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The London post-punk band’s lists and non sequiturs expose the absurdity of modern life from the inside. | The London post-punk band’s lists and non sequiturs expose the absurdity of modern life from the inside. | Dry Cleaning: Boundary Road Snacks and Drinks EP | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/dry-cleaning-boundary-road-snacks-and-drinks-ep/ | Boundary Road Snacks and Drinks EP | If you use a notes app for more than just passwords and grocery lists, it quickly becomes a chaotic archive of dream interpretations, draft texts, and years-old epiphanies. Florence Shaw, vocalist of post-punk quartet Dry Cleaning, turns those notes into lyrics about finding connection in an apathetic world. On the band’s new EP Boundary Road Snacks and Drinks, Shaw picks up where August’s Sweet Princess EP left off, confronting loneliness and desire through lists and non sequiturs. She comments on duvet covers, an abandoned fridge, hot people, a banana. Spread across six tracks, these observations represent more than just banal references to personal history. They track a practice of looking, one that places the everyday under a microscope to find out what lies within.
“Do you believe that hard work is what it takes to be successful?” Shaw asks on opener “Dog Proposal,” and without lingering, opines: “Hard work has very little to do with success.” The line acts as an overture, inverting one contemporary western belief in preparation for a larger attempt to expose the absurdity of the most trivial aspects of modern life. Repeating the lyric, “I’ve joined a gym, I’ve joined a gym close to the office,” Shaw creates a loop of professional small talk that turns meaningless conversation into a critique of itself.
Shaw never sounds removed from the behaviors she observes. “Stream, stream, stream my favorite shows/Just tell me who dies and who finds love,” she sings on “Spoils,” as if watching with glassy eyes. She portrays herself as stuck, not unhappily, in a life of monotonous routine, attached but disinterested at the same time. She dissects her own emotional states with equal coolness. In the latter half of “Viking Hair,” she asks a lover: “Stick up for me/Do what you’re told but sometimes tell me what to do as well/I just want to sexually experiment on a nice safe pair of hands/Don’t judge me, just hold still.” The relentless push of electric guitar and drums lends her words both a sense of confidence and the surreality of a film soundtrack.
Shaw’s habit of poking fun of the life she leads, yet leading it nonetheless, loses its humor on the aptly titled “Sombre One.” Over ascending and descending notes on electric guitar, she delivers lines detached from narrative in a slow, heavy monotone. She repeats phrases, telling herself that “everything is easy to get out and put back quickly” as if seeking consolation in the pages of an instruction manual. Reciting a to-do list, she whispers, “Don’t get burnt by the sun’s rays.” Against spare guitar and a dull drumbeat, the line feels pregnant with self-reproach, as if Shaw is ashamed to remind herself to do so little.
“Sombre One” imbues jagged, stream-of-consciousness lyrics with melancholy, and it almost falters under the weight of its own self-seriousness. But before the song ends, the instruments fade away, and Shaw’s voice is heard from a distance, delivering a mix of lyrics from other songs like spoken-word poems. It’s a self-reflexive moment for the band, one that turns their signature re-purposing of phrases (“Rest in heavenly peace,” “Amazing voice, amazing body”) back on themselves. By treating language as a machine to be taken apart, Dry Cleaning crystallize experience with just a few images and turns of phrase. It’s enough to make you sift through the minutiae of your own life in search of meanings you’ve overlooked. | 2019-11-05T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2019-11-05T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | It's OK | November 5, 2019 | 7.5 | 05afdfc2-042d-4182-a181-1d13fc382bcd | Colin Lodewick | https://pitchfork.com/staff/colin-lodewick/ | |
The maestro behind the Gangsta Grillz mixtapes gets a major-label shot to replicate his ear for the Now-- including fantastic tracks by Outkast and Project Pat. | The maestro behind the Gangsta Grillz mixtapes gets a major-label shot to replicate his ear for the Now-- including fantastic tracks by Outkast and Project Pat. | DJ Drama: Gangsta Grillz: The Album | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/10992-gangsta-grillz-the-album/ | Gangsta Grillz: The Album | He calls himself "Barack O'Drama" more than once on wax, but DJ Drama's got a lot more in common with Mike Huckabee: Vaguely inoffensive, vaguely southern, affable, entrepreneurial; the kind of simple-minded dude who synchronizes everyone-gets-a-seat-at-the-table warmth with jaw-dropping blunders (denying the science behind evolution/befouling the video reunion of UGK).
The political analogy continues. On the inside cover of Gangsta Grillz: The Album, Drama poses unnervingly close to the fish-eye close up, the plane of hands perpendicular to the ground, thumbs up, caught in some unclear gesticulation that could symbolize an awkward approximation of a booty, a square of china white, or just a square. He's supposed to look hard, serious, "so focused." Drama doesn't rap, sing, produce, or mix. So why are so many fizzy pop rappers and A-listeners flocking to him? Because behind all the stunted veneers and posing rests the most important person the modern economy: the middle man. All he does is shout over beats and bring people together.
His series of Gangsta Grillz mixtapes have been both buzz-forming and buzz-maintaining for a few years now, aiding everyone from Little Brother to Lil' Boosie. For many, Lil' Wayne's Dedication 2, a Gangsta Grillz entry, has become the unofficial demarcation of his ascent to rap's top tier. Drama is a fixer. His in-house producers (Don Cannon, most readily) have benefited from the endless series of canvasses too, spring boarding onto 50 Cent and Young Jeezy production credits. Like a good agent, getting in bed with Drama gets you in bed with the right people, or, at the very least, the best people willing to work with you.
Don't misunderstand, DJ Drama has made some fantastic mixtapes. He'll hopefully make more. But about 25% of Drama's overall skill set translates well to major label album-length hip-hop. Sadly, Gangsta Grillz: The Album has to exist for us to learn that. No single narrator or speaker to guide and anchor. No fixed regional style to diverge and return to. Just overstuffed tracks like loosely spooled nylon or hastily booked professional wrestling matches (Jeezy! Twista! Joc! T.I.! Diddy! Nelly!-- on one song). Skits red-line embarrassment; Katt Williams going on for three minutes too long about Kush, Diddy just smiling and shouting shit on that annoying DJ Clue self-echo. The singles are baubles, and Jazze Pha ones at that ("5000 Ones"). Sonically, not a producer on here ever met a Visigoth bell sequence or predictably "explosive" drum roll he didn't like.
Two jewels get lost in the blather. Everyone already knows about Outkast's "Art of Storytellin' Part 4"-- it's great, lovely to hear the pair together, and Andre 3000 is the only MC who can rap about the war (though I'd like to know how he'd capitalize it), and it's Drama's platform at its finest: Giving space to something instant right at this very second. Even though the collaborative "187" is a song very different from "Storytellin'", it's a satisfying enough shuffle of related yet previously uncombined parts. Project Pat gets to play Ford to 8Ball and MJG's collective Nixon. And B.G. should croon hooks more often; he pouts and flicks through this one.
Sadly, and mostly, Gangsta Grillz also forces a lot of crow down the throat. Those who got behind the opaque, effortless Houston aesthetic are going to have to grit their teeth through "Gettin' Money", and it's frightening to hear Clipse sound like monotone MCs who just read a lot of Italian and Japanese Vogue (the album closing "Cheers"). I'd chide Drama for not helping, not standing in front on his product, but when your Rolodex and your open door are the only tools you bring to the job, all there is to do is politic. | 2008-01-11T01:00:05.000-05:00 | 2008-01-11T01:00:05.000-05:00 | Pop/R&B / Rap | Atlantic | January 11, 2008 | 4.5 | 05b02237-0f9a-4a86-8c54-91aa4ec6c903 | Evan McGarvey | https://pitchfork.com/staff/evan-mcgarvey/ | null |
Brooklyn-based musician Kam Tambini layers roaring guitars, Latin rhythms, and his own low-pitched, sighing vocals to explore the mundanity of city life. | Brooklyn-based musician Kam Tambini layers roaring guitars, Latin rhythms, and his own low-pitched, sighing vocals to explore the mundanity of city life. | Tambino: Sin Miedo EP | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/tambino-sin-miedo/ | Sin Miedo EP | No city has ever saved 33-year-old Kam Tambini, better known as Tambino, from the exhaustion of 21st-century existence. The clave rhythms that pepper his new Sin Miedo EP stem from Tambini’s childhood in Bogotá, Colombia and his birthplace of Lima, Peru, while his distorted guitars, clattering drum machines, and glistening synths recall cramped Brooklyn venues where the sound guy is learning on the job. Tambini’s blend of shoegaze, indie pop, and electronic touches on everywhere he’s been, but his sound isn’t as simple as his own label for it, “cumbiagaze.” Its charm lies in the way he layers roaring guitars, Latin rhythms, and his own low-pitched, sighing vocals to explore the mundanity of city life. He sounds drained but resilient: Sin Miedo is a reminder of the pockets of contentment in the most frustrating of modern eras.
On “NY Daze,” Tambini unleashes a slow-moving tidal wave of overdriven power chords and deadpans, “Some are getting out of here/I won’t leave New York City, ’cause/Kids, I’m in it/’Til the end.” He sounds anything but convinced, and the rest of Sin Miedo presents a familiar citydweller’s dilemma: Can you feel consistently worn down by a place, yet enchanted enough to stay? On opener “Estos Dias,” Tambini paints a picture that could be inspired by any U.S. city in summer 2020: “Estos días/A miles ví/En las calles de marfil” (“These days/I saw thousands/In the marble streets”). His chorus chant of “Nos mata la policia” (“The police are killing us”) sounds resigned, yet his double-time percussion and bursting guitars feel inspired enough to join the crowd. Even when he’s emotionally worn thin, he finds a glimmer of hope.
Sin Miedo sounds somewhat, though not entirely, clearer and more mobile than 2020’s Tambino EP (both produced by Michael Beharie), and the faint lucidity elevates the moments when Tambini most strongly feels the weight of it all. “Standing on the corner/I can’t speak/Drunks on the subway,” he quasi-raps in the background of “Las Tardes,” nearly indiscernible through the whirring guitars underlying his brief yet vivid description of a metropolitan Friday night. “It’s all coming down on my head,” he continues, his mumble emphasizing his rapidly diminishing emotional capacity. The music cycles between stretches of rapid low-E string plucking and swirls of icy synths accompanied by shaking maracas, all sides of his upbringing in the mix: Wherever he goes, there he is.
Tambini reports his reflections with honest yet simple words—the kind that likely don’t go through any revisions after he writes them down—and his groaning guitars and vocal production suggest a foggy mindstate. So when the crystalline keys and clipped vocal samples of “Deseo” break through, it’s shocking. Click-clacking, reggaeton-tinged percussion dances around chilly synths and Tambini’s echoing, ever-detached voice: “Bailabamos/Con el trago y mi dolor/Yo te daría mi vida” (“We were dancing/With a drink and my pain/I would give you my life”). It’s a new sound for Tambino and a classic city picture: Strong feelings lost to the club yet still present in the morning.
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2022-01-26T00:00:00.000-05:00 | 2022-01-26T00:00:00.000-05:00 | Pop/R&B / Rock | self-released | January 26, 2022 | 7.2 | 05b2dc00-127e-40f8-8e47-7f47c6d10041 | Max Freedman | https://pitchfork.com/staff/max-freedman/ | |
Mark Linkous’ second album as Sparklehorse shines an old light on impossible things. He found the purity of pop music and then lacerated it with the quirks and imperfections he cherished. | Mark Linkous’ second album as Sparklehorse shines an old light on impossible things. He found the purity of pop music and then lacerated it with the quirks and imperfections he cherished. | Sparklehorse: Good Morning Spider | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/sparklehorse-good-morning-spider/ | Good Morning Spider | In a 1998 documentary, Mark Linkous holds up an old hollow-body guitar. “This one...do you want to smell it?” he asks his interviewer, who’s standing somewhere behind the camera. “It smells so good.” She obliges, and asks what the smell is. “Just that old wood, old lady smell,” Linkous says in his slight drawl. “It belonged to an old lady who played it in church, that’s how I got this one. It’s 1960.”
The house they’re in is over a hundred years older, built in 1860 or 1840, Linkous isn’t sure. He’s living in Andersonville, Virginia, at this point, in an old farmhouse with his wife Teresa and a few dogs who scamper in and out of the frame. He’s got a recording studio he calls Static King set up in one of the rooms, insulated enough from the rest of the house that he can spend hours experimenting in there without Teresa hearing him. The camera pans across the studio. It’s a mess—gnarls of cables crisscrossing over old amplifiers, old tape decks, tiny Casio keyboards from the ’80s, scratched guitars stood up in the corner. It looks less like a recording studio and more like a patch of woods in the Virginia green outside, where vines dangle from trees and the grass bustles with insects.
Good Morning Spider, the 1998 album Linkous recorded in this 19th-century house, teems with a similar life. Its songs bleed in and out of each other: an organ drone ends one track and begins another; a strand of tape hiss winds through the work. You can hear machines starting up and stopping again, fingers squeaking across the frets of an acoustic guitar. Linkous had a tendency to sing close enough to the microphone that you could hear the spittle crackling off his teeth, like he’s whispering in your ear or through a tin can strung up with twine.
Linkous recorded the album, the story goes, after dying for the first time. He was opening for Radiohead on tour in England and after taking too much Valium, or alcohol, or heroin (he doesn’t remember and the story changes), he passed out in a London hotel room with his legs pinned underneath him. The potassium build-up stopped his heart once paramedics straightened his legs out, and he died for a minute or three; at the hospital, his tour manager was led to the grieving room where doctors would deliver bad news. But there was none, and Linkous got to live again. He even got to keep his legs, despite what the doctors told him when he woke up.
“It must have changed your life profoundly,” the documentary interviewer says of the experience, which strung on for three months in 1996 at St. Mary’s Hospital while Linkous’ legs healed. He pauses, and then, haltingly, replies. “Well, it made me notice a lot more. It made me be a little more perceptive to small things, more, after that, I think. You know? People, babies, animals, insects. Things like that.”
Born in Arlington, Virginia, to a coal mining family, Linkous moved to New York and then Los Angeles after high school to become a rock star instead. He tried to learn Led Zeppelin songs on guitar as a kid and almost gave up on the instrument because they were too hard. Then, “I saw on the evening news, a news flash from London: punk rock!” he says. “And I was like, man, I can definitely do this.”
Linkous joined a power-pop band called the Dancing Hoods in the ’80s. They put out two albums and broke up, and Linkous moved back to Virginia, where he began making music by himself under the name Sparklehorse. He gave up on being a rock star; he even gave up on the idea that he was the one making the music coming out of him. “My songs? I don’t feel like they’re even mine,” he tells his interviewer. “I’m just a conductor.” He likens them to the bugs crawling around in the grass on his property. They’re in his space, but there’s no way they could ever belong to him. They just pass by.
Good Morning Spider, Sparklehorse’s second album after 1995’s Vivadixiesubmarinetransmissionplot, retains some of the punk rock fervor that pushed Linkous to both coasts in his late teens and early twenties. “Pig” is the closest Sparklehorse comes to a raw punk song, and “Cruel Sun” sees him shouting against the full lurch of multi-layered guitars. “Happy Man,” a song Linkous bisected with the ambient organ number “Chaos of the Galaxy,” could have been a pop punk chart-topper in a corporate producer’s hands. But if punk ran on spontaneity, coarseness, and attitude, Sparklehorse found life in the details punk ignored.
Linkous constantly approached the purity of pop music and then lacerated it with the quirks and imperfections he cherished. “Happy Man” has a populist enough hook: “All I want is to be a happy man,” Linkous wails. But that line only releases the tension he’s been building up in the verse and pre-chorus, a tension built on lyrics like, “I woke up in a horse’s stomach one foggy morning/His eyes were crazy and he smashed into the cemetery gates.” That’s not radio fodder, not even in the strange ’90s milieu that made hits out of Marcy Playground’s “Sex and Candy” and Butthole Surfers’ “Pepper.” Who wants to see the world from the inside of a horse?
Though signed to Capitol from the first album, Sparklehorse never found the broad audience Linkous hoped it might. It found fans, though, in people like Thom Yorke (who collaborated with Linkous on one song, a cover of Pink Floyd’s “Wish You Were Here”) and Daniel Johnston (whom Linkous covers on Spider) and Tom Waits (who sang guest vocals on Sparklehorse’s next album It’s a Wonderful Life) and PJ Harvey (ditto). And it found listeners in weird kids around the country who bought Sparklehorse’s CDs or (more likely) pirated them from peer-to-peer networks. Sparklehorse was Soulseek rock, the kind of thing you let trickle through your headphones on your rough nights but didn’t ever really play for your friends. When he sang, he sang for you and no one else, except maybe the june bugs in the grass.
According to Linkous, it’s a rural thing, a facet of artists who live in houses, not apartments, who have to cross miles of winding road in a car to get anywhere. It’s why he made his albums from equipment salvaged from junkyards and purchased from eccentric characters, not on professional equipment in a glossy urban studio. “Country people, being so isolated, they have to kind of improvise with things they have access to,” he says. “Always thought that was a really admirable trait of country people.”
Drive through Virginia enough and you’ll start to see what Linkous saw, all the layers of time and memory that go into making something as delicate and complex as his music. Vines swallow trees, moss swallows gravestones, the hum of bugs blankets the haunted emptiness of Civil War battlefields. It’s a place pulsing with the memory of violence, serene now but weighted by what’s been done there. There’s nowhere in the country with more ghosts.
Sparklehorse’s songs tend to follow you like ghosts, especially the ones on Good Morning Spider, Linkous’ best and most intricate work. I’ll be driving for hours in the dark and find myself thinking of the refrain to “All Night Home”: “We’re gonna drive/All night home,” a companion piece to Roy Orbison’s “I Drove All Night” that works more like a prayer for safe arrival. On “Come on In,” Linkous modifies the children's prayer “Now I Lay Me Down to Sleep,” removing references to the Lord: “I pray my soul to keep/If I die before I wake/I pray my soul to take.” That shift from soul as object to soul as subject feels impossibly lonely, the presence of God implied but not spoken to, unless that’s who Linkous is pleading with when he sings, “Come on in/Take me home tonight.”
These big, ambiguous concepts—loneliness, souls, sadness—populate the album as characters in the near-absence of people. There’s the stray reference to a “you” in there, a few mentions of “he” and “she”, but the majority of living beings here are animals and ideas. The “he” on “Ghost of His Smile” is a pet lizard who died at Linkous’ home; the Joe in “Hey, Joe” belongs to Daniel Johnston. In Linkous’ rendition, clearer and more fleshed out than Johnston’s original, Joe and Jack and the rest of the names fade in the light of the stars above them.
Johnston’s line—“There’s a heaven and there’s a star for you”—appeared on sparklehorse.com after Linkous’ death, the real one, in March 2010. His family put it there as a footnote to their statement on his passing. I don’t know if they thought he wrote it or if they knew it meant a lot to him or if it was just the most resonant language to appear on his albums in the wake of his death. He died in Knoxville, Tennessee, where he’d been living in his last months. He killed himself in an alley you can find on Google Maps, if you really want to.
In the documentary, Linkous talks about being in so much pain after his ’96 hospital stay that Teresa had to hide his guns. It’s eerie, now that he’s dead, to hear him talk about suicide all those years ago. Maybe he knew; maybe he could feel the totality of his own life the way he felt the everything-ness of the spaces he lived and worked in, the details of a place from its bugs to its mountains.
I’d like to think that whatever conducted these songs into being is still here. In a dream a few months after his death, when I was living in D.C., Linkous told me to look for him in the color green. I don’t want to make too much of it, but I saw hawks floating over the highways all that summer, too, and I remember how he wrote about hawks, how “Hammering the Cramps” from Vivadixie was written about a wounded hawk he picked up off the road in Virginia and drove home on his motorcycle. One hand on the handlebars, one hand cradling an enraged hawk, for miles.
Good Morning Spider carries so much melancholy inside of it, but it’s the kind of melancholy that’s existed long before people were around to experience it and will be there long after we’re gone. More than anything, the album shines an old light on the impossible things that happen all the time: dogs coming back from the dead, spiders building webs, the moon yanking the sea around the earth. The bugs that are dead all winter and suddenly not dead at the first hint of green. Human love for the non-human. “It’s a hard world for little things,” Linkous sings on “Ghost of His Smile.” The catch is there’s nothing living that isn’t little.
Here’s another prayer from Linkous: “I’m so sorry/My spirit’s rarely in my body/It wanders through the dry country/Looking for a good place to rest.” He sings it on “Hundreds of Sparrows,” a song about birds and intimacy and coming back to your body after drifting away from it for hours. I think of it when I neglect my friends, which is often, or when I’m not listening to someone speaking to me because my mind’s somewhere else. Then I hear Linkous’ voice in my head and I return to my body while I have it. | 2017-08-06T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-08-06T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Parlophone | August 6, 2017 | 9.1 | 05b33fc7-0d3e-4ffc-a14a-438454df9928 | Sasha Geffen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sasha-geffen/ | null |
On their fifth album, the Detroit post-punk band recruits a woodwind section for its most expansive statement yet. | On their fifth album, the Detroit post-punk band recruits a woodwind section for its most expansive statement yet. | Protomartyr: Ultimate Success Today | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/protomartyr-ultimate-success-today/ | Ultimate Success Today | The first four Protomartyr albums offered a compendium of America’s collective grief: unending wars, gentrification, the opioid epidemic, white supremacy, patriarchal hegemony—all our greatest hits. The fifth, Ultimate Success Today, appears to address our current twin crises: the global pandemic and the plague of police brutality in America. Will the apocalypse be “a foreign disease washed upon the beach,” frontman Joe Casey asks on “Processed By the Boys,” in his familiar wavering croon, or “a riot in the streets?”
But the album was written more than a year before this particular boiling pot overflowed, and Casey told Aquarium Drunkard that he had ICE in mind when he wrote the song. As usual, his lyrics report from a grim reality that isn’t confined to any particular moment in history. The titular “boys” could be buzz-cut behemoths in Punisher patches, Silicon Valley billionaires, legislators whistling dixie as they withhold health care and stimulus payments, or perhaps all of the above: Casey’s dystopia is the capitalistic system we suffer under until we’re ground to a nub.
Protomartyr has mastered telling this story through a noisy, claustrophobic style of post-punk. But on the band’s latest, most ambitious-sounding release, the band gets expansive. Recorded in a cavernous former church in upstate New York and co-produced by the band and David Tolomei (Girlpool, Beach House), Protomartyr strikes a balance on Ultimate Success Today, using familiar techniques—throbbing basslines, reverb-drenched guitar, syncopated drums, Casey’s droll delivery—but wading into deeper and murkier territory. After experimenting with some sparse bass clarinet, viola, and cello on 2018’s Consolation EP at the behest of collaborator Kelley Deal, the band took a dive into the woodwind section of the orchestra for the ensuing LP.
But this isn’t Protomartyr—now with bonus free jazz!, even though there is at least one woodwind instrument on every track from jazz musicians Jemeel Moondoc (alto saxophone) and Izaak Mills (saxophone, bass clarinet, flute) and with improvisor Fred Lonberg-Holm contributing cello to more than half of the songs. Moondoc’s deft improvisations on the haunting “Tranquilizer” boost the song’s swelling chorus, and Lonberg-Holm’s cello abrades the surface alongside Greg Ahee’s Sister-era Sonic Youth guitars. Moondoc doubles the melody line on verses in “The Aphorist,” replacing what might’ve been a synthesizer on previous records with a much warmer sound. On “June 21,” Half Waif’s Nandi Rose fuses her tranquil lilt with Casey’s baritone sing-speak to peel back the facade of a serene summer scene.
Casey has made a name for himself as a lyricist, and his lyrics are, as ever, dense with historical, literary, and mythological references. His “yellow Zephyr on blocks” on “June 21” refers to the Ford car (and perhaps Detroit auto industry at large), as his narrator feels the lowness of what is supposed to be a cheerful time of year. But a zephyr—named for Zephyros, the god of the west wind in Greek mythology—is a term for a gentle spring or summer breeze used to symbolize happiness and love, however fleeting. It’s blowing through city blocks, but can’t reach him through the “windows rust shut.”
But it gets darker. On “Worm in Heaven,” the album’s closer, Mills extends a sorrowful note for 30 seconds, setting the stage for the most purely beautiful and crushingly hopeless tune in the band’s discography, one in which Casey turns his crisis inward, imagining missing a chance at grace in life and “cleaning the gilded gutters,” in death. “Remember me, how I lived. I was frightened, always frightened,” he sings, the guitar melting away and ceding to Mills, before second guessing that he ever existed at all. It’s bleak, even for a guy who once wrote a song about the Flint water crisis as inspired by an 18th-century book called The Anatomy of Melancholy. Casey, having already plumbed the depths of sorrow, still has room to go deeper as Protomartyr’s sound continues to become much richer and more rewarding.
Buy: Rough Trade
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Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2020-07-20T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-07-20T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Domino | July 20, 2020 | 8 | 05b99565-b56b-48c8-8d53-a22737a8572a | Chris O'Connell | https://pitchfork.com/staff/chris-o'connell/ | |
Coming seven years after his debut, the North Carolina EDM producer’s second album alternates between euphoric pop and muted ambient work, exploring the difficulty of finding fulfillment and lasting peace. | Coming seven years after his debut, the North Carolina EDM producer’s second album alternates between euphoric pop and muted ambient work, exploring the difficulty of finding fulfillment and lasting peace. | Porter Robinson: Nurture | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/porter-robinson-nurture/ | Nurture | Porter Robinson’s music has often treasured escapism. Whether making ecstatic dance or cinematic pop, the producer has long imagined his work as a portal to other realms, as if, through enough head-spinning drops and intricate synth programming, he could create a better world. His debut full-length album, 2014’s Worlds, was explicitly about the transportive power of fiction, the way that art can take us into an “imaginary universe.” And in the video for his Madeon collaboration “Shelter,” a father creates a bright, beautiful simulation for his daughter to live in while the real world around her crumbles and burns. It’s a sentimental idea, but a powerful one. In a lonely world, who couldn’t use an escape?
But seven years of creative blocks, self-doubt, and mental-health struggles have altered Robinson’s perspective. His second album Nurture explores the difficulty of finding fulfillment and plumbs the joyful realization that the world he wanted to create was always right in front of him. The album’s tagline underscores its aims succinctly: “Everything we need is already here.”
Robinson sings with a newfound clarity on Nurture, writing directly about his struggles and the ecstatic realizations that have come from hard times. “Look at the Sky,” the first vocal track after an ambient piano-led opener, is a ballad of hard-won optimism. Over the kaleidoscopic chirps of a handful of interlocking synth parts, he sings affirmations, looking ahead to a better future. “Look at the sky, I’m still here,” he sings with quiet confidence. “I’ll be alive next year. I can make something good.”
This disposition runs through the record. On “Musician,” Robinson mulls the difficulty of making art during tough times, flickering between despair and reassurance: “I just can't stop, I'm sorry,” he sings, then: “I can feel a new day dawning.” Nurture feels careful to mirror the twists and turns of his headspace. There’s murky, tone-setting ambient pieces (“Lifelike”), blissed-out digital shoegaze (the Totally Enormous Extinct Dinosaurs collaboration “Unfold”), and anxious electronic collages (“dullscythe”) all interspersed between euphoric pop songs like “Get Your Wish” and “Something Comforting.” Even when a song is bright and buoyant, there’s a restlessness beneath, a sense that the feeling he’s describing might only last for a moment—that any solid comfort might just slip through your fingers.
Across the record, Robinson distorts, pitch-shifts, and otherwise mutates his vocals, which is meant to add a layer of what he calls “corruption and artificiality” to the songs. The technique introduces a note of lingering doubt into songs about beauty and hope. On the closing track “Trying to Feel Alive,” he emerges from the fog with the realization that struggle gives life its color in the first place. “Maybe I don’t really need to feel satisfied,” he sings. “Maybe it's a gift that I spend all this time just trying to feel alive.”
Buy: Rough Trade
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Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-04-29T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2021-04-27T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Mom+Pop | April 29, 2021 | 7.6 | 05baf978-6b7a-4d98-b34f-8a403b425549 | Colin Joyce | https://pitchfork.com/staff/colin-joyce/ | |
Each Sunday, Pitchfork takes an in-depth look at a significant album from the past, and any record not in our archives is eligible. Today, we revisit a marvel of spiritual jazz, an album overflowing with transcendence, harmony, and grief. | Each Sunday, Pitchfork takes an in-depth look at a significant album from the past, and any record not in our archives is eligible. Today, we revisit a marvel of spiritual jazz, an album overflowing with transcendence, harmony, and grief. | Alice Coltrane: Journey in Satchidananda | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/alice-coltrane-journey-in-satchidananda/ | Journey in Satchidananda | Alice Coltrane’s daughter Sita Michelle once recalled a morning when she was lying in bed before school. She awoke to the sound of a beautiful harp and thought, “If heaven is like this, then I’ll be certainly ready to welcome it when I get my chance.” The story goes that John Coltrane had ordered that harp, but died before it could arrive. Since Alice’s career as a bandleader took off in the years after John’s death, and her practice centered around this silvery new instrument, it’s tempting to see the harp as the gift that he left her to perpetuate their shared musical legacy.
But Alice was not Orpheus, and John was not Apollo. To suggest that the harp itself began her career would be to deny the intensity of her talent and do wrong by every wife whose legacy has been yoked to her husband’s. Though their influences dovetail, their oeuvres remain separate, and within the spectacular and emotional Journey in Satchidananda, the knot at the heart of Alice Coltrane’s harp story starts to unfold.
Born Alice McLeod in the Detroit summer of 1937, she was a talent from the start, playing piano and organ in her local Baptist church. Because the music she would go on to make is so cosmic, so beatific, it’s easy to mistake Alice Coltrane for somebody without rigorous musical training. But she performed classical piano at concerts around Detroit in her teens. In 1960, she moved to Paris and took up jazz under the mentorship of pianist Bud Powell. By the following year, she was performing as the intermission pianist at the Blue Note in Paris.
The first man Alice Coltrane married delivered her, in a way, to the second. She wedded jazz vocalist Kenny “Pancho” Hagood in 1960, but almost as soon as she conceived their child, their relationship deteriorated due to his heroin abuse and she returned to America. With their daughter Sita Michelle in tow, Alice arrived in Detroit later that year and her career as a professional musician began in earnest. She gigged around Detroit, eventually joining Terry Gibbs’ quartet on the piano. She was a sought-after improviser, notable for her commitment to trance-like playing that transcended the rhythms her bandleader established. While playing a New York show with Gibbs’ band in 1962, she met John Coltrane on a shared bill at Metropole. The following year Alice abruptly quit Gibbs’ band, telling him that she was going to marry John. John and Alice had three children together.
John died of liver cancer in 1967. He left Alice bereft, or whatever word is stronger than “bereft.” She couldn’t sleep and she saw visions; she lost weight. In the depths of her grief, Alice had visited a man named Swami Satchidananda, a guru who had spoken to the crowds at Woodstock, and become his disciple. His advice and spiritual guidance soothed her spirit.
Coltrane was by this stage deeply engaged with matters of the spirit. Her compositions began to bend psychedelically to musical traditions around the world, but remained flavored by the bebop environment of her Detroit youth. She recorded Journey in Satchidananda, named for her spiritual adviser Swami Satchidananda, in 1970. All of Coltrane’s early albums bear witness to her exploration of mythology and religion, particularly from Egypt and India, the latter of which she visited several times in the 1970s. But it’s Journey in Satchidananda that pays full tribute to the transformation that she underwent in the late 1960s—as a human being and artist.
As that crystalline harp makes so immediately clear, this is a record as much about the soul as it is about skilled orchestration. The clue is in the title: it’s a journey. Coltrane takes us across uncharted territory in jazz composition, drawing from multiple cultures and diverse instruments, but she also shows us emotion in motion. Because she refuses to stay in one key, instead treating the album’s themes as a set of recurring melodic shapes, the very texture of Journey is defined by transition, process, and flow. Its music has no beginning or end. Instead, as the first bars of the opening track demonstrate, Coltrane is working with the principle of looping and transcendence.
You should listen to Journey beginning to end while lying on the ground with your eyes closed, because those are the best conditions for performing the kind of visualization that Alice Coltrane’s liner notes request: “Anyone listening to this selection should try to envision himself floating on an ocean of Satchinandaji’s love,” she wrote, “which is literally carrying countless devotees across the vicissitudes and stormy blasts of life to the other shore.”
And so I spread myself out over the floor of my apartment until I felt like a conduit between the earth below and the universe above. The record opens with three droning tamboura notes, anchoring the title track. The three-note phrase looped around, holding me inside it, while a soft and well-assured bassline spread out beneath. Then Alice enters. Within the theme played on the tamboura—a long-necked string drone instrument with an almost reedy timbre—her harp sounds like a sprite, or a child set free after a long confinement. It dances upwards and downwards unselfconsciously, as if nobody is watching. With my eyes closed, it sounded like a beam of light on water.
When the legendary free jazz pioneer Pharoah Sanders joins, his saxophone melody could go anywhere, since Cecil McBee’s bass is so steady (McBee by this time had played with Miles Davis, Yusef Lateef, and Freddie Hubbard). On this track as on the next four, dissonance is a place to visit but not to stay. Every top melody is an exploration, but Coltrane’s orchestration always provides a stable and repetitive place of return. That drone-and-bass texture comes from McBee and the tamboura, played by a musician credited only as “Tulsi,” while at the other end of the register Sanders’ sax and Vishnu Wood’s oud join Coltrane’s harp in a kind of sparkling, freeform dance.
The orchestration is broad and deep, unmistakably influenced by Coltrane’s interest in South Asian tradition. Nothing as boring as chord progressions governs Journey. Instead, like John, Alice worked in the modal style, discarding functional harmony in favor of freely-chosen chords around a root note. The album’s harmony references Indian scales and other non-diatonic series, but mostly it runs off its own themes, like that opening three-note drone. Melodies wander across the record from instrument to instrument, and track to track. They recur, alter, and they play.
On track two, “Shiva Loka,” Alice’s harp grows stronger, unfurling into an own entity with its own character. The track is named for a goddess, the Dissolver of Creation. The three-note circle from track one is now a sonorous base, its resonance becoming thicker and more lively. The bells speed up and scatter over the music’s surface. The pulse is thicker too, taking us off the beat and into a real rhythm. It’s hard to dance while lying on the ground, but “Shiva Loka” makes that possible.
The groove continues in “Stopover Bombay,” a train rocking on its tracks. It’s only on “Something about John Coltrane” that things quiet down. Coltrane switches over to piano and it falls like rain, patterning the space with cool irregularity. When Sanders’ sax beings to scream, you hardly know whether he is laughing or crying. It’s a track animated by intense emotion that takes you in every direction there is. As it drew to a close, I felt as if I had been returned unharmed through a storm, back to the circle of tamboura that had protected me from the start.
In the final track, the live-recorded “Isis and Osiris,” we finally meet Alice’s sadness. Over 11 committed minutes, Vishnu Wood gives us an oud melody that sounds trapped inside the minor scale. The oud’s sound is sharp but resonant. He sobs and he trills, taking the record’s grief to a conclusive pitch. Then everything goes quiet, and the journey is over.
In the long moment before I peeled myself off the floor, I felt the spirit of Coltrane still touched by grief. It’s so hard to describe—to put into the language of words, rather than of sound—but among the record’s abundant mix of emotion, you can hear pain. There is no Journey without John; no Satchidananda without the Swami; no Swami without the grief. Instead of a binary split between music and life, or husband and wife, this record reveals that all these elements of Alice Coltrane’s life existed for her in an all-encompassing divine flow. His name may have cast a shadow over hers, but Alice Coltrane was not trying to escape it.
When I finally opened my eyes, a beam of sunshine flooded through my apartment. Like the cascading harp at the center of the album, the sunbeam seemed to say to me that art is the only thing that exists beyond death. Shadows don’t exist without light. Each defines the other. Alice Coltrane made Journey in Satchidananda from an in-between place, amid the unlocatable flow of different emotions, different lives, different traditions. Coltrane’s music is a journey, this record says, and a destination all of its own. | 2019-02-03T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2019-02-03T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Jazz / Experimental | ABC | February 3, 2019 | 10 | 05bbfacd-f9f1-4ce1-91cd-91b8cd97b04d | Josephine Livingstone | https://pitchfork.com/staff/josephine-livingstone/ | |
The contemporary-classical sextet have played with Bon Iver, Björk, Grizzly Bear, Sufjan Stevens, and Arcade Fire. Their first LP slots compositions from Annie Clark, Shara Worden, and Son Lux alongside young-composer colleagues. | The contemporary-classical sextet have played with Bon Iver, Björk, Grizzly Bear, Sufjan Stevens, and Arcade Fire. Their first LP slots compositions from Annie Clark, Shara Worden, and Son Lux alongside young-composer colleagues. | yMusic: yMusic, Beautiful Mechanical | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/16066-ymusic-beautiful-mechanical/ | yMusic, Beautiful Mechanical | If you're an indie rocker in need of chamber instruments, odds are you'll end up hiring a member of yMusic. The quietly ubiquitous sextet has spent its three-year existence amassing cross-genre collaborations like so many passport stamps: you've heard them, wittingly or not, playing with Bon Iver, Björk, Grizzly Bear, Sufjan Stevens, Arcade Fire, the National, Vampire Weekend-- you get the idea. But they also perform as a more traditional contemporary-classical ensemble, and on Beautiful Mechanical, their first proper full-length, they mix up the two worlds, slotting compositions from St. Vincent's Annie Clark and Son Lux alongside new works from young composer colleagues. The album's existence is a feat of networking savvy and determination-- it was funded via Kickstarter page-- but the music itself is sadly hit-or-miss, underlining a melancholy truth about bridging genre divides: It results in empty press-release fodder as often as it produces luminous, surprising new music.
Son Lux's titular work, "Beautiful Mechanical", lands somewhere blankly in the middle. Son Lux is no dabbler: He studied composition at Indiana University. But his work is somehow both antic and utterly frozen-- its gestures twitter away in different corners of the compositional space without engaging thematically. The work, which does some sly things with missing beats and rhythmic emphases, is technically assured, but it feels like the sort of forgettable, frictionless, minimalist sketch you can currently hear too many of at downtown-NYC new-music concerts.
Annie Clark fares significantly better. In fact, her piece, "Proven Badlands", might be the most beguiling and multi-layered composition on the album. On the basis of it alone, Clark could easily slip outside of her indie rock clubhouse entirely for an album's worth of chamber-music miniatures. "Badlands" begins with a swan-necked glide of a bassoon line, a thrice-digested memory of Gershwin's "Rhapsody in Blue". Cello and flute hop lightly into the frame. Then, the instruments clear out a space for an unexpected finger-picked acoustic guitar. Interesting things keep happening: A muted trumpet calls out a yearning tritone, the sharp, ear-troubling interval found at the heart of West Side Story. Bugling horns erupt into a locked-in pattern, an arch almost-quote from some lost big-band record. The work is a lively jumble of jazzy-French flavors, strongly suggesting that Clark's education in the classical canon made a little extra time for Debussy, Milhaud, and other jazz-age cosmopolitans.
Shara Worden of My Brightest Diamond also shows up to hand yMusic two sketches-- one vaguely Eastern, one vaguely African. Both are spry bundles of tiny noises. Worden's rich singing voice, which lit last year's Penelope, isn't here, but her pieces are imbued with the same lamplight glow. They are minor, but lively. Sarah Kirkland Snider, the composer of Penelope, revisits its agitated sound world with "Daughter of the Waves", a nine-minute swirl of muted anxiety. Judd Greenstein's "Clearing, Dawn, Dance" starts with a loping figure in the woodwinds and sends it rippling expertly outward through the ensemble, like small bobbing boats in a wake-- tracking its movement and hearing how Greenstein obscures it proves absorbing listening all on its own.
yMusic are part of a resourceful, engaged cluster of young classical musicians who are furiously networking a full-blown scene into existence. Collectively, they represent the movement's best qualities: broad-minded, ambitious, eagerly collaborative. However, Beautiful Mechanical also hints at some of the still-growing scene's nagging limitations: As exciting as all this activity is to behold, the marketing heat it generates carries over into its music only about half of the time. There are delightful moments scattered throughout, but the overall impression is of a small box of baubles, modest and lovely but inessential. | 2011-12-02T01:00:04.000-05:00 | 2011-12-02T01:00:04.000-05:00 | Pop/R&B / Experimental | New Amsterdam | December 2, 2011 | 6.7 | 05bdf5cd-2181-4890-b5fc-e77e3dfca649 | Jayson Greene | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jayson-greene/ | null |
Over seven tracks that span 80 minutes, the expansive, looping, shifting synths and rhythms of Bajas Fresh mark the trio’s most diverse and ambitious record. | Over seven tracks that span 80 minutes, the expansive, looping, shifting synths and rhythms of Bajas Fresh mark the trio’s most diverse and ambitious record. | Bitchin Bajas: Bajas Fresh | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/bitchin-bajas-bajas-fresh/ | Bajas Fresh | Cooper Crain once crystallized the Bitchin Bajas ethos with a simple question: “If you find a good loop that can hold its own musically, then why not use it?” That philosophy has served his group well for going on seven years, and has recently proven just as effective in collaboration. Through work with Bonnie “Prince” Billy, Natural Information Society, Olivia Wyatt, and Haley Fohr’s Jackie Lynn, Bitchin Bajas expanded their sound and prodded their partners to do the same. Credit the trio’s knack for finding good loops and knowing how to use them.
In particular, Bitchin Bajas know how to use a good loop for a long time. It’s easy enough to let a cycle grind away forever, hoping that repetition alone will entrance listeners. It’s also tempting to get too proactive and force sonic variety from a loop, as a pre-emptive stab at fending off boredom. Bitchin Bajas excel at finding midpoints between those default poles. They trust their loops to grow naturally but can also shift textures and vary moods to avoid predictability.
That’s why Bitchin Bajas’ music sounds best in extended durations. Their last full-length album, 2014’s self-titled two-disc set, stretched eight pieces across 77 minutes. The trio paid pretty obvious homage to their minimalist heroes—Terry Riley in particular—but lived up to that inspiration by carving their own way through familiar-sounding synth cycles and drones. On their follow-up, Bajas Fresh, Bitchin Bajas continue in long-form mode, filling 80 minutes with just seven tracks—including their longest to date, the 23-minute and 3-second “2303.” But this one is less about homage than exploration. Though no track is a radical departure, Bajas Fresh is the group’s most diverse and ambitious record so far.
Part of that diversity comes from wider instrumentation. Five guests are credited on Bajas Fresh—including veteran Ghost guitarist Masaki Batoh—and each track has its own distinct tone and atmosphere. Perhaps this expanding sonic horizon is a byproduct of recent collaborations, but Crain, Rob Frye, and Daniel Quinlivan have also widened their field of vision naturally over their discography. The more music they’ve made together, the more comfortable they’ve gotten with introducing new elements into their sturdy approach.
The best example might be the one song on Bajas Fresh that the trio didn’t write themselves. Their cover of “Angels and Demons at Play,” the title track from a Sun Ra album, takes the original’s bubbling rhythm and massages it into a meditation, turning Marshall Allen’s soaring flute into a slo-mo flutter. This transformation from jazz swing to minimalist loop is remarkably smooth, and that kind of easy confidence permeates all of Bitchin Bajas. It’s in all the rotations of “Jammu,” the field-recording-like rattling of “Yonaguni,” and the calm horn sounds of “Chokayo.” Even during “2303,” the record’s longest and most drone-heavy track, the band’s assuredness keeps everything in constant motion.
For a long record full of long songs, Bajas Fresh has a remarkably distinct flow. The group balances tension and relaxation with the timing of a master storyteller. It’s a talent Bitchin Bajas has shown on previous records, but here they’ve perfected it, instilling direction and purpose into what could easily be aimlessly pleasant music. “It’s not abstract sound at all,” Crain explained when chatting with Haley Fohr in 2015. “I would hope if our music was ever portrayed as a painting of what we heard, it would be a beautiful picture, not an abstract or messy image.” Crain’s hopes are realized on Bajas Fresh, an album worth hanging on your wall and staring at for a long time. | 2017-11-20T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2017-11-20T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Experimental | Drag City | November 20, 2017 | 8 | 05bfe118-2119-4d75-bd79-e5fe18606a9f | Marc Masters | https://pitchfork.com/staff/marc-masters/ | |
Donald Glover’s final album under this moniker features eclectic and adventurous rap and R&B, but the big swings never really connect. | Donald Glover’s final album under this moniker features eclectic and adventurous rap and R&B, but the big swings never really connect. | Childish Gambino: Bando Stone and the New World | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/childish-gambino-bando-stone-and-the-new-world/ | Bando Stone and the New World | When I was 14, I was introduced to Childish Gambino through his 2010 mixtapes I Am Just a Rapper and I Am Just a Rapper 2. This was when he was a sitcom star first and a rapper second, rapping with a glut of pop culture references, getting off punchline after punchline in a congested voice that made him sound like Urkel doing Da Drought 3. I liked them because they were satire, or maybe not, and maybe that was the point. If anything, the mixtapes were endearingly corny, nerdy, and goofy—he played with a rap character he was forming and hinted at the racial insecurities that would make 2011’s Camp a pop-rap disaster.
All these years later, Childish Gambino is merely a side project of Donald Glover, who has worked tirelessly to shift the perception of himself from nerdy, goofy, and insecure Black artist to a cool, layered, and serious Black artist. I think of his 2018 New Yorker profile in which he said, “I learn fast—I figured out the algorithm,” and described his “superpower” as getting people to believe whatever he wanted them to about him if he tried hard enough.
He did try and it worked. “Awaken, My Love!” from 2016 was essentially his Parliament-meets-Maxwell funk project. It’s nowhere near as soulful or groovy as he wanted it to be (I’ll give it up for “Riot,” though), but it did infuse his music with the stamp of Blackness he was thirsty for. Then there was the song and video for “This Is America,” more vague and less radical than its reputation, but it instantly gave his songs the aura of importance. And, oh yeah, there’s this television show he created called Atlanta, one of the best shows of the 21st century, the thing that makes good on his desire to make exceptional Black art. Through dark comedy and the hyperlocal lens of his hometown, the show blurs the lines between persona and reality, a thought he was veering toward on the 2013 project Because the Internet. And yet the greatest achievement of Atlanta is much more straightforward: It was funny as hell.
There’s not much of a sense of humor on Bando Stone and the New World, billed as Donald Glover’s final album as Childish Gambino. The reason he gave The New York Times? “It’s not fulfilling. And I just felt like I didn’t need to build in this way anymore.” You can feel that in how he seems burdened with the pressure of living up to the perception he has molded for himself. It’s a strained album that so badly wants to end the Childish Gambino experiment with a bang, that wants to be a middle finger to everyone who ever thought he didn’t have the range to pull off whatever he set his sights on, that wants to be the kind of vulnerable record that lasts because a new generation of teenagers see themselves in his music. That’s fine and all. Atlanta had similar ambitions baked in. But also, the best episodes featured something you had never seen before in your life, and it was exciting to watch Donald and his writers’ room subvert the expectations of TV. Meanwhile, Bando Stone and the New World is a familiar slog, and the swings feel algorithmic rather than experimental.
Think of all of the albums over the last decade or so that have shaped the identities of teenagers, or at least teenagers who buy records off the end-caps at Urban Outfitters: Bando Stone extracts a little bit of that sauce while sounding nowhere near as compelling as the originals. Yeezus is one, of course, not a big surprise considering that Gambino has always worshiped the showmanship, contradictions, and music of Kanye. Here, his throbbing, glitchy, pitch-shifting intro “H3@RT$ W3RE M3@NT T0 F7¥” with a chant of “Everybody Satan and I’m G-O-D” aims for the provocativeness of Ye’s 2013 heat check, but it’s more like one of the joyless, angry blasts of noise you’ll find on Donda. Then, like some of SZA’s SOS, he does the pop-punk nostalgia thing on “Running Around,” but instead of raging like she did, it’s more unbearably cutesy in the vein of Teezo Touchdown. I can’t forget “Got to Be,” a chaotic sample-heavy mashup that brings to mind the mayhem of JPEGMAFIA, though his crate digging would be more adventurous than weaving together the Prodigy and Uncle Luke.
Of the spiritual raids going on here, the most effective is Frank Ocean’s style of R&B. That could be because the album is covered with the fingerprints of Michael Uzowuru, a megastar whisperer who once loomed around the Odd Future camp and was behind a few of Frank’s most memorable songs, including “Chanel” and “Nights.” Uzowuru has production credits on the seven-minute “No Excuses” (along with Glover and his longtime collaborator Ludwig Göransson) and it has this slow-mo jazziness that feels like lightweight Fela Kuti that meshes well with Gambino’s sweet, cloudy Blonde-esque croons. He pulls it off well enough—I’ve liked his voice since the 106 & Park–era R&B hums he hit at the end of his Sway freestyle in 2013. I’d say the same for “Steps Beach” (co-produced by Steve Lacy), which is fuzzy lyrically but his swooning falsetto is incredibly romantic. His singing goes off the rails when he steps outside of this zone, specifically the theatrical “Lithonia.” The album is supposed to be a soundtrack for a film that he hasn’t released yet, so maybe “Lithonia” will make more sense inside a different narrative arc, though that won’t change that his full-throated belts make him sound like Troy Bolton.
Gambino doesn’t even sound like he’s having that much fun trying on all these new hats; the main point just seems to be that range = greatness. A few moments say otherwise, like the high-pitched flexing mode Amaarae and Flo Milli put him onto on “Talk My Shit” or the intergalactic vibe out with Yeat on “Cruisin’.” He does have some heavier thoughts bubbling, such as fatherhood and aging on “Dadvocate” and “Can You Feel Me.” Both are incredibly earnest moments from an artist whose earnestness is always up for debate.
But maybe that’s the problem. It’s hard to grasp who Childish Gambino is supposed to be. So even when he’s genuine, I have a little bit of skepticism on my mind. That’s always what kept me at a distance from Gambino’s music, constantly wondering What does he want to get out of this? The only thing that stops me from doing that is when the project is just so great that I forget about that question entirely, like Atlanta was and how Bando Stone and the New World isn’t. Still, there is one song from the album I’ve been stuck on: “Yoshinoya,” one of the few straight-up rap tracks. It has some of that goofball cheesiness that marked the I Am Just a Rapper series. In the second verse he mentions his Chick-fil-A order, calls out the “old heads” who clown his “short shorts and PRO-Keds”, and criticizes cosplaying rappers. He doesn’t usually write verses that silly anymore, but it feels right. Because even for how radically his music has morphed over the years, the blustering smart-ass still feels like the closest I ever got to knowing Childish Gambino. | 2024-07-23T01:01:00.000-04:00 | 2024-07-23T00:18:01.166-04:00 | Rap | RCA | July 23, 2024 | 5.8 | 05c056a2-1ec2-4ea5-8d01-902885cb5276 | Alphonse Pierre | https://pitchfork.com/staff/alphonse-pierre/ | |
Darkside, Nicolás Jaar’s partnership with guitarist Dave Harrington, follow their recent reimagination of Daft Punk’s Random Access Memories with a fascinating, endlessly explorable debut. Psychic is translucent and dense, electrified and organic, holding a form while constantly being prodded into new shapes. | Darkside, Nicolás Jaar’s partnership with guitarist Dave Harrington, follow their recent reimagination of Daft Punk’s Random Access Memories with a fascinating, endlessly explorable debut. Psychic is translucent and dense, electrified and organic, holding a form while constantly being prodded into new shapes. | Darkside: Psychic | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/18586-darkside-psychic/ | Psychic | Nicolás Jaar would likely take offense with the same old dutiful recitation of his credentials—you know, the Chilean-born, Brown-educated electronic wunderkind, Clown & Sunset label head, serious artiste behind BBC’s Essential Mix of 2012, musical cubes, and a five-hour MoMA performance in a geodesic dome. In our interview from earlier this year, Jaar wanted to shed his past reputation, and that’s fair enough. Who doesn’t hope to be seen as a different person at 23 than they were at 21? But that's the kind of C.V. you only play down if you're worried about being called an elitist or running for public office. That might not be so far off the mark in regards to Darkside, Jaar’s partnership with guitarist Dave Harrington. The name alone triggers an automatic word association with an album owned by over 50 million people and recognized by nearly everyone who’s made it to 10th grade. The prismatic, black-lit aura of their fascinating, endlessly explorable debut Psychic doesn’t try to stop anyone from making that connection and if you spot Jaar’s stated influences of Can and Richie Hawtin, that’s fine too: Rarely has a record held such appeal for the high-minded while welcoming the simply high-minded.
Though a logical extension of the prog-dance fusion explored on Darkside’s self-titled EP from 2011, it makes their curious reimagination of Daft Punk’s Random Access Memories from a few months back feel like their true debut. Upon initially hearing it, one could easily think of Daftside as an academic work rather than something meant for listening pleasure—a foment of the bubbling resentment towards the original’s Gatsby-esque confluence of ostentatious extravagance and genuine, if self-serving, benevolence; it was a hell of a party that left a lot of up-and-coming producers feeling like they were locked out of East Egg. However, Psychic and Daftside have the same essential goal, guided equally by artistic reverence and crackpot scheming. And that aim is to emulsify the disparate record industry obsessions that dominated right before the advent of the compact disc: opulent disco and ornate prog-rock, yacht-pop and astral funk, the former of each almost exclusively singles mediums, the latter beholden to the LP and all sounding like the sole province of bearded, flamboyantly lapeled millionaires.
On the gargantuan opening gambit of “Golden Arrow,” Darkside spend 11 minutes misremembering the ground rules for music neither of them were alive to hear the first time around. The heartbeat pulse serving a baseline for those distant, whirring synthesizers and hollowed-out drones is pure space-rock, but the gorgeous overlay of sighing cello and digital disintegration is not. When the beat finally drops after about four minutes, it’s a slack and stumbling disco interloper—high on pot, not blow. Those palm-muted funk guitars have After Dark bloodshot tincture, but that label would never allow this much modernist, bit-crushing babble in their proudly purist Italo, let alone that undulating synth bass. And then, Harrington’s falsetto takes off like an apparitional Gibb brother and... are we sure this isn’t disco? Do these guys have any clue what they’re doing?
Thankfully, the answer is “hell no”—they have a plan, but no ground rules or precedents; Darkside aren’t recreating anything. The subliminal bass shadowing Jaar’s vocals on the confounding, starched-shirt blues of “Paper Trails” has its own gravitational pull, it only exists in music made by Nico Jaar. Nor is there a session player capable of conjuring the panglobal percussion that morphs throughout “The Only Shrine I’ve Seen,” the impossibly lush layering of cymbals, snares, bells, and claps joining the hands of church choirs, marching bands, and Buddhist monks. Even Harrington’s rudimentary, blues box guitar soloing gives Psychic crucial, humanist grounding—those slowhand Dire Straits leads are the last thing you’d expect a forward-thinking electronic musician to incorporate into their mission statement, but amongst all the retro-futurist discovery, it’s the sound of rediscovery, similar to the reclamation of saxophones on Destroyer’s Kaputt or Bon Iver’s electric-piano vindication of “Beth/Rest.”
Psychic is rife with extraterrestrial atmosphere and alien texture, but it never strays into pure ambience. Bust out the beanbag chair if you want, but in a record that fits an incredible amount of music into a compact 45 minutes, the silences are moments of active listening, too. “Sitra” initially registers as a necessary comedown from the stern demands of “Golden Arrow” until it pans completely in the left stereo channel. Darkside anticipate the very moment right before the disorientation of the unbalanced mix would be unnecessarily confrontational and drop you right into “Heart”, a traipse down the yellow brick road set to unsettling tribal drums. And just when you think it's getting kind personal on its one narrative (“Paper Trails”), the album drifts off into staticky calm.
That tranquil moment gets blown open thirty seconds later by “The Only Shrine I’ve Seen” and that’s just the first half of Psychic coming to a close. Side B only gets weirder as it hews more closely to Jaar’s associations with proper dance music. Up to this point, “space disco” typically meant one thing—airy, pretty, generally envisioning a brighter, cleaner future. “The Only Shrine I’ve Seen” and “Freak, Go Home” imagine what dance music could spring up from our future lunar cities if they’re every bit the dense, intimidating, metal monstrosities they are here on earth, teeming with both life and decay, flesh and rust. The most innovative and intriguing sounds on Psychic are almost entirely dedicated to its rhythm section—panned tambourines whizzing through “Paper Trails,” gooey snares on the hot-buttered closer “Metatron,” “Freak, Go Home”’s constant fluidity between acoustic and digital percussion. Though Psychic is the kind of immense and immersive experience typically described as “monolithic”, Jaar and Harrington ensure it’s more like the bubble gracing its cover—translucent and dense, electrified and organic, holding a form while constantly being prodded into new shapes.
When a record spends this much time reveling in pure sound, it’s understandable to ask, “Where’s the humanity?” The most instantly memorable lyric comes on “Paper Trails”, when Jaar intones “I want a house to live in/Baby to take care of,” though in that voice of his, you never expect him to mean exactly what he says. Psychic doesn’t talk a whole lot about its feelings; true to its title, it’s not looking for a heart-to-heart so much as a telepathic exchange. And in trying to read Jaar and Harrington’s minds, you might think a little differently about things you already know, which can be just as important as being moved. Though the psychedelic density and classic rock touchstones of Psychic are ostensibly a negation of Jaar’s breakthrough, the quizzical, minimalist Space Is Only Noise, reconsider his intimidating biography and all of a sudden, Darkside makes a ton of sense, establishing connections between listeners and genres rather than pronouncing differences—people dance to Ricardo Villalobos, start record labels because they want to make music with their friends and, yes, Ivy League kids like to get stoned and listen to Pink Floyd. At least for the duration of Psychic, everything under the sun is in tune. | 2013-10-07T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2013-10-07T02:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Matador / Other People | October 7, 2013 | 9 | 05c1e652-b966-4475-afbf-68e9af3ccd30 | Ian Cohen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ian-cohen/ | |
On their fifth album, the Go! Team look to the Motor City for their 1960s fix; they’re as boisterous as ever, but their nostalgia doesn’t dip far beneath the surface of their inspirations. | On their fifth album, the Go! Team look to the Motor City for their 1960s fix; they’re as boisterous as ever, but their nostalgia doesn’t dip far beneath the surface of their inspirations. | The Go! Team: Semicircle | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/the-go-team-semicircle/ | Semicircle | Nearly two decades and five albums along, the ear-ringing sugar buzz that energized a generation of previously fun-averse indie fans still hums through the Go! Team. Helmed by Brighton’s Ian Parton, the Go! Team suggested that there was a place where meticulous beatmakers like the Avalanches could find common cause with JV cheerleaders. But as the decade wore on, they seemed unable to move far beyond Thunder, Lightning, Strike, their 2004 debut. The original version of the band dissolved and 2015’s The Scene Between found Parton scaling things back to just himself.
With Semicircle, Parton again opens up the project’s parameters, even bringing back the rapper Ninja and original guitarist Sam Dook. Rather than replicate the group chants that made their songs so boisterous, Parton instead made a pilgrimage to the Motor City and enlisted the Detroit Youth Choir to sing backup on the album. Across Semicircle’s 12 tracks, a sense of time slippage occurs: In 2018, the Go! Team sound much like they did back in 2004, all while retaining a fervent enthusiasm for the sounds of the 1960s. The album teems with girl-group bubblegum, giddy cheers, and peppy drums reminiscent of Phil Spector’s Wall of Sound. “The Answer’s No - Now What’s the Question” could be mistaken for a cut from the One Kiss Can Lead to Another box set. But this isn’t exactly fresh terrain; Vivian Girls, Dum Dum Girls, and Frankie Rose all mined the same seam, often to edgier effect, in the mid 2000s.
Not that Parton doesn’t add a few new wrinkles to the template. On the rowdy “All the Way Live,” one of the album’s standouts, he sets a rap lifted from a 1983 single against a bright backdrop of marching drums, clanging bells, and shout-along chorus. And Ninja’s return for “She’s Got Guns” finds the rapper matching the swagger of the old-school beat. But when Parton returns to ’60s tropes, they go stale. Having band members shout out their astrological signs on “Semicircle Song” feels quaint in an age of social-media oversharing. The dusty AM pop fluff of “Chico’s Radical Decade” is anything but.
Exuberance and positivity, qualities sorely in need these days, have been the Go! Team’s defining characteristics since their debut. And opener “Mayday,” with its shouts and Morse-code tattoos, delivers a much-needed shot of adrenaline, though a san of the lyrics reveal it’s not about an actual state of emergency, just a girl with “only a heartache to hold me tight.” Which isn’t to say that all pop pleasures need align themselves with the issues of the day, but it sounds willfully heedless for Parton—himself operating under the cloud of a pending Brexit—to decamp to Middle America and then make his hired locals shout “Mayday!” After five albums, it’s nostalgic sleight-of-hand for the Go! Team to continually look back on the sounds of the ’60s yet still tune out the underlying noise of that radical decade. | 2018-01-19T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2018-01-19T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Memphis Industries | January 19, 2018 | 6.3 | 05c2c2f2-9c1f-4f7f-bd06-712c7784f8e2 | Andy Beta | https://pitchfork.com/staff/andy-beta/ | |
Today we commemorate the 20th anniversary of the death of Christopher Wallace with a review of his 1994 debut Ready to Die, an unparalleled piece of rap history. | Today we commemorate the 20th anniversary of the death of Christopher Wallace with a review of his 1994 debut Ready to Die, an unparalleled piece of rap history. | The Notorious B.I.G.: Ready to Die | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22952-ready-to-die/ | Ready to Die | New York City doesn’t sell drugs anymore. Sure, there are bike messengers that peddle weed packed in plastic jars and Russian mobsters who launder money through Coney Island auto-shops, but the kind of trap-house, dope-boy, Robin Hood archetype that still carries in cities like Atlanta has been wiped clean from tri-state folklore. This is undoubtedly a good thing—entrepreneurial city teens today hustle fashion trends to ogling editors instead of baggies to scraggly addicts. But the shift has fossilized a certain kind of rap album, like The Notorious B.I.G.’s debut Ready to Die, released in 1994. The lawlessness it describes—robberies at gunpoint on the A train, open-air hand-to-hand crack deals on Fulton St., shootouts with the NYPD—land unfathomably to most New Yorkers today. Young transplants and natives alike would rather hear old tall tales than experience anything near it firsthand; distinct from nostalgia, it's more like moving into a home where a murder occurred. The thrill is a combination of fear and gall, rooted in the security that the scene will likely never repeat itself.
But there may be something habitual in New York’s craned gaze backward. Note that B.I.G. opened Ready to Die by complaining about changes in the city around him over 20 years ago. Even then, the album was a reflection: an over-the-top, fisheye union address of the city’s waning crack era, and a reeling admission that something must have gone terribly wrong for it to have happened. Its intro maps B.I.G’s life against the sounds of various eras—’70s “Superfly,” ‘80s “Top Billin’,” and ‘90s Doggystyle—before the 21-year-old launches into “Things Done Changed,” an opening monologue that sets the chaotic scene. Life used to be about funny hairstyles, curbside games, and lounging at barbecues, he says, but “Turn your pagers to 1993,” and the story has taken an inexplicably dark turn. It goes unmentioned here, but hip-hop’s region of choice had changed too: New York’s first generation of rap inventors had given way to the West Coast, so it’s Dr. Dre’s voice we hear between verses, dispatching from Compton. “Things done changed on this side,” the sample declares, a savvy appropriation that characterized a rise in violence across coasts, and a shift in sound that B.I.G. hoped to correct.
In 1992, “a whole lot of niggas want[ed] Big to make a demo tape.” He’d been battling around Fulton St since he was 13, and was known in Bedford-Stuyvesant as a force, in music and otherwise. The demo he recorded, “Microphone Murderer,” along with a few other cuts, made it’s way to The Source’s Unsigned Hype column, then influential in hip-hop’s walled off media environment, and then to Bad Boy, where Sean “Puffy” Combs would sign him. But as the demo’s opening line specified, it was only at the nudging of his close friends that he pursued music—B.I.G. was splitting time between Brooklyn and Raleigh, where he’d set up a profitable drug operation. When his record advance didn’t land quickly enough, he went back to N.C. to pick up the slack, and Puffy called him, alternately begging and demanding the rapper stop hustling and return to New York, devoted to music for good. The day that he left, the Raleigh house he’d operated out of was raided by police officers.
What made Christopher Wallace pop-palatable amid such a gruesome backdrop was his humor, personality, and wit. He was a gruff, neurotic alternative to the ice-cool Snoop Dogg: if Snoop had bitches in the living room till six in the morning, B.I.G. was getting paged at 5:46, wiping cold out his eye. If Cali crossed over with low-rider funk from Parliament, New York would ride on block-party boogie from Mtume. And if taut flows were giving way to languid hooks, B.I.G. would tighten everyone back up. “Unbelievable” was the antithesis of “Juicy,” a love-letter to underground rap radio shows like Stretch & Bobbito, and to anyone with an oversized Land Cruiser (another change to consider—New Yorkers used to drive). “Those that rushes my clutches get put on crutches, get smoked like dutches, from the master”; you can hear the roots of “punchline rap” forming in Big’s puns and internal rhyme, and the ironic turns of phrase that kids like Cam’ron would intensify years later: “‘I thought he was wack!’—Oh come, come, now, why y’all so dumb now?”
At the time, the album was praised for its honest portrayal of the drug dealer’s internal conflicts, as opposed to sunny glorification of gang violence imported from L.A. Songs like “Everyday Struggle” and “Suicidal Thoughts” showed Big’s depth, frequent references to his mother showed his rearing, and casual dropping of words like “placenta” showed his coy love of language. B.I.G. was a smart kid that had (or liked) to do dumb things, the record suggested, itself a comment on the how genius gets sharpened when faced with obstacles, and an affirmation of rap as a platform for such genius to be realized, and monetized.
Despite its author’s youth, *Ready To Die *shows its age with its production. The beats already paled in comparison to the high-definition score of Life After Death, B.I.G.’s follow up album, and the tinny drums and swampy samples on tracks like “Me and My Bitch” and “Respect” probably played better on cassette than they do on Apple Music. At the time of the album’s release, more nimble producers were doing interesting work on neighboring albums—one could say Illmatic dried everyone in New York up of their best material. The major tracks on Ready to Die had to be heavy-handed, and the filler was just an excuse to hear Big keep rapping. “Big Poppa” was inseparable from Ron Isley’s “Between the Sheets” and snuck in a trendy, post-regional synth line that would perk up West Coast ears. The “One More Chance” remix became a smash crossover hit; the original included on the album is expectedly disposable. Even strong exhibitions of songwriting like “The What” or “Gimme the Loot”—one a duet with Method Man, the other with himself—are weighed down by loops from Easy Mo Bee, a dated producer who Puffy might’ve been smart to have axed shortly after.
Which brings us to the true triumph in Ready to Die—Sean Combs, who’s been able to spot a dollar hidden in the most unlikely places ever since, finds proof-of-concept for New York hip-pop that can carry from street corners to school dances, with the right sonic contexts, visual branding, and occasional ad-libs, a formula he’d apply to Mase, Shyne, and his own material thereafter. The sounds may have shifted, but the thesis remains: drug dealers have stories for days, and Americans want to hear them. We revere the salesman more than the politician, and B.I.G. could sell the hell out of the life he lived. Maybe not all that much has changed after all. | 2017-03-09T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2017-03-09T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rap | Bad Boy | March 9, 2017 | 10 | 05c3dacb-01ef-49d3-ac0d-7a6a585c52e6 | Matthew Trammell | https://pitchfork.com/staff/matthew- trammell/ | null |
Back from pandemic-induced hiatus, the Florida-based band fuses urgent post-hardcore with softer strains of shoegaze and grunge to unlock a new power of restraint. | Back from pandemic-induced hiatus, the Florida-based band fuses urgent post-hardcore with softer strains of shoegaze and grunge to unlock a new power of restraint. | Gouge Away: Deep Sage | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/gouge-away-deep-sage/ | Deep Sage | Gouge Away’s new album is a resurrection. Since forming in Fort Lauderdale in the early 2010s, the quartet has generated throat-mulching noise rock and shattered fragments of hardcore, imbuing every note with an intensity that felt impressively unsustainable—like the sound of a band destined to burn out and implode sooner rather than later. Their first album was titled , Dies, like a clause in the headline of a newspaper obituary: It seemed to suggest they were doomed from the start.
When the onset of the pandemic forced the band to pause writing its third album, Deep Sage, the gloomy prophecy nearly came true. Vocalist Christina Michelle stepped back from the band to “focus on [her] personal life” and moved to Portland, Oregon. Other bandmates departed Florida for different parts of the country and began to accept that their songs-in-progress might never see the light of day.
But as time passed, absence and distance papered over old disagreements and Gouge Away found that they missed each other. In 2022, they revisited the dormant project with fresh eyes—eager again to make something that felt new. The resulting songs are daringly restrained for a band best known for its frayed emotions and unrelenting extremity. These qualities are present in Deep Sage, but the new album also exhibits striking contrasts, embracing relatively softer, melodic sounds—gravity-defying shoegaze, gloomy grunge—alongside the urgent post-hardcore refractions Gouge Away have offered since their earliest days.
Their 2018 record Burnt Sugar—recorded with Jeremy Bolm (of Touché Amoré) and Jack Shirley (who’s produced for Deafheaven, Loma Prieta, and more)—represented the band’s first attempt to weave these more sedate sounds into desperate, distressed songs. Deep Sage, recorded again with Shirley, digs deeper to explore sounds that previous work only hinted at. There are songs like “Idealized,” where the melodies wriggle and squirm like the off-balance ’90s post-hardcore collected in Numero Group box sets. The stumbling, blistering “Newtau” recalls the labyrinthine riffs of David Pajo, if he were recording in an active blast furnace. Closer “Dallas,” a loving tribute to a lost friend, churns through the foamy melodies of lower-fi shoegaze, allowing space for Michelle’s voice to fall to a delicate hush instead of her usual pinched scream.
When heavy bands branch out, it sometimes comes at the expense of their previous crushing chaos, but Gouge Away pursue new directions primarily in service of increasing their overall intensity. When they launch into the seasick hardcore riffs of “Spaced Out” or the queasy AmRep fuzz of “The Sharpening” (which features some of Michelle’s most unsettled vocals across any of the bands’ records to date) the impact is felt more directly because of the quieter moments: Each of Michelle’s shredded screams arrives with the hair-raising jolt of a jump scare. It's a new trick for Gouge Away, and an effective one—they force you to let your guard down for a moment, and then they shove your face straight back into the concrete. | 2024-03-20T00:01:00.000-04:00 | 2024-03-20T00:01:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Deathwish | March 20, 2024 | 7.5 | 05c68601-a184-4e5d-a3a7-b4c4fa64294e | Colin Joyce | https://pitchfork.com/staff/colin-joyce/ | |
For his second album on J. Cole’s imprint, Cozz is beginning to build his own style while finding how to maneuver between the boisterous and introspective. | For his second album on J. Cole’s imprint, Cozz is beginning to build his own style while finding how to maneuver between the boisterous and introspective. | Cozz: Effected | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/cozz-effected/ | Effected | The explosive 2014 breakout single, “Dreams,” by Los Angeles rapper Cozz, caught everyone’s attention due to its go-for-broke desperation: If this rap shit doesn’t work out, boy, who’s to say what he'll succumb to. Based on the strength of that song, J. Cole signed Cozz to his aptly named Dreamville imprint. After four years of grinding and putting out various projects, cut to Cozz spitting a few bars from the chorus of “Dreams” on “That’s the Thing,” a track from his second studio album, Effected. This time, though, the urgency is gone, replaced with a nervous complacency. Cozz offers an update on trying to get paid and be known before acknowledging his true reality: “I’m just tryna maintain.”
Effected is Cozz’s third project since being signed to Dreamville, but it’s the 24-year-old’s most significant: He mixes skits, big-name features (Kendrick Lamar, J. Cole, Curren$y), and high-concept self-examinations (the five-minute “Demons N Distractions”). Anthems like “Dreams” notwithstanding, Cozz has always been drawn to ominous and spacious instrumentals that allow his emphatic, articulate flow plenty of room to vent. On Effected, he commits more than ever to this pared-down sound, and while he’s better than Cole at sliding between the boisterous and the introspective, he’s still working on finding the right balance.
Cole himself only shows up once, producing and rapping on late-album highlight “Zendaya” (which flips a pretty incredible Ivan Lins sample), but his influence is felt throughout: Songs like “My Love,” “Bout It,” and the first half of “Demons N Distractions” feature Cole’s signature half-groaned, singalong hooks. But while they more or less work for Cole, they fall short for Cozz. Unlike his more melodically inclined mentor, Cozz is a go-for-the-jugular rapper, relying on a steady stream of patient, snarling rhymes whose sheer forcefulness snap you to attention.
The album’s producers, led by Cozz’s longtime partner Meez, bring a practiced but somewhat one-dimensional take on jazzy, head-nodding instrumentals that often do more to harness Cozz than liberate him. These are beats that sound smarter than they really are—saxophone samples and slow-crawling bass abound, but very few of the more pensive beats stick out after a few listens, and the more lackluster ones force the charismatic, quick-witted Cozz to over-exert where Cole would’ve simply navel-gazed. The song where he lusts after women of a certain age, “Freaky 45,” and the Kendrick-featuring “Hustla’s Story” are two examples of the types of locked-in grooves that add color to Cozz’s storytelling rather than stripping it down. “Hustla’s Story,” a slow-burning and perceptive assessment of urban life’s many traps—addiction, prostitution, absent parents—reawakens his gift for narrative, and brings along a Section.80-sounding Kendrick for the ride. But Cozz also steps up to rope the listener in with a combination of zeal and detail: “This probably your uncle’s song/Probably your big brother’s song/Your father or your mother’s song/I understand your circumstance,” he spits, convincingly positioning himself as an all-seeing everyman.
Cozz is capable of tearing up pretty much any track he hops on, but he’s most fun over beats that match his bristling intensity. He flows with confrontational swagger atop TDE producer Tae Beast’s eerie bounce on “Van Ness” and proves he’s capable of ditching his more “conscious” sound on the somewhat gimmicky but undeniably hard “Ignorant Confidence.” On the title track, featuring the album’s most explicitly West Coast sound, Cozz shows off his depth, switching nimbly between different mental states—vulnerable, defensive, paranoid, confident. Over a sinister, creeping groove reminiscent of Dogg Pound-era Kurupt, Cozz is assured and revealing: “I guess I gotta write my problems down, because in my lifetime/Ain’t no one in my eyesight that I can trust with my lifeline.” Cozz, it figures, is the most honest man he knows, the only person he can confide in. He’s precocious enough to examine himself and the dynamics affecting him, but still too young, or too inexperienced, to articulate a distinct artistic vision. Still, his fever dreams of riches are well within reach, and Effected is a confident step toward turning what used to be fantasy into cold, hard reality. | 2018-02-15T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2018-02-15T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rap | Dreamville / Interscope | February 15, 2018 | 6.8 | 05c7090b-ba58-4edb-82f7-c0ca9e80d615 | Jackson Howard | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jackson-howard/ | |
At last available digitally, these quietly revolutionary albums still break one of music’s deepest-held genre orthodoxies. | At last available digitally, these quietly revolutionary albums still break one of music’s deepest-held genre orthodoxies. | Ray Charles: Modern Sounds in Country & Western Music Volumes 1 & 2 | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/ray-charles-modern-sounds-in-country-and-western-music-volumes-1-and-2/ | Modern Sounds in Country & Western Music Volumes 1 & 2 | More than a half-century later, the premise of Ray Charles’ two-volume Modern Sounds in Country and Western Music—that is, an established R&B star makes a record of country hits—might yet inspire a spit take from the uninitiated. Alas, the uninitiated have long remained uninitiated, since these groundbreaking albums have been reissued infrequently since their 1962 release. But a remastered Concord set, which includes vinyl and CD reprints of both albums, marks the first time these landmarks are available as downloads and streams. Maybe having them available outside of distorted YouTube rips will, 57 years later, affirm Charles’ rightful status as a country music pioneer.
Building off a string of hits with Atlantic and an ABC-Paramount contract with a “full artistic freedom” clause, Charles was finally able to record the music he’d been listening to since he was a self-described country boy growing up in Greenville, FL., a town of around 900 near the Georgia border. Back then, he would tune into the Grand Ole Opry every Saturday night. That period provided direct inspiration for the first Modern Sounds and its hastily assembled sequel, recorded in the wake of its predecessor’s explosive success. Charles put his golden touch on two dozen of the biggest country songs of the day. “I think a lot of the hillbilly music is wonderful,” he told Billboard, starting his campaign to record such tunes in 1959. “I think I could do a good job with the right hillbilly song today. If you really have the ability, that’s what counts.”
Despite several subsequent counterexamples, from Charley Pride to Darius Rucker, the idea that a black singer could attain mainstream success singing country music still challenges one of the deepest-held genre orthodoxies. “A rhythm-and-blues singer, at least when I was coming up, was typecast, much like an actor,” Charles wrote in his 1978 autobiography. “Even today I’m called ‘Ray Charles, the blues singer,’ or ‘Ray Charles, the soul singer.’ And this is after 20 years of singing damn near everything!” Charles approached the album with what would turn out to be necessary defiance, as he faced skepticism from his label and the industry at large. Even though the albums contain some of Charles’ most enduring singles, they are still more accepted as Ray Charles songs than disclaimer-free country. When Modern Sounds was first released, the charts refused to track this music as country; the Grammys nominated these very clearly named albums in rhythm & blues categories.
Still, these arrangements played off the perceived tension of Charles’ foray into Nashville territory. Half the songs were recorded in Los Angeles, with Charles backed by lush strings and a straight-laced choir to build a poppier take on the pervasive Nashville Sound. In New York, a swinging big band more familiar to those who were already Charles fans supported the other half. The end result is seamless, showing just how wide a gap Charles’ voice could bridge. String-backed ballad “I Can’t Stop Loving You” is a larger-than-life song that toes the line of pure schlock with lyrical hyperbole and musical gloss. But a gentle, insistent country shuffle and Charles’ endless capacity for relatable sorrow (perhaps country music’s most enduring hallmark) ground it. Buried in the album’s B-side because producer Sid Feller thought it was the weakest track, the song became the biggest hit of Charles’ career.
Charles’ mix of polish and pure emotion has proven nearly impossible to match, from weepy orchestral tunes like “You Don’t Know Me” (maybe the most convincing description of life in the friend zone ever recorded) to brassy up-tempo numbers, like Hank Williams’ “Hey, Good Lookin’.” But making something infallibly bright and genuine, rich and timeless was a secondary achievement. More importantly, he proved that the connection he heard between country’s twang and R&B’s groove wasn’t a fatal distinction but simply a matter of interpretation. Charles exposed how inane it is to draw a hard line between two genres that shared an ancestor—the United States’ original hybrid, the blues.
You can go through and parse which parts of every record sound more like Nashville, which parts sound more like soul. “You Are My Sunshine” relies on the same hip-swiveling call-and-response that Motown would soon make ubiquitous. “Born to Lose” uses barely any swing outside of Charles’ voice, readying it for the honky-tonk. But that kind of dissection misses the point—that this music is accessible to him, too, a black man. In the end, Charles didn’t just fit in; he revolutionized the genre by sparking a rush of Nashville/pop crossover acts.
This music remains a tribute to and rejoinder of the futile divisions we so often take for granted. Charles made headlines promoting the album with integrated shows throughout the South, refusing to perform in segregated venues. “Both whites and Negroes alike have attended the same dance and actually danced together at Charles concerts,” wrote the Chicago Daily Defender in November 1962 of Charles’ shows in Memphis and St. Louis. “There is no race problem when he plays.” It’s proof of Charles’ enduring yet still-aspirational achievement on these albums: unity. | 2019-02-23T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2019-02-23T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Jazz | The Ray Charles Foundation | February 23, 2019 | 9.2 | 05ca0c10-7067-4da4-9d71-cda0930f07ae | Natalie Weiner | https://pitchfork.com/staff/natalie-weiner/ | |
Culled from singles for DFA and Paw Tracks, as well as five cuts from an EP released simultaneously with Load Blown, the Brooklyn band's fourth official LP is really more a singles collection than an album but it hangs together well regardless. | Culled from singles for DFA and Paw Tracks, as well as five cuts from an EP released simultaneously with Load Blown, the Brooklyn band's fourth official LP is really more a singles collection than an album but it hangs together well regardless. | Black Dice: Load Blown | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/10825-load-blown/ | Load Blown | Officially, Load Blown is the fourth album by Brooklyn's Black Dice. But since it contains the band's final single for DFA (a three-track 12"), their first for Paw Tracks (a two-song 12"), and five cuts from an EP released simultaneously with Load Blown, it's really more a singles collection than an album. That may seem like trivial semantics, and these 10 tracks hang together well regardless. But the fact that they were created separately and originally intended for individual consumption gives Load Blown more immediacy and straight-up power than any previous Black Dice full-length.
Nearly every cut here gets right to the point, jumping into simple rhythmic and sonic ideas with little delay, then grinding away devoutly at those basic elements, adding accents and building momentum along the way. There are few stretches of the kind of wandering exposition heard on other Black Dice records, which usually cropped up when the band pushed a track past the 10-minute mark. Those moments often produced inspired music, and surely the band hasn't abandoned them. But it's fun to hear Black Dice go straight for the jugular throughout the aptly-titled Load Blown, and hit the mark every time.
In that sense, the album sounds like an expansion of band member Eric Copeland's recent solo effort for Paw Tracks, Hermaphrodite. That record built sunny loops from bouncing rhythms and semi-melodies, and so does Load Blown, with a wider, more open sonic palette. "Kokomo" uses repeated yelps and street-shaking bass bombs to lead a round of sonic jumping jacks, while "Toka Toka" weaves chirping squiggles into dancing circles, akin to the cartoon-ish audio experiments of Raymond Scott. Such bright-eyed swing is something Black Dice began to drive toward on their last album, 2005's Broken Ear Record. Here, however, almost every second is fueled by buoyant, even catchy energy.
Not that Load Blown is a delirious joy-fest, but even its darker pieces have an insistent pulse. The cutting beat of the hip-hop-ish "Gore" gets crashing and abrasive, but still hypnotizes. Later, the album's noisiest track, "Bottom Feeder", creates a shiny rainbow out of harsh blasts and babbling vocals. But the best tracks, like the skipping "Drool" and the vocal beat-box collage "Manoman", constantly sway and rise, recreating the head rush of a childhood ride on a schoolyard see-saw.
Despite the shift toward a more immediate brand of sonic invention, Load Blown is no radical departure. It's simply a new take on Black Dice's idiosyncratic mix, where attention to detail, openness to possibility, and intuitive senses of rhythm and timing all collide. Four albums and 10 years into their career, the band continues to pursue the detailed tweaks and disciplined practices required to master a craft, and Load Blown confirms they're well on their way to some kind of creative black belt. | 2007-10-26T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2007-10-26T02:00:01.000-04:00 | Experimental / Rock | Paw Tracks | October 26, 2007 | 7.8 | 05cb4d33-dac3-4464-a431-5beefffdea8d | Marc Masters | https://pitchfork.com/staff/marc-masters/ | null |
Steely Dan entered the ’80s with something elegant and arid—immaculately conceived malaise-age bachelor-pad music. In these songs, everyone’s alone, or together in a way that’s worse than being alone. | Steely Dan entered the ’80s with something elegant and arid—immaculately conceived malaise-age bachelor-pad music. In these songs, everyone’s alone, or together in a way that’s worse than being alone. | Steely Dan: Gaucho | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/steely-dan-gaucho/ | Gaucho | A man flees west, pursued by saxophones. That’s how Steely Dan’s Gaucho starts, with “Babylon Sisters,” a foreboding melody that creeps into the room like toxic fog, and a lyric about a guy in a car en route to a three-way. While the horn section keeps rupturing the mood the keyboards are trying to set, the narrator spins stick-with-me-baby fantasies of California leisure and hedonism for his female companion(s). There may be no more perfectly yacht-rock tercet in the Dan canon than, “We’ll jog with show folk on the sand/Drink kirschwasser from a shell/San Francisco show-and-tell.” But even the singer doesn’t believe the sales pitch. By the end of the verse he’s talking to himself, or maybe he has been all along. “It’s cheap but it’s not free,” he says. “And that love’s not a game for three/And I’m not what I used to be.” Meanwhile, Randy Brecker’s muted trumpet dances around him, mocking his pain the way only a muted trumpet can.
Good times! Is it any wonder Gaucho—the seventh Steely Dan album, and the last one Donald Fagen and Walter Becker would make together until the year 2000—is the one even some hardcore Danimals find it tough to fully cozy up to? The almost pathologically overdetermined production is elegant, arid, a little forbidding, and every last tinkling chime sounds like it took 12 days to mix, because chances are it did. And underneath that compulsive craftsmanship, that marble-slick surface, there’s decay, disillusionment, a gnawing sadness. But that’s what’s great about Gaucho. It takes the animating artistic tension of Steely Dan—their need to make flawless-sounding records lionizing inveterately human fuckups—to its logical endpoint.
It’s their most obviously L.A. record, so of course they made it in New York, after spending years out West making music so steeped in New York iconography it practically sweated hot-dog-cart water. And it’s also the most end-of-the-’70s record ever made, 38 minutes of immaculately conceived malaise-age bachelor-pad music by which to greet the cold dawn of the Reagan era. The characters in these songs have taken an era of self-expression and self-indulgence as far as they can. They’re free to do and be whatever and whoever they want, but all that severance of obligation has done is isolate them from other people.
The only character who’s having any kind of communal fun is the coke dealer on “Glamour Profession,” who makes calls from a basketball star’s car phone and takes meetings over Mr. Chow dumplings with “Jive Miguel…from Bogotá.” Everyone else is lost out there in the haze, having mutually demeaning sex or reaching for human connection in angry, possessive, usually futile ways. “Gaucho” and “My Rival” are both about relationships into which some threatening/alluring interloper has driven a wedge; both “Hey Nineteen” and “Babylon Sisters” are about older guys who chase younger women and wind up feeling older than ever. Things fall apart, the center does not hold, there’s a gaucho in the living room and he won’t leave, and it’s getting hard to act like everything’s mellow.
“The Cuervo Gold/The fine Colombian/Make tonight a wonderful thing,” sings the narrator of “Hey Nineteen,” and then he sings it again, as if that’ll make it true. The narrator of the bouncy, Michael McDonald-enhanced “Time Out of Mind” seems to be in a pretty good mood, but it’s only because he knows he’s going to go somewhere later and smoke heroin until L.A. morphs into Lhasa. Everyone’s alone, or together in a way that’s worse than being alone; every lyric is a one-sided dialogue.
There’s a precisely calibrated mix of empathy and irony in the way the Dan observe these poor devils, these sinners in the grip of a checked-out God— Becker, perfectly, called it “a sneer and a tear.” This is, at points, a very funny record—particularly the title track, whose unfolding absurdity builds to the moment where the narrator, having caught his lover holding hands with a bodacious cowboy in a spangled leather poncho, cries out, “Would you care to explain?” in high dudgeon worthy of Frasier Crane.
When Becker and Fagen started making this music, it was 1978, and they were coming off the platinum-selling Aja, the biggest hit they’d ever had. They briefly toyed with the idea of putting together a band and touring—a form of strenuous exercise they’d given up years earlier—but instead they went back to work on new music, and didn’t emerge from the studio until late 1980. One of the first tracks they finished was “The Second Arrangement,” a blithe kiss-off from an unapologetic Jaguar-driving lothario whose faithlessness is suddenly fashionable. You can find the song on YouTube in various states of completion—a piano demo with Fagen trying a shaky falsetto on the chorus, a polished instrumental, a bootlegged-sounding full-band version whose discoid thwack evokes a waterlogged “Get Lucky”—but you won’t find it on Gaucho. After an assistant engineer accidentally erased a large chunk of the master tape, Becker and Fagen tried for a while to recreate the track, then gave up on it entirely. It wasn’t the only good song they discarded during the sessions—even with all the king’s sidemen at their disposal, they couldn’t capture “The Bear” or the surreal colonialist fever-dream “Kulee Baba” either—but it might have been the best song on the album if it had survived. They replaced it with the merely-very-good “Third World Man,” a retooled track left over from the Aja sessions, featuring a downhearted soliloquy of a guitar solo by Larry Carlton, who was reportedly surprised to discover he’d played on Gaucho.
Fagen later described the “Second Arrangement” debacle to Rolling Stone correspondent Robert Palmer as “one of the most serious emotional setbacks we’ve had in the studio.” There are less-auspicious ways to begin work on a record. But maybe Gaucho was destined to go awry no matter what. By shrinking themselves to a two-man unit (plus longtime producer Gary Katz and engineer Roger Nichols) and forsaking the road, Becker and Fagen had cut down on the entropy to which even moderately successful rock bands usually succumb, but during the course of the Gaucho sessions, they were dealing with a range of high-class problems, from a court battle with MCA Records (who’d just absorbed the Dan’s old label ABC, and believed the final album the band owed that label was now contractually theirs) to Becker’s burgeoning heroin addiction, which made him an inconstant contributor to the band’s creative process. He played some guitar and bass on three songs, but as the sessions wore on, he was busy going through hell.
In January 1980, Becker’s girlfriend Karen Stanley, who Becker later said had struggled with depression, died of what may have been an intentional overdose in Becker’s apartment. Then, in April of that year, while walking on a New York street, Becker was hit by a taxi cab. He spent seven months in a cast with a fractured tibia and was effectively sidelined from the studio for most of the three laborious months it took to mix Gaucho. Mixing was Becker’s forte; Fagen was left to muddle through. During a visit to the studio in summer 1980, Palmer watched him sit with Katz and Nichols, “inhaling a cigarette in spasmodic gulps” while endlessly retooling the fade-out at the end of “Babylon Sisters,” eventually spending four hours fiddling with fifty seconds of music.
Of the nearly 40 consummate studio pros whose work at the Gaucho sessions made the final cut, the player with the heaviest footprint belongs to “Wendel,” a Paleolithic 12-bit sampling unit designed and built by Nichols, deployed by Becker and Fagen to impose a drum-machine-like consistency on the work of live drummers like Steve Gadd and Rick Marotta. “In the ’80s,” Becker told Mojo years later, “hand-crafted, hand-played music was being overtaken by this increasingly mechanical, perfectionist machine music, and we were just trying to get there first. They had all these disco records that were just whack-whack, so perfect, the beat never fluctuated, and we didn’t see why we couldn’t have that too, except playing this incredibly complicated music…It seemed like a good idea.”
Of course, the computerized micro-tweaking of live instrumentation is now as commonplace a part of pop-music production as reverb, but back then the option to program with real drum hits was tantamount to magic, especially for two guys who’d spent much of their professional lives being just a tiny bit disappointed by some of the finest session musicians on the planet. But Wendel was also a bit of a prickly collaborator. “[E]ven the most minute event,” the band wrote in the liner notes to a 2000 reissue of Gaucho, “had to be programmed in the gnarly and unforgiving 8085 Assembly Language, in which all relevant parameters needed to be described in its baffling hexagesimal-base numerical system, which ultimately became the only language Roger Nichols spoke or understood, at least for a time.”
The Dan’s commitment to the path of most resistance paid off. “Hey Nineteen” cracked the Top 10, and the album went platinum. Even Wendel got a plaque. Then in 1981, Becker and Fagen took an 11-year break from working together as Steely Dan. It’s probably a coincidence that this album about breakups and estrangements and encroaching age and the corrosive effects of hard drugs on human fellowship immediately preceded the not-drug-unrelated suspension of a longstanding creative partnership between two guys who were just entering their 30s. But we’re talking about Steely Dan here, not Fleetwood Mac—if they ever wrote about themselves, they’d never be uncool enough to admit it. It’s probably better to think of this as a loose concept album about people with a higher-than-average chance of dying in an accident involving downers and a hot tub, but one whose content couldn’t help but mirror the struggles in its makers’ lives. It might not be the best of Steely Dan albums, but it’s definitely the most Steely Dan of the Steely Dan albums. Becker and Fagen are too smart not to know ideals like perfection and grace are for opium dreamers, but can’t help reaching for them anyway. | 2019-11-20T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2019-11-20T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | UMG | November 20, 2019 | 9.4 | 05cc7a07-2478-4aec-b356-3bf4c59d355d | Alex Pappademas | https://pitchfork.com/staff/alex-pappademas/ | |
The rapper’s eighth solo album is a stroll down memory lane, summoning the ‘90s boom bap aesthetics he grew up on. It’s a nostalgic trip that further cements his witty, introspective, and singular style. | The rapper’s eighth solo album is a stroll down memory lane, summoning the ‘90s boom bap aesthetics he grew up on. It’s a nostalgic trip that further cements his witty, introspective, and singular style. | Open Mike Eagle: Component System With the Auto Reverse | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/open-mike-eagle-component-system-with-the-auto-reverse/ | Component System With the Auto Reverse | For music fans of a certain age, the home stereo was more than just a convenient way to listen to music: It was a recording studio, a pressing plant, and a portal to other worlds. All-in-one component systems, the affordable stereos that contained all the pieces of a hi-fi system in one compact black box—an amplifier, AM/FM tuner, CD player, dual-cassette deck, and often an equalizer—minted myriad amateur engineers in the ’90s, democratizing access to the tools needed to record, duplicate, and listen to mixtapes.
As a kid, the rapper Open Mike Eagle used one of those component systems to craft mixtapes spliced together from radio recordings. Replete with commercials and DJ monologues woven between his favorite songs, the tapes were the soundtrack of his youth, the score for countless bus rides across Chicago’s South Side. It was one of those tapes, cobbled together from broadcasts on the local college radio station WHPK Chicago, that inspired Eagle’s latest LP, Component System With the Auto-Reverse. The record is a nostalgic trip through the rapper’s musical genesis and an exploration of the psyche of an artist who recently lost his wife, his job, and some of his closest friends. If 2020’s Anime, Trauma, and Divorce was an unflinching examination of all that he’d lost, this album answers the question of what remains.
In rediscovering his old mixtapes, Eagle finds that he’s the same man he’s always been: a whip-smart comic with acerbic wit, a “grown man with toddler habits” (a quality that he gets from his father), and an old school hip-hop head who can rap his butt off, but can’t dance. He has long written from a comedian’s POV, and on this album, he once again leverages a bittersweet sense of humor to soothe his painful awareness of the world’s absurdity. His cleverness requires a certain degree of pop culture literacy, and some of his references—like 2Pac’s curious collaboration with smooth, sensitive ‘90s R&B crooner Jon B—might feel ancient to a zoomer. But these are the bars of a middle-aged man who still shares memes (“Who Among Us is mega sus?” he asks on “i’ll fight you”); they are tightly packed nerd raps from a dad who’s quick-witted enough to keep up with his adolescent son.
The songs here reflect both his embrace of Los Angeles (“crenshaw and homeland”) and his Chicago roots (“79th and stony island”); after college, the rapper left his hometown and has since toiled in the headier spaces of L.A.’s hip-hop underground. There is also plenty of room for poignant introspection (“the song with the secret name”) and unabashed fandom of hip-hop greats (“for DOOM”). His choice of collaborators feels less like clout-boosting streaming bait and more like homies who can rap well, which makes for a laid-back cipher vibe that reveals the album’s raw but carefully considered aesthetic. Its most frequent guests are Video Dave and Still Rift, two rappers with backpacker flows and few credits that don’t involve Eagle. But even when he operates with more well-known entities like New York’s acid-tongued duo Armand Hammer, he shows he can coalesce disparate styles.
The pace and tone of the album ebbs and flows—too clunky to be mixed by a DJ, but still sequenced with intention. On “burner account,” the aforementioned collaboration with Armand Hammer, the three MCs meet each other halfway between Eagle’s self-deprecating one-liners and billy woods and ELUCID’s vivid imagery. It amounts to a tongue-in-cheek spoof of Griselda Records’ trafficking raps, one that somehow feels more reverential than derisive.
In the process of building Component System With the Auto Reverse, Eagle originally pulled samples from a tape featuring a rant from a WHPK DJ. On it, the host waxed philosophical about Diamond D, the New York producer and MC who co-founded the infamous Diggin’ In the Crates crew, home to Big L, Fat Joe, and Showbiz & AG. Eagle has spoken at length about his veneration of the East Coast legend, and although the recording didn’t make the final cut of the album, it was the impetus for his exploration of the Uptown rap scene, which has informed his own aesthetic since childhood. It’s all the more momentous that Diamond D has production credits here on three tracks, and even a guest verse on the album closer. Like DITC, part of Eagle’s genius lies not just in lyrical skill or head-bobbing beats, but a strong sense of self—an identity shaped by communities as unique as those who survived them.
Component System With the Auto Reverse sits at the geographical and spiritual nexus of Chicago, New York, and Los Angeles, tracing a map of people and places that have shaped Eagle’s experience with hip-hop. To that end, Component System’s coda “cd only bonus track” closes the loop on Eagle’s stroll down memory lane, with a beat and a verse from one of the New York heroes that sent him on the path away from Chicago in the first place. On his last LP, Eagle was riddled with self-doubt. But by looking even further in the rear view, through all the years, all the bars, and all the trauma, he seems to have returned to his original sense of self. Even as he grows, he’s always been exactly who he is supposed to be. | 2022-10-17T00:01:00.000-04:00 | 2022-10-17T00:01:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Auto Reverse | October 17, 2022 | 7.8 | 05cd47bf-8277-425b-8f07-37914092c47d | Matthew Ismael Ruiz | https://pitchfork.com/staff/matthew-ismael ruiz/ | |
ryan loves it and he likes mmlp too so he's all sonning me now with this 'well ethan yes ... | ryan loves it and he likes mmlp too so he's all sonning me now with this 'well ethan yes ... | Eminem: The Eminem Show | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/2771-the-eminem-show/ | The Eminem Show | ryan loves it and he likes mmlp too so he's all sonning me now with this 'well ethan yes perhaps i'd allow you to give the marshall mathers lp a 10.0, i mean that particular record was perfect, but not this one' yeah well you were busy talking about at the motherfucking drive in back then so let me redeem your godawful site now. jeez unless he went back on his dumb-ass 'policy' theres a nine dot one up there but i promise you 'the eminem show' is really a ten, know that
oh my darling eminem! how i love you marshall, spittin shiny massive magnetic acrostics to fit the thrillest rhyme style ever invented (ugh yeah i'm trying not to explain his quote unquote flow in those meaningless autechre words like architectural and labyrinthine but SHIT) but yeah although em's lyrics arent usually quotably evocative for rock reviews like wu or jay here i'm not even going to try, you have to hear him spit at it live or on record
that said he's playing the same old marshall vs shady real-or-fake game as usual (stage-y red curtain album cover referencing 'smarmy' faux-soul masterpiece lexicon of love!?!) and its as interesting and complex as it ever was but that wasnt what i came to the shady table for in the first place and you know all about it anyway from spin so lets pretend not to care
instead
let me tell a story
this one time i was listening to eminem, and
haha no
he's complicated you know
eminem i mean
but no no no this is more than usual like he pukes up the nastiest song about mother mathers ever but loves hailie lots and meanwhile metamorphasizes into a grown-ass woman 'on the rag and ovulating' making us listen to queen and aerosmith and and AND THEN him and dre have been 'fucking with hats off' all along!! (after this ahem revelation dre deadpans 'suck it, marshall')
uh
in a normal pfork review there would be some more bullshit here all like 'ha ha he makes fun of that stupid trl but he's on it!!' or like 'his rapping style is a direct copy of gab from blackalicious' like yeah dude timbaland is biting aphex twins white ass too haha i dunno fuck it here are some more bullshit things about the actual record like right on schedule pfork review style
ahem
track one
white america
after a tender orchestral prelude (lexicon of love again) these like big silver jets fly overhead and lame linkin park riffs rev up and eminem 'finally' addresses the race issue telling us a bunch of shit we already knew about in his labored 'the way i am' style (with only a marginally better chorus than that grr)
haha later he gets crunk and actually says 'whodi' on the bounciriffic everlast-dreams-about-the-big-tymers 'superman'!! (fake southern accents are the new black italiano you know)
also on hailies song he sings and its not great but like better than mos def
first in a series - people your fake indie ass will mention in a lame rock critic attempt to legitimize eminem: screamin' jay hawkins
'business' is cartoon-beat chase scene batman & robin like all the early singles but this time he's actually talking about batman and robin!! (a running theme of the entire record for some wonderful reason)
i adore the plasticky genital mutilation pornography and hilarious cronenberg AIDS horrors of 'drips' and anxiously await the obie trice record
but more than that i love hailie jade on 'my dad's gone crazy' which is like this saccharine-sweetened lemon incest gone faggy (eminem may have finally torn down the old gangsta wont-touches of mama and jesus off the wall to beat the shit out them both but dude still loves his baby girl!)
and the sleazy disco of 'without me'
'the press' wet dream like bobby and whitney'!
'cleaning out my closet' takes the childhood hell of 'all i've got is you' and turns all that emotional vunerability into righteous articulated fury at his 'goin though public housin systems, victim of munchausens syndrome'(!!) mama.
hey
a thought
eminem is gay
proof:
the him fucking dre thing
dyeing your hair and wearing earrings thing from the aerosmith song
or hailie being 'the only lady he adores'
sleazy disco
little eric and erica
dre is batman and he's the burt ward robin
etc
okay at this point i'm just gonna put in shit to see if ryan will really not edit this like he said so like if you're reading this sentence then wow i really got an unedited review on pfork
haha i bet he cuts my columbine refs
uh in conclusion....
Ryanpitch4k : ethan, i'm gonna edit it anyway, you're lucky i'm gonna go over it with you
et HAN P2 3 : lets not be some fucking review factory ryan
Ryanpitch4k : ethan you know as well as i do that it IS a factory, which is why it gets no respect from industry/"real" journalists
but later...
Ryanpitch4k : what? ok, i'm an indie pussy. i consider the music i listen to "above" and "better than" pop music. that's MY opinion
and then....
Ryanpitch4k : look, ethan, you know what? i just have a feeling we're not going to agree about this. i think it's fine for us to not agree, but i don't think you would like changes i would want to make. you're really incredibly high-maintenence as reviewers go, and i'm not completely sure it's even worth it
and yes finally....
Ryanpitch4k : ethan you act like i don't know what you're capable of
et HAN P2 3 : but what would be the worst that could happen
et HAN P2 3 : what am i capable of??
Ryanpitch4k : you'll get away with anything you can
Ryanpitch4k : the more you get away with the happier you are
eminem is great!! | 2002-06-03T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2002-06-03T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Interscope | June 3, 2002 | 9.1 | 05d3aea3-14a2-41b6-8132-9d0d3e8c8c98 | Ethan P. | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ethan-p./ | null |
Fit Me In is a compact and efficient EP that offers a glimpse of Frankie Cosmos' work with all-electronic instrumentation. These songs are little glimpses into her fully realized universe, less verse-chorus-verse pop confections than open-ended, contemporary poetic constructions that don't stop where the recording ends. | Fit Me In is a compact and efficient EP that offers a glimpse of Frankie Cosmos' work with all-electronic instrumentation. These songs are little glimpses into her fully realized universe, less verse-chorus-verse pop confections than open-ended, contemporary poetic constructions that don't stop where the recording ends. | Frankie Cosmos: Fit Me In EP | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21254-fit-me-in-ep/ | Fit Me In EP | Frankie Cosmos (aka Greta Kline) writes songs that are as close to one gets to a pure hybrid of pop and poetry. Her acknowledgment of Frank O'Hara as a significant influence makes a good deal of sense; like O'Hara, her work is both personal and abstract, economical, and infused with humanity, "between two persons" rather than a communication between listener and artist. For those concerned with Kline's overtly twee aesthetic, worried that an overdose of saccharine will blot out any other subtle flavoring, her work contains self-deprecation and displacement in good countermeasure. The balance of sweet and salty feels not just purposeful but realistic.
Fit Me In, a compact and efficient EP portending a more fleshed-out full-band LP in 2016, is an experiment in what Kline's songwriting would sound like given nearly all electronic instrumentation. A collaboration with frequent musical partner Aaron Maine of Porches, Fit Me In is more in line with Kline's prolific home recordings than a full indie pop record like Zentropy (opener "Korean Food" appeared first on 2013's self-released Daddy Cool). Drum machine and synth-heavy, this is true bedroom pop—so intimate as to show the rumpled coverlet and the minute, ancient, nearly unnoticeable stains on the carpet. As is Kline's wont, these songs are little glimpses into her fully realized universe, less verse-chorus-verse pop confections than open-ended, contemporary poetic constructions that don't stop where the recording ends. Like poetry, they require reading and interpretation and us to be engaged as listeners, in communication with Cosmos; art that exists "between two persons" requires dialogue.
"Young" in particular is arch and sly, a response to media commentary that would seek to cast Kline as a fresh-faced ingenue, a character in a box rather than a real, complicated young woman. "I heard about being young/ But I'm not sure how it's done.../ Something about fun," she sings. You can interpret me, she seems to be saying, and I'll interpret you right back. In "O Contest Winner", she boasts "No need for a retest/ I know I'm a genius," tongue firmly in cheek, again pushing against others' expectations of her and her work. Such bragging is usually the province of hip-hop, and to hear it in delicate indie pop context could feel self-conscious or appropriative, but in Kline's subtle delivery it sounds both sincere and welcome, both a refutation of the idea that female artists must always minimize their senses of self-worth and an awareness of the sheer absurdity of any declaration of ego.
"Korean Food" and "Sand" are both tender etchings of the everyday nature of real love, a theme Kline excels at exploring; her version of love is not grand or epic, not forced into any particular narrative arc. She finds love in moment-to-moment minutiae, in the smallest pleasures and least valued rituals, without weighting those moments too heavily: "And touch all the books outside the Strand/ Their oldest pages soft like sand."
There's a reason we're captivated as a society by well-written diaries—at their best, sketches of others' lives as they live them allow us chances to slow down, to connect and to understand one another that we rarely encounter in a highly relational world. Greta Kline is a master at the art of the musical diary—never confessional in a way that feels exploitative and lurid, but tender, intimate, and real nonetheless. We're fortunate she keeps letting us into her world in this way. | 2015-11-11T01:00:01.000-05:00 | 2015-11-11T01:00:01.000-05:00 | Rock | Bayonet | November 11, 2015 | 7 | 05d4ee99-9ae9-45f4-b2b1-d231d99d4551 | JJ Skolnik | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jj-skolnik/ | null |
Ex-"Degrassi" star finds new levels of fame as a rapper via a mixtape complaining about his previous level of fame. Major labels drool; Lil Wayne guests. | Ex-"Degrassi" star finds new levels of fame as a rapper via a mixtape complaining about his previous level of fame. Major labels drool; Lil Wayne guests. | Drake: So Far Gone | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/13238-so-far-gone/ | So Far Gone | On the one hand, it’s heartening that something like this can still happen: Relative unknown creates mixtape with a few friends and uploads it to the Internet, and then, within a few months, he’s maybe/possibly dating Rihanna and fielding seven-figure offers from broke major labels. Except, in this case, the relative unknown in question was a star on the Canadian teeny-drama “Degrassi: The Next Generation”, and the friends in question are Lil Wayne and Trey Songz and Chris Paul. Even weirder, the main overarching theme of Drake’s So Far Gone seems to be the stresses and travails of fame, even if he recorded the damn thing when he wasn’t famous in any meaningful way. And now the tape has made him good and famous for real. I don’t know how this kind of thing happens; I just watch it.
Drake’s calling card has become “Best I Ever Had”, a likable, breezy summery pop song that’s managed to ascend to Hot 97 omnipresence without any sort of label backing, a very serious achievement. It’s a Nerf-heavy declaration of lust with a nice sentiment behind it, Drake telling the song’s second-person subject that she’s prettiest with no makeup, that she’s the fucking best lay he ever had. It also contains the one and only slick punchline Drake offers on the whole hour-plus mixtape: “When my album drops, bitches’ll buy it for the picture/And niggas’ll buy it, too, and claim they got it for they sister.”
See, Drake’s not a great rapper. His delivery manages to convey confidence at pretty much all times, but it’s still halting and awkward. Half the time, his lines barely even make sense: “I never get attracted to fans/ Cuz an eager beaver could be the collapse of a dam”—huh? And even if the tape is mostly crammed with emo soul-baring, he still comes up with lines like this: “My delivery just got me buzzing like the pizza man.” Ugh. In his four appearances on the tape, Lil Wayne just annihilates Drake. This wouldn’t be news, except we’re talking about circa-2009 syrup-fried Wayne here, and it’s rarer and rarer that he gets the better of anyone on a song.
And yet So Far Gone still scans as one of the most compulsively listenable mixtapes of a great year for mixtapes. Blame Kanye. Drake isn’t just a post-Kanye artist; he’s a post-808s and Heartbreak artist, possibly the first. On that album, Kanye drifted lazily from rapping to singing over a bed of rippling lush-but-sparse electro that still gets better every time I hear it. Drake does much the same thing on So Far Gone. He’s a singer/rapper in the Missy Elliott mode, and he even pays Missy tribute by swiping the beat from her “Friendly Skies” for “Bria’s Interlude”. When he swings from rapping to buttery teen-idol singing, it feels organic and effortless, like he’s just doing whatever makes the most sense at any given moment.
Musically, Drake favors a very specific sort of sugary but spacious electro-soul; nearly every track makes heavy use of organ sustain and sparse heartbeat drums. He uses tracks from Swede-pop types like Lykke Li and Peter Bjorn and John, the sort of thing that seems forced and gimmicky when most rappers do it. In Drake’s hands, though, those songs make sense in close proximity to, say, Jay-Z’s “Ignorant Shit” or Kanye’s “Say You Will”. And it helps that he actually interacts with his source material. With “Little Bit”, Drake doesn’t simply rap over Lykke Li’s original. Instead, he structures it like a duet, he and Lykke slowly circling each other and admitting their crushed-out feelings. It’s cute. My favorite track on the tape is the DJ Screw tribute “November 18th”, wherein Drake pulls off something that I’ve never heard any actual Houstonians manage (sorry, Big Moe): He turns Screw’s slow, woozy sound into loverman R&B. The lyrical conceit is goofy as hell (“Tonight I’ll just fuck you like we’re in Houston”—slow, get it?), but Drake’s angelic falsetto floats beautifully over the smeared-streetlights track, and it just sounds right.
And then there’s all that price-of-fame stuff. Again, blame Kanye, because somehow this comes out sounding slippery and interesting rather than petulant and unbearable. See, Drake’s figured out that the way to brag backhandedly—to brag without bragging—is to complain about all the awesome shit that you get to endure. So here he is on “The Calm”: “Look what I became, tryna make a name/ All my first dates are interrupted by my fame.” Other rappers talk big about getting mobbed every time I hit the mall; Drake complains about those masses making his candlelit dinners a little bit more awkward. Or: “My mother embarrassed to pull my Phantom out, so I park about five houses down.” You learn he has a Phantom, and you also learn that it’s the source of some family strife that doesn’t even make sense. Crafty. And now that Drake is really, truly famous, he should really have some shit to complain about. | 2009-06-29T02:00:03.000-04:00 | 2009-06-29T02:00:03.000-04:00 | Rap | self-released | June 29, 2009 | 7.4 | 05d85f02-3626-4f64-8075-8c9021efb609 | Tom Breihan | https://pitchfork.com/staff/tom-breihan/ | null |
Drawing on UK dance music, experimental R&B, and hip-hop, this remix album to the London saxophonist’s kaleidoscopic jazz record expands on the eclectic universe of the original. | Drawing on UK dance music, experimental R&B, and hip-hop, this remix album to the London saxophonist’s kaleidoscopic jazz record expands on the eclectic universe of the original. | Nubya Garcia: Source ⧺ We Move | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/nubya-garcia-source-we-move/ | Source ⧺ We Move | After years of dance music borrowing from jazz, in the late 2010s UK jazz musicians decided to return the favor, with albums from Kamaal Williams, Moses Boyd et al. drawing from UK garage, jungle, broken beat, house, R&B, afrobeats and more in search of a new jazz swing. In this context, Source ⧺ We Move feels like a logical next step for London saxophonist Nubya Garcia after the success of her 2020 debut album Source, a modern jazz record of kaleidoscopic musical ambition. Garcia called Source “a definite ode to musical history,” with the album taking in influences from Colombian cumbia, reggae, calypso, and modern dance music to create a vision of jazz that was both historic in scope and modern in feel.
On Source ⧺ We Move, Garcia has invited musicians from the worlds of hip hop (DJ Harrison), experimental R&B (KeiyaA, Georgia Anne Muldrow), broken beat (Kaidi Tatham), house (Suricata) and South American fusion (Dengue Dengue Dengue) to remix tracks from her debut, alongside jazz musicians Nala Sinephro and Moses Boyd, with the “We Move” suffix reflecting the new album’s embrace of dance beats. And yet, on the whole, Source ⧺ We Move is less an overhaul of Garcia’s work than a spotlight on existing musical ideas. Dengue Dengue Dengue’s take on “Source,” for example, lasers in on the reggae groove that pins down the album version, while DJ Harrison teases out the hip hop cadence that underlies “The Message Continues”.
Source ⧺ We Move’s weaker tracks can feel rather reductive when compared to the original album’s cornucopia of ideas. Georgia Anne Muldrow’s remix of “Boundless Beings” is pretty fine, in and of itself, but the decision to decimate Akenya’s bewitching vocal leaves the remix looking underfed. Suricata’s late-night house remake of “La cumbia me está llamando” (ft. La Perla), meanwhile, is too strait-laced compared to the original’s spirited and rather raw Afro-Caribbean slink. A couple of other songs—the Blvck Spvde remix of “Inner Game” and Nala Sinephro’s take on “Together Is a Beautiful Place To Be”—go too far the other way in their search for answers. Both are captivating and very inventive pieces of music but it is hard to see what, exactly, they have taken from their Source material.
Between these extremes, Source ⧺ We Move really takes off when the remixers match Source’s wild inspiration with metamorphic insight of their own. Two of the best remixes come from artists close to the UK jazz scene: Kaidi Tatham, a legend of the West London broken beat sound, with its syncopated rhythms and heavy jazz influences, transforms “La cumbia me está llamando” into an idiosyncratic dance-floor bomb, adding ductile bass, Roy Ayers chords, and a wonderfully sharp drum rhythm; while Moses Boyd makes “Pace” into a live drum & bass beast, like Roni Size & Reprazent with added creases ironed in. Chicago songwriter KeiyaA’s “Stand With Each Other” is another highlight, rearranging the original song according to a new internal logic, where R&B, rough electronica and jazz collide, the three pillars eventually dovetailing in a gorgeous chord sequence that breezes down halfway in.
More than a remix album, then, Source ⧺ We Move is like an expansion pack to Source’s electric, eclectic universe, opening up paths and byways that shed new light on Garcia’s work while staying true to her vision; a modular musical adventure that is best enjoyed in context.
Buy: Rough Trade
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Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-10-25T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2021-10-25T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Jazz | Concord Jazz | October 25, 2021 | 7.6 | 05d95014-62c9-44d5-ae64-53f345117f72 | Ben Cardew | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ben-cardew/ | |
Madvillainy, one of the most anticipated releases in underground rap history, happens to parallel one of the most anticipated arrivals… | Madvillainy, one of the most anticipated releases in underground rap history, happens to parallel one of the most anticipated arrivals… | Madvillain: Madvillainy | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/5579-madvillainy/ | Madvillainy | Madvillainy, one of the most anticipated releases in underground rap history, happens to parallel one of the most anticipated arrivals in comic book history: the short-lived Amalgam Comics label. As the name implied, the Amalgam Universe brought together the two most dominant and popular comic factions—Marvel and DC—and all of their respective characters, styles and quirks. The long-awaited collaboration between producer/emcees Madlib and MF Doom, Madvillainy is the Infinity Gauntlet of rap, a tense mainstream-meets-indie, avant-meets-antique melee that, as the opening sample suggests, plays on a “seminal connection that audiences can relate their experience in life with the villains and their dastardly doings.”
“MADVILLAIN: RETARDED HARD COPY”
In November 2002, Otis Jackson Jr. (aka Madlib) went south to Brazil on business. For the trip, he compiled two mix CDs of beats and unfinished tracks: one stored his collaborations with Detroit’s Jay Dee; the second held work with Brooklyn’s Daniel Dumile (aka MF Doom). As a true testament to both fidelity’s fragility and the power of file-sharing, both discs leaked a few months later, giving birth to a logical buzz, but more importantly, heightening expectations to impossible heights; these demos were pretty fucking tight. If “Peeyano Keys” and “Powerball #5” were just rough drafts, what could be expected of the completed project?
Undoubtedly, Madlib and Doom felt the pressure. The leak seemed to be a huge kick in the ass, especially for Madlib, who in the past few years has been garnering the reputation of being brilliant and prolific, but distracted: His Blunted in the Bomb Shelter mix (rumored to have been concocted in less than a day), Blue Note-sampling Shades of Blue, and even the Jaylib collaboration are fresh, but sloppy and often unfocused. Madvillainy is anything but: The samples are smart and never played-out, and the production and rhymes reveal a determined sense of cooperation, as Doom spouts off his most brilliant lyrical change-ups and production-conscious playoffs.
“Wild guess, you can say he stay sedated.”
One of the noticeable differences between the unauthorized promo and the final burn of the album is a change in vocal tone from Doom, which has shifting from an excited, measured performance to a slower, scratchier and ultimately better-suited delivery, considering Madlib’s low-key, bass-oriented production. Some people take the new chilled delivery as somehow inferior to the old incarnation, but taken in context, the album benefits from the re-recording, particularly in cases were Doom re-arranges couplets to optimize his punchlines (“Meat Grinder”) or adds new lines altogether (“Figaro”).
“Your first and last step to playing yourself like accordion.”
Doom’s acknowledgement of Madlib’s accordion sample (the same one Daedelus used on 2002’s Invention) is the most obvious instance of Madvillainy’s lyrics/production integrity, but the album is chock full of them. For a collaboration which the duo has described as something “like a telepathy thing. There wasn’t a lot of talking,” Madlib and Doom, proponents of two distinctive hip-hop styles, are of one unusually strong mind.
“Mad plays the bass like the race card.”
The axis of Madvillainy is Otis Jackson Jr.’s production. While Doom’s entire career has been shadowed by consistently strong production efforts, never has such chemistry developed between him and another beatmaker. From the unbelievable Castlevania-meets-Rocky & Bullwinkle piano chase music of “Supervillain Theme” to the shifting keyboard jazz suite of “Great Day” to the dark chamber bass, timbales and jump-cut ukulele plucks of “Meat Grinder,” Madlib proves himself as much more than just a loop digger, topping his best work on Quasimoto’s The Unseen with an album of consistently incredible beat work. And it isn’t just the beats that make the partnership work so well: The character of his vocal samples and the smoothness of his song-to-song segues make this album individual to the styles of both artists—a difference that puts this pairing far ahead of similarly talented teams like RJD2 and Blueprint’s Soul Position.
“Don’t make me have to pound his tin crown face in.”
Both Doom’s and Madlib’s myriad aliases make sparkling cameo appearances on Madvillainy, most notably on “America’s Most Blunted,” in which Madlib bickers with alter-ego Quasimoto, and on “Fancy Clown,” which features Dumile as Viktor Vaughn. Here, Vaughn steams on an ex-girlfriend’s unfaithfulness—but she’s cheating with Metalface, another Dumile alias. It’s a brilliant conceit, and perhaps makes “Fancy Clown” hip-hop’s first schizophrenic self-diss track.
“Hey you: Don’t touch the mic like it's AIDS on it.”
Okay, so maybe that’s a little harsh. Although the guest appearances from the Stones Throw massive are Jackson Jr.’s take on label-based self-aggrandizement, they never disrupt the album’s flow, and never say anything too stupid (Medaphoar even garners a laugh on “Raid” with, “My niggas take ‘no’ like Kobe”). Still, it helps that these extraneous verses are few and far between; most listeners would likely have preferred an additional Doom cut instead, or at least an appearance from Doom’s Monsta Island Czars.
“Spit so many verses, sometimes my jaw twitches/One thing this party could use is more… booze.”
When much of the underground often aspires to Truth and Something Bigger, Madlib and Doom have always seemed content to be quirky through and through, lightly roasting themselves and subverting the genre itself to brilliant effect. Like in the above quote from “Great Day”: The rhyme’s pattern and rap’s topical stereotype demands the word “bitches,” yet Doom hilariously says “booze” instead. Or on “Money Folder,” in which Doom starts off, “Don’t mind me, I won’t just rhyme lightly off of two or three Heinies,” but flips beers to babes midway: “And boy was they fine, G: One black, one Spanish, one Chi-nee.”
“The best emcee with no chain ya ever heard.”
Madvillainy is inexhaustibly brilliant, with layer-upon-layer of carefully considered yet immediate hip-hop, forward-thinking but always close to its roots. Madlib and Doom are individually at their most refined here, and together, they’ve created one of the most exciting blockbuster alliances in the underground to date. Good luck finding a better hip-hop album this year, mainstream, undie, or otherwise. | 2004-03-25T01:00:02.000-05:00 | 2004-03-25T01:00:02.000-05:00 | Rap | Stones Throw | March 25, 2004 | 9.4 | 05dd76dc-6e23-4602-ac4c-2c4ff6bf4401 | Rollie Pemberton | https://pitchfork.com/staff/rollie-pemberton/ | |
Berlin's FILM Recordings offers a new recording of two golden-era works by the minimalist masters, reimagined and modernized. | Berlin's FILM Recordings offers a new recording of two golden-era works by the minimalist masters, reimagined and modernized. | Steve Reich / Terry Riley: Six Pianos / Keyboard Study #1 | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22596-six-pianos-keyboard-study-1/ | Six Pianos / Keyboard Study #1 | The 1970s was Steve Reich’s decade; although he had already completed groundbreaking phase pieces It’s Gonna Rain, Come Out, and Violin Phase by the end of the ‘60s, the ten-year run that followed was something else entirely. Starting with Drumming in 1971, moving through the epochal Music for 18 Musicians and passing into the early ’80s with the beautiful Tehillim, Reich married his early structural innovations to a singular, aqueous melodicism that rocketed him out of the downtown NY avant-garde into as close to the mainstream as it is possible for a modern composer to be.
Six Pianos—written in between Drumming and 18 Musicians and released to accompany the show-stealing Music for Mallet Instruments, Voices and Organ—is a solid fan favorite, a lovely piece of music that fits perfectly between the larger, more definitive works. Once you know what to expect from the composer, Reich’s work from this era does exactly what it says on the box: there are six pianos, playing overlapping developments and variations on deceptively simple melodic figures for the piece's duration. Development will happen, but in a such a supple fashion you will be hard pressed to remember what was different between the start of the piece and its conclusion. Everything has shifted, yet nothing has changed.
Something similar can be said for the various recordings of Reich’s work. One sinks into the music so easily that different iterations can seem only incrementally distinct from each other. This new LP issued by Berlin’s FILM Recordings reprises a recent performance by an ensemble featuring, among others, members of chamber-techno upstarts Brandt Brauer Frick and promises “Six Pianos the way it should be looked at in 2016.” To achieve this, each player recorded their individual part alone, in separate studios, later combining the layers into a unified whole. The result offers a distinct perspective on Pianos, though perhaps not an improvement.
Reich’s music is quintessentially New York, with precise, percolating rhythms and a subtle melancholy evoking nothing more than the simple pleasures of darting through a hectic Manhattan on a crisp autumn afternoon. Part of the joy of his larger ensemble works is the lush crowding of instruments, with different voices smearing together, suddenly poking out before receding back into the mix. On this recording, however, each line is rendered with stunning clarity and separation. It’s a move that’s in line with the times, with ensembles like So Percussion and Alarm Will Sound offering virtuosic updates of classic pieces, and makes for an intriguing listen. The clockwork qualities of Reich’s music are brought to the front, and you can focus immediately on any part you like, letting the rest move around you.
However, some of the richness and emotion that make this work so enduring are dulled in favor of a tidy tastefulness. In their youth, minimalist composers had to fight hard against lazy attempts to classify their work as New Age, and the players here seem determined to emphasize the elemental rigor of the piece. But although Reich was never utopian in his goals, he was also unafraid of drawing human pathos out from his looping melodies.
The B-side is a rendition of Terry Riley’s Keyboard Study #1 that goes further in its modern updates. Riley’s original score is written in billowing, hippie chicken scratch and reads more like a brain teaser than a piece of music: “The two kinds of figures interlock and are repeated in this fashion until one of the hands selects another figure… combine any figure from lines 2-6 with continuum figure 1… if any figure from lines 8-10 is played in the alignment of continuum figure 7… it may be combined with other figures from lines 8-10.” And so on. Ensemble member Gregor Schwellenbach performed the piece solo and put together the final mix with assistance from engineer Lukas Vogel, who added delays and reverbs. The work, open to interpretation, here becomes a series of tight, consonant piano runs that double over each other in dizzying spirals. An early work of Riley’s, Study #1 laid the groundwork for his iconic A Rainbow in Curved Air and subsequent masterpieces like Persian Surgery Dervishes. Intuitive, often darkly psychedelic explorations of textures and loops performed during druggy “all night flights,” these pieces presaged techno by over a decade. Now an ensemble with roots in modern club music has returned to the source material, and though you would never confuse this record for a DJ tool, you can hear a familial bond.
Back in 1999, Nonesuch released the Reich Remixed compilation, where a splashy array of electronic producers were invited to explore his back catalogue. A case has always been made for Reich’s relationship to minimal dance music, but aside from the obvious use of repetition that both share, I’ve never seen it, and the compilation struck me as a ham-fisted attempt to gussy up his image for a new generation. This LP is something else entirely. As electronic production has become the new normal and generations upon generations of producers continue to stretch the possibilities of dance music, techno has itself become an elder statesman's genre. Festivals like CTM and Unsound have made their name juxtaposing DIY electronics, touring DJs, loner ambient composers and new music ensembles, and left-of-center artists like Andy Stott, Demdike Stare, and Lee Gamble regularly shuttle between the club and the art world. This LP serves as a worthy and timely addition to the composers’ catalogues, but after finishing this version of Six Pianos, I found myself reaching for my beat up copy of Reich’s 1986 re-orchestration for marimbas. And when it was done, I reached for it again. | 2016-11-30T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2016-11-30T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Experimental | Forced Exposure | November 30, 2016 | 7.2 | 05e0eb42-0932-4aeb-a7f1-8fe2cd5ed2b8 | Daniel Martin-McCormick | https://pitchfork.com/staff/daniel-martin-mccormick/ | null |
Ahmed Gallab has spent the last six years slowly refining the scope of his music. The one-time contributor to both Yeasayer and Caribou returns here with an album that seamlessly mixes Afropop and off-kilter electronic sounds. | Ahmed Gallab has spent the last six years slowly refining the scope of his music. The one-time contributor to both Yeasayer and Caribou returns here with an album that seamlessly mixes Afropop and off-kilter electronic sounds. | Sinkane: Mean Love | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/19715-sinkane-mean-love/ | Mean Love | Ahmed Gallab has spent the last six years slowly refining and reducing the scope of his music. When the Sudanese sometimes-session musician started on his own as Sinkane, his work resembled the rustling, windswept breeze of post-rock—2008 debut Color Voice and the following year’s self-titled effort could’ve been easily mistaken for the sprawling instrumental work coming out of Chicago in the late ‘90s. But as he vacuumed up more sonic influences, the music contracted. Mars from 2012, Sinkane’s breakout effort, was an appealing mix of Afropop rhythms and dance music’s slinkier tendencies, as Gallab restrained his leg-stretching tendencies with pop-focused structures that nonetheless possessed a jammy feel. His latest, Mean Love, is his most direct and concise collection of songs yet, distilling his compositional talents and reining in any attendant looseness.
This overall trajectory isn’t dissimilar to that of the band he’s most known for contributing to, Brooklyn aesthetes Yeasayer, who made a name with distinctly proggy, expansive-sounding music before whittling down their rougher edges. But while Yeasayer have experienced a creative decline in their search for a simpler expression, Gallab continues to improve his sense of songcraft. Earlier this year, he acted as musical director for ATOMIC BOMB! The Music of William Onyeabor, a celebration of the Nigerian synth-pop pioneer that included contributions from David Byrne, Devonté Hynes, and Hot Chip’s Alexis Taylor, among others. On Mean Love, Gallab exudes a similar sense of adventurousness, and he liberally wields Afropop influences with confidence; the cascading horns and easy, continuous beat of “New Name” resemble the hypnotic ebullience of luminaries like Tony Allen and Fela Kuti poured into a small-scale mold.
Showcasing a stylistic restlessness that works in Gallab’s favor, Mean Love’s try-anything spirit is sometimes reminiscent of the electro-pop of Toro Y Moi’s Chaz Bundick, with Gallab’s smooth professionalism replacing Bundick’s good-natured amateurishness. More favorably, Gallab’s pleasing upper vocal register and genre-bending tendencies recall Dan Snaith, the mastermind behind the influence-inhaling Caribou project (Gallab was a live drummer for Caribou for a time) who’s proved a master in creating pop music that’s emotive, brainy, and brawny. Snaith’s airy voice tends to float over the music, and Gallab similarly hovers over the slow drumbeat and jettisoned synths of “Son”, the album’s lyrical high point. "Son" finds its creator ruminating on familial pressures and the eternal conundrum of finding a place within one’s point of geographical origin: “There’s a pressure to being your eldest/ There’s such pressure to make you the proudest...I will not forget where I came from.”
Elsewhere, Gallab tackles slow-moving funk, spaced-out psychedelic pop, and peppy tropicalia with confidence. His creative malleability is impressive, even if the results don’t always excite; in particular, a few cuts on the album’s back half (the languid title track, “Galley Boys”, the twangy closer “Omdurman”) take on countrified shapes with brushes of slide guitar, a stylistic turn that is structurally sound but not as engaging as Mean Love’s other genre excursions. It seems almost unfair, though, to criticize Gallab for the minor crime of engaging with a sound that’s not as inherently interesting as what he’s proven capable of elsewhere, as Mean Love cements his reputation as a capable musical wanderer willing to engage with a variety of sounds. | 2014-09-04T02:00:03.000-04:00 | 2014-09-04T02:00:03.000-04:00 | Electronic | DFA | September 4, 2014 | 7.2 | 05e0fb0e-f5f5-4cd4-a47b-4439c2adde26 | Larry Fitzmaurice | https://pitchfork.com/staff/larry-fitzmaurice/ | null |
"I Dig a Pygmy by Charles Hawtrey & The Deaf Aids."
\n\n\ ...Or some such convoluted story. All these years ... | "I Dig a Pygmy by Charles Hawtrey & The Deaf Aids."
\n\n\ ...Or some such convoluted story. All these years ... | The Beatles: Let It Be... Naked | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/1093-let-it-be-naked/ | Let It Be... Naked | "I Dig a Pygmy by Charles Hawtrey & The Deaf Aids."
...Or some such convoluted story. All these years after the fact, what is clear is that The Beatles were special mainly because they were dedicated to producing things nobody else could. These songs, the band's persona, the stances they took and lessons learned in front of the camera weren't just the exploits of a popular band, but live memoirs of the spiritual, artistic and disciplined Ideal. For each word written and photo taken of all manner of celebrities, they are still arguably the only group of musicians worth talking about with the same significance as any world leader or religious icon you care to name-- at least in the West. Bigger than Jesus? All you need is love, and there is nothing I could write about them that isn't a cliché a hundred times over.
Because of this, most folks with a half a brain refuse to write about them in the same boundless way fans and journalists did in the 60s. I suppose this is a wise choice; after all, I'm about as interested in sifting through their complete story right now as I am in reading the dictionary cover-to-cover. Sure, it's "important," if music and people and getting swept up in a minor revolution of love and change is important, but it's too fucking much. Collectively, The Beatles had so many ideas, made so much music, affected so many people, inspired so much good (and bad) that they were necessarily bigger than life. Thus, we're necessarily stuck with tackling this stuff bit by bit. It's a story of looking at things under a microscope, taking things slowly and trying to remember why we were so interested in the first place; it's a story of uncovering some small kernel of their legacy and watching it wind its way back to the center. Everything worthwhile gets back eventually.
"Phase one in which Doris gets her oats."
Paul McCartney is a smug, charmless fuck. Ahem: "The great thing now about the remixed versions is that, with today's technology, they sound better than ever." If he had any humility, he'd insert a joke about receiving a bonus CD of outtakes when you ordered now; let's see some testimonials from satisfied customers as they pump their Beatles-themed parties, and claim, "Listening to this stuff brings back so many memories!" If his reasons for bringing you the "real" Let It Be seem cribbed from an infomercial, one can hardly fault his timing. George Harrison did, in fact, sign off on this release before his death, but given that he actually quit the band during the original sessions, one can only hope McCartney is reaping all his karmic just desserts for this "naked" edition.
In January 1969, about six weeks after The White Album was released, the band more-or-less agreed that their next project would involve being filmed as they performed their music. Well, at least they agreed they should be filmed; or, they had certainly been open to the idea of all being in the same place at the same time, working on music, possibly making a movie (but "no movies," as Harrison protested) and maybe eventually playing live somewhere in an Arabic desert. Or France. Or maybe on the rooftop of their studios. Oh, and, "Any of us can do separate things as well and that way it also preserves The Beatles bit." Hmm, but, "What we're doing is still rehearsing and we'll get it together." "We'll collect our thoughts and you collect yours."
The sessions and rehearsals that eventually produced the original issue of Let It Be have been rightfully documented as disorganized and tension-filled. After spending a month being filmed by Michael Lindsay-Hogg (who they'd already worked with on videos for "Hey Jude" and "Revolution", among others) as they rehearsed new material, and having put so much sound to tape that no one could be bothered to sift through it all when the time came to deliver an actual product, the band, realizing their defeat, handed it all off to engineer Glyn Johns and moved on to their next project. One original idea for these sessions was merely to be filmed performing songs from The White Album; another was that they should get back to their roots of performing raving rock 'n' roll in front of an audience. Typically, The Beatles' ideas and ambitions far outreached what they could possibly have achieved on their own-- and for the first time since they'd been together, most of them were too tired, distracted or otherwise uninspired to make sure all those ridiculous ideas actually materialized.
Johns compiled his version of what the record should be: studio chatter, adlibs, many rough takes of new songs and even off-the-cuff covers. He was chosen because of his work with The Rolling Stones, but only too soon discovered that his new employers operated differently. Even after several modifications and release dates, his compilation was rejected. The tapes were shelved until the band agreed to let legendary producer Phil Spector have a go at squeezing a good record out of them. It should be noted that while The Beatles were only too happy to rid themselves of the burden of Let It Be, they were working with George Martin on Abbey Road in exactly the same way they always had: If perfectionism and pride were forgotten in the winter of '69, apparently they could make amends on a "proper" LP. Of course, when the band actually heard what Spector had produced, they balked (well, most of the time, depending on who was arguing with who). Nevertheless, Let It Be was released in January 1970, after Abbey Road, and despite considerable differences of opinion on its "greatness" at the time, it has become yet another canonical set of Beatle music.
So what did Spector produce? First, he added a couple of songs, including an old throwaway by Lennon called "Across the Universe", which was originally from 1968 and had recently been released on a charity compilation called No One's Gonna Change Our World. Secondly, he beefed up some of the rather sparse arrangements with ersatz orchestral and choral parts-- much to the fury of McCartney after hearing his "The Long and Winding Road" turned into a Hallmark commercial. Never mind that Spector had at least given the band a releasable record, including managing to turn a minute-and-a-half Harrison song fragment into "I Me Mine". Given McCartney's famed disgust over the resulting LP, his enthusiasm to issue his idea of how this music should sound shouldn't surprise anyone. Let It Be... Naked is a remixed, resequenced presentation of the most maligned Beatles album, and for better or for worse, will wrap no loose ends whatsoever.
"Don't Let Me Down"
The best news about this record is that the songs themselves have not changed much in 33 years. Those of you who love "Across the Universe" and "Two of Us" for their elegant simplicity and overwhelming beauty will be happy to know they haven't changed, even if these performances are not the ones to which we've become accustomed. By the same token, I don't think I can ever love "The Long and Winding Road"; sure, the choirs were a bit much, but then, McCartney didn't really need them to lay on some pretty thick drama. In any case, once over the initial shock of the new song order, Naked will seem very familiar to fans.
The sound is perfect, of course. If anything, Naked serves as a great argument for a project to remaster all of the original Beatle albums. Producers Paul Hicks, Guy Massey and Allan Rouse have done an excellent job cleaning up whatever warts were on the original tapes, and presenting these songs in a fresh way without resorting to making them sound overly "modern." They've also somehow found a way to make McCartney play in tune, so I can only be grateful for that.
Now I must ask: Why? In 2003, there are few people clamoring for an alternate version of Let It Be, and those that are have almost certainly discovered the myriad bootlegs offering every possible combination of halfway-finished covers and studio banter. There is Beatle music yet to be released that should be: My pick would have been a legit issue of their sessions at George's house playing The White Album songs unplugged before recording them. This is music that lends a considerably different light to their music than any remix ever could, and also has the advantage of not being horrifically over-analyzed for the past 30 years. Conversely, Naked is really only interesting as a mild curio, for fighting the boots and for the strangeness of reading a lecture on the wrongs of music-sharing placed within the cover of a Beatles record.
"Riffs are the only thing that will help all of us."
So then, the tunes. To my ears, "Get Back" and "For You Blue" are unchanged. The difference is that "Get Back" now leads off the record, and "For You Blue" is slotted third, suggesting McCartney thinks more of it than Spector did. Likewise, "I Me Mine" features the same familiar Harrison vocals and guitar lines, but is completely stripped of the cinematic Spector backing arrangement. "The Long and Winding Road" also seems mostly the same, minus the orchestra and choir. However, listening more closely, I'm sure this is a different performance; McCartney's vocal wavers slightly and Billy Preston's organ solo gives it a subtle, soulful feel, reminiscent of "A Whiter Shade of Pale" (one of McCartney's favorite songs). However, what's immediately noticeable is the marked clarity of all of these songs. Ringo's hi-hat is crisp, Harrison's Leslie'd asides are in plain sight, rather than being buried by excitable sopranos.
Lennon's "Don't Let Me Down" wasn't on the original LP but was rehearsed at the same sessions. The band performs it here more uptempo than on the released "Get Back" B-side, and generally more ragged-- as is to be expected, given that this was pulled from their famous rooftop performance. Lennon lets loose with some wailing falsetto near the end, and even though they weren't the tightest outfit ever to play, few can deny the contagious enthusiasm they mustered onstage. "I've Got a Feeling" and "One After 909" are also pulled from the roof concert, and are similarly raw. Still, they're hardly bad recordings and I wonder why the band was so reluctant to release them at the time.
The tracks that struck me most on Naked were "Let It Be" and "Across the Universe". The former because it seems very much improved with this remix; the Harrison guitar solo is new, so this is likely a different version than was released originally, and the hymnal-esque backing vocals are gorgeously placed across the aural plane in the mix. These are the kinds of changes that make Naked an interesting listen for longtime fans, and raise the question of the powers that be possibly issuing a full-length project of Beatles remixes wherein drastic changes are made to songs without the obligation of placing the project alongside the rest of their proper LPs, as if this is the way they were "meant" to be. That said, "Across the Universe" is the same (slowed-down) vocal and guitar from Let It Be, but with more reverb and soft sitar-like sounds. Though there's already a beautiful, lesser-known version of this track available (an elaborate George Martin-produced studio version with a background children's choir and bird chirps), this take eclipses the already beautiful original Let It Be version as the second-best performance of the song.
Let It Be... Naked also comes with a second disc entitled Fly on the Wall, consisting of several short fragments of studio conversation and song rehearsals, amounting to approximately 21 minutes of bonus material. This disc will doubtless be fascinating to fans, and in particular the snippets of John performing a very early version of "Imagine" (here referenced as "John's Piano Piece"), and a short, striking version of Harrison's "All Things Must Pass", obviously influenced by his time spent with Bob Dylan and The Band in America the previous year. However, given that the entire two-disc set runs less than an hour, I wonder why it wasn't condensed to a single disc. Furthermore, if a 21-minute outtakes collection deserves its own bonus disc, why not expand this material to fill the rest of the CD? Apparently, releasing two versions of Let It Be make more sense to the remaining Beatles than giving fans something new.
"Let It Be"
Ultimately, Naked is not essential. Unlike scattered moments in the Anthology series, this music, though immaculately presented, doesn't really expand on either the music of Let It Be, or The Beatles' legacy. At this point, I'm not sure many people are prepared to accept a new take on the band anyway, but I might at least be happy knowing they didn't take me for a raving completist. And yet, I stood in line for this, just like millions of other like-minded fans will, merely for the chance to hear some small kernel leading me back to the reason I started listening in the first place. The albums will always be there, and the legend will forever be imprinted on the hearts of anyone believing in the affirming power of their music. In the end, regardless of what I write, this is The Beatles, and you already know what that means. | 2003-11-19T01:00:02.000-05:00 | 2003-11-19T01:00:02.000-05:00 | Rock | Capitol | November 19, 2003 | 7 | 05e16bae-1a8a-4fb1-8086-040f45026572 | Dominique Leone | https://pitchfork.com/staff/dominique-leone/ | null |
With 43 tracks spread over two discs, the latest deluxe version from the Beasties catalog suffers from some of the same lack of editing as the original did. | With 43 tracks spread over two discs, the latest deluxe version from the Beasties catalog suffers from some of the same lack of editing as the original did. | Beastie Boys: Hello Nasty [Deluxe Edition] | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/13527-hello-nasty-deluxe-edition/ | Hello Nasty [Deluxe Edition] | Even more so than career high-point Paul's Boutique, Hello Nasty tries to squeeze in every interesting record, old or new, that passed through the Beastie Boys' orbit at its time of recording. So why is one album considered a masterpiece while the other belongs in the bottom end of the band's catalog, just above the tedious instrumental EPs and second-rate hardcore? For one thing, Hello Nasty lacks the energy of almost every other Beasties album. It's got all these sounds to work with, that little-bit-of-everything agglomeration that characterized the late-1990s underground's listening habits: electro, drum'n'bass, lounge, folk, turntablism, tropicalia, dub. Basically anything you'd find in the collection of a given member of Tortoise. But the further the album strays from straight-up hip-hop, the less excited it sounds to do anything with these new influences.
That makes it sound like a chore, and it is, albeit intermittently. At 22 tracks, Hello Nasty is less boundary-pushing, carefully collaged risk-taking than the excess that comes from unlimited home studio time and no fear of mercenary label owners or turncoat audiences. "Song for the Man" is the first real evidence of the trio's slide into overextended, self-satisfied slackness. When you take the kitchen-sink approach to making an album, you better make damn sure you bring your A-game to each idea you try. It's not like the Beasties lacked the chops or wit to turn "Song for the Man" into something worth listening to. And there's nothing wrong with froth for frat boys, provided there's a hook. But this little-too-laid-back hip-hop lite is barely a song. Even the Beastie's post-Paul's instrumental funk noodles had more bite.
It sounds all the weaker coming from a band whose prime draw was a exuberance, even mania. Sounding lazy rather than effortless or playful is a bad look for any band-- especially when you've previously prided yourself on proving a don't-give-a-fuck-attitude is compatible with hardcore studio experimentation and pop savvy. If the Beasties anticipated so much of the cut-and-paste hip-hop sound on Paul's Boutique, then why does their contribution to the downtempo glut, passably whimsical instrumental interlude "Sneakin' Out the Hospital", sound less like elders schooling their disciples than three aging magpies trying to keep up with the Ninja Tunes and Mo' Waxes?
Elsewhere, the Beasties fall into the usual traps that beset smart dudes with wide ears, a lot of heart, and plenty of industry clout: go-nowhere studio trickery (murky mumblefest "Flowin' Prose"); eye-rolling heart-on-sleeve earnestness (MCA channeling George Harrison's high guru era on "I Don't Know"); and of course your standard case of guest star-itis. If you can make it through the starstruck Boys' inability to reign in Lee "Scratch" Perry's ramblings on "Dr. Lee, PhD", well, you've got a stronger stomach for superstars kowtowing to their heroes than I do.
The good bits tend to stick to what the Beasties do best-- hyperactive rhyme-lobbing with more bad puns than a MAD magazine sub-editor and a brain-melting overload of one pop-cult ref after another-- with a pre-millennium dancefloor sheen. Thankfully pre-millennium dancefloors-- some of them, at least-- were increasingly in thrall to the recycled rigidity of old-school electro. So you get the Beasties keeping current by referencing the sounds that reared them when they were hip-hop obsessed hardcore kids. Unsurprisingly, the Boys rarely fumble when playing with a sound they'd been loving and perfecting over a decade.
It was also-- lest we forget-- the era of dunderheaded big beat and jungle's last gasp of crowd-pleasing jump-up dumbness. The Beasties were clearly trawling New York's import bins in the months before they laid down Hello Nasty, making the live-from-London remixes of tracks like Fatboy Slim's rework of "Body Movin'" (included on the bonus disc) almost superfluous. The original album tracks have all of the club-centric subgenres' antic energy, plus plenty of trademark Beasties stupid-unto-genius wordplay to make them more than dance comp filler. Ad-Rock rhyming, "I'm the king of Boggle/ There is none higher" with "quagmire" tends dangerously close to both being show-offy and plain cringeworthy. But I'm smiling as I roll my eyes, so I guess he wins.
Elsewhere things get odder, less predictable in the good way. "The Negotiation Limerick File" and "Electrify" don't fit the party-hard schema, but they're good reminders of the sonic diversity of the era's not-quite-mainstream hip-hop. And "Three MC's and One DJ", where Mix Master Mike offers a late-1990s turntablism master-class handily condensed to the length of a single, makes me long for that brief moment when Wire-reading avant-heads shared common ground with straight-up b-boys, the pleasure principle of hip-hop colliding with a noise head's preference for abstract expressionism.
The length of the bonus disc nearly rivals the original's length (21 tracks to the parent album's 22) and contains mostly cutting-room excerpts and drag-assy alternate mixes. Oh boy, an even more meandering "dub mix" of "Dr. Lee, PhD"! There are plenty of short snippets of heavy, kitschy jams where the Beasties indulge their love for the muddy, slo-mo funk of the mid-70s. Get ready for a lot of blaxploitation-in-two-minutes-or-less like "Dirty Dog" and "Aunt Jackie Poom Poom Delicious". As far as the bonus instrumentals go, only the porn-ready mystical mumbo-jumbo minimalism of "The Drone" and the pensive quasi-rock of "Creepin'" justify running the tape past two minutes. And the bulk of the remixes by other artists are inessential, save the stop-and-go stutter-funk Colleone and Webb's "Intergalactic", compelling because it never quite seems to gel with the original.
For an album already in need of a stern editor's hand, the bonus disc just reinforces the impression that the Hello Nasty-era Beasties were bursting with interesting starting points they never bothered to see to completion. I remember loving Hello Nasty at the time in part because it was so much, even the undercooked bits and gimpy hippie schlock. Hell, there were still plenty of tracks left to justify the sticker shock of the just-prior-to-MP3s new CD. But it's hard hearing the positives in such a shapeless mush of half-formed sorta-songs with the weary ears of the post-iTunes playlist compiler. Let alone bothering to pay for it again in full. As an object in itself, we've got the album we've got, and that means assessing the whole unshapely mass/mess, the of-the-moment experiments with the actual tunes worth keeping a decade-plus later. And that whole, less a glorious mess than the exhausting sort, is the least essential Beasties disc until we hit the new millennium. | 2009-10-02T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2009-10-02T02:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap / Rock | Capitol | October 2, 2009 | 7 | 05e1f71f-d26f-45e3-b013-3d8bbcc37292 | Jess Harvell | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jess-harvell/ | null |
The Indiana singer-songwriter brings his seductive falsetto and clever production touches to a short, sweet debut EP of bedroom pop and throwback soul. | The Indiana singer-songwriter brings his seductive falsetto and clever production touches to a short, sweet debut EP of bedroom pop and throwback soul. | Omar Apollo: Stereo EP | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/omar-apollo-stereo-ep/ | Stereo EP | Omar Apollo taught himself to sing and play guitar the true millennial way: using YouTube videos as a guide. The Chicano singer-songwriter and producer grew up in Hobart, Indiana, and got his start at the end of 2016, when he was still a teenager, with a string of SoundCloud loosies: a brew of bedroom pop and slinky R&B that offered proof of a natural-born talent. Stereo, his debut EP, is a cross-cultural pleasure trip that further builds out those early ideas, showcasing a colorful palette that glides across genres and eras.
The title track offers a preview of Apollo’s most alluring qualities: dreamy guitar-driven production, soothing vocals that slip seamlessly between Spanish and English, and a lovesick pen. He avoids banality by reshaping each element from track to track; electric bounce on one, acoustic slow burn the next. No matter how forlorn the lyrics, Apollo’s consistently honeyed sound attracts the ear. “Erase” would be a run-of-the-mill breakup ballad if not for the way it feels more sentimental than bitter, like he knows the relationship hasn’t yet reached the end of the road. He pleads his case in warm tones over tremolo guitar and a crisp drum groove, impassioned but not stricken.
Similarly, when he sings, “Got into some bad love, now my heart’s a mess,” on closer “Amor Malo” (“Bad Love”), he doesn’t sound nearly as regretful as it looks on paper. Adoration seeps from his voice, which makes it all the more convincing; he’d likely do it all over again if he could. But Stereo isn’t simply dulcet crooning. On the disco-inspired “Hijo de Su Madre,” he slips between rapping and a glistening higher register. He brings the funk on “Ignorin,” with a little help from a squelching guitar and playful drums. His staccato falsetto‚ a clear callback to Prince’s style, creates a sharp contrast to the rest of the song’s suavity.
Even with a deep bag of tricks to pull from, he’s at his most striking when he goes back to the basics. The EP’s centerpiece, “Ugotme,” is the only one of his original singles reprised here; with nearly two million plays on Spotify, it remains his most popular song to date. It’s not hard to see why: Apollo’s buttery vocals and bluesy guitar make for a sublime combination befitting the enamored lyrics. Like most of his songs, it’s short and sweet, smoldering for a fulfilling but far-too-quick two minutes. But this one sticks with you much longer, tapping into something that is familiar and comforting—an old soul operating in a new time.
That Apollo folds pieces of his heritage into the mix further sweetens the deal, as popular music (like the nation itself) continues to reckon with the visibility afforded to brown people. The stakes may be higher for Apollo, who is a first-generation Mexican-American, but Stereo is a breeze that promises romance even in heartbreak. As a debut, it’s an abridged but still effective introduction to a triple threat of an artist with plenty to offer. | 2018-06-07T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-06-07T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | self-released | June 7, 2018 | 6.8 | 05e2a5ea-16c4-4652-9023-2320e9aa5658 | Briana Younger | https://pitchfork.com/staff/briana-younger/ | |
The Brooklyn-based producer, vocalist, and drummer underlines her frosty club cuts and wordless, tranquil interludes with a message of dissent. | The Brooklyn-based producer, vocalist, and drummer underlines her frosty club cuts and wordless, tranquil interludes with a message of dissent. | Ela Minus: acts of rebellion | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/ela-minus-acts-of-rebellion/ | acts of rebellion | The underlying theme of Ela Minus’ music is the idea that resistance grows from everyday practices. There are whispers of this across her meticulously crafted debut full-length acts of rebellion, but it’s Minus’ intricate production that commands the most attention. She is both a skilled craftsman and a learned composer: After years of playing in an emo band in her native Colombia, she trained as a jazz drummer at Berklee, where she also learned to design and build synthesizers. Though Minus wrote, produced, engineered, and recorded acts of rebellion at her Brooklyn home, these songs were made for the dark corners of a coldwave disco.
Minus alternates between club cuts and wordless, tranquil interludes, front-loading her most aerobic tracks and leaving more contemplative music for the cooldown. Her technical knowledge is especially evident in the album’s lush instrumentals: Opener “N19 5NF” is glittery and dizzying, like staring at the stars while spinning around too fast; “let them have the internet” stretches out like mechanized whale song through a sea of static. In these nonverbal passages, Minus produces canvases more rich and emotive than some of the realities she sings of.
The album’s most propsulive entries come in the three-song suite of “they told us it was hard, but they were wrong,” “el cielo no es de nadie,” and “megapunk,” which embroider four-on-the-floor beats with clattering percussion, distant breaths, and buzzing synthesizers. “they told us” and “megapunk” are overtly tied to her mission statement: “I want people to feel like they have the power to change the world,” she recently told Pitchfork, suggesting that such change often starts from small acts. Minus has also said that she writes her lyrics (which are sung in English and Spanish) after the music is completed, often relying on unedited improvisation. This process may account for some of the ambiguity in “megapunk” and “they told us,” which approach the topic of dissent in broad, pared-back vocabulary. From “megapunk”:
We can’t seem to find
A reason to stay quiet
We’re afraid we’ll run out of time
To stand up for our rights
We can’t seem to find
Any peace of mind
As much as we try
There’s no way out, but fight
Minus is well-intended, but it’s hard to peek through these platitudes to find what she’s passionate about. The music is layered and driving and a little bit frosty, and the words don’t stoke a particularly visceral or emotional reaction. The kinetic reaction is undeniable—Minus is more than adept at crafting dance music. But is dancing to this music rebellion enough, or is there more to discuss?
On the album’s second half, Minus looks inward, and when she draws from life’s everyday scenes her songs become far more nuanced. On “dominique,” she describes a haze of nocturnal living: spending too much time alone, sleeping well into the evening, and surviving on coffee and liquor. Her voice is breathy and light—a timbre she maintains throughout the album, but one particularly suited to the lone narrator wandering through the wee hours. “The world is made for those who sleep at night,” she speculates over a bittersweet melody that sounds like New Order noir. It’s dance music interested in the loneliness of late-night partying, and Minus tends to the subject with a subtle hand.
acts of rebellion examines the quiet, intimate moments of life as well as concepts that are vast and difficult to convey. Minus approaches both with rich and sophisticated electronic music; it may not be outwardly provocative, but it serves as a place to process initial visions of resistance, those that existed in her private space as she wrote these songs. Perhaps that is a kind of everyday change—acts of rebellion are sometimes dreamt up in your room, but they’re rarely completed there.
Buy: Rough Trade
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Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2020-10-29T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-10-29T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Domino | October 29, 2020 | 7.2 | 05e3f384-bdfa-442c-8554-75f2104e7c4c | Madison Bloom | https://pitchfork.com/staff/madison-bloom/ | |
The Detroit rapper teams up with the Missouri producer on a muted album that plays out like a nostalgic travelogue. Despite his laid-back delivery, James’ verses burble with conflict and regret. | The Detroit rapper teams up with the Missouri producer on a muted album that plays out like a nostalgic travelogue. Despite his laid-back delivery, James’ verses burble with conflict and regret. | Boldy James / Conductor Williams: Across the Tracks | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/boldy-james-conductor-williams-across-the-tracks/ | Across the Tracks | A few years ago, superproducer and frequent Boldy James collaborator the Alchemist discovered that the rapper likes to write in cars. “Not even a moving vehicle,” Alchemist told Complex; “he’s just parked up with the lights on, and he gets his mind right.” That habit fits with the alert repose of the Detroiter’s ruminative drug rap. James’ music is still and relaxed, yet taut as a wound spring. At any moment, violence or emotion might erupt from the calm, like a parked vehicle charging into traffic.
Boldy’s meditations have become a cottage industry since 2020. Every few months, he’ll huddle up with a single producer—like Alchemist, Jay Versace, or Nicholas Craven—and emerge with another casually prismatic street chronicle. It’s shocking how seldom he repeats himself, even as his collaborators tap similar loop-based beats. Working with one producer seems to allow Boldy to zoom in on a particular moment in time—be it the aftermath of a devastating car crash or the stressful prologue to his rap career—and capture every racing thought. On Across the Tracks, a team-up with Missouri producer Conductor Williams, Boldy sifts through recollections of life on the road and on the grind. The album is a travelogue of memories, each song grasping at some distant locale or experience.
The title, which plays on producer Conductor Williams’ name, suits the music’s pensive and peripatetic mood. Conductor, one of the pillars of Griselda Records’ luxe and wavy sound, specializes in dreamy beats built around yawning samples, and this collection is his strongest. He seems to loll his samples rather than chop them, stretching sounds like taffy and then arranging drums and melodies around their elongated shapes. “Flying Trapeze Act” starts with a gorgeous vocal loop and bleeds into a star stream of percussion and chords that flicker in and out of focus as Boldy waxes about close calls. “Used to feel trapped in the ghetto, tryna to break free/On a 30-year run, I feel like an escapee,” he says with relief. Rappers often turn reflective and defiant on Conductor beats; his arrangements have the transportive sparkle of reveries.
As if daydreaming, Boldy spends Across the Tracks teetering between the past and the present. He is dazzlingly limber on standout “The Ol Switcharoo,” bouncing off the clomping downbeat as he recalls life on the go. “East, west, running back and forth tryna run his money up the long way/Stepped on it like a bunion, had a run-yun for the mun-yun/Sold more circles than some Funyuns, all eyes on me through the tollways,” he raps, stretching his words to fit the soothing beat’s languid cadence. His use of directions rather than specific places reinforces the feeling that he is never at rest.
Even when James does use proper nouns, his narratives are generally scrambled. Key motifs and throughlines become legible only through the subtle accretion of tiny details and tensions amid the slick flexes. Driving makes him antsy (“Touchin' down was a cakewalk, I was more nervous on the drive back”) and puts him at ease (“Backin’ Wraith out the garage, I'm through the stratosphere”). His first brick of cocaine, the “worst” one, marks him like a curse, but he boasts, “I just took that bitch to pound town” of a bundle he deems “Sexxy Red.” The FBI, which gets multiple mentions, makes him wary of unfamiliar cars. But also, the feds are just haters: “Whole Bureau know that a nigga high-profile.” There is no explicit payoff to these threads, but they add ballast to Boldy’s twisty verses, which can seem leisurely because of his laidback delivery but often burble with conflict and regret. Conductor’s use of wailing voices and snatches of dialogue accents the rapper’s frequent mentions of dead friends and old memories. James’ Detroit, like Vince Staples’ Long Beach and Ka’s Brownsville, is both a physical place and a spectral presence.
Despite this haunted dynamic, the album ends with an embrace of home. Closer “Stamps in the Middle,” set to fuzzy horn blasts and hazy drums that echo opener “Terms and Conditions,” casts Boldy’s arcing journey as prodigal. “Yeah, I sold drugs, but that ain't shit to be ashamеd about/I made it out unscathed, blocks so hot that you could sunbathe/Nеighborhood full of dead ends and one-ways,” he raps with pride. This bleak, claustrophobic image shouldn’t be charming, but his conviction, and Conductor’s sanguine beat, coat it in warmth. | 2024-07-16T00:01:00.000-04:00 | 2024-07-16T00:01:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Near Mint | July 16, 2024 | 7.8 | 05e44a58-abb9-4279-a7fe-886b6767bbb4 | Stephen Kearse | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stephen-kearse/ | |
Kannon is the first complete Sunn O))) album in six years, and it documents a return to the elements for Greg Anderson and Stephen O’Malley. | Kannon is the first complete Sunn O))) album in six years, and it documents a return to the elements for Greg Anderson and Stephen O’Malley. | Sunn O))): Kannon | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21286-kannon/ | Kannon | In 2008, Sunn O))) played a short series of duo concerts meant to acknowledge the band's modest, mimetic origins. Sunn O))) began as a tribute of sorts to Earth, the influential duo whose low, slow riffs and steadfast amplifier worship established the doom-metal mold that Greg Anderson and Stephen O'Malley were trying to fill anew. And for the first few years, that was the limit of the pair's output—lumbering riffs, played at a near-tectonic pace and deliriously high volumes.
During the next half-decade, however, Anderson and O'Malley evolved. They incorporated a constellation of metal, noise and experimental guests into a series of high-concept records—White1, White2, and Black One, each of which expanded the pair's personnel and possibilities.They staged high-profile, full-length collaborations with counterparts and heroes. They turned concerts in clubs and cathedrals alike into frame-shattering, wall-shaking temporary installations, where robes, fogs, and a shrine of their namesake amplifiers shaped a sort of heavy-metal happening. More than a 10-year anniversary, those 2008 shows represented chances to jettison the excess and prove that the anchoring idea—chords played so long and loud the listener heard every overtone and felt every subtle change—remained potent. The new art-metal masters wanted to show they could still get back to basics.
A year after those concerts, Sunn O))) issued Monoliths & Dimensions, an aptly named colossus that folded a horn section, a choir, a string section, a blown conch shell and black metal legend Attila Csihar speaking slowly into four pieces that were just ridiculous and divergent enough to work. In the years since, collaborations with Ulver and Scott Walker have also pushed Anderson and O’Malley farther beyond the early, atavistic comforts of Earth. Kannon is the first complete Sunn O))) since Monoliths & Dimensions, and it likewise documents a return to the elements for Anderson and O'Malley. Cut with a cast of familiar collaborators playing mere support roles to Anderson, O'Malley, and their amplifiers, Kannon reneges on that progression with a triptych of elegant yet underwhelming arcs and drones. It is typically loud. It is often pretty. It is, cumulatively, the first minor full-length studio album of Sunn O)))'s career.
There are, no doubt, many beautiful and bracing passages throughout Kannon. Few musicians can summon the same mix of patience, intensity, roar, and meticulousness as Anderson and O'Malley; it's wonderful to hear them interact in the pristine, refined acoustic setting offered by producer Randall Dunn. Near the midsection of "Kannon 1", the bass, guitar, Csihar's obscured voice, and a capillary of feedback lock into a perfect unison. Even delivered through headphones, the sound is somehow paralyzing and exhilarating, as though a team of masseurs has just found all the right pressure points. The playing is so careful and the recording so crisp that, during "Kannon 3", you can listen to chords and notes arrive one by one and track their slow disappearance into the din around them. It's like watching time-lapse footage of solitary raindrops forming a deep puddle.
But where Kannon exceeds as a collection of moments, it fails as both an album and an experience, especially given the general Sunn O))) scale. Brevity may be the only truly new idea the band incorporates here, as these three tracks just break the 33-minute mark. But Anderson and O'Malley don't seem to have squeezed the normal complications and layers into a tighter space so much as omitted them altogether. "Kannon 1" slowly gathers its riffs, pulling back the stage curtains for the subterranean rattle of an oddly subdued Csihar. "Kannon 2" begins with a wrestling match with a guitar that resolves in feedback and, again, introduces a familiar choir of incantatory voices, all surrounded by a wispy veil of electronic oscillations. The album's most unexpected instant actually comes at that song's end, when one massive, static bass note hangs still in the air. Percussion jostles beneath it, as though the enormous tone were rattling a household cupboard. Rather than explore the strange sound, Sunn O))) simply shut down the amps and discard it. And that's the problem, really: Kannon feels underdeveloped and rushed, like the start of a project that's been delivered prematurely.
Since the release of Monoliths & Dimensions, Anderson and O'Malley have taken very separate paths. Anderson has re-launched the blues'n'doom outfit Goatsnake and retooled his label, Southern Lord, for old-school hardcore, crusty metal, and crossover fare. O'Malley, on the other hand, started an improvisational band with Keiji Haino and Oren Ambarchi, scored a film, composed for an orchestra, performed a new Alvin Lucier work, and launched a label devoted to such interests. That tension has long been an animating, thrilling force for Sunn O))). On Kannon, though, Anderson and O'Malley have opted to avoid rather than embrace it, to find a middle ground of compromise that steers safely away from the frisson of conflict. At least they sound good doing it. | 2015-12-03T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2015-12-03T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Experimental / Metal | Southern Lord | December 3, 2015 | 6.5 | 05e7a57b-397c-4ab4-a3af-5ae5c7e3f645 | Grayson Haver Currin | https://pitchfork.com/staff/grayson-haver currin/ | null |
Four reissues of Funkadelic's essential, early-1970s Westbound Records releases. | Four reissues of Funkadelic's essential, early-1970s Westbound Records releases. | Funkadelic: Funkadelic / Free Your Mind / Maggot Brain / America Eats Its Young | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/11739-funkadelic-free-your-mind-maggot-brain-america-eats-its-young/ | Funkadelic / Free Your Mind / Maggot Brain / America Eats Its Young | Funkadelic, arguably the greatest "black rock" band ever...Actually, strike that, they are far and away the best black rock band ever. In fact, screw everything, they're one of the greatest rock bands period, up there with any classic rock dinosaur you care to name. And though it's tempting to launch an essay on the racism of rock radio-- or rock journalism for that matter-- I'll stick to the band. Even as they're revered as legends and purveyors of the some of the best funk of the 70s, I've read relatively few accounts on their greatness as a pure rock band. But they had it all: great players, great singers, a great look, a great concept, actual hits, great albums, great drugs, freaky sex, disputes over money-- everything Led Zeppelin (or Spinal Tap) taught us was necessary to make the world's greatest rock music.
They started small, backing up ringleader George Clinton's Parliaments in the late 60s. When Clinton got into arguments with his label Revilot over money and rights, he decided to start recording his backup band instead, using the original Parliaments singers (Clinton, Ray Davis, Clarence "Fuzzy" Haskins-- and come on, dude's name is "Fuzzy"-- Calvin Simon and Grady Thomas) as "guests." Guitarists Eddie Hazel and Tawl Ross, bassist Billy Nelson, drummer Tiki Fulwood, and eventually, master keyboardist Bernie Worrell were the band that would turn this fairly traditional soul group into the intense live act that wowed Detroit's Westbound Records head Armen Boladian. He signed them, and from the get-go, their music cut through genres and money bullshit like neither had ever existed. Never mind that half the band quit and came back again during recording sessions for their first record, Funkadelic was destined for greatness. Ace's reissues of the band's Westbound catalog is long overdue-- they sound a world better than the terribly mastered original CD pressings, and contain a wealth of bonus tracks, alternate mixes, and liner notes.
Funkadelic from 1970 was a bomb dropped all over rock and soul. No matter Hendrix, no matter James Brown, no matter the MC5, nobody had ever heard anything like this. This music was slower than sludge, dirtier than the "raw funk" Herb "Sparky" Sparkman talks about in "Music For My Mother". It was a great big fucking mess, and a lot of people didn't know what to make of it. I remember reading a Rolling Stone review from the time that ended with "who needs this shit?" and a writer from the Blues & Soul 'zine from a year later admitted, "Funkadelic has never been one of my favorite R&B; acts". Still, the record sold (peaking at #16 on the Soul LPs chart), and planted the seed of a cult worship that would balloon in the latter half of the decade, making the P-Funk enterprise the most successful soul act on the planet.
"Mommy, What's a Funkadelic?" started out with the sound of Clinton's wet mouth and the best ever opening line for an album: "If you will suck my soul, I will lick your funky emotions." When the beat hits with Hazel's guitar line, there can be no doubt that Funkadelic were without peer as far as this stuff was concerned. This stuff-- hell, tunes like "Mommy" and "Good Old Music" are slams to the gut as powerful as anything Zep ever did, and with beats to spare. "Music For My Mother" is like a Southern myth, detailing a loner's travels through "Keep Runnin' Mississippi", hearing music he thought long dead, yet getting trapped by its sticky black allure. "What Is Soul?" drops more classic lines ("soul is a hamhock in your cornflakes," "Soul is chitlins foo young," "soul is a joint rolled in toilet paper") in seven minutes than most bands muster up in a career. Bonus tracks like the tight instrumental "As Good As I Can Feel" and several single versions of album cuts make this album one of the most indispensable of all indispensable Funkadelic records.
Even as Funkadelic was an inspired statement, it wasn't exactly a coherent one, especially as most of the band had quit and come back again during the recording sessions. Their second record, 1971's Free Your Mind was the first (of only two) records done by the core unit from start to finish-- albeit, according to Clinton, one recorded in the span of a single day, while everyone was tripping. Compared to the debut, it's a lot more "rock" and a little less "soul." The opening track "Free Your Mind and Your Ass Will Follow" was like a Sly Stone jam gone haywire, with fuzzed out guitar and bass, distorto-organ, and spoken, chanted or otherwise freaked vox appearing all over the mix. "Friday Night, August 14th", "Funky Dollar Bill", and "I Wanna Know If It's Good to You" were a bit tighter, and a lot harder. "Funky Dollar Bill" features another down-home-on-a-porch-and-an-amp-with-probably-some-pot-and-other-things guitar riff from Hazel and Clinton and company sounding completely fucked up and screaming out at you from the depths of the stereo on lines like "you don't buy a life, you live a life, a father learns much too late-- HE WAS A-NEVER HOME!!" "Euology and Light" is like a lysergic Lord's Prayer, replete with backwards choir. The bonus track "Fish, Chips and Sweat" is again reminiscent of Sly, but in his "Dance to the Music" guise, and is suitably celebratory, even as the mix distorts the tape.
And then they got serious: Maggot Brain, released in the July of the same year, is the peak of the Funkadelic experience. The songs jam harder, the way out stuff is way fucking out there. Seriously, how many dimensions is Hazel traveling through on the instrumental title cut? His 10-minute guitar soliloquy is a spiraling model of the blues filtered through a psychedelic lens, and almost single-handedly places him in a realm with Hendrix, Jimmy Page, and Eric Clapton as one of the great classic rock guitarists. But it got better: "Super Stupid" was the tale of a dumbass junkie set to a tune Black Sabbath would have been proud of; "Hit It And Quit It" is a funk anthem where keyboardist Worrell gets his licks in and the beat turns around a dozen times before we hit the chorus; "Can You Get to That" is honest-to-whoever pop that showed Funkadelic could be serious from time to time, especially when it came to social commentary (and also featured Isaac Hayes' female background singers, giving it a classic soul sheen), and "Wars of Armageddon" (recently, wisely used by Optimo on the Psyche Out mix) is a knock-out-drag-down fight to the death between the world's best rhythm section and paranoid, psychedelic sound effects and crowd sounds. Maggot Brain was an explosive record, bursting at the seams with exactly the kind of larger than life sound a band called Funkadelic should have made.
Too bad most of the band left afterwards. Tiki Fulwood was fired due to drugs getting in the way of his reliability as a band member; Tawl Ross reportedly got into an "acid eating contest, then snorting some raw speed, before completely flipping out," per Billy Nelson, and has not performed professionally since; Nelson himself quit over a money dispute with Clinton, leaving only Hazel and Worrell from the original Funkadelic lineup. Drummer Tyrone Lampkin replaced Fulwood, while guitarist Gary Shider (who'd already played with the band on parts of Maggot Brain) came aboard to fill out the sound. However, a lot of folks would look at former JBs like Phelps and William "Bootsy" Collins additions as the most significant. Certainly, Bootsy's mark on the whole Parliafunkadelicmint thang would eventually be almost as strong as Clinton's.
Nevertheless, 1972's America Eats Its Young is a disparate, schizophrenic record. Despite Clinton's efforts to produce a record that would have a better chance at crossover appeal than the first three Funkadelic records, like many double LPs, there's simply too much material, and too many conflicting directions to really make this seem anything other than a Frankenstein production. Of course, it has its classics: "Loose Booty" and "A Joyful Process" are the two of the best pure funk songs the band ever did, while "If You Don't Like the Effects, Don't Produce the Cause", "Biological Speculation", "Everybody Is Going to Make It This Time", and "Miss Lucifer's Love" are great evidence of the band's strong pop bent even as their chosen subject matters could range from dark to disturbing to sci-fi. Tunes like "I Call My Baby Pussycat", "Balance", and "Philmore" even hark back to the more rock-oriented stuff of the first three records. However, it's hard to hear "We Hurt Too" (a maudlin ballad about the hidden tenderness of men) as anything but a joke, and the title track, similar to Maggot Brain's title cut, is a bit heavy on the huffing and panting. I think of this record as Funkadelic's White Album, containing too much great stuff to dismiss, but by almost anyone's standards, containing more than it needs.
From here on out, Funkadelic would devote increasingly more time to maintaining and expanding their appeal. Albums like Let's Take It to the Stage and Standing on the Verge of Getting It on (also reissued, along with Tales of Kidd Funkadelic) were considerably less freaked-out than the early stuff, but alongside Parliament's concurrent music, helped turn Clinton's empire into one of the biggest acts in music. Still, I'll always love their first records the most. Call me rockist if you will, there's just something undeniably awesome about a funk band blasting guitar jams and telling me about neurotic bitches who want to take over the universe. | 2005-08-03T01:00:01.000-04:00 | 2005-08-03T01:00:01.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B / Rock | null | August 3, 2005 | 9 | 05e8aeb4-1c74-4459-bd72-429a18a32e41 | Dominique Leone | https://pitchfork.com/staff/dominique-leone/ | null |
The New York rapper reunites with his prodigal mentor, MF DOOM, and forges a new partnership with Kaytranada on his full-length solo debut. | The New York rapper reunites with his prodigal mentor, MF DOOM, and forges a new partnership with Kaytranada on his full-length solo debut. | Bishop Nehru: Elevators: Act I & II | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/bishop-nehru-elevators-act-i-and-ii/ | Elevators: Act I & II | You probably know Bishop Nehru as the promising protégé to MF DOOM’s sinister sensei. He’s that New York kid with the looping flows, internal rhyme patterns, and taste for vintage East Coast beats that caught the ear of the masked supervillain. But hip-hop history teaches us that you rely on DOOM at your peril. With his mentor mostly off the grid since the release of NehruvianDOOM, their undercooked 2014 collaboration, Bishop has been searching for new direction. His short tenure on Nas’ Mass Appeal Records more or less came to nothing, while unconvincing attempts to stylistically mutate—as with the clunky sci-fi sounds of 2016’s Magic 19—have just underlined the need for more senior advisors.
His 2017 mixtape Emperor Nehru’s New Groove showcased an increasingly confident star, with Bishop rapping comfortably on everything from dusty, old-school loops to murkier modern sounds. Now, with the 21-year-old’s official solo debut, he’s throwing his machine fully into reverse and leaning toward the throwback New York style he made his name on.
Elevators: Act I & II’s 10 full tracks are split into two distinct halves: The first, subtitled “Ascension,” features fresh production from Kaytranada, while the second, “Free Falling,” reunites him with his prodigal father figure, DOOM. The idea seems to be that Nehru’s personality is similarly divided—the positivity versus the depravity. But the tangible differences between his mood, subject matter, and delivery on the two sets of tracks are so subtle that it’s hard to see this as a worthwhile concept.
It’s mostly down to the two beatmakers, then, to differentiate the record’s sides. The 25-year-old Kaytranada wasn't born yet when DOOM dropped his first album with KMD in 1991, but he’s still up to the challenge of making vintage beats that pick up where the Native Tongues school left off. Take “No Idea,” the best song on Side A: It’s not difficult to picture Q-Tip riding the symphonious sample. The lyrics are as personal as any Nehru has written, as he lays out the hardships he’s endured, covering bouts of depression, homelessness, and industry bullshit. “I walked through hell, now I’m inventin’ the heaven,” he raps triumphantly. The theme could easily come through as hackneyed, but the catharsis palpable in Nehru’s voice as he lays it all out there is undoubtedly moving.
DOOM’s contributions to Elevators: Act I & II suggest that his interest in the project was probably limited. As with NehruvianDOOM, a lot of these beats are old or have been recycled from other places. It’s a little disappointing that Nehru didn’t seek all-original instrumentation for his first solo studio LP, but these are still very good DOOM tracks. The zany laser gun sounds and boom-bap drums of “Again & Again” encapsulate the intersection of underground New York rap and Saturday morning cartoons that has long been the producer’s strongest realm.
Nehru raps well on these cuts. His flow is fluid on the cosmic squiggles of “Rollercoasting” and the smoky, jazz-saxophone-led “Rooftops.” But if the album’s second half is supposed to represent the brooding side of his personality, then the content feels way off. Where his tutor can be gloriously malicious on the mic, Nehru comes off as a schoolyard bully in comparison. One-liners such as “Like doctors with anorexia, my patience is thin,” from “Again & Again,” aren’t so much malevolent as they are silly. And the hooks throughout this section leave such little impression, he probably would have been better off taking DOOM’s lead and largely dispensing with the idea of a chorus.
In the press notes, Nehru calls this album his attempt at creating “a rap Pet Sounds.” But Elevators: Act I & II is just too thin, too lacking in both scope and lateral thinking to warrant comparison to the Beach Boys’ ambitious leap. Nehru’s significant talents are all on display, but it’s tough to thrive in such tight margins. | 2018-03-22T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-03-22T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Nehruvia LLC | March 22, 2018 | 6.2 | 05ea4519-3058-43cc-8f9b-7040e5534472 | Dean Van Nguyen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/dean-van nguyen/ | |
Forty years after the pastoral new age of From Gardens Where We Feel Secure, the UK composer once again fuses chamber folk with rural field recordings, conjuring a vivid sense of place. | Forty years after the pastoral new age of From Gardens Where We Feel Secure, the UK composer once again fuses chamber folk with rural field recordings, conjuring a vivid sense of place. | Virginia Astley: The Singing Places | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/virginia-astley-the-singing-places/ | The Singing Places | Nothing excites Virginia Astley more than the familiar comforts of home. Not the late-’70s underground circuit where she got her start, playing gigs at seedy pubs as a member of the new-wave outfit Victims of Pleasure. Not the subsequent post-punk wave either, when she had the opportunity to record with titans like Echo and the Bunnymen and Siouxsie and the Banshees. While on tour with the Teardrop Explodes in 1981, she played in a group called the Ravishing Beauties, contrasting the psychedelic assault of the headlining band with opulent melodic sweeps and her uniquely ghostly vocals. The Beauties never released a record (though they did record in John Peel’s BBC studios), but the music they made together laid the groundwork for the delicate soundscapes Astley would continue to explore in her solo career. Her debut album, 1983’s From Gardens Where We Feel Secure, came two years after the tour wrapped up, with a title that makes her preference for solitude abundantly clear.
Gardens was a work of pastoral theater that infused sprightly woodwinds and strings with recordings from the riverside village of Moulsford-on-Thames, looping bleating livestock and rushing streams into miniature dioramas of rustic life. It would remain the only record of its kind in Astley’s catalog for four decades as she explored new modes, incorporating song and poetry into her worlds. With her new album The Singing Places, she returns with another assemblage of field recordings and elegant acoustic arrangements. She’s finally revisiting the verdant garden of her imagination.
Astley collected sounds for The Singing Places in various locations around the upper bounds of the River Thames, which becomes more rural and sparsely populated the further it stretches away from the bustle of big cities. She said in a recent interview that she’s often struck by inspiration while on walks in the countryside; walking along the Thames is like turning the clock back to eons past. Centuries-old church bells ring out; rickety watermills creak as they revolve; Astley’s footsteps can occasionally be heard trodding well-worn pathways. There’s a sense that she’s enraptured by the history surrounding her as she passes through sites untouched by industrialization and weathered by the passage of time.
To accompany these recordings, Astley weaves languorous musical motifs that drift alongside them. In contrast to the more structured vignettes on From Gardens Where We Feel Secure, The Singing Places is free and fluid, letting the gentle serenade of nature ring without interruption. Woodwinds join a choir of bird calls, then fall away against their sustained chirping. Strings swell into a lovely waltz, but never overwhelm the rippling of the river. It’s structured as one continuous, 27-minute piece, with each movement effortlessly flowing into the next, via some deft editing. It sounds like she is simply strolling from one idyllic scene to the next.
As the album begins to wind down, the birdsong heard at the start of the record creeps back into the foreground. Astley plays a lilting refrain on her piano, responding to the lively chatter from the treetops with a spirited song of her own. She gradually brings the music to a halt, ceding the record’s final moments to the chorus of an English country garden. The Singing Places reads like an aural map of Astley’s favorite spots; her playing guides your ear toward the beautiful music that was already there. | 2023-12-13T00:02:00.000-05:00 | 2023-12-13T00:02:00.000-05:00 | Experimental | self-released | December 13, 2023 | 7.6 | 05ea48ab-311b-4ec5-ac57-3ae5f41715c6 | Shy Thompson | https://pitchfork.com/staff/shy-thompson/ | |
Hypnogogic pop maven explores his mysterious, hyper-referential 1980s sound on a new album and a recent vinyl reissue. | Hypnogogic pop maven explores his mysterious, hyper-referential 1980s sound on a new album and a recent vinyl reissue. | James Ferraro: Nightdolls with Hairspray / On Air | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/15643-nightdolls-with-hairspray-on-air/ | Nightdolls with Hairspray / On Air | Two years ago, David Keenan of The Wire coined the name "hypnagogic pop" for a strain of lo-fi, 1980s-centric psychedelia, or "pop music refracted through the memory of a memory." Though Ariel Pink's AM-radio concoctions made him a godfather, Keenan placed James Ferraro-- previously known as part of the noise duo Skaters-- at the center of this "movement." In Keenan's article, Ferraro's first quote went like this: "I've always viewed my music as just sort of plugging into a matrix of human-alien culture, through plugging into a world broadcast of media entities that jump out of the screen and merge with life via people internalizing them as soundtracks for life temples."
Ferraro's music can be as confusing as that rambling proclamation. Yet there's a weird, hermetic kind of logic to both. Whatever a "life temple" might be, you can imagine it when you hear his mysterious, hyper-referential sound. He relies on samples, loops, and the textures and aura of 80s pop-- the kind heard on worn-out VHS tapes and glitchy video games. And he turns cheesy clichés-- preset keyboard melodies, phasey riffs, falsetto choruses-- into something hypnotic and almost cyber-spiritual, like a photocopy blurred by generations of reproduction until it becomes a Magic Eye painting.
Often, this approach can produce remarkably catchy music. Night Dolls with Hairspray in particular is filled with hooky gems. Its plunging bass lines, warped guitar riffs, and crooning vocals bounce around the stereo space like lasers in a hall of mirrors. Listening feels like peeking into the mind of a pop-culture-addled 80s teen-- an effect enhanced by lyrics about adolescent concerns sung in a pre-pubescent whine. Hissy, muffled, and oddly funny, Night Dolls can get pretty dizzying. Some might even find its sheen nauseating, much the way audiences left The Blair Witch Project more sick from the shaky camerawork than scared by the plot. But for anyone enchanted by Ariel Pink, there's lots to love in Ferraro's murky pop.
Just don't wait around for him to tone it down. More often, in the massive discography he's built, he turns the queasiness up to 11. In the resulting swamps of noise, ghosts of pop songs, movie soundtracks, TV ads, and other fleeting ephemera stew and rumble, but never quite break through the stubborn surface of his dense mix. That's the mode that Ferraro is in on On Air, first issued as a limited CD-R on Olde English Spelling Bee and recently pressed onto vinyl by Underwater Peoples. Here, he seems to man a black-hole radio station, mixing in surreal announcements and static-laden transitions. Snippets of melody and blasts of noise slam into each other, with single tracks often containing four or five chunks of what could be songs on their own. Maybe Ferraro's own trippy titles explain it best: "Electrocuted Hair", "New Waver From Hawaii Saturn", "Virtual Sumo Bubble Gum", "Cyber Shock Headtroplolis". Those could all be the names of Boredoms outtakes, and On Air's arty mess recalls that group as well as Yamantaka Eye's even nuttier Hanatarash.
Much the way that listening to a lot of Boredoms can alter your perception of what music is and how it works, making it through On Air is a bit of a brain-altering experience. By the end of it, you might understand Ferraro's Wire quote a little better, whether or not you can explain why. Plugging in, jumping out, merging with life-- on paper they sound like discarded New Age platitudes, but in the hands of James Ferraro, those ideas regain the electric charge of epiphany. | 2011-07-18T02:00:02.000-04:00 | 2011-07-18T02:00:02.000-04:00 | Electronic | null | July 18, 2011 | 7.9 | 05ebbbd6-e85d-46e3-b9da-37f114f9325d | Marc Masters | https://pitchfork.com/staff/marc-masters/ | null |
Wielding the moody beats and unflinching honesty of drill music, the Brooklyn rapper takes an intimate look into the oft-unseen realities of sex work and trans survival. | Wielding the moody beats and unflinching honesty of drill music, the Brooklyn rapper takes an intimate look into the oft-unseen realities of sex work and trans survival. | Ms. Boogie: The Breakdown | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/ms-boogie-the-breakdown/ | The Breakdown | Voguing—at least, the style now called “old way”—was popularized through performances by gay men, like those immortalized in Madonna’s 1990 video. Vogue fem, the style predominant today, could only have been created by trans women (known as “fem queens” in ballroom, the primarily Black and Latino scene where voguing emerged). This style of dance blends fastidiously feminine gestures with dramatic storytelling and bold, athletic feats. Ms. Boogie, an Afro-Latina rapper from Brooklyn who came up in the ballroom scene, similarly fuses softness with drama on The Breakdown, wielding the unflinching honesty of Brooklyn drill to depict a life that’s uniquely her own, yet intimately familiar to other trans women.
Ms. Boogie performed for years under a different name, releasing a debut album in 2014 and rising from the U.S. warehouse circuit to European tours. After publicly announcing her transition in 2018, she began brazenly breaking down her new reality on 2020 single “Fem Queen” featuring Trannilish (“Niggas love chicks with a dick/DMs just to prove it”) and rapping about the medicinal power of getting railed on 2021’s “Dickscipline.” Since then, she’s leveled up her operation—the new album launched with a slickly choreographed video—while the themes of her work have grown more complex. On The Breakdown, she meditates on success with a mixture of pride and ambivalence, backed by moody, muted production that lets her storytelling shine.
Most Brooklyn drill rappers are men, often recounting stories about dope dealing and violence. Ms. Boogie instead divulges the oft-unseen realities of sex work and dating DL (“down-low”) trans-attracted men. “I’m the plug and the drug,” she raps. “Streets is watching,” so she sends her man a black car and asks him to sign an NDA. Such tight-lipped business leaves little room for play: “I don’t need new friends/It’s a cold world, I need new Timbs,” go the bars on “Come Again,” a song whose braggadocious hook (like early-aughts Eve filtered through a codeine blunt) makes one long for more such catchy moments. But Ms. Boogie’s tale calls for a different sound.
Most of the album was produced by Minneapolis’s Boo Boo, aka M Jamison, who leverages her experience scoring films. The Breakdown’s melancholy synths and dreamy strings sound like rolling through dark city streets in the rain, somewhere between Blade Runner and the symphonic grit of Mos Def’s “Auditorium.” Producer El Joven leaves metallic fingerprints on “H20” and “Build Me Up,” whose funky beats echo the confrontational sound of New York’s queer underground. Ahya Simone’s harp weaves airy grace throughout the album, most gloriously on the closing track. (Jamison and Simone are also Black trans women; nearly every hand that touched the record, including its mixing engineer, belongs to a queer or trans person of color.)
On “Dazed & Confused,” the elevator climbs to the 47th floor en route to “Hustler,” a ballad made theatrical by Samir Robinson’s violin. Its narrator surveys her queendom and reflects on the life of Barbie, a departed ballroom niece. Then the clock strikes 2, the song breaks down, and the narrator leaves to meet her second client of the night. This arc is the album’s centerpiece, typifying its sound and message: A trans woman can triumph, and the high life might look glamorous, but her community remains in peril, and the hustle never stops.
With the exception of Cassius Cruz’s indispensable singing on “Hustler,” Ms. Boogie tends to outshine the album’s other vocalists. No verse hits like Trannilish’s on “Fem Queen,” and if “Come Again” is peak Eve, then it’s missing a Gwen. Many songs have similar vibes and structures; El Joven’s most seductive rhythmic experiments are relegated to the closing seconds of two later tracks. The focus is always on Ms. Boogie and her story, which she centers unapologetically. Oscillating between the DL and the deeply candid, she channels the bruised inner voice of someone who’s built a tough, if beautiful, exterior to survive. Rap need not be girly to be feminine, and on The Breakdown, Ms. Boogie takes off her mask without letting down her guard. | 2024-01-25T00:00:00.000-05:00 | 2024-01-25T00:00:00.000-05:00 | Rap | self-released | January 25, 2024 | 7.4 | 05ecba56-73fe-4282-b8b0-67d06282a45a | Delilah Friedler | https://pitchfork.com/staff/delilah-friedler/ | |
The duo Mood II Swing's productions in the '90s helped establish a style of house music—moody, colorful, and rhythmically inventive—that has had a profound impact on several successive generations of club producers. The bulk of the songs collected here date from between 1992 and 1997, but the uninitiated listener hearing them for the first time might well mistake many of them for brand-new productions. | The duo Mood II Swing's productions in the '90s helped establish a style of house music—moody, colorful, and rhythmically inventive—that has had a profound impact on several successive generations of club producers. The bulk of the songs collected here date from between 1992 and 1997, but the uninitiated listener hearing them for the first time might well mistake many of them for brand-new productions. | Mood II Swing: Strictly Mood II Swing | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21405-strictly-mood-ii-swing/ | Strictly Mood II Swing | It's often said that dance music has a short shelf life—that once-novel sounds and techniques are eventually flattened by the technological steamroller that is Moore's Law. That's not necessarily true, though. If the retro fixations of the current century have told us anything—from electroclash's fascination with the early '80s to the recent revival of grime's bleepy fundamentals—it's that dance music's period-specific patinas are a big part of its enduring charm.
A new anthology of the duo Mood II Swing is, if anything, overdue. Their productions in the '90s helped establish a style of house music—moody, colorful, and rhythmically inventive—that has had a profound impact on several successive generations of club producers. Their unique sense of swing helped feed the slinky syncopations of UK garage around the turn of the millennium; more recently, the hypnotic and soulful aspects of their sound have influenced revivalist house music from the underground all the way to the top of the charts, from tunes like Jack J's "Thirstin'" to Duke Dumont's "Need U (100%)." The bulk of the songs collected here date from between 1992 and 1997, but the uninitiated listener hearing them for the first time might well mistake many of them for brand-new productions. Many sound uncannily current; the best sound timeless.
That Mood II Swing (consisting of Lem Springsteen and John Ciafone) established such an immediately recognizable style is all the more impressive for the fact that most of the time they were remixing other artists. Only 14 of the 33 songs here are originals; the rest are remixes for a diverse lot of pop and R&B acts whose names have mostly faded from view, like Kim English, Loni Clark, and Ultra Naté, whose career peak, 1997's "Free," was co-written with and produced by Mood II Swing. No matter who the credited performer is, though, a number of hallmarks remain constant throughout. The most obvious is the group's infectious and inimitable sense of the groove. Around steady kicks and hi-hats, regular as fence posts, snake vine-like figures dipping and bobbing in the breeze—shakers and congas, hiccupping accidentals and sidewinding basslines that turn even the most linear rhythms into controlled explosions of kinetic energy.
On a song like Doubleplusgood's "Conga Té (Mood II Swing 12" Mix)," you can hear the influence of hip-hop, particularly Public Enemy and the Bomb Squad: Every inch of the track is stuffed with elements until it all ignites like a sky full of fireworks. A typical Mood II Swing track is charged with so much friction, you expect sparks to fly, and that's particularly true when they indulge their fondness for busted and broken sounds. You can hear that in the distortion of BT's "Remember (Mood II Swing Remix)," in which the kick drum rattles like a shredded speaker cone, and the nervy squelch of the heavily filtered "Slippery Track," which rivals Matthew Herbert's most aggressively funky work of the period.
The compilation is split more or less evenly between vocal tracks and instrumentals or dub versions, and in the case of Eric Gadd's "The Right Way," which is presented in both versions, you can hear how differently the duo approached those two contexts. The vocal mix leaves the singer's whispery falsetto unadulterated, and the results sound a lot like early '90s R&B with a piano-house underpinning. (The vocalists they worked with tend to be soulful belters; your appreciation for the vocal side of their catalog will depend largely upon your fondness for that emphatic, melismatic style.) On the dub, though, Mood II Swing mute everything the singer does save for a plaintive looped cry. It's on these dub mixes and instrumental cuts where Mood II Swing's talents really shine: Just check "Do It Your Way," which takes a "Billie Jean"-like bassline and kits it out in flashing ride cymbals, slapback delay, and a liquid tone that sounds like a melancholy snippet of whale song. In these moments they're sultans of swirl, masters of the hypnotic groove, and as nuanced as anyone in dance music, then or now. | 2016-01-11T01:00:02.000-05:00 | 2016-01-11T01:00:02.000-05:00 | Electronic | Strictly Rhythm | January 11, 2016 | 6.9 | 05f8e4f4-cbfb-4815-969d-d95f47b57421 | Philip Sherburne | https://pitchfork.com/staff/philip-sherburne/ | null |
Shamir Bailey’s latest is a lo-fi set of interesting ideas that never quite gel. As ever, his soulful voice is the star, offering hints of sophistication and wonder. | Shamir Bailey’s latest is a lo-fi set of interesting ideas that never quite gel. As ever, his soulful voice is the star, offering hints of sophistication and wonder. | Shamir: Revelations | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/shamir-revelations/ | Revelations | When Shamir Bailey returned only six short months ago with his second album, Hope, it signaled a drastic change in direction, sound, aesthetic—frankly, just about everything. The Las Vegas-born, Philadelphia-based songwriter had been previously lauded for his excellent debut, 2015’s Ratchet, an all-killer dance record filled to the brim with bubbly choruses and club-pop hooks. Hope was meant to wipe the slate clean, to rid Shamir of a persona he no longer felt represented him as a musician, and it did just that. The record, while uneven and imperfect, showed a side to Shamir that merely a few years earlier, no one would have dreamed existed. Exploring lo-fi bedroom pop, indie, experimental rock, and outsider music, Hope basically positioned Shamir as a new artist. With the total rejection of Ratchet, and splitting with his label and management, he was now free to make whatever kind of music he chose.
The main issue with Revelations, the follow-up to Hope, is that it fails to make good on that momentum. By its end, Shamir is in the same place he was at the end of Hope: a collection of introspective songs strummed directly into a four-track, a decent album full of interesting ideas that never quite jell. To be fair, Shamir has had a difficult few years. Diagnosed with bipolar disorder right after releasing Hope, his artistic process feels raw, real, and valid. Sometimes there’s no balm more soothing that disappearing into the dense feedback of a fuzzy rock song, and Revelations feels cathartic. Still, it’s frustrating that through the resulting haze, the songs don’t shine, and you’re left with a feeling of empty-handedness.
The setbacks are apparent from the album’s opening bars. “Games” begins with a plodding keyboard riff, repetitive and hypnotic, but teetering on clumsy. You can practically hear the wheels turning, Shamir’s fingers plonking on the keys. It’s that brand of lo-fi production that’s distracting—it should sound effortless, laissez-faire, but instead comes off as labored, which defeats the purpose. The song itself strives for a sort of extremely stripped-down Tori Amos atmosphere, the lyrics both passionately personal and endearingly colloquial. “I think you’re totally mean to the core/But I won’t blame you/I won’t shame you/But I can’t continue to play this game,” Shamir sings, his voice climbing and sliding across the simple melody. Like on most of the album’s tracks, Shamir’s voice is the star here, his instantly recognizable soulful tinge giving the song a hint of sophistication and wonder.
Other than his voice, there are other aspects of Revelations that carry some of the trademarks that made Shamir popular in the first place. His lyrics are biting and fun, spiked with clever wordplay and a bluntness that draws you into the emotions he’s describing. The lead single, “’90s Kids,” asks the listener to “Put a drink in the air for the college girls and boys/Paralyzing anxiety is just a chore.” Another single, “Straight Boys,” makes good use of Shamir’s tendency to speak directly to you while also barely recognizing he’s writing for an audience: “I always seem to let these straight boys ruin my life,” he reflects, not necessarily looking for an answer to the problem.
And there are glimpses where Shamir’s production does deliver satisfying, grungy guitar pop. “You Have a Song,” with its syrupy bassline and sandpaper guitars, recalls something the Deal twins would have bashed together in 1991. More than anything else on the record, “Blooming” is an uptempo indie-pop song that points to where Shamir could fulfill his talents in the long-term.
Until then, Ratchet remains the benchmark of Shamir’s career. Not because he wants to leave it behind, or because he’s not allowed to pursue his creativity however he sees fit, but because it’s his best work. No one is asking Shamir to release another pop record—it does not seem in the cards—but cutting himself off from his past doesn’t absolve him from creating a future that lives up to it. Largely, Revelations leaves us waiting for the subtly brilliant moments its title suggests. | 2017-11-03T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-11-03T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | Father/Daughter | November 3, 2017 | 5.9 | 05f8e8c8-b19c-431f-b8ca-b7e42b27ef16 | Cameron Cook | https://pitchfork.com/staff/cameron-cook/ | |
The follow-up to Born to Die finds Lana Del Rey in ballad mode, finding new synergy between the character she presents to the world and the content of the songs. Producer Dan Auerbach of Black Keys turns out to be the perfect creative partner. | The follow-up to Born to Die finds Lana Del Rey in ballad mode, finding new synergy between the character she presents to the world and the content of the songs. Producer Dan Auerbach of Black Keys turns out to be the perfect creative partner. | Lana Del Rey: Ultraviolence | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/19449-lana-del-rey-ultraviolence/ | Ultraviolence | Lana Del Rey, the creation of singer and songwriter Lizzy Grant, is all alone. She’s an utterly distinctive figure in popular music—not part of a scene, with no serious imitators—and befitting someone completely off on her own, she’s lonely. Where her last full-length, the frequently terrible Born to Die, tried on different moods and looked at her character from a few angles, Ultraviolence finds one feeling—a seedy, desperate, hyper-romanticized sense of isolation and loss—and blows it up to drive-in screen proportions, saturating the color riding the blue crest of sadness for the better part of an hour. Whether or not you want to take this particular ride will largely depend on how much stock you put in “authenticity,” your tolerance for Del Rey’s vocal tics, and your reflexive response to her lyrics.
Creating a semi-fictional delivery system for your creative ideas is nothing new, but few have had Del Rey’s commitment to the idea—imagine Madonna sticking with Breathless Mahoney for multiple album cycles. This far in, after so many interviews and so much media attention, we don’t know all that much about Lana Del Rey, and we’re not sure what we’re told is real. She’s become a screen onto which we project our desire and/or our loathing. With Ultraviolence, Del Rey has found new synergy between the character she presents to the world and the content of the songs.
Gone are annoying trifles like Born to Die’s “Carmen” and “Diet Mountain Dew”; in their place are slow, atmospheric songs filled with theatrical melancholy and a parade of women in trouble who mourn for men who treat them badly yet somehow remain irresistible. The lyrics are studded with her trademark iconography: “he hit me and it felt like a kiss”; “the sun also rises”; “talking about my generation”; a reference to “Sunset and Vine” and another to “strange weather.” But here she’s found the perfect musical vehicle for her vision. Ultraviolence sounds tragic and beautiful—darkly-shaded ballads are what she was created to make, and this album is nothing but, a Concept Album from a Concept Human.
The first section of the album is so gorgeous and rich, Ultraviolence at first seems better than it is. The Black Keys’ Dan Auerbach, who produced much of the record, turns out to be Del Rey's ideal creative partner, crafting lush walls of sound that evoke her favorite cultural era, a time when the prim and surface-level 1960s were just starting their slide into drug-fueled decadence. “Cruel World” is a six-minute dirge that 30 years ago might have been sung by Bonnie Tyler, its twangy guitars and thudding drums exploding at just the right moments. The title track’s gorgeous chorus dresses up a song where love and physical abuse are intertwined. Del Rey’s angelic interval leap on the chorus of “Shades of Cool” is a new addition to her small array of vocal effects, bringing to mind the faux-Asian sweep of Nancy Sinatra’s “You Only Live Twice” mixed with the song that lured the prince in Disney’s Sleeping Beauty. They’re songs that would make no sense if anyone else sang them. In this way, and a few others, she draws inspiration from rap music, broadcasting her obsessions and forcing you to engage with the persona first and the content of the songs second.
It’s an impressive opening shot, and there are a few moments in this sequence that make you want to sit back and say, “Hold on, is this for real?” But then comes “Brooklyn Baby”, a song that references Lou Reed, a rare jazz collection, feathers in hair, the “freedom land of the ’70s,” and “churning out novels like beat poetry on amphetamines.” Is Del Rey taking the piss, making fun of lifestyle accessories as a source of identity? Or is she celebrating these icons, the way she has so many others, reveling in the colorful tapestry that is American popular culture?
Turns out these are the wrong questions. When lines like these pop up on the record, I find myself chuckling, sometimes laughing out loud, which might seem odd on an album about sadness. But that says something about how strange Del Rey's music can be, and the internal coherence of the worlds she creates. These songs don’t ask you to respond in any particular way; they evoke heartbreak one moment and they’re ridiculous the next, and those qualities don’t cancel each other out. It’s entertainment, camp, and the ambiguity of it all, nurtured by the cool distance of Lana Del Rey’s image, is a huge part of the music’s appeal. Those who really hate what she’s about—and there are a lot of these people—look for something in music that she has no interest in providing. To enjoy what she does, you have to give yourself over to her media-saturated fantasy and put the everyday on hold, and you also have to lay aside pop radio’s typically sunny affirmations.
But this thing Lana Del Rey is going for isn’t easy to sustain, and it starts to go south during the back half of Ultraviolence. The album grows tiresome somewhere during the stretch where “Pretty When You Cry” leads to “Money Power Glory” and then on to “Fucked My Way Up to the Top”. The melodies are a little less interesting and, instead of melodramatic fables, she settles for button-pushing. It’s also wearying to spend this much time in the presence of this particular character. The masochism, the self-hatred, the drugs, the emotional world filtered through the tragic figures American teenagers are drawn to gets old. You can feel Lana Del Rey inching into territory where she’s daring you not to like her, and by the time you get to the Ultraviolence bonus track “Florida Kilos”, a Harmony Korine co-write that might as well be called Spring Breakers: The Audiobook, you begin to remember why many people find the whole project repellant. Still, it’d be wrong to overlook the many things Ultraviolence does well, and how sui generis Lana Del Rey is. She’s a pop music original full-stop, and there are not nearly enough of those around. | 2014-06-16T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2014-06-16T02:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | Interscope / Polydor | June 16, 2014 | 7.1 | 05fbcdee-0119-4add-b540-09929b728798 | Mark Richardson | https://pitchfork.com/staff/mark-richardson/ | null |
The DIY fixtures behind Silkies, Dee-Parts, and Mini Dresses turn their attention to scuzzy, no-fi ’80s punk overflowing with pop hooks. | The DIY fixtures behind Silkies, Dee-Parts, and Mini Dresses turn their attention to scuzzy, no-fi ’80s punk overflowing with pop hooks. | Sweeping Promises: Good Living Is Coming for You | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/sweeping-promises-good-living-is-coming-for-you/ | Good Living Is Coming for You | Over more than a decade and a half dozen aliases, Lira Mondal and Caufield Schnug have bled the past dry, mining just about every vein of indie rock down to the bedrock. As fixtures of Boston’s DIY scene, the collaborators carved out a wide niche by reshaping nostalgia into various formulae: beachy garage rock (Silkies), gothic minimalism (Dee-Parts), and, in their longest-lasting project, Mini Dresses, girl-group-adjacent dream pop. Their latest, Sweeping Promises, emerged from a converted Boston laboratory to seize the indie-rock science-fair trophy, this time with painstakingly scuzzy ’80s punk that’s convincing enough to sound beamed in from an episode of New Wave Theatre. Hypothesis confirmed: Dial in the right ratio of reverb to fuzz, age the tapes to perfection, and the recording studio can spit you back into any decade.
Now based in Kansas and convinced—whether by monomaniacal obsession or the unexpected support of Sub Pop—to linger in the Reagan years a while longer, Mondal and Schnug buckle down in the workshop (now a former nude painting studio) to sharpen their thesis. Having broken ground on their new direction with 2020’s Hunger for a Way Out, Sweeping Promises now widen it into a crowded highway on Good Living Is Coming for You, swerving through a bumper-to-bumper sprawl of pop hooks.
Time proving its endlessly flat-circle nature, Sweeping Promises arrive at a moment when the bookish rage of post-punk once again feels perfectly suited to pierce the malaise of supposedly “late” capitalism. But rather than tangle themselves up in its noisy machinery with dense instrumentals, a la Squid, or ponder its nauseating surrealism via dense wordplay, as Dry Cleaning might, Mondal and Schnug smoothly pluck out the anxious splinters in their minds like toys from a claw machine. Drawing on an impulse to write what Mondal calls “the parts of songs that I always loved singing really loud at the top of my lungs in the cars,” Good Living Is Coming for You plays like a lost compilation of bubblegum road-trip rock. Think the B-52’s’ “Roam” if the masters were left to cook in an attic for the last 40 years, or Kleenex’s secret soundtrack to a Saturday-morning cartoon.
One by one, the album’s 10 tracks tumble off the Sweeping Promises assembly line, their thrills vacuum sealed almost immediately by a first-thought-best-thought songwriting philosophy. Crack open lead single “Eraser” and you’re hit with a streamlined barrage of crunchy guitar, bargain-bin synths, snappy drums, and, most critically, Lira Mondal’s titanic vocals. Her acrobatic, ear-shattering wail pirouettes to perfection across Good Living Is Coming for You, all the while uncovering new tricks that stretch the album’s monophonic lo-fi to its limits. Take her snarling cries on the title track, gnashing and hissing at the frustrations of tumbling through declining standards of living, or the gritty alt-rock crooning of “Can’t Hide It,” headbanging its way through block after block of featureless gentrified housing. Multi-tracked, her voice is unstoppable, elongating the title of “Throw of the Dice” into a glittering cascade of descending harmonies and punching the lights out of a hated foe with an army of herself at her back on the gritty “You Shatter.” Mondal’s bold, uncanny knack for convertible-ready shout-alongs bends the lyrics’ sloganeering into mouth-watering neon signs of blinding intensity, sparkling across your retinas and imagination for hours afterwards.
Matching this glorious lack of subtlety blow for blow, the mangled, lo-fi instrumentation prizes melody over texture, piling hooks on top of hooks. Schnug’s guitar stabs and slashes instead of strumming, circling Mondal like a shark with biting two- or three-note vamps and even solos. On the powerful one-two punch of “Connoisseur of Salt” and “Walk in Place,” the confident economy of his playing opens up room for synthesizer and saxophone to add warmth to the grimy background; on the latter, an unexpectedly beautiful pre-chorus bed of calmly pulsing horns slides into place to smooth over its deja vu nightmare. It’s a fitting moment of reprieve and growth: For all its cracked nerves, Good Living Is Coming for You is a record of triumph and gathering strength, of harnessing self-awareness to break out of toxic cycles.
On the closing “Ideal No,” the relentless tick-tock chop of Schnug’s guitar heightens the anxiety of an aging body slipping into disrepair, bludgeoned further by woozy synths. But even as they tally up the damage, Mondal and Schnug are content to shrug it off. Their chirping refrain of “This isn’t ideal” isn’t quite the battle cry of “Oh Bondage! Up Yours!” but it feels sturdier and more grounded, a soft cry of defiance from DIY veterans pulling on rusty armor to stay in the fight. The guillotine might not be rolling out quite yet, but Sweeping Promises will have you swearing that you can hear it rumbling into view. | 2023-07-07T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2023-07-07T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Feel It | July 7, 2023 | 7.8 | 05fdccbb-1d88-4806-add2-c2167750fa06 | Phillipe Roberts | https://pitchfork.com/staff/phillipe-roberts/ | |
On their second album, this quartet featuring Ty Segall and Ex-Cult’s Chris Shaw prod and pull at their militaristic punk with psychedelic tricks and brief detours. | On their second album, this quartet featuring Ty Segall and Ex-Cult’s Chris Shaw prod and pull at their militaristic punk with psychedelic tricks and brief detours. | GØGGS: Pre Strike Sweep | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/goggs-pre-strike-sweep/ | Pre Strike Sweep | Of the innumerable albums, backing-band permutations, and side projects that form the Ty Segall ecosystem, GØGGS are the most singular. Though Segall again teams with longtime bandmate Charles Moothart in the group, their fusion of skate-punk and space-rock on GØGGS’ self-titled 2016 debut marked a clear aesthetic detour from the continuum of British Invasion rock and proto-metal that connects most of Segall’s releases (and his work with Moothart in Fuzz). GØGGS, after all, is ultimately less a vehicle for Segall’s wandering whimsy than a platform for the hectoring, hardcore-schooled bark of Ex-Cult shouter Chris Shaw. He is the fearsome drill sergeant whipping Segall and Moothart’s fuzzy offensive into militaristic shape, a role he embraces with Sergeant Hartman-style zeal on their second record, Pre Strike Sweep.
As Segall’s own catalog has turned increasingly eclectic and elegant, GØGGS is less an extracurricular indulgence for him than a necessary outlet for aggressive impulses. Even when he’s not behind the microphone, he makes his presence clear with tinfoil-chewing guitar spasms, the quality that best distinguishes GØGGS from Ex-Cult’s equally pulverizing punk. Opener “Killing Time” teases at radical reinvention with a brittle acoustic intro, but the band batters it into a warped piece of psych-metal within a minute. Bassist Michael Anderson then introduces a Black Flag rumble, setting the unrelentingly caustic tone of the next half hour.
GØGGS don’t exactly redraft their battle plan on Pre Strike Sweep, but they at least consider new ways to work within it. Like cats trapped in a bag, they poke, prod, and stretch without compromising established parameters. On the title track, Shaw plays shout-and-response with a convulsive riff, but halfway through, the song comes to a halt, only for Segall to revive it with crossfading noise swirls and snake-charmer guitar squiggles. The Paranoid-powered “Funeral Relief” shows just how much detail they can pack into two minutes, offsetting a raised-fist chorus with acoustic-propelled verses and dramatic arpeggios. Even when they adopt the cheeky sneer and sing-along sloganeering of late-1970s British street-punk on “CTA,” arrhythmic shocks of noise swoop in, throwing the song off balance.
While a sense of mischief lurks beneath the menace on Pre Strike Sweep, Shaw’s voice remains a proudly inflexible instrument, like the concrete walls of a burning skyscraper. Shaw is at once GØGGS’ most prominent feature and their most elusive—a loud, agitated, but obfuscating mouthpiece who sounds like he’s screaming down the empty hallway that leads to the practice space. Often, the only lyrics you’ll be able to make out are the song titles, though sometimes you don’t need much more. Amid the marauding metallic punk of “Vanity,” he spits out “Vanity/Your vanity” with enough disgust to make you feel like you've been caught striking a Blue Steel pose for a selfie.
There are times here where GØGGS can’t quite reconcile their hardcore DNA with their latent experimental impulses. The moody “Ruptured Line” feels less like a song than an excerpt from an extended avant-punk jam, and its improvised chaos leaves the normally authoritative Shaw sounding unmoored. But there’s equal evidence that GØGGS are becoming more adept at crafting hard-hitting songs that offer more than cathartic aggression for its own sake. The finale, “Morning Reaper,” sounds like vintage power-pop being torn apart inside a circle pit before GØGGS lock into some hard-rock riffage. Even in this marginally more melodic context, it’s still hard to decipher what exactly Shaw is railing against. But when most every aspect of life seems to be a source of chronic anxiety and rage, does it really matter? | 2018-10-22T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-10-22T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | In the Red | October 22, 2018 | 7.2 | 05fdea3c-b7c6-4032-9457-4da75171a76f | Stuart Berman | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stuart-berman/ | |
The latest project from L.A.-based rapper is a fascinating, seemingly unfinished collage of spoken interludes, gorgeous beats, and low-fi snippets that reckons with a life of gold and faith. | The latest project from L.A.-based rapper is a fascinating, seemingly unfinished collage of spoken interludes, gorgeous beats, and low-fi snippets that reckons with a life of gold and faith. | Pink Siifu: ensley | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/pink-siifu-ensley/ | ensley | This record, from a peripatetic, multi-talented twentysomething who uses several stage names, is both so accomplished and so incomplete. The strands used to create it point toward a completely unfamiliar artistic lane for many listeners. That the entire project is as good as it is while remaining defiantly “unfinished” and coming from a little-known artist is a reminder of all the artistic galaxies out there on the web, just beyond reach. It’s enough to bring a digital crate-digger to the point of existential crisis.
Pink Siifu, born Livingston Matthews and based in Los Angeles, has made music under many other names, most prominently Iiye. He’s a kind of a personification of the streaming’s counterculture, all the difficult-to-monetize music that has been passed around among smaller groups of listeners, beneath the SoundCloud rappers whose streaming numbers inflate their names to the point that major labels take notice. Matthews’ music weaves a web between various pillars of neo-soul, and sun-dried California hip-hop—Isaiah Rashad, D’Angelo, J-Dee, Flying Lotus—but at the center, there is a comprehensible Siifu. His persona is fully fleshed out: an earnest poet dependent on prayer but too shy to scan as self-serious, speaking his thoughts through the voices of others and disguising his own in crooked, glinting bars. Pro-black at every turn and implicitly anticapitalist, ensley is a portrait of the artist in fragments that refract Matthews’s image, splitting and tossing it every which way, forming a more complete picture than a traditional album might.
ensley is the latest of the more than three-dozen projects posted on Siifu’s Bandcamp page. Its 25 songs are shot through with spoken interludes, gorgeous beats, and low-fi snippets that reflect the heavy influence of veteran producer Knxwledge. The decaying loops shimmer like the gold that Siifu mentions throughout the songs here, almost as often as he brings up the power of prayer. Add to those two motifs the mysterious, insidious element identified on “tht bag” and you’ll begin to understand the struggle that defines the album. Gold and prayer are the weapons at Siifu’s disposal, the first granting a sense of aesthetic well-being (not economic) and the second a sense of spiritual well-being. The “bag” is figurative, standing for any element that threatens to rob a subject of those senses: the weight of alcoholism, racism, all forms of moral turpitude.
That none of this is immediately clear is a blessing. ensley is not pedantic. Its lessons have been hastily shoved into corners and wallpapered over with a wonderful selection of beats that make use of everything from classic hip-hop to ballads and old technicolor movie scores, shredding many of the samples beyond recognition. Those disguised sources are just one of the record’s many secrets. If you listen closely, the prospect of death is raised frequently: it’s there on “birmingham skies,” an ode to Matthews’ hometown on which he describes a friend who tells him, candidly, that she’s tired of breathing. He echoes her several songs later on the gorgeous “stay sane,” which turns a sampled dirge into high art. Siifu raps that he’s pacing on a tightrope, trying to ward off the devil and receiving encouragement from loved ones long gone. Faith, far more than technical ability, is the tool that he’s interested in sharpening. To evaluate Siifu’s rapping ability seems beside the point: He’s as scrutable as he wants to be from song to song, and he switches frequently from mumbling and muttering to clear pointed verses and back again.
The songs on ensley often arrive paired or tripled, reflecting each other in various ways, with other tracks slipped in-between those that are too closely related. The frayed horns of “outlet” only help that song shine more brightly, but its inverse arrives in the form of “set out.” The beat that set “outlet” aflame is hollowed-out and Siifu mutters about his father being “drunk as hell,” praying that he puts the bottle down. A more cheerful pairing comes at the end of the record in two comic skits, “Black Woman is God” and “No Mo Fux” that are entirely given over to the voices of black women. ensley is filled with women, from the pride Matthews expresses in his sister throughout to the fire mid-album verse on “Golds and Smiles” from the rapper Maassai.
ensley is long and occasionally repetitive. But even on its more challenging tracks, the album seems like a natural next step, a work in motion like The Life of Pablo, a set of collaborations midwived by the web and positively bursting with soul like Anderson .Paak’s Yes Lawd! It would be tempting to label it a proclamation, the introduction of an “important new voice,” but Siifu has been here for a minute and ensley feels more like it’s supposed to be passed around in private. The whole thing is hush-hush. The features, the samples, there’s so much to be recognized in Pink Siifu’s new world that stretches from the heavens down to the worst things on earth. | 2018-08-29T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-08-29T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | self-released | August 29, 2018 | 8 | 05ff31ee-640a-4135-b736-8835bbac1699 | Jonah Bromwich | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jonah-bromwich/ | |
Sam Beam's sixth Iron & Wine album Ghost on Ghost is packed with ideas and features musical flourishes that nod to 1970s lite rock, jazz, and the blues. | Sam Beam's sixth Iron & Wine album Ghost on Ghost is packed with ideas and features musical flourishes that nod to 1970s lite rock, jazz, and the blues. | Iron & Wine: Ghost on Ghost | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/17875-iron-wine-ghost-on-ghost/ | Ghost on Ghost | “Winter Prayers”, a standout on Iron & Wine’s sixth album, Ghost on Ghost, begins quietly and disarmingly. Following the short, breezy instrumental coda of “Sundown (Back in the Briars)”, with its soft eddies of violin, “Winter Prayers” features only Sam Beam’s voice and guitar, with a sympathetic piano gently reinforcing the song’s delicate melody. What makes the moment so notable is how closely it resembles the Iron & Wine of yore, when Beam was recording albums in his living room and smuggling dark thoughts via comfort-food folk. Is the song just a means of offsetting some of the fuller and louder passages that make up the bulk of Ghost on Ghost? Or is it something slyer and more self-aware, a wink and a nod to the old self he’s left behind? Is Beam trying to remind us just how far he’s come since he calculated Our Endless, Numbered Days?
He has, in fact, come very far. In an effort not to play the sad strummer covering the Postal Service for the rest of his life, Beam has spent the last decade engaged in an arms race with himself. With each album he has seriously and self-consciously expanded his range, indulging new musical modes while locating finer grains of emotion. When he’s at his best, it can be bracing to watch a man whose repertoire once seemed so limited perform new tricks: In 2005 the Woman King EP slyly fitted his low-key folk with rustic percussion and sharp country-blues riffs, and two years later The Shepherd’s Dog (still his finest effort) revealed new full-band ambitions and arrangements as unruly as cowlicks. That pair of releases argued persuasively that Iron & Wine was more than just a guy, a guitar, and a beard.
What was truly remarkable about The Shepherd’s Dog was how quickly, confidently, and gracefully Beam shifted from folk minimalist to roots maximalist. However, 2011’s Kiss Each Other Clean sounded like a step backwards, toggling between the seemingly effortless (the affectionately nostalgic “Tree by the River”) to the turgidly effortful (the strained Dylanisms of “Walking Far form Home”). It plays like the transitional album that should have preceded, not followed Dog. Unfortunately, Ghost on Ghost is haunted by that same sense of in-between-ness: Beam is obviously excited about playing with new sounds and ideas, but he seems as yet unsure how to piece them together.
“Winter Prayers” is one of the quietest moments on the album, but it’s also one of the least fussy songs. Working again with Tin Hat Trio’s Rob Burger, who provides horn and string arrangements, Beam has recorded an album dense with ideas and busy with musical flourishes that distract as often than they cohere. Opener “Caught in the Briars” catches you off guard with its low thrum of horns and reed instruments bolstering one of Beam’s sunniest melodies. Soon the rattletrap percussion comes in, a little stodgy in this context. Then comes piano, adding nothing. The backing vocals insert persistent oohs and aahs, and the whole thing takes on a sequiny sparkle before the song falls down a flight of stairs on the coda.
Of course it’s admirable that Beam wants to push himself, to constantly redefine himself, to continually redraw the boundaries of his art. The fact that he’s willing to include some blues riffs and jazz combos on Ghost on Ghost-- hell, just the fact that he’s interested in rhythm at all-- suggests that he has a broadminded view of Americana that transcends folk and country. But Beam doesn’t do all those styles equally well. His nods to 1970s lite rock on “The Desert Babbler” and the Carpenters-slick “Grass Windows” more than pay off, but “Joy” is sickly sweet, and Iron & Wine-as-jazz-combo is disastrous: “Lovers’ Revolution” is a hot mess of overwrought druggy lyrics and underthought Beat rhythms, and when the song breaks for its instrumental interlude-- too gentle to evoke the havoc of a bad high, too rhythmless to be a New Orleans funeral parade-- it accommodates one of the most awkward musical passages of the year.
The inconsistency frustrates: One minute the arrangements sound crowded with sonic bric-a-brac, the next minute Beam turns on his inner editor, settles into an easy melody, or drops an imaginative turn of phrase. He’s an inventive songwriter with an idiosyncratic lyrical style, and most of the songs on Ghost on Ghost convey a sense of travel and transience with their place names and concrete details. The American Southwest figures prominently in his lyrics, as Beam evokes that specific quality of California light on “The Desert Babbler” and “New Mexico’s No Breeze”. His postcard impressionism gives the album its own distinct personality within his catalog, which comes through despite the cluttered production. In other words, Ghost on Ghost is best when it’s most straightforward and worst when the experimentalism becomes desperate rather than bold. Too often it sounds as though Beam is less interested in defining a new sound and more concerned with distancing himself from an old one. | 2013-04-19T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2013-04-19T02:00:00.000-04:00 | Folk/Country | Nonesuch | April 19, 2013 | 6.1 | 06001fe0-a1b4-4950-a285-e96c0ab5a303 | Stephen M. Deusner | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stephen-m. deusner/ | null |
The late-career renaissance of a great American troubadour continues with an eclectic album featuring Jamila Woods, James Mercer, Vernon Reid, and others. | The late-career renaissance of a great American troubadour continues with an eclectic album featuring Jamila Woods, James Mercer, Vernon Reid, and others. | Bruce Hornsby: Non-Secure Connection | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/bruce-hornsby-non-secure-connection/ | Non-Secure Connection | Few contemporary music men have embraced the role of American troubadour like Bruce Hornsby. He cracks jokes, shakes his head in bewilderment at days gone by, and—judging by his broad roster of famous collaborators—is equally comfortable lending favors as calling them in. Since the 1991 breakup of his first band the Range, he’s played keys for the Grateful Dead, played jazz with Jack DeJohnette and bluegrass with Ricky Skaggs, and released a dulcimer album. (He also, legend has it, beat Allen Iverson in a game of one-on-one.)
Hornsby’s spent the last decade scoring Spike Lee Joints, and cinematic cues enlivened 2019’s Absolute Zero as well as its quick follow-up Non-Secure Connection. Non-Secure Connection’s arresting opener “Cleopatra Drones” showcases Hornsby’s ability to wrest resonant imagery from childlike turns of phrase, his layered vocals evoking a desert apocalypse of marching animals and “shoebox satellites.” Percussion sneaks in around the track’s halfway point, building a head of steam en route to a climactic keyboard solo. Similarly atmospheric production buoys “Time, the Thief,” on which Hornsby’s piano sails atop a symphonic horn arrangement.
As ever, Hornsby’s wistful, elegant melodies are the main attraction. A winding sitar and stand-up bass grab your attention on the unearthed Leon Russell collaboration “Anything Can Happen,” but it’s the earnest piano chords that make it such a winning ballad. Like much of the album, the James Mercer vocal duet “My Resolve” is grounded in cataclysmic themes; each verse and instrumental solo is its own roiling descent, each chorus an oasis of reprieve. And while Jamila Woods’s guest spot is the big-tent draw on “Bright Star Cast,” it’s driven by Hornsby and Living Colour guitarist Vernon Reid’s thick electro-funk. The engineering is crisp and capacious, their playing loose and lively.
Of the dozens of character sketches scattered across Hornsby’s 35-year recording career, the most infamous are from Reagan’s second term. In the Range’s 1986 FM-radio breakthrough “The Way It Is,” a song about the insufficiency of the Civil Rights Act, a silk-suited businessman harrasses a woman waiting in a welfare line. This was followed in 1988 by “Look Out Any Window,” a Mellencamp-ian survey of farmers and fishermen casting weary eyes at the decade’s horizon. Rather than oppositional forces, Hornsby cast the urban poor and the red state/blue-collar demo as brothers of a widening underclass, sharing interests (organized labor) and antagonists (politicos, slick salesmen, small towns and small-mindedness).
But Hornsby’s writing actually improved when he became less of a prognosticator. By 2004’s Halcyon Days, a middle-aged manifesto of a piece with Billy Joel’s The Bridge and Mellencamp’s Key West records, he narrowed his focus to subtler narrative intersections, the sort of generational divides which tend to come up more in passing and less at the Thanksgiving dinner table. Shortly before Warren Zevon’s death, Hornsby began performing Zevon’s “Play It All Night Long,” a portrait of rural patriarchy gone to seed, in concerts; Non-Secure Connection’s “Shit’s Crazy Out Here” adds a layer of post-modern paranoia to the woebegone flippancy of Zevon’s “My Shit’s Fucked Up.”
For all his hip affiliations and progressive politics, Hornsby acknowledges his old soul happily enough. As on Halcyon Days, Non-Secure Connection’s characters are compromised less by the objective state of things than by their struggles to keep up. On the title track, a hacker likens himself to a Trojan warrior, yet can’t quite articulate the joy he finds in sowing chaos online. Later, on “Porn Hour,” an internet porn addict considers the onward trudge of technology: “The innovation of the internet was driven by a couple on a film set/We thank the hard boys and the naked girls, for the coming of our beautiful cyberworld.” I’m not sure I ever needed to hear the “Mandolin Rain” guy marvel aloud at the wonders of PornHub, but now that I have I’m not even mad about it.
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Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2020-08-17T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-08-17T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Folk/Country | Zappo | August 17, 2020 | 7.5 | 060398fd-0d01-4a16-be96-362a7df9a352 | Pete Tosiello | https://pitchfork.com/staff/pete-tosiello/ | |
The Swedish electronic musician Peder Mannerfelt, who has produced groups like Fever Ray and Blonde Redhead, evokes a gothic energy in his own music. In his hands, electronic music's habitual futurism looks a lot more like horror. | The Swedish electronic musician Peder Mannerfelt, who has produced groups like Fever Ray and Blonde Redhead, evokes a gothic energy in his own music. In his hands, electronic music's habitual futurism looks a lot more like horror. | Peder Mannerfelt: Controlling Body | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21780-controlling-body/ | Controlling Body | You might not recognize Peder Mannerfelt by name, but over the past decade, the Swedish electronic musician has had a hand in plenty of projects with a higher profile than his own. He and his frequent collaborator Henrik von Sivers co-produced much of Fever Ray's debut album; they also produced Blonde Redhead's Penny Sparkle and some of Glasser's debut. Mannerfelt used to make stark, charcoal-dusted techno as the Subliminal Kid, and with another Swedish producer, Malcolm Pardon, he peddles burbling cosmic synth jams in the duo Roll the Dice. But the key to understanding his work under his own name lies in "Evening Redness in the West," a strange and harrowing song from his 2014 debut album that borrows its title from Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian. Over flickering drones, a computerized voice intones a succession of disconnected words that might be ripped straight from McCarthy's pages: "barren," "horizon," "filth," "Bowie knife," "blood." It sounds a little bit like HAL, the on-board computer from 2001: A Space Odyssey, having a fatal meltdown in the dry Texas chaparral—an unlikely juxtaposition that goes to the heart of Mannerfelt's vivid, unconventional approach. He's no goth, exactly, but his work is deeply informed by gothic literary tropes, and in his hands, electronic music's habitual futurism looks a lot more like horror.
Mannerfelt's last album, 2015's The Swedish Congo Record, used coldwave and techno as a roundabout way of examining African percussion and European colonialism. Although the themes underlying his new record, Controlling Body, are less explicit, we can get a sense for what's on his mind from titles like "Abysmal," "The Confidence of Ignorance," and "Limits to Growth." This is chilly, forbidding stuff, setting disassembled techno rhythms against a backdrop of queasy synths and industrial clang. The ambiguity of the album title bleeds into a series of questions. What constitutes a body, for instance? What do our bodies control, and what forces control us? Is it possible that the computers are really in charge?
Controlling Body opens with "Building of the Mountain," in which Glasser's Cameron Mesirow, whose voice is threaded throughout the album—sometimes speaking, sometimes singing, and often just providing throaty color—sings long, clear tones that quiver against filament-bright sine waves. There's no rhythm to speak of, just a gloomy "Mentasm" stab that comes hurtling across the stereo field at regular intervals. The overall impression is of Joan La Barbara leading a funeral march across the outskirts of a Belgian rave, and that bleak tone persists across the rest of the album. A few tracks are ominously atmospheric: "Coast to Coast" suggests sighing train whistles, and "Abysmal," an ambient acid sketch, enlists a chorus of the damned to drive its apocalyptic point home. Those quieter cuts help cushion full-bore tracks like "Limits to Growth" and "Perspectives," in which the word "subject" stutters and loops over punishing, shuddering rhythms. It's as through the Singularity had finally arrived, but due to insufficient bandwidth, all those uploading souls were left endlessly buffering, stuck in a kind of data purgatory.
Given linguistic cues like these, it's not hard to find all manner of possible interpretations for the ideas that give Controlling Body its substance; it's about as literary as instrumental electronic music gets. But Mannerfelt also keeps things wonderfully open-ended: The patient, glassy pings of "The Confidence of Ignorance" climax in a slow, rhythmic fusillade of gunshots and distant shouts, and if the source is what I think it is, that almost certainly makes this the finest album this year that samples skeet shooting. And on the closing "I Love You," Glasser sings a scratchy ballad that's as foreboding as it is tender. Her presence—hushed, vulnerable, but also defiant and at times intimidating—helps emphasize the imposing scale of Mannerfelt's sweeping electronic architectures. Both breathy and carnal, she is the ghost in the machine and the body in the cloud, a specter haunting a dystopian landscape of electrical hum and binary code, the human point of reference that brings his gothic panorama thrillingly to life. | 2016-04-14T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-04-14T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Peder Mannerfelt Produktion | April 14, 2016 | 8.1 | 06089842-6c48-450e-88db-4c605e423d30 | Philip Sherburne | https://pitchfork.com/staff/philip-sherburne/ | null |
As Stereolab take a hiatus, they leave us with a new LP of material recorded during the same sessions that produced Chemical Chords. | As Stereolab take a hiatus, they leave us with a new LP of material recorded during the same sessions that produced Chemical Chords. | Stereolab: Not Music | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/14838-not-music/ | Not Music | When Stereolab announced plans to take an indefinite hiatus in April of last year, they also mentioned that a parting gift was in the works: Chemical Chords 2, a second record of material from the 2007 sessions that spawned the concise, horn-studded Chemical Chords. At the time, Tim Gane told Pitchfork it would "make an interesting kind of sibling or companion to [Chemical Chords]," and that they were hoping to get it out quickly "because it's too similar, it's from the same sort of sessions." Laetitia Sadier described it as having "31 songs, which are split into two halves. One is the day side, and one is the nighttime side."
Over the past year and a half, Not Music was pared back considerably: The final version features 13 songs, including two extended remixes of Chemical Chords songs by the Emperor Machine and Atlas Sound. This turns out to have been an effective approach. The careful song selection and sequencing of this mix is intended to play like a proper studio album, and mostly, it does, even with the 8-minute-plus remixes acting as centerpieces. And while obviously similar in sound to Chemical Chords, the record is suffused with as much joyous synth experimentation, astral effects and flourishes, and buzzy motorik rhythms as Stereolab's mid-career efforts.
Needless to say, if you're hoping for a career-defining endcap, this is not that record. The new, non-remix tracks on Not Music ignore much of Stereolab's omnivorous career-- there's no space-age bachelor pad music, no bossa nova flourishes, and no sign of the rawer avant-garde leanings that shaped their earliest records. Instead, the set continues in the taut, propulsive pop vein of their more recent releases.
Album opener "Everybody's Weird Except Me" is sweet yet dry, using the richness of Laetitia Sadier's nonchalant alto to cut the cuteness of the melody. The track plays off the dichotomies Stereolab have come to love-- old-fashioned pop tropes delivered by whirring, futuristic instruments, with cold detachment rubbing up against whimsical lushness and cerebral orchestrations played with charm. "Sun Demon" opens by deconstructing a garage-rock melody (there's a trace of the Castaways' "Liar, Liar" organ line in there) with splashes of videogame bleeps, then throws its back into an unrelenting rhythmic chug. And "Two Finger Symphony" explicitly answers the last record's "One Finger Symphony" with its slightly altered repetitive keyboard vamp.
Stereolab's last effort was among the most concise and tightly focused of the band's career, distilling their baroque, buzzing aesthetic into breathless, three-minute pop songs. Not Music mostly echoes that change, but also sprawls like vintage Stereolab when it needs to, as on the 10-plus-minute centerpiece "Silver Sands [Emperor Machine Mix]", which turns the xylophone melody of the Chemical Chords original into a sparse, mechanized krautrock throb.
The Stereolab story for the last five years has been, "Yep, they still sound like Stereolab." And if we're disappointed that the band's ever-experimental drive feels stifled by the brevity of this newer material, perhaps this hiatus is well-timed. While we learn to finally miss the quirky, stylish synth-pop that we've begun to take for granted, we'll have to content ourselves with Not Music as the band's final hurrah-- at least for now. I suspect it won't be long before we realize that the leftovers of a band like Stereolab are still better than main dishes offered up by many of their peers. And maybe by then, they'll be back to recording. | 2010-11-16T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2010-11-16T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Experimental | Drag City / Duophonic | November 16, 2010 | 7.5 | 060cbeed-14b2-4bff-976f-8e61d19815d2 | Pitchfork | null |
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For the first time in his brief career, the triple-threat singer is running on more than just potential. On his latest project, he brings youthful charm, optimism, and curiosity to his most fully realized work yet. | For the first time in his brief career, the triple-threat singer is running on more than just potential. On his latest project, he brings youthful charm, optimism, and curiosity to his most fully realized work yet. | Omar Apollo: Apolonio | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/omar-apollo-apolonio/ | Apolonio | For music that drips with adolescent, hormone-fueled infatuation, Omar Apollo’s songs are notably free of the melodrama of teenagehood. “And you said I was your soulmate, but that was just a lie,” he bemoans on “Useless”—a highlight from his latest project Apolonio—before pivoting with a shrug: “It’s all right, we’re too young to be giving out advice.” Playful yet self-aware, Apollo, 23, knows how to navigate the peaks and valleys of youthful angst, lust, and carefree fun without ever taking himself too seriously.
Apollo’s triple-threat potential has always been part of the conversation surrounding his music: handsome and stylish, equipped with a malleable, multi-octave vocal range that scrapes Miguel-level heights, he’s nearly as talented a producer as he is a singer-songwriter. Apolonio’s sound, like that of 2018’s Stereo and 2019’s Friends, bridges the vulnerable funk of Daniel Caesar, the seductive atmosphere of Kali Uchis (who steals the show on Apolonio’s “Hey Boy”), and the warm solitude of Nostalgia, Ultra-era Frank Ocean. It’s not a new sound, nor is it particularly balanced, but across these nine songs, aided by Apollo’s undeniable charisma, Apolonio melts into something perfectly suited for the butterflies of a long-awaited kiss or the nostalgia of an old yearbook.
Like much of Apollo’s music, Apolonio pulses with yearning; what’s different here is Apollo’s comfort in directing it to men as well as women. His songwriting has opened up as a result. “Drive through Georgia 19 hours on vacation/I ain’t never left the state, man, I been waiting/and that pretty boy still hit me up on strange occasions,” he sings on “Kamikaze,” a piercing reflection on teenage heartbreak. But then the humor peeks through. “I ain’t really know you was freaky, though,” he sings moments later, his voice poking out of its monotone. “Ass round like Cheerios.”
Apollo’s take on queerness has always been sly and understated; there’s no doubt that questions about his sexuality, which he’s avoided addressing directly since he broke out, have made him more beguiling. But there’s no right way for a queer person to be queer—and hearing Apollo, on “Kamikaze,” remembering being hurt by a boy who moved on, or singing about boys, girls, and a crush on a boy who’s with a girl now on the bouncy bilingual opener “I’m Amazing,” it all feels honest and vulnerable, like moments of self-actualization that reduce the exhausting public obsession with other people’s sexuality to dust.
This isn’t to say he has it all figured out. Apolonio feels more like a collection of disparate sketches than a cohesive vision—jumping from Parliament-style funk and muted pop to rapping and Mexican corrido (on the exuberant origin story “Dos Uno Nueve,” sung in Spanish), it’s a reflection of Apollo’s own unbound energy, both giddy and unsure. He’s most in his comfort zone when he deepens an already established sound, like on lead single “Stayback,” a wet and sticky slow jam that has Apollo reaching for a Curtis Mayfield falsetto, over-enunciating and dramatically scrunching his voice up like George Clinton (the knockout remix even features Bootsy Collins). He strikes gold on “Useless,” which features guitar and songwriting from Strokes guitarist Albert Hammond Jr; Apollo does his best Julian Casablancas impression on the verses before flooding the chorus with thwacking bass and flawless harmonies. It’s a clear homage to the Strokes that nonetheless feels distinctly new, and it works.
Apollo and his occasional co-producers (including Frank Ocean collaborator Michael Uzowuru, 21-year-old wunderkind Teo Halm, and hip-hop iconoclast DJ Dahi) sometimes struggle to keep that same level of focus throughout the project. “Want U Around,” featuring singer Ruel, is the type of flat funk imitation that “Stayback” manages to avoid. One of two tracks not at least co-produced by Apollo himself, “Bi Fren” forces Apollo into sounding like a groaning clone of Post Malone and Khalid over an anonymous beat, stripping him of his trademark quirk and taking the punch out of his wrenching vulnerability.
The more you listen to Apolonio, the more its unevenness comes to feel like an extension of Apollo himself, still growing, still curious. Yet for the first time in Apollo’s brief career, it’s not his potential that feels most thrilling, but rather the glimpses we’re getting of what’s already there; Apolonio undoubtedly stands on its own as his most fully realized work. Apollo’s music celebrates what was and what is, not what could be, and in a moment when the future feels catastrophic at best, there’s comfort in knowing that a few years ago, in a different reality, a teenaged Omar Apollo drove 19 hours to Georgia to see his crush for the last time. | 2020-10-21T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-10-21T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | Warner | October 21, 2020 | 7.2 | 060cf04d-5c44-486e-8093-c5771895200e | Jackson Howard | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jackson-howard/ | |
He really went ahead and did it: Lil Wayne finally releases his unlikely, unqualified, and quite unbelievable rock album. | He really went ahead and did it: Lil Wayne finally releases his unlikely, unqualified, and quite unbelievable rock album. | Lil Wayne: Rebirth | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/13116-rebirth/ | Rebirth | It could be worse. "Everybody say they just do it, well, I just don't," claims Lil Wayne on Rebirth, his unlikely, unqualified, and quite unbelievable rock album. And he's speaking the truth: This album is not the logical official follow-up to 2008's best-selling Tha Carter III. At all. In any way. For that, he deserves credit. Considering Wayne is a man whose artistic aims apparently involve 1) Collecting oil-tycoon cash, 2) Having sex with several women at once, and 3) Concocting the world's finest excrement-related rhymes, Rebirth is most definitely a flop, terribly unsexy, and contains surprisingly few shit jokes. Wayne is playing against type here. "When I play sick, I'm Jordan with the flu," he boasts on the album, referring to Jordan's classic game against the Jazz. And in general, that's true; but here Wayne is like Mike with pneumonia and a broken leg... playing baseball.
In the mid 1980s, Run-D.M.C. used distorted guitars and stadium-rock drums to help break hip-hop into the mainstream. Now, one of the world's biggest rappers is using the same tools to make a niche record only a diehard could truly love. That flip says as much about hip-hop's current state of evolution (shaky) as it does about Lil Wayne's current commercial predicament. Although his recent mixtape was dubbed No Ceilings, the pressure of success and the idea that he'll never top the million-in-a-week phenomenon that was Tha Carter III is naturally weighing on Wayne. He may never have a single as big as "Lollipop" or reach the level of universal relevancy to warrant another prime time interview with Katie Couric. He seems to realize this on Rebirth.
"Call me crazy, I've been called worse/ It's like I have it all, but what's it all worth?" asks Wayne on "Paradice", a Miltonian epic about the trappings of super stardom that aims for Axl Rose, Use Your Illusion-style heights. The closest he comes to an answer to that question is on "Drop the World", where he combats paranoia by threatening to "pick the world up and drop it on your fuckin' head!" It's a hilarious image that would serve as an incredible exaggerated parody of Linkin Park angst if the song wasn't dead serious-- a fact confirmed by a martyr-me guest shot from Eminem, who himself still sounds like he's coming to grips with the fact that he'll never be as famous as he once was.
"Drop the World" also contains another key lyric from Wayne: "The spot get smaller and I get bigger/ Tryin' to get in where I fit in, no room for a nigga." The lines hint at the notion of Rebirth being something of a cop-out, i.e., if he can't top himself, he's just going to scratch away everything that makes him great. So instead of rapping we get gurgled Auto-Tune chirps and squeals that often nullify his one-in-a-billion elastic croak. Instead of next-level clever punchlines-inside-of-punchlines we get pure high-school inanity or swear parades deserving of a soapy mouthwash. According to Wayne, rock music combines the coked-out idiocy of Sunset Strip hair metal with the processed rage of Bizkit-ed headbanging. Understandably, the combination can be abhorrent. The choice to cannibalize two of rock's least respectable styles against each other makes zero sense, and is especially surprising from someone obsessed with André 3000, whose similarly risky 2003 genre switch up, The Love Below, wisely borrowed from Prince more than Evanescence.
But even with Rebirth's crushing lows-- and Wayne's imminent jail sentence thanks to a guilty plea on attempted gun possession charges-- there is little reason to doubt the 27-year-old's future as an enterprising, Grammy-highlighting superstar of the most esteemed set. "Confidence is the stain they can't wipe off," he says on the record, and he's right. A big part of his magnetism relies on unpredictability and his willingness to reside in a personal realm where trends, gimmicks, and gravity are of little concern. In that more ideological and less critical mindset, Rebirth is an oddball win. His still-impressive productivity rate also cushions the blow-- thanks to No Ceilings, we know the guy's rapping abilities are still sharp. And, on the same day Rebirth saw release, Wayne also put out a brand new non-album cut called "Fuck Today" that combines rap and rock with more aplomb than anything on the new LP. The track is diabolical and political, recalling Ice Cube in his early-90s prime. And it makes you think the proposition of a Rebirth II might not be so awful. I mean, it could be better. | 2010-02-04T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2010-02-04T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rap | Cash Money / Universal Motown / Young Money Entertainment | February 4, 2010 | 4.5 | 0610d329-9c0b-43d1-8912-55b820a6886a | Ryan Dombal | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ryan-dombal/ | null |
Led by the indomitable Patrick Stickles, the band’s fifth album shifts towards a more stripped down, barroom rock feel. But for all its musical freedom, A Productive Cough is still a laborious record. | Led by the indomitable Patrick Stickles, the band’s fifth album shifts towards a more stripped down, barroom rock feel. But for all its musical freedom, A Productive Cough is still a laborious record. | Titus Andronicus: A Productive Cough | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/titus-andronicus-a-productive-cough/ | A Productive Cough | Midway through a documentary about the making of Titus Andronicus’ fifth album A Productive Cough, lead singer Patrick Stickles seems to question everything his epic New Jersey punk band has done until now. “In my music, it’s like I ask for understanding for myself, and I know that in doing that I’m doing it on behalf of certain members of my audience,” the frontman tells his dad. “But I also push these people away with a lot of screaming sometimes!” Maybe, he reasons, there’s a way he can communicate that understanding more directly, without the barrier of anger and amplifiers, or the threat to snap at any moment. There will still be some screaming, “But really, I’m trying to put the communicating first,” he insists.
Being understood is a reasonable concern for a songwriter who once couched his personal anguish deep in an album-length metaphor for the Civil War on their most storied album, The Monitor. For Titus Andronicus’ last LP, the colossal 2015 rock opera The Most Lamentable Tragedy, Stickles went so far as to annotate his own songs on Genius, but that gesture of comprehension seems slight compared to the fundamental recalibration of the band’s sound he attempts on A Productive Cough. The record tames the band’s usual, roiling rock with looser, jauntier grooves pitched somewhere between the Stones’ rangy early ’70s LPs and Van Morrison’s homages to New Orleans R&B. Where its predecessors played out in sickeningly tense eruptions of guitar, their latest takes the edge off, leaving the band room to kick back and unwind.
Of course, the album’s easygoing musical approach may also reflect the practical necessity for a band like this to scale back from time to time. Titus Andronicus has a pattern of following a massive event album with a smaller one that doesn’t quite scratch the same itch, and A Productive Cough is more focused than The Most Lamentable Tragedy. But even this band’s minor works are an undertaking, and with its 46-minute runtime spread across just seven songs—one of them a first-person reinterpretation of Bob Dylan’s “Like a Rolling Stone” that runs a numbing nine minutes—there’s a burdensome heaviness to the record that belies what was presumably meant to be a cheerier, more inviting sound. The music’s supposed to be an escape, yet the album always feels like it’s on the clock.
A Productive Cough sets an odd tone by opening with its most labored, tightly wound track, “Number One (In New York),” an eight-minute address about the State of Titus Andronicus. The gist: The band is still kicking, but nothing’s ever easy. “Declare myself president of the emptiness, say I’m Rembrandt of dancing on the precipice,” Stickles scours in a tattered voice that seems to age a decade between each album, “Eleven years in and trying to stay relevant.” His wordplay is as sharp and generous as ever, but the song unspools at such a torrid pace, toiling so hard for such a modest payoff, that it leaves the listener exhausted before the album even really begins.
And for a band that’s always encouraged deep reads, there isn’t a lot going on under the surface of many of these songs. All boozy Memphis horns and barroom pep, “Above the Bodega (Local Business)” charms out of the gate, but its lyrical conceit amounts to little more than “the guy at the corner store sure must see a lot,” a quaint observation about city life that it stretches very thin. “Crass Tattoo,” about a literal Crass tattoo, is more cleverly literary in its riff on music fandom as a higher calling (“My right arm, I dedicated to that noble cause/To dismantle authority and nullify all laws,” sings Brooklyn musician Megg Farrell, breezily) but its funereal tempo drags down an album that’s already plagued by languid pacing.
The promotional campaign for A Productive Cough has been preemptively defensive, overstating the degree to which the band has shed their punk ties and working from the assumption that a lot of fans are going to hate it; one press release even throws in a jab about infuriating “the black-denim-and-PBR set.” But blaming the album’s reception on straw-man rock fans—the same fans, presumably, that Stickles vows to preach understanding for—is strangely contradictory, especially when the album’s faults are so self-evident. Stickles is a fundamentally bad match for these sounds, and his brusque demeanor clashes with, and sometimes outright deflates, any uplift in this music. His churlish persona can be a blast when his grievances soar past like billboards on a highway, but it’s not nearly so entertaining when you’re locked in close proximity with it for long, ambling exposures. For all its promises of a leisurely, good time, A Productive Cough plays like a quarantine. | 2018-03-06T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2018-03-06T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Merge | March 6, 2018 | 5.9 | 061192be-32a1-4cbf-932c-1588cf441e0c | Evan Rytlewski | https://pitchfork.com/staff/evan-rytlewski/ | |
Contemporary rock's top chameleon gives the people what they want, drafting in the Dust Brothers to try to recapture his Odelay persona and sound. | Contemporary rock's top chameleon gives the people what they want, drafting in the Dust Brothers to try to recapture his Odelay persona and sound. | Beck: Guero | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/621-guero/ | Guero | PATIENT PROGRESS ASSESSMENT: MARCH 2005
Subject: Beck Hansen, 35 years old, Caucasian
Medical History: Physically, subject's health is good; no major or chronic issues, although voice suggests persistent sinusitis. Psychologically, Mr. Hansen shows a history of Multiple Personality Disorder (MPD), diagnosed in 1995 and treated intermittently via analysis and hypnosis. Subject's recorded personalities include:
Dust Bowl-era folk singer, prone to wearing flannel, acoustic guitar always present, unable to leave house without harmonica clip (see attached materials, One Foot in the Grave).
Ardent practitioner of "hip-hop," exhibits "word salad" symptomology characteristic of schizophrenics (see Mellow Gold).
Self-described "space cowboy." Similar to personality #1, except with claimed origin in future, rather than past. Also known to dabble in bossa nova. (see Mutations).
Smooth-talking sexaholic, race indeterminate. Causes subject to wear small outfits with big collars. Frequently does "the splits." Earnestness of personality questionable. (see Midnite Vultures).
Depressive, excessively self-reflective middle-aged man. Moves at very slow pace, exhibits fetish for exotic string arrangements, and shows delusional belief that he's Blood on the Tracks-era Bob Dylan. By far his least enjoyable persona; friends report being "really bummed out" in his presence when these traits are dominant (see Sea Change).
Mr. Hansen has experienced one distinct period of personality cohesion, which is widely considered to be his most healthy and agreeable time (see attached materials, Odelay). Since this psychological peak, the patient has experienced pressure to return to this state, wherein all of the above personae peacefully co-exist to create a unique and well-balanced whole. However, Mr. Hansen has appeared unable or unwilling to bend to these outside demands, instead spending periods of 1-2 years at various extremes of the above stated categories.
Current Session: Lately, Mr. Hansen has shown an increased willingness to accept the advice of his peers and doctors, mounting a highly motivated and publicized effort to return to the behavioral cohesion of his Odelay period. Reuniting with his therapists of that era, the Dust Brothers (Drs. M. Simpson and J. King, M.D, Ph.D), he has made a lot of progress towards this goal, exhibiting behavior (see attached media, Guero) that appears to resemble his healthier days. But whether this restoration of character balance is merely superficial, and, furthermore, whether it is the proper attitude for the patient, remains to be determined.
Note the resemblance of Guero opener "E-Pro" to Odelay's "Devil's Haircut", both tracks assembled from guitar-driven riff-loops and Mr. Hansen's drowsy talking-blues delivery. Notice that the twangy-acoustic vs. turntable-scratch paradoxes of "Jackass" are repeated on "Earthquake Weather" and "Farewell Ride". Further antecedent is seen in the quirk collage (sonar blips, harmonica, Christina Ricci) of "Hell Yes", which can be directly traced back to the earlier period's "High 5 (Rock the Catskills)".
That the patient is re-visiting past combinations of his constituent personalities is not in itself a cause for worry; after all, it is what most of his support system has been suggesting for many years. But one wonders whether Mr. Hansen's heart is in the proceedings, as many of the songs appear to be little more than weak echoes of their similar predecessors. Furthermore, stray remnants of individual personality types, particularly the most recently-seen "mope" character, pop up on "Missing" and "Broken Drum," in the form of slow tempos and "Blue Jay Way" strings.
Other areas give indications of new, healthy ways of rectifying the contradictions within Mr. Hansen's torrid mind. "Girl" uses an NES symphony prologue to introduce a Cali-rock pastiche, the sweetness of which overcomes its serial killer lyrics and "Hey Ya" biting. "Black Tambourine" finds the patient stripping down his usual methods, concentrating on foreboding rhythms and gimmick economy, while "Earthquake Weather" is similarly sparse, and sees Mr. Hansen using his falsetto for a purpose other than adding a musical wink to his less serious efforts.
All in all, my assessment of the patient's recent advances is a mixed one. Mr. Hansen has certainly attempted to follow the regimen recommended to him, and has done his best to recapture earlier moments of lucidity and unity, but in many ways the final result feels rote and calculated. It seems likely that what worked for the subject almost ten years ago may not be appropriate at this later stage; in today's landscape, the methods seem a bit obsolete and over-prescribed. Mr. Hansen may have given us what we demanded, but, at this juncture, we should consider that his personalities have drifted so far apart that they are better left that way. | 2005-03-27T01:00:03.000-05:00 | 2005-03-27T01:00:03.000-05:00 | Rock | Geffen | March 27, 2005 | 6.6 | 061262b1-dc56-4c15-955b-8e47a264c897 | Rob Mitchum | https://pitchfork.com/staff/rob- mitchum/ | null |
Nite Jewel and Dâm-Funk have been teasing a collaboration for years, and their long-awaited EP, they capture lightning in a bottle. More, please. | Nite Jewel and Dâm-Funk have been teasing a collaboration for years, and their long-awaited EP, they capture lightning in a bottle. More, please. | Nite-Funk: Nite-Funk | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22091-nite-funk/ | Nite-Funk | When combined, Nite Jewel and Dâm-Funk can arguably be considered a supergroup, as both artists have forged their own solid paths in the underbelly of the electronic music scene. It was only a matter of time before the pair joined forces on a real project: They've been teasing that union for close to a decade now through one decent collaboration and several loose associations. On their long-awaited collaborative release Nite-Funk, we get a glimpse of what these two can do when their creative forces unite on an EP, and it’s lightning in a bottle.
In September of 2015, Nite Jewel and Dâm-Funk dropped off what was presumed to be their Nite-Funk lead single “Can U Read Me?” The track was woozy and arguably less aggressive than their previous 2009 collaboration “Am I Gonna Make It,” which was more upbeat but underproduced. While “Can U Read Me?” didn’t make the EP (though it definitely should have), the song signified the direction the duo would be taking on Nite-Funk. At four tight tracks, Nite-Funk is merely an appetizer for a dinner we’ve been craving for years. Both Nite Jewel and Dâm-Funk bring their best selves to the project, channeling vibes of more recent duo successes like AlunaGeorge, only less syrupy and blippy and more soulful and funky.
The breezy opener “Don’t Play Games” delivers melodic hums from Nite Jewel with Dâm-Funk adding playful keys and delicate synths. “Let Me Be Me” follows, carrying a darker, Hall and Oates-esque vibe, with Nite Jewel singing crisply and chanting “I’ve gotta get out and be free.” The slower-simering “Love x2” sounds eerily like a Janet Jackson deep cut, and Nite Jewel travels along that same vein on the mid-tempo “U Can Make Me.” If there is one critique to offer (outside of the exclusion of “Can U Read Me?”) it’s that Nite-Funk could easily be regarded as a Nite Jewel project featuring Dâm-Funk. While his presence is certainly felt through the intoxicating production, it still leans in Nite Jewel’s favor, especially when her ethereal vocals are inserted into the beat. This could have easily been tacked onto her latest solo album Liquid Cool. But even judged on those terms—a Nite Jewel solo EP that happens to feature Dâm-Funk—it sounds like a success. "
*Nite-Funk *was more than likely the result of a seven-year conversation between Nite Jewel and Dâm-Funk playing the “should we or shouldn’t we?” game. Four tracks is only so much to go on, but if this short-but-sweet project was their litmus test, then they should race back to the studio and cut a full-length project. More, please. | 2016-07-08T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-07-08T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Glydezone | July 8, 2016 | 7.8 | 061498ab-3463-4f68-b229-a4565b8b91dc | Kathy Iandoli | https://pitchfork.com/staff/kathy-iandoli/ | null |
The Rise and Fall of Paramount Records: Vol. 1 (1917–1932), released on Jack White's Third Man imprint and Revenant, is a 22-pound set that comes in a thick cardboard box. At the center of the collection is a drive containing 800 songs from Paramount’s first decade, a period that shaped the landscape for the rise of a recording industry anchored on jazz, rock'n'roll, and country music. | The Rise and Fall of Paramount Records: Vol. 1 (1917–1932), released on Jack White's Third Man imprint and Revenant, is a 22-pound set that comes in a thick cardboard box. At the center of the collection is a drive containing 800 songs from Paramount’s first decade, a period that shaped the landscape for the rise of a recording industry anchored on jazz, rock'n'roll, and country music. | Various Artists: The Rise & Fall of Paramount Records, Volume One (1917-1932) | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/18703-the-rise-fall-of-paramount-records-volume-one-1917-1932/ | The Rise & Fall of Paramount Records, Volume One (1917-1932) | The Rise and Fall of Paramount Records: Vol. 1 (1917–1932) arrives like a family of nested matryoshka dolls. Sent by post, the 22-pound compendium comes in a wide and thick cardboard box, with the name and address of Paramount’s parent enterprise, the long-extinct Wisconsin Chair Company, branded on the side for the sake of authentic anachronism. Inside, two-inch walls of Styrofoam and a plastic sheath protect what Third Man and Revenant Records, the project’s operational partners, call The Cabinet of Wonder.
The hinged-and-clasped oak Cabinet bears Paramount’s iconic medallion on the outside, an eagle with its wings spread and head cocked, talons locked into the label’s name and positioned in front of a grooved record that suggests a morning’s rising sun. The set smells of varnish and glue and furniture—sweet but a little sour, too. Clasp popped, five distinct layers of wonder follow: a batch of six marbled brown LPs housed in an old-fashioned wooden binder; a velum envelope containing replications of ephemera from the earliest days of the recording industry; a hard-cover volume that tells the story of that troublesome start and its biggest stars; and a phone-book sized catalogue that does its best to detail nearly every performer included and, for the first time ever, name each of the thousands of records Paramount released in its two-decade lifespan.
The littlest doll, wedged into a specially cut hole in the green felt platform that lines the box, is a tarnished brass flash drive, playfully dubbed a Jobber-Luxe. The contraption is crafted to look like the reproducer-and-needle assembly of one of the Wisconsin Chair Company’s Vista Talking Machines, the reason they got into the nebulous and uncertain business of selling records, anyway. It is the ultimate fulfillment of the set’s creative anachronism. The drive contains 800 songs culled from Paramount’s first decade, a fitful and suddenly fertile period that, in many ways, shaped the landscape for the rise of a recording industry anchored on jazz, rock ’n’ roll, and country music. Taken together, these recordings are no less than one blueprint of what has become American music.
Through scrupulous research, audacious design, and ostentatious packaging, this two-volume collection’s first installment does precisely what the best box sets intend to do—add proper deference and context to music that remains vital and significant. Retailing for $400, The Rise and Fall is no doubt expensive, especially considering that there’s a second and complementary volume forthcoming. But at once, it’s a history lesson, a dance hall, a bandstand, and a smoky blues parlor, all tucked neatly into one sturdy box. This is the Cabinet of Wonder, indeed.
The Paramount Records story is one of American entertainment’s great musical curiosities and catalysts. The label started slowly and without certainty, publishing cheap singles so that the people buying monolithic turntables from the Wisconsin Chair Company would actually have something to hear. The label operated with eternal economy, using talent scouts instead of investing in field recording equipment, forgoing demos, and working in cheap studios where even some of the best takes were of mediocre quality.
But the real jolt to the company—and the reason this set so closely mirrors the sound at the start of its country’s music industry—came with the arrival of Mayo Williams. A proud and cunning black man and former professional football player, Williams had gone to Brown and worked a stint as a salesman for the blues-and-jazz-heavy record label Black Swan. When Paramount purchased Black Swan, he traveled to Wisconsin from Chicago in 1923 to ask for a job; he emerged as a talent scout, a talent manager, and the true pioneer of the short-lived empire that pushed Paramount toward the front of the emerging “race records” industry—that is, recording black music to sell to black listeners.
“There’s 14 million Negroes in our great country and they will buy records if recorded by one of their own, because we are the only folks that can sing and interpret hot jazz songs just off the griddle,” Mamie Smith’s impresario, Perry Bradford, had said in 1920. Mamie had happened upon a hit for Okeh; the year Williams arrived in Wisconsin, Bessie Smith had done the same at Columbia. Williams’ professed specialty had become a suddenly hot commodity and his subsequent discovery, advocacy, and management of his artists made stars that, in turn, made movements. With Blind Blake and Blind Lemon Jefferson, Ma Rainey and Ethel Waters, Williams turned Paramount into an artistic institution if only by sheer commercial willpower. Williams left the company in 1927, the year that this volume—which documents the rise of Paramount just before its Depression-abetted fall—ends.
The structure and sound of many of the songs found throughout The Rise and Fall and within the archives of Paramount’s peers proved foundational to the shape of modern music. But pondering the historical implications of Papa Charlie Jackson’s acrid wit and aggressive playing or the twinkling roar of Jimmy Blythe’s piano runs the risk of ignoring this set’s most incredible invitation: to let these songs simply play (on vinyl, in iTunes, or through the customized and customizable playlists included on the Jobber-Luxe) and to immerse oneself in some incredible, make-or-break performances. It’s tempting to get lost in the high-design grandeur of the Cabinet of Wonder, but this music—gathered piecemeal from the collections of enthusiasts all over the world, fighting always through a scrim of static on these remastered recordings—is the raison d’être, the heart of a box alive with history.
When these songs were made, they existed on the bleeding edge of entertainment and society, with black suddenly meeting white, farm suddenly meeting city, sound suddenly meeting cylinder. Indeed, many of the performers here, such as Ma Rainey, represent the coming senescence of their chosen forms, while folks like blues patriarch Blind Lemon Jefferson, plainspoken country singer Ernest Stoneman and the incredibly versatile pianist Lovie Austin, all included here, represent the development of their own respective frontiers. Rise and Fall lets you slip back into that moment, to pretend that these blues and sermons and silly songs are your vernacular, too.
Allow that, and the Wonders come quickly. Jelly Roll Morton and Ma Rainey, James P. Johnson and Blind Blake, the North Carolina Ramblers and Fletcher Henderson: They’re among the popular standbys represented here. But the real joy of these 800 tracks comes with the personal discoveries. Alabama bluesman Ed Bell recorded only four songs for Paramount in 1927. All included in this box, they share a childlike sense of rhythm, with Bell starting and stopping and bounding between tinny notes in fits of whimsy. His voice is not as heavy or as haunting as those of his Southern contemporaries, giving it a singsong approachability. There are two 1924 tunes from Ukulele “Bob” Williams, where social provocation supporting the then-jailed Marcus Garvey and Republican public policy takes the guise of jaunty little numbers for four strings and a jubilant voice. The Norfolk Jubilee Quartette delivers wonderfully woozy harmonies, particularly on the stepwise and springy “Pleading Blues” or their torpid and bass-anchored “Swing Low Sweet Chariot”. Over swiveling horns and simple piano, Baltimore’s Viola Bartlette winks and smiles as she sings of the archetypal dilemma between welcoming a new lover and not disappointing old dad, either. Trixie Smith takes a decidedly less reserved approach on “My Man Rocks Me (With One Steady Roll)”, a salacious tune about sex that lasts for the better part of a day (13 hours!) and treats double entendre and suggestive rhymes as conscripts. “There’s no slippin’ when he once takes hold,” she purrs, pointing a direct arrow toward the radio dial nearly a century later.
But The Rise and Fall is not just a glob of music. One of the most carefully considered sets I’ve ever seen, it puts these 800 tunes and the entire Paramount picture into a multidimensional context. Due to a lack of proper record-keeping, many of these sessions, songs, and musicians still hover in a cloud of mystery. Who played what on a session? When were they recorded? What songs are still left to be discovered? Thanks to an encyclopedic ream of research done by some of the most dedicated names in this particular act of audio archeology, The Rise and Fall works in earnest to tell the stories behind it all. The set includes hundreds of advertisements rescued from the era and recreates in toto a 1924 Paramount catalogue and The Paramount Book of Blues, a 1927 guide to the label that featured several laughable dossiers of the artists and bunches of sheet music.
Aside from hours of intrigue, such materials also make it clear that not much has changed during 90 years of the music industry: Just as Third Man proprietor Jack White and Black Keys singer Dan Auerbach feud in public now, so did diametric vixens Alberta Hunter and Ethel Waters then. Just as big labels seek the next trend on which to turn a fast dime now, Paramount’s pursuit of black musicians stemmed from surprise hits on other labels then. And just as social media now attempts to lure listeners via must-click-here promotion, Paramount’s illustrated advertisements in the Chicago Defender and its insistence that it had discovered singers then practically demanded that regular folks spend more on their records than anything else in life. “Race’s Favorite Stars on Paramount,” read one 1923 promotion. “Every Christian home will prize this record,” read another, stopping just short of suggesting that not buying that particular Norfolk Jubilee Quartette single would guarantee eternal damnation. The music industry, it seems, always begot high stakes.
In the beginning and, really, throughout most of the label’s history, the executives at Paramount and its parent company did not seem to understand the important trove they were building. During half of the era covered in this volume, for instance, the label released lots of baubles and bores, patriotic songs and symphonic recordings that simply didn’t excite like what came later. The possibility of music hadn’t occurred to them. And even when Williams was leading the race record series to dizzying sales and helping fuel the sound of a nation now suddenly listening, he wasn’t on salary. Otto Moeser, the president of the whole operation, once instructed Williams to take the freight elevator to a meeting in a lavish Chicago hotel. This was the 20s, after all, and Williams was a black man marketing records to black customers. That same oblivion resulted in the incomplete records and the destruction of the label’s archives when it went belly-up, a scene vividly limned by Scott Blackwood in the wondrous liner notes. Such retrospective ignorance makes the trove of The Rise and Fall that much more remarkable, valuable, and edifying. This is almost-lost history, faithfully restored.
But Third Man and Revenant seem to have the opposite—if notably less problematic—quandary: They truly understand the cultural and historical cachet of what they have gathered, and they present it with a clear respect. That’s something that Paramount itself, with its budget materials and condescending advertisements that played fast and loose with social stereotypes, certainly did not. But now, the riches come tucked away in a new oak box, lavishly packaged and highly priced so that mostly only the rich old men who already have an enthusiasm for this stuff will have access to it. It’s a reissue cycle that seems to push the music only another decade or so away from extinction. These Cabinets of Wonder, however impressive, will slowly but almost certainly become Coffins of Disuse, limited to the 5,000 people who hoard them.
“If people only want the songs, there are probably are other sources for most of it,” Dean Blackwood, who co-founded Revenant with his management client and friend John Fahey in the mid 90s, told me recently. “This is more about people with a fascination for the tactile and sensory world. That just can’t be replicated in the digital realm.”
But it doesn’t need to be that way. With a sigh, Blackwood adds that selling the 5,000 manufactured copies of each volume will essentially make The Rise and Fall effort a break-even enterprise, despite the decade of work and global contributions that went into it. Why, then, not pad the income a bit by making the music accessible to those who can’t plunk down a car payment on a box set, perhaps by selling the USB drives for $100 or streaming the assets through a subscription service, such as the one provided to the press for this release? If the point of this labor is to give the music included both reverence and eternal life, as its mere existence suggests, is there any better end than making sure as many people as possible hear it? Why save something only to let it sink into sure atrophy?
Almost a century ago, the miserly folks at Paramount would have found a way to make sure more people heard these tunes, if only to make yet another dollar. There’s something commendable about not doing that, but you can’t really hear that, can you? | 2013-11-22T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2013-11-22T01:00:00.000-05:00 | null | Third Man | November 22, 2013 | 9.2 | 0614dc0f-3790-4ccb-b22a-fa6565672a11 | Grayson Haver Currin | https://pitchfork.com/staff/grayson-haver currin/ | null |
An artist turned musician, Temple seemingly discovered that a four-track layers audio the same way an artist slathers paint, though the former offered him endless chances for reconfiguration. | An artist turned musician, Temple seemingly discovered that a four-track layers audio the same way an artist slathers paint, though the former offered him endless chances for reconfiguration. | Luke Temple: Snowbeast | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/11113-snowbeast/ | Snowbeast | Luke Temple's biography mentions his job at a candy shop in California, a time when he slept in the forest for a year, and painting murals on apartment walls for rich New Yorkers. An artist turned musician, Luke Temple discovered that a four-track layers audio the same way an artist slathers paint, though the former offered him endless chances for reconfiguration. His story, and even this easy equation ("music is painting"), builds the gentle naiveté that runs throughout Temple's second LP.
"Saturday People" leads off Snowbeast and it's easily Temple's strongest song and showcases everything that's good about the singer/songwriter/multi-instrumentalist. Temple's banjo carries the brisk waltz through dynamic shifts that move him from a easy lope to a section of harmonies straight out of an early CSNY record. In fact the lines "People/ Looking-glass people/ Saturday people/ Will live one final time," when sung in that harmony (and perhaps coupled with the over-the-top "A mescaline freak-out in an off-Broadway show in the morning") invoke a variety of romanticized and alienated imagery that's snatched straight from a time when squares were there to be looked at and made strange. In that sense, "Saturday People" is a period piece, or maybe a period triptych. Aside from the outro, the song's three parts are miniature gems grouped by time signature and quasi-pyschedelic inflections; they refract and reflect each others' brilliance.
"Saturday People" is solid through and through, and it's really no surprise that Temple can't keep up the momentum through the rest of the record, the song really is twice as good as anything that follows. Most of the rest of the songs seem to hinge on one melodic idea that comes and goes. Consequently, I spent most of my time waiting for those moments to crop up. In "Medicine" an almost-dramatic minor-key melody lends the opening line ("Better take your medicine") a paternalistic threat that simply peters out as the song progresses, only to revive itself when the hook returns. But it dies away again as it turns out, "your medicine was love." Oh. It's always disappointing when a songwriter tries to decode his music for the listener, but when it turns out that the equation is "x=love," there's no hope for redemption.
Yet it's no surprise that the "answer" to the question "What is 'medicine'?" is "love." It's a totally conventional answer, and "Medicine" is a conventional song by design. Another acoustic slow-poke, "People Do", follows similar constraints. Though it showcases Temple's strange, lovely voice and those harmonies again, there is little to listen for besides the sheer pleasure of hearing his vocal turn miraculously from bloodless to soulful with just the slightest application of vibrato.
The acoustic tracks are few and far between, though. For the most part Temple favors a melange of tinkling synths and keyboards. When he uses them for their rhythmic qualities, as on "Family Vacation", he's on firm footing, threading his melodies through a Timbaland-ish tom beat until the frenetic releases that serve as choruses. "Family Vacation" is a fun track, and it's woefully brief. More often, though, Temple uses his keyboards as texturing devices, and he tends to favor sounds somewhere in the range of his voice. This means that a song like "Serious", though it's a fine song, suffers from treble overload. The lone bass cannot support the layers and layers of high-end piled upon it.
Temple is a relatively young songwriter and this, his second full-length, shows promise. Its unevenness seems like a result of his struggle with ideas, rather than a lack of ideas worth filling out. The fuller the palette he works with, the better the result. Such a frail, pretty voice needs something to support it, and in songs like "Saturday People" where it finds itself in a niche carved out especially for it, rather than adrift on a see of aimless synths, Temple's various gifts amplify each other. | 2008-02-01T01:00:04.000-05:00 | 2008-02-01T01:00:04.000-05:00 | Pop/R&B | Mill Pond | February 1, 2008 | 7.4 | 06162e6f-51ba-4eec-b370-a6acf50f99cd | Jessica Suarez | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jessica-suarez/ | null |
The ferocious Leeds trio treat post-punk like a game of Tetris, joyfully flipping and rearranging the elements into new patterns. | The ferocious Leeds trio treat post-punk like a game of Tetris, joyfully flipping and rearranging the elements into new patterns. | Drahla: Useless Coordinates | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/drahla-useless-coordinates/ | Useless Coordinates | As we all know from that junk-science email your mom forwarded you back in 2003, our brains recognize the overall shape of a word as much as its proper letter sequence, allowing us to read sentences even if the words cnoaitn a bcunh of typos. The music of Drahla inspires a similar game of mental gymnastics. On the one hand, the Leeds trio embraces the brevity and ferocity you’d expect from self-professed Wire fans. But within those parameters, all bets are off. Singer/guitarist Luciel Brown, bassist Rob Riggs, and drummer Mike Ainsley treat songwriting as a game of Tetris—the playing field might be narrow, but there’s a palpable joy in the way they flip and rearrange the elements into new interlocking patterns.
Useless Coordinates touches on the big issues of the day—environmental degradation, gender nonconformity, wealth concentration—but minus the admonishing tone of much topical post-punk. Brown’s the sort of singer who’s starting a new sentence before finishing the previous one, and she seems less interested in our apocalyptic headlines themselves than in how we receive them—as jolts that quickly dissolve into the slipstream while we get stoned on information overload. On “Twelve Divisions of the Day,” her thoughts cohere just long enough to call out “narcissism on the net,” but the reference whips by like an ad on a speeding bus, while the accompanying machine-gunned drum break serves as the cold black puddle that douses your legs. On “React/Revolt,” Brown rifles through cryptic, dour images (“Wool on woman/Flies on food/Capitalize/Status signs/Sovereign sector/Burn the oil/Recognize/Lucrative signs/Blood enamel/Ripened peach/Acid on/Glistening teeth”) as if she were fronting Parquet Goths.
At their most focused and fierce—like the needling “Stimulus for Living”—Drahla resemble Sonic Youth’s early no-wave and MTV-baiting phases folded into one another (a trait compounded by the fact Brown often sings to you the way Kim Gordon sang to [Chuck D](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SDTSUwIZdMk)). But during the breakneck roller-coaster plummet of “Serenity,” Drahla unveil a powerful new weapon in the form of guest saxophonist Chris Duffin (of avant-drone outfit XAM Duo), who maintains an imposing enough presence to earn unofficial fourth-member status. He wields his sax like a flamethrower, blasting open portals into unrestrained psych-jazz chaos. But he can also alter the band’s chemistry in more subtle ways—after hovering in the background of the frantic “Serotonin Level,” he leads the song into its murky, bass-battered coda like a lion tamer luring his beast into a cage.
It’s a rare moment of inertia on an otherwise convulsive record, yet a necessary one. On Useless Coordinates, Duffin’s sax isn’t just some decorative noisemaker, but a crucial corrupting influence. For a genre once defined by limitless possibility, post-punk has codified into a familiar formula of discordant guitars, propulsive bass, and melody-averse sing-speak. But if Useless Coordinates embraces post-punk as a received language, Drahla remind us there’s still freedom and joy to be had when speaking in tongues. | 2019-05-06T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-05-06T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Captured Tracks | May 6, 2019 | 7.7 | 061cbc49-8c13-4bf8-ab48-3371314bb7f1 | Stuart Berman | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stuart-berman/ | |
Rather than delving further into experimentation or exploring their strengths, the world's most well-loved prog-metal band has made an...A Perfect Circle record. | Rather than delving further into experimentation or exploring their strengths, the world's most well-loved prog-metal band has made an...A Perfect Circle record. | Tool: 10,000 Days | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/8105-10000-days/ | 10,000 Days | Like most progressive rock and heavy metal-- hell, maybe most popular music in general-- suspension of disbelief is key with Tool. Taken at face value, with their song suites, meat puppet videos, and histrionic singer, they're pretty goofy. People make fun of Tool fans because they assume they take the band seriously-- these spotty, greasy kids with bad shoes and worse hair who already wear an insult on their T-shirts. At 28, I'd feel funny mocking 15-year-olds still finding their place in the world. And as for taking them seriously-- well, I take Tool about as seriously as I do black metal or Lil Jon or the films of Tsui Hark. Which is to say, not very.
A Pitchfork-friendly analogy: Tool are the Radiohead of xFC-metal. Both bands predate scenes they later became avatars for; both were more creative and inspirational than their followers; both were incredibly pretentious; and both still managed to sell an ass-load of records. Tool didn't release an album between 1996 and 2001. They missed xFC-metal's entire rise and fall, an era of whiteboy dreads, bonsai facial hair, funk bass poppin', and constipated balladry. And much like Radiohead when they dropped the Kid A/Amnesiac doubleshot, Tool released Lateralus early in this decade to radio silence and huge numbers.
Like a mall-friendly King Crimson, Lateralus had a starless and bible black sound that actually rocked rather than wittering on, converting complex, mathematic passages into visceral rock. Also like King Crimson, the lyrics were mostly garbage, but goddamn did that rhythm section pummel the shit out of its instruments. As with the Mars Volta's debut, the drums were the lead voice on Lateralus, and Danny Carey was his instrument's Minnie Ripperton.
Five years later, Tool return with *10,000 Days. But rather than delving further into experimentation or exploring their strengths, Tool have made an...A Perfect Circle record. Like singer Maynard James Keenan's side project, 10,000 Days is considerably less punishing and much more ethereal. Songs like "Lost Keys" and "Vigniti Tires" are dark ambient soundscrapes that just make you wonder where the drums went. And when they are there, they're decidedly less brutal than on Lateralus. On "Right in Two" they sound more like bongos. The title track features sitar and tabla. Listening to this album, you get the sinking feeling that Tool have made an art-rock, rather than art-metal, album. And yes, the difference is considerable.
Keenan's vocals are no less powerful here, but your appreciation of his style still depends largely on your feelings towards quasi-operatic hard rock (you know, like emo, except they actually hit the notes they're going for). People who enjoy voices that sound like they're singing into their overcoats to ward off a night chill will probably find it embarrassing. (The white dude version of melisma?) The lyrics-- the usual mix of drug references, conspiracy theories, tortured declarations of vague emotional trauma, and general doom-mongering-- won't do much to convince non-believers. And with most songs stretching from the seven- to 12-minute range-- and without the stop-start whiplash that was the previous albums' definition of rhythm-- it's unlikely that most listeners will possess the patience or fortitude to make the pilgrimage more than a couple of times.
10,000 Days is supposedly named for the amount of time between Keenan's mother becoming paralyzed and when she died, so it's sort of a "Death Disco" for suburban teenage potheads. If only the music had one-tenth of the Public Image Limited song's power. Instead I find myself in the awkward position of trying to sell you on the merits of a deeply uncool band by telling you to go buy their last album instead. But hey, the next time you're sneering at someone in a Tool shirt, just remember how you look walking down the street with the words "The Boy Least Likely To" or "Clap Your Hands Say Yeah" across your chest.
CORRECTION: A previous version of this article contained language that was offensive. It has been removed. | 2006-05-01T02:00:45.000-04:00 | 2006-05-01T02:00:45.000-04:00 | Metal | Volcano | May 1, 2006 | 5.9 | 061fcee6-00f7-4175-976a-bafd3c024a6d | Jess Harvell | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jess-harvell/ | null |
The tactile and heartfelt fifth album by the instrumental Austrian trio Radian doesn’t simply reward repeated listens, it demands them. | The tactile and heartfelt fifth album by the instrumental Austrian trio Radian doesn’t simply reward repeated listens, it demands them. | Radian: On Dark Silent Off | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22624-on-dark-silent-off/ | On Dark Silent Off | Over the course of their first four albums, Radian perfected a painterly approach to sound construction. What makes the instrumental Austrian trio exceptional is its ability to wrest seemingly endless possibilities by fine-tuning the grain of every sound. On their fifth album On Dark Silent Off, Radian take the tactile dimension of their music even further while also introducing groove and drama basically for the first time. On Dark Silent Off bristles with a passion that you don't hear on their back catalog. It's not like past Radian records are stiff, but the band always sounded slightly removed as it supplied you with a constant flow of sensory input. This time, they connect with your heart too.
On Dark Silent Off begins much as Radian's other albums do, with two minutes of instrumental textures building into a half-organic, half-synthetic hybrid: electric guitar chords strained through an amplifier, a bleeping electronic pulse, and drum sticks establishing a pattern on snare. As usual for them, the overall tone feels, if not cold, then at least impersonal, an exercise in modernist architecture that privileges audacity of form over comfort. This time, the band relied heavily on transducers to project sounds onto various surfaces, a process not unlike replaying tracks through an amp or studio monitor to increase the feeling of spatial dimension. When new guitarist Martin Siewert plays guitar chords, it feels like you can reach out and touch the grill covering on his amplifier. You can hear air moving behind Siewert and Brandlmayr's array of electronic noises. If the music on On Dark Silent Off had been painted on a canvas, you'd notice the detail in the brush strokes from twenty feet away.
But right around the two-minute mark of album opener “Pickup Pickout,” Radian switch into an actual groove, like a post-rock interpretation of a techno banger. Out of nowhere, the music starts to pant, sweat, and move. The sudden rush of humanity is startling. The song ends with a repetitive, pulsing digital loop, and by that point Radian have covered more ground in one piece than they have on some of their entire past albums. In the same vein, a piece like “Recreate Loved Objects” unfolds like a suite, almost a mini-album unto itself, as its somber single-note guitar line traverses a shifting landscape of sounds. Suffice it to say the album doesn’t simply reward repeated listens, it demands them.
Radian's brand of art rock has always gone down surprisingly smooth in whole-album servings, but they've outdone themselves on every level here. More limber and fiery than ever, the band has risen out the experimental cul-de-sac with a riveting work that should appeal to both its expected audience and to new fans who might have otherwise dismissed this style of music as too antiseptic for their liking. | 2016-11-21T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2016-11-21T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Thrill Jockey | November 21, 2016 | 8 | 061fe71f-b200-41e4-8a16-ec325c590cfa | Saby Reyes-Kulkarni | https://pitchfork.com/staff/saby-reyes-kulkarni/ | null |
Another year, another indispensable Miles Davis box. This season's gift from Columbia/Legacy is a 6xCD set of every track put to tape by Davis' revolving cast of players bewteen 1972-75. | Another year, another indispensable Miles Davis box. This season's gift from Columbia/Legacy is a 6xCD set of every track put to tape by Davis' revolving cast of players bewteen 1972-75. | Miles Davis: The Complete On the Corner Sessions | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/10901-the-complete-on-the-corner-sessions/ | The Complete On the Corner Sessions | Miles Davis dropped jazz for good in late 1971-- not that he'd been keeping up many appearances for the genre in several years. Though his band would still occasionally play old standards live, his main show in the early 70s was free-ish funk, openly indebted to Sly Stone and James Brown (and I still wonder what Davis would have made of Funkadelic). Of course, the maligned genre in question-- jazz-- was mostly the property of people writing about Davis, and in some cases, his still-jazz-oriented peers, so it's no surprise to read his bandmates of the time (percussionist Mtume, bassist Michael Henderson, guitarists Pete Cosey and Reggie Lucas, drummer Al Foster, saxophonist Dave Liebman) refer back to those days with no small amount of pride, and scorn towards the ever-present "critics". The records Davis made during this time sounded raw (but weren't), hard (and were) and not the kind of thing that was going to fit into any particular canon, even as their maker adopted conscious efforts to position his music for younger, blacker audiences. And he might have dropped jazz, but he picked up something a lot more important: the future of music.
On the Corner* was released in October 1972, followed by Big Fun and Get Up With It, both in 1974. All of these records contained (at least partially) music recorded during sessions in 1972-75, the period represented on Columbia Legacy's latest extravagant box-set treatment for Davis, The Complete On the Corner Sessions. Over six discs, we get every track put to tape during the period by Davis' revolving cast of players (in addition to the core of his touring band, luminous Davis alums like Chick Corea, Jack DeJohnette, John McLaughlin, Herbie Hancock, Don Alias, and Bennie Maupin drop by), and though I don't anticipate many all-night OtC listening parties in the near future, it's arguably the greatest collection of Davis' post-Bitches Brew studio music in one set. The thing is, this is thick, sticky stuff; 20-minute jams like "Ife" or the unedited take of "On the Corner" are amazingly gripping despite their lengths, but process a few in a row, and you risk experiencing dizzy spells. In retrospect, maybe it's not surprising that Davis retired in 1975, resurfacing half a decade later playing music that was a lot more easily digestible.
Since its 72 release, On the Corner (featured in full on the last disc in the box) has attained a level of infamy outmatching any of Davis' other records, though not really for the right reasons. Downbeat's equally infamous calling-out of its tunes as "repetitious boredom" unfortunately summed up the feeling of many folks who would have preferred to only remember Davis' music from the 50s and 60s. However, rock and experimental music fans weren't quite so dismissive-- in fact, today, OtC is one of the easiest Davis records to recommend to a non-convert, especially if they're down with the wtf production and uber-grooved-out beats. Teo Macero's editing/splicing/midwifing of the myriad sessions that comprised the record were no less significant to its sound than Davis' pieces, and considering how records are made today, perhaps more so. Still, it's the avant-funk and druggy ambience that lingers longest. There's a reason people compare this stuff to Can.
Disc one features unedited takes of "On the Corner", "One and One", and "Helen Butte/Mr. Freedom X", all of which would appear in messed-with form on the 1972 LP. And though *OtC'*s edits are a considerable part of its magic, the surprising thing with these tracks is how well they work as just jams (greatly assisted by the fact that in most cases, their signature hooks are intact, such as the hi-hat pulse in "On the Corner", or the classic sing-song melody in "Helen Butte"). "Jabali" is a previously unissued track, featuring a slow, lurching bassline from Henderson, and gradually picks up steam while simultaneously becoming more psychedelic (anyone order three extra keyboards?). The second disc begins with "Ife" (originally issued on Big Fun), and adds Paul Buckmaster on electric cello. Buckmaster's contribution to Davis' music at that time was considerable, especially via turning the trumpeter onto Karlheinz Stockhausen, whose use of recorded and electric sound had a big impact on the recording of OtC. "Chieftan" is a previously unissued, agitated vamp, featuring an insistent hi-hat + rim shot beat, augmented (like many tracks from this era) by tabla and sitar. "Turnaround" and "U-Turnaround" are also new tracks, but whose slow, heavy grooves would have sounded very at home on, say, Live-Evil or Dark Magus. "Rated X" (later on Get Up With It) is just a badass funk track that features some seriously distorted production, and should probably be sampled by all crate-digging, rare-grooves DJs ASAP.
Disc three begins with another track from Get Up With It ("Billy Preston"-- not featuring Billy Preston btw), and several unissued tracks: the somewhat raucous, wah-wah guitar-powered "The Hen", two HUGE mixes of "Big Fun/Holly-wuud" (which would later be severed to make both sides of a 74 single), the skeletal, relatively restrained "Peace", and the funk dirge "Mr. Foster", which takes the basic groove of "Big Fun", and stretches it across 15 minutes of mournful vamping and uncharacteristically solemn solos from Liebman and Davis. Disc four contains the two epic-length tracks from Get Up With It, "Calypso Frelimo" and the Duke Ellington tribute, "He Loved Him Madly". The first piece begins as reverb-drenched, frantic funk, and moves into molasses-paced death groove (though still laced with reverb, as if recorded in a subway tunnel). I've never been a huge fan of "He Loved Him Madly", though its extended (30+ minutes) calm is a welcome respite from the otherwise merciless pace of the rest of the box.
"Maiysha" (also from Get Up With It) begins disc five, and though its major-key, curiously sprightly guitar figure seems a little out of place with generally darker (or more cynical) music on the other discs, it still retains the exotic flavor of the box's music. "Mtume" begins with-- you guessed it-- a conga solo by Davis' permanent conga player Mtume, and soon turns into an up-tempo Afro-Cuban groove with cool triple-guitar wah-ing from Lucas, Cosey and Dominique Gaumont. (A shorter outtake of the same track features a good soprano sax solo from Sonny Fortune.) The 19-minute blues-shuffle "Hip Skip" (with a pretty bizarre organ solo by Davis), frantic "What They Do" (reminiscent of the faster stuff on Dark Magus) and brief, strangely loungy "Minnie"-- notable mostly for being recorded at Davis' last session in 1975 before his five-year retirement -- are all previously unissued. The final disc of the box contains all of the OtC LP, in addition to a fairly straight blues on "Red China Blues" (from Get Up With It, and featuring the only harmonica solo I can remember hearing on a Davis track), and both sides of the "Big Fun"/"Holly-wuud" single.
So, here we are again, near the end of another year, with another indispensable Miles Davis box to purchase (which Columbia doubtlessly realizes, as the lofty $120+ price tag might indicate). Do you need it? If you're a die-hard, it's obvious: you do. If you've never heard On the Corner, it's obvious: you don't. However, you do need to buy OtC sooner than yesterday. Perhaps in six months or a year, after you've stopped annoying all your friends by telling them how great it is, then you can go back and order the box-- by which time, should be available for about half of what is now. Davis saw the future with this music. Be smart, do the same. | 2007-11-15T01:00:01.000-05:00 | 2007-11-15T01:00:01.000-05:00 | Jazz | Columbia / Legacy | November 15, 2007 | 9.2 | 061ff15b-29e5-401a-94f1-af80a7d10ae9 | Dominique Leone | https://pitchfork.com/staff/dominique-leone/ | null |
Sarah Lee Guthrie, Woody's granddaughter, and her husband Johnny Irion have been singing together for 13 years and recording for eight. Jeff Tweedy and Wilco's Patrick Sansone co-produced the pop-friendly Americana duo's sugary new album, Wassiac Way. | Sarah Lee Guthrie, Woody's granddaughter, and her husband Johnny Irion have been singing together for 13 years and recording for eight. Jeff Tweedy and Wilco's Patrick Sansone co-produced the pop-friendly Americana duo's sugary new album, Wassiac Way. | Sarah Lee Guthrie / Johnny Irion: Wassiac Way | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/18348-sarah-lee-guthrie-johnny-irion-wassiac-way/ | Wassiac Way | Sarah Lee Guthrie and her husband Johnny Irion have been singing together for 13 years and recording for eight. In that time, they’ve released three studio albums that have been generally lumped in with the Americana set, thanks primarily to their folksy harmonies and acoustic-based sound. Yet they’ve often bristled against the strictures of the roots scene, and the duo have indulged their taste for unabashedly pop hooks and moody soundscapes. In other words, they ought to be a perfect match for producer Jeff Tweedy: As frontman for Wilco, he certainly knows a thing or two about screwing around with folk-rock conventions, and as a helmer for Low and Mavis Staples, he has devised a recognizable sound that is playful yet artful, ambitious yet restrained. Furthermore, he has a long history with the Guthrie family, starting back in 1998 when he worked with Nora Guthrie to put music to some of her father Woody’s unrecorded lyrics. That incredibly fruitful project produced three LPs’ worth of strong material and launched a cottage industry of sorts. Sarah Lee is Nora’s niece and Woody’s granddaughter, which makes her the third generation of Guthries, living or dead, to work with Tweedy in some capacity.
With Wilco’s Patrick Sansone he co-produced Guthrie and Irion’s new record, Wassaic Way, but any expectations that artists and producers are well matched are immediately dispelled on the very first song, which is called “Chairman Meow”. Seriously. It’s a slice of tooth-decay meme-pop about a girl with a crib in Koreatown, a movie in production, and a cat with a clever name. Never mind that it’s impossible to determine if the song is parody or paean: it just sounds bad. Tweedy and Sansone turn the treble all the way up and the bass all the way down, which renders everything tinny and shrill. The drums plod along, the fuzz guitar fizzes like a child’s toy, the voices take on a pre-adolescent pitch. It all sounds juvenile.
Wassaic Way could be a sequel to Guthrie's 2009 children's album, Go Waggaloo. While there's nothing wrong with targeting the pre-K set (check out Tweedy's version of Woody's "Hoodoo Voodoo" for proof), there is something alienating about treating adult listeners like children. Whether attempting upbeat power pop or nestling into a saccharine ballad, these songs are persistently coy and cloying, with lyrics about butterflies and trick-or-treat that habitually mistake platitudes for insights. "How are we here? What are we made of?" Guthrie asks on "Circle of Souls. "Now the dream is clear, so what are we afraid of?" It sounds lofty and portentous, but ultimately sacrifices meaning for rhyme.
Despite-- or, perhaps, due to-- Guthrie and Irion’s long history as bandmates and spouses, their voices go together all too well. One is cake, the other icing: both are uniformly sugary, but they do the same thing, set the same tone, and convey the same emotions in exactly the same way. There’s no contrast between them, therefore no tension or conflicts in these songs. Surprisingly, they sound better when they sing solo, as on “Circle of Souls” or “Not Probably Gone”. Even more surprisingly, they sound best at their most conservative, when they settle into songs modestly rooted in a quaint country sound, like “Still Dreaming” or the harmonica-drenched title track. It's pleasant enough-- not exactly memorable but also not actively off-putting to a grown-up listener. | 2013-08-05T02:00:04.000-04:00 | 2013-08-05T02:00:04.000-04:00 | null | Redeye | August 5, 2013 | 4.5 | 06204022-139d-4512-be38-e93d75ad30e8 | Stephen M. Deusner | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stephen-m. deusner/ | null |
The singer-songwriter’s second album sharpens the darkness of a romantic estrangement into glittering pop gems. Apollo is still full of longing, but he’s ready to show his claws. | The singer-songwriter’s second album sharpens the darkness of a romantic estrangement into glittering pop gems. Apollo is still full of longing, but he’s ready to show his claws. | Omar Apollo: God Said No | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/omar-apollo-god-said-no/ | God Said No | On his second album, God Said No, Omar Apollo wields his heartbreak like a butterfly knife. On “Done With You,” an airy, brass-assisted pop song, he cloaks moments of devastating vulnerability with a protective layer of detached cool. In the shrugged-off chorus, he insists that he’s done with his lover—a toughness that stands in stark contrast to his earlier, velvety pleas for them to let him go. The video matches this energy, depicting the star as he alternates between waving blades at the viewer and running them painfully along his jawline. It’s a fitting visual representation of a record where Apollo sharpens some of his darkest moments into glinting pop gems.
God Said No originated from three months Apollo spent in London in 2023. Following the release of his debut full-length Ivory in 2022, tours with SZA and Billie Eilish, and a nomination for Best New Artist at the 2023 Grammys, the Mexican American singer-songwriter was riding a professional high, but privately nursing a broken heart as he surveyed the wreckage of a relationship. Working with familiar collaborators Teo Halm (here as executive producer), Carter Lang, and Blake Slatkin, Apollo first sketched out the 14 songs in the prestigious Abbey Road Studios, later finishing the album in the U.S. With his biggest hit to date being the gut-wrenching “Evergreen (You Didn’t Deserve Me at All),” Apollo already has something of a reputation as a heartbreak aficionado—as he recently told Complex, “my natural state is always longing.” But on this record, he paints that emotion with every shade on his palette. God Said No stretches far beyond downbeat balladeering; Apollo weaves his sadness, anger, and self-doubt through a collection of anthemic choruses and disco-tinged pop tracks.
On “Less of You” and “Drifting,” Apollo recalls Robyn’s style of tearful dancefloor anthem, the former combining Giorgio Moroder-esque vocoder melodies with a eulogy for a relationship that’s slowly evanescing, and the latter sprinkling Apollo’s romantic disillusionment over a breezy, Balearic-type beat. These shades of understated Europop are a new element of Apollo’s sound, brooding where once he might have belted. But his voice remains the star of the show, particularly when he’s trading gorgeous, tumbling melodies with Sudanese Canadian singer-songwriter Mustafa on the plaintive “Plane Trees.”
While they are often luxurious to listen to, Apollo’s ballads represent the album’s least compelling moments. “Empty” and “Dispose of Me” meander drowsily, doing little to distinguish this record from his previous bedroom R&B releases. A meditative voice note about grief from Pedro Pascal also wears thin on repeat listens. The album is more arresting when Apollo knowingly leans into the more unhinged aspects of heartbreak. Take the rousing lead single, “Spite,” where, with a hook that bristles with delicious fury, Apollo walks a razor-thin line between loving and hating the partner who’s keeping him hanging on. Over sulky licks of guitar, he brings the confusing loneliness of a situationship to life through bittersweet vignettes of dying flowers, unread text messages, and long flights taken alone. Elsewhere, he howls an embittered and desperate hook on the expansive “How,” his anger as coldly insistent as the drum machine that backs it.
These wild-eyed moments hint at more complex and ambitious possibilities for Apollo as a storyteller and as a pop star. On “Life’s Unfair,” a strutting funk-pop song, Apollo coolly admits to doing “something real bad” to someone he once wanted to marry. The trap-inflected standout “Against Me” takes a kind of hyper-masculine, posturing response to being dumped. On these songs, Apollo may be full of longing, but he’s also flawed, fired-up, and the self-proclaimed “baddest bitch.” God Said No stands apart from Apollo’s previous releases not only because of its genre experimentation and its stickier choruses, but for its willingness to get ugly. Here, Apollo has been knocked down, but he doesn’t play the victim. Instead, he bares his teeth. | 2024-07-10T00:01:00.000-04:00 | 2024-07-10T00:01:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | Warner | July 10, 2024 | 7.4 | 062362f1-a659-42ed-9263-ba612f5ec8f8 | Aimee Cliff | https://pitchfork.com/staff/aimee-cliff/ | |
The Wu-Tang Clan’s debut album channeled their grimy New York roots and love of ’70s kung fu into an instant hip-hop classic, launching a sprawling and influential culture empire. | The Wu-Tang Clan’s debut album channeled their grimy New York roots and love of ’70s kung fu into an instant hip-hop classic, launching a sprawling and influential culture empire. | Wu-Tang Clan: Enter the Wu-Tang (36 Chambers) | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/wu-tang-clan-enter-the-wu-tang-36-chambers/ | Enter the Wu-Tang (36 Chambers) | On August 11, 1973, at a back-to-school party in the Bronx, a local DJ named Kool Herc used two copies of a James Brown LP to create a blockbuster dance number from the breakbeat of “Give It Up or Turnit a Loose” that shook the party to its core. Just over a week later, Enter the Dragon—the story of martial artists Lee (played by an ascendent Bruce Lee), Roper (John Saxon), and Williams (Jim Kelly) infiltrating a fighting tournament—hit movie theaters. The film capitalized on the emerging kung fu craze, but Lee, Saxon, and Kelly kicking ass together had a stronger impact: the sight of a Chinese, white, and Black actor coming together to fight a common enemy was a sign of racial unity that also happened to appeal to as many ticket buyers as possible.
These converging movements—hip-hop, kung fu, and the unabashed culture mixing—would come to define the life and life’s work of Robert Diggs, who turned 4 years old in 1973. Diggs spent much of his early years traveling across the United States, but when he first heard rap music at a block party, his life found a new purpose. By 11, he was cutting up in rap battles across the East Coast, and whenever he was in New York, crashing with his family in the Stapleton Houses projects on Staten Island, he’d kill time seeing kung fu films with his cousin Russell Jones at the scuzzy Times Square theaters. The duo quickly adopted a regular weekend habit: They’d go to the movies, leave, fight each other with the moves they learned, hop the train back home, fight some more, run into other MCs, fight them, and then get into rap battles with said MCs.
But it was Enter the Dragon in particular—and another movie by director Lau Kar-leung, The 36th Chamber of Shaolin—that changed Diggs’ life. “It was through these films that I was able to see and feel from a non-Western point of view,” he explained. He also took the implicit message of the multicultural trio to heart, as he later told Andscape: “[Lee, Saxon, and Kelly] were all working together against the oppressor who was poisoning the people. If you add in a few other elements, that’s our country, bro!” The dual philosophies of martial arts films and the Five-Percenter Muslim teachings of his native New York were what pushed Diggs, in 1984, to corral Jones and fellow cousin Gary Grice to form their own rap group Force of the Imperial Master, which was changed to the less distinct All in Together Now less than a year later. At the same time, Diggs formed another group, D.M.D. Posse, with friends he’d made in his Park Hill neighborhood of Staten Island: Clifford Smith Jr., Lamont Hawkins, Jason Hunter, and Corey Woods. During a brief solo stint at Tommy Boy Records that involved a chintzy single titled “Ooh I Love You Rakeem,” Diggs relocated to Steubenville, Ohio, to live with his mother for a brief period.
It didn’t take long before Diggs was swept up in petty crime, leading to an altercation where he was arrested for allegedly shooting someone in the leg. Had Diggs been convicted, the eight-year prison sentence he was staring down might’ve squashed his rap ambitions before they ever truly began. With a second chance in hand, he was ready to turn his and his friends’ lives around for the better. While in Ohio, Diggs became friendly with producer Selwyn Bougard, later known as 4th Disciple. Before long, Bougard and Diggs were talking music and began recording demos in Bougard’s grandmother’s basement with a visiting Jones and Dennis Coles, a friend and roommate of Diggs’ who had bonded over Five-Percent Nation’s teachings and comic books together. Dingy setup aside—the mic was hung from a wire hanger with a sock as a pop filter—the group’s chaotic yet productive energy further inflated Diggs’ sense of purpose.
Once they all got back to New York in 1991, Diggs was ready to unite his friends under all things hip-hop, kung fu, and nerdy: He became the RZA; Jones was christened Ol’ Dirty Bastard; Grice transformed into the GZA; Smith dubbed himself Method Man; Hawkins took on the name U-God; Hunter emerged as Inspectah Deck; Woods took the mantle of Raekwon the Chef; Coles was reborn as the Ghostface Killah. Jamel Irief, a friend and mentee of GZA’s, joined shortly after and dubbed himself Masta Killa. RZA’s Avengers had been assembled, a cabal of microphone warriors who each brought their own piece of New York to the table. With a group name nicked from one of RZA and O.D.B.’s favorite movies—1983’s Shaolin and Wu Tang—Staten Island would become their Shaolin, the first to bear witness to the Wu-Tang Clan.
Wu-Tang entered a rap world far removed from the grimy atmosphere they were looking to conjure; jazz rap on the East Coast and G-funk on the West Coast took up most of the mainstream real estate, and it was hard for anything else to get a word in edgewise. But RZA’s approach was murky, rain-damaged, and hard as a roundhouse kick to the chest. He created many of the beats for Wu-Tang’s early music with a banged-up Ensoniq keyboard sampler he got from a trade with producer RNS of the Staten Island group the U.M.C.’s, a hand-me-down that reflected the DIY nature of his early music. RZA manifested a dark, warm, and playful energy for everyone to tap into, like they were standing around a bonfire in a junkyard.
The Wu-Tang Clan began recording at Firehouse Studios, a cheap spot in Brooklyn ill-equipped to handle one vocalist, never mind nine. Their first session cost $300, which they largely paid for in quarters; the recording booth was a walk-in closet connected to a living room that had to house the entire collective as they jammed in, taking turns recording verses with the little time they had. After they were done attempting the first song, an unsatisfied RZA completely remade the beat and gathered the group for another session where he rearranged the verses. Inspectah Deck’s verse, which was originally second, started the song off with a straight shot: “I smoke on the mic like ‘Smokin’ Joe’ Frazier.” The new beat throbbed with bass plinks, faint horns, and a kettle whistle similar to the one from Public Enemy’s “Rebel Without a Pause.” But where Public Enemy’s song sounded like a bubbling pot about to boil over, “Protect Ya Neck” seethed and rumbled like liquified concrete.
Every member of the Wu—save for Masta Killa, who had yet to formally join—fought for space and came out with swords swinging. It was the first example of their group chemistry on full display: Inspectah Deck’s guillotine-sharp brashness scraping against Raekwon and Method Man’s swagger; U-God’s smooth psychotics folding into O.D.B.’s controlled chaos; Ghostface’s howling precision playing against the stoic headbutts of RZA and GZA. “Protect Ya Neck” isn’t a song about anything more than proving your worth on the mic, eight passionate and talented rappers commiserating around years of joy, pain, and sacrifice filtered through a distorted sample of James Brown’s band the J.B.’s. Sampling soul records wasn’t unheard of at the time, but RZA had taken the early teachings of Kool Herc and DJ Premier and made them uglier and sadder, a novel reflection of the dusty metropolis they called home. It was a warning that New York rap was about to get a whole lot darker.
Wu-Tang released “Protect Ya Neck” as a single through their label Wu-Tang Records in December of ’92, where it quickly gathered steam in the underground. Every record sold came with the RZA’s phone number, in case any bigger fish wanted a piece. Eventually, he parlayed that hype into a group deal with Loud Records, which kicked off the creation of their debut album, Enter the Wu-Tang (36 Chambers), in earnest. This modest windfall didn’t improve conditions much. Even though several members were selling drugs at this point, recording at Firehouse was still all they could afford. On the days they couldn’t pay for chicken wings to feed the members and engineers, Ghostface, clad in a long and oversized coat, would make grocery store runs and steal as many canned goods as he could fit in his pockets.
The cramped space and shoddy equipment meant that RZA and company had to get creative with recording. Much of the dusty atmosphere associated with 36 Chambers came from the studio’s outdated technology, and transitions between songs were harsh—“C.R.E.A.M.” begins with the sound of a new tape being added to the reel in the studio, less a creative choice and more an unerasable leftover. RZA’s grand vision involved melding samples of the soul, funk, and jazz records he loved with samples from his beloved kung fu flicks, a synthesis that gave every beat some cinematic heft without losing the dank and dingy lo-fi charm. On “Bring da Ruckus,” sampled pianos from the Dramatics’ “In the Rain” sit next to a makeshift snare RZA created by placing the mic in a paint bucket and slapping it repeatedly. The theme song from popular cartoon Underdog was slowed down and placed over drums from Joe Tex and Biz Markie cuts to create the rolling thunder of “Wu-Tang Clan Ain’t Nuthing ta F’ Wit.”
Seven of the album’s 13 tracks have at least one sampled bit of film dialogue on them, usually at the very beginning or hovering in the background of a hook. Of those seven, dialogue from Shaolin and Wu Tang appears on six of them, sometimes by itself, sometimes doubled up with others like Five Deadly Venoms (“Da Mystery of Chessboxin’”) or Ten Tigers From Kwangtung (“Bring da Ruckus”.) The first words uttered on opening track “Bring da Ruckus” are from Shaolin, used to explain the function of RZA’s beats and the Wu’s raps, respectively: “Shaolin shadowboxing and the Wu-Tang sword style… Do you think your Wu-Tang sword can defeat me?” Over the next four minutes, Ghost, Rae, Deck, and GZA use biography, current events and pop culture reference to eviscerate each other on the mic: styles are tricky like Richard Nixon, rugged as the Palestinian Liberation Organization, and ripped hardcore like porno-flick bitches. Each verse feels like the introduction of a new challenger, amplifying the filmic qualities brought about by the Shaolin samples.
And with nearly a dozen different voices populating these songs—many of whom had never recorded music beforehand—everyone’s personality and backstory is somehow given time to blossom. As the architect, RZA affords himself a bit of the spotlight, but his greatest achievement on 36 Chambers was trusting his instincts to fit these wily and charismatic rappers onto just the right weird and wonderful beats. O.D.B.’s wail was made for the creaky mandolin sample on “Da Mystery of Chessboxin’,” just as Method Man’s hazy proclamation that “cash rules everything around me” wouldn’t make sense outside of the dreamy piano keys on “C.R.E.A.M.” Each piece of the album, no matter how incongruous, feeds back into a whole like the shattered fragments of an ancient medallion.
Every member gets at least one standout moment, but most have several. U-God’s four-bar appearance at the opening of “Chessboxin’” would still be a concise powerhouse even if he didn’t record it days before being convicted for firearm and drug possession. On “Can It All Be So Simple,” the undeniable chemistry that would later power Ghostface and Raekwon’s Only Built 4 Cuban Linx… manifests as stories of innocence lost, as dreams of lamping on expensive yachts are interrupted by calls from friends in upstate prison over a ghostly Gladys Knight & The Pips sample. Method Man spits rhymes about peanut butter, Dick Van Dyke, Looney Tunes characters, and croons about White Owl blunts while chewing all available scenery across a vicious three-and-a-half-minute verse on his own self-titled track. Each element of 36 Chambers—its swirl of rhyme styles and reference points, its musical blemishes and unfixable production quirks—coalesces into a bulletproof melancholy whole through RZA’s and his newfound brothers’ sheer force of will. It proved that they were as strong apart as they were together.
36 Chambers, an insular and weird album by design, arrived not a moment too soon in a decade where insular and weird music found unexpected traction in the mainstream. It made an impact when it was released on November 9, 1993, peaking at No. 41 on the Billboard 200 and selling 30,000 units in its first week. But as the album sold and the singles spread, the Cult of Wu began to grow: The album went platinum by 1995, minting the collective and slashing a buck fifty across the face of anyone who would dare oppose New York hip-hop. It set the stage for the barrage of solo albums—Cuban Linx, GZA’s Liquid Swords, Method Man’s Tical, and Ghostface’s Ironman—that would further cement the Wu legacy by the end of the ’90s. Before long, RZA was legitimately scoring movies, beginning with 1999’s Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai; a fighting video game was conceived and eventually abandoned, though it would live on as a novelty about the time they made a fighting video game about the Wu-Tang Clan; the group’s West-meets-East ethos would become crystallized in books and Chappelle’s Show skits.
36 Chambers directly paved the way for harder-edged New York rap from Nas, Mobb Deep, and the Notorious B.I.G., and provided a hardcore hip-hop blueprint that’s been followed by rap purists and collectives for nearly three decades. It began the Tao of Wu, bonding nine Staten Island dreamers by philosophies of the mind and the scents of the fried food wafting past Brooklyn’s Palmetto Playground. But more than anything, it’s a testament to pop culture’s power to create and forge brotherhood. In 2004’s Wu-Tang Manual, just over 10 years after the album’s release, RZA broke down the significance of its title as only he could: “You have the thirty-six chambers, and there’s nine members of the Wu-Tang Clan. Each member of Wu-Tang has four chambers of the heart. And what’s nine times four?” | 2022-10-09T00:04:00.000-04:00 | 2022-10-09T00:04:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Loud / RCA | October 9, 2022 | 10 | 062382e2-30c3-4296-a576-6ba19ac30b9b | Dylan Green | https://pitchfork.com/staff/dylan-green/ | |
This split release sees Amps for Christ's Henry Barnes in as messy a mood as ever, with his taste for roughness rubbing off on Woods' rustic offerings. | This split release sees Amps for Christ's Henry Barnes in as messy a mood as ever, with his taste for roughness rubbing off on Woods' rustic offerings. | Amps for Christ / Woods: Woods / Amps for Christ | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/16501-woods-amps-for-christ/ | Woods / Amps for Christ | Woods' 2011 album Sun and Shade came and went so quietly that it felt like it was largely forgotten when it came time to compile the year-end shakedowns. The lack of fanfare that heralds the band's releases, of which there are many, mirrors the quiet, introspective nature of the group members themselves. Records from Woods come often, rarely dropping below the impressively high bar they've set for themselves despite their tap never being fully turned off. It seems likely the band members are too hard at work on their next project(s) to care too much for the conversation surrounding their current release. So here we are with another Woods record, this time a self-titled split LP with folk-noise experimentalist Henry Barnes, better known for his highly erratic output under the name Amps for Christ.
The work is carved up neatly over this album, with four Amps for Christ tracks, four from Woods, and one collaborative effort. Barnes' recordings, made up of three instrumentals and one vocal composition, are all over the map, as anyone who has paid close attention to his output has come to expect. "When" manages to pull a kind of sickly lo-fi sweetness from his jarring and occasionally sloppy playing. It's recorded to make him feel like he's right there in the room with you, fluffing chords and tripping over the rush of ideas pulsating through his brain. Barnes' work has a childlike wonder to it, ranging from endearing, naif-like approaches (the ramshackle "Roto Koto in C Major") to grating, sub-par noise aberrations (the aimless electronics of "Native Chantz"). On "Lord Bateman (Child #53)", he demonstrates his superior skills as a craftsman of jolly folk songs juxtaposed with quietly screaming guitars-- a move that immaculately paves the way for Woods' similarly minded pieces.
There's little mistaking these as Woods songs once Jeremy Earl's caterwauled falsetto sinks in, although this is a stripped-back version of the band. Mostly they forgo electric guitars altogether, instead settling on a roughly hewn form of acoustic bonhomie. There's plenty of space in these recordings, making it sound like you're sitting on Earl's porch, listening to his group cobble together songs with little or no finesse. You can practically smell the marshmallows getting toasted over a crackling campfire in the background. The only exception is "Wind Was the Wine", a vigilantly assembled Woodsian take on pop that would effortlessly fit alongside "Pushing Onlys" and "Death Rattles" should this band ever assemble something like a greatest hits album. Elsewhere it's much more opened-ended, with the music leading them down knotty, freeform paths ("September Saturn") and encroaching on the kind of crackpot takes on rootsy Americana Will Oldham often attempts ("Brothers").
So this feels less like an "album" in the traditional sense and more like a loose string of unconnected ideas, pieced together with little thought for direction. As such, it just about works, with the lack of production values helping convey the spirit of adventure in which it was no doubt conceived. That feeling is typified by the collaboration between the two artists, "From Oatmeal to Buttermilk", which is dominated by what sounds like a warily plucked sitar (or perhaps one of Barnes' homemade instruments). It's constantly teetering on the brink of implosion, nearly sticking to its shabby meter, with all the players sounding like they're barely in control of what they're doing. But in many respects that's what a project like this is for, to suss out potential directions, to push forward into new areas. John Peel always said he was disappointed if a band recorded a Peel Session and just stuck to what they were already good at. Sometimes you've got to take the machine apart and figure out a new way to put it back together. | 2012-04-19T02:00:04.000-04:00 | 2012-04-19T02:00:04.000-04:00 | Experimental / Rock | Shrimper | April 19, 2012 | 6.2 | 06258bf4-c858-4d6c-8192-fc70ffc84415 | Nick Neyland | https://pitchfork.com/staff/nick-neyland/ | null |
Cold Beat is a new band fronted by Grass Widow's Hannah Lew. Away from that groups thicker production and layered harmonies, Lew takes a more minimal approach, foregrounding her voice and her sometimes harrowing songs. | Cold Beat is a new band fronted by Grass Widow's Hannah Lew. Away from that groups thicker production and layered harmonies, Lew takes a more minimal approach, foregrounding her voice and her sometimes harrowing songs. | Cold Beat: Over Me | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/19498-cold-beat-over-me/ | Over Me | Late last year, Grass Widow's Hannah Lew released Worms/Year 5772, the first EP from her band Cold Beat, on her own label, Crime on the Moon. That shrewd collection channeled loss into captivating songs, which Lew wrote over four years while grappling with both the weight of her fathers’ death and her own insomnia. Cold Beat’s new album, Over Me, is an extension of that melancholia, a space where Lew confronts grief through punchy post-punk.
Lew’s songwriting shifts between separate but related states—life and death, shadow and sun, together and apart, here and there. There’s a pained goodbye to a familiar place on “Abandon”, where her space in San Francisco is described as “Like a heroine in an old story disappears when fingers turn the page.” She’s restless, turning towards an unfamiliar oblivion in the record’s poppiest number, “Out of Time”. The infectious “Collapse” takes place within a cataclysm as it’s happening, with violins plucking at the tension of displacement. But there’s a sense of acceptance there too, although less pronounced. On the stomping “Tinted Glass,” she croons: “Unknown location/ No heart attached.”
Grass Widow specialize in girl-group vocal acrobatics; Lew’s meaty basslines take instrumental precedence in their saltwater-scuffed garage songs, but her voice is harder to pick out amongst the band’s three-part harmonies. Over Me finds her writing and recording on her own minimalist terms; even the vocal arrangements are sparse—it’s virtually all Lew, and she has a lovely voice, expressive and breathy. Her voice is mixed a bit too low, making it hard to hear the lyrics, but that fits Over Me's broader theme of wrestling with and confronting identity. “Can’t see anything / Looking at my face / There’s nothing at all,” Lew confides to the listener in the pop-punk squalor of “Mirror”.
Lew has a remarkable talent for portraying scenes in the starkest terms. “Face of the clock is never kind,” she muses in the exuberant “Fatal Bond”, which could be mistaken as a B-side from Parallel Lines. She describes time as the ultimate “paralyzing fatal bond,” winding us in its gears. Violent symbols are everywhere. “Give your sharp knife,” she commands in the rollicking “UV,” while she dares her oppressor to chain her down in “OSOTW”. The symbols are survival mechanisms: weapons, mirrors, and blindfolds are all over the record, becoming instruments of simultaneous self-improvement and self-destruction. Over Me is Hannah Lew standing before the mirror, unsure of what she sees within herself, her future, her music. But she’s looking. | 2014-07-10T02:00:02.000-04:00 | 2014-07-10T02:00:02.000-04:00 | Rock | Crime on the Moon | July 10, 2014 | 7.6 | 06258e5e-2239-4a03-bd93-b810b17e44e5 | Paula Mejia | https://pitchfork.com/staff/paula-mejia/ | null |
The Tokyo guitarist and pianist channels jazz, fusion, and Japanese environmental music as he deepens the emotional resonance of his music while maintaining its soothing atmosphere. | The Tokyo guitarist and pianist channels jazz, fusion, and Japanese environmental music as he deepens the emotional resonance of his music while maintaining its soothing atmosphere. | Leo Takami: Next Door | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/leo-takami-next-door/ | Next Door | Leo Takami finds joy in simple melodies played in a straightforward manner. Though his compositions often lead somewhere unexpected, the jazz guitarist and pianist keeps his tunes as rounded and safe as kindergarten toys. Like Joe Hisaishi, the Studio Ghibli composer who is one of his clearest predecessors, Takami has forged an aesthetic that’s clear and chipper when it’s happy, curious and grounded when it’s not. His willingness to plainly state his emotional intentions without pandering or infantilizing is refreshing, as if he’s giving the listener permission to explore the complexities of feelings that once seemed easy to understand: You have no idea how interesting happiness can be. This quality made 2020’s Felis Catus and Silence a charming testimony of good cheer, and on Next Door, he deepens the emotional resonance of his music without setting it on edge.
The mood on Next Door is blue, but Takami’s indefatigable optimism makes it more of an airy azure than the deep cobalt of, say, Miles Davis. Like Pat Metheny, his guitar lines have a plainspoken eloquence and patience that makes the music feel airy and open, even at its most contemplative. He chooses his notes carefully, more concerned with sustaining or expanding emotional tone than musical possibilities. On the lengthy lead he plots through “Winter Day,” he plays like he’s reading out loud from Dickens—he’s steady, precise, letting the notes themselves convey the meaning rather than the way he’s voicing them. He shakes loose a few needles from his guitar in “Road With Cypress and Star,” but he primarily saves the big, bursting runs for his piano and organ, both of which he tends to keep farther back in the mix, as if their relative feistiness might trouble the songs. If the textural clarity of the recording makes it feel like the music you’d hear in a department store stereo demonstration, that may be on purpose: Takami seems to want to fish his audience from the relentless flow of everyday life in order to experience the simple pleasure of listening.
While Takami’s playing can be straightforward, it’s supported by subtly complex production that both supports and reframes the simplicity of the lead instruments. Like Felis Catus, the album draws equally from ECM jazz, classical minimalism, and Japanese environmental music without sounding much like any of them. Behind the opalescent drops and desert blues of “Beyond” are pulses that spread like moss in a deep forest. In “Family Tree,” a loop of faded found sound crackles behind a guitar swelling with regret. The interplay and the distance in fidelity between the elements makes the song’s sense of time feel three-dimensional, as if we’re hearing the present considering and being shaped by the past. Takami plays every instrument on the record, and he produced it himself; absent a band, these production touches are a form of interplay, and at times you can hear his leads responding to and being reshaped by the gentle urgings of their accompaniment.
In the proper opener and standout “As If Listening,” Takami’s guitar greets you with a smile, but it emerges in the wake of the Erik Satie-like piano intro “Letter.” The sadness of that brief track lingers throughout “As If Listening,” sighing in the strings and implicit in the distant shuffle of shaker and pulse of marimba. Takami draws the guitar toward the background, its bliss eventually turning into a contemplative trance. When the song stops to catch its breath in the final moments, its momentum follows the gaze of the strings skyward. The slow twinkle of piano and hum of electronics make it feel like looking up at the sky in awe. Over and over again on Next Door, Leo Takami recontextualizes the familiar, returning us to truths whose universality made them cliches in the first place. The stars don’t shine any brighter here; you’re just seeing them through clearer air. | 2023-10-07T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2023-10-06T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Jazz | Unseen Worlds | October 7, 2023 | 7.7 | 06261e2c-55fe-4470-b72d-16563c43abd7 | Sadie Sartini Garner | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sadie-sartini garner/ | |
The second LP from this Savannah, Ga., metal quartet finds producer John Congleton coaxing more sound out of the band than they've ever allowed. | The second LP from this Savannah, Ga., metal quartet finds producer John Congleton coaxing more sound out of the band than they've ever allowed. | Baroness: Blue Record | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/13603-blue-record/ | Blue Record | Blue Record, the second LP from Savannah, Ga., hero-metal quartet Baroness, feels like it spins for either 30 or 90 minutes, but never the 44 minutes the tracklist advertises. Full of stops and starts, dynamic swells and swan dives, razor-sharp guitar leads, and dense full-band bludgeons, these 12 tracks swell with parts and counterparts, condensing epics into tightly arranged, executed, and edited two-minute stretches. Within most any given track, Baroness twist between feelings of triumph and trouble, elation and depletion, playing all with unequal parts grace and grit. When those extremes and the sonic care that goes into creating them win over, the Blue Record feels like a marathon where everyone wins. That description, however, runs the risk of making Baroness' triumphant follow-up to 2007's Red Album seem like a laborious listen. It's not: Via expert pacing and meticulous sequencing, those peaks and valleys arise precisely where they should, creating an experience that feels more like a sunny ride in a sports car than anything resembling hard work.
No, Baroness, along with producer and mixer John Congleton, have done all of the heavy lifting for you. Congleton-- more familiar to the indie rock world than the metal set thanks to his work with bands like Black Mountain, Explosions in the Sky, and, more recently, St. Vincent on the texturally astounding Actor-- coaxes more sound out of this four-piece than they've ever allowed. Still using only bass, drums, guitars, John Baizley's full-throated roar, and a touch of piano, Baroness and Congleton render a surprisingly rich palette of sound that's well-suited for atmospheric lulls and electrified roars. Guitarist Pete Adams, new to the band after the departure of Brian Blickle late last year, flanks Baizley now. They make quite the sympathetic pair, lifting from the mid-level, mid-tempo chug that shapes the band's core into the sort of high-flying, skydiving riffs that decorate it effortlessly.
But Baroness are more than the sum of their guitar glories. Drummer Allen Blickle tweaks time habitually. On "A Horse Called Golgotha", he crams stacks of beats into tiny fills, adding exclamation marks to a tune that doesn't even need them. And on "The Gnashing", he steadily builds from a simple, bar-band plod into the sort of triumphant rumble that sends grown men into mosh pits. Congleton treats all of the pieces like interconnected games of seesaw, constantly cloaking one in the mix to highlight another, keeping it all in motion. For this, "Jake Leg" becomes more than the album's bruiser. In the verses, Congleton pulls back the marching drums back to push Baizley's bark to the fore. In the breaks, he pushes everything together, creating a mess of guitars and drums that rolls like a boulder into the next line. Think Torche with greater control and finesse. That is, the song's anthemic quality doesn't get in the way of its million moving parts. One just augments the other.
You're only going to notice details like that when you listen, rewind, and listen again. Blue Record is simply much too fun and kinetic to analyze in real time. With Baroness, one part is always changing while another prepares to do the same, everything working in concert to pull the listener along, too. These songs are invitations that are easy to accept. You'll be excused while digging for your lighter and singing along during "Steel That Sleeps the Eye", fingerpicking an air guitar during the serpentine intro to "O'Er Hell and Hide" or pumping a fist and shouting, "Flesh is weak!" and "My lip needs a meal," during the relentless "Jake Leg". Even "Ogeechee Hymnal", a slow-burning instrumental ostensibly intended as the mid-album respite, magnetizes with its gorgeous sheets of guitar and bass. When it bleeds into "A Horse Called Golgotha", any inkling you might've had to think gets crushed by sheer power. It feels as good as Journey's "Don't Stop Believin'", but it's as accomplished as the best of a masturbatory metal dude like Marc Rizzo.
Baroness makes this all seam so seamless, casual, and spirited, as if four Southern badasses simply walked into a room one afternoon and ripped through this album in a jam. Every song bleeds into the other, and its flow is impeccable. But the whole production-- the peerless sound, the acoustic interludes, the interwoven lyrics-- betray careful, deliberate construction. Still, Blue Record never feels overthought or overworked. These guys are having too much fun for that. Complex enough to reward repetitive listening and compact enough to encourage it, Blue Record is one of the year's most generous hours. Or half-hours. Or, hell, however long the thing is. | 2009-11-03T01:00:02.000-05:00 | 2009-11-03T01:00:02.000-05:00 | Metal | Relapse | November 3, 2009 | 8.5 | 06263421-c78e-4d47-83f6-d9193aaa2bcc | Grayson Haver Currin | https://pitchfork.com/staff/grayson-haver currin/ | null |
The crown princess of Bronx drill arrives with a down-to-earth attitude and a diabolical knack for hooks. Assume her naïveté at your own peril. | The crown princess of Bronx drill arrives with a down-to-earth attitude and a diabolical knack for hooks. Assume her naïveté at your own peril. | Ice Spice: Like..? EP | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/ice-spice-like-ep/ | Like..? EP | Ask anyone to impersonate a teenage girl and they might roll their eyes to the point of retinal detachment and, in the voice of a catatonic zombie, say, “OMG, like, totally.” Once dubbed one of the UK’s “most annoying filler words,” “like” is the bane of the existence of snooty grammarians and Daily Mail editors: Its association with frivolous, vapid femininity makes it an easy target. For Ice Spice, “like” is less of a filler and more of a mouth gag. Like, shut up when she’s speaking. Aptly titling her debut EP Like..?, the Bronx rapper has the air of a girl who comes to class with nothing but a tube of lip gloss yet makes the dean’s list every year. A velour tracksuit in a subgenre of Nike Techs, she’s the drill Elle Woods.
At a time when everyone is clamoring for the titles of queen and king of rap, a young, often queer, and chronically online community hungry for ’90s cultural nostalgia has dubbed Ice Spice “this generation’s Princess Diana.” At first, her tracks’ unexpected samples and random digs (“We both from the Bronx/So I know that you dirty”) made her the latest scapegoat for everything that’s wrong with hip-hop today. But with her signature emotes, screengrab single covers, and Cabbage Patch doll mane, Ice Spice knows how to capitalize on outrage cycles and internet thirst. The 23-year-old’s goofy antics and down-to-earth attitude work well in the era of memes and snippets. Truly for the people and with the people, she funded the recording of her debut with pandemic-era stimulus checks.
Bringing “smoochie,” “maddie,” and “baddie friend” into our cultural canon, she graduated from the Scorsese school of world-building and is currently studying for her master’s at the Azealia Banks school of linguistics. In the 2012 article “They’re, Like, Way Ahead of the Linguistic Currrrve,” journalist Douglas Quenqua noted that “young women serve as incubators of vocal trends.” Ice Spice’s rise provides a case study: For many men, “Munch” now carries the weight of a slur. Her knack for crafting hooks is so diabolical you’ll find yourself not only muttering along but imitating her signature dances to lines like “big boobs and the butt stay plump,” knowing you’re a 28AA cup. Listen past the familiar snippets and she rewards you with clever wordplay: “You was my stitch but it’s not what it seam.”
Sometimes the songs on Like..? are just that: snippets. The area between the exhilarating two bars that populated TikTok For You pages feels like waiting in line for a five-second rollercoaster ride. In an interview with Rap Caviar, Spice revealed that she records tracks spontaneously to avoid self-censorship. Each line can feel like an intrusive thought untethered to a central theme, like when she quickly follows up “How can I lose if I’m already chose?” with “If the party not lit then I’d rather not go.” Halfway through “Bikini Bottom,” she succumbs to a delayed-cue-card delivery that dilutes the track. RiotUSA, who’s produced most of Spice’s music since her 2021 debut, saves the lethargic midpoints with skittering tracks that sound like true collaborations as opposed to premade beats. In just six songs, the duo experiments with the past, present, and future of drill. Even on cartoony instrumentals that at first seem unserious, he maintains the drill ethos with sharp snares, blown-out 808s, and militaristic hi-hats, updating them with Digimon basslines (“Princess Diana”), club beats, and a squiggly Puffy sample (“Gangsta Boo”).
Repping a city of larger-than-life characters like Nicki Minaj, Cardi B, JAY-Z, and Lil’ Kim, a borough of loyal and street-savvy Bronxites, and a rap subgenre known for its gritty ominousness, Spice’s chilled and cutesy demeanor stands out. There’s no question her lighter skin expedited and sustained her virality within TikTok’s biased algorithm and the colorism that plagues hip-hop. Her often rudimentary lyrics reflect the brief time she’s had to develop her craft, but as the daughter of an underground rapper, she’s well-versed in hip-hop and specifically drill history. Citing Sheff G as an early influence, crediting Chief Keef as a pioneer, and adopting the late Pop Smoke’s gruff tone in “Acting a Smoochie,” she honors her predecessors but doesn’t parrot. Assume her naïveté at your own peril. She’ll give you a nickname that’ll require decades of therapy. | 2023-01-23T00:02:00.000-05:00 | 2023-01-23T00:02:00.000-05:00 | Rap | 10K Projects / Capitol | January 23, 2023 | 7.6 | 06292c31-922e-4d02-93b6-f9c38f7d6497 | Heven Haile | https://pitchfork.com/staff/heven-haile/ | https://media.pitchfork.com/photos/63c9c30abd7796bda791d2c6/3:2/w_3498,h_2332,c_limit/Ice%20Spice-%20Like.. |
Using mainly her resilient voice and some electronic effects, the latest record from the Japanese underground legend draws parallels to the punk impulse with her extended, avant-garde vocal excursions. | Using mainly her resilient voice and some electronic effects, the latest record from the Japanese underground legend draws parallels to the punk impulse with her extended, avant-garde vocal excursions. | Phew: Voice Hardcore | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/phew-voice-hardcore/ | Voice Hardcore | After Phew made her first solo single in 1980—an analog synth oddity called “Finale,” produced by Ryuichi Sakamoto—the Japanese underground legend humbly wondered if she could “draw a picture by voice.” When Phew dubbed her vocals, she said, “a completely different world emerged that cannot be described in the context of melody, harmony, [or] rhythm.” She wished to go there.
This sounds like a statement you might expect from a Downtown vocal iconoclast at the end of the 1970s: Meredith Monk, perhaps, or Joan La Barbara. But Phew came from more lawless territory still. Her aesthetically anarchic Osaka post-punk band Aunt Sally was inspired by the Sex Pistols, but took little of ’77 punk’s supposed sonic dogma—they took only the question marks that punk used to replace any concrete understandings of what is acceptable in art and life. And so for Phew, that “completely different world” encompassed screams, flutters, grunts, laughs, and coolly flat singing. Phew’s work underscores how similar the punk impulse was to the avant-garde’s simultaneous extended vocals excursions, which all seemed to ask: Where can things move? What have we not seen? What part of the mind has not yet been reached?
These are questions Phew never stopped answering, especially on her recent collections of minimal, inquisitive noise music, 2015’s A New World and last year’s Light Sleep. Of course, Japanoise has a rich history, but among its best-known artists—the skull-drilling onslaught of Merzbow, or the noise-rock pummel of Boredoms—Phew’s subtler approach is anomalous. For her latest, Voice Hardcore, Phew used no instruments beyond her resilient voice and some electronic effects. Recorded in eight hours over three days in her Tokyo bedroom, it was, Phew said, “an attempt to make new reverberations that I have never heard before using only my body.”
Phew creates droning environments thick with texture and stillness; they can feel ecological, overcast or humid, as if dew is forming on notes. Her hyper-present voice cuts in from any side of a track. Phew’s speak-sing is alternately distorted or pure, spoken or shrieked, guttural or graceful or sometimes both. She beams in from somewhere other. Whether somber or bewitchingly cackled, passionate or dry, Phew’s vocals humanize her experiments, making Voice Hardcore sound like an ensemble of herself.
The more space Phew allows—the more explicit her canvas—the more distinctive she gets. There is a rumble beneath “Just a Familiar Face,” but the openness is what reaches out to you. Phew sounds like she is enacting a cast of characters, with balletic shrieks, robotic spoken word, and screams that seem to come from a floor above. Many of her lyrics (all in Japanese) are about the quotidian and the mundane—a common interaction with a stranger, a stain on the ceiling, an annoying cafe—and with that, the music shows how heavy everyday life can feel.
“Scat” is the heart of Voice Hardcore, and it is simple: just Phew’s wordless voice, sensitively layered. It seems choral, but it is disarmingly melodic, like a punk version of Gregorian chant. This spartan approach suits the record’s title, and its feeling of total autonomy recalls her punk roots in Aunt Sally. Hardcore, in Phew’s world, might be synonymous with extremity, or vulnerability, or discovery—by way of challenges to logic. “Scat” has no noise, but it feels like Voice Hardcore’s greatest risk and deepest expression.
Phew is often considered in the context of her better-know collaborators. In 1981, she bridged the worlds of Japanese punk and German motorik by recording her essential eponymous debut with members of Can at Conny Plank’s studio. She has worked with members of Boredoms, Bill Laswell, and Jim O’Rourke (somehow never with Sonic Youth). And yet, on the radically self-contained Voice Hardcore, it is inspiring to hear Phew alone. Last year, Phew noted how, despite her experimental pedigree and breadth of experience, she has resisted honing skills for the sake of them. “I am not an athlete,” Phew wrote, “I’m a musician.” She welcomed the freedom of limitation. “It also made me ask: ‘What is music?’ There is no correct answer.” It is, as ever, a blank space to be filled, a question mark to linger. | 2018-01-19T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2018-01-19T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Experimental | Mesh-Key | January 19, 2018 | 7.5 | 062c6911-c392-4247-95b9-e16192ab4f1d | Jenn Pelly | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jenn-pelly/ | |
I think it's safe to say that the Flaming Lips' Wayne Coyne is a genius, equal parts Thomas Edison ... | I think it's safe to say that the Flaming Lips' Wayne Coyne is a genius, equal parts Thomas Edison ... | The Flaming Lips: Yoshimi Battles The Pink Robots | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/3081-yoshimi-battles-the-pink-robots/ | Yoshimi Battles The Pink Robots | I think it's safe to say that the Flaming Lips' Wayne Coyne is a genius, equal parts Thomas Edison and P.T. Barnum. Like Edison, Coyne is a relentless tinkerer, a visionary experimenteur with a sci-fi fetish and a soft spot for odd technologies. And like Barnum, Coyne is a consummate showman-- the hand puppets, the boombox orchestras, the oddball short films, the radio-controlled headphones. In 1984, Coyne was just another Oklahoma dreamer with an amateurish psych-rock garage band and a duffel bag stuffed with thrift-store effects pedals; 18 years later, Coyne finds himself in the position of following up one of the most universally regarded albums since Pet Sounds.
So let's just come right out and say it: after the one-two punch of Zaireeka and The Soft Bulletin, Yoshimi Battles The Pink Robots is a bold and inventive work, brimming with ideas and sublime moments of brilliance. But it's also unfocused and top-heavy, a concept album about robots and karate that, somewhere along the line, strays into languorous, contemplative songs about mortality and death. Nor does Yoshimi always put the Lips' best foot forward-- though Dave Fridmann's production dazzles, the overdriven drums and orchestral swoons that characterized The Soft Bulletin are often lost in a busy mesh of programmed beats and lazy synthstrings.
The album gets off to a rollicking start with the winning "Fight Test," a glossy rumination on the call to duty-- whether that's standing up to a playground bully or, as the Lips would have it, an army of rebellious androids bent on world domination. "If it's not now, then tell me when would be the time that you would stand up and be a man?" Coyne sings over a thick buzz of keyboards, bass and an almost hip-hop rhythm, offsetting his resolve in the refrain: "I don't know how a man decides what's right for his own life/ It's all a mystery." It's a stunning pop song-- easily this album's "Waitin' for a Superman"-- with an intensely memorable melody and the conflict of Coyne's internal dialogue resonating positively on many levels.
Yoshimi takes its first left turn with "One More Robot/Sympathy 3000-21," a slippery detour into glitch augmented with falsetto choruses, reverberating vocals and haywire surges of digital clickery. "Unit 3000-21 is warming/ Makes a humming sound when its circuits duplicate emotions," Coyne sings over a simple bass figure and ambient tones before the song explodes in a burst of overdriven clockwork. It's a dizzying, disorienting sound-- but once the novelty wears off, you've gotta admit it sounds a bit like Steely Dan.
"Yoshimi Battles The Pink Robots (Part 1)" rides a simple melody and ridiculously infectious butt-beat as it sets the stage for the album's short-lived 'concept'-- some entertaining nonsense about an army of Japanese girls training to take on the salmon-hued robots at a kung-fu compound right out of Enter the Dragon. In the chorus, Coyne plays call-and-response with a malevolent synth burble that sounds like a malevolent R2-D2. Its rollercoaster companion, "Yoshimi (Part 2)," scales a slinky, ascending wall of farty synth and distant Japanese babble before the bottom falls out, rocketing into chaotic instrumental breakdowns each a shade more intense than the last. It's the closest the Lips have come to writing straight videogame music, complete with crowd noises and bloodcurdling screams (courtesy of the Boredoms' Yoshimi Yokota).
And this is where Yoshimi makes its first misstep, on the sleepy "In the Morning of Magicians." Though punctuated with bursts of instrumental energy, the arrangement quickly devolves into a thick lite-FM syrup. "What is love and what is hate, and why does it matter?" Coyne wonders over a flitty symphony of Muzak strings. Again, the production is flawless-- I especially dig the wavering tape-speed fluctuations on the background vocals-- but the song throws the album into a downbeat, overly philosophical malaise from which it never fully recovers. What happened to Yoshimi again? Pink robots... what pink robots?
Yoshimi shines again with the superior "Ego Tripping at the Gates of Hell," which pits more existential lyrics over a far more satisfying collage of sounds (vocal samples, snippets of mellotron, a lumbering bass). "I was waiting on a moment, but the moment never came," croons Coyne, echoing the issues of readiness and bravery "Fight Test" raised, but also betraying Yoshimi's greatest weakness: the moment never comes.
The closest the Lips do come is on the divine "Are You a Hypnotist?," if only for the brief return of some actual drums (brilliantly tracked to create some glitchy, idiosyncratic fills impossible to play in real life). Coyne indulges in wordplay such as, "I have forgiven you for tricking me again/ But I have been tricked again/ Into forgiving you," as the song builds to a distorted swell of fuzzy static and some otherworldly choir.
"Do You Realize" buzzes and clangs with overproduction, as Coyne breezes through a list of trite observations like, "Do you realize that everyone you know someday will die?" and, "Let them know you realize that life goes fast/ It's hard to make the good things last." Its parallels with Mike + The Mechanics' "The Living Years" are uncanny, and believe me, it hurts me more to say that about a Flaming Lips song than it does you to read it. The already unsubtle onslaught of church bells, woozy background harmonies, and strings ascends into supreme levels of cheese with not one, but two key changes midway through, becoming a near-parody of the genuine emotional weight that carried The Soft Bulletin. And the minor-key Beatleisms of "It's Summertime (Throbbing Orange Pallbearers)" are wasted on more childlike philosophizing: "Look outside/ I know that you'll recognize it's summertime." After the grandiose, symphonic universalisms of The Soft Bulletin, could it be this record's deepest message is "stop and smell the roses"?
Apparently so, as the self-explanatory "All We Have Is Now" retreads these themes for a third time, albeit with an uncharacteristically fragile beauty. All of this might have some ironic poignancy if, god forbid, Coyne were to be diagnosed with some terminal illness tomorrow (and indeed, the latter half of Yoshimi was reportedly inspired by the death of a Japanese fan). But in the context of this album, Yoshimi simply runs out of emotional punch, having expended its boldest moves and most resonant sentiments in the first five songs.
Bafflingly, Yoshimi ends with "Approaching Pavonis Mons by Balloon (Utopia Planitia)," an anticlimactic instrumental punctuated with distant vocal warbling, laser-beam bursts, and sudden fanfares of trumpet. It didn't have to be this way, judging from the wealth of stronger material widely traded online by net-savvy Lips fans. The evocative "The Switch That Turns Off the Universe" (previewed in a 1999 BBC session) would seem to be a perfect fit with Yoshimi's cautionary tales of techno-doom. Or better yet, the Yoshimi outtake "If I Go Mad/Funeral In My Head" (now set to appear as a single b-side), an instant Lips classic in which Coyne seemingly conjures rainstorms, orchestras, and deafening applause on command.
Despite this album's disappointing brevity (45 minutes, padded with two instrumentals), its dense production and well-crafted melodies offer long-term replayability. Moments like the Coyne-as-robot "I'll get you, Yoshimi" barely audible in the title track, or the interchangeable "I must have been drifting"/"I must have been tripping" background vocals in "Ego Tripping at the Gates of Hell" seem tailor-made for bull sessions around the alien-head bong. Though Yoshimi could be considered guilty of adhering too strictly to a tried-and-true formula (fast beats, slow melodies), it's really the more disparate elements that keep this album from building emotionally into a classic. And so, like a double feature of Drunken Master and Terms of Endearment, or a surprise party where the surprise is that your best friend has cancer, ultimately Yoshimi is kind of a bummer. | 2002-07-15T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2002-07-15T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Warner Bros. | July 15, 2002 | 8.4 | 062d975c-0dc5-4d9a-9414-b3045c61d8be | Pitchfork | null |
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The debut LP from Montreal producer Lunice (one-half of TNGHT) is intended as the score for a speculative theater piece, but the music alone comes off garish and retrograde. | The debut LP from Montreal producer Lunice (one-half of TNGHT) is intended as the score for a speculative theater piece, but the music alone comes off garish and retrograde. | Lunice: CCCLX | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/lunice-ccclx/ | CCCLX | CCCLX, the debut album from Montreal producer Lunice Fermin Pierre II, comes with a dramatic conceit: It is meant to be the score for a speculative theater piece. Reportedly inspired by the opera Madame Butterfly, Lunice—who is one-half of the trap duo TNGHT, with Hudson Mohawke—splits the album into four-acts, with curtain calls, costume changes, and fade outs all built into the structure. But what would this imaginary visual piece look or feel like? Perhaps like a stadium: Lunice has described his own music as “blockbuster” commercial rap, the kind of hip-hop production that would and could only sound good in a gigantic space. The aspirations of CCCLX define themselves along these lines. While a good stadium show can inspire bacchanalian reverie and awe (Kanye on the floating stage, for example), it can also feel bloated and puzzling (Cirque du Soleil as soundtracked by M83). The outsized melodrama of CCCLX puts the whole enterprise in the latter category.
This is partly due to Lunice’s distinct lack of subtlety in his production work. With TNGHT, he made trap music hooked up to an IV of Monster energy drink, and his solo work essentially painted him as Lex Luger with an Adderall prescription. Five years ago, when he started working on CCCLX, the sound of sleek, bass-heavy hip-hop was in vogue (Kanye’s Cruel Summer album with his G.O.O.D. Music crew being the apex of the sound). That sound has not aged well and is especially retrograde on CCCLX. From the persistent motif of gaudy opera vocal samples to the echoing kick drums that populate each song, there are few moments on CCCLX that avoid the temptation of chasing a sugar high.
The instrumental tracks, in particular, are where Lunice is especially prone to indulging more ham-fisted tendencies. The worst of these is “CCCLX( Intermission)” with its sour piano line and garish percussion, resembling a trap remix of The Godfather theme. Most of the album, though, is devoted to a series of vocal collaborations, which are a mixed-bag. The largely unknown Canadian MC CJ Flemings gets the most shine on CCCLX, and his generic rapping is like set-dressing on top of Lunice’s ornate instrumentals. His wooden flow and his rather uninspired lyricism (“This isn’t for the year or a decade/This is for the century,” he raps on “CCCLX (Curtain)”) can really take away from the dramatic experience Lunice is trying to create. There are a few bright spots: “Distrust,” with Denzel Curry is perfectly suited to the Florida rapper’s preference for high-powered goth-rap, and “Drop Down” with SOPHIE and LE1F is a pleasingly bawdy piece of bubblegum trap.
The one saving grace that runs throughout the album is Lunice’s devotion to high-production value: Every song here sounds expensive, and would play exquisitely on enormous sound systems. But that imbalance, between the level of production and substance, means all the SFX and sonic wizardry of CCCLX can feel a little brainless. If this is music for a blockbuster work, it’s more Michael Bay than Stanley Kubrick. | 2017-09-13T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-09-13T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | LuckyMe | September 13, 2017 | 5.7 | 063091ea-69a2-449c-890c-a8d7e2376383 | Kevin Lozano | https://pitchfork.com/staff/kevin-lozano/ | |
This striking release from the eclectic duo brings together 99 collaborators to create an enthralling picture of the present moment. | This striking release from the eclectic duo brings together 99 collaborators to create an enthralling picture of the present moment. | Matmos: The Consuming Flame: Open Exercises in Group Form | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/matmos-the-consuming-flame-open-exercises-in-group-form/ | The Consuming Flame: Open Exercises in Group Form | Matmos’ high-concept investigations take narrow parameters to gleefully absurd extremes. For last year’s Plastic Anniversary, the duo of Drew Daniel and M.C. Schmidt sourced every sound from cast-off plastic objects: vinyl LPs, riot shields, even a breast implant. On Ultimate Care II, they extended a career-long quest to find art in unlikely places by using a Whirlpool washing machine as the album’s sole musical instrument. And 2013’s The Marriage of True Minds examined the pair’s long creative and romantic partnership through a paranormal lens, using experiments in telepathy and ESP to generate musical raw material. The Consuming Flame spins a seemingly arbitrary number into one of their most elaborate conceits yet. Soliciting contributions from 99 different musicians, including themselves, Matmos wove the lot—squirrely electronic beats, post-rock excursions, dub interludes, freeform noise—into a mammoth, three-hour suite meant to be experienced in a single sitting. They only required their collaborators to pace their submissions at 99 beats per minute. The collaged-together results are fascinating, often enthralling, occasionally an uphill slog, and every bit as anarchic as their genesis would suggest.
Matmos have made collaboration a key part of their practice for years, but even by their typically open-armed standards, The Consuming Flame’s guest list is staggeringly diverse. Their accomplices include longtime friends (Wobbly, J. Lesser, People Like Us), electronic veterans (Mouse on Mars), indie titans (Yo La Tengo), improvisers (David Grubbs), noise rappers (clipping.), and an array of experimental electronic musicians (Rabit, Oneohtrix Point Never, DeForrest Brown, Jr.). There are metalheads, techno producers, opera singers, and acoustic fingerpickers. Even author Douglas Rushkoff turns up—doing, as best I can tell, some kind of electronically assisted impersonation of the Muppets’ Beaker. An accompanying poster lays out a detailed timeline of who is playing when—at the music’s busiest, as many as seven artists are in the mix—but it never tells us exactly what they are doing. Part of the fun is in trying to disentangle the strands of the music’s knottiest moments—or, conversely, figuring out why what looks, on paper, like a particularly crowded stretch might yield so few clues as to its constituent parts.
For all the variety of that list, The Consuming Flame is not an eclectic listen, exactly. This is not a supermarket where individual contributions sit neatly packaged and tidily arranged; it’s more like a bulk-foods store after a hurricane, with oatmeal and wild rice, dried apricots and seaweed, carob chips and detergent all swirled together, patterns giving way to chaos and back again, depending on how and where the upturned bins have landed.
Given the album’s length and density, it resists close reading; if there is an organizing logic here, it is not readily apparent, although brushed drums and choppy vocal effects provide thematic through lines, and the occasional recurring motif lends a sense of narrative cohesion. But the music often unspools with natural ease. During one particularly engaging passage early in CD1, “A Doughnut in the Sky,” shimmering drones give way to dubby post-rock that rises into a Loaded-style jam; a fade-out leads us into a field recording of children’s voices, and then a rapid succession of highly suggestive sonic images: the bonging of a broken grandfather clock; power sanders on the fritz; the ghost of Derek Bailey. Before long, a Diwali-like clapping rhythm is paired with prepared piano; toward the end of the first section, a burst of pure, uncut jazz fusion flashes out like a glimpse of an alternate universe.
It’s not always a pleasurable listen; I haven’t found it conducive to meditative morning walks or dinners with friends. There are stretches of monotony, and the tempo they have chosen can drag, trudging along at a sullen andante. But these moments of struggle are part of the point of the endeavor. Schmidt has compared the album, in its 178-minute surfeit, to a journey by car, and lord knows that even the most scintillating road trips have their doldrums. What might be most striking about The Consuming Flame is how perfectly it suits the peculiarities of the present moment, even though the whole project was in the can before the pandemic ever reared its ugly microbial head.
The project could scarcely be more prescient: Its central mode of remote collaboration is, suddenly, one of the principal ways that people work together. Its emotional states, veering from giddiness to abject boredom, are a mirror image of these past few months’ unfamiliar clockworks, their racing weeks and creeping hours. Like most Matmos albums, The Consuming Flame is about more than just its ostensible organizing principle. The number 99 is largely arbitrary, but the animating ideas are the same ones that have been at the heart of Matmos’ work all along: community, interdependence, the radical joy of creative play. And as this long year stretches on, infection curves unspooling against the X axis—not entirely unlike the multi-colored bars stretching across the album’s list of contributors—those same ideas are proving just as important in life as in art.
Buy: Rough Trade
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Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2020-08-25T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-08-25T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Experimental | Thrill Jockey | August 25, 2020 | 6.9 | 063c73d1-3ae9-48fa-ac55-832e4831fc2a | Philip Sherburne | https://pitchfork.com/staff/philip-sherburne/ | |
The Egyptian producer’s music is forceful, corrosive, unstable-sounding. His latest EP, a collection of six unrelenting club cuts, is his heaviest record yet. | The Egyptian producer’s music is forceful, corrosive, unstable-sounding. His latest EP, a collection of six unrelenting club cuts, is his heaviest record yet. | ZULI: All Caps EP | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/zuli-all-caps-ep/ | All Caps EP | In a city of 23 million, Ahmed El Ghazoly sometimes had trouble finding a receptive audience for his brand of club music. “My stuff is too weird for Cairo,” he told The Wire a few years back. In fact, El Ghazoly’s output as ZULI sounds extreme just about anywhere. Drawing from hard-edged sounds like techno, trap, and drum’n’bass, his music is not just forceful, it’s fundamentally unstable; even his toughest drums seem dipped in corrosive fluid, so that they flake apart to the touch. Beneath each crumbling beat lies a potential wormhole to points unknown: a torn scrap of UK grime, a blast of static, a fleeting glimpse of crowded cityscape.
Since 2016, when he put out his Bionic Ahmed EP on Lee Gamble’s UIQ label, followed by two more records there over the next two years, ZULI has become a familiar face on adventurous international lineups, slotted among like-minded peers for whom “too weird” can be a point of pride. For the past year, of course, he hasn’t played in public anywhere, at home or abroad. You might guess that a year of enforced solitude would have pointed El Ghazoly back toward the slow tempos and queasy atmospheres of his UIQ debut. Quite the opposite: A collection of six unrelenting club cuts, All Caps is ZULI’s heaviest record yet.
El Ghazoly has good reason to sound so aggressive. Four months after putting out 2018’s Terminal, his most ambitious record to date, he had a follow-up EP ready to be mastered when he fell asleep on a French train and awoke to find that his laptop was gone. He lost the completed record and a big chunk of his sample library and music collection. “Tany” opens All Caps on an appropriately cathartic note, its overdriven Amen breaks hitting with the fury of a fist through drywall. What gives the track its manic edge is a looped vocal sample that’s been pulverized until it’s just a spray of nonsense syllables, like an auctioneer’s spiel peppered with duck calls. “Where Do You Go,” the EP’s other jungle cut, is just as exhilarating: Again, he chops up familiar breaks in fresh (and virtuosic) ways, and he drops in a verse of Arabic-language rapping, briefly giving the song an anthemic feel. Every so often, the whirlwind of kinetic energy is silenced by an eerie, violent shudder of bass, as though the track were imploding upon its hollow core.
The record’s textures are uniformly dazzling. The club cut “Keen Demag” rattles like a rock tumbler packed with agates and razor blades; the footwork-tempo “Bassous” triggers kick drums and hiccupping vocal shots like the bumpers of a pinball machine. The latter is the record’s simplest cut and also its most evil. There’s little more to it than drums and voice, but El Ghazoly stabs at his spartan palette with a sense of controlled violence.
Despite the scowling intensity and occasionally acrid mood, All Caps isn’t entirely dour. It can actually be quite funny. The lumbering trap song “Penicillin Duck” gets its title from a garbled vocal sample that does, in fact, sound remarkably like the titular phrase. And the closing “Bro! (Love It)” is structured around an actual joke, punchline and all. For the song’s first two minutes, El Ghazoly lays on the EP’s messiest, most disheveled drumming. Then, as the tempo slows and broken beats give way to North African reeds and percussion, an American-accented voice interjects: “Oh my god, this has Egyptian music all over! Love the Arabic fusion, bro!” If you were casting a voice actor and needed the Most Annoying Guy in the World, this would be him.
In interviews, El Ghazoly has criticized the Orientalist narratives that Westerners impose upon Egyptian styles like mahraganat, a working-class genre often praised, and exotified, for its noisy immediacy. Likewise, as a global citizen who spent the first 10 years of his life in London—“All my influences come from the internet and, before that, from MTV,” he says—he bristles at the idea that he should be tasked with representing some idealized Egyptian sound, even an underground one. In “Bro! (Love It),” he drives the point home.
After the Most Annoying Guy in the World exits the scene, El Ghazoly turns a dial, and the North African ensemble morphs back into a chaotic club beat. Then, another voice appears, like someone poking their head into the DJ booth: “Excuse me, excuse me, hi—What happened to the North African music you were playing earlier?” The song was inspired by a real-life DJ gig in Berlin, he says, when a listener mistook his hard-drum selections, part of a global subgenre that stretches from London to Mexico City, for traditional North African music. Here at the end of a blistering EP, his impromptu mashup feels both hilarious and scathing, a bravura display of subverting expectations and demolishing stereotypes. The producer whose music is too weird for Cairo, it turns out, is a few steps ahead of European clubbers, too.
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-03-16T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2021-03-16T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | UIQ | March 16, 2021 | 7.7 | 064059dc-93e3-4413-8716-02a141b923c3 | Philip Sherburne | https://pitchfork.com/staff/philip-sherburne/ | |
On Transatlanticism, Chris Walla was expanding his scope and ambition as a producer, intersecting with Ben Gibbard, who was doing the same as a writer. A decade after its release, Death Cab For Cutie's fourth and finest album is being reissued on limited vinyl (and MP3) with demo versions of all 11 tracks. | On Transatlanticism, Chris Walla was expanding his scope and ambition as a producer, intersecting with Ben Gibbard, who was doing the same as a writer. A decade after its release, Death Cab For Cutie's fourth and finest album is being reissued on limited vinyl (and MP3) with demo versions of all 11 tracks. | Death Cab for Cutie: Transatlanticism | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/18656-death-cab-for-cutie-transatlanticism/ | Transatlanticism | The term “transatlanticism” was coined by Ben Gibbard to define the incomprehensible emotional gap between two lovers separated by comprehensible distances—the continental United States, an entire ocean, or, most likely, just a couple floors in your freshman dorm. In the 10 years since Death Cab For Cutie released their finest record, the title has taken on an unintended resonance in regards to their career. On one side of their fourth of seven studio albums, there are three modestly performed and admirably successful LPs released on Seattle indie label Barsuk. On the other, three exquisite-sounding and wildly successful LPs released on New York City major...Atlantic. Death Cab’s aesthetic hadn’t really changed all that much, and yet how do you span the distance between the uber-#feelings video for “A Movie Script Ending” and two #1 albums (Codes and Keys hit #3), Grammy nominations, platinum sales when they meant something, huge festival slots, and Zooey Deschanel? Look, it’s nigh impossible to extricate Death Cab’s ascendance from The O.C., so how’s this: from the moment the skyrocket guitars go off in “The New Year”, Death Cab are taking a leap of faith like Seth Cohen up on that kissing booth, risking embarrassment to tell as many people as possible that they may be dorks, but they’re not going to be anyone’s secret anymore.
Up until 2001's The Photo Album, Death Cab created often excellent songs that did a limited number of things—they didn’t rock (nor did they really try), they didn’t groove, their blood didn’t run particularly hot either, even when Gibbard sang about abusive parents, any number of lost loves, or hatred for his future hometown of Los Angeles. On Transatlanticism, well, not much really changed. But Walla in particular found countless ways to work around it. We all know Summer Roberts’ “it’s like one guitar and a whole lot of complaining” wisecrack helped Death Cab far more than it ever hurt them, but what always bothered me was the idea that they ever sounded like one guy. Death Cab songs are nearly impossible to accurately recreate in a solo performance and if the rinky-dink demos (hear “We Looked Like Giants” and the title track with 8-bit drums!) included in the reissue prove anything, it’s that.
Walla takes advantage of all the band’s moving parts, ensuring each one has its own distinct sonic character and turning Transatlanticism into a downright indulgent listen, a grand buffet of texture and tone. On the whole, the band creates perfectly detailed sonic dioramas—from the piano punctuating the pregnant quietude of “Passenger Seat”, you feel a frozen forest night in the middle of winter. “The New Year” captures explosions off in the distance and the ambivalence of wondering why you can’t relate to them. Within these ornate arrangements, a clever addition sneaks in towards the end and steals the song—the xylophone that rearranges the melody of “Title and Registration”, the combination of handclaps and slashing guitars on “The Sound of Settling”, and especially the percussion, whether those of new drummer Jason McGerr or the mechanistic electronics (beyond its profile boost, the concurrent musical influence of Gibbard’s work in the Postal Service tends to be overstated).
It reveals much of their work leading up to Transatlanticism as test runs—the simple Death Cab + drum machine format of “Coney Island” or the Stability EP are upgraded to complex, mixed-meter rhythms on “Lightness” and “Death of an Interior Decorator”. On “Bend to Squares”, “Title Track”, “Styrofoam Plates” (and later, “Marching Bands of Manhattan” and “Bixby Canyon Bridge”), Death Cab developed a trick where they’d build and build and build without ever exploding into pure catharsis. The consuming title track unapologetically goes over-the-top, giving you a safe and sound drop on the most sincere, intense FaceTime conversation ever: those glistening guitars and the endless, upward ramp of the drums convey enough infinite sadness as is, and then a church choir comes in to goad the listener: will these two EVER just make out already?
Walla was expanding his scope and ambition, intersecting with Gibbard, who was doing the same as a writer. It didn’t initially seem that way: though this record gained Death Cab many, many new fans, it lost some older ones as well, and in our original review of Transatlanticism, William Morris echoed their sentiments, taking issue with the increased generality of Gibbard’s lyrics. And there’s truth to that, as Transatlanticism is full of compact ways to express the same ideas that Death Cab songs would earlier obfuscate with bigger words or dense metaphor: “So this is the new year/ and I don’t feel any different,” “I need you so much closer,” and of course, “She is beautiful, but she don’t mean a thing to me.” That said, I think you’d be hard-pressed to find anyone else capable of pulling off Gibbard’s more typically elliptical concepts. A disastrous wedding “felt just like falling in love again” to the lonely empty nester on “Death of an Interior Decorator”. “Title and Registration” begins with a silly joke and it’s revealed as a defense mechanism as Gibbard recalls how the dumbest thing (like, “searching for some legal documents”) can unearth a wellspring of repressed feelings. It’s a phenomenon that can cause you to lose hours at a time, and “Title” sums it up perfectly in four minutes.
As a result of pulling all those heartstrings, short of the Decemberists, no band has become an easier target for people who want to assert their “I ain’t with that indie bullshit” masculinity. Granted, Death Cab For Cutie’s music never sounds sexual, and you can’t really call it “rock music” as something derived from “rhythm and blues”—hell, they’ve always been an awkward fit into “emo” as a musical ideal, since that entails some basis in punk and Death Cab clearly have nothing of the sort. And that’s fine, as Gibbard sought to create the definitive songs about the span of a romantic coupling rather than a sonic approximation of it. Whereas the previous albums dealt with mundane, household affairs—reading the unemployment pages, sharing cigarettes, “We Laugh Indoors”—a lot more’s at stake this time out, emotionally and physically. Death Cab thrashes desperately throughout “We Looked Like Giants” while Gibbard recalls both the thrall of hormonal, visceral lust and the painful recollection of the liminal moments spent around jukeboxes and magazines. Wavering sonar beeps cloak low-key amorousness on “Lightness”. And, oh man…"Tiny Vessels.”
A common criticism of Death Cab (and really, its fanbase) is that wimpiness served as a cover for passive-aggressiveness or a safe haven from actually acting on emotions or impulses and risking rejection—if not outright misogyny. “Tiny Vessels” doesn’t exactly negate that criticism, it just forces the issue by putting it right out there. Though he'd reconfigure the “I spent two weeks in Silver Lake” line after his divorce from Zooey Deschanel, that's an exception, as one of Gibbard’s strengths is that his lyrics can be rich with personalized detail without sounding personal. That said, his vocals always lead you to believe that the narrator at least kinda looks like him and it's startling to hear Gibbard detail the kind of callous sexual conquest people think they're escaping by getting into the indie crowd.
The entire band is in peak form on "Tiny Vessels"—a glancing, sour note in the introductory guitar harmony precedes the unsympathetic admission that you're no different than the narrator, that "you'll tell her that you love her but you don't." Time-elapse layering of shockingly distorted guitars raise the drama during the bridge as he “wanted to believe in all the words that I was speaking/ As we moved together in the dark.” That gets most of the attention, though it’s the spellbinding third verse where all of it clears out, leaving plangent, echoing drums that house the monstrous, hollowed-out sentiment of Gibbard’s lyric—that of a total jerk who’s very aware of the thoughts and feelings of the other person, but chooses not to stop himself. It’s understandable that many people either can’t or choose not to acknowledge both sides of “Tiny Vessels”, and every time a Death Cab live crowd turns it to a singalong (and it’s usually one of the loudest), it becomes one of the most biting indictment of “nice guy syndrome” ever written.
We’ve gotten this far, so let’s just do away with it: judging Death Cab, and Transatlanticism in particular, from a completely objective standpoint feels kinda insincere and wholly inaccurate (and everybody knows it). From a lot of the descriptors above, “indulgent,” “consuming,” etc.—you can assume that, yeah, I was completely obsessed with Transatlanticism back in 2003. It was in a way that should be embarrassing in retrospect, but why judge your younger self like that? If the “little brother/sister music” tag often applied to Death Cab is going to stick, at least remember the times when your world was that small where new love (or a broken heart) filled its entirety and thensome. Or maybe that a new love shrinks your world to the point where there isn’t room for anything else. Note the central simile in “We Looked Like Giants”, two people “in the back of [a] gray subcompact/ fumbling to make contact” don’t have a lot of space to consider politics, socioeconomic struggle, whatever you consider to be “important” matters for art to discern.
I mean, I can bust out a map and point out the mountain passes of Virginia’s I-64 that I’d brave after skipping early classes or talk about the resonance of “Title and Registration” in relation to the November day in 2003 I spent getting my automotive legal documents in order or how I first heard the title track on the way to a college reunion, for crying out loud. Serendipity, for sure—but few records open themselves up to forge those kind of moments, to be a formative emotional and listening experience, pushing you to feel what you’re thinking (to flip a line from “Lightness”), daring to be universal enough to allow you to see yourself in it. If you love this album, or will, you’ll have some a personal history of your own and that’s why Transatlanticism stands out over Death Cab’s impressive catalog—they were always great at telling you stories, but here, they proved even better at helping you understand your own. | 2013-11-06T01:00:01.000-05:00 | 2013-11-06T01:00:01.000-05:00 | Rock | Barsuk | November 6, 2013 | 8.4 | 0640dfc0-1727-43d3-8347-40785f3ee78d | Ian Cohen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ian-cohen/ | null |
The recent success of Matt Pike’s rebooted Sleep sounds like it’s rubbing off on his long-running High on Fire, whose 8th album leans on the heavier half of their habitual doom-meets-thrash mixture. | The recent success of Matt Pike’s rebooted Sleep sounds like it’s rubbing off on his long-running High on Fire, whose 8th album leans on the heavier half of their habitual doom-meets-thrash mixture. | High on Fire: Electric Messiah | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/high-on-fire-electric-messiah/ | Electric Messiah | High on Fire are often compared to Motörhead, for many reasons: their raw speed, gravelly throats, swaggering attitude, and—lately, especially—consistency. Black Sabbath-style riffing at thrash tempos while Matt Pike sings about arcane creatures: You pretty much already know what a new High on Fire album will sound like, and that’s not to their detriment at all. For almost a decade, they bounced from producer to producer, striking gold with Steve Albini (Blessed Black Wings) and Jack Endino (Death Is This Communion) before pairing with the more commercial Greg Fidelman for with their most anthemic material, on Snakes for the Divine. In Kurt Ballou, they found someone who cut through the mud, making them sound their most extreme without squelching the dynamics. Sticking with Ballou for a third time might make it seem as though there’s nothing new on Electric Messiah, but even though High on Autopilot would still be a thrilling heavy-metal odyssey, subtle changes make all the difference.
High on Fire are by no means obscure, but they’ve tended to live in the shadow of Pike’s other band, Sleep. The former may have a broader body of work, but the latter have a mythology, something to sell beyond the music. (This is not a knock against Sleep, and The Sciences is a welcome comeback.) Sleep rebooted are the band that allowed Pike to quit his day job and get the 1978 El Camino he always dreamed of owning, something even High on Fire’s frequent touring couldn’t achieve. Electric Messiah leans more on the Sabbath side of Pike’s patented MotörSabbath blend, suggesting that Sleep’s renewal is rubbing off on him. “Steps of the Ziggurat/House of Enlil” would be a lightning-fast Sleep song; in High on Fire terms, Pike lets his riffs come to a rolling boil rather than unleash everything out the gate. “God of the Godless” incorporates some of Sleep’s boogie, which gets drowned out when Pike and company go full Slayer. On “The Witch and the Christ,” there’s even a throwback to Blessed Black Wings, where High on Fire were beginning to realize themselves as a metal metal band, even though they hadn’t yet entirely shaken off Sleep’s doomy crunch.
Still, when High on Fire rip, it’s like they’re tearing through the whole universe. Most bands would struggle to even halfway keep up with the way they bash away on “Spewn From the Earth.” The title track was born from a dream—a divine vision, if you will—Pike had where Lemmy was hazing him. Motörhead are so integral to High on Fire’s being that it was only a matter of time before Lemmy himself turned up in one of their songs. High on Fire reimagine their “messiah”—already a larger-than-life figure, but also ultimately a dude who liked women, video poker, and Jack and Cokes—by giving his band’s sheer speed a cosmic thrust. The music’s still dirty as hell, yet there’s a bigger purpose behind it all.
“Sanctioned Annihilation” is Pike’s take on a Sabbath-style epic, one that imagines Tony Iommi marrying his monolithic riffage with the longer, more melodically driven ballads of Sabbath’s Dio era. This isn’t a ballad, but the bigger scope and all-encompassing feeling are there, and this is where Electric Messiah sets itself apart. “Sanctioned Annihilation” is High on Fire’s “Sign of the Southern Cross,” moving through battle and victorious comedown, sown into the dirt yet always looking ahead and upward. Pike is lauded as a high priest of metal for his invocation of metal’s finest; “Sanctioned Annihilation” reveals that even in tribute, Pike’s reverence always comes out in his own image. It also reveals how thundering a drummer Des Kensel is—just as important as Pike, but considerably more low key. He combines Dave Lombardo’s double pass with Dale Crover’s hypnotic, hard-hitting tom bursts, and this is exactly what Pike, who swings between so many extremes, needs. “Annihilation” is cut from the same cloth as “Snakes for the Divine,” one of their most popular songs, for its interpolation of “Thunderstruck” via Master of Puppets, even though the two songs don’t example resemble each other. Both tunes capture High on Fire reaching the top of the mountain, achieving a moment of godliness for a sliver of time. And that, above all, is how Electric Messiah is the High on Fire you’ve come to expect. | 2018-10-09T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-10-09T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Metal | eOne | October 9, 2018 | 7.8 | 0642685f-a205-49a0-87f1-9827d87a500f | Andy O'Connor | https://pitchfork.com/staff/andy-o'connor/ | |
Long in the making, Boards of Canada's fourth full-length is their darkest and moodiest record. Clearly inspired by film soundtracks, Tomorrow's Harvest is heavy on atmosphere and richly textured drone. | Long in the making, Boards of Canada's fourth full-length is their darkest and moodiest record. Clearly inspired by film soundtracks, Tomorrow's Harvest is heavy on atmosphere and richly textured drone. | Boards of Canada: Tomorrow's Harvest | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/18104-boards-of-canada-tomorrows-harvest/ | Tomorrow's Harvest | Sounds like Boards of Canada. In the early years of this century, you heard many electronic music aficionados using that phrase, usually in the context of an endorsement. The Scottish brothers Michael Sandison and Marcus Eoin didn’t invent a new sound, but they did take various strands of music floating around and pull them into one place and essentially perfect them. And their particular fusion was so distinctive that their name became shorthand. The appetite for the BoC was so voracious that the group’s actual output, which was actually fairly prolific in its first decade, wasn’t nearly enough to satisfy it. But that was a long time ago. Since 2006 we’ve heard a lot of music that seems spiritually connected to Boards of Canada, from Burial to chillwave, but we haven’t heard a note of music from the originators until the surprise announcement of Tomorrow’s Harvest.
While BoC have always seemed comfortable inside their core sound, their records are still easy to distinguish. On Music Has the Right to Children, they mixed creepy pre-erased drones with childhood nostalgia and drums that drew from hip-hop; on 2002’s Geogaddi, the beats got harder and the unease grew more intense, resulting in an album that was still playful but far darker. Campfire Headphase, from 2005, brought acoustic guitars to the table and aimed for a more pastoral feel, but it lacked the tension of what came before. And Tomorrow’s Harvest is in some ways the flipside to Campfire, the bucolic tint swapped out for moody drones and encroaching dread. It is the most internally focused of Boards of Canada’s records. Rather than working around the edges of their sound in search of new territory, Tomorrow’s Harvest finds them drawing back toward the center.
Given its hermetic feel, it makes sense BoC have indicated that soundtracks were an especially big influence. They specifically invoke the work of John Carpenter, Mark Isham, and Wendy Carlos, all of whom constructed some of their most enduring scores in the late 1970s and early 80s. That was a period where analog synthesis was reaching full maturity but digital synthesis was in its earlier stages, when the tape-driven Mellotron competed for studio space with the digital Fairlight and new timbres were being explored. If the earliest Boards of Canada music still seemed inspired by Warp’s post-techno Artificial Intelligence movement, beats on Tomorrow's Harvest are secondary. The tempos are generally slow, and there’s not much trickiness to the percussion. The tracks tend to create a groove and stick with it for the duration.
The creative energy here is directed toward building textures, which are very deep and rich indeed. The most visceral sound design in Boards of Canada’s music has tended to occur during their short interludes, but here they’ve taken some those ideas and explored them at length, filling the tracks with details that can take some time to soak in. On headphones, you can explore the tracks one motif at a time, as if each were a small landscape. “Jacquard Causeway” has a series of metallic-sounding twinkles that seems to grow out of the chords that swell underneath, and they slip in and out of phase with the underlying drums in a manner that imparts an extra measure of uneasiness. “Split Your Infinities” has bird sounds and distant noises that sound like lasers, both of which are so subtle so as to function subliminally. “Nothing Is Real” is a swirl of deep bass, stop-start drums, and a continual surging synth line that sounds like a swarm of bugs, but it also has a distant, echoing keyboard line that haunts the track like a ghost. The layering of the various sounds on a given track offers a different way in each time, so they can take on an M.C. Escher-like quality, where the tone and emotional content varies according to what you choose to pay attention to. There are sounds behind sounds and sounds underneath sounds and you can find yourself sifting through the layers, turning the pieces inside-out.
If Boards of Canada’s sound construction has reached a new plateau, they do seem to have left some appealing elements of their earlier approach behind. Returning again to Music or Geogaddi, it’s striking how tuneful those records were. Whether they’ve lost that ability or no longer choose to incorporate it, melody is not the focus on Tomorrow’s Harvest. These tracks unfurl, grow, and shrink, but they don’t exactly develop, at least not in the same way. The early playfulness, too, is no longer part of the equation. It’s easy to forget about “childlike” for Boards of Canada at one point didn’t just mean the ache of nostalgia or the fear of nightmares but actually pleasurable activities like clapping hands and laughing and saying funny words. And the lightness and humor-- the repetition of the word “Orange” in "Aquarius", say-- are something they don’t seem remotely interested in here. It’s not hard to imagine a certain kind of Boards of Canada fan missing that variety.
So that’s what is not here. What we’re left with is Boards of Canada’s moodiest record, a full-length tinted with atmosphere that unfolds slowly and is happy to allow you to come to it. Creating a new way to hear electronic music, as they did in the first half of their career, earned them that right to make a record that is absorbed through osmosis. And true to its patient nature and long gestation period, Tomorrow’s Harvest’s last third is its best. As they move from the ultra-simple, Music for Films-like “Sundown” through the soot-dusted “New Seeds”, with its quiet guitar grind and bell-like percussion, and then on through the arpeggiated Tangerine Dream-style “Come to Dust” and the the closing bass-pedals of “Semena Mertvykh”, it’s clear that they still, after all this time and all the imitators, own this world. And it’s nice to hear that they’re still inhabiting it. | 2013-06-10T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2013-06-10T02:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Warp | June 10, 2013 | 8.3 | 06491f5e-f6f0-416e-a19e-34a705b457d8 | Mark Richardson | https://pitchfork.com/staff/mark-richardson/ | null |
As a creative package, M3LL155X is unimpeachable; a high-concept piece of work that's evocative, accessible and transgressive. It builds on FKA twigs' previous work, exploring ideas of psychic and interpersonal dominance and submission, but drills down almost completely into self. | As a creative package, M3LL155X is unimpeachable; a high-concept piece of work that's evocative, accessible and transgressive. It builds on FKA twigs' previous work, exploring ideas of psychic and interpersonal dominance and submission, but drills down almost completely into self. | FKA twigs: M3LL155X | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/20985-m3ll155x/ | M3LL155X | In "Papi Pacify", the video that introduced FKA twigs to the wider world, the British pop star stares into the camera as a man (a lover, it should be said) pries his fingers into her gaping mouth. The hook is a moan: "Mmm, papi pacify." The lyrics are about the tension of desire, but the mise en scene is power. On the cover of her third EP M3LL155X, twigs echoes this gesture, staring at us as her own hand merges into her face. Once again, her gaze is discomfiting and impossible not to return. A glassy-voiced singer refracting melody through diffuse electronic beats, twigs takes the familiar R&B star as her avatar, but her presentation is more complex: her ideas mar beauty and mine power, and exalt sex without exotifying.
She develops these ideas further on M3LL155X, a five-song EP accompanied by a 16-minute music video/film that dropped last week, just over a year after the release of twigs' high profile debut, LP1. As a creative package the EP is unimpeachable; a high-concept, intellectually curious project that's evocative, accessible and transgressive enough to satisfy the competing demands of a newly broadened fanbase and her existing audience of Tumblr-educated aesthetes. M3LL155X (pronounced 'Melissa') builds on her previous work, exploring ideas of dominance and submission and drilling down almost completely into the self.
Instead of obfuscating her soft voice with layers of effects or singing in that cartoonishly frail and breathy falsetto, twigs prowls confidently over M3LL155X. The opening track "Figure 8" rumbles, shudders, whirrs and clicks like most of LP1, but her voice is clearer than ever. Over modular synth patches and a fluid wheeze of artificial strings on "In Time", she tests her brawniest delivery yet: "Every day, every day, you be testing my sane, you've got a goddamned nerve." When there are vocal effects, they're sinister instead of sweet, as if she's haunted by her own thoughts. That's the rub behind a seemingly submissive song like "I'm Your Doll", an angsty love song written by her pre-woke teenage self that twigs repurposes for adulthood."I just want [for] you to love you," she implores, as a reminder, on the garage-meets-gagging dancefloor missive "Glass & Patron." M3LL155X — like Sasha Fierce or Zadie Smith — isn't interested in vulnerability.
In the video for "Figure 8", a song about life and birth, twigs uses a prosthesis to appear pregnant, stepping and spinning while clutching her belly. The title of the track, produced with Beyonce's Beyoncé ace Boots, is derived from the detailed handwork voguers use to frame their faces as they dance, as twigs explained in an interview with Complex. Voguing, like the ballroom culture that birthed the dance style, has been a way for gay men and queer people of colour to aggressively reclaim their bodies, cycling back into twigs' ideas about rebirth.
What lyrics might not make explicit, her videos and movement do: illuminating the multifarious ways in which a woman — a black woman — understands and owns her body, sexuality and creativity. The film accompanying M3LL155X opens on the wrinkled, smiling face of restaurateur and creative icon Michèle Lamy, who is tattooed, older and unbothered, and the muse and partner to fashion designer Rick Owens. Later, twigs moves through vignettes that show her as a sex doll, seductress, pregnant, in the club with her girls, being watched by a man as she dances solo to trembling down a runway with a crew of voguers. The mood flips between the skin-crawling sci-fi of Jonathan Glazer's succubus film Under The Skin and the bubblegum spunk of early '00s girl groups like 3LW and Cleopatra.
What twigs is interested in, above all, is mastery. Her idea of mastery involves ownership of her craft, but is mindfully tempered with the knowledge that she is one of many voices. twigs appears to understand that mainstream culture pins her as artist zero for voguing (and baby hairs) and she counters cultural myopia by continually naming her teachers and collaborators: Wet Wipez, Benjamin Milan, Derek Prodigy. She maintains co-producer credits on her tracks (although, as MIA, Bjork and Missy Elliott have noted of their work, credit often goes to the men who produce with her, like Tic and Arca). For some, it matters profoundly that twigs centers black men in her videos. We increasingly see twigs behind the camera as director as well (in additionto many of her recent videos, she developed that crazy piece for Google Glass as well).
All of which is to say that the EP takes the ur-feminist mantra of "the personal is political" as a starting point. Indeed, after the tiresome reams of "is she or isn't she?" thinkpieces dissecting Beyoncé, Rihanna, Nicki Minaj, Taylor Swift and other figures that commodify feminist rhetoric, twigs makes the strongest case for the feminist pop star proper, standing up (for now) to the checklist scrutiny of "ur fav is problematic" culture. Role models aren't universal, but if we need a feminist pop star, then twigs is it. | 2015-08-19T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2015-08-19T02:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic / Pop/R&B | Young Turks | August 19, 2015 | 8.6 | 064a82fc-66f3-4381-b2af-f4131d209a6d | Anupa Mistry | https://pitchfork.com/staff/anupa-mistry/ | null |
As they shed their masks and streamline their sound, the UK psych-pop duo sound like they’ve found their voice but not yet something significant to say. | As they shed their masks and streamline their sound, the UK psych-pop duo sound like they’ve found their voice but not yet something significant to say. | Jadu Heart: Hyper Romance | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/jadu-heart-hyper-romance/ | Hyper Romance | We’ve met Jadu Heart before, but in a sense, their second album is a chance to meet them anew. On their 2016 EP Wanderflower and 2019 debut Melt Away, the duo of Diva Jeffrey and Alex Headford wore 3D-printed masks, adopted elaborate mythologised characters named Dina and Faro, and couched their electronic pop experiments in a fantastical backstory. Like their identities, their sound was polymorphous, shifting between ukelele folk and choppy electronics in the vein of Maggie Rogers or Mura Masa (with whom they share a manager). One year on, follow-up Hyper Romance feels like a re-introduction to the band, who have ditched the masks and settled into a steadier groove. The newfound simplicity suits them.
Jeffrey and Headford made Hyper Romance after moving away from the bustle of London to the port city of Bristol. Holed up in a basement studio, they used distortion pedals and cheap amps to create the layer of atmospheric grunge that hangs over the record (which was later co-produced by Guy Sigsworth, noted for his work with Björk and Madonna). “Suddenly I Know Who You Are” is built around a swaggering Britpop riff, while the ghost of Tame Impala appears in the faintly psychedelic rush of “Metal Violets,” and the blurred edges of “Dead, Again” feel an homage to The Bends-era Radiohead. On each of these songs, Jeffrey and Headford’s vocals intertwine seamlessly, the contours of their voices fitting into one another so well that it’s sometimes hard to tell where one ends and the other begins.
It’s these more spectral and sensitive moments, the ones hiding behind the crunching guitars, that are the record’s most powerful. The dusky ballad “Caroline” is tailor-made for the montage that comes three-quarters of the way through an indie rom-com, when the protagonist’s life has fallen apart. Nothing on the album quite tops “Burning Hour,” a smoky blend of live drums, tentative falsetto vocals, guitar shimmers, and—piercing through the haze, before things get too comfortable—samples of screams. It’s a refinement of the laid-back yet eerie electronic sound that flickered through the more disjointed Melt Away, with a pining chorus that sticks.
On Hyper Romance, Jadu Heart sound like they’ve found their voice—if not yet something significant to say. The points of reference for their songwriting shine so brightly that at times it threatens to overwhelm them, as with the Thom Yorke moment at the end of “Day by Day,” and their lyrics exhibit the same problems as on their first LP, which often relied heavily on rhyme and cliché. Despite the occasional striking line or memorable hook—like the disarming honesty of “I heard your friend call me a pig” on the prickly romantic duet “Walk the Line”—many images in these songs are ones you’ve seen before. Take this uninspiring couplet from “Caroline”: “A rolling stone, whose moss has grown and grown/A broken home, no love lives here no more.”
Towards the end of the record, on the title track, the band sample Streetwise, the 1984 documentary about homeless youth living in Seattle. While the emotive snippets work well within the whorl of warm synth notes and metallic found sound, the overall effect is one of nostalgia for its own sake. The film is a familiar sample, used by bands including the Avalanches and How to Dress Well in the past, and the question of how its tragic mutterings pertain to this record from a Bristol-based psych-pop duo goes unanswered. Though they’ve removed their literal masks, there’s still a sense that Jadu Heart are trying on different costumes, trying to figure out which one captures who they really are.
Buy: Rough Trade
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Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2020-09-28T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-09-28T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | VLF | September 28, 2020 | 6.5 | 06500701-94d4-482d-ab2a-c32bca98d569 | Aimee Cliff | https://pitchfork.com/staff/aimee-cliff/ | |
Originally conceived as a performance for 2011's Øya festival in Oslo, the recording of Elements of Light is an impressive example of how versatile the lowly bell can be, and offers familiar beats and bass swells from Hendrik Weber's world shot through with giddy-making surprises. | Originally conceived as a performance for 2011's Øya festival in Oslo, the recording of Elements of Light is an impressive example of how versatile the lowly bell can be, and offers familiar beats and bass swells from Hendrik Weber's world shot through with giddy-making surprises. | Pantha du Prince / The Bell Laboratory: Elements of Light | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/17511-elements-of-light/ | Elements of Light | The lowly bell might not figure much in the history of minimal techno-- or, indeed, much contemporary music at all-- but it's a percussive instrument that holds much attraction for German producer Hendrik Weber, aka Pantha du Prince. Strip the bells out of "Lay in a Shimmer" from the high-benchmark Pantha release Black Noise and it simultaneously loses its twinkly elegance and errs a little too close to humdrum genre fare. Back in 2011 Weber appeared at the Øya Festival in Oslo where he took his obsession up a notch by collaborating with a collection of musicians on a series of bell-oriented tracks under the name Pantha du Prince and the Bell Laboratory. The name neatly tied into Weber's fascination with the instrument and electronic music's past; the original Bell Laboratories were where Max Mathews developed one of the first computer programs to play music back in the 1950s. At Øya the group played a piece titled Elements of Light, the name given to this studio recording of their efforts. There's a lightness to it that belies the literal heaviness at the center of the album-- an instrument named the bell carillon, made up of 50 bronze bells, bearing a combined weight of three tonnes.
This isn't such a great departure for Weber, instead coming across as the logical extension of an idea he's been chasing for a while. There are elements of classic minimalism worked in, as well as a healthy dose of the all-surface moves that were typical of Tortoise's transitionary work on the TNT album. On that record it felt like Tortoise were bridging between the airless electronics they leaned on during Millions Now Living Will Never Die and a space where you could sense them loosening up a little more. It's a feeling this album also taps into. The playing is incredibly tight, but there's a sense of adventure to the whole undertaking, with all the players locked into a common goal. It's an instrumental album with a tinge of narrative, particularly when they venture into mazy 10-minute-plus pieces like "Particle" and "Spectral Split". Ventures like this often end up feeling like a display of chops, a demonstration of proficiency, an exercise in technical prowess. Elements of Light is mostly the opposite; it feels like those involved were as invested in the transformative power of the music as they were in flexing their not inconsiderable talents.
"Particle" is a particularly impressive example of how versatile the bell can be as an instrument, especially when it juxtaposes ominous, church-like clangs with lighter tones that skip and twist across its surface. It's positively giddy at times, never quite ending up where you expect, bringing in familiar beats and swells of bass that anchor it in Weber's world, then constantly pulling rugs out from underneath the listener. To give away too much would spoil the surprises that are crucial to making this album work, but a small glimpse of its magic can be found in the turn into Tom Waits-style pots-and-pans percussion that is unexpectedly teased out during a section of "Particle". Moments like that, rendered here as a brief snatch of creative flash, but surely the basis for an entire track in lesser hands, are the points where this album really excels. Occasionally it meanders into cyclical drifting, particularly in shorter tracks like "Photon", where the ideas run a little dry. But even that just about works as a contemplative prelude to "Spectral Split", serving as a necessary foot-off-the-gas moment before something meatier.
It's in "Spectral Split" that Elements of Light flashes through all its tones, from washed out ambience to a momentum borrowed lightly from Steve Reich's Music for 18 Musicians, to the interlinking of classical and electronic textures that Weber so clearly obsesses over. It also demonstrates his astute understanding of how important anticipation is in dance music, with almost half the 17-minute runtime devoted to a slow build that explodes into color when all its spaghetti-like parts are interwoven. That sense of release surfaces sporadically throughout the album and is fundamental to making it work, but it's always delivered with a great degree of control and patience. Sometimes a stiffness emerges in the playing and it feels too mechanical, like a computer trying to figure out the meaning of joy, but even those little moments tie in perfectly with the historic wink in the name of the Bell Laboratory. It's possible that their collected devotion to precision would loosen up more in a live setting, of which more plans are afoot. Here, there's a sense of picking at a strand of inspiration and seeing how it flows toward a form of endgame, albeit one that still prickles with possibility. | 2013-01-09T01:00:01.000-05:00 | 2013-01-09T01:00:01.000-05:00 | Electronic | Rough Trade | January 9, 2013 | 7 | 065073db-1104-4632-b306-9ffe061849c9 | Nick Neyland | https://pitchfork.com/staff/nick-neyland/ | null |
Nick Murphy (fka Chet Faker) fires off in a new direction while trying to bridge a gap with his diverse new EP featuring Afrobeat, R&B, soul, and Kaytranada—sometimes all at once. | Nick Murphy (fka Chet Faker) fires off in a new direction while trying to bridge a gap with his diverse new EP featuring Afrobeat, R&B, soul, and Kaytranada—sometimes all at once. | Nick Murphy: Missing Link EP | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/23291-missing-link-ep/ | Missing Link EP | Reinvention is a risky proposition for any artist, riskier still for Chet Faker. In just five years, the award-winning, chart-topping singer/songwriter went from an unknown with a cheeky moniker to Australia’s most popular independent artist this side of Tame Impala. After relocating from Melbourne to New York in 2014, with hopes of learning something about himself, Nick Murphy announced a new direction for his neo-soul music. “There’s an evolution happening and I wanted to let you know where it’s going,” he tweeted in September of last year, underlining that he dropped the alias Chet Faker for his given name. Years after his debut album, Built on Glass, it was a surprising announcement from a wildly successful artist who had every reason to stay in his lane.
Our first glimpse of the new Nick Murphy arrived with “Fear Less,” a confident shift towards electronic pop tinkering à la Moderat or Bonobo. The eight-minute “Stop Me (Stop You),” co-produced by Darkside’s Dave Harrington, came two months later, and its uplifting vocal introduced some stadium-sized emotion to Murphy’s changing sound. His new tracks were a far cry from the bubbly, sensual Chet Faker hits “Gold” and “1998,” but even as he dabbled in more adventurous styles, Murphy kept playing to the cheap seats. It gave the sense that, despite all the talk of evolution, maybe the name change was more about shedding a moniker Murphy didn’t exactly want in the first place. Or maybe it had to do with his streak as a finicky, conflicted perfectionist, someone who is said to have scrapped his debut album twice and often writes multiple versions of his songs. Was a radical transformation just around the corner, or would the evolution be more understated?
On Missing Link, Murphy’s first record released under his given name, the music remains uncertain of its direction. Granted, all previous allusions to change ring true, but they’re realized as a mixed bag of mostly underdeveloped ideas and polished demos. The sultry collaboration “Your Time,” described by Murphy as an “old song” he wanted to put out “before it was too late,” first appeared in rough form on Kaytranada’s 0.001% mixtape. It has a fair amount in common with Built on Glass—including an engrossing vocal performance and moody but subtle hooks—though it proves to be a false start. As does the needless interlude “Bye,” which sounds more like a Run the Jewels beat than anything to do with Murphy’s past or present. Sure, Missing Link comes with the disclaimer calling it “A bridge between what’s out and what’s coming,” but it’s a sizable leap from one side to the other.
By track three the EP reaches Murphy’s new frontier, the electronic, heavily-produced pop that “Fear Less” and “Stop Me (Stop You)” had outlined. It’s still a sound marked by mixed textures, fits of noise, thick atmosphere, and punchy drums, and those characteristics are well suited for the skybound structures and lyrics about tumultuous love. But for an artist like Murphy, whose renowned singing has only grown stronger and more distinctive over the years, it’s strange that the songs underutilize his voice. Even compared to the measured delivery on “Your Time,” there's a restraint that verges on flatness in the toplines of “I’m Ready” and “Forget About Me.” If his goal is to leave room for more showy instrumentation, Murphy’s focus on production doesn’t always work, either. The first 45 seconds of “Forget About Me” are especially egregious, where a high-pitched vocoder, a clanging bell, and operatic strings mush together to introduce the song’s U2-lite posturing. For the last two minutes, Murphy finally lets his voice run wild, and yet he buries it beneath electronic clutter and the arrangement's pedestrian histrionics.
Of *Missing Link’*s newer material, “Weak Education” is by far the most interesting, and it points a way forward for Murphy that doesn’t ditch his past entirely. Not unlike Built on Glass’ “Cigarettes & Loneliness,” the song competently borrows from artists and styles outside the R&B and soul spheres. Thom Yorke’s solo work informs the mild-mannered eclecticism; Fela Kuti’s Afrobeat bolsters the jittery, stripped-down groove; from the opening horns to the wailing keyboard solo at the end, Murphy’s enduring jazz obsessions emerge with gusto. During a recent interview with Zane Lowe, Murphy said, “I’m so confused by myself right now, in terms of the music I’m listening to. It just seems to be getting heavier and heavier, and weirder—just abstract as hell.” But by pairing those fresh inspirations with his familiar strengths, he”s began to make some sense of it all. | 2017-05-20T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-05-20T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Downtown / Opulent | May 20, 2017 | 6.2 | 065171ef-b5d0-41cd-b0b2-dca491590829 | Patric Fallon | https://pitchfork.com/staff/patric-fallon/ | null |
This set of unreleased material from the late singer/songwriter collects two CDs' worth of material recorded around the same time as Elliott Smith and Either/Or, and makes for a worthy and welcome addition to a stunningly consistent catalog. | This set of unreleased material from the late singer/songwriter collects two CDs' worth of material recorded around the same time as Elliott Smith and Either/Or, and makes for a worthy and welcome addition to a stunningly consistent catalog. | Elliott Smith: New Moon | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/10208-new-moon/ | New Moon | Elliott Smith's legacy is best spoken by his records. For all the emphasis placed on his unhappy backstory and the distressing nature of his death, Smith left behind a body of work that defies and exceeds any stereotyping. Sadness may be the easiest emotional current to pick up on in his songs, but Smith's expressive range was as wide as it was subtle; his music could be angry, funny, hopeful, and despondent, often at the same time. New Moon collects two CDs' worth of material recorded around the same time as 1995's Elliott Smith and its 1997 follow-up Either/Or, and unlike typical posthumous releases (not to mention second ones), is a genuinely worthy addition to a stunningly consistent catalog.
Part of what makes both Either/Or and 1998's XO so essential is Smith's avoidance of "classic album" compartmentalization; you don 't get "the sad song," followed by "the experimental song," followed by "the upbeat song." Smith didn't record specifically towards any album, he just recorded-- more or less constantly. At their inception, the songs compiled for New Moon were no less significant than those that wound up making the cut for Elliott Smith and Either/Or, and for the most part they're no less developed.
Smith's signature style is more musical than it is aesthetic; from the lo-fi folk of Roman Candle through the muscular chamber-pop of Figure 8, Smith's songwriting tics remain completely recognizable. New Moon is overflowing with characteristic melodic turns and unexpected chord changes, yet still covers a good deal of ground stylistically. The chugging acoustic guitar of "Big Decision" conjures Johnny Cash, while "New Monkey" subtly nods to a similarly titled Beatles song. Each song seems fully realized in its own right; for a 2xCD posthumous compilation, it's unbelievably refreshing to not pick up even the slightest whiff of exploitative barrel-scraping.
Like much of Smith's material from this era, New Moon is by and large quiet, acoustic, and emotionally complicated. It's easy to see why Smith's music earned him a reputation as a "sad sack," but such dismissals don't really hold up to any scrutiny. When asked whether he considered himself a "lo-fi" artist, Smith once responded that he simply didn't want the recording process to be "a drag." Smith's interest in the the expressive potential of recording comes through loud and clear on New Moon; even when the subject or tone of a song is depressing, it still carries an unmistakable note of joy.
Which is certainly not to say that New Moon finds him sounding "happy." Many of the songs here are almost unbearably melancholy, but their weight is the product of expert craft, not wanton self-indulgence. The coda of "Talking to Mary", in which Smith repeatedly intones "One day she'll go/ I told you so," would not be nearly as powerful without the subtle tension and movement in Smith's guitar part. "All Cleaned Out", which hints at the musical and lyrical concerns that Smith took up with XO, is made all the more affecting by a second vocal line that injects well-placed harmonies into an already memorable melody. Every musical decision on New Moon feels both intuitive and considered; never obtrusive or distracting, but thoroughly rewarding when examined in depth.
Nowhere is this clearer than on an early version of the career-making "Miss Misery". This is the fourth, and earliest, version of this song that I've heard, and it speaks to the incredible care and refinement that went into Smith's recordings. The melodic backbone of the song is definitely present on this version, as are formative fragments of the lyrics, harmonies, and arrangements. It's fascinating to hear this track in such an early stage, but downright humbling to connect the dots to the song it eventually became. Smith had an uncanny and arguably unmatched talent for developing his music to suit his ever-evolving arrangement and production techniques, and every intermediate version of "Miss Misery" makes perfect sense the way it's performed and recorded.
Phrases like "rare talent" are thrown around all the time these days, but this compilation makes painfully clear just how unique and valuable this music is. Smith's visionary qualities were not terribly flashy or transgressive, and his great musical gifts were not those of innovation. Instead, he steadily and quietly wrote, honed, and recorded a body of beautifully executed, deeply moving records not quite like any others. Consider him the patron saint of hobbyists, a talented and dedicated craftsman with a tireless love of the creative process. | 2007-05-09T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2007-05-09T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Kill Rock Stars | May 9, 2007 | 8.7 | 0654e7f0-0faf-46c5-9ffa-90687dc2cccc | Matt LeMay | https://pitchfork.com/staff/matt-lemay/ | null |
Aphex Twin's first album since 2001's Drukqs is sixty-five minutes of highly melodic, superbly arranged, precisely mixed, texturally varied electronic music that sounds like it could have come from no other artist. Syro absorbs many different sounds, from loping breakbeat to drum’n’bass to techno proper to hints of disco, but it has a way of making other genres seem like they exist to serve this particular vision. | Aphex Twin's first album since 2001's Drukqs is sixty-five minutes of highly melodic, superbly arranged, precisely mixed, texturally varied electronic music that sounds like it could have come from no other artist. Syro absorbs many different sounds, from loping breakbeat to drum’n’bass to techno proper to hints of disco, but it has a way of making other genres seem like they exist to serve this particular vision. | Aphex Twin: Syro | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/19755-aphex-twin-syro/ | Syro | It’s 2014 and there is a new Aphex Twin album, which means the most conspicuous musical drought this side of My Bloody Valentine has ended. Syro, unlike the Caustic Window LP released earlier this year, is not a collection of material cut during Richard James’ prolific 1990s heyday and shelved. It’s a new album of new music recorded in the last few years, and it’s said to be the first of more to come. Unlike MBV, it’s not that James went away entirely—in 2005, he released a series of Analord 12" EPs as AFX, and there were a couple of low-key EPs as the Tuss. But with many-monikered electronic musicians, branding is everything: it’s not an Aphex Twin release unless it’s presented as an Aphex Twin release.
Syro is an unusual album to contemplate because its overall approach is not particularly unusual. Older fans of electronic music who followed along with James’ shape-shifting in the 1990s may need to adjust their expectations slightly. On the evidence here, he has no interest in re-inventing his sound. Syro has few extremes, no hyper-intense splatter-breaks or satanic “Come to Daddy” vocals or rushes of noise. On the other end of the spectrum, Syro doesn’t cast James in a quasi-classical light; there's no “serious composer” tracks like “4” or “Girl/Boy Song” that beg to be arranged for string quartet. And there are no “Windowlicker”-like nods to pop, no attempts to smuggle some truly weird music onto the charts.
Without all that, what’s left? Sixty-five minutes of highly melodic, superbly arranged, precisely mixed, texturally varied electronic music that sounds like it could have come from no other artist. James throughout the ’90s was an influence sponge; part of his genius was how he took ideas and ran them through his highly idiosyncratic filter. The bizarro highlights came when he put his own spin on genres, making jungle weirder, pop more unsettling, and piano music more gorgeous. Syro also absorbs many different sounds, from loping breakbeat to drum’n’bass to techno proper to hints of disco, but in a more subtle way. It has a way of making other genres seem like they exist to serve this particular vision. And it’s a confident album precisely because it’s not self-consciously pushing the envelope. Electronic music with a strong beat not intended for the dancefloor was, if not invented by this guy, certainly perfected by him. So with his first trip back from the wilderness, he’s demonstrating exactly how it’s done.
Syro scans as “’90s” in terms of form but is quite modern in its particulars. Music sounded like this in 1996, but it didn’t sound quite this good. Whether James has acquired better machines or improved the way in which he records them, Syro contains some of his most tactile music; it’s a headphone record par excellence, an hour-long feast for the ears. But as exquisite as all the fragments are in isolation, the heart of the record is its steady sense of momentum, all the more remarkable since the tempos are mostly relaxed and uniform. James has spoken of tricks he uses in sequencing to free his music from a ridged digital grid; whatever his methods, his rhythmic DNA is as identifiable as John Bonham’s. There’s a playful swing to his rhythms, with accents that dance on and around the beat, and that unmistakable drive is the frame upon which the album is built.
The album’s formal simplicity keeps the focus on the arrangements, especially in the first half. The ten-and-a-half-minute “XMAS_EVET10 [120][thanaton3 mix]” glides forward like a smooth stone over polished ice, allowing a new element—a sly melodic twist, a stuttering shift in the beat, an unusually bassy groan—to enter seamlessly in every bar. It’s complicated but never busy, myriad parts cohering into a logical whole. “4 bit 9d api+e+6 [126.26]” mixes muted acid squelches with twinkly keyboard melodies, with barely-there voices intoning a few layers beneath, while the opening “minipops 67 [120.2][source field mix]” has wordless singing presented straight—the one new wrinkle on the album—and it’s so naked it’s disarming. The album gets a few clicks harsher in places, as on “CIRCLONT6A [141.98][syrobonkus mix]”, with its assertive bass grind and rubbery video game noises, but it never goes too far in that direction. The care and virtuosity with which these tracks were assembled is immediately obvious, but nothing feels difficult; the record’s easy flow despite it all is one of its primary virtues, and there’s something new to uncover with every listen.
Syro’s tremendous focus on detail marks it as a more muted release in Aphex Twin’s discography. The “What the hell was that?”, once an Aphex touchstone, is nowhere to be found; there’s little here in the way of brute-force appeals to the lizard brain, and Syro is on balance more sophisticated and cerebral. And that silliness, that bratty desire to be noticed, was part of what made the Aphex Twin experience special. Some will miss it. But this record—virtuosic, precise, but also alive with feeling—has something else in mind. It’s telling that the most extreme moment here is also the quietest—the closing “aisatsana [102]”, a painfully lovely minimalist piano piece recorded on a creaky upright with birds chirping away in the background. By that moment, the feeling of “I’m listening to a new Aphex Twin album” has fallen away and the deeper beauty of Syro starts to sink in. | 2014-09-22T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2014-09-22T02:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Warp | September 22, 2014 | 8.7 | 06560b6c-22e8-438f-9f0d-db69a985a253 | Mark Richardson | https://pitchfork.com/staff/mark-richardson/ | null |
On this collection of officially sanctioned archival bootlegs, we can hear the roots country icon Gillian Welch in the process of discovering and honing her inimitable voice. | On this collection of officially sanctioned archival bootlegs, we can hear the roots country icon Gillian Welch in the process of discovering and honing her inimitable voice. | Gillian Welch: Boots No. 1: The Official Revival Bootleg | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22614-boots-no-1-the-official-revival-bootleg/ | Boots No. 1: The Official Revival Bootleg | “If any of y’all wanna give me shit about my twang, you can just do it,” Gillian Welch once told a chatty San Francisco crowd in 1994. It was two years before Welch would release her debut Revival, but the California-bred daughter of two entertainers was already anticipating the skepticism that would greet her when she rose to prominence in the mid-to-late ’90s singing about destitute coal miners and Depression-era whiskey runners with an unsettling familiarity for someone born in New York City, raised in Los Angeles, and who found their lifetime musical partner at a conservatory in Boston.
In 1994, Welch’s repertoire consisted largely of a number of songs that would never find their way onto a record, a handful of traditional tunes, and some John Prine covers. For an artist with an aesthetic as carefully and consistently rendered as Gillian Welch, it’s strange to think of a time when she wasn’t producing or reproducing that aesthetic, but was, rather, searching for it herself.
That sense of fresh discovery and wide-eyed experimentation can be heard plainly on Boots No. 1, Welch’s first archival release that serves as a 20th anniversary expanded release for her debut LP. The two-disc collection is comprised of outtakes, demos, and alternate takes culled from the Revival sessions, a time when Welch and guitarist Dave Rawlings were first honing in on their precise sound, mood, and style. “There really was no me. The artist Gillian Welch didn’t really exist,” Welch has said of the sessions, “And then after that, I did.”
Welch’s spectral country music has always felt otherworldly in its ability to evoke feelings, memories and atmosphere on command. “Sound [that] holds moods the way humid air holds smells,” is how writer Jedediah Purdy has described it. Part of the revelation of Boots No. 1, then, is witnessing Welch’s music made mortal, to hear her navigating her many influences with a young artist’s enlightened uncertainty, and to hear imperfect recordings that may not necessarily conjure universes on their own accord so much as they recall old-fashioned country music that’d sound at home on the radio.
Some of the most thrilling moments on this 21-song release are just that: hit records. “455 Rocket” is a hand-clapping muscle car ode in which Welch deadpans goofy lines likes like, “Whose junk pile piece of sh….Chevelle is this?” “Dry Town” is a talking country-blues Johnny Cash pastiche about craving a six-pack for the road. The former became a hit for country singer Kathy Mattea in 1997, while the latter ended up, a decade later, on Miranda Lambert’s chart-topping Crazy Ex-Girlfriend.
Boots No. 1 takes a more subtle approach than landmark archival releases like Dylan’s Bootleg Series. With dozens of songs remaining unreleased from this period, many of which, like “Birds of a Feather” and “Unfinished Business,” are even more telling examples of the diverse country traditions Welch was soaking up at the time, this collection is definitively more interested in tracing Revival’s process and evolution than in presenting any sort of radically alternate history of Welch’s mid-90’s artistry.
Nevertheless, witnessing gradual transformation can be revelatory, and several early takes lay bare the process of refining Gillian Welch into “Gillian Welch” with staggering clarity. The version of “Paper Wings” that made its way to the final album is much slower, sparser, and jazz-leaning than the honky-tonk demo. Moments like this show how greatly producer T Bone Burnett’s subtle aesthetics helped sculpt Welch’s sound.
Listening to the original Revival now, it’s astounding to hear all the constructed artifices and delicate contemporary flourishes that were so easy to overlook when the album first came out. The closing moments of “Orphan Girl,” Welch’s first signature tune, reveal a shocking swirl of grungy guitar feedback and tape distortion. “One More Dollar” is just one of several songs with a crisp, full rhythm section, a reminder that Welch and Rawlings wouldn’t settle into their now-famous acoustic duo format until 1998’s follow up Hell Among the Yearlings.
As several of these new songs also affirm, Welch’s third-person storylines often point inwards at moving autobiography. Like so much of Revival, “Wichita” and “Riverboat Song” are stories of movement and motion that trace both the thrill of fleeing home and the lonely alienation of being a stranger in the big city. Both songs were written just a year after Welch and Rawlings had moved to Nashville, a period when the two singers lived a ghostly existence spent largely recording music in the middle of the night by themselves.
Part of Welch and Rawlings’ aura is the sense that their music exists out of time, so it’s illuminating to hear the two artists conversing so intimately with contemporary genres and artists. They cover Robert Earl Keen and later, respond to him in song with “I Don’t Want to Go Downtown.” Lyrically, “Barroom Girls” is an equal-rights-to-party anthem that would’ve sounded at home on a Lilith Fair mainstage. On the other hand, “Pass You by” is strikingly loud, just a full drum-kit away from sounding like an outtake on Wilco’s roots-grunge opus Being There, released six months after Revival.
All of which goes to show that the authenticity scare that surrounded Welch upon her arrival feels, twenty years later, almost unrecognizably dated. Perhaps it’s because Welch herself, who would go on to play an integral role in Americana’s big-bang O Brother, Where Art Thou? soundtrack just a few years later, has since become the very aesthetic and artistic paradigm for 21st-century roots singer-songwriters. Or, perhaps, it’s because the anxieties about Welch’s authentic credentials were so misguided in the first place. | 2016-11-23T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2016-11-23T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Folk/Country | Acony | November 23, 2016 | 7.9 | 065ce5a0-d64a-4a08-8d14-58f1785b28fd | Jonathan Bernstein | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jonathan-bernstein/ | null |
The singer's new EP, featuring production from Kingdom, Nguzunguzu’s MA, and Arca, continues her sensuous, sensitive, and hi-definition approach to R&B. These songs use the gristle and guts of feeling as a thematic base for exploring new textures. | The singer's new EP, featuring production from Kingdom, Nguzunguzu’s MA, and Arca, continues her sensuous, sensitive, and hi-definition approach to R&B. These songs use the gristle and guts of feeling as a thematic base for exploring new textures. | Kelela: Hallucinogen EP | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/20432-hallucinogen-ep/ | Hallucinogen EP | Earlier this year, the L.A.-via-D.C. singer Kelela spoke about the challenges of performing electronic music in a live setting. "I feel like I just want my emotions to be at the forefront of my performance, and if anything distracts from that, I’m in trouble," she told The Cut, riffing on the experience of seeing the veteran of digital feelings, Björk, on stage. That kind of resonant tactility also goes a long way when it comes to listening to electronic music, and Kelela’s 2013 release Cut 4 Me indicates that, whether she was aware of it or not, this ability to transpose intimacy to music has been part of her wheelhouse from the start.
Her new EP, Hallucinogen, uses the gristle and guts of feeling as a thematic base for exploring new textures in music. Like Cut 4 Me, the sound is like being enveloped in the black-lit silence of the intro to Belly: it’s a sensuous, sensitive, hi-definition approach to R&B. Some of the producers are the same (Kingdom, Nguzunguzu’s MA) and some are new (Arca, Kendrick and Drake collaborator DJ Dahi), but these partnerships hew to what’s now the Kelela template: soulful songs with unpredictable, assaultive drum patterns, whorls of whimsical synthesizer effects, and so much processing on the vocals that it sounds like you’re listening to a transmission from tomorrow. The deconstructed clatter of FKA twigs—who also worked with Arca—might be from another dimension altogether, but Kelela, whose music feels like there is blood flowing through it, looks to a future with a decidedly human shape.
Kingdom, who co-produces the EP’s sole uptempo track, "Rewind", is a student of Timbaland’s slick approach to pop-R&B. Alongside Kelela and Nugget, he channels that, as well as the bounce of Jazze Pha, for the song, which is the EP’s lead single and a showpiece for Kelela’s much-improved singing. "All the Way Down" pulls rap producer DJ Dahi into completely different terrain; the shudders of hi-hat trills provide the seams, but the print he’s working with is studded with twinkling synths that gives way to a droning. Dahi’s beat doesn’t explicitly recall Aaliyah, but Kelela's voice does—she riffs on the melody and phrasing and pillow talk-closeness of the late singer’s 1999 track, "I Don’t Wanna" (incidentally, a Jazze Pha production).
More pressing is the existential rumble that bookends the EP. "All I know is all I’ve got/ Is it hard to face all we lost?," Kelela questions on the desolate opener "A Message". Arca’s hollow kickdrums prod the song along at a ragged crawl, allowing Kelela to wring out a melody with her voice while he fills the space with funereal, yawping organ-like patches. It’s the only song on the EP, aside from closer "The High", in which Kelela sings without heavy reverb or effects, heightening its somber quality.
"And I’ll do anything for the high," she urges a placid lover on the latter, the piercing hook contrasting with her hushed verses. In content—and maybe even in producer Gifted & Blessed’s tranquil heartbeat—it’s a song that feels spiritually descended from the Weeknd. And there's another connection: writing on Pitchfork about the Weeknd’s music and its inherited ambience, Hannah Giorgis described a "long Ethiopian musical legacy of tortured pining," and it’s instructive to think that Kelela—whose family is also from Ethiopia—may have absorbed a similar propensity for mournful music.
If you consider that Kelela’s roots are in soul and R&B, the emotional side of her music makes sense. The mechanics of dance music might inspire feelings in listeners, but within the genre, overrun with the egos and opinions of "bro-teurs," her emotions are revolutionary. She is a transparent creator, unafraid of tainting the canvases of her mostly male collaborators with the imperfect, vulnerable contents of her brain and heart. | 2015-10-07T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2015-10-07T02:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | Warp / Cherry Coffee | October 7, 2015 | 8.3 | 065dd537-0bca-417f-9699-18d42e6d2bd5 | Anupa Mistry | https://pitchfork.com/staff/anupa-mistry/ | null |
Lo-fi heroes graduate to crafting country-inflected indie pop that's part Wowee Zowee and part Workingman's Dead. | Lo-fi heroes graduate to crafting country-inflected indie pop that's part Wowee Zowee and part Workingman's Dead. | Woods: At Echo Lake | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/14224-at-echo-lake/ | At Echo Lake | One of the most promising developments of the last year or so in indie rock has been the removal of the Grateful Dead from the blacklist. Thanks to the valiant efforts of folks like Animal Collective and Arthur magazine, your average Brooklynite is starting to wonder why they ever hated the Dead in the first place. Truth be told, there's a lot to be learned from the Dead, and plenty of bands on both coasts seem to be taking notes. There's a re-emphasis on the live experience, on finding the psychedelic space within compositions, on not fearing the improv, on passing around music in cassette form. It's as refreshing as a 1967 Morning Dew.
Woods sound very little like the Dead; few of these bands actually do. But there's something of Garcia and co. in their DNA, most markedly in the free-form excursions of their live set, where the four-piece weaves through compelling improvisational passages. But the Grateful Dead made albums too, and the country-inflected indie pop that fills At Echo Lake, their fifth full-length and possibly their best, is a worthy heir as well. Loose, shuffling, and tuneful, the abridged Woods experience sounds more like Wowee Zowee than Workingman's Dead, but it hits just the right contradictory note of tight arrangements and breathing-room playing to get that back-porch, weird America vibe.
Where previous records got distracted with lo-fi detours or lengthy workouts that didn't translate from the stage to tape, At Echo Lake is far more concise. Made up exclusively from the soft landing points that punctuate their longer live jams, it's a brisk listen, even down to its half-hour runtime. Only the brief near-instrumental "From the Horn", which sounds excised from a longer jam session, hints at the group's more exploratory and dangerous side. The rest is a sunset daydream flickering by with songs, often acoustic-based, rarely lasting longer than it takes to plant a melody in your head. The endearing nasality of Jeremy Earl's voice is sloughed off by a distorted effect on all lead and backing vocals, making the record sound like a patchy signal from a distant ham radio.
Successful as At Echo Lake may be, Woods are still more interesting live than on record-- a photo-negative of 99% of indie rock bands these days, who mostly remain content to jukebox their catalog on shuffle night after night. Adding a couple of extended jams might help make a Woods record a more accurate souvenir of the live experience, but is that really necessary? Perhaps the most important lesson to be learned from the Grateful Dead is that the show and the album can be discrete experiences, feeding each other, but not overlapping. | 2010-05-10T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2010-05-10T02:00:01.000-04:00 | Rock | Woodsist | May 10, 2010 | 8 | 065fea97-5da2-45ed-8bb6-72e1231525b8 | Rob Mitchum | https://pitchfork.com/staff/rob- mitchum/ | null |
After a smattering of singles and a compilation, this raucous garage-pop outfit with an eye for the perils of teen love offers its full-length debut. | After a smattering of singles and a compilation, this raucous garage-pop outfit with an eye for the perils of teen love offers its full-length debut. | Hunx and His Punx: Too Young to Be in Love | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/15239-too-young-to-be-in-love/ | Too Young to Be in Love | The first things we hear on Too Young to Be in Love, the full-length debut from Hunx and His Punx, are wordless vocals cooing a familiar melody and the drums pounding out the iconic "Be My Baby" beat. To figure out the number of times these devices have been used over the course of the past three years, all you need is a calculator with a properly functioning multiplication key. But by the time Hunx frontman Seth Bogart alternates between speaking and singing in the first verse, all worries that the band might lean too heavily on dull, tasteful homage are thrown out of the window. The fourth wall is brought down and the band is all smiles and gleefully reveling in sock-hop pastiche.
But don't get "pastiche" confused with "smug ironic distance." The 10 songs on Too Young to Be in Love are exuberant snapshots of rock music's earliest years, bursting with teenage romance and allusions to oral sex, but they are also very faithful ones. Backup singers are deployed (in addition to playing their respective instruments, drummer Erin Emslie, guitarist Michelle Santamaria, guitarist/organist Amy Blaustein, and bassist Shannon Shaw all contribute vocals) and the most recognizable chord progressions are used. And while the sense of enjoyment feels sincere, the band alternates between conveying uncomplicated emotion and offering up conscious subversion. Bogart is gay, which inevitably upends some of the archetypes from the 1950s and 60s. So the call-and-response of "The Curse of Being Young" and the bouncy "Tonite Tonite" sound like a local contemporary theater rewriting Grease, where Danny Zuko and Sandy Olsson are best friends who have a crush on the same boy.
The vintage greaser girl-group vibe comes courtesy of producer Ivan Julian (Richard Hell and the Voidoids), working in a studio that was once graced with the presence of Bogart favorite Ronnie Spector. The record's dry, modest production highlights the vocal performances. Bogart is not exactly what you would call a classically trained singer. His distinctively nasal tone is punctuated with a lisp, so if you're the type of person who winces and grits your teeth when confronted with the voice of, say, Cassie Ramone or John Darnielle, Bogart's singing will likely try your patience. The background vocals are useful for taking the focus off of him (most notably on "He's Coming Back"), and they are equally untrained, but not nearly as potentially divisive. On the other hand, Shaw operates as the band's charismatic secret weapon, stealing the scene on a handful of songs here. The freewheeling "Bad Boy" is improved by her rockabilly-leaning rasp, emotion pours out of her leads in "The Curse of Being Young", and during the end coda of "If You're Not Here", Shaw is given a vocal solo, where she wrings a great deal of emotion out of a few simple words. She creates the album's most arresting moment in the process.
After the 20-some-odd minutes of sounding like they're having a blast, the band slows down the tempo and changes the time signature on closer "Blow Me Away". With its lyrics of sadness, regret, and crying mothers, the song at first sounds like yet another one of the band's odes to young love. But it's actually about the suicide of Bogart's father during the songwriter's teenage years, giving a bolstered level of affect when he sings, "I want you to blow your troubles down the drain/ And then you'll never, ever have to be in pain." It's one of those rare moments on the record where Bogart shows a sense of genuine vulnerability. It also marks a potential new direction for Bogart, who after a smattering of singles and a comp (2010's Gay Singles) finds cohesion and stability. | 2011-03-29T02:00:02.000-04:00 | 2011-03-29T02:00:02.000-04:00 | Rock | Hardly Art | March 29, 2011 | 7.2 | 0660b8a9-42f3-4083-b116-d8c92e35a93e | Martin Douglas | https://pitchfork.com/staff/martin-douglas/ | null |
Three years after their debut collaboration, the Egyptian singer/poet/trumpeter and the German electronic trio reunite for six haunting tracks of socio-political despair and existential dread. | Three years after their debut collaboration, the Egyptian singer/poet/trumpeter and the German electronic trio reunite for six haunting tracks of socio-political despair and existential dread. | Carl Gari / Abdullah Miniawy: Whities 023 (The Act of Falling From the 8th Floor) | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/carl-gari-abdullah-miniawy-whities-023-the-act-of-falling-from-the-8th-floor/ | Whities 023 (The Act of Falling From the 8th Floor) | Early in 2016, Will Bankhead’s eclectic electronic label The Trilogy Tapes dropped a thrilling run of club-melting 12"s from Rezzett, Four Legs, and Call Super’s Ondo Fudd alias. Slotted among these was an eerie, queasy release credited to Carl Gari and Abdullah Miniawy, with a stark photograph of Tahrir Square and the scorched exterior of the former parliament building in Cairo. The music matched that smoldering, post-revolutionary scene; the heavy atmosphere of the country and the bitterness of the military dictatorship resonated in haunting drones, ominous throbs, and a voice incanting in digitally processed Arabic. Despite what the credits suggested, it was not a duo, but rather a spontaneous collaboration between the German electronic trio Carl Gari and Egyptian singer/trumpeter Abdullah Miniawy. Three years on, Carl Gari and Miniawy emerge on another trailblazing English imprint, Nic Tasker’s Whities, again offering a bewildering, heart-shaking detour from normal club fare.
The Act of Falling From the 8th Floor is a harrowing and desolate listen that captures the mood and mindset of Miniawy and numerous other Egyptians living under the brutal oppression of the Al-Sisi regime. Miniawy only escaped by fleeing to France. The move makes for a less hurried collaboration than the group’s debut, which the musicians recorded in Cairo after their first meeting; these recordings took place at a remote house in the Bavarian forest. Even if the meaning of Miniawy’s lyrics escapes non-Arabic speakers, Carl Gari amplify their poetry with bleak, turbid electronics bringing to mind Joy Division and post-industrial soundscapes transported from Europe to North Africa.
The dread-filled throb of “Haj” recalls the Scott Walker-penned “The Electrician,” from 1978, which itself put the brutal right-wing regimes of Chile and Argentina into song form. But where that song pressurized until it finally burst at the chorus, here Carl Gari and Miniawy make the atmosphere more leaden, the pressure inescapable. In a broken voice, Miniawy’s words suggest volumes in only a few lines: “I beg you, man who ploughs/If I left after being a witness to the accident/Please don’t erase its traces.” With its sluggish drum machines, minor-key synths, and heavy guitar reverb, “Zawaj” suggests the dour gloom of early Portishead emanating from a more desperate time, Miniawy’s voice pushing through the morass and soaring over the rubble.
The centerpiece of the six-track release is “B’aj بعاج,” pairing metallic drones with a poem by Miniawy that follows a man’s fall from an eighth-floor window. Against a beat like an electric wire scraping against corrugated metal (echoing the sparse, desolate percussion of Joy Division’s “Decades”), his delivery is straightforward as he details how he plunges past each floor of his building. His downward path charts a microcosm of Egyptian society, everyday scenes that take on a fraught aspect; as the facade of home life slips, despair surges to the surface. There’s the fleeting image of a skipping rope that turns into a hangman’s noose, the tactile feel of fingernails against metal, a vertiginous succession of slides. All these details, these little failures, add up to convey a broader sense of dread, depression, and societal collapse.
But rather than offering the release of final impact, as the narrator reaches the end, Miniawy howls the kicker: “High diving from the first floor/Taking you again to floor number nine.” It’s a damnation worse than death, the very act of falling turned into its own Sisyphean hell. The Act of Falling From the 8th Floor is a gripping soundtrack to the inner despair not only of Egyptians, but anyone feeling bereft of hope in the modern world—a sound that keeps growing louder. | 2019-09-06T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-09-06T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Experimental | Whities | September 6, 2019 | 7.6 | 0666ccc7-ed2f-4f73-a304-b0d1406b8503 | Andy Beta | https://pitchfork.com/staff/andy-beta/ | |
Recently, Sun Araw has been an expanding universe, one that finds Cameron Stallones incorporating various musicians into studio and concert settings. But his newest offering, the 80-minute double album Belomancie, is a solo record showcasing a hypnotic minimalism. | Recently, Sun Araw has been an expanding universe, one that finds Cameron Stallones incorporating various musicians into studio and concert settings. But his newest offering, the 80-minute double album Belomancie, is a solo record showcasing a hypnotic minimalism. | Sun Araw: Belomancie | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/19107-sun-araw-belomancie/ | Belomancie | The back cover of Belomancie reads “COMPOSED, PERFORMED, & PRODUCED BY CAMERON STALLONES.” A few years ago, that information would’ve been redundant, as Sun Araw began in the late 00’s clearly as Stallones solo project. But lately it’s been an expanding universe, incorporating various musicians into both studio and concert settings; he’s even referred to it as the Sun Araw Band. This ensemble has morphed so much that some iterations took on new names—Turban Chopsticks, Duppy Gun, The Celebrate Music Synthesizer Group—suggesting Stallones is increasingly interested in subsuming his personality into a larger collective. So, suddenly, it’s surprising that he would make a Sun Araw record by himself.
This would all just be interesting trivia if it didn’t have discernible effects on the music. But the sonic minimalism of Belomancie makes it distinctly the expression of a single mind. This is easily the most sparse, skeletal record Stallones has made. He’s explored stripped-down versions of his woozy psych-dub before, and this double LP is too wide to be labelled with a single style. But the majority has a building-block feel. Frequently throughout its 80 minutes, Stallones hones in on the most irreducible elements of Sun Araw—a single beat here, a minute loop there—to see what might happen if they got to play alone for a while.
The result hypnotizes as strongly as the murkier swirls of previous peaks—the glowing smoke of On Patrol, the bleary humidity of Ancient Romans—but in a different way. In a sense, listening to the album’s sharp, pointillist beats and all the air in between them is like staring into space rather blinking into the fog. But there’s also something microscopic about the music that makes it like a nuclear laboratory. With so many layers stripped away—primarily the heavy reverb of Stallones’ guitar, which usually drowns his songs in swampy dreams—what remains gets magnified, meaning a single machine-drum hit can sound as big as a bomb. It’s as if Stallones zoomed so far into the essence of Sun Araw that you can see the molecules circling each other, the neurons firing through synapses. And it’s pretty fun to just keep on staring.
Part of that enjoyment comes from how Stallones can go minimal without losing a key Sun Araw effect—the sense that it’s all happening spontaneously. There may be a path in the crooked beats, squeaking synths, and three-note guitar loops, but there’s certainly no forseeable destination. This open, anything-could-happen vibe comes easier when music is bathed in echo or buried in haze; making sparser stuff feel so pregnant with potential is a trickier feat. But Stallones is so practiced at conjuring that magic that it’s almost impossible to imagine him not doing so. When the pin-pricks and string-slashes of “Scrim”, or the snare punches and two-word lyrics of “Huff” (note those minimal titles) unfurl across their nine-minute journeys, every moment feels like a step toward something new. By the end of each I’m thinking less about how long Stallones has been churning away than about how much longer he clearly could.
Which points to the greater significance of Belomancie in the context of Sun Araw’s oeuvre. It shows Stallones has more moves in his aresnal, more ways he can adjust or reimagine his approach without losing its essence—or in this instance, actually enhancing it. The sounds may be comparatively shrunken, but together they stretch his world, suggesting its expanse may be boundless. If you’ve been fascinated by any of Stallones’ work, Belomancie will get you stoked about not only what he’s done, but how much more he can do. | 2014-03-11T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2014-03-11T02:00:01.000-04:00 | Experimental | Drag City | March 11, 2014 | 7.7 | 066c3755-3b72-4b12-907c-6e0e644b79de | Marc Masters | https://pitchfork.com/staff/marc-masters/ | null |
Kanye’s big year culminates in an LP that feels like an instant greatest hits, the ultimate realization of his strongest talents and divisive public persona. | Kanye’s big year culminates in an LP that feels like an instant greatest hits, the ultimate realization of his strongest talents and divisive public persona. | Kanye West: My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/14880-my-beautiful-dark-twisted-fantasy/ | My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy | Kanye West’s 35-minute super-video, Runaway, peaks with a parade. Fireworks flash while red hoods march through a field. At the center of the spectacle is a huge, pale, cartoonish rendering of Michael Jackson’s head. My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy’s gargantuan “All of the Lights” soundtracks the procession, with Kanye pleading, “Something wrong, I hold my head/MJ gone, our nigga dead.” The tribute marks another chapter in West’s ongoing obsession with the King of Pop.
West’s discography contains innumerable references and allusions to Jackson. His first hit as a producer, Jay-Z’s “Izzo (H.O.V.A.),” sampled the Jackson 5’s “I Want You Back.” For many, his first memorable lines as a rapper came during 2003’s “Slow Jamz”: “She got a light-skinned friend look like Michael Jackson/Got a dark-skinned friend look like Michael Jackson.” And when West’s recent interview with Matt Lauer on the Today show went awry, he took to Twitter, writing, “I wish Michael Jackson had twitter!!!!!! Maybe Mike could have explained how the media tried to set him up!!! It's all a fucking set up!!!!” Like most everything else, Kanye may exaggerate the kinship, but it’s real. And it’s never more apparent than on Twisted Fantasy, a blast of surreal pop excess that few artists are capable of creating, or even willing to attempt.
To be clear, Kanye West is not Michael Jackson. As he told MTV last month, “I do have a goal in this lifetime to be the greatest artist of all time, [but] that’s very difficult being that I can’t dance or sing.” He ended the thought with a laugh, but you get the impression he’s not kidding. Unlike Michael, he’s not interested in scrubbing away bits of himself—his Blackness, his candidness—to appease the masses. And while Jackson’s own twisted fantasies of paranoia and betrayal eventually consumed him whole, West is still aware of his illusions, though that mindfulness becomes increasingly unmoored with each newspaper-splashing controversy. The balance is tenuous, but right now it’s working to his advantage. On Twisted Fantasy, Kanye is crazy enough to truly believe he’s the greatest out there. And, about a decade into his career, the hardworking perfectionist has gained the talent on the mic and in the control room to make a startlingly strong case for just that.
Kanye’s last album, 2008’s 808s & Heartbreak, was heavy on the Auto-Tune and stark synths, but relatively light on grandiose ideas. It was a necessary detour that expanded his emotional palette; a bloodletting after a harsh breakup and the passing of his mother that manifests itself in Twisted Fantasy’s harshest lows. But musically, the new album largely continues where 2007’s Graduation left off in its maximalist hip-hop bent, with flashes of The College Dropout’s comfort-food sampling and Late Registration’s baroque instrumentation weaved in seamlessly. As a result, the record comes off like a culmination and an instant greatest hits, the ultimate realization of his strongest talents and divisive public persona. And since the nerd-superstar rap archetype he popularized has now become commonplace, he leaves it in the dust, taking his style and drama to previously uncharted locales, far away from typical civilization.
He’s got a lot on his mind, too. After exiling himself for months following last year’s infamous Taylor Swift stage bomb, the rapper made some of his first comeback appearances at the headquarters of Facebook and Twitter in late July. Videos of West standing on a table in tailored GQ duds while gesticulating through new rhymes (sans musical accompaniment) quickly made the rounds. The Silicon Valley visits seemed like a stunt, but they were prophetic. Forever an over-sharer, Kanye was looking for an outlet for his latest mirror-born musings. He found that platform with Twitter, and proceeded to dictate his own narrative in 140 character hits. Whether showing off exotic purchases, defending himself against the press, or going on stream-of-consciousness rants, Kanye finally had the middleman-free, instant-gratification platform he’d always wanted.
Juiced on the direct connection, he began releasing weekly songs for free online, the generosity of which would be moot if the songs didn’t deliver. But they did, over and over, eventually building up the same type of superstar goodwill Radiohead pulled off with their pay-what-you-want In Rainbows release plan and Lil Wayne’s free mixtape barrage leading up to 2008’s Tha Carter III. So while Kanye can’t sing or dance like Michael, he’s making meaningful connections in a fresh, oftentimes (ahem) naked way. “When I used to finish an album I would be so excited for my mom to hear the final - final!” he wrote on November 11. “The final - final is what we used to call the... completed album with all the skits!!! I made songs to please one person... MY MOM!!! I would think... would my my Mom like this song!”
I’m not sure which song he’s talking about. Because, between July and November, West seemingly decided to make My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy less mom-friendly and more of a hedonistic exploration into a rich and famous American id. At Facebook, he rapped the first verse of what would become album closer “Lost in the World,” at one point changing Michael Jackson’s "Wanna Be Startin’ Something” refrain to, “Mama-say mama-sah Mama Donda’s son,” referring to his late mother. The familial allusion was left off the album. Another Facebook tune—a brutally oedipal account called “Mama’s Boyfriend”—was also deleted, along with the vintage-Kanye-sounding “See Me Now.” Such exclusions speak to the album’s sharp focus—to move everything forward while constantly tipping on the brink of frantic instability.
This isn’t the same resourceful prodigy who made The College Dropout or even the wounded soul behind 808s & Heartbreak. Instead, Kanye’s Twisted Fantasy incarnation cherry-picks little things from his previous work and blows them up into something less than sane. The expansive, all-encompassing nature of the album is borne out in its staggering guest list which includes mentors Jay-Z, RZA, and No I.D., along with new charges like Nicki Minaj, Rick Ross, Kid Cudi, and Bon Iver’s Justin Vernon. The inclusion of Minaj (who contributes the schizoid verse of her life on “Monster”), Ross (a guy known for making up his own reality as he goes), and Cudi (who’s probably even more wildly self-destructive than Kanye) especially adds to the hallucinatory tone. By the time Chris Rock shows up to provide comic relief during one of the album’s bleakest moments, it begins to feel as if Kanye is stage-managing his own award show with enough starpower, shock, and dynamism to flatten the Grammys, the VMAs, and the rest all at once.
Over the past few months, Kanye has intermittently tried to flush away his rep as a boorish egoist in interviews and on Twitter, which is, fortunately, impossible. Because without his exploding self-worth—itself a cyclical reaction to the self-doubt so much of his music explores—there would be no Twisted Fantasy. “Every superhero needs his theme music,” he says on “Power,” and though he’s far from the virtuous paragons of comic book lore, he’s no less complex. In his public life, he exhibits vulnerability and invincibility in equal measure, but he’s just as apt at villainy—especially here.
With “Runaway,” he rousingly highlights his own douchebaggery, turning it into a rallying cry for all humanity. Like many of his greatest songs, it’s funny, sad, and perversely relatable. And while the royal horns and martial drums of “All of the Lights” make it sound like the ideal outlet for the most over-the-top boasts imaginable, West instead inhabits the role of an abusive deadbeat desperate to make good on a million blown promises. “Hell of a Life” attempts to bend its central credo—“no more drugs for me, pussy and religion is all I need”—into a noble pursuit. As a woofer-mulching synth line lurks, Kanye justifies his dreams of not sleeping with but marrying a porn star, peaking with the combative taunt, “How can you say they live they life wrong/When you never fuck with the lights on.” Inspired by his two-year relationship with salacious model Amber Rose, the song blurs the line between fantasy and reality, sex and romance, love and religion, until no lines exist at all. It’s a zonked nirvana with demons underneath; a fragile state that can’t help but break apart on the very next song.
The haunted, Aphex Twin–sampling “Blame Game” bottoms out with a verse in which Kanye’s voice is sped up, slowed down and stretched out. The effect is almost psychotic, suggesting three or four inner monologues fighting over smashed emotions. It’s one of many moments on the record where West manipulates his vocals. Whether funneling some of his best-ever rhymes through a tinny, Strokes-like filter on “Gorgeous” or making himself wail like a dying cyborg in the final minutes of “Runaway,” he uses studio wizardry to draw out his multitudes. Tellingly, though, he doesn’t get the last word on the album. That distinction goes to the sobering tones of Gil Scott-Heron’s 1970 spoken-word piece “Comment #1,” a stark take on the American fable. “All I want is a good home and a wife and children and some food to feed them every night,” says Scott-Heron, bringing the fantasy to a close.
On “Power,” Kanye raps, “My childlike creativity, purity, and honesty is honestly being crowded by these grown thoughts/Reality is catching up with me, taking my inner child, I’m fighting for custody.” The lines nail another commonality between the rapper and his hero. Like Michael, Kanye’s behavior—from the poorly planned outbursts to the musical brilliance—is wide-eyed in a way that most 33-year-olds have long left behind. That naivety is routinely battered on Twisted Fantasy, yet it survives, better for the wear. With his music and persona both marked by a flawed honesty, Kanye’s man-myth dichotomy is at once modern and truly classic. “I can’t be everybody’s hero and villain, savior and sinner, Christian and anti Christ!” he wrote earlier this month. That may be true, but he’s more willing than anyone else to try. | 2010-11-22T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2010-11-22T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rap | Def Jam / Roc-A-Fella | November 22, 2010 | 10 | 066d6d38-6109-4e6e-bf2b-bf9d73e63fe3 | Ryan Dombal | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ryan-dombal/ | |
In 2000, Dave Portner and Noah Lennox self-released a home-recorded album in a tiny edition of CDs. But Animal Collective’s de facto debut is far more deliberate, ambitious, and sophisticated than you might remember. | In 2000, Dave Portner and Noah Lennox self-released a home-recorded album in a tiny edition of CDs. But Animal Collective’s de facto debut is far more deliberate, ambitious, and sophisticated than you might remember. | Animal Collective: Spirit They’re Gone, Spirit They’ve Vanished (Remastered 2023) | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/animal-collective-spirit-theyre-gone-spirit-theyve-vanished-remastered-2023/ | Spirit They’re Gone, Spirit They’ve Vanished (Remastered 2023) | You probably know the story of Animal Collective, the band that started out making electronic-acoustic noise jams with lots of babbling and screaming, gradually learned to pull melodies and song structures from the iridescent muck, and eventually became indie-rock stars. Spirit They’re Gone, Spirit They’ve Vanished, self-released in a tiny edition of CDs by the duo of Dave “Avey Tare” Portner and Noah “Panda Bear” Lennox in 2000, and now remastered and issued alongside an EP of previously unheard tracks from the same period, doesn’t quite fit that tidy narrative. Animal Collective’s de facto debut is a far more deliberate, ambitious, and even sophisticated album than a listener working their way backward through their catalog might expect, given the music that came soon after.
The likes of 2001’s Danse Manatee and 2003’s Here Comes the Indian (later retitled Ark) can give the impression that the band in its early years was driven mostly by intuition and enthusiasm, summoning whatever ecstatic racket their limited tools and proficiency would allow. But as is so often the case with artists who are labeled childlike outsiders or savants, it seems at least as likely that they cultivated their primal sensibility on purpose, because they were interested in its expressive and aesthetic possibilities. Revisiting Spirit They’re Gone two decades and 10 or so albums later makes clear that Animal Collective were not a bunch of naifs who donned silly names, twisted a few knobs on their SP-404s, and landed dizzily in the art-pop avant-garde. From the beginning, they knew what they were doing.
The subsequent Animal Collective release that Spirit They’re Gone most resembles is 2005’s Feels, in that it is more or less a rock album, albeit a highly idiosyncratic one. Portner and Lennox recorded it at Portner’s parents’ house, when both were just shy of drinking age. Portner sang and played guitar, piano, and various electronics; Lennox played drums. The songs are long and elaborate, with dramatic dynamic and rhythmic shifts, more like progressive rock than anything else in their catalog. Portner’s lyrics reflect on childhood and look apprehensively toward what comes next, rendering the adolescent journey in imagery befitting a fairy tale.
The story goes that Portner had originally envisioned making a solo release, but was so moved by Lennox’s contributions that he gave him co-billing. It’s easy to understand why. Lennox’s drum parts are as important to the album’s uncanny atmosphere as Portner’s vocals. They often sound like the fills most rock drummers use to punctuate a section or transition from one to another, tumbling across toms and cymbals to build tension before locking back into the beat. But Lennox didn’t use them that way. Instead, he repeated these ornate sequences over and over, so that an entire six-minute song might live in the transitory moment of a drum fill, forever on its way. It’s a fitting technique for an album so focused on the passage of time.
Such active rhythms might overwhelm the songs or oppress the listener if it weren’t for Lennox’s light touch. He plays more like a jazz drummer than a rocker, landing hits like drizzle on a tin roof. Anyone who primarily associates Animal Collective with the pounding of a single floor tom may be surprised at how skillfully he finesses the kit here. His crucial decision to use brushes rather than drumsticks was apparently guided in part by the pair’s mutual appreciation for Love’s 1960s psych-folk landmark Forever Changes, a choice that points obliquely toward Animal Collective’s more mature work. Part of their greatness lies in the ability to absorb outside influences, assimilating rather than replicating them; Spirit They’re Gone sounds no more like Love than later albums sound like Frankie Knuckles or the Grateful Dead. Nor, for that matter, does it sound much like free jazz or reggae, despite the distinct imprint of the former on the stormy introduction of “Alvin Row” and the latter on the synth basslines across the album. The similarity to Jamaican music is most pronounced on “Chocolate Girl,” when that song’s initially jittery rhythms downshift into loping half-time for the chorus, and for a moment Avey Tare and Panda Bear are grooving just like Sly & Robbie.
Those faint glimpses of influence on Spirit They’re Gone are the exception. More often, the album is striking for how singular it sounds. How were these 20-year-olds, without the resounding validation that would come later, already so confidently in command of their own ideas, especially when their ideas were so strange, so free from received notions about how rock bands should operate, so feral, so potentially uncool? Which record in Portner’s collection could have possibly inspired the section of “La Rapet” when the drums fall away and all that’s left is a lonely acoustic guitar, a sound like crumpling paper, and his queasily pitch-shifted voice, cooing and sighing like a toddler? It’s the sound of Sung Tongs in miniature. What about their habit of adorning Spirit’s otherwise delicate arrangements with screeching, grating, headache-making high-frequency noise, somehow made beautiful by its surroundings? Pick almost any later album and you’ll hear some version of this impulse. And what made them so sure that such outré inclinations could share space on the same album—the same song, even—with music like the coda of “Alvin Row,” surging and heroic and easy to love, the sort of communal gesture that would eventually take them to the big stage? They started playing it live for the first time 16 years later, as if they wrote it with the future already in mind.
There are puzzling small decisions, perhaps indicative of the band’s lack of experience, that I imagine they might go back and change if they could. The omission of a bass part on “Penny Dreadfuls” slightly undermines its otherwise expertly paced arrangement, depriving it of a certain heft and grounding. The band was still figuring out which passages would begin to levitate with repetition and which would be better off played just once, and Portner’s surrealist poetry yielded the occasional awkward line, a combination that means “Bat You’ll Fly” ends with a full minute devoted to the chanted couplet “I feel so elusive in Houston/You feel so exclusively Houston.” Lennox abandons his restraint behind the kit for the final section of “Chocolate Girl,” and his copious cymbal crashes temporarily break the stillness of the album’s atmosphere, so that it sounds for a few moments like what it really was: a document of two young men jamming in a bedroom, rather than a transmission from a magical netherworld. The remastering job makes the album as a whole sound a little bigger and more present, but it can’t really fix issues like these, which is just as well. Part of the reason to reach for Spirit They’re Gone, Spirit They’ve Vanished when you might otherwise play Feels or any other Animal Collective album is that sense of messy youthful aspiration and yearning.
The reissue also reveals another Animal Collective trademark already in place at this early stage: the quietly arresting album-companion EP. Five previously unreleased songs, collected under the title A Night at Mr. Raindrop’s Holistic Supermarket, reflect the themes of Spirit They’re Gone through an electronic funhouse mirror, replacing Lennox’s skittering percussion with dreamy sample collages and drum machines. The original songs, including a trancelike rework of “La Rapet” and an untitled track that presages the swampy synth ambience of Strawberry Jam, are good to great. The most interesting track for historical purposes, though, is a cover of Fleetwood Mac’s “Dreams.” The arrangement reimagines the soft-rock classic as buzzing DIY dub, but otherwise it’s faithful to the original. A selection from one of the slickest and biggest-selling albums of all time seems an odd choice for this band, whose next few albums would approach pop the way an alien might approach a turkey sandwich. Maybe they knew bigger things were on the way.
Correction: Josh “Deakin” Dibb engineered the A Night at Mr. Raindrop’s Holistic Supermarket EP; he did not engineer the original Spirit They’re Gone, Spirit They’ve Vanished sessions. | 2023-05-13T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2023-05-13T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Experimental | Domino | May 13, 2023 | 8.9 | 0671be79-0c66-417a-93e0-57aa76e21046 | Andy Cush | https://pitchfork.com/staff/andy-cush/ | |
On their 14th studio album, the best-selling duo in UK pop dampen the euphoria; the result is a tuneful, wan album that lands somewhere in the middle of their rich catalogue. | On their 14th studio album, the best-selling duo in UK pop dampen the euphoria; the result is a tuneful, wan album that lands somewhere in the middle of their rich catalogue. | Pet Shop Boys: Hotspot | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/pet-shop-boys-hotspot/ | Hotspot | For more than 35 years, Pet Shop Boys singer-keyboardist Neil Tennant has returned to a question of world-historic import: Do I stay in or do I go out? “Turn on the news, drink some tea/Maybe if you’re with me we’ll do some shopping” goes one couplet in 1988’s “Left to My Own Devices.” Observing a teen on “I Don’t Wanna,” a song from Pet Shop Boys’ 14th studio album Hotspot, Tennant sings with his usual starchy plaintiveness, “Feels so shy/He’d rather sit alone and cry/But no one understands this guy.”
Pet Shop Boys do. No other act has so richly documented the cautious development of lonely queer boys whose ambitions—sexual and economic—are as huge as the beats they heard at the club last Saturday night. On the dancefloor, these boys rehearse how to deal with other boys checking them out or abandoning them for hunkier alternatives. Giorgio Moroder’s sequencer lines are lodestars for Tennant and keyboardist Chris Lowe, like Beatles guitar licks were for other acts. On Hotspot, the best-selling duo in UK pop dampen the euphoria; the result is a tuneful, wan album: a mid-tier effort.
Hotspot observes Pet Shop Boys’ pattern of following up a pair of bangers (2015’s Super and 2013’s Electric) with a bagful of autumn leaves. The mid-tempo tunes keep their top buttons buttoned, muted and wary like the sixtysomethings Tennant and Lowe have become. No dictate requires late middle-age to be as fraught as adolescence, but Hotspot puts Lowe’s orchestral synth chords and house keyboard patterns in the service of rote tales of resignation, whose resonance may be dependent on the affection of their listening base. Dismiss “You Are the One” as a sappy little thing if you like; listen generously and you may appreciate the lyric’s affirmations and the mournful way in which Tennant caresses the chorus hook. The object of desire may be “the one,” but Neil’s none too pleased about it. Three decades after he gleefully shacked up with a bloke who may not love him on the catty “Why Don’t We Live Together,” now he weighs the costs.
Hotspot stumbles when Tennant and Lowe convince themselves they need a good time. The interplay between strings, bass synth, and call-and-response female vocal on “Monkey Business” sounds fabulous until Tennant sings, “We’re gonna have a pah-rty!” like he’s a human resources vice president at the Hyatt bar; he’s often played these guys, but now the joke’s not funny. And there’s no reason for “Dreamland,” a duet with Olly Alexander, who as the frontman of synth-pop band Years & Years makes a natural heir to Tennant. So many of Alexander’s songs detail the kind of danger implicit in Pet Shop Boys’ 1993 “Young Offender”: older man getting mixed up with a far younger male lover. Why then is this song such an inoffensive racket?
Perhaps the inoffensiveness is the point. In a post-Obergefell environment where gay youth can imagine a life untrammeled by disease but experience anxiety about kissing in public, tracks like “Wedding in Berlin” (“We’re getting married because we love each other/We’re getting married today”) signify as goal and fantasy. Tennant-Lowe’s incorporation of Mendelssohn’s ubiquitous “Wedding March” registers as a shrewd gesture of queering an original text—not an unexpected move at this point in Pet Shop Boys’ career, but nonetheless a discomfiting one, as inoffensiveness can be too. “Only the Dark,” a shimmering ballad in which Tennant pledges fidelity so long as the lights are out, is better. It’s not the first time he and Lowe have preferred the erotic possibilities of the unseen—a longstanding fascination which speaks to how profoundly Pet Shop Boys revel in paradox as a first principle. So much uncertainty requires consistency.
Buy: Rough Trade
(Pitchfork may earn a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.) | 2020-01-30T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2020-01-30T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Electronic | x2 | January 30, 2020 | 6.1 | 06747c29-5491-4527-8523-276ae2e00715 | Alfred Soto | https://pitchfork.com/staff/alfred-soto/ | |
The fifth album from Damon McMahon is his euphoric breakthrough. Everything feels silvery and romantic, like a hallucination of the classic-rock songbook. | The fifth album from Damon McMahon is his euphoric breakthrough. Everything feels silvery and romantic, like a hallucination of the classic-rock songbook. | Amen Dunes: Freedom | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/amen-dunes-freedom/ | Freedom | Words have a way of blurring in Amen Dunes’ music. Over the past decade, Damon McMahon has led his psychedelic folk-rock project with an ear for transforming language, stretching and repeating simple phrases past the point of clarity. His voice, distinguished by a ghostly, soulful vibrato, has never been entirely intelligible, and that’s part of why it works. Like Spiritualized or Panda Bear, McMahon suggests through his music that if you spend too long focusing on what everything means, then you’re missing the point. His records never seemed geared toward a popular breakthrough, if only because they already felt so self-contained. Each song is a hermetic breakthrough, its own emotional journey toward something bigger.
This all remains true on Freedom, the New York-based artist’s silvery, sprawling fifth album. “We play religious music/Don’t think you understand, man,” he affirms near the start, as direct a mission statement as you’ll find across his catalog. But where that spirituality once felt like a cryptic code, now it’s a little easier to take part in. On Freedom, McMahon’s voice is clearer, his hooks are sharper, and his music—once a hazy spider web of hisses, drones, and vamps—opens to reveal a latent aspiration toward the classic-rock songbook. These are the first Amen Dunes songs you could actually sing along with.
Painstakingly crafted over the span of three years, Freedom is propelled by sounds you wouldn’t expect to find on a record put out by the avant-goth label Sacred Bones: Everything is sparkling and reflective, like sunlight on an infinity pool. Collaborating with a large stable of musicians, including Italian electronic artist Panoram, guitarist Delicate Steve, and Yeah Yeah Yeahs’ Nick Zinner, it’s the most dynamic, confident Amen Dunes record to date. At times, McMahon’s euphoria recalls a period in the late ’90s when singer-songwriter fare merged with au courant dance music on multi-platinum records like David Gray’s underrated White Ladder. Two decades ago, this record’s opening track, “Blue Rose,” might have been a massive hit: a kaleidoscopic scene-setter that introduces the album’s themes of grief, family, and self-empowerment to a lapping, luminescent rhythm.
Like a lot of records that tackle big topics, Freedom was born of loss. McMahon’s mother was diagnosed with terminal cancer following the release of his last album, 2014’s drone-folk opus Love, and the connective tissue throughout Freedom comes from childhood memories. The lyric sheet is littered with names—streets, saints, friends, relatives—but McMahon’s tone is too hallucinogenic for his work to seem autobiographical. His writing feels more like an intimate conversation heard from a neighboring apartment, with all the missing pieces and context left to the imagination. The feel-good rockabilly-reggae hybrid “Calling Paul the Suffering” might be a Bible story or a climactic confrontation, although it could just as easily be a stoned delusion, dazed eyes looking in the mirror for their own reassurance.
Even with the subtle narrative running through the record, McMahon’s songs gain resonance less from their lyrics than from the forward pulse of his music. He avoids conventional verses and choruses, so his songs rely instead on recurring musical motifs, trusting the trills and catches of their presentation to expose new angles. Songs like “Miki Dora” and “Skipping School” are stunning exercises in tension and release. The former is teased ahead by drum rolls and muted guitar licks, while “Skipping School” bursts open with a low, echoing harmonica that rushes like wind through a cracked car window. In “Believe,” the album’s emotional centerpiece, McMahon describes something that sounds like a resurrection, but it’s the choir of harmonies and synths that make his story come to life.
One of the thrills of Freedom is how McMahon rewires classic-rock tropes to feel new and entirely suited to his own music. It’s a quality that brings to mind the War on Drugs’ Adam Granduciel, whose project also reflects the sound of old FM radio through a gauzy, idiosyncratic filter. But where Granduciel channels those acts at their wisest—sighing and nodding through his lyrics as if contemplating them for the first time—McMahon is pure id. He stutters and scats and spits to get his point across. In “Freedom,” he shivers through the word “cold” like ’80s Mick Jagger. In his mouth, the word “suffering” is rendered completely untranscribable. During these songs that freefall through formative memories, there’s joy in hearing McMahon work through these rock-star poses, a feeling echoed by the rush of youthful confidence that opens and closes the album: “This is your time—their time is done,” a child’s voice instructs him.
Freedom revolves around that mantra, a tribute to how such certainty dissipates over time. The widened scope of the music is matched by an increased vulnerability in McMahon’s voice, a tenderness that can imbue even his vaguest incantations with a cosmic tenderness. If so much of Amen Dunes’ music felt like McMahon’s world away from the world—a druggy, impenetrable fortress—then this is when he confronts reality, an expansive breakthrough that’s equally mystifying and immediate. “Woke up Sunday feeling good,” he sings in “Skipping School.” “Thought I’d try maybe stay high forever.” The music lurches and grinds beneath him, but by the end of the song, it doesn’t seem like such a crazy idea. | 2018-03-30T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-03-30T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Sacred Bones | March 30, 2018 | 8.6 | 067547e4-e835-4d16-abb6-db8950a56644 | Sam Sodomsky | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sam-sodomsky/ | |
With his self-titled debut, the rapper behind the smash hit "Trap Queen" has the platform to show he's more than a singles guy. Fetty Wap is light on guests and superstar producers and, for the most part, Fetty doesn't venture too far outside his comfort zone. But that turns out to be a good thing. | With his self-titled debut, the rapper behind the smash hit "Trap Queen" has the platform to show he's more than a singles guy. Fetty Wap is light on guests and superstar producers and, for the most part, Fetty doesn't venture too far outside his comfort zone. But that turns out to be a good thing. | Fetty Wap: Fetty Wap | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21043-fetty-wap/ | Fetty Wap | It's hard not to root for Fetty Wap, the rapper whose irrepressible 2014 single "Trap Queen" went from Tri-State SoundCloud sensation to this year's late-pass song of the summer. The 24-year-old, born Willie Maxwell, is unshakably positive, turning a prominent disability (he lost his eye to glaucoma as a child) into a proud calling card that's already inspired a 10-year old to venture out into the world without his own prosthetic eye. He's from Paterson, N.J., a place we would almost certainly not be talking about were it not for Fetty Wap; he's fiercely loyal to his longtime Remy Boyz 1738 crew, including perennial sidekick Monty, a rapper we would assuredly not be talking about were it not for Fetty Wap. He's almost singlehandedly revived the ride-or-die thug love ballad with a serotonin-soaked ditty—now double-platinum—that turns a negative situation (having to cook dope to make a living) into not just an unforgettable date but a symbolic proclamation of undying, committed love. And though he's no longer in a relationship with "Trap Queen"'s muse, he's currently paying her college tuition as a thank-you.
If there's any hurdle in Fetty's way at this point, it's his nagging reputation as a one-and-done singles artist that persists even as he smashes Billboard records. When "Again", the album's fourth single, entered the charts in August, he became the only artist in the history of the Hot Rap Songs chart to have his first four singles reach the Top 10 simultaneously. The same week, an article was published: "Is Fetty Wap Destined To Be Another One-Hit Wonder?" It's a bizarre dissonance, best understood as such: those four charting singles, addictive as they are, don't do much to break the mold of what we've come to expect from a Fetty Wap song. Which is to say: generous Auto-Tune, exuberant melodies, and a lot of warbled "Yeaaaaaaaa baby"s and "1738"s.
With Fetty Wap, released through the tech-savvy but still-transitional 300 Entertainment imprint, the rappa-turnt-sanga finally has the platform to show he's more than a singles guy. To that end, he put out a 20-song album with no new friends and no big-name producers—in short, this is the album he probably would have made with his RGF Productions squad in Paterson were there no label involved at all. Those looking for a new direction from Fetty, or who've already mined the depths of his prolific SoundCloud, may find this a letdown. But those who've embraced his loyalty and radical self-love should be delighted: Is there a more quintessentially Fetty Wap move than turning the year's biggest major label rap debut into a self-directed Paterson block party?
The first thing you might notice on Fetty Wap's tracklist isn't what's there—if you've kept up with his output over the last year and a half, there's a lot you'll recognize here—but who isn't. Drake's hastily added guest verse to "My Way" from earlier this year is missing; the album version features a verse from Remy Boyz' Monty, who appears on nine of the album's 20 tracks, the only guest aside from relatively unknown M80. As a whole, Fetty Wap adopts the same self-assured stance: Fetty's formula definitely ain't broke, and he doesn't seem in a hurry to fix it. In what can only be described as a flex, he opens the album with "Trap Queen", a seemingly audacious move he knows full well he can back up. Why coyly tease out your first and biggest hit when you've got 19 more just like it?
That's the thing: you could shuffle these tracks endlessly and the album would probably have the same effect. It's not that there are any missteps here, really; if you like what you've already heard from Fetty, you'll like these songs. There are variations, to be sure—second single "679" borrows some West Coast bounce, functioning as a clubby palate cleanser in the way that "Fight Night" did for Migos. "I Wonder" and "Boomin" successfully skulk into drill's shadowy corners. But for the most part, Fetty doesn't venture too far outside his comfort zone.
Still, when the highs are this high, it's hard to complain. "My Way" is still 2015's ultimate trap lullaby, lilting in hypnotic spirals. "RGF Island" turns somber keys into a hard-earned celebration, and "I'm Straight" dials the exuberance further up with triumphant steel drums. And though he's a much more natural singer, "Again" is Fetty's best rap performance. "I'm tryna finish who I started with/ I'm tryna spend it all who I got it with," he crows, reassuring his fed-up trap queen that his crazy life will all be worth it when they can enjoy it together. Fetty approaches everything in his music with the earnest devotion of matrimony: his trap queen, his money, his beloved Remy Boyz. So though it's tempting to wonder what may have happened had 300 recruited labelmates Young Thug or Quavo, or beatmakers du jour like Metro Boomin or Zaytoven, it's only right Fetty insisted on keeping things in the 1738 family. | 2015-09-30T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2015-09-30T02:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | 300 Entertainment | September 30, 2015 | 7.6 | 06767e1c-a4d5-458e-93dd-50a576600bd3 | Meaghan Garvey | https://pitchfork.com/staff/meaghan-garvey/ | null |
Following the release of his sophomore tape The Water(s), the rapper Mick Jenkins jumped from not mentioned at all to one of Chicago's most promising rookie candidates. Wave[s] is a new direction, and it may upset expectations, pushing him away from his more strident instincts. | Following the release of his sophomore tape The Water(s), the rapper Mick Jenkins jumped from not mentioned at all to one of Chicago's most promising rookie candidates. Wave[s] is a new direction, and it may upset expectations, pushing him away from his more strident instincts. | Mick Jenkins: Wave[s] | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/20922-mick-jenkins-waves/ | Wave[s] | Mick Jenkins' sophomore tape The Water(s) stood apart in a competitive Chicago scene. With a resonant baritone that telegraphed masculine authority, Jenkins jumped from not mentioned at all to one of his city's most promising rookie candidates. He combined an ear for poetic language with a principled consciousness and a no-bullshit persona, a formula which quickly snowballed into a substantial underground fanbase. Since that time, in numerous profiles and interviews, Jenkins has wrestled with what this sudden success means. His art has been in many ways about seeking truth in a system designed to obscure it, as an uncompromising, conscientious moralist unafraid to cut through the noise. It's a relatable pose, but one that doesn't necessarily lead artist and listener to the same destination. Wave[s] is a new direction, and it may upset expectations, pushing him away from his more strident instincts. Even if it isn't his best, it's probably for the best.
What that means in practical terms is a shift from the somber blues and greens of The Water(s) into a more colorful earth-toned exploration of musical possibility. Although his poetic approach and political conscience are still in play, it feels less like a focal point and more a part of the music's texture. With Haitian-Canadian producer Kaytranada and Chicago-based musical collective THEMpeople providing the backdrop, Wave[s] is influenced primarily by a jazzy neo soul—to be reductive about it—sound. In a time when artists have been celebrated for chasing fashionable worlds of influence through a bottomless hard drive, Jenkins has opted to stick to a core set of inputs, a closed circuit of musical inspiration, and is finding himself within that limitation. His more orthodox listening tastes are refreshing, a reminder of how constraints can provide a framework for freedom.
So when Jenkins opens up his world, it's for this tradition, one that gives him the grammar to relieve a pressure that had previously driven his work. Thus "40 Below" lets him tell a story of lost love that doesn't carry the burden of representing some sort of larger structural critique, or the obligation to wake up the world. Jenkins had painted himself in a bit of a corner, and Wave[s] is a sly sidestep, an exploration of possibility from an artist whose overriding purpose had previously eliminated that opportunity. Jenkins could risk didacticism, but it was his willingness to do so that initially cultivated such a loyal following; Wave[s] gives him an opportunity to shake those who may have valued his work only inasmuch as it provided that function.
As a whole, Wave[s] isn't as strong as The Water(s), and may ultimately be seen as a bit minor in Jenkins' catalog. His biggest strength as an artist is his pen: as a writer, Jenkins has a gift for poetic turns of phrase and clever wordplay, delivered with potent urgency. The level of applied skill in his writing—the work that suggests he could one day rival some of rap's biggest names in a larger arena—hasn't quite been applied to his songwriting. His choruses are things like: "Get Up, Get Out, Get Down!", bordering on blank cliches in need of workshopping. Even "Your Love"—the album's far-away highlight, with the potential to cross over—interpolates Lupe Fiasco for its ingratiating hook. Meanwhile, THEMpeople provide a vigorous experimental backdrop, but relative to the style's jazzy vanguard—think the Los Angeles world of Low End Theory parties, Thundercat, Flying Lotus, and To Pimp a Butterfly—the group is still establishing its voice, working toward a unique approach.
This is not to suggest that the album is a failure, or that Jenkins' new direction is a bad one; if anything, it points to an artistic flexibility that will pay dividends down the road. The room to grow is there, should he decide to pursue the colors Wave[s] has opened up for him. The artistic success of "Your Love" suggests he has the right instincts, even if the execution is, for now, more of an exploration than a destination. | 2015-08-21T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2015-08-21T02:00:01.000-04:00 | Rap | Cinematic / Good Years | August 21, 2015 | 7.6 | 0676d64f-2e96-442c-bf37-fcc820a8d21f | David Drake | https://pitchfork.com/staff/david-drake/ | null |
London's Hot Chip follow their breakthrough 2006 LP, The Warning, with the lovable but flawed Made in the Dark. | London's Hot Chip follow their breakthrough 2006 LP, The Warning, with the lovable but flawed Made in the Dark. | Hot Chip: Made in the Dark | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/11129-made-in-the-dark/ | Made in the Dark | The received wisdom on London's Hot Chip is that they're equal opportunity funsters who'll pinch from any old genre in the name of a grin. But after the potent combination of "Over and Over", "Boy From School", and all the attendant remixes increased their festival bill font size by about 20 points, there was good reason to believe that the London quintet's next record might find them rectifying their cartoonish pop into something sleeker and more streamlined. They might have, for instance, decided to expand on the soul and R&B influences that occasionally pepper their music; or to smoothen the undanceable rumples of their creaky, short-circuited pop with a few well-placed blasts of minimal techno; or maybe, to topple their previous output with an even more dazzling pastiche of color, candy, and complexity.
Any one of those paths would have served Hot Chip well. But of all of their many virtues, focus isn't one, and instead they took them all. A string of self-conscious interruptions, perfect pop moments, show-offy sonics, and inscrutable non-sequiturs, the lovable but flawed Made in the Dark has moments that come off as almost gluttonous-- and that's even by Hot Chip's standards. And while the majority of the material here ranges somewhere between inoffensive and fantastic, momentarily obnoxious misfires (the funhouse mirror horrorshow "Bendable Poseable", the impish "Don't Dance", and the weirdly overrated "Shake a Fist") underscore why "all of the above" is not a tenable long-term formula for the band: That level of consumption can't stay charming forever.
Which is to say that Hot Chip have a big record in them and this isn't it. Once you do away with that disappointment, though, there's plenty to appreciate. There might not be anything as definitive or as moment-making as "Over and Over" or "Boy From School" here, but once you've acclimatized to Made in the Dark's sonic trills and party poppers, some affecting songs emerge. On the pop side, none are as lovable as the tender-hearted electro of "Ready for the Floor", in which the band once again finds comfortable middle ground between Alexis Taylor's balladesque vocal and vibrant, electro-pop dressing. Elsewhere, the feelgood "Touch Too Much" cruises by on a big chorus and some characteristically clattering percussions, while the infectious "One Pure Thought" opens against a backdrop of gnarled guitar chords and keening synths.
Unhampered by the otherwise relentless hairpinning subjected to all their uptempo material, Hot Chip's ballads do better service to the band's songwriting skills. With a serpentine vocal melody, a healthy backbeat, and a gently unfolding array of whistles, pinging guitar notes, and reverbed backing vocals, album centrepiece "We're Looking for a Lot of Love" is an easy highlight. Meanwhile, with its slow changes and melting analog pads, the two-minute dirge "Whistle for Will" provides Low-style gravitas, closer "In the Privacy of Our Love" flirts with gospel, and the album's title track is an exercise in lazy, Sunday morning soul.
On paper, those individual components read like they might make for a patchy, turbulent record, and to be honest, that's pretty much how Made in the Dark plays. For all the talk about them being genre agnostics, they're just as beholden to everyday rules of pace and structure as anyone else. So: Good record but not a great one. By the time you see them this summer, they'll have it sorted out. | 2008-02-05T01:00:01.000-05:00 | 2008-02-05T01:00:01.000-05:00 | Electronic | Astralwerks / DFA | February 5, 2008 | 7 | 06783173-d0de-40bc-a2a7-b1e8605e900c | Mark Pytlik | https://pitchfork.com/staff/mark-pytlik/ | null |
This box set collects instrumentals released under MF Doom's production alias and shows the depth and range of his beat style. | This box set collects instrumentals released under MF Doom's production alias and shows the depth and range of his beat style. | Metal Fingers / DOOM: Special Herbs: The Box Set Vol. 0-9 | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/15114-special-herbs-the-box-set-vol-0-9/ | Special Herbs: The Box Set Vol. 0-9 | Hiding behind a mask and a plethora of pseudonyms while working in collaboration as both spotlight-grabbing rapper and behind-the-scenes producer, MF Doom has enjoyed two decades as one of hip-hop's most restless and prolific artists. The vast Special Herbs project, an all-instrumental series of discs put out under his Metal Fingers moniker, would seem to form the center of Doom's ample discography, at least in terms of quantity. But despite the sheer amount of music collected under the Herbs banner-- 10 volumes released in a variety of formats between 2001 and 2005, enough to rival another artist's career output-- the series is often discussed as if it were a sketchbook of Doom's production ideas that is less essential than official "finished" albums like Operation: Doomsday or Madvilliany.
That's not particularly surprising, but it is a little unfair. On the one hand, the Herbs line mostly act as a compendium of instrumentals Doom produced for both himself and other rappers over the course of his career, from his early 1990s days with Native Tongues satellites KMD to his 21st-century rebirth as monster-loving underground polymath. Casual fans might wonder why, especially if they own the original rap albums these tracks spring from, they need to grapple with this much previously released material in instrumental form. But these releases are far from just being DJ tools or freestyle fodder for amateur MCs. They offer a chance for anyone to revel in Doom's breadth and inventiveness, to appreciate his head-spinning stylistic shifts as a producer by bringing the beats to the foreground. Make no mistake-- most of these tracks sound plenty "finished" even in rhyme-less form. And as a document of an underground producer's life's work (so far), the Herbs series is rivaled only Doom's friend and fellow manic archivist Madlib in both scope and completeness.
The box slaps all previous Herbs installments onto 10 slabs of DJ-friendly vinyl, while also offering a digital download of the full series and bonus material for those rabid Doom-heads who apparently didn't get enough with their first 10 doses (for this review, I listened to digital files). The bonus cuts include a 7" with two slices of lo-fi R&B nostalgia, the tense trunk-rattler "Constipated Monkey" and the richer brass-and-organ 60s fantasia "Project Jazz", their "lost jukebox 45" quality fitting the old-school vinyl single format perfectly. There's also a whole disc of unreleased material that ranges from the whimsical, Muppet-sampling "Humrush" to the standup bass showcase "It Sounded like a Roc!", though most of the never-before-heard tracks stick to the warm, friendly, jazz-tinged sound of the 90s underground, rather than Doom's harsher psychedelic/futuristic outings.
Naturally, 12 new tracks on top of 71 previously released cuts will only be an enticement to mega-fans who decided to preorder this set the day it was announced. But whatever the package, whether this lavish vinyl collection or the multi-disc mixed CD compilation Nature Sounds released a few years back, the Herbs are an essential buy for 21st-century beat freaks. Doom covers so much ground that it might be a little surprising for those who haven't been following his career for the last two decades, with something to please both hip-hop classicists and experimental-leaning b-boys on every disc. Do you miss the strutting Meters-derived funk of 90s hip-hop? Find plenty of it here. Or the way producers once shamelessly flipped classic rock/R&B chestnuts, letting you revel in the original hook with the bonus of a punchy rap beat? Well, Doom does his own brand of disco editing on the Doobie Brothers' "What A Fool Believes" on "Mandrake". Are you a new-school fan of the tweaked psychedelic beatscapes of the Brainfeeder crew? Doom seems anticipate those as well, making the decade-old Herbs feel more up-to-date than you might expect.
Sure, he's got his signature tricks, and yes some of these tracks will always feel like backing tracks in search of a rapper. But much of Doom's instrumental output is varied and listenable enough all on its own, full of gorgeous (the weeping violin on "Syrax Gum," the fluttering Spanish-tinged funk guitars of "Chrysanthemum Flowers") and often untrammeled melodies courtesy of his original sample sources. He's equally at home with lusher-than-lush symphonic soul homage and disorienting krautrock-esque noise refashioned into neck-snapping NYC minimalism, a breadth which justifies the Herbs' status as stand-alone product. Some tracks offer the kind of antic and hook-heavy funk-collage that once made "DJ records," from Steinski to the Invisibl Skratch Piklz, plenty of fun without a rapper in sight. And even the more static and laid-back cuts make for excellent, immersive background music. The luscious detailing and wild sonic change-ups of the Herbs recall a time when people didn't necessarily need an MC to appreciate the intricacies of a killer cut-and-paste job, when many were happy to lose themselves in the head-nodding repetition of a densely layered loop. | 2011-02-25T01:00:02.000-05:00 | 2011-02-25T01:00:02.000-05:00 | Rap | Nature Sounds | February 25, 2011 | 7 | 067da06c-05ac-4fc2-a3ba-6bffb0e06589 | Jess Harvell | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jess-harvell/ | null |
Brandon Flowers dials back the pomp for an intimate, homespun, and sometimes clunky tour through the small town where he grew up. | Brandon Flowers dials back the pomp for an intimate, homespun, and sometimes clunky tour through the small town where he grew up. | The Killers: Pressure Machine | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/the-killers-pressure-machine/ | Pressure Machine | For better or for worse, the Killers’ legacy and reputation were cemented with Sam’s Town. Released 15 years ago, the band’s second record established Brandon Flowers and co. as a band of Springsteen aspirants whose best approximations of “Dancing in the Dark” always seemed to miss the mark by at least a few hundred feet. They were Vegas-dwelling pop stars who fetishized all-American rock but who could only ever recreate it the Vegas way: lit with brighter lights, made with ersatz materials, and free of the gravitas of the definite article. The resulting songs—gleaming, indie-disco-ready hits like “When You Were Young” and “Read My Mind”—were most satisfying when they leaned into pop star pomp; the band seemed to cotton on to that fact, all but ditching the Boss worship on future records in order to try on shinier, more glamorous guises.
Five albums and a decade-and-a-half later, at about the exact point where they could have resigned themselves to a life of greatest hits tours, the Killers have decided to return to, if not exactly Sam’s Town, then somewhere down the road from there. Pressure Machine, the band’s seventh record and second in just under a year, is a decidedly more successful show of Springsteen idolatry: a concept album about Flowers’ childhood home of Nephi, Utah, that pays newfound attention to things like scene-setting and narrative throughline, key songwriting components that the Killers have always appeared to consider casualties in their pursuit of the Next Great Arena Anthem. Although positioned as a companion piece to last year’s camp, invigorated Imploding the Mirage—an artistic refocusing helmed by indie superproducers Jonathan Rado and Shawn Everett—it more often feels a little like an attempt on Flowers’ part to affirm himself as a writer with gas still left in the tank.
Flowers approaches Pressure Machine’s subject matter with a kind of dippy openness; he is entirely uncynical and, perhaps as a result, also entirely uncritical of his own authorial view. Sam’s Town, written with youth still in the rearview, focused on protagonists with palpable contempt for their hometown; here, he seems content to sketch out a relatively uncomplicated image of life in Nephi—specifically, life in Nephi in the ’90s, when he was a teen—that’s rife with problems but somehow absent villains both individual and systemic. Homophobia, in Flowers’ Nephi, is attributable to the fact that “culture is king”; the opioid crisis kind of just… exists; a life of forced poverty is presented as something immovable. There are no systems of cause and effect in Flowers’ Nephi, and people don’t ever really change. In other words, there are gaping holes in Flowers’ worldview, likely related to the fact that he’s about 20 years and several socioeconomic rungs removed from where he was when he actually lived in Nephi.
But discard a little bit of cynicism, and Pressure Machine starts to open up: Aside from the bloated opener “West Hills,” these songs feature Flowers’ most fully realized songwriting, the result of him writing lyrics ahead of recording for the first time ever, rather than just “scrambling at the last minute” for impressionistic, batshit phrases that have come to define his certain je ne sais quoi as a lyricist.
Although the Killers’ Springsteen worship has always been more of a vibe, “Desperate Things” is pure Nebraska, a murder ballad about a police officer who vengefully kills his girlfriend’s abusive husband. The song is spare and mournful until its fifth and sixth verses—perhaps the only fifth and sixth verses in the entire Killers oeuvre—when the song suddenly becomes all caterwauling guitar and cymbal crash. “You forget how dark the canyon gets/It’s a real uneasy feeling,” Flowers sings. You get the sense that intimacy is not his natural mode, that he’d much prefer writing songs less beholden to narrative and more driven by feeling and melody—perfect car stereo music. But the ambition is exciting and inspiring nonetheless: “Desperate Things” is troubled not just by its climactic violence, but by the twist that the officer has a wife and a daughter, too.
As on “Desperate Things,” the best moments of Pressure Machine add destabilizing wrinkles to Flowers’ usual iconography-heavy lyricism. “Quiet Town,” a spirited jaunt featuring cult Americana singer-songwriter Joe Pug on harmonica, is easily dismissed as a shallow Springsteen tribute—“They still don’t deadbolt their doors at night/In this quiet town” goes its chorus—until you realize the chorus is a foil to Flowers’ deceptively upbeat verses, which convey the chill of the opioid crisis sweeping in: “When we first heard opioid stories/They were in whispering tones/Now banners of sorrow/Mark the front of childhood homes,” he sings. It makes “Quiet Town”’s chorus sound more like a plea: This community is good, so why is it suffering?
“Quiet Town” introduces one of Pressure Machine’s most compelling thematic strains: How does one keep faith in the face of genuine struggle? On “Terrible Thing,” Flowers writes from the perspective of a closeted teen contemplating suicide: “Around here we all take up our cross/And hang on His holy name/But the cards that I was dealt/Will get you thrown out of the game.” There is no answer here, and no inspirational message: The protagonist, who in earlier Killers songs might have dreamt of ecstatic freedom, finds no solace in childhood memories. On “Cody,” one of a couple songs on Pressure Machine that feel inspired by R.E.M., Flowers once again questions the church’s deep roots in Nephi: “Cody says He didn’t raise the dead/Says religion’s just a trick/To keep hard-working folks in line/He says it makes his stomach sick.” Resigned as it is, “Cody” suggests you can believe both: Nothing’s real, but a miracle might just make everything better, too.
Reckonings with God don’t preclude Pressure Machine from including some of the Killers’ most direct pop songwriting. “In the Car Outside,” the record’s flushed centerpiece, inverts the band’s usual formula: Instead of a song about getting out of some shitty town, this is “Born to Run” on an endless treadmill, no end in sight. Its combustible heart is fueled by its protagonist’s recklessness and his death drive; the song is a race towards nowhere, culminating in a soaring, wordless finale. In a similar vein is “In Another Life,” the band’s most paranoid song since Hot Fuss. Where that record dealt in tales of defeatist glamour and anxious one night stands, the protagonist of this song is alone, drunk, wondering if he’s really living the dream he thought he was as the jukebox in the corner of the bar plays “country songs of stories that sound like mine.” These anti-anthems play to Flowers’ strengths as a songwriter without retreading old ground, examining the foundations of the “breakin’ out of this two-star town” fantasies of Killers songs past.
Ultimately, though, Pressure Machine rarely escapes Flowers’ Brandon Flowers-ness: try as he might—and you do get the sense that he’s trying so, so hard—his usual wide-tipped brush can’t do justice to what should be finely detailed scenes. He is a lover of maximalism and of songs “consume[d] through your heart” rather than your brain, a rightfully beloved form that nonetheless smothers the subtlety required to, say, tell the story of the opioid crisis’ incursion into Nephi. Flowers will always be pop’s great architect of the bright and shiny—but in the case of Pressure Machine, the people of Nephi deserve the real thing.
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. | 2021-08-13T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2021-08-13T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Island | August 13, 2021 | 6.6 | 067dc494-a65a-4359-a78b-a5ad8fa4c5aa | Shaad D’Souza | https://pitchfork.com/staff/shaad-d’souza/ | |
Italian electronic musicians Donato Dozzy and Eva Geist team up on a bewitching album of opulently appointed songs rooted in the country’s disco and synth-pop traditions. | Italian electronic musicians Donato Dozzy and Eva Geist team up on a bewitching album of opulently appointed songs rooted in the country’s disco and synth-pop traditions. | Il Quadro di Troisi: Il Quadro di Troisi | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/il-quadro-di-troisi-il-quadro-di-troisi/ | Il Quadro di Troisi | If 2020 had turned out differently, the debut album by Il Quadro di Troisi might have been the perfect soundtrack to the arrival of breathless exchange students in Italy’s ornate university cities, its winsome synth-pop spilling out of the headphones of homesick young people sharing flirtatious guidebook sentences with mysterious, well-dressed locals. In the absence of foreign travel, Il Quadro di Troisi—a collaboration between Italian electronic artists Eva Geist and Donato Dozzy—does the hard work for us, conjuring up the head-spinning beauty of Italy’s architecture and the effortless elegance of its nightlife.
Geist (aka Andrea Noce) and Dozzy (Donato Scaramuzzi) are both excellent producers in their own right, behind everything from wobbly psychedelia (Geist’s 2019 Urban Monogamy EP) to body-slamming acid (Dozzy’s 2018 LP Filo Loves the Acid) to heady ambient techno (Scaramuzzi’s mind-bending duo Voices From the Lake). But nothing in their catalogs has suggested they might be capable of producing pop as lush and poised as “Il Giudizio,” a song shot through with an irresistible twinge of melancholy and glamour, like sorrow between silk sheets.
Noce’s vocals, in particular, are a revelation. She sings the way Venice must surely look after a late-night heartbreak, all gloriously dusted beauty and elegant sighs. On “Real” her voice soars to the rafters like a startled bird; on “Sfere di Qi” it is shot through with tension; on “Non Ricordi” it drips with erotic charge. Scaramuzzi’s production, meanwhile, draws on Italy’s small but perfectly formed history of Italo disco and synth pop, all dreamy synth lines and discerning machine rhythms; their graceful tick is like an enigmatic stranger’s tantalizing offer to dance, rather than the relentless mechanical pester of contemporary dance music.
The shadow of Ennio Morricone’s exquisitely textured soundtrack work haunts Il Quadro di Troisi’s arrangements, adding sumptuous flesh to Scaramuzzi’s electronic skeleton. Pietro Micioni, of Italian indie label Twilight Music, contributes a wonderfully spidery guitar line to “Il Giudizio” that pushes the song into full ecstatic melancholy, like a rural reprise of the Sabres of Paradise’s classic “Smokebelch II (Beatless Mix).” “Sfere di Qi” introduces lilting flute to a synth that coils around Noce’s vocals like a predatory python, suggesting early Kraftwerk if Ralf Hütter and Florian Schneider had grown up on the banks of the Tiber. And Tommaso Cappellato adds the lightest dusting of live drums to “Raggio Verde,” his fine-drawn cymbal strikes upping the song’s organic texture by fractional—but important—degrees. These are pop songs for weary adults, which sacrifice the impulsive neon glare of modern production for a comforting pastel glow, their subtly layered charms emerging on sustained plays like ruins from the Neapolitan dirt.
Il Quadro di Troisi’s gloriously evocative touch leaves them in elevated company. If Air represent a guidebook glimpse of France, swapping mundane reality for the ornate grandeur of their native Versailles, then Il Quadro di Troisi do the same for Italy, their florid synth adventures painting pictures of a country so impossibly debonair it could only exist in our dreams. The album was born of a correspondence between Scaramuzzi and Noce about the late actor and director Massimo Troisi, best known for his outsider comedies, but it feels closer to Fellini's vision of Rome in La Dolce Vita: a work of pure creative opulence.
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2020-11-30T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2020-11-30T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Electronic | Raster | November 30, 2020 | 7.5 | 067ed4a8-531b-41a0-a2ce-60ac40ce5657 | Ben Cardew | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ben-cardew/ | |
Crystal Fairy pits together At the Drive In’s Omar Rodríguez-López, Le Butcherettes’ Teri Gender Bender, and Melvins members Buzz Osborne and Dale Crover. Their sounds prove strikingly complementary. | Crystal Fairy pits together At the Drive In’s Omar Rodríguez-López, Le Butcherettes’ Teri Gender Bender, and Melvins members Buzz Osborne and Dale Crover. Their sounds prove strikingly complementary. | Crystal Fairy: Crystal Fairy | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22890-crystal-fairy/ | Crystal Fairy | It’s always a good idea to approach supergroup-type projects with caution, no matter how enticing they might look on paper. After all, when artists from well-known bands come together, they face the near-impossible challenge of sounding enough like their main acts while also breaking new ground—and usually without much time to gel. The new group Crystal Fairy pits Melvins core members Buzz Osborne and Dale Crover alongside Le Butcherettes frontwoman Teri Gender Bender and Butcherettes collaborator/producer Omar Rodríguez-López, most famous as the driving force behind the Mars Volta and At the Drive In.
Crystal Fairy doesn’t put any new twists on the established sounds of Le Butcherettes or the Melvins, but it does prove the groups to be remarkably complementary. The quartet’s self-titled debut grafts Gender Bender’s dynamic vocal style onto the Melvin’s rhythmic trudge—apparent immediately on opener “Chiseler,” a quick-and-dirty uptempo riff rocker. Coming from such a creative bunch, the straightforward character of Crystal Fairy is surprising, but the strong, pre-existing rapport between its two pairs of players helps. After 30-plus years together, Osborne’s guitar riffs and Crover’s drumming are pretty much conjoined, while Rodríguez-López has helped upgrade Le Butcherettes’ scrappy neo-psychedelia into a vivid backdrop for Gender Bender’s outsized presence to roam free.
Crover and Osborne have worked with strong musical personalities before, including Jello Biafra, Mike Patton, and Lustmord. This time, though, Osborne may have found a long lost twin in Gender Bender. She comes across as more vulnerable and agitated, but Gender Bender also shares Osborne’s penchant for stagy, absurdist delivery. Here, she practically plays the role of Osborne’s alter-ego, only with a relish that charges the Melvins’ sound with an urgency it typically lacks. And by introducing a harmonic breadth the Melvins have never captured before, she brings new contours to their ongoing fascination with re-appropriating Sabbath, Kiss, and other classic rock tropes.
Gender Bender has a flash of mad inspiration on “Drugs on the Bus.” Her Farfisa part meanders spiderlike across the sludgy main riff, and when she wails about a woman who cuts her own eyes out in the climax, the mood intensifies starkly. She gets to channel her inner Jello Biafra on a cover of ’80s hardcore outfit Tales of Terror’s “Possession,” which recalls the springy cadence of the Dead Kennedys classic “California Über Alles.” And while the funereal riff that anchors “Moth Tongue” is indistinguishable from countless other Melvins tunes, Gender Bender scrapes the back of her throat on her high notes, allowing a glimpse of what the Melvins might sound like if fronted by the banshee wail of Rush’s Geddy Lee.
Crystal Fairy concludes on an anticlimactic note, as the final stop-start stutter of the short-fast “Vampire X-Mas” simply fails to resume when the band has set you up to expect that it will. It sounds intentional, but the track also leaves a lingering feeling that the album ends unresolved. That’s a minor quibble, though, after 40-minutes of hearing people play together with far greater affinity than anyone could have expected. | 2017-02-24T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2017-02-24T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Ipecac | February 24, 2017 | 7.7 | 0680af68-65e8-4105-a434-14704e82f979 | Saby Reyes-Kulkarni | https://pitchfork.com/staff/saby-reyes-kulkarni/ | null |
Toronto's David Psutka records as Egyptrixx, who helped define the atmospheric sound of London's Night Slugs label. His project Ceramic TL is a radical break: The beats are gone and the melodies have run dry. It's all atmosphere, heady as huffing aerosol. | Toronto's David Psutka records as Egyptrixx, who helped define the atmospheric sound of London's Night Slugs label. His project Ceramic TL is a radical break: The beats are gone and the melodies have run dry. It's all atmosphere, heady as huffing aerosol. | Ceramic TL: Sign of the Cross Every Mile to the Border | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21606-sign-of-the-cross-every-mile-to-the-border/ | Sign of the Cross Every Mile to the Border | Recording as Egyptrixx, Toronto's David Psutka helped to define the sound of London's Night Slugs label. His albums Bible Eyes and A/B Til Infinity took techno rhythms, gleaming synth melodies, and noxious ambient atmospheres and spun them into exciting new variants. His new project Ceramic TL represents a break with Egyptrixx's style: The beats are gone and the melodies have run dry; with an emphasis on buzzing drones and detuned bell tones, it's all atmosphere, and it is more noxious than ever, heady as huffing aerosol.
Sign of the Cross Every Mile to the Border is pitched as "seven meditations on optimism and faith through the prism of environmental cataclysm." It's a theme that might bring to mind his former labelmate Jam City's recent album Dream a Garden, which was described by its creator as an attempt to locate beauty and healing in the fight against oppression. But the music couldn't be further away from Jam City's dreamy mood board, with its gauzy echoes of Scritti Politti and Prince and vintage 4AD. Psutka's '80s borrowings are limited to the suffocating cacophony of Glenn Branca's guitar symphonies and the persistent swoosh of digital phaser effects. His fondness for black metal is evident in the charred rumbling of a track like "Life on Earth," in which ringing bells melt together into an unbroken din and a low hum crackles like a burning bass amp. At the track's close, a car revs in the distance and the sound of wind and fire whips across the landscape, bringing the album's environmental themes to the fore.
The opening track, a burnished bell-tone whine, is remarkably similar to the stopped-watch loops of Thomas Brinkmann's What You Hear (Is What You Hear) and it scans as pure texture. The entire album, in fact, is almost entirely devoid of conventional musical or rhythmic events, preferring the static repetition of granular loops stretched to infinity. Ceramic TL—does that "TL" stand for "timeline"?—seems to be a project about taking a time-based medium and squeezing the life out of it, stopping it dead in its tracks and flattening it beyond recognition: music as roadkill, as flatline.
Where the music is austere, the track titles are positively Byzantine. "I Attached To and Pored Over Photos of Places I Loved That Were Reduced to Ash" is one; "I Often Wondered How the Group Would React When Eco-Apocalypse Finally Struck" is another. Some sound like they might be clippings from YA novels ("This Looks Just Like It, the Answer to My Prayers - I Thought My Life Was Over Until Two Years Later I Arrived"), but it's also possible to imagine them, not uncharitably, as Black Metal Cats captions. Of course, black metal itself is no stranger to florid iconography, and the deep purple of Psutka's prose, as faintly ridiculous as it may be, has the effect of doubling down on his theme, practically daring you not to meet the album on its own ambitious terms.
The final track, called simply "Clearing," is a welcome breath of fresh air after the labyrinthine path that has led up to it. Amid a fluttering of birdsong, an automobile's open-door chime beeps, the door slams, and a metallic chop of rotors, indicating sudden liftoff, flashes back to the zap and chug of Egyptrixx. Whether or not it suggests a return in the future to his more club-oriented work, who knows. But it makes a fitting finish for Ceramic TL's claustrophobic audio play, in which sound itself is dramatized as a life-or-death struggle for oxygen. And, at long last, Psutka's bet on "optimism and faith" pays off. | 2016-03-16T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-03-16T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Halocline Trance | March 16, 2016 | 7 | 0680c0a3-37ae-40bd-bab7-087f6a99d4d4 | Philip Sherburne | https://pitchfork.com/staff/philip-sherburne/ | null |
Angelo Badalamenti’s soundtrack for David Lynch’s 1992 “Twin Peaks” film Fire Walk With Me remains as enchanting and evocative as ever, and gets a long overdue vinyl reissue courtesy of Death Waltz. | Angelo Badalamenti’s soundtrack for David Lynch’s 1992 “Twin Peaks” film Fire Walk With Me remains as enchanting and evocative as ever, and gets a long overdue vinyl reissue courtesy of Death Waltz. | Angelo Badalamenti: Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me OST | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22787-twin-peaks-fire-walk-with-me-ost/ | Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me OST | Despite a career that stretches back a half-century, Angelo Badalamenti’s arrangements for the likes of Nina Simone and Shirley Bassey as well as his soundtracks for A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors, Dominion: Prequel to the Exorcist, and National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation never quite haunted the collective memory. (That is to say nothing of his forgotten turn at bouncy country music.) Instead, it was when he was brought in to coach Isabella Rossellini’s vocals on the set of 1986’s Blue Velvet that his profound collaboration with David Lynch began. Since then, Badalamenti’s distinctive blend of smoky jazz, ’50s pop, and three a.m. noir has seeped into pop culture. It’s easy to hear the hushed dark of his influence on an array of players, be they Nick Cave, the xx, Morphine, or Bohren & Der Club of Gore.
In providing themes that toggled between darkness and light on “Twin Peaks,” Badalamenti’s music slid into American prime time to lingering effect. But Lynch’s feature-length prequel box-office boondoggle Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me (25 years on, the Metacritic score holds at 28) clouded over the composer’s work for that film. And while none of the themes are as instantaneously familiar as anything from the series, Badalamenti’s soundtrack remains as enchanting and evocative as ever, presented here in a long overdue vinyl reissue courtesy of the soundtrack fetishists at Death Waltz.
Badalamenti handles all the production, arrangements, and orchestrations; he plays keyboards, even contributing some gruff vocals to the set. Tucked into its 12 tracks are a curious array of players, from bassist Ron Carter and hard bop drummer Grady Tate to the voice most often associated with the man’s music, Julee Cruise. The nearly seven-minute main theme might not readily pair to images of Agent Cooper or Laura Palmer, but it’s brooding and melancholic in its own right. Badalamenti’s keyboard chords haunt in the distance as a muted trumpet lead, walking bassline, and barely grazed ride cymbal conjure dark and lonesome images of their own. For a solo turn at the synthesizer, Badalamenti moves through a spectrum of sadness, distress, love, and resolve on closer “The Voice of Love.”
An allergy towards all things Tom Waits-esque, and the jarring clang of “A Real Indication”—featuring growled lines from Badalamenti himself—are the only real disruptions to the otherwise crepuscular ambience of the album. “The Pink Room” serves up noir-ish instrumental rock, not unlike Chris Isaacs’ “Wicked Game” by way of early Bad Seeds. The composer himself returns to the microphone to lay down a murmur on the skin-crawling two minutes of “The Black Dog Runs at Night,” but the guest vocals are more effective. The legendary Jimmy Scott appears on the slow-moving piano ballad “Sycamore Trees”; the baritone sax and Mr. Scott’s astonishing countertenor twine in the darkness like two cigarettes left smoldering in an ashtray. And the gravity-free bliss that is Cruise’s voice returns to drift like a lone cloud across the hymn-like “Questions in a World of Blue.”
The gorgeous “Don’t Do Anything (I Wouldn’t Do)” evokes early ’60s Blue Note sessions, a gentle meld of piano trio and the hovering vibraphone lines of Jay Hoggard. On “Moving Through Time,” Hoggard’s languid lines mix with Badalamenti’s piano, Tate’s brushed drums, and the expressive bowed bass of Rufus Reid to easily make for the most stunning seven minutes of the soundtrack. Beyond being a revered soundtrack composer, Badalamenti is equally adept at just blending into the group as a player. | 2017-01-20T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2017-01-20T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Experimental | Death Waltz | January 20, 2017 | 8.4 | 0680cb66-bc08-407e-aa58-cb97fe329ba2 | Andy Beta | https://pitchfork.com/staff/andy-beta/ | null |
Toronto-based singer and producer PARTYNEXTDOOR recently signed with Drake's OVO Sound imprint, and his debut mixtape abounds with homespun beats that turn radio rap tropes inside out and easy melodicism. | Toronto-based singer and producer PARTYNEXTDOOR recently signed with Drake's OVO Sound imprint, and his debut mixtape abounds with homespun beats that turn radio rap tropes inside out and easy melodicism. | PARTYNEXTDOOR: PARTYNEXTDOOR | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/18284-partynextdoor-partynextdoor/ | PARTYNEXTDOOR | This spring Drake picked up the first signee for his newly minted OVO Sound imprint in Toronto-based singer and producer PARTYNEXTDOOR. Like The Weeknd, who produced sporadic sessions as the Noise before a name change and a dollop of mystery sent his career into the stratosphere, and Frank Ocean, who toiled in obscurity as Def Jam songwriter Lonny Breaux prior to 2011’s Nostalgia, Ultra, PARTYNEXTDOOR had been making cheery EDM-infused R&B under his real name Jahron Brathwaite before starting with a clean slate. Brathwaite’s OVO acquisition was announced with an unassuming track drop on Drake’s October’s Very Own blog. The song, “Make a Mil”, found PARTYNEXTDOOR running through fleet verses of self-assured melodic rap with greater ease and range as a singer than his benefactor. His eponymous self-titled mixtape trades the doe-eyed sensitivity of the Jahron B. material for something closer in spirit to the villainous player chronicles of Ty Dolla $ign and the Weeknd.
The album’s chock full of strippers and drugs, and our narrator navigates a succession of dimly lit clubs and private afterparties with devilish gusto, informing the exotic dancing love interest of “Relax with Me” that, “Girl yo ass is so instrumental” and noting elsewhere that “Shawty silhouette look like a dollar sign”. All of this is carried out in a vocal delivery that fuses an R&B singer’s melodic finesse with the percussive wordplay of a rapper. In his lower register he’s a dead ringer for his boss; “Wus Good/Curious” invokes So Far Gone makeout cuts like “Houstatlantavegas”. When he draws his voice up into a high register word flurry on “Right Now” he essentially affects Meek Mill’s puppy dog yawp. If you close your eyes you might mistake “Tbh” and its oscillation between Brathwaite’s baritone and high tenor ranges for a lost Drake/Weeknd collaboration. Brathwaite’s a talented singer, but sometimes you get the impression he’s better at twisting and recapitulating sounds than inventing them. The inarguable triumph of PARTYNEXTDOOR is actually his production.
PARTYNEXTDOOR abounds with homespun beats that turn radio rap tropes inside out. “Make a Mil” and closer “Ballin’” both call in the foreboding 808s and the cricket chirp hi-hats of trap, but the former does it in service to a central melody played on what sounds like a Pan flute while the latter undercuts its cavernous low end with breathy flute notes that soak up all the menace. Mid-album highlight “Right Now” revolves around a breakneck synth figure, while “Break from Toronto” bastes otherwise unremarkable drum programming in a choice chop of Miguel’s “Girl with the Tattoo”. Throughout the album PARTYNEXTDOOR’s flair for off-the-wall musical flourishes (the clinking glasses and noirish sax on “Wild Bitches”, the drillbit synth sound that piledrives the kick hits home on “Wus Good/Curious”, the brashly synthetic horn section on the chorus of “Make a Mil”) and propensity to stash melodic elements in unexpected corners (see: the marimba melody of “Over Here” and the album’s tendency to pair hollow kick thuds with deep bass hits to give the effect of trunk-rattling drums) collude to buoy these songs through fitful moments of mimicry.
Jahron Brathwaite’s decision to ditch the mealy mouthed, saccharine dance pop to transmogrify into PARTYNEXTDOOR has been a shot in the arm. He’s got the ear of Drake at a time when the Toronto MC’s presence has solidified into dominance, and his versatility as a producer and songwriter means he could be put to great use in the OVO pop machine. PARTYNEXTDOOR occasionally works better as an audition for future work with Drake than an expression of Brathwaite’s own aspirations as an artist. But it’s also clear from the bedroom intimacy of the production and the demo-like quality of some of the one- and two-minute sketches that pepper the album between the more fully realized songs that PARTYNEXTDOOR is maybe just a sampler. It spends much of its brief running time wandering around Take Care’s wheelhouse churning out deft approximations of Drake and Noah “40” Shebib’s pet sounds, but some of it is used to strip their signature brand of confessional hip-hop/R&B fusion for parts to restructure it into something new. | 2013-07-31T02:00:03.000-04:00 | 2013-07-31T02:00:03.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | October’s Very Own | July 31, 2013 | 6.9 | 06820398-a578-4bfc-bd50-38f2bbc9b6b0 | Craig Jenkins | https://pitchfork.com/staff/craig-jenkins/ | null |
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