The restless UK electronic musician sets aside prior experiments in spliced soul and finger-picking folk-glitch in favor of foggy ambient atmospheres that are both soothing and haunting.

Phantom Brickworks

As the past 12 years have made clear, Stephen James Wilkinson is a restless explorer of musical styles. There seem to be few genres that Wilkinson, better known as Bibio, hasn’t turned over and scrutinized intently: odes to R&B and Boards of Canada; finger-picking folk-glitch; spliced soul and downtempo pastiche. The results have ranged from charming to competent to maddening. Surprisingly, one area that Bibio hasn’t properly explored until now is ambient music.
But don’t think of Phantom Brickworks as the ticking of a box. The cumulative effect of these nine pieces makes it his most fully realized album to date, one that avoids the fidgety eclecticism of his previous work. Rather than racing from one thing to the next, Wilkinson sounds as if he’s come to a state of rest; the album’s carefully developing tracks resulted from improvisation, but it sounds almost as though he channeled them. Wilkinson has described them as  “a mental portal into places and times—some real, some imaginary, some both.” Many of the album’s titles allude to various points around the United Kingdom, adding to the suggestion that the album represents a kind of sonic road trip where every landmark is cloaked in that famous English fog, their outlines blurred beyond recognition.
“Capel Celyn” is named for a rural, Welsh-speaking community tucked away in Gwynedd, North Wales, that was flooded and turned into a reservoir to supply Liverpool in 1965. It would be pat to say that Wilkinson’s eight-minute tribute sounds like it was recorded underwater. But there is a sense of bobbing in place, a slow stillness to its handful of somber notes, that is reminiscent of some of William Basinski’s archival tape loops. The blurred, halting melodic fragment slowly drifts and changes shape before fading completely away two-thirds of the way through, when it enters even darker territory, like the bowed undercarriage of a submarine slicing through deep water.
The elegiac “9:13” brings to mind some of Wolfgang Voigt’s work as GAS. The sounds are masked and smudged to the point where the timbres are unidentifiable: Is that a brass or woodwind instrument? Wilkinson gently elongates the tones and lets them turn slowly in space. As they continue, tape saturation and distortion alter their sound, blurring its edges, like an image seen from behind rain-dappled glass.
Running nearly 14 minutes, the title track is so sublimely murky, with its plangent piano and lo-fi haze, that one expects Liz Harris’ voice to emerge at any moment. But as “Phantom Brickworks” unfurls, new little details emerge: Bits of fuzzy feedback and a sound like thrummed metal spindles keep Bibio from merely approximating Harris’ work as Grouper. An even longer piece, “Phantom Brickworks II,” continues to wade through the ambience of sustained, slightly detuned piano notes,  accompanied by what might be field recordings of distant cars passing in the rain, while the sound of children at play peeks out from the hiss. But rather than go down the path of his label-mates Boards of Canada, Wilkinson’s noises here more closely resemble electronic voice phenomena, recordings that purport to capture the voices of the dead. Something ghostly begins to arise from the dark corners of this music, which comes to seem like anything but a soothing balm of ambient sound.
In his review of Bibio’s Silver Wilkinson, Ian Cohen noted that Wilkinson’s “accumulative” approach, piling loops upon loops, tended to eclipse his actual songwriting. But here, that technique proves to be Bibio’s untapped strength, as hazy overtones, muffled field recordings, tape hiss, and decaying drones create a gorgeous effect. The album’s release is well-timed: The autumn chill and gray light that accompany the end of the year are conducive to ambient music and self-reflection. In a year in need of centering and a sense of calm, Phantom Brickworks lives up to its name; it feels haunted while also offering up a hope to rebuild.


Second solo LP from Broken Social Scene vocalist Leslie Feist ("Almost Crimes"), produced by Peaches collaborator Chilly Gonzales, finds Feist in a radically different state of mind.

Let It Die

Anyone who has ever seen Broken Social Scene perform in their A1 configuration knows that Leslie Feist (singer of You Forgot It in People's "Almost Crimes") has roughly six backrooms worth of charisma stockpiled in her lighter pocket alone. Yet, despite that her tenure in the scene-stealing department extends back to her days with the middling indie rock outfit By Divine Right, Feist has always approached her solo career with agonizing apprehension. Her solo debut, Monarch, appeared in 1999, and while a serviceable indie rock record, it did little to communicate the swaggery gleam of her stage persona.
Nearly five years removed from that debut, Let It Die finds Feist in a radically different state of mind, completely abandoning her guitars-and-strings indie rock shorthand in favor of folk, jazz, French pop, and disco accoutrements. While her propensity for serial genre-hopping makes it difficult for the album to congeal into a whole (Let It Die's scattered closing trilogy comprises covers of songs by Ron Sexsmith, The Bee Gees and 1940s vocalist Dick Haymes), it is nonetheless held together by her wistful song selection and an airy, summery aesthetic.
Although many of its originals were sparked in Toronto, where Feist first cut them as four-track demos, the bulk of Let It Die was realized and recorded in Paris with the assistance of fellow Canadian expat Jason Beck, better known as Peaches collaborator Chilly Gonzales. Emblazoned with jazzy guitar shapes, droning vibes, crisp percussion, toothless synths, smoothed-out samples and Feist's slippery vocals, the music sloshes around the stereo channel like liquid in a canister. It's no wonder that, despite her protestation, reviewers have quite reasonably taken to calling it Feist's French pop album; whether intentional or not, Let It Die shares all sorts of characteristics with our archetypal vision of Paris. "Whimsical," "romantic" and "adventurous" are all adjectives that apply.
With five original songs followed by six covers, Let It Die intimates its own Side A/B divide, of which the former is undoubtedly the stronger half. We begin with "Gatekeeper", a sparse, jazzy lament on love's inconstancy that at once establishes the album's central theme; namely, the juggling act involved in reconciling boundless romanticism and optimism for the future with the soured relationships and broken hearts of the past. One of the summer's gentlest, most natural pop melodies follows with first single "Mushaboom", from which we're gently airlifted into the title track. Featuring a funereal organ line and a weak pulse of a drum beat, "Let It Die" yields one of the album's stillest moments. Equal parts relationship swansong, a reproach to a former lover, and a hardening act (chorus: "The saddest part of a broken heart isn't the ending so much as the start"), it is also the album's emotional centerpiece.
Comprising covers of material by FraxE7oise Hardy, Sexsmith and others, Side B is decidedly less rewarding. Among Feist's least essential readings is her version of Sexsmith's "Secret Heart", which, although lovingly rendered, betrays the original's vulnerability to a tangle of cutesy string plucks and whiz-bang synth sounds. When things work, as they do on her softly lit, glossy rendition of The Bee Gees' "Inside Out" and her black-and-white take on Haynes' black-and-white piano ballad "Now at Last", they verge on inspired, but I too often found myself willfully ignoring the implications of her aggregate five original songs over the last four years and stubbornly unwishing some of the more extraneous covers in favor of more of her own material.
Ultimately, however, Feist's charm is such that it doesn't matter all that much who writes the songs so long as they're the right ones. Indeed, one of the major reasons Let It Die hits is because Feist finally knows precisely what she's aiming at. For that quantum leap in wisdom, we'll grant her the aforementioned five-year hiatus, but after this record, we're not likely to be as patient again.


On her solo debut, the Detroit singer-songwriter cuts with her folk-rock past and turns to 1960s-indebted indie pop and 1990s-schooled alt-rock hooks.

Quit the Curse

The indie-pop musician Anna Burch was born for the spotlight; it just took several attempts to get there. After singing in the folk-rock band Frontier Ruckus, co-fronting the indie-rock act Failed Flowers, and joining other Michigan projects in her spare time, the Detroit singer-songwriter makes her solo debut with Quit the Curse, a record of wry one-liners and moody indie pop. Every track on the record is marked by fuzzy guitar hooks and 1960s-flavored girl-group harmonies—a bold step forward from her folk background.
The years Burch spent performing in bands—learning to complement a fellow guitarist’s melody, blending her voice with other singers, and other quintessential hive-mind tricks—have clearly guided her along the way to becoming her own bandleader. A song like “Tea-Soaked Letter” gives the illusion that she’s a naturally gifted songwriter: Guitar strums descend in a satisfying progression, vocal harmonies never falter, and every melody feels familiar yet fresh. According to Burch, however, it’s been a process of revision and relearning, as she never properly studied songwriting until her late twenties.
Burch is at her best when she tries her hand at what sound like alt-rock singles from the 1990s. Like Juliana Hatfield and Liz Phair, Burch has a knack for complex chord changes and personable delivery, the kind that tempts you to blast her music in the car as an inexpensive form of therapy. That’s particularly true of the malaise-ridden “Asking 4 a Friend,” a drug-dealer love story that nods to the Lemonheads’ “My Drug Buddy.” The snarky annoyance and dissonant guitar give her deadpan delivery an extra push. On opener “2 Cool 2 Care” and closing ballad “With You Every Day,” Burch tackles vintage beach-pop in the vein of Alvvays. Even as she doubles down on guitar and vocal tricks, Burch avoids over-saturating her carefree pop songs.
Even as Burch reinvents herself, she doesn’t entirely let go of her folk-rock past, particularly on the album’s second half. Though soothing, a half-baked guitar chord progression in “What I Want” and the ambling pedal-steel whine in “Belle Isle” sound dull when compared to her sharper hooks. Burch has admitted that a handful of the songs felt “stiff and stilted” when she demoed them. That’s why she sent them to engineer Collin Dupuis—his work with Angel Olsen and Lana Del Rey got Burch's attention—who gave her tips for re-recording them. But some songs, like the title track, still don't sound particularly lively.
Come the end, Quit the Curse reveals itself to be a window to watching a songwriter grow. Singing about unfulfilled romantic desires, she packs in enough self-awareness to mock the melodramatic format. Distinguished by her sure-footed stride, Quit the Curse sounds like an album by an artist who at last knows where she’s going.


Shaking off the brooding insularity that clouded his previous records, Patrick Wolf goes upbeat, taking theatrical cues from Kate Bush, Antony, and Current 93 while finally overcoming his tendency toward sullen, adolescent introspection.

The Magic Position

Patrick Wolf is growing up. The classically trained, left-of-center indie star's colorful adolescence and early twenties were unusually productive, resulting in two charming albums (2003's Lycanthropy and 2005's Wind in the Wires) that found delicate string-and-piano pop pieces laced with guttural electronics. Both were charismatic but maudlin efforts, full of bittersweet montages, percussion-heavy compositions, and pissy, spit-out vocals that documented search after fruitless search for enlightenment or joy-- but if it all seemed a bit self-absorbed, there was no denying Wolf had a way with a melody.
With The Magic Position, though, Wolf shakes off much of the brooding insularity that clouded his previous records, refining his melodic strengths and overcoming his tendency toward sullen introspection. Album opener "Overture" has an energetic, marching pulse, its ascending violin line providing a lilting and confident backbone as Wolf announces his newly discovered positivity. He's "found the major key," as he states in the title cut, and it's in that key that Wolf affirms his growth not just as a songwriter, but as an entertainer. Where Wind in the Wires' musical potency was sometimes overshadowed by Wolf's penchant for melodrama, The Magic Position takes cues from Kate Bush, Antony, and Current 93 (and, okay, sometimes just a little Adam Ant) to turn his natural theatricality into an asset: Here, it's used to lend a sense of ethereal drama, to set scenes, tell stories, and imbue the record with a sort of campy, reverent mysticism.
But what still stands out most is the songs themselves: These tracks-- especially the upbeat springtime romp "Get Lost", the danceable, triumphant "Accident and Emergency", and the celebratory title track-- show an entirely new side of Wolf: one that finally puts impeccable pop songcraft ahead of lachrymose keening. The title track, in particular, is a stunner, riding a cantering violin riff to a soaring, staccato pop anthem. The keyboard's playful, ascending scale acts as a cheerful motif as the song twists off in unexpected directions with sudden melodic breaks and interludes, and juxtaposes Wolf's lyrical darkness with sonic brightness.
Of course, it's worth noting that, for all the frolicking glee, Wolf's melancholy hasn't entirely vanished-- it's just that it's no longer quite so cheerless. Granted, for Wolf to have discovered optimism may seem like an ominous transformation to fans content to be swaddled in cryptic early gems like "The Libertine", but the distinctive, ornate qualities of his first two records remain. And what's taken the place of all that narcissistic grief-- a crucial sense of self-awareness and the resolution of some very elementary identity issues-- has allowed him an artistic and lyrical progression that results in refined and concentrated updates like "The Stars", which insightfully links family and nature, or the virtuosic ballad "Augustine", while retaining a spirited, anthemic quality that puts them confidently at home in the same body of work.


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 blink-182’s third album, a defining moment in both pop-punk and immaturity writ large.

Enema of the State

On the weekend of the infamously disastrous Woodstock ’99, which symbolized rock radio’s id-fueled descent into aggro dipshittery, a snottier kind of teenage angst was manifesting 200 miles to the west in Buffalo, New York. Then in its fifth year, the Vans Warped Tour had crisscrossed the country bringing affordable revelry to the green-haired masses. If Woodstock was for the shirtless jocks, Warped Tour was for the skaters, losers, and wannabes who still sometimes needed a ride from mom. No one was there for the revolution; they were just teenagers drunk on community and tongue-kissing, blissfully alive during the final summer of what had been a relatively idyllic American decade. And that summer, no act on the bill was bigger than blink-182.
While the concept of pop-punk dates back to ’70s bands like the Buzzcocks and the Undertones, pop-punk didn’t become actual popular music until 1994, when Green Day’s Dookie sold more than 12 million copies and set off a never-ending debate about selling out that persists in DIY spaces today. Sure, Green Day sang more about masturbation than anarchy, but that simply did not matter to all the young kids who, apart from lapping up the music, constituted a new customer base for the record industry to serve.
These market conditions had lifted blink-182 to festival superstardom just five years into their recording career. In 1992, Mark Hoppus met Tom Delonge through Hoppus’ sister Anne, and they immediately connected through their obsession with punk rock and middle-school humor—two foundational elements for a new pop-punk band. But while they loved conceptual predecessors like the similarly Californian and cheeky Descendents, they were serious about owning a suburban home. “I’d like to make a lot of money and fuck credibility,” Hoppus said in 1998 to i-Zine. “People make so much out of something that’s just the band trying to get ahead and get its music to as many fans as possible.”
They weren’t selling out; they were buying in. Part of that was Hoppus and Delonge’s exurban SoCal upbringing, which encouraged a sunny prankishness at odds with the urban despair of the big cities. “The Californian middle-class suburbs have nothing to be that bummed about,” Delonge told music journalist John Robb in 2000. (He might have added “white,” too.) Two decades earlier, the teenaged Ramones were social outcasts in New York, but Delonge was named homecoming king his senior year of high school (he was also expelled for showing up drunk to a basketball game). What they began doing quite well and to excess was simple: record the pouty concerns of middle-class kids in a plainspoken language they could understand, set to addictive melodies and played at moshing speed.
That largely meant singing about women. “I guess this is growing up,” Hoppus had declared on 1997’s “Dammit,” a cynical dispatch about a collapsed relationship; two years later they were hardly more considerate about the opposite sex. As Warped Tour kicked off in 1999, they released Enema of the State, their third studio album, first with a real budget, and first solely for a major label (1997’s Dude Ranch was released in tandem between MCA and early patrons Cargo). Nine of its 12 tracks were directly about women, with a tenth—the anti-suicide “Adam’s Song”—inspired by the loneliness Hoppus felt on tour as the crowds got bigger and the schedule more demanding.
“What’s My Age Again?,” their first single to hit the Billboard Hot 100, summed up blink’s entire emotional purview: sexual failure, exes, and developmentally arrested existential despair. (The initial title, rejected by the label, was “Peter Pan Complex.”) The song was boosted immensely by the accompanying video, in which the band sprinted nude through Los Angeles, a stunt that landed them on MTV’s Total Request Live, then the gold standard for artists hoping to break into mainstream America. The nudity didn’t have much to do with the song, but juxtaposing earnest sentiment with love of their own dicks would become the band’s default approach for the next few years.
Nice guy misogyny, practiced by men who claim to love and respect women, but also think they know what’s best for them, was rampant in ’90s culture and music, and blink-182 were not an exception. Gasoline-powered opener “Dumpweed” is catchy as hell; it also has a chorus where Delonge yells, “I need a girl that I can train,” an attitude made abundantly clear throughout the album. (Reviewing it in The New York Times, Ann Powers called “Dumpweed” a “nasty idea, but the rest of the song makes it obvious he is the one at heel.”) The moral record doesn’t need to be retroactively corrected, as plenty of critics and adults despised their act: A 2000 SPIN piece threw them into the rising tide of sexist rock bands, alongside frat-rap acts like Limp Bizkit and Kid Rock; a profile from the year before highlighted the animosity from ethically-minded punks concerned about the implications of blink-182’s waggish bullshit.
The music publicist Tristin Laughter, who was then employed by prominent punk label Lookout! (home to a pre-stardom Green Day), wrote in the influential fanzine Punk Planet, “Boys who go to see the punk bands on the Warped Tour may be inspired to start their own rock bands. Girls may be inspired to think they could actually be pretty enough to be cheered on when they remove their shirts.” The band treated the accusations with little credence: “I love all those criticisms, because fuck all those magazines!” Delonge told SPIN. “I hate with a passion Maximumrockandroll and all those zines that think they know what punk is supposed to be. I think it’s so much more punk to piss people off than to conform to all those veganistic views.” This brand of assholishness didn’t negate the fact of their wrongness, which the band could occasionally recognize with the slightest concessions; after all, as their audience began skewing younger, they did stop asking the women in attendance to remove their shirts.
They may have been stuck at the emotional age of 23, but the 1998 addition of Travis Barker had given their collective musical ability a quantum leap forward. Citing burnout, original drummer Scott Raynor had left the band mid-tour, and Barker was recruited on short notice from costumed punks the Aquabats, one of their tourmates. He learned the entire setlist in about 45 minutes, which Delonge later remarked was both a testament to his skill and the band’s lack of refinement. Not long after, Raynor was formally kicked out, and Barker was hired on full-time.
Barker’s two drumming heroes were jazz legend Buddy Rich and Animal from the Muppets. In contrast to Hoppus and Delonge, he’d grown up working class, and carried himself with a seriousness they did not share. (For years, he’d be regarded by fans as “the quiet one.”) Full-body tattoos and a stylish mohawk belied a monkish devotion to his craft—he practiced obsessively, and played so forcefully he once fractured his arm during a video shoot. Though he didn’t receive songwriting credits (and wouldn’t be inducted as an official member of the band until the recording of 2001’s Take Off Your Pants and Jacket), Barker arranged all of the songs on Enema, selecting the tempos and organizing the flow of verses, choruses, and breaks.
Given new power thanks to producer Jerry Finn’s arsenal of pedals and amps, Delonge’s guitar-playing bounced against Barker’s hard-nosed drumming, with Hoppus’ bass lines as the connective tissue. Barker’s versatility meant they could settle into a twinkling ballad, or approach the tempo of hardcore. Often he did everything in the same song, like on “Dysentery Gary,” where a start-stop lockstep with the riff flows into a samba groove before achieving rocket-fueled liftoff on the chorus. Aquabats singer Christian Jacobs assessed the value of Barker’s contributions more bluntly: “Without Travis, Mark and Tom would have been, at best, a lukewarm poser pop-punk band. A couple of hot dogs wiggling around in a bucket.”
The full-throttle catchiness of a song titled “Dysentery Gary” (which is about a slimy guy who steals Delonge’s girlfriend) sums up why fans loved blink-182, and why critics often rolled their eyes. Their punk forebears offered clever critiques of capitalism; they came up with, “Work sucks/I know.” They were lifestyle music for kids radicalized by the Tony Hawk Pro Skater soundtrack, empowered by their self-assigned right to rebel.
Even so, they could be surprisingly sensitive, like on “All the Small Things,” which Delonge wrote about his then-girlfriend and future wife Jennifer. The lyrics aren’t profound, and the Fisher-Price rhyme scheme led to syntax that sounds spat up by a Babelfish translation (“Always I know/You’ll be at my show”). But it was engineered to provoke a physical reaction: leaping out of the speakers like a Van Halen song before slowing down to build momentum for another eruptive chorus buttressed by Delonge’s adenoidal harmonizing, his na-na coming out as a nasally faux-British naw-naw. The fizzy pleasure of the melody captures the Hallmark simplicity of young love, and though the instantly iconic video mocked the boy bands of their era, any amateur critic could point out they were just doing “As Long As You Love Me” for the lip-ring set.
Considering how easily the band defaulted to juvenilia—even the sweet “All the Small Things” got a goofy video—it’s relatively stunning how straight they played it on “Adam’s Song,” which became the most impactful anti-suicide song of the ’90s due to its vivid first-person perspective and empathetic narrator, a depressed teenager whose feelings of anguish and alienation were proximate to a lot of blink-182’s young fans. “Adam’s Song” read like something a teenager might have written, which is why millions of them loved it. The experience of navigating suicidal feelings rarely sounded so anthemic, and Hoppus’ somber delivery, heartbreaking details (“Please tell mom this is not her fault”), and eventual hopeful turn even closed out with a tender piano outro. It was capital-M Mature; it was also named after a Mr. Show sketch about a band who visits a fan after his suicide attempt, further heightening their push and pull between emotional development and the easy joke.
Then again, what do you expect a band that would call their next album Take Off Your Pants and Jacket? They were just close enough to their youth to instantly relive it, which may have given their therapists heartburn, but made for amazingly effective pop music: Hoppus was 27 years old when he wrote, “Nobody likes you when you’re 23,” and DeLonge actually was 23 years old when he insisted on being unlikeable.
But blink-182 eventually did grow up, sort of. The darker textures and increasingly sophisticated songwriting made 2003’s self-titled album, recorded just before their eight-year hiatus, a predecessor to the moody emo-pop bands that would soon dominate the charts (it even included a duet with the Cure’s Robert Smith, one of Hoppus’ heroes). They still write silly songs like 2016’s “Built This Pool” (complete lyrics: “I wanna see some naked dudes/That’s why I built this pool”), but their reunion records are studded with moments of emotional reflection and compositional elegance that, 20 years ago, would’ve been impossible to anticipate. Particularly good is 2011’s “Up All Night,” in which they grapple with the night terrors that set in after the money has been made, the suburban home has been purchased, the family life and personal development have been secured, but life nonetheless remains unresolvable.
In a meta bit of casting, Delonge was replaced by Matt Skiba of Alkaline Trio, who’d often stood in contrast to blink as a “serious” pop-punk band. Hoppus morphed into a sage, wry presence on Twitter, and a vocal advocate of the younger groups blink-182 inspired; Barker became canonized as drummer to the stars, and garnered an unyielding wave of goodwill after barely surviving a plane crash in 2008. Whispers abound that Delonge will eventually rejoin the band when he’s finished proving that aliens are real, and by the way, you are not alone in being overwhelmed by the fact that the guy from blink-182 might prove that aliens are real.
Through all these encroachments into adulthood, Enema remains the album that defined them. Nothing they released after had the same immediacy or cultural connection, and they’re now performing the record in full, the surest sign that a band has finally embraced its status as a legacy act. In blink’s case, their once-teenaged fans are now full-fledged adults with nostalgia for their less responsible years, and the money to emotionally regress for a night. They were slated to headline Fyre Festival, a disaster of Woodstock ’99 proportions mostly attended by monied urbanites whose artistic interests top out at “stuff I recognize.”
Even so, the appeals of puerile insouciance are evergreen, and their celebrity status allowed them to stretch across generations in a way that most pop-punk bands have not, with the exception of Green Day. When I finally saw them perform for the first time, at 2013’s Riot Fest, their audience was filled with hundreds of teens, some of whom weren’t even born when Enema came out. At that age, reacting stupidly in front of your crush is a forgone conclusion, because nothing ever feels as hurtful or as confusing as one’s first experiences with torments of romance. Immaturity is a type of rebellion—a stupid one, but transparently so, and though the band is now in its 40s, they can still faithfully evoke a specific pose of solipsistic juvenile rebellion that hasn’t been anywhere near as culturally omniscient or validated since 1999, at least not by a guitar band. No wonder they were still an inspiration for the kids not yet ready to grow up, even if they should’ve been acting their age.

Buy: Rough Trade
(Pitchfork may earn a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.)


"There is a reason the present begrudges the past," writes Harlan Ellison; I won't pretend to be wise enough ...

Reality

"There is a reason the present begrudges the past," writes Harlan Ellison; I won't pretend to be wise enough to know what that reason is, but I believe that statement to be true, regardless. The evidence is plain in just about anyone beyond a certain age, the all-consuming, epic oldness where a person can say "when I was your age" without a trace of irony. It hits some people as early as twenty or so, when they suddenly find themselves on the downhill side of life, confronted with a bleak realization that things were a whole lot greener back when they were still climbing (or before they knew any better, at least). Some people, they just never stop climbing; it's rare, but it happens.
A great many of David Bowie's fans, with each successive year, slowly but surely creep into the former category even as Bowie himself manages to still act like a card-carrying member of the latter. "I'm never never gonna get old," he proclaims on the Toys 'R' Us-inspired "Never Get Old", and to his credit, he makes yet another convincing argument. With one exception (the hokey, one-foot-in-the-grave Hours), Bowie-- even in his advanced age (by fresh-faced rock standards), even after almost a trillion records-- has never dwelled unduly on his past. If anything, while people will always hold him up to his past accomplishments, his career has floundered more than once out of his desire for self-conscious avant-gardism and an almost schizophrenic need to reinvent his persona. What last year's Heathen implied, and what Reality seems to prove, is that those days are over; never looking back, and no longer focusing ahead, Bowie has finally joined us all in the present, mind-young as ever but old enough not to make a show of it.
And then, if you'll grant this indulgence, there's me, the one who's supposed to be writing about him: "Plain Ol' 'Dave'" baffles me. Bowie's work is traditionally seen in a terrifically damaging binary-- common law states that if his work isn't brilliant, it's terrible; that's obviously wrong, since there're plenty of gray areas to be found in Bowie's oeuvre, but it's easy as hell to fall into the trap. Not much can stack up to Hunky Dory or Scary Monsters, after all. But then he goes and releases, consecutively, the two most earnest, unpretentious albums he's ever dreamed up, and the Pocket Dichotomy that had been used so frequently to dismiss Outside, Earthling, and others, is now terminally, irrevocably broken. Heathen looked like it might've been a holding pattern on the way to greater heights, but only for rising from the ashes of Hours; Reality shows that instead, Bowie is not aiming for an unattainable Ziggy-caliber alien classic, but is simply going to rock like any other human, in a pleasantly mild, non-conformist manner.
This is as close as Bowie has ever come to simply "pretty good" in his storied career. A zealous few will say that he's just further ahead of the curve than anyone can see, but if that's so, then what lies ahead is MOR rock and roll, with producer Tony Visconti's unobtrusive, light-handed electronic flourishes as gloss; no way-- he's too talented to be overtly influenced or obviously faddish, but that doesn't mean he's breaking ground. That's not an insult. I feel the biggest strength of this album is how relaxed it is, how well this anti-pose suits Bowie. It's freed him to craft some of the finest original material he's done in quite a while; Heathen best expressed his singular vision through the compositions of others, but Reality's original material easily overshadows its covers.
In particular, the George Harrison-penned "Try Some, Buy Some", though a kind tribute to Bowie's recently deceased contemporary, might be the album's only real mistake. Sappy, vacant lyrics and plodding, waltz-timed orchestration give a feel similar to a more fleshed-out version of the Morrissey cover "I Know It's Gonna Happen Someday", but without any the self-referential poignancy invested in the latter. The deep-space broadcast of "Pablo Picasso" is a substantial improvement, in terms of covers, with its echoing trills and white-funk syncopation and the intense surrealism of hearing the words "Pablo Picasso never got called an asshole/ Not like you," come from Bowie's mouth, but David promised that Reality would "rock", and he proceeds to do so even more effectively elsewhere.
Hard-edged dynamics are supplied to direct, aggressive rhythms on numerous tracks like the supremely nervous, desperate "Looking for Water" and less obviously on the epic jazz kick "Bring Me the Disco King", but only "New Killer Star" feels like more than an exercise with slightly dusty rock standbys. It opens the album with a bassline etched indelibly within our genetic make-up, instantly recognizable and irresistible, and once the hook is set, a deluge of static-hazed background singers, weird robo-choruses, and a shaky treble riff that easily marks the album's finest moment simply spew forth from the speakers, overwhelming all but the most cynical of Bowie's detractors. At least, that's what I predict.
Also worthy of mention is the stark contrast provided by "The Loneliest Guy". It sounds like the title to a forgotten Dudley Moore flick, and may sound somewhat like disingenuous fame lament coming from Bowie, but the song itself will dispel those thoughts. Nearly a cappella, with bare hints of strings and stray piano chords fading in from other rooms, Bowie instead offers that he's "the luckiest guy/ Not the loneliest guy/ In the world/ Not me," but does so with such mournful uncertainty that no easy reading of the song is possible; it seems surprisingly human, bittersweet, and altogether far more real than its name implies. It's startlingly out of place, sandwiched between "Never Get Old" and "Looking for Water", so much so that it almost implies sarcasm, but that's fitting, as this is as eclectic and puzzling album as Bowie's ever made. He's not always at the top of his game, but Bowie's musical ideas, not filtered through any sort of trend-grab, are unfailingly unique, and that alone should cement his continued role as vibrant, modern artist for years to come.


Mixed by Jim O’Rourke, the duo’s debut is a progression of left turns and interruptions—drone blasts, electronic spasms, lyrical cello—whose unpredictability mimics the rhythms of city life.

Michael Beharie / Teddy Rankin-Parker: A Heart From Your Shadow

A Heart From Your Shadow

The names of multi-instrumentalist Michael Beharie and cellist Teddy Rankin-Parker probably won’t ring bells for many people, but their list of accomplishments is long: Their genre-spanning CVs would make for a pretty unusual playlist, with credits ranging from Primus to Iron & Wine, Au Revoir Simone to Laurel Halo, Pauline Oliveros to Father John Misty. The two met a decade ago, when both were students at Oberlin, before Beharie headed to New York and Rankin-Parker lit out for Chicago. After carving out a presence on their respective scenes, they finally came together for their first record as a duo, A Heart From Your Shadow, spending time at Beharie’s living-room studio in Bed-Stuy and at a proper studio in Greenpoint; Jim O’Rourke handled mixing duties. Across 10 fractured pieces, Beharie and Rankin-Parker flit through a number of modes: gorgeous strings, drone blasts, polyrhythmic din, spoken-word études, electronic spasms, and more, never feeling the need to settle on any one for long. Like being elbowed on a crowded subway by a good-looking stranger, you come away feeling at once jostled and besotted by the results.
The album’s concise opener, “Intro,” presents both extremes of the duo’s approach. Elongated cello tones and celestial voices that emerge like a mirage from the vibrating strings make for an enchanting two minutes. But at precisely 2:01, the vibrato turns malicious and dark and the angelic voices suddenly become shrieking sirens—a bewildering trick if you’re walking on the sidewalk with earbuds in. The maneuver encapsulates the urban experience as soundtracked by your own personal playlist, with real life breaking noisily in every few feet. On “Smooth Face,” the wailing sirens return, but this time, Rankin-Parker’s cello moves in tandem with them: an echo rather than a rupture.
“Paper Tiger” finds the duo evoking the shape-shifting surprises of Oneohtrix Point Never, solemn and sparse for a span, glitching and overdriven the next, gossamer melodies turning into deep growls. There are moments of deep-space darkness, of traversing junkyard mounds, of breathing in rarefied air; it becomes increasingly hard to discern just which parts have been written and which ones improvised. Depending on where you dip into “Roses,” you might find it a mournful cello solo, impenetrable feedback, keyboard noodling, near-silent scraping, or an alien chorale.
The set’s most fascinating moments come when the duo folds polyrhythmic patterns into spliced sonic textures. Clanging highlight “Gully” draws from Beharie’s Jamaican heritage, its beat reminiscent of the strange yet visceral riddims of Equiknoxx and the metal-on-metal scrape of This Heat. “Fake Money” immerses us in lo-fi beats that sound submerged in a lake. Lose track of the muffled rhythms and you soon find yourself amid plucked and buzzing strings. Heard from beginning to end, the album can cause whiplash, while adding tracks to a playlist can scramble the mood in the best way. It’s one of Beharie and Rankin-Parker’s neat tricks: expertly sliding sounds all around you, continually leaving you bewildered and in unfamiliar new spaces.


The classic soft-rock band returns with its first album in a decade, and it still seems wholly unique and oddly captivating.

Soldier of Love

"Inimitable" isn't the first word that comes to mind when discussing Sade, but it's next to impossible to name another millions-selling pop act that sounds anything like them. (And, yes, Sade are a band.) In the mid-1980s, before hip-hop and R&B became inexplicably twinned, the band helped to define the quiet storm era, when smooth grooves aimed at grown-ups were still a legitimate mainstream phenomenon. In 2010, Sade seems wholly unique.
Music this tasteful and even-keeled can be wearying in large doses, and when the radio was chock full of impossibly slick Vandross-alikes, it was easy to take Sade for granted. But the new Soldier of Love feels soothing after a few hours spent in the company of Ke$ha and Lady Gaga. Soldier of Love offers listeners a rather narrow range of interest-- songs that (at their best) suggest strong feeling restrained by a fierce dignity-- but Sade remain the best at what they do.
And so Soldier of Love is unsurprisingly of a piece with the five previous Sade albums. Songwriting-wise, it could have been released at any point in the band's career. The production only occasionally draws attention to itself-- the dub-esque snare crashes on "Babyfather" are a bit of a surprise-- and you can forget any gauche stabs at currently hip sonic tricks. The idea of singer Sade Adu robo-warbling through Auto-Tune would be laughable if it weren't impossible even to conceive. Even the album's curveball first single, title track "Soldier of Love", with its strident marching band snare rolls, doesn't so much deviate from Sade's core sound as cast it in a new light: What better to emphasize Adu's sense of control than a rhythm with the stiffly regimented forward momentum of a parade ground drill? And if "Soldier of Love" seems "hard," it's only because the surrounding tunes are once again delicate to the point where nuance is all.
The music often gets the short shrift when discussing Sade, because the band is so purposefully unobtrusive. Theirs isn't the kind of minimalism designed to draw attention to itself, merely to capture a mood (usually longing or the gentlest of joy) in as few moves as possible. It's a tricky thing to praise, the kind of competency that's always just a few steps from blandness. Musically, Soldier of Love has plenty of deft touches, like the way "Morning Bird" suggests desolation with a piano motif paired back to as few notes as possible. The band knows its job is to provide as unfussy a backdrop for its singer as possible.
And Adu is one of the odder candidates for modern soul-singer canonization. While she's got one of the warmest tones in modern pop, she'll never, ever lose herself in the moment, let her voice run wild. She always seems to be pulling her emotional punches. So if your interest in modern R&B is limited to dance music-- that lineage that runs from new jack swing through Timbaland and beyond-- you may be surprised to learn that the heartbeat-steady "Skin" is what Sade calls ecstasy. But Adu's voice has to be one of the most calming sounds on planet Earth. Not for everyone, or every mood, but perfect for working out the kinks caused by pop's mile-a-minute barrage of capital-p Pleasure.
That unwavering sense of understatement has also left Sade strangely underrated, especially by listeners who get antsy when an act makes a virtue of restraint. For decades, pop fans have been mistaking reserve for repression, and composure for lack of soul. In 2010, though, things seem to be changing, at least a little. Describing something as "smooth" no longer sets off the same alarms for younger listeners, or younger critics. And Sade's Soldier of Love is kind of a litmus test in that regard. Sade hasn't changed, and Soldier of Love will likely be the year's most relaxing album. But will listeners reared to expect the immediate gratification of rock or rap go for music that hovers tremulously on the edge of both pleasure and pain?


Kurt Vile's fourth full-length may also be his best, as it distills classic American guitar music into one singular and sublime vision.

Smoke Ring For My Halo

"On tour, Lord of the Flies. Aw, hey, who cares? What's a guuuii-taaaaar?" So begins the sharply titled "On Tour", a spacious, diary-like explosion nestled just a few minutes into Smoke Ring for My Halo, Kurt Vile's fourth and finest full-length to date. Strings buzz, strummed patterns double back on themselves and from up above it all, the Philadelphia-native showers everything with cosmic, harp-like harmonics. It's a song that's both monastic and vast all at once, the kind of curiously rich work that seems like it was crafted by forty longhairs instead of just one. But Vile has gone great lengths in answering his own question in recent years, finding a way to distill thousands of hours spent with classic American guitar music into one very singular and sublime vision. Whether he's channeling the energies of John Fahey or Tom Petty or even Bob Seger, Smoke Ring makes clear that the end result is his alone.
But to listen to Kurt Vile is to hear him in conversation with himself: That can be said of his ultra-wry lyrical observations just as much as the elliptical, brick-by-brick architecture of his songwriting. In the past, though, Vile's words have been written off as mumbled, unintelligible, and listless-- a criticism made all the more reasonable given the crude recording techniques he employed. But 2009's Childish Prodigy, his Matador debut, found Vile wiping off some of the grimy, decidedly "lo-fi" film that had fenced off much of his work up until that point. (Additionally, he brought his sometime touring band, the Violators, into the studio to help fill out those songs that required more brawn. They also appear here.) It was a jump to the relative big leagues that, despite its cleaner approach, offered more in the way of promise than focus. That's not at all the case here. As hinted at by last year's Square Shells EP, a "stepping stone" to where we are now, the sonics and vocals have been spit-polished to shimmer-- every sonorous detail can now be heard in full, and Vile's voice has taken on a new, mountainous presence in the center of each song. The conversation's grown far more engaging.
What we learn is that Kurt Vile has a lot to say. He can be quick, as on the strong-jawed, electric groove of "Puppet to the Man", when he opens, "I bet by now you probably think I'm a puppet to the man. Well I'll tell you right now, you best believe that I am." And he can yank your heart out, as he does a number of times here, perhaps most memorably amid the celestial fingerpicking of "Baby's Arms", when he tries convincing himself that, he'll "never ever, ever be alone." But he's actually always alone here. Vile's lonesome brand of melancholia is still communicated both plainly and unassumingly enough to be missed, but its that sense that he seems to be talking only to himself that lends these songs such magnetic pull. Between the two seismic chords of "Ghost Town" this album's bulldozing climax, Vile wonders aloud, "think I'll never leave my couch again, because when I'm out, I'm away in my mind. Christ was born,  I was there. You know me, I'm around. I got friends, hey wait, where was I, well, I am trying." Although he stretches those last two or three notes, it doesn't feel like he's singing. We're eavesdropping on the most private of dialogs.
Sonically and compositionally, Vile allows us the space to do that. He's still cycling between strummers and fingerpicked mazework, but the battery of pedal effects is mostly gone. Rather than stitch loop to loop to loop, Vile's  given every marvelous, carefully placed layer all kinds of room to aerate. In the past, "Peeping Tomboy" may have sunk halfway through its bridge, while single "In My Time" probably would have lost its way mid-jam. But here, Vile has acknowledged limits in length for the sake of depth. It makes for a full-blown journey. Though there isn't an earworm like "Freeway"-- that endlessly replayable, interstate love song from Vile's 2008 Constant Hitmaker LP-- Smoke Rings isn't that kind of listen. This feels like a family of songs, one whose complexion and course changes as a whole with every spin. In the closing moments of "Ghost Town", Vile leaves us with, "Raindrops might fall on my head sometimes, but I don't pay 'em any mind. Then again, I guess it ain't always that way." He knows exactly what he's trying to say.


Fernando Almeida and Benke Ferraz of Brazilian psych pop duo Boogarins spent the duration of their debut album lightly teasing every record in their collections. Their new As Plantas Que Curam is packed with melody, wit, and memorably referential music.

As Plantas Que Curam

When you mock something, it's because you love it, helplessly and truly: No one understands this truth better than teenagers, particularly teenage boys. Fernando Almeida and Benke Ferraz of Boogarins were in high school when they recorded their debut, and they spend its duration lightly teasing every record in their collections, reproducing it note-perfect faithfully while tweaking its nose. Every stumbling drum fill, fuzz blurt, vocal affectation, and slightly detuned guitar chord on As Plantas Que Curam is the sound of two boys punching psych-pop in the arm, tipping its chair back with their feet because they're mad they can't stop thinking about it.
Their spirit remind you of another breakout 2013 band with a goofy name: The currently-beleaguered, possibly-shipwrecked Foxygen, whose still-great We Are The 21 Century Ambassadors of Peace and Magic did a similar pirouette between mockery, pastiche, and loving tribute. Like Foxygen, the kids in Boogarins have spent several years in thrall to the sounds of 50-year-old records, and they have also self-recorded their efforts, paying close attention to how they might achieve the just-right abraded sounds.
That they assembled an album that sounds this good while working in their parent's basements says a lot about their talent. They have good taste in other people's records, but they also have the innate musical smarts to pull similar sounds out of their own: Boogarins is rich, heavy, and sonorous, the guitar tones sensually warm and the vocals and drums sent through several treatments to blur them and lift them off the ground. On "Eu Vou", the vocals swim through liquid silence, tiny rippling mouth pops and a faraway synth the vocal track's only distant companions. It might be their tribute to Marble Index-era Nico; it channels a similar empty vastness.
Almeida and Ferraz are Brazilian, and it is impossible to listen to the album' opening track, from its title of "Lucifernandis" to its gonzo, slightly out-of-time opening riff and not think "Os Mutantes." That group's gently antic spirit, and their secret sweet-tooth genius with pop melodies, presides over Boogarins like a loony-uncle figure who won't ever quite leave the garage.  There are a million other little touches of songwriterly wit and grace on the album, imported from other sources: the quote of the Kinks' "Lazy Old Sun" that strings together "Hoje Aprendi de Verdade", the lift of what appears to be the guitar line for Wilco's "I'll Fight" on "Doce." Almeida and Ferraz know good melodies when they hear them.
Even when they borrow material, though, they use the quotes like jumping-off points, self-imposed challenges to craft their own memorable songs around them.  Their ear for melody is much stronger and more sophisticated than most bands their age—the sleepy guitar line winding through "Erre" has been restarting itself endlessly in my mind ever since I heard it. Even their one-minute-long, doodled sound experiments, like "Canção Perdida", float by on a pretty melody. There is a sense that the classic-rock heritage they are wading around in is a big, thrilling game to them, each song a Sudoku puzzle for their songwriting. There is a goofy, loose feel to As Plantas Que Curam, but it's a feint. Almeida and Ferraz aren't goofs; they're connoisseurs.


The Brighton-based singer’s second album exquisitely recreates the sound of early ’70s AOR, with songs that go straight to the despondent heart.

Not the Girl

Holly Macve’s second album is like the bobbly touch of your favorite sweater when you're feeling down: warm, comforting and organically familiar, a sensation of melancholic succor that bypasses logic for emotional instinct. There is nothing particularly new about Not the Girl, the new album from the Brighton, England-based singer; its influences—Bobbie Gentry, Carole King and Mazzy Star—are comfortingly well worn. But Macve wields familiar tools with compassion and a deft musical touch, crafting an album that calls back to the golden Valium bubble of late ’60s/early ’70s pop in the lineage of Tapestry, Glen Campbell’s “Wichita Lineman” or sad Abba. Its message may be impossibly glum, yet its construction is improbably comforting.
“Daddy’s Gone”, Not the Girl’s centerpiece and stand-out track, reinvigorates well-worn motifs. Its title raises the time-honored creative theme of parental abandon, and the song kicks off with the “Be My Baby” beat, a musical trope too often wheeled out as a signifier of pop grandeur. But, in an act of canny songwriting, Macve subverts expectations by establishing a message of apparent ambivalence—“I never needed him like I should have done/There was nothing to let go of, there was nothing to keep hold of”—only for the sadness to creep in quietly via a series of nagging doubts: “Everything’s fine, everything’s alright /But I just can’t help but wonder what it would have been like.” Delivered in Macve’s broody, world-weary voice, these devastating lines culminate in a teary masterpiece.
Macve’s classically-inclined songwriting and deathless voice were present on her 2017 debut, Golden Eagle, a promising album of bluegrass balladry that never quite escaped its influences. What elevates Not The Girl is its production, which adds sweeping violins, swaggering rock backbeat, noir-inflected electric guitar and the nebulous glide of a pedal steel to Macve’s already potent songs, infusing them with variety and depth. “Little Lonely Heart” and its follow-up “Sweet Marie” are not that distinct melodically (both feature solemn verses leading into swooping choruses), but their productions pull them in entirely different directions. The former is a tainted cotton-candy waltz of violins and brushed drums, while the latter is a darkly dramatic work of heavy guitars and offsetting drones.
Though her musical nostalgia is generally rewarding, there are moments on Not The Girl when Macve’s reverence for rock classicism goes a bit too far. There’s the rather obvious reference to “heaven’s door” on “Eye of the Storm,” which lies in the song’s lyrics, unchallenged, like a ponderous callback to Bob Dylan’s classic songwriting. But Macve doesn’t always take the obvious route: “Daddy’s Gone” ends with a smart left-turn; its melancholy swoon of echoing guitars and sparse piano chords mutate into a classic rock and roll chug, and the insistent piano rhythm that drives the song to climax brings to mind the Velvet Underground’s narcotic urgency.
To dislike Not The Girl for being indebted to the past is like hating summer rain for being wet. Holly Macve is a master of immaculate pop finesse, who shows exquisite control over a certain strand of musical history, with songs that go straight to the wretched heart.


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 Stevie Wonder’s sprawling, misunderstood double album about the interconnections of ecology and the black experience.

Stevie Wonder: Stevie Wonder’s Journey Through the Secret Life of Plants

Stevie Wonder: Stevie Wonder's Journey Through the Secret Life of Plants

A journalist might have found themselves one autumn morning in 1976 eating a luxurious breakfast at Essex House before boarding a private jet to a farmhouse in Worcester, Massachusetts, to have a first-listen to Stevie Wonder’s masterpiece, Songs in the Key of Life. Wonder himself introduced the album, decked out in a cream-colored cowboy suit and hat, with a leather gun belt whose holsters were festooned with the cover art and the message “#1 WITH A BULLET.” Universally beloved, it shipped gold, entered the charts at No. 1, and stayed there until January of 1977.
When a journalist could next chat with Wonder, it was nearly three years later. They could just take the 2 train uptown to the New York Botanical Garden, where critics were instead served vegetarian fare as they listened to another double album, the follow-up to his magnum opus. Stevie Wonder’s Journey Through the Secret Life of Plants was years in the making, a soundtrack based on Walon Green’s documentary based on the bestselling book about how plants can be lie-detector tests, how the fern in your house reacts to your emotions, and how mustard seeds can communicate with distant galaxies.
October 1979 was a particularly auspicious month for double albums like Fleetwood Mac’s Tusk and the Who’s Quadrophenia soundtrack (Pink Floyd’s The Wall and the Clash’s London Calling would soon follow). Secret Life of Plants entered at No. 4 on the album charts its first week but quickly plummeted. After Wonder collected 12 Grammys in a four-year span, Secret Life of Plants only garnered one measly nomination. An incredibly ambitious tour—boasting over 60 musicians, singers, sound crew, staff, a computer to synchronize his synthesizers, a screen projecting scenes from the film, and a recording truck—hemorrhaged money and was truncated to six dates. Stevie couldn’t even sell out his hometown of Detroit.
Motown Record executives and fans alike did not know where to begin this Journey and critics were merciless. “May Be His Worst Yet,” read one headline. “More than being awful pieces of music, [they] reek of automation and transmit no sincerity,” went a review. Rolling Stone likened it to Karo syrup and called it “a strange succession of stunted songs, nattering ballads and wandering instrumentals,” while Robert Christgau equated it to “[an] anonymous Hollywood hack at their worst...ardently schmaltzy instead of depressingly schlocky.” The Village Voice equated it to “the painful awkwardness of a barely literate sidewalk sermon.”
It’s a reversal of fortune without equal in pop music. In nearly any appreciation of Stevie Wonder’s profound run of music, Secret Life of Plants serves as a page break, a bookend, the arid valley after the vertiginous peak of the beloved Songs in the Key of Life. In almost every assessment, it marks the end of the greatest run in pop music history. “If Alexander wept when there were no more worlds left to conquer,” critic Jack Hamilton said when Slate ran their “Wonder Week” feature, “Stevie happily composed 90 minutes of largely instrumental music for the soundtrack to a documentary about botany.”
Favoring slowness as well as quicksilver mood shifts, spare balladry and additive composition, acoustic guitars and two $40,000 Yamaha GX-1 synthesizers, whimsical experimentation and near invisible incremental movement, an album with six credits for “special programming of synthesizer” and Wonder with almost all other instrumentation, it’s a flummoxing and charming album wherein Wonder sings about seeds, leaves, and ecology as he himself embodies the traits of his botanical muse. The best insight into Plants may lie in the original Times review, where, in the midst of meditating on self-indulgence and Wonder’s sentimental mysticism, John Rockwell notes: “He has also managed to make an album that in its own idiosyncratic way may seem an oasis of peace and calm amid the bustle of the rest of the pop-music business.”
When Wonder accepted the challenge of providing a soundtrack for the documentary, even he was surprised: “I’d always figured if I did one it would be for a film that raised society’s consciousness about black people.” Originally, the film was to use a soundtrack made in part from plants with Wonder contributing “Tree” for the end of the picture. It didn’t fit with the rest of the film, but producer Michael Braun asked Wonder to instead score the entire film. So Wonder would go in with a four-track recorder and headphones. In the left channel was Braun explaining what was happening on-screen while engineer Gary Olazbal would count down the number of frames in the sequence in his right, leaving Wonder to sketch out the score.
Six studios would ultimately be used. It was only the second album to ever be recorded digitally (Ry Cooder’s Bop Til You Drop beat it by a few months) and the first album to use a sampler in the form of the rudimentary Computer Music Melodian, which perhaps explains the special thanks given to the air traffic controllers at Dallas-Fort Worth airport and the Los Angeles Zoo.
Its scope is difficult to convey, not just because a blind musician provided a soundtrack for a film that he himself could not see. Wonder probably saw about as much of the film as the general populace did, as The Secret Life of Plants never got a wide release in theaters and was never put out on VHS, DVD, or made available on streaming services. The opening movement of “Earth’s Creation” is ludicrously bombastic all on its own, full of Phantom of the Opera-style high-frequency shredding and chord-bludgeoning. With the film though, it pairs perfectly with intensely dramatic images of spuming lava, crashing tsunami waves, flapping seaweed, and dancing plankton. The first side of the album remains wildly uneven, but how else to convey the Godlike act of creation without being by turns chaotic, messy, lovely, whimsical, and a little cruel?
“The First Garden”—with its lullaby chimes, sampled bird songs and crickets, acoustic bass, and harmonica line (all played by Wonder)—provides the underlying motif of The Secret Life of Plants and it works magically with the time-lapse images of sprouting acorns, spores, and new shoots. And while “Voyage to India” might seem willfully exotic on the album, mixing together themes that appear later into an array of wineglass drones, symphonic strings, and sitar, it works with the film and its introduction of Sir Jagadish Chandra Bose, the Indian polymath and botanist. Later on, Wonder folds in a Japanese children’s choir and a crackling duo of African kora and djembe drum.
It’s nearly 15 minutes into the album before Stevie Wonder’s voice appears, telling the story of both Bose and George Washington Carver on the plaintive “Same Old Story.” It scans as the first of many songs overtly about plants, as well as one of Wonder’s most forced biographical efforts. But the stories of Bose and Carver are far more painful than that. Bose was an Indian subject of the Queen, his work discovering the electrical nature of plants largely ignored by the Royal Society in London during his time. Across the ocean, the slave-born botanist Carver struggled most of his life to rise to the descriptor of “Black Leonardo.” But as brown- and black-skinned men—“Born of slaves who died,” as Wonder puts it—their genius was discounted and dismissed outright in white society. There’s a tactile resignation in the chorus: “It’s that same old story again.”
In exploring the neglected, ignored, seemingly inhuman aspects that society affixes to the plant kingdom, Wonder finds resonance between his botanical subject matter and the black experience. “A Seed’s a Star” states in its first line: “We’re a people black as is your night/Born to spread Amma’s eternal light.” Reaching back to the Dogon tribe of Africa and their worship of the distant star Sirius B, also referred to as “Po Tolo,” that name in their language signifies at once the immensity of that heavenly body as well as the smallest seed, a paradox that encompasses the interconnectedness of all life.
Stevie introduces many voices other than his own. Children’s voices and overheard conversations hover at the periphery of several songs. Wonder deepens the dimensions of the album with these intimate, everyday sounds, drawing correlations to childhood, memories, and the connections between people, not just between plants. It suggests that the album could seemingly arise out of anyone’s daily life. While the book and film could be esoteric, Wonder insisted that the album was in part about down-to-earth black life and love, telling The Washington Post that year that this music “comes just from my life.” Perhaps that’s why he had his ex-wife, Syreeta Wright, come to lend her soft vocals to the indelible piano ballad, “Come Back as a Flower,” wishing to spread the sweetness of love and envisioning “that with everything I was one.”
Human as it can be, The Secret Life of Plants is big and wide enough to be decidedly other, too, as when Wonder warps his platinum voice with a wide array of electronics. There’s the Brainfeeder funk of “Venus’ Flytrap and The Bug,” maybe the closest he ever got to the sound of his contemporary, George Clinton. And then there’s the femme falsetto he adopts to sing as Pan for one of Journey’s sweet delights, “Power Flower.” A woozy, low-key gem in the Stevie Wonder songbook (check the stretched taffy of his coos-and-drums solo 3:30 into the song) and one of Janet Jackson’s favorites, Wonder utilizes his synths to make himself sound something other than human.
That strange, neutered, warbling, alien voice that arises on the astonishing “Race Babbling” is as visionary a sound as anything Stevie ever created. It’s a techno odyssey that resembles the likes of Carl Craig and Juan Atkins and the hazy, ethereal feel of Solange’s When I Get Home (she explicitly credited this album’s influence on her own approach). In the context of the film’s collage of sped-up urban scenes, it even anticipates Philip Glass’ groundbreaking score for another nature documentary, Koyaanisqatsi. Unfurling, clenching, spiraling, and mutating across its nine minutes, it’s the longest song on the album and approaches the sort of gender destabilization of something like the Knife’s Shaking the Habitual. Wonder’s voice morphs and merges with the timbres of trumpet and saxophone (his manically high-pitched vocal hook is a freakish delight), and later blurs into the harmonies of Josie James until it’s hard to parse who is who. It’s a disorienting effect in more ways than one, a queering of the biggest African-American male pop star of the era that’s still without precedent.
Rather than attempt to carry on with Key of Life’s trajectory and his own heritage, Stevie had the rare cache to wander down every path, in effect making Motown his own private press label. No longer rooted to the traditions of soul, gospel or the sound of Motown that he built his legacy upon, Wonder literally branched out, reaching upward towards an undetermined new destination, exploring intuitively and fearlessly in a manner that few artists have ever managed to do in the history of pop music.

Buy: Rough Trade
(Pitchfork may earn a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.)


Influential label's latest 2xCD comp mixes tracks from Ricardo Villalobos, Melchior Productions, and Shackleton into two hours of vibrant techno.

Superlongevity 5

The Berlin-based Perlon label is one of the titans of the last decade of electronic music, but if their name doesn't ring out like Kompakt or Warp (or Hyperdub), it's mostly because they don't want it to. The label has a strictly-for-aficionados air about it, not least because their idea of how to present a big release constitutes "releasing a CD version" (the label's wares are often vinyl-only and they mostly stay away from digital). As of this writing, the label's website is still a giant Flash animation alerting you that Perlon.com is "Opening Imminently." Breath: bated.
Perlon's Superlongevity series has served as a clearinghouse for the label in the past, often collecting bushels of their 12"-only singles. The middle volumes can stand tall next to Kompakt's Total 3 and Total 4 as essential documents of 2000s techno-- specifically minimal, the hypnotic, spare house offshoot that dominated DJ decks and established Germany as the center of the electronic music world. Perlon's relative obscurity is due partly as well to prolonged silences from some of its bigger artists: Ricardo Villalobos, Melchior Productions, and STL have all quieted down or moved their releases elsewhere. (Shackleton's Three EPs was the label's last release to gain any traction outside dance circles.) So Superlongevity 5 represents a pretty substantial release for the label, not just because it revives a dormant brand name, but because it offers new music from the artists above as well as from standbys like Baby Ford, Kalabrese, and Shackleton.
Keeping to form, Superlongevity 5 is offered as a mix of new or unreleased material spread across two CDs (a limited seven-record vinyl box set was also made available). As a mix, it differs substantially from a stone-skipping DJ set: the tracks are presented in large chunks, usually between five and six minutes, which not only gives each track plenty of room to breathe and develop but also obviates the need to hear "full" versions for all but the compulsive. Always the slightly sillier cousin to the starker Kompakt, Perlon has only gotten wilier since their heyday. Superlongevity 5 is bursting with weird mantras ("Just being tape!" from Matt John's "The Tapedeckers"), tropical horns (Kalabrese's "The 2010 Kitchen Session"), and rubbery rhythms (everything, really). Dandy Jack's lounge disco "Show You My Tent" actually chuckles at itself throughout (or at me?). San Proper's "Lady Cop" is a funky noir that features samples of dialogue from "The Wire"'s beloved Kima Greggs.
Coming for the headliners-- Villalobos, Shackleton, and Melchior arguably have the most cachet here-- is a mistake. Superlongevity 5 is a place where everyone wilds out; at times it feels like a group of goofball college buddies meeting up years later. Matthew Dear takes his Jabberjaw moniker out of mothballs; "Pop Bottle" features sampled baby nonsense and someone shouting "I need help!" Label co-founder Zip teams with Sammy Dee on their Pantytec project and offer the detuned, jazzy "Zwölvis".
Nothing here settles too heavily. Zip mixes an imposing 28 tracks of carbonated oddities into two hours of vibrant techno. When it's through, it's hard not to compare Perlon's stubborn vinyl adherence and low visibility to the colorful, clever music of its artists. But this is the context in which Perlon has always thrived: mixed among friends and peers. It's techno music for techno fans, but it never makes the mistake of being too serious or exclusive.


In the latest soundtrack from his long partnership with director Hayao Miyazaki, the composer pares down to a minimalist palette that reflects the film’s nostalgic mood.

Joe Hisaishi: The Boy and the Heron (Original Soundtrack)

It’s impossible to consider composer Joe Hisaishi without also thinking of his lifelong collaborator, filmmaker Hayao Miyazaki. Their creative partnership began with 1984’s Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind, the film that would lead to the inception of the legendary Studio Ghibli, and they have gone on to make nearly a dozen films together. Miyazaki is known for magical realist narratives that effortlessly blend the fantastical with the everyday, and Hisaishi has created a diverse body of work to evoke the filmmaker’s imagined worlds. He complements the fast-paced thrills of Princess Mononoke with booming war anthems and conjures the sleepy seaside feeling of Kiki’s Delivery Service with gentle, breezy waltzes.
For nearly 30 years, Miyazaki turned out films at a steady pace, working intensely for two years at a time and taking the next two to recuperate. Then, following 2013’s The Wind Rises, he announced his retirement—something he’d done in the past, but this time it seemed like he meant it. Inevitably, several years later, he announced that he’d begun work on a new film, The Boy and the Heron. The longer gap between productions brought changes to Miyazaki’s workflow. Where the director was once deeply involved in the process of creating music for his films, energetically pointing to storyboards as Hishaishi composed, this time he summoned his friend to the studio only once the film was almost done. After viewing the nearly completed feature, sans dialogue, Hisaishi received no instruction from the director. “I just leave it up to you,” Miyazaki said.
Hisaishi chose restraint. He had done everything for Ghibli from the otherworldly electronics of Nausicaä to the triumphant symphonic sweeps of My Neighbor Totoro, but he had never explored his first musical love: classical minimalism. Inspired by artists like Steve Reich and Philip Glass, he abandoned past productions’ grandiose orchestrations in favor of piano and spare accompaniment. This intimate change, Hisaishi said recently, “would be a chance for me to move myself close to what Miyazaki had intended.”
Heron is structured as two distinct chapters, and Hisaishi’s score mirrors its narrative arc. The film’s first hour, which depicts post-World War II Japan as Miyazaki remembers it, is primarily backed by Hisaishi’s piano and sparse arrangements. He plays with a stately grace on “White Wall” as the opening scenes unfold, bringing to mind the gentle lilt of Erik Satie’s Gymnopédies. When tension builds between the young boy and the titular gray heron, strings build to a sudden crest and fall away just as quickly. “A Feather in the Dusk” conveys mounting anxiety and temporary relief as man and beast lock in a standoff. The plucky strings of “Feather Fletching” bring a moment of levity before the oppressive threnody “A Trap” propels the action to its climactic turning point.
As the film transitions to its second act, the music opens up along with the scope of Miyazaki’s fantasy world. On “Ark,” Hisaishi adds wobbly pitched percussion to communicate the liveliness of the heron’s domain, while “Warawara” uses synthesized voices to underscore the whimsy of an eye-catching set piece. The main theme, “Ask Me Why,” is the strongest example of the way Hisaishi builds up musical motifs. The tender ballad—originally composed as a birthday gift for Miyazaki—appears on three occasions, accumulating momentum with each reappearance. By the time credits are ready to roll, the lightly accompanied piano composition has transformed into a celebratory orchestral swell, punctuating the decisive moment the protagonist gains his resolve.
The Boy and the Heron is Miyazaki’s most personal work. It’s an unusually vulnerable window into the filmmaker’s life, featuring abstracted depictions of himself, his closest friend, and his late mentor at Studio Ghibli. Though his decades-long friendship with Hisaishi isn’t visible in the film, the score communicates it clearly. “What is most important to me is to compose music,” Hisaishi said in an interview. “The most important thing in life to Mr. Miyazaki is to draw pictures. We are both focused on those most important things in our lives.” Hisaishi pays respect to Miyazaki’s vision by creating his leanest work to date, giving those pictures plenty of room to move.


Having taken a pleasurable detour toward grinding synth pop on his 2011 releases Bermuda Drain and Time's Arrow, with Through the Window, Dominick Fernow convincingly throws himself to the growling hounds of techno.

Through the Window

The path from black metal to techno via noise is so well-travelled these days that you could, if you were feeling melodramatic, call it an exodus. It's a trip the now L.A.-based Dominick Fernow has been prolifically and prophetically plugging away at for well over a decade, carving out a reputation for ferociously uncompromising sonics with an inquisitive air. Having taken a pleasurable detour toward grinding synth pop on his 2011 releases Bermuda Drain and Time's Arrow, with Through the Window, Fernow convincingly throws himself to the growling hounds of techno.
Through The Window is an overtly theatrical body of work even by the standards of the worlds it straddles: the high camp of metal, the existential roar of noise, and techno's ritualism. Its three tracks even function like the three acts of the archetypal quest tale, spanning the journey, the obstacle, and the reward. "Through the Window" sets the scene for Prurient's techno rebirth before "Terracotta Spine" issues a blood-curdling screech of noisy resistance, which we're gratefully delivered from by the still-ominous yet tonally triumphant "You Show Great Spirit": our reward for endurance though, of course, there's joy to be found in the enduring itself. That final act builds seductively in waves, a delicious drowning that leaves the sharp tang of aluminum on the lips. While each track could be enjoyed on its own merits, the three tracks need one another, requiring the other's context and contrast.
Fernow's command of texture is in full, swaggering flow throughout. Underneath the pummeling rhythms of "Through the Window" lies a sea of writhing life-- adrenaline-laden breathing, static clicks, the prickling of erect hairs-- while, later, in the final moments of "You Show Great Spirit", we're left with the chip-chip-chink of metal against metal, fragments dropping to a stone floor. These are loose ends, sure, but all the more intriguing for it. There's a similar approach to melody too. It comes and goes, weaving in and out with a gently shifting intricacy yet refuses to submit to convention.
Unlike the aforementioned Time's Arrow and Bermuda Drain, which featured foregrounded vocals (somewhat controversially to noise purists), Fernow's voice drops to a barely discernible, deathly whisper on Through the Window. "Big things grow much bigger/ And need bigger things inside them," he intones archly, which could be read as a clue to his own evolution, and that of the wider noise scene. When sonics themselves have lost their power to shock and excite-- or when we are too comfortable with the old ways of feeling uncomfortable-- we look elsewhere to revive the sensation. Little wonder contemporary techno's diametric binding of ritualistic rhythms and elastic form appealed.
"Noise used to be a place that was devoid of expectations," Fernow told Tiny Mix Tapes in 2011. "But there are people who have been working 24 hours a day to make it into a genre of music like any other with a set of rules and regulations, which to me is the antithesis of noise ideology. So I have no problems with not being categorized as such, because that word has come to mean the opposite of what it should." Some 15 years on from his first Prurient album, it is thrilling to still hear the vigor in his searching; in his questioning of restrictions and extending of freedoms. This gripping chapter in his exploration might not quite be his definitive statement, but then definitive has never been of interest to Fernow.


The second album from the Brooklyn synth-pop revivalists explores a broader emotional palette while hitting familiar pleasure points.

A Way Forward

As of last year’s Introduction, Presence, the Jersey-to-Brooklyn synth-pop trio Nation of Language seemed engineered for a certain type of indie fan. Singer Ian Devaney sounded uncannily comfortable in a familiar register of pure melancholy, murmuring self-indulgent sweet nothings with the brassy ice of the best New Romantics: Start with Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark, add one part Robert Smith, two parts Depeche Mode, stir in Kraftwerk-flavored sprinkles. On their latest album, A Way Forward, Nation of Language start to shed some of the trappings of synth-pop comfort food, foregrounding their melodic elasticity and narrative charm to explore a broader emotional palette than the formal polish of their debut.
Throughout A Way Forward, the band’s renewed focus on the low-end teases a groovier sound. It offers a subtle reminder that these art-school Brooklynites might have equally fond memories of 2000s indie-dance artists like Cut Copy, Bloc Party, and the Yeah Yeah Yeahs as their ’80s luminaries. “Every day we’re circling, never closing in on what we want,” Devaney sings on “Across That Fine Line,” with a gently ascending groove that skates across a cool synthesizer background. The Strokes loom large here in particular, not just in the timbre of the drum machine and asymmetrical riffs, but also in the lyrics, which manage a near-Casablancas level of slickness.
Other songs, according to the band, explicitly draw from ’70s synth auteurs like Laurie Spiegel and Cluster. Some of these experiments hit harder than others, but all indicate a genuine willingness to push beyond revivalist repetition. A song like “Former Self” works in a way that the weepy “Wounds of Love” doesn’t quite: The synth arpeggios pair more explicitly with the stoic reflexivity of lyrics like “My former self says I could ask for more.” At their best, these tracks make the band’s connection to Kraftwerk something more than a sonic affinity—classics like “The Hall of Mirrors” on 1977’s Trans-Europe Express draw on the same ghostly, existential lens that Nation of Language is mining on their own robo-cabaret excursions. However, the band also comes up against the emotional limitations of early synth pop’s chunky retro gloss, which smothers some moments of genuine compositional panache. Such is the outcome of the grand piano sentimentality on a song like “Miranda,” which aims for Simple Minds but lands somewhere closer to Styx.
In moments like these, Nation of Language suggest a level of emotional breadth that is occasionally belied by coloring within the lines. Perfunctory anti-capitalism bop “The Grey Commute” and neurotic autocritique “This Fractured Mind,” while undeniably inspired, hit the same pleasure centers that Nation of Language have been targeting for a few years now, bolstered only by Devaney’s slightly more idiosyncratic vocal chops. The band’s decision to expand their swagger and invest in more complex synth work pushes them to new territory, and the most remarkable digressions from their comfort zone point towards a future beyond pastiche—but it feels like this is a half-step, not a full leap.

Buy: Rough Trade
(Pitchfork earns a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.)
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here.


Bombay Bicycle Club's latest So Long, See You Tomorrow is an often dazzling, euphoric electronic-pop record where the band has decided to depart from their jangly indie pop roots.

Bombay Bicycle Club: So Long, See You Tomorrow

So Long, See You Tomorrow

It’s inappropriate to talk about Bombay Bicycle Club’s “evolution," since that word assumes some kind of logical progression. Between 2009 and 2011, the London group released three albums—one as an affable post-punk-pop Arctic Vampires hybrid, another as a “quiet is the new loud” retread and, on the surprisingly vigorous, Ben H. Allen-helmed A Different Kind of Fix, a third that was sleek and streamlined Urban Outfitters mixtape filler. It secured them a sizable fanbase and not much respect as a rock band: it’s hard to get taken seriously when your first big break involves winning a Battle of the Bands, and even as their music improved significantly, this was often credited to their producers. But that all happened in the span of two years, about six months less than it took just to make their fourth LP. Another radical change and a wonder of cosmetic surgery, So Long, See You Tomorrow is an often dazzling, euphoric electronic-pop record where Bombay Bicycle Club have decided they don’t want to be seen as a rock band anyway.
Who knew that Bombay Bicycle Club's ultimate destiny would involve  finally figuring out a way where TNGHT and the greatest hits of Alexandra Patsavas can coexist? On a musical level, it’s pretty much what most upstart “indie rock” (read: synth-pop) acts are trying in vain to suss out—how to make syncable, meet-cute songs conversant in maximalist, omnivorous R&B and hip-hop production. Compared to damn near every band trying to do the same thing, Bombay Bicycle Club are exceedingly well-prepared, having started as a hooky, if indistinct pop band and learning about crowd-pleasing electronic production by playing actual festivals. They’re operating with a broad scope and an eagerness to please, so every time they go overboard with the ProTools, it’s in the service of adding fundamental pleasures of melody or rhythm rather than dull atmosphere. The band recorded and produced So Long in their own studio, and wisely enlisted Mark Rankin as an engineer and mixer—he worked on the most recent Queens of the Stone Age and AlunaGeorge albums and that’s adequate preparation for band who likely asked him, “help us sound like both.”
In particular, first single “Carry Me” and opener “Overdone” show Bombay Bicycle Club getting newly aggressive, where they just want to express their joy in discovering different forms of sonic expression. The pummeling drum track of “Overdone” would’ve been ear-turning enough, but the title becomes a wink as the band piles on battling countermelodies, percussive synths, staggered drops and octave-shifted guitars. Meanwhile, “Carry Me” boasts the closest thing to a guitar riff, but it sounds more like a trombone over an impossibly jerky, inhuman rhythm, imagining Hidden-era These New Puritans as flower children rather than warmongers.
As fun as it is to hear Bombay Bicycle Club get all RoboCop, surrounding Steadman’s all-too-human vocals with rock ‘em, sock ‘em machinery, they’re even better at demonstrating how these bold new sounds can augment their charming, heart-on-sleeve wimpiness. The crucial thing here is that Steadman wants to show you what he’s learned from pop radio, not merely how much he likes Aaliyah. The marching band percussion lent to “It’s Alright Now” shows a band that’s smart about their pilfering from pop and R&B—they probably love Destiny’s Child’s “Lose My Breath” and decided to take the parts that could best compliment their burst-and-bloom, gushing hooks, while “Home By Now” teases with a bit of radio killa production before shifting towards a gorgeous, crushed-out heavenly duet between Steadman and Lucy Rose.
All of this happens within the first six songs and perhaps if Bombay Bicycle Club was more judicious about its pacing, So Long might be a total triumph instead of a very good LP adhering to a pop albums' tendency to frontload. Almost everything at least has its charms, though the cacophony of layered drums that eventually brings “Eyes Off You” and the title track to a climax feel like knowing apologies for the pretty, if a bit limpid piano balladry that precedes it. So Long’s dizzying array of percussion and instrumentation was meant to be a sonic passport of sorts, as Steadman spent the past couple of years globetrotting around Asia and Africa, but “Feel” is the one time where things get a little too Eat, Pray, Love.
Even still, it's hard to use Bombay Bicycle Club's enthusiasm against them. Whatever the songs on So Long are actually about is up for debate despite their plainspokenness, but suffice to say, they trigger the exact joy buzzers that leave you usually infatuated, perhaps a bit hopefully lovelorn. As with everything on So Long, it’s really the thought that counts and the hook on “Feel” lets you know what they’re trying to get at—“just one feeling,” repeated over and over.


Yes: The Yes Album / Fragile / Close to the Edge / Tales from Topographic Oceans / Relayer / Going for the One / Tormato / Drama / 90125

I. Exposition: Time and a Word
Odds are you already have an opinion on Yes, and since you're reading this website, there's a good chance that your view of them isn't a favorable one. Despite the fact that a formidable portion of the music we love (anyone from Radiohead and Super Furry Animals to Hella) is directly influenced by Yes and their prog-rock peers, we tend to look at the early 70s through punk's distorting lens, and that lens shows us images of dinosaur muso wankers lumbering from stadium to stadium with comically oversized light shows and Victorian clothing (never mind that punk itself became a mill of convention and spectacle in only a few short years).
Of course, there's quite a nugget of truth to that image; on-again-off-again Yes keyboardist Rick Wakeman staging his Myths and Legends of King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table album as an ice show alone demonstrates how out of hand things could get when the budget was too big and judgment was lacking. When you move beyond the pageantry and pomp, though, you're left with some pretty interesting music. Yes were the most popular and longest lasting of the quartet of bands that defined progressive rock in the early 70s. Genesis, ELP, and King Crimson were the others, and listening back to them, it's easy to see why Yes won out. For all their lengthy songs, virtuoso musicianship and softheaded philosophical musings, Yes were fundamentally approachable, even radio-friendly. Try listening to "Roundabout" or "I've Seen All Good People" without getting them stuck in your head. Of course, there's a certain ridiculousness to the grandiose Roger Dean artwork, would-be poetic lyrics (random sample: "Battleships, confide in me and tell me where you are!"), and multi-part suite naming formulas-- but then, that's part of why Yes got listened to in the first place.
Nevertheless, a past penchant for prog is a major skeleton in the closet for a lot of people, but as Rhino reissues the first eleven Yes studio albums, it feels as good a time as any to let the bones rattle in public. Feel free to forgo the band's first two albums with guitarist Peter Banks (we did), records that feature a band still finding its feet and occasionally hitting on something great, like "Astral Traveler", but often stumbling.
II. The Albums: The Solid Time of Change
Yes had already released two albums, but 1971's The Yes Album was the record that put them on American FM radio and into millions of living rooms around the world. With guitarist Steve Howe on board for the first time, it also established the classic Yes sound, where essentially any instrument could take the lead at any time. Drummer Bill Bruford and bassist Chris Squire (the only member to appear on every Yes album) were a tight and angular, almost funky rhythm section by this point, while Howe's slashing guitar parts fit nicely into that mix. The two-part "I've Seen All Good People" is one of the band's best singles, while Howe's slow, spacey guitar build at the end of "Starship Trooper" is one of the great Yes moments. Howe also shows off his acoustic chops on "The Clap", a rollicking rag that bears little resemblance to anything else in the band's catalog (the original album version was a live recording, the reissue also appends a slightly crisper studio version). This album showcases Yes at their most concise, and is probably the best starting point.
1972's Fragile introduced Yes' highest-powered line-up, as the silver-cape wearing, 12-keyboard-hauling Rick Wakeman replaced the mediocre Tony Kaye. But the question is, what was "fragile?" Their egos? The battle between the perfectly balanced arrangements-- as on classic rock radio staples "Roundabout" and "Long Distance Runaround"-- and each virtuoso's need to grandstand, vented through five solo interludes (most memorably Steve Howe's "Mood for a Day")? All that firepower could have ruined the band, yet on Fragile, they put songcraft firmly over indulgence. The intriguing middle section of "South Side of the Sky" might've blown up like a laser light show had they recorded it in the late 70s, and even though the band had a knack for crescendos and flighty, eagle-centric lyrics, they were more likely to get high through chugging guitars and Bruford's precise drumwork than outright bombast. "Heart of the Sunrise" still holds up as a deftly constructed proto math-rock epic, and Jon Anderson would never sing a lyric as plainly as "I feel lost in the city" again.
The band's crowning achievement, Close to the Edge, contains only three lengthy "songs," but each one is an absolute epic. The title track dominates all of side one of the original LP, rushing in with a burbling, dissonant intro, Howe's jagged riffing and Wakeman's fluttering fingers building a dense, overpowering texture. Squire's bass in the majestic "Total Mass Retain" section could liquefy solid tissue at the right volume; it's almost impossible to believe it hasn't been made into a hip-hop sample yet. Most importantly, the title track has a sense of coherent progression, tension and release that most of the band's other side-filling epics lack. "And You and I" is arguably the ten most gorgeous minutes Yes ever laid to tape. It begins humbly, with twelve-string acoustic guitar, rises through mellotron-soaked crescendos, and then does it all again, building to a huge closing climax called "Apocalypse", essentially laying out the blueprint for Sigur Rós. That leaves "Siberian Khatru" to close out the album with nine minutes of hook-stuffed organ and guitar interplay, understated harmony vocals and more of Squire's chunky, front-and-center bass playing. This record is an essential document of just how powerful prog could be when focused.
It couldn't last. On 1974's Tales from Topographic Oceans, they simply took things too far. Anderson's lyrics (supposedly based on Japanese "shastrick" scriptures, wtf?) are pure astral hogwash, and even worse, they're printed so you can read them. The band seems totally disinterested in communicating musically, and each of the four twenty-minute compositions (that's right, a double LP with four songs on it) squanders its few inspired moments. "The Ancient (Giants Under the Sun)" is the most promising, opening with what should be an exhilarating passage of rushing keyboards topped by a blistering solo from Howe, but new drummer Alan White can't keep up the intensity like Bruford (by then defected to King Crimson) had, and it collapses under its own weight. Likewise, a pretty choral verse intervenes toward the end of "The Remembering (High the Memory)", but comes too late to salvage the listless keyboard washes and lame noodling. It was exactly this type of excess that had fans saying "no" to Yes for the first time in their career. Even Wakeman was so disgusted that he quit after the album's completion.
Possibly to recoup their rep, Yes quickly made for the studio in the hopes of turning out another masterwork. However, in spite of the flashy musicianship that made Relayer a fan-favorite, the record is all but unlistenable to the rest of the world. Noisy and grotesque, it betrays some of the most atrocious taste of any Yes record. Temporary member Patrick Moraz shows up with his own bank of keyboards that sound even more tweaked than Wakeman's, and he pushes the band to garish new soundworlds; "Gates of Delirium" is a kind of nightmare children's book story about men (or elves? hobbits??) going to war. The band recreates the battle in a jaw-droppingly over-the-top instrumental that fades into a longing, eerie finale. That's followed by "Soundchaser", a vomit stew of jarring rhythms and bastardized funk climaxing with Anderson's infamous "cha cha cha" section. And "To Be Over" would've been pretty if they hadn't jammed it with instrumentals. Someone once told me that this is what they should have blasted at Noriega to drive him out of that nunnery; casual listeners turned their backs on this mess, while fans that could appreciate its dissonant, virtuosic extremes hid under their headphones and just kept basking.
After an extended hiatus following Relayer, Yes regrouped for 1977's Going for the One, bringing grand old ham Wakeman back to record an album of much fewer pretensions than anything they'd done since Fragile. Of course, that really meant only one 15-minute epic instead of four, but right down to the non-Roger Dean cover art, it signaled a new start for Yes. The title track, with Howe's great steel-guitar opening riff, did indeed reveal a band that still knew how to rock even if lyrics like, "Get the idea cross around the track, underneath the flank of a thoroughbred racing chaser," exposed their hippie-mystic trappings. However, Squire's "Parallels" and the Beatlesque "Wonderous Stories" forecast the band's 80s rebirth as pop stars. Furthermore, the album's lone concession to headier days and side-length symphonettes, "Awaken", was a fairly amazing example of how Yes could fuse new age sentiments and reverb-drenched tinker-bell soliloquies, yet somehow come out unscathed. Sure, it went on a bit too long, but in retrospect, it was a fine last gasp for a band concerned with "progress" in the 70s.
Perhaps inspired by the fact they didn't all hate each other after finishing Going for the One, Yes took the same lineup in for 1978's Tormato. However, even as streamlined song-lengths and a couple of attempts at pop crossover appeared, the band sounded desperate rather than invigorated. Primary offenders on an album among the most hated of all hated Yes records include the flat, rigid "Don't Kill the Whale", in which Wakeman managed to insert ridiculously baroque synth stylings into a would-be Greenpeace disco protest anthem, while Anderson pleads with us to "dig it." And whomever thought it was a good idea to invite Anderson's kid to twee it up on "Circus of Heaven" should probably have been fired on the spot. Oh right: it was Anderson, and he left right after this record. It's too bad, because relatively aggressive, driving numbers like "Future Times" and the fusion-tinged "On the Silent Wings of Freedom" weren't bad, even if the album's lack of punch throughout sucked the life out of most of the music.
With Anderson's and Wakemen's defections, Yes recognized that they could no longer continue in the same lackluster manner as on Tormato. At the end of the 1970s, the band finally felt ready to embrace a new era. A Buggles era! Trevor Horn and Geoff Downes, possessing neat new synthesizers and actual MTV experience, joined for 1980's Drama, and paved the way for a decade of Yes at their most pop-friendly. The transition, however, was not an easy one. For starters, longtime fans weren't fooled for a minute by Horn's vocals, which didn't quite hit those high notes as easily as Anderson. Also, songs like "White Car" and "Into the Lens" just didn't sound like Yes, rather like Yes-influenced, overblown AOR fare. However, "Machine Messiah", "Does It Really Happen?" and especially the new-wave-meets-prog of "Tempus Fugit" were better than anything the band had done in years and, doubtlessly due to the Buggle-presence, sparkled with state-of-the-art production sheen. Of course, this lineup would disband shortly after the record, but lessons were learned and the next time Yes graced the world with an album, the world listened.
On Drama, Horn had simply attempted to emulate Jon Anderson, but by the time he produced 1983's 90125 for the (yet again) newly reformed and reconfigured Yes, he had become the synth-pop genius behind ABC, Frankie Goes to Hollywood and the Zang Tuum Tumb label, and gets no small share of credit for reinventing Yes as a hit 80s pop band. The extensive drum and horn samples on "Owner of a Lonely Heart" and the glowing a capella on "Leave It" turned those songs into radio hits; but just when you think they've sold out, they write elaborate pop songs like "It Can Happen" or characteristically bizarre lyrics like, "This world I like/ We architects of life," or, "Your heart is inside your head." This line-up formed practically from scratch, bringing Squire and White back together with Anderson and the long-lost Tony Kaye; Trevor Rabin-- the only one who didn't bleach his hair-- completed the band with an 80s hard rock guitar sound that's the most dated thing about the record. Still, if you can handle the style-disconnect, 90125's songcraft makes it one of their tightest records.
III. Recapitulation: High the Memory
Yes may have disappeared commercially after 90125, but they're still active today in varying lineups, and have a full nine subsequent studio albums that Rhino has wisely chosen not to reissue. The much-delayed follow-up to 90125, Big Generator, was a dud of spectacular proportions (in all seriousness: 0.0), and few of their subsequent releases are much better. For all intents and purposes, the band that tours now is something of a traveling history lesson, so it'll be interesting to see how hindsight treats them in another twenty or so years, when they've finally hung it up and rested on their laurels. For now, don't surround yourself with yourself and move on back a square. Yes would love to meet you.