alternativeHeadline
stringlengths 2
551
⌀ | description
stringlengths 2
700
⌀ | itemReviewed
stringlengths 6
199
| url
stringlengths 41
209
| headline
stringlengths 1
176
⌀ | reviewBody
stringlengths 1.29k
31.4k
| dateModified
stringlengths 29
29
| datePublished
stringlengths 29
29
| Genre
stringclasses 116
values | Label
stringlengths 1
64
⌀ | Reviewed
stringlengths 11
18
| score
float64 0
10
| id
stringlengths 36
36
| author_name
stringclasses 603
values | author_url
stringclasses 604
values | thumbnailUrl
stringlengths 90
347
⌀ |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Celebrating its 50th anniversary, a new expanded edition revisits the album that burnished McCartney’s critical reputation after the Beatles’ breakup, reestablishing as a force to contend with. | Celebrating its 50th anniversary, a new expanded edition revisits the album that burnished McCartney’s critical reputation after the Beatles’ breakup, reestablishing as a force to contend with. | Paul McCartney / Wings: Band on the Run (50th Anniversary Edition) | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/paul-mccartney-wings-band-on-the-run/ | Band on the Run (50th Anniversary Edition) | Band on the Run turned 50 at the end of last year, and a new expanded edition—its fourth—celebrates the anniversary. As the proliferation of reissues over the years suggests, it’s Paul McCartney’s most consequential post-Beatles record, if not necessarily his best: the album that revived his critical fortunes and established him as a powerhouse outside his former band.
McCartney’s career was hardly languishing when Band on the Run appeared at the end of 1973. Earlier that year, Red Rose Speedway became his second album to reach No. 1 in the U.S., with the dreamy ballad “My Love” topping the Billboard charts and his James Bond theme “Live and Let Die” coming close. Yet his critical reputation was at a nadir, lacking the countercultural cachet of either John Lennon or George Harrison, ex-bandmates whose early-’70s successes hit the sweet spot where the underground and mainstream met. Cast as the primary culprit in the Beatles’ demise, McCartney was portrayed as a careerist control freak who specialized in featherweight pop.
But following the Fab Four’s breakup, McCartney hardly had a master plan. Newly married to the former Linda Eastman, he moved to a farm in Scotland and then revived an idea he had for the Beatles in their waning days: to get back out and play rock’n’roll as part of a group. As he recently told Mojo, he realized his path forward was “to get a band that isn’t massively famous, to not worry if we don’t know what we’re doing because we would form our character by learning along the way.”
An essential part of that fledgling band was Linda McCartney, who previously hadn’t played music. Paul recalled, “I wasn’t motivated by having a fabulous group. I was motivated by not wanting to leave my wife behind. We had only just married. What was I going to do, run off on the road? The Beatles weren’t very good when they started out either.” He had the pick of prime studio players, recruiting New York drummer Denny Seiwell after he played on Ram, the 1971 album credited to Paul and Linda McCartney, but he found his true lieutenant in Denny Laine, a guitarist who sang lead on the Moody Blues’ breakthrough hit, “Go Now,” in 1964 but spent the subsequent decade struggling to maintain a living as a working musician.
Laine shared a history with McCartney and also recognized his subordinate role. He later said, “Let’s be honest—[McCartney] wanted to be in a band in a sense, but he would still have the final call.” McCartney overshadowed the rest of Wings to the extent that their records were essentially treated as Paul’s creation: Jon Landau’s Rolling Stone rave of Band on the Run didn’t mention Denny Laine’s name once.
By the time Wings recorded Band on the Run, they had whittled down from a quintet to a trio. McCartney alienated Seiwell and guitarist Hugh McCullough; the two musicians chafed at their paltry weekly retainers—a pay system devised to mimic what the Beatles had in their prime—and their boss’ exacting vision. When McCartney’s constraints and eccentricities began to grate, they chose to bolt—right on the eve of Wings heading to EMI’s outpost in Lagos, Nigeria.
Having their choice of EMI studios throughout the world, the McCartneys chose Lagos believing it’d be a working vacation: “We thought, Great… lie on the beach all day, doing nothing, breeze into the studios and record,” recalled Paul. “It didn’t turn out like that.” That’s an understatement. Upon their arrival in Nigeria, Wings and Geoff Emerick—an engineer who had worked with McCartney since Revolver—discovered that EMI had drastically oversold their studio’s capabilities. Forget competing with Abbey Road; it barely had functional microphones. Wings rallied, but the setbacks were many. Fela Kuti visited the studio twice, convinced that McCartney intended to appropriate his music; the two reached an uneasy understanding after Kuti realized there wasn’t a trace of African music in McCartney’s new songs. Cream drummer Ginger Baker, who had recently adopted Lagos as his home, was also irked by the presence of the McCartneys, but for pettier reasons: He wanted them to use his (admittedly superior) studio, not EMI’s. McCartney placated him by cutting “Picasso’s Last Words (Drink to Me)” at Baker’s ARC Studio. Then there was the matter of the McCartneys’ mugging. Instructed not to wander about at night, the hippies figured they’d be fine, but one night, walking back to their villa after working at the studio, the pair were accosted in the street. Among the valuables the thieves obtained were a clutch of demo tapes, forcing McCartney to immediately cut a set of new demos from memory, just so he wouldn’t lose these nascent tunes forever.
That series of re-recordings could be a key to why Band on the Run is tighter than most McCartney records: Forced to revise from memory, McCartney effectively gave his songs a second draft. He saved the creative spontaneity for the recording, working well with Linda, Laine, and Emerick; he later recalled, “It was quite a joy being so slimmed down after the other two members of the band decided they didn’t want to come out."
Band on the Run lacks the detours and loose ends common to McCartney records without sacrificing his quirks; they’re there, simply used as flair. At a mere nine or 10 tracks—the American version, which is the one included on this 50th-anniversary edition shoehorned the glam-inflected hit “Helen Wheels” onto the second side—it doesn’t ramble, nor does it wander into foreign territory. The songs can be broken down into three familiar McCartney categories: There are sweet acoustic reflections and rampaging rockers, plus snazzy showstoppers that blend these two sounds. McCartney pulls out a couple of tricks he pioneered with the Beatles, threading song snippets into a mini-suite à la Abbey Road and closing the album with a reiteration of musical themes in a fashion that echoes Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. There’s a crucial difference between those records and Band on the Run: Although Tony Visconti’s walloping orchestral arrangements on the perennial hits “Band on the Run” and “Jet”—written in just three days—create the illusion of a studio tour de force, the album actually captures the sound of a small combo being inventive with the meager tools at hand.
To that end, the “Underdubbed” version included here—a rough mix created by Geoff Emerick after everybody returned home, previously buried somewhere in McCartney’s archives—has instructive value. Initially, the absences are glaring, particularly on the tracks sweetened by Visconti. Without the orchestrations, “Band on the Run” and “Jet” can seem incomplete; indeed, “Nineteen Hundred and Eighty-Five” contains no lead vocals whatsoever. It’s not a finished product but a working mix, one that nevertheless captures how Wings interacted as a band. Stripped of the gloss, Band on the Run’s quieter moments seem to be a natural heir to the ramshackle rustic strumming of Wild Life. It also becomes apparent how much texture Linda’s analog synthesizer adds to the songs, generating rumbling propulsion on “Jet” and adding a creeping sense of foreboding on “Nineteen Hundred and Eighty-Five.” Laine acts as empathetic support, weaving his guitar with Paul’s and seamlessly intermingling his harmonies with the McCartneys’. When he trades lead lines on the lovely “No Words"—an effervescent evocation of mid-’60s guitar jangle that’s his first co-writing credit on a Wings record—there seems to be no distance between himself and his married partners. He’s not an interloper, he’s part of the crew.
In a sense, this is what McCartney yearned for since the waning days of the Beatles: to get back to the early days, when being in a band carried a sense of adventure. His phenomenal fame created an inherent power imbalance when he started Wings, but by Band on the Run, he had a pair of players who knew and accepted his idiosyncrasies. He didn’t have supporting musicians, he had a group with a distinct character, one that was captured on record during an extraordinarily difficult set of circumstances. Paul McCartney is surely the driving spirit behind Band on the Run—it distills his gifts as well as any album could—but the peculiarly warm, loving camaraderie of Wings is the reason it’s endured over the decades. | 2024-02-08T00:01:00.000-05:00 | 2024-02-08T00:01:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Capitol | February 8, 2024 | 9 | d2ddb5ac-6867-43f3-b916-8ea46ce75501 | Stephen Thomas Erlewine | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stephen-thomas erlewine/ | |
The London electro-pop artist takes a step forward after last year’s Bluff EP: The textures are richer, the emotions deeper, and her confidence more assured. | The London electro-pop artist takes a step forward after last year’s Bluff EP: The textures are richer, the emotions deeper, and her confidence more assured. | Yunè Pinku: Babylon IX EP | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/yune-pinku-babylon-ix-ep/ | Babylon IX EP | Yunè Pinku makes nostalgia-fueled music infused with techno and garage, and airlifted by her gentle, occasionally deadpan vocal melodies, corroborating lyrics like “told you I don’t give a fuck” with a delightful, lilting shrug in her voice. Now 20 years old, the Malaysian-Irish Londoner broke out with her fidgety, incandescent debut single, “Laylo,” and hit her stride during a string of lockdowns early in the pandemic, creating a cache of song sketches that formed her Bluff EP last year. Thematically concerned with the paranoia that lurks even when you’re trying to let loose at the club, Bluff confirmed an exciting new voice whose buoyant hooks quickly tunnel their way into your brain.
On her latest EP, Babylon IX, Yunè levels up by adding richer detail and texture to her production, moving more assuredly in the process. Inspired by the Hanging Gardens of Babylon, she sets a rave within its walls to seek out deeper pockets of euphoria and melancholy in her electronic music. Yunè finds an easy sweet spot between trance and electro pop throughout, gliding toward a sleek, tasteful approach without relinquishing her personality. The sing-song verses on “Sports,” an early standout, are a head-nodding delight framed by a strutting bassline, skittish drums, and blaring airhorn synth. “TV’s boiling over, love,” she sings to someone with an unhealthy attachment to their screen, a trepidation about technology that appears glancingly throughout. “I’m not digital,” she intones later, on “Night Light”; “I’m just feeling.”
Babylon IX’s best songs merge springy rhythms with a sense of wistfulness. On the storming “Fai Fighter,” which opens with an out-of-left-field Wilhelm scream, she hits a pleasure point with an oscillating synth melody and backing vocals pitch-shifted into a gossamer high. Like a breezier version of Orbital’s “Halcyon,” the song is kinetic and plaintive at once, outfitted with deep, melodic bass tones and lyrics urging to forget past mistakes. “Night Light” moves in a similarly rapturous mode, with sighing samples, an agitated beat, and bedroom-pop keys that anchor a pleading chorus: “Make me better,” Yunè sings, “Make me better forever.” Her words dissipate into a cloud of noise, rippling out with yearning.
When Yunè slows down further, the effect is just as dreamy. “Blush Cut” opens with an atmospheric prologue that gives way to a bittersweet, downbeat climax. “Hit me where it hurts now,” she urges, adding a sting to the lightness. Opener “Trinity” tiptoes toward its big trance breakdown, as flashing synth pads and murmured vocals are gradually fleshed out with a radiant, wordless chorus. Yunè’s melodic sensibility allows for slow builds as easily as a sharp tempo changes.
The small details make Yunè’s best songs dazzle—a beaming synth line suddenly shifted to a canted angle, a beat churning in on itself to inject a jolt of adrenaline. Imbued with more confidence than before, Yunè’s music on Babylon IX doesn’t peacock, but it doesn’t have to. She glides along at her own easy, assured pace, both comfortable and in control. | 2023-05-02T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2023-05-02T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B / Electronic | Platoon | May 2, 2023 | 7.4 | d2e4797c-d76d-45cf-b8e4-ebbe8f23bfb1 | Eric Torres | https://pitchfork.com/staff/eric-torres/ | |
On his fourth album with his father’s Egypt 80 ensemble, Seun Kuti delivers a smartly distilled primer on the power of Afrobeat. | On his fourth album with his father’s Egypt 80 ensemble, Seun Kuti delivers a smartly distilled primer on the power of Afrobeat. | Seun Kuti & Egypt 80: Black Times | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/seun-kuti-and-egypt-80-black-times/ | Black Times | The responsibility of writing protest songs is hardwired into Seun Kuti’s DNA. The 35-year-old bandleader and saxophonist is the youngest son of Fela Kuti, the Afrobeat pioneer who started his own Movement of the People party, penned lyrics that brazenly took shots at Nigerian politicians and, in the case of “Zombie,” provoked a bloody military attack on the Kalakuta Republic commune and recording facility that he’d founded in Lagos. Channeling this fiery legacy, Seun Kuti’s Black Times, the fourth album he’s recorded in cahoots with his father’s Egypt 80 ensemble, forcefully drives home the infectious protest power of Afrobeat.
“Last Revolutionary” sparks the eight-track set into life. Powered by Shinan Abiodun’s furious snares, Oladimeji Akinyele’s trumpet blasts lead the charge as Kuti anoints himself “the walking, talking struggle of my people.” This belief in the power of change pulses through the rest of the album. The title song, which features bluesy, wavering guitar by Carlos Santana, is rooted the idea of learning from history to achieve physical and spiritual of freedom. “Theory of Goat and Yam” pairs pounding bass and live-wire alto-sax blasts with lyrics inspired by the former Nigerian President Goodluck Jonathan, who justified embezzlement by comparing it to goats wolfing down yams left tantalizingly within reach. “Corporate Public Control Department (CPCD)” is a funked-up critique of self-serving politicians the world over that’s powered by spunky waves of brass. “Promise to give me peace and you give me war,” Kuti cries. “You promise me justice and then you jail the poor/You promise jobs and you close the factory/But there’s always work in the penitentiary.”
This working- class angle is Black Times’ defining motif, and it transcends African politics to speak directly to all those feeling the daily burden of economic oppression. On “African Dreams,” Kuti rallies against those suckered into chasing American capitalist goals at the expense of their own heritage and welfare. “Struggle Sounds” opens with a rousing, four-to-the-floor beat before introducing rapid-fire brass stabs and slinky keys over which Kuti delivers a defiant message: “I make that struggle music as the voice of the people/Struggle sound like the weapon of the future.”
Key to Afrobeat’s appeal is the way the music marries political messages to bewitchingly upbeat grooves. On Kuti’s watch, the experience is never preachy. Incendiary lyrics are delivered in a call-and-response fashion against tuneful brass riffs; expansive instrumental sections of songs skillfully add and detract instruments while building the grand groove of it all. And where Fela was fond of 10-minute-plus flights of revolutionary fantasy, most of the songs on Black Times are capped at the six- or seven minute mark, casting the album as an extra potent and smartly distilled primer on the punch of Afrobeat.
Growing up to the world as Fela Kuti’s son will naturally always cast something of a shadow over Seun Kuti’s music, but Black Times comes across as both a respectful reminder of his legacy and a demonstration of Kuti’s own fresh talent. Humble enough to acknowledge his place in a grander lineage, “Last Revolutionary” features Kuti embarking on a metaphysical roll call. “I be Marcus Garvey/I be Kwame Ture/I be Shaka Zulu,” he proudly proclaims, before delivering the knowing kicker: “I be Fela Kuti.” | 2018-03-06T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2018-03-06T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Jazz | Strut | March 6, 2018 | 7.6 | d2edcd9e-3fca-4a1a-859c-bebc671e5b2d | Phillip Mlynar | https://pitchfork.com/staff/phillip-mlynar/ | |
The South African jazz ensemble’s improvised soundtrack to a 2017 documentary about the 1976 Soweto Uprising captures a mixture of outrage, injustice, and hope that resonates powerfully today. | The South African jazz ensemble’s improvised soundtrack to a 2017 documentary about the 1976 Soweto Uprising captures a mixture of outrage, injustice, and hope that resonates powerfully today. | SPAZA: UPRIZE! | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/spaza-uprize/ | UPRIZE! | “I ran away from the scene,” photographer Sam Nzima recalled to Time magazine. Then, after recovering himself, he doubled back to capture one of the most powerful photographs of the 20th century. It was June 16, 1976, and several thousand Soweto students had begun protesting the imposition of mandatory Afrikaans-language instruction in township schools. When a student protest turned violent, Nzima captured the still-shocking image of 13-year-old student Hector Pieterson, gunned down by police. South African apartheid wasn’t well known outside of the country up until that point, but its brutality was undeniable after that.
Director Sifiso Khanyile’s 2017 documentary UPRIZE! focused on these student protests and foregrounded their struggle against the Bantu Education Act, a repressive policy aimed at disenfranchising Black South Africans. Enacted in 1953, the law set up mandatory government-run schools where Black children were trained for lives of manual labor and menial work, creating an uneducated, unskilled underclass, and indoctrinated to believe that they were subservient to the country’s white minority. “They were putting our minds in a box,” playwright Fatima Dike says in the film. Accompanying the film is an improvised soundtrack by the South African group SPAZA, created as they watched a rough cut of the film projected on a living-room wall in 2016.
On last year’s heady debut album, which captured a one-off live performance from 2015, the group—an open-ended collective with rotating members—created a decidedly loose and spacey iteration of South African jazz, favoring slowly unspooling improvisations and woozy electronics. Stripped back to a quartet (only bassist Ariel Zamonsky and percussionist Gontse Makhene are held over), the smaller ensemble tightens up its sound while keeping that expansive sense of space. Zamonsky, who also serves as bassist for Shabaka and the Ancestors, provides a scraping, growling figure at the start that suggests deep unease and serves as a recurring theme throughout. “Bantu Education,” named for the repressive law, joins Zamonsky’s visceral low end with the echoing ululations of newcomer Nonku Phiri to create eerie, hackle-raising atmospheres. Folded into the spacious music are voices from the film describing apartheid’s attempts to divorce children from their heritage. “The South African history would get thinner and thinner and thinner,” says one woman. “And all you were taught was that your ancestors sold their land to the white people for a mirror or a knife.”
Spontaneous though the album’s compositions may be, several tracks stun with a spare, disarming beauty. On “Sizwile,” led by pattering hand drums and the gently spaced piano chords of Malcolm Jiyane (whose style brings to mind Bill Evans and South African jazz legend Abdullah Ibrahim ), Phiri’s aching vocals take center stage, by turns mournful and soaring, electronically doubled at key junctures to create a weightless atmosphere. Unhurried and disarming across its eight gossamer minutes, it serves as the spiritual kin to another piece of hushed, reverent South African jazz from earlier this year, Asher Gamedze’s “siyabulela.” Built on a one-note pulse from Zamonsky, “Banna Ba Batsumi” is another highlight, moving ever so slowly from turmoil to transformative release.
But through most of the album, the dread and unease of the apartheid era infuse the music. Fear and darkness encroach on pieces like “Mangaliso Sobukwe” and “The Black Consciousness Movement.” On the latter, Phiri’s vocals are processed in such a way that they resemble a spirit roaming the earth, unable to rest. Restraint and reserve inform most of the music up to that point, as if conveying resilience in the face of oppression and injustice. Only on “Bayasiphazamisa” do SPAZA finally let their sound boil over. Agitated keys and shrieks emulate the tipping point of the film, wherein the student demonstrations begin to spread into widespread workers’ protests and strikes across South Africa.
On the closing “We Got a Lot of Work to Do,” the recurring bass motif returns, now in a higher register. The title is potent, suggesting that such protests are not the end, but the beginning of a much longer struggle. The Soweto student uprising and dissemination of Nzima’s photograph were but the first step; it would be another 14 years before Nelson Mandela, who had been sentenced to life imprisonment in 1964, was released. It’s erroneous to say that SPAZA’s performance captures the energy of our present moment, given that they recorded four years before the current upheavals. Yet they expertly distill in sound a sense of outrage, injustice, and hope similar to the one felt throughout the world now. As singer/actor Abigail Kubeka says in the film, “The only way we could find of dealing with the trauma was to perform.”
Buy: Rough Trade
(Pitchfork earns a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.)
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2020-10-15T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-10-15T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Jazz | Mushroom Hour Half Hour | October 15, 2020 | 7.8 | d2efc7cd-0c4f-4c33-bfbc-096843c9d2b4 | Andy Beta | https://pitchfork.com/staff/andy-beta/ | |
Stars of the Lid's Adam Wiltzie and pianist/composer Dustin O'Halloran find a halfway point between their projects, creating music that moves more than drone and feels thicker than minimalism. | Stars of the Lid's Adam Wiltzie and pianist/composer Dustin O'Halloran find a halfway point between their projects, creating music that moves more than drone and feels thicker than minimalism. | A Winged Victory for the Sullen: A Winged Victory for the Sullen | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/15809-a-winged-victory-for-the-sullen/ | A Winged Victory for the Sullen | When I heard Adam Wiltzie, known for his ambient work with Stars of the Lid, and Dustin O'Halloran, a Berlin-based pianist/composer and member of the dream pop band Devics, were teaming up for a new project, I knew what to expect. Which isn't a bad thing. Wiltzie makes sonorous and droning music with static harmonies in Stars of the Lid (and has played in Windsor for the Derby); O'Halloran writes melancholy piano music built around the repetition of chords and phrases. A Winged Victory for the Sullen, it turns out, is an exact halfway point between the two.
What's interesting about the sound they've hit on isn't so much what the two musicians bring to each other's styles, as it is what each sacrifices from his own. In Stars of the Lid, Wiltzie and Brian McBride have a particular way of massing instruments into a big, pulmonary drone-- the individual timbres of the instruments rarely rise out of the overall shape. You can hear him do some of this on A Winged Victory for the Sullen, making new sounds out of many sub-sounds, but he also lets certain individual tones take over. It creates small, noticeable details in otherwise large, fairly monolithic compositions.
O'Halloran is a synesthete, and I wonder what this music looks like to him. Certainly, it has different colors from his own work, though his usual palette is present. He's used to the repetitive harmonic structures favored by Wiltzie, but in his own music there is typically more movement. When his music includes more than piano, he's usually chosen those instruments for their unique timbres. Here, he's giving a bit of that away to Wiltzie. The strings-- and even to some extent the piano-- move in and out of focus. The duo did some of the principle recording at Berlin's Grunewald Church and overdubbed some of the strings in East Germany's old state radio studios, so some of this blurring and refocusing can be attributed to acoustic spaces in which the recordings were made-- like Wiltzie's other duo, A Winged Victory creates all these otherworldly sounds using only traditional instruments.
The band was named in reference to a Greek statue in the Louvre called "Winged Victory of Samothrace," a long-beheaded depiction of Nike, the winged goddess of victory, found on the Greek island of Samothrace. It portrays the striding, triumphant figure, an image of arrested motion that ties nicely to this record: A Winged Victory's music, more active than drone and thicker than minimalism, captures movement and freezes it. | 2011-09-14T02:00:03.000-04:00 | 2011-09-14T02:00:03.000-04:00 | Experimental | Kranky / Erased Tapes | September 14, 2011 | 7.3 | d302d03a-72e5-4e19-9941-1c48bb15ec2a | Joe Tangari | https://pitchfork.com/staff/joe-tangari/ | null |
The Belgium-based composer—best known as a member of Stars of the Lid and A Winged Victory for the Sullen—steps out with a solo debut that plays like an ambient-drone crowd-pleaser. | The Belgium-based composer—best known as a member of Stars of the Lid and A Winged Victory for the Sullen—steps out with a solo debut that plays like an ambient-drone crowd-pleaser. | Adam Wiltzie: Eleven Fugues for Sodium Pentothal | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/adam-wiltzie-eleven-fugues-for-sodium-pentothal/ | Eleven Fugues for Sodium Pentothal | There’s something distinctly Texan about Adam Wiltzie’s music. With the late Brian McBride, the drone titan co-founded Stars of the Lid in 1993, releasing seven albums of ambient music as wispy and ethereal as a desert mirage. Though he’s lived in Belgium for nearly 25 years, he continues to produce music that suggests both the nearly incomprehensible vastness of the American West and the dread secrets it seems to contain. His new album Eleven Fugues for Sodium Pentothal sounds somewhere between a Western soundtrack and an emanation from an underground gas-mining operation, with tails of reverb from electric guitars bleeding into miasmas of strings and horns. Perhaps it’s time to think of Wiltzie in the tradition of European artists—the Wim Wenders of Paris, Texas, the Daft Punk of Electroma—fascinated with America’s enormity in contrast to the compact continent across the pond.
Remarkable though it might seem, given his lengthy string of collaborations and duo projects, this is Wiltzie’s first full-length under his own name. (It also contains only nine fugues for sodium pentothal—the co-author of “December Hunting for Vegetarian Fuckface” retains his streak of mischief.) Wiltzie spends a lot of the album’s runtime in his orchestral-drone comfort zone, but whenever the terrain threatens to sound too well trod, he pulls out something like “Dim Hopes,” with its twinkling constellation of vibraphones, or “Stock Horror,” which seems in the process of being ground up and devoured by the earth. “Tissue of Lies” is one of the catchiest things he’s written, with a friendly two-chord guitar motif that’s all the more mysterious for sounding so familiar: maybe a cousin of Slowdive’s “Trellisaze,” or a ghost of classic rock.
Wiltzie has made plenty of music like this in the past, but it’s easy to forget that he hasn’t made much like it recently. His primary project for the last decade-plus has been A Winged Victory for the Sullen, his duo with Dustin O’Halloran, which feels a little more high-budget and magisterial than the almost self-deprecatingly quiet music he made in the first decade or so of his career: the self-titled Aix Em Klemm and Dead Texan albums, the sad and spectral emanations on the 2001 masterpiece The Tired Sounds of Stars of the Lid. (The Dead Texan, a collaboration with Christina Vantzou, particularly seems like a precedent for this record.) Is it a stretch to call an ambient drone album a crowd-pleaser? Wiltzie does everything you hope he will on Pentothal, and then some.
The opening track is titled “Buried at Westwood Memorial Park, in an Unmarked Grave, to the Left of Walter Matthau.” Fans will surely speculate that it’s a reference to the resting place of Brian McBride, but Wiltzie has confirmed it’s not; ambient albums have a nasty habit of getting contextually tangled up with tragedies that happened once the music was already recorded. Eleven Fugues for Sodium Pentothal is the latest in a long string of albums concerned with ephemerality, and its emotional weight comes from the sense of a glacial time scale that renders human concerns profoundly irrelevant. The most important thing here is this feeling of impermanence, the illusion that the sources of these sounds dissipated into the Texas heat before the soundwaves reached your ears. | 2024-04-11T00:01:00.000-04:00 | 2024-04-11T00:01:00.000-04:00 | Experimental | Kranky | April 11, 2024 | 7.6 | d3030ffa-5116-4fb7-8822-e837cfba2e70 | Daniel Bromfield | https://pitchfork.com/staff/daniel-bromfield/ | |
The follow-up to King-- one of 2006's best rap albums-- works on the thin and dubious concept that T.I. the businessman and T.I.P. the unreformed hustler are two completely different entities, and that the strain of balancing the two personas is enough to tear Clifford Joseph Harris Jr. apart. | The follow-up to King-- one of 2006's best rap albums-- works on the thin and dubious concept that T.I. the businessman and T.I.P. the unreformed hustler are two completely different entities, and that the strain of balancing the two personas is enough to tear Clifford Joseph Harris Jr. apart. | T.I.: T.I. vs. T.I.P. | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/10397-ti-vs-tip/ | T.I. vs. T.I.P. | On last year's King, T.I.'s scrappy street-kid swagger seemed indivisible from his pop instincts, and that's partly why it was one of the year's best rap albums. On older records like 2003's Trap Muzik, T.I. built an image of himself as a haunted, remorseful drug-dealer, balancing triumphant anthems like "Rubberband Man" with sad, introspective laments like "Be Better Than Me". By the time he released King, though, the emotional resonance was all but gone from his music, replaced by a world-conquering confidence unmatched in rap. Titanic bangers like "What You Know" and "Top Back" didn't work in spite of T.I.'s guttural sneer; they used that harshness as fuel. But T.I.'s new album, T.I. vs. T.I.P. operates on the thin and dubious concept that T.I. the businessman and T.I.P. the unreformed hustler are two completely different entities, and that the strain of balancing the two personas is enough to tear Clifford Joseph Harris Jr. apart. Apparently, those two sides aren't as indivisible as they once seemed.
T.I. first explored this dichotomy on Trap Muzik's "T.I. vs. T.I.P.", crafting an argument that movingly dramatized his internal struggle. That struggle also serves as the concept for the new album: T.I.P. gets the first seven tracks, T.I. the next seven, and the two sides spend the last four songs hashing out their differences. It's an interesting conceit, but it doesn't really work as a hook for an entire album, and the record's exhaustingly long running time pushes the conceit far past the breaking point. For one thing, it's a pacing disaster; by lining up all his sugary for-the-ladies tracks in a row, T.I. leaves a long dead-streak in the second half of the album. For another, it plays against his strengths. His music works best when both sides of his personality are allowed to co-exist in the same track. When they're separated, they both sound emaciated and half-formed. And he never quite commits to the concept. If T.I. represents the rapper's pop half, why do the album's first two singles come from the T.I.P. section? If the album's final stretch is meant to unite both sides, why do they confront each other in song only once, on the second verse of "Respect My Hustle"?
Unsurprisingly, the strongest stretch of the album comes from T.I.P. On songs like the underwhelming first single "Big Shit Poppin'" and the clichéd drug-dealer instruction-manual "Da Dopeman", the rapper seems to be on autopilot, but a few of the T.I.P. tracks would've been highlights even on King. On "You Know What It Is", he rides Wyclef Jean's sublimely summery rubber bassline, intuitively sinking into the beat and savoring the sound of his voice. "Watch What You Say" boasts a bluesy organic thump and the most authoritative Jay-Z guest-verse in a couple of years, and T.I.'s throaty snarl conveys menace infectiously. On "Hurt", he keeps pace with Danja's royal horns and riotous drums and the fiery guest-verses from Alfamega and (surprisingly) Busta Rhymes.
The T.I. suite doesn't fare so well, partly because its mere existence positions it as a compromise. T.I.'s cruise-ship money-talk never feels as urgent as his grimy side, and bored and lazy guest-verses from Eminem and Nelly-- both of whom sound like shadows of their former selves-- don't help anything. The best that can be said about the T.I. section is that it mostly doesn't sound all that different from the T.I.P. section; beats from Just Blaze and the Runners are as convincingly hard as anything elsewhere, and T.I. uses the same cadence and delivery whether he's talking about spending money or killing you. If the final act works more consistently than the previous two, it's more because of its two slyly synthetic Danja beats than because of any trenchant insights the rapper comes up with.
Even if the concept falls flat, though, T.I. vs. T.I.P. still warrants a listen, if only because T.I. seems constitutionally incapable of releasing an album full of uncompelling music. As a rapper, he's still a dominant voice; his slurry, guttural drawl is a great instrument, and always keeps it deep in the track's pocket, occasionally whipping out tricky double-time patterns or murmuring singsong melodies. The album is perhaps best heard in chunks; only a few of these songs wouldn't sound great on shuffle. Heard as a piece, though, the album's momentum sputters and dies more than once; after a few consecutive listens, T.I. sounds dour and joyless, like he's just punching the clock.
Shortly after the release of King, T.I.'s friend Philant Johnson was shot dead after a nightclub brawl between T.I.'s entourage and some Cincinnati thugs. After Johnson's death, T.I. mentioned that the business of rapping no longer felt good and admitted that he was seriously considering quitting music altogether. On T.I. vs. T.I.P., he repeatedly makes reference to Johnson, and indeed he rarely displays the spark and verve that gave King much of its power. T.I. vs. T.I.P. may be self-obsessed and self-indulgent, but maybe T.I. needed to make this album to keep himself interested. Let's hope he's gotten it out of his system. | 2007-07-05T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2007-07-05T02:00:01.000-04:00 | Rap | Atlantic / Grand Hustle | July 5, 2007 | 6.4 | d3072da3-5fac-4399-b7a3-f3613bd3d291 | Tom Breihan | https://pitchfork.com/staff/tom-breihan/ | null |
Silversun Pickups, who generated more Smashing Pumpkins comparisons than any band this side of Zwan with their 2006 debut Carnavas, return for Album #2. | Silversun Pickups, who generated more Smashing Pumpkins comparisons than any band this side of Zwan with their 2006 debut Carnavas, return for Album #2. | Silversun Pickups: Swoon | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/12926-swoon/ | Swoon | Silversun Pickups generated more Smashing Pumpkins comparisons than any band this side of Zwan with their 2006 debut Carnavas, and whether or not it was justifiable, it was certainly understandable. But in the manner in which these things usually work out, such hyperbolic comparisons helped the Silver Lake band way more than it hurt them-- if they haven't quite reached the national profile of the Pumpkins, when I suggested that Los Angeles lacked a band that was locally connected, critically respected, and popularly accepted, I got a bunch of e-mails claiming my exclusion of Silversun Pickups had to be unintentional.
Despite a handful of expected Second Album Upgrades (cue the strings!), Corgan influences continue to manifest themselves on Swoon-- Brian Aubert's treble-gutted riffs, the tendency to honk boyishly miserable lyrics through his nasal passage, and requirement that a bassist must be a looker that can harmonize. But while the Great Pumpkin would balance "Siva" and "Quiet" with a "Disarm" or "Window Paine", the Pickups just polish-to-shine loud modern rock songs that feel like they evolved out of jam sessions based on "Drown" and go on at least a minute longer than they should. The shortest track on Swoon clocks in at about 4:30 and the longest at 5:55, but these roomy structures don't house stand-alone riffs, mean displays of chops or interesting dynamic diversions.
More often, it's tougher to tell when the Pickups should've cut. Though Swoon never becomes unpleasant, Aubert's lyrics and melodies are so wishy-washy that you'd think they were going out of their way to be ignored. Hardly any melodic turns stick among these slippery and repetitive textures-- the Pickups are so mesmeric at times that if they had more groove, they could pass for a Krautrock band.
Most of the blame for Swoon's featureless vista goes towards its identikit modern rock production. You wouldn't think these guys would be better off listening to Siamese Dream more, but, you know-- listen to Siamese Dream, particularly "Soma" or "Today" or "Geek U.S.A." and you recognize the dynamics are actually dynamic. Here, the Edge-wise tapping that of "Getting Old Is Getting Old" and "Draining" register at pretty much the same volume as the martial intensity of album highlight "Panic Switch". When the chorus of "Secrets" is supposed to blast off, there's no room in its obnoxiously compressed confines.
Upon the announcement of Swoon's impending release, Pitchfork's Tom Breihan's backhanded compliment that Carnavas had two really great songs whereas most other albums had none was pretty much on-point-- no matter how you choose to interpret that. Swoon ultimately delivers the exact same results as its predecessor mostly because it's written in nearly the exact same way. The problem all along for the Silversun Pickups isn't that they sound too much like the Smashing Pumpkins. They just sound way too much like themselves. | 2009-04-14T01:00:02.000-04:00 | 2009-04-14T01:00:02.000-04:00 | Rock | Dangerbird | April 14, 2009 | 5.3 | d30ca1d7-69cf-47c2-b076-5f7466c69f2b | Pitchfork | https://pitchfork.com/staff/pitchfork/ | null |
Expectations are a bitch. Ask J.D. Salinger. Or George Lucas. Or Kevin Shields. After Broken Social Scene stumbled out ... | Expectations are a bitch. Ask J.D. Salinger. Or George Lucas. Or Kevin Shields. After Broken Social Scene stumbled out ... | Broken Social Scene: Broken Social Scene | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/955-broken-social-scene/ | Broken Social Scene | Expectations are a bitch. Ask J.D. Salinger. Or George Lucas. Or Kevin Shields. After Broken Social Scene stumbled out of the incestuous Toronto alt-rock scene with Feel Good Lost-- a postrumental refrigerator-hum stiff of a debut-- few would have guessed this group of scruffed-up bohos had a veritable classic lurking in their collective consciousness. Then, ignited by a rabid internet reception, You Forgot It in People gracefully went boom, and lots of people remembered why they loved indie rock-- the shambling ecstasy, the pitch-perfect experimentation, the unabashed heart-on-sleeveness of it all.
Now, with file-sharers queuing up like mad and pre-orders bumping them to Amazon Top 50 status, the collective reacts to the furor by expanding and magnifying; another six members join the brood for its self-titled third full-length, and the band's once-refined studio sound is blown up into a pixilated blur of blood-gush guitars and squall-of-sound production that's somehow meticulously unhinged. This exercise in excess makes the ambitious You Forgot It in People seem positively understated by comparison.
De facto band leader Kevin Drew recently told Pitchfork that Broken Social Scene producer (and NYPD punching bag) David Newfeld "got addicted to the idea of trying to top YFIIP." He added: "His massage therapist says he might die in 10 years unless he changes his lifestyle." It's Newfeld's risky mixing and uncanny knack for coalescing myriad instruments and voices into a propulsive whole that defines this new album. Whereas You Forgot It in People was exacting and refined-- each cymbal crash snipped to perfection, each underlying string melody was spare and to-the-point-- Broken Social Scene is wily and flowing. Just consider each disc's mood-setting introduction: YFIIP's "Capture the Flag" is muted and tasteful; BSS's "Our Faces Split the Coast in Half" gets out of bed, trips, falls down, does a sloppy summersault, and gets back up no worse for the wear. The contrasting titles alone-- one direct, one Dali-esque-- speak volumes. But, however symbolic, "Faces" is only a casual stretch, with follower "Ibi Dreams of Pavement (A Better Half)" serving as the album's first true workout.
"Ibi" breaks in with a woozy, five-alarm guitar-- a warning call for the track's off-key surrealism and pile-on distortion. Like the shaky ascent of a homemade rocketship, the song constantly teeters on cataclysmic oblivion; shards of chords slip away and grind against each other as the track embarks. Buried between the static and the void, mumbled vocals are folded in before the brass enters and elevates the endeavor to fist-pumping, room-on-fire glory.
That track's garbled vocals and lyrical ambiguity are filtered throughout this record. With no accompanying lyric sheet, most of the album's highly interpretable words not only provide fans with a time-wasting message-board guessing game but add another layer of atmospheric haze to the group's already out-there takes on sex, politics, and that whole indies-vs.-majors thing. On the wispy, faux-idyllic "Major Label Debut", the chorus could be "I'm all hooked up" or "I'm all fucked up," but either meaning snidely puts down the rockstar clichés Broken Social Scene are determined to avoid.
Anyone's who's been to a Broken Social Scene show over the past few years probably knows "Major Label Debut" as a rollicking, open hi-hat dust storm. But here, that version is relegated to an accompanying EP (otherwise filled with mostly expendable outtakes and instrumentals) while the album version is slowed down and fogged up-- and decidedly less single-worthy. Another live favorite and possible crossover contender, "Superconnected", is still catchy on record, but Newfeld's all-at-once, in-between-vox production subverts any chance at overt smashdom.
Such insular stubbornness leads to Broken Social Scene's few overly self-indulgent moments, when their lack of inhibitions turns from charming to faintly annoying. Their tendency to jam out-- not entirely surprising given bassist Brendan Canning's striking Trey Anastasio-meets-Elmo look-- turn the seven-minute "Bandwitch" into an aimless jumble. Along with the similarly too-free-spirited "Windsurfing Nation" and "Handjobs for the Holidays", such unchecked exorbitance damages the album's hard-won continuity.
But a few regrettable overreachings are somewhat inevitable when a band tries to top a record as strong as YFIIP. Looser and slightly kinkier, Broken Social Scene indulges in the pop eccentricities and keen melodic ears of more than a dozen Canadians who take willful pride in their ability to lock together into one solid unit and make good on the sum of their unique individual talents. With its doomsday provocation of a title, the epic Springsteenian endcap "It's All Gonna Break" bursts forth with enough ideas to keep a lesser band productive for years. The song ecstatically encapsulates Broken Social Scene's heightened ambitions and flawed Icarus journeys, conflating into a bold, brash love-in infatuated with its own bumps and bruises. | 2005-10-03T01:00:01.000-04:00 | 2005-10-03T01:00:01.000-04:00 | Rock | Arts & Crafts | October 3, 2005 | 8.4 | d311a12b-962f-4783-9f30-7f1c335bc5e7 | Ryan Dombal | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ryan-dombal/ | null |
Annie Clark’s self-produced seventh album goes for a hard reset on the St. Vincent project. She retains her sharp edge as a songwriter while making the music sound exalting, inspiring, and thoroughly romantic. | Annie Clark’s self-produced seventh album goes for a hard reset on the St. Vincent project. She retains her sharp edge as a songwriter while making the music sound exalting, inspiring, and thoroughly romantic. | St. Vincent: All Born Screaming | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/st-vincent-all-born-screaming/ | All Born Screaming | Annie Clark says that a performer’s job is to “shock and console.” For years, she was doing much more of the former than the latter. Her first four records—an impeccable run from 2007’s Marry Me through to 2014’s St. Vincent—played on a common trope of the horror genre, the idea that behind every pristine façade lies a world of ugliness, violence, and malcontent. Horror franchises, of course, tend to get stale pretty fast: Once you know the general mode and motive of a killer, they aren’t all that scary. The aesthetic of Clark’s music has stayed relatively consistent but as she’s added more elements in—synths, latex, wigs, outlandish album concepts that don’t necessarily align with the increasingly personal music contained within—it’s begun to feel less potent.
All Born Screaming, Clark’s self-produced seventh album, goes for a hard reset on the St. Vincent project, not by going back to the harsh, alien textures of, say, 2011’s Strange Mercy, but by flicking the dial from “shock” to “console.” Musically, it feels like the first St. Vincent album since Marry Me presented without a unifying aesthetic: at various points, Clark incorporates Bond theme melodrama, Steely Dan-style prog, bouncy art pop and lechy industrial rock, making for what is arguably her loosest record, an exhale after years of fitting her songs into increasingly tight restraints.
It’s a freedom that carries through to the album’s emotional content. Clark’s records often display warmth and vulnerability in flashes, but All Born Screaming feels thoroughly romantic and highlights bits of beauty amid Clark’s usual lexicon of chaotic, violent imagery. On the dazed dream-pop ballad “The Power’s Out,” she sings about New York as a kind of hell created by its inhabitants; far from a horror story or an indictment, it sounds like a love song.
St. Vincent has occasionally let her mask of irony fall on past albums—“Candy Darling” on Daddy’s Home, “Champagne Year” on Strange Mercy, “Happy Birthday, Johnny” on Masseduction—but this feels like an album full of those songs. Even the harsh tracks are born out of empathy; the quivering, volatile “Reckless” is about spiraling out after someone you love dies; “Flea” might be kinda gross, casting love and desire as a form of infestation, but there’s something romantic about that idea, too. Over a beat that recalls the overdriven chug of Nine Inch Nails, Clark sings lyrics that walk a line between devoted and creepy: “Drip you in diamonds/Pour you in cream/You will be mine for eternity.”
“Flea” was one of All Born Screaming’s lead singles, along with the sleazy, hammed-up classic rock pastiche “Broken Man.” Their brazen sexuality and thundering riffs hardly represent the album proper, which on the whole is sensitive and introspective. On the surging pop track “Sweetest Fruit,” Clark pays tribute to SOPHIE and other artists who know that “the sweetest fruit is on the limb”; on “So Many Planets,” a glammed-up take on two-tone, she sings of having “to visit so many planets before I find my own” with equal parts exhaustion and wonderment. Clark has long used her music to memorialize individual queer friends and heroes, but this album takes a more general tack; it feels as if she’s looking to both exalt and inspire, a relatively new mode for Clark, but a welcome one.
Or maybe that’s a total misread: After the straightforward lyricism of Masseduction and Daddy’s Home—both produced by Jack Antonoff, who is known for asking his collaborators, “What’s the worst thing that’s ever happened to you?” as a songwriting prompt—Clark has returned to the relatively oblique, enjoyably puzzling turns of phrase of her early records. Some of these are fairly legible—“I have climbed into open arms that turned into a straight jacket,” she sings on the fidgety new wave track “All Born Screaming,” which borrows a lyrical conceit from the Strange Mercy classic “Cheerleader”—and others confounding (“Hemorrhaging heartthrob with a six-pack of beer/Leaning outside her burned-out window”.) For the most part, though, All Born Screaming feels sanguine. It ends on a repetition of its title phrase, which could, in one light, be an expression of pessimism; on Clark’s most hopeful record to date, it feels like a marker of communal experience—a sweet kind of consolation. | 2024-04-25T00:02:00.000-04:00 | 2024-04-25T00:02:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Total Pleasure | April 25, 2024 | 7.8 | d315367b-974e-4dfe-8e0f-9c47f035bcd6 | Shaad D’Souza | https://pitchfork.com/staff/shaad-d’souza/ | |
For many EDM acts, once they go pop, they stay pop, but Eric Prydz’s career has represented a kind of balancing act between overground notoriety and underground cred. Opus is a 19-song album collecting new material, fan favorites from Prydz’s own DJ sets, and even a few singles dating back as far as 2012. | For many EDM acts, once they go pop, they stay pop, but Eric Prydz’s career has represented a kind of balancing act between overground notoriety and underground cred. Opus is a 19-song album collecting new material, fan favorites from Prydz’s own DJ sets, and even a few singles dating back as far as 2012. | Eric Prydz: Opus | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21409-opus/ | Opus | Eric Prydz got his pop crossover out of the way early. The Swedish DJ and producer broke through in 2004 with "Call on Me," a fizzy filter-house anthem that sampled Steve Winwood’s "Valerie" and came complete with a video aimed at horny boys. For many EDM acts, once they go pop, they stay pop, but Prydz’s career since then has represented a kind of balancing act between overground notoriety and underground cred. At Ultra Music Festival in 2013, he performed on the same stage as Calvin Harris, Avicii, Tiësto, and David Guetta, but that same week he also played Scuba’s Hotflush party at Miami’s 300-capacity Electric Pickle club. And while Prydz’s catalog over the years has been peppered with programmatic, over-the-top heartstring-pullers like "Every Day," last year’s proggy epic "Opus" found an unlikely fan in Four Tet, who publicly asked to remix the song (and eventually got his wish). Fellow big-tent Swedes like Steve Angello, Axwell, and Sebastian Ingrosso may pay lip service to the underground, but they can only dream of getting that kind of co-sign.
Opus, a 19-song album collecting new material, heretofore unreleased fan favorites from Prydz’ own DJ sets, and even a few singles dating back as far as 2012, is Prydz’s second album, and it confirms him as both a master craftsman and a masterful manipulator of emotions. He’s got a real way with neat four-bar chord progressions and elegant counterpoints that spin as naturally as mobiles, and his mixes are as uncluttered as his drums are crisp and loud. He favors big, bold melodies pitched somewhere between yearning and euphoria; his melodic sensibility is a lot like that of M83, whose "Midnight City" Prydz remixed in typically grand fashion in 2011.
Even with the showiness, Prydz is probably the subtlest DJ ever to headline Madison Square Garden. One of his favorite tricks is to hypnotize listeners with a reassuring chord progression and then, after three or four minutes of eight-bar cycles, to suddenly pivot into a new variation, breaking the imaginary space of the track wide open. He wisely avoids the over-the-top pyrotechnics of main-stage EDM in favor of hypnotic arpeggios and long, teasing filter sweeps; instead of his peers’ Pavlovian sucker-punches, he prefers to seductively blur the line between tension and release. And where big-room DJs deploy rushing snare rolls and vertiginous glissandi to create tension at the close of a 32-bar segment, Prydz uses a single, reverberant snare drum, a sound so imitated that it has come to be called the "Pryda snare," after one of Prydz’s alter egos. (In theory, each of his aliases has its own sound—Pryda leans toward pure progressive house, Cirez D is reserved for techno, and Prydz’ bigger crossover tracks come out under his own name. In practice, however, the lines between them are often blurry.)
Opus oscillates between two poles. On the one side are entrancing progressive house numbers like the bookending "Liam" and "Opus," in which lessons learned from decades’ worth of electro-pop are sculpted into lean, elegant shapes that arc effortlessly toward the horizon. "Black Dyce," one of the album’s highlights, fashions its bassline after Giorgio Moroder’s octave-jumping throb and its synth lead after Kraftwerk’s naïve melodies; there’s a little bit of Depeche Mode in there, too. "Floj" proceeds along similar lines, with an Italo-inspired bassline eventually evolving into a spine-tingling breakdown reminiscent of fellow Swede Tomas Andersson’s 2005 electro-house anthem, "Washing Up."
At the other end of the spectrum are songs informed by Prydz’s pop instincts, and these can be more of a mixed bag. The slow, snaky "Breathe" boasts an excellent synth lead reminiscent of Boards of Canada, but the vocals from Knife Party’s Rob Swire take the song deep into generic, post-grunge stadium rock territory; they’re as faceless as Prydz’s own style is distinct. And "Every Day," a cover of a 2002 song by Mood II Swing’s John Ciafone, sounds more like an electro-house rendition of Van Halen’s "Jump," and the over-the-top emoting of the vocals do the song no favors.
But sometimes he gets it just right: On "Moody Mondays," a singer named the Cut does his best Phil Oakey impersonation, striking a balance between effortless cool and faintly ridiculous—a balance that’s even more effectively managed on the '80s-tinged "Generate," where singer Tom Cane’s falsetto evokes Yes’ Jon Anderson. Yes, there’s something faintly corny about those songs, and also "Liberate," a shimmering vocal anthem meant to elicit closed eyes and raised cell phones. But corniness—the willingness to let go, to be not cool, to escape judgement—is deeply woven into the fabric of EDM. And it’s to Prydz’s credit that he makes even these moments of excess sound far classier than any of his peers. | 2016-02-05T01:00:01.000-05:00 | 2016-02-05T01:00:01.000-05:00 | Electronic | Virgin | February 5, 2016 | 6.2 | d3174747-bf84-4571-a3e9-b5f0b9d3db29 | Philip Sherburne | https://pitchfork.com/staff/philip-sherburne/ | null |
Rilo Kiley co-leader Jenny Lewis takes another solo bow with this immediately pleasurable genre record, one brimming over with hooks and songwriting techniques that announce themselves with openness and surety. Elvis Costello guests. | Rilo Kiley co-leader Jenny Lewis takes another solo bow with this immediately pleasurable genre record, one brimming over with hooks and songwriting techniques that announce themselves with openness and surety. Elvis Costello guests. | Jenny Lewis: Acid Tongue | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/12249-acid-tongue/ | Acid Tongue | Plenty of the most celebrated writers of the past century, from William Faulkner and Graham Greene to Michael Chabon and John Banville, have found cause or need to periodically interrupt their more individualized pursuits and produce work that strictly adhered to a certain niche such as horror, mystery, or sci-fi. For such authors, genre-bound detours often function as tie-loosening fodder-- playful, low-stakes, persona-dodging fare. As one of indie rock's preeminent lyricists and a fascinating personality in her own right, Jenny Lewis has similarly been trying her hand at already regimented styles, particularly over the course of her two most recent albums, the 2007 release Under the Blacklight from her band, Rilo Kiley, as well as her newest solo effort, Acid Tongue. Lewis made her name with highly conversational indie pop that played up her keen lyrical and vocal facilities for conveying humor, sexiness, and humanity, yet these latest recordings have found the former child actress retreating into classic soul, pop, and rock roles that inevitably mute her most appealing idiosyncracies and predilections. What separates Lewis from the aforementioned novelists is the fear that these moves represent a significant shift in artistic direction as opposed to a momentary diversion.
As with Under the Blacklight, Acid Tongue is immediately pleasurable, brimming over with hooks and songwriting techniques that announce themselves with openness and surety. The problem then is one of staying power-- Lewis does such a good job of nailing choice sounds and styles from pop's past that you can't help getting reeled in right away; only upon later reflection do you realize that much of her success lies in evoking something else great rather than achieving a greatness more uniquely her own. The spacious echo of "Black Sand", the crackling tension of "Pretty Bird", and the blues-rock hysterics of "Jack Killed Mom" are enjoyable mostly insofar as they reenact the prior accomplishments of Jeff Lynne, Neil Young, and the White Stripes, respectively. Meanwhile, "Bad Man's World" and "Trying My Best to Love You" resume Blacklight's fetish for girl-group and early soul (with the former, to its credit, boasting a delectable bassline).
Perhaps it sounds like I'm being too hard on Lewis, and it's true that in most other hands such simulacrums would likely be more forgivable. The difference with Lewis is that she's already displayed a distinct, undeniably compelling artistry that's mostly been given short shrift here. Her solo debut, 2006's Rabbit Fur Coat, was a rambling, intensely personal document of sexual and spiritual confusion that frequently conflated and commingled the twin urges in fascinating ways. Constant soul-baring isn't necessarily a healthy tactic for any songwriter, yet aside from the self-excoriating title track (the record's clear highlight, swiping the indie-gospel vibe that helped make RFC so indelible) and the early-Rilo-evoking "Godspeed", the majority of Acid Tongue lacks Lewis' singularly bracing, unabashed stamp. That's not to say she doesn't cut loose with aplomb on the blistering, eight-minute country-rock medley, "The Next Messiah" or raise a few goosebumps with the gently lilting "Sing a Song for Them". The first minute or so of the shit-kicking "Carpetbaggers" is pretty thrilling, too, at least until Elvis Costello shows up to wheeze all over everything.
The point isn't that Lewis needs to stick to dirty jokes and jaunty twang (though country seems her natural milieu). There's more than enough likeable, listenable material on Acid Tongue, yet the effect is nonetheless equivalent to Tiger Woods trying to conquer the mini-golf circuit. In these straitjacketed settings, Lewis' considerable strengths as a lyricist and performer just aren't given sufficient room to fully emerge. | 2008-09-24T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2008-09-24T02:00:01.000-04:00 | Rock | WEA / Warner Bros. | September 24, 2008 | 6 | d31f4988-a816-4854-be32-7b73ab71d2e0 | Joshua Love | https://pitchfork.com/staff/joshua-love/ | null |
Coming on the heels of two stellar 2020 albums, one of the best new voices in underground hip-hop sounds a little looser and lighter, but still keeps his raps bracingly personal. | Coming on the heels of two stellar 2020 albums, one of the best new voices in underground hip-hop sounds a little looser and lighter, but still keeps his raps bracingly personal. | Navy Blue: Navy’s Reprise | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/navy-blue-navys-reprise/ | Navy’s Reprise | Before sharing a pair of soul-bearing 2020 albums that established him as a new scion of cerebral, lo-fi hip-hop, Navy Blue released a lot of music that very few people heard. Most of it was tucked away on an anonymous SoundCloud account, or on projects that played like demos and beat tapes, rough drafts fishing for completed thoughts. Two years after revealing his identity, some listeners are still surprised to learn that the man behind those projects is Sage Elsesser, an accomplished skateboarder and a model for skatewear brands like Supreme (although Elsesser’s proximity to Odd Future and his credits on Frank Ocean’s Blonde might have been giveaways that he had musical ambitions).
Perhaps Elsesser was just waiting until he honed his craft to go public. If his early tapes were solid, 2020’s Àdá Irin and Song of Sage: Post Panic! were frequently brilliant, fine-tuned with a poet’s precision and an arthouse director’s control of mood. Yet if he’s looking to capitalize on the acclaim those projects earned him with his third album, Navy’s Reprise, he sure isn’t showing it. Surprise released with a bare minimum of promotion on his social channels, the album is, for the time being, available only as a digital download on his website for $20—hardly an egregious sum, and a good $10-$20 cheaper than some Roc Marciano digital albums will run you, yet still an uncommon barrier to entry for music in today’s economy.
What most separated Navy Blue’s 2020 albums from his SoundCloud loosies—as well as his many peers making similarly underground hip-hop—was Elsesser’s intensely autobiographical focus. Those same themes of trauma, resilience, and recovery carry through Navy’s Reprise. “This is personal” he repeats over the sampled fanfare of the opener “Light.” Elsesser is most moving when he testifies to the power of familial bonds and ancestral ties, and he slips those sentiments everywhere. Most of these songs include tributes to his mom, dad, and sisters, as well as the literal and figurative brothers who shaped him. On “Timberwolves” he’s recharged by a visit to his grandma, who tells him he has his grandfather’s eyes.
Elsesser is seldom showy—like most lyricists in the loops-and-rhymes lane of rap, he works from a spartan palette of cadences—yet his voice can reveal meaningful tells. When he looks back at his childhood on “Peach Cobbler,” his flow is hued with an almost Mac Miller-esque boyishness. When he recalls an ambiguous family tragedy on “HGTV,” it aches, like he’s physically reliving the experience. “My laugh sermon/My past murdered/My back hurtin’,” he raps.
Navy’s Reprise is a touch more down the middle than its predecessors, the pain still present but less front and center, the production less askew. Here, his producers fillet their shag-carpet soul samples down to just the choice cuts, with fewer of the off-kilter crops that lent a nervy edge to Àdá Irin and Song of Sage. Yet if Navy’s Reprise lacks some of the heft and invention of those albums—if it feels less like a statement and more like, in the words of his collaborator and former roommate Earl Sweatshirt, some rap songs—it isn’t to the music’s detriment. The lighter mood frees Elsesser for shit-kicking bars like, “They can’t even swim around the moat, toss ’em in Dawson’s Creek/All these white teens suck, I don't know defeat, I know growth,” along with copious jovial references to food and athletes. Àdá Irin and Song of Sage stood out for their loftiness, but the world needs projects like this, too, well-rounded rap albums that acknowledge trauma without being defined by it.
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-06-02T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2021-06-02T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Freedom Sounds | June 2, 2021 | 7.9 | d3239c71-83ae-48cf-a373-b301444462a8 | Evan Rytlewski | https://pitchfork.com/staff/evan-rytlewski/ | |
The Berlin-based duo of Errorsmith and Fiedel push toward the extreme lower limits of danceability on a debut LP that’s stranger, woozier, and slower than anything they’ve made before. | The Berlin-based duo of Errorsmith and Fiedel push toward the extreme lower limits of danceability on a debut LP that’s stranger, woozier, and slower than anything they’ve made before. | MMM: On the Edge | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/mmm-on-the-edge/ | On the Edge | For a quarter century, Berlin’s MMM have crafted rave anthems of unusually potent caliber. The duo of Errorsmith and Berghain resident Fiedel, MMM aren’t terribly prolific. Since their debut, in 1996, they’ve released just seven 12"s, all on their eponymous label, along with one half of an unusual split LP with German noise-rockers Surrogat and a handful of remixes. But their scant output is the fruit of dogged focus; each of their records feels carefully designed to make dancefloors go absolutely apeshit, using as few elements as possible.
Early on, MMM developed a knack for songs that not only move your body but practically pierce your skull. The 1997 anthem “Donna” and 2010’s “Nous Sommes MMM” brandish frequencies that whir like trepanning drills, steadily increasing in pressure over whip-cracking electro drums. In recent years, their music has grown even more unhinged, pushing energy levels into the red or stripping lysergic minimalism down to splintered bone. But On the Edge, their debut LP, represents a radical reversal. Gone are the seasick pitch-shifting, the blistering distortion, the bruising kick drum. In place of MMM’s usual white-knuckled intensity, the duo explores a vibe that’s stranger, woozier, and slower, shifting their attention from far-out psychedelia to the extreme lower limits of danceability.
The album begins in relatively upbeat territory: “Where to Go” is its most energetic track, coursing along upwards of 130 BPM. Yet it also displays a lightness of touch—a level of rhythmic and textural refinement—that feels new to their work. Though nominally four-to-the-floor, the kick drum falls only on the first and third beats of each bar, giving the rhythm a springy, moon-walking cadence; soft, syncopated chords suggest a reggae band covering Raymond Scott’s Soothing Sounds for Baby, while squirrelly little drum-machine fills add to the lighthearted air.
If you’re not paying attention, you might not even realize that what follows, “Everything Falls Into Place,” is a new song. It’s essentially a dub version of the opening track made with little more than glancing echoes of its glowing chords, the anti-matter to its matter. An overwhelming emptiness also defines the third track, “On the Edge,” which colors in the faintest percussive outline—skipping hi-hat, steady kick drum, occasional clap—with the dubbed-out ghost of a single chord. The equally vacuumed-out fourth track, “No Thought,” underscores the nothingness at the heart of the album.
The remaining tracks proceed like a balloon that’s steadily leaking air: Each one is a little bit slower and more enervated than the one before. “The Interview” deploys scraping cello—shades of Mica Levi—over staggering kick drum and clattering spring reverb. (“Everybody gets, you know, chills,” intones an unidentified woman, neatly summing up the effect. “When I don’t get those chills, I am very disappointed, and I just want to cry.”) “Farsta Dream” twists a mournful vocal melody over wraithlike chords; “When Does Ghosting End” collapses into a languid groove reminiscent of Andy Stott at his most soporific. By the end, with “So Nigh,” there’s nothing left but an eerily processed voice over lethargic kick drums, all of it soaked in the clammy reverb of a freeway underpass.
But for all the murk, these final tracks are never actually gloomy. Even with their boots stuck deep in the mud, MMM remain fundamentally playful, and even at its darkest, their music is distinguished by its lightness of spirit. When MMM played Krakow’s Unsound Festival last month, their set skewed heavily toward On the Edge, but even way down in the double-digit BPMs, they kept the peak-time crowd engaged. The low end was voluminous and enveloping; their trademark hi-hats were sharp as scalpels. It was a good reminder of the risks that dance music can take. MMM have proven time and again that they’re masters of the full-on; with On the Edge, they show that emptied out can be just as satisfying.
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-11-16T00:00:00.000-05:00 | 2021-11-16T00:00:00.000-05:00 | Electronic | self-released | November 16, 2021 | 7.4 | d3263e91-a4b9-47ed-af95-0533a86d67e1 | Philip Sherburne | https://pitchfork.com/staff/philip-sherburne/ | |
With a focus on guitar-centric pop-rock, Posty’s latest record is a passion project that feels overstuffed and undercooked. | With a focus on guitar-centric pop-rock, Posty’s latest record is a passion project that feels overstuffed and undercooked. | Post Malone: AUSTIN | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/post-malone-austin/ | AUSTIN | AUSTIN has to be Post Malone’s guitar album, if only because, as he proudly noted, he plays guitar on every track. He’s no stranger to the instrument of course, and he has dialed down the trap-pop dial and replaced it with various speeds of six-string pop-rock. He’s still drinking too much, still smoking like an oil fire. But the most interesting thing about Post Malone’s fifth album is how his vices have changed from rote signifiers to features of his mental landscape. His chauffeur’s doing tequila shots, so Post takes a cab home. He pukes in someone’s bathroom, then pauses to admire the tiling. His relationships are co-dependent, but at least he’s got company. Propulsive lead single “Chemical” tints its bad romance with a yearning three-note bass figure. “Outside of the party, smokin’ in the car with you/‘Seven Nation Army,’ fightin’ at the bar with you,” he sings, cherishing every tainted memory. “Sign Me Up” is the same situation with a New Romantic spin. “If your love is a cult/Then I’m in it,” Post shrugs, skipping past all the red flags until he comes upon his one true dealbreaker: when she tries to take his liquor away.
While his guitar album is decidedly not a country album, the tenderness with which he regards whatever bottle’s at hand is certainly the most country thing about it. “2 a.m. they ran out of lemonade,” he croons on “Enough Is Enough,” splitting the difference between Morgan Wallen and Warren Zevon, “So I shot that vodka straight anyway.” The combination of electric piano and acoustic strum conjures the illusion of a banjo. But when the drums come in it’s pure Antonoff homage. On the boom-clap ballad “Landmine,” Post swings from the heels like fun.’s Nate Ruess. In the lyrics, Post’s self-conscious about ripping cigs while his friends are taking supplements; he ostentatiously breaks out a pack to see if it catches anyone’s interest. The track has some poignant bits for any partier approaching (or careening through) their thirties. But more importantly: It has a bridge.
For some reason—fear of boring his fans, obedience to the preferences of the streaming services, a career focused on club bangers—Malone won’t let these songs breathe. The result is an album that’s overstuffed and undercooked, no matter what he and co-producers Louis Bell and Andrew Watt try. The balearic boogie of “Speedometer” is lovely, but too brief to enter a dream state. The chamber-folk “Green Thumb” may be the most creatively ambitious thing Malone’s attempted, just him and a guitar and a whole chorus conversing with an ex’s dying plant. He’s clearly proud of it: In his Zane Lowe interview, he talked at length—Martin acoustic at hand—about the challenge of writing and performing the song. Yet it’s built like it’s something to quickly usher offstage. It’s over faster than you can return from the beer line.
But when he does dip into pop-rap, the results are as richly weird as Post at his best. He chases the Nirvana Unplugged vibes of opener “Don’t Understand” with “Something Real,” a doomy, choir-backed lurch through luxury. He stomps from foreign island to foreign island, popping mushrooms and strapping skeleton watches on like armor. In the album’s most audacious moment, he croons, “I could play that pussy like it’s Für Elise,” twisting the melody until it becomes Beethoven’s. He’s firmly in his bagatelle. This is Post at his strongest: audaciously raiding the entire pop toolkit. Even after forsaking Los Angeles for Utah, his life remains a movie: loaded with state-of-the-industry pyrotechnics, bristling with guns, and littered with synergistic product tie-ins. It makes AUSTIN, in directorial terms, a one-for-me situation: a passion project secured with almost a decade at the summit of pop-rap as collateral. | 2023-08-01T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2023-08-01T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Mercury / Republic | August 1, 2023 | 5.5 | d32e21f6-3c27-43da-af82-68db4bc19a47 | Brad Shoup | https://pitchfork.com/staff/brad-shoup/ | |
Benny Hester is considered one of the pioneers of the Contemporary Christian Music movement, and he has written many of the genre's standards. But in the early '60s and '70s, he made a lovely, strange, and sincere baroque psych-pop record with Elvis' backing band, which has just been reissued. | Benny Hester is considered one of the pioneers of the Contemporary Christian Music movement, and he has written many of the genre's standards. But in the early '60s and '70s, he made a lovely, strange, and sincere baroque psych-pop record with Elvis' backing band, which has just been reissued. | Benny Hester: Benny... | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21564-benny-hester-benny/ | Benny... | It might be hard to imagine now, but there was a time when "Christian rock" was an oxymoron. It wasn’t until the advent of the Haight-Asbury-friendly "Jesus movement" in the late '60s that CCM (Contemporary Christian Music) became a staple in worship services. Before there were charts and public access programs full of it, the genre’s seeds were being planted by individual voices like Benny Hester’s, young singer/songwriters strumming guitars outside of makeshift chapels—Hester recalls first attending a "gigantic tent revival on [a] vacant lot." He and his peers remained enamored with both the psychedelic sounds of post-Beatles rock and the therapeutic possibilities of Christ.
Today, Hester is regarded as one of the CCM movement’s pioneers. He wrote many of the genre’s standards, and would go on to release the longest-running #1 on the Christian music charts in 1985. But a full decade earlier—when Hester got his first break as a solo artist—he was poised for a more uncertain career path, and on a potentially larger scale. Hester spent the late ‘60s and early ‘70s bumming around Las Vegas. He hawked jingles and helped out at soul recording sessions before an opportunity to record his songs arose. Miraculously, the most in-demand mercenary musicians in town were part of the deal. The result of Hester’s sessions with the "Taking Care (of) Business" band—famous for backing Elvis during this time—was Benny..., a modest collection of well-scrubbed baroque pop. At this time, Hester was forming his identity: The record is not fully secular, not explicitly the Word. It’s musical schematics are about as idiomatic for the time period as one can imagine: Opener "Give Your Love Forever" makes this immediately clear, mirroring the melody of Neil Young’s "Old Man," from that February’s Harvest. Later, the likenesses pile up more and more, from the precocious neo-classic pop of the Left Banke to pre-Rumours Lindsey Buckingham ("What’s Happened to My Friends”) to Chipmunk-ed Tumbleweed Connection-era Elton John ("The Painter").
Perhaps the album could have gotten some modest traction, if only in nu-Christian circles. But just after a literal handful of promos were sent out, the home of his label burned down, and Benny…’s masters along with it. Hester would make a proper debut in 1978, but he’s called the loss of his first, non-CCM record "the greatest disappointment that I’d ever had in my life." One wonders if the reason for the decades-long delay in the record’s release—remastered from errant vinyl copies—was more personal than practical. Now, 44 years later, Benny… sounds too odd in its delivery to imagine as anything other than a collector-championed footnote.
Its eccentric character comes from the tension between the naivete of Hester’s agile, high-tenor vocal—mired in his pronounced Southern drawl—and the TCB Band’s adept, chamber orchestra-enhanced arrangements. One can imagine what inchoate, less convincing solo acoustic demos might have sounded like, but guitarist James Burton and his cohort improve every song’s chances. One of the record’s most cloying compositions, "Love Never Dies," organizes around the Donovan-esque refrain of "Have you seen the people there/ They are speaking words of love/ From their souls." However, the song gains lustre from phantasmal string cushioning and a cascading, George Harrison-esque guitar solo.
Most of Benny…’s tracks are made more appealing by their sophisticated arrangements, though electric-piano-driven clodhopper "Malcombe," with its fidgety, Ren Faire aspect, is unsalvageable. A few songs feel like a musical triumph on every level, demonstrating Hester’s sensitive and detail-oriented ability with a melody. On tracks like highlight "No the End Is Not Near," beautifully voiced electric guitar and a lilting bassline highlight and complicate Hester’s simple strummed acoustic backdrop. The words are crammed awkwardly, avoiding rhymes that could have been pulled off with the help of a wilier co-lyricist. But without these kinks, Benny… would certainly lose some of its character.
There is a sadness listening back to Benny… knowing that it would be a false start rather than a fortuitous beginning. The singer/songwriter’s most famous work would merge deathly smooth, Kenny Loggins-esque funk with the sensibility of tragic-anthemic rock opera, articulating more somber Christian messages and narratives. Much of this music demonstrates a sharp pop prowess, but the sunnier, more pantheistic Benny… stands in contrast to it both lyrically and compositionally. It’s the charmingly transparent work of a fledgling singer-songwriter realizing his first group of songs, which offers as utopian a vision of its decade as "I’d like to buy the world a Coke." A slight, necessary edge is provided by allusions toward a slightly unsettled sense of faith ("The Bridge"). "I believe I’m about to change…Please let this be so," he sings late in the album, with saucer-eyed earnesty. Hester was indeed on the cusp of a change and a new becoming, but it was to be much more hard-won than he imagined. | 2016-02-17T01:00:04.000-05:00 | 2016-02-17T01:00:04.000-05:00 | Rock | Moraine Music Group | February 17, 2016 | 7.4 | d3363dcd-008b-4fc6-98dc-1b0e867161e9 | Winston Cook-Wilson | https://pitchfork.com/staff/winston-cook-wilson/ | null |
Luke Temple's new project finds him letting his psychedelic impulses take over, as he adds hazy electronic textures, loops, and extended bits of ambience and noise. | Luke Temple's new project finds him letting his psychedelic impulses take over, as he adds hazy electronic textures, loops, and extended bits of ambience and noise. | Here We Go Magic: Here We Go Magic | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/12724-here-we-go-magic/ | Here We Go Magic | Luke Temple's first foray into pseudonymical songwriting territory feels as current as did Snowbeast and Hold a Match for a Gasoline World , his prior two records released under his given name. But where those albums-- banjo-centric and cast with Temple's delicately high-pitched voice-- situated him firmly in the realm of borderline-precious indie folkies like Sufjan Stevens and Danielson, Here We Go Magic works with a different form of alchemy. Four-tracked and supposedly cut in "a two-month period of stream-of-consciousness recording," the album filters Temple's psychedelic muse through a much more muted palette: hazy electronic textures, endlessly-spiraling lyrical loops, occasional forays into extended sections of ambience and noise. The title itself indicates that Here We Go Magic might just be a spur-of-the-moment lark between more polished works, but its best points suggest we should only encourage Temple to mess around more in his off-time.
The old-timey waltz "Everything's Big" closes Magic as both a reminder of the first two records and a neat index of the prevailing themes of the current effort: winsome, romantic philosophizing distilled to its very essence, with Temple agape, staring down the immensity of his existence. Opener "Only Pieces" has Temple singing a mantra about mortality awareness ("What's the use in dyin', dyin', if I don't know when?") in a lo-fi wash of xylophone, clip-clopping percussion, and acoustic guitar. If it sounds like a field recording of a ca. 1971 Paul Simon acid trip, it's as much kismet as intent: Temple's vocals throughout the album are cast with a sense of boyish wonder that suggests Simon, but that's only because it's how a lot of young guys sound when they're confronting the enormity of the Big Questions.
The gentle abruptness of "Only Pieces"' conclusion-- it just quietly fades away-- is indicative of Magic on the whole: we don't get proper endings, but brief interruptions in what seem like transmissions straight from Temple's unconscious. The best bits of Magic are, like "Pieces", wispy and repetitive, emerging fully formed, drifting about for a bit, then disappearing. On "I Just Want to See You Underwater", Temple blanches his voice to Perry Farrell territory, and cycles through that phrase alone, mantra-like, as if it matters not to him that anyone actually hears it. All of "Tunnelvision"s woozy vigor is also contained in Temple's undulating vocals, which glide effortlessly between notes over a backing of hiccupping guitars and the comforting sound of drumsticks on a guitar case. The result is a bedroom-folk "Knives Out", which is a good thing. "Fangela", the best and most fully realized track, is where clip-clopping percussion and handclaps share space with glimmering synth flecks, over which Temple's voice offers sympathetic counsel. Only swatches of the lyrics are intelligible ("Look at me," "Feast your eyes," "All is yours") but that's part of the enchantment of magic: A fleeting glimpse of something that might have been transcendent, leaving our minds to fill in what we didn't quite see.
By definition, interior monologues are self-indulgent, and entrancing as it can be at its peaks, 11 minutes of Magic's brief 38 are taken with that trendiest of current indie tropes, the ambient/noise interstitial. Deerhunter, No Age, and Women have all found different ways to let the hiss take over, but Temple doesn't seem to have the same innate knack for this stuff (maybe I'm being too idealistic, but Temple seems too good-natured to simply broadcast white noise), and those moments combine to drag the album down a bit. More specifically, those bits suffer in comparison to those other 27 minutes of Magic: a sculpted version of that same disarming din, with a compassionate interpreter telling us what we're seeing. | 2009-03-02T01:00:02.000-05:00 | 2009-03-02T01:00:02.000-05:00 | Rock | Western Vinyl | March 2, 2009 | 7.4 | d344a82a-8f7c-45f1-8441-9ccbf04e730a | Eric Harvey | https://pitchfork.com/staff/eric-harvey/ | null |
Layering spoken interviews about the experience of disability with pulsing minimalist fugues, Perspective is a powerful work of love and empathy that underscores the poison of ableism in American culture. | Layering spoken interviews about the experience of disability with pulsing minimalist fugues, Perspective is a powerful work of love and empathy that underscores the poison of ableism in American culture. | Molly Joyce: Perspective | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/molly-joyce-perspective/ | Perspective | Five decades after Judith Heumann sued the New York Board of Education to become the state’s first teacher to use a wheelchair, the esteemed disability rights advocate asked Molly Joyce why she referred to her left arm as “weak.” Joyce, a 30-year-old composer and teacher, has always made disability a central subject of her work, drawing on her own experience with a childhood car accident that left severe, permanent nerve damage. With the Magnus chord organ, a toy produced in the 1960s and ’70s, Joyce found an instrument naturally suited to her body, allowing her to use both hands freely without any further adaptations.
Prompted by Heumann to reconsider strength, weakness, and other supposed dichotomies, Joyce began interviewing others about their inner lives and experiences with disability. She assembled them into Perspective, a multimedia program that Joyce has presented as a dance collaboration, a music performance, and an audiovisual installation. Now in album form, Perspective is a powerful work of love and empathy that underscores the poison of ableism in American culture.
Joyce probed questions about her body and belonging on 2020’s Breaking and Entering, but in expanding her focus, she exposes realities that simply never register to many able-bodied people. Joyce sorts Perspective’s dozen pieces by subject, beginning with a spoken question: “What is access for you?” Layered amid rich, buoyant chords and pulsing arpeggios, Joyce’s interviewees do not identify themselves or their disabilities; her interlocutors are free-floating entities whose primary accounts are edifying and vulnerable. Joyce favors a pluralistic approach, collecting insights from a varied array of experiences, among them musician JJJJJerome Ellis, accessibility AR entrepreneur David Furakawa, and activist Alice Wong, who founded the Disability Visibility Project. From “Access,” Joyce moves into interrogations of weakness, interdependence, agency, and autonomy. She balances a high two-note oscillation against airy vocals in “Care,” where speakers reflect on their needs and how to meet them.
Perspective highlights the marginalization that those with disabilities experience while also gesturing toward the financial and logistical impediments that impose a brutally low ceiling on the “independence” they can achieve. (In the United States, for example, most people who receive disability payments may not keep more than $2,000 in personal cash savings.) Against that end, “Control” is a tense ride driven by a fast but surly synth line, a derisive laugh relaying dark humor early on. The tone and candor of Joyce’s respondents bring extra color to their testimony: Their voices tighten in frustration and loosen in dismay. The album’s closing triad—“Isolation,” “Connection,” and “Darkness”—impresses a somber seal as interviewees discuss their feelings on loneliness, solitude, and community.
Against the restrictive ideals of an exclusionary dominant culture, Perspective refuses to treat disability as deficiency—just as it refuses to treat minimalism as a purely formal or aesthetic exercise. “Maybe it isn’t you who is a failure,” Joyce suggests on “Resilience,” where others push back against patronizing assumptions. “Cure” further rejects prescriptive solutions, examining how a hardline focus on medical responses still equates disability with brokenness. Able-bodied understandings of disability are frequently fixated on themes of “overcoming” and “inspiration”—a condescending mix of myopic optimism, pity, and even fear. But just as Joyce found a newly unfettered self through the controls of her keyboard, she uses her compositions to aid others in finding relief from the maladaptive mainstream’s unrelenting demands. She points her listeners toward a radically simple, if not entirely foregone conclusion: the idea that each person, regardless of their bodily differences, deserves to build their own comfortable and dignified life. | 2022-11-07T00:00:00.000-05:00 | 2022-11-07T00:00:00.000-05:00 | Experimental | New Amsterdam | November 7, 2022 | 7.8 | d344fc8c-efd0-4f56-8a85-7af9f843b4dc | Allison Hussey | https://pitchfork.com/staff/allison-hussey/ | |
The third volume of Light in the Attic’s ongoing survey of this largely notional movement puts a new twist on the idea of combining two seemingly incompatible genres in one unruly sound. | The third volume of Light in the Attic’s ongoing survey of this largely notional movement puts a new twist on the idea of combining two seemingly incompatible genres in one unruly sound. | Various Artists: Country Funk Volume III (1975-1982) | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/various-artists-country-funk-volume-iii-1975-1982/ | Country Funk Volume III (1975-1982) | One of the unsung qualities of Country Funk Vol. I and Country Funk Vol. II was their casual disregard for history. Documenting a scene that wasn’t really a scene and not even much of a movement, they traced a mere idea—hey, let’s combine country twang with funk rhythms!—across a couple dozen tracks from the late 1960s through the mid 1970s. Neither bothered to put the songs in chronological order; in fact, the two volumes themselves weren’t in order, with Vol. II covering a slightly earlier time frame (1967-1974) than Vol. I (1969-1975). Those spans didn’t even represent particularly salient mile markers; they were just the dates of the songs the producers wanted us to hear. They were more like mixtapes than reissues, which fit the gritty, sometimes funny, occasionally sexy, often bizarre music perfectly well.
Almost by necessity, this long-awaited third volume is a bit more aware of the past. It picks up roughly where the other two left off and follows that idea into the early 1980s. Still scrambling the timeline in its sequencing, the collection can’t help but track the changes that both country and funk but especially country-funk endured as one decade ended and the next began. Vol. III covers 1975 through 1982, a period that saw the end of outlaw country and Southern rock, the beginnings of yacht rock, the rise and fall of disco, the start of the Reagan era, and the arrival of new sounds and technologies in pop music, all of which affected the music collected on this new compilation.
So set aside your disappointment that Jess Rotter didn’t return to draw the cover; this set succeeds because it puts a twist on the whole idea of combining these two genres into one unruly sound. The yacht-country strains of Eddie Rabbitt’s “One and Only One,” with its breezy vocals, percolating rhythm section, and genius rhyme scheme (“Baby, you’ll always be my special… lady”), would have sounded jarring on the first two volumes, but it fits nicely within this wider array of sounds. Jerry Reed projects boundless hick charm on “Rhythm and Blues,” and Delbert McClinton goes cowboy noir on “Shot From the Saddle,” which gets its boogie from, of all things, an alto saxophone. The funkiest thing about Dolly Parton’s disco-adjacent “Sure Thing” is the way she sings that title, hoarsely drawing out the ur in sure with a wink and a nudge.
Some of these country artists, including Parton, used funk sounds as a springboard to cross over into the pop market, while others struggled to adapt. Tony Joe White was caught between the mainstream hitmaker he’d been in the late ’60s and the cult artist he’d eventually become, and “Alone at Last” (released here for the first time) shows why he was flailing commercially: That low voice still sounds compelling and weird in its phrasing and intonation, but it’s paired with a chintzy keyboard that is the very opposite of funky. (Side note: Is he actually singing, “The first time your ass touched mine, I knew we’d get together somehow”?) Ronnie Milsap, on the other hand, was on the cusp of crossing over to a pop audience when he cut “Get It Up” in 1979, sounding like a man so unhinged by lust that he mistakes the discotheque for a honkytonk.
Sex remains one of country funk’s favorite topics, and Vol. III tracks some changing attitudes about getting it on. There’s nothing here that’ll make you blush as scarlet as Bobbie Gentry’s “He Made a Woman Out of Me” did on Vol. I, but Rob Galbraith’s “I Got the Fever” comes awfully close, specifically the way he delivers the line, “You got me feeling so illegal.” And Terri Gibbs delivers a rags-to-riches story worthy of Joan Collins: On “Rich Man,” she plays a woman who uses her wiles to snare a wealthy husband and has fun doing it. Best of all, Gary & Sandy combine sex and sci-fi on “Gonna Let You Have It,” which is Gary, Sandy, a tight rhythm section, and a phalanx of laser blasters. Over a galloping melody, the duo equates shootouts with hookups, with Sandy turning even the most cliched lines into come-ons: “Gonna open fire… with sweet desire.”
It may be obvious by now that the best moments here are the most outrageous, the ones that lead country music way out into some deeply weird pastures. And none get weirder than Billy Swan’s 1977 not-a-hit “Oliver Swan,” which opens as a character sketch about a town drunk who “smelled like a dead skunk.” Despite that supremely infectious organ lick and shuffling drumbeat, it plays like one of those somber Southern slice-of-life songs, similar to Mac Davis’ “Lucas Was a Redneck,” from Vol. I. Then it takes a truly strange turn: “Then one night a saucer flew down from the sky, full of another world’s women saying, ‘We need us a guy!’” They abduct him, hold intergalactic orgies, and repopulate their planet, and Billy Swan wraps it up by describing a “bunch of little green Oliver Swans.” There’s a mischievous edge to his delivery, as though he can barely suppress a laugh. It’s the beautifully ridiculous centerpiece of this collection.
Even at its most absurd, there’s a tinge of sadness to Vol. III, as though the artists and the compilers understand that something is coming to an end. The ’80s weren’t necessarily kind to country funk, as many of these artists aged out of the mainstream and were replaced first by Nashville neo-traditionalists who viewed innovation with suspicion and later by hat acts more interested in rock than funk. A theoretical Vol. IV could dive deep underground, although half the fun of these weird compilations is knowing that these artists and sounds had infiltrated the mainstream to some degree. Or it could simply backtrack and see what was happening from 1974 through 1981. Until then, Dennis Linde’s frantically upbeat “Down to the Station” serves as a fitting send-off to this unlikely marriage of two seemingly incompatible styles. “Feeling fine at the station, I ain’t even gonna look back,” sings the man who wrote both “Burning Love” and “Goodbye Earl.” “I ain’t worried about tomorrow, it ain’t here and I ain’t there.”
Buy: Rough Trade
(Pitchfork earns a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.)
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-08-07T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2021-08-07T00:00:00.000-04:00 | null | Light in the Attic | August 7, 2021 | 7.5 | d347ee33-97e0-440d-87d9-5022c1180b9e | Stephen M. Deusner | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stephen-m. deusner/ | |
Stas offers a sharp solo debut doused heartbreak, identity, and the familiar production touches of her former futurist rap and R&B duo THEEsatisfaction. | Stas offers a sharp solo debut doused heartbreak, identity, and the familiar production touches of her former futurist rap and R&B duo THEEsatisfaction. | Stas THEE Boss: S’WOMEN | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/stas-thee-boss-swomen/ | S’WOMEN | Stas THEE Boss, best known as one-half of the futurist rap and R&B duo THEESatisfaction, bops through a string of breakups on her self-released solo album S’WOMEN. Pronounced “swimming,” and billed as “an aquatic explanation of failed female companionships,” the 11-track project is a meditation on Stas’ knack for falling out of love that follows her 2014 Stas For Hire instrumental EP. S’WOMEN is buoyed by nostalgic sample selection, Stas’ post-Digable flow, and a collection of innuendos that deliver bravado and honesty with ease. The project’s narrative, however, is disrupted by frequent returns to the well where she pulls from the deep black aesthetic that defined THEESatisfaction, whose 2012 debut awE naturalE and 2015 follow-up EarthEE positioned the duo as the feminist star children of Missy Elliott, Erykah Badu, and Audre Lorde. Though infrequent, the places where S’WOMEN falters ultimately become a testament to Stas THEE Boss’ growth, which remains imminent but incomplete.
S’WOMEN is the fruit of three failed relationships in as many years. At points cold and cocky, at points vulnerable and introspective, the project is a meditation on getting it wrong. Stas doesn’t consult the “please baby, please” handbook of R&B to secure a do-over, she gets things off of her chest like they’re extended riffs on angsty text message threads. Though Stas obviously grapples with disappointment, she is also resigned to diplomacy—the odd ways that it can fill the divide between estranged lovers.
Vocal distortion, playful harmonies, and rich basslines mingle with cheeky samples that show her love for bogle-ready basement party anthems. Stas speaks with impressive fluency through the music that has spoken to her through her life, like an encyclopedic recall of the jams of her youth. She checks another girl for being an opportunist over a mesmerizing sample of Nina Simone’s “Don’t Smoke In Bed” on “Solo.” Echoing Simone’s sentiments, she fashions curses into salty pleasantries on the clear star of the album. “Bummer” sports a flip of Wreckx-N-Effects’ “Rump Shaker.” “Before Anyone Else” and “Melt” are derived from Missy Elliott’s Supa Dupa Fly standout “Beep Me 911,” and Erykah Badu’s “Other Side of the Game,” respectively. The latter is propelled by Stas’ search for a suitable partner, which comes with a warning that her bite is much worse than her bars; “You been waiting from the get go/[...]Scary at my best so you should never let your fret go.”
Deviating from her infatuation with the otherworldly, S’WOMEN eventually brings Stas back down to earth to navigate her feelings. But the way she crowds the production makes it difficult for the heart of these songs to be made plain. She plunges into familiar territory with references to the black cool and ancestral memory that girded THEESatisfaction’s catalog. “Melt,” “Gon Phishing,” and “Diamond Doris”—a cool nod to notorious jewel thief Doris Payne—suffer when Stas acts upon the urge to reiterate, despite her dating woes, how authentically black she is. Like her talent, her identity is never in question. Her measurable growth, however, is. While Stas is consistent across S’WOMEN, it is not clear that she makes a sustained effort to ditch her comfort zone. Transformation was not the stated purpose of the project, but a bit of sonic bravery and tighter storytelling would have made the final mix that much more refreshing. | 2017-08-09T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-08-09T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | self-released | August 9, 2017 | 6.7 | d34eb6fd-f253-496a-b504-b9a876284af8 | Karas Lamb | https://pitchfork.com/staff/karas-lamb/ | null |
Barcelona’s John Talabot and Stockholm’s Axel Boman work in tandem to bring house music off the floor and into the air with an invigorating and meditative mix of compositions. | Barcelona’s John Talabot and Stockholm’s Axel Boman work in tandem to bring house music off the floor and into the air with an invigorating and meditative mix of compositions. | Talaboman: The Night Land | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22991-the-night-land/ | The Night Land | Making electronic music is often a solitary endeavor, and sometimes, after enough lonely all-nighters in the studio, its practitioners find themselves craving company. The annals of electronica are peppered with what we might call “superduos,” pairings where both members first made their names as solo artists. Sometimes these are one-offs, like Mike & Rich (the early-’90s collaboration between µ-Ziq and Aphex Twin) and Supermayer (Superpitcher and Michael Mayer). Sometimes, the new projects become so influential that they threaten to eclipse their members’ solo careers, as briefly happened with TNGHT (Hudson Mohawke and Lunice). Sometimes, these outings give their members an opportunity to veer outside their usual lanes, like househeads Motor City Drum Ensemble and Marcus Worgull dabbling in kosmische music as Vermont. More often, they find their participants doubling down on shared traits, like Mumdance and Logos collectively engineering an ultra-reduced, hyper-abstracted form of grime, or Marcel Dettmann and Ben Klock cutting all the meat off techno’s bones.
Talaboman are Barcelona’s John Talabot and Stockholm’s Axel Boman, and the goofy portmanteau is strangely fitting. The crosshatched part of the Venn diagram connecting the two artists is actually relatively slim. Both musicians make a kind of house music, both are disco fans, and both are given to bright-eyed reveries (compare Talabot’s “Destiny” or “So Will Be Now…” with Boman’s “1979” or “In the Dust of This Planet”). But that’s about it. If the tattooed Boman sometimes comes across as the wily class clown, Talabot is the sensitive kid in the corner, distracted by his colors and his books. Together, though, something interesting happens. Their collective output doesn’t sound much like either’s work; it doesn’t even necessarily reflect the thin, convex sliver where their interests overlap. Instead, they’ve hit upon something new.
The album’s long, slowly evolving tracks tend to be more mood pieces than club jams, defined less by their beats than by the rounded contours of their synthesizer patches. Album opener “Midnattssol” (Swedish for “Midnight Sun”) is a scrap of Balearic cosmic disco replete with rain sticks and birdcalls, and it sets a tone midway between ritual and celebration, private contemplation and collective abandon. Half the set hovers around that languid pace. “Safe Changes,” an emotional highlight, toys with a Kraftwerkian melody and bubbling dub delay over a measured andante drumbeat; “Six Million Ways,” a hair faster, teases a slinky arpeggio out of a murky, slow-motion house groove. The album’s other highlight is “Brutal Chugga-Chugga.” As a pitter-pat CR-78 rhythm percolates beneath the keys, their synths gradually stiffen and sharpen; the Knife’s Silent Shout briefly comes to mind, and the sound of thunder occasionally peals across the background.
The musicians have said that embarking upon the project gave them license to buy scads of hardware; fortunately, unlike most kids with new toys, a remarkable air of restraint prevails. All that extra room paves the way for some wild acousmatic effects: Listening through decent headphones, the steady backbeat thump of “Dins El Llit” (Catalan for “In Bed”) sounds for all the world like it’s situated somewhere in the physical world, just outside the room you’re sitting in. It’s disorienting and damn near magical.
The other half of the album kicks along closer to house music’s usual pulse. “Samsa” is the album’s clubbiest selection, and—perhaps not coincidentally—its least compelling, flogging dubby organ chords and bass squelch over tambourine backbeats for nearly 11 minutes. Along the way, they flirt with a tremolo synth lead that's strikingly reminiscent of Carl Craig’s classic “Falling Up” remix, and while the extended climax might help explain why they stretch out the way they do, they could have managed just as much drama in half the time. “The Ghosts Hood” is more successful, wrapping a cowbell-heavy groove in burbling electronics and periodically unleashing quiet but expressive bursts of reverb. It's small tweaks like these, which subtly but decisively move the energy forward, that reveal the deftness of their touch. On “Loser’s Hymn” and the closing “Dins El Llit,” they keep the pace brisk but downplay the drums, and the results, a kind of dance music with its head in the clouds, are both invigorating and meditative—like the album itself. | 2017-03-22T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-03-22T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | R&S | March 22, 2017 | 7.6 | d3543b20-80ff-4eba-b444-e7de9fc8bd6a | Philip Sherburne | https://pitchfork.com/staff/philip-sherburne/ | null |
Members of Orthrelm and Behold...The Arctopus come together for a project that combines the hyper-technical "calculator metal" of their other projects with dreamy textural meditations. | Members of Orthrelm and Behold...The Arctopus come together for a project that combines the hyper-technical "calculator metal" of their other projects with dreamy textural meditations. | Krallice: Krallice | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/12250-krallice/ | Krallice | "I'd love to be a nature band, but unfortunately we live in New York." So said guitarist/vocalist Mick Barr in Pitchfork's interview with Krallice, his black metal band with Colin Marston and Lev Weinstein. He was referring to black metal's typical obsession with nature, given its origins in Scandinavia's rugged landscape. But Krallice is a nature band. It's just that New York's "nature" is concrete, glass, numbers, and dollars. Barr's and Marston's main gigs are Orthrelm and Behold...The Arctopus, respectively, two bands that showcase mind-boggling technicality. Their "calculator metal" aspect colors Krallice, which is precise, neurotic, yet powerful-- just like mathematician Maximillian Cohen, protagonist of Pi, Darren Aronofsky's Kabbalah/math thriller set in New York. "For fuck's sake, how does a Jew end up listening to Burzum?" Weinstein rhetorically asked. Easy: Cohen would have jammed hard on Krallice.
From their first note, it's obvious how unlike most other black metal they are. Barr's agonized yell isn't the usual witchy screech. The guitar tone nods to black metal's trebly buzz, but it also has rich midrange. Instead of paper-thin walls of cymbals, these drums have heft, blessed by a naturalistic analog recording. No Satanism, Odinism, or nationalism here-- a few mysterious phrases replace printed lyrics: "Solar winds breed laceration"; "The lesser gods have taken their withered placement back from man." Most saliently, the guitar work isn't the typical minor chord that's moved up and down. These are complex, abstract lines, often spinning away from each other in counterpoint. In "Cnestorial", guitars cross at skewed angles, cutting the tonality loose in an indeterminate key. Eventually, dreamy sheets of Rothko-esque chords envelop the tune. "Timehusk" flutters with free jazz skronk, then resolves into straight-ahead thrash. "Forgiveness in Rot" weaves lines picked at light speed with curtain-like chords that billow open and shut. It's ambient music at 200 bpm.
The tremolo picking and blastbeats are unmistakably black metal, but this record otherwise relocates the Norwegian art form to Mars. Two American precedents do exist for Krallice: Weakling and Wolves in the Throne Room. Weakling were more emotional, and Wolves in the Throne Room are more lush, but both have stretched what essentially began as Satanic punk rock into 10-minute textural meditations. Krallice have now added math to the equation. The results are hard to grasp, but strangely addictive. Krallice would have made a marvelous soundtrack to Pi. | 2008-10-14T02:00:03.000-04:00 | 2008-10-14T02:00:03.000-04:00 | Metal | Profound Lore | October 14, 2008 | 7.8 | d35a1763-13d1-4888-9afc-190e451a66a2 | Cosmo Lee | https://pitchfork.com/staff/cosmo-lee/ | null |
Born in 1931, the Russian composer Mikael Tariverdiev scored more than 130 Russian films in his lifetime. The box set Film Music is his first introduction to the West, and it is all the more compelling for arriving with its mystery intact. | Born in 1931, the Russian composer Mikael Tariverdiev scored more than 130 Russian films in his lifetime. The box set Film Music is his first introduction to the West, and it is all the more compelling for arriving with its mystery intact. | Mikael Tariverdiev: Film Music | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21385-film-music/ | Film Music | Film Music arrives in the West with little in the way of context. Without any context, actually, beyond the basic information provided on the sticker that adorns the front of the set. Born in 1931, Mikael Tariverdiev became hugely popular in his home country of Russia. In addition to ballets, suites, concertos, and even operas, he scored more than 130 Russian films from the 1950s until his death in 1996, most of them directed by Mikhail Kalik. Goodbye, Boys!, from 1964, is arguably their most famous collaboration, but none of the films represented on Film Music are available in the United States at this time.
Gathering mostly instrumental excerpts and miniature suites on 3 LPs, Film Music is his first comprehensive release in the West, essentially introducing him to half the world, which makes it a major collection, albeit a puzzling one. Soundtracks are a curious musical format, by nature secondary to the visuals they’re meant to accompany; in execution the music ought to work subliminally, becoming part of the fabric of the film itself, not unlike set design, wardrobe, or blocking.
Listening to Film Music without having seen the films, in other words, can be an odd, unsettled experience. You have no idea what Tariverdiev might be reacting to, what he might be trying to achieve, how he might be using musical cues to complement visuals. Nor do you have any of his previous works to provide a clearer portrait of the composer. So we are left with music that is presented in a setting for which it perhaps was never intended. And yet, it is to Tariverdiev’s immense credit that the music sounds so evocative, so immediate, so transporting even without its visual anchor. Rather than forbidding, Film Music is immersive: a box set to get lost in.
These excerpts sound simultaneously simple and complex, austere and lush, straightforward and elusive, adventurous and modest. Typically Tariverdiev spotlights only one or two instruments at a time, usually with minimal backing: A piano daydreams at a sidewalk café on "Prelude for Ket," the spare percussion suggesting the clink of silverware and the chatter of passersby. A robust and red-faced saxophone bursts into "The Last Romantic" to deliver a pining solo that sounds like a eulogy. The tracklist has an easy, unforced range that covers humble piano suites, knockabout American jazz, pliant folk, rambunctious klezmer, erotic chanson. This is specific, even programmatic music, allowing you to infer character, setting, and even story.
Tariverdiev’s eclecticism allows these songs to exist apart from the films that inspired them and to speak to Western audiences. In fact, Film Music gives you a strong, yet fleeting impression of Russian cinema during the latter half of the 20th century. You would imagine any film accompanying this music would balance whimsy and melancholy, humor and tragedy, naturalism and fantasy, hope regarding the future and nostalgia for the past. For Tariverdiev, the thing itself—whether a musical instrument, an artistic tradition, or a political idea—is much less important than how it interacts with other things. That may be the guiding theme of Film Music, which is all the more evocative for arriving with so much of its compelling mystery intact. | 2016-01-07T01:00:04.000-05:00 | 2016-01-07T01:00:04.000-05:00 | Global | Earth | January 7, 2016 | 8 | d35eb040-a6ae-4b0d-9152-1247a8c41356 | Stephen M. Deusner | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stephen-m. deusner/ | null |
Law & Order-- the solo debut from Foxygen's Jonathan Rado-- suggests Rado is fully prepared to make Foxygen records on his own. The collection sketches out a homemade grab-bag of jams and rough-cut gems devoted to monolithic 60s rock sounds. | Law & Order-- the solo debut from Foxygen's Jonathan Rado-- suggests Rado is fully prepared to make Foxygen records on his own. The collection sketches out a homemade grab-bag of jams and rough-cut gems devoted to monolithic 60s rock sounds. | Jonathan Rado: Law and Order | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/18436-jonathan-rado-law-and-order/ | Law and Order | Foxygen’s devotion to 60s rock knows no bounds. Along with adopting all of those paisley clothes and groovy organ sounds, the polarizing psych-pop duo even conforms to the era’s compressed sense of time. Similar to how the Beatles and the Rolling Stones released new albums every six months, and went through full-scale musical transformations pretty much every other year, Foxygen has already endured a career’s worth of ups and downs since the release of 2012’s Take the Kids Off Broadway EP. There was the acclaimed full-length debut We Are the 21st Century Ambassadors of Peace & Magic, a series of tumultuous tours, rumors of intra-band strife, a wacky appearance at the Pitchfork Music Festival, and now Law & Order, the solo debut from the “quiet” half of the band, Jonathan Rado. As if that wasn’t enough activity, Rado is already working on his second solo LP, even as Foxygen’s handlers insist that the group isn’t falling apart. It might be a good idea to keep eyes peeled on L.A.-area rooftops for an impromptu farewell concert, just in case.
No matter what lies ahead in Foxygen’s future, Law & Order suggests that Rado is fully prepared to make Foxygen records on his own. As a singer, he’s not as dynamic as Sam France, whose ability to ape various 60s icons-- Jagger, Lennon, and Barrett are his main touchstones-- adds extra authenticity to the group’s studious genre exercises. Rado’s vocals, meanwhile, are serviceable though not exactly essential, which might explain why he often buries them in effects (like on the demented late-night soul ballad “Looking 4a Girl Like U”) and abrasive guitar fuzz (on the clanking garage-rocker “I Wood”), or removes them completely (on the swinging Booker T. and the MGs homage “Dance Away Your Ego”).
Rado didn’t set out to make a record as pristine as We Are the 21st Century Ambassadors; Law & Order is a homemade grab-bag of jams and rough-cut gems that sounds like it was hashed out in a matter of days. It’s basically Rado's version of McCartney, which is one among approximately 83 classic-rock references on Law & Order smothered in the requisite air quotes.
Rado might be derivative, but at least there’s an admirable consistency to his prodigious output. Studying the masters has taught him how to put together catchy songs seemingly at will. The best tracks on Law & Order are frontloaded: The album-opening “Seven Horses” blobs along on a trippy groove that’s surprisingly funky, and “Hand in Mine” is an enjoyable callback to the sexy camp of those old Lee Hazelwood/Nancy Sinatra duets. Things get weirder in the album’s second half-- “I Wanna Feel It Now!!!” recalls the thrilling cacophony of Broadway-- but the glitchy closer “Pot of Gold” is Rado’s most focused pop song yet. He even indulges in a slick yacht-rock guitar solo-- is this a sign that he’s moving on to the 70s, as all 60s heroes must eventually do? Knowing Rado, the wait won’t be long to find out. | 2013-09-05T02:00:02.000-04:00 | 2013-09-05T02:00:02.000-04:00 | Rock | Woodsist | September 5, 2013 | 6.2 | d363e29c-4c57-4719-af11-19a0448e290b | Steven Hyden | https://pitchfork.com/staff/steven-hyden/ | null |
The Austin band’s first album in 18 years puts an ever-so-slightly sharper edge on their familiar, slow-burning indie rock. | The Austin band’s first album in 18 years puts an ever-so-slightly sharper edge on their familiar, slow-burning indie rock. | The American Analog Set: For Forever | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/the-american-analog-set-for-forever/ | For Forever | “Punk as Fuck” is American Analog Set’s definitive song and not just because it’s their most popular. The opener of 2001’s Know by Heart doesn’t hit all that different than “A Good Friend is Always Around,” “Come Home Baby Julie, Come Home,” “Dim Stars (The Boy in My Arms),” or any other song with a title that more accurately reflects the Austin band’s music. Their bashful take on slowpoke indie rock was initially seen as an extension of Yo La Tengo and Stereolab, and it was a formative influence on Ben Gibbard, who appeared on an AmAnSet track named “The Postman” two years before Give Up. Throughout their initial run straddling the turn of the 21st century, the Austinites stuck to one sound, and they had a sense of humor about the reputation it earned them.
The nice thing about having such a defined aesthetic is that any incremental adjustment can have a profound impact, like a cruise ship sailing half a degree off course. For Forever, the first American Analog Set album in 18 years, doesn’t really rock, but it’s not afraid to get in your face. The instruments are stripped of the cottony production of their Emperor Jones era, the synths completely devoid of retro kitsch. You’d figure that a song that shares its name with a Judas Priest classic would be For Forever’s “Punk as Fuck,” an ironic allusion to everything this band is not. But “Screaming for Vengeance” really is the most metal thing American Analog Set have ever made, if only because the mix is completely dominated by a bass riff that judders like a close-mic’d trampoline spring.
It’s all relative, but “the hardest American Analog Set album” still applies. As with many of his peers in the early aughts, Andrew Kenny’s lyrics had a mean streak masked by a librarian whisper. But as every sound on For Forever becomes more rigid and aggressive, Kenny takes on a snarl that highlights the nastier tone. While “Over the Jeans” and “By the Bridle” could be interpreted as obituaries for the indie rom-com era that American Analog Set helped soundtrack, “Screaming for Vengeance” has little room for interpretation. “It’s young love/You get fucked/You’re gonna bleed a lot,” he hisses.
Still, none of this comes off as urgent or bracing. For Forever is not the result of a pandemic-induced reckoning or an opportunity to capitalize on an unexpected flourishing of influence; a Numero Group reissue of the band’s first three albums isn’t set to arrive until 2024. Rather, it’s been described as the result of guys slowly remembering they liked hanging out together and years of surreptitious jamming awaiting a proper outlet.
And so For Forever moves at the same leisurely pace as classic American Analog Set, setting aside a sizable amount of time for songs with no particular sense of where they need to be. The lengthier “Camp Don’t Count” and “Long Limbs” recall times when this band was described as “krautrock,” because what else are you gonna call a song that repeats the same riff for six or seven minutes? Then again, even as the 12-and-a-half-minute title track makes good on its name, it doesn’t aspire for a state of mesmerism or try to pack in as many ideas as possible. Once they hit on a mantra of “back and forth and forever dear,” they just knew they were going to stretch things out. Familiarity is still the primary appeal of For Forever: the melodies soothe rather than rouse, most songs start and end at the same volume, and the clever double entendres satisfy even if the meaning remains somewhat elusive. It aligns with the real, if somewhat reductive, nostalgia not just for American Analog Set, but for a time when indie rock bands were beloved for not seeming so eager to be noticed. | 2023-11-02T00:01:00.000-04:00 | 2023-11-02T00:01:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Hometown Fantasy | November 2, 2023 | 6.9 | d364b0af-4216-4c14-8775-21caecfe7826 | Ian Cohen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ian-cohen/ | |
Featuring a standout vocal performance from Panda Bear, the French house veterans’ new EP could almost be mistaken for a lost classic of the Y2K era. | Featuring a standout vocal performance from Panda Bear, the French house veterans’ new EP could almost be mistaken for a lost classic of the Y2K era. | Alan Braxe / DJ Falcon: Step by Step EP | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/alan-braxe-dj-falcon-step-by-step/ | Step by Step EP | In a quarter century of four-to-the-floor beats and spine-tingling filter sweeps, Alan Braxe and DJ Falcon never collaborated until now—but for fans of the silky style popularized by Daft Punk, their union represents the second coming of the French touch. Both men’s trajectories trace back to Roulé, the label that Daft Punk’s Thomas Bangalter ran between 1995 and 2003. Roulé released only a dozen records in those eight years, but it cast a long shadow: Together with his partner Guy-Manuel de Homem-Christo’s Crydamoure imprint, Bangalter’s label masterminded the playful sample flips, driving drum machines, and insouciant squelch that came to define late-’90s French house.
As two of the few members of the Roulé roster not named Bangalter, Braxe (aka Alain Quême) and Falcon (aka Stéphane Quême, Braxe’s cousin) are central to the story of the French touch. Braxe had a hand in the 1998 Stardust one-off “Music Sounds Better With You,” a single that is to French house as the croissant is to French pastry; Falcon partnered with Bangalter on a pair of singles that stretched the crew’s template to especially ecstatic proportions. Falcon subsequently dropped out of view; Braxe continued to refine his sumptuous sound across numerous productions and remixes, including a celebrated stint alongside fellow Frenchman Fred Falke in the early ’00s. Braxe + Falcon’s new Step by Step EP sounds more meticulously crafted than any of the early Roulé 12"s, which were banged out on rudimentary samplers, but—improved fidelity aside—the record shares the same spirit of simplicity; it could almost be mistaken for a lost classic of the Y2K era. Now that Daft Punk have hung up their helmets, it’s a welcome return to the golden age of French house.
Roulé’s signature was always exceptionally tactile: The label’s dogged loops, disco vamps, and overstuffed chords suggested a surfeit of emotion that the era’s electronic tools could barely contain. The EP’s clubbiest tracks revive that full-to-bursting energy with chord changes that just keep spiraling giddily upward. On “Love Me,” a rock-steady house beat fleshed out with laser zaps and boomy drum fills lays the foundation for a slow-motion whirlwind of a chord progression, synths and pianos cycling in such a way that they seem always on the verge of arriving at a climax. The keys have a naggingly familiar quality that makes you wonder where you’ve heard them before—the turnaround in a Billy Joel song? The bridge of some Joe Jackson B-side? The slower, swervier “Creative Source” manages a similar trick with a chunky loop of lush, orchestral disco sampled from ’70s R&B group Creative Source’s “I’d Find You Anywhere”; listen closely around the song’s 31-second mark, and you’ll hear the snippet that Braxe + Falcon flip into their warbly hook, sped up until it sounds like a Jackson Five song you can’t quite place. Both songs capture the kind of winking déjà vu that French house has always excelled at—a guileless, open-armed embrace of pure pleasure.
In the post-Roulé era, Braxe has become known for particularly starry-eyed takes on ’80s pop—like the Fred Falke collaboration “Rubicon,” a serotonin-fueled descendant of Jan Hammer’s Miami Vice theme, or “One More Chance,” a synth-driven power ballad in the tradition of “Take My Breath Away” and “One More Night”—and “Elevation” plays with similar sounds. It’s the weakest track here; within the context of the song’s mid-tempo funk, L.A. singer Sunni Colón’s velvety falsetto inevitably evokes Pharrell’s turns on “Happy” and “Get Lucky,” and the chords lack the unpredictable frisson of Braxe’s best work. Even the production, while sparkling and satisfyingly spacious, fails to surprise; this time, the déjà vu feels a little too on the nose.
The standout is “Step by Step,” a song so good that the rest of the EP pales in comparison. It’s a languid yacht-rock-disco number that features a chord progression for the ages; the sun-kissed vibe recalls Chicago, Godley & Crème, and Christopher Cross, while the high-end frequencies fan out like the jets of a lawn sprinkler. Clever filtering was always one of the principal hallmarks of French house, and the two producers make great use of it here. In the song’s intro, there’s nothing but tinny midrange frequencies that sound like a battered transistor radio playing your grandparents’ favorite soft-rock station. But then an invisible knob twists and a whole world of color and frequency comes surging to life.
What really makes the song is Noah Lennox, aka Animal Collective’s Panda Bear, who delivers one of his most stirring performances. His multi-tracked harmonies rise upward in gravity-defying layers, like glass-sheathed architectural marvels, and when he hits the high notes, it’s a searchlight streaking across the skyline. Though the lyrics are a hair’s breadth from an inspirational quote—it is, after all, a steadfast ode to taking things step by step—Lennox’s idiosyncrasies have a winning relatability that’s uncommon in platinum-dipped dance music; there’s a conversational familiarity to his drawl, and a loveable, almost goofy quality to some of his couplets (“As I try to find a new way forward/An empty space that I am goin’ for”). Few singers handle the balance of elation and dejection better than Panda Bear, and when he’s in underdog mode, as he is here, it’s impossible not to root for him.
Step by Step doesn’t entirely hang together as an EP. Leading with the best song is understandable, but it would have been better saved for last; listening sequentially, the shift from “Step by Step” to “Love Me” is jarring. But the producers sweeten the pot with “Step by Step - Bonus Beat,” a dub mix that strips out Panda Bear’s lead vocals and leaves only his multi-tracked backing harmonies. Faster than the original, it’s no longer a middle-school slow dance, but an end-credits drive into the sunset. Panda Bear’s voice is unrecognizable; filters teasing him in and out of the background, he’s rendered shapeless and weightless, a chorus of angels. There’s a reason they call this stuff the French touch: It’s tactile, corporeal, a full-frequency embrace that can feel like a divine caress. | 2022-07-06T00:03:00.000-04:00 | 2022-07-06T00:03:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Smugglers Way | July 6, 2022 | 7.5 | d366406b-ab9e-4409-8785-ca9fdcdf3a70 | Philip Sherburne | https://pitchfork.com/staff/philip-sherburne/ | |
Jill Scott's fifth studio album is slow in the way that the familiar is slow: we already know what to expect. With Scott, it's mom-and-pop, all-you-can-eat R&B; sexy fun for grown folk over the age of 40, like speed dating at church. | Jill Scott's fifth studio album is slow in the way that the familiar is slow: we already know what to expect. With Scott, it's mom-and-pop, all-you-can-eat R&B; sexy fun for grown folk over the age of 40, like speed dating at church. | Jill Scott: Woman | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/20819-woman/ | Woman | Jill Scott's voice is familiar like hair being braided on a stoop, like a fire hydrant pouring out into the street, like a slow summer. Woman, her fifth studio album, is slow in the way that the familiar is slow: we already know what to expect. With Scott, it's mom-and-pop, all-you-can-eat R&B; sexy fun for grown folk over the age of 40, like speed dating at church.
Woman's first track, "Wild Cookie", initially seems like a spoken word ode to "Empire"'s Cookie Lyon, but the lyrics quickly suggest that "Cookie" is a euphemism for the vagina. "Wild Cookie choices lead to lonely pregnancy," Scott says over strings and drums. The vagina in "Wild Cookie", personified, acts on its own. Desirous, it does not have a mind of its own, but it would seem that way. "Just the other day my girlfriend said she was watching TV and her wild cookie detached from its seat." That detachment, that Jill speaks of—that desire—is a magnetizing energy.
Beyond "Wild Cookie", there are other food references. After all, Scott perpetually sings like she's about to cook dinner for a family that isn't even hers. She wants domesticity, craves it. "Prepared", the track that follows the intro poem, has the lyrics "I've been getting recipes off the Internet" and "I've been eating more greens", which come as no surprise for anyone who's ever listened to "The Way" off her first album. Food is a big part of Scott's music. Additionally, in the track "Closure", Scott sings about not making a man quiches and homemade waffles anymore, how he shouldn't expect breakfast.
"I'm on my way, I'm almost there," Scott sings in "Coming to You", a percussion-laden, breathless track, the most urgent on a decidedly slow record. "Coming to You" is a funky, upbeat jam, but for a faster song, it's not necessarily more fun. The fun tracks are the ones that shimmer. "Fool's Gold", arguably the best song, is about a disillusioned Scott who finds herself in a relationship that might as well have been a pipe dream. "I was living the dream/ Believing things that just ain't true/ Oh, I can't believe I ever believed in you/ Had me chasing fool's gold," she sings over a bouncy, enchanting instrumental. Another strong track is "Lighthouse", a somberly reassuring lullaby of a ballad about supporting a lover through trying, burdensome times. "I'm your shelter," Scott sings like an overprotective siren, striking a balance between sexy and soothing.
Intimate and slow-moving, Woman is good but underwhelming. It lacks the dynamism of Who Is Jill Scott?**, the rap features of Light of the Sun. What was new, interesting, and different 15 years ago isn't anymore. Scott's mastered the formula of candlelit, slow-cooker music. Her sense of humor and sensuality, fine-tuned, endearing and bold, is infused throughout this album, but it doesn't feel like enough. It misses the mark, like a lot of great music does, because it's less inventive. | 2015-08-05T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2015-08-05T02:00:01.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | Atlantic | August 5, 2015 | 7.1 | d36fdfb9-0e3c-438a-97d0-0bd843faf5ce | Safy-Hallan Farah | https://pitchfork.com/staff/safy-hallan-farah/ | null |
The London-based literary polymath’s fourth album fuses spoken-word poetry with skeletal production, painting a picture of contemporary UK culture in imagistic, intricately wrought verse. | The London-based literary polymath’s fourth album fuses spoken-word poetry with skeletal production, painting a picture of contemporary UK culture in imagistic, intricately wrought verse. | Kae Tempest: The Line Is a Curve | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/kae-tempest-the-line-is-a-curve/ | The Line Is a Curve | Since making their live debut doing spoken word at 16, London-based Kae Tempest has made their mark across multiple disciplines: poetry, theater, fiction, and rapping. In 2012, they won the Ted Hughes Award for innovation in poetry. Two years later, they were selected as one of the Poetry Book Society’s Next Generation Poets. Two of their albums have been nominated for the Mercury Prize.
The tension between the self and the collective is central to their work; so is narrative’s role in bridging those two realms. Tempest has a predilection for myth (in 2013, they released Brand New Ancients, a contemporary retelling of the tale of Tiresias), and their writing often argues for the importance of storytelling itself. On their fourth album, The Line Is a Curve, they turn their attention to more contemporary stories. The album attempts to capture what it feels like to be alive today in contemporary Britain, drawing on familiar signifiers and clichés: online lives, multiple jobs, youthful years drowned in pubs. But as Tempest examines the stop-and-go motions of being, it also feels like they are asking what it feels like to be alive, period.
The Line Is a Curve is a sentimental, prophetic, mimetic, and worldbuilding work that blends moody electronica with elements of neo-soul and grimey hip-hop. It chronicles the afflictions of everyday life and the pressure to overcome them—from the violent desire to dissolve into limerence (“Don’t You Ever”) to breaking patterns of generational trauma (“Smoking”)—and ultimately counsels that we make peace with our daily adversities. With “more pressure” comes “more relief,” they intone on “More Pressure.” Beginning and ending with the same melody, the album’s cyclical structure mirrors the daily obligation to overcome our suffering and endure.
The album begins on a menacing and claustrophobic note with “Priority Boredom,” as co-writer and co-producer Dan Carey braids an apocalyptic melody into the center of the mix while Tempest tangles their vocals right into it. As the album progresses, Carey’s instrumentation becomes wider and lighter, and Tempest’s lyrics become more optimistic—“More grounded/More rooted/Less convoluted,” they rap on “More Pressure” over Carey’s euphoric, oscillating synth. In these more positive moments, Tempest can come across as mawkish; their style has always felt aligned with the heightened emotion of the American slam poetry scene, and This Line Is a Curve brims with chicken-soup-for-the-teenage-soul lyrics. Yet the album’s strength of heart is undeniable. “There are things I have to say about the fullness and the blaze/Of this beautiful life,” they rap on “Grace,” offering the album’s final words. It’s a beautiful and well-earned release after several tracks’ worth of despondency.
This is Tempest’s show, but musicians who have been playing with them since they first began gigging provide little smatterings of drums, guitar, tuba, cornet, and french horn. Further contributions come from Fontaines D.C.’s Grian Chatten (whose verse on “I Saw Light” feels conservative and glib compared to Tempest’s incisive and intimate imagery) and former BROCKHAMPTON member Kevin Abstract, who was introduced to Tempest through Rick Rubin, the album’s executive producer. Tempest and Carey have spent the last several years learning from the studio guru, using their time at Shangri-La trying to reconstruct the relationship between Tempest’s intricately polysyllabic verses with Carey’s post-dubstep productions. On 2019’s The Book of Traps and Lessons, their first Rubin-produced project, Carey reined in his sound, leaving more space for Tempest’s words. Carey and Tempest repeat this formula on The Line Is a Curve: As Carey’s synths brood, Tempest explores a whole poetry anthology’s worth of meters. Their dramatic delivery functions like a musical monologue, and their lyrics, which are stuffed with glottal stops and plosive consonants, function like a layer of percussion against Carey’s largely beatless electronic meanderings.
Throughout, Tempest balances character study, vignettes, monologues, and prosaic details that function metonymically—“Discarded masks, empty tubes/The colds, the flus,” they rap on “Salt Coast”—with each detail reconstructing the universe we live in. Tempest’s visceral yet temperate delivery is comparable to Little Simz’s calm conviction. Like Simz, too, Tempest is almost Biblical in their mode of address. Tempest’s linguistic instinct, however, is nearly peerless. The tight iambic trimeter of “Nothing to Prove”—ten lines of six slick syllables—sounds like bullets. Elsewhere, on “Priority Boredom,” where each verse is dedicated to its own vowel sound, the monotony of individualism is cleverly represented with congested “or” sounds: “Priority boredom/Gorging/Four courses/Forced absorption,” they spit, the words like slushy fruit in their mouth.
The Line Is a Curve functions as a therapeutic exercise in resilience and repetition. Starting from a place of isolation and dejection, Tempest ends with community-facing lightness and love. “But if you do not bring forth what is within you/What you do not bring forth will destroy you,” they prophesy—an epiphany that doesn’t last long, before the opening melody from “Priority Boredom” returns, and Tempest starts the journey over again. | 2022-04-13T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2022-04-13T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Fiction | April 13, 2022 | 7 | d37af567-d038-416e-9afe-06f5e83fe592 | Emma Madden | https://pitchfork.com/staff/emma-madden/ | |
For a lot of kids, David Bowie is a guy that's never been even remotely\n\ cool, let alone ... | For a lot of kids, David Bowie is a guy that's never been even remotely\n\ cool, let alone ... | David Bowie: Hours | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/881-hours/ | Hours | For a lot of kids, David Bowie is a guy that's never been even remotely cool, let alone taken seriously. Yep, they remember him for what he's contributed to society in their lifetimes-- Tin Machine, Black Tie, White Noise, the "Cool World" soundtrack, Outside, Earthling, and now Hours. Who'd guess that a discography that unlistenable would belong to the richest man in rock music?
At this point, David Bowie has done more harm than good to his fans' cochleas. His last few albums have failed in almost every aspect, but not for a lack of trying. Outside, his 1995 "comeback," was a concept album about a futuristic murder case that featured an endless stream of clichés and banal S&M; imagery in lieu of lyrics. His 1997 follow-up, Earthling, attempted mock drum-n-bass, some shoddy reggae- tinged numbers, and a universally- panned tour with Trent Reznor.
Hours, of course, completes Bowie's late 90's trilogy in his usual fashion-- he's altered his sound to fit his perception of current musical trends. And as always, he's closer to getting it right than you might expect, but still way off the mark. Here, Bowie seems content to cut his losses with today's youth and reach for the older set. Hours opts for a spacy, but nonetheless adult- contemporary sound that comes across with all the vitality and energy of a rotting log.
For the better part of an hour, Bowie drifts through some the most sterile and unimaginative songs since Sting released Mercury Falling. On "Thursday's Child," Bowie acknowledges his issues with growing old, and possibly, his dwindling fanbase. "Throw me tomorrow," he sings. "Not that I've really got a chance." At least he can admit it. But just six songs later, Bowie regresses into "The Pretty Things are Going to Hell," an homage to his classic 1971 song "Oh! You Pretty Things" and Iggy and the Stooges' "Hard to Beat (Your Pretty Face is Going to Hell)" off Raw Power. As expected, it's not something you wanna find yourself listening to.
No, it's not a new low, but that doesn't mean it's not embarrassing. David Bowie is my dad's age, whether he likes it or not, and he needs to exercise some self-restraint-- you know, like taking a deep breath when he gets the urge to pen a sequel to one of his old hits. Or counting to ten when he feels the need to put a flanger effect on the guitar track. Or returning to an old drug habit when he becomes inspired to record another album... | 1999-10-05T01:00:04.000-04:00 | 1999-10-05T01:00:04.000-04:00 | Rock | Virgin | October 5, 1999 | 4.7 | d38e5840-d960-4148-ad6b-956bde1867b8 | Ryan Schreiber | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ryan-schreiber/ | null |
The Alabama rapper’s official debut brings her sharp-tongued bars and bassy 808s into a glittery world of early-’00s pop culture and reality TV nostalgia. | The Alabama rapper’s official debut brings her sharp-tongued bars and bassy 808s into a glittery world of early-’00s pop culture and reality TV nostalgia. | Flo Milli: You Still Here, Ho ? | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/flo-milli-you-still-here-ho/ | You Still Here, Ho ? | If Cardi B and Megan Thee Stallion are seniors in the school of pussy rap, then Flo Milli, Kali, Lakeyah, and Yung Baby Tate are the well-known sophomores. The grandchild of legends like Lil’ Kim, Trina, and Missy Elliott, modern-day pussy rap comes equipped with a sharp eye for sexual prowess, deprioritizing men, and getting to the money, a recipe that’s already elevated stars like Latto, Saucy Santana, and City Girls. Among the later class, Alabama’s Flo Milli has brought cutting bars and knocking singles that demand attention, moving at her own pace with performance, freestyle, and artistic direction chops. The 2021 XXL freshman’s best-known tracks—“Beef FloMix” and “In the Party”—have become bad bitch summer anthem mainstays.
Her 2020 mixtape Ho, Why Is You Here ? solidified Milli’s bravado and lyrical clarity. Tracks such as “Weak” off the debut were a flip of SWV’s classic and showed off Milli’s love for Southern snap music, punctuating her ability to insult you and degrade men in the same breath. Milli’s official debut, You Still Here, Ho ?, pursues various channels through Milli’s colorful world of boasts and empowerment anthems, but at times misses the mark of showing her range.
Alluding to a Southern girl’s dreams of superstar fame, Milli welcomes us to a glittery world of early-’00s pop culture and reality TV, complete with an introductory cameo by Flavor of Love alum Tiffany “New York” Pollard. Milli’s formula of contrasting her higher-pitched voice with bassy 808s and sharp-tongued bars serve her well on this project. Early single “Conceited” feels like a thudding Southern revamp of Remy Ma’s 2006 classic with Milli rapping, “Please don’t bark cause Milli bite back.” Even a slower tempo song such as “No Face” illuminates Milli’s knack for a simple yet effective chorus: “Put that pussy on his face/No face, no case.” Oddly enough, one of the second strongest moments is “Titled Halo,” where Milli plays the slow, syrupy storyteller as she contemplates the possibility of falling in love again (“You say I’m the one you pray for/But I ain’t nobody’s angel”). It’s the perfect song for a late-night drive of yearning and indecision.
The only time we lose the power of Milli’s pen is on “Pretty Girls,” an OG Parker-produced track whose stock power-pop guitar riff feels numb to the song’s bubbly, sunshine-filled mood. “Hottie” and “On My Nerves” run into similar problems: In theory, these should be big moments, but the beats lag behind Milli’s vocals and the predictable choruses don’t hold their weight. Some of the awkward shifts feel like understandable growing pains: In an industry hellbent on insisting that women in rap can only be caricatures, it’s refreshing to see Milli step out with both her classic approach and new attempts at claiming selfhood. You Still Here Ho ? meets Flo Milli in her most adventurous form yet. | 2022-07-27T00:02:00.000-04:00 | 2022-07-27T00:02:00.000-04:00 | Rap | RCA | July 27, 2022 | 7.3 | d3932ecb-8f86-40b6-9591-9317249f4b1c | Clarissa Brooks | https://pitchfork.com/staff/clarissa-brooks/ | |
STROOM, a Belgian label whose releases are not so much reissues as alternate histories of avant-garde pop, surveys the dreamlike soundscapes of a fringe figure from the 1980s. | STROOM, a Belgian label whose releases are not so much reissues as alternate histories of avant-garde pop, surveys the dreamlike soundscapes of a fringe figure from the 1980s. | Benjamin Lew: Le personnage principal est un peuple isolé | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/benjamin-lew-le-personnage-principal-est-un-peuple-isole/ | Le personnage principal est un peuple isolé | In a recent profile of the curious Belgian imprint STROOM, art director Nana Esi said, “You need some vagueness to be able to be flexible.” To which her partner and the label head, Ziggy Devriendt, added, were money not an issue, “I would immediately start a restaurant here in Ostend with the name STROOM, I would start a CBD shop named STROOM.” Music as sustenance, music as vapor: STROOM similarly slips out of easy grasp with every release. The label has drifted between sounds, countries, and eras; its releases are not quite reissues so much as alternate histories. One record might be hypnotic, globe-trotting ambient, another unabashed trance, while most revel in simply being unclassifiable.
That the label sought out Benjamin Lew aligns with this outlook. A furtive figure on the 1980s Belgian scene, Lew was responsible for a few evocative releases on the similarly genre-averse Crammed Discs label, working with the likes of the Durutti Column and Tuxedomoon. As Crammed owner Marc Hollander recalled, Lew wasn’t a trained musician but rather a guy who dabbled in “photography, writing, visual arts… and worked part-time as a cocktail mixer in a tropical bar,” serving drinks to other creative types. So his output makes sense in our current gig economy, as Lew sways between dreamlike ambient, woozy jazz, and skewered pop, beholden to nothing save his own whimsy. Le personnage principal est un peuple isolé draws from his ’80s albums and collects unreleased music, but it also feels like an unfinished portrait, given that it maddeningly leaves out his stunning, surreal 1982 debut, Douzième Journée: Le Verbe, La Parure, L'Amour.
The first few pieces here align Lew with other forgotten artists from that era only getting their due in the 21st century, like Woo, Gigi Masin, and Hiroshi Yoshimura. “Profondeurs des eaux des laques” and “Moments” draw on the playful slant of Erik Satie rather than the more objective ambient of Brian Eno, at once serene and gently surreal (the former title roughly translating as “the depths of lacquered waters”). Woodwinds and treated guitars move together in drunken duet, while “Moments” has all the resonant plinks, drips, and ripples of a good long bathtub soak.
The title track falls into the lineage of Can’s “Ethnological Forgery Series” along with recent productions from artists like Jan Jelinek, Andrew Pekler, and RAMZi. Here Lew creates an imaginary sound with a carefully constructed blend of thrummed hand percussion, sitar twangs, the buzz of a double-reed instrument, and voices that could be in any tongue. It conjures a world as tenable as smoke, drawing you in only to dissipate after four minutes. “Qu'il fasse nuit” does something similar with clarinet, violin, and clattering percussion, weaving them together to sound like a jaunty highlands folk dance unearthed by Lew the ethnographer. On “Etendue,” he creates something both earthy and ethereal, mixing a church choir with the sound of someone calling to their herd.
Only two short songs in the middle of the album break the spell: “The Wheel” and “Little Birds Sit on Your Shoulder” are clunky rather than charming. Despite a knack for trying on numerous hats, Lew won’t ever be remembered as a savvy songwriter or a good vocalist. He’s at his best wringing plangent feelings out of minor-key drama, as on the excellently titled “La magnifique alcoolique” and in the struck chimes that twinkle across the pensive yet tingly “Joyeux regrets imprécis.” That song’s title might also serve as motto for both Lew and STROOM: “Happy vague regrets.” | 2019-05-18T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-05-18T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Experimental | Stroom | May 18, 2019 | 7.4 | d398436e-3fdd-4e9b-b36e-a0baf8dadc23 | Andy Beta | https://pitchfork.com/staff/andy-beta/ | |
The third issue of Stefan Betke's Pole project just hit the stores, and\n\ in step with the album-naming ... | The third issue of Stefan Betke's Pole project just hit the stores, and\n\ in step with the album-naming ... | Pole: CD 3 | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/6371-cd-3/ | CD 3 | The third issue of Stefan Betke's Pole project just hit the stores, and in step with the album-naming trend started by the band Chicago, it's called CD 3. The cover of Pole's first release was solid blue, the second was bright red, and this one is all yellow. From the outside, this is all that differentiates the three CDs, and many might say that there's even less difference in the music. These people have a point about the sameness; hell, even Betke would admit that Pole has a pretty narrowly defined sonic trademark. He makes vaguely rhythmic, dub-wise music constructed in part using the crackles from a defective pole filter, a device used when mastering vinyl LPs. Static pops, electrical buzzes, surface noise-- these are a few of Betke's favorite things. And what most people consider the annoying by-products of a retro music storage fixation, Betke considers instruments.
CD 3 is a good news/bad news kind of record. The good news is, if you've been unsure about Pole, understandably reluctant to spend your money on quiet, crackly ambient music, your prudence has been rewarded. This is definitely Pole's best record, and it's by far the most "pop" (as opposed to just "click-and-pop") of the three. The familiar scrapes, snaps and hisses have been relegated to the background here, as opposed to being the focus of CD 1, and the accessibility factor has definitely been upped. The first five tracks in particular should appeal to any open- minded fan of dub, as Betke meets the rockers uptown with deep, melodic bass, reverberating keyboard refrains, and loads of spacy atmosphere.
"Überfahrt" (alright, quiet down-- it means something entirely different in German) is particularly hypnotic, as every melodic and percussive phrase slides lazily in and out of the mix, echoing back from whence it came. And if you get high enough, you could probably actually dance to "Rondell Zwei," a tune that marches steadily forward on the strength of a downright catchy, substratic bassline. Somewhere, King Tubby is smiling.
The bad news is that if you already own a Pole record or two, it's tough to recommend buying another-- they're just too similar. CD 3 completes my Pole collection (except for those rare 12-inches), so I now own three albums of his minimalist, fractured techno records. Frankly, it's making me feel like an asshole. So, do I sell the first two and just hold on to CD 3? Probably. Because without a doubt, this is the record I'm putting on next time I feel like listening to Pole. | 2000-06-20T01:00:05.000-04:00 | 2000-06-20T01:00:05.000-04:00 | Electronic | Matador | June 20, 2000 | 7.4 | d39ccac1-57eb-4e90-b0ee-d401e2d6919d | Mark Richardson | https://pitchfork.com/staff/mark-richardson/ | null |
Fifteen years ago, kids didn't listen to this kind of music on CD, cassette, vinyl; they listened to it ... | Fifteen years ago, kids didn't listen to this kind of music on CD, cassette, vinyl; they listened to it ... | Spacemen 3: Forged Prescriptions | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/7720-forged-prescriptions/ | Forged Prescriptions | Fifteen years ago, kids didn't listen to this kind of music on CD, cassette, vinyl; they listened to it on the tips of their tongues. It used to come on blotter paper, in tabs. When string-seducer Sonic Boom went into his Rainbow Guitarland of Doom, people's serotonin levels never recovered. The Perfect Prescription was like taking an acid bath in the dungeon of the mind: revelatory but solitary. On Forged Prescriptions, the Spacemen are trying to absorb us into their skin.
This two-disc release consists of various alternative mixes, demos, and covers from Spacemen 3's Perfect Prescription recording sessions. According to the Boom, the majority of these mixes were "considered by us to be too hard to replicate live and therefore reduced for the original release." This is admittedly kind of absurd, like saying these tracks were too good to be listened to, but there is some validity in the sentiment. Whereas the disparity between the old and "new" mixes are perhaps subtle at best and practically indiscernible at worst, there is a difference in mood. If The Perfect Prescription often sounded extraterrestrial, it also just as often sounded like traditional Velvets-inspired indie rock. On Forged Prescriptions, though, the stratifications of guitar are even further attenuated to stunning single tones, the basslines float even more subliminally under the psychedelic mind-spinning noodling, and... well, okay, the drums are pretty much the same.
The gateway drug on this collection is the alternative mix to "Things'll Never Be the Same". If the original was a feedback dust-up, quenched in gravelly, occasionally Bob Mould-ish vocals and an abyssal thump, the new mix is so bombarded with combating guitar squeals, earthen drums, and Pierce's sustained tones it will excoriate your entire body. From the classic intro onwards, the guitars are played backwards, forwards, sidewards, epiphanywards. The original was phenomenal strutting feedback stagnating in the void. This is a twirling tea kettle launched into orbit, feedback that goes somewhere, at a pressure that gives you the bends. By "Call the Doctor", the guitars are spewing their trajectories of cosmic refulgence farther than the ears can grasp. At one point, I accompanied this euphony with the "Rolling Fire" setting on Windows Media Player and my computer restarted itself. Truth.
The new "Walking with Jesus" is perhaps the most startling mix, taking the original into an even more incorporeal and immaculate sphere. The Perfect Prescription version used too many 80s-indie-rock guitars for my liking, and vaguely sardonic; this one is an anesthetic plunge into purgatory, equipped with a choir instead of rock 'n' roll, and it's positively cultish-- the anthem of a Polyphonic Spree crossed with Heaven's Gate. "Come Down Easy (Demo Version)" is a filthy atomic 100-bar blues, oscillating echoes of birdman Pierce, our acidhead savior. You will bow down to him for his beatific benevolence and serenity. Except in this religion, the communion wafers are shrooms, the crucifix is the solar system, and the holy book is my hallucinations about Toad Demons: "It's 1987/ All I wanna do is get stoned."
But the second disc is the one that truly breathes new life into Perfect Prescription. The extended version of the Red Krayola cover "Transparent Radiation" replaces the angry muddle of the album version with light and clarity. The demo version of "Walking with Jesus" is when the Son of God bought a shotgun, rockin' twine and fuzz battered by shivering engines. The demo version of the heralded "Starship" and the previously unreleased cover of the MC5's "I Want You Right Now" are bone-implodingly dense, perfect tributes to 60s psych-metal, plasma ghosts emerging from Sabbath's grave.
To get pragmatic for a second (a little silly considering the only word this band knows is "excess"), the differences between these tracks and their album version counterparts can seem innocuous enough if you're not listening closely. Purists who've spent years memorizing every note of The Perfect Prescription are sure to think of it as little more than a curiosity. Many of the mixes here, however, are more complex, harmonious and pulverizing than those on the original classic. The second disc also acts as a sort of paltry best-of that combines some excellent covers with the most memorable songs from the original LP. As for those neophytes who ask if this album's any good if you're not on drugs, a better question might be whether drugs are any good without this album. | 2003-10-28T01:00:03.000-05:00 | 2003-10-28T01:00:03.000-05:00 | Experimental | United States Distribution | October 28, 2003 | 8.1 | d39df506-eda7-4df4-a510-d0937e7da57d | Alexander Lloyd Lindhart | https://pitchfork.com/staff/alexander-lloyd lindhart/ | null |
On their psychedelic and virtuosic second album, the Denver quartet brings death metal to new and exalted places. | On their psychedelic and virtuosic second album, the Denver quartet brings death metal to new and exalted places. | Blood Incantation: Hidden History of the Human Race | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/blood-incantation-hidden-history-of-the-human-race/ | Hidden History of the Human Race | Death metal glories in ugliness—rhythm guitars the texture of churned shit, leads like pig squeals, vocals like reverse peristalsis. But Blood Incantation do beautiful things with that ugliness. Their ugliness moves; within 40 minutes on their second album Hidden History of the Human Race, the Denver quartet brings death metal to exalted places, places it hardly ever goes, without ever losing the essential, foul tang of the sound.
It helps that they are incredible players, virtuosic in the most basic sense. In just the first few minutes of the opening epic “Slave Species of the Gods,” guitarists Paul Riedl and Morris Kolontyrsky evoke the cold steel-shavings scrape of Slayer’s Kerry King and the hair-flip theatrics of Metallica’s Kirk Hammett. But their virtuosity comes from their vocabulary, as well: They just seem to think differently than their peers. Great riffs are less the products of finger muscles than the peculiarity of a mind, and there is no question that they are singular players.
You can hear this relative oddness everywhere. They are more fond of harmonized guitars than most death metal bands, which give their suite-length songs uncommon melodic movement and emotional resonance. Ambient synthesizers play walk-on roles at several surprising moments, and clean-toned psychedelic guitar leads often pick up where those synthesizers left off, carrying melodic ideas forward. Even when drummer Isaac Faulk is drilling the music into the earth with blast beats, there is something in the arrangement arcing upward.
Another delicate touch comes from Jeff Barrett's fretless bass, an instrument known for rounded tones and freakishly high technical demands; in rock-music circles, it is most associated with louche pop records likee Roxy Music’s Avalon. In “The Giza Power Plant,” Barrett plays high up the neck, shaping long lines and sounding almost like a bassoon behind the din.
Death metal has a long history with juvenile winner-takes-all nihilism—it is the home of Cannibal Corpse, Goatwhore, Deicide. But in the last several years there have been a number of American bands that express some genuine spiritual stirrings—the Toronto outfit Tomb Mold and the Philly band Horrendous, to take two other examples. Blood Incantation take that transformational energy the furthest. Yes, the song titles are a pretty big hat tip in that direction—the album concludes with an 18-minute piece called “Awakening from the Dream of Existence to the Multidimensional Nature of Our Reality (Mirror of the Soul)”—but you feel it shot through the music as well. The leads glow through the murk; on “The Giza Power Plant,” they swarm atop the traditional down-tuned chugging rhythm guitars like phosphorescence in a swamp.
But the music feels meditative, despite all its frenetic motion; they recorded the entire thing—every interlocking part and lightspeed tempo switch—analog, which means that you are hearing a band breathing as an organism, a group of people accomplishing something remarkable when you play it. The euphoric “Inner Paths (To Outer Space),” was improvised “on psychedelics over a period of several months,” according to the band, and it evolves entirely in unexpected leaps, dissolving into synthesizer washes and backmasked guitars and then plunging ahead, again, stirring up the primordial ooze. At every point, you hear a band going somewhere new, hurtling towards a forever-receding spot in the consciousness.
Buy: Rough Trade
(Pitchfork may earn a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.) | 2019-11-27T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2019-11-27T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Metal | Dark Descent | November 27, 2019 | 8.3 | d39f1c48-3d12-4183-99da-38c908afe518 | Jayson Greene | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jayson-greene/ | |
From the spluttering hardcore of their first LP through wildcard bassist Cris Kirkwood's lost years, the Meat Puppets seemed to chase chaos, musical and otherwise. On their 14th album, they opt more for a leisurely drive down a familiar track. | From the spluttering hardcore of their first LP through wildcard bassist Cris Kirkwood's lost years, the Meat Puppets seemed to chase chaos, musical and otherwise. On their 14th album, they opt more for a leisurely drive down a familiar track. | Meat Puppets: Rat Farm | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/17882-meat-puppets-rat-farm/ | Rat Farm | From the spluttering hardcore of their first LP through wildcard bassist Cris Kirkwood's lost years, Meat Puppets seemed to chase chaos, musical and otherwise. So when Cris, fresh off a few particularly rocky years, rejoined brother Curt Kirkwood in 2006, once-bitten fans didn't know what to expect, save a certain amount of mania. What they got was anything but: starting with 2007's Rise to Your Knees, the Meat Puppets got good and mellow, trading in their frenzied pacing and Spirograph guitars for a surprisingly even-keeled, weirdness-averse, country-tinged amble.
Rat Farm, the Puppets' 14th studio LP, finds the brothers Kirkwood continuing to take things easy. Curt's been calling Rat Farm "real blown-out folk music," playing up its compositional simplicity and explaining away its lack of fretboard melée. Rat Farm's pop jangles and crisp country workouts don't feel all that much straighter than the band's other post-reunion LPs, and there are still hints (however fleeting) of the Meat Puppets of old in Rat Farm's ragged harmonies, permafried geniality, and Curt's wide-eyed fascination with the natural world. But all that remarkable stuff that's been lost to the Puppets' gradual mellowing-- the hardcore furor, the Deadhead twinkle, the sunburnt boogie-- hasn't been replaced by, well, much of anything. Which leaves the perfectly pleasant Rat Farm feeling strangely wanting.
"Everything's cool, and everything's fine," Kirkwood sings at the top of "Waiting", quickly adding "and everything drives me out of my mind." That's kind of the trouble with Rat Farm: everything's fine, but that's about the long and short of it. Whether it's the Byrdsy stroll of "You Don't Know", a post-grunge chopper "Leave Your Head Alone", or a countrypolitan swoon like "Waiting", everything here unfolds as you'd expect it to, amicably enough, but with a distinct lack of adventure. The mood's convivial, the tempos are easygoing, and the solos—when they happen at all—are clipped. Sure, some things'll never change: Curt still sings like he's holding in a lungful, and there's a certain wobbliness to the arrangements that never lets you forget who you're listening to. But culling the chaos from their sound doesn't exactly flatter what remains, and with every layer of weirdness they shed, some personality follows.
Still, the smile stretched across Rat Farm's face does wonders for the hints of blankness behind its eyes. Curt's mind remains bent, even as his songs have straightened themselves out; Rat Farm's world is populated by a mechanical money, a yard full of cats and rabbits, and the titular Kirkwood-owned home for rodents. Dual highlights "Down" and "Time and Money" allude to adult concerns-- parenthood and cash-flow, respectively-- but even they never seem too far from a shrug and the crack of a beer. At its best, Rat Farm is warm, well-executed, and slightly goofy; that won't be enough for everybody, but for the Kirkwoods circa 2013, it seems to be plenty. | 2013-04-19T02:00:02.000-04:00 | 2013-04-19T02:00:02.000-04:00 | Rock | Megaforce | April 19, 2013 | 5.5 | d3a347a1-23ef-4c43-ad51-1e42e2dc74cb | Paul Thompson | https://pitchfork.com/staff/paul-thompson/ | null |
The London-based electronic duo's latest record was written well before Brexit, but its austere, dystopian murk reflects the deflated, anxious, uncertain national mood of their home. | The London-based electronic duo's latest record was written well before Brexit, but its austere, dystopian murk reflects the deflated, anxious, uncertain national mood of their home. | Darkstar: Made To Measure | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22090-made-to-measure/ | Made To Measure | In 2015, as Britain anointed its first Conservative-majority government since 1992, there was a sense among vanquished liberals that things could scarcely get worse. A gimlet view of the national mood came from Darkstar, the London-based, northern English electronic duo. Following the departure of singer James Buttery, their election-year album Foam Island foregrounded spoken-word field recordings that captured working-class northerners as they danced in the pincers of Tory Britain. (“Cuts,” for instance, revolved around a bleak audio clip from a straitened council’s website.) What was once Darkstar’s subtext—soundscapes of barren yearning, conceptual nods to the English North—now had a concrete object: Here’s what’s screwed, and here’s why. It worked, in part because Foam Island handled heavy themes with a lightness of touch: preoccupied, spiritually drained, yet oddly upbeat, like a chipper coworker after a grueling shift.
In hindsight, it’s possible to see how political LPs like Foam Island and Jam City’s Dream a Garden (a companion piece, of sorts) were energized by the prospect of Tory re-election. As reality dawned, the outpourings of leftwing dismay were, if nothing else, inspiriting communal moments in isolated times. That was before Britain waved goodbye to the European Union, of course, and now, it’s all too easy to conceive of things getting worse. Made to Measure was written well before Brexit, but its austere, dystopian murk reflects the extinguished hope that’s characterized recent weeks here: deflated, anxious, uncertain.
While the duo always had the chops for poignant songs—after “Aidy’s Girl Is a Computer,” they scrapped a vaguely commercial debut to burrow into the impenetrable North—their vocally despondent music since hasn’t quite replaced that single’s computer-human discord with a compelling synergy of the two. On “Reformer,” guest vocalist Empress Of is a more natural fit, light-as-air and acrobatic enough to swirl above the smoky, claustrophobic synths. Gaika has less to play with, but complicates “Black Ghost”’s sparse, grime-textured production with a serenely stuttered elegy: “I sing for the black ghosts/I sing for all that we lost.”
There’s a sense of distant, benevolent forces at work on the pair of remaining tracks. “Deltaskelta” revives the digitally haunted “Aidy’s Girl” aesthetic with modem-like twinkles, illegible lyrics, and a sweet melody rendered with the effect of an extraterrestrial transmission. Shimsung’s moonlit edit of “Through the Motions,” a *Foam Island *track, threatens to drift into a starry-eyed slumber, but culminates with sad, strangled synths and warm chords that glide in to catch them.
Darkstar are sometimes lumped in with the “post-dubstep” crew—spatially abstract songs, earnest vocals, the odd 2-step beat—but it’s a tag they never really grew with. Unlike James Blake, who, as Mark Fisher puts it in Ghosts of My Life, has “gone from digitally manipulating his own voice to becoming a singer; from constructing tracks to writing songs,” Darkstar often feels like a construction project: Even the limber, prettier turns on News From Nowhere and *Foam Island *seemed somehow un-songlike, layered-up rather than laid down. While *Made to Measure *is refreshingly quick to the point, it solves one problem and creates another: The eerie tunes are so cryptic and dense, the structures so churning and hopeless, that the vocals are a necessary rescue operation. Across four tracks, the EP hovers gracefully on the cusp of an abyss, staring at despair and willing it to turn into beauty. It does, with help from their friends, but next time—regardless of who joins them—they’ll be stronger if they learn to save themselves. | 2016-07-14T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-07-14T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Warp | July 14, 2016 | 6.8 | d3acdaaf-40f2-4dbb-b1e5-52dafa3f893d | Jazz Monroe | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jazz-monroe/ | null |
The German producer abandons his customarily bass-heavy breakbeats in favor of smooth, pumping techno. It’s an unexpected shift, but the details and the dynamism are pure Skee Mask. | The German producer abandons his customarily bass-heavy breakbeats in favor of smooth, pumping techno. It’s an unexpected shift, but the details and the dynamism are pure Skee Mask. | Skee Mask: ISS010 | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/skee-mask-iss010/ | ISS010 | “In the beginning, there was Jack, and Jack had a groove.” Last August, that iconic line from Rhythm Controll’s oft-sampled 1987 classic “My House” was the opening salvo to Skee Mask’s back-to-back set with Rotterdam DJ Stranger at Amsterdam’s Dekmantel Festival. The echoing proclamation served as the setup for a stuck-in-reverse hardgroove loop that seemed to tear open a hole in space-time, sucking in all those within earshot of the UFO II stage. Inside the rift, Skee Mask and Stranger dished out a barrage of classic techno from the likes of Ben Sims, Jeff Mills, and Joey Beltram.
It was an unexpected stylistic shift from Skee Mask, real name Bryan Müller, who’s best known for cobbling together unpredictable broken rhythms from a number of bass- and breakbeats-heavy genres. On ISS010, the 10th EP from Ilian Tape’s Ilian Skee Series, he makes his most extensive foray yet into techno. From start to finish, the record runs on bouncy, tightly looped four-on-the-floor grooves that pump like greased-up pistons. But don’t mistake their repetition for monotony; if the pounding kicks are Müller’s sturdy chassis, then the peripherals are his hissing hydraulics, warm neon underglow, and spinning rims.
On “Matchpoint,” the repetitive bassline may induce mild tunnel vision, but Müller’s amorphous percussion is the star of the show. He cycles through an unhinged carousel of different hi-hats, switching up patterns and continuously tweaking delays, echoes, filters, and slippery reverse effects. The following track, “Double Standard,” puts similarly dubby synths to more aquatic ends, swirling them around a chugging monolith of a groove. The way that Müller slaps in different percussive elements with an audible thwap brings to mind Jeff Mills, whom Müller has more than once posted about on X (formerly Twitter), trying to ID a long-lost track from a 1995 DJ set at Germany’s Slam Club. Mills is a maestro behind the decks, commanding the gear to do his bidding, and Müller suggests a similar assuredness in the studio, tinkering away in what sounds like an invincible flow state.
“Stomp” is where Müller applies the blissful synth and pad work from Compro to his new techno experiments. Easing off the accelerator a bit, he introduces the first breakbeat of the EP. For a moment, rigid techno and breaks rhythms scrape against each other before Müller welds them together with a synth swell that glows white hot. Just when they feel like they’re going to come apart, he fires off another arc, with melodic sparks flying off into the distance. Before the track ends, Müller indulges in a bit of IDM deconstruction that further bridges the gap between ISS010 and his previous work, if only for a moment. The callback is a welcome reprieve from a hardgroove-leaning onslaught.
ISS010 marks a significant departure from Skee Mask’s massive soundscapes and genre amalgams. With fewer tools at his disposal than usual, Müller seems to be testing himself to do more with less—and inviting listeners to dig deeper into his music’s subtleties. ISS010 may not be the map to “the groove of all grooves” that Body Controll once promised, but it reveals a promising new facet of Müller’s ever-evolving profile. | 2024-04-15T00:01:00.000-04:00 | 2024-04-15T00:01:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Ilian Tape | April 15, 2024 | 7.4 | d3afff9f-af56-4e6f-8dc6-aa6ed9282622 | Reid BG | https://pitchfork.com/staff/reid-bg/ | |
Because its 10 songs are variations on the single theme of "heartbreak," Jens Leman has said I Know What Love Isn't feels like the first proper album he's made. | Because its 10 songs are variations on the single theme of "heartbreak," Jens Leman has said I Know What Love Isn't feels like the first proper album he's made. | Jens Lekman: I Know What Love Isn't | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/16979-i-know-what-love-isnt/ | I Know What Love Isn't | Two years ago, Swedish pop troubadour Jens Lekman released the first song that would appear on his next LP, and it was a characteristically verbose, witty, and string-kissed number called "The End of the World Is Bigger Than Love". That title was disconcerting: Jens Lekman's music is the kind you look to when you need confirmation that love is the end of the world. Over the past decade, few songwriters have dedicated themselves to dramatizing the rise and fall of the heart as brilliantly as Lekman. Whether he's falling in love at the post office or making out during a boring Sunday sermon, his well-detailed, gracefully arranged songs inflate everyday moments and view the most banal aspects of modern life through rosy lenses, as though somebody's constantly spiking his drinks with love potion. So the message of this new song was a stark departure. Coming from the guy who once wrote a song about using his one prison phone call to dedicate a love song to a girl on the radio, a chorus like "A broken heart is not the end of the world" brings with it Santa's-not-real-either levels of illusion-shattering.
But even for the most hopelessly romantic Lekman fans, two years should have been long enough for the track to reveal itself as a grade-A grower. There are a few characteristic laugh-lines ("It's bigger than the Flatbush Avenue Target! And their pharmacy department!"), but mostly "End of the World" glides through a wide variety of tones, scenes, and feelings, as Lekman's breezy delivery distracts from how difficult it is to write a song that's so emotionally precise yet complex. The second verse finds him in Washington, D.C., on the night of the 2008 presidential election, trying to reconcile his private heartbreak with the public elation exploding around him-- and the strange happiness he feels in that moment, too. This isn't "Black Cab", his magnificently gloomy 2003 ode to being bummed when everyone around you is happy. It's a song about the infinite shades of gray that exist between joy and sadness. These are not always easy things to capture in pop songs, but they're the hues he's chasing throughout I Know What Love Isn't. During a six-minute song about the painfully prolonged end of a relationship ("The World Moves On") someone snips, "I wish you just would have cheated on me instead." For one thing, that would have been an easier song to write.
All of this means that I Know What Love Isn't is, by some stretch, the hardest Jens Lekman record to love-- or at least feel instantly infatuated with. His earlier songs specialized in big, bombastic choruses and memorable hooks-- the kind of writ-large tricks that leave you swooning on first listen. But he's after something different here. A word that Lekman's repeatedly used when describing the record is "aerodynamic," and in a recent interview he said, "You know how in the early 90s, a lot of the songs were very focused on the verses being very quiet, and the choruses being super loud, like Nirvana? I was looking for the opposite of that, where you hardly notice where the chorus starts; it's just like an airplane taking off from a runway, smooth, and all of a sudden you're in the air."
Though he sometimes takes this "smoothness" to an extreme (the Spanish guitar solo and saxophone riff make "Erica America" one of the more divisive songs in his oeuvre), it's most gainfully employed in the service of some of Lekman's classic lyrical sleights of hand. He's always gotten a kick out of wordplay ("And when she talked about the fall/ I thought she talked about Mark E. Smith" remains one of his greatest deadpans), but on the standout "Become Someone Else's", it's used with remarkable deftness-- not a punchline so much as a gutpunch. Over a moseying, Bacharach-y piano riff, the title phrase transforms from an idyllic profession ("Life's too good to become someone else's") to an image of loneliness ('That lonesome feeling and what it tells us/ Sleeping on my arm 'til it becomes someone else's"). It's funny, until it's not-- at which point you realize that it ranks up there with his best songs.
Before I Know What Love Isn't, Lekman's gone so far as to say that he hates "albums." His terrific 2005 record Oh You're So Silent Jens was actually a singles collection, and when it came time to assemble the tracklist for his arguable career highlight Night Falls Over Kortedala, he let his friends choose what should make the cut. The hodgepodge approach suited him well, and those records had a feel that was both panoramic and casual: A song about his girlfriend was followed by a song about his barber, each as expertly sketched. I Know What Love Isn't is, he admits, singularly focused on heartbreak, and because its 10 songs are variations on a single theme, he's said it feels like the first proper album he's made. But he's the first one to point out the casualties of thematic maturity: "[On Night Falls Over Kortedala], I created a big rainbow of different colors on my little palette," he explains. "But, for this album, I only chose a few of those colors, so it's a little bit more held back." Ultimately, some of those missing colors leave a void.
But even when he focuses his unflagging talents within fixed bounds, Lekman's still one of the most distinct and observant writers in indie rock today. The understated closer, "Every Little Hair Knows Your Name", is a gem, as wrenching as it is lyrically agile. The title and first verse make it sound like a love song, until the phrase "when we broke up" drops like an anvil. "Every chord I struck was a miserable chord," he croons, and then plucks a few examples, note by mournful note. "It all sounds the same, every chord knows your name." It's heartbreak at its most sumptuously sad, as though he's taking back everything he said before. It actually sounds like the end of the world. | 2012-09-07T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2012-09-07T02:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Secretly Canadian | September 7, 2012 | 7.7 | d3b847fa-aa05-4a01-b205-5938e4c5a58b | Lindsay Zoladz | https://pitchfork.com/staff/lindsay-zoladz/ | null |
The Brooklyn band’s ninth album is an unpretentious garage-punk racket that wears its analog heart on flannel-clad sleeves. | The Brooklyn band’s ninth album is an unpretentious garage-punk racket that wears its analog heart on flannel-clad sleeves. | The Men: New York City | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/the-men-new-york-city/ | New York City | The Men: Now there’s a band that knows how to self-mythologize. You might associate the punk four-piece with the Brooklyn music scene of the early 2010s, a world of 285 Kent gigs, Northside showcases, and the BrooklynVegan comments section. But they were always slotting themselves into an earlier classic-rock lineage—recording straight to tape; pushing out five albums in four years; naming their 2011 breakout album after a Ramones classic; going full Crazy Horse on their fourth and arguably best album, 2013’s New Moon. That album’s recording process (in a cabin in the Catskills, naturally) was immortalized by singer-guitarist Nick Chiericozzi in a liner-notes essay, the kind of grandiose reminiscence you’d expect to accompany a 30th-anniversary reissue. These guys knew they were onto something.
The Men’s uber-prolific imperial phase came to a close with 2014’s Tomorrow’s Hits, but they’ve soldiered along since then, releasing a solid album every two years or so. These have vacillated between roaring throwbacks to the band’s shit-kicking punk roots (2016’s Devil Music) and rangier, mellower efforts that serve as eclectic samplers of their rustic influences (2018’s Drift, 2020’s Mercy). Within the opening seconds of the skittering, straight-ahead “Hard Livin’,” as Chiericozzi declares, “Hard times are over/Just because!” in a phlegm-caked growl, it’s clear that New York City leans towards the former category.
The album’s backstory and title (come on—who besides Lou Reed and X has the nerve to name an album after their home city?) reflect the group’s knack for shamelessly blowing its own horn. As the story goes, founding members Chiericozzi and Mark Perro laid down an early iteration of New York City with a drum machine in 2020. Unhappy with the result, they went into a Brooklyn studio with bandmates Rich Samis (drums) and Kevin Faulkner (bass) and rerecorded live to 2" tape, favoring impromptu energy over multitrack perfectionism.
To wit, New York City is the scuzziest the Men have sounded in years, an unpretentious garage-punk racket that wears its analog heart on its flannel-clad sleeves. On tunes like the hard-charging “Echo,” the guitars are in the red, the vocals are in the red, and even the drums thwack and wobble like a Times New Viking deep cut. The closest thing to a ballad is the minor-key dirge “Anyway I Find You,” which would have felt right at home on New Moon. Elsewhere, it’s a gaudy rock’n’roll album filled with gaudy rock’n’roll gestures, from the pair of throat-busting screams that open “Eye” to the wailing guitar solo in “Through the Night” that pans back and forth between stereo channels with all the subtlety of a Spinal Tap goof.
Yet this is hardly a return to the corrosive post-hardcore of Leave Home. As raw and blown-out as New York City may sound, it retains the melodic sensibility the Men have spent the past decade refining; uptempo rave-ups like “Peace of Mind” and “Eternal Recurrence” draw more from the boozy well of ’70s rockers like Thin Lizzy and Cheap Trick than a no-wave punk lineage. Even the record’s weaker moments—looking at you, “God Bless the USA,” a Chuck Berry-powered 12-bar protest-rocker with a limp Putin name-check—slot right in with the modern-day dudes-rock canon of White Reaper and Japandroids. The songwriting is often brash and undercooked, but the album’s sheer boisterousness is a joy.
Why’s the album called New York City? Who knows. I suppose the Men are a New York institution at this point (what’s more NYC than recording your best album upstate?). But New York City is less a reflection of the sanitized, hyper-gentrified New York of today than a reaction against it—sneering from the paint-peeling dive bars, flipping off the real-estate vultures, and summoning the snottiest ghosts of the city’s punk past. | 2023-02-06T00:03:00.000-05:00 | 2023-02-06T00:03:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Fuzz Club | February 6, 2023 | 7.1 | d3c66d7f-eee0-4634-9e83-3e1c84e93748 | Zach Schonfeld | https://pitchfork.com/staff/zach-schonfeld/ | |
With producer Redinho, the Greek pop artist smooths out some of her defining idiosyncrasies, embracing new sounds but lacking the vision to transcend her influences. | With producer Redinho, the Greek pop artist smooths out some of her defining idiosyncrasies, embracing new sounds but lacking the vision to transcend her influences. | Σtella: Up and Away | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/stella-up-and-away/ | Up and Away | With galloping guitars, off-kilter electronics, and quirky, imagistic lyrics, Stella Chronopoulou cemented her place as one of the most popular young artists in her native Greece. Since debuting in 2015, Chronopoulou, who records as Σtella, has paired her melismatic contralto with dream-pop synths to tell quotidian yet alluring stories that only needed small details like beer, wine, and a strong come-on to paint a complete picture. For the most part, she rooted her sound in 21st-century pop, but throughout her catalog, you could occasionally identify a dash of traditional European music, as on 2017’s “Works for You,” with its flourishes of mandolin and synth-flute.
On Up and Away, Chronopoulou’s first album for Sub Pop, those traditional European sounds move to the forefront. Produced by Tom Calvert, a.k.a. Redinho, the music abounds with fingerpicked nylon-string guitar lines inspired by Grigoris Bithikotsis and Tzeni Vanou, two of Chronopoulou’s favorite ‘60s and ‘70s Greek folk-pop musicians. You can also hear the influence of the globetrotting Houston band Khruangbin, whom Chronopoulou and Calvert bonded over in the studio. Like that band, whose once-adventurous music has gradually settled into duller textures, the experiment is not always successful, and her combination of desert blues, psychedelia, and Greek pop erases the idiosyncrasies of Σtella’s best songs, registering as little more than background music.
Chronopoulou and Calvert’s incorporation of new sounds blunts the sharpness that made her previous work so enticing. Sure, the smoky, reverbed drums on “Nomad” are pleasant, but the song is only pleasant—nothing about it lingers. The hourglass-slow guitar line and Chronopoulou’s sleepy vocals make the song sound like she and Calvert poured its raw materials into the precise mold of a “vibes” playlist. “Who Cares” is a direct homage to Chronopoulou’s Greek-pop inspirations, but the percussion and bass, along with Chronopoulou’s vocals, are so gauzy you’re more likely to tune out than tune in. The problem isn’t that Chronopoulou’s music can’t work outside modern pop fare: The invigorating title track from her 2020 apex The Break deftly fused a driving disco beat with playfully serrating strings that evoked highlights from M.I.A.’s Kala. Lacking the vision to distinguish the music from its influences, Σtella’s most explicit forays into Greek music often land as her most directionless work yet.
It doesn’t help that Chronopoulou’s voice, which can purr with subtle vibrato or scrape the skies, is buried far deeper in the mix. On 2015’s “Wait on Me,” her vocal control and clarity could make the most bizarre lyrics—including, of all things, “shaking my ass like a chipmunk”—sound earnest and endearing. On Up and Away, her voice, when it’s audible at all, is doused in effects that mask her quirks and blend her voice into the instrumentation. The percussion and jazz guitar of “Black and White” often blur her lyrics, and when she does break through the murk, she sings flat, nondescript lines such as “Ooh, I don’t understand you” and “You changed your mind/But I don’t care no more.”
The best moments on Up and Away reinforce what’s missing in the worst ones. The title track is an energizing, synth-driven gem, a rare instance of Chronopoulou folding her influences into a sound that feels her own, with handclaps adding a dance-like rush during the chorus. “Another Nation” returns strange yet charming lyrics to the Σtella formula (“Run like a pink flamingo/You’re familiar with some prison lingo”), and it’s built on the record’s catchiest guitar line. Toward the end of the second verse, Chronopoulou reaches into the highest, most exciting parts of her register: She sounds like she’s ready to leap off the page and revisit The Break’s most headphone-filling vocal performances, but she never quite gets there. Instead, she lets out some sluggish oohs and aahs, and then, the song is over. | 2022-06-21T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2022-06-21T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | Sub Pop | June 21, 2022 | 5.7 | d3cce737-e081-461e-adac-15959ed944f7 | Max Freedman | https://pitchfork.com/staff/max-freedman/ | |
On this triumphant live album, the Asheville songwriter transforms his dreamlike narratives into something joyous, collective, and free. | On this triumphant live album, the Asheville songwriter transforms his dreamlike narratives into something joyous, collective, and free. | MJ Lenderman: And the Wind (Live and Loose!) | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/mj-lenderman-and-the-wind-live-and-loose/ | And the Wind (Live and Loose!) | When MJ Lenderman performs with his backing band, the musicians barely fit on stage. At one point, the Wind ballooned to eight members because the self-professedly “conflict avoidant” frontman couldn’t bear to kick anybody out. Standing with his electric guitar, behind the pedal steel and the occasional keyboard, Lenderman leads from within his band, a fitting stance for a musician who quit basketball because he couldn’t muster a competitive attitude. As a live ensemble—now generally pared back to a five-piece—MJ Lenderman and the Wind continuously rework the Asheville songwriter’s extensive back catalog, adding a vibrancy to his earlier home recordings that paints them as natural B-sides to his exuberant studio debut, 2022’s Boat Songs. On And the Wind (Live and Loose!), a live album composed of recordings from two shows during summer 2023, Lenderman and his band elevate his dreamlike narratives into something joyous, collective, and free.
“The less people hear me talk, the more they can project on me or think I’m a smart guy,” Lenderman said in an interview earlier this year. True to form, the frontman hardly utters a word between songs across the album. When he does speak up, during the minimalist groove that leads into “You Are Every Girl to Me,” it’s only to credit his collaborators—Wednesday bandmate Xandy Chelmis on the pedal steel, Ethan Baechtold on bass, Colin Miller on drums, Jon Samuels (also of Philadelphia bands Friendship and 2nd Grade) on lead guitar, and a special appearance from Lenderman’s girlfriend and Wednesday lead singer Karly Hartzman as a third guitarist and backing vocalist. The band’s chemistry is obvious throughout the record: Chelmis’ pedal steel melts almost imperceptibly into the empty spaces on “Toontown,” lending an extra sigh to Hartzman and Lenderman’s harmony of rodeo clowns. There, as with other Boat Songs cuts like “Under Control,” the band approaches the song as a marathon, not a sprint, Samuels’ riffs carving new paths into familiar rhythms.
Many of the songs from 2021’s Ghost of Your Guitar Solo were written around the same time as those on Boat Songs; with a full band behind them, they feel of a piece. Take “Catholic Priest,” a winsome ode to the perceived simplicity of piety and the naivete of youth: In its original form, Lenderman’s voice wavers uneasily, occasionally inaudible and cracking on the high notes, while a frail guitar moves through the song’s rhythms. But live, Lenderman sings with the confidence built from years spent on the road, while Chelmis’s pedal steel breathes new energy into the melodies once lazily plucked by an electric guitar. The same goes for an homage to Jack Nicholson’s courtside Lakers seats, “Live Jack,” whose jokes land even harder when they’re punctuated by dueling guitar solos. “Dan Marino,” the shakily recorded Boat Songs track that might be Lenderman’s most compact piece of poetry, sounds like peak time at the honky tonk from the minute the opening guitars come crashing in. Live and Loose! is a document of friendship, the experience of watching the stories Lenderman wrote in isolation become bigger than their creator.
This transformation from solitude to camaraderie reaches its peak on the live rendition of “Knockin’,” a song originally released as a fuzzy home recording in 2021. The pieces were all there in the initial version—the humor of watching professional golfer John Daly sing a Bob Dylan classic, the knowing sting in his voice as he sings “You’re all I need babe/Yeah, you’ve heard that one before,” the closed loop of Lenderman himself singing “knockin’ on heaven’s door” in the final moments. But the band continued to develop the song at live shows, slowing its pace and doubling its ferocity; no longer constrained by recording equipment or personnel, “Knockin’” is set ablaze. Lenderman’s voice rises to a gravelly roar at the apex, aiming toward the sky as he sings about taking flight. Lenderman finally released a full-band version of “Knockin’” just before the shows featured on Live and Loose!, but the live performance still captures a uniquely communal catharsis.
The album closes with a cover of “Long Black Veil,” a country standard about a man framed for murder, originally recorded by Lefty Frizzell but made famous from live covers like the Band’s 1969 Woodstock performance. Joined by Nashville experimental folk four-piece Styrofoam Winos at his Chicago show, Lenderman sounds at home among friends, his voice lifted by the lilting twang in Lou Turner’s. The song choice is also instructive: “Long Black Veil” reads like an MJ Lenderman song, rooted in gallows humor (Our protagonist can’t confess his alibi: He was sleeping with his neighbor’s wife at the time of the murder!). It also shares Lenderman’s uncanny ability to write songs that are both instantly classic and strangely contemporary, music that only grows from reinterpretation. | 2023-11-21T00:02:00.000-05:00 | 2023-11-21T00:02:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Anti- | November 21, 2023 | 8 | d3d890d3-09a5-431f-bdac-d84e9a297b39 | Arielle Gordon | https://pitchfork.com/staff/arielle-gordon/ | |
The London jazz-pop musician is at her most opaque on a new three-song EP, yet these tracks are as evocative and affecting as any in her catalog. | The London jazz-pop musician is at her most opaque on a new three-song EP, yet these tracks are as evocative and affecting as any in her catalog. | Nilüfer Yanya: Feeling Lucky? EP | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/nilufer-yanya-feeling-lucky-ep/ | Feeling Lucky? EP | Nilüfer Yanya’s melodies have a pull so strong they almost necessitate their own law of physics: Play a song in your living room one time, and two days later, without fail, you’ll hear your roommate singing it. As she’s evolved as a musician, the London-based artist has shifted from slick jazz-pop towards scuzzier rock, but those tremendous hooks, bolstered by her intricate guitarwork, remain at the center. On last year’s full-length debut Miss Universe, Yanya candidly tackled heartache, disappointment, and paranoia, channelling existential dread into unyielding anthems of angst. Her new three-song EP, Feeling Lucky?, is nominally about losing and finding good luck. But the theme comes secondary to continued dread—fear of flying, resentment about feeling trapped in a relationship. These songs are some of her most opaque, yet they are as evocative as any in her catalog. More than ever, those intricate melodies—guitar lines that evoke Soccer Mommy or Liz Phair, flurries of roller rink-ready synth notes—provide the emotional heartbeat.
The narratives on Feeling Lucky? feel nebulous in part because Yanya’s layered, distorted words often dip in and out of legibility, functioning more as an instrument than as a means for communication. Most striking is her expert falsetto, gauzy but crystalline, like a frosty window on a cold winter morning. “Day 7.5093” finds its backbone in the lower registers of Yanya’s voice, which intertwines with a guitar riff that could propel a ’90s alt-rock jam. But the whimsy and sparkle comes when she intermittently breaks into falsetto—and at the end, when she duets with a series of staccato, high-pitched synth blips, like two robots having a conversation.
Yanya has always made deliberate use of repetition, an approach that’s especially effective here, as the words and phrases that emerge from the instrumentals become more resonant. The chorus on the Nick Hakim-produced “Crash”—“If you ask me one more question, I’m about to crash”—emerges through a mesh of guitar, twisting like a ribbon. The song leaves you dizzy and agitated, capturing the emotional tunnel vision induced by extreme annoyance. The lyrics of “Same Damn Luck” discuss spite and resentment, but what echoes in the mind are the chanted words “miss you, miss you,” a feeling of confused yearning that matches the ’80s nostalgia of the diffused synth and meandering guitar.
Short EPs like this one can sometimes feel like stopgaps between bigger projects, but the songs on Feeling Lucky? express Yanya’s anxiety from a new vantage point: in the middle. Permeated by adrenaline and confusion, they parse feelings without establishing any distance from them. At a little over 10 minutes long, the project is too short to elaborate on its overarching themes. Instead, it submerges the listener into the middle of the action and invites them to stay for a moment.
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2020-12-12T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2020-12-12T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Pop/R&B | ATO | December 12, 2020 | 7.5 | d3db38ff-05d3-469b-8840-1dcee3a6f5eb | Vrinda Jagota | https://pitchfork.com/staff/vrinda-jagota/ | https://media.pitchfork.com/photos/5fcfbe8c67ac352c357ea864/1:1/w_3000,h_3000,c_limit/Feeling%20Lucky |
On the sort of record that would have once sparked a minor bidding war between Stones Throw and Ninja Tune, hip-hop, IDM, and ambient music drift into a waking dream. | On the sort of record that would have once sparked a minor bidding war between Stones Throw and Ninja Tune, hip-hop, IDM, and ambient music drift into a waking dream. | Black Taffy: Elder Mantis | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/black-taffy-elder-mantis/ | Elder Mantis | Imagine if the Caretaker were more into RZA than early jazz, spinning detuned and damaged stabs of harp and piano into loops that stumble atop crumbling percussion. The new Black Taffy LP by Dallas’ Donovan Jones, a former member of heavy post-rock act This Will Destroy You, is that image, shivering into life. The enchanting instrumentals of Elder Mantis (even the title seems ripped from the Wu-Tang manual, right?) rise up like mirages from smoothly spreading bass lines, slowly skidding claps and snares, and dusty scraps of harp and koto. The overall effect is like Liquid Swords stripped of GZA and reworked as a meditation exercise.
That’s one way of hearing it, of course: You could also say it’s like J Dilla and Boards of Canada blending into a sinister Bibio, or a boom-bap Harold Budd. However you slice it, there is something distinctly time-stamped about Black Taffy, pitched between soul-streaked glitch-hop and beard-stroking bedroom electronic. This is the sort of record that would have sparked a minor bidding war between Stones Throw and Ninja Tune a little more than a decade ago.
But Elder Mantis is more than a dated genre exercise because of its liminal position between genres and its modern sense of hollow, haunting, almost Burial-like space. Jones has found a voice of his own among his touchstones, one that knocks like hip-hop, wobbles like IDM, and hovers like ambient. For something so restrained and hypnotically webbed with shuddering loops, Elder Mantis has a striking sense of musical eloquence and variety. Where “Divining Rod” quivers and drifts like its namesake, tracks like “Corridors” and “Switchback” scroll by in steady breaths, so that the record is constantly tightening or slackening, as if on a spool.
Unlike many of his reference points, Jones doesn’t let things blur into murk. He cultivates a rare atmosphere that is at once clear and polluted, spacious and looming, relaxing and uneasy. Elder Mantis thrives on the pleasure of hearing a sparse, precisely defined palette thoughtfully interpreted through a set of colorways and feelings. The simple elements are legible but pitched at a slant, creating a tension that allows each of these pieces to be more than the sum of discernible parts. Each stereo pop, frequency notch, or sprung-clockwork drum seems placed by hand, and unsuspected melodies keep rising from beneath them, like gas from cracks in the earth. From the slithery “Land of Nod” to the elegant noir of “Windflower,” the lush string sweeps of “Geraldine” to the Laraaji-style zither hymn “The Empty Mirror,” Jones contrives all manner of subtle drops, openings, and turns without ever rising above a hushed drift. It’s an alert album that, turns out, is also great for drifting to sleep. | 2019-02-16T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2019-02-16T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Experimental | Leaving | February 16, 2019 | 7.3 | d3e459b9-d668-4eec-b6da-2c53f31f9b81 | Brian Howe | https://pitchfork.com/staff/brian-howe/ | |
St. Vincent, Low, Courtney Barnett, the Linda Lindas and more highlight the enduring influence of Sleater-Kinney on this track-by-track tribute to the band’s breakthrough 1997 album. | St. Vincent, Low, Courtney Barnett, the Linda Lindas and more highlight the enduring influence of Sleater-Kinney on this track-by-track tribute to the band’s breakthrough 1997 album. | Sleater-Kinney: Dig Me In: A Dig Me Out Covers Album | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/sleater-kinney-dig-me-in-a-dig-me-out-covers-album/ | Dig Me In: A Dig Me Out Covers Album | It’s hard to hear a song from Sleater-Kinney’s heyday without thinking of the individual contributions of each of its three members. What would “Words and Guitar” be without the piercing exclamations of Corin Tucker, the nimble riffs of Carrie Brownstein, or the rollicking drums of Janet Weiss? When Tucker belts “take the noise in my head,” each syllable razor-sharp, you can’t help but feel a sense of urgency. It isn’t a song about simply enjoying music—it’s a song about music as a life source.
A good cover shouldn’t try to replicate its original, but instead highlight the strengths of both its performer and songwriters. Take Courtney Barnett, who covers “Words and Guitar” for Dig Me In: A Dig Me Out Covers Album, a track-for-track tribute commemorating the 25th anniversary of Sleater-Kinney’s breakthrough third album. Barnett barely tweaks the tempo, but she gives the song a more lenient attitude; she doesn’t try to mimic Tucker’s sharp snarl, instead letting her mid-range deadpan flow. It doesn’t feel forced or xeroxed but perfectly attuned to Barnett’s skillset.
With 13 artists total covering each of the original album’s songs, Dig Me In is a slightly unbalanced collection that attempts to distill what made Sleater-Kinney’s 1997 album so powerful and enduring. Its high points do that successfully: TV on the Radio’s Tunde Adebimpe makes “The Drama You’ve Been Craving” barely recognizable, swapping its frenetic spunk for sultry synth-pop. Black Belt Eagle Scout’s take on “It’s Enough” keeps its chugging guitars at the forefront, but they’re blanketed in a healthy dose of fuzz that, along with Katherine Paul’s subdued murmurs, turns the original’s insistence into brooding, cryptic allure. The most drastic change comes thanks to Low, who strip “Dance Song ’97” down to little more than just vocals and a leaden bassline; when Alan Sparhawk and Mimi Parker’s voices converge to declare the track’s desires—“You’re the one that I saw/You’re the one that I want”—their words sounds less romantic than haunted, or even sinister.
Because Dig Me Out includes some of the best songwriting of Sleater-Kinney’s career, the renditions on Dig Me In also underscore its performers’ weaknesses. Jeff Tweedy doesn’t pretend his voice carries the same intensity as Tucker’s, but when Wilco otherwise copy and paste “One More Hour” note for note, the result is feckless. On the other hand, St. Vincent’s “Dig Me Out” encroaches on the opposite extreme, bogged down by clumsy, grating electronic production; meanwhile, alt-pop singer Self Esteem shrinks the ardor of “Heart Factory” into an ultimately forgettable acoustic ditty. Then, there’s Tyler Cole—the musician/producer best known for his collaborations with Willow—who augments “Buy Her Candy” into an overstuffed, heavy-handed slice of arena rock that strips Tucker’s version of all nuance and intimacy.
One of the most genuinely fun moments on Dig Me In is a faithful performance of “Little Babies” by teen and pre-teen punks the Linda Lindas, who’ve heavily acknowledged the influence of Sleater-Kinney in their music and make their appreciation clear in their performance. To attempt to eclipse Sleater-Kinney with a cover of their song is to predestine failure, but the herd of artists featured on Dig Me In—who range in age as widely as they do genre—encapsulate the band’s endless relevance and lasting legacy. | 2022-10-27T00:02:00.000-04:00 | 2022-10-27T00:02:00.000-04:00 | Rock | self-released | October 27, 2022 | 6.8 | d3efeb5c-5a63-4dd0-a49d-878cea0306cd | Abby Jones | https://pitchfork.com/staff/abby-jones/ | |
The Lisbon batida producer’s second LP is more spacious than her hard-charging debut, but infused with ambivalent emotion; the ghosts of good times seem to hover anxiously in the wings. | The Lisbon batida producer’s second LP is more spacious than her hard-charging debut, but infused with ambivalent emotion; the ghosts of good times seem to hover anxiously in the wings. | Nídia: Não Fales Nela Que A Mentes | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/nidia-nao-fales-nela-que-a-mentes/ | Não Fales Nela Que A Mentes | On her debut LP, 2017’s Nídia é Má, Nídia é Fudida, Nídia sounded tough and triumphant, firing out knotty batida rhythms and piercing melodies with the pluck of a newcomer. Batida, a salmagundi of styles circulating through the Afro-Lusophone diaspora, and a sound closely associated with Lisbon’s Príncipe label, was still finding its footing on an international stage. Two years earlier, Nídia had joined the label when she was just 18 years old, building on the style as it had been established by pioneers like DJ Marfox and DJ Nigga Fox. After a long stint living in Bordeaux, Nídia has returned to Lisbon; Não Fales Nela Que A Mentes is one of three new records produced in her bedroom studio there. But unlike her hard-charging debut LP, this one is a breezy collection of mid-tempo tracks, clocking in at just 29 minutes.
With their spacious arrangements and shuddering, 808-style bass blasts, the 10 tracks owe more to rap and grime instrumentals, or the street sounds of the global South, than they do to the heat and frenzy of the club. (The title, taken from a poem by Jorge de Sena, roughly translates as, “Don’t talk about her or you’ll end up lying about her.”) Nídia’s approach to sound is efficient and elemental, taking recognizable material—hand claps, crash cymbals, plasticky brass—and creating complexity through arrangement rather than signal manipulation. She paints in bold, black lines before filling in the gaps with heavy pigments. On “capacidades,” a distorted voice pops up like a cartoon speech bubble, chanting “Go! Go! Go!” as the beat topples forward. On “rap-tentativa,” the rhythm is spelled out like a schoolyard clapping game while a pair of two-note melodies circle each other like a team chant.
The track titles read like hastily chosen placeholders—“popo,” “intro,” “RAP-complet”—as if they’ve come from a sample pack of “Nídia-Type-Beats” for prospective MCs. That doesn’t necessarily reflect on their contents; the interplay of breathy flute and twanged strings on “popo,” for instance, provides enough narrative without the need for human input. But other tracks do seem to be making space for a guest who never shows up, whether it’s a vocalist or simply a further development of melody or dynamics.
Nídia exits the stage with a reverse fanfare on “emotions.” Sad stubs of synth brass blare out over hand claps and hi-hats, like a negative sheet for some mid-’00s Southern rap hit. The ghosts of good times seem to hover in the wings. In fact, Nídia often finds her way to a minor key or a dissonant triad, upsetting her upbeat rhythms with a shred of nervous energy. On a two-track 7" released in tandem with this album, there’s more of this happy-sad, stop-go mood, as growling basslines square up to pretty pianos. Such complications are fundamental to the Príncipe universe, where tensions are left unresolved. | 2020-05-27T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-05-27T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Príncipe Discos | May 27, 2020 | 6.7 | d400fdaf-13ad-4e0f-b4c6-3401f2913333 | Chal Ravens | https://pitchfork.com/staff/chal-ravens/ | |
After a six-year absence that found the South become the dominant region in hip-hop, Houston legends Bun B and Pimp C sound equally frustrated and vindicated on their outstanding comeback album. Outkast, Scarface, Three 6 Mafia, Geto Boys, and Too Short are among the guests. | After a six-year absence that found the South become the dominant region in hip-hop, Houston legends Bun B and Pimp C sound equally frustrated and vindicated on their outstanding comeback album. Outkast, Scarface, Three 6 Mafia, Geto Boys, and Too Short are among the guests. | UGK: Underground Kingz | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/10541-underground-kingz/ | Underground Kingz | Even when they were scrappy newcomers from a town no one in rap cared about, UGK's Bun B and Pimp C sounded like wizened old veterans. Pimp's beats were slow, organic country-funk instrumentals; they could've passed for Stax backing tracks if they didn't have so much bass. Bun's matter-of-fact, virtuoso, baritone flow exuded weariness and authority. Fifteen years later, the Texas duo sound like eternal, immovable features on rap's landscape, and their style has hardened into a blueprint; an album like T.I.'s Trap Muzik, say, would've been near-unthinkable without UGK's precedent.
But it's been a while since we've heard from UGK. Dirty Money, their last album, came out in 2001. Since that time, Pimp spent four years in prison for violating his probation on an aggravated assault charge. During Pimp's imprisonment, the South became rap's dominant region, and Bun kept the group's name alive by going on an absolute guest-appearance tear, popping up on tracks with virtually every major rapper working. Even after Pimp's release, UGK's label pushed back the release of this album for nearly a year. And so now the album's release makes for a weirdly bittersweet moment: Underground Kingz is an equally frustrated and vindicated album. Pimp hasn't forgotten what it was like to rot in a cell while his region exploded, and Bun hasn't forgotten that he had to keep his group above water by himself. Neither has forgotten a decade-and-a-half of record-label drama and elusive success, and neither seems particularly happy with a rap climate that they helped to shape. On album opener "Swishas & Dosha", Pimp sneers at his successors: "I remember when a rapper was a go-getter/ Now all these rappers is some ho niggas." Bun agrees: "You MySpacing and Facebooking, playing games with them toys/ I'm in the streets where gangstas meet while you online with them boys."
Throughout Underground Kingz, Pimp and Bun wield their legacy like a club. They repurpose two rap classics, Too Short's "Life Is...Too Short" and Scarface's "The Fix" on "Life Is 2009" and "Still Ridin Dirty", songs that feature Too Short and Scarface, respectively. (The latter doesn't rap; he just shows up singing histrionic fake-gospel on the hook. It's awesome.) Other rap legends show up as well: Geto Boys bulldog Willie D snaps at region-dismissers on "Quit Hatin' the South". Houston depressive Z-Ro waxes elegiac on "Trill Niggas Don't Die". Big Daddy Kane and Kool G Rap, both old-school New York royalty, spit weathered threats all over Marley Marl's hard, simple track on "Next Up", and Pimp and (especially) Bun sound perfectly at-home alongside them. Most transcendently, the two trade verses with another legendary Southern duo, Outkast, on the gorgeous single "Int'l Players Anthem". Three 6 Mafia's DJ Paul and Juicy J throw enormous drums under a joyous loop of Willie Hutch's classic blaxploitation ballad "I Choose You", and Andre 3000's tender, lovestruck verse perfectly offsets Pimp C's megaton sneer. "Int'l Players Anthem" finds UGK in an uncharacteristically euphoric mood, and it just might by my favorite song of the year.
Most of Underground Kingz, though, is anything but upbeat. It's the first UGK album where Pimp doesn't handle the lion's share of the production, though most of the album's producers make sure to make their tracks fit the slow, woozy aesthetic that the duo established long ago. On "Cocaine", the Blackout Movement curl blues-guitar around minimal drum-thumps while Pimp moans the title over and over on the chorus and Bun gives a quick lesson in the drug's history: "It's been around for hundreds of years, exploited by the rich/ They even used to put it in Coca-Cola; ain't that a bitch?" On "Two Types of Bitches", Momo's nasty blues-guitar and blurting organs lazily circle each other while guest Dizzee Rascal turns up to spit some paranoid misogyny. Elsewhere, the duo absorbs the newer trends in Southern rap, showing the kids how to attack them: Lil Jon's jacked-up bass on "Like That", the Runners' epic synth-churn on "Take tha Hood Back".
The album really hits its stride, though, when Pimp takes over the controls and brings back the sad, heavy country-rap that he does better than anyone else. "The Game Belongs to Me" is an irrefutable declaration of supremacy, so warm and effortless that Bun and Pimp's voices sound like they're bubbling up from the track. "How Long Can It Last" winds seven minutes of emotional self-torture around screaming blues-guitars and gut-rumbling bass. Even a song as formulaic as "Chrome Plated Woman", which works the ancient car-as-girl concept, is executed with masterly panache.
The two discs of Underground Kingz run well over two hours, and plenty of fat could easily have been trimmed. Nobody needs another two tinny synth-beats from Jazze Pha, to say nothing of the man's abysmal verse on "Stop-N-Go". The warm sentiment of "Real Women" is much-appreciated after the bile of "Two Types of Bitches," the lite-jazz Fender Rhodes less so. As great as "Int'l Players Anthem" is, the album would be fine without its two remixes; the ugly screwed-and-chopped version practically kills the album's momentum right at the end. Still, these aren't complaints; they're quibbles. Underground Kingz is the first UGK album in six years, and it's just an enormous relief to hear that these two can still weave a cohesive long-form tapestry of an album better than almost anyone else in rap. | 2007-08-17T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2007-08-17T02:00:01.000-04:00 | Rap | Jive | August 17, 2007 | 8.4 | d401ee64-c5c0-4be1-a2cf-383338dda207 | Tom Breihan | https://pitchfork.com/staff/tom-breihan/ | null |
Austria-born, Barcelona-based producer Zora Jones makes tracks indebted to Chicago footwork, but with a unique vision. Her work suggests club music injected with helium and sent bobbing high overhead, and for all the flyaway nature of her sounds, her compositions carry real emotional weight. | Austria-born, Barcelona-based producer Zora Jones makes tracks indebted to Chicago footwork, but with a unique vision. Her work suggests club music injected with helium and sent bobbing high overhead, and for all the flyaway nature of her sounds, her compositions carry real emotional weight. | Zora Jones: 100 Ladies EP | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21318-100-ladies-ep/ | 100 Ladies EP | Zora Jones has described 2010 as her year zero. She saw DJ Rashad spin for the first time at a party in Montreal, where it was pretty much everyone's first encounter with footwork in a club setting. She and her friends ended up spending a week with the Chicago DJ, and he gave them a batch of tracks he'd produced with his Ghettoteknitianz crew. It opened up a whole new world for her. "That folder is still one of the main folders I go to for inspiration," she told The Fader. "Those tracks are so crisp to me and so influential. 2010 was the year for me."
You can hear the late Rashad's influence on Jones' debut EP, 100 Ladies—or at least, you can deduce it. Many of her tracks move at 160 BPM, smack in the middle of footwork's sweet spot. But in the past five years, Jones has also established her own sound, one that's indebted to footwork (and also to grime), but irreducible to either of those genres. It's several steps removed—and that's a direct result of the work that she's put in.
The title of the Austria-born, Barcelona-based producer's EP is a reference to a pact that she made with herself: to make 100 tracks before she released anything. This isn't the first thing she has unveiled; there have been collaborations with Sinjin Hawke and DJ Taye on FractalFantasy (the imprint she runs with Hawke, which began life as an online outlet for audiovisual productions), and she's posted the odd solo track to her SoundCloud account. But this is her first extended statement, and the singularity of her vision is immediately apparent.
Aside from the occasional anchoring 808 kick, she favors thin, silvery sounds: brittle rimshots, tinny hi-hats, and 808 toms tuned toward their upper limits. Her main instrument is the voice—resampled, stacked in dizzying fifths, pitched up near dog-whistle frequency, and painted on in bright, loopy brushstrokes. Put together, these elements combine to suggest club music injected with helium and sent bobbing high overhead.
Of the album's seven tracks, only two come anywhere close to resembling established forms. "Zui", with its shuddering 808 patterns and stuttering monosyllables, wears its footwork influences proudly on its sleeve, and the lurching cadence of "Too Many Tears" sounds like an outgrowth of the "weightless" style of grime favored by Mumdance, Rabit, and Murlo. Again, though, her wordless vocal melodies stand proudly apart; they're eerie, shapeshifting things, part violin and part warbling bird, and their effect is spellbinding.
The EP is bookended by its best tracks. The footwork-tempo closer "First Light" pumps away like Philip Glass rearranged for tin whistle, Gameboy, and chipmunk, while the opening "Oh Boy" forsakes drums entirely; it's just wordless vocal trills pitched up into icy configurations accompanied by the hollow hum of whirly tubes. Despite their novelty, both songs remain unusually moving; for all the flyaway nature of her sounds, her compositions carry real emotional weight. They offer the equivalent of a solid musical form being melted down and channeled into tiny, sidewinding rivulets; it will be fascinating to see where these streams carry her next. | 2015-12-04T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2015-12-04T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Electronic | Fractal Fantasy | December 4, 2015 | 8 | d4028031-0943-4b9b-b5b2-2e005d4cadd8 | Philip Sherburne | https://pitchfork.com/staff/philip-sherburne/ | null |
Rage Against the Machine’s debut is a radical fistful of funk, rap, and rock. Through its power, it remains an essential call to activism and a necessary lesson on how to withstand the opposition. | Rage Against the Machine’s debut is a radical fistful of funk, rap, and rock. Through its power, it remains an essential call to activism and a necessary lesson on how to withstand the opposition. | Rage Against the Machine: Rage Against the Machine | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/rage-against-the-machine-rage-against-the-machine/ | Rage Against the Machine | At the beginning, Rage Against the Machine were relentless.
It was 1990, and Tom Morello was a struggling rock guitarist in Los Angeles, with a Harvard degree in social studies. He had a vision to funnel the unrest of the day—the Gulf War, the prospective end of apartheid, the collapse of the Soviet Union—and his galvanizing experiences as a Kenyan-American kid in suburban Illinois into a group that synthesized rock and rap into something inherently rebellious. Or, as he put it in a want ad, he required “a socialist frontman who likes Black Sabbath and Public Enemy.”
A year later, he found his spark, the complete creative complement who shared his systematic disillusionment, anarchic interests, and multiracial experiences. A scrawny 21-year-old punk with an unruly tuft of dreadlocks and a stiff upper lip, Zack de la Rocha had been shuttled for many of his teenage years between divorced parents in tough East Los Angeles and the more affluent and pale Irvine. His father was a famed Mexican muralist, his mother a “half-Chicano/half-German” teacher’s aide, as he put it. He liked a jumble of music, from the flutter of Charlie Parker to the esprit of Run-D.M.C. and hardcore. In high school, his white friends rejected him when they caught him breakdancing on the football field.
But the moment de la Rocha stepped into a rehearsal room with Morello, drummer Brad Wilk, and de la Rocha’s childhood bandmate bassist Tim Commerford, the chemistry was instant and undeniable. “It was this kind of intense electricity that I hadn’t really felt before,” Wilk remembered. “Everyone in the band was fully on that trip.”
Within weeks of forming, Rage Against the Machine—a name lifted from an abandoned tune in de la Rocha’s last band—had recorded a 12-song demo of originals, pieced together largely from fragments in de la Rocha’s journals and song structures Morello had contemplated for years. By the end of 1991, they were navigating major-label offers. By the middle of 1992, they were recording their self-titled debut in a string of fancy Los Angeles studios. Seven of those first demos reappear on Rage Against the Machine in almost identical form, de la Rocha’s vocals simply sharpened by veteran engineer Garth Richardson.
The speed with which Rage wrote and recorded its first screeds is paramount to understanding why, now a quarter-century after its release, Rage Against the Machine remains an essential call to activism and a necessary lesson on how to withstand the opposition. While taking on the most powerful institutions of consolidated American power, Rage Against the Machine were having the time of their lives. You can hear it in most every note.
Politics, however, seemed preeminent. Haunted by guitar lines that whir like air-raid sirens, “Bullet in the Head” takes aim at war-driven nationalism and an endemic unwillingness to think beyond the narratives of the nightly news and presidential addresses. “Take the Power Back” addresses the same problems in the classroom, lampooning the “one-sided stories for years and years and years” of a Eurocentric educational system. “Motherfuck Uncle Sam,” de la Rocha spits in one of his sharpest barbs, a perfect proclamation of defiant self-worth. “Step back. I know who I am.” And a good half of the album, from the eternally combative anthem “Killing in the Name” to the battle cry of “Know Your Enemy,” presciently speaks not only to a period of perceived federal overreach, from the streets of Los Angeles after the Rodney King verdict to the mountains of Idaho during the Ruby Ridge standoff, but also to the coming tide of neoliberalism and its half-hearted promises. Rage Against the Machine is a symptom of its time, presented as a possible panacea.
The political invective of Rage Against the Machine, though, has often overshadowed its arguably more essential quality, or at least the one that made hormonal suburbanites and buzzed undergraduates even give such issues the time of day: It is incredibly fun, not only for the millions who have since bought the album or chanted along to “Killing in the Name” live but also for the band itself. Just look at them, beaming on New Year’s Day in 1992.
De la Rocha became his generation’s most dependably popular political lyricist, but on the band’s first ten tracks he seemed every bit as exuberant as outraged. In the opening triptych alone, he emphatically counts into “Bombtrack,” repeatedly grunts and shouts inside every rest within Morello’s iconoclastic solo during “Killing in the Name,” and demands that you the listener “Crank the music up” and that the band “Bring that shit in” before he’s even launched into the first verse of “Take the Power Back.” No matter how mad you may be, you don’t scream “Fuck you, I won’t do what you tell me” against a collapsing din sixteen times without enjoying yourself. De la Rocha sounds entirely triumphant, a vexed-and-confused kid who has survived a difficult, discriminatory childhood to find the proper vent for his feelings.
He’s an unflinching young emcee, too, starting a full third of the album as battle raps against the entire world. “Bombtrack” begins, for instance, with a threat against the simpletons who haven’t realized that rap can be a weapon, while he aligns himself with the spirit and purpose of the Black Panthers and EPMD at the jump of “Wake Up.” He dips into the dozens throughout the record, popping out of politics to reassert his overall authority. During “Know Your Enemy,” he brags about being “born with insight and a raised fist… born to rage against ’em,” the native son of cultural assimilation who now has the book learning, energy, and microphone skills to push back. He is ready for every fight on every level.
As de la Rocha declares during “Bombtrack,” however, these would be just sketches in his notebook without his band; they provide the “dope hooks [that] make punks take another look.” The trio around him animates every idea, pushing what he’s selling with unwavering belief. The rhythmic undertow of “Township Rebellion”—where the bass plows through a cowbell-and-snare beat like a glacier through a narrow pass—is an ecstatic dance that practically vaults into the chorus that is the band’s best credo: “Why stand on a silent platform? Fight the war. Fuck the norm.”
And at a time when a mix of rap and metal was just a novelty, Rage outlines its own complex, chimeric identity. Rising and falling with de la Rocha’s despair, “Settle for Nothing” traces the dynamic peaks and valleys of prog rock, even as it grows into a hardcore tantrum. On “Wake Up,” they pivot between worship of Led Zeppelin’s “Kashmir” and a delirious breakbeat, Morello scratching his guitar strings like he’s suddenly stepped behind the turntables. With ubiquitous funk bass and guitar theatrics, Rage sound, at times, goofy and unsophisticated. But the unselfconscious honesty in hearing these four navigate their shared interests in real time—and loving the process—is intoxicating.
Rage Against the Machine became a better band on each subsequent album. Their landmark follow-up, 1996’s Evil Empire, is much more coiled and concise. Wilk and Commerford were perfectly heavy. Morello had found the fertile nexus between gargantuan riffs and idiosyncratic techniques that intrigued adolescent fans and Guitar Player obsessives alike. And on 1999’s The Battle of Los Angeles, their hard-nosed finale, de la Rocha is at the height of his polemical powers, rhyming in great hypertextual arcs of political pleas. Morello’s singular guitar style had developed to the point that Rolling Stone famously mistook his screeching “Guerrilla Radio” solo for a harmonica break.
Never again, though, would the quartet sound so casually confident, as if they actually had the gusto and naiveté to take on the world. They recorded Rage Against the Machine in what felt like an instant; the next two albums took three and four years and never mounted the same sort of enthusiasm. By the time Rage cut Renegades, a farewell batch of covers from Cypress Hill and MC5 to Bob Dylan and Devo, they sounded exhausted and effete, drained by the process of being the planet’s most woke major-label band.
All of this pressure, of course, wasn’t internal, or the result of some infinite great internal awakening. From the beginning, certain factions of Rage’s rapidly metastasizing fanbase saw the great paradox of the band’s peculiar situation: Here they were, purporting to be against the machine, while very much deepening the coffers of the machine thanks to a record that blew up as quickly as it had been made.
Epic, after all, was then a subsidiary of Sony, the global electronics empire that not only profited from selling a Rage tape but also the very Walkman that played it. In cutting the checks, Rage’s patrons, some argued, had made capitalist cogs of the socialist rebels. In a representative moment, Rage launched a “Freedom Fighter of the Month” program toward the end of their run, intending to give a platform to a militia of assorted activists. One recipient confessed to Spin that he worried he’d compromised his cause by being but one chainlink away from a multinational corporation. “I was a little embarrassed, to be honest,” he said. “Maybe [Rage] aren’t as pure as they’d like to be, or as they’d like to look.”
The so-called paradox, in retrospect, was puritanical scaremongering, an absurd ideological litmus test that gave more power to those already controlling the world than those wanting to change it by any means possible. And anyway, Rage had done exceptionally well during its brief independent trial, selling more than 5,000 copies of their demo at shows and through friends. When the label executives (including Madonna, who tried to ink them to Maverick) started showing up at rehearsals, Morello didn’t see the chance to get rich. He saw the mechanism for public broadcast. “It’s great to play abandoned squats run by anarchists,” he later said, “but it’s also great to be able to reach people with a revolutionary message, people from Granada Hills to Stuttgart.”
The resulting riches have sometimes felt embarrassing, as when de la Rocha ran a stoplight with a Rolling Stone reporter in a Ford Explorer as he headed to his new home in the hills of Los Angeles. But how else should Rage have done its bidding, especially at least a decade before the internet allowed easy worldwide distribution, or at least the promise of it? Should they have remained independent and preached their politics to a smaller network of the already converted, made redundant by someone else’s system of moral absolutism? Or should they have exploited an already-exploitative label system to seed extreme ideas in politically fallow places—a state-sponsored conspiracy, if you will, against itself?
Consider this: Rage made just four music videos to promote their debut. The first, a grainy and heavily filtered live capture of “Killing in the Name,” could have served as the meet-cute concert setting for two California punks in some skate film. But the successors, for “Bombtrack” and “Freedom,” are pure four- and six-minute advertisements for unapologetically radical politics. As de la Rocha impugned the American educational system, jingoistic patriots, malleable media, and complacent suburbanites on the album itself, he largely avoided naming names or offering specific solutions, aside from taking direct aim at J. Edgar Hoover’s racist COINTELPRO during “Wake Up.” But these videos offered highly specific fights and fixes, putting a weaponized point to the record’s blunt rhetorical weight.
During “Bombtrack,” Rage thrashes inside a steel cage flanked by heavily armed guards, mirroring the circumstances of Peruvian communist leader Abimael Guzmán. Two months before Rage Against the Machine arrived, the Peruvian government arrested Guzmán in an effort to suppress his Shining Path party, which had spread through the country’s nooks and crannies for two decades. Flying in the face of U.S. foreign policy at the time (and even now), Rage offered a sympathetic portrait of the Shining Path, framing it as a movement of Peruvian liberation against oppressive brutality. “The people continue their heroic struggle,” the screen reads as the rebels arm themselves and head into the Andes, each word offered in emphatic synchronization with Wilk’s Bonham-sized coda.
But it’s the reel for “Freedom” that, a quarter-century later, still feels revolutionary, both in content and context. Rage plays in cramped quarters, pressed close to an audience that throbs to Wilk and Commerford’s militant thrum. “Freedom for [Leonard] Peltier,” reads the black banner at their backs, a demand on behalf of the American Indian Movement activist who received two life sentences for the murder of two FBI agents during a 1975 standoff at a South Dakota reservation. As they play, scenes from the battle, its prelude, and its aftermath interweave with a flash-card history of federal land grabs from Native Americans. (The problem has been especially pernicious in southwestern South Dakota, where Mount Rushmore was etched into lands previously ceded in perpetuity to Peltier’s ancestors.) When the song peaks, de la Rocha howling “Freedom/Yeah, right” with his last bit of breath, the Lakotas march and arm and fly the United States flag upside down, at half-mast, and beside the American Indian Movement’s banner. It is a righteous moment that fades into explicit instructions for writing to the Leonard Peltier Defense Committee and helping.
What’s more, Epic encouraged Rage to make this video when the company’s suits realized they needed something less profane than “Killing in the Name” to push on domestic radio and television. “Throughout Europe, South America, and Asia, the band had started to explode, partly because you have less censorship there… But not in the U.S., because we refused to edit for lyric content,” Morello remembered for Metal Hammer. “It was actually at [Epic’s] suggestion that the next single be a six-and-a-half-minute song without a chorus, and that we make a video for Leonard Peltier! That suggestion came from the record company, not the band, like they were trying to outflank us!”
These weren’t superstar-studded compilations for AIDS relief or even polite benefits on behalf of Tibetan liberation, both very much en vogue as Rage ascended. No, Rage Against the Machine’s major-label gambit was an infomercial for justice and reconciliation for centuries of indigenous extermination, funded by a major label. When has that ever happened? And in an era when the president criticizes the free speech of theater companies and threatens to dismantle broadcast rights for networks he deems enemies of the state, can you imagine it happening again anytime soon?
When I was a teenager, those videos Rage had made finally found me in rural North Carolina on the family farm, only after we had invested in an unsightly satellite dish. They were life-changing events, introductions to political protest and the personal empowerment it could engender. I have little doubt that, had Rage Against the Machine remained independent, I would have explored such ideas much later, if at all. And I have even less doubt that, had Rage not backed the ideology of “Bombtrack” or “Freedom” with a sense of liberation and enjoyment, those ideas would have likely held little sway.
Watch the crowds in a live video from the band’s earliest era: It is sweaty and ecstatic, church camp for the future activists of the world and an indoctrination to the joy of potential change. Rage Against the Machine recognized that, until the institutional changes about which they wrote and spoke were actually implemented, they would be yelling about cultural pride and socialist ideals into the void—that is, unless they could co-opt the mechanics of capitalism and wield them. Twenty-five years later, in a world of broad media consolidation and Silicon Valley-powered megaphones, the need to do just that has only grown. But so have the possibilities for smart rebellion, for using the tools of the machine to weaken the core.
“The test of whether Rage Against the Machine will be a successful band has nothing to do with album sales,” Morello told Guitar Player in 1994. “It’s going to have to do with the way the message translates into concrete action.” In the quarter-century since Epic issued Rage Against the Machine, the band’s subsequent self-seriousness and the dubious rap-metal that followed often turned it into a punchline. And amid the horrors of George W. Bush’s state surveillance and his continuation of his father’s war in the Middle East and the drone warfare under Barack Obama’s administration, it was hard not to feel like Rage had failed in that regard, like we had all failed.
During the last year, though, Democratic Socialists have won local elections. Ordinary folks have taken to the streets, marching en masse to embarrass the president, and taken to the Internet to dislodge powerful men who are also molesters. And an awareness of and reckoning with cultural appropriation is no longer a sidebar but a real public discourse. No ten songs are responsible for that, of course. But for millions, Rage Against the Machine helped shape a spirit of necessary and electric defiance, of yelling out loud and over and over, “Fuck you, I won’t do what you tell me.” May it remain relentless. | 2017-12-17T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2017-12-17T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Epic | December 17, 2017 | 9.1 | d4039700-45d3-4c4a-8360-fcb9e67da0b0 | Grayson Haver Currin | https://pitchfork.com/staff/grayson-haver currin/ | |
Not out in record stores until late September, the Canadian indie pop band and its label Arts & Crafts wisely made its theatrical new album available for digital sales before it leaked. | Not out in record stores until late September, the Canadian indie pop band and its label Arts & Crafts wisely made its theatrical new album available for digital sales before it leaked. | Stars: In Our Bedroom After the War | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/10518-in-our-bedroom-after-the-war/ | In Our Bedroom After the War | For Canadian romantics Stars, love is war. And their modern love is strikingly similar to the world's modern war: confusion and anxiety topped with a sense of semi-staged dread. The presentation is great-- clean production, fine instrumentation, and careful arrangements-- but its undercurrent is pure self-doubt and longing. So while the quintet pushes its passion-based politics to the fore and includes the phrase "after the war" in the title of its fourth album, the emphasis is still "in our bedroom." Assuming you can dodge enough bullets to make it there.
Of course, the intricacies of relationships have always been Stars' specialty. "I am trying to say what I want to say without having to say I love you," chirped co-leads Torquil Campbell and Amy Millan on 2004's minor masterpiece Set Yourself on Fire, and the line's roundabout Valentine's Day logic could double as a band mantra. What sets their new album apart from previous material is setting, scope, and a newly inflated theatrical bent. Considering his decade-spanning IMDb resume-- not to mention an award nomination for 1983's boy-meets-sea creature drama The Golden Seal-- Campbell's mannered, Moz-y vocal delivery is hardly surprising. He's a ham, plain and simple. The singer's over-the-top preening is Stars' most divisive characteristic but, instead of toning things down, his acting chops and sense of Broadway pomp permeate Bedroom's high-gloss pop more than before. And, as any Hollywood-type will tell you, an actor is only as good as his script.
Playing a pill-popping whore looking to shatter his dead-end existence on the U2-style "Take Me to the Riot", Campbell brings his pitiful role to life with compassion. Backed by smashing cymbals and chiming tones, his ad-libbed plea to "let me stay, let me, let me stay!" erases the distance between the performer and his character. The Les Mis-esque weeper "Barricade" doesn't fare as well: Its storyline is trite (a couple brought together-- then torn apart-- by a common, radical cause!) and, accompanied by a lone piano, there's nothing for Campbell to hide behind. But even if it approaches cheeseball bluster, at least it's sorta ballsy. Muddled by forced postmodern nonsense and an oddly lifeless narrative, "Life 2: The Unhappy Ending" is about as boring as its title. Ironically, though she might not possess a SAG card, Millan's dramatic abilities often trump her partner's on Bedroom-- she's more subtle and natural whether nailing the album's straight-ahead pop songs on her own or bringing out Campbell's best on a couple stand-out duets.
Both "My Favourite Book" and "Bitches in Tokyo" find Millan pining for affection in unequivocal terms. "Book" runs with the blind optimism of the group's indie-hit "Ageless Beauty"-- a rare moment of guilelessness buoyed by an easy listening backdrop that would make Burt Bacharach giddy. The song provides a brief but welcome respite from the hurt and rejection surrounding it. (As if to immediately deflate the cheeriness, Millan snaps out of her rose-pedal haze with the first words of the following track: "Sweetness never suits me." Never say never.) "Bitches" isn't as dizzy-- after a plethora of "mistakes," "lying" and "sabotage," Millan can't help but beg an ex to take her back. But even with all that baggage, the singer makes a convincing case with the help of some blistering girl-group drums, piano and horns. Short and without reservation, the song avoids some of the indulgent outros and solos that tank Bedroom's lesser Millan-sung tracks including the guitar-grinding "Window Bird" and lethargic pep talk "Today Will Be Better, I Swear!"
As on Set Yourself on Fire's incredible "Your Ex-Lover Is Dead", which had Campbell and Millan not just backing each other up but interacting and playing off each other in a bittersweet boy-girl tale, Bedroom's "Midnight Coward" and "Personal" take full advantage of the band's unique two-headed attack. The former is a neurotic internal analysis of that oh-so-important first-date question: Should I stay or should I go? "I don't want to say too much," whispers Millan, rifling through the night's possibilities before finally joining Campbell into the unknown: "I can see what's coming, but I'm not saying it." On the surface, "Personal" is a gimmick-- a song written in personal ad parlance ("Wanted single F/ Under 33/ Must enjoy the sun/ Must enjoy the sea"). But both vocalists give the song their most impressive performances-- Campbell distant and cold, Millan vulnerable and pained-- turning its showy conceit into something genuinely wrenching. The ambiguously antiquated details emphasize its timeless central struggle: Stamped missive or Match.com, the face-to-face (dis)connection's the thing.
Growing more staged, warier, and a little less playful with age, Stars don't quite match the wily rush of Set Yourself on Fire here. After three albums of artistic quantum leaps, they slow down gracefully on Bedroom, replacing Fire's indie-symphony twists and turns with more overt dramatic airs that can fall into blubbering melodrama, e.g., the title track, which suffocates under its own ticker-tape parade epic-ness. But when they're on, Stars are one of only a few current bands that can make war seem so appealing.
NB: This record is available for digital download via Arts & Crafts.* | 2007-08-13T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2007-08-13T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic / Rock | Arts & Crafts | August 13, 2007 | 7.4 | d40bd9e4-00df-4d87-bbb9-223f1097ae56 | Ryan Dombal | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ryan-dombal/ | null |
The underground Atlanta rap star teams with DJ Marc B, who backs his signature bouncy flows and silly punchlines with gleaming, thudding beats. | The underground Atlanta rap star teams with DJ Marc B, who backs his signature bouncy flows and silly punchlines with gleaming, thudding beats. | Key!: Marquis | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/key-marquis/ | Marquis | Key! has been one of underground Atlanta’s best-kept secrets for years, a stylistic chameleon with a golden ear for emerging talent. For over a decade, he’s released solo projects and single-producer collaborations at a wicked pace, and any of his albums can cover a wide range of lyrical and sonic territory. It’s not easy being the kind of rapper who compares guns to Harry Potter’s broomsticks one minute and begs a lover to “wear my shirt, spend the night” the next, but Key!’s work has always swerved between moods. His latest, Marquis, follows a run of falling action: He went to rehab and got sober after years of drug addiction and last year signed his first-ever label deal. Despite the changes, he’s still the same endearing, emotional goofball with a chip on his shoulder.
Like the Kenny Beats-produced 777 and the Tony Seltzer-manned The Alpha Jerk, Marquis is helmed by one producer, this time fellow Atlanta pulse-chaser DJ Marc B, who offers up a potent mix of rattling bangers and gleaming beats. Key! is rapping about much of the same stuff as before—absurdist money talk, tear-soaked love ballads, odes to friends—but there’s a wizened edge to his words. Lead single “You Need God” has the bouncy flows, sprinkles of melody, and silly punchlines that have become Key!’s trademarks, but his lifestyle adjustments occasionally come through in the lyrics. Bars like “If you can trip off life, I need a hit” or “Shut up sons, I got one daughter” would be corny if they didn’t sound so sincere.
Key! doesn’t bring up his recovery often, but his sense of adventure communicates his gratitude. His boundless enthusiasm glows like sunshine, and Marc B’s beats attempt to follow suit. Typical booming fare like the Soulja Boy-referencing “Crank Dat” or late-album highlight “Racks Don’t Talk Back” are fun, but the duo shows out by experimenting. “Cheat Code” dabbles in digital flutes and Nextel chirps that split the difference between plugg and chiptune and give Key!’s warbling voice ample room to swim. The ominous piano line and tinny trumpets of “That Fye” sound chintzy, like they could’ve been cut from the Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas soundtrack, but Key!’s growls juxtaposed with fellow Two-9 member (and recent Dreamville signee) Jace’s nasal voice are urgent nonetheless.
Key! shares the Marquis stage with underground stalwarts and a new generation of Atlanta talent, but it never feels like regional nepotism—each guest brings as much to these songs as Key! does. Longtime collaborator ManMan Savage’s croons on the back end of closer “Love Like This” anchor the song after Key! hops between melody and straight rapping. Local maverick Tony Shhnow brings his brand of slick shit talk to “You Need God” (“I told the jeweler I’m a plug, put a brick in it”), contrasting Key!’s more affable verse with steely flexes.
In a recent interview with the Not97 podcast, Key! extolled the virtues of casting a wide musical net: “If you can be a little bit of everything, you’re the one.” He’s not talking about the calculated versatility of a megastar like Drake, or copycats attempting to suck the marrow from the bones of proven ideas. Key!’s appeal comes from how organic his world feels, his ability to adapt to nearly any style, his willingness to mix silly and serious. He never sounds like he’s forcing himself to keep up with a trend. In turn, his influence is everywhere, in the work of artists like WifiGawd, Duwap Kaine, and Luh Tyler. Marquis remains restless in the most forward-thinking sense. | 2023-08-22T00:01:00.000-04:00 | 2023-08-22T00:01:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Third & Hayden | August 22, 2023 | 7.3 | d4117e90-1caf-4a11-8700-356033ebdb95 | Dylan Green | https://pitchfork.com/staff/dylan-green/ | |
UK house and breakbeat veteran Paul Woolford connects the dots between club-music styles from across the decades, finding a through line in lush, transporting melodies. | UK house and breakbeat veteran Paul Woolford connects the dots between club-music styles from across the decades, finding a through line in lush, transporting melodies. | Special Request: DJ-Kicks: Special Request | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/special-request-dj-kicks-special-request/ | DJ-Kicks: Special Request | The history of electronic music, particularly in the UK, has been one of fractures and splits, as ever more specific styles and subgenres spin off into their own orbits. Special Request (aka Leeds’ Paul Woolford) is one of the enlightened few moving the other way, with his diverse catalogue including everything from chart-house bangers (“Looking for Me,” with Diplo and Kareen Lomax) to pungent nu-jungle (Special Request’s 2019 album Zero Fucks).
Woolford is better known as a producer than a DJ. But his entry into the venerable DJ-Kicks series offers him a chance to showcase his turntable chops as he weaves a captivating musical thread across historical and generic boundaries. Songs on this mix date from 1962 (Sun Ra & Solar Arkestra’s “Cluster of Galaxies”) right up to the present day, while the styles glide from proto house to techno and IDM to jungle, passing through ambient, disco, electro, and breakbeat.
Eclectic selections can make for bumpy musical rides. But Woolford has based his song choices around his love for “lush melodics,” a decision that adroitly transcends genre. In Virgo’s 1986 house jam “R U Hot Enough?,” this translates into undulating piano chords and ethereal synth strings; in the Special Request mix of FC Kahuna’s “Hayling,” it means bleeps, breaks, and satiny vocal; and in Tim Reaper’s VIP mix of Special Request’s “Pull Up,” melodics come in the form of a pumped-up and billowing bassline that is vicious in its volume and strangely tender in its melodic caress.
As a DJ, Woolford favours layering and smooth transitions over flashy tricks. DJ-Kicks doesn’t so much jump from track to track as ooze ever onwards, the boundaries between songs often impossible to locate. Some of the transitions are particularly graceful, such as the passage from “R U Hot Enough?” to Speedy J’s 1991 IDM classic “De-Orbit” via Krystal Klear’s 2014 techno tool “Tun Valve,” the four decades between the tracks falling effortlessly off the bone. Woolford has the DJ’s gift of taking exactly what he needs from a record, whether that’s 39 seconds of atmospheric noise from “Cluster of Galaxies” or five minutes of song structure from John Morales’ remix of Alicia Myers’ disco anthem “Right Here Right Now”; a given song’s individual merits are secondary to the mix’s common good.
Where the requisite jigsaw piece isn’t at hand, Woolford has the production skills to create it. Previously unreleased Special Request tracks “KissFM NY87 Mastermix” and “Vellichor” help guide the mix from the dreamy, trumpet-led disco of Morgan Geist’s “Lullaby” into AS ONE’s galactic IDM, while new Special Request remixes of “Hayling” and μ-Ziq’s “Twangle Frent” tilt the mood towards the biting nu-jungle of the mix’s closing stretch. Woolford had a hand in 11 of the 25 tracks here, but DJ-Kicks never feels overwhelmed with his work; it’s a compelling example of the way that talented producers can make captivating DJs.
With global nightlife still largely shuttered, it makes little sense to talk of a 2021 club record. But DJ-Kicks presents a powerful case for Woolford’s cosmopolitan dance Arcadia as the unifying sound that could—and perhaps should—accompany the ribbon-cutting when dance floors welcome us back with a spring in our step and a thirst for adventure.
Buy: Rough Trade
(Pitchfork earns a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.)
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-03-22T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2021-03-22T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | !K7 | March 22, 2021 | 7.7 | d418ff3c-4561-4dcd-bb1e-f75339ce68eb | Ben Cardew | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ben-cardew/ | |
The Oakland quintet’s debut album is a spirited indie-emo blend driven by intricate underlying themes, channeling a slew of influences even as it exists in a space of its own. | The Oakland quintet’s debut album is a spirited indie-emo blend driven by intricate underlying themes, channeling a slew of influences even as it exists in a space of its own. | Club Night: What Life | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/club-night-what-life/ | What Life | To Club Night, dystopia is just an arm’s reach away. On their full-length debut What Life, the band ensconce this sense of foreboding in snappy, math-rock-inspired melodies and whimsical instrumentation. Frontman Josh Bertram, as an unabashed fan of ’90s emo cult icons Cap’n Jazz, cites Tim Kinsella as a personal mentor. What Life is crisper and more clear-cut than Cap’n Jazz’s sole album, trading Kinsella’s screamy grit for the vivacious spirit of Los Campesinos! At various points, Club Night evoke the splendor of The World Is a Beautiful Place & I Am No Longer Afraid to Die, the freaky jubilance of Architecture in Helsinki, and the twinkling fuzz of early Now, Now.
But they’re greater than the sum of their influences, making What Life delightfully familiar even as the album exists in a space of its own. Bertram is no newcomer to indie-rock trends: His previous group, Our Brother the Native, rode a mid-2000s wave of experimental folk. Though, by his own admission, those early releases don’t hold up, they weren’t for nothing: What Life not only expands on the musical dexterity of Club Night’s 2017 EP Hell Ya, but it demonstrates that Bertram, now with more than a decade of musicianship behind him, has finally homed in on the cohesive, propulsive sound he was trying to achieve all along.
On opener “Path,” drummer Josiah Majetich’s quarter-note hits prompt a cacophony of riffs and screeches. One of the album’s chief dilemmas arises less than 60 seconds in: “To be honest, I don’t know how long it takes to create a conscience,” Bertram admits in a nervy, androgynous tone. As the song continues, he condemns the “bad advice” of older generations, however well-intended. Club Night’s drive to break ties with the past parallels their ability to channel their predecessors without seeming juvenile or outdated. Some of the album’s sharpest musicianship comes on “Cherry,” by way of pinpricked guitars and rumbling drums that are as joyous as the lyrics are desolate (“I carefully kept this pristine terror from my old life/On the rural atlas where I was born/Feeling like a tourist in my own mind”), before lulling into a relaxed outro that assumes the place of a mid-album interlude.
As often as What Life directs its energy outward, Club Night also indulge in some angst. “So begins the 20-odd years of my idiotic war,” Bertram laments on “Trance,” but the self-pity stops there. “Wit” offers an immediate counterweight, crashing in with an army of power chords separated by breakdowns in 6/8 time. “Village,” the album’s poppiest cut, plants a surprise seed of optimism: “All these hurtful words no longer stir in me/And I move on/Wrote myself a little love song,” Bertram sings. Embellished with eccentric guitar plucks, the song is a sunbeam that diffuses an otherwise gloomy outlook. Rather than let sorrow to turn to despair, What Life grounds its emotional tumult in vivacious intensity. | 2019-05-01T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-05-01T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Tiny Engines | May 1, 2019 | 7.7 | d4209327-26f4-42c8-8163-949197105aed | Abby Jones | https://pitchfork.com/staff/abby-jones/ | |
The group’s second album skates between rhythmic, mechanical churn and abstracted instrumental sweeps, seeking the boundaries between natural, artificial, and supernatural. | The group’s second album skates between rhythmic, mechanical churn and abstracted instrumental sweeps, seeking the boundaries between natural, artificial, and supernatural. | Loma: Don’t Shy Away | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/loma-dont-shy-away/ | Don’t Shy Away | It can be hard to know when you’re done with a creative pursuit. There are endless ways to fuss over the details of an audio mix, the timing of a film cut, the right choice of word; more broadly, it can be just as challenging to know when to call it quits on a project. A sense of unfinished business—and a particularly flattering compliment—drew Cross Record’s Emily Cross and Dan Duszynski and Shearwater’s Jonathan Meiburg back together as Loma. On their 2018 self-titled debut, the band frayed the edges of indie-rock conventions, balancing stately electronic flourishes within familiar keys-and-guitars structures. The new Don’t Shy Away expands on their capability for total absorption, reaching for a more varied palette of textures and plunging deeper into synthesizers and the human psyche.
Some of Loma’s renewed momentum came from the unexpectedly enthusiastic endorsement of Brian Eno, who said in 2018 that he’d been playing Loma’s serpentine “Black Willow” on repeat. At the band’s request, Eno produced and developed synth programming on Don’t Shy Away’s final song, “Homing,” completing the track from stems sent via email. His appearance scans as a footnote, an unobtrusive assist that primarily plays to Loma’s own biome-building strengths.
Don’t Shy Away skates between rhythmic, mechanical churn and abstracted instrumental sweeps, framing the naturalistic imagery of the band’s lyrics alongside ambient elements. Bird calls peek through the final minute of “Blue Rainbow” before synthetic buzzes edge them out; the short instrumental piece “Jenny” drifts a rippling guitar part over deep percussion and bonfire crackles before ceding to the slowly restless title track. The whole transmission feels less like a battle of human bravado against the wilderness than an attempt to suss out the boundaries between natural, artificial, and supernatural.
Much of the album is shadowed by ominous clouds, blares of horns and low peals of synths that seep across the record like ink into thick paper. “Ocotillo” lurches forward over a foghorn trombone as keys glimmer beneath squalls of brass. From a pulsating beat that presses forth with the insistence of a club track, “Given a Sign” concludes with a wall of synths that underscore its sense of urgency. Don’t Shy Away quickly sounds darker and richer than Loma, and its instrumental obfuscations are as enchanting as they are challenging to unravel.
Below these surfaces, however, the band builds out dazzling instrumental environments like dense, dynamic undergrowth. Synths and guitars intertwine, coiling into a labyrinthine backdrop as their edges blur. Moments of lightness arrive in the jittery opening synth swipes of “Elliptical Days,” which transforms into a stately, swooping number that winks at some sort of futuristic forest cotillion. “Breaking Waves Like a Stone” flits with bright melodic dapples, while its bassline (supplied by Wye Oak’s Jenn Wasner) provides a calming counterpoint. Cross’ airy voice is the album’s guiding light, slipping in and out of each song with the unassuming insistence of sunlight leaking through a canopy.
By capturing the space between the ache of yearning and the warm glow of memory, “Homing” exemplifies Loma’s talent for bottling convoluted feelings. The intangible potency of Don’t Shy Away comes from its latent sense of spirituality; in “Homing,” it’s a reminder that geographical distance can’t keep someone from being, in a sense, right here. Humane intimacy prevails within Loma’s landscapes, magnified by Cross’ spoken-word narration and bobbing background harmonies. Though it’s phrased in the negative, Don’t Shy Away is an invitation. It honors the sacred space of uncertainty, acknowledging lingering darkness while trusting in the possibility that brighter, more brilliant worlds lie within reach.
Buy: Rough Trade
(Pitchfork earns a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.)
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2020-11-10T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2020-11-10T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Sub Pop | November 10, 2020 | 7.6 | d4211626-7048-4877-b189-d8e485a2e9ba | Allison Hussey | https://pitchfork.com/staff/allison-hussey/ | |
This Boston singer-songwriter’s second proper album is a treasure trove of self-deprecating wit, melodic complexity and endearingly anxious energy. | This Boston singer-songwriter’s second proper album is a treasure trove of self-deprecating wit, melodic complexity and endearingly anxious energy. | Sidney Gish: No Dogs Allowed | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/sidney-gish-no-dogs-allowed/ | No Dogs Allowed | Sidney Gish’s story so far is a familiar one. By day, the 20-year-old singer-songwriter studies music business at Boston’s Northeastern University; by night, she digs deep into lo-fi bedroom pop, anti-folk, and uptempo rock jingles, adding to the wealth of catchy, oddball songs she’s been posting on Bandcamp since 2015. The next step, as everyone from Frankie Cosmos to Car Seat Headrest can tell you, is widespread acclaim and a record deal. No Dogs Allowed, Gish’s second proper full-length, just might be the album that gets her there. Listening to this self-released gem feels like stepping into the brain of an insecure, hyper-aware, gifted young person who may or may not be totally oblivious to how endearing they are.
As a solo artist, Gish is versatile enough to serve as her own backing band. Over the album’s 13 tracks, she uses electric guitar, melodica, MIDI instruments, and assorted percussion to evoke a one-woman show full of clever melodies, inventive hooks, and borderline-jazz guitar licks. (“i’m not studying jazz guitar i just looked up a ii V I tutorial once and want to get ok at it before i die LMAO,” she says in a typically self-deprecating note on her Bandcamp page.) Her rich vocal harmonies cascade on “Where the Sidewalk Ends” and encourage sing-along moments on “Impostor Syndrome.” Gish has credited her knack for complex arrangements to her naturally having perfect pitch—“If a car beeps in an F sharp, then I’ll know it’s an F sharp,” she told The Boston Globe—but the ingenuity of her songwriting is about much more than luck. Just listen to “Not But For You, Bunny,” where she introduces contrapuntal, almost contradictory vocal parts and channels Tom Tom Club to serenade her pet rabbit. Moments like this show that she’s been honing her virtuosic skills for years, with or without an audience.
Gish’s uniquely skewed sense of humor is the album’s best hook of all. On “Good Magicians,” she twists a story of manipulation and emotional sleight-of-hand into a flirtatious ode to a trickster: “I would end up with Trix cereal’s mascot suffocated in a hat/And half a torso cut in half...” she muses. “That, the rabbit, and a non-comedic lawsuit on top of that.” Later, she mocks dull conventionality with titles like “I’m Filled With Steak, And Cannot Dance.” But most of the time, she’s just trying to point out her weaknesses before someone else does. “Two-faced bitches never lie/And therefore I never lie,” she sings on the guitar-scaling highlight “Sin Triangle,” using tongue-in-cheek phrasing to suggest something subtler than a garden-variety melodramatic sulk. On the same song, she puts her noncommittal attitude in geopolitical terms to satirize the benefits of distance (“Maybe I wanna see him/But then again, I’m an isolationist”). Elsewhere, she chides herself for mispronouncing a Greek goddess’s name as “purse-a-phone” and questions her individuality through the eyes of a city rat, nodding to solipsistic philosophy, The Matrix and video-game NPCs as she goes. It’s as if Gish is standing atop a pile of books, so overcome with nerves that she repurposes their facts into self-effacing darts. Yet the more she does this, the more she stands out as a smart, plainspoken, entirely relatable young person in the post-Tumblr era.
In the year that followed her 2016 album Ed Buys Houses, which earned her acclaim as one of Boston’s best new artists, Gish strengthened her approach to production. She’s still using a USB microphone to record, but there’s an invigorating new clarity and sense of fun to her sound. Between guitar scuffs and synth notes, Gish will throw finger snaps, a camera shutter, or an old recording about teaching parakeets to talk into the mix. Sometimes these intrusions clog the flow of the record—campy vintage vocal samples occasionally enter without any real purpose and obstruct her guitarwork—but mostly they just add to the engaging eccentricity that’s earned Gish comparisons to Regina Spektor.
Despite her habit of describing herself as unsure or erratic on No Dogs Allowed, Gish is remarkably consistent in capturing what it’s like to enter your twenties without a clear sense of whether you’re living life correctly, or what living life correctly even means. Midway through “I Eat Salads Now,” she quotes the opening line of Frankie Cosmos’ 2016 song “I’m 20,” a nod to the universality of feeling young and washed-up. But where Frankie Cosmos sounds whimsical, Gish finds herself at a crossroads with no roadmap, standing on her toes to better find direction. Melodically, the song is bubbly and dips its chorus in falsetto. Lyrically, it’s full of masked dread and laughed-off anxiety. This is Gish’s trademark: She confronts challenges with erudite analogies, then conceals them with earnest, unaffected charm. With No Dogs Allowed, she pinpoints the feeling of entering the adult world as a creative person who’s not yet scarred by jadedness, but far from immune to doubt. | 2018-01-11T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2018-01-11T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | self-released | January 11, 2018 | 7.7 | d4291f48-4df7-4730-bc40-9ac7db38e673 | Nina Corcoran | https://pitchfork.com/staff/nina-corcoran/ | |
Newly reissued, the duo’s 1999 magnum opus queers ambient music in a psychedelic journey through sex, death, and gardening. | Newly reissued, the duo’s 1999 magnum opus queers ambient music in a psychedelic journey through sex, death, and gardening. | Coil: Musick to Play in the Dark | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/coil-musick-to-play-in-the-dark/ | Musick to Play in the Dark | Balance and Sleazy were one of music’s great romances. In the early 1980s, Geoff Burton, aka Geoff Rushton and then John Balance, utilized fan letters and zines to will himself from a troubled childhood of precocious homosexuality and occult aspirations into the arms of Peter “Sleazy” Christopherson. As a photographer whose portraits shocked the Sex Pistols, graphic designer for Peter Gabriel’s early albums, and member of the notorious “Wreckers of Civilization” Throbbing Gristle, Sleazy had already earned a reputation. But in true alchemical fashion, when the two came together they created something much stronger, and stranger, than most life-work partners, amassing dozens of albums and EPs and homages to back-of-the-lab psychedelics and antiquarian gems. Coil devised an uncanny, stained, ever-shifting kaleidoscope of musique concrete, kosmische, techno, drone, cabaret, jazz, and glitch, with guest stars including aliens, the ghosts of ancient kings, and “the accumulation of male sexual energy.” (Hence the stains.)
Coil planted seeds. They introduced into their devoted fanbase the effluvia of early queer mystics like Austin Osman Spare and presented them the evidence of modern queer existences fundamentally opposed to assimilation. Their cross-pollination of futuristic tech and ancient texts would sprout various tangles: Björk’s pagan poetry and Sunn O)))’s postverbal omm, the antibody music of Autechre and Dreamcrusher, the probiotic post-goth of FKA twigs and the Knife and even Perfume Genius, all seeking out healing in the abject.
Like most romantics, though, they were at their best in the shadows. Musick to Play in the Dark, their magnum opus, released just as the last millennium turned, is part Muzak and part Magick. It’s effective, setting a mood like marital aids Music to Keep Your Husband Happy and the Love Unlimited Orchestra, or Haruomi Hosono’s ’80s music for department-store shopping, or Spotify’s yawning chasms of vibey playlists—yet far more potent, almost domineering. If you give yourself over to it, odd things transpire. (Many moons ago, I spent a year or so falling asleep to it. One night I did not. My house burned down the next morning.)
“Are You Shivering” sets the stage with a ferocious roar, like a groaning opening of black rubber curtains; it recedes to reveal a glistening expanse of slippery little noises sliced into dripping tinsel. Balance’s voice hovers among them, first cut and honed into amorphous moans, then clear as an echoing bell: “I lay down and shiver in your silver river/Out drips the last drop of this vital fluid… This is moon music.” Others have twinned male potency and lunacy, perhaps, but no song has made semen so spellbinding.
Post-coital from the start, Musick then spaces out with “Red Birds Will Fly Out of the East and Destroy Paris in a Night,” an epic of arpeggios and buzzing analog threads spun largely by synth whiz Thighspaulsandra, who, along with Drew McDowall, are the album’s crucial collaborators. “Red Birds” spirals ever larger before self-immolating in toxic fizz. The little noises return, licks of flames soundtracking a fireside chat—and out stumbles the “Red Queen,” in which Balance recriminates via sped-up chitter chatter and coruscates with crisp, shady intonation. “Is it so awful to be seen to feel and fail?” he asks of those too proud to admit they’ve been fooled by the foolish. The band plays on behind him, the beat an entirely blotto slur of heaving bass and vicious minces of piano. “An unsafe male trait,” Balance calls out, snide in the face of macho vanity. “What are you going to do if they don’t believe you?”
Safety’s for the birds. “Strange Birds,” that is, in which clicks and cuts flutter and take flight and presage recordings of their real, feathered brethren. It’s a grounding pause for an album with its head in the stars. But it’s not a relief. In 1999, bird songs often augured the end of an ambient set, and loons sang across jungle tracks; here, they don’t offer a consolation of dawn so much as a warning from the sky. “One day your eggs/Are going to hatch,” Balance whispers. “And some very strange birds/Are going to emerge.”
Like so many of music’s great romances—Ike and Tina, Kurt and Courtney—horror attended the astonishing beauty of their creation. Balance, a long-suffering alcoholic, fell from their mansion stairs to his death in 2004; Sleazy died in Bangkok just six years later. The horror was inextricable from the beauty of albums like the AIDS-haunted Horse Rotovator, or the limited-edition records cloaked in white covers streaked with Balance’s own blood, loosed during a lunatic episode. Myths are made from such mayhem.
Yet the most profound moments of Musick are somehow the simplest and sweetest. Closer “The Dreamer Is Still Asleep” summons the uncanny power of, say, Portishead remixing Arthur Russell. A rhythm shuffles like a lover’s gentle snore; Balance’s voice, never more gentle than here, and cloaked in reverb thick as warm blankets, duets with a warm organ. Lonely chords swell as Balance ponders the legacy and latency of trauma. “Is that hurt you?” Balance wonders. “We forget, and don’t notice the loss/Crossing into venerable degeneration.”
We all return to the soil. At the center of the album, Coil’s finest moment blossoms. “Broccoli” is perhaps the only Balance and Sleazy duet, an astonishing meditation on familial duty, death, etiquette, gardening, and the titular vegetable. “By working the soil we cultivate the sky,” Sleazy sing-songs, and Balance chants over bass as deep as the grave. “We embrace the vegetable kingdom.” Death as vegetative state, death as generation. Coil are dead, but we’re still feasting on their harvest.
Buy: Rough Trade
(Pitchfork earns a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.)
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2020-11-30T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2020-11-30T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Electronic / Experimental / Rock | Dais | November 30, 2020 | 8.4 | d42cda80-b853-460b-9929-c10c2b366c1c | Jesse Dorris | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jesse-dorris/ | |
Undergoing personnel changes and toying with new technology, the band changed gears in 1998, adopting an atmospheric sound that left both longtime fans and recent converts scratching their heads. | Undergoing personnel changes and toying with new technology, the band changed gears in 1998, adopting an atmospheric sound that left both longtime fans and recent converts scratching their heads. | R.E.M.: Up (25th Anniversary Edition) | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/rem-up-25th-anniversary-edition/ | Up (25th Anniversary Edition) | In February 1999, R.E.M. walked into a Los Angeles nightclub to tape an episode of Fox’s prime-time drama Party of Five. “Who would have thought we’d ever do stuff like this?” bassist Mike Mills quipped of their cameo. But then, the veteran alternative rockers were at an unexpected point in their career. Their appearance on the show was meant, in part, to promote Up, their exploratory 11th album, released just three months prior. By the time R.E.M. filmed the segment, it was clear that Up was dead in the water. “Daysleeper,” its lovely, lilting first single, had been their first lead single not to reach the Top Ten on Billboard’s Modern Rock charts, and “Lotus,” the hardest rocking cut on the record, barely scraped both the Modern and Mainstream Rock charts.
With hindsight, it’s clear that Up was a transitional record, the pivot point between R.E.M.’s reign as the biggest band in the college-rock underground and their subsequent act packing arenas. A dense, adventurous record, Up—newly reissued in an expanded 25th-anniversary edition that includes the Party of Five live recording as a second disc—seems designed to play directly to longtime fans predisposed to follow the group wherever it leads. Heavy on atmosphere and leisurely in pace, it requires close attention. Yet somehow Up wound up alienating followers enamored of R.E.M.’s jangle and chime as well as recent listeners brought aboard by the earnest introspection of Automatic for the People and overdriven fuzz of Monster.
That’s quite a trick, and, in some respects, the alienation was intentional. Fresh from re-upping their contract with Warner Bros.—in the fall of 1996 they inked a deal for a reported $80 million, a staggering amount for a group that crawled out of the Athens scene of the 1980s—guitarist Peter Buck and bassist Mike Mills were eager to continue the explorations of New Adventures in Hi-Fi, the 1996 album largely recorded while touring Monster in 1995. They immediately faced a significant roadblock: At the inception of the sessions for Up, drummer Bill Berry left the band. Berry’s decision was understandable. He had suffered an onstage brain aneurysm in 1995, a health scare that prompted him to hang up his rock’n’roll shoes and retire to a farm in Georgia.
Berry’s departure threw the band’s dynamics off balance. They’d long ago settled into a familiar working rhythm: Buck and Berry workshopped material in the studio prior to Mills’ arrival, and the trio would then hand over tracks to singer Michael Stipe. Buck had already been seeking new sounds, amassing old keyboards and drum machines prior to the start of the album sessions. Once recording was underway, Buck, on bass, started each day laying down tracks with drummer Barrett Martin and multi-instrumentalist Scott McCaughey, while Mills added color and textures with keyboards. Stipe suffered a massive case of writer’s block toward the end of recording, leaving the rest of the band to tinker with overdubs and mixes as they waited for the vocals. Navigating such shifts would be tricky under any circumstances, but R.E.M. also switched producers from Scott Litt, who had helmed every one of their records since 1987’s Document, to Pat McCarthy, a sympathetic collaborator who helped facilitate Buck’s experiments with electronics, achieving sounds that, while not out of step with the alternative rock of the late 1990s, were still new to R.E.M.
R.E.M. pushed their machines to the forefront on “Airportman,” a song that Mills insisted on having as Up’s opening track—“like a signpost,” he said: “‘This way lies madness.’” If Up never quite succumbs to derangement, “Airportman” nevertheless serves as a fitting keynote for an album about being in transit, moving inexorably from one location to the next. The forward motion isn’t without pauses. Up often digresses, lost in its own ambience and introspection. Partway through the record, a series of hushed, elongated songs skirts the edges of a drone for nearly 20 minutes, a span as long as a mini-LP. Sometimes, it seems as if Up was sequenced as a series of interlocked EPs: The first third contains the brightest, hookiest material; the second segment ( from “The Apologist” to “Why Not Smile”) is the darkest; and the final stretch splits the difference between the two extremes.
Undercutting that sequencing is the fact that each song sounds both like a beginning and an ending. The album’s elliptical flow makes it appear that the band keeps returning to the starting line. Succumbing to the era’s propensity for CD bloat didn’t help matters: The record expands and contracts for over an hour, then abruptly finishes with “Falls to Climb,” an elegiac number that plays like neither a conclusion nor an epilogue. The almost arbitrary ending supports Buck’s contention that “Up never really did get finished.”
The Party of Five set that rounds out the 25th-anniversary reissue shows the band making tentative steps back into the light: Surrounding Up material with older hits, R.E.M. sound relieved to be entertaining an audience, their levity and muscle giving such cloistered songs as “Walk Unafraid” and “The Apologist” space to breathe. But as welcome as it is, the Party of Five disc winds up emphasizing the curious nature of Up, as the point where interpersonal tensions collided with broader cultural shifts.
Aligning themselves with the artier elements emerging in the wake of the ’90s alt-rock explosion—the electronics can’t help but suggest Stereolab, while the Beach Boys fascination recalls the baroque indie pop of the High Llamas—Buck and Mills celebrated esoteric sounds at a time when Stipe’s words grew increasingly direct. The slight dissonance between the two approaches adds intrigue, particularly because it’s never resolved. An undercurrent of tension runs beneath the album's best moments. “Suspicion” simmers sensually; “Hope” hums along to an understatedly urgent pulse; “Why Not Smile” summons a glimmer of hope in sadness; and “At My Most Beautiful” channels its debt to Brian Wilson into an uncommonly open-hearted love song.
Another point of tension: After having grown their fanbase exponentially in the previous years, with Up R.E.M. introduced a newly nuanced sound to a public that wasn’t much interested in subtlety. In the waning years of the ’90s, the alt-rock explosion winnowed down to radio-ready rockers, nascent rap-rockers, and cutesy novelties, leaving little space for a record as willful as this one. Up isn’t challenging, exactly, but R.E.M. nevertheless demands that the audience meet them on their own terms. At the time, the album’s maze of byways, detours, and dead ends may have left many fans by the roadside, but a quarter century later, it serves as a fascinating reminder of a moment where the band’s future was anything but settled. | 2023-11-11T00:00:00.000-05:00 | 2023-11-11T00:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Craft | November 11, 2023 | 6.9 | d4323c53-867e-4a1a-a1f0-89cee7f670d7 | Stephen Thomas Erlewine | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stephen-thomas erlewine/ | |
Defiantly queer, proudly Canadian, and righteously stoned, Ontario’s Partner infuse their bubble-grunge indie-rock riffs with a slyly subversive spirit. | Defiantly queer, proudly Canadian, and righteously stoned, Ontario’s Partner infuse their bubble-grunge indie-rock riffs with a slyly subversive spirit. | Partner: In Search of Lost Time | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/partner-in-search-of-lost-time/ | In Search of Lost Time | The debut album from the Windsor, Ontario, duo Partner is the ultimate write-what-you-know exercise. Listening to In Search of Lost Time, you will learn that singer/guitarists Josée Caron and Lucy Niles are proudly gay, proudly Canadian, and proudly, deeply stoned. They’re part Tegan and Sara, part Beavis and Butt-Head: Their record is filled with stories about being best buds looking for the best bud, arcane jokey references to ’90s Canuck cartoon-pop act Prozzäk (a.k.a. the proto-Gorillaz), and at least two songs about just wanting to curl up at home and watch TV in sweatpants. Sprinkled throughout are a handful of phone-call skits that make virtue of their general ineptitude, whether they’re campaigning their label head to let them put a portrait of Melissa Etheridge on their album cover, or breaking down into a giggle fit on the self-explanatory “Piss Pants Tampon.” But if Partner go to great lengths to present themselves as lovable fuck-ups, they’ve totally got their shit together with their tunes.
Compared to the rickety indie rock of the band’s early singles, In Search of Lost Time displays the blown-up bubble-grunge riffage and maximal shredability that wholly encourages Caron’s use of a double-neck guitar in concert (not to mention the occasional impromptu Bad Company cover). On the album’s opening track/self-fulfilling prophecy “Everybody Knows” (“you’re high,” natch), Caron describes her weed-induced meltdown as such: “Now everything is cinematic and The Big Lebowski/I’m in the California desert, it’s the 1990s.” So the least she can do to make herself feel better is provide a period-appropriate soundtrack. In Search of Lost Time imagines a Veruca Salt that take their cues from Weezer instead of the Breeders, applying the duo’s glowing harmonies to an unmistakably Rivers Cuomosian combination of nerdy neuroses, faux-rap repartee, and the kind of candy-coated crunch that inspired him to outfit his band’s logo with Van Halen wings.
But if songs like “Comfort Zone” and “Daytime TV” (the two aforementioned couch-potato anthems) aspire to be nothing more than the musical junk-food equivalents of the binge-watching pleasures described within, other tracks reveal the subversive spirit lurking behind the surface. After all, Partner first gained attention in 2015 for their single “The ‘Ellen’ Page,” which was less a fan letter to the Juno star than a clever comment on stereotyping lesbians. (“People say that I look like Ellen Page/They say it’s my face or maybe something they can’t place/I hate to say it but I think they’re mistaken/’Cause we’re far from spitting images/We’re just two gay Canadians.”) Even Partner’s name feels like a cheeky dig at the polite, sanitized term for a same-sex lover. Certainly, when Caron and Niles talk about wanting to put Melissa Etheridge’s picture on their album cover, they’re doing it for a laugh—but it’s also their heartfelt way of honoring a trailblazer who has allowed them to be as queer as they wanna be.
The open expressions of woman-to-woman desire on euphoric, radio-ready rave-ups like “Ambassador to Ecstasy,” “Women of Dreams,” and “Play the Field” are refreshing and necessary at a time when the biggest queer stars are still being extra-careful about what pronouns they use. The latter song also yields the album’s most poignant moment, when it interrupts its stream of tawdry sports-as-sex metaphors to yield Niles’ candid dispatch from the high-school locker room: “In the year 2004, staring at the tile floor/Of the gym class changing room, and trying not to look at you/’Cause even though I’d really like to/It’s not worth being called a dyke to see you in your sports bra.” Sure, Partner’s definition of a well-balanced lifestyle is having a bong in one hand and a remote control in the other. But In Search of Lost Time is also the celebratory, liberating sound of no longer having to feel ashamed about who you are. | 2017-09-12T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-09-12T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | You’ve Changed | September 12, 2017 | 7.5 | d449570b-390c-455c-be2b-6c60dcc3ff42 | Stuart Berman | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stuart-berman/ | |
Mixing gothic mysticism and hazy dream pop, Gardens & Villa step out with a promising full-length debut. | Mixing gothic mysticism and hazy dream pop, Gardens & Villa step out with a promising full-length debut. | Gardens & Villa: Gardens & Villa | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/15603-gardens-villa/ | Gardens & Villa | On their 2008 tour for Devotion, Beach House had a t-shirt for sale at their merch table featuring the album title spelled out in the sort of gothic font you see on death-metal album covers, creating a cheeky contrast between the grim presentation and the band's tranquil hazy-headed dream-pop. But those two aesthetic poles blurred into one upon hearing the striking debut single from Gardens & Villa. Ideal for summertime strolls through a cemetery, "Black Hills" pits vibraphone chimes against an icy synth pulse overtop an unnervingly steady beat. And while "Black Hills" presents magisterial images of mountains, seas, and high tides, its environment feels tensely claustrophobic, with Chris Lynch's elastic, androgynous voice projecting serenity and severity in equal measure. It's the sort of song you could easily imagine Beach House coming up with, were they to follow-up the lushness of Teen Dream with something more sinister.
But the self-titled debut album that "Black Hills" opens shows Gardens & Villa to be something more complex than just a Beach Hearse. That such a moody outfit hails from sunny Santa Barbara is but a surface indication of their curious qualities. With a lyric sheet that's preoccupied with nature and mysticism-- not to mention a singer who's not afraid to whip out a flute-- Gardens & Villa could easily be pegged as hippies. But they're also keen on playing up the artificial qualities of their music, foregrounding synthesizers and mechanized, metronomic rhythms to create a peculiar hybrid of 1960s and 80s sensibilities. (One song bears the particularly apt title of "Neon Dove".) As such, the austerity of their sound can make them seem both sternly serious and, at times, rather goofy. (See: the ping-ponged synth-pop of "Spacetime", wherein the title is repeated in a comically spooky voice, as if it were the intro to some old Saturday morning cartoon.) Given their fondness for the classic and the plastic, it's no surprise Gardens & Villa feel equally at home recording their album with piano-bar bard Richard Swift as touring with hipster hype magnets Foster the People.
But if the ambiguous quality of their sound sometimes makes it hard to become emotionally invested in Gardens & Villa, in Lynch, they're blessed with a singer who has remarkable presence and poise. For all the effeminate intimations in his voice, he never uses it for pure affectation or gratuitous, histrionic effect. And though the band has been quick to cite the percussive funk of Talking Heads as a driving influence, they truly excel at crafting atmospheric ballads: the Low-like hymn "Chemtrails" and, especially, the foreboding "Sunday Morning", a rainy-day requiem that favorably recalls the retro-futurist psych-pop of the United States of America or Broadcast. It's hard to predict where Gardens & Villa might go from here: bombastic, drum-circle-ready closer "Neon Dove" carries the possibility of Yeasayer-styled transition from misfits to populists, while "Orange Blossom" suggests a desire to join Wild Beasts on the art-funk fringes. But in the flute-tootin' Lynch, they've got a pied piper worth following down whichever path he takes. | 2011-07-06T02:00:04.000-04:00 | 2011-07-06T02:00:04.000-04:00 | Rock | Secretly Canadian | July 6, 2011 | 6.8 | d450ded2-6a4b-4890-9f6e-96fb113e92a4 | Stuart Berman | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stuart-berman/ | null |
Remix disc added to the Kanine band's debut LP features contributions from Dntel, Soft Pink Truth, and Ariel Pink, among others. | Remix disc added to the Kanine band's debut LP features contributions from Dntel, Soft Pink Truth, and Ariel Pink, among others. | Grizzly Bear: The Remixes | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/3667-the-remixes/ | The Remixes | It's practically a Brooklyn fairy tale: Sensitive dude makes hushed, lo-fi folk-pop in his Greenpoint bedroom after hearing just enough Iron & Wine. Dude has talented, arty friend who adds just enough arboreal, backwards-reverbed oddness to draw comparisons to the latest local avant-garde "scene" (other than noise, of course). The hirsute and horn-rimmed hordes rejoice; dudes reissue debut album with a disc of snazzy remixes by all their cool neighbors, plus some non-locals. Crotchety Pitchfork critic makes gratuitous opening Brooklyn references, claps hands, says "dude" too much.
Much of Horn of Plenty's sheepish beauty lay in Christopher Bear's eccentric blurrings of Edward Droste's naturally melodic, one-microphone campfire koans. At times The Remixes sharpens the focus on Droste's songwriting, which was often submerged in Bear's abyssal touches; Safety Scissors, for instance, accelerate the syrup-sopped "La Duchesse Anne", add buzzing, intermittently shuffling beats, and expose a catchy "do-do-do" leftfield pop gem. Simon Bookish makes the most immediately satisfying turn, adding a goofy new verse about "London Calling" and file-sharing to a clatteringly optimistic take on the wounded "Eavesdropping". Still other tracks-- such as Son's fuzzy "Shift" or Circlesquare's coruscating expansion of the same song (whistle-choir front and center, natch)-- serve to further abstract the originals.
Either way, The Remixes serves as a revelatory set of reinventions, while not a song-for-song do-over like Bloc Party's latest thingy. Listeners old and new are likely to find remixes they'll prefer over their forebears: not just Bookish's "Eavesdropping", but also Final Fantasy's "Don't Ask", which takes one of Horn of Plenty's most conventional tracks and dresses it up in strings and snug melodrama. Soft Pink Truth takes "A Good Place" all over the damn place-- underwater vox, "Slave 4 U" stripclub rhythms, meowing pet-store horn samples-- while concentrating on the song's evocative "blow by blow" lyric. And get me Jimmy Tamborello: Dntel does "Merge" as pulsing, wistful "Chariots of Fur" laptronica. Efterklang's opening "Campfire" rattles the halls of Rivendell with triumphant woodwinds that neuter the orig by comparison.
Helps, too, that so many of the artists featured aren't among remixing's usual suspects. First-time second-mixers Ariel Pink offer a droning, crackly "Disappearing Act", like "Our Prayer" Brian Wilson collaborating with Syd Barrett and then vanishing like the drum fills amid reverent, one-chord acoustic strums. Castanets apparently took "Deep Sea Diver" literally, plunging into three minutes of groaning, rippling guitar noise-- The Life Subaquatic! As in real fairy tales, freak-folk's emperors are sometimes accused of lacking clothes; Grizzly Bear's songs beguile however they're adorned. | 2005-11-10T01:00:04.000-05:00 | 2005-11-10T01:00:04.000-05:00 | Rock | Kanine | November 10, 2005 | 7.4 | d4585b1a-c0ff-4157-9d37-128be25eeb0f | Marc Hogan | https://pitchfork.com/staff/marc-hogan/ | null |
Harpist Mary Lattimore, who has worked with Thurston Moore and Sharon Van Etten, teams with mult-instrumentalist and War on Drugs producer Jeff Zeigler for a hypnotizing, semi-improvised score. | Harpist Mary Lattimore, who has worked with Thurston Moore and Sharon Van Etten, teams with mult-instrumentalist and War on Drugs producer Jeff Zeigler for a hypnotizing, semi-improvised score. | Mary Lattimore / Jeff Zeigler: Music Inspired by Philippe Garrel’s Le Révélateur | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22162-music-inspired-by-philippe-garrels-le-revelateur/ | Music Inspired by Philippe Garrel’s Le Révélateur | Every New Year’s since 2008, Texas’ Ballroom Marfa has invited musicians to provide a live score for a silent film. The fifth edition paired the harpist Mary Lattimore, who’s accompanied the likes of Thurston Moore and Sharon Van Etten, with the multi-instrumentalist Jeff Zeigler, a longtime engineer for the War on Drugs who produced their 2014 epic Lost in the Dream. (They’ve both worked with Kurt Vile). In Marfa, the duo scored Philippe Garrel’s 1968 experimental film *Le Révélateur, *which ultimately inspired a collaborative album called Slant of Light**. And now comes the release of their semi-improvised score as Music Inspired by Philippe Garrel’s Le Révélateur.
This collection presents two version of the score: a 45-minute album composed of 11 tracks, roughly split for each of the film’s scenes or major moments, and a version synced up to the film’s 67 minute runtime. Without the images, this is a fascinating entryway to Lattimore’s very unique way of playing. Her harp experiments make for perfect wandering music. You can hear strong echoes of her recent solo album, At the Dam, in this score.* *The ping-pong machine of sounds her harp makes with its array of effects pedals is no doubt hypnotizing. It’s a sound so multivalent and warped that it’s always made me want to close my eyes to digest the weirdness of it all (a hindrance, of course, to a project that is also visual).
Zeigler’s use of the melodica, especially in the song “A Tunnel,” strangely and successfully resembles the bold flourish of Ennio Morricone’s harmonica in his western scores. Throughout, it nearly haunts the background of Lattimore’s stray plucks. Zeigler’s synthesizer manipulations create ambient waves of noise that lend all Lattimore’s harp gymnastics an odd disembodied feeling. She responds in like by deploying delay pedals to elongate sounds and taps the body of the harp to use it as a drum. They also experiment with straight noise, in songs like “A Forest,” which is almost Glenn Branca-esque in its wall of dissonant tones.
When I did try to watch the film and listen to the score all at once, I was always just a little off, the film or the score always out of sync—human error framing it all. So watching Lattimore and Zeigler perform the score in person earlier this month, at Brooklyn’s Nitehawk Cinema, felt necessary. Lattimore set up at her 47-string Lyon and Healy harp on one end of the auditorium and Zeigler was behind a synthesizer, array of knobs, and melodica at the other end of the theater. Her harp was so large and grand that one of its wooden corners obscured the edge of the screen. The very physicality of the experience was overwhelming. Lattimore’s harp echoed and bounced off the walls at random angles, making the live sound a strange flickering presence that stuck with you as each new note lead into the next. The harp is a dramatic choice for the rather minimal and rather metaphysical film; it slathers across the story. Their score, in its own way, provides an alternative narrative for the silent film, because it creates a sense of drama and tension that is more openly up to interpretation.
The film is so intensely visual, so obliquely shot, and so very weird that the French philosopher Gilles Deleuze said *Le Révélateur *was a primary example of what he called the *cinema du corps *(“cinema of the body”). In his theory of film, *cinema du corps *was defined by a pronounced physicality, the cerebral faculties overwhelmed by the mass of sensations a film could produce (such as the awareness of the beat of your heart, or the ringing in an ear). When your body is able to fully internalize this, the experience of what Lattimore and Zeigler are doing is so one of a kind. But the profound difficulty of achieving the perfect experience makes the album a tad disappointing, with its disconnect between lived experience and what will always be just a recording. | 2016-08-01T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-08-01T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Experimental | Thrill Jockey | August 1, 2016 | 6.9 | d46f4637-8bca-4d96-82df-7e27ff7621db | Kevin Lozano | https://pitchfork.com/staff/kevin-lozano/ | null |
The Scottish post-punk band's new box set isn't just a lavish retrospective, it's the complete Orange Juice. | The Scottish post-punk band's new box set isn't just a lavish retrospective, it's the complete Orange Juice. | Orange Juice: Coals to Newcastle | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/14878-coals-to-newcastle/ | Coals to Newcastle | By the time Orange Juice released an album-- 1982's You Can't Hide Your Love Forever-- their early 45s were already the stuff of frustrating legend. Their first home, Postcard Records, had come and gone and left the band in the unfortunate position of having a stellar reputation based on material few could now hear. Everything they subsequently did was judged against those initial releases-- four lost singles which defined lovelorn, literate indie pop. Combined with their sputtering commercial fortunes, it gave Orange Juice an air of underachievement. Come the CD age and those first blasts of inspiration were well served-- compiled and recompiled, most recently on 2005's The Glasgow School. For most of the last decade it's been the group's later career that's fallen into shadow.
This is a band long defined by unavailability. But no more: New box set Coals to Newcastle isn't just a lavish retrospective, it's the complete Orange Juice. More complete than complete, in fact: As well as The Glasgow School, a radio sessions CD, and a DVD, each of the group's four albums gets an expanded disc to itself, which means the six-song Texas Fever is saddled with barely different alternate mixes. But most of the wealth of extra material is worth a play-- Orange Juice were never shy of throwing experiments onto B-sides, and tracks like "Tongues Begin to Wag" are droll sketches of their working process. The most treasurable rarity here, from a 1981 John Peel session, is "Blokes On 45", a medley of those early singles set to a faux-disco backbeat and a vision of proto-indie as an oldies' circuit variety turn.
That was the essence of Orange Juice: They were always self-conscious, and they were usually very funny. The former came with the post-punk territory-- at the end of the box set there's a radio interview where Edwyn Collins talks about being "into" something then chastises himself for sounding like a hippie. The latter was more unusual, but wit and self-deprecation are what links the jangle and rush of their first releases with the louche pop-soul precision of their final ones. That and Collins' immediately recognisable voice-- a plummy, permanently amused croon.
Collins was very cautious of pigeonholing-- he'd emerged talking about fusing pop and soul and then ended up sitting on the sidelines while the s-word became the era's most overused. He resisted the idea that Orange Juice's career was a steady progression towards slickness. But that's unavoidably what it sounds like. You Can't Hide and second album Rip It Up are full of spashy, amateurish collisions of pop, funk, indie, and latterly African sounds which somehow resolve into joy. But by the final, self-titled LP there's a muscle and poise on tracks like "What Presence?!" and "Salmon Fishing in New York" that's completely absent from the band's earlier work.
Collins' persona, and his love of melody and language, is what makes the contrast seem like a complement, not a trade-off. His killer lines are best discovered for yourself, but a common thread is his talent for picking up on the odd little idioms of everyday speech: "Here's some mud in your pretty eye," "Poor old soul." It makes the songs at once more conversational and more articifial: At the end of "Tenterhook", his most smouldering song, he sings "you tell me don't make any bones about it," and in the slow-burning context it sounds deliciously odd and curiously moving.
Coals to Newcastle is studded with such moments-- the real test of the indie soulboy was how they managed at ballads, and like Scritti Politti's Green Gartside, Collins passed it. The slow numbers help to offset the non-stop wryness, but the indended audience for this box wouldn't have a problem with it in the first place. This isn't an introduction: If you're not sure about Orange Juice, pick up a compilation first. If you've acquired the taste, you'll adore this, and welcome the opportunity to rediscover the group's less influential but often delightful latter days. | 2010-11-19T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2010-11-19T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Domino | November 19, 2010 | 8.6 | d47c71ed-9d29-4570-9647-87de2467f7dc | Tom Ewing | https://pitchfork.com/staff/tom-ewing/ | null |
The San Francisco rapper’s laid-back presence is the perfect foil to tales of luxury rides and big-money moves. On his latest album, he slips into a more romantic mode. | The San Francisco rapper’s laid-back presence is the perfect foil to tales of luxury rides and big-money moves. On his latest album, he slips into a more romantic mode. | Larry June : Spaceships on the Blade | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/larry-june-spaceships-on-the-blade/ | Spaceships on the Blade | Is Larry June the new ultimate hustler? Last year, Complex sat the rising San Francisco rapper down and asked him to pass judgment on the hustling credentials of some of the genre’s biggest names. June draws his authority on the subject from experience: He overturned a disappointing stint on Warner to find success with his own label, The Freeminded, while making music with a consistent message of diversifying one’s portfolio and making smart investments. On “Financial Freedom,” from 2020, he mused on a regret that he once bought a watch instead of stock in Amazon.
June’s hustling finishing school was the streets. “We was fucking with anything we can get our hands on and make some money,” he told The Ringer. If he doesn’t reveal more, it’s because his music requires minimal backstory. Spaceships on the Blade plays like a weekend in the life of a hustler, our protagonist’s journey told in hazy late-night drives behind the wheels of purring sports cars. The album begins with the sound of some super-fly, string-drenched soul-funk and June shares the demeanor of any number of legendary on-screen hustlers: Youngblood Priest, “Fast Eddie” Felson, Huggy Bear. Calm as you like, he teases out smooth bling’n’nice-things rhymes. The title to “I’ll Make Time” feels like a fallacy: June comes across as a man who has never felt rushed in his life.
So you get a song like “Private Valet,” where June describes parking his Lamborghini near his speedboat, stepping off a jet in a mink coat with a beautiful woman by his side, and sleeping just fine after spending a half a million dollars. Spaceships on the Blade largely eschews the investment raps in favor of many tales of June treating his lady, so much so that he sometimes slips into a more romantic and melodic vocal style. It’s Jay-Z’s “Excuse Me Miss” video extended to 53 minutes. There’s an inherent silliness to these Rick Ross-sized indulgences, but June’s laid-back presence keeps the mood light. You take him as seriously as you want to take him.
Born Larry Eugene Hendricks III to teenage parents in San Francisco, June moved to Atlanta at age 5; he spent much of his childhood vacationing to the West Coast, where he longed to live permanently. At 14, he moved back to his native Hunters Point neighborhood briefly before heading to Vallejo. His music proudly reps the Bay, relying on post-hyphy pop’n’snap beats, and like many regional forefathers, June releases music at an unconquerable level of prolificacy. Yet some Southern influences seep through: “5.0 Chronicles” features a screwed-down hook and a guest spot from Curren$y. Another Southern diplomat arrives on “Still Boomin” in the form of 2 Chainz. Spaceships on the Blade regularly looks to synthy 1980s R&B, too: the romantic “For Tonight” receives a velvety hook courtesy of Syd.
There are some obvious setbacks. The lack of specificity can make the writing feel generic at times, especially over the course of a 20-track release. On “In My Pockets,” June celebrates closing a deal without going into detail about the deal itself. And sometimes his ultra-relaxed flow can slide into the realm of lackadaisical. But it’s impossible to throw on Spaceships on the Blade and not come away feeling that June is a guy who’s just dope—a rapper with the natural magnetism and confidence that correlates with the success he wants to convey. | 2022-08-23T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2022-08-23T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Empire | August 23, 2022 | 7.2 | d47cfcf3-5c83-416f-9e2f-f03f344b7e96 | Dean Van Nguyen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/dean-van nguyen/ | |
The British pop star Emeli Sandé writes power ballads that start at “cinematic” and scale upward. Her second album places that massive voice atop tracks of stately but interchangeable gloom. | The British pop star Emeli Sandé writes power ballads that start at “cinematic” and scale upward. Her second album places that massive voice atop tracks of stately but interchangeable gloom. | Emeli Sandé: Long Live the Angels | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22610-long-live-the-angels/ | Long Live the Angels | For the better part of the 2010s, the role of British misery troubadour has been occupied by two people named Adele: Adele Laurie Blue Adkins—the Adele-Adele—and Adele Emily Sandé. Industry-wise, they occupy much the same niche: colossal-voiced balladeers of inoffensive angst and outlier sales. But the two artists are subtly different. The mononymic Adele’s music is rooted in Northern soul and not much else; when she brought popmaker Max Martin in for 25 it was both surprising and, for Max, restrained. Sandé follows more trends; her solo debut “Heaven” was hitched to the UK’s breakbeat revival, and subsequent singles have brought in grime and David Guetta’s brand of EDM. Adele’s music was adopted quickly by the X Factor-industrial complex; Sandé, who began her career as a Syco songwriter, was part of it from the start.
Perhaps as a result, Adele’s music, with the notable exception of “Rolling in the Deep,” is human-sized—her songs are written to slot into the mundane heartbreaks and little resignations of everyday life. Sandé writes songs that start at cinematic and scale upward. (She must have been peeved she didn’t get to do the theme to Skyfall.) Her natural home is the place many Britons first met her (if not Americans): the 2012 London Olympics, where she performed in the opening and closing ceremonies.
This is all well and good if you’re cheering on thousands of athletes, or soundtracking a trailer. It’s somewhat less so if you’re recording an album. Several tracks on Long Live the Angels, Sandé’s second, long-gestating LP, were co-produced by English DJ Naughty Boy, best known for crossover hit and Sam Smith showcase “La La La.” But instead of doing what he did there—curating bubbling-up dance trends like the ones on Sandé’s best hits—Naughty Boy indulges his, and her, most maudlin tendencies. A gospel choir appears barely one minute in; it remains in residence for most of the album. Sandé sings, well and interchangeably, over over a dozen tracks of stately but amorphous gloom—the sort of beige dramatics The Guardian dubbed, in 2011, “the new boring.” This is your pain with an acoustic guitar. This is your pain as a piano ballad. This is your pain with “Bleeding Love” drums. This is your pain with a small choir. This is your pain with a large choir. When Sandé finally perfects the formula, on “Highs and Lows,” it's after at least eight other tries.
“Garden” would normally be a waste of Emeli—she’s barely on it—but here it’s triply a relief: for its sinuous, minimalist beat, for the bookending performance by British poet Áine Zion, for its being among the rare times Jay Electronica is a refreshing presence. “Tenderly” isn’t much of a song on its own, but the inclusion of the Serenje Choir—a nod to Sandé’s Zambian heritage—at least distinguishes the track. “Hurts,” the big single, takes a bit to get going, but once it does, it really does: a sudden tempo shift, handclaps, mood like gathering clouds. The tempo leaves no time for X Factor emoting, which means Sandé can provide emotion instead; her voice goes ragged and her words turn bitter (“oh man, what a tragedy, ha ha”). Being an Emeli Sandé song, it eventually turns into a power ballad like the rest, but the swell feels earned. Too much of Long Live the Angels just feels turgid. | 2016-11-15T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2016-11-15T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Pop/R&B | Virgin | November 15, 2016 | 5.4 | d481d866-f736-494e-9eaa-1e79e24d252f | Katherine St. Asaph | https://pitchfork.com/staff/katherine-st. asaph/ | null |
On her most personal album to date, the UK experimental musician retains her focus on the ambiguities of the processed human voice while bringing traditional instrumentation to the fore. | On her most personal album to date, the UK experimental musician retains her focus on the ambiguities of the processed human voice while bringing traditional instrumentation to the fore. | Klein: Lifetime | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/klein-lifetime/ | Lifetime | The musical sensibility that the South London experimental producer Klein has developed over the course of her previous records and assorted performance commissions is unmistakable and evolving. Jagged soundscapes made from loops of melodic fuzz and pop-culture samples harbor memories both personal and cultural. Klein’s own voice floats throughout—sometimes as sung language, sometimes in the form of abstract groans or ululations. Her surfaces are uneven, and there’s a multitude of weird, hyper-specific detail to get lost in; the overall effect, though, feels like searching—for sounds, for workable forms, for lost or hidden selves.
On Lifetime, Klein sprawls more comfortably into sonic space than she has before in her recorded music. Totality becomes a possibility: the approximation of a whole. Lifetime is structured as a series of interlocking cycles, and as it resolves and unfurls, it seems to ask: What does the tension between duration and transformation sound like?
Klein has said this is a deeply personal album, akin to “giving someone your diary.” That doesn’t mean it’s informative in some extractive sense—more that it’s characterized by an abstract sort of openness throughout. Especially on the album’s A-side, she plays with proximity in the way she collages sounds: The opener toys with a wordless sung pop hook, first at the front of the listener’s ear, piled atop ambling distortion, and then, once the instrumental portion of the track has suddenly dropped away, at an echoey distance. A chorus emerges, combining both vantage points to a lightly dissonant effect. If we can access a person through their voice—an idea that is present but certainly not stable in these songs—we contend with her as simultaneously a performer and an intimate.
I’ve long associated Klein’s sound with a combination of vocal experimentation and the distorted grain of digitally collaged sound. Instrumentation, however, comes more crisply to the fore here, drawing our attention away from the record’s crackling interstices and toward a set of classical sounds perhaps more confidently invested with representational power. “Silent” blooms with cycles of hurried, ecstatic percussion, against which a brief, stunning piano line is introduced; a version of this pairing resurfaces a few tracks later on the choppier, more discordant “Never Will I Disobey.” Saxophonist and sound artist Matana Roberts guests on the gently roiling “For What Worth,” and her playing is one of the clearer shapes within the blurry samples that form the song’s shifting ground. Present, too, are samples of dialogue from Spencer Williams’ early-20th century American race films, sculpted with spiritual vocals on “We Are Almost There” into a swell of vocal expression—featuring Klein’s voice, too, and thus developing a textured chorus that spans a century.
The 10-minute track “Honour” is one of the least musical offerings here, and gives Lifetime its unlikely pinnacle. Spoken voices—Klein’s? Her mother’s?—are presented in a sort of field-recorded argument about theology, faith, family. “Forgiving and forgetting. What does forgiving and forgetting require? Accountability. The Bible also speaks about accountability,” Klein says. The voices that make up the conversation become processed with vocoder effects, and background sound takes the shape of an ominous, percussive squelch. We return from that sound to music proper, ambivalent ambient tones and a series of swelling, slow-burning textures: to resolve the conflict to which we were just privy? To echo or to burn away the everyday pain of family and faith? In these soundscapes, the banal and the intense, music performed and sound happenstance, collapse into one another. Lifetime is marked by aesthetic and personal conflict, and while it doesn’t uncover easy resolution, its beauty (and it is a remarkably beautiful record) derives in large part from the acceptance, or even embrace, of those conflicts as what generates a lifetime’s meaning. | 2019-09-12T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-09-12T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Experimental | ijn inc | September 12, 2019 | 7.8 | d4a42937-4142-48de-aa8c-5f30bdbe8a9b | Thea Ballard | https://pitchfork.com/staff/thea-ballard/ | |
The engimatic Swedish band Ghost's 2013 sophomore album Infestissumam was supposed to be metal's second commercial coming, but it was mostly a bore. With Meliora, their third full-length, they've returned to a heavier direction, and created a far more engaging collection of their seductive Satanism. | The engimatic Swedish band Ghost's 2013 sophomore album Infestissumam was supposed to be metal's second commercial coming, but it was mostly a bore. With Meliora, their third full-length, they've returned to a heavier direction, and created a far more engaging collection of their seductive Satanism. | Ghost: Meliora | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/20899-meliora/ | Meliora | The engimatic Swedish band Ghost (briefly known as Ghost B.C.) are in an odd place in the metal world right now. They're maybe the only modern metal band to earn accolades from both Darkthrone's Fenriz (one of their earliest supporters as a part of his "Band of the Week" feature) and Dave Grohl (who has played with them live and produced their covers EP If You Have Ghost). Ghost's main appeal is not only their throwback sound, but also their presentation, which combines black metal's anonymity with a theatrical, sometimes silly macabre bent only slightly removed from King Diamond. Even if we didn't ask for a new Kiss, Ghost is just that.
But if their 2013 sophomore album Infestissumam was supposed to be metal's second commercial coming, there couldn't have been a worse album to place that expectation upon. Opus Eponymous, their unabashedly derivative 2010 debut, at least had solid hooks. There's that whole thing about catching more flies with honey than vinegar, but vinegar is a crucial ingredient of metal. With Meliora, their third full-length, they've dropped the temporary B.C. from their name and returned to a heavier direction, ditching most of the lite Mercyful Fate/Blue Öyster Cult hybrid for more folk and Deep Purple influences. It's far and away a more engaging record than Infestissumam, but still, you have to wonder if Ghost should be metal's new chief representative.
Commending a metal record for having an upfront guitar sound seems unnecessary; that said, Andy Wallace's mixing was what Ghost needed, and now their desire for the metal big-time at least has a fitting production. Ghost also stepped up when writing more aggressive material befitting of the menace they wish to breed. While opener "Spirit" takes its time kicking in, "From the Pinnacle to the Pit" has that drive sorely missing from Infestissumam. The choral breaks and aggressive organ drives, like Purple in their prime, contrast so well, their fullest realization of "seductive Satanism" so far. And even if the Rainbow groove and driving bassline aren't anywhere close to new, some things still work decades later for a reason.
"Cirice" was a wise choice for a first single, a combination of familiar strengths given new life. Again, the contrast of somber acoustic guitars and foreboding strings has been used time and time again, but it's just the launching pad for the song's main riff. In metal, it's very difficult to write a compelling midpaced song—Tom G. Warrior and Dimebag Darrell are among the few to not be cursed—so that Ghost gets that rare boogie right is enough of an accomplishment. "Majesty"'s intro must have been lifted straight from Deep Purple's Perfect Strangers, oozing blusey swagger that Ghost has never tapped into before. Ghost's presentation works better in a live setting with a powerful PA, and that song has all the potential to become a live staple.
Meliora also reveals the limitations of Ghost's vocalist, who this time is the third incarnation of satanic pope Papa Emeritus. (Part of Ghost's gimmick is that each Papa Emeritus "dies" and is succeeded by a different Papa Emertius with every album, even though it is, in fact, the same vocalist.) His soft approach to incantations is apt for "He Is", which shows off the folkier side of Ghost. Otherwise, it can't keep up with his Nameless Ghouls (the name of the Ghost "band"). For all of "Mummy Dust"'s strengths, as it plays with the loud-soft dynamics in a spookier way, a little more drama in the vocals would have really brought it to its full potential. There are plenty of moments where you wish Papa wouldn't just coast on a croon, but would instead let out a maniacal laugh or scream.
That goes back to the central problem of Infestissumam: no matter how accessible you want to be, metal is nothing without a little tough confidence. Granted, getting compared to King Diamond must get old by now. That doesn't mean Papa Emeritus III couldn't vary it up, whether he wants to take it up himself or bring in a rival Pope with a different vocal range. (It'd add to the stage show.) In "Pinnacle", he brings a little snarl to his delivery, which should have been applied more liberally throughout the record. Papa Emeritus also doesn't add much to closer "Deus in Absentia", which makes the song feel twice as long as it actually is, and ends up being the weakest track on the whole.
Except for "Pinnacle", "Majesty", and "Cirice", none of these songs feel essential or ready for headlining festival slots. That brings us to the ultimate question around Meliora and Ghost in general: What are they bringing to metal, especially for those who are not super into the underground? Say what you will about hair metal's shred pyrotechnics and blatant bubblegum tendencies, it at least brought something new to mainstream metal. Grunge was not the anathema to metal as is the popular narrative, but actually reaffirmed Black Sabbath's status as metal masters by taking more from them than most bands before. Since then? Most of the innovation and excitement has gone underground. So, what is Ghost doing, exactly? Is metal so desperate for a commercial force that we're willing to accept a crooning Pope as our savior? Is Ghost for Kiss fans who want their kids to have another Kiss, instead of something new? When the cloak comes off—and it will, sooner or later—there may not be much left behind. Ghost don't deserve outright scorn that hellishly opinionated metal fans can dish and dish, and Meliora is a step in the right direction, but their pandering can only go so far, and even then, it might be misguided. | 2015-08-21T02:00:02.000-04:00 | 2015-08-21T02:00:02.000-04:00 | null | Loma Vista | August 21, 2015 | 6.2 | d4a717a6-515f-4cac-94ae-c75f3dd36b8c | Andy O'Connor | https://pitchfork.com/staff/andy-o'connor/ | null |
The Peruvian-born, Berlin-based musician’s debut EP is the kind of house music that skirts convention and renounces rote functionality without ever forgetting that its purpose is to make people move. | The Peruvian-born, Berlin-based musician’s debut EP is the kind of house music that skirts convention and renounces rote functionality without ever forgetting that its purpose is to make people move. | Sofia Kourtesis: Sofia Kourtesis EP | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/sofia-kourtesis-sofia-kourtesis-ep/ | Sofia Kourtesis EP | Last year’s Studio Barnhus Volym 1, the first full-length compilation from the cheerfully leftfield Stockholm dance label, was a group portrait populated in large part by class clowns and loveable misfits. Co-founders Kornél Kovács, Pedrodollar, and Axel Boman all delivered reliably off-kilter takes on their twinkling brand of house music; Kompakt’s Superpitcher jumpstarted a senior center’s AM radio with some help from a battered drum machine; and Baba Stiltz did his stoned lothario bit. But virtually everyone on the record—even DJ Koze, whose ambient beats took on an unusually opalescent glow—was upstaged by Sofia Kourtesis’ bewitching “WinWin San.” With easy-listening vocal harmonies looping dreamily above garbled voices and a deceptively bass-heavy house groove, the song swirled like a cotton-candy kaleidoscope.
That was Kourtesis’ first appearance on wax, save for a guest vocal on Gold Panda’s “Half of Where You Live,” in 2013; now, just six months later, the Peruvian-born, Berlin-based musician returns with a debut EP that’s every bit as magical. It’s easy to see what the Studio Barnhus label hears in her. Like the imprint’s founders—and like Koze himself, whose offbeat, low-key sensibility provided the blueprint for the Stockholm crew’s whole aesthetic—she makes house music that skirts convention and renounces rote functionality without ever forgetting that its purpose is to make people move.
Her tracks bound all over the place. Steady kick drums suddenly buckle at the knees; scrappy accents tug at the beat’s already lopsided center of gravity. Her drum programming, which seems to have been cobbled together from mismatched drum-machine hits, rickety breaks, and percussive abstractions, amounts to a hyperkinetic hodge-podge of clinks, clanks, zaps, and pows—a veritable comic book’s worth of onomatopoeia.
A sense of mystery runs through all four songs, beginning with the cloudy circumstances of their very genesis. There’s no telling exactly how they were made, but they sound largely sample-based. In “Lana Gaye,” a dramatic strip of harmonized vocals is chopped up—possibly backwards, though it’s hard to tell for sure—over a beat that rattles like a stick against a washboard. In “Trains & Airports,” a half-sung, half-shouted call-and-response refrain triggers memories of Ricardo Villalobos’ Christian Vander-sampling “Enfants (Chants).” Often, a wordless vocal loop becomes an overstuffed bed of tone that incidental elements get bounced off of, like quarters tossed on a lumpy mattress.
There’s always something just out of earshot, just past the limits of comprehension: garbled street noise, a snatch of overheard dialogue in another language, a yelp that might be a hiccup. In “Ios Santos,” the EP’s most placid cut, what might be a market vendor’s cry briefly harmonizes with the song’s melodic elements, an inspired bit of collage that reveals the music hidden in everyday life.
Kourtesis says that many of her sounds come from her travels—the din of the Amazon, the shouts of children selling papa y queso—while others come from movies, old records, or children’s toys from the flea market. None of these techniques are new, but, putting them in the service of such expressive melodies and surprising arrangements, she makes them wholly her own. This is as playful and as spirited as house music gets. It’s not enough, she seems to say, to make people move; Kourtesis’ songs make a compelling argument that the real purpose of dance music is to make people dream. | 2019-03-07T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2019-03-07T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Electronic | Studio Barnhus | March 7, 2019 | 8 | d4a8f64e-b9ca-41d9-8e58-a1d3904bc3d3 | Philip Sherburne | https://pitchfork.com/staff/philip-sherburne/ | |
Seventh album from this ambient mainstay draws its source material from recordings made at the MIR space station. | Seventh album from this ambient mainstay draws its source material from recordings made at the MIR space station. | Biosphere: Autour de la Lune | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/710-autour-de-la-lune/ | Autour de la Lune | Biosphere's Geir Jenssen knows from cold. Residing as he does near the Arctic Circle in Norway, Jenssen understands the psychological implications of a sun that, like a lamented deadbeat parent, routinely disappears for months at a time, and the absence of that essential lifeforce takes an inevitable emotional toll that informs Jenssen's art. It's tempting to say that Biosphere's bleak music sounds as it does for the same reason countries of Norway's approximate latitude make the world's best Vodka. But then Jenssen's other great passion is mountaineering (he has climbed the 26,906 foot Himalayan peak Cho Oyu without oxygen), suggesting a kernel of inspired humanity frozen in the tundra.
The vacuum of space gets pretty close to absolute zero, cold's recognized ideal, so it makes sense that the conceptually minded Jenssen sets albums there. His latest trip into the beyond started when French radio commissioned Jenssen to create a piece using their archives. He selected sounds from a radio dramatization of Jules Verne's space travel story De la Terre à la Lune ("From the Earth to the Moon") and pulled additional material from recordings made at the MIR space station, then combined the fragments with his own new music. The result is Autour de la Lune, a single 74-minute piece in nine movements.
The samples are used sparingly throughout Autour de la Lune, and the beat-driven side of Biosphere is completely absent. Mostly, the record is a showcase for long and impossibly deep drones. The 21-minute opener "Translation" is an exception here, as a cluster of midrange notes that braid to form a definite melody. Rather than referencing found sound or environmental recordings, "Translation" seems inspired by film music, with tense throbs and horn-like synth lines that suggest captured images of a spacecraft leisurely moving in front of stars. The scene is set.
The following "Rotation" does away with the fanfare to send faint pings and bass swells into the blackness, but the exceptional "Modifié" is where the record starts to get creepy. Jenssen processes human voices-- hard to tell if they're from the radio broadcast or MIR cosmonauts-- in a way that merges them completely with the electrical noise that carries them. They sound lost and unreachable, the last little whimpers of a doomed crew about to be swallowed by the event horizon. And yet, they're singing, kind of.
We follow them into darkness with the next few tracks, which consist of little more than the most punishing bass tones I've ever heard on a CD. On "Déviation", sounds hover at the bottom end of human audibility, causing all but the heartiest subwoofers to sound like an open newspaper flapping in a strong wind. I've approached this bass from three different sources (two sets of headphones and my living room speakers), and I can only guess the genuine sound through triangulation.
Strange things happen when I listen to "Circulaire" loud on headphones; the low end is total and all encompassing, but with the kind of throb that happens when you can hear your heart beating in your ears. The contrast means that the ambient sounds wherever I happen to be create "notes" in between the pulses. Because it seems so grounded in biology, I can't help but imagine this middle section as a musical approximation of the ambience in a suit during a spacewalk, where you hear nothing but your own body. If that's so, "Tombant" is accompaniment to the final drift back into the docking hatch, as it reprises the textures and symphonic swell of the opening "Translation".
Autour de la Lune is an excellent record that is nearly victimized by its awesome conceptual success. It offers such a compelling and internally complete idea of interstellar space-- moods, textures, samples, cover art, all of it-- that it loses some flexibility when it comes to individual interpretation. Still, Jenssen gotten exactly where he wanted to go. Upon reaching the icy mountain peak, he kept climbing into the stars. | 2004-07-07T02:00:02.000-04:00 | 2004-07-07T02:00:02.000-04:00 | Experimental | Touch | July 7, 2004 | 7.8 | d4acaf28-a12f-43dc-97e8-72d21d2c6f50 | Mark Richardson | https://pitchfork.com/staff/mark-richardson/ | null |
Juliana Barwick’s revelatory new album asks us to picture healing at a moment when the task feels impossible. | Juliana Barwick’s revelatory new album asks us to picture healing at a moment when the task feels impossible. | Julianna Barwick: Healing Is a Miracle | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/julianna-barwick-healing-is-a-miracle/ | Healing Is a Miracle | In a pandemic, cynicism is a crutch, and optimism is a meme. It’s easier to be a skeptic than it is to imagine a path forward. The ironic internet mantra “nature is healing” pokes fun at viral glimpses of post-apocalypse (goats reclaiming a Welsh town, dolphins in the Bosporus) but also casts the possibility of recovery as a joke. As the days drag on and the extent of our disconnection is reinforced, that possibility feels increasingly abstract.
Julianna Barwick’s new album, Healing Is a Miracle, couldn’t be more at odds with the dreary landscape in which it arrives, and yet it’s difficult to imagine it existing at any other moment. Refuge has always been the promise of her music—the restorative power of those sylph-like vocals, soaked in reverb and looped ad infinitum. But her vision of ambient music is also fundamentally open-ended; it asks you to make something of it, to pin it in time and space before it fully unfurls. Healing is a warm, shifting collection that doesn’t so much anticipate the current moment as adapt to it: it’s a medium for the unconscious, a salve for the collective wound. At a time when healing feels impossible, Barwick asks us to picture it together.
Where 2016’s Will was hushed and intimate, Healing Is a Miracle is comparatively forceful. “Safe” is made up of just a few elements, tracing a wordless shape in air before a whole-step loop rises up and overtakes it. There’s new power in Barwick’s layered singing, which feels distinctly present; you’re never worried it might slip away into the ether. “Inspirit” is reminiscent of John Tavener’s porous, holy minimalist chorales, but it’s set apart by thin waves of decaying bass. The earnest plea at its center is in keeping with Barwick’s project: “Open your heart/It’s in your head.” As with the album’s title, the frankness is almost startling.
Healing hinges on “Flowers,” which maxes out the knob on the bass components teased on “Inspirit.” Haunting, cavernous ambience melts into stuttering dark as Barwick traverses high and low registers, summoning up strange, wordless glyphs. It unsettles more than it invites us in. These aren’t feelings one traditionally associates with respite, or with Barwick’s music, and yet the track is a necessary descent that shades the rest of the album, making for a more complete psychic journey. It ends in chaos, with what sounds like a lightning storm, and an abrupt cut to black.
There’s something cinematic about what Barwick is doing here, a quality that’s most explicit in the album’s twin climaxes at the end of its A and B sides. “In Light,” written and recorded with Jónsi of Sigur Rós, pairs anthemic choruses with slow, incantatory verses. This is star-straddling, world-filling music—the kind of thing that risks cheesy bombast before arriving at transcendence. Its structure is also fundamentally different from Barwick’s earlier music: sturdier, less diaphanous. The Nosaj Thing collaboration “Nod” is shaped around an urgent rise and fall, and heaves like a living thing. The effect is profoundly empathetic.
Though her previous music has frequently been compared to Brian Eno’s, Barwick has pushed back on the idea that she’s taking any significant cues from his ambient series. And while it’s clear she’s drawn from that conceptual reservoir to some degree (her sound installation for a hotel lobby space was commissioned by avowed Eno fans), on Healing Is a Miracle, she’s never been further from the category of background music. Sincerity this pure draws attention to itself. It’s a genuine revelation.
Buy: Rough Trade
(Pitchfork earns a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.)
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2020-07-15T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-07-15T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Ninja Tune | July 15, 2020 | 8.3 | d4af8eea-c0d5-4367-ba8c-9654e6c89fca | Will Gottsegen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/will-gottsegen/ | |
This 4-song EP includes producers Diplo, Jacques Greene, Geeneus, and Zinc, along with Jessie Ware and rappers Iggy Azalea and Wiley. Proving herself an excellent curator, Katy B uses Danger to explore a softer, more forlorn aspect of nightlife. | This 4-song EP includes producers Diplo, Jacques Greene, Geeneus, and Zinc, along with Jessie Ware and rappers Iggy Azalea and Wiley. Proving herself an excellent curator, Katy B uses Danger to explore a softer, more forlorn aspect of nightlife. | Katy B: Danger EP | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/17493-danger-ep/ | Danger EP | The opening track on UK pop talent Katy B's new EP, Danger, is called "Aaliyah". At this point we generally know what we're in for when mention is made of the late singer-- some haphazard reappropriation of a vocal track or Timbaland beat, the trademark baby coos of "Are You That Somebody?" buried behind layers of echo or slapped onto somone else's production. But Katy flips expectations here by creating a song that sounds nothing like an Aaliyah original, instead paying homage by making her the subject of the track's lyrics. "Aaliyah, please-- this is green envy/ Why must you taunt me, girl?," she sings over a bass rhythm. Katy trades lines seamlessly with guest Jessie Ware, another UK breakout vocalist, crafting a lyrical love triangle that gazes at Aaliyah from a brand new angle. Together the singers take low-hanging fruit and make something complex from it.
Ware joins a stacked lineup of collaborators on the four-song Danger EP that also includes producers Diplo, Jacques Greene, Geeneus, and Zinc, along with rappers Iggy Azalea and Wiley. Which could have very easily made for a crowded, linkbait-laden mess of an EP under another artist's jurisdiction (see: Charli XCX’s Super Ultra EP), but Katy B proves herself an excellent curator. Danger's a collective effort that's diverse but never motley, warm never weak, tough but never harsh, slick but never washed out. While Katy's the centerpiece of the release, she's also an expert chameleon who bends to accommodate her collaborators without sacrificing her vision of gentle UK bass-bred club music. She invites them to see things her way.
On paper, the easy weak link appears to be "Light as a Feather", which pairs Diplo's "Set It Off" beat with notorious Australian rap robo-doll Iggy Azalea. It's a recipe for a capital-A annoying song, but Iggy makes what might be her least grating showing ever, adding a brief and subdued verse before passing the buck back to Katy. "Show me your wild side/ I'll be your Vegas/ Don't hold back/ It's yours for the taking," she raps, just as Katy swoops in and cleverly lifts the word "take" for her own part. "What does it take/ To make you feel/ To get you excited/ To see you smile?," she asks as the soft synth fizz percolates.
As she did with On a Mission, Katy B uses the Danger EP to explore a softer, more forlorn aspect of nightlife, braiding the nuances of parties and relationships together. "Yeah you passed my love to the left-hand side/ Smoked it right down to the roach/ So I might as well put it out," she sings on the slinky Jacques Greene-produced ballad "Danger". She and Drake might get along well. But the message is clearest on Friday-night anthem "Got Paid": "Straight to the floor/ I let the beat mend my broken heart." Katy never sulks for long.
Dropped out of the blue in the year's mid-December deadzone, Danger is another triumph of the EP-length release. Some of the year's best music-- Dum Dum Girls' End of Daze, TNGHT's self-titled debut, and Solange Knowles' new record True-- has been released in the brief, punchy form, and now we can add Danger to that list. In Katy's case, it serves several important purposes: It's a placeholder that reminds us of her existence and shows us she's established some exciting collaborative relationships since On a Mission. It gives us a sparkling peek into what she might have lined up for her scheduled full-length next year. Most of all, it just makes us want to dance. | 2012-12-13T01:00:01.000-05:00 | 2012-12-13T01:00:01.000-05:00 | Electronic / Rock | self-released | December 13, 2012 | 7.8 | d4b9a550-2584-4311-a5a2-56d2387c171c | Carrie Battan | https://pitchfork.com/staff/carrie-battan/ | null |
A grab bag of styles, SMD's latest features Hot Chip's Alexis Taylor, SFA's Gruff Rhys, Jamie Lidell, Beth Ditto, and Yeasayer's Chris Keating. | A grab bag of styles, SMD's latest features Hot Chip's Alexis Taylor, SFA's Gruff Rhys, Jamie Lidell, Beth Ditto, and Yeasayer's Chris Keating. | Simian Mobile Disco: Temporary Pleasure | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/13420-temporary-pleasure/ | Temporary Pleasure | When it comes to making pleasure-centric middlebrow pop-dance albums, you can't fault Simian Mobile Disco's instincts. Vocalists are good. Filler is bad. Hooks are a must. Nods to underground sounds must not alienate the unfamiliar. And an approach to genre that ranges somewhere from "catholic" to "aggressively eclectic" is the only way to hold the attention of the uncommitted.
Sure, judged by those increasingly out-of-date album-qua-album standards, Temporary Pleasure is something of a mess. It doesn't "flow." Sonically, SMD sticks to the neon thread that runs from the glittering prizes of 1980s synth-pop through Latin freestyle roller-skating jams and on into the earliest house and techno whose smiley-faced exterior wooed radio programmers. TP feels like 10 distinct singles, each pastiching a slightly different side of well-trod retro-modern electronic/club culture, connected by an album title and little else. And the disparity in quality between those singles can be pretty stark.
The album also lacks the immediate replay value of the best pop craftsmanship, the kind of choruses, breakdowns, or random spine-tingling musical asides that make you rewind a track before it's finished to relive the shiver all over again. Sure, even the most uninspired femme diva material (cf. Beth Ditto doing her best bedroom-mirror Crystal Waters on the somnambulant "Cruel Intentions") on Temporary Pleasure never irritates like "Poker Face". Young Fathers' skills on "Turn Up the Dial" surely best anything Flo Rida's farted out in the last 24 months. But you also can't picture a single SMD song besting Billboard's current kings when it comes to the kind of dance-pop that works as well on drive-time Top 40 as it does during a club's peak hours. Less irritating than Lady Gaga or "Low" is one thing, but SMD would still pale next to fellow 80s fetishist The-Dream's lesser efforts.
At their worst, SMD's turns toward "songwriting" are crass and half-assed at once, slapdash stuff that points out the mix of sweat and inspiration that goes into even the most effortless-seeming bubblegum. A truly terrible song, "Audacity of Huge" dares you to make it through Yeasayer's Chris Keating pulling on an ill-fitting sassy diva costume and snapping his way through an increasingly ridiculous big-spender shtick. (Swimming pool filled with grape Kool-Aid, mother-of-pearl oyster fork, bio-diesel dirigible, et friggin' cetera.) The song is a reminder of why so much electroclash stiffed on impact: A guest vocalist and sarcastic high-life signifiers do not a sure-shot jukebox hit make.
Not so shockingly, Temporary Pleasures delivers more reliably on its title when it sticks to straight-up dance. "Synthesise" is a fierce little slice of hyper-compressed gospel-techno, somewhere between an abstract Blaze belter and Justice at their less intentionally abrasive. "Ambulance" is a slow-burning accumulation of acid squiggles and Emergency Broadcast System sirens that stays just on the pleasing side of shrill.
But throw on SMD's best (old) single, "It's the Beat". Listen to how the track builds and maintains interest with good old inhuman techno building blocks-- nagging bleep, a few overlapping synth squiggles. The sampled snatches of rap are useful punctuation, but the track wouldn't collapse without them. It becomes clear that for a distressingly large chunk of Temporary Pleasures, the duo has forgotten to do much of interest with the backing tracks in favor of roping in a rolodex's worth of singers and rappers and hoping the songs write themselves. Yeah, Technotronic had Ya Kid K. But what everyone really remembers is those riffs. | 2009-09-03T02:00:02.000-04:00 | 2009-09-03T02:00:02.000-04:00 | Electronic | Wichita | September 3, 2009 | 6.5 | d4be36fd-7bb2-4a9f-9bea-2f2a2d2b6918 | Jess Harvell | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jess-harvell/ | null |
The second LP from People Like You is a fusion of jazz musicianship, emo spirit, and indie-pop tunefulness. It’s a mix so coherent that even the ugly parts are beautiful in their precision. | The second LP from People Like You is a fusion of jazz musicianship, emo spirit, and indie-pop tunefulness. It’s a mix so coherent that even the ugly parts are beautiful in their precision. | People Like You: Verse | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/people-like-you-verse/ | Verse | People Like You call themselves “indie jazz,” but the “indie” is hard to spot as their second LP, Verse, begins. Their chops are impeccable and the production is immaculate on the opening “You Need a Visa,” as the quintet hits every lope, skip, and stutter-step with precision, cross-hatching silvery guitar ribbons, clacking percussion, and horns just so. And then there’s the last three seconds, which features some of the ugliest vocals you’re liable to hear outside of a black metal record. If you’re familiar with lo-fi emo from either 1994 or 2014, you’ve heard this style before: Chris Lee-Rodriguez steps far away from the mic, not even singing so much as hyperventilating to purge himself of the words. And yet, this interjection makes for a seamless segue as People Like You immediately accelerate into “The Baker,” which represents Verse at its best—a fusion of jazz musicianship, emo spirit, and indie-pop tunefulness so coherent that even the ugly parts are beautiful in their precision.
Lee-Rodriguez’s outburst doubles as a callback to where People Like You were three years ago on their loftily-titled debut “This is what you learned.” When they formed in Boston, the group imported 75% of the lineup from emo-mathletes I Kill Giants—losing that group’s distortion, but not their spasmodic guitars and will to puncture the superficial niceties of their scene. People Like You’s “A song about white supremacy” could be taken as a sequel to I Kill Giants’ “just because it’s a joke doesn’t mean it’s not racist” (both released in 2014). But while the guitar filigrees were pure Kinsella, that version of People Like You could be more accurately compared to Joan of Arc due to Lee-Rodriguez’s prickly relationship with pitch, the occasional spoken word interjection, and intimidating reference points spiked with obtuse humor. (Witness the highbrow-pop Philip Glass/TLC homage, “Kneeplay 5: Forever Left-Eye.’”)
The “Kneeplay” interludes remain, as do the post-genre fluency and high-minded time signature trickery. But while pianist/vocalist Michi Tassey contributed guest vocals to three songs on “This is what you learned.,” she’s completely altered the texture and color of her surroundings as a full member on Verse. During the more winsome pop songs in Verse’s first half, her tonality can be so clear and bell-like that it’s inseparable from the horn parts. It can leave Lee-Rodriguez and Tassey sounding superficially unbalanced in their harmonizing, but that never stopped the Anniversary, and the amicable dissonance sounds perfect in the way these things so often do in a realm where community and physical wonder serve as frequent subject matter (“Talking about the universe/And how we’re small/And how our loneliness/Connects us all”). Even the whimsical, seafaring tone of “Variations on an Aria” is countered by Tassey’s concise longing, as she voices lyrics penned by Lee-Rodriguez about displacement from his Puerto Rican ancestry.
The band just sounds tighter on Verse, but credit also goes to the World Is a Beautiful Place & I Am No Longer Afraid to Die’s Chris Teti, who provides the 3D glimmer and percussive body that elevates just about anything he touches in their respective realms. It’s especially appreciable during the smokier second half, wherein Tassey fully embraces her role as not just a lead vocalist, but a focal point on the incense-lit “Eulita Terrace” and “Josephine Ave.” The careening “Hackensack Hospital” is the only time where Lee-Rodriguez retakes the lead, recalling the skittish and precious nature of their debut. But even then, People Like You never sound as grating or pitchy as they once did on “This is what you learned.” Surely, it’s the production and the redistribution of vocal roles. But as Lee-Rodriguez meets tragedy head-on (“You’re half my size but you still made me feel so small/I’m still your grandson after all”), it’s indicative of People Like You’s evolution into a band that no longer needs to be pushy when a warm embrace can be far more moving. | 2017-08-03T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-08-03T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Topshelf | August 3, 2017 | 7.2 | d4bf7922-651b-4e6b-a73c-7d6ae80411b4 | Ian Cohen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ian-cohen/ | null |
The Los Angeles rapper’s latest career move is a pleading, quasi-introspective R&B album that suffers from an almost total lack of imagination. | The Los Angeles rapper’s latest career move is a pleading, quasi-introspective R&B album that suffers from an almost total lack of imagination. | Tyga: Kyoto | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/tyga-kyoto/ | Kyoto | Tyga is preposterous. He’s a platonic doofus, a happy-go-lucky heel, and a distillation of Los Angeles’ most garish impulses. The canary-yellow Lamborghini shrieking through red lights on Sunset Boulevard? That’s Tyga. A pseudo-pensive pose on the glass-ringed balcony of a rented Hollywood Hills mansion, Instagram captioned: “it took alot of grindin to get here”? That’s Tyga. The guy in a gold backwards cap getting served legal papers at an L.A. Gear event? That, quite literally, is Tyga.
It’s appropriate, then, that his latest career move is a preposterous one. Kyoto is a pleading, quasi-introspective R&B album by a rapper previously best known for unsubtle lyrics about his unyielding acquisitiveness—he gets laid, gets money, and gets high. Why the sudden change in tack? “The last five years of my life has been a lot of me in the media because of my relationships,” he recently told Billboard, presumably referring to his time with Blac Chyna and a youthful Kylie Jenner. “I can’t even go to the movies with a girl anymore. It’s a gift and a curse. I really wanted to step in front of the narrative and create my own story.”
After 52 minutes of Kyoto, it remains unclear what that story is. Instead of addressing the alienating nature of celebrity, or the motivations for his romantic choices, or the past (and maybe necessary) falsity of his public persona, Tyga mostly opts for bad puns and shallow platitudes. On “Temperature,” a dancehall-style dud that recalls “1 of 1” from—sigh, deep breath—Bitch I’m The Shit 2, he intones in a half-assed patois, “I lost my watch and I still found time.” Or, on “Hard2Look” (more like “Hard2ListenTo,” amiright?), he sings, “I know this bustdown Patek won’t switch sides/I know this Lambo won’t switch sides/I know my true fans won’t switch sides.” Or, worse, on the hazy “King of the Jungle,” he admits, “I’ve been unfaithful/I’ve been lyin’ like the king of the jungle.”
More obvious than its spiritual emptiness is the album’s somnambulance. As is de rigueur in contemporary R&B, Kyoto tries to pass off silken textures and washed-out vocal samples as sensual and vulnerable. But those sensual, vulnerable tones should, ideally, boil at some point into something with a burning immediacy. These songs don’t, and much of the album just sounds exhausted. These inert instrumentals don’t do Tyga any favors: He’s more of a melodic, vibing vocalist than an outright singer, and the sparseness only serves to highlight his limited range.
Eventually, the yawning void of imagination at the center of Kyoto becomes downright oppressive. The album is nearly an hour of rote box-checking: two dancehall songs—check (“Temperature” and “Holdin On”); an EDM-inspired club track—check (“Leather in The Rain”); near-scandalous revelations about another celebrity, in this case Kylie Jenner—check (“King of the Jungle”); an A-list guest verse—check (Gucci Mane mails it in on “Sip A Lil”). I’ve seen more daring artistic flourishes on the walls of gas station bathrooms.
Sadly, this album seems likely to generate a crossover hit or two. My predictions: “Temperature” is going to score the transfer of a communicable disease at a Las Vegas pool, and “Leather in the Rain” will ooze from tinny fitting-room speakers at fast fashion stores across the country. For a project with a sexualized cartoon cat-woman on the cover, recorded by an artist known for his horniness, the whole of Kyoto is, well, flaccid. | 2018-02-23T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2018-02-22T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rap | Last Kings / Empire | February 23, 2018 | 3.3 | d4bfbee6-b8d6-4b68-8c4a-b134a2393f13 | Torii MacAdams | https://pitchfork.com/staff/torii-macadams/ | |
Unlike many of their 1990s alt-rock contemporaries, Greg Dulli and Mark Lanegan continue to push ahead musically without having to rely heavily on past triumphs-- a winning streak that continues with their long-in-the-works debut as the Gutter Twins. | Unlike many of their 1990s alt-rock contemporaries, Greg Dulli and Mark Lanegan continue to push ahead musically without having to rely heavily on past triumphs-- a winning streak that continues with their long-in-the-works debut as the Gutter Twins. | The Gutter Twins: Saturnalia | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/11235-saturnalia/ | Saturnalia | While so many other 1990s alt-rock acts are rehashing their hits on nostalgia package tours, Greg Dulli and Mark Lanegan have pushed ahead musically without having to rely heavily on past triumphs. Dulli continues his surprisingly tenacious Twilight Singers project, and Lanegan has released six fairly well-received solo albums, although he's better known for collaborating with Isobel Campbell and Queens of the Stone Age.
Dulli and Lanegan have spent most of the 2000s collaborating flirtatiously, touring and recording together-- check out Lanegan's vocals on the Twilight Singers' cover of "Flashback" by Fat Freddy's Drop, from their 2006 EP A Stitch in Time-- but Saturnalia is their long-in-the-works debut as the Gutter Twins, a partnership that Dulli describes as "the Satanic Everly Brothers." The "Satanic Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid" might be a little more apt: The album finds them bursting forth from their studio, guns blazing but no clean getaway in sight. Musically, Saturnalia, named after the Roman festival where slaves and masters switch roles, is a concentrated dose of their usual badassery, never straying too far from the territory Dulli explored on the last three Singers albums, and even includes many of the same collaborators: wayward troubadour Joseph Arthur, Mathias Schneeberger, Dave Rosser, Martina Topley-Bird, Queen of the Stone Age Troy Van Leeuwen, and New Orleans organist Quintron (who illuminates "Seven Stories Underground").
The project's sense of familiarity, however, is not a negative. "Each to Each" revisits the eerie electronica of the Twilight Singers' debut, a welcome compliment to Dulli's vocals courtesy of guitarist Jeff Klein and synth player Natasha Schneider. With its odd chorale intro and a string arrangement that shifts chords tectonically, "Idle Hands" builds to a chorus that could scale a skyscraper. Scavenging the gutter, though, Dulli and Lanegan come across some new flourishes. Discordant strings add tension to opener "The Stations", which marches along at a midtempo before Schneeberger's churchly organ raises it aloft. Before the Twins can build to the expected finale, the song simply fades out, redemption thwarted. "God's Children" settles into a Whigsy blaxpoitation mood before drummer Greg Wieczorek hammers out a soaring chorus. "Who Will Lead Us?" is part folk and part gospel, so subdued that the tension never releases but bubbles into "Seven Stories Underground".
With a billion cigarettes between them, the Twins are well matched vocally: Lanegan sings like he's rising from the dead, Dulli like he's falling from grace. Together, they can make a line like "We're gonna have some fun" sound utterly sinister, which lends these lecherously slow burners their peculiar gravity. Lanegan sings "All Misery / Flowers" like a Tom Waits song, his vocal delivery tripping against the song's rhythms as he conjures junkie afflictions: "Little girls might twitch at the way I itch, but the way I burn, it's a son of a bitch." Dulli closes the album with "Front Street", which begins, somewhat morbidly, with the chirping of birds. It's no joke, but a chiaroscuro contrast with the song's pitch subject. "People to use, lovers to break, handful of pills, no life to take," he sings, flirting with the masochist lover/confidence man he perfected 15 years ago on Gentlemen and seemed to abandon with the Twilight Singers.
It's no coincidence that Sub Pop is releasing Saturnalia: The label was home to both the Whigs and the Trees, as well as to Lanegan the solo artist. These songs plumb their persistent themes of sin and redemption, damnation and salvation, but in a way that sounds like they're taking stock of their own long and undeniably tough careers, in which disappointment, death, and drug addiction are public record. As such, the album possesses a gruesome attraction for fans of both musicians, who will hear it as a bloodletting, as well as for newcomers, who may hear it as a violent shoot-out-- Dulli and Lanegan against the world, their fates undecided. The Twins push each other to go darker and deeper, to bare more of their souls, so Saturnalia sounds heavier, bleaker, simultaneously more desperate and more content than anything either musician has done in years. As they both sing on "All Misery / Flowers, "I did all I did just to get through to heaven." Dulli and Lanegan haven't reached the Pearly Gates yet, but that's our good fortune. | 2008-03-04T01:00:01.000-05:00 | 2008-03-04T01:00:01.000-05:00 | Rock | Sub Pop | March 4, 2008 | 7.8 | d4c78544-99b2-411d-96df-3933986a5c6b | Stephen M. Deusner | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stephen-m. deusner/ | null |
Taken individually, the pieces on this album from the Los Angeles-based accordion player can be moving, but their similar construction yields transcendence and tedium in equal measure. | Taken individually, the pieces on this album from the Los Angeles-based accordion player can be moving, but their similar construction yields transcendence and tedium in equal measure. | Walt McClements: A Hole in the Fence | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/walt-mcclements-a-hole-in-the-fence/ | A Hole in the Fence | Nothing else Walt McClements has recorded sounds remotely like A Hole in the Fence. The Los Angeles based-accordion player previously spent his career floating around indie circles, playing in groups like Hurray for the Riff Raff and Weyes Blood and heading his own project Lonesome Leash. His pop songwriting is vanilla and earnest, and the focus on accordion as a focal point provides a passing resemblance to Beirut’s early records, but with traces of post-punk skitter and fewer literary ambitions. By contrast, A Hole in the Fence, his first record under his given name, is all shadow and abstraction, full of heaving drones and flickering specks of reedy treble that steadily fluctuate and churn. While the album’s five pieces for electronically processed accordion sound like tentative steps into the unknown by a composer just figuring out his strengths, McClements often channels feelings of genuine wonder into his layers of swirling, overtone-rich chords.
On A Hole in the Fence, McClements imbues stylistic templates established by ambient minimalists like Stars of the Lid, Tim Hecker, and Kali Malone with a distinctive emotional urgency. His accordion, when unadorned by reverb and delay, sighs openly, expressing a tender melancholy with each of its expansions and contractions. McClements has stated that the music is informed by complicated memories of the “somewhat hidden worlds I’ve travelled through my life, from underground music and punk communities to train hopping and gay cruising grounds,” risky spaces where those excluded from mainstream society are relegated to seek connection and release. Ruminative melodic fragments feel like maps through these secret locations, and beds of drone swaddle the listener in an atmosphere both beautiful and mysterious. As each piece inevitably crests, there’s a sense that he is insistently trying to communicate exactly how it feels to live on the edge.
McClements’ process of molding simple musical figures into dramatic arcs makes travelogues out of his compositions. On “Naked (a showing of scars)” a circular four-note theme is tentatively introduced, the breathy accordion appears closely-mic’d without processing, only to then be slowly augmented with tight harmonies before expanding into monolithic slabs of reverb-laden resonance. The piece unfolds entirely in relation to that theme’s chant-like rise and fall, growing in intensity like a lantern that gradually illuminates more and more of a spectacular underground chamber. By juxtaposing the intimate sounds of the accordion’s mechanics—the wheeze of its bellows and the light tap of fingers hitting keys—with heavily processed surges of bass or dense chords smeared with delay, McClements provides depth to each of the environments he leads us through.
As the album wears on, the predictability of these incremental reveals lessens their visceral impact. Though there are variations in pace and theme, each piece shares the structure of a bell curve: A tranquil, anticipatory exposition grows into a rapturous climax of pulsating tones ringing out into the void only to finally collapse in on itself, leaving the listener with flickering reflections of what they just experienced. There are no truly unexpected twists; the closest we get to a sharp left turn is when the bottom drops out of the brooding, drone-laden “Reckon (holding burning beams),” and even that song makes a parabolic return to its airy opening motif. Taken individually, the pieces on A Hole in the Fence can be deeply moving, even transcendent, but the voyage becomes tedious when each path is indistinguishable from the last.
McClements’ mastery of the accordion comes through in the expansive nature of how he wields it, by turns soft and vulnerable or dense and cerebral. And while the contours of each composition resemble one another, the feelings evoked can range from the wide-eyed awe contained in the ambiguously triumphant swells of “Thresholds (through a hole in the fence)” to the wistful nostalgia heard in the pensive rising chords of “Rinse (repeat repeat).” Slowly, purposefully, he lets us revel in the magnitude of these moments before they finally dissipate.
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-08-18T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2021-08-18T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Experimental | American Dreams | August 18, 2021 | 6.8 | d4d8d90e-0850-4251-b96e-579426a28421 | Jonathan Williger | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jonathan-williger/ | |
On her second album as Fever Ray, Karin Dreijer is more conflicted, more manic—and more in love, too. | On her second album as Fever Ray, Karin Dreijer is more conflicted, more manic—and more in love, too. | Fever Ray: Plunge | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/fever-ray-plunge/ | Plunge | “Of course we’re growing restless,” wrote the Knife in the manifesto that accompanied their last album, Shaking the Habitual. They cited “hyper-capitalism,” Monsanto, ecology, privilege; they imagined the pulse of a throbbing dancefloor rearranging clubbers’ very DNA. It was a vision of music as catalyst: They had few answers, but they knew that something—everything—needed to change. “This time it’s structural,” they wrote, more presciently than anyone could have realized at the time. This bar graph could be your life.
If Shaking the Habitual feels like a long time ago now—four whole years!—then 2009’s Fever Ray feels like another era entirely. But then Karin Dreijer and her brother Olof have never put much stock in pop music’s three-minute jolts, despite the early success of singles like “Heartbeats.” For all the left turns of their respective careers, they seem less interested in following the calculated steps of the typical album cycle than in the long sweep of a far more unruly trajectory. They set their clocks not by the Grammys calendar, but something more naturally unfolding—moss time, maybe, or ice-melt time. Seven years passed between the Knife’s Silent Shout and Shaking the Habitual; eight years mark the gap between Fever Ray and Plunge. In that time, Fever Ray’s music and character have settled in with a deep familiarity in ways that the Knife’s constantly shape-shifting identity—with its stylistic detours, its costume changes, its forays into opera and Charles Darwin and queer theory—has not. The Knife keep you on your toes, but Fever Ray has always felt like a port in a storm.
From the beginning, Dreijer’s solo music has carried a supernatural charge: Her pitch-shifted voice and chiming parallel fifths are enough to make the hairs on your arm stand on end, as though you had been visited by a ghost. The idea of Fever Ray as a kind of transcendental mood music was reinforced by the use of “If I Had a Heart,” the opening song from Dreijer’s 2009 solo debut, in the opening titles of the History Channel series “Vikings.” If anything, the choice of the song felt like cheating: No matter how striking the visuals, they paled beneath the song’s powerful sway. More than merely atmospheric, Dreijer’s vivid sonics and imagistic lyrics tend to conjure entire worlds: Hit “play” and be instantly transported to a world of heavy skies, visiting magpies, velvet mites.
If the Knife’s evolution represents a gradual politicization, a shift from fantasy to praxis, the new Fever Ray is also political in a way Dreijer has not been before. She sings of “Free abortions/And clean water” on “This Country,” a grinding electro dirge at Plunge’s center; “Destroy nuclear/Destroy boring,” she cries, in one of those perfect couplets that go to the heart of her inimitably anarcho-Scandinavian perspective. (Fingers crossed that future Fever Ray merch includes T-shirts printed with those lyrics.) As she shrieks on “This Country,” “Every time we fuck we win/This house makes it hard to fuck/This country makes it hard to fuck!”
There is a fair amount of fucking on Plunge, which might come as a surprise. Where Fever Ray was largely about motherhood and the search for self—ideas she refracted through the lens of elemental forces, animism, images of fur and fire and snow—Plunge focuses all of its energies on love and desire, with a striking candor. Heads turned when, on the album’s early single “To the Moon and Back,” she shouted, “I want to run my fingers up your pussy!” When had Dreijer ever been this direct, this libidinous, this scandalous? And when, at least since “Heartbeats,” had she made anything that sounded quite as sweet or as perky, even cloying, as “To the Moon and Back”’s major-key arpeggios, Latin freestyle bassline, and delirious sing-song vocals?
But that song’s chipper tones turn out to have been a head-fake—an outlier in tone and mood on an album far noisier and more hot-blooded than Dreijer’s previous solo work. Plunge feels much more manic, more conflicted, than her debut. If Fever Ray was distinguished by its penumbral chill, this album puts the heat and light back into her alias: the fever, the radiance, the beams emanating from red-ringed eyes.
It’s not a total departure: Her electronic soundscapes are often soft and full of mystery, suggesting cobwebs glistening in the moonlight, and she has retained many hallmarks of her sound. She sends her synthesizer queasily pitching and reeling, and she favors synth patches that straddle the “real” and the artificial, like the wheezing pan pipes of “Mustn’t Hurry” or the faux vibraphones and woodpecker bursts of “To the Moon and Back.” Her ubiquitous perfect fifths, with their bold, unresolving tones, generate a kind of force field—a zone of life-giving vibration. It is hard not to feel invincible while Fever Ray is playing.
Which is good, because Plunge is riskier than anything she has made before. It is sometimes harsh, often dissonant, frequently audacious. Her voice no longer hides behind the pitch-shifting it once did; here it is sharpened and pushed high in the mix, the better to emphasize her strange, elastic, playful diction—vowels stretched and twisted in unpredictable ways, consonants that slice like paper cuts. Her voice throws off sparks as it comes into contact with similarly tempered sounds: the cascading rave stabs of “Wanna Sip,” Sara Parkman’s see-sawing violin in “Red Trail,” a scraped echo of John Cale’s viola in the Velvet Underground. “Falling” rides a beat crafted from dial tones, alarm bells, and patches of reverb as slick and hard as black ice. “IDK About You,” the album’s most thrilling song, hurtles ahead atop a 150-BPM beat of rolling toms and shrieking cuíca; Dreijer’s distorted vocals sound like she may have recorded them on her phone. The track is a collaboration with Nídia, a 20-year-old Portuguese batida producer, and it’s the song that ventures the furthest from Dreijer’s own moody wheelhouse.
The desire that fuels Plunge is shot through with danger, and although she never quite spells it out, the specter of societal taboo looms around the corner of every kiss. “That old feeling of shame/She makes me feel dirty again,” Dreijer bellows in “Falling.” She sings of toxic habits, of painting in blood, of “perverts.” Sometimes she sidles right up to violence, looks it in the eye, and stares it leeringly down: “Gotta love my tracks/And swing an axe,” she taunts a potential lover, practically daring them to swipe left. But elsewhere, the meanness of the world presses in. “A Part of Us” imagines planting a garden, building a family, but the idyll is shadowed by menace: “What we are/Brings the wrong kind of attention out here,” she warns, at once vulnerable and coiled, spoiling for a fight, “One hand in yours and one hand in a tight fist.”
Like Shaking the Habitual, Plunge is also accompanied by a manifesto of sorts. It is often cryptic. “Listen!” Dreijer writes, in collaboration with the British artist Hannah Black: “Sex is work, love is work, work is sex, work is love, the magical conversion of ‘is’ given impossible power by its delivery in music.” This is the language of someone projecting matters of the heart through critical theory—the language of someone grappling deeply with the implications of desire. Her meditations on the relationship between subject and object, song and lover, are as complicated as her tangled, tumultuous electronics, her drawn-out snarls. But the text also helps to spell out some things: “The decision to fall is harder than the fall itself,” she writes, underlining that the plunge in question is falling in love. Further on, she specifies, “I’m looking for a girl who stands 10 feet tall and has teeth like razors… I’m looking for a girl to affirm my reality, or cancel it.”
It is not until the album’s closing song, the enveloping “Mama’s Hand,” that she cuts to the heart of the matter. The cycling arpeggios suggest a slowed-down companion to the Knife’s “Forest Families”; the hopeful lyrics stretch backward and forward in time. The details are Dreijer’s to know and ours to guess; they concern family and motherhood and, perhaps, a new partner entering the fold. But it all ends on an unambiguous image: “The final puzzle piece/This little thing called love.” Plunge is not just a record about falling; it is more fundamentally about transformation. And here at the end of a profoundly, thrillingly restless album, she stakes out something like freedom. | 2017-10-30T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-10-30T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Mute | October 30, 2017 | 8.7 | d4d96bf0-ff6f-4af1-87a1-dd47cb5e5c40 | Philip Sherburne | https://pitchfork.com/staff/philip-sherburne/ | |
The new EP is a retreat, another Of Montreal release where the standout track is the one that most sounds like Ziggy Stardust. | The new EP is a retreat, another Of Montreal release where the standout track is the one that most sounds like Ziggy Stardust. | Of Montreal: Rune Husk EP | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22805-rune-husk-ep/ | Rune Husk EP | People would appreciate Kevin Barnes’ music more if he released less of it. Two decades into his Of Montreal project, Barnes continues to average about an album a year, and far more if you count compilations and EPs. That Stephen King-like prolificacy may work for rappers who aren't concerned if you listen to their latest mixtape or wait for the next one, or guys like Robert Pollard, whose records ask almost nothing of the listener. But even Of Montreal’s best albums don’t exactly go down easy; they’re a serious investment of time, energy, and patience. We all only get so much time on this earth, and we can only devote so much of it listening to Kevin Barnes. And so since False Priest Of Montreal albums have piled up like unread issues of The New Yorker on a coffee table, guilt tripping you for failing to keep up with them.
For those who checked out after the band’s third consecutive Georgie Fruit album, or those who could no longer keep all of the group’s Seussian record titles straight, here’s what you’ve missed: a further bottoming out, followed by a run of decent full-lengths that felt a bit like apologies for the headaches that preceded them, including a kind of folky record, a more rocking one and, last year, a semi-EDM inspired one called Innocence Reaches. While by no means one of the group’s best records—it probably doesn’t even crack the 50th percentile—that last album seemed to outline a promising path forward for the band: Stay relevant by engaging with contemporary sounds instead of returning to the usual Beatles/Bowie/Prince triptych. But this is Of Montreal we’re talking about, and they’ve never been ones to follow a linear progression, so here we have their latest EP, Rune Husk, which ret-cons away the last record’s raved-up synths. It’s a retreat, another Of Montreal release where the standout track is the one that most sounds like Ziggy Stardust.
“Stag to the Stable,” with its punchy, Mick Ronson-esque riff, is the EP’s most purely fun moment, especially during a loopy bridge that riffs on one of Barnes’ go-to themes, transformation (“Disappearing is eerie when you don't even care to maintain a physical form/Or give voice to the pariah plaintiff in adjudication rooms.”) Unfortunately, the limp tracks bookending it feel like leftovers, possibly ones that predate Innocence Reaches by quite a while. Two are low-energy psychedelic sketches in need of a hook. The third is a slightly livelier one with the same problem.
Credit Barnes this, though: He may have made some misguided albums, but he’s never made a cynical one. Even on his lesser material, he digs in with gonzo determination, and that conviction can go a long way. “Island Life” almost coasts on his vividly grotesque beat poetry alone: “King Derelict outed shifty ranges and kinky drones/No fetal sex traumas without revenge, a boring execution climax of trinity maggot.” And when on the otherwise aimless “Widowsucking” Barnes enthuses “I’m wicked ’cause I have not peaked!” he’s so confident that you truly want to give him the benefit of the doubt. It’s possible he hasn’t peaked. Mostly, though, Rune Husk reaffirms what we already know: Barnes has some more good music in him, and possibly even some great music, but he’s going to make us keep digging for it. | 2017-01-24T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2017-01-24T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Sybaritic Peer | January 24, 2017 | 5.4 | d4dd1c1a-8a80-4e38-ad22-610d0a875916 | Evan Rytlewski | https://pitchfork.com/staff/evan-rytlewski/ | null |
With 1973’s Índia, the samba singer Gal Costa cemented her status as one of Brazil’s biggest and most defiant stars, collaborating with Caetano Veloso and Gilberto Gil in the process. | With 1973’s Índia, the samba singer Gal Costa cemented her status as one of Brazil’s biggest and most defiant stars, collaborating with Caetano Veloso and Gilberto Gil in the process. | Gal Costa: Índia | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/gal-costa-india/ | Índia | Brazilian samba singer Maria da Graça Costa Penna Burgos’ career began in 1965 and took off as the decade went on. While she released her first single as Maria Da Graça, she soon shortened her name further to Gal Costa, and found herself working with a vibrant new generation of singer-songwriters in her country, like Gilberto Gil, Caetano Veloso, and his sister Maria Bethânia. She recorded an album of breezy bossa nova duets with Veloso in 1967, which served as both of their debut albums.
Soon after, Costa became a part of the revolutionary musical movement known as Tropicália. And by 1969, Gal was one of the most potent and popular voices in that group, scoring nationwide hits like “Divino, Maravilhoso” and “Não Identificado” while also pushing her sound to the extremes of psychedelic rock. (See the second album she released that year, Gal, for a dose of some of the era’s wildest sound.) As Caetano Veloso put it in his memoir Tropical Truth, Costa’s voice transformed from soft and dulcet to “incorporating vocal sounds that included both Janis Joplin’s grunts and the cries of James Brown.”
But by the early years of the 1970s, Tropicália as a movement was extinguished, as Costa’s key collaborators Gil and Veloso were first imprisoned and then exiled to England until 1972. Despite that, Costa’s star was ascendant—so much so that, across from her Rio home, a stretch of beach where the hippies hung out to smoke weed was deemed “Gal’s dune.” Costa’s 1973 album Índia cemented her status as one of Brazil’s biggest and most defiant stars, from its government-banned cover image to its closing cover of the standard “Desafinado.” With it, Costa paid tribute to her country’s musical heritage while also bravely forging ahead in the post-tropicalismo era, one increasingly repressed by the military regime running the country.
Índia finds Costa drawing upon her past and pushing deeper into Brazilian mainstream pop (often shortened to MPB). Gil served as musical director and guitarist, while Veloso penned two songs. The show-stopping title track—arranged by Rogério Duprat, the “George Martin” of Tropicália—reveals an orchestral lushness not heard since Costa’s 1967 debut. Costa’s voice moves from a simmering murmur entwining with woodwinds to an impassioned cry at the soaring refrain. As penned by José Asunción Flores and Manuel Ortiz Guerreiro, the song was originally written from a male perspective. But in covering it, Costa keeps the feminine pronoun intact, singing “India of brown skin, with her little mouth I want to kiss.” Later that year, she shared a kiss onstage with fellow MPB superstar Maria Bethânia, a moment that author Rudi Bleys wrote in Images of Ambiente: Homotextuality and Latin American Art, 1810-today, “paved the way for a lesbian coming-out in music.”
That Costa was emboldened in the face of repression is evident from the very cover of the album. Censored by the authorities of the Brazilian military regime soon after its release and instead housed in a plain blue sleeve, Índia’s cover may no longer shock, but it still startles. In the intervening decades of empowered female pop stars—from Millie Jackson to Madonna, Lil’ Kim to Rihanna—has any one of them baldly put their bikini-clad camel toe front and center on an album as Costa did back in 1973?
“Milho Verde” updates a Portuguese folk song with a battery of Brazilian hand percussion and multiple layers of Costa’s voice. Her strange juxtaposing of vocals comes over as akin to Veloso’s own abstract sound poetry album Araçá Azul from the same year. Veloso himself contributes the slinking ballad “Da Maior Importância” and bandoneon-bounce of “Relance” and also recommended the eloquent “Volta” by early 20th-century composer Lupicínio Rodrigues to Costa (he himself would cover the song as a single two years later). The funk vamp “Pontos De Luz,” arranged by Brazilian composer Arthur Verocai, will no doubt sound familiar to beatheads—it was sampled by the likes of Madlib, and its snaking beat helped a robot learn to boogie on Kaytranada’s “Lite Spots.” Índia ends with a nimble take on Tom Jobim’s classic “Desafinado,” Costa’s voice a perfect vessel for the bossa nova standard.
The rest of the album perhaps doesn’t push boundaries like the cover photo and title track, but after the outrageous psychedelia of albums like 1969’s Gal, where else could she go? Instead, Índia revealed Costa to be an elegant interpreter of others’ songs, a trajectory that has subsequently made her a superstar in her home country. It shows that a former tropicalista like Costa could do more than just shock and astound; she could also seduce.
Correction: A previous version of this review incorrectly identified the authors of the title track. | 2017-07-26T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-07-26T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | Mr. Bongo | July 26, 2017 | 8.5 | d4f23d7e-1b08-409b-9023-8268b6c06f36 | Andy Beta | https://pitchfork.com/staff/andy-beta/ | null |
Is Nothing Feels Good the quintessential emo record? Maybe, maybe not, but you could do a lot worse than starting here. Though now 18 years old, the Promise Ring's landmark sophomore album retains the freewheeling spirit its members, then in their early twenties, imbued it with. Listening to it isn't about being transported back in time to their youth, or yours for that matter—it's about encapsulating all the frenetic, nervous joy that comes with new adulthood. | Is Nothing Feels Good the quintessential emo record? Maybe, maybe not, but you could do a lot worse than starting here. Though now 18 years old, the Promise Ring's landmark sophomore album retains the freewheeling spirit its members, then in their early twenties, imbued it with. Listening to it isn't about being transported back in time to their youth, or yours for that matter—it's about encapsulating all the frenetic, nervous joy that comes with new adulthood. | The Promise Ring: Nothing Feels Good | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21125-nothing-feels-good/ | Nothing Feels Good | The Promise Ring didn’t write the book on emo; they just named it. One has to assume Nothing Feels Good graces the cover of Andy Greenwald’s genre exegesis, subtitled "Punk Rock, Teenagers, and Emo", partially because of its title: Greenwald takes us to the LiveJournal era and beyond, so "nothing feels good" speaks both to the performative oversharing and theatrical sadness most have associated with emo as well as the self-deprecation and guilt that is assumed of its fans. But even after 18 years, there’s no way anyone can listen to the Promise Ring’s landmark second LP and feel as if it’s an endorsement or cause of anhedonia; it’s one of the most effective cures.
The world of Nothing Feels Good doesn't pinpoint specific, identifiable emotions. It is a state of being, one where an overactive mind and overstimulated body aren’t exactly at war, but struggling to attain common ground. It’s feeling like your heart is pumping Mountain Dew straight to your brain and your central nervous system can’t be trusted. Davey von Bohlen himself is at a loss for words to describe it: many of Nothing Feels Good’s inscrutable, quotable lyrics are a result of internal miscommunication: "I got my hands on the one hand, and I don’t know where to put them", "I married a room, where I’ll at least keep my hands in order", "how do I explain your body to the rest of my day?"
The Promise Ring were in their very early twenties in 1997, when Nothing Feels Good was released. They retained the urgency and velocity of their rawer, punkier debut 30° Everywhere (also being reissued), matching it to the nervous energy of an entire freshman dorm at a midwestern public university on a Friday night. The Promise Ring can barely contain themselves here, their biggest difference from von Bohlen's previous band Cap’n Jazz, who didn't even try. This touch of restraint amidst chaos makes the Promise Ring a quintessential emo band, and it's the rhythm section that sets them apart from proper indie rock. Compare Nothing Feels Good to the predominant bands of the era—Yo La Tengo, Built to Spill, Pavement, and Belle and Sebastian weren’t exactly known for their exuberance, earnest embrace of pop or crisp musicianship, and while Sleater-Kinney and Fugazi were the only two bands with tighter rhythm sections, their concerns were far different than those of the Promise Ring. This was "college rock" but with a different set of reference points: Imagine if Fugazi’s "Do You Like Me?" were written from the mindset of "Call Me Maybe".
And so when skeptics conflate the Promise Ring with more pop-punk oriented peers like Saves the Day or the Get Up Kids, drummer Dan Didier and bassist Scott Beschta (sorely missed on subsequent LPs) are the best counterargument. "Is This Thing On?" starts Nothing Feels Good in a full sprint and from that point forward, Didier rarely repeats himself for more than four bars, filling every moment with syncopations, triplet fills, or double-time cymbal crashes. Beschta likewise forgoes indie's preferred thumbing of simple root notes, treating bass as an active melodic and rhythmic participant. It’s not music you can really dance to, but it encourages extroversion and restless giddiness just the same.
The sheer likability of Nothing Feels Good may result in its slightly underrated status—it lacks the mythic aura of Cap’n Jazz, isn’t granted the same hushed reverence of Diary, nor is it as currently influential as American Football, passionately defended as The Power of Failing, or as expansive and progressive as Clarity. But it's still subtly innovative—the unconventional song structures showed emo could become pop without verses and choruses, while their open-C tunings lent a warm beauty to even the friskiest songs.
More importantly, von Bohlen neutralized early emo's chest-beating with his off-key lisp and playful, poetic language, bridging the abstractions of Tim Kinsella’s Joan of Arc and Owls with Mike Kinsella’s plainspoken mash notes in American Football. Even when "emotional hardcore" was presented as an way out of its excessively aggro roots, it was still music meant to be taken very, very seriously—loud and fast and extremely earnest, not entirely concerned with melody, driven by an intense, cloth-rending yearning for spiritual deliverance. The guy at the center of Promise Ring songs is idealistic and well-read, but approachable; we come barrelling into a house party during "A Broken Tenor" and all of a sudden, one of the kitchen drinkers is quoting Sylvia Plath’s "Daddy".
Von Bohlen’s vocabulary is heavy on geographical and chromatic symbolism—he canvasses the continental United States and likes how his girlfriend looks in red, white and blue ("Red & Blue Jeans"), whereas on "B Is for Bethlehem", those colors represent flesh and blood. Conflating place and people names would soon become one of the emo's most tired cliches—the Promise Ring themselves were already guilty of it by Very Emergency ("Jersey Shore," "The Deep South"). Still, Nothing Feels Good is charged with the honest enthusiasm you feel upon discovering how much there is out there beyond your hometown, where every new city and every new person seems impossibly fascinating.
With sensations this intense, the potential for burnout is perilously high. Greenwald’s book views it as a foregone conclusion for emo bands and fans alike, and there’s a lot of evidence backing up this view—nearly all of the genre's legendary bands flamed out spectacularly, made overtly "mature" albums that were shunned by fans, or evolved into more sedate, wistful projects (including Von Bohlen’s own Maritime). "I don’t know if anything at all will be alright," von Bohlen sings on the title track, likely referring to the pressures of adulthood. But he was unfortunately prophetic: the Promise Ring would suffer a near-fatal van accident in 1999 and tried to put a happy face on things with the Botox’d power pop of Very Emergency. A year later, von Bohlen was suffering from severe migraines before a fist-sized tumor was discovered and removed from his brain, followed by an insertion of a prosthetic plate in his skull to replace an infected fragment. On the subsequent Wood/Water, the Promise Ring signed to Anti-, hired a guy who produced Smiths records, and von Bohlen wrote floral, folky songs about settling down, giving up on guitar music, and wishing he never was a singer.
Meanwhile*, Nothing Feels Good* sounds like the kind of record only people in their early twenties can make. The Promise Ring never did cash in during the subsequent gold rush (the closest they got was von Bohlen’s cameo on Bleed American); at least their place in the history books is literally secure. And rightfully so: from the first moment of "Is This Thing On?", Nothing Feels Good bursts with enthusiasm and nervy optimism, a tireless advocate for the thrills this style of music alone can provide. | 2015-10-20T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2015-10-20T02:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Jade Tree | October 20, 2015 | 8.6 | d4f40d82-4894-4d90-b0c1-2d693f28e5b5 | Ian Cohen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ian-cohen/ | null |
The duo Big Business’ latest is an anxious and adventurous little record, too eccentric and playful to be accepted as metal but too loaded and loud to be taken as most anything else. | The duo Big Business’ latest is an anxious and adventurous little record, too eccentric and playful to be accepted as metal but too loaded and loud to be taken as most anything else. | Big Business: Command Your Weather | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22098-command-your-weather/ | Command Your Weather | Save some late-career marketing miracle, the loud-and-proud duo Big Business will forever be billed as a metal band, bound to inherently intractable tags such as sludge, doom, or stoner. In many respects, drummer Coady Willis and guitarist Jared Warren have asked for it: They issued their earliest records on the boundary-testing metal bastion Hydra Head. Not long after becoming Big Business, Willis and Warren also became active members of the Melvins, an outlandish metal institution with decades of international influence and a die-hard cult of converts. And their music has always been heavy, what with Warren’s burly tone, Willis’ busy drumming, and surly harmonies that sometimes suggest a peculiar folk-rock band on an unexpected hair-metal kick.
But even more than its devilishly deviant predecessors, Command Your Weather—Big Business’ fifth album, second since Hydra Head essentially crumbled, and first as a basic duo since their debut—evades heavy metal’s stylistic stronghold. Instead, it confirms anew that Big Business remain a band without comfortable genre quarters, as indebted to power pop and psychedelic rock as they to sludge or stoner metal. Sure, the closer, “Horses,” approximates doom’s funereal lurch, and “Father’s Day” kicks and pounds through a thick groove tapped from a vein that stretches from Sabbath to Kyuss and beyond. That, however, is simply the foundation on which Big Business build their strange, singular, and steadily evolving catalogue. In true Big Business fashion, Command Your Weather is an anxious and adventurous little record, too eccentric and playful to be accepted as metal but too loaded and loud to be taken as most anything else.
“Send Help” even borders on the willfully antagonistic. Over the plinks of a toy piano and howling horror-film organ, Willis and Warren harmonize about existential anxiety like a ghoulish Simon & Garfunkel. “You don’t have to get bigger,” they repeat in the chorus, “but you have to get out of this space.” That line serves as a sort of credo for Big Business, who take most every chance to push out of their comfort zone. Though “Father’s Day” sounds like a straightforward ripper, Willis crams a math rock song’s-worth of rhythmic tricks into its march. The vocals, meanwhile, crisscross and undulate wildly, as if ever-florid producer Dave Curran were attempting to harness the Beach Boys behind the boards. There are extended percussion breaks and a cappella chants, solos that threaten to shoot skyward like Hawkwind and themes that seem sharp enough for a spot on a modern rock station’s summer playlist (or, at the very least, a Torche album). Even “Horses”—a seven-minute, glacially paced genre piece—pivots into eccentricity and accessibility, suspending its strange hook about suffering beasts around ringing church bells.
A decade ago, when Big Business were both in their infancy and new to Los Angeles, enlisting in the Melvins likely felt, to some extent, like finding a readymade safety net or incubator. The elder Melvins had a touring infrastructure, a fanbase, and invaluable experience as an oddball duo that had long dared to do metal a bit differently. But Big Business is now five albums into a career that continues to produce a half-dozen mostly perfect pop songs at a time, and they seem still to be spinning their wheels with respect to audience and perception. Willis and Warren are forced to joke about their sludge-metal associations in interviews rather than be recognized for something much more distinct and delightful. They write hooks deserving of Cheap Trick or Sloan, then deliver them with the strength of Boris and the playfulness of Ween. Had they not made that choice to serve a supporting role in someone else’s career a decade ago, would they live less deep in an ill-fitting pigeonhole? Maybe, but Command Your Weather—an album about making the best of bad circumstances—does exactly that, spinning out songs that are total hits even if most people miss them. | 2016-07-26T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-07-26T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Metal / Rock | Joyful Noise | July 26, 2016 | 7.6 | d4f5d775-3395-4d83-a330-c50a4e00bbff | Grayson Haver Currin | https://pitchfork.com/staff/grayson-haver currin/ | null |
Balancing a gutsier sound against the restrained emotion of her voice, the Irish singer-songwriter’s debut flits between clinical detachment and startling closeness. | Balancing a gutsier sound against the restrained emotion of her voice, the Irish singer-songwriter’s debut flits between clinical detachment and startling closeness. | Ailbhe Reddy: Personal History | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/ailbhe-reddy-personal-history/ | Personal History | Whether it’s a first therapy appointment or a first date, downloading an abridged version of yourself can feel like the most perfunctory of intimate experiences. For Dublin-based singer-songwriter Ailbhe Reddy, it’s far more interesting to think about what remains unsaid. On the title track of her debut album, Personal History, Reddy pines tentatively for her ex and “the romance of watching TV,” before the drums crash in to underscore her frustrated howl: “I don’t wanna go on dates/And hear personal histories.” Playing with the clinical undertones of the title, which is taken from the term for medical records, it’s simultaneously scathing and vulnerable. Compared to the softness of a lived-in relationship, Reddy seems to say, night after night spent sharing life stories with strangers feels procedural.
Fresh off a year of psychotherapy study, Reddy consciously deploys therapeutic language throughout the album. “I protect my ego,” she sings of a fight with her partner on “Between Your Teeth.” The result is a lyrical voice that flits between clinical detachment and startling closeness, combined with a sound that is gutsier and grungier than the brooding folk songs of her 2016 and 2017 EPs. Personal History feels more aligned with inspirations Reddy has named in the past, like Phoebe Bridgers, Big Thief, and Fiona Apple. While her songwriting might not be quite on par, Reddy similarly mixes streaks of anger and catharsis with biting, self-deprecating humor.
Previous EPs hinted at the emotional range of Reddy’s voice—as on 2017’s fragile “Relent”—but Personal History expands it hugely. Saving her powerful belt for only the most visceral moments, she shows a more restrained side on the somber, wintry piano ballad “Walk Away,” and evokes the light touch of Laura Marling on the gentle “Loyal.”
Not everything on the record is so inventive. “Time Difference” brings a fresh, upbeat feel to the tracklist, but its central concept—a long-distance relationship—feels under-developed. It operates on one level, but Reddy is capable of much more when she adds a layer of self-awareness to her angst. In the opening bars of “Self Improvement,” jangly guitar and harmonies set an uplifting tone as she sweetly sings: “I’m off the meds again...Until I can’t cope again.”
It’s these jarring details that elevate Personal History: the knife-edge of Reddy’s voice when she tells someone they “talk like a historian,” or the cold, anxious synth stabs on “Looking Happy,” a track about watching your ex live their best life on Instagram (“Just turn it off!” she pleads with herself on the chorus). Reddy easily inhabits an aloof, deadpan character—see the “Looking Happy” video, in which she holds a Wednesday Addams-style staring contest with camera—but the richness and openness of her voice removes the record from cynicism. Instead, Personal History constantly confronts us with emotional honesty, pressing on bruises that feel all too familiar.
Correction: A previous version of this review included mention of a song that was mistakenly included on an advanced copy of the album. That mention has been removed.
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2020-10-08T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-10-08T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Folk/Country | Friends of the Family | October 8, 2020 | 6.8 | d4f62c31-3f01-4cfc-aad1-8fd2ba0201e0 | Aimee Cliff | https://pitchfork.com/staff/aimee-cliff/ | |
R.E.M. acknowledge a few misteps with their 14th album Accelerate, trading the sleepy studio experiments of their recent LPs for renewed vigor and louder guitars. | R.E.M. acknowledge a few misteps with their 14th album Accelerate, trading the sleepy studio experiments of their recent LPs for renewed vigor and louder guitars. | R.E.M.: Accelerate | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/11308-accelerate/ | Accelerate | In a lot of ways, the R.E.M. story ended with 1996's underrated New Adventures in Hi-Fi. That was the final R.E.M. disc to feature drummer Bill Berry, and in retrospect, Berry brought a lot more to the band than simply his drumming. But that hasn't stopped R.E.M from awkwardly furthering the plot. First came the often pretty but not quite rewarding Up. Next, the pleasant but uneven Reveal, and then Around the Sun, which even most hardcore fans disdained as lackluster at best.
But if rock-star longevity is at least partially political, the savvier-than-ever R.E.M. took it upon themselves to control their message. As the band's studio output dragged, it presented itself as a revitalized live outfit, turning out inspired performances that seemed wildly disproportionate to its increasingly dull LPs. Reveal didn't warrant a tour, but tellingly, the band's 2006 greatest-hits collection did, and on stage, R.E.M. relished the opportunity to disprove naysayers with blistering sets that spanned their entire career.
Accelerate is the name of R.E.M.'s new album, the band's 14th, and it attempts to port that newfound vigor to the studio, not just by trading longtime producer Pat McCarthy (on board since 1998's Up) for U2 associate Jacknife Lee, but also by paring down the excess and sharpening the focus. Accelerate might as well be called Reverse, as it self-consciously aspires to recapture the spirit (if not necessarily the sound) of R.E.M.'s prime. Throughout its 11 songs and 35 minutes, only two tracks top the four-minute mark, and many run less than three. But velocity is not the same thing as vitality, and brevity is not the same thing as urgency. Accelerate ultimately isn't so much a back-to-basics move as a redefinition of what "basic" even means to an arena rock band. Accelerate's broad strokes, big riffs, and beefy production (the album was reportedly recorded in "just" nine weeks) are admirable, as is the disc's concision, but its success is still more as a step forward than a slam dunk.
Still, the very fact that R.E.M. recognized a problem and made an effort to remedy it is pretty impressive from a band of their stature. You can immediately hear the results on the lead song "Living Well Is the Best Revenge": Jacknife Lee has given the track (and the rest of the album) a refreshing sense of grit that's at odds with McCarthy's fussier studio constructions. Peter Buck's guitar rings and chimes with a layer of aggression one step beyond that of Monster, the band's previous "rock" record. Drummer Bill Rieflin plays with a Ministry-honed power, Mike Mills' backing vocals are absolutely key, and Michael Stipe's vocals are gruff, pissed off, and mixed low enough to make the lyrics tricky to make out.
But "Man-Sized Wreath" is no match for that airless rush-- its vague 60-isms might make a solid B-side, but it's hardly a continuation of the opener's call to arms. The same can be said of the slick, safe single "Supernatural Superserious", the kind of song R.E.M. could write in its collective sleep. "Hollow Man", aside from its piano intro misdirection, might as well be the Gin Blossoms, Counting Crows, or any other middle of the road band R.E.M. influenced. "Houston" is about as weird as R.E.M. allows themselves to get these days, but against the odds the track's a highlight. It's a curious 6/8 dirge adorned with what sounds like a wheezing organ, featuring some nicely enigmatic lyrics and a musical toughness that updates the insular world the band introduced with Automatic for the People. Again, like "Living Well Is the Best Revenge", it unfortunately highlights the relative mundaneness of the next two songs, the title track and "Until the Day Is Done".
Accelerate make a surprise finish, though, with its last four songs pushing the band to fresh places. "Mr. Richards" is a vaguely blurry hybrid ballad that hints at shoegaze, invoking the band's staid studio experiments but connecting them to the group's more aggressive origins. Similarly, the self-referential "Sing for the Submarine" recalls an Up-era waltz while name-dropping some blasts from R.E.M.'s more distant past. "Horse to Water" is pure rush, just over two minutes of condensed energy unlike anything R.E.M. has done to date, a kick in the nuts to anyone not impressed by what came before it. And as closers go, "I'm Gonna DJ" is an oddball but memorable choice, perfectly selected for its gonzo agitation.
If you forgot the last couple of R.E.M. discs as soon as they were released, love it or not, "I'm Gonna DJ" and much of what precedes it at least ensures that Accelerate won't be forgotten quite as quickly. But, like any act of rehabilitation, it's no seismic shift, just a move in the right direction. It's as if the band strived for resonance but settled for a satisfactory glimmer of renewed relevance. | 2008-03-31T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2008-03-31T02:00:01.000-04:00 | Rock | Warner Bros. | March 31, 2008 | 6.7 | d4f6c2bd-d8ea-4585-974a-038aefd18c67 | Joshua Klein | https://pitchfork.com/staff/joshua-klein/ | null |
Greta Kline is a 19-year-old who records under the name Frankie Cosmos. Her charming new indie pop album Zentropy touches on love, aging, and the archetypal triumphs and disappointments of young life in a big city. | Greta Kline is a 19-year-old who records under the name Frankie Cosmos. Her charming new indie pop album Zentropy touches on love, aging, and the archetypal triumphs and disappointments of young life in a big city. | Frankie Cosmos: Zentropy | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/19130-frankie-cosmos-zentropy/ | Zentropy | Indie-pop has always privileged shy people who manage their world by making it feel as small as possible. Enter Greta Kline, a 19-year-old who records under the name Frankie Cosmos. Her new album, Zentropy, is 10 songs and less than 20 minutes long, opening with a complaint about art school and closing with the eulogy of a pet dog. In between are explorations of love, aging, and the other intricacies of private life, all rendered with the simplicity of a stick-figure drawing.
As its title suggests, Zentropy is a playful but disciplined album. Most of it consists of pretty, tuneful music in a tradition that connects Best Coast to Beat Happening to pared-down takes on 1960s girl-group pop, anchored by a three-piece drum set and an electric guitar—the utility kit of a band that occasionally wants to get loud without ever having to leave the living room. Its longest song is two and a half minutes long, and its best, “Birthday Song”, is just over a minute. “Just because I am a certain age, doesn’t mean that I am any older/ Than I was yesterday,” it starts, Kline’s voice as sweet as a child’s but firm as a board.
Kline is not afraid of cute, self-evident statements like this, nor is she afraid of using them as a bait-and-switch for more complicated ones. “I think how repulsive to you it must be when I refuse to do the things you want me to,” she sings a few seconds later. Like every line on Zentropy, it sounds innocuous when you hear it, but conveys a feeling so rich it could fill a song five times as long. “Repulsive” alone has an almost atomic presence: Pry into it and something unexpectedly big might explode.
Toward the end of the album, Kline confesses, “I do what I/ Have to do/ This is when I say my ‘I love you.’” For a 19-year-old, she has an unusually good grip on the obligations and nuances of long-term relationships, and an ability to relate them in ways that feel clever but direct. “I’m bitter like olives,” she jokes on “Leonie”, but then pivots: “That’s why you like them and I don’t.” Her simplicity is her mask: It makes her seem like she doesn't have anything to say, which is why it’s so surprising when she does.
In the same way rappers exaggerate confidence to give listeners the thrill of feeling strong, Kline—as is custom in our time of ironized over-sharing—exaggerates her sadness to make space for real vulnerability. “I’m the kind of girl buses splash with rain,” she sings. Not just a girl, but a kind of girl: A cliché you’ve seen in movies and heard about in songs. And yet, as soon as she sings it, her sadness feels light and abstract—something playacted. There’s an argument here: The first step to feeling better is to let yourself feel bad; the second is to realize that whatever you’re feeling is probably somewhere on TV right now.
For all its little-girl-lost poses, Zentropy is a tight, confident album. Kline—the daughter of actors Phoebe Cates and Kevin Kline—seems emblematic of the way culture is being re-zineified by shows like "Girls" or publications like Rookie: Examples of young female voices who can articulate intimacy in a way that feels savvy and clear. But she also belongs in a larger conversation about older things: the New York poet Frank O’Hara (of whom she is a fan), the sweeter moments of filmmaker Jean-Luc Godard, or the sister group the Roches—clever, funny writers who navigated the margins of urban life with heartache and whimsy. What Zentropy reminds me of most is Greta Gerwig and Noah Baumbach’s Frances Ha, a movie that did less to capture the sociological particulars of Brooklyn in the 2010s than the archetypal triumphs and disappointments of young life in a big city.
In the past few years, Kline has released over 40 albums and EPs on Bandcamp. Had she wanted to, she could have included 50 songs here, maybe 60. But why muddle the point? She knows what she wants to say and she is saying it. If there are weak moments on the album, it’s when she steps back into a bigger sonic picture: the girl-group chorus on “Dancing in the Public Eye”, the distancing echo of “I Do Too”. Like any music whose strength lies in its intimacy, the fewer reminders Zentropy gives us of the world outside, the better.
Is this music simple? Yes. Solipsistic? That too. But in Kline’s withdrawal, there’s also a kind of humility: Never will she speak for anyone’s experience but her own. “He was just a dog/ Now his body’s gone,” she sings on "Sad", the album's last song. “So what is left, but me and my poem?” Nothing, maybe, but that doesn’t matter: The poem is plenty. | 2014-03-11T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2014-03-11T02:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Double Double Whammy | March 11, 2014 | 8 | d5006888-98c9-41a7-854f-ea7c9f6f2847 | Mike Powell | https://pitchfork.com/staff/mike-powell/ | null |
As he approaches his eightieth year, the veteran folk craftsman embraces good times and creature comforts on a collection of homespun tunes that radiates his familiar charm and insight. | As he approaches his eightieth year, the veteran folk craftsman embraces good times and creature comforts on a collection of homespun tunes that radiates his familiar charm and insight. | Michael Hurley: The Time of Foxgloves | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/michael-hurley-the-time-of-foxgloves/ | The Time of Foxgloves | Michael Hurley is nothing if not dependable. Every few years since his debut in 1964, he’s released another collection of homespun tunes from wherever he was laying his head. Each album treads similar ground as the last—absurdist tales sung with the conviction of a sage, shoulda-been folk standards, and honest-to-God standards dressed up in their rattiest outfits—but that barely matters. Hurley steadfastly follows his own compass, always pointed slightly askew of true north, and does what he does with the workaday dedication of a craftsman. His songs often contain flashes of brilliance, but it’s his consistency that makes him such a remarkable figure and a hero to the counter-cultural folk milieu.
As such, despite its upgrade in fidelity, diversity of instrumentation, and a jump to a more established label, The Time of the Foxgloves is not an attempt to inaugurate a late-period renaissance. This is just how it’s always been, even during periods where there was less attention paid to his latest recordings. Foxgloves is as charming and insightful as any of Hurley’s albums, and it radiates intimacy and coziness even with an expansive list of collaborators. He’s joined by several other singers, most notably Josephine Foster, and each duet feels like a conversation between old friends. Moving his operation out of his living room in Astoria, Oregon and into a professional studio has done nothing to diminish the rustic feel of his music; Hurley still recorded his parts on the same four-track he’s used for years, and the first sound you hear before the soft strum of acoustic guitar is warm tape hiss.
Creature comforts and good times dominate the songs on Foxgloves. There’s the shared glow of having a drink with a close confidant (“Beer, Ale and Wine”), the joy of a nighttime rendezvous with a lover (“Love Is the Closest Thing”), and the warmth of returning to one’s homeland (a ramshackle cover of the Louvin Brothers’ “Alabama”). Even when Hurley sings of painful ordeals, like on “Are You Here For the Festival,” which opens with inquiries into a broken heart, it’s tempered by the promise of a full belly and good music. Last year, Hurley described himself as “ruthless, callous, mean, ornery,” but when listening to these songs it’s hard to imagine a rotten word passing his lips. All we get here is his gentle, age-worn tenor asking to be left alone by sorrow as he takes in the unrefined beauty of the Oregon woodland.
That particular reflection takes place on “Lush Green Trees,” an unhurried number that trots between folk and jazz, joining Hurley’s lone guitar with a bass clarinet that gingerly swings and dances around his hushed voice. Though not all of the songs on Foxgloves are as slow, enough are to give nearly the whole affair (especially the second half) a languid, dreamy quality. The instrumental “Knocko the Monk” features Hurley on banjo tracing a spare, twangy melody over a bed of droning pump organ. Even the slinking “Se Fue en la Noche,” the song that most resembles the most popular work of his ’70s heyday, is easygoing and unobtrusive. Thankfully, Hurley’s songwriting is quirky enough to save the album from becoming sleepy, as he slyly zig-zags between slack and slanted takes on bluegrass, country, and blues.
Listening to a new Michael Hurley album is like sinking into a well-worn couch cushion; we’ve been here before, but that doesn’t mean it’s any less satisfying than the last dozen times we’ve taken a load off in this exact spot. Right down to the hand-painted cover, Foxgloves fits the mold and goes down smooth. Even as he approaches 80, Hurley’s ability to synthesize different strains of American traditional music and twist them to fit his own idiosyncratic vision is as sharp as ever, and the effortlessness of it all testifies to many years of practice and refinement. Just because the sun goes down every day doesn’t make today’s sunset any less spectacular.
Buy: Rough Trade
(Pitchfork earns a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.)
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-12-10T00:00:00.000-05:00 | 2021-12-10T00:00:00.000-05:00 | Folk/Country | No Quarter | December 10, 2021 | 7.8 | d509c787-2da1-4d9b-98ad-f6c24d83493c | Jonathan Williger | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jonathan-williger/ | |
DJ Paypal's name might be ironic and trollish, but his love of Chicago footwork is sincere. On his playful and mind-expanding new mini-LP Sold Out, he not only makes incredibly good footwork but helps pave the way for its future. | DJ Paypal's name might be ironic and trollish, but his love of Chicago footwork is sincere. On his playful and mind-expanding new mini-LP Sold Out, he not only makes incredibly good footwork but helps pave the way for its future. | DJ Paypal: Sold Out | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21169-sold-out/ | Sold Out | Footwork producer DJ Paypal doesn't appear on the surface to be the type of artist that treats his influences with any sort of mindfulness. From his trollish stage name to the plainly ironic bite of Pen and Pixel's distinctive, lens-flare-heavy aesthetic on the cover of his new mini-LP Sold Out, he reads on first glance like just another node on Internet Art's massive recombination engine, which endlessly churns out kitschy (and occasionally brilliant) assemblages of random late-capitalist pop-cultural detritus.There's also the matter of the style he's working in: footwork is a particularly holistic musical form that until very recently has been virtually inseparable not only from the dance style that it soundtracks, but also from the brutally segregated, impoverished black neighborhoods on Chicago's South and West Sides where it was born.
It's a minor revelation to find out that Paypal's far more sincere than his image would suggest. The way that the drums on Sold Out's titular opening track pulse in and out of focus is an expert move well out of reach of the average SoundCloud dilettante, and throughout the album he displays the kind of rule-bending that only comes from closely studying the rules first. "A lot of kids hear like five tracks and start making footwork, and that’s not respectful," he told Pitchfork recently. It's clear from his music that he has listened to thousands and absorbed them into his DNA. And not only does he make incredibly good footwork, he's also helping to clear a path for its future evolution.
Paypal's a member of the L.A.-born Brainfeeder coalition of artists representing a certain organic, jazz-indebted segment of bass music experimentalists, and like most of the best material to come out of the Brainfeeder camp, it reconnects beat-based music with styles of pre-digital black music whose more radical avant-garde aspects have been forgotten over the years, or dulled by overfamiliarity—bebop, free jazz, and especially the synthesizer-crazed soul and fusion artists of the '70s.
"Ahhhhhhh" combines blissed-out piano riffs, pitched up vocal harmonies, and a burbling bassline. "With Uuuuuuu" and "On a Cloud" teasingly reference early synth-funk (the latter with a vocoder part that Paypal and coproducers Nangdo and DJ Taye blend into a crisp solo trumpet). Other parts of the record reach even further out—"Slim Trak" folds in Brazilian samba drumming, while "Say Goodbye" (featuring Keiska and Tielsie), drifts into a stoned-genius hybrid of dream pop and J-pop that's easily compelling enough to sustain an entire LP.
At the same time, Paypal's also a member of Chicago's venerable footwork music crew Teklife, and his tracks never lose sight of the style's more utilitarian roots scoring YouTube footworking videos and high school hallway dance battles. The old slogan that "music wants to be free" is a truer fit for remix culture than the music piracy advocates that coined it. There's a point in the life cycle of every musical style where it has to expand its worldview and open itself up to new participants and new influences, or else it stagnates and withers away. No artist needs to ask permission to borrow an influence, and with so much music available and making it becoming so cheap, it's not even a requirement that you dive more than surface deep into a style before you borrow it. But Sold Out shows what a difference it can make when you hold yourself to a higher standard. | 2015-11-24T01:00:01.000-05:00 | 2015-11-24T01:00:01.000-05:00 | Electronic | Brainfeeder | November 24, 2015 | 7.9 | d50c49d0-dab5-478f-a3e7-3d3b76a728bf | Miles Raymer | https://pitchfork.com/staff/miles-raymer/ | null |
On his new project, the Detroit rapper lets his bleakest thoughts pour out. His nuanced renditions of pain make it hard to turn away. | On his new project, the Detroit rapper lets his bleakest thoughts pour out. His nuanced renditions of pain make it hard to turn away. | BandGang Lonnie Bands: Scorpion Eyes | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/bandgang-lonnie-bands-scorpion-eyes/ | Scorpion Eyes | In the last year or so, BandGang Lonnie Bands’ music has taken on a more insular and fatalistic bent. Spurred by the death of two close friends and fellow members of the Detroit crew BandGang, his 2021 single “Heartburn” and mixtape Hard 2 Kill introduced his revamped sound: ominous Michigan-style beats, increasingly jittery flows, and hardened but vulnerable lyrics. Inspired by the way 2pac aired out his darkest feelings on the paranoid 1996 album All Eyez on Me, Lonnie’s newest project, Scorpion Eyes, lets all his bleakest thoughts pour out. It’s harrowing and thorny yet full of skillful rapping, clear-eyed storytelling, and subtle but impassioned vocal tics.
There’s an uneasy edge to his voice, shaky and high-strung no matter if he’s in a pessimistic mood or if he’s trying to conceal his fears by puffing out his chest. A lot of his lines end with exasperated exhales or are trailed by incoherent murmurs, as if he’s gathering his thoughts in real time. The title track sets the album’s tone: Death isn’t looming in the background, it’s the topic. Unlike Pac, who at times seemed accepting of it, Lonnie is fighting to care. “Why you taking life for granted?” he asks an unknown rival, but it works just as well pointed inward. Later, his voice tenses up as he raps, “I think I need some therapy, I’m sparring with depression/I been sippin’ heavy lean, battling with addiction,” over a skittish instrumental that accentuates the nervous mood. They feel like words he’s saying for the first time.
Throughout the album he isolates and dissects his own feelings in ways that feel almost invasive to hear. On “Help Me,” his croaky vocal cadence stretches until it strains as he tries to swat away suicidal thoughts fueled by a pill addiction and the anxiety that his kids are destined to inherit his struggles. He’s lonely on “Rolling Stone Cold,” aware he’s his own worst enemy but too goosed-up on pride to do anything about it. “Still a Mama Boy” tells a story of regret. He feels as if he wasted his mom’s hard work and vents by comparing himself to his dad: “Thinking about how pops did my mama make me wanna kill him/She ain’t even be bitter, she begged me to fuck with him/I hate I even got a couple traits like that fuck nigga.” The switch between angry and wistful is seamless.
Not all his attempts at self-criticism are sympathetic, though. On “MarkTwain,” he raps about smacking a woman in front of his daughter, and just because it’s said in a remorseful tone doesn’t mean he gets a pat on the back. Like a lot of tortured, self-destructive men in art, he tries to justify treating the women in his life terribly by playing it like the guilt that haunts him is just as bad.
In more ways than one, Scorpion Eyes is a difficult listen. With so many rappers killed by violence and addiction in the past few years, it’s chilling to hear Lonnie rap so openly about his own fears. But what makes Scorpion Eyes so hard to turn away from is the nuances of the music, how pain comes through in so many ways beyond the lyrics. With “Strathmolism” it’s the worn-out singing that wouldn’t be out of place on a No Limit mixtape. On “Stop Wrapping My Life,” it’s the frequent pauses he takes between lines that make every bar feel soul-wrenching. “No Pillow Talkin” conveys the same jumpy energy as the songs on Drakeo the Ruler’s Cold Devil: like the walls are closing in. None of it makes the discomfort go away, but music this complex, layered, and blunt doesn’t come around too often. | 2022-08-03T00:02:00.000-04:00 | 2022-08-03T00:02:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Anti Media / TF Entertainment | August 3, 2022 | 7.3 | d50eae7a-a2d5-47f1-bfff-842a62e5e719 | Alphonse Pierre | https://pitchfork.com/staff/alphonse-pierre/ | |
The second album from Baltimore's Co La represents a compositional step up from 2011's Daydream Repeater, smoothing the seams between his heavy sampling and original music-- provided in part by ex-Dirty Projector Angel Deradoorian on vocals. | The second album from Baltimore's Co La represents a compositional step up from 2011's Daydream Repeater, smoothing the seams between his heavy sampling and original music-- provided in part by ex-Dirty Projector Angel Deradoorian on vocals. | Co La: Moody Coup | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/17964-co-la-moody-coup/ | Moody Coup | "Melter's Delight", the first single from Co La's second album Moody Coup, features a sample from the Upsetters' "Cloak a Dagger", a voice introducing the track as "Music to make you stagger!" It's a lovely line, and its boastful, confident tone runs counter to Co La's practiced docility. This type of fake exotica-- the desire to displace yourself, but only gently so-- is Co La's M.O.. On Moody Coup he idles more purposefully than on his debut, Daydream Repeater, kneading his many samples into frothy, dubwise vignettes that tickle with recognition.
Co La burdened his debut with a lackadaisical approach to sampling, leaving recognizable snippets (the Supremes!) relatively untreated and then doubling down by looping them ad nauseum. Moody Coup represents a compositional step up, with Co La smoothing many of the seams that showed on Repeater. His samples are better hidden and the tracks, while plenty rhythmic, are no longer quite so stubborn. An infusion of sub-bass turns unassuming moments into a surprise rattle. Vocals from ex-Dirty Projector Angel Deradoorian mean that this album's melodies aren't entirely outsourced. The result is like a baby-shampoo version of Black Dice: lots of rustle and friction but nothing that would hurt your eyes.
This explains why Moody Coup, despite a wide range of sounds (reggae, barbershop, ambient, techno), spins so easily. Tracks such as "Remarkable Features" and "Head in Hole in Space" are summer storms: They come together quickly, make a little noise, and move on. This will sound like a backhanded compliment, but Moody Coup is an album that doesn't necessarily reward close listening, because Moody Coup is an album where the details don't necessarily matter that much. "Baby's Breath" stirs bongos, childrens' laughter, and what sounds like dripping water, but sussing out the ingredients isn't nearly as gratifying as letting the song's carbonation hiss and fizzle. On "Make It Slay (Barbershop Solo)" and "Un", Co La approaches the snap-and-crackle noir of Nicolas Jaar but filters out the dance DNA, leaving amiable puddles of sound.
When you're in the sound-art game, the flipside of friendly and gentle is frivolous, an accusation that does get lobbed at Co La. Moody Coup succeeds, though, because of how naturally it comes together, because of how deftly it mimics the rhythms of, say, whiling away a Saturday afternoon. It takes skill to be both abstract and inclusive-- ask Four Tet-- so it's not an accident that Co La's sampledelia lands so softly. Moody Coup is the "take only pictures, leave only footprints" sign at the gates of experimental music: an ode to niceness. | 2013-05-07T02:00:02.000-04:00 | 2013-05-07T02:00:02.000-04:00 | Electronic | Software | May 7, 2013 | 7.5 | d50f8767-e6e2-4c87-8e5f-318382b9ddcf | Andrew Gaerig | https://pitchfork.com/staff/andrew-gaerig/ | null |
The reggae-lite collaboration between Sting and Shaggy is as professional, good-natured, and helplessly uncool as its billing promises. | The reggae-lite collaboration between Sting and Shaggy is as professional, good-natured, and helplessly uncool as its billing promises. | Sting / Shaggy: 44/876 | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/sting-shaggy-44876/ | 44/876 | Why Shaggy? Presumably, if Sting wanted to go 50/50 on a reggae album, he had options. Toots Hibbert is still in fine voice. The Wailers aren’t really the Wailers anymore, but Sting and the Wailers has a hell of a ring to it. And if he were looking to make a splash on the adult contemporary charts, Michael Franti probably could have made it happen. But Shaggy? Mr. Boombastic? The guy who sings like he’s auditioning to voice a breakfast cereal character? Why?
It turns out the two just really hit it off. Sting even refers to “my good friend Shaggy” early on the duo’s unlikely collaboration 44/876, and the album never leaves any doubt that Sting means it. Just look at them posing on those motorcycles, like your parents in their most embarrassing vacation photo. Even when the material falls flat, as it frequently does, there’s some pleasure in picturing these two entirely unobjectionable personalities living their best lives, knocking back Coronas while gently busting each other’s chops with the superficial banter of Liam Neeson and his middle-age golf buddies in the Taken films. It’s such an old-man record you can almost feel your testosterone drop listening to it.
44/876 is as professional, good-natured, and helplessly uncool as its billing promises. Does Sting feign a Caribbean accent? Yes, obviously. Does he fetishize white sandy beaches and honor the ghost of Bob Marley? You know he does. Are there air horns? Yup—all those boxes are checked right out the gate on the opening title track, another inglorious addition to the canon of reggae songs about how great reggae music is. “It shakes me to my soul with a positive vibration, I start dreaming of Jamaica,” Sting sings, standing out like a fanny-packed tourist against unexpectedly contemporary pop-dancehall production fit for a Sean Kingston album. The track’s modern sheen is a fake-out; the rest of the record is more UB40 than Top 40.
In a Rolling Stone profile, Shaggy makes a crack about women getting pregnant to the album’s steamy single “Don’t Make Me Wait,” but by and large the Shaggy here is a far less randy one than the “It Wasn’t Me” Shaggy at the turn of the century. He’s not as miscast as he sounds on paper. Nobody will mistake him for one of reggae’s greats, but he’s a game performer, down for whatever the album throws at him, be it dub, rocksteady, or yacht rock. His toasts color otherwise colorless songs without disrupting the tasteful romantic vibe Sting sets so carefully. And while there’s some initial absurdity in hearing him opposite Sting, one of the stateliest and most humorless of all of rock elder statesmen, the album never acknowledges it, not even on “Morning is Coming,” where Sting is awoken by to the serene song of a nightingale… that happens to share the severe nasally voice of Shaggy.
More often Sting is the one who sounds out of place. His voice has taken on a smoky hue that can work for him when he leans into it, especially on the jazzy, The Dream of the Blue Turtles-styled “Waiting for the Break of Day” or the torchy “Sad Trombone” (yes, that’s really the title, and no, it doesn’t get the reference). Yet every time he reaches for his higher registers he shows the limits of his range, inviting unflattering comparisons to his youthful heyday with the Police. There was a time when Sting legitimately could have nailed a designated reggae album, but his realistic window for that closed quite a while ago. Maybe that’s why so many of these songs, even the upbeat ones, dwell on missed opportunities and the passage of time.
The great irony of 44/876 is, despite its inherent disposability, it’s actually one of Sting’s more enjoyable albums, simply because he’s actually having fun here. At times, the album almost feels like Sting’s treat to himself, a reward for all those grief-stricken song cycles, symphonic works, and that one album with all the lute on it. After decades of treating music as a solemn obligation, he deserves a little vacation, and 44/876 is as close as any Sting album has ever come to sounding like one. The music’s usually pretty lame, but at least the company is nice. | 2018-04-25T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-04-25T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock / Pop/R&B | Interscope | April 25, 2018 | 4.8 | d51636bf-1468-4bf3-8921-60f2c0d64c0c | Evan Rytlewski | https://pitchfork.com/staff/evan-rytlewski/ | |
It's not easy being Nas. No matter what the man does, no matter how strong he comes, people still ... | It's not easy being Nas. No matter what the man does, no matter how strong he comes, people still ... | Nas: The Lost Tapes | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/5709-the-lost-tapes/ | The Lost Tapes | It's not easy being Nas. No matter what the man does, no matter how strong he comes, people still come back with, "It ain't Illmatic." It's an unfair way to judge someone's work, though you can hardly deny that statement's accuracy. After all, the 90s only spawned a handful of other hip-hop records that can even be mentioned in the same breath as Nas' 1994 classic. With songs like "Life's a Bitch", "One Love", and "N.Y. State of Mind", and producers like Pete Rock, Primo, and Large Professor, Illmatic not only signified Nas at his nastiest and most poetic, but it also represented the pinnacle of 90s NYC hip-hop. The falloff has been a bitch; Nas' sins include releasing what can politely be considered a string of mediocre albums, ghostwriting for Will Smith, and immersing himself in enough beefs to keep a fleet of hip-hop gossip columnists busy for years.
But, after all these disappointments, we still hold out hope for the return of hip-hop's prodigal son. And The Lost Tapes does, on the surface, seem like a possible candidate for that revival. Ostentatiously released for the real headz, this collection features tracks only previously released on mixtapes or over the Internet. Hopefully, this means none of the jiggy, commercial-friendly nonsense that's really dragged down his records the past few years.
The album's first track, "Doo Rags", finds Nas doing what he does best: reminiscing about his youth in the ghetto over a jazzy, piano-based loop. Nas namechecks Beat Street Breakers and the X-Clan while railing against "political thugs in shark suits [who] persuade us to pull triggers." At the end of the second verse, he raps, "Your paper money was the death of Christ/ And all these shorties comin' up just resurrect your life/ It's like a cycle." After the science of "Doo Rags", the resurrection of Rakim's only true successor seems like a real possibility.
Unfortunately, Nas' return is pretty short-lived. On the next track, "My Way", Nas returns to his pimped-out, diamond-studded-glocks persona. He raps, "Living my life like everyday is my last night/ Alcoholic on toilets I shit blood/ Foreign cars, models and stars, life of a rich thug." Yeah, okay. But it must be said that Nas does add a little more to the gangsta formula than most. In the second verse of the song, he gives a vivid retelling of the death of his friend Ill Will, whose name Nas has used for his record label, and concedes that he "still feels broke with millions in the bank." The Alchamist (aka Primo-in-Training) provides a nice but somewhat generic beat.
Ever the provocateur, Nas does take a couple of shots at his rivals. On "Purple", he raps, "I don't like the way P. Diddy did Shyne with different lawyers," while on "Everybody's Crazy", he insults someone by calling them a "Sisqo fag." In "Black Zombie", Nas veers back towards black conscious, deriding the media's stereotypes of African-American as gangstas and hoes, the inequality in the educational system, and black-on-black violence. After hearing Nas spin gangsta narratives on "Blaze a 50" and "My Way", and after being subjected to the hype surrounding his long string of self-provoked beefs, it isn't hard to spot the hypocrisy in these otherwise noble sentiments. But, when you think about it, haven't the boldest and greatest of us been mired in contradictions: Lenin, Bill Clinton, Bob Dylan, Tupac Shakur...
So, maybe we can forgive Nas of his moral contradictions. But what's a little harder to swallow are some of the beats on this album. The Barry White sample on "No Idea's Original" is nice, but it doesn't fit Nas' flow on the track. And while "Blaze a 50" is an interesting narrative involving betrayal, sex, and murder, the generic violin-based track almost ruins it. Despite its flaws, though, The Lost Tapes is nice. Not a return to form, per se, but possibly as close as we're likely to get. Besides, after all the years and disappointments, the expectations for Nas have finally subsided. What I'm saying is, if you can manage to forget Illmatic, you might actually like the guy again. | 2002-10-07T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2002-10-07T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Columbia / Ill Will | October 7, 2002 | 6.9 | d5171d7b-aa52-4c2d-abf0-f0d8292a8461 | Pitchfork | null |
|
The soundtrack to a documentary about the flagship indie label features early material from Ministry, My Life With the Thrill Kill Kult, and other industrial icons. | The soundtrack to a documentary about the flagship indie label features early material from Ministry, My Life With the Thrill Kill Kult, and other industrial icons. | Various Artists: Industrial Accident: The Story of Wax Trax! Records | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/various-artists-industrial-accident-the-story-of-wax-trax-records/ | Industrial Accident: The Story of Wax Trax! Records | When Wax Trax! filed for bankruptcy in 1992, cofounder Jim Nash offered an accompanying statement. “We have been credited with being the primary label behind the development of what has become known as ‘industrial’ music,” Nash wrote, detailing how the label had gone bankrupt in explanatory sections with titles such as “Ministry, Al Jourgensen and Crazed Management.”
Nash died in 1995; his business and life partner Dannie Flesher died in 2010. Their legendary Chicago record store has been gone for over two decades (the original store, in Denver, has continued under different ownership since the late 1970s), as has the label it spawned. But the latter has been resurrected by Jim's daughter Julia Nash, who started making the Wax Trax! documentary Industrial Accident after driving to Arkansas to retrieve store and label relics from Flesher's garage.
As a business, Wax Trax! suffered from shaky business practices, but as a label, it developed as cohesive a label identity as any U.S. indie. Flagship artists include their most famous U.S. alums Ministry and My Life With the Thrill Kill Kult, German industrial stalwarts KMFDM and Belgian electronic body music pioneers Front 242. The label’s acts tended towards an over-the-top visual presentation and intense musical physicality, creating a catalog that unified pummeling beats with riffs and hooks.
Musical genres are like leftist politics; as soon as a sect is named, the argument about inclusion begins. Industrial Accident is lucky enough to have the genre arbitrated by Chris Carter of industrial icons Throbbing Gristle, whose members all released later work through Wax Trax! In one of the documentary's funnier moments, Carter dubs some of the label’s releases “industrial, I guess. Ish.”
The soundtrack for Industrial Accident is more than industrial-ish; the only outlier is Revolting Cock Chris Connelly's Scott Walker-influenced solo track “Shipwreck.” Opener “A Daisy Chain 4 Satan,” by Chicago's My Life With the Thrill Kill Kult, epitomizes both the band’s early output and the signatures of the first industrial hits: oddly sourced vocal samples, a single unvarying bass riff, and processed shout-sung vocals. TKK were also viciously campy, like the label founders, and thus went endearingly all-in on parent-alarming imagery: sex, drugs, the devil.
The inherent camp of Chicago industrial makes complete sense considering the label’s second official release was a single by Divine, John Water’s transgressive drag performer muse. After Divine came Ministry’s “Cold Life.” Al Jourgensen’s musical evolution has been well documented—Industrial Accident includes footage of Big Black and an appearance by Steve Albini, who inspired or was ripped off by Jourgensen, depending on who you ask—but the actual missing link between Ministry’s various musical phases seems to be this previously unreleased version of “Tonight We Murder,” a song written with and sung by TKK’s Frankie Nardiello (aka Groovie Mann). Here, the clubby bass and bubbly synths disappear and menacing drum loops and guitar riffs take their place.
Wax Trax! never met an Al Jourgensen side project it didn’t like, from his Pailhead work with Ian Mackaye to the prolific, often sophomoric Revolting Cocks. “Animal Nation” sounds like the product of the time Jourgensen spent with young TVT recording artist Trent Reznor; it is slinkier than most RevCo output, with the kind of strong vocal melody and funk-inflected groove that would soon make Reznor the more famous of the two.
Everything else here is a mixed bag of welcome surprises and curios: KMFDM's “Vogue (Apart Version)” and Front 242’s 2017 live recording of “Headhunter” are fine, if slightly less satisfying, variations of the originals, both of which were charting dance hits. There’s always been a market for dance music you can bang your head to, and “Headhunter” met that need so well that it made Front by Front the label’s biggest seller.
In the ensuing years, the Wax Trax! brand hasn’t exactly claimed a place in the American indie canon. Even at its peak, it struggled for respect; in a 1992 Maximum Rocknroll interview, Albini derided it as “based on campy, dress-up humor, taking drugs and disco.” The focus on societal horrors was largely juvenile, and the questionable flirtation with fascist imagery is best left in the past.
But the beats, they were hard, and the influence of Wax Trax! artists has been widespread and diffuse. The artists influenced by its output today are three or four generations removed—Kanye West's best album, Yeezus, wouldn't have existed without Wax Trax! And just as with the label's original output, that could be a statement of credit or blame. | 2019-04-23T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-04-23T01:00:00.000-04:00 | null | Wax Trax! | April 23, 2019 | 7.5 | d5171efc-3ca8-4479-bc38-9bb9c31612ab | Susan Elizabeth Shepard | https://pitchfork.com/staff/susan-elizabeth shepard/ | |
The guitarist and the pianist collaborate for an album of gentle, edgeless improvisations. | The guitarist and the pianist collaborate for an album of gentle, edgeless improvisations. | Steve Gunn / David Moore: Let the Moon Be a Planet | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/steve-gunn-david-moore-let-the-moon-be-a-planet/ | Let the Moon Be a Planet | The acoustic guitar and the piano are chummy enough in popular recordings, but there’s little concert music written for the duo. Without the magic of compression, how could a mere six or 12 hand-stirred strings, with a little hole to catch the sound, hope to match more than 200 strings pounded by hammers in a big reverberant crate? Steve Gunn and David Moore offer eight lovely answers on Let the Moon Be a Planet, which inaugurates Rvng Intl.’s new “Reflections” series of collaborative albums. It may be too laid-back and vibey to bolster a repertoire, but it blends their respective voices—film-grained fingerstyle for guitarist Gunn; film-score minimalism for pianist Moore—into a tranquil, slow-running elixir.
Let the Moon Be a Planet isn’t exactly a classical record, having more in common with the deconstructed Americana of William Tyler. But it advances the classical guitar expedition Gunn began on 2021’s Other You, trading the steel sting that had defined his playing for the supple shimmer of nylon. A couple of years ago, as he told Guitar World, Gunn got a chance to play an old Gibson Folksinger and felt inspired to buy a six-string Córdoba C5, a classic beginner’s nylon-string model. It appears to be the very guitar he’s holding on the cover of Other You, and it contributed much to that record’s soft L.A. weather. And Moore, whose pellucid tone anchors the ensemble Bing & Ruth, is a classically trained pianist who gets invited to play baby grands on cliffsides and spinets in parabolic glass houses. He clearly cherishes Glass, Eno, and Debussy, though he’s more apt to pay tribute to Ecco the Dolphin, The Simpsons, and American Beauty.
Gunn and Moore first collaborated on Nakama, an EP of collaborative renditions of Other You songs, which led to a series of remote improvised sessions they finished together in upstate New York. The result is Let the Moon Be a Planet, an elaborate and far-out title for a mild and mossy record. It’s generous with bright major keys, undemanding on the ear; Gunn and Moore seem particularly fond of the hopeful sunrise of D. While some songs are atmospherically chorded or tonally furtive—the dry arroyo of “Scattering,” the lunar shadows of “Libration”—high pianism is subordinate to graceful touch and tender feeling.
Moore often dwells on little etudes patched up from simple scales, which you can pick out easily if you have a keyboard handy. Gunn’s close-mic’d chords and rustic ringlets bring more vigor and variety, soaring up and looping back to trace every path in small patches of harmonic terrain. That’s not necessarily a knock against Moore, because what elevates Let the Moon Be a Planet is the edgeless interplay of the voices, not what either is doing on its own. Lead and accompaniment join in a constantly changing ratio as Gunn and Moore hand melodies back and forth with the fluid ease of relay racers, and the pieces proceed in unbroken, radiant streams.
Improvised music often feels like traveling over a long distance, which Let the Moon Be a Planet does on the Music for Airports-like “Basin.” But more of it feels like sitting still and watching the world go by. The more you pay attention to the songs’ structures, the less interesting they seem, and I would have liked to hear the piano put a little more space between this record and “Soft Guitar & Piano Music for Stress Relief” on YouTube. But perhaps the point is more about feeling good than seeming interesting, and at least the piano equivalent of cowboy chords makes sense in the Americana context. Any given moment sounds wonderful, though not much lingers beyond a deep sense of calm. | 2023-04-05T00:01:00.000-04:00 | 2023-04-04T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Folk/Country / Experimental | Rvng Intl. | April 5, 2023 | 7 | d5206fa4-a667-4c44-8649-bb10b84b8190 | Brian Howe | https://pitchfork.com/staff/brian-howe/ | |
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 JAY-Z’s second album, one that’s more gripping as a show of raw skill than it is as an act of myth-making. | 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 JAY-Z’s second album, one that’s more gripping as a show of raw skill than it is as an act of myth-making. | Jay-Z: In My Lifetime, Vol. 1 | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/jay-z-in-my-lifetime-vol-1/ | In My Lifetime, Vol. 1 | One night in the fall or winter of 1996, JAY-Z and The Notorious B.I.G. were relaxing at Daddy’s House, the studio that Bad Boy owned in Midtown. This was almost certainly after the car accident that shattered Biggie’s left leg and forced him to use a wheelchair, and later a cane, as he worked slowly on the sophomore album that he planned to call Life After Death… Til Death Do Us Part. The rappers were friends if not exactly peers: Big’s first LP, Ready to Die, had taken on a mythic quality, where Reasonable Doubt, Jay’s debut from two years later, had been a modest success.
That night in the studio, Big played Jay some works in progress: “Hypnotize,” “My Downfall,” a handful of others. Jay was a little envious, looking at somebody who by the age of 25 had mastered virtually every popular style of rap and was slipping tangents about kidnapping plaintiffs’ daughters onto radio singles. He was, it seemed, peerless. Worse: Jay only had one new song of his own to share.
It didn’t sound like Reasonable Doubt—it had a little more gloss and bounce—but it was knotty, sarcastic, vivid. It was called “Streets Is Watching,” and it ramped up to a virtuosic, 42-bar final verse full of drug operations that teetered on state lines, looming droughts, visions of God, impaneled grand juries. Big heard it once, and then he played it again, then five more times. Finally, he stopped, and looked at Jay out the corner of his eye. “Is the whole album gonna sound like this?”
He wouldn’t live to find out. In the early morning hours of March 9, 1997, Big was shot and killed at the intersection of Wilshire Boulevard and Fairfax Avenue in Los Angeles. The case, as you probably know, is still unsolved.
After Biggie’s death, Puff Daddy, who had discovered Big and then put himself all in the videos, dancing, set out to pay tribute. He asked Jay to write verses for “I’ll Be Missing You,” a flip of the Police’s “Every Breath You Take” that would also feature Big’s wife, the singer Faith Evans. Jay declined. Instead, he drove down to Virginia Beach and channelled his grief into a song called “The City Is Mine,” which was produced by Teddy Riley, featured Blackstreet (plus saxophone by a then-unknown, pre-Neptunes Chad Hugo), and was built around a sample of Glenn Frey’s “You Belong to the City,” which sounds like an extremely sensual elevator ride. “What’s the deal, playboy?” he asks at the song’s beginning. “Just rest your soul.”
“The City Is Mine” is In My Lifetime, Vol. 1 distilled into a four-minute sample: wrought with grief and buoyed by extraordinary technical skill, packaged in (and maybe marred by) a fixation on the most commercial sounds of the moment. It captures Jay doing things he’d try more audaciously in the future: “I’m the focal point like Biggie in his prime/On the low though (shh), the city is mine” is the polite precursor to what he’d do four years later on The Blueprint: “And if I ain’t better than Big, I’m the closest one.” It’s the sound of a remarkable talent attempting the leap into superstardom and fucking up the landing just a little bit.
Big’s death had left a vacuum in rap; that Jay was in a position to dream of filling it was a minor miracle. After brokering a small deal to promote a single and then a slightly bigger one to distribute Reasonable Doubt, his label, Roc-A-Fella records, was able to leverage that album (along with Jay’s work as a ghostwriter on Foxy Brown’s Ill Na Na) into an unusually favorable arrangement with Def Jam. Jay’s appearance on Life After Death helped signal this next, presumably more lucrative era for the Roc. The song he was on, “I Love the Dough,” is a perfect little triumph, all sheen and sneer. Big washes Jay, but that’s beside the point. He was welcome in the real-cash Monopoly game.
The first way to understand Vol. 1 is as Jay’s Bad Boy album. Despite jilting Puff for “Missing You,” Jay recruited that label’s producers to handle about half of the album’s beats, and the ones they didn’t touch mostly replicate Bad Boy’s signature shine. At times, this works beautifully: the way the O’Jays are flipped into a somber suite for confession on the jarring closer “You Must Love Me,” or the way Rene & Angela, who were the basis for “I Love the Dough,” morph into something sinister for “Imaginary Players.”
But, as is characteristic of every Bad Boy release (even that skit on Ready to Die), there are lapses where the album seems to have been thrown together haphazardly. For example, it’s impossible to reconcile the fact that the unforgivably desperate “I Know What Girls Like” is made to flow right into “Player.” In the latter, you have one of the slickest, most irresistibly arrogant songs in Jay’s catalog, complete with that absurdly condescending final monologue. But you spend half of that track trying to scrub your brain of clumsy bullshit from the song before, like: “I never seen a face like yours before/And I’ve been around some cute whores before.”
Fortunately, Jay has always had a gift for giving emotional depth to his albums without cheating or showing his hand too early. The violence that’s introduced on “Rhyme No More” (“Shoot up the whole block, then the iron I toss”) and complicated on “Streets Is Watching” (“For the first time in my life, I was getting money, but it was like my conscience was eating me”) is given a second, more harrowing layer of guilt on “You Must Love Me.” That song opens with a verse to Jay’s mother, who was struggling with her own addictions just as Jay began hustling: “All you did was motivate me: ‘Don’t let ’em hold you back!’/What’d I do?/Turned around, and I sold you crack.” The next verse recounts the time that Jay, at just 12 years old, shot his brother in an effort to retrieve some stolen jewelry. His brother survived, then asked to see Jay in the hospital the following day. You must love me, he raps.
The album’s masterpiece, though, is “Where I’m From.” The scaffolding is an Yvonne Fair sample that sounds like a steel city grinding its inhabitants into dust. Jay raps vividly about the Marcy Houses, describing himself and his neighbors as “foul” all while taunting outsiders: Prodigy, the Mobb Deep MC who feuded with Jay for years, took the line about Marcy being where “you and your mans hung in every verse in your rhyme” as a direct shot. It’s also the most acrobatic rapping Jay had done to this point in his career: There are times when he’s deep in the beat’s pocket, and others when he’s rapping as if the beat is a mere suggestion. In the middle of the second verse, there’s an absolutely breathtaking passage:
I'm a block away from hell, not enough shots away from stray shells
An ounce away from a triple-beam, still using a hand-held weight scale
You're laughing—you know the place well
Where the liquor stores and the base dwell
This sort of free, cascading run, where every line is extraordinarily technical but sounds as if it was ripped from casual conversation, is something he’d continue to perfect over the next several years but would mostly abandon by The Blueprint, opting instead for digestible midtempos. With hindsight, Vol. 1 is more gripping as a show of raw skill than it is as an act of myth-making: The way he floats over the beat on “A Million & One Questions” and burrows into it on its twin song, “Rhyme No More,” or that extended, staccato climax to “Streets Is Watching,” is the element of his post-9/11 catalog that’s most sorely missed.
The softer songs are tougher to grapple with. “Lucky Me” has its own cult following (Lil Wayne has its title tattooed on his neck and a verse from it tattooed on his leg) but is stiff and overproduced; its complaints about fame are more exhausting than insightful. And then, of course, there’s “(Always Be My) Sunshine.” “Sunshine” shares a Kraftwerk sample with a Whodini song; it’s the sort of thing that can be rehabilitated with time, but would have seemed painfully out of date in the moment. And then there’s its video, where dancers run through fierce choreography in what looks like the stomach of a Rubik’s cube while Jay mugs in a lime-green suit. It’s awful. “Sunshine” has mostly been relegated to the footnotes in Jay’s career—it wasn’t a big enough success or spectacular enough a failure to seem, today, like a turning point—and that’s fortunate, given how close it flew to an extremely fluorescent sun.
Eight years before Vol. 1 came out, Jay-Z was living in London. His mentor, a fellow Marcy Houses native who went by Jaz and who, for a time, had a reputation as one of the best unsigned rappers in Brooklyn, had been advanced nearly a half-million dollars by the record label EMI. He brought Jay across the Atlantic, to the flat in Notting Hill, to soak up whatever he could while the album got made.
At first, the label guys seemed nice enough. Jaz’s finished records were sounding close enough in spirit to their demo versions. But at some point, EMI insisted Jaz record a gimmicky, ukelele-driven song called “Hawaiian Sophie.” It was an utter disaster. The video was full of hula dancers gyrating in front of green screens and palm trees painted on large tarps that were hoisted clumsily toward a soundstage “sky.” Imagine the Lost pilot staged by kids at a summer camp. Jay, who appears in the video behind giant sunglasses, draped in a lei, would later say it was “nearly career suicide.”
“Hawaiian Sophie” was supposed to turn Jaz into a star. But when it inevitably bricked, the label stopped returning his phone calls. The album dropped in May 1989 as little more than a tax write-off. That’s when executives at EMI finally picked up the phone—to call Jay, wondering if he was interested in a record deal of his own.
This turned Jay’s stomach. He buried whatever rap dreams he had, skulked back to the States, and moved his crack trade from East Trenton, New Jersey down to Maryland. This was a good idea until it wasn’t: There were shootouts in nightclubs and rumors of sweeping police investigations.
When Jay returned to music, he was wary of and wearied by the EMI experience. The “Sophie” debacle seemed to shape his approach to the industry for the years to come: It confirmed his distrust of record companies; it urged him to hone the double- and triple-time skills he’d been developing, then shed them for something more communicative. The impeccably dressed kingpin from the Reasonable Doubt cover could never be seen in Bermuda shorts. He even references “Sophie” on the opening song of Vol. 1—both the fact that it exists, and the fact that it made him disappear. And yet it’s impossible to see the “Sunshine” video without thinking, for a second, about all those plastic palm trees.
There’s this incredible trick that Big pulls at the beginning of Life After Death. It opens with a narrative song called “Somebody’s Gotta Die”; the broad strokes are that one of Big’s old friends knocks on his door in the middle of the night with blood on his shoes, saying that their mutual friend had been shot. A revenge plot whirs to life—and ends with a tragic mistake. Straightforward. But in the first verse, as he’s talking himself into a frenzy, Big shatters the implied divide between these crime tales and real life: “‘Cause I’m a criminal,” he raps,
Way before the rap shit
Bust a gat, shit—Puff won’t even know what happened
On an album that is primarily about the experience of being a rap star, Big is staring into the camera and smirking, as if to say: For all you know, I could be in the streets right now. The times when Big shows you the seams of this stardom add to the effect—the barbs at New York rappers on “Kick in the Door,” the tongue-in-cheek ode to the other coast on “Going Back to Cali.”
By comparison, Vol. 1 labors to achieve the same feeling. Its plays for radio feel deliberate, as if they were pulled from a totally different set of sessions than the “Where I’m From”s and the “Streets Is Watching”s. Big blurred those lines between pop and pure instinct (“Playa Hater”) or reveled in just how arbitrary they were (he has those threats to kidnap daughters on “Hypnotize,” he raps about phone taps on “Mo Money Mo Problems”); the only time Jay comes close to this fourth wall-fracturing magic is on “Friend Or Foe ’98,” when he’s about to kill a rival hustler in a “two-hotel town,” and leaves him with a message to send Big in heaven. The songs on Vol. 1 are almost uniformly excellent. But the greater the commercial and mythic stakes Jay tried to attach to the set as a whole, the more the vacuum threatened to swallow them all at once. | 2019-09-01T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-09-01T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Def Jam / Roc-A-Fella | September 1, 2019 | 8.4 | d521d3bb-7f09-4916-b4c8-dff058d33766 | Paul A. Thompson | https://pitchfork.com/staff/paul-a. thompson/ | |
Aly Spaltro was a teenager when she wrote much of her 2013 Lady Lamb the Beekeeper debut, a collection that found her whipping folk tropes into rock rambunctiousness. On her second album, she hits one of the unexpected truths of your twenties: that embracing your repressed childlike instincts is one of the more adult things you can do. | Aly Spaltro was a teenager when she wrote much of her 2013 Lady Lamb the Beekeeper debut, a collection that found her whipping folk tropes into rock rambunctiousness. On her second album, she hits one of the unexpected truths of your twenties: that embracing your repressed childlike instincts is one of the more adult things you can do. | Lady Lamb: After | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/20201-after/ | After | Aly Spaltro isn't a teenager anymore, but she was when she wrote much of her Lady Lamb the Beekeeper debut, 2013's Ripely Pine. That album didn't sound like the emergence of a college-aged songwriter so much as it played like an experiment from someone who had already gotten good at putting music together. Full of nerves and breath and blood, Ripely Pine whipped folk tropes into rock'n'roll rambunctiousness, giving her plenty of space to sound precocious. On her second album, After, Spaltro hits one of the unexpected truths of your twenties: that embracing your repressed childlike instincts is one of the more adult things you can do.
Ripely Pine struck out big, with elegant metaphors rooted in the natural world. After's track list includes a song called "Milk Duds", suggesting that Lady Lamb's tone has shifted from Ripely's seven-minute ballad "You Are the Apple". "We fell asleep on a box of Milk Duds," she sings on the new song. "They melted into the clubhouse cushions/ I never loved another person/ More than I loved you when I woke that morning." That sticky mess doesn't make the prettiest image in the traditional sense, but Spaltro's probably the first songwriter to find a symbol of her love in a pile of chocolate and caramel and polyester. She's getting braver.
After is heartsick to its core—the title seems to eulogize a love affair in a single word—but it's much rowdier than its lyrics alone would imply. On opener "Vena Cava", Spaltro looks at her sleeping partner and sees the fiery death of their relationship as though it's already happening in slow motion all around her. "I can feel how the seams of your ribs will separate from the seams of my ribs," she sings. "I know already how much TV will fail to comfort me in your absence." She switches from two ribcages unraveling to a melancholic Netflix binge in one line. And the song's a jam to boot.
Her lyrical muscle lets Lady Lamb oscillate between the visceral and the mundane without so much as a knowing lilt in her voice. Both modes come easily to her, and the tension between them is fertile. There's a parallel tension in the music, too: The strongest songs on After verge on acoustic despondency only to break into a big, crunchy chorus. You can always weep out the pain, but sometimes it's so much more fun to mosh it off.
There are plenty of startling moments full of guts and gristle in Lady Lamb's dense lyrics, and then there are the moments when she wanders. The fingerpicked "Sunday Shoes" stretches out between the shoegaze-inflected "Heretic" and "Spat Out Spit", injecting a weird bubble of space into the album's flow. The rousing coda on "Penny Licks" almost feels like an Arcade Fire climax, even though it only arrives in the seventh song. Like Ripely Pine, After clocks in at a solid hour—and it's an hour you'll feel, because while After boasts a stacked lineup of well-crafted songs, it's a choppy ride to make it through them all. | 2015-03-04T01:00:01.000-05:00 | 2015-03-04T01:00:01.000-05:00 | Rock | Mom+Pop | March 4, 2015 | 7.4 | d53c5e30-c7d9-43cd-adb3-0ea7f9ce6764 | Sasha Geffen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sasha-geffen/ | null |
This unlikely electronic trio—featuring the Chili Peppers’ John Frusciante, Venetian Snares’ Aaron Funk, and noise musician Chris McDonald—cherry-picks from 11 years of dazzlingly complex improvisations. | This unlikely electronic trio—featuring the Chili Peppers’ John Frusciante, Venetian Snares’ Aaron Funk, and noise musician Chris McDonald—cherry-picks from 11 years of dazzlingly complex improvisations. | Speed Dealer Moms: SDM-LA8-441-114-211 | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/speed-dealer-moms-sdm-la8-441-114-211/ | SDM-LA8-441-114-211 | The debut EP from Speed Dealer Moms came out 11 years ago. The unlikely trio of John Frusciante, Red Hot Chili Peppers guitarist and late-blooming rave maven; Aaron Funk, who makes furiously virtuosic breakcore as Venetian Snares; and Chris McDonald, a comparatively little-known musician specializing in scorched-earth electronic noise, has been working together steadily since then. When their schedules permit, they gather to test the limits of various analog synths and drum machines, pushing their vintage equipment to extremes of velocity and intricacy that would stupefy any reasonable human collaborator. On SDM-LA8-441-114-211, their long-gestating second release, they’ve got 22 minutes of music to show for these years of experiments, apparently culled from a much larger archive. The brevity isn’t a problem. Each of the three tracks is so dense with musical information that it’s difficult to imagine processing even one more after the EP shudders to a close.
The first Speed Dealer Moms EP was one of Frusciante’s earliest forays into purely electronic music; if it was tempting to see him as a dilettante back then, time has proven that characterization unfair. He’s racked up multiple albums of fleet acid house and techno with his Trickfinger alias since SDM first appeared, and he released a reverent but rewarding collection of breakbeats and synth stabs under his own name last year. (If anything, it’s his recent return to the RHCP fold that now seems faintly puzzling.) Funk’s career path has always been as jittery as the rhythms of his own drum tracks; after the sweeping cinematics of his 2018 collaboration with Daniel Lanois, a return to the mayhem of the Moms makes as much sense as any other possible move. Given the restlessness of both men, and the low profile of McDonald, whose Skm-Etr project has an online footprint consisting of a few YouTube links and a handful of ultra-DIY releases cataloged on Discogs, it’s pretty much impossible to make an educated guess about who’s doing what at any given point during SDM-LA8-441-114-211. You get the sense that they like it that way.
For such a slap-happy and technologically inclined trio, Speed Dealer Moms have an old-fashioned, almost jazzy devotion to capturing the spontaneity of live performance. They program their synths, plan out a loose structure for a given track, and start jamming; what you hear on the record is what came out of the machinery that day, without edits or overdubs. Even their track titles resemble notes from some lost Blue Note session: the date, the take number, maybe the location. So it’s apparently just a coincidence that “April One 4” reads like a tribute to one of the best-known Aphex Twin compositions, though Richard D. James turns out to be a pretty good reference point for the way the music sounds. Not the placid solo piano of “Avril 14th,” but the organized clatter of his mid-’90s Hangable Auto Bulb era, when the glowing analog synths of his early work collided with the computer-assisted percussive freakouts of his later albums.
Speed Dealer Moms’ ability to generate the same sort of complexity in real time, without clicking and dragging clips around on a laptop screen, is impressive, even if they can’t always match James’ corresponding gift for clear and simple melody. The various elements of “April One 4” clearly have some rhythmic relationship with one another, but for most of the track’s duration, you’d have a hard time figuring out what it is. A handclap pattern nearly syncs up with a bubbly arpeggio, then races off in the other direction; some obscure subdivision of the beat takes over for a few moments and starts to supplant the main pulse. It feels a bit like peaking hard on a cocktail of stimulants and psychedelics: Everything is moment by moment, with little opportunity to process one sensory overload before the next one takes over. When it all coheres into a loping four-on-the-floor pattern for the track’s final minute and a half, it’s more surprising than any of the hyperactive feints that came before. I’m torn between admiration for the trio’s uncompromising approach and a wish that they’d ease off the intensity a little more often, let the music breathe like it does here.
“LA August 1,” the 11-minute opener, is the EP’s most satisfying track, and perhaps its most accessible, despite the imposing runtime. Without close attention, it might whir by as an undifferentiated mass of beeps and stutters, but focused listening reveals an elegant compositional arc, with a handful of themes arriving in various combinations over a stately repeated bass line. If you’ll permit a tortured comparison, it reminds me of an IDM update on Pachelbel’s famous Canon in D—processional music for acid-fried ravers. “April Two 11,” the closer, isn’t so friendly. The trio abandons the anchor of the kick drum, leaving only intersecting buzzsaws of cymbal and snare, with occasional globs of synth bass filling in the gaps. The “dance” part of the IDM equation has become purely notional at this point, if it wasn’t already. By the end, the Moms have just about left rhythm behind altogether, in favor of screaming feedback and bellowing drone. It’s as if the machines, brought to the breaking point and beyond, have finally given up.
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-06-15T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2021-06-15T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Evar | June 15, 2021 | 6.7 | d54e0ace-7780-4cc1-b701-2d42d539cf0a | Andy Cush | https://pitchfork.com/staff/andy-cush/ | |
The latest archival set collects demos and live recordings from the pivotal years between the stark solo songs of For the Roses, her full-band masterpiece Court & Spark, and the impressionistic jazz-pop of The Hissing of Summer Lawns. | The latest archival set collects demos and live recordings from the pivotal years between the stark solo songs of For the Roses, her full-band masterpiece Court & Spark, and the impressionistic jazz-pop of The Hissing of Summer Lawns. | Joni Mitchell: Archives, Vol. 3: The Asylum Years (1972-1975) | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/archives-vol-3-the-asylum-years-1972-1975/ | Archives, Vol. 3: The Asylum Years (1972-1975) | We hear a drummer counting off and then a half-sentence from his bandleader, Joni Mitchell, who in April 1972, was embarking on the first official recording sessions for For the Roses. One year earlier, she’d released Blue, the album that solidified her place, at the age of 27, as one of the greatest songwriters who ever lived. After that came a period of reflection and retreat from the music industry and its hometown of Los Angeles, both of which she’d begun to view with suspicion. She moved to a stone cabin in rural British Columbia, listened to the arbutus trees rustling at her window, entertained the occasional deranged fan who managed to find her there, and wrote songs about whatever came to her.
Many of these new songs were about an artist’s relationship to her own work; to the audiences who receive and justify it; and to the middlemen who both facilitate and corrupt this exchange. The sojourn to the country had been artistically fruitful, but Mitchell, whose questioning mind was at its sharpest when it took its own motives up for examination, eventually started to wonder why she was there. The house had been “conceived out of paranoia,” she told an audience later. She’d hoped to escape the corruption of the city: “Suddenly everything that was good and virtuous seemed very important to me. Well, that’s alright, but it leaves very little room for humanness, you know?” In late 1971, she returned to L.A. and started recording.
“Give me that again,” it sounds like she’s saying on the tape as the drummer counts off a full-band rehearsal of “See You Sometime” on a new box set, Joni Mitchell: Archives, Vol. 3: The Asylum Years (1972-1975). One benefit of life among the humans: other musicians to play with. Mitchell had never been a foursquare folk songwriter, but the songs she’d written since Blue were more complexly rhythmic than anything that had come before. Evidently, their contours suggested to her the sound of an ensemble, in contrast to the largely solitary delivery of her work until that point. For the Roses, in its final form, is a transition between masterpieces, with the starkness of Blue on one side and the jazzy full-band exuberance of 1974’s Court and Spark on the other. But as demonstrated on Archives, Vol. 3, the excellent latest entry in a series of releases that collect previously unreleased demos and alternate versions from her back catalog, she already had a germ of the Court and Spark sound in mind when she began recording its predecessor.
The box set—which also includes the exhilarating live album Miles of Aisles and the impressionistic The Hissing of Summer Lawns—covers a period of Mitchell’s career that already resists linear narrativizing. It was a time when she seemed to be pushing her music closer to an ideal that only she could see or hear, and her most radio-friendly work rubbed up against her most experimental. Asylum Years, at 5 CDs and 96 tracks in its full version, is an exhaustive presentation of Mitchell’s process in this era. Some of the recordings are so good that it’s difficult to understand how they sat in the vaults for this long. Others are brilliant, but close enough to the released versions that anyone with less than a scholarly interest in Mitchell would be better served by the official albums. Still others—like an instrumental jam that flirts with classical Indian music, or a duet with James Taylor on a medley of early rock’n’roll covers—are more like sketches or larks, exceedingly rare peeks at the discard pile of an artist who edited herself pitilessly, so that even demos often sound more or less finished. There’s even one wholly unheard song: “Like Veils Said Lorraine,” a document of spiritual conflict recorded as a demo for For the Roses, whose imagery—“More veils beyond veils/Always walls behind the walls”—is evocative but feels unfinished, a dreamlike wisp from a songwriter who favored lived detail. The set’s revelations don’t exactly clarify the journey from solo singer-songwriter to barnstorming bandleader to uncategorizable avant-gardist she partook in the early-middle 1970s. In the case of the early For the Roses sessions, they only complicate it further.
Back to the tape: “See You Sometime,” a plainspoken ballad about lingering affection in a relationship’s aftermath, performed on solo piano in its finished form, is the song on For the Roses that could most easily fit on Blue. But on that day in April ’72, Mitchell had a rhythm section with her: bassist Tim Drummond and drummer Kenny Buttrey, Nashville session killers who’d recently backed up Mitchell’s friend Neil Young on Harvest. Mitchell tells them to run it again, Buttrey counts off, and for a moment you’re hearing a premonition of Court and Spark.
The hi-hats gently pulsate and the bass offers a descending countermelody, bringing Mitchell’s song out of the folk idiom and toward the groove she would find in a couple of years. But in the bridge, the rhythm’s subtlety falters. Mitchell’s piano gets a little funkier, and Buttrey and Drummond overshoot their mark, playing an R&B rave-up that only lasts a few moments before they get back to the amorphous beat of the verse. The solo version that made the album is more conservative, in that it more closely resembles Mitchell’s earlier work than the future sound she seemed to be reaching for, but cutting the drums and bass section was a wise choice: when she’s on her own, the rhythmic switchbacks don’t come across as ostentatious, but as natural extensions of her idiosyncratic vocal phrasing. Soon, she would find the musicians who understood how to follow her.
The session with Buttrey and Drummond also produced an early version of “You Turn Me On, I’m a Radio,” this time with Young himself playing harmonica and electric guitar. If there’s one recording to hear on Asylum Years, this is it. They take it a little slower than Mitchell eventually would, drawing out the wistful feeling in the descending chords of its verses. Young plays beautifully on both instruments, adding a winding melody on harmonica but keeping his guitar accents minimal. It sounds just about exactly how a fan might imagine Mitchell playing with Young and his Harvest band might sound, an ideal union of her compositional intricacy and their easygoing sway.
The story goes that Mitchell wrote “You Turn Me On, I’m a Radio” in response to her label boss David Gefffen’s complaints that she didn’t have enough pop material. It is perhaps the album’s most richly contradictory expression of her relationship to fame at the time: a baldfaced pander to radio DJs, a sly satire of its own attempts at mass appeal, and a love song with all the emotional nuance of her less commercial material. The final version, with Mitchell’s insistent acoustic guitar driving the rhythm and the band mostly stripped away, feels truer to her sensibility at the time, and was her first single to crack the Top 40. But the take with Young sounds more like a radio hit: a glimpse of a path not taken, on which Mitchell fully inhabited the Southern California soft rock sound, a box that in reality could never contain her.
There’s one more Young collaboration on Asylum Years, from just over a year later, a time when both artists were in vastly different places from their previous studio meeting. Mitchell was preparing to record Court and Spark, and Young was in the middle of making Tonight’s the Night. On one side: sunlit, danceable, intellectually probing. On the other: sunglasses at night, apocalyptic, stoned to incapacitation. Joni dropped in on Neil’s sessions one day and they ran through “Raised on Robbery,” whose three-chord boogie and lyric about an ill-fated barroom romance make it a surprisingly apt candidate for the doom and gloom Young and his band were doling out at the time. There was no way the results were ever going to make it onto a Joni Mitchell album, but it’s a thrill to hear them trying: Young shredding leather-jacket lead guitar licks and moaning incoherent backing vocals on the choruses, Mitchell swaggering and swinging above the din.
By the time of Court and Spark, Mitchell had found the players who could follow her, and it wasn’t Neil Young and his goons. A drummer friend had suggested that jazz musicians might get her closer to the sound she wanted, and eventually she hooked up with the L.A. Express, a fusion group led by saxophonist Tom Scott. Something like “jazz pop” is the quickest shorthand to describe the album’s sensibility, though the music doesn’t have much to do with swing. The harmonic vocabulary, full of airy suspended chords, has something in common with the language Miles Davis and his bandmates (future Mitchell collaborator Wayne Shorter prominent among them) developed in the ’60s, but the rhythms are pure Joni. On Asylum Years, this period opens with another major highlight: a 12-minute solo piano suite encompassing fragments of “Down to You,” “Court and Spark,” and “Car on a Hill,” with improvised instrumental passages connecting the sketches of each song. In a liner-note interview with Cameron Crowe, Mitchell dismisses her own playing on the suite as noodling, but it provides an invaluable window on her compositional process: trying out a harmony, sitting with its ambiguity for a while, moving on to the next one.
There are several other solo Court and Spark demos on Asylum Years. An acoustic guitar take on “Trouble Child” shows how holistically the album’s arrangements emerged from Mitchell’s initial conception of each song, filling out the frame of her music rather than imposing themselves upon it. You can hear the band’s entire low-slung groove in the simple guitar figure she uses to open the demo. “Help Me,” Mitchell’s biggest-ever hit, isn’t quite as close to completion in its demo take, but there are faint outlines of its slick instrumental hooks in the chord voicings of Mitchell’s guitar. The stripped-down take highlights the ingenuity in the song’s bones: the way Mitchell expands and contracts the rhythm to accommodate the flow of the lyric, or uses an unusual chord change to inflect the feeling of the single sustained vocal note that rides atop it. The song addresses a relationship that the narrator knows won’t work, and the joyous interplay of the musicians on the album version can fool you into thinking the stakes aren’t all that high, that Mitchell is on a breezy patio somewhere, assessing her situation at a distance. In the final section of the demo, she repeats the title with increasing edge and ardor over a single churning chord, and you know she’s down bad.
1975’s The Hissing of Summer Lawns was Joni’s biggest break yet from the mold of her early work, an album that was misunderstood at the time but later emerged as a classic of her catalog. The demos on Asylum Years are most striking for how traditional they sound in contrast to the finished album, whose smeared textures seem to emanate directly from the subconscious of the characters in its third-person narratives. As with Court and Spark, there are some flashes of the final versions in the rhythms and harmonies that Mitchell outlines on guitar and piano. But little in the strummed early version of “The Jungle Line,” for instance, could prepare you for the rumble of synthesizers and sampled field recordings that characterize its incarnation on the album, a gesture that still sounds jarringly radical today. “Harry’s House” is present here without its hallucinatory detour into the jazz standard “Centerpiece.” The Hissing of Summer Lawns may have been a heroic leap into the darkness for Mitchell, but it started as a searching step.
Two full live concerts round out the bulk of the Asylum Years tracklist. Both are spectacular, as standalone listening experiences and demonstrations of how far Mitchell’s music progressed in two short years. The first, a February 23, 1972 appearance at Carnegie Hall that has been floating around for years as a bootleg radio broadcast recording, is presented in much better fidelity here. It was her first show back after the hiatus in rural Canada, and the setlist is roughly split between songs from Blue and the not-yet-released For the Roses, with a few earlier chestnuts thrown in. The crowd is rapt, responding to even the songs they don’t know yet with roaring applause. Performing solo, save for a faintly audible cameo from her friends in CSNY singing harmonies on the set-closing “Circle Game,” Joni meets the audience’s enthusiasm with gregarious banter and vocal performances that are as good and sometimes even better than what she put down on the records. Her rendition of the Blue classic “A Case of You,” in particular, is breathtaking.
The second is a March 3, 1974 show at Los Angeles’s Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, backed by the Court and Spark band. Some of its setlist is familiar from Miles of Aisles, which documented the same tour. The highlights are songs from earlier albums that didn’t make that official live release, reworked with arrangements that are bigger and more energetic than their presentation on Mitchell’s stark first few albums. Set opener “This Flight Tonight” is rendered as rollicking rock’n’roll, reminiscent of the Grateful Dead, a world away from its intimate solo delivery on Blue and at the Carnegie Hall show, which it also opens. Ladies of the Canyon deep cut “Rainy Night House” gets a suitably sultry reimagining, the instrumentalists slow-burning like the world’s greatest cocktail lounge act (complete with jazz flute) and Mitchell crooning and belting with newfound bravura. She hadn’t lost any of the depth of her early years, but now she was complementing it with the showmanship of a professional entertainer.
Compared to Bob Dylan, whose similarly minded archival releases reveal a penchant for writing and rewriting, Mitchell was more deliberate, less antically stream-of-consciousness. Most of the melodies and words were already in place, though the occasional odd phrase will strike listeners who are accustomed to the finished product. (In “Help Me,” the love object is a “rambler and a gambler and a boogie man,” rather than a “sweet talkin’ ladies man.”) The most pronounced of these changes is in “Down to You,” Court and Spark’s orchestral centerpiece, in which a one-night stand prompts a broader meditation on transience and change. The piano suite, recorded in summer 1973, presents the earliest version in the box set. Addressing a “constant stranger” who may or may not be the singer herself in the first verse, Mitchell gives a blunt assessment: “You’re a good person/You’re a bad person, too.”
You don’t often encounter this sort of binary logic in her songs, which are more oriented toward observation than judgment. Within a few months, she had found the right phrase: “You’re a kind person/You’re a cold person, too,” as heard on a demo from September or October, and again on the final album version. The emotional valence is the same, but now the language is just a little more precise, and a little closer to the realm of neutral description. Anyone could decide anyone else is bad for any reason at all. “Cold” still has a note of accusation, but it isn’t as sweeping, and it refers to a specific set of behaviors. A bad person is condemned, a cold person is just cold.
That small but consequential edit shows us something important about the philosophical project of Mitchell’s songwriting. There’s kindness in looking closely, forgiveness in rigorous commitment to simple truth. That commitment was already firmly in place by the period covered by Asylum Years, which is marked primarily by her development as a musician rather than a writer. But maybe its allowance for ambiguity and openness also encouraged her to pursue the same principles in her rhythms and harmonies, unfurling the vistas of her groundbreaking mid-’70s work for exploration. It’s the kind of cliche Joni Mitchell would never dream of using in a song: The truth will set you free. | 2023-10-13T00:02:00.000-04:00 | 2023-10-13T00:02:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Rhino | October 13, 2023 | 8.6 | d5531f6f-1507-4e7a-b94d-e59871e470b8 | Andy Cush | https://pitchfork.com/staff/andy-cush/ | |
With post-Throbbing Gristle outfit Psychic TV, Genesis P-Orridge bent together the opposing poles of psychedelia and industrial music. Two new reissues show the extremities of their early catalog. | With post-Throbbing Gristle outfit Psychic TV, Genesis P-Orridge bent together the opposing poles of psychedelia and industrial music. Two new reissues show the extremities of their early catalog. | Psychic TV: Pagan Day / Allegory and Self | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/psychic-tv-pagan-day-allegory-and-self/ | Pagan Day / Allegory and Self | In his post-punk history bible, Rip It Up and Start Again, writer Simon Reynolds notes that psychedelia and early industrial music were as spiritually in tune as they were sonically antithetical. After all, many of industrial’s key progenitors were lapsed hippies themselves, adapting 1960s-schooled principles of sound manipulation, visual stimulation, anti-establishment rhetoric, and communal living to the unforgivably harsh landscape of late 1970s post-punk Britain. Psychedelia and industrial were essentially opposing poles on the same horseshoe magnet—and no one put more effort into bending them together than Genesis P-Orridge.
If punk was an attempt to revitalize rock’n’roll, then P-Orridge’s proto-industrial performance-art troupe, Throbbing Gristle, were on a mission to annihilate it altogether. Absconding with all of rock’s signifiers (guitars, drums, melody, any possibility of deriving pleasure from a song, etc.), Throbbing Gristle believed subjecting audiences to all manner of ugliness—be it ear-drilling synth frequencies or concentration-camp imagery—was necessary to dismantling Western power structures and emancipating the self. But if Throbbing Gristle aurally and visually terrorized their fans with the cool, cruel efficiency of a military operation (complete with their disturbingly SS-like insignia), P-Orridge’s post-TG outfit practiced a similar liberation philosophy under the rubric of a religion. Their provocation agent of choice shifted from Nazism to the Manson Family.
Featuring P-Orridge alongside TG’s resident visual specialist Peter “Sleazy” Christopherson and multi-instrumentalist Alex Fergusson (also of first-wave punks Alternative TV), Psychic TV were conceived less as a proper band than the musical arm of upstart occult organization Thee Temple ov Psychick Youth (TOPY). Its fundamental belief, in P-Orridge’s words, is that “the conscious and unconscious mind should be integrated.” Like Throbbing Gristle, Psychic TV were as much a visual as musical entity, the “TV” functioning as both a simple callback to Fergusson’s former band and a recognition that their most effective pulpit was the burgeoning medium of home video. After attempting to destroy rock’n’roll with Throbbing Gristle, P-Orridge’s mission with Psychic TV was to infiltrate and infect it, and transmit the Temple’s message to a wider audience.
True to their name, the music that Psychic TV released at the outset effectively mirrors the act of mindlessly flipping through television stations and being subjected to a series of jarring, seemingly unrelated images. From song to song, Psychic TV could be as warm, congenial, and nostalgic as a rerun of your favorite sitcom, and then as horrifying as images of some warzone massacre on the 11 o’clock news; they could sound as low budget as a public-access show and as droning and repetitive as a test pattern. Two new reissues filter that experience through radically different lenses—one with all of grainy resolution a UHF-dialed black-and-white TV, the other in glorious HD. Pagan Day (1984) and Allegory and Self (1988) represent extremities in the early Psychic TV catalog—the former was once the rarest and rawest of their recordings, the latter was their most pop-oriented and commercially successful. But these two oppositional records share a significant amount of DNA.
Like followers of any religion, TOPY parishioners were occasionally subjected to tests of faith. And for those wishing to procure a copy of Pagan Day upon its release, that meant showing up at London’s Rough Trade Records on December 23, 1984 at 11 p.m. (i.e., the 23rd hour of the 23rd day) to snag one of 999 copies before the record was removed from racks at midnight forevermore (or at least until 1986, when it received a proper release). Pagan Day was Psychic TV’s subversive take on the traditional limited-edition Christmas release. Like many holiday-themed records, it’s a celebration of being with family—after hearing her cry as a newborn on PTV’s 1982 debut, Force the Hand of Chance, Genesis’ daughter Caresse graces the cover of Pagan Day and delivers the album’s welcome message in garbled toddler-speak. However, unlike most holiday-themed albums, this seemingly innocent package contains hazy-headed psych-blues jams with self-explanatory names like “Opium” and minimalist synth-disco advocating for “New Sexuality.”
Comprising four-track recordings that P-Orridge and Fergusson had amassed over the previous years, Pagan Day was a byproduct of, as explained in a recent SPIN interview, becoming “re-obsessed with the wonderful simplicity but sort-of brutal use of studio techniques in psychedelic music” (like using metal plates to create natural reverb). The album is an exercise in futurist primitivism, split evenly between the sort of intimately melodic serenades P-Orridge introduced on Force the Hand of Chance and 1983’s Dreams Less Sweet, and crude, rhythmic instrumental sketches in search of a song. For the tracks that fall in the latter camp, the sense of slap-dash improvisation is all too palpable. On “Cadaques,” a brittle drum-machine beat provides the wobbly foundation for a flute-like synth melody and a jittery acoustic guitar line—and when the song runs out of gas before the two-minute mark, they just spark up the beat once more and do it all over again. Later, on “L.A.,” a sprightly, mechanistic rhythm gets weighed down by a heaving keyboard that sounds like a wheezing, detuned accordion.
But Pagan Day’s embrace of psychedelia went beyond a fascination with recording techniques. The album’s centerpiece is a stripped-down but reverential cover of “Translucent Carriages” by psych-folk figureheads Pearls Before Swine, and this reissue adds a boombox-raw but still disarmingly wistful rendition of the Rolling Stones’ “As Tears Go By” (titled “Farewell” on the tracklist). And in “Cold Steel,” Psychic TV deliver a beautifully baroque ballad that, even in this rudimentary recorded form, can stand proudly among those ’60s standards.
“Cold Steel” is actually the Fergusson-sung demo version of “The Orchids,” which first surfaced on Dreams Less Sweet (and was covered to wonderful effect by Califone in 2006). Its appearance here reinforces the fact that Pagan Day is less notable for what it is than what it became—a handful of these first drafts would get fleshed out into superior form on other PTV releases. And the greatest beneficiary was 1988’s Allegory and Self, where “We Kiss” would be upgraded from somber, synth-shaded folk ballad to sweeping, cinematic set piece; the tinker-toy Velvet Underground-styled romp “Baby’s Gone Away” would acquire a Smiths-ian shimmer; and “New Sexuality” would get stripped of its lyrics but blown up into the neon-tinted Moroder-esque fantasia of “She Was Surprised.”
Allegory and Self arrived after a mid-’80s avalanche of EPs, live records, soundtracks, ballet commissions, and other projects. If Psychic TV’s early recordings saw them trying to reconcile their avant/industrial roots with their irrepressible love of psychedelic pop, Allegory and Self forged a more harmonious relationship between vintage psych-rock and its modern permutation: rave. While Psychic TV’s full-blown conversion to acid house would soon take effect, Allegory and Self captures the moment right before the E really kicked in—if it doesn’t explicitly assume the form of dance music, it chases its blissful, weighty highs. The result is a record as splendorous as it is surreal.
But before they left rock behind for a subsequent slew of dance-oriented releases, Psychic TV effectively invented Britpop with “Godstar,” the 1985 single that serves as Allegory’s opening track. Overtop a hip-shaking Stonesy groove, P-Orridge delivers an elegy to that band’s late guitarist Brian Jones, undercutting the song’s ecstatic swagger and elated harmonies with intimations that Jones’ 1969 death may not have been as accidental as it appeared. “Godstar” proved to be Psychic TV’s one and only hit single and P-Orridge claims its chart ascent was curtailed by the Stones’ management coercing BBC Radio 1 to stop playing the song. Still, its ’80s spin on ’60s psych showed rhythmically inclined rock bands like the Stone Roses and Primal Scream the way to the dance floor, while its post-modernist sensibility would eventually take root across the Atlantic in U.S. acts like the Dandy Warhols and the Brian Jonestown Massacre.
Allegory and Self does yield equally sublime moments: the hand-clapped go-go goth of “Just Like Arcadia,” the heavenly Beach Boys homage “Being Lost.” In true PTV fashion, they serve as the Trojan Horse decoys that lead you into some forbiddingly unsettled soundscapes. That said, Allegory and Self’s ugliest, anarchic moments are rendered with the same lustrous detail and shot through the panoramic scope as its big-ticket pop songs. “Starlit Mire” is a house-quaking industrial behemoth that builds into an apocalyptic hellfire of creepy incantations, screeching klezmer violins, and suffocating dissonance. And “Thee Dweller” is at once the album’s most horrifying and hypnotic track, unfurling like a dub remix of the haunting “Mother Fore” section on Pink Floyd’s “Atom Heart Mother,” with P-Orridge’s demonic Beefheartian patter fighting for oxygen against wolf howls that resound like air-raid sirens.
And yet smack dab in the middle of Psychic TV’s artistic and commercial high point, they make room for “Caresse Song,” a Casiotone doodle featuring P-Orridge’s then-five-year-old daughter seemingly making up lyrics and chords on the spot. (Collectively, her cameos on these early Psychic TV records were like the ‘80s industrial equivalent of getting periodic photo updates of your friends’ kids on Facebook.) But as incongruous as this child’s play may seem in the context of Allegory and Self’s grandeur, “Caresse Song” was arguably the most important piece of the puzzle. Amid all of Psychic TV’s controversial efforts to promote new ways of thinking and being, it served as a poignant reminder of who they were fighting for. | 2017-07-22T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-07-22T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Experimental | null | July 22, 2017 | 6.7 | d5578b45-ce91-44c3-ba4b-25980c627f9d | Stuart Berman | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stuart-berman/ | null |
On his third album of 2020 and first for Griselda Records, the Detroit rapper continues to pry open windows onto his past, soul, and psyche. | On his third album of 2020 and first for Griselda Records, the Detroit rapper continues to pry open windows onto his past, soul, and psyche. | Boldy James: The Versace Tape | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/boldy-james-the-versace-tape/ | The Versace Tape | The Versace Tape is the third album the Detroit rapper Boldy James has released in the last six months. It follows February’s The Price of Tea in China, a skeletal but psychedelic collaboration with the acclaimed Los Angeles producer Alchemist, and last month’s constantly molting Manager on McNichols, which was helmed by the veteran but comparatively obscure Sterling Toles, from Boldy’s hometown. Versace pairs the rapper with someone from, well, the internet: Jay Versace, the former Vine star who has lately turned to producing music. It was a surprise this spring when Versace popped up in the credits of Westside Gunn’s Pray for Paris; The Versace Tape is Boldy’s first album for Griselda Records, the label co-founded by Gunn, and fits neatly into a machine that promises steely, ambitious street rap, delivered at regular intervals.
Boldy’s catalog has the quality of genre fiction: his songs hit familiar notes and live in an instantly recognizable milieu. The style is repeatable without being repetitive, its dials tweaked slightly for each new iteration. The Versace Tape’s intro smartly signals that the rapper has refitted his approach for Griselda Records, whose releases––especially Gunn’s––are littered with, and in some ways defined by, references to luxury goods. This intro is a local news clip about a thief who walks into a gas station and steals a “very expensive pair of Cartier glasses” right off of a victim’s face before sauntering out the door and into a waiting car. The police, this news anchor says, described the suspect as “bold and nonchalant.”
That nonchalance is one of Boldy’s signatures; it’s slyly funny when, on the already muted “Maria,” he deadpans that all the money he’s been raking in is making him emotional. Early on “Brick Van Exel”––he can cook with his left hand––Boldy recalls two generations of his relatives growing into the drug trade. The moment is allowed to land, but not linger; there are instructions about burner phones and stern warnings to give. Later on in the same song, he raps, “Every time I met up with the plug, felt like a setup,” before once again dropping that idea to follow a new tangent. This structure and affect makes his music compulsively listenable, because it suggests these stark personal revelations and jaw-dropping asides will be meted out consistently, as if from a metronome. They are.
Versace’s beats are similarly reliable. It is perhaps ironic that such an antic internet personality is turning out beats that fit so neatly in the post-Dilla, -Madlib, -Marcberg world of contemporary underground street rap, where drums are of little concern and loops are often laid bare. This album is warm, as if it was all dipped in sepia.
To that point, one of the most pleasantly surprising aspects of Boldy’s work this year is the sentimentality that creeps in at the margins. “Long Live Julio,” one of the record’s standout tracks, begins with an ad-libbed redux of a famous Eazy-E hook, where the “boys in the hood” are not meant to be menacing and mythic, but rather young and full of promise, frozen in memory. Boldy throws the song into fourth-period lunchrooms and cramped bathrooms where he’s scrubbing Nikes with a toothbrush; he makes the life sentences that hang over murder cases sound like speedbumps in his school parking lot.
Even in these moments, though, Boldy is the consummate technician. From the time he says “Rest in peace, Eric Wright” at the song’s beginning, he never strays from that rhyme pattern; it strings together prayers to God and homage to Fredo Santana. This trio of 2020 albums suggests that the windows into an artist’s past, soul, and psyche can be pried open not only in fits of mysterious inspiration, but also by relentless, uniform effort.
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2020-08-14T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-08-14T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Griselda | August 14, 2020 | 7.7 | d55b8a8a-b645-4bc0-9607-0e6e3efe50ef | Paul A. Thompson | https://pitchfork.com/staff/paul-a. thompson/ | |
Telefon Tel Aviv's latest-- released on the heels of the death of bandmember Charles Cooper-- is a detailed and smartly programmed reimagining of 1980s synth-pop. | Telefon Tel Aviv's latest-- released on the heels of the death of bandmember Charles Cooper-- is a detailed and smartly programmed reimagining of 1980s synth-pop. | Telefon Tel Aviv: Immolate Yourself | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/12611-immolate-yourself/ | Immolate Yourself | Hit the right couple of notes and you could convey even the most complex of feelings. Our ears are hyper-attuned to nuance, whether we notice it or not, and certain sounds can telegraph an avalanche of emotion. Enlisting this shorthand sometimes encourages laziness in musicians, but nobody minds when the results work. For example, "The Birds", the lead track from Telefon Tel Aviv's third album Immolate Yourself, isn't much on paper-- some sequenced synths, an insistent snare, some ghostly, hard to make out vocals-- but its six or so minutes set the stage so nicely for greater things to come it doesn't matter that there's not much there.
The fact that the rest of the disc only occasionally delivers on that promise shouldn't be held too strongly against its achievements. Immolate is arranged and produced with almost microscopic attention to detail by the Chicago team of Joshua Eustis and Charles Cooper, who was tragically found dead the week of this album's release, and the emotions it evokes are undeniably effective-- and musically similar to Junior Boys or M83, sentimental groups that specialize in electronic music imbued with a certain elusive pop glow. Indeed, one of the pleasures and frustrations of Immolate is how subtly it similarly exploits the nearly invisible barrier separating song from simple synth sketch.
Yet unlike the more cohesive albums from those aforementioned acts, Immolate is a one-step forward, one-step back proposition, marching in place to an internal setting somewhere between chilly background mood and something more melodic and engaging. It's impeccably crafted but oddly non-committal, pulling you in and out like a dream. Part of the problem stems from the practical matter of sequencing-- not in programming terms but simply how the album progresses. Following "The Birds", "Your Mouth" pulls off nearly the same sleight-of-hand trick, implying more substance than what's actually there, priming you for something bigger to happen but ultimately leaving you hanging.
The payoff arrives with the next track, "M", which after its slow swoosh of a start develops into an honest-to-goodness song, with vocals, a hypnotic hint of a melody, and herky-jerk drums equally informed by the clubs and contemporary top 40. It's not a Technicolor Wizard of Oz moment, but the effect is largely the same. Something's different, something clicks, or at least clicks and connects in a better way than what came before, even more so on "Helen of Troy", which sounds like a great lost Depeche Mode single-- there's even an actual chorus! With the subdued but still solid "Mostly Translucent", it again sounds like Telefon Tel Aviv found their inner Martin Gore, and the super "Stay Away From Being Maybe" finds the group heeding that advice, the listening experience shifting to a more enthusiastic "definitely."
Then, disappointingly, Telefon Tel Aviv retreat back to mood piece on the pretty but ephemeral "Made a Tree on the World", which once again relies too much on a few well-placed chords and the easy sentiments they suggest. "Your Every Idol" doesn't justify its five minutes of echoing drums, droning synths, and disembodied voices and the record closes with the relatively perfunctory title track and like riding a Mobius strip, we feel back at the beginning again. For all the pleasant stops along the way, the album hasn't come full-circle so much as spun its wheels in place. | 2009-02-02T01:00:04.000-05:00 | 2009-02-02T01:00:04.000-05:00 | Electronic | Bpitch Control | February 2, 2009 | 6.4 | d569bdd8-7548-4c00-92af-92e47114b65d | Joshua Klein | https://pitchfork.com/staff/joshua-klein/ | null |
On his dense but meticulously rendered new album, the British folk singer uses grander pop arrangements to wade into the barbarism of modern life. | On his dense but meticulously rendered new album, the British folk singer uses grander pop arrangements to wade into the barbarism of modern life. | Richard Dawson: 2020 | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/richard-dawson-2020/ | 2020 | A man wakes in the middle of the night to the glowing screen of his partner’s iPhone. He sees a flirty text from an unfamiliar number and sneaks to the kitchen for a carving knife to enact his revenge. If this were the extent of “Heart Emoji,” a highlight on Richard Dawson’s new album 2020, it would still be a strange, modern horror story. But there’s more. Additional details include the phone’s passcode (daughter’s date of birth), the contents of the text message (“I miss you ❤️”), the unwelcome creatures infesting their home (spider, slug), the music playing in the narrator’s earbuds (classical), and a story of how the couple met that leaves you questioning their power dynamic and long-held resentment toward each other. It’s a lot to process—and this is one of the shortest, simplest tracks on the album.
The songs on 2020 all involve first-person narratives that tend to swerve toward grander, anti-capitalist themes, set in Dawson’s native UK. “Obviously a lot of talk has been about Brexit,” he recently told Q Magazine, “but there’s so many other things without the fanfare.” To accompany these complex stories, he makes music that’s equally overstuffed. In “Heart Emoji,” there’s a creeping guitar part—the sound of stalking through the house at three in the morning—and a wobbly synth solo that mimics a blurry unnatural light in a dim room. Dawson himself, a singer whose thick Geordie accent and primal howl seem to emerge from somewhere deep in his stomach, is restless in his delivery, slurring and braying and dipping into a squeaky, heartbroken falsetto to deliver the words “heart emoji,” as if the thought alone might bring him to tears.
Those two words—“heart” and “emoji”—offer a good survey of the album’s themes. On his previous record, 2017’s Peasant, Dawson explored the medieval age, using archaic diction and characters whose dark, grotesque humor left you wondering how distant the past really is. But in the present, amid vape shops and YouTube channels, watching soccer and eating brunch, he finds just as much barbarism. “I don’t want to go into work this morning,” he sings in the opening song, “I just want to lie here and play the new Call of Duty.” And if you think there’s a metaphor somewhere to be uncovered, he makes his point even plainer a few lines later: “I refuse to do this filthy work anymore,” he sings, bellowing the word “refuse” several more times until it sounds like he’s having an actual breakdown.
It’s Dawson’s least beautiful music, but it’s also his most expressive. By comparison, Peasant was lush, conventional even, with its sing-song melodies and pastoral texture. On 2020, the arrangements are proudly inorganic as they lurch and blast, sputter and break. The long-form structure of the record feels more like a short story collection, and taking it in front-to-back can have an overwhelming, exhausting effect. But unlike the sometimes hopeless characters in his songs, Dawson can wield this glut of information in his favor. The extraordinary first single, “Jogging,” embodies this challenge: Dawson sings about seeking therapy in exercise as he tries to cram his thoughts into its vaguely motivational rock melody. It seems like a tight, uncomfortable fit, and that’s precisely the point.
For “Jogging” and several other songs, Dawson took inspiration from conversations he had with fans at shows, and his intimate tone makes you consider words and phrases you’ve never heard in a folk-rock song before: dehumidifier, voluntary redundancy, Nando’s. There’s a level of difficulty to this combination of banality and mythology (minotaurs and sirens also lurk these songs), and Dawson’s mastery as a writer guides you along without hiding the awkwardness of addressing the world at its ugliest. Compared with other sprawling, self-referential works from this year—say, Lana Del Rey’s Norman Fucking Rockwell! or Bill Callahan’s Shepherd in a Sheepskin Vest—Dawson succeeds by finding surreality and horror in his everyday musings. The title seems pointed, referring both to our near future and the power of hindsight.
While the album is placed in hypermodern scenarios, in a world burdened with violence, xenophobia, and generational exhaustion, its most stunning moments lead you to unexpected places. There’s “Black Triangle,” a tale of a UFO sighting that patiently evolves into a less fantastical tale of being dumped for a pilates teacher. Even more ambitious is “Fulfillment Centre,” a 10-minute parable that takes place inside of an Amazon shipping warehouse, transporting you with shuffling sound effects and a robotic call-and-response. “There has to be more to life than killing yourself to survive,” Dawson sings in the closest thing this album has to a thesis statement. Of course, there’s no easy answer, so to follow it, he gives us this thought: “One day I’m going to run my own cafe.” For a minute, the music turns bittersweet and his words feel so tender and close that you could hold them in your hand. And one day, you think, maybe he will.
Buy: Rough Trade
(Pitchfork may earn a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.) | 2019-10-17T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-10-17T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Folk/Country | Weird World | October 17, 2019 | 7.8 | d5708e81-1a87-40f5-a0b4-62bb6feb6ad5 | Sam Sodomsky | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sam-sodomsky/ | |
The Anti-Pop Consortium rapper and producer imagines the death of hip-hop as a means for exploring histories both personal and political: “To write like it’s the afterlife.” | The Anti-Pop Consortium rapper and producer imagines the death of hip-hop as a means for exploring histories both personal and political: “To write like it’s the afterlife.” | Hprizm: Magnetic Memory | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/hprizm-magnetic-memory/ | Magnetic Memory | The opening gambit of Hprizm’s Magnetic Memory is a familiar one. On the album’s first track, “Keep Pushing,” the founding Anti-Pop Consortium MC and producer, aka High Priest, blesses a beat that’s formed around clipped snares and sinister strings with the proclamation, “I resurrected rap by killing it then restoring the feeling.” Hip-hop artists are fond of diagnosing the genre’s ailing health. But rather than a simple autopsy of the genre, Magnetic Memory presents a holistic treatment of hip-hop in which Hprizm time-travels back and forth through personal and political memories. The concept imbues the 25-minute album with a powerful, ghostly aura.
Magnetic Memory’s opening stretch sketches out the ambit of Hprizm’s vision, which he relays over self-produced beats that embrace a compositional approach to sampling rather than relying on extended loops. In “Resuscitate,” frantic snare taps and live sax blasts from James Brandon Lewis prompt the line, “I can’t relive it or bring it back to life/My mission’s to write like it’s the afterlife.” “Waking Them Up,” with mournful synth contrails embedded in static, introduces the idea of furrowing through the memory banks to reach a state of “flashback and future forwards—call it total recall.” On “Break the Body Down,” Hprizm imagines hip-hop as a living organism and invokes the metaphor of a body at war with itself. “When pain heals under the skin it leaves scars/I wear that/No mask on these bars,” he raps, before broadening his horizons: “Robbed of our identity, history and our language/Stress breaks the body down/Fear breaks the body down... Let’s build.”
This building involves journeying deeper into a cache of memories to weave the album’s themes together. The shuffling, backwards tape loops of “F08 Soul” inspire a restatement of golden-age hip-hop standards, with Hprizm hollering, “My team was molded from Kanes, the De Las/For those that said bars were dead, this is a seance.” The song is followed by the frantic “Asia (Adrenaline),” a blast of upbeat ’89-tempo hip-hop smartly sparked by an interpolation of a Big Daddy Kane lyric. Then the spunky boom-bap of “And Bet” gives way to “After the Storm,” a percussion-free vignette that heralds the album’s closing stretch, with Hprizm contemplating a picture of himself as a child, complete with “beams shooting out of the photo/Reflecting back at me rapidly…/Avatar me with my mask off.”
This reflective tone sets up the album’s dramatic climax, “Electric Ladyland,” where Hprizm’s verse becomes figuratively “ghostwritten” as he pays respects to two victims murdered by the police. “Shot Philando on the camera/Korryn died saying she’s sovereign/As I’m writing this, had to light a candle on the mantel/Wax melting down the alter." As the track crescendos into a heady swarm of electric guitar, Hprizm signs off: “Let the lightning flash/All colors and sounds clash/Grabbed a few jewels from the past and made a smash.” With those departing words, Magnetic Memory dissolves into the sampled sounds of a rainstorm. Like everything in Hprizm’s moody seance, it’s a reminder that we often look back in order to travel forward, because we can never escape the specter of the past. | 2018-11-30T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2018-11-30T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rap | Don Giovanni | November 30, 2018 | 7.7 | d57d3ede-aa24-43d2-b8f3-f943ae75e762 | Phillip Mlynar | https://pitchfork.com/staff/phillip-mlynar/ | |
Ben Bondy makes ambient music shot through with sharp, pristinely mixed drums. This album for Huerco S.’s label is psychedelic in a way that suggests a faint sense of nausea or discomfort. | Ben Bondy makes ambient music shot through with sharp, pristinely mixed drums. This album for Huerco S.’s label is psychedelic in a way that suggests a faint sense of nausea or discomfort. | Ben Bondy: Glans Intercum | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/ben-bondy-glans-intercum/ | Glans Intercum | Glans Intercum isn’t really Latin, and if it sounds like something dirty, it’s supposed to. The cover looks like a fruiting fungus at first, but look closer and it’s clearly a moldy dog turd. (Those are mushrooms of a very different kind, though, in his Bandcamp artist photo.) There’s no doubt about it—Ben Bondy is a bit of a jokester. The Brooklyn-based producer and graphic designer might seem like an odd fit for West Mineral Ltd., best known for a vaporous and murky strain of ambient concealed in fog and shadow. But as boisterous as Glans Intercum can be, it really isn’t all that different from what associates and collaborators like Huerco S., Picnic, Pontiac Streator, and Ulla Straus do: ambient music shot through with the pulse of the club.
The difference is that while those artists rarely let anything more than the slightest beat penetrate the murk of their productions, Bondy relegates the more vaporous elements of his music to the back of the mix, using them as a moving platform for some of the sharpest, most pristinely mixed drums you’re likely to hear on an electronic album this year. In the absence of stereo panning, these drums take on a fearful symmetry, and Bondy subtly treats them with echo so they seem to duck in and out of the darker corners of the mix, where all the pads and squishy sounds live. “Ash in Emerald Casing,” “Drip on Nape,” and “Skizz'' are the album’s most relentless drum workouts. Meanwhile, the more ambient tracks that divide them seem composed almost entirely of the pops and snaps and pointillist clicks that usually find their way into West Mineral productions as textural grit.
At first, there seems to be a clear divide between the “ambient” tracks and the “club” tracks, but one of the record’s strengths is how the two feed into one another. There’s always something gorgeous going on deep in the bowels of the bangers, like the great swooning chords that perfume “Emerald Casing” or the wonderful droplet synth on “Drip on Nape” that moves in and out of fields of echo. Meanwhile, the ambient tracks hint at a beat with little shudders and snare rolls, until finally the whole album unburdens itself into the title track, which comes across as an extended sigh. It’s refreshing that Bondy doesn’t treat these tracks as foreplay. There’s always something weird going on in the background (is that the sound of someone chewing on “Spangled?”), and he never relies on loops or drones or synth-pad ruminations to kill time.
This is a spongy, tactile record, and it sustains an organic quality without incorporating anything resembling a “real” instrument. Maybe that’s because of how it always seems to be writhing and twisting. Spoken word by Andrea Stella appears on two tracks, but the words are less important than the way Bondy distends them so they seem to curl back on themselves like a Möbius strip. Bondy, as a lover of all things mycological, must have internalized the way the body wants to squirm out of itself in the throes of a mushroom trip. This is an intensely psychedelic record—not in the mind-expanding way in which the term is usually used, but in a physical way that suggests a faint nausea, a sense of discomfort. If ambient music is associated with comedowns, here’s an album for the peak.
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-08-03T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2021-08-03T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Experimental | West Mineral Ltd. | August 3, 2021 | 7.1 | d582622b-6f56-48b7-9129-23e278e3c447 | Daniel Bromfield | https://pitchfork.com/staff/daniel-bromfield/ |
Subsets and Splits