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A long way from his 1970s folk-rock roots, the veteran guitarist travels far beyond the limits of genre, fusing pedal steel with ambient glitches and piercing insect sounds. | A long way from his 1970s folk-rock roots, the veteran guitarist travels far beyond the limits of genre, fusing pedal steel with ambient glitches and piercing insect sounds. | Mike Cooper: Raft | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/mike-cooper-raft/ | Raft | A 2014 trio of reissues from the Paradise of Bachelors imprint brought the adventurous, early-1970s output of British folk-rock guitarist Mike Cooper to a new generation of listeners. But those reissues also muddied the waters. In the years since those recordings, Cooper has transformed into a maddeningly elusive player, one no longer beholden to folk, blues, rock, or any other genre. In the 21st century, Cooper has kept up a healthy output of woolly music on his own Hipshot label, some 20-plus albums in as many years. Like a small craft traveling from island to island, depending on the album, Cooper might offer up inspired takes on Delta blues guitarist Skip James or Italian minimalist Giacinto Scelsi; for one particularly inspired album, 2004’s Rayon Hula, he ran ’50s exotica through a bank of electronics, rendering your grandfather’s easy-listening into something more akin to Fennesz or Black Dice.
With Raft, he drifts past all of the above touchstones and ventures a bit further out, with each of the album’s seven tracks delving deeper into the 74-year-old musician’s idiosyncratic sound. Nearly 50 years into a recording career that has yielded over 60 albums, it’s hard to suggest a single album as an entry point. If you’re not already attuned to Cooper’s interests of late—a strange brew of shortwave radio interference, gamelan, atonal guitar sounds, field recordings, and Hawaiian slack-key guitar—Raft is a plunge into the deep end.
Opener “Raft 21 - Guayaquil to Tully” glides in with a shimmering drone and rippling notes on steel guitar, which soon butt against glitches and splintering high frequencies. It slides into the album’s centerpiece, the 12-minute “Raft 37 - Las Balsas,” an ambient track that seems to be moving forward and backward at once, and the elongated notes that Cooper conjures on steel guitar are soon joined by their reflection: a guitar accompaniment in the form of a backmasked tape, warping and distending the tones. While the noise and notes don’t ever quite meld together, they do coexist in a curiously easy manner, like gulls floating carefree over turbulent water.
Cooper’s experiments with drum machine comes to the surface on the three-minute “Raft 28 - Vital Alsar,” the album’s most accessible piece. Here his slidework does two things at once, striking crystal-clear notes and also making warped, disorienting figures underneath, producing an effect akin to seeing your legs below you in the ocean. Soon the eerie sound of droning insects at night, combined with foreign-language chatter and the chiming metal of Indonesian gamelan (which sounds like some of Cooper’s own field recordings layered together), makes for the album’s most menacing moments.
“Raft 29 - Honey Hunters,” which opens with Cooper’s slide gently rattling the strings and a motor whirring near the pick-ups, might seem like the most relaxed moment on the album, but the insect sounds that dominate are of such a piercingly high frequency (not unlike this Sublime Frequencies album) that they verge upon the migraine-inducing. And “Raft 36 - Age Unlimited” finds the guitarist in a prickly free-improv mode, coaxing all manner of thwacks, croaks, growls, and scrapes out of his instrument as a canopy of tropical birds chirps across the stereo field. The set’s closing five minutes return to the album’s earlier, more enticing sense of drift, with sounds swelling and receding hypnotically. Glints of old country blues, slack-key guitarist Gabby Pahinui, Fripp & Eno’s (No Pussyfooting), or the KLF’s Chill Out might all come to mind, but if Cooper’s varied and voluminous catalog tells us anything, these are all just tributaries flowing into the man’s particular ocean of sound. | 2017-07-17T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-07-17T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Experimental | Room40 | July 17, 2017 | 6.8 | d5835dc8-293c-4a27-8830-c04df42a03a8 | Andy Beta | https://pitchfork.com/staff/andy-beta/ | null |
After a lengthy hiatus-- one that has found indie increasingly enthralled with clubland crossovers-- the Notwist finally follow Neon Golden and Shrink with an album every bit as intricate in construction and disorienting in effect as its celebrated predecessors. | After a lengthy hiatus-- one that has found indie increasingly enthralled with clubland crossovers-- the Notwist finally follow Neon Golden and Shrink with an album every bit as intricate in construction and disorienting in effect as its celebrated predecessors. | The Notwist: The Devil, You + Me | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/11917-the-devil-you-me/ | The Devil, You + Me | The popular history of the Notwist has been steeped in transformation-- gloomy grunge misanthropes reborn as laptop-pop romantics. But in the six years that have elapsed since the German band's 2002 Stateside breakthrough Neon Golden, the Notwist haven't changed so much as the definition of what it means to be an indie/electronic crossover act.
For the Notwist, the gradual adoption of IDM idioms was less a paradigm shift than a complementary outcome, with the clicks and cuts that permeated Neon Golden and its 1998 predecessor Shrink providing a more modern variation of the tape hiss and crackle that formed the intimate ambience to the classic 80s indie-rock records on which brothers Markus and Micha Acher were raised. But since Neon Golden's release, the indie/electronic divide that the Notwist so carefully toed has been obliterated in a flash of strobe lights, with acts like Cut Copy and Hot Chip pushing shy-guy indie-poptronica out of the bedroom and onto discotheque floors; compared to the outsized, big-room ballast of "Lights and Music" and "Over and Over", the Notwist's brand of mechanized melancholy now seems understated.
Of course, the obvious move would be for resident programmer Martin Gretschmann to beef up the beats and set the synths on squelch. But for all of their rhythmic manipulations and percussive precision, the Notwist have always strived to move the heart over the hips. And if anything, their knee-jerk response to indie's current clubland crossover is to head back to the garage: The Devil, You + Me's stellar opening salvo, "Good Lies", begins with a bright, jangly guitar riff and a pounding floor-tom beat that mainline Sonic Youth's Daydream Nation, while frontman Markus Acher introduces the anthemic, gently fist-pumped chorus. But the song's euphoric rush-- emphasized by its breakdown/rebuild structure-- is decidedly at odds with the betrayals described within. Acher provides a candid glimpse into a troubled marriage by describing it in terms of the material goods used to prop it up-- "I remember good lies/ When we carried them home with us/ To our bedside tables and the coffee sets"-- thereby keenly drawing parallels between dysfunctional relationships and the IKEA-furnished apartments that house them: the cool surface appearances barely concealing the soul-deadening sterility. The equally affecting "Gloomy Planets" works a similar contrast between expression and repression-- overtop spirited folk-song strums, Acher asks "why is everything so locked up?" before the song's ascending, accelerated climax lets it all out in a cathartic gush of tremoled synth tones and motorik motion.
Appearing in the first and third positions respectively, "Good Lies" and "Gloomy Planets" make an early case for The Devil, You + Me as the Notwist's return-to-rock gesture, and the fact that the title track-- a glockenspiel-glistened acoustic lullaby-- is based upon a chorus melody very similar to that of Neon Golden's "Pick Up the Phone" might suggest the Notwist are settling into a comfort of zone of sorts. Though they comprise The Devil, You + Me's most immediate moments, these songs aren't the most representative ones on an album that proves to be every bit as intricate in construction and disorienting in effect as its celebrated predecessors. Melody is an absolute, but everything else is fair play: on the unnerving "Alphabet", a tense one-chord acoustic strum clears the way for a procession of horror-movie drones, power-drill guitar squall, laser-beam synths clattering drum breaks and incessant sleigh bells-- recalling the soundtracky beat-scapes the Notwist fashioned in 2006's 13 & God collaboration with hip-hoppers Themselves-- all while Acher drops one-liners like "I won't sing you algebra" with an eerie sense of calm. Later, on side two, the bedside ballad "Sleep" projects a break-of-dawn optimism that's mischievously undercut by piercing glitches and booming dub breaks, the latter of which also form the backbone for the shadowy slow-motion creep of "On Planet Off". But even as the mise en scène around him mutates in unexpected, sometimes sinister ways, Acher's voice is unwaveringly poised, an eminently curious instrument that manages to project both disaffection and great concern in the same breath.
In contrast to its briskly paced first act, The Devil, You + Me doesn't so much build to a finale as gradually wind itself down, lending the album a sense of anti-climax; in retrospect, it would have been a smart idea to reassign "Gloomy Planets" to the home stretch so as to break up the second side's mid-tempo momentum. But even after a six-year siesta, the Notwist's approach to pop music-- exploiting both its formal properties and endless possibilities-- is no less captivating and visionary than before. And when Acher declares himself "Gone, Gone, Gone" on the album's sweet, uncannily Nico-esque closing ballad, you're left hoping you won't have to wait another half decade for a reintroduction. | 2008-06-19T01:00:02.000-04:00 | 2008-06-19T01:00:02.000-04:00 | Electronic / Rock | Domino | June 19, 2008 | 7.7 | d587ee66-e945-490b-b40c-6b54cc5e7e5e | Tyler Grisham | https://pitchfork.com/staff/tyler-grisham/ | null |
The minimal-techno icon celebrates the 20th anniversary of the breakthrough LP where he first established his otherworldly percussive sensibility. | The minimal-techno icon celebrates the 20th anniversary of the breakthrough LP where he first established his otherworldly percussive sensibility. | Ricardo Villalobos: Alcachofa (2023 Reissue) | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/ricardo-villalobos-alcachofa-2023-reissue/ | Alcachofa (2023 Reissue) | There is a kind of party that has the rareness and mystique of a beautiful and endangered species, something connoisseurs spend years chasing and feel blessed to experience for themselves. Specifics will vary from person to person, but in many cases this scene may not much resemble what the average person might imagine when they hear the words “nightclub,” “rave” or “dancefloor.” Ricardo Villalobos described his version in a 2007 interview. It would be outside, preferably near a river. It would have exceptionally clear sound. And it would, in ways that are hard to explain, exist outside pressures of the world at large, free from the tyranny of linear time itself, a place where attendees—not so much paying customers eager to be entertained as warm-hearted people down for whatever—return to a state of childlike playfulness. Alcachofa, released on Playhouse in 2003 and reissued this year on Perlon, is both a soundtrack to, and transmission from, the semi-utopian bubble that has long been his domain.
If music is a language, as Villalobos believes, Alcachofa is his first work of poetry. “I prefer a clear, understandable, calm voice in music,” he once said. “I don’t like fortissimos.” The “understandable” part may be hard to square with a record that begins with “Easy Lee,” an afterhours anthem whose lyrics, moaned through a Nord Lead vocoder, no one has ever quite been able to decipher beyond the titular phrase. This sets the tone for an album defined by oblique moods and loose, organically evolving arrangements. Emotions come in subtle shades, from the nervous edge of “Bahaha Hahi” to the quiet determination of “Quizás” (Spanish for “maybe”).
Unlike so much neatly regimented dance music, these tracks unfurl according to the unconscious logic of improvisation, meandering serenely despite their brisk tempos, introducing elements that appear once and never return, and ending somewhere different from where they began. There are melodies, vocals, and hooks, but they’re upstaged by the sounds themselves—crystalline, impossibly tactile, deftly gelling mic-recorded acoustic sounds with electronic instruments (whose inventors Villalobos honors, along with his family and loved ones, in the album’s dedications). The percussion in particular is immaculate, with kick drums (when they appear) like beads of porcelain connecting his delicate structures. In a wise shuffle of the track order, Perlon’s reissue ends with “Waiworinao,” a DJ tool made almost entirely of samples of the Polish jazz bassist Krzysztof Ścierański, and a dazzling contrast to the lean electronics that come before it.
Few artists manage such subtleties in club music, but it’s not surprising that Villalobos does. Rhythmic music has been one of his primary modes of self-expression since childhood. His parents, Chileans displaced to Germany by Pinochet’s coup (part of the ignominious legacy of the recently departed Henry Kissinger), raised him in a house full of South American music and spontaneous parties, where a young Ricardo might be handed a conga in an all-night percussion session. He proved a valuable addition to Frankfurt’s booming club scene in the 1990s—DJing, throwing parties, and making hypnotic house and minimal records that embodied a unique blend of influences: South American music, synth pop (he was a Depeche Mode super fan), kosmische bands like Kraftwerk and Can, and, later, the kind of jazz and classical that might appear on ECM (a label whose catalog he remixed, alongside Max Loderbauer, in 2011). Much of his adult life has followed a weekly cycle: a few days in the studio, then DJ gigs all weekend, rarely playing for less than three hours, and sometimes for eight or more. (“I prefer not to sleep,” he once told an interviewer. “I don’t like it so much.”)
Heard today, Alcachofa is clearly the essential turning point in his decades-long body of work. Before it came a dozen or so distinctive but relatively traditional house and minimal records, among them classics like “The Contempt” and “808 the Bassqueen.” After it came music too wild to fit established notions of club music, or, for that matter, the runtime of a vinyl 12". There was Fizheuer Zieheuer, a 37-minute mind-bender that calls to mind both Latin house and Manuel Göttsching’s E2-E4; then his “Apocalypso Now” mix of Shackleton’s “Blood On My Hands,” a haunted 19-minute odyssey whose lyrics will inevitably invite some listeners to ponder the spectacle of September 11th (“when I see the towers fall... fall... fall…”)—a bold move for the wee hours in room one at London’s fabric club.
For many DJs, dance music is an art form tailored to a specific time and place, which might explain its occasionally limited range. For Villalobos, it’s enmeshed with the essence of human life. This is, after all, a man who described himself as “the remix” of his father, says Basic Channel records remind us of being in the womb, and celebrated the birth of a child with a 17-minute DJ tool (2008’s “Enfants”). Alcachofa was, especially at the time of its release, a powerful demonstration that “DJ-friendly” need not imply a dumbing-down. Consider “Dexter,” whose ambiguous blend of warmth and sorrow goes well beyond the emotional range of most dancefloors. And yet “Dexter” is, along with “Easy Lee,” the album’s most famous track. When Zip played it at Houghton festival last summer, sometime around 10 a.m. beneath an overcast sky, its mournful hook got whoops and whistles from the crowd—along with at least one set of misty eyes.
Perlon’s reissue is more than merely ceremonial. The album has been out of print for years, and, like most music from this lifelong internet skeptic, has never been sold digitally. Perlon, the Berlin label founded by Zip and Markus Nikolai that is home to much of Villalobos’ most adventurous music, has reimagined it slightly, packaging its four vinyl discs in a particularly ecstatic orgy of text (their longtime visual signature) and shaking up the tracklist of the original (and divergent) LP/CD pressings a bit—they’ve added “Bach to Back” and “Waiworinao,” from the Alcachofa Tools EP, and ditched two others, “Fools Garden (Black Conga)” and “What You Say Is More Than I Can Say.” Curiously, the final chords from that last one waft over the beginning of “Dexter,” as they did on the Playhouse CD, implying Perlon used those masters instead of the original vinyl cuts—an odd quirk that may lead purists to remain partial to Playhouse’s original vinyl package, but one that won’t to matter to anyone just happy to have their hands on the thing.
This reissue serves a larger purpose, too. Villalobos has spoken about the importance of preserving the delicate community of artists, labels, and clubs that he inhabits, in part by making and releasing music on independent labels, especially on vinyl. In that sense, this reissue of Alcachofa is not just an artifact of his elusive world, but also part of his ongoing effort to keep it alive. | 2023-12-12T00:01:00.000-05:00 | 2023-12-12T00:01:00.000-05:00 | Electronic | Perlon | December 12, 2023 | 8.3 | d598f9b0-7642-46a2-b285-94d97dde5c53 | Will Lynch | https://pitchfork.com/staff/will-lynch/ | |
Talking Heads’ fifth album is an inky passport of sounds—art-rock, funk, pop, Afrobeat—meticulously mapped for the collective yet informed by the movements of the individuals. | Talking Heads’ fifth album is an inky passport of sounds—art-rock, funk, pop, Afrobeat—meticulously mapped for the collective yet informed by the movements of the individuals. | Talking Heads: Speaking in Tongues | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/talking-heads-speaking-in-tongues/ | Speaking in Tongues | In nearly 35 years of David Byrne’s stage performances, some elements have endured: He still dances passionately with floor lamps. He lies supine on the stage, singing into his headset. Brass and woodwind players march around him in geometric shapes. Above all, his hyphenate backing singers/dancers always seem positively euphoric, beaming in a way that transcends professionally rehearsed cheer, as they execute song after song of quirky, nimble bends and leaps, the sort of exaggerated movements that evoke children’s specials and turtleneck-heavy performance art. From Talking Heads’ epochal 1984 concert film Stop Making Sense to Byrne’s celebrated 2019 Broadway show American Utopia, these dancers’ amusement has always been scrawled on their faces: How different this is, they seem to muse while in their Gumby contortions, perfectly identical yet each awed in their expressions. What an absurd, wonderful thing we’re doing now.
Their balance of joyful freedom inside methodical choreography, spontaneity inside structure, perfectly mirrors Talking Heads, who first mastered that equilibrium in the studio. On their fifth album, Speaking in Tongues, Byrne, Tina Weymouth, Chris Frantz, and Jerry Harrison indulge their unusual, gamboling whims within solid walls. The record brought along the spry, Afrobeat-inspired polyrhythms and funk saunter of 1980’s Remain in Light while adding in new wave’s synths and the sharp, physical precision of Byrne’s 1981 score for Twyla Tharp’s dance piece The Catherine Wheel; there are also glimmers of the neon pop cheer of Weymouth and Frantz’s side project Tom Tom Club. Together, this inky passport of sounds yields an album that, besides smoothly mixing art-rock with funk with pop, feels meticulously mapped for the collective yet informed by the movements of the individuals.
Even for an album titled after communication—nodding to both glossolalia and Byrne’s famously garbled scatting in recording sessions—Speaking in Tongues is singularly immediate and direct. In each song, one concept—one saucy bass-and-piano walking line, one ricocheting keyboard line, one heavily shouted pyromaniac refrain—repeats into an insistent foundation, so emphatic it begins to burrow into a trancelike state befitting the album name. Choruses are evolutions of verses, of ideas that have repeated enough to feel lived-in. Weymouth’s funk bass, the unsung star of the album, is never far from the foreground.
This rigid framework throughout allows the rest of the instrumentation to cavort above it: A jubilant momentum rises throughout “Girlfriend Is Better,” but its base—a sauntering line from Weymouth, sci-fi synth radiation from guest Bernie Worrell of Parliament-Funkadelic—is set quickly. This bedrock allows for Byrne’s hoarse, scattered shouting to reach velocity above while still feeling controlled. “Pull Up the Roots” flirts with disco as it rides a tight rhythm section that feels a shade too hectic for dancing; the bass bounce starts at a gallop and the guitar backflips around it. “Burning Down the House,” Speaking in Tongue’s biggest hit—and the only Top 10 single in Talking Heads’ entire catalog—starts with a literal scream from Byrne, and has no clear markers between verse and chorus: It is a full stampede to the howled refrain, an explosion buoyed by such a perky trajectory, it sneakily exculpates some the most insurgently unglued lyrics to ever crack the Billboard charts. (“People on their way to work and baby what did you expect?/Gonna burst into flame!” is some dark, dark weather.)
Byrne’s lyrics have been deemed inscrutable art-school fare by many, minimized as Mad Libs sold as gospel; in fact, as Speaking in Tongues proves definitively, they are is the opposite. Byrne sings like a kindergarten teacher, or a Rosetta Stone language bot: in plainspoken, short observations that make sense individually, yet sequence into a mystifying dialogue. On “Moon Rocks,” when Byrne seems to scoff at alien intelligence—“Flying saucers, levitation/Yo I could do that!”—and follows it up a hair’s-breadth later with a liberal arts pep talk—"So take your hands out of your pockets/And get your face adjusted”—these are perfectly intelligible thoughts, individually. On “Slippery People,” Byrne and sensational guest vocalist Nona Hendryx offer a strange sort of gospel proselytizing—"Turn like a wheel, he’s alright/See for yourself, the Lord won’t mind,” a millisecond before sharing stark memories of cold bathtub water—over a merry funk pulse and scratchy, uber-’80s synths.
For all its charms, and the big single it housed, Speaking in Tongues lies in the shadow of Remain in Light; it’s not as effortlessly cohesive, its diffused interests not as zealous and enchanting as its more focused predecessor. But Speaking in Tongues does have the distinction of ending on the Talking Heads song most likely to be on a skeptic’s wedding playlist: “This Must Be the Place,” a neurotic’s concession to love even as he frets over the transience of life, and a bittersweet pact to let someone into his fearful mind. Byrne is unusually tender; his wild thoughts flow in one direction. As he sings gently to his partner, wondering, “Did I find you, or you find me?” the beautiful messiness of existence seems to soften. Here aren’t 30 thoughts bandying for space in Byrne’s fulminating brain, only vulnerability. There aren’t three synth lines racing off a cliff, just some percussive clang and one light synth wobble. His expression of love feels even more romantic because he clearly still knows love is a distraction. It's the strangest move of all from him, and it almost makes sense.
Buy: Rough Trade
(Pitchfork earns a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.) | 2020-04-23T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-04-23T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Sire | April 23, 2020 | 8.5 | d59b8f22-b493-4790-bbc8-97027980b775 | Stacey Anderson | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stacey-anderson/ | |
The debut album from Meg Duffy and Joel Ford maps the interaction between delicate fingerpicking and precise electronic textures; it is a study in subtle, gorgeous discord. | The debut album from Meg Duffy and Joel Ford maps the interaction between delicate fingerpicking and precise electronic textures; it is a study in subtle, gorgeous discord. | Yes/And: Yes/And | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/yes-and-yes-and/ | Yes/And | There is an inherent sweetness in Meg Duffy’s work. As Hand Habits, the guitarist and songwriter is known for their layered, intimate melodies. Their songs sound cracked open, split to reveal a softly glowing warmth. Under a new partnership with producer Joel Ford, prior collaborator of Oneohtrix Point Never and Jacques Greene, Duffy retains that vulnerability, but it is subverted and fortified by Ford’s peculiar, dissonant treatments. The duo recorded their self-titled debut as Yes/And during a series of mid-pandemic studio sessions in Los Angeles. The wordless, 10-song collection maps the interaction between Duffy’s delicate fingerpicking and Ford’s precise textures. It is a study in subtle, gorgeous discord.
Yes/And tugs gently between two realms: the serene and the uneasy. At times, this tension is present within a single piece. On “Ugly Orange,” a sunny, pastoral phrase reminiscent of Duffy’s work with guitarist William Tyler somersaults throughout the song. But there are things creeping beneath the motif that belie its playful nature: A buried, crackling voice, synthesized whale song, and a small, ceaseless drone. As Duffy plays, the loping melody staggers and slowly collapses into this field of sound. Ford’s expanding squeals and static devour the riff, like waves reclaiming flotsam that’s been washed ashore. “Tumble” is also underpinned by tiny, almost imperceivable patches of distortion, but it’s the innocuous friction in Duffy’s playing that is most fascinating. Their guitar strings are tautly drawn and palm-muted, each percussive strum flat and dry. The repetitive cadence is almost grating in its simplicity, yet somehow it is oddly soothing.
These moments of well-placed strain add intrigue, but they do not detract from the album’s mesmerizing pull. Yes/And play with scope as much as they do detail, toying with the listener’s sense of proximity to the music. On “More Than Love,” we feel extremely close to the source: The unsteady, agitated strings scratch around like insects crawling through dry grass. On “Centered Shell,” intricate guitar flourishes sparkle like sun-drenched asphalt. Here we are zoomed in, inspecting each three-dimensional detail under a high-powered microscope. Contrary to these tactile compositions, mid-album track “Learning About Who You Are” is cosmic and grand. Ford employs broad washes of synthesizer, resonant and metallic and mysterious. The noise is all-enveloping—you don’t stop to consider the hands that created it; you just let it sweep over you.
Duffy typically sings on Hand Habits recordings, their light, clean register providing context outside of their agile guitar technique. On Yes/And, Duffy is largely voiceless, their playing recontextualized by Ford’s understated maneuvers rather than the arc of a personal narrative. On the fragmented “Emoticon Scroll,” Duffy’s presence recedes furthest into the background. It is Yes/And’s most abstract piece, split between an extended, scuffed-up groan and pulses of springy, croaking keys. It is at this very moment that Duffy’s role as a guitarist becomes so clear and essential. In their absence, the warmth and sensitivity coursing through the rest of the album also retreats. This lack is sharply felt on “Emoticon Scroll,” though it is likely intentional, given the song’s cold, detached title. As closer “In My Heaven All Faucets Are Fountains” trickles in immediately after, Duffy’s deft plucking returns triumphantly. No matter how disguised or reshaped, their sweet, pure playing is the undeniable heart of this music.
Buy: Rough Trade
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Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-08-04T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2021-08-04T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Experimental / Rock | Driftless | August 4, 2021 | 7 | d59d3577-a80d-48c6-80db-38ac4c3a5dff | Madison Bloom | https://pitchfork.com/staff/madison-bloom/ | |
Darold Ferguson Jr.-- best known as A$AP Ferg, a member of A$AP Rocky’s A$AP Mob crew-- brings a tantalizing skillset to the table, a startling versatility and an electricity that not even his more famous friend can boast. Those skills are evident on Trap Lord, a release that began life as a mixtape and has been transformed into his major label debut. | Darold Ferguson Jr.-- best known as A$AP Ferg, a member of A$AP Rocky’s A$AP Mob crew-- brings a tantalizing skillset to the table, a startling versatility and an electricity that not even his more famous friend can boast. Those skills are evident on Trap Lord, a release that began life as a mixtape and has been transformed into his major label debut. | A$AP Ferg: Trap Lord | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/17921-aap-ferg-trap-lord/ | Trap Lord | Darold Ferguson Jr.-- best known as A$AP Ferg, a member of A$AP Rocky’s A$AP Mob-- brings a tantalizing skillset to the table, a startling versatility and an electricity that not even his more famous friend can touch. He sings (see his star-making debut on Rocky’s “Kissin’ Pink”), he can write (take his bendy, gleeful “Shabba”), and he’s weird-- when he’s feeling purple, he channels his inner Fergenstein, a lewder, more hedonistic persona. He also talks big: “I wanna be as known as Jesus,” he told me earlier this year, later mentioning his affinity for artists like Jean-Michel Basquiat and Warhol. (Sounds like he’d enjoy Jay-Z’s bathroom). He’s funny, he’s got a peculiar style, and he’s got, for a lack of a better word, a sizeable amount of swag. Like Rocky, he's a uniter of rap audiences and regional sounds, the only other performer in the A$AP crew who’s exhibited that star-like sheen so far. If he were to deliver on that promise with a debut that properly channeled all the potential... next stop, stratosphere.
Trap Lord, Ferg’s debut mixtape turned debut album, probably isn’t that record, though it has quite a few bright spots. While it begins with a fierce, feverish bundle of tracks-- the hulking, patois-smeared “Let It Go”, the infectious knocker “Shabba”, the emotional, mythologizing “Hood Pope”-- it’s also listless in spots, too reliant on underdeveloped ideas. Some of that can be chalked up to the nature of the record's existence-- like Flockaveli, it was originally conceptualized as a mixtape and only later was transformed into a major label debut. But a fair chunk of Trap Lord finds Ferg trying to figure himself out in real-time-- a natural shape shifter, he never stays in the same form for long, switching personalities and flows at the drop of a hat. Where it’s effective on songs like “Hood Pope” and the thundering opener “Let It Go”, it’s less so on scatterbrained songs like “Fergivicous” and “Make a Scene”. For an artist drawing effortlessly from what seems to be a wellspring of creativity and thoughtful tribute, Trap Lord can, at times, feel underdeveloped and skeletal.
But, that’s not to suggest that Trap Lord doesn’t sound great-- A$AP Mob still has the best ears in town. The production is leering and paranoid but rippled with muscle. It’s a dark-tinted record, to be sure, sonically and lyrically. The VERYRVRE-produced “Hood Pope” chronicles the loss of a young child; “Murder Something” uses a Kirk Franklin analogy to underscore a particular, graphic ass-kicking; the closing, experimental “Cocaine Castle” uses a crack house as the setting, a location where the protagonist sees “doctors in their suits”, babies, his mom. It’s heavy shit, reinforced by thick, tense production from under-the radar producers like Frankie P, P on the Boards, Snugsworth and HighDefRazjah. The stormy sonic texture is the backbone that the album aligns itself along, a logical combination of Cleveland smoke (Bone Thugs-N-Harmony incidentally show up on "Lord"), Death Row menace, and classic New York rap radio that's perfectly tailored to A$AP Ferg's reverential package.
When Trap Lord flashes-- Ferg’s speed-it-up-slow-it-down verse on “Work” is pure thrill-- it’s brilliant. But despite its status as his commercial debut, it's easiest to approach it as a low-stakes introduction to Ferg, an artist who, like Rocky and other newcomers like Travi$ Scott, has the ability to push the boundaries of the genre toward more experimental sounds and ideas. Though Trap Lord's vision is refracted through split personalities-- for better or for worse-- A$AP Ferg still sounds like a star in the making. | 2013-08-22T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2013-08-22T02:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | A$AP Worldwide / Polo Grounds Music / RCA | August 22, 2013 | 7.5 | d5a04bdb-1958-4221-8f1b-3d78f74368e7 | Corban Goble | https://pitchfork.com/staff/corban-goble/ | null |
This brief EP shows just how much ingenuity and fresh new wrinkles Wata Igarashi can wring out of his Roland-909, Ableton, and modular synth set-up. | This brief EP shows just how much ingenuity and fresh new wrinkles Wata Igarashi can wring out of his Roland-909, Ableton, and modular synth set-up. | Wata Igarashi: Question and Answer EP | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/wata-igarashi-question-and-answer-ep/ | Question and Answer EP | Four months into the new year, the Japanese techno producer has already dropped two spacey yet sinister EPs for Berlin, contributed a live podcast mix to Resident Advisor, made the relentless acid cut “Adrenochrome” as part of the Bunker’s massive compilation 15 Years of the Bunker, and now returns to the Brooklyn imprint for another four-track release. Question and Answer may not be as focused and of-a-piece as Mood of the Machines, his standout 2016 EP for the label, but it shows just how much ingenuity and fresh new wrinkles Wata Igarashi can wring out of his Roland-909, Ableton and modular synth set-up.
“Outburst” opens the EP at full throttle, a menacing yet minimal piece of peak time techno that draws from the axis of techno masters like Jeff Mills and Kenny Larkin. As unrelenting as its kick is, the track soon reveals chasms of black space around every beat, with Igarashi making them feel even deeper and more disorienting, especially when the low end cuts out and you feel like you’re dangling in deep space, with a visceral sense of release washing over when the bass finally returns. It’s techno and EDM’s stock trick of the trade, yet Igarashi makes it feel compact yet expansive at the same time. Perhaps it’s thanks to Igarashi’s day job as sound producer on more commercial projects, there’s a crystalline yet never flashy exploration of what just a few sonic elements can do to the listeners’ perceptions.
With just a handful of elements—and at a slightly slower tempo than its predecessor—“Train of Thought” is nevertheless mesmerizing, liable to hijack your own on headphones. With destabilizing synth line, a slow arching sinewave and a ceaseless thump ever so subtly shadowed by a shaker, Igarashi builds the track up to a dizzying peak, to where it hits a cruising altitude four minutes in and stays aloft the rest of the way. “Broken Telephone” is similarly cautious in its build, a slow chugger that soon picks up some steam. And once everything is in motion, the 909 and the modular squiggles that Igarashi uses here bubble up like over-carbonated seltzer, making for a tingly sort of space that’s easy to get lost in.
The title track recently marked an early peak on Igarashi’s RA podcast and it remains a standout entry here. Full of clattering, metal-tinged percussion and an extreme arpeggio liable to make you vertiginous with its high peaks and valleys, it feels like a rollercoaster, the type of track that when deployed at the right moment can turn an underground techno party into a funhouse. A mix of hard percussion and ethereal effects swirling around at the periphery of perception, it’s these sorts of queasy, head-bewildering moments in Igarashi’s productions that reveal his knowledge of Jimi Hendrix and appreciation of psychedelic rock. Perhaps those are peculiar influences for a techno artist, but it’s what fellow producer Peter Van Hoesen called “the right amount of psychedelic sensibility” in his music. Even those averse to experimental techno will find plenty of moments to space out to here. | 2018-04-30T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-04-30T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | The Bunker | April 30, 2018 | 7.5 | d5aabf7a-f70f-4041-8294-0136f274ddee | Andy Beta | https://pitchfork.com/staff/andy-beta/ | |
After the disappointing Indie Cindy and the serviceable Head Carrier, the band shows signs of recapturing some of the spark of their classic albums. | After the disappointing Indie Cindy and the serviceable Head Carrier, the band shows signs of recapturing some of the spark of their classic albums. | Pixies: Beneath the Eyrie | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/pixies-beneath-the-eyrie/ | Beneath the Eyrie | During all those years that fans clamored for new music following the band’s 2004 reunion, who could have predicted that expectations for a new Pixies album would ever sink so low? After nearly a decade spent growing rusty on the reunion circuit, the band deflated what little excitement remained following Kim Deal’s departure with Indie Cindy, a comeback that not only failed to recreate their old mystique, but struggled to even understand what made the band so alluring in the first place. The sinister spark, the mischief, that giddy confusion they stirred with their blur of candy and sadism—it was totally absent, replaced by an at best anonymous, at worst obnoxious shrug of secondhand tics.
At least things couldn’t get any worse. It didn’t buy them back much goodwill, but 2016’s Head Carrier was perfectly fine, a serviceable effort roughly on par with the average Frank Black album. And over the last few years the band’s concerts have begun to show signs of life again, thanks in part to replacement bassist Paz Lenchantin, whose happy-to-be-here presence sets an example for her tired bandmates. Having new material to perform doesn’t hurt, either. It at least offers the group a chance to mix it up a bit after years of bleeding the same old Doolittle staples dry.
The Pixies’ modest rebound continues on their pleasant, undemanding, and completely respectable new album Beneath the Eyrie. It won’t win back scorned fans who took the band’s fall from greatness as a personal betrayal, yet it comes closer to conjuring the gleeful chill of the Pixies’ classic albums than anything they’ve released since reuniting. There are moments where, if you zone out just a little bit, it feels like you’re listening to some Bossanova B-sides that you somehow missed. The Pixies have finally made an album that scratches the itch for new Pixies music.
It’s got some rippers on it, too. The romping “Graveyard Hill” (one of several tracks co-written by Lenchantin, an eager presence throughout the album) sets up Black Francis for some of the freest, most feral barks he’s unleashed in two decades. “The Long Rider,” meanwhile, is the album’s big earworm, and prime radio fodder on the off chance alternative stations decide a new Pixies single might be something they’re into. It’s made from recycled parts—repurposed pieces of “Velouria,” mostly—but it lifts off in a way few classic Pixies imitations do.
The band is also learning how to make change work in their favor. Francis’ slithery, sexual energy of yore has given way to an old-man crotchetiness. Instead of feigning the mystique that now eludes him, he leans into candor, touching on his recent divorce in unguarded terms, at least on the tracks where he isn’t singing about witches or mythical half-human sea creatures. The blustery opener “Arms of Mrs. Mark of Cain” and the naked “Ready for Love” cast him as heartbroken and cursed, picking up where his confessional final effort with the Catholics, Show Me Your Tears, left off. Even the spritely jangle of “Bird of Prey” does little to temper the resentful bite of Francis’ lyrics. “You’ve stolen my tomorrow/So I come for it today/You stole it when you stole my yesterday,” he sings in a smoldering, Leonard Cohen growl.
The Pixies recorded Beneath the Eyrie at a creepy old church, which must have helped juice the gothic sound that they’re going for. Of course, in their prime this band could make even the most sterile studio sound haunted, but after two records grasping for ambience, it’s nice to hear a Pixies album with a moody sense of place again. It’s weird that “better than nothing” became the bar for what was once one of the most celebrated bands of their era, but if it’s a choice between more records as solid, if unspectacular, as Beneath the Eyrie or nothing, the Pixies might as well keep them coming. It’s been a long time since this band had anything left to lose.
Buy: Rough Trade
(Pitchfork may earn a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.) | 2019-09-17T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-09-17T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Infectious / BMG | September 17, 2019 | 6.7 | d5b04767-d78c-4f61-b8d4-26fb1eed9cdc | Evan Rytlewski | https://pitchfork.com/staff/evan-rytlewski/ | |
Recorded over the last 15 years, and alternating between stripped-down folk and thickets of distortion, Shade takes Grouper’s careful balance between intimacy and inscrutability to a new extreme. | Recorded over the last 15 years, and alternating between stripped-down folk and thickets of distortion, Shade takes Grouper’s careful balance between intimacy and inscrutability to a new extreme. | Grouper: Shade | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/grouper-shade/ | Shade | Liz Harris always seems to be telling us a secret. The catch—and the thing that makes her music as Grouper so fascinating—is we’re never sure what. Titles like “Thanksgiving Song” and “The Man Who Died in His Boat” hint that she’s letting us in on specific moments and memories, but the lyrics lean toward abstraction, and that’s when you can make them out from behind a thick wall of reverb. From 2014’s Ruins onward, Harris has scrubbed away much of the grit from her sound, and it’s been a thrill to watch her music hint at candor before ducking back into the shadows where it thrives. Shade takes this knife’s-edge balance between intimacy and inscrutability to the extreme.
Many of Shade’s nine tracks feel like experiments in how much Harris can remove from her music while retaining its essential mystery. The album’s most notable development is to present her voice and acoustic guitar largely unadorned. The setting is so spare we can hear the buzz of the room and the squeak of her fingers on the frets. On “Ode to the blue” and “Pale Interior,” her words seem to dissolve as soon as they leave her mouth, and the faint slapback echo on “Pale Interior” puts an extra degree of separation between her voice and the listener. Even in such a raw and intimate context, listening to these songs still feels like entering an environment rather than being serenaded by someone with a guitar.
On the other side of the spectrum, we hear songs that retreat deeper into thickets of distortion than anything she’s made since 2011’s A I A. The album opens with “Followed the ocean,” and immediately she’s belting, her voice working with the guitar feedback to push the mix into the red. That song and the dramatically side-chained “Disordered Minds” sound like Laura Nyro singing from the middle of a maelstrom. We get all the ache of a great soul vocal without totally understanding what’s moving enough to merit such an emotional delivery. The contrast with the acoustic material is kind of funny, like Harris is playing with two ways of making sure her message almost gets to us.
A few tracks on Shade feel like love songs. That’s certainly true of “Unclean mind,” with its hushed and naked pleas. The repetitive guitar motions of “The way her hair falls,” in tandem with the oft-surfacing word “pretty,” make it feel as if she’s performing a tender and intimate gesture such as braiding a lover’s hair. But Shade seems just as interested in Harris’ proximity to nature. On “Kelso (Blue sky),” we hear an owl hooting in the distance (Harris likes serendipitous, non-human duet partners; remember the microwave on “Labyrinth” from Ruins). “Followed the ocean” feels buffeted by the elements, like a wanderer on a spiritual quest. And the omnipresent room tone on the quieter tracks alerts us to the presence of the vastness of the surrounding universe, just on the other side of the walls.
Harris recorded these tracks over the last 15 years, in the Bay Area and Oregon. The easy assumption is that the fuzzier songs are older and the newer songs represent the conclusion of the trend toward more unvarnished production on Ruins and 2018’s Grid of Points. But it’s hard to be sure, and on “Ode to the blue,” her voice sounds enough like Vashti Bunyan’s to make me wonder if it wasn’t recorded closer to 2006, when Bunyan’s influence was more pervasive in indie rock. Either way, the possibility of a 15-year leap as “Followed the ocean” abruptly barges into “Unclean mind” is nearly as disorienting as the famous million-year match cut in 2001: A Space Odyssey.
Grouper albums typically pick a mood and stick with it, but the jostling together of the two poles of Harris’ sound gives Shade a distinct tenor within her discography. This push-pull structure accounts for much of what makes the record fascinating, but it also makes it harder to get lost in than some of her albums. The major-key “Kelso” feels like too resolute an ending so soon after “Basement Mix” leads us into the woods down a trail of low-end distortion. And there are a few moments that try too hard for an “intimate” feel, like when a bit of jokey dialogue interrupts the end of “Disordered Minds,” or the take of “The way her hair falls” where she messes up and starts over. But had Shade followed a more disciplined arc, it might lose its sense of floating freely through time and memory, replaying some moments with striking clarity and burying others in the fog.
A more stripped-down Grouper isn’t necessarily more interesting or emotionally resonant, but it’s hard to think of many musicians who are better at transmuting pop and folk structures into abstract, haunted environments, and that strength has not dimmed on Shade. The chain reaction these nine songs generate together produces enough fog and smoke to keep the spell going strong—and to keep whatever secret she’s trying to tell us just on the other side of the speakers.
Buy: Rough Trade
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Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-10-26T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2021-10-26T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Experimental | Kranky | October 26, 2021 | 8.2 | d5b2d21b-d91e-4b27-b1ee-edc2c4c92d00 | Daniel Bromfield | https://pitchfork.com/staff/daniel-bromfield/ | |
Soft-hearted and whisper-voiced, Chicago singer-songwriter Jessica Viscius’ band reflects on loneliness and loss with no hint of resentment. | Soft-hearted and whisper-voiced, Chicago singer-songwriter Jessica Viscius’ band reflects on loneliness and loss with no hint of resentment. | Bnny: One Million Love Songs | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/bnny-one-million-love-songs/ | One Million Love Songs | There is a special ache that sets in after any big ending. It doesn’t need to be a breakup; it could be a death, moving out of an apartment, or settling in for bedtime at the end of an especially perfect day. Throughout their seven-year career, Chicago soft rockers Bnny have sat in this wounded sadness like a frog on a pond. Their second album, One Million Love Songs, finds power in it, using rough-hewn layers of guitar to break open singer-songwriter Jessica Viscius’ teary-eyed world.
Viscius’ grief-struck 2021 debut, Everything, excavated some of her pain following the 2017 death of her partner, the musician Trey Gruber. (Viscius is also a former graphic designer for Pitchfork.) It was slow and frostbitten, with Viscius’ voice interrupting cold silences like dust, but One Million Love Songs furnishes the abandoned house with a more delirious form of acceptance. Constant disappointment is okay, or at least tolerable, because it proves you’re alive. “I’m just born blue,” Viscius sings on the anthemic “Crazy, Baby,” dripping with Angel Olsen’s melted ice cream inflection.
Bnny’s sorrow flows from a breakup, this time. Wednesday producer Alex Farrar helps make it brighter with little rhinestone details, like the heartbeat thump of the drums on “Get It Right” that propels Viscius’ promise that “I’m trying, I’m trying, I’m trying.” “Good Stuff” sparkles like a ruby slipper, spinning out into a Sheryl Crow chorus: “I’m hanging on/To the sunshine,” Viscius sings with abandon, like she turned up the car radio, “I’m hanging on/To my big love.”
But, unlike comparable breakup music—“burn it down and pack it into a lipstick tube” albums like Jagged Little Pill or, more recently, Sour—One Million Love Songs is never indignant. It doesn’t imagine keying anyone’s pickup truck. Bnny’s music feels more like surrendering to the “million” disappointing outcomes of love, the introverted antithesis to the Magnetic Fields’ 69 Love Songs: the urgent need to acknowledge that you could end up alone. The firefly blink of the acoustic closing track, “No One,” makes this abundantly clear. “Burned some bridges/And burned some doors/Now no one loves me anymore,” sings Viscius, resigned. So, what should you do—lash out? No, you savor the mystery.
Sometimes, the lyrics on One Million Love Songs unhelpfully pull you from your seat just when it’s just starting to get good. Lines like “trying to walk straight/But I’m stumbling/Trying to forget you/But I’m struggling” feel more like getting lost in RhymeZone than in Viscius’ otherwise lovely garden. But the album masters melancholy anyway, using careful guitar and vocal flourishes to make the music’s embryonic self-consciousness feel urgent, like it’s yours. There’s power in reclaiming unhappiness, allowing it to become a piece of your heart instead of a weight on your back. | 2024-04-17T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2024-04-17T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Fire Talk | April 17, 2024 | 7.3 | d5cfa6dc-965e-4d71-97c7-92ed7298c397 | Ashley Bardhan | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ashley-bardhan/ | |
The Buffalo rapper’s new project is another serving of glamorous beat loops and gaudy raps delivered with the confidence of someone who believes that all of their thoughts belong in the MoMA. | The Buffalo rapper’s new project is another serving of glamorous beat loops and gaudy raps delivered with the confidence of someone who believes that all of their thoughts belong in the MoMA. | Westside Gunn: Who Made the Sunshine | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/westside-gunn-who-made-the-sunshine/ | Who Made the Sunshine | No Westside Gunn project stands alone. Each release is like a Marvel movie, made to raise the profile of his Griselda Records brand and introduce new rappers into his tight-knit community of collaborators. If it happens to be really good, that’s a bonus. A Westside Gunn project has both a floor and a ceiling: The worst are not so bad, and the best are exciting, but just a notch below great. Most importantly though, they’re reliable, like a Toyota that’s good on gas and only has to go to the shop once a year.
Westside Gunn’s new album, Who Made the Sunshine, is exactly what you would expect: glamorous beat loops and gaudy raps delivered with the confidence of someone who believes that all of their thoughts belong in the MoMA. His standout solo moment is “Big Basha’s,” where Gunn weaves between grimy and swanky bars. “Glock next to my nuts, Balenciagas oversized,” he says, on Daringer and Beat Butcha production that would suit dinner on a yacht. But outside of “Big Basha’s” the album is less a showcase for Westside Gunn, than for his favorite rising emcees, underground stalwarts, and hip-hop legends.
If you were to rank the top five verses on Who Made the Sunshine, I’m not sure any of them would belong to Westside Gunn. On the eight-minute posse cut “Frank Murphy,” for instance, five guests leave their mark on a soothing Conductor Williams beat. Most notably, the Syracuse native Stove God Cooks mentions that his plug resembles Razor Ramon, compares an act of violence to the Rocky training montage, and offers possibly the first Bruce Bowen name-drop in at least a decade, all in one unforgettable minute. Similarly, “All Praises” overcomes unnecessary Westside Gunn crooning through mellow Alchemist production, a radiant Boldy James verse, and Jadakiss, who never fails to be timely: “Everybody woke now, they want us to vote now/COVID-19 is the stamp on the dope now.”
But Westside Gunn deserves credit for his Kanye-like ability to seamlessly work anyone into his world. The best example of this is a pair of Slick Rick features, which Gunn treats carefully. Each verse is slotted at the end of their respective tracks, for maximum reverence. On “Ocean Prime,” following an overly intense Busta Rhymes, the beat becomes slightly less busy and draws you in, as if Gunn’s afraid you’ll miss a word of Rick’s verse. On both songs, Rick sounds ageless and sly; “Goodnight” is like the moment when a wrestling forefather makes their long-awaited return to Monday Night Raw.
Yet, as far as Westside Gunn projects go, the loops here are less memorable and consistent than his better records (see: Pray for Paris and Flygod). Tracks like Daringer and Beat Butcha’s “The Butcher and the Blade” and “Ishkabibble’s” are fine, but they sound like leftovers from Kool G Rap’s 4,5,6 that have been cleaned up and polished—they could use some mud. Daringer and Beat Butcha are responsible for seven of the 11 tracks, and they make up for the few misfires with splashes of greatness, like “Lessie,” which includes a nostalgia-invoking sample resembling an ice-cream truck jingle. But it’s these slight inconsistencies that separate the more successful Westside Gunn projects from the forgettable ones. Who Made the Sunshine falls somewhere in the middle, and doesn’t feel like it was devised to be anything more than what it is: another step toward the expansion of the Griselda Records brand.
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2020-10-02T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-10-02T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Shady | October 2, 2020 | 6.7 | d5dd31eb-bc64-47d4-a395-fb9d93a7d37a | Alphonse Pierre | https://pitchfork.com/staff/alphonse-pierre/ | |
Josh Davis' third album is an odd mélange of exotica, hyphy, and alt-rock, featuring guest spots by both David Banner and Christina Carter. No, really. | Josh Davis' third album is an odd mélange of exotica, hyphy, and alt-rock, featuring guest spots by both David Banner and Christina Carter. No, really. | DJ Shadow: The Outsider | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/9436-the-outsider/ | The Outsider | On his first two albums, DJ Shadow-- mired in memories of Eric B., Brian Eno, and the Meters-- seemed worlds away from the conceits of mainstream rap. But underneath his detached exterior lies all the egoism and paranoia of the best hip-hop stars: "There are songs on [The Outsider] that I think blow away almost anything else I've ever done. One thing’s for sure-- it's going to make it very difficult for people to imitate my sound," Shadow posted on his website. It wasn't just talk. His new album slyly sabotages the biters: Who'd be dumb enough to copycat all this watered-down exotica and epileptic hyphy?
It'd be impossible to "sound" like Shadow anyway, since there's no consistency (or any distinctive elements, really) to be found here. In fact, The Outsider may be one of the least cohesive records this year. Its total incoherence is actually kind of impressive: It's somehow even less structured than both the motley singles comp Preemptive Strike, and UNKLE's Psyence Fiction, which managed to begin with Kool G Rap and end with Metallica's bassist.
So then, The Outsider makes a pretty apt title: This album should alienate virtually everyone who's ever been a Shadow fan. Trance divas won't tolerate its madcap hyphy collaborations, cratediggers will shun its middling alt-rock tributes, and everyone else will wonder why samples and breaks are replaced by lukewarm synth washes. Nearly every track seems like a rote genre exercise, as if Shadow spent the past four years perfecting a parlor trick. Granted, The Outsider's hip-hop tracks are better than its rock-influenced ones, but that's a backhanded compliment: Shadow's tracks are so dense and claustrophobic that even the most manic MCs-- Keak Da Sneak, the Federation, and David Banner-- falter amidst the onslaught.
That said, the production is sometimes engrossing, and occasionally more: Both "3 Freaks" and "Turf Dancing" at times flirt with something close to genius, popping with burped blips, convulsive beats, and synthesized froth. The grinding mixes echo everything from Too $hort to Computer World, and the psychotically dour "Keep 'Em Close" spreads coked-out cant over submarine sonar and icy department-store piano. But all these songs succumb to lazy speak-sing choruses that dull the clinical anger of their verses.
The record peaks with David Banner's elegy to New Orleans. Part séance, part TV-movie, Banner's performance perversely resembles Katrina itself: Everything gets a hell of a lot whiter when it's over. Suddenly, the high-adrenaline hip-hop bids us adieu, to be replaced mostly by monotonous alt-rock instrumentals that play like a tour through mid-90s KROQ playlists. The Martin Denny vibe (complete with birdcalls!) of "The Tiger" is completely insufferable; the Southeast Asian strings of "Triplicate/Something Happened That Day" are littered with amateur field recordings; and while "You Made It" (featuring Charalambides' Christina Carter) is patently ridiculous, at least its ostentatious spoken-word will be familiar to Shadow fans. The same can't be said of "Erase You"'s insipid Britpop bullshit. The only rock-tinged success here is "Artifact"-- and its smoldering acceleration, funk synths, and pent-up thrash might as well be a mash-up of the Count Five and Bad Brains.
Again, most listeners won't have the luxury of praising or penalizing Shadow for his efforts. It's difficult to even discern whether his recent interest in pop production might prove rewarding with the benefit of hindsight. Nearly everything this record offers-- from the garbled hyphy to the Private Press soundalikes-- is lackluster, if not downright disappointing. Incoherence is not necessarily a fatal flaw, but accompanied by tedium and confusion, The Outsider sounds like a chore-- to record, to listen to, and to review. | 2006-09-19T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2006-09-19T02:00:01.000-04:00 | Electronic | Interscope | September 19, 2006 | 5.8 | d5e5d198-6b23-4d34-b3df-5ecf02937b45 | Alex Lindhart | https://pitchfork.com/staff/alex-lindhart/ | null |
In the early 1980s, the Glasgow pop duo Strawberry Switchblade were a band with many possible futures. This raw three-song demo catches a glimpse of the group they could have become. | In the early 1980s, the Glasgow pop duo Strawberry Switchblade were a band with many possible futures. This raw three-song demo catches a glimpse of the group they could have become. | Strawberry Switchblade: 1982 4-Piece Demo | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22803-1982-4-piece-demo/ | 1982 4-Piece Demo | The story of Strawberry Switchblade is a reminder of just how small the alternative music scene was in the early 1980s, and how deeply its subcultures intertwined. Formed in 1980 in Glasgow by Jill Bryson and Rose McDowall, the pair’s eye-catching look—gothic Geisha in polka dot dresses and black lace gloves—set them apart from their immediate peers, the buttoned-up young men of the Postcard Records scene. Their early live performances caught the attention of John Peel, for whom they recorded a BBC session. But with renegade A&R man Bill Drummond—later to form pop terrorists the KLF—installed as the group’s manager, Strawberry Switchblade turned to face the mainstream.
Their 1984 single “Since Yesterday” was a breezily nostalgic electronic pop song that McDowall later claimed was about nuclear war. It broached the UK Top 10, propelled the duo onto the cover of Smash Hits, and made them officially big in Japan—screaming fans, limousines, the works. Strawberry Switchblade split acrimoniously two years later. By now, though, McDowall was a face on the post-industrial scene, singing with Psychic TV, Coil, and the neofolk groups Current 93 and Death in June. She was also hanging out with a young Björk, then part of Icelandic anarcho-punk band Kukl.
For a group that lasted just one album, this is a long and tangled history, and one that Glasgow label Night School have made it their task to unknot. In 2015, Night School released McDowall’s lost post-Switchblade LP Cut With the Cake Knife, and they follow now with this—a seven-inch of previously unreleased music from Switchblade’s earliest days. 4-Piece Demo lines up three songs in 10 minutes, and it passes quick. Captured while the group was briefly a quartet, completed by bassist Janice Goodlett and drummer Carole McGowan, this recording captures a Strawberry Switchblade only hinted at by their existing recordings: a cutie garage group hiding something desperate and nihilistic beneath their gently shambolic exterior.
The sweet-savage juxtaposition of Strawberry Switchblade’s name found echo in their music. Bryson and McDowall wrote songs that sounded winsome and naive, but spoke of an emotional desolation that was anything but contrived. In interviews, McDowall has spoken of her hard-knock upbringing in a Glasgow sink estate, where violence was rife and she watched her six-year-old brother die following a beating. Bryson, meanwhile, suffered from extreme agoraphobia, writing about her condition on Strawberry Switchblade’s debut single “Trees and Flowers.” The version here, pared down to droning guitar and clumpy drums, is some of the sweetest fear and loathing that you ever heard. “I hate the trees/And I hate the flowers/And I hate the buildings/And the way they tower over me,” sings McDowall. The song closes with a lament: “Can’t you see/I get so frightened/No one else seems frightened/Only me, only me…”
One song here is wholly new. With its hopscotch rhythms, keening harmonies, and squirming bass, “Spanish Song (Don’t Go)” would sound like textbook C86 were it not for the mariachi guitar outro that starts out halting and ends close to joyous. Meanwhile, “Go Away” offers another glimpse of how Strawberry Switchblade’s debut album might have sounded. The version that appeared two years later is a high-gloss thing, all breathy synths and pseudo-oriental melodies—but this take, with its wispy Velvets jangle and gently deflating chorus, arguably captures the song’s lyric of sorrowful abandonment all the more keenly.
Completing the package is liner notes written by Stephen Pastel, a friend of Strawberry Switchblade who, around the time these songs were recorded, was busy prepping the debut single by his own young group, the Pastels. Their music was, like that found on 4-Piece Demo, a little primitive and rough around the edges, but full of creativity and life. The Pastels would kickstart a whole new indie-pop fanzine culture, though, and prove extraordinarily resilient, remaining an ongoing concern today. Strawberry Switchblade were a band with many possible futures, and this demo offers just a fleeting glimpse of the group they could have become. | 2017-02-02T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2017-02-02T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Night School | February 2, 2017 | 7 | d5eac6c2-c7a1-4378-8b59-32a69355dce5 | Louis Pattison | https://pitchfork.com/staff/louis-pattison/ | null |
Bloc Party’s serene fifth LP observes the void of evangelism in present pop culture, and tries to fill it. But there’s an awkward sense that frontman Kele Okereke is clutching at spiritual straws, rather than relating an honest-to-God epiphany. | Bloc Party’s serene fifth LP observes the void of evangelism in present pop culture, and tries to fill it. But there’s an awkward sense that frontman Kele Okereke is clutching at spiritual straws, rather than relating an honest-to-God epiphany. | Bloc Party: Hymns | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21384-hymns/ | Hymns | Shortly before Arctic Monkeys came along, you could divide UK indie into three camps: It started with the Libertines, then came Franz Ferdinand, and finally Bloc Party, a four-piece from London's New Cross. Each songwriter commanded his own archetype—back-alley dreamers Pete and Carl, suave epicure Alex Kapranos, misfit idealogue Kele Okereke—and took a unique grab-bag of influences from the British canon*.* Alex Turner once said he walked "the lyrical tightrope between Jarvis Cocker and Mike Skinner," and while it’s fair to say Okereke, a clumsier wordsmith, is not a lyrical tightrope-walker, he’s a master of the shallow dive. His grand proclamations ("I am trying to be heroic/ In an age of modernity," began A Weekend in the City) scale queasy heights, plummet theatrically, and manage improbable landings.
Bloc Party's last record, 2012’s Four, was billed as a return to form but lacked the cool menace of the early stuff, which channeled Manic Street Preachers as much as Wire or Joy Division. Silent Alarm, their 2005 debut, wasn’t the best UK indie record of its era, but it was one of the savviest, and maybe the angriest. On follow up A Weekend in the City, Okereke wrote boldly about subjects he took seriously—the isolation of modernity, upper-crust London's coke-fueled opulence, the absurdity of MTV, the disappointing political views of teenagers in shopping malls, the selfishness of ex-lovers, and, perhaps underpinning it all, the "2nd generation blues" of a black twenty-something living in a city that wanted to destroy him. Despite occasional misfires, Okereke won us over because he embodied a role his contemporaries wouldn’t touch: that of the outsider genius making sense of a corrupt world through music—music he believed, or refused not to believe, would improve it.
Inspired by a Hanif Kureishi talk Okereke saw in London, Bloc Party’s serene fifth LP observes the void of evangelism in present pop culture, and tries to fill it. But the notion that our jaded generation needs nothing more than a dose of devotional art is tired, and while last-ditch religion per se isn’t Okereke’s ticket here, there’s an awkward sense that the 34 year old is clutching at spiritual straws, rather than relating an honest-to-God epiphany.
The good news is that "The Love Within," Bloc Party’s comeback track, an indie disco-pop hybrid that is somehow both garish and bland, is comfortably the worst song on Hymns. A little better is "So Real," which trails a Silent Alarm throwback riff over low-key soul and hangover-soothing deep house; on "The Good News," a similarly midtempo Blur pastiche, a down-and-out narrator trudges from "the Gospels of St. John" to the "bottom of a shot glass."
That Okereke writes clunky lines by choice is conceivable, and you see why he might: a ruthless commitment to writing economically; overcompensation for the tryhard smartassery of youth; or a self-fulfilling paranoia that jarring sincerity is Bloc Party’s redeeming gimmick, and fixing the leaky roof would require tearing the whole thing down and starting over. It's more likely, though, that between long band hiatuses and sporadic immersion in DJ culture, the songwriter in Okereke has been displaced by some other existential component. "These words will fall short/ But I must try," he sings earnestly on "Exes," and you scratch your head, wondering if that’s what trying sounds like.
In fairness, that song—borne along by sighing chords and a gospel choir—is enjoyably soothing, a highlight on an album that, "The Love Within" aside, hangs together well enough and is never unpleasant. As ever, Okereke’s lyrically inspired moments are not perfect but richly specific and poignant. On "Living Lux," a shattering post-breakup lament, he sings, "I want to spend my money on you." It's a nicely judged line, the kind of faintly pathetic confession you'd expect from the vanquished high-roller we met on A Weekend in the City. Sadly, nine years on, that seems to be the only character he can play with conviction. | 2016-01-27T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2016-01-27T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Vagrant / BMG / Infectious | January 27, 2016 | 5 | d5f5a3d8-e0f8-40b1-b12a-ba9c2f419951 | Jazz Monroe | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jazz-monroe/ | null |
Originally released in 1986, the reissue of High Rise II shines a light on an important and fiery document of Japanese psych rock. | Originally released in 1986, the reissue of High Rise II shines a light on an important and fiery document of Japanese psych rock. | High Rise: High Rise II | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/high-rise-high-rise-ii/ | High Rise II | Western listeners have long been drawn to underground Japanese music that falls between genres. Once the domain of pricey imports and fanzine pages, this decade has seen compilations such as Chee Shimizu’s More Better Days gather off-beat pop that draws from all over the global map, while labels like Palto Flats and WRWTFWW Records get rarities back into Western rotation. One of the most ambitious reissues projects comes from Black Editions, which is bringing out-of-print gems from Hideo Ikezumi’s psych-rock-leaning PSF label. Their latest is a fixture of Japanese underground rock, the second album from the Tokyo band High Rise. It’s a frantic set of blow-out garage rock that lives at their stylized intersection of psych, free jazz, and punk—a fiery testament to these Japanese artists’ ability to sever themselves from existing music communities to create something all their own, and capture a singular, high-energy moment in their careers.
High Rise officially came together in 1982, centered around bassist and vocalist Asahito Nanjo and guitarist Munehiro Narita. Both grew up listening to imported Western music—Nanjo obsessed with any soundtrack he could find, Narita exposed to the Doors, Pink Floyd and Wilson Pickett among others via an uncle—before venturing into even more eclectic territory, developing a playing style heavily shaped by groups like Grand Funk Railroad and Blue Cheer. Punk, free jazz, and no wave caught both of their attention, as did domestic projects such as early Keiji Haino outfit Lost Aaraaff and the band Friction (featuring Reck, an early member of Teenage Jesus and the Jerks). The pair found themselves briefly playing in the same shadowy psych band, Kosokuya, but soon grew restless. “I decided to do something ‘hard’ with the people I got on best with,” Nanjo said in an interview.
The pair started playing as Psychedelic Speed Freaks, a name obvious about that Tokyo record store owner Hideo Ikeezumi asked them to change it before he put out their debut album on his label because it was too direct. They renamed themselves High Rise—after J.G. Ballard's 1975 novel—and in 1984 put out Psychedelic Speed Freaks, their first album and the accidental namesake of Ikeezumi’s fledgling label. High Rise, though, set the template for future PSF groups, if not sonically than at least in attitude. Their feedback-stained improvised rock drew from the wild jazz and avant-garde communities dotting Japan, but with a rock backbone provided by Narita’s guitar playing. “We didn’t have a position,” Najo says of their place in the Japanese music world, and they’ve never sounded like they lamented it.
High Rise II marked the crest of the band’s fried-out psych, partially because they found Yuro Ujiie, a drummer who could actually keep up with Najo and Narita. High Rise have cycled through drummers at a quick clip over the last few decades, but Ujiie was the only one to push the central pair into their most fertile territory. It’s not just about swiftness, although cuts like “Last Rites” and “Turn You Cry” are among their quickest salvos. Just as important was Ujiie’s ability to hang with two players ready to veer off in different directions at any second, lending II a more manic energy than their locked-in debut.
Not that you would notice, at least right away. Critical to II’s atmosphere is how the drums get mixed lower, putting the emphasis on the fuzz-soaked bass and guitar. Ujiie provided propulsion, but it’s more subtle across High Rise’s second full-length, pushing songs forward but staying just out of the spotlight. Same goes for Nanjo’s vocals, coated in distortion and tough to make out. “They’re just various bits of English junky slang strung together. They just say that if you want to take drugs, you’re going to have to be prepared to die,” Nanjo has said of his lyrics, pointing to the group’s foundational theme of being anti-drugs (“The concept was to save the junkies”). Still, every word gets obscured by sound, rendering Nanjo’s singing as an unnerving (and, frequently, catchy) detail rather than something to really dwell on.
High Rise created a cult because of the way the guitar and bass tore off across their songs. As relayed in interviews, the group didn’t create songs as much as they made concepts, improvisations that sounded focused. Narita’s guitar playing goes a long way here, tearing apart the heavy groove of “Cotton Top” and darting across “Wipe Out’s” rush of bass and drum fills. If Nanjo and Ujiie were more in sync and creating a constricting squall, Narita added the rush of on-the-edge oblivion that gives II such a dizzying vibe. Comparing faster cuts like “Turn You Cry” and “Last Rites” to hellacious motorcycle chases works well—the guitarist described High Rise’s music as “like seeing a traffic accident happen right in front of you.” The same reckless plunge forward even comes through on II’s one extended jam, the 13-minute whirlwind “Pop Sicle,” a number bringing to mind the slow-burn dirges of Les Rallizes Denudes sped up and frayed.
Black Editions reissue presents what they call the “definitive version” of II, mixed and mastered by Nanjo. He makes sure the guitars come to the fore of this 2018 version, maintaining the wild energy of the original. Two bonus songs originally found on a PSF CD version released in 1993 also appear here—the chug-a-lug of “Monster a Go Go” is as close as High Rise came to sounding like a conventional rock band, and earns its status as an extra. Far better is “Induced Depression,” a psych blast more in line with the shorter numbers on II featuring some particularly busy solos courtesy of Narita.
II caught High Rise at their most confident and adventurous—future releases would find Nanjo, Narita and whoever could handle the kit slowing down, or with the singing and drums coming through more clearly, while all involved would venture off into multiple other groups, like the more structured Mainliner or Musica Transonic. It’s on this 1986 release, though, where they are most eager to blaze their own path, not just far removed from the glitzy sounds of mainstream Japanese music during the bubble years but from other underground artists. II holds nothing back, but it also features catchier elements separating it from the pure bludgeoning of Merzbow and other “Japanoise” acts, while also being more muscular than the dramatic sounds of labelmate Haino. No shortage of niche acts popping up in Tokyo’s live-houses sound like High Rise, but the real legacy to glean from II is that of a band embracing their independence and going their own way. | 2018-02-13T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2018-02-13T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Black Editions | February 13, 2018 | 8.4 | d5f68864-11d1-4677-8f75-8dc80ef97666 | Patrick St. Michel | https://pitchfork.com/staff/patrick-st. michel/ | |
On his first proper full-length in three years, the Japanese electronic musician collages tiny sounds into intricate grooves that harness the wonder of everyday life. | On his first proper full-length in three years, the Japanese electronic musician collages tiny sounds into intricate grooves that harness the wonder of everyday life. | Foodman: Yasuragi Land | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/foodman-yasuragi-land/ | Yasuragi Land | Foodman’s music assembles tiny sounds into intricate grooves. Short clicks and pops, clipped gurgles and swishes, and miniscule snippets of synth arrange themselves into tangled rhythms that reference different types of electronic music, from house and footwork to classic video-game soundtracks, but always feel skewed and toylike. Often it sounds like a miniature approximation of dance music, as if he’s built a club out of a colorful assortment of Legos, just waiting for the tiny figurines to come alive and find their groove. It is a swirl of joy and creative energy, leaving an unmistakable impression of the Japanese producer’s wonder as he discovers the answer to the question “What happens if I do this?” over and over again. No matter how tricky or obtuse the beats become, a sense of gleeful exploration is self-evident.
The Lilliputian scale of the music highlights its warm playfulness. “I want to make music out of these fun little moments in our daily lives,” Foodman, aka Takahide Higuchi, said several years back. “I really value those psychedelic feelings that you can sometimes get from small things, like totally forgetting yourself while taking a bath because it feels so good, or while you’re eating curry at home....I want to transpose what I feel at those moments into music.” On Yasuragi Land, Foodman’s first proper full-length in three years, he digs further into this side of his music, leaning into the intimate familiarity of the acoustic guitar and scooping out any stray remnants of low-end from the mix. Yasuragi translates to “peace of mind” or “serenity”; it’s also the name of a Japanese bathhouse in Sweden, which might not be coincidental, given Higuchi’s documented affinity for saunas and spas. Though the music on Yasuragi Land isn’t new age by any stretch of the imagination, it reveals a calm and focused mind nimbly assembling hundreds of different sounds and textures just so.
Yasuragi Land has more in common with the whimsical cut-and-paste style Foodman perfected on 2018’s Aru Otoko No Densetsu than with the more straight-ahead, nearly club-ready EPs he’s released for Mad Decent and Highball in the past two years. It tends towards an omnivorous, throw-everything-at-the-wall approach, and though nearly every track has a loose groove tethering it to terra firma, syncopated hits and stray added beats can make it feel immeasurably complex. One of the album’s defining features is its very sparse use of bass, a technique that enhances the crispness of the sound. Endless kicks and heavy low-end throb can be exhilarating but also exhausting; at the end of each listen through Yasuragi Land I’ve felt rejuvenated and light, having experienced the music’s unencumbered energy and motion as a purely uplifting force.
The muted twang of digitally rendered acoustic guitar is a pervasive, but subtle, presence throughout. It often emerges as a counterpoint to the synth blips and intricate percussive taps, either wildly strummed, as on “Shiboritate,” or existing on the fringes, buried among sampled flutes, squeaks, and knocking claves, like on “Food Court.” Several years ago Higuchi relocated back to his hometown of Nagoya, and has spoken about the rush of nostalgia that came in the wake of his return, including memories of playing guitar and busking outside of train stations. His music has always existed just beyond the grid, but the guitar’s loose, untamed nature makes the album feel like the haphazard effervescence of the real world is worming its way into the vivid yet ordered digital environment. Those happy memories of first playing music for others seem to be a potent source of inspiration, adding to the album’s impression of gentle euphoria.
Whether it’s losing yourself in the gooey umami of a shoyu tamago—as the name Foodman suggests, eating has been a major influence on Higuchi—or feeling your body slowly being enveloped by steam, the experiences he draws on for inspiration are moments when the self dissolves into pure sensory experience. Yasuragi Land, with all its bizarre nooks and silly tangents, doesn’t attempt to replicate the stillness of those moments, but instead serves as a reminder of the spirit of curiosity that makes them possible. The album’s intricacy is an invitation to listen closer and decipher all his little sleight-of-hand details, letting the music’s simple joy excite its own small moment of everyday bliss.
Buy: Rough Trade
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Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-07-12T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2021-07-12T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Experimental | Hyperdub | July 12, 2021 | 7.6 | d602186c-c00f-41c3-a2c0-a8243969d344 | Jonathan Williger | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jonathan-williger/ | |
On his striking new LP, the pop-ambient composer Matthew Cooper, aka Eluvium, marshals his sound into sweeping maximalist splendor. | On his striking new LP, the pop-ambient composer Matthew Cooper, aka Eluvium, marshals his sound into sweeping maximalist splendor. | Eluvium: False Readings On | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22281-false-readings-on/ | False Readings On | Matthew Cooper is one of our definitive contemporary pop-ambient artists, and he never goes too long without issuing Eluvium music in some fashion. He tends to release an LP about every three years, as though his creativity runs on the same long natural cycles that inform his songs. Though his albums blend into a timeless stasis in memory, going back over his discography—without even getting into collaborations with the likes of Explosions in the Sky’s Mark T. Smith—reveals a process of deliberate change, and then assimilating the changes back into the whole.
Cooper began by coaxing drones from guitars in the manner of Stars of the Lid and playing misty-eyed piano études. He then came into his own on 2007’s polyglot Copia, where added strings and winds glowed from within. The 2010 Similes LP made room for (and was diluted by) Cooper’s wan vocals. But he corrected course on 2013’s Nightmare Ending, where he fell silent again, ginning up dark clouds of distortion for a dense, nocturnal experience.
False Readings On is a logical follow-up, marshaling Eluvium’s arsenal into sweeping maximalist splendor. And perhaps it’s that sense of a logical conclusion that makes it sometimes feel more impressive than genuinely transporting. To be sure, Cooper is operating with persuasive confidence. With hardly a shadow to be found, the music is bright, loud, and physical. The stated theme is “cognitive dissonance in modern society.” One often scoffs at ambient artists who put too fine a point on the heady themes of their sparse chord changes, but you can actually hear how the concept structures the compositions, as drastically different speeds and timbres play against one another, unleashing turbulent energies.
That’s clearest in “Fugue State,” where nervy tootles that sound ripped from the madder regions of Philip Glass’ Music in Twelve Parts are held in check by a grand, slow harmonic apparatus. The funnels of distortion from Nightmare Ending are back, all but blotting out the inner dynamics of “Washer Logistics.” There are glorious organ chords, like the wind-beaten surface of sun-slicked water. Screaming quasi-operatic vocals telegraph some afterlife feeling beyond pleasure and distress; they do the orchestral heavy-lifting. Lustrous acoustic guitar strums and pianos glint here and there. And it’s all pillowed in the softest harmonies, shot through with the long revolutions of simple intervals in the bass or a recessive synth tone.
Each track is either very short or very long. The long ones build and break with magisterial resolve, sometimes to a fault: “Beyond the Moon for Someone in Reverse” and “Rorschach Pavan,” though very different in tone, have almost identical arcs. The album’s thick relentlessness flatters the soft space of “Movie Night Revisited,” where acoustic swells evoke Arvo Pärt by way of the Caretaker—sacred music gone benignly mad. The Messiaen-like wind line that enters in the middle is a welcome surprise on an album where tracks are more likely to gather and repeat without changing direction.
It’s a reminder of the more reticent Eluvium of Copia, still his best album. For the most part, those elegant, eloquent miniatures are gone. Instead, we must be drenched in distortion, buffeted by mezzo-soprano gales, swallowed by keyboard chords, drowned in drones. The effect is certainly striking. Album closer “Posturing Through Metaphysical Collapse” accounts for a quarter of the album’s length, and luckily, it’s a keeper, drawing all the album’s motifs into a climactic tour de force. And yet the sense persists that the more Eluvium piles on, the less unique he sounds. False Readings On is awesome while it’s playing, and when it stops, it’s gone. But the small, chiming whorls of “Radio Ballet,” you won't soon forget. | 2016-09-07T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-09-07T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Temporary Residence Ltd. | September 7, 2016 | 7 | d603fd13-11d8-4add-a289-9c47c2658926 | Brian Howe | https://pitchfork.com/staff/brian-howe/ | null |
Unlike some of R&B’s showier personalities, the Chicago singer makes do with a great voice, laid-back vibes, and a classic sound that’s neither brazenly modern nor self-consciously retro. | Unlike some of R&B’s showier personalities, the Chicago singer makes do with a great voice, laid-back vibes, and a classic sound that’s neither brazenly modern nor self-consciously retro. | BJ the Chicago Kid: 1123 | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/bj-the-chicago-kid-1123/ | 1123 | BJ the Chicago Kid has spent his career straddling the line between sideman and star attraction. The Chicago crooner guested on singles from Kanye West and Schoolboy Q and recorded with many of the most distinguished artists of his generation—Kendrick Lamar, Chance the Rapper, and Solange among them, in addition to Dr. Dre, Freddie Gibbs, Vic Mensa, A$AP Rocky, Lil Durk, and dozens more. He performed at Barack Obama’s 2017 farewell address and earned three Grammy nominations for his 2016 Motown debut, In My Mind. Yet for all that exposure, he still hasn’t had a charting single of his own.
It seems the industry loves BJ the Chicago Kid’s voice but doesn’t have much of an opinion one way or the other about him as an artist. For all his obvious talent, he’s a deceptively hard sell. He doesn’t have the voice-of-his-generation allure of Khalid or the tortured-poet mystique of Frank Ocean. He idolizes artists like Marvin Gaye and D’Angelo, complicated figures who carry an aura of importance, but his own records are more in the lineage of Musiq Soulchild and Dwele, singers with great voices and pleasant dispositions but considerably humbler ambitions. The marketplace never quite knows what to do with acts like that.
It’s to his advantage that BJ never tries to be anything that he’s not. His fetching sophomore album for Motown, 1123, doubles down on the laid-back, creature-comfort vibe of In My Mind. The Anderson .Paak feature “Feel the Vibe” kicks off the record on an especially charming note, welcoming the listener to a family gathering filled with music, spirited conversation, and generous spreads of soul food (“Don’t forget the cornbread”). From there, nearly every track offers some combination of good times, good drink, good company, and good sex.
The closest the record comes to conflict is when BJ wonders whether things are too comfortable. “Real men get scared sometimes because it’s too good,” he laments on the Donny Hathaway-esque relationship study “Too Good.” The album’s other great dilemma: On “Champagne,” a spontaneous roll in the hay threatens to make him late for a pre-existing commitment—though he doesn’t make those plans sound especially important anyway. BJ has never been one to manufacture high stakes.
Like all of neo soul’s greats, BJ seamlessly blurs R&B’s past and present, but 1123 tends to sidestep the most obvious tropes, both modern and retro. Save for its Rick Ross verse, the bumping Marvin Gaye update “Playa’s Ball” sounds like it could have been recorded at any point over the last quarter century. In its final stretch, though, 1123 does toss out a few of-the-moment tracks that radio might be able to work with. The hater-smiting “Worryin’ Bout Me” dabbles in trap, with a verse from Offset, and “Reach” casts BJ opposite some contemporary house from Dutch DJ Afrojack.
The most conspicuous departure is “Rather Be With You,” the album’s Khalid moment: a big, sappy ballad that wallows in the artificial drama that BJ otherwise almost pointedly resists. It’s the one moment on 1123 where the production upstages BJ’s voice, and the one moment where he sounds anything less than completely comfortable. When a singer proves this good at small statements, there’s no need to try to force a grand one.
Buy: Rough Trade
(Pitchfork may earn a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.) | 2019-07-31T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-07-31T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Motown | July 31, 2019 | 7.2 | d6044931-efca-43f9-b549-d6799068bcde | Evan Rytlewski | https://pitchfork.com/staff/evan-rytlewski/ | |
Muse records are largely blockbuster action flicks centered around a cryptocratic nightmare that can be explained on a billboard. Drones, their latest, proves no more capable of altering U.S. military strategy than The 2nd Law managed to singlehandedly end global warming. Mutt Lange produces. | Muse records are largely blockbuster action flicks centered around a cryptocratic nightmare that can be explained on a billboard. Drones, their latest, proves no more capable of altering U.S. military strategy than The 2nd Law managed to singlehandedly end global warming. Mutt Lange produces. | Muse: Drones | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/20520-drones/ | Drones | Like their prog-pop predecessors Rush, Queensrÿche, and Pink Floyd, Muse will never be cool, but their subject matter will always be relevant—they only deal in current events that speak to timeless pathologies of the human condition. The Resistance raged against any and all machines while the environmentally conscious The 2nd Law made global warming appear to be yet another shadow government conspiracy rather than scientific fact. Likewise, Drones is not a critique of American military strategy, but rather, "the journey of a human, from their abandonment and loss of hope, to their indoctrination by the system to be a human drone, to their eventual defection from their oppressors." Really, what are Muse records but blockbuster action flicks centered around a cryptocratic nightmare that can be explained on a billboard?
Then again, you do not listen to Muse records for nuance. Muse have to hit the stadium cheap seats and the back row in any given 8th-grade history class. This is how they end up with songs like "Mercy" and "Revolt"—wherein lead singer Matt Bellamy commands tens of thousands to shout down the brainwash tactics of diabolical plutocrats while wearing Bad Boy circa-'98 shiny suits that should warrant a name change to Mu$e.
And while even the big singles are supposed to hew to Drones’ concept, Bellamy never gets too specific. Lyrics like, "Don’t leave me out to die/ I gave you everything" led many to assume opener "Dead Inside" was about Bellamy’s ex-fiancée Kate Hudson, when it’s actually the protagonist’s blue-pill indoctrination into an army of murderbots. "Defector" probably wasn’t made with the intention of mirroring Taco Bell’s latest ad campaign, but it’s way more fun to hear, "Yeah, I’m free/ From society/ You can’t control me/ I’m a defector!", as Bellamy waxing ecstatic about the A.M. Crunchwrap.
Even Muse seem to have thought their most recent work was getting too convoluted, so they’ve played up Drones as "by our standards...back to basics". At their most humble, Muse were the most histrionic of the post-OK Computer world, so Drones represents a chance to reflect on what Muse consider to be their "basics". For starters, Drones is "basic" in the sense that Hail to the Thief would be way too subtle of a pun to fit here. In both sound and its refusal to speak in anything other than the most literal, explanatory terms, Drones is somewhere between "Iron Man" and "Mr. Roboto". A "[Drill Sergeant]" interlude ends with its subject yelling "ARE YOU A HUMAN DRONE?", which leads into the chorus of "Psycho"—"I could use someone like you/ Someone who’ll kill on my command/ And ask no questions." "Psycho" itself splices Metallica’s boogie "2x4" and the first half of Full Metal Jacket, although think of Marilyn Manson playing the role of Gunnery Sergeant Hartman.
Musically, they've ditched the influence of industrial and festival EDM that resulted in the most ludicrous parts of The Resistance and The 2nd Law, which were also the best parts. While "Dead Inside" recalls the phallic funk thrust of 2nd Law highlight "Panic Station", everything here is otherwise locked and loaded for Rock Band 4. On some level, it’s heartening to know this stuff can still exist in 2015—the marathon tapping solo on "Reapers" or the 720-hp revving of "The Handler" are almost thrilling in their commitment. But even Muse's down-and-dirty rock record includes a 10-minute suite, and the very next song is an a cappella chorale of a thousand Matt Bellamys. Moreover, Drones is produced by Mutt Lange and boasts cover art from Matt Mahurin, who spent the early '90s slathering Bush, Alice in Chains, Soundgarden, and even Lou Reed in the grunge-glam sludge. The last time Lange and Mahurin collaborated on the same record, Def Leppard was asking us to stand up and kick love into motion.
Whatever pleasure can be generated from Bellamy’s admirable melodic sense and overblown hooks is negated by Muse’s insistence that they’re profound rather than fun. They’re too humorless to be camp, unwilling to explore the obvious homoerotic subtext of the plot (I mean, just read the lyrics to "Psycho") and unshakable in their errant belief they’re tearing down a power structure rather than solidifying it. Drones might as well be overlain with Entourage, à la Wizard of Oz/Dark Side of the Moon, for the ultimate in critical hate-consumption. Muse’s operatic vocal runs, tablature-bustin’ riffs, and CGI'd production feel unmistakably similar to the way Doug Ellin brandishes yachts, celebrity cameos, and bared breasts. If it’s luxury porn, just own up—we know it when we see it. | 2015-06-09T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2015-06-09T02:00:01.000-04:00 | Rock | Warner Bros. | June 9, 2015 | 4.5 | d6157d87-e80a-40b1-9c4d-579253fc314f | Ian Cohen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ian-cohen/ | null |
On their debut album, the Lahore band blends the free-form improvisation of Hindustani classical and jazz with sample-heavy production creating a musical dialogue about faith, spirituality, and the self. | On their debut album, the Lahore band blends the free-form improvisation of Hindustani classical and jazz with sample-heavy production creating a musical dialogue about faith, spirituality, and the self. | Jaubi: Nafs at Peace | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/jaubi-nafs-at-peace/ | Nafs at Peace | In 2016, Pakistani instrumental quartet Jaubi marked the tenth anniversary of J Dilla’s death by releasing an Indian classical take on the Detroit rapper-producer’s “Time: The Donut of the Heart.” Zohaib Hassan Khan’s sarangi reimagines the original’s jaunty melody (itself sampled from a Jackson 5 track) as a wistful, almost plaintive refrain, backed by minimal acoustic guitar chords. The star of the show is tabla player Kashif Ali Dhani, who treats Dilla’s dynamic, behind-the-beat rhythm as a taal—a percussive framework within which to improvise. In a thrilling display of virtuosity, he traces and re-traces increasingly complex rhythmic patterns on the tabla, building up to a metronomic tattoo that somehow still swings with the original’s fluid grace.
The minute-long cover serves as a perfect introduction to the Lahore band’s musical philosophy, one that marries the free-form improvisation of Hindustani classical and jazz with sampling’s whatever-works approach to composition. This philosophy finds its fullest expression yet on their debut full-length Nafs at Peace, a suite of seven largely instrumental pieces that incorporate Indian classical ragas, the spiritual jazz of Yusuf Lateef and John Coltrane, hip-hop and funk. Tradition and modernity march in lockstep on the record—sarangi melodies vamp over clattering Moog rhythms, space-age synths doodle around the tabla, each instrument adding its own voice to a musical debate about faith, spirituality, and the self.
Nafs at Peace was composed and recorded over two short sessions at studios in Lahore and Oslo with UK multi-instrumentalist Ed “Tenderlonious” Cawthorne and Polish composer Marek “Latarnik” Pędziwiatr (the sessions also yielded Tenderlonious’s 2020 release Ragas From Lahore: Improvisations with Jaubi). Hindustani classical ragas provide the initial jumping-off point, but the compositions here are almost completely improvised, guided by little more than a shared commitment to finding catharsis and transcendence through music.
Thematically, the album draws from the Qur’anic concept of the nafs (Arabic for “self/soul”). In Islam—especially in Sufi and Shia traditions—there are three stages in the development of the nafs. There’s the inciting nafs, which pushes us to indulge in our base instincts. The self-accusing nafs represents the struggle to master the ego, while nafs at peace represents self-actualization, a self that has untangled itself from material and worldly concerns and found true peace. Drawing from their own experiences of bereavement, divorce, drug addiction and crises of faith, Nafs at Peace is Jaubi’s attempt to chart a musical path to the final nafs, each track a different destination on this spiritual journey.
Opener “Seek Refuge” sets the scene with elegiac sarangi and Ali Riaz Baqar’s delicately plucked guitar, backed by the seraphic chorus of a chamber choir. On “Raga Gujri Todi,” the sarangi sketches a mournful lament over an ominous drone, a slow build-up of tension that explodes into an industrial maelstrom of drums and synths that evoke the organized chaos of life on the subcontinent.
“Straight Path” is the album’s thematic and musical centerpiece, its title a reference to a verse in the first chapter of the Qu’ran. If “Raga Gujri Todi” embodied the internal dissonance of the struggle against the ego, “Straight Path” offers a tantalizing glimpse of what lies on the other side. Sarangi and flute take turns tracing a raga melody over Latarnik’s ambient synths, before Dhani’s dense tabla percussion takes center stage, allowing the flute and synths to trade increasingly complex and frantic solos. The track ends with an ecstatic showdown between percussion and sarangi, one last counter-attack by the ego.
The closing title track, lead composer Ali Riaz Baqar’s response to John Coltrane’s A Love Supreme, is a “spiritual jazz raga” that serves as an elongated moment of catharsis. The most conventionally jazz piece on the record, the track features a blistering sax solo by Tenderlonious, who leads the rest of the band into a series of incendiary crescendos, each member pushing the other to even more stratospheric heights. The mind has been purified, the soul purged, and all that’s left is tranquility.
On Nafs at Peace, Jaubi pick up the baton passed to them by ’60s and ’70s trailblazers like Don Cherry and Mahavishnu Orchestra, pushing the boundaries of South Asian classical music into new and exciting spaces. They represent a new generation of South Asian musicians who are neither tied down by the traditional conservatism of classical music, nor burdened by the expectations of rebellion. Instead, they offer a new path that side-steps such debates in favor of something more visceral, more essential: the sheer, blessed joy of creation.
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-06-09T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2021-06-09T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Jazz | Jaubi / Astigmatic | June 9, 2021 | 7.6 | d6192340-4210-4ad8-8906-fb1a5ab53aca | Bhanuj Kappal | https://pitchfork.com/staff/bhanuj-kappal/ | |
Zhu first gained attention with massive 2014 last-call club hit “Faded,” but his debut album is bloated with bland, often downright bad dance music. | Zhu first gained attention with massive 2014 last-call club hit “Faded,” but his debut album is bloated with bland, often downright bad dance music. | ZHU: Generationwhy | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22216-generationwhy/ | Generationwhy | In 2014, a shadowy song called “Faded” was released in Australia and began slithering through pitch-black hot spots from Los Angeles to Berlin. Zhu, its creator, kept his identity a mystery, which naturally piqued curiosity, but the track is interesting enough without any manufactured drama. Over spidery keys with a belly-rumbling synth bass line, Zhu thinned out his voice to a high warble and offered the battle cry of club-goers at last call across the world: “Baby, I’m wasted, all I wanna do is drive home to you/Baby, I’m faded, all I wanna do is take you downtown.” Of course it was a hit.
Since then, Zhu has revealed himself to be Steven Zhu, a 27-year-old Chinese-American who studied music business at the University of Southern California. He’s continued his formula of juxtaposing dark production with sparse lyrics sung in his breathy, high-pitched voice, but he’s also been successful when he’s ventured away from that—the star-smeared “Cocaine Model” is as bright and glittery as the sky in Joshua Tree and the jittery “Paradise Awaits” positively struts. Unfortunately, nothing so charming is found on *Generationwhy, *Zhu’s debut album, which is bloated with bland, often-awful dance music.
There are a few pleasantly innocuous tracks to be found. “In the Morning” is a good companion piece to “Faded;” “Cold Blooded” settles into a loungey groove, and the skittery “Electrify Me” holds a few surprises, suddenly opening up to a billowy sonic expanse. The title track, the album’s poppiest and most radio-friendly, is catchy enough, although Zhu’s wispy, delicate-winged vocals—which so often have flitted perfectly across his gauzier songs—sound flimsy. No surprise that Generationwhy’s final song, a bonus track titled “Working for It,” bodies the rest of the album—Skrillex and THEY. assist. As usual, Skrillex strides in all business, and his deft, decisive additions, combined with THEY.’s earthy vocals, are grounding. Still, it’s the kind of song you hope ends before your roll kicks in.
The rest of the album is a blend of insipid lyrics, faded vocals that quickly grow irritating, and self-parodying thirdhand ’80s nostalgia: The police sirens and tortured guitar riffs of “Palm of My Hand” could either soundtrack Crockett and Tubbs’ anguish at letting a coke kingpin escape or at having spilled ketchup on their linen blazers when their speedboat hits a wave. “Secret Weapon” might also be mistaken for parody if it weren’t so earnest: Lyrics like “You’re my secret weapon, my sexy piece of heaven/Girl you make me better, I swear we’ll be together” are one thing, but then Zhu lets loose a majestically corny electric guitar solo, and uncontrollable giggling becomes unavoidable.
Yet those pale in comparison to “Money.” Taken together, the pitched squealing, the sax solo, and the fake-deep chorus of “Moneyyyyyy! No I don’t need no moneyyyyyy! I mean, it’s just moneyyyyy! And it don’t mean nothin’ without you” are almost physically repulsive. Then, in “One Minute to Midnight,” plucking an acoustic guitar, Zhu sings, “All you needa know baby girl I’m drunk … tell me if you came to party, tell me or you got somebody,” in what must be the worst Aaliyah flip of all time.
Maya Angelou (and a sax) opens the album: “Everyone in the world has gone to bed one night or another with fear or pain or loss or disappointment. Yet each of us has awakened arisen. It’s amazing, wherever that abides in the human being, there is the nobleness of the human spirit.” If that lofty intro is an indication, perhaps Zhu was attempting to make an album that explored the emptiness of nightlife and the salvation many find in music. But as it stands, Generationwhy should’ve just been named* Why. * | 2016-08-09T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-08-09T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Columbia | August 9, 2016 | 4.8 | d62459af-f2f1-4757-9a14-ce73334d6615 | Rebecca Haithcoat | https://pitchfork.com/staff/rebecca- haithcoat/ | null |
A slight and unwaveringly safe 30 minutes, Yeasayer’s latest goes down easier than anything the band has ever done, while making less of an impression. | A slight and unwaveringly safe 30 minutes, Yeasayer’s latest goes down easier than anything the band has ever done, while making less of an impression. | Yeasayer: Erotic Reruns | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/yeasayer-erotic-reruns/ | Erotic Reruns | For a band that sounded so far out at the time, there was a lot of precedent for Yeasayer’s eccentricities. With their first two albums, 2007’s All Cymbals Hour and 2010’s Odd Blood, the band charted a Venn Diagram of nearly every major indie rock trend of the era, shading their art rock with Animal Collective’s hippie splatter, MGMT’s burnt-out party psych, and TV on the Radio’s dark plays on Peter Gabriel, while touching on R&B, African music, and just about anything else that was music-blogger catnip during those years. Did I mention they were from Brooklyn? Do I need to mention they were from Brooklyn?
It was almost uncanny, Yeasayer’s ability to embrace all the right sounds at exactly the right time, yet they pieced these styles together so inventively that they rarely came across as opportunistic. Whatever they may have lacked in originality they made up for with creativity, and their records were so generous with leftfield surprises that you could forget how of-the-moment they were. They could dole out pop pleasures but they could just as easily make your skin crawl. Odd Blood is most remembered for the euphoric delights of “O.N.E.” and “Ambling Alp,” but it opened with “The Children,” a skeevy number that played like the imagined soundtrack to an alien ritual sacrifice. The band was always most exciting when they were kind of a mind fuck.
The trio's fifth album Erotic Reruns begs for some of that old interdimensional weirdness. A slight and unwaveringly safe 30 minutes, it goes down easier than anything the band has ever done, while making less of an impression. Pivoting hard from the heady psychedelia of 2016's Amen & Goodbye, Yeasayer fall back on the same good-times and falsetto formula of Portugal. The Man or every other similarly punctuated alternative band that’s learned to crib just enough from Maroon 5 to secure some licensing deals.
The most shocking thing about the record is its pep. With its Emotional Rescue strut, opener “People I Love” could easily dance its way into Spotify’s crossover playlists. The album’s big attempt at an earworm, “Ecstatic Baby” is a slaphappy serving of Midnite Vultures-style funk. They're both “fun:” in the way that pre-show movie theater trivia or gas-pump infotainment segments are, diversions pitched so nondescript to its hard to imagine anybody gleaning meaningful enjoyment from them.
Only the occasional shot of bitter politics offsets the album’s pervading syrupy sweetness. “Blue Skies Dandelions,” ostensibly about James Comey’s firing and Donald Trump’s ego, rides an easy groove that disguises its subject matter. “24-Hour Hateful Live!” comes closer to drawing blood, with lyrics that rhyme "Steven Miller" with “child killer” and “Sarah Sanders” with “propagandist.” “Goebbels might be her true Pa,” Chris Keating sings, pulling no punches, but the music itself is too staged and tasteful to rile any real emotion or capture the misery and chaos of the modern news cycle. Even with a layer of blustery saxophones amplifying its message, the song has all the anger of a high school musical.
I wonder what Odd Blood-era Yeasayer could have done with the outrages of Trump administration as an animating muse. At their peak they could have made music almost as unnerving as the headlines, but it’s been albums since they’ve conjured that intensity. Somewhere over the last decade they exhausted their imagination. There’s a danger in over-romanticizing Yeasayer’s early records just because they felt so fresh—in truth these guys have never been especially deep songwriters or distinguished lyricists, and they’ve always struggled to match their style with substance. The difference, though, is those records could genuinely thrill. Erotic Reruns never does. | 2019-06-13T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-06-13T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic / Rock | Yeasayer | June 13, 2019 | 5.5 | d62e6d6a-918e-4249-ace4-0791032fc258 | Evan Rytlewski | https://pitchfork.com/staff/evan-rytlewski/ | |
The debut solo album from Beth Ditto finds the former Gossip singer reconnecting with her southern roots. Despite some thin lyrics and odd production choices, it has a few excellent moments. | The debut solo album from Beth Ditto finds the former Gossip singer reconnecting with her southern roots. Despite some thin lyrics and odd production choices, it has a few excellent moments. | Beth Ditto: Fake Sugar | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/beth-ditto-fake-sugar/ | Fake Sugar | It makes perfect sense and no sense at all that Beth Ditto’s debut solo album is a pastichey southern rock record. It works because her voice, that raunchy Arkansas holler, was made to embellish Muscle Shoals grooves and electrify honky-tonk barnstormers—a combination that she never quite pulled off with her old band Gossip on their early garage rock albums. But it doesn’t work because why is Beth Ditto, one of the most radical bandleaders of the last decade, turning her hand to a genre safely lagged in schmaltz? That was apparently the point. “I did not wanna make a cool record!” she told DIY. “I always call it a riot grrrl proverb, but it was a slogan: dork equals cool. That changed my fucking life.”
The songs on Fake Sugar were originally intended for another Gossip album, until Ditto’s bandmate Nathan Howdeshell moved back to Arkansas, to her surprise, and she decided to go it alone. Following the demise of her band, the death of her father, and a rocky patch with her wife, she also reconnected with her southern roots. Heading south is a well-worn trope for artists in strife; completing the image, Ditto became obsessed with Graceland on her travels. After auditioning a host of potential producers, she found her match in Grammy-nominated Jennifer Decilveo, who’s mostly worked on pop and R&B records, and a band of session musicians (plus Queens of the Stone Age bassist Michael Shuman).
It’s a shame that Fake Sugar is so slick and professional. It’s often stately where it should bleed, and hokey where it should shred. There are odd production choices: like the noodly British indie guitar parts that cascade through “Savoir Faire” (as if Two Door Cinema Club turned up at the saloon), and total outliers like “Do You Want Me To,” which sounds like a Depeche Mode tribute from a completely different record. “Oo La La” is a lazy, leering garage jam. But soul rock revivalism has been done to death, and despite its predictable structures (tense builds; ripping choruses) Fake Sugar has a few excellent moments. “Fire” is Peggy Lee’s “Fever” with more grit and less patience. “In and Out” pits a mighty verse about being fine with compromising in long-term relationships against a softer chorus where Ditto tries to affirm whether her partner feels the same: “I, I do it for you/You, you do it for me/And we go in and out of love,” she sings anxiously.
Unsurprisingly, it’s Ditto’s boozy yell that lets her pull off this material. She puts poison in the twangy kiss-offs of “Savoir Faire,” and has the charisma to get away with singing lines like “I get so tired of feeling sick and tired” on the title track. There are a few too many power ballads that trade on stretching the word “love” as thin as it goes (“Lover,” “Love in Real Life”), but considering Ditto’s only true vocal competition is probably Adele, you can’t blame her for giving it a shot. She pulls it off on “We Could Run,” the record’s finest moment. It’s a copper-bottomed stadium ballad that builds on cavernous, chiming guitar, and then bursts into an enormous chorus that streaks like lights on a highway.
It’s rare that you get to hear a woman artist lean into such a brawny, fearless song, and Ditto’s perspective elevates Fake Sugar massively. Not only does she use heartland rock to deal with the breakdown of her marriage to a woman, which feels somewhat radical, but the distance she establishes between her self-image and the mess a seemingly unfaithful partner makes of it is quite heartbreaking. Ditto sings proudly about her too-muchness—how she comes on like a storm, this obsessive “firecracker” who “don’t care what anybody thinks of me”—but then in desperation, pledges to hold back. “I’ll never ask too much from you/But oh, I’ll do whatever you want me to,” she promises on “Do You Want Me To.” “Was I not enough?” she worries on “Lover.”
Overlooking the gory betrayals and specifics of identity, Ditto is great at singing about the nuanced trials of long-term love. It makes the album’s direction a little bit easier to comprehend: Fake Sugar is happily middle-aged. It’s hard to know where it fits on U.S. radio, but in the UK, Ditto is almost a household name—she recently appeared on one of the country’s biggest, blandest breakfast radio shows to talk about the record. For all its carefree, uncool origins, it’s hard not to see it as a huge commercial stab—and to wish it well. Ditto’s non-traditional view down a well-trodden path is welcome, but you do wish she’d kick up the dust a bit more. | 2017-06-26T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-06-26T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Virgin | June 26, 2017 | 6.1 | d6373cf0-4d27-41ae-ab06-7d7ee636d6b4 | Laura Snapes | https://pitchfork.com/staff/laura-snapes/ | null |
On an album generous in both spirit and proportion, the Montreal-based musician fuses traditional Algonquin influences from her upbringing with synth pop, strings, and experimental vocal techniques. | On an album generous in both spirit and proportion, the Montreal-based musician fuses traditional Algonquin influences from her upbringing with synth pop, strings, and experimental vocal techniques. | Kìzis: Tidibàbide / Turn | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/kizis-tidibabide-turn/ | Tidibàbide / Turn | Kìzis’ music takes its shape from life’s sprawling contours. Kìzis was raised in an intensely religious home to a white mother and an indigenous father in Southern Ontario. She belongs to the Ardoch Algonquin First Nation, and attending pow wows as a child formed a significant part of her early inspiration. She later moved to Montreal and formed the indie-pop band Archery Guild. As a trans Two-Spirit person, she says, “Sometimes it’s difficult to show who I am, but I use my music and performance to help elaborate my essence.”
Her solo work, first as Mìch Cota and now as Kìzis, weaves the deeply personal with a desire to reach outwards. On her 2018 album Kijà / Care, she fleshed out lush synth pop with strings and experimental vocal processing, offering self-love and interpersonal connection as means of moving beyond trauma. Clocking in at 36 tracks and three and a half hours long, her newest album, Tidibàbide / Turn, is a joyful proclamation of presence. Kìzis takes the lessons in vulnerability from Kijà / Care and spins them into a record that stretches and sustains itself with Kìzis’ tenderness and the musical support of some 60-odd collaborators.
Tidibàbide / Turn drifts fluidly between genres. Molding traditional Algonquin influences into techno, synth pop, and heart-swelling strings, Kìzis lets the music meander where it likes. Tracks like “Dawemà,” “Nika,” “Okàdeniganàtig,” and “Moswa” feature Algonquin drumming accompanying a chorus of voices that move between Algonquin and English. Kìzis rewrites the Canadian national anthem in “No Canada,” singing mournfully over a steady drumbeat: “No Canada/No home on Native land/Your patriot lust/expecting us to bend.../Your way is killing me.” Elsewhere, the defiant techno of “Amanda” and meandering electro pop of cuts like “PERSONALITY!” and “That’s My Dream (FAMILY = COMMUNITY)” pay tribute to the sense of community Kìzis has found in queer party spaces. Her music can be dissonant and amorphous, but she can also be intimate and conversational, slipping into spoken-word cadences to share secrets in such a way that it sounds like she’s revealing them for the first time.
There’s a defiant spirit in Tidibàbide / Turn’s colossal proportions and ever-changing nature. It emerges in force in the sprawling, four-part “Sister Flower,” which she has described as “an audible dissertation on empowerment.” “Sister Flower (One Comes to Us)” is held together by a forceful 4/4 beat but moves gracefully through grandiose strings, electro pop, and spoken word; “Sister Flower 2 (4 Spirit)” accelerates and decelerates at will, changing the terms of the game as it plays. On the 16-minute “Sister Flower (Honor and Celebration),” Kìzis’ voice comes in and out of focus amidst a patchwork of muttering and whispering. As she reels off impressionistic images (“Slide off my shoes/Lay on my back/And let a lizard play with you”), a hissed chant emerges from the mix: “a cacophonic symphony.”
But it’s a gentle cacophony. The for-us-by-us ethos—prominent Canada-based trans musicians like Elle Barbara and Beverly Glenn-Copeland are among the album’s collaborators—forges a feeling of tender togetherness, a charm against inhospitable surroundings. Despite its length, Tidibàbide / Turn isn’t a forbidding listen. Throughout its many transmutations, Kìzis’ voice is a guiding light. Her music feels both formally adventurous and spiritually nourishing. As she intones in “Brianna,” “I’m moving forward/How do I move forward now?/I climb/I run I sing.”
Buy: Rough Trade
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Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-03-02T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2021-03-02T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Experimental | Tin Angel | March 2, 2021 | 6.8 | d63c13e8-7015-4c7d-bd62-0bbaf4fff668 | Jemima Skala | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jemima-skala/ | |
Although their Warp Records peers—Aphex Twin, Autechre, LFO—are regarded as the vanguard of "intelligent dance music," the Black Dog were as equally deft, playful, and rambunctious through the early half of the '90s. Since rescuscitating the name in 2005, they've issued a slew of releases, and as Neither/ Neither reveals, they've gotten far darker and more negative with time. | Although their Warp Records peers—Aphex Twin, Autechre, LFO—are regarded as the vanguard of "intelligent dance music," the Black Dog were as equally deft, playful, and rambunctious through the early half of the '90s. Since rescuscitating the name in 2005, they've issued a slew of releases, and as Neither/ Neither reveals, they've gotten far darker and more negative with time. | The Black Dog: Neither/Neither | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/20870-neitherneither/ | Neither/Neither | Although their Warp Records peers—Aphex Twin, Autechre, LFO—are regarded as the vanguard of "intelligent dance music," the Black Dog were as equally deft, playful, and rambunctious through the early half of the '90s. A track like "Techno Playtime", which kicked off their 1990 EP of the same name, was truth in advertising, its sleek drum programming overtaken midway by a gnarly thump like Donkey Kong let loose. But by 1995, the trio, comprised of Ken Downie, Ed Handley, and Andy Turner, split, with Handley and Turner taking the more lighthearted aspects of their sound with them when they formed Plaid.
But after a decade, Downie resuscitated the Black Dog with 2005's Drexciya-inspired Silenced, teaming up with Martin and Richard Dust. Since then, there has been a slew of Black Dog albums, nearly twice as many releases as in its original incarnation. But as Stephen King's Pet Sematary once warned, a revived dog isn't necessarily the same dog. As their seventh post-Handley and Turner album, Neither/ Neither, reveals, they've gotten far darker and more negative. Or as the press release puts it: "We are all proles now; all are expected to maintain a mental state…of uncertainty and inaction."
It makes sense that the Black Dog would grow more dour, in that both have roots in Psychick Warriors ov Gaia and Thee Temple ov Psychick Youth, which trace back to early industrialists Psychic TV. The first few times through Neither/ Neither, I was also reminded of fellow '90s acts like Portishead and Boards of Canada, who returned after a decade away to far sourer times, their music reflecting a heightened sense of paranoia, anxiety, and pessimism about the world. The downtempo title track here, with its skittering hi-hats and lurching heartbeat pulse, could definitely have come off of Tomorrow's Harvest, especially when—some two minutes in—its slow-moving analog melody crests and breaks.
The tricky cymbals of "Them (Everyone Is a Liar But)" suggest a balance between early and present Black Dog, while "Self Organising Sealed Systems" is bracing, visceral techno that's au courant in Berlin. But ambient tracks like "B.O.O.K.S." mistake aimlessness for eeriness, and the interludes neither heighten the tension nor cast more shadow over the proceedings. As a result, most of the album drifts by without much to distinguish it from its field. Tracks like "Control Needs Time" and "Shut Eye" are indistinct to the point of anonymity, making Neither/ Neither an all too-perfect soundtrack for uncertainty and inaction. | 2015-08-14T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2015-08-14T02:00:01.000-04:00 | Electronic | Dust Science | August 14, 2015 | 6.2 | d640877b-011f-493f-ae85-dc429ebdae8c | Andy Beta | https://pitchfork.com/staff/andy-beta/ | null |
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 Bobbie Gentry’s 1968 album, a daring, atmospheric, and oft-overshadowed Southern classic. | 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 Bobbie Gentry’s 1968 album, a daring, atmospheric, and oft-overshadowed Southern classic. | Bobbie Gentry: The Delta Sweete | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/bobbie-gentry-the-delta-sweete/ | The Delta Sweete | Bobbie Gentry turned 25 in July 1967, the month she was swept up in one of the great how-on-Earth stories in pop history. Back in the winter, she was just another unknown songwriter who recorded a demo for Capitol Records. With her acoustic guitar and thick alto, she narrated her suicide-mystery story-song, “Ode to Billie Joe,” thinking it might be a good fit for Lou Rawls. Instead, Capitol added some strings and released the record as-is. It spent four weeks at No.1 and Gentry won Grammys for Best New Artist, Best Pop Vocal, and Best Solo Vocal. “Ode to Billie Joe” was covered by Tammy Wynette, Diana Ross, the Ventures, and dozens of others, translated to French and German, then adapted as a movie. The song’s tragic setting is the Tallahatchie Bridge, a real structure near Greenwood, Mississippi, which was soon overrun by visitors who wanted to jump in tribute.
Gentry’s Ode to Billie Joe LP was quickly assembled and released in August, and by October it overtook Sgt. Pepper’s atop the Billboard album chart. Its cover was the precise opposite of that modern art monument. It showed her as a barefoot country gal in jeans and a t-shirt, sitting on a rural bridge with an acoustic guitar. This was accurate enough, since Gentry, born Roberta Lee Streeter, grew up near Woodland, Mississippi, a town of barely 100 people. But as “Ode to Billie Joe” became a global phenomenon, the song that will inevitably appear in every headline of Gentry’s eventual obituaries, that image hid more than it revealed. Only the singer’s trademark bouffant gestured at her worldliness: she left Woodland for California at age 13, spent years as a singing partner with her mother, then had additional stints as a philosophy major, model, and conservatory student.
The song and the record were both mature statements and recognized as such. As a piece of writing, “Billie Joe” is evocative and mysterious, and its central mystery is left unresolved. Gentry’s singing was a marvel as well. She had a husky, nearby voice and total expressive control of it. She was perfectly suited to story songs, and much of her debut album sounded pleasingly like the big hit: Gentry’s sensuous rasp narrating Southern scenes above her herk-and-jerk rhythmic patterns as a delicate swirl of chamber strings, hand percussion, brass, and rock backing tracks come and go. Ode to Billie Joe was nominated for Album of the Year, but by the time of the ceremony in February 1968, Gentry was already finished with her follow-up, a statement of artistic and personal purpose that was a self-conscious turn away from bare feet and a t-shirt.
It's clear just from the title that Bobbie Gentry Performs the Delta Sweete is a more complex thing. It presents a cohesive work with a name that suggests “an evening with,” a sort of audio tour of Gentry’s home territory through covers, folk tunes, and originals. There’s the pun, too, as Gentry announces a suite of songs and a new glammed-up style that jettisoned everything about her previous image except the bouffant. She appeared on the cover as a forlorn reverse silhouette, framing a picture of her grandparents’ dilapidated Mississippi shack, and for the next decade she presented herself in bell-bottom jumpsuits, cat’s-eye makeup, and towering hair.
The Delta Sweete was released about six months after Ode to Billie Joe, which itself was rushed to completion in the wake of the single’s runaway success. Since the follow-up record lacked a hit song and never rose higher than No. 132, the easy assumption was artistic overreach: Gentry tried something too pretentious and audiences wouldn’t follow. That seemed to be the attitude of her record labels in the U.S. and UK, who renamed, resequenced, and reissued the album only a few years later before letting it go out of print for decades. It also seemed to be Gentry’s own attitude, since she took a decisive pop-oriented turn in response. But that narrative overlooks the strangeness of Ode to Billie Joe, both in its beguiling content and its wild unlikeliness as a pop culture phenomenon. And it dismisses the astounding depth and range of talent that it took for Gentry to create these statements within months of each other. She never made an album like her first two ever again, but in retrospect they seem more alike than they must have at the time, and equally unlike anything that came before.
Delta Sweete opens with its lead single, “Okolona River Bottom Band,” just as Billie Joe opened with its most up-tempo moment, “Mississippi Delta.” Both function as an unofficial overture, introducing her voice and the scope of instrumentation, though in “Okolona,” Gentry’s butterscotch vocal tone slips into a dark cackle, like she’s compelling listeners to join her group in the underworld. From there, both records move into gentler, more textured moods. Billie Joe presented each song in its own customized standalone arrangement, whereas on Delta Sweete they overlap and bleed into one another. The first side proceeds to the Jimmy Reed blues tune “Big Boss Man,” which sounds almost like a field recording, with only a tinny-sounding acoustic guitar and near-spoken vocals. She then moves into her own stunning “Reunion,” reenacting a family picnic through an overlapping sampled chorus of antic in-character voices and chants in the round.
After a devilish cover of the Bukka White prison song “Parchman Farm,” Gentry’s own “Mornin’ Glory,” sung to a lover as if they are still in bed, showcases her voice’s disarming intimacy. When she hits her lowest notes here, on the line “Where’d you spend the night?” the sound is closer to an ASMR exercise than a country croon. And with its blend of strings, nylon guitar, melodica, and glimmering bells, this gorgeous love song evokes Os Mutantes’ “Baby” or Dusty Springfield’s “Breakfast in Bed” more than Loretta Lynn. The side closes with another original, “Sermon,” with Gentry rapid-fire preaching over a hopping gospel track. Delta Sweete doesn’t have a narrative, it has a flow, an almost DJ-like movement across ideas and feelings.
The record’s second side leans even more heavily into atmospherics. Two covers, “Tobacco Road” and the geographical outlier “Louisiana Man,” are the sole feints toward pop. (The latter is performed in a marvelous uptempo Cajun-flavored arrangement that I would swear influenced Harry Nilsson’s “Coconut.”) But the rest of these songs are mere wisps of melody and hazy atmosphere. The dreamlike sequence of “Penduli Pendulum,” “Jessye ‘Lizabeth,” and “Refractions” is an orchestral pop achievement to match the Left Banke or Love. The closing song, “Courtyard,” resembles the mystical contemporary folk that Fairport Convention were making four-thousand miles away. It is a story song, yes, but in the Astral Weeks sense, not “Harper Valley P.T.A.”
But consider: Bobbie Gentry was writing songs to match Van Morrison and Tom T. Hall when those men were making the music that defined their careers. She was a nobody in the spring of 1967, and by Christmas, she had recorded two divergent but equally visionary musical-literary statements about the South. That would be accomplishment enough even if the first one didn’t become a cultural touchstone.
“Ode to Billie Joe” anticipated late-’60s Southern-story hits like Tony Joe White’s “Polk Salad Annie,” the Band’s “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down,” and about half of Creedence Clearwater Revival’s output. All those acts specialized in their unique brand of twangy funk-country, which became the lingua franca of mainstream rock in the early 1970s. But Gentry’s Latin-accented signature guitar rhythm prefigured them all, just as her enormous fame made her the face of crossover country-rock before the Byrds adopted a pedal steel or the Stones heard Gram Parsons.
If The Delta Sweete made less of an obvious or visible impact, it’s worth noting that the scruffier end of the country world became a landscape of concept albums in the ’70s, starting with Willie Nelson’s Yesterday’s Wine and encompassing Merle Haggard’s prolific run of tribute LPs, Kenny Rogers’ The Ballad of Calico, Terry Allen’s Lubbock (On Everything), and the Waylon Jennings-led Civil War operetta White Mansions. Theme records were already a tradition in the genre going back at least as far as Marty Robbins’s 1959 Gunfighter Ballads and Trail Songs, but these new records, as well as Dolly Parton’s My Tennessee Mountain Home, were often feats of storytelling, not only song curation. They were works of reminiscence and imagination about a vanished South, suffused with mythic imagery and audio-theatrical production flourishes.
Gentry followed her theatrical muse but never made such an overtly thematic album again. Within the next three years she recorded four more solo albums for Capitol plus a duet record with Glen Campbell. Her LP output stopped in 1971, but as foremost Gentry expert Tara Murtha describes it, her record-making “was only the beginning of her pioneering career” as a broadcaster (hosting variety shows on the BBC and CBS), Armed Forces Radio DJ, and a decade-long song-and-dance attraction in Vegas.
What thrills most about The Delta Sweete now is that sense of adventurousness. Gentry’s chord and rhythms voicings are rarely obvious, and her voice sounds almost uncomfortably close in the mix and low in her range. The quiet moments are whispered and meditative, the busy ones are alive with a dozen voices. She recorded this album as she was in the process of becoming an enormous star, but it doesn’t feel indulgent. Instead, it is the slightly more experiential back half of a shockingly prolific and influential year’s work, as if Ode to Billie Joe were Side A of Abbey Road and The Delta Sweete was the Sun King medley. She made her own Southern Hounds of Love in just a few months.
Gentry is alive today, though it seems relevant to say that few people know where. She hasn’t released music or made any public appearances since the early 1980s, not even as country music has come to an attempted overdue reckoning for its gender imbalances. Not even as other “lost” or legendary musicians of her era have found second or third lives as documentary subjects and memoirists. Not even as Mercury Rev released an album-length cover of The Delta Sweete a few years ago featuring vocals from Lucinda Williams, Margo Price, and other contemporary singer-songwriters. Few artists have had such an outsize effect on the shape of “Americana” music in such a short period of time, and few have paid so little heed to the restrictions of that lineage. The Delta Sweete is her least restricted statement of all.
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Get the Sunday Review in your inbox every weekend. Sign up for the Sunday Review newsletter here. | 2021-09-12T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2021-09-12T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Folk/Country | Capitol | September 12, 2021 | 8.7 | d661e425-0793-4cb5-a370-8401ae5d9835 | John Lingan | https://pitchfork.com/staff/john-lingan/ | |
The “Yucky Blucky Fruitcake” rapper’s major label debut showcases her versatility but loses some of the vibrant personality that made her breakout hit so appealing. | The “Yucky Blucky Fruitcake” rapper’s major label debut showcases her versatility but loses some of the vibrant personality that made her breakout hit so appealing. | Doechii: she / her / black bitch EP | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/doechii-she-her-black-bitch-ep/ | she / her / black bitch EP | Doechii’s independent 2020 single “Yucky Blucky Fruitcake” unfolds like a magical girl transformation. Speaking as a nervous new student introducing herself to a classroom, the Tampa-raised rapper begins with a meekness that sharpens into steely resolve as the track builds, girlhood crises of confidence giving way to adult conviction. “I am a black girl who beat the statistics,” she raps with a mix of relief, pride, and vexation. Doechii’s cadences and vocal tics on the song suggest Nicki Minaj, but the origin story at its center is wholly hers. When “Yucky Blucky Fruitcake” went viral the next year on TikTok, soundtracking then-versus-now reveals including gender transitions, weight loss stories, and makeovers, the song’s themes of self-discovery and overcoming adolescent angst drove the trend.
Doechii’s perspective is significantly muted on she / her / black bitch, the 5-song EP that marks her major label debut. She’s been more visible since moving to Los Angeles and signing a joint deal with Top Dawg Entertainment and Capitol, scream-rapping on The Tonight Show, literally snatching a wig on stage at the BET Awards, and landing a spot in XXL’s 2022 Freshman Class (she hits an impeccable rap squat on the magazine’s cover). But her most recent music feels less rooted in her experiences and identity, growing awash in empty flexes and filler.
The title she / her / black bitch nods to Doechii’s social media bio, reclaiming an insult lobbed at her growing up as a dark-skinned Black woman, but the writing on the EP rarely inhabits a point of view or sets a scene. “What should I do today, do today?/Who should I be, be today?” she ponders on the diaristic “This Bitch Matters,” capturing the aimless mood. Doechii’s nimble rapping and svelte singing work on a technical level, but she’s more often showing her skills than applying them. Though Doechii manages about six flows in three verses on opener “Swamp Bitches,” Rico Nasty lands the slickest lines in half the time. On “Persuasive,” Doechii’s even-keeled melodies are steamrolled by SZA’s impassioned vocal runs, which actually embrace the song's account of intoxicating seduction.
The EP has been billed as a stopgap as Doechii completes her debut album, but these songs don’t capture a moment of transition or experimentation. Doechii still traces lines drawn by muses like Minaj and Azealia Banks, and she’s not yet honed her core sound. Though the production is helmed by TDE producer Kal Banx (the secret weapon of Isaiah Rashad’s comeback album The House Is Burning), none of the beats feel as well matched to her writing as the tinny, homebrewed instrumental on “Yucky Blucky Fruitcake.” As she / her / black bitch swings from bar fests to R&B to soul, Doechii seems so intent on proving her versatility that she obscures her personality. | 2022-08-10T00:02:00.000-04:00 | 2022-08-10T00:02:00.000-04:00 | Rap / Pop/R&B | Top Dawg Entertainment / Atlantic | August 10, 2022 | 6 | d67ab50e-1c46-48b5-bca0-4c628dff0b9d | Stephen Kearse | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stephen-kearse/ | |
Mike Scott takes his long-running Irish/Scottish folk rock band the Waterboys into new terrain on his latest LP—incorporating four-four disco stomp, a heavy dose of hip-hop, and romantic love. | Mike Scott takes his long-running Irish/Scottish folk rock band the Waterboys into new terrain on his latest LP—incorporating four-four disco stomp, a heavy dose of hip-hop, and romantic love. | The Waterboys: Out of All This Blue | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/the-waterboys-out-of-all-this-blue/ | Out of All This Blue | Mike Scott has never been one for small gestures. It takes some measure of chutzpah to describe your art as “big music,” which is precisely what Scott did on a 1984 single by his Scottish/Irish folk rock band, the Waterboys. “Big music”—like an earnest, echoing fusion of Bruce Springsteen and Van Morrison—was a term amorphous enough that not even indie stalwart Alan McGee could explain it. But the very name conveyed ambition, or arrogance, and those are the two qualities that have been constants in Scott’s work, no matter who is in the Waterboys or what kind of music they’re playing.
Take Out of All This Blue, the new album from the Waterboys that marks a clear departure from their best-known records: the galvanizing 1985 LP This Is the Sea and 1988’s ramshackle Fisherman’s Blues. In its simplest incarnation, it’s a 23-track double album running 96 minutes, but add the 11-track bonus disc to the mix and Out of All This Blue balloons to two hours and 16 minutes. What spurred Mike Scott to indulge in his loquacious tendencies? A new love, naturally. Between 2015’s Modern Blues and Out of All This Blue, he fell in love and married the Japanese artist Megumi Igarashi—better known as Rokudenashiko—and the couple had a child. All this joy informs the songs and spirit of Out of All This Blue, whose very title, if viewed from a certain angle, suggests a triumphant emergence from sadness.
Along with a new romance comes a new set of influences for Scott. He accentuates the R&B that lurked on the edges of Modern Blues, insisting his “soul is in Memphis” even if “his ass is in Nashville, Tennessee” on a song named for the latter city. He hauls out a glitter ball for the four-four disco stomp “Monument” and adds a heavy dose of hip-hop. Scott realizes he is a few decades late to this game, but he maintains hip-hop is “still a changing frontier” of “reckless freedom.” These admirable sentiments are somewhat undermined by “Yamaben,” which sounds like the ghost of the Stereo MC’s, and how Scott thought it was wise to call an interlude “Hiphopstrumental 4 (Scatman),” a title that is pretty much the walking definition of a dad joke.
Such misses may be inevitable on an album as long as Out of All This Blue, but as the record crawls to its conclusion, these absurdities—which find companions in all manner of music and words—are ingratiating because they stem from Scott’s inherent pomp. Nearly 35 years after the Waterboys’ full-length debut, he’s still besotted by poets and idols, as apt to churn out purple prose as crack a wry aside. He’s the kind of guy who places equal weight on the questions “can you live with a man without becoming his mother” and “can you tell me the last six books you read” when courting a potential paramour (“If the answer is yeah,” he sings, then he’s into you).
If anything, Scott’s romantic instincts are accentuated in an unprecedented way on Out of All This Blue because so much of this lengthy album is devoted to love songs. Scott may ponder the question “Do We Choose Who We Love” on the track of the same name, but he doesn’t hesitate to single out Rokudenashiko or nod to her via a song named after a Japanese term of endearment (“Payo Payo Chin”). Coming from a singer/songwriter who used to strive to write for the world at large, such specificity is endearing—endearing enough that it can often excuse the dorky dance beats and other gauche production decisions. After all, part of Scott’s charm is his willingness to risk embarrassment, so it seems only right that an unfettered and smitten Scott feels free to let it all hang out on Out of All This Blue, both for good and ill. | 2017-09-09T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-09-09T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | BMG | September 9, 2017 | 6.3 | d680d724-2bf7-40f4-8d93-c01e15546918 | Stephen Thomas Erlewine | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stephen-thomas erlewine/ | |
This south London rapper and King Krule associate evokes the carefree heyday of ’90s UK garage. | This south London rapper and King Krule associate evokes the carefree heyday of ’90s UK garage. | Pinty: Midnight Moods | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/pinty-midnight-moods/ | Midnight Moods | Before grime, there was UK garage, a party-starting genre that treated its rappers more like hype men than storytellers. UK garage MCs were typically more concerned with getting the party started than documenting adversity, and Pinty, a south London artist and King Krule associate, grew up wanting to be just this kind of garage MC. His playful flow brings to mind the halcyon days of the late ’90s, when MC Neat and Craig David lit up the UK charts.
Pinty’s no straight-out copycat, though: while most garage MCs were hyped to the point of explosion, Midnight Moods was recorded at night, and you can hear the nocturnal ooze in Pinty’s voice, his laconic tone caught somewhere between going to bed and recording just one more vocal. The production shares this nonchalant, itchy feel. King Krule produced the tracks “It’s Just Life” and “Fresher” (plus the 56-second “Pint’s Lullaby” on the vinyl) under his DJ JD Sports guise, and he brings his lush musicality to bear: The shadowy, guitar-lined “It’s Just Life” recalls The Streets’ Mike Skinner if he grew up on jazz in bohemian South London. Meanwhile, the central trio of “E’s”, “Moonlit Duty” and “All Nightly” suggest a meandering strain of chill-out garage, their production not far off from a young Burial.
The mixtape’s most disquieting production is also its best. If the majority of Midnight Moods has the easy warmth of a packed bedroom studio, then “Go To Bed Pt. 2” brings the intoxicating delirium of a head cold, a warped synth line wrapping itself around nervous lo-fi house beats. Sadly, the mood dims when Pinty shows up, his one-paced flow suggesting a lack of confidence and finesse. Pinty’s vocals are genial enough when they fit to the beat, but a more versatile rapper would have switched up his style. But in the modest environment of Midnight Moods, this lack of personality is almost fitting. Garage MCs were rarely the stars of the show, and Pinty’s vocals contribute to the ambience of this charmingly understated mixtape, rather than dominate them. | 2020-05-02T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-05-02T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Winged Feet | May 2, 2020 | 7 | d6829faa-f5ac-4acf-b4bb-1f0c008cd65a | Ben Cardew | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ben-cardew/ | |
On her least country album to date, the Nashville songwriter flattens out the twang and borrows from pop and hip-hop, to mixed results. | On her least country album to date, the Nashville songwriter flattens out the twang and borrows from pop and hip-hop, to mixed results. | Ashley Monroe: Rosegold | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/ashley-monroe-rosegold/ | Rosegold | From her earliest singles in the mid-2000s, Ashley Monroe bent country music to her will. Whether she was singing about grief over her father’s death, the complicated joy of motherhood, or just a simple crush, she took old, familiar sounds and gussied them up to express something particular and deeply personal. As a result, her music often feels as meaningful and as confessional as her lyrics. Her songs about weed and sex sound all the more radical for being packaged in a style more commonly associated—rightly or wrongly—with conservatism. There’s poignancy in hearing her address rocky relationships with her parents through songs steeped in the classic twang they impressed on her as a child. Her intimate connection to the genre has made her one of the most compelling—not to mention one of the most sneakily subversive—artists in Nashville, albeit not among the most popular: She’s an outlaw of sorts, but not the easily marketable kind.
From the lush countrypolitan sound of The Blade to the gentle twang of the Dave Cobb-produced Sparrow, Monroe’s records each have a distinctive palette, suggesting an artist constantly rethinking her relationship to country music. Her latest, Rosegold, is more blatant and calculated in its sound, and it is steadfastly not a country album—it’s more Lana Del Rey than Dolly Parton. Working with a familiar crew of songwriters and producers, Monroe borrows from pop and hip-hop, flattens out the twang and distorts her vocals, and drenches everything in twilit colors meant to accentuate the songs’ melancholy.
But once you get past the gutsiness of an artist willing to jettison her comfort zone, what you’re left with is muddled and unsatisfying. Many of these songs are rooted in country songwriting and harmonizing, in particular “Silk” and “The New Me,” but her efforts to move away from these familiar elements create a tension that more often than not emphasizes the songs’ shortcomings. Rosegold asks you to calculate its precarious successes against its noble failures. There are plenty of the former, because Monroe knows how to put a song together: She piles the strings high on “Gold,” so that they tower over her voice—a monument to the way a certain someone makes her feel. “See” marches to a slow-moving chorus that recalls the National’s “Pink Rabbits,” highlighting the delicate breaks in her voice and the way she can twist a syllable to catch the light. But there are just as many moments when Monroe overreaches, such as the awkwardly insinuated reggae rhythm on “Groove” or the loudly ticking drums that open “I Mean It.”
Especially for an artist so steeped in country music—a genre that prizes tradition more than practices it—this kind of musical boldness can be compelling even when the stunts don’t land. What ultimately sinks Rosegold is the songwriting, which is where Monroe typically excels. This might be her least distinguished set of songs to date, relying too heavily on cliché (“I’m flying without even trying”) and vague, pat sentiment (“Sometimes it doesn’t come together ’til it breaks”). Even a title like “I Mean It” seems to nod to the suspicion that there’s less of her in these songs than we’ve come to expect. By the time she gives herself a pep talk at the end of “The New Me,” it’s clear that she’s serving these arrangements more than they serve her.
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-05-04T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2021-05-04T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Folk/Country | Mountainrose Sparrow / Thirty Tigers | May 4, 2021 | 5.7 | d684bedb-a300-4ae5-926a-ee9a2af15c70 | Stephen M. Deusner | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stephen-m. deusner/ | |
Flatland is the debut full-length by TJ Hertz's dark techno project Objekt. Flatland is experimental to its core, but it never considers polish and passion to be mutually exclusive. | Flatland is the debut full-length by TJ Hertz's dark techno project Objekt. Flatland is experimental to its core, but it never considers polish and passion to be mutually exclusive. | Objekt: Flatland | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/19840-objekt-flatland/ | Flatland | We've come to a strange chapter in the story of electronic music. Sounds that were long considered niche are now mainstream. It's an exciting space to be in, as the possibilities of electronic music's history are basically endless, but it's also somewhat confusing. Who and what do we talk about when we talk about electronic music? Where do we draw the line between what electronic music was and what it has become? And why, if at all, is it important to make these distinctions?
No surprise, then, that 2014 has given us more questions about "proper" electronic music than answers. Young producers like Sophie and the PC Music camp contextualized contemporary dance and pop permutations in their own high-gloss chicken-or-the-egg scenarios; Aphex Twin reinvigorated his career with an album that bucks current trends (many of which he's at least partially responsible for) by ignoring them altogether; and hardworking elder statesman Brian Eno released two records with Underworld's Karl Hyde that expressly contradicted each other's sounds, styles, and creative processes. Thankfully, much of this has made for thrilling, provocative music, and in ways that reward open-mindedness and conservatism in equal measure.
This is the context surrounding Flatland, the debut LP by TJ Hertz as Objekt, and he seems keenly aware of it. Maybe that's because he's been a leader in the electronic music conversation since 2011, when his first solo 12" snuck up behind dubstep and yanked the rug out from under it. Though "The Goose That Got Away" and "Tinderbox" have very little to do with the sleek, weighty tracks Hertz produces in his Berlin studio these days, the deep technical knowledge that helped make them possible is still central to Objekt's musical identity. Here is an artist who studied electronic and information engineering at University of Oxford, has developed software both personally and professionally (for tech giant Native Instruments), readily and openly shares tips, tricks, and advice with other producers, and only further hones his craft with each intermittent release. Nevermind if Objekt has any solutions for the state of electronic music, we have more to gain from knowing what he ponders and hearing how he manifests those thoughts.
Though his approach to techno may appear clinical or overly academic, Objekt's productions always feel animated and impulsive; Flatland is experimental to its core, but it never considers polish and passion to be mutually exclusive. It's because Hertz can fashion fiercely tactile and resilient elements with textbook precision that the basslines in his menacing "Dogma" use your backbone like a seismometer. And it's how "Ratchet" projects Cybotron's Detroit electro-isms from cathode tube monitors into a 3-D virtual environment. As an intro, "Agnes Revenge" dazzles with hi-def depictions of cryonized steel shattering ice blocks in ultra slow-mo, which Objekt inverts and further details during the noxious seepage of "Agnes Apparatus". No matter if it's functioning as soundsystem armament or headphone oddity, Flatland won't hesitate to travel down every avenue uncovered by the refined programming, ingenious sound theory, and liberal stylistic influences it was mapped with.
Which is why the record sounds rooted in electronic music's history even as it carves out an alternate future. Learned perfectionist that he is, Hertz knows the secrets of Drexciyan history, Autechre's essential deep cuts, Speedy J's trusty drum patterns, and what makes Richard D. James a legendary producer—using such seminal influences not to revive the past, but to reinvent it for his own purposes. The chugging thump in "Strays" may not have been made with an actual Roland TR-909, nor the acid sequences of "One Fell Swoop" or "Interlude (Whodunnit?)" with a 303, but Objekt can nonetheless capture each machine's warm, gritty soul with his own digitial approximation. Hertz remains dedicated to his icons while subverting their methods because he does so with the avant-garde spirit passed down through their work.
Throughout Flatland, Objekt reclaims his genre's all-too-familiar affectations by making us hear them for the first time all over again. It's a rare album that sounds so vivid and transparent despite its densely intricate constructions. Stranger still, it's one largely devoid of apparent melodies and climactic structures, instead using pristine sound design and dynamically expressive arrangements in the way an expert orchestra plays a symphony's fluid notation. Flatland isn't remarkable for answering any of electronic music's questions, it's remarkable because it lets us consider them from a completely new perspective. | 2014-10-23T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2014-10-23T02:00:01.000-04:00 | Electronic | Pan | October 23, 2014 | 8 | d69058a4-8ea7-4b6a-ae2f-2a70c225fdbf | Patric Fallon | https://pitchfork.com/staff/patric-fallon/ | null |
Theo Parrish might have gotten screwed over at the vinyl-pressing plant, but as a result, we got two volumes of this very-bluntly-named collection of moving, diffuse, spare, soul-deep jams. | Theo Parrish might have gotten screwed over at the vinyl-pressing plant, but as a result, we got two volumes of this very-bluntly-named collection of moving, diffuse, spare, soul-deep jams. | Various Artists: Sound Signature Presents: These Songs That Should've Been Out on Wax By Now | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22166-sound-signature-presents-these-songs-that-shouldve-been-out-on-wax-by-now/ | Sound Signature Presents: These Songs That Should've Been Out on Wax By Now | In a feature about the adversities facing the vinyl resurgence back in 2014, Joel Oliphint wrote: “Everyone is competing with everyone to get their records made and, at this rate, there won’t be enough presses to meet demand for some time, if ever.” Even with the good news that vinyl sales are at a 28-year high for 2016 and Third Man’s new pressing plant in Detroit, anyone who is not a major label is still feeling the squeeze at the presses. And if you’re a small, African-American-owned dance label out of Detroit doing runs in the hundreds like Theo Parrish’s Sound Signature, you might be screwed entirely.
Enter Sound Signature Presents: These songs should've been on wax by now. Due to back up at pressing plants we bring them to you in a somewhat inferior format that at least exists in a physical world! enjoy! Inferior format sure (these are CD-Rs), but since it’s almost impossible to keep up with the label and its scattershot 12”s, their pressing plant woes are to our benefit, as the two compilations provide a handy overview of Theo’s soundworld as well as that of his friends and neighbors. Not that it’s too easy, as these 18 tracks are bereft of artist credits. Instead, there’s just a list of people who appear: Afrobeat legend Tony Allen, Detroit session man Amp Fiddler, underground house forces like Marcellus Pittman, Kyle Hall, and Kai Alce, as well as Parrish himself. Guess them all, the CD case says, and you might win “even a new car even!”
Despite the wide range of artists, the music most closely reflects Parrish’s own sensibilities, as moving, diffuse, spare, soul-deep and withholding of payoffs as the man’s own productions. A mysterious female singer purrs over a piano vamp “Somewhere Inbetween” but the beat never comes. An incessant hi-hat and flurry of electric piano might be the only elements of “Whachawannado (Instrumental),” but the track never loses steam. Jazz fusion licks power “Hanna’s Waltz” while “Arrivals” and “Faucet” have the heady, heavy kick of Theo’s best tracks.
“Wayshimoovs rx” sounds like it’s from the same sessions that brought together Theo and Tony Allen. This easeful neo-soul track features the latter’s skittering shuffle beat paired to Theo’s spare keys and Andrew Ashong’s D’Angelo-esque purr. The two discs offer similar rewards, but the slowed-to-a-crawl “Greazy Spoonwalk” bogs down the first disc (and makes you wish for a vinyl version so as to pitch it up +8) and most of the heavier beats reside on the second volume.
Volume 1 ends with a remembrance of old Detroit, a bit of dialogue talking about seeing the old Motown revue for $2 as a horn plays in the background. Not much happens on the track, but it nevertheless informs all of the music. While all the tracks are new, they carry within them the history of the Motor City. Even if they don’t have the same star wattage, the voices on “Digital Love” and “Whachawannado” hearken back to the heyday of Motown soul singers like Marvin Gaye and Mary Wells. “Caddylack Steam Theme” delivers ‘70s funk with Blaxploitation swag, right down to the horns and rippling guitar licks. With its undeniable bass, stomping kick, cresting organ, vocal hums and crisp claps, “Ooohbass” is one of the set’s highlights, showing just how a producer like Parrish (or Pittman, Hall, etc.) draws on their hometown’s heritage for their own tracks. Sound Signature showcases Detroit house music at its dustiest, undeniable best, showing that even in the 21st century, dance music is at its most evocative when it’s the perfect triangulation of gospel, soul and funk. | 2016-07-25T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-07-25T01:00:00.000-04:00 | null | null | July 25, 2016 | 7.4 | d6988bd3-bc95-402e-8f8d-e793e50ae585 | Andy Beta | https://pitchfork.com/staff/andy-beta/ | null |
The debut album from the neo-soul singer-songwriter is driven by warm funk and soul and has the healing familiarity of hanging out on the couch commiserating with a best friend. | The debut album from the neo-soul singer-songwriter is driven by warm funk and soul and has the healing familiarity of hanging out on the couch commiserating with a best friend. | Ari Lennox: Shea Butter Baby | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/ari-lennox-shea-butter-baby/ | Shea Butter Baby | That sweet, warm, slightly nutty scent of shea butter; its aroma inseparable from memories of self-preservation, softness, and the kind of intimacy needed to recognize both. The effortlessly soothing Ari Lennox and her debut full-length Shea Butter Baby live up to the rich evocations of the title. The 12-song collection, driven by warm funk and soul, is at once wrenchingly intimate and sweetly playful. From slinky tracks about endless longing to hip-popping bops about unabashed desire, the album is a balm, elevating Lennox to the upper echelon of today’s neo-R&B and soul wave.
Shea Butter Baby comes nearly three years after Lennox signed with J. Cole’s label Dreamville and released her 2016 EP Pho. Including songs written across those first three years, the album presents lush, gogo-infused instrumentation as the backdrop to Lennox’s chronicles of life and love. Lyrical references points include buying cough drops at CVS, wearing Target (pronounced “Targét”) lingerie, and having bad luck on Tinder. “I just got a new apartment/I’m gon’ leave the floor wet/Walk around this bitch naked/And nobody can tell me shit,” she sings on “New Apartment,” a strutting tribute to domestic autonomy. Over a fat funk bass line and bouncy horns, she revels in the power to leave her hair in the shower or cartwheel inside her yet-to-be-furnished living room.
It gives way to one of the spoken interludes peppered throughout Shea Butter Baby, where Lennox’s voice is pitched up to a mousiness that, in Vine and YouTube fashion, pokes light fun at her words. Meanwhile, on “I Been” Lennox sings about smoking weed to forget a past lover, bringing an exhilarating quality to the velvety R&B track with playful vocals melodies that jump from high, heady notes to low ones from the chest and back again.
These moments of levity make the album’s intense sincerity that much more powerful, as on airy R&B song “Whipped Cream,” whose lyrics quickly slide from light distraction to something deeper: “I’ve been eating whipped cream/Having vivid dreams/Of your face and through people on TV screens/You’ve been everywhere/And I wish I didn’t care.” There’s a cool ease to Shea Butter Baby that stems from Lennox finding abundance in quotidian details. That clear-eyed look at millennial life makes the emotional heart of each song—whether it’s frustration, lust, or unrepentant joy—feel as tangible as the comforting clutter on your bedside table.
Though the album doesn’t really step outside of neo-soul conventions, it is nevertheless as stirring and lifting as a memory-triggering scent. Like the image Lennox conjures of shea butter staining a pillowcase, Shea Butter Baby grounds the spiritual sultriness of neo-soul and R&B in irreverent frankness, subverting the idea that the modern self-assured woman must maintain a divine facade. There’s power, she suggests, in celebrating the imperfect and slightly messy, rather than chunks of reality polished smooth. In that way, Lennox’s brand of neo-soul has the healing familiarity of hanging out on the couch commiserating with a best friend. Sometimes you don’t need an untouchable guide out of everyday angst and annoyances. Sometimes you just need someone in there with you. | 2019-05-15T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-05-15T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | Dreamville / Interscope | May 15, 2019 | 7.6 | d69b6f5f-1d8d-41f0-861d-2114e370acc2 | Ann-Derrick Gaillot | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ann-derrick-gaillot/ | |
There's only one question that really needs to be asked of 69 Love Songs: is it a brilliant masterpiece ... | There's only one question that really needs to be asked of 69 Love Songs: is it a brilliant masterpiece ... | The Magnetic Fields: 69 Love Songs | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/5041-69-love-songs/ | 69 Love Songs | There's only one question that really needs to be asked of 69 Love Songs: is it a brilliant masterpiece or merely very, very good? The title alone is enough to send music geeks the world over into a foamy-mouthed, epileptic frenzy. 69 songs equals 3 CDs equals nearly three solid hours of new Magnetic Fields material-- think of it! That's more than some notable bands released in their entire existence. Add that to the fact that the Magnetic Fields actually followed through with their concept without turning it into the indie-pop equivalent of Lou Reed's Metal Machine Music.
You see, I have this theory that music critics are suckers for novelty, and there isn't much in this world that's more novel than 69 Love Songs. It borders on being a prop in a Mark Leyner story-- it's hyperreal and excessive, yet perfectly plausible when you consider how weird reality is. Because of this, the album never feels like a ponderous, pretentious artistic statement (unlike most multi-CD releases). Stephin Merritt and company sound like they approached this ridiculously ambitious project with the most casual of airs, idly plucking melody after divine melody out of the air like low-hanging fruit from a tree. It's how pop music should sound, really: so natural and feather-light that you never notice the amount of effort that went into it.
Therein lies the paradox of 69 Love Songs-- it's such a basic style of music that it's easy to dismiss it as "just pop music." Of course, that's what it is, so should it really deserve such high praise? Should it rank among the best albums of the 1990s? Or is it too bizarre to be considered culturally important? I mean, Abbey Road is a pretty weird album, too. Then again, Abbey Road isn't three hours long.
Regardless, Stephin Merritt has proven himself as an exceptional songwriter, making quantum leaps in quality as well as quantity on 69 Love Songs. This incarnation of the band doesn't feature much of the densely layered, burbling electro-pop that they're best known for; in its stead are sparser, more acoustic songs that sound as if they're being played on actual instruments by a group of actual musicians (as opposed to Merritt himself playing mad scientist with effects racks and overdubs). It may initially seem like this stylistic decision came due to budget restrictions-- if you're recording that many songs, you can't blow too much money on any one track. But it's probably more likely that Merritt finally realized the limits of tinny synths and drum machines.
On the Fields' previous outing, Get Lost, you can hear Merritt beginning to lean toward simpler, more elegant arrangements; 69 Love Songs could easily be seen as a continuation of that trend. Merritt also ensures that the listener will never get bored with any one sound, trading off vocal duties with four other singers and deploying a mind-boggling array of instruments: ukulele, banjo, accordion, cello, mandolin, piano, flute, guitars of all shapes and sizes, a dumpster full of percussion toys, and the usual setup of synths and effects. Among other things.
And the songs themselves? Well, I could write a thesis dissecting each and every song on this album, but that would take months. As a prism refracts light into a spectrum of colors, 69 Love Songs not only refracts love into a spectrum of emotions, but also refracts the love song itself into a spectrum of musical forms. There's a duet between a dysfunctional Sonny and Cher ("Yeah! Oh Yeah!"), a country-gospel tune confusing religious and secular love ("Kiss Me Like You Mean It"), and an amusingly light-hearted tale of a soldier's drunken tryst ("The Night You Can't Remember").
There's giddy lust ("Let's Pretend We're Bunny Rabbits"), romantic longing ("Come Back from San Francisco"), sleazy leering ("Underwear"), and resignation and despair ("No One Will Ever Love You"). There are genre exercises such as faux-beatnik jazz ("Love is Like Jazz"), Paul Simon-ish world music ("World Love"), Gilbert and Sullivan-style mincing harpsichord ("For We are the King of the Boudoir"), Merritt's cartoony, day-glo interpretation of punk rock ("Punk Love"), Scottish folk ("Wi' Nae Wee Bairn Ye'll Me Beget"), and a brief Philip Glass tribute ("Experimental Music Love"). There are also plenty of archetypal Magnetic Fields songs, with those trademark deadpan drama-queen vocals, casually depressive lyrics, and clever rhymes. But Merritt also shows he can pen some surprisingly sincere, moving ballads ("Busby Berkeley Dreams," "The Book of Love"), too.
So, back to the original debate. You know that old saying about the whole being more than the sum of its parts? The sum of the parts of 69 Love Songs adds up exactly to its whole. No more, no less. Each song contains its own small epiphany, but they never quite add up to the one big sweeping epiphany that you'd hope for. That's because it's impossible to reconcile the concept of 69 Love Songs with its execution; it's simply too big. That might sound like a cop-out, but this is truly an album you can get lost in. The individual songs will inevitably distract you from a big-picture interpretation of the album. Of course, the Magnetic Fields don't concern themselves with such matters; they promised us 69 love songs, and that's what they delivered. That it's actually worth the exorbitant $35 price tag is a bonus. | 1999-09-07T01:00:05.000-04:00 | 1999-09-07T01:00:05.000-04:00 | Rock | Merge | September 7, 1999 | 9 | d69bca10-6129-40e7-a714-052c4fab3f36 | Pitchfork | null |
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Atlanta rapper Rome Fortune is an independent artist who has paid his dues on the mixtape circuit. His new album offers a look behind the veil of moderate Internet-based fame. | Atlanta rapper Rome Fortune is an independent artist who has paid his dues on the mixtape circuit. His new album offers a look behind the veil of moderate Internet-based fame. | Rome Fortune: Jerome Raheem Fortune | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21604-rome-fortune-jerome-raheem-fortune/ | Jerome Raheem Fortune | Atlanta rapper Rome Fortune is a working-class MC, an independent artist who has paid his dues on the mixtape circuit, even if he’s still not a member of rap’s functional middle class. In an age of viral rap stars thriving on the Instagram snippet economy, Fortune has taken a more methodical approach, building a cult following over several years with his two-part Beautiful Pimp mixtape series and a host of collaborative projects, among them YEP with rapper OG Maco and EPs/tapes with local producers Dun Deal, Childish Major, and CeeJ (from the rap collective Two-9). You can hear the labor in his method, in the mechanics of how he puts his words together.
It’s fitting, then, that the self-titled Jerome Raheem Fortune focuses on his toils, from living in a motel with his single mother to paying back loans to missing the birthdays of loved ones due to the punishing schedule of life as an aspiring rapper. Fortune seeks to humanize and not deify, and this is the most personal he has ever been in his writing, with lyrics that are closer to journal entries than rap verses. The songs are at times almost uncomfortably autobiographical, a look behind the veil of moderate Internet-based fame: Fortune talks openly about family dynamics, being broke, and his entire life outside rap, everything from how he ended up with two baby mamas to how he plans to pay for his kids’ pull-ups. On "Still I Fight On," he establishes his priorities, summarizing with "Fuck an album placement/ I fought for survival." For him, rap is a means to an end; he believes himself to be a dynamic artist, yes, but he’s constantly got his eye on the bottom line.
This desire for financial stability and proud DIY mentality fuels everything Fortune does, and here he attempts to earn his keep narrating his life. Jerome Raheem Fortune builds on the sound of 2013’s Beautiful Pimp—quick-splitting, electronic-leaning productions with snug verses that lean heavily on charismatic vocal performances, songs actively seeking to buck Atlanta trap trends—but he’s never gone this far out. The dark, coke-powered "Heavy as Feathers," which whirrs like a UFO desperately trying to stay afloat, clicking and clanging and breaking apart, is the centerpiece for his sound-warping escapades. When the experimentation works, there are songs like "Past Future," a collapsing multi-tone palace that pairs his best writing ("The writing on the wall was a movie script") with his most captivating rapping.
Rome Fortune’s strongest attribute is his comfort with virtually any production, and that serves him well on the constantly-shifting Jerome Raheem Fortune. There are lush, blooming tracks scattered thought ("Alone Tonight" builds slowly and woozily before switching dramatically into a strutting riff; "Find My Way" false starts into trickling synths), and he’s good at finding the open space despite all the continuous movement, sliding in and out of the grooves with intimate admissions. But while Fortune bares his soul, he isn’t a particularly gifted wordsmith and some of the storytelling gets muddled a bit because of it. Still, he’s an exceptional performer and overcomes his limitations with sheer energy. Jerome Raheem Fortune is the work of an artist who is still figuring it all out, a flawed but ambitious art piece that’s the culmination of several years of growth. | 2016-02-29T01:00:01.000-05:00 | 2016-02-29T01:00:01.000-05:00 | Rap | Fool’s Gold | February 29, 2016 | 7 | d6a4be26-e0b8-43b0-99b8-84d44efbeb46 | Sheldon Pearce | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sheldon-pearce/ | null |
A new installment in Parlophone’s ongoing reissue series revisits an oft-bootlegged 1969 session with fellow folkie John Hutchinson: literal bedroom tapes, but still revelatory. | A new installment in Parlophone’s ongoing reissue series revisits an oft-bootlegged 1969 session with fellow folkie John Hutchinson: literal bedroom tapes, but still revelatory. | David Bowie: The ‘Mercury’ Demos | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/david-bowie-the-mercury-demos/ | The ‘Mercury’ Demos | In the spring of 1969, David Bowie had been in exile from pop music for over a year. After splitting with his label, Deram, as they kept rejecting prospective singles, he’d formed a folk trio with his girlfriend, Hermione Farthingale, and John Hutchinson, a guitarist from his former band. Bowie auditioned for plays, crafted a cabaret act, joined a UFO spotting group, performed mime, got bit parts in films and commercials—a typical late-1960s creative experience. But his primary goal was another record deal, and he was running out of options. Philips/Mercury was one of his last shots—most other major UK labels of the ’60s had already released music by him, with no chart success. Befriending a Mercury A&R rep, Bowie had an inside connection, so he and Hutchinson auditioned via a Revox reel-to-reel.
The ‘Mercury’ Demos are simply that: 10 demos for Mercury by the folk duo of Bowie and Hutch (Bowie and Farthingale had broken up some months before). Bootlegged for decades, they finally get an official release as part of Parlophone’s ongoing reissue series. Happily, it’s a single LP here and not a cumbersome box set of 7" singles, as with the Clareville Grove Demos and Spying Through a Keyhole. Unhappily, it’s a single LP of demos whose retail price is more in line with that of a multiple-CD reissue set.
The packaging mimics a promo kit from 1969: photo contact sheets and headshots of Bowie and Hutch, a few stapled pages of “typewritten” liner notes. But as with the other Bowie demo sets, it can’t shake looking like a cynical bid for the fan wallet. Perhaps the final touch will be a “master” box set collecting all previous box sets. (Unlike Keyhole, at least, it didn’t wait months to appear on streaming services.)
Still, The ‘Mercury’ Demos are of historical interest and, if you’ve not heard the bootlegs, revelatory. There’s a solid upgrade in sound quality, as many bootlegs were based off a tape that appears to have been slightly sped up. The interplay of Hutchinson and Bowie’s guitars and their vocal harmonies are far better distinguished; there are also exchanges and jokes not heard on the most widely circulating boots.
Though these were literal bedroom recordings, complete with microphone clunks, quickly tuned strings, noise from another room, and an audible cigarette break, the tapes are the start of David Bowie as he’s generally remembered. His career retrospective Sound + Vision opened with the Mercury demo of “Space Oddity,” included in this set—Bowie marking off where he believed his performing self began and reducing the rest of his ’60s work to juvenilia.
Songs fall in a few categories. There are two covers, with prominent Hutchinson vocals: “Life Is a Circus,” written by Roger Bunn, and Lesley Duncan’s “Love Song,” which paid far more dividends for Duncan (a Bowie intimate and fellow UFO enthusiast) when Elton John covered it on Tumbleweed Connection. “She’s very underrated,” Bowie notes before the take.
Of greater interest are songs Bowie wrote after his breakup with Farthingale, which he’d record for his 1969 album Space Oddity: “Letter to Hermione” (here under its original title, “I’m Not Quite”) and “An Occasional Dream.” Gorgeous heartbreak mementos, they’re charming and sweet in their bedsit demo forms. The Mercury “An Occasional Dream” (an earlier demo of it appears on Clareville Grove) is preferable to its uptempo crushed-velvet version on 1969’s Space Oddity, with its jaunty recorder arrangement.
The Mercury set shows how swiftly Bowie was developing as a songwriter in 1969: Only “Ching-a-Ling,” Donovan-esque hippie flotsam, and the wonderfully odd “When I’m Five” hail from the year before. Freshly minted songs include “Conversation Piece,” destined to be a B-side (introduced as “a new one,” with Bowie prompting Hutchinson with its opening chords) and “Janine,” whose Space Oddity take (unsurprisingly) lacks the “Hey Jude” homage heard on the demo. Then there’s “Lover to the Dawn,” a Bowie/Hutchinson harmonized song about a “bitter girl” that Bowie soon worked into “Cygnet Committee,” an anti-counterculture rant/prophesy/freak-out track.
But its centerpiece is “Space Oddity.”. Bowie had honed the song for months, cutting multiple demos, and a full-band take for a promo film. It was Bowie as a shameless magpie, scanning the radio dial and grabbing what he could. A guitar break from Fifth Dimension’s “Carpet Man.” A vocal arrangement in the line of another folk duo: Hutchinson as Ground Control Simon to Bowie’s Major Tom Garfunkel. And a lyric whose scenario isn’t far from the Bee Gees’ death-bubblegum hits “New York Mining Disaster 1941” and “I’ve Gotta Get a Message to You.” The Mercury demo shows how tightly Bowie had constructed the song—it’s the blueprint for its single recording in June 1969.
Mercury signed Bowie, and “Space Oddity” hit No. 5 in the UK in late 1969, but he soon sputtered out commercially and didn’t become a star until landing with RCA two years later. Perhaps we’ll hear the groundwork for that record deal soon enough. | 2019-07-10T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-07-10T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Rhino | July 10, 2019 | 7.1 | d6a68d47-e0c0-4d24-8b67-a50dfc9805bf | Chris O’Leary | https://pitchfork.com/staff/chris-o’leary/ | |
Working with producer Dave Sitek, Nathan Williams returns with another mixed bag of combative rock songs that are straightforward to a fault. | Working with producer Dave Sitek, Nathan Williams returns with another mixed bag of combative rock songs that are straightforward to a fault. | Wavves: Hideaway | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/wavves-hideaway/ | Hideaway | It’s been a long time since indie rock produced a lightning rod like Nathan Williams. Although the Wavves frontman has mellowed out since his breakout year in 2009, when the music press eagerly documented every canceled show, on-stage meltdown, and verbal or physical altercation, he remains a uniquely contentious figure, whether he’s baiting Trump supporters or burning bridges with Warner after a stint on the label that was almost preordained to end poorly. Most recently he outed himself as a landlord, giving his detractors a new tag to taunt him with. A story about a musician leasing apartments might have bounced off most artists. Williams, however, has always had a gift for making bad press stick.
Williams’ combative tendencies carry through his music. Wavves’ eighth album Hideaway opens with three consecutive rippers about cutting toxic presences out of your life—most specifically, toxic people. “I don’t want your dark cloud around me,” he sneers on the title track. On “Thru Hell” he decries the “hideous people” pointing fingers at him. “I gotta get away from the things that bring me pain,” he vows on “Help Is on the Way.” It’s a declaration of self-care, but there’s some axe-grinding there, too.
After a couple of major label albums and a self-released 2017 LP, Hideaway marks Wavves’ return to Fat Possum, the label that released the two records Williams will be remembered for: 2009’s scuzzy Wavvves and 2010’s pop-punk reinvention King of the Beach, the high-water mark that all of its successors are measured against. Hideaway abides by the same rules as every Wavves record: When it’s generous with volume and tempo, as on its brisk opening run, it’s a kick. When it slows down, it drags. This band’s songs always fare best with a running start; the depressive doo-wop of “Honeycomb” and the twinkling ballad “Caviar” don’t get one.
Producer Dave Sitek, of TV on the Radio, assumed a fairly hands-on role, co-writing several songs and contributing guitar or synth to others. He adds density and texture to these tracks, most of it welcome. “The Blame” in particular pops with period detail, playing like a jaunty country exercise right out of a Monkees record. If anything, Hideaway could have benefited from a little more studio interference: Williams’ songwriting is so economical it leaves a lot of room for color around the margins. “Planting a Garden” conjures the chime-and-churn of the Posies’ grungiest records, but it begs for a little more alt-rock punch—the guitars never bite as viciously as Williams’ lyrics.
Of course, nobody comes to a Wavves record for the production. This band lives or dies by its hooks, and in truth most of Hideaway’s are only OK. They’re straightforward to a fault, and short on those small, sometimes barely even perceptible deviations from expectation that distinguish a sublime hook from a routine one. Williams’ greatest strength and weakness as a songwriter is that he always follows the path of least resistance. But a decade into his career, that approach has created a trap: Try too hard and it sounds forced; recycle the same tricks and there’s nothing new to see.
Buy: Rough Trade
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Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-07-19T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2021-07-19T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Fat Possum | July 19, 2021 | 6.2 | d6a9d81a-f998-45e9-a6c7-4f01c0ebff43 | Evan Rytlewski | https://pitchfork.com/staff/evan-rytlewski/ | |
Sun Ra manifested an ecstatic vision of jazz that is still being unpacked and realized a half-century on. A pair of new reissues highlight two defining albums in his oeuvre. | Sun Ra manifested an ecstatic vision of jazz that is still being unpacked and realized a half-century on. A pair of new reissues highlight two defining albums in his oeuvre. | Sun Ra and His Arkestra: The Magic City / My Brother the Wind Vol. 1 | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/sun-ra-and-his-arkestra-the-magic-city-my-brother-the-wind-vol-1/ | The Magic City / My Brother the Wind Vol. 1 | In a roughly 10-year period after the post-Civil War era, the small Alabama town of Birmingham exploded from a population of 100 to over a quarter-million, a growth that earned the Southern town the title of “The Magic City.” But for Birmingham-born Herman “Sonny” Blount, as a young man, the segregated city had no discernible “magical” qualities. During WWII, he was a pacifist imprisoned for six weeks as a conscientious objector to the draft, a fate worse than death for the young musician. Soon after his release, he left Birmingham for Chicago, rechristened himself Sun Ra, and struck out on a lifelong mission against a society dedicated to war, creating a body of music that ecstatically celebrated “a universal existence… common to all the living.”
Sun Ra manifested a vision of jazz that is still being unpacked and realized a half-century on by the likes of Kamasi Washington, Flying Lotus, and Hieroglyphic Being, to name a few of his followers. His discography is extensive and labyrinthian, with entire books dedicated to piecing it all together. Recently a new imprint, Cosmic Myth Records, was established to remaster and reissue select albums from the man’s long career, the first two releases being 1966’s The Magic City and 1970’s My Brother the Wind Vol. 1, two defining albums in his oeuvre.
For the remainder of his terrestrial years, Sun Ra resided in Chicago, New York City, and Philadelphia, never returning to Birmingham until the end of his life. (In 1993 he went to see his sister, contracted pneumonia, and died in his hometown.) The Magic City looms large over jazz much like Ulysses—James Joyce’s ode to his abandoned home of Dublin—does in modern literature.
After years spent in Chicago, Sun Ra and his Arkestra landed in New York City’s East Village in the early 1960s, living communally and rehearsing daily. While Sun Ra and band had made a reputation for themselves in the Windy City, being at the epicenter of jazz expanded the band’s dimensions, the big band swing and exotica of their early albums giving way to more avant-garde sounds. In 1965, there was no shortage of groundbreaking jazz emanating from New York City (John Coltrane’s A Love Supreme, Albert Ayler’s Spiritual Unity, Archie Shepp’s Fire Music, and New York Art Quartet’s debut to name a few), but despite such company, Sun Ra’s opus remains audacious in almost every sense of scale. Sun Ra himself released five albums that year (Fate in a Pleasant Mood, Secrets of the Sun, Art Forms of Dimensions Tomorrow, and Heliocentric Worlds of Sun Ra Vol. 1), but The Magic City and its title track tower over them all.
On The Magic City, a 13-member Arkestra unfurls across a 26-minute title track unlike much jazz from that era: there’s no clearly stated theme, no head and section for solos, but also no sense that it’s a free-blowing jam either. There’s a structure to be gleaned, but it more closely resembles Martian architecture than anything to be found in the jazz idiom. It moves like a city story, full of interactions: between the reeds of Arkestra mainstays Marshall Allen, Pat Patrick, and John Gilmore grappling with Walter Miller’s trumpet and Ali Hassan’s trombone; the bowed bass of Ronnie Boykins against a battery of percussionists; the piano and horror movie Clavioline of Sun Ra dictating the pace and directions throughout. A cluster of flutes and piccolo flutter in the high registers over a minute and a half in, like birds around a park bench. Other horns jostle and trade lines like overhead street chatter, then a riot of shrieks explode later on.
And unlike almost any other jazz up until that point, there’s cognition of the recording process itself. Tommy “Bugs” Hunter, a longtime ally of Sun Ra, is credited with reverb on the composition. While the likes of Rudy Van Gelder and Bob Thiele were capturing jazz performances as naturally and unobtrusively as possible, Sun Ra was liable to suddenly plunge a listener into the depths of space, swaddling horns, hand drums, and his electric piano in cavernous reverb. Any number of modern jazz icons from the era could create the bustle of the street, but only Sun Ra could vertiginously shoot you up over the skyscrapers with such effects.
Sun Ra was also an early adaptor of another novel effect, that of the Moog synthesizer created by Robert Moog. By the end of the 1960s, the Moog had begun to enter the pop world, adding odd new effects to songs from the Byrds and the Beatles and even bringing Bach into the modern world. As Sun Ra told Down Beat magazine: “[The Moog Synthesizer] most certainly is worthy of a place in music. There are many effects on it which at present are not upon any other instrument.” He was not alone in utilizing the synth in jazz, as Paul Bley and Annette Peacock were also experimenting with its tones, but Sun Ra’s initial encounter with the instrument—which would become part of his sonic arsenal the rest of his life—is documented on his 1970 album My Brother the Wind Vol. 1 (not to be confused with Vol. II, a charming album of space chants featuring Arkestra vocalist June Tyson).
While an album like The Magic City reveals Sun Ra’s own strain of logic when it comes to writing for his group, My Brother the Wind sounds more exploratory, seeking just where the outlandish effects of the Moog mingle with breath-based reeds. “Wind” is a perfect descriptor for the kind of tone Ra unleashes from the Moog’s keys on the opening title track, sounding more like a whistling winter gale than actual notes. On the gurgling “To Nature’s God,” the mellowest piece here, Sun Ra hits upon alien gamelan-like tones that glimmer. The reissue also unearths the wobbly “The Perfect Man,” one of the funkiest (hence, strangest) entries in the man’s catalog, an electronic groover with Moog flatulence fluttering atop the steady rhythm.
But as Sun Ra noodles around, his stripped-down ensemble does its best to follow him outward. The 17-minute long “The Code of Interdependence” wanders far and wide, cohering at points but mostly just venturing to the furthest extremes of the Moog for signs of life. For those looking for the most cosmic part of Sun Ra’s sound, the 18-minute “Space Probe” is near legendary. It’s Sun Ra operating solo, exploring the wooliest voids of space with the Moog as his craft, tuning into the most alien of frequencies and making them heel to his command. Making the mysterious sounds of space reverberate on Earth remains one of Sun Ra’s greatest feats of magic. | 2017-10-16T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-10-16T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Jazz | null | October 16, 2017 | 8.5 | d6bb1b56-bb61-44e3-9ba9-b3745b1ebe7a | Andy Beta | https://pitchfork.com/staff/andy-beta/ | |
On their fourth album, the indie-folk band still possess their signature warmth, but the charm of their heartfelt confessionals has dimmed. | On their fourth album, the indie-folk band still possess their signature warmth, but the charm of their heartfelt confessionals has dimmed. | Pinegrove: Marigold | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/pinegrove-marigold/ | Marigold | Pinegrove arrived on a promise of deep personal connection. One of the band’s early songs, “New Friends,” begins with singer-songwriter Evan Stephens Hall scanning the room for anyone he knows. When he can’t find a familiar face, it’s as if he welcomes members of the audience as fresh confidantes. In a twangy voice that can rise from a bookish murmur to a raspy yawp, he belts, “What’s the worst that could happen?”
Organized around the core duo of Hall and drummer Zack Levine, two friends who grew up together in a leafy New Jersey township, Pinegrove kept spreading that sense of intimacy through their creaky indie-folk. Their breakout record, 2016’s Cardinal, opens with “Old Friends,” a shuffling, spoken-sung romp with a diaristic homecoming narrative that carries a twinge of mortality. “Should tell my friends when I love them,” Hall sings. Bigger and bigger audiences were soon singing along; their fans became known as Pinenuts; Kristen Stewart got a Pinegrove tattoo. They raised more than $21,000 for Planned Parenthood while delivering communal anthems as impassioned as they were vulnerable.
A follow-up to Cardinal was just about ready to go when, in November 2017, Hall announced—via a long Facebook post—that he’d “been accused of sexual coercion” by an unnamed person. (According to a recent Pinegrove profile in The New Yorker, the accuser was “a member of the band’s crew” who had a romantic relationship with Hall that she views as “implicitly manipulative.”) After a year-long hiatus at, Hall told Pitchfork, the request of the accuser, the band released Skylight, a spare album that refined the band’s open-hearted alt-Americana. Pinegrove’s new album Marigold contains some of their signature warmth but lacks the luster that made their initial run of albums exceptional.
Self-produced by Hall and Pinegrove multi-instrumentalist Sam Skinner, Marigold is endearingly rumpled, but the mood is more melancholy, more dreary. These songs find the forever-unguarded Hall in dark, sleepless nights and awestruck mornings. The most transcendent moment comes in the chorus of the opening track, “Dotted Line,” when Hall sings, joined by weeping steel guitars and the powerhouse backing vocals of former member Nandi Rose (aka Half Waif), “I don’t know how/But I’m thinking it’ll all work out.” Another balm is “The Alarmist,” where a rootsy shimmer somewhere between Nick Drake and Big Thief cushions a naked plea for reassurance.
The sullen, hangdog mood can start to feel drab. Hall always seems to be singing about either waking up or falling asleep; more than one song hinges on an encounter with an animal in the road. These banal motifs make it feel like you’re shut in with someone who doesn’t get out much and, in contrast to such famous recluses as Belle and Sebastian’s Stuart Murdoch, doesn’t have much imagination about the world outside, either.
There’s no blueprint for how—or even whether—a band should return after complicated sexual misconduct allegations. Though Skylight was released after the allegations, it was recorded before and shelved soon after. That album’s seeming return to basics was more like a fluke of time than a statement. Following a string of sold-out shows last year, Marigold is the first album written in the wake of Hall’s experience, one that perhaps colors the feelings of seclusion and doubt so earnestly deployed here. Whether he’s writing through it or writing around it, Hall presents as an open book.
Unfortunately, this openness leaves something to be desired artistically. Some lyrics have a grating, Victorian quality: “You do upend my island,” Hall sings on one song, like a lovesick character from a Decemberists deep cut. “Let’s build us a new house for to live,” he sings on another. The charm of his confessions has dimmed considerably and the six-minute title track, a droning electro-acoustic instrumental, is simply superfluous. Even on “The Alarmist,” the songwriter who once used “solipsistic” as a lyric now pushes back at solipsism by demonstrating the discovery of object permanence: the awareness, which typically occurs during infancy, that people and objects still exist even when they’re out of sight. “When you walk away, you still exist,” Hall sings. It feels of a piece with why Pinegrove’s once bottomless well of sincerity now feels low and lukewarm. The simple has turned complicated, the signal has some static, but they still play as if they just want to find a new confidante in the crowd.
Buy: Rough Trade
(Pitchfork may earn a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.) | 2020-01-22T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2020-01-22T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Rough Trade | January 22, 2020 | 6.6 | d6c384c4-d241-4acd-91e6-395d6248ae46 | Marc Hogan | https://pitchfork.com/staff/marc-hogan/ | |
In Kenny Mason’s world, puppies are royalty and contemporary Southern rap and rock go hand-in-hand. | In Kenny Mason’s world, puppies are royalty and contemporary Southern rap and rock go hand-in-hand. | Kenny Mason: RUFFS | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/kenny-mason-ruffs/ | RUFFS | Genre-blending is standard in rap today, but Kenny Mason’s mix is more fluid than most. From a young age, the Atlanta rapper was drawn to music across genres—from Lil Wayne and Kendrick Lamar to Deftones and Slipknot. At 27, he’s an exactingly technical writer who underlines his slice-of-life anecdotes with double entendres and balloons them with grand, moody beats. It isn’t like Baby Keem releasing an album of mostly rap songs with one acoustic rock ballad; Mason is just as likely to rap-croon over a crunchy guitar riff as he is to flow breathlessly across stuttering 808s. Every sound in his music folds back into rap, the soup stock supporting the diverse ingredients that give his work its texture.
Mason has been calibrating this bombastic combo since his 2020 debut, Angelic Hoodrat, a fast-paced mix of alternative rock, trap, and R&B. As he’s matured, his ambitious musical hybrids detract less from the raw yet clinical writing style that’s made believers out of Denzel Curry and Freddie Gibbs. On his loosely canine-themed new album, RUFFS, Mason’s genre agnosticism becomes virtually seamless, disinclined to draw your attention to the fact that any fusion is occurring at all. He’s not exactly charting unexplored terrain like quinn or Redveil, but his wanderlust has coagulated into something more singular: A world where puppies are royalty and contemporary Southern rap and rock go hand-in-hand.
As a rapper, Mason has an unnerving sense of control, and his deadpan voice makes it all the more impressive when he pulls the ripcord and effortlessly demolishes bars. He blazes through the reverb’d frenzy of opening track “Zoomies” and mid-album highlight “Nosedive” without so much as an exhale, yet manages enough switches not to get stale. “Halloween” and “RX” span staccato sing-raps and stadium-sized croons, which are different from the sturdy flows over samples and hi-hats on “Halos” and “Shell,” which are different from the bouncy raps and melodic touches that dot later tracks like “Spin N Flip” and “Givenchy.” RUFFS never goes too deep into one sound; its colorful musical footnotes melt and pool like wax around a candle.
It’s thrilling to hear Mason rattle off schemes, but his raps aren’t technical just for the sake of it. Clever images and wordplay litter every song—he pulls a gun clip back with his thumb like the secret handshake from Hey Arnold! on “Zoomies” and, on “Shell,” remembers growing up “too broke to know what a break meant, but not enough to do a break-in.” There’s plenty of young-adult angst to go around, but it never feels juvenile. As he confides in love interests and homies and mourns innocence lost to early exposure to Glocks, Mason’s writing cracks the door to his personal life just wide enough to foster connection without giving away all the details.
A special relationship with dogs helps to flesh out his emotions. “Zoomies” compares his tendency to “run through this shit” to an overexcited pet’s burst of energy. On “333 / Atom,” he makes the connection more spiritual: “I pray to puppies ’cause I think they listen/They brought me pussy and paper and pistols.” As much an evolution of the bridge between rock and hip-hop established by groups like Korn as it is of the moody funhouses of Young Nudy or Lucki, Mason’s music shares the attentive ear and sharp focus of the animals he loves. “[Dogs] survive on loyalty. It’s for real death over dishonor,” he said in an interview last year. In Mason’s case, loyalty doesn’t mean fidelity to a single style so much as it means trusting that your skill and passion will carry your ambitions home. On RUFFS, his loyalty to his vision pays off. | 2022-10-14T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2022-10-14T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | RCA | October 14, 2022 | 7.6 | d6c8902a-1710-4a1e-b3ce-7ded1ec3baad | Dylan Green | https://pitchfork.com/staff/dylan-green/ | |
The London jazz musician’s latest stakes out a middle ground between spiritual fire and smooth jazz. | The London jazz musician’s latest stakes out a middle ground between spiritual fire and smooth jazz. | Kamaal Williams: Wu Hen | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/kamaal-williams-wu-hen/ | Wu Hen | Powered by drummer Yussef Dayes and keyboardist Henry “Kamaal” Williams, 2016’s Black Focus —the duo’s lone release as Yussef Kamaal—neatly mirrored the renaissance of jazz out on the West Coast helmed by Kamasi Washington. Uncluttered yet rhythmically deep, Black Focus also revealed the true range of UK jazz; its ready assimilation of hip-hop, R&B, Afrobeat, dubstep, and broken beat set the stage for the likes of Shabaka Hutchings, Kokoroko, and Ezra Collective to rise up in its wake. But Dayes and Williams soon splintered, never building on that keystone.
Yet, with each passing year, Black Focus grows in importance and resonance. It continues to inform Williams’ subsequent releases, from his house music-indebted productions as Henry Wu to the group he helms now; he’s even adopted Black Focus as his label name. Following from 2018’s The Return, Wu Hen forges further into jazz-funk territory, staking out a middle ground between the spiritual fire and the glossy textures of smooth jazz, a terrain that keyboardist Lonnie Liston Smith himself mapped back in the 1970s.
The songs themselves seem aware of that disparity, with neighboring tunes serving as subtle variations on a shared theme. The needling synths and vocal ad-libs that jolt “One More Time” impart a craggy feel, but Rick Leon James’ supple bass throbs even it out, while Williams’ shimmering keyboard accompaniments find more space as we suddenly slip into “1989.” A decidedly more mellow take on the same groove, Quinn Mason’s buttery saxophone mixes eloquently into swells of scored strings, which come courtesy of guest Miguel Atwood-Ferguson, the L.A.-based multi-instrumentalist and arranger.
“Toulouse” and the subsequent “Pigalle” evolve in similar fashion. Williams puts away the keyboards and reverts to piano to state the lovely theme, when he’s joined by Mason’s breathy sax and pizzicato strings. As Williams’ comping turns choppy and James’ acoustic bass runs quicken, the piece opens up into “Pigalle,” which moves the sound into Maiden Voyage-era Herbie Hancock territory, flowing like a tributary into an open sea. For all of Williams’ penchant for blending together the electronic textures of different eras, the in-the-studio feel of this post-bop jazz throwback stands out, feeling spontaneous rather than carefully deliberated. Even Mason’s otherwise unobtrusive horn pushes to its harsher register, giving the song a harder edge. A similar trick occurs between the pliant balladry of “Big Rick” and the disco groove of “Save Me.” Drummer Greg Paul flips to double-time and Williams gets within shouting distance of the off-kilter dance tracks he makes as Henry Wu. As he toys with the filters on his synths, the song evolves yet again into “Mr. Wu,” leading to the kind of infectious jazz-funk that could slot into a Theo Parrish set.
Atwood-Ferguson’s arrangements to the set are the clear stand-outs, adding yet another era of musical tradition for Williams to draw upon (in this instance, the opulent charts crafted by the likes of David Axelrod and Gil Evans) and new textures for his group to react to. Yet the gorgeous opener “Street Dreams,” which foregrounds Atwood-Ferguson’s work, feels interrupted. The use of harp and orchestrations hearken back to the likes of Alice Coltrane (a touchstone for the Angeleno), but just when the piece seems like it’s about to achieve lift-off to a higher plane, it instead comes to an abrupt halt at two minutes.
Williams’ music emphasizes the malleability and evolution of sound across styles and eras, even drifting into an R&B track voiced by the up-and-coming Lauren Faith stashed away near the album’s end. But the continual stylistic shifts make stretches of Wu Hen feel fidgety, hurriedly racing off to somewhere different rather than lingering and deepening its focus.
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here.
Buy: Rough Trade
(Pitchfork earns a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.) | 2020-07-24T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-07-24T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Jazz | Black Focus | July 24, 2020 | 7.3 | d6cc092c-ff77-4bd6-a6d3-11ea1da1af11 | Andy Beta | https://pitchfork.com/staff/andy-beta/ | |
Chris Thile spent the early '00s as frontman and principal songwriter of the progressive bluegrass trio Nickel Creek, but he's shifted his focus to Punch Brothers, a quintet who churn out the same dexterous roots music with more oomph. The Wireless EP finds the group bridging last year's The Phosphorescent Blues with their next avant-American LP. | Chris Thile spent the early '00s as frontman and principal songwriter of the progressive bluegrass trio Nickel Creek, but he's shifted his focus to Punch Brothers, a quintet who churn out the same dexterous roots music with more oomph. The Wireless EP finds the group bridging last year's The Phosphorescent Blues with their next avant-American LP. | Punch Brothers: The Wireless EP | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21250-sarcosuchus-the-wireless-ep/ | The Wireless EP | Few modern roots musicians have amassed the critical acclaim and international popularity enjoyed by the honey-voiced, quick-fingered mandolinist Chris Thile. As the frontman and principal songwriter of the progressive bluegrass trio Nickel Creek, the California-born musician spent the early '00s pushing an invigorating, risk-taking acoustic melange he dubbed "newgrass", imbuing an art form commonly thought of as static with modernist quirks. Since then—Nickel Creek's 2014 reunion notwithstanding—Thile has shifted focus to Punch Brothers, a quintet who churn out the same dexterous roots music with a little more *oomph. (*Meanwhile, Thile’s Nickel Creek comrades Sean and Sara Watkins issued Watkins Family Hour, an LP birthed from the siblings’ monthly residency at Los Angeles’ Largo). Along the way, he’s won a Genius Grant and released several successful solo albums. Next year, he’ll host A Prairie Home Companion.
Recorded during the same sessions that beget their last album, last year’s T-Bone Burnett-produced The Phosphorescent Blues, Punch Brothers' latest, The Wireless EP*,* combines three cuts previously included on that record's deluxe vinyl edition with two never-before-heard tracks, bridging their most recent musical statement with their next avant-American LP. The collection’s diverse blend of pensive instrumentals, rousing singsongs, and stylistic experiments—namely, a roots-y interpretation of Elliott Smith’s "Clementine"—makes it a great introduction to the Punch Brothers’ quirky, clever bluegrass, as well as a satisfying (if modest) addition to the quintet’s catalog.
Guitar, mandolin, fiddle/violin, banjo, bass, and whiskey-smooth vocals: six sounds—no more and no less—comprise the bulk of Punch Brothers’ deceptively full sound, a paradigm familiar to anyone who’s heard put on an Alison Krauss or Doc Watson LP. The biggest challenge for the group is molding this simplistic sonic recipe into a multitude of forms without falling victim to redundancy (or even worse, directionless noodling)—and Thile and company make it look like nothing. Where slow-churning opening track "In Wonder" pits soaring harmonies against a relentless, defiant fiddle, slinky instrumental "The Hops of Guldenberg" offers a country-fried take on jazz improvisation. There’s even room for existential banter: centerpiece "Sleek White Baby" stars Ed Helms of "The Office" fame as an old-timey announcer hawking the answer to all life’s problems against a serendipitous shuffle.
If Punch Brothers' barbershop-quartet harmonies and old-school instruments are the roots tethering the group to bluegrass convention, then their covers are the shoots reaching onwards and upwards, transgressive in origin but puzzlingly traditional-sounding in practice. Thile and company regularly toss tunes fashioned outside of their rusted wheelhouse onto their setlists, as well as on their studio releases; past interpretations include spindly, creaky takes on Radiohead's "Kid A" and "Packt Like Sardines In a Crush’d Tin Box", as well as a prickly spin on "Icarus Smicarus", from post-hardcore heroes Mclusky. Like the rest of the band’s covers, "Clementine" is not so much a playful dalliance as it is another 20th century addition to the Punch Brothers’ envelope-pushing interpretation of the bluegrass canon. What’s more, by seamlessly integrating Smith’s booze-soaked hymn into the Appalachian-indebted mix, Thile and company don't just solidify the song’s latent transcendency: they propose a challenge to modern conceptions of bluegrass. | 2015-11-25T01:00:03.000-05:00 | 2015-11-25T01:00:03.000-05:00 | Folk/Country | Nonesuch | November 25, 2015 | 6.8 | d6d29d36-d944-42e0-831b-924495e04fff | Zoe Camp | https://pitchfork.com/staff/zoe-camp/ | null |
Treating music as something like a homeopathic remedy, Freakout/Release joins doubt with deliverance over the cleansing pulse of a disco beat. | Treating music as something like a homeopathic remedy, Freakout/Release joins doubt with deliverance over the cleansing pulse of a disco beat. | Hot Chip: Freakout/Release | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/hot-chip-freakout-release/ | Freakout/Release | On the title track of Hot Chip’s eighth album, Alexis Taylor makes a startling confession: Music isn’t really doing it for him anymore. Against a claustrophobic backdrop of throbbing robo-disco, he frets, “Music used to be escape/Now I can’t escape it.” He runs down a litany of woes—music is ubiquitous, oppressive, ignorable—and arrives at a crisis of faith: “I’m losing my taste for this feeling/Give me a sign I can start to believe in.”
If this momentary crack in Taylor’s worldview is surprising, it’s because Hot Chip have always radiated the glow of kids eagerly biking home from the record store bearing the hottest 12" in the latest genre. Throw a dart at one of their lyric sheets, and you’re likely to hit a line about “a sound that resonates” or “the joy of repetition,” or a reference to lovers rock or Vanity 6. “Freakout/Release” is no different in that regard; the opening vocoder refrain evokes UK techno group LFO’s 2003 dancefloor bomb “Freak,” making it an easter egg for leftfield clubbers of a certain age.
Inspired in part by Hot Chip’s live cover of the Beastie Boys’ “Sabotage,” “Freakout/Release” is one of the loudest songs in the band’s catalog to date, and stylistically one of the most out of character. But it’s also the spiritual centerpiece of an album about grown-up aches wrapped in the unbridled energy of eternal youth. Treating music as something like a homeopathic remedy, Freakout/Release joins doubt with deliverance over the cleansing pulse of a disco beat.
This isn’t the first time they’ve sung about these kinds of themes; a quick skim of past reviews suggests that Hot Chip have been making their grown-up album since at least 2010’s One Life Stand. But Freakout/Release is clouded by specific pains, both societal and personal. Their last album, 2019’s A Bath Full of Ecstasy, was meant to simulate immersive bliss, but things didn’t quite work out; it was overshadowed by the death of co-producer Philippe Zdar, then a medical scare on tour; then, just nine months after the album’s release, nightlife came to a screeching halt, all that ecstatic bathwater going cold during the angst-ridden COVID-19 lockdowns.
Freakout/Release constitutes a reset. Much of the album is outwardly about pleasure: of dancing, of togetherness, of physical contact and sex. Recorded in the London studio that Al Doyle set up during the pandemic, it’s the first Hot Chip album to be written from scratch by the full band all in the same room, and its sound reflects that pooling of energies, full of exuberant dance rhythms and arrangements that burst at the seams. The opening “Down,” anchored by a roof-raising ’70s funk sample from the Universal Togetherness Band, is a life preserver tossed by a DJ into a sea of existential desperation. The rushing “Time” arrays a tick-tocking house groove in heart-in-mouth trance synths and laser zaps. Virtually every inch of tape seems to bend under the weight of all the things they throw at it. The audacious and exceptionally fun “Guilty” is a mid-tempo anthem that riffs on big-budget ’80s pop like Van Halen, Yes, and Peter Gabriel, as well as, obliquely, Tom Waits; the closing “Out of My Depth” starts out with a muted meditation on depression, but by the end it’s practically levitating, sounding like a soundclash between Spiritualized and Stereolab.
As boisterous as the grooves may get, the band’s lyrical preoccupations are overwhelmingly pensive. Taylor has said that his songwriting this time was inspired by getting older and seeing friends experiencing “the harder sides of life”—divorce, disease, suicide. Healing isn’t so much the album’s subtext as the IMAX-sized screen their ebullient sounds are projected on. “Hard to Be Funky,” which kicks off with one of the most dryly funny couplets in Taylor’s discography—“Ain’t it hard to be funky when you’re not feeling sexy/And it’s hard to feel sexy when you’re not very funky”—is part of a suite of songs, along with “Broken” and “Out of My Depth,” about the ripple effects of depression. “Miss the Bliss,” a companion piece to the title track, explicitly invokes the search for wholeness, linking dancing to solace via a gospel-fueled bridge: “You can heal if you’re wounded/You can heal anytime.”
This is hardly original terrain; for young and old alike, trauma is pop music’s lingua franca nowadays, to the extent that it’s become cliché. But Hot Chip, never ones to wallow, buoy their weightiest sentiments with provocative contrasts. “Eleanor” may be about separated families, yet their tale of “all-encompassing pain” rides a euphoric groove. Even the lyrics take a gleefully absurdist route to pathos: The chorus interpolates Edgar Allen Poe, and the bridge riffs on Samuel Beckett giving André the Giant a ride to school. Grief has rarely sounded like such a hoot.
Taylor claims that there are no ballads on the album, but he’s not quite right; “Not Alone” is one of the gentlest and most hopeful songs they’ve ever written. In the third verse, he hears a girl he “barely knew” play a cover of one of Hot Chip’s songs, “and in that moment turned my life around.” As he sings of darkness and heartache, his bandmates’ playing is hushed, reverent, luminous synths flickering in time with dreamily harmonized backing vocals. In tone and mood, “Not Alone” is the polar opposite of the title track, but it is also its companion: In “Freakout/Release,” Taylor goes looking for a sign that music still matters, and with “Not Alone,” he finds it. At its root, he suggests, a song can be a kind of spiritual beacon, the shared experience of music a form of redemption. “It holds me I—holds me I—holds me I have no choice,” he sings in elliptical electronic loops at the song’s conclusion, his voice as pure as a beam of light. “All the rest is noise.” | 2022-08-23T00:03:00.000-04:00 | 2022-08-23T00:03:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Domino | August 23, 2022 | 7.6 | d6dc6954-a0e0-43b3-b7e9-6ad836000e76 | Philip Sherburne | https://pitchfork.com/staff/philip-sherburne/ | |
After decades of wandering, the former Court & Spark and Hiss Golden Messenger member follows his wanderlust West again, where he puts down new roots for his soulful folk-rock sound. | After decades of wandering, the former Court & Spark and Hiss Golden Messenger member follows his wanderlust West again, where he puts down new roots for his soulful folk-rock sound. | Scott Hirsch: Lost Time Behind the Moon | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/scott-hirsch-lost-time-behind-the-moon/ | Lost Time Behind the Moon | Scott Hirsch’s long musical journey has come full circle. Back in the 1990s he and M.C. Taylor started making music together in the Southern California hardcore act Ex-Ignota, then traipsed up to San Francisco to start a band called the Court & Spark, whose change of musical style was signaled by the fact that they borrowed their name from one of Joni Mitchell’s most popular albums. Upon moving to North Carolina in the late 2000s, the duo made music as Hiss Golden Messenger, with Taylor the singer and chief songwriter and Hirsch a multi-instrumentalist, arranger, and producer. Following a brief sojourn in Brooklyn, Hirsch moved back to the West Coast in 2016, settling not too far from where he and Taylor first started making music together.
That transitory life, along with the general travails of any touring musician, provided grist for Hirsch’s solo debut, Blue Rider Songs, released in 2016. Moving about the country was his primary subject, both lyrically and musically: He wrote movingly about emotional and geographic transience, and he borrowed from an array of country and R&B sources to create an easygoing yet endlessly inventive and deeply soulful folk-rock sound. A picaresque through the American landscape, Blue Rider Songs gave in to the romantic lure of the open highway, even if it never settled on any one particular destination. By contrast, his follow-up, Lost Time Behind the Moon, is about the lure of home, equally powerful even if it’s harder to romanticize. “I’m going back to California, where the grass grows so high,” he sings on “No No,” as his makeshift band churns out a murky groove that sounds unstable and slippery, like the Golden State coastline itself. “When I get back to my baby, there’ll be no more coming down.”
Featuring contributions from William Tyler and members of Wilco, America, and Edward Sharpe & the Magnetic Zeros, Lost Time Behind the Moon has a destination in mind: “Aim to the West,” goes “When You Were Old (El Dorado),” which sounds like a vintage Al Green track as it steadily makes its way to that lost city of gold. But that doesn’t mean he’s not taking backroads and scenic routes. If that song lingers outside Hi Records in Memphis, “Spirits” wanders around Big Sur, “Valley of the Moon” stargazes from somewhere in the Mojave, and “Pink Moment” might as well be on the moon for all its spacey pedal steel. Perhaps even more than on Blue Rider Songs, Hirsch manages to corral all of these disparate sounds into a coherent and compelling whole, to stake his claim to this particular musical territory. There are still the expected nods to Joni Mitchell and Neil Young and JJ Cale, all of whom have informed his music in the past, but on Lost Time Behind the Moon, they sound less like spiritual guides and more like people who gave him directions to the next town.
These songs suggest that Hirsch has reached a destination, at least with his music: that he has arrived at a place where he is able to harness these sounds and allusions to convey the particulars of his wanderlust. There’s a new confidence here, even in the way he deploys those backing vocals, a ’70s staple transformed into something like a Greek chorus on “Long Lost Time.” “If I come back, won’t you let me stay?” he asks, as a gently strummed guitar and a simple drum pattern coalesce into a stately folk-rock processional. It sounds like whenever Hirsch gets there, it’ll be the end of one journey and—fortunately for his listeners—the beginning of another. | 2018-12-19T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2018-12-19T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Electronic | Scissor Tail | December 19, 2018 | 7.5 | d6dc84f7-800b-415e-ba3b-a17b4ad8affa | Stephen M. Deusner | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stephen-m. deusner/ | |
Techno that tumbles towards ecstasy, courtesy of Matthew Dear. | Techno that tumbles towards ecstasy, courtesy of Matthew Dear. | Audion: Suckfish | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/488-suckfish/ | Suckfish | It's hard to get out of Suckfish once it's on. You're just suddenly in it, like a silver pinball shot into the screwy Op art lock groove of its cover. The prickly microhouse rhythms he brought to 2003's Leave Luck to Heaven are still present, but as Audion Matthew Dear tops those stipples with synthesizers that growl and an attitude that says, "Come on." With this record, the only thing you're supposed to do is get off. Oscillating tones pierce the beat repeatedly on opener "Vegetables", and pretty soon there are manipulated voices in there too, mumbling alone in your mind. But that's just a preamble to the Suckfish thump of "Your Place or Mine" and "Titty Fuck". There are elements of empty space in the former-- Dear snips off the bass except for right over the drum so the synths are like pointy elbows jutting into the open space on a dancefloor, and the effect is chilly. But if their titles didn't give it away these songs are pretty randy, too-- Suckfish is techno that tumbles towards ecstasy in 4/4 time.
"Your Place or Mine" is cool, but it's "Titty Fuck" that's the real base desire provider, its slinky 22nd century disco beat flirting with a five-note melodic tickler until the whole thing swells to a hissing, gritty finale that's just unclean. Back alley sex = bad idea. But that's the feel Dear is going for with Audion, however detached and dirty it is. He wants you to envision having relations among machines, or maybe machines having relations; either way, he provides tracks like "Kisses" and "The Pong" to do it to. "Pong"'s primary tone thrusts and eases back, the inevitable give and take of a frantically dancing crowd in a dark basement room, and a howling bass line alternates with blasts of clattering rhythm and quieter moments that sound like pinging sonar.
The calculated quality of Suckfish is part of its allure. Unlike Nympho, Armand Van Helden's recent foray into sexified disco-punk obviousness, Dear has specifically categorized "Titty Fuck," the fluid, tense "Uvular", and the rest as being separate from himself. (You won't see something like the blatant "Just Fucking" on Leave Luck to Heaven's follow-up.) Releasing them under an alias allows Dear to position this material as a separate project, a grand design to get you laid. And the designer? Audion, which doesn't sound the least bit human and instead suggests a faceless superintelligent robot or hard plastic nub that will exude soothing "penetration sounds" in some Huxley sex parlor of the future. This is opposite to Van Helden's all too manmade and selfish approach, like bad cologne and worse drugs versus the sleek lines of Suckfish, the sex toy prototype. | 2005-10-12T01:00:02.000-04:00 | 2005-10-12T01:00:02.000-04:00 | Electronic | Spectral Sound | October 12, 2005 | 8 | d6def0c1-f7bd-4d76-99e0-bf2b3e44a0bb | Johnny Loftus | https://pitchfork.com/staff/johnny-loftus/ | null |
The inimitable auteur’s latest record shows why he’s become the godfather of underground rap, and someone who’s still finding ways to tweak what he’s already perfected. | The inimitable auteur’s latest record shows why he’s become the godfather of underground rap, and someone who’s still finding ways to tweak what he’s already perfected. | Roc Marciano: Marciology | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/roc-marciano-marciology/ | Marciology | On September 3, 2021, Montreal producer Nicholas Craven set a specific corner of Rap Twitter on fire. Drake had released Certified Lover Boy that day, a mostly forgettable collection save for its opener, “Champagne Poetry.” Instead of the tinny, trap-adjacent drums he typically favored, an unadorned, syncopated upright bass provided the rhythmic backbone of the track’s first half. It switched to a soul loop in the second, the low end slightly enhanced to keep the pulse intact. The lyrics were typical Drake fare, but he was in his technician bag, flirting with complex rhyme schemes. He’d carry them for several bars at a time, only to pull them apart carefully, as if curious how they fit together in the first place. This all sounded very familiar to a certain subsection of rap fans, including Craven, who tweeted, “Roc Marciano is the direct reason ‘Champagne Poetry’ exists.”
If you scan through Reddit threads, YouTube comments, and tenth-anniversary retrospectives, you’ll find loose consensus that Marcberg, Marci’s 2010 solo debut, laid the groundwork for much of today’s rap underground. By the late aughts, focus had shifted away from the gritty Golden Era New York sound in favor of animated Atlanta trap and humid Texas funk. Contrary to the zeitgeist, Marcberg traded in frayed, ashen sonics, referencing and updating the bleak winter menace of East Coast classics like Mobb Deep’s Hell on Earth and Big L’s Lifestylez ov da Poor & Dangerous.
The Long Island rapper-producer’s dusty, claustrophobic sound owed a lot to ’90s forebears like the RZA and 4th Disciple, but it felt more thoughtfully modern than hollow throwback. Marci slowed tempos to a crawl and stripped his samples of anything superfluous—sometimes forgoing drums altogether—and rapped in gravelly, menacing monotone. Arguably, groups like Griselda and the Umbrella Collective, or scenes like the Lynn, Massachusetts universe surrounding Estee Nack and al.divino, wouldn’t exist without the diligent study of his catalog. To hear Marci’s minimalism mimicked by the biggest rapper in the world, a man known for echoing innovations by those levels below, meant Marci had transcended. His latest album, Marciology, is the most overt recognition of his living legend status. The title casts it as a text to pour over: This is Roc Marciano the inimitable auteur, still finding ways to tweak what he’s already perfected.
As a producer, Marci wields minor-key loops like a hypnotist’s pocket watch, intensifying the trancelike groove with each repetition. Marciology features some of his outright trippiest work, sounding ripped from the soundtracks of obscure European heist films. Marci’s clearly inspired by the opulent spaciousness The Alchemist supplied for their 2022 collaboration, The Elephant Man’s Bones, but intent on deepening the mushroomy experimentation of 2020’s Mt. Marci. He helms ten of the album’s 14 tracks, crafting an unsettling psychedelic atmosphere; everything feels as off-kilter as a salvia breakthrough, recognizably part of Marci’s palette, but decisively weirder.
“Floxxx” has the tension of a Sergio Leone standoff, its jittery hi-hats and keyboards churning through a two-chord vamp, kick and snare holding solid as eye contact. On “Went Diamond,” droning strings anxiously slide through splashy ride cymbals, while the drums on “Gold Crossbow” tumble drunkenly around the staccato piano notes. Strangely enough, the cuts that sound the most like previous Marci records come from the guest producers. The Alchemist provides two luxurious, nearly percussion-free tracks (“Bad JuJu” and “Higher Self”), while Animoss’s contributions (“Goyard God” and “Tapeworm”) tap into the smoggy Blaxploitation vibe that colors much of Marci’s earlier work. They blend perfectly, however, taking cues from Marci’s tightly controlled, spartan worldbuilding.
It’s astonishing what he can do with so little. Marci keeps ample daylight between the instruments in his beats, leaving plenty of elbow room for his incredibly dense writing. He’s in top form here, spinning superhuman mafioso tales from impenetrable thickets of rhymes that contract and expand like gasses changing form. On “True Love,” which pins a sparse vocal sample between shuffling drums and a dubby bassline, Marci unspools dizzying stanza after dizzying stanza: “Lord, would you please have mercy on us/For the turf, he was warring/My fatigues was dirty when I wore ‘em.” His knack for disquieting detail remains sharp as well. “Motherfuckers got the gall to call my phone/Talking bout the bullet holes in your daughter room,” he says on “Gold Crossbow.” “That’s the warning when you ignore the rules.” The combination of his dry, raspy voice and cool delivery hides these grim moments in plain sight, reaching their full skin-crawling potential on repeated listens.
Marci’s flow, which often sits just off center, caroming over the ends of bars or bursting apart mid-thought, is just as influential as his production chops or lyrical abilities; you can hear it in verses from artists like Willie the Kid, Knowledge the Pirate, and CRIMEAPPLE, all rappers Marci’s worked with extensively, two of whom show up on Marciology. CRIMEAPPLE’s homage-paying appearance on “Killin Spree” is especially potent, namechecking Marci’s first two albums as formative to his style. They sound great together, master and student fully occupying a shared, singular world. But Marci’s not one to rest on his laurels; 12 records in, he’s pushing himself in new directions, nailing cascading triplet patterns on “BeBe’s Kids” and rapping with a slight L.A. slink on “Higher Self.” He still sounds hungry, eager to discover new wrinkles in his approach.
About a third of the way through the title track—the first song on the album—Marci bluntly asserts “I done created a lane,” perhaps his most concise, straightforward statement to the depth of his legacy. It’s a fittingly mind-bending opener, with pinging sample-and-hold bleeps and an atonal bassline weaving through steady drums as Marci assembles a complicated mosaic of syllables. The song bears a striking resemblance to Three 6 Mafia’s “Playa Hataz,” an early-’90s classic with a similarly trudging tempo and detuned synth notes. Both Roc Marciano and Three 6 Mafia are now institutions, powerhouses who’ve left an indelible mark on rap music. Their influence has only strengthened over the past 30 years as more people discover their immense catalogs. Marci knows his music's impact, offering Marciology as the decoder ring for an entire generation of hip-hop. It’s a universal key that works even as Marci himself changes the locks. | 2024-04-03T00:02:00.000-04:00 | 2024-04-03T00:02:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Pimpire International / Marci Enterprises | April 3, 2024 | 8.1 | d6e5fc33-aab5-4075-bab3-b6c682660820 | Dash Lewis | https://pitchfork.com/staff/dash-lewis/ | |
The Norwegian producer rediscovers the simple joy in his space-disco sound on his most cohesive LP in years. | The Norwegian producer rediscovers the simple joy in his space-disco sound on his most cohesive LP in years. | Prins Thomas: Ambitions | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/prins-thomas-ambitions/ | Ambitions | At some point over the course of five solo albums, Prins Thomas’ space-disco sound slipped into autopilot. His perky beats and basslines were pure ear candy, but on his recent solo albums—2016’s Principe del Norte, 2017’s Prins Thomas 5—the really interesting stuff happened when he powered down his drum machines and let his tracks spiral out into synth-soaked minimalism. On Ambitions, the Norwegian producer born Thomas Moen Hermansen ducks back inside his groove-fueled wheelhouse, but this time he seems to be reveling in it.
Some of that freshness may stem from the fact that Ambitions’ tracks weren’t originally intended as pieces of an album; they’re based on stray ideas sketched out on his laptop, or even hummed directly into a handheld recorder, while traveling and gigging around the world, and then fleshed out in Hermansen’s’ studio in Asker, an Oslo suburb. That shotgun genesis might help account for the range of the album, which takes in woozy soul, polyrhythmic drum studies, slow-motion dream techno, and even a couple of songs that might be mistaken for Moon Safari outtakes.
The mood is cohesive throughout, but Prins Thomas never sounds like he’s repeating himself. Each song is a unique piece of the puzzle. If there’s a unifying theme, it’s warmth: sunny, wistful, as suggestive of spring. The chirping birds of opener “Foreplay” make way for the laid-back disco of “XSB,” which is whipped as frothy as a sugary meringue. Toward the end, melancholy strings rise in the mix, triggering memories of Massive Attack.
For fans of Prins Thomas at his headiest, two long songs at the center of the album should do the trick: The dazzlingly polyrhythmic “Ambitions” morphs, over 12 minutes, from 6/8 drum circle to a four-to-the-floor funk stomp. (In a note accompanying the album, along with shout-outs to Haruomi Hosono, Daniel Lanois, Shinichi Atobe, and Ricardo Villalobos, Hermansen thanks the late Can drummer Jaki Liebezeit, and Liebezeit’s example rings loud and clear.) Where “Ambitions” is knotty, “Fra Miami til Chicago,” is smooth and pleasingly predictable, teasing out a chiming guitar melody over a clean 4/4 beat and rosy bass synth; it’s the closest the album comes to the blissful soundscaping of his last album, and it’s enough to make you wish he’d dedicate an entire album to this style.
But the album’s penultimate and most far-reaching song, “Urmannen,” offers the best of both worlds: It’s a progged-out disco bubbler with all the nuance of Talk Talk in their blacked-out studio, delicate tendrils of sound disappearing into the loamy darkness. It’s the rare occasion that Hermansen’s ambient interests align so neatly with his disco instincts—a small step, perhaps, toward a new era in his exploration. | 2019-04-09T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-04-09T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Smalltown Supersound | April 9, 2019 | 7.4 | d6e996e2-3fd9-4622-931c-55521bdabec4 | Philip Sherburne | https://pitchfork.com/staff/philip-sherburne/ | |
After a 20-year hiatus, this concise new Chavez EP arrives with little fanfare, drawing in a trancelike sound and Eastern-inspired melodies. | After a 20-year hiatus, this concise new Chavez EP arrives with little fanfare, drawing in a trancelike sound and Eastern-inspired melodies. | Chavez: Cockfighters EP | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22728-cockfighters-ep/ | Cockfighters EP | Normally, the arrival of new recordings by a beloved rock band after a 20-year hiatus is accompanied by all manner of fanfare. No so with Chavez. Everything surrounding the return of this beloved indie group has run counter to the norm.
Cockfighters, the quartet’s first studio effort since 1996, is a mere three songs, done and dusted in less than 10 minutes. And while their longtime label Matador did their best to coordinate a splashy premiere from “The Bully Boys,” the EP’s snaky closing track, the band sent their publicists scrambling by dropping it a few days early on their Facebook page. There has been no talk of extensive touring or TV appearances or even a full-length album on the horizon. Like it or not, it seems this is all we’re getting. Abbreviated as it may be, though, Cockfighters burns hot and bright, recapitulating the strengths of the group while emphasizing how they’ve grown as musicians over the past two decades.
Drummer James Lo exhibits this more than anyone here. On previous Chavez albums (1995’s Gone Glimmering and Ride the Fader from a year later), he locked in with steady force behind the spinning guitar duets of Clay Tarver and Matt Sweeney. These new recordings, particularly on “Bully” and the slowly engulfing “Blank in the Blaze,” turn Lo into a caustic element, sparking and rumbling through each jazzy breakbeat and double-time stomp.
The rest of the band—Tarver, Sweeney, and bassist Scott Marshall—opt for a more minimal sound. There are minor flare ups, such as the guitar solo that streaks through the middle of “The Singer Lied” like a small lightning storm, and the closing minutes of “Blank,” where Sweeney and Tarver ooze their individual hues together to create dazzling new colors. But everywhere else, the emphasis is on creating something hypnotic and trancelike with the incessant repetition of Eastern-inspired melodies.
Cockfighters doesn’t strike any bold new paths for the group, but Chavez have matured as artists and songwriters, and this EP slots into their catalog well. They’ve all got day jobs now; they can return on their own terms. (Tarver is a staff writer and co-executive producer on HBO’s “Silicon Valley,” and Sweeney is a well-regarded session player who has lent his talents to Billy Corgan’s supergroup Zwan, Cat Power, and Kid Rock.) It has to help, too, knowing that their previous work has only grown in stature in the years since the first two albums were released. They’ve garnered enough respect for their work to warrant a three disc CD/DVD retrospective in 2006 and vinyl reissues of their LPs in 2015. While most groups live and die by the flame bursts of hype they can conjure online, the men of Chavez are happy to toss another log on the fire and let it slowly smolder. | 2017-01-09T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2017-01-09T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Experimental / Metal / Rock | Matador | January 9, 2017 | 7.2 | d6eb8f31-d25c-402d-a4a0-e0d7884fb8b3 | Robert Ham | https://pitchfork.com/staff/robert-ham/ | null |
Like so much electronic music, Thug Entrancer's Arcology plays with heady futurist themes on the surface. Beneath that, however, it is a satisfying collection of variations on footwork and techno, seen through the eyes of a producer with his own skewed vision. | Like so much electronic music, Thug Entrancer's Arcology plays with heady futurist themes on the surface. Beneath that, however, it is a satisfying collection of variations on footwork and techno, seen through the eyes of a producer with his own skewed vision. | Thug Entrancer: Arcology | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21585-arcology/ | Arcology | Like so much electronic music to have come before it, Thug Entrancer's Arcology has futurist themes encoded deep within its DNA. It takes its title from a term coined by the architect Paolo Soleri, best known for Arizona's Arcosanti community, meant to describe architecture in balance with ecology. But the album's press release speaks of alien colonies and world-building, while its cover art features a cybernetic figure wearing what look like VR goggles; a cable extrudes from the back of his skull, Matrix-style. (Zoom in far enough, and you may also notice a peeing-Calvin decal adorning his jack—the influence, perhaps, of Daniel Lopatin, whose Software label put out the record, and whose last album as Oneohtrix Point Never similarly grappled with science-fiction themes through the twin lenses of adolescence and trash-culture kitsch.)
But, as is the case with so much electronic music to have come before it, the sci-fi conceit also feels like a red herring. Thug Entrancer is Ryan McRyhew, a Denver-based musician who came up playing punky electronic music in the DIY scene around the city's Rhinoceropolis space before moving for a time to Chicago, where he discovered local staples like juke, footwork, and acid. His debut album, 2014's Death After Life, was a snapshot of his infatuation with those sounds as he acquainted himself with the mechanics of 160-BPM drum patterns and squirrelly 303 lines. Of Arcology, McRyhew says, "The album title stems from the idea of a structure or object that is entirely self-sufficient and life-generating with little to no outside influence." But that's precisely the opposite of how the album actually functions. Arcology, like its predecessor, is a genre study first and foremost, rearranging familiar elements according to McRyhew's own idiosyncratic vision.
Those elements haven't changed much since Death After Life; he's still preoccupied with frenetic drum-machine workouts and lyrical bass melodies, and he's still using classic pieces of kit like the Roland TR-808 and TB-303 (or, perhaps, plug-in simulators). But where his debut album was split mostly between flickering footwork tunes and, less successfully, sluggish slow-motion sketches, he's expanded the tempo range here, and in doing so he's opened up to a wealth of new ideas and moods. The early standouts "Ghostless M.S." and "Arrakis" boast gnarled, overdriven acid lines that really sing, along with hectic-yet-nimble drum programming.
McRyhew shows off his considerable sound-design chops on a handful of ambient cuts, like "ROM" and "Low-Life" and "VR-Urge," that come closer to the otherworldly ideas supposedly underpinning the album. The finest thing here, "Arcology," also functions like an ambient track, even though it ripples away at 150 beats per minute: Its keening synth melody recalls early Autechre, back when they still wore their hearts on their sleeves, but it's not directly derivative of anything or anyone. Its pinging, rustling background noises, meanwhile, sound like electronic imitations of running water. Formally, it is a picture of perfect balance, all its moving pieces in perfect synchronization with each other. Within the context of the album, it operates as a kind of clearing, an oasis, where the known universe falls away. If McRyhew really is interested in world-building, it is an excellent first stab at terraforming. | 2016-03-02T01:00:01.000-05:00 | 2016-03-02T01:00:01.000-05:00 | Electronic | Software | March 2, 2016 | 7.8 | d6f4c430-9906-43ae-8d51-326cd27221c0 | Philip Sherburne | https://pitchfork.com/staff/philip-sherburne/ | null |
The Philadelphia quartet’s first album for Merge is a communal attempt to make magic out of the mundane. | The Philadelphia quartet’s first album for Merge is a communal attempt to make magic out of the mundane. | Friendship: Love the Stranger | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/friendship-love-the-stranger/ | Love the Stranger | Human beings are not designed to seize the day and make every second count. At least that’s what I’ve learned from the music that compels us to live that way—celebration rock, festival indie, empowerment pop, all of it performed with an unsustainable urgency that concedes just how much effort it takes to go against our resting state. Take songwriter Dan Wriggins at his own words, and Friendship should be playing in any one of those styles, yet the Philadelphia quartet has carved a comfy niche making the bold argument to slow down and let the day seize you instead. “Meant to write down/What I was feeling in the moment/Thinking, ‘Man, you better get it just like it was/Or else you’re gonna forget it,’” Wriggins warbles early into Friendship’s fourth album, taking about 30 seconds to complete his thought.
That’s a long moment, and not much happens in it. Wriggins dreams of getting away, not necessarily out of town. He hears that a local cathedral is being destroyed and imagines how it’ll affect the person he’s singing to. All of the real action takes place in the past and future. Depending on your identification with Friendship’s slow-and-low lifestyle, it’s also the moment that epitomizes the appeal and frustration of Love the Stranger, an album that sees a higher calling in taking it all in—especially if it’s the boring stuff.
As their debut on indie institution Merge, the mere existence of Love the Stranger is a stress test on Friendship’s ethos, a 45-minute Big Moment. If Friendship’s previous album, Dreamin’, was meant to reflect the rejuvenating power of that one beer in the fridge after a long day of work, Love the Stranger is Wriggins splitting a six pack of the good shit for a celebratory toast. Each of the four core members of Friendship has their own widely varying solo projects, most notably, 2nd Grade, a band whose compact power-pop is an inverse of Friendship. Similar to Florist’s recent self-titled album, Love the Stranger is counter-programming to the pandemic’s ongoing challenge to communal artistry, rebranding a once insular project as a potluck. Each member plays at least four instruments and contributes production, while the album is split into proper songs and improvisatory interludes. The best moments blur the distinction—a sputtering, almost atonal keyboard serves as the instrumental backdrop for the intense heart-to-heart of “Alive Twice,” whereas the robust alt-country of “Hank” ends with a pawn shop guitar’s circuitry giving out, a fitting coda for a tribute to making the most out of our faulty tools.
It’s a subject that Wriggins knows well. His history as a manual laborer—Maine lobster fisherman, groundskeeper—often serves as inspiration for Friendship’s lyrics, delivered in a low warble to which an aura of Real Talk is often projected. Wriggins acknowledges how starved people can be for a straight answer in a time when indie rock has absorbed and misconstrued concepts of therapeutic empathy. “I was in a bad place but you set me straight with your on-the-nose-advice,” he recalls on “Alive Twice,” later appreciating a friend who refused to play “volunteer bodyguard” in “Mr. Chill” (“I can tell you stuff I can’t tell anyone else/Because you don’t threaten to help”).
Even if Friendship weren’t so enmeshed in a Philly indie scene where rawer, scrappier acts typically aspire towards rustic authenticity as they age, their pivot to outlaw country was inevitable; Wriggins’ recent Utah Phillips cover EP suggested a deeper relation to the philosophical underpinnings of the canon, and the mere mention of earbuds on “What’s the Move” negates any whiff of Lucinda Williams cosplay. Likewise, the brief interludes elaborate on Wriggins’ charming, yet unsentimental Americana: “UDF,” “Quickchek,” and “Kum & Go” mostly serve as prompts to recognize the vast stretches of the nation that can only be told apart by the incremental distinction between regional convenience stores.
Friendship do not engage in world-building, instead calling greater attention to the world in which we’re all just passing through. While always endearing, over the course of Love the Stranger, they can just as often feel constrained by a documentarian approach. A pair of white Vans or a Jager nip or a truck stop T-shirt can take on a symbolic heft in Wriggins’ lyrics; other times, “apathy joins me in the booth,” and an unwashed dish of grape jelly requires a significant reach to be a metaphor for a lingering grudge. “Heading out to the bountiful fields and coming back empty-handed,” Wriggins laments on “Mr. Chill"; for all of the rewards, Wriggins can't help but admit that trying to make magic out of the mundane can be just as exhausting as living every day like it’s your last. | 2022-08-03T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2022-08-03T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Folk/Country | Merge | August 3, 2022 | 7 | d6f8d993-68be-461b-a805-d9741ecc9352 | Ian Cohen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ian-cohen/ | |
The New Jersey band’s seventh album is a hero’s journey powered by indomitable lifeforce and spirited, classic rock-inspired songwriting. It’s a rollicking good time and their best record in years. | The New Jersey band’s seventh album is a hero’s journey powered by indomitable lifeforce and spirited, classic rock-inspired songwriting. It’s a rollicking good time and their best record in years. | Titus Andronicus: The Will to Live | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/titus-andronicus-the-will-to-live/ | The Will to Live | The Will to Live, the seventh album by New Jersey rock group Titus Andronicus, is now the second Titus Andronicus record you’ll play to get your friends into Titus Andronicus. It’s about time. ’Til now, neophytes had nowhere to go but The Monitor, the band’s 2010 masterpiece, a rock opera about the Civil War as rewarding as it is challenging. (Press play on opener “A More Perfect Union,” and you’ll hear nearly a full minute of Abraham Lincoln before you hear a guitar or a drum.) The band has since veered from excess—2015’s 29-track-long The Most Lamentable Tragedy—to economy—2019’s An Obelisk, which didn’t clear 40 minutes. The Will to Live manages a balance between these poles. It is an easy, thoroughly enjoyable sell, abounding in the band’s signature blend of grit and gratitude.
Opening track “My Mother Is Going to Kill Me” welcomes listeners new and old with a sound collage: the peaceful noises of nighttime give way to wailing cats, then sirens, and then ringing riffs, galloping drums. It’s a nourishing slab of hard-rock beef. Stickles says he was shooting for Lou Reed; his friends hear Alice Cooper. A little later, Stickles introduces his cast: “Single mother/Deadbeat dad/Bastard baby/Boy gone bad.” The album’s narrator, he stresses, is not himself. Repeated references to a “mother”—as in Nature—and “father”—as in “God”—ground the record’s weighty existential themes in nuclear family relationships. Lead single “(I’m) Screwed” lands like a lightning bolt, speeding through the language of war, famine, and pestilence before landing on a more mundane adolescent sneer—“Dad… Are you gonna turn the screws on me?”—at the chorus.
These choruses, by the way, are the best Stickles has ever written. “All Through the Night” is a spirited call-and-response cri de coeur for a lads’ night out; “Baby Crazy” pairs mile-a-minute verses with an irresistible hook (“Blame it on the mama/Blame it on the papa”) that sounds like the Stones at their danciest. Straightforward pop structure has never been a Titus Andronicus hallmark. By and large, the band’s calling card is sprawl. (There are exceptions: the gorgeous Pogues tribute “Come On, Siobhán”; the E Street Band swagger of “Fatal Flaw.”) By embracing the traditional verse-chorus limitations of classic rock, Stickles distills this album’s weighty subject matter into hit after potent hit. A record deeply concerned with death becomes a rollicking good time.
Two songs, “An Anomaly” and “Bridge and Tunnel,” hit the seven-minute mark and weave through thickets of Biblical imagery and moral philosophy. The latter is a duet with Josée Caron, of the Canadian indie duo Partner, in the role of gloomy Celtic maiden. On these longer tracks, Titus Andronicus confront the destruction of nature and the responsibility of humanity to slow or stop this ruination. The anomaly of “An Anomaly” turns out to be man himself—hardly the first animal to kill and eat, but the only one with the devil in him, and the only one with the capacity to boil the seas and punch holes in the atmosphere. “If you wanna reach the promised land,” sings Stickles, “you’re gonna have to drop your contraband”—but who wants to give up luxury, privilege, comfort? “Goddamn!” he howls, miserable, furious. Caron enters on the electric guitar, parting the song with a searing solo.
During the making of this record, Stickles’ cousin, close friend, and occasional bandmate Matt “Money” Miller died suddenly. “He was my best buddy the whole time he was alive,” said Stickles, in a recent interview, “a really important guy to me, a part of me.” The two had known one another all their lives; that’s Miller and Stickles as kids on the cover of A Productive Cough. Stickles wrote several songs on The Will to Live in the wake of Miller’s death, including “Give Me Grief,” the record’s strongest moment. It’s a little like the “more life” monologue from Angels in America, if set to song: a rejection of suicide in favor of life, more life. But where Prior Walter spoke of life’s ugliness, Stickles’ narrator enumerates small pleasures: “A caring family, sympathy/Groceries for the whole week.” Friends, he sings, “to get me clean” and God, no longer a wholly malevolent presence, “to give me grief.” It’s a sweetly powerful statement, and a fitting tribute.
By the record’s end, the torment of the first and second acts gives way fully to hard-won serenity. Closer “69 Stones” first appeared on 2016’s live album S+@dium Rock; it receives new context and strength here, on the heels of the narrator’s arduous journey. The loping country sensibility has been pared back—there’s still harmonica, but less of it—and Stickles’ vocal is more contemplative, restrained. “It makes its blessed home,” he sings, as his bandmates enter, harmonize, “wherever teeth rip flesh from bone.” A destructive force, yes, but a vital one. | 2022-10-05T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2022-10-05T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Merge | October 5, 2022 | 7.5 | d6fb20a1-71c9-44b2-ab53-10ff8ff527d1 | Peyton Thomas | https://pitchfork.com/staff/peyton-thomas/ | |
Follow-up to 2004's She's in Control again finds the electro-pop duo successfully mining the 80s for inspiration, incorporating talk boxes, 808s, canned percussion, and Prince-style atmospherics. | Follow-up to 2004's She's in Control again finds the electro-pop duo successfully mining the 80s for inspiration, incorporating talk boxes, 808s, canned percussion, and Prince-style atmospherics. | Chromeo: Fancy Footwork | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/10431-fancy-footwork/ | Fancy Footwork | Chromeo's Dave 1 keeps his cool, even in the middle of a domestic scrap. "Let's keep the screaming and the fighting and the crying to a minimum," he says on "My Girl is Calling Me (A Liar)", "and if the kitchen don't work we can fight in the living room," biting off that last syllable sharply enough to force the rhyme. Before the household battles, presumably, comes the pick-up, and he's good at that too: "Let me tell you that I saw your boyfriend, walking down the street," goes "Bonafied Lovin' (Tough Guys)". "He was standing all shaky, hands all sweaty, and he could hardly speak/ I might as well take a minute or two to put you on to some game: You got a boy like him, a man like me, and that's just not the same."
Best friends Dave 1 (aka David Macklovitch, A-Trak's older brother) and P-Thugg, who give one another common sense advice as part of their tracks, don't self-edit much. "Just take her to movies and you're bound to work it out," interjects P-Thugg, via telephone, on "My Girl Is Calling Me". The band's self-consciously limited palette-- an electrofunk-by-numbers mélange of talk boxes, 808s, canned percussion, and Prince-style atmospherics-- is just another manifestation of their inability to tell a lie. If a song's called "Fancy Footwork", it's going to be about fancy footwork.
Cocksmen they may be, but it's a thing they've got to talk themselves into. Faux-ballad "Momma's Boy" is a mashed-out keyboard confessional about a romance between a girl in love with her dad and a boy equally in love with his mom. A novelty song with a happy ending, the two of them figure something out: The girl looks like his mom, and he looks like her dad, so they're all set. On the 1980s throwback "Opening Up (Ce Soir On Danse)", Macklovitch is in the middle of baring his soul to a new girlfriend when he loses her number. He's got to ask her, "Tell me what numbers to dial, 'cause I've been strung out for a while."
Going over the top here is just part of the package. The skin flick sax on "100%", the ripping, non sequitur guitar solo on "Momma's Boy", the straight "1999"-rip that is "Outta Sight": These are the consequences of getting in the mood. Better that than the cynical grab at pop star detachment that is "Tenderoni", Fancy Footwork's first single and far and away worst song. Built around a bad bit of slang that fell out of favor years ago, Macklovitch utters platitudes like "You and I/ Baby we go side by side" before rapping about getting in those pants over some slap bass. All you need to save songs like these is to not blink in the face of the irony, the shtick, whatever-- just don't break the frame, right?
More lovable is their "Intro", where over some tinnily epic synths the two Chromeos get a girl to chant their name, over and over, the three syllables ascending like stadium entrance music. This is surely what they come out to when they play live. And though it may hype a crowd it's obvious it's there for them too. Nerdy guys in sunglasses, they've got to convince themselves of their cool before they go to work on us. | 2007-07-24T02:00:03.000-04:00 | 2007-07-24T02:00:03.000-04:00 | Electronic | Vice | July 24, 2007 | 7.9 | d6ff7057-410c-4a25-9dd2-552546b3cbbb | Pitchfork | null |
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The duo of guitarist Courtney Garvin and drummer Connor Mayer make deranged twee psych-pop, anxious and sometimes goofy songs fit for isolation in unfamiliar surroundings. | The duo of guitarist Courtney Garvin and drummer Connor Mayer make deranged twee psych-pop, anxious and sometimes goofy songs fit for isolation in unfamiliar surroundings. | Gum Country: Somewhere | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/gum-country-somewhere/ | Somewhere | Somewhere, the debut record from the slightly deranged twee psych-pop duo Gum Country, is the product of a move from Vancouver to Los Angeles and the uncertainty and anxiety that comes with living in a new place. The brainchild of guitarist Courtney Garvin of the Courtneys and drummer Connor Mayer, Somewhere embraces lo-fi aesthetics and wry lyrics about visualization exercises, vegging out, and feeling on the verge of falling asleep behind the wheel of life. The record is as ironic as it is fun, where goofiness is the answer to anxiety in the face of isolation and new beginnings.
Gum Country’s music lies in the sweet spot between Stereolab’s loopy grooves and the snarky yet sweet songs of the Magnetic Fields. With its impeccable bass groove and warm, vintage organs, the opener and title track is the kind of lo-fi punk you can dance to like a Peanuts character. Its lyrics describe the simultaneous fear and excitement of acquainting oneself with a new place: “Haven’t felt this way in a while/I can’t think straight, can’t find my style/I guess this is my life for a while,” Garvin sings with a chilled-out, cartoonish attitude. Finding your footing in the great big world is a nauseating exercise, she suggests, but worth it in the end. The sentiment is enshrouded by layers of distortion and delay, requiring time to parse out her words. More often than not, it’s worth it.
Gum Country engage directly with the things we do when we’re alone, an experience that can be wildly monotonous to the point of insanity. On “Brain Song,” Garvin unselfconsciously calls out a few influences: “Sunset on my back/Kate Bush/Fleetwood Mac,” goes one line, as casual as a grocery list. On “Talking to My Plants,” Garvin sings about the anxiety of isolation with a bone-dry sense of humor. “I’m talking to my plants/Or are they talking to me?” she asks. Then a plant speaks: “I am a plant/Please give me water/And lots of sunlight.” It’s an exchange plucked from a hot summer afternoon by yourself, when you start to anthropomorphize the only other living thing in the room.
At times, Somewhere hits a lull. The record stretches out too long and flirts with monotony in its own right. Some songs inch toward the directly personal, but never quite goes all the way. Lyrics tend to be fragmented, and Garvin’s aesthetic choices often distort her vocals until you can’t quite make out what she’s saying. The choices fit the record’s scrappy ethos, but it would be interesting to see Garvin be more direct. Somewhere is as its best when Garvin bares her teeth and uses her sense of humor to talk about what is haunting her, be it spending far too much time alone, or trying to find your place on new ground. | 2020-06-24T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-06-24T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Kingfisher Bluez / Dinosaur City / Waterslide | June 24, 2020 | 7.2 | d70c625b-fbfb-456f-b550-e7d3b6956821 | Sophie Kemp | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sophie-kemp/ | |
On a collaborative release, the grindcore and shoegaze bands team up for the rare metal album whose greatest virtue is its delicacy. | On a collaborative release, the grindcore and shoegaze bands team up for the rare metal album whose greatest virtue is its delicacy. | Full of Hell / Nothing: When No Birds Sang | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/full-of-hell-nothing-when-no-birds-sang/ | When No Birds Sang | There are two Full of Hells. There’s the Full of Hell known for making tightly wound and carefully plotted grindcore on the albums they release under their own name. And there’s the Full of Hell known for their ability to alter their signature sound to the specifications of another band’s music. On their previous collaborative albums, you can hear them scraping and squeezing the aluminum waves of Merzbow, the freeform sludge of the Body, and the doom metal of Primitive Man. The prettiness of Nothing’s dirtbag shoegaze—its haziness, the defeatist riffing, the way the songs move with the oblivious sway of Audrey Horne—isn’t an obvious stylistic match. But on their collaborative album, When No Birds Sang, Nothing’s strolling pace forces Full of Hell to choose their steps carefully, while Full of Hell’s ferocity and ear for detail corrode some of Nothing’s natural beauty. Like all great collaborations, it comes across as the work of a single band and it’s impossible to imagine either group making this record on their own.
If Full of Hell and Nothing sound like they see eye to eye on When No Birds Sang, it could be because they were actually looking at one another. The full ensemble—Full of Hell’s Dylan Walker, Spencer Hazard, Dave Bland, and Sam DiGristine and Nothing’s Domenic Palermo and Doyle Martin—set up shop in Ocean City, Maryland, and wrote together in person, rather than sending demos back and forth. The method gives the album a sense of focus, even as it ventures into new territory for both acts, and their shared commitment to vulnerability tenderizes even the hardest blows.
When No Birds Sang highlights the depression that’s always lurking within both bands’ heaviness. Opener “Rose Tinted World” is structured around a thousand-foot-tall Black Sabbath riff from which Walker launches his scream; he’s consistently one of extreme music’s most inventive and compelling vocalists, and when words fail him mid-line, he transitions into a foaming snarl. It’s a brutal opening, with feedback whipping around its edges and a rhythm that could turn granite to powder. But when cheery samples of daytime TV begin to filter in, spilling over one another in their eagerness to insist on the bright happiness of the day—“Miles and miles of sunshine,” gushes one anchor—their chipper attitude recasts the song’s viciousness. Rather than a show of strength, the huge darkness feels dwarfed by the relentlessly empty face of false optimism.
Palermo takes the lead on “Like Stars in the Firmament.” It’s a gauzy slowcore prayer, the ensemble doing just enough to give Palermo the support he needs. “I don’t wanna die,” he sings, his voice soft with tragedy. Rather than throw a cloak of compression over the song to mimic intimacy, producer Will Putney gives the instruments space, allowing DiGristine’s fretless bass to gulp with Palermo as he sings about the flames of hell licking the gates of heaven. Later, in “Spend the Grace,” a scrape of guitar and sigh of feedback cycle around Palermo’s vocal in a sketchy loop, moaning in and out of dissonance and disrupting the angelic tone. It’s the kind of detail Full of Hell would normally gouge into the body of a song; here, their etching deepens the shadows in an already stately sculpture.
When No Birds Sang is the rare metal album whose greatest virtue is its delicacy. Peer into the distance of “Wild Blue”’s icy grace and see the malfunctioning electronics crackling away. Or listen to the sing-songy chords of “Rose Tinted World”’s coda mimicking the breathiness of a typical Nothing vocal, and how the cascading morning-show samples embody the noise and anger of Walker’s delivery. Functionally, it’s a duet between two of the most distinctive vocalists in metal in which neither opens their mouth: a fitting high point on an album that shows Full of Hell and Nothing pushing one another into new ways of using their voices. | 2023-12-07T00:01:00.000-05:00 | 2023-12-07T00:01:00.000-05:00 | Metal / Rock | Closed Casket Activities | December 7, 2023 | 7.6 | d717073d-2dad-439a-83a9-b97ba6515cbf | Sadie Sartini Garner | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sadie-sartini garner/ | |
The Dap-Kings saxophonist assembles a sizeable, percussion-heavy ensemble on a set that draws inspiration from a search for his ancestral past. | The Dap-Kings saxophonist assembles a sizeable, percussion-heavy ensemble on a set that draws inspiration from a search for his ancestral past. | Cochemea: All My Relations | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/cochemea-all-my-relations/ | All My Relations | Cochemea Gastelum had the idea to record All My Relations while the saxophone player was on tour with soul singer Sharon Jones, who passed away in 2016. In between shows, the 46-year-old Gastelum and the rest of Jones’ backing band, the Dap-Kings, would hit up local record stores and host impromptu listening parties around a turntable at the back of the tour bus. At one point, someone put on the Afro-Cuban jazz player Sabu Martinez’ Afro Temple, a 1973 album that combines rich layers of Latin percussion with wailing sax lines. After hearing the record, Gastelum—who grew up in California, lives in Woodstock, and claims Yaqui and Mescalero Apache Indian roots—felt he could express his own feelings about his ancestral background via a similar template of saxophone set to waves of percussion. This bewitching combination has forged All My Relations into a jazz album that’s equal parts spiritual journey and irrepressible funk.
The album’s 10 songs mix improvised percussion with impressionistic melodies. Gastelum called together a group of 10 musicians to engage in collective writing sessions at Daptone’s House of Soul studio in Brooklyn, where they’d jam until they hit on a groove and felt a song start to take shape. The core of the ensemble features a percussion section built around a spellbinding array of congas, bongos, tablas, dhols, and shekeres; this rhythmic foundation is embellished by Gastelum’s consummate saxophone playing, plus bass courtesy of Bosco Mann and clavinet and pianet from Victor Axelrod. The opening song, “Maso Ye’eme,” encapsulates the blend: Sinewy, smoldering melody lines play off smartly morphing percussion that builds to a frantic climax. Elsewhere, “Mitote” is spearheaded by a tight, upbeat horn riff that brings to mind James Brown’s band the J.B.’s; “Seyewailo” coasts with a breezy, blissful swing; and the title track is a defiant march that includes the communal chant, “Ain’t gonna build no wall.”
All My Relations boasts a syncopated charm that stems from the freedom of groove inherent in jam sessions. But the album’s spiritual elevation comes from Gastelum’s songwriting process. After taking time to consider his relationship to his ancestral roots, he attempted to transform the images in his head into melodic phrasings. “Sonora,” which is named for the homeland of Gastelum’s ancestors, was prompted by imagining a place that he’d never visited but felt an intense longing for. The track takes on a beautifully lonesome quality, with wistful sax backed by stripped-down, metronomic percussion that captures a feeling of wandering strange lands. These themes of ancestry and spiritual connection add narrative cohesion to the album: “Sonora” is followed by the ghostly-sounding interlude “Los Muertos,” which gives way to the Mexican rhythms of “Mescalero,” a song written in homage to Gastelum’s Mescalero Apache grandmother in which Gastelum deftly switches out his sax for flute.
Gastelum’s act of grappling with his heritage sometimes translates to a heavy listening experience, but the album ends on a tranquil note. Inspired by the Navajo song “Shí naashá,” the closing “Song of Happiness” combines lilting percussion with the sort of sweet soul refrain you’d happily believe was penned by Stevie Wonder. Following the gravitas of what’s come before, this finish ushers in a feeling of serenity. It’s as though Gastelum has discovered that at the end of a long journey into his past, a sense of hope for the future is its own reward. | 2019-03-01T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2019-03-01T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Jazz | Daptone | March 1, 2019 | 7.9 | d71a49fb-9d0a-4acc-bb8f-fa681e297c08 | Phillip Mlynar | https://pitchfork.com/staff/phillip-mlynar/ | |
The Detroit rapper broke out in 2021 with an unmistakably funky style and jokes for days. Now he has to do it again. | The Detroit rapper broke out in 2021 with an unmistakably funky style and jokes for days. Now he has to do it again. | Bruiser Wolf: My Story Got Stories | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/bruiser-wolf-my-story-got-stories/ | My Story Got Stories | In wrestling, one of the most euphoric moments is the debut of a new character with a cool-ass look and a devastating move—think of Brock Lesnar teleporting into the ring in 2002 with muscles grown on his muscles, leaving nothing but carnage. The hard part is getting beyond that initial awe and turning into a weekly personality, the type of character that you want to latch onto. That’s sort of what Bruiser Wolf is going through on his second album, My Stories Got Stories.
The Bruiser Brigade standout is one of those rappers that could make you pull over to the side of the road when you first hear them. Maybe for you it was one of his guest turns on early 2021 albums by fellow Bruiser Brigade MCs J.U.S or Fat Ray, where his flows sound like Bell from Willie Dynamite at 2x speed. Or maybe it was later that year, when he stole the limelight on the Detroit crew’s Alchemist-produced posse cut with a collage of doughboy memories and witty punchlines. Most likely it was his 2021 album Dope Game Stupid, where his conversational slick talk combined with Raphy beats that sounded like they should be blasting out of a Cadillac Eldorado. It holds up well over 13 joints. Now he has to do it again, and you can feel the pressure to adopt an incrementally more conventional style weighing on the album.
For one, the raps on My Stories Got Stories are less funky than they were on Dope Game Stupid. There’s nothing as out-there as him getting in his Curtis Mayfield bag for the bleak yet sticky hook of “Momma Was a Dopefiend” or the hyperactive and dark chants of “the dope fiend my best friend” on “Middle Men” that come directly after Fat Ray’s hearty reinterpretation of 50 Cent’s timeless chorus. The closest Bruiser Wolf gets on this album is the end of “Let the Young Boys Eat,” where he puts his spin on the breezy sung melodies you could find all over 1990s Bay Area rap albums. Even the beats—there’s still plenty of Raphy, but also others like Harry Fraud and Dag—bring to mind Griselda’s hard-nosed soul samples rather than, say, Cotton Comes to Harlem.
But he’s an eccentric enough rapper that even the streamlined version of his style is still a pretty fun ride. On “Looney Tunes,” he’s got his flow on a yo-yo as he changes speeds and stitches together details that add color to his dope-dealing flashbacks (“Just a Detroit hustler rocking the Fila brand”). His best bars are hilarious because of their specificity and randomness: “You sing like J.T. from The Five Heartbeats/My nigga, that’s a City Girl.” All of the dope analogies on “Holla at Ya Mans” are killer, including “had the white girl doing hot yoga” and “finessed the plug with Terms of Endearment.” Raphy’s beat on “G’z & Hustlaz” has that splash of opulence the others don’t and Wolf glides over it, though the flows could be quirkier. They are on “Crack Cocaine,” where he stretches his voice to a register higher than Chris Tucker’s in Money Talk.
I wish Bruiser Wolf bent his voice to those extremes even more often. My Stories Got Stories is pared down in a way that’s distracting, sacrificing a little bit of his individuality to make sure that as many people as possible recognize the depth beneath the jokes. So we have on-the-nose songs like “2 Bad,” in which he takes a crack at the sound of current Michigan street rap with Danny Brown and Zeelooperz, or his West Coast pimp-rap cut “I Was Taught To.” His music is already in conversation with those styles without having to make lesser versions of them. On “My $tory Got $tories,” he warmly reminisces on the grind that got him to this point, like your uncle off the yak on Thanksgiving, but with the repetition of the title phrase and a way-too-long Stephen A. Smith clip about the poor conditions of Detroit tacked on, the song does a lot of over-explaining. I understand why—underground rap is a tough business, and he’s trying hard to carve out a lane with longevity. But a rap album that has me thinking about the job of a rapper as much as the music is missing something. | 2024-01-18T16:50:12.000-05:00 | 2024-01-18T08:05:56.746-05:00 | Rap | Fake Shore Drive / Bruiser Brigade | January 18, 2024 | 6.1 | d721faef-03e5-4f7c-b9a7-6e7f6abc3010 | Alphonse Pierre | https://pitchfork.com/staff/alphonse-pierre/ | |
With dusty, psychedelic production from Roc Marciano, Jay Worthy’s latest collaborative album is his grimiest to date. | With dusty, psychedelic production from Roc Marciano, Jay Worthy’s latest collaborative album is his grimiest to date. | Jay Worthy / Roc Marciano: Nothing Bigger Than the Program | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/jay-worthy-roc-marciano-nothing-bigger-than-the-program/ | Nothing Bigger Than the Program | Over the past decade, Jay Worthy has become one of the most dependable members of the West Coast underground. The Compton-by-way-of-Vancouver emcee is half of LNDN DRGS, the project he formed with producer Sean House in 2014. The late A$AP Yams was an early champion, and his mentorship opened the door to work with the likes of Curren$y, G Perico, and Larry June. As a solo artist, Worthy’s racked up solid albums with A-list producers like DJ Muggs, Harry Fraud, and the Alchemist. He’s also signed to Griselda Records, though his luxurious California sound doesn’t really align with the label’s typical warped-cassette grime. Worthy’s made his career by shrewdly choosing associates; though not the most technically skilled rapper, he’s a master of vibe. His true talent lies in finding fellow travelers who share his vision.
Worthy’s latest album, Nothing Bigger Than the Program, continues his streak of inspired collaborations, pairing him with underground legend Roc Marciano. Marci’s impeccable ear for dusty, psychedelic loops makes this Worthy’s grimiest album, the closest he’s come to embodying the Griselda ethos. It’s also one of his most feature-packed projects, as all but two songs (“How?” and “Players Only”) have guest verses. Nothing about this music feels tossed-off: Marci’s kush-scented production feels perfectly suited to Worthy’s gangster-next-door persona and the two, along with a committee of criminal-minded consiglieres, put together a carefully considered set of fun, sleazy rap songs.
Marci doesn’t always get his proper due as a producer. His solo records are self-contained worlds; the post-RZA sound he whittled to the bare essentials with 2010’s Marcberg laid the groundwork for much of today’s prestige rap landscape. When he produces for other artists, he tends to work with more polarizing rappers like Stove God Cooks or Flee Lord. Worthy has a more immediately agreeable charm, his most egregious offense being a slinky L.A. flow that might not always land right on East Coast ears. But Marci’s minimal, often drumless beats are the ideal backdrop for Worthy, whose push-pull delivery slips easily into each nook and cranny.
Take, for example, the title track, where Marci accents the descending wah-pedal guitar with a kick-cymbal combo but leaves the loop otherwise unadorned. Worthy raps as if he’s late for an appointment, rushing through the end of each bar nearly breathless. When the hook comes around, he crushes “Aw damn, they shooting” and “I swear to God I couldn’t make this shit up” into an urgent, wobbling run-on sentence. Even if Worthy isn’t dropping quotable lines, his delivery has a certain electricity to it, a crackling energy found throughout Nothing Bigger.
“Wake Up” is the strongest track, and it expertly distills the strengths of Worthy and Marci’s partnership. The soft-focus beat feels like a funk band warming up two bloody marys deep, unsure of where the groove will take them. Worthy spits a day-in-the-life verse that moves from nursing a hangover to riding to “Maryland in a Chevy coupe,” presumably dirty. Marci shows up in top form for an unannounced verse, dissecting and collaging multisyllabic rhyme schemes. The two sound completely natural together, and Marci’s appearance on the mic feels like a stamp of approval. Alongside stellar verses elsewhere on the record from veterans like Bun B and Kurupt, it’s a testament to the good will that Worthy has earned in the hip-hop community and another turning point in his evolution from sturdy to sought-after. | 2023-05-30T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2023-05-30T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | GDF / Marci Enterprises / Empire | May 30, 2023 | 7.5 | d723c782-91f7-49d9-9be7-f5898ea5a32c | Dash Lewis | https://pitchfork.com/staff/dash-lewis/ | |
The London producer’s frosty new album is an enigmatic journey through windy ambient passages, glossy R&B melodies, and frenzied piano. | The London producer’s frosty new album is an enigmatic journey through windy ambient passages, glossy R&B melodies, and frenzied piano. | Klein: touched by an angel | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/klein-touched-by-an-angel/ | touched by an angel | Before she made her singular brand of beguiling, textured experimental music, Klein’s first love was filmmaking. In a 2018 interview, the South London composer and producer even joked that her music career is “a ploy to win an Oscar.” Her latest album, touched by an angel, gives credence to this ambition. It is a wintry odyssey that elides easy interpretation while offering fascinating glimpses into the life of its creator. At nearly 90 minutes, it has the immersive feel of a feature-length film.
touched achieves this placid, weightless ecstasy through unlikely vocal manipulation and warped instrumentation. The record is composed of windy ambient passages that threaten to swallow the listener, naked piano that flies up and down like a mad Tinkerbell, and glossy R&B melodies buried under static and distortion. Distant train whistles recur as motifs, transporting us to ambiguous planes of memory. Listening to the album can feel like skating on an icy pond until suddenly you’ve ascended, your feet barely skimming the ground.
Lyrics are few and far between, giving only hints into the inspiration behind the music. (The title, touched by an angel, allegedly comes from a Christian TV show that Klein watched with her mom.) On highlight “say black power and mean it,” metallic percussion ricochets before tempestuous static blankets the track in a layer of fuzz. On “storm,” synthetic strings beckon from the darkness, joined by recorder squeaks, burbles, and the sound of flapping wings. The 10-minute “no weapon shall form against me” crescendos into staticky yells that become more overwhelming as they repeat. Even when you hear human voices, they are often scrambled, unintelligible.
Mainstream pop culture has always existed on the outskirts of Klein’s music, and here she incorporates specific allusions to express feelings of alienation. On “black famous,” the album’s opener and most rousing song, Klein references Drake’s “Started From the Bottom,” flipping his flex to evoke a sense of loss without resolution. “Started from the bottom, man/She’s still in the bottom, man,” she says with a devotional quality. The music video for “DJ drop,” a hypnotic meditation built from train whistle and looped croons, focuses on a plastic bag’s journey on the sidewalk: It functions both as a tongue-in-cheek nod to Katy Perry and a somber visualization of feeling invisible as a person of color.
The eight-minute “street cred” exemplifies the entrancing idiosyncrasies of Klein’s music. Over a simple hum, she rewinds her voice again and again, creating alien melodies from repetitive snippets of unintelligible words. Her chirpy, pitch-shifted vocals sound hypnotizing but disorienting. It’s a dazzling performance that leaves you captivated, even as Klein slips away from our grasp once again. | 2023-11-06T00:00:00.000-05:00 | 2023-11-06T00:00:00.000-05:00 | Experimental | Parkwuud Entertainment | November 6, 2023 | 7.4 | d728309d-584d-4663-bc2a-b8a12264d632 | Peyton Toups | https://pitchfork.com/staff/peyton-toups/ | |
This Sacramento rapper has had a busy couple of years, and though his latest often sounds rushed, he remains one of the foremost narrative stylists in hip-hop. | This Sacramento rapper has had a busy couple of years, and though his latest often sounds rushed, he remains one of the foremost narrative stylists in hip-hop. | Mozzy: Mandatory Check | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22031-mandatory-check/ | Mandatory Check | The 2002 2Pac documentary Thug Angel: The Life of an Outlaw contains footage of the rapper giving insight into his prolific recording process, an approach which would prove just as influential as his music. “We don’t have the time or the luxury to spend all this time doing one song,” he said. “I know it ain’t all that, but I did my whole album three songs a day... You can mix it later and have niggas that love being in the studio all night just adding the drum beat…after the rappers leave... For while we’re in here, and you’ve got eight rappers here, everybody drinking and smoking and shit? Man, get that beat popping, throw them niggas on the track, boom. The name of the song is whatever this nigga said, what his last word was.”
2Pac wasn’t suggesting he was too busy to work at his craft, but that for an oral art form like hip-hop, his relevance was an extension of his productivity. This was a timely and unmediated connection with his audience, suggesting to the next generation they had no need for major label budgets or months of careful revision and rehearsal to release urgent music. (If anything, he seems to imply it could stop up the creative process.) Building on that idea, Mozzy and other artists in this lineage don’t structure recording around carefully selected singles campaigns and yearly album releases. Instead, Mozzy has built his audience through 2014 and 2015 by keeping his signal-to-noise ratio high despite a prolific release schedule, flanking well-funded and better publicized stars.
Mandatory Check is his second solo release of 2016 after February’s Beautiful Struggle EP, and its inconsistency is an argument not that Mozzy has slipped—he remains one of the foremost narrative stylists in hip-hop—but that he’s yet to transition to a more mainstream distribution model. Indeed, in the last year he’s released a handful of collaborative records and appeared on a dozen more—records with Bay Area rapper Stevie Joe, with supergroup One Mob, crew album Hexa Hella Extra Head Shots 2, and albums from crew members Hus Mozzy, Celly Ru, and EMozzy. Not to mention his guest appearances with Nipsey Hussle, YG, Nef the Pharaoh, etc.
No matter how talented the artist, this level of prolificacy means his own album isn’t as potent as it could be. A record like his Stevie Joe collaboration “2 Bitches” would easily be top-tier single material if it appeared here, and his tormented verse on One Mob’s “Stranger to the Pain” sticks to the ribs in a way that makes much of Mandatory Check feel slight in comparison. Mandatory Check’s token R&B record “Like Me” is tossed off relative to 2015’s “Wat It Izzery Luv,” a song that used lived-in details to weave a relationship story with heart. And his own recent solo single “Killa City”—an attempt at peacekeeping in the midst of an internecine inter-city street beef—has an urgency that would stand out were it included on his latest release.
That said, close listening will reward the rapper’s fervent fanbase. Particular highlights include the aching “Love My N****z,” with sunset production courtesy longtime collaborator June Onna Beat, and the funky “Brought Up,” (“Don’t worry about the dreads bitch I like the shit matted up!”). Lead single “So 4Real,” though, may best capture the moral contradictions that permeate Mozzy’s music and life. It closes with a harrowing passage in which perverse bravado and violent shame collide, and the lines hint at this eye for storytelling detail: “Threw him in the back of the Audi and yanked off/Hit him with a FN bullet, he can’t walk/Fending for himself, his momma got laid off/She was smoking dope in the closet, young boy heartbroken when he opened the closet/Liability with all the damage we causin’, such a beautiful struggle, say it ain’t you jawsin’.”
Mandatory Check is an imperfect entry point, which is a disappointment only because for many, this will be their first exposure to the rapper’s catalog. It was clearly recorded in haste, a snapshot of a moment rather than the culmination of an aesthetic. (Though likely recorded under similarly hurried circumstances, newcomers may find 2015’s Gangland Landscape a more rewarding listen and a better overall summation of the rapper’s appeal.) But if the multitude of guest verses and songwriting or production whiffs undercut him, his verses remain the consistent core of his art. | 2016-06-15T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-06-15T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Empire / Mozzy | June 15, 2016 | 6.8 | d72a7944-6a43-46f7-a720-fc6a9288869f | David Drake | https://pitchfork.com/staff/david-drake/ | null |
Each Sunday, Pitchfork takes an in-depth look at a significant album from the past, and any record not in our archives is eligible. Today we revisit the debut album from a trio that split from the Specials to forge a mischievous and mysterious electro-pop sound haunted by the racist violence entrenched in British history. | Each Sunday, Pitchfork takes an in-depth look at a significant album from the past, and any record not in our archives is eligible. Today we revisit the debut album from a trio that split from the Specials to forge a mischievous and mysterious electro-pop sound haunted by the racist violence entrenched in British history. | Fun Boy Three: Fun Boy Three | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/fun-boy-three-fun-boy-three/ | Fun Boy Three | The Specials were unlikely pop stars. In 1981, the Coventry ska band, fronted by young misfit Terry Hall but led by keyboardist Jerry Dammers, hit No. 1 with “Ghost Town,” a haunted state-of-the-nation address that painted an image of a country beset by economic decay and racist violence. It was a surprising capstone to a three-year period in which they had come to define two-tone, a working-class, multi-racial subculture, and channeled the downcast, nihilistic mood of Thatcherite Britain. “Ghost Town” perfectly captured the Specials’ ethos and aesthetic, laying bare the contempt the British state had for disenfranchised young people while retaining the wit and candor that reflected their humble origins.
The Specials were at their critical and commercial peak, yet relationships within the band were rotten. Hall, along with Lynval Golding and Neville Staple, felt constricted and underappreciated by Dammers, despite the songwriter’s messages of unity and social justice. “Equality and democracy were what we preached. That’s how it was when we started, but it didn’t last,” said Golding at the time. “When we started making $2,000 a night instead of $200, we weren’t equal anymore; we were working for Jerry Dammers.”
At the height of their popularity, Golding, Hall, and Staple walked away and started a band where they had everything they claimed Dammers had withheld from them: total creative freedom. Fun Boy Three drew from the same well as the Specials, combining elements of punk with the Jamaican styles that were rattling sound systems across the country. But they gave themselves the liberty to be as wild, weird, and flexible as they wanted. No more suits, no more monochrome, and no more checkered 2 Tone Records stripe on the sleeve. On the cover of their self-titled debut album, the band appeared in front of a giant red spot, dressed down in singlets and t-shirts. The three musicians were already celebrities in the UK, but here they were presented as a band casting off the codes of the two-tone subculture they had helped define.
Any sane A&R might have thought twice about betting big on a record like Fun Boy Three, but Chrysalis, the parent company of 2 Tone, rightly decided that the trio was, as Hall put it, “too big to be dropped.” Regardless, any concerns around commercial appeal were moot: The band didn’t demo their songs, so there was nothing for Chrysalis to object to. Working with Specials producer Dave Jordan, the band commuted between Coventry and London every day, improvising songs based on mambo, cha-cha, and reggae rhythms until they hit upon a sound that was spooky and sexy in equal measure, like exotica played by the most maladjusted person you know.
The band’s first single—the eerie, thundering “The Lunatics (Have Taken Over the Asylum)”—was like a Specials song on the point of combustion. It’s ostensibly about the abjectly depressing Thatcher and Reagan era, but at times it seems to double as FB3’s rebuke to Dammers. When the Specials reformed in 2009, Hall told The Guardian that Fun Boy Three was “the sound of three people sent mental by being in the Specials,” and his lyrics toward the end of “Lunatics” seem to nod to his time under the thumb of his former bandmate: “Take away my right to choose/Take away my point of view/Take away my dignity/Take these things away from me.”
“Lunatics” was—somewhat improbably, given its loose structure and avant-garde palette—the first of seven UK Top 40 hits that Fun Boy Three netted in a little under two years. It began the history of one of UK pop’s greatest curios: a hugely successful band that, despite great commercial impact, left little lasting trace on the world. Fun Boy Three released two Top 20-charting albums in two years (the latter, Waiting, produced by David Byrne) and launched the career of Bananarama, who performed on their debut. But they were such a cultural anomaly—their roots too obscure to legibly scan for a general listening public, their hits too strange to find an afterlife on golden oldies stations—that their impact now, 40 years after their debut, seems remarkably small. When Hall died of cancer last year, at the age of 63, obituaries and tributes treated Fun Boy Three as a footnote in his career, if at all; Staple’s memoir, Original Rude Boy, rarely touches on the group.
It’s a shame, given that Fun Boy Three still sounds as mischievous and enigmatic as it likely did upon release. Its status as a relatively forgotten cultural artifact only adds to its mystique: This album of Gregorian-style chants and absurdist one-liners made for an entirely unexpected entrant to the UK Top 10. At the time, Golding called Fun Boy Three an “extension” of the Specials, but Fun Boy Three might be more accurately described as a distillation of “Ghost Town”—bleak and cavernous, politically and spiritually dejected, haunted by the darkness of modern-day Britain and the racist violence entrenched in its history.
One of the band’s goals, according to Golding and Hall, was to convey a sense of subtlety that the clear-cut, ultra-political Specials never possessed. At the time, Hall described the Specials’ lyrics, many of which were written by Dammers, as “too blatant,” saying that he was “embarrassed singing them sometimes.” Disavowing his past work was a favorite pastime of the 23-year-old, a self-described “old punk” with the cynicism to prove it, and he wouldn’t stop with the Specials: By the time the band released Waiting a year later, he had been slagging off Fun Boy Three in the press for a good few months.
Nevertheless, you can hear Hall, Golding, and Staple working hard across Fun Boy Three to find new modes of songwriting that were far removed from their previous project. These songs are made largely from looping phrases and chants, heavy on deadpan spoken word and only occasionally spotlighting Hall’s distinctive whine. Their circular structures seem to have been influenced by the drum machine at the root of the songs; as with each production element, the singing on Fun Boy Three contributes more to a given song’s groove than its meaning. There are few lead vocal lines, and when there are, they’re almost always offset by chants or proto-raps from the entire band.
Like the high-gloss pop bands Soft Cell and the Human League, Fun Boy Three embraced the newish technologies that had become widely available in the early ’80s. They just used them to make music that sounded nothing like what was on the charts. “Funrama 2” is the closest thing Fun Boy Three has to a ska song, but it could hardly be confused for anything the Specials ever produced: Filled with sounds of soccer whistles and jungle animals, using Bananarama’s voices as percussive elements, it has more in common with jazz than Jamaica. Sometimes, Fun Boy Three hit upon a sound that was uncharacteristically current, but even then, they did it in their own wonky way: “Faith, Hope and Charity,” with its metallic drum-machine chug and discordant guitar line—the only one on the record—sounds like Afrika Bambaataa filtered through the confrontational spirit of no wave, inadvertently hybridizing the sound of New York’s two most fertile creative scenes.
They often came across like crate-diggers trying to weave together sounds from pop’s past. Even in the Specials, Hall had been interested in classic pop music, and here he flexed his wide-ranging taste in impish, anarchic ways. “It Ain’t What You Do It’s The Way That You Do It,” Fun Boy Three’s biggest hit, was a remake of a 1930s jazz standard, featuring Bananarama singing lead and Hall playing piano. They had discovered the London trio during their tenure with the Specials, though the details are fuzzy; sometimes they claimed to have seen a photo of them in The Face, and at others they said they saw them performing at a London club. Impressed by their singing ability, and seeing them as a female mirror of Fun Boy Three, they recruited them to sing across the entirety of Fun Boy Three.
“It Ain’t What You Do” was a huge hit in the UK, reaching No. 4 on the singles chart and propelling Bananarama to national fame. Their cameos were so sparkling and magnetic that they earned them a “co-starring” credit on the back of the album. Although they rarely sang anything other than backing vocals, Bananarama were an essential part of Fun Boy Three, turning a weird, sometimes painfully misanthropic record into something softer and prettier. They served as the lawful good counterpoint to FB3’s chaotic evil: When the three women left the studio one day after tracking vocals for “Funrama 2,” Hall, Golding, and Staple recorded percussion by throwing ashtrays and drum cases around the studio. “It was the same at school,” Hall said of recording with Bananarama: “The girls used to work hard and the boys used to mess about.”
Fun Boy Three is as political as any Specials record, but, true to their word, Hall, Golding, and Staple most often hid their politics beneath a glaze of impressionism. “Best of Luck Mate” is built around the kind of slinking piano line that you’d expect to hear in a dinky 1960s spy show, Staple toasting cryptically about frittering his scant income away on gambling. It’s a wryly mundane vision of British disillusionment in the ’70s and ’80s, still deeply tapped into their social milieu but less polemical than the songs Dammers had written.
The exception is “I Don’t Believe It,” a reggae song in which Golding sings about the constant surveillance that Black Brits were, and still are, subject to. It plays with the cadence and tone of a nursery rhyme, but has a Stepford-esque eeriness to it. Golding delivers his lyrics with equal parts discontent and paranoia: “Man call around to make a few inquiries/He tell me what I smoke before I even smoke it/Everything is written in the neighbor’s diary.” Golding was a pacifist and a strong advocate for racial harmony; “Why,” the B-side to “Ghost Town,” was written and performed by Golding about being a victim of a racially motivated attack. Where that song is pleading and confused, the overwhelming tone of “I Don’t Believe It” is one of exhaustion created by the sheer drudgery of having to wake up and contend with a deeply racist society day in and day out.
By the time Fun Boy Three was released, “I Don’t Believe It” had already taken on new layers. The day the band finished recording the album, they returned to Coventry. They played “It Ain’t What You Do” at a local radio station, and afterwards went to Shades, a nightclub near the city center, to hang out with two of Staple’s friends. There, the group was jumped by a gang of white youths; Golding’s throat was slashed, and he nearly lost an eye. While in intensive care, his house was robbed.
Just as quickly as they began, Hall disbanded Fun Boy Three in 1983, shortly after the release of “Our Lips Are Sealed,” their take on the Go-Go’s hit Hall had co-written with Jane Wiedlin, and FB3’s final hit. It’s possible that, to Hall, commercial viability was antithetical to his art; he once said that he was “uncomfortable” with the success of “Ghost Town,” and started Fun Boy Three because any attempt to find a midpoint between pure radicalism and pure pop was a fool’s errand. To his credit, Fun Boy Three was a chart success in spite of its craziness—the sound of three people driven mad and coming out on top.
Additional research by Deirdre McCabe Nolan. | 2023-11-26T00:00:00.000-05:00 | 2023-11-26T00:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Chrysalis | November 26, 2023 | 8.4 | d72c6ec3-e4a7-408e-8ef4-bc9a6f7ef43d | Shaad D’Souza | https://pitchfork.com/staff/shaad-d’souza/ | |
Behind its carefree title, Miley Cyrus’ eighth album is an edgeless and synthetic collection of disco-pop bummer jams. | Behind its carefree title, Miley Cyrus’ eighth album is an edgeless and synthetic collection of disco-pop bummer jams. | Miley Cyrus: Endless Summer Vacation | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/miley-cyrus-endless-summer-vacation/ | Endless Summer Vacation | For years, each new album signaled the pronouncement of a new, more mature Miley Cyrus, and a host of new visual metaphors for said maturity: an asymmetrical haircut, an acoustic guitar, a branded condom, another asymmetrical haircut. But she has remained one of pop’s most endearingly guileless songwriters. On songs like “Malibu” and “High” she sings about true love with total innocence; on 2020’s “Bad Karma” and “Night Crawling,” collaborations with Joan Jett and Billy Idol, respectively, she took on the guise of rock stardom, affecting a swagger with the enthusiasm of a superfan. Taylor Swift shed her wide-eyed sense of wonderment somewhere around Reputation; Cyrus never did, giving her music a curious, appealing openness that stands out in the contemporary pop landscape.
On Endless Summer Vacation, Cyrus’ eighth album, that changes. Its airy, mostly unfussy pop-rock production is streaked with the pink and red of a summer sunset; emotionally, it carries the mottled purple tint of a bruise. Early on she howls a backhanded apology to an ex: “I’m sorry that you’re jaded.” By the time the record’s played through—after she sings about her own callousness and her inability to settle down, and wonders “Am I stranded on an island/Or have I landed in paradise?”—it seems like she might be singing to herself. Cyrus is only 30, but Endless Summer Vacation is marked by a blunt cynicism that seems like a product of both a recent divorce and a lifetime seeing her own image warped and criticized by the media.
Led by the hammy self-love anthem “Flowers”—a chugging daytime disco song that aims for “I Will Survive” but lands more like “I Will Survive?”—Endless Summer Vacation has been sold as Cyrus’ stylish moving-on record, an unbothered counterpart to its snarky predecessor Plastic Hearts. But it is more interesting than a simple statement of self-confidence. On most of these songs, Cyrus is regretful, even mournful: “Rose Colored Lenses,” seemingly about a moment of post-coital bliss, wallows in the realization that such peace can never really last. “You,” a gorgeous soul ballad that captures all the grit and tension from Cyrus’ ragged voice, counters devotional lyrics with a chorus that laments a breakup as a foregone conclusion: “I am not made for no horsey and carriage/You know I’m savage.” On streaming, Endless Summer Vacation is packaged with a demo version of “Flowers,” and although it is a demo in name only—it is as taut and shellacked as the final version, just quieter—it’s actually a neat bookend, making Cyrus’ lyrics sound yearning and contrite.
Cyrus has never really made a great front-to-back album—2013’s Bangerz, weirdly, is probably most listenable the whole way through—and, with Endless Summer Vacation, “no skips” remains out of reach. A run of understated early tracks, largely produced by Harry’s House collaborators Kid Harpoon and Tyler Johnson, is interrupted by the interminable Harmony Korine co-write “Handstand,” the kind of grooveless synth dirge that helped 2015’s Flaming Lips collaboration Miley Cyrus and Her Dead Petz sink like a stone. “Handstand” is built around a heavy-handed boat metaphor that never seems to go anywhere, and confoundingly introduces a character called Big Twitchy, a constant presence in Korine’s paintings. It feels as if, after exercising the kind of restraint that’s rare across her catalog, Cyrus finally let herself slip back into mindless excess.
Cyrus has said Endless Summer Vacation is loosely divided into “AM” and “PM” sections, and it’s the nighttime songs, roughly beginning with “Handstand,” that grate. “Wildcard” unsuccessfully retreads the “I’m damaged” regretfulness of “You” with less panache; “Muddy Feet,” a leaden collaboration with Sia, aims for tough talk and mostly lands at awkward. A decade on, Cyrus has still not found an appealing way to sing the word “I’ma,” and the song describes a cheating partner with a maddening combination of vagueness and ultra-specificity.
Indeed, a search for any of these songs brings up dozens of tabloid articles purporting to explain how they relate to Cyrus’ personal life. Thankfully, most of the album doesn’t fuel the impulse to speculate. On its best songs, such as the vampy and lascivious “River,” Cyrus effectively showcases who she is at this point in her career: Mature but still messy, not above a theatrical turn of phrase (“You’re pourin’ down, baby, drown me out”) and, very occasionally, still in tune with the big-hearted optimism that characterized her earlier music. “You could be the one, have the honor of my babies,” she sings. “Hope they have your eyes and that crooked smile.” Thrown into the middle of a horned-up dance jam, it comes as a surprise. A little like Endless Summer Vacation—which is not the sundazed party record that was promised but an exploration of how it feels when the party’s over. | 2023-03-14T00:03:00.000-04:00 | 2023-03-14T00:03:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | Columbia | March 14, 2023 | 6.2 | d7323d1f-144b-42a1-bc46-ba4b298c286d | Shaad D’Souza | https://pitchfork.com/staff/shaad-d’souza/ | |
A landmark anthology originally released in 2001 documents how James “Plunky Nkabinde” Branch and his groups connected jazz, R&B, and funk through Afrocentric rhythms and spirituality. | A landmark anthology originally released in 2001 documents how James “Plunky Nkabinde” Branch and his groups connected jazz, R&B, and funk through Afrocentric rhythms and spirituality. | Oneness of Juju: African Rhythms 1970-1982 | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/oneness-of-juju-african-rhythms-1970-1982/ | African Rhythms 1970-1982 | For much of the COVID-19 quarantine, James “Plunky Nkabinde” Branch—the saxophone- and flute-playing founder/leader of the Oneness of Juju, and through line of the recordings featured on African Rhythms 1970-1982—has been performing 10-minute concerts every evening from the front porch of his Richmond, Virginia home. What started as a familiar salute to essential workers of Plunky’s hometown has become a nightly meditation on global kinship. As the Black Lives Matter protests began to be felt especially strongly in Richmond, with its avenue of Confederate monuments, Plunky’s nightly repertoire has come to feature Oneness funk originals such as 1980’s “Make a Change,” which resonates acutely in a year when radical reconsideration has become central to public discourse.
Plunky Branch’s career as a social sage and connector of Black American music is one of the subtexts of African Rhythms 1970-1982, a reissue of the classic Strut compilation. It originally dropped in 2001, as Oneness of Juju and Plunky’s other groups were being “rediscovered” by Afrobeat DJs and hip-hop beatmakers. (Dilla covered the comp’s title cut the same year.) But it feels newly relevant, given Plunky’s role in many of the ongoing, fruitful discussions of our moment: about African roots and American lives; the interlocked musical traditions sometimes known as “jazz” and “funk”; and Black culture’s economic self-sufficiency and capitalism’s voracious need for content. With the flames of “spiritual jazz” rising higher on multiple continents, its reappearance is right on time.
African Rhythms 1970-1982 documents a crucial chapter in the history of Black American music and the movements it soundtracked. There are links to the era’s anti-war and anti-colonialist political activism (Plunky had an FBI file), South African musical exiles (members of Juju played on Ndikho Xaba and the Natives’ 1971 Afro-jazz-funk masterpiece), and post-Black Arts Movement New York loft scene (Juju lived in Ornette Coleman’s rent-free). The DIY spirit of Black independent music labels and distributors—particularly trumpeter Charles Tolliver and pianist Stanley Cowell’s legendary Strata-East, which released Juju albums, and D.C.’s Black Fire, which Plunky helped found (and which is the subject of its own upcoming release)—was a major influence. The continuity and interconnectedness of the diaspora’s localized rhythmic intricacies captured here are shown to be as fluid as night turning into day. And the presence of fabled figures such as Sun Ra, Pharoah Sanders, Gil-Scott Heron, and Hugh Masekela can be spotted just off stage, whether in the liner notes (by Chris Menist) or via one degree of separation through the players involved.
The early selections on African Rhythms focus more on the drumming foundations of Plunky’s groups than on their deep free improvisations of the period. The compilation forgoes chronology in favor of vibe and flow, while at the same time sketching a cultural timeline of the era’s evolving styles. A 1971 triptych of sexually and spiritually hungry feminist spoken word by Bay Area poet Roach OM, read over the Natives’ Afro-Cuban groove (the oldest recording on the compilation), offers a glimpse of the lyrical and musical longings of youthful, budding revolutionaries. On the New York (1972-73) and Richmond (1974) recordings of Plunky’s first band, Juju, featuring the ex-Natives vibraphonist Lon Moshe and drummer/percussionist Babatunde Michael Lea, that formula pairing spoken word with rhythm comes into sharper focus. Percussive layers (up to five instruments at once) are supple and unrelenting, and Plunky’s sheets of sound are also in service of the beat. Yet they could also touch transcendence: On the epic “End of the Butterfly King,” which features Ngoma Ya Uhura reading verses of a hopeful poem called “Things Comin’ Along” (“There is no time—only rhythm and change”) Juju fly in breathtaking angles behind him, Plunky’s thorny soprano lines rising and Al-Hammel Rasul pounding his piano, McCoy Tyner-style, through a simple and gorgeous melody. It’s free jazz as dance music.
Oneness of Juju made their debut in 1975, building on that dance while taking it in the direction of Afrocentric R&B, as played by a percussion-heavy jazz group—one that now featured a female vocalist (Eka-Ete Jackie Lewis) and a more funk-minded bassist (Plunky’s younger brother, Muzi Branch). The “African Rhythms” single was Black Fire’s first release, and the shift in musical strategy proved a commercially prudent one, just as the group’s audience evolved from art spaces of New York to the clubs of the Mid-Atlantic; yet the group’s musical and cultural message, that African rhythms equated to “the truth,” remained steadfast. Here too, Branch and band demonstrated how global Black rhythms represented continuity between the past and the future. Much of Oneness and Branch’s later ’70s contributions slot perfectly between Manu Dibango and Parliament tracks, tailor-made for the disco of Larry Levan and David Mancuso. There’s a full-on house music-meets-Egypt 70 vibe on 1982’s “Black Fire Mix” reimagining of famed Ghanaian percussionist Okyerema Asante’s “Sabi,” originally recorded in 1976-77 as a pure Afro-disco groove (sample lyric: “Get up on your feet and boogie”). Meanwhile, Oneness also fed a distinct environmental consciousness—1977’s “Be About the Future,” a percussion-driven funk number, featured Muzi-penned lyrics that presented ecological needs (clean water, saving resources) well ahead of the headlines.
By the time of 1982’s “Every Way But Loose,” built around Muzi’s lightly bumping bassline and another lyrical riff on the epistemology of rhythm (“Ain’t nothing but the truth gonna turn you loose”), had finally scored the group an actual hit (#62 on Billboard’s Dance Club Songs), Plunky & Oneness were also seeing D.C.’s go-go pick up their percussive mantle. (In 1977, Black Fire had released Experience Unlimited’s Free Yourself, among the first go-go recordings.) Eventually, “rhythm and change” caught up with him, as hip-hop and house—a machine-driven bridge too far for Plunky to cross—took up the beats of their elders. Not that Plunky ever stopped—his N.A.M.E. Brand label continued reissuing older recordings, while Plunky & Oneness still drop new ones.
African Rhythms 1970-82 wonderfully sums the sound James Branch and his colleagues plugged into in the late ’60s, which harkens to the one that poet/critic LeRoi Jones (later Amiri Baraka) predicted as “Unity Music” in his 1966 essay “The Changing Same”: a “Black Music which is religious and secular.” Jones foresaw …“a social spiritualism” that would resolve all the “artificial oppositions” in Black music, and include “all the rhythms, all the yells and cries, all that information about the world, the Black ommmmmmmmmmmmmmmm, opening and entering.” Plunky’s still playing it on his Richmond front porch. Go check him out.
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Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2020-07-20T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-07-20T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Jazz | Strut | July 20, 2020 | 8.4 | d736b016-3509-46d4-9e23-73ad29adc1b7 | Piotr Orlov | https://pitchfork.com/staff/piotr-orlov/ | |
Tragically Hip singer Gord Downie, diagnosed with a terminal brain tumor, offers an affecting album with Broken Social Scene's Kevin Drew about the plight of Canada's indigenous population. | Tragically Hip singer Gord Downie, diagnosed with a terminal brain tumor, offers an affecting album with Broken Social Scene's Kevin Drew about the plight of Canada's indigenous population. | Gord Downie: Secret Path | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22537-secret-path/ | Secret Path | In 2014, Kevin Drew of Broken Social Scene approached Tragically Hip singer Gord Downie about recording an album. Downie said he didn’t think he had any songs. “But,” he said, “I have been writing about Charlie.”
“Charlie” is Chanie Wenjack, a boy who, in the 1960s, was separated from his family and placed in the Cecelia Jeffrey Indian Residential School in Kenora, Ontario. His name was warped into the misnomer “Charlie” by his teachers. One day he escaped the school and tried to walk home. His family lived 400 miles away. He never made it. The album that Drew and Downie made, Secret Path, is, in Downie’s words, “an attempt to capture the feeling, somehow, of trying to get home.”
The first residential schools appeared in Canada in the late 1800s, and the system survived until the mid-1990s; children were removed from their families and placed in distant boarding schools administered by local churches and funded by the federal government. The schools were developed to “take the Indian out of the child”; teachers forbid the students from speaking or writing in their native language and educated them exclusively in white culture and Christianity. The students suffered physical and sexual abuse; many died from disease, which spread recklessly through the schools. Others committed suicide. The Canadian government stopped recording the deaths of children in residential schools in 1920, and many of the original records have been lost or destroyed. A recent commission estimated that up to 6,000 children may have died while living in residential schools, and earlier this year a state of emergency was declared in the indigenous community of Attawapiskat after 11 people attempted suicide on the same day; one of the cited reasons for the suicide attempts is the lingering, cross-generational trauma of residential schools.
Downie tells Chanie’s particular version of this story by developing its sense of place. The compositions on Secret Path feel more like haunted environments than songs; it sounds as if Downie, Drew, and the Stills’ Dave Hamelin—all of whom supply most of the instrumentation—are all wandering through these spaces with Chanie. (This quality might’ve been transferred to the recordings by Drew, whose albums with Broken Social Scene have such a strongly defined sense of place that listening to them feels like visiting individual cities.) The instruments, mostly acoustic guitar and piano, are recorded in such a way that they produce atmospheres out of minimal playing. Piano chords drone and occasionally sound as if they’d been reduced to their own echo, wrapping the songs in a kind of musical shadow.
This is the most severe and spartan context that Downie’s sang in since his solo debut, 2001’s Coke Machine Glow, and his words for the most part land in the scenery as haunted, disconnected fragments. Downie, as a lyricist, is traditionally remarkable for his density. Unlike fellow Canadian poet Leonard Cohen, he is not particularly interested in space, and unlike fellow Canadian lyricist Joni Mitchell, his songs aren’t delivered by or assembled around characters. His work is rarely about himself, and in fact seems to flow from a composite perspective, a sensibility that shifts so often that it resists characterization or stability. He takes literature, history, and geography, and compresses them into living, shapeshifting jigsaw puzzles. A lyric from “Christmastime in Toronto,” from his 2003 solo album Battle of the Nudes: “With your dark epiphanies/Your true lines of smoke/Your glistening rails and streetcars all aglow/Always the wind and the persistent snow/Gets into your eyes and your mouth and every fold of your coat.” At least half of that line is from Chekhov, and the other half is a mundane image of winter in Toronto ascending into a realm of magic realism.
On Secret Path, Downie’s words have a sudden respect for space; they never veer from Chanie’s story. In the first song, “The Stranger,” Downie resists projecting onto Chanie, and the lyric produces an ambiguity and anxiety that feels true to the theoretical feelings of a lost 12-year-old: “And what I’m feeling is anyone’s guess/What is in my head?/And what's in my chest?.” But Downie is also capable of reducing the narrative to a single heartbreaking detail, as in the title track, where Chanie seems to wrestle with the definition of the word “windbreaker” as he’s assaulted by wind and frozen rain (“Doesn’t do what they said it’d do/It’s just a jacket”).
Downie’s more direct lyricism may also respond to how Secret Path itself a story of space—of the distance between Chanie and his family, of the yawning space between his footsteps as he walks over a seemingly infinite stretch of train tracks. The image of the train tracks is provided by artist Jeff Lemire, who illustrated a graphic novel around the album; Lemire wordlessly depicts Chanie’s life before and after escaping the residential school in elliptical, repeating images and rhythms: one Chanie and two other students on a swing set, just before they escape the school; one of a raven, which may or may not be Chanie’s hallucination, drifting in and out of the minimal, monochrome landscape, sometimes carrying a pair of articulated eyes in its beak; and one of Chanie’s father, who is a hallucination, and who materializes out of the only soft petals of color in the book. There’s an uncanny loneliness in Lemire’s pictures and in Downie’s words. “I can see my father’s face/Warming his feet by the stove,” Downie sings in “I Will Not Be Struck.” “We used to have each other/Now we only have ourselves.” He’s describing a kind of distance, a kind of space that can’t be filled or healed.
In August of this year, the Tragically Hip played what is potentially their final show, which took place in their hometown of Kingston, Ontario. Downie had been diagnosed a few months earlier with glioblastoma multiforme, a terminal brain tumor characterized by necrotizing tissue forming around aggressive, undifferentiated cells, and which in x-rays appears as a shadow swimming through fluorescent regions of the brain. Downie’s memory was compromised; he remembered his lyrics through teleprompters that were arranged around the stage. In between songs, with 11.7 million Canadians watching the concert through the CBC broadcast and its attendant stream, he started to improvise; Downie identified Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau in the audience, and admonished him to start repairing Canada’s relationship with its indigenous population. “It’s going to take us 100 years to figure out what the hell went on up there,” Downie said. “But it isn’t cool and everybody knows that. It's really, really bad, but we're going to figure it out. You're going to figure it out." Secret Path, it seems, is Downie’s own way of figuring it out. | 2016-10-29T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-10-29T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Arts & Crafts | October 29, 2016 | 8 | d73b11be-86bf-43ae-8ad1-8030cabe0fcf | Ivy Nelson | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ivy-nelson/ | null |
On her brutally honest debut album, the Chicago singer-songwriter takes folk music and bends it to her will, exploring agony and adoration in equal measure. | On her brutally honest debut album, the Chicago singer-songwriter takes folk music and bends it to her will, exploring agony and adoration in equal measure. | Kara Jackson: Why Does the Earth Give Us People to Love? | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/kara-jackson-why-does-the-earth-give-us-people-to-love/ | Why Does the Earth Give Us People to Love?
| Kara Jackson doesn’t just wear her heart on her sleeve, she offers it to you in her palms after cutting it from her chest. In the music video for “no fun/party,” the lead single to her debut record, Why Does the Earth Give Us People To Love?, the 23-year-old Chicago native and former National Youth Poet Laureate straddles a double of herself and pulls the organ from the doppelganger’s body. “Isn’t that just love?” she sings ironically, placing her heart, still slick with blood, delicately on a table of makeshift wires. It’s a striking visual that speaks to Jackson’s commitment to painful vulnerability, her recognition that agony and adoration must stem from the same source.
That love and suffering often go hand in hand is conventional wisdom by now, and one that Jackson herself tackled in her 2019 EP, A Song for Every Chamber of the Heart. On her latest record, the singer-songwriter has both refined her musical capabilities and pushed her existential questions into rockier terrain. Why Does the Earth Give Us People to Love? is an album about love, certainly, but none of its tracks are love songs. The music is neither sweet nor loving; many of the songs are harsh and disorienting, probing and uncomfortable. Where others might posit that it’s better to have loved and lost, Jackson argues that love is loss.
Her storytelling is masterful, filled with earnest lyricism and a knack for arresting imagery. On “no fun/party,” she describes the banality and repetition of finding the one: “It’s hard to have patience when you’re waiting on luck, like a postal truck, like a postal truck…” Jackson also flexes her wide vocal range to drive home the emotions behind her words. “Don’t you bother me,” she warns her ex-lover on the meditative, breakup ballad “Free,” the deep rumbling of her voice adding a menacing edge. On the title track, Jackson pitches her voice high and childlike, almost as though her philosophical questioning—“Why does the earth give us people to love then take them away from our reach?”—soars toward the heavens.
Jackson is a guitarist whose instrument functions not as an appendage to her words, but the very skin that holds her music together. On “no fun/party,” she rarely deviates from a five-note lick which cradles her lyrics and maintains the song’s pensive undertones. These songs introduce lusher arrangements—piano, banjo, xylophone—and a few hometown guests—KAINA, NNAMDÏ, Sen Morimoto—into her repertoire, which let her melodies shift and meander; just when you think you’ve grasped one, it wiggles out of your fist. On the outstanding “Dickhead Blues,” her lackadaisical guitar changes shape when layered with frenetic drums and then disappears altogether, drowned by the layered voices of a choir.
In the title song, Jackson mourns her friend Maya, who died from cancer in 2016. Over the most ominous arrangement on the record, she asks why she was gifted a beautiful friendship if it was only meant to be taken from her. “We’re only waiting our turn, call that living,” she laments. Death is a constant specter in Jackson’s work—“lotta people gonna die,” she bellows on “recognized” and its reprise—but her grief is not only for the loss of life. She is also mourning relationships that died mid-course, or perhaps killed her spirit. She sings of a lover who forced her to be their therapist, of someone who made her feel cheap and used, of an ex who was generally just kind of a dick.
The cost of love comes up repeatedly on Why Does the Earth, and it’s never clear if it’s one Jackson feels is worth paying. “Have you thought about the price of my mouth?” she asks her lover cheekily on “Free.” On “Rat,” Jackson sings of a man who “couldn’t buy compassion cause it’d cost him 40 dollars.” “Price,” “cost,” “bargain,” “pay”; her frustration with transactional relationships is palpable, as is her desire to devote herself to someone without giving away parts of herself. The record captures the dangers of living with an open heart at a time of diminished personal connection, massive overwork, incessant productivity, and constant grief: To prioritize love one must give up something else.
But real love is never free. bell hooks said it best in her landmark 1999 text, All About Love: “To be loving is to be open to grief. To be touched by sorrow, even sorrow that is unending. The way we grieve is informed by whether we know love.” Throughout these 13 songs, Jackson never answers the question she poses in the album’s title. But she does have some breakthroughs. At the end of “Dickhead Blues,” as she finishes recounting her tumultuous love affair, she affirms the value in herself in a way her partner never could. “I am pretty top notch, I’m useful!” Jackson cries, her layered falsetto drifting into the ether. Though much of the loss that accompanies love is outside of our control, there is one thing Jackson’s certain of: She will not lose herself. | 2023-04-17T00:03:00.000-04:00 | 2023-04-17T00:03:00.000-04:00 | Folk/Country | September | April 17, 2023 | 8.2 | d73de7d6-349e-444c-bfc7-4c77327fc99a | Mary Retta | https://pitchfork.com/staff/mary-retta/ | |
Inspired by the great outdoors, the latest album from the Colorado musician and ambient artist is a gently psychedelic ode to all that is wild and wandering. | Inspired by the great outdoors, the latest album from the Colorado musician and ambient artist is a gently psychedelic ode to all that is wild and wandering. | M. Sage: Paradise Crick | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/m-sage-paradise-crick/ | Paradise Crick | The hills of the Front Range cast long shadows over M. Sage’s music. Reared in Fort Collins, Colorado—an unassuming mid-sized city tucked into the northern foothills of the state—Sage grew up riding boats with his family in mountain reservoirs, taking in the sun, the bug bites, the adventure. In his music, trees flicker supernaturally in the morning light, the sky takes on impossible hues of amber and green, and time seems to expand and contract with liquid ease. His ambient work is often preoccupied with a sense of place, but in its many digitally processed effects and minute edits, it ends up feeling like the product of another dimension entirely.
When Sage moved to Chicago in the mid-2010s, he brought that same sense of expanse to his now-retired Patient Sounds label and his own shapeshifting work, which has grown from glacial slabs of environmental tape hiss to glitchy experiments in plunderphonics. Across his releases for Orange Milk, Geographic North, Noumenal Loom, and about a dozen other tentpole labels of the American electronic underground, Sage has quietly flowered, never pausing to engage in self-mythology. Paradise Crick, his latest release (and first for RVNG Intl.), was conceived as a kind of fictional soundtrack for Sage’s Midwestern camping trips. Taking notes from Richard Brautigan’s dissonant hippie-era staple Trout Fishing in America, the album doesn’t so much contrast electronic with acoustic elements as fuse them in often seamless ways—a sonic embodiment of venturing into nature to clear one’s mind before returning home to city life to make sense of it all. Bringing the many shades of Sage’s output together into one unfurling panorama, its psychedelic scenery is an ode to all that is wild and wandering.
Maybe you’ve seen a UFO while staked out on an empty plain in the middle of the night, and maybe it sounded something like the modulating laser-beam synths that materialize in the album’s opening seconds. From the start, Paradise Crick is hardly just pastoral nostalgia: There’s an alien undercurrent to these tracks that consistently leads Sage down strange and unexpected roads. When “Bendin’ In” begins to swell with yawning, earthy guitar chords, his strumming is slowly encased in electronic chimes that shimmer like rock candy. The jazzy piano that sets off “Crick Dynamo” appears at first to pull the track into a chasm of aquatic folktronica, but then everything glitches out, and we’re left with short-circuiting signals echoing into the ether.
Though Sage has recently begun to embrace a more acoustic sound—whether as a member of the Fuubutsushi jazz quartet or collaborating with a cadre of flutists, slide guitarists, and harmonium players on 2021’s The Wind of Things—here he honors the spirit of the outdoors using the most computerized sounds imaginable. “Map to Here” deploys a high-pitched buzzing tone to create a singing bed of crickets, while “Backdrif” is filled with synthetic, skipping keyboard loops that tumble over themselves as smoothly as pebbles being drawn down a riverbed. Even the music’s busiest textures are peaceful.
As amorphous as it sometimes seems, Paradise Crick contains Sage’s most songlike creations yet. Rhythm seems to be of particular interest: In between passages of scattershot electronics that vibrate in all directions, Sage occasionally pulls a full-fledged beat from the churn. On “Mercy Lowlands,” it comes in the form of a hi-hat that weaves its way around a serpentine melody and playfully bouncing synth notes. “Evenin’ Out” brings the beat back in a steady handclap, this time as the bedrock for a whinnying breeze of campfire harmonica. Best of all is “River Turns Woodley (for Frogman),” where Sage plays a soft penny-whistle melody as if gazing out upon a new-agey vista, until his flute leaps into the air, and a reverberating drum stomp carries the song up and away.
Paradise Crick probably doesn’t resemble any campsite you’ve ever stayed at before, but in its artificial glow, it transcends the bucolic clichés so common in music inspired by the outdoors. “I’m always interested in how instrumental music is this form of communication,” Sage said in a 2021 interview. “It’s like, ‘Here’s three and a half minutes of wiggling air. Maybe it’ll tell you a story.’” Since finishing Paradise Crick, he has returned to Colorado to be among the mountains that raised him. Listening to the album, you can hear the upheavals of technology and the gentle permanence of the wider world, and the ways in which each might resemble the other more than we realize. In negotiating these tensions, Sage breathes life into an ecosystem that’s all his own. | 2023-05-31T00:03:00.000-04:00 | 2023-05-31T00:03:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Rvng Intl. | May 31, 2023 | 7.8 | d742d8c9-4723-4ef6-a8e7-1c292d16ed13 | Sam Goldner | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sam-goldner/ | |
Inspired by traditional music and an ancient mystery, French producer Julien Hairon creates buzzing, digitized dance beats that iterate endlessly on themselves. | Inspired by traditional music and an ancient mystery, French producer Julien Hairon creates buzzing, digitized dance beats that iterate endlessly on themselves. | Judgitzu: Sator Arepo | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/judgitzu-sator-arepo/ | Sator Arepo | Producer and ethnomusicologist Julien Hairon has spent the past decade wandering the Eastern Hemisphere, collecting field recordings from indigenous groups. In Cambodia, he witnessed the Kreung community play a polyrhythmic gong piece during a harvest ritual that involves feasting on a sacrificial cow. In Tanzania, he lived among the Maasai, who invited him to record the traditional music of a circumcision ceremony. Hairon releases these recordings via his Les Cartes Postales Sonores label, and reissues other CDs and tapes found during his travels—to Indonesia, Australia, China, Bangladesh—on the PetPets’ Tapes imprint.
But for Sator Arepo, Hairon’s debut as Judgitzu, he found inspiration closer to home. He became intrigued by the Sator Square, a five-word Latin palindrome. Versions of the puzzle, which dates back to ancient Rome, have been found in Europe, Asia, and North Africa. Its exact meaning is unknown, but from the middle ages into the 19th century, such squares were believed to have magical properties. The acrostic—which includes some formation of the Latin words Sator, Arepo, Tenet, Opera, and Rotas—was chiseled into stone to ward off illness, evil, and even raging flames. On Sator Arepo, Hairon reinterprets the circularity of palindromes, crafting digitized, rapid-fire dance beats that circle and distort.
With a modest arsenal—an Elektron Digitakt sampler and sequencer, a Yamaha PSS-50 keyboard, a Critter & Guitari Organelle, and a Microkorg—Hairon recycles song structures and hints back at his own beats and synth sequences. He reconfigures frenetic digital drum patterns and stretches out drones summoned from the Organelle. The basslines cooked up on his Microkorg throb like a jugular vein pumping blood. This self-referential closed loop mimics the limited set of letters contained in a palindrome, seeding each new song with a trace of the previous one. Hairon mutates the sounds slightly with each rotation, but the whole of Sator Arepo plays like a cohesive barrage of rhythms meant to induce trance-like state.
Tactile details make the tracks more distinct, even when they appear to have been erected from similar blueprints. On “Sylphe” and the title track, Hairon seems to coat the drums in lacquer, giving them a plasticky clack. The percussion on “L’Or des Fous” (“Fool’s Gold”) feels both plastic and metallic—like a ping-pong ball ricocheting off pots and pans. Hairon manipulates non-rhythmic elements with the same precision; “L’Or des Fous” is threaded with foghorn-like synth pusles and a gnawing buzz that evokes a giant fluorescent tube. The dark, mechanical “Vitalimetre” is powered by shrill synths that sound like a souped-up dental instrument.
Hairon’s debut is clearly inspired by singeli, the jet-propelled dance music that has been pumping out of Dar es Salaam for over a decade. The producer was, as he put it, “contaminated” by the genre when he lived in the coastal Tanzanian city, and he became transfixed with its breakneck speed, which can reach 300 BPM. Watching Hairon’s footage of the Cambodian Kreung community reveals another structural influence for Sator Arepo: The ceremonial performers play three separate songs simultaneously on five staggered gongs, allowing the tones to overlap and intertwine. Hairon’s take on these influences is icy and harsh, more mechanical than the warm acoustic pieces he heard during his travels. On Sator Arepo, the specter of what’s come before echoes through every song with a chilly sheen that feels inherently foreboding. | 2023-10-25T00:01:00.000-04:00 | 2023-10-25T00:01:00.000-04:00 | Electronic / Experimental | Nyege Nyege Tapes | October 25, 2023 | 7.1 | d7448e4e-f079-4229-95f3-a53ba6e4046c | Madison Bloom | https://pitchfork.com/staff/madison-bloom/ | |
The Virginia crooner and sometime rapper is back with his old name and his new sensibilities—a re-re-introduction that solidifies his love for all things smooth and sappy. | The Virginia crooner and sometime rapper is back with his old name and his new sensibilities—a re-re-introduction that solidifies his love for all things smooth and sappy. | DRAM: What Had Happened Was… | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/dram-what-had-happened-was/ | What Had Happened Was | DRAM has never been afraid to be silly. Whether he’s belting about getting money, finding love, or smoking debilitating amounts of weed, he’s always performing for the cheap seats, his powerful vocal range lampshaded with a goofy exuberance. His guilelessness has mutated slightly across his first two albums. His debut full-length, 2016’s Big Baby D.R.A.M., had more than its fair share of crowd-pleasers, but smoky, intimate outliers like “WiFi” and “Monticello Ave” proved he didn’t always feel the need to swing for crossover hits. By 2021’s Shelley FKA DRAM, the Virginia crooner and sometime rapper had gone through a name change and fully committed himself to adult contemporary R&B and soul. It was the most mature he’d ever sounded on record, but not mature enough to forgo a light dusting of shenanigans, whether cheeky interludes or the occasional groaner (“Let me touch your soul before I touch your skin”). On What Had Happened Was…, DRAM is back with his old name and his new sensibilities, a re-re-introduction that solidifies his love for all things smooth and sappy.
As a singer, DRAM flows between a velvety tenor and a piercing falsetto that recalls Ronald Isley if he mainlined nothing but trap-soul playlists. His vocals simmer and rise on the hooks for “Ride or Die” and “Let Me See Your Phone,” the warble of his upper register selling reassuring coos to one lover and threats of invading another’s privacy with equal charisma. Vibrato has always been a secret weapon in the best DRAM songs, but his application is more nuanced now, letting it seep into the cracks of the music instead of drilling it through the foundation—the purring throughout tracks like “Best That I Got” and “Reflections” is smooth and inviting. He’s a more seasoned vocalist than before who’s eager to flesh out core elements of his technique. The stacked vocal harmonies on “3’s Company” and “Can’t Hold You Down” have the texture of Voodoo-era D’Angelo, and his voice generally has a richer, more confident tone.
What Had Happened Was… aims to refine the formula DRAM first established on Shelley FKA DRAM. Each song is a loose narrative about different stages and forms of love: one-night stands and brushes with the One; break-ups and makeups; affairs behind closed doors and JumboTron-worthy proclamations. He’s been through it all, and he approaches each scenario with playboy confidence and loverboy earnestness. “3’s Company” is a funk ballad in whic DRAM succumbs to his partner’s request for a threesome; it plays out with just enough melodrama to not read like a soap opera (“Even though I’d rather it be you and me/But I don’t really mind because it’s not new to me/It’s just that it reminds me who I used to be”). The laidback silly charm manifests in interludes dotted with Super Saiyan sound effects and Spongebob jokes, and brief lapses into rapping (“Soul to Take,” “Big Baby DRAM”). For all his growth, DRAM is still a kid at heart.
Occasionally, he leans a little too hard into goofball territory (“Wham you out your jammies, wham you out your panties/That’s a double whammy”; “Your baby mama says I taste scrumdiddlyumptious”), but the emotional balance between songs is getting stronger. The fading romance of “Let Me See Your Phone” lands with the same verve as the lothario tales on Big Baby D.R.A.M. The album’s emotional centerpiece is a three-song stretch dedicated to his mother, who passed away in November 2020. “Angry” deals with the immediate harshness of her passing (“What do you mean I can’t see you?”) while “A Mother’s Love” unpacks as many of his feelings as possible before he breaks down into tears on the song’s bridge. The moment is personal and gutting without becoming dour or depressing, more kindling for the fires of DRAM’s performance.
It also helps that the music is as fluid as DRAM’s vocals. A gang of producers, from New Orleans multi-instrumentalist Spiff Sinatra to bassist extraordinaire Alissia Benveniste, work together to match DRAM’s syrupy voice with hefty slices of funk and soul and a little trap&B thrown in for good measure. Benveniste wraps distorted bass and light synths around “3’s Company” to provide the steamy ambience it requires and gives “PPL” a warmly elegant shuffle that plays against the “hurt people hurt people” narrative at its center. On “WHAM,” Sinatra and producer HERO blend 808s kicks and hi-hats with digitized vocals that complement DRAM’s horny-in-the-backseat come-ons. It’s one of several moments where the modern but vintage feel of the music syncs with the mushy but still attractive aspects of DRAM’s songwriting.
Back-half highlight “Reflections” is one of the album’s few instances of self-love. Here, the rigors of fame catch up to DRAM as he fights depression and fatigue (“laying in bed ain’t gon’ pay my rent”) while lamenting the old him, a man not above locking his girlfriend out for questioning whether or not he cheated on her. “Reflections” is emblematic of a struggle between the old DRAM and the new one that takes place across What Had Happened Was…: the happy-go-lucky womanizing rap-singer that Drake bit off in 2016 (and randomly dissed earlier this year) and the modern mellow crooner, unlucky in love but always trying. He’s lived many lives, but the DRAM who emerges from the rubble is the most well-rounded of the bunch, blending love, lust, and wide-eyed charm into a funky cocktail all his own. | 2022-11-16T00:02:00.000-05:00 | 2022-11-16T00:02:00.000-05:00 | Rap | Waver | November 16, 2022 | 7.3 | d7491bf5-f72d-4be6-8bad-9c686a411cee | Dylan Green | https://pitchfork.com/staff/dylan-green/ | |
Tim Cohen's band has taken a melodic and jangly turn on a collection of songs that deals mainly in expressions of love at its most immediate and pleasurable. | Tim Cohen's band has taken a melodic and jangly turn on a collection of songs that deals mainly in expressions of love at its most immediate and pleasurable. | The Fresh & Onlys: Long Slow Dance | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/16992-long-slow-dance/ | Long Slow Dance | Romance in contemporary popular music, as it is in life, is hard to come by. Songs of love and lust are commonplace, but romance? It seems to be a luxury we can no longer afford, which is a shame. Romance might only be artifice, but sometimes it's a necessary artifice, presenting an elusive vision that exists in our hearts and can only be made tangible in art. Even if Long Slow Dance, the fourth full-length album by San Francisco psych-pop group the Fresh & Onlys, were not loaded with excellent songs, it would be worthy of affection because it is so unabashedly imbued with this lost sense of romanticism. The band's principal songwriter, Tim Cohen, is pictured on the back cover as a typical po-faced indie rock dude with the de rigueur bushy beard and scraggly, mussed-up 'do. But on the record, he's a tuxedoed Fred Astaire doing a soft-shoe with Ginger Rogers through a wondrous black-and-white world. Lush and love struck, with a light-as-air melodicism that blesses the songs like sprinkles of pixie dust, Long Slow Dance dares to revel in that magical moment between a first kiss and the walk back to the car, and stretch it out to the length of a lifetime memory.
The Fresh & Onlys pointed in this direction on 2010's great Play It Strange, which was kicked off by the band's two best-ever songs, "Summer of Love" and "Waterfall". With its Beach Boys harmonies, gently rolling surf guitar, and Cohen's dreamy, reverb-heavy vocal, "Summer of Love" suggested a mood of escape that the more propulsive "Waterfall" explicitly spelled out in the lyrics. Frequently classified as revivalists, the Fresh & Onlys were actually evolving into sensualists, and that process comes to a head on Long Slow Dance, which deals mainly in expressions of love at its most immediate and pleasurable.
Cohen is never more charming on Long Slow Dance than he is on the title track, a jangly strummer that supplements the Fresh & Onlys' usual 1960s rock touchstones with nods to the Cure and the Church. "You supply the innocent mind/ And I'll bring the guilty heart/ And borne together, we'll make the perfect romance," Cohen sings, his flat baritone cracking just enough to indicate a thawing of his previously cool façade. It's not clear whether the person he's singing to truly exists, nor does it matter; what's important is that Cohen's yearning is relatable even as the evocative music elevates it to poetic heights. Unlike many similar-minded groups that merely allude to prior examples of classic songwriting rather than carry on the tradition, "Long Slow Dance" is a genuinely fantastic example of the form, with Cohen following through a list of "you're wonderful and I'm scum" metaphors as the impossibly comely music conjures a quick tango underneath a starry sky.
The rest of Long Slow Dance nearly matches that high level of swoony wonder. "Dream Girls" is a twangy lament in the vein of Chris Isaak, and "Presence of Mind" sounds custom-made for movie montages, with its giddy marimba flourishes and squiggly dream-sequence guitar riff from Wymond Miles. (It also carries the album's nut graph: "Here lies a man with stars in his eyes/ What does he care if the future is bright?/ The future is bright, after tonight.")
Easily the slickest album the Fresh & Onlys have made yet, Long Slow Dance subtly expands the band's sonic palette without overwhelming the band's appealing simplicity. The sweeping "20 Days and 20 Nights" takes a melancholic turn via a wistful piano solo, while the moody folk-pop tune "Executioner's Song" culminates with a surprisingly expressive horn section. The sinister lo-fi side of the group's personality displayed on its 7"s and 2009's spooky Grey-Eyed Girls has been sublimated. For now, Cohen is playing up the poppiest aspects of his band's sound, occupying the space once owned by the Shins on Oh, Inverted World and Chutes Too Narrow. With Long Slow Dance, he's made a record for blissfully happy nights. | 2012-09-05T02:00:02.000-04:00 | 2012-09-05T02:00:02.000-04:00 | Rock | Mexican Summer | September 5, 2012 | 7.6 | d74f3cd6-e358-42f3-8acb-ac3872470476 | Steven Hyden | https://pitchfork.com/staff/steven-hyden/ | null |
On their third album, Brooklyn’s Landlady perfect their quizzical prog-pop. The album is best when it's most vexing, while frontman Adam Schatz explores basic human sensation with a Cheshire Cat wit. | On their third album, Brooklyn’s Landlady perfect their quizzical prog-pop. The album is best when it's most vexing, while frontman Adam Schatz explores basic human sensation with a Cheshire Cat wit. | Landlady: The World Is a Loud Place | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22832-the-world-is-a-loud-place/ | The World Is a Loud Place | Certain political travesties of the last few months have promoted a hands-over-ears response from even the most optimistic citizens, with logic drowned out by alternative facts and social media bloviations. Suddenly it feels much more difficult just to be in the world, which is the animating idea behind the third album by the Brooklyn collective Landlady. The World Is a Loud Place is one of those works of art that was made in one era but released in another, darker one. It’s an album that perhaps wasn’t intended to be political, but in 2017 it’s inescapably politicized. Frontman and chief songwriter Adam Schatz isn’t trying to topple regimes or even speak truth to errant power; rather, he’s just trying to evoke the sensation of being in a human body at this point in time.
“Feel your heart beat once, there it goes again,” Schatz sings on “Electric Abdomen,” the album’s opener, as though the continuity of consciousness was a surprise. The song itself spools out in zig zags, changing direction and tempo abruptly and without warning. From their previous record to this one, the band have mastered a kind of lenticular prog-pop, defined by busybody arrangements and winding structures that form a fitting musical approximation of that .gif album cover: always in motion, always jumping from one idea to the next. “Rest in Place” snakes around into a big brass fanfare, although it fades out before you can discern the motive: Is it triumphant or cautionary? Do those horns constitute a happy ending or is the killer still alive, ready to pounce at us once more?
Schatz presides over these songs with a mischievous glint in his eye—half wiseacre Virgil leading us through a new American hellscape, part grinning Cheshire Cat sitting in inscrutable judgment. His lyrics recall the fragmented domestic scenery of recent Wilco tunes: trapped in first person, always trying to make sense of another person. “Teach me how you’re organized,” he sings on “Cadaver,” and it sounds like the most existential pick-up line imaginable. “Just be happy with the guts that we’ve got” is his warped version of a kitten-poster platitude. It’s a harsh world, but certainly not unpleasant to visit, thanks to Schatz’s gnomic charisma.
Has anyone ever enunciated the word “California” with as much loopy precision as he does on “Driving in California”? Schatz savors every consonant and vowel, then tosses the word out the car window with a distracted “-yeah.” The song is almost purposefully annoying, like a parody of tour songs or Golden State paeans: “Driving in Californ-yeah makes me forget everywhere that’s not Californ-yeah.” Then Schatz moves eastward, first to Colorado and then to Niagara, picking up in cleverness along the way. It’s the only track on The World Is a Loud Place where Schatz’s lyrics are superficially sensical, where the lyrical conceit is too unwieldy for him and the agile band to handle.
The album is best when it’s most vexing, when its puzzle-piece arrangements demand you put everything together. Part of the fun is following the circuitous routes these compositions take and hearing the oddball flourishes Landlady insert into the arrangements. Landlady craft a cacophony, but Schatz won’t put his hands over his ears: There’s some beauty in the noise that’s worth going deaf to hear. | 2017-01-31T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2017-01-31T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Hometapes / Landladyland | January 31, 2017 | 7.6 | d75040e7-62e1-4a72-a6e5-57a631f469da | Stephen M. Deusner | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stephen-m. deusner/ | null |
The London-based singer-songwriter takes a leap forward with a nuanced and meticulous set of electro-pop. | The London-based singer-songwriter takes a leap forward with a nuanced and meticulous set of electro-pop. | otta: Songbook EP | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/otta-songbook-ep/ | Songbook EP | Seven years ago, the London-based Anna Ottridge could be found on YouTube performing acoustic versions of Amy Winehouse and English folk trio Daughter. Her voice—agile and slightly smoky—was already refined, but the music was not her own, and the coffeehouse-cover-singer archetype was well-worn. In the years since, Ottridge has developed her own distinctive songcraft. These days, Anna Ottridge is otta, and her new EP Songbook (released on producer Kwes’ BOKKLE imprint) is a promising collection of meticulous electro-pop tempered by her dusky vocals. Songbook is Ottridge’s second release under her new moniker, following her 2020 debut EP after it all blew over, and it stands apart from her prior work; across eight tracks, she details her bedroom-pop compositions with a lush palette of synthesizers, saxophone, organ, and midi strings, bringing her closer to an avant pop group like Field Music than the cafe singer-songwriter she used to be.
Songbook is bookended by its two strongest tracks: “never see” and “just like the rain,” which are also the EP’s most uptempo and danceable moments. The former maximizes three main elements: canned percussion, a crawling bassline, and otta’s layered vocals, stacked like a sheaf of crisp paper. “never see” is a promise that there is someone out there who is made to love you—who “wants to know the smell of your soap.” But the song is as much of a warning as it is a pledge: you might be standing in your own way of that love. When a tangle of grim synthesizers swarm the song’s final moments, it’s difficult to tell if the story ends in love or loss—a marker of otta’s nuanced approach.
“just like the rain” is similarly bittersweet, bobbing between a disco beat and thumping bass as otta turns phrases that sound wiser than her 23 years. “Nothing can keep you from yourself if you don’t let yourself out,” she sings, before the song is washed away in a synthesized downpour, groaning saxophone, and swipes of piano. otta’s manipulation of her vocal tracks is particularly interesting here—she braids them into strange, eerie howls. It’s a welcome subversion of her otherwise-sweet melodies.
otta’s skills as a producer (and engineer and mixer) are evident throughout Songbook, and they set her apart from countless young artists coming up in the South London scene. Musical interlude “suihku” is particularly compelling—a slaw of vocal samples and synthesizer fragments chopped at a frantic pace. There are hints of anxious electronica buried throughout the EP, but “suihku” reveals them in their bare and bracing form.
If Songbook has one major flaw, it’s the late-album ballad “no more tears.” Here, otta’s vocals are glossed over with AutoTune, compressing her unique and vulnerable voice and making it sound like everybody else’s. The song falls prey to a recent trend that seemingly requires fledgling artists to use Vocoder on a minimum of one song per album (see: Porridge Radio’s “(Something),” Becky and the Birds’ “Do U Miss Me,” and ALASKALASKA’s “Arrows,” to start). It’s as if otta is ticking a box labeled “Contemporary Music Trend,” an understandable urge for a young artist, but unnecessary for someone with such a developed style. Anna Ottridge may still be finding her voice as otta, but Songbook makes an exciting case for the search itself.
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2020-08-06T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-08-06T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Experimental | PIAS / BOKKLE | August 6, 2020 | 6.9 | d7578645-25b5-4ddb-8c20-479ebd01a708 | Madison Bloom | https://pitchfork.com/staff/madison-bloom/ | |
A decade after his wildly successful rework of the Baroque giant’s ubiquitous string concerti, the London composer revisits the material yet again, but the differences can be hard to pick out. | A decade after his wildly successful rework of the Baroque giant’s ubiquitous string concerti, the London composer revisits the material yet again, but the differences can be hard to pick out. | Max Richter: The New Four Seasons - Vivaldi Recomposed | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/max-richter-the-new-four-seasons-vivaldi-recomposed/ | The New Four Seasons - Vivaldi Recomposed | Nearly two hundred years after the death of Antonio Vivaldi in 1741, he was a name known only to scholars of Bach and the Baroque, a ghost who haunted Western music from a small cemetery outside the city walls of Vienna. But the Italian composer’s resurrection in the years before World War II was dramatic. In the 1930s, Vivaldi’s greatest cheerleader, Ezra Pound, helped usher him into the canon through a series of performances in Rapallo, on the Italian Riviera. By the 1950s, students all over the globe were beginning to learn the Venetian’s compositions, but four violin concerti, rightly or wrongly, stand above the rest.
The Four Seasons is among the most famous pieces of music in the history of Western culture, beloved and derided in equal measure—like any omnipresent work of pop. As Alex Ross argued in The New Yorker, we now think of Vivaldi as “the Muzak of the middle classes, the backbeat of the bourgeois bustle.” This reputation mostly stems from The Four Seasons, which is ubiquitous beyond belief: The opening notes of “Spring” float above wedding processions, year after year; the swells of “Summer” and the tumult of “Winter” have been perennial favorites of ad breaks and movie soundtracks for nearly a century. Diddy apparently has called “Spring” his theme music.
The Four Seasons has been recorded hundreds if not thousands of times, and a 2012 “recomposition” by Max Richter is among the most widespread. His “Spring 1” is frequently synced on television: It has appeared as a wonderfully deployed leitmotif in the HBO adaptation of Elena Ferrante’s My Brilliant Friend; soundtracking the horny, Regency-era melodramas of Bridgerton; and loop-de-looping around shots of avant-garde meals in Chef’s Table. Richter’s version of The Four Seasons bears the mark of much of the London composer’s work, which brings certain postmodern values to the canon. Framing his project as a “conversation” with Vivaldi rather than another re-recording, he threw out three quarters of the original material, kept what he liked best, rewrote the score, and used looping techniques to make these staid sounds seem unfamiliar and new again.
“We hear [The Four Seasons] everywhere—when you’re on hold, you hear it in the shopping center, in advertising; it’s everywhere,” Richter told NPR. “For me, the record and the project are trying to reclaim the piece, to fall in love with it again.” A decade later, he has returned to The Four Seasons with the hopes of making it anew one more time. Working with the violinist Elena Urioste and the musicians of Chineke! Orchestra, Richter’s The New Four Seasons uses period instruments, gut strings, and vintage analog synthesizers to achieve what he hopes is a “grittier, more punk rock sound.”
Rather than grittier, though, the surface of The New Four Seasons seems even shinier, encasing each movement in chrome and stardust: The opening seconds of “Spring 0” are melodramatic, the celestial synths seemingly designed to give the song a second life as material for PBS documentaries on the cosmos. The creepy artificial glow of “Autumn 2” might be meant to evoke a mix of dread and longing in an indie drama. The frothy rush of “Summer 3” will surely be used in a luxury electric car commercial someday soon. Yet discerning the differences between the decade-old version and this new one is tricky: Neither rougher in texture nor wildly different in its structure, The New Four Seasons sounds a lot like the old one.
If Richter’s 2012 recomposition was about bringing the past into the present, there is a sense that on The New Four Seasons Richter is applying a software update, one that hums in the background, adding features you are told are essential, but that otherwise are frictionless and out of sight. The 2012 recomposition reimagined what was once familiar, but without going back to the drawing board, The New Four Seasons merely returns to the familiar. Worse, it risks becoming forgettable.
Still, there are moments when Richter delivers on his goal of transforming what might once have registered as “smooth, pleasant, and slightly nauseating,” as Alex Ross wrote of the classic concertos broadcast on American drive-time classical radio, into objects of the future, flexible and fluid enough to be whatever we want them to be in whatever moments they are needed.
This is truest of his “Spring 1,” which carries with it shape-shifting powers, capable of evoking joy and pain in equal measure. Heard side by side, his decade-old recording and the new one carry minor but perceptible differences; the newer version is more action-oriented, faster paced and less serene. Here, we see the grittier Vivaldi Richter hoped to discover, reminding us of the earth and soil, wind and rain, the very weather The Four Seasons was meant to mimic and honor. | 2022-06-16T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2022-06-16T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Experimental | Deutsche Grammophon | June 16, 2022 | 6.8 | d7646ba4-ce7c-45f1-9959-e316bcf532ce | Kevin Lozano | https://pitchfork.com/staff/kevin-lozano/ | |
__NOTE: Record and track reviews return next week. In the meantime, t____his space highlights our most recent Best New Music selections. Enjoy!
__ | __NOTE: Record and track reviews return next week. In the meantime, t____his space highlights our most recent Best New Music selections. Enjoy!
__ | YACHT: See Mystery Lights | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/13334-see-mystery-lights/ | See Mystery Lights | Jona Bechtolt-- founding member of YACHT, former member of the Blow-- is a huge talent, something that may not have been readily apparent on any of his three previous LPs. Those albums, created largely as solo endeavors, will not have prepared listeners for See Mystery Lights. Now an official partnership between Bechtolt and Claire L. Evans, who performed on several songs on 2007's I Believe In You, Your Magic Is Real, YACHT finally feel like a full-fledged band with direction and vision, particularly given the added weight (or rather, levity) of Evans' influence.
The songs on See Mystery Lights-- from the bouncy, burbling you-can't-take-it-with-you screed "The Afterlife" (which plays like a less spastic companion piece to the Mae Shi's "Run to Your Grave") to the roller rink-ready vocoder vocals of "I'm In Love With a Ripper"-- represent YACHT at their most poppy. It's a collection of stone jams that finds the band finally as hellbent on experimenting and expanding the boundaries of its sonic scope as it is on having fun. Built on electronic foundations-- laser effects, skittering computerized beats, and spacey synth lines (or guitar riffs that have been tuned or distorted to sound like synths)-- these new songs are giddy with creative freedom while remaining tethered in service of their melodies. The vocal melodies are bright and buoyant, but delivered (by either band member, or in unison) in a chanted, oftentimes detached monotone that plays up the repetitive lyrics' mantra-like feel and adds a welcome undercurrent of slacker cool to their otherwise sugary optimism.
See Mystery Lights also marks the first time that YACHT are recording for DFA. Normally a label-change wouldn't be notable, as it is usually less an indicator of artistic choices than it is of financial or business ones, but moving to a label with such a distinctive aesthetic may be enough for many to reconsider their work. YACHT themselves created the track "Summer Song" as an homage to LCD Soundsystem, and LCD/DFA leader James Murphy liked it enough to release it on his label. It's no wonder that Murphy was smitten; the track, which also appears on the full-length, echoes the deadpan vocal delivery and burbling 80s krautrock synths of his own band, as well as cowbell-and-handclap percussion ripped from the Rapture's "House of Jealous Lovers", one of DFA's biggest singles. Even other tracks on the collection-- ones that weren't written specifically in homage to Murphy-- can't help but sound influenced by him. Case in point: "We Have All We've Ever Wanted", with its minimalist dance beat, heavy bass, and Bechtolt's dry, talky delivery, recalls "Losing My Edge", albeit with a lighthearted, anthemic chorus.
Still, while YACHT clearly share influences with Murphy's gang (Eno, Ferry, Neu!, ESG, etc.), their positive, futuristic jams actually sound most closely related to Tom Tom Club. Perhaps that's because, like Tom Tom Club's first self-titled album, which was recorded in Barbados, See Mystery Lights was recorded in a sunny, faraway locale-- in this case, far from the band's native rainy Portland, Oregon, in Marfa, Texas. The vibe of the album is relaxed and sun-soaked-- especially "Psychic City (Voodoo City)", which features an elastic groove built on a dubby, reggae-ish keyboard melody inspired by the bassline of Althea and Donna's "Uptown Top Ranking".
Regardless of influence or intent, however, See Mystery Lights is a triumph. It's a feel-good album for an era that could use a little happiness, a sweaty collection of heady, hedonistic tunes just in time for the hottest days of the year. And the best part is that one spin of this wily, sunny disc will be able to transport you back to summer vacation any day of the year. | 2009-08-05T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2009-08-05T02:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | DFA | August 5, 2009 | 8.5 | d7658d8c-003a-4581-a144-ea2affe1240f | Pitchfork | null |
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Each Sunday, Pitchfork takes an in-depth look at a significant album from the past, and any record not in our archives is eligible. Today, we revisit the singular comedic thrill of the Los Angeles rap group’s debut. | Each Sunday, Pitchfork takes an in-depth look at a significant album from the past, and any record not in our archives is eligible. Today, we revisit the singular comedic thrill of the Los Angeles rap group’s debut. | The Pharcyde: Bizarre Ride II the Pharcyde | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/the-pharcyde-bizarre-ride-ii-the-pharcyde/ | Bizarre Ride II the Pharcyde | In 1992, legendary stand-up comic Richard Pryor began work on new material in preparation for a tour. Appearing drawn and frail from multiple sclerosis and years of unruly living, Pryor performed sets at Los Angeles’ Comedy Store while sitting in an easy chair. He sometimes relied on the arm of his assistant to guide him to his place under the lights on stage.
Like the first heart attack in ’77 or the horrifying freebasing incident in ’80, the trials of his disease became part of the routine, and he joked freely about his body turning on him. How his 51-year-old dick no longer worked how he wanted. How it wasn’t unusual now, to piss himself. The personal moments of weakness and shame became a source of laughter among strangers at the small venue on the Sunset Strip.
Nearby, in a graffitied house near the USC campus of South Central L.A., the original members of the Pharcyde absorbed the eye-popping honesty and absurdity of the ribald albums Pryor cut in the ’70s. Holed up at the digs they dubbed the Pharcyde Manor, they worked on their debut album Bizarre Ride II the Pharcyde over the better part of 1992, elaborating on a demo made up of three gems: “Passin’ Me By,” “Officer,” and “Ya Mama.” Pryor’s language, gathered from bits like “White and Black People” and “Black Funerals,” showed up in their lyrics and in the production, sampled from vinyl. He was their spiritual kin.
Bizarre Ride II the Pharcyde remains one of the most boisterous and creative acts of adolescent knuckleheadedness and confession in hip-hop history. The album, released in November of 1992, is as much the product of the Black comedic tradition as it is a continuation of the sample-drunk playfulness of De La Soul’s 3 Feet High and Rising, Beastie Boys’ Paul’s Boutique, or the Digital Underground’s Sex Packets. It borrows from the past, delights in the present, and anticipates the future. One song (“Ya Mama”) consists entirely of the Dozens, a dissing game that leaves no mother spared and no friend free from embarrassment. It’s an album of outrageousness, the kind that brings tears squeezing through the creases around your eyes because your friend just said the smartest stupid shit you’ve ever heard. And instead of the moment dissipating like weed smoke, it’s laid down permanently on wax.
“I suppose the first thing I was allowed to laugh at without fear of repercussion was myself,” the L.A.-born novelist and poet Paul Beatty wrote in the introduction to Hokum: An Anthology of African-American Humor. Pryor recounts a similar realization in his autobiography, Pryor Convictions: “I sat on a railing of bricks and found that when I fell off on purpose everyone laughed.” A dog walked through the yard to defecate and Pryor improvised: “I got up, ran to my grandmother, and slipped in the dog poop. It made Mama and the rest laugh again. Shit, I was really onto something then. So I did it a second time….That was my first joke. All in shit.”
Running counter to the steely-eyed displays of power on Ice-T and N.W.A. records, Bizarre Ride is full of self-deprecation and ego deflation; the group is almost aggressive in their willingness to talk about masturbation and STDs (“If Magic can admit he got AIDS, fuck it: I got herpes”), about the molecular-level hurt of heartbreak, about generally coming off as weirdo punks. Like Pryor, they’d found that “human untidiness” (to use Hilton Als’ apt description) was good fodder, especially when you didn’t take the dripping, nasty stuff very seriously.
Before getting into rapping full time, most of the MCs in the Pharcyde entered the revolving door of show business through dance, and none could be accused of taking shit too seriously. Trevant “Slimkid3” Hardson linked with Emandu “Imani” Wilcox at Torrance’s El Camino College in the late 1980s—Tre an Elco student, and Imani still a high school senior. Both made their living as dancers, frequenting local clubs, chasing after young ladies, and scoping other crews. They had some interest in making music, but in a lackadaisical, adolescent fashion; they needed guidance.
A local after-school music program for aspiring musicians and entertainers called the South Central Unit (SCU) would provide a new structure and setting for their ambition. Juan Manuel Martinez, a teenage R&B producer known as J-Swift, introduced them to SCU, which occupied three bungalows in Inglewood and housed a mirrored room for dance rehearsals, a recording studio, and various musical equipment. Bankrolled by Reggie Andrews, who had produced and co-written smashes like the Dazz Band’s “Let It Whip,” SCU became the Pharcyde’s home base and incubator. (Thundercat, Kamasi Washington, and Terrace Martin also studied at SCU.)
Soon, Romye “Bootie Brown” Robinson, from Pasadena, and Derrick “Fatlip” Stewart, from Fairfax, rounded out the crew. Most of the guys still danced in music videos and at competitions to make money, but with Andrews and J-Swift in the picture, music became the mission. J-Swift would produce (using samples culled from Andrews’ massive record collection); Tre, Imani, Romye, and Fatlip would rap; and Andrews would help navigate the industry side. (Andrews was soon replaced by a younger guy, Paul Stewart, who had managed House of Pain and was more familiar with the rap game.)
“We danced for Tone Loc,” Romye told journalist Andrew Barker in his 33 1/3 book on Bizarre Ride. “You know how rappers used to have all these niggas boogying in the background? We were the niggas in the background, boogying.” The dance circuit, with all its auditions, was a grind, even if it did earn them a couple appearances as “Fly Guys” on In Living Color. By the time the crew was ready for record label auditions, they’d started to feel the burnout. “I feel like we performed for every record label that meant anything,” Tre recalled to Barker. “We got fed up.”
Maxed out on performing for industry suits, the group put together a different routine for one memorable audition. They bought one-piece mechanic’s coveralls and wore them without anything underneath. “And on our asses we wrote the name of our band, right down to the last ass,” Tre told Barker—one letter per cheek. When the performance was over, they doffed the coveralls and literally showed their asses. Then they walked out.
The accounts differ, but at some point in the late ’60s, Richard Pryor reached a breaking point onstage at a Las Vegas club. He couldn’t do the whitewashed, punchline-dependent comedy he’d been told was the only way he would make it, and he abruptly quit at the start of his set. As he recalled in his autobiography, “I asked myself, ‘Who’re they looking at, Rich?’... And in that flash of introspection when I was unable to find an answer, I crashed… I turned and walked off the stage.” After that, he started being Richard Pryor.
He released albums with titles like That Nigger’s Crazy and Craps (After Hours). The cover of the latter depicted Pryor among an intergenerational group of Black people, throwing dice on a felt table under cheap yellow light, in casual defiance of the “No Gambling” sign hanging in the background. It’s the kind of grubby and fertile nightlife scene he knew from his childhood in Peoria, Illinois, where he was raised by his grandmother among the network of whorehouses she ran. This is the material the Pharcyde used for inspiration when recording their debut.
The first voice heard on Bizarre Ride II the Pharcyde is Pryor’s. Sampled from a bit about Sugar Ray Robinson on Craps, he delivers the project’s mission statement: “Oh shit!” After J-Swift’s brief instrumental intro fades out, Pryor’s exclamation cuts into the dead air. Then the drums come in as the group incredulously repeats the phrase after him, introducing their premier posse cut, “Oh Shit.” Tre jumps in first, beginning his verse by flipping the “Little Sally Walker” nursery rhyme into something dirty, fitting only for the back of the school bus or the loudest table in the lunchroom.
Tre’s voice undulates with melodic possibility—he’s on the verge of becoming a singer, if only he’d let a little more vibrato in. (His bittersweet solo cut “Otha Fish” is a perfect song in part because he finally does.) His verse reaches its punchline when, while seemingly alone with a "brown-eyed bombshell," he’s instead caught having sex by his entire school; J-Swift embellishes the moment with another wry Pryor bit: “He came and went at the same time.”
Sampling aside, J-Swift’s musicality is one of the most impressive parts of his production. His beats are never simple loops, but almost always complex productions that evolve over the course of the song. Bouncing in like a rubber ball, Imani joyfully squeaks through a verse about sleeping with his friend Greg’s mom, who is eager but also sort of frightening, undercutting the alleged bravado of the act a bit. (Of course, Greg catches them, doggy-style, on the living room couch: “Oh shit!”) Then, after Imani’s verse, a darker piano bit enters the mix to set up Fatlip.
Another Pryor sample appears—“son of a bitch”—and Fatlip describes one summer evening on Crenshaw Boulevard with a trans woman. It’s not difficult to imagine the verse devolving into something violent in the hands of a different artist; Fatlip, on the other hand, feels tricked but laughs at his situation. The verse isn’t exactly sensitive—it clumsily distorts transphobia into a punchline—but its ignorance acknowledges his own insecurity. Each verse of “Oh Shit” gestures to the anxiety underneath macho posturing about sex. (Coincidentally, their muse also once spun a bit about guys too afraid to ask if their partners had come.)
That soft underbelly is exposed fully on “Passin’ Me By,” the group’s highest-charting single and that rare sort of song that can reasonably take credit for entire careers. (Where would the puppy-dog wistfulness of early Drake have come from if “Passin’ Me By” hadn’t existed?) A miraculous simp anthem, “Passin’ Me By” tells four tales of unrequited love that leaves everyone with their dignity intact. J-Swift’s beat is a marvel of wonky craftsmanship, combining several different samples into a creaky framework for the guys to empty the lowest moments of their young lives into. They share their wisdom too: “I guess a twinkle in her eye is just a twinkle in her eye”—cold comfort to live by.
“Passin’ Me By” isn’t the first rap song about wanting love, but it refuses the smooth bravado of LL Cool J or the ridiculousness of Biz Markie. The guys sound sincerely wounded by unrequited desire. It’s the sort of tenderness that was not very hip-hop—or, as Fatlip used to say during the recording of the album: “This shit ain’t bangin’ in the hood.”
On their Bizarre Ride, the members of the Pharcyde gleefully run around a cartoonish version of Southern California with pins, popping norms like balloons. Traditional masculinity, being hard, being a player: pop, pop, pop. At a time when Los Angeles hip-hop was typified by gangsta rap as heard on Straight Outta Compton and The Chronic, Bizarre Ride is fearlessly quotidian and relatively low-stakes. Even “Officer,” their irreverent homage to Public Enemy’s “Black Steel in the Hour of Chaos,” turns the real peril of operating a motor vehicle as a Black male into a comic escapade.
Though the album is not without its tensions. Immediately after “Oh Shit,” the first skit, “It’s Jigaboo Time,” begins. It’s a queasy number that lists the acts that would earn an artist the titular epithet and was surely inspired by the group’s experience on the dance-and-rap audition track. “You’re rapping for the white man,” Fatlip spits out. At one point, the guys discussed naming themselves the Jigaboos instead of the Pharcyde. “We just felt like no matter what, when you’re up there on stage you’re definitely being exploited, and you’re definitely lining someone else’s pockets,” Imani told Brian Coleman in his book Check the Technique. Musically, the skit shakes itself to pieces, with brutal piano stabs and cymbal crashes before the final line: “But we’re all jigaboos in our way,” delivered sweetly, like a deranged kindergarten teacher. “So might as well just get paid.” Then it’s back to the show.
Simply put, every track plays its part; the skits just as necessary as the songs. If De La Soul’s Prince Paul admired the heart-rendering audio journey that concludes Stevie Wonder’s “Living for the City” for its virtuosity and verisimilitude, the skits on Bizarre Ride succeed because they are absolutely what they appear to be: the pure shenanigans of friends fucking around. Recorded during an hours-long jam session arranged by J-Swift and edited into digestible interludes after the fact, the skits find the guys rethinking the U.S. presidency and improvising a blunted Tin Pan Alley ditty about the impending arrival of their beloved weed dealer, Quinton. It’s “Happy Days Are Here Again” for indica enthusiasts, wedged tightly into the sofa cushions.
For an album with so many jokes, it may come as a surprise to learn that in the first days of recording Tre stood in the booth at Hollywood Sound and cried. Suddenly overcome by the enormity of creating an album—“This is gonna exist forever,” he thought—Tre broke down. Granted, he was very high, but still, there’s something important to acknowledge here. Being funny is hard work that can be too easily dismissed, especially in hip-hop. Maybe it’s because the genre has fought for artistic credibility for so long, maybe it’s because of rock-critic values, but “serious” work tends to get the accolades. Bizarre Ride II the Pharcyde is the exception that proves the rule.
The early work of Kanye West, so willing to make the corny joke or memorialize a mundane experience like wanting to fight the manager at your lousy job, bears Bizarre Ride’s influence (Kanye once named it his favorite album). What is J. Cole’s “Wet Dreamz” if not a Pharcyde song with less slapstick? Is it not possible to draw a direct line from Fatlip’s deranged prank-call verse on “4 Better or 4 Worse” to Eminem’s murderous fantasies to the first releases from Odd Future?
After the album’s release, the group spoke with The Source. “Your album didn’t really have a message, right?” the interviewer began. “There’s lots of hidden, secret messages. You can’t hear them?” Romye replied. It was easy to mistake their jokes for a lack of substance. But on Bizarre Ride, humor was a way of processing anxiety and pain; a tool to show self-deprecation isn’t always the inverse of self-aggrandizement. Like their hero Pryor, it was a way to make themselves the larger-than-life center of attention, to give their struggles and fears their due.
Get the Sunday Review in your inbox every weekend. Sign up for the Sunday Review newsletter here. | 2020-12-06T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2020-12-06T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rap | Delicious Vinyl | December 6, 2020 | 9.3 | d76e7dc9-e8ed-4bee-94d3-4497f44f7a3f | Ross Scarano | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ross-scarano/ | |
An avant-garde cellist and a great turntablist collaborate on a 36-minute, fully improvised set that blurs the line between her strings and his samples. | An avant-garde cellist and a great turntablist collaborate on a 36-minute, fully improvised set that blurs the line between her strings and his samples. | Okkyung Lee / Christian Marclay: Amalgam | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22465-amalgam/ | Amalgam | Christian Marclay was one of turntablism’s earliest pioneers. Throughout the 1980s, the multimedia artist plundered the discographies of others: scratching and refracting one Hendrix jam into a fresh psychedelic swirl, or layering several pieces by Chopin or Louis Armstrong into new soundscapes. Less indebted to hip-hop sonics than to the genre-blending aesthetics of John Zorn, Marclay eventually began to collaborate with a range of players that included Thurston Moore and Ikue Mori.
Since his 24-hour installation film The Clock became a smash hit in contemporary art circles, Marclay has noticeably scaled back his turntablist practice. In recent years, he’s collaborated more with musicians through the interface of his collage-style “graphic scores.” But he still occasionally busts out his cartons of vinyl, as he did with the cellist Okkyung Lee for a 2014 performance at London’s Cafe Oto. Now released under the title Amalgam, the concert is easily one of Marclay’s most invigorating performances as a turntablist this century—and leagues more interesting than a pair of gigs released on limited-edition vinyl in conjunction with a 2015 gallery show in London.
A good deal of Amalgam’s success has to do with Marclay’s duet partner, Okkyung Lee. The cellist has demonstrated her avant-improv bona fides on her collaboration with piano great Cecil Taylor. And her own compositions display Lee’s skills with lyricism and melody, in between passages of crunch and noise. Appropriately, she has as many ideas for coaxing sounds from the cello as Marclay has strategies for abusing vinyl. This mutual acuity gives solid shape to their 36-minute, fully improvised performance.
After Marclay opens with samples that employ shifts in playback speed, Lee’s cello can be heard quietly, insistently repeating a short jagged phrase—a cellist’s imitation of a turntable scratch. Lee’s development of this brief figure gradually incorporates longer-held tones and broader fingerboard swoops, both of which help a listener identify her cello as the source of these particular sounds. By then, Marclay has begun splicing together noisier shards.
Not long after these discrete positions have been staked out by the two players, they pivot to blend their approaches. Occasionally, a figure that could have been produced by the live string player is revealed to be a Marclay sample, plucked from some string-laden LP. Metallic scrapings or atmospheric trails of sound production can seem like fodder from a vintage recording—until an expressive, violent burst in the line shows that this has all come from Lee’s cello.
This back and forth journey, between easy recognition of the different players and more ambiguous duo textures, creates much of the performance’s excitement at a minute-by-minute level. The larger structure follows a loose, three-movement style, with a quieter middle section that takes over in the fourteenth minute. Unlike many of Marclay’s past duo recordings with other artists, this session with Lee doesn’t include many recognizable samples. (You don’t even get any Anthony Braxton breaks that have cropped up in the turntablist’s collaborations with Elliott Sharp or Günter Müller.) But after this inspired performance, what lingers is the dazzling newness that Lee and Marclay create by exploring the outer fringes of timbre. | 2016-11-14T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2016-11-14T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Electronic / Jazz / Experimental / Rock | Northern Spy | November 14, 2016 | 8 | d77f4016-e6c1-4423-8522-198ae4ecd4eb | Seth Colter Walls | https://pitchfork.com/staff/seth-colter walls/ | null |
Ayman Rostom’s debut album under his house music alias covers a surprisingly large amount of ground with lumbering grooves, off-kilter rhythms, and impish sample play. | Ayman Rostom’s debut album under his house music alias covers a surprisingly large amount of ground with lumbering grooves, off-kilter rhythms, and impish sample play. | The Maghreban: 01DEAS | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/the-maghreban-01deas/ | 01DEAS | In 2006, the British producer Ayman Rostom put out an album under his hip-hop alias, Dr. Zygote, called Beats to Make You Frown. The title suited the mood his guest rappers conjured: nervous, combative, screw-faced. But a playful spirit lurked in Rostom’s production choices: squiggly sci-fi samples, dizzy hot-jazz riffs, breakbeats that jiggled like plates of Jell-O. Even at his most glowering, Rostom couldn’t hide his essential M.O. as a wily maker of beats to make you smile—or, at the very least, arch a quizzical brow.
Those instincts are particularly evident in the music he releases as the Maghreban, an alias dedicated to house music and its offshoots. Between the throwback classicism and the perennial obligation to keep dancers moving, house music has become conservative in recent years, but the Maghreban’s tracks resist settling into complacency. Perhaps because he came to house music only recently as a self-described outsider, or perhaps it’s simply his natural inclination, but the Maghreban’s records are stranger and squirrellier than your average dancefloor filler. They’re full of lumbering grooves, off-kilter rhythms, and impish sample play—yet they still bang.
There is much to smile about on the Maghreban’s debut album. Take “Hi Top Remix,” an early highlight. The vinyl scratching lurches like a drunken sailor; the sax bleats invoke the shouts of the oft-sampled “Think (About It)” break, and the L.A. rapper A-F-R-O’s lickety-split rhyming is a giddy riff on old-school hip-house. But with a beat that splinters like kindling and a woozy layer of dub delay, it’s too weird to scan as merely retro. Some of his samples feel almost unfashionable: “Crime Jazz” sports the kinds of jazz licks and film dialogue reminiscent of the early years of Mo Wax and Ninja Tune. But instead of spy-movie kitsch, the song courts full-on psychedelia as a tremolo-riddled synth pulls the proceedings steadily off the rails.
Rostom is the son of Egyptian immigrants—his handle refers to the region of North Africa bordering the Mediterranean Sea—and he frequently draws upon African music for melody and tone color. “Sham” is a kind of lo-fi Afrobeat overlaid with a tumbling marimba melody; “Mbira” is an ambient sketch for synths and thumb piano; and “Revenge,” featuring the Zimbabwean singer and mbira player Rutendo Machiridza, is a slow, stomping triplet jam reminiscent of Africaine 808’s cross-border fusions. In all these songs, the warm timbres and lilting rhythms are a welcome contrast with his occasionally knotty programming. And when he really lets loose, those melodies (particularly on “Revenge” and “Mike’s Afro,” a bumping Afro-disco jam with Gatto Fritto) make for the album’s most freeing moments, where weirdo studio experiments give way to communal dancefloor bliss.
01DEAS is over in less than three-quarters of an hour, but it covers so much ground that it’s easy to miss some of its more intriguing tangents, particularly as the album staggers into its idea-stuffed back half. There’s “Strings,” which pairs a Larry Heard-inspired bassline with dissonant string samples and airy free-jazz saxophone; “Needy,” a dark dub number; and “Broken,” an understated house groove whose splotchy chords and loosey-goosey timekeeping recall DJ Koze’s manner of finger-painting all over the rhythmic grid. Rostom doesn’t dwell too long on any of these; just a few minutes apiece, and he’s on to the next thing. Occasionally, though, his short attention span gives way to greater focus. That’s the case with “Mr. Brown,” a late-album standout that pairs hypnotic ride-cymbal taps with meandering Ethio-jazz keys. If elsewhere he delights in pulling the rug out, here he gives the listener something buoyant to fall into. If some of his beats trigger manic grins, the smile he elicits here is positively beatific. | 2018-03-27T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-03-27T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | R&S | March 27, 2018 | 7.2 | d780ccb0-5730-419f-8945-ddf40ea38ec1 | Philip Sherburne | https://pitchfork.com/staff/philip-sherburne/ | |
The debut LP from the Australian group F ingers features a cadaverous aesthetic: spider-web guitars billow and glisten, cheap synths drip like melting icicles, and Carla dal Forno sings as if she’s in a death trance, emotionless and distant. The results are distinctly chilling. | The debut LP from the Australian group F ingers features a cadaverous aesthetic: spider-web guitars billow and glisten, cheap synths drip like melting icicles, and Carla dal Forno sings as if she’s in a death trance, emotionless and distant. The results are distinctly chilling. | F ingers: Hide Before Dinner | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/20909-hide-before-dinner/ | Hide Before Dinner | In the phenomenon known as "spirit photography," which rose to prominence in the 19th century, ghosts are said to be captured on film by unsuspecting cameramen during the course of a normal day’s shooting. Some of them are clearly the result of double exposure or trickery—the photographer William H. Mumler built a career on such forgeries—but the most effective ones have an eerie realism, as if you’re catching a momentary glimpse into another, darker world that exists just below the surface of our own.
That’s more or less the effect of listening to Hide Before Dinner, the debut LP from the Australian group F ingers. That’s largely because each of its seven songs strictly adhere to their own cadaverous aesthetic: spider-web guitars billow and glisten, cheap synths drip like melting icicles, and Carla dal Forno—who, like F ingers’ Tarquin Manek, is also a member of the gloomy electronic outfit Tarcar—sings as if she’s in a death trance, emotionless and distant.
That kind of deliberate spookiness in clumsier hands can feel affected or, worse, just dull, but Hide Before Dinner is instead distinctly chilling, mostly because del Forno, Manek, and Samuel Karmel seem to be following specific, supernatural sheet music. Opener "Escape Into the Bushes" starts like something from the Cure’s Faith, with a mournful, two-chord guitar pattern ringing out in pitch-black open air. But the minute del Forno enters, it becomes something else. The words she’s singing are indistinct, but that hardly matters: she sings them like they’re the familiar intro to some occult ritual—purposeful, reverent, and with grim anticipation. Whatever weird conjuring is about to take place, del Forno’s determined tone implies that it’s happened before, and there’s no stopping it from happening again.
That mood carries throughout Dinner. There’s not much to "Mum’s Caress After Trip" beyond a ghoul-calliope keyboard line and del Forno’s baleful alto, but it inches under the skin. Del Forno sounds like she’s moved past sorrow into something worse—depressive catatonia—and the music’s ruthless blankness seems to mirror the condition of her spirit. "Useless Treasure" takes this same aesthetic of emptiness and stretches it out to a full seven minutes. Here, del Forno’s voice is lacquered with effects and then stretched and twisted, lurching zombie-like through blue bars of bass. There are echoes of the same funereal mood that pervaded Nico’s Marble Index, but compared to F ingers’ whispery instrumentation and miles of cold empty air, that album seems like an exercise in maximalism. The title track milks a simple, four-chord minor-key guitar line for all it’s worth, dragging it miserably across the song’s six minutes, del Forno’s suffocated vocals so far in the background it sounds like she’s singing from another room, downstairs, beneath a thick wool blanket.
F ingers are even more disquieting when they purposefully ratchet up the darkness. The electronic wind chimes that ripple throughout "Tantrum Time" sound like they’re being stirred up by a warm night breeze outside the devil’s back door, and del Forno’s diced-up and detuned vocals are distinctly menacing; as the song progresses, it slowly fills with more and more digital apparitions—warped bass tones, suffocating static—summoning more horror than dread.
Because its primary goal is sustaining a mood rather than delivering concrete songs, Hide Before Dinner works best when taken as a whole, like outsider art from the afterlife. It’s a bleak and focused exercise in misery—traveling music for a long boat ride down the river Styx. | 2015-08-18T02:00:05.000-04:00 | 2015-08-18T02:00:05.000-04:00 | Experimental | Blackest Ever Black | August 18, 2015 | 7.7 | d789f956-12c2-42e2-b29e-91f0608d34be | J. Edward Keyes | https://pitchfork.com/staff/j.-edward keyes/ | null |
The Mars Volta's new album is partially a Lynchian pro-immigration statement that, we assume, will thrill lovers of musical onanism. | The Mars Volta's new album is partially a Lynchian pro-immigration statement that, we assume, will thrill lovers of musical onanism. | The Mars Volta: Amputechture | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/9406-amputechture/ | Amputechture | The Mars Volta's piss-soaked indulgence often pushes critics to similarly bombastic, mouth-foaming performances. It's understandable. The boys have created an oeuvre that, while technically adventurous, is more or less a hodgepodge of ADD prog trope noodles. That said, I carefully cross my heart at the news of each release, hoping that approaching these guys with an open mind will unearth the pleasures that make bong-toting college boys and Total Guitar subscribers purr. But hard as I tried (again), Amputechture tested, bent, and eventually broke me: Synths lap, strings weep soppingly, ham-fisted fingers tap, time signatures flash, and the amphetamine Beat poetry...is amphetamine Beat poetry.
Now, I dig indulgence when it's done well (see: Finnegans Wake, that skinny guy who wins all the hot-dog eating contests), and what got me through multiple listens to Frances the Mute was the album's overall ludicrousness, that weirdo King Crimson corn-dogging. I enjoyed some of the vocal lines, and it had an intriguing concept-- characters flesh-out from found objects-- but the endless boogie eventually flatlined. It wasn't good rock music, but it was fun in a beer-helmet sorta way. But unless you do keg stands for a living, party tricks usually only work once. To the band's credit, at least they didn't aim for another classic-rock crapper like Frances's "The Widow"-- if your raison d'être is sitcom-length epics, why plop in that one radio-ready single?
Here, the closest the Mars Volta come to a stadium-sized anthem is opener "Vicarious Atonement", in which slow-drip Led Zeppelin histrionics and drama-queen guitar wanks waddle over space ambiance, modem sounds, piano swirls, and free-jazzercise horns. The effect? Climbing a mountain with a noodling Sam Ash balladeer. (Actually, it's probably John Frusciante, who plays guitar on just about every track here.) Of course, the 7+ minute "Been Caught Stealin'"-on-DXM shower ballad could've been trimmed by three minutes, but that's not a bad percentage for these guys.
As is illustrated by the 17-minute "Tetragrammaton". The move from "Vicarious Atonement"'s saxophone bleats and Cedric Bixler-Zavala's mutant whine to the hyperspeed Dream Theater schlep is nice enough: The track's first few minutes show promise, but before long it's veered off into unlistenable, meth-addled Rich Little territory. "Tetragrammaton", of course, is the Hebrew name for God, but seriously, there's no reason to try to squeeze the entire dude into one track. How many scales can a person take? Leave the room, come back, go to sleep, take a walk: They're still at it.
This isn't to say Amputechture is without redemption: "Vermicide" has a couple mellow and pretty guitar parts; actually, though, that's snuffed by the word "sacrosanct," a ricocheting vocal effect, and late-period funk spunk. Heady hand drums, acoustic guitar flumes, and drifty gleams at "Asilos Magdalena"'s opening are promising, but a quivering Cedric gets weepy on us. My guess: Mary Magdalene's pissed at Jesus for not taking her with him. Then I thought of Devendra Banhart for a second, before wiping off my windshield. The religious imagery's knee-deep in each track: "Viscera Eyes" rages about "a crown of maggots" and "the border we're watching." Somewhere Fred Durst nods along with a copy of The Dharma Bums in his back pocket.
The demonizing, idol-worshipping "Day of the Baphomets" opens with and sustains the most energy, but then comes a number of unnecessary shifts, including fun-house vocal effects and wavy gravy Lynchian midget sounds. The song features a legitimately kinetic vocal turn-- "Poachers in your home/ Poachers in your home"-- that echoes Nation of Ulysses, but my finger's still off a few inches.
None of this is surprsing: It's the Mars Volta's third proper album and a blizzard of onanism is expected-- to quite a few people, it'll be highly anticipated. Hell, it even had me interested: This is ex-At the Drive In bassist Paul Hinojos' first studio stint with the band after he started touring with them in 2005. Maybe he'd turn back the clock and force his comrades to look in the mirror and see how far they've strayed off course? Sadly not. Which reminds me: Bixler-Zavala and Volta keyboardist Ikey Owens guest on Mastodon's new Blood Mountain album. Maybe they'll brainwash Atlanta's finest metal band into this kinda bullshit so the world can celebrate the crushing loss of two great bands together. | 2006-09-12T01:00:01.000-04:00 | 2006-09-12T01:00:01.000-04:00 | Rock | Interscope / GSL | September 12, 2006 | 3.5 | d78a1709-65b4-4e87-b7a7-4043b0fe757f | Brandon Stosuy | https://pitchfork.com/staff/brandon-stosuy/ | null |
The new album from New York’s Immolation is a masterclass in death metal songwriting. It pairs a queasy feeling of gloom with melodies you can actually hum along to. | The new album from New York’s Immolation is a masterclass in death metal songwriting. It pairs a queasy feeling of gloom with melodies you can actually hum along to. | Immolation: Atonement | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22956-atonement/ | Atonement | In the early ’90s, death metal luminaries like Death’s Chuck Schuldiner and Morbid Angel’s Trey Azagthoth introduced technicality to the raw, guttural template they’d pioneered a few years earlier. At that point, death metal became a haven for artists who not only placed a high premium on chops but also thought of themselves as capital-C composers. (Gorguts bandleader Luc Lemay, for example, actually took private lessons in composition from a nun.) But over the genre’s 30-year creep from the fringes to respectability, we still don’t think of it as a songwriter’s artform. That’s not necessarily fair, as it takes enormous skill to wrest hooks from such harsh tones.
On Atonement, the 10th long-player from the New York-based second wave death metal outfit Immolation, guitarist Robert Vigna delivers a masterclass on songwriting in this framework. A cohesive listen from start to finish, Atonement contains twists, turns, peaks, and valleys galore—a remarkable achievement considering that Immolation haven’t modified their approach all that much since their 1991 debut Dawn of Possession. Atonement, in fact, begins with a short, detuned clean guitar phrase that reacquaints listeners with Vigna’s preference for scales that sound as if they’re warping under his fingertips.
As with so many of his peers, Vigna likes to play squealing leads that he double-tracks in discordant harmonies to create a queasy feeling of gloom. But he also possesses an unparalleled knack for injecting melody into his riffs without watering-down the heaviness or resorting to the inflated bombast of symphonic death metal. (Though former Goreaphobia/Incantation guitarist Alex Bouks joined Immolation last year, Vigna still plays all of the parts on the album, as he’s done for much of the band’s history.) Vigna crafted the album as a batch of songs you can actually hum along to. Looking back, how many of the genre’s all-time classics can we say that about?
Even when compared to Immolation’s back catalog, you’d be hard-pressed to find a more riveting string of transitions between songs. After a series of blast beats and double bassdrum rolls, second track “When the Jackals Come” opens out onto an epic climax where Vigna guitars wail like a chorus of air raid sirens. Here, in a drawn-out ending that takes nearly as long as the song’s main section, the music lends itself to the apocalyptic scenery the album cover depicts. “Their war is already won,” sings vocalist/bassist Ross Dolan, “your world will end when the jackals come”—a typical death metal lyric about societal collapse that takes on an unusually profound sense of tragedy thanks to the dolefulness in the music.
In a great sequencing move, “When the Jackals Come” simmers down onto the eerie drone that introduces “Fostering the Divide,” which hints at Vigna and Dolan’s affinity for the gothy ambient darkness of non-metal acts like Dead Can Dance. And though the drone component remains quite subtle throughout the album, mixer Zack Ohren leaves ample room for drummer Steve Shalaty’s intricate cymbal patterns to come to the front and color even the most dense passages. Ohren’s mix is beefy but not outsized or over-processed like so much modern metal can be. The music reveals endless contours over repeat listens.
Immolation have recorded with producer Paul Orofino since their third album, 1999’s Failures for Gods. By this point, the band’s work flow is well entrenched. Likewise, Dolan’s preoccupation with religious and political institutions as agents of evil is still as fervent as it was from day one. At times, Dolan breathes a contemporary edge into his lyrics. “Jackals” was inspired by John Perkins’ book Confessions of an Economic Hit Man, while “Fostering the Divide” aligns perfectly with the contentious tone of American politics (even if it doesn’t explicitly address the recent presidential election). Mostly, though, Dolan isn’t saying anything he hasn’t said before. In a sense, neither is Vigna. But in death metal, consistency is the name of the game, and it’s harder than it looks. If a band can “say” the same thing for 30 years while delivering it with more flourish than they ever have, as Immolation have done with Atonement, then that really says something. | 2017-03-08T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2017-03-08T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Metal | Nuclear Blast | March 8, 2017 | 7.7 | d78b67c1-80a1-4e65-84cb-5668b92396b2 | Saby Reyes-Kulkarni | https://pitchfork.com/staff/saby-reyes-kulkarni/ | null |
The fifth album from the hypnotic Moon Duo is their breeziest to date. Its combination of sweetness and substance is blissed-out and pillowy, like soft-core shoegaze. | The fifth album from the hypnotic Moon Duo is their breeziest to date. Its combination of sweetness and substance is blissed-out and pillowy, like soft-core shoegaze. | Moon Duo: Occult Architecture Vol. 2 | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/23212-occult-architecture-vol-2/ | Occult Architecture Vol. 2 | Moon Duo makes rock’n’roll comfort food. Since they debuted in 2009, their sound has progressively gotten smoother and more sugary. Ripley Johnson melts his singing into the music, rarely breaking character with yelps or screams, while his guitar stays mellifluous even as its fuzz gets denser. Sanae Yamada’s keyboard melodies lilt snugly, while simple beats—once executed with a drum machine, now handled by John Jeffrey—swing like a hammock. If you have a taste for German motorik drive, Velvet Underground chug, Spacemen 3 hypnotism, and blissful psych-rock, Moon Duo hit an irresistible sweet spot.
Occult Architecture Vol. 2, their fifth full-length, is their sweetest spot so far. It’s intended as a brighter counterpart to the darker Vol. 1 released in February, and while the two albums aren’t radically divergent, Vol. 2 is definitely the lightest, breeziest Moon Duo record to date. Everything flows ahead at mid tempo, with no tangential digressions or disruptive curveballs. Nearly half the album is taken up by two instrumentals that suggest the band jamming on a sunny, worry-free afternoon. It’d be easy to say music this pleasant is also fleeting, but just because Moon Duo indulge a sweet tooth doesn’t mean Vol. 2 is weightless. Think of them as sonic pastry chefs: you can’t live off their songs alone, but they’re not all empty calories either.
That combination of sweetness and substance is crystallized by “Lost in Light,” an eight-and-a-half minute tune so blissed-out and pillowy, it’s like soft-core shoegaze. Over a melody that hints at Lou Reed’s “Street Hassle”—and Spacemen 3’s ode to same—Moon Duo slowly climb toward the clouds, settling into a chorus so dreamy it’s like they’re swimming in cotton candy. As Johnson’s words (again evoking Spacemen 3) mix religious tones with drug references—“What a feeling to be saved,” “I’m a servant to the wind,” “Roll another, you want it”—“Lost in Light” sounds like a stab at rapture via lysergic guitar chords.
The rest of Vol. 2 isn’t quite that euphoric, but enchantment persists. On the two other songs in which Johnson sings, he spools out more paeans to easy drift. “It’s sweet, that Southern roll,” he purrs on see-sawing opener “New Dawn,” while waxing beatific on “Sevens”: “Walk on, the river said...We’re out on the boulevard/Lost in a feeling on the run.” Such serene sentiments aren’t verbalized on instrumental “Mirror’s Edge,” but the tune’s swaying jangle is so laid-back that it begs you to recline your seat and let the music guide you down its own desert highway.
Continuing to chase a sound this sweet and floaty might not be Moon Duo’s best option moving forward. Though they’re nowhere near saccharine on Vol. 2, it’s not hard to imagine them drifting into tooth decay territory if they maintain this path. As Vol. 1 showed, this group is still capable of the kind of darker edges that they’ll surely revisit in the future—all they really need to do is let Yamada work in some descending keyboard chords and things suddenly get a lot spookier. But as an exercise in baking their sound into a decadent dessert, Vol. 2 is pretty convincing—and, more importantly, totally satisfying. | 2017-05-17T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-05-17T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Sacred Bones | May 17, 2017 | 7.3 | d7919341-449e-4d72-870b-1e42877d7ee1 | Marc Masters | https://pitchfork.com/staff/marc-masters/ | null |
The Compton rapper’s latest is a sequel to his 2014 debut mixtape. Boogie steps into the California sun, embracing a brighter sound with a flow that sharpens year after year. | The Compton rapper’s latest is a sequel to his 2014 debut mixtape. Boogie steps into the California sun, embracing a brighter sound with a flow that sharpens year after year. | Westside Boogie: Thirst 48 Pt. II | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22513-thirst-48-pt-ii/ | Thirst 48 Pt. II | At the wild, cramped party that is Los Angeles rap, Boogie’s the guy sitting in the corner, sermonizing about the desperate conditions black parents in his neighborhood face while flicking through photos of his son on his iPhone. The deep-thinking lyricist might be straight outta Compton at a time when the city is the center of the hip-hop universe again, but he’s kept his lens focused on his own. Even the one unequivocal banger in his canon, “Oh My,” was about poverty and police brutality when you stripped out the high-rise keys and booming bass.
The impressive Thirst 48 and The Reach mixtapes—released in 2014 and 2015, respectively—found Boogie pondering the kind of issues that keep South Los Angeles parents up at night. That both were released on his young son’s birthday signaled their heavily personal nature. Thirst 48 Pt. II might be presented as a sequel to his debut, but it feels like an advancement of his style. Boogie has emerged from behind his living room curtain and stepped into the California sun, slickly shifting from the blurry synths and lurid drum machines that punctuate most of his catalog to a brighter sound that embraces his geographical roots.
It’s not like Boogie has dropped the pen, though. On opener “Still Thirsty,” he shuffles through all the issues weighing on his mind: the pressure to succeed, fear of poverty, relationship hang-ups, parental struggles. “We went from tears at the bottom ’til we almost top tier,” he raps, “my biggest fear is I don’t finish through.” Moments on Thirst 48 Pt. II underline what we already knew: the South Angelino is one of the sharpest West Coast writers right now.
Boogie raps over piano chords with the same open-book sentiment that Tupac once did. The sweetly caressed keys of “Won’t Be the Same” channel the spirit of “I Ain’t Mad at ‘Cha,” if ‘Pac rapped about his girl instead of an old friend. That line connecting past to present is crystallized on the DJ Quik-featuring “Fuck ‘Em All.” With Sacramento’s Mozzy brought along for the trip, the trio rib over the kind of wonky, tweaked-out beat Snoop and posse would have jumped on and had a ball with in the mid-’90s. Boogie adapts to these good-time flavors as easily as he once skulked in the sonic shadows.
Elsewhere, “Slide on You” sees him go down in the DMs over some smooth ratchet finger snaps. “Sunroof,” meanwhile, is better than any rap song that rides an acoustic guitar has any right to be. Boogie shows California love on the West Coast anthem, which channels everything from ‘Pac’s odes to his home state to the sweet ’60s harmonies of the Mamas & the Papas. But he’s not in a such a positive mood that he can’t work in a line like, “You a good day, you like a hood day with no police.”
With this shift in lanes, Boogie sometimes sounds like he’s trying to run the modern-day commercial rap gambit. He gives a report on a new relationship through the prism of their social media interactions on “Two Days,” and ponders stealing his friend’s girl on “Just Might.” (“I just might fuck your wifey out of spite,” he sneers). There’s a newfound level of steel in his voice on the latter. It’s evidence that his flow has sharpened year after year. Pt. II’s free throw percentage would have been bolstered by the inclusion of pre-release singles “Out My Way (Bitter Raps II)” and “Man Down.” But the tape does something more crucial: it proves that even when he falls into line, Boogie still stands out from the crowd. | 2016-10-19T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-10-19T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Interscope | October 19, 2016 | 7.8 | d796b3c2-6192-4a5b-b7c7-0cf5f487f90d | Dean Van Nguyen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/dean-van nguyen/ | null |
G-Eazy is a white indie rapper from the Bay Area who has built a sizable cult fanbase. His second record, When It's Dark Out, is a deliberately serious affair that refuses to play to his strengths. | G-Eazy is a white indie rapper from the Bay Area who has built a sizable cult fanbase. His second record, When It's Dark Out, is a deliberately serious affair that refuses to play to his strengths. | G-Eazy: When It's Dark Out | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21325-when-its-dark-out/ | When It's Dark Out | It's easy to write G-Eazy off as a Macklemore that simply grew up further south: He's a white indie rapper from the Bay Area who has built a sizable fan base producing the same kind of sober wordplay, one that carefully articulates individual syllables and slots them into grooves, expressing thoughts in straight lines. Each artist has taken each painstaking step to address his whiteness (and subsequently how that makes them outliers and commodities all at once) and they both present themselves as very for the culture, a phrase which here means aligned with conservative rap values and in tune with hip-hop culture's history and innermost workings. But upon closer examination, G-Eazy isn't much like Macklemore at all; in fact, he's more like Bizarro Macklemore, a self-serious, self-absorbed swag rapper who shuns the thrifty for the bourgeois.
His debut album, 2014's These Things Happen, articulated this identity through the prism of the sounds of the moment: mostly the sadness of Drake and somberness of Kendrick Lamar. It was a decent first offering, but the music had no pulse: It was carefully dressed mannequin rap, standing stiff without feeling. His sophomore effort When It's Dark Out makes a lot of the same mistakes: This is a deliberately serious record that refuses to play to his strength, a sharply turning flow that pivots on his buoyant pronunciations, which are naturally comical. Instead, it opts to move cautiously and without jest. It's fitting that one of the singles is titled "Sad Boy" because that's the plainest way to express the basic idea of this record: Even something as cool as being famous can be humorless and miserable.
Rapping and being a rapper often feel like chores for G-Eazy, and it can be a chore to listen to him. There's a certain earnestness to his writing, which focuses in on the things he wants—whether that's a Ferrari, a Grammy, or just for his grandmother to stay in her old home—and he's a very capable lyricist. But when he raps, "And fuck it, I'm the coldest white rapper in the game since the one with the bleached hair," on "Calm Down" it somehow feels less like a boast and more like an admission of a shallow field. When he's sharing space with someone as engaging as E-40, the holes really start to show.
When It's Dark Out is a marked sonic improvement from his debut. The majority of These Things Happen was produced by frequent collaborator Christoph Andersson and G-Eazy himself, and it dragged throughout. Though they do share production credits on "Sad Boy", "Some Kind of Drug", and "Think About You", the beats come primarily from an ensemble cast highlighted by 808 Mafia co-founder Southside, Boi-1da, and DJ Dahi. There are productions from electronic producer Cashmere Cat, longtime Future cohorts Nard & B, and rap radio regulars KeY Wane and Kane Beatz. This all seems like a conscious effort on G-Eazy's part to flesh out his sound into something more dynamic and less one-note, and there are effective tonal shifts, especially the Kehlani-featuring "Everything Will Be OK".
G-Eazy is at his best when he steps out of the shadows and raps assuredly, and there are signs of that on When It's Dark Out. On "Random", he asserts that his surprise indie success isn't the result of some lucky breaks but a byproduct of hard work. ("What If" posits an interesting counter theory before coming to the same conclusion: "What if the game didn't care I was white/ Would I still be selling out shows every night/ Would they all believe in the hype/ Regardless of image/ I'm askin' would people still love me despite/ I'd still be right here in these shoes cuz I fit 'em, I worked for this life.") The Big Sean-assisted "One of Them" boasts one of his more elastic flows. He gets his closest to passing off his Sad Boy aesthetic on "Don't Let Me Go", which pairs Nard & B up with KeY Wane for a clattering beat that flattens a drowsy vocal sample into a sprawling canvas. "Troubled mind of an artist/ But the star comes alive in the darkness," he raps, as if to justify his status. It's one of the few moments that give any credence to his burgeoning base. | 2015-12-10T01:00:04.000-05:00 | 2015-12-10T01:00:04.000-05:00 | Rap | RCA | December 10, 2015 | 6.7 | d79db2ee-f516-47fe-8415-beebbe8f39b0 | Sheldon Pearce | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sheldon-pearce/ | null |
The Chicago multi-instrumentalist and jazz-rap artist’s self-titled double album conceals a reflective sorrow within its blissful swirl of beats and blips. | The Chicago multi-instrumentalist and jazz-rap artist’s self-titled double album conceals a reflective sorrow within its blissful swirl of beats and blips. | Sen Morimoto: Sen Morimoto | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/sen-morimoto-sen-morimoto/ | Sen Morimoto | Sen Morimoto’s music is an open book. Diaristic, fragmented lyrics and layers upon layers of harmonies pile into his kinetic jazz rap. It’s a heavy book—an encyclopedia, probably. A jazz saxophonist since childhood, Morimoto gobbled up other instruments and disciplines along the way from his birthplace of Kyoto to small-town Massachusetts, where he grew up and began gravitating towards hip-hop, and then to his current home in Chicago. Or maybe it’s a phone book: In just the past couple of years, Morimoto has collaborated in an impressive range of circles, playing on albums by jazz ensemble Resavoir, pop singer KAINA, rappers Ric Wilson and Joseph Chilliams, and indie bands Lala Lala and Vagabon.
In July, Morimoto took his openness to a new level. When the City of Chicago invited him to appear on the “Millennium Park at Home” virtual series, Morimoto took the chance to call out his mayor—and was promptly removed from the bill. “I would like to add my extreme disappointment in the lack of action that has been taken by Mayor Lightfoot and our elected officials here in response to over 100,000 protesters here in Chicago demanding the police be defunded and CPAC [the Civilian Police Accountability Council] be enacted,” he said in his submitted video. The city gave him a chance to recant; he declined, and his colleague Tasha followed him out the door.
Disappointment permeates the lyrics of Morimoto’s self-titled second album, too. He imagines a future where everyone has left for Jupiter; he raps about being too tired to feign happiness and crying so loudly it upsets his dog. But you might not notice any of that, because musically, the dominant mood is blissful and relentlessly hyperactive—more suggestive of happy daydreams than the flat, grey slog of this year’s bad-news parade. The album’s sound is downright optimistic; if you knew nothing else of him, you might wonder if he has been living on Jupiter for the past several months.
Morimoto turns his imagination loose, filling up a double album that bursts with vivid color and gnarly chord structures, as well as a laundry list of guest features—some of which serve his love of working with friends a little more than they serve the song. Where his debut album, Cannonball!, was built by subtraction (as he explained, he wrote by overcrowding his songs with parts, then stripping them away one by one), Sen Morimoto lets it all fly. Bigger drums and lavish beats take over for the less adorned boom-bap propulsion of his last effort, and songs are washed, but not often drowned, in rainfalls of keys and blips.
One of the biggest surprises here is that Morimoto mostly leaves his sax at home, with the exception of the album’s bookends—he blares it loud enough to set off a car alarm on the opener, spins a few upward-spiraling phrases on the closer, and that’s pretty much it. Instead he branches out with other tools, playing around with different guitars, synths, and production techniques, manning everything himself except for the live drums. But the album’s riskiest, and often best, moments come when he sings. He tries his hand, respectably, at being a full-on crooner on “Wrecked” and casually ascends a tower of harmonies on the breezy highlight “Symbols, Tokens,” taking two or three extra steps up that build into one glorious payoff note. “Everything reminds me of you,” he sings; the whole song feels like a warped, digital “God Only Knows” sung from a convertible.
With each sharp twist, Morimoto racks up originality points—whether they land or not, they are certifiably, uncompromisingly out there. And while his progressions and arrangements can be breathtakingly kaleidoscopic, they’re also occasionally coupled with the sense that he’s trying too many things at once. You can’t help but wonder what his instrumental album would sound like, or one where he stretches his voice beyond perpetual chillness, or where he narrows and focuses his words. Sen Morimoto’s hindrances arise from the same place as its distinguishing qualities: an atmosphere of infinite possibility.
Buy: Rough Trade
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Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2020-10-23T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-10-23T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Jazz | Sooper | October 23, 2020 | 7.3 | d7a0d678-e203-4d6d-ae50-ec1f9df82d1b | Steven Arroyo | https://pitchfork.com/staff/steven-arroyo/ | |
The new album from crushers Full of Hell is an impressive show of stylistic transcendence—featuring a standout collaboration with art-pop auteur Nicole Dollanganger. | The new album from crushers Full of Hell is an impressive show of stylistic transcendence—featuring a standout collaboration with art-pop auteur Nicole Dollanganger. | Full of Hell: Trumpeting Ecstasy | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/23129-trumpeting-ecstasy/ | Trumpeting Ecstasy | Compared to the other branches of the heavy-metal family tree, grindcore bands face a disproportionately uphill battle when it comes to leaving an impact. As inheritors of both hardcore’s blistering short-form and death metal’s ear-splitting volume, they readily renounce sonic wiggle room, and by extension, conventional dynamics. In the right hands, grindcore’s shock-and-awe can feel dreamlike, even sublime. But fumble it, and the uniformity renders the whole storm moot, another passing flurry.
Maryland/Pennsylvania crushers Full of Hell are well aware of these limitations, and have strived—and for the most part, succeeded—to overcome them since their 2009 inception. On their first two releases, 2011’s Roots of Earth Are Consuming My Home and 2013’s Rudiments of Mutilation, the band subverted sameness by tracing their basement fury with industrial touches (crackling samples, glitchy effects), filling out the din with textural frisson. Since then, Full of Hell have spent the bulk of their time in crossover mode. They’ve penned joint LPs with the avant-garde elite (Merzbow, The Body) and released splits with rabid contemporaries like Nails and Psywarfare, assembling a diverse arsenal of noisemakers in the process.
Full of Hell’s upgraded toolbox is on full display on Trumpeting Ecstasy, their third and best solo album. With the coaching of hardcore luminary Kurt Ballou, the band barrel through a thrilling 23-minute gauntlet, all mosh-pits, sludge piles, and—because this is a Full of Hell album—bone-chilling reminders that we’re all going to die. While it’s anything but a crossover in the traditional sense (if you didn’t like grindcore before, this one probably won’t change your mind), the 11-song effort marks an impressive show of stylistic transcendence.
Trumpeting Ecstasy is Full of Hell’s first studio album without Brandon Brown, the band’s co-founding bassist and one half of its unparalleled tag-team behind the mic; his demonic, guttural register is the ying to frontman Dylan Walker’s piercing yang, a hellish interplay that’s easily one of grindcore’s national treasures. But Brown’s replacement, Sam DiGristine, maintains this tradition with aplomb on “Gnawed Flesh” and “Crawling Back to God,” bellowing from the gut as his bandmate screams his head off. On “Branches of Yew” and “Bound Sphynx,” guitarist and effects wizard Spencer Hazard accelerates the jagged see-saw with tremoring, dread-laden riffs, matched note-for-note by drummer Dave Bland. Ballou rounds out the interstitial space—however few seconds that are left, anyway—with sinister, crackled melodrama: “The trees are in misery,” sighs a sampled Werner Herzog before the first peals of “Deluminate,” the album’s opening peal of Nordic Thunder.
Although Full of Hell spend the majority of Trumpeting Ecstasy examining their usual tricks through an expanded prism, their overall approach remains the same. They take a sweeping panorama of the abyss, compress it down to a single point, and shade it in until it breaks. Towards the end of the album, the band momentarily loosen their grip, to great effect: art-pop auteur Nicole Dollanganger swoops into the static with an otherworldly aria, flooding the void with light. Less than a minute later—which can feel like an eternity in grindcore time—we’re back into oblivion. Following the sludgy closer “At the Cauldron’s Bottom,” the album chugs to a close, but that angelic interlude remains—an unsettling, unshakable magic. Such is the album’s spell. | 2017-05-09T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-05-09T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Metal | Profound Lore | May 9, 2017 | 7.7 | d7a481ed-842f-4110-a535-f46365e7afac | Zoe Camp | https://pitchfork.com/staff/zoe-camp/ | null |
Allison Crutchfield’s debut solo LP jettisons punky guitars for pirouetting synths, vast open spaces, and lyrics that explore haunted memories and still-fresh heartache. | Allison Crutchfield’s debut solo LP jettisons punky guitars for pirouetting synths, vast open spaces, and lyrics that explore haunted memories and still-fresh heartache. | Allison Crutchfield: Tourist in This Town | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22785-tourist-in-this-town/ | Tourist in This Town | In 2014, between projects, Allison Crutchfield released Lean in to It, a synth-led EP of private epiphanies on love and heartbreak. From an artist given to collaboration—not least with her sister, Waxahatchee’s Katie Crutchfield—its starkness was intriguing. Allison and Katie’s first major outfit was Birmingham, Alabama’s P.S. Eliot, a raucous pop-punk band whose busy lyrics and zipwire melodies seemed, in brief moments, to make the planet spin twice as fast. In 2012, a year after they split, Allison moved from drums to the mic with Swearin’, still reveling in the racket of ferocious guitars. She began work on Tourist in This Town after Swearin’ played their last show, in 2015, due to her split with co-songwriter Kyle Gilbride. After years touring with her sister and boyfriend, the 28-year-old’s Lean in to It follow-up—and debut solo LP—might have occasioned a reckoning with independence and her unmapped future. Instead, she finds her compasses jammed by existential drift and haunting memories.
As on Lean in to It, which corralled tales of youth romance gone awry, Tourist in This Town is a breakup record whose ennui goes beyond romance. Couched in her stories are trials of self-acceptance, psychic grappling, physical dislocation. Cleanly produced by Philly synth-whisperer Jeff Zeigler, the LP channels the kind of late-80s synth pop that jettisoned style in favor of vastness and grace—skyline synths pirouette, vocals implore, pensive guitars sporadically erupt. The effect is to coalesce Crutchfield’s anecdotes and soliloquies into a blur of fury and melancholy.
Like her sister, Crutchfield has a knack for sardonic observations designed to bore through the bullshit of young adulthood (mostly emanating from other young adults). With less room for stormy punk guitars, Tourist proceeds with a new lightness of touch. Instead of steel-plating her tongue, the music consoles and reveres the heart-on-sleeve lyrics. On “Sightseeing,” as piano chords sprout reverb, Crutchfield recounts an awkward face-to-face encounter (“You say nothing/You just come sit next to me”) in an anguished tone that suggests a divine experience. It’s oddly dramatic, and a little jarring, but the lyrics’ psychological layers—“Baby, you are not as sad as you want me to think”—somehow bring you to her level.
Rather than submit to the inevitability of breakups, Crutchfield obsessively autopsies what went wrong: she purports to be “selfish” “shallow,” and “unstable” on “Broad Daylight”; on “Mile Away,” she seethes to her partner, “You assume you understand because your voice is the loudest.” These scenes often occur in public—waiters refill glasses, onlookers mock her tears. More than heated blow-outs, they sound like scrappy internal monologues, filling silences made unbearable by the weight and breadth of what’s unsaid. On “Charlie,” Crutchfield and her partner inhabit a domestic space flooded with conflicting memories—their touching pillow-talk, his yelling in her face. When she concludes, “You bite me on my neck like I was something you could eat/You bite me ’cos you like the way I feel in your teeth,” her tone taints the cuteness with a dash of something sinister.
If there’s a drawback to this psychic dredging, it’s a slightly limited emotional range. Crutchfield frames scenes vividly, yet we rarely feel the weight of the mutual devastation, the perverse thrill of love discarded. When her post-romantic tumult subsides, on “Expatriate,” a moment of introspective honesty is warranted—one that might carry more weight had the tone ventured further afield elsewhere. “The things you used to hate about me are all heightened now,” she sings, with a measure of contentment. “But I love myself, or I’m figuring out how.” The line still resonates, but it’s more satisfying, in this case, to see her meticulous, anxiety-parsing work as its own redemption—entombing the past in a reliquary of sad matters settled. | 2017-02-03T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2017-02-03T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Merge | February 3, 2017 | 7.8 | d7a8a4ad-ef9e-45d3-97f2-486eb0cb49cb | Jazz Monroe | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jazz-monroe/ | null |
After a few years in limbo, the Atlanta rapper reestablishes himself as one of the genre’s most innovative stylists and its most heartfelt writers. | After a few years in limbo, the Atlanta rapper reestablishes himself as one of the genre’s most innovative stylists and its most heartfelt writers. | Rich Homie Quan: Back to the Basics | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/23197-back-to-the-basics/ | Back to the Basics | Rich Homie Quan is determined to lay it all on the line. “Never Made It,” the two-minute opening song from his latest record, Back to the Basics, isn’t a prelude or a teaser, it’s a top-to-bottom referendum on his life and career. Quan raps about his “situation,” which is likely about being caught in label limbo, settling lawsuits, and watching his former peers blow past him by all commercial metrics. He rattles off important professional moments from the last few years, including “Flex (Ooh, Ooh, Ooh)” going double-platinum and a disappointing freestyle on Tim Westwood’s show that invited jokes and jabs, only to remind the listener: “Never forget—I still got me a little family to feed.” As Big Boi would say, that’s only the intro.
There was a time not too long ago when Rich Homie Quan figured to be Atlanta’s next breakout star. In 2013, “Type Of Way” made him an instant sensation. The song was vicious and skull-rattling, but had a strangely conspicuous softer side: “I’ve got a hideaway, and I go there sometimes/To give my mind a break/Still I find a way.” That was Quan, injecting heart and vulnerability into styles that don’t demand it. His mixtapes, especially that year's I Promise I Will Never Stop Going In, generated considerable buzz, and the following year, he teamed up with fellow Atlantan Young Thug for Tha Tour, Part One, issued by Cash Money under the Rich Gang moniker.
Tha Tour was a staggering record, and seemed to position Quan for further success: Songs like “Freestyle” cast him as the emotional center of a new wave of rap stars. But a number of factors, including and perhaps especially a legal battle with his former label, T.I.G. Entertainment, have kept him from breaking through. “Flex” was a massive hit (that video has over 100 million views), but failed to land him a commercial album release date; his last trio of mixtapes, though solid, has yet to further his public stature, and to an outsider, Quan seems to have been running in place.
So he went back to the basics. Over 11 tracks and 35 minutes, Quan reestablishes himself as one of the genre’s most innovative stylists and its most heartfelt writers. “Heart Cold” throws you back into the trap houses Quan detailed so vividly in 2013, but now the timeline is blurry—is this a half-remembered scene, or is he selling a mid-2000s Clipse thing, where the rap money is so slow he’s diversifying? He makes sex and money sound dull and vaguely annoying, but blows his paranoia up in Technicolor and raps intensely about affixing trackers to cell phones. It would sound like a well-executed writing exercise if it didn’t also sound like an exorcism.
Quan is still a pure, unmitigated joy to hear rap. “Money Fold” resurrects the Rich Gang trick of making a mansion party sound like a haunted house. Closer “Str8” carries his style to its natural, irresistible conclusion, where he raps in a half-dozen different modes, but each of them could very well serve as the song’s chorus. Back to the Basics is well-curated, and certainly serves as a mission statement for the second phase of Quan’s career, but just as often functions as a masterclass.
Before he starts rapping on “Replay,” Quan says into the mic: “I’m so content with the person I am. I can give a fuck about what you think about me, honestly, bro.” Somehow, it seems earned. Back to the Basics is a lot of things, but it isn’t confused; it plays like a long therapy session, where Quan lays out his regrets and paranoias—something he has to do to arrive at this place. It’s possible that Quan never gets bigger than he is right now, and it sounds like he knows it. But he’s rapping on his terms, and doing it on a level that almost none of his peers can match. | 2017-04-22T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-04-22T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Motown | April 22, 2017 | 7.5 | d7a8d6a9-27dd-47f4-8bd3-d997ca4583ad | Paul A. Thompson | https://pitchfork.com/staff/paul-a. thompson/ | null |
The veteran South African DJ and producer broadens his sound and his global reach, but his own smooth, moody grooves are more reliably rewarding than his highest-profile collaborations. | The veteran South African DJ and producer broadens his sound and his global reach, but his own smooth, moody grooves are more reliably rewarding than his highest-profile collaborations. | Black Coffee: Subconsciously | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/black-coffee-subconsciously/ | Subconsciously | Black Coffee’s music rarely calls for stillness. The narratives pieced together across his discography concern movement, like the journeys of transient workers on 2005 standout “Stimela,” an intoxicating rendition of the Hugh Masekela joint. Black Coffee’s work also touches on another form of movement: The inheritance of sounds and melodies, of generational experiences bridged by familiar notes. In the DJ and singer-songwriter’s hometown of Durban, South Africa, people are constantly on the move, hustling from one job to another, packed in omnibuses. But as COVID-19 continues to surge, any type of motion, physical or mental, has been drastically altered. Black Coffee’s latest release, Subconsciously, is aware of the challenges of stillness. Its heavy, syncopated house beats channel the barely restrained frustration of staying put when all you want to do is move: towards your lover, towards a different version of yourself, towards anywhere but your present.
To trace these inevitable fractures, Black Coffee calls on artists who don’t readily evoke solace, yet settle confidently into their role as the voices in our heads. Jozzy, who co-wrote the remix to the monster hit “Old Town Road,” is an unexpected, haltingly earnest presence on the Pharrell-featuring “10 Missed Calls,” a take on a late-night voicemail. Her pleas for intimacy and clarity swing from desperation to assertiveness, never truly aligning with either: “Did you, did you know/That I tried my best just to let it roll, it roll?/I had 10 missed calls/And not one from you.” There’s nothing quite like feeling alone in a relationship, and Black Coffee treads a thin line between frustration and fits of ecstasy, peaking with Jozzy’s anxious cries. Echoes of Thandiswa Mazwai’s “Kwanele,” remixed on Coffee’s 2005 self-titled debut, are evident: an unfulfilled partner who wants to leave but can’t bear to lose the time invested.
Black Coffee’s 2017 rendezvous with Drake on the More Life single “Get It Together” seems to have rubbed off on “Flava,” which could easily fit into the perpetually lovelorn rapper’s playlist. Tellaman, a singer-songwriter who also hails from Durban, and Una Rams, from the Limpopo region, croon about a woman who’s been mistreated and now feels incapable of accepting a deserving suitor. It’s a basic enough concept that doesn’t quite work coming from an artist who, four tracks earlier, called on Sabrina Claudio to meld her heartbroken lyrics with a reminder that “she’ll love when she’s ready.”
In the past decade, as international pop stars have pivoted to African beats and rhythms in search of inspiration with a global reach, Black Coffee has found a heightened level of visibility. He has shared the stage with Usher (who’s featured on “LaLaLa”) and performed at Coachella in 2016 and 2018. Moving from regional to mainstream fame brings a familiar challenge: balancing the skills that brought you acclaim with those that will put you on the charts. Rarely do these two work in tandem, and Subconsciously falters when it tries to provide what it thinks the people want. “Never Gonna Forget,” with Diplo and an assist from English artist Elderbrook, is empty and monotonous instead of intentionally sparse. And while on-and-off R&B star Cassie delivers some of her better rhymes and tones on the groovy “Time,” Black Coffee is hardly noticeable on a song that’s keenly aware of its narrator’s vocal limitations, and so dutifully plays to her strengths.
A better example of the emotion Black Coffee can invoke with a capable storyteller is his 2018 single “Ilala,” featuring Mondli Ngcobo. Subconsciously gives a similar sense of symbiosis on “Ready for You,” with English soul singer and songwriter Celeste. Black Coffee gives her room to lead the story, allowing her warm, rounded tone to thread between his kwaito-influenced Afropop and jazz studies. Having released six studio albums and several genre-blending mixes, Black Coffee has built a formidable map of the musical geography of the place he calls home. Subconsciously isn’t the type of album that offers bangers through and through, but the standout tracks are compelling enough to stay the course.
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-02-10T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2021-02-10T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Electronic | Ultra | February 10, 2021 | 7 | d7b9e91c-a4ec-478f-82d2-511a2012ca17 | Tarisai Ngangura | https://pitchfork.com/staff/tarisai-ngangura/ | |
The noise duo’s seventh album is the most life-affirming and accessible music they’ve ever made. | The noise duo’s seventh album is the most life-affirming and accessible music they’ve ever made. | Lightning Bolt: Sonic Citadel | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/lightning-bolt-sonic-citadel/ | Sonic Citadel | For 25 years now, Lightning Bolt has made a career out of indulging only the most gnarled riffs, covering every sound in brittle distortion, and playing live shows so loud and destructive that they—literally—blow out the power and leave the performers covered in blood. The duo’s dedication to this “move fast, break everything” mentality is still strong on Sonic Citadel, their seventh full-length album. The first song is called “Blow to the Head,” a three-minute blast of punishing kick drum, acrid bass riffs, and squealed vocals like a pile of styrofoam plates tossed on a bonfire. It’s as wonderfully ugly as anything they’ve ever made.
They keep up this energy—standouts include the surreal anthems “Bouncy House” and the Tilt-a-Whirl hardcore of “Tom Thump”—adding a handful of tracks to the pantheon of Lightning Bolt jams designed to keep your local audiologist in business. But where Sonic Citadel really takes off is in the moments where they deviate hardest from their formula. Underneath all the fuzz, there’s always been pop sensibility at work; Lightning Bolt riffs have been catchy in their own warped way since Ride the Skies. But at points, they allow those instincts to come into startling focus.
That’s telegraphed, in part, in some of the song titles, which reference Don Henley, Husker Dü, and Van Halen. None of these jams especially sound like classic rock or hair metal, but they are some of the most memorable moments in the band’s catalog. “Don Henley in the Park” is an especially notable curveball, built around overlapping bass riffs that sound like a Durutti Column song as played by the Tasmanian Devil. Chippendale’s nursery-rhyme vocals would almost be fit for a sing-along, if you could make out what he’s saying. (The lyric sheet isn’t especially helpful on this score; it reads “[improvised lyrics].”)
The record’s last vocal track, “All Insane,” is among the more straightforward songs in the Lightning Bolt catalog. Gibson does away with the frills and flourishes that often accompany his bass work as Chippendale settles into a steady mid-tempo beat, singing passionately of living life while the living is good. It’s surprising, but not unprecedented: Somewhere in the flailing limbs and searing volume of Lightning Bolt’s music was a call to squeeze everything you can out a moment, to do whatever it takes to feel something and to do so for as long as you can.
Buy: Rough Trade
(Pitchfork may earn a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.) | 2019-10-12T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-10-12T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Thrill Jockey | October 12, 2019 | 7.8 | d7bbb122-86ba-4cca-8e90-233030dc6073 | Colin Joyce | https://pitchfork.com/staff/colin-joyce/ | |
Impressive, precocious debut from this Brookyln-based teenager pairs his acrobatic, emotionally nuanced voice with Eastern European and NMH-like accoutrements. | Impressive, precocious debut from this Brookyln-based teenager pairs his acrobatic, emotionally nuanced voice with Eastern European and NMH-like accoutrements. | Beirut: Gulag Orkestar | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/1204-gulag-orkestar/ | Gulag Orkestar | My grandparents were Russian immigrants who spent their lives working in factories; when they got too old for that, they graduated to the cafeteria of a Queens high school. Visiting them as a kid, the thick accents of their incomprehensible language were, to me, the music of the so-called "motherland." When grandpa was spinning records, though, he opted for melancholic horns and voices or polka. He may have dug Gulag Orkestar, the debut album by Zach Condon aka Beirut.
Beirut's received quite a bit of pre-release buzz. He deserves some of it. His tuneful Balkan stomp is fairly unique within the indie realm, an aesthetic shared with Man Man, Gogol Bordello, and Barbez but few others. That, and for a 19-year-old from Albuquerque (now living in Brooklyn), he sounds like an old man sipping vodka and humming along to Tchaikovsky while the neighborhood kids play stick ball or drink egg creams. The sound is there, but beneath the atmospherics his themes of war, fallen curtains, bunkers, life on the Rhine-- his song titles are more fixated on Germany (and Slovakia and an imaginary Eastern Bloc) than Russia-- and Gulags, are vague and sometimes less than effective. That makes sense: He doesn't have the lived experience for those situations. Perhaps he studied W.G. Sebald to add some color, and in a very Sebaldian move the album's anonymous cover photos were found in a library in Leipzig, Germany. In the liner notes, Condon asks if anyone knows the photographer's whereabouts.
Beirut's brassy In the Aeroplane Over the Sea-like instrumental accents have garnered Neutral Milk Hotel comparisons. There's also guilt by association-- ex-NMH player Jeremy Barnes and his A Hawk and a Hacksaw compatriot Heather Toast contribute accordion, violins, and percussion. But while Condon writes generally spare, pretty tableau that can lodge themselves in your ear like hazy memories, his words aren't as intellectually, emotionally, or erotically invested as Mangum's feverish, tear-jerky lyrics. And that's OK-- it's unfair to hold a debut record up to one of the bona fide indie classics of the past 10 years. I mention it only to squash the impulse at the root, because exaggerated expectations shouldn't dissuade anyone from enjoying Beirut's best work, chiefly the gorgeous triumph "Postcards From Italy", an infectious, Rufus Wainwright-tinged love/death story accented by loping majorette drumming, a menagerie of horns, and a plucky ukulele lilt that mixes perfectly with Condon's airy croon.
Elsewhere, "Bratislava" is a celebratory march for the Slovakian capital-- a sweaty, saw-dusted cabaret jam with Gogol Bordello. It's at moments like these, his vocals placed further back in the mix, that you realize the kid sounds truly authentic and captivating. In the bubblier chill of "Scenic World", Condon arms the troops with dinky Six Cents & Natalie Casio drum machines and brings them into Magnetic Fields and Jens Lekman territory. It's two minutes of pretty pop, plain and simple. At the end, amid horn flourishes, accordion, and doubled vocals he sings, "I try to imagine a careless life/ A scenic world where the sunsets are all breathtaking"-- he holds the last word, letting it swoon and flutter, like Morrissey with a hammer-and-sickle Band-Aid on his nipple.
Time and again, the most powerful element of Gulag Orkestar, and what ought to be emphasized, is Condon's acrobatic, powerful, emotionally nuanced voice. It could carry any style of music. Fixate for a second on the stuff he's doing on "Rhineland (Heartland)". The lyrics are dopey, but his trills and whirls are mind-blowing. Pairing these melodies with Eastern European accouterments in lieu of standard guitar-pop creates an obvious appeal. Still, the question ought to be asked: Are the songs really so incredible or do they simply mimic and mine musical traditions unfamiliar to the average indie rock fan? That said, the best songs here are a joy and the average and ho-hum tunes even have a thick and aesthetically appealing atmosphere-- in other words, it's an impressive and precocious debut. | 2006-05-11T02:00:05.000-04:00 | 2006-05-11T02:00:05.000-04:00 | Rock | Ba Da Bing | May 11, 2006 | 7.7 | d7df2adc-dd03-49b4-860c-ac099eeedf0e | Brandon Stosuy | https://pitchfork.com/staff/brandon-stosuy/ | null |
Ultimate Painting is centered on the wiry guitar lines of Jack Cooper (Mazes) and James Hoare (Veronica Falls). Their economical three-minute songs echo the patient melodies of the Velvet Underground's self-titled third album and the workingman's garage-pop of New Zealand bands like the Chills and the Bats. | Ultimate Painting is centered on the wiry guitar lines of Jack Cooper (Mazes) and James Hoare (Veronica Falls). Their economical three-minute songs echo the patient melodies of the Velvet Underground's self-titled third album and the workingman's garage-pop of New Zealand bands like the Chills and the Bats. | Ultimate Painting: Green Lanes | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/20842-green-lanes/ | Green Lanes | Ultimate Painting named their first album Ultimate Painting, and opened it with a song called "Ultimate Painting". Those neutral titles matched the duo's no-frills music. Centered on the wiry guitar lines of Jack Cooper (Mazes) and James Hoare (Veronica Falls), their economical three-minute songs echoed the patient melodies of the Velvet Underground's self-titled third album and the workingman's garage-pop of New Zealand bands like the Chills and the Bats. Ultimate Painting was winningly casual, the sound of two congenial dudes psyched to roll out easygoing melodies. But repeat listens revealed intriguing tensions inside basic templates.
The group's follow-up, Green Lanes, sounds even more casual. It's mellower and more subdued, with most songs ticking along at medium tempo or slower. At first it even seems that Ultimate Painting might have gotten too relaxed, drifting into zoned-out territory (they did recently use a modified Grateful Dead logo as their Twitter avatar). But much like its predecessor, Green Lanes grows more interesting and distinctive with each subsequent rotation. Cooper and Hoare's deceptively simple interplay slowly worms into your synapses, as their seemingly anonymous melodies gain personality.
That's part of what makes Green Lanes so cohesive, since its lyrical themes are as simple as its moods. Many songs focus on the austere pleasures of nature—words such as ocean, beach, fog, and sun recur—as well as the plain details of daily life. One of the catchiest tunes, the lament "(I've Got the) Sanctioned Blues", plays like the song about unemployment benefits VU never wrote.
Songs like that could easily come off as run-of-the-mill, but Ultimate Paining infuse their short, spartan verses with deep contemplation. Just as Real Estate's music gathers meaning in nostalgia, Cooper and Hoare tap into universal experiences that approach profundity rather than mundanity. This gives their songs a vintage hue, most obvious in the Beatles-esque piano of "Break the Chain" and the Beach Boys-like vocal harmonies of "Paying the Price".
Such classic reference points make it tempting to call Green Lanes a low-stakes record. Music this devoid of attention-seeking flash or overt ambition can sometimes appear risk-averse. But truly committing to any style means taking a chance, even if that style is inherently low-key. American Analog Set and Low built a wide palate with an understated approach, and the quietude of that third Velvet Underground album seemed daring at the time. Ultimate Painting are similarly devoted to a calm, subtle cause, and on Green Lanes that humble gamble again pays off handsomely. | 2015-08-03T02:00:03.000-04:00 | 2015-08-03T02:00:03.000-04:00 | Rock | Trouble in Mind | August 3, 2015 | 7.4 | d7e518c7-5455-46bc-ba47-cb946376b65c | Marc Masters | https://pitchfork.com/staff/marc-masters/ | null |
Featuring songs by Frank Ocean, Lana Del Rey, Nick Cave, and more, Chan Marshall’s third collection of covers is her widest ranging yet, illustrating her talent for radical reinvention. | Featuring songs by Frank Ocean, Lana Del Rey, Nick Cave, and more, Chan Marshall’s third collection of covers is her widest ranging yet, illustrating her talent for radical reinvention. | Cat Power: Covers | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/cat-power-covers/ | Covers | It can take a keen set of ears to tell when Chan Marshall is singing someone else’s tune. Take her rendition of the Rolling Stones’ “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction,” which opens 2000’s The Covers Record. Her voice dragging over spindly guitar, she sounds like a broken bird in a burned-out nest. Where the Stones’ swaggering anthem was a hot-blooded rush, Marshall’s version is hushed and dolorous, a wilted lily in an airless mausoleum. It’s not just a question of mood: She excises the song’s entire chorus, leaving only vignettes that feel like disconnected snapshots of a deep and unrelenting depression. Where the Stones’ song revels in a surfeit of emotion, Cat Power’s anhedonic dirge is a lament for the very impossibility of feeling anything at all.
To render a song so unrecognizable can appear irreverent, but Marshall has never come off as ironic or trolling. Even her most radical reinterpretations feel tender, searching, and, above all, thoughtful. And there are many: In addition to what are now three collections of cover songs, with the arrival of her latest album, Covers, most of her releases contain at least one song made famous by another singer. Her choices can be canonical or idiosyncratic: She’s tackled Duke Ellington, Bob Dylan, and Billie Holiday, but also Liza Minelli, Creedence Clearwater Revival, and Ca$h Money rappers Hot Boys. Long before indie rock’s cloistered scene had given way to a more diverse and dynamic landscape, Marshall reminded her listeners that life didn’t begin with the Velvet Underground (even though she covered them too). The widest ranging of any of her covers collections yet, Covers pushes beyond the habitual melancholy that has marked much of her work. In bold colors and vivid relief, it illustrates her talent for radical reinvention.
Her choices are audacious right from the opening track: “Bad Religion,” a total teardown of Frank Ocean’s 2012 single about nursing emotional wounds. In place of the original’s gospel organs and ’60s soul strings, Marshall swaps in piano backed by a subtle but muscular rock rhythm section. She not only changes the song’s key; she writes new chords and even a new melody. And while some of her lyrical edits might seem minor on the page—“Praise the Lord/Hallelujah, little girl” in place of “Allahu akbar”—her delivery brings these lines to the forefront, drawing out “Lord” into four agonized syllables that feel like a physical bloodletting. The most striking line of all is her own addition: “All just stuck in the mud/Praying to the invisible above,” an act of supplication that teases out the song’s implicit theme of faith and illuminates it like a cross up on the wall.
Rarely content with merely rearranging the decor of a given song, Marshall seems happier tearing up floorboards and pulling down drywall, as though she were intent upon revealing structures that were there all along, just hidden from view. On “Unhate,” she covers herself, translating the skeletal blues of The Greatest’s “Hate” into a smoldering, psychedelic whorl of Rhodes and multi-tracked vocals. To revisit a song where the key line is “I hate myself and I want to die” is no small thing; here, it feels like a statement of defiance, as though only by saying the words could she rob them of their power. Where the original is fragile and dejected, this song pulses with life. It’s striking, in fact, how forceful so many of the songs are. She turns the motorik chug of Iggy Pop’s “The Endless Sea” into an eerie electric blues, woozy but hi-def, that takes additional cues from the Stooges’ “Dirt”; she remakes the rolling psychobilly of Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds’ “I Had a Dream Joe” into a seething, churning drone that feels cut from Swans’ ritualistic cloth.
Of course, this being Cat Power, there’s plenty of material that is simple and bittersweet, like a downy pump-organ update of the Pogues’ “A Pair of Brown Eyes” or a starkly sentimental rendition of “These Days,” a Jackson Browne song first made famous by Nico. Marshall’s fingerpicked version of the latter is one of the album’s most faithful tributes; ironically, that makes it one of Covers’ riskier moves, given how many times the soft-rock standard has been interpreted by other singers. But Marshall’s weary tone is such a lovely fit for its downcast air, it might as well have been written expressly for her. Her voice has never sounded better than it does on Covers; her greatest interpretive talent might be her ability to slip between the lines of the stave and capture shades of emotion so subtle that they defy naming. Consider “I’ll Be Seeing You,” a love song popularized in the 1940s. Billie Holiday’s version is wistfully but gracefully resigned, a fond farewell to a bygone love. But Cat Power’s husky enunciation and mournful blue notes make it sound less like a ballad than an obituary. It’s devastating.
One of the album’s best tracks is also its most unexpected. The song “Pa Pa Power” is by Dead Man’s Bones, a Halloween-themed project from 2009 featuring actor Ryan Gosling and a children’s choir founded by Red Hot Chili Peppers bassist Flea. Their song, if it’s about anything, might be about deceitful robots. (“We won’t destroy you,” promises the chipper chorus, but the verses tell another tale: “Burn the street, burn the cars… Broken glass, broken hearts.”) The tone is quirky and low-stakes, faintly ironic—imagine Man or Astro-Man? as sung by the Langley Schools Music Project, perhaps—and largely forgettable. But in Marshall’s hands, it becomes something else entirely. Though she’s barely changed the words, it sounds like she’s singing about revolution, turning Gosling’s band’s flat affect into a plea of anguish: “Burn the streets, burn the cars/Power/Broken glass, but what about our broken hearts?” Lingering on every broken syllable, the grain of her voice gone smooth, she sounds bone tired, as though worn down by the past few years of social upheaval and daunted by the long, uphill climb to come. Again, her voice does the heavy lifting, every sigh and pause and halting melisma expressing as much as, or more than, any of her couplets. When I hear her singing “Pa Pa Power,” I can’t help but wonder: What did she hear in Dead Man’s Bones’ song in order to turn it into this? In moments like these, the unusual nature of her approach reveals itself. On Covers, we don’t just hear Marshall singing to us; we hear her listening to the world.
Buy: Rough Trade
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Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2022-01-14T00:00:00.000-05:00 | 2022-01-14T00:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Domino | January 14, 2022 | 7.7 | d7e7ccd7-bdf6-458d-ad75-31b3cbb70e39 | Philip Sherburne | https://pitchfork.com/staff/philip-sherburne/ | |
In 1973, producer Craig Leon went to see an exhibit of ancient art made by the Dogon people, a Malian tribe. He took what he learned and made Anthology of Interplanetary Folk, a masterpiece of early electronic music that acts as a precursor to later explorations in industrial music, new age, and ambient techno. | In 1973, producer Craig Leon went to see an exhibit of ancient art made by the Dogon people, a Malian tribe. He took what he learned and made Anthology of Interplanetary Folk, a masterpiece of early electronic music that acts as a precursor to later explorations in industrial music, new age, and ambient techno. | Craig Leon: Anthology of Interplanetary Folk Music Vol. 1: Nommos/Visiting | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/19434-craig-leon-anthology-of-interplanetary-folk-music-vol-1-nommosvisiting/ | Anthology of Interplanetary Folk Music Vol. 1: Nommos/Visiting | In the 1970s—the decade during which he'd produced groundbreaking debut records by Suicide, the Ramones, Richard Hell, and Blondie—Craig Leon went to see an exhibit of ancient art made by a tribe from Mali, the Dogon. Although their people have lived in relative seclusion for centuries, their ancestors developed an impressively complex system of astronomy. The Dogon worship amphibious, extraterrestrial creatures called Nommos, who are believed to have travelled to earth from the distant star Sirius B. All of which might sound a little out there—until you learn that in the 20th century, modern astronomers were astonished to find how accurate the Dogon's ancient calculations were; somehow, centuries before telescopes, their ancestors had identified stars that were invisible to the naked eye. Leon was as taken with this mystery as he was with his growing collection of synthesizers. He decided to make an album of what he imagined would be playing "on the Nommos's Walkman" ("They would have had to listen to something on an interplanetary flight… otherwise it would have been very boring") and, in a cosmic nod to Harry Smith, give it the playful title Anthology of Interplanetary Folk.
The resulting collection is a masterpiece of early electronic music—a precursor to later explorations in industrial music, new age, and ambient techno—but up until now, it's never been heard exactly how Leon intended. Leon composed the Anthology as two "mirror image" parts: The driving and metallic Nommos came out on John Fahey's Takoma label as a standalone LP in 1981, and its sequel, the softer and more subdued Visiting came out a year later. In the decades it's been out of print, Nommos in particular has been bootlegged repeatedly, and late last year the California label Superior Viaduct put out a reissue of Nommos against Leon's wishes. "I had always envisioned a different version of the album being the definitive version," Leon said, and so the 2013 release spurred him into taking control of the record's legacy. This new authorized reissue, put out with care by the Brooklyn label RVNG, finally presents Leon's otherworldly achievement exactly as he wanted it to be heard, with Nommos and Visiting side by side for the first time.
A cliche you often hear about early synth-based music is that it "still sounds like something from the future," but what's interesting about Anthology is that it was always meant to sound like a transmission from the past. As his invented genre of "interplanetary folk" attests, Leon was drawn to the interplay of apparent opposites: antiquity and progress, earth and space, and, of course, new age and punk. Anthology is not an anthropological attempt to replicate (or colonize) the sounds of the Dogon tribe, but rather something more creative and personal—a sonic work of speculative fiction that uses "new" technology to imagine a time before recorded music. Neither primitive nor futuristic, it still has this uncanny feel of music that exists somewhere outside of time.
The atmosphere of Nommos is clanging and aqueous (because the Nommos could swim, Leon wanted to make it sound like music heard underwater). Driven by a mesmerizing polyrhythmic beat, "Donkeys Bearing Cups" is punctuated by sudden spurts of jagged-aluminum synths, while the incandescent "Nommo" lulls you into a gentler (though no less immersive) trance. Anthology's centerpiece is Nommos' penultimate track, the haunting 15-minute reverie "Four Eyes to See the Afterlife", the last two-thirds of which build on a tinny loop and a wordless, interplanetary siren song voiced by Leon's wife and collaborator Cassell Webb.
Although it still captures a feeling of intergalactic awe, Visiting is meant to evoke a more terrestrial vibe than its companion piece. The bright and lively "Region of Fleeing Civilians" is the closest the collection comes to a straight-ahead synth-pop instrumental (complete with percussion that sounds like handclaps), and "Visiting" introduces a tranquilly lilting guitar into the atmosphere. As far as its earth-bound kindred spirits go, Anthology sounds attuned to the frequencies that had been coming out of Germany that decade: Nommos' "She Wears a Hemispherical Skullcap" has an "Autobahn"-esque luminosity about it, while Anthology's more muted moments echo Brian Eno's work with Cluster. Still, as Leon explains, the spirit of New York punk is pulsing through it, too. "The Lower East Side scene was very involved in counterculture art and poetry," he recalled in a recent interview. "It became populist later, but if you look at Patti Smith, Television, Talking Heads, even the Ramones… Nommos fit in with that."
The timing of this reissue couldn't be better. We're in middle of a modest but notable new age revival, when a new generation of listeners are reassessing this often-misunderstood genre, discovering its pioneers, and uncovering its hidden DIY roots. Leon is a perfect embodiment of new age's unexpected punk past, and it would seem the world is only now catching up with his vision, over thirty years after his Anthology was released. A few months ago, I had the pleasure of seeing Leon play Nommos in full at the Greenwich Village venue Le Poisson Rouge, a short walk from the downtown clubs where he first saw Suicide and Patti Smith decades ago. His set featured spacey visual projections, and he and Webb were joined by the stylistically adventurous string ensemble ACME—which, actually, was how he envisioned this supposed synth-classic all along. "It was meant to be orchestral," he admitted in a recent interview, "but we didn't have any money!" Like these performances, the definitive reissue finally brings Leon's landmark work full circle. Anthology of Interplanetary Folk is far from some kitschy relic of electronic music past; in fact, there may have never been a better time to join Leon for the ride. | 2014-06-26T02:00:02.000-04:00 | 2014-06-26T02:00:02.000-04:00 | null | Rvng Intl. | June 26, 2014 | 8.4 | d7eb7585-7375-4874-bae3-9c016b1596ee | Lindsay Zoladz | https://pitchfork.com/staff/lindsay-zoladz/ | null |
Chicago R&B singer Ravyn Lenae’s impressive new EP brims with quiet intensity, as her subtle falsetto glides over a blend of modern bounce, dream pop, and electro-soul. | Chicago R&B singer Ravyn Lenae’s impressive new EP brims with quiet intensity, as her subtle falsetto glides over a blend of modern bounce, dream pop, and electro-soul. | Ravyn Lenae: Midnight Moonlight EP | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/23183-midnight-moonlight-ep/ | Midnight Moonlight EP | As a kid growing up in Chicago, Ravyn Lenae listened to a steady stream of R&B, alt-rap, and neo-soul—in a 2016 interview, she called out OutKast, Timbaland, India.Arie, and Erykah Badu as some of her influences. Now a member of the Zero Fatigue crew with rapper Smino and producer Monte Booker, the vocalist captures a robust spectrum of black art while establishing her own aesthetic. Lenae doesn’t sing, per se; instead, her blend of atmospheric hums speaks directly to you, even as Booker’s swirling beats threaten to take most of the attention. There’s a strong nostalgia to Lenae’s music that borrows from her late ’90s and early ’00s influences, but she doesn’t simply mimic them. Lenae’s art feels current.
For her impressive new EP, Midnight Moonlight, Lenae treads the same path she began on 2015’s Moon Shoes, her excellent debut. But where that collection was far brighter, Midnight carries a methodical late-night vibe suitable for Quiet Storm radio. Lenae reemerges having signed to Atlantic Records and garnered praise from the likes of Badu and Nas; she’s the latest in a recent line of Chicago musicians (Noname, Jamila Woods, Saba) to make national waves. And she’s still a teenager, studying classical music at the Chicago High School for the Arts.
With Booker on production once again, Midnight brims with quiet intensity, bringing singers like Syd and Aaliyah to mind. Yet while their art focuses strictly on hip-hop and R&B, Lenae’s sound feels a bit more atmospheric, blending modern bounce, dream pop, and electronica, encompassing those subgenres without leaning too heavily on one in particular. These words feel equally assertive and despondent, coming off like sweet one-liners scribbled in the margins of crumpled notebook paper.
There’s a nomadic nature to this work that grows stronger as the album plays, as if Lenae is still trying to find her voice among the colors. Her timbre—a soft, subtle falsetto—isn’t built for long runs or exaggerated solos, but when mixed within Booker’s nuanced electro-soul, the results are especially soothing. On “Hiatus,” the composer crafts a Brainfeeder-inspired track over which Lenae’s airy sighs set a romantic mood: “When your heart won’t grow, on you I’ll rain.” Then, on “Last Breath,” it seems Lenae wades into political terrain. “Are you willing/To sacrifice your life?” she sings, her tone more prominent. “Are you willing/To give it up tonight?” On an album full of subtlety, this is easily its most defiant stance. Lenae fills the romantic and political with grace and gravity, a dazzling feat that she's thankfully just beginning to explore. | 2017-04-25T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-04-25T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | Atlantic / Three Twenty Three | April 25, 2017 | 7.8 | d7ed03ec-e377-4c8d-abfe-c94b3c296ee2 | Marcus J. Moore | https://pitchfork.com/staff/marcus-j. moore/ | null |
Mono's ninth album looks to nothing less than the mother of all epics, Dante's The Divine Comedy, for inspiration. | Mono's ninth album looks to nothing less than the mother of all epics, Dante's The Divine Comedy, for inspiration. | Mono: Requiem for Hell | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22496-requiem-for-hell/ | Requiem For Hell | Perhaps the most surprising thing about Mono making a record inspired by Dante’s The Divine Comedy is that it took them nine albums to do it. Since their dramatic 2001 debut Under the Pipal Tree, the Japanese ensemble’s arrangements have only swelled, growing ever grander and more orchestral—like a lot of instrumental post-rock bands, they’ve often struggled with how to one-up themselves. So on Requiem for Hell, their ninth album, they look to nothing less than the mother of all epics, Dante’s account of the journey of man’s soul, on a song cycle patterned around the rhythms of life and death. If that all sounds lofty, it is, but no more so than any other Mono album from the last decade. At this point in their career, going big is their default play.
Hell’s title makes it clear which installment of The Divine Comedy most captured Mono’s imagination. There’s a reason why every high school English curriculum assigns Inferno but hardly anybody makes it through Paradiso. Graphic depictions of sinners submerged in shit and gnawed at by three-headed dogs are inherently more exciting than scenes of celestial figures politely discussing theological doctrine. Like Dante, then, Mono cut right to the lurid stuff, the peeling flesh and showers of scalding sand. Opener “Death in Rebirth” speeds up the band’s usual slow build a bit, its guitars taking only a few minutes to reach a sinister, Locrian-esque squall. The song runs with the heavier influences Mono played up on 2014’s Rays of Darkness, but it’s more convincingly fierce than anything on that record, one of their most effective flirtations with metal.
The kinder, gentler strings and glockenspiels of the album’s shortest piece “Stellar” initially seem like an attempt to sooth some of the burn of that opener, but really it’s just a misdirection, a pause for the band to reset the stage just so Requiem for Hell’s title track can pour kerosene all over it again. That 18-minute centerpiece is a mixed bag, encompassing the album’s showiest thrills but also its most tedious stretches. Its payoff comes early, when the guitars erupt around the five-minute mark, and the acrobatics that follow are exhilarating. But eventually the track begins to play out like an Aristocrats joke, an exercise in how needlessly long you can stretch out an idea without it collapsing under its own excess. By its shrill final stretch, the song is no longer intensifying so much as simply sustaining the illusion that it’s intensifying; the noise circles around itself in a kind of infinity loop, like a GIF of an M.C. Escher staircase. The only payoff is that it ends.
Hell’s overloaded title track doesn’t do any favors to the album’s more subtle, paradise-inspired closing compositions. Lovely as they are, “Ely’s Heartbeat” (set to a sample of the in-utero heartbeat of a friend’s child) and the ponderous closer “The Last Scene” barely even register after all that noise. And really, that’s the story of the band’s whole catalogue: When you go full hog so readily, the smaller moments inevitably get dwarfed. It’s a trap Mono have always struggled with, and anybody expecting them to figure out a way around it on album number nine probably should have moved on years ago.
The harshest knock against Mono has long been that, consistent as they are, they haven’t contributed a single original idea to the genre. And it’s true: They’ve never attempted anything that hasn’t been done before and better by Sigur Rós, Godspeed! You Black Emperor, or Explosions in the Sky—instead they merely shuffle those same tropes into something comfortingly familiar. It’s not as glamorous as recording classics, yet in a way their prolificacy seems tuned to the way music is consumed now. In the streaming era, where albums are no longer pricey investments but essentially free to anybody with a Spotify or Apple Music plan, there’s a lot more room in the market for this kind of mid-tier post-rock. If you’re in the mood for a good-enough orchestral rock album that lifts and falls in all the expected ways, you might as well queue up one you haven’t heard before. Mono are doing their part to keep you in a steady supply of them. | 2016-10-17T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-10-17T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Temporary Residence Ltd. | October 17, 2016 | 5.9 | d7f35d39-8235-44a8-ab30-06cd326270b1 | Evan Rytlewski | https://pitchfork.com/staff/evan-rytlewski/ | null |
The emo lifer’s seventh album tries to balance intimacy and accessibility, but he only ends up with the latter. | The emo lifer’s seventh album tries to balance intimacy and accessibility, but he only ends up with the latter. | Dashboard Confessional: Crooked Shadows | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/dashboard-confessional-crooked-shadows/ | Crooked Shadows | Chris Carrabba’s lyrics loom over today’s pop like a baffling relic of teendom. Taylor Swift, Paramore’s Hayley Williams, and Kacey Musgraves can sing some of these pained words by heart, but so can scrappy emo revivalists and maudlin rap-rockers. If you’ve been a teenager at any point in the 21st century, then perhaps you can too.
The release of the first Dashboard Confessional album in more than eight years is an opportunity to revisit the reasons why so many young music lovers learned his piercing, sentimental lines in the first place. Carrabba’s debut, 2000’s The Swiss Army Romance stands as an incredible pop document, like emo lightning in a singer-songwriter bottle. The impression I had back then, in my own late teens, was of a tender-hearted misfit, shouting out his innermost feelings over not much more than acoustic guitar. It was released in a small run on a South Florida label near where Carrabba grew up, just as the internet was reshaping how music could spread. He wasn’t the first bandleader to unplug, but he made an artistic identity out of it.
Young audiences recognized themselves in these diaristic songs of naïve longing. Carrabba knew how to wring maximum stomach butterflies out of small but commonplace details, and he left enough space for us to find our own voices in those strums and yelps. But Crooked Shadows, Dashboard’s seventh album, is also a chance to acknowledge the reasons it sometimes seems better to let those lyrics lie dormant in the cultural subconscious. There was a tension between Dashboard’s austere origins and the full-band gloss needed for a stretch of three gold albums released between 2001 and 2006. It’s also harder to take Dashboard’s post-adolescent pining with a straight face once you reach the age—from mid-20s to early-30s—that Carrabba actually was during that charmed run. Worse was the male-centric solipsism, brimming with angst toward a largely undifferentiated female “you,” that rightly led to feminist reevaluations of how emo could often be sexist.
Dashboard’s recordings since those early years have oscillated between mega-produced albums for a mass audience and stripped-down sets for fans. He’d retreat into the studio with big-name producers like Daniel Lanois or Tony Visconti, and then turn around and sell a tour-only album of acoustic covers. With Crooked Shadows, Carrabba aims to bring together his competing production impulses. Unfortunately, the results are all over the place. It’s possible to balance intimacy and accessibility, but it’s not easy, and too often here we end up with only the latter. The most egregious example is road-trip anthem “Belong,” a corporate-synergy collaboration with DJ group Cash Cash that brings to mind the Chainsmokers producing Owl City. “We got the radio pumping jams,” Carrabba sings in a rasp, like he’s lifting something heavy.
Reassurance is a theme of the album and the opener “We Fight,” about defending a fiercely inclusive local music scene, is a highlight. There’s real urgency in Carrabba’s delivery, as the arrangement swells from Death Cab for Cutie-ish introspection to full-throated righteousness. Ironic detachment won’t help the kid “who’s tired of bleeding, and battered, and being torn up,” Carrabba demonstrates, but hollering along with kindred spirits just might.
But the thing that really connects these nine songs on this disparate, scattershot album together is that every song is generally disappointing. “Catch You” is synth-streaked new-wave pop a la the Cars, with Carrabba oddly asserting that he’s “no angel” but, given that “it’s a long way up to fall all the way down,” he’ll still swoop to your rescue. “About Us” is by-the-numbers keyboard pomp, with shades of fun., the Killers, or any other fine purveyor of “wanna hold you a little bit tighter/burn like a lighter” power ballads. Crooked Shadows’ finale “Just What to Say,” with stately guest vocals by Chrissy Costanza of labelmates Against the Current, describers all the symptoms of writer’s block, and the rest of the record certainly exhibits them.
Did you know that, several years ago, Carrabba formed a Mumford-style stomp-and-clap folk-pop band? He did. And that’s most evident on the stark strummer “Heart Beat Here,” which resembles early Dashboard on bluegrass. He’s still melodramatic, letting us picture a married couple connecting despite time they’re forced to spend apart, but he has only clumsy things to sing about feeling a pulse. “Be Alright” is built more on smoldering U2-style arena rock, but it too has one of those “oh-oh-oh” jamboree hooks. And if “we ain’t the kind to play it safe,” as he claims on the song, why is this reassurance so stultifyingly bland?
Dashboard being Dashboard, Carrabba offers romantic comfort, too. On “Open My Eyes,” with melodramatic violin from YouTube star Lindsey Stirling, Carrabba begs for an epiphany amid a relationship that’s grown “from dancing and turning/to pacing and worrying.” It’s relatable the way Dashboard once could be, but also a tad generic. The title track, with hints of the prickly guitars from Paramore’s 2017 alt-pop balm “Hard Times,” resolves the tense moments that happen between two otherwise-loving adults with a silhouetted image. The female partner in his songs still isn’t a three-dimensional character, but at least she more closely resembles one.
The other night, while getting ready for dinner, I inadvertently started singing the title track of Dashboard’s 2001 So Impossible EP. My wife, who knew the song from a mix I’d made for her back when it was fairly new, weighed in, sounding more exasperated than annoyed: “I thought we were done with this.” She wasn’t wrong. Like so much else in our past lives, the impact these words once had on me was gone, replaced with the bittersweet tang of nostalgia. I stopped singing immediately. Carrabba doesn’t have the same luxury. | 2018-02-10T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2018-02-10T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Fueled by Ramen | February 10, 2018 | 4.7 | d7fbd674-d5a6-4a4f-8aaf-e9e7e8a11c6b | Marc Hogan | https://pitchfork.com/staff/marc-hogan/ | |
The Detroit techno and house producer Jay Daniel expands outward, embracing his role as percussionist and folding vibrant live textures into his sound. | The Detroit techno and house producer Jay Daniel expands outward, embracing his role as percussionist and folding vibrant live textures into his sound. | Jay Daniel: Broken Knowz | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22656-broken-knowz/ | Broken Knowz | “The reality of dance music is that it encompasses more than just dance music,” the 25-year-old DJ and producer Jay Daniel recently told an interviewer asking about the Detroit music scene. He also seemed to be displaying his career ambitions in a single sentence. After several notable years as a prodigious house and techno talent, Daniel is cautiously expanding his purview. “I’m called a techno artist when really I’m a drummer,” he said. “I want to be referred to as a musician more so than a DJ.”
Since 2013 the Detroit artist has shared a handful of scatterbrained 12”-single and EP releases, improving in strides along the way. The progression has been leading up to an official debut called Broken Knowz, his first long player and also the first time he’s fully centering live percussion in his production, shifting purposefully from programming drums in favor of channelling his own considerable chops.
Daniel grew up in Detroit with his mother, the elusive soulful house singer Naomi Daniel, and then in Maryland with his father, where he picked up a pair of drumsticks and played throughout high-school. “I feel go-go had an effect on the way I see and hear music,” he once said of his time away from Detroit. “The cadence and syncopation is different from any other music. I could have played in a band, but it’s easier to make music by yourself.”
Accordingly, this debut feels like a solitary affair, full of the type of obsessive layering that can only be accomplished by a single pair of hands. The nine songs on Broken Knowz brim with meticulous, meditative production, and Daniel’s drumming is a revelation throughout. Instead of chopping up his drum sounds and triggering them individually, the artist uses multiple tracks to layer and loop percussion takes he recorded in his mother’s Detroit basement. As a result, the rhythms on Broken Knowz sound alive and slinky, and somehow despite all the singular attention nothing on it sounds fussy.
Daniel diverts sounds like a sleight-of-hand artist. A busily tapped hi-hat clouds the driving kick-drum of “1001 Nights” before a clipping sound builds into a galloping rhythmic element. Like any artist making dance music, Daniel revels in repetition, and he digs up little revelations inside his evolving loops. It’s an easy, popular trick to build a track up by its components, and while Daniel frequently relies on song-length crescendos of complexity, he arranges his layers with nuance and restraint, introducing certain sounds as flashy highlights and others as inconspicuous building blocks.
“Paradise Valley” is an obvious standout, and it’s also a bit of a red herring in its lush feel, a brilliant dose of shifty electronic funk that betrays some of the deeper and more austere grooves that follow. Unlike many of the songs on Broken Knowz, Daniel leads from the start with a shimmering synth that soars over a clanking percussive element. The producer taps a cowbell like a funky metronome in the right channel before a warbling synth lead rises and squirms above everything else. It’s busy and quirky, naturally just-so.
In interviews and as a DJ, Jay Daniel comes off studious and workmanlike, hyper and humbly self-aware of the Detroit music scene he inhabits. With Broken Knowz he’s fully built up his own identity. The live drum sounds are an obvious advancement in the producer’s craft and personality, but he’s also doubling down in his Detroit diligence, digging deeper into his already deep house and techno roots with sharpened tools. He’s finding old ways to do new things. | 2016-12-03T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2016-12-03T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Electronic | Technicolour | December 3, 2016 | 7.5 | d800ea4c-8307-4b44-a6d9-fbd368fbe0e0 | Jay Balfour | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jay-balfour/ | null |
The experimental craftsman teams here with Elliott Sharp for an improvised concert based on an abstract score, one crafted by graffiti on blank music sheets. | The experimental craftsman teams here with Elliott Sharp for an improvised concert based on an abstract score, one crafted by graffiti on blank music sheets. | Christian Marclay: Graffiti Composition | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/14725-graffiti-composition/ | Graffiti Composition | Christian Marclay is best known as an experimental turntabilist, and for collaborations with John Zorn, Lee Ranaldo, Okkyung Lee, and Elliott Sharp, among others. But he's more a conceptual artist, reaching beyond music into photography, video, collage, installation, and curation. Through these varied pursuits, he's built an impressive oeuvre, recently celebrated in wide-ranging three-month exhibition at New York's Whitney Museum. The downside is that, because his art is so idea-heavy, his records can be more interesting to think about than to listen to.
Take his most famous album, 1985's Record Without a Cover, fascinating mostly due to its lack of sleeve, which meant that accumulated scratches and debris would make it sound different every time it was played. To be fair, Marclay's discography isn't all abstract. His turntable and sample-based records can be entertaining-- 1989's More Encores features chopped-up collages of Johann Strauss, Louis Armstrong, and Jimi Hendrix, and 1997's hyper-cut Records has the cartoon-ish appeal of Carl Stalling and Raymond Scott. But his latest, Graffiti Composition, falls on the more overtly conceptual side, and as a musical experience it's uneven.
The concept behind it goes like this: In 1996, Marclay posted blank music sheets around the streets of Berlin, then returned to photograph them after they had been torn, smudged, and covered with graffiti. 150 of those photos were selected to form an open-ended graphical "score"-- the kind without any traditional notes or time signatures. In 2006, that score was given to Elliott Sharp to arrange and conduct for a single performance. The resulting recording is as much a Sharp album as it is a Marclay one, since Marclay doesn't actually play on it himself.
Which is not to say that the unevenness of Graffiti Composition is Sharp's fault. He assembled a strong lineup of guitarists for the event-- including Ranaldo, Living Colour's Vernon Reid, and Mary Halvorson-- and directed them into a busy mélange of sounds. Drop your digital needle anywhere among the six tracks, and you'll find something interesting-- a tearing note cluster, a thick swath of distortion, a beatific chord. But over 40 minutes, the tonal range of this ensemble turns out to be narrow, and their sounds blur together. Even abrupt shifts in volume feel smooth and unsurprising.
More importantly, Graffiti Composition rarely coheres into something larger than a collection of sonic events. Of course, you can't expect a one-time improvised concert based on an abstract score to produce some kind of linear narrative. But even the most abstract record should possess a memorable cohesion if it's to reward repeated listens. Here, the sounds are often so unconnected, they could be rearranged at random and it would be hard to tell the difference. Perhaps Graffiti Composition would've been best left as a had-to-be-there event*,* memories of which wouldn't be dulled by the harsh light of repetition. As an album to be enjoyed over and over rather than admired once, its impact is fleeting. | 2010-10-11T02:00:04.000-04:00 | 2010-10-11T02:00:04.000-04:00 | Experimental / Rock | Dog W/A Bone | October 11, 2010 | 6.3 | d80312b9-23dc-43d3-8f7f-ac8f7e563c5a | Marc Masters | https://pitchfork.com/staff/marc-masters/ | null |
Sounding effortlessly in command of her money and her sexuality, the Griselda rapper’s new album oozes seductive pleasure. | Sounding effortlessly in command of her money and her sexuality, the Griselda rapper’s new album oozes seductive pleasure. | Armani Caesar: The Liz 2 | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/armani-caesar-the-liz-2/ | The Liz 2 | The rap collective Griselda takes its name from Griselda Blanco, the so-called “cocaine godmother.” Escaping an abusive childhood for life outside the law, Blanco became one of the most infamous operators in an underworld more often dominated by male kingpins and drug lords. The story of a woman who survived by any means necessary must resonate with Buffalo native Armani Caesar, the so-called “first lady” of the overwhelmingly male Griselda label roster. But Caesar’s own chosen icons aren’t all notorious crime bosses, or even corporate girlbosses—her work honors a pantheon of misunderstood women, recognized for their glamor but not always their hustle. The Liz 2 is her second project to be named for Elizabeth Taylor, whose face peers out from the cover, third eye open. No matter the era, Caesar loves a diva with big hair, and her new album abounds with references to everyone from Diana Ross to Paula Deen.
Caesar has been in the game for over a decade, and her work has matured with experience and the aesthetic guidance of the Griselda braintrust. Though she doesn’t share the family connection of cousins Westside, Conway, and Benny, she aligns perfectly with the creative mission of Griselda, a hub for hardworking rap veterans who never quite got their breakout moment. On early mixtapes like 2009’s Bath & Body Work and 2011’s Hand Bag Addict, Caesar worked in a more uptempo pop register, spitting over Dr. Dre and Jazze Pha beats. As her sound has slowed and deepened, she’s taken on an aura that’s arguably closer to the legends she idolizes. Her patient delivery and effortless gravitas command attention rather than giving it.
Draped in fur stoles and costume jewels like a Hollywood star of a bygone era, Caesar holds herself at a distance—not necessarily cold, but poised and self-assured. The new album’s production is a lush velvet of funk samples and soulful strings, the air thick with hairspray and blunt smoke. There’s a disco flair to the Nile Rodgers-like bassline on “Meth & Mary,” and the video for “Diana” imagines something like a remake of Mahogany co-starring Kodak Black. Trippy Moog tones float in the clouds on “Queen City,” and a brooding synthesizer rolls in and out like the tide on “Hunnit Dolla Hiccup.”
When Caesar sings, on tracks like “First Wives Club” and “Snowfall,” her voice is softer and brighter. It’s a sharp turn from her exacting rap flow, but her guard never drops. Words leave her mouth with emphatic precision, and while the pace is thoughtful, certain consonants hit like jabs to the chin. There’s menace to her delivery, and an unsettling tactility to the production—the classic breakbeat and thick bassline of “Survival of the Littest” are married to an incessant background tone that whines like a tea kettle. She’s in her hardcore New York bag on “Mel Gibson,” built from a wonky, scattered piano sample that would sound at home on an Armand Hammer joint.
Caesar’s Griselda period is a redefinition rather than a total reinvention; her core voice remains consistent, but she’s confident enough now to think about the total package. On “Survival of the Littest,” an origin story in the “C.R.E.A.M.” tradition, she breaks down how she hustled her way out of precarity, first as a stripper and then as a rapper. Like her labelmates, she proudly owns what she’s done to survive; there’s an obvious line between the sexual confidence and business acumen of her lyrics and her past work in another genre of performance. Fittingly, The Liz 2 closes with an outright banger that feels destined for placement on the P-Valley soundtrack: the 808-heavy “Sike,” featuring Queendom Come and legendary Texan strip club maestro BeatKing. But The Liz 2 is more than music for the club itself; Armani Caesar is speaking to the girls in the dressing room, reminding them that feeling yourself is the first step to making it on your own. | 2022-10-25T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2022-10-25T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Griselda | October 25, 2022 | 7.4 | d804e1b1-3c54-41ad-8bac-087db590c90d | Nadine Smith | https://pitchfork.com/staff/nadine-smith/ | |
Hip-hop, one of America's last bastions of regionalism, is threatening to exalt itself out of its local roots. Authenticity ... | Hip-hop, one of America's last bastions of regionalism, is threatening to exalt itself out of its local roots. Authenticity ... | Dizzee Rascal: Boy in Da Corner | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/2345-boy-in-da-corner/ | Boy in Da Corner | Hip-hop, one of America's last bastions of regionalism, is threatening to exalt itself out of its local roots. Authenticity issues still insist the genre is tied to the street, but where a hip-hop province used to be as compressed as the South Bronx, it's now as sprawling as the Dirty South. Even during the dichotomy of the pre-Chronic days, when East almost never met West, entire coasts counted as local wards. Ten years later, hip-hop is pop music in America, and its global reach is arguably greater than rock's has ever been. From Missy and Timbaland's tabla to Jay-Z's bhangra beats, The Neptunes' Eastern flavor to dj/Rupture's ragga/Nubian/chart-hop mashups and the Diwali-led rise of Jamaican dancehall, U.S. hip-hop is finally engaged in a two-way dialogue with the rest of the world.
On his debut album, Boy in Da Corner, 18 year-old Dizzee Rascal instantly stakes a claim that East London is hip-hop's next great international outpost. East London: Rascal's world is precisely that small, and it returns a sense of rueful perspective to hip-hop lost among the soundtrack tie-ins, Godzilla-aping Bone Crusher videos, and 50 Cent-style mixtape mythmaking. In basic ways, Rascal echoes the wish fulfillment of much of American hip-hop, but he's hardly mimicking their act. Rascal is at ground level, eyes trained on his immediate surroundings. His rhymes, and especially his beats, reflect his area's desperate social, economic and political landscape. Often, this desolation hardens an emcee's psyche (Styles gets high every day to combat his mental strain) or delivery: This summer's post-ecstasy swing toward punishing sounds and pugnacious looks threatens to bleed the personality, humor, and adventure out of hip-hop. But to wunderkind Rascal, the accelerated disintegration of his immediate world pains him-- absolutely wounds him-- and it's the Tupac-esque mix of brio and vulnerability, along with his dexterous cadence and gutter beats, that separates his rhymes from the typical money/cash/hoes triptych.
On the opening track, "Sittin' Here", Rascal concludes, "I think I'm getting weak 'cause my thoughts are too strong." Over ambient sounds of sirens and guns, he laments, "It was only yesterday/ Life was a touch more sweet." Most people Rascal's age crave arrested development, but Dizzee already longs for the innocence of childhood. And yet, the boy in da corner's emergence from adolescence isn't the start of a self-imposed purgatory-- life on the dole, or at university-- it's spent cowering, crouching and ready to pounce, and most of all, watching. Little of what he sees is pleasant: a cycle of teenage pregnancy, police brutality, and friends lost to the lure of crime and cash (if they're still alive at all). What's perhaps worse: For all of his concern and meditation, Dizzee himself offers few suggestions and little hope. He can dish bravado with the best emcees, but despite the eloquent boasts, he remains fragile, apprehensive, and consumed by the possibility of failure. "I'll probably be doing this, probably forever" is as convincing a career boast as Dizzee can make.
The hesitation and anxiety in that claim could also double as a question: whether Rascal will dabble in hostility forever. On "Brand New Day", he touchingly wonders if estate violence is youthful folly that he and his mates will outgrow. Over a bittersweet melody that sounds like a blend of an Asian music box and a Lali Puna lullaby, Dizzee asks, "When we ain't kids no more/ Will it still be about what it is right now?" For someone with enough of a big-picture grasp to announce that he's "a problem for Antony Blair," there's something tragic and poignant about Rascal wondering aloud if settling scores with organized violence is a mere child's game.
Rascal's curiosity about adulthood and responsibility doesn't, however, extend to fatherhood. Although he has girls on his mind, they're approached with suspicion. "Love talks to everyone/ Money talks more," a female emcee insists on "Wot U On"; "Jezebel" laments the cycle of teen pregnancy, blaming a promiscuous girl for bringing other future Jezebels into the estate. And on "Round We Go", a ringing "hey" (borrowed, Just Blaze-style, from The More Fire Crew) echoes the repetition and similitude of a series of loveless romantic entanglements sexlessly listed by Dizzee. Most strikingly, his debut single "I Luv U"-- recorded at the age of 16-- is a he-said/she-said snipe between an unmoved could-be father and a friend of the girl that could be "juiced up." It's a harsh amalgam of atonal bleeps and blips, washes of gabba sound, and low, harsh bass, fitting for the track's ultimately selfish approach to the impending consequences ("Pregnant/ Whatya talkin' about?/ 15?/ She's underage/ That's raw/ And against the law/ Five years or more"). It's among the record's most captivating, visceral moments.
It's on "I Luv U" that Rascal's sound most nods to the hollow shell of UK garage's end days, just before the champagne went dry and the world economy's bubble burst. UKG's move from feminized, R&B; club music to breakbeats and emcee bravado created a thrilling light/dark duality into which So Solid Crew stepped, and it seemed as if they'd be the ones to put South London on the international hip-hop map. When the press and record buyers began to ignore UKG in droves in 2001, SSC's strength in numbers (their crew has upwards of 20 members) seemed like an urgent plea for attention. They got it: "21 Seconds" shot to #1 on the UK charts, which secured for the collective a memorable Top of the Pops appearance, during which almost all of their members were crammed onto the BBC studio's bulging stage. Of course, they were aware that the sheer size of their group had benefits as well as limitations: The title "21 Seconds" referred to the maximum amount of time any one member could spend at the mic on any given track. This faceless, monolithic look and sound provided their music with a rare and unique power, but was eventually their undoing as well.
With UKG seemingly left in tatters, Rascal and pirate radio cohorts crawled into the wreckage, reconstructing its grimiest bits and blending them with RZA's paranoid minor chords, some off-kilter electro-glitch, the low-rent nihilism of Cash Money and No Limit, and the ghosts of ragga-jungle. Sparse and ugly, Rascal's record is an icy orchestra of scavenger sounds, owing as much to video games and ringtones as it does to anything more overtly musical. The despairing beats make the lyrical push and pull that much more severe: When Dizzee is venomous, they sharpen his bite; when he gamely searches for the light at the end of the tunnel, admits his failures, laments his unraveling psyche, and battles with depression, they seem like obstacles.
Despite Boy in Da Corner's garage roots, it couldn't rightly be called "dance music." There are still traces of those long-gone days when hyping the crowd or extolling the virtues of the drugs or the music were about all a British emcee would provide, but they're nods at best. On "2 Far", a helium-voiced claim ("I'm the fitness instructor") tips its hat to a rave emcee leading a crowd through its all-night workout, but now such calls are relegated to the periphery. Instead, the language-- which had often remained subservient to the beat in the UK's previous attempts to grapple with hip-hop (trip-hop, jungle, garage-rap circa 2000)-- is the focus. The point isn't to disconnect from the body, but to train the mind to match the speed of thought with the deceptively high BPMs.
After a cycle of cynicism, dark humor and despair, Rascal closes the album with "Do It", Boy in Da Corner's answer to The Streets' album-closer "Stay Positive". Simultaneously, it's an apology for his antisocial behavior, a rallying cry, a confession, and a lucid realization that, despite his age, he's already reached the crossroads. His resistance worn, he admits that he wishes he could sleep forever: for days, for years, then "for good," confessing that "if I had the guts to end it all, I would." Like he often does throughout the record, Dizzee sounds as if the only thing nearly as bad as dying is having been born.
Dizzee's despairing wail, focused anger, and cutting sonics place him on the front lines in the battle against a stultifying Britain, just as Johnny Rotten, Pete Townshend, and Morrissey have been in the past. The difference between the four (and their claims that "There's no future," "I hope I die before I get old," "I don't want to wake up on my own anymore," and "I wish I could sleep forever") isn't as different as it might appear on the surface: If Rascal grows at a similar rate, it's not out of the question that he could leave a comparable legacy. | 2003-07-06T01:00:04.000-04:00 | 2003-07-06T01:00:04.000-04:00 | Rap | XL | July 6, 2003 | 9.4 | d809fa85-6008-4219-a771-e9ec3558fe62 | Scott Plagenhoef | https://pitchfork.com/staff/scott-plagenhoef/ | null |
Teaming with producer John Carroll Kirby, the R&B singer sets an idyllic, spiritual mood while contemplating the weight of the world. | Teaming with producer John Carroll Kirby, the R&B singer sets an idyllic, spiritual mood while contemplating the weight of the world. | Eddie Chacon: Sundown | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/eddie-chacon-sundown/ | Sundown | Ibiza may be best known for nightlife, but away from the endless raves and debaucherous parties, the island’s natural beauty can be something to get lost in. In October 2021, Los Angeles musicians Eddie Chacon and John Carroll Kirby escaped to the Mediterranean oasis and found themselves doing exactly that—soaking up the ample sun and lush greenery while recording Sundown, a collection of laid-back grooves and sultry meditations on love, loss, and the human experience.
Chacon has had decades of practice settling into this rarified zone. After an adolescent stint in a mid-’70s garage band with Faith No More founder Mike Bordin and future Metallica bassist Cliff Burton, he made a name for himself singing breezy, radio-friendly music as one half of soul-pop duo Charles & Eddie in the early ’90s. At their peak, they found global chart success with the irresistible “Would I Lie To You?,” from their 1992 debut, Duophonic. But 1995’s follow-up Chocolate Milk flopped and the two called it quits. In 2001, not long after they’d begun entertaining the idea of making music together again, Charles Pettigrew passed away. Chacon changed career paths, becoming a creative director and fashion photographer.
Fast forward to the late 2010s, when a mutual friend introduced Chacon to John Carroll Kirby, a seasoned producer and pianist who’s worked with Solange, Frank Ocean, Steve Lacy, and Harry Styles. Together, they collaborated on Chacon’s 2020 solo comeback, Pleasure, Joy and Happiness, a series of foggy, low-key reflections that Chacon cut through in his barely-there falsetto. His newest album, Sundown, serves as an extension of those meditations on romantic woes and regrets as Chacon and Kirby’s camaraderie matures into an effortless partnership.
A throughline of Chacon’s solo music, built on the foundation of soul legends like Marvin Gaye and Curtis Mayfield, has been his minimal lyrics. For the most part, he’ll stick to one or two core refrains, repeating them until they slowly take the shape of mantras. From accepting the fleeting nature of life on the bouncing synth-funk cut “Comes and Goes” to subtly grappling with his mental state on the shimmering “Same Old Song,” he renders the lessons he’s learned throughout his 59 years short and sweet. The repetition of lyrics on “Far Away” (“What went wrong?”) and “Step by Step” (“Listen to your heart and know/Every day a stepping stone”) exemplifies his less-is-more approach, an ethos of simplicity that shows the influence of spiritual greats like Pharoah Sanders and Laraaji.
The labyrinthine music often fills the gaps between words. Spearheaded by Kirby’s sleek production and woozy fingerwork on the Fender Rhodes, the smooth, soulful instrumentation comes to life with bird-like flutes, samba-infused bongo rhythms, and communal handclaps. The music video for the title track gives a behind-the-scenes look at the utopian recording process at Los Angeles’ 64 Sound Studios, with Chacon, Kirby, and a slew of players, eyes closed, bobbing their heads in unison.
In the impressionistic outlier “Haunted Memories,” Chacon confronts the nature of his difficult mind as his slightly off-key vocals and Kirby’s oscillating keys add a sense of unease. Sequenced back-to-back with “Same Old Song,” this darker stretch mirrors the uncharacteristic anguish he detailed on 2020’s “My Mind Is Out of Its Mind.” With a forlorn but sensual feel, his troubles were easier to digest back then; here, his introspection seems unresolved in a way that’s more visceral. As “Haunted Memories” progresses, his voice trails off like he’s losing himself deeper in thought, while the ticking drumbeat and shaky, fluttering flute seem to engage in a conversation of their own.
It’s not all heavy, though. In the funky “Holy Hell,” Chacon considers whether the glass is half-empty or half-full: “We can keep on shining,” he sings in a confident rasp, “But we can’t stop the hands of time.” Album closer “The Morning Sun” sends things off in high spirits: Blissful saxophones and synth bass emit an air that’s joyous and carefree alongside Chacon’s shaky vibrato, describing summer breezes and gentle rain. Moments like these encapsulate the spontaneous, paradisiacal feel of the album’s early days in Ibiza: a place where Chacon could reflect on love, loss, and the weight of the world without ever losing his groove. | 2023-04-06T00:01:00.000-04:00 | 2023-04-06T00:01:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | Stones Throw | April 6, 2023 | 7.2 | d80c203a-8f54-4af9-9380-5e018a433dbc | Margeaux Labat | https://pitchfork.com/staff/margeaux-labat/ | |
With their self-titled debut, Weval have made the rare electronic record that is so strong and obviously appealing that it can't help but end up in the hands of casual listeners. | With their self-titled debut, Weval have made the rare electronic record that is so strong and obviously appealing that it can't help but end up in the hands of casual listeners. | Weval: Weval | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21951-weval/ | Weval | Every once in awhile an electronic record comes along that is both so strong and so obviously appealing that it can’t help but end up in the hands of people who otherwise own no records from labels like Kompakt, Hyperdub or !K7. Think of The Knife’s Silent Shout in 2006, or Burial’s Untrue and Justice’s † in 2007. Beyond luck and timing, these kinds of releases are successful because they are not only masters of their genre and bring its best attributes to light, but also because they manage to be a lot of different things to different people. It’s uncommon for all of those factors to come into play at once, but with the new self-titled debut album by Weval, it’s easy to imagine how German techno mainstay Kompakt could have the next great crossover artist on their hands.
Weval is the work of Dutch friends Harm Coolen and Merijn Scholte Albers, who have been tinkering together in the studio since first meeting in 2010, Albers coming from a self-described background in trip-hop, and Coolen in house. They describe their creations as being part of no particular subgenre of electronic music but instead a “cumulation of music that inspires” them. These points alone probably explain a lot about why Weval’s music could appeal to audiences of many stripes.
From a very first listen to Weval, it becomes immediately easy to envision the record simultaneously functioning as a summer soundtrack to beach nights at Ibiza, windows-down empty road car drives, backyard BBQs, background ambiance at expensive NYC hotel rooftop bars or headphone music for late-night dog walks. It’s hard to single out highlights on an album whose excellence is partially connected to the phenomenal consistency of mood and feeling it provides, but even so, there are many noteworthy tracks on Weval. “The Battle” begins with a slow, propulsive beat that sounds either like live drums or a well-recorded imitation and a filtered synth refrain. Its assured confidence and its sampled vocal shine with a swagger that sets both the temperament and tone for the rest of the album.
The dryly recorded syncopated pitter-patter drumming underneath “I Don’t Need It” immediately recalls “Bloom” from Radiohead’s *The King Of Limbs. *Other influences on the record stand through more deferentially. Beginning with a Knight Rider bass, “Square People” is almost like a dark, vocal-less homage to Depeche Mode’s “Enjoy the Silence,” with a circulating return chord that gives the song a feeling like it could go on forever. And on the elegiac two-part suite “You Made It,” the warbling senescence of the intro and cooing background vocals recall Boards of Canada and Ulrich Schnauss.
For a record that maintains a constant sonic template, Weval’s peppering of vocals throughout are crucial to providing gentle tone tweaks that keep it interesting. While many tracks are driven by vocal samples by KW Toering, two of them feature actual singing throughout, “Ways to Go” and “Days.” Perhaps due to the Lana Del Rey ringer My Larsdotter on “Days,” it feels like the track most likely to work as a “crossover hit,” or at least the one most likely to inspire an actual “featuring Lana del Rey” collaboration in the near future.
Perhaps best of all are “You’re Mine” and “Just In Case.” The former builds an incredible skittering beat for a minute and a half over a wall of decayed synths that sound like the chirping bugs before finally giving way to the organ hook that carries the song. Coolen and Albers’s sense of pacing is impeccable, seemingly knowing exactly how long to tease each part for maximum effect before moving on to the next. It is perfectly sequenced, mysterious and moody. For a debut album, the fully-formed nature of their songwriting, sublime pacing and monolithically tasteful atmosphere is remarkable. | 2016-06-20T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-06-20T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Kompakt | June 20, 2016 | 8 | d80f594d-2ffb-42d1-bfdf-b8f22f53c99f | Benjamin Scheim | https://pitchfork.com/staff/benjamin-scheim/ | null |
Subsets and Splits