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The second album from the viral star is crowded with histrionic vocals, tired emotions, and petty grievances, leaving little room to actually enjoy his music. | The second album from the viral star is crowded with histrionic vocals, tired emotions, and petty grievances, leaving little room to actually enjoy his music. | Hobo Johnson: The Fall of Hobo Johnson | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/hobo-johnson-the-fall-of-hobo-johnson/ | The Fall of Hobo Johnson | To Hobo Johnson, Earth’s imminent demise won’t be because of climate change or nuclear war. Instead, the apocalypse will arrive the next time a girl he likes doesn’t text him back. Hobo Johnson is the product of a section of a pop culture fandom whose life was changed by a Kid Cudi lyric, went to Warped Tour once, started shopping at Zumiez, and learned about love from 500 Days of Summer. The 24-year-old’s music is a genre-bending mash of spoken-word pop and Lin-Manuel Miranda-style raps, backed by a versatile band called the Lovemakers that play punk, folk, and jazz with the same sexless energy as the group of dads that played your local church fundraiser. But the core of Hobo Johnson’s music is his emotional honesty and an occasional ability to detail his battles with crippling insecurities. This would be relatable and maybe even affecting if his material wasn’t all sourced from jealousy and disappointment at the women that continue to pass up on the good guys like him.
Last year, the California-raised Hobo Johnson entered NPR’s Tiny Desk Contest with a live backyard video for a song titled “Peach Scone.” His entry went viral on social media garnering millions of plays in less than a week, but the response to the video was polarizing. A few people reasonably called out his insincere approach to rap. “My name is Hobo Johnson, I’m a rapper/I’m actually not a rapper, I like to say musician,” he raps, while implying falsely that his use of live instruments distances himself from the genre. But the majority of the reactions to Hobo Johnson—born Frank Lopes Jr.—was warm. He was positioned as a hopeless romantic, despite “Peach Scone” being a possessive story about his falling in love with a girl who has a boyfriend only because she was the first person to show him any attention. The track features his teary-eyed emotion and his brand of quirky comedy. He became the latest love of moody teenagers desperate to find music that reciprocated their temperamental and lonely online aesthetic.
The Fall of Hobo Johnson is his first album since his viral moment, and it stays true to “Peach Scone”’s unstated goal of making music for guys who are angry that a person they’ve never spoken to doesn’t love them back. Fame hasn’t changed Hobo Johnson’s view on relationships. At all. “Fear the girl who he really thinks is a different species, she’ll rip your heart out,” he says on “Mover Awayer,” justifying her decision to ghost him. His songwriting is mostly composed of ramblings that could double as overly deep black-screen background Instagram stories: “She makes my Mondays feel like Fridays,” and, “Every single guy she’s ever loved to me sounds really fucking dumb.”
If you haven’t noticed, Hobo Johnson doesn’t take rejection well. On the surface he does—he fills his ex-crushes’ inboxes with shallow compliments and warm wishes. “I really hope that you find happiness,” he says in the opening line of “Happiness.” Though that’s before he spends the remaining three minutes spiraling, placing the guilt on her for not sharing those feelings through pill-popping and drinking himself to near-death. These emotions don’t connect or make you think of similar times from your own past. Instead, you just feel sorry for him.
Aside from his never-ending heartbreak, the other major theme on The Fall of Hobo Johnson is death. It often comes across melodramatic, especially on the cliche and unimaginative “Moonlight,” which features him in the afterlife: “And if I go to hell I will think of you, I will think of you and everything will be OK,” he says moodily. “Sorry, My Dear” is similarly heavy-handed and made unlistenable by scratchy voice-alteration and production that is like if Bon Iver retired the weed for Juul pods.
What Hobo Johnson does have going for him is that there’s no artist within the reach of the mainstream consciousness that sounds like him. He laughs, screams, and cries like an open-mic slam poet. But the last thing the music world needs is more “I don’t understand girls” rap that feels it’s above the genre. His goals are mundane: On “I Want a Dog,” he talks about his life goal to be married with a wife, a dog, a house on a hill, and a kid that plays guitar. His approach to relationships would make him the villain of every reality television dating show and the Lovemakers are probably set to be the first band replaced by artificial intelligence. Now Hobo Johnson is left to wait for the next viral moment that keeps his world spinning.
Buy: Rough Trade
(Pitchfork may earn a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.) | 2019-09-19T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-09-19T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap / Rock | Reprise / Warner | September 19, 2019 | 3.6 | d05670c4-8f2e-47df-88f1-e1651864db52 | Alphonse Pierre | https://pitchfork.com/staff/alphonse-pierre/ | |
The debut from the young hip-hop duo is an antidote to mainstream South Korean rap and pop—personal, anti-capitalist screeds over experimental trap and techno hybrids. | The debut from the young hip-hop duo is an antidote to mainstream South Korean rap and pop—personal, anti-capitalist screeds over experimental trap and techno hybrids. | XXX: Language | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/xxx-language/ | Language | Hip-hop in South Korea has made it over to the mainstream, partly due to the massively popular music competition show “Show Me the Money,” which is like is like “X-Factor” with more hypebeasts in bucket hats. As the reality TV program has gained popularity, major Korean record labels have become more willing to invest in burgeoning rap stars instead of the typical idol or group. XXX’s Kim Ximya, who raps on top of production by the duo’s other half FRNK, has suggested that the commercialism of Korean rap has killed the authenticity of the genre, as it increasingly mirrors the formulaic nature of K-pop. “For most of the Korean rapper population, I feel they did not write about what they actually felt or what they were actually doing,” Kim said in an interview with Billboard. “They were making music they thought people would like to hear.”
On their debut album Language, XXX present themselves as the alternative to the sanitized, hyper-glossy rap music typically pumped out by the billion-dollar Korean music industry. If BTS are measured and subtle about their politics, XXX cuss in two different languages to get the point across. Kim launches invectives against the corporate K-pop machine, money-thirsty rappers, and oppressive standards of “success” (as defined by capitalism). He’s at his best when he’s absolutely seething with rage—a refreshing mode of delivery that doesn’t appear often in K-pop’s biggest hits.
“Y'all wanna know what the fuck hip-hop is?” Kim spits with vitriol on “S_it,” before he answers his own question: “Such luxury does not exist in Korea.” And although Kim’s intermittent English lyrics are sometimes clunky, they help non-Korean speakers get a sense of the themes he’s tackling here. It works best in “Sujak,” when he starts off by rapping in English: “Strip club/Casket/Body in that basket.” Kim charges the song with nihilistic energy before switching over to Korean to elaborate on living in a soul-sucking society that values money over people. It seems almost utilitarian, like how other K-pop stars add in random English interjections in order to appeal to as many international listeners as possible. But his bilingualism is more impressive in the moments when the shift is seamless and the two languages flow together, like when he rhymes Korean words with English ones and vice versa.
While Language repeatedly takes aim at the overwhelmingly high pressures of the Korean music industry, Kim’s rage never becomes monotone or boring. His frustrations are nuanced, as he portrays his internal conflict of wanting to succeed within the system that he’s actively trying to fight. On “Ugly,” Kim admits that he ascribes his self-worth to his success as an artist. “This ranking system and poverty is fucking my mentality/In the end, my music doesn’t reach the charts,” he raps. And on “What You Want,” he illustrates how easy it is to find himself slipping back into the capitalistic ethos. His train of thought begins to unravel: “Art is human/Human is greed/Ergo greed is money.” He snaps himself out of the cycle and starts over, until he inevitably finds himself talking about money yet again.
Since they’ve gained attention globally, Korean rappers have been accused of biting off their American counterparts and even “mocking” black culture. But XXX seek out their own identity by opting for dark, intense production that would fit in more at a warehouse rave than an upscale club, bolstering their anti-establishment attitude. On Language, FRNK veers towards Arca’s Stretch 2-era twisted experimental trap and leans into the bombast of Hudson Mohawke and Lunice’s TNGHT bangers. In a standout moment at the end of “S_it,” a fascinating breakdown chops up the sound of knives unsheathing with ominous plucks from the gayageum, a traditional Korean string instrument. Instead of lifting sounds from another scene, XXX take cues from their own culture and mash them up with weirder found sounds, proving that Korean rap can innovate, not just replicate.
XXX have lamented the fact that they’ve started to gain more recognition in America than in Korea. (Kim said: “I really wanted to break the system first back home.”) But they’ve carved out a space on the internet instead of on TV or venues in their native country, where the music industry might not want to champion two iconoclasts who don’t fit the status quo. Their exile from mainstream Korean rap and pop, of course, is why Language is such a thrill to listen to. | 2018-12-27T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2018-12-26T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rap | BANA | December 27, 2018 | 7.3 | d0605b3e-0ec2-440f-b00b-a98aa984bf86 | Michelle Hyun Kim | https://pitchfork.com/staff/michelle-hyun kim/ | |
Matt Cutler, known for the lysergic downbeat and serotonin-flushed rave throwbacks he creates as Lone, released his first widely available album, Lemurian, seven years ago. The label that put it out has gone dark, but the collection has now been remastered, given striking new cover art, and, crucially, released on vinyl for the first time. | Matt Cutler, known for the lysergic downbeat and serotonin-flushed rave throwbacks he creates as Lone, released his first widely available album, Lemurian, seven years ago. The label that put it out has gone dark, but the collection has now been remastered, given striking new cover art, and, crucially, released on vinyl for the first time. | Lone: Lemurian | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/20769-lemurian/ | Lemurian | It's only been seven years since Matt Cutler released Lemurian, his first widely available album as Lone, so it might seem early for a reissue—but there are practical issues to consider. Dealmaker, the UK hip-hop label behind the original release, went dark after 2010. Cutler has since become known for his singular fusion of lysergic downbeat and serotonin-flushed rave throwbacks; it makes sense that fans would want to hear what came before his subsequent albums—Ecstasy & Friends, Emerald Fantasy Tracks, Galaxy Garden, and Reality Testing—established him a kind of King Midas in Mickey Mouse gloves. To sweeten the deal, Lemurian has been remastered, given striking new cover art (a big improvement on the original, which evoked Britpop cutout-bin CDs from the '90s), and, crucially, released on vinyl for the first time.
It's easy to imagine that Lemurian was always destined for reissue treatment, if only because it was such a nostalgic undertaking from the get-go. The longing for a lost musical utopia is woven into its very fibers. Lone's debut outing, 2007's Everything Is Changing Colour CDR, was already an attempt to recreate the sound and style that Boards of Canada pioneered a decade prior, from the blurry family photo on the cover to track titles that hinted at synaesthesia, numerology, and other cornerstones of the Scottish duo's aesthetic. The music, meanwhile, brimmed with pitch-bent synths, woozy easy-listening samples, and shuffling hip-hop beats. But it was with Lemurian that Lone really immersed himself in his idols' tape-warping acid bath.
The titles might have come straight from a Boards of Canada name generator—"Phthalo Blue", "Green Sea Pageant", "Maya Codex", "Lens Flare Lagoon"—and the music follows suit. If Everything Is Changing Colour represented Cutler's desire to sound like his heroes ("I heard Boards of Canada on John Peel when I was 12, and that was it," he told the Nottingham Post in 2008), then Lemurian found him mustering the chops to do so convincingly—and compellingly. Their hallmarks become his hallmarks: his synths are fat and rich and full, brilliant as a kaleidoscope full of diamonds. His chord changes evoke a wistful, nonspecific yearning, and the omnipresent wow and flutter lends an extra layer of temporal dislocation. Matching the distressed VHS-tape timbres, there are scraps of found footage running through "Interview at Honolulu"; the soft-focus "Girl" samples the trailer from a racy European flick from the '70s. And he's no stranger to a beautiful place out in the country: waves lap in "Under Two Palms", a river runs through "Orange Tree", and birds chirp in "Lens Flare Lagoon". Beyond those literal references to nature, the whole thing feels sun-drenched and wind-kissed. He's fond of chords that rise up and away, forever drawing your attention above the shining horizon; his Doppler-effected de-tunings feel like sound that's been carried on the breeze from three counties over.
Even the album's sequencing takes after Music Has the Right to Children and Geogaddi: in between the more fully fleshed-out songs, brief sketches suggest wide vistas before dissolving into thin air. "Buried Coral Banks" is as watery and mysterious as its title; "Green Sea Pageant", just a loop of too-bright keyboards and a scrap of voice, feels like a late-night public-access transmission spun into a locked groove. Like his heroes, Cutler has a thing for low-budget cable-TV aesthetics, and his digging game is strong: "Phthalo Blue" loops an easy-listening interlude from Bob Ross' The Joy of Painting and turns it into a woozy folktronic miniature that sounds almost like a Bibio tune.
But Lemurian, to its credit, is more than just the sum of its inspirations. His approach to rhythm is looser than Boards of Canada's, for one thing. Cutler has cited Madlib as his other key influence, and it's easy to hear how Madlib and Dilla's slack, elegantly ramshackle timekeeping animate Cutler's own rumpled sense of swing. Where Boards of Canada's beats are often crisply mechanical, his slow-burning grooves crackle like the cherry at the end of a cone-shaped spliff; they shuffle along, shoulders hunched, hands stuffed in pockets, as though they were trying to go unnoticed. Sometimes lumpy, sometimes fluid, his beats feel unusually organic, as misused as that term can be—almost as though they grew themselves, like a burl, or a fungus. Lone's later albums would incorporate the cadences of Detroit techno and breakbeat rave, but Lemurian's intense focus on the expressive possibilities of hip-hop rhythms and looped chords lends to its success as a sustained mood piece, front-to-back. It's as though he heard a kernel of something in his favorite records and, not hearing enough of it there, figured out a way to extend it to fill an entire album. That we're still going back to it seven years later, after he moved on to four albums that are far more diverse, and maybe even more ambitious, is a testament to its success. If you're interested in immersing yourself in a phthalo-blue haze, there's no better place than this. | 2015-07-01T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2015-07-01T02:00:01.000-04:00 | Electronic | R&S / Magic Wire Recordings | July 1, 2015 | 7.5 | d0627a7a-ffda-4bfb-969d-b1f483ef6629 | Philip Sherburne | https://pitchfork.com/staff/philip-sherburne/ | null |
On their seventh studio album, the UK rave veterans help themselves liberally to sounds and ideas from their back catalog while punching up the production to ultra-modern standards. | On their seventh studio album, the UK rave veterans help themselves liberally to sounds and ideas from their back catalog while punching up the production to ultra-modern standards. | The Prodigy: No Tourists | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/the-prodigy-no-tourists/ | No Tourists | It’s tempting to call the Prodigy the Rolling Stones of rave. Both bands formed in the unfashionable home counties around London. Both took Black American music, sugared it up, and flogged it back to the States. And both stopped innovating 15 years into their careers, in favor of repackaging classic sounds into stadium-friendly bundles. That makes No Tourists, the Prodigy’s seventh studio album, their Steel Wheels or Voodoo Lounge: a permissible indulgence that’s most satisfying when it reminds you of their earlier work. Prodigy leader Liam Howlett almost admitted to this nostalgic tinge when he explained in the run-up to the release that No Tourists “draws on the best elements of the band.”
He wasn’t kidding. Listening to No Tourists sometimes feels like a game of sonic whack-a-mole as you try to work out where, in the Prodigy’s long career, you’ve heard that sound before. There’s a lengthy YouTube thread under the video for “Light Up the Sky” that tries to trace elements of the song back through the Prodigy catalogue, calling on “Breathe,” “Their Law,” “Voodoo People,” and “The Day Is My Enemy” in the process, while “We Live Forever” sees Howlett sample Ultramagnetic MC’s for at least the fourth time in the Prodigy’s history.
Even when specific noises are more original, a comforting air of familiarity hangs over the album. Since rejuvenating their sound with an injection of Pendulum’s metallic drum ‘n’ bass rush on 2004’s Always Outnumbered, Never Outgunned, the Prodigy have been in happy stasis, immune to the musical world outside them. And so it proves here: the lopsided “Amen” break on “Resonate” is the only sign of the band trying anything different and even that doesn’t last much longer than the song’s first two minutes. Elsewhere, the Prodigy spew up their usual mixture of elephantine drum sounds, snarling vocals, and heavy-metal synth riffs, wrapped up in the kind of rave production rush that feels like a garish fairground ride on a cold November night.
For all that, Howlett has denied that the new album is retro, and you can kind of see his point. The production is so incredibly well crafted—loud and compressed like an aural battering ram—that it leaves the band’s older rave records sounding weedy in comparison. But if No Tourists is effective—those Eastern European festivals will be shook—they’re also having fun with it. The Prodigy have long been distinguished by their sugar-rush hooks, and No Tourists has some of their strongest, from the nagging vocal sample on “Need Some1” to the turbo synth line on “Timebomb Zone.”
Yet this fun might have ended up somewhat more profound if the Prodigy had pushed the boat out farther. In the past some of the band’s more captivating moments have come when they welcomed unexpected guests (Martina Topley-Bird on 2015’s “The Day Is My Enemy,” Dave Grohl on 2009’s “Run With the Wolves”) but the invitees on No Tourists are too close for comfort. Industrial hip-hop group Ho99o9 don’t lend anything to "Fight Fire With Fire” that The Prodigy themselves couldn’t have cooked up, while English singer-songwriter Barns Courtney merely waters down Keith Flint’s growl—itself a diluted version of John Lydon’s—on “Give Me a Signal.”
Ultimately, No Tourists is the sound of a once-inflammatory band happily lodged in its comfort zone, where virtuoso water treading meets industrial-strength customer satisfaction. It’s rave as family entertainment: good, wholesome fun with just a whiff of cartoon danger, the contented din of a bunch of punks who grew up, got rich, and—like Mick Jagger before them—realized that maybe you can get some satisfaction when your bank balance demands it. | 2018-11-06T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2018-11-06T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Electronic | BMG / Take Me to the Hospital | November 6, 2018 | 6.2 | d063e3ad-ca5b-42fc-af2a-c01eda55598a | Ben Cardew | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ben-cardew/ | |
The Queens, New York-based outfit Psalm Zero explore the fertile territory between metal and new wave on their sophomore album. | The Queens, New York-based outfit Psalm Zero explore the fertile territory between metal and new wave on their sophomore album. | Psalm Zero: Stranger to Violence | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22133-stranger-to-violence/ | Stranger to Violence | The members of the Queens, New York-based outfit Psalm Zero have impressive underground pedigrees: Frontman Charlie Looker is an alum of Extra Life, Zs, and Dirty Projectors, and former co-frontman Andrew Hock, formerly of Castevet (and no longer with Psalm Zero: While he’s on this record, he was dismissed in February after allegations of unwanted sexual contact), is steeped in jazz improv. But on their sophomore album Stranger to Violence, their musical adventurousness starts to work against them. On opening track “Stranger to Violence,” and second track “Pay Tomorrow,” the pair combines guitar riffs straight out of the industrial metal playbook with unconvincing synths that could have been lifted right out of the wan pomp of Europe’s “The Final Countdown,” Van Halen’s 5150-era forays into keyboard fluff, or countless other forgettable c-grade hard rock songs from that same period. Clearly, Looker and Hock were looking to infuse their music with melody, a noble pursuit, but they went out of their way to flirt with a cheese factor that doesn’t serve the music.
On paper, Stranger to Violence offers a new route through the fertile valley between metal and new wave. Looker’s voice and phrasing, for example, recalls Morrissey, Joey Ramone, and Killing Joke’s Jaz Coleman all at once. Looker’s vocal tone immediately splashes fresh context—and sensitivity—onto Hock’s coldly mechanical guitarwork, which follows in the footsteps of Godflesh, Prong, and Voivod at their most dissonant. But Looker and Hock don’t initially extract the full potential from these contrasts. Crude, tinny electronic drumbeats barely do more than function as demo-grade placeholders and don’t come anywhere close to the personality or menace that Godflesh were able to convey with far more limited drum-programming methods at their disposal.
Once you get past the first two songs, though, the album’s contrasts get richer, even if they don’t necessarily deliver on their promise. Looker’s voice may possess the timbre of the aforementioned vocal icons, but he is unable to move through his phrases with their flexibility. That said, his reflective, humane lyrics about mass-scale problems like imperialistic Western dominance (“Real Rain”) and global economic collapse (“Pay Tomorrow”) mesh well with his more personal outlooks on addiction (“Oblivion’s Eye”) and Jewish identity (“Not Guilty”). And as the album progresses, the pop touches undercut the seriousness of those lyrics with additional layers, rather than hollow them out as they do on the first two songs. Either way, hearing synth figures that recall the giddy celebration of ‘80s radio makes you do a double-take, a mismatch of moods that Looker intended to play up.
Likewise, Hock’s wiry guitar tone offers a change of pace from the predictably leaden guitars that have become de rigeur in contemporary heavy music. As a lifelong fan of Depeche Mode going all the way back to the first cassette he ever bought, it’s easy to see where Looker got his affinity for spartan arrangements. And as Stranger to Violence grows more compelling and its sonic quirks sound more natural on the ear, Looker and Hock’s facility with chord changes becomes more apparent, as does the inventiveness of some of their choices.
The meditative chant that opens “Real Rain,” for example, falls right into place beside Godflesh/Fudge Tunnel-style growling, and Looker sounds perfectly natural alternating between both approaches. “Not Guilty” starts out, typically enough, with a strobing tremolo guitar throb until a horn hook lifts the song from convention and sends it halfway to the renegade jazz mentality of Steely Dan. And by closing the album with the one-two punch of “White Psyche” and “Oblivion’s Eye,” Psalm Zero prove they’re perfectly capable of rewarding listeners with a dramatic payoff that they manage to sustain for a total of 15 minutes.
But Hock’s guitar riff on the verse of “Stolen by Night” highlights this album’s central issue: it takes a moment to notice how Helmet’s Page Hamilton could have written it, and that’s because it lacks Hamilton’s inimitable grit and flair. In fact, Helmet, Killing Joke, Katatonia, and the rest of Psalm Zero’s progenitors all possessed that intangible “it” factor that continue make their work instantly recognizable to this day. Even recent output by those bands oozes with character that this album, for all its efforts, simply can’t match. As a quirky bastard offspring of industrial, metal, and new wave, Stranger to Violence anchors itself in a decidedly modern brand of stress. But it’s hard to listen to it without being drawn back to the times when Psalm Zero’s influences made their own hybrids with far greater authority. | 2016-07-30T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-07-30T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Metal | Profound Lore | July 30, 2016 | 6.4 | d0691f26-5f49-41f4-a9b4-704c961e6b0a | Saby Reyes-Kulkarni | https://pitchfork.com/staff/saby-reyes-kulkarni/ | null |
These influential but under-documented L.A. punks finally get a proper release, and the five demos here reveal an adventurous band pushing the boundaries of punk orthodoxy. | These influential but under-documented L.A. punks finally get a proper release, and the five demos here reveal an adventurous band pushing the boundaries of punk orthodoxy. | Screamers: Screamers Demo Hollywood 1977 | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/screamers-screamers-demo-hollywood-1977/ | Screamers Demo Hollywood 1977 | Outside of crude bootlegs of sub-demo quality and grainy videos, the Screamers have existed mainly in wistful anecdotes conveyed by California punk royalty like Jello Biafra, Exene Cervenka, and Pat Smear, who claim the band’s outsized influence and lament their lack of proper documentation. Despite never recording an official album or single, Superior Viaduct has unearthed the closest approximation of such with Screamers Demo Hollywood 1977, a collection of five demo tracks recorded at the band’s outset.
For the uninitiated, the opener, “Magazine Love,” may initially sound incomplete, like the guitar track is missing from the mix. But all the hallmarks of the burgeoning L.A. punk sound are there. Drummer K.K. Barrett bounces, hitting the snare on the one and the three, a beat similar to the one on Fear’s “I Love Livin’ in the City.” Singer Tomata du Plenty blithely snarls about mainstream publications like Family Circle and Tiger Beat. A throbbing pulse of synthesized bass propels the song forward. But, by design, the Screamers completely eschewed that ubiquitous talisman of first-wave punk: the extremely loud electric guitar. Unconventional as it was, the Screamers looked and sounded punk anyway, and in 1977, before hardcore hegemony, that was enough.
Performing for most of their history as a quartet—toward the end, the Screamers augmented their live shows with two violinists and a female vocalist—the band swapped out guitar and bass for dual keyboards. Tommy Gear, who co-wrote most of the band’s songs with du Plenty, played an ARP Odyssey synthesizer, and David Brown mutated the sound of his Fender Rhodes by channeling it through a Big Muff distortion pedal. The Screamers were, to their dismay, contemporaneously compared to Kraftwerk, and “Punish or Be Damned” is probably the reason. Clocking in at five minutes in length—an eon in punk time, especially adjusted for inflation—the synths pave the way, swirling in ascending spirals as du Plenty adopts a staid monotone over a mostly electronic drumbeat. It’s not quite krautrock, but it makes sense that the punks at L.A.’s famous punk club the Masque watching a rail-thin du Plenty deliver his lines under meticulously styled German expressionist lighting thought so.
The twin keyboardists that defined the band’s sound had clearly designated roles, which are easiest to discern on songs like “Anything.” Gear starts with a repetitive high single note on what sounds like an organ. A few seconds in, Brown’s skronking keyboard descends like an alien ship onto the song. When the drums kick in, that extra-terrestrial noise essentially becomes the distorted bassline, and Gear’s note—still the same—acts as the lead. That sonic duality is echoed in Gear’s delivery of the song’s message, a combination of societal rage and personal desire that permeates much of the band’s output. “I get so sick of the fashion and the fascism/Makes me crazy, wanna try a little smash-ism!” Gear screams in his idiosyncratic rasp during the verse. But then he seems to stare down the listener, quietly sing-speaking: “You wanna have fun, you want a reaction/I wanna have you, I want a sex action.”
Much of Screamers Demo Hollywood 1977—and indeed band’s catalogue—deals with sex and sexuality. There’s the suggestion of smutty reading materials in the title of “Magazine Love” and the description of du Plenty’s peers on “Peer Pressure”: “Some of them are straight, and some of them are queers.” On “Mater Dolores,” du Plenty breaks into a staccato yelp to convey an existential crisis for the Virgin Mary, stifled by piety and “with no one to charm her.” He combines the sacred and the profane with one lonely image, lamenting that there are “no angels in the boudoir.” Gear and du Plenty first performed together as part of an all-drag trio following du Plenty’s early days in Seatlle’s late-’60s gay theatre underground. Their flamboyant stage presence and du Plenty’s life as an out gay punk didn’t appear to alienate the 1977 Los Angeles scene.
In September 1978, early punk documentarian Joe Rees filmed the Screamers performing at San Francisco’s Mabuhay Gardens for his studio, Target Video. One of the only other existing documents of the Screamers, it shows an audience that largely seems to worship the group. Once, a snotty punk shouts “You suck!” during a break in one song, but another voice screams, “We love you, Tomata!” and the throng of spiky-haired, mostly male kids scream along and pass du Plenty beers when he asks. Perhaps the Screamers stacked the deck for the professionally filmed set, loading the crowd with its most ardent Bay Area fans, but most evidence points to total acceptance of wherever the band wanted to take them. Before punk begat hardcore, a largely homogenized and dogmatic genre—1981 seems to be the turning point, which is coincidentally the year the Screamers split—the punks could fuck around and be as weird as they wanted. Screamers Demo Hollywood 1977 finally bottles up that singularity.
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-01-21T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2021-01-21T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Superior Viaduct | January 21, 2021 | 8 | d06a4e01-c62d-4bc8-a793-406d4648051a | Chris O'Connell | https://pitchfork.com/staff/chris-o'connell/ | |
A deluxe reissue of Minnie Riperton’s best album—fusing funk, reggae, folk, soul—includes bonus tracks and new liner notes, which elaborate on the process of recording this classic with Stevie Wonder. | A deluxe reissue of Minnie Riperton’s best album—fusing funk, reggae, folk, soul—includes bonus tracks and new liner notes, which elaborate on the process of recording this classic with Stevie Wonder. | Minnie Riperton: Perfect Angel | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/minnie-riperton-perfect-angel/ | Perfect Angel | In 1972, Minnie Riperton was semi-retired from the music business. She was in her mid-20s, married with a young child and another on the way, and wanted an easygoing life away from the industry. So Riperton, her husband Richard Rudolph, and their son Marc moved to Gainesville, Fla., where Richard worked as a weekend disc jockey for WGVL-FM and Riperton quietly wrote songs. For her, the 1960s were littered with short-lived creative endeavors and others that weren’t successful. In 1961, the Chicago native joined a local girl group called the Gems; elsewhere, she sang backup for the Dells and Etta James while working full-time as a receptionist in the office of Chess Records. After releasing a single, “Lonely Girl,” under the pseudonym Andrea Davis, Riperton joined the Rotary Connection, a psychedelic soul band that achieved moderate commercial success before dissolving in the late ’60s. In 1971, Riperton released her solo debut album, Come to My Garden, a gorgeous yet downtempo blend of jazz and orchestral soul that also flew under the radar.
Steve Slutzah, then a college rep for Epic Records, found Riperton in Gainesville a year into her sabbatical. He’d been looking for her ever since the Rotary Connection broke up, and he received word that she was there. In Florida, Riperton’s husband played Slutzah a four-song demo that he and Riperton had recorded during a previous stint in Los Angeles. Slutzah loved what he heard so much that he took the demo back to Epic’s A&R rep Don Ellis in New York, who eventually flew south to meet Rudolph and Riperton personally—and sign them. “Don flew out, sat on the floor with us on these big pillows as I played guitar and Minnie sang,” Rudolph said in a 2001 interview. “Next thing we knew, we were flying back to L.A. to make a record.”
That record became Perfect Angel, Riperton’s second and best album, which has now been remastered and reissued as a double disc with 11 bonus tracks, including two alternate versions of smash hit “Lovin’ You.” This isn’t the first time Perfect Angel has been reissued: Capitol Records re-released it following Riperton’s untimely death from breast cancer in 1979, when she was 31. But the new reissue includes a 24-page packet of rare photos and extended liner notes by Rudolph that break down Perfect Angel’s full backstory and elaborate on what it was like working in the studio with an icon, Stevie Wonder.
Riperton wanted Wonder to produce Perfect Angel, though he was then in the midst of his legendary run of albums, including 1972’s Talking Book and 1973’s Innervisions. Riperton and Wonder had met once before, in 1971, at a black expo in Chicago. They exchanged pleasantries, and Wonder insisted he’d always wanted to work with the singer. Epic didn’t believe Wonder would get on board for Perfect Angel. But an agent got Wonder on the phone, and Riperton found herself at his studio that very day, singing background on “It Ain’t No Use” and “Creepin’,” which would appear on his 1974 album, Fulfillingness’ First Finale. Still, Motown didn’t want Wonder to produce a record for Riperton, who they considered an upstart. So to circumvent Motown, Rudolph and Wonder created a joint company called Scorbu Productions, and Wonder co-produced Perfect Angel with Rudolph under an alias, “El Toro Negro.”
On paper, a Riperton-Wonder collab made complete sense. They both sang of trees and flowers, comparing Earth’s grand beauty to the spiritual power of love. To them, love was the ultimate healer; petals, water, and the sun were divine gifts from which humanity could summon long-lasting peace. They were both hippies at heart. Perfect Angel would be Riperton’s brightest moment.
With Wonder’s backing band, Wonderlove, at the helm, the album felt bold and robust. Compared with Come to My Garden’s jazz arrangements and operatic elegance, Angel combined a lush blend of funk, reggae, folk, and soul. Riperton sounded more assertive than ever on opener “Reasons,” a strong mission statement with a brazen rock sound. It showed right away that Riperton had grown, that she was a budding star coming into her own. The first of three planned singles, “Reasons” saw marginal success on the radio, as did subsequent singles “Take a Little Trip” and “Seeing You This Way.” But they showed a different side of Riperton, as did the steamy “Every Time He Comes Around.” Never before had the vocalist been so sensuous in her music.
Other standouts included “The Edge of a Dream”—which, according to Rudolph, was partially inspired by the civil rights activism of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.—and “Perfect Angel,” which was written by Wonder. Then there was “Lovin’ You,” a sweet, acoustic lullaby that Riperton delivers wistfully. It became the album’s biggest single and Riperton’s most recognized song ever. Listening to it today, “Lovin’ You” still feels remarkably affectionate, and offers the best example of her famed five-and-a-half-octave vocal range; when you think of Riperton, you remember that voice, a dynamic, heart-rendering instrument that imparts love, caring, and tender romanticism in equal measure. Of the alternate versions on Perfect Angel’s deluxe edition, the band rendition—with Wonder on Rhodes, Ollie Brown on drums, and Reggie McBride on bass—gives “Lovin’ You” a completely different sound, full of rolling basslines and floating keys steeped in Brazilian jazz.
The second disc of this reissue offers a nice glimpse into how Perfect Angel was compiled, complete with studio chatter and extended jam sessions that make this great album even greater. We hear Riperton and Wonder tinker with the pace of “Seeing You This Way,” and Wonder’s sheer delight as the extended mix of “Perfect Angel” fades to a close. While these details could be considered small in the grander scheme of the recording, they speak directly to the joy that was captured on this LP. They offer peeks under the hood, showing us that the musicians not only created a masterful record but also had fun doing it together.
Also on the second disc, album closer “Our Lives” is stretched beyond the nine-minute mark, carried by a layered funk groove and Wonder’s signature harmonica. The song feels moving and sad when reexamined now. Here, Riperton looked ahead to old age, when she and Rudolph could celebrate each other and the growth of their children. “Side by side, in the sun,” she sang, “we will build the world we’re after.” Near the end of the second verse, as Riperton reached the top of her range, she let out a soft “I love you,” that—when coupled with Wonder’s chilling chords—feels especially haunting. “During our time in Florida, Minnie and I were together all the time,” Rudolph writes in the new liner notes. “We were consumed with each other. We used our feelings as jumping off points to write songs like this one.”
Riperton died long before her vision of the future could materialize. Though she’d release three more albums before her passing, Perfect Angel caught lightning in a bottle, and presented Riperton at her creative apex. Riperton set a precedent for artists like Erykah Badu and Moses Sumney, whose respective strains of soul and folk draw a direct line to her free-spirited ethos. You hear the legend’s hushed tranquility on new songs like Sumney’s “Doomed” and throughout the ’70s-inspired funk-soul hybrid of Badu’s 2000 album, Mama’s Gun. Samples of Riperton’s music can be heard across many rap songs, from A Tribe Called Quest and Black Star to J. Cole and Kendrick Lamar. Her iconic stature was cemented on Perfect Angel—43 years on, it has become a record for the ages. In what would’ve been her 70th year of life, Riperton continues to fill the world with magic. | 2017-12-05T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2017-12-05T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Pop/R&B | Capitol | December 5, 2017 | 9 | d06dc9d7-3468-4e6c-804d-224958ad687a | Marcus J. Moore | https://pitchfork.com/staff/marcus-j. moore/ | |
Janelle Monáe's second album is looser and more physical than her 2010 debut ArchAndroid. Together with her tight-knit Wondaland collaborators (and with guest spots from Prince, Erykah Badu, Miguel, and Solange), she supervises and synthesizes a parade of golden era touchstones into a showstopping display of force and talent. | Janelle Monáe's second album is looser and more physical than her 2010 debut ArchAndroid. Together with her tight-knit Wondaland collaborators (and with guest spots from Prince, Erykah Badu, Miguel, and Solange), she supervises and synthesizes a parade of golden era touchstones into a showstopping display of force and talent. | Janelle Monáe: The Electric Lady | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/18470-janelle-monae-the-electric-lady/ | The Electric Lady | Janelle Monáe opens her second album the same way she did her 2010 debut: with a sumptuously recorded studio orchestra tossing off flourishes with abandon. When the smoke clears, the first full song features a guest vocal from...Prince. Monáe is not the kind of entertainer who takes prisoners; she operates at the locus of generosity where "generous" shades subtly into "aggressive." The song is called "Givin Em What They Love", but the feeling is a little more "take you home and make you like it."
The facts of Monáe's emergence have occasionally made it difficult to embrace her music: She arrived so thoroughly anointed by so many key figures in the entertainment industry that it has sometimes felt pointless to try and touch her. At the heart of her ornate, impressive music, a hint of chilliness kept us at arm's-length; she was a conqueror, undoubtedly, but maybe she glossed over the whole "winning the hearts of the people" thing.
With The E**lectric Lady, she finds a way to give us more of herself. Together with her tight-knit Wondaland collaborators-- Kellindo Parker, a magnificent guitarist who singlehandedly gooses several songs into transcendence; her college friends Nate “Rocket” Wonder and Chuck Lightning, and Roman GianArthur-- Monáe supervises and synthesizes a parade of golden touchstones (Sly, Stevie, Marvin) into a show-stopping display of force and talent. And at the heart of it, she embeds some of the most personal pain she's allowed to leak into her music.
Many of her lyrics here telegraph a desire to break away, to "find a way to freak out," as she puts it on "Dance Apocalyptic", which is the closest the album comes to an immediate calling card like "Tightrope". The album is overall looser and more physical than its predecessor, more concerned with dancing, sex, love, and abandon. "I wanna scream and dream and throw a love parade," she sings, in a creamy mid-register, on the moonlit Miguel duet "Primetime". The song rides a cerebral whine into an "I Only Have Eyes For You" glide, with a "Purple Rain" solo cascading over the top like an MGM waterfall.
The emotional core of the album, and its unique loneliness, derives from how Monáe both fails and succeeds to connect. She wants to scream and dream, she's found a way to freak out. The most pleading passages on Electric Lady-- gorgeously tender soul ballads like "It's Code" and "Can't Live Without Your Love"-- feature some of her most emotionally bare, strikingly abject singing. But for all of the sex-positive, queer-friendly utopianism of her music (one between-song skit advertises a "bouncing electro booty contest"; on the title track, she pictures "all the birds and the bees dancing with the freaks in the trees"; and on the Erykah Badu-featuring "Q.U.E.E.N.", she asks playfully, "Is it weird to like the way she wears her tights?"), her music has always been about the the exhilaration coming from the sensation of total control.
Attention to detail is nothing new for the admittedly obsessive Monáe, but man, there are some knockout details here: the rusty poking bedspring of a guitar that powers "Q.U.E.E.N."; the percussion loops on "Electric Lady"; the manic clean-toned jazz guitar skittering behind the vocal breakdown on "Ghetto Woman". The strings carry some of the most heart-tugging melodies, and the most beautiful moments come when songs melt from an amped-up funk groove into a glimmering, soul-revue orchestra, like "We Were Rock and Roll", "Give Em What You Love", and "Q.U.E.E.N". Gorgeous soul ballads like "Can't Live Without Your Love" are built on the kind of rich, finely managed melodies and jazzy modulations that haven't been the sound of the radio since the late 70s.
Taken as a whole, The E**lectric Lady is a convincing argument for the virtues of micromanagement, but some of the most powerful, tender moments come from acknowledging limits. On "Sally Ride," she admits defeat, of sorts, declaring she's "packing my spacesuit, and I'm taking my shit up to the moon." On "Victory," Monáe offers, "I'll just keep singing until the pain goes," and there's something humbly stoic in her voice. She's not singing to exorcise pain, which will hang around until it's good and ready to go, she's just passing the time until it does doing the thing she does best. | 2013-09-10T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2013-09-10T02:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | Bad Boy | September 10, 2013 | 8.3 | d06e2072-0303-494a-bb4e-9f5f00e7b7ef | Jayson Greene | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jayson-greene/ | null |
The Louisiana rapper's follow-up to the excellent The Luca Brasi Story finds him world-weary in all the spots where he was starry-eyed and reflective. While the pop hooks are played down, Gates' knack for detailed, despairing storytelling cogently picks up the slack. | The Louisiana rapper's follow-up to the excellent The Luca Brasi Story finds him world-weary in all the spots where he was starry-eyed and reflective. While the pop hooks are played down, Gates' knack for detailed, despairing storytelling cogently picks up the slack. | Kevin Gates: Stranger Than Fiction | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/18336-kevin-gates-stranger-than-fiction/ | Stranger Than Fiction | Louisiana rapper Kevin Gates’ The Luca Brasi Story matched the brutality of coke rap to earnest sentimentality and melodicism with such a finesse that it obscured the record's essential weirdness. Songs outlining the perils of trafficking narcotics were heard next to those inspired by romance novelist Nicholas Sparks’ The Notebook and the Twilight series. In street rap, a fixation on romance is often seen as a mark against the artist’s perceived toughness, as if the one gives the lie to the other. But the weathered rasp of Gates' voice lent a measure of grit to the love songs even as it made the deterministic criminality elsewhere in the tape feel lived-in. He's has since inked a deal with Atlantic Records (who summarily squished the 22-song tape into a digital EP) and released the low-stakes digital album Stranger Than Fiction. Where The Luca Brasi Story’s itinerant sprawl and plentiful guest appearances played like a game of show and prove, Stranger Than Fiction whittles things down to a series of pithy two- to three-minute nuggets that lurch toward resolution, often finding it within a verse or two.
The accomplished tunefulness of Luca Brasi highlights “Paper Chasers” and “Neon Lights” is pushed to the margins here. Save for the hooky despondency of late-album gem “Don’t Know What to Call It”, Stranger Than Fiction’s Kevin Gates is world-weary in all the spots where he was starry-eyed and reflective the last time around. Whether the tense shift in his songwriting is a conscious attempt to put some distance between himself and his trap house hook-men contemporaries or a function of him stockpiling melodies for a future mainstream push, his knack for detailed, despairing storytelling cogently picks up the slack.
Stranger Than Fiction draws much of its gravitas from Gates’ own colorful back story: he cuts through the airy synths and open spaces of “4:30AM” with a travelogue of betrayal for which he’s as much a culprit as a victim, and on “4 Legs and a Biscuit”, a viewing of the gangster flick King of New York trips off a broadside about the constant strain of legal woes. “Tiger” elaborates on the period when he quit dealing drugs to pursue a career in rap, only to fall prey to a series of janky promoters and label executives whose shifty machinations made him the vic instead of the villain. Stranger Than Fiction is a litany of near-misses with police and armed foes interspersed with emotionally guarded examinations of the trust issues they leave as collateral damage. But where Gates has pulled back from the emotional heft that made Luca Brasi such a compelling character composite, he’s poured his energy into the mechanics of rhyming with such fervor that what’s being said in these songs is often trumped for intrigue by the way he says it.
While Gates’ stories suggest a battle-damaged cynic, his restless wordplay gives voice to the excitable language nerd beneath the gruff exterior. “Die About It” effortlessly switches up cadences mid-flow, shifting from a laconic swing to a sparse, staccato yelp and back. On “Careful”, he goofily adopts three different Southern accents in two verses, only one of which is his own. “MYB” reduces his voice to a guttural whisper, rendering the song’s callous dress-down of a lesser criminal all the more diabolical in the process. Gates sells all of these experiments with the same verve, and the album scarcely misses a mark until Wiz Khalifa hits the buzzerbeater on the album closing remix of Gates’ 2012 single “Satellites” with a wastepaper-basket-deep verse delivered in a bratty yawp grossly ill-suited to the rest of the song.
The success of Stranger Than Fiction is as much a result of keen lyricism and inventive vocal tricks as good editing. Its 14 tracks are over and done in just a little more than 40 minutes. The brevity and the relatively monochromatic production, a glut of foreboding minor key trap beats, collude to force the spotlight on Gates’ versatile rapping. From the achy old gunshot wound that flares up after Gates gets stabbed and the glass of Sprite that’s purple instead of pink because he overdid it on the promethazine on “4:30AM” to the Popeyes dinner that lends the title to “4 Legs and a Biscuit” to the punch in the face that doesn’t hurt on “MYB” and the succession cars he laments not being able to drive on “Don’t Know What to Call It”, the record's uncompromising hard luck street narratives are dispensed with a preternaturally sharp eye for detail that dabs Gates’ economic writing with a shock of much-needed color. | 2013-07-26T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2013-07-26T02:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Breadwinners Association | July 26, 2013 | 7.6 | d06f8374-1beb-446d-8982-d28d32eda9d0 | Craig Jenkins | https://pitchfork.com/staff/craig-jenkins/ | null |
Inspired by waltz time, heartbreak, and ambient Americana, Jason Lytle returns with his characteristic mix of humor and tragedy. | Inspired by waltz time, heartbreak, and ambient Americana, Jason Lytle returns with his characteristic mix of humor and tragedy. | Grandaddy: Blu Wav | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/grandaddy-blu-wav/ | Blu Wav | Jason Lytle has always written in the folk tradition. Even in his early songs as Grandaddy, the Californian tended towards fictionalized narratives, aphoristically making sense of technological apprehension like a Pete Seeger or Judy Collins for the turn of the millennium. Rather than lament the uniform “little boxes” of post-war suburbia, Lytle channeled the alienation born from even smaller boxes—computer monitors, cubicles—into evergreen ennui. By casting his emotions onto our surroundings, both organic and non, Lytle rendered them universal in their profound specificity: “Grieve like a freeway tree,” he sang on the 2017’s Last Place, capturing a sadness so uniquely American and yet so instantly legible. On Blu Wav, Grandaddy’s first album in seven years, Lytle leans into bittersweet Americana twang, a natural fit for his fatally flawed, cautiously optimistic cast of characters.
Inspiration for the shift toward country arrived when Lytle heard singer Patti Page’s 1950 hit “Tennessee Waltz” on his car radio. Struck by both the song’s time signature—he felt that he already naturally wrote in a waltz’s 3/4 or 6/8—and its gentle, winsome strings, he set out to make an album in a similar style. He captured his aesthetic vision in the titular phrase, a portmanteau of bluegrass and new wave—and since it wouldn’t be a proper Grandaddy title without at least one double meaning, “wav” also refers to the lossless audio format.
In part, Blu Wav recalls what some writers have dubbed “cosmic country” (or if you want to sound really smug, “bootgaze”), wherein acts such as SUSS and Luke Schneider combine traditional folk instruments like lap steel guitar with modular synthesizers and drum machines. With the addition of Max Hart’s pedal steel, Blu Wav sounds as expansive as the open road: “Cabin in My Mind” layers flurries of arpeggiated synths and soft guitar atop Hart’s winding melodies, a warm invitation to Lytle’s imagined oasis. On “Long as I’m Not the One,” Hart’s pedal steel and a few well-placed bass plucks imagine Grandaddy as the Emo Morricone, singing about loneliness over swelling synths that conjure an endless Western expanse. His instrumentals—“Let’s Put This Pinto on the Moon” and “Yeehaw AI in the Year 2025”—take a far more impressionistic approach, recalling David Bowie’s Berlin Trilogy ambient work with Brian Eno. Between gurgling machine bleeps, sounds from Lytle’s home recording setup bleed into the mix—coyote howls, wind batting the walls—forming a cinematic combination of quotidian life with the alien sounds of synthesis. It isn’t quite familiar, but it’s not exactly frightening either: Blu Wav lives in the eerie in-between.
“I wish the happier, more upbeat [songs] just flowed out of me easier,” Lytle said in a recent interview. But in a departure from his previous records, here he at least sounds sanguine, even if his characters are in dire straits. The gentler sound of Blu Wav underscores lyrics that are typically Grandaddy in their mix of humor and tragedy: There’s the office flirtation gone wrong on “Watercooler,” where he can’t bring himself to call a coworker and tell her their relationship won’t work. The album also deals, opaquely, with Lytle’s divorce: In perhaps its most devastating refrain, he sees a former flame with a new lover and assesses the damage: “You’re going to be fine, and I’m going to hell.” But Grandaddy’s most memorable songs often leave the realm of his personal life completely, and on “Jukebox App,” he invents a personal purgatory: A heartbroken boy sits in the parking lot of the diner where his ex and her new beau are eating, furiously programming the restaurant's jukebox app to play “our song” on repeat. It’s a hilariously contemporary punishment, but his protagonist’s demented agony long predates TouchTunes.
When Lytle heard “Tennessee Waltz,” a song about a lover leaving you for one of your friends, he saw it as “simple and sweet.” That same contrast—gentle guitars and soft piano beneath lyrics about abandonment—grounds this album. Blu Wav has a calmness and ease, even as Lytle sings about feeling miserable. The guiding rhythm of the waltz suits the record’s strange, contained world, which seems to move one step back for every two steps forward. Lytle, a former amateur skater, has recently taken up long distance cycling, and Blu Wav also echoes the sport’s balance of tranquility and steady momentum. You might say he’s finally heeded his own advice, turning off his computer and heading to the cabin in his mind. | 2024-02-22T00:02:00.000-05:00 | 2024-02-22T00:02:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Dangerbird | February 22, 2024 | 8 | d07dcd63-eae3-4c69-b27f-8cd0154c1442 | Arielle Gordon | https://pitchfork.com/staff/arielle-gordon/ | |
The Australian electro-pop veterans return with a climate-change album both as chilled as an upscale boutique and as politically engaged as your Instagram feed. | The Australian electro-pop veterans return with a climate-change album both as chilled as an upscale boutique and as politically engaged as your Instagram feed. | Cut Copy: Freeze, Melt | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/cut-copy-freeze-melt/ | Freeze, Melt | Cut Copy have been at it for almost 20 years, which seems impossible. They seem to exist outside of time, perhaps because they’ve been looking back from the start—immediately appealing and with a toothsome competence, but more about articulating taste than defining a singular point of view.
Maybe bandleader Dan Whitford felt stale after 2017’s slick bummer, Haiku from Zero. Maybe the anxiety of influence had settled into ennui. For whatever reason, Whitford left his native Australia and decamped to Copenhagen, endured Scandinavia’s dark winters of the soul, and obsessed about climate change before returning to Melbourne to get the band together again. The result is an album as chilled as an upscale boutique in a heatwave and as politically engaged as your Instagram feed, which is to say very and not quite as much as it thinks.
Lead single “Love Is All We Share” is sumptuous, with an icy choir hovering at eye level and little squiggles signifying the alienation that arrived with the dial-up modem, leaving us more connected and more isolated than ever. “Dead to the world,” he sings, as beautiful chunks of harmony float by like floes in a rising sea, “can you feel it in your fingers?/Love is all we share.” There’s more numbness than sentiment. If this “we” is us in Australia, or Denmark, or the United States—or, sadly, so much of the rest of the world—love is not all we share; rage and terror are at least two more things. Anyway, in “A Perfect Day,” Whitford is “running out of love” but does have very well recorded percussion echoing like bad thoughts, and glistening synths that can fill up an otherwise empty room. “What a perfect day,” he sings, “to be alone.”
Words barely make it into “Stop Horizon,” a twinkler of plucked guitars and pitter-pat keyboards, as if the Orb’s “Little Fluffy Clouds” blew in some light showers. Later, a track called “Rain” arrives, and whether it signifies tears, a biblical cleanse, the flooding doom on our horizons, or a pitiless drought which will allow the West to burn unabated, it puddles beautifully. It’s basically an onomatopoeia, but the meaning washes away. Lyricless “In Transit” moves the album to a close, with little stuttering ticks of time running out for us all and a rather lovely sing-song melody that murmurs, Oh well.
“Running in the Grass” has a bit more bite, with a sharp swiping blade of a noise that could give your eardrum a papercut. It severs the chorus (“You cut me down to the bone”) from the verses. If crowds ever gather again, it will please them. As will “Like Breaking Glass” which is mixed, like the rest of the album, by the Knife and Fever Ray collaborator Christoffer Berg. It softens those Swedes’ silent shouts into slightly hushed sighs. And opener “Cold Water” is wistful and effective, a soggier take on Portishead’s “The Rip,” soaring upward in hopes of a festival to survey. Would that it find might one.
Festival culture, with its massive expenditures of energy and waste creation, is (was?) hell on the climate. Touring, too, not to mention the transubstantiation of fossil fuel into beautiful vinyl. If it’s hypocritical for Cut Copy to swap the joys of neon and dancing and kissing for a political agenda diametrically opposed to their own work, well, hypocrisy is the price of existence. The trick is to acknowledge reality without aestheticizing peril. The cover of Freeze, Melt nods to the conceptual artist John Baldessari, whose death at the start of 2020 might have warned us of the waves of bullshit to come. Its own concept is unimpeachable: Climate change does suck. Ice is a memory. Mostly, though, Freeze, Melt just feels like a nice warm bath. | 2020-08-25T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-08-25T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Cutters / The Orchard | August 25, 2020 | 6.5 | d087857a-4e64-48b1-90fb-13f1f63a05f6 | Jesse Dorris | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jesse-dorris/ | |
Samantha Urbani’s debut is alt-pop with style and nuance. She coats her sound with some retro ’80s accessories, but her real emotions remain grounded in the present. | Samantha Urbani’s debut is alt-pop with style and nuance. She coats her sound with some retro ’80s accessories, but her real emotions remain grounded in the present. | Samantha Urbani: Policies of Power EP | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/samantha-urbani-policies-of-power-ep/ | Policies of Power EP | Samantha Urbani has been exploring the boundaries of pop music since her days as a founder and frontwoman of the Bushwick group Friends. The collective—who channeled ESG and Stacey Q.—was a Brooklyn DIY staple and one among a coterie of producers and performers finding blog acclaim for pushing pop outside of its overly-manufactured confines (see: Charli XCX’s “Nuclear Seasons,” MNDR’s “Fade to Black”). Like other subcultures before it, alt-pop was a direct response to 2010s Top 40 despondency. The artists creating some of the hookiest songs of the year weren’t necessarily trying to navigate the indie world, but rather trying to make glossy, catchy music whose substance and heart were in plain view.
“The current, tragic state of pop music doesn’t mean that people should forget about great pop artists of the past or write off the genre’s future,” Urbani said in 2012. “Look at somebody like Prince, for example; he was such a genius who was in control of all aspects of his music, and he still made complex yet commercially palatable music with a statement behind it.” Five years later, Urbani has readied her debut, a five-track collection called Policies of Power. If her goal is simply to have control over music and create sonic and lyrical depth while still being primed for radio, then she ticked all of those boxes easily with her EP.
Featuring two songs released in 2015 (“1 2 3 4” and “U Know I Know”), Power is a product of patience. In 2016, she launched her own record label URU (as in “you are you”) where she first reissued overlooked British synth-pop duo Rexy’s 1981 album Running Out of Time. The reissue was released in tandem with a covers series for which she enlisted people like Ariel Pink and Zoë Kravitz, among others, to perform alongside her. Her own music stayed on the back-burner.
Even though one of her oldies, “1 2 3 4,” is the most euphoric point on the album, the new songs are deft and nuanced—synths make way for sax on “Time Time Time” (supplied by Sade’s co-writer and “Smooth Operator” saxophonist Stuart Matthewman) and ’80s hair metal shredding goes bubblegum on “Hints & Implications.” The vibe can feel more suited to a decades-old, forgotten teen comedy, but because Urbani’s lyrics avoid platitudes, it scans as something more grounded and mature. “No more invitations/I got the hint that you don’t want them,” she sings on the hook. “Without the same information/We’re living in two separate dimension/So break it to me.” It isn’t as detailed as the failed romance narratives some like Kelela displays so baldly, but it is far more personal than the vague missives pop so often provides.
“Go Deeper” pulls out the same shattered poetry: “I had an attitude/And you can't, can't, can't stand that/I hear you, respect your solitude/But was it poetry when you told me you would be right back?” Some listeners will suspect that lines like these are about her former paramour Dev Hynes, but those coming to the EP for indie gossip are here for the wrong reason. Urbani’s big draw is her contrast, the elation that glows behind the sadness revealing more and more layers of her sound and personality.
Policies of Power may only suffer because it does have so much style. Urbani is often compared to Madonna because of her ’80s throwbacks caked in contemporary gloss. But unlike some mainstream pop music that is incubated in songwriting camps with each piece fabricated until it is blemish-free, Urbani’s music comes almost entirely from herself. Considering the time it took for her to reveal who she is and the art she wants to make, it was worth the wait. | 2017-08-19T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-08-19T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | Lucky Number / URU | August 19, 2017 | 7.2 | d08b8959-f26a-4e4b-8a24-2cba9e94d8e1 | Claire Lobenfeld | https://pitchfork.com/staff/claire-lobenfeld/ | null |
Experimental guitarist and ex-Harry Pussy member Bill Orcutt’s A History of Every One comprises cover versions of old songs, some dating back to the 1800s. He doesn't view these standards as patterns to trace, but as collections of moments that inspire him toward new ones. | Experimental guitarist and ex-Harry Pussy member Bill Orcutt’s A History of Every One comprises cover versions of old songs, some dating back to the 1800s. He doesn't view these standards as patterns to trace, but as collections of moments that inspire him toward new ones. | Bill Orcutt: A History of Every One | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/18541-bill-orcutt-a-history-of-every-one/ | A History of Every One | Bill Orcutt’s guitar playing is all about possibilities. As he unfurls impulsive runs and quick turns, each move opens a web of new paths he could travel. As a result, when I listen to his albums I end up thinking as much about what could happen as what is happening. But then Orcutt’s plucks and strums are usually so quick and idea-filled, it sometimes feels like everything that could happen actually is happening.
Given this boundless approach to improvised playing, A History of Every One—an album comprised solely of cover versions—is risky. By limiting himself to others’ songs, Orcutt could sound handcuffed, beholden to preset parameters rather than following his muse wherever it wants to take him. Further complicating matters, he’s chosen tunes that are all over 50 years old (some even go back to the 1800s). Many, especially ubiquitous ones like “White Christmas” and “When You Wish Upon a Star”, are so culturally ingrained, any attempt to transform them could be like trying to reshape the Grand Canyon.
Fortunately, Orcutt views these songs not as patterns to trace but collections of moments that can inspire him toward new ones. That's not really a surprise—he previously used the raw ideas in his head as points from which to launch, so here he takes concepts well-worn by others and does the same. But that doesn’t make it any less of a bold move, because it’s still rare to hear covers that don’t mimic originals or simply replace one style with another.
Orcutt has found another way. He truly explores these songs, eager to hurtle down any tangent that each phrase, hook, or melody could lead to. From a single note he’ll burst into a looped figure or angled run, then dart back to the original figure to find more uncharted avenues to trample. His restless style makes each piece sound three-dimensional, as shards of songs pass each other in a storm of string activity. It makes for exhilarating, sometimes exhausting listening. But it also makes for music that, though it hints at structure, never sounds predictable and rarely settles.
It also makes for pretty varied music considering it’s just one man and six strings—or actually four, assuming Orcutt’s still playing his vintage Kay acoustic guitar. A few tracks fly by, like a blistering take on “Zip a Dee Doo Dah” (from the 1946 Disney movie Song of the South) and a nearly-epileptic version of the 1915 union anthem “Solidarity Forever”. But others mix fast runs, sharp stops, and gradual stretches. Orcutt’s rapid-fire sounds are a wonder, but it’s even more impressive when he cuts them with pauses or slows them into moments of reflection. This turns the 1925 song “Spanish is the Loving Tongue” into a kind of serrated elegy, and the Lightnin’ Hopkins’ “Bring Me My Shotgun” into a seamless mesh of fire and ice. He even turns a Harvard fight song into a spirited mantra of pointed plucks and urgent moans.
Those moans are stronger than ever on A History of Every One. I’m not sure if Orcutt “sings” (which for him means wordless humming, howling, and wheezing) more than on previous full-lengths, but it sure feels like it. As the album progresses, his voice becomes increasingly prominent, leading the songs rather than reacting to them. By the time he gets to a swaying approximation of “Ballad of Davy Crockett”, you can almost hear him crooning the melody like he’s teaching it to his guitar. Perhaps Orcutt felt more singing would help capture spirit of these originals, most of which center on lyrics. But just as likely, he needed to deploy all his weapons to find new ideas in songs played so much their potential might already be exhausted.
A History of Every One shows that’s far from the case. It also represents a turn in Orcutt’s approach. These songs seem to have inspired a more contemplative mode. It may be paradoxical to call music this active “contemplative,” but even when he’s got the pedal to the floor, you can hear Orcutt thinking these songs through—rolling them over in his mind while pouring them out from his fingers. This culminates in perhaps the simplest thing he’s ever recorded, an album-closing cover of Stephen Foster’s “Massa’s in the Cold Cold Ground”. Sparse and moving, it shows Orcutt can do as much with restraint as he can with speed—opening up yet another path he can pursue. | 2013-10-14T02:00:04.000-04:00 | 2013-10-14T02:00:04.000-04:00 | Experimental | Editions Mego | October 14, 2013 | 7.8 | d08cd4b8-2251-4264-84c8-e042252aa4d1 | Marc Masters | https://pitchfork.com/staff/marc-masters/ | null |
Still trying to capture the lightning of his star-making debut, the Compton rapper’s latest is an attempted return to form that plays it far too safe. | Still trying to capture the lightning of his star-making debut, the Compton rapper’s latest is an attempted return to form that plays it far too safe. | Roddy Ricch: Feed tha Streets III | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/roddy-rich-feed-tha-streets-iii/ | Feed tha Streets III | Roddy Ricch is stuck in limbo. Fueled by a bevy of hooks, the 24-year-old Compton artist’s 2019 debut, Please Excuse Me for Being Antisocial, propelled him to a stratosphere of rap superstardom not seen since 50 Cent’s mammoth debut. The record was slightly personal but mostly familiar, showcasing the infectious melodies of the era’s mainstream rap, proof that the sound of mid-2010s Atlanta had spread across state lines. On his 2021 follow-up, LIVE LIFE FAST, he struggled to recapture that lightning in a bottle. Instead of continuing to add his unique spin to a sound that was being regurgitated everywhere, he faded into the background. Feed Tha Streets III, his latest project, is supposed to be a return to form, but it suffers from the anxiety of trying to conform to fan expectations and subdues his best traits.
The game plan: Strip away the glitz and glamor of his prior studio album and retreat to the bare-bones approach of his mixtapes. It’s a good idea in theory, but the problem with Roddy’s music lately isn’t that he’s trying to accomplish too much—it’s that the melodies and beats have become so anonymous that if you’re not paying attention, you’ll forget whose song you’re listening to. “Blue Cheese” is a dry impression of a pumped-up Young Thug song—down to the woo hoos—that falls flat without any identifiable eccentricities to get stuck in your head. The repetitive ad-libs on “Twin” (“Across the street from my hotel”) only get more tiresome as he keeps going. Has Roddy been hit with a neuralyzer? At the peak of his powers, he had a knack for stringing together lines with ease, turning simple concepts into full-blown hits with slight vocal twitches and emotive singing. On Feed Tha Streets III, he seems to have forgotten how.
When Roddy raises the energy, it’s a reminder of how electric his voice can be. Single “Aston Martin Truck” is buoyed by pitch and tempo variations that keep things interesting the whole ride. When he wails “My mama said she see the demons on me/So I gotta stay outta her way” on “Get Swept,” his frank delivery stands out, even if it doesn’t lead anywhere. These jumps in intensity are the shots of espresso the album needs. But they aren’t enough. Maybe a Mustard feature could have broken up the formulaic production choices: If the hi-hats or acoustic guitar on “Favor for a Favor” had an inkling more imagination to meld with the croons, the song could morph from fine to good.
When Roddy finds a topic that doesn’t feel like just a backdrop to a celebratory Instagram post, he can express a sense of urgency, like when he lays out how he wants his son’s childhood to be different from his own on closer “Letter to My Son.” Looking inward and getting personal isn’t the only way to move forward, but he’ll need some semblance of depth to separate his music from all the other rappers jockeying for the top spot on Apple Music’s Rap Life playlist. At least LIVE LIFE FAST made a few efforts to diversify his sound. On Feed Tha Streets III, Roddy sounds so worried about stumbling that he ends up moving at a snail’s pace. | 2022-11-30T00:01:00.000-05:00 | 2022-11-30T00:01:00.000-05:00 | Rap | Atlantic | November 30, 2022 | 5.3 | d09104e8-f252-4631-bf91-6faf085900eb | Serge Selenou | https://pitchfork.com/staff/serge-selenou/ | |
The duo’s second collaborative album is an enveloping matrix of sounds both familiar and unfamiliar—a form of ambient music that refuses to recede into the background. | The duo’s second collaborative album is an enveloping matrix of sounds both familiar and unfamiliar—a form of ambient music that refuses to recede into the background. | Félicia Atkinson / Jefre Cantu-Ledesma: Limpid as the Solitudes | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/felicia-atkinson-jefre-cantu-ledesma-limpid-as-the-solitudes/ | Limpid as the Solitudes | For Félicia Atkinson, sound is pretty much sentient. She calls it a “live presence” that “can get inside people, get in and out as it pleases.” Her music works under a central assumption: We merely share the world with all the sonic phenomena swirling all around us. It’s this reverence for the spiritual side of sound, as well as its omnipresence, that has made the French experimental musician’s catalog so fascinating. She deploys a bevy of tools and techniques—voice, assorted synths, field recordings, and numerous passages of unknown origin—to achieve uncanny effects. Her songs can generate strange, psychoacoustic sensations; the buzz and static of her compositions can in ring your ears like insects trapped in your skull.
The New York ambient musician Jefre Cantu-Ledesma has similar proclivities, using a tsunami of guitar dissonance and echo to create formidable and emotional noise recordings. Limpid as the Solitudes is the pair’s second collaborative album, and it is a brain-teasing exercise in sonic manipulation. Combining animal groans, rumbling weather fronts, and busy urban landscapes with surreal synths and lulling drone, the project is the perfect middle ground for Cantu-Ledesma’s sculptural approach and Atkinson’s fantastical mindset.
The four compositions on Limpid as the Solitudes reveal few clues as to how they were made. There’s a sort of alchemy at work in the way the two create a pool of noise and echo in which sounds bob like buoys in a wine-dark sea. On the opener, “And the Flowers Have Time for Me,” they introduce countless little details across a nearly six-minute span, creating a fully realized world to inhabit: what might be a crowd jostling in public transit, the pulse of an EKG machine, naked flesh rubbing up against coarse fabric, doors opening and closing, water pouring from a carafe, birds chirping, storms cloud gathering on a sunny day. Undergirding it all is the simultaneously calming and queasy rumble of synthesizers and the hiss of what might be tape delay.
The effect that this slow accumulation of so many familiar and unfamiliar sounds creates is disorienting. The music’s easy flow invites relaxation, but its many subtle shifts make it hard to drift away, and the way they force dozens of contrasting textures together can be quietly jarring. This is especially true of “Her Eyelids Say,” which sounds like two extremely different songs playing in parallel. On one side, there’s what feels like an alien abduction, with tractor beams buzzing overhead; crawling, creeping, buzzing bodies moving all around; and fluids dripping into a receptacle. On the other side is a patient progression of piano notes that might be the rehearsal for a recital.
What makes Limpid as the Solitudes such an excellent ambient release isn’t just the rigor of its formal experimentation. Like William Basinski, these two know how to make a song that spills and mixes into the listener’s own environment. The album’s centerpiece, the 18-minute “All Night I Carpenter,” is a wide, rich, and open space that folds nearly all of the record’s previous sounds into a warm whirlpool of hum. Whatever else is happening around you at the time gets sucked into the mix: A hissing heater or a honking horn might be confused for a purposeful gesture. That randomness, that possibility of a song changing with every listen, multiplies Limpid as the Solitudes’ many rewards. | 2018-11-13T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2018-11-13T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Experimental | Shelter Press | November 13, 2018 | 7.7 | d0929432-eb94-4576-8fe6-ccc5bcad0687 | Kevin Lozano | https://pitchfork.com/staff/kevin-lozano/ | |
This fiery live recording, the first to feature Wire's most recent stage lineup, focuses on the elegantly textured 2011 collection Red Barked Tree. | This fiery live recording, the first to feature Wire's most recent stage lineup, focuses on the elegantly textured 2011 collection Red Barked Tree. | Wire: The Black Session: Paris, 10 May 2011 | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/16257-wire-the-black-session-paris-10-may-2011/ | The Black Session: Paris, 10 May 2011 | Thirty-five years into their start-and-stop career, Wire are not short on live albums. This is the 15th they've released since 2004 through their own Pinkflag imprint, covering all three incarnations of the band: the brittle, brainy punks who hurtled artward from 1976 to 1980, the poppy, brainy "beat-combo" that branched out toward both alternative radio tunes and monomaniacal hammer-drone from 1985 to 1992, and the tough, brainy old guys who reconvened in 2000 and have been bearing down hard ever since. But the only really significant live Wire discs are the out-of-print Document and Eyewitness-- a bootleg-quality set centered on an abrasive 1980 gig that featured almost entirely new material-- and 1989's It's Beginning to and Back Again, which was so heavily reworked in the studio that it's barely a live album at all.
That shortlist hasn't changed with the new addition to the pile. The formal distinction of The Black Session is that it's the first recording to feature Wire's most recent stage lineup. (For those who haven't been following closely, founding guitarist Bruce Gilbert left in the mid-2000s; Margaret Fielder McGinnis of Laika replaced him on tour for a few years, and, since 2010, Matt Simms has augmented the remaining trio of original members on tour.)
The days when Wire would turn up for gigs with a set of material the audience had never heard before, or save the throwbacks for the encore, are behind them. At this gig, they run through the better part of 2011's Red Barked Tree, basically ignore everything else from the past 24 years except for 2002's hardcore-velocity "Comet", and toss in a couple of old favorites. It's particularly unsettling to hear "Map Ref. 41ºN 93ºW", one of their most precisely constructed studio singles, in a sloppy garage-band rendition-- metronomic drummer Robert Grey struggles to keep the tempo steady, and singer/guitarist Colin Newman sounds uncomfortably exposed when nobody joins him for harmonies on the chorus. The final encore is one that rejoined their repertoire in 2000 and stayed there: "Pink Flag", with its original two-chord structure replaced by a single blaring E chord at which they hammer for seven minutes or so until it disintegrates into end-of-show chaos.
For Wirephiles, the value of The Black Session is the live treatments of the Red Barked Tree tracks. As elegantly textured as that album was, it also sounded reserved and unconvinced in places, and tried to pass off some old Wire ideas as new ones. These versions have more fire and bite to them, even on slow numbers like "Down to This" and "Adapt", and the band has rearranged "Clay" to not sound quite so much like a faint carbon copy of 1978's "I Am the Fly". There's no getting over the resemblance of "Moreover" to Wire's 1979 single "A Question of Degree", but it's mostly an excuse for them to stomp hard, and for Simms and Newman to contrast a tightly wound little riff with a high-pressure spray of noise.
In the context of Wire's catalog, this is just another document of incremental change, and not even the best live recording they've made lately (that would be their gorgeous Daytrotter session from 2008). Still, if this were the only Wire record in existence-- a debut album by a new quartet, three of them in their late 50s, captured live on French radio-- it'd be bracingly new even in 2012, an original take on punk minimalism, guitar sound, singing technique, tunefulness vs. dissonance, and so on. "My God! They're so gifted!" Newman yells in "Two People in a Room", and as usual he could be referring to himself and his collaborators. | 2012-02-07T01:00:02.000-05:00 | 2012-02-07T01:00:02.000-05:00 | Rock | Pinkflag | February 7, 2012 | 6.3 | d097aa61-135d-490d-9a9e-d530ee07ab30 | Douglas Wolk | https://pitchfork.com/staff/douglas-wolk/ | null |
The Berlin tech-house duo’s debut album purports to expand its palette, but an impressive list of collaborators can’t keep the music from lapsing into middle-of-the-road anonymity. | The Berlin tech-house duo’s debut album purports to expand its palette, but an impressive list of collaborators can’t keep the music from lapsing into middle-of-the-road anonymity. | Âme: Dream House | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/ame-dream-house/ | Dream House | It’s hard to remember, but the oft-overlapping genres known as tech house and minimal were once bastions of experimental dance music. As the 1990s bled into the first decade of the new millennium, producers like Richie Hawtin, Akufen, Cassy, and Levon Vincent explored a lean, groundbreaking hybrid of techno’s futurism and house’s funk. Sturdy, endless grooves bolstered druggy detours, glitchy hiccups, and startling ambiguity. Breakout star Ricardo Villalobos matched DJ celebrity with a recorded output of tunneling vortexes, hour-plus-long remixes of folk melodies, and feverish mirages. He was recognized for his efforts with a cover story in The Wire, his name next to Whitehouse and Laurie Anderson.
But as the aughts drew on, a sense of futility crept into the party. The music’s immaculate strangeness began to seem fussy and irrelevant as dubstep, grime, and rawer strains of techno came to the fore. It was at this crossroads that Innervisions, the label run by Berlin’s Dixon and Âme, stepped in. Their output cleaned away the freaky debris of minimal, bolstered the production to soundsystem-rattling perfection, and coated everything in a warm, welcoming glaze. Their signature has been one of the most influential in modern dance music: Resident Advisor’s readers repeatedly voted Dixon as the No. 1 DJ of the year, and EDM’s flirtation with four-on-the-floor piggybacks directly on the smooth, crowd-pleasing drops Innervisions perfected. If the label remains a template for dance music’s current mainstream, the duo Âme arguably embody one of the most distilled iterations of that formula. Now, 14 years since their first release, they are releasing Dream House, their debut album.
Âme made a name for themselves with tracks like “Rej” and “Balladine”: monstrously effective dancefloor bombs that built shamelessly towards huge moments but were tinged with just enough melancholy to keep things tasteful. Dream House, however, is billed as an expansion of their voice. Moving away from the club, the record draws an eye-grabbing list of collaborators, including Matthew Herbert, Cluster founder Roedelius, German art-punk veteran Gudrun Gut, and Planningtorock, and attempts 11 mood pieces, genre workouts, and studio experiments. Like all their work, Dream House sounds expensive and carefully constructed. It’s also punishingly square.
The record suffers from a false binary which remains endemic in dance music: the questionable idea that fun, energetic work should be saved for 12”s while albums are reserved for Serious Artistic Statements. The press release for Dream House explains that it’s “an evocative home listening journey,” as if no one ever listened to energetic music at home. It’s an absurd proposition—imagine Metallica crafting Kill ‘Em All or Yoko Ono prepping Plastic Ono Band deciding to tone it down for “home listening.”
Of course, Âme aren’t obligated to rev their motors if they aren’t in the mood, but Dream House is so bereft of substance that you sense the duo backed into these tracks via mood boards and career strategization rather than genuine inspiration. There’s not a wrong note on the entire album, yet nothing leaps out at you either. It’s a polite wave of empty gestures and aesthetic nods, neither demanding to be heard nor allowing you to be overwhelmed.
The duo draws from Can’s humid wiggle, EBM’s primitive futurism, Pet Shop Boys’ studio perfection, Tangerine Dream’s layered arpeggiations, and "Miami Vice"’s steely soundtrack. These influences could suggest an arty cruise through the 1980s, but Âme’s years of big-room gigs don’t fall away so easily. Everything winds up tech-housed in the end. Sometimes it’s harmless, as on the perfectly lovely chillwave instrumental “Futuro Antico,” but elsewhere things get rough. Herbert, the loungey dark prince of minimal, layers his vocals on “The Line”: “Still just sitting around,” he croons over a melodramatic builder that could pass for the Chainsmokers on a Peter Gabriel binge; “it would be a curious thing if I felt the fury was real.” This from the guy who once sampled a pig being killed to raise “complex questions about our relationship to these often-maligned and misunderstood creatures.” Meanwhile, “No War” loops its title with insulting banality, as if Âme were blithely proposing world peace over oat milk cappuccinos.
Mostly though, Dream House is simply anonymous to the point of invisibility. Heard in a clothing shop or a commercial, you wouldn’t notice a thing, but that’s just the rub. The duo spent three years on this album, and in that time scrubbed it clean of almost any identifying marks or glimpses of spontaneity. In the group’s bio, they describe their music as “strumming at your heartstrings.” This isn’t a good thing. If Âme wanted to make a truly serious artistic statement, they could have risked looking ugly, weird, or uncool. Instead, Dream House forsakes even the grandiose manipulations of their EPs for a placid, empty surface. It looks good on paper. It will sound nice while you cook dinner. Then you’ll forget you ever heard it. | 2018-06-02T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-06-02T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Innervisions | June 2, 2018 | 4.8 | d0a91801-ca43-4c9a-8578-22c85ff7653c | Daniel Martin-McCormick | https://pitchfork.com/staff/daniel-martin-mccormick/ | |
This set from the lo-fi pop eccentric gathers odds and ends from across his career. But weirdly it functions surprisingly well as an album, documenting changes in his sonic evolution and singular sense of humor along the way. | This set from the lo-fi pop eccentric gathers odds and ends from across his career. But weirdly it functions surprisingly well as an album, documenting changes in his sonic evolution and singular sense of humor along the way. | John Maus: A Collection of Rarities and Previously Unreleased Material | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/16833-a-collection-of-rarities-and-previously-unreleased-material/ | A Collection of Rarities and Previously Unreleased Material | There is obsessive fandom and then there is unguarded, shameless devotion. Mausspace is a place for the latter. Launched in October 2007 by three John Maus obsessives, the website is a message board and unofficial news source dedicated to the lo-fi pop eccentric, philosopher, and former Haunted Graffiti member. Prior to Maus' breakthrough record, last year's We Must Become the Pitiless Censors of Ourselves, fans would often happen upon the site while scouring the web for his demos, only to discover they actually were not alone in their respective Maus worship. Forum avatars boast such phrases as "MAUS IS REAL" and "MAUS FOR PRESIDENT". And the discourse surrounding his reverb-washed new wave recordings and lovably pretentious persona can be profoundly sincere. Mausspacers seem unanimously to deem Maus a visionary, and often on the board he has been called a spiritual hero. Casual onlookers might wonder if Maus is legitimately insane; Mausspacers say he is prophetically different.
All of which is to illustrate that Maus, currently a full-time Ph.D candidate residing in Minnesota, possesses a strange kind of magnetism, due in no small part to his relentless desire to push his music to physically and intellectually intense boundaries. This new, 16-track collection of rarities and unreleased cuts from 1999 to 2010 is filled with songs of murky romance marked by his deep, gothic, and expressive vocals. It's largely been made available in physical form for committed Maus fans-- an ironic reality considering Mausspacers have already heard the majority of the material, despite the fact that it's never been commercially released. All but two tracks have been available to download on the site.
Regardless, this remastered Collection of Rarities is intriguing beyond its archival purposes, as it traces the evolution of an artist over the course of 11 years. And the readily apparent aesthetic progression here-- from elaborate noise and abstraction to Maus' progressive embrace of songcraft at its most pure and potent-- also documents Maus' developing theories regarding "pop's true potential" to do something visceral and subversive with the genre. Though adventurous, Maus rejects experimentation for experimentation's sake, insisting instead that "it is our task as artists to make an intensive use of a major language." Last year, The W**ire contributor Adam Harper published a book on Maus, titled Heaven Is Real: John Maus and the Truth of Pop, which considered his works as "metapop" that offered commentary on pop itself. "Does Maus have something to teach us about arriving at the truth through personal musical expression?" Harper asks. "Has he really discovered Heaven-- and can he take us there?" That such a book even exists says a lot about Maus and the impression his music has made. It can be thoroughly confounding.
Collection of Rarities' earliest cuts are dissonant, exploratory, and slightly nonsensical. "Lost" feels like traveling through time-- anxious and cinematic with an indecipherable, superdramatic vocal line, and sharp, meandering keys that conjure the frantic feel of a horror film. The earliest track, 1999's "Fish With Broken Dreams", is suggestive of Maus' interest in classical music; the sounds of a miniature symphony orchestra filtered through a Xerox machine and pushed through the looking-glass. "I Don't Eat Human Beings" is a peculiar, new age atmospheric, where Maus sounds lost in his own head.
Maus may have moved on from the scattered structures of his early years, but, thematically, self-loathing is all over this collection, which comes off very much as the sound of a man tragically alone, working within the confines of his own shell, committing fully to each idea. "The Fear" is one of several meditations on inner-strife and anxiety, wherein Maus declares, "Motherfuck, the fear is back/ The fear is back, the fear is back." Meanwhile, "Angel of the Night" touches on his own personal dissatisfaction with his last LP and an ensuing breakdown. The sad earlier track "Big Dumb Man" strikes as even more personal, as Maus seems to unpack the quandary of an emotionally stunted intellectual, singing with an almost theatrically desperate inflection, "Big dumb man/ Is talking about logic," and "Big dumb man/ Cannot convey any emotion."
Several highlights feature production that simply sparkles, like 2007's radiant "All Aboard", the driving dance groove of 2010's "Castles in the Grave", or "North Star", which conjures a lonesome, late-night feeling of subtle disorientation. But the collection's two greatest achievements do what Maus has spent his career becoming great at: unadulterated new wave pop. "No Title (Molly)", which was also recently released on flexi-disc for Record Store Day, is a widescreen synth-pop sprawler, where Maus repeatedly sings romantic lines like, "I want you in my arms tonight." Much ink has been spilt on Maus' maniacal live performances, wherein he punches the sky, tears his hair, sweats, screams, pogos, and runs-in-place; the mechanized drum beat on "No Title (Molly)" is tailor made for Maus' on-stage energy expulsions.
And the same goes for "Bennington", the record's most melodic track, and one of the most earnest, comically distraught, and characteristically Maus anthems yet. The smart humor is rooted in just how emphatically committed Maus sounds to his own desperation on "Bennington". There is legitimate pain in his voice, as he plainly recounts a sole night spent with the college girl he'll dream of forever, but it's so exaggerated you can't help laughing a little, imagining Maus singing with his arms thrust to the reaches of the sky on each dramatic, downbeat synth rip. "I still love the girl from Bennington/ Even though I'll never see her eyes," Maus declares, repeatedly, following cosmic, wizardly oscillations, "I love those fucking eyes/ Those eyes don't leave my mind." When he finally reaches the song's frustrated end, his introspective, staccato-sung plea is cringe-inducing. The narrative is tragic and ridiculous, a profoundly lonely outsider anthem.
"Bennington" is one of Maus' most simple songs, but that doesn't make it any less cutting or human. The fact that Maus is open to interpretation makes him fascinating. An academic might discover the Harper book and enjoy puzzling through Maus' philosophical treatises. Enthusiasts of DIY production might gravitate toward the collection for its homemade warmth. An aesthete may marvel at his sublime synth washes, and how they pour over the emotive, baritone vocal lines. Some Mausspacers, meanwhile, are self-described "teeny bopper-esque" fanatics, approaching Maus like a capital-P Pop star, making Maus memes and monitoring his Twitter page and even transposing his face into pictures from the movie "Space Jam". And that's all fine. We "get" Maus as we choose. | 2012-07-20T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2012-07-20T02:00:01.000-04:00 | Experimental / Rock | Ribbon Music | July 20, 2012 | 8.4 | d0aa91f0-bf01-4858-92d7-a886a667df7c | Jenn Pelly | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jenn-pelly/ | null |
Incorporating elements of cut-up soul and hip-hop, this is a stunning transformation for a guy that seemed like a one-trick pony focused only on atmosphere. | Incorporating elements of cut-up soul and hip-hop, this is a stunning transformation for a guy that seemed like a one-trick pony focused only on atmosphere. | Bibio: Ambivalence Avenue | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/13125-ambivalence-avenue/ | Ambivalence Avenue | Boards of Canada's 2005 album, The Campfire Headphase, included a song called "Chromakey Dreamcoat" that sounded like guitar loops playing on a wobbly phonograph. You have to wonder if this was a shout-out to their li'l homey Bibio, who cut three records for Mush from the whole cloth of this idea. Like his idols, he filled his electro-acoustic music with antiquated cultural products and nature sounds-- things that are beautiful because we've less and less use for them. But he lacked range, his wavering loop-collages falling into two categories: those informed by the sprightly forms of British folk, and those that were nearly formless.
Bibio released Vignetting the Compost just five months ago, and it seemed to cement his status as a pleasant one-trick pony. So it's shocking how utterly and successfully he rewrites his playbook on this Warp debut. I actually have to eat a little crow. I wrote of Compost that Bibio had a "thin, modest voice that verges on anonymity," and suggested that he should favor atmosphere over songcraft. This seemed justified: The more the songs approximated pop structures, the less interesting they became. But on Ambivalence Avenue, Bibio proves that he actually can sing and produce memorable arrangements. He used to make FX blurs with traces of pop and folk; now he inverts that formula with bracing clarity.
The results are fantastic and diverse: The title track weaves bouncing vocals through crisp guitar licks and bouncy flutes; "All the Flowers" is a fey folk gem; the dreamy "Haikuesque (When She Laughs)" is better indie-rock than many indie-rockers are making these days. Summery anthem "Lovers' Carvings" coasts on crunchy, gleaming riffs and upbeat woodblocks, and the autumnal "The Palm of Your Wave" is simply haunting. It's hard to believe that these inspired, moving vocal performances are coming from the same guy who recorded moaning ambiguities like "Mr. & Mrs. Compost". Occasionally, you'll hear a little tremble in the strings and go, "Oh right, this is Bibio," but mostly, detuned atmosphere has been replaced by silky drive.
While these songs are a quantum leap for Bibio, they still reasonably project from the foundation he's laid. But there's no accounting for the remainder of the album, which finds him paddling the uncharted waters of hip-hop, techno, and points outlying. "Jealous of Roses" sets lustrous funk riffs dancing between the stereo channels as Bibio belts out a surprisingly effective Sly-Stone-in-falsetto impersonation. "Fire Ant" spikes the loping soul of J Dilla with the stroboscopic vocal morsels of the Field; "Sugarette" wheezes and fumes like a Flying Lotus contraption. The music feels both spontaneous and precise, winding in complex syncopation around the one-beat, with subtle filter and tempo tweaks, and careful juxtapositions of texture (see the arid, throttled voices scraping against the sopping-wet chimes of "S'vive"). Many songs taper off into ambient passages that have actual gravity, gluing the far-flung genres together. It's the kind of seamless variety, heady but visceral, that few electronic musicians who aren't Four Tet have achieved.
While Ambivalence Avenue is an excellent album by any measure, Bibio deserves extra credit for venturing outside of his established comfort zone. He began his musical career trying to emulate Steve Reich and Boards of Canada on no-fi equipment. He was fascinated by the physicality of media-- of degrading tape and malfunctioning recording gear. And he was interested in the natural world, letting the sounds of streams and rainshowers stand in for his own personality. Having depleted these ideas over the course of three solid albums, he's put them aside to do nearly the opposite. Ambivalence Avenue moves the focus from the flaws of media to their capacity for precision, and takes fewer cues from nature than from the urban sounds-- including Dilla and Madlib-- that Bibio admits discovering in recent years. By jettisoning a limiting aesthetic, he reveals his abilities to be startlingly vast, and one of our most predictable electronic musicians becomes a wild card. | 2009-06-26T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2009-06-26T02:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Warp | June 26, 2009 | 8.3 | d0ac2b6a-e63b-413f-92a4-396be5eeebd4 | Brian Howe | https://pitchfork.com/staff/brian-howe/ | null |
On her studio debut, Mykki Blanco shines with both her lyricism and radicalism. | On her studio debut, Mykki Blanco shines with both her lyricism and radicalism. | Mykki Blanco: Mykki | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22399-mykki/ | Mykki | Mykki is the first proper studio album by Mykki Blanco, but it’s just the latest in her long line of punk moves. The New York rapper has been rising through the Afropunk scene for half a decade, cleaving apart the conventions of hip-hop through her dense rhymes—hectic, often hilarious gasps of speech have their own internal scaffolding. It’s something Mykki offers in spades, from her declarations of “smoking blunts wit my cunts” in the club to raging, “They swear they kingpins in Rio but really D boys in Jersey/Put a hit out he swerved, the nerve of doing me dirty!” But often enough, Blanco is radical merely by holding steadfastly to her persona: the queer, gender-fluid alter ego of the performance artist Michael David Quattlebaum Jr., a woman who’s the sharp-tongued, arms-aloft progeny of riot grrrl and Lil’ Kim.
It’s high-concept hip-hop, a swerve from the brusque heterosexualization of nearly all mainstream rap. And Blanco has been greeted by her share of raised brows. But this experimental persona is delivered so nonchalantly, it frequently undercuts the radicalism; it’s a facet of the artist, not an aggressively pushed narrative. (She’s already gone on record bemoaning the media’s usual response to her identity, which is to group her with other gay, black artists like Le1f and Zebra Katz.) On Mykki, her assertiveness never wavers, whether diving into top-shelf hedonism in the club bangers or keening to find love past carnality in the ballads. Unlike her breakthrough 2014 mixtape Gay Dog Food, Blanco’s full-length debut offers unabashed moments of autobiography: She’s Snapchatting naked. She’s falling in love for the duration of a pill. She’s talking shit across a club banquette, and she’s furious at her partner for those suspicious texts.
Mykki’s whirlwind of topics have a heated musicality to match, jostling backpack rap with spongy neo-soul, usually with a chant-along pop chorus twining it all together. Opener “I’m in a Mood” is her most delicately melodic moment, a woozy morning-after twirl in which Blanco sighs, “My sweatpants they Gosha/La Costra nostra/Ziplocked them potions/I love my lip gloss and lotion.” The ardent electronic rasp of her voice is an analog to the gentle gilding of Frank Ocean or Ro James. “For the Cunts” is a bubblegum rap kiss-off that revels in bravura bitchery, with a chorus that folds in cliquish giggling. The album’s most hypnotic and eccentric banger, “My Nene,” balances the previously unfathomable: husky baritone lusting after her hot-to-trot “Nene” (whose gender is deliberately never revealed) with the hyperbolically yelped, overtly silly verses that land somewhere between Lil Wayne, Boosie Badazz, and the Lonely Island. (In good conscious, I cannot endorse “Boy am I in luck/Shawty’s bad as fuck/One look at the booty make my noodle wanna bust” as a romantic entreaty at the club.)
These flashy moments are broken up with interludes of solemn introspection—twice as spoken interludes from Blanco’s diaries, in which she confesses a desire for monogamous love (which feels pretty punk in itself, nowadays). Most compelling is when Blanco raps her journey in the gruff, low-slung cadence she has mastered. In “You Don’t Know Me,” Blanco stares ahead, unflinching, into her HIV-positive status, her gender fluidity, and the misogyny that surrounds her, in an operatic tumble of disclosure: “Buzzing on the block, I guess you heard the news/I’m running through the city like a predator, I’m burning dudes,” she mutters, sliding into a tetchy bark. “Booling with my Hooligans but deep inside I feel the trigger/Smoking weed ain’t working and these Xans done killed too many niggas.” The tinny percussion offers minimal accompaniment, but Mykki requires nothing more; Blanco doesn’t need any help defining herself. | 2016-09-23T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-09-23T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | !K7 / Dogfood | September 23, 2016 | 7.7 | d0ac81e0-7b96-425c-ae85-83178852acc1 | Stacey Anderson | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stacey-anderson/ | null |
The Chicago quartet swings big on a Chris Walla-produced album that brings unexpected grandeur to their modest, rootsy indie rock. It sounds like a breakthrough. | The Chicago quartet swings big on a Chris Walla-produced album that brings unexpected grandeur to their modest, rootsy indie rock. It sounds like a breakthrough. | Ratboys: The Window | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/ratboys-the-window/ | The Window | A level-up record isn’t just a band’s best yet, or even the record where a band finally realizes its promise. It’s a record that taps some previously unrecognized potential, surpassing any reasonable expectations even the musicians might have had for themselves. Producer Chris Walla has had a hand in many such albums over the years: Tegan and Sara’s The Con; Foxing’s Nearer My God; The Decemberists’ The Crane Wife; and, depending on your level of Death Cab fandom, arguably at least two or three with his former group. And now, with Ratboys’ The Window, he’s produced another.
For the first decade of Ratboys’ existence, the intermittently rootsy, perennially likable Chicago group made modest records enjoyed by a rather small audience. By 2020’s Printer’s Devil, they’d expanded from a duo to a quartet and amplified their sound accordingly, downplaying folk and country for ripping alterna-pop in the Superchunk/Breeders tradition, but The Window is their first record to use that fuller sound in the service of a bigger statement. In Walla, they found a producer who flatters their songs with both polish and heft. He brings an unlikely sense of classic-rock grandeur to a band that had always seemed perfectly content playing club shows.
His timing couldn’t be better, because if ever there were an opening for this band, it’s now. Country-leaning indie rock is having a moment, and The Window fortuitously echoes some of the most celebrated albums of the past several years. Between Julia Steiner’s hazy, hopeful voice and the accompanying bouquet of fiddle, “Morning Zoo” could slot right into Waxahatchee’s Saint Cloud. There are periodic shades of Big Thief, too—not only in the album’s lispy twang, but in the four musicians’ synchronistic chemistry, especially their almost telepathic vibe on “Black Earth, WI,” a joint-passing, nearly nine-minute guitarists’ showcase.
In its scrambled guitars and somersaulting hooks, the record The Window most closely mirrors is Wednesday’s Rat Saw God, albeit without the abrasive bite. On Wednesday albums, the drugs are harder and so are the life lessons; Karly Hartzman writes from a place of not just emotional drama but often physical peril. The world Steiner paints is safer and less squalid: Instead of rotting houses or torched landmarks, she’s more apt to observe the restorative calm of nature or the brilliance of the northern lights. Yet while Steiner’s songwriting may be sweeter and gentler, it’s no less vivid or lived in, and she never lets you mistake her tenderness for naivety. Her serenity is hard won, and these songs pull back the curtain on all the work she puts into her positive thinking. “I kill my thoughts with a knife/Then blow a kiss to the silence,” she sings. On “No Way,” she throws up a triumphant middle finger to the toxic presences she’s cut out of her life: “There’s no way you’ll control me again,” she boasts.
For all the sunroof-dropping riffs of escapist jams like “Crossed That Line” and “It’s Alive!,” sorrow tugs at the album’s margins. Over the Gin Blossoms-y heartland chime of the title track, Steiner relays her grandfather’s distant final glimpses of her grandmother, who was sequestered in a nursing home due to Covid restrictions. The guitars are purposefully bright, as if to allay the aching sadness of six decades together without a proper goodbye. Steiner’s plainspoken prose never oversells the tragedy, either. With material this touching, there’s no need.
Ratboys have written great tunes before, but they’ve never stacked so many together like this. There’s a confidence to The Window that can border on cockiness. All these sizzling guitars and mammoth, McCartney-esque bridges risk upsetting the fundamental humility that was always so key to the group’s appeal. The Window’s great gambit is to lean into them anyway, and it pays off spectacularly, heightening the thrills without sacrificing the amiability. What a pleasure it is hearing this charming little band show off. | 2023-09-01T00:02:00.000-04:00 | 2023-09-01T00:02:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Topshelf | September 1, 2023 | 8 | d0aca20e-2cc7-4a83-bb14-6b1281250b35 | Evan Rytlewski | https://pitchfork.com/staff/evan-rytlewski/ | |
Setting aside the punishing death metal of their main band, the Tomb Mold players’ side project floats a whimsical fusion of math rock and city pop festooned with sneaky metal accents. | Setting aside the punishing death metal of their main band, the Tomb Mold players’ side project floats a whimsical fusion of math rock and city pop festooned with sneaky metal accents. | Daydream Plus: Escape at Your Own Pace EP | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/daydream-plus-escape-at-your-own-pace-ep/ | Escape at Your Own Pace EP | The shredders of Tomb Mold seem intent on being anything but straight-ahead death-metal musicians. Since establishing their main outfit as one of the beastliest OSDM groups in recent memory, each member has stretched their tentacles further outward. In Dream Unending, guitarist Derrick Vella has embraced heavenly post-rock guitar tones and slowed his riffs to a luminescent crawl, while Tomb Mold’s latest album, The Enduring Spirit, is less a sludgy beatdown than a skyward journey into chorus-pedal-fueled prog. Payson Power and Max Klebanoff, now two EPs into their Daydream Plus side project, have ditched the distortion and devil horns altogether for a breezy fusion of smooth jazz and math rock.
If Tomb Mold have been unfairly maligned for dressing like nerds, Daydream Plus practically dare the haters to come after their lunch money. With artwork straight out of an old city-pop record and riffs so smooth you can practically hear the laughter erupting between takes, the whole project feels like an inside joke being wheeled out to the public just to see if it has legs. If the duo’s crisp 2022 EP set the tone, their follow-up, Escape at Your Own Pace, pushes their sound further, adding a new bassist and guitarist to the mix and bringing in the slightest of metal touchstones to create a silly yet satisfyingly light experiment.
Once again clocking in under 15 minutes, Escape at Your Own Pace briskly powers through its four short songs, reveling in its low-key vibe. Though the artwork may call back to jazz-fusion albums from the likes of Masayoshi Takanaka and Casiopea, the closer Japanese comparison would be the clean guitar tones of bands like toe and tricot, with Payson fluttering his way through one sweetly melancholic riff after another. “Gently Technical” opens the EP on a surfer’s high, its winsome melody building to a finale laden with show-offy finger taps and cheeky, wind-swept chimes. “Neighborhood Watch” makes the metal connection even more apparent, opening on a blast-beat run from Klebanoff before settling into its sunny groove, with Power firing off the occasional screeching pinch harmonic for good measure. The flourishes are integrated so subtly that if you didn’t know these guys were metalheads in their day jobs, you might miss it entirely.
The EP’s remaining half goes down just as easy, even if the tracks are mellow to a fault. “Hourglass” phases through one anime-credits-ready riff after another without offering much in the way of a build, while “Try to Relax” takes its own advice a little too much to heart, cruising on a slow, dreamy riff that effectively puts the EP to bed. The project’s greatest achievement is in the way it continues to widen Tomb Mold’s musical universe. As each member has experimented with brighter tones, it feels like brutality is becoming less central to what this group is trying to achieve. Turns out that once you strip away the monstrous riffs, torrential drums, and imagery of unholy interstellar oblivion, Tomb Mold might actually just be beach-blanket music in disguise.
CORRECTION: An earlier version of this review incorrectly identified Dream Unending as Payson Power's project. | 2024-06-04T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2024-06-04T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | self-released | June 4, 2024 | 6.8 | d0ad0893-eda4-4142-85cc-0cc7c1785f99 | Sam Goldner | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sam-goldner/ | |
The Strokes return after a lengthy hiatus following the disappointing First Impressions of Earth, and they sound fragmented with a lack of purpose. | The Strokes return after a lengthy hiatus following the disappointing First Impressions of Earth, and they sound fragmented with a lack of purpose. | The Strokes: Angles | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/15230-angles/ | Angles | The last time we saw the Strokes in a music video they were dead. In the visual for 2006's "You Only Live Once", the quintet wore all white while dark liquid filled the room, leaving them drowned and floating. And if that really had marked the end of the band, few would've been surprised. Their third album, First Impressions of Earth, had them limping, desperately trying to expand the signature sound that looked to be swallowing them up like so much black water. It didn't work. And the Strokes are too cool and too smart to become one of those bands that puts out a record every few years just so fans can sing the oldies back to them, right? So they went away-- to an array of lackluster side projects, to families, to anywhere but the Strokes.
As late as November 2009, Julian Casablancas was non-committal on the subject of a fourth Strokes album. "We've been trying to do it for years," he said. "I'm always available and they know that but getting together is tough." Guitarist Nick Valensi went even further: "I'm not even sure we're going to make a fourth album at this point." But still, here we are with Angles, not a roaring comeback as much as a glorified spit-balling session.
The album attempts to rebuild the band from the ground up. Whereas Casablancas had previously written nearly every part of the group's songs including guitar solos and basslines, he steps back on Angles, which features songs from other members. And this revised process is evident in the credits: "All Music Written and Arranged by the Strokes." Casablancas called the new way "Operation Make Everyone Satisfied," which sounds condescending enough. And while the more democratic move may seem generous, the singer threw his clout around by separating himself from the rest of the recording process and sending his vocals to the band via electronic files. And the album's oddly collaborative origins are evidenced in both its scatter-shot diversity and its lurching fragmentation.
With its sprightly, dueling fret work and familiar, cascading chorus, first single "Under Cover of Darkness" hinted that the Strokes had come to terms with being the Strokes-- after dalliances with other styles and sounds, they seemed content with a revival in their own image. But, for better and (mostly) worse, that is not the case. Though this band was routinely slapped with claims of 1970s plagiarism upon their arrival, it's unlikely that many people have ever mistaken a Strokes song for one by Lou Reed or Television. So it's ironic that their mimicry can be uncanny on Angles. But traces of scummy CBGB punk are sometimes replaced with big-snare 1980s flash. "Two Kinds of Happiness" pilfers one-time tour mate Tom Petty for the palm-muted and hiccup-phrased verse before ramping things up in a whooshing vintage-U2 hook. And "Games" is another 80s throwback, utilizing crystalline synths and distant hand claps to help prove its dour and strained point about "living in an empty world." Opener "Machu Picchu" recalls "Down Under" dudes Men at Work. These are not the expected influences for a Strokes album.
Which would be fine-- great, even-- if they were carried through with anything resembling charm or commitment. Throughout, the album is hobbled by disconnections-- between verse and chorus, lyrics and music, intent and execution. Casablancas' ambivalence about his own actions crops up often. On the ugly prog wannabe "Metabolism" he declares, "I wanna be outrageous/ But inside I know I'm plain." Disjointed closer "Life Is Simple in the Moonlight" has him confessing, "There's no one I disapprove of or root for more for than myself." And while the singer's singed self-loathing was present in the Strokes from the beginning, it was always tempered with music that provided some uplift. But on the sad-eyed and drum-less "Call Me Back", he's left to moan about how "no one has the time, someone's always late" against a single guitar and ethereal keyboard. Listening to the track, it's pretty easy to see why people may not be returning his calls.
Yet there are still those moments when you remember why it's a good thing that these five guys stayed together. The beatific "Gratisfaction" is so easy-going and straightforward in its Thin Lizzy-meets-Billy Joel strut that it immediately rushes past nearly every other song here in the race for greatest hits-dom. Even better is "Taken For a Fool", which is the only track on Angles to really offer something refreshing while also sticking with That Strokes Sound. The song's verse is air-tight and bizarrely funky like some lost tape from David Bowie's Lodger, while the hook relieves the syncopation with to-the-point brashness. Talking about his general sonic goals in 2009, Casablancas said, "The ideal for me is to get really out there but have it go full circle and sound pretty normal." It's a worthwhile aim, and "Taken For a Fool" nails it.
As news about the Strokes' shaky resurgence has continued to flow over the last few months, two of the group's contemporaries chose to bow out. The White Stripes-- who faced off against the Strokes in a friendly Coolest Band Alive competition for a few years in the early aughts-- officially broke up after a hiatus on February 2 in order to "preserve what is beautiful and special about the band and have it stay that way." Meanwhile, fellow wry New Yorkers LCD Soundsystem will wrap up their run April 2 at Madison Square Garden. As it happens, that's just one day after the Strokes will play the same venue to kick-start their second life. Everybody wants to quit while they're ahead. Some actually do it. | 2011-03-21T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2011-03-21T02:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | RCA | March 21, 2011 | 5.9 | d0addb4d-a4c6-4d16-95cf-4e83dad9e9a4 | Ryan Dombal | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ryan-dombal/ | null |
Serving as a synopsis of everywhere he's taken Toro Y Moi to date, Chaz Bundick's third full-length is also the longest and loudest of his releases. Here's silky R&B, roller-rink pop, bubblegum funk, and tasteful chillout music, all unified by a voice that's grown more confident with time. | Serving as a synopsis of everywhere he's taken Toro Y Moi to date, Chaz Bundick's third full-length is also the longest and loudest of his releases. Here's silky R&B, roller-rink pop, bubblegum funk, and tasteful chillout music, all unified by a voice that's grown more confident with time. | Toro y Moi: Anything In Return | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/17516-anything-in-return/ | Anything In Return | We like to think of artists as straining against their limitations, pushing boundaries, confounding expectations, and provoking listeners. This framework makes it easy to underestimate the kind of ambition Chaz Bundick's demonstrated within the context of Toro Y Moi. He's a prolific artist who never comes off like he's in a race with his muse; he subtly expands his range and refines his production skills, but in genres uniformly bereft of bombast or overstatement. Even after 2011's rep-solidifying Underneath the Pine and its equally worthy successor, the Freaking Out EP*,* many still want to view him as the guy whose earliest singles became definitive documents of a subgenre synonymous with apathy. So Anything in Return can appear like it has Big Third Album things to prove, ambitious in easily understood ways: it's the longest Toro Y Moi album and the loudest as well. It just manages to do those things on Bundick's self-effacing, generous terms. Which shouldn't obscure Anything In Return's accomplishment of being another strong, forward-thinking record from an artist whose grasp never seems to exceed his reach.
Anything in Return serves as a tidy synopsis of everywhere Bundick has taken Toro Y Moi to date. So there's silky R&B, roller-rink pop, bubblegum funk, tasteful chillout music, all unified by a voice that's grown more confident with time. The light touch he applies to his melodies sounds assured rather than meek. The higher BPMs early on make Bundick's peripheral relationship to dance music more overt. He's been on the giving and receiving end of countless remixes and revived his Les Sins project for a partnership with Dan Snaith's Jiaolong label, so he's had plenty of chances to workshop with similarly-minded artists. "Harm In Change" is where he shows the results; unlike the introductions from Causers of This or Underneath the Pine, Anything In Return doesn't begin on a wobbly note, rousing itself into shape. The bass drum hits almost immediately, and along with single "Say That", "Harm In Change" incorporate gestures that would typically have to wait until the inevitable remix make themselves heard: house diva samples serving as punctuation on his own vocal lines, four-on-the-floor beats, modular synth bass, all distinguishing it from the decisively organic Underneath the Pine.
That said, it isn't dance music proper, nor does it aim to be. You might already be hearing it as a potential go-to for rooftops, house parties, or any non-club function, or perhaps as dress-up/go-out music for people who don't relate to "Suit & Tie". Anything in Return never feels exclusionary, so the extroversion of the music and the increasingly tony production ensures that any mention of Toro Y Moi as a "bedroom" act has to relate to the lyrical concerns only. "So Many Details" follows the uptempo introductory duo with a seductive slow grind and cooed lyrics ("This ain't appropriate…I just want to tease your eyes") that project a polite sort of lasciviousness before unraveling into a hint-dropping, percussive coda. "Rose Quartz" consolidates what came before it, two minutes of patient, hands-in-the-air build up before establishing its central juxtaposition of instinctual desires and metaphysical hesitance-- "Don't let me fall/ 'cause I feel weak."
As with his previous two LPs, Bundick bookends Anything in Return with the most instantly captivating material, while the middle ultimately establishes the determinative mood. This is where Anything in Return truly differentiates itself. Causers of This took was an immersive experience, aqueous and aquamarine, while the ornate and warm *Underneath the Pine *painted with pastels; Anything In Return is better described by its shape and body rather than its color. While Toro Y Moi is more or less characterized as portable music, you really should consider a nice subwoofer for this one.
This newfound emphasis on the low-end counters his tendency to let songs drift. This is particularly true on tracks that would otherwise be the most stereotypically chillaxed: "High Living" anchors itself with bass that lets the good times roll very, very slowly, "Studies" lays nasally funk guitar over an insistent drum break, the champagne-swilling "Touch" fizzes but never goes flat. It can actually get a little too lost in its luxury; Anything in Return has more truly great music than any Toro Y Moi album, but at 52 minutes, the overall impact gets dulled. When "Cake" pops up as the 10th track*,* it's by far Bundick's most assertively-sung, and the stickiest as well. It's a revelation for him as an artist, but the startling jolt it provides after the midsection makes you feel like the Anything kicked its feet up for about 10 minutes too long.
Anything in Return could still be called "lifestyle music" in the pejorative sense. If you think Toro Y Moi exists solely as a sonic accessory for buying tote bags, this album won't do much to change your mind, largely because it doesn't really want to. But Toro Y Moi's music has a relatable quality that can't be overlooked. The most direct lines tend to be fourth-wall busting mentions of being on tour, having no plans on Friday night, and trying to sort out girl problems, especially when they're freaking out about failing a class and how to explain it to their parents.
While tech-obsessed, sonically omnivorous, and emotionally distracted music typically serves as fodder for "sound of life today" thinkpieces, Anything in Return embodies a certain ideal of young adulthood at the pace it's actually lived; of fluidity between creative pursuits and careers, between hanging out and making out. It's tough to say whether Bundick is seeking to make a "statement" as Toro Y Moi, no more than any of his peers are seeking to define themselves with a nine-to-five (in fact, his definitive song "Blessa" may have been about the futility of just that). But the occasional structure is helpful for an artist constantly plotting his next move. For now, the musically and emotionally rewarding Anything in Return evokes the feeling of being young with options and in no hurry to figure it all out. | 2013-01-21T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2013-01-21T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Electronic | Carpark | January 21, 2013 | 7.9 | d0af5ade-989d-4d4e-af9a-39172edf8718 | Ian Cohen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ian-cohen/ | null |
The Juan MacLean's third studio album cements their status as one of DFA's flagship acts, cementing the partnership of John MacLean and Nancy Whang as the kind of ever-evolving collaboration the label was built on. | The Juan MacLean's third studio album cements their status as one of DFA's flagship acts, cementing the partnership of John MacLean and Nancy Whang as the kind of ever-evolving collaboration the label was built on. | The Juan MacLean: In a Dream | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/19767-the-juan-maclean-in-a-dream/ | In a Dream | Juan MacLean represents something of an archetype DFA artist: a reformed indie rocker who immersed himself in synth gadgetry and surrendered to the groove. He typifies the behind-the-scenes, slave-to-the-music vibe from which so much dance music springs, and like any great dance artist, Maclean's best work has come via his singles ("Happy House", "You Are My Destiny"). If James Murphy was the quarterback of the DFA roster, then Maclean was the president of the AV club.
If there's any extra urgency or excitement surrounding Maclean's third studio album, In A Dream, it's that DFA now lacks a flagship act, and Nancy Whang—frequent collaborator, In A Dream cover star, justification for the definite article preceding the Juan's name—seemed to be a burgeoning creative force herself in the waning days of LCD Soundsystem. Her work on In A Dream is among her best: brassy and affecting, she sings like a punk rocker whose feet have warmed to disco but not her heart.
Which is just as well: Maclean and Whang have been distilling the funk/punk out of this project since 2005's still beloved Less Than Human. To wit: within about a minute of the album's start—the cardio motorik of "A Place Called Space"—we're treated to a searing guitar lead. What Maclean and Whang have settled on here is a more muscular, downtown version of the type of reedy disco-pop that Lindstrøm & Christabelle explored on Real Life Is No Cool. In A Dream is hi-def synth boogie, flexing and preening in ways its forbears simply couldn't, as if old Ze Records and italo-disco classics had spent the last 30 years in the gym packing on studio wherewithal and audio fidelity.
When everything comes together, In A Dream is spectacular. "I've Waited For So Long" whips around hurriedly as Maclean and Whang trade verses and choruses. "Running Back To You" is a slo-mo bass gargle, with Whang's salt-corroded vocals bristling against the perfectly formed contours of the bass synth, which Maclean walks carefully on a leash for the song's duration. "A Simple Design" is the most compact, finest ever summation of this partnership, a simple, danceable track that finds the two dancing around each other, Whang's "la la la"s providing ample space for Maclean's flights of fancy before she grabs the chorus by the throat and caresses it gently.
Problems that have persisted throughout The Juan Maclean's output crop up here as well. Maclean is a less frequent and less irksome vocal presence than on prior records, though he's still uncompelling, pushing through the shoulda-been-anthemic peaks of "Love Stops Here" with affectless utterances. Maclean is a masterful synth programmer but not a singular one, and so sometimes In A Dream resembles those beautifully built urban townhouses, trading sturdiness for creativity and sapping some of the fun in the process.
That's the harshest grenade you can throw at In A Dream, though: it's too comfortable and robust. When the duo come in for the requisite 10-minute, album-closing jam, it feels earned, and it's motive and charming enough not to bore. In A Dream is Maclean and Whang's most fruitful, balanced partnership, and if it fails to truly make a star out of either of them, it cements them as the kind of ever-evolving collaboration DFA was built on. | 2014-09-02T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2014-09-02T02:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic / Rock | DFA | September 2, 2014 | 7.4 | d0b43f30-c2f2-4425-a828-f2255617b0da | Andrew Gaerig | https://pitchfork.com/staff/andrew-gaerig/ | null |
One half of Tonstartssbandht, Eola is a vocal-only project with loops and blues. Dang is charming, weird, and extremely sincere. | One half of Tonstartssbandht, Eola is a vocal-only project with loops and blues. Dang is charming, weird, and extremely sincere. | Eola: Dang | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22369-dang/ | Dang | Most everything produced by Orlando-born brothers Edwin and Andy White has a certain freewheeling quality. In the case of their cultishly beloved duo Tonstartssbandht, this has meant a frenetic, even theatrical, approach to what could be vaguely termed psychedelic guitar rock, with a strong emphasis on touring and live improvisation over producing studio output. Tonstartssbandht has existed in some form for nearly a decade, at times as a long-distance project, Edwin and Andy each living in various cities and touring with other groups. In that time, both have maintained solo projects that, though distinct in sound, are in spirit very much linked to the work they’ve done together.
For Edwin, that’s Eola, the title under which he releases his own murky pop songs, built mostly from staggered choruses of vocal loops. Dang, his first release since 2013, compiles a selection of recordings made between 2011 and 2015. Eschewing Tonstartssbandht’s proclivity for instrumental flourishes, these songs are pared-down and rhythmically cyclic, nodding to gospel and blues, tropes White warps and reworks into repetitive structures.
While White’s enthusiastically straining voice is the backbone of all of this, it’s also obscured, soaked in reverb and vocoder effects. The result oscillates between sing-songy and droning, upbeat and disconcerting. Opening track “And I Know” layers an impassioned vocal performance over a two-note dirge, introducing the record with a degree of anxious intensity. In the songs that proceed, however, the pace slows, and White’s singing takes a gentler turn. The record includes two cheerful renditions of full-on pop songs—one a take on his brother’s “Big Chestined Nights,” and the other of Montreal-based associate Sean Nicholas Savage’s “Someone’s Got a Secret”—but White’s own songwriting tends toward something more meandering. This can be one of the record’s frustrations: though absorbing live, meditative tracks like “Daylong Breathing” and “Future Hymns” have a somewhat uninviting tinniness about them in this reproduction. White is an expressive and playful singer, and his songs are at their best when these qualities are amplified by, rather than buried beneath, lo-fi processing and recording techniques.
Part of that Tonstartssbandht spirit embodied here is, personal evolution aside, a good-natured and perhaps wholly unintentional unwillingness to bend to shifts in the dominant sounds of indie and experimental music. Rather, their music’s tendency has been to create in performance its own self-containing world. Eola has social and aesthetic affiliations to a niche breed of offbeat small-batch tape label pop—most obviously, Arbutus Records and the Montreal-based scene around it—and such points of reference can feel, already, somewhat of a bygone era. But unchanged as it sound may be, Dang is an odd enough record to stand on its own, satisfying for its intuitive, rather than intellectual, approach to experimentation.
For that reason, its curious—and seemingly very sincere—absorption of devotional tropes seems best understood at the level of the voice. On “How Far Am I From Canaan,” White reprises a gospel song made popular by Sam Cooke. Much unlike Cooke’s sweetly sung and singularly uplifting rendition, it’s droning and skeletal, but also overflowing with feeling in its own abstract way. White’s scratchy “hallelujah, hallelujah now” strikes as both unholy and, for all its grubbiness, at least a little transcendent. However unpolished, Dang still has a glow about it. | 2016-09-24T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-09-24T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Leaving | September 24, 2016 | 6.8 | d0c91ad9-b53c-4433-80c9-89d083f8a107 | Thea Ballard | https://pitchfork.com/staff/thea-ballard/ | null |
On Montreal producer CFCF's new Outside, instead of simply losing himself in the haze of the translucent pastels as on previous release Continent, Silver uses the release as a bid to ground his music with more approachable song structures. | On Montreal producer CFCF's new Outside, instead of simply losing himself in the haze of the translucent pastels as on previous release Continent, Silver uses the release as a bid to ground his music with more approachable song structures. | CFCF: Outside | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/18663-cfcf-outside/ | Outside | It's kind of hard to believe that Outside, the latest offering from Montreal electronic producer Mike Silver (aka CFCF), is actually only his second full-length release. Since introducing himself with his debut Continent, Silver has released a series of EPs that, given their length and depth, work as larger statements rather than placeholders. Reliably innovative and stimulating, these efforts helped illuminate the varied intellectual curiosities (architecture, film, objects) that inform his constantly mutating palette, often with arrestingly beautiful results. In the ever-expanding sphere of electronic musicians willing to take risks, Silver managed to stand out thanks to both his willingness to think outside the box and his keen pop sensibilities. So it's no surprise that, on Continent, he's embracing the traditional aspects of the long-player format on Outside, crafting vaporous, understated tracks that often play as updates on vaguely new age-y, soft rock radio staples.
One of Silver's greatest strengths is his ability to modify his sound while still sounding uniquely like himself. Outside boasts the same familiar textures and colors we've come to expect from CFCF, evidenced by the fluorescent kabuki dreamscapes ("Jump Out of the Train") and sweltering, celestial atmospherics ("Find") on display here. But instead of simply losing himself in the haze of its translucent pastels, Silver uses Outside as a bid to ground his music with more approachable song structures. Touching on the likes of Phil Collins, Peter Gabriel and even Sting, Silver gives the album a more human touch, inspired by "the yearning for stability that comes from constant movement." Amorous and aching, it's no wonder Silver feels the urge to throw himself from the train, as much of the album evokes how the strange, reflective quietude of a life spent inside the cabin can dull the realities of the busy, bleary landscapes rushing past your window.
The most notably different thing about Outside is the return of Silver's actual voice, now more in the foreground than on any of his previous releases. It's unspectacular—hushed, a little flat, at times almost plainspoken—but one with a deliberate purpose, used to bring more shape and emotional clarity to these pieces. He even goes so far as including a surprisingly faithful cover of Bonnie "Prince" Billy's "Strange Form of Life". But most of the time, Silver's vocal presence acts as more of a distraction than a guiding light. While a good portion of these songs would sound unfinished without a lyrical component, you can't help but wonder what Outside would sound like with anchored by a different person (or persons) on vox, Active Child assist on "Train" notwithstanding.
Much like Continent or any of the subsequent EPs released under the CFCF name, Outside is designed to wash over you, creating an immersive experience that often times helpfully obscures the weightiness of Silver's concept exercises or, in this case, hokey confessional pop. Except this time around, the effect can't quite stand up to his current fascination with slightly warmed-over, 80s adult contemporary looks. Needless to say, if you balked at Bon Iver's "Beth/Rest", it's unlikely that you'll take much interest in the minimalist takes on Tears For Fears ("Feeling. Holding"), softcore cable porn soundtracks ("The Crossing"), or the funereal "Miami Vice" vibes ("This Breath") that pepper the record. It's not that Silver doesn't successfully develop these ideas, but he presents them in ways that are too resolute and self serious to be effectively absorbed.
And yet, with repeated listens, Silver's hypnotic grip strengthens, often overshadowing his cheesier impulses. "The Forest At Night" is as revealing a title as any, while the excellent "Find", with its hair metal ballad guitar and humid, swelling synths, feels very much in spirit with the music of former Emeralds member Mark McGuire. On opener "Beyond Light", Silver finds himself back in the depths of some Herzog-ian jungle scene, all maddening arpeggios and tribal drums. The beauty of a project like CFCF is that it's an amorphorous one, despite the clear lines that can be drawn from one release to the next. The shadows its shape casts may not always create flattering silhouettes, but there's both comfort and anticipation to be found in knowing that Silver's constantly tweaking the lighting. | 2013-10-21T02:00:03.000-04:00 | 2013-10-21T02:00:03.000-04:00 | Electronic | Paper Bag | October 21, 2013 | 6.7 | d0d20a14-ed19-43f7-8312-fd138811951e | Zach Kelly | https://pitchfork.com/staff/zach-kelly/ | null |
Rap's trickster god and R&B's least tolerable person collaborate on a mixtape with no discernible upside. | Rap's trickster god and R&B's least tolerable person collaborate on a mixtape with no discernible upside. | Chris Brown / Young Thug: Slime&B | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/chris-brown-young-thug-slimeandb/ | Slime&B | Of the many strange pop-culture artifacts to emerge from quarantine, a collaboration between Young Thug and Chris Brown probably falls higher on the plausibility index than Beyoncé shouting out OnlyFans or the name X Æ A-12, but their new mixtape, Slime&B, still feels beyond explanation. It’s hard to imagine it existing in a world less dystopian than the one we’re in now. The title implies a meeting of the minds and a marrying of their styles, yet this is a clear mismatch. Brown, while still commercially viable, has been slumping creatively. Thug is at the height of his success and near the peak of his powers. To work with Brown, Thug must sacrifice a ton of what makes him special and engaging. Why go from So Much Fun to so little?
Thug is no stranger to this kind of project. On Rich Gang Tha Tour, Part 1, he and Rich Homie Quan formed an unlikely yin-yang duo that seemed linked even when unyoked, and even though he often lacks chemistry with frenemy Future, their collaborative tape, Super Slimey, was still like watching two sluggers at a home run derby bat flipping every time they go yard. They were two of rap’s preeminent talents in their primes, independent but together.
Young Thug teaming with Chris Brown doesn’t have the same upside. Brown is a deposed R&B king-turned-heel whose continued hitmaking is offset by his inability to grow or show restraint, in his music or in his life. He is an incompatible, and in some cases unwelcome, partner for rap’s mischievous trickster god—indeed, someone’s already made a version where he is entirely cut out of the tape. The two of them don’t share any meaningful connection, and they mostly come across as self-indulgent.
Young Thug, for his part, sounds jaded and disengaged. Roping Thug into Chris Brown’s world of frictionless songcraft limits the possibilities for what the rapper can do; he’s rarely seemed as bored as he does on “Trap Back.” Thug says he recorded his verses in a single day; honestly, it sounds like it. (He was spotted shooting hoops with Brown the day before they announced the tape.) He is so prolific and explosive that it’s easy to imagine a lot of his best rapping happening like this, but his verses and hooks here are aimless in an idle sort of way. These are “nothing else to do” bars without real inspiration. Even if the point of this project is simply to kill time, listening shouldn’t feel like a waste of time.
Nor does his proximity to Brown push him to deliver on his singing. When Thug is locked in, as on the Swae Lee duet “Offshore,” he sounds like he could make all the chairs swivel on The Voice or pull a T-Pain at the Tiny Desk moment. But his performances here are just flat and spiritless, paling in comparison to the no-holds-barred crooning of his “singing album” Beautiful Thugger Girls. These two just don’t have any chemistry at all; on “She Bumped Her Head,” Brown sounds like he’s encroaching on Thug and Gunna’s space, trying to squeeze himself into a role likely meant for Lil Baby.
Thug and Brown find common ground in the cut-the-line VIP lifestyles they lead, how that celebrity gets them laid (often), and the nature of their stroke games (always great, apparently). But there aren’t many songs that really sell the Playboy Mansion debauchery they’re aspiring to. Songs about being too wasted (“Undrunk”) and about not being wasted enough (“No Such Thing”) cancel out. And after half an album of womanizing, Chris Brown comes up for air just long enough to disavow the entire thing: “Poppin’ bottles in the club/Fuckin’ models, doin’ drugs/And I can’t do this anymore/I feel like an animal,” he cries. Granted, he does so on his knees trying to win a woman back, but still, it is a severe U-turn. Young Thug, missing the point entirely, plays the song differently, fully coveting the way of life that Brown is questioning. Neither of them seems to be paying any attention, so why should we? | 2020-05-13T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-05-13T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic / Pop/R&B / Rap | RCA | May 13, 2020 | 5 | d0e67088-8562-46d8-9ec5-8bd2a478f577 | Sheldon Pearce | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sheldon-pearce/ | |
The New York rappers’ complementary styles unlock a world of imagistic detail and surreal coincidence. | The New York rappers’ complementary styles unlock a world of imagistic detail and surreal coincidence. | Phiik / Lungs: Another Planet 4 | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/phiik-lungs-another-planet-4/ | Another Planet 4 | It would be nice to resist the reference points, but Lungs offers them so readily. When he was in the fifth grade, he told the blog RhymeBeat, his mother gave him a birthday present: the Fugees’ The Score. The rapper-producer, who grew up between New York City and Long Island, says the first time he listened to that record, he was running a 103 degree fever, hallucinating that one side of his bunk bed opened onto a vast desert, and if he rolled to the other side, a jungle. When the fever broke, he logged onto a file-sharing platform called Frostwire and downloaded two totems of Def Jux’s apex: Cannibal Ox’s The Cold Vein and Aesop Rock’s Bazooka Tooth.
Those seemingly incongruent schools of hip-hop—a moodiness that aspires to spiritual awakening, atonality that quickly resolves from noise into signal—would become twin pillars of his style. Since the beginning of quarantine, Lungs has been joined by fellow New York-based rappers like AKAI SOLO, Fatboi Sharif, and his collaborator on the Another Planet series, Phiik, in forming the spine of a new scene that sounds like it could only have emerged “since the beginning of quarantine.” Where New York’s non-drill underground had been dominated by rappers like MIKE and Navy Blue, whose insouciant deliveries mask a constant inward drive toward an improved self, this cadre seemed to snap upright with raps that are muscular, verbose, and agitated with the cacophonous world outside.
Another Planet 4 is the first full-length installment in the series Phiik and Lungs began in late 2020 and the cleanest distillation yet of their binary star chemistry. While Lungs is the one who admitted an adolescent pirating spree, it’s Phiik who sounds as if he’d be at home on a release schedule next to Aesop Rock or Vordul Mega. His verses are packed just as densely as Lungs’ are, but Phiik maps a route through them, as those Def Jux rappers did, with halting rhythms, onomatopoeia, and the percussive qualities of language. (See especially his verse on “When I Needed Someone”: Fear Factor, a backpack of bugs.) Lungs, by contrast, raps like lines of code flitting across a screen, ceaseless and seamless. Your brain needs time to attune to the sheer amount of information contained in his verses, which can overwhelm on first pass. The effect of these styles together—cousins but not twins—is to build dynamism where there might otherwise be only virtuosity.
And still, the detail comes as a flood. Each rapper’s lyrics are acutely observed. Some images are so rich as to be ethnographic: Phiik’s “45-year-old off-duty cop rocking Dunks,” Lungs’ recollection of a party “out in Suffolk, Italian kids headbutting walls, all bumping Cage/They parents upstairs, fucked up, doing bumps to Jimmy Page/The streets unpaved.” When Lungs drives on the LIE it’s with a “stomach full of bad Perc 30s”; when Phiik imagines a threat from the margins of society, it comes in the form of “overly pissed weirdos in a duster with a hit list.” The sinister figure out of The Matrix or Columbine punctures a porous border between pop culture and what we know as reality. The first lyrics on the album are “Lana Del Rey.” Unk rattles out of speakers and Colin Farrell dives into a phone booth, Steve Irwin dies and Windows 95 boots to life, Vine microcelebrities order drugs on their phone and rappers sound “like James Dolan when he piss,” all this adding up to a simulation that “can’t even run properly, without lags.”
This overload is in psychic step with the production, which is handled entirely by Lungs under his LoneSword pseudonym, and sounds like Operation: Doomsday if it were pieced together on one of those translucent iMacs in a school computer lab. In place of the quiet storm samples pulled from Stretch Armstrong’s record collection are the drumless loops that have dominated New York post-Marcberg, gestures toward jazz, lonely sirens, R&B samples half-heard through apartment walls. But even while Lungs and Phiik tend toward minimalism on a beat-by-beat basis, they eschew it in the aggregate, the album in sequence mimicking a brain as it shuffles through libraries, news feeds, memories.
Though dizzying at first, Another Planet is never quite inscrutable, and in fact traces the outline of a worldview: one that prioritizes basic decency, one that’s afraid of straying too far from the coasts because someone “might try to shoot up Target.” Lungs and Phiik understand not only how to navigate this din, but how to wield it for their own purposes—and how to critique the plausible deniability it grants to those who would rather shrug and move immorally. As Lungs raps on “Death Weapon,” before noting how tidily a New York street cleaves the “yuppies sitting in heated tents” and the unhoused people freezing to death across from them: “I tried to read the verse and couldn’t—there was too many ink blots.” | 2023-03-03T00:01:00.000-05:00 | 2023-03-03T00:01:00.000-05:00 | Rap | Tase Grip / Break All Records | March 3, 2023 | 7.8 | d0f04d17-ca3e-40cb-b953-84f2cba224a5 | Paul A. Thompson | https://pitchfork.com/staff/paul-a. thompson/ | |
The North Carolina band once sounded tethered to the past. Now, more than 20 years into its career, it trades retro Americana for more expansive cinematic atmospheres. | The North Carolina band once sounded tethered to the past. Now, more than 20 years into its career, it trades retro Americana for more expansive cinematic atmospheres. | Chatham County Line: Hiyo | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/chatham-county-line-hiyo/ | Hiyo | Age suits Chatham County Line, who have been anxious to act older than their years from the moment they picked up stringed instruments. Founded in Raleigh, North Carolina, in 1999, they once sounded like they might have been emissaries of a much earlier era, but with the passage of time, they’ve become less tethered to the past while expanding their vision of what Americana could be. After feinting toward heartland rock on 2020’s Strange Fascination, Chatham County Line turn moodier on Hiyo.
CCL vocalist/guitarist Dave Wilson co-produced the album with producer and music supervisor Rachel Moore, who in 2022 enlisted the group to serve as backing musicians on the set of George & Tammy, a Showtime series dramatizing the legacy of country icons George Jones and Tammy Wynette. Once filming was complete, Wilson returned the favor by convincing Moore to join the group in the studio. The album they created together feels appropriately cinematic, drifting from bluegrass picking and plaintive harmonies into territory where such distinctions cease to matter.
Chatham County Line still emphasize harmony, both vocal and instrumental, yet they appear newly eager to discover what lies beyond the borders of bluegrass. They place their emphasis neither on songs or fingerpicking, two cornerstones of the genre, but on atmosphere. Moore’s subtle use of studio effects gives Hiyo an almost painterly grain. The players ride meditative, melancholy chords that ebb and flow, reaching a pinnacle on the soft pulse of “Heaven,” which spends as much time receding as it does creeping ashore.
The desire to experiment occasionally leads them astray; Wilson’s writing on “Lone Ranger” gets bogged down in bedroom power dynamics. They’re better served by a lighter touch, like when they preserve the gendered lyrics in a haunted version of Patsy Cline’s “She’s Got You.” The Cline cover is one of a handful of retro accents on Hiyo—the closing “Summerline” features Wilson crooning into a phased old-timey microphone—but Chatham County Line have never seemed less burdened by the past. They embrace electronics and melodies sweet enough to be classified as pop—on “Magic,” they do so simultaneously—and discover new spectral microtones lying within their combined voices. These impressionistic textures place the album in a netherworld that’s untethered from any specific time or place. There’s an unquantifiable restlessness at the heart of Hiyo that keeps the record just out of reach, hinting at territories both alien yet oddly comforting. | 2024-02-05T00:01:00.000-05:00 | 2024-02-05T00:01:00.000-05:00 | Folk/Country | Yep Roc | February 5, 2024 | 7 | d0f38ef5-e99e-4e05-b196-9a97fde18a60 | Stephen Thomas Erlewine | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stephen-thomas erlewine/ | |
For club-friendly artists to become or remain relevant on the strength of a single great 12-inch is not unusual, but ... | For club-friendly artists to become or remain relevant on the strength of a single great 12-inch is not unusual, but ... | !!!: Louden Up Now | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/1764-louden-up-now/ | Louden Up Now | For club-friendly artists to become or remain relevant on the strength of a single great 12-inch is not unusual, but when the New York-based funk/rock octet !!! kept a prominent finger in the disco-punk pie with merely one song, last year's "Me and Giuliani Down by the School Yard (A True Story)", it seemed an impressive feat. Two years earlier, the band had cut a self-titled full-length that went mostly unnoticed. But by 2001, !!! had latched onto an updated no-wave aesthetic that countless other bands would soon mindlessly mishandle. The featured 10-minute dancepunk epic-- stuffed with more hooks and movements than entire full-length albums-- not only reclaimed the band's reputation, but promised new life to the genre itself. The band's trajectory was the genre's trajectory, and with "Me and Giuliani", !!! and disco-punk began to stray away from safe post-punk skronk, and gradually draw nearer to more adventurous disco sleek.
On Louden Up Now, !!! have progressed toward a slicker, more disco-oriented sound. The band generally forgo the sloppy horn lines and heavy punk riff backbone of their debut, opting instead for slow, trance-like builds. At the heart of the album is a suffocating, dark electro-acoustic disco smog that recalls Black Devil's 1979 Disco Club EP, as well as Larry Levan, Walter Gibbons, and Arthur Russell's more pessimistic contributions to the disco underground. All of which is to say that the production on Louden Up Now is particularly commendable. Over the course of songs such as the first single "Pardon My Freedom", "Shit Scheisse Merde (Part 1)", and album highlight "Hello? Is This Thing On?", the !!! rhythm section boasts not only an adroit shape-shifting timbre, but enough subtlety for close listening.
Louden Up Now isn't all dancefloor thrills, however: !!! smartly dodge pigeonholes and one-trick-pony accusations with some less punchy moves, such as the psychedelic grind of "Dear Can" and the bright but blunted moonbounce of "Theme from Space Island". On "Shit Scheisse Merde (Part 2)", the band even curiously infringe on the drum sampling and sparse rhythmic figures of their sister group Out Hud.
So the production is great, the songbook is varied, and the band is tighter and more ambitious than ever-- the only problem with Louden Up Now is the unfortunate paucity of ideas within the songs themselves. It's as if the equivalent of all of the musical energy of "Me and Giuliani" has been spread over the album's nine other tracks. While Louden Up Now's electronic embellishments are finely mutated, the album sorely misses the huge, nearly anthemic guitar hooks that, to my mind, make !!! so exciting. Also sadly absent from anything other than "Me and Giuliani" are the distinct chapter-like movements of !!!'s longer numbers. On both "Shit Scheisse Merde (Part 2)" and "Dear Can", !!! get caught in a groove and seem hesitant to explore other potential variations or moods.
!!! always flirted with the possibility that they'd fail to fully deliver on the promise of "Me and Giuliani"-- unfortunately, just as a single 12-inch can make a reputation, that track can also serve as a potentially unforgiving benchmark. Louden Up Now contains plenty of good ideas-- as well as two tracks ("Pardon My Freedom" and "Hello? Is This Thing On?") that could soundtrack summer dance parties and net !!! a larger audience. But even when one considers that most listeners are no longer apt to be wowed simply by the concept of dance music with guitars-- and that most of !!!'s audience has come to accept Nic Offer's generally asinine lyrics as an inherent part of the group's unique dynamic-- Louden Up Now is simply not the indie-dance juggernaut many hoped it would be. | 2004-06-07T01:00:01.000-04:00 | 2004-06-07T01:00:01.000-04:00 | Rock | Touch and Go | June 7, 2004 | 7 | d105301b-ef76-4ea3-ae40-bfdb1cbfa7a9 | Nick Sylvester | https://pitchfork.com/staff/nick-sylvester/ | null |
Zaki Ibrahim’s second album is a future-soul marvel that connects sounds across time and oceans, creating thrilling moments of pop music synthesized through her wise and worldly vision. | Zaki Ibrahim’s second album is a future-soul marvel that connects sounds across time and oceans, creating thrilling moments of pop music synthesized through her wise and worldly vision. | Zaki Ibrahim: The Secret Life of Planets | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/zaki-ibrahim-the-secret-life-of-planets/ | The Secret Life of Planets | The most pernicious lies about Canadian culture—that it is fledgling, subpar, or one-note—are self-generated. A month ago, I read a 1964 short story where the late novelist Mavis Gallant describes a photo of an expat family taken on a “Canadian-looking lawn.” It takes skill to make something as dull a patch of grass seem even more dull, though it is a pretty effective quip. Growing up in the Toronto suburbs in the ’90s, that same derisive shorthand was used to poke fun at homegrown radio and television content that conformed, lacked imagination: “It sounds Canadian,” “It looks Canadian,” we’d say.
The recent, unprecedented interest in Canada’s youth culture stems mainly from rappers, pop stars, and YouTubers—many black and brown, or children of immigrants—who leapfrogged these civic tropes to find global success. But in the rush to canonize this digital generation and their savvy, we’ve subtly encouraged the ahistorical idea that culture is somehow new here. For decades artists have flouted the overwhelming whiteness of Canadian sensibilities, considered their ancestries, made the pilgrimage “home,” returned, and eked out space. Exile is part of the Canadian story—almost all of us are settlers on this land—and this forgetting helps no one.
Singer and songwriter Zaki Ibrahim is part of this history. The Secret Life of Planets is Ibrahim’s second full-length release in a 12-year career, half of which was spent fervently gigging around Toronto’s R&B, rap, and house music scenes, before decamping for her fatherland in South Africa. In Cape Town, she found new inspiration in the loping cadence of kwaito, recorded parts of her 2012, Polaris Prize-nominated LP Every Opposite, and lent her flushed, practiced vocals to collaborations with local musicians as well as Hyperdub producers like LV and Scratcha DVA.
Along the way to arriving at Planets, Ibrahim has gathered new methods, sounds, and communities, recombining old ideas to make something all her own. This analog/digital, past/future, sensory/tactical approach to music-making is her hallmark. On The Secret Life of Planets (a title that riffs on a kitschy 1979 Stevie Wonder album), she flexes this musical vision—helped by Toronto producers/instrumentalists Alister Johnson and Casey MQ—with singular focus and nuanced whimsy. Try, but it’s very difficult to pick a favorite patch of sound from the Planets’ 13 tracks, her best album to date.
Despite its title, Planets is less liturgical science fiction and more soulful and sublime, focusing on cosmos of human experience. Ibrahim’s space odyssey somehow feels like both the dewy coast of British Columbia, where she was born, and South Africa’s sun-blanched expanse. Musically, she’s connecting a lineage of black styles across eras and oceans. Emotionally, she’s narrating a moment when time collapsed: her father’s death, followed four months later by the birth of her baby boy. Could life be more literal? Planets captures the giddy wonder that can come with immense despair. That moment when you raise your wet cheeks to the sun, our closest star and anchor, and find some peace in the immensity.
“Intro” feels the most familiar to the astral theme; it’s the dulcet, soft-lensed opening credits of a planetarium laser show, orbited by voices that are gurgling, somber, and far-off like a transmission. For most of Planets, Ibrahim and her producers dig into a range of earthbound electronic sounds: “Get There” is the lucid, bass-heavy two-step of the rave, “Love Made Naked” skips backward to boogie, and “Do the Thing Right” vibrates like a sweaty function, as vocal chants, percussion and horn sounds collide over the tipsy wub of Afrohouse. In the past, Ibrahim’s affinity for four-on-the-floor house and improvisational vocal rhythms have provided beautifully literal tributes to her South African return. But on Planets, she’s syncretized these interests into something of her own that sounds placeless, inquisitive, undeterred.
There are some thrilling pop moments too. “Cut Loose” follows a sultry loop and releases into rapturous, funky, wall-of-sound harmonies. On “Diamond Time,” which feels equally indebted to Chaka Khan and the warm bounce and clean lines of ’90s British soul, Johnson and MQ freak a range of wild synth sounds and muted handclaps, but it’s the big hook that takes it away. “I known love through the ages,” Ibrahim and her chorus exhale in unison, before soaring over the beat, “Big enough to blow your mind.” And on the incandescent lullaby “Galileo,” there’s a spotlight on Ibrahim’s most compelling gift: her moonlit voice, contoured by emotion.
Ibrahim’s eclipsing talent has been tenaciously honed outside of the pressures of a homogenizing industry that would benefit from making her its star. Planets isn’t just a product of black American or South African music styles; it’s multiple identities make it distinctly Canadian. It’s the work of an optimist whose voice wasn’t silenced by the confines of an unimaginative industry; it’s expansive in effort, and by sheer existence. | 2018-02-15T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2018-02-15T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Pop/R&B | self-released | February 15, 2018 | 7.8 | d105ff58-6682-428b-ac05-1cd22001053a | Anupa Mistry | https://pitchfork.com/staff/anupa-mistry/ | |
The neoclassical-ambient duo of Adam Wiltzie and Dustin O’Halloran offers a gorgeous, towering, and apposite score for a dance theater production based on the Italo Calvino novel of the same name. | The neoclassical-ambient duo of Adam Wiltzie and Dustin O’Halloran offers a gorgeous, towering, and apposite score for a dance theater production based on the Italo Calvino novel of the same name. | A Winged Victory for the Sullen: Invisible Cities | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/a-winged-victory-for-the-sullen-invisible-cities/ | Invisible Cities | While appearing on albums for reputable labels such as Mute, Kranky, and Bedroom Community, today’s electronic-ambient artists are also afforded a healthy sideline in commissions for dance, theater, art installation, and film. One key benefactor is the choreographer Wayne McGregor, who treats his internationally acclaimed spectacles like he’s booking Moogfest, enlisting composers such as Max Richter, Ben Frost, and Jon Hopkins.
But those lines seem especially blurred in the case of A Winged Victory for the Sullen, whose second album, Atomos, was written for McGregor. Two of the group’s four LPs are scores, not even counting two other compositions for film soundtracks. Pianist Dustin O’Halloran’s most famous song is the Transparent theme, while Adam Wiltzie—whose ambient group Stars of the Lid launched countless hum-alikes—was tapped to score the big Whitney Houston doc for reasons even he doesn’t understand.
The only noticeable difference between the duo’s albums and commissions is the latitude that they allow themselves on the latter. That’s certainly the case on Invisible Cities, the score for a sprawling dance theater production based on Italo Calvino’s postmodern novel. Ambient musicians do have a habit of imputing weirdly specific concepts to interchangeable drones. But in this happy case, the applied content could hardly be more harmonious.
In Calvino’s 1972 novel, the 13th-century explorer Marco Polo describes imaginary cities to his contemporary, Kublai Khan, the Mongolian emperor later immortalized by a laudanum-dazed English poet. Any AWVFTS album would resonate with the beautifully wrought shape of Calvino’s prose, its sentimental, sorrowful grandeur, and the dreamlike flow of glittering details. Chip away all that agate and chalcedony, and Marco Polo is not describing cities, but how memory structures them, and what longings attached to them—two themes AWVFTS know well.
On Invisible Cities, their established neoclassical-ambient template is perfectly intact, with wide, spreading basses on the bottom, distorted melodies sharply etching the high end, and soft harmonies shifting in the abyssal middle. The tempo is solemn, the pacing regal, the mood perpetually expectant. The hopeful uncertainty of O’Halloran’s piano lends human scale to towers of holy drones and fuming strings. But there are more varieties of motion and force here than their imperious stasis usually allows.
Several songs dance on rapid pizzicato strings or driving violin ostinatos, while others incorporate tight, breathless arias. Others explode the elegant façade with exhilaration. “There Is One of Which You Never Speak” builds to a shorting mess of circuitry, almost shocking from a group that usually abhors any stereo chaos. The big finish, “Total Perspective Vortex,” goes even harder. The usual symphonic ice-melt erupts in volcanic distortion, which is then chopped into the strafing patterns that pervade the record, peaking in a metal scream.
Naturally, the most explicit Calvino references are in the song titles, though it’s nice to think of the subtle elephant-trumpet timbre of “The Dead Outnumber the Living” as an homage to the pachyderm in the book’s prologue. Wiltzie and O’Halloran knew what they were about when they snagged the line “desires are already memories” for a title, though somehow they overlooked “a sense of emptiness that comes over us at evening,” an excellent précis of their whole vibe.
Still, one more parallel might be suggested. Calvino deployed heightened emotion with schematic rigor—most of the book’s Wikipedia page is concerned with its intricate internal structure. (He was a member of Oulipo, some French authors who started trying to write literature with math in the 1960s.) In a different way, AWVFTS does the same thing.
This is a group, after all, whose prior album was a sort of musical treatise on the perfect fifth. Their music conveys a sense of drama, high stakes, even godlike perspective, yet it does so in such a seamless, unerring way that it feels abstract, tooled for proscenium halls. A baseline of reliability can double as a cap on transcendent potential, and it’s those cap-rattling moments that make what’s otherwise simply another fine album from this duo worthwhile.
Buy: Rough Trade
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Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-02-02T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2021-02-02T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Experimental | Artificial Pinearch Manufacturing | February 2, 2021 | 6.9 | d108395e-0df3-4263-88d5-2030900cb527 | Brian Howe | https://pitchfork.com/staff/brian-howe/ | |
Pépé Bradock made his name crafting immaculate deep house, but for more than a decade he has delighted in flouting expectations. Guitar in hand, he does just that on this album under a new alias. | Pépé Bradock made his name crafting immaculate deep house, but for more than a decade he has delighted in flouting expectations. Guitar in hand, he does just that on this album under a new alias. | Brigitte Barbu: Muzak pour ascenseurs en panne | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/brigitte-barbu-muzak-pour-ascenseurs-en-panne/ | Muzak pour ascenseurs en panne | Brigitte Barbu, better known as French deep-house enigma Pépé Bradock, is an impossible man to pin down. After a brief scuffle with the mainstream at the end of the 1990s thanks to “Deep Burnt,” a jazzy house classic of immaculate poise, Bradock has retreated—or perhaps advanced—into a career of inscrutable oddity. His erratic release schedule wanders between moments of beauty, fear, and utter outlandishness. Muzak pour ascenseurs en panne (Muzak for Broken Elevators), only Bradock’s third album in 24 years—following the 1998 singles anthology Synthèse and last year’s appropriately titled collage effort What a Mess!—continues this beguiling and sometimes frustrating trend. The album is neither the “abstract hip-hop LP” that Bradock promised, nor an example of the deep house with which he made his name. There are no beats, for a start, and barely a hint of the constructive patterns that house typically demands; the songs instead ooze from one point to another like microorganisms in the primordial soup.
Most eye-opening of all is the role that the electric guitar plays: Muzak pour ascenseurs en panne was recorded and mixed during a one-week studio residency with the guitar employed, he says, as “a brainwashed instrument, mirroring machines and computers.” The instrument’s presence shouldn’t be a total surprise—Bradock started playing guitar at 14, graduating to Parisian jazz-funk bands before house took over—but the instrument has barely featured in his music since. On the evidence of the exquisite, often entrancing, patches of guitar melody on Muzak, I wish it had. Bradock has a gift for the kind of atmospheric guitar traces that Steve Hillage employed on albums like Rainbow Dome Musick, notes misted onto the mix like the suggestion of rain. Rather than mirroring the machines, though, the guitar flows into them, dissolving the border between digital and analog as it joins Bradock’s collection of esoteric drones, trills, and pulses.
The album’s best moments coincide with the strongest melodic work. “Dae Boj DeMoya” washes in on a gorgeously tender melody whose hybrid guitar/synth tone falls somewhere between a whistle, pedal steel, and slide guitar; its haunting tint of Americana evokes the KLF’s journey into the American dreamland on Chill Out, with the melody becoming progressively more enveloped in electronic curlicues as the track develops. “Sainte Amante” travels from spidery guitar lines to airy chords, which bathe the song’s electronic arpeggios in shimmering light, while “Mistori” uses a sublime combination of reverbed guitar and synth drone to trace layers of melody, ending up like Apollo: Atmospheres and Soundtracks if Brian Eno had set his controls for the heart of the sun rather than the moon’s barren surface.
Muzak’s tendency to meander is both its charm and its Achilles’ heel. When the musical ideas are strong it is a luxury to drift along on Muzak’s wave, free from the distraction of beats or extraneous elements; when they are weak or ill defined, as on “Ray Z,” a track most notable for sporting a comically duck-like squelch, the music feels rather slight, more a collection of sounds than anything approaching a song. On an album this short—with just six songs and five brief sketches to its name—this feels wasteful. Perhaps completing an album in one week was an unrealistic proposition for an artist who confesses to work at the pace of a “Burgundy snail.”
Then again, the tendency for dazzling self-sabotage is typically Pépé Bradock, a hugely talented producer whose obduracy is part of the package. There are no simple answers to the Bradock riddle, and nor would you want them. This week he’s Brigitte Barbu, recording amorphic, guitar-led caprice; the next week he won’t be, but Muzak pour ascenseurs en panne remains another perfectly imperfect milestone along Bradock’s exasperating golden path. | 2020-06-15T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-06-15T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic / Experimental | Circus Company | June 15, 2020 | 6.8 | d10c3acf-ad6f-462b-8314-64ba94cad84d | Ben Cardew | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ben-cardew/ | |
J Dilla's younger brother trawls through the late producer's wealth of unused beats and uses them as the foundation for his debut album. | J Dilla's younger brother trawls through the late producer's wealth of unused beats and uses them as the foundation for his debut album. | Illa J: Yancey Boys | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/12438-yancey-boys/ | Yancey Boys | Illa J is the younger brother of the late stoner-rap deity J Dilla. That in itself speaks to some fundamental lameness, like if Jay-Z had a rapping younger brother who called himself Zee-J. More to the point, his familial connection to a great dead producer appears to be Illa's chief qualification to release an album. On the interlude "Alien Family", Dilla associate Frank Nitty tries to make a case for this particular feat of nepotism, testifying as to the musical abilities of the entire Yancey clan: "It's like they the Jackson 5 from Mars." If you say so, Frank Nitty.
And yet Yancey Boys does work pretty well because of that familial connection: Illa exclusively works with previosuly unheard mid-1990s Dilla beats, and a new album full of old Dilla beats is never a bad thing. Dilla apparently left behind a Tupac-level archive of unused material when he died in 2006, and Yancey Boys is pretty much 48 minutes' worth of the producer's trademark glimmering murk. It's a good little, unhurried, rainy-afternoon rap album. Dilla had a definite formula-- amniotic soups of echoed-out Fender Rhodes, sharp snares, gurgley bass, precisely sloppy record-scratches-- yet surprises do pop up every once in a while on Yancey Boys. "We Here" swipes the drums from Kraftwerk's "Trans-Europe Express". "All Good" employs someone running a stick up and down one of those wooden crocodile sculptures. Mostly, though, these old beats just thump away in a comforting sort of fog.
As for Illa, he's got a rapping voice way more soft and delicate than the vaguely clumsy tough-guy yammer Dilla himself usually used. At times, Illa recalls a seriously stoned and vaguely bored Q-Tip. His lyrics are heavy on digression. On "Strugglin'", apropos of nothing: "My favorite White Stripes album is Elephant/ OK, I know that's irrelevant/ But that's my shit." "IllaSoul" is a weird sort of a come-on song, Illa getting stoned and staring at the ocean while at the same time hitting on some girl. Actual lyric: "I'm so glad that we got we/ And also, I'm so glad that we got weed."
But Illa spends at least as much time singing in a relaxed soul-singer falsetto coo as he does rapping-- and he rarely diverts attention from the beats, which makes him a more appropriate vessel for them than a prominent Dilla collaborator like Common or Busta Rhymes would've been. Illa recalls fellow indie-rap psych-traveller Aloe Blacc in the way he mixes Sam Cooke harmonies with utilitarian rapper. But unlike Aloe, Illa rarely gives the impression that he's doing anything more than fucking around in the studio. This, after all, the sort of album where someone says, "I grab your derriere and vibrateth my fingertips" in a vampire accent over "Für Elise". At the end of "Sounds Like Love", Illa ad-libs, almost to himself, "It's just the music. It speaks for himself." He's right. And thanks to his brother's beyond-the-grave contributions, he himself is the most disposable part of his own debut album. Luckily for him, it probably won't be too hard to find another hour's worth of unused Dilla tracks when it comes time to record the follow-up. | 2008-11-18T01:00:04.000-05:00 | 2008-11-18T01:00:04.000-05:00 | Pop/R&B / Rap | Delicious Vinyl | November 18, 2008 | 6.3 | d11526b8-3b17-440b-be46-e10b6aa4bedc | Tom Breihan | https://pitchfork.com/staff/tom-breihan/ | null |
Vermont is the new synthesizer-based project from German electronic composers Daniel Plessow (Motor City Drum Ensemble) and Marcus Worgull. These careful, patient pieces, a handful featuring Can's Jaki Liebezeit on drums, are focused and luminous. | Vermont is the new synthesizer-based project from German electronic composers Daniel Plessow (Motor City Drum Ensemble) and Marcus Worgull. These careful, patient pieces, a handful featuring Can's Jaki Liebezeit on drums, are focused and luminous. | Vermont: Vermont | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/19129-vermont-vermont/ | Vermont | Vermont is a new project from Germans Danilo Plessow and Marcus Worgull. For Plessow, better known as Motor City Drum Ensemble, it represents the first significant dump of new material since his wildly popular Raw Cuts series—dusty, sample-based house ravers—put him on the map at the end of last decade. The album, a collection of percolating synthesizer landscapes, represents a new direction for both, one that borrows from Germany's storied history of outre music in both form—the influence of artists like Popol Vuh and Hans-Joachim Roedelius is undeniable—and function: Can's Jaki Liebezeit guests on drums.
Despite its relative obscurity in the canon of western music, instrumental synthesizer music is plentiful. Analog circuitry is enormously fun to fiddle with and gear obsessives have a tendency to hit "record" and do just that. Artists such as Steve Moore, Norm Chambers (Jürgen Müller, Panabrite), Steve Hauschildt, and Jorge Velez (Professor Genius) are just a handful of artists who've released exciting works in the genre recently. This is music that sits in the middle of a venn diagram that brings together ambient, improvisatory, and generative musics, which is to say that it's music that can often seem more edifying and enriching for its creators than for its audience. Vermont's careful, patient compositions don't feel particularly generative or improvisatory, but the instruments still do a lot of the heavy lifting: anyone not predisposed to enveloping pads and wispy filigrees of melody will find little else to sink their teeth into.
If Plessow and Worgull distinguish themselves, it's via clarity and execution. Because its creators are often using finicky gear three and four decades old, lots of synthesizer music tends to sound as worn and fractured as the tools used to make it. Vermont, though, is focused and luminous; its high is similar to that of waking up early, totally sober, and gathering oneself. There's discipline and fidelity in this music, which is a fancy way of saying it has its shit together. Vermont is never less than agreeable and pretty: if you get off on hearing a bunch of volts and circuits evoke mountains and fog, Vermont might be for you.
Evoking those landscapes, though, is all Vermont does. It's polite music that, unlike proper ambient music, has pretensions that extend beyond politeness. It's here where Vermont's balance hurts it. Something foggier or more random would open more avenues to explore, but Vermont feels complete, without mystery or intrigue. It lacks the psychedelia and stoned otherness of its inspirations. "Macchina"'s puddled rhythms and "Ruckzug"'s graceful plumes are lovely, but oddity and intrigue are beyond their grasp. "Cocos" is a moody, minor-key sea of texture, but it never stirs up any real tension.
To its credit, Vermont stares its self-imposed limits in the face and walks away with plenty of elegant moments. Its slightness makes it nothing more than a diversion: for listeners, sure, but also for its creators. Vermont is a side project that sounds like one, a pastime for Plessow and Worgull, a minor curiosity for their fans. | 2014-03-19T02:00:04.000-04:00 | 2014-03-19T02:00:04.000-04:00 | Electronic | Kompakt | March 19, 2014 | 6.4 | d119dd1c-4e1c-453c-869b-1696a7798a7c | Andrew Gaerig | https://pitchfork.com/staff/andrew-gaerig/ | null |
Feist’s quietest album to date is warm and comforting throughout, but really peaks when it gets fuller, weirder, and more unpredictable. | Feist’s quietest album to date is warm and comforting throughout, but really peaks when it gets fuller, weirder, and more unpredictable. | Feist: Multitudes | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/feist-multitudes/ | Multitudes | On Multitudes, Leslie Feist is a new mother softly soothing her baby to sleep with lullabies of fear and death. She is a sorcerer channeling thunder and lightning, finding life in the rumble and the flash. She is a grieving daughter with a new understanding of what it means to be alone. She is an exorcist driving out our collective anxiety with screams that could wake the dead. She is a 47-year-old single parent looking beyond romantic love. She is a choir leader singing to the birds, and the birds are singing back.
These pieces of her sit alongside the ones she’s stacked up across two decades of sidelong stardom: The cosmopolitan chanteuse. The chirping indie rocker. The reluctant pop idol. The translator of millennial heartbreak. The solitary blueswoman. The creative community builder. The spartan folkie. The seller of digital devices. The champion of all things analog. The naturalist. The wind. The water.
Written during the blurry height of the pandemic, when Feist was beginning a new life with her adopted daughter, Tihui, Multitudes is largely a testament to hushed perseverance amid personal and collective upheaval. It is her quietest album, an invitation to introspection. Half of the 12 songs here don’t have any drums whatsoever, and most of the rest lack anything resembling a steady backbeat. And whereas the distorted tones smeared over 2017’s Pleasure could make it seem as if she were squaring off against her guitar and microphone, Multitudes mostly sounds as cozy as a winter sweater that’s three sizes too big.
Nearly everything revolves around her voice, a darting melodic hummingbird flying right next to your ear, along with her acoustic strumming and fingerpicking, calling back to classics by Nick Drake, Leonard Cohen, and Joni Mitchell. Several times across the record, a chorus of Feists sings lines in the round, offering an illusion of plenty. On “Forever Before,” an ode to Tihui that details the perspective shifts that come with no longer living only for oneself, she repeats the words “fear” and “fearless,” stretching them out wide, and the effect is as serene as a deep breathing exercise. This is comfort music that emerged during a period when Feist, and everyone else, needed lots of comforting—ASMR-folk for the tattered soul.
At times, the album’s lowkey spareness can make it feel plain; lullabies, after all, are meant to lull. Feist’s canny sense of rhythm, the way her words dance between snare and bass, is missed. As is her lightness, her sense of play. The intimacy created by Feist and longtime producers Mocky and Robbie Lackritz puts realness to the fore—she is up-close, personal, unvarnished—but this can also snuff out the mystery that hangs like smoke over some of her most intriguing work. And however lovely, a song like “The Redwing” can’t help but feel a little redundant amid an oeuvre filled with references to fine feathered friends and the freedom they represent.
When Multitudes gets fuller, weirder, and more unpredictable, it hits its peaks. “I Took All of My Rings Off” plays like an ancient fable of enlightenment made modern. She removes the jewelry from her ears, fingers, and dreams, buries it in the dirt—and then things get cosmic. The song shakes off its gravitational pull about halfway through, as Feist’s voice is suddenly enveloped in a cloud of reverb. She sounds like she’s floating hundreds, then thousands of feet above the ground, awash in vintage synthesizer tones that conjure a retro futuristic moonshot. The song is messy and meandering, easy to get lost in. It’s also one of a few tracks on the album that features production from Blake Mills, whose adventurous way with singer-songwriter music—from his work with Perfume Genius to his arresting solo album Mutable Set—is a perfect fit for Feist.
Opener “In Lightning” is the most propulsive thing here, where Feist makes her own version of a vintage Björk banger. Booming percussion that sounds like an army of marching redwoods is smashed together with the singer belting in full voice and a swooping string arrangement from Miguel Atwood-Ferguson, the veteran musician and composer whose credits range from Flying Lotus to Mary J. Blige. The song is about embodying the brightest and loudest forces, and Feist unequivocally steps up to the task.
She has often written about the wonders of the natural world, but Multitudes represents another subtle perspective shift: Instead of concentrating on her small place within the enormity of the elements, she now finds solace, love, and oneness in Mother Nature. Sound corny? It’s not. “Become the Earth” introduces itself like a stripped-down Roy Orbison or Elvis ballad—except those guys never sang about the process of our bodies decomposing in the ground only to rise again as overgrown vines. At the midway point, the music dies, and Feist begins her ascent, her voice glitching and breaking up in the void, as if she’s losing her signal with human existence. “Some people have gone, and the people who stayed/Will eventually go in a matter of days,” she sings, matter-of-factly, making the idea of death as approachable and universal as it should be but rarely is. It’s hard not to think of the song as a fittingly unconventional elegy for her father Harold, an abstract painter who passed away in the spring of 2021.
Why search for transcendence in a romantic relationship, she seems to say across Multitudes, when you can find it in a giant sequoia that was here long before us, and will be here long after. Or in the camaraderie of womankind. Or in the baby sleeping in the corner. These are the kinds of noble sentiments we’ve come to expect from Feist, as if she alone has the power to bypass the bullshit and unlock profound truths. This nobility was tested last year when she embarked on a tour with Arcade Fire days after that band’s leader, Win Butler, was accused of sexual misconduct by multiple women, which he has denied. After a couple of uncomfortable sets, she walked away. “The last two nights on stage, my songs made this decision for me,” she wrote in a statement. “Hearing them through this lens was incongruous with what I’ve worked to clarify for myself through my whole career. I’ve always written songs to name my own subtle difficulties, aspire to my best self and claim responsibility when I need to. And I’m claiming my responsibility now and going home.” For all that she contains, Feist’s song of self does not waver. | 2023-04-14T00:03:00.000-04:00 | 2023-04-14T00:03:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Interscope | April 14, 2023 | 7.6 | d11f2ba6-8933-4d30-8694-16dfb89321b4 | Ryan Dombal | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ryan-dombal/ | |
Six years and one nearly fatal accident after her promising debut, French singer-songwriter Melody Prochet celebrates her recovery with an album of gleefully overstuffed psych-pop. | Six years and one nearly fatal accident after her promising debut, French singer-songwriter Melody Prochet celebrates her recovery with an album of gleefully overstuffed psych-pop. | Melody’s Echo Chamber: Bon Voyage | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/melodys-echo-chamber-bon-voyage/ | Bon Voyage | Melody’s Echo Chamber’s Bon Voyage is one of those “highly anticipated” albums that are as haunted as they are hyped, with fans’ excitement for the music giving way to concern for its creator. French psych-pop artist Melody Prochet isn’t a celebrity, but the travails she underwent while finishing her second LP were newsworthy: It ends with a song originally released in 2014. “A million hours of work” went into her sessions with Tame Impala’s Kevin Parker, Prochet’s now-ex-boyfriend and the producer on her self-titled 2012 debut. The most distressing setback was a nearly fatal accident that led to a broken vertebra, a brain aneurysm, and an understandably canceled tour. (Prochet has underplayed the incident, allowing only that it “broke a life pattern that didn’t work for me.”) Instead of responding to that turn of events with a cleansing, sober album of plainspoken acoustics, Prochet celebrated her emotional and physical recovery by taking gleeful, blindfolded swings at an overstuffed piñata of psychedelic candy.
The sound capitalizes on the strengths of Prochet’s collaborators: Swedish psych fixtures Fredrik Swahn of the Amazing and Reine Fiske of Dungen, as well as Nicholas Allbrook of Australia’s Pond—three artists whose adventures in blissed-out trippiness are only intermittently concerned with structure—served as the record’s musical and spiritual advisers. Opener “Cross My Heart” begins with a 12-string guitar figure that could’ve appeared on any of the above musicians’ releases, or as a continuation of the stylish pop modes on Melody’s Echo Chamber. But, after 30 seconds, the intro gives way to an album’s worth of instruments and production tricks: grainy string sections, close-mic’d drum rolls, twittering flute, double bass, and a breakdown into beatboxing and synthesized record scratching. It’s the raw materials of an Avalanches track and their finished sample collage at the same time.
Prochet’s private psychedelic reel toggles between English, French, and Swedish lyrics; analog purism and postmodern pranks; soul-cleansing screams and a spoken-word bit from Allbrook about fucking and shitting himself at the moment of his death. Though the sacred texts it cites fall firmly within the syllabus of the lysergic ’60s and ’70s, Bon Voyage feels more spiritually indebted to the pancultural, track-stuffing maximalism of the late ’90s—sound for sound’s sake, the result of indiscriminately rummaging through heavy deep cuts and easy-listening kitsch alike. The difference is that the irony and detachment that defined that era are absent; while Prochet is content to let her vocals serve as one of the album’s infinite luscious textures, her immediately intelligible lyrics are pull quotes that hint at the central tensions behind Bon Voyage. The paralyzing pain of its backstory coexists with the overwhelming joy of its creation.
But the record is almost entirely beholden to this subtextual reading, and it’s a hard one to uphold for 33 minutes. Prochet’s willingness to lose herself and the listener in a reverie starts to yield diminishing returns. Bon Voyage is overflowing with ideas, and their splattered presentation ultimately brings to mind Robert Frost’s saying about free-verse poetry: It’s like playing tennis without a net. The whistled bubblegum hook of “Breathe in, Breathe Out” is given as much weight as its momentum-killing bridge. Hearing the mammoth drum fills on “Quand Les Larmes D’un Ange Font Danser La Neige” once or twice is a kick that becomes numbing after more than seven minutes. “Desert Horse” contains the most arresting lyrical image—“So much blood on my hands/And not much left to destroy”—but it subjects Prochet’s voice to shrieking octave shifts, Auto-Tune, insectoid buzz, Arabic ululations, and rinky-dink drum machines. It’s both Prochet’s most emotionally invested performance and the one with the most distractions.
That chaos is apparently by design, though: Prochet has described “Desert Horse” as a document of “becoming an adult woman in a mad world.” And as tempting as it is to consider what Bon Voyage could’ve been with more focus and grounding, there is no alternate-universe version to separate the album’s maddening density from its immediate appeal. Despite the scattered song structures, the tracks unite to form a strangely cohesive whole; squishy funk-pop jam “Shirim” sounds like it was recorded in a bouncy castle, and “Desert Horse” seems to spill out from a padded room furnished with Pro Tools, but they’re both chasing the same antic impulses. Bon Voyage celebrates the catharsis of clearing away old wreckage, but it also revels in replacing that mess with new toys. | 2018-06-20T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-06-20T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Fat Possum | June 20, 2018 | 7.1 | d123e206-c18b-4691-b8a0-93420187f567 | Ian Cohen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ian-cohen/ | |
Recorded in Reykjavik with producer Valgeir Sigurðsson (Björk, Bonnie “Prince” Billy), Sam Amidon's new album was mostly captured in single takes, the band playing together in the studio and indulging only minimal overdubs. Rather than producing a more urgent album or at least one that sounds rawer or wilder in its performances, Lily-O too often sounds distracted by small flourishes. | Recorded in Reykjavik with producer Valgeir Sigurðsson (Björk, Bonnie “Prince” Billy), Sam Amidon's new album was mostly captured in single takes, the band playing together in the studio and indulging only minimal overdubs. Rather than producing a more urgent album or at least one that sounds rawer or wilder in its performances, Lily-O too often sounds distracted by small flourishes. | Sam Amidon: Lily-O | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/19848-sam-amidon-lily-o/ | Lily-O | The centerpiece of Sam Amidon’s fifth proper record is a nine-minute song called “Lily-O”, which opens with Amidon singing a lengthy a cappella epilogue about three suitors courting three ladies. It’s austerely quiet until two minutes into the song, when a second instrument enters—a single crackle of electric guitar, sharp and splintery, like a log sparking in a fireplace. Amidon is settling in for a long story that is less about marriage and more about betrayal, violence, death, and loss. “Lily-O”, we soon learn, is a murder ballad, with one brutal stabbing followed by a long list of bequeathals. “Oh what will you leave to your brother John, oh Lily-O?” he asks. “The rope and gallows to hang him on.”
Despite the grimness of the subject matter, Amidon never raises his voice, preferring instead to deliver the tale with a calm that borders on psychopathic. He would rather let the other instruments express the characters’ hope and grief and outrage as best they can: that electric guitar gives way to a jittery acoustic strum, which is joined by a skittering snare drum and some stray electronic bloops and bleeps. Sounding as though the song’s guts are spilling out, the din is perhaps intended to evoke the psychological state of the murderer, or to provoke some moral response in the listener. The players certainly are up to the task: Amidon is an accomplished banjo player and fiddler, the scion of a family steeped in folk tradition, and he’s joined by the ace rhythm section of bassist Shahzad Ismaily and drummer Chris Vatalaro. And that chiming, slicing guitar is played by Bill Frisell, the legendarily eclectic musician who has performed with John Zorn, Ryuichi Sakamoto, and Elvis Costello, among too many others to list.
So why does both “Lily-O” and the album of the same title fall so flat? Recording in Reykjavik with Valgeir Sigurðsson (who has produced albums by Björk and Bonnie “Prince” Billy), the makeshift band captured most of the album in single takes, playing together in the studio and indulging only minimal overdubs. Rather than producing a more urgent album or at least one that sounds rawer or wilder in its performances, Lily-O too often sounds distracted by small flourishes—the jazzy piano interlude between “Won’t Turn Back” and “Maid Lamenting”, for instance—at the expense of variation and shape. These songs are all pitched in the same mode and the same mood, as though each expresses the same dreamy reverie. As a result, the whole is persistently wistful, as its uniform tone overrides the nuance of the actual subject matter. In other words, the sorrowful “Maid Lamenting” and the contented “Devotion” strike the same chord of melancholy as the work song “Walkin' Boss” and “Groundhog Variations”, which is about frying and eating whistle-pig brains.
Somehow, Lily-O is Amidon’s most deliberate-sounding album, despite the spontaneity of its creation. He’s a fine instrumentalist with a wily sense of rhythm, especially when he bangs out the tricky patterns of “Pat Do This, Pat Do That”, but he can be a limited vocalist. Amidon sings every line in the past tense, even if it’s not conjugated as such, as though these songs are all memories fluttered around his brain during some lonely evening. The title track sounds like some repressed trauma gently resurfacing, yet Amidon cannot make those horrors sound immediate or dangerous. Every drama and every emotion sounds like it is safely put away in the past, with nothing to disrupt the present or to affect the living. On previous albums, Amidon has scrambled our sense of time by including old-time covers of new-time songs like Tim McGraw’s “My Old Friend” and Tears for Fears’ “Head Over Heels”, but there is nothing on Lily-O to break the spell these musicians have too carefully cast. In other words, there is nothing to get Amidon out of his own head or out of our collective past. | 2014-10-09T02:00:03.000-04:00 | 2014-10-09T02:00:03.000-04:00 | Rock | Nonesuch | October 9, 2014 | 5.9 | d13ecead-9413-49ac-b066-1d67fe9295ff | Stephen M. Deusner | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stephen-m. deusner/ | null |
The L.A. rapper’s dead-eyed hustler tales are grimier and druggier than ever. It’s a harsh toke, but the crackling production gives it the energy it needs. | The L.A. rapper’s dead-eyed hustler tales are grimier and druggier than ever. It’s a harsh toke, but the crackling production gives it the energy it needs. | Sideshow : F.U.N. T.O.Y. | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/sideshow-fun-toy/ | F.U.N. T.O.Y. | On F.U.N. T.O.Y., the voices surrounding Sideshow—parents, peers, pastors, sidewalk philosophers—appear between the songs like a Greek Chorus of damnation. They offer no hope or encouragement. Instead, they detail the myriad ways Sideshow and his generation are doomed. One such voice opens the record by explaining that “the young people are not gonna make it into heaven,” another issues hyper-specific death threats, and another shruggingly concedes that violence is “in his blood.” Sideshow doesn’t push back on these ideas much. His dead-eyed hustler tales indicate someone who is resigned to his fate.
Sideshow has a utilitarian, disarmingly personal writing style, an approach that feels less concerned with theatrics or manipulation of language than blunt force. His verses are collections of starkly composed snapshots, brief scenes of terror or heartache rendered in vocals that suggest Boldy James and Oddisee drained of all color; even when his delivery becomes frenetic, like the paranoid flow he deploys on “Bad Friend,” his voice still moves with a slippery codeine crawl. It gives his songs a hypnotic quality, making it easy to miss brutal passages like “All my life I been stepped on/God put both feet on me/I cried, my cries they get ignored” on initial listens. There’s a thick air of inevitability in Sideshow’s work, the kind of malaise that comes from always—unfortunately—being proven right about the world.
In previous albums, Sideshow’s relationship with selling and consuming drugs occupied the margins like a distant stormcloud, affecting the atmosphere without being at the center of it. Here, substances play a more central role as ubiquitous numbing agents needed to get through the day. Lean is his narcotic of choice. “I’m just tryna put a thousand dollars in one styrofoam,” he raps on “How to Kill a Man”,” following up on that thought later in the song: “Only codeine gives me purpose.”
In contrast to Sideshow’s deadpan vocals, the beats he chooses are active and skittish, tumbling over themselves like loose truck tires racing down a hill. Popstar Benny’s contributions are full of colorful, pixelated synths zigzagging around plugg drums, while chameleonic Chicago producer Ayochillmannn provides shuffling, futuristic Southern funk. When combined with Sideshow’s droopy intonations, it all has a crackling, circuits-frying energy. It’s tactile; you can almost smell the frayed wiring.
“Villain in Your Story (Still UA)” is a particularly harsh toke of a closer. Marc Rivera’s trudging beat is the perfect backdrop for Sideshow’s unblinking honesty (“You ain’t know I’m a fucked up dude?” he raps, less of a question than a sneer). But after 30 minutes of unrelenting darkness, Sideshow changes perspective. During a spoken-word outro, he explains that as a Black person in America, he can’t be depressed. He’s oppressed; there are systems in place designed to keep him trapped under problems engineered to be insurmountable. The bleary drug abuse, the ambient threat of violence, and the voices preaching downfall are part of a purposeful cycle. If everyone and everything around you only speaks prophecies of doom, you might eventually become a doomsayer yourself. | 2024-06-17T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2024-06-17T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | 10k | June 17, 2024 | 7.6 | d14175e4-e545-41ac-bc21-20548cadc64c | Dash Lewis | https://pitchfork.com/staff/dash-lewis/ | |
The experimental musicians’ first full-length collaboration gives the impression of life, fertility, and verdancy. It’s one of the most sumptuous works of either artist’s career. | The experimental musicians’ first full-length collaboration gives the impression of life, fertility, and verdancy. It’s one of the most sumptuous works of either artist’s career. | William Basinski / Janek Schaefer: . . . On Reflection | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/william-basinski-janek-schaefer-on-reflection/ | . . . On Reflection | William Basinski will probably be associated with death, decline, and decay for the rest of his life. His breakout series of albums was constructed from fraying tape loops, and most of his music sounds submerged and ancient, as if it’d been bottled from the distant past. You’d imagine his first full-length collaboration with Janek Schaefer, a sound collagist who works with vinyl (and a Guinness Book of Records-certified three-armed turntable), would be a celebration of physical media that show their scars as they age. Yet the strongest impression of . . . on reflection is one of life, fertility, and verdancy. It’s one of the richest and most sumptuously sound-designed works of either’s career, and a highlight in both catalogs.
The two musicians spent eight years raiding their undoubtedly vast archives of piano loops and stitching them into the backbone of the five-track, continuously flowing record. To anyone familiar with either artist’s catalog, it’s shocking how pristine the piano sounds, and we expect that it’ll eventually be submerged in vinyl crackle, tape hiss, and effects. But aside from the occasional burst of dubby echo, the piano remains unblemished. The real story unfolds in the margins: field recordings of birds, machines, vehicles, distant murmurs of crowds, shouts of children, a spooky little metallic shimmer every now and then.
If Basinski hadn’t already called an album The River, it would’ve been an apt title for this one. The piano seems to cut through the landscape, revealing layers of history previously unseen; it suggests a time-lapse of a canyon being created, or of a civilization growing along the banks of a river. A lot of the best recent ambient albums make heavy use of field recordings, often to create a sense of relatable, everyday domesticity or reflect the artist’s specific memories. . . . on reflection thinks on a bigger scale; it seems like it’s about everything.
Because we’re really just hearing two things here, piano and field recordings, it’s easy at first to overlook how complex this music is. The piano loop sounds stagnant at first, and it might take a few listens to notice how many different little vamps and motifs have been Frankensteined together. If you’re listening to . . . on reflection outside, letting the sounds of your own environment blend with the music, you might not process or even notice how much is going on in the back of the mix until you give it a focused listen in a quiet place. That’s not to say there’s one “correct” way to listen to it. It works well as an “experiential filter,” as a past review described Basinski’s music, or you can really focus on it and track its movements as a piece.
. . . on reflection has an interesting structure. Though it’s really one piece, it’s split into five numbered tracks; the two tracks that bookend either side of the record are based on piano, but in “. . . on reflection (three),” the piano cuts out and we’re greeted by a deep, meditative organ drone. Little electric zaps flit across the stereo field, as if we’ve suddenly stepped into a clearing in a forest and can observe comets shooting through a vast night sky. Then, not even six minutes later, the piano loop reassembles itself, and the album proceeds as if nothing has happened.
It’s a little frustrating at first to not be able to spend more time in this space, but . . . on reflection doesn’t really seem to adhere to human instincts. Like so much of the best ambient music, it feels like something that’s just happening rather than something that’s been meticulously assembled, which is why it might take a few listens for the level of its craftsmanship to sink in. Because it lacks Basinski’s usual layers of lo-fi murk or Schaefer’s predilection for harsh sounds, it’ll be more easily accessible to newcomers than most of their work. Yet it doesn’t seem to care if you like it or not. It just flows on, impassively, as the great confusing tumult of life goes on around it. | 2022-04-30T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2022-04-30T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Experimental / Electronic / Rock | Temporary Residence Ltd. | April 30, 2022 | 8 | d14de33e-ca6d-4fc9-bcc6-92a701718181 | Daniel Bromfield | https://pitchfork.com/staff/daniel-bromfield/ | |
The Stockholm producer offers a bewildering yet comforting gateway to his tragicomic worldview on an ambitious set of complementary albums. | The Stockholm producer offers a bewildering yet comforting gateway to his tragicomic worldview on an ambitious set of complementary albums. | Axel Boman: LUZ / Quest for Fire | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/axel-boman-luz-quest-for-fire/ | LUZ / Quest for Fire | What distinguishes Axel Boman’s music from other house music may be obvious to the ears, but it can be hard to put your finger on. The Stockholm producer avails himself of the same materials as many of his peers in the European dance underground—spongy synth bass, sharp-edged drum hits, filtered disco samples—but even when hewing to convention, Boman’s bouncy, brightly colored tracks stand out as though sprinkled with fairy dust. His productions are a little cartoonish, a little dreamlike, a little off-kilter. Like his occasional labelmate DJ Koze, Boman knows that there’s a fine line between a knee-slapper and a tearjerker: His music harbors both a sly sense of humor and an unmistakable melancholy, and the former often feels like a coping strategy for the latter.
In the nine years since his debut LP, 2013’s Family Vacation, the Studio Barnhus co-founder has mostly busied himself with singles and EPs, developing his idiosyncratic style on songs like “1979,” a bittersweet draught of sentimental deep house, and the more rambunctious “Voodoo,” which might elicit the mental image of elephants carousing on a merry-go-round. Two years ago, on Le New Life, he stretched slow-burning deep-house tracks to 12 and 13 minutes, the better to sink listeners into eyes-closed bliss. Boman has never been afraid to fiddle with format: He’s made music out of gamma radiation and released a 12" of nothing but locked grooves.
LUZ and Quest for Fire make for an especially unusual proposition. On streaming services, they’re presented as two distinct yet complementary albums. The physical edition bundles them together and spreads them across six sides of vinyl—or one and one-half discs per album. The inner sleeves of the 3xLP package are printed with an absurdist short story by the Swedish artist and “internet antiquarian” Erik Lavesson. The story revolves around a fictional remake of the 1981 caveman film Quest for Fire that ends in bankruptcy, madness, and stateless elephants roaming Iceland’s volcanic plains. (In a separate text about the story, Lavesson expounds at some length on the subject of Ulam, the guttural caveman language that Anthony Burgess invented for the 1981 film, and notes his interest in writing something that could connect the language to Boman’s music.) Over their cumulative hour and 23 minutes and 18 tracks, the two albums offer the fullest picture yet of Boman’s tragicomic worldview.
Across both albums, sampled choirs billow, sub-bass rumbles, and strings and synth pads tremble like spring blossoms in the breeze; vintage easy listening daubs many songs with a trace of sticky-sweet sap. There’s a real sense of physicality to Boman’s sounds, which he applies in thick, gloopy brushstrokes; if you could run your fingers across his virtual canvas, you’d detect nubby congas and midrange swirls and tiny pinprick hi-hats that bristle to the touch. Quirky details are woven into the fabric of the music: In the silky, ecstatic “Grape,” a hard-panned thwack positions you smack in front of the net in a table-tennis game; in the spangled disco epic “Sottopassaggio,” Boman spins the knob on his delay unit so hard that space-time threatens to pull apart at the seams. Tempos range from languid slo-mo to cocaine fast, but mostly it hangs in the midrange, Latin accents and disco shimmer fleshing out its contours; steady son clave patterns pepper both albums like conga-line Morse code. What if, Boman seems to be asking us, cruise ships were actually cool?
Luz is, by a slim margin, the more lighthearted of the two records. On the dubby breakbeat house anthem “BHUKA,” South African vocalist Kamohelo (of the Barnhus-signed group Off the Meds) raps in gravelly triplets over starburst arpeggios; the plunging bassline evokes the feeling of walking on air, suggesting a spiritual kinship to “Purple Drank,” Boman’s woozy 2010 breakout hit. In the narcotized “Gröna Dalen,” blown-out bass sucks like quicksand at the lite-funk squelch and harp glissandi of soft-focus Swedish romance flicks; on “’Atra,” rollicking cowbells and a sun-warmed saxophone solo encapsulate the record’s feel-good vibes. Boman veers closest to going full gonzo on “Out Sailing,” a jittery pastiche of yacht rock and French house whose giddily yowled refrain (“My love is out sailing!”) is the only potentially divisive moment on either album; as with frozen blue daiquiris, you may wish to moderate your intake at first, to see how it sits with you.
Not everything on Luz is so tongue in cheek; the enveloping, bass-forward “Edgeware Road” feels almost like an attempt to craft a fast-techno version of one of Yo La Tengo’s most patient and sensitive ballads, and on Quest for Fire, Boman gets even more sentimental. “One Two” plays skippy hi-hats off somber chords, recalling French house eccentric Pépé Bradock’s starry-eyed lullabies; “Stone Age Jazz” sets bird-like trills against rosy background vocals and lawn-sprinkler hiss, a perfect picture of poolside idyll. Quest for Fire is home to much of the slower material—like “Cacti Is Plural,” a shadowy acid track in the tradition of the early-’00s duo Closer Musik and, before that, the eerier ends of the Rephlex catalog—but it also features the fastest: “Jeremy Irons,” a hard-driving cut that turns a truncated disco loop into one of the heaviest techno behemoths of the year.
Why Boman decided to release LUZ and Quest for Fire in this way, as conjoined twins rather than a conventional double album, is unclear. So, too, is the precise relationship between Lavesson’s odd short story and Boman’s own music, whose cheeky reference points are more space age than stone age. Both albums prove more bittersweet than some of their more whimsical overtones might suggest. Even the sunniest tracks, like “Sottopassaggio,” have an element of wistfulness. This emotional duality, so easy to miss when the tempo is high, comes to the fore on “Hold On,” the lilting song that closes LUZ. Over chiming, major-key chords and little tendrils of guitar, an uncredited Baba Stiltz sings, “Don’t be scared/Even if it’s been scary for a while/Lift your head up/Give yourself a smile.” He goes on: “When the going gets tough, it sucks/That’s why you got to hold on.” The sentiment is a hair’s breadth from being hopelessly hokey, but for whatever reason, it just works. Chalk it up to the spiritual and psychic exhaustion of the past two years, or to his agreeably low-key tone, or to the funny assonant rhyme between “gets tough” and “it sucks,” setting up the latter to land like a good-natured punchline. Boman may comport himself like a tattooed trickster, but at its most sincere, his music feels like a warm embrace. | 2022-04-18T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2022-04-18T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | null | April 18, 2022 | 8.3 | d14f107f-4f26-49d2-b244-0850ca59ce11 | Philip Sherburne | https://pitchfork.com/staff/philip-sherburne/ | |
Balancing lush ambience and sharp electronics, this cross-continental collaboration addresses the climate crisis with musical interpretations of land under assault. | Balancing lush ambience and sharp electronics, this cross-continental collaboration addresses the climate crisis with musical interpretations of land under assault. | Merzbow / Vanity Productions: Coastal Erosion | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/merzbow-vanity-productions-coastal-erosion/ | Coastal Erosion | Masami Akita and Christian Stadsgaard—who create music as Merzbow and Vanity Productions, respectively—each hail from countries highly susceptible to damage from climate change. Akita is from Japan, where beach loss in the near future is projected as high as 79 percent; Stadsgaard is from Denmark, where coastlines are eroding by four meters each year. In both nations, the majority of the population is situated along the coast.
On Coastal Erosion, their debut collaborative album, the two artists address the crisis with musical interpretations of land under assault. Merzbow’s haphazard noise is buoyed by Vanity Productions’ spectral synth pads, and the balance of lush ambience and sharp electronics recalls the work of Tim Hecker or Fennesz. One may also be reminded of Merzbow’s 2016 album Kakapo, where discordant noise was more meditative than head-splitting, and profits benefited a critically endangered New Zealand parrot. While Coastal Erosion isn’t linked with a specific conservation program, it’s still a work of environmental activism. By welcoming listeners into a catastrophic sound world, Akita and Stadsgaard invite us to experience the destruction occurring in their home countries in a way that reading statistics may not always accomplish.
“Erosion Japan,” the first of the album’s two extended tracks, begins with dreamy synth pads that lull listeners into a turbulent sea of noise. Though it’s never quiet, one grows accustomed to the onslaught, a process that serves as a damning reflection of climate apathy. A sudden and dramatic obliteration of a country’s coastline would turn heads; a more gradual and consistent process is easier to ignore. But like waves crashing against shorelines and barriers, the song’s rhythmic noise batters the defenses without interruption.
The second track, “Erosion Denmark,” follows the same formula but is noticeably tamer. Though its constituent components are similar, the sound is less unwieldy, and the mood is consequently more grim. If the previous track instilled an understanding of coastal erosion through a palpable sense of immersion, this one does so by presenting its aftermath. In Denmark, archaeologists have warned that erosion could lead to the disappearance of cultural heritage and legally protected sites situated along coastlines. Even if people start to move inland, swaths of human history will be lost. Listening to the cold synth pads and bleak atmosphere of “Erosion Denmark” feels like gazing across that rubble-strewn wasteland.
In an era of climate anxiety, Coastal Erosion stands out as one of the year’s most relevant experimental albums. By crafting music that attempts to illustrate the severity of the situation at hand, Akita and Stadsgaard offer a space to reckon with fear and panic. Their cross-continental collaboration is indicative of what the problem requires—that people from around the world see eye-to-eye. But by engaging with these songs, one is forced to recognize that such extended periods of reflection are a temporary luxury. Coastal Erosion’s greatest success is in showing how we have failed. | 2019-08-09T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-08-09T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Experimental | Ideal | August 9, 2019 | 7.7 | d14f1608-f32e-4f20-82a1-ad36aa003d04 | Joshua Minsoo Kim | https://pitchfork.com/staff/joshua-minsoo kim/ | |
On his new mixtape, the Vallejo upstart sounds a little too eager to break out of his home base. | On his new mixtape, the Vallejo upstart sounds a little too eager to break out of his home base. | Nef the Pharaoh: Mushrooms & Coloring Books | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/nef-the-pharaoh-mushrooms-and-coloring-books/ | Mushrooms & Coloring Books | Nef The Pharaoh is a rapper in the finest Vallejo tradition, making music that simultaneously pays tribute to and transcends his regional ancestors. History doesn’t weigh Neffy down, it drives him: “I’m the closest thing you’re going to get to Mac Dre,” he boldly announces on the intro to “Drought,” from new tape Mushrooms & Coloring Books. Line up their music on the same playlist, and it’s easy to make an argument that Nef is the heir apparent, but he also seems primed for stardom beyond his home base.
Regrettably, the latest tape shows growing pains, mostly due to the potential blockbuster tracks flat-lining. Take the single “High Voltage”: Guest rapper Tyga’s voice scrapes off producer DTB’s creeping beat like sandpaper. Worse still, Tyga’s cretinism seems to have infected Nef, who makes transgender people a punch line and drops dumb lyrics like, “Even when I’m at the house I’m paranoid/I don’t trust you if you don't fuck my boy.” “Rockstar” finds Nef envisioning big-time living—dodging paparazzi, clashing with label executives, and that’s before you get to the sex and drugs—but the fantasy deflates over a soft music-box beat. He sounds like he’s trying to force a breakthrough hit, and it dims his usually strong instincts.
But when you block out the misjudged moments, Mushrooms & Coloring Books features some Nef’s most exhilarating songs yet. Nef shouts out his favorite liquor store and calls out the local cops over DJ Fresh’s Cali funk on “South Vallejo.” And the star quality he has been searching for is all over “Love Got Us Beefin,” with Nef shuffling through vocal styles to decry a collapsing relationship with his high-school sweetheart over a glittering beat that recalls Prince’s “Diamonds and Pearls.” You can just feel how eager he is to break out nationally, and you can’t help but want it for him. Maybe next time he will dial down the impatience and keep his heart at home. | 2019-08-12T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-08-12T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Sick Wid It / Empire | August 12, 2019 | 6.8 | d158eab8-d3aa-4bca-8f4b-b5a0ef74ba33 | Dean Van Nguyen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/dean-van nguyen/ | |
Chilean tech-house star Villalobos follows his fantastic and varied Alcachofa LP with a record that displays a monkish, almost classical degree of top-down restraint. | Chilean tech-house star Villalobos follows his fantastic and varied Alcachofa LP with a record that displays a monkish, almost classical degree of top-down restraint. | Ricardo Villalobos: Thè au Harem d'Archiméde | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/8507-the-au-harem-darchimede/ | Thè au Harem d'Archiméde | I suspect that a lot of this tech-house stuff is easy to make. Perhaps process shouldn't be a determining factor in the opinion of a final product, but nevertheless I respond pretty consistently to Kompakt and Force Tracks and especially Perlon releases in part because the tracks just sound more thought-out and labored over. If anything, they're extremely detailed. Sometimes detail work makes us dance harder, and on rare occasions it can even give a track some unexpectedly human quality: Michelangelo Matos talks about the thread of pessimism that courses through Luomo's Vocalcity, for instance. Whatever gives icy tracks like "Tessio" or Jan Jelinek's "Tendency" such emotional depth, Fruity Loops definitely doesn't have a preset for it-- at least just yet.
Blame the detail work, the drugs, or the greasy long hair in his eyes: Ricardo Villalobos' Thè au Harem d'Archiméde is the sound of paranoia, a ticking bomb that never quite goes off. Nine well-carved tracks fidget violently within a remarkably controlled spectrum of sound. While tech-house in 2004 widened its scope for bigger sounds, trading computers for synths and hard grooves for genre and song structure, Villalobos approaches Thè au Harem with a monkish, almost classical degree of top-down restraint. It seems as if the Chilean-Berliner sticks to only seven or eight percussive sounds throughout the whole album, running them through every possible permutation, milking them till they're miraculously warm and woozy. Villalobos gave us great hooks on 2003's Alcachofa; here he stalks us in a sweaty haze of Amazon rhythm, challenging us to find the hooks ourselves.
Dizzying and sometimes nerve-wracking, Villalobos is hardly a shyster though, hooking up Thè au Harem's hardest working listeners with fantastic payoffs throughout the mix. While the first three tracks flaunt grooves as tightly-wound as Maurizio twelves, Villalobos still finds an unsettling amount of wiggle room for wind-chime strings in "Hireklon", swashbuckling slurps in "Serpentin", and noirish synth accents in "For All Seasons". As the album progresses, tracks become livelier and more unpredictable, each building on the rhythmic developments of the one before. Lush pun-on-title-track "Thèorème d'Archiméde" is the tipping point, thereafter Villalobos insisting on increasingly chaotic routines: "Temenarc 2" spins like a shattered Tiefschwarz record, and follow-up "Temenarc 1" all but bats its way out of an aluminum trash can. By the time the aptly-named "True To Myself" finishes out Thè au Harem, Villalobos has become quite the derelict, offering 14 minutes of weary chants and ghostly yelps. Think Dani Siciliano in Downtown 81 drag, chasing us through the jungle. | 2005-01-11T01:00:02.000-05:00 | 2005-01-11T01:00:02.000-05:00 | Electronic | Perlon | January 11, 2005 | 8.2 | d16a0c7a-9a28-4d28-ab21-d6307a300bd1 | Nick Sylvester | https://pitchfork.com/staff/nick-sylvester/ | null |
The Brooklyn rapper’s vivid storytelling and golden flow have inspired emcees for nearly 30 years. But his new album pales in the shadow of 2021’s momentous Doe or Die II. | The Brooklyn rapper’s vivid storytelling and golden flow have inspired emcees for nearly 30 years. But his new album pales in the shadow of 2021’s momentous Doe or Die II. | AZ: Truth Be Told | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/az-truth-be-told/ | Truth Be Told | “No one can define you,” AZ says solemnly in the introduction to Truth Be Told, his 10th studio album, over a scant drum track and angelic vocals that throb like a heartbeat. “The moment you allow them to define you, you allow them to become your God.” It’s a fitting proclamation for the Brooklyn rapper who, after spitting an iconic guest verse at the start of Nas’ 1994 single “Life’s a Bitch,” has spent the last three decades reaffirming why he was offered the spot in the first place. His distinct nasal tone, vivid storytelling, and golden flow have inspired rappers from Joey Bada$$ and Rome Streetz to Rae Sremmurd’s Slim Jxmmi; not to mention he’s one of a handful of former major-label stalwarts who successfully went independent years before Roc Marciano and Griselda popularized the approach. Doe or Die II—the 2021 sequel to his 1995 solo debut—doubled as both a victory lap after its 12-year gestation period and a solid meat-and-potatoes rap album from an emcee who, at the time, was pushing 50. Now approaching 52, AZ still brings that cognac-in-an-easy-chair reminiscence to Truth Be Told, only this time, the ice has slightly melted and the stories are beginning to run together.
Doe or Die II was thrilling as a showcase of AZ’s impressive skill and perspective. The down-on-his-luck capo from the original had not only come up from squalor but outlived his demons, and the way that story dovetailed with AZ’s own journey through rap helped the celebratory air feel earned. But while Truth Be Told has some exciting moments, there’s less meaningful reflection than its title implies and more spinning of the wheels. These are either stories we’ve heard before or ideas he’s executed with more flair elsewhere. That isn’t to say AZ has fallen off entirely. At its best, that Brooklyn slur of his is still gripping, riding through the contours of beats like a bucket with 150,000 miles on it. “Still Got It” and “The GOAT” are the sharpest examples: AZ fully locks in with the drums to talk about coming up from nights on the park bench and finding his place in rap history between Big Daddy Kane and Lil Wayne. But more often than usual, his flow gets a little slippery, derailing the momentum of some songs. And when that is combined with weaker storytelling and retreaded subject matter, like the bland paeans to Black capitalism on “Don’t Go Astray” or the career SparkNotes that is “One of the Greatest,” the illusion is broken.
Producer and longtime collaborator Buckwild tries to inject a sense of pomp, but even the man behind Biggie’s “I Got a Story to Tell” offers up a mixed bag. Buckwild mixes his usual sampling chops with a live-band hip-hop sound that, at its worst, is staid and boring. “Reintroduction” and closing track “Respect Mines” are serviceable but anonymous beats that sound ready for an NBA highlight reel—they have no personality or sense of urgency and are Air Force 1-generic to their core. The one exception on the brighter end is “Amazing,” whose string plucks and lush bass bring the best out of AZ, who interpolates Mitch’s infamous basketball speech from Paid in Full. But the beats sound better when they get moodier. Take “Go Time,” which flips ominous horns and violin shrieks into a haunted playground for AZ and guest Pharoahe Monch to tear rhyme schemes to shreds. AZ sounds completely in his element here, navigating this thumping terrain with gusto: “No halves, I whole key it/If we clash, then so be it/Hoes see it, the haters know it, they favorite poet/Paid it forward for me and mines, a major moment.”
AZ has accomplished a lot and stayed the course through almost 30 years of constant rap evolution. The fact that he’s still here, and that people still care, isn’t lost on him, and he sounds genuinely grateful to be able to spit for an audience, even when it’s about going to get his prostate checked (eat your heart out, André 3000). Following up a gargantuan project like Doe or Die II was always going to be a challenge, and AZ and Buckwild’s Truth Be Told answers the call with a middling jog through faded memories.
Correction: A previous version of this review claimed that AZ is from Queens. He is from Brooklyn. | 2023-12-14T00:00:00.000-05:00 | 2023-12-14T00:00:00.000-05:00 | Rap | Quiet Money | December 14, 2023 | 6.4 | d175496c-90c8-4b5c-b589-339bb0d364bd | Dylan Green | https://pitchfork.com/staff/dylan-green/ | |
The Beijing-based post-punk duo stack garage instrumentation, Ali Farka Touré melodies, and dissonance without a whiff of the baroque. | The Beijing-based post-punk duo stack garage instrumentation, Ali Farka Touré melodies, and dissonance without a whiff of the baroque. | Gong Gong Gong 工工工: Phantom Rhythm 幽靈節奏 (幽霊リズム) | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/gong-gong-gong-phantom-rhythm/ | Phantom Rhythm 幽靈節奏 (幽霊リズム) | A couple of misfits and a brash bouquet of sound: These are the building blocks from which rock’n’roll sprang. Beijing-based Gong Gong Gong slot directly into the canon—the streamlined duo of Tom Ng and Joshua Frank use two of the most familiar instruments in the rock pantheon, a rhythm guitar and a bass, to create Phantom Rhythm 幽靈節奏. The result is a novel pastiche of post-punk, West African blues, Bo Diddley, and distortion.
Ng and Frank started playing together in 2015 under their adopted city’s underpasses and in DIY spaces. Even with crisp production, this record (their first, after 2018’s Siren 7") indicates a pair capable of holding its own in a repurposed warehouse or shipping crate. Their divergent backgrounds—Ng grew up in Hong Kong, and Montreal-born Frank has lived in Beijing off and on since childhood—yields a complementary chemistry. Adding drums or keys would be an intrusion. Gong Gong Gong stack garage instrumentation, Ali Farka Touré melodies, and dissonance without a whiff of the baroque. Opener “The Last Note” casts an ominous, unrelenting spell, building steadily towards Ng’s deadpan Cantonese intonations. It’s a refusal to capitulate on multiple fronts—language, fervor, unnecessary flourishes. By minute four, the fervent, interwoven riffs evoke the sinews of a charging beast.
The album reaches its zenith midway through, where standouts “Wei Wei Wei” and “Some Kind of Demon” follow in succession. These songs follow a similar structure as most others—an insistent, galloping rhythm overlaid with guttural cries and a sinuous riff. “Wei Wei Wei”’s opening fuzz leads into a faux-casual plod, charting a steady ascent into rhythmic abandon, order teasing at chaos. It’s music that engages one’s entire body. “It’s a pity/As long as/Can only/But not/Still,” Ng yelps on “Some Kind of Demon,” the choked lyrics in direct opposition to the music’s metronomic swagger.
In its spareness and meticulousness, Phantom Rhythm 幽靈節奏 leaves so little room for missteps that every reverberation proves to be an act of curation and collaboration. If there’s a critique to be made here, it’s that some tracks (“Moonshadows,” for instance) pale in comparison to their freakier counterparts, whose jazzy rhythms elevate them beyond their component parts. Even so, Ng’s screech in the second half of “Moonshadows” is a fork stuck into a live outlet. At their best, Gong Gong Gong point towards a future where (porous) borders and a vast palette of influences facilitate interesting collaboration. When they’re plugged in, driving towards a chorus or bridge, they sound like an engine of revelation.
Buy: Rough Trade
(Pitchfork may earn a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.) | 2019-10-10T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-10-10T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Wharf Cat | October 10, 2019 | 7.6 | d1794061-b470-43c6-bdd0-64c84be982e6 | Linnie Greene | https://pitchfork.com/staff/linnie-greene/ | |
With tangled riffs and lyrics that read like fridge-magnet poetry, the Baton Rouge duo makes mischievous art punk with a gleefully absurdist spirit. | With tangled riffs and lyrics that read like fridge-magnet poetry, the Baton Rouge duo makes mischievous art punk with a gleefully absurdist spirit. | SPLLIT: Infinite Hatch | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/spllit-infinite-hatch/ | Infinite Hatch | Baton Rouge oddballs SPLLIT make records that clatter and bleep like an arcade crammed with rowdy kids. The duo’s members, known simply as Urq and Marance, approach their tunes like madcap chemists tinkering with acidic formulas. On their debut release, 2019’s XX_HANDLE // SOAR THROAT, Urq and Marance split their duties down the middle; each member penned half of the LP, writing and recording their respective batch of songs in less than a day. On that project, they spotlit their distinct styles—Marance’s skewed art punk, Urq’s scuzzy garage rock—but their music’s wattage only intensifies when their powers are combined. SPLLIT’s impish new LP Infinite Hatch is packed with abstract verses, angular guitars, and an arsenal of animated squeaks and skronks.
In under 30 minutes, SPLLIT tear through 12 songs that range from heat-warped indie rock (“Bevy Slew”) to lippy new wave (“Growth Hacking”) to muted psychedelia (“Time Passing Dirge”). The band cites Captain Beefheart, the Fall, Deerhoof, and the Raincoats as inspirations, but you can also pick out traces of the Waitresses, Devo, and DRINKS, Cate Le Bon’s off-kilter duo with Tim Presley. On the wonky outlier “Curtain Lift,” they even recall Leisure-era Blur, slipping bent guitar riffs and hushed drumming under their most fluid vocal melody. But even with all of this input swirling around in their brains, SPLLIT shred and reassemble their influences rather than rubbing off carbon copies.
Infinite Hatch’s songs are built like scrappy, neon-flecked collages; some edges are torn, others cut into crisp corners. Their lyrics also can feel snipped from magazine copy and rearranged like effortless fridge-magnet poetry. On “Growth Hacking,” the product of a 45-minute songwriting exercise, Marance blurts out a string of seemingly unrelated words over squiggles of synth and pin-pricking guitar. “Hunch hard shake… change hack rake,” they sing in staccato bursts. The sheer sound of the words outweighs their possible meanings; their harsh consonants land like a heavy chain clunking to the floor, link by link.
While writing “Fast Acting Gel,” SPLLIT plucked random idiomatic phrases from the internet for lyrical inspiration. Marance rattles off clichés (“a dime a dozen,” “break a leg”) before decoding them (“something common,” “good luck”). The bluntness of Marance’s definitions makes everyday phrases feel like alien codes. “Shine Sheen” offers a less wordy look into the absurdity of language; amid high-pitched, cartoonish whizzes and digital crickets, SPLLIT refer to talking as a “speech reflex” that occurs despite a “mind body disconnect.” Lines like “Tip over a filing cabinet/Just to scatter all my regrets” only enhance the delightfully bizarre nature of SPLLIT’s dual braintrust. By inverting the mundane and poking around in its detritus, Urq and Marance create a strange haven of their own. It feels at once calculated and lovingly cobbled together. | 2023-12-28T00:00:00.000-05:00 | 2023-12-28T00:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Feel It | December 28, 2023 | 7.7 | d195de6a-427f-410b-a9e7-76bf5fc7471d | Madison Bloom | https://pitchfork.com/staff/madison-bloom/ | |
Eight years after bidding farewell to the traditional album format, the Norwegian duo returns with a sprawling multimedia project whose best material feels, ironically, like a return to form. | Eight years after bidding farewell to the traditional album format, the Norwegian duo returns with a sprawling multimedia project whose best material feels, ironically, like a return to form. | Röyksopp: Profound Mysteries | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/royksopp-profound-mysteries/ | Profound Mysteries | For more than two decades, the Norwegian electronic duo Röyksopp made their mark on svelte electro pop and sprawling, atmospheric soundscapes alike, with recognizably clean production guaranteed along the way. After five albums, Svein Berge and Torbjørn Brundtland grew weary of the grind, and they billed 2014’s The Inevitable End as a “goodbye to the traditional album format.” If the sendoff seemed vague, that was the point; the duo didn’t really retire, instead opting to plumb their archives for their Lost Tapes series and turn to film and theater collaborations. In the interim, nevertheless, Röyksopp created an entire new album’s worth of material. “Let’s just say that we have to go back on a promise we made in the past,” they conceded in a post to fans this past January.
The resulting Profound Mysteries contains both music and a multimedia project, including a cryptic website, images, and 10 videos made by the film production company Bacon that attempt to expand on the collection’s larger theme, which grapples with the unknowability of the universe. All of the clips (which the band call “films”) are surreal and oblique; however pivotal to the project they are meant to be, they’re hardly necessary viewing. The actual songs vary from sleepy piano interludes to moody, charging electro pop. The back-and-forth doesn’t always work, but Röyksopp still land on some of their most energizing floor-fillers to date.
They have recruited an inspired roster of guest artists, availing themselves of Alison Goldfrapp’s hypnotic soprano and Susanne Sundfør’s folky croon. The singers’ lightweight voices give the project a welcome unifying thread, as though each is gently stepping in to bolster the duo’s barreling electronics. On the brooding “Impossible,” Goldfrapp murmurs about rolling thunder and a world on fire over a gummy synth reminiscent of Daft Punk; the song is a solid reminder that Goldfrapp remains a quietly powerful force who can control a dance song with little more than a breathy sigh. The seven-minute highlight “This Time… This Place” takes a harder approach, opening with breakneck techno before paring back into a sturdy, clean beat for singer Beki Mari. By the time it hits the six-minute mark, the song devolves into a swirl of Mari’s voice, dreamy synth lines, and a shuffling drum beat, evoking the gauzy, after-hours feeling of watching the sun rise over the dancefloor after a late night out.
When the musicians decompress with midtempo, instrumental tracks, the buzzing, high-octane effect of the other songs dissipates. Both “(Nothing But) Ashes” and “There, Beyond the Trees” are guided by sedate piano and synth melodies that are detached rather than affecting. On “The Ladder,” Röyksopp fare slightly better, unspooling a loose, space-age synth line over pattering drums to create a light stroll through the kind of gentle synth pop that the pair have all but mastered at this point.
The best songs on Profound Mysteries operate within those comfort zones, making it more of a return to form than even The Inevitable End, but Röyksopp still trip themselves up. While the euphoric, ascendant melodies gesture toward otherworldly grandeur, the drifting instrumentals and forgettable, abstract lyrics keep them from quite scaling those heights. But then, trying to capture a subject as hefty as the mysteries of the universe is bound to be an unwieldy pursuit. | 2022-05-03T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2022-05-03T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic / Pop/R&B | Dog Triumph | May 3, 2022 | 6.6 | d19c8d2a-f77c-47cd-93b2-06af046e403d | Eric Torres | https://pitchfork.com/staff/eric-torres/ | |
On a pair of EPs, the young Chicago band captures the kinetic energy of its live show, walking a thrilling tightrope between abrasion and melody. | On a pair of EPs, the young Chicago band captures the kinetic energy of its live show, walking a thrilling tightrope between abrasion and melody. | Lifeguard: Crowd Can Talk / Dressed in Trenches | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/lifeguard-crowd-can-talk-dressed-in-trenches/ | Crowd Can Talk / Dressed in Trenches | Lifeguard have a spry, freewheeling, and continuously evolving sound, emblematic of the scene that birthed them. The Chicago trio met as members of the self-declared “Hallogallo Kids,” a loose constellation of local teenagers who attended classes at School of Rock and the Old Town School of Folk Music. Lifeguard built up their repertoire by playing live together, letting improvisations take shape as songs. Before the pandemic, they met on weekends so one member could attend high school out of state and released a 10-minute jam, “Tin Man,” recorded in a basement. On their debut duo of EPs for Matador, Dressed in Trenches and Crowd Can Talk (initially released last year by Born Yesterday), Lifeguard capture the kineticism of their live show, pushing their instruments to their limits without sacrificing melody.
All between the ages of 16 and 18, the members of Lifeguard are already seasoned musicians with deep connections in the city’s DIY scene. Drummer Isaac Lowenstein has performed with his sister, Penelope, in the jangly noise pop group (and fellow Matador signees) Horsegirl. The father of vocalist and bassist Asher Case is FACS frontman Brian Case, who also played in now-defunct Chicago rock acts like Disappears and the Ponys. Vocalist and guitarist Kai Slater makes music concurrently with fellow Hallogallo Kids in Dwaal Troupe and publishes the Hallogallo zine, an unofficial guide to an ever-expanding scene that also includes newer acts like Friko and Post Office Winter. While having a father in a successful indie rock band isn’t exactly a golden ticket—“I always tell Asher the only thing I can give you is this record collection and this advice,” Brian Case told Talkhouse in 2019—it granted the band access to the city’s rich musical history. Not every tweenaged trio, after all, records their debut at Electrical Audio with the engineer who once recorded Jim O’Rourke.
For 2022’s Crowd Can Talk and this year’s Dressed in Trenches, the three returned to Electrical Audio, this time with engineer Mike Lust, and doubled down on improvisation as a writing tool. “We started realizing that when we would play shows, the songs would kind of just take different shapes,” Slater said. The result is controlled chaos: On “Fifty Seven,” Lowenstein adroitly carries the band through a series of rhythmic change-ups; by the end, the gnarled knot of cymbals and guitar in the coda barely resembles the tight snare hits of its intro.
Things get even looser on their 2023 EP: For the first minute, “Ten Canisters (OFB)” crackles with the feedback and one-off drum fills of a band warming up, before taut guitar chords come crashing in. Lifeguard play confidently with atonality, wielding it like a weapon on the foreboding “Shutter Shutter,” and as a foil to their more pop-forward instincts. On “17-18 Lovesong,” Case’s monotone speak-singing establishes dissonance before Slater’s wistful counter-harmonies take hold. It can be tempting to draw comparisons to Case’s dad in FACS, but while the bands overlap in their post-punk sensibilities and British-leaning vocal inflections, Lifeguard cull from a wide avant garde lineage. It’s easy to hear Chicago’s Shellac and the Jesus Lizard in Slater’s screeching guitars, and unsurprisingly for a scene that takes its name from a Neu! song, there’s a heavy Krautrock influence in their motorik basslines.
Lifeguard’s dynamic is a constant power play: On “Typecast,” it’s hard to tell if the bass or drums are leading the charge, but Slater’s vocals meet the rhythm in the middle, marching forward with his unmodulated vocals. Lyrics are secondary; filled with coded acronyms, the words are more sign than signal, a mere shape for Case and Slater’s barking to take. It’s hard to parse more than loose vowels and taut consonants on songs like “Alarm,” but pay attention to every word and you’ll miss the point. As their screams grow louder on the closest thing to the song’s chorus, they become another layer of noise, building on Lowenstein’s percussion to an emotional crescendo that seems to come from all directions.
The band walks a thrilling tightrope between abrasion and melody throughout these EPs. Even in the harshest moments, songs retain a central logic, as when “New age (I’ve got a)” gallops from feedback into a surprisingly straightforward rock song, its main guitar motif reminiscent of more pop-leaning groups like Bully or the Beths. Case and Lowenstein bonded over a shared love of Tortoise when they were 11, and much like those Thrill Jockey legends, they’ve carved out their own community playing loud, polyrhythmic rock in Chicago. Combining post-punk’s propulsive rhythms with progressive rock’s winding melodies, Lifeguard channel the verve and manic energy of making art with like-minded peers and the rush of sharing your bespoke musical world. | 2023-07-14T00:01:00.000-04:00 | 2023-07-14T00:01:00.000-04:00 | Rock | null | July 14, 2023 | 7.2 | d1aaa988-9461-4521-8583-d1f9ca7d3dca | Arielle Gordon | https://pitchfork.com/staff/arielle-gordon/ | |
On his first album in six years, Tom Krell shrouds labyrinthine songs in distortion and slips down referential rabbit holes. The extremes can be daunting, but the highs are ecstatic. | On his first album in six years, Tom Krell shrouds labyrinthine songs in distortion and slips down referential rabbit holes. The extremes can be daunting, but the highs are ecstatic. | How to Dress Well: I Am Toward You | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/how-to-dress-well-i-am-toward-you/ | I Am Toward You | For nearly 15 years, How to Dress Well has resisted simple pleasures. On Love Remains, Tom Krell’s 2010 breakthrough under the alias, he drowned R&B melodies in dense production, obscuring straightforward sounds with reverb, distortion, and disjointed lyrics about death and desire. Even at his most accessible, Krell’s approach to pop music has been outré. His two best albums, 2012’s Total Loss and 2014’s “What Is This Heart?”, twisted songs that Whitney Houston could’ve sung into skittery, ethereal gems, like imaginary Top 40 hits encountered in a dream. A skilled deconstructionist, he dismantles familiar forms and pop archetypes, repurposes their core parts, and uncovers labyrinths buried beneath.
Krell’s latest album, I Am Toward You, is his first release in six years and undoubtedly his most difficult yet. He constructs an idiosyncratic world of field recordings and ephemera, muffled soul singing and glitchy guitar samples, mournful melodic detours and buzzing electronic drops. It’s frequently blissful and self-consciously beautiful, yet its hooks are elusive—you won’t find a new “& It Was U” or “Repeat Pleasure” here. Lead single “No Light” is dominated by a harshly distorted lead riff that offsets the magic of its dance-pop backbeat, the vocals overdriven to the point of erasure. Even when his choices are less abrasive and more tuneful—like the straight-line strutter “On It and Around It” or the hymnlike a cappella “The Only True Joy on Earth”—the songs have an opaque, hazy quality. They seem to creep their way to transcendence, as if they’ve been floating in memory and are just now announcing their presence.
But like any How to Dress Well project, I Am Toward You asks to be accepted on its own terms, free from preconceptions. A number of breathtaking moments offer inroads to immediacy even during strenuously experimental stretches that otherwise may keep you at arm’s length. Krell uses his raw falsetto less than he used to but still deploys it to powerful effect on “nothingprayer” and “A Secret Within the Voice.” Standout “Song in the Middle” is a slow-building accretion of loops that evokes a surge of strong emotions—anxiety, longing, hard-earned optimism. “A Faint Glow Through a Window of Thin Bone (That’s How My Fate Is Shown)” features a string and piano breakdown that’s as moving as anything in the How to Dress Well catalog. Even in its quieter passages, I Am Toward You discards clean, predictable patterns to judder and zag with obsessive intensity.
In an eight-page, 4000-word exegesis Krell wrote to accompany the album, he describes it as a “transcendental poetic effort of great contemplation, confusion, unknowing, and prayerfulness… populated by birds, stones, contingencies, confusion, God, and fate, which takes up the task of becoming oneself, the intergenerational transmission of trauma, the meaning and experience of art and music, the mediation of all of this by technology.” Krell's lyrics are as impressive as they are disorienting, crammed with social critiques, psychoanalytic formulations, poetic wordplay, Greek myth, and Bataille references. “I guess I once confused the German word for face with the word for history/Just change one little letter, see your fate in the mirror,” he sings on “Contingency/Necessity (Modality of Fate),” a meditation on the interplay between historical narrative and personal experience.
Krell earned his Ph.D in philosophy in 2022, writing a 400-page dissertation on the possibility of non-nihilistic metaphysics. He has since spurned academia, saying he had “to leave academic philosophy in order to save the true value of philosophical life from the nihilistic jaws of professionalization.” He had a similar falling-out with the “music industrial complex,” as he calls it. After making 2016’s Care, a record his ex-manager insisted be more commercially viable (it was co-produced by Jack Antonoff), Krell grew disenchanted. While touring his most recent album, The Anteroom, in 2018, he realized he needed to “leave the music industry” in order to save “the sacred meaning of music for my life.”
I Am Toward You feels like a decisive step away from institutions and industries where art and philosophy are packaged as commodities, with Krell reemerging refreshed into an artistic life free of compromise or creative constraint. The album may not foreground the sort of open-hearted melody Krell once penned with such astonishing ease, but in its insistence upon breaking open old forms to find new truths, it remains faithful to How to Dress Well’s inquisitive—and provocative—spirit. | 2024-05-13T00:01:00.000-04:00 | 2024-05-13T00:01:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | Sargent House | May 13, 2024 | 7.1 | d1ad2799-eeb9-41e2-b8f7-7191e2533e1e | Brady Brickner-Wood | https://pitchfork.com/staff/brady-brickner-wood/ | |
How? It's a question elicited by any great album, but one that accompanied Sonic Youth's 2002 return to ... | How? It's a question elicited by any great album, but one that accompanied Sonic Youth's 2002 return to ... | Sonic Youth: Sonic Nurse | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/7348-sonic-nurse/ | Sonic Nurse | How? It's a question elicited by any great album, but one that accompanied Sonic Youth's 2002 return to glory, Murray Street, in particular, and will likely arise in response to any remotely decent effort from the group herein. It might have dawned on some fans only after hearing Murray Street that Sonic Youth's mean age was then roughly 45, and that the group arguably hadn't produced a record of such caliber since they were in their late 20s. And while age is certainly unavoidable, as sensitive fifty-something poets constantly remind us, it shouldn't come as any great surprise that the band still pack some alternately-tuned potency in their aging physiognomies: There are manifold examples of musicians in most every genre, besides younglings rock and hip-hop, who have continued playing, if not composing, masterfully, well into their 70s.
Like the best jazz musicians, Sonic Youth have turned their love for experimental rock into a habit; perhaps more so than any other band, they've transcended the temporality of quality output in rock music. While bands like the Rolling Stones and the Grateful Dead continue to take the stage in a larkish clamber, Sonic Youth are still alive in the studio, where the process of making music is somewhat more draining than regurgitating old hits every once in a well-publicized while. With centenarianism becoming more of an improbable reality and less of a tall tale, it's no longer inconceivable that rock composers might thrive into their latter days, especially now that the relatively young genre has been given time to produce a few elder masters. In short, Sonic Youth aren't an exception; they're a pioneer example of a nascent rule.
That said, while Sonic Nurse isn't quite as strong as its predecessor, it's equally as imbued with instrumental dexterity and impressively coherent ideas. Unlike Murray Street, the album isn't so much an expansion of form as a return to it: Here, Sonic Youth harken back to the noisome atmospherics of their late-80s work, only handing it a more crystalline production treatment that smacks of more recent releases like A Thousand Leaves. Whether the implications of the line are intentional or not is difficult to say, but when, on "Paper Cup Exit", Lee Ranaldo sings, "It's later than it seems," the band seem to be keenly aware of their age and relevance. That self-awareness, both of an appreciably long canon and the four lives it has traversed, makes Sonic Nurse all the more remarkable.
Throughout their career, Sonic Youth have indulged in as much avant-garde experimentation as they have ground out formal studio albums. If anything, the lesson taught by mishaps such as the infamous NYC Ghosts & Flowers is that Sonic Youth are best at being themselves. Fortunately, that "self" is an enormously vibrant and sophisticated entity, capable of evoking a broad range of moods and tones, and continually learning from its mistakes. As atrocious as NYC Ghosts & Flowers was, they never repeated its missteps, and for that it can be conveniently forgotten. Conversely, when the group hits their stride, they know to run with it, as they do here, swimmingly riding the ample momentum generated by Murray Street.
"Pattern Recognition" opens, touching down on a well-trodden playing field of heady, arpeggiated riffage. After a brief, almost proggy intro, the song descends into a perilous odd-time build redolent of "Candle", as Kim Gordon brays "you're the one" in wontedly Daydream fashion, forgoing the bloodless beat poetry whining that often made her presence an annoyance in recent years. 16 years later, her pipes are still as seductively smoke-tinged as they were on "Kissability", and the opener marks the first of several pleasant appearances by Gordon on Nurse. "Unmade Bed", the record's only sub-four-minute endeavor, recalls the nocturnal second half of Murray Street, casting beacons of beautifully melodic guitar as it builds to a gloriously intertwined climax. As with many of the band's best songs, it takes a few listens for the riffs to sink in, but once they have, they're indelible.
Dynamically, however, not every track on Sonic Nurse is as striking as the band have proved themselves capable. Murray Street's "Rain on Tin" was a euphoric rollercoaster ride that seemed to capsulize to the band's entire career. "Stones", perhaps this album's closest parallel to that song, erupts with an insurgent guitar melody after a rocky climb, and features more than its fair share of strong riffs. Yet, while doubtless a strong number, the track isn't nearly as dramatic as career highlights like "Washing Machine" and "Expressway to Yr Skull". Additionally, "Mariah Carey and the Arthur Doyle Handcream" is a more traditional Kim Gordon screed that extends about two minutes too long in its monotonous din to be as effective as Murray Street's similar "Plastic Sun".
However, while those tracks do belabor the flow of the record slightly, their impotency is more accurately attributable to Sonic Nurse's questionable sequencing. While many of these songs exemplify the band in top form, they're sometimes inhibited by the record's somewhat scatterbrained narrative arch. "Peace Attack", in particular, suffers from mishandling. Played in isolation, the track is clever and wistful, but in its role as closing song, it feels awkwardly contrived and anticlimactic. Meanwhile, "Pattern Recognition", another one of the band's finest recent tracks, seems too bold an opening statement for this deeply cogitative collection. And unlike Murray Street, which was anchored by the towering middle track, "Karen Revisited", this issue lacks a similar axis to corral the disparate tones and give them direction.
Of course, considering these minor bones of contention, Sonic Nurse is hardly what one might call a disappointment. "The Dripping Dream" adheres to the familiar tension/release/jam formula typified by "Rain on Tin", but manages to keep fresh with a reliably brilliant guitar apex before receding into a hazy wash that recalls the deliquescent waning minutes of "The Sprawl". "I Love Golden Blue" features a formless, protracted intro that points to the band's one-time relationship with seminal avant-garde composer/no-wave icon Glenn Branca. And "Peace Attack", despite its placement, is quietly poignant in contrast with erstwhile monoliths such as "Trilogy" and "The Diamond Sea".
Even the staunchest pundits should find something to like on Sonic Nurse, while steadfast devotees are well accounted for by the record's sheer canonical breadth. Though its ultimate placement in the band's legacy is a debate waiting to happen, Sonic Nurse is certainly on a plane with some of Sonic Youth's better work. Indeed, it is later than it seems. And for a band to live up to that proclamation on its 19th album is awesome. | 2004-06-06T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2004-06-06T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Geffen | June 6, 2004 | 8.5 | d1b13518-ef47-4c25-9e98-23314604c886 | Pitchfork | null |
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Like Ford trucks, J Dilla-influenced beatmaker/MC Black Milk uses dependability as a selling point. Here he hooks up for an album with fellow Detroit MC Fat Ray. | Like Ford trucks, J Dilla-influenced beatmaker/MC Black Milk uses dependability as a selling point. Here he hooks up for an album with fellow Detroit MC Fat Ray. | Fat Ray / Black Milk: The Set Up | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/11511-the-set-up/ | The Set Up | Like Ford trucks, Detroit beatmaker/MC Black Milk uses dependability as a selling point. His 2007 debut, By Popular Demand, was one of the year's most consistent, if not terribly innovative, rap records, and he's arguably the brightest star in the post-Dilla Fat Beats/Stones Throw constellation; you'd be hard-pressed to find a wack beat with his name attached to it. However, there was something of a telling moment thrown into the extravagant instrumentation of "Luvin' It", namely Milk uttering, "This is the shit I wanna make, man." Since major-label hip-hop is about as financially stable as mixed martial arts or original internet programming, even the bigger names have gone underground, but is the basement getting too crowded?
Like most producer/MC double-bills, The Set Up traffics in lowered expectations so as to let either party go off on a tangent that might otherwise be considered too curveball on a real release. For those looking for Popular-er Demand, Milk lays out his cards in quick fashion-- the wildly flanged "Lookout" comes out of nowhere, a Diwali-ish club rumbler straight off of So Addictive (albeit without a particularly sturdy hook). It's even more glaring sandwiched between the relentless Ironman boom of "Flawless" and "Bad Man", so mid-1990s, you probably need to wear 40 Below Timbs and Triple Fat Goose just to fully appreciate it.
From there on out, it's more along the lines of what we've come to expect from one of the most tireless producers working right now: weeping soul samples ("Nothing To Hide"), dusty breakbeats, the occasional string loop, the Foreign Exchange-on-HGH of "Take Control"-- it all sounds pretty fantastic. What ties most of these tracks together is Milk's shattering, presently anomalous drum work. Be honest with yourself; between Kanye West popularizing chamber pop and European club techno and the prominence of southern synth merchants, when was the last time you heard a drum track knock?
But if there was a reason why Popular Demand was really good instead of great, it's an issue of what some would call consistency and the more skeptical listeners would call complacency. Maybe it's just projection on my part, but there seems to be a self-fulfilling prophecy of "real hip-hop" superiority due to the mere fact that they're rappin' on Music House about something other than the sort of topics that are deemed taboo on Okayplayer. Though clearly ambitious behind the boards, Milk and nearly everyone else don't seem all that interested in challenging themselves lyrically or revealing what makes them tick other than a metronome. Clocking in at nearly 40 minutes, The Set Up was likely meant as snack food, but as much as it can sate the listener, its impact doesn't last very long beyond the tantalizing proposition of what more versatile rhymers could've done with it.
In terms of flow, the main characters are certainly nice with theirs: Milk can be likened to Kanye with baggier clothes, and as for Fat Ray, he sounds like someone who learned the craft by listening to Re-Up Gang tapes and fast-forwarding through the Clipse. But whether it's coke puns or B+ battle raps, refusing to ever leave your comfort zone can only result in diminishing returns. The two are hardly subpar on the mic, but they stay in cruise control to the point where you only notice the speed bumps (mostly coming from Fat Ray)-- "better make room like Fiddy's crib," "we don't smoke squares, n***a-- rectangles," "you see how we stack chips like Chester Cheetah."
Taken as a full experience, The Set Up ends up as a great beat tape and a pretty good full experience that, in a sneaky way, seems to dismiss the talents of the people involved. While Guilty Simpson does a pretty good job of roughing up his sixteen bars on "Bad Man", Beanie Sigel might've dug 'em a deep grave. What about finding the cave MF Doom is hiding in to lace up the syrupy keys on "When It Goes Down"? There's more than enough in Black Milk's track record that justifies him wanting to work with the best and having the best seek him out. And he may just be a part of something truly great in the future, but he'll have to decide whether his name will be on the spine or in the credits. | 2008-05-28T01:00:02.000-04:00 | 2008-05-28T01:00:02.000-04:00 | Rap | Music House | May 28, 2008 | 7.3 | d1b63b4f-ec93-46a8-b31d-da05ccb2a5e2 | Ian Cohen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ian-cohen/ | null |
Louisiana rapper Kevin Gates is a star on par with Lil Boosie around his stomping grounds in Baton Rouge and New Orleans, but he hasn’t had much luck in popping nationally. His mixtapes peruse an emotive, melodic style that often gets him lumped into the same milieu as introspective lady-killers like Drake and Future. | Louisiana rapper Kevin Gates is a star on par with Lil Boosie around his stomping grounds in Baton Rouge and New Orleans, but he hasn’t had much luck in popping nationally. His mixtapes peruse an emotive, melodic style that often gets him lumped into the same milieu as introspective lady-killers like Drake and Future. | Kevin Gates: The Luca Brasi Story | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/17808-the-luca-brasi-story/ | The Luca Brasi Story | Louisiana rapper Kevin Gates is a star on par with Lil Boosie around his stomping grounds in Baton Rouge and New Orleans, but he hasn’t had much luck in popping nationally. Gates got a taste of nationwide notoriety after inking a deal with Lil Wayne’s YMCMB imprint a year ago but spent most of his tenure there on ice with YMCMB’s well-populated roster of benchwarmers. It’s a shame they couldn’t find a use for him. Gates’ mixtapes peruse an emotive, melodic style that often gets him incorrectly lumped into the same milieu as introspective lady-killers like Drake and Future. His similarities to those artists starts and ends with the fact that he’s a capable rapper and singer. He’s more technically gifted at both than Future, whose acerbic croak is often cloaked in a mist of Auto-Tune, and he’s more weathered and streetwise than Drake, whose background in soap opera acting undercuts his talk of hardship of its relatability. Gates has been at it at least as long as either of them, and his new mixtape The Luca Brasi Story imbues trap’s claustrophobic bleakness with an emotional nakedness, capable lyricism, and melodic certitude many of its recent breakout stars have lacked.
Gates openly plays off the complexity of his character in naming the mixtape after The Godfather’s Luca Brasi, a brutal but unerringly loyal contract killer whose first scene in the film adaptation shows him mulling over how best to present a gift to the don’s daughter at her wedding. Gates shares that devotion to matters of the heart and matters of the street, and The Luca Brasi Story oscillates wildly between the two poles. Street anthems like “Paper Chasers” and “Weight” hold court with tender tales of love under duress like “Arms of a Stranger” and “Twilight” (yes, that Twilight). That might sound like a strange brew, but Luca Brasi’s portraits of lonesome lotharios and traphouse paper chasers all teeter over the same the brink of collapse, and the intensity and break in Gates’ voice make it the perfect vehicle for these stories of desperation. He’s got his method down pat, so The Luca Brasi Story really lives or dies on the kinds of songs he chooses to apply it to.
The Luca Brasi Story soars on upbeat productions like Swiff D’s “Paper Chasers” and Nard & B’s “Hero”, which apply Kevin Gates’ sing-song cadence to 808s and frenetic synth runs. Gates is also at home on the moodier stuff: the twinkling keys and trance vibes of “Hold Ya Head” and “Twilight”, and the ethereal, pulsating bass of “Neon Lights” and the spectral keys of “Arms of a Stranger” all provide the perfect space for him to examine his shortcomings and insecurities. The only real problems arrive when Gates gets more conventional trap sounds to work with. “Weight” and “Flex” both overlay ominous hood gothic beats with vocal performances that are a touch derivative. “Weight” proposes a clever nutrition metaphor, but Gates plainly approximates Young Jeezy’s asthmatic wheeze on the song’s guttural, multitracked chorus. “Flex” finds Gates co-opting Gucci Mane’s smooth but subversively verbose flow when guest Terrance Hines isn’t hammering away at the song’s grating chorus. 22 tracks is a few too many opportunities to flounder, and while The Luca Brasi Story’s misses are mercifully scant, there’s maybe just a little too much of it to go around.
Kevin Gates is a gifted, pliable songwriter figuring out how to reconcile the cold embrace of street life with a longing for companionship. On The Luca Brasi Story, he mostly settles for ping pong, cordoning off its more contemplative fare from its tough talk and shifting radically in tone from one song to the next. It isn’t really until the mixtape’s closer “IHOP (True Story)” that we get a glimpse of what Gates can do without barriers. “IHOP” is a winding story-song rapped a capella with what sounds like Gates tapping out a rudimentary beat on his chest. It recounts a story of a man at wits end from relationship troubles who stumbles into a set-up and survives to coldly execute a revenge attack. It’s a chilling bit of dopeboy determinism that digs deeper than the self-aggrandizing boasts of invincibility that anyone who lived it would have every right to express, instead examining the outward stimuli that coerce us into losing control. You immediately get the sense that there’s more to Gates than he’s even letting on, that The Luca Brasi Story’s deft exercises in adjoining pop sensibilities to trap are just Gates working out the kinks, and that something special is just over the horizon. | 2013-02-28T01:00:01.000-05:00 | 2013-02-28T01:00:01.000-05:00 | Rap | null | February 28, 2013 | 8 | d1b757a1-aafb-415e-a862-b19a94dbc446 | Craig Jenkins | https://pitchfork.com/staff/craig-jenkins/ | null |
On their first album in seven years, the New York fusionists tap into a welter of global styles; the result is soft-edged and idyllic, yet hides a subtle political undercurrent. | On their first album in seven years, the New York fusionists tap into a welter of global styles; the result is soft-edged and idyllic, yet hides a subtle political undercurrent. | Gang Gang Dance: Kazuashita | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/gang-gang-dance-kazuashita/ | Kazuashita | With their magpie musical fusion and love of global pop sounds, you might expect Gang Gang Dance to feel right at home in a world where Drake peppers his work with Nigerian Afrobeat, London grime, and Jamaican dancehall, and where K-Pop is a global phenomenon. Yet there remains something charmingly out of bracket about the New York band on Kazuashita, their first new album in seven years, as if they had teleported in from a benevolent pop universe where Sigur Rós and Cocteau Twins rule supreme and the pursuit of musical beauty is an end in itself.
There is, it soon becomes clear, nothing sharp, stark, or edgy on this album. Instead, everything operates as if shaded by the most ecstatically blurry Instagram filter, like an album viewed from the corner of your eye after a long day on the beach. “Snake Dub” borrows from dancehall rhythms but bathes their teak-tough rhythmic snap in soft-focus synth and echoing vocal effects, while “Young Boy (Marika in Amerika)” uses drum-machine rhythms that nod to trap, blunting their cutting edge against new-age synth chords, noodling guitar, and percussion that sounds indebted to the Tsifteteli rhythms of Greece and Turkey.
This gorgeously gentle approach puts a paradoxical strain on the band’s compositional powers. Melody has to do the heavy lifting on Kazuashita, with harmonic beauty fighting to rescue the album’s smooth edges from the slippery fingers of the bland. Frequently, they pull it off. There are moments of incredible musical splendor on Kazuashita, including singer Lizzi Bougatsos’ Elizabeth Fraser-esque vocal swoops on “J-TREE” and the fabulous lead track “Lotus,” which marries Art of Noise’s “Moments in Love” to the swooning guitar rush of shoegaze.
These highlights are enhanced by the casual way in which they seem to arrive. Gang Gang Dance borrow from the sprawling musical tradition of bands like Pink Floyd, the Grateful Dead, and the Orb in that their music seems to drift into existence. Fusing together different styles the way they do—and on Kazuashita you can hear everything from techno to prog to reggae, frequently within the same two-minute stretch—can be a tricky business. But Gang Gang Dance make it sound effortless, as if they scratched up these moments of delight in an early-morning jam session before settling down to breakfast. The effect is like finding a pristine rose in the dirt, rather than protected in a botanical garden.
Beauty and blurred edges may not sound particularly 2018, but Gang Gang Dance don’t so much ignore the sharp political realities of today as approach them in their own distinct way, one that concentrates on the hope—and even joy—that an optimist can find beneath the toxic surface.
Bougatsos recently revealed that “Young Boy (Marika in Amerika)” is about “the wrong people getting shot… and the fact that police should not shoot children,” while “J-TREE” features a recording of Shiyé Bidzííl of the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe talking about the deployment of “tear gas, riot gear, weapons, rubber bullets” against protestors at the Dakota Access Pipeline. Both songs address authoritarian repression, a theme that has increasingly permeated music in this era of police brutality. But where Fatima Al Qadiri’s exploration of protest on 2016’s punishing Brute was carried out in nauseous sonic detail and Kendrick Lamar’s critique of police violence, in the video for “Alright,” was grim, “Young Boy” unfurls above a pillowy soft bed, while Bidzííl’s words on “J-TREE” funnel into a chorus of massed vocal ecstasy, creating the feeling that things might, somehow, end up OK.
When the band’s fluffily melodic approach fails, as on the promising (but ultimately dull) title track or the Sigur Rós-lite album closer “Salve on the Sorrow,” Kazuashita ends up saccharine and pompous, like music designed to soundtrack bad wildlife documentaries. Thankfully, these missteps are rare on an album that proves Gang Gang Dance aren’t so much of the moment as of a different moment, an alternative and rather more pleasant one. You could call their through-the-looking-glass approach unrealistic. But Gang Gang Dance show that sometimes unreality is a great place to be. | 2018-06-25T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-06-25T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Experimental | 4AD | June 25, 2018 | 7.7 | d1b77d97-15ba-4c2b-8c36-6ba782d6aff8 | Ben Cardew | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ben-cardew/ | |
Okkervil River keyboardist Jonathan Meiburg takes the reins on the latest record from this side project, resulting in the group's best effort to date. | Okkervil River keyboardist Jonathan Meiburg takes the reins on the latest record from this side project, resulting in the group's best effort to date. | Shearwater: Palo Santo | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/7105-palo-santo/ | Palo Santo | If you've previously written off Shearwater as an Okkervil River side project, now is the time to reevaluate that stance. The band once split the difference between OR's frontman Will Shelf and keyboardist Jonathan Meiburg, each pulling 50/50 songwriting duties. You may wonder where Sheff has gone on this record, but you won't miss him. The push-pull between Sheff's croaking and Meiburg's lilting falsetto is gone, forcing the less-experienced vocalist to dial it up and find newfound strength in his vocals. With Meiburg in charge, Shearwater make several leaps from their previous albums: Did you want stark backwater hymns with PJ Harvey-levels of catharsis? Palo Santo has that (opener "La Dame at La Licorne"). Hiss-soaked tributes to some heretofore lost or imagined side of the radio dial à la M. Ward? That's here, too ("Palo Santo" and "Sing, Little Birdie"). Even if mid-tempo Bruce Hornsby piano ballads are your bag, Meiburg has that nailed down ("Seventy-four, Seventy-five" and "Johnny Viola".)
Those aren't even the highlights of Palo Santo. The records puts its best feet forward early: The banjo-plucked folk of "Red Sea, Black Sea" is overwhelmed by a strange backward pulse of keyboards throughout the verses, recalling the Southern Gothic twinge of R.E.M.'s early material. It's then lifted by sparse but stern percussion and Meiburg's ranting vocal turn in the chorus, powerful but frayed on every edge. That keyboard throb pushes the song one notch further into uncomfortability, building a sense of impending danger, but it's Meiburg's voice that makes you want to hear it again (and again). "White Waves" is perhaps where Sheff could have sat in on a duet, but instead makes for a rather catchy moment of schizophrenia. Meiburg's falsetto promises he "won't go traveling tonight," and more chillingly, "there's something singing in the ice in the deepest part of the wood." That's before the song sprouts an unexpected riff, a few chords lurching back and forth in syncopation, while his voice bursts and implores himself not to go over the guitars that rise and vanish at the whim of Meiburg's wavering delivery.
While Meiburg's voice and a guitar, piano or banjo are at the center of most of these tracks, the instrumentation has suddenly fallen into place, intuitive now where it once diverted attention from previous albums' monotonous mood. Palo Santo is no less dark, certainly, but the songs breathe and swell much more naturally, with some of Meiburg's sharpest melodies yet. The more fragile arrangements from the Shearwater of old appear now and again, but where you'd once expect an intimate performance, songs like "Palo Santo" hint at empty space beneath that's nearly bottomless. Will Sheff has been writing narrative songs for years, but Jonathan Meiburg has written the soundtrack worthy of his own, or anyone's, images. | 2006-05-09T02:00:17.000-04:00 | 2006-05-09T02:00:17.000-04:00 | Rock | Misra | May 9, 2006 | 7.6 | d1d011fd-769f-4931-88b3-d3ee8f7aa446 | Jason Crock | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jason-crock/ | null |
The latest collaboration between Cluster and Harmonia visionary Hans-Joachim Rödelius and American composer Tim Story is a meld of neo-classical and ambient composition that both soars and stumbles. | The latest collaboration between Cluster and Harmonia visionary Hans-Joachim Rödelius and American composer Tim Story is a meld of neo-classical and ambient composition that both soars and stumbles. | Hans-Joachim Roedelius & Tim Story: Inlandish | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/12109-inlandish/ | Inlandish | It's almost impossible to ignore the still-fresh imprint that keyboardist and composer Hans-Joachim Rödelius has left on electronic music. The influence of his groups with Dieter Moebius, Cluster and Harmonia (the latter also included Neu!'s Michael Rother), is difficult to overstate. But now, at 74, Rödelius seems just as comfortable plonking out Satie-like piano themes as he is touring the States with Cluster, now ambient celebrities. In the midst of said tour, Rödelius has released Inlandish, his latest collaboration with American composer Tim Story.
This time, Rödelius left much of the electronic arrangements to Story, spending only ten days in the studio laying down piano before letting the American elaborate on his themes with neoclassical synths, cellos, and oboes. The result often fronts a certain contemplative neutrality (or as the two composers term it, "emotionally ambiguous soundscapes"), which might otherwise be mistaken for the pretense of new age serenity. But there's no affected or meditative agenda hidden in the fluttering synthesizers, save perhaps that Story's treatments sometimes borrow a little too much from his collaborator's best works. More often, Tim Story's treatments add a sort of melodic counterbalance worthy of previous HJR associate Brian Eno.
It's a stark contrast from their last collaboration, 2003's Lunz, which heavily featured Rödelius' piano work and relegated his American disciple's embellishments to second-chair groundswells. Here, the collaborators let the piano lines form a supple backbone while Story's arrangements continually extend the work: sinuous synthetic flesh built upon a delicately evolved frame. And while Cluster and Harmonia were always known for their centripetal force, wrapping tight progressions around ever-changing repetitive themes, Rödelius melds his best ambient works with a patience gleaned off his looser works of the 1980s and 90s. Each piece unfolds methodically, each pulsating rotation of Rödelius' theme sloughing off another layer of Tim Story's arrangements, themselves playing out like the elegant evolution of a rock or blues solo.
The "rock thing" is a funny observation, since Tim Story says that Rödelius came to his attention just as he was searching for an alternative to rock music. But Inlandish certainly carries within it a rockish underpinning-- at the very least, consciously acknowledging post-rock luminaries like Tortoise as well as their progressive rock ancestors. It's intriguing that Rödelius and Story are perceived as guys who try to breathe life into a form that protests the cold rock'n'roll machine, because it seems like Tim Story is sometimes playing pop god with his German collaborator's delicate essence. While it's true that he sometimes overpowers his subject and crushes that little spark with dated beats ("Riddled") or melodic fusions of new age and ambient forms ("Downrivers"), the two composers nurse their supple little creation, their fragile little life form, charged with the empirical DNA of the same electronic figures Rödelius once revolutionized. | 2008-08-26T02:00:04.000-04:00 | 2008-08-26T02:00:04.000-04:00 | null | Grönland | August 26, 2008 | 6.8 | d1d1bfbe-ea79-42fa-9e3e-23624ef7727d | Pitchfork | null |
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Mary Timony and Christina Billotte’s early band operated for less than two years, but the appeal of their jagged, math-rock-adjacent punk has lasted decades longer. | Mary Timony and Christina Billotte’s early band operated for less than two years, but the appeal of their jagged, math-rock-adjacent punk has lasted decades longer. | Autoclave: Autoclave | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/autoclave-autoclave/ | Autoclave | The mythos of the Dischord Records band Autoclave is similar to that of one-season-wonder TV shows like Freaks and Geeks or My So-Called Life: Most of the players are discussed in relation to the more mainstream, but equally beloved, work they’ve done since. More importantly, despite their relative obscurity while active, their appeal has lasted decades longer than the band’s actual lifespan. Autoclave never released a debut album, but rather two EPs that were eventually compiled in a self-titled CD-only release in 1997. Now, for the first time, Dischord has remastered and reissued that compilation (with a rearranged tracklist) on vinyl.
Fronted by guitarist Mary Timony—now of Helium and Ex Hex fame—and bassist Christina Billotte, later of Slant 6 and Quix*o*tic, the quasi-math-punk quartet operated between 1990 and ’91, mostly during Timony’s visits home to Washington, D.C. while on break from Boston University. Their growth as a band was ultimately stunted by the distance, but they did manage to play shows with now-iconic groups Nation of Ulysses, Fugazi, and Beat Happening (all of whom probably could have been considered then-iconic, too—as a pre-Bratmobile Erin Smith wrote in her Action Teen zine about a 1991 show featuring all four bands, “This is your Altamont”).
Despite Autoclave’s close ties to Bratmobile—Billotte once filled in on drums at a Bratmobile show—they were not a riot grrrl band. “We definitely thought of ourselves as female,” Timony said in a 2016 interview with Washingtonian, but Autoclave’s musical ethos seemed light-years from the punk-rock-feminism-rules-okay truisms of riot grrrl proper. Timony is a classically trained guitarist, and Billotte, drummer Melissa Berkoff, and guitarist Nikki Chapman are clearly highly skilled musicians as well. Their lyrics were rarely, if ever, explicitly political, and they tended toward androgyny in their language. Perhaps no name could have suited as well as that of the autoclave, an industrial pressure chamber, to convey their blend of technical precision and urgency.
Billotte articulates that sound on the spastic opener “Dr. Seuss”: “Going down a one-way street/Don’t look back, just keep the beat.” Autoclave’s resistance to categorization as straight punk is due in large part to her voice; low and melodic, Billotte’s singing tends more toward power-pop than conventional punk. (It’s striking now to hear how similarly distinct she and Timony sounded at the time; at first listen, it’s often nearly impossible to tell them apart, especially knowing how much deeper Timony’s voice is now, when performing with Ex Hex.) “Dr. Suess” makes a more inviting opener than that of the 1997 CD, “Go Far,” which though impressive in its musicianship is comparatively impenetrable in its intensity. “I’ll Take You Down” features the kind of noodly-yet-calculated guitars that came to classify Autoclave as math rock-adjacent, as does the only song sung by Chapman, the jagged and winding “Bulls Eye.” The intricate fretwork throughout the album is Timony’s doing, a result of her classical training and a high-school obsession with virtuoso guitarists Steve Vai and Joe Satriani.
The reissue includes two demos: “Summer,” a Timony-sung track that was originally released via Simple Machine’s 1992 Lever compilation, and “Paper Boy,” a cover of the theme song for the NES game of the same name that somehow manages to avoid excessive cheekiness. Both songs were also released on the 1997 compilation. The reissue doesn’t include any “special” exclusive materials, but considering the difficulty of finding other physical Autoclave memorabilia (at the time of publication, there’s a single copy of the CD available on Amazon and it costs $100.26), the tangible album feels special and exclusive enough.
Regardless of listening medium, the highlight of the Autoclave catalog has always been “Hot Spurr.” The only other song on which Timony sings lead, it’s by far the band’s most leisurely. Autoclave’s chord progressions here are closest to conventional college alt-rock (though they still maintain a slightly off-kilter time signature), and in context sound like the unspooled culmination of Timony’s many tightly woven riffs. Of the titular character, she sings, “He shoots words faster than bullets and you got riddled in the fire.” In some ways, it’s a fitting epitaph for Autoclave itself, a group of whip-smart young women who, though maybe less brash or forthright than their punk contemporaries, were equally biting. With maze-like instrumentation and a proclivity for cryptic lyrics, every Autoclave song feels like a sneak attack.
It’s hard to take a pure critical eye to Autoclave at this point, when the band feels nearly impossible to separate from Billotte’s and especially Timony’s later work. Any criticism of their modest discography could be rebutted by the sheer fact of their ages: It’s impressive how nuanced a group of 20-year-olds were in conveying their anxieties. Autoclave’s music didn’t seem like an outlet for its members’ angst, but an embodiment of it. There is very little breathing room on this album, and sometimes the lyrics are too inscrutable to provide any real catharsis, but that mysteriousness is also what, nearly 30 years on, makes Autoclave far more than a footnote in its members’ careers. | 2019-04-06T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-04-06T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Dischord | April 6, 2019 | 8.6 | d1e6eb24-e601-4394-8168-04fcd99f588f | Annie Fell | https://pitchfork.com/staff/annie-fell/ | |
The man who took us to church tries to take us to the same church, again, 14 times, six years later. | The man who took us to church tries to take us to the same church, again, 14 times, six years later. | Hozier: Wasteland, Baby! | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/hozier-wasteland-baby/ | Wasteland, Baby! | Like a desperate magician guessing card after card until he arrives at the one in your hand, Andrew Hozier-Byrne spends much of his second album stumbling through a simple trick. To kick off his first full-length in five years, the platinum-selling Irish singer-songwriter celebrates the legends who spoke truth to power, as he shouts out a veritable VH1 marathon’s worth of greats: Nina Simone, Billie Holiday, John Lennon, James Brown, Joni Mitchell, Mavis Staples, Patti Smith, Marvin Gaye, and more are name-checked during the opening song “Nina Cried Power.” The message is simple. All of these people made a difference, and, whoever you are, wherever you are, at least one of them probably means something to you. Why dwell in hopelessness when you can join the choir?
It’s a well-meaning call to action that’s paid dividends in the past. “Take Me to Church” is both the title of Hozier’s career-making 2013 single and also his imagined purpose as a songwriter—a purveyor of good will, packaged in radio anthems designed to be sung at the top of your lungs. In his music and interviews, the soft-spoken 28-year-old is passionate about noble causes, from LGBTQ awareness to the Irish nurses’ strike and the opioid crisis. Standing at six-foot-five, with chiseled features and the occasional man-bun, the mononymic singer even has a kind of Christ-like aura, or at least downmarket Russell Brand. His mother, the visual artist Raine Hozier-Byrne, designed his latest album cover in a process that involved submerging her son underwater for extended periods of time: “I had said to mum,” he joked dryly, “Just try to think of the album sales if I do die on this shoot!”
Another thing: he’s got a gorgeous voice. Booming and effervescent, it’s an instrument that communicates passion, adventure, and wisdom, all to the extent that transcribing his lyrics seems to be somewhat missing the point. There’s a reason why most people didn’t realize that “Take Me to Church” is a protest song about the Catholic Church. Like Foster the People’s similarly out-of-nowhere smash “Pumped Up Kicks,” it seemed to ascend the charts solely on hummable hooks and crowd-pleasing adrenaline. Such strengths are a sweet but elusive currency. Analyze a beautiful day and it’s already over. At 14 tracks in roughly an hour, Wasteland, Baby! falls prey to the humdrum, all its power wrung dry.
The record’s pitfalls are nothing new for major-label artists attempting to follow a surprise hit. Nearly every element of “Take Me to Church” is isolated and recycled here in the hopes of crowning a successor: God is not in the house. The aid of a gospel choir doesn’t make the awkward one-word refrain of “To Noise Making (Sing)” sound like something worth singing along to, just as the slow-build, stomp-clap murk of “Movement” mostly invites you to avert eye contact from the back of the room. Even just the central refrains of these songs—Sing! Move! Now!—suggest an unbecoming directness. Rock stars make us want to join in on the fun; wedding singers and youth group leaders demand it.
Hozier has always had a subtle dark streak, and you can sense him trying to wield his moods in new ways. He now deals in spacier arrangements, heavier guitars, and harsher lyrics. (“No Plan” takes aim at the “screaming, heaving fuckery of the world.” Hoo-ah!) Most successful is a ballad called “Shrike” that also appeared on last year’s Nina Cried Power EP. It’s stark and fingerpicked, with gestures toward traditional Irish folk music. His bellowed vocals exude a down-home intimacy that makes me consider the strange path that led us toward pop music that sounds like this. It maybe begins with the Black Keys and Danger Mouse’s lite psychedelic blues and weaves through the Lumineers’ audience-participation folk-pop; it rides in the sidecar of Adele’s torch ballad supernovas and stops just short of Alabama Shakes’ riotous pearly gates. It wants badly to sound timeless but it already feels like a moment that’s passed. Ed Sheeran and James Bay, two of Hozier’s peers, have attempted to evolve by writing fake Rihanna songs and cutting their hair, respectively. Hozier’s unease about the future is palpable.
The way Hozier tells it, he wrote Wasteland, Baby!’s title track after reading how threats of nuclear war caused the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists to move our doomsday clock ahead 30 seconds—an event that resulted in the BBC using the word “apocalypse” in a headline. And yet, he sees a little light. “All the fear and fire of the end of the world,” he sings gently, “Happens each time a boy falls in love with a girl.” He’s not the first songwriter to lament the small apocalypses that occur every day, or how love’s temporal nature is also what makes it special. And to hear him sing it—his voice coated in an unearthly burble atop humble, fingerpicked acoustic guitar—is to hear him acknowledge his limitations. After all, churches are where we celebrate life’s fiery beginnings and endings, but the truth is, we spend most of our time somewhere in the middle, consumed by an earnest and unglamorous everyday kind of searching. Without meaning or direction, it might, given a voice, sound something like this. | 2019-03-06T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2019-03-06T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Rubyworks | March 6, 2019 | 4.8 | d1eb3968-3966-4cc2-93cf-bff533899079 | Sam Sodomsky | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sam-sodomsky/ | |
The mighty Sleater-Kinney return a decade after their last album, 2005's The Woods, and they haven't lost a step. No Cities to Love is the band's most front-to-back accessible album, amping their omnipresent love of new wave pop with aerodynamic choruses. | The mighty Sleater-Kinney return a decade after their last album, 2005's The Woods, and they haven't lost a step. No Cities to Love is the band's most front-to-back accessible album, amping their omnipresent love of new wave pop with aerodynamic choruses. | Sleater-Kinney: No Cities to Love | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/20148-no-cities-to-love/ | No Cities to Love | Now is the time: breaking the decade of relative silence that followed Sleater-Kinney's prodigious supposed finale, 2005's The Woods, the girls are back in town. We have arrived at the critical reappraisal and celebrated comeback of music's most revered feminist saviors of American rock'n'roll. It is 2015 and we are staring down Sleater-Kinney's wise eighth album—exactly 50 years removed from the birth of "R-e-s-p-e-c-t", exactly 40 years removed from the birth of Horses, exactly 30 years removed from when Kim Gordon first yells "brave men run away from me" in the Mojave desert, exactly 20 years removed from Sleater-Kinney, a primal, insurrectionist warning shot from the margins. Ever since, we have had Corin Tucker, Carrie Brownstein, and Janet Weiss to soundtrack our societal chaos and progressing zeitgeist: tangled agitation, pummeled norms, principled wit, sublimity, sadness, friction, kicks.
Nowadays, there is a prevailing notion that we ought not want such epochal bands as Sleater-Kinney to reunite, because why tarnish the legend of "Best Band in the World" acclaim and a perfectly ascendant seven-album streak? But if any band in the past two decades has proved they've got the intellect, skepticism, and emotional capacity to deserve this—to keep living—it's Sleater-Kinney. No Cities to Love is a disarming, liberationist force befitting the Sleater-Kinney canon. Fervent political leftism has been implicit to this Olympia-born trio since they first inverted Boston's "More Than a Feeling" on a 1994 comp and that goes on here as well; we desperately need it. It is astonishing that a radical DIY punk band could grow up and keep going with this much dignity and this many impossibly chiseled choruses. No Pistol, Ramone, or unfortunate mutation of Black Flag could have done this.
The necessity of change—the creative virtue of ripping it up and starting again—remains a crucial strand of Sleater-Kinney's DNA. This is still them: low-tuned classic rock tropes resuscitated with punk urgency, raw and jagged like Wire compressing crystalline Marquee Moon coils. Weiss' massive swoop is still the band's throbbing heart, pumping Sleater-Kinney's blood. But Brownstein has said they set out to find "a new approach to the band" and that is true of No Cities to Love. It is no less emphatic and corporeal than punk classics Call the Doctor and Dig Me Out. But unlike their last two albums of monstrous combat rock, No Cities to Love keeps only the most addictive elements—if Sleater-Kinney are still taking Joey Ramone as a spiritual guide, this is their mature, honed, and clean-sounding Rocket to Russia. Catchy as all-clashing hell, it's Sleater-Kinney's most front-to-back accessible album, amping their omnipresent love of new wave pop with aerodynamic choruses that reel and reel, enormously shouted and gasped and sung with a dead-cool drawl. The album has the particular aliveness of music being created and torn from a group at this very moment—tempered, but with the wild-paced abandon that comes with being caged and then free.
As ever, empathy is Sleater-Kinney's renewable energy source. They have always made a kind of folk music—songs of real people—and opener "Price Tag" is an honest example of this, fueled by Tucker's motherly responsibility. In concrete detail, it describes the struggle of a working class family in the context of American capitalism and financial crisis (it rings of the high cost of low prices). Real life power dynamics permeate No Cities, among the rubbery synth lines of the otherwise venomous "Fangless" (which I know will frighten off a couple to-the-bone punk purists, like garlic wards off evil) and the anxious post-hardcore lurch of "No Anthems", which Albini could have produced. On the glammy "Gimme Love", Tucker plainly wants more of that four-letter-word for girls and outsiders (she seems to wish, in the words of de Beauvoir, "that every human life might be pure transparent freedom"). Brownstein, meanwhile, sings some of the most elliptical and oblique lyrics of her career: "I was lured by the devil... I'll choose sin 'til I leave," she hollers like a Bad Seed, clenched and possessed. In lighter moments, it's heartening to hear Tucker and Brownstein in unison at the record's sing-song center: "No outline will ever hold us/ It's not a new wave/ It's just you and me."
Sleater-Kinney began work on No Cities in earnest around May 2012, they have said, but especially on the anthemic title track and "Hey Darling"—the first two songs they wrote—you can hear echoes of that decade of pause, an airing out of just why. The titular phrase is abstract enough, but considering Brownstein's vocal incompatibility with the van-show-van-show tour-life void—and her lines, here, about "a ritual of emptiness"—it plays like a direct take on the complicated reality of the rootless rock band and its scattered tribe. On "Hey Darling", one of Tucker's gummiest melodies becomes a letter to fans, reasoning her hiding: "It seems to me the only thing/ That comes from fame is mediocrity," and then, "Sometimes the shout of the room/ Makes me feel so alone." The slow-burn of "Fade", the closer, also takes on Sleater-Kinney's hiatus. Tucker is like a Robert Plant putting her supernatural quasi-operatic range on display over epic, minor-key hard rock, switching from sly-voiced ballad to high-pitched inflection: "If there's no tomorrow/ You better live," she sings of a dimming spotlight, her slipping self-perception. It's the closest No Cities gets to The Woods' feminist rewrite of '70s rock grandeur, and yet sounds like nothing on that record. Sleater-Kinney's discography is full of songs delivering meta-commentaries on what it means to be women playing rock; No Cities is more purely personal and explicitly political, evidence enough that in the context of family, middle-age, and multiple careers, it is possible to have everything.
For the first time in 21 years, Sleater-Kinney have written an album without a proper stomach-twisting tearjerker; no wistful confessions, breathless breakups, or dying lovers, no "Good Things", "One More Hour", or "The Size of Our Love". But I predict Sleater-Kinney will be making more people cry this year than ever before—maybe Lena Dunham, maybe Perfect Pussy's Meredith Graves, definitely Fred Armisen (tears are highly subjective, and yet my claim is substantiated). "We tell ourselves stories in order to live," Joan Didion famously wrote, and we align ourselves with the potent narratives of great bands for the same reason. Their songs guide us through the restless process of figuring out who we are. We search for meaning in rhythm and couplets and distortion, and if a band is grounded with as much purpose as Sleater-Kinney, they charge our consciousness, occupy space in our relationships, symbolize what we want to become. Sleater-Kinney's music still does this. It tells us—women or anyone who has ever felt small and othered—the truth, that even when the world seems to deny it, we are never powerless. Now the story goes on longer; it didn't have to end. | 2015-01-20T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2015-01-20T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Sub Pop | January 20, 2015 | 8.7 | d1fec56c-910a-4ad8-921e-d04eb901cd75 | Jenn Pelly | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jenn-pelly/ | null |
Led Zeppelin's John Paul Jones, Nirvana/Foo Fighters drummer Dave Grohl, and Queens of the Stone Age's Josh Homme resurrect the hard rock supergroup. | Led Zeppelin's John Paul Jones, Nirvana/Foo Fighters drummer Dave Grohl, and Queens of the Stone Age's Josh Homme resurrect the hard rock supergroup. | Them Crooked Vultures: Them Crooked Vultures | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/13717-them-crooked-vultures/ | Them Crooked Vultures | There was something almost quaint about watching Them Crooked Vultures' recent performance at Washington D.C.'s 9:30 Club. Yes, the music was punishingly loud and, sure, the chops on display were near godlike, but a bunch of dudes pumping their fists to a hard-rock supergroup? Once the domain of the Claptons and Crosbys of the music world, the supergroup seems to be coming back into vogue. From the Jack White-helmed Raconteurs and Dead Weather to the multi-bearded onslaught of Monsters of Folk, it feels like the confines around a musician's "main band" are looser than ever. Which makes sense: the majors' slow death and the general grab-bag atmosphere of the industry makes these collaborations easier than ever. And, of course, they open a new revenue source and creative outlet for the parties involved, so why not?
Well, history is littered with plenty of reasons why not (Velvet Revolver or Zwan ring a bell?), but even those dubious of these projects couldn't help but register excitement for Them Crooked Vultures, the much-talked-about alliance of Queens of the Stone Age's Josh Homme, Nirvana/Foo Fighter Dave Grohl, and John Paul Jones, who once played bass for this band called Led Zeppelin. (Also recording and touring with the band is QOTSA's Alain Johannes, let's not forget.) A few of those being, y'know, some of the greatest rock groups of all time and each player a fierce instrumentalist in his own right, the stage seemed set for these gents to join together, like Voltron, into some kind of indestructible hard-rock juggernaut. That happens occasionally on their self-titled debut, but the band also tussles with some of the same problems that have befallen many a supergroup before them.
As he's done with past iterations of QOTSA and his long-running Desert Sessions project, Homme takes the lead here, serving as frontman and steering the musical direction. The record features all the trademarks of a Homme-led affair-- druggy, mutant blues, loud/soft dynamics, songs about sex, and regular forays into the silly and absurd. The musicianship throughout is as phenomenal as you'd expect, and on a gut level it's thrilling just to hear these three men play together-- the way Grohl's snapping drum hits ricochet off Jones' rapid-fire bass notes on songs like "Scumbag Blues", for instance. (Grohl, in particular, is excellent throughout, affirming once again his destined place in a rock band.) And the guys themselves are clearly having fun. Amidst all the technical shredding, there's a looseness at play that seems to stem in part from Homme and Grohl getting to live out a boyhood fantasy. Oddly that becomes kind of a problem on the record.
One of the negative aspects of a supergroup is that the presence of multiple stars tends to disrupt the natural hierarchy of a band-- meaning that there's no one to shoot down bad or unnecessary ideas. If you're Josh Homme and John Paul Jones or Dave Grohl wants to take a bass or drum solo, you let him. And Them Crooked Vultures often feels overstuffed with the weight of too many ideas. This is especially true on longer cuts such as "Elephants" and "Warsaw or the First Breath You Take After You Give Up", the latter nearly eight minutes of prog-fueled, time-signatured madness that closes with an extended instrumental outro. Sure, these guys have earned the right to do that, but that doesn't make it a good song. Yet for each of these trying numbers, there's a muscular hard-rock track like "Dead End Friends" that helps make up for it. And if you simply want to hear Homme/Jones/Grohl sync into a furious, interlocking groove, there are songs like "Gunman" that offer that too. Having said that, Them Crooked Vultures still feels like a record to be checked off a list rather than one to live with and fully invest in. | 2009-11-19T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2009-11-19T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Interscope | November 19, 2009 | 6.2 | d1fedecf-035b-4faf-a774-f5f7ac73539f | Joe Colly | https://pitchfork.com/staff/joe-colly/ | null |
In the early ’90s, B12 were the best example of Detroit’s influence on IDM, and the reissue of Electro-Soma alongside a new compilation is a fearsomely beautiful work of electronic head music. | In the early ’90s, B12 were the best example of Detroit’s influence on IDM, and the reissue of Electro-Soma alongside a new compilation is a fearsomely beautiful work of electronic head music. | B12: Electro-Soma I + II | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/b12-electro-soma-i-ii/ | Electro-Soma I + II | It may not be immediately apparent from the latter-day rhythmical mazes of Squarepusher, Autechre, Aphex Twin, et al., but the futuristic classicism of Detroit techno was one of the key inspirations for IDM as the genre emerged from the wobbly shadows of the rave era. B12, aka British production duo Mike Golding and Steve Rutter, were probably the best example of Detroit’s influence on IDM. The pair were inspired by Detroit originators Juan Atkins and Derrick May and early releases on their B12 label displayed a huge debt to the steel-brazed melodies that emanated from the Motor City in the late ’80s and early ’90s.
In 2017, such an approach would probably consign B12 to a life on the techno circuit. But in Britain during the early ’90s, when electronic music had yet to be ushered into sharp stylistic lines, Golding and Rutter found unlikely bedfellows in Aphex Twin, whose Rephlex label included two of their tracks on its 1992 compilation The Philosophy Of Sound And Machine, and Sheffield bleep techno dons Warp Records, which put “Telefone 529” and “Preminition” on its seminal Artificial Intelligence compilation, an album that would birth the idea of electronic listening music and eventually IDM. Golding and Rutter subsequently signed to Warp and in 1993 the label released Electro-Soma, one of a series of artist albums under the Artificial Intelligence name that helped to define the IDM sound.
Electro-Soma, which is being reissued alongside the new Electro-Soma II compilation, may not have the same historical legacy as Artificial Intelligence releases from Autechre and Aphex Twin but it remains a fearsomely beautiful work of electronic head music. Some 24 years on, the 10 tracks here—a mixture of personal favorites picked by late Warp Records founder Rob Mitchell from early B12 releases and new work made specifically for the project—feel wonderfully timeless, sitting somewhere between the classically inclined melodies of Kraftwerk, LFO’s cold Northern English bleeps, and Derrick May’s artful techno with just a hint of rave theatrics (see the dramatic opening chords and acid lead of “Metropolis”). Album opener “Soundtrack Of Space,” for example, could fit comfortably onto Kraftwerk’s 1978 long player The Man-Machine, second wave Detroit techno producer Carl Craig’s 1995 album Landcruising, or the 2017 roster of Nina Kraviz’s трип label.
Electro-Soma may not have sounded as shockingly new as other Artificial Intelligence releases but it more than makes up for this thanks to B12’s brilliant melodic instincts and inclination for clarity. “Basic Emotion” has a gloriously atmospheric melody that shines like a bright winter’s day; “Hall of Mirrors” takes Derrick May’s jazzy synth inclinations into lingering astral orbit and “Obsessed” uses a whispered hook and steely LFO-esque chords to devastating pop effect. The result is an album that fulfills Warp’s vision of electronic listening music by fitting in enough hooks, detail, and structure to delight the armchair fan. It’s flab-free too, making its point over ten tracks and 55 glorious minutes on the original vinyl release (which this re-release copies).
Such conciseness, while very welcome in the world of sagging electronic music albums, makes Electro-Soma II a harder sell. The new compilation collects a dozen B12 tracks from the Electro-Soma era and is intended to give further insight into one of Warp’s more elusive artists. That’s all very well in theory but for the newcomer, there is little here that wasn’t said with more melodic style and technical precision on the original Electro-Soma album. “Ecliptic,” for example, is a decent enough take on the airy side of Detroit techno but lacks the glassy elegance of “Hall of Mirrors,” while “Fear of Expression” has some of “Metropolis”’s rave urgency, without that track’s rush of cold emotion.
That’s not to say Electro-Soma II isn’t worth your time, just that it has big boots to fill. “Ming” is a wonderfully creepy crawly example of lolloping, late-night fog, while “Bubbles” uses the kind of aquatic synth rush that Drexicya would later make their own, the two tracks giving an indication of avenues B12 might have explored further had they not gone on hiatus from 1998 to 2005. Meanwhile, album highlight “Eilya” is a fantastic example of lush “Basic Emotion” ambience that would have slotted right onto the original Electro-Soma release.
What the new compilation really demonstrates, perhaps despite itself, is how well Rob Mitchell did when compiling the first Electro-Soma album, paring away B12’s more rambling tendencies to find the 10 essential songs within, on what remains the classic B12 release. Take Electro-Soma alone, then, for a direct hit of melodic IDM grandeur or pair it with Electro-Soma II for a more sustained, if diluted, approach. But whatever the case, do let B12 permeate your blood stream. | 2017-08-26T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-08-26T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Warp | August 26, 2017 | 7.7 | d204d7cb-3c03-4907-a407-8f5316021ac1 | Ben Cardew | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ben-cardew/ | null |
The Indiana musician Kevin Krauter makes sunny, nostalgic shoegaze with some pleasing arrangements but not a lot of specificity. | The Indiana musician Kevin Krauter makes sunny, nostalgic shoegaze with some pleasing arrangements but not a lot of specificity. | Kevin Krauter: Full Hand | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/kevin-krauter-full-hand/ | Full Hand | Kevin Krauter makes soft, well-worn shoegaze music, kind of like that old sweater from high school you still keep around. The Indiana musician and Hoops bassist’s second album, Full Hand, is first and foremost a spring record; it makes for nice background noise as the sun stays out longer and the grass gets greener. The 12 songs are breezy and genteel, with very little brewing below the surface. Krauter doesn’t make sweeping statements in the lyrics or arrangements. Instead, what we hear is weightless and bucolic, even blissful.
Full Hand cherry-picks and subverts elements of ’70s soft-rock and R&B. Where it would feel obvious to have live drums, Krauter will play with drum machines. When it would make more sense for a song to fade out quietly, Krauter will write an off-kilter synthesizer arrangement. Take “Opportunity,” a honey-coated song about the light coming in from his bedroom window. Resonant keys linger gently, and a drum machine shuffles like a bike on an unpaved road. The song unfolds methodically until the end, where Krauter shakes things up with a left-of-center, vaguely baroque keyboard part. If not for that quiet bait-and-switch at the end, this song would be innocuous: lovely, but not particularly memorable.
It’s easy to miss Krauter’s compelling and complicated arrangements; the record is subdued almost to a fault. You have to put in work to feel drawn into Krauter’s world. A song like “Kept” feels more aligned with Swedish dream-pop bands like the Radio Dept than it does with polished indie rock from the early 2010s that feels like its more obvious analog. What at first seems like chilled-out disaffection is actually closer to pure melancholy. When he writes about his experiences, he almost always does so cryptically, taking great care to keep things out of view as he sees fit.
The title track is the album’s most fully realized. It sounds like an AM-radio gold supercut, guitars building to a pool of noise you want to float atop forever over a tight drum groove. Krauter is at his best when he writes these sunny, nostalgic arrangements. A stellar groove doesn’t make an album, though. Krauter writes pretty, deceptively complex melodies, but offers very little substance. Full Hand is a house with no insulation: nice on the outside, but not really a place to call home.
Buy: Rough Trade
(Pitchfork may earn a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.) | 2020-02-29T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2020-02-29T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Bayonet | February 29, 2020 | 6.2 | d214b595-03a8-4d3f-8ec8-043d30074f34 | Sophie Kemp | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sophie-kemp/ | |
The fifth album from Adam Granduciel and co. chips away some of their hazier edges in favor of sharper melodies, broadening the borders of the meticulous yet joyously simple sound he has perfected. | The fifth album from Adam Granduciel and co. chips away some of their hazier edges in favor of sharper melodies, broadening the borders of the meticulous yet joyously simple sound he has perfected. | The War on Drugs: I Don’t Live Here Anymore | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/the-war-on-drugs-i-dont-live-here-anymore/ | I Don’t Live Here Anymore | The songs of the War on Drugs exist in a world between knuckle tattoos: love, hurt; home, away; dark, lght. They usually begin in medias res, with our hero, the tressy and lovelorn Adam Granduciel, wandering the empty plains of grief with a guitar strapped to his back. He’s down bad; he’s rudderless; he’s desperately trying to find his way out of the rain or pain or chains. Heartbreak is behind him but hope is always just ahead, a pin-light through the clouds in the shape of a mythological figure known only as “babe.”
Granduciel’s continuing romantic odyssey—a long and possibly endless journey—is so emotionally grand, so preposterously epic that even though his lyrics are borderline cliché, it functions more like the shoegaze bands the War on Drugs were once likened to on their first couple of records. Instead of sitting at the front of the music, Grandcuiel’s words drape over his songs like a thin film so that they essentially disappear. You can only hear him sing the words “dream” or “memory” or “lost” or “found” so many times before they lose their meaning and slip into the ocean of music around it. Inside a song, you are neither here nor there, a liminal feeling that evokes so much of our time in life languishing in the middle. Call it meta-heartland rock, but perhaps this is why they have grown from a small Philadelphia indie-rock concern to arena headliners over the last decade: The War on Drugs want to occupy the space between it all, and there is so, so much of it.
On I Don’t Live Here Anymore, the band’s fifth album, Granduciel is determined to arrive...somewhere. It doesn’t matter when or where, for now, just any old spot in space in time: A pyramid in which he was born, a Bob Dylan concert where he danced, an old par-3 golf course where he can work on his short game. It’s a start! This sense of place in the lyrics grounds the songs more, making them less wafty and more permanent. It goes hand in hand with Granduciel’s vocals, newly sharpened and melodic. There are barely any sung notes that end with that kind of adenoidal Dylan slide-whistle fall, nor is there any hooting and hollering at the climaxes of songs, a fond calling card of Granduciel’s greatest hits. Every musical element from vintage synthesizers to even-more vintage guitars is honed and cut clean, chipping off some of the hazier edges of the band without losing the methodical and gorgeous production that Granduciel and his co-producer, Shawn Everett, have mastered.
Admittedly, I Don’t Live Here Anymore doesn’t sound that different from 2017’s Grammy-winning A Deeper Understanding. Most songs still carry the band’s signature feel: a steady backbeat, the bass and kick-drum almost always in unison, and waves of guitars and synths folding in and over each other. But the War on Drugs’ recording process includes hours of layering, tinkering, and turning of knobs until the balance is just so. The shifts are incremental, and each of the hundreds of choices here feels especially considered this time around. Granduciel puts such a primacy on simple pop melodies—the main element that’d categorize this band as “classic rock”—that the album is gluttonous with simple hooks: this acoustic guitar motif halfway through “Harmonia’s Dream,” that piano riff that towers over “Victim,” that staccato vocal take on “Change.” Take A Deeper Understanding and make it a little smaller and denser; I Don’t Live Here Anymore has more to see and less time to see it.
There’s also the fact that, like A Deeper Understanding, I Don’t Live Here Anymore sounds like one of the biggest, most luxurious records this side of Steely Dan’s Gaucho. The album feels so spatially and texturally interesting, which is difficult to do because Granduciel limits his palette to the primary colors of rock’n’roll (including, according to the liner notes, a bass once owned by Walter Becker). This isn’t “real” music like some errant YouTube comment might suggest, but it’s transparent music, a more direct ratio of instrument to sound, where every guitar and snare and synth coming through the mix sounds exemplary. This is the simple trick of the War on Drugs: It’s easy to ignore the daffy mythopoetics of Granduciel’s songwriting and just listen to the alchemy this band has perfected, a complex machine that produces something joyously simple.
And while you could put on I Don’t Live Here Anymore and take comfort knowing that the War on Drugs have Beach House’d their way to another terrific record by simply refining what works, there are a few songs that test the borders of the band’s classic little world. The confluence of sound and vision comes on “Victim,” an absolute blaster on amphetamines that stands among the best things Granduciel has ever written. You know how “Strangest Thing” had that slow and unforgettable seven-note riff? “Victim” does the same thing much quicker in four notes with a colossal piano riff on a Juno synth. It also shows a more knowing, acidic side of Granduciel’s songwriting. There’s no self-pity or walking through a vale of tears: He’s arrived at a place of knowing one thing about yourself and throwing it in someone else’s face: “Honey I’m a victim of my own desire/Who are you?”
Granduciel has said this record is about change, as he told Vanity Fair, about “growing up, getting older, but also growing out of yourself and into something new.” He steps cautiously into newness, smudging songs with just a little more certainty and specificity. A faint thread of astrology glides over the album (who doesn’t have an astrology phase); he opens a song with a direct quote from Dylan’s “Shelter From the Storm”; his old skin is “peeling away.” It’s subtle, because if you ctrl-f the lyric sheet it’s still six results for “dream,” six for “lost,” and three for “memory”—the mirepoix of any War on Drugs album. And yet: Destinations appear, a few answers reveal themselves, a new feeling becomes articulated, and the majority of it happens on the closing track, “Occasional Rain.”
The song is small in sound and scope, a little like intimate U2, maybe even a little like Beach House with all the vibey arpeggiated guitars. If many War on Drugs songs sound like Granduciel softly running his hand alongside a wheat field, here’s one that’s just a little sprout of green. This is the one where, charmingly, he says he’s living down by an old par-3. As the song rolls ahead without a chorus, Granduciel reaches the climax harmonizing with himself like he rarely has done before. “Ain’t the sky just shades of grey/Until you’ve seen it from the other side?/Oh, if loving you’s the same/It’s only some occasional rain.” Maybe this moment is enough, and real change comes not by wanderin’ around looking for it but when you finally decide to stop.
Buy: Rough Trade
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Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-10-29T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2021-10-29T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Atlantic | October 29, 2021 | 8.4 | d2157573-e0c6-41d6-b2a9-18dc2023eaca | Jeremy D. Larson | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jeremy-d. larson/ | |
This lovingly curated posthumous album collects a decade’s worth of unreleased ambient compositions by the late Women guitarist. | This lovingly curated posthumous album collects a decade’s worth of unreleased ambient compositions by the late Women guitarist. | Chris Reimer: Hello People | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/chris-reimer-hello-people/ | Hello People | It’s been a busy season for the former members of the much-loved but short-lived Calgary indie-rock act Women. The band’s singer, Patrick Flegel, recently stepped out with their avant-pop drag queen alter ego, Cindy Lee. In March, their bassist brother, Matt, and drummer Mike Wallace released an album with their intense post-punk outfit Preoccupations. The final member of Women, guitarist Chris Reimer, went to bed one night in February 2012 and never woke up—but he, too, has a new record out this spring.
There were many shocking facets to Reimer’s death from heart complications at 26: its suddenness; his young, prime-of-life age; the fact that it came just as he was forging a path forward after Women’s infamous onstage break-up by joining indie-folk stompers the Dodos. Reimer’s sister Nikki coped by making the mourning process communal, launching a memorial blog that quickly transformed into a digital storehouse of photos, live performances, and articles about Reimer. That outpouring coincided with the establishment of the Chris Reimer Legacy Fund Society, a group of family and friends that has created a digital catalog of his multidisciplinary work, commissioned animated short-film tributes to Reimer, and donated money in his name to support young people studying music and dance.
Now, the group that has been instrumental in preserving his legacy is helping to unveil a new dimension of it, with Hello People. For the better part of a decade, Reimer had been stockpiling ambient compositions that he never got around to releasing. Some of these appeared on a limited-edition 2012 cassette fundraiser for the Legacy Fund, titled The Chad Tape and recorded with musician and producer Chad VanGaalen shortly before Reimer’s passing. But Hello People offers a more thorough representation of the breadth of these private recordings, spreading 15 very different pieces over 65 minutes and four sides of vinyl. Delicate and playful at times, dark and foreboding at others, the collection forms a collaged portrait of an artist who was always seeking new pathways to access the most elemental emotions, from joy to dread.
Some of these recordings may have been rough sketches that Reimer intended to elaborate on later. “Hongdi,” one of the few tracks that features drums, is a desolate, windswept apparition of Slintian post-rock that dissolves just as it seems to be coalescing, while the brief snippet “Mustard Gas” could be a Women song stripped down to nothing but Reimer’s tense electric-guitar curlicues. Even this collection’s lone traditionally structured song, “About,” emphasizes a sense of absence: Over a percolating guitar refrain, Reimer lays down an acoustic melody and a whispered vocal that’s barely audible above the strums. On its own terms, the song is a poignant foray into Elliott Smith-style melancholia; in light of Reimer’s passing, it’s devastating to hear his voice fade into the ether.
More than simply showcasing Reimer’s unreleased experiments, Hello People puts us right there beside him. This is a record where tape hiss, ambient room sounds, muffled background dialogue, and fidgeting equipment play as big a role as any proper instrument. But on the album’s trio of captivating extended pieces, Reimer explores variations on a theme until all sense of time and place is lost: The mesmerizing fog of “Beneluxx” conjures the same weightless, uneasy sensation as Boards of Canada’s early ambient pieces; by contrast, “Wallpaper 6 (extenze edit)” is a warm, churchly organ drone that feels like the build-up to a Spiritualized epic. In a perfect world, some hip entrepreneur would license the analog-synth starbursts of the hypnotic “Arpeg” and program them into a sound machine to soothe crying babies.
It isn’t just the recordings that sprawl beyond the 10-minute mark that strike a deep emotional chord. The brief track “French Death” opens Hello People with the pluck of an acoustic-guitar string, suggesting that some stripped-down, folky instrumental will follow. But Reimer immediately pulls back the dusty curtain to reveal a gorgeous 3D soundscape, its eye-socket-swelling synth texture bleeding like a red sky at sunset. It may be impossible to distill a life into 66 seconds of sound, but this succinct track embodies Reimer’s defining qualities: It’s welcoming, industrious, full of surprises, and gone far too soon. | 2018-05-04T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-05-04T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Flemish Eye | May 4, 2018 | 7.5 | d2248544-e918-4091-9a9b-388c00af4ea8 | Stuart Berman | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stuart-berman/ | |
With a menacing sound and bleak but playful lyrics, the Norwegian noise-rock trio stands out from the pack on its debut EP. | With a menacing sound and bleak but playful lyrics, the Norwegian noise-rock trio stands out from the pack on its debut EP. | Hammok: Jumping/Dancing/Fighting EP | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/hammok-jumping-dancing-fighting-ep/ | Jumping/Dancing/Fighting EP | Browse the tourism website for Oslo, Norway and the capital presents itself as a vibrant panorama of pastel storefronts, fjordside dining, and sleek modern architecture nestled between snow-capped mountains. In the eyes of local noise rock trio Hammok, though, the city takes on a gloomy facade–a contrast long documented by the country’s black metal starter pack. Jumping/Dancing/Fighting, their debut EP, suggests the best way to get through the woods is by throwing punches and busting moves, no matter how idyllic the scenery around you is. In just under 20 minutes, Hammok present their case for nihilism as peace of mind, letting searing guitars riffs and combative drumming replicate the sensation; the louder the wall of sound, the less there is to feel.
Singer-guitarist Tobias Osland and drummer Ferdinand Aasheim are childhood friends who spent the past decade playing in numerous projects together. They started Hammok during lockdown in early 2020 at the age of 22. Alongside bassist Ole Benjamin Thomassen, they snuck off to their studio for daily songwriting sessions to cope with the isolation. While an eerie silence enveloped the world, Hammok defined their own menacing sound as a band raging from within: needling guitar runs anchored by foreboding power chords, basslines pummeling the very fuzz pedals they’re filtered through, and kick drum that triples in speed only to be swallowed by crashing cymbals and tom fills. The fury on display in Jumping/Dancing/Fighting brings to mind the sheer volume of Unsane and the tonal sprightliness of the Fall of Troy.
What makes Hammok’s debut EP stand out among the relatively straightforward field of noise rock is their clever interplay between music and lyrics. The band elevates the genre as a vehicle for lending weight to confessional thoughts by also offering solutions, however bleak they may be. “It’s okay to be dead inside/Just feel around,” Osland yells on “J/D/F,” as if the secret to beating depression is finding a cozy spot to curl up in its endless caverns. Come the song’s end, he snakes a new guitar riff through reverb, its major chord relief offering a tangible sense of hope. On “Contrapoint,” Hammok deliver a pop commandment—dance the pain away—with cathartic, blood-curdling screams. “It’s the only point for me to prove/That it’s all for nothing,” growls Osland, his clean enunciation and surprising pitch echoing that of Touché Amoré singer Jeremy Bolm. Even the disjointed piano notes that open “Smile,” a comparatively tame number about the pitfalls of social media, act as a centering point when the whirr of stressors in the lyrics overwhelm. These moments indicate how Hammok reach beyond the genre’s simple formula—write the heaviest riffs possible, turn up the distortion, play loud—in search of a more memorable and haunting effect.
With all but two of its songs clocking in around the two-minute mark, Jumping/Dancing/Fighting is a robust, unified collection that flies by, in part thanks to the band’s own Osland juggling producer duties with a keen eye for clarity and tension. On first listen, it almost feels like a fever dream: a sudden, chaotic spiral that clouds your view before abruptly dissipating with “Outro.” In reality, Jumping/Dancing/Fighting is a polished introduction that posits Hammok not merely as noise-rock newcomers, but also erudite students of the genre who hit the ground running. | 2022-12-30T00:00:00.000-05:00 | 2022-12-30T00:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Loyal Blood | December 30, 2022 | 7.2 | d227384b-f338-4332-b1b5-90e9f28af526 | Nina Corcoran | https://pitchfork.com/staff/nina-corcoran/ | |
Famed singer-songwriter enlists Brian Eno to create the sort of newfangled electronica-meets-classic-rock album that Paul McCartney, Mick Jagger, and Eric Clapton attempted last decade. | Famed singer-songwriter enlists Brian Eno to create the sort of newfangled electronica-meets-classic-rock album that Paul McCartney, Mick Jagger, and Eric Clapton attempted last decade. | Paul Simon: Surprise | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/7855-surprise/ | Surprise | Here's to the noughties, Mrs. Robinson. Or should I say the 1990s: Paul Simon has arrived at his rock 'n' roll contemporaries' midlife crisis a decade or so late, and not in the good, fashionable way. As the 20th century wound down, elder statesmen such as Paul McCartney, Mick Jagger, and Eric Clapton dabbled in newfangled electronica-- and whippersnapper David Gray sold six million before Bob Dylan could contemplate following suit. At the time, Simon was busy flopping a musical, 1997's The Capeman, and prepping 2000 safety-move You're the One. On Surprise, Simon & Garfunkel's better half signs up an, ahem, hot young knob-twiddler-- 57-year-old Brian Eno-- to handle "sonic landscape" (haw haw actual liner note!) on half-formed tone poems that live down to the self-absorbed, vapidly mystic, utterly clueless conception of Baby Boomers one sees in TV commercials.
It appears Simon is still narcissistic after all these years. While that's not inherently bad, here it's ill-advised. Surprise drowns in signifiers of experimentalism-- wobbly U2 electric guitars, drones, whizzes, and oh-em-gee programmed beats-- that already sounded stale when "electro-folk" was actually a fad. Meanwhile, when Simon isn't probing the mysteries of aging, he's singing about his own writer's block. "Locked in a struggle for the right combination of words in a melody line," he begins on "Everything About It Is a Love Song". On "Sure Don't Feel Like Love", Simon waxes even more meta-- "Thing about the second line?"-- but clunky thing about it really is that "the poet" just rhymed "school" and "fool" in two straight songs, and his one-man band's busy textures can't fully distract from insipid songwriting. Even Simon's welcome bursts of wry humor are self-centered: "I'm paintin' my hair the color of mud," he Jason Mraz drawl-raps on outrageously unfunky "Outrageous". Eno is Simon's Just for Men.
Narcissism, it turns out, is just the metaphysical underpinning for a bunch of post-hippie New Age nonsense. "Who's gonna love you when your looks are gone?" Simon repeats on "Outrageous". The answer? God. Oh. Raga-like "Beautiful" describes adopting children from Bangladesh, China, and Kosovo. They're beautiful. Proggy "Wartime Prayers" goes mealy-mouthed political, its gussied-up choir a weak contrast to Neil Young's impassioned legions on the recent Living With War, while "Once Upon a Time There Was an Ocean" shows off Simon's knack for huge, simple metaphors before stumbling on adolescent wordplay: "Nothing is different, but everything has changed". Wait, wasn't that a Ben Lee electro-folk song? Opener "Why Do You Live in the Northeast" says we're all the same, even if some of us eat rice, and poses another rhetorical Q: "If the answer is infinite light, why do we live in the dark?" Here I'm still trying to figure out if the theater's really dead.
Given how much recent indie pop owes to Simon, he probably coulda cleaned up with a Rick Rubin nostalgia treatment. It'd be kinda neat that he didn't-- if the results weren't so vainglorious. "I don't pretend that I'm a mastermind with a genius marketing plan," Simon sermonizes. Closer "Father and Daughter" is the most conventionally light-jazzy thing here-- the only track without an Eno-scape, it originally appeared on The Wild Thornberrys soundtrack. And while it's better than, say, Bob Carlisle's "Butterfly Kisses" it won't replace "Daughters" as daddy/daughter wedding dance. Still, pulsating runaway tale "Another Galaxy", with the album's finest melody, shows Simon's compass hasn't totally slip-slid yet.
Contractually mandated "surprise" pun: In the end, Eno really isn't one. Talking Heads' 1980 Remain in Light owed as much to African polyrhythms as Simon's wildly successful Graceland did six years later. Moreover, Simon has always changed trappings from album to album, bringing on Nile Rodgers and Philip Glass for 1983's underrated Hearts and Bones and looking to Brazil for 1990's Rhythm of the Saints. But while a trendy folk-rock arrangement initially made "The Sound of Silence" a hit, memorable songs made Simon & Garfunkel worthwhile. On Surprise, Simon neglects his strengths, and the record's Plastic Eno Band mud paint can't bring them back. | 2006-05-10T02:00:11.000-04:00 | 2006-05-10T02:00:11.000-04:00 | Rock | Warner Bros. | May 10, 2006 | 5.1 | d22a2e92-d943-4468-a30e-c1d1f51aab1f | Marc Hogan | https://pitchfork.com/staff/marc-hogan/ | null |
Paring her sound back to little more than her skillful guitar-playing and deep, husky voice, the London songwriter explores the aftermath of a breakup with confidence and repose. | Paring her sound back to little more than her skillful guitar-playing and deep, husky voice, the London songwriter explores the aftermath of a breakup with confidence and repose. | Lianne La Havas: Lianne La Havas | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/lianne-la-havas-lianne-la-havas/ | Lianne La Havas | Lianne La Havas’ first two albums were lush blends of pop-R&B, rock, and folk music, steeped in her six-string acoustic guitar and warm, lilting voice. On 2015’s Blood, the London-born songwriter explored her Jamaican and Greek heritage alongside meditations on love, displaying her ear for winding melodies and a fondness for dreamily poetic lyrics. On La Havas’ earthy self-titled third album, however, she pares her sound back entirely for a folk-soul style filigreed with little more than her skillful guitar-playing and deep, husky voice. The approach serves a breakup album that excavates a failed relationship with bracing vulnerability, in the process revealing a statement of purpose and artistry that La Havas has worked toward for years.
Lianne La Havas is about the singer’s whirlwind relationship with a musician in Los Angeles, and a breakup that spurred a move home to London to piece together the music she’d been working on and take stock of her own personal growth. It’s a theme that she’s touched on before—portioning an ex’s thoughtlessness into heartbreaking parts is some of her bread and butter—but here it comes into focus through sparse instrumentation and a complicated rendering of the mental flux that comes with realizing it’s time to move on. “Knowing my head from my tail isn’t easy for me,” she admits on “Please Don’t Make Me Cry,” an ambling highlight that features Nick Hakim playing the record’s only electric guitar. Later, on the beatific “Sour Flower,” La Havas offers a thesis: “I’m done settling for so much less than I knew I deserved.”
Yet for as much as the album is about separation—from a person, a place, or disruptive thought processes—there’s never an air of crisis. La Havas is in repose throughout, confident in her needs and desires. “Could make a baby tonight/Throw my life away,” she sings off-the-cuff on “Read My Mind,” a breezy tropicália-inspired song that coasts on sauntering drums. Her melodies evoke the rush of new romance, a theme that perfumes the first half of the album with sensuality. She also took a break from smoking and drinking around the time she started recording, resulting in a clarity to the grain of her voice that shades her admissions with intense candor.
Lianne La Havas streamlines her impulse to blend styles, while still taking the time to nod toward pioneers. On “Bittersweet,” she lifts a guitar line from Isaac Hayes’ 1971 medley “Ike’s Rap Part III/Your Love Is So Doggone Good” and braids it with hummed vocal melodies: “Now my sun’s going down,” she muses, rounding out the last word with knowing acceptance, “telling me something isn’t right.” La Havas sounds stronger for the doubt, trusting her inner voice to see her through. On a cover of Radiohead’s “Weird Fishes,” her smoky range reveals itself as a natural conduit for Thom Yorke’s mental discord. She slows the stuttering drums of the original song to a resounding heartbeat and accents it with vocoder and keys, revealing new wrinkles by adhering to her determined simplicity. By the time La Havas arrives at the crescendo, voice cracking over handclaps and multi-tracked backing vocals, the song becomes as much hers as it is theirs.
La Havas’ featherlight guitar work is informed by jazz (she taught herself how to play through YouTube tutorials as a teenager), but she leans into knotty folk melodies with equal dexterity. Joni Mitchell’s Hejira is a touchstone here, evident in the meandering turns on “Can’t Fight” and “Green Papaya,” both detailed with delicately fingerpicked notes that trail after each other like ellipses. Her deft skill on guitar famously caught the attention of Prince, who became a mentor and champion of her work before his death in 2016. His loss is among several that La Havas endured while writing the album, something she nods to obliquely with the closing “Sour Flower,” named for a phrase her late great-grandmother used to describe a personal hardship. But the song’s outro manifests La Havas’ sense of overcoming, commingling double bass, piano, and guitar into an exuberant jam session. Throughout the album, each supplementary instrument—a spare flute here, a cello and viola there—lends the music texture and depth.
La Havas’ most profound moment appears on “Paper Thin,” the album’s crushing centerpiece. “It’s your life, but you’re not the only one who’s suffering,” she sings, laying out in generous terms why the relationship no longer serves her. “I know you’re made of better stuff.” Her voice sounds on the verge of tears, tremulous and rich with vibrato. Filled out with guitar, drums, and a low bassline, “Paper Thin” is one of La Havas’ most spare and plainspoken songs, yet it’s a showstopper. Free of expectations and radiating self-assurance, La Havas lets each unvarnished moment stand powerfully on its own.
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here.
Buy: Rough Trade
(Pitchfork earns a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.) | 2020-07-23T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-07-23T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | Nonesuch | July 23, 2020 | 7.8 | d22c7207-8e0e-490d-89f4-1d26f40c8f32 | Eric Torres | https://pitchfork.com/staff/eric-torres/ | |
On its debut album, the UK duo spins deadpan tales about the mundanities of existence over a desolate, desert backdrop recalling PJ Harvey and Nick Cave. | On its debut album, the UK duo spins deadpan tales about the mundanities of existence over a desolate, desert backdrop recalling PJ Harvey and Nick Cave. | King Hannah: I’m Not Sorry, I Was Just Being Me | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/king-hannah-im-not-sorry-i-was-just-being-me/ | I’m Not Sorry, I Was Just Being Me | King Hannah are a band from Liverpool, but that’s not to say they’re a Liverpool band. The duo—comprising life-long local Craig Whittle and Welsh expat Hannah Merrick—feels less a product of the city’s storied rock’n’roll lineage than of its geographic significance: As a port city, Liverpool historically served as the waystation through which American roots music was imported into the UK and absorbed into the British bloodstream. King Hannah’s debut album, I’m Not Sorry, I Was Just Being Me, presents a group whose hearts belong to the American South, projecting their songs onto a desolate desert backdrop of broken-down blues and voodoo grooves. But their heads are very much stuck in their home lives, as they ponder the peculiarities and mundanities of existence with equal doses of weariness and absurdist humor.
King Hannah songs typically begin with an ominous rumble before gradually erupting into spark-shooting discord, following a similar path from the swamp to the scrapyard as Nick Cave and PJ Harvey before them, while coasting on a dirty-dub undercurrent that suggests a truckstop Portishead. But Merrick and Whittle are no southern-gothic cosplayers or film-noir fetishists. They may be embarking on a hellbound Route 66 road trip that many have traveled before, but their preferred topics of conversation include Steve Carell, go-karts, bedwetting, and fantasizing about your ex choking on dumplings.
As legend has it, Whittle first spotted Merrick singing in at an open-mic night and was instantly inspired to make music with her, but the two didn’t formally meet until two years later when, by pure happenstance, they found themselves employed at the same pub. You can understand why he was so taken with her: Merrick is a fascinating frontwoman who both embodies and upends the femme-fatale archetype. Her voice rarely rises above a smoke-ringed sigh even as the mix creeps into the red, her Welsh accent adding enigmatic inflections to the most common phrases. And that no-fucks-given nonchalance just makes her words feel that much more withering. On the prowling “Big Big Baby,” she dresses down an ex-lover with a single killer couplet: “I heard you got a lady pregnant/Well, I can only wish her well/Cuz soon you’ll have a bigger baby in the family than yourself.” But in that same dead-cool voice, she fesses up to her childhood enuresis—and the embarrassing nurse visits that resulted—on “All Being Fine,” suggesting that she’s, if not outright traumatized, then at least humbled by the memory.
For much of the record, Whittle gamely plays the silent partner, using his guitar like a weather vane that summons the inevitable storms. The seven-minute centerpiece “The Moods That I Get In” starts out as King Hannah’s “On the Beach” and ends up being their “Cortez the Killer,” as Whittle slowly piles on the feedback shards, serrated twang, and gut-wrenching solos. But in those rare moments when Whittle and Merrick do share the mic, we get charming glimpses of two misfits bonding over their eccentricities. The title track is a winsome stoner-country duet that recalls the quirky, self-effacing conversations between Courtney Barnett and Kurt Vile on Lotta Sea Lice. And on “It’s Me and You, Kid,” they effectively turn their own origin story into a curtain-closing musical number: “I thank god the day we met in the gross bar/We’re doing it, so that we can live our whole lives just doing this,” Merrick reveals, before the song’s exultant chorus crashes in like an avalanche of confetti. It’s a rare moment of sing-along celebration from a duo that otherwise speaks in disquieting tones and deadpan one-liners, and it’s a deserved one: King Hannah’s music may initially conjure journeys down America’s lost highways, but they’re well on their way to building a world all their own. | 2022-02-28T00:00:00.000-05:00 | 2022-02-28T00:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | City Slang | February 28, 2022 | 7.4 | d2428297-89d9-4428-9777-ccba830e0c33 | Stuart Berman | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stuart-berman/ | null |
The album Sam Ray envisioned as his last begs close listening, but punctuated with impenetrable harshness, it is almost prohibitively scattered. | The album Sam Ray envisioned as his last begs close listening, but punctuated with impenetrable harshness, it is almost prohibitively scattered. | American Pleasure Club: Fucking Bliss | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/american-pleasure-club-fucking-bliss/ | Fucking Bliss | Death has a way of magnifying an artist’s life. Suddenly, there’s a cliff where their output ends; absent new work, fans and critics are left to analyze and dissect what’s left, and to begin to define some sort of legacy. Some artists, aware of their imminent demise, may try to get out in front of the posthumous obsession. David Bowie, secretly suffering from liver cancer, created the complex and beautiful Blackstar as a “parting gift,” and died just two days after its release. The French artist and writer Édouard Levé had similar foresight, drafting a novel about suicide 10 days before taking his own life in 2007. “Henceforth, the shadow of this tall black tree hides the forest that was your life,” he wrote, pondering the nature of his own remembrance.
It is Levé who inspired Sam Ray to record fucking bliss, his own last will and testament, over the span of nine days in 2015 during “a horrifying, awful time” when he felt certain he would be dead before the release of his next record. Thankfully, Ray lived to see that record, Teen Suicide’s final release It's the Big Joyous Celebration, Let’s Stir the Honeypot. He is happily married, irreverently tweeting, and touring with his band, now renamed American Pleasure Club. fucking bliss, then, is a sort of memento mori, a brief, dense peek into Ray’s mind as he imagined his own mortality.
A set of photographs included with the record recall the nature shots Ray posted on the band’s Tumblr around the same period, but these are interlaced with trauma: A picture of a lake at sunset is followed by a hand covered in blood. Sandwiched between a lyric sheet and band biography is a photograph of a man, face blacked out with Sharpie marker, injecting himself with a needle.
At its worst moments, fucking bliss can feel similarly jarring. Album opener “the miserable vision” pairs Ray’s breathy vocals with plaintive, simple piano. The facade begins to crack after a minute, when a booming voice cuts in with the force of a bass drop at a poetry reading. Things return to normal for another minute or so before the song makes an emergency landing—suddenly, it’s a pounding dance number played through an amplifier from hell, feedback sputtering like sparks flying from a power saw. Devoid of context, it can feel like Ray is trolling, or testing the listener: “Can you handle it?” the song asks, eyebrows raised. Five tracks in, the jittering, anxious synths of “ban this book” are punctuated by walls of harsh noise, as if to say, “Are you sure?”
Ray’s eclectic output ranges from IDM as Ricky Eat Acid to emo rock as Teen Suicide and Julia Brown, but fucking bliss most clearly focuses on his electronic work. “hello grace,” a halting, candy-coated track featuring soft female vocals and a punchy drum machine, is reminiscent of “In my dreams we’re almost touching,” the beautifully weird, Drake-sampling number from Ricky Eat Acid’s Three Love Songs. “it’s everything to me,” rich with warped, shimmering strings, shares the sonic universe of Ray’s warbly EP am i happy, singing_. But as the album concludes with “faith,” Ray blends the muted guitar of his earlier work with his dark brand of deconstructed pop. Over an acoustic guitar played so limply one fears he’s falling asleep, Ray’s Auto-Tuned vocals barely mask their own desolation. It is the same bleakness found on Teen Suicide tracks like “grim reaper” or “bad vibes forever.”
Each of these songs is uniquely glum, but together, they fail to coalesce into a greater whole. Ostensibly meant as messages left behind, they feel too dense, too layered, too rich with signifiers. What could the crashing drums on “what kind of love?” have meant to Ray’s fractured mind? What about the trap beat mixed with cheery piano on “dragged around the lawn”? No explanation is offered in the lyrics, which are barely audible, pitched down or mixed too low to be meaningful to the human ear. As a concept, the album begs close listening, but punctuated with impenetrable harshness, it is almost prohibitively scattered. Perhaps Ray, whose career as a musician has been defined by bratty immaturity interspersed with moments of beauty, created exactly the impression he would have wanted to leave. | 2019-04-04T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-04-04T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Run for Cover | April 4, 2019 | 5.5 | d24d411f-ba6c-431d-9ac1-f351ebb9c556 | Arielle Gordon | https://pitchfork.com/staff/arielle-gordon/ | |
Jessy Lanza leans into low-lit club pop (and picks up a saxophone) on an album whose breezy mood feels inspired by her new home of Los Angeles. | Jessy Lanza leans into low-lit club pop (and picks up a saxophone) on an album whose breezy mood feels inspired by her new home of Los Angeles. | Jessy Lanza: Love Hallucination | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/jessy-lanza-love-hallucination/ | Love Hallucination | Jessy Lanza’s music carries an air of indelible, charged intimacy. The Ontario-born producer likes to lock into a yearning sweet spot by way of suggestive lyrics delivered in a whispering falsetto and snaking, rhythmic bass that pumps like blood. Her light touch gained sinewy confidence on 2020’s playful All the Time, traipsing between vulnerable confessions and whimsical asides over an energetic, shapeshifting backdrop. On her fourth album, Love Hallucination, Lanza leans into her vision of low-lit club-pop, R&B, and footwork with even greater assurance, finding value in both unbridled lust and complicated heartbreak against a collage of steely, hypnotic electro-pop.
As with All the Time, Love Hallucination marks another period of change in Lanza’s itinerant life. Following a move from New York to San Francisco, she’s now settled in Los Angeles, a locale that informs the new album’s breezy, limber mood. She brings an observant lens to heady desire, pairing her findings with straightforward, instantly appealing pop hooks. “I’m not good at saying no,” she admits on the upbeat standout “Limbo,” a co-production with German DJ Tensnake that channels the rush of an irresistible fling into an elastic bassline and sugary backing vocals. The chorus exemplifies Lanza’s vivid, hopscotch phrasing, spelling out the title in a cheerleader chant that becomes a wistful plea by the time she elongates that final, breathy “oh.” “Midnight Ontario,” an R&B ballad featuring co-production by Jacques Greene, circles a two-step beat until its full-screen, hypnagogic chorus. It bears out the album’s success in joining Lanza’s laid-back style with fellow producers eager to bend club influences to fit her featherlight presence.
Janet Jackson has long been one of Lanza’s north stars, but the comparison is especially salient across Love Hallucination. She draws on the superstar’s frisky sensuality more than ever on “Marathon,” a spangled, finger-snapping standout originally written as a demo for another artist. Lanza transforms it into something buoyant and outwardly lustful; the sultry workout peaks with an ecstatic, surprising sax solo she played herself. (“Show me you can run it like a marathon,” sung in a sweet melody, ranks among Lanza’s most memorable refrains.) On the dreamy “Casino Niagara,” she channels Jackson over a delayed beat and nodding bass that keep uneven pace behind lyrics about a fraught relationship. “When you’re close it makes me feel like/I just wanna burn it down,” she murmurs.
Across Love Hallucination, uncertainty and self-doubt play against sneaky self-confidence. Opener “Don’t Leave Me Now,” inspired by Lanza’s experience of nearly being struck by a car in L.A., rattles at a gently accelerating pace as Lanza intones her anxieties, never settling long before the beat switches. She reaches a true stride on “Don’t Cry on My Pillow,” a kiss-off haloed by chirping background vocals. “Don’t call my mom/… Don’t play my Rhodes,” she seethes to an ex, capping a salty list of “don’ts” with a revelation of strength: “Don’t tell me I’m too soft on myself or anyone.” Quiet humor and personal resilience are common threads, even in the album’s more oblique moments; the billowy synth ballad “I Hate Myself” cribs a self-deprecating lyric from a Prefab Sprout song (“I hate myself/You’re so cool”) and twists it into a bittersweet, chilled-out mantra. It’s a respite with irreverent flair and subtle production wrinkles, like when she drops the occasional filtered cough into the mix.
Constantly varied yet consistent to her core sound, Love Hallucination is Lanza’s most fleshed-out album to date. She simply sounds more comfortable luxuriating in it all. On closer “Double Time,” the drums land in aqueous slow motion, submerged in reverb that insulates Lanza’s delayed vocals. “Still I want you/Double time,” she sings, winking to the lazy tempo, as if to say, Just because it goes by fast, doesn’t mean it can’t feel slow. Like the rest of Love Hallucination’s eclectic, bolder approach, it’s a slight pivot that rewards in full. | 2023-07-31T00:02:00.000-04:00 | 2023-07-31T00:02:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | Hyperdub | July 31, 2023 | 7.9 | d2500c45-0190-4426-9968-8d7d3144167a | Eric Torres | https://pitchfork.com/staff/eric-torres/ | |
This Trent Reznor-produced record is following the In Rainbows price model, but just as importantly is the work of one of the few artists who can pull off the hip-hop/rock interchange. | This Trent Reznor-produced record is following the In Rainbows price model, but just as importantly is the work of one of the few artists who can pull off the hip-hop/rock interchange. | Saul Williams: The Inevitable Rise and Liberation of NiggyTardust! | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/10885-the-inevitable-rise-and-liberation-of-niggytardust/ | The Inevitable Rise and Liberation of NiggyTardust! | There's two novel ideas at work behind this album, but only one of them's getting much attention. Trent Reznor has been pretty upfront recently about his general disdain with the way the music industry works, encouraging concertgoers to share his music and going public with his irritation at the cost of his own CDs. It became apparent once Reznor parted ways with Interscope that he'd be looking for a new business plan that would circumvent your garden-variety industry bullshit. All it took to set a solid-enough precedent was Radiohead's pay-what-you-want model for In Rainbows-- after that, the "try it for free; pay $5 if you like it and you get to download higher-quality audio files" plan for the new Saul Williams album The Inevitable Rise and Liberation of NiggyTardust! was enough to get some attention all by itself.
But the other novel idea, being overlooked in lieu of the distribution plan, is the album's stylistic approach. Saul Williams, despite being more of a straight-up poet than an MC, is one of those rare artists who justifies the notion of a hip-hop/rock interchange in a post-nu-metal world. His aggression is focused, pointed, and self-aware enough to avoid falling into temper-tantrum emptiness, and it's backed by music that focuses on the aesthetic slipperiness of heavy rock's capabilities. After 2001's Rick Rubin-produced Amethyst Rock Star and his self-titled 2004 record (featuring guest spots from Zack de la Rocha and Serj Tankian), it isn't a shock that Williams paired up with Reznor for this new album-- especially considering Saul's opened for Nine Inch Nails on more than one tour over the last couple of years. But to hear Williams' firebrand rhetoric about black identity delivered over an album filled with punk and industrial undercurrents-- and to hear Reznor infuse those undercurrents with moments of hip-hop inspiration ranging from Southern bounce to straight-up Public Enemy tributes-- is eye-opening.
As for whether it results in an entertaining record, well, that probably depends on whether you like to be less comfortable going out of an album than you are coming in. There's plenty about the production for NiggyTardust! that makes it initially accessible-- opening track "Black History Month" makes like a drumline facing off against skyscraper subwoofers; there's a touch of Timbaland gone malicious in the supple but abrasive electro-bounce of tracks like "The Ritual" and "Break"; there's even a semi-faithful cover of U2's "Sunday Bloody Sunday" stripped down to the rhythm and augmented with flashes of buzzing synth. But those moments don't sustain or define the album as much as the anxious, creeping-tension moments do; apparently Trent put together the bulk of NiggyTardust!'s beats with the ingredients he left out of Year Zero for not being immediate enough. The slow-grower songs, like the Boards of Canada soundalike "No One Ever Does", the sleepy, minimalist, dying-808 pulse of "Raw" and its clangy, semi-organic counterpart "Skin of a Drum", mostly act as rhythms for Williams' voice to ricochet off. And even when the production gets intense (the post-rock-vs.-Neptunes clamor of "Convict Colony"; the classic Downward Spiral-isms of dirge "Raised to be Lowered"), Saul's voice still acts as the dominant instrument-- wailing, murmuring, jousting sneeringly with his own overdubbed voice, and even veering fascinatingly close to Reznor's own stylings; credits notwithstanding I'm still not 100% convinced it's not actually Trent singing on "Banged and Blown Through", which attests to Williams' versatility as a singer.
In a sort of simultaneous downside and necessity, Williams' lyrics tend to be a bit opaque and evasive, dodging the straightforwardness that many of his ideas demand even if his voice shapes them into something heavier. Sometimes, they're too busy asking questions to account for all the possible answers: PE homage "Tr(n)igger" brings up a familiar but crucially unnerving theory ("would Jesus Christ come back American/ What if he's Iraqi and here again?") only to drop it after a disorienting barrage of unclear "where will you be when the revolution starts" rhetoric.
Then there's tracks like "Black History Month" ("I'm taking my spot, nigga, I ain't afraid to be me/ Sometimes I find it very hard to be/ Who? Me") and "Scared Money" ("I swear, I used to pray to change back the year/ When niggas spoke of motherships with space helmets for hair/ Well, now what have we here? Thugs and poets, ah yeah/ What we seem to have in common is we're common as air") which address the need to find a place for the foreign and the unreal in a hip-hop culture concerned with regionalism and realism. The songs, however, have so many layers of language that the core message is a bit hard to grasp. Yet making the listener work doesn't necessarily make for a bad record, just a challenging one, and since NiggyTardust opts to leave the easy answers in the margins, its more resonant lines skew toward the kinds of uncomfortable accusations and introspective examinations that are both difficult and important to mull over. Yeah, the pricing's fair, but it's not the five bucks you have to worry about-- it's your full attention. It might be harder to focus on this record than it is to actually put down money for it; but to get anything out of it, you've got to pay into it. | 2007-11-09T01:00:02.000-05:00 | 2007-11-09T01:00:02.000-05:00 | Rap | Fader Label | November 9, 2007 | 7.3 | d251e8c7-597d-46f7-ac00-7900ee22ab33 | Nate Patrin | https://pitchfork.com/staff/nate-patrin/ | null |
On the first full album in seven years from the softly psychedelic British band, they’ve left something behind in the quest to recapture the essence of the Clientele. | On the first full album in seven years from the softly psychedelic British band, they’ve left something behind in the quest to recapture the essence of the Clientele. | The Clientele: Music for the Age of Miracles | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/the-clientele-music-for-the-age-of-miracles/ | Music for the Age of Miracles | Alasdair MacLean closes Music for the Age of Miracles with what can be called a confession: “Lately I’ve been living like I’m so far away/Like I’m somebody else, in some other place,” he sings during the chorus of the record’s last and best song, “The Age of Miracles,” a beautiful reflection on adjusting to the effects of age and the arc of time. MacLean’s voice peaks just past its usual reverb-trailed whisper, a bit of urgency suggesting he’s now got something to do, somewhere to be. It is a moment of sudden self-recognition on the first full album from his softly psychedelic British band the Clientele in seven years, an act of blinking awake after a late-afternoon nap or an idle year in comfort and complacency. And it is, unfortunately, an apt analogy for most of Miracles, a twelve-track exercise in mannerism that omits an essential element of what long made the Clientele so captivating. His wake-up call from pleasantry arrives too late to make much of Miracles.
For a few years, the Clientele seemed to be finished. In the summer of 2011, they announced an indefinite hiatus, nearly two years after releasing Bonfires on the Heath, an exquisite record that would have bid an appropriate adieu. But over the next several years, occasional shows, a batch of odds-and-ends, a reissue, and sporadic singles burbled up. The Clientele, it seemed, had simply shifted to a secondary concern for MacLean, who turned his attention to a beguiling nylon-stringed duo called Amor de Días.
During the break, the Clientele seems to have grown or evolved very little. Many of the trademarks that earned the band a cult following remain for Miracles: MacLean is still a wonderfully ponderous lyricist, capturing scenes of sylvan twilight and urban ennui with a painter’s eye for detail and a novelist’s knack for symbolism. And he delivers them in a wonderfully reverb-dressed voice, which seems always to sigh out his secrets. The rhythm section—bassist James Hornsey and drummer Mark Keen—remains one of indie rock’s most subtly brilliant supports, with small, tricky shifts in time and tone that test the structural limits of the twinkling tunes they shape.
For the Clientele’s return, however, MacLean favors his new nylon-stringed instrument to its electric predecessor, picking out pretty, luxuriant lines from start to finish. At their best, the Clientele’s twinkling songs countered austere beauty with gripping tension, be it an electric guitar that jolted the soft landscape or a hiss of dissonance that introduced welcome frisson. But here, they just add layer after layer of lovely, from strings and horns and harmonies to Mary Lattimore’s percolating harp or the low-focus vocals of MacLean’s Amor de Días partner, Lupe Núñez-Fernández. Most any loudness, dissonance, or abrasion is a feint, a bump that’s apologized for with a quick retreat toward the baseline. “The Neighbour,” “Falling Asleep,” “Everyone You Meet”: The bulk of Music for the Age of Miracles is simply evidence that the Clientele can still sound like the Clientele, albeit one tempered and softened by age. This is a pair of old slacks, slipped on for a lazy Sunday afternoon.
There are moments buried within these dozen tracks that suggest that this needn’t be the Clientele’s end, that intriguing ideas and directions still linger at the core trio’s periphery. “The Circus,” for instance, hints at the sort of pastoral unease Pentangle pioneered nearly half a century ago, with riverine acoustic guitar and prismatic harmonies conjuring their British predecessor’s haunted atmospherics. And during “Everything You See Tonight Is Different from Itself,” they make a concession to the changes that have come to its own genre since its last album. MacLean first sings above gently backlit electronics, his voice floating and then flying above the beat. This is the most complicated, amorphous, and loud track on the record, swelling and receding and altogether surprising. It’s the sound of a band still trying to define its sound after nearly a quarter-century. But on a record that feels largely redundant and listless, no matter how welcome the Clientele’s return may seem, it is pure anomaly.
For years, the Clientele has been concerned with time, the shifting of the seasons, and the ways in which people become shadows or mutations of their former selves. A de facto reunion album on which they appear somehow reduced by time seems inevitable and appropriate, then, a linear if lamentable and ironic progression. In essence, they’ve left something behind in the quest to recapture the Clientele. It is the sort of scenario MacLean might document in one of the spoken-word tone poems that often mark the back half of Clientele albums. During the waltzing “The Museum of Fog,” he even describes a night of lonely drinking in which he finds himself in a rock club, watching a mysterious rock band that conjures the sound and energy and ambition of his sixteen-year-old self. He tries to track down the masked singer, only to see him slip away in a crowded car of kids. “I stood in the night,” MacLean says solemnly at the end, “and I wondered what had been taken from me.” You can hear him chasing and missing that same spirit during Music for the Age of Miracles. At least he sounds good doing it. | 2017-09-22T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-09-22T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Merge | September 22, 2017 | 6.7 | d255afae-b29b-4dc0-8a42-b1a82676ce1e | Grayson Haver Currin | https://pitchfork.com/staff/grayson-haver currin/ | |
In the 1960s and ’70s, Bruce Haack led a double life. By day, he made children’s music. By night, demonic electronica. This reissue presents his most accomplished work in all its end-times glory. | In the 1960s and ’70s, Bruce Haack led a double life. By day, he made children’s music. By night, demonic electronica. This reissue presents his most accomplished work in all its end-times glory. | Bruce Haack: The Electric Lucifer | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22375-the-electric-lucifer/ | The Electric Lucifer | Whenever a serial killer is arrested, there’s the inevitable doorstep interview on the nightly news with the incredulous neighbor who can’t believe such a nice, shy, quiet person could do something so evil. Bruce Haack was the musical embodiment of that double-life dichotomy.
Throughout the 1960s, the Canadian composer was as ubiquitous on children’s and variety shows as were exotic animals from the San Diego Zoo. But he wasn’t there to perform so much as demonstrate. Back then, electronic music wasn’t a genre; it was a scientific discipline, and Haack was among its most fervent early adopters. In his formative compositions for theatre and ballet, he had experimented with tape loops and musique concrète techniques; by the early ’60s, he wasn’t just playing around with electronic sounds, but also making the very gizmos that generated them.
As a guest on Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood, Haack wowed kids with his Musical Computer—a homemade contraption built from a suitcase and cutlery drawer that was part synthesizer, part Theremin, part Clapper. Another invention, dubbed the Dermatron—showcased on The Tonight Show and The Mike Douglas Show—was a heat-sensitive synthesizer pad strapped onto a willing subject’s face. The novelty of these innovations coincided nicely with a ’60s-era appetite for space-age futurism, and, by day, Haack would eke out a living as a composer for commercials and a series of instructive, interactive children’s records made with collaborator Esther Nelson. But by night, Haack was making music that was decidedly adults-only.
Originally released in 1970, The Electric Lucifer was Haack’s first work pitched to a contemporary rock audience, released by Columbia Records in the dying days of a post-hippie moment when bizarro outsider-psych could still find a home on a major label. If it was not the first rock record to feature electronics, it was certainly among the first to give them a starring role—both musically and conceptually. For Haack, the advent of computerized technology represented not just a cool innovation; it was a turning point in the evolution of the human race, investing us mere mortals with the power to play God. And so The Electric Lucifer was envisioned as an ominous concept album consumed with religiosity and apocalypse, where the fate of humanity is determined by an epic battle between good and evil, love and hate, Mother Earth and modernity. It’s like a Henry Darger painting rendered in pixels.
Not surprisingly, this exceedingly strange record flopped upon release. But its commercial failure didn’t deter Haack from further exploration of the dark arts. While he continued to crank out children’s records through the ’70s, he also made increasingly primitive and profane exercises in avant-electronica—including an Electric Lucifer sequel and the infamous Haackula—that would go unreleased for decades. And in the years leading up to his death from heart failure in 1988, Haack’s outré experiments had begun to dovetail with the contemporaneous rise of hip-hop and electro, resulting in an oddball collaboration with future Def Jam don Russell Simmons on the 1982 single “Party Machine.” Since then, Haack's quirky kids’ records have curried enough favor with crate-diggers to spawn an all-star tribute record, while his post-1970 catalog has been subject to a Stones Throw overview. But this reissue of The Electric Lucifer (via Toronto art-punk label Telephone Explosion) presents us with an opportunity to experience Haack’s most accomplished work in all its paranoia-stricken, end-times glory.
As much as The Electric Lucifer was ahead of its time, the album was also very much a product of it. You get a pretty good sense of the kind of rock music that Haack was drawn to, namely the organ-powered poetry of the Doors and the Dada-esque mayhem of the Mothers of Invention. To modern ears, parts of the record may initially scan as downright goofy—the opening “Electric to Me Turn” sounds like nothing so much an android hockey-arena organist going on the fritz. But even that silly introduction betrays what makes the album unique.
Much early electronic pop music—from “Telstar” all the way to Kraftwerk—projected a utopian quality that announced itself as the sound of the future, with clean, bright synth tones prepping us for the oncoming age of flying cars and interplanetary travel. But on The Electric Lucifer, Haack uses his hardware to foretell our demise. This is a thoroughly unsettled record, full of fidgety bleeps and bloops that envision a world choking on wires; vocoderized voices devoid of emotion; and sudden structural shifts that feel like the Earth’s crust being split open. On the sound-collage splatter of “War,” Haack subjects baroque-classical and marching-band melodies to synth-blasted shock treatment; they emerge distorted and decayed, faded remnants of our society for aliens to discover thousands of years from now.
The Electric Lucifer is split evenly between these sort of free-form interludes and proper songs, and the record actually gets stranger the more it leans on the latter. Haack enlisted a revolving cast of guest singers—including friend-turned-manager Chris Kachulis—to serve as The Electric Lucifer’s de facto narrators, investing expository tracks like “Cherubic Hymn” with a melodramatic gusto worthy of the Gilligan’s Island theme. (They’re also prone to disturbing spoken-word outbursts that channel Jim Morrison at his “Soft Parade” batshit craziest.) Where that song revels in the jarring contrast between its valorous vocal delivery and short-circuiting sound design, The Electric Lucifer’s man/machine dialectic manifests itself in more insidious ways. “Song of the Death Machine” is a seemingly innocent sing-along modeled after “You Are My Sunshine,” before it’s slowly debased by disintegrating sonics and Haack’s unnervingly demonic vocal. And while “Word Game” at first sounds like a throwaway, free-associative exercise in proto-fridge-magnet-poetry, things take a turn for the sinister when Haack’s cold, roboticized voice starts lingering on the eerie confluences and contradictions that exist in our everyday vocabulary: “Death/Breath/Earth/Birth/Life/L-I-V-E/Live/E-V-I-L/Evil/Lived/L-I-V-E-D/D-E-V-I-L/Devil/Divine…”
The Electric Lucifer climaxes with the foreboding majesty of “Super Nova,” whose intensifying oscillations and creepy, whispered incantations point the way to krautrock and the cryogenic chill of Suicide. But The Electric Lucifer’s great prophecies were as much philosophical as musical. On “Program Me,” Haack fashions a gospel spiritual for the dawn of the digital age: “My heart beats/Electrically/My brain computes/Program me!” With its subliminal synthetic-drum loop and urgent bass pulse, “Program Me” is one of the rare moments on The Electric Lucifer where the rhythm builds into a hypnotic groove. But Haack’s technophilia didn’t so much anticipate the rise of EDM as a modern world where computers can write Beatles songs and God has been forsaken for gadgets. | 2016-10-05T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-10-05T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Telephone Explosion | October 5, 2016 | 7.6 | d259a307-7025-450d-961c-1d8014b118e5 | Stuart Berman | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stuart-berman/ | null |
With live instrumentation and a hard-won sense of optimism, the GothBoiClique artist’s official debut makes a case for itself in the pop-punk lineage. | With live instrumentation and a hard-won sense of optimism, the GothBoiClique artist’s official debut makes a case for itself in the pop-punk lineage. | Cold Hart / YAWNS: Good Morning Cruel World | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/cold-hart-good-morning-cruel-world/ | Good Morning Cruel World | Cold Hart, born Jerick “Jay” Quilisadio, is a founding member of GothBoiClique, the internet-based emo-rap crew that includes YAWNS, former Tigers Jaw vocalist Wicca Phase Springs Eternal, Lil Tracy, Horse Head, fish narc, and, most famously, the late Lil Peep. Merging pop-punk, trap, and SoundCloud rap, GothboiClique’s infectious, knowingly bratty songs tackle serious topics: depression, drugs, tormented relationships, and self-destruction. As with MySpace-era emo rock, much current emo rap (with the exception of Peep) is as reviled by critics as it is adored by the young, sad, and extremely online. But with live instrumentation and a hard-won sense of optimism, Cold Hart’s official debut Good Morning Cruel World makes a case for itself in the pop-punk lineage.
Quilisadio bills the album as a makeover. “It’s more about illustrating emotions instead of wanting to be depressed and numb,” he told i-D. “It’s also about leaving toxic relationships and waking up, even though you know the world is shitty.” On past EPs and one-off singles like “Spyro” or “Thru the Screen,” Coldy (as he’s affectionately known) sounded typically downtempo and downhearted. There’s plenty of that on Cruel World too, especially in the second half, but it’s the open-hearted moments that shine brightest.
The sentiment is best captured on “EYES,” with its driving guitar riff, handclap hi-hats, and alive-again chorus: “Eyes wide shut, screaming, ‘I’m not afraid of loving’/Fuck me up ’cause I’m so used to feeling nothing.” The video sends Cold Hart and collaborator Rawksa on a nighttime cruise, alternately hanging out of a sunroof and hanging out on a stairwell. Like so many legendary nights, it’s somehow both kinetic and ordinary.
GothBoiClique has long used samples to honor influences: the Microphones on Lil Peep’s “Beamer Boy,” Senses Fail on Lil Lotus’ “Bodybag.” Cold Hart’s new direction finds him transitioning to the live-band sound explored on 2018’s Wish Me Well EP, but his references are no less overt. “You know that I want you in the worst way/Taking Back Sunday on a Thursday,” he sings on the upbeat single “Hot Pink Lighter,” before borrowing a TBS lyric for the hooky, beat-driven “Leo Szn.” Playing live eliminates sample-clearance headaches, and it fleshes out Cold Hart’s sound, allowing him to inhabit his world more fully. In videos for “Nick Cave In” and “Hot Pink Lighter,” you could almost mistake him for a star of MTV2 circa 2003—until a closer look reveals that all members of his backing band are played by YAWNS.
If the third-wave emo affect is bitterness—life is a letdown and your ex-lover is to blame—the pop-punk call to mosh comes from a wonder at the heart’s capacity. Cold Hart never participates in the misogyny that an unfortunate amount of emo rap shares with its third-wave predecessors. Instead, like Blink-182 or Simple Plan, his enthusiasm crests in moments of lovestruck weightlessness, buoyed by the easy charm of the Long Beach skater scene he grew up in. He’s fond of heart imagery and, fittingly, Cruel World ends on its own sort of beaming heart-emoji sendoff: a cover of Sarina Paris’ proto-nightcore club banger “Look at Us.” Celebratory, nostalgic, and a little absurd, it’s the sound of an artist ready to embrace joy alongside pain. | 2019-08-06T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-08-06T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock / Rap | GOTHBOICLIQUE | August 6, 2019 | 6.9 | d25e8ec7-64f8-46c2-a1d9-6cfb752ec9ee | NM Mashurov | https://pitchfork.com/staff/nm-mashurov/ | |
The Brooklyn-based musician’s long-percolating debut is a collection of small dream-pop ditties that only feel cheery on the outside. | The Brooklyn-based musician’s long-percolating debut is a collection of small dream-pop ditties that only feel cheery on the outside. | pronoun: i'll show you stronger | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/pronoun-ill-show-you-stronger/ | i'll show you stronger | Pronoun’s Alyse Vellturo has a backstory so earnest and precious it seems impossible to hate. The Brooklyn-based musician attended Berklee College of Music, got spooked by how talented her classmates were, and then retreated into the shadows for a decade until she finally gained the confidence to give music another shot. Now Vellturo is 30, and she’s finally released her debut, i’ll show you stronger, a record of small dream-pop ditties largely about heartbreak. The record is a labor of love, albeit a not entirely realized one.
Vellturo knows her way around reverb-heavy guitar parts, emo-inflected vocals, and pop-punk percussion, but i’ll show you stronger doesn’t fit easily into any of those columns. She has no brand allegiance to a specific sound, which for the most part lends itself to compelling results. Take “you didn’t even make the bed,” a song that’s coated in Sunny D on the outside and oozes anguish from within. Here, Vellturo plays a tenderly picked guitar line that gets rejiggered and muddled up by competing vocal lines and incandescent production flourishes. Then come the lyrics, which are some of the record’s most candid: “I said talk to someone your own age/Not fuck a 45-year-old/Who’s expired,” she sings, sounding like an emo Victoria Legrand who chews on consonants and doesn’t quite have the necessary breath control. It’s a painfully intimate scene that she keys us into, making a point early on that i’ll show you stronger is written for Vellturo and Vellturo alone.
“Stay” has a similarly cheery exterior, while the lyrics compare falling out of love with getting run over by an 18-wheeler. Both the song and the experience it depicts feel kind of unresolved, unfinished, and messy around the edges. You still might get weepy, though. On the following track, “Sadie,” Vellturo addresses the person making her miserable. “So Sadie, don’t act like I’m the problem/When you ran out of money and sought out your rock bottom,” she sings, with a fixed gaze. Vellturo is raw, and her pain isn’t fleshed out yet. Neither is the song.
A lot of music attempts the happy-on-the-outside, sad-as-all-hell-on-the-inside sort of thing; Robyn has made a career of dancefloor bops that make you want to bawl your eyes out. This is the kind of company Vellturo’s music aspires toward, and there are moments on the album that come really close. If she never quite finds those bombastic sweet spots that turn a good song into an anthem—well, that’s ok. It may have taken a decade, but it’s a debut. Vellutro hasn’t quite figured out what function her art will serve. She’s nervously dipped her toes into the water, and wrote her truth into existence. That’s more than enough to get started. | 2019-05-29T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-05-29T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Rhyme & Reason | May 29, 2019 | 6.5 | d26652a6-b3d0-4510-9db1-64109946d626 | Sophie Kemp | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sophie-kemp/ | |
On their ninth album, the Pacific Northwest mainstays push past their folksy twee inclinations towards the avant experimentations of early Stereolab. | On their ninth album, the Pacific Northwest mainstays push past their folksy twee inclinations towards the avant experimentations of early Stereolab. | LAKE: Roundelay | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/lake-roundelay/ | Roundelay | Since forming in Olympia in 2005, the Washington indie pop group LAKE have carved a niche for themselves as enduring purveyors of good vibes. Along the way, they became Pacific Northwest mainstays, releasing albums on regional bastion K Records and serving as the backup band of Anacortes icon Karl Blau. It feels felicitous that one of their gentle tunes served as the closing theme for the whimsical but quietly devastating animated show Adventure Time.
But LAKE have ripened with age. On their ninth record, Roundelay, the band push past their folksy twee inclinations towards the avant experimentations of early Stereolab, who themselves had roots in jangle pop. Early hypnotic highlight “She Plays One Chord” sounds like a lost Peng! cut in all the best ways: jazzy strings, cascading synthesizers, and abstract lyrics refracted through Ashley Eriksson’s dreamy warble. The self-titled opener, perhaps the brightest song to ever namedrop punk gremlin GG Allin (in addition to Mork & Mindy and Cyndi Lauper) plays with unusual time signatures and kaleidoscopic organ humming. Later on “Bubble,” the band mimics the movement of a pressure gauge, their tone shifting from droning to ebullient as they describe water erupting through the ground.
LAKE is now a trio composed of Eriksson, Eli Moore, and Andrew Dorsett—each share various instrumental duties—and their music emits a steady sense of tenderhearted introspection. A glowing cover of Bert Jansch’s “Tell Me What Is True Love” snuggles right into the album’s theme of growth. On “Resolution,” a blissful tune built off a simple chord progression, Moore sings of being fulfilled by companionship, but also the occasional distance that results in growth: “It was so many days/To be away from you/But it gave us a chance/To find out who is who.” “Forgiveness” is similarly contemplative, as Eriksson wonders: “Look in your heart, what do you hold?/Do you hold on too hard to hold?” Though its tempo never drifts above a pleasant amble, “Forgiveness” incorporates horns, Vocoder distortion, and a rumbling bassline with a playfulness that recalls like-minded peers Mega Bog or Iji.
Near its middle, Roundelay can feel a bit one-note, its pleasantry blurring together. The nursery-rhyming of “Don’t Pray for Me” borders on sophomoric, especially compared to the thoughtfulness of other tracks. But Roundelay picks up towards its end. “The Hanged Man” pairs ethical ponderings with ’70s AM-radio sunshine. Unlike the minimalist verses of earlier songs, “Talons & Feathers” contains an assemblage of vivid details and inside jokes—soaring eagles, overflowing wine, and matadors. But what cuts through this melange is a poignant depiction of remove: “Just like house guests/You are there, I am here/On the couch with my problems.” Roundelay can slip into languor, but the understated poeticism of moments like this prevails. | 2020-05-07T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-05-07T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B / Rock | Off Tempo | May 7, 2020 | 7.5 | d26885f2-b206-4e5e-8497-c43ebec42038 | Quinn Moreland | https://pitchfork.com/staff/quinn-moreland/ | |
Cold Cave continue to tap into the emotional space of 1980s new wave as they fully transform themselves into a big, bold, goth-pop group. | Cold Cave continue to tap into the emotional space of 1980s new wave as they fully transform themselves into a big, bold, goth-pop group. | Cold Cave: Cherish the Light Years | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/15284-cherish-the-light-years/ | Cherish the Light Years | To be an American fan of UK new wave in the 1980s was to acknowledge that your homegrown culture wasn't giving you what you needed. New Order, the Cure, Depeche Mode, and Siouxsie and the Banshees made broadly appealing pop music but also made sense to outcast kids in the U.S. because they clearly came from somewhere else. Drop any of them into your average American town and they would be mocked; the straight world would make fun of their haircuts and clothing and make-up. That was part of what drew people to them. They were theatrical and sensitive. They were singing about feelings. They were androgynous. Those drawn to this music at the time articulated a cluster of associations and feelings around these qualities that endures two decades later.
Cold Cave's 2009 full-length debut, Love Comes Close, tapped into the emotional space of 80s new wave. It wasn't just that the group sounded like bands from that decade, though that was certainly part of it. But like Peter Murphy, Ian Curtis, or Robert Smith, Cold Cave leader Wesley Eisold has a voice that's both strong and vulnerable, a low croon with a deeply embedded ache. And when used with basslines and spiky guitars that sound lifted from some lost band on Factory, his voice perfectly conveyed the drama of being a teenage outsider.
That feeling continues on Cherish the Light Years, but here everything has been blown up to a degree that borders on absurdity. From opening cut "The Great Pan Is Dead", Cherish feels like a John Hughes film projected in an IMAX theater-- guitars wail, synths scream, and the whole thing is loud, loud, loud. And Eisold responds in kind, his voice rippling with a new desperation-- he'll come running as stars explode, hearts break, and we all yearn for salvation. It's a bracing and brilliant album opener, stating in no uncertain terms, "This is now a different band." Just a few short years ago, Cold Cave were a home-recording project beholden to the sound of early industrial and minimal synth. The throbbing murk in that music made you think something was wrong with your stereo-- many tracks barely qualified as noise, forget about songs. But on Cherish, Cold Cave sound like they're storming the gates of the mainstream, ready to appeal to anyone with an ear for big, bold, goth-pop.
And they succeed. All nine tracks are well crafted and memorable, with sections that poke out on first listen and worm their way into your consciousness with further plays. "Underworld USA" begins with a dark synth thump and a lonely guitar but quickly explodes into a raging anthem for the disaffected. Eisold wants to dream and cry and let the night pass him by-- he sings of the meek inheriting the earth and rhymes "missionary" with "cemetery." And then "Confetti" is subtler, opening with a delicate synth line and a gorgeous reverb-laden guitar that sounds lifted from a 4AD record circa 1986. "I feel so good on the outside," Eisold sings-- when you're feeling miserable, you'll take what you can get. These songs are tuneful and empathetic studded with sharp observations; it's the kind of music that makes you wish your life would fall apart a little bit, just so that you could wallow in it.
But the songs never stay in one place. The contrast between "Alchemy Around You", which adds a trumpet and thickens the production further, and the following "Burning Sage", a bleak and bass-heavy tune with synth from noise-master and CC member Dominick Fernow that hearkens back to the band's industrial origins, brings to mind the eclectic experimentation of Kiss Me-era Cure. These guys are ready to fold anything into their aesthetic. It all gets a little claustrophobic at points, and when that happens the vocals of Caralee McElroy, who contributed to Love Comes Close, are missed. But if Cherish finds Cold Cave going for it and trying their hand at new wave pop anthems, they're still sweating the details. These songs and arrangements are like catnip for those who crave the bleak romantic end of new wave.
There is one issue that keeps Cherish from being an unqualified home run: The mix and mastering job are brickwalled to the extreme, squashing all the production detail and rendering this 40-minute LP tiring to listen to as a whole. It was a strange choice to make this record so incredibly loud and compressed; this music wants to bring you closer, but the monolithic sonics have a way of keeping you at arm's length. Not to mention that this kind of ultra-loud mastering brings to mind albums that touch on some of the same sounds and feelings but in a heavy-handed way-- Bloc Party's Intimacy or the Killers' Day & Age, say. Considering how much care went into the songwriting and overall conception, we have to assume that Cold Cave have their reasons for wanting the album to sound like this. But to my ears, this music deserved better. Even so, taken as a whole, Cherish has the feel of a breakthrough, and Wes Eisold comes across as an artist with a vision that will resonate with a larger audience. | 2011-04-04T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2011-04-04T02:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock / Electronic | Matador | April 4, 2011 | 7.7 | d26c1a92-da16-42ed-a851-6129d035c80f | Mark Richardson | https://pitchfork.com/staff/mark-richardson/ | null |
The Virginia band takes the drama of screamo and black metal to grandiose new heights. | The Virginia band takes the drama of screamo and black metal to grandiose new heights. | Infant Island: Obsidian Wreath | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/infant-island-obsidian-wreath/ | Obsidian Wreath | What kind of music best suits an era of sociopolitical upheaval? While Obsidian Wreath is playing, blackened screamo seems like the only acceptable answer. Infant Island’s third album is yet another broad-gesturing statement about these times in an era overflowing with like-minded music, but Obsidian Wreath embodies the chaos more than it chastises about it. The sense of drama is sky-high, from the desperate-sounding clean strums and roll of rim clicks that open “Another Cycle” to the self-immolating coda that ignites just when closer “Vestygian” seems like it’s dying out. This isn’t the angriest skramz album, nor is it the prettiest, but there’s a good chance that it’s the most tempestuous.
Infant Island already married black metal’s massive scale with screamo’s purple hues on 2020’s Beneath and Sepulcher EP, but both feel icy and brittle in comparison to Obsidian Wreath’s warm, heaving textures. Alongside the baked-in Virginia skramz ancestry, the band singles out Panopticon and Deafheaven as chief influences: The former’s penchant for folk and bowed instruments and the latter’s lush guitar tones provide a roadmap for evolution. Even if you reduced Obsidian Wreath to a standard guitar-bass-drums setup, it would feel baroque and grandiose. Alexander Rudenshiold and Winston Givler’s guitars sound beyond multi-tracked; it’s as if there’s a few rows of players all shredding to sheet music. The tremolo-heavy style of picking in many songs almost replicates the buzz of a string section. Drummer Austin O’Rourke conducts the maelstrom both literally—he is additionally credited with piano, cello, accordion, mandolin, and orchestral arrangement—and figuratively, as his stickwork guides the music between unexpected movements that nevertheless hit all of the marks.
The album opens with the furiously paced “Another Cycle” and “Fulfilled,” which both eventually deliver varied takes on the never-tired “bring back the nasty riff but slower” trope. From there, Infant Island begin to flex their extracurricular talents. “Found Hand” is an eerie noise piece akin to those on Beneath and Sepulcher. The mid-album suite of “Veil” and “Amaranthine” moves between uplifting, anthemic gang vocals, a delicate acoustic passage, and bookending peaks. “Kindling,” featuring Harper Boyhtari and Logan Gaval of the doomgaze band Greet Death, spends its first half as a slowcore song. It’s not as if Infant Island need these deviations to freshen up their sound—their screamo base is already tempered by black metal, which is in turn undercut by a grindcore-esque rhythmic creativity that avoids the fatigue of constant blastbeats. But Obsidian Wreath’s softest moments add to its overall heft, the rising and falling actions lending more weight than an end-to-end sonic assault would.
Written in 2020, Obsidian Wreath is, according to the press release, yet another “pandemic record.” The band cites the United States’ “apathy towards social health,” along with the ongoing crises of climate and capitalism, as the primary targets of Rudenshiold and lead vocalist Daniel Kost’s lyrics. Cut-and-dry sentiments like “How could you spare to inconvenience your comfort?” share space with characteristic screamo abstractions like “Eternity weaved over your lavender grave.” Of course, you’d need a lyric sheet to grasp Infant Island’s politics, but Obsidian Wreath’s visceral churn is a natural fit for the looming specters determining the fate of the planet. While their music has never seemed more suited for apocalypse, the future of Infant Island feels newly limitless. | 2024-01-17T00:00:00.000-05:00 | 2024-01-17T00:00:00.000-05:00 | Metal | Secret Voice | January 17, 2024 | 7.6 | d2786ae7-4c3e-4f24-8432-b875d95db120 | Patrick Lyons | https://pitchfork.com/staff/patrick-lyons/ | |
The prolific Chicago rapper’s recent project is his loosest, funniest, and most invigorating to date, full of hard left turns and sly wit. | The prolific Chicago rapper’s recent project is his loosest, funniest, and most invigorating to date, full of hard left turns and sly wit. | Chris Crack: Crackheads Live Longer Than Vegans | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/chris-crack-crackheads-live-longer-than-vegans/ | Crackheads Live Longer Than Vegans | Chris Crack is so prolific this isn’t even his most recent project. Over the past eleven months, the Chicago MC has somehow released seven albums, each filled with short songs showcasing his acuity and wordplay. His song titles tell their own little stories—“Hug Me Till I Smell Like You,” “Real is a Handicap,” “Explanation Kills Art”—and his raps dance lightly around them. Clocking in at only 16 minutes long, Crackheads Live Longer Than Vegans is his loosest and funniest project yet, full of hard lefts and sly wit.
Somewhere along the line, maybe after last year’s Being Woke Ain’t Fun, Crack realized that less was more: His raps thinned out, and the breathing spaces began to open up in his work. He’s been following this wayward path ever since—2018’s Just Gimme A Minute consisted of minute-long snapshots, 2019’s This Will All Make Sense Later a series of madcap detours. All of the songs on Crackheads are under two and a half minutes long, but other than that, there is no obvious blueprint. A surprise waits around every corner—there are digressions, untagged interludes, audio cues, speech snippets. Uncredited guests requisition entire songs.
As with Just Gimme A Minute, the bedrock of Crackheads Live Longer Than Vegans is ‘90s R&B and hip hop soul, sometimes merely tracing its edges and sometimes transfiguring it. “Goals Only Exist in Soccer” takes the same “Any Time, Any Place” sample used for Kendrick Lamar’s “Poetic Justice” but Janet’s vocals bend around Crack’s and not vice versa, as if live. He also flips Mary J. Blige’s “I Can Love You” and 702’s “Get It Together,” on “Repair for Character” and “Bitches Don’t Deserve Me” respectively, and his songs expand on the mood of the source material, as if he’s in conversation with them.
In the cracks, the grooves within the grooves, Crack raps as if emptying himself out. “Always needed something pleasant, was the first one with the gold Tesla/Watch your back around the soul catchers,” he raps on “Black People Can’t Be Racist.” By turns, he’s funny, cynical, deadpan and sly: On the closer “My Ex Was a Garden Tool,” he opts out of depression and vows to “Make her pick her jaw up/When she see you in that Lexus.” Crackheads Live Longer Than Vegans is brief, but it brims with so much personality it’s almost like an absurdist sitcom, its offbeat cast of characters shuffling in and out of the frame around its star. From his sudden denouncement of Papa John’s in the opening moment to the distorted R&B harmonies at the close, Chris Crack makes something out of every second. There’s no filler and there are no boundaries. | 2019-04-05T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-04-05T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | New Deal Collectives | April 5, 2019 | 7.6 | d27dcc9f-959e-4667-9c1f-3e47e45826c8 | Sheldon Pearce | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sheldon-pearce/ | |
Five years after the original issue of Robyn, the Swedish singer still has a knack for memorable pop gems. | Five years after the original issue of Robyn, the Swedish singer still has a knack for memorable pop gems. | Robyn: Body Talk Pt. 1 | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/14294-body-talk-pt-1/ | Body Talk Pt. 1 | "I'm always going to feel like this person on the outside looking in," Robyn recently told Popjustice. The Swedish singer and songwriter has no fear of pop: A platinum seller in her own country, Robyn cracked the Billboard top 10 in the late 1990s working with famed teen-pop producer Max Martin. As the daughter of a couple who ran an independent theater company, however, Robin Miriam Carlsson is also a woman who enjoys doing things her own way.
Robyn, first released in Scandinavia five years ago on the newly liberated singer's own Konichiwa label, ultimately led to a UK #1 hit, a tour with Madonna, and Snoop Dogg remix spots. Major labels turned out to be a necessary evil, but the deal's on Robyn's terms now. "It's pop music, you know?" she told us earlier this year. "It's entertainment and at the same time it has to mean something to me. I like dealing with that balance."
With Body Talk Pt. 1, the first of a potential three new albums tentatively scheduled for 2010, Robyn doesn't just walk the line between what she has called the "commercial" and "tastemaker" realms. She obliterates it. Immaculately produced, fantastically sung, and loaded with memorable choruses, this eight-song effort has plenty to please everyone from post-dubstep crate diggers to teen tweeters-- often at the same time. Like most of Robyn's best tracks, though, from mid-90s teen-pop hit "Show Me Love" to "With Every Heartbeat" a decade later, Body Talk Pt. 1 is capable of not only appealing to many different people, but also touching them emotionally.
"Play me some kind of new sound/ Something true and sincere," Robyn begs on "None of Dem", a dark, tense, early-morning type of dance track featuring Norwegian electropop duo Röyksopp. She's not being hypocritical. Opener "Don't Fucking Tell Me What to Do", a talky electro-house tirade against electro-age anxieties, really isn't like anything else in the singer's discography. "Dancehall Queen", her so-wrong-it's-right collaboration with tastemaking Philadelphia DJ/producer Diplo, may have purists grumbling at its 1980s dancehall synths, subwoofer wobble, and "Sleng Teng" shoutout-- the title's sideways allusion to ABBA appears to have gone generally overlooked-- but "I came to dance, not to socialize." It's here, dancing, with a chorus that Santigold and Gwen Stefani might kill for, that Robyn is free from all the worries that are "killing" her at the album's start.
Robyn reintroduced Robyn as a Missy Elliott-loving badass. Body Talk Pt. 1 texts that persona into the 2010s. Most similar to songs like "Konichiwa Bitches", "Cobrastyle", and "Curriculum Vitae" is first preview "Fembot", a Klas Åhlund co-write that flips the script on Robyn's track for Röyksopp's 2009 Junior. On "The Girl and the Robot", Robyn was the neglected lover "asleep again in front of MTV." Here, to wonderful effect, she's a "scientifically advanced hot mama."
But Robyn seems most comfortable watching from afar as somebody else goes home with her prize. Dancing, the narrator's escape on "Dancehall Queen", becomes a prison of her own making on the album's emotional peak, "Dancing on My Own"-- a clear descendant of Robyn's girl-loses-boy, boy-ties-Ms.-Whatshername's-laces classic, "Be Mine!". With unadorned piano and strings, "Hang With Me (Acoustic Version)" is closer to "Be Mine! (Ballad Version)" and hits similar emotional notes: You say you're just friends, well that's OK, but don't you dare "fall recklessly, headlessly in love with" her. If she's sitting on a killer dancefloor version of this one, good luck.
In an album full of songs that manage to be both specific and universal, "Cry When You Get Older" might prove to be the most enduring: a prom song, a graduation song, an end-of-summer-camp-PowerPoint song. Dudes like Max Martin and Peter Bjorn & John meet at parties and brag about what great melodies they've written, Robyn told us a couple of years ago; this is one worth bragging about. The lyrics are conversational, the synths respond, and there's a Prince reference to go with a Smashing Pumpkins' "1979"-like perspective on teenage ennui. Everybody in the back, quote it: "I lost all my faith in science/ So I put my faith in me."
Body Talk Pt. 1 ends painfully soon, but at least it ends with a pair of tracks focusing on Robyn's soulful voice. In addition to "Hang With Me", there's "Jag Vet En Dejilg Rosa", a Swedish traditional song the singer performed over Björn Yttling's piano accompaniment in a 2007 tsunami memorial. Here she's backed by bells, and her touch is lighter. Robyn's vocals aren't only about singing; they're also about untranscribeable details like the little flutter when she sort of smiles at herself on this slow song, or her goofy ad libs between lyrics on faster songs. Above all, Robyn puts herself on the line-- loses her cool for the sake of emotional connection-- like few other contemporary vocalists.
In 2000, a guy I know e-mailed Robyn about singing technique. In her reply, she gave detailed advice about maintaining his jaw muscles, hips, back, tongue, and vocal chords. "But the most important thing," she wrote, "is to be happy, and I don't mean that you always should be in a good mood. Because all the emotional stress that you feel is reflected in your body and can easily affect your voice-- which is a good thing if you take care of it. Because it is a tool that will help you get to know yourself and remind you when it's time for you to look inside for answers." Head and hips are both important, but the heart is still the strongest muscle. Bring it, Body Talk Pt. 2. | 2010-06-01T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2010-06-01T02:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | Interscope / Konichiwa / Cherrytree | June 1, 2010 | 8.5 | d27fb7c7-a53b-4ee4-9ae0-25fafe097863 | Marc Hogan | https://pitchfork.com/staff/marc-hogan/ | null |
Move to Pain, the debut solo album by Josh Eustis of defunct Chicago laptop duo Telefon Tel Aviv, had a gestation that was long and landmarked by tragedy. Listening to the music without context, though, you'd never guess at the circumstances surrounding its conception, as it sublimates misfortune into distantly sad wisps of retro electro-pop and church-stern interludes. | Move to Pain, the debut solo album by Josh Eustis of defunct Chicago laptop duo Telefon Tel Aviv, had a gestation that was long and landmarked by tragedy. Listening to the music without context, though, you'd never guess at the circumstances surrounding its conception, as it sublimates misfortune into distantly sad wisps of retro electro-pop and church-stern interludes. | Sons of Magdalene: Move to Pain | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/19560-sons-of-magdalene-move-to-pain/ | Move to Pain | Move to Pain, the debut solo album by Josh Eustis of defunct Chicago laptop duo Telefon Tel Aviv, had a gestation that was long and landmarked by tragedy. Eustis started using the name Sons of Magdalene in 2007 after his father contracted cancer, then recorded some of the record's songs not long before his musical partner Charlie Cooper died suddenly in 2009. Eustis finished the album in 2010 and put it on the shelf until now. Perhaps unfairly, this backstory sets up expectations for a certain kind of record—an emotionally bared and demonstratively tormented one where the artist emerges transfigured by grief.
But while listening to the music featured on Move to Pain without context, you'd never guess at the circumstances surrounding its conception, as it sublimates misfortune into distantly sad wisps of retro electro-pop and church-stern interludes. Created while Eustis was learning to work without his longtime partner, Move to Pain sounds understandably tentative and cautious; taking his former band's sound to unaccustomedly poppy places, it's agreeable but innocuous. Dreamy dance-pop, driving atmospheric ligature, and threads of sinuously clipped IDM, with 808-style claps and blocky arp bass slathered everywhere, are all blended into one simple, unassuming consistency.
Telefon Tel Aviv traded in chill, jazzy electronic music with lots of samples, glitches, clicks, and cuts. At best, they cobbled tough, supple rhythms and fine, gummy tones into shuddering structures that felt bulky but delicately detailed—sonic objects you could feel in your ribcage as well as abstractly admire. At worst, they could be numbingly polite, like something sleek but ignorable you’d half-hear in a coffee shop, and the featured vocals often sounded dreary. Those inconsistencies also hold true for Sons of Magdalene; the best tracks balance the formidable and the fragile, making sub-bass fluctuations and slanted sequences feel blown up under a microscope. "Crows on the Eaves of My Father's House" is a particularly compelling look, with gulping vocal cut-ups that recall Andy Stott's "Numb". But that close focus slips on the more traditional songs, which range from functional but unimaginative to almost rote.
As a singer, Eustis gets the job done without frills, but he seems hesitant about letting us hear his voice and lyrics. He claims the foreground in opening track "Hold On Hold Still for a Second", maneuvering a pretty, watery melody through a rubbery sheath of thrumming arps, drilling claps, and plunging synth toms. He scores his most mobile and charismatic vocal performance on "A Strange Sound", a sea breeze of electro-pop (rendered just slightly strange by the skippy pitches in the harmonies) that builds to a rewarding Panda Bear-like conclusion. Less successful is his stab at a louche electro style on the haunted dub of "The Whip", which lands somewhere between Matthew Dear and Trans Am. But more often, we can barely hear him, as on his timid dance-diva take on the title track or his shy coloring of the oily bass music braid "O Death".
Move to Pain is most noticably held back by its rudimentary tones and structures, which are surprising from someone who's proven capable at cultivating complexity and detail. The songs either crescendo like opening funnels or orbit through sequenced arpeggios, contrasting counterpoint and drifting harmonies with dead-predictable dynamics. In either case, they feel overly straight and preordained, not taking us very far from beginning to end.
The music is simple, but not enough to be sublime; it's active, but not enough to find transcendence. And it doesn't render commonplace technology personal and alive—there's not much here that a savvy amateur couldn't do with GarageBand, a low bar to clear when grid-based composition with soft synths is so accessible. The results that Move to Pain yields are pleasantly neutral, with nothing going spectacularly right or wrong. | 2014-07-15T02:00:03.000-04:00 | 2014-07-15T02:00:03.000-04:00 | null | Audraglint | July 15, 2014 | 6 | d28595ca-5d33-41a5-aa14-b1b4237afb96 | Brian Howe | https://pitchfork.com/staff/brian-howe/ | null |
On their first album in four years, the married electro duo curate a highly collaborative record that is richer and stranger than anything they've done before. It's unusually electrifying. | On their first album in four years, the married electro duo curate a highly collaborative record that is richer and stranger than anything they've done before. It's unusually electrifying. | ADULT.: Detroit House Guests | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/23001-detroit-house-guests/ | Detroit House Guests | ADULT.’s Nicola Kuperus and Adam Lee Miller have always had a hermetic aesthetic. Their synthesizers sound like museum pieces; their post-punk production reeks like a leaky dungeon. And their dry sense of humor keeps the listener perpetually off balance, the same way that their creepy cover art steadfastly refuses to meet the viewer’s gaze. You never see a pair of eyes on the duo’s record sleeves—just covered faces, gloved hands, and ambiguously slumped poses, markers of contemporary alienation raised to the level of high art. If you were to describe their music in architectural terms, it would be part hall of mirrors, part Winchester Mystery House.
For Detroit House Guests, their first album in four years, the married duo—both are visual artists and filmmakers as well as musicians—went the opposite route: Assisted by a $40,000 Knight Foundation grant, they threw open the doors of their 4,000-square-foot compound in Detroit’s New Center neighborhood, inviting a handpicked succession of artists to live and work with them. Some, like Nitzer Ebb’s Douglas J. McCarthy, they had known for years. The Austrian Thereminist Dorit Chrysler, on the other hand, had only a passing acquaintance with the duo before her residency. It was an “intense” process, Kuperus has said: “Because you’re living together, you’re having breakfast together, and when you’re done with the studio you’re watching Netflix together.” That kind of intimacy is palpable across the album. While there’s no mistaking ADULT.’s wiry signature, their collaborators’ input is largely indistinguishable from their own, leading to a record that is richer and stranger than anything the duo has done before.
All of their usual hallmarks are here: spring-loaded drum programming, clammy reverb, brittle synths that clink like wind chimes in an ice storm. Classic electro remains a driving force, and on “Stop (and Start Again),” featuring Light Asylum’s Shannon Funchess bellowing over a flanged, high-necked bassline, they return to the hair-raising goth of 2005’s Gimme Trouble. But a majority of the album’s tracks find them foraging far beyond their usual stomping grounds. The opening “P rts M ss ng,” with Lichens’ Robert Aiki Aubrey Lowe, is slow and methodical, its modular synthesizers twitching like metal shavings under a magnet. “Breathe On,” with Swans’ Michael Gira, extends the meditative mood; Gira’s basso purr verges on ASMR territory, and the same could be said of the woozy third track, “Into the Drum,” with its disorienting soup of whispers and vocal fry.
In fact, they don’t unleash their usual body-moving assault until the fourth song, “We Are a Mirror,” a chilly slab of death disco enlivened by Kuperus and McCarthy’s call-and-response vocals. Just like his hosts, McCarthy sounds like he’s ventured far from his comfort zone. Neither of his songs bear obvious traces of Nitzer Ebb’s abrasive legacy; instead, he seems determined to twist his formidable baritone into the most unexpected shapes. Ironically, it falls to Funchess to deliver the album’s best Nitzer Ebb impersonation: Her “We Chase the Sound” is a dead ringer for the EBM pioneers’ scorched-earth funk.
Throughout, ADULT.’s synthetic sound world is unusually electrifying. On “Inexhaustible,” abetted by Chrysler’s Theremin, they conjure a mercurial fusion of Morton Subotnick and early Depeche Mode. And on “Uncomfortable Positions,” the conceptual textile artist Lun*na Menoh performs on a modified sewing machine whose darting needle wobbles like a quarter spinning down. Strangest of all is “This Situation,” which sounds like an eight-minute tribute to the Beatles’ notorious musique concrète experiment “Revolution 9.” Over rumbling abstractions, two snippets of Kuperus’ voice loop in parallel. “Forgive me if I change the usual order of the menu,” runs one; “This situation can’t go on indefinitely,” goes the other, more or less indefinitely.
The album’s most fascinating aspect is the way it affords a glimpse behind the duo's masks. The closing “As You Dream,” in which Michael Gira does his best Tibetan monk impersonation, is a damn-near liturgical take on drone techno—not so much hermetic as immersive, a rising tide spilling out their front door and subsuming everything in its path. ADULT. still do a convincing showroom-dummies impersonation, but they’ve never sounded more human than they do here. | 2017-03-20T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-03-20T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Mute | March 20, 2017 | 7.9 | d2895040-fd9a-4bf5-9c1d-c533c3ebb635 | Philip Sherburne | https://pitchfork.com/staff/philip-sherburne/ | null |
With help from Taylor Swift, Phoebe Bridgers, and Sufjan Stevens, the National return with their gentlest album yet: a collection of airy, tender gestures. | With help from Taylor Swift, Phoebe Bridgers, and Sufjan Stevens, the National return with their gentlest album yet: a collection of airy, tender gestures. | The National: First Two Pages of Frankenstein | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/the-national-first-two-pages-of-frankenstein/ | First Two Pages of Frankenstein | The National’s ninth album, First Two Pages of Frankenstein, is consumed with keeping track: where things diverged, where things were lost, what has been accumulated since. The band is taking stock—sometimes literally. “Eucalyptus” is a breakup anthem in which Matt Berninger spreads out their shared personal effects, pausing every so often to expand the negotiations. (“What about the ornaments? What if I reinvented again?”) During the chorus he makes an offer that is insistently, suspiciously generous: “You should take it/If I miss it, I’ll visit.” The negative accounting continues on the exhausted “Ice Machines,” as Berninger lists everything he can do without (speaker systems, blinking white lights, being perceived). Bryan Devendorf’s drumming is particularly deft, almost sheepishly reticent.
That sort of light touch brushes nearly everything here: In both form and content, this is the National’s gentlest album to date. They’ve been on this trajectory for some time, but Frankenstein goes even further: shedding the prickle and urgency of 2017’s Sleep Well Beast, dropping the conceptual framework of 2019’s artfully orchestrated I Am Easy to Find. Like the latter, Frankenstein has a topflight guest list: Sufjan Stevens, Phoebe Bridgers, Taylor Swift. But only Swift contributes anything beyond vocal coloration. Everyone has their moments—particularly Bridgers, whose harmonies elevate the stately chamber-rock ballad “This Isn’t Helping”—but their presence feels a bit like moral support.
Not to dismiss the power of moral support. It supercharges the hipster reverie “New Order T-Shirt,” which runs sunny fingerpicking under its precise memories: a pack of blue American Spirits on a Russian restaurant table in August 2001, a “Japanese novelty bomb” and the ensuing customs incident. Closing lullaby “Send for Me” is an airy, tender gesture: a ballad that plays like their “Sometimes You Can’t Make It on Your Own” or “Fix You.” “If you’re ever sitting at the airport/And you don’t wanna leave,” Berninger dreamily mumbles, “Don’t even know what you’re there for/Send for me.” Still, the project of the National fundamentally differs from that of U2 or Coldplay: Berninger doesn’t offer hope or wholeness, just a simple ride home.
At this point in the National’s career, every sound and lyric perches on the edge of evaporation. They dangle the fantasy of escape but settle for the perpetual transit from city to city, room to room, poolside to poolside. And during all this travel come the nagging questions. “But would your life be so bad/If you knew every single thought I had?” a wounded Berninger asks on “This Isn’t Helping.” There’s an answer, perhaps, on the fidgety doomscroll lament “Tropic Morning News.” “Oh, where’s the brain we shared?” Berninger wonders as he glances up from his phone, mainlining everyone else’s unending urgencies. He admits that staying current can be a kind of stasis: an endless mechanical tapping mirrored by Devendorf’s clipped percussion pad.
Midway through Frankenstein, Taylor Swift hops in, returning the favor of the National’s credited feature on 2020’s Aaron Dessner-produced Evermore. Like “Coney Island,” “The Alcott” is a true duet, a waltz-time two-hander between estranged mopes condemned to mutual attraction. A subliminal industrial rapping girds the track; Berninger sounds like he’s running lines on a friend’s screenplay. The text, writerly and assured, hums with Swift’s energy: The result is the National (Taylor’s version). The mess is there, just not the chaos.
The chaos comes on the very next track, “Grease in Your Hair,” one of a couple songs that performs the National’s old sleight of hand: working the anxiety around until they pull an anthem out of thin air. As a way to address one of the primary tensions in their catalog—writing songs about dissatisfaction in spite of great conventional success—it’s a great bit. But as Frankenstein moves from wrestling to reckoning, the swells are tamer. “Grease” is rollicking enough, but it crests on wan resignation: “You were so funny then/And I kept thinking I would catch it.” On the pittering-in-place “Alien,” Berninger keeps interrupting his fumbling devotion (“I can be your nurse or something”) to have a breakdown, out of earshot. That kind of emotional withdrawal happens all over the album, and though Aaron and Bryce Dessner carefully daub their compositions with pealing guitars and a full string complement, it has the effect of filling a canyon with mist.
The band has been candid about Berninger’s year-long writer’s block—with depression acting as a force multiplier—that sidelined the singer at the end of a fertile period for both the National and his solo endeavors. (In interviews, the notorious live raconteur has also spoken about quitting alcohol.) By all accounts, his bandmates and family gave him the time and support necessary to recapture his voice. Some of that support surfaces on the record: When Berninger sings, “Your mind is not your friend,” he’s repeating something Carin Besser, his wife and frequent co-writer, told him. First Two Pages of Frankenstein isn’t a portrait of triumph—that would be too easy. Instead, it’s a depiction of someone made unsteady from their time away, but nonetheless desperate to connect: less with an entire arena than someone in the passenger seat. | 2023-04-27T00:03:00.000-04:00 | 2023-04-27T00:03:00.000-04:00 | Rock | 4AD | April 27, 2023 | 6.6 | d2917903-5b27-4eb3-8d93-f157eede1310 | Brad Shoup | https://pitchfork.com/staff/brad-shoup/ | |
Each Sunday, Pitchfork takes an in-depth look at a significant album from the past, and any record not in our archives is eligible. Today, we revisit the winding and mystic 1972 album from the Chicago jazz and folk singer-songwriter. | Each Sunday, Pitchfork takes an in-depth look at a significant album from the past, and any record not in our archives is eligible. Today, we revisit the winding and mystic 1972 album from the Chicago jazz and folk singer-songwriter. | Terry Callier: Occasional Rain | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/terry-callier-occasional-rain/ | Occasional Rain | Restless wanderings in and through the American ghetto, told in miniature, sung by one of America’s greatest vocalists: This was Terry Callier’s project, met at every luckless turn with institutional ambivalence and obscurity. His second album, 1972’s Occasional Rain, is his small miracle: Formally folk, affectively soul, a sprawling, psychedelic shimmer. Folk music has often struck at the heart of American self-narration, stitching legacies of violence to the natural or the mundane: Western African vocal traditions were carried over to Turtle Island by trans-Atlantic slavery, developing into call-and-answer strategies in the plantations; the words and tunes eventually finding paper. Occasional Rain makes clear the Black aesthetic connection to folk music—as progenitor, mastery, unavoidable base layer—in a collection of stories from Callier’s native Chicago. The songs collide with and deflate America, breaking open every civic myth.
Terry Callier was born in 1945 outside the Cabrini-Green housing projects, growing up with Curtis Mayfield, jazz-pianist Ramsey Lewis, and the Impressions’ Jerry Butler, all artists whose music pushed against urban despair. Callier got his start doo-wop harmonizing with a neighborhood crew, auditioned for Chess Records, and at the age of 16, penned his first single, “Look at Me Now.” His debut record, The New Folk Sound of Terry Callier, released in 1968 by the jazz label Prestige, contained several retellings of traditional folk songs—Callier’s downtempo renditions stretching the lyrics out until they were thrilling once more. That created space for the wandering that would become Callier’s lyrical metier; his early track “Golden Apples of the Sun”—a reinterpretation of a Judy Collins song that reimagines a poem by William Butler Yeats—takes its deepest breath as Callier sings of travels through quiet and hilly lands in search of a berry, who’d once called him by his name, transforming into a “glimmering girl” before disappearing into the brightening air.
After a few years of woodshedding and joining the Chicago Songwriters Workshop, Callier signed with Cadet, an imprint of Chess, where he cemented fruitful collaborations with his musical partner Larry Wade, as well as Charles Stepney, the jazz fixture and production insider known for his work on the psych-soul rock band the Rotary Connection. Stepney would go on to produce Callier’s trio of albums with Cadet: Occasional Rain, What Color is Love (1972), and I Just Can’t Help Myself (1973). That trilogy was Callier’s folk-jazz opus, Stepney’s baroque orchestration finding common cause with Callier’s voice, relieving it of certain emotional burdens, and allowing for Callier’s songwriting to take on a more disarming and complex hue.
Occasional Rain marked Callier’s move from song interpreter to songwriter. His lyrics here contain the soul staples—invocations of love, leaving home, forgetting the past—while also transgressing their boundaries with levity and bluntness: “Leather, tinker, tailor man/Anyone you meet/Here come a flunky/What a failure man.” The record is made of narrative vignettes in a jarring mix that reflects the jazz tradition of Callier’s influences, chief among them John Coltrane. “And for my openin’ line/I might try to indicate my state of mind,” begins “Ordinary Joe,” full of passionate soul squawks and non-lexical vocables—what Callier terms a “rhythm for your spirit.” Narratively, Callier preferred a first- or second-person address but his interests predominantly lay in the subjectivities of others, his oft-titular characters—Edie-D, Handsome Harry, Sister Sadie, Ordinary Joe. They move through the world in observance, making scenes, receiving lectures from racists and politicians, their interiorities kept at some distance, compelling us to walk with them.
Callier was a drifter in the Northern soul tradition; families dislocated from the American South, supplanted to urban enclaves and kept there to occasionally wish outwards. That drifter condition is informed by the insurmountability of any sort of reclamation of the lands their families died on: A relentless America, ghosted lakes atop blasted pastoral, obscured by dirt mounds and forests. If some Black musicians found reprieve in the Nubian, or the “pan-African,” or the Jovian, Callier’s characters travel to Chicago’s wastewater plant atop a Black neighborhood and back: “I just can’t wait to get to Golden Gate/Maybe that’ll straighten out my mind,” he sings on “Blues for Marcus,” with a stridency befitting someone briefly unmoored from their sanity under the conditions of modern life.
This is true of the earlier Callier, at least: In later years, it was Dar es Salaam that called out to his protagonists, after he devoted himself to Islam. To me, this is part of a single, roiling current of faith that animates Callier’s art, which is invariably about divine love. That faith is on unremitting display on Occasional Rain’s title track, a perfect four minutes on the record’s B-side. In it, sporadic showers and the designs of a conspiratorial weatherman transform into stings of ordinary sadness, relieved at once by sun and by God in the key of B. When I listen to it, I am brought back; I can’t be sure, but I believe it was my first Callier. The record was playing at a Sunday flea market in the middle of a Manchester city square; I remember how everything slowed down, the synthesizer-y yelps of the sopranos making me stop and listen.
Like many others, I first heard Callier years after the album’s recording; that day in England was less than a decade ago. This makes sense; Europe’s acid jazz and rare groove scenes rediscovered Callier in the ’80s and ’90s—in particular, What Color is Love’s nine-minute-long chamber-folk blockbuster “Dancing Girl”—leading to a career resurgence. (Callier recalls feeling totally overwhelmed playing at London’s Jazz Café in 1995 and hearing the crowd sing back every line; who knows how things might have gone had he wound up in Europe earlier, like Josephine Baker, or Count Basie, or Jimi Hendrix.)
Callier’s women also spin in and out of the observable realms, but their presence remains obsessively felt. Occasional Rain plays in love’s tributaries: The perfectly circumscribed world of a bedroom return; an alienation from a past love seen stoned on the street; a vacant stare; a comfortable place to bury one’s head. “Golden Circle,” attempts a cool fuck-you, but slips into admissions of durable interconnectedness. These are men’s feelings, perhaps, but not men’s stories, and “Trance on Sedgewick Street,” the record’s most important song, makes this plain: All of Callier’s gentle and salubrious framings are distilled into a scattered whole-relation, his characters flowing in and out of each other’s lives along the planned outlines of their city. That “trance” is both urbanicity at work and a Black response. Attuned to them from birth, Callier captures and harnesses those energies, placing them atop his childhood places, in a dynamic swell that rejects the intentional enervation of the projects.
Callier’s tool for this is his voice. It’s a simple formulation, and yet, it is no less true: It is the only thing that could hold together Occasional Rain’s dizzying jazz, soul, folk, and gospel sounds. You can feel this on the record’s “Do You Finally Need a Friend,” which stretches out and out; in an account of a couple’s long-delayed reunion, a then-27-year-old Callier takes his cues from stories of homelife, backed by the vocals of Kitty Haywood and Minnie Riperton, coalescing together into a stillness far beyond their years.
Callier excelled in speaking to these paradigmatic human emotions: “The trouble’s gone/Let’s leave our tears behind/Just rest your head/And ease your weary mind/Let’s begin again,” he sings in “Do You Finally Need a Friend.” But the seemingly universal framings are filled with surprising antagonisms: The folk platonic, “And don’t ‘ya know each little bird in the sky/Is a little bit freer than I,” infers much more than its pleasant observation. Callier often allows the unsaid to do the work for him in this way, unspooling words into doo-wop garble, from which a breathless “aha!” can escape.
Callier is cool, never too precious. He neither attempts a totalizing theory of Blackness nor an experiment in daily abjection; his goal is songwriting that moves the listener through the world. This was not, however, a humanist project, and sometimes the stolidity of white culture comes out in flashes of relief: The draining “Man,” the preening “money makers”—trouble on the street below. But Callier doesn’t cheapen his people’s experiences of racism or poverty. Instead, his music seeks to surround them like a shield.
After Callier was dropped from Cadet, ostensibly due to poor sales, producer Don Mizell signed him to Elektra, who attempted to slot him into the “disco-loverman” formation, releasing Fire on Ice (1978) and Turn You to Love (1979). Again, the mislabeling hindered his career, and in 1983, when Callier’s daughter Sundiata told him she wanted to live in Chicago, he retired from music, got a job as a computer programmer at the University of Chicago, and focused on raising his daughter. Callier’s collaborations were riddled with premature deaths: Stepney at 45, Riperton at 31. Callier persisted until he died of throat cancer in 2012.
It is a little disorienting to read posthumous essays that emphasize the “discovery” of Callier’s talents, projecting him as unsung hero. It is meant respectfully, and I am not sure I achieve anything different here in attempting to impart that Callier was extraordinary and deserving of all that love. Besides fame, had found different meanings through his art: a respected singer-songwriter in the eyes of his contemporaries and, in a testament to his own experimentation, an influence on a wide spectrum of musical lineages, including early American grunge, British trip hop, and Japanese lo-fi instrumentalism.
His friends and family called it an “ordinary joy,” the way that man lit up a room, the childlike wonder he inspired among his friends and peers. That light was reciprocated: In 2017, after a community petition, Chicago inaugurated Terry Callier Way on a stretch near Seward Park in Cabrini-Green. It’s a small memorial to a Chicago man whose primary tension was between his people and the world outside. On “I’d Rather Be With You”, a warm and generous song from his third album, he sings of indispensability, of the sacrifices he would be willing to make to be with someone: “I could take my guitar/And hit the road, try to be a star/That sort of thing/Just don’t appeal to me.” Sometimes love owns us. | 2022-06-12T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2022-06-12T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | Cadet | June 12, 2022 | 9 | d29c8785-6006-46f8-a155-d47207f8c470 | Kaleem Hawa | https://pitchfork.com/staff/kaleem-hawa/ | |
The latest, underwhelming installment of the rapper’s cosmic album series arrives 11 years after the original and coasts on a legacy built a lifetime ago. | The latest, underwhelming installment of the rapper’s cosmic album series arrives 11 years after the original and coasts on a legacy built a lifetime ago. | Kid Cudi: Man on the Moon III: The Chosen | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/kid-cudi-man-on-the-moon-iii-the-chosen/ | Man on the Moon III: The Chosen | If you’re of a certain age, the first Man on the Moon, from 2009, probably meant something to you. Maybe you took your first bong rip while Kid Cudi chanted “I got 99 problems and they all bitches.” Or maybe you sent your middle school crush a link to “Cudi Zone,” and they responded with, “Your taste in music is sick!” Or maybe you gloomily stared out of your bedroom window and repeatedly played “Day ’N’ Nite” hoping one day you could move out and go post up on a Soho street corner in a Bape hoodie. Cudi’s music was there for a lot of transformative experiences. And even though he has hardly released any memorable solo music in a decade, he’s still seen through nostalgia-tinted glasses with hopes that one day he’ll change lives again.
To Cudi’s credit, Man on the Moon III: The Chosen is not a cash grab or a plea for relevance. He’s been doing relatively fine without it. (This year alone, he starred in the new Luca Guadagnino HBO show, appeared in the third Bill and Ted movie, and scored a No. 1 single with Travis Scott.) But even though Cudi’s heart is in the right place, Man on the Moon III is still like when the old rock band reunites and their costumes don’t fit anymore.
On the album, the old crew is back—Dot Da Genius, Mike Dean, Plain Pat, Emile Haynie, and even Evan Mast of Ratatat—and some new faces have been added into the fold: Most specifically Take a Daytrip, the beat-making duo who show up when the major Atlanta-based producers are too busy. To make the album seem more important, it’s split into four acts and attempts to follow a loose concept about trying to defeat his demons and find peace. Part of what made Cudi’s music appealing in the first place was that he was an everyman. His stories about how struggles with depression and loneliness affected his relationships were detailed enough to be personal but also vague enough to be easily applied to anyone’s life. That’s not the reality anymore, and Cudi doesn’t appear to realize it.
When he’s not trying to be relatable, Cudi excels. “Girl is tellin’ me she don’t know what she want/Lotta demons creepin’ up, they’re livin’ underneath,” he raps with malaise on the album’s best song, “Tequila Shots,” rattling off a snippet from his life instead of attempting to capture the zeitgeist. Over this familiar-sounding Dot Da Genius and Daytrip beat, his tone catches the perfect balance, too, not too humdrum or overly excited, which is usually the case for him.
The worst thing that has happened to Cudi, musically speaking, is the time he’s spent hanging around Travis Scott. On “Damaged,” the hollow arena-ready production, one-note croons, shrieking ad-libs, and an underwhelming drop check off all the boxes of a record generic enough to fit on Jackboys. The same could be said for “Show Out”; Pop Smoke’s verse sounds as if it was never meant to be used, the drill-influenced beat is like when fast fashion steals runway designs, and Cudi’s spirituality is shallow. Cudi seems to think he’s making records the crowd at Rolling Loud will eventually moshpit to, but it’s probably more likely to end up at dinner parties hosted by Virgil Abloh.
But even when Cudi pauses the rage, Man on the Moon III is no better. If it wasn’t real, “She Knows This” would be known as a lazy parody of a Cudi song: It starts off with a Michael Cera sample from Scott Pilgrim and ends with Cudi using vocal manipulation techniques that should have been retired after the My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy sessions. The second half of the album hits all of Cudi’s clichés: “The Void” has the lifeless hums; “Lovin’ Me” has the empty-hearted collab with an indie darling, this time it’s Phoebe Bridgers; “Elsie’s Baby Boy” has the half-assed singing on a miserable-sounding guitar sample that has plagued almost every Cudi record after Man on the Moon II.
And though it’s admirable to hear Cudi open up about his struggles with mental health and addiction, it doesn’t automatically make the music worthwhile. Cudi croons, “Say, ‘I’m waitin’ to die,’ I cry/Many nights I spent gettin’ fucked up, livin’ a lie,” on “Mr. Solo Dolo III,” a sequel to the Man on the Moon standout, but his flat vocals and plodding production just make it underwhelming. If anything, “Mr. Solo Dolo III” is only memorable because of its title, which like too much of Man on the Moon III is coasting on a legacy built a lifetime ago.
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2020-12-16T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2020-12-16T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rap | Republic | December 16, 2020 | 4.9 | d2a36db1-003a-42f0-8c65-e69f5148bcf4 | Alphonse Pierre | https://pitchfork.com/staff/alphonse-pierre/ | |
The Philadelphia rapper delivers a bloated and messy new album, struggling to live up to their reputation for imaginative, genre-blending adventures. | The Philadelphia rapper delivers a bloated and messy new album, struggling to live up to their reputation for imaginative, genre-blending adventures. | Lil Uzi Vert: Pink Tape | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/lil-uzi-vert-pink-tape/ | Pink Tape | When Lil Uzi Vert dropped the Pink Tape trailer in late June, announcing their first full-length project since 2020’s Eternal Atake, it was an open question where they were headed. They have a famously wacky and experimental sensibility, constantly pushing hip-hop’s boundaries; anything is on the table, including Jersey club beats, anguished pop-punk shrieks, and blistering, relentless raps that harken back to the fury of early Meek Mill and Chief Keef. Pink Tape is a Frankenstein creation that attempts to marry all the parts of Uzi’s personality, creating a sprawling realm of pulsating rap, death metal screams, and rock riffs. With features ranging from Bring Me the Horizon and Snow Strippers to Nicki Minaj and Don Toliver, it slots metalcore right alongside Uzi’s rap stylings. The result is a cacophonous mishmash of an album that struggles to live up to its ambition.
Part of the allure of Eternal Atake stemmed from the rapper’s imaginative references, like the Space Cadet 3D Pinball sample on “You Better Move,” or the interpolation of the eponymous Backstreet Boys classic on “That Way.” Those remain on Pink Tape, but Uzi’s rapping gets drowned out by the surrounding noise too often, instead of working in concert with the chaos. The pounding BNYX production of “Aye,” which could soundtrack a supervillain’s entrance, feels wasted by two uninspired verses from Uzi and Travis Scott. The slowed-down interpolation of Eiffel 65’s “I’m Blue” on “Endless Fashion” lacks the sample’s rambunctious energy, making it feel lackluster, even if Nicki Minaj delivers a solid feature. Elsewhere, the System of a Down cover “CS” misses the pure rage and anguish of the original source material.
Other transitions into rock and metal are far more successful, producing some of the album’s peaks. On the grandiose “Nakamura,” Uzi oscillates between plaintive howls and breakneck flows, his voice accompanied by the strings of the WWE theme song. And the Bring Me the Horizon-assisted “Werewolf,” with its full-throated screeching and thrashing guitar riffs, is the most entertaining and effective harmony of Uzi’s interests. These ventures register as extensions of Uzi’s powers, not random shots in the dark.
Pink Tape produces (rare) occasions of tenderness and vulnerability, like when Uzi pays tribute to friends and family who held their hand during a recent rehab stint on “Rehab.” Just like they would spit about Balenciaga pieces or endless racks, they confess insecurities with stark clarity: “I got brain damage, but they overlook ‘cause I got cash,” they rap on “Days Come and Go.” At the beginning of the album, Uzi addresses rampant speculation about their sexuality, using hyper-masculine boasts that seem empty and obligatory: “First of all, I fuck eight bitches a day/How could you ever say Lil Uzi gay?” they rap on “Flooded the Face.” There is one notable omission from the record: In 2022, Uzi pleaded no contest to an assault charge from ex-girlfriend Brittany Byrd, a situation which they don’t overtly address, instead letting the hype of a surprise release wash away the gravity of the allegations.
At 26 tracks, Pink Tape is bloated and messy, with occasional flashes of excellence between grating screamo misfires and unremarkable songs that feel like retreads of Playboi Carti or Trippie Redd hits. It undermines Uzi’s sterling record and acts as a cautionary tale about undiscerning genre adventures; instead of driving into exciting new terrain, it seems like they are just veering in the wrong direction. | 2023-07-08T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2023-07-08T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Generation Now / Atlantic | July 8, 2023 | 5.7 | d2a47714-ff95-4917-8488-ab35c40a2e07 | Matthew Ritchie | https://pitchfork.com/staff/matthew-ritchie/ | |
On her gripping and redemptive debut, the Los Angeles singer seems bound for crossover status, with pop anthems that challenge power structures and embrace simple pleasures. | On her gripping and redemptive debut, the Los Angeles singer seems bound for crossover status, with pop anthems that challenge power structures and embrace simple pleasures. | Miya Folick : Premonitions | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/miya-folick-premonitions/ | Premonitions | Premonitions, the debut album by unabashed Los Angeles singer Miya Folick, begins with an exquisite apology. Over the pearly synths, gauzy vocal intonations, and grinding cellos of gripping opener “Thingamajig,” Folick takes accountability for her actions and embraces the emotional flux that comes with it—the power of taking responsibility, the powerlessness of what comes next. Amid a cultural movement where unspoken wrongs are finally being aired, only to be met by the half-hearted repentance of systemic corruption and patriarchal nonsense, her sincere plea feels like redemption. “Only you know what to do now,” Folick sings in the haunting final words, relenting control. Premonitions, this introduction declares, is about fighting for the best version of ourselves.
Many of the tunes on Premonitions feel like anthems, battle cries for personal and universal empowerment. This comes, in part, from Folick’s incredible voice—deep and broad and rich, yet capable of soaring to fluttering soprano heights. That prodigious instrument is the shiny glint that first catches your attention, but the writing is arresting, too. It feels intimate but applicable, a successor to the likes of Lorde and Florence Welch. Joined by veteran producers Justin Raisen and Yves Rothman, who have separately made radio hits and esoteric pop, the classically trained singer crafts songs marked by fierce self-awareness and self-control. Her singing and songs recall pop predecessors who paired emotional force with creative trademarks—the elegiac coos of the Cranberries’ Dolores O’Riordan, the alluring theatricality of David Byrne, the empathic lyricism of Imogen Heap. Both lyrically and vocally, Folick is a trapeze artist, plunging into uncertain, dark depths only to spring to the other side of the divide.
Premonitions speaks of uncomfortable battles. “Deadbody,” an apt theme song for 2018, is an antidote for those who’ve been gaslit for their trauma. A low, ringing piano mimics the final chime of a clock, a musical signifier for time’s up. Drums crowd Folick’s voice, which hovers just above a growl as she details the exploitation of women. Pushing back against hyper-masculine rhetoric, Folick asserts, “My strength lies within my gentleness.” On “Cost Your Love,” her vocals cascade between registers as she illustrates the tempestuous battle for love, not lust masquerading as something more. “I might love myself this time/I might win the fight this time,” she sings. From calling out abusers to offering up her own self-examination, Folick’s music feels urgent in its advocacy of resilience. “Don’t make it easy on me/Don’t let me slide/I’ll force myself to take it/Swallow my pride,” she sings on the title track, drums propelling her as chimes offer cover. Secret delights float through the mix—angelic fingerpicking, oblong slide guitar, spectral cries that echo around the dark.
Folick has coyly dubbed her music “domestic pop,” an attempt to make mundane moments feel significant, even crucial. She transforms physical rituals like shaving her head and bathing into processes meant to wash away the unholiness of the day during “Stock Image.” She makes turning off the phone a new avenue for transcendence on the racing “Freak Out.” An Irish goodbye during “Leave the Party” allows her to escape inside herself. Post-exit, she turns to disco music, a bowl of Cheerios, painting her pinky toes, and even over-tweezing to feel more self-assured. “I want to fill myself with bliss/When I’m alone, I exist,” she howls before horns envelop her. Infectious melodies and luminescent production give these ideas a sense of cathartic danceability.
“We have to speak with grace/We will become the words we say,” Folick sings at the end of “Stop Talking,” a perky and lovingly honest ode to friendships and against noxious boy fixation. This axiom is a core part of Folick’s belief that the way we speak about our memories shapes our present and future. She recently wondered, too, about a world where humanity’s ability to evolve emotionally is our species’ shining hope, not our inventive technological prowess. During closer “What We’ve Made,” Folick envisions this simple utopia, a place where “We make tiny happinesses in each moment.” Time and time again, Premonitions delivers on that promise as Folick shares her inspiring vision of an ennobled world. | 2018-11-01T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-11-01T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Terrible / Interscope | November 1, 2018 | 8.1 | d2a764d8-c9d1-43f6-aa6a-4d07831343e5 | Margaret Farrell | https://pitchfork.com/staff/margaret-farrell/ | |
On the heels of a new signing, the singer remerges with a four-track EP that reworks songs from her previous albums, coupling the flexibility of her original compositions with daring musicianship. | On the heels of a new signing, the singer remerges with a four-track EP that reworks songs from her previous albums, coupling the flexibility of her original compositions with daring musicianship. | Laura Mvula: 1/f EP | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/laura-mvula-1f-ep/ | 1/f EP | Laura Mvula has a knack for drawing out and distilling several moods in one song. On “Make Me Lovely,” from her outstanding 2013 debut Sing to the Moon, she alternates beautifully between defiance (“I can’t make you love me”) and whispered insecurity (“Don’t want the world to lose my soul”). Her 2016 follow-up, The Dreaming Room, went further by tapping the London Symphony Orchestra to fill out the emotional landscapes of her complex and layered arrangements to stunning effect. Mvula’s classical training is evident and is the easiest influence to parse out, but it’s just one color in a palette that includes jazz phrasing, funk, soulful melodies, and mastery of repetition.
Frankly, Mvula’s music is what pop should sound like: an unpredictable and stirring amalgam of genres. While mainstream success has remained frustratingly out of reach for her, Mvula’s mark in the pop world hasn’t gone unnoticed and has garnered her a crew of high-profile supporters, including Jill Scott, Nile Rodgers, and the late Prince. So when Mvula was unceremoniously dropped from her record label via email in 2017, less than a year after the release of her second album, it was not only painful but confusing to her. “I didn’t understand. I was always told I was such a valued part of what Sony had become,” she said at the time. “I was an artist who was taking risks and doing things that were fresh and genuinely new—I believed them.”
Save for a few guest features and an entry for a film soundtrack, 1/f marks Mvula’s first release in the five years since The Dreaming Room and the subsequent label fallout. The EP, which consists of three reworked versions of songs from her past two albums and a Diana Ross cover, comes on the heels of her signing with a new label. There is no new material on the EP, but sonically it signals a departure for the singer. The acoustic orchestra has been swapped for an electronic one, replete with synthesizers, electric keys, and a staccato pulse that’s reminiscent of both the neon sheen of ’80s pop and Prince-era funk. Instead of just putting a new dress on her older material, Mvula’s reworks have shifted the emotional center of the songs, tapping into a skill that made her prior work so compelling. The flexibility of the original compositions coupled with Mvula’s daring musicianship lends themselves wonderfully to a set of reimaginings that speak to her current position as an artist—closing the chapter on a past life and stepping into a promising future.
“Sing to the Moon” takes the measured encouragement of the original and spins it into something brighter and more forceful. If the former glided, this rendition charges forward with a spirit of determination. Accented by a metronome-like loop, the rework sheds the melancholy of the original and repurposes the choral harmonies into an anthem of uplift. The Dreaming Room’s tour de force, “Show Me Love,” makes a triumphant return as a celebratory ode to a former lover. The original sat firmly in the immediacy of loss—pleading and praying for love’s return—but this version feels redemptive. With a palpable sense of appreciation in her voice, Mvula has moved beyond mourning to cherish the best of the past amid a crescendo of sunny synths. On “Green Garden,” the multi-tracked vocals and handclaps are stripped away for Mvula’s solo voice and slinky guitar riffs. The result is a sultry update that points most clearly to Mvula’s new sound: loose, super funky, and sexy. Where the original garden was brimming with childhood innocence, this one holds the thrill of forbidden fruit.
A cover of Diana Ross’ 1970s UK hit “I’m Still Waiting” is the closest the EP gets to Mvula’s earlier music and could easily fit in either of her last two albums. Her crisp delivery on the closing track filters out the Motown version’s schmaltzy moments, and it’s not hard to imagine the lyrics as directly addressing Mvula’s struggles with the music industry. Mvula handles the song’s spiral from romantic naiveté to total disillusionment with calm and grace—a final look over her shoulder before walking away.
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-03-09T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2021-03-09T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Pop/R&B | Atlantic | March 9, 2021 | 7.8 | d2a937d5-8e26-475b-b47b-17b7ebc6d2e1 | Jessica Kariisa | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jessica-kariisa/ | |
Now down to a duo, the busy instrumentalists recruit Tune-Yards, Shabazz Palaces, and the singer of Yes for their aggressive fourth album. | Now down to a duo, the busy instrumentalists recruit Tune-Yards, Shabazz Palaces, and the singer of Yes for their aggressive fourth album. | Battles: Juice B Crypts | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/battles-juice-b-crypts/ | Juice B Crypts | With their bracing debut single, Battles offered a new vision of indie rock. The quartet turned prog grandiosity, funk propulsion, and anarchic No Wave spirit into songs Rube Goldberg may have admired. With the vocals of early member Tyondai Braxton or the slew of subsequent guests, they suggested a sort of cyborg pop, as brawny as it was brainy. For a while there, Battles sounded like little else.
But Battles have been perpetually beset by instability. Braxton quit after their colossal first LP, 2007’s Mirrored, leaving drummer John Stanier, multi-instrumentalist Ian Williams, and guitarist Dave Konopka to recruit multiple vocalists for 2011’s wild-eyed follow up Gloss Drop. They tried life as a frenetic instrumental trio on 2015’s La Di Da Di. Following Konopka’s departure in 2018, Stainer and Williams return to the Gloss Drop template for their fourth album, Juice B Crypts, gathering a diverse roster of singers to slip into the narrow spaces inside their meticulous instrumentals. Jon Anderson (yes, from Yes) splits the singing on “Sugar Foot” with fascinating Taiwanese band Prairie WWWW. Tune-Yards’ Merrill Garbus, meanwhile, sings on the final two-song suite, “Last Supper on Shasta.”
Captivating tidbits rattle inside each of these 11 tracks, thrilling details that, when found, hit like syringes of adrenaline—the synths that seem to scream “Woo” when Shabazz Palaces’ Ishmael Butler finishes his verse on “IZM”; the pitch-shifted electronics that chase Xenia Rubinos like laser-guided missiles at the start of “They Played It Twice”; the West African guitar line that warps into a fractal midway through “Ambulance.” Amid the rubber-band snap of “Titanium Step,” the Pentecostal yelp of Liquid Liquid’s Sal Principato is a pure delight, flashing back to the Talking Heads and Battles’ own early work.
But the more you listen, the more these intricacies suffocate inside arrangements too busy for their own good. The instrumental title track seems to ride a dozen merry-go-rounds at once. And the sounds around Garbus simply won’t let her do the work, breathlessly modulating in every direction and stranding her inside the chaos.
Many of these songs feel like knots of ideas superficially strung together. “They Played It Twice” pivots between Rubinos’ electrifying lead and mutated breakbeats, but Battles never bother to make the ideas cohere. “IZM” hops from boom-bap thrust to astral krautrock projection, leaving Butler to repeat uncharacteristically pedestrian phrases, clutching them like guylines. Only “Fort Greene Park” shows restraint. Battles slowly build a single theme, sharing it between slicing guitars and spiraling electronics. Just before it spills into bedlam, they lasso it back, leaving something to the imagination.
Juice B Crypts is anti-gestalt music, where incredible parts are subsumed by wholes that try to do too much. You’re left to wonder if Stanier and Williams feel they have to prove themselves again. Or perhaps they’re aware that the polyglot power that made their early work so powerful is almost passé now, as the lines between genres corrode. Either way, Juice B Crypts is an act of overcompensation from a duo trying to make too much happen with less.
Buy: Rough Trade
(Pitchfork may earn a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.) | 2019-10-21T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-10-21T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Warp | October 21, 2019 | 6.1 | d2afc463-4c14-487b-9863-df05827dc695 | Grayson Haver Currin | https://pitchfork.com/staff/grayson-haver currin/ | |
The Brighton band follows Ian Parton's explosive home project Thunder, Lightning, Strike with its first record as both a full-fledged, crowd-pleasing band and a Sub Pop-signed act. | The Brighton band follows Ian Parton's explosive home project Thunder, Lightning, Strike with its first record as both a full-fledged, crowd-pleasing band and a Sub Pop-signed act. | The Go! Team: Proof of Youth | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/10649-proof-of-youth/ | Proof of Youth | For every artist that starts out with a solo home-recording project, hitting the road circuit can present a problem: It necessitates the recruitment of other musicians, a reworking of overdubs and sample-laden material for live performance, and a general shift away from the original plot. After a couple of hundred shows and radio sets, these adjustments can become part of the artist's musical DNA, redirecting all future work away from those lonely, antisocial earlier days, and towards a crowd-pleasing, stage-translatable compromise.
The Go! Team know this challenge well: After Thunder, Lightning, Strike became a surprise hit on both sides of the Atlantic, auteur Ian Parton found himself with a demand for a live version of his kitchen-sink project. By the end of 2006, he'd played every festival from Austin to Australia with his merry crew, slowly evolving from shy, nervous rookies to seasoned party-rock veterans, with the multimedia backdrop and headbands to prove it. When Parton found himself ready to record album #2, he likely discovered that his band was nothing like where he'd left it on his debut; for one, there were a lot more people in it.
In reaction, Parton seems to have overcompensated for these changes, turning Proof of Youth into more of a sequel that replays the Thunder, Lightning, Strike formula rather than allowing the new personnel to push the Go! Team mission in a new or different direction. That decision brings both pros and cons with it: On one hand, the Go! Team sound remains a pretty singular blend of unlikely sonic companions, but revisisting that approach risks hitting the bottom of the creative well.
First single "Grip Like a Vice" is the thesis statement to Proof of Youth's copycat philosophy: It instant-replays the template of "The Power Is On", staccato playground chants and roller-rink organ building to sports-highlight fanfare and caustic guitar peaks. It's a relief, at least, to hear that the addition of non-sampled vocals-- most courtesy of rapper Ninja-- hasn't changed Parton's approach to production: Her words are still low and faded in the mix, as if he recorded her, pressed it to vinyl, and then sampled it just to maintain his aesthetic. "Grip Like a Vice" isn't the only "Power" clone, though it's probably the best: "Titanic Vandalism" and "Keys to the City" find diminishing returns as the novelty of the approach wears thin.
The other welcome news is that the guest-star buddies that the Go! Team have accumulated don't do much to break up the gameplan either, as appearances by Bonde do Role's Marina Ribatski, the Rapper's Delight Club kids, and the Double Dutch Divas fade right into the grainy mix. Only Chuck D stands out: "Flashlight Fight"'s paranoid sirens and clattering drums hearken back to the Bomb Squad's urgent soundscapes.
While the kid-chants-as-hip-hop-maneuver bit starts to show signs of staleness on Proof of Youth-- even in spite of the album's guests-- other aspects of the Go! Team's philosophy provide more replayable highlights. "Fake ID" is less old-school rap pastiche than twee indie-pop given a supercharged engine, with glockenspiel and child-like vocals propelled by fuzz bass and Parton's voluminous drums. "Doing It Right" shuffles those poppier elements into the jump-rope rhyming and horns template, intercutting the proto-rap with a dreamy chorus. But would it kill the band to include a few more instrumental interludes like the Alan Parker cover "My World", which offer a welcome relief from the frenetic pace while sucker-punching memories of Sesame Street Super-8 interludes and weird Morricone-knockoff cartoon scores?
Those quieter moments may have been the necessary sacrifice to the Go! Team's new extrovert status, and if so, it's a fair but troubling tradeoff. Proof of Youth mostly recaptures the enthusiasm and unique sensibility of Thunder, Lightning, Strike, further filling that niche for lo-fi sample-based old-school-noise-rap we never knew we needed filling. But in retracing his earlier steps, Parton is beginning to flirt with the dangerous point where a thrilling new sound becomes a one-trick pony, allowing the band to drift more towards exclusively making the kind of music that plays big on stage. | 2007-09-12T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2007-09-12T02:00:01.000-04:00 | Rock | Sub Pop | September 12, 2007 | 7.2 | d2b05459-3b64-46fb-9ef4-2f133db1b04e | Rob Mitchum | https://pitchfork.com/staff/rob- mitchum/ | null |
On her first collection of original material in over a decade, the country-folk songwriter frames observations of modern life in timeless American musical forms. | On her first collection of original material in over a decade, the country-folk songwriter frames observations of modern life in timeless American musical forms. | Iris DeMent: Workin’ on a World | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/iris-dement-workin-on-a-world/ | Workin’ on a World | Workin’ on a World is like a parade on a stormy day, a celebration beneath increasingly ominous skies. Lyrical references to gun violence and police brutality place its stories in a modern context, along with a litany of proper nouns ranging from the Chicks and Mahalia Jackson to John Lewis and Rachel Corrie. But Iris DeMent also works to ground her writing in timeless forms, with songs that play like folk standards and gospel ballads, populated by Bible characters and old American idioms. “I’m not trying to impress anybody with my new, clever metaphor,” the 62-year-old songwriter recently told Paste. “I’m trying to speak to people emotionally and spiritually, and if something that’s been used before works? I’m not going to let my ego get in the way of letting it work again, if it says what I needed it to say.”
For her first collection of original material in over a decade, the country-folk songwriter slowly amassed material without an overarching structure in mind. Inspiration came from all directions: “Goin’ Down to Sing in Texas” is an eight-minute protest song written after she played a venue in Austin, where a sign at the door instructed attendees how to handle their firearms during the performance. “The Cherry Orchard,” a piano ballad featuring the single most breathtaking vocal delivery in her deep catalog, delves into the psychology of a character from the Chekhov play of the same name. “Let Me Be Your Jesus” is a poem written by her husband, Greg Brown, that she delivers in a devilish whisper, taking audible pleasure in setting his words to music.
It was Brown’s daughter, Pieta Brown—the folk songwriter who co-produced the album with Richard Bennett and Jim Rooney—who pushed DeMent to follow her muse wherever it led. Spacious, cozy, and glowing with urgency, her new album collects six years of work but plays like an everflowing vision. “Nothin’ for the Dead” seems to speak to DeMent’s current process, capturing her ethos in four distinct verses—one about a tree in the snow, another about the dynamic between two young parents and their screaming child, the next about the brutality of the world, and the last about leaving a mark during our short time here. “Use me up while I am living, Lord,” she sings with intensity. “Let’s not leave nothin’ for the dead.” A horn section and pedal steel wind uneasily around her words with an almost comic persistence, suggesting that the chaos and carnage will continue; it’s only our perspective that will change.
As always, DeMent’s writing is generous and quotable, showing the lingering effects of a childhood spent poring through the Bible. It also furthers the literary influence that informed her previous release, 2015’s The Trackless Woods, which set new arrangements to the poetry of Russian writer Anna Akhmatova. But the performances are also among the liveliest and most dynamic in her catalog, ranging from the full-band, Mark Knopfler–style riffs of “The Sacred Now” to gentler tracks like “The Cherry Orchard” and “I Won’t Ask You Why,” led by DeMent’s piano, an instrument she wields as elegantly as her writing. (Notice how in “Say a Good Word,” she gives herself space to sing the word “magnanimity,” adding a sense of musicality with a light, rhythmic touch on a major 7th chord.)
From the beginning, DeMent had a crackling, luminescent country voice, equally suited for capturing the grand unknowability of the universe, the addictive rush of physical affection, and the slow-burning sadness of watching a familiar way of life disappear alongside the people we love. “No voice has inspired me more than my mother’s,” she announced in a spoken-word recitation near the end of her debut album, Infamous Angel, in 1992. Even then, she seemed wiser than her years, able to swerve between the wisdom of adulthood and the wild openness of youth.
Three decades later, DeMent has found new ways to reach higher ground. In “The Cherry Orchard,” she sings about winter and aging, swinging upward to a brittle falsetto, letting us hear the gravel as she switches between registers: “My life, my youth, my happiness/I bid adieu,” she sings, with all the drama and distance necessary to make us trust she means it. This sense of tragedy seeps through nearly every song. It’s what unites the vast material and makes Workin’ on a World feel pivotal in her catalog. These high points also help recontextualize DeMent’s continuing evolution as an observer of American life, as her influence continues to spread throughout folk and country music. Even the title, which rings with the bold promise of a campaign slogan, finds a way to factor in the inevitability of death: “I’m workin’ on a world,” she sings to a steady drumbeat, “I might never see.” And while the worry seems to get louder with each passing day, it might also be the thing that pushes us to keep marching on. | 2023-02-24T00:02:00.000-05:00 | 2023-02-24T00:02:00.000-05:00 | Folk/Country | Flariella | February 24, 2023 | 8 | d2b41833-96f2-4c9a-a522-0759c108af1b | Sam Sodomsky | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sam-sodomsky/ | |
The analog master’s first all-digital release is a compelling document of a veteran artist learning new tricks. | The analog master’s first all-digital release is a compelling document of a veteran artist learning new tricks. | John Vanderslice: eeeeeeep! EP | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/john-vanderslice-eeeeeeep-ep/ | eeeeeeep! EP | Someday, there will be books and graduate dissertations examining the distinctly 2020 phenomenon of the quarantine album. The term already invokes a web of clichés: a stripped-down album exuding authenticity and Nebraska aesthetics, borne of isolation and quiet reflection. And John Vanderslice, the stalwart indie-rock songwriter and producer, has made absolutely nothing of the sort.
As a legendary analog disciple—he’s the founder of a studio where rooms are packed with vintage tape spools and “ProTools” is said to be a dirty word—Vanderslice has amassed enough purist cred for one lifetime. Now, in quarantine, he’s trading audiophile aesthetics for Ableton. His new EP, Eeeeeeep!, is billed as “the first songs I have ever recorded on a computer,” as well as an attempt to “blur my vocals and lyrics into some weirder shit.”
So, if you’re expecting one of Vanderslice’s more abrasive releases, you won’t be disappointed: The EP opens with a supremely discordant stew of scraping beats and mangled vocals. But overall, Eeeeeeep! is less a full departure from the compellingly skewed indie-pop Vanderslice has spent 20 years exploring and more an expansion of the squiggly synths and sputtering drum machines that have always lived on the margins of his songs.
There are plenty of familiar reference points for fans. “Lure Mice Condemn Erase” puts a glitchy spin on the distorted acoustic sound of 2007’s Emerald City. Its lyrics imagine Vanderslice as a zealous cult leader, an example of his knack for building emotionally resonant songs around outlandish plots. “Just give in, just collapse/Follow our total relapse,” he exhorts his followers. “Team Stammer/Savior Machine” provides a subtle callback to 2001’s “Keep the Dream Alive” with its counting-based rhyme scheme, except now the melody jostles against knotty drum programming. It’s a solid example of Vanderslice using digital software to make his music stranger rather than streamlining it.
These experiments may have emerged from quarantine tinkering, but they’re also reflective of other changes in Vanderslice’s life. In 2019, the artist left San Francisco, his longtime home base, and decamped for Los Angeles, setting up a small studio in his backyard. That year, he released The Cedars, his first album after a six-year retirement, jumpstarting a creative rebirth that fed right into 2020’s Dollar Hits—a companion album spun from mutated tracks from The Cedars—and now Eeeeeeep! When he was interviewed about his recent influences, Vanderslice cited experimental hip-hop eccentrics like JPEGMAFIA and Tierra Whack: hardly common touchstones for established indie-rock dudes over 50, but you can hear such influences bleeding into the fractured textures and abrupt edits of this EP.
Eeeeeeep! is a compelling document of a veteran artist studying new tricks. But the EP is brief, and skittering, chaotic creations like “Xxxx” and “Song for Leopold” feel more like intriguing sketches than fully satisfying compositions. Anyone who’s seen Vanderslice live knows that, despite his modest fame, his songbook is capable of bringing audiences together in raucous singalongs. (There’s nothing quite like a crowd of strangers shouting the words “Bill Gates must die!”)
His recent output—particularly since 2013’s Kickstarter-fueled Dagger Beach—has veered away from discernible choruses and unifying gestures. This is by design, and feels like the start of a new creative phase borne out of both inspiration and necessity. But Vanderslice’s left turn into digital wizardry works best when it doesn’t ignore his considerable gift for old-fashioned songcraft.
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2020-08-25T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-08-25T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Tiny Telephone | August 25, 2020 | 6.8 | d2b429f0-c9f3-4d43-b723-6d2f21dff1c4 | Zach Schonfeld | https://pitchfork.com/staff/zach-schonfeld/ | |
New vinyl reissues spotlight a masterful pair of albums by the elusive German producer whose ambient techno occupies an interzone between the dancefloor and cloud nine. | New vinyl reissues spotlight a masterful pair of albums by the elusive German producer whose ambient techno occupies an interzone between the dancefloor and cloud nine. | Dettinger: Intershop / Oasis | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/dettinger-intershop-oasis/ | Intershop / Oasis | Michael Mayer first encountered Olaf Dettinger in 1997, at a party in Bautzen, a small East German town halfway between Dresden and the Polish border. Dettinger played an opening set of battle-style Chicago hard house—a far cry from the mischievous minimal techno that Mayer had packed his crate with—and presented the visiting headliner with a demo tape of his productions. Mayer wasn’t wowed by the demo’s relatively straightforward club tracks, which paled in comparison to the squirrelly, idiosyncratic music that Mayer and his friends in Cologne—Wolfgang and Reinhard Voigt, Jürgen Paape, and Jorg Bürger, among others—were putting out via a tangled web of labels and an even more chaotic array of aliases, a network they’d established out of their hometown’s Delerium record store. The music wasn’t bad, Mayer told Dettinger, but he found the sound derivative and the choice of instruments—a standard array of Roland 303, 808, 909, and the like—predictable. Besides, he added, in Cologne they’d moved from drum machines to samplers, a shift that had opened up new possibilities in sound design.
A few weeks later, another cassette turned up in Mayer’s mailbox. Dettinger hadn’t just gotten the memo; the new tape was so in line with the sounds coming out of Cologne that he might as well have been one of them. The boom-ticking beats were ruthlessly reduced, and they swam in a strange wash of filtered chords whose source was impossible to place. There was a clear affinity with the dub techno of Wolfgang Voigt’s Studio 1 project, but Dettinger’s peculiar mix of grungy sonics and crisp drums stood on its own. One song was particularly striking: It sampled the pastel swirl of “The Ghost Has No Name,” from the Cocteau Twins and Harold Budd’s 1986 album The Moon and the Melodies, provocatively mixing techno rhythms, ambient atmospheres, and pop melodies—precisely the blend at the heart of so much of the Cologne scene’s music.
Mayer and his crew signed the tracks for their New Trance Atlantic label and ordered a test pressing. But before they could manufacture the EP, they made a fateful decision. The jumble of imprints had gotten out of hand. It was time to tie off the spiraling list of labels—New Trance Atlantic, Profan, Auftrieb, etc.—and bring all their projects under one roof: Kompakt. Following an inaugural EP from Jürgen Paape, a co-founder of the new enterprise, Dettinger’s Blond EP, originally slated as NTA017, became the second release on the new label, followed a few records later by Dettinger’s even more adventurous Puma. The two 12"s helped establish the fledgling outlet as the source of some of Germany’s most exciting dance music of the era. But Kompakt had yet another ace up their sleeves: Intershop, Dettinger’s debut album and the label’s inaugural full-length, which would follow Puma a month later, in May 1999. Newly remastered and reissued—and pressed on vinyl for the first time—Intershop captures Kompakt at a pivotal moment in its evolution, branching out from club 12"s into a new world of home-listening music.
Dettinger had already flirted with ambient on the Cocteaus-sampling track on Blond; with Intershop (named after a state-run chain store in the former East Germany), he moved more decisively into an interzone between the dancefloor and cloud nine. (“We always loved ambient,” recalled Mayer of his reaction to the Intershop demo. “KLF’s Chill Out was a record where everyone inside Kompakt could sing every note. To include ambient into the world of Kompakt was just a logical step for us.”) The first track—untitled, like every single cut in Dettinger’s catalog—lays out the palette that set the album apart from its peers.
His synthesizers have a blurry, liquid quality. The sub-bass is too low to register as anything other than a vague pressure welling up underneath. Sampled drum-machine hits flit backward and forward like windshield wipers. The gliding groove gives the impression of rolling ceaselessly ahead in slow motion; the tempo is an unhurried 100 beats per minute, though dub delay on the fogged-out snares and hi-hats adds a quickening sense of movement that keeps the groove from plodding. Where techno usually stomps, this aqueous opening salvo undulates.
Across six more tracks, Intershop builds on that humble set of ideas in evocative and vividly tactile ways. Track two wreathes its chords in a halo of distortion that glows like hammered copper. Track three, a loping fusion of hip-hop and industrial dub, is shot through with what might be the rattle of a film projector, gravelly and unyielding. On track four, reversed drum hits and elliptical delay patterns combine to create a groove that seems to pull apart at the seams—a lumbering, intransigent cadence that goes to the heart of Dettinger’s unusual sense of rhythm.
If his mysterious sound design—lo-fi, suggestive, always seeming to hide secrets beneath its mottled surface—ropes you in, the music’s emotional pull keeps you there. That’s particularly true of Intershop’s final two tracks. The penultimate cut is a loping dub sketch whose luminous melody flickers like a wraith in the woods; in the closing track, a handful of piano notes run through a delay chain that slips increasingly out of phase, swirling like water going down the drain. It is one of the simplest songs I’ve ever heard; on some days, I’m pretty sure it’s also the saddest.
Six months after Intershop, Dettinger returned to the dancefloor with the bruising, bewilderingly left-footed Totentanz 12", which lumbers like an elephant through a field of icicles. Then, with August 2000’s Oasis, he delivered his magnum opus. For many years, I’d considered Intershop to be his masterpiece, but with time, Oasis has come to rival its predecessor. The general approach is much the same as the first time out: The tempos are slow, the sounds dusty, the spaces between them yawning and empty. You can practically see the tumbleweeds bouncing through the music. But Oasis benefits from a more varied palette than Dettinger’s debut, and its crumbling sense of structure feels even stranger.
The first track is made of little more than two chords that cycle each other warily, blasted and bit-crushed. It’s the kind of perfect loop that you could listen to for days, trying to decipher where it repeats and where it varies; after years of listening, I’m still not sure. The second track, on the other hand, is rendered in ultra-high fidelity, offsetting seismic dub bass with crystalline digital clicks. On track three he busts out shimmery guitars that sound much like the Cocteau Twins samples of Blond; track four’s toe-scuffing ambient techno sounds like it’s been cobbled together out of dust bunnies, sawdust, mica, and chalk. If Oasis doesn’t have anything that hits with the heartbreaking intensity of Intershop’s closing track, it’s more cohesive as an album. By turns sullen and ecstatic, it’s held together by its meditative air; every track feels like an experiment to see just how much can be removed. The closing track is the opposite of Intershop’s devastating finale: a trance-gated expression of pure, wordless bliss.
Dettinger never released anything else under his surname; as far as I know, he never released anything else period. (According to Mayer, he worked in recording studios for a time, and eventually moved into the gaming industry.) But as far as posterity is concerned, he hardly needed to. Together, Intershop and Oasis invented a new vocabulary for ambient techno, creating the model for artists like the Field—Oasis’ closing track might as well be the starter from which the Field created his whole aesthetic—as well as Kompakt’s long-running Pop Ambient series.
Dettinger’s influence stretches beyond the Kompakt label. You can hear it in the gravelly desolation of Actress’ grayscale fugues, the hobbling machine rhythms of Germany’s Workshop, the vinyl-hiss fantasia of Burial. Dettinger is the third inspiration cited in the liner notes to Panda Bear’s Person Pitch. “For us, he was the dude,” Noah Lennox once said of the German composer. Yet as influential as Dettinger’s albums have proven, few artists have struck quite the same balance of tumbledown rhythm, sandblasted texture, and bleeding-heart emotion. More than a quarter century later, his slim catalog feels increasingly unique: a fleeting collision of a moment, a creative vision, and a nascent scene, yielding a sound not to be repeated. | 2024-05-09T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2024-05-09T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | null | May 9, 2024 | 8.3 | d2bcba3a-5874-4940-bf3e-43697eb96df7 | Philip Sherburne | https://pitchfork.com/staff/philip-sherburne/ | |
Erika M. Anderson emerges from the ashes of her former project Gowns with an unsettlingly beautiful collection of songs about pain and loss. | Erika M. Anderson emerges from the ashes of her former project Gowns with an unsettlingly beautiful collection of songs about pain and loss. | EMA: Past Life Martyred Saints | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/15386-past-life-martyred-saints/ | Past Life Martyred Saints | Erika M. Anderson has talked about finding "true bliss and terror" in the live performances of her former band, Gowns. The pressure-cooker atmosphere she and her partner in that group (and in life) Ezra Buchla immersed themselves in had to crack at some point, and it did, fatally and finally, at the beginning of 2010. Anderson's way of propping open an escape hatch from the bruised purging of Gowns was to retreat into herself, by gathering her collective musical ideas and putting them out under her own initials. But it's immediately apparent on hearing Past Life Martyred Saints, her debut full-length as EMA, that she's still all tangled up in "bliss and terror." For the most part, it's a white-knuckle ride. There's no pretense or pose here. No pulling back from the brink to foster an air of cool detachment. Anderson's music has the power to plummet to the depths and drag you right down there with her.
There's a lack of timidity in the way this music is expressed. It's almost as though Anderson snoozed her way through the past decade and is picking up threads that have mostly lain dormant since the early-to-mid 1990s. The boldness in her language, which thematically pings back and forth between emotional and physical duress, has the same naked volatility as Kat Bjelland circa Spanking Machine or Courtney Love in her Pretty on the Inside phase. It's often terrifying, distressing stuff. There's a feeling that you're watching someone in the midst of several life crises. It's a strange kind of testament to Past Life Martyred Saints that it often feels like a daunting proposition to listen to, as if spending too much time with it will leave you as scarred as its creator.
The lyrical fixations here frequently zoom in on Cronenberg-ian body horror, with Anderson exploring the gnarly elasticity of the human frame when it's placed under threat. EMA songs often duck into little mantras; "Butterfly Knife" bears one of the most unnerving of those in its "20 kisses with a butterfly knife" line. "Marked" is similarly nauseating and obsessed with physical abuse. Over a noise that sounds like water chugging down rusty steel piping Anderson devolves into repeating: "I wish that every time he touched me he left a mark." It dwells in the same kind of unsettling territory as Goffin/King's "He Hit Me (It Felt Like a Kiss)", and the bare-bones musical arrangement heightens the severity of the message just as Phil Spector's production did on the Crystals' song.
That ability for her arrangements to acutely reflect her lyrical mood is one of Anderson's trump cards. She knows exactly when to add and subtract elements, bringing "Marked" out of the doldrums at its close with a warm organ tone that she deploys whenever things get a little too heavy (see also: "Milkman"). The opening "The Grey Ship" is one of her most ambitious conceits in that regard. It shifts in style several times, from its earthy, folk-y opening to a midsection where all the instrumentation vanishes suddenly as if the bottom just fell out of the world.
It's a sign of her confidence and ambition that she can open the record with such a multi-faceted song, full of odd diversions and unexpected twists that need multiple plays to really sink in. But the hit-rate here is high. "California" is among Anderson's best works, a stream-of-consciousness rant about displacement and alienation set to a musical backing that feels like civilization collapsing around her. "California" shows off her enviable talent for finding a comfortable place where big-topic sloganeering and personal tales can coexist. It's that sweat-soaked head-rush of repulsion, sadness, anxiety, and nostalgia you get when you feel the tug of home.
Past Life Martyred Saints is a fiercely individual record, made by a musician with a fearless and courageous approach to her art. Crucially, the desire to let such raw emotion out in song never feels forced. It simply wouldn't work this well if there was a hint of artifice, or a suggestion that Anderson hadn't regurgitated all these feelings of loss, loathing, and rejection from a pit of genuinely volatile emotion. There's a conviction to her delivery that leaves you in no doubt that this is something she needed to flush out of her system. Comparisons can certainly be drawn to artists such as Patti Smith or Cat Power, and her dry, deadpan delivery occasionally orbits the same sphere as Kim Gordon's vocal work with Sonic Youth. But this is Anderson's own brittle unease. It hits as hard as a cold slap in the face-- and will leave its mark on you. | 2011-05-10T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2011-05-10T02:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Souterrain Transmissions | May 10, 2011 | 8.5 | d2c7e2c0-9375-4164-a7f1-55fdbcebea85 | Nick Neyland | https://pitchfork.com/staff/nick-neyland/ | null |
The Bolivian American artist formerly known as Elysia Crampton spins Andean music, digital effects, and overwhelming distortion into a binary-smashing collage with ecstatic overtones. | The Bolivian American artist formerly known as Elysia Crampton spins Andean music, digital effects, and overwhelming distortion into a binary-smashing collage with ecstatic overtones. | Chuquimamani-Condori: DJ E | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/chuquimamani-condori-dj-e/ | DJ E | Chuquimamani-Condori’s gloriously fractured music mashes the mundane with the divine, leaving every jagged seam lovingly exposed. As Elysia Crampton, E+E, and now using their Aymara name, the Bolivian American experimental producer has woven cumbia, tarqueada, huayño, and other Andean folk and dance styles into splintered collages pierced by white-noise blasts, electronic rhythms, and hyper-compressed digital bass. Beyond simply invoking these genres, they capture a sense of their passage through the world—as if their muffled rhythms were blasting out of an overdriven PA system in the park, or ripped from an online mix with the ads still intact. Chuquimamani-Condori treats these sounds as a breathing social organism, an animated embodiment of traditional music as it lives today.
After a handful of releases like ORCORARA 2010 and Selected Demos & DJ Edits [2007-2019] that presented the disparate building blocks of Chuquimamani-Condori’s music at their rawest, DJ E dazzlingly rejoins the pieces. Dropped onto Bandcamp with little fanfare toward the end of last year, it feels like a full-circle moment for Chuquimamani-Condori; like 2018’s self-titled album or their mesmerizing 2015 debut, American Drift, it could never be mistaken for the work of another artist. It is simultaneously harrowing yet warm, deathly urgent yet defiantly playful. Though everything from the album’s low-key release to its proudly unmastered sound may seem to undercut its significance, Chuquimamani-Condori’s rejection of industry norms only serves to highlight the vitality of the music.
The first thing you may notice about DJ E is just how busted it sounds. Chuquimamani-Condori stacks one ultra-compressed layer on top of another, their claustrophobic mixing only heightening the music’s intensity. “The older I get, the uglier I want my music to feel,” they told Tiny Mix Tapes in 2015, arguing that clean, self-consciously futuristic sound design is rooted in a colonialist “mode of educated whiteness.” By that metric, DJ E is Chuquimamani-Condori’s most violent rebellion yet: “Forastero Edit” skitters with sword-drawing stock effects and stop-start guitar from their brother Joshua Chuquimia Crampton (whose own ultra-minimal music has paralleled Chuquimamani-Condori’s over the last few years). “Return” buries its pleading siku panpipes in a blown-out fog of throbbing bass and crunched-up distortion, in what feels like trying to glimpse sunlight through a sandstorm. It’s not that far off from the disorientation caused by the weirder end of Brazilian funk, a kind of hypnosis only made possible by the sound of plug-in bass presets clipping out of control.
Though Chuquimamani-Condori’s music is concerned with destruction and transformation—whether of gender, apparatuses of oppression, or the spirit itself—DJ E highlights the way that repetition plays into catharsis. Songs don’t develop as much as softly mutate in place, and they often return to the same motifs. The manic laughter that writhes throughout “Eat My Cum” previously appeared on the E+E track “STEERED,” and the various DJ tags and radio transitions littered throughout the album will be familiar to anyone accustomed to Chuquimamani-Condori’s work. Where their previous albums could be disturbingly dark, however, DJ E reveals a newfound sweetness, a sense of coming home. Nostalgic tracks like “Breathing” and “Until I Find You Again” reconfigure the artist’s palette with all the earnestness of a handmade album of blurry photos your aunt printed off of Facebook.
Even the plastic detritus in Chuquimamani-Condori’s music feels charged by a higher power; few other artists could successfully deliver doomsday sermons while holding a keytar. On “Engine,” a tender piano melody glides alongside a whirring like that of a dentist’s drill—when its buzzing slows at the end, it feels like a great exhale. They’ve described DJ E as “the sound of our water ceremonies, the 40 bands playing their melodies at once to recreate the cacophony of the first aurora & the call of the morning star venus.” For Chuquimamani-Condori, this digital overload is tantamount to a spiritual release. The line between club and folk music smudges to the point where the two become indistinguishable, and the truth of who we are lies somewhere in that pixelated middle space. | 2024-01-09T00:01:00.000-05:00 | 2024-01-09T00:01:00.000-05:00 | Experimental | self-released | January 9, 2024 | 8 | d2cabd6e-825c-4e71-99ce-5e08ae91acb5 | Sam Goldner | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sam-goldner/ | |
Joined by an illustrious lineup of players including Yasmin Williams, Ryley Walker, and jaimie branch, the Chicago-based guitarist constructs wistful, evocative psychic landscapes. | Joined by an illustrious lineup of players including Yasmin Williams, Ryley Walker, and jaimie branch, the Chicago-based guitarist constructs wistful, evocative psychic landscapes. | Eli Winter: Eli Winter | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/eli-winter-eli-winter/ | Eli Winter | Give the mind a crumb of story and it’ll spin a tale, even in the absence of explicit narrative. This tendency proves true with Eli Winter’s new self-titled album, a six-track instrumental odyssey driven by virtuosic guitar. With ambling compositions that are as evocative as they are refined, it’s easy to imagine some lone traveler, cycling from defeat to resolve and back again. On this, his sixth record after this year’s Controlled Burning with Jordan Reyes and 2021’s Anticipation with Cameron Knowler, Winter transports the listener to a cerebral landscape as dynamic and storied as American topography.
Here, the Chicago-based wunderkind—an accomplished writer with storytelling bonafides beyond the guitar—merges the mythos of his native Texas with jazzy, explosive bombast, like a cowboy on DMT. He’s joined by a who’s-who of musicians at the intersection of tradition and experimentation: Knowler, Yasmin Williams, Ryley Walker, jaimie branch, David Grubbs, and Tyler Damon, among others. This roster might feel crowded if it weren’t full of career collaborators, practiced in subtlety and harmony. The resulting songs are dimensional and rich, but never baroque. The guitar remains at the fore, even as distortion (as on “No Fear”) or brass (“Dayenu”) lends additional dimension.
They’re also emotionally resonant—the deft finger-picking on opener “For a Chisos Bluebonnet” feels like wind in the sails, fortifying and hopeful, while closer “Unbecoming” builds from austere harmonium into a looping, bittersweet melody, wistful as the Texas plains. These songs are spiritual and sonic cousins to William Tyler’s “Highway Anxiety,” music of and for journeying (even if it’s just a trip through the psyche). “Dayenu,” with its fevered percussion and flugelhorn, crests to a frenzied climax that ends like a cliffhanger, playing as much with time and pace as with tone. Winter moves from fluid, honky-tonk rhythms to the precipice of abstraction, turning over the sunny familiar to see what writhes underneath.
That searching emotional current feels more potent in certain moments than others, and it’s alluded to directly in the titles of “Dayenu” and “Davening in Threes,” which reference Jewish prayer. The quest for meaning takes on varying degrees of urgency. “Brain on Ice,” with its slide guitar and languid tempo is a pleasant listen, but it doesn’t have the same impact as the songs that bookend it, which feel satisfying and textured, like massaging a scar. “Davening in Threes” feels mildly indulgent by its end, close to noodling, but charms with a freewheeling riff that circles layers of warm, reverberating chords. What it evokes—emotionally or narratively—will depend on who’s listening, but in this melange of past and present, beautiful and dissonant, the space for discovery is as wide as the horizon. | 2022-08-22T00:01:00.000-04:00 | 2022-08-22T00:01:00.000-04:00 | Folk/Country / Experimental | Three Lobed | August 22, 2022 | 7.6 | d2d17f19-7dd5-4a83-b5ee-6d02d78296aa | Linnie Greene | https://pitchfork.com/staff/linnie-greene/ | |
Mark Foster enlists more beat-filled haze for his third album, a tuneful but confounding modern pop event that lands somewhere between the Beach Boys and Just Blaze. | Mark Foster enlists more beat-filled haze for his third album, a tuneful but confounding modern pop event that lands somewhere between the Beach Boys and Just Blaze. | Foster the People: Sacred Hearts Club | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/foster-the-people-sacred-hearts-club/ | Sacred Hearts Club | The unhurried lope of “Pumped Up Kicks” ran counter to Mark Foster’s rapid ascent. After graduating high school in northern Ohio, he moved to Los Angeles, eventually landing a job with the commercial-music concern Mophonics. It was in Mophonics’ studio that Foster tracked “Pumped Up Kicks.” Though he had songwriting partners in drummer Mark Pontius and former bassist Cubbie Fink, “Kicks” was Foster’s work alone: the version that hit No. 3 on the Hot 100 was his original demo. When Foster the People played the 2012 Grammy Awards—wearing matching striped Gant popovers for a Beach Boys anniversary segment—they performed “Wouldn’t It Be Nice,” another pop smash written by a jingle writer/LA transplant.
A bout of writer’s block spurred Foster to travel; his final stop was Morocco, where he spent eight days with super-producer Paul Epworth, who worked on the band’s debut. The writing session led to 2014’s Supermodel, largely a lateral move. There were more indie-pop vocals massed like fog-shrouded battle formations; more ruthless refrains; and another bass-led, deceptively upbeat single. Afrobeat-jacking opener aside, the change was thematic. “You want more and ambition’s taking its toll on you,” Foster sang on “Ask Yourself.” The band, as you’d expect, grappled with materialism. “I’m bored of the game and too tired to rage,” went the bridge of “Coming of Age,” the album’s riff-riddled highlight. Unlike Columbia stablemates MGMT—to whom Foster and company have frequently been compared—Foster the People had become shepherds of a sound, not shamans.
On their third album, they’re still steering their flock through the smoke. In a teaser video released last month, Foster spoke of the album as being built from the beat up and influenced by ’60s psychedelia. In theory, this implies a pivot to MGMT’s template. In reality, Sacred Hearts Club splits the difference between the bookending acts on that Grammys tribute: Maroon 5 and the Beach Boys. Pontius’ boom-bap anchors the angsty one-two opening: “Pay the Man” threads a pitched-up vocal scramble into Foster’s falling-teeth fever dream, while the anthemic, electro-pop “Doing It for the Money” spends its verses in a fighter’s stance, shifting weight from one foot to another, waiting for the bell.
This focus on the beat leads directly to regrettable pop-rap cadences. “Loyal Like Sid & Nancy”—with its clap-heavy 808 coursing underneath—is an inscrutable data dump, with references ranging from sort of cute (“ghosting like I’m Daniel Johnston”) to ill-advised (“got my hands up in the air/I’m saying ‘I can’t breathe’”) to downright horrifying (“lock our voices in the oven/like Sylvia at home”). Despite the title, “Harden the Paint” owes more to Just Blaze than Lex Luger, as smeared synth hits give way to Foster’s sprechgesang (“I’m just floating with my hands up/All street and gold dust”). A lovely chromatic vocal counterpoint enjoins his lover, who we’re led to believe, does not play for the Houston Rockets.
But Foster’s first love was the Beach Boys, and he pays homage to them yet again on Sacred Hearts Club. On SupermodeI, it was the choral “The Angelic Welcome of Mr. Jones.” Here, it’s “Time to Get Closer,” a 58-second, full-band stroll through the surf. Their fullest tribute is the daydreamy “Static Space Lover,” a duet with singer and actress Jena Malone: Foster the People stuff the pre-chorus with sleigh bells and curlicue harmonies, then build the bridge around a piano line, leading to something like trap beats meets Pet Sounds.
Whether these developments bring more chart success is an open question. New co-writers (K’naan, Aftermath signee Justus, Ryan Tedder) exacerbate Foster’s tendency to sketch around his point. His gift, as his Mophonics bio once read, is writing “compositions... [that] won’t let you forget them.” For hits like “Helena Beat” or “Coming of Age,” this implies craft. For stretches of Sacred Hearts Club, it’s persistence, as Foster’s existential couplets become more like carnival barking through the production’s thick haze. In a sense, Foster the People already belong to another age. The week before “Pumped Up Kicks” entered the pop Top 50, Spotify debuted in America. The streaming service didn’t help the song—Spotify plays weren’t figured into Billboard’s formula until 2012, by which point “Kicks” had crossed three million paid downloads. But if you plug their name into the search bar, you can find a version of ”Pumped Up Kicks” on an official playlist titled ”Oldies but Goodies.” | 2017-07-24T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-07-24T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic / Rock | Columbia | July 24, 2017 | 5.5 | d2d27d4e-73fc-4a5b-b3da-903ae45ecfbf | Brad Shoup | https://pitchfork.com/staff/brad-shoup/ | null |
After a long hiatus, the solo electronics master returns with a mesmerizing, terrifying, and emotionally nuanced “anti-fascist ritual” of an album. | After a long hiatus, the solo electronics master returns with a mesmerizing, terrifying, and emotionally nuanced “anti-fascist ritual” of an album. | Deathprod: OCCULTING DISK | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/deathprod-occulting-disk/ | OCCULTING DISK | More than 15 years ago, Norwegian sound artist and Supersilent co-founder Helge Sten seemed to bury his Deathprod alias. For a decade, Sten barbed intricate drones with spikes of static, then stuffed it all into four essential discs in a 2004 box set that suggested a coffin. He went largely silent. Motivated by the recent rise of nationalists and strongmen worldwide, though, Sten has resurrected Deathprod for what he calls an “anti-fascist ritual” with Occulting Disk. The album is, as Will Oldham writes in the liner notes, a 10-track attempt to “address ... hatred and reduce it by its opposite.”
Sten launches Occulting Disk on the offensive with “Disappearance/Reappearance,” a digital battle hymn that pushes one distorted note past the point of collapse. For nine minutes, Sten oscillates between corrosive washes and bellowing foghorn blasts, stretching out the rests between them to make you fret over what comes next. It’s as forceful and finessed as the best of Birchville Cat Motel or Prurient, and it offers a welcome progressive corrective for power electronics, a world often hamstrung by its flirtation with or outright descent into fascism.
Despite the truculent introduction, Sten does much more than rage. His emotional breadth and nuance remind us of the heart required to fight back. “Occultation 2” suggests the onset of a panic attack, with meticulously nested layers of static and sustain closing in around you, cutting off your ability to consider anything else. With its delicate tones drifting above air-raid sirens, “Occultation 3” evokes a mourner’s wail amid chaos.
Sten has often explored a sense of play with Deathprod’s concepts and titles. He’s got a beautiful track called “Orgone Donor” and an eerie drone dubbed “The Contraceptive Briefcase II.” The brilliantly ambiguous title Occulting Disk continues this thread. Is the music meant to conscript us into rebellions? Or is the “occulting” that happens here more akin to an interrupted signal, as when the moon occults the sun? Perhaps these tracks are acts of distraction, meant to be blasted at an enemy. Occulting Disk is somehow mesmerizing and terrifying—motivational for those who need it, a nuisance to those who don’t want it.
At 66 minutes, Occulting Disk may get tedious or even tiring. Its heaviest blows fling you against the ropes and leave you there. But the length and the range of these 10 tracks offer an implicit lesson in perseverance, a necessary skill when countering deeply entrenched, well-heeled oppressors. Sten emerges from the catatonia of “Occultation 7” with a 12-minute counterattack of a finale, a piece that overruns whatever space you give it. Looking from the edge of one decade where entropy has metastasized and into the increasingly anxious next one, Occulting Disk is a reminder to believe in rallying for the cause, no matter how long it takes or however hellish the prospect and process may sound.
Buy: Rough Trade
(Pitchfork may earn a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.) | 2019-12-19T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2019-12-17T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Electronic / Jazz / Rock | Smalltown Supersound | December 19, 2019 | 8 | d2d2e430-6a12-4879-b9cf-9c5d3b42698d | Grayson Haver Currin | https://pitchfork.com/staff/grayson-haver currin/ | |
Jonny Pierce’s eponymous new album reflects the characteristically sunny indie pop and increasingly inward focus of the Drums’ solo incarnation. | Jonny Pierce’s eponymous new album reflects the characteristically sunny indie pop and increasingly inward focus of the Drums’ solo incarnation. | The Drums: Jonny | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/the-drums-jonny/ | Jonny | For all the sweetness of the Drums’ music, they’ve always sounded crushed. As the leader—and now sole member—of the band, Jonny Pierce has written hundreds of spare, summery indie pop songs full of self-recrimination and self-examination. His new album, Jonny, is the culmination of 15 years of introspection. Pierce confronts head-on the memories of childhood trauma that have reverberated through the Drums’ past five albums, matching the mood with a sparer sound.
Filigreed with an edge of post-punk, Jonny is full of dreamy, minimal jangle pop. The lyrics are stark, sifting through Pierce’s past and examining how it’s invaded his present. In the sunny-sounding “Isolette,” Pierce describes the incubator where he was placed after a traumatic birth. He attributes his mother’s early detachment to this formative event, and the song follows those ripples into his adulthood intimacy. “You’ll find a better lover,” he apologizes to his subject. “I’m just back in the isolette.” Across Jonny, Pierce’s lyrics are unpoetic—the album ends with the refrain “I used to want to die/But now I don’t want to die!”—but the melodies are strong enough to carry them. “I Want It All” and “Plastic Envelope,” the two best songs here, express plaintive emotions with unadorned directness.
While the sound is pared back, there’s a greater variation in style, like the surprisingly grand, doo-wop-esque ballad “Be Gentle.” A Rico Nasty feature on “Dying” comes out of left field, but her voice, candy-sweet and bell-clear, blends right in; you only wish she had more interesting material to work with. Instead, the song is flat-soda synth-pop, with Pierce making a suitably uncomplex point (he’s been “dying all my life”)—a recipe that’s repeated across the tracklist. Pierce’s work has grown more insular since the Drums compressed into a solo act, and tracks like “Better” and “Pool God” feel at once bloated and shallow.
Even as excess weighs down Jonny, the album still glimmers with beauty. Pierce’s depictions of raw, strange intimacy have long distinguished the band’s music, and Jonny’s core scrutiny of trauma and its aftermath plays to his strengths. As a pop songwriter, Pierce’s instincts tend toward the brief and precise. With some editing and a tighter focus, Jonny could have brought those talents to their most evocative, full-bodied expression yet. | 2023-10-20T00:01:00.000-04:00 | 2023-10-19T00:02:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | Anti- | October 20, 2023 | 6.7 | d2d48f23-3d92-4326-95c3-26cb1f3b2f36 | Zhenzhen Yu | https://pitchfork.com/staff/zhenzhen-yu/ |
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