A newly reissued private-press curio from 1975 captures the bygone sounds of daily life in Portland, Oregon, in dreamy, proto-ambient form.

Neighborhoods

In 1975, the Portland, Oregon, musician Ernest Hood pressed his lone solo album, Neighborhoods, in an edition of a few hundred. He passed out copies primarily to friends, and the album, a curious blend of found sounds and proto-ambient, disappeared into the Pacific Northwest mist. Newly reissued by Freedom to Spend (in a much improved pressing, spread across two discs), it’s not the first such rarity to be pulled from the ether in the 21st century, as YouTube’s algorithm accumulates millions of plays for once obscure jazz and new-age records. But it might be the most uncanny, an album that kindles a sensation not unlike watching home videos of your own childhood.
If you’ve sat in the yard at dusk right before the mosquitoes come out, ridden a bike through the suburbs in the summertime, or even just driven around your own neighborhood with the windows rolled down, you’ll hear in Neighborhoods an aleatoric sound set in amber. Who was the fellow that plucked out such moments of everyday life, pared them down, and wove it all together?
Born in 1923, Hood grew up in a time when kids ran unsupervised all day long and the most enthralling sound was big-band jazz. Hood picked up the guitar and started playing ballrooms with a jazz band (his brother Bill would go on to have a moderately successful career in the industry), but in the early 1950s, while still in his twenties, he fell victim to a devastating polio outbreak. He spent a year in an iron lung and for the rest of his life used leg braces, crutches, and a wheelchair to get around. He could no longer hold a guitar in his lap, so he took up the zither. At one point in the early 1970s, Hood’s zither could be heard on Flora Purim’s early albums, mixing in alongside fusion stars like George Duke and Stanley Clarke.
His own career in jazz might have ended abruptly, but Hood remained a presence in Portland, where he cofounded the KBOO community radio station. (Before his death in 1995, post-polio syndrome took away even more mobility as well as his ability to speak and he became the public face of the Death With Dignity Act.) And while his guitar playing was halted, he continued to study recording and production. Starting in the mid-’50s, Hood began using a wire recorder to collect the sounds around him, eventually upgrading to a reel-to-reel and microphone, assembling his field recordings into “audio postcards” for his radio show. As the liner notes recount, Hood would surreptitiously park around Portland, “blacking out the windows of his car with a dark cloth to act as a windbreaker,” which attracted a fair bit of notice from concerned neighbors.
It wouldn’t be until 1974 that Hood started assembling all these field recordings and snatches of dialogue into Neighborhoods, weaving in the voices of his own son and family friends. He was in his early fifties at that point and envisioned the album as a nostalgic glance back at his own childhood, a period rapidly fading from memory in the post-war era. There’s talk of a sunken riverboat and steam-powered trains, and the scrape of a game of kick the can, not all that far removed from what Ray Davies would sing on Kinks albums. But you never get the impression that Hood is pining for these lost times so much as documenting the peculiar similarities between his own bygone youth and what he could hear all around him in that moment.
The album opens with birds, barking dogs, a kid tooting on a whistle, a passing car—the kind of stuff that rushes in whenever you pull up your garage door. When Hood’s own zither and synth musings bloom to life, they move with a logic like the wind in the trees, picking up speed and then dying back down, meandering along at their own pace. He gets one of his early synthesizers to chirp along with bird sound in one moment, and then to mimic a tune the kids down the street are yelping the next.
Hood’s musical musings never take over, but rather move in and out of earshot. Sometimes he strums a whimsical air like something lifted from Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood, and at other times he echoes a radio tuned to an old jazz song. The synth melody that gurgles up throughout “Gloaming” brings to mind another album that wove together pioneering synth work and field recordings, Stevie Wonder’s Journey Through the Secret Life of Plants. Neither moving toward a song nor getting lost in the other sounds, Hood lets it all come to him. While the recordings are documentarian in their way, the music is as vague and open-ended as daily life. There are moments when you might be hard-pressed to notice Hood’s signature at all.
“It hardly matters in which neighborhood you sprouted,” Hood wrote in the original liner notes. “The games we played… and the feelings we experienced… are tantalizingly familiar.” Songs with names like “At the Store” and “After School” could be set just about anywhere. Hood susses out a symphony in the daily noise of American life, like Charles Ives with a portable tape recorder or Norman Rockwell with an early synthesizer prototype. In some passages, Neighborhoods doesn’t feel like a half-century-old curio, but as of-the-moment as a walk to the train. Put it on, hear children shouting out songs, crickets chirping, and the noise diesel engines rumbling past and feel the illusion of time dissolve: You’re in Ernest Hood’s neighborhood.

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


No Line on the Horizon

Why U2? How did these four Irishmen become the blueprint for every band with stadium aspirations? The Edge's churchly guitar chime-- which thrives on the same arena acoustics that can turn otherwise booming bands into mud-- is certainly a factor. So is their weakness for the big gesture-- whether it be a giant lemon, heart, or mouth. And Bono's cathartic mix of modern panacea-- love, God, mass culture-- gives them a reach to the back row and beyond. But, perhaps above all else, the band's restlessness and willingness to challenge both themselves and their patrons is why the Killers, Kanye West, and Coldplay want to be the next U2 and not the next AC/DC. It's why these four Irishmen still represent the punk spirit decades after they emerged from it.
"You've got to balance being relevant and commenting on something that's happening today with trying to attain timelessness," philosophized the Edge in the early 1990s. The quote sounds like rock star bullshit...until you realize that's pretty much what U2 did for 20 years. From 1980 to 2000, it was difficult to tell exactly what the next U2 album would sound like. Briefly: They added atmosphere to new wave, looked for God and found hits, exhumed their rock'n'roll heroes, sent-up those same heroes while losing their religion, and punctured pop via mutated techno. Each move was more audacious than the last-- even 1997 knee-jerk victim Pop saw the world-beating act taking completely unnecessary musical and financial risks in the name of Warholian post-modern pastiche. They then also managed to surprise on 2000's All That You Can't Leave Behind by successfully returning to form after shrugging off the notion for so many years. But 2004's How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb and its subsequent tour were troubling.
That record saw four guys famous for dabbing classic rock into all sorts of impressionistic frames (or dismantling it entirely via Village People costumes) uncomfortably grasping for old-fashioned riffs, when they weren't mindlessly feasting on their own past. It was completely predictable ("City of Blinding Lights"), canned ("Vertigo"), and depressingly Sting-like ("A Man and a Woman"). But the group did little to hide the fact that they were basking in their early-century comeback's afterglow; in concert, in place of the ATYCLB tour's heart-shaped runway was a, um, circle-shaped runway. Still self-aware enough to sense stagnation, the quartet began to work on what would become No Line on the Horizon with new producer Rick Rubin and an imperative to break all those piling U2 trappings once again. As Bono told The New York Times this week: "When you become a comfortable, reliable friend, I'm not sure that's the place for rock'n'roll."
Sixteen years ago, U2 worked a snippet of Public Enemy's "Don't Believe the Hype" into their technologically prescient Zoo TV tour-- perhaps fans should heed that bit of sampled advice right about now. Because while this group of slick talkers may have set out to expand their own definition once more, they've ended up with old collaborators Brian Eno and Daniel Lanois --along with an album that's neither relevant nor timeless.
First single "Get on Your Boots" is a worrisome harbinger-- to call it a mess would be generous. The song combines sub-Audioslave riffs with Escape Club's "Wild Wild West" and sounds more disjointed than the worst Girl Talk rip off. "I don't wanna talk about wars between nations-- not right now!" claims Bono on the song, before extolling the virtues of tight leather boots. His off-the-cuff attitude and delivery suggests a cheekiness missing from U2's music for more than a decade, but it's a red herring. While other tracks like "I'll Go Crazy If I Don't Go Crazy Tonight" and "Stand Up Comedy" feature knowing lines that examine the singer's faults and hypocrisy, the album is heavy on half-assed word-salad characterizations and the sort of meaningless platitudes Bono used to be so great at (barely) avoiding. And there's a strong theme of resignation running through the record; whereas many classic U2 tracks have come from Bono's struggle with faith and certainty, he seems content to give up agency on songs like "Moment of Surrender" and "Unknown Caller". "I've found grace inside a sound," he sings on "Breathe", and the line seems like a cop-out from a man who spent so much time struggling with salvation.
Meanwhile, the album's ballyhooed experimentation is either terribly misguided or hidden underneath a wash of shameless U2-isms (the three-note ring Edge nicks from "Walk On" for "Unknown Caller", the "oh oh oh" outro from "Stay" apparently copied and pasted into "Moment of Surrender", etc.). While Eno used to work his unique sound-bobbles and ambiance into the fabric of U2 songs, he seems content to offer spacey intros totally disassociated from their accompanying tunes here (see: "Fez - Being Born", "Magnificent"). And oftentimes the band mistakes risk-taking for ill-fated arrangements and decisions. "Surrender"-- reportedly improvised in one seven-minute take-- comes across as lazy indulgence, and the title track's hard-nosed verse is torpedoed by its deflating fart of a hook. As the go-to sonic innovator of the group, the Edge dials in a particularly dispiriting performance throughout; his rare solos usually pack in enough panache to fill stadiums but his bluesy blah of a spotlight on "Surrender" would barely satisfy a single earbud.
"It keeps getting harder. You're playing against yourself and you don't want to lose," Adam Clayton told Q last month. And he's got a point. After nearly 30 years of chart crashing and sell-outs, starting afresh can't be easy. There's only one "One". In a way, U2 spoiled their followers by consistently questioning themselves while writing songs that straddled the personal and collective consciousness. But Horizon is clearly playing not to lose-- it's a defensive gesture, and a rather pitiful one at that.


As Special Request, UK producer Paul Woolford aimed to honor his teenage years of listening to pirate radio, hearing the sounds of first-generation jungle and rave through his speakers as rave culture was forming. The project's proper debut, Soul Music, is one of the most exciting dance records of this year.

Soul Music

When it comes to evoking nostalgia, Paul Woolford is keeping it extreme. For his Special Request project, the UK producer keeps his studio space loaded with vintage hardware, including an FM transmitter that allows him to broadcast over his own frequency and sample the results. This complicated process, which Woolford has referred to as "creating a false memory," plays a large role in his aim to honor his teenage years of listening to pirate radio, hearing the thrilling sounds of first-generation jungle and rave through his speakers as rave culture was forming and, as the years progressed, re-shaping itself into new forms.
"The attractive thing about pirate radio is that it sits outside of convention," Woolford told FACT earlier this year while discussing his still-strong attachment to the format. "So there are no rules." The relative constraints applied to Special Request speak to a method of creating new rules to escape the encumberances of ones already in place; in other words, it's a highly conceptual project, and not the first of its kind. With Death of Rave, sound deconstructionist Leland Kirby dismantled rave's glory days as a tribute to the culture, degrading its sounds until there was little more than an exquisite corpse left over; meanwhile, Burial's own decayed-throwback style owes something to the enigmatic producer becoming enamored with artifacts of an era he didn't experience first-hand: "Old jungle, rave and hardcore...they still sound future to me."
The 38-year-old Woolford's recent tendency of looking towards the past has coincided with a spate of new visibility for the producer, who's been churning out high-grade techno for nearly a decade under his own name: his single for Hotflush this year, "Untitled", has become something of a low-level "hit", adding another jewel to the accomplished producer's already impressive crown. Capitalizing on the increase in attention, Special Request's proper debut LP, Soul Music, pushes the needle into the red again with winning results.
With a sense of nasty-edged playfulness that keeps the project's nostalgia from lapsing into stiff reverence, it's unquestionably one of the most exciting dance records of this year. When Four Tet's Kieran Hebden unleashed his own pirate-radio hat-tip this year in the form of "Kool FM", there was an expectation that the according full-length, Beautiful Rewind, would similarly dive headlong into clattering waters; that record turned out to be more subtle than expected, so anyone disappointed by Hebden's muted elegance on display there will most likely find the head-rush corrective they're looking for in Soul Music's 12 tracks.
Woolford's "no rules" approach is evident from Soul Music's opening track, "Forbidden", an icy slice of techno reinforcing the notion that Special Request is less about evoking the sounds of pirate radio's heyday and more about recreating its anything-goes attitude. Not to say that Soul Music isn't sonically slavish to its nostalgic ideals, too: junglist breaks abound, along with plenty of strangled vocal samples and sound effects that give each track its own open-transmission vibe. The straight-techno tracks that Woolford's put out under his name and other aliases have often been colorful and full, beacons of chaos even during minimal techno's light stranglehold on the genre. The songs collected on Soul Music are similarly and gleefully overstuffed, a series of funhouse constructions that approach mania with cool-handed seriousness.
Soul Music's most straightforwardly dusty moments are reminiscent of the recent work of Zomby, the bass music enfant terrible who's made a name off of contorting dance music's history in his own twisted, smoggy visage. Structurally, Zomby's own 'ardcore-revivalist vibes have often resembled tiny nuclear reactors constantly powering up and malfunctioning, brief bursts of energy with short half-lifes. Woolford's approach is different, as he lets most of these tunes stretch their legs past the five-minute mark with plenty of room to tweak their structures ever so slightly and pleasingly (see: the placid bed of tones that stride into the midsection of "Lockjaw"'s gaping breakbeat maw). Accordingly, the collection's longest cut, a nearly eight-minute "VIP" edit of Woolford's remix of Lana Del Rey's "Ride", is Soul Music's most revelatory head-rush, a constantly evolving torrent of breaks with a serpentine bassline not unlike the one that dotted the undercarriage of his 2011 single "Can't Do Without".
A dense collection of dance cuts that make few overtures to those not previously converted by the genre, Soul Music is a thick listen that carries even more potency when broken up in small chunks than as a still-immersive front-to-back playthrough. Along with a vinyl release that took place at the top of this month, the CD and digital versions of Soul Music arrive with a bonus disc of selections from previous Special Request 12"s, as well as remixes from Woolford and others; while this additional volume has some essential gems—Woolford's remix of fellow Brit Tessela's already-massive tune "Hackney Parrot", NYC house wünderkind Anthony Naples' dissonant take on "Mindwash" that appeared on this year's Hardcore EP—it's perhaps more rewarding to seek out Special Request's excellent run of preceding EPs and build your own "early works" compilation here. As a single-disc shot, though, Soul Music is a truly unique and enriching experience: a collection of old sounds from one of dance music's enduring mainstays, re-assembled in a way that sounds fresher than ever.


The footwork pioneer sets aside the obsessive minimalism of his previous album in favor of party-starting anthems and sly sample flips. But his work remains a masterclass in rhythmic dexterity.

Established!

One of the many advantages of growing older is that you stop caring so much about what people think of you. This surely goes double for a dance-music legend like RP Boo. Established!, Boo’s fourth full-length for Planet Mu, may be titled to remind the casual listener that the Chicago DJ and producer is no newcomer to the footwork game: His 1997 song “Baby Come On” has been cited as the genre’s founding track. But judging from this gleefully party-starting album, which borrows from orthodox sources such as Phil Collins and Dr. Dre as it calls back to footwork’s roots in Chicago house, Boo is more interested in polishing the dancefloor than burnishing his own reputation.
Established! makes a left turn from Boo’s previous album, 2018’s I’ll Tell You What!. That record was minimal almost to the point of obsession, frequently doing away with the bass-drum punch that punctuates footwork in favor of winsome drift. Established! isn’t maximalist, exactly—Boo’s style favors using a small number of ingredients to maximum effect—but simple good times are back in vogue on the album’s bookending songs. On both tracks, Boo revisits the roots of Chicago footwork via the 4/4 pulse of the house scene that birthed it, weaving in elementary piano riffs on “All My Life” (a track that could almost be the work of the late Paul Johnson) and borrowing from Class Action’s “Weekend” on “Another Night to Party.”
If the latter sounds familiar to RP Boo fans, that’s no surprise: Boo has sampled “Weekend” on a handful of previous occasions and also employs it on “Finally Here (ft. Afiya),” which rounds off the first half of Established!. On paper, this repetition might sound lazy. But in gleeful practice, these songs feel more like the supremely self-assured work of a producer who isn’t ashamed to employ a simple trick in the name of firing up the dance. As if that wasn’t quite enough to drive the festive point home, “Finally Here” also samples Masters at Work’s eternally reworked “The Ha Dance,” a sacred text of ballroom, the two dance-music touchstones skipping around each other with the nervous energy of rookie boxers at their first bout.
Beyond the audacity of these musical moves lies Boo’s knack for reinvention. “Ivory Surface” initially appears to be moving at two entirely different rhythms, as Boo flips the seductive funk of Barry White’s “I’m Gonna Love You Just a Little More Baby” into a spiky ball of musical nerves that promises a sinister end to the original’s silken seduction. The Dre-indebted “How 2 Get It Done!” is another masterclass in sampling, as Boo chops and stitches his material into classically angular footwork constructions using tiny, dextrous moves, like a sculptor coaxing shapes from a block of marble. And if “All Over” leans rather heavily on Phil Collins’ heavily gated 1982 song “I Don’t Care Anymore,” seeing pristine footwork surface from such unlikely source material is still a hoot.
In a big season for footwork releases, with ingenious new albums from Jana Rush and DJ Manny already on the shelves, Established! doesn’t exactly move the needle for the genre; it is a shame, too, that the album lags slightly as a listening experience on tracks like “Now U Know!,” which Boo says he created with dance battles in mind. But if you’re looking for a record to remind you why you fell in love with footwork in the first place, as well as a gentle refresher of the genre’s roots, Established! is perfectly placed to twang heartstrings and hamstrings alike, bursting with audacious energy, liberal sass, and mountains of soul.

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.


Accompanied by cello, lap steel, and other acoustic instruments, the Philadelphia singer-songwriter creates abstract soundscapes that envelop even their loneliest songs in a soft, expansive warmth.

Shannen Moser: The Sun Still Seems to Move

The Sun Still Seems to Move

Shannen Moser’s latest album, The Sun Still Seems to Move, lingers in a place of emotional uncertainty. The Philadelphia singer-songwriter understands life’s ephemerality but is still unsure how to stay afloat in the thick of a storm. “You are gone and I am a well of guilt and pain…/In your absence I am learning how to live,” they sing on the title track, one of many instances where the only solution is to fumble forward the best you can.
The Sun Still Seems to Move is Moser’s first album in four years following two folksy Americana releases, a 2017 debut and the full-band arrangements of 2018’s I’ll Sing. Moser initially envisioned their third album as a strictly vocals-and-guitars record. But midway through the record’s creation, a personal tragedy inspired Moser to invite collaborators into their process, hoping that outside players—on cello, clarinet, lap steel, banjo, and other mostly acoustic instruments—could help translate the feelings churning inside. Together, Moser and their collaborators composed abstract soundscapes that envelop even the loneliest of these 11 songs in a soft, expansive warmth.
The correlation between the looser production and the intimacy of Moser’s thoughts is palpable—you can hear it in the woodwinds that stabilize “The Bell” and in the way the thunderous bass at the end of “Two Eyes” gives Moser the strength to shout. Moser’s voice is pushed to the front of the mix, and its physicality is striking, their inflection shifting with a playfulness that evokes Joanna Newsom. (Moser, like Newsom, draws on folk traditions, in this case shape-note singing, a choral tradition that prioritizes collective expression.)
As a storyteller, Moser faces hard truths with open eyes. The opening line of “Ben” is startling not only in its refusal to mince words but also in the measured calm with which it is delivered: “All the boys I’ve known in middle school are dropping dead.” On “Foul Ball,” taking care of an ailing loved one turns into “the world’s best ever game of catch,” as a vitamin tossed across a bedroom is charged with with World Series stakes. There are no happy endings in these songs of death and broken hearts, only something resembling acceptance that sometimes all you can do is laugh. And there is a cheeky edge to Moser’s existential searching: “I know that life’s not one linear, seamless destination/Leaning towards a pillar moment saying you ended up just right,” they acknowledge on the stunning “Oh My God.” “It’s ass-to-ass traffic, sometimes yelling on the freeway.”
It’s an absurd but bittersweet truth, one that Moser must reckon with throughout The Sun Still Seems to Move. “A series of quiet moments makes forever,” a friend advises on the lush opener “Paint By #.” Moser allows this realization to guide them, recognizing eternity all around: in a pair of trees that grow side by side, never touching; in constantly evolving relationships; and in the memory of a dead friend, frozen in time as a scrappy young man. Moser is moved by each, beholden to their lessons.


On her debut album, the New York polymath roams free across a map of the last 50 years of contemporary pop music, leading to her most accessible and purposeful record to date.

Lily Konigsberg: Lily We Need to Talk Now

Lily We Need to Talk Now

Lily Konigsberg has a question for the culture: What about Stacy? On “Proud Home,” the raging centerpiece of her oddball-fabulous debut, Lily We Need to Talk Now, she recasts Fountains of Wayne’s enduring “Stacy’s Mom” from the point of view of the jilted Stacy, a wry pop-cultural bloodletting some 18 years in the making. “You’ve got a lot of fucking things to be proud of!,” Lily-as-Stacy seethes. “I know you’ve got a crush on my mom/You come by every time she is home.” Konigsberg plays her part with gonzo commitment and a fanfiction writer’s sense of imagination: She’s Stacy if Stacy started making narky pop-punk in the garage.
In each of her many musical projects, the twenty-something native New Yorker roams free across a map of the last 50 years of contemporary pop music, picking and choosing sounds and ideas as she pleases. Konigsberg seems to recognize that spending time far from the beaten path often yields the most exciting results: Her output to date displays a canny blend of the experimental and the aggressively catchy. In just the past two years, she’s released an EP of charismatic pop-rock experiments as part of My Idea, a collaboration with Water From Your Eyes’ Nate Amos; Palberta5000, the punky third album by avant-garde trio Palberta; a Jessy Lanza-ish dance record with electronic duo Lily and Horn Horse; an Unsound-ready experimental EP, Laugh Now Cry L8r, with Lucy; and an EP under her own name, It’s Just Like All the Clouds.
Although there are a few qualities that recur in each of Konigsberg’s projects—her cherubic voice and Arthur Russell-indebted sense of melody—for the most part, these records are tied together by Konigsberg’s polymathic musical sensibility, her ability to draw from a dozen different traditions at once. Taking stock of her catalog reveals an artist seemingly more driven by method than style. Listening to Konigsberg’s music, I imagine the questions she might ask herself during her creative process: How can I make this odd song more immediate? Can this pop track be a little freakier? The unifying quality of Konigsberg’s various projects may be that there are no distinct aesthetic or creative boundaries.
Lily We Need to Talk Now doesn’t make any real attempt to reel in Konigsberg’s impulse towards genre fusion, but it is her most purposeful record to date, and her most accessible. Working exclusively with Amos as producer, there’s a consistency of tone. This is, loosely, a breakup record; it runs through familiar beats (you’ll never find anyone better; you need to seek help; why did we split; I’ll always love you) in surprising ways. Unlike The Best of Lily Konigsberg Right Now, a compilation of recent solo music, Lily We Need to Talk Now is lush and coherent, and, at 24 minutes, extremely easy to leave on repeat. Konigsberg cycles through a handful of styles—alt-pop that splits the difference between Sixpence None the Richer and Natasha Bedingfield on “Sweat Forever,” funky, ESG-indebted dance on “Alone,” crunchy pop-punk on “Bad Boy” and “Roses, Again,” bratty garage rock on “That’s The Way I Like It” and “True”—but thanks to the record’s thematic spine, the jumps never induce whiplash.
As a writer, Konigsberg is laser-focussed: Most every song has a hook that’s liable to get stuck in your head, and each is tailored to its environment. The titular phrase of “That’s The Way I Like It” begins staccato and turns into a drawl, a rhythmic style that recalls Whitechocolatespaceegg-era Liz Phair, while the chorus of “Alone” slots perfectly between furious congas and a frenetic bass line. “Roses, Again” seems to nod to Joyce Manor’s “Constant Headache,” drawing out that song’s sing-song, girl-group-ready qualities. The chorus of “Sweat Forever” should play on a loop every time someone looks at the Nicole Kidman post-divorce photo: “I can make you sweat forever/I was right/The last time that I saw you/Said goodbye, knowing it would be forever.”
Although Konigsberg is both prolific and chameleonic, Lily We Need to Talk Now feels like the best showcase yet of her talent as a writer and arranger. Last year, she told Pitchfork that she “want[s] to write songs that get stuck in people’s heads for the rest of their lives,” and while each of her projects thus far has had a song or two that fits the criteria, Lily We Need to Talk Now is wall-to-wall hooks. She draws on the entire history of pop-rock heartbreak anthems and ties it together with sugary-sweet vocals and a witty, whimsical sensibility.
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.


Cloud Nothings’ latest album moves in one direction and at a breakneck pace. Dylan Baldi is simply unwilling or unable to stop writing hook-filled songs, rendering Here and Nowhere Else even more tense and thrillingly conflicted than its predecessor. The band continues to make powerfully utilitarian music for people who don’t seek out this type of music just to be told what to think.

Here and Nowhere Else

Cloud Nothings’ 2012 album, Attack on Memory, aspired to be not only the band's first great album, but one that would eradicate their introductory phase as Dylan Baldi’s solo, no-fi pop-punk project. It succeeded wildly on the first count, the second one not so much: on singles “Stay Useless” and “Fall In,” Steve Albini scoured the reverb and fuzz just to further expose Baldi’s facility with bittersweet melody. Baldi gives it another go on Here and Nowhere Else, enlisting John Congleton to wipe away any remnant of “Hey Cool Kid” and present Cloud Nothings as they’ve never been and probably never will be: a grisly, caustic punk trio knocking out harrowing and powerful singalongs in dingy basements that can barely contain the sound. Once again, though, Baldi is simply unwilling or unable to stop writing hook-filled songs, rendering Here and Nowhere Else even more tense and thrillingly conflicted than its predecessor.
In spite of the grayscale environs, Baldi would have you believe Here and Nowhere Else boasts a sunnier disposition than Attack on Memory, but the lyrics sheet is filled with brusque marching orders: a strangulated repetition of “Swallow” directing the listener through the desolate wilderness of “Giving Into Seeing”, and opener “Now Hear In” stating with cold equanimity, “I can feel your pain/And I feel alright about it.” The more noticeable shift Cloud Nothings make here is physical: They try to enact themselves into right thinking by ditching just about any verbal, mental, or instrumental unnecessary baggage.
Regardless, Cloud Nothings have not gotten “tighter.” Baldi replaces the twinkly leads of the departed Joe Boyer by acting as both lead and rhythm guitarist, alternating low-slung, detuned riffs and shards of dissonance that owe equal debts to Josh Homme and J. Robbins. More than ever, Cloud Nothings are a band that will inspire novice guitarists to play along with their records, an important role for any band to occupy—and forget about the piano that occasionally popped up on the indulgent-by-comparison Attack on Memory: Despite Congleton’s C.V. (Bill Callahan, St. Vincent) the most ornate production trick featured here is an echo effect liquefying Baldi into a molten puddle during the phosphene-inducing coda of “Pattern Walks.” In fact, it’s pretty much the only production trick on Here and Nowhere Else, save for the frightening thwack of Jayson Gerycz’s snare coming off like a percussive Wilhelm scream.
To put it bluntly, Jayson Gerycz is the most beneficial addition to any rock band I can think of in the past decade, and Here and Nowhere Else reiterates that, rather than Albini, Congleton, or Baldi’s newfound vocal prowess, he represents the most crucial alteration to Cloud Nothings yet. His drums are rightfully put higher in the mix than the vocals, so he speaks for Cloud Nothings just as much as Baldi does, as the two define Here and Nowhere Else’s mind/body dynamic where restlessness and an implacable urge for action serves as a paradoxical stasis.
Here and Nowhere Else mostly moves in one direction and at a breakneck pace; by playing just ahead of the beat, taking charge of the song with torrential fills, Gerycz does everything in his power to try and throw it off course. The insatiable drive and urgency of Here and Nowhere Else, as well as the resulting cohesion, means that it might initially appear less ambitious than Attack on Memory. To call it a “grower” would be accurate, though that downplays its visceral jolt, as previous Cloud Nothings records revealed their high points fairly quickly; here, the initial sonic beating's reflected in the unmistakable shades of purple, black, and blue-black in the resultant bruises.
Baldi told Pitchfork in an earlier interview that he wasn’t a punk himself growing up, but rather a musical loner who “didn’t really like anyone.” That’s a mentality easy to latch onto, as Cloud Nothings continue to make powerfully utilitarian music for people who don’t seek out this type of music just to be told what to think. They siphon punk’s righteous physicality and leave self-righteousness, victimization, and nihilism as the subject matter of the privileged. In ridding themselves of talking points, Cloud Nothings espouse a desire to live in the present moment, and that in itself is an admirable ambition. On Here and Nowhere Else, their music becomes a pure  resource of energy that allows the listener to do what they will.
Whether you use Here and Nowhere Else to soundtrack a grueling run or a pound-the-steering-wheel commute to work, closer “I’m Not Part of Me” is a hell of a victory lap, Cloud Nothings’ finest song to date. After the satisfying sensory deprivation that precedes it, the song acknowledges the bigger stages the band occupies right now, generously expanding the prior, potent austerity of Baldi’s songwriting to include an EP’s worth of hooks. It also serves as Baldi’s valedictory speech: “It starts right now/There’s a way I was before/But I can’t recall how I was those days anymore.” He’s become a trenchant critic of his own work, and as much as the title of Attack on Memory spoke for itself, that lyric encapsulates everything you’ve heard on Here and Nowhere Else: This may very well be how Baldi imagined himself in his basement back in 2009, trying to make music that reflected the mundane despair of being a kid in Cleveland with no real prospects, while secretly striving to make music that would allow him to get the fuck out. Five years later, it’s almost impossible to remember a time when Baldi failed to hit the mark.


The London DJ born Joseph Richmond Seaton crafts a set that channels Fabric’s late-hours ambience, when things get weird and wooly.

Fabric 92

At its best, a nightclub can be a scale model of utopia, a shared hallucination, an alternate reality that lasts as long as the house lights stay dark. The same holds true for mix CDs. Most merely operate as calling cards for the DJ making them, or flyers for the club promoting them. Occasionally, though, they aspire to be something more ambitious: a postcard from that imaginary place that the best club nights conjure into being out of sheer force of collective will.
That’s the context in which Call Super’s Fabric 92 comes to us. The London DJ, aka Joseph Richmond Seaton, says that he intended the release as a snapshot of the late hours of his sets, when consensus floor-fillers give way to stranger, more personal selections. That’s one unusual thing about the mix; another is that it was born in the wild, but raised in captivity, as it were. His choice of theme and mood reflects a careful study of Fabric’s mix series as much as it does his time in the booth at the London venue. Noticing that the late hours seemed “strangely under represented” within the series, he writes, “I thought it would be good to start there instead of using this opportunity to add another peak-time chapter to the collection.”
Commercial mix CDs have lost the central role in DJ culture that they enjoyed in the ’90s and ’00s; thanks to the internet, mixes are everywhere now, and free. But, perhaps precisely because no one has time to listen to even a fraction of them, Fabric’s series is more of a canon-maker than ever. Fabric 92 is, above all, a testament to digging widely and without prejudice. Beneath house and techno’s broad umbrella, it’s as diverse a set as you’ll find, spanning multiple eras, styles, and scenes, and boasting a final 14 minutes that veers way out into the deep end, from drone to country blues to polemical dancehall reggae.
Seaton’s selections are spellbinding, as every track presents a self-contained world of its own. Some, like Don’t DJ’s polyrhythmic “Pornoire,” are wildly complex; others, like the flickering electro of Shanti Celeste’s “Strung Up,” are relatively tidy. The cumulative effect of the way he layers and strings them all together is akin to moving through a series of wormholes, flashing from landscape to landscape while standing in place. His mixing is never ostentatious, but it generally emphasizes action. It’s rare that a song is left to play out unaccompanied; far more often, he’s got two and even three tracks running in parallel, resulting in a dynamic, shape-shifting fusion that’s far more than the sum of its parts. Early on, he combines muted, shuffling cuts from Jan Jelinek and from Wolfgang Voigt’s M:I:5 project to mossy effect, as though burrowing through underbrush, while using the doleful trumpet of Beatrice Dillon and Rupert Clervaux’s “The Same River Twice” to draw bright, silvery streaks overhead.
A few tracks later, following an early climax brought on by his friend Objekt’s “The Stitch-Up”—whipcracks, shrapnel, a heart-in-mouth ostinato—he turns to relatively obscure, mid-’90s cuts from Photek and Two Full Minds to create a subaquatic atmosphere. That relative calm sets up the mix’s most white-knuckled passage, in which Flanger’s head-scratching “Spinner,” in 10/4 time, is teased in and out of Carl Craig’s epic “A Wonderful Life” for three minutes of tug-of-war. At several points, it feels like it could all collapse into the mud at any moment, but it’s precisely that sense of risk that’s so exhilarating.
On the downhill slope, Seaton switches into a more sentimental gear, leaning heavily on melodic IDM and electro from Marco Bernardi, Jega, Shanti Celeste, and Bitstream; concluding with a fleet-footed Detroit techno skip from Convextion, this might be the set’s most satisfying segment. But Seaton has one final trick up his sleeve. As Convextion’s beats fade away, a pair of ambient drones from Karen Gwyer and Thomas Ankersmit & Valerio Tricoli shimmer brightly in the darkness, and a lilting, sing-song speaking voice rings out: “Well I’m just walkin’/I’m trying to find the end/But every time I stop/Look like my trouble just begin.” It’s Walter Brown's “Keep on Walkin’,” an a cappella country blues recorded in Mississippi in 1981 by a pair of German ethnomusicologists.
It’s hardly the first time that archival blues has turned up in dance music—Moby, you may recall, built his empire on wringing as much authenticity as he could out of vintage recordings of black Americans’ voices. But Seaton’s approach, which sets Brown’s rueful blues in an imaginary summer night, lit only by stars and fireflies, is far stranger. And in the context of a club set, it’s nothing short of audacious. Eventually, Yves Tumor’s woozy, soulful “The Feeling When You Walk Away” takes us by the hand and leads us back toward the light, and Speng Bond’s “Cutbacks,” a dancehall reggae tune about economic austerity policies, sends us home feeling righteous. But for just a moment there, at the tail end of the set’s spellbinding denouement, everything falls silent as Walter Brown’s plaintive voice carries on unaccompanied: “On my knees, I’m gonna just/Keep on walkin’.” In a journey full of left turns and switchbacks, this calm, quiet testament to faith and fortitude speaks the loudest; it’s a moment when absolutely anything feels possible.


Will Oldham's (thankfully) crowded discography gained a pair of low-key releases in the past few months: *Wai Notes*, a set of *The Letting Go* demos and *Wilding in the West*, a Japanese/Australian-only live album from Oldham's 2007 tour that includes at least one "remix" by Royal Trux's Neil Michael Hagerty. On the heels of November's *Ask Forgiveness* EP, these releases risked giving off a "Dear Fans: Thanks, also fuck off"-vibe, but since precisely no one's child is going Ivy League off of 10,000 copies of *Wai Notes* it's probably safe to assume we're being asked to pony up again in

Will Oldham / Dawn McCarthy: Wai Notes / Wilding in the West

Wai Notes / Wilding in the West

Will Oldham's (thankfully) crowded discography gained a pair of low-key releases in the past few months: Wai Notes, a set of The Letting Go demos and Wilding in the West, a Japanese/Australian-only live album from Oldham's 2007 tour that includes at least one "remix" by Royal Trux's Neil Michael Hagerty. On the heels of November's Ask Forgiveness EP, these releases risked giving off a "Dear Fans: Thanks, also fuck off"-vibe, but since precisely no one's child is going Ivy League off of 10,000 copies of Wai Notes it's probably safe to assume we're being asked to pony up again in the name of Art.
Wai Notes comes impeccably wrapped in stamped cardstock, its cover featuring a woman…in a woman suit, the backside boasting a glossy of a hambone Oldham sitting with The Letting Go collaborator Dawn McCarthy. What's not clear is why these 10 demos weren't packaged with their parent album instead of the more useful rarities disc Little Lost Blues, now difficult to obtain itself. The fickle nature of the Oldham cult all but assures that had Wai Notes preceded The Letting Go it would've been hailed as a return to sonically quaint beginnings; on at least two occasions Oldham sings the wrong lyric and immediately mutters a correction into the margin. And it is worth wondering why Oldham no longer makes records like "The Signifying Wolf", on which a tiny guitar unravels and exposes horny animal chants.
But hell: The Letting Go, driven by Nico Muhly's tempest string arrangements, was the most clearly conceived record of Oldham's career. Airing the dirty laundry of sleepy-dog ballads like "Then the Letting Go" or "I Called You Back" does them no favors. Hearing Oldham tiptoe his way through "Wai"-- his fingers hang over chords, as if he's trying to remember the changes-- is thrilling in a voyeuristic sort of way, but Oldham's is a catalog that already contains its share of flubbed notes.
Wilding is harder to pin down but seems more useful. Recorded live in "central coastal California" (no specific venue or date is named), Wilding is pressed by Oldham distributors P-Vine (Japan) and Spunk (Australia), and it's a bit difficult to sort out: Hagerty's unexplained "remix" work includes the random and indecipherable "Naked Lion" and, more intriguingly, a cut-up of "Lost Blues" and "God's Small Song" deft enough to pass as one coherent piece. Ponder also the market that sees "Little Small Song"'s "fuck" intrusively censored but "Naked Lion"'s looped "Yeah shit's hard" given a pass.
Wilding's tenuous cohesion still fares better than 2005's cobbled-together Summer in the Southeast. No one does loins-as-rock better than Oldham and he accordingly wrestles a set of quiet older tracks to the ground: "O Let It Be" and "Three Questions" are pugnacious, and Oldham has never presided over a moment as turgid as this band's teetering "Master & Everyone". Keyboardist Azita tenderly augments deep cut "Weaker Soldier" with barroom piano ambience. McCarthy shows for the Letting Go material, which sees its strings replaced with haughty electric keys and the burly electric guitar of Emmett Kelly.
Then there's "Magnificent Billy", which is either a goof on "Lay and Love" or a live recording spliced with show banter: between harmonies Oldham and McCarthy alternate "Just sayin' what's on my mind" and "Bonny Billy!…Bonny Billy!" Right. Everyone is loose, everyone is happy in central coastal California, interjecting and harmonizing and remixing. Clear as mud.


Achtung Baby is rightly known as one of rock's greatest reinventions because it was so complete. And just as the 1991 album both fulfilled and upended rock'n'roll myths, this coffee-table-book sized, 6xCD, 4xDVD set both props up Achtung and pokes a few holes in it.

Achtung Baby [Super Deluxe Edition]

"If you give a pop star a shit pile of dough and he refuses to self-destruct, I think it is a bit wet," said a smoking, slicked-back, black-sunglasses-clad Bono in a 1993 interview on the UK music show "Naked City". "I think it's part of the deal. If they don't die on a cross by 33, I'd ask for your money back." Like many of the knowingly audacious quotes from the singer and his U2 mates during this period, it's a little tough to deduce the exact level of sincerity involved. And that was the whole idea. In the early 1990s, U2 were sending up the idea of a "rock'n'roll star." They were offering themselves as an ironic, postmodern band for similarly confused times. They were making fun of themselves and their own humorless, slate-faced 80s reputation. A year after Bono's casual quip about pop stars dying on a cross, Kurt Cobain killed himself. And in Nirvana's final video, for "Heart-Shaped Box", Cobain could be seen making wild eyes in front of one.
Achtung Baby and its accompanying Zoo TV tour lived within the slippage between perception and reality. "Sometimes you can get far closer to the truth of what you're trying to say by highlighting what it isn't as if it were true," said the Edge on "Naked City". "That's assuming we know the truth-- 'truth' is one of those words that's lost its meaning." In the 80s, U2 seemed endlessly in search of a definite truth, whether in peace or god or love or some ambiguous combination of the three. Famously, they didn't find it.
But the quest was thrilling-- at least until 1988's album and film Rattle and Hum, which found the group looking and sounding spectacularly self-serious while gawkily paying tribute to some of their American heroes like Elvis Presley and B.B. King. The resulting critical backlash caused these open-hearted Irishmen to reflect, and they weren't crazy about what they saw in the mirror. "We looked like a big, overblown rock band running amok," says Bono in an excellent new documentary called From the Sky Down that chronicles the band's pivotal turn-of-the-decade moment. And while that might seem like an aptly derisive opinion of today's incarnation of U2, it's important to remember that these guys originally came out of the cacophony of rule-breaking post-punk, a realm where bloated arena rock was the enemy. So they went away and tried to come up with a new way to seek some truth.
Achtung Baby is rightly known as one of rock's greatest reinventions because it was so complete. Sure, U2 changed their sound from chiming melodics to lurching, distorted rhythm. But they also changed their attitude, their demeanor, their look, their ideas on how to deal with celebrity. All of a sudden, they were funny, sexy, a bit dangerous-- three things few would've associated with U2 in the 80s. And yet, at their core, the band's values remained constant. They were still ethically minded and interested in the real-life connection between living beings. But the way they went about projecting those core tenets flipped. In TV-news parlance, their attitude switched from "60 Minutes" to "The Colbert Report".
This new era was conveniently spelled-out on Achtung's first single "The Fly" with the Edge's metallic skronk and Bono's conspiratorial, effected whisper of lines like, "It's no secret that a conscience can sometimes be a pest/ It's no secret that ambition bites the nails of success." And just as the album goes lengths to both fulfill and upend rock'n'roll myths with thorny tales of deep betrayal, questioned fidelity, and ambiguous artifice, this coffee-table-book sized, 6xCD, 4xDVD set both props up Achtung and pokes a few holes in it, too.
Take the album's much-ballyhooed place of origin, Berlin's Hansa Studios. This was the location that played host to David Bowie and Iggy Pop's electronic-inspired masterworks Low and The Idiot. And Hansa is located near the Berlin Wall, which had only recently been breached when U2 set up there in the fall of 1990. Perched literally in the middle of historic liberation, U2 were meant to find inspiration in the world events around them and turn that spark into a new version of the band for a new decade. It's a great backdrop for a great story. But it didn't really go down that way. "We're there, and greatness has left the building," Bono recalls in From the Sky Down, which features the band returning to Hansa earlier this year in preparation for their headlining set at Glastonbury.
While Berlin did inspire bits of the record-- "Zoo Station" was named after one of its prominent train terminals-- it hardly lived up to its lofty reputation. This serves as a lesson for U2, a band that shamelessly worships past rock heroes, to move past such naïve mythologizing. "Berlin was a baptism of fire," says bassist Adam Clayton in the documentary. "It was something we had to go through to realize what we were trying to get to was not something you could find physically, outside of ourselves, in some other city-- that there was not magic to it and that we actually had to put the work in and figure out the ideas and hone those ideas down." This newfound pragmatism would help them to move past their fantasies about the sanctity of rock. So while Berlin played a part on Achtung Baby, it did so in surprising ways; though "One" was mostly written in a burst of inspiration in Hansa, most of the album truly came together once the group went back home to Dublin.
Most of the audio bonuses in this set are unfortunately superfluous, and don't offer much in terms of insight. There are two CDs filled with dance remixes, and while U2 were at the vanguard of big time rock bands embracing the notion of the remix, even the most devout rave nostalgist would have little use for six remakes of "Mysterious Ways". The disc of bonus material and B-sides is disappointingly slight, and another filled with early versions of every song on Achtung offers a few revelations-- an Irish jig-style version of "Tryin' to Throw Your Arms Around the World" has an easy charm, but generally, it's easy to see why these attempts were improved upon later. Achtung's even more electronic and weirder follow-up, 1993's Zooropa-- which was recorded in a creative frenzy during a break in the Zoo TV tour-- is also included, though it's generally (and somewhat unfairly) glossed over in all the accompanying materials.
The worthy additions in this "super deluxe edition" are nearly all visual. There's Anton Corbijn's gorgeous and colorful photography that covers its case, as well as a big, sturdy 84-page book. And then the four discs of video: It Might Get Loud director Davis Guggenheim's new 90-minute doc From the Sky Down, every video from the era, a full live gig taped in Australia in 1993, interview shows (like "Naked City"), and, best of all, a playfully subversive TV special from 1992 that includes live footage from the Zoo TV tour as well as goofy interludes that play up the surrealism and insanity of the whole project. Moments like the "Even Better Than the Real Thing" video, with the band playing in a glass case while fans look on outside, successfully tie in all the pomo flourishes U2 were chasing. The group was at the forefront of bringing huge video screens into the live arena, and some of the tricks they pull off-- Bono "dueting" with a static-y Lou Reed or flipping channels to live local stations-- still look impressive. And for all the technical wizardry of the stage setup, the band still uses it to complement the music rather than overshadow it. Even 20 years on, the tour looks like something to behold, a singularly inventive experience that no band-- including U2 itself-- has been able to really expound upon in a meaningful way.
In the Zoo TV special, which originally aired during Thanksgiving weekend in 1992, a "news commentator" covering the show dubs it "the most significant and exciting TV event since the Gulf War." Some of the ideas behind Zoo TV and Achtung Baby were inspired by the television coverage of that initial Gulf War in 1991, and the bizarre reality of being able to switch channels from home shopping to MTV to the bombing of Baghdad. U2 recognized the dangers of this idea, when war turned into just more filler for the burgeoning 24-hour TV-news cycle. And instead of preaching against it in a high and mighty fashion, they embraced that chaos in an effort to expose it. Of course, our collective information overload has been upped exponentially since thanks to the internet, making the flashes of words and slogans that backed U2 during their live campaign seem eerily prophetic. Talking about the Zoo TV audience in the "Naked City" interview, drummer Larry Mullen, Jr. says, "They're coming to a rock'n'roll show and watching television, what more can you ask for?" He's joking, but as we go to arenas and see singers on big screens through our cellphone cameras, the question begins to answer itself.


Despite the experimental pedigree of their new lineup, Wilco's sixth album finds them receding into the comfort zone. The result is an album that exposes the dad-rock gene the band has always carried but attempted to disguise-- the stylistic equivalent of a wardrobe change into sweatpants and a tank top.

Sky Blue Sky

Jeff Tweedy's restlessness has always been one of his greatest strengths. Since Wilco's inception more than a decade ago, his willingness to explore an ever-widening spectrum of sounds and genres, and to keep the revolving door of the band's line-up well-oiled, has paid off in a discography that's as diverse as it is indispensable. Though his songwriting DNA was bound tight during the later days of Uncle Tupelo, Tweedy has nurtured it in different ways with each successive album, from the transitional sunset country-rock of the first two, through the keyboard-thick pop of Summerteeth, the fractured deconstructions of Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, and the languid abstractions of A Ghost Is Born. Following that last record, Wilco swelled to its largest and (according to Tweedy himself) best lineup ever, with the addition of guitar hero Nels Cline and utilityman Pat Sansone. Charged up and bursting with eccentric and experimental talent, Wilco Mk. 5 seemed poised to generate the band's finest-- or at least most interesting-- music yet. Instead, it produced Sky Blue Sky.
An album of unapologetic straightforwardness, Sky Blue Sky nakedly exposes the dad-rock gene Wilco has always carried but courageously attempted to disguise. Never has the band sounded more passive, from the direct and domestic nature of Tweedy's lyrics, to the soft-rock-plus-solos format (already hinted at on Ghost's "At Least That's What You Said" and "Hell Is Chrome") that most of its songs adhere to. The lackluster spirit even pervades the song titles: "Shake It Off" is probably most accurate (not to mention the album's worst track), but "On and On and On" and "Please Be Patient With Me" are both strong alternatives.
It's hard to contest Tweedy's headspace in the making of Sky Blue Sky-- the record's themes of exhaustion and hesitantly returning to normalcy are particularly resonant in the wake of his recent rehabilitation. Perhaps it's just a shame that the music fits the message so well; just as the chaos and space of Yankee Hotel Foxtrot fit with that record's message of communication breakdown, Sky Blue Sky's soothing classic rock elements feel like a desperate pursuit of comfort. Even the noisy guitar interludes (often led by Tweedy rather than Cline) play a dramatic role, absorbing the frustrations Tweedy must have accumulated during all the difficult moments documented in the record's lyrics.
Among Sky Blue Sky's most distressing attributes is its misuse of the experimentalist weapons at Tweedy's command: drummer Glenn Kotche is given no room to stretch beyond routine time-keeping, and Cline is used for his capacity to rip and wail rather than his ear for texture and atmosphere. Case in point, the drowsy opener "Either Way" sleepwalks through a list of indecisive sentiments ("maybe you love me, maybe you don't") before breaking for a Cline solo that's straight-up Weather Channel Local on the 8s. Elsewhere the sextet lineup tends to overplay what should be a collection of fragile, lonesome material. Multiple songs ("Impossible Germany", "Walken") end up in multi-guitar Skynyrd jam sessions or White Album aspirations ("Hate It Here") that sound more homage than heartfelt. Meanwhile, quiet moments such as "Leave Me (Like You Found Me)" are marred from being delicate Being There throwbacks by excessive noodling and Tweedy's passive-aggressive self-pity.
On the other hand, "Side With the Seeds" is the rare track where the new band demonstrates its chops without getting in the way of the song. With a soulful vocal, intertwined piano and organ, and guitar conversations that build to melodic peaks over a loosely swinging Kotche drumbeat, it's way jambandy, but epic and triumphant nonetheless. And speaking of the granola crowd, the acoustic simplicity and warm harmonies of "What Light" make it the American Beauty nod that Wilco's always been itching to play, even if the song title calls for an exclamation point (or at least a question mark) and is sung with an indifferent period.
For a band who can credit a hefty part of their charm to always thinking they're weirder than they actually are, stripping away the disconnect between Wilco's earthy adult-alternative center and their more recent ambitious aspirations-- whether they're exploring Krautrock, breaking into a Sonic Youth freakout, or sabotaging a song's structure-- reveals a fairly traditional band that's emerged from their "weird" phase a markedly less interesting group than they were before they entered it. Perhaps after giving the band-member carousel another spin, Tweedy merely ended up with the wrong personnel to articulate his mood here. If that's the case-- as long as his restless habits hold-- we may only need to wait one more album for message and messenger to click back into alignment.


The dark and atmospheric album from this difficult-to-classify UK-based project has been augmented with a terrific single and a bonus disc.

Forest Swords: Dagger Paths [Expanded Edition]

Dagger Paths [Expanded Edition]

The musical recipe that UK producer Matthew Barnes uses in his one-man project Forest Swords is simple enough-- pick some sparse rhythms and sounds, loop them at a pace both languid and insistent, and fold in texture and volume as each piece slowly gathers momentum. But judging by the Dagger Paths EP, released by Olde English Spelling Bee earlier this year, the results are richer than you might expect. Through dense, mesmerizing atmospheres, which conjure faded memories and dream states, Barnes manages to evoke techno, dub, drone, and even hip-hop and R&B.
In fact, when I wrote about the EP back in June, I had a little trouble seeing Barnes' work outside of the fog of buzzy micro-genres like chillwave and witch house. His music's ghostly aura connects to those and other leftfield trends, but really, Barnes has pretty much transcended them all. The more I've listened, the more I've found his hypnotic concoctions to be in a category of their own. Now that UK label No Pain in Pop has re-released Dagger Paths, adding two tracks from a recent 7" and a CD-R with an impressive array of bonus material, the singularity is so clear it's almost blinding.
Most of that bright light comes from the surprisingly integral role of guitar. At first, these songs sound like a slow, sleepy weave of disparate elements-- dubby bass, sparse percussion, distant voices, blurry samples. But eventually, a bold guitar figure crafts a melody that sticks in your head rather than drifting away with all the echo and atmosphere. Barnes' music can rightly be called murky and dream-like, but it's deceptively so. Dagger Paths is much more active and sharp than such descriptions might imply.
The result is that, the further you delve these songs, the catchier each becomes. A few are immediately engaging, like the swinging "Miarches" and hip-hop-in-slo-mo "The Light" [#script:http://pitchfork.com/media/backend/js/tiny_mce/themes/advanced/langs/en.js]|||||| [#script:http://pitchfork.com/media/backend/js/tiny_mce/themes/advanced/langs/en.js]|||||| . But other tracks prove just as memorable once they have some time to burrow into your brain. On "Glory Gongs", winding guitar chimes return whenever the track threatens to fall apart. And even the reverb-heavy, negative-space cover of Aaliyah's "If Your Girl Only Knew" retains the hook of the original. That trend persists as Barnes shifts his sound on two newer tracks-- the sparse, reggae-inflected "Rattling Cage", and "Hjurt", which wraps guitar in bombed-out drums and distant cries.
No Pain in Pop's bonus CD-R starts with six early Forest Swords tracks, all of which show Barnes' methods to have been pretty well intact from the start (a few are so heavy on fuzzed-out guitar explorations that Forest Swords could be mistaken for an improv rock combo). Also added are remixes of Dagger Paths cuts by other artists, and a 20-minute mix in which Barnes inventively reworks These New Puritans, Burial/Four Tet, and Wild Beasts. Clearly the guy has wide ideas about sound and what it can do, but what impresses most about Dagger Paths is its focus. All the elements and styles that Barnes collects like a magnet quickly align toward one unmistakable musical vision.


The Los Angeles-based singer and producer trades the gospel of his previous work for sensual R&B, using the club as his canvas for tender odes to queer desire.

GRIP

According to memes and folklore, people who wear all-black Air Force 1s are menaces to society. Unkempt and ungovernable, they clomp through life indifferent to the dust accumulating on their kicks and the darkness gathering in their souls. The shoes are so maligned that even in Nelly’s classic paean to the Nikes, no one raps about or rocks black Forces. (One person does buy some.) Despite that stigma, serpentwithfeet dedicates a song on his third album to the quiet confidence of a guy giving off black Air Force energy in the club. “Ain’t nobody fucking with you,” he coos flirtatiously.

Club scenes and sounds are fixtures of GRIP, which trades the gnostic gospel of the singer and producer’s past music for saucy R&B. serpentwithfeet has always been a student of the genre, but lately he’s been in active conversation with its history and motifs. DEACON wove Janet’s earnestness, Brandy’s vocal runs, and Darkchild’s quiet-storm fronts into tender odes to queer Black men. The record retained his signature interest in religious symbols and themes, but the music took more cues from R&B than gospel or electronic—a trend that continues here. Firmly planting a flag in modern R&B, serpent explores the ways that touch sparks and sustains romance.
His songwriting is punchier and more direct in this purist mode. There are more come-ons and solicitations than innuendo or symbolism, a shift that fits the intimate theme. “Kiss you longer, longer than an opera/If we keep on dancing, we gon’ make love,” he sings on floorfiller “Damn Gloves,” framing a deep smooch as an intervention. The humid and pounding beat, produced by Nosaj Thing, I Like That, and serpentwithfeet, ups the urgency of the command. You can feel the charged proximity of the dancers’ bodies.

The writing on “Safe Word” is just as loaded and beckoning. “The safe place is me, safe place is me,” he sings, declaring his body a sanctuary for a lover. Vocal processing embellishes the protective sentiment, smearing his words across Sensei Bueno and I Like That’s soft drums and cool melodies. serpentwithfeet notably treats his vocals throughout the album, rarely relying on his operatic falsetto. The choice feels intentional: As stunning as his upper register is, even at its most ecstatic, it exudes anguish and solitude. The breathy, immediate singing of GRIP is more conversational, evoking closeness, exchange, and community.
The beats aren’t always as distinctive as serpentwithfeet’s storytelling and performances. The bass-heavy and uptempo arrangements of “Black Air Force” and “Rum / Throwback” bring to mind the generic fare DJs play when the club doors open. On songs about the meet-cutes and hook-ups that happen beyond the dancefloor, the production is more striking. “Deep End” is delightfully airy, gentle percussion and puffs of synth nudging along his dulcet melodies as he sings of a one-night stand that lasts 12 days. “Hummin” is built atop a slowed four-on-the-floor pattern that Stwo, Nosaj, and I Like That garnish with knocks and keys. The steady rhythm complements serpent’s sensual eruptions of melody.
At a glance, GRIP can feel slight next to the rapturous drama of soil and the blissful vignettes of DEACON, which both use negative space and dynamics to ratchet up the intensity of the music. These songs are not as impassioned or ornate as “cherubim” or “four ethers,” but serpentwithfeet hasn’t lost his bite. Sticking to R&B helps him refine his focus. Instead of epics, he offers instants, zooming in on the passing gestures and feelings that aggregate into love. “If God is a god at all/He lives in your grip,” he croons on “Lucky Me, sensing a flicker of the divine in a single embrace. Your local black Forces enthusiast might contain multitudes.


More streamlined than 2007's Person Pitch, yet more rhythmically robust than 2011's Tomboy, Panda Bear Meets the Grim Reaper is Panda Bear’s toughest, grimiest, and funkiest album to date.

Panda Bear: Panda Bear Meets the Grim Reaper

Panda Bear Meets the Grim Reaper

The great irony about bringing a new life into this world is you start worrying a lot more about death. Not just that of the family members you must provide for and protect, but your own, as well. Plain and simple, the first rule of parenting is: don’t die. When entrusted with the immense obligation of caring for a child, even the youngest of new parents become exceedingly conscious of their own mortality and survival instincts. Behaviors once taken for granted—like, say, air travel or cycling alongside cars on city streets—start to feel more like roulette games wagered with your life; once-considered activities like bungee jumping and skydiving get transferred from your bucket list to a "fuck that" list.
You could hear that sort of uneasiness gradually seep into the seemingly serene work of Noah Lennox—a.k.a. Panda Bear—over the past decade, both without and within Animal Collective. As the first A.C. member to become a parent, Lennox has become increasingly fond of rooting his boundless sonic exploration in meditations on home life, whether cheekily celebrating the drudgery of domesticity ("Chores"), eulogizing the family dog ("Derek"), making heartfelt affirmations of paternal duty ("My Girls"), or openly fretting over his shortcomings as a breadwinner (“Alsatian Darn”). And though he’s avoided explicitly ecclesiastical language in his solo work since writing 2004’s psych-folk hymnal Young Prayer for his late father, each Panda Bear record released since has retained the form and feel of a communal church service: They welcome us in with reassuring proverbs ("try to remember always, always to have a good time") couched in heaven-sent harmonies, provide a sense comfort in the face of encroaching chaos, and strive to connect our physical world to a more celestial plane. And be it the psychedelic pop sprawl of 2007’s Person Pitch or the dub-like lurch of 2011’s Tomboy, a Panda Bear record ultimately requires a test of faith, a belief that Lennox’s beaming voice will guide us safely through the dense, phantasmagoric fog that threatens to consume it. In Lennox’s cathedral of sound, you can always see the stormy skies creeping in view through the radiant stained-glass windows.
On his latest venture, the tension between inner peace and external pressure reaches boss-battle proportions. Lifting its main-event billing from old King Tubby records, Panda Bear Meets the Grim Reaper serves a similar function for its creator as Slasher Flicks did for Avey Tare—it’s a playful, fantastical response to some serious life changes. In Portner’s case, it was divorce and strep throat; for Lennox, it’s the entry into middle age and the substantial familial responsibilities that go with it. In a recent Rolling Stone interview, Lennox pondered the possibility of retiring the Panda Bear moniker, which makes sense—part of getting older is doing away with your old college nicknames. But if that is indeed the case, Panda Bear is not going down without a fight.
More streamlined than Person Pitch and more rhythmically robust than Tomboy, Grim Reaper is Panda Bear’s toughest, grimiest, and funkiest album to date. But all that extra grit and groove doesn’t come at the expense Lennox’s unmistakable melodic graces, which still provide each song with its pulse. As to be expected from an album co-produced with Tomboy holdover Pete Kember (a.k.a. Sonic Boom of '80s psych-punk patriarchs the Spacemen 3) and reportedly inspired by classic '90s boom-bap beat construction, Grim Reaper achieves just the right balance of skull-splitting drone and head-noddin’ drive. In contrast to the unpredictably amorphous song structures that defined previous Panda Bear records, many of the songs on Grim Reaper lock into a looped beat and rarely waver course. However, they’re often prefaced by or dissolve into ominous, buzzing oscillations (some of which, like the half-minute "Davy Jones' Locker", are portioned off into stand-alone tracks) that suggest the onset of a panic attack or some shadowy predator. As such, the midnight-marauding march of lead single "Mr Noah" and electro-fuzzed yodeling of "Boys Latin" are transformed into weapons of retaliation—a strobe-lit assault on the encroaching bleakness. "Dark cloud has descended again," Lennox sings on the chorus of the latter song, but his elated vocal thrusts the black mass back up into the stratosphere.
Lennox told Pitchfork last fall that, despite all the personal rumination that inspired Grim Reaper, he wanted to keep his lyrics purposefully non-specific and relatable. But for all its booming breaks and future-shocked freneticism, Grim Reaper—like all Panda Bear records—remains a highly insular experience, one where it often sounds as if Lennox is speaking into a mirror. "So good, you’ve got it so good," he sings overtop the blissed-out shuffle of "Crosswords"—a simple statement of fact from a happily married father of two who lives in a cosmopolitan coastal European city in between sold-out tours. But his wistful delivery betrays the fear of losing it all. And Lennox spends much of the seven-minute "Come to Your Senses" repeating a question ("Are you mad?") for which there is only one logical answer ("Yeah, I’m mad"), as the song’s shantytown acid-house throb mediates between serenity and insanity. A sobering aftershock arrives in the form of late-album wake-up call "Selfish Gene"—a sort-of post-rave "That's Not Me"—where the incessant synth-jabs provide Lennox with needling reminders of his family-man mission ("When it comes to fill those spaces/ Only you can fill those spaces").
Taken as a whole, Grim Reaper feels like a gradual process of Lennox trying to tune out the extraneous noise of modern life and focus on what’s truly important to him. And it’s an evolution mirrored by the album’s sequence, which bookends the most boisterous, beat-driven songs around two stunning centerpiece tracks—"Tropic of Cancer" and "Lonely Wanderer"—that provide Grim Reaper with an extended and well-earned moment of quiet contemplation. The former is a cosmic doo-wop serenade that stands as the most affecting and beautiful vocal performance of Lennox’s career; the latter projects a gorgeous, aqueous tranquility unheard from the Animal Collective camp since side two of Feels, its light piano drizzle summoning thundercloud rumbles of foreboding reverberations.
But even when it trades in day-glo stompers for weightless ballads, Grim Reaper still crushes. In the unsentimental, funereal refrain of "Tropic of Cancer"—"you can’t get back, you won’t come back, you can’t come back to it"—Lennox invokes his father’s 2002 death and, in doing so, reemphasizes his own current reality as a patriarch, and that pervasive, deep-seated fear of prematurely leaving one’s family behind. If Panda Bear Meets the Grim Reaper posits adult life as some imaginary horror movie, it’s one where the phone call warning of impending doom is coming from inside the house.


The New York-based electronic musician tries his hand at collage in an appealingly loose, rangy record that's ideally suited to his magpie tendencies.

Safe (Exits)

The six songs on Bryce Hackford’s 2013 debut album, Fair, could have been mistaken for the work of as many different artists. One loop-heavy house track evoked Moodymann; a fuzzy techno piece riffed on the Field; a song for drum machine, falsetto vocals, and slapback delay might as well have been Arthur Russell cosplay. Taken together, the album felt like a map of divergent paths, as though Hackford couldn’t bear to leave any route unexplored. On Safe (Exits), Hackford’s restlessness leads him to try his hand at collage, which turns out to be the perfect medium for a musician who tends to prefer and to or. The album encapsulates the best aspects of his magpie tendencies, avoiding the clutter that has sometimes plagued his work.
Hackford gathered the album’s raw materials during a residency at the UK’s PRAH Foundation, a recording studio and creative hub in Margate, a seaside town some 90 minutes outside London. (The studio is an extension of PRAH Recordings, a small independent label whose most famous signee is the cellist Oliver Coates.) There, Hackford recorded contributions from 11 different instrumentalists, with one catch: He recorded all 11 musicians independently of one another, without any of them hearing the others’ parts, and then reworked choice bits and pieces of their playing into a coherent whole.
The result is an appealingly loose, rangy record with a deep funk pulse, one that wraps a motley array of sounds—airy woodwinds, scuffed-up electric bass, mercurial Rhodes soloing—around Hackford’s skeletal, and often idiosyncratic, drum programming. The pacing is patient; the record opens with the 13-minute-long “Einmal,” a slow-motion approximation of ’00s minimal techno played mostly on acoustic percussion and overlaid with scraps of jazz. Flute, clavinet, and pitch-bending synths float in and out; it sounds less like a jam session than time-lapse footage of a house party. Their combined movements feel unplanned, but there’s a rhythm to the randomness.
The first half mostly sticks to this mode of woozily controlled chaos. In “Fetish Present,” a lumpy drum-machine groove fights its way through a curtain of bells; “Zajal” is slow and atonal, its synths the color of an oil slick. Halfway through, a saxophone wafts into the frame, conjuring ’80s noir visions. “Holy Mountains” gently weaves contrapuntal lines in a way that suggests a chopped-and-screwed version of the Australian improvising trio the Necks, while “Deep Voices” takes a hard left into dubby post-punk. Throughout, the influence of Miles Davis’ Bitches Brew looms large in the music’s freeform drift and inky dissonance.
The album peaks with “After Sun,” a 14-minute meditation for Rhodes and synthesizer. It’s the record’s most successful fusion of groove, melody, and mood, but the final two cuts flesh out the picture of Hackford’s work in intriguing ways. Both are ambient in form and feel, extensions of the kinds of immersive, long-form pieces he’s been experimenting with since his first album. “Coast (Maybe)” arrays plaintive synth pads over white-noise hiss, while the even simpler “Harbor” sets dubbed-out Rhodes keys against a faint backdrop of street noise and the occasional seagull. Rather than a painstaking collage, it feels like someone sitting down at the keyboard in real time, poking idly at the keys for a quarter of an hour. On an album informed by others’ contributions, this contemplative closing makes for a welcome moment of solitude.


It’s a terrible night for a moondance: On this risible and intermittently lovely 28-song collection, Van indulges in some of his most cherished paranoid theories and deepest-held grudges.

Van Morrison: Latest Record Project, Vol. 1

Latest Record Project, Vol. 1

Five decades ago, an agitated 21-year-old Van Morrison recorded 31 original songs about missing royalty checks and ringworm, intended to fulfill the terms of what he judged to be an onerous record deal. Those 1967 recordings, known colloquially as the Contractual Obligation Session, were un-releasable by design: One track late in the running order is titled “Freaky If You Got This Far.” The Contractual Obligation Session was the first of many real and imagined revenges that Morrison would exact on the music industry over his storied career. The most recent of those revenges comes in the form of Latest Record Project Volume 1, a risible and intermittently lovely 28-song collection which, in its bonkers way, brings Morrison’s tumultuous career full circle.
If you’re new to Van, or at least blissfully unaware of his pathologies, it can be perplexing to understand why an individual who has made upwards of $90 million playing music could feel quite so aggrieved. The short version is that it appears hardwired: The dark strain of paranoia that runs through his work is the flip side of its meditative beauty. Take 1986’s pastoral masterpiece No Guru, No Method, No Teacher, which briefly interrupts its Proustian song cycle long enough to stipulate that “copycats ripped off my songs/Copycats ripped off my words/Copycats ripped off my melodies.” And by copycats he means: Bruce Springsteen, Bob Seger, Elvis Costello, U2, or just about anyone else who ever admired him and also set words to melody. It has seemingly never occurred to him to be, you know, flattered.
Even by his own standards, Van has been on a tear lately. After a career mostly spent steering clear of the political arena, Morrison was apparently radicalized by the coronavirus lockdowns, which, in the manner of privileged white men everywhere, he evidently perceived as a personal affront. This prompted the release of a handful of anti-lockdown songs each more ludicrous than the last and culminating with an Eric Clapton collaboration where the jokes write themselves. With his dander fully up, Van’s in no mood to mince words on Latest Record Project: Volume 1. He’s like Clint Eastwood’s character in Gran Torino, except his bête-noir is misleading government websites instead of murderous gangs.
The first track on Latest Project: Volume 1 is “Latest Record Project Volume 1,” and immediately it is impossible to know if all of this is a prank. “Have you got my/Latest/Record Project?” Van croons with insinuating casualness over a fetching jazzy stroll pitched somewhere between Frankie Avalon and go-fuck-yourself. The follow-up track doubles down on the light-jazz-dude-taking-no-shit-vibe with “Where Have All the Rebels Gone?” (Spoiler: He’s the only one left.)
As with all things Van, his genius consistently shines through irrespective of the asinine context. In addition to his outsized gifts as a songwriter and performer, Morrison’s uncanny ability as a bandleader and talent curator is perhaps his most overlooked asset. The group assembled for Latest Record Project: Volume 1 is no different in this regard: Regal horns and Hammond organs provide a decorous backdrop for a supple rhythm section as Van and his backing singers conjure frequently heaven-bound exertions. All the difficulties occur when the material is earthbound.
To be a genius is not the same as being a sophisticated political thinker, as we keep learning again and again, to the point of exhaustion. In his press materials for the LP, Van hilariously valorizes himself as the only living protest singer, by which it appears he means he is the only gazillionaire rock star to be a pandemic-denier besides Eric Clapton. For 28 tracks Van discusses hidden cabals of dangerous media types so frequently that it verges on a convoluted concept record. The seven-minute “Long Con” summarizes his strange host of anxieties: He’s a targeted individual, judges and government officials are after him, everyone is jealous. Who is behind the curtain? It’s a terrible night for a moondance.
For those of us who love Van, the concern is always that his madness will overtake his judgment and something will occur that truly desecrates his legacy. “They Own the Media” is a cringeworthy title adjacent to a common anti-Semitic dogwhistle that blessedly turns out to be just another mostly anodyne psycho-non-specific-paranoid-blues workout. Same with “Psychoanalyst’s Ball,” same with “Stop Bitching, Do Something,” and same with (not kidding) “Why Are You on Facebook?” This is the project of loving Van Morrison in the fraught year of 2021. He is the Belfast Cowboy, the dweller on the threshold, the king of the slipstream. He is also transparently insane, in insane times. Together we flow into the mystic.

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.


After a decade of composing increasingly difficult music, the experimental duo offers a reprieve. SIGN is an exceptionally engaging listen: lean, intermittently sedate, even quite pretty.

SIGN

Machines don’t care. Self-driving cars, data-harvesting algorithms, Boston Dynamics’ hideous quadrupeds—all these things unnerve us in part because we know that they can’t be trusted. They are indifferent to us by design. Autechre have long played to this unease, channeling the unfathomable depth of machine intelligence into forbiddingly complex music that appears to be the product of pure data, intractable and untamed. Using an inscrutable array of home-brewed software and jury-rigged hardware devices that they refer to simply as “the system,” Sean Booth and Rob Brown put the onomatopoeia back into number-crunching.
What is daunting about their work is less the mystery in how it’s made and more the specter of supreme disregard that lurks in the margins of their compositions. Their music can suggest machines running blithely amok, unfazed by the presence of humans, disinclined to kowtow to the human desire for, you know, melody and rhythm. In brief moments of pathos or humor—the apparition of a plaintive synthesizer tone, the momentary outbreak of a groove—the duo’s hands become visible behind the thickets of circuitry. But as their work has grown denser and darker, those moments have become uncommon; it was easy to wonder if Booth and Brown had themselves calcified into silicon. But from the sound of SIGN, something has changed.
It’s not just that their music became gradually more byzantine over the last decade, as though their already fractal beats were further splintering, granulated patterns branching into gardens of forking paths. The dimensions of their work sprawled. They quickly followed 2010’s Oversteps with Move of Ten, a 10-track EP as long as many albums. The 4xLP Exai, in 2013, ran two hours long, a feat doubled by the five-part elseq series in 2016, whose running time doubled again with 2018’s absurd, eight-hour NTS Sessions. SIGN, in contrast, is remarkably compact. Breezing through 11 tracks in just over an hour, it is roughly the same length as the last track on the final volume of the NTS Sessions.
More importantly, SIGN is surprisingly direct: lean, intermittently sedate, frequently quite pretty. The album begins intimidatingly, with a synthetic growl that might be the heptapods in Arrival discovering the ills of gluten. But then, after a minute and a half of rumbling and clanking, what sounds like a submarine crumpling beneath sea pressure, they unleash a single chord that stands among the most beautiful sounds they have created in 29 years. Out of the groaning of twisted metal bursts an explosion of color, like a cloud of powdered pigment hanging briefly in the air before it dissipates, announcing the tonal palette for the entire album. Across the course of the record, this “basic tonal vocabulary,” as Brown called it in a recent interview (possibly borrowing the term from the UK avant-techno legend Surgeon) boils down to a handful of uncannily vivid textures and sensations: sheet metal, soapstone, and pumice; lozenges growing smaller and smaller; renegade foghorns; the taste of copper.
Chaos quickly reasserts itself in the opening track, but that is the only place where the duo’s violent tendencies hold sway; even then, it is as if the beats have been sheared away and sanded down, leaving only the suggestion of great force in the striations left behind. Most of the album is all but beatless. “F7” is a synthesizer etude whose fanfare might not sound out of place in a Michael Mann film, were it not for the perilous detuning and the hollow, buzzing tone, flickering like fluorescent tubes. “si00” chirps and chimes over a muted pulse, like early ’90s ambient techno grown sour; “esc desc” is slow and stately, layered synths slipping between consonance and dissonance like multiple copies of New Order’s “Elegia” being played out of sync. It takes five tracks for Autechre to drop their first real beat, but even here, on “au14,” in which Drexciyan tones bubble to the surface over a rapid-fire 4/4 kick, they seem determined to keep their squirreliest tendencies in check. Every component is perpetually shape-shifting; good luck enumerating all the discrete elements in play, much less tracking their millisecond-by-millisecond mutations. Yet the music flows intuitively. It’s not difficult, simply alive.
Something almost like nostalgia occasionally rears its head, a rarity for this duo. The sullen synths of “psin AM” call back to Boards of Canada’s Hi Scores EP, which is unexpected, if only because the Sandison brothers often seemed like Autechre’s docile younger cousins, out daydreaming in fields while Booth and Brown were soldering shortwave radios in the garage. The serene tones of the album’s many beatless tracks spring from the same well as 2008’s contemplative Quaristice and even 1994’s wistful Amber. “Metaz form8,” the album’s gorgeous ambient centerpiece, might be the first Autechre composition you could conceivably play on piano.
But that outward simplicity is deceptive. Every repeat play of even the most restrained tracks here turns up new details and new shades. The melodies tend to flock in close formation around narrow bands of tones; the whole album feels like a swarm of insects attempting to carry a tune. Even the softest material on SIGN isn’t all that different from the most austere or amelodic material on NTS Sessions; it’s just been smoothed into a form that catches the light differently, emphasizing continuity over disjunction. They have found new ways to make their favorite materials sing.
The album’s shortest track is its most affecting. “gr4” is the most lyrical piece of music Autechre have written in years, with neat contrapuntal motions reminiscent of Baroque music—all buried beneath layers of effects that corrode the orchestral tones into dust. The longer it goes on, the more it feels almost like an actual song. Then, after three minutes, it simply fades away, without ever quite revealing itself. The ending feels sudden and unplanned; you wonder why they chose to cut it here, what happened in the recording of it that they couldn’t have extended it further. But after the last few years’ maximalist bonanza, to be left wanting more is a novel, welcome feeling with Autechre. With SIGN, Autechre have managed to do something that machines can’t do nearly as well as humans: surprise us.

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.


Jenn Ghetto, formerly of now-defunct Seattle band Carissa’s Wierd, makes darkly confessional songs as S. Her new album, produced by Chris Walla, is her most accessible yet, but her songs are as sharply-observed as ever, offering a typical balance of wry humor and sad yearning.

Cool Choices

As a former member of the now-defunct Seattle band Carissa’s Wierd, Jenn Ghetto understands the science of bittersweet confession. She writes psychologically acute breakup stories that show what it means to hurt, but her songs aren’t about pretending to make the right decisions—they’re about telling the truth.
Producer Chris Walla recorded her new album, Cool Choices, and he has a lot to do with its approachability. Ghetto worked with him back when she was still making achy, acoustic slowcore as part of Carissa’s Wierd. That group disbanded after releasing their third album, Songs About Leaving, in 2003, at which point Ben Bridwell and Mat Brooke went on to form Band of Horses, Sera Cahoone went solo, and Mat Brooke went on to Grand Archives. Ghetto quietly released records as S, most of them sad bedroom confessionals recorded on a four-track.
Cool Choices’ narrative style is familiar: Ghetto’s last records as S were called Sadstyle, Puking and Crying, and I’m Not as Good at It as You; previous songs had titles like “Pathetic”, “Crushed”, and “Outro (The Agony)”. From here, opening the first line on her latest record with “This is how losers feel/ I am a loser” seems like a natural thematic progression. A blithe melancholy subsumes the entirety of this record, which is also her most accessible record to date.
“Like GangBusters” is a jangly, propulsive ballad the lineage of Tegan and Sara’s “Dark Come Soon”—a comparison that I’m wary of making, if only because Walla also produced that track. The harmonies are similarly clean—sharp arpeggios and barrel drumming drive it’s melodies— and Ghetto’s declarations of “you will not take me down” are measured like they wouldn’t feel out of place on The Con. The effect here and throughout Cool Choices is that Jenn Ghetto sounds more like Jenn Ghetto— Walla lends the record a familiar warmth, and better production highlights lyrical gems like “I’m crazy and you’re fucked up” whenever they occur.
Ghetto typically writes with a balance of wry humor and sad yearning, but Cool Choices feels like a maturation in terms of delivery. Her voice luxuriates over Walla’s blended instrumentals with such command that you might forget how broken the lyrics really are. “It’s so hard to see you around here every day” and “I know about the girl you fucked” are words that Ghetto murmurs in the span of the same hook. Elsewhere her voice grows more assertive-—“You never did any of that/ You never said any of those things/ You never even called me back”—as if she’s finally owning a resentment that her whisper-croon could barely relay.
The difficulty surrounding Ghetto's vocal delivery— a sort of stylized numbness—is that when the hooks don’t catch, or when the instrumentation isn’t interesting enough, the songs are easy to forget. The second half of Cool Choices can’t match the first in quality or intrigue, but what makes the album as a whole worth listening to is Ghetto’s ability to burrow into a quarry of sentimental abandon and talk about what it feels like to be vulnerable. Whenever her lyrics are twee or oblique— as with the empty phrasing on “Forever Love”—that sense of intimacy is lost. The record’s higher points—“Brunch”, “Loser”, “Vampires”— stay much closer to the chest. Cool Choices succeeds when it feels like introspection, and that should always be enough.


Unfinished Business

Jay-Z and R. Kelly don't like each other. They've been canceling dates on their co-headlining tour, and the rumors are flying. Kelly doesn't like that Jay got a better reception at the tour's opening show in Chicago. Jay doesn't like that Kelly simulates sex with two women in a cage/jail cell as part of his act. When they're onstage together, they barely look at each other.
So why did they make another album together? It could be for money, but neither of these guys is going digging for change anytime soon. It's not for artistic reasons; both are firmly on autopilot here. So it would seem, then, that their reasons are entirely egotistical. In March 2002, the pair released The Best of Both Worlds, a collaborative album hyped as a blockbuster union of the two brightest stars in R&B; and hip-hop. But within a few weeks of the album's release, a bootleg video of Kelly allegedly having really, really nasty sex with an underage girl surfaced. Radio stayed off the album like it was infected, and the artists never even bothered to make a video. As a result, the album was a relative flop, failing to sell even one million copies. Neither artist could cope with that sort of blot on their resumes, so now we get Unfinished Business. "In the first week, I predict a million sold," posits Kelly on "Big Chips".
Unfinished Business is a decidedly minor work from both artists; neither strays from his comfort zone. Jay doesn't indulge in any of The Black Album's bittersweet introspection, and Kelly almost doesn't mention Jesus. Instead, they're both in full VIP-section pimp glide, leaning hard, stepping past bouncers, blowing cigar smoke with a girl on each arm and donning immaculately perfect white suits. They're all smoke and mirrors.
Most of the album's beats are reworkings of Best of Both Worlds tracks, and they sound oddly dated. Like Both Worlds, the entire album was produced by the Trackmasters, a Neptunes-lite duo who peaked around 2001 and who haven't been finding a lot of work since. Their sound-- flanged acoustic guitars, jazz-funk piano plinks, rippling clicks-- is so clean you could eat off it. It's the sound of richer, happier times. Sometimes it's effective; they deploy burbling synthesized flamenco guitars on "Mo' Money" and a bazonkers gospel choir on "Don't Let Me Die" to great effect. But they also deliver "Feelin' You in Stereo" and "Break Up (That's All We Do)", some weak-ass bourgie mid-90s slow jam shit. And in 2004, Jay-Z has no business rapping on a track that could've been a City High remix three years ago.
So, then, is Jay still retired or what? He knows you're thinking it: "Y'all nervous/ I ain't back yet/ I'm on extended vaca/ I ain't unpacked yet," he says on "Stop". It's a point he makes very clearly over the course of this record; he's not truly present here, and rarely contributes more than a cameo. This is primarily Kelly's album, and he plays it to the hilt-- all effortless, honey-dripping purr. Sometimes he's Nate Dogg-level lazy, but that falsetto is powerful enough to have put some of the most shocking allegations in R&B;'s storied history a mere footnote to his career. And! He raps! Kelly makes a surprisingly spry emcee, dropping lines in a crisp, lilting, fussy sing-song cadence that bites Slick Rick so hard you almost don't notice when the real Slick Rick shows up at the end of the album. On "Mo' Money", Kelly follows a typically dazzling jackhammer Twista cameo with his own take on Midwest speed-rap, acquitting himself so impressively that Jay has to pull out some weird, breathless, gasping flow shit to top him.
For his part, Jay pretty much sticks with tossed-off playa-isms about whips and jewels and getting this paper. We've heard it before, but he still does it better than anyone else, rolling syllables around for entire verses just for fun. You can hear the joy in his voice when he drops bon mots like, "Take a photo/ Last time you see a nigga so cold/ So below zero, so froze/ So-so rappers are so sore in the soul/ Ain't my fault I'm so rock 'n' roll," on "We Got 'Em Goin'".
Unfinished Business is a light, breezy listen, and surprisingly solid for an album with no real reason to exist from two guys who can't stand each other. But of course, Jay and Kelly are masters of effortlessness-- they can make music in their sleep, and here, that's pretty much what they've done.