowd, Grande didn't really seem like the bad girl; maybe she knew one she could fix you up with? As she told Complex the year before,“I don’t see myself as sexy and I’m not comfortable being sexy and dressing sexy. I don’t see myself ever becoming a sex symbol.” But she seems to have taken the “Bang Bang” lyric as a mood-board inspiration for her third album Dangerous Woman, which finds the 22-year-old trading in the mini-skirts, go-go boots, and cat ears for a Sasha Fierce-like alter ego. As a result, Grande spends most of Dangerous Woman coyly flirting with desire, “bad decisions,” and independence. “Something about you makes me feel like a dangerous woman,” she sings on the chorus to the slow-burning title track, which is a few qualifications away from actual danger. There's something about the whole album that feels a bit like Sandy in her skintight leather outfit at the end of Grease, only in Ari’s case, it’s a latex bunny mask.
At this point, there’s no question that Grande is a powerhouse vocalist, having earned her comparisons to Celine Dion, Mariah Carey, and Christina Aguilera circa *Back to Basics. (*Among her spot-on impersonations of those singers, Grande does an absolutely insane Aguilera impression, solidifying her spot as the diva’s millennial incarnation.) Grande’s four-octave range, impeccable control, and penchant for belting assures that no matter the lyrics or production, her music will always be strong in that regard. And as in her previous album My Everything, which was chock-full of bangers like the Zedd-produced “Break Free,” the production on her new Dangerous Woman is enormous, full of flirty pop eruptions and slinky dancefloor seductions. "Into You," produced and co-written by Max Martin and Alexander Kronlund, who helped pen some of Robyn’s best songs, might be Grande's best single since “Love Me Harder.”
So then where does Dangerous Woman struggle? In a rather forthcoming interview with Billboard, Grande described the album as “a 22-year-old girl comes into her own trying to balance growing up, love, and a lot of other bullshit along the way.” However, the listener comes away from Dangerous Woman feeling like they still don’t know much about the ponytailed lady peeping out from behind the mask. Grande has never touted herself as a Swiftian friend to all fans, but her slight reserve means that Dangerous Woman, paradoxically, feels safe, which acts in contradiction to the at least 19 times she sings a variation of “danger” or “dangerous” on the record.
*Dangerous Woman *opens with “Moonlight,” which was originally the title of the record and thusly should perhaps be viewed as a prologue. “Moonlight” offers the album’s closest thing to a ballad, all celestial romance and melismas. But its serenity is quickly steamrolled over by “Dangerous Woman,” the real introduction to the record. “Dangerous Woman” is a slinky, empowered, Bond theme of a belter; you can practically picture her sauntering down a grand staircase in a floor-length gown and fur on the way to seduce and destroy a lover. After the quake of “Dangerous Woman,” “Be Alright” and “Into You” are appropriately both cool, snappy little thumpers.
In the middle of this 15-track record, Dangerous Woman’s guest features feel underused and lackluster. Nicki Minaj’s verse on “Side to Side” is a far cry from the duo’s Pinkprint collaboration “Get on Your Knees” which found both women returning to the personalities of “Bang Bang,” Ariana as a doe-eyed vixen, Nicki as the tough-as-nails Queen. That chemistry is absent here and instead Minaj’s bored, reggae-tinged verse compliments neither women. Although Minaj once again relies on the sexual wordplay her last name provides, the verse feels rather PG. Lil Wayne’s appearance on “Let Me Love You” was one of Dangerous Woman’s more surprising features, yet perhaps predictably, Weezy seems sleepy. He manages to throw out the cringe-worthy line “She grinding on this Grande, oh lord,” and not even the obligatory “moolah baby!” saves him from sounding half-hearted.
Perhaps the most unsatisfying collaborator is Future. A majority of his contribution is repeating the song’s title, “Everyday,” making him Dangerous Woman’s more minimalist version of Big Sean on “Problem.” If Future’s sexual-devotion-filled verse was taken away, it would be immediately obvious that “Everyday” is constructed atop a pile of hot fluff. The only exception to this is Macy Gray’s “Leave Me Lonely,” which sets Gray’s raspy pipes against Grande’s flawless vocals, adding a welcome change of consistency. Smack in the middle of all these features is “Greedy,” a romp that announces that Grande truly shines when she is given center stage.
The second half of the record lacks the energy of the first. She continues to sing of growth and maturity from a former self (“I used to let some people tell me how to live and what to be but if I can’t be me then fucks the point?”) with the point being that she is now free in thought and action. As Minaj says on “Side to Side,” “young Ariana run pop.” This is indeed evident on Dangerous Woman, even if the results are uneven at times. Grande does not need to force any sort of spirit, she is full of it already. She just needs to find the Dangerous Woman within herself and let her break free. | 2016-05-25T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-05-25T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | Republic | May 25, 2016 | 7.6 | 052ee90a-f9fa-43da-92e5-fa1d07752924 | Quinn Moreland | https://pitchfork.com/staff/quinn-moreland/ | null |
Nominally a metal act, Inter Arma have anchored their full-length albums to itinerant bristling guitars and doubled-down drums, with sections that plunged alternately into doom’s lurch and death’s leaps. Their excellent new EP, featuring vocals from Windhand’s Dorthia Cottrell, consists of a single 46-minute piece that feels like a condensed and uncompromising version of the Richmond, Virginia quintet’s prevailing vision. | Nominally a metal act, Inter Arma have anchored their full-length albums to itinerant bristling guitars and doubled-down drums, with sections that plunged alternately into doom’s lurch and death’s leaps. Their excellent new EP, featuring vocals from Windhand’s Dorthia Cottrell, consists of a single 46-minute piece that feels like a condensed and uncompromising version of the Richmond, Virginia quintet’s prevailing vision. | Inter Arma: The Cavern EP | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/19523-inter-arma-the-cavern-ep/ | The Cavern EP | The long-form, one-track EP always seemed like a requisite step for Richmond, Virginia’s Inter Arma. Nominally a metal act, they’ve anchored both of their full-length albums to itinerant bristling guitars and doubled-down drums, with sections that plunged alternately into doom’s lurch and death’s leaps. At their best, though, Inter Arma function more as a gyre of genres than a unilateral machine; on last year’s standout Sky Burial, they integrated electric psych sprawl and acoustic pastoral interludes, working as five surly dudes not ashamed to admit that Led Zeppelin and Pink Floyd were more lifelines than mere gateways. Inter Arma, however, have never been all-inclusive. They plucked from the musical multiverse with an unapologetic ear for the grand, where valleys implied multiple peaks and any sense of quiet only served to amplify the power to come. Despite its more staid moments, Sky Burial aimed for overall ascent. On that eight-piece album, where themes dissolved only to reappear, the divisions between tracks sometimes felt like commercial concessions for the group’s big Relapse Records debut. It’s not hard to imagine its hour-plus runtime moving uninterrupted, a direct line toward the heavens.
They finally do that on The Cavern, Inter Arma’s first single-song EP. Though the track lasts for 46 minutes, it feels like a condensed and uncompromising version of the quintet’s prevailing vision. The band climbs a slope of increasing momentum, where every step seems to find the action growing bigger and bolder. Though these kind of hour-long escapades can often suggest stunts by an act eager for a convenient concept and quick adulation, The Cavern feels like what Inter Arma should have done all along—fade into a piece, rip through an idea without hesitation, fade out of the piece, repeat. Written in 2009, The Cavern predates both Inter Arma LPs, but it was discarded until an employee at Relapse learned of its existence and urged the band to revisit it. After refining the composition, they finally captured it during a long session last year in Tennessee before gilding it with violin from former U.S. Christmas member Meg Mulhearn and vocals from Windhand singer Dorthia Cottrell. It’s the kind of commanding performance that both Inter Arma albums have implied, delivered now without hesitation or penance.
The Cavern centers around a story of epic death: The protagonist wakes in a desert and lingers at the precipice of mortality until, when the sun sets, a light emerges from a cave tucked inside a solitary mountain peak. He crawls toward the luminescent oasis, climbs inside and, as he falls asleep, realizes this will become his final resting place. As the song ends, he gives over to darkness, which takes the shape of a Persephone-like beauty “whose long hair veils her face.” Cottrell supplies the god voice during a gorgeous, kaleidoscope-sky midsection, her echoing vocals stretched between a nightmare and a daydream.
The narrative prevents the ever-fluid Cavern from becoming too formless, from shifting between moods or motifs without warning or reason. Sure, parts emerge wholly unexpected, such as an electrifying and Allman-like guitar turnaround that the band likes to revisit, or Cottrell’s sudden and august arrival. But even those aberrations fit into the meticulously framed whole, part of a comprehensive system. During the first 15 minutes, for instance, the band volleys between two sections—a slow, swollen trudge and a quickened, belligerent half-thrash; that’s when the subject first realizes he’s in peril, stranded in an inhospitable clime. The same surroundings return for the finale, when the hero realizes what he hoped was his salvation actually will be his downfall. The drums press harder, and the once-sharp riffs of the guitar fray at their ends, adding death’s door urgency. It’s a musical inclusio, the signposts pointing to how things have gone from pragmatically bad to existentially black.
The timing of The Cavern is fortuitous. Had Inter Arma released it ahead of both of their albums, especially before the Relapse deal, it’s easy to imagine the audacity being overlooked as a gimmick from a young, anonymous act. But Sundown and Sky Burial broadcasted the range of Inter Arma, or the limits to which they were willing to go to conjure an air of triumph. This reconfigured take on The Cavern, which arrives after the band has had a chance to mature on the road and in the studio, condenses and cements those elements, never allowing for any sign of an easy exit. It’s their most riveting release to date, a simple story charged by a complicated sound. | 2014-10-24T02:00:03.000-04:00 | 2014-10-24T02:00:03.000-04:00 | Metal | Relapse | October 24, 2014 | 8.3 | 05318db7-d99e-49be-9630-8343c0b3ddaf | Grayson Haver Currin | https://pitchfork.com/staff/grayson-haver currin/ | null |
Kendrick Lamar's good kid, m.A.A.d city is fearless and brilliant, an unvarnished and nuanced peek into the rapper's inner life that ties straightforward rap thrills directly to its narrative. | Kendrick Lamar's good kid, m.A.A.d city is fearless and brilliant, an unvarnished and nuanced peek into the rapper's inner life that ties straightforward rap thrills directly to its narrative. | Kendrick Lamar: good kid, m.A.A.d city | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/17253-good-kid-maad-city/ | good kid, m.A.A.d city | The first sound we hear on good kid, m.A.A.d. city is a prayer: "Thank you, Lord Jesus, for saving us with your precious blood," voices murmur, evoking a family dinner gathering. The album's cover art, a grubby Polaroid, provides a visual prompt for the scene: Baby Kendrick dangles off an uncle's knee in front of a squat kitchen table displaying a 40-ounce and Lamar's baby bottle. The snapshot is such an unvarnished peek into the rapper's inner life that staring at it for too long feels almost invasive. This autobiographical intensity is the album's calling card. Listening to it feels like walking directly into Lamar's childhood home and, for the next hour, growing up alongside him.
Lamar has subtitled the record "A Short Film by Kendrick Lamar", and the comparison rings true: You could take the album's outline and build a set for a three-act play. It opens on a 17-year-old Kendrick "with nothing but pussy stuck on my mental," driving his mother's van to see a girl named Sherane. As his voice darts and halts in a rhythm that mimics his over-eager commute, Lamar explores the furtiveness of young lust: "It's deep-rooted, the music of being young and dumb," he raps. The song is interrupted by the first of several voice mail recordings that delineate the album's structure: Kendrick's mother, rambling into his phone and pleading for him to return her car. These voicemails appear through the record, reinforcing that good kid, m.A.A.d city is partly a love letter to the grounding power of family. In this album's world, family and faith are not abstract concepts: They are the fraying tethers holding Lamar back from the chasm of gang violence that threatens to consume him.
All this weighty material might make good kid, m.A.A.d city sound like a bit of a drag. But the miracle of this album is how it ties straightforward rap thrills-- dazzling lyrical virtuosity, slick quotables, pulverizing beats, star turns from guest rappers-- directly to its narrative. For example, when "Backseat Freestyle" leaked last week, its uncharacteristic subject matter ("All my life I want money and power/ Respect my mind or die from lead shower") took some fans by surprise. But on the album, it marks the moment in the narrative when young Kendrick's character first begins rapping, egged on by a friend who plugs in a beat CD. Framed this way, his "damn, I got bitches" chant gets turned inside out: This isn't an alpha male's boast. It's a pipsqueak's first pass at a chest-puff. It's also a monster of a radio-ready single, with Kendrick rapping in three voices (in double- and triple-time, no less) over an insane Hit-Boy beat.
Lamar grew up in Compton, and ghosts of West Coast gangsta-rap haunt this album's edges, casting shadows on Kendrick's complicated relationship with his hometown. When "The Art of Peer Pressure" brings Kendrick and his friends to Rosecrans Ave., the music downshifts into menacing G-funk mode as a salute to hallowed ground. Ice Cube’s “Bird in the Hand” is invoked to set up “m.A.A.d city” (“Fresh of out school, 'cause I was a high-school grad..."), which appropriately marks the moment when real violence erupts. Here, Kendrick sounds like a terrified kid: "I made a promise to see you bleeding," he raps, his voice pitched at a pleading, near-hysterical sob. In response, the voice of Compton's Most Wanted rapper MC Eiht leers, "Wake yo' punk ass up," like a father figure of the Darth Vader variety.
Which brings us to the album's most visible benefactor and most unsettled presence: Dr. Dre. In recent months, Dre has availed himself of the fresh-career oxygen Kendrick's rise has pumped into his atmosphere, lumbering out of his corporate airlock to stand with Lamar on magazine covers. But the role he plays in Lamar's story feels muddled and unresolved. On an album that manages to seamlessly work a smirking Drake and a highly recognizable Janet Jackson sample ("Poetic Justice") into the fabric of a larger narrative, it is only Dre's appearance, on the final track "Compton", that feels like an uneasy outlier.
"Compton" is the victory lap, the coronation. Coming after the stunning 12-minute denouement "Sing About Me, I'm Dying of Thirst", in which Lamar delivers a verse from a peripheral character that is the album's most dazzling stroke of empathy, it can't help but be a small deflation. The moment of arrival in any artist's story is always less interesting than their journey, and there's a disconnect in hearing Lamar and Dre stunt over Just Blaze's blaring orchestral-soul beat. Dre's music is part of the landscape that Kendrick grew up in but his actual appearance has a certain Truman Show feel to it.
But the true ending of good kid, m.A.A.d. city takes place at the end of the previous song, "Real", which represents the spiritual victory that the album's story has thrashed its way towards. Finally grasping that "none of that shit"-- money, power, respect, loving your block-- "make me real," Lamar embraces what does, as his parents put the album's central concerns to bed: "Any nigga can kill a man," his father admonishes. "That don't make you a real nigga. Real is responsibility. Real is taking care of your motherfucking family." And his mother: "If I don't hear from you by tomorrow, I hope you come back and learn from your mistakes. Come back a man... Tell your story to these black and brown kids in Compton... When you do make it, give back with your words of encouragement. And that's the best way to give back to your city. And I love you, Kendrick." | 2012-10-23T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2012-10-23T02:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Interscope / Aftermath / Top Dawg Entertainment | October 23, 2012 | 9.5 | 05369f00-7c94-46c2-a1a4-0179d4037afe | Jayson Greene | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jayson-greene/ | null |
At a fraught time for young women in pop, the UK trio’s 2000 debut elevated candid songs about teenage girls’ hunger for experience by the mining sounds they might actually like. | At a fraught time for young women in pop, the UK trio’s 2000 debut elevated candid songs about teenage girls’ hunger for experience by the mining sounds they might actually like. | Sugababes: One Touch (20th Anniversary Edition) | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/sugababes-one-touch-20th-anniversary-edition/ | One Touch (20th Anniversary Edition) | In the rabble-rousing pantheon of UK girl groups, only the Spice Girls have had more domestic No. 1 singles (nine) than the Sugababes (six). The mutable British trio were a defining band of the 2000s—and yet this 20th anniversary reissue of One Touch, the debut album by the original line-up (held a year due to the pandemic), honors the potential future that founding members Keisha Buchanan, Mutya Buena, and Siobhán Donaghy were denied the chance to live out.
Their story is UK pop lore. Their debut single “Overload” arrived in September 2000, a “Starman”-on-Top-of-the-Pops moment for pre-teens fatted on the nation’s surfeit of trite post-Spice kid-pop and awed by their slick U.S. counterparts. It sounded like nothing else—perhaps the All Seeing I or Cornershop, not that we 11-year-olds knew that—with a bassline that skipped like a stuck record, a scrawl of a guitar solo, and an air raid siren climax in lieu of a middle eight. Its relentless tempo explained the seductive nihilism of the girls’ lyrics about hormonal overwhelm: There was no escaping its undertow.
And they were girls—Buena and Buchanan 15, Donaghy 16—lending the song an extra shade of unease. “Strange fear I ain’t felt for years/The boy’s coming and I’m close to tears,” Donaghy sings, her intimations of worldliness undercut by the sudden realization that she could very well be referencing playground games of kiss-chase. “Train comes/I don’t know its destination,” they sing in blithe harmony during the chorus, with a disquieting hint of sourness; “I’ll sleep with any man,” Buena exclaims between lines, deserted by reason.
In the video, the camera pans past their faces on a white background: aloof, unshowy, often conspiratorially cheek to cheek, staring out pityingly. Theirs was evidently a lower-budget operation than Destiny’s Child and TLC, their closest peers, and lightyears more laissez-faire than cheerful UK peers S Club 7, who pulled double duty playing themselves in a kids’ TV show. Their harmonies were understated, their UKG-tinged R&B off-kilter, their demeanor unruffled. In an interview for the irreverent TV show Popworld (another dearly departed UK pop cornerstone), Buchanan comments that they really should nail their choreography someday: “We can’t bother to remember it.” Sugababes were cool—to fans, critics, and members of Arab Strap alike.
Then less than a year later—four decreasingly successful singles, one album in like a bullet at No. 77—they were over, at least as we knew them. Said to be unhappy, Donaghy left and Buena and Buchanan were accused of bullying, a tenacious narrative with clear racist undertones that the group’s management did nothing to challenge. They were dropped from London Records owing to low sales of their debut but then signed to Island and bolstered by a new member: The video for the refreshed trio’s comeback single, “Freak Like Me” (itself a mash-up, a meta wink), depicted the original two subjecting blonde Heidi Range to a hazing ritual in a club. The lineup remained steady through 2005, providing the bulk of their commercial success, and then Buena was replaced; four years later, Buchanan was kicked out (her final album with the band was 2008’s tackily titled Catfights and Spotlights), leaving a full lineup of new brooms. Their distinctiveness waned accordingly.
The tumult made the band into a cruel punchline. As with so many pop women of their era, it took more than a decade for the original Sugababes to publicly reckon with forces way beyond their control as teenage girls, whose sometimes standoffish image clearly concealed no small amount of nervousness. Buchanan and Buena were childhood friends; the band was created by managers (despite being told to say they all met at a party), and the career hot-housing didn’t leave much room for bonding with Donaghy, who was also a school year older and studied separately from her bandmates. As they became commercially viable, their management team inflated from two to eight. (“We were like: Who are these people?” Donaghy said.) They played the trio off against one another, Buchanan recalled: “They’d whisper to one of us: ‘You should go solo.’ And to another of us: ‘So-and-so doesn’t like you.’” Child labor laws meant they were legally only allowed to promote their debut album 72 days a year, to the label’s disappointment. One Touch eventually peaked at No. 26, and that was it. Buchanan and Buena claimed that management made them hold auditions for Donaghy’s replacement when, unbeknown to them, Range had already been hired. The shifting sands told a bleak story about the precariousness of a girl’s status.
Despite the difficult circumstances surrounding their debut, One Touch remains the clearest place to hear the original Sugababes’ voices as young artists. One person the trio said really did listen to them was the album’s primary producer, Cameron McVey (husband of Neneh Cherry; dad of R&B singer Mabel, who slept through Sugababes studio sessions as a little kid). He sent them home with tracks and encouraged them to write, leaving them with credits on nine out of 12 songs. It feels symbolic to their fate that most of their lyrics negotiate a moment that’s slipping away, one where desire exceeds maturity (as well as their parents’ curfew). “I’ve got time and you can have it all,” they sing on the flinty, suspicious “One Foot In.” “As long as I’m not home too late.” Their contributions are self-evident: The three songs they didn’t write, “Soul Sound,” “Lush Life,” and the title track, lean towards bland aspiration.
The millennium was a complete shitshow when it came to public mores about young women’s sexuality: professionally sexualized by older men, yet pilloried for exploring it on their own terms. Sugababes’ songwriting explored a more truthful paradox, candid about the realities of a teenage girl’s hunger for experience, and the conflict between confidence and naivety. “Look at Me,” the first song they wrote together, is an icy plea for their parents to let them make their own mistakes. Some of the singing is barely in tune; added to the chorus, a glacially slow, direct appeal drenched in minor-key harmonies, the song becomes a stark confrontation, insisting to be accepted on one’s own terms.
They demand clarity from flaky guys and assert their worth (“I’m not your fashion accessory,” they sing on “One Foot In”) but later question whether they can trust their own feelings on “Real Thing,” a dreamy Janet Jackson echo in which the chorus melody rises in parallel with their hope that this might just be true love. Sometimes the friction occurs within a single song: “Just Let It Go” is a Destiny’s Child-lite debate over whether Buena should leave her bad boyfriend; her verses about needing this wastrel are notably more convincing than Donaghy and Buchanan’s rebuttals advising her to get over him and “find the sweetest rainbow,” which sound ripped from a teen magazine advice column. The tension, about not yet knowing enough to know what you might be missing out on, feels arrestingly true.
That beguiling awkwardness distinguishes One Touch musically, too. Sugababes’ prickly R&B wasn’t as boundary-pushing as anything by Aaliyah, a breakout artist in the UK that year, nor Destiny’s Child, but it revelled in introversion, discomfort, and intensity in a way that their fully neutered, jazz-handsy UK pop peers couldn’t. (Its closest spiritual predecessor in that sense might be Robyn’s 1995 debut, Robyn Is Here.) The album thrived on mining sounds that teenage girls from northwest London might actually like—UK garage, boom-bap, lilting West Coast pop—and rarely hewed to neatly resolving pop conventions. Sometimes that leaves it undercooked, and a few tracks are too self-consciously street—it’s peppered with wiki-wiki record scratching—which undermines the trio’s innate ability to sound worldly and terrifying.
Although they’re capable of beauty—the lovely, almost a capella “New Year” and “Soul Sound”—their harmonies are best suited to wraithlike taunting, often embodying a nagging conscience. Buchanan flits nimbly around the two-stepping “Same Old Story,” then the trio come together for one of their distinctively tapered and intimidating choruses. The synth tones of “Promises” shift uneasily between keys, the girls’ layered, downward-spiralling vocals assuring some fiend that their treachery is “coming back to haunt you.”
They reveal the weight of withstanding these pressures too: “Overload” and “Run for Cover,” both about feeling overwhelmed, bookend the album. The latter’s nervy piano, grave strings, and distorted drums are dramatic and isolated, grounding another discomfiting, unblinking chorus about shutting down in the face of emotional intensity. The album ends with a warning and a strike of self-protection: “You never seem to wonder/How much you make me suffer/I speak it from the inside,” they sing in severe harmony. It establishes a distance, making them tantalizingly unreachable.
That’s where they would remain. The swift dissolution of the original trio left them with a mythic status in UK pop: What might have been? Buchanan once said she had to stop listening to their “adorable” demos because it became too painful: “I would think, ‘Oh, if we were just left to it, we could have done so much.’” Maybe she’s referring to the songs that come with this expanded edition: Several are generically poppy, filled with banal lyrics about partying and devotion (and strangely affecting samples of era-specific mobile phone chimes). If anything, the fact that they didn’t make the original album makes its weird audacity that much more impressive. A couple push that strangeness further: “This Is What You Need,” with its Daft Punk-style vocal processing, post-Missy energy, and blurting production, could be a proto-Danny L Harle track.
True to that spirit, a (fairly unilluminating) disc of remixes and alternative versions features MNEK, Metronomy, and Blood Orange, the progressive, artist-first UK pop producers who worked with the trio when they reformed as MKS in 2012. Getting back together was a personal decision, Buchanan said: “People didn’t allow us to enjoy the experience the first time round.” Despite a few singles, a promised second album hasn’t materialized: Various songs were leaked online and then filleted for use by other artists, including Bananarama and James Arthur. Donaghy also cited “major legal complications,” and admitted that it had taken time for the trio to reckon with their relationships to one another.
The ongoing saga can feel somewhat like history repeating itself, ambitious women caught in an unwinnable system. The One Touch reissue isn’t so much a chance to revisit a classic album—it isn’t one—but an overdue gesture of respect for a group of girls whose long shadow defies any abiding idea that they were disposable.
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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. | 2021-10-09T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2021-10-09T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic / Pop/R&B | London | October 9, 2021 | 7.3 | 05375a2c-a5d9-45dd-8f3f-1d36fa466138 | Laura Snapes | https://pitchfork.com/staff/laura-snapes/ | |
It's always great to hear a band known for their so-so records suddenly make one where everything clicks. Rilo ... | It's always great to hear a band known for their so-so records suddenly make one where everything clicks. Rilo ... | Rilo Kiley: The Execution of All Things | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/6788-the-execution-of-all-things/ | The Execution of All Things | It's always great to hear a band known for their so-so records suddenly make one where everything clicks. Rilo Kiley's self-titled debut was catchy and smart, but erratic; the follow-up, last year's Take Offs and Landings, came off as languid and lazily paced, with undistinguished writing. Now the L.A. quartet has recorded an album for Omaha, Nebraska's Saddle Creek-- home to Bright Eyes and The Faint, among countless others-- and it surpasses all of their earlier work: it's a dynamic album with intriguing lyrics, a country/folk shimmer, and explosive pop moments.
Jenny Lewis and Blake Sennett-- singers, guitarists, and incidentally, both grown-up child actors-- front the band and write the material. They're joined by Pierre de Reeder and Jason Boesel on bass and drums, and some eclectic guest musicians (some pedal steel, but also accordion, strings, and even a little vibraphone for color). Almost all of this stuff is used tastefully on the diverse material, and though this is their most complicated production so far, it stays loose enough for sudden explosions and guitar solo outbursts.
Lewis, singing lead on almost every song, is more restrained but more effective than on the earlier albums. She switches between two styles: at times she's blunt and plain-spoken, taking no shit and saying "fuck" a lot, which gets her compared to Liz Phair, everyone's favorite empowered indie rocker; at others, she takes on a quieter, melodic voice, marked by a bit of twang and a twinge of something doubtful-- an emotional edge that can be interpreted a dozen ways; it could hint that she doesn't believe herself, but more likely, that she doesn't think you believe her. This edge enriches her bitter lyrics and helps the ecstatic ones soar.
The words here are descriptive and articulate, but gracefully rendered. Perfect images and phrases litter the verses, some of them upbeat but more of them conflicted, like the scattered confrontations in "Paint's Peeling". Lewis also gets autobiographical in her almost stilted poetry on "And That's How I Choose to Remember It", a calliope-sounding song about her parents that's been cut in three pieces and (somewhat obtrusively) slipped between the main tracks.
Around these frequently bleak lyrics, Lewis and Sennett wrote catchy and energetic music, with perfect hooks and choruses that knock down the walls. "Paint's Peeling" and the title track have both entered "repeat" mode on my disc player, and the lilting strings on "Capturing Moods" are plain addictive. Blake Sennett's turn on the loping "So Long" and the anthemic "Three Hopeful Thoughts" are effective, as well; he isn't a striking singer or, let's face it, as charismatic as Lewis, but he's genuine enough to sell lines like, "I hope that I drive tonight/ Into the last of the great sunrises."
You could call The Execution of All Things a feel-good album, but there's enough going on that it rarely sounds like froth. Aside from a couple of twee missteps-- like the hyper-bouncy keyboards on "My Slumbering Heart"-- the band almost always hits the right tone: they do Americana without the alt-country cliches and cowpoke pacing, and the undercurrent of environmental concern is rich rather than blunt. So when they reach the last track, "Spectacular Views", they've earned a giddily big, vibrant California pop anthem, on which they completely let go and allow Lewis to take in the coast and the stars, screaming, "It's so fucking beautiful!" Who's gonna argue? | 2003-01-12T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2003-01-12T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Saddle Creek | January 12, 2003 | 7.5 | 053df9d3-5ba0-426c-a662-8645137cc6d0 | Chris Dahlen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/chris-dahlen/ | null |
79-year-old samba icon and Brazilian national hero Elza Soares offers a searing, surging fusion that combines Afro-Brazilian styles with wiry, dissonant strands of punk and noise-rock. | 79-year-old samba icon and Brazilian national hero Elza Soares offers a searing, surging fusion that combines Afro-Brazilian styles with wiry, dissonant strands of punk and noise-rock. | Elza Soares: A Mulher do Fim do Mundo (The Woman at the End of the World) | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22173-a-mulher-do-fim-do-mundo-the-woman-at-the-end-of-the-world/ | A Mulher do Fim do Mundo (The Woman at the End of the World) | There’s a story, often repeated, about Elza Soares’ big break. The future samba icon was just a teenager when she went on Rio de Janeiro’s “Calouros em Desfile,” a talent show whose name translates as something like “Freshmen on Parade.” The daughter of a washerwoman and a laborer, she cut a strange figure for a talent show, wearing an ill-fitting dress she had pilfered from her mother’s laundry, gathering and pinning its billowing extra fabric. The audience cackled as the show’s host, Ary Barroso, incredulously asked her, “What planet are you from?”
Soares didn’t bat an eye: “Planet Hunger.”
She wasn’t kidding. Soares, born in 1937 (by most accounts, anyway) in one of Rio’s favelas, grew up poor and desperate. At 12, her father had forced her into an abusive marriage with the neighborhood teen he believed was raping her. She had given birth to her first son at 13; by the time she was widowed at 21, she would have four more children. She gave up one for adoption; another died of malnutrition. It’s often said that she appeared on “Calouros em Desfile” in order to win the money she needed to buy medicine for her sick child.
It goes without saying that she won the show. Afterward, Soares would go on to develop one of the most distinctive voices in música popular brasileira, or MPB, adopting elements of scat singing and New Orleans jazz and making the most of her richly expressive rasp. Today she is fêted as a national hero: Her biographer José Louzeiro has declared her contributions to Brazil’s folk music analogous to Bessie Smith’s and Ella Fitzgerald’s to the blues.
Black, working class, and self-taught, Soares is the literal embodiment of the classic rags-to-riches story. But hardship has never loosened its grip upon her. She has endured exile, scandal, and racist opprobrium. She watched the love of her life, the legendary Brazilian soccer star Garrincha, spiral into alcoholism; he was drunk at the wheel in the accident that killed her mother. They split after he beat her, knocking out her teeth shortly before she was scheduled to appear for a television interview. Not long after he died of cirrhosis of the liver, penniless and forgotten, her son from that union died in another car wreck. All in all, she has lost five of her sons and daughters.
Soares is 79 now, and her latest album, A Mulher do Fim do Mundo (The Woman at the End of the World) marks the kind of record few artists ever make, much less iconic figures who could be reasonably expected to live out their remaining years resting comfortably on their laurels. The album is part autobiography, part reinvention, and all provocation, channeling both her life’s pain and her incredible resilience into an alloy that is by turns jagged and molten. Written by and recorded with a group of young experimental musicians from São Paulo’s “samba sujo” (or “dirty samba”) scene, including artistic directors Guilherme Kastrup and Rômulo Fróes and members of the bands Passo Torto and Metá Metá, it is a searing, surging work of fusion that combines Afro-Brazilian styles with wiry, dissonant strands of punk and noise-rock, where the Ex mingles freely with Tom Zé.
This is not morbid music; it is full of life, of spit and grit. This is an album in which a 79-year-old woman barks a snarling ode to the joys of fucking, “Pra Fuder”; it is an album in which a battered woman threatens to douse her abusive husband with boiling water, to parade him before the neighbors, to humiliate him in front of his mother (“Maria da Vila Matilde”). “Get him!” she shouts as the dog tears off after him, her voice ricocheting down a dizzy chain of dub delay. The combination of sounds and textures is nothing short of astonishing: the hardscrabble guitar-and-drum interplay; the horns, betraying the faintest hint of two-tone ska; and above all, her impossibly malleable voice, like a scrap of sandpaper turning into a tsunami. I don’t know of any other records that sound quite like this one: by turns wiry, warm, playful, and elegiac, it evokes twisting vines and cracked cement, with guitars that snake like the pichação graffiti of São Paulo and Rio.
The album doubles as a portrait of contemporary Brazil—a country beset by crises, including corruption scandals, the worst recession in over a century, a wave of police brutality, and a rising tide of anti-gay violence. The opening song, “Coração do Mar,” is a musical setting of a poem by the modernist writer Oswald de Andrade—a melancholy, imagistic meditation upon loss and slavery that becomes, in her weary recitation, something like an inverse national anthem. In the stirring title track, over bright cavaquinho and swelling strings, she sings a heart-rending ode to samba, carnival, and the lifesaving qualities of music itself. “I go on singing ’til the end,” she promises, and you can tell that she means it, her voice bristling like the hair on a dog’s back.
Soares has long advocated for the downtrodden (“I’m always singing to remind you that blacks exist,” she once said; “gays and prostitutes” too), and in “Benedita,” she pays tribute to a crack-addicted trans woman with a slug lodged in her flesh and a silver bullet in her pocket, “to kill the careless cop.” But Soares and her co-writers take more abstracted paths, too: The breezy “Firmeza” turns a brief encounter on the street into a wry, dissonant tone poem. “Dança,” a song about a dancing corpse, channels Tom Waits’ junkyard fantasias. And the cryptic, mournful “O Canal” sings of death and exodus in “the gleam of Alexander the Great’s lighthouse.” (The album’s excellent lyric sheet, including Portuguese and English translations and even footnotes for select cultural cues, goes a long way toward unlocking its intricacies.)
It all adds up to one of the year’s most original and exhilarating listens; that is equally true of its raucous, unorthodox fusions and its quietest, contemplative moments. Just as it opens with an a cappella, the better to highlight Soares’ inimitable voice—soft as a spring lawn, coarse as ground coffee—it closes with another, “Comigo.” The song begins with dark, droning tape loops, swollen as rain clouds, but they abruptly cease, ceding the stage to Soares alone. The song is about her mother; her voice wears the scars of a lifetime of grief. “I carry my mother with me/Even though she’s gone,” she sings, a hoarse, funereal lament. “I carry my mother with me/Because she gave me her own self.” You don’t need to understand the Portuguese to feel the weight of her words: It might be the saddest song you ever heard. She sounds exhausted, worn out, run into the ground by sorrow. But in every click in her voice, in every catch in her throat, there is also defiance. All these years later, the girl from Planet Hunger refuses to back down. | 2016-07-29T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-07-29T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Global | Mais Um Discos | July 29, 2016 | 8.4 | 053ebfd3-1598-4daf-8f36-ae2fd026a933 | Philip Sherburne | https://pitchfork.com/staff/philip-sherburne/ | null |
More namechecked than heard, Carey Mercer, Spencer Krug, and the rest of this B.C. band follow a series of small-scale studies with one of their best full-lengths to date. | More namechecked than heard, Carey Mercer, Spencer Krug, and the rest of this B.C. band follow a series of small-scale studies with one of their best full-lengths to date. | Frog Eyes: Tears of the Valedictorian | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/10167-tears-of-the-valedictorian/ | Tears of the Valedictorian | Why is this valedictorian crying? For the classmates he's leaving behind? For that van full of kids who drove drunk into the storm ditch after prom? No, if the speaker is Carey Mercer, who fronts Victoria, B.C.'s Frog Eyes, he's bawling because he's supposed to be an adult now and what's more a man, but there are no men around, only military blowhards, craven merchants, and drunken dads.
Frog Eyes have been a band more namechecked than listened to, thanks to now-and-then keyboardist Spencer Krug's other groups (Wolf Parade, Sunset Rubdown), and Mercer's collaboration last year with Krug and Dan Bejar of Destroyer under the guise of Swan Lake. While Mercer shares his friends' elliptical and bombastic rhetoric, he's at once more of an orator and more of a synesthesist, working with smears and splatters more than melodies, and bringing his own fixations.
Tears of the Valedictorian is Frog Eyes' first substantial advance since 2003's The Golden River, which was a fanciful songcycle on a backdrop of ecological anxiety. The Folded Palm (2004) approximated the frenzy of their shows, but at the expense of the songs. The intervening mini-albums were pleasant small-scale studies. Valedictorian again mobilizes the band's full palette-- Mercer's wife Melanie Campbell's stomping drums and flat stutter cymbals, Krug's keyboards switching from crosshatch shadows to radiant showers, Michael Rak's grounding bass, Mercer's and McCloud Zicmuse's light-seeking insect guitars and, always, Mercer's gibbering, his croon, his grumbles, his yodeling yip.
Mercer stands in the lineage of rock frontman as half-carnival-barker, half-gnostic-preacher that Greil Marcus describes as the "crank prophet," from Screamin' Jay Hawkins through Arthur Lee of Love, Captain Beefheart, David Thomas of Pere Ubu, Tom Waits, and the Pixies' Frank Black. But Frog Eyes' sound owes more to early Roxy Music-- music that filtered out blues in favor of high modernism-- as well as advertising jingles and John Philip Sousa. In keeping with Victoria's Brit-dominated demographics, it also recalls English music hall, though the hall is on a riverboat and the river on fire.
Mercer's preoccupation here seems to be masculinity, as it often has been in rock, the music of boys coming of age. But unlike Mick Jagger or Bruce Springsteen (whose trace, as so often these days, shows up here in some surprising runs of piano fills and exhortations), Mercer is stalking the heath of manhood's ruination. He turns over artifacts of Romanticism like an anthropologist on a dig, sketching out the landscape and puzzling over how these dick-swinging ancients survived. His yowls are the cry of somebody waking up from history with a hangover-- "he was what the Poor call the Maimed," he sings-- as its dreams disperse over the horizon of legibility.
I don't mean to make Mercer sound like a nostalgist. His voice is nothing if not urgently present, struggling to pull his warring selves into some workable here and now. He invokes patriarchs just to dispose of them, from the "Roman ambassador" who is "torn apart by plaster and reassembled after" in the opener, "Idle Songs," to the "druken and besotted father figure" who's pushed out to sea on an ice floe in "Evil Energy, the Ill Twin of..." They stand between Mercer and a longed-for future in which the masculine spirit somehow gets sane and whole. Meanwhile, touchingly, that bad dad out on the ice "trembles and he trembles and he puts his heart on tremble."
Mercer breaks from the crank-prophet line in that he wants to defeat his solipsism, to hack his way out of the thicket of male ghosts and build relationships-- with nature, lovers, family, his band and the listener. This album is peppered with references to himself as singer, from the epic second track "Caravan Breakers, They Prey on the Weak and the Old" ("I bet you are sick of hearing songs about the trail") to the entrancing near-closer "Bushels", which assures "there's a colony in song" and ends on the simple statement, "I was a singer and I sang in your home." In between comes "The Policy Merchant, the Silver Bay", an acoustic, falsetto-sung ballad in which he teases, "Mercer is a merchant, a policy merchant/ He calls himself urgent!/ He gathers all of the urchins up in their tearaways/ He gathers them into his palm and then he sings 'Another Day.'"
These wry acknowledgments feel especially gracious from a singer who is so under siege by sound and by the unending, unpredictable demands of all the voices of past and future birthing and dying in his gullet. But that's what Frog Eyes achieves here, not just in the songwriting but in the band's new dynamic range and precision-- for the first time, there's space in their hermetic universe for the rest of us. It's graduation day. | 2007-05-03T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2007-05-03T02:00:01.000-04:00 | Rock | Absolutely Kosher | May 3, 2007 | 8.5 | 053f3bb0-5964-4873-a7fa-12db01a5fc3a | Carl Wilson | https://pitchfork.com/staff/carl-wilson/ | null |
The Boston hardcore band Converge are nearing the 25-year mark, though you might not guess it from the manic energy crammed into it their excellent eighth album, All We Love We Leave Behind. If you go beyond the amped, break-neck intensity and listen to the compositions, it becomes clearer: You don't just show up and write songs like this. | The Boston hardcore band Converge are nearing the 25-year mark, though you might not guess it from the manic energy crammed into it their excellent eighth album, All We Love We Leave Behind. If you go beyond the amped, break-neck intensity and listen to the compositions, it becomes clearer: You don't just show up and write songs like this. | Converge: All We Love We Leave Behind | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/17132-all-we-love-we-leave-behind/ | All We Love We Leave Behind | The brilliant hardcore band Converge have been around a long time, though you might not guess it from the manic energy crammed into their eighth album, All We Love We Leave Behind. If you go beyond the amped, break-neck intensity and listen to the compositions, it becomes clear the Boston band is nearing the 25-year mark: You don't just show up and write songs like this.
One of the quartet's not-so-secret weapons is Kurt Ballou, the guitarist (and backing vocalist, bassist, keyboardist, etc.), who happens to be one of the most well-regarded engineers in heavy music and an endless tinkerer who'd build a snare from scratch if it meant getting the sound he needed. The central core of vocalist/in-house artist Jacob Bannon and Ballou-- along with bassist Nate Newton and drummer Ben Koller, who both joined in 1999-- have been together long enough to know each other very well, and to play almost entirely to their own strengths. As such, there's never a dull moment across AWLWLB's 38 minutes. It's all peaks.
The record is the logical followup to 2009's Axe to Fall, my favorite record that year. Axe included a large supporting cast of friends and fellow travelers from Cave In, Disfear, Genghis Tron, the Red Chord, and Neurosis. It ended with a seven-minute song that seemed to include them all. When I spoke with Converge frontman Jacob Bannon a few weeks ago about AWLWLB, he said Axe to Fall had been the "collaborative concept taken to the extreme." This time, it's just the band and the watchful ear of Ballou. As Bannon put it, "There's no artificial distortion, triggers, or Auto-Tune on this album. It's all organic, it's real sounds that capture the way the band performs live."
From opener (and first single) "Aimless Arrow" onward, the music here is mostly fast, compact, and coiled. That's Converge in general, but they've distilled the elements to even tauter extremes this time. The technical mastery is mind-blowing, as is the way they manage to squeeze in brutal melodies and hooks. The vocal lines seem to be woven into the guitars, to which they've also added a bluesier feel, a detail that reminds me of the classic post-Negative Approach Touch and Go band Laughing Hyenas-- or even the Jesus Lizard. It's a streamlined, live-sounding collection that can feel like one giant kick to the head. But they know when to give, take, and plop in a slow-grind blues riff. Tracks overlap and echo. When they slow things down to a momentary crawl with the album's longest song, the five-minute doom ballad "Coral Blue", it's like a chair's been pulled out from behind you. You get that in the middle of the two-minute "Empty on the Inside" as well as the instrumental "Precipice", an interstitial piece with piano, clean guitars, psychedelic soloing guitars, and deep-factory/chain-gang percussion. "All We Love We Leave Behind" picks all of that up gorgeously.
As overwhelming as AWLWLB may be on first listen, it's really not all speed. There's a thing people say about young professional quarterbacks, about how they need experience before the game "slows down." You get that on this album, too. In my interview with Bannon, he said: "I feel that the current generation of listeners of heavy music are progressing a bit past their gateway bands and are digging deeper than they used to and understanding more abrasive and complex music and art. It's like being around an unfamiliar language long enough that it eventually begins to make sense." I agree with this, and it's the reason why Converge are a band with plenty of fans who weren't close to being born when the band formed in 1990.
Of course, there's plenty for older audiences, too-- aging, death, decisions, punk as a way of life, and the way these things preoccupy you when you go past 30 are largely what this album is about. (It all opens with "Aimless Arrow"'s "To live the life you want/ You've abandoned those in need"). Bannon describes the grizzled two-minute anthem "Shame in the Way" as a song about "feeling fragmented from the traditional concept of family." He adds, "As I've gotten older, I've worked on mending the things I can, while being conscious of the things I can't repair." You get this on the genuinely moving title track, too. Bannon calls it "an open letter to the things that I feel I've left behind in order to pursue an artistic and musical direction in my life." He says it was inspired in part by the death of his beloved dog, Anna Belle, but there's a lot more than that here: It's a classic hardcore anthem, one that looks at the decision to live a life in a particular way, and it might bring you to tears if you hear it right. Really, more than the past couple of Converge albums, AWLWLB feels like a hardcore record.
We live in a period of compression, where there's more stimulation and less time for reflection-- but we're also continually presented with a repackaged, slightly off past. Nostalgia is music's biggest seller, it seems. The thing is, underground bands that formed in 1990 are often getting back together in 2012 for reunion tours, not eighth albums. The irony of the title, of course, is that Converge are also a lesson in not leaving behind what matters. "Predatory Glow" ends the record with the lines: "Let the future know/ I won't be there tomorrow/ Let the past know/ I gave them my all/ I'm aching for an end/ Grown thinner every day/ I bow down to you/ Extinguished youth." When I asked about the song, Bannon explained: "I am far from an 'old' person in human terms, however I've spent over half my life immersed in the punk rock and hardcore community. I am not wholly defined by that as a person, but it is something that has been part of me for a long time."
And it will be, until he dies. AWLWLB is an example of building on and mastering the music you loved when you were younger-- something that became more than music, ultimately-- so that it has a chance to grow old with you without becoming any less vital. | 2012-10-12T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2012-10-12T02:00:00.000-04:00 | Metal | Epitaph | October 12, 2012 | 8.6 | 0540ba3a-88a4-4e15-8cff-88c67a4664d7 | Brandon Stosuy | https://pitchfork.com/staff/brandon-stosuy/ | null |
The surprise release of If You’re Reading This It’s Too Late, a retail mixtape arriving on the six-year anniversary of Drake's star-making So Far Gone, has inspired much speculation: Is it a ruse to close out his Cash Money deal? But the music itself gives Drake room to breathe outside the lumbering commercialism of his studio albums. | The surprise release of If You’re Reading This It’s Too Late, a retail mixtape arriving on the six-year anniversary of Drake's star-making So Far Gone, has inspired much speculation: Is it a ruse to close out his Cash Money deal? But the music itself gives Drake room to breathe outside the lumbering commercialism of his studio albums. | Drake: If You're Reading This It's Too Late | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/20271-if-youre-reading-this-its-too-late/ | If You're Reading This It's Too Late | Death is the only certainty for rap dynasties. One year it’s "All About the Benjamins" and the next it’s Lincolns and Washingtons. Cash Money Records has escaped the fate of the Roc-A-Fellas and Bad Boys thanks to the enduring genius of Bryan "Baby" Williams, AKA Birdman. Birdman’s business acumen and A&R smarts carried Cash Money through three distinct eras, from the late '90s Hot Boys heyday through Lil Wayne’s mid- to late-2000s bid for "Best Rapper Alive" to the current YMCMB incarnation featuring Drake and Nicki Minaj. (With Young Thug and Rich Homie Quan he seems to be training still another army.) The wheels appeared to come off of the Cash Money machine for good, however, on a random December afternoon when Wayne gave a curt Twitter update on his long-gestating Tha Carter V album, blaming Birdman and Cash Money for the holdup and demanding an exit from the label he’s called home most of his life. He’s since initiated an audacious $51 million lawsuit requesting not only his own exit but that of Drake and Nicki Minaj as well.
Drake and Nicki have been smartly mum on the split (well, word around town is Birdman was barred from Minaj’s Grammy party earlier this month), but years of whispers about Drake being owed substantial back royalties were publicly validated with the surprise release of If You’re Reading This It’s Too Late, a retail mixtape arriving on the six year anniversary of Drake’s star-making So Far Gone. If You’re Reading This is littered with pith for Drake’s label situation ("No Tellin’": "Envelopes coming in the mail, let her open ‘em/ Hoping for a check again, ain’t no telling," "Star67": "Brand new Beretta, can’t wait to let it go/ Walk up in my label like ‘Where the check, though?’"), and all of this surfacing weeks after Wayne’s lawsuit bombshell raises a few questions. Is this release a ruse to close out Drake’s Cash Money deal? Is the absence of Birdman from the mixtape’s lengthy thank you's an oversight or an intentional slight? Is the title a dig?
If You’re Reading This arouses many unanswered questions on a business front, but where it truly delivers is giving Drake room to breathe outside of the lumbering commercialism of his retail albums. There’s little in the way of obvious singles here, (though the Ibiza bop "Preach" might find a chart by accident). Instead we get a spectral late-night longing not unlike that of So Far Gone touchstones "Lust for Life" and "Successful". The pre-fame queasiness of early Drake is now the loneliness of a distrustful despot. On "10 Bands" he’s holed up in a home studio for weeks pushing himself to create ("Drapes closed, I don’t know what time it is/ I’m still awake, I gotta shine this year"). "Know Yourself" celebrates the thrill of mobbing through a city that’s his for the taking, but even in joy there’s a note of tension and the ever-present possibility of actual danger. ("I ain’t rock my jewelry, and that’s on purpose/ Niggas want my spot and don’t deserve it.") Success creates as many problems as it solves.
Music is the real joy for Drake, and If You’re Reading This It’s Too Late is best enjoyed as an exercise in the casual excellence of the artist as rhymer and purveyor of hooks. The vocals are often just vampy flow experiments, but at their best these verses exhibit the weightless exhilaration of a technician at work. Drake’s never more formidable than when he’s shadowboxing, and at its flashiest, If You’re Reading This It’s Too Late feels like his Rocky run. Inspired by gauntlet tosses from adversaries high and low, Drake uses the mixtape to toast and taunt a rogue’s gallery of industry frenemies. For Diddy, who reportedly punched him over ownership of the beat for "0 to 100/The Catch Up": "Real quick, man, you couldn’t’ve hated that/ Let’s be real, nigga, you couldn’t’ve made it that." For disgruntled labelmate Tyga, who insulted Drake in a Vibe magazine feature: "You need to act your age and not your girl’s age." For friend-turned-rival Kendrick Lamar: "They gon’ say your name on them airwaves/ They gon hit you after like it’s only rap."
On If You’re Reading This, all of this chest beating is delivered over the most darkly hypnotic beats Drake’s graced since So Far Gone. Much of the mixtape foregoes the supervision of his producer-in-residence Noah "40" Shebib, but 40’s codeine-soul aesthetic is the ghost in the machine. The PARTYNEXTDOOR showcase "Wednesday Night Interlude" matches the OVO signee’s pleading vocal to a chunk of Canadian producer Ekali’s ethereal "Unfaith", itself an interpolation of Ciara and Future’s "Body Party". Ginuwine and Timbaland’s 2000 classic "So Anxious" is sampled twice, soundtracking the slow-cooking opener "Legend" and the 40 contribution "Madonna". Where R&B sounds aren’t incorporated directly, their thick sensuality is frequently hinted at. The pace of the mixtape rarely elevates past a crawl, reveling in the moody, winding instrumentals and hooky sentimentality of Boi-1da, PARTYNEXTDOOR and newcomers Wondagurl, SykSense, and Sevn Thomas without worrying about posting upbeat knockers to Top 40 radio.
In the days to come you’ll read that Drake "pulled a Beyoncé" with the stealth drop of If You’re Reading This, and yes, both are surprise releases from A-list artists topping the charts without a rollout or much in the way of an advance warning. But Radiohead’s In Rainbows is the better comparison: Both records found the artists revisiting the mood of a highly regarded early work as they transition into new methods of delivering music to fans. Whether the Drake tape is a clever track dump disguised as an album with the intent of worming out of his Cash Money deal, a deliberately planned gesture to tide fans over until the upcoming Views from the 6, or just an exercise in shirking the protracted waits and missed dates of the retail rap game, If You’re Reading This It’s Too Late winningly employs the occasion of the So Far Gone anniversary to revisit the twilight consternation of Drake’s breakout release, perhaps to close out a chapter of his career on the same note on which it began. | 2015-02-17T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2015-02-17T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rap | Cash Money | February 17, 2015 | 8.3 | 0541f9da-20ac-46bc-9cee-b1d99b66f8f9 | Craig Jenkins | https://pitchfork.com/staff/craig-jenkins/ | null |
It could be said that Liz Phair's greatest asset has always been her inability to write a perfect pop ... | It could be said that Liz Phair's greatest asset has always been her inability to write a perfect pop ... | Liz Phair: Liz Phair | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/6255-liz-phair/ | Liz Phair | It could be said that Liz Phair's greatest asset has always been her inability to write a perfect pop song. On her 1993 debut, Exile in Guyville, Phair's gruff voice wrapped awkward non-hooks around flimsy, transparent chord progressions, resulting in (to everyone's surprise) a certifiable indie roadtrip classic. It still stands as a powerfully confrontational album, skirting convention yet marked by Phair's striking awareness of her own limitations.
Unfortunately, it seems that Phair has spent the better part of her post-Exile career trying to gloss over the very limitations that made her original statement so profound. Though her second album, Whip-Smart, had a few choice moments which recalled the insight and complexity of Exile, it ultimately seemed like a much more calculated affair. Things didn't start to go horribly awry, of course, until Phair's next album, Whitechocolatespaceegg. That record's attempts to radio-ize her sound only dismantled the depth of her music-- if not the awkwardness-- resulting in an odd batch of songs that perhaps encapsulated Phair's faulty view of what constitutes a radio-friendly album.
Ten years on from Exile, Liz has finally managed to achieve what seems to have been her goal ever since the possibility of commercial success first presented itself to her: to release an album that could have just as easily been made by anybody else. Even the songs on Liz Phair that could be considered "shocking" or "profound" are gratuitous and overdetermined, eschewing the stark and accusatory insights of Exile in favor of pointless f-bombs, manipulative ballads, and foul-mouthed shmeminism.
Liz Phair has always been known for her vulgarity, but on Exile and parts of Whip-Smart, she put that trait to good use. On "Fuck and Run", a standout from Exile, Phair used the word's negative connotations as a means of pointed self-deprecation and lamented, "Whatever happened to a boyfriend/ The kind of guy who makes love cause he's in it/ I want a boyfriend/ I want all that stupid old shit/ Letters and sodas." "Flower", Phair's most notorious track to date, reads like a laundry list of graphic sexual desires, but rather than paint a uniformly flattering portrait of her love interest, he's immature, he's obnoxious, and despite it all, she still wants to fuck his brains out-- a simple, necessarily crude semi-contradiction that speaks volumes.
"Flower" would seem to have a descendent in "H.W.C." ("Hot White Cum"), in which Phair extols the virtue of semen as a beauty aid ("...Dear Cosmo: Splooge, The New Rouge!"). But, unlike the complex, alternatingly cocky and self-effacing sexuality of "Flower," "H.W.C."'s unqualified sperm-praise is entirely vain and degrading. Even more degrading is the constipated donkeyfuck harmonica solo towards the track's end, a hilarious sideshow that only magnifies the triteness of the song's glycerin-slick production.
Though "H.W.C." is without question the best water-cooler conversation piece on Liz Phair, "Rock Me" makes for a close second. Here, Phair sings exuberantly about the benefits of an affair with a younger guy including-- I shit you not-- "[playing] Xbox on [his] floor." In between choruses of, "Baby baby baby if it's alright/ Want you to rock me all night," Phair declares, "I'm starting to think that young guys rule!" without a trace of self-doubt or reflection. It's hard to imagine that the Liz Phair of ten years ago wouldn't have had something profound and devastating to say about older women who shack up with clueless college kids, but on "Rock Me"-- as on the rest of Liz Phair-- vapid, cliché-filled rhyme couplets dominate.
Take, for example, the album's first single, "Why Can't I", "co"-written by Avril Lavigne songwriting team The Matrix. With a chorus of, "Why can't I breathe whenever I think about you?" and a cookie-cutter rock/pop background, the song could easily pass for Michelle Branch. The lyric, "We haven't fucked yet/ But my head's still spinning," seemingly seeks to set Phair apart from the teen-pop crowd, but the use of the word is completely gratuitous-- change it to "kissed" and stick a 16-year-old girl in front of the mic and no one could tell the difference.
Only on "Little Digger" does Phair attempt to tackle subject matter unique to the circumstances of her own life as a 36-year-old single mother. The song has received positive press for addressing a difficult issue, as Phair sings to her son about his absent father and the new men she's dating. But the fact that anything positive could be said about this track speaks only to the overwhelming lack of substance on this record. From its cloying synthstring arrangements to its ballad-in-a-box drumbeat to its infuriatingly manipulative chorus of, "My mother is mine," "Little Digger" offers up all the insight and emotion of a UPN sitcom.
In recent interviews, Phair has been upfront about her hopes of mainstream success, and claims full awareness that Liz Phair is likely to alienate many of her original fans. What she doesn't seem to realize is that a collection of utterly generic rocked-out pop songs isn't likely to win her many new ones. It's sad that an artist as groundbreaking as Phair would be reduced to cheap publicity stunts and hyper-commercialized teen-pop. But then, this is "the album she has always wanted to make"-- one in which all of her quirks and limitations are absorbed into well-tested clichés, and ultimately, one that may as well not even exist. | 2003-06-24T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2003-06-24T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Capitol | June 24, 2003 | 0 | 05440670-df02-4cc3-9ab1-2e45c1aed9b3 | Matt LeMay | https://pitchfork.com/staff/matt-lemay/ | null |
Six years after Vol. 2, the latest label compilation obliterates the notion that there’s any one PC Music sound. It’s the work of producers interested in self-expression and the shifting grounds of pop music. | Six years after Vol. 2, the latest label compilation obliterates the notion that there’s any one PC Music sound. It’s the work of producers interested in self-expression and the shifting grounds of pop music. | Various Artists: PC Music, Vol. 3 | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/various-artists-pc-music-vol-3/ | PC Music, Vol. 3 | Despite PC Music’s high-concept visuals, shapeshifting production, and ambitious collaborations with multinational beverage corporations, the aims of the label are modest. For founder A. G. Cook, running the boundary-pushing record label has always been about releasing music that feels honest and intimate, first and foremost. He told Interview Magazine that when he makes tracks, it’s as if his computer is an extension of himself. “My brain is just operating on a different level,” he said. “[My computer] feels like a part of me.” Over the years, he’s made it clear that if he and his collaborators are making “personal computer music,” the emphasis is first and foremost on the “personal.”
PC Music Volume 3—a mix of new tracks and songs released since 2016’s Volume 2—is the first of the label’s compilations to fully deliver on that promise. In the label’s earliest days, it could feel like there was a house style of sorts—especially since Cook had his hands in so many of the label’s most memorable plasticine productions—but Volume 3 obliterates the notion that there’s any one PC Music sound. No matter the genre—from cyborg radio refractions to acid-burned rave memories—each track feels intensely detailed and emotionally rich, the work of producers as interested in self-expression as they are focused on shifting notions of what pop music can sound like.
In the case of some of the artists collected on Volume 3, that means edging ever closer to music that’d genuinely be fit for the Billboard charts. A. G. Cook’s “Xcxoplex,” for example, welcomes Charli XCX for a euphoric rework of one of his solo songs, and it sounds, in places, like the sort of euphoric EDM track that would have once soundtracked kids grinding their teeth at Electric Zoo. But Cook’s never been the sort of artist to embrace pure pleasure; the most ecstatic moments are cut with digital noise, rhythmic contortions, and pitch-shifted harmonies. Even as the timbre of pop music shifts toward more outré sounds—the head-spinning sonics of hyperpop, digicore, and plugg have emerged from the internet underground since the last PC Music compilation—Cook’s productions are still wonderfully jarring. Other dreamy efforts like caro♡’s “over u” and Namasenda’s “☆” (which features French singer-producer Oklou) are a little less complicated. This approach can be a virtue for pop music, but some of these moments feel a bit weightless in the context of a PC Music compilation that’s full of complex, rich takes on otherwise recognizable sounds.
Still, other familiar faces from the PC Music catalog show up to turn in some of their most memorable melodies. Hannah Diamond offers up a hyperreal love song on “Invisible.” Felicita teams with Caroline Polachek for the dramatic piano ballad “marzipan.” Danny L Harle offers a dreamy dance track with Clairo on “Blue Angel.” Many of these tracks were previously released, so Volume 3 feels a little like a Greatest Hits of the last half-decade of PC Music—a celebration of how far they’ve come since their last compilation. They’re working with stars now, but they still feel like pop iconoclasts, pushing their collaborators to try out new and strange sounds.
They’ve established the outer limits of pop and dance music over the better part of the last decade, and they still sound at their best when they’re diving into the unknown. A pair of tracks from the Brooklyn-based producer umru represent some of the compilation’s most futuristic sounds. “Check1,” featuring Tommy Cash and glitch-rap mutant 645AR, is powered by a menacing yet minimal beat that sounds like a UK drill track caved in upon itself. “Popular,” a 2018 single featuring 100 gecs’ Laura Les, is full of warped electronics and smeared technicolor melodies. But unlike a lot of digitalist pop released in its wake, it’s focused and straightforward, clearly the work of a producer who understands careful songcraft, yet decided to disregard it altogether.
It’s in these moments that PC Music Volume 3 feels the most singular. When Lil Data torches the edges of acid techno on “Burnnn” or when Planet 1999 sends shoegaze beyond the stratosphere on “Party,” there’s a sense that PC Music aren’t done yet. Even as some of the label’s efforts edge closer to the mainstream, there will always be room on PC Music for producers who want to uncover new worlds altogether. | 2022-05-17T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2022-05-17T00:00:00.000-04:00 | null | PC Music | May 17, 2022 | 7 | 05470678-c61a-4f70-9d16-c2a7f531a00f | Colin Joyce | https://pitchfork.com/staff/colin-joyce/ | |
Fury’s debut LP is a proud revival of the Orange County youth crew hardcore tradition. It is a devastating work of emotional and philosophical inquisitiveness that, yes, you can totally punch shit to. | Fury’s debut LP is a proud revival of the Orange County youth crew hardcore tradition. It is a devastating work of emotional and philosophical inquisitiveness that, yes, you can totally punch shit to. | Fury: Paramount | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22264-paramount/ | Paramount | “Are these shouts in bravery/Or announced recklessness?” So screams Jeremy Stith at the start of “Death Yellows Life and Reason,” a high point of Fury’s debut full-length, Paramount. It’s one of the most powerful and passionate hardcore records of the year so far. Stith is raging, sure, but he’s just as apt to lash inward as outward. Bravery or recklessness? It’s not only a question to ask oneself as the frontman of a hardcore band—it’s a conundrum leveled at the hardcore subculture as a whole. But the beauty of Paramount is that it transcends the scene entirely. It is a devastating work of emotional, even philosophical inquisitiveness that, yes, you can totally punch shit to.
Fury hails from California’s Orange County, and there’s weight to that. In the ’80s, youth crew hardcore had a stronghold in the area, thanks to the label Wishingwell and straightedge bands like Unity, Uniform Choice, Insted, and No for an Answer. Fury draw a lot from their geographic forebears: Paramount is built around the youth crew infrastructure of hoarse vocals, chunky riffs, and whiplash breakdowns, with trickles of melody bleeding through. On “Thin Line,” fluid chords flow into palm-muted tension; “In Extremis” slows the aggression to simmer. But as tight, tuneful, dynamic, and immaculately crafted as the music is, it’s Stith’s lyrics that elevate them. “Unworthy sculptors/Poor young knives/They’ll do what they’re told/Lost, unwanting,” goes the opening line of “In Extremis,” meshing cryptic symbolism with the howling, accusatory tone of vintage youth crew—a finger that stabs both ways.
Paramount is a proud revival of that Orange County tradition, but oddly enough, the album more closely resembles two legendary East Coast bands from the ’80s: Youth of Today (who released their debut album on Wishingwell) and Bold (who almost released their debut album on Wishingwell). The lunging intro to Paramount’s “Duality of Man” calls to mind Youth of Today’s anthem “Break Down the Walls;” the unrelenting turmoil, pinpoint riffage, and dark undercurrent of Bold’s Speak Out infuses “Damage Is Done.” The youth crew paradox—pissed off and cathartic yet introspective and inspirational—is where Fury’s real reverence comes into play, though. They’re not going through the motions. They’re reimagining one of hardcore’s most vital, specific subgenres as something bigger and more universal, an exploration of what motivates us and holds us back, and what that costs us, as both members of tribes and as individuals. Or in the words of “Duality of Man:” “Lost and aweless/I paid to be free/Found solace in what’s ahead of me.”
As progressive as the album is, “The Feeling” yanks it into another dimension entirely. The four-minute-plus closing track seem to pound along for 10 times that, and it still ends too soon. Churning and metallic—with a dive-bombing dogfight between guitarists Madison Woodward and Alfredo Gutierrez that ventures into early-Fugazi territory—it parallels the turn toward longer compositions, broader influences, and more intricate dynamics that hardcore took in the late ’80s, just before post-hardcore came into its own. The song simply seethes—a nest of exposed nerves clenched in check and spit out through some savage force of will. As always, though, Stith is on a quest. In a voice as big as oblivion, he ponders how open-heartedness can coexist with the pain it inevitably brings.
Ultimately, it’s not the pain that wins. On the caustically euphoric “The Fury”— which might as well be the band’s theme—Stith urges, “Take the fury/Turn it into something positive,” chewing each syllable like it’s made of glass. He isn’t just tapping into the rich legacy of youth crew optimism, from Unity’s “Positive Mental Attitude” to Youth of Today’s “Positive Outlook;” he and the rest of Fury are walking it like they talk it, plunging headfirst into hardcore’s nihilism and clawing out a raw new hope for the future. | 2016-08-18T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-08-18T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Triple B | August 18, 2016 | 8 | 05488b64-5379-46bb-b5eb-21ea72450789 | Jason Heller | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jason-heller/ | null |
The two rappers and producer strike a devious, almost perfect balance on their mixtape released on Halloween, where supernatural frights are replaced by guns and goons. | The two rappers and producer strike a devious, almost perfect balance on their mixtape released on Halloween, where supernatural frights are replaced by guns and goons. | 21 Savage / Offset / Metro Boomin: Without Warning | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21-savage-offset-metro-boomin-without-warning/ | Without Warning | Without Warning is obviously rap music as horror film expressionism. Released on Halloween by buzzing Atlanta trap rappers 21 Savage and Migos’ Offset with super-producer Metro Boomin, the mixtape carries all the signifiers in its lyrics, allusions, and sonic cues: eerie cackling, howling winds, jump-scares, skeletons, goblins, bloody Phantoms, Grim Reapers, Jason, and Nightmare on Elm Street. 21 Savage and Metro Boomin know a thing or two about turning murder to bloodsport, as they showed on their 2016 mixtape Savage Mode, which serves as a gory precedent for Without Warning. Now with Offset—one of the most outstanding rappers of 2017—along for the ride, the trio have produced a punishing mixtape where supernatural frights are replaced by guns and goons. The bad guys win.
In the run-up to Without Warning, Metro Boomin has had several run-ins with the project’s billed co-stars. After Savage Mode, he played full-time producer on Gucci Mane’s Droptopwop and Nav’s Perfect Timing. Both of those mixtapes had standout features from Offset—on “Met Gala” and “Minute,” respectively. Soon after, Metro produced the majority of 21 Savage’s debut, Issa Album, which had its own sleeper hit, “Bank Account.” 21 and Offset crossed paths—albeit with Offset as a part of the Migos Ghidorah—on Mike WiLL Made-It’s “Gucci On My,” and the pair teamed-up with Metro as a threesome for the first time on DJ Khaled’s “Iced Out My Arms.” These collaborations mostly yielded mixed results, but Without Warning maximizes the potential of this unholy trinity.
In some sense, 21 Savage and Offset seemed like an odd couple coming into this. They have decidedly different methods: 21 is hostile and inhuman, rapping with the wooden, lifeless delivery of someone numb to violence; Offset is adrenalized and fun-loving, constantly in motion with tightly-wound, precisely-measured, fiercely-performed meters. But they weirdly complement each other here. They each get solo showings but they work mostly in tandem. Offset helps to fill the gaps in 21’s affectless, foreboding execution, keeping those disinterested murmurs from flatlining. Wherever 21’s performances are lacking, Offset adds a touch of showmanship; wherever Offset’s raps become too dense, 2l presents simplicity, concision, and clarity. On “Darth Vader,” Offset raps, “Runnin’ from the demons, angels in my dream when I’m leanin’/Tec-9 wit’ the beam/Don’t nobody move before the shit start ringing.” 21 makes the ideas much more direct: “My dog lost his life and it changed me/I’m poppin’ Percocets ’cause the pain deep/Peel a hot box then we did a drive-by/Get your kids out the street we finna slide by.” One amplifies the other.
The spooks and scares on Without Warning are so contrived and so exaggerated that they just make for big fun. 21 Savage and Offset aren’t undead stalkers or masked slayers but they might as well be. “Wear a hoodie man, I’m the boogie man,” 21 snarls, like a gleeful serial killer taking great pleasure in his conquest: “Another nigga dead, another family scared/Tryna duck the feds.../Paint the city red...” Offset turns pop-up horror fixations into the cornerstone of his cloaked persona. “Come in the middle of the night, like it’s a nightmare/You open your eyes, not dreamin’, nigga we right there,” he raps on “Nightmare.” They dare to reimagine real-life gangland terrors as torture porn. This is Halloween if Michael Myers was Menace II Society’s O-Dog.
Sound design is key to a release like this, and Metro constantly finds the right balance between ghostly and ghastly, striking a tone dark enough for a shudder yet bracing enough for an adrenaline rush. Even counting the gory shriekers on Savage Mode, Metro’s productions have never been this sinister or blood-splattered, dripping bright reds and cloudy carmines. Songs like “Mad Stalkers” and “Run Up the Racks” trade on the pulse-raising booms of 808 drums and minor-key notes. The flourishes are subtle but impactful: the seamless segue from 21’s “My Choppa Hates Niggas” to Offset’s “Nightmare,” the understated tectonic shift beneath the Offset verse on “Rap Saved Me,” the drum programming on “Still Serving,” which bottoms out every few stanzas. Each drop a death rattle ringing out through a deserted town. A campy fiendishness hangs over proceedings like a fog.
The solo songs are as strong as the duets (Offset gets his chance to explode and go full showman on “Ric Flair Drip,” and 21 gets his chance to mutter threats on “Run Up the Racks”), and the tape never loses sight of what it is: a Halloween treat. It’s short and cohesive, an enjoyable and uncomplicated 33 minutes of sheer exhilaration, filled with stings, itches, and cold chills. In one form or another, the collaboration comes as a surprise to all of us, arriving suddenly and carrying within the electricity and satisfaction of a good scare. | 2017-11-03T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-11-03T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Slaughter Gang / Epic | November 3, 2017 | 8 | 0548a78d-7a4b-435c-a314-aa9d26ecf431 | Sheldon Pearce | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sheldon-pearce/ | |
Sturgill Simpson’s outstanding album under a new stage name expertly balances cosmic and outlaw country and reintroduces himself as the premier Nashville outsider. | Sturgill Simpson’s outstanding album under a new stage name expertly balances cosmic and outlaw country and reintroduces himself as the premier Nashville outsider. | Johnny Blue Skies / Sturgill Simpson: Passage du Desir | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/johnny-blue-skies-sturgill-simpson-passage-du-desir/ | Passage du Desir | Who the fuck is Sturgill Simpson? Folks have been asking that question ever since A Sailor’s Guide to Earth was surprise-nominated for the 2016 Grammy for Album of the Year alongside Beyoncé, Drake, Justin Bieber, and eventual winner Adele. It became a meme for a few months, with Sturgill even selling T-shirts and sporting a new one at Bonnaroo that read, “Who the fuck is asking?” It all seemed like a good joke at the time, maybe even a pointed commentary on how talent goes unrecognized in Nashville, but the question sums up Simpson’s career; nobody has been asking more than the man himself. He posed it repeatedly on his first three albums, which, in retrospect, form a loose trilogy about losing and finding himself—in Nashville (2013’s High Top Mountain), in the cosmos (2014’s Metamodern Sounds in Country Music), and on the high seas (Sailor’s Guide).
Since that Grammy nomination, however, Sturgill has become much harder to pin down, for himself and for us. He seemed to get lost in different roles: first the guitar shredder on the 2019 manga soundtrack SOUND & FURY, then the bluegrass auteur on not one but two acoustic albums, and finally an outlaw troubadour on the song cycle The Ballad of Dood & Juanita. After rupturing his vocal cords in 2021, he announced his retirement from touring, then unretired for a short tour earlier this year. But he is still making good on his promise to record no more than five albums of new material, which represent “the traditional Christian narrative of the journey of the human soul.” The bluegrass records don’t count because they’re almost entirely retreads of older songs. And his latest is not technically a Sturgill Simpson album.
Credited to Johnny Blue Skies, Passage du Desir is simultaneously two things that seem completely contradictory. It’s the first album Simpson has released under a pseudonym, and it’s also the true follow-up to A Sailor’s Guide to Earth. In addition to ditching his given name, he chucks most of the R&B horns and Bakersfield riffs that punctuate his previous songs in favor of percolating percussion, cosmic string arrangements, and bluesier guitars. This is country music caught between earthiness and spaciness, and it reintroduces him as one of Nashville’s oddest artists, who understands and subverts both the square mainstream and the outlaw fringes of country music. It’s been only three years since Dood & Juanita, but Passage still feels like a comeback.
The album opens on the high seas, the same longitude where Sailor’s Guide left off. The Navy enabled him to see the world and find himself, but on “Swamp of Sadness,” the ocean is a place of confusion, peril, and suffering. Passage is wracked with tribulation, full of death and disconnection and dreams of escape. On the yacht-country “Scooter Blues,” ostensibly the album’s most upbeat song, Sturgill fantasizes about leaving Nashville and self-exiling to some unnamed island. The accumulation of details—rhyming “chocolate milk and Eggos” with “steppin’ on Legos,” taking up kickboxing to stay in shape—suggests that this is no idle reverie but a path to freedom: a way to lose one self and gain another. “Gonna hop on my scooter and go down to the store. When people say are you him, I’ll say not anymore.”
If his lyrics address various strains of alienation, the music on Passage du Desir engages with all sorts of sounds and styles and scenes. He may be the only major Nashville artist who has Can and Amon Düül in his collection, who hears in ’70s country a kind of avant-garde impulse. Sturgill is at his most cosmic on “Jupiter’s Faerie,” which raises a glass to an old friend who died before they could make amends. The story is bound to Earth, but the music imagines an afterlife in the vacuum of space: a peaceful vision of heaven, at least for seven and a half minutes. On closer “One for the Road,” he indulges some of his shredding but without the aggression and ostentation of SOUND & FURY. That’s fitting for what sounds like a breakup song, especially one where he tries to remain stoic in the face of the pain he’s causing and feeling.
All of this heartache is filtered through the persona of Sturgill the Grammy-nominated country artist, as though he can’t quite escape that particular identity. Songs about the glare of the spotlight can risk sounding hermetic at best and whiny at worst, especially when so many deserving artists would love to have their lives changed by a hit album. Wisely, Sturgill plays up alienation over celebrity, which makes these songs more relatable. Essentially, he’s echoing a very different Johnny: Take this job and shove it. Who hasn’t wondered who they are separate from what they do? Who hasn’t dreamed of shedding their responsibilities to play checkers on the beach? You might roll your eyes when Sturgill sings, “That old radio still won’t play me,” on “Who I Am,” especially considering he’s done a lot to ensure they don’t. But generally, for an artist so guarded and so prickly, Passage is focused outward rather than inward.
Maybe you’ve noticed that I’m not referring to him here as Johnny Blue Skies. That’s not an act of catty defiance. I’m not dismissing his need to adopt a new name to make this album or get comfortable in his skin again, but there’s more Sturgill on Passage du Desir than there was on his past four full-lengths. So this isn’t his Camille and it likely won’t be his Chris Gaines either. Mr. Blue Skies sounds more like a conduit back to himself, a means of maintaining a consistent identity when the world insists on twisting and contorting him into someone else. “I’ve lost everything I am, even my name,” he laments on “Who I Am.” “They don’t ask you what your name is when you get up to heaven. And thank God, I couldn’t tell Her if I had to who I am.” He may go to his grave still wondering just who the fuck he is, but on Passage du Desire, he sounds more like himself than he has in ages. | 2024-07-12T00:01:00.000-04:00 | 2024-07-12T00:01:00.000-04:00 | Folk/Country | High Top Mountain | July 12, 2024 | 8.5 | 054a041a-6d66-4bca-8b28-54f47b947b41 | Stephen M. Deusner | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stephen-m. deusner/ | |
The drugged-up R&B project returns with its second free album, picking up where House of Balloons left off and adding some new twists. There's the same ineffably skeezy vibe and a genuine sense of the album-as-journey, and the production is slightly harsher and streaked with violence, befitting the lyrical content. | The drugged-up R&B project returns with its second free album, picking up where House of Balloons left off and adding some new twists. There's the same ineffably skeezy vibe and a genuine sense of the album-as-journey, and the production is slightly harsher and streaked with violence, befitting the lyrical content. | The Weeknd: Thursday | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/15754-thursday/ | Thursday | It sounds a bit ridiculous to say that the Weeknd avoid the sophomore slump with Thursday, given that the Toronto crew's first release arrived just five months ago. But not many artists, especially in the Internet era, show up with such a well-developed aesthetic (a very foggy, of-the-moment variation on mainstream radio's slow jams) and something as self-assured as the House of Balloons mixtape. And those that do probably don't have a Drake co-sign and such a carefully managed cloak of anonymity. Months later, all we really know about the Weeknd is that there's a singer named Abel Tesfaye with an earthy The-Dream-like voice and a lecherous persona that's both repellent and compelling. We've seen a few smoky, black and white photos disseminated via Tumblr that perfectly fit the music's bad vibes; there have been a couple of live dates; and apparently, the project has two associated producers helping to craft a sprawling, drugged-up R&B sound: Doc McKinney, best known for Esthero's Breath From Another and another guy named Illangelo. Beyond that and a handful of "unofficial" but suspiciously high-budget videos, we have the music on these two mixtapes.
Though there's less breathing space on Thursday, and fewer melodic hooks, it still feels of a piece with House of Balloons. There's the same ineffably skeezy vibe and a genuine sense of the album-as-journey, brought upon by smart sequencing and Tesfaye's willingness to complicate his devilish, drug-addled Lothario persona. The production is slightly harsher and streaked with violence, befitting the lyrical content-- "Life of the Party", the best and most disturbing song here, is based around doom-like guitar riffs that suggest something truly terrible about to happen. The guitars burst forth during Tesfaye's mocking chorus ("you're the life of the party"), sung as he casually convinces a girl into a group-sex situation. Other songs are tinged with similarly abrasive sounds: drill'n'bass noises rattle around in the background of opening track "Lonely Star"; "Rolling Stone" begins with a blustery chunk of heavily processed guitar; and the final track, "Heaven or Las Vegas" (not a Cocteau Twins cover) features a late-song interruption by screeching effects and heavy echo. For contrast , the only jarring touch to the production on the fairly one-note House of Balloons is the title track's Siouxsie and the Banshees sample. So the world here, in addition to being more sonically varied, feels just a little darker and a little more dangerous.
Oh yeah-- and Drake shows up on this one. He delivers an end-of-song verse on "The Zone", very much in his "I'm on One" mode. Which means he's full of confidence and rapping in a manner that lurches forward and then slows-up, teasing his melodic, every-dude croon but never giving into those R&B impulses. The Weeknd and Drake have been linked for a while now, first through a series of blog and Twitter co-signs and now as proper collaborators, so it's interesting to finally hear the superstar step into this far more debauched world. Surprisingly, he remains himself, talking about not having fun at a strip club ("Whoa, all these broken hearts on that pole") and later on, advising a groupie to "be you." Even when Drake seemingly stumbles into an encounter in which he does indeed, fuck "your girlfriend," he isn't devilishly smiling about it, and there's no question of consent as there often is on many of the Weeknd's drug-fueled seduction songs. The introduction of anything resembling an ethical point of view is jarring and underlines the stark differences between these collaborators.
Drake gets mileage out of being conflicted and in over his head, while Tesfaye sings from the perspective of an unabashed creep who doesn't care what people think, and waits for the moment when everything's at a tipping point and people's guards are down. Part of the odd appeal to the Weeknd's music is that by spending this much time with a predator, the vulnerable inconsistencies in an image trying hard to armor itself with coke, pills, and cynicism start to show through. Repeating the days of the week on "Thursday" slowly comes off as pretty pathetic, even a tad OCD, and "Gone", a hypnotic, purposefully stagnant epic, feels a lot like being at a party near a guy content to tell you how fucked up he is, over and over again. The gorgeous "Rolling Stone" contains meta references to Tesfaye "smoking til' [he] can't hit another note" and concerns that his mystery is fading. It's almost sympathetic, though it's just as likely that this is some new, more nefarious form of seduction by way of self-deprecation; after all, the last words crooned on the album are, "I am God."
When Thursday comes to an end, you have to wonder where the Weeknd go from here. This is the danger of anonymity and telling of the way Internet hype programs our cheapest impulses: We're ready to ask about the next thing before this other thing, even though it's quite good and rewarding, has come to an end. The Weeknd, however, know what they're doing, and so, in a few months, another new release, Echoes of Silence, is due to arrive, and our strange, dysfunctional relationship with their damaged R&B will start all over again. | 2011-08-25T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2011-08-25T02:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | self-released | August 25, 2011 | 7.9 | 054aae3d-7291-4e68-ba9f-2a4a4257e15d | Brandon Soderberg | https://pitchfork.com/staff/brandon-soderberg/ | null |
The second album by Inter Arma is a bleak picture of danger, apocalypse, despair, and dismay. But the Richmond, VA, band's energy and obvious enthusiasm for their unlikely alchemy of influences-- such as Zeppelin, Lightning Bolt, and Sleep-- make Sky Burial a truly exhilarating listen. | The second album by Inter Arma is a bleak picture of danger, apocalypse, despair, and dismay. But the Richmond, VA, band's energy and obvious enthusiasm for their unlikely alchemy of influences-- such as Zeppelin, Lightning Bolt, and Sleep-- make Sky Burial a truly exhilarating listen. | Inter Arma: Sky Burial | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/17607-inter-arma-sky-burial/ | Sky Burial | On the second full-length from Richmond, VA's heavy psychedelic alchemists Inter Arma, danger and apocalypse always loom nearby, casting long shadows over everything within sight. In these eight songs, the destroyer becomes the vaunted creator. Humankind sends the earth into a vortex of despair and decay. End-times gloom represents a lone currency of hope. The music is made to match, too, with salvos of rapid-fire black metal and plumes of foreboding instrumental drift lightning the lantern toward darkness.
Listening to Sky Burial, however, is one of the most exhilarating experiences you might hope to have with a record, largely because its creators sound so obviously intoxicated and energized by the possibilities of music itself. As these five multi-instrumentalists and experimenters work through creaking doom and obliterative marches, smoldering introductions and scowling grooves, the sense that they’re loving every moment of this is pervasive. They foreground their enthusiasm and counter the darkness with contagious élan. Appropriate for an album so obsessed by the beginnings that endings can bring, Sky Burial’s misanthropic heart is inspired enough to make one, well, happy.
At nearly 70 minutes, Sky Burial is a massive stylistic crucible where unlikely influences and aspirations bleed and blur into one another. Inter Arma represents a convergence of disparate traditions-- Led Zeppelin and Lightning Bolt, Pink Floyd and Pentangle, Immortal and Enslaved, Sleep and the Staple Singers. Though all these strains share the same space, Inter Arma never sounds claustrophobic, meaning they give each component its due before showing how it can cooperate with the next approach. Acoustic interludes in the midst of loud rock records, for instance, certainly aren’t novel ideas, but when Inter Arma push away from the amps and drop the howls, the acoustic instrumentals don’t function as mere sideshows. Lined with sighing steel guitar and sustained piano notes, the four-minute “The Long Road Home (Iron Gate)” shows similar development to the 10-minute epics that bookend it. Inter Arma opens its successor, “The Long Road”, with more than seven minutes of rising rock ’n’ roll action, reaching the It Still Moves-sized limits of My Morning Jacket before catapulting, without hesitation, into a malevolent Scandinavian-influenced blast. At one point, “Westward” flips from a patchwork of noise and grindcore into the sort of open-wheel blues metal you’d expect from millennial Allman descendants.
One could counter, of course, that being stoked on making music isn’t enough to make said music good. The teenager enlisting friends to join a basement rock band is certainly zealous, but that doesn’t mean their tunes are worthy of your time. But Inter Arma isn’t just ardent. Rather, these songs are both well designed and well executed. The ingenious “’sblood” rides the same riff and rhythm for most of its six minutes, while Mike Paparo shouts four repetitive lines about the limits of the earth. He breaks the lines into pairs, though, a device that the band uses to create a tripwire of tension as the audience awaits the conclusion. Opener “The Survival Fires” might be the band’s best dexterity showcase to date. Drummer and instrumental cleanup man T.J. Childers works through demanding patterns; he rolls into stuttering beats and lumbers into distended grooves. The guitars match the action, countering the central theme with grinding dissonance and sudden breakaways. In metal, this sort of spirit without the skills to match can be a missed opportunity, while the skills without the spirit can be worse still. Musically, Inter Arma is good enough to manage all of these sounds; emotionally, they are excited enough to make them work in one righteous exhortation.
Sky Burial will likely land as one of the year’s great breakthroughs for a heavy act, standing, at least in my mind, as the same sort of pay-attention proclamation as the Body’s All the Waters of the Earth Turn to Blood in 2010 or Pallbearer’s Sorrow and Extinction in 2012. That’s good news for Relapse Records, the venerable metal syndicate that picked up Inter Arma after their fine full-length debut, Sundown. But listening to Sky Burial, you get the sense that an escalation of notoriety won’t change Inter Arma so much. They are, after all, already making music that doesn’t make sense on paper. Segue the Southern rock instrumental into Second Wave black metal screech? Sure. Volley from tightly wound prog into swaggering stoner land? OK.
The root of Inter Arma’s creative success seems to be their delight in stubbornness, their willingness to indulge what they’d like to indulge, with no need to negotiate genre expectations. In this post-everything moment, where multiple sounds often arrive at once, it’s common for young musicians to exist as magpies, collecting stylistic scraps only to display them as their own piece. It is, however, much rarer for those results to seem so wholly synthesized, even as the individual parts don’t buckle under the weight of their accoutrements. Sky Burial does just that, brandishing erudition just enough to arrive at a crossroads of inspiration and innovation. | 2013-03-19T02:00:04.000-04:00 | 2013-03-19T02:00:04.000-04:00 | Metal | Relapse | March 19, 2013 | 8.2 | 054acca5-6eeb-4167-8e71-ca50028c7ca9 | Grayson Haver Currin | https://pitchfork.com/staff/grayson-haver currin/ | null |
The influential jazz bassist assembles an ambitious tribute to the songs of Curtis Mayfield, featuring contributions from Amiri Baraka, Hamid Drake, and more. | The influential jazz bassist assembles an ambitious tribute to the songs of Curtis Mayfield, featuring contributions from Amiri Baraka, Hamid Drake, and more. | William Parker: I Plan to Stay a Believer: The Inside Songs of Curtis Mayfield | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/14762-i-plan-to-stay-a-believer-the-inside-songs-of-curtis-mayfield/ | I Plan to Stay a Believer: The Inside Songs of Curtis Mayfield | When Curtis Mayfield recorded his last album in 1996, he did it lying on his back, singing a line at a time. He had no choice-- he'd been paralyzed since a 1990 lighting rig accident. He was near the end of a life and career that saw him become one of the most influential songwriters and performers of his generation. He was a multi-instrumentalist, singer, songwriter, producer and thinker who had his hands in a lot of amazing music, and was among the first black pop artists to inject the ideas and hopes of the Civil Rights movement into his work, doing it subtly at first with the Impressions with "Amen" and "Keep on Pushing" and then much more directly later on.
Jazz, of course, got to openly supporting Civil Rights and expressing black pride before pop music did. Max Roach's 1960 Freedom Now Suite is a good example. Charles Mingus' 1959 classic "Fables of Faubus" was a sly and sarcastic takedown of Arkansas governor Orval Faubus after the Little Rock Nine incident-- the list is pretty long. Part of the reason jazz got there before Mayfield is that Mayfield was working within the constraints of pop radio, which is where all his record labels were aiming. In 1960, he couldn't have done what Max Roach was doing for the simple fact that no one would have given him the chance.
Jazz bassist William Parker was getting his start in the early 70s just as Mayfield went solo with a series of albums that very directly addressed issues of race, equality, and black pride. These themes have run through Parker's work as well for decades, so a tribute to Mayfield seems natural and fitting. Parker isn't simply interpreting or covering Mayfield's songs on I Plan to Stay a Believer, though. He's extending them, treating them as living documents, and adding new content that dovetails with Mayfield's political thoughts. Parker's notes on the recording explain his belief that every song has an "inside song" waiting to be reborn, and he implies that these are the songs he heard inside Mayfield's music.
Parker and his collaborators began work on this project nearly 10 years ago, and this final document is a live compilation of sorts, bringing together performances from 2001, 2002, 2007 and 2008 into a basically seamless whole that presents a panoramic exploration of both Mayfield's music and modern black identity over two discs. Actually, the recording dates are interesting, because three of these tracks were recorded in Italy just days before the election of Barack Obama, and there is a sort of old-school Civil Rights thrust to the additional poetry contributed by Amiri Baraka-- post-racial this is not, and it's sort of a pre-acknowledgement that having a black president won't automatically erase all of the nation's tormented racial history.
Looking across the two-disc track list is a little intimidating-- eight of the eleven tracks are over ten minutes long, with "If There's a Hell Below" topping out at 21:23, so you know up front that this won't be a casual listen. These songs twist and turn, invariably opening with musical motifs from Mayfield's originals-- the creeping bass line of "Hell Below", the funky riff of "Freddie's Dead", the ebullient horn fanfare of "Move on Up", here slowed, rounded off and made significantly darker-- and from there, it's anyone's guess where the energy of the performance will take the band. Gospel, bop, soul, funk, post-bop and free music are all part of this mix, and the band spends a lot of time between them as well. For instance, the 10-minute version of "This Is My Country (New York)" on disc two takes on the feel of an out-of-control revival, ultimately flying off the rails into an ecstatic muddle of squealing sax, shouting, and tumbling drums.
It has the feel of the type of project Charles Mingus might have taken on had he lived to see this century, ambitious and quasi-historical, but still swinging and loaded with content that takes many listens to unpack. The band is amazing. Several tracks feature choirs (including a choir of 90 children on two of those tracks), but they blend right in, adding to the dual vocal attack of Baraka and singer Leena Conquest, a long-time Parker collaborator who dances through these tangled arrangements and the heavy subject matter with tremendous grace. Asim Barnes plays guitar on only three tracks, but I could spend a whole paragraph breaking down why what he does is thrilling, and drummer Hamid Drake is strictly next-level on every song. The way he switches between a slow, swinging beat and a double-time stomp on "Move on Up" is breathtaking and helps transform the song into a living, pulsing beast-- Conquest riffs on "Keep on Pushing" as the song begins to break down and head off into freer territory, and if you've spent any amount of time digging Mayfield in the past, you will love the way she does it.
I wish I could've seen some of these performances in person, because the amount of energy the band packs into them surely must have flowed right into the crowd. Even here, pressed onto little plastic discs, the band practically explodes toward you. I have no idea what Mayfield would think of these versions of his songs, but it's hard to imagine him being anything but flattered by the immense thought and planning that clearly went into these arrangements. To pull and stretch these songs so much and still preserve their essential identity is a true feat of art. | 2010-10-21T02:00:02.000-04:00 | 2010-10-21T02:00:02.000-04:00 | Jazz | AUM Fidelity | October 21, 2010 | 8.2 | 054c9a5a-6565-42ce-b3bf-3051d98ebdc6 | Joe Tangari | https://pitchfork.com/staff/joe-tangari/ | null |
Four months after “drivers license,” pop’s newest star offers a nimble and lightly chaotic collection of breakup tunes filled with melancholy and mischief. | Four months after “drivers license,” pop’s newest star offers a nimble and lightly chaotic collection of breakup tunes filled with melancholy and mischief. | Olivia Rodrigo: SOUR | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/olivia-rodrigo-sour/ | SOUR | Few people on Earth can know how Olivia Rodrigo feels right now; even by today’s standards of viral fame, her rise has been exceptional. On January 7, she was playing in the celebrity minor leagues, the not-quite-18-year-old star of the Disney+ show High School Musical: The Musical: The Series. By January 12, she had smashed streaming records and blanketed TikTok with her debut single, “drivers license,” a piano-driven power ballad steeped in suburban malaise and teen anguish. Since then, she’s graced magazine covers, sung at the Brits, and become the subject of an SNL sketch. Then she was invited on as the musical guest.
But most of us can know how Olivia Rodrigo felt when she wrote her debut album, Sour: so gutted by heartbreak she simply couldn’t talk about anything else. “drivers license” outlined a crushing breakup, the contours of which became clearer in subsequent singles. A gossipy real-life backstory aided—though certainly did not precipitate—the song’s rise. (If you must know, it’s said to be about Joshua Bassett, Rodrigo’s HSM:TM:TS co-star, who has since been linked to another Disney star.)
The matter of failed romance is central to Sour, a nimble and lightly chaotic grab bag of breakup tunes, filled with both melancholy and mischief. Rodrigo’s first trick: Seconds into the lugubrious strings that open the record, she and her producer, Dan Nigro, abruptly switch to grunge guitar and distortion. Abandoning both the gossamer falsetto and the emotive belt that power “drivers license,” Rodrigo adopts a wry sprechstimme on “brutal” to rattle off her grievances: self-doubt, impossible expectations, her inability to parallel park. “Where’s my fucking teenage dream?” she snarls, wisecracking about the way pop culture romanticizes youth. It’s not particularly elegant—it’s not meant to be. Bucking expectations about the kind of sounds she might gravitate toward? That’s just part of the fun.
When she was little, Rodrigo and her mother made a habit of grabbing records indiscriminately from the thrift store, exposing her to the mistiness of Carole King and the muscle of Pat Benatar. Born two years post-Napster, two years pre-YouTube, Rodrigo grew up with music of all varieties at her fingertips. The range of her taste, and her disinterest in choosing a lane, animate Sour; queue up a track at random, and you might hear pop-punk fireworks à la Paramore (“good 4 u”), dewy-eyed soft balladry à la Ingrid Michaelson (“1 step forward, 3 steps back”), or alt-rock squall à la the Kills (“jealousy, jealousy”). Like any teenager, Rodrigo is trying on identities. The fluidity of her approach creates a sense of play that balances out the record’s more sullen moments—the self-righteous sprawl of “traitor,” for example, or the sinister extended metaphor of “favorite crime.”
Of Rodrigo’s many influences, she’s most obviously styled herself after Taylor Swift, whose work she praises often and emphatically. Like her idol, Rodrigo treats emotional turmoil like jet fuel, and laces her lyrics with specifics—a Billy Joel song she and her ex listened to together, the self-help books she read to impress him. She’s said that the shouty bridge in Swift’s “Cruel Summer” directly inspired her own in “deja vu”; “1 step forward, 3 steps back” interpolates the reputation song “New Year's Day.” And publicly inveighing against a heartbreaker, then sauntering off with the last word? How very Swiftian.
But there’s more to Rodrigo’s writing than revenge; Sour gives her occasion to examine her own insecurities. “I wore makeup when we dated ’cause I thought you’d like me more,” she sings over fingerpicked guitar on the tearful “enough for you.” It’s a shot at her ex for underappreciating her, but also a hard lesson about not making concessions. On “happier,” a sweet-and-sour ballad that appeared in demo form on Rodrigo’s Instagram in early 2020, she grapples with the faulty narrative of female rivalry: “And now I’m picking her apart/Like cutting her down will make you miss my wretched heart.” It was this song that captured the attention of Nigro, a former emo band frontman who’s written with Carly Rae Jepsen and Conan Gray. It’s easy to hear what he heard in the homemade snippet: a gently tumbling melody, Rodrigo’s flute-like lilt, a winning balance of pettiness and wisdom.
Meanwhile, Rodrigo is still very much a part of the Disney ecosystem, reprising her role in the second season of HSM:TM:TS, which debuted just last week. To anyone familiar with the history of Disney darlings and the morality clauses that typically bind them, the profanity that peppers Sour will stand out as a break from type. This minor subversion of expectations has given Rodrigo a low-key rebel status. Like her seeming newness, her earnestness, the heartbreak baked into her ascent, it’s one of the qualities that make her easy to root for. In a way, the flattening effect of the internet has worked in her favor, allowing her—someone who has been on TV for roughly a third of her life and is signed with the biggest record company in the world—to slip into the role of the underdog.
Rodrigo avoided the major-label treatment when Universal left her and Nigro largely to their own devices to make Sour. But the effort to preserve the authenticity of Rodrigo’s voice also leaves her shortcomings more exposed. The flatness of the melody on “traitor” is especially noticeable alongside the movement of “drivers license”; “enough for you” is oversung. On a record largely centered around a single story, Rodrigo can fixate on select plot points (like the amount of time it took her ex to move on), rather than seeking out new angles. She sometimes settles for simple rhymes and self-evident phrasings: “You betrayed me/And I know that you’ll never feel sorry.” In moments like these, she seems more invested in content than in craft.
Of all the songs on Sour, “hope ur ok” feels most connected to her Disney lineage. Over a twinkly instrumental, Rodrigo sings directly to a victim of child abuse, a queer girl rejected by her family, and to outcasts more broadly. In its message of love and acceptance, the song calls to mind the empowerment anthems churned out by a previous generation of Disney stars. But as Sour’s closer, “hope ur ok” is limp. An outward-looking loosie tacked on to 10 songs about the world inside Rodrigo’s head and heart, it reads as a last-minute effort to demonstrate perspective and maturity. Someone out there might feel genuinely comforted by Rodrigo’s words, and that matters. But, as the success of “drivers license” shows, there’s a certain magic to be found in embracing your own mess.
Buy: Rough Trade
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Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-05-21T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2021-05-21T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | Geffen | May 21, 2021 | 7 | 054d55f8-5e05-47f2-b67b-8506e867cd7c | Olivia Horn | https://pitchfork.com/staff/olivia-horn / | |
Common’s dissonant, politically-charged new album Black America Again finds him angry and off-balance—which feels like it’s exactly where he should be. | Common’s dissonant, politically-charged new album Black America Again finds him angry and off-balance—which feels like it’s exactly where he should be. | Common: Black America Again | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22588-black-america-again/ | Black America Again | At 11 albums strong, Common’s career has passed through so many stages that he’s got a trail of shed skins, including two or three different rappers (and half a rockstar) along the way. So when his later-period albums, from 2014’s tough and sorrowful Nobody’s Smiling to this week’s striking Black America Again, are called a return to form for the Chicago-bred MC, it may be important to clarify which form he’s returning to, and establish some signposts for hearing an album as momentous as this one is.
Back in 2014, Common’s frequent collaborator Questlove called for a revival of protest music in the wake of a grand jury’s decision not to indict the police officer who killed Eric Garner. Scarcely two years on, ugly racial rhetoric has characterized a seemingly endless campaign season, outrage over extrajudicial police killings has taken on a sort of sick rhythm, and it’s actually hard to remember a world where there was a shortage of protest music. D’Angelo’s Black Messiah, Kendrick Lamar’s To Pimp a Butterfly and Solange’s A Seat At the Table, among others, have upended expectations and reinvigorated and expanded the category frames (hip-hop, soul or simply black music) placed around them.
This is important context for listening to Black America Again, partly because great albums from the Okayplayer/Soulquarian family seem to come in waves—and there is a strong case to be made that Black America Again is to Black Messiah what Like Water for Chocolate was to the 2000-era classics Voodoo and Things Fall Apart. Some of the big-room soul flourishes (courtesy of John Legend and BJ the Chicago Kid) trend toward the thematically safer sound that characterized Com’s Oscar winning Selma song; a touch expected—corny, even—if still emotionally stirring. But overall Karriem Riggins’ gritty, moody production provides Com with his most eclectic (and apt) sonic backing since Kanye's production on Be. It may also be the angriest—and not coincidentally, sharpest lyrically—we've seen Com since his Ice Cube dis “Bitch In Yoo”—warmed-over beefs with Drake notwithstanding.
Yet there is clearly more to Black America Again than just ripped-from-the-headlines timeliness. After all, in a season when #BlackLivesMatter is at the front of the public consciousness, pretty much every artist who shows up to the BET Awards (and a bunch who didn’t) has adopted the appropriate signifiers of Woke-ness—right down to erstwhile Rubber Band Man T.I.—without necessarily touching artistic greatness. It is, in fact, the way the current mood dovetails with Common’s personal story arc that gives it its power. After prophetically calling on America to “Impeach [Bush] and elect Obama” on Jadakiss’ 2004 “Why” remix, Com has arguably spent the Obama years seeking a worthy opponent for his battle skills—and failing to locate one. The bloodshed and racial tension of 2015-16 have finally focused his considerable firepower. It also doesn’t hurt that it was helmed by the brilliant Karriem Riggins, the Detroit-based drummer who has been a staple of Common’s live band for years—and who has truly stepped into his own with his production work here.
Riggins works firmly in the post-metric genre-verse first explored by J Dilla, but he is one of the few beatmakers who can truly hang with the master. His sonically grungy, emotionally and rhythmically complex arrangements push Com’s flow into an off-balance, never-quite-slipping dance that will be familiar to longtime fans as Com’s zone. From the moment he stepped on the scene in the early ’90s, Com has been a sharp battle rapper, noted for laying down bars in solid combinations of gut-punches like a prize fighter, yet capable of a sort of tipsy whimsy when he allows himself to be loose.
This is exactly the side of Common that Riggins’ compositions bring out of him, and for the first 10 tracks or so, the album flows along flawlessly. Frenetic drum patterns rush ahead of the beat even as noodle-y electric jazz textures and screwed vocal samples pull backward at different speeds, interrogating the meter of “straight” time in ways that recall Dilla’s drunken drums. Bilal’s vocals add another layer of virtuosic dissonance to several tracks while Common’s Yoda-like constructions (“As dirty as the water in Flint the system is”) create internal rhyme schemes and tripping-into-the-next bar rhyme schemes in counterpoint with the off-kilter beats.
The chemistry is so right, in fact, it’s enough to make you re-evaluate Com’s career arc, at least since 2000. For many fans his artistic growth peaked in the Soulquarian era, then spun out on Electric Circus where he maybe got a bit too loose. In this reading of Common’s story arc, recent outings (2011’s The Dreamer/The Believer; 2014’s Nobody’s Smiling) are less comeback triumphs than back-to-basics bootcamps, or the solid road-game victories he needed before he regained the confidence to stretch out and loosen up a little again.
The single and title track “Black America Again” is a brilliant case in point; huge piano chords overpower a drum break that is EQ’ed into such crispy upper reaches of the treble range that it threatens to disappear, an inversion of all conventional pop or hip-hop logic. Even Stevie Wonder’s relentlessly melodious voice is chopped and phrased in unexpected ways and Com’s delivery channels the spoken-word of his idols the Last Poets in a way that stands alongside his very best verses: “You know, you know we from a family of fighters/Fought in your wars and our wars/You put a n***a in Star Wars/Maybe you need two/And then maybe then we’ll believe you.”
Momentum falters a bit on “The Day Women Took Over” a well-meaning narrative that posits woman-power as the solution to all problems but reduces them to embodiments of abstract virtues, rather than identities or agents of their own desires, reminiscent of Spike Lee’s Chi-Raq. But Common finds his footing again with “Little Chicago Boy” (the requisite variation on “Pop’s Rap”) and “Letter to the Free,” which serves as a sort of closing argument. If it ends the album on a more sedate note, the choice feels deliberate, reminding us that in his most inspiring moments, Common is swinging at the Big Questions of our time, and that even his loose improvisations are still part of a larger project.
It’s very much worth unpacking that project, since it both dovetails with and cuts against the grain of modern Black activist thought. Common has in fact taken heat for suggesting in interviews that Black people should respond to racism by “extending my hand in love.” Even as he gives voice to his hurt and anger and eloquently runs down the undeniable crimes committed against Black Americans, he seems to be asking again throughout the album’s lyrics what freedom could even look like in this America—and time and again he suggests that freedom itself is an act of improvisation, of imagination, that begins now: “We write our own story.”
It’s in the context of these bigger ideas that Com lands some of his biggest gut-punches of all time, while rapping in his simpler, prize fighter mode: “No consolation prize for the dehumanized/For America to rise/It’s a matter of Black lives/And we gon’ free them so we can free us…”—bringing home again the sheer magnitude of the forces he’s been dancing with all along. | 2016-11-04T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-11-04T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Def Jam / UMG | November 4, 2016 | 7.9 | 054e9aeb-8f9e-4a75-825e-8e49236c5ddb | Edwin “STATS” Houghton | https://pitchfork.com/staff/edwin-“stats” houghton/ | null |
On wide-ranging Canadian producer Ryan Hemsworth's first solo LP and second major release of 2013 after the Still Awake EP, he remains stylistically daring, but shows off a newfound focus. The material still meanders, though with more purpose, sharper hooks, and lusher instrumental textures. | On wide-ranging Canadian producer Ryan Hemsworth's first solo LP and second major release of 2013 after the Still Awake EP, he remains stylistically daring, but shows off a newfound focus. The material still meanders, though with more purpose, sharper hooks, and lusher instrumental textures. | Ryan Hemsworth: Guilt Trips | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/18670-ryan-hemsworth-guilt-trips/ | Guilt Trips | In the growing body of writing about how disastrous millennials are supposed to be, people throw around phrases like “severely shortened attention spans” as an insult, but the twentysomething producer Ryan Hemsworth is proof that this assumed failing can, in fact, be a great strength. Over his short but industrious career he’s displayed an almost pathological inability to stick with any one particular style of music for more than a few minutes at a time. He’s remixed everyone from Cat Power to Waka Flocka Flame to Danish pop duo Quadron, and his DJ sets bounce nimbly between disparate styles: radio rap into ambient electronics, slick 90s R&B into aggressive dancehall.
In his own productions he’s been relatively more consistent, but still wide-ranging. His original works tend to consist of a rap beat, often one that uses the rhythms of trap rap and sounds that could've been lifted off the laptop of an experimental electronic musician, layered with washes of synthesizers and manipulated vocal samples that deliver the same benzo bliss as Clams Casino and Shlohmo, albeit with a more ragged, deconstructed feel. With subtle tweaks to his formula he can evoke Tangerine Dream or the-Dream with equal ease.
On Guilt Trips, his first solo LP (after an album length collaboration with the rapper Shady Blaze) and second major release of 2013 (after May’s Still Awake EP), he’s still stylistically daring, but shows off a newfound focus that’s uncharacteristic but successful. There’s more clarity here than on his past work—production-wise he’s removed much of the haze that some of his other releases swam in, and the songwriting shows considerably more forethought than previous compositions, which often just wandered around for a while then ended.
His new stuff still meanders, though now with more purpose, sharper hooks, and lusher instrumental textures. They’re most apparent on the several tracks here made for vocalists like avant-rapper Lofty305 and R&B singer Sinead Harnett. “Still Cold” lays a plaintive vocal by Baths over an electropop arrangement that hints at both the Postal Service and some of Brian Eno’s more accessibly quirky 70s material, and is way more hummable than any of Hemsworth’s old stuff.
This new straightforwardness is even more apparent on “One for Me”, featuring up and coming singer Tinashe. It sounds far less like the experimental twists on radio R&B he’s made his name on, and more like something you'd straight up hear on the radio, with a popping bass line, skittering hi-hats, and Tinashe’s voice stacked in Mariah-like formations. As pop’s become increasingly enraptured by blends of rap, R&B, and dance music, pop producers have taken an interest in artists like Hemsworth and his sometimes collaborators like Shlohmo and Supreme Cuts who specialize in these sorts of combinations. A few recent largish albums have shown what seem to be clear signs of their influence. Whether it’s a conscious decision or just the result of his evolution as an artist, Hemsworth’s starting to return the favor, and in the process is looking more than capable of competing in the pop field.
A few small things would need to change in order for that to happen, though. His mixes, while substantially less murky than on his previous recordings, are still a little too unpolished. While there’s something idiosyncratic and slightly rebellious about his tendency to keep the low end just shy of where it should be, it also keeps the songs from being fully satisfying.
One thing he shouldn’t have to adapt is his stylistic peripateticism. Like his DJ sets, Guilt Trips is all over the place genre-wise, but it never feels dilettantish. He has an astute ability to figure out what makes different styles tick, and to replicate them in his own work. The tracks here suggest that along with trap rap, Chicago house, electropop, and the dozen or so styles that get vigorously nodded at over the span of 10 songs, he’s also starting to get a grip on the rules of composing the kind of stuff the Hot 100’s made from. Where he goes from here, whether up into the pop world or laterally off to into some new genre experiments, seems to be totally up to him. | 2013-10-24T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2013-10-24T02:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Last Gang | October 24, 2013 | 7.4 | 054fef75-fbdb-452b-8226-61780e1c4603 | Miles Raymer | https://pitchfork.com/staff/miles-raymer/ | null |
The 11 irresistibly fun songs on Brooklyn indie rockers Ava Luna's new Electric Balloon are as eccentric as anything the band has ever done, but they stick in your head in a way their earlier material didn't. | The 11 irresistibly fun songs on Brooklyn indie rockers Ava Luna's new Electric Balloon are as eccentric as anything the band has ever done, but they stick in your head in a way their earlier material didn't. | Ava Luna: Electric Balloon | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/19061-ava-luna-electric-balloon/ | Electric Balloon | Ethan Bassford, the fatefully named bassist of Brooklyn art-rock oddballs Ava Luna, got into a few arguments with singer/guitarist Carlos Hernandez while they were writing their 2012 debut album, Ice Level. Couldn't they at least try to write a song with a chorus?, Bassford wondered. As the freewheeling, compositionally adventurous Ice Level attests—the answer was a resounding no. But Bassford persisted. "I was like, 'Carlos, don't worry,'" he recalled in a recent interview. "'It's still gonna be weird. Having a chorus doesn't make it not weird.'"
After hearing Ava Luna's taut and irresistibly fun new album Electric Balloon, it's hard to disagree. Its 11 songs are as eccentric as anything this band of merry weirdos has ever done, but they stick in your head in a way their earlier material did not. Ava Luna are a kitchen-sink band, whose richly cluttered songs pull from a variety of influences: dance-punk, funk, doo-wop, and R&B. (They've summed it up in a perfectly succinct Bandcamp tag: "nervous soul.") They're one of very few current indie bands (in New York or anywhere else) reaching back to the lineage of no-wave; Hernandez often sings in a trembling falsetto but his acrobatic yelps sounds like nobody so much as James Chance. Because of their punchy and tightly arranged female backing vocals, Ava Luna often get compared to Dirty Projectors, but that parallel is more appropriate for the figures at the center of those bands. Like Dave Longstreth, Hernandez is an intelligent, almost-too-ambitious maestro who over time has learned how to embrace playfulness and shine a spotlight around his equally talented ensemble.
Ava Luna wrote and recorded Electric Balloon over two different two-week-long working vacations sequestered in a house in upstate New York; every evening, they'd cook, crack jokes, and then channel their energy into nightly after-dinner jam sessions. The result of this process—"more like culling than just writing," as Bassford says—is a much looser album than Ice Level, which was carefully arranged to the point of sometimes feeling stiff or aloof. But there's an inclusive, kinetic vibe to the best songs on Electric Balloon (which was produced by Hernandez and drummer Julian Fader), like the spunky shout-along "Sears Roebuck M&Ms", or "Plain Speech", which morphs halfway through from jittery funk to dazzling AM radio gold. Ava Luna are an exhilarating live band, and Electric Balloon is the first thing they've done that comes close to bottling that energy.
Since Ice Level, Ava Luna have shrunk from a seven-piece to a five-piece, and this streamlining has cleared out some (though not all) of the clutter in their sound and benefited the band dynamic. Felicia Douglass (vocals/keyboards) and Becca Kauffman (vocals/guitar) are both more active presences on Electric Balloon—and this is a very good thing. Ava Luna are now a band with not one but three distinct lead singers, each with unique but complementary personalities. Hernandez's songs, like the opener "Daydream", are often driven by a frayed, manic intensity. (The "nervous soul" tag is definitely most apt when he's at the helm.) It's an enjoyably wild ride, but it might be too much to take were it not balanced out by quieter moments like the ballad "PRPL", Douglass's stunning and velvety lead vocal turn.
But, as long as you like your choruses weird, the breakout star of Electric Balloon is Kauffman. She vamps and woooops! through "Sears Roebuck M&Ms" like a kid riding a sugar high, and spews mesmerizing gibberish throughout the title track, which channels the brief moment when the B-52s were too strange for the radio. That last song was written most spontaneously of all, when Kauffman stepped up to the mic and started riffing on a vocal idea she had during one of the after-dinner jam sessions. The rest of the band tried to join in but they weren't quite sure what she was saying: "Shock me with electrical uhh?" "Shopping with electric balloon?" None of the guesses amount to much sense—but damn if that mysterious hook isn't stuck in your head for days. Ava Luna are still speaking in tongues, as they always have been, but this time they're inviting you to sing along. | 2014-02-28T01:00:04.000-05:00 | 2014-02-28T01:00:04.000-05:00 | Rock | Western Vinyl | February 28, 2014 | 7.7 | 05510e2e-65f9-47a8-b18d-c62f175c8da0 | Lindsay Zoladz | https://pitchfork.com/staff/lindsay-zoladz/ | null |
Abi Reimold is a Philadelphia artist whose dark voice bears similarities to Mitski and Angel Olsen, yet sticking a singer/songwriter tag on Reimold feels like a disservice. Reimold isn’t just playing her music; she’s living it, and it sounds goddamn exhausting. | Abi Reimold is a Philadelphia artist whose dark voice bears similarities to Mitski and Angel Olsen, yet sticking a singer/songwriter tag on Reimold feels like a disservice. Reimold isn’t just playing her music; she’s living it, and it sounds goddamn exhausting. | Abi Reimold: Wriggling | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21522-wriggling/ | Wriggling | Abi Reimold's voice is ripe with pure emotion. On her debut full-length, Wriggling, the 23-year-old Philadelphia singer wields the instrument like a crooked sword she only just learned she's rather good at using. There are surface similarities to Mitski and Angel Olsen's dark delivery, yet sticking a singer/songwriter tag on Reimold feels like a disservice. She isn't just playing her music; she's living it, and it sounds goddamn exhausting. The album art, an open can of worms—yes, they're wriggling—in tight focus, mirrors her sound well. There's slime, dirt, and awkwardness in all 12 tracks, and hearing her crawl through the tangle to confront depression and self-worth is both harrowing and invigorating. Statements like "Fuck this and fuck me" roll off her tongue mid-song easily and without emphasis, and for good reason. At 23 years old, that's a mantra, not a one-time thought.
Reimold wrote much of the material two years ago when she came into legal adulthood. Wriggling carries that intimacy, the wide-eyed fear of what's to come after the façade of teenagerdom disintegrates, particularly in the record's folkier moments. "An illusion of an elevator: how we create our creator," she sings on "Machine," somewhat hopeless, before continuing: "Grant me my mortality, make me blind so I won't see/ That there's no scheme, there is no plan, we grow where our seeds happen to land." On "Vessel," she claws at her own organs with diaristic imagery ("Perhaps the bolts themselves will tighten/ Sit on my ass waiting for you to ripen") and eventually turns to instruments like pedal steel on "Trap" to create the fullness of a '60s country-rock song.
When Reimold switches to electric guitar, she locks into late '90s alt-rock mode. "Bad Seed" starts full throttle with help from Philly neighbors Mumblr for the rhythm section. Things turn heavier with "Clouded" and "Mask," songs that could easily be mistaken for early Speedy Ortiz demos, as she reverts to thick riffs and sings through a delay pedal for vocal distortion. Throughout the album, Reimold communicates the sensation that she's working through memories in real time, ones that are clearly still fresh enough to punch her in the gut. It gives her songs the feel of being performed right in front of you.
Combining those two styles of songwriting can feel lopsided, but she pulls it off. The mix of rock and folk is soldered with lo-fi recordings of intimate moments: a room's silent hum while someone texts, a passing car whose music can be heard through closed windows, a playground in the distance where children shriek during a game of tag. Those poetic inserts never take themselves too seriously.
Wriggling's darkest moments recall the gloominess of Cat Power's quieter material or Torres' Sprinter. Two-minute track "Dust" finds her beating herself up repeatedly. The song's only two lines ("I will learn what dust tastes like/ I am not immune") change shape each time they leave her mouth. Each repetition is cushioned by new sounds, switching from bedroom guitar strums to guitars overcome with shrill feedback. Like many of her Philly peers, from Hop Along to Radiator Hospital to every self-described DIY band in between, Reimold guards her confessional lyrics with punk attiude, but her delivery sets her apart from the rest. Her voice is just coarse enough to sound painful, but soft enough to sound private. If it weren't for the tender heart beating in her songs, Reimold's music would be brutal. Luckily for us, life has already claimed that title—and she's still in the process of learning that it won't let up anytime soon. | 2016-02-11T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2016-02-11T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Sad Cactus | February 11, 2016 | 7.9 | 0551498c-ff7f-4517-b09e-25c60e7359ba | Nina Corcoran | https://pitchfork.com/staff/nina-corcoran/ | null |
College Dropout Mini-Course Syllabus
Week 1: Allow Myself to Introduce Myself. Backstory. Discuss humble beginnings making beats in bedroom, car ... | College Dropout Mini-Course Syllabus
Week 1: Allow Myself to Introduce Myself. Backstory. Discuss humble beginnings making beats in bedroom, car ... | Kanye West: The College Dropout | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/8767-the-college-dropout/ | The College Dropout | College Dropout Mini-Course Syllabus
Week 1: Allow Myself to Introduce Myself. Backstory. Discuss humble beginnings making beats in bedroom, car accident in October 2002 that nearly killed him. Consider rise to fame: Currently has three singles in the Top 20 ("Slow Jamz", "You Don't Know My Name", "Through the Wire") bearing his name. Compare/contrast rise of hip-hop artist/producers with singer/songwriter movement of 1970s; Is Kanye West Neil Young or Neil Diamond?
Week 2: Chitown, What's Going On? Discuss the failure of Chicago to produce a bona fide hip-hop star despite possessing more than enough fertile neighborhoods of racial segregation and socioeconomic difficulty. Uncover reasons why Common and West needed to move NYC-wards to attain widespread success.
Week 3: First Nigga with a Benz and a Backpack. Analyze the fast-disappearing line between mainstream and underground hip-hop, as personified by College Dropout's guest appearances, and West's personal rap style. Compare/contrast to analogous rock divisions, in regards to how rock collaborations of similar caliber (Nickelback ft. Xiu Xiu?) would be greeted with indignant horror by fans.
Week 4: School Spirit. Engage the anti-education themes of College Dropout's songs and skits, discussing why this particular message is greatly emphasized by West. Acknowledge the groaner irony of discussing an album's anti-intellectualism in syllabus form.
So many extracurricular angles, so little time; so let's just suffice it to say that College Dropout is the first great hip-hop album of the still pre-pubescent 2004. Runner-up in its first week on the Billboard album charts only to Ravi Shankar's jazz-waif kid, the record is poised to be a huge coming-out party for one of the top producers working today, possibly even winning him the Outkast Triple Crown of acceptance from pop radio, hip-hop purists, and reactionary rock critics. Frequently delayed, retooled, overdubbed, teased on the mixtape circuit, overloaded with skits and guest stars, and dispersed in multiple misleading forms over the Internet, the retail version finally takes the form of a flawed, overlong, hypocritical, egotistical, and altogether terrific album.
In a way, it's strange that West would be the first of the current producer bumper crop to find such success with his own name on the spine, with The Neptunes and Timbaland having colonized the charttops for a much longer period of time, and with much more adventurous and characteristic sounds. West's style is far less future-vision, as he typically reworks old records with the playfulness of a kid enthralled by playing 33s at 45. You can write it off as a safer or less original approach, but the sugar-high soul technique tends to be an addictive substance in West's hands, as anyone who's had the hook from "H to the Izzo" stuck in their head for a week or eight can attest.
But Kanye's success through the studio glass is more drawn from his surprising abilities as an MC: He possesses a sizable amount of his Rocafella boss' charisma while hiding his occasional technical shortcomings with his gift for comedic timing. Mixtape downloaders have known this for a while, thanks to his whip-smart verses on "Heavy Hitters" and "The Good, The Bad and The Ugly", but College Dropout brings a new evidence file, whether he's probing creative tax accounting on "We Don't Care" or puncturing the air bag of designer materialism in "All Fall Down". And when words fail, Kanye can always fall back on his day job, camouflaging even less-inspired lyrical moments with affably absurd beat constructions like the vocoder/strings/handclaps amalgamation that carries "The New Workout Plan" past its lyrical juvenilia.
One begins to wish there were even more examples of Kanye's mic-work, as the album is also laden with distracting guest appearance speed-bumps-- spots that safety-net the album's bottom line but dilute the spotlight on its lead performer. Strangely, the biggest names fare the worst, with Jay-Z already sounding groggy from retirement on "Never Let Me Down" and Ludacris sounding groggy from something less legal on the hook to "Breathe In Breathe Out". The small names of Kanye's Chicago crew fail to impress as well, with GLC and Consequence's laconic verses deflating the menace of working-class lament "Spaceship".
As a result, the mid-level MCs steer around the flank to steal the show, particularly on the quietly tense "Get 'Em High" where Kanye coaxes Talib Kweli into lightening up and fellow Southsider Common into getting serious. Chart-topper "Slow Jamz" appears in a slightly longer (and slightly weaker) form featuring overkill Jamie Foxx and depleted Twista, but if you haven't reached your quota yet, it remains the best getting-it-on song ever written about getting-it-on songs. The ferocious "Two Words" up-ramps a Mandrill sample into an ominous choir and violin-fed war cry flexibly savage enough to allow Mos Def to spit about his politics, Kanye about his Grammys, and Freeway about Jackie Joyner-Kersee and Steven Seagal.
That "Two Words" is sequestered (along with the chock-full-of-clever "Through the Wire") behind a painful stretch of three clunker skits in four tracks (with the song island, "School Spirit", one of the album's weakest) shows that Kanye hasn't quite soaked in the lesson of the Jay-Z album that made his reputation: less skits = longer shelf life. Fortunately, listeners can take the editing into their own hands in this age of the iPod, also axing the once-interesting, twice-tiresome biography speech that fills out the 12-minute "Last Call". Deleting the skits also cuts down on the strange logic of the album's anti-college stance-- someone should tell West that not everyone on the street has the ability and/or luck to make a living in the music biz. (Full disclosure: Your reviewer may be biased by the fact that he'll probably be spending his lifetime in the Ivory Tower.)
Bloated tracklist, guest star overload, lyrical paradoxes: It all might sound a bit critical for an 8+ album, but College Dropout's flaws tend to only help make Kanye West all the more personable as an artist. With the fat playlist trimmed, the album lays down a sky-high standard for hip-hop challengers in '04, featuring enough singles in reserve to fill out the calendar year. Ideal weather conditions of Chicago's rap void, producer name-dropping, and mainstream/underground bleedover may have handled the advance work for Kanye West's arrival, but College Dropout doesn't muff the kick. | 2004-02-20T01:00:01.000-05:00 | 2004-02-20T01:00:01.000-05:00 | Rap | Roc-A-Fella | February 20, 2004 | 8.2 | 055a1e57-e4ed-4dd8-b5a2-6387f242247a | Rob Mitchum | https://pitchfork.com/staff/rob- mitchum/ | null |
Björk's ninth proper full-length, filled with lush arrangements and some of her most powerful singing, can be slotted among the most human, emotionally candid, even functional of art forms: the breakup album. | Björk's ninth proper full-length, filled with lush arrangements and some of her most powerful singing, can be slotted among the most human, emotionally candid, even functional of art forms: the breakup album. | Björk: Vulnicura | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/20181-vulnicura/ | Vulnicura | Björk has logged nearly 30 years of increasing artistic cred and platform-omnivorous ambition, and she has the enviable ability to anticipate sonic and technological waves just before they crest. But her albums over the past decade have underwhelmed, despite their reach and sense of craft. Part of it’s how Björk, as she’s grown as an artist, has grown inward; at her best (parts of Medúlla and Biophilia), her albums come off like slivers of some grand unrealized possibility—undeniably dazzling, but intimidating for everyone who isn’t Björk. At her worst (parts of Volta), those slivers are contorted, Procrustes-style, into the easy templates she left behind somewhere around Debut.
But part of it’s the tendency to make Björk into other, false versions of herself: Björk the wayward pop figure, Björk the wearer of the outfits that became memes, Björk the metaphor-smitten New Ager, Björk as the quirky vessel for her male collaborators, rather than the person with complete creative and curatorial control over all aspects of her music. Even Björk the genius, who works in the abstract, disconnected from, as she once sang, "the exchange of human emotions." But for all her classical ambitions and hyperextended metaphors, the best Björk tracks express startlingly direct emotional truths, blown up to their towering real-life scale.
Nowhere is this more clear than on her ninth album proper, Vulnicura. Co-produced by Arca (Kanye West’s Yeezus, FKA twigs’ LP1, his own Xen) and the Haxan Cloak and drawing on Björk’s split with artist Matthew Barney, the album places itself among the most human, emotionally candid, even functional of art forms: the breakup album. Its position is deliberate; in conversation with Pitchfork, she called Vulnicura a "traditional singer/songwriter thing," suggesting something plainspoken, modest, even folksy. Perhaps unsurprisingly, Vulnicura is none of these things, but it’s simultaneously her most mature feat of arranging and almost psychosomatically affecting. It’s also, as was widely reported, with us a few months early. While it’d be wrong to say it’s for the best that Vulnicura was leaked then rush-released—no one in Björk’s position would welcome that—the leak does her an inadvertent service: it makes Vulnicura the first Björk album in years to come into the world untethered by museum exhibitions, movie tie-ins, iPad apps, or promo cycles involving Timbaland. We receive it simply on its own iconoclastic terms.
Vulnicura is loosely arranged around the chronology of a relationship: the period before the breakup, the dazed moments after, the slow recovery. It’s a sense of time that’s both hyper-specific—in the liner notes, Björk places each song up until the two-thirds mark in an exact point on the timeline, from nine months before to 11 months after—and loose, with half-moments that span entire dramatic arcs. "History of Touches", for example, is a near-forensic exhumation of the precise time of relationship death. The song begins and ends upon the narrator waking her soon-to-be-ex-lover, and Arca’s programming develops in slow motion as Björk’s vocal and lyric circle back upon the scale and warp the timeline: "The history of touches, every single archive compressed into a second." There’s some "Cocoon" in there, in the post-coital setting and smitten sigh, but there’s also the unmistakable sense that everything Björk describes is expiring as she speaks it. It’s luxuriant and bleary and sad, something like sleepwalking infatuated through an autopsy. Skip to several months after in the record's progression, album centerpiece "Black Lake", a masterwork of balancing elements: Björk’s requiem strings leading to Arca’s tectonic-plate percussion and vocal patches, cuttingly crafted (in unmistakably Björk fashion) lines like "I am bored of your apocalyptic obsessions" giving way to lines far more unadorned and unanswerable: "Did I love you too much?"
What keeps these questions from sounding maudlin are those flashes of rueful wit (elsewhere, on "Family": "Is there a place where I can pay respects for the death of my family?") and Björk’s vocal delivery; she’s at least twice expressed her admiration, at the pure musical level, of fado singer Amália Rodrigues, and you can hear it in how she leans into syllables, indulging feelings then dissecting them. Rarely does Vulnicura sound anything but seamless; her palette blends in drum-and-bass loops, flatline effects, groaning cellos, pitch-warped echoes by Antony Hegarty. The more Björk has grown as an arranger, the less dated her albums sound; closer "Quicksand" initially scans like it’s approaching over-timely Rudimental territory, but it’s a little late in the album for that, and this is soon subsumed into a string reverie that’s unmistakably hers.
In Björk’s discography, Vulnicura most resembles Vespertine, another unyieldingly cerebral work about vulnerability and being turned by love to besotted viscera, and also an unmistakably female album. Vulnicura doubles down on these elements, from the choir arrangements to the yonic wound imagery of the cover, like Björk’s attempt at a grand unified photoshoot of female pain, to Vulnicura’s echoes from the first track ("Moments of clarity are so rare—I better document this") of the long tradition of women artists thinking and rethinking their own life stories, in public, until they coalesce into art. Fittingly, when Björk dispenses with the breakup framework (and timestamps) two-thirds of the way through the album, Vulnicura becomes about more. "Mouth Mantra" is part glitchy nightmare of grotesque imagery ("my mouth was sewn up… I was not heard") and part reassertion of her artistic identity: "this tunnel has enabled thousands of sounds."
It isn’t just her. "I want to support young girls who are in their 20s now and tell them you’re not just imagining things," she told Pitchfork, and on "Quicksand" Vulnicura shifts finally from personal documentation of one person’s rough year to words for those who’ve stayed for it all: "Every time you give up, you take away our future and my continuity—and my daughter’s, and her daughters, and her daughters," Björk sings on the track, just before it cuts off mid-string cadenza. It’s possible to hear this as resignation, but it’s also possible to hear it as a note of hope, that there is a future after coming out of such an emotional wringer, if not quite one that’s reassuring. The ambiguity feels honest. | 2015-01-23T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2015-01-23T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Electronic / Pop/R&B | One Little Indian | January 23, 2015 | 8.6 | 055b8cc1-b815-4b66-8944-66aaf8944a57 | Katherine St. Asaph | https://pitchfork.com/staff/katherine-st. asaph/ | null |
In 1984, Purple Rain turned Prince into a global superstar, and the 3xCD remaster of the canonical record adds an entire disc of previously unreleased music cut during the same period. | In 1984, Purple Rain turned Prince into a global superstar, and the 3xCD remaster of the canonical record adds an entire disc of previously unreleased music cut during the same period. | Prince / The Revolution: Purple Rain Deluxe — Expanded Edition | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/prince-purple-rain-deluxe-expanded-edition/ | Purple Rain Deluxe — Expanded Edition | In so much of his music, Prince seemed fixated on contradictions. He used the album format to position seemingly alienated concepts against each other—spirituality and sexuality, of course, but also isolation and collaboration, minimalism and maximalism, life and afterlife. He longed to connect these ideas, to isolate the points at which they melted into each other. The soundtrack for his 1984 movie Purple Rain represented the most precise implosion of his internal contradictions—sex, religious devotion, empathy, alienation. The album is a kind of geode of identity, a product of remarkable individual pressurization.
Purple Rain — Deluxe Expanded Edition is the first reissue produced by the deal Prince signed with Warner Brothers in 2014 in order to regain ownership of his masters. This edition’s approach to the original LP is to kind of unfold it from the edges by including unreleased songs and extended mixes that both expand and complicate the record’s essential character. Purple Rain was Prince’s commercial flashpoint, an album- and feature-length metaphor for his arrival on a national stage; in the last 33 years, it has been written about breathlessly (Carvell Wallace reconsidered it here just last year, one of a series of reviews published after Prince’s death), and it has been contemplated down to its skeletal details. The remastering job heard on this edition, apparently overseen by Prince, adds a clarity and fluorescence to an album whose elements already sounded carefully distributed. Prince’s screams in “Baby I’m a Star” take shape in three dimensions, and the interlaced guitar lines in “Darling Nikki” sound as if they're radiating their own humidity. The songs feel heavier and fuller and conversely, the void surrounding the guitar chord that introduces the title track feels as if it’s been expanded into an even vaster loneliness.
As good as the remaster sounds, the primary attraction of this edition is its second disc, 11 tracks from Prince’s vault of unreleased songs, all cut between 1983 to 1984. Prince wrote and recorded constantly for his entire career, and only a fraction of his music has found its way onto his official records. He only issued two archival compilations in his lifetime, 1998’s Crystal Ball and 1999’s The Vault: Old Friends 4 Sale, where many of the songs recovered from the archives were altered, remixed, or re-recorded. Original versions of vault songs have tended to circulate among Prince fans through bootlegs or live recordings, where they would appear full of crackling and hissing artifacts, or would seem to be playing from a considerable distance, muted and cottony, as if they had barely escaped their source. (My bootleg mp3 copy of the 12-minute “Computer Blue” only occasionally verges on listenable.) On the Deluxe Edition of Purple Rain, the vault tracks sound like fully-formed Prince songs—animated, vibrant, reflexive, fluid, almost vehicular in their design and velocity, as if the motorcycle on the album cover were sculpted according to the songs’ sleek and slightly alien shapes. Whether Prince is constructing busy hydraulic cylinders of funk (“Love and Sex”) or drawing a few scribbles in empty space (“We Can Fuck”), one hears every detail with a previously inaccessible focus.
There’s a playfulness that animates tracks performed entirely by Prince; “Electric Intercourse,” a decaying piano ballad in the mold of “The Beautiful Ones,” is sung almost entirely in the unstable region between his falsetto and his scream. On “Possessed,” his vocal seems to never reach the earth, weaving a sinuous arc through the air. “Gosh, I love it when the horns blow,” he says just before the breakdown, “Everybody watch me dance!”; the drums recede and the “horns” turn out to be a synth figure pulsing in the center of a vacuum. But as much as Purple Rain is the sound of Prince achieving critical and commercial supremacy, it’s also the sound of his band, the Revolution, solidifying as a unit, reshaping Prince’s music as they played it. The best of the unreleased songs either feel intended for the Revolution or involve them directly, seeming to form their compositions out of the electric and ambiguous flow of the band’s interplay.
Among the most startling moments in this vein is found on “Our Destiny / Roadhouse Garden,” when the strings and drums evaporate and Revolution keyboardist Lisa Coleman says, “Look, I’m not saying let’s get married or nothing, I’m not ready to settle down, and I don’t want to have your baby, but you’ve got to be the finest specimen I’ve ever seen.” Prince, Lisa, and Wendy Melvoin share buoyant harmonies on the perfectly-named “Wonderful Ass,” in which subject of the song is so lost in peripheral distractions (“You do not understand my quirky ways/My crazy logic leaves you in a daze/You think my neurosis is just a phase”) that the chorus— “You’ve got a wonderful ass”—almost feels like a non-sequitur. The complete, 12-minute version of “Computer Blue,” the only song on Purple Rain credited to Prince, Wendy, and Lisa, digresses into a series of melting guitar solos, and then again into a more formal funk exercise, and then dissolves further from there into a kind of short story, told by Prince, in which he describes someone who lives in a house with many hallways. “It was a long walk to his bedroom,” Prince says, “because to him each hallway represented an emotion, every one vastly different from the next.” He assigns each hallway its appropriate emotional designation: “lust,” “fear,” “insecurity,” and finally, “hate.”
The most revelatory track from the vault is “We Can Fuck,” which appeared later in a different form as “We Can Funk” on the soundtrack for Prince’s movie Graffiti Bridge. To listen to the Graffiti Bridge version and then to its original 10-minute arrangement is to hear the song unfold backwards through time. Prince worked on the song from 1983 to 1990, adding and subtracting different textures; the Graffiti Bridge version is ultimately aided by George Clinton, a horn section, and an additional chorus which aligns the song with the more communal design of a Parliament-Funkadelic song. The original “We Can Fuck,” however, gets so deep into Prince territory that its pre-breakdown section ends with him arranging his voice into harmonized screams. “Oh, the Kama Sutra,” he sings against a slowly developing groove that eventually consumes the entire song, “I can rewrite it in half as many words.” It builds and falls apart and builds again, synths whirling and floating with the choreography of leaves, flowing around Prince’s multiplied voice and transforming what once felt like a minor funk digression into one of his best tracks. Its placement, before Prince’s somber and sinuous recording of a piano piece his dad wrote (“Father’s Song”), gives the second disc the integrity of a lost Prince album, one in which the listener seems to follow him beyond his hits and even his album-length statements, to the very edges of his sensibility.
The third disc of the set focuses on another dense layer of Prince’s discography, the 12-inch mixes that considerably expand and warp the shape of his singles. Where extended versions of songs initially served a utilitarian purpose for DJs—longer versions of songs allowed for more relaxed and precise transitions—Prince saw the space afforded by a 12-inch as a kind of Möbius strip; his extended remixes tend to drift and twist away from themselves as they go. Listening to these songs, one has the feeling of rocketing through membranes, the compositions always opening up onto some new internal space. “Erotic City,” a B-side that inadvertently ascended into radio playlists, is stretched out into seven-and-a-half minutes of sheer mechanical austerity in its “Make Love Not War Erotic City Come Alive” mix, where the composition is often reduced to synthetic and percussive blinks, vocals curving through the empty space between each snare. The extended remix of “I Would Die 4 U” is 10 minutes long and weirdly doesn’t play at all with the original recording’s texture; it’s a live performance taken from one of the Revolution’s rehearsals. The song builds relentlessly, always seeming to unlock an extra room of itself, particularly when Eddie M’s saxophone starts fluttering through the substance of the track.
The third disc also includes single edits, which are less imaginative and constantly unfolding than they are extremely, arbitrarily folded down. Prince reportedly prepared at least 100 songs for Purple Rain, so the new set is hardly comprehensive, and one wonders what else could’ve been included in lieu of a 7-inch edit of “Take Me with U.” The reissue specifically lacks “Wednesday,” which appeared on one of the earliest configurations of the Purple Rain tracklisting, as well as the full 11-minute version of the title track, performed at a 1983 show at First Avenue, out of which Prince carved the album version.
That legendary concert was the Revolution’s first show with Melvoin; she plays “Purple Rain”’s central chord progression, engineering and manipulating all of the emptiness around it. In the narrative flow of the album and film, which migrates from desire to jealousy to personal and professional breakdown, Prince finally embraces an expression of empathy, which also seems to flow inexorably from all of the previous expressions. There’s no radical shift in structure in the 11-minute recording; it just sort of wanders through its changes forever, one’s sense of time dislocating around it. In the center of the performance, Prince’s concerns about beginnings and endings, of birth and death seem to dissolve and fold into its ambulatory drift. This is Prince’s afterworld, the timeless space he sought to access in his own music, and it’s as close as he ever got to portraying it in performance and on record. | 2017-06-26T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-06-26T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B / Rock | Warner Bros. / NPG | June 26, 2017 | 10 | 055c5fbd-6f5c-4736-b391-0b0965ae109c | Ivy Nelson | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ivy-nelson/ | null |
Bob Dylan's 36th studio album is a collection of old jazz crooner standards most closely associated with Frank Sinatra. While it may prompt some exasperated debates, Shadows in the Night represents a lifelong appreciation for Sinatra, and Dylan is toasting a very specific era in pop songwriting. | Bob Dylan's 36th studio album is a collection of old jazz crooner standards most closely associated with Frank Sinatra. While it may prompt some exasperated debates, Shadows in the Night represents a lifelong appreciation for Sinatra, and Dylan is toasting a very specific era in pop songwriting. | Bob Dylan: Shadows in the Night | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/20190-shadows-in-the-night/ | Shadows in the Night | Is Bob Dylan trolling us? His 36th studio album, Shadows in the Night, is a collection of old jazz crooner standards most closely associated with Frank Sinatra. It’s an idea seemingly as weird as his phlegmy Christmas album or his leering Victoria’s Secret ad. In the '60s, Sinatra was arguably for squares; entrenched in Vegas and disdainful of rock'n'roll (which he had called "the most brutal, ugly, desperate, vicious form of expression it has been my misfortune to hear"), he represented the establishment against which the counterculture was kicking, and that made him a kind of anti-Dylan. And then there’s the fact that crooning is all about the voice—making it smooth yet expressive, agile yet graceful. Just as Dylan’s songwriting exploded the notion of the tightly structured pop tune, his voice has roundly rejected the notion that pop singers must sound pretty.
While it may prompt some exasperated debates, Dylan has in fact been teasing this project for years, if not decades. A few of the songs on Shadows in the Night have appeared sporadically in his setlists since the 1990s, and in his 2004 memoir, Chronicles, Volume One, Dylan even professed his fandom for the Chairman of the Board, even if he subtly admitted that the crooner wasn’t exactly a popular figure among the folkies in the Village: "When Frank sang ["Ebb Tide"], I could hear everything in his voice—death, God and the universe, everything. I had other things to do, though, and I couldn’t be listening to that stuff much."
In other words, Shadows in the Night represents a lifelong appreciation for Sinatra, but more than that, Dylan is toasting a very specific era in pop songwriting. He’s not interested in aping the man’s vocal style (which would be laughable) or retreading his signature tunes (which would be redundant). There’s no "Strangers in the Night" or "My Way" on here, nor is there a single dooby-dooby-doo. Instead, Dylan digs deep, picking personal favorites rather than obvious hits. "Some Enchanted Evening" and "That Lucky Old Sun" may be familiar to many listeners, but others, like "Stay With Me" and "Where Are You?" are more obscure, which allows Dylan to put his stamp on them without sounding like he’s falling back on that late-career cliché: the standards album.
Rather than mimic the robust orchestral arrangements that define Sinatra’s catalog, Dylan strips these songs down considerably. According to a statement on his website, he’s not covering them, but "uncovering" them: "Lifting them out of the grave and bringing them into the light of day." There are some gentle horn charts on "The Night We Called It a Day", but they’re generally unobtrusive, included less for dramatic effect and more for simple ambience. His small band accompanies him sensitively and sympathetically, often playing so quietly that it sounds like Dylan is singing a cappella. The lead instrument here is Donny Herron’s pedal steel, which is so crucial to the album’s moonlit ambience that it might as well hang the stars from the night sky.
And what do you know, Dylan can actually sing. Without sounding overly reverent, he croons persuasively, especially on "Why Try to Change Me Now". That song, recorded by Sinatra in 1959 for his album No One Cares, resonates powerfully on Shadows in the Night, with a performance so assured you might think Dylan wrote it himself. And perhaps that’s why Dylan gravitates to these tunes. Never the most confessional songwriter—he dodges more than he professes—he has remained guarded about his inner life, making him both the most studied songwriter of the rock era and also the least known. But "Why Try to Change Me Now" may be one of the most revealing tunes he has sung in the twentieth century, allowing him to settle into the role of the lovable curmudgeon, a man who understands he’s a mess but is too old to change. It’s the best reason he’s given for recording this album.
Because these songs seemingly reveal some new facets of Dylan’s character and celebrity, they comprise a fascinating and conceptually rich object whose meaning will be debated and dissected for years to come. In particular Shadows in the Night asks us to hear these crooner anthems as folk tunes, as though Sinatra was Seeger with a tux and a stint at the Sands. While ignoring social or political dilemmas, they speak to certain emotional conundrums common to everyone: how to live with love and heartbreak, how to survive on whimsy and regret. Trying to explain the nature of attraction on "Some Enchanted Evening", Dylan offers a sly wink as he sings, "Fools offer reasons, wise men never try." Especially in such a popular tune, the line takes on fresh gravity in the context of Dylan’s career, as though he could be quoting one of his own songs.
And yet.
Shadows in the Night may pose some compelling questions for the Bobophiles who scrutinize every line and every word of every Dylan song, but for the more casual, less obsessive listener, it can be a bit of a snooze. The songs are well chosen and certainly revealing, but Dylan and his band play them all pretty much the same, sacrificing any sense of rhythm for stately ambience. Once they strike a mood on opener "I’m a Fool to Want You", they never stray from it. That gives Shadows a distinctive identity in Dylan’s catalog, but it also has a leveling effect. Each song hits the same tempo and strikes the same tone, so that swoon quickly turns somnambulant. As the album progresses, the songs sound more and more emotionally muted, as though this style of American pop songwriting was good only for providing ruminative ambience rather than sophisticated humor, feisty insight, or infectious rhythm. Say what you want about Sinatra, but at least the man could swing. | 2015-02-03T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2015-02-03T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Columbia | February 3, 2015 | 6.2 | 055eff03-2f29-4329-864b-71a2235994f7 | Stephen M. Deusner | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stephen-m. deusner/ | null |
The classic Blink-182 lineup reunites to huff the fumes of their best material. | The classic Blink-182 lineup reunites to huff the fumes of their best material. | Blink-182: One More Time... | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/blink-182-one-more-time/ | One More Time... | Blink-182 have always been living on borrowed time. “I wish that Earth clock/Could often just be stopped,” Tom DeLonge sang on the 1993 demo Flyswatter. To trace the band’s obsession with aging through their discography—“Lemmings,” “What’s My Age Again?,” “Good Old Days,” “Blame It on My Youth”—is to trace the journey from arrested development to desperate self-delusion. Their Peter Pan syndrome is an act of self-preservation: The absurdity and vanity of youth are the generative forces of pop-punk, a genre built on dick jokes and being mad at your parents. For a band like Blink-182, aging—or acknowledging it—would be tantamount to admitting defeat. And so, night after night, fans participate in a collective fantasy that Mark Hopppus is still 29 years old and thinks it’s funny to sing about elderly incontinence (admittedly, it slaps live). Disbelief became harder to suspend in 2021 when Hoppus was treated for stage 4 lymphoma. With the threat of oblivion breathing down their necks, Hoppus, DeLonge, and drummer Travis Barker—who had not recorded together since 2012’s surprisingly affecting Dogs Eating Dogs EP—returned to the studio to cement their legacy. The resulting album, ONE MORE TIME…, clamors with the frustrated energy of a band too engrossed in its own mythology to innovate on the form it helped create.
Blink-182’s inward collapse had already begun on 2019’s NINE, their last record with Alkaline Trio guitarist Matt Skiba, where they quoted their own hits on songs like “Blame It on My Youth.” On ONE MORE TIME…, they don’t even try to couch nostalgia with in-jokes. Take album opener “Anthem Part 3,” the capstone to the trilogy of 2001’s “Anthem Part Two” and 1999’s “Anthem.” It starts with a guitar and drum pattern nearly identical to “Part Two,” establishing an uncanny valley of sentimentality that lingers throughout the album. It’s a lazy shorthand for the time lost between releases, a suggestion that if you close your eyes, you too can be transported back to the Mark, Tom, and Travis of 2001. “Work sucks/I know” was transcendent in its minimalism. Here, they feel the need to spell things out explicitly: “When your job has gone to deep shit/If you’ve fallen off of that list/When you’re clenchin’ both of your fists.” Blink-182 have a lot more to say, even if they’re not saying anything.
Since their last full album as a trio, 2011’s Neighborhoods, the most perceptible shift in the Blink-182 dynamic has been the emergence of Barker as a pop-punk svengali, paving the rap-to-rock pipeline for artists like Lil Huddy and Machine Gun Kelly. His overstuffed, cheap-thrills approach to production—starting with drum fills that occupy every inch of breathable air—has seeped into Blink-182’s empty hooks. “Dance With Me” (after Tom’s intro, which made me miss the days of old Blink) channels Machine Gun Kelly’s unrelenting onslaught of guitars and nasal screeching. Whereas previous albums were primarily written by the band members, ONE MORE TIME… adds a bevy of songwriters, including Kelly collaborator Nick Long and OneRepublic’s Ryan Tedder. It feels disjointed and bloated, not to mention heavily indebted to the band members’ existing discography. “Terrified,” originally written for Barker and DeLonge’s side project Box Car Racer, is almost identical to the sound of that band’s biggest hit, “I Feel So.” “You Don’t Know What You’ve Got” strips the haunting guitar riff from “Adam’s Song” for parts, just different enough that you might miss it at first. When they run out of their own material, they turn to their inspirations: The cloying “Fell in Love” opens with a synth line based on an interpolation of the Cure’s “Close to Me,” which could have felt inspired if it didn’t force such unflattering comparisons to the old Blink song actually featuring Robert Smith, 2003’s sparse and subtle “All of This.”
The Blink lore-as-lyric bottoms out with “One More Time,” a maudlin ballad that addresses head-on Hoppus’ battle with cancer and Barker’s near-fatal plane crash in 2008, crises that eventually led the trio to reconnect. “It shouldn’t take a sickness/Or airplanes falling out the sky,” Hoppus sings. The story is one of enduring friendship, reduced to vacuous balladry that reads like a high school poetry assignment. But it’s the third verse that determines how you’ll likely feel about Blink’s latest dispatch: If the thought of Mark and Tom harmonizing “I miss you” in obvious homage to their massive 2004 single seems charming, then by all means, let them serenade you back to the George W. Bush era. Such a bald reference softens the blow of having to learn new lyrics and chords, both for fans and the band. But if it sounds self-congratulatory, like a band doing cheap covers of its own songs, the rest of the album is unlikely to convince you otherwise. “Edging,” the Dropkick Murphys-esque single named for the sexual practice of which Barker is an avowed fan, rips a lyric practically wholesale from DeLonge’s other band Angels and Airwaves. To fans who’ve followed Blink-182’s side projects over the years, the similarities are almost offensive, as if those albums were merely practice for their eventual return.
Blink-182 have never shied away from putting songs about prank calls next to serious discussions of depression and suicide, the immaturity of the former serving as a hedonistic outlet for the latter. On “Turpentine,” they attempt both at once and fall flat: It’s hard to take verses about existential despair seriously after hearing DeLonge sing, “Slide your mom on top of me.” Across the album, the deep end is shallower and the shallow songs feel strangely like they are actually beneath Blink-182. They take their singular obsession with youth to illogical conclusions until the songs become immortality word salad. “When We Were Young,” released to coincide with the band’s headlining appearance at the Las Vegas emo festival of the same name, barely tries to make sense: “When we were young/Are you still riding free like every other?” On album closer “Childhood,” the nostalgia snake catches its tail: “Remember when we were young/And we’d laugh at everything?” DeLonge and Hoppus ask in unison, unable to finish the album without referencing an earlier song in its tracklist. By the end of 17 tracks, they sound exhausted, as if worn down by their own charades.
Occasionally, Blink-182 still manage to sound like they’re enjoying themselves: “Blink Wave,” their take on new wave, hums to life with a glimmering synth and blessedly minimal drumming from Barker. It could fit well next to songs from both Hoppus’ project +44 and DeLonge’s Angels and Airwaves, and their radically different registers both work surprisingly well over the energetic bassline. “’Cause the same old fights, they just won’t do,” DeLonge sings in the chorus, his strange So-Cal glissando fighting for the high notes. It’s a shame that it seems that the same old melodies and lyrics will do just fine. Blink-182 want to find eternal life in a state of permanent regression. It’s kind of funny until it’s not. | 2023-10-24T00:03:00.000-04:00 | 2023-10-24T00:03:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Columbia | October 24, 2023 | 5.2 | 055ff88c-f085-4d12-9e67-b37b8f418354 | Arielle Gordon | https://pitchfork.com/staff/arielle-gordon/ | |
The biggest-selling album of all time returns on a gold-plated 25th edition that reminds us of its frequent briliance and adds both a DVD and bonus tracks featuring Kanye West, Akon, will.i.am, and Fergie. | The biggest-selling album of all time returns on a gold-plated 25th edition that reminds us of its frequent briliance and adds both a DVD and bonus tracks featuring Kanye West, Akon, will.i.am, and Fergie. | Michael Jackson: Thriller: 25th Anniversary Edition | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/11163-thriller-25th-anniversary-edition/ | Thriller: 25th Anniversary Edition | Thriller is the biggest-selling album of all time; it says so on the cover of this reissue package. What it doesn’t say is that, on a worldwide scale, it outpaces the Eagles, Pink Floyd, and Celine Dion by more than just a marginal million or so: At 100 million+ copies sold, it’s estimated to have sold more than twice its nearest rival.
And so people try to concoct explanations. The album was focus-grouped for broader appeal—but then why haven’t focus groups worked so well since? Jackson made the racial crossover breakthrough on MTV—but once that door was opened, why didn’t the sales crossover work for others? Jackson’s stunning dancing and videos exploded pop’s visual formatting—but the Thriller album, until DVD-era reissues like this one, wasn’t a visual experience.
When Thriller opens, those 100 million sales feel just. “Wanna Be Startin’ Somethin’” is pure confused, shocked teenage rush. So there’s another theory: Thriller is the best-selling record ever because it’s the best record ever. That one holds up for six minutes and two seconds, during which Jackson and Quincy Jones mix the tension of rock’n’roll with the rapture of disco and hit perfection. But then you get “Baby Be Mine”—one of the original tracks that wasn’t a single—and the momentum fades: On the heels of “Wanna Be Startin’ Somethin’”, it should maintain the temperature; instead, it goes nowhere, starts nothing.
Thriller is inconsistent in style, which gives it something to appeal to everyone, but it’s oddly tough to listen to even the great bits sequentially—its peaks are from different mountain ranges. “Thriller”’s joke-shop horror segues well into Eddie Van Halen’s headbanging guitar on “Beat It.” But to follow that into the paranoid celebrity funk of “Billie Jean,” the meltingly tender “Human Nature,” and the smooth R&B of “P.Y.T.”? These are all brilliant singles, though; Thriller’s greatness lies in its great songs not in it “working like an album.”
For this edition Jackson called in some current big guns to provide remixes, and sadly they do provide the consistency the originals gloriously lack. Will.i.am sets the tone: He takes Macca off “The Girl Is Mine” but decides it can’t work without someone sounding like an idiot and steps manfully in himself. There’s a general reluctance to use what these guest stars are good at: will.I.am is a consistently slick, inventive pop producer but nobody wants to hear him rap, whereas on Kanye West’s “Billie Jean” a guest verse might have added dynamics to the mix’s clumsy claustrophobia. Fergie’s gift as a pop star is the way her crassness shifts into oddness—so on “Beat It” her nervous reverence is a waste of time. Only Akon comes off well, flipping the meaning of “startin’ somethin’” and turning the song into a joyful seducer’s groove, and here it’s Jackson’s own mush-mouthed new vocal that spoils things.
The remixes aren’t a missed opportunity—they’re an imaginative way to wring bonus material from sessions overseen by a notorious perfectionist. It could be a lot worse. The last time Thriller got reissued it included “Someone in the Dark,” a horror from the E.T. soundtrack showcasing Jackson’s most saccharine side. We’re spared that, and the token MJ rarity here is “For All Time,” recorded during the Thriller sessions (and then later rejected for Dangerous). A glistening, slightly overdressed piano ballad, it might have made a nicely sappy album closer—if we didn’t already have the subtler, understated, and underrated “The Lady in My Life,” possibly Jackson’s most soulful solo performance on the record.
The DVD footage, with all the videos you’d expect, is much better. Watching the famous Motown 25th Anniversary performance of “Billie Jean” in particular I’m struck by how angular Jackson’s dancing is, how tense: Knees and elbows spiking out, body freezing into indecipherable alphabets. And then how beautiful, the way he simply flows out of each position, the release that made his music so joyful given kinetic form.
The biggest-selling album of all time, then, and you should probably take the “of all time” literally. His highest-clout guest stars here have shifted around one-twentieth the copies Thriller has, and in a dwindling industry it’s hard to imagine anything similar happening again. Fluke it maybe was, but as a unification move it worked—the last time, maybe, one person could incarnate almost all of pop, all the corny and all the awesome in one mind. We live now in the world of the “long tail”—Thriller was the big head. | 2008-02-15T01:00:01.000-05:00 | 2008-02-15T01:00:01.000-05:00 | Pop/R&B | Epic | February 15, 2008 | 7.2 | 05636924-9108-4e86-b2e4-757f6bd63a48 | Tom Ewing | https://pitchfork.com/staff/tom-ewing/ | null |
On their ethereal debut EP, the Norwegian electro-pop trio treat romance with a stylish, if sometimes frustrating, remove. | On their ethereal debut EP, the Norwegian electro-pop trio treat romance with a stylish, if sometimes frustrating, remove. | SASSY 009 : Do You Mind EP | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/sassy-009-do-you-mind-ep/ | Do You Mind EP | Sassy 009 have a fraught relationship with romance. The Norwegian electro-pop trio—Sunniva Lindgaard, Teodora Georgijevic, and Johanna Scheie Orellana, friends based in Oslo—demonstrates as much throughout Do You Mind, the group’s ethereal, often melancholic debut EP. They sing of being smitten and they sing of being hurt. They lament their suffering at the hands of a callous lover, then insist it’s all right; they urge someone close out the door, then two songs later agonize at the thought that he might leave. Joe Strummer wanted to know if he should stay or if he should go. Sassy 009 seem displeased with either option.
Over the brief course of its 16 minutes, Do You Mind describes the arc of a love affair in turbulent decline. It begins with “Summin’ You Up,” a striking introduction: Reverb rolls in like thunder and distortion churns like a storm cloud while blown-out, heavily treated vocals air bitter accusations. “You’re tearing me down/You’re tearing us down,” they sing, frostily. No matter the vitriol, Sassy 009 remain impassive, acerbic but cool. Indeed, they skewer the notion that heartache should move anyone to sorrow at all. “They show no remorse/There is no regret,” they intone after recounting a lover’s indifferent cruelty. “We’re equal now/Why the distress?”
Do You Mind is not a breakup record, even though many of its songs address the desire to break up. “Promise me that you’ll leave me one day,” the band sings, without feeling, on “Feel Me,” above muted synths and distant, echoing oohs and aahs in the style of early Grimes. “Embarrass me then turn it around/And say ‘It’s not me, it is you.’” And yet after that promise, Sassy 009 seem surprised to find the lover following through. “Are you leaving me now?” they ask on the following song, called, naturally, “Are You Leaving.” “Don’t get away now/Don’t get away now,” they continue to chant—uncertain as ever of what they want, emotionless about the result either way.
Sassy 009’s ironic detachment—they’re miserable, but resigned to it—perfectly complements their aesthetic. Perhaps too well: The glacial, almost apathetic character of the music has a tendency to meander, particularly as the lead vocals, background vocals, and delicate electronic instrumentation mingle into the same vacant and vaguely dispassionate haze. Bedroom-pop keys float airily, largely directionless; the occasional flourish, such as the lovely flute riff on “Are You Leaving,” gets lost in the overall muddle. The sound can be exquisite, but it feels thin, without momentum or emphasis.
Even at only a quarter of an hour, Do You Mind has a tenuous hold on the listener’s concentration. Their utter lack of affect precludes niceties like brio and panache—it’s as if writing a dynamic song would somehow compromise their sangfroid. Granted, this placid air clashes with the lyrics to interesting effect, giving even the odd romantic cliche a nicely vicious touch. But it makes for a flat and fairly monotonous listening experience. One wishes the songs themselves were as well written as the sentiments they express, or, indeed, that the range of feelings they encompass were reflected in Sassy 009’s musical range. For now, their coldness only inhibits their promise. | 2017-11-07T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2017-11-07T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Pop/R&B | Luft | November 7, 2017 | 6.2 | 05677287-ab16-4fca-af86-25e7c672cb0d | Calum Marsh | https://pitchfork.com/staff/calum-marsh/ | |
Babyfather is the name of the latest project by the elusive British musician Dean Blunt. It is a painfully raw, emotionally generous, politically charged, intensely intelligent, sometimes unlistenable album. | Babyfather is the name of the latest project by the elusive British musician Dean Blunt. It is a painfully raw, emotionally generous, politically charged, intensely intelligent, sometimes unlistenable album. | Babyfather: BBF Hosted by DJ Escrow | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21702-bbf-hosted-by-dj-escrow/ | BBF Hosted by DJ Escrow | Dean Blunt is the kind of musician who inspires even the headiest of critics to admit in think pieces that their take was "doomed from the start." He is the kind of musician that has been dissected, questioned, and subject to the wildest interpretations, theorizing, and speculation. Even as he invites all this, Blunt remains nearly impervious to any kind neat conclusion. And on April Fools day of this year, like only Dean Blunt would do, he is releasing a new album called BBF: Hosted by DJ Escrow, under the banner of a possibly fictitious group called Babyfather. It is over 50 minutes long and stretches to an impossible 23 tracks. It brandishes a jaw dropping pièce de résistance of a cover depicting a Union Jack-decaled hoverboard overlooking a hazy London skyline.
From the title, it seems that Blunt is playing an obscure joke of some kind, maybe flicking his nose at the mixtape culture found on Datpiff and Livemixtapes. In BBF, Blunt (I think) alternates between a high-pitched Quasimoto-esque flow and his low baritone drawl. The squealing rap voice that haunts most of this album delivers some of the most important moments, specifically a refrain that occurs three times ("Stealth," "Stealth Intro," and "Stealth Outro") in the album: "This makes me proud to be British." This line is repeated over and over and over again, surrounded by a wash of saccharine strings, and it verges on numbing. This refrain opens up the album, and it stretches on painfully for several minutes, a point at which most sane people would just stop listening.
The rest of album splits itself between two attitudes, a stream-of-consciousness confessional and a potpourri of ironic tropes directed at American hip-hop. It boasts some very snazzy features, namely appearances from Arca and Micachu. But these tracks are red herrings; they prick the interest of someone scanning the tracklist, but for the most part are extremely forgettable. In "Killuminati" he repeats "another one," an obvious joking nod to DJ Khaled. He hints at "exclusives" in "Prolific Demons" and tries on a mask of bravado in "Meditations" [ft. Arca]: "20 bands everyone can see/20 bands don't stand for me/20 bands got me up in the sky...Get these white girls out of my home." This for the most part does not work for Blunt, and the theme takes up more than half of the album. It might be the album’s narrative thrust and conceptual core, but like a lot of Blunt’s concepts, it’s overstated and hangs very loosely.
When Blunt does make himself available and emotive it’s hard to ignore. These are the spots where the album starts to work. On "Escrow 3" he admits "trust is a luxury I cannot afford" and he doubts the veracity of his friendships: "I couldn't tell who was real and who wasn't." His voice almost cracks as he asks "If I die/would you cry?" It's cathartic and feels vaguely shameful to be witnessing. The moment underscores that beneath the irony, this is as vulnerable Blunt has ever been. It is a painfully raw, emotionally generous, politically charged, intensely intelligent, sometimes unlistenable album.The project is, most of all, a fascinating peek into the psyche of man who we are still miles away from understanding, and when I listen to I can only see a man in the distance getting farther and farther as I try to get closer. | 2016-03-25T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-03-25T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Hyperdub | March 25, 2016 | 6 | 056776fe-8556-4661-9ee8-aca2a58f6592 | Kevin Lozano | https://pitchfork.com/staff/kevin-lozano/ | null |
The Los Angeles group’s second album is a soul-scouring emotional purge that sets a new bar for screamo—and confirms the genre as one uniquely suited to a year as harrowing as this one. | The Los Angeles group’s second album is a soul-scouring emotional purge that sets a new bar for screamo—and confirms the genre as one uniquely suited to a year as harrowing as this one. | Nuvolascura: As We Suffer From Memory and Imagination | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/nuvolascura-as-we-suffer-from-memory-and-imagination/ | As We Suffer From Memory and Imagination | Nuvolascura’s As We Suffer From Memory and Imagination, which the Los Angeles band recorded in December 2019, sounds like an emotional purge—an attempt to shake off the end of a bad year, a bad decade, maybe even a bad life, one that frontperson Erica vividly describes as a “lab test gone wrong.” (Nuvolascura don’t use last names; they’re severe like that). But the group’s second album now joins a growing list of groundbreaking releases that have turned screamo into 2020’s most vital and prescient form of punk rock, one especially suited for a time when being stuck in our homes might have us all feeling like screamo singers—alternately paralyzed and powered by nervous energy, looking for any outlet for release.
Even among the leading figures of modern screamo, Nuvolascura remain a uniquely inscrutable act, refusing to provide the typical peace offerings of post-rock expanse, metalcore musculature, or clean vocal melody. The 21 minutes of As We Suffer From Memory and Imagination are split into 13 tracks, but they might easily have been broken down into twice as many. Songs that last barely 100 seconds still function as collage, flipping the smallest possible fragments of math-y dissonance, ascetic post-hardcore, technical metal, and caustic Midwestern emo before moving onto the next riff. Almost none of it follows a typical song structure. Instead, their songs play out like cinematic knife fights—fluid, intuitive, and carefully scripted in ways that defy comprehension. The carnivalesque tapping riffs of “Pixel Vision Anxiety” might be their very own Kill Bill: a celebration of hyperbolic, stylized brutality.
Though also produced by Jack Shirley, Nuvolascura’s self-titled debut bore the dank, claustrophobic ambience of the DIY spaces where they had honed their sound. The heightened fidelity of As We Suffer has emboldened Nuvolascura as an instrumental unit, one more willing to take risks with technical dazzle and dynamics. The clean guitar figures that introduce the album are Nuvolascura’s one nod toward a traditional post-hardcore arc, preparation for an inevitable full-band crash. But when that does come, Nuvolascura play so punishingly loud that it initially sounds wrong—at least until “As the Mask Slips” maintains the same crushing intensity for its duration. Erica begins “Disguised in Scintillations” cursing her depression, sounding like she’s ducking behind the drum riser before rushing towards the mic seconds later: “Break locks, walk down train tracks,” she rages. “Burn, pine, perish for a moment of euphoria.” The song doesn’t outwardly advocate for burning a LAPD cruiser, but it also doesn’t not. The relatively quiet moments feel like a band in a state of shock, surveying an eerie absence of violence—erratic Morse code bleeping, hollowed-out arpeggios wafting like smoke after the American Football house gets burnt to cinders, the clean-tone guitars of “We’ll Never Know the True Extent of Our Loss” closing As We Suffer with two minutes of bloodletting.
At the center, Erica is constantly on the verge of becoming a casualty in the asymmetrical war of modern life. “Keep your distance/Long for connection/Patterns emerge/If I smile you’ll fuck me/Wear all black/Avoid eye contact,” she shrieks on “Apyrexy.” When hell isn’t other people, it’s a prison of isolation or self-medication: “Remember when I didn’t need 50 pills to function? Remember when my body turned against me?” This is all impossible to discern from the singing itself, and the band’s political beliefs are best discerned from the lengthy syllabus of charitable causes in the album credits. Yet As We Suffer From Memory and Imagination is inherently and timelessly political in the way all screamo is, where anarchic destruction has to come before the message can be absorbed. “Let the chips fall where they may/I’ll never have faith that anything will be OK,” Erica screams midway through, a timely pledge of solidarity to everyone done with trying to settle for “OK.”
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2020-07-10T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-07-10T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Zegema Beach / Dog Knights | July 10, 2020 | 7.6 | 0569ea0e-55e1-41fd-ab55-22249110e130 | Ian Cohen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ian-cohen/ | |
Chasing hits and fighting against his own strengths prevent Trippie Redd’s debut album from having a seismic impact. | Chasing hits and fighting against his own strengths prevent Trippie Redd’s debut album from having a seismic impact. | Trippie Redd: Life’s a Trip | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/trippie-redd-lifes-a-trip/ | Life’s a Trip | A year ago, Trippie Redd stood in the iconic Coney Island theme park staring at the screaming roller coaster riders and berating the crowd for faintly booing his performance. Besides a few Supreme shoulder-bag wearing SoundCloud heads, the audience had no clue who he was despite his track “Love Scars” tearing up the internet. He said that they will know him in a month—and he was right. Even in the hyperspeed world of SoundCloud, Trippie’s rise was accelerated. It’s why his debut album Life’s a Trip shouldn’t be disappointing but is because despite the numbers, high-profile beefs, a permanent spot on DJ Akademiks’ Instagram, and a voice like no other, Trippie wasn’t ready for his big moment.
Trippie’s debut mixtape, 2017’s A Love Letter to You, was a beautiful mess. The tape created a world where Trippie sang, introduced everyone to his signature moans and screeches, and even dove into some boom-bap. He was versatile, he could hold a melody well enough to perform a pop-punk ballad and rap like someone who listened to too much Little Brother. And that was cool, but what made Trippie a breakout star were the times when he took full control of his voice and embraced the incessant shrieking on production that was both dark and airy.
On Life’s a Trip, Trippie—who begins his album 10 feet from the mic yelling, “I’m a rockstar,”—fights his own strengths. One thing the artists born on Soundcloud who seamlessly transitioned into rap stars have done is emphasize their sound, even if it was initially polarizing. Lil Pump doubled down on the minute-and-a-half speaker-blaring ad-lib marathons and Playboi Carti transformed his ethereal sound into a lush vibe. Trippie doesn’t seem as sure of himself and the weight of a debut album leads to some head-scratching decisions.
At his best, Trippie’s music is slightly maniacal and haunting, but still catchy and relaxed enough to have pop appeal. Life’s a Trip hardly ever reciprocates that feeling; instead, Trippie falls into the misconception that melancholy guitars are the best way to convey something serious. The intro track, “Together,” is a slow-moving ballad that restricts his voice while he halfheartedly sings about confronting his inner demons. “How You Feel” incorporates Chris Daughtry-esque strumming that ruins the moment when his voice reaches its pop-punk peak. Trippie then wallows in despair on “Underwater Flyzone” a six-minute downbeat moan-fest absent of drums, and by this point, you’d rather read a timeline of his beef with 6ix9ine than hear another guitar.
But where Trippie really goes wrong is the blatant hit-chasing, which feels unnecessary given the strength of his music until now. He ignores the blueprint laid out by songs like “Gucci Gang” and “XO Tour Lif3,”—which took significant elements of each of those artists and turned it up a notch—and on “Taking a Walk,” he desperately reaches to meme hell for a bright sounding Scott Storch revival that hardly maintains any of Trippie’s previous identity. He saves the song with some cleverness (“Ooh, so they think I wanna die, yeah/Cause my doors are suicide, yeah”) but it still sounds so forced. He then gives the Diplo-produced “Wish” its second album placement—after blaming Diplo for ruining it on his own album—and gets in touch with his rockstar dreams, stepping into his voice: “Might just blow my brain, I’d be Kurt Cobain.” But all of Diplo’s additions to the track are so irritatingly unaware of Trippie’s appeal mashing his voice with an unsubtle harmonica and using these flat drums that sound like they were programmed before Trippie was even born.
When Trippie strays away from the guitars and hit-chasing, we get to see glimpses of his potential. Atlanta hit-maker Honorable C. N.O.T.E. blesses Trippie with a beat that mixes a dark melody with 2010 Lex Luger on the Travis Scott-assisted “Dark Knight Dummo.” It’s also one of the few instances where Trippie lets his voice run wild, even belting on the ad-libs. Producer OZ sets Trippie up with hard-hitters on both “Bang” and “Uka Uka,” two songs that pace his vocal explosions perfectly. And Young Thug rolls through on “Forever Ever” to briefly steal the show and pass the polarizing songbird baton to Trippie.
Life’s a Trip is stuffed with forced production choices that impair Trippie’s over-the-top voice from hitting all of its quirks. It’s clear Trippie needs more time to develop his sound and iron out a direction that doesn’t feel like a detour. A great Trippie Redd album is possible, but first he needs to destroy all of the guitars in his vicinity, block Diplo’s cell, and use his voice and Soundcloud rooted style that got him here in the first place. | 2018-08-15T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-08-15T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | 10K Projects / Caroline | August 15, 2018 | 6.2 | 056c3f3a-149d-4004-bf48-823d1b2e5ee4 | Alphonse Pierre | https://pitchfork.com/staff/alphonse-pierre/ | |
On his fourth album, Kevin Parker takes a breath and eases into a smoother psychedelic sound. Even without the adrenaline-filled highs, the compositions are as rich and thoughtful as ever. | On his fourth album, Kevin Parker takes a breath and eases into a smoother psychedelic sound. Even without the adrenaline-filled highs, the compositions are as rich and thoughtful as ever. | Tame Impala: The Slow Rush | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/tame-impala-the-slow-rush/ | The Slow Rush | For Kevin Parker, perfectionism is a lonely thing. The fastidious Tame Impala mastermind often copes with his self-isolation and doubt through stonerisms, highly portable mantras like “let it happen” and “yes I’m changing” and “gotta be above it” (said three times fast to ward off bad vibes). Their inverse is the negativity Parker’s trying to keep at bay in his head: “It feels like we only go backwards,” “But you’ll make the same old mistakes,” “You will never come close to how I feel.” It is easy to get lost in all the layers of groovy, time-traveling technicolor surround sound, particularly because Parker isn’t really trying to be clever or literary, but the internal tug of war within the Australian musician’s lyrics—between trying to better yourself and stay present, or succumbing to your own worst thoughts—is part of what keeps fans faithfully returning to Tame’s three albums, perhaps subconsciously. The repetition of phrases pairs well with the dubby, trance-like aspects of the music. Think of it as psychedelia for people with meditation apps and vape pens: Instead of opening your mind, you’re just trying to silence it.
On Tame Impala’s fourth album, Parker addresses the eternal enemy of perfectionists everywhere: time. He struggled with it himself, considering The Slow Rush arrives five years after Currents, the album that made his one-man band more famous than he could’ve imagined. Parker has toured arenas, headlined mega-festivals, worked with Travis Scott and Kanye West, more or less ditched the skinny scarves, and had the rare honor of being covered by Rihanna (and making her dance like this). He intended to release The Slow Rush just before headlining Coachella last April, but he didn’t feel like it was ready yet. You could sense that flux in the album rollout: First single “Patience” hinted at a yacht-rock direction but ultimately didn’t make the cut; second single “Borderline” was trimmed and beefed up for the LP; and the whole thing was remastered following a November 2019 listening party, where he couldn’t stop noticing things he wanted to tweak. Given time, Parker will tinker.
Clearly, all the tinkering paid off. The Slow Rush is an extraordinarily detailed opus whose influences reach into specific corners of the past six decades, from Philly soul and early prog to acid house, adult-contemporary R&B, and Late Registration. I have to marvel that all this sound and history comes from Parker alone, picking every string and twisting every knob. He’s always used strong melodies and riffs to anchor his more unconventional structures, but there seems to have been a slight shift in perspective: Working with hip-hop producers got him thinking more about samples—how they unite music of different eras and genres under one roof.
But Parker, with his vast knowledge of tools and techniques, doesn’t need to sample—he creates the kind of music that other people like to sample. He can make his own instrumental loops that sound like Daryl Hall (the bittersweet keyboard in “On Track”), or Jimmy Page (the riff throughout the first part of “Posthumous Forgiveness”), or Quincy Jones (the “Ironside”-esque siren that lends panic in “It Might Be Time,” an ode to feeling washed). You might think you recognize the acoustic riff circling early-’70s soul-cruiser “Tomorrow’s Dust,” or the ascendant piano line in the ’90s-via-the-’70s R&B jam “Breathe Deeper,” but what you are most likely hearing is Parker’s gift for crafting classic parts.
This “sampled but not” sensibility, along with Parker’s constant use of boom-bap-style drums, is one of the ways that Tame Impala makes rock music that feels in conversation with hip-hop. And while Parker employs more acoustic instrumentation here than on Currents, The Slow Rush is also shot through with the effortless pulse of house music—the kind of grooves that dare you not to dance. On the kinetic opener “One More Year,” the record’s initial beat sneaks up from behind a robot chorus with a tremolo effect and doesn’t let up until everyone’s had a chance to strut and pose through the bass and conga breakdowns, and Parker’s made his little coach’s speech (“We got a whole year! 52 weeks! Seven days each...”).
This is a decidedly more upbeat Parker. There’s another person firmly in the frame with him now, an implied “we” as the newly wed Parker sees the next 50-ish years spread out in front of him—imagining kids, coming to terms with the choices he’s made, the whole bit. The Slow Rush seems to work from the present forward, maintaining the “fuck it, let’s do this” energy of “One More Year” with “Instant Destiny,” a swirling start-stop of a victory lap where he threatens to do something crazy, like buy a house in Miami. Almost immediately he regrets his impulses: “Gone a little far,” starts “Borderline,” with its mournful keyboards. Later, on a sentimental semi-ballad about keeping pace (“On Track”), he seems to wonder if that purchase is such a good idea: “Babe, can we afford this?” Parker toggles between positive and negative thoughts as usual, but at least he sounds like he’s genuinely having some fun.
The worst you can say for The Slow Rush is that when you offer multipart epics on multipart epics, you’re bound to have some sections that feel less crucial by comparison. “Posthumous Forgiveness” and “Tomorrow’s Dust” both go on a passage or two longer than they should. The falsetto-led melody that opens early-album victory lap, “Instant Destiny,” feels incessant and cloistered until the song opens up a bit, thanks in part to a luxe xylophone break. “Lost in Yesterday” tries to edge up an aggressively beachy vibe with Daft Punk vocals and dub effects, and ends up feeling a little dated; then again, I could see it killing at all those big festivals the band will headline over the next few years.
Parker may want to be a Max Martin type in another facet of his career, but in his own band, he’s still a sonic-maximalist introvert searching for inner peace. He seems to locate it in the quietest moments of the album’s show-stopping seven-minute closer, “One More Hour.” “As long as I can, as long as I can spend some time alone,” he sings atop steady piano chords, the barest he’s sounded all record (and still drowning in echo). Suddenly there are tense, fluttering strings and an apocalyptic, heavily phased guitar, then another gnarly riff, crashing drums, and Moog synths firing in all directions. The effect is something like multiple YouTube videos accidentally playing at once, a restless mind making gorgeous chaos—the work of a true perfectionist. | 2020-02-14T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2020-02-14T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Interscope | February 14, 2020 | 8 | 0572b00b-b808-400d-bc37-be3bf17f3d97 | Jill Mapes | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jill-mapes/ | |
On Beauty Behind the Madness, Abel Tesfaye sheds the fat from his disappointing major label debut, Kiss Land. The album plays like a victory lap, with Tesfaye revisiting past glories and embellishing them, and when he harnesses his gift, the results are impossible to argue with. | On Beauty Behind the Madness, Abel Tesfaye sheds the fat from his disappointing major label debut, Kiss Land. The album plays like a victory lap, with Tesfaye revisiting past glories and embellishing them, and when he harnesses his gift, the results are impossible to argue with. | The Weeknd: Beauty Behind the Madness | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/20999-beauty-behind-the-madness/ | Beauty Behind the Madness | "My cousin said I made it big and it's unusual/ She tried to take a selfie at my Grandma's funeral," Abel Tesfaye sings on "Tell Your Friends", a revealing highlight from his second major label album. For anyone following the Weeknd since House of Balloons materialized from the ether in 2011, watching him walk on stage at the VMAs to perform "Can't Feel My Face"—his first number one hit—certainly felt unusual. Not that the song's success was unpredictable. Co-written by Max Martin, "Can't Feel My Face" replaced direct references to Tesfaye's favorite things (cocaine and sex) with PG-13 allusions—a Weeknd song that's fun for the whole family. It was also the catchiest song of his entire career.
Tesfaye's pivot from cult lothario to pop star began last year with a guest verse on Ariana Grande's "Love Me Harder". Tesfaye scrapped what writers provided him with and tried his hand at something radio-friendly, and the result was his most likeable verse since the hallowed days of the Trilogy. Then there was "Earned It", the theme song for 50 Shades of Grey which introduced him to a whole new audience and put his angelic voice over orchestral pomp—a formula that proved hard to resist, even if the song was kind of icky.
With that momentum behind him, Beauty Behind the Madness sees Tesfaye hell-bent on stardom, shedding the fat from his disappointing major label debut, Kiss Land. But instead of going the "Can't Feel My Face" route, opening up his sound and softening its edges, he returns to what made him great in the first place. Everything we know about the Weeknd is here: the dark, mysterious production where contemporary R&B rubs elbows with post-punk and shoegaze (Tesfaye's OG producer, Illangelo, is everywhere on it); the lascivious lyrics that swing between menacing and laughable; and, most of all, Tesfaye's sinuous vocal melodies. Developed from a childhood spent listening to Ethiopian music, his labyrinthine hooks and ad-libs are more indelible than ever.
The album plays like a victory lap, with Tesfaye revisiting past glories and embellishing them. "The Hills", with its disaffected croak and horror-movie screams, sounds like a song from the Thursday mixtape on a Hollywood budget. "Tell Your Friends" is like "The Morning" produced by Kanye West. "Shameless" is "Wicked Games" from a more knowing perspective, while "Angel" wraps the Weeknd's most epic moments—think "Heaven or Las Vegas"—in a glossy adult-contemporary framework that could house a Celine Dion song (and written with one of her collaborators, Stephen Moccio). And then there's "In the Night", a MJ-esque disco stomper and guaranteed hit single that sounds like nothing he's done before.
In moments like this, when Tesfaye harnesses his gift, the results are impossible to argue with. But he's still a victim of his own flawed persona. Tesfaye repeats the tired tropes he's been squeezing the life out of since the beginning (take a shot for every time he offers a variation on "love is pointless"). "Acquainted" and the mind-numbingly boring Ed Sheeran collaboration "Dark Times" feel like they were written with Mad Libs, and elsewhere, Tesfaye's cruelly misogynist perspective remains jarring and uncomfortable. Sometimes he's underhanded, like on "As You Are", which is one long neg disguised as a tender love song, and other times it's skin-crawlingly direct. Thankfully, he has toned it down somewhat —we're miles away from that time he killed a woman in a music video and let the camera pan over her bloodied body.
In the end, enjoying the Weeknd requires a certain suspension of disbelief, and that remains true on Beauty Behind the Madness. You really have to buy into his bad-guy persona, and after four years of this stuff, you might roll your eyes at a chorus like "I only call you when it's half past five"—we get it. But for newcomers, there's a whole world to explore, and on Beauty Behind the Madness it's richer and smarter than ever.
It helps that the self-awareness he's flashed in his interviews has begun creeping slowly into his music. Tesfaye has made a career singing nasty things in a sweet voice, but there are moments on Beauty, like "Prisoner", his soul-searching duet with Lana Del Rey, where he finally sounds like he's engaging with this persona critically, making his audience question themselves for singing along so easily this whole time. "Tell Your Friends" reflects on Tesfaye's rise over six crystalline minutes that rank among the best in his career. The themes are familiar, but his voice carries a new authority, and when he sings "I'm that nigga with the hair/ Singing 'bout popping pills, fucking bitches, living life so trill," at the end of the chorus, there is an audible smile on his face.
That song restates Tesfaye's defining duality, reveling in the bacchanalian excess of his lifestyle while keeping a hold on its emptiness. When he wrote songs like "High for This" or "The Morning", Tesfaye was homeless and barely 20, crashing on couches around Toronto and working at American Apparel. On "Tell Your Friends", he's a touring pop star with a number one hit under his belt. He's cruising in the West End in his new Benz, hearing his songs stream out of the Queen Street haunts he used to frequent. He uses "Tell Your Friends" to look back, reminding us that he's still the same old guy in the face of all the fame, though some things have changed: back then, in 2011, Cali was his mission. Now, it's the whole world. | 2015-09-02T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2015-09-02T02:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | Republic / XO | September 2, 2015 | 7.2 | 05762c2b-661b-47b6-b885-ebee2a8a5f07 | Andrew Ryce | https://pitchfork.com/staff/andrew-ryce/ | null |
null | In 1987, the Beatles' albums appeared on compact disc for the first time. Considering how much music had already found its way to CD, the Beatles were very late, so the digital rollout was a big deal. The new issues came out in batches and the excitement steadily built, peaking when *Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band* came out on June 1, 1987, the 20th anniversary of its original release ("It was 20 years ago today..." was perhaps the greatest record marketing hook of all time.) In the 22 years since, plenty of bands have had their catalogues reissued a | The Beatles: Stereo Box / In Mono | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/13425-stereo-box-in-mono/ | Stereo Box / In Mono | In 1987, the Beatles' albums appeared on compact disc for the first time. Considering how much music had already found its way to CD, the Beatles were very late, so the digital rollout was a big deal. The new issues came out in batches and the excitement steadily built, peaking when Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band came out on June 1, 1987, the 20th anniversary of its original release ("It was 20 years ago today..." was perhaps the greatest record marketing hook of all time.) In the 22 years since, plenty of bands have had their catalogues reissued a few times over (some with ridiculous frequency-- looking at you, Bowie and Costello), either to take advantage of improvements in technology or to repackage the records to sell them again to existing fans. But those 1987 CD versions have been it as far as the original Beatles albums. They've done some special projects-- Let It Be...Naked, two volumes of The Capitol Albums, collecting American versions of their records, the remix album Love-- but if, two months ago, you wanted to buy a copy of A Hard Day's Night, you'd be getting the 1987 remaster, done with 1987 technology, complete with a flimsy, bare-bones CD insert in a jewel case.
This week, Capitol/EMI rectifies the situation. The entire Beatles catalogue has been remastered and the CDs are coming out in new editions. It is perhaps ironic that this is happening as interest in the compact disc format is on the wane, but once again Beatles fans are excited. Are they worth buying again? Over the next three days, we're going to be reviewing all of the Beatles reissues, including the Beatles Rock Band game also coming out this week. But in addition to discussing the music and the records, we wanted to take a moment here to lay out some general thoughts on the sets, with further details relegated to the proper reviews.
First, the configurations. All 12 original albums, from Please Please Me to Let It Be, have been remastered and are being issued in stereo (these are the same tracklistings as have been on CD since the 80s, including the American version of Magical Mystery Tour). In addition, the two Past Masters CDs, which collect singles and tracks that didn't appear on the original albums, have been combined into one 2xCD set. The first four albums are appearing in stereo on CD for the first time. The packaging for all stereo CDs includes the original artwork and liner notes, along with new recording notes and a historical essay. Rather than jewel boxes, the stereo CDs are packaged in sharp-looking and durable foldout cardboard packaging. Each CD contains a short documentary in QuickTime format on the making of the album (these are said to be limited to this initial reissue).
The packaging in general is very well done; the albums feel like they were put together with care and great attention to detail. You hold one in your hand, and it feels important. I've never been a fan of the plastic jewel box, and it's wonderful that they've done away with them here. CDs slide into a little pocket, so there are no spindles to break. The liner notes are succinct and informative, they favor the factual over the hyperbolic, and they cover what should be covered. The documentaries are well done but about what you would expect: four minutes long or so, narrated with interviews with the Beatles and George Martin culled from the Anthology project, with archival photos and film footage. They're certainly nothing revelatory, but a nice intro to the world of the album for anyone unfamiliar with the details. All in all, they did the packages right.
In addition to the individual CDs, the reissues are available in two box set configurations. The Stereo Box collects the stereo versions of all the albums and adds a DVD gathering all the short documentaries in one place. In Mono-- limited, but it's not exactly clear yet how limited-- is more of a specialty item. It presents mono mixes of albums (which are available only in the box set, not for sale individually) from P**lease Please Me up through The Beatles (aka the White Album). Yellow Submarine, Abbey Road, and Let It Be were never mixed for mono, and are not included, but the set does include a 2xCD set called The Mono Masters with mono mixes of most of the singles included on Past Masters (a few of the later ones were never mixed for mono). Each record included with In Mono appears in a mini-LP replica package, accurate all the way down to the original printing on the inner sleeves (yep, you can slide the CDs in them if you want). Two discs, Help! and Rubber Soul, also contain the original stereo mixes on the same disc as the mono mixes (the 1987 CD issues were newly remixed for stereo). The original inserts included with the LPs-- the individual portraits in The Beatles, the cut-outs in Sgt. Pepper's-- are included as well. There are no CD booklets in In Mono; rather, the set contains a separate booklet of liner notes, covering the Mono Masters set in detail, and explaining the differences between the stereo and mono mixes of the proper albums. There are also no mini-documentaries.
Why mono? Two reasons. First, pop music in stereo was still a novelty through most of the 60s. Radio was dominated by single-channel AM, and the young people who bought LPs were far more likely to have a mono record player as a sound source. Given their audience and the technology of the time, for much of the Beatles' run, the band themselves considered the mono mix as the "real" version of the record and devoted more of their attention to it. Mono mixes were prepared first with the involvement of the band, and in some cases, George Martin and EMI engineers completed stereo remixes of the albums later, after the group had left the studio. So mono, first off, presumably hews closer to the intentions of the Beatles themselves. It's what the Beatles had in mind, their vision of the records.
Secondly, since the mono and stereo mixing sessions happened at different times, there are differences between the two versions, not just in the balance of the sound but also in the actual content. Different takes were sometimes used for punching in overdubs, or an alternate vocal take might make its way into the mix. Sometimes tracks were edited differently, and would be shorter or longer, and in some cases the tape ran at a slightly different speed, changing the pitch slightly. Some of the differences are subtle, and some are not. The mono version of "Helter Skelter", to take one example, is a minute shorter, as the "false" ending fadeout is presented as the track's true ending (and it thus omits the closing scream of "I got blisters on my fingers!") The significance of these differences will depend on the level of one's Beatles fandom; of course, those shelling out for the In Mono box will likely enjoy poring over the details.
Comparing stereo and mono versions also offers an opportunity to think about changes in the technology of music listening. In the 60s, far fewer people listened to music on headphones. Music was meant to be heard through the air-- over the radio, in a car, on a jukebox, in a living room. And mono mixes were not designed with headphone listening in mind. It's been pointed out that mono records heard through headphones can sound like they are coming from a single point in the middle of your head, which can feel strange. I find that as the decade wore on and stereo mixes became more sophisticated, the Beatles' albums become less interesting on headphones when they are in mono-- the swirling pans of psychedelic material like "I Am the Walrus" or "Revolution 9" moving around are missed. From roughly Revolver forward, if I'm listening on headphones, I generally prefer the stereo mixes. Over a sound system, though, the mono mixes throughout the catalogue sound absolutely wonderful. The first four albums, however, with their extreme stereo separation, sound much better in mono in my opinion, regardless of the playback source.
In any case, the sound of these remasters, mono or stereo, is exceptional. I've always felt that the sound quality of the original 1987 remasters was slightly underrated. The CD issues were well received at the time and were considered state of the art, but as the years wore on and the label never did anything to improve them, resentment set in and people began to focus on their flaws. Fair enough. But whatever you think of the 1987 remasters, these new versions are a marked improvement. In terms of clarity and detail, they are consistently impressive. But they're also successful for showing restraint.
In the last few years, there's been a lot of talk about the "loudness war"-- the tendency to over-compress and master albums too "hot," so that dynamic range is squashed and peak-level sounds are pushed to the point of clipping. Fortunately, that has not happened here. These CD versions are definitely louder across the board, but there's still plenty of breathing room, so that the dynamic sound-- and these records were nothing if not dynamic-- hits the way they should. Interestingly, the mono mixes are uniformly a bit quieter than the stereo mixes, tending to fall somewhere between the original stereo master and the new one. To get geeky here for a moment, a few diagrams, so that you can see the increases in volume with the new set. The key when looking at waveforms is to take note of whether the peak sounds (which come closest to the volume ceiling inherent in digital audio) maintain the same relationship to the quieter sounds. I'm not an engineer, but the loudest sounds:quietest sounds ratio looks to me to be intact.
"Tomorrow Never Knows" [1987 Remaster]
"Tomorrow Never Knows" [2009 Remaster]
"Tomorrow Never Knows" [Mono]
"While My Guitar Gently Weeps" [1987 Remaster]
"While My Guitar Gently Weeps" [2009 Remaster]
"While My Guitar Gently Weeps" [Mono]
"I Want You (She's So Heavy)" [1987 Remaster]
"I Want You (She's So Heavy)" [2009 Remaster]
Listening to the new masters, the differences in sound quality generally manifest in three ways: songs have more "punch," with Paul McCartney's bass (an absolute wonder throughout) and Ringo's drums hitting with more force; the separation is better, so that instruments and (especially) layered vocals have more definition-- when the Beatles are harmonizing, you can more easily pick out the different vocalists, and the voices have more presence; and finally, the sound in general seems just a touch brighter, with various sound effects, cymbals taps, and so on, ringing with more clarity. The differences to my ears are not quite night and day, but they are certainly there, and they are noticeable. And it's satisfying to have these albums, absolutely some of the best-engineered records in the history of pop music, sounding as good as they can.
And now, onto the music. Note that, rather than doing so for individual records, we're designating the Beatles sets as a whole as "Best New Reissues".
Please Please Me
With the Beatles
A Hard Day's Night
Beatles for Sale
Help!
Rubber Soul
Revolver
*Sgt. Pepper'*s Lonely Hearts Club Band
*Magical Mystery Tour
*
The Beatles Rock Band
The Beatles
Yellow Submarine
Abbey Road
Let It Be
*Past Masters
* | 2009-09-07T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2009-09-07T02:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | null | September 7, 2009 | 10 | 05796ed6-035f-4065-8bf0-6bd6fe17ae85 | Mark Richardson | https://pitchfork.com/staff/mark-richardson/ | null |
After the release of 2009's DIA, Damon McMahon returned to America from China and formed a band, resulting in a fuller sound on his latest. He's still making muffled, eerie pop akin to the private visions of Syd Barrett and Skip Spence but its 14 songs are sharper and fuller, with quicker access to your brain's pleasure center. | After the release of 2009's DIA, Damon McMahon returned to America from China and formed a band, resulting in a fuller sound on his latest. He's still making muffled, eerie pop akin to the private visions of Syd Barrett and Skip Spence but its 14 songs are sharper and fuller, with quicker access to your brain's pleasure center. | Amen Dunes: Through Donkey Jaw | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/15760-through-donkey-jaw/ | Through Donkey Jaw | Most of what I said about Damon McMahon's last album as Amen Dunes, 2009's DIA, can be said about his newest, Through Donkey Jaw. He's still making muffled, eerie pop akin to the private visions of Syd Barrett and Skip Spence and the homemade pop of New Zealand artisans Alastair Galbraith and Graeme Jefferies. His voice is still central, filled with downbeat subtlety, and his songs still mix classic melody and fuzzy obscurity in a way that's both focused and loosely inspired.
There's something different about Through Donkey Jaw, though. Its 14 songs are sharper and fuller, with quicker access to your brain's pleasure center. The simple explanation would be that McMahon formed a band upon moving back to America from China after the release of DIA, which would iikely make his songs sound bigger. But my guess is his improvement comes from something even simpler-- just by keeping at it, McMahon naturally got better at what he already did well.
Whatever the reason, Through Donkey Jaw's forward steps are apparent immediately on hypnotic opener "Baba Yaga". Over a trembling guitar line and primitive drumming, McMahon moves gradually from a solemn moan to a possessed croon. "You know that I, I lie," he howls, as if he's not so much admitting this to someone as figuring it out himself. Similar introspection recurs throughout the record. "I don't knock on no doors/ I'm quietly shared/ I'm for people who know," he chants on "Christopher", over a wash of beat and reverb that's like a tangent to the Beatles' "Tomorrow Never Knows".
A classic group that Through Donkey Jaw evokes even more often is the Velvet Underground. (The album ends with a 10-minute song actually called "Tomorrow Never Knows", but its wordless noise is more like a VU jam than the Beatles' original). There are a few specific instances to point to-- "Gem Head" sounds like a bedroom-recorded version of "Run Run Run"-- but where McMahon most connects with the VU is in using repetitive rhythms and raw edges to turn hooks into mantras. Take "Jill", a shimmering jam that's somehow catchy, even when he closes with the desperate chant, "I don't want to give in." Again, introspection is key; McMahon catches your brain by inspecting his own. Think of Through Donkey Jaw as an out sound from deep within. | 2011-08-26T02:00:04.000-04:00 | 2011-08-26T02:00:04.000-04:00 | Rock | Sacred Bones | August 26, 2011 | 7.5 | 057b628b-17e5-4249-96bd-c4b1d87e5338 | Marc Masters | https://pitchfork.com/staff/marc-masters/ | null |
On one of the best rapper/producer collaborations of the year, the Atlanta MC remains a perfect fit for Pi’erre Bourne’s weird and heavy beats. | On one of the best rapper/producer collaborations of the year, the Atlanta MC remains a perfect fit for Pi’erre Bourne’s weird and heavy beats. | Young Nudy / Pi’erre Bourne: Sli’merre | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/young-nudy-pierre-bourne-slimerre/ | Sli’merre | Sli’merre, the first co-billed project from finesse rapper Young Nudy and producer extraordinaire Pi’erre Bourne, is a bit like the iconic photo of Dwyane Wade’s no-look celebration of his alley-oop to LeBron James during the crest of the Miami Heat basketball dynasty. Wade, arms outstretched and expectant, already awaiting praise for a thrilling tag-team move only half complete, is like Bourne, whose beats are usually so dynamic and perfectly executed all that’s left is to not fuck up the finish. The tape, like the photo, is a signature moment encapsulating years of collaboration. It is teammates getting the best out of each other after developing a sixth sense for one another.
Atlanta rapper Young Nudy is perhaps best known as the target of the sting operation that led to his cousin 21 Savage being apprehended by ICE during the Super Bowl. He is a two-dimensional character best when placed in the middle of the action, which allows him to react instead of think and run through a myriad of rap deliveries on instinct. Pi’erre Bourne is one of the more distinguished producers behind the SoundCloud vanguard—Playboi Carti, Lil Uzi Vert, Trippie Redd, Lil Yachty—but moments meant to be his two biggest breaks never quite panned out: a placement on a Drake album that has yet to materialize and a ghost credit on the worst Kanye West album to date.
Since “Magnolia,” Pi’erre has become one of the most interesting contemporary rap producers with his own signature sound, but he has yet to attain the sort of outsized influence of a Metro Boomin or Tay Keith in his run. He hasn’t worked closer with anyone during that span than he has with Nudy, producing huge chunks of the first two SlimeBall tapes and 2017’s Nudy Land. After only producing one song on Slimeball 3, the duo return as co-headliners on Sli’merre, their blockbuster, a collaboration near its apex.
After a sound engineering gig at Epic fell through for Pi’erre, Nudy was the first rapper to gravitate toward his beats, and they’ve developed a strong chemistry since. They were nearly in sync on Nudy Land, with Pi’erre turning Nudy’s villainous nightlife escapades into carnival attractions, but here they really find balance. On “Mister,” Nudy raps, “All my life, I’ve been a hustler/Dope boy, cap peeler, street young nigga,” and most of his raps are just him plainly living out those roles. There is plenty of robbing, even more shooting, and enough firearms to make a gun nut blush. It’s Nudy’s job to simply rob and shoot his way through Pi’erre’s wacky noise parade.
Like Playboi Carti, Nudy is a premium space filler. Neither will ever be considered great rappers but both have the capacity to perfectly integrate themselves. Where Carti is animated, Nudy is subdued, often carried leisurely forth by the current of Bourne’s productions. He is not as good at making his presence felt, but that comes with its own rewards: on songs like “Sunflower Seeds” and “Dispatch,” his voice retreats back into the belly of the beat and becomes a complementary instrument furthering Bourne’s palette.
Nudy, to his credit, has an ear for the weirdest, most pronounced Pi’erre Bourne beats. While the production on Die Lit is all minor variations of a similar form, Sli’merre is constantly mutating into something new and weird. And these are easily Bourne’s strangest and most thrilling designs. They can feel equal parts absurd and scintillating, like plugging a jailbroken Super Nintendo into a particle accelerator or rigging an augmented reality headset to convert the pixels of cartoon gifs into sounds.
Nudy is mostly just the guest at an amusement park of Bourne’s creation. Understanding where to fit in is a skill in itself, and he slips in and out of the openings with varying degrees of intensity, always matching the requisite force. His whiny Auto-Tune melodies deflate into the humming synth work on “Gas Station.” As slashing strings, piano stabs, and tremorous bass reconstitute around him on “Extendo,” he’s just shimmying through it. He seems to know he only has to do but so much. Nudy on his own is relatively ordinary and working in a limited space, but shuffling through Pi’erre Bourne beats transports him to a world unknown. | 2019-05-08T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-05-08T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Paradise East | May 8, 2019 | 8 | 057bb7a1-ed16-4255-9c40-cabfff972413 | Sheldon Pearce | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sheldon-pearce/ | |
The London band’s full-length debut is an audacious experiment: 52 short snippets of rippling pianos and synthesized symphonics that can be shuffled in any order to create one continuous song. | The London band’s full-length debut is an audacious experiment: 52 short snippets of rippling pianos and synthesized symphonics that can be shuffled in any order to create one continuous song. | ME REX: Megabear | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/me-rex-megabear/ | Megabear | Not since the Flaming Lips spread Zaireeka across four discs has an album required instructions as badly as ME REX’s Megabear. Rather than draft another batch of the punchy, immediate songs that made the London quartet’s 2020 Triceratops and Stegosaurus EPs such a kick, the group’s debut full-length is an audacious experiment: 52 short song snippets, all of them in a similar key and time signature so they can be shuffled in any order to create one continuous song with no beginning or end. It’s a true Choose Your Own Adventure experience; Sufjan Stevens could never.
So how do you even listen to this thing? The band has created a website that will do the shuffling for you, guaranteeing a different song order every time. The album is also available on streaming services with a fixed tracklist that frontman Myles McCabe insists is arbitrary, and as a vinyl record sold with an optional deck of 52 cards, each representing a song, that can be drawn at random to determine a track order.
Like a board game with too many pieces, you have to spend a little bit of time to get the hang of it, but with few exceptions, these song segments really do blend seamlessly into each other. Pieced together from rippling pianos and synthesized symphonics with occasional surprise beats and choral accents, they’re rousing and varied, teasing huge ideas within quick, 32-second packages. When it works and the songs feed into each other just right, it’s exhilarating.
But, of course, it doesn’t always work. Depending on luck of the draw, the experience can also be frustrating and disjointed, and sometimes gratingly repetitive. McCabe’s biggest miscalculation was repeating several lyrical refrains—sometimes you can’t get through more than a few tracks without him singing “the party’s never over” or “I want a river to run through me.” Between that and the constant stop-and-start of hearing a new song every half minute or so, Megabear burns fast. The more you listen to it, the quicker the magic wears off.
McCabe is a graduate of the Los Campesinos! school of verbose, trenchant turns of phrase that land like blows to the gut. That prose shined on ME REX’s 2020 EPs, but here it takes a backseat to the concept. Megabear’s best ideas beg to breathe, to be built and expanded on, to graduate into completed songs. But most of these tracks are saplings that never get the chance to grow. It’s not for nothing that the record’s best track, “Lead,” with its vivid depiction of environmental and mental infirmity, is also one of the record’s longest at 66 seconds: It’s the closest to being a standalone piece.
There’s another way to engage with Megabear: You can make your own songs by sliding a few standout tracks into a playlist and shuffling them around until they make sense. Here’s what I came up with: “Lead,” followed by the album’s other great song about compromised nature, “Ancient Ash,” chased with the aching “God of Rain” and closed out dramatically by “Reclaimed From the Water.” It’s a rare album that invites that level of participation. Yet I still wish the work had been done for me; there’s an optimal sequence for this music, and the album denies it to us. Megabear is a unique and innovative concept piece that suggests lofty questions about intentionality and artists’ agency. But a regular 12-song album with a beginning, middle, and end probably would have been more satisfying.
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. | 2021-08-11T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2021-08-10T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Big Scary Monsters | August 11, 2021 | 6.7 | 057dd114-073b-4718-8de2-60ad998dedc7 | Evan Rytlewski | https://pitchfork.com/staff/evan-rytlewski/ | |
A collection of catchy, lo-fi 7"s on Athens’ Chunklet shows off the Philadelphia musician Jason Henn’s bedroom-pop prowess and surreal, often funny songwriting. | A collection of catchy, lo-fi 7"s on Athens’ Chunklet shows off the Philadelphia musician Jason Henn’s bedroom-pop prowess and surreal, often funny songwriting. | Honey Radar: Sing the Snow Away: The Chunklet Years | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/honey-radar-sing-the-snow-away-the-chunklet-years/ | Sing the Snow Away: The Chunklet Years | Jason Henn makes hooks. In the 14 years since he started Honey Radar, the group’s only constant—besides Henn himself—has been catchy tunes. He has a seemingly unlimited ability to spin an ear-worming riff, add a simple beat, and sing some clever phrases along with it. Those kinds of skills should make Honey Radar work best as a singles act: Grab any two tracks from their catalog and you’ve got a ready-made 45 that would sound great in any diner’s jukebox.
But Honey Radar albums and EPs sound pretty great too. Like prolific songwriters Billy Childish and Robert Pollard, Henn is so creative that his tunes grab you no matter how many you hear, or in what order. Sing the Snow Away, a sparkling compilation of the 7" records Honey Radar made for Athens, Georgia, label Chunklet, is as cohesive and addictive as any of the group’s three full-length LPs. It might even be better: Henn has given Chunklet some of his most memorable material, and hearing all of it together adds extra adrenaline.
What makes the songs on Sing the Snow Away memorable is Henn’s knack for creating a classic, where-have-I-heard-this-before aura while adding idiosyncratic accents. He’s well versed in rock history: He got his first record, a Monkees album, when he was five, and his parents steered him strongly toward the Beatles (in order to keep him away from the Rolling Stones). All of those groups echo in Henn’s curved guitar lines—one of the album’s best cuts, “Telephone Betty’s Aneurysm,” sounds torn straight from Revolver—as do contemporaries such as Sic Alps and Ty Segall. Henn isn’t afraid of his influences: He covers the Monkees on Sing the Snow Away, and his peculiar choice—an obscure tune heard only on a 1969 TV special—shows the depth of his fandom.
But who you hear in Honey Radar is less important than how Henn tweaks that legacy. Much of his musical character comes out in lo-fi production values: crinkly, distorted sounds born of cheap mics and tape hiss. This anti-polish gives each track a charmingly casual, sketch-like feel, as if Henn worked out his ideas immediately after hitting the record button. But that’s deceptive: Play anything from Sing the Snow Away on repeat and you’ll soon hear how sharply structured and fully formed it actually is.
That’s especially clear when you focus on Henn’s words. Sung in a stoic, fading voice that contrasts the music’s rough energy, his lyrics can at first sound like footnotes. But eventually his twists of phrase reveal themselves to be surprisingly funny and surreal. During “Kangaroo’s Court,” over loping acoustic and electric guitars, he whispers, “Butlers hemming a navy coat/A patchwork of dull kazoos/Laughing and tapping an oily mark/A jungle gym of fragrant tattoos.” Sometimes his wordplay evokes nursery rhymes: In “Fan the Earthworm,” Henn depicts a worm whose laughs blow smoke, while “United Fox” introduces a mythical fox who “gave us the greatest sounds around.” And some of his mysterious images hint at bigger ideas. On “Medium Mary Todd,” Henn’s protagonist seems to embody the mercurial nature of creativity: “The songbird missed his prom/Look as he strolls by everything/He’s off and he is on.”
None of these intriguing verses would have the same impact without Henn’s ample supply of musical hooks. Melodies are his creative currency, and on Sing the Snow Away he spares no expense when it comes to doling out memorable themes. In lesser hands, such reliance on riffs might pound the material into a thin, dull roar. Instead, the deftness of Henn’s writing makes Honey Radar’s music grow more nuanced with every listen.
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2020-06-30T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-06-30T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Chunklet World Industries | June 30, 2020 | 7.4 | 057fbc15-b142-4038-855c-8fe7b9b25113 | Marc Masters | https://pitchfork.com/staff/marc-masters/ | |
On their second album, these metallurgists again find an awesome intersection of black metal pummel and shoegaze luster—then remain there, in its thrall. | On their second album, these metallurgists again find an awesome intersection of black metal pummel and shoegaze luster—then remain there, in its thrall. | Astronoid: Astronoid | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/astronoid-astronoid/ | Astronoid | The self-titled second album from Boston’s Astronoid begins, boldly, with a song called “A New Color.” But if you have heard Deafheaven’s Sunbather and Boris’ Pink or even simply seen their covers, this a familiar hue, where black metal and neon shoegaze converge in a brilliant Belt of Venus. As the double kick drums shudder beneath comet trails of processed guitars, certain expectations emerge for the vocals—something harsh and demonic, signifying the atrocity inside the eerie mist. But Brett Boland is actually the exact opposite, his choirboy keen providing the unearthly glow of a Mew or Sigur Rós record. Hearing Boland in the context of Astronoid’s laser-lit blackgaze is unsettling but awesome, like witnessing a hailstorm in daylight. But this excellent first impression is the only one Astronoid really make.
That same wow factor propelled Astronoid’s 2016 debut, Air, too, putting the band squarely on the softer, more approachable side of Deafheaven, Vattnet Viskar, and Alcest. If there were a nagging sense that Air didn’t convey much beyond the awestruck innocence gleaned from hearing any one minute of their music, it didn’t matter—Astronoid had already presented familiar elements in a completely new way, and things like “craft” and “nuance” are reserved as talking points for second albums, anyway.
But Astronoid pull the same tricks over and over again for these 47 minutes, too. It’s a curious case of expansive-sounding metal best suited for 30-second streaming previews. Catch anything here at the right moment—the old-school guitar heroism of “A New Color,” or Boland howling “I’ll be fine” ahead of a blast-beat torrent on the chorus of “I Dream in Lines”—and it likely scans as transcendent. If Astronoid lopped a minute or two from these five- or six-minute songs, they might land as a posi-vibes pop-metal band. If they added a minute or two here or there by digging a bit more deeply into their occasional prog-metal overtures or sludge redirections, Astronoid could be a formidable psych-metal act fit for, say, Desert Daze, their overdriven guitars and generous harmonics practically radiant.
As it stands, Astronoid is a weirdly static, even tedious affair. The moments of triumph appear without any resistance, leaving “I Dream in Lines” and “A New Color” as satisfying as playing a beautifully rendered video game at the lowest difficulty level. Boland’s vocals are unlike much else in metal right now but also too much like himself, without much motion or versatility. The band applies the same blinding sheen to Bolan’s vocals and every single instrument for every single song and every single second. And while cycling among stock images of falling through dark skies or considering faded pictures like Robert Smith at his most Mad-Libbed, Boland sings almost exclusively in stock rhyme schemes—“Victim of another year/I don’t know who shed a tear/I remember dear,” goes one emblematic sequence. Occasionally, the Eurovision gloss on Boland’s vocals underscores the bizarre Babel Fish syntax: “I want the fun afar/I’m not a friend/I’ll say again.” These songs resemble a jelly donut—break the fragile crust, only to find an even more cloying, airy sweetness inside.
Astronoid operate with a total lack of cynicism, so their spirit and candor make them harder to dismiss than a mere genre novelty. But this is an intended crossover album that glimmers like fool’s gold. The final words of Astronoid unwittingly become its most stinging critique: “The joke’s on us/We’re unaware/We’re all caught up/With nothing there.” At least it shimmers from a distance. | 2019-02-07T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2019-02-07T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Metal | Blood | February 7, 2019 | 5.2 | 057ffcf3-ba33-400b-a84c-e0a5cfa58e29 | Ian Cohen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ian-cohen/ | |
Re-recorded in meticulous detail, along with a dozen songs cut from the 2012 original, Taylor Swift’s most pivotal album has still more to say about growing up and moving forward. | Re-recorded in meticulous detail, along with a dozen songs cut from the 2012 original, Taylor Swift’s most pivotal album has still more to say about growing up and moving forward. | Taylor Swift: Red (Taylor’s Version) | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/taylor-swift-red-taylors-version/ | Red (Taylor’s Version) | Just beyond the bounds of normal human awareness lies a realm governed by a benevolent blonde whose songs are sacred texts. In wormholes on Tumblr and TikTok, you’ll discover a new language of signs and symbols, and a bounty of messages waiting to be decoded. Nail polish colors hold secret meanings. Halloween costumes are harbingers. Lost scarves are mythologized like lost arks.
This is the Swiftiverse. Is Red (Taylor’s Version) really trying to exist anywhere else? The second of six albums that Swift is remaking from scratch to regain financial and legal control of her catalog, it’s built on the well-founded belief that her fandom will consume anything spun by her hands—even lightly retouched versions of songs that came out less than a decade ago, plus a fistful of contemporaneous unreleased tracks for good measure. Leave it to Taylor to turn a business maneuver into a sweeping mid-career retrospective; leave it to Swifties to receive the songs, the merch, and the short film as gifts, glimpses into their idol’s secret history handed down as rewards for their devotion.
Originally released in 2012, Red was the clear nexus between where Swift’s career started and where it was heading. After a three-album progression away from country, she revealed the extent of her pop ambition, calling in producers Max Martin and Shellback—Swedish heavy-hitters who had sent Britney Spears and P!nk up the charts—to cue the synths and drop the bass. (“Message in a Bottle,” the first song Swift wrote with the pair, is among Red (Taylor’s Version)’s new offerings; its abundant polish nearly makes up for its dearth of personality.) Red was also where she began to seek source material beyond her own biography; the character studies (of Ethel Kennedy on the lightly ditzy “Starlight”; of a Joni Mitchell–esque elder on “The Lucky One”; of a mother who loses her young son to cancer on vault track “Ronan”) point in the direction of Folklore, where, years later, the gulf between Swift and her narrators would widen.
Like Fearless (Taylor’s Version), the first of Swift’s re-recordings to be released, Red (Taylor’s Version) stays true to the original. Hunting for subtle differences between the old and the new feels like a game of Where’s Waldo?, and sometimes just a test of headphone fidelity. Various instruments are slightly louder or quieter in the mix; a note or two might have been tweaked in the melody of “Sad Beautiful Tragic”; the “wee-ees” on “We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together” are even more cloying than before. A notable exception to this trend of sameness is the bonus track “Girl at Home,” formerly a prim, strummy ode to girl code, freshly remade with producer Elvira Anderfjärd (a Max Martin signee) as a burbling, bottom-heavy synth-pop joint.
If you haven’t listened to Red, recently or ever, it’s well worth your time; in its ecstatic, expressive vocals, tart humor, vivid imagery, and tender attention to the nuances of love and loss, you’ll find everything that makes Taylor Swift great. But the real draw for her main audience, who already know Red like the back of their hands, is the new material. Some of it is new only in the sense of being newly attached to this album or newly reclaimed by Taylor: “Ronan” was a one-off charity single in 2012; Little Big Town recorded “Better Man,” a stolen rearview glance on the drive away from toxic love, in 2016; and the venom-laced air kiss “Babe” was released by the country duo Sugarland in 2018. Most anticipated is an extended cut of a classic: “All Too Well,” a Red track with an outsize presence in Swift lore.
A slow-burn account of sunsetting love, long since codified as an exemplar of Swiftian storytelling, the original version of “All Too Well” was the product of Swift and co-writer Liz Rose’s extensive edits to a 10-minute demo. Now, Swift has dug up the lost verses. Not all of them are additive; Swift’s beyond-her-years analysis in the final verse feels disconnected from the in-process pain of the version that we know, and when she opens up the song for its subject’s input (“Did the love affair maim you too?”), she undermines the definitiveness of her own account. The extra bulk dilutes the original’s walloping crescendo, making it harder to locate the emotional climax. Still, it’s surreal to see the stuff of lesser writers’ dreams—“You kept me like a secret/But I kept you like an oath”—abandoned, until now, on the cutting room floor.
Some of the vault tracks feel like they were left off of Red because they weren’t up to snuff; see the garish cheer of “The Very First Night,” the too-obvious hook of “Run” (“like you’d run from the law”). Much more compelling is “Nothing New,” a somber acoustic ballad squarely in the wheelhouse of guest star Phoebe Bridgers, which grapples with the music business’ famously fickle relationship to young women. These same anxieties—about being chewed up, spit out, and replaced—surfaced on “The Lucky One,” but here, instead of projecting them onto another character, Swift inhabits them in her own voice. “Nothing New” was written by Swift in her early twenties, a time when she was deeply scared of alienating her audience. I wonder if she withheld it out of fear that it would become a self-fulfilling prophecy—that by exposing her disillusionment, she’d dull her own shine.
Swift has an unfortunate habit of relegating female guests on her songs to the background; just ask Haim, Imogen Heap, the Chicks, or Colbie Caillat. Bridgers, meanwhile, makes off with a full verse and chorus to herself. In light of the song’s subject, this feels significant: By inviting a popular younger artist who has studied her textbook to share her stage, Swift suggests that there’s ample room for them both. But things get eerie on the bridge, when she begins waxing prophetic about the young woman who will eventually take her crown. Trading lines with Bridgers, she sings:
I know someday I’m gonna meet her, it’s a fever dream
The kind of radiance you only have at 17
She’ll know the way and then she’ll say she got the map from me
I’ll say I’m happy for her, then I’ll cry myself to sleep
Just this year, a 17-year-old Olivia Rodrigo released her breakout smash, then borrowed liberally enough from Swift to grant her two writing credits—one of them retroactive—on her debut. Swift is too smart not to know that some of her listeners will make this connection. Whatever; she owns it. Ownership is, after all, this project’s raison d’être—ownership of master recordings, but also of personal and artistic history. You have to admire Swift’s pluck in standing so resolutely behind hers. Red, often lauded as Swift’s best album, is not perfect; it contains some of her great masterpieces (“Holy Ground,” “22,” “All Too Well”), but also some duds (while reviewing this record, I got through “Starlight” for maybe the first time since 2012). Red (Taylor’s Version) may be a commercial endeavor first, but that doesn’t mean it lacks an underlying artistic statement: that sometimes we must revisit our past, both the flattering and the less flattering bits, in order to get to our future. Swift won’t have any trouble finding companions for the road. | 2021-11-15T00:00:00.000-05:00 | 2021-11-15T00:00:00.000-05:00 | Pop/R&B | Republic | November 15, 2021 | 8.5 | 05806902-1d3d-47a2-8411-9073284e736c | Olivia Horn | https://pitchfork.com/staff/olivia-horn / | |
Conor Oberst has been a musician in the public eye for nearly half of his life, and over the past decade, he’d be most accurately described as a folk artist. Upside Down Mountain is Oberst’s latest documentation of his obsessions with escape, death, the passing of time, and the potential of finding serenity in an assumed identity. | Conor Oberst has been a musician in the public eye for nearly half of his life, and over the past decade, he’d be most accurately described as a folk artist. Upside Down Mountain is Oberst’s latest documentation of his obsessions with escape, death, the passing of time, and the potential of finding serenity in an assumed identity. | Conor Oberst: Upside Down Mountain | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/19256-conor-oberst-upside-down-mountain/ | Upside Down Mountain | Conor Oberst is a 34-year old married man. He’s been a musician in the public eye for nearly half of his life, and over the past decade, he’d be most accurately described as a folk artist. His latest album Upside Down Mountain is being released on Nonesuch, a label whose release slate includes the Black Keys, Natalie Merchant, and Nickel Creek. The cover art is designed by one of the guys in the Felice Brothers, and he’ll be trekking around the country with Dawes. The moment you hear Oberst sing, though, you will forget every single one of these facts and remember every positive and negative association you have with Bright Eyes instead*—*there’s just no mistaking him for anyone else at this point, and it’s unclear how he feels about that. While claiming “this is a return to an earlier way I wrote", Upside Down Mountain is Oberst’s latest documentation of his obsessions with escape, death, the passing of time, and the potential of finding serenity in an assumed identity.
That said, Upside Down M**ountain isn't a Bright Eyes album, so Oberst’s not driven by the same incessant need for romantic and artistic validation that kept him going until Lifted, nor will circumstances ever align the way they did for his protracted 2005 critical breakthrough. On the plus side of the ledger, you can understand what the hell Oberst is talking about most of the time on Upside Down Mountain, which makes it an immediate improvement over Cassadaga and The People’s Key, two albums that somehow managed to be cryptic and pedantic at the same time.
Besides possessing one of the strongest melodies Oberst has ever penned (and there are plenty here), “Time Forgot” is a welcome reintroduction to the guy who never had trouble getting his point across. Here, he longs to grow a beard, to be left alone, to let the wind scatter thoughts, to just listen. This puts him in a similar mindset as he was on his self-titled record from 2008, the last truly great thing he’s put his name on. But there’s been an unmistakable change of perspective*—*on Conor Oberst cuts like “I Don’t Want to Die (In the Hospital)”, death was impending because he was Conor Oberst, the wildly talented and self-destructive rock singer. Here, he’s not chasing death, but death will catch up with him because he’s Conor Oberst, human being.
The most resonant moments of Upside Down Mountain follow suit in deconstructing Oberst’s myth of himself*—during the otherwise chintzy, rhinestone cowboy pop of “Hundreds of Ways”, “I hope I am forgotten when I die” is the most poisonously enunciated line on the LP. Meanwhile, on the mesmerizing minor-key whisper of “Artifact #1”, Oberst just wants to be forgotten while he’s alive__—*__“I don’t want a second chance to be an object of desire/ if that means slipping through your hands.” Sometimes he even has a sense of humor about it all; though “Kick” is addressed to a luckless Kennedy, it’s not a “Diane Young”-style philosophical treatise, but rather one fuck-up relating to another. And when he admonishes a self-absorbed drunk during “Enola Gay”’s rummy strut, it might just be himself. The evocation of solitude in a crowded club links it back to his atomic self-pitying from Digital Ash in a Digital Urn's “Hit the Switch”, but anyone can learn from its hook: “The world’s mean, getting meaner too/ So why do you have to make it all about you?”
But elsewhere on Upside Down Mountain, he wields populist observation like a politician, trying to utilize his homespun wisdom from an elevated plane. Over a decade ago, he claimed “There is no truth, there is only you/ And what you make the truth”, and that sounds more convincing than his attempts to convey his own version of the truth as the genuine article. During “Time Forgot”, he muses, “They say everyone has a choice to make/ To be loved or to be free”, but, really, who says that? He’s got a lot of big ideas about love throughout*—*“True love hides like city stars”, “Love was the message...full stop”, “Freedom is the opposite of love”, “Our love is a protective poison”, “There is no dignity in love.” It's easy to think of him like Don Draper, hacking out emotionally manipulative and impeccably worded pitches on a Coronet until something sticks.
His facility with pat truths is most evident in “You Are Your Mother’s Child”, a song that bears an instant resemblance to I'm Wide Awake, It's Morning's* *homemade valentine “First Day of My Life” in its unadorned simplicity. It’s open-ended enough to be adopted by anyone who wants it to be about their child, but after a striking, writerly first verse, an adolescent’s all-American upbringing feels less like an actual person’s experience than it does a songwriting exercise. It could’ve been written about anyone, but it also could’ve been written by anyone.
But it couldn’t have been sung that way, and the saving grace of Upside Down Mountain is that it makes the case for Oberst as a truly unique and remarkable vocalist. Earlier in his career, his tremble, quaver and vibrato were seen as affectations of an amateur, but here they're all confidently and carefully utilized like a mastered instrument. For the most part, it gives character to gauzy C&W like “Double Life” and the chugga-chugga festival-folk of “Zigzagging Toward The Light”, but he still has a way of throwing in awkward phrases that stick in your craw like popcorn kernels*—*“Snickers bar”, “Japanese arcade”, “Klonopin eyes”, and the pronunciation of “parlour trick” to sound like “politrick.”
One line in particular stands out*—*“I stole all the rhinestones from Carolina/ And sold them out in Bakersfield for cash.” Maybe it’s playing to and against type as the rambling folk artist, since Carolina and Bakersfield are as real as it gets, even if they’re being used as placeholders. It's the kind of line Ryan Adams would unspool—a fitting association since Upside Down Mountain is essentially Oberst’s Ashes & Fire. It's gorgeous to the point of near gaudiness, a “return to form” after a strange decade evolving from wildly prolific, heartbreak soundtracking, Winona Ryder-dating enfant terrible into a domesticated Americana bard no longer interested in why to be young is to be sad. Hopefully, Oberst will find a way to make "older and wiser" just as revelatory. | 2014-05-19T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2014-05-19T02:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Nonesuch | May 19, 2014 | 6.5 | 0581d24a-c472-4b66-a817-f41f7d7fefa1 | Ian Cohen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ian-cohen/ | null |
The Chicago band's third LP features Sonic Youth's Steve Shelley as full-time drummer, and it's their most concise, commercial music to date. | The Chicago band's third LP features Sonic Youth's Steve Shelley as full-time drummer, and it's their most concise, commercial music to date. | Disappears: Pre Language | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/16343-pre-language/ | Pre Language | When Disappears took shelter in the 15-minute long "Revisiting" at the end of last year's Guider, it felt like they were on the cusp of pushing their music into an audacious new space. There were certainly plenty of associations that could be drawn between that song and other artists-- it fed off an unholy amalgam of the Stooges' grit, the blissful repetition of Can, the planet-sized riffing of Loop. But there was poise to it, a sense of all those elements running off one another to create a glorious noise, mapped out in a place you could retreat to and get lost in for days at a time. The touring undertaken to promote Guider brought Sonic Youth's Steve Shelley into the Chicago-based band's fold-- a natural fit for the eternally cyclical guitar lines singer Brian Case and Jonathan Van Herik were obsessing over at the time. Shelley returns on Pre Language, now a fully paid-up member of the band, on the most concise account of Disappears' music to date.
Instead of acting as a jumping-off point to something new, "Revisiting" has been treated as a dead end, a place where the group's fixation on repetition was shoved out to its natural brink. It's not altogether surprising to find Disappears acting this way. There was a strong shift in style between their 2010 debut, Lux, and Guider, from sweet-toothed guitar pop to the nihilistic Detroit 1969 abandon of tracks like "Halo". Pre Language is a further modification, with Case clearly keen to show off his Anglophile tendencies by channeling the Fall's Mark E. Smith on a number of songs ("Replicate", "Fear of Darkness"). Strangely, considering Shelley's involvement, there's also a whiff of 1990s alt-rock also-rans, the kind of acts that trailed in Sonic Youth's wake. "All Gone White" could be a track by long-forgotten St. Johnny, one of the many eyebrow-raising recipients of a major deal (at DGC) during the storied post-grunge feeding frenzy.
That same fate isn't likely to befall Disappears any time soon, but on Pre Language they are producing their most commercial work to date. When it peaks, on the forceful "Hibernation Sickness" and through the shivery guitars of "Brother Joliene", there's a natural buoyancy at work, with the band's psych impulses, pop flair, and scratchy guitar passages all working in tandem. But too often it slides into unremarkable sludge, making it feel like the blown-open sound and ambition of Guider isn't being capitalized on. "Minor Patterns" resembles an inconsequential Dandy Warhols album track when the chorus rolls in, wandering aimlessly in a haze of shoegazery fuzz. Even tracks that lean back into Disappears' trusted framework of repetition don't find the same kind of purpose as before, with "Love Drug" trudging aimlessly in place for much of its duration.
The fundamental difference between Pre Language and its predecessor is a sense of identity, that ability to turn obvious touchstones inside-out to land in a place easily defined as Disappears' own territory. This album feels more like a series of genre exercises, a place in which they occasionally work up a palpable tension, but never enough to make this more than an adequate diversion from the resources they're obviously sourcing. It's possible that "Revisiting" was so monolithic in size that it became something from which Disappears needed to make a hasty retreat, fearing such an exercise couldn't be equaled. There would certainly be no point in repeating something like that again. But there's heightened aspiration there, a sense of loosening the band's tightly wound sound to see where it would take them, bringing them to a place Pre Language doesn't arrive at often enough. | 2012-03-01T01:00:03.000-05:00 | 2012-03-01T01:00:03.000-05:00 | Rock | Kranky | March 1, 2012 | 6.2 | 05824ed7-d881-49c9-9a92-dfb2f02512b0 | Nick Neyland | https://pitchfork.com/staff/nick-neyland/ | null |
On their second album this year, the Netherlands-based Anatolian psych rockers push deeper into electronic pop, infusing traditional Turkish melodies with the spirit of disco. | On their second album this year, the Netherlands-based Anatolian psych rockers push deeper into electronic pop, infusing traditional Turkish melodies with the spirit of disco. | Altin Gün: Âlem | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/altin-gun-alem/ | Âlem | Perhaps there was no timestamped tipping point, but in the past few years, we leaned into the gossamer of 1970s and ’80s Europop imports, or off-continent paeans to its bombast and shine. The Mamma Mia! sequel reinvigorated the thirst for ABBA; the Bee Gees got their own HBO documentary. And while Anatolian psych-rockers Altin Gün made their name playing sprawling Turkish rock, their new album Âlem inches towards disco decadence, a melange of influences that makes a heady argument for joy.
Hailing from Turkey, Indonesia, and the Netherlands, the members of Altin Gün build something novel from a barrage of composite parts. Still, the facets bear identifying: In slow burner “Çarşambay Sel Aldı,” you could tease out Marvin Gaye’s “Sexual Healing,” pedal steel, and the plaintive wail of a tanbur. The mix is smooth as a drag of Gauloise, syrupy and unselfconsciously cool. That’s the general assessment of every track on Âlem, no matter how far-flung or ambitious. Album opener “Yali Yali,” a traditional song famously recorded by Neşe Karaböcek, could have fit onto the soundtrack to A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night, brooding and propulsive in spite (or because of) its aerobic ’80s synth. With few exceptions, Âlem sustains an atmosphere as fantastic as it is decadent. During certain bridges and ecstatic builds, it is a rebuke of ennui, a soundtrack for the main character in the movie of your life.
The album’s most winsome moments happen at the intersection of raw and refined. You can imagine the acrobatic vocals on “Malatya” or “Oğlan” sounding arresting even when unadorned, but the 808s and embellishments take what’s beautiful and render it prismatic. Where a track could be driving or lovely, it’s both; every earworm comes with a side of ambition. The band has pledged album revenue to the ecological charity Earth Today, and in combination, these sounds and their context evoke a global consciousness. Among the many translations of Âlem: “realm,” “universe,” and “orgy.”
A few imperfections dull the high shine. “Üzüm Üzüme Baka Baka,” a collaboration with Belgian duo Asa Moto, has its brighter moments but sometimes feels more like an extended jam session. The reggae-lite “Kisasa Kisas” pauses for breath just when it’s getting good, decelerating before the raucous “Badi Sabah Olmadan” races back uphill.
Is Âlem a record for the club or the planet? Is it more revealing to think of Altin Gün’s songwriting process as a form of scholarly exploration, a deep dive in the archives, or is it something more instinctual—a ode to the relevance and possibilities of Anatolian rock, Europop, synth rock, disco, and beyond? Studied or off the cuff, on the dancefloor or in the world at large, the result is the same: adventurous bangers without borders.
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-07-30T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2021-07-30T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | ATO | July 30, 2021 | 7.4 | 0589f7b6-c4c2-4394-98f6-8d5cf7faffda | Linnie Greene | https://pitchfork.com/staff/linnie-greene/ | |
In a collection of unreleased and rarely heard recordings, the French electronic music pioneer displays his mastery of an early proto-synthesizer. | In a collection of unreleased and rarely heard recordings, the French electronic music pioneer displays his mastery of an early proto-synthesizer. | Jean-Jacques Perrey: Jean-Jacques Perrey et son Ondioline | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/jean-jacques-perrey-jean-jacques-perrey-et-son-ondioline/ | Jean-Jacques Perrey et son Ondioline | In 1951, two years before Elvis Presley first entered a recording studio, a youthful Jean-Jacques Perrey made his recording debut on Charles Trenet’s “L'âme des Poètes.” He played a proto-synthesizer called the Ondioline that was known for its ability to mimic other instruments, as well as for its naturalistic vibrato, a result of the instrument being suspended on springs.
Jean-Jacques Perrey et son Ondioline, the first release on a new label from Gotye that is dedicated to uncovering lost works by pioneering musicians, rounds up Perrey’s work on the instrument, featuring unreleased tracks from his personal archives and selections from private-press releases. Given the role that Perrey, who died in 2016, would go on to play in popular music—inspiring the Beastie Boys and being sampled by Dr. Dre and Gang Starr, among others—it’s easy to make a case for this collection’s historical importance.
Important, though, doesn’t always equate with entertaining, and the latter half of this record, an extended demonstration of the Ondioline’s ability to recreate the sound of everything from the French horn to the banjo, feels more informative than it does engaging—particularly given that Perrey exhibited the Ondioline’s capabilities to far more amusing effect on a 1960 episode of the American TV show “I’ve Got a Secret.” By happy contrast, the opening 11 songs of this anthology are a riot: a collection of funkily weird, weirdly funky, and remarkably elegant Ondioline tracks that take in genres as disparate as chanson (“L'âme des Poètes”), galactic ambience (“Visa to the Stars”) and what we can only call barnyard funk (“Chicken on the Rocks,” based on the folk song “Chicken Reel”).
The Ondioline was, as the producers of “I’ve Got a Secret” clearly realized, a novelty. But the key to Perrey’s work, with the Ondioline and later with the Moog, was that he never treated it as such. Perrey was not interested in innovation for innovation’s sake; he used the Ondioline as a tool to help him create music that is sumptuous, extravagant, and soulful. It helps that Perrey was such a master of the instrument, known for his finesse in playing its keyboard with one hand while manipulating the filters with the other. You can hear the effect this produces on the semi-comic lament “Danielle of Amsterdam,” composed, arranged, and produced by long-time collaborator Angelo Badalamenti, where the changing tone of the Ondioline—from comical squawk to cosmic banjo via fairground organ—subtly alters the mood of the piece, nudging the song forward in a suitably dramatic fashion.
Elsewhere, Perrey uses the Ondioline to masterfully mimic a violin on “L'âme des Poètes”; impersonates the effect of falling stars on the beautifully far-out “Mars Reflector”; and teases the sound of pigs, ducks, and donkeys on the cartoonish “Barnyard in Orbit,” a song that gives ridiculousness a good name. By any standard, the Ondioline is an impressive machine, its slider switches and spring suspension capable of producing a dazzling array of velvety sounds. But Perrey is the one who makes it sing with sonorous electronic soul.
Along with these wonderful sounds are songs with a more cinematic feel, a few of which were actually used in films and commercials. “La Vache et le Prisonnier Main Theme (Excerpt)” is taken from the soundtrack to the French film of the same name, the haunting tones of the Ondioline lending pathos to the tale of a prisoner of war who escapes a German farm accompanied by a cow. “Danielle of Amsterdam” was adapted for the 1970s cop film Law and Disorder, where the song helped to bridge the movie’s mixture of comedy and drama. Similarly, “Cigale,” one of the few pieces of music written by the Ondioline’s inventor, Georges Jenny, may not have interested record labels at the time—it was unreleased until now—but you could easily imagine it soundtracking a doomed romantic encounter in a 1960s Parisian café, thanks to a sweeping, wonderfully morose Ondioline melody and a gorgeous change of key that sees Jenny’s compositional skills briefly steal the limelight back from the instrument he invented.
You could treat Jean-Jacques Perrey et son Ondioline as a history lesson, if you liked, with its rare and unreleased recordings cementing the instrument’s place in the annals of electronic music. Far better, though, to sit back, relax, and enjoy the enduring beauty of this record, whose sheer melodic delights eclipse its merely important qualities, much like Perrey’s Moog Indigo before it. Rather than a scratchy historical document, Jean-Jacques Perrey et son Ondioline is deceptively experimental music in the lineage of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop or Tomita: lush musical soundscapes that still come alive to modern ears, more than a half-century after they were recorded. | 2017-07-19T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-07-19T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Forgotten Futures | July 19, 2017 | 7.6 | 058d0f8b-8cbd-4194-a4ad-39c26c910737 | Ben Cardew | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ben-cardew/ | null |
The folk supergroup subtly recasts centuries of standards for our fractious and uncertain present. | The folk supergroup subtly recasts centuries of standards for our fractious and uncertain present. | Bonny Light Horseman: Bonny Light Horseman | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/bonny-light-horseman-bonny-light-horseman/ | Bonny Light Horseman | Bonny Light Horseman formed casually, like a front-porch jam. Fruit Bats singer Eric D. Johnson heard that his friends—veteran multi-instrumentalist Josh Kaufman and singer-songwriter Anaïs Mitchell—were getting together to revisit ancient folk songs. He asked to sit in on the experiment, and the chemistry was instant. On their self-titled debut, the trio reimagines centuries of standards for our fractious political climate, making old chestnuts feel new.
On first listen, these 10 performances may sound traditional, even staid, three dovetailing voices floating above bright acoustic guitars and ringing pianos. There are references to bygone wars and the bounty of a father’s garden, to the Biblical parable of prisoners Paul and Silas and the folk heroism of John Henry. If you’ve listened at all to English, Irish, or Appalachian folk music or any of their many revivals, you’ll spot familiar archetypes and icons. But Bonny Light Horseman gently cut these songs free from aging roots, transplanting them to the present.
The trio has more reverence for the flexibility of the oral tradition than the songs it has produced. They splice together bits of old numbers into new ones, drop or add verses, and relocate antediluvian sagas into Stateside settings. The tune that gave the trio their name, for instance, is a lover’s lament for a dead soldier, killed during the Napoleonic Wars. Mitchell spent years recontextualizing folk tropes before her myth-plundering Hadestown became a Broadway hit, and here, she sings a version that lambastes Napoleon by name but scrubs other historic details. This version excoriates all-powerful leaders who dispatch the powerless to their death; as strongmen worldwide foment new nationalism, her rendition feels as much like a warning as a plea.
“Mountain Rain” exquisitely recasts the ballad of John Henry—a steel driver who battled his mechanized rival to victory and death—as the unionized lament of his coworkers. “West Virginians, hammer in the morning/Hammer in the mountain rain,” Johnson sings, giving voice to workers who didn’t want to die just to prove their worth. You can imagine artificial intelligence and the threat of automation, coming around the Great Bend into a new millennium.
The settings meet these lyrical revisions halfway. Bonny Light Horseman reimagine the gospel song “Children, Go Where I Send Thee” under the name “Jane Jane,” making the tedious structure of the “counting song” feel miraculously breezy. Cock your head just right, and the layered acoustic and electric guitars even sparkle like Steve Reich’s Electric Counterpoint for Pat Metheny. At the surface, “Magpie’s Nest” is a pastoral beauty, Johnson crooning of idealized love over graceful guitars. But listen to the furtive cymbals, brooding saxophones, and moaning organ—they infuse the song with the same
sophisticated blues that drifts through Johnson's yearning voice.
This revisionism peaks during the timely “Black Waterside.” For decades, “Down by Blackwaterside” has been the currency of British folk, passed, for instance, from Anne Briggs to Bert Jansch to Led Zeppelin. In the classic version, a young maiden sleeps with a deceitful man who woos her through empty promises of marriage. Bonny Light Horseman turn it into a duet, with Mitchell nailing the role of the naif and Johnson serving as an omniscient narrator. They linger on a frequently omitted last line—“’Tis then he’ll marry me,” sending it up like a wail from the edge of madness. If the standard “Blackwaterside” is pitiful, this one quietly seethes, cloaking a hint of vengeance behind a pretty voice.
Mitchell, Kaufman, and Johnson have rarely sounded better than they do together, locked inside these scenes with the intimacy of siblings. Late in the album, though, a new voice arrives—Bon Iver’s Justin Vernon, who co-owns the festival and label where Bonny Light Horseman made their live and recorded debuts. Over dusky piano, the temporary quartet trades the lines of “Bright Morning Stars,” a wondrous Appalachian spiritual about the heartbreak and hopefulness of mortality that’s undergone a late renaissance. Their call-and-response interplay is gorgeous, but it feels like a well-meaning intrusion during someone else’s deep conversation. Mitchell and Johnson rejoin one another for the finale “10,000 Miles,” a ballad about longing for a lover during some Odyssean journey. Their voices fit together so perfectly it’s possible at last to believe in such a star-crossed fantasy.
Buy: Rough Trade
(Pitchfork may earn a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.) | 2020-01-29T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2020-01-29T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock / Folk/Country | 37d03d | January 29, 2020 | 7.8 | 0590f92f-bdbe-4f32-9660-4b6b36fadd4e | Grayson Haver Currin | https://pitchfork.com/staff/grayson-haver currin/ | |
Following the departure of Jason Isbell, Drive-By Truckers' remaining primary songwriters, Patterson Hood and Mike Cooley, offer a brilliant study in duality, as-- seemingly in conversation with one another-- they weigh the respective pulls of decadence and dependability. | Following the departure of Jason Isbell, Drive-By Truckers' remaining primary songwriters, Patterson Hood and Mike Cooley, offer a brilliant study in duality, as-- seemingly in conversation with one another-- they weigh the respective pulls of decadence and dependability. | Drive-By Truckers: Brighter Than Creation's Dark | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/11080-brighter-than-creations-dark/ | Brighter Than Creation's Dark | As guys wrestle with the encroaching responsibilities of work and family, they still often romanticize or cling to their shit-kicking youth; the Drive-By Truckers' principal songwriters, Patterson Hood and Mike Cooley, represent each side of this coin. Using the broadest strokes imaginable, gravelly and grizzly Hood is the endlessly vigilant, fiercely protective papa bear, while laconic slick-talker Cooley the hell-raising, yarn-spinning fuck-up.
There's always been plenty of wiggle room on either side, of course (Cooley's tensely domestic "Loaded Gun in the Closet", Hood's ball-busting "Aftermath USA"), but with the departure of talented third songwriter Jason Isbell, DBT's two founding members solidify their positions within the group on its seventh studio album, Brighter Than Creation's Dark. What at first blush might sound like unhealthy entrenchment turns out to be a brilliant study in duality, as Cooley and Hood-- seemingly in conversation with one another-- weigh the respective pulls of decadence and dependability.
The more conventional, traditional Cooley may not win as many critical plaudits as the idiosyncratic Hood, but he's outclassed his comrade over the group's last two, uneven records, contributing gems like "Where the Devil Don't Stay" and "Space City" while Hood was busy handing out self-help bromides. A tougher, smarter, funnier version of the prototypical alt-country gunslinger, Cooley's in rare wise-cracking form this time around, unspooling quick-witted, sin-soaked vignettes of colorful loners and losers that hearken back to DBT's pre-Southern Rock Opera incarnation as supreme underground redneck jokesters. "Bob" and "Lisa's Birthday" are both superbly funny character sketches (sorry, no Leon Kompowski cameo on the latter), while "Self Destructive Zones" offers a head-spinning, sardonically knowing tour of the past 20 years of angst-rock. But Cooley's most welcome contribution might be the blistering "3 Dimes Down", a loose-limbed groover from a story-centric band that's too often a lumbering musical beast.
While brother-in-arms Cooley tosses off seemingly effortless odes to fast cars and booze-fueled loving, Hood is still busy being the Tony Soprano of southern rock, an imposing man's man who nonetheless opens up his rawest emotional wounds for inspection. Bathos may have burdened much of his songwriting post-SRO, but Hood sounds reborn here thanks to a newly crystallized focus-- fatherhood. In a less emotionally seasoned songwriter's hands such frequent invocations of dads and kids might seem like a gimmick, but Hood has long been amused, compelled, and inspired by the family, going back to "Zoloft", "Sink Hole", and the immortal "The Southern Thing". Here though, Hood's hearth-honed eye is specifically trained on children, the ones we try to support and protect ("The Righteous Path", "Goode's Field Road"), and the ones we sometimes tragically leave behind. Such is the self-excoriating scenario that drives the war-themed "That Man I Shot", wherein our protagonist kills an enemy combatant and can't help wondering about the little ones he may have rendered fatherless. That emotional crescendo is followed closely by the similarly pained "The Home Front", which tautly conveys the worry of a wife and mother waiting for her man to come back from battle.
It's a mostly harrowing cycle that Hood has woven in the midst of Cooley's debauched ditties (with first-time frontwoman Shonna Tucker striking an equitable balance with her three appropriately gritty but generically sung contributions), but it's not all fatherly hand-wringing, thanks at least to the succinctly-phrased ode to decompression, "Daddy Needs a Drink". Irresponsible rabble-rouser or put-upon parent, that's a sentiment every grown-ass man can appreciate. | 2008-01-25T01:00:01.000-05:00 | 2008-01-25T01:00:01.000-05:00 | Rock | New West | January 25, 2008 | 8.2 | 05937db2-2527-4844-9d36-210e5d66069c | Joshua Love | https://pitchfork.com/staff/joshua-love/ | null |
Buffalo producer Daringer’s austere music spotlights Meyhem Lauren’s phonetic idiosyncrasies. For the first time in years, the Queens rapper is an unequivocal headliner. | Buffalo producer Daringer’s austere music spotlights Meyhem Lauren’s phonetic idiosyncrasies. For the first time in years, the Queens rapper is an unequivocal headliner. | Meyhem Lauren / Daringer: Black Vladimir | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/mayhem-lauren-daringer-black-vladimir/ | Black Vladimir | As New York City enters its fourth decade of real estate speculation and cultural diffusion, the term “New York original” connotes anachronism as much as innovation. A New York original is a throwback to the days of accents and attitude, when the city was defined by characters and vice versa. For Queens rapper Meyhem Lauren, the designation fits. A larger-than-life street rhymer with a penchant for luxury brands, he pokes fun at rap tropes while maintaining reverence for hip-hop canon; his inflection is so non-rhotic, he sounds almost British. He embodies Biggie’s kingpin persona and linguistic alacrity with none of the finesse, bulldozing through couplets preposterous enough to make Paul Barman blush. Lauren is Barry Manilow to Roc Marciano’s Rod Stewart, his showmanship bordering on absurdism.
Embellishment is the order of the day on Black Vladimir, a full-length outing with Buffalo producer Daringer. As ever, Lauren sticks to the four Fs: food, fashion, flights, and fornication. “Black Pinot” alights on ancient Greece: “People fuck up, they say you changin’ if you don’t forgive ’em/I just forget ’em ’cause we movin’ at a different rhythm/Absorbin’ wisdom from the Socrates Prison/As I breeze through the Acropolis, my life is never profitlеss.” Daringer’s piano loop is almost simplistic in its austerity, but it foregrounds Lauren’s unmistakable locution—you can picture the mangled vowels escaping from his mouth.
In less inspired moments, Lauren gets by on his gruff voice—but Black Vladimir ranks among his more accomplished technical offerings. On “Red Pesto,” his alliterative multis render Conway’s guest bars modest by comparison; the emphatic syllable placement of “Chicken Chinese” breaks the pace of the album’s first half. A consummate shit-talker, Lauren writes in a way that’s governed by phonetics more than any narrative concern. “Lavish Vision” is a grab bag of free-associative spontaneity (“My closet’s like a down payment on a duplex/Anytime I’m headed outside, I’m gettin’ new sex”) interspersed with enigmatic disjointedness (“I’m outside, my flesh lookin’ radiant/I’m okay, my life is a gradient”). He hits for power as opposed to average, but even his groaners (“I’m eatin’ broccoli rabe, you get robbed for your broccoli”) are good for laughs.
In spite of their flinty source material, Black Vladimir’s instrumentals assume an ambient quality. An architect of Griselda’s early triumphs, Daringer loops one- and two-bar samples with minimal deviation, a departure from Harry Fraud and DJ Muggs’s ornate production on Lauren’s most recent projects. He conjures a grainy noirscape on “Conflict Resolution,” stretching oboe and horns across an understated bassline. Although the drums on “Nigerian Vegetables” are barely perceptible, the organ takes on a percussive quality when paired with Lauren’s quixotic bars (“Internal Revenue Services is my only obstacle/Grew up out Jamaica Hospital, now life is tropical”). There aren’t any show-stoppers to speak of, but the unobtrusive music spotlights Lauren’s idiosyncrasies—for the first time in years, he’s an unequivocal headliner.
This is a golden age for forty-something tri-state loudmouths, and Lauren fits better in today’s scene than the soupy, navel-gazey blog-rap era in which he first arrived. On Black Vladimir, he’s exactly who he’s always been: a colorful if one-dimensional B-lister with a deep Rolodex. If the novelty eventually wears thin, Lauren and his stable of Queens County mavericks—Action Bronson, Hologram, Big Body Bes—have refined their craft, and the blunt Griselda sound suits them as well as any. Meyhem is still more stylist than trailblazer, but that’s all modern-day New York asks. | 2022-09-07T00:01:00.000-04:00 | 2022-09-07T00:01:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Black Truffle Enterprises | September 7, 2022 | 7.1 | 0594dfb5-3adb-41b3-88d7-921a26468d01 | Pete Tosiello | https://pitchfork.com/staff/pete-tosiello/ | |
These magnificent reissues of English art-rock innovators Talk Talk's 1991 final record Laughing Stock and their reclusive leader Mark Hollis' 1998 self-titled solo album are presented on immaculate vinyl. They sound as good as these albums have ever sounded, in any format. | These magnificent reissues of English art-rock innovators Talk Talk's 1991 final record Laughing Stock and their reclusive leader Mark Hollis' 1998 self-titled solo album are presented on immaculate vinyl. They sound as good as these albums have ever sounded, in any format. | Talk Talk / Mark Hollis: Laughing Stock / Mark Hollis | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/15957-laughing-stock-mark-hollis/ | Laughing Stock / Mark Hollis | There are many ways for a band to follow up a hit. None of them is guaranteed to work, but some are more likely than others to flop, artistically or otherwise. This reissue of Talk Talk's final album, 1991's Laughing Stock, presented here without any distracting "bonuses" on immaculate vinyl, helps tells the story of Talk Talk's fraught, exhausting, confounding, brave, and ultimately brilliant final act. (There's also a postscript, in the form of frontman Mark Hollis' solo album, but we'll get to that.) Though you're more likely to describe Laughing Stock as lovely or otherworldly or even gentle, in its way it's as uncompromising as any apocalyptic noise record. And in a weird way it exists only because Talk Talk were at one time a hit-making pop band.
Formed in 1981, by 1986 Talk Talk were enjoying the biggest sales and best reviews of their short career, thanks to their third album, The Colour of Spring. Having started out as a moodier-than-average synth-pop act-- Duran Duran with the glitz and hedonism swapped out for nervous jitters and existential dread-- they'd transformed into the avant-garde edge of 1980s M.O.R. Even at their most acceptance-hungry, there'd always been something faintly left-of-center about Talk Talk, from Mark Hollis' haunted and word-swallowing singing to the musical hints that the band was more interested in 1970s prog than 80s dance-rock. On The Colour of Spring, the big, romantic ballads were still there, but they were strangely muted. They had an eerie jazz-like minimalism and attention to atmosphere that suggested an appreciation for Eno's ambient records.
This canny mix, stadium-friendly melodrama in an experimental but not too out-there package, paid greater commercial dividends than probably anyone would have guessed. With EMI's accounting department more than pleased, the label gave Talk Talk carte blanche to make any damned album they wished. The result was the band's fourth album, 1988's Spirit of Eden. Talk Talk took up this new freedom with a perverse relish, racking up countless hours and major dollars recording Spirit, a gorgeous but amorphous epic that proved that ruthless quiet could be just as difficult as ear-harassing volume. Talk Talk took this go-ahead from their label as their chance, possibly their last, to explore their truly envelope-pushing ideas, rather than the hints they'd offered on Spring.
By the time of Spirit, Talk Talk had fully rejected the sleek and kitschily futuristic music that first brought then to prominence. In its place, they crafted an immersive and ever-flowing style, alternately hushed and loud, lush and arid. It was a brand of unashamed art rock that was completely out of step with both the underground's unkempt roar and the manicured mainstream. Jazz became a more major component than ever, both in the overall style of playing, especially drummer Lee Harris' steady and cymbal-heavy swing, but also in the band's increasingly complex and usually improvised interaction. These improvisations were stitched together after the fact into what sound like carefully thought-out compositions that still somehow vibrate with the surprise of in-the-moment exploration. Which partly explains how "I Believe in You", Hollis' most comprehensible performance on an album where a lyric sheet is very necessary, can feel like a singer-songwriter ballad floating in and out of a swirl that evokes avant-classical at its least forbidding and electric jazz at its most beatific.
This genre-blurring fearlessness, along with the way Spirit and Laughing Stock bloom from extreme quiet to extreme loudness only to slowly recede again, is why these albums get tagged as precursors to post-rock, when no post-rock albums much resemble them in sound, construction, or especially ambition. Talk Talk use ideas from jazz and classical to build the subtlest gradations of drama. But despite the restraint, it's also not polite, musically or otherwise.
Hands were wrung on a corporate level over Spirit. Some old fans understandably balked, though new fans did gradually accumulate. An note of puzzlement could be read in the press notices, whether they offered praise or derision. The band decamped to Polydor and made an even more opaque fifth and final album, using much the same methodology as on Spirit and seeming to give even less of a shit about how it would all be received.
This is the oft-repeated and probably too-pat story that gave Talk Talk a second life as fame-spurning and journey-hardened underground icons. But it's also not hard to understand why the band broke up after Laughing Stock, or was simply broken. There's more going on in these six tracks than on Spirit, but the song structures are even stranger, built up from the tiniest musical gestures, clashing in mood from track to track, frequently more improvised-sounding than ever. The goal, assembling a coherent album from all this stuff, probably seemed quixotic to many of the contributors as it was being made. The recording process has long been described as one of the most arduous and prone to control freakitude ever. The band members were probably relieved to dissolve Talk Talk, move on to less demanding projects, or recede back into private life, once Laughing Stock was finished, despite the monumentality of what they finally made.
And it remains wholly singular, however many indie rock bands and experimental composers have genuflected toward it over the last 20 years. The half-dozen songs on Laughing Stock feel discrete, complete-unto-themselves, each one a little world that doesn't always seem to have much to do with the song that precedes or follows it. The underwater glide of "New Grass" is Talk Talk as a purely placid and lovely proposition, electric organ and lilting guitar endlessly circling around Harris' heartbeat-steady drumming, recalling the tranquility threatened with an edge of disquiet in Robert Wyatt's early solo work. "Ascension Day" remains the band's most chaotic and vicious song, like a small jazz combo being elbowed aside by a noise-rock band, with a climactic barrage of drumming that falls on your ears like an avalanche before the audible tape-splice cuts it dead. But even in this assault you can hear the monomaniacal care and craft that went into assembling and recording Laughing Stock, from the full-bodied throb of the upright bass to the little twitches and groans of horror-movie music lurking in the background on the verses. Laughing Stock was Talk Talk at their most demanding, and when listening to the spectral free jazz squeal of "Taphead", you understand why it was saddled for so many years with the "difficult" epithet.
The Laughing Stock reissue sounds amazing, as good as the album's ever sounded, in any format. Which is crucial, because on some level Talk Talk's later albums are all about sound. How startling, isolated moments of sound, or a formless wash of sound, can wring emotions out of listeners as powerfully as any conventional melody. How the ambient sound of the room in which an album was recorded can be used almost as instrument in itself, and how the studio can be used to create a sense of environment in the listener's mind that has nothing to do with recording booths and control decks. How far the sound of a rock song can be pared back and loosened up and still be "rock," or even still be "a song." And especially how sound can become all the more powerful when surrounded by silence, great gulfs of which are all over the later Talk Talk albums, especially Laughing Stock, captured here in a remarkable vinyl mastering job on Ba Da Bing's part.
Seven years after Laughing Stock, and seven years into the band's slow word-of-mouth rehabilitation from pretentious flop to shining example for independent artists, Mark Hollis returned with a completely unexpected solo album, which seemed to almost sneak out into the real world rather than be "released" with the usual promotional fanfare. Part of this feeling comes from Hollis' almost Salinger-grade rejection of celebrity, journalism, the industry, even making art for public consumption. (Talk Talk virtually disappeared as a public entity from Spirit onward, leaving the records to do most of the talking.) But it also comes from the startlingly private sound of Mark Hollis itself, like the kind of painful, personal document that's usually released only after the artist's death.
Where Laughing Stock creates multiple environments, Mark Hollis is intimate, almost shockingly so. Hollis often sings as if he's right up against your ear, at a volume designed to not wake spouses and small children. Listening, you often feel like you're eavesdropping on a musician working in the supposed seclusion of his home. Indeed, like few other records I know-- maybe Panda Bear's Young Prayer and Arthur Russell's World of Echo-- Mark Hollis creates the sensation that you're very much in the room where it was recorded.
But where those albums sounded very much like thrifty, one-man-band operations, Mark Hollis draws on a cast of musicians almost as large as Laughing Stock, and in their own self-consciously restricted way, these songs are as dramatic as anything on that album. Certainly they're as immersive, if only because you have to listen so closely, thanks to the lower-than-low-volume approach to recording and playing, in order to follow the even more classical-informed logic of their movement, whole songs carried by just an oblique dance of woodwinds or a long-decaying string melody. Over its eight minutes, "A Life (1895-1915)" plays like a novel whittled down to a haiku, tracing one WWI soldier's tragic arc from birth to early death on the battlefield, with Hollis' barely audible voice at the song's end communicating as much ache as any of his more full-throated performances. If the hermetic Laughing Stock was a scaling back of the wide-open grandeur of Spirit of Eden, then Mark Hollis is an even more radical reduction of scale.
So it's no surprise that Hollis has been publicly silent ever since, since silence always seems to be where the songs on Mark Hollis want to go, as if it took great effort to even decide to commit these particular sounds to tape. Perhaps Hollis just feels that he's said everything he had to say. Or perhaps he's still deliberating as to what, if anything, he's comfortable with releasing next. Unlike many reclusive musicians, though, you won't feel that Hollis absented himself before his overall project was completed. These albums still stand a good chance of alienating you, but if you find yourself vibrating sympathetically to them, there's enough mystery and beauty in them to sustain a lifetime's listening, whether Hollis or Talk Talk ever record another note. | 2011-10-21T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2011-10-21T02:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | null | October 21, 2011 | 10 | 05984498-70df-453a-a70f-f1b25847a15f | Jess Harvell | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jess-harvell/ | null |
On Peripheral Vision, Turnover move past their pop punk origins into sighing, wistful indie*.* The best songs still sound like Turnover’s application to Captured Tracks finishing school, but retain pop punk’s main lyrical drivers of social and sexual insecurity. | On Peripheral Vision, Turnover move past their pop punk origins into sighing, wistful indie*.* The best songs still sound like Turnover’s application to Captured Tracks finishing school, but retain pop punk’s main lyrical drivers of social and sexual insecurity. | Turnover: Peripheral Vision | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/20446-peripheral-vision/ | Peripheral Vision | Though it’s a warm and often gentle record, not much about Turnover's Peripheral Vision is subtle. Start with the cover, which is a pretty girl in a field, her image washed out, soaked in amber and obscured by a spiderwebbed glass. She’s real, but she’ll be forever out of reach, and this is exactly the kind of feeling Turnover evoke over and over again here, with just enough reverb and treated guitar to create distance and depth around every pensive daydream. If you’re into the idea of planning a mix to commemorate the girl that will get away, there's about seven songs here that can get you started.
Quite the coincidence that Peripheral Vision shares a very similar name as Title Fight’s risky, triumphant reinvention Hyperview, as well as its producer. In each instance, a traditionalist punk band goes headfirst into more aqueous forms of indie rock, but retain qualities which put them at an advantage over the countless wan, limp bands who decided to sound like the Smiths from the beginning.
In Turnover's case, their pop punk past is nipping at their heels: Their self-titled debut EP justly earned the tag, and even after 2013’s Magnolia smoothed out some of their more Warped Tour affectations, they were doing shows with Dashboard Confessional 2.0, This Wild Life, and the perpetually short-pantsed, hair-gelled schlubs in New Found Glory as recently as last month. But you can tell that they come to their new sound from a realm that prizes vocal, lyrical and sonic clarity—Austin Getz's vocals are unusually upfront and legible for this style of music, and Will Yip’s production is crystalline and sleek. "Radio-friendly" is mostly theoretical in 2015, but Yip tends to work with bands who've managed to find young, dedicated, merch-buying audiences who still believe in the idea of big-tent alternative rock as a refuge.
And so you hear a lot of atypically crowd-pleasing, extroverted maneuvers here—the gorgeous opening reverie of "Cutting My Fingers Off" is blown open by a bridge of pulse-quickening drum rolls similar to Brand New’s "Sic Transit Gloria…" or any given Explosions in the Sky song. The chorus of "Take My Head" is florid, AP English self-pity delivered as a pop punk shout-along, "Humming" is sophisticated bedsit pop that expresses the same desires as "Dixieland Delight" or "Chattahoochee", minus the geographical signifiers.
But just as often, the gap between where Turnover is and where they want to be is painfully obvious. Throughout, Getz's lyrics are either effective or seriously awkward and there’s very little in between. He's earnest enough when he's fussing over his transition into adulthood ("New Scream", "Hello Euphoria"), but just as often, he's reading off Robert Smith flashcards, his imagery full of dissolution, disintegration, dizziness, disappearance and descent—you get pretty much all of the above during "Dizzy on the Comedown", which reveals the wisdom of bands like Wild Nothing who purposefully go blank on lyrics.
Despite its stylistic reverence, Peripheral Vision can actually be novel when Turnover most resemble their previous incarnation. On "Diazepam", Getz emasculates himself as a preemptive strike against the inevitable—"Your father doesn’t like me ‘cause I’m not into sports/ And your mother won’t approve because I’m not of the cross/ I took an upper before your sister’s wedding just to help me pretend," creating a heretofore-unfathomable nexus between Blink-182 and Galaxie 500. And then there’s "I Would Hate You If I Could". Think of your favorite Real Estate song. One of the really chill ones like "Green Aisles" or "Pool Swimmers". And then, instead of a chorus reminiscing about the simple, bittersweet pleasures of suburban life or the challenges of fatherhood, how about the bitter memories of rough sex with your ex, pinning her against the wall and trying not to wake her roommates. They still sound like Turnover’s application to Captured Tracks finishing school, but retain pop punk’s main lyrical drivers of social and sexual insecurity.
It's hard to figure out an appropriate emotional reaction to the raw, honest, and unsympathetic character in "I Would Hate You If I Could". Perhaps the message is that even as your tastes in music mature, getting fucked over in a relationship hurts as much as it does when you’re 16. That’s not supposed to be the enduring message of Peripheral Vision, at least not according to Getz. He explained the album’s overarching theme as, "I always remember things better than they were and miss people more than I should." Those are the feelings this music is meant to convey, but as a document of a young band in a sharp and tricky growth spurt, Peripheral Vision still can’t hide how messy and complicated real life can get. | 2015-05-06T02:00:04.000-04:00 | 2015-05-06T02:00:04.000-04:00 | Rock | Run for Cover | May 6, 2015 | 6.6 | 05992b2a-8966-4f50-a749-251c6358d15e | Ian Cohen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ian-cohen/ | null |
Citing albums by Kraftwerk, Joy Division, and Roxy Music as influences, the Gutter Twins/ex-Screaming Trees vocalist's first solo album since 2004 incorporates drum machines and oozing synths into the mix. | Citing albums by Kraftwerk, Joy Division, and Roxy Music as influences, the Gutter Twins/ex-Screaming Trees vocalist's first solo album since 2004 incorporates drum machines and oozing synths into the mix. | Mark Lanegan Band: Blues Funeral | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/16253-blues-funeral/ | Blues Funeral | If you value melody and visceral thrills as a listener, it must be weird to see critics engage with the latest Tom Waits, Bob Dylan, and Leonard Cohen records as if they're park rangers describing protected national treasures-- they tend to speak solely in terms of topography, remarking upon jagged outcroppings and bottomless lodes of capital-t Truth hidden in those crevasses created by years of erosion from hard living and hard liquor. Me, I don't necessarily give growling old white men the presumption of wisdom. Point being that even though Mark Lanegan will be all but grandfathered into that Hall of Fame in 20 years and will look swarthy in men's magazines proclaiming Blues Funeral to be the testosterone-boosting antidote to wimpy indie rock and fashionista hip-hop, he has every bit the obligation to avoid cliché and actually come up with good songs as everybody else. Can an album named Blues Funeral, of all things, actually make good on that?
Unfortunately, it's closer to something like Machete, where the majority of the pleasure was derived from seeing grizzled and badass charcter actor Danny Trejo doing grizzled and badass things in a lead role, plot or character development be damned. But then again, that voice. It really is something to behold-- while the aforementioned greats have vocals that are nearly utilitarian in function, worn down to an essentialist nub, Lanegan's is as lustrous, supple, and thoroughly American as a well-oiled baseball mitt. When given the proper material-- which in the past has often come from wisely chosen collaborators such as Greg Dulli, Isobel Campbell, Josh Homme, and PJ Harvey-- the results are almost invariably powerful on a sheer physical level. Do lyrics like, "With piranha teeth/ I've been dreamin' of you," sound any less ridiculous than they look on paper? Not really, but it's the impossibly thick riffs and Jack Irons' feral drumming that drives "The Gravedigger's Song" toward Queens of the Stone Age's hot zone between the monster-truck muscle and race-car seduction.
Lanegan doesn't stay in there long. Based on title alone, it's tough to associate "Bleeding Muddy Water" with any word besides "turgid," but the six minutes of the song itself, much of which finds Lanegan leaning hard on a line like "loooooord, now the rain done come" without creating context for its payoff, is more than content to follow suit, becoming one of Blues Funeral's many dirges that simply drag. But even the more uptempo material is hamstrung by strangely dated production that makes it come off like one of those "genre bending" roots rock albums from 1999 that tried to incorporate electronica and hip-hop touches. As a result, Blues Funeral sounds adrift both sonically and lyrically, chippy drum machines and oozing synths backing Lanegan's verbal merry-go-round of rising suns, avenging gods, and pitiless oceans. Something like the crawling blooze of "St. Louis Elegy" should be hard as nails, and its chorus of, "If tears were liquor/ I'd have drunk myself sick," tries to get there. But it's an exemplary Lanegan lyric in how repetition reveals its inherent clumsiness rather than depth. And while mentions of whisky are never too far away from descriptions of Lanegan's output, amidst the pumped-up kick drums and soloing guitars that never stop once during "Riot in My House", you feel like some retired NFL coach is about to give you a lecture on the significance of widemouth cans and frost brew liners.
Though a mixed bag, Blues Funeral does have its moments: "Ode to Sad Disco" is ostensibly the furthest stretch for Lanegan, a chintzy New Romantic backing that immediately recalls Erasure's "Chains of Love" and flows easily where the similarly lengthy epics on Blues Funeral buckle under their own assumed weight. As a song, it's nothing amazing, but more important is the acknowledgement that it "works." Weirdly, the less overt the stunt casting, the more awkward it sounds: "Harborview Hospital" and "Deep Black Vanishing Train" have seemingly the most personal and poetic lyrics on Blues Funeral, but their dime-thin orchestral arrangements hew closer to Collective Soul's "Run" than resonance. And while "Quiver Syndrome" isn't too far away from the Brit Invasion bands that influenced Screaming Trees, it's the one time Lanegan is simply overwhelmed by the jet-setter production: Competing with disembodied female "ooh-oohs" and laser-light sound effects, Lanegan huffs, "The moon don't smile on Saturday's child/ Lyin' still in Elysian fields/ I don't know what the doctor he did/ Now I'm all day long with my body in bed," like a winded Lizard King, proof that surrealistic nonsense can become its own kind of cliché.
Lanegan recently gave an interview to the Quietus where he namedropped albums by the Bee Gees, Kraftwerk, Joy Division, and the Gun Club as lifelong influences-- while it humanizes Lanegan in a way his obtuse and daunting lyrics rarely attempt to, it also makes you wish he went even further on Blues Funeral, so it could risk spectacular failure rather than mild disappointment. Indeed, Blues Funeral isn't ever bad per se, or even unlistenable. But back on Screaming Trees' 1996 album Dust, Lanegan sang, "all along, I've been a traveler," and while he's done an often-admirable job of embodying that mission statement, the drifter isn't so compelling when they sound as directionless as he does here*.* | 2012-02-07T01:00:01.000-05:00 | 2012-02-07T01:00:01.000-05:00 | Rock | 4AD | February 7, 2012 | 5.9 | 059c58a0-fd1c-43ce-b5bc-135b9b801223 | Ian Cohen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ian-cohen/ | null |
The Venezuelan singer-songwriter’s 11th album tackles grief and melancholia with the kind of endearing eccentricity only he can. | The Venezuelan singer-songwriter’s 11th album tackles grief and melancholia with the kind of endearing eccentricity only he can. | Devendra Banhart: Flying Wig | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/devendra-banhart-flying-wig/ | Flying Wig | Devendra Banhart has never shied away from the esoteric. On “Für Hildegard von Bingen,” from 2013’s Mala, he recast the eponymous 12th-century Christian mystic as a “VJ on rotation” over a playful disco-rock groove. “María Lionza,” from 2009’s What Will We Be, is a dreamlike guitar and saxophone instrumental that references the Venezuelan syncretic deity by name. For Banhart’s 11th album Flying Wig, the once-king of freak folk softens his purview into something resembling a meditative peace chant. Produced by Welsh art-rock songwriter Cate Le Bon, the 10-track collection tackles heartbreak, forgiveness, and melancholia. Taking inspiration from “This Dewdrop World,” a poem by Japanese lay Buddhist priest and “Great Four” haiku master Kobayashi Issa, Banhart approaches somber themes with whimsy. Songs about losing phone chargers, or tales written from the perspective of nuns on the run, take on unexpectedly profound meanings.
While Flying Wig does indeed ascend, it never quite lands on solid ground—which feels like the whole point. Here, the one-time king of freak folk continues his avoidance of the campfire setting and acoustic instrumentation of his early work in favor of ethereal, synth-driven cuts and sleepy slacker rock. The focus on synthesizers results in a warm and pervasive hum, a floaty fantasia that threatens—in gentle, low whispers—to nod off at any moment.
Banhart’s first solo record in four years is funny and endearingly weird, even as it sings of life’s heaviness. The influence of Le Bon, who also played synth, guitar, percussion, bass, and piano on the album, is palpable in the slow-thudding drum machines on “Fireflies” (which plays out like a Beach House B-side) and quietly anthemic single “Twin,” both bolstered by a droning synth. Banhart has praised Le Bon for pushing him to new heights, and you can hear what he means in the album’s subtle moments of transcendence. “Charger” wraps a tender reflection of love lost in a silly, overarching metaphor (“It looks like I’ve lost my charger”) that gives way to a heavenly choir. On the title track, he assumes the perspective of a wig hanging off a mic stand, describing himself as “alone/Dancing naked/On an eye/Without a head.”
Banhart’s contemplative yet easygoing approach strikes a kind of surrealist gold. This levity isn’t new territory for him, but it allows Flying Wig’s strange images and Morphean soundscapes to vibrate on a higher plane. He also tapped into the divine feminine, donning a sky-blue Issey Miyake gown and his grandmother’s pearls throughout the recording process. The dress has been present at recent live shows, most notably last year’s Caracas’ Cusica Festival, his first-ever show in Venezuela. In press materials, Banhart explained that writing and singing in the dress parallels experiences from his childhood, when he would don his mother’s gowns: “It wasn’t about sexuality, just connecting with my feminine side and feeling that I had permission…It felt like a power. And that’s a very safe and comfortable place for me.” In its enveloping comfort, Flying Wig mirrors that feeling of safety.
Banhart has been drawing from queer aesthetics for years, a known follower of androgynous Haight-Ashbury ’60s collective the Cockettes who has set songs in the Castro district of San Francisco and written others as a femme. As he continues toying with gender, genre, open-hearted expression, and some of his most oblique songwriting yet, perhaps unintentionally, his work expounds on a crucial tenet of queerness: liberation in lightness and in unabashed optimism. | 2023-09-26T00:01:00.000-04:00 | 2023-09-25T00:02:00.000-04:00 | Folk/Country / Experimental | Mexican Summer | September 26, 2023 | 6.9 | 059d2da1-5ea4-4a0f-beb4-756ae80859bd | E.R. Pulgar | https://pitchfork.com/staff/e.r.-pulgar/ | |
Hey, did you hear? Hip-hop is a world phenomenon now! Yes, spend some time poking around your favorite music magazine ... | Hey, did you hear? Hip-hop is a world phenomenon now! Yes, spend some time poking around your favorite music magazine ... | The Streets: Original Pirate Material | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/7531-original-pirate-material/ | Original Pirate Material | Hey, did you hear? Hip-hop is a world phenomenon now! Yes, spend some time poking around your favorite music magazine's website and I'm sure you'll find a heavy handful of hip-hop-gone-global thinkpieces. Read profiles of angstful teenagers rapping about life in Israeli-occupied Palestine, Cuban kids protesting the oppressive state police in rhyme, even Greenland b-boys composing bouncy anthems about caribou and snow.
So it should come as no surprise that the British, notorious for chewing on our music before spitting it back over the Atlantic in a shiny, new form, have also turned their sun-starved faces to the arena of hip-hop. There's just one small problem: simply put, British accents just don't sound particularly right in the context of syncopated rap-speech. To put my tweed linguistics jacket on, the American tendency to cheat on pronunciation fits in perfectly with the wordplay of hip-hop, while the stubborn British habit of perfectly enunciating every syllable makes things sound rather, well, formal. Or to put my Degrassi Jr. High pop culture jacket on, British rap can't help sounding like the dope flow of the immortal Murray Head on "One Night in Bangkok."
Which is why the first time you put on Original Pirate Material, you might find it awfully hysterical-- especially if the name had you assuming it was going to be another Strokesian garage act. The giggles will eventually give way to a bit of discomfort at the slightly awkward delivery-- the words here are jammed into measures like an overstuffed couch. You'll wince at a chorus like, "Geezers need excitement/ If their lives don't provide it, then they incite violence/ Common sense, simple common sense," bursting at the seams of its tempo. Then, about 48 hours later, you'll realize it still hasn't left your head.
One-man MC/DJ package Mike Skinner has an obvious talent for forging damn sharp hip-pop hooks that supercede his inherent verbal handicap. Unashamedly revealing a taste for 80s soft rock, the smooth-sung chorus and reverbed Rhodes of "Has It Come to This" is highly reminiscent of fantastically hair-styled pop giants Hall & Oates-- and believe it or not, I don't mean that as a putdown. "It's Too Late," meanwhile, features a sugared melancholy duet with a dreamy British lass between the verses, and tracks fortified with more canned orchestra than a late-period Flaming Lips album.
All of which would leave things a bit flaky, if it wasn't for Skinner's flair for nervous, metallic beats (The Streets' percussion is inventive enough for the album to be erroneously labeled as 'electronica' in the critic's bible All Music Guide). Whether changing speeds or dropping out unexpectedly beneath the ominous strings of "Same Old Thing," trampolining playfully in "Don't Mug Yourself," or rolling along completely oblivious to the piano loop rhythm on "Weak Become Heroes," they're catchy and inventive enough to make one forget the accent for a bit. It's not all successful (the slow-reggae bounce of "Let's Push Things Forward" is, ironically, pretty backward and tired), but it usually is-- and even when it's not, it's at least trying to be.
Which leaves us with the lyrics, tales of English street life provided entirely by the very proper-sounding Skinner. Now, if the phrase "English street life" makes you bristle, hold on a sec-- anyone who's ever read an Irvine Welsh novel (half-credit if you've seen Trainspotting) should know that life for the British working class is hardly Buckingham Palace. So while the lingo takes some getting used to ('geezas' instead of 'niggaz,' 'birds' not 'bitches,' etc.), it'd be incorrect to write off The Streets as either poseur or gimmick, and in a genre where unique lyrical perspective is especially important, the UK vibe is an intriguing element.
Plus, let's face it, Skinner's race and nationality will probably earn The Streets a spot on the "safe hip-hop for indie rockers list" this year, possessing, as it does, that certain unplaceable, familiar aura that appeals to mild hip-hop-ophobes such as, well, myself. As such, I'm not real sure where it would fall along the critical spectrum according to a genre expert (paging Sam Chennault, Sam Chennault to the OR, please), but Original Pirate Material seems to be remarkably solid. And given the fact that it does, eventually, manage to overcome the horrific-sounding concept of British hip-hop, it seems pretty reasonable to give it a recommendation. Bloody good show, I say. | 2002-08-22T01:00:02.000-04:00 | 2002-08-22T01:00:02.000-04:00 | Rap | Warner Bros. | August 22, 2002 | 7.9 | 059d8214-49b2-4ee1-aef6-daca54e27711 | Rob Mitchum | https://pitchfork.com/staff/rob- mitchum/ | null |
A nice little addition to last year’s breakout Hood Hottest Princess, the St. Louis native’s EP is packed again with filthy, horny, sex-fueled shenanigans. | A nice little addition to last year’s breakout Hood Hottest Princess, the St. Louis native’s EP is packed again with filthy, horny, sex-fueled shenanigans. | Sexyy Red: In Sexyy We Trust | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/sexyy-red-in-sexyy-we-trust/ | In Sexyy We Trust | If you were hoping that the filthy, horny, sex-fueled shenanigans of Sexyy Red would forever be stuck in the summer of 2023, I have bad news for you. She’s got another one with In Sexyy We Trust. Sure, last year’s Hood Hottest Princess (damn-near all bangers) can’t be replicated, as part of the appeal was getting caught off guard and going from Oh, that song where she goes “My bootyhole is brown” is funny to Hold up, did she just drop one of the great rap mixtapes of the year? basically overnight. It was such a polarizing sensation that I wouldn’t have been surprised if her follow-up scaled up too much, in a quest to prove that Hood Hottest Princess wasn’t a flash in the pan. But thankfully, Sexyy does not give a fuck. You’re gonna’ get homages to Gucci Mane and Chief Keef, graphic sex jokes and puns, and vulgar-ass quotables required to be shouted anytime you have a drop of alcohol in your system.
About half of the tracks on In Sexyy We Trust should be summer anthems. “She’s Back” is a full-throttle DJ set cheat code; if it was up to me I would ban Rihanna’s “Birthday Cake” from being the soundtrack of the cake-cutting and replace it with Sexyy’s “It’s My Birthday.” The St. Louis native has a flair for these fun and rowdy songs that feel nostalgic for Southern and Midwest rap of the past without being pure pastiche. A good example of that is the lead single “Get It Sexyy,” where she howls a few Keef-inspired ad-libs and describes her physical attributes with more detail than an NFL draft scout, all in a hummable singsongy flow. Another is “Sexyy Love Money,” in which her verse starts off hot with an explosive, Waka Flocka-coded opening line (“Got my money up, bitch, I can’t act right”) and doesn’t let up. Her energy is cool yet so contagious that even a buzzkill guest appearance by Chicago drill newcomer VonOff1700 and a couple of punchline clunkers by her (“Higher than a motherfucker, eyes lookin’ like ching-chi”) don’t ruin the exquisite paycheck-hitting-your-bank-account-on-a-holiday-weekend vibe.
Fame (going on tour with Drake, photo-ops with Lana Del Rey) hasn’t stopped Sexyy from saying whatever she wants. “Let’s go half on a baby, shoot the club up,” she raps casually on “Boss Me up,” as if she’s talking about splitting the bill at Applebee’s. On the cranked-up “Ova Bad” she blurts out the visual, “Drop and hit some splits, bitch, I wanna see that cameltoe.” Sometimes, though, the shock value can be a little try-hard. For one, the sexual moans on the chorus of “Outside,” the Brazilian funk-infused dud, are just annoying. Then, her duet with Lil Baby “Lick Me” wants to be freaky so bad, but they have such little chemistry that it’s more uncomfortable than sexy.
But Sexyy Red’s worst chemistry is actually with Drake. Last year on Drake’s For All the Dogs, she stole the show with her New Orleans bounce-esque flow on “Rich Baby Daddy,” though he brought nothing to the table. Now on “U My Everything” he’s doing too much. It’s a silly, kind of sweet love song, her cracking melodies making it feel so earnest until Drake appears and instantly steamrolls the lovey-dovey mood by switching the soulful bounce to Metro Boomin’s A.I.-sampling (yawn) Drake-diss “BBL Drizzy.” It’s a troll-job, a way of signaling to Metro that he is unbothered. I do not care. Please, enough of this mid-life crisis rap beef, now it’s taking away the attention from Sexyy Red on a Sexyy Red mixtape, the worst thing you could do.
Sexyy doesn’t need any of that fuss as long as she has her horndog bars and a thumping beat. Tay Keith’s instrumentals are nothing special, blending early 2010s ATL with modern Memphis bounce, but do a decent job of just giving her a blank, danceable canvas to run wild. And she does: From the stripped-down, trash-talking “Fake Jammin’” to the rattling “Awesome Jawsome,” where she comes up with countless different ways to get across that she’s getting head: “I’m on my period, it’s blood drippin’ down his face.” It would be kind of gross if it wasn’t funny, if she didn’t have so much personality, if I didn’t want to rap along. (OK, it still is kind of gross.) She’s no fad, she’s a rap star. | 2024-06-03T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2024-06-03T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Rebel / Gamma. | June 3, 2024 | 7.5 | 059db8fc-4070-4305-9cc4-37d33ba1ae25 | Alphonse Pierre | https://pitchfork.com/staff/alphonse-pierre/ | |
On their third album, the dubby band’s feel for a groove remains intact, but they often render vibrant sounds from all over the world as impeccably stylish mood music. | On their third album, the dubby band’s feel for a groove remains intact, but they often render vibrant sounds from all over the world as impeccably stylish mood music. | Khruangbin: Mordechai | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/khruangbin-mordechai/ | Mordechai | A little over a month ago, Khruangbin marked the impending release of Mordechai by relaunching their official playlist generator. On a website called AirKhruang, fans can specify a duration and choose from a wide range of activities, then receive a custom-generated mix via Spotify or Apple Music to enhance the vibe of whatever they find themselves doing. The song selections reflect the laid-back cosmopolitanism that has turned this largely instrumental Houston trio into theater-filling stars, with fans including both JAY-Z and your Phish-loving cousin. Generate a playlist for reading and you might be served French jazz fusion and Thai electro; choose “beach hang” instead and you might get Somalian disco and Sierra Leonean maringa. Khruangbin’s eclecticism clearly stems from real devotion to music from outside the Western pop-rock canon, and their willingness to direct listeners toward their influences shows an admirable lack of pretense about where it all comes from. But Mordechai rarely accomplishes anything these playlists don’t do better: rendering vibrant sounds from all over the world as impeccably stylish mood music.
Mordechai, Khruangbin’s third proper album, is the first to prominently feature vocals, with all three members contributing. The introduction of singing suggests a new interest in songcraft, a welcome development for a band whose past records can feel like evocative but unpopulated landscapes, heavy on languid atmosphere and light on compositional substance. And Mordechai’s most memorable tracks are the ones with the most singing, like the poolside disco of “Time (You and I),” and the highlife-inspired pop of “So We Won’t Forget.” The best is “Pelota,” whose sun-baked guitar licks and surrealistic Spanish lyrics don’t point so clearly to any particular genre reference, offering a lively possibility for what Khruangbin might sound like when they’re not trying to be anyone but themselves.
But Mordechai doesn’t quite commit to delivering fleshed-out songs, or to synthesizing Khruangbin’s influences into something new. It’s too busy to settle fully into your subconscious like the intercontinental ambience of Khruangbin’s 2018 breakout Con Todo El Mundo, but not substantial enough to satisfy more active listening. On “One to Remember,” guitarist Mark Speer plays meandering jazz leads above a dubby one-drop rhythm from Ochoa and drummer DJ Johnson, an intriguing combination that might rise above its Pat Metheny Meets Rockers Uptown pastiche if Speer didn’t sound so tentative about whether he’s taking a solo or hanging in the background. The vocals consist of a few chanted words, appearing as occasional reverb-drenched accents. It’s a clear nod to the way dub producers reduce melodic lines to ghostly echoes, but without its careful attention to negative space or its suggestion of depth beneath the surface.
Opener “First Class” channels the shimmering-asphalt aura of Roy Ayers’ immortal 1976 jazz-funk track “Everybody Loves the Sunshine,” a platonic ideal for the sort of music Khruangbin are making here: quietly swaggering, more groove than song, belonging to no particular genre but evoking several, conjuring a singular mood from a few simple elements arranged in just the right way. Khruangbin’s failure to catch the elusive magic of the original may be an issue of historical fetishism. Ayers wasn’t studiously recreating the feeling of a decades-old cratedigger gem. He was just playing what he wanted to play.
In a recent New York Times profile, Khruangbin’s label head compared the experience of hearing them for the first time to coming across a mindblowing rare record: “I couldn’t place it—was it a lost psych-funk classic from a far-off land?” You get the sense that Khruangbin like it this way. They are almost as much like DJs as they are a band, as driven to curate as they are to create. Like their previous albums, Mordechai is distant and murky in its production, heavy with nostalgia for a nonspecific time and locale. It sounds as if it’s already been plucked from a dollar bin, fawned over by an exclusive cult of collectors, uploaded to YouTube, and eventually reissued, before it was ever released in the first place.
It is difficult to imagine Khruangbin existing before the internet, at a time when digging for lost classics might have meant pawing through records in crates around the world. Their music is borne from the abundance of streaming, and also borne toward it, its tastefully unobtrusive good vibes purpose-built for playlist placements and Netflix syncs. But Khruangbin also belong to several older and woolier traditions. Their semifrequent guitar solos and emphasis on instrumental interplay make them something like a jam band, which may help explain their runaway success, granting them access to a uniquely loyal base of concertgoers. And their repurposing of Caribbean, African, and Asian sounds as lush easy listening has antecedents as varied as Thievery Corporation and Les Baxter—though, to be fair, they engage with their source material much more seriously and transparently than the exotica artists of the ’50s and ’60s.
A few decades later, those exotica records took on their own status as kitschy collector’s items, and perhaps Mordechai will fare similarly. Down the road, it might look less like a collection of music from across global history and more like a flawed but fascinating reflection of our relationship to that music at this particular moment in time. Nearly everything is available, and everyone is a connoisseur, a state of affairs that can be both enlivening and depressing. There’s nothing like the excitement of finding a great old record you’ve never heard before on YouTube or Spotify, and nothing like the promise of another on the horizon to keep you from spending much time with the one you just found. Mordechai is a symptom of this condition as well as a kind of antidote: it gives you everything at once, without asking for much at all in return. All you have to do is chill.
Buy: Rough Trade
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Correction: *A previous version of this review misstated the origin date of the playlist. The language has been adjusted to reflect that he playlist existed before the launch of the album. The review also stated that bassist Laura Lee Ochoa mostly handled lead vocals. It has been updated to say that the entire band sings on the album, which better reflects the nature of the vocals. * | 2020-06-26T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-06-26T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Dead Oceans / Night Time Stories Ltd. | June 26, 2020 | 5.8 | 059e9d5e-2b3b-4d9d-acdc-1f37a267e632 | Andy Cush | https://pitchfork.com/staff/andy-cush/ | |
The long-dormant rapper/producer Edan is coaxed out of hiding by Homeboy Sandman, one of rap’s most irreverent characters, for a short, playfully psychedelic album. | The long-dormant rapper/producer Edan is coaxed out of hiding by Homeboy Sandman, one of rap’s most irreverent characters, for a short, playfully psychedelic album. | Homeboy Sandman / Edan: Humble Pi | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/homeboy-sandman-edan-humble-pi/ | Humble Pi | Edan’s Beauty and the Beat was a glorious record. A full clip of kaleidoscopic samples, rumbling electronics, and streetwise bars rooted in the classic lyrical tradition, it encapsulated the inventiveness of independent rap in the early 2000s, before labels like Definitive Jux evaporated into dust. I threw Beauty and the Beat on recently and can happily report that the album is aging beautifully, 13 years after its release. (To its great credit, the label behind the record, the small UK outfit Lewis Recordings, still has its doors open). But as underground hip-hop crumbed beneath his feet, Edan disappeared into the soil. The short 2009 mixtape Echo Party is his only release since his sophomore record dropped. So like Master Yoda, forced into exile on Dagobah to wait for another opportunity to strike, the rapper/producer’s been biding his time. Waiting. Training.
Does that make Homeboy Sandman Luke Skywalker? Not quite. Angel Del Villar II is no apprentice, with a prolific, decade-long recording career that’s earned him a reputation as one of rap’s most irreverent characters—an emcee not minded to shed his lunatic tendencies for anyone (not that he could if he tried). Sandman’s strong three-part Lice series alongside Aesop Rock has already proved how buoyant he can be when teaming up with a fellow alt-rap king. On paper, joining forces with Edan makes perfect sense, and the elusive star is tempted out of hiding for Humble Pi, a short record that shows flashes of both artists’ indomitable abilities.
Rap has shuffled through many cloaks in his period away, but little has changed in Edan’s galaxy. He produces all seven cuts on Humble Pi, all of which boast his trademark proclivity for grubby loops and off-kilter grooves. The beats are layered and complex, and they never stop evolving. On “Grim Seasons,” Edan plays with rugged spaghetti-western and kung-fu movie flavors, throwing in some electric guitar squiggles halfway through to keep his orchestration mutating. The twisted, psychedelic “Rock & Roll Indian Dance” works in an interpretation of Roy Ayers Ubiquity’s “Everybody Loves the Sunshine,” one of the most sampled records ever. But Edan’s song is a unique voyage, riding a pinging, almost abrasive metallic pulse before releasing that building tension with Ayers’ warm words on the hook. It’s a fine example of how Edan can alchemize a rap arrangement in ways that would never flash into another musician’s brain.
Edan and Sandman’s easygoing chemistry is palpable: On “Rock & Roll Indian Dance” they pass the mic like a hot potato, their voices interlocking with zero friction. Edan’s lyrical contributions are sparse, though, with Sandman picking up the slack. Some of his most grabbing moments come on the brawny boom-bap of “#NeverUseTheInternetAgain,” an amusing smackdown of social media, blogs, and other online portals. It sounds like Sandman likely recorded his verse before the controversies that hit Facebook earlier this year, and he mostly sticks to the kind of arguments college freshmen unleash at parties when asked for their usernames—social media kills productivity, dating websites are impersonal, and so on. Sandman is deeply pissed off here. His berzerk tirade sounds half righteous, half hilarious.
Ultimately, the album is held back by its lack of ambition. Kanye West’s spotty Wyoming odyssey wasn’t the strongest argument for the validity of the seven-track rap album, but it’s clear that diamond-cut records, like Pusha-T’s Daytona, can work if the focus is laser sharp and no motions are wasted. But not all of Humble Pi is as strong as its best moments. “The Gut,” with its swarming 8-bit electronics, lacks the breeziness of Edan’s best cuts, while there’s a straight misstep on “Unwavering Mind,” with Sandman’s double-time rapping refusing to fuse with the rasping beat, which resembles a cymbal falling to the floor on repeat. With the slight running time, these flaws are magnified. Not to worry, though. Humble Pi might be thin, but there’s enough here to spark hope that this is the origin point of Sandman and Edan’s cracked journey, and not the final destination. | 2018-11-13T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2018-11-13T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rap | Stones Throw | November 13, 2018 | 6.8 | 05a07ff8-6041-4882-bee7-8aa03be6e943 | Dean Van Nguyen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/dean-van nguyen/ | |
With his penchant for poetic over-sharing, Drake is an apt avatar for the era of reality television and 24-hour self-documentation. Backed by lush and moody beats, Take Care finds him putting his talents to use on his strongest set of songs so far. | With his penchant for poetic over-sharing, Drake is an apt avatar for the era of reality television and 24-hour self-documentation. Backed by lush and moody beats, Take Care finds him putting his talents to use on his strongest set of songs so far. | Drake: Take Care | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/16039-take-care/ | Take Care | In 1976, Marvin Gaye holed up in his Hollywood studio and began recording Here, My Dear, a brutally candid album-length dissection of his divorce from wife Anna Gordy. The soul great found beauty within the wreckage, and the album doubled as an emotional exorcism that pushed out pain, anger, regret, spite, vengeance. "Memories haunt you all the time/ I will never leave your mind," he threatens on a song called "When Did You Stop Loving Me, When Did I Stop Loving You". Reviewing the album upon its release in 1978, critic Robert Christgau wrote, "Because Gaye's self-involvement is so open and unmediated... it retains unusual documentary charm."
The same could be said of Drake, whose unrepentant navel-gazing and obsession with lost love reach new levels on his second proper LP, Take Care. Running with Gaye's ghost, Drake offers a profane update of his forebear's twisted heart: "Fuck that nigga that you love so bad/ I know you still think about the times we had," he sings on the insidious hook of "Marvins Room", a song recorded in the same studio where Gaye originally exposed his own unedited thoughts more than three decades ago.
In this age of reality television, 24-hour celebrity news, and second-to-second documentation-- where behind-the-scenes sagas mix with what's on screen and on record, creating an ever-morphing, ever-more-self-aware new normal-- Drake is an apt avatar. Naturally, he knows this, too. "They take the greats from the past and compare us/ I wonder if they'd ever survive in this era," he contemplates on the album, "In a time where it's recreation/ To pull all your skeletons out the closet like Halloween decorations." We can thank Kanye West for legitimately kicking off this open-book hip-hop era, and it's increasingly apparent that Drake is the most engaging new rap star since Ye. While fame causes some to withdraw and cling to what little privacy they have left, this 25-year-old Canadian's penchant for poetic oversharing has only been emboldened by his success. When he's not making the most epic drunk-dial song in pop history with "Marvins Room", he's openly pleading with former flame Rihanna on the record's title track, or duetting with Twitter wife Nicki Minaj on "Make Me Proud" only to call out such publicity-baiting "relationships" two tracks later, where he raps, "It look like we in love, but only on camera." With its startlingly frank talk and endless heartbreak, Take Care often reads like a string of especially vulnerable-- and sometimes embarrassing-- Missed Connections.
This time around, Drake has a better grasp on his own notoriety and the mind-fucks that come with it. While he expressed wonderfully wounded trepidations about his sudden rise on Thank Me Later, he's learning to embrace it more here. "They say more money more problems, my nigga, don't believe it," he raps on closer "The Ride". "I mean, sure, there's some bills and taxes I'm still evading/ But I blew six million on myself, and I feel amazing." And on "HYFR (Hell Ya Fucking Right)", he all but gives away his hand, turning his sadness into strategy: "What have I learned since getting richer?/ I learned working with the negatives could make for better pictures." And while he claims "I think I like who I'm becoming" on "Crew Love"-- about as ringing an endorsement you'll get from a guy so bent on exposing his own disappointments-- he's still more interested in contradiction than triumph. Even when staring at a pair of unnatural breasts, he highlights the incision rather than the size: "Brand new girl and she still growing/ Brand new titties, stitches still showing/ Yeah, and she just praying that it heals good/ I'm 'bout to fuck and I'm just praying that it feels good."
Just as his thematic concerns have become richer, so has the music backing them up. Thank Me Later banked on a sonic tableau that was slow and sensual and dark-- equal parts Aaliyah and the xx-- and Take Care takes that aesthetic to an even more rewarding place, spearheaded by Drake's go-to producer Noah "40" Shebib, who gets a writing and production credit on almost every song. While the bombastic style of producer Lex Luger's work with Rick Ross and Waka Flocka Flame threatened to turn the tide on Drake and 40's moody atmospherics last summer, the pair stick to their gut here and delve further into smooth piano and muffled drums, fully committed to the idea of doing more with less. This is sensuous music that breathes heavy somewhere between UGK's deep funk, quiet-storm 90s R&B, and James Blake-inspired minimalism. (Drake reportedly had a vinyl copy of Blake's debut LP on display in the studio while recording Take Care.) Its subtlety is a direct rebuke to the rash of in-the-red Eurotrance waveforms clogging up radio dials. Even the more upbeat tracks take pains not to rely on a simple thump. "Take Care" features Rihanna and a four-four beat, but the singer shows off her little-heard whispering delivery and the instrumental comes courtesy of the xx's Jamie xx, who nimbly tailors his remix of Gil Scott-Heron's "I'll Take Care of You" for the occasion.
Drake's worked on his own technical abilities, too, and both his rapping and singing are better than ever here. Notably, he only brandishes the hashtag flow he quickly became famous (or infamous) for over the last few years, turning it into a knowing knock on copycats: "Man, all of your flows bore me/ Paint drying." And he breathlessly runs through the opening verse on the vicious "HYFR" at a speed that would likely garner respect from Busta Rhymes. And then there's "Doing It Wrong", a brilliant, barely there slow jam that borrows some lyrics from an unlikely source (Don "American Pie" McLean's twangy 1977 track "The Wrong Thing to Do") and features an unlikely guest in Stevie Wonder. Fitting the album's classy, unshowy demeanor, Wonder is tapped not to sing but play harmonica-- and uncharacteristically downcast harmonica at that-- for the track's crushing denouement. The song has Drake chronicling the conflicting emotions of a difficult breakup and giving us his finest singing to date. His words are simple, universal, true: "We live in a generation of not being in love, and not being together/ But we sure make it feel like we're together/ 'Cause we're scared to see each other with somebody else." Elsewhere, André 3000 references Adele's unimpeachable "Someone Like You" in one of the album's many well-placed guest verses; "Doing It Wrong" deserves to follow that song as pop's next Great Heartbroken Ballad.
The cover of Take Care shows its star sitting at a table, dejected and surrounded by gold, like a hip-hop Midas. Considering some of the money-doesn't-buy-you-happiness sentiments inside, the picture is apropos enough. But it's much too obvious to truly represent what Drake and his crew have done here. A better image would be the grainy, amateur photo he released with "Marvins Room" when he originally leaked it in June, which shows the rapper walking away from a group of private jets, his face obscured by a puff of smoke making its way up to an overcast sky. It lets his reality do the heavy lifting while Drake stands by, taking it all in. | 2011-11-14T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2011-11-14T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rap | Cash Money / Young Money Entertainment / Universal Republic | November 14, 2011 | 8.6 | 05a3bb1a-fad6-44c2-a0f5-d8a16afd1e87 | Ryan Dombal | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ryan-dombal/ | null |
Eric Burton’s latest album is a logical extension of his to 2015 album Communion, an experimental world of dissolving certainty where all light is gradually leached out of the landscape. | Eric Burton’s latest album is a logical extension of his to 2015 album Communion, an experimental world of dissolving certainty where all light is gradually leached out of the landscape. | Rabit: Les Fleurs Du Mal | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/rabit-les-fleurs-du-mal/ | Les Fleurs Du Mal | In the first few minutes of Rabit’s Les Fleurs Du Mal, the gloomy Texan producer (aka Eric Burton) does something unexpected: He cracks a joke. At least, that’s one interpretation of a scrap of found sound that flutters briefly above the ambient din. “Possessed,” the album’s first song, begins in medias res: A low rumble, inaudible voices, bursts of what might be police scanner. “Chop it up,” commands a low voice, threatening and authoritative. From the snatches of conversation we overhear—“Break that off, that’s a whole cookie”; “You got the money?”—it seems likely we have dropped into the middle of a drug deal. A sampled cello scrapes circles around the outline of a melody; the atmosphere could not be more ominous if this were a scene from Antoine Fuqua’s Training Day. A woman murmurs in French; another woman bellows about the devil. Out of this bewildering murk, a man’s voice pipes up in a reedy Southern drawl: “This is the beginning part.” Amid all that humid terror, it’s practically a knee-slapper: a signpost that serves to highlight the dimensionless and disorienting sound-world Burton has conjured.
Burton titled his album after Charles Baudelaire’s volume of nihilistic poetry, and it’s not hard to understand why; his suffocating air of self-loathing is an obvious inspiration for the toxic depths of Rabit’s airless, album-length tone poem. The record’s 12 tracks swirl together into an unsteady whole, and the usual structural elements—melody, rhythm, lyrics—are largely absent. In their place, a freeform sense of drift, muggy and narcotic, prevails. Much of the album has an explicitly filmic cast: “Roach” throbs with explosions, plangent strings, and chattering electronics like a dystopian supercut of Hollywood soundtracks; “The Whole Bag” groans under a similar kind of THX-driven ear pressure, as clanking metal tiptoes out to the border between representational and abstract sound. In “Humanitys Daughter,” there’s a glowering, pitched-down reference to Fleetwood Mac’s “Landslide” while electronic tones cascade like freezing rain; if you could record your nightmares, they might well sound a lot like this.
In many ways, Les Fleurs Du Mal feels like a logical extension of Rabit’s last album, 2015’s Communion, in which the sounds of gunshots and breaking glass were stitched into an eerie approximation of club music. To follow Rabit’s artistic development is to enter into a world of dissolving certainty, where all light is gradually leached out of the landscape. Ever since Burton’s first records, which imitated the sounds of the UK’s “weightless” strain of instrumental grime, he has gradually stripped his music of all references to conventional dance music, and with Les Fleurs Du Mal, that process becomes terrifyingly complete. The press release suggests the new album shares kinship with Elysia Crampton’s Demon City and Chino Amobi’s Paradiso—deeply original albums about identity and alienation that created their own haunting sound worlds—and the comparison holds up. (Burton contributed to both those albums, and Amobi reappears here, along with Coil’s Drew McDowall and an artist known simply as Cecilia.) But Burton’s album, in its willingness to jettison so many musical hallmarks in pursuit of an experience of pure formlessness, might be the most radical of the three.
It reaches a terrifying nadir a little before the halfway mark with “Dogsblood Redemption.” The track opens with the wails of a baby over horror-movie rumble; brief snippets of heavy metal and bits of movie or television dialogue slice through the darkness. There are wails and moans of pain. And then, louder than anything else, the clearest statement on the entire record comes bellowing through the speakers, mixed conspicuously louder than everything else: “You’re all a bunch of fuckin’ slaves!” The track ends with a passage of German-language dialogue and what sounds like coitus, and abruptly cuts off in mid-sentence—a jarring short-circuit even in an album full of discontinuity.
Despite the omnipresent grimness, though, Les Fleurs Du Mal can also be strangely beautiful. “Bleached World,” a skeletal and meandering fugue that utilizes just one synthesizer sound, summons the same stark grace as Arca’s music does. “Ontological Graffiti” sinks into slowly bowed drones as evocative as the buzz of airplanes high overhead, and the closing passage of “Prayer II (Gemme)” and “Elevation” make for a pillowy denouement: Strings sweep backward and a voice speaking in French is slowed and shrouded in whispers, sounding druggy and dreamlike. It is an elegant conclusion to an album that feels at once as oppressive as a lead blanket and as diffuse as a wisp of incense. However you might choose to approach the album—as ambient music, radio play, fetid sustenance for misanthropic shut-ins—it is a singular piece of work, and a bold step forward for Rabit’s inky aesthetic. | 2017-11-10T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2017-11-10T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Electronic | Halcyon Veil | November 10, 2017 | 7.6 | 05a63df6-e0a4-4efb-ad33-3452e1ff5282 | Philip Sherburne | https://pitchfork.com/staff/philip-sherburne/ | |
Solange’s new record is stunning, a thematically unified and musically adventurous statement on the pain and joy of black womanhood. | Solange’s new record is stunning, a thematically unified and musically adventurous statement on the pain and joy of black womanhood. | Solange: A Seat at the Table | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22482-a-seat-at-the-table/ | A Seat at the Table | Solange Knowles turned 30 in June, and it seems clear that her Saturn Returns manifested in an artistic surge. A Seat at the Table, her third full-length album, is the work of a woman who’s truly grown into herself, and discovered within a clear, exhilarating statement of self and community that’s as robust in its quieter moments as it is in its funkier ones. Even though it’s been out less than a week, it already seems like a document of historical significance, not just for its formidable musical achievements but for the way it encapsulates black cultural and social history with such richness, generosity, and truth.
To this point, Solange has been trying on styles and stretching out into her own skills as a songwriter. Having spent her early teen years singing backup and writing songs, she debuted as a solo artist at just 16, with Solo Star. Very 2003, it was a gleaming, hip-hop-informed album that slinked over beats from the likes of Timbaland and the Neptunes; even with plenty of great tracks, the production outweighed her presence. After a five-year break as a solo artist—during which she got married, had son Julez, moved to Idaho, got divorced, starred in Bring It On: All or Nothing, among other films, and wrote songs for her sister Beyoncé (whew!)—she returned in 2008 with Sol-Angel and the Hadley St. Dreams. That album was clearly immersed in a deep love of ’60s funk and soul and its attendant politics, and she rebelled against expectations (see: “Fuck the Industry”), eager to fully express her individuality. She fused her musical impulses in the easy, ebullient grooves of 2012’s True EP, which eased a glossier vision of pop into the soulfunk groove she had ingrained.
Even with such an impressive resume, though, A Seat at the Table is on a different plane. It’s a document of the struggle of a black woman, and black women, in 2016, as Solange confronts painful indignities and situates them historically. Many of these songs draw from current reactions to the seemingly unending killing of black women and men at the hands of the police, but the scope of the record as a whole is much larger than that, with Civil Rights hymnals encompassing centuries of horror black Americans have been subject to, including that inflicted on Knowles’ own ancestors. But even when Solange offers her narrative in first-person and incorporates her family’s past through interludes with her mother Tina and father Mathew, she does so with such artistic and emotional openness that this album feels like nothing but a salve.
The quick sketch “Rise” opens slowly, on a sweet piano and with layers of Solange’s voice in jazz modulations, as a sort of blessing and a placid encouragement to thrive despite it all. “Fall in your ways, so you can crumble,” she sings. “Fall in your ways, so you can wake up and rise.” The word “rise” lands on the high note, but the song lays out the album’s central tension between pain, pride, sorrow, and fierce dignity. This leads directly into “Weary,” a ginger, breathy document of exhaustion, and the deceptively euphoric “Cranes in the Sky,” which, taken as a “Weary”’s counterpart, illustrates two stages of sorrow. What’s so touching about “Cranes,” though—intertwined with the airy, peaceful beauty of its video—is the way Solange specifically documents her process of coping, down to the smallest escape mechanisms. On a warm bass strut, she sings about drinking, sexing, running, and spending in an effort to be free from “those metal clouds,” making visible the kinds of mundane things we all do in the service of a temporary reprieve. Naming these actions feels radical in and of itself, but by the time she flies off her own cloud of a Minnie Riperton-level aria, she seems to have freed herself from the routine, and transcended it.
Solange has said that it was important to her to articulate her roots, and so along with the recordings of her parents, she made the bulk of A Seat at the Table in New Iberia, Louisiana, “based on that area being the start of everything within our family’s lineage,” the place where Tina Knowles-Lawson’s parents first met and then fled after being “run out of town.” In terms of production, her song structures, and melodies, she celebrates the whole history of black music. But the result is never derivative; when you recognize the spirits of artists like Riperton, Zapp, Angie Stone, Aaliyah (lyrically, in “Borderline (An Ode to Self Care”), Janet Jackson, Stanley Clarke, Lil Mo, Herbie freakin’ Hancock and so many more, it feels more like a musical nod or a wink.
The master musician and bandleader Raphael Saadiq serves as co-producer; Saadiq meets Solange in the juiciest middle, both bridging their instincts between classic instrumentation and futuristic funk. The arrangements are voluminous, loose and tight at once, but Solange’s voice is always at the front of this proscenium; each shows restraint as they lean into her collective vision. The sound they conjure is chill-inducing, an easy sound for subject matter that’s as real and tough as it gets. The excellent “Don’t Touch My Hair” (with a feature by Sampha) and “Mad” (her second collaboration with Lil Wayne) specifically address the way black women are devalued, and the songs meet that with resistance. Solange’s voice is a palliative for the pain she describes, as she names truths to divest them of their power.
A Seat at the Table offers a hearth to black women as much as it asserts Solange’s right to comfort and understanding. And in terms of her lived experience, the table of the album’s title, metaphysical and physical, rests in her home of New Orleans. In several interludes, the rapper, label head, and entrepreneur Master P threads the album with musings on No Limit’s runaway success as a black-owned record label (landed him on the Forbes list, baby). That particular segment leads into “F.U.B.U.” ("For Us, By Us"), a honey-dripped slow-grinder of black affirmation, with tubas that sound inspired by NOLA’s Second Lines as Solange mews, “This shit is for us/Don’t try to come for us.” Her sumptuous harmonies build a protective forcefield: “Some shit,” she sings, “you can’t touch.”
A Seat at the Table’s nature is beneficent, but at its spiritual core it is an ode to black women and their healing and sustenance in particular; in writing about herself, Solange turns the mirror back upon them, and crystallizes the kinship therein. She harmonizes with Kelly Rowland and Nia Andrews that “I got so much magic, you can have it,” but the song that perhaps best encapsulates this outstanding work is “Scales,” a slow-burning duet with Kelela near the end of the album. Their harmonies are heavenly and create almost a meditative effect, a mantra of healing kindness in a syrup-slow synth progression. It’s a sex jam, I think, but it can also serve as a shine-theory jam. “You’re a superstar,” they sing together, letting the “star” part roll around a bit in the lower part of the vibrato. “You’re a superstar.” | 2016-10-05T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-10-05T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | Saint / Columbia | October 5, 2016 | 8.7 | 05a7a723-cfe8-4fbf-a5e3-89cb6e42ed9a | Julianne Escobedo Shepherd | https://pitchfork.com/staff/julianne-escobedo shepherd/ | null |
Modest Mouse follow the unlikely success of "Float On" by recruiting former Smiths guitarist Johnny Marr and gently nudging toward new directions. The Shins' James Mercer guests. | Modest Mouse follow the unlikely success of "Float On" by recruiting former Smiths guitarist Johnny Marr and gently nudging toward new directions. The Shins' James Mercer guests. | Modest Mouse: We Were Dead Before the Ship Even Sank | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/10010-we-were-dead-before-the-ship-even-sank/ | We Were Dead Before the Ship Even Sank | For all of the pandemonium over the indie rock gold-record mainstream-radio-play explosion, few of the bands who breached Clear Channel's glass ceiling were actually longtime members of the small-label fraternity. The Shins and the Arcade Fire, to pick two of the bigger success stories, had relatively short histories before raising their profile beyond college campuses, while more seasoned groups with major-label money-sacks like Built to Spill and Mercury Rev never cracked the Billboard top 50. I could get all crotchety and bemoan this trend as the Johnny-Come-Latelies pulling the rug out from underneath the old vets, but it's more likely just a matter of younger bands sounding more enthusiastic on their second or third record and working with a fresher formula.
Of course, Modest Mouse are the exception to this generalization, having scored in the hit-song jackpot 10 years and four full-length albums into their career. Perennially relegated to the second tier of the 90s indie-rock league (I still remember mis-learning of them as a BtS spinoff), modern rock chart-topper "Float On" allowed Isaac Brock to have the last laugh on his former indie label brethren, as he enjoyed the kind of crossover hit that's eluded so many major-label recruits since the heady days of grunge. What was even more astounding was the fact that Modest Mouse-- mob cries of "sellout!" notwithstanding-- didn't really compromise their sound for mass consumption: Brock's weird yelp-shout retained its volatile quaver, the band's punched-up rhythm section still sounded sharp and vital, and the hunt for cosmic guitar pedal settings still sounded like their driving passion.
The album that gave birth to "Float On", Good News for People Who Love Bad News, was similarly unmitigated down to its mouthful title, but indicated that Brock wasn't treading water either, tweaking his sound to incorporate a touch of programming and the Tom Waits worship of his Ugly Casanova side project. We Were Dead Before the Ship Even Sank continues that measured consistency, preserving the core Modest Mouse sound despite the recruitment of historic guitar figure Johnny Marr while gently nudging toward new directions.
Ironically, the most successful track on We Were Dead is the one that pushes hardest against the group's established formula: the almost gaudy single "Dashboard". With Modest Mouse's trademark itchy guitars all but drowned out by brass fanfares and slurring strings, "Dashboard" is the Vegas version of "Float On", and it works as an experiment to see just how far they can push the dissonance of Brock's multi-tracked barking against slick, commercially ambitious surroundings.
Had the rest of the record gone further down this path of orchestration indulgence, it would've been either a classic or a disaster (just ask Trail of Dead, who've spent their time since Source Tags and Codes trying and utterly failing to create a similar kind of symphonic indie hard-rock). But instead of that dice-roll, We Were Dead continues to refine Brock's aesthetic, producing another solid (if not necessarily great) record. The development is clear in the way "Parting of the Sensory" smoothly evolves from foul-mouthed acoustic lament to boxcar-hobo hoedown, or on tracks like "Fly Trapped in a Jar", which takes an abrupt left turn halfway through from a dark, bristly screamer that echoes their earlier work to a jagged but dancey post-punk groove. Those latter moments are likely where Marr's much-anticipated influence is most obvious, but even then it's subtle; rather than impossibly sounding like the Smiths all of a sudden, the band has fun pilfering the rhythmic sheets of mid-period Talking Heads on songs like "Education" or "Invisible".
So yes, despite the hefty presence of Marr, it's still undeniably Brock's band, and his development as a frontman is most apparent in his impressive inventory of vocal characters: There's ornery/shouty Brock, Waitsian-growl Brock, spoken-word proselytizer Brock, wounded/reflective Brock, and countless permutations of all of these. Many of those personae appear in the same song or even the same line, singing backup to each other on opener "March Into the Sea" or allowing the singer to play call-and-response with himself on "Parting of the Sensory". And when Brock can't modulate his throat quite as sweetly as he'd like, he calls in the Shins' James Mercer, whose counterpoint on "Florida" and the excellent "We've Got Everything" help put a couple of strong follow-up singles in the can.
Unless my radio barometer is totally out of whack, 2007 should be another banner year for the disorienting experience of hearing Modest Mouse sandwiched between Fergie and Fall Out Boy, not to mention covered on "American Idol". There's no reason this development should be met with scorn; if anything, Modest Mouse should be championed for exposing a larger audience to a sound in line with classic indie rock, rather than aiming for more traditional rock sounds like many of their more accessible indie contemporaries. That a window has briefly opened in the greater cultural consciousness to make room for Modest Mouse on the airwaves would have been unthinkable at the start of the decade; that they've remained so true to their core aesthetic in light of the temptation that success undoubtedly brings is rarer still. | 2007-03-19T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2007-03-19T02:00:01.000-04:00 | Rock | Epic | March 19, 2007 | 7.8 | 05aacd43-b94f-4818-867a-5bbbdc2202a5 | Rob Mitchum | https://pitchfork.com/staff/rob- mitchum/ | null |
On a fascinating and flawed new album, PJ Harvey yokes the siren-like catchiness of her last great America-influenced album, Stories From the City… to the swamp-tarnished filth of her classic first three records. | On a fascinating and flawed new album, PJ Harvey yokes the siren-like catchiness of her last great America-influenced album, Stories From the City… to the swamp-tarnished filth of her classic first three records. | PJ Harvey: The Hope Six Demolition Project | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21698-the-hope-six-demolition-project/ | The Hope Six Demolition Project | In 1992, an NME writer asked PJ Harvey about the political resonance of her work. "I feel uncomfortable with myself at the moment because I feel I’m neglecting that side," she replied. "I’m not concerned enough about things." She worried that the critical attention she had received for her debut album, that year’s Dry, was making her introspective. "It could get really dangerous if I don’t do something about it soon," she said. "I could develop a huge ego or something." Instead, Harvey, then 22, suffered a breakdown, the result of moving to London from rural Dorset, her first big breakup, and the pressure of being the scrutinized center of a rapidly popular band (as the PJ Harvey Trio were then). From then on, her interviews became opaque. She refused to explain her lyrics or discuss much of her personal life. It frustrated journalists, but her records spoke for themselves, centering sexual and biblical apocalypse in the body of a middle-class white woman with a filthy sense of humor and a preternatural gift for the blues.
But 14 months ago, Harvey pulled off an unprecedented reveal for the making of her ninth album. She and her band recorded behind one-way glass in the basement of London’s Somerset House, as paying spectators looked on. Last October, she showcased the finished songs live, along with poems (available as a book, The Hollow of the Hand), and Seamus Murphy’s photographs from their research trips to Afghanistan, Kosovo, and Washington D.C., which formed the record. Her creative process has never been more transparent, yet somehow, her intentions remain totally inscrutable—she’s given zero interviews since announcing the project, and considering the noncommittal dispatches she offers from these places, it's hard to know what point she's trying to make.
On 2011’s groundbreaking Let England Shake, all roads led back to England and its role in various 20th century international conflicts. If there’s a unifying thread between the desolate global vignettes of The Hope Six Demolition Project, it’s that Washington has a tendency to leave its business unfinished. The U.S. wades into communities at home and abroad in the name of improving conditions, whether through toppling dictators or tearing down unsafe housing projects, but ultimately disenfranchises them, amputating the infected limb and driving off with the crutches. This is her Let America Shake, if you will.
However, she can be strangely thoughtless here, in ways that aren't easy to parse. She’s already run into trouble for the album’s opening track, "The Community of Hope," which offered a dispiriting portrait of the D.C. neighborhood Anacostia. Local activists denounced her characterizations of the local school as "a shithole," and the addicted, homeless populace as "zombies." "Or at least, that’s what I’m told," she sings, making clear that those were her tour guide’s words. Perhaps she’s pointing out the subjectivity of perception, but there’s a frustrating reluctance on her part to assign any value or judgment to the things she sees, other than a few trite comparisons between haves and have-nots—not least a terrible faux-deep portrait of a homeless, disabled indigenous woman drinking in a Redskins cap.
Whatever her geopolitical intentions, The Hope Six Demolition Project is her most exhilarating rock album in years, yoking the siren-like catchiness of her last great America-influenced album, Stories From the City… to the swamp-tarnished filth of her classic first three records, Dry, Rid of Me, and To Bring You My Love. It’s leering, brash, and dissonant, but also not without its warmth: Despite the bleakness of the guided car tour in "The Community of Hope," there’s a driving optimism to its droning guitar and steady drums.
At Hope Six’s most thrilling points, Harvey delves back into the influence of her parents’ record collection to channel the swagger of Captain Beefheart, John Lee Hooker, and Howlin’ Wolf. The use of this carnal, hurting tradition feels both apt and transgressive as a basis from which to examine human desertion. "The Ministry of Social Affairs" is hooked around the refrain from Jerry McCain’s "That’s What They Want," in which the blues singer oozes, "Oh yeah, money, honey"—likely a warning against tax collectors or gold-diggers, but also an eroticization of need. The guitar from his song evokes the soupy traffic that Harvey sees around her as she witnesses beggars taking shelter against the wall of the welfare building, but then the song’s unsteady foundations slip into a hellish, squalling cabaret, and Harvey and her band turn McCain’s line into a demonic chorus line. "Medicinals" is more defined, her saxophone ascending through a neat scale, but she licks the end of each line of lyrics with an acidic flourish, like a whip from her old feather boa.
After the eerie high registers of Let England Shake and 2007’s haunted White Chalk, it’s bracing to hear Harvey almost back to using her voice to its fullest range. You get the sense that she’s never going to unleash ze monsta again, but she switches between full-blooded confrontation, evil cunning, haunted falsetto, and forlorn laments, bringing great zeal to her often affectless choice of language. She’s often backed up by her all-male band, who lend depth and community to a record with a very isolated perspective. They add particular soul to "River Anacostia," humming its deep, smouldering melody, before chanting it at the end: "Wait in the water/ God’s gonna trouble the water." It’s one of the album’s more inventive phrasings—many of these songs started life as poems, and they haven’t all translated well to song. On "The Ministry of Defence," the stilted verses are interspersed with thunderous, industrial clangs to fantastic effect. But elsewhere, there’s a sense of square pegs being jammed into round holes: the band’s cry of, "Oh, near the memorials to Vietnam and Lincoln," isn’t going to trouble a festival crowd near you any time soon.
And Hope Six definitely suffers from ideas being transferred between mediums without being refashioned to fit. Along with the poetry book, photographs, and album, there’s still a feature-length documentary to come. It’s hard to think of a project that fundamentally says so little being stretched across so many outlets. It buzzes with life and thought, but it feels as if Harvey is still working out what she’s seen; or, for some reason, that she’s sublimated her gift as a lyricist. Only a few songs here feel fully written, with the requisite lens twist or intimacy to elevate them beyond attempts to translate Seamus Murphy’s photographs into words. "Near the Memorials to Vietnam and Lincoln" is one of them, and one of the album’s few violence-free images: A young boy pretends to throw seeds so that the birds will scatter, evoking the more literal portrayals of salvation denied elsewhere on the record. On "The Wheel," as a swing chair ride turns and its child passengers flash in and out of view, Harvey is reminded of the children who died in the Kosovo War: "Now you see them, now you don’t," she declares in a chilling, strident tone, over more tarnished saxophone.
But these moments of clarity are matched by an equal number of perplexing, muddled ones. For good or ill, it's impossible to know where Harvey's narrator stands in these vignettes. Occasionally we teeter on the brink of her worldview, but she always pulls away: "A restlessness took hold my brain/ And questions I could not hold back," she sings on "The Orange Monkey," but hold back she does. On "A Line in the Sand," she states, "What I’ve seen—yes, it’s changed how I see humankind," a promise of insight that dissolves in her mealy-mouthed assessment of international involvement in Kosovo: "I make no excuse—we got things wrong, but I believe we also did some good." Is she even singing as herself?
Harking back to Let England Shake, maybe her dispassionate storytelling is making a point about how we easily condemn past atrocities while failing to recognize history repeating itself before us. Questions of perspective, and how we bear witness, feel central to The Hope Six Demolition Project. We were voyeurs, watching her make a record about being a voyeur. Is it a deconstruction of the protest record? By pointing out the problems in these three communities, but proposing no solutions, is she just as responsible for their desertion as the global powers that came before her? You sense that the record is part of an ongoing inquiry, not a destination. Fortunately, the music often feels like salvation itself. | 2016-04-14T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-04-14T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Island | April 14, 2016 | 7.6 | 05ab0e45-1162-4e39-a8ad-1a6cec0e4dfc | Laura Snapes | https://pitchfork.com/staff/laura-snapes/ | null |
The second full-length from the rocking side project of Low's Alan Sparhawk builds nicely on the sound of their debut LP. | The second full-length from the rocking side project of Low's Alan Sparhawk builds nicely on the sound of their debut LP. | Retribution Gospel Choir: 2 | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/13841-2/ | 2 | Retribution Gospel Choir, the more rocking part-time gig of Low frontman Alan Sparhawk, have a harder hill to climb on their sophomore record. For one, their 2008 LP reprised some songs that, though first played live by RGC, debuted on record on Low's 2007 LP, Drums and Guns. The differences between the versions was fascinating, as was hearing RGC release all the tension that Low so carefully maintain. It made sense to finally document a project that had been running for a few years. And there was the added novelty of hearing Alan Sparhawk singing and playing guitar in an honest-to-god rock'n'roll band-- and the surprise of hearing him pull it off. But the novelty is not an issue on 2. RGC now have to justify themselves as a stand-alone act-- and fortunately, they acquit themselves just as ably as they did on their debut.
It's a record of sharp hooks and slick production, with several anthemic and instantly memorable choruses, all evident from the very first track. "Hide It Away" blends chest-beating harmonies and moments of quieter guitar jangle with the band's familiar surging 4/4 rock. It's as sweetly melodic as anything Sparhawk has written, but with unfettered, audacious confidence and a guitar solo gliding on heavy reverb-- more stumping on their campaign to become a current-day Crazy Horse. "Your Bird" follows up on the teeth-gritting bile of their debut with some added catchiness. And "Working Hard" toys with rock convention without inhabiting it completely, toning down the verses to a quieter shuffle and adding slyly nihilistic lyrics while still milking the handclaps and blue-collar guitar chug of the chorus for all they're worth.
While 2 may not be as consistent in mood and tone as the debut, it diversifies the band's otherwise guitar-dominated sound in the album's second half. The strum of a banjo adds texture to the distorted chords of "White Wolf". Cello is used on two songs, the epic eight-minute reach-for-the-cheap-seats of "Electric Guitar" and the following comedown of the Low-like closing track "Bless Us All". a song marked by acoustic plucking, choral harmonies. "Something's Going to Break" goes all the way into using studio as instrument, sounding both muffled and feral in its first two minutes before abruptly shifting into the heaviest head-down riff of the record. The resulting explosions are still the band's raison d'être.
But if 2 is slightly more dynamic, it isn't a dramatic departure from the debut, which the band nods to in its bone-simple title (another tweak on rock convention) and in the similarity between the album covers. What you see is what you get here, and while this record is as hard and heavy-- sometimes more so-- 2 bears all the slow, subtle refinement of Sparhawk's better-known projects. Slowly getting better at what you do isn't the most exciting story ever told, but it's one that has yet to get old. | 2010-01-28T01:00:02.000-05:00 | 2010-01-28T01:00:02.000-05:00 | Rock | Sub Pop | January 28, 2010 | 7.3 | 05ac75f1-45a8-4b20-8786-2ef8363415de | Jason Crock | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jason-crock/ | null |
The country crossover star’s excellent songwriting is raw and evocative, and though he continues to hone his sound, the total emotional experience of the album sometimes wears a bit thin. | The country crossover star’s excellent songwriting is raw and evocative, and though he continues to hone his sound, the total emotional experience of the album sometimes wears a bit thin. | Zach Bryan: The Great American Bar Scene | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/zach-bryan-the-great-american-bar-scene/ | The Great American Bar Scene | Some songwriters have a direct line from their open wounds to the pen on the page, and then there’s Zach Bryan. His 2019 self-produced, self-released debut album, DeAnn, was named after his mother, who died of complications related to alcoholism when Bryan was 20. Recorded during his time as an aviation ordnanceman in the Navy, its ragged songs detail grief and regret, devotion that leads to violence, family curses and hard-won redemption. Bryan’s passion and pathos garnered him a cult following that turned him into a stadium-filling superstar, and though he now records and travels with a full band—not to mention guest stars like Maggie Rogers, Bruce Springsteen, and the “Hawk Tuah” girl—his work still carries the stark intensity and emotional bareness of a heart-to-heart with a stranger after one too many beers.
His new album, The Great American Bar Scene, adds to the Zach Bryan formula by taking on a wider lens, weaving his personal struggles and triumphs into the greater legacy of lost souls and camaraderie found in America’s watering holes. This can lead to exciting new lyrical territory for him, like on “Oak Island,” a tightly wound character song about a railroad worker whose brother’s gotten into trouble with some boys from New Jersey. His protagonist, Mickey, also appears on the title track—this time as a nod to malt liquor—in a story that starts off with getting played by a bookie from Philly, winds through a police chase in Cheyenne, and ends with swaying to Johnny Cash with some sweet young thing under neon lights. In the background, you can hear the ambient sound of balls clanking in a game of pool, timed to the strums of the guitar.
It’s all very Nebraska, a comparison that’s hung over Bryan since his early lo-fi releases. He even tries to get ahead of the punchline here, with references to “State Trooper” and “Reason to Believe” and a duet with the Boss himself on “Sandpaper.” Ironically, the sound of Bar Scene is the most full-bodied of Bryan’s career, building upon the heartland rock that he explored in his 2022 major-label breakthrough American Heartbreak and the self-titled follow-up from last year. Bryan makes the kind of production choices here associated with someone gaining a lot more money and creative control in a short amount of time, deploying mariachi horns, gospel choirs and, yes, a John Mayer guitar solo to complete his vision. They mostly work, though maybe not surprisingly, Bryan’s folksier instincts shine the most: the moments of lonesome pedal steel and guitar-pickin’, the skilled harmonies with Noeline Hofmann on “Purple Gas,” and the showstopping harmonica on “Pink Skies.” That song, an account of DeAnn’s funeral, is so meticulously constructed that you can see exactly why, against all odds, it was picked as the album’s lead single.
Bryan has expressed stubbornness, even pride, in continuing to release albums that extend past an hour. While the drawn-out onslaught of emotions can set up a uniquely cathartic experience, it starts to wear thin on Bar Scene, where well-crafted tracks bump up against half-baked ghosts of past Bryan songs. “Bass Boat” sounds like an attempt at recapturing the magic of the two-part ballad “Jake’s Piano - Long Island” from last year, but apart from one particularly devastating line—“I was raised by a woman who was hardly impressed/And I carry that shit real deep in my chest”—it never quite reaches the same heights. Bryan sometimes trades jarring specificity for more general platitudes, such as, “Don’t get angry, listen to the sounds/Them good times will find their way back around,” on “Better Days.” Even when he gets into the details, he tends to lean on nostalgic signifiers—Beale Street and Elvis quotes, old Fords and Tom & Jerry, Trans-Am and Kodachrome—in place of more substantive meaning.
There have been many comparisons made between Bryan and Morgan Wallen, the other streaming giant of country music, unabashedly more conservative than Bryan but also a fan of long albums, wistful reminiscing, and authentic presentation. But there are arguably many more similarities between him and Tyler Childers, the Appalachian singer-songwriter whom Bryan shouts out on the very last line of Bar Scene, or Colter Wall, the gruff-voiced plainsman from Saskatchewan, whose song “Motorcycle” Bryan recently covered on his Instagram Story. All three of these men combine a reverence for country traditionalism with the outlaw attitude of the 1970s, to the extent where, when Bryan rails against “808s” infiltrating the country charts on “Bathwater,” it feels redundant.
But if artists like Bryan can match, or even surpass, the stardom of Nashville’s revolving door of country-pop singers, then what exactly is he rallying against? Bryan is now, reluctantly or not, the biggest crossover success in the industry, long past the point of being able to call himself an underdog. “I’m a mechanical bull, throw a quarter and watch me go,” he mutters, with a shrug, early on Bar Scene. You get the sense that, if given the chance, Bryan would fast-forward through all this “fame” business and become a barroom staple, with the kind of songs that people sing along to because their parents did. Only time will tell if he ever reaches that point; as Bryan would know, it takes a few decades to earn a permanent spot in the jukebox. | 2024-07-15T00:02:00.000-04:00 | 2024-07-15T00:02:00.000-04:00 | Folk/Country | Warner | July 15, 2024 | 7 | 05af5250-3e2a-4a37-8d10-b23ee5074718 | Claire Shaffer | https://pitchfork.com/staff/claire-shaffer/ |
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