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Method Man's first solo album since 2006 is a throwback to Wu-Tang’s mid-2000s wilderness period where the leading figures tried to establish independent fiefdoms outside of RZA’s view. Raekwon and Inspectah Deck guest. | Method Man's first solo album since 2006 is a throwback to Wu-Tang’s mid-2000s wilderness period where the leading figures tried to establish independent fiefdoms outside of RZA’s view. Raekwon and Inspectah Deck guest. | Method Man: The Meth Lab | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21000-the-meth-lab/ | The Meth Lab | If you've been keeping up with Method Man over the past decade or so, the question isn’t whether he will make embarrassing "Breaking Bad" references on an album called The Meth Lab, it’s how many times will he make a reference, the likely range being "too many" to "far too many." This is how Johnny Blaze does nowadays—after kicking off 8 Diagrams with a promise to "bring the sexy back like Timbaland and Timberlake," he’s followed with countless other, similarly demoralizing punchlines that are at least a year past their spoilage date. Method Man has always been expected to be Wu-Tang Clan's mainstream emissary, and his lyrics mirror their currently tangential relationship with relevancy.
If that doesn’t kill your vibe, look at the tracklisting of The Meth Lab: of the 19 tracks, only three are credited solely to Method Man. One is the intro, another is the outro, and the other is fittingly called "2 Minutes of Your Time". This actually works out quite well for the Method Man brand—if hip-hop has completely passed him by, Method Man can always surround himself with rappers more out of step than himself.
Though it doesn’t advertise as such, The Meth Lab is a throwback to Wu-Tang’s mid-2000s wilderness period where the leading figures tried to establish independent fiefdoms outside of RZA’s view—even if Hanz On, Eazy Get Rite, Mack Wilds, Chedda Bang, Dro Pesci, Kash Verazzano, and Hue Huf aren’t given the dignity of a crew name, The Meth Lab is a posse record in practice, very much in the lineage of Theodore Unit's 718, Polluted Water, or the ultimate in Wu-Tang marginalia, Ugodz-illa Presents the Hillside Scramblers. Pity these dudes if you want—Method Man is still a household name.
Based on their handles alone, you can’t possibly imagine the aforementioned involved with pertinent rap music in 2015. Not that they want to anyway—beyond the likely deathless #hashtag and "no [RAPPER OF INTEREST]" kickers, Meth Lab's foot soldiers have a stylistic cut-off point around the most recent Method Man album, and that came out in 2006. They favor broadly-drawn street journalism and humorless punchlines, less derived from Method Man than the still-down-for-whatever Streetlife, who appears on over 1/3rd of The Meth Lab. The production complements the rapping—you likewise get Wu-Tang’s second tier (4th Disciple, Mathematics behind the boards, Killa Sin and Carlton Fisk on the mic), and the occasional "oh that guy!" from any number of "bring New York back!" waves. The biggest outside appearances come from Corey Gunz and Uncle Murda—both are technically major-label rappers, though it feels like a matter of time before Epic or one of the four imprints currently sharing Gunz fixes the glitch. Likewise, you get a beat from Ron Browz, who no longer refers to himself as Etherboy. Seven tracks are helmed by Pascal Zumaque—the first thing that pops up in a Google search of his name is his LinkedIn page.
Otherwise, you know Meth’s steez—Wu-Tang’s for the children, other rappers need to pull their pants up, hip-hop peaked when you could still hear Method Man songs on the radio. He’s basically turned into Redman now—except when Redman stays making O.J. references in 2015, he’s at least staying in character as hip-hop’s favorite knucklehead uncle. Method Man just sounds like a guy who got set up with a Twitter account and has no initiative to use it, making jokes to himself while watching TV. Sift through the verses for proper names and the likes of Michael Vick, Fat Joe, Lil Mama, and Rappin’ 4-Tay emerge. Yet, here’s the one that I find most fascinating—"I’m here to analyze your shooter like I’m Kenny Smith." Just think about that one for a second—what exactly is Method Man trying to express here? I know what he means, but it also makes no goddamn sense. This is undeniably the result of Method Man’s mind drifting while watching "Inside the NBA" and as far as rapper/actors clowning on the Jet, he now ranks below Shaquille O’Neal.
To Meth’s credit, he hasn’t fallen the fuck off as hard as Inspectah Deck, who shows up on "The Purple Tape", a highlight by default because it also features Raekwon—the one guy left in Wu-Tang Clan who really hasn't fallen off at all. His F.I.L.A. record from earlier this year didn’t leave much of a mark either, but the appearances of Rick Ross, A$AP Rocky, and French Montana didn't feel like desperate grasps at Hot 97 airplay; those guys likely showed up on their own volition, an acknowledgement that Rae’s style has aged well because rapping in code about selling drugs and fly gear has never gone out of style in hip-hop and never will. All you can really do with The Meth Lab is contemplate its reason for existence— if anything, the fact that it's being released on Tommy Boy might get a chuckle out of GZA... provided you can get a chuckle out of GZA. But if you make it to the end, you find out that this is actually a prelude to Method Man’s real solo album. Which will be called Crystal Meth. So really, we’re right back where we started. | 2015-09-03T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2015-09-03T02:00:01.000-04:00 | Rap | Tommy Boy | September 3, 2015 | 4 | d8100656-2141-45bc-a6d4-2124a1b00af9 | Ian Cohen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ian-cohen/ | null |
A new compilation explores the early days of Elliott Smith's alt-rock band, whose tight songcraft and introspective lyrics set the stage for his solo work to come. | A new compilation explores the early days of Elliott Smith's alt-rock band, whose tight songcraft and introspective lyrics set the stage for his solo work to come. | Heatmiser: The Music of Heatmiser | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/heatmiser-the-music-of-heatmiser/ | The Music of Heatmiser | When Elliott Smith and his college buddy Neil Gust formed Heatmiser in Portland in the early ’90s, all the pieces started falling into place. They had two supremely talented songwriters, a thrashing yet tuneful alt-rock sound, and a local following from their sold-out performances at the local club La Luna. Onstage, they were “just a phenomenal, rip-your-head-off-and-shove-it-up-your-ass rock band,” the group’s manager, JJ Gonson, later recalled.
So, what happened? Elliott Smith happened. Relations within Heatmiser deteriorated during the recording of their third album, 1996’s Mic City Sons, and the band broke up just as Smith’s solo career was taking off. Within two years, he was performing at the Oscars while his old band was relegated to coulda-been status. Now, 30 years after Heatmiser’s debut, 1993’s Dead Air, a sprawling, 29-track compilation takes stock of their fiery early recordings and fills in some blanks, making a persuasive case for their undersung greatness.
Heatmiser—rounded out by bassist Brandt Peterson and drummer/engineer Tony Lash—were exhilarating from their first 1992 demo, which comprises the first six tracks here, four of which appeared in slightly more polished form on Dead Air. Each song got in and out in about two minutes and would’ve fit on any college radio playlist in the country. “Lowlife” is a pounding statement of intent, led by Smith’s youthful torment (“I’ve got a plague/Plague in my head”), while “Buick” showcases Gust’s twangier delivery and more narrative-driven songwriting. On “Dirt,” the two singers trade lines and egg each other on, sounding remarkably like Ian MacKaye and Guy Picciotto of Fugazi. Similarly, the previously unheard “Just a Little Prick,” with its hulking bass groove, could pass for a Repeater outtake.
Both Smith and Gust sound consumed with angst and self-loathing. Gust grappled with his alienation as a gay man, a subject he addresses obliquely on “Candyland” and “Can’t Be Touched” (“They’re all so straight they’d swear the earth was flat/And that the bend is in my head,” he sings on the latter). Smith, who removed feminine pronouns from some of his love songs in solidarity with his friend, confronts his own disillusionment with masculinity on “Man Camp,” a darkly funny skewering of the mythopoetic men’s movement.
Despite its definitive title, The Music of Heatmiser is not a career-spanning set. The focus is on Heatmiser’s early recordings, demos, and live cuts from 1992 and 1993, when they played an intense, somewhat derivative brand of post-hardcore, borrowing from trailblazers like Hüsker Dü, Nation of Ulysses, and of course Fugazi. Smith’s vocal style back then—gruff, loud, deep—will come as a shock to anyone only familiar with his solo records. His contributions to Heatmiser’s later albums, particularly Mic City Sons, offer hints of his folk-pop melodicism, but you won’t find any of them here. Instead, we get a charming cover of the Beatles’ “Revolution” and a live recording of the band’s 1993 set on KBOO—a compelling document of their live prowess that’s also a bit repetitive, since most of the tracks also appear on the compilation in demo form.
In retrospect, Smith’s rise as a solo artist seems so preordained that it’s easy to forget how unfashionable his hushed, acoustic style seemed in the mid-’90s. As Smith once reflected, “I thought my head would be chopped off immediately when [Roman Candle] came out because it was so opposite to the grunge thing that was popular.” If it was Smith’s willingness to buck trends that made his records stand out, then Heatmiser had the opposite problem. They were great, but they sounded like a lot of other fashionable bands, too, struggling to fully break out from the pack. The Music of Heatmiser conveys what was so compelling about the band in its nascent period and what was soon to come from Smith: They had caterwauling energy and angst to spare, yes, but they also had the songs. | 2023-10-11T00:03:00.000-04:00 | 2023-10-11T00:03:00.000-04:00 | Metal / Rock | Third Man | October 11, 2023 | 7.5 | d828ba4a-fa0a-4c65-b3a2-f39984ad659b | Zach Schonfeld | https://pitchfork.com/staff/zach-schonfeld/ | |
Gore is easily Deftones’ most engaging record since White Pony, filled with carefully crafted hooks disguised as bridges and transition. As with all of their best music, it sounds like the brutal, beautiful result of the band being passionate enough to rip each other’s heads off. | Gore is easily Deftones’ most engaging record since White Pony, filled with carefully crafted hooks disguised as bridges and transition. As with all of their best music, it sounds like the brutal, beautiful result of the band being passionate enough to rip each other’s heads off. | Deftones: Gore | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21547-gore/ | Gore | Deftones were going through a particularly rough patch and Chino Moreno just had to vent: “I hate all my friends, they lack taste sometimes.” This wasn’t from an interview: it’s a lyric from “Hole in the Earth”, the lead single from their self-described artistic nadir, one where Dan the Automator, Kanye-skeptic Bob Ezrin, Ric Ocasek, and label-appointed song doctors were of no avail for a band that was alternately exhausted and apathetic. Meanwhile, their 2000 masterwork White Pony was plagued with so much in-fighting that Moreno admits, “it almost killed us.” This is worth remembering a decade later in light of how the leadup to Gore has mostly honed in on out-of-context quotes about how they hate each other’s taste sometimes. As with all of their best music, Gore is the brutal, beautiful result of Deftones being passionate enough to rip each other’s heads off.
More justifiable causes for concern were Moreno’s claims that Deftones were making studio-intensive “heady, outside the box” music, worrisome terms that could describe the various, underwhelming material he released with Palms, ††† and Team Sleep since 2012's Koi No Yokan. It’s somewhat surprising that Deftones would want to dig their heels in after being in a groove: Diamond Eyes and Koi No Yokan are strong records, but a lot of the praise felt fueled by relief. The band had proved capable of functioning after a devastating accident left founding bassist Chi Cheng in a coma until his death in 2013, reemerging from their post-White Pony wilderness period with the ability to write hooks again, and their longevity had vindicated their relative critical acclaim and commercial failures compared to the likes of Korn and Limp Bizkit. But their “return to form” felt a bit too literal, and for all of their attempts to distance themselves from nu-metal’s He-Mook posturing, Koi No Yokan’s “Tempest” still did a very convincing job of soundtracking an auto-erotic Vin Diesel montage in Furious 7.
Moreno perhaps sensed they’d exhausted their decades-tested “five guys in a room” format and Deftones entered the studio with no written material and no real timetable. Rather than sapping them of their immediacy or energy, the protracted, Pro Tools-y composition of Gore ensured they didn't have to rely on old patterns or just finish the damn record already. Sound manipulator Frank Delgado reasserts himself on the most texturally luscious Deftones record yet, layering shakers, backmasking effects and dessicated vocal filters onto the shapeshifting bad trip “Acid Hologram”; while Jerry Cantrell dishes Dirt on the bluesy first half of “Phantom Bride”, Delgado pulls the coda down a black hole of grinding ambience. And while the maddening, math-rock rhythms of “Geometric Headdress” and “(L)MIRL” will push drummer Abe Cunningham to his physical limits in a live setting, the arrangements themselves clearly feel like the result of man-machine interplay.
There’s still plenty of the palpable tension between Moreno and Carpenter that drives Deftones records and sometimes derails them. But where previous records tended to isolate their conflicting desires into separate songs or allot them to standard verse/chorus dynamics, both Moreno and Carpenter achieve a compelling standoff throughout Gore. “Hearts/Wires” was the song that prompted Carpenter’s red-flag-raising remarks, and it does recall a more shapely take on Moreno’s Isis-featuring Palms project. Carpenter takes out his frustration on the rest of Gore, as the riffs on “Doomed User” and the title track hit with astonishing, almost atonal brute force. His work on Gore is equally reverent of Meshuggah and the ’80s iterations of Maiden and Metallica, a layering of black-, leather- and denim-metal similar to Deafheaven's New Bermuda. It's a flattering comparison that still manages to demonstrate Deftones' unique presence: they do this in the context of songs that could conceivably be played on rock radio.
Emphasis on conceivably, though—Gore lacks a crossover shot as transcendent as “Be Quiet and Drive (Far Away)", "Change (In the House of Flies)", "Minerva" or “Digital Bath", but there’s a satsifying, nasty, seething edge to “Prayers/Triangles” and “Doomed User” that their post-Chi singles lacked. Still, Gore is easily Deftones’ most engaging record since White Pony, filled with carefully crafted hooks disguised as bridges and transitions; even the requisite, rangier late-album cuts aren’t subject to the drifting coo that Moreno relied on to fill out verses before the inevitable piledriving chorus.
If Diamond Eyes and Koi No Yokan were a vindication of Deftones’ formula, Gore captures the inimitable essence of the band: the thing that makes people reference them when discussing Deafheaven, Sigur Ros’ Kveikur or basically any heavy rock album that strives to be prettier than its peers or vice versa, a truly new metal that’s sensual without resorting to shoegaze tropes, aggressive and unconventionally freaky in a way that never suggests predation or regressive machismo. Synaesthetically speaking, it’s a smear of pink, purple and black, a kiss that bites down on your lip to draw blood. By no means did Deftones invent the idea of combining brutality and beauty in metal, although they were definitely at least a decade ahead of the curve on covering Sade. Nothing short of a name change will likely convince skeptics at this point, but Gore proves that Deftones can remain vital as they are relevant, if they don’t kill each other first. | 2016-04-12T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-04-12T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Metal / Rock | Warner Bros. | April 12, 2016 | 7.8 | d82c299a-a36a-4f3f-b392-7728168a4ac7 | Ian Cohen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ian-cohen/ | null |
Newly unearthed audio of the Stooges’ infamous final original lineup performance highlights their masterful album Fun House and sheds light on their raw, druggy, unhinged stage show. | Newly unearthed audio of the Stooges’ infamous final original lineup performance highlights their masterful album Fun House and sheds light on their raw, druggy, unhinged stage show. | The Stooges: Live at Goose Lake: August 8th, 1970 | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/the-stooges-live-at-goose-lake-august-8th-1970/ | Live at Goose Lake: August 8th, 1970 | The promoter behind the 1970 Goose Lake International Music Festival near Jackson, Michigan promised a good time. His newspaper ad announcing the three-day event wished “peace” to all the “brothers and sisters” who wanted to see Jethro Tull, Chicago, Faces, Bob Seger, the MC5, and a dozen other bands for $15. It wasn’t quite the nightmare that Altamont had been the previous year, but government officials in Michigan decried it as, essentially, a shitshow. The 200,000 in attendance more than tripled the expected capacity, and they were all prohibited from leaving the grounds’ barbed-wire fence enclosure. Sketchy drugs were everywhere, which caused over 500 people to be treated for bad trips on the first day alone; multiple reports emerged of people ingesting “cocaine” or “PCP” that turned out to be horse tranquilizer. The governor later made a public speech decrying the “deplorable” Goose Lake problem and the promoter was indicted for promoting the sale of narcotics.
This was the fittingly chaotic scene of what turned out to be the Stooges’ final show with their original lineup. The band’s Goose Lake set took place one month after the release of Fun House, and that entire summer, they performed their brand new masterpiece in its entirety while Iggy Pop built his legend as an unhinged performer in front of bigger and bigger crowds. In Cincinnati earlier that summer, he was filmed in his dog collar and long silver gloves smearing peanut butter on his chest, mid-crowd-surf. Consider what it must have felt like to see the Stooges perform “1970” in 1970 at a sweaty outdoor music festival—heaving forward with the current of the crowd when Iggy thrashes into the front rows, hearing him repeatedly scream “I feel alright” while Ron Asheton rips through one of his best hooks. Then, with the adrenaline sky high, you can feel the kick of Scott Asheton’s bass drum in your chest as Steve Mackay’s freeform sax solo folds chaos and frenzy into the band’s hypnotic “Fun House” groove. It’s psychedelic music with wild menace, and it’s all anchored by the lithe little Michigan goblin flailing unpredictably somewhere near the front of the stage.
It absolutely rules that Third Man is putting out a live Stooges album from this period, and at the same time, it makes perfect sense why Iggy voiced hesitation about officially sanctioning the newly unearthed Goose Lake audio. It’s an infamous night in Stooges lore. The Jim Jarmusch documentary Gimme Danger, for example, mostly distills this event into two distinct story beats: the bad drugs that Iggy took right before the set and the firing of bassist Dave Alexander right after the set. The legend goes that Iggy went into a tent “with some wild people,” took what he thought was cocaine, and suffered temporary amnesia just moments before he went onstage. He pulled it together, but looked over at Alexander, who was apparently too fucked up to play anything. Iggy said Alexander froze and didn’t play a note; Scott said someone unplugged Alexander’s amp. Either way, Iggy fired the bassist immediately after the show, closing the book on the lineup that made The Stooges and Fun House.
So the biggest surprise about Live at Goose Lake is that the Stooges’ performance transcended the long-held narrative that this wasn’t a great show for them. If you’ve ever loved a Ron Asheton guitar solo or hook, know that this album’s brimming with those. If your love of Fun House is defined partially by Mackay’s sax performance, absolutely buy this record and listen to his work on the B-side first. Iggy, meanwhile, delivers all the nuances required of performing the music from Fun House. He sings gently, he shouts with authority, and—why not—he even incites a minor riot. Iggy briefly flouts “TV Eye”’s actual lyrics, and in apparent frustration about festival security not allowing him to stage dive, he starts singing about the “big ol’ wall” and screaming “RAM IT.” A security guard, interviewed by Creem’s Jaan Uhelszki for the Goose Lake liner notes, confirmed that this was the moment people in the massive crowd started to rip planks off the front of the stage.
As for Alexander, his presence on the album is a major selling point of Third Man’s Live at Goose Lake LP. The late bassist’s supposed non-performance has been the gospel of biographies, documentaries, and Iggy interviews for years, but you can hear Alexander’s bass all through this newly released audio. So yes, he was playing and he was plugged in, but no, he did not play a perfect set. There are stretches of “Loose” with palpable gaps where there should clearly be bass, and there are other sections where Alexander is either behind the beat or playing the wrong notes entirely. And to his credit, he often shows up when it counts most. “Dirt” hinges entirely on Alexander’s trudging, climbing bassline, and he’s absolutely there, doing the work of establishing the song’s foundation. But then he’s spotty for significant chunks of two crucial numbers: “1970” and “TV Eye.”
That void is disorienting and distracting—especially when you stack these performances next to his work on Fun House. Goose Lake is not the careful work of the Stooges in Elektra’s L.A. studio, and it doesn’t have the luxury of the standard crisp production quality of most ’70s live albums (like Bob Seger’s Live Bullet and Neil Young’s Live Rust). The Goose Lake tapes were found recently in a festival sound engineer’s basement, and frankly, they sound like some old tapes you’d find in a Michigan basement after five decades. While the audio is in largely good shape, the vocals wipe out every other instrument as soon as Iggy screams (which happens pretty often here), and there are a couple brief moments during the closing “Fun House” and “L.A. Blues” freakout where the audio drops out completely.
The impressionistic and imperfect sound quality of Goose Lake ultimately feels fitting for a record that captures some of the band’s less performative and more human moments. The flubs, stage banter, audience chatter, and interstitial tuning all make it feel like a breathing historical document in a way that even the Stooges’ studio albums can’t capture. Turn up the volume for everything that happens between the fuzz and the screaming—the moments when everybody on stage is catching their breath—and you can imagine what it was like to watch this unbelievable band on a Michigan summer night somewhere in the sea of bodies and drugs.
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. | 2020-08-11T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-08-11T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Third Man | August 11, 2020 | 7.3 | d82fdb94-e0a2-4d93-ac47-858629dac7bd | Evan Minsker | https://pitchfork.com/staff/evan-minsker/ | |
At this point, Clark has been translating his wracked emotions via machines—samplers, software, synths—for about half his life. Clark finds the Warp artist merging techno, electro, noise, classical, ambient, and post-rock with the skill of a virtuoso. | At this point, Clark has been translating his wracked emotions via machines—samplers, software, synths—for about half his life. Clark finds the Warp artist merging techno, electro, noise, classical, ambient, and post-rock with the skill of a virtuoso. | Clark: Clark | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/19905-clark-clark/ | Clark | The world is ending, and Chris Clark is writing its soundtrack. In the 35-year-old electronic producer’s latest dystopian vision, the Earth’s layers peel back with painstaking certainty while everything else bursts and pops in unrest. Temperatures flash between frostbite and flame. There are moments of unsettling calm, only to be ruptured by bruised sky, acid rain, famine, disease. Unknown beings attack, armed with tones set to bewilder. Somewhere, the sound of a muffled Billie Holiday acetate being mauled by a pack of lions echoes through the murk. There is last-chance dancing—or are those people just running away?
As far as end-times scenarios go, the one Clark sets forth on his eponymous seventh album is vivid. And while there’s plenty of terror to be found here, Clark resonates because it pinpoints both the humanity and the nothingness that come along with complete dread; he knows that in order for annihilation to mean anything, you have to care about what’s being annihilated. Because for every laser-burned bass kick and alien-probe synth, forces of good cautiously look out from the rubble in the form of twinkling lullabies and melancholic piano loops. In cinematic sci-fi terms—and it’s hard not to think of this record as a kind of headphone IMAX experience—Clark is more akin to Alfonso Cuarón’s devastating infertility parable Children of Men than, say, Independence Day: ominous because its pulse feels all too real.
At this point, Clark has been translating his wracked emotions via machines—samplers, software, synths—for about half his life, and Clark has him merging techno, electro, noise, classical, ambient, and post-rock with the skill of a virtuoso. Growing up just outside of London, he indulged in nascent omnivorous Internet-era listening habits, giving time to indie rap, Pavement, and Squarepusher as a teen before Warp deemed him next-in-line to their mindful electronic throne at the start of this century. Though it was probably unfair to expect Clark to live up to the legacies of Aphex Twin and Boards of Canada, it was also inevitable. But with his third album, 2006’s Body Riddle, he quietly did just that, turning in an opus that moved the sounds of Warp’s classic 1990s roster forward, mixing sensuousness and mechanics to create a 21st century cyborg touchstone.
Owing to the mercurial nature of his tracks, which often morph unexpectedly many times across just a few minutes, follow-up Turning Dragon was nearly as excellent but utterly different, trading in spectral atmosphere and hip-hop rhythms for a more full-on techno thrust. And after five years of frustratingly diffuse material that had the producer grasping at new styles and textures with mixed success, Clark is a much-welcomed return that locates the midpoint between Body Riddle’s tangibility and Turning Dragon’s bulletproof sheen. The album adds a fresh layer of grandiosity that hints at festival-sized dance music or even Trent Reznor’s churning soundtrack work while never bowing down to any type of current trend. Clark is like Aphex’s comeback Syro in that it showcases a veteran artist living and breathing within a sonic space of his own creation—and the fact that no one would confuse the two records is a testament to Clark’s hard-won individuality.
What’s always set Clark apart is his eclecticism, dynamism, and flair for the dramatic, all of which is on fine display here. His tracks don’t drop as much as they slip or swerve, forever off-balance. He’ll end a techno album with eight minutes of beatless, sky-cracking ecstasy you’d expect to find on a Sigur Rós LP, and it will make sense. He’s allergic to the idea of standard sounds and presets, which is partly why we’re still talking about him 13 years after his debut. And unlike many of his more insular peers, Clark can be open to sentimentality—not schmaltz as much as a belief in humanness and all its inexact wonder. In electronic music’s never-ending battle between man and machine, he’s seeking a third way. “It's just far too easy these days,” he said in an interview earlier this year, talking about the copy-and-paste replicability of so much modern composition. “I'm often inspired by the path of most resistance. Looking for those tiny snippets of error—machines being pushed into areas of behavior that seem wrong and unusable. There is real fruit there.”
Rather than fighting the SoundCloud hivemind with real people playing real instruments, à la Daft Punk’s Random Access Memories, he composed Clark largely on a computer by himself in a barn in the middle of the English countryside, cracking codes and inflicting glitches. As computerized watches and glasses inch toward ubiquity, this idea of subverting machines to make them more human seems like a particularly worthy preservation strategy—and nobody does that quite like Clark. Yes, he makes music that sounds like the end of the world. But he also makes you want to live long enough to see what that will look like. | 2014-11-07T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2014-11-07T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Electronic | Warp | November 7, 2014 | 8.3 | d8300771-c6e9-47de-abcd-239403c45cc1 | Ryan Dombal | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ryan-dombal/ | null |
Weaving in and out of concrete, direct, indie-rock songwriting and meditative, impressionistic dream pop, Girlpool’s third album features their most expansive and surreal songs to date. | Weaving in and out of concrete, direct, indie-rock songwriting and meditative, impressionistic dream pop, Girlpool’s third album features their most expansive and surreal songs to date. | Girlpool: What Chaos is Imaginary | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/girlpool-what-chaos-is-imaginary/ | What Chaos is Imaginary | A few songs into Girlpool’s 2017 album Powerplant, all the rules the band had set for themselves seemed to fly out the window. The break comes during “Corner Store,” a 90-second jaunt built on twangy guitar chords and the close-knit harmonies of the group’s two singers, Cleo Tucker and Harmony Tividad. Shortly into the track, the guitars erupt into a squall of feedback and distortion; it’s as if we’ve been lifted from the world of Girlpool and plopped down right in the middle of a Sonic Youth jam. After a few measures, the hard-rock spell ends, and the song continues on like it never happened. No other songs on the album call back to that brief interruption. Girlpool, known for rendering the world through a quasi-surrealist but ultimately soft lens, let loose a little chaos.
The boldness contained in that spontaneous bout of noise spills over into the duo’s third LP, What Chaos Is Imaginary. Weaving in and out of concrete, direct, indie-rock songwriting and meditative, impressionistic dream pop, the record takes up more space than any of Girlpool’s previous music. Guitar chords tend to land with a hefty crunch, bleeding distortion across the field of sound rather than keeping clean and tightly wound. A few songs skirt Girlpool’s usual rock instrumentation in favor of drum machines and synth organs. The record crests and falls, agitated on one track, melancholic and serene on the next.
What Chaos is Imaginary is the first album Girlpool has released since Tucker came out as trans and began taking testosterone that lowered his voice to a tenor range. Where on previous albums the band’s two singers trailed each other, singing nested melodies, their voices are now clearly differentiated. When they harmonize, a bright friction between their ranges adds a new dimensionality to the music.
Suddenly, there are Tividad songs and there are Tucker songs, two discrete threads that wind together into a Girlpool album. They pass the baton on lead vocals, playing off of each other as much as they play with each other. Certain songs on the record began as solo recordings; “Lucy’s,” the punchy fuzz-rock number that opens the album, is a Tucker song, while “Where You Sink” and “Joseph’s Dad” both appear in embryonic form on Tividad’s acoustic 2018 solo release, Oove Is Rare.
A few idiosyncratic lyrical gestures (puzzle pieces, glue) recur here from Powerplant, which can make songs like “Stale Device,” with its tried-and-true rock grounding, sound like outgrowths of the band’s last album. Girlpool’s lyrics are so striking that any repetition tends to call attention to itself, especially when it’s employed toward an image as compelling as the one Tividad uses in “Pretty”: “There was a person I once knew/He built a molehill out of glue/He claimed I was too close to stick/But somehow I’m still stuck in it.” A molehill becomes a sticky mountain trapping the song’s speaker in the past. The dense psychological weight of loss and memory bores through lines written as simply and memorably as schoolyard chants.
Many songs on What Chaos is Imaginary wrangle the messy process of constantly becoming a new person while saddled down with the memory of who you used to be. “Will I make the matinée with my newest life/And be that bright time?” Tucker asks at the start of “Hire.” On the album’s beautifully delicate title track, Tividad snakes her way out of a world bounded by a painful past. “I loved him and his violence for the pretty view/Rehearsed a strange reality, what chaos is imaginary,” she sings, pronouncing her words carefully over a steady drum machine beat, a swell of synthesizers, and intermittent strings. Girlpool have often sung about leaving one world behind for another—exiting childhood and entering adulthood, shedding the self-destructive reflexes of past selves—but they’ve never so poignantly attended to the pain of such a shift. It hurts to forsake a toxic reality and build a bigger, healthier one. But it has to happen.
A certain vertigo occurs when the present self faces the past. The older you get, the more there is to look back on, and the distance from here to there can be overwhelming. Girlpool excel at squaring history and immediacy with lyrics that float freely—not quite stories and not quite streams of consciousness, but words that hang somewhere in the middle. “Create the vague you need,” sings Tucker on “Roses,” as if laying bare the duo’s lyrical ethos. “It’s a tug-o-war/With his dreaming and the floor.” A slow guitar bristles beneath his voice, and Tividad courses in gently behind him. It sounds like he’s not quite done; the melody lilts unresolved. But the guitars eventually fade out, and Tucker doesn’t come back. He leaves you there, half dreaming, half bolted to the floorboards, in the limbo that divides the imaginary from whatever you take to be real. | 2019-02-01T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2019-02-01T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Anti- | February 1, 2019 | 7.8 | d832bbb2-9c0c-41b8-afcd-5bdb6a6a20cc | Sasha Geffen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sasha-geffen/ | |
Angel Deradoorian’s second LP is darker, less polished, and openly meditative. Even in its most psychedelic moments, the fuzzy aesthetic gives her music an earthy, grounded feel. | Angel Deradoorian’s second LP is darker, less polished, and openly meditative. Even in its most psychedelic moments, the fuzzy aesthetic gives her music an earthy, grounded feel. | Deradoorian: Find the Sun | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/deradoorian-find-the-sun/ | Find the Sun | Finding oneself is never easy, but Angel Deradoorian seems determined to try. In recent years, the nomadic singer-songwriter cultivated self-awareness while actively embracing solitude, decamping to the woods of upstate New York for long stretches. In 2019, however, she found herself craving communion (and the company of other musicians), and brought that feeling into the studio. Find the Sun, her second full-length, is the unexpected result. Boomy and soaked in reverb, the record occasionally sounds like someone set up a single mic in the corner and left the room. It’s darker, less polished, and more openly meditative than anything she’s done before, miles away from the psychedelic sheen of her debut, 2015’s Expanding Flower Planet, and its more subdued follow-up, 2017 mini-album Eternal Recurrence. But the new LP’s fuzzy, almost lo-fi aesthetic gives her music an earthier, more grounded feel, even in its most psychedelic moments.
Find the Sun was recorded at the Panoramic House, a scenic analog studio in Marin County, California. On previous releases, Deradoorian largely worked alone, only involving others when she needed an instrument that she couldn’t play herself. This time, she recruited percussionist Samer Ghadry and guitarist Dave Harrington (of Darkside), granting them license to not just play along, but to improvise and help flesh out the sketches she’d already written. Setting up shop in Panoramic House’s spacious live room, they refused to overwork the material, running through each song only a few times before selecting the best take and moving on to the next one. Their breezy approach shines on “Corsican Shores,” a peppy tune that sits somewhere between ’60s garage rock, fuzzy Phil Spector-produced pop, and the jangly groups that populated the K Records roster during the ’90s.
The LP’s guitar-centric approach is a bit of a surprise, but Deradoorian isn’t a stranger to big riffs. She’s done stints in bands like Dirty Projectors and Avey Tare’s Slasher Flicks; more recently, she’s been ripping it up as the vocalist of BSCBR (aka Black Sabbath Cover Band Rehearsals), filling Ozzy Osborne’s shoes alongside artists like Yeah Yeah Yeahs guitarist Nick Zinner and drumming virtuoso Greg Fox. Find the Sun never reaches Paranoid levels of bombast, but it’s easily her brawniest solo record to date. Songs like “Saturnine Night” and closer “Sun” channel the psychedelic swagger of ’70s giants like the Doors and Led Zeppelin, while the rubbery bassline and surging guitar chords of album highlight “It Was Me” bring to mind the likes of Nirvana and Hole—or at least the times when those bands emulated indie pop groups like the Vaselines and Young Marble Giants.
But Find the Sun shouldn’t be mistaken for an exercise in rock worship. The influence of Can looms large, and Deradoorian’s music is still psychedelic, weird, and seemingly primed for a hallucinogenic trip to the outer recesses of the human psyche. With its motorik groove and dramatic talk-singing, “The Illuminator” sounds like a freaky, nine-minute-long outtake from Andy Warhol’s Factory, while the slinky “Devil’s Market” recalls the space-age lounge music once championed by bands like Stereolab. “Saturnine Night” does feature growling guitars, but they’re paired with an unkempt Krautrock rhythm that could have been pulled from Neu! 2, along with a dramatic, PJ Harvey-esque vocal turn from Deradoorian, who belts out brooding lines like “Innocence/In my death” and, simply, “I die.”
Thematically, Find the Sun is rooted in the idea of self-exploration. Deradoorian has a fervent passion for psychology, neuroscience, and astrology, and in the months before she hit the studio, she attended an intense, 10-day Vipassana meditation retreat in rural Massachusetts that further shaped the album’s introspective tilt. While there, she meditated 10 hours a day and could not touch or even acknowledge fellow practitioners, but Deradoorian—who describes the retreat as life-changing—seems to have come out of the experience with a deeper understanding of herself, her body, her fears and anxieties, and her capabilities. Find the Sun can’t necessarily be described as a confident album, but its creator’s willingness to document her spiritual growth and present herself as vulnerable feels uniquely brave and honest.
The gentle “Waterlily” and the somber “Mask of Yesterday” offer some of the album’s quietest, most emotionally naked moments, but Find the Sun reaches a whimsical zenith on “Monk’s Robes,” a folksy, largely acoustic number whose twirling melodies wouldn’t be out of place at the local Renaissance Faire. It sounds escapist, but according to Deradoorian, “it’s a song about accepting the futility of attempting to escape your reality, finding peace in acceptance and working with what you have to make something beautiful.” It’s an approach she’s applied to all of Find the Sun, which feels like a snapshot of a single moment along a much longer path. Like most of us, Deradoorian doesn’t know where she’ll ultimately end up—but she’s embraced that uncertainty. Even with its dense clouds of reverb, Find the Sun might be the album that provides the clearest window into who she is.
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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. | 2020-09-24T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-09-24T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Experimental | Anti- | September 24, 2020 | 7.5 | d83bc18f-fb38-4b0e-94fd-aaf6b04d49eb | Shawn Reynaldo | https://pitchfork.com/staff/shawn-reynaldo/ | |
The second album from one of Atlanta’s most promising rappers recasts him as a star in waiting. He writes with grisly clarity and humor, and his songs here are sturdy, inventive, and sticky. | The second album from one of Atlanta’s most promising rappers recasts him as a star in waiting. He writes with grisly clarity and humor, and his songs here are sturdy, inventive, and sticky. | 21 Savage: I Am > I Was | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21-savage-i-am-i-was/ | I Am > I Was | The jarringly sober track “a lot,” which opens 21 Savage’s poised and superbly focused i am > i was, is contemplative without being dramatic, mournful but not morose. At one point, the 26-year-old recounts his little brother’s murder and how it warped his psychology, but he does so in a perfunctory way, like talking to a therapist who’s already familiar with the smaller details. It’s a great tone to strike first: moody at a bit of a remove.
Early in his career, the Atlanta rapper appeared almost exclusively as a mood—his voice was the ideally dry vehicle for 2016’s Savage Mode, Metro Boomin’s experiment in tempo and ambient sound. At times, 21’s appeal was explained away as a sort of authenticity fetishism, as if the raw carnage in the music was the main selling point. In truth, he’s spent the last few years building a persona that’s tormented by trauma and violence but unworried about projecting just how tough or wise or beloved or feared it’s made him. His raps are self-assured. The songs about the strip club—like the Three 6-sampling, Yung Miami-featuring “a&t”—are good because they’re good strip club songs not because they’re couched in self-awareness or PTSD.
21 is an effective writer because he’s not hung up on what everything means—he’s much more interested in how things actually are, how they feel: the pit in his stomach when he thinks about jail, the weight of his jewelry in his hand. He’s tormented but also wants to go to the club, loves his mom but also his bodyguards, and is willing to explore those halves of himself without using “whoa, there are two halves of me” as a narrative crutch. So the statement in the title—I am greater than I was—is a little misleading. This is not a record about self-improvement as a 12-step course with dramatic results. When it’s about anything, it’s about self-improvement as a small, constant struggle where you contradict yourself and eat your own tail.
The way 21 describes the grisliest details of his past can be unnerving when he filters it through an unexpected tone. He’ll rap about gruesome memories that are shocking in their neutrality: “Back in the day I used to rob with no mask on/Shit on my wrist? I woulda killed the whole house for.” 21 has burrowed so deep into his trauma-wracked brain (see “Close My Eyes” or “Numb” from 2017’s Issa Album) that the subtlest modulations on how he speaks about his demons can have a profound effect. On “asmr,” he raps, “All these dead bodies got me seein’ strange things” with a bounce in his voice that makes it seem like he’s about to introduce a new dance, and maybe he is.
Those small tweaks are smart, but they have nothing on the spontaneous adjustments to his voice. Before Savage Mode, 21 had never been locked to such a deep register and quite so laconic a flow. Since he’s been famous, he’s perfected a half-dozen variations on his whispered style, finding a whole dynamic range where a lesser vocalist would come off as painfully one-note. (Think of 21 as Meek Mill’s equal opposite: The number of textures and variations Meek brings to his full-throttle bars are the same ones 21 brings to his sotto voce raps.) 21’s found a way to emote without breaking character, to grin at the camera without letting his voice crack and sound sarcastic. This helps him sell the sly jokes he peppers throughout: On “can’t leave without it” alone, he says he keeps a stick “like a hobo” and brags about his gun being autographed by Osama Bin Laden.
There are points where i am > i was nearly becomes rote; “break da law,” the Offset duet “1.5,” and parts of other songs will sink into production formats that are so well-worn they’ve become ruts; a song like “gun smoke” is little more than 21 on autopilot. Those blips are fine considering that most of the record is musically exciting. The groove on “letter 2 my momma” is irresistible, and “good day”—which samples Lord Infamous’ “Damn I’m Crazed,” a song 21 could have written in another life—makes superb use of both Project Pat and Schoolboy Q’s voice. There’s also “all my friends,” which is really a showcase for Post Malone, as if it could follow “rockstar” straight to the top of the charts.
i am > i was shatters the notion of 21 Savage as a specialist with a narrow purview and audience, and recasts him as a star in waiting, all without forcing him into unflattering contortions. It also cements him as a far more original stylist than other hopefuls from Atlanta, like Lil Baby and Gunna, who appear here together and sound simply like Young Thug disciples. At its best, the album is still weird, like when 21 raps earnestly over Santana, or when he ends with a Young Nudy duet that sounds for all the world like the third act of a Morricone western. That’s the song where 21 sneers at rappers who “drop a mixtape, then they tattoo their face.” It gets at the core idea of his work: You can’t fool people into thinking you’re someone you’re not. | 2019-01-02T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2018-12-25T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rap | Slaughter Gang / Epic | January 2, 2019 | 7.8 | d84b51d2-3dbe-4681-ba50-23fe17259c64 | Paul A. Thompson | https://pitchfork.com/staff/paul-a. thompson/ | |
Seattle doom metal duo Bell Witch’s third album sounds broken down by life and death alike, but it scrapes together something like hope. | Seattle doom metal duo Bell Witch’s third album sounds broken down by life and death alike, but it scrapes together something like hope. | Bell Witch: Mirror Reaper | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/bell-witch-mirror-reaper/ | Mirror Reaper | Seattle doom metal duo Bell Witch’s first two albums engaged fearlessly with themes of death and transience. Their 2015 release Four Phantoms even got into the grisly details, envisioning ghosts dying for all eternity by each of the four elements: buried alive in earth, burnt at the stake, drowning in a river, and falling into winds so harsh they tear the skin off the dead. That album’s fantastical details and grandiose scope painted death as something inevitable, but easier to imagine as a fable than as reality. On their third album, Mirror Reaper, Bell Witch sound broken down by life and death alike. It’s their first album since the death of drummer and founding member Adrian Guerra, who passed away in 2016, and so their first album written in the blunt light of public grief. Having hit the bottom of their reserve, they spend the record scraping together something like hope.
Arranged as a single 83-minute track, Mirror Reaper steps back from the resplendent gestures that swept across Four Phantoms. Each beat of Jesse Shreibman’s drum kit, each throb of Dylan Desmond’s six-string bass sounds labored, as though they’ve had to drag the sounds out like lead hammers. Doom metal works with fewer notes at a time than thrash or death metal, so the key to its emotional power is to pour everything you’ve got into each one. Bell Witch do just that in Mirror Reaper’s quiet moments, which are more abundant than their previous albums, and also in its loud ones, where Shreibman lurches forward one kick of the bass drum at a time and Desmond carves mournful leads out of his extra wide fretboard.
Few bassists can make their instrument sing quite like Desmond. About 33 minutes into Mirror Reaper, he climbs a crescendo that, in its tone and its simplicity, sounds like a human voice singing a funeral hymn to itself. He exploits the upper range of his bass, digging out emotional extremes from the notes that could be mapped onto the low end of an electric guitar if they weren’t quite so rich with overtones. He’s newly joined by the sounds of Shreibman’s Hammond B3 organ, whose chords tangle with the distortion on the bass and the echo of the cymbals. Plenty of metal bands play impressively in step, but here, Desmond and Shreibman play as though they are clinging to each other.
Both members of the band sing, as did Desmond and Guerra, and their voices feel both distinct and entwined. Shreibman issues a low, diaphragm-racking growl; between the drummer’s parts, Desmond sings clean, his voice multi-tracked so as to emulate a Gregorian choir. He sounds like he’s standing far from the microphone, and the contrast between his stoic detachment and Shreibman’s visceral roar emphasizes the album’s lyrical themes of duality: between life and death, sorrow and relief, the body and its fleeing ghost.
Halfway through the album, Guerra’s voice appears, too, in a sequence the band has titled “The Words of the Dead.” These screams were recorded for, and cut from, Four Phantoms, and they form the living emotional core of Mirror Reaper. Here is where the tension of the album’s first side climaxes, where life and death seem to pierce each other. Guerra is dead, and he is singing with his former band; they are mourning him and they are with him at the same time. Then the cresting waves of sound fall away, and on Mirror Reaper’s second side, Shreibman and Desmond wade through acres of empty space. Their instruments echo into beats of silence. The loss of their friend bores holes in the music itself.
Mirror Reaper’s stark final act, which features lyrics sung by the band’s continuing collaborator Erik Moggridge, ranks among the loveliest and saddest moments the band has recorded. Moggridge’s voice lilts, gentle and devastating, as though he’s crying out for someone, anyone, to hear him, as though he’s not sure there’s another living soul on the scorched earth. When Desmond answers him and the drums clatter back in, the feeling only multiplies. It’s like the emptiness grows once there are more people to feel it.
Mourning overwhelms the mourner; it often feels as though it is the whole world. Mirror Reaper simulates that totality of grief, but it also transcends its own function as a eulogy. That hope that Bell Witch scrape together by the end? It’s the kind that emerges once everything in your periphery has been burnt to the ground and you, somehow, still exist. You exist, and you get up, and you walk in whatever direction you’re most likely to find light. | 2017-10-30T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-10-30T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Metal | Profound Lore | October 30, 2017 | 8 | d84fb720-9c31-426b-838c-e25cfa5062a7 | Sasha Geffen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sasha-geffen/ | |
Lisa-Kaindé and Naomi Díaz’s rhythm-forward third album is a syncretic celebration of sounds and traditions that shimmers with color and joy. | Lisa-Kaindé and Naomi Díaz’s rhythm-forward third album is a syncretic celebration of sounds and traditions that shimmers with color and joy. | Ibeyi: Spell 31 | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/ibeyi-spell-31/ | Spell 31 | Ancient Egyptians imagined death as a journey through a treacherous underworld of demon reptiles, onerous puzzles, and grueling trials. To help the dead navigate these obstacles and reach eternity, the Egyptians assembled The Chapters of Coming Forth by Day, commonly known as The Book of the Dead. The tome offers spells, prayers, and adventure, a breadth that Ibeyi embraces on their third album, which takes its name from one of the book’s many entries. Since 2014’s Oya EP, named after the Yoruba deity of storms and death, the French-Cuban sister duo has bent heavy emotions and weighty subjects into lithe, elegant shapes, building shrines from personal and historical tragedies. On Spell 31, they rework their signature layered spirituals into fleet grooves that shimmer with color and joy yet still channel pain and loss.
Where Ash and Ibeyi were spectral and skeletal, evoking aching absences, the songs on Spell 31 are rhythmic and sinuous, engorged with blood and energy. The twins have credited the shift to a change in their writing process: Normally, Lisa-Kaindé would initiate songs on the piano and Naomi would mold the percussion around her sister’s melodies and lyrics. This time, the rhythms came first, Naomi and longtime collaborator Richard Russell making beats and Lisa-Kaindé writing to them. Her melodies “had to gain muscle…and be able to live up to the beat,” Lisa-Kaindé explained in an interview. The resulting album isn’t an outright jamboree, but the rhythm-forward approach begets bolder, more lively performances and arrangements.
“Made of Gold” pulses with textures and voices, Ibeyi and Pa Salieu declaring their resilience over a thicket of rumbling bass, shrill yelps, and rattly percussion. “My spell made of gold, gold, gold,” Lisa-Kaindé sings for the hook, a buoyant harmony backing her. The line works as both incantation and earworm, a one-two punch Ibeyi also land on “Lavender & Red Roses,” a collaboration with Jorja Smith that evokes the lush melodies of We Are KING. “Lavender and red roses,” the trio coos, their voices tender and warm as they dedicate the floral offering to a hopeless former lover. The song is the rare kiss-off that’s as sweet as a kiss.
Amid the revelry and uplift, Ibeyi still evoke the bone-deep grief and despondence that characterized their early work. “Creature (Perfect)” builds to an epiphany that sounds more paralyzing than freeing. “I don’t have to be perfect, don’t have to be perfect/I finally see, I’m just a creature,” Lisa-Kaindé wails, stretching the last word with downcast trills that recall Björk. “Tears Are Our Medicine” offers a similar mix of pain and triumph, the sisters dolefully reaching their upper registers over a spare bassline and a faint drone. “Look at my eyes and cry with me,” they softly request.
On “Los Muertos,” over solemn hums, dulled stomps, and the Santería chant of “ibaé,” which is used to honor deceased loved ones, they recite the names of lost relatives and friends. The song is celebratory despite its gravity, the “ibaé” sourced from a song by Lisa-Kaindé and Naomi Díaz’s late father, famed conguero Miguel “Angá” Díaz. Ibeyi also sample their father on “Rise Above,” a soulful but limp interpretation of Black Flag’s punk standard. Their version, which they reportedly recorded without hearing the original, includes a perfunctory reference to George Floyd’s murder, and is more respectable than galvanizing.
Luckily, “Rise Above” is the album’s sole misfire. Ibeyi continue to celebrate and probe diaspora, building bridges between the sounds and traditions of their transatlantic heritage. There’s a quiet audacity to their growing syncretism, which here casually yokes together Egyptian funerary lore, South African sangomas, Santería rituals, and British rap. The wacky sprawl feels in step with The Book of the Dead, which historically was a varying, unofficial collection of texts rather than a stable, canonical book. In Ibeyi’s deft hands, tradition, like death, is a gateway to strange wonders. | 2022-05-11T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2022-05-11T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | XL | May 11, 2022 | 7.8 | d8575b2e-70e4-418b-a42e-72c34192822c | Stephen Kearse | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stephen-kearse/ | |
The experimental soul musician's adventurous debut album draws as much from free jazz and IDM as it does funk and R&B, from the Dirty Projectors as much as D'Angelo. | The experimental soul musician's adventurous debut album draws as much from free jazz and IDM as it does funk and R&B, from the Dirty Projectors as much as D'Angelo. | Jon Bap: What Now? | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22206-what-now/ | What Now? | What Now? opens with a nearly 10-minute-long track called “Guided Meditation.” The title here is quite literal: the track consists of a recording of a woman guiding the listener through a meditation exercise over layers of ringing drones. This is a bold move, to be sure, especially for a new and relatively unknown artist like Jon Bap—it’s as if he’s demanding our patience and open-mindedness as the cost of admission to his sonic world. Still, this kind of confrontation is fully in keeping with Bap’s uncompromising ethos. He is nothing if not a serial breaker of rules, his practice largely defined by a continual willingness to scribble outside of the lines.
While it’s difficult to find a box that he fits into neatly, Bap is perhaps best described as an experimental soul artist. His background is in many ways traditional: He was raised in a musical family, first found his voice in the church choir, and clearly draws a lot of inspiration from classic funk, soul and R&B. The forms that his songs take, however, push beyond the commonly understood bounds of those genres. His aesthetic as a recording artist is one of disorderly virtuosity, a composer who piles up home-recorded sounds in unexpected and sometimes stunning ways. In this regard he has more in common with, say, the Dirty Projectors than D’Angelo, though he’s clearly indebted to both.
Nowhere is Bap’s outsider stance more clear than in his approach to percussion. The drums on Jon Bap songs clash and clatter, fighting for control of the tempo and the listener’s ear. He allows beats to collide at odd angles, to play counter-rhythms, to create an air of barely-contained chaos. On What Now? Bap has taken this sensibility a step further by fully removing the drummer from the songwriting process. Nearly all of the drum tracks on What Now? were sampled from hours of jazz drummer Mike Mitchell’s improvisations, which Bap recorded in preparation for the album and then sequenced to create these tracks. On these songs, Mitchell’s playing evokes everything from Questlove’s off-kilter kit work on Voodoo to Zach Hill’s manic fills to the inhuman breakbeats of IDM artists like Squarepusher and Aphex Twin.
Despite the rhythmic discord, Bap’s best songs still manage to feel loose, warm and immediate. “Gotta Be Your Lover” sounds like the warped memory of a Prince song with a wind-up toy standing in for a drummer. “Don’t Run Into the Dark So Quick” is a devastating ballad, its wobbly, detuned guitar conjuring a dusty blues acetate, as Bap pleads with a wayward lover. And “Let It Happen,” the beautifully off-balance, Jeff Buckley-esque title track from Bap’s debut EP, gets a welcome reprise here, closing the album with one of Bap’s strongest vocal performances to date.
Jon Bap is a promising new voice, and the inventiveness and confidence he displays here is commendable, but he might benefit from an editor. What Now? has more than its fair share of interludes, field recordings and spoken-word bits, but its primary shortcoming is that there are simply not enough songs, especially by way of comparison to his more focused debut EP. Similarly, not every sonic experiment here clicks; songs like “Intuition” border on cacophonous in parts, when the songwriting begins to bow under the weight of too many tempos and layers. Still, it’s not difficult to see how this sort of willful messiness might support Bap’s overall aim, to surprise and unsettle the listener but also, to see that her patience is rewarded. | 2016-08-10T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-08-10T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | Astro Nautico | August 10, 2016 | 6.5 | d860833b-8c25-4400-808d-968cc313b503 | Mehan Jayasuriya | https://pitchfork.com/staff/mehan-jayasuriya/ | null |
The Israeli-Dutch techno duo’s fifth album is an intriguing left turn, leading them far from the dancefloor and well into serene, spacey new age territory. | The Israeli-Dutch techno duo’s fifth album is an intriguing left turn, leading them far from the dancefloor and well into serene, spacey new age territory. | Juju & Jordash: Sis-boom-bah! | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/juju-and-jordash-sis-boom-bah/ | Sis-boom-bah! | It is entirely possible that Juju & Jordash’s Sis-boom-bah! is the only techno record you will hear this year that features wah-wah guitar. But then, the Israeli-Dutch duo is hardly your typical club-music proposition. Gal Aner and Jordan Czamanski, both jazz aficionados, approach their live gigs in the spirit of pure improvisation, heaping their gear table high with sundry machines, many of them years if not decades old, and jamming away. They start from scratch—no preset synth patches, no pre-programmed rhythms—and make it up as they go along, building woozy, wooly, and sometimes downright noodly grooves out of nothing but the circuitry they brought with them. They approach their records in much the same way. The only difference is that the recording studio offers many more possibilities for cutting away the excess and honing in on the meat of the idea, the sinew of the groove.
Sis-boom-bah! is their fifth and most streamlined record yet. Juju & Jordash typically oscillate between freeform abstraction and Detroit-inspired techno, but this is more like their take on new age. Where they were once happy to whack away on a fat 909 snare, here they’ve whittled all the drum sounds down until they’re little more than suggestions of percussive energy: neatly filed hi-hats, shadows of kick drums, snares that are all rattle and no smack. A few songs have no recognizable drums at all, and on several tracks, liquid tones drip like a serum squeezed from an eyedropper, reinforcing the sense that the two musicians have distilled their sound to its essence. Though it’s still recognizable as dance music, this is a vision of techno that has wandered far from the dancefloor and has no great interest in going back—a little like a raver who has wandered into the woods and is happy to remain there, communing with the trees, while pinging droplets and distant synth riffs filter through the foliage.
“Herkie” opens the album like a statement of intent: part electric Miles, part Motor City synths, it rolls elliptical rings of Rhodes keyboards, plucked guitar, and greasy bass tones around rattling, metallic percussion. The circular vamping serves as a kind of scene-setting, building energy without arriving at any particular destination; swelling synth pads and lilting tambourine amplify the sense of drift. “Rah-Rah” picks up the same palette and adds trickling liquids, Hammond flutter, and guttural chants, for a skipping house groove that only hits cruising altitude in its final minute.
With the third track, “Back Tuck Basket Toss,” Juju & Jordash ease into the syncopated chords of piano house (and, for fun, some gnarly digital slap bass). It’s the record’s clubbiest cut yet, even though it’s slower than the two that have preceded it. The album’s sequencing follows a curious organizing principle: Each successive track across the first half of the album is slower than the last. The effect is not so much to lessen the energy level as to darken the mood and deepen the intensity of every pulse, and with the following track, “Deadman,” things get truly entrancing. There’s a hint of a talking drum in the toms; a low wind blows through the track’s ample empty space. Knowing when not to play is one of the most important instincts an improviser can develop. Here, and across the album, they flex those chops brilliantly.
The tempos bottom out with “Paper Dolls” and “Hanging Pyramid,” a pair of tracks that hover around the 90-BPM mark, and which collectively comprise the record’s beating heart. “Paper Dolls” plays highlife-inspired guitar off delicately detuned synthesizer, and its triplet pulse lends to a dizzy sort of slow/fast quality, while “Hanging Pyramid,” the album’s most unassuming cut, applies double-time pulses to a barely-there array of marimba and handclaps, like a drum ‘n’ bass remix of Jon Hassell. Both are dazzlingly pointillistic. The remaining three tracks build up the energy once more, but it’s here at the album’s cavernous center that the duo's skills shine brightest, as they carefully (but never fussily) polish their sounds to a dull gleam, weaving everything into a loose lattice of pluck and ping. Keeping one finger on the pulse without ever submitting entirely to it, they highlight the tension between the rhythmic grid—rigid, unrelenting—and the slipperiness of the objects that pass through it. Sis-boom-bah! is a celebration of techno at its most elastic. | 2017-10-21T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-10-21T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Dekmantel | October 21, 2017 | 7.5 | d86487ad-1208-4086-a028-243d2030f6fc | Philip Sherburne | https://pitchfork.com/staff/philip-sherburne/ | |
The Australian pop singer finds freedom in the EP format, breaking the family-friendly veneer of past releases and serving up his most idiosyncratic music yet. | The Australian pop singer finds freedom in the EP format, breaking the family-friendly veneer of past releases and serving up his most idiosyncratic music yet. | Troye Sivan: In a Dream EP | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/troye-sivan-in-a-dream-ep/ | In a Dream EP | Late last year, on the final night of his Bloom tour, Troye Sivan walked onstage suited à la David Byrne and left in the spandexed, eyepatched regalia of David Bowie. Sivan was at the tail end of an album cycle that had him performing alongside supernovas of pop music: strutting down a catwalk singing his hit “My My My!” with Taylor Swift, dancing on tables with Ariana Grande. This costuming was a potent symbol of ambition, and a cheeky nod to subversive, queer-ish forebears. Bloom, Sivan’s 2018 sophomore album, made him an avatar of a new generation of mainstream-friendly queer popstars. In the lights of a sold-out arena, he seemed poised to become the first of them to hit the big—really big—leagues.
In a Dream, the 25-year-old’s six-song sequel to Bloom, isn’t an ascension to blockbusting ubiquity, but something more interesting: a formally adventurous break-up record that explores the far corners of indie pop. Although enjoyable, Bloom and Sivan’s 2015 debut Blue Neighbourhood rarely broke through a certain veneer of cleanliness. When he emerged, there were far fewer young queer people in the mainstream; one could hardly blame him for appearing as a polite and broadly appealing spokesperson for an underrepresented community. At a time when mainstream pop is as calculated as it’s ever been—the product of a major label system obsessed with playlisting and “streamability”—he might have been rewarded for maintaining that family-friendly image. Instead, like the forebears Sivan emulated onstage last year, In a Dream chooses distinctiveness over approachability, offering a bricolage of warped indie rock, tech-house, and theatre-kid emotion.
Across In a Dream, Sivan eschews the black-and-white sadness of typical pop breakup albums in favor of the self-discovery that can happen in the wake of heartbreak. “Stud,” the record’s lascivious, sun-kissed centerpiece, dives into heart-racing casual sex, hinging on a classic trope of queer desire: Do I want to be him, or fuck him? (Call it the Call Me by Your Name conundrum.) “Hey stud! You can come and meet me out front, you got all the muscles and the features I want,” Sivan sings, his Auto-Tuned voice crinkling like tinfoil. He teases and taunts, flirtatious to the point of second-hand embarrassment, as the song switches gear into a raucous house beat. When he’s feeling more downcast on opener and first single “Take Yourself Home,” snatches of arena anthem fodder hang around him like peeling wallpaper. These touches seem to deliberately undermine their own triumphant feeling, serving as bitter reminders that even a great pop song can’t fix the worst feelings. In both cases, the tentative, fresh-faced star of Bloom —“Hold my hand if I get scared now”—is gone.
These songs are drawn from the moments when sadness turns to clarity and loneliness to self-possession, and the same confidence drives In a Dream’s more outré aesthetics. Between Charli XCX’s immersion in PC Music hyperpop and Taylor Swift’s collaborations with members of the National and Bon Iver, there’s nothing new about pop stars drawing from indie music. But In a Dream feels connected to a more peculiar segment of pop’s underground: I hear smacks of Negative Gemini’s dissociated club music and Vegyn’s formed formlessness in these songs, as well as the warmth of Rostam, indie-pop’s current king of the queer bildungsroman. The hazy, guitar-heavy interlude “could cry just thinkin about you” isn’t far from the jangle experiments of avant-garde hero Dean Blunt, who Sivan namechecked on Beats 1 earlier this month. The team that assisted Sivan on In a Dream is largely the same as on Bloom; Sivan seems to have simply grown into his own influences. The EP format—the preferred model for a new class of pop auteurs, from Mallrat to Yaeji—may afford him freedom to explore his own weirdness without the pressure of a major album cycle.
Even the EP’s most conventional song, the ’80s-inspired cheating apology “Easy,” surprises. Sivan sings through thick Auto-Tune, lamenting the dissolution of his relationship, but punctuating it with an uncanny exclamation—“This house is on fire, woo!”—that suggests there’s something sublime about the agony. Nothing about “Easy” should work, from the “woo!” to the Future-lite vocals to the City Pop synth solo. And yet it does. These idiosyncratic choices may sacrifice some of Sivan’s universal appeal, but it’s much more fun to watch him cutting his own path.
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. | 2020-08-24T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-08-24T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | Capitol | August 24, 2020 | 7.6 | d86af711-b5e3-4983-9a0d-6d94f7e0da7c | Shaad D’Souza | https://pitchfork.com/staff/shaad-d’souza/ | |
On their first album of original material since 2004, the Blues Explosion never assume their comeback is assured. They're reapplying for the job of America's most raucous, hardest-working rock'n'roll band, and will let the sweat speak for itself. | On their first album of original material since 2004, the Blues Explosion never assume their comeback is assured. They're reapplying for the job of America's most raucous, hardest-working rock'n'roll band, and will let the sweat speak for itself. | The Jon Spencer Blues Explosion: Meat and Bone | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/17056-meat-and-bone/ | Meat and Bone | When the Jon Spencer Blues Explosion returned to the stage two years ago after a six-year layoff, their mission was philosophically simple, if physically demanding: They just had to live up to their reputation as the perpetually sweat-soaked band that showed the 90s American indie underground how to get down. And as that 2010 reunion tour-- which coincided with extensive reissues of the band's 90s-era catalog-- continued to rack up positive notices well into 2011, there was little doubt that, even well into their 40s, frontman Jon Spencer, guitarist Judah Bauer, and drummer Russell Simins still possessed the stamina of their twentysomething selves.
However, what the Blues Explosion could bring to the table as a rebooted recording act was far less certain. From their 1991 debut through to 1998's Acme, the band had undergone a dramatic evolution from no-waved scuzz-punks to studio-savvy funkensteins, but one that had seemingly run its course as they entered the new millennium: 2002's Plastic Fang saw the band awkwardly try to temper its sound into '70s-Stones suaveness (tellingly, it's the lone Matador JSBX release to not receive the reissue treatment), while 2004's Damage reverted back to the Acme game-plan of enlisting a supporting cast of hip-hop heavyweights (DJ Shadow, Dan the Automator, Chuck D), but in a manner that ultimately normalized the band's sound rather than redefine it. So a new Blues Explosion album in 2012 presents no obvious game plan. Do they make a sleek, radio-friendly blooze-rock album in attempt to muscle in on some of them Black Keys bucks? Do they try to score cred points with the Ty Segall set by revisiting their early-90s avant-noise roots? Or, given the Blues Explosion's track record of reconstructing black musics ranging from Mississippi Delta blues to Shaft-esque funk to NYC rap, do they try to put their own absurdist spin on contemporary R&B?
With Meat and Bone, the answer is: none of the above. Which is the best possible outcome, really: The Blues Explosion barrel through the album's 12 tracks as if they have no legacy to uphold, no expectations to live up to, and nothing to lose. Stripped of the cut-and-paste studio trickery and celebrity cameos that defined the band's records from the mid-90s onward, the self-produced Meat and Bone boasts no ambition beyond capturing the Blues Explosion in straight-up, no-bullshit rock'n'soul mode. It essentially provides them with a chance to rewrite their post-Acme history, and posit the question: what if the botched back-to-basics mission of Plastic Fang was salvaged by the maniacal gusto of Extra Width?
If anything's really changed here, it's that Spencer sounds genuinely humbled. In the early 90s, the Blues Explosion were distinguished not only by their fondness for the sort of blues-based tradition from which so much punk and indie rock tried distance itself, but also by Spencer's penchant for hip-hop-inspired self-aggrandizement; "Blues Explosion" was not only his band's name, but his most utilized lyric, as if he were practising a form of inter-song product placement. But with Meat and Bone, pretty much the only "Blues Explosion" you get is printed on the album cover, and Spencer's banter here-- "Are you ready for your new career? Need a J-O-B," "I feel like a god/ But I still got a problem paying the rent"-- leans toward the self-deprecating musings of someone who's aware he's no longer the king of the scene.
Amid a 90s indie rock environment that frowned upon rock-star posturing, Spencer's shameless shout-outs to himself came off as playfully arrogant, if not outright provocative. But Spencer understands it's the sort of rhetoric that holds less power today, when self-promotion isn't so much a cheekily effective way to assert a persona as a practical necessity for any aspiring indie act. So on Meat and Bone, the focus is less on theatrical myth-making than reasserting the band's real-deal bona fides: three men in a room making one big racket. While "Bag of Bones" and the Orange-tinted "Get Your Pants Off" suggest the band haven't unlearned all of their funk finesse, Meat and Bone gradually forsakes its congenial groove for pure smash-and-grab insolence, hitting a feverish peak with the New York Dolls-damaged "Danger" and the contorted glam boogie of "Black Thoughts", on which Spencer seemingly sums up his time out of the spotlight by declaring, "Without a doubt, this is the worst vacation I have ever been on!" But what makes Meat and Bone a success-- despite simmering down into a mid-tempo murk during its home stretch-- is that the Blues Explosion never assume their comeback is assured. They're reapplying for the job of America's most raucous, hardest-working rock'n'roll band, and will let the sweat speak for itself. | 2012-09-20T02:00:02.000-04:00 | 2012-09-20T02:00:02.000-04:00 | Rock | Boombox / Mom + Pop | September 20, 2012 | 7.3 | d86b5378-bba7-4a99-9f1f-ca6f1246385a | Stuart Berman | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stuart-berman/ | null |
The poster boys of big beat, that hip amalgam of electronica and rock that has dug its way into the ... | The poster boys of big beat, that hip amalgam of electronica and rock that has dug its way into the ... | The Chemical Brothers: Surrender | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/1412-surrender/ | Surrender | The poster boys of big beat, that hip amalgam of electronica and rock that has dug its way into the national consciousness via "The Rockafeller Skank," have been busy since their 1997 breakthrough, Dig Your Own Hole. Maybe last year's DJ mix album, the reasonably decent Brothers Gonna Work It Out, should have been the clue, but Tom Rowlands and Ed Simons have clearly been raiding a library- sized record collection since their last offering of "original" music.
"Music: Response," the album's leadoff, starts like a ride on the Autobahn with Kraftwerk circa the mid '70s, with its analog synth blips and monotone computerwelt voices, before tossing in some ferocious beats to bring Krautrock into the new millennium. The mood carries through on "Under the Influence" with more Kraftwerk- styled noodlings. Meanwhile, their best instrumental effort is "The Sunshine Underground," an eight- and- a- half minute ride through chiming tones, wafting flute- like sounds, and sputtering and gurgling synths that intertwine with the briefest of dreamy vocals. Actually, it wouldn't have been out of place on the last Orbital album.
Surrender will receive a ton of hype based on its superstar guest appearances, and none more historically relevant than "Out of Control" with New Order's Bernard Sumner on vocals. Being electronic dance music freaks from Manchester, New Order is like the holy grail to the Chemical Brothers and it's easy to see why. The Chemicals share with their Manchester predecessors an obsession with hypnotic, melodic, dance beats. "Out of Control" works so well it could be a lost track from Low Life. After his turn on "Setting Son" with the Chemicals in 1996, Oasis' terminally out- of- style Noel Gallagher returns for another psychedelic, Beatles-esque anthem on "Let Forever Be," again snagging the rhythm track from "Tomorrow Never Knows" off Revolver.
Surrender is both the Chemical Brothers most immediately satisfying work and, perhaps not coincidentally, the most like a rock album of their career. Unlike a fair share of techno, these songs feel like "songs," not a collection of clever samples and a race to the fastest BPM on the planet. Yeah, you can go out and buy your jungle, your trance, your trip-hop and your ambient, but why would you when you'd be sacrificing the greatest gift of all: Surrender's love and understanding. | 1999-06-29T01:00:01.000-04:00 | 1999-06-29T01:00:01.000-04:00 | Electronic | Astralwerks | June 29, 1999 | 9 | d880a01e-51bc-4784-aaf6-ba1d0a57e83c | Pitchfork | null |
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A free Christmas release, billed as "the World's First iPad Album", this nice marketing gimmick is the result of Damon Albarn's restlessness on tour. | A free Christmas release, billed as "the World's First iPad Album", this nice marketing gimmick is the result of Damon Albarn's restlessness on tour. | Gorillaz: The Fall | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/14966-the-fall/ | The Fall | "It can be anything you want it to be. This is the nearest we have got to seeing what I would call a universal machine." That's British artist David Hockney talking about the iPad. Hockney does sketches on his, using an app called Brushes, and several of his works are already hanging this month in an exhibition at the Pierre Bergé-Yves Saint Laurent Foundation in Paris. Hockney is presumably drawn to the novelty as much as to the functionality of Apple's curious device, which is like a big iPhone that won't make calls, or like a small laptop without a keyboard. Rather than render it redundant or limited, those disabilities have made it as universal as Hockney attests, attracting hundreds of thousands of users ranging from my mom to Damon Albarn, who recorded the new Gorillaz album on his iPad.
The Fall, released for free on Christmas, is a nice marketing gimmick and the product of Albarn's restlessness on tour. While Hockney's sketches clearly look like they were done on some kind of computer, nothing about Albarn's songs reveals their origins. Instead, The Fall possesses the crisply eccentric production value of a typical Gorillaz album, which may be a testament to the iPad's ability to manipulate and combine sound files with little loss of fidelity or complexity.
On the other hand, it doesn't appear to handle hip-hop very well. The Fall contains opens stretches of loping, belching beats that are painstakingly crafted yet often sound like they've been created as backdrops for MC cameos. But there's only one guest, a barely recognizable Bobby Womack on "Bobby in Phoenix"; otherwise, it's Albarn singing and creating songs, which gives The Fall the feel of a solo album. At times it needs other voices to liven up some of these long stretches. Even so, it's fitting that Albarn has released it under the Gorillaz moniker. For one thing, that band has always had a strong visual component that makes the cartoon/hologram characters seem like they were meant to be up- and downloaded, so it's not hard to imagine them trapped in an iPad like General Zod at the end of Superman II.
Songs like "Revolving Doors" and "Detroit" have the same hazily martial beats that have marked the Gorillaz' output since "Clint Eastwood", which makes The Fall slot neatly into the Gorillaz catalog. It's less a proper album like Demon Days or Plastic Beach-- more an auxiliary item like that live album or that G-Sides comp or that remix album (or, in Albarn's career as a whole, like his lowkey, homemade Democrazy set.) Albarn's mode may be somber and road-weary, but there's not a whole lot of heft here, which means it sounds like a unified outtakes record rather than a major statement. Thematically, it's a tour album, leaving behind the Pacific Ocean trash island of Plastic Beach for the highways of America, evoked in songs named after Phoenix, Aspen, Dallas, Detroit, Seattle, and Amarillo. With its rangey beats and garbled transmission noises, "The Parish of Space Dust" imagines a Texas as expansive as the cosmos, but it's just enough to make you wish Albarn had incorporated some southwestern influences the way Plastic Beach used island rhythms to bolster its setting.
Despite the emphasis on atmosphere that pervades the album and that seems like a necessary byproduct of its creative technology, The Fall may be the most earthbound Gorillaz album yet-- and at times, therefore, the most banal. At his best, Albarn manages to create an alien ambience, as if visiting America has made him feel as out-of-place as certain travelers must have felt around Roswell. Still, he's always passing through, never stopping for a visit, and as a result, The Fall is a blur. Whether as an album or as a touring document, it doesn't add up to much of a statement, which means the particulars of its creation will probably always overshadow whatever life this album may find. | 2011-01-06T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2011-01-06T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Electronic / Rock | EMI | January 6, 2011 | 5.8 | d88154a4-1af6-4d63-a257-075fa312cff9 | Stephen M. Deusner | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stephen-m. deusner/ | null |
The Louisiana rapper’s latest is typically blunt, anguished, and unsettling. | The Louisiana rapper’s latest is typically blunt, anguished, and unsettling. | YoungBoy Never Broke Again: 38 Baby 2 | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/youngboy-never-broke-again-38-baby-2/ | 38 Baby 2 | Following in the footsteps of Louisiana legends like Boosie and Kevin Gates, YoungBoy Never Broke Again makes autobiographical rap that touches on pain, paranoia, and trauma. Over melancholy pianos and guitars, the 20-year-old sings and raps in a choked voice that sounds like he wants to cry, but doesn’t know how. He’s incredibly blunt, and listening to his music can be as brutal as immersing yourself in early Chief Keef. “Red dot and head shots for who wanna do me/Homicides, mamas cry, it ain’t nothing to it,” he wails on “Solar Eclipse.” Often he’ll mention his family and friends by name. The emotional immediacy is undeniable, even if the headlines swirling around him remain unsettling.
Since the release of early mixtapes like 38 Baby and AI YoungBoy, the Baton Rouge, Louisiana-raised rapper has built a massive and loyal fanbase who have consistently made him the no. 1 streamed artist on YouTube. YoungBoy is almost always involved in a legal issue, but with every one, he only gets more popular. The hip-hop tabloids have responded by following his every move like he’s their Paris Hilton, though the only time you’ll likely hear him speak is through Instagram Live. On that platform, tens of thousands of fans watch him faithfully like they’re at a megachurch, as he angrily rants, gives life updates, and runs through cigarettes like a bag of candy.
His new album, 38 Baby 2, isn’t that much different from any other YoungBoy project, but part of YoungBoy’s appeal is consistency. Throughout much of the album YoungBoy is in his comfort zone, reflecting on his struggles over mournful production: “My mama cars ain’t never had AC ever since I was little/Thank God every card I got in my pocket hold at least one million,” he sings on the intro, followed by a verse from his own mother. Next to his mother, YoungBoy sounds sweeter than he ever has, but that doesn’t last long.
YoungBoy has become defined by his menacing personality, as someone who can say, “I’m down to kill a whole house when my feelings involved,” like he does on “Rough Ryder,” and then quickly move onto something else. Typically he’s hostile and unpredictable; it’s made his relationships the source of endless social media debate and it’s reflected in his purest love songs. “Let me love you in my own way, that’s from a distance/I said ‘Fuck you,’ I was on them drugs and I was trippin’,” he sings on “Treat You Better.” It’s honest, but paired with real-life stories it’s hard to listen to. The best YoungBoy songs balance his lovesick attitude with his never-ending struggle.
No other rapper has mood swings this extreme: He can sound like a typical madly in love 20-year-old and a madman who is a liability every time he leaves the house. It’s what made YoungBoy Never Broke Again’s connection with his fans so personal; whether it’s good or bad, YoungBoy lets them into his life. And now he’s not just another rapper who sings about pain, but the rapper who sings about pain. | 2020-04-29T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-04-29T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Never Broke Again, LLC | April 29, 2020 | 7 | d88264b3-8731-4673-ab15-56fd804adda1 | Alphonse Pierre | https://pitchfork.com/staff/alphonse-pierre/ | |
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 Harry Smith’s foundational 1952 mixtape that used the United States’ rich musical inheritance to suggest how we might better ourselves | 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 Harry Smith’s foundational 1952 mixtape that used the United States’ rich musical inheritance to suggest how we might better ourselves | Various Artists: Anthology of American Folk Music, Vol. 1-3 | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/various-artists-anthology-of-american-folk-music-vol-1-3/ | Anthology of American Folk Music, Vol. 1-3 | PRE-DISCOGS, MAN HAS RECORDS BUT NO MONEY. TRIES TO SELL THEM, GETS RECORD DEAL INSTEAD. CHANGES AMERICAN MUSIC.
While the other kids were playing marbles or collecting Joe DiMaggio baseball cards, Harry Smith was becoming an amateur ethnologist. When the Oregon-born, Washington State-raised son of a cannery family was still a teenager, Smith jury-rigged a cheap recorder to a big battery. He captured the rituals of the Pacific Northwest’s indigenous Salish tribes as best as his crude technology allowed, a little Lomax of the left coast.
In the months to come, he swooned over the rest of his country’s early recorded legacy when, in 1940, a 78 RPM single by Mississippi bluesman Tommy McClennan arrived at a record store along the shores of Bellingham. Smith was haunted by that sound, obsessed, hooked. He wanted more of this American folk music. The bombing of Pearl Harbor soon gave it to him.
After the attack, when the United States joined the Allied forces in Europe, old-timers dug out their shellac phonograph records at the military’s command. Some would be melted down for weaponry, others dispatched to entertain “our boys” on faraway bases. Old record warehouses cleared their shelves to make way for fighting supplies. If you could get to it in time, you could amass the entire recorded history of the United States for peanuts.
Smith wasn’t going to war. His bowed skeleton and stooped frame caused by a childhood case of rickets made him unfit for duty. Instead, after moving to the San Francisco Bay in the early ’40s, he went shopping. He bought abandoned troves of “hillbilly and race records” (crassly commercial terms he perpetually resented) and even met Sara Carter—the captivating voice behind the transformational Carter Family country records he adored—a few hours east in a trailer encampment. For a decade, he amassed thousands of records that made their way to California from all points east—“immensely protective of the record collection and greedy about getting more records,” an old chum later described him, with love.
An associate of the emerging Beatnik resistance, Smith was also a burgeoning visual artist, fastidiously illustrating strips of film to run back through a projector; in those early days of LSD research, the results suggested astral phantasms, beyond the limits of reality. Heavyweights like Charlie Parker and Thelonious Monk jammed to his work and he to theirs, especially Dizzy Gillespie. He’d make intricate abstract maps of their pieces, hundreds of colorful little curves and geometric artifacts. When German aristocrat and eventual Guggenheim Museum cofounder Hilla Rebay offered him cash to continue this work in New York, he crossed the continent as the innocent ’50s dawned, all conservative and safe and potentially very boring.
But the money—as always with Smith—wasn’t enough, whether for the drugs he loved or the films he loved to make with them. So Smith sought out a record label head by the name of Moses Asch to buy thousands of his records. Smith needed cash more than shellac; Asch demurred. His finances, after all, weren’t exactly stable. Only four years earlier, his first label had cratered, sending him into bankruptcy. Because of those legal woes, his longtime secretary, Marian Distler, registered alone as the president of an all-new label, Folkways, never even mentioning Asch in the paperwork. Distler and Asch were surviving on $25 per week.
Rather than spend a fortune he did not have, Asch presented Smith with a counterproposal: The 33 1/3 LP was steadily gaining post-war popularity, so why didn’t Smith comb through his 78s and pick the most compelling tracks, the most gripping documents of American folk? If Smith would sequence them, Asch would issue the results with the imprimatur of his young Folkways imprint. Folkways had already released strong sets of Southern rags and blues and East Tennessee gospel, and others had released troves of folk elsewhere. But Smith, Asch later said, understood this music’s “relationship to the world.” He could do it better.
And so Smith—a struggling 28-year-old artist who embraced the occult and sometimes insisted Aleister Crowley was his father, new to New York from the Pacific Northwest—made a mixtape, largely documenting the struggles and songs of the American Southeast. The Anthology of American Folk Music, originally released in August 1952, collects 84 white-hot cuts of early blues, country, gospel, Cajun, cowboy, jazz, jug, and dance, jumping across those supposedly color-lined genres with revelatory aplomb.
These songs were only a couple decades old when Smith repurposed them; they were so strange and uncanny, listeners assumed the artists were dead. In effect, Smith had reached across the lacuna between the Great Depression and World War II, a period when vinyl sales cratered almost entirely, and pulled an almost forgotten past back into the country’s present. Some tunes here read like ill-informed news summaries of the Titanic’s disaster or presidential assassinations, while others are emphatic paeans to a ferocious and feared god. One man vows to run away with his love forever, while many others share dastardly deeds of betrayal, cheating, and murder. There is dying and dancing, working too hard and working too little, fucking and fussing and fighting, all tucked into four wonderfully overwhelming hours.
Smith split his mix into three broad sets of about 28 songs each. Each set got a symbolically colored cover, the hue tapped from his lifelong interest in alchemy—green “Ballads,” for water; red “Social Music,” for fire; and blue “Songs,” for air. There’s been much ado made about his intentional track-to-track connections, how a lyric or an idea from one song arrows into the next. Look for such links, and you’ll often find them. Instead, I recommend letting the Anthology wash over you as a whole, revealing a world where anything could and often does happen. When he spent time with the Salish tribes in his youth, he recognized his interest in “music in relation to existence,” how sound could mirror the mercuriality of life. This was that realization’s triumphant apotheosis.
But Smith didn’t stop with the music. When he trawled the scrap heaps and record shops in the ’40s, he collected record catalogs from stores and started tracing the songs to their sources, using the pioneering musicology of Cecil Sharp, the Lomax family, Olive Dame Campbell, Carl Sandburg, and the like to tease out their Appalachian, Delta, and even Transatlantic origins. In a 28-page book that accompanied the Anthology, Smith did his best to reveal those roots, his sources, and anything else he knew about both song and singer. He brilliantly reduced each number into an irreverent newspaper headline, too. Of “Ommie Wise,” a fiddle-backed murder ballad so tragic it may be the set’s heaviest wrecking ball, he riffed: “GREEDY GIRL GOES TO ADAMS SPRING WITH LIAR; LIVES JUST LONG ENOUGH TO REGRET IT.”
The liner notes—themselves an essential document of American musical intrigue—incorporated cut-and-paste photos of the performers, their instruments, sheet music, and how-to banjo schematics. The set’s cover, meanwhile, audaciously included a 16th-century sketch of the “celestial monochord” by Theodor de Bry, the European illustrator who gave Europe its earliest glimpses of the New World. It was said that the very hand of God reached from the heavens to tune it, divining all music, no matter the origins.
Smith’s Anthology represented his syncretic vision of the world, unbound by genre or class or concepts of high and low art. Mississippi John Hurt, the Alabama Sacred Harp Singers, and Austrian philosopher Rudolf Steiner, quoted by Smith in the liner notes, belonged in conversation, not distant cultural corners.
What’s more, 1952 was the middle of McCarthy’s Red Scare and the dawn of the Civil Rights movement, when the communist-linked Civil Rights Congress accused the United States of genocide against Black Americans in front of the United Nations. The Anthology offered a potent if tacit political message through Smith’s idealist vision for the United States.
Much like Woody Guthrie, Smith saw his country as it was but did not let that interfere with his hopes for how it could be. He never listed the race of these performers, an uncommon move in those days of unabashed Jim Crow, himself a byproduct of American folk minstrelsy. He deliberately omitted any song that included a racist epithet, a fact that became painfully clear when the label Dust-to-Digital initially included them in a 2020 companion set. Smith relished the fact that people thought Mississippi John Hurt, born near plantation land at the end of the 19th century, was a white hillbilly. This was America reimagined for the future, molded from the scraps of its barbaric past.
Perhaps this hope is why its signal keeps coming around again and again, like some lighthouse’s beacon. After its initial release in August 1952, it unsteadily emerged as a large piece of the foundation of the folk revival of the ’50s and ’60s, the movement that gave us the songwriters who reshaped the possibilities of rock and, by extension, all that followed. It was one of the first albums the White House acquired for its official record collection in the early ’70s, a bit of terra firma during the vertiginous Nixon years.
The monumental CD edition issued by Smithsonian Folkways in 1997 (the venerable institution acquired Asch’s label and all its 2,168 releases a decade earlier) sparked a subsequent renaissance, allowing the old sounds of American folk to follow unexpected new courses. A slapdash, pricy, and coveted LP rendition by Mississippi Records in 2014 had less widespread impact, but it looked gorgeous.
After 70 years, to hear this Anthology of American Folk Music is still to hear what you already know about the United States, our collective tangle of sadness and celebration, promise and failure. To really hear it, to understand the radical depth of the world Smith was trying to conjure, is to know that we could and can perhaps still be something better.
FORGOTTEN FOLK SONGS SWEEP UP INNOCENT BYSTANDERS, TRANSPORT THEM TO HEAVEN AND HELL, TURN THEM INTO MOLES BENEATH MOUNTAINS.
The critic Greil Marcus—an Anthology enthusiast so unabashed he once rendered the set’s characters into an imagined soundstage town dubbed “Smithville” to the apoplectic dismay of John Fahey—once called its 61st song “the greatest recording ever made.” By that point, in 2010, Marcus had been writing about the Anthology for well over a decade, his essay “The Old, Weird America” even serving as the analytical gangplank for the 1997 reissue.
His pick was “James Alley Blues,” one of the six tunes that New Orleans toughie, bluesman, and boatman Rabbit Brown cut in 1927. And it is a masterpiece in miniature, the bent-and-beaten strings of Brown’s tinny guitar the wobbly framework beneath his existential crisis. He desperately loves a woman who is exploiting his country naivete, using him for rent, groceries, and, it seems, goodness at large.
“Times ain’t now nothing like they used to be,” he bleats at the beginning, his voice trying but failing to get bigger than a moan. Is there a more concise summary of a curdling relationship, of the creeping suspicion that a love isn’t worth all the worry? By the song’s end, Brown doesn’t know if he should kill or kiss this source of agony. You just want him to run, to find someone who wants to be his “daily thought and nightly dream.”
There are at least a dozen songs on the Anthology that still dazzle me the way “James Alley Blues” dazzled Marcus when he wrote that in 2010, even after my own couple decades with them. I hear them and think that nothing could get better, that no one else has ever captured the essence of emotion or joy of sound so completely. This feeling lasts, at least, until the next good gobsmacking.
In fact, throughout the Anthology, there is the wonderful feeling that any of these songs might at any moment feel like “the greatest recording ever made.” Despite Anthology’s idiosyncratic artistry or all the through lines to follow from these century-old tunes, its nucleus remains these 84 songs. There was, after all, not yet a music industry about which to be cynical, no real precedent for being disaffected. Here are 69 acts forging blindly into the frontier of recorded sound, supercharged by the wide-open novelty of the whole notion.
Take, for instance, the 63rd song, Bascom Lamar Lunsford’s 1928 recording of the near-hallucinatory “I Wish I Was a Mole in the Ground.” Lunsford was a singing lawyer and avid song collector from a nook of the North Carolina mountains that, a century later, remains economically and socially sequestered; in 1949, nearing 70, Lunsford recorded a staggering 330 songs in a two-week spree at the Library of Congress.
This, though, is his triumph. Sturdy but strange, like the burl of some mighty oak, his voice is perfect for this string of seemingly simple but altogether surreal images. He wants to be the rodent that topples the mountain, then the charming lover gifting his gal a “$40 bill,” which had not existed in the United States by that point for more than a century. He is a lawyer who talks about busting out of the pen, the sun-bathing lizard who somehow hears his darling sing. These incongruous images are an inheritance of the local oral tradition, but taken together, especially above Lunsford’s spring-loaded banjo, they shape an endless mystery. What does Lunsford want me to do with these warped vignettes? Fight the power? Relax and enjoy life? Give up on life altogether? Here is a riddle with no right answer, presaging abstract expressionism with little more than a few strings.
That sense of mystery is the locomotive behind many of these other “greatest recording[s] ever made.” Just what happens to “Frankie,” who shoots the scoundrel she’s been supporting after he repays her by cheating? Above one of the most enchanting guitar lines ever committed to shellac or any other format, Mississippi John Hurt doesn’t plainly say. And is Clarence Ashley’s take on the Appalachia-via-England standard “The Coo Coo Bird” the forlorn testimony of a ghost or the doubtful dreams of an ordinary American aspirant? In Ashley’s haunted hums and twitching banjo, I can hear it both ways.
The pleasures are as far-flung as they are absolute. Backed by two trotting guitars, the fiddle of Texas Prince Hunt is so fierce during “Wake Up Jacob” it recalls a scintillating Eddie Van Halen guitar lead or a splenetic Kathleen Hanna vocal. Once in my life, I want to feel what Hunt’s feeling, or at least how he’s been feeling it. Not so much, though, with G.B. Grayson and his exquisitely heartsick “Ommie Wise.” His fiddle sobs intermittently as he relays the real-life tale of Jon Lewis, who murdered Naomi Wise, a lover whose only crimes were sweetness and trust. He escapes into the Army, presumably to get paid for his violence. The weight of it all bends Grayson’s voice until it starts to break; his fiddle is all elegy, tears down a ruddy cheek.
From start to finish, Smith’s sequence of early gospel recordings—the second half of “Social Music”—is rapturous. I don’t know that I’ve ever heard someone sing with more force than Chicago’s Rev. Sister Mary Nelson, whose gutbucket warnings of the Second Coming are amplified by the innocence of two kids who chase her lead. Likewise, the growl and bark of Blind Willie Johnson, clenched so tight you may mistake the scriptural snippets of “John the Revelator” for nonsensical syllables, is countered by the seraphic tone of (possibly) his wife, Angeline Johnson. Heaven may be the goal, the juxtaposition seems to say, but you’ll need to endure hell to get there.
Of course, there are misses, songs that may make you wince the first (or last) time you hear them. Even Smith lampooned the set’s gambit, “Henry Lee,” a tale of murderous love and unrequited lust delivered so drably it makes the side-effect disclaimers at the end of pharmaceutical commercials feel inspired. I likewise tire of its successor by the Alabama duo Nelstone’s Hawaiians, more concerned with fumbling through a poor imitation of slack-key exotica than digging into this tale of child abduction. Or is it murder? Rape? They’re too noncommittal to offer insight or intrigue. Pop and Hattie Stoneman, who helped pioneer and popularize country music, remind me that someone’s influence can sometimes outstrip their art. Their two tracks here presage the worst of twee. The couple’s back-and-forth relationship banter is more cloying than old-fashioned rock candy, their preening recitations of courtship about as seductive as a box of rotten chocolate.
That’s the joy of any mixtape, made clear here for perhaps the first time. You can hear through someone else’s ears, take what you love and leave the rest. Some have made bloodsport of despising “The Lone Star Trail,” a cowboy’s travelogue softly strummed by Ken Maynard, a Hoosier who liked to say he was from the contested banks of the Rio Grande. He sings of the plains, his dreams, and his duties, pausing for a chorus where he coos like a coyote. Smith vaunted this as “one of the very few recordings of authentic ‘cowboy’ singing.” Critics have lampooned it as a pandering precursor to self-proclaimed folk musicians who know nothing of rural life. I’m with Smith here. It’s one of his Anthology’s very few stoic treasures. And when the moon is just right, I swear it may be the greatest recording ever made.
A MADMAN’S MIXTAPE FINDS ITS PEOPLE IN DRIBS AND DRABS! THEIR MUSIC RESPONDS IN KIND.
David Fricke wrote in Rolling Stone that it is “impossible to overstate the historic worth” of Smith’s Anthology. John Fahey, always a master of exaggeration, opined that it would hold up against “any other single compendium of important information ever assembled,” Dead Sea Scrolls included. Indeed, Smith’s masterwork is perhaps the most important American mixtape ever made, at least until the dominance of hip-hop decades later.
But its influence did not arrive as some sudden sea change, an instant and undeniable transformation. To wit, researcher Katharine Skinner has published intriguing work about how little the Anthology sold upon initial release, disappearing “from the market altogether for several years” and never even cracking Folkways’ internal best-sellers charts. This canonization, Skinner argued, did not comport with the mixtape’s commercial reality, at least before the Smithsonian’s ballyhooed 1997 edition.
Skinner’s findings fascinate me, not as a counter to the Anthology’s influence but as a suggestion that its spread, at least after the original 1952 release, was often an act of community, not unlike much of the music itself. Several years ago, while flipping through a record store’s used bins, I found a very early pressing of the Anthology’s spirited second volume, the records scuffed with love but perfectly functional. It felt like a talisman; more important, it felt instructive. Housed in a thick plastic case, stamped with the old organizational tags of a local library, my find had once been a community resource, forked over to now-unknowable people who were interested in such songs and, just maybe, went on to start a band of their own.
“It was the beginning of the folk revival, everyone playing guitars,” Alice Gerrard told me late last year, in an interview for The New York Times, of her arrival at Antioch College in the early ’50s. “My friend, who became my husband, gave me—no, loaned me—his copy of the Harry Smith Anthology. That blew my mind, so I started looking for other things.” Gerrard went on to start a canonical duo, Hazel and Alice, that at last centered women in old-time and bluegrass circles and, in turn, helped center women like the Judds in country. (The first song the Judds learned? A Hazel and Alice number.) The line between Smith’s low-selling compilation and, say, the chart-topping songs of Judds zealot Kacey Musgraves is long but direct.
How many times did that happen? How often is it still happening? It’s hard to say. Bob Dylan, for instance, has waffled about how much the Anthology inspired him, but he has talked about the way friends shared their copies. Bellowing Greenwich Village fixture Dave Van Ronk owned the set, Dylan admitted in 2001, so he and friends would hang out at people’s houses and listen. His “Hard Times in New York Town,” from 1961, is a faithful re-creation of the charged “Down on Penny’s Farm,” Smith’s 25th selection. Dylan simply swapped the scenery of the country gripe for his new city. Maybe Dylan learned of the duo whose members’ names remain unknown somewhere else, but Smith seems the most likely provenance, especially given how often bits and pieces of the Anthology peppered the next 60 years of his work.
There is a pernicious tendency to overstate the isolation of these performers, to treat those living in Appalachian hollers or Delta hamlets like hermits, sealed off from the rest of the world by design. But Anthology’s works were powered by community and connection, resulting from an exchange of ideas by its itinerant preachers, Hollywood actors, and bona fide party bands. Lunsford, the giver of the $40 bill, collected tunes as he moved across the peaks and valleys of the Blue Ridge. Charlie Poole and Kelly Harrell, who sing separate songs about dead presidents on the Anthology, labored in Piedmont mills, hardscrabble and dangerous places where music was a necessary social balm. They even recorded together.
Indeed, many songs on the Anthology are magpie masterworks, three minutes of magic synthesized from a half-dozen different sources. The residents of Smithville weren’t intentionally distancing themselves from society; they were trying to sell records. A few became some of the country’s first music superstars, while others still linger in near-anonymity. Take “Moonshiner’s Dance Part One,” an ecstatic medley of children’s tunes, romantic ballads, polkas, and gospel songs crammed into 160 breathless seconds by a party band in a St. Paul nightclub. The group, Frank Cloutier and the Victoria Café Orchestra, was a near-complete enigma until 2006, when relentless Anthology researcher Kurt Gegenhuber tracked down their census records and recording credits. They tried fitting the entire world into the sides of a 78. Interaction and recombination, not isolationism, is the true spirit of Smith’s Anthology.
As an audience, we’re closer to this message than ever. The first folk revival the Anthology helped spark in the ’50s and ’60s could certainly be conservative, with hordes of stand-and-deliver folkies just trying to give us some truth, man. (Dylan became Judas to the lot for simply indulging in electricity.) The next revival Smith helped usher in—after the Smithsonian reissued the Anthology in 1997, six years after his death—better actualized his syncretic vision. Having already inherited the liberation of rock in all its variants, plus free jazz and electronic music, this generation heard in the Anthology new fodder from an ancient fount. They ran with it, headlong into alt-country and freak-folk and a few dozen assorted permutations.
“It should be free and exhilarating … convey something of the wildness and wonder of existence,” English singer Sharron Kraus wrote of modern folk music in a stirring essay about the Anthology. She traced the ways it helped compel her to move to Philadelphia and join a community that had taken the set’s engrained strangeness as its cri de cœur. “It should open us up to unfamiliar worlds as well as familiar ones.”
The music of that fertile moment, inspired in part by Smith’s work half a century earlier, still sends out ripples. I now see that same unencumbered enthusiasm for putting disparate pieces together, for making the old new again, in online collage culture, a spillway of wild hybrids. Smith, I think, would have tried to collect the entire Internet and then yelled, with his wild grin, “Look at what I have found!” He wasn’t committed to protecting anything. He was committed to possibility.
84 SONGS TELL US WHERE WE WERE A CENTURY AGO. THEY TELL US WHERE WE ARE, TOO.
Soon after the start of the year, I commenced another rambling road trip across the Lower 48, the only states that existed when Smith made his mixtape. From California through Texas and out to Tennessee, and eventually north to Connecticut, I played his entire Anthology—at maximum volume, until my van’s speakers crackled like the horn of a vintage Victrola—on repeat for the first time in years. I spent 4,000 miles with it, thinking about the modern United States unrolling in front of me and the century-old nation rattling out of my stereo.
They felt shockingly similar, the topics Smith’s set tackles not only relevant but present at more highway crossings than not. “They cover such subjects,” ran the 1952 Billboard brief announcing the compilation, “as love, murder, robbery, politics, gambling, travel, prison, the Bible, courtship, hunger, etc.” Let’s unpack that “et cetera” to include unemployment, adultery, agriculture, industrialization, and beguiling rural weirdness. There is an abiding ethic of American restlessness to the Anthology, too, someone always going somewhere. They’ve grown tired of the country or jittery in the city, itching for a better lover or a new beginning altogether. It is music for moving on, toward some destiny you have simply yet to manifest.
Uncle Dave Macon’s electrifying “Way Down the Old Plank Road”—complete with the startling admonishment to “Kill yourself!”—documents being put on a chain gang simply for getting drunk, for existing freely. I passed near Mississippi’s infamous Parchman Farm and multiple road signs warning of hitchhikers that might be escapees of nearby penitentiaries, extant symptoms of the same carceral state against which Macon railed. And he was so white he was dubbed “The Dixie Dewdrop.” Blind Lemon Jefferson sounds like he’s singing for his sanity during “Prison Cell Blues,” especially when he hollers about the apathy of his captors. “I asked the government to knock some days off my time,” he sings, stretching that last word like a wail. “Well, the way I’m treated, I’m ’bout to lose my mind.”
There were mega-churches and little country sanctuaries along the way, all preaching pacific or prosecutorial strains of Christianity you can trace on the Anthology. There was Cadillac Ranch outside the city of Amarillo, then its more esoteric and funny country cousin, Slug Bug Ranch, in the small town of Panhandle, just to the north. They both reminded me of the wild ways folks find to entertain themselves, as eccentric as “The Coo Coo Bird” and enjoyable as Henry Thomas’ joyous taunt, “Fishing Blues.”
I saw the lights of farmers’ tractors blinking in the distance long after dusk and long before dawn, reminding me of the Carolina Tar Heels’ great country trot “Got the Farm Land Blues,” about the endless frustrations and travails of raising crops for a living. And it was hard not to think about the Tar Heels’ labor lament “Peg and Awl”—the tale of a longtime cobbler whose job has disappeared because a new machine that “make 100 pair to my one”—in truck stops, where drivers worried about the automation that may soon gobble their gigs, too. Vitriolic politics spilled off the front pages of local newspapers there, just as they did with the Anthology’s two songs about two presidents killed by a disgruntled man and an energized anarchist, respectively.
Most nights, delirious with white-line fever, I’d crawl into bed and watch a little Dateline, tales of cheating, robbery, and murder stuffed neatly into hour-long blocks. I couldn’t help but imagine how Buell Kazee would have told those tales in his adenoidal voice, or G.B. Grayson above his forlorn fiddle. Delight through other people’s worst moments? Sometimes, I swear I wished I were a mole in the ground, too.
There is little point in limning all that has changed about the United States, the advances we have made technologically, socially, and legally. But as I listened to Smith’s assemblage again and again, I couldn’t help but think that only the stitching had been replaced, not the fabric itself. “I’m glad to say my dreams came true, that I saw America changed through music,” Smith said at the 1991 Grammys, nine months before his death, leaning against the podium like the king of cool. Sure he did, but exactly how much?
I have long struggled with the name Anthology of American Folk Music, for the completism and inclusion it suggests but to which it never actually aspired. Smith worked within very specific parameters here, pulling only from commercially available recordings made in real if rudimentary studios between 1926 and 1932. He made field recordings of indigenous Americans during several phases of his life, but neither field recordings nor indigenous Americans are here. And neither are there many women nor much music from the North, the West, or the Midwest. Such records hadn’t flooded the market to the same degree as these raw transmissions from the South, the country’s unqualified musical Eden. The Anthology represents, at most, a cross-section of the whole of American folk music, and that fraction gets smaller every year.
As vital and urgent and engrossing as these pieces are, they are collectively a synecdoche for the enduring American condition, forming an anthology of American experiences from bits of our musical history. Smith intended to compile five, maybe even six volumes of the Anthology; a natural polymath, he instead spent the rest of his life making films, collecting things like paper airplanes and string games, and becoming the de facto mayor of the Chelsea Hotel, where he encouraged young artists like Patti Smith and Robert Mapplethorpe. Fahey’s Revenant Records eventually finished the fourth volume, a year before the death of the guitarist and Anthology adherent. After three volumes, what else did Smith have left to say?
You can’t stream the Anthology, not out of some Luddite resistance but likely because the legal bureaucracy of gathering together these 84 tracks remains imposing if not altogether impossible. (You can, at least, currently hear about half of them on Spotify.) You can sample 30-second bits of everything and download the 1997 liner notes through the Smithsonian’s marvelous website. Or you can buy the 6-CD box set for $80, a hell of a federally subsidized deal.
But I think that Smith, forever in need of someone to float him more than a few bucks, might actually want you to steal it, to grab the whole thing from the Internet Archive and dig in for the rest of your life. The Anthology was always legally suspect, anyway, released by Asch with the hope that larger labels would not care about the passion-driven reissue of sides they’d long ago let drift out of print and into obscurity.
The Smithsonian, it’s worth noting, worked through these legal issues for its attentive reissue, prompting at least one critic to say it fit our “benign, Disneyfied version of the twentieth century.” He has a point. This music was a positive piece of our national inheritance, Smith always seemed to say. Someone might as well take a risk sharing what good came with so much bad, particularly if they could front him the cash. | 2023-02-05T00:00:00.000-05:00 | 2023-02-05T00:00:00.000-05:00 | null | Smithsonian Folkways | February 5, 2023 | 10 | d885d927-7e70-4f19-b176-703030581961 | Grayson Haver Currin | https://pitchfork.com/staff/grayson-haver currin/ | |
In a 16-channel piece commissioned for France’s Groupe de Recherches Musicales, the electroacoustic pioneer looks to the origins of the universe and the unconscious mind for inspiration. | In a 16-channel piece commissioned for France’s Groupe de Recherches Musicales, the electroacoustic pioneer looks to the origins of the universe and the unconscious mind for inspiration. | Beatriz Ferreyra: *Senderos de luz y sombras * | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/beatriz-ferreyra-senderos-de-luz-y-sombras/ | Senderos de luz y sombras | Part and parcel of Beatriz Ferreyra’s compositional practice is the act of surrendering to music. “I do not think of anything,” she’s explained; “the sounds with their colors, their shapes, and their dynamics take me by the hand and take me where they want.” The pioneering Argentine experimentalist has decades of work that are sprawling in this way, grandiose in both ambition and impact because of sound’s unpredictable, commandeering nature. Her 1972 composition Siesta Blanca transmogrifies Astor Piazzolla tangos into elemental sensations of cold and heat. Dans un point infini, from decades later, is a longform epic built on screeching, manipulated strings. Her latest album features what is perhaps her loftiest work: a 30-minute composition written between 2016 and 2020 titled Senderos de luz y sombras (“Paths of light and shadows”). A 16-channel piece commissioned by the French state, it looks to the origins of the universe and the unconscious mind for inspiration; as always, she’s drawn to the mysterious processes that animate life itself.
Its first half, “Senderos abismales,” begins with a slow crescendo that feels like being sucked into a vortex. Amid its agitated electronics is a familiar clatter, like that of a door being locked: a signpost for the way this music aims to entrap. The actual results are mixed. Ferreyra is at her best here when finding ways to ground her oblique electroacoustic cacophonies in the everyday, such as when gusts of wind and speeding cars sound like they’re rushing past you, their familiar sonics magnified to the point of being hyperreal. There’s a science-fiction affect to a lot of music in the Groupe de Recherches Musicales (GRM) tradition, but if the music is constantly shifting, then it’s hard to feel immersed when every step of an evolution isn’t allowed to shine. In the middle of “Senderos abismales,” revving motor vehicles seem to materialize out of primordial goo, but they quickly fade to drab, droning hums. If Ferreyra’s fascination with the universe’s beginnings includes matter-antimatter annihilation, then she’s begrudgingly successful: Flashes of energy are indeed created, but they’re instantaneous, fleeting.
A lot of writing about Ferreyra’s music notes her time with Pierre Schaeffer, founder of the GRM, but her stints with Bernard Baschet—the late instrument builder and sound sculptor to whom this record is dedicated—are insightful too. Baschet, along with his brother François, were invested in constructing novel sounds, and pieces such as Iranon and Chronophagie have an exploratory sense of wonder. Ferreyra also dedicates Senderos to another experimental titan: Bernard Parmegiani. After hearing an unfinished version of Violostries in the 1960s, Ferreyra was emboldened: “Everything is possible,” she remembers thinking. Whether with tape music or instruments made from metal and glass, these artists’ works helped Ferreyra see that she could conjure entire worlds from relatively simple means.
Ferreyra’s understanding of this power drives Senderos’ best moments. “Senderos del olvido” opens with a sneeze—or at least something approximating one—and the piercing tones that cryptically glisten thereafter sound like miniature alien lifeforms chattering away. By the track’s halfway point, she makes the familiar even stranger by folding in a variety of extended vocal techniques, layering sputters and breaths with engine-like sounds akin to those in “Senderos abismales.” It provides narrative complexity but little else, bereft of the ecstatic playfulness that defined Murmureln or the hypnotic folk roots of Echos. Senderos’ coldness is perhaps the point, but it fails to live up to its premise, providing few opportunities to feel like you’re witnessing something monumental. Its final minutes are not cosmic, merely quotidian: Synths flicker in dull, unceremonious fashion, sounding less like the subtle glints of star formations than the deadened atmosphere of a run-down casino. | 2023-01-06T00:02:00.000-05:00 | 2023-01-06T00:02:00.000-05:00 | Experimental | Recollection GRM | January 6, 2023 | 6.6 | d8866a24-54aa-4ba3-87f5-2f3d6d6e2c8e | Joshua Minsoo Kim | https://pitchfork.com/staff/joshua-minsoo kim/ | |
Drawing freely from funk, gospel, African pop, and electronica, Ahmed Gallab’s exuberant new album rejoices in the power of Black diasporic identity and community. | Drawing freely from funk, gospel, African pop, and electronica, Ahmed Gallab’s exuberant new album rejoices in the power of Black diasporic identity and community. | Sinkane: We Belong | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/sinkane-we-belong/ | We Belong | On his new album, Ahmed Gallab, the Sudanese-born, New York-based multi-instrumentalist behind Sinkane, embodies the sense of deep pain and great joy that powers the sound of Black liberation. From the earliest spirituals to the first civil rights songs, the uplifting power of gospel to the cathartic energy of funk, Black music resonates with this profound duality, serving as a fundamental tool of resistance—a loud, proud refusal to comply with the expectations of a world that seeks to oppress. On We Belong, Sinkane uphold this legacy, smashing through constraints with revolutionary exuberance. The fact that so many civil rights anthems remain as relevant today as they were in the 1960s could be cause for sorrow, but Gallab chooses to celebrate the beauty in the struggle—most of all, the role of community and togetherness in driving it forward.
Sinkane’s albums all exude positivity, starting from the sunlit, breezy grooves of Mars (2012) and Mean Love (2014), which drew on Sudanese pop, ’70s funk, and electronica to give shape to the borderless sound that has come to define Sinkane. Gallab sharpened his focus on Life & Livin’ (2017), engaging more deeply with issues afflicting the world around him; on 2019’s Dépaysé, he explored his identity and the complexities of growing up as “an outsider” while reiterating messages of hope and unity. Thematically, then, We Belong is no great departure. Yet it feels grounded in a way that Sinkane’s previous albums were not, its joy less rooftop party, more radical and transformative. Opener “Come Together” lays out the core theme, urging those who feel they don’t belong to do just as the title suggests. “Greater than a sum of parts/There’s a better life to be,” Gallab belts over a swell of surging synths, as the word “Africa” rings out in a robotic drawl, transforming the track into a George Clinton-esque pan-African anthem.
We Belong is Sinkane’s most collaborative album to date, welcoming luminaries like soul singer Bilal and the late jazz multi-instrumentalist Casey Benjamin. It especially draws on “a specific kind of Black musical community” centered around New York, Gallab said in a statement. Many of the featured vocalists, such as Ifedayo Gatling (of the Harlem Gospel Travelers), Tru Osborne, and STOUT, have roots in gospel. The title track, co-written by Gallab and Amanda Khiri, channels the transcendent joy of Black church music through call-and-response vocals and an earth-shattering performance by STOUT. Together, they offer up P-funk extravagance, a call to freedom, and a few words borrowed from Alexander Pope: “Be yourself, free your mind/To err is human/To forgive divine.”
On an album that doesn’t seek simple escapism, “How Sweet Is Your Love” stands out as a rare moment of pure disco release. Bolstered by radiant strings and shimmering synths, Sinkane invite you to shed your worries and embrace the present moment. But We Belong doesn’t shy away from confronting the harsh realities of Black existence in America: The soul- and gospel-inspired “Everything Is Everything” reflects on the persistence of racial inequality and systemic violence, evoking the murders of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and so many others (“Y’all only know our names from hashtags”). The track epitomizes Sinkane’s ability to intwine such starkly contrasting emotions, opening on pensive, weighty guitars before reaching for the sky with soaring vocal harmonies and Osborne’s urgent entreaty: “My people, we will find our way/We ain’t got more time to wait.”
Tracks like the Afrobeat-infused “Liming,” with its East African vocal flourishes, hark back to the Sinkane of albums past, acknowledging the journey so far. In the years since his prior album, Gallab earned a master’s degree in composition, enabling him to join his kaleidoscopic influences in a more rigorous way; he’s credited as producer alongside Money Mark. The more collaborative approach feels like a natural progression from his experience as musical director of the Atomic Bomb! Band, a supergroup tribute to the work of groundbreaking Nigerian artist William Onyeabor that included the likes of Pharoah Sanders and David Byrne, among many others. By zooming out and opening up to the community around him, it feels like Gallab has given life to the vision he had for Sinkane’s music all along. Glittering with disco lights and showered with confetti, We Belong is a radiant homage to Black music and Black people. | 2024-04-09T00:01:00.000-04:00 | 2024-04-09T00:01:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | City Slang | April 9, 2024 | 7.5 | d8867b35-a80b-4bf9-8b84-ebfc4489b465 | Megan Iacobini de Fazio | https://pitchfork.com/staff/megan-iacobini de fazio/ | |
The Chicago post-punk quartet’s jittery second album rails against gentrification, algorithmic overload, and the bankruptcy of life under an extractive system. | The Chicago post-punk quartet’s jittery second album rails against gentrification, algorithmic overload, and the bankruptcy of life under an extractive system. | Stuck: Freak Frequency | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/stuck-freak-frequency/ | Freak Frequency | Stuck are preoccupied with life’s most consistent torment: capitalism. On their wryly-titled debut Change Is Bad, the Chicago quartet captured the nagging anxiety of life under a fucked-up system, pairing political screeds with twitchy, groove-driven post-punk that recalls Protomartyr and Mission of Burma. Lead singer Greg Obis likened his powerlessness to that of a bug: “I am the cockroach hissing alone/Another panicked and twitching drone.” The band sharpened their knives on 2021’s Content That Makes You Feel Good EP, critiquing corporate surveillance, the commodification of art, and the brutal ineffectiveness of cops.
Their second album Freak Frequency stays on theme, informed by the difficulty of maintaining sanity in a world ruled by bloodthirsty plutocrats and algorithms. How do you cope with the reality that your city’s most recent mayor—who looks more like a cartoon villain than most cartoon villains—was more interested in crushing teachers unions and sending out the police than improving general well-being? Reckoning with goofy, blatantly transparent evil, the band’s music sounds weirder and more diabolical than before, anchored by twisty, bickering guitar lines, scattered saxophone honks, and Obis’ manic vocal delivery. Leaning on cool overenunciations and sassy wails, he dials up the absurdity.
Obis foams at the mouth on “Time Out,” yelping satirical slogans like “Sell the pain!” to convey how social media gorges on our psyche like it’s a T-bone steak. Similarly, lamenting the way that history repeats itself on “Break the Arc,” he spits out consonants like a machine gun; underneath, the guitars stab like daggers while devilish boings add an element of farce. The darts keep flying: On “Do Not Reply,” Obis rebukes corporate executives who would “jump me in a heartbeat for the change in my pocket,” and on “The Punisher,” he pokes fun at MAGA stooges who exist in never-ending delusion.
The attacks are invigorating, but the band has a more vulnerable side, too. “We all know it’s just a matter of time before the stress becomes me,” Obis sighs in defeat on “Lose Your Cool,” consumed by anxiety even as he hears his therapist reassuring him in the back of his mind. On Plank III,” he recounts a relationship that fizzled after a diner became an empty lot, observing how gentrification can rob people of meaningful experiences. But he still has his sights on the developers who caused this ruin: “3D-rendered transformation/They didn’t leave any traces/of the lives that were lived here.” Stuck’s songs may not fall on the ears of the reckless billionaires and sycophants they write about, but they make an impact all the same. | 2023-06-01T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2023-06-01T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Born Yesterday | June 1, 2023 | 7.2 | d88efb91-667b-4125-97b1-928588dc4975 | Lizzie Manno | https://pitchfork.com/staff/lizzie-manno/ | |
On her third album, the British singer-songwriter proves to be an artist deeply invested in archetypes, one who doesn't muck about with the details of 21st-century life in her explorations of desire, loss, and understanding. | On her third album, the British singer-songwriter proves to be an artist deeply invested in archetypes, one who doesn't muck about with the details of 21st-century life in her explorations of desire, loss, and understanding. | Laura Marling: A Creature I Don't Know | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/15808-a-creature-i-dont-know/ | A Creature I Don't Know | Laura Marling's music feels timeless. I don't mean "timeless" in the sense that people refer to, say, Adele or Duffy as timeless, when really they're really just evoking a very specific time that happens to be distant. Marling evokes other artists, too, but they're spread out over the past five decades of pop and rock, from Joni Mitchell, Fairport Convention, and Leonard Cohen to Fiona Apple, Tori Amos, and PJ Harvey. Still, her songs feel divorced from time, lacking clues or signposts to indicate whether her stories and scenes might be set 500 years ago or yesterday. Marling's first two albums were noteworthy in large part for their precociousness. Her newest is A Creature I Don't Know, and it's her first that can't benefit from stunning you with its level of maturity. This is simply who Marling is right now-- an artist deeply invested in archetypes, one who doesn't muck about with the details of 21st-century life in her explorations of desire, loss, and understanding.
Certainly it's a brave artistic approach, this notion of wrestling with only the most primal states of being and ignoring all the fleeting fads and noise that make up the rest of our world. At the same time, such a large part of songwriting is making human connections, and often with Marling it's not entirely clear whether these songs are springing forth from a 21-year-old Englishwoman or some deathless, wandering spirit. Her reliance on heavily symbolic language and lack of interest in putting more of her personality into her compositions creates frustrating paradoxes: Her music's intimate yet distant, earthy yet seemingly not of this earth.
That said, the success of each song on A Creature I Don’t Know hinges on how well Marling inhabits the role she's given herself. Fortunately, while she may not be a particularly revealing performer, she's an extremely commanding one. Marling's tendency is to be stark and direct, and her presence carries equal weight whether she's accompanied by little more than piano or guitar (the unnervingly hushed, death-obsessed "Night After Night") or a churning instrumental malestrom (the Neil Young-worthy "The Beast"). On "The Muse", "Salinas", and the Zeppelin III-goes-hoedown single "Sophia", Marling's scarily impressive self-possession actually spills over into a kind of wickedly controlling glee, as she adds domineering theatrical flourishes to certain words and phrases in a manner that comes reasonably close to matching Harvey during her mid-1990s reign. Marling may spend the majority of these songs and several others struggling to find wisdom and peace in the face of trials brought on by lust, money, and death, but she almost always sounds like she already has all the answers. | 2011-09-13T02:00:04.000-04:00 | 2011-09-13T02:00:04.000-04:00 | Folk/Country | Ribbon Music | September 13, 2011 | 7.6 | d893a3f5-00ee-43b1-954d-4c90017a1eba | Joshua Love | https://pitchfork.com/staff/joshua-love/ | null |
After COVID foiled the tour behind their debut album, the London pop chameleons return with an EP that lurks in the shadowy spaces of claustrophobia, existential dread, and the sadness of a long pandemic winter. | After COVID foiled the tour behind their debut album, the London pop chameleons return with an EP that lurks in the shadowy spaces of claustrophobia, existential dread, and the sadness of a long pandemic winter. | Sorry : Twixtustwain EP | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/sorry-twixtustwain-ep/ | Twixtustwain EP | In March 2020, the London pop chameleons Sorry were about to embark on a series of shows in support of their debut record, 925: a headlining tour across the UK, SXSW showcases, festival dates. You know what happens next. One year later, the band’s new Twixtustwain EP offers assurance that while the world went on pause, Sorry have only gotten weirder. Sorry’s core songwriting duo, Asha Lorenz and Louis O’Bryen, first met as schoolmates. Initially, the friendship was contentious but eventually softened and the pair started a project, initially known as Fish. Later renamed Sorry, the band expanded and added band members Lincoln Barrett (drums), Campbell Baum (multi-instrumentalist), and Marco Pini (synths).
While 925 blended post-punk, pop, and jazz, the five-song Twixtustwain evokes the experimental collage of Sorry’s first two mixtapes, 2017’s Home Demo/ns vol. I and the following year’s Home Demo/ns vol. II. Though Lorenz and O’Bryen frequently cite prolific Philadelphia weirdo Alex G as an inspiration, another city of brotherly love band, Spirit of the Beehive, feels fitting as well. Like Spirit, Sorry flit between ideas, rarely sticking to a clear blueprint. Overall, however, Twixtustwain lurks in the shadowy spaces of claustrophobia, existential dread, and the sadness of a long pandemic winter. On the downcast opening duet, “Don’t Be Scared,” O’Bryen takes the lead, mumbling reassurances to a lover until he is abruptly cut off by a confession from Lorenz: “I’m at odds with myself/So many questions, even more doubts.” “Cigarette Packet,” on the other hand, channels its romantic confusion into bright chaos, with cowbell, synths, and babydoll vocal distortion all merging into a sort of hyperpop-lite.
With its shapeshifting songs and lyrical uncertainty, Twistustwain feels elusive. On the knotty “Things To Hold Onto,” Lorenz asks for a few crumbs of affection to cling to even if it makes an imminent separation more painful in the long run. The disjointed, glitchy “Separate” explores physical and emotional distances. Most of the EP’s lyrics are grounded in plainspoken observations, but Lorenz’s imagery is particularly poetic here: “Feel like I’m the salt and you’re the water spinning round,” she sing-speaks in her distinctive, detached monotone.
Twixtustwain’s closing track, “Favourite,” is the EP’s most restrained. Evoking the dreamy sprawl of Galaxie 500 with hints of weirdness buried in the mix, Sorry’s version of a love song is straightforward and intimate, exploring the complicated dynamic of wanting to be desired while feeling insecure. “I couldn’t explain/Or put into words/All of the pain/That we’ve maintained/And put in a box,” Lorenz murmurs as O’Bryen repeats her words in the background. It’s a curiously quiet way to conclude an eclectic collection, but it shows Sorry’s determination to explore every avenue.
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-04-15T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2021-04-15T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Domino | April 15, 2021 | 7 | d8a37386-11d9-44e9-8d6b-86f6b8458434 | Quinn Moreland | https://pitchfork.com/staff/quinn-moreland/ | |
The pop star’s latest is less of a faceplant than a comfortable rehash of past glories. He scales his stuttering electro and squelchy ’80s funk into hollow, expensive-sounding maximalism. | The pop star’s latest is less of a faceplant than a comfortable rehash of past glories. He scales his stuttering electro and squelchy ’80s funk into hollow, expensive-sounding maximalism. | Justin Timberlake: Everything I Thought It Was | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/justin-timberlake-everything-i-thought-it-was/ | Everything I Thought It Was | Y2K is back and Justin Timberlake is the asterisk in the trend report, left in the dirt like skinny scarves and fedoras. The ex-*NSYNC singer’s stuttering electro-pop, kissed with silky millennium-era R&B, produced at least one all-time album with 2006’s FutureSex/LoveSounds. But after a decade of borderline unlistenable music, hindsight suggests that despite his talents as a performer, Timberlake was also simply in the right place at the right time to benefit from Timbaland’s mid-’00s hot streak, or snag the Michael Jackson rejects that made up his 2002 debut Justified.
Timberlake’s sixth album, Everything I Thought It Was, is designed to buff the dents out of his public image in the wake of a recent memoir by his ex-girlfriend, Britney Spears. She wrote that he encouraged her to get an abortion, told the media she was a “cheating slut and a liar,” and generally acted even worse than you might imagine from a cornrowed white dude who’s prone to speak in AAVE. In an interview to promote the album’s lead single “Selfish,” a wispy mea culpa directed to “the owner of my heart and all my scars,” aka his wife of 12 years Jessica Biel, Timberlake spoke admiringly of music that lays male emotions bare. Referencing Donny Hathaway’s cover of “Jealous Guy,” he told Zane Lowe, “You just don’t hear that from men often, that they would express an emotion that makes them vulnerable. Growing up the way I grew up, you’re kind of taught not to do that.”
Timberlake’s read on contemporary pop could have been true half a decade ago, but today’s radio airwaves are full of men talking about feelings, and the biggest songs last year from male artists were yearning country ballads. No one really wants to hear about gender from an artist who saw fit to name a 2013 single “Take Back the Night,” but softboy masculinity is a useful touchstone for an artist embarking on a redemption arc. Listening to his new album makes it all feel about as convincing as the rootsy pose he struck on 2018’s Man of the Woods, an album for the hypebeast whose hiking boots have never seen soil.
At 77 minutes, the mercilessly unhurried Everything I Thought It Was does everything you thought Justin Timberlake did but worse. Contrary to the story he told Lowe, the album stops short of meaningfully grappling with his past, offering a lily pad for rote, randy showmanship. “Flame” shoots for the cinematic swoop of “What Goes Around…Comes Around” but trades the intricacy of FutureSex/LoveSounds’ karmic ballet for smooth radio piano, soundbank samples of siren wails, and arson metaphors piled like dusty coals that are never going to take. By the end of the song you’re begging for something, anything to jolt the song’s eight producers out of bird-feeding Timberlake’s former triumphs back to you.
Timberlake’s songwriting hasn’t matured much since he co-wrote the labored addiction metaphor “Rehab” for Rihanna in 2007. Love is like war but also like a drug; women are angels who “taste” of cotton candy, or demi-gods with a “temple” primed for worship. The Timbaland co-production “Technicolor” should be a synesthetic delight with its kaleidoscopic imagery and visions of cosmic union, but it falls into The 20/20 Experience’s trap of an overlong runtime and a beat switch that goes nowhere. (Not for the first time on this 18-song album, I wondered what bass ever did to hurt Timberlake and his collaborators.)
Timberlake was always a shameless flirt with just enough goofy self-awareness to pull off a song as fundamentally silly as “Sexy Back.” On Everything I Thought It Was, gone is the switchy sub begging to be whipped if he misbehaves, replaced by an epilated chancer who gives you the ick. “Help me mess up this bed,” Timberlake sings on “Liar,” a fine-enough Afrobeats track featuring Fireboy DML and produced by Danja. “Don’t act like you don’t know what I meant.” We did. On “Imagination,” one of the album’s better attempts at disco-funk, Timberlake promises that “feeling is believing,” the kind of pick-up line that could keep a group chat fed for weeks. The electro-funk-leaning Calvin Harris co-production “Fuckin’ Up the Disco” is a highlight, even if the lyrics evoke an overserved IT technician at a conference wrap party. “You the password, I’ma hit reset,” he speak-sings, in a song that also invites its subject to “run your nine-inch nails all over my back.”
I’ll resist a gag about Timberlake’s own downward spiral, because Everything I Thought It Was is less of a faceplant than a comfortable rehash of past glories that has nothing to do with putting a fresh spin on his signature sound(s) and everything to do with cautiously course-correcting ahead of an extensive world tour. Timberlake has lived an uncommon, fascinating life, but offers only boardroom-approved breadcrumbs of insight. Album opener “Memphis” is a cliché take on the pressures of fame that makes Spears’ “Lucky” look like “For the Roses.” “They say, ‘Just be great/Who cares if there’s too much on your plate?’” Timberlake sings over a Noah “40” Shebib-esque beat that Jack Harlow would pass on as too generic. Aside from a shoutout to “Phineas, Jess, and Si”—his wife and kids—the song could be by anyone.
Ironically, it was songs like “Cry Me a River” that helped establish a template for gossip-powered pop hits that use not-so-secret Easter eggs about artists’ personal lives to jumpstart discourse. (See Miley Cyrus’ “Flowers” or Olivia Rodrigo’s “Vampire.”) But with Timberlake you’re not sure you even want to hear it. There’s little on Everything I Thought It Was that piques curiosity, even though its author is utterly convinced of its importance. “A singular piece of art,” Timberlake recently declared while unboxing a vinyl edition with an alternate cover. “If there’s any film buffs out there like myself, this is a Fellini reference.” At least the singer resisted saying that something else was 8½.
Timberlake’s reticence to reveal much of anything makes you wonder if he really wants to play in pop’s big leagues at all. A recent raft of poorly judged features arrived to crickets, and Everything I Thought It Was’ only headline-making moment came after news that *NSYNC would reunite for one new song, “Paradise” (it’s ghastly). The album’s best moment looks to Timberlake’s boy band era more cannily. On the elegantly spare closing track “Conditions,” he draws on his quieter head voice to worry if a partner will stay by his side “if I lose myself and I go missin’/Make a couple hundred bad decisions/Do some shit I know won’t be forgiven.” He sounds adrift, with just a flicker of the pathos that bristled through *NSYNC’s indelible “Gone.”
The moment is brief. Timberlake has been punching below his weight and coasting for a decade thanks to certain stylistic and demographic advantages. Everything I Thought It Was brims with a misplaced confidence that can only be described as Timberlakean, laboring for such a long, long runtime under the misapprehension that a risk-averse mop bucket of last decade’s trending sounds is gonna hit through the sheer force of its performer’s waning charisma. For Timberlake in 2024, that’s something like business as usual. | 2024-03-20T00:02:00.000-04:00 | 2024-03-20T00:02:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | RCA | March 20, 2024 | 4.9 | d8b262c2-e6a8-4bfa-b952-8d738f717da7 | Owen Myers | https://pitchfork.com/staff/owen-myers/ | |
TK | TK | Brent Faiyaz : Larger Than Life | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/brent-faiyaz-larger-than-life/ | Larger Than Life | Brent Faiyaz is the guy in the club who seems mysterious and knows it. He’s got the moody-yet-cool lane on lock, and it’s made him one of the most prominent men in R&B right now. There’s nothing too deep about it, but when it works, it’s like his life is a Scorsese montage of short-term relationships that end with his suitcase getting tossed out the window. His velvety speak-sing won’t blow you away—especially if you were raised in a crib where weekends were soundtracked by the supernatural smoothness of Luther and such—but it is effortlessly fly. As a songwriter, the Maryland native relishes in being the villain (it won’t come as a surprise that he has said he “grew up on Max B and Dipset”). In the process his name has become a descriptor of its own—for the kind of dude who’ll play games with your heart.
What keeps the fuckery in Brent Faiyaz’s music feeling like real life instead of image upkeep is the setting. Since his breakout moment with the silky hook on “Crew”—with D.C. rappers GoldLink and Shy Glizzy—there’s been a sense that even if one of his late-night adventures takes place in L.A. or New York, all roads lead back to D.C., Maryland, and Virginia. On the heels of last year’s underwhelming but extremely popular Wasteland comes Larger Than Life, a life-is-good album where Faiyaz could easily have chosen to pop champagne to his success by bringing all of today’s most powerful rap and R&B artists into the fold. Instead he pays homage to his home by getting both regional pioneers and up-and-comers involved in his mess.
To underline the point, Larger Than Life kicks off with one of those timeless intros from Virginia Beach’s Timbaland that sounds like it’s been ripped off an answering machine. Once the smoke clears for Faiyaz’s naturally icy croons, the immediately recognizable sample is TLC’s “No Scrubs,” which sounds like a jittery Timbo beat but of course isn’t. No context necessary, though: Faiyaz’s conversational and flirtatious delivery is as crisp as ever. That’s followed up by “Last One Left,” another obvious flip, this one derived from Timbo’s beat for Missy Elliott’s “Crazy Feelings.” (Missy, another Virginia native, is here too, basically re-recording the cascading hook of the original.) What could have been just karaoke is spiced up by a pretty batshit verse where Faiyaz lectures some poor girl about getting relationship advice from her friends: “If they gon’ run yo’ life, then get your ass out of mine,” he sings sweetly, as if he’s not in full guilt-trip mode. Tacked on at the end is emerging Maryland rapper Lil Gray, spitting one of those radio-friendly guest features you could expect from Fabolous or Fat Joe in the early 2000s.
Predictably, Faiyaz does the Neptunes, too, on “Best Time.” This one is boring—summoning Timbaland and the Neptunes within the first four songs is nostalgia overload. He doesn’t even need it, not when he can choose from original local producers like Tommy Richman and Mannyvelli, who made the breezy “Upset,” and Manny again on the weightless “Moment of Your Life” (with Dpat and Sparkheem). Unfortunately “Moment of Your Life” doesn’t have vocal chemistry to match: Faiyaz’s thin coos are blown away by the traditional pipes of duet partner Coco Jones. It’s like replacing Usher on “My Boo” with Omarion. Usually Faiyaz gets around those vocal limitations by sticking to an even temperament, but when he tries to sound in love or at least infatuated, the grace turns to strain. He almost gets there on “Wherever I Go”: The falsetto right before the chorus is a nice flourish, just not enough for the pain to hit. It might feel beside the point to rag on his vocals, but rap-infused singers have had the range before. Send him a link to Lloyd’s Street Love.
Faiyaz sounds most alive when the stakes aren’t all that high, like on “WY@,” where his version of accountability is “I be doin’ shit I shouldn’t do for real/That’s why I always tell you to come through for real.” Or when he’s just laying down some player rhymes on “On This Side” with A$AP Ant and CruddyMurda, the D.C. rapper who doesn’t waste his moment in the spotlight. Still, he leaves a lot of emotional questions hanging. Is this life lonely? Is it monotonous? Faiyaz sings about stories that would be the highlight of most people’s year like it’s just another day. There’s gotta be another layer, I just know it. One more look under the hood—that could turn Brent Faiyaz into more than just R&B’s resident cool guy. | 2023-11-01T00:02:00.000-04:00 | 2023-11-01T00:02:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | ISO Supremacy | November 1, 2023 | 7 | d8b3e5cf-96da-440a-925f-d8361752404a | Alphonse Pierre | https://pitchfork.com/staff/alphonse-pierre/ | |
The first LP from Hype Williams in six years is ostensibly helmed not by its founders—Dean Blunt & Inga Copeland—but by a duo called Slaughter & Silvermane. It’s full of sludgy 808s and cheap synths. | The first LP from Hype Williams in six years is ostensibly helmed not by its founders—Dean Blunt & Inga Copeland—but by a duo called Slaughter & Silvermane. It’s full of sludgy 808s and cheap synths. | Hype Williams: Rainbow Edition | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/hype-williams-rainbow-edition/ | Rainbow Edition | Dean Blunt and Inga Copeland were musical creatures born in a cloud of obfuscation. Their since defunct collaboration in Hype Williams fueled the beginning of the mystery around them. Blunt and Copeland were possibly fake names; in interviews they presented as opaque, put-on, and difficult; and their music was just as willfully obscure. Across their handful of records, their sound was not so much a solid thing, but rather like the thick dry ice fog Blunt prefers to perform under, gaseous and wet. It was a sound at the middle of IDM and pop and hip-hop and performance art. Their music was not exactly made for pleasure in mind, but maybe for thinking or more likely trolling.
Blunt and Copeland ended Hype Williams six years ago, and have not made music together since 2012. Over the past year, a group claiming to be Hype Williams released a pair of albums, but their representatives said Inga and Dean were no longer involved. The same inscrutable electronic sound was present on these records, but apparently they were fakes. Rainbow Edition is the first new officially-sanctioned Hype Williams record since, and the group is now fronted by a duo of musicians called Slaughter & Silvermane (at least according to a picture provided by the group’s reps). The album is 20-songs long, with not many tracks much longer than a minute.
While the sound is not dissimilar to previous Hype Williams efforts, it does have a rudimentary, more aggressively analog feel. The tracks are cleaved from thick, sludgy whacks of 808 drums and cheap synthesizers. They bear the influence of soul and hip-hop, which is not unlike the sound of Blunt’s recent Blue Iverson project (one of a few hints he’s behind this even though he says he’s not), but Rainbow Edition is more distorted. It’s like the kind of shitty-sounding, computerized soul music someone would make for a straight-to-VHS movie—the poor quality recalls the constant static wailing of a dial-up modem.
There are vocals, too, but they often come in snippets of pre-recorded conversation, telephone calls, and static-heavy samples, lending the record a feeling that almost approximates eavesdropping set to clunky music. Take, for example, the opener “Madting,” which is mostly a conversation a woman has with a group of men, accusing them of being “Uncle Toms” as a rinky-dink drum beat plays hesitantly in the background. It sets a sour but intimate tone that the album carries throughout its brief runtime.
While titles like “Cockblocker Blues” or “This Is Mister Bigg. How You Doing Mister Bigg” might suggest only play, this album for the most part is rather melancholic. At its best, Rainbow Edition expertly mixes high and low like in “Spinderella’s Dream,” where jagged synth sounds and angelic choruses intermingle to create what sounds like the prettiest arcade soundtrack ever. But, this being a Hype Williams record, jokes and goofiness are more readily apparent as an animating factor than actual musicianship and songcraft. There are genuinely weird songs, like “The Whole Lay,” which features a helium-inflected, Auto-Tuned voice crooning amid a field of flutes, as if to make a joke on the current trend of flute in pop music.
But then there are strangely poignant moments, like “#Blackcardsmatter,” where a male voice slurs the title phrase over and over again. The title itself is a seemingly crude joke, an inversion of “Black Lives Matter” that references exclusive, income-based credit cards; even more, the prickly, minor key piece sounds like it was composed on a Fisher-Price toy keyboard. But there is a sense of sheer sadness to it all, embodied by the absurdist but piercing lyrics that the heaving voice utters (“They wouldn’t really like this/The interracial thing/All I’ve got to say is Black Cards Matter”). The song is unexpectedly affecting.
Aside from a few bright spots, Rainbow Edition is ultimately a thin record of short, demo-quality beats. Like so many of Hype Williams’ records from the past, this one will feel like a curio or better yet, another reason to ask the question: Who the hell made this? | 2017-08-30T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-08-30T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Big Dada | August 30, 2017 | 6.4 | d8b5cd6f-a185-478c-89eb-e71ef307671b | Kevin Lozano | https://pitchfork.com/staff/kevin-lozano/ | null |
On King Woman’s debut LP, band mastermind Kristina Esfandiari finds her own path to redemption in doom—and it’s enough to inspire new believers outside of metal circles. | On King Woman’s debut LP, band mastermind Kristina Esfandiari finds her own path to redemption in doom—and it’s enough to inspire new believers outside of metal circles. | King Woman: Created in the Image of Suffering | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22902-created-in-the-image-of-suffering/ | Created in the Image of Suffering | The response to Doubt stunned Kristina Esfandiari. In 2015, the San Francisco songwriter finally issued her proper, full-band debut as King Woman, a name she’d toyed with for years while playing in other people’s bands. Across the EP’s four songs, Esfandiari used blown-out, country-kissed doom to reckon with and rage against a childhood spent in a Christian cult-like community. The unlikely mix—where waves of distortion and wrecking-ball drums crashed against a voice that somehow drifted even as it raged—found a sudden following. Conjuring Slowdive, Sleep, and maybe even Lucinda Williams, King Woman became one of the decade’s most interesting new doom acts, loaded with crossover potential.
But Doubt courted a more unexpected audience, too—the same religious clutches Esfandiari had castigated during those songs and in interviews with The Huffington Post and Rolling Stone. She soon started to clarify her positions publicly, but she didn’t back down. “This is my experience. This is my story, and I don’t give a fuck about what any you think,” she said last year. “I’ve had no voice for long enough, and there’s so much that I need to say.”
Esfandiari doesn’t repent during Created in the Image of Suffering, King Woman’s brazen and brilliant first LP, either. Instead, she redoubles her frustration and invective, not only impugning religious fervor but slyly subverting it as well, using its ecclesiastical language for very human conquests. Her writing is gripping and unapologetic, shrugging off the veils and cloaks of Doubt to address her grievances and express her regrets directly. “I wish somebody would have told me/’Cause the past you can’t get back,” she sings as “Worn” lifts to its grand chorus, “Feels like somebody wore me/There’s a deliverance I lack.” Backed by a three-piece that seems now to share ownership of these songs, she seems to be finding her own path to redemption in doom—and, in doing so, created one of the young year’s most powerful rock records to date.
No one gets off easy here. Esfandiari scorns the self-medicating faithful during “Deny,” her soft but haunting voice riding a riff that feels as sharp as a reaper’s scythe. “Shame,” meanwhile, spotlights the existential dread of Esfandiari’s former fellow adherents. She wonders how they find comfort in doomsday prophecies and punitive proclamations, why they seek shelter in something that feels so vengeful. She worries less about what people worship than how they worship—specifically, how they use their beliefs to ensnare themselves and those around them, herself included. During Doubt, King Woman seemed to be learning how to communicate these concerns as a group; here, they preach together as a mighty team. The band pounds away behind her questions and observations, the bellicose rhythm section and snarling guitars demanding answers from a society of self-delusion.
The real strength of this still-new quartet becomes clear on “Hierophant,” the centerpiece of these eight songs. Esfandiari funnels the language of the sacred into a series of profane come-ons: “If you’re a holy church, I wanna worship,” she sings. “If you’re a sacred script, I am the Hierophant.” She treats actual human lust with the same sort of obsessive, accidentally prurient language evangelicals sometimes use for God. It’s funny, seductive, and coming from someone who has seen both sides, tragic. And with a chorus that hits like an electrified lullaby with a heretic’s sense of mischief, it wouldn't be hard to imagine “Hierophant” as a rock radio anthem. Now that would be a coveted fall from grace.
Religious reckoning, of course, is nothing new to metal. For decades, the genre has subsisted on turning crosses and crowns upside down, self-identifying with the damned, and lampooning sources of self-proclaimed deliverance. But Esfandiari’s rebuke on Created in the Image of Suffering is personal and real in a way that vaguely recalls the torment of the Delta blues or the spiritual keening of early American gospel music. Darkness is not just some metaphorical tool for expressing defiance or disillusionment—Esfandiari has suffered and survived the horrors of which she sings. And yet there is an empowered spirit at the core of Created in the Image of Suffering, an understanding that goodness and light can crawl out of that dark, even if it takes a lifetime. With King Woman, Esfandiari has staked out her own salvation, and Created in the Image of Suffering is strong enough to inspire a lot of new believers. | 2017-02-17T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2017-02-17T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Metal | Relapse | February 17, 2017 | 8.2 | d8c4580c-3e1b-4c84-9b4f-3157d06d739e | Grayson Haver Currin | https://pitchfork.com/staff/grayson-haver currin/ | null |
This suite of three intricate, hour-long guitar drones from the Swiss experimental musician suggests no ends or beginnings, just an unfathomable expanse of immersive sound. | This suite of three intricate, hour-long guitar drones from the Swiss experimental musician suggests no ends or beginnings, just an unfathomable expanse of immersive sound. | Zimoun: Guitar Studies I-III | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/zimoun-guitar-studies-i-iii/ | Guitar Studies I-III | A jumble of 825 motorized cardboard boxes, bumping into one another until they conjure the rhythm of distant techno. A sea of 663 suspended steel washers, bouncing from the floor until they invoke an overcrowded gamelan convention. A wall of 1,000 square feet of plastic wrap, blown by ventilators until it summons the pop and crackle of dusty vinyl. These are just three of the dozens of installations and sculptures that Swiss artist Zimoun has concocted over the past two decades, in order to elicit extraordinary sound from assemblages of everyday objects. (Highly recommended: Pass a few amused and mesmerized minutes or hours watching Zimoun’s other ingenious schemes.) They are attempts to create the feeling of chaos through control, to design systems so immense and intricate you are simply overwhelmed by their effect. When such sculptures work, they spark a keen sense of wonder—where else in your day-to-day existence have you overlooked such possibilities?
Zimoun’s actual albums, though, have never quite captured those twin senses of intrigue and imagination quite like Guitar Studies I–III, a new triptych of fastidiously made and totally immersive hour-long guitar drones that marks his debut for Lawrence English’s essential Room40. For each piece, Zimoun recorded a string of hour-long guitar improvisations, each exploring a different idea, like a motor vibrating the strings or a ball pinging against them. He played these takes through an assortment of amplifiers, sometimes hi-fi and sometimes shabby, and occasionally re-recorded the results by playing the passes back through carboard tubes or even half-broken speakers speckled with sand. There were no loops or shortcuts. An ostensible glutton for tedium, Zimoun stitched and mixed the layers together until they fit like tongue and groove.
If that all gets complicated, just remember this: By folding together so many layers, Zimoun created spans of electric sound that seem to have no end or beginning, no top or bottom. Listening feels like walking in some high desert that appears barren until you notice how alive everything is, including the soil itself. “It could even be endless,” Zimoun said of an earlier release. “It’s not going somewhere and not coming from anywhere—even if it is continuously changing.” At last, he masters that phenomenon.
The first of these three massive pieces unspools like a relatively quiet soliloquy from a member of Sunn O))). Massive chords roar in seemingly ceaseless waves, buttressed by low harmonies and static quakes that rise and fall, like breathing. The closer and longer you listen, though, the more you may hear; buried in the background of the track’s second half, for instance, there’s a piercing hum. Hearing that high tone glacially peel away from the surrounding lows is a subtle but visceral thrill, like time-lapse video of seasonal ice breakup.
The 64-minute finale moves like one of Rhys Chatham or Glenn Branca’s signature guitar armies, distilled until only the absolute essence remains. A fluorescent guitar tone serves as the piece’s through line, while other guitars offer variations—a distant tremolo murmur, a shorting cable’s crackle, a sweetly sighing riff. Just as there’s no clear beginning or end, “III” suggests that Zimoun doesn’t intend for this music to be happy or sad, glowing or gloomy; as with reality, it hangs always somewhere in between.
This liminal sense permeates “II,” the album’s centerpiece and masterpiece, plus its best balancing act between control and chaos. A murmur of a melody repeats from start to finish, like a spring daydream beset by static blips and ghostly hums. Think GAS marooned in the Black Forest, or Fennesz forever scoring the same square inch of shimmering ocean. The piece feels one note away from collapse or completion, as if one more element would either end it or elevate it into euphoria. But that change never comes, so “II” just flickers like an eternal flame, beautiful and bright but somber.
Guitar Studies I–III is bound to court one of the most rote criticisms of experimental music: Anyone can do this, right? Actually, maybe! Zimoun has been a guitarist since he was 10, but there are no fanciful licks or ornate riffs here, just patience and imagination. Given enough time and pedals, most decently competent instrumentalists could approximate most of these sounds, even if they lacked the wherewithal to build such intricate layer cakes. In that way, this music reflects geologic deep time, where rather ordinary events repeated over millions of years have shaped a splendid planet of mountains and canyons, rivers and plains. No one moment makes history or even stuns you; taken as a whole, the effect is completely awe-inspiring. | 2022-05-27T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2022-05-27T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Experimental | Room40 | May 27, 2022 | 7.8 | d8c6334d-79be-48ec-8dca-aca13a262561 | Grayson Haver Currin | https://pitchfork.com/staff/grayson-haver currin/ | |
On their first album in six years, the experimental pop duo (mostly) puts down their namesake instruments to fold more electronic elements into their potent songs. | On their first album in six years, the experimental pop duo (mostly) puts down their namesake instruments to fold more electronic elements into their potent songs. | Buke and Gase: Scholars | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/buke-and-gase-scholars/ | Scholars | Buke and Gase are often billed as an experimental pop act, a tag that has more to do with their inputs than their output. More than a decade ago, Arone Dyer and Aron Sanchez designed the instruments from which they take their name—a bass ukulele (Buke) and a guitar-bass hybrid (Gase). More recently, they've crafted “the Arx,” a multi-instrument electronic control system that sounds awesome and sounds awesome. Still, on Scholars, their third proper LP and first in almost six years, they sashay into a familiar lineage of deconstructed, bold pop alongside the likes of Dirty Projectors and Braids, bands folding ingenious electronic elements into potent, acoustic-centered songs. The pair built these dozen colossal tunes by jamming and chipping away at their most ecstatic improvisations until the most powerful snippets with the heaviest grooves remained. The result suggests a robotic chamber orchestra, soldered together by someone shielded in a helmet emblazoned with a Bananarama sticker, Hot 97 blaring from a nearby boombox.
Dyer enters the album with a sky-high lament, her voice rising through a web of droning chords: “I fall down on the weekend/I fall so many times on the weekend/Yeah, you couldn’t find a better friend than me,” prompting memories of younger days of inebriated abandon from a distant, more-calm vantage. It sure feels beautiful, though—especially the way the sun glints from every word hanging in the air. Like Imogen Heap, she routes the round through Auto-Tune, creating harmonies that chase her transfixing voice like an army of droids. The melodies are huge, unfurling as multi-colored banners in the sky. Dyer meanders through them like she’s lost, ultimately finding her way back home via unpredictable but meticulously plotted rhythmic and melodic routes.
“Scholars” itself sets up a Bizet-worthy aria before bending toward 1990s grunge, all smashed to bits under relentless drums. Dyer and Sanchez play all these tricky grooves with their feet, using kick drums, tambourines, snares, and other triggers like subway buskers; rather than a limitation, it’s a kind of formalist constraint, establishing the cohesive framework from which they build. It recalls the early work of Yeasayer (or, more generally, dance forms like disco) in that the percussion and songwriting feel mutualistic, so that one cannot exist without the other. The off-kilter beat of “Pink Boots” seems to have shaped Dyer’s very syllables.
Living somewhere between Animal Collective and the Dresden Dolls, Buke and Gase’s 2010 debut, Riposte, established them as an innovative outlier amid the blog-rock flotsam. In 2013, General Dome added more complex arrangements, astounding vocal lines, and some studio wizardry. Scholars ups even that ante, as Buke and Gase largely ditch their namesake instruments in favor of the Arx and other electronics, setting up a transfixing contrast between synthetic and acoustic sounds, all led by Dyer’s skywriting voice. The production here snaps with the clarity and force of stadium-sized headbangers while maintaining the intimacy of Buke and Gase’s earlier work. It’s as if stints opening for the likes of the National and Battles challenged Buke and Gase to consider their sound in larger spaces without losing their fascinating edge.
Dyer manages space so well with her voice on “Derby” that the track sounds like a lost Sneaker Pimps single. There are shades of Frank Ocean’s Blonde, as when “Temporary” flosses an ode to New York through a vocoder and over a bouncy riff. “Wrong Side” wrangles the hard-knocking inflections of Björk’s Volta, while “Eternity” simultaneously recalls the insouciance of Tom Waits and the global rhythmic explorations of Yonatan Gat. Even in their extended absence, Buke and Gase have exemplified the ethos of self-determined musicians, songwriters, and sonic explorers, looking for ways to warp and refine an idiosyncratic craft. With an eye toward the innovations of contemporaries working in similar modes, Scholars exists on its own proud terms—suggesting the authority of a peer-reviewed entry to the canon. | 2019-01-18T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2019-01-18T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Experimental | Brassland | January 18, 2019 | 7.5 | d8ca404a-653e-4b8a-a95f-cd2ab65c063f | Dale W Eisinger | https://pitchfork.com/staff/dale-w eisinger/ | |
Recorded in Nashville, backed up by an acoustic string-band including Jim Lauderdale, this is sort of a mishmash of ideas, some kicking around for decades. | Recorded in Nashville, backed up by an acoustic string-band including Jim Lauderdale, this is sort of a mishmash of ideas, some kicking around for decades. | Elvis Costello: Secret, Profane and Sugarcane | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/13079-secret-profane-and-sugarcane/ | Secret, Profane and Sugarcane | Most of Elvis Costello's records for the past 15 years have been side projects of one kind or another-- attempts to show how very broad his range is that mostly demonstrate the opposite. He's released jazz records, classical records, a soundtrack or two, collaborations with New Orleans R&B overlord Allen Toussaint and mezzo-soprano Anne Sofie von Otter. And every few years, at least when he's not threatening to quit recording, he gets together with his actual rock band-- the Attractions or their current iteration, the Imposters-- and does what he's genuinely brilliant at.
Secret, Profane and Sugarcane is not one of those rock-band albums. Costello recorded it in Nashville, backed up by an acoustic string-band including Jim Lauderdale, who sings harmonies on most of it, and the estimable dobro player Jerry Douglas. The most promising name in the credits, though, is producer T-Bone Burnett, who worked with Costello on 1986's King of America (as well as a nifty 1985 single credited to the Coward Brothers). King was a focused, fire-spitting album: a seething riposte to American culture and a conflicted love letter to American music.
The new record is no King: It's a gummy mishmash, an overambitious collection of table scraps and leftovers. (The forced wordplay of the title is the first sign that it's trying to cover too much ground.) There are remakes of a couple of songs that have been kicking around the Costello repertoire for ages ("Complicated Shadows" and "Hidden Shame", both of which previously turned up on the expanded version of All This Useless Beauty); there are a handful of fussy arias salvaged from a never-finished opera about Hans Christian Andersen and Jenny Lind, and a song dropped from 2004's The Delivery Man. There's a songwriting collaboration with Loretta Lynn, and two more with Burnett. One of the latter, a pastiche of Good Old Boys-era Randy Newman called "Sulphur to Sugarcane", is the closest thing to a keeper here (and the song from the album that Costello's been playing live the most), although it'd probably be more striking at three minutes than six. The version of the old Bing Crosby/Patti Page standard "Changing Partners" that closes the album is the most sensitive performance on it-- Costello's always had a great ear for covers. It's also a simpler, better-crafted song than any of his originals here.
The glory of the Attractions/Imposters is that they can make basically anything in Costello's repertoire sound good--even when the songwriting flags or Elvis oversings, they're fiery and idiomatic enough to keep things interesting. The Sugarcanes, as this album's ensemble will be called when they back Costello on tour this summer, are a fine, subtle, tasteful group, but accompanying this particular frontman occasionally calls for a degree of bluntness or spotlight-hogging they can't supply. When he tries to evoke early Johnny Cash on the remake of "Hidden Shame", their boom-chicka-boom lacks snap; when he slows down to a midtempo stroll or torch-song crawl, they don't bother to attempt the Americana-as-critique ferocity of King of America. And when he cranks up his delivery to spit'n'sneer, as on "My All Time Doll", they just get railroaded.
At its worst, this is effectively a contemporary acoustic neo-No-Depression record with Costello's signature vocal tics slapped on top. It's yet another entry in his string of gestural albums-- another argument that he's not "just" the rocker with a rock band whose rock songs still form the backbone of most of his live performances, both in their native idiom and out of it. But whoever suggested that being one of the great rock musicians was something he should aspire to move beyond? | 2009-06-03T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2009-06-03T02:00:01.000-04:00 | Rock | Hear Music | June 3, 2009 | 3.8 | d8d26e04-c5f9-4114-9782-291bcd832dea | Douglas Wolk | https://pitchfork.com/staff/douglas-wolk/ | null |
The long-married Malian duo confronts the country’s upheavals with an album of shimmering Afro-pop that urges hope and offers uplift. | The long-married Malian duo confronts the country’s upheavals with an album of shimmering Afro-pop that urges hope and offers uplift. | Amadou & Mariam: La Confusion | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/amadou-and-mariam-la-confusion/ | La Confusion | Once student and teacher at Mali’s Institute for the Young Blind and now grandparents celebrating 37 years together, Mariam Doumbia and Amadou Bagayoko are the original Awesome Tapes From Africa. The blind Malian couple began releasing cassettes in the late 1980s and have since become iconic international African stars who count Damon Albarn, David Gilmour, and TV on the Radio as fans and collaborators. Despite charges that Western influence has infiltrated and diluted their sound, they have become an African power couple, two of the continent’s most prominent cultural exports.
But just what does Africa mean to the outside world in 2017, five years on from their last album, Folila? The American president praises “Nambia,” a nonexistent country, in a speech at the UN; some DJs pay a small country’s GDP to collect original Nigerian boogie albums; and Drake and Ed Sheeran ride the charts on lightened and brightened African beats. These are minor issues compared to the true crisis facing Amadou & Mariam: Since 2012, northern Mali has been in and out of the hands of Islamic extremists who have imposed Shariah and banished music (and musicians) from parts of their homeland. It’s hard to pick a more apt word to describe the world’s current predicament this year than La Confusion, the title of the duo’s new album, recorded in Paris. “Nothing is what seems, and you have to get a lot of patience to understand what is really going on,” Amadou said in a recent interview. But even capturing such tumult, the couple radiates beauty and confidence on the title track, with producer Adrien Durand buoying the song with a shimmer befitting an early-’80s pop hit.
Their ninth album eschews the guests that swelled the ranks of their recent recordings; this time, their principal collaborators are African musicians like kora player Djeli Moussa Diawara and ngoni player Youssouf Diabaté. Opener “Bofou Safou” boasts a rubbery, buoyant bass sound redolent of early African house, full of clanging cowbells, canned claps, even a snatch of vocoder. If it had come out in the late ’80s or early 1990s, it would doubtless be fetishized by contemporary DJs. When it reaches the chorus, the song bursts into full bloom, making good on the type of dancefloor confection that the couple’s remixes have always hinted at. (As the album’s first single, it’s been reworked by Henrik Schwarz, Africaine 808, and Fatima Yamaha.) But behind the feel-good house beat, Doumbia also sings: “It is necessary to work in life/One must not cross one’s arms in life”—hardly a message of dancefloor escapism. “Fari Mandila” boasts horns reminiscent of Bagayoko’s former employer, the Malian big band Les Ambassadeurs. The lyrics here similarly urge strength instead of hopelessness in trying times. Were it sung in English rather than their native Bambara, it might well serve as a theme song to the #Resistance.
Even with a slick bassline and bit of saxophone and flute to smooth the song out, Bagayoko’s spangled guitar, entwined with the ngoni, gives “Filaou Bessame” a nervy feel; most of the songs’ silky surfaces are belied by worrying concerns. The ambient bird calls and swelling synths of “Femmes du Monde” accompany lyrics about gender inequality, and the percolating polyrhythms of “C’est Chaud” underpin a song about the uncertainties of migrating to another continent. But despite such subject matter, the duo nevertheless remains optimistic. Midway through “Massa Allah,” a gentle, twinkling instrumental interlude of synth and hand drum, Bagayoko’s unadorned guitar drifts across the song. The title is an expression of gratitude addressed to God, even in the most trying of times. It’s a sentiment that resonates broadly: La Confusion offers uplift in a time of global insecurity. | 2017-09-29T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-09-29T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Global | Because Music | September 29, 2017 | 7.7 | d8db098e-8682-48e9-b92d-de02ebba2c50 | Andy Beta | https://pitchfork.com/staff/andy-beta/ | |
The sequel to 2014’s beloved Black Metal is a brief but thrilling project from the mercurial artist, featuring the most approachable music of his career. | The sequel to 2014’s beloved Black Metal is a brief but thrilling project from the mercurial artist, featuring the most approachable music of his career. | Dean Blunt: Black Metal 2 | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/dean-blunt-black-metal-2/ | Black Metal 2 | Dean Blunt has never exactly seemed approachable. His interviews are coy, almost dismissive, his projects are enigmatic, and his live sets are cryptic, fog-filled descents into the inscrutable. Then there’s the music itself, which can be sample-heavy and noisy or acoustic and melodic. On his 2014 album, Black Metal, you were as likely to hear him sing over a Pastels sample as you were to confront a 13-minute dirge with squawking horns and burnt-out piano. His music was fundamentally averse to genre, an avant-garde milestone that made implicit arguments about how we categorize music: “I get really put off by people that are too conscious of genre,” he told NPR in 2016. “I find that people who are too conscious of genre usually are way too conscious of race and way too conscious of shit that I also am irritated by.”
In typical Dean Blunt fashion, the rollout of Black Metal’s long-awaited sequel was understated and tongue-in-cheek. But once you actually listened to the music—looking past the trollish humor and unignorable allusions to Dr. Dre’s 2001—it became clear that Black Metal 2 is the most approachable album of his career without losing the vital ambiguity that has always made his records special. This is minimalist sophisti-pop, sung by a terminally downward-looking troubadour. It is the clearest Dean Blunt has ever sounded and one of his most thrilling releases to date.
In place of the flashes of intensity that popped up through Black Metal’s noisy interludes, its nominal sequel is built around stately strings, steady percussion, and jangling guitars. Black Metal’s instrumentation felt purposefully tinny; the strings were compressed, somewhat muted, as if Dean Blunt had recorded them on his cellphone and placed his vocals over them in Audacity. The production, mixed with freeform loops and martial snares, felt like a personal homage to post-punk: Colin Newman’s Commercial Suicide or This Mortal Coil’s Blood on a budget. While the music is a good deal softer this time around, the approach isn’t so much Dean Blunt goes pop as Dean Blunt goes Talk Talk. On “SKETAMINE,” rumbling bursts of guitar entwine with an ascending string section, while a harmonica wails in the distance. Blunt’s hazy imagery glints across the surface of the production, forming a loose outlaw ballad from scattered details like a “gun on the beach.”
Dean Blunt’s commanding baritone is newly and immediately at the front of the mix; he sings as if he’s given up a piece of himself that will never be restored. “Daddy’s broke/What a joke,” he murmurs on “NIL BY MOUTH,” a melancholy strummer pushed forward by Giles Kwakeulati King-Ashong’s drums and folk singer and frequent collaborator Joanne Robertson’s vocals, a constant companion through the album. Under the cool dismissal of these lyrics is an acceptance of eventual tragedy; throughout the album, Blunt states the fates of the characters in his narratives in an almost neutral tone, emphasizing the interchangeability of their dilemmas.
As the music grows more polished, Dean Blunt’s transmissions get rawer and more difficult to parse. His storytelling is often clipped, cut off when he’s just about to say something conclusive. On “VIGIL,” the stunning opener, he speaks as if bearing witness to an act of violence: “Nigga, where you are?/Can’t see in the dark/So nigga, where’s your gun?/Can you see what you done?” As the strings fade, you’re left with just the terrifying ambiguity. Taken literally, it seems possible that he is speaking to someone who doesn’t yet know he’s a killer. It’s somewhere between an observation and a testimony, which is the fertile ground where most of these songs lie. The emptiness of Dean Blunt’s songs comes from a recognition that so much of identity is made before you’re even cognizant you have one.
Dean Blunt gently mocks the absurd roleplaying that gets us through the day, while also recognizing its importance. Take the scammer’s mantra of “MUGU”: “Everybody gotta sin/So a scammer’s gotta have a win.” Because he views self-presentation as a form of self-preservation, you get the sense these words have more to do with seeing yourself as a winner than actually winning anything. And when he later sings, “Let it out, nigga, let it out/Show them crackers what you all about,” his tone is at once empathetic and sarcastic, a subtle way of arguing that performing anger is just another way of reencoding notions of Black masculinity. Though trying to pin Dean Blunt’s actual beliefs down has never been the point of his music, what seems certain now is that his words contain as much truth as they do fiction; behind every bit is a deeply held feeling.
The gripping finale, “the rot,” is the closest Dean Blunt comes to putting it all on the table. The instrumentation is magisterial yet rustic, evoking a sense of desolation. It’s the type of song you might expect a singer to growl or wail over—yet Blunt draws out the words with detachment: “I told her relax/You might as well relax/’Cause the fear is going down, down, down.” Robertson responds with a quiver, echoing his message: “And I guess it’ll rot away.” This might be the closest a Dean Blunt record has ever come to offering words of comfort. It’s a skeletal glimpse at something like hope, a fitting message to end on. Before you’ve taken it all in, it evaporates away.
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. | 2021-06-17T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2021-06-17T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Experimental | Rough Trade | June 17, 2021 | 8.1 | d8f2a7cf-2b94-491e-9810-05cb09bda2d4 | Hubert Adjei-Kontoh | https://pitchfork.com/staff/hubert-adjei-kontoh/ | |
On her first album in a decade, the folk great takes a hard look at the state of the world and tries to muster something like hope. | On her first album in a decade, the folk great takes a hard look at the state of the world and tries to muster something like hope. | Joan Baez: Whistle Down the Wind | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/joan-baez-whistle-down-the-wind/ | Whistle Down the Wind | In June 2015, just days after a white gunman shot and killed nine African-American worshipers in Charleston, South Carolina, President Obama delivered a eulogy for the slain Rev. Clementa Pinckney that included an a cappella performance of “Amazing Grace.” It was a remarkable moment for many reasons, not least because it acknowledged that certain horrors and hopes were beyond his powers as a public speaker. That moment demanded a song. Two years later, the folk singer Zoe Mulford wrote her own song about that day and called it “The President Sang Amazing Grace.” It’s a matter-of-fact lyric, as though reluctant to do anything but record history: “The President came to speak some words/And the cameras rolled and the nation heard.”
It is, in other words, exactly the kind of song Joan Baez might have sung 50 years ago. And so, when Baez covers “The President Sang Amazing Grace” on her first album since 2008, Whistle Down the Wind, it feels right. In its subject matter as well as in its funereal pace, it recalls Richard Fariña’s “Birmingham Sunday,” written after another act of white supremacist terror, the 1963 bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church. Baez included that song on her 1964 album 5, and the extent to which her voice has changed over the last half-century only underscores the extent to which the times have not. Her voice now sounds graver, more deeply grooved by age, with a slight tremble as she recounts the violence in Charleston and its aftermath. Her version is less pretty than Mulford’s, less settled, less communal. When Obama sang “Amazing Grace,” he was joined by a grieving congregation. When Baez sings about that moment, she sounds lonely, her optimism measured at best.
Having lived through decades of protest-song history, Baez knows how to gauge the state of the world and how to pitch her music to reflect it. She chooses songs that convey a sense of ambivalence about our country’s fate, as though she must now work to muster something resembling hope. That struggle is what makes this album so compelling and ultimately so rewarding. Working with producer Joe Henry, who has helmed similar late-career albums by Solomon Burke, Mose Allison, and Allen Toussaint, Baez crafts a lo-fi acoustic palette that makes room for the occasional flubbed note and sounds all the more immediate and intimate for it. She sings Anohni’s “Another World” to an insistent thump against the strings of her guitar, which could be a racing heart or a ticking clock. As with the 2008 original, it’s the details that put the song across and make it more than just a farewell: “I’m gonna miss the sea, I’m gonna miss the snow.” Rarely has Baez ventured so far beyond the folk and roots world to find material, but the song suits her remarkably well as both an ecological warning and as a personal consideration of mortality.
For the most part, though, Baez doesn’t sound like she’s saying goodbye or setting her affairs in order, even if she has suggested that this will be her final studio album. She brings a steely fury to “Silver Blade,” a murder ballad penned by Josh Ritter that plays like a righteous #metoo anthem. Similarly, Baez manages to convey a novel’s worth of information in the first four lines of “Whistle Down the Wind,” written by Tom Waits and Kathleen Brennan: “I’ve grown up here,” she sings, bending the words slightly upward to convey both nostalgia and bitterness. Only “The Things We Are Made Of,” by Mary Chapin Carpenter, sounds a bit too sentimental for an album that rejects easy sentiment.
Indeed, to her credit, Baez continues her lifelong reluctance to settle for easy answers on Whistle Down the Wind. She doesn’t shy away from political protest, but she’s careful to couch her dissent in the personal and the compassionate. “I’m the last leaf on the tree/The autumn took the rest but they won’t take me,” she sings on the album’s other Tom Waits cover, “Last Leaf.” Baez makes such resiliency sound like a noble, necessary virtue. | 2018-03-10T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2018-03-10T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Proper | March 10, 2018 | 7.4 | d8f38a3a-f873-4d48-b678-d63bc773febb | Stephen M. Deusner | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stephen-m. deusner/ | |
The Norwegian alt-pop singer’s second album feels both evocatively raw and painfully shallow. | The Norwegian alt-pop singer’s second album feels both evocatively raw and painfully shallow. | girl in red: I’M DOING IT AGAIN BABY! | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/girl-in-red-im-doing-it-again-baby/ | I’M DOING IT AGAIN BABY! | I’M DOING IT AGAIN BABY! starts in a better place than girl in red’s 2021 debut, if i could make it go quiet. Gone are Marie Ulven’s intrusive thoughts about physically hurting her loved ones and herself, the spiraling anxieties that seemed to plague her every moment. In their place, she’s discovered a newfound self-confidence and some much-needed stability. Maybe, as she suggests on the opening song “I’m Back,” taking some time away from the music industry helped. But mental illness is a lifelong struggle, and while she’s eager to say, “I love being alive,” she’s careful to caveat it: “At least for now.” On her second album, Ulven approaches familiar topics—unrequited love, self-doubt, the pains of growing up—with a stronger sense of self, sounding both softer and more fierce than before. As a queer pop star with a firm grasp on her own emotional failings, girl in red addresses common issues from a unique perspective. But too often, her lyrical ambitions fall short of their lofty goals.
Ulven’s strength as a lyricist is also her weakness: The 25-year-old artist writes about romance and heartbreak as if she’s the first person ever to experience them. On “A Night to Remember,” her giddiness is infectious, the propulsive dance-pop and palpable excitement (“The whisper in my ear/Saying let’s get outta here/Yeah, I’ve never been so light on my feet”) helping to smooth over some of the song’s clunkier lines (“Cocaine and weirdos” is a club descriptor best saved for the next day’s recap text). “Too Much” vividly channels the fury of a relationship breakdown: “House always wins, so I’m taking all my love back/With you I lose either way.”
Ulven writes about her own experiences with a remarkable degree of honesty and clarity, but more profound revelations are just out of reach. At its best, her naivete is evocatively raw. “Phantom Pain” recasts a trite turn of phrase into a genuine moment of self-reflection: “I really didn’t notice the heart on my sleeve/I think I got invested in you and me.” But it’s hard not to wish for more insight—breakup sentiments like “I wish I never met you in the first place” feel inanely common. The slick production across I’M DOING IT AGAIN BABY!—helmed by Ulven and fellow Norwegian Matias Tellez—would be better served with more nuance. Their warm synths and her textured growls call for deeper feelings. In contrast to its lyrical shortcomings, her second album is sonically richer, balancing the delicate piano on “I’m Back” against heavier basslines on “Ugly Side.” Ulven’s voice also extends further than before, cracking into a roar on “Phantom Pain” and retreating into mellower territory on “Pick Me.”
The promising near misses come sandwiched between some egregiously sloppy songwriting. “Doing It Again Baby” is an onslaught of half-sensical affirmations that would sound right at home as interstital music for Selling Sunset: “Got my Ray-Bans on and I’m rolling with the boys/Having all this swagger was never a choice.” After our heroine dons an outfit fit for a Bode devotee—Japanese denim, loafers—the song ups its obnoxious ante with inexplicable banjos. Elements best used sparingly, like spoken-word interludes, take center stage. Rather than allow guest Sabrina Carpenter to do what she does best (broad superiority platitudes) on “You Need Me Now?” Ulven awkwardly introduces her for 10 seconds first. And at the end of an otherwise plaintive reflection on the ways mental illness can hurt those around us on “Ugly Side,” she flattens her own feelings with an excerpt from what sounds like a therapy session.
That’s all lead-up to the album’s strangest song, closer “★★★★★,” where Ulven imagines herself at Andy Warhol’s Factory in the 1960s (“I’m reading up on history/Pretending I’m in NYC”). Instead of fraternizing with Basquiat, she retreats to simple rhymes: “The factory/The fact to me is/I do amazingly bad.” Like so many songs across the album, it’s a concept with potential that severely misses the mark.
I’M DOING IT AGAIN BABY! is the sound of an artist searching for what comes after the initial rush of self-discovery. Ulven has said she wants to steer clear of the “shallow mental health songs that don’t tell the story.” To do so, girl in red must do more than scratch the surface of these thorny but oft-discussed topics. “Can I do it again?” she asks at the end of “★★★★★.” Yes, girl in red is capable of another skin-deep album about crushes and self-doubt. But it would be far more interesting to see her attempt sincere emotional depth. | 2024-04-16T00:02:00.000-04:00 | 2024-04-16T00:02:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | Columbia | April 16, 2024 | 6.2 | d8fbe87c-1c4c-4868-b5fe-a6b83c28c0f9 | Arielle Gordon | https://pitchfork.com/staff/arielle-gordon/ | |
Matmos audio alchemist Drew Daniel returns with his ambiguously ironic, plunderphonic project, The Soft Pink Truth. His latest excursion seemingly tackles the dancepunk phenomenon with diced-up and often homoerotic disco and microhouse covers of punk classics from the likes of Minor Threat, Crass, Die Kreuzen, The Angry Samoans, Swell Maps, Rudimentary Peni...and Carol Channing. | Matmos audio alchemist Drew Daniel returns with his ambiguously ironic, plunderphonic project, The Soft Pink Truth. His latest excursion seemingly tackles the dancepunk phenomenon with diced-up and often homoerotic disco and microhouse covers of punk classics from the likes of Minor Threat, Crass, Die Kreuzen, The Angry Samoans, Swell Maps, Rudimentary Peni...and Carol Channing. | The Soft Pink Truth: Do You Want New Wave or Do You Want the Soft Pink Truth? | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/7315-do-you-want-new-wave-or-do-you-want-the-soft-pink-truth/ | Do You Want New Wave or Do You Want the Soft Pink Truth? | A word war will set off the keg
My words of war!
Should a word have two meanings?
What the fuck for?
Should words serve the truth?
--Minutemen, "Do You Want New Wave (Or Do You Want the Truth?)"
Let's dance with semantics. Perhaps The Soft Pink Truth's Drew Daniel revised the title of the Minutemen's classic ballad just because it's a clever phrase. Many audiences didn't know what the 80s punk legend was screaming about in concert. D. Boon and Mike Watt hollered blue-collar fuming about bosses in high castles. Their lyrics could be interpreted as Everyman frustration contorted into cubist shapes or mere beer napkin scribbles, but the selected passage from "Do You Want" is poignant. It argues that political language's barrier is its perpetual ambiguity, self-contradiction, and cliches. On his latest album, Daniel tackles that dilemma by slipping a neon-green cassette of house music on the P.A. when a mosh pit breaks out at a hardcore primal scream session.
Daniel's music thankfully never gives easy answers. His solo work and musique concrete tomfoolery in Matmos can sometimes confuse listeners about whether he's expressing genuine affection or ironic commentary. There's his remix of Missy Elliot's "Get Ur Freak On" where he clanged actual gold bars for "bling-bling" beats or his suave microhouse homage to the nosejob on "California Rhinoplasty", sampling godawful surgical scrapes and drills. Do You Party?, his 2003 debut album as The Soft Pink Truth, traced his roots as a go-go dancer in San Francisco's gay disco culture; cartoonishly skewering it all into autistic microhouse with stuttering R & B divas, 80s new wave melodrama, and venereal beats for "Big Booty Bitches". The "genuine affection" factor rang there-- evoking more passion than the electroclash sold at the time. With Do You Want New Wave, his cover album of punk classics, he's on the offensive. Consider his robo-funk cover of the Angry Samoans' "Homo-Sexual", as he deadpans "Screw your wife up the behind and tell your kids everything's fine." Homophobia reduced to a sing-along for any rainbow parade. The irony can kill 20 men with one drop.
Daniel deftly retains punk's spirit of negation. Instead of remixing the originals by underground punk legends like Die Kreuzen, Minor Threat, Rudimentary Peni, and Crass, he pasteurizes their dogmatism and raw vitriol as disco calls. Daniel subverts by stripping away the distortion and lousy enunciation that cloaked the lyrics of these songs on record or in concert, and reveals their kinkiness. His disco element also dents the "punk rocks, disco sucks" ethos of snapping the young n' disaffected outta disco's narcotic escapism with anti-grooves. Although the ever-solemn Crass did release the galloping death-disco number "Walls".
It's difficult to say if Do You Want is nostalgic for Daniel's punk roots (the liner notes dedicate the record to his beloved Louisville hardcore scene of the late 80's), or a mocking bastardization. Hell, the record could be just a distraction from his Ph.D. studies at UC-Berkeley. The CD's inner sleeve features "Dissertation Avoidance," a brainstorm list of the record's possible meanings like "Escapist Nostalgia," "Regressive Fantasies," and "Ruining Sacred Truths."
Daniel's music makes the original songs' social defiance sound terribly cute. Consider his fingerprints on Minor Threat's straight-edge anthem "Out of Step". The song is now a jock jam with a techno-pop rhythm slowed down to allow cheerleaders to stomp and clap along to, and chanteuse Dani Siciliano giving the Mary Poppins treatment to "Don't smoke/ Don't drink/ Don't fuck/ At least I can fucking think." Daniel even mixes in samples of a starch-collared doctor praising the listener for not smoking. "Out of Step" is now a jingle worthy of a DARE video aimed at sixth graders.
More faithful is Crass' declaration of revolt, "Do They Owe Us a Living?", where he razor-slashes with a bare, tech-house beat to let People Like Us's Vicki Bennett tell citizens in the unemployment line to overthrow their society and its ideals of a natural aristocracy. "They'd live to see me dead," she sneers. Unfortunately, Daniel mares the song with wanky lasers and DSP'd ping-pong beats. His digital swordplay fares better on Die Kreuzen's "In School", which sounds like a Do Your Party? b-side with its stitched-together fragments of a dozen singers and robots, and a hypnotic disco cover of Rudimentary Peni's "Vampire State Building", on which he disintegrates the voice of fashion designer Jeremy Scott.
The brazen homophobia of "Homo-Sexual" still nags though. The Angry Samoans always tried too hard to offend for the sake of political incorrectness but Daniel's fellow Matman, Martin Schmidt, diminishes their impact with his rendition of Nervous Gender's "Confession". Singing through a coagulated vocoder over a Valley Girl-charming handclap, he announces, "Jesus was just like me!/ A homosexual nymphomaniac/ Walking the streets of Galilee." And then there's the giddily misogynistic Teddy & The Frat Girls' "I Owe it to the Girls", where Daniel and Blevin Blectum duet to a rump-tickling, tech-house beat, singing, "I can't get no pussy...relief...ride...ice cream/ I owe it to the girls." These three songs are now dancefloor punch lines akin to DJ Assault's "Ass and Titties"-- or "Disco Duck" for that matter. Firing between the eyes is the CD's design that equates a "punk" with a double-arrow bedroom companion.
Ultimately, Daniel seems to be giggling at his punk past. He ends the album with an eerie, androgynous rendition of Styne and Robin's Broadway tune, "Looking Back", once sung by drag icon Carol Channing. The song is now a funeral wake with a dreary feedback tone that places silver dollars on the eyes of a mourning lullaby about how "It's nice looking back at the past/ Full of memories that last/ Souvenirs of a life that was fast and fun/ Now it's done." A fine ending for one of this year's most remarkable "punk" albums. | 2004-11-03T01:00:02.000-05:00 | 2004-11-03T01:00:02.000-05:00 | Electronic | Tigerbeat6 | November 3, 2004 | 8.5 | d903278c-e5c0-4260-9201-a6b18f93b91c | Cameron Macdonald | https://pitchfork.com/staff/cameron-macdonald/ | 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 Mariah Carey’s triumphant comeback, an album that captured the zeitgeist of 2000s R&B and resurrected a pop icon. | 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 Mariah Carey’s triumphant comeback, an album that captured the zeitgeist of 2000s R&B and resurrected a pop icon. | Mariah Carey: The Emancipation of Mimi | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/mariah-carey-the-emancipation-of-mimi/ | The Emancipation of Mimi | Mariah Carey is zipping up to Harlem in Cam’ron’s purple Lamborghini when she suggests they ditch her security. It’s long past the middle of the night, they’ve outgrown the afters at her Tribeca penthouse and want some fun in the relative anonymity before dawn. Cam steps on the gas, gaining some distance on Carey’s detail in the SUV behind them, and speeds her to a brick church on 131st Street, where her great-aunt Nana Reese used to worship, and where her mother and father were married.
In Carey’s recounting, this moment occurs after the release of 2002’s Charmbracelet, her ninth album, and as a prologue to the creation of The Emancipation of Mimi, the massive 2005 release that would reinvigorate a career that, at that time, many in the music industry and media had left for dead. She had weathered the chaotic rollout of her 2001 movie Glitter, a commercial flop reviled by critics. Its accompanying soundtrack was released on 9/11, which Carey watched live on television from the communal room of a Los Angeles rehab facility. (More than a decade later, Carey would reveal she had been diagnosed with bipolar disorder.)
That July, she’d planned a stunt with MTV in which she rolled an ice cream cart onto the set of TRL to promote “Loverboy” and rambled a bit, calling it “my therapy session.” For the tightly controlled TRL, it was off-the-cuff and random, but after three decades of reality television, not that wild in hindsight. Yet host Carson Daly sniffed sensationalistically that “Mariah Carey’s lost her mind,” and the tabloids sneered that she was “crazy.” Her label, Virgin, paid her $28 million to leave its stable rather than put up with the flagging sales and negative press.
Charmbracelet, the result of a bidding war won by Island Def Jam, was layered and introspective but didn’t shoot her to the peaks she’d achieved in the past. Yet by the time she was joyriding in Cam’s Lambo, she had reached peace with what she had overcome—Glitter and a sexist, racist media culture trading on schadenfreude, but also the aftermath of her controlling and coercive marriage to former label boss Tommy Mottola and her fractured relationship with opportunistic family members. Outside the crumbling Harlem church, Carey contemplated her great-aunt and grandmother’s ownership of several brownstones despite their lack of formal education, meditated on the cumulative effects of the Jim Crow South, and recalled her devout Nana Reese, an “extra-crispy Christian.”
“So much of the pressure from the recent past had been lifted,” Carey wrote in her 2020 memoir with Michaela Angela Davis, The Meaning of Mariah Carey. “I had a new record deal. I had people who were excited and enthusiastic about my comeback. I had thought that Glitter would be the death of me, but it gave me new life. I took it as an opportunity to retreat, rest, and renew my purpose.”
At 35, Carey was primed to write The Emancipation of Mimi, named for a long-fought spiritual liberation and a nickname from her childhood. Though she had always considered herself a soul singer, Carey—a multiracial woman of Black American, Afro-Venezuelan, and Irish American descent—had been dogged by label suits demanding she remain in the “crossover” white pop space even after years of hip-hop-influenced singles and collaborations with rappers.
For the bulk of Mimi, Carey reunited with Jermaine Dupri, the So So Def super-producer who had worked on Charmbracelet, 1996’s “Always Be My Baby,” and produced her best remixes (“Honey,” “All I Want for Christmas Is You”). Their approach was contemporary, free, and in the moment, embracing Atlanta’s growing dominance in hip-hop and Carey’s desire to write bright and cheeky songs about love and relationships. At the same time, she was reinvesting in her spiritual faith, as manifested in one of Mimi’s most powerful songs, “Fly Like a Bird,” a gospel soul track that features Bishop Clarence Keaton, the leader of the Brownsville, Brooklyn church she began attending regularly during the rough years at the turn of the millennium. “Don’t let the world break me tonight,” she belts, clear and emphatic. “I need the strength of You by my side.”
“Fly Like a Bird” is the only blatant godly part of Mimi. Like R&B throughout its existence but especially in the mid-2000s, the two moods are love and the club. Mimi’s songs express the fun she’d been yearning for, making tactile the sound of an evolving woman who’d shook free from her albatross and kicked off her Choos. “When I see Mariah now,” Dupri told Joan Morgan at Essence in 2005, “I see her almost as a new person who’s lived a full life.” Carey’s new attitude paid off: Mimi became a colossal success, ultimately selling seven million copies in the U.S. Seven months after the album’s initial release, an Ultra Platinum Edition added an EP worth of remixes and songs, including the soon-to-be-everywhere, lush slow jam “Don’t Forget About Us,” which became Carey’s 17th No. 1 single and tied a record set by Elvis Presley (she later surpassed him). Untethered from the judgment of others, Carey returned with a vengeance.
From Mimi’s opening track, “It’s Like That,” Carey signals her desire to put an end to the past. Over Dupri’s whistling synths and drum machine, she sets a boundary, drawing the line at “stress” and “fights”: “Mimi’s emancipation/A cause for celebration,” she chirps. “I ain’t gonna let nobody’s drama bother me.” The drum machine has a dinky clink at first, a common tic in the crunk era, but it’s a proportionate amount of dink that allows Carey to soar between the kick drums and cowbell. On the triple-time verses, she telegraphs that no matter her superstar status, her ears are angled toward the club: “All the fellas keep lookin’ at us/Me and my girls on the floor like, what?/While the DJ keeps on spinnin’ our cut,” she sings, cocksure in a fashion that would inspire two decades of dancefloors to mimic her pose, before unforgettably rhyming “Caution, it’s so explosive” with “Them chickens is ash and I’m lotion.”
Carey was lotion, and she was a hair-flip. She flaunted her impassivity to drama on “Shake It Off,” the slinking, mid-tempo radio hit built on a piano-propelled lowrider bounce. As she reads a laundry list of a paramour’s indiscretions, including “this one and that one by the pool, on the beach, in the streets,” her voice is baby-oil smooth and almost slack to signify her breezy indifference: She can’t even bother to entirely enunciate consonants. The whisper quality of her background vocals—“I gotta shake, shake, shake you off”—sounds like salt thrown over the shoulder to prevent bad luck, a gentle internal monologue that gives the song its nimble quality. On “Say Somethin’,” another chrome-smooth single—and, alongside the jaunty “To the Floor,” her first time collaborating with the Neptunes—Carey bats her eyes and flirts with a coy low register, the smoky persuasion of Snoop Dogg as her rapper foil. (The album cut, however, remains slightly inferior to the sublime So So Def remix with Dem Franchize Boyz.)
These three singles, as well as the breakup dirge and gigantic hit “We Belong Together,” are notable for what Carey is not doing in them: She is not performing vocal gymnastics, she is not hitting impossibly high notes, she is not venturing anywhere near music that could be considered overly emotional or even treacly. It is easy to get caught up in the mere fact of Mariah Carey’s voice, which is impressive and beguiling but invites the listener to get over-jazzed by her technical razzle-dazzle—her four-and-a-half-octave range, her whistle register, her melismatic backflips. This prowess can elide the emotion within each song, and on Mimi especially, she is exercising a characteristic rarely cited in exaltations of her genius: her total restraint. “I’ve just never wanted to only belt,” she told the New York Times’ Lola Ogunnaike. “And when I sing breathy it feels more intimate.”
Her vocal self-discipline fit perfectly in a year when the biggest and most culturally resonant R&B hits—Ciara’s “1, 2 Step,” Amerie’s “1 Thing,” Kelis’ “Milkshake,” even Rihanna’s “Pon de Replay”—were sharp and contained. Those records played tight, streamlined production against simple, sometimes coquettish vocals, a response to the gospel-inflected power ballads that had dominated R&B in the ’90s, and Carey sat neatly within this zeitgeist. Her ability to convey the more sordid nuances of relationships—and assert herself as a much stronger woman finally having the best night on the town—was undeniable to fans old and new. Everybody loves a redemption narrative. Mimi was the best-selling album of 2005, ubiquitous on all radio stations and video channels, and remains the marker of when pop-R&B morphed irrevocably with hip-hop’s synthy shift (not to mention the mid-’00s dominance of the Korg Triton).
In retrospect, Mimi feels like a pointed assertion of Carey’s relevance in the third decade of her career. She was catwalking out of the ’90s into a wiser, more authoritative iteration of herself—as signified by the futuristic album cover, where she stood gilded and celestially glowing, infinite golden leg aslant. Her exhortations to the physical world situated her within the moment too, as she sang about using the answering machine or changing the terrestrial radio station, technological concerns that would be dustbinned within a decade. (The last-call jam “Get Your Number” also places her firmly there, courtesy of Jermaine Dupri’s extremely 2005 delivery, though their playful good time at least gave us Michael Ealy as its video club hook-up.)
Behind the pop juggernaut, though, resides an extremely enduring soul record. Strip away the memory of hearing Hot 97 and MTV Jams play “We Belong Together” 12 times an hour, and it’s affecting how in the pocket Carey was. On “Stay the Night,” a newly famous Kanye West revs up the Stylistics’ “Betcha by Golly, Wow,” while Carey makes being a side chick sound like the most angelic pursuit in the world, singing in a rasp alongside the pops of the sampled record. On the chorus, when she belts “niiiiiiiight” and “liiiiiiight,” she mirrors the pure, planetary timbre of a very young Michael Jackson (a reminder that she covered “I’ll Be There” for her 1992 MTV Unplugged EP). On “Mine Again,” with its flourishes of Rhodes and flute, Carey channels Diana Ross without ever sounding like anyone but herself. “Circles” hearkens to classic Philadelphia soul with its warm bass guitar, sax, and other live instrumentation, showcasing Carey’s most kaleidoscopic talent: the way, when she harmonizes with herself, it evokes infinity mirrors in the most glamorous discotheques, so glittering as to be hallucinogenic.
Perhaps not unexpectedly, the initial reception to Mimi was lukewarm, and still marred by the negative reception of the Glitter era. (One 2005 interview with Carey in the New York Post began, “Everyone knows Mariah Carey is crazy,” as if the writer felt obligated to preemptively disclaim his praise.) Nonetheless, as Andrew Chan points out in the book Why Mariah Carey Matters, Emancipation brought in scores of new listeners who hadn’t grown up on “Vision of Love” or “Emotions,” maybe hadn’t even been born when those songs were released. To longtime fans, the initial critical reaction didn’t seem to matter, and the astronomical sales eventually nudged a reluctant critical establishment to come around. Carey’s attunement to what was popping on the streets showed, and her fealty to soul and self shone through. “There are so many intimate, special, inside, almost intangible details that are specific to me on that album,” she wrote in The Meaning of Mariah Carey. “You can actually feel my authentic emotions; there are no dramatic, overproduced ballads to appease label executives. This was pared down, simple, real shit.”
Mimi’s best song is one of its simplest. The beat for “Your Girl” is based on the Kanye-style, sped-up soul record trend that was aflame at the time, but it was made by Scram Jones and samples an acoustic guitar from “A Life With You,” a 2004 song by the New Zealand R&B duo Adeaze. The premise is classic: a shy young woman makes up her mind to seduce a man she’s had her eye on for ages, asserting herself in his presence for the first time. The chorus is an exercise in exhilaration that arrives in a high-registered delirium—“You’re gonna know! For! Sure! That! I should be your girl!” Carey’s ecstasy is premised less on the potential for love and more on the rush of finally going after what she wants. It’s a transcendent moment so bright it’s nearly blinding.
There’s a Diplomats remix, too, which circulated on the DJ mixtapes—physical CD mixtapes, the kind procured from disinterested guys running tiny stalls on Canal Street—featuring Juelz Santana and Cam’ron at the peak of their fame. “Roll that purple and pop that Crissy/We the ’05 Bobby and Whitney, yo mami you with me?” Cam raps in the intro. “Forget security, you hopped in the whippy/We left the block at 160/Cops couldn’t get me/I’m gone.” The elusive chanteuse hums feather-light vocal runs around his verse, as if lost in thought behind her knowing smile, in ascension while the wind whips through her hair.
Additional research by Deirdre McCabe Nolan | 2024-02-18T00:00:00.000-05:00 | 2024-02-18T00:00:00.000-05:00 | Pop/R&B | Island Def Jam | February 18, 2024 | 9 | d9063cfd-a3a6-4e3d-9e2b-ba32b1ba0b23 | Julianne Escobedo Shepherd | https://pitchfork.com/staff/julianne-escobedo shepherd/ | |
The Buffalo-area MC is a savvy and earnest lyricist, pairing a violent streak with a clear-eyed gaze at the conditions behind her grisly scenarios. | The Buffalo-area MC is a savvy and earnest lyricist, pairing a violent streak with a clear-eyed gaze at the conditions behind her grisly scenarios. | Apollo Brown / Ché Noir: As God Intended | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/apollo-brown-che-noir-as-god-intended/ | As God Intended | Halfway through As God Intended, on the ominous static-flecked storytelling track “12 Hours,” the Buffalo-area MC Che’ Noir mistakenly winds up murdering a man she suspects of cheating on her with a friend. In reality, the unlucky soul was simply consulting with said friend about buying Che’ a ring, which the Hennessy-fortified Che’ subsequently finds in his pocket after shooting him with a gun she’d taken from his safe. “Fuck, I gotta get the fuck out of here,” she whispers at the end of the track, before hightailing away from the bloody scene. The grisly vignette is an apt summation of the world Che’ depicts in her music, where violence and relationships intermingle with themes of betrayal and loss.
On the surface, there’s often a wild violent streak to Che’s rhymes on As God Intended, which she delivers in a smooth and unhurried monotone over beats by Detroit-based producer Apollo Brown that trade in alluring mid-tempo melancholy. As an MC, Che’ delights in killing her foes without remorse. On the album's opening song “Anti-Social,” which is carried by soothing piano and a classic breakbeat, she comes packing “bullets big as tennis balls” and calmly warns, “I put rappers in cemeteries/Then go to your wake and autograph your obituaries.” Later, on “Worth Gold,” she politely informs us, “I keep a blade that I use just to cut the tongue of a snitch.” But just like last year’s The Thrill Of The Hunt 2 project, which was entirely produced by Rochester’s 38 Spesh, As God Intended has a depth that reveals Che’ as a savvy and earnest lyricist, adept at linking dramatic scenes to the wider socio-political shackles that might prompt them. She's also unafraid to add vulnerable autobiographical flashbacks to her writing, as she delves into her family and upbringing.
“Daddy's Girl” emerges as a key to understanding Che’ as she gazes back on the psychological effects of a childhood without a dependable father figure. “Look, black complexion, bad and reckless in my adolescence/’Cause I was young the first time I seen my dad arrested,” Che’ recalls before reflecting, “Too young to comprehend it at that time but now I’m old enough/To understand the damage from his absent presence growing up.” On “Money Orientated,” she pries further into the effects the criminal justice system can have on the dynamics of a household, musing over a pensive piano loop, “I got family that’s behind walls and they caged down/Went in a Christian, now it’s Allah when he pray now/That’s when I realized jail or death is where this money don’t matter/Can't buy my way into heaven when He judging me after.”
A lot of rappers are skilled at describing the immediate world around them, whether that’s growing up on hardscrabble streets or flaunting the excess of the glamorous life. But on As God Intended, Che’ aims higher, subtly spotlighting how the various factors of her environment and experience—single parenthood, blighted neighborhood blocks, the prison system, religion and family values—all connect and influence each other, for better or worse. It’s an emphasis that turns the album into a persuasive reminder of the rewards that come with striving to paint the bigger picture.
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. | 2020-07-10T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-07-10T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Mello Music Group | July 10, 2020 | 7.7 | d908910f-3a6d-4161-928b-d5b4424127e8 | Phillip Mlynar | https://pitchfork.com/staff/phillip-mlynar/ | |
A mammoth box set of Daevid Allen’s prog-rock project makes a virtue of its excesses, capturing the band’s monumental strangeness. | A mammoth box set of Daevid Allen’s prog-rock project makes a virtue of its excesses, capturing the band’s monumental strangeness. | Gong: Love From the Planet Gong: The Virgin Years 1973-75 | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/gong-love-from-the-planet-gong-the-virgin-years-1973-75/ | Love From the Planet Gong: The Virgin Years 1973-75 | If Daevid Allen’s prophecy is correct, we are a mere 13 years away from Planet Gong descending from the heavens to deliver enlightenment to all earthlings. Allen first posited his theory on a series of albums by Gong in the mid-1970s: Each LP was designed, he said, to prepare “the heads of all who hear their music for the arrival in the year 2032 of many Pot Head Pixies who will be coming to help spread of joy in the new age.” Those albums, long known among the Gong cognoscenti as The Radio Gnome Trilogy, are housed alongside a bounty of unreleased live material excavated from deep in the Virgin Records vaults in the hefty Love From the Planet Gong: The Virgin Years 1973-75, a 12-CD/1-DVD box set whose very weight may intimidate anyone who is not already a member of the band’s dedicated cult.
Gong tended to attract cultists, in every sense of the word. Freaks of all stripes flocked to Allen, hearing loopy wisdom lying underneath Gong’s cacophonic prog-funk fusion, ever-expanding space-rock, and tall tales of spliff-toking sprites. The most famous of these fans was Sherman Hemsley, who gained notoriety as George Jefferson on the Norman Lear sitcom The Jeffersons. At the height of his fame in the late 1970s, Hemsley flew Allen out to his Los Angeles home, where the Gong guitarist discovered a chamber devoted to his band. Flying Teapot—the first installment of The Radio Gnome Trilogy, released in 1973—played on a loop in a darkened room filled with naked women, and that was just the tip of the actor’s devotion. Hemsley planned to wallpaper Hollywood with billboards trumpeting Flying Teapot, in hopes of spreading the Planet Gong philosophy to the masses. Gong’s music inspires this intense dedication but also its opposite reaction: To those on the outside, the fantastical music-hall jazz sounds utterly bewildering.
If Gong seem as if they flew in from another world, there is some truth in that suspicion; they were born in the serene surroundings of the French countryside. As a member of the pioneering psych-jazz outfit Soft Machine, the Australian-born Allen was part of Canterbury’s nascent prog-rock scene in the late 1960s, but once the band’s 1967 European tour wrapped up, the UK denied him reentry due to an overextended visa. Undaunted, Allen claimed Paris as his new home, witnessing the student revolution of 1968 before eventually settling on the edge of a forest with his partner Gilli Smyth. Before long, the pair formed Gong, which from their earliest days defied anything resembling a stable lineup. Musicians would come and go, usually living in the band’s communal house in Voisines. Allen wasn’t so much the leader of the bunch as he was its shepherd, encouraging his flock to follow his path but happy to take whatever detours the pack pursued.
A few Gong records came out on the French label BYG in the early 1970s, but the three years the group spent at Virgin is where they took flight. Happily, they inked a deal with the fledgling Virgin Records when Richard Branson was flush with cash and willing to let his acts do whatever they wanted. Along with Mike Oldfield, whose “Tubular Bells” became a massive hit thanks to its prominent placement in The Exorcist, Gong were Virgin’s signature act. Flying Teapot, largely recorded prior to the Virgin deal, didn’t quite take full advantage of this freedom, yet it still shows the band taking shape. It’s a technicolor blimp that lurches and glides, cruising along on dextrous funk fusion before it descends into annoying maniacal chants. Chalk the latter up to the pothead pixies, who were central to Allens’ “Gong philosophy,” which wasn’t so much a cohesive manifesto but a feverish prankster fantasy filled with cheap puns, smutty jokes, and a fervent belief in cosmic unity.
All those elements gel on Angel’s Egg, a 1973 LP that Gong recorded at their country home, miking the woods for ambiance. The crackpot idea worked. Gong sound utterly unencumbered by gravity, floating between moments of grace and madness. Again, much of that lunacy comes from Allen’s mythology, which picked up themes and the thinnest of narrative threads from Flying Teapot, then turns it into a jumble that’s indecipherable without bushels of weed.
Paradise eventually comes to an end, and so it was with Gong. A bust—equal parts customs and drugs violations—prompted France to kick the group out of the country, so they headed to England and gathered the material for 1974’s You, which was their biggest, boldest album. Nominally the conclusion of The Radio Gnome Trilogy, You found Allen’s Gong philosophy slowly subsumed by the majestic power of the band. In a sense, they achieved an equilibrium, with the band—now featuring the liquid, startling guitar of Steve Hillage—racing along at the same speed of Allen’s mind, while his lunacy prevented the knotty extended improvisations from calcifying into egghead art.
The divide between Allen and much of the rest of Gong came to a head in 1975. At a concert, Allen claimed “a force-field stopped me taking the stage on my musical cue,” so he simply left the band he created. Some members quit in his wake, while others were relieved to see him go: Drummer Pierre Moerlen and percussionist Mireille Bauer were eager to ditch the “silly lyrics” and overhauled the group into a slick, serious outfit that could hold its own with Weather Report. That incarnation of Gong can be heard on 1976’s Shamal, the last of the four studio albums included on Love From the Planet Gong. It’s an impressive work, sharing a clear lineage with the nimble jazz-funk of the preceding three albums, but neither Shamal nor the post-Allen live concert from 1975 quite feels like Gong. Without Allen’s babble, the band lacked the means of achieving transcendence.
Not that Gong often did that anyway. Most of the time, the band was working at cross purposes, a tension that is maddening and thrilling in equal measure. In the studio, these tendencies were gussied up, often in an appealing fashion, but the live recordings that provide the bulk of the unreleased material on Love From the Planet Gong show the band’s muscle and might at work. Stripped of the stage visuals—their act was replete with mime, sorcerer hats, ultraviolet lights, and paper plates doubling as flying saucers—the group is an unwieldy delight: a British Sun Ra Arkestra that manages to make it home in time for tea.
The live recordings are bracing and, oddly enough, they provide a better gateway to understanding Gong than the albums themselves, as the LPs often are dressed in fussy period charms. Returning to the studio trilogy after absorbing the live recordings, Flying Teapot, Angel’s Egg, and You seem like vivid snapshots of songs that are often too wild to sit still. Gong’s restlessness is integral to their appeal, since it’s what pushed them to explore the outer reaches of the universe from the confines of a French country home. The group managed to create an enduringly weird body of work whose strength is perhaps best appreciated in total, not in parts. Taken individually, or without the concert recordings, the LPs seem merely odd, but when they’re combined as they are in this box, the strangeness seems monumental. And that’s fitting a testament to Gong: They’re not a band designed for dabbling, only a full immersion will do. | 2019-10-03T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-10-03T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | UMC | October 3, 2019 | 7.7 | d909a9bb-564f-4db8-aaab-3bd4c011e12e | Stephen Thomas Erlewine | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stephen-thomas erlewine/ | |
One of the most promising dubstep producers is also one of those responsible for taking the dance genre places it usually doesn't go: R&B, post-rock, IDM. | One of the most promising dubstep producers is also one of those responsible for taking the dance genre places it usually doesn't go: R&B, post-rock, IDM. | Mount Kimbie: Maybes EP / Sketch on Glass EP | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/13731-maybes-ep-sketch-on-glass-ep/ | Maybes EP / Sketch on Glass EP | If you're still trying to figure out what dubstep is, keep in mind that people are already using the term "post-dubstep" (and "halfstep" and, god, "brostep"). I'd rather not get neurotic about genre-- especially in the obsessively territorial underbrush of dance music-- so I'll say that Mount Kimbie is a London duo that makes pretty, mostly mid-tempo tracks between three and four minutes long with sped-up vocal samples, little tunnels of ambience, unimposing synth patches, and syncopated percussion that sounds like someone putting away the silverware (or that water-droplet effect people make by flicking their cheek with their finger). Small music, scarf music.
Maybes and Sketch on Glass aren't always sunny, but they're playful, dreamy, and melancholic-- refreshing qualities to hear in dubstep, a genre slightly less emotionally versatile than hair metal. Even Burial-- its most expressive, articulate producer-- works in a kind of greyscale compared to Mount Kimbie (though, to be fair, Burial's music reaches a depth that Mount Kimbie's doesn't, and probably isn't aiming for).
It's true that their rhythms are still dubstep in DNA-- deftly syncopated, slightly off-center, ambiguously danceable-- but most of what they lay on top of the beat sounds like it's being dragged out from places dubstep usually doesn't go: R&B, post-rock, IDM. Of the two EPs, Sketch on Glass is markedly funkier but also feels more self-assured and detailed: The bass is deeper but the sound is lighter and more agile; the plinks and pops-- sorta cute-- really ricochet around in the mix instead of just accenting it; the vocal samples are warped and flattened in weirder ways.
Still, Maybes-- especially the title track-- is a good listen, and should be of interest to listeners who find dubstep's pervasive moodiness to be a turn-off (in his year-end column for this site, Martin Clark mentioned the group in a paragraph about records that went "beyond the dubstep sphere"). Between both EPs, there's character, humor, light chaos, nice sound design, and real melodic imperative. It's strong music, and I want to hear more. Big ups, as they say in England. Oh, and some people are just calling this stuff "step." | 2009-11-30T01:00:04.000-05:00 | 2009-11-30T01:00:04.000-05:00 | Electronic | null | November 30, 2009 | 7.4 | d90a722f-9d91-4304-8044-1ac20ce976bf | Mike Powell | https://pitchfork.com/staff/mike-powell/ | null |
On her latest release, the Canadian electronic producer approaches emotional turbulence from a place of spiritual calm. | On her latest release, the Canadian electronic producer approaches emotional turbulence from a place of spiritual calm. | YlangYlang: Interplay | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/ylang-ylang-interplay/ | Interplay | Since launching her solo project YlangYlang in 2012, Canadian producer Catherine Debard has split her time between gigs in Montreal’s subterranean experimental scene and the more formalized world of artists residencies, workshops and academic programming. Over time, her iridescent synth drones and sparse laptop beats have gelled into an abstract ambient pop that’s as equally suited to attentive gallery space performances as the kind of venues you have to direct message for their address. With her new album Interplay, Debard layers her raw electronics with live instruments, building introspective and sophisticated songs glazed in noise.
Debard has worked alone for the majority of her YlangYlang discography, but here she invites a host of other musicians into the booth. The chopped bell samples and synth arpeggio that lay the foundation for “Dualities” open up to include squeaking cellos and stray clangs from a dulcimer-like instrument called a santur. Every timbre floats shapelessly, only fusing together when a wave of ugly static engulfs the mix. In “Our Provisional,” distant horns meander amid scrambled electronics before rising up in a moment of harmonic clarity. “Lost Realms,” one of several instrumentals, begins with a wash of textural noise that recedes into a tide pool of layered brass and woodwinds.
YlangYlang’s latent new age tendencies also take on a new depth here. In the past, these inclinations manifested as superficial signifiers like a tape of self-described “therapeutic” improv jams (titled You might want to burn some sage, no less) or the soundtrack to a hypnosis meditation. While there are still references to healing ceremonies and neural pathways, the new age undertones on Interplay surface most when Debard approaches emotional turbulence from a place of spiritual calm. She circles back repeatedly to themes of solitude and separation, ultimately giving herself over to the will of the universe.
In “Limitless” she walks alone through the city, sorting through the fallout of a recently ended relationship. The song transforms feelings of pain and rejection into near-euphoric surrender. Rather than wallowing, she processes her emotions and reconnects with herself outside the context of the expired romance: “I accept this shifting from the start/As a part of a greater process /I’m humble, I’m porous,” she sings, in the patient cadence of a mantra. Over the course of the record, Debard makes arrangements to return an ex’s house key, stifles screams of frustration in her tiny apartment, and writhes on the ground contemplating the end of civilization, grateful at every turn just to experience it all.
For all its existential thrashing, Interplay exudes warmth. Even the harshest moments are grounded, exploring chaos but never spinning out. Seeking out the beauty in an array of precarious feelings, Debard follows her contradictory impulses into the ether. As she asks with the album’s closing lyric, “What else is there to do?” | 2020-02-03T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2020-02-03T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Experimental | Crash Symbols | February 3, 2020 | 7.2 | d91e3de8-4c43-40ad-8016-c3bec5a16802 | Fred Thomas | https://pitchfork.com/staff/fred-thomas/ | |
Field recordings and ambient synthesizers combine to paint an evocative picture of the English countryside and its natural cycles of rot and rebirth. | Field recordings and ambient synthesizers combine to paint an evocative picture of the English countryside and its natural cycles of rot and rebirth. | Meemo Comma: Sleepmoss | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/meemo-comma-sleepmoss/ | Sleepmoss | Have you ever picked a blade of grass, stretched it taut between your two thumbs, and blown this makeshift reed to release its musical potential? You get the same sort of satisfying squeak when you walk across a wet lawn in sneakers. This almost animalistic sound is rife in the latter half of “Night Rain,” from UK producer Lara Rix-Martin’s second album as Meemo Comma, Sleepmoss. Had she not stated in the accompanying notes that the record was inspired by her daily walks on the South Downs—a stretch of hills that runs for a couple hundred miles along the southeast coast of England—it wouldn’t have been too tricky to work out: the dense and scurrying sonics of Sleepmoss quickly establish the gist.
Sometimes the musing on a personal relationship with nature is especially explicit, as on the soothing “Murmur,” with its field recordings of morning birdsong, the simulated tap-tap-tap of a woodpecker, and a low hum that evokes a thousand busy minibeasts. Likewise, the crunch and creaking tones of “Tanglewood” suggest a contemplative autumnal woodland stroll. That said, Sleepmoss really soars in those moments where Rix-Martin’s sound design is attuned to a more cinematic purpose. The use of distortion and what sounds like reversed audio on “Windross,” for example, accurately conveys the sensation of wind whipping past the ears, the fragments of signals it carries forever scrambled. “Amethyst Deceiver,” too, is irresistibly uncanny; its tense and scraggly melody conjures a hopping magpie in my mind’s eye, bending its head to one side as if to assess the onlooker’s character.
Being in nature, wherever you are in the world, amplifies your own internal nature. It’s not just the isolation that leads to reflection, but the abundance of life and death in a never-ending cycle. What makes Sleepmoss a particularly English countryside album in this regard is that it nails the predictably unpredictable weather. There are parallels to be drawn between the ecosystem of UK undergrowth—damp and rotting, yet at once sprouting and squirming—and the thought cycles of the mind. It’s the presence of rain that grounds Sleepmoss and gives it strength.
Where the album occasionally falters is in its attempts to evoke rain’s opposite. While most of the album avoids pastoral cliché to walk a more nuanced path, the bright synth and chimes of “Winter Sun” come off as twee. Similarly, on closing track “Psithur,” a soft synth that sounds like a CGI pan pipe is an odd note to end on. It falls flat because it feels like it’s trying too hard, unlike the rest of Sleepmoss.
When I smell wet soil, I know that I am from the earth and one day will return to the earth. This is the truth of the great outdoors and one that Rix-Martin excavates with care. Our planet’s land belongs to no one, and therefore no one has the right to deny others access to its metaphysical riches—because everyone, ultimately, is part of it. That Sleepmoss arrived during this time of Brexit and climate change makes it a particularly resonant document. Moss has found a way to survive anywhere and everywhere for millions of years, yet some of its most ancient forests are in danger of being wiped out. Within these contexts, it is Sleepmoss’s poignant title track that best rounds out the album for me: a mass of vibrating life-force strings that act as both meditation and invigoration.
Buy: Rough Trade
(Pitchfork may earn a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.) | 2019-10-29T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-10-29T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Planet Mu | October 29, 2019 | 7.5 | d925049c-6ee4-478f-b418-202a9a03c130 | Ruth Saxelby | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ruth-saxelby/ | |
Sharing two members with Tame Impala, this Australian psych trio blends indulgent chunks of far-outness with fundamentally solid rock'n'roll tunes. | Sharing two members with Tame Impala, this Australian psych trio blends indulgent chunks of far-outness with fundamentally solid rock'n'roll tunes. | Pond: Beard, Wives, Denim | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/16340-pond-beard-wives-denim/ | Beard, Wives, Denim | More often than not, most side-projects and spin-off bands don't spin very far from their respective musical mothership. Take the charmingly shambling Pond, a psych-rocking Australian three-piece that shares two members with Tame Impala, the psych-rocking Australian four-piece responsible for 2010's terrific Innerspeaker. That debut put a revisionist spin on guitar-driven psychedelia so much so that, unlike other bands mining for retrograded, kaleidoscopic gold, Innerspeaker felt beholden to no specific time or place. So it's with Beard, Wives, Denim that Tame Impala alumni Nick Allbrook and Jay Watson (here with Joseph Ryan) give the same kind of sounds and textures a more worldly setting with Pond. This album may not deviate much from the Tame Impala playbook (and, as sort of a guiding principal, trades the sheer scope of that record in for something more organic), but instead welcomingly recontextualizes that sound while offering it in easily digestible bites.
Recorded in a "ramshackle old farmhouse in Western Australia" over two weeks back in 2010, Beard, Wives, Denim feels like some very capable musicians getting back to their play-it-loose-and-fast roots. The communal, freewheeling looseness is one of the album's greatest assets, as you feel as if you were a party to the making of the record in Eagle Bay, too. This is obviously not a record meant to transport you to anywhere except the small little universe in which it was created, helpfully buoyed by a genuine sense of good humor, evidenced by the press release's silly accompanying track notes ("Nick B slept for upwards of thirty hours, becoming the human-koala") and the odd stitch of audio caught while the tape was still running. "That was pretty shit, that one," a voice notes amid laughter at the end of "Dig Brother". Nothing here could be classified as being pretty shit, but at almost an hour there's certainly some trimming that could've been done. "Tangent-heavy" seems like a more appropriate criticism. But brevity clearly isn't the aim: Beard, Wives, Denim exists and works in very much the same way a high school battle of the bands would, where whichever band can wedge a freaked out, three-minute improv into a perfectly fine two minute pop song will probably lay claim to the prize.
Despite the fact that said pop songs are mostly used as vessels, there sure are some pretty sweet ones here. As opener "Fantastic Explosion of Time" suggests with its deliciously warped take on the British Invasion, there isn't much mystery to where these songs' influences sprung from. Like Tame Impala, Pond's genre sampling feels authentic under the canopy of an established sound, with odes to swaggering 1970s cock-rock ("Moth Wings"), twist-n-shout good vibes ("Leisure Pony"), and some relatively bluesy shit-kicking western wanderers ("Elegant Design"). All would make fine singles, if only it weren't for the jammed-out extentions and loose-limbed codas that each song eventually falls subject to. Most of the detours are massively fun, like the immersion-blender-to-the-dome shred fest that intersects "Sun and Sea and You", and the terrific little details tucked into just-okay tunes, like the desert mirage guitars on "Mystery". Getting a little lost along the way, it would seem, is kind of the point.
It may be unfair to compare Pond to Tame Impala too much, but when a band like the former's shadow looms so long, it's difficult not to. And in instances where Pond get a little too comfortable, focusing intently on the kind of horizon-gazing slow-bloomers that Tame Impala manage to render so elegantly, you may find your skip-button finger itching. More at fault might be Pond themselves, who are clearly very good at nailing tracks with a best-of-both-worlds approach, fusing those indulgent chunks of far-outness with fundamentally solid rock'n'roll tunes. And thanks to the communal tack, none of these ideas were given much time to stagnate. So it's hard to complain when the trips in between take a little longer than expected. But if your guy happens to have some of that high-test left, and you've got a little time tucked away, you're going to be just fine. | 2012-02-29T01:00:03.000-05:00 | 2012-02-29T01:00:03.000-05:00 | Rock | Modular | February 29, 2012 | 7 | d92af1fb-0aaa-4985-aac6-cafdb2177d85 | Zach Kelly | https://pitchfork.com/staff/zach-kelly/ | null |
The Against Me! frontwoman intended to record these bracing songs with her main band before the pandemic sidelined that plan. Her austere solo version feels like a pale shadow of the real thing. | The Against Me! frontwoman intended to record these bracing songs with her main band before the pandemic sidelined that plan. Her austere solo version feels like a pale shadow of the real thing. | Laura Jane Grace: Stay Alive | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/laura-jane-grace-stay-alive/ | Stay Alive | Is there a producer better cut out for the pandemic than Steve Albini? The famously hands-off engineer has been keeping a safe distance from bands in his studio since well before the CDC was advising it, and the coronavirus hasn't changed his process much. As Laura Jane Grace tells it, masks aside, the recording sessions for her first solo album Stay Alive weren't all that different from the usual Albini productions: no computers, no overdubs, no wasted time or niceties. They tracked the album in just two days. “I could kind of tell that if I did more than two takes, he got annoyed,” Grace told Rolling Stone.
Stay Alive is not the album Grace hoped to record this year. She intended these songs for Against Me!'s first album since 2016's Shape Shift With Me, but the pandemic uprooted those plans, stranding her band in separate parts of the country. Rather than let her songs grow cold, she committed them to this largely acoustic set, an austere shadow of the electric Against Me! record that might have been. Save for an occasional primitive drum machine or amplifier, it's largely just Grace's graveled voice and her six-string guitar—her rawest recording since the very earliest years of Against Me!, when the band was essentially a folk-punk solo project.
Despite the spartan setup, Stay Alive doesn't shy from volume. Grace pitches her voice somewhere between a bark and a roar, intermittently channeling the uninhibited wail of The Mountain Goats' John Darnielle. At its best the session has the intimacy and power of a living room concert; at other times it's more like a subway busker performing too loud for passersby who won't make eye contact.
Although these songs were written before Covid-19, Grace uses them to process the shock of our new normal, conjuring the helplessness of those first few weeks of lockdown in particular. “This only feels like the death of everything,” she snarls on the hard-strummed opener “Swimming Pool Song.” On “The Calendar Song,” she longs for travel, fantasizing about the tropical warmth of Portugal or the vibrant green pastures of Glasgow. Cabin fever hangs over the entire album. “There's always someone dying to leave where you're dying to get to,” she sings on “Shelter in Place,” yet another song that somehow predates the pandemic, despite lyrics like “my own private paradise quarantine is very nice.”
Generally the ferocity of the performances make more of an impression than the songs themselves. Though it doesn't mince words about Donald Trump's flirtations with white supremacy, “Hanging Tree” once again lays to waste the idea that his election was somehow going to usher in a golden age of protest music. “You're tweet-tweet-tweeting from a golden tower/Ain't got no soul to sell and that's your power,” Grace sneers. She's got the conviction, but it's hard for even the boldest songwriters to lobby a critique of this guy that isn't already expressed hundreds of times an hour online.
COVID-19 has taught us to settle for poor substitutes, because they're all we have—birthday parties with three people, live streams instead of concerts, Zoom happy hours instead of real ones. So perhaps it's in the spirit of the times that, like almost everything in our lives right now, Grace's solo debut feels like an unceremonious consolation. Once the allure of hearing Grace so stripped down wears off, the record begins to sound like what it is: glorified demos for an Against Me! album we'll never get to hear. Even at its most vital, Stay Alive never escapes the sense that the pandemic has one again cheated us out of something better.
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2020-10-20T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-10-20T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Polyvinyl | October 20, 2020 | 6.8 | d92caef2-4eb4-469f-a078-7bbba2043cb0 | Evan Rytlewski | https://pitchfork.com/staff/evan-rytlewski/ | |
With the help of producer I.B. Classic, the Chicago trap-soul rapper delivers the most defining and unifying record of his career. | With the help of producer I.B. Classic, the Chicago trap-soul rapper delivers the most defining and unifying record of his career. | Tree: I.B. Tree | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22274-ib-tree/ | I.B. Tree | One of Tree’s loose Soundcloud uploads from 2015, an unusually quiet year for the Chicago rapper and producer, was a song called “Pac Dilla,” inspired by “years of comparisons by writer after writer.” Tree has called Tupac a sworn influence, whereas Dilla has been his most frequent point of comparison since his breakthrough 2012 release Sunday School—sometimes, a way of implying that Tree is more distinctive as a producer than MC. His latest rapping-first project, an EP entirely produced by fellow Chicagoan I.B. Classic, proves the perceived slight may be a good punching bag for him. It makes the case for Tree-the-MC better than any of his other projects, while Classic's beats, with their soupy synths and funhouse samples, maintain the spiritual connection to Dilla.
Tree’s previous rapping-only releases (most recently, last year’s Trap Genius) can lack the duck-and-weave approach the MC favors while rapping over his own more lopsided instrumentals. But I.B. Classic aligns more with Tree’s style than past collaborators. He described the producer’s role on the EP as “chauffeuring MC Tree through the upper, lower and mid-level echelons of soul trap housery.” Classic has his own flair though, favoring dusty sonics and hollow trashcan snares over Tree’s preferred Lex Luger kits. His concoctions tease out Tree’s strengths. “I fuck with I.B. Classic, man,” he chuckles at the beginning of “Couple Nights.” “Make me feel like Pac, yo.”
As it turns out, Tree just sounds really good when he’s relaxed. On I.B. Tree, he rarely moves to belt out gospel-tinged melodic hooks; the mournful chorus of lead single “On Dem 4’s” is muted, crooned, and heard from afar. “Kinfolk”’s plea to “keep it plain, keep it simple” manifests itself across the entire EP; every song bends toward exhortations to remain humble, loyal, and grateful. The mantra is to stay in touch with one’s roots despite snowballing success.
His talking points mirror the delivery. A particularly striking and uncharacteristic example is “Heard Nothing,” where Tree gently pulls in and out of time, fakes us out, and scales a jazzy drum cadence. You begin to wonder if he has been taking cues from his past collaborator Roc Marciano, or his elusive associate Ka. “The Plug” is comparatively fiery: Tree builds the story of a routine drug rendezvous (“Come by yourself/Top floor at the Palmer House/Make a left when you exit”), into a storm of introspection (“I put two and two together/Jealousy the brother/Matter ’fact, twin/Hater be the mother”), and still it’s a quiet one.
With independent Chicago artists now a solidified presence in hip-hop media, message boards, and the nationwide concert circuit more than they were prior to the drill boom of 2012, there’s less pressure for MCs to prove themselves based on standards other than their own. Tree’s private quest to become the kind of rap statesman he wants to be—or at least, to keep trying new things—has led him, seemingly accidentally, what is perhaps his most rewarding release since his breakout year. | 2016-08-23T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-08-23T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | self-released | August 23, 2016 | 7.7 | d933578d-e17d-4c12-b68e-ce1bd5bfbec3 | Winston Cook-Wilson | https://pitchfork.com/staff/winston-cook-wilson/ | null |
The Atlanta rapper’s second album asserts her confidence and versatility, rounding out the trap beats with tracks that draw on pop, gospel, and R&B sounds. | The Atlanta rapper’s second album asserts her confidence and versatility, rounding out the trap beats with tracks that draw on pop, gospel, and R&B sounds. | Latto: 777 | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/latto-777/ | 777 | At 16, Latto won first place on a reality show called The Rap Game, but turned down the prize—an offer to sign with Jermaine Dupri’s So So Def—believing that she was worth more than the deal offered. After a slew of mixtapes, the Clayton County-raised rapper made her breakthrough with the lively 2019 single “Bitch From da Souf,” which became inescapable that summer and led her to sign with RCA for her studio debut, 2020’s Queen of da Souf. Nearly two years later, Latto, now 23, has continued to fine-tune her craft. Personal growth, along with public scrutiny, pushed her to change her stage name from Mulatto to Latto, meant to be short for “lottery” and representative of “a new chapter, good fortune, spiritually and financially.”
With this rebrand, it’s clear that she’s still in the process of finding herself and her sound. She uses her second album, 777, to get reacquainted with fans and position herself for mainstream success. If you weren’t familiar with Latto before, the fiery and combative two-part intro “777 Pt. 1” and “777 Pt. 2” will quickly enlighten you: “Top two, and bitch, I ain’t number two/Real rap back and Latto is the proof,” she asserts.
This newfound confidence allows her to venture away from her comfort zone and explore a more diverse selection of beats across the 13-track project, with mixed success. Lead single “Big Energy” aims to showcase her range with a fresh twist on Tom Tom Club’s “Genius of Love,” but misses the mark. The song sounds almost like a jingle, and Latto’s bars aren’t strong enough to revive the concept of “big dick energy,” a meme that by now feels a bit dated. “Real One” is a classic Pharrell production, with a bouncy, playful beat, but Latto’s flow makes an awkward fit, and her description of a relationship gone sour keeps the details at surface level.
She’s more triumphant at flaunting her versatility on “Sunshine,” an unexpected feel-good anthem Latto has described as “hood gospel.” She goes toe to toe with guests Lil Wayne and Childish Gambino, venting about past betrayals and feeling grateful to move beyond them. “They use my couch when they needed the therapy,” she raps, then pivots to sing the hook: “I just let the sun shine on me.” It feels like the first warm summer day in the hood, having fun on the block with your people. It’s a fresh sound for Latto and one of the album’s high points.
Opposite the more pop-influenced, upbeat tracks are R&B sounds—“Sleep Sleep,” which samples Twista’s “Get It Wet,” and “Like a Thug,” with Lil Durk—that offer a peek at a softer, more sultry side of Latto. She also taps into her more usual trap beats, saving some of her best rapping for the hard-hitting “Trust No Bitch” and “Stepper,” featuring Nardo Wick. 777 proves that Latto is a formidable force, though there’s still work to do to realize her full potential. If she hasn’t quite nailed down a winning sound, she’s willing to take some big gambles. | 2022-04-06T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2022-04-05T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | RCA | April 6, 2022 | 6.5 | d93a07d5-9234-4890-a276-e68c950eec24 | Tyra Nicole Triche | https://pitchfork.com/staff/tyra-nicole triche/ | |
The second full-length from UK electronic artist Forest Swords focuses more acutely on the music’s organic elements. It retains the uncanny qualities he’s known for, but with dashes of hope. | The second full-length from UK electronic artist Forest Swords focuses more acutely on the music’s organic elements. It retains the uncanny qualities he’s known for, but with dashes of hope. | Forest Swords: Compassion | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/23128-compassion/ | Compassion | When Forest Swords’ breakthrough EP, Dagger Paths, was released in 2010, the Merseyside, England-based producer born Matthew Barnes was leading a wave of artists fascinated by the darkest and most insular aspects of club music. At the time, Barnes and his contemporaries found an uneasiness lurking beneath pop’s slick veneer. His music, which mixed elements of techno, hip-hop, house, and dub, was a daguerreotype of the dance floor; if there was a rave in the Upside Down dimension on “Stranger Things,” Forest Swords would have made for the perfect soundtrack. Seven years later, that description holds, but Barnes’ vision has grown with each subsequent release, becoming more ambitious and varied while retaining the uncanniness he’s known for.
Compassion, the second proper Forest Swords full-length, focuses more acutely on the music’s organic elements. Percussion clacks and clatters with the sound of actual wood meeting solid resistance; vocal samples, though chopped and deconstructed, resonate more deeply; sweeping arrangements take the listener from claustrophobic drones to world-expanding crescendos. It’s a breadth of sound that Barnes has been building to his whole career as he’s added weight to his music’s skeletal frame. It’s also a relatively predictable direction: Forest Swords’ previous album, Engravings, had already taken much of what made his early music great while dilating and deepening it. In 2017, the Forest Swords of Compassion isn’t entirely a maximalist, but he’s perhaps more similar to Ben Frost than he is to Burial.
Most of Forest Swords’ tracks are wordless, but the human voice is key across Compassion, expressing Barnes themes of state power, technological isolation, and gender dynamics. While the interplay between his inspirations is impressionistic (you have to mine interviews and press materials to explicitly uncover Barnes’ inspirations) the tension created by the music is easy to grasp. Like other electronic producers with a political edge, Forest Swords’ relationship with technology is ambivalent, if not downright hostile. Last year he soundtracked In the Robot Skies, an experimental film made with drones. And perhaps the best track on Compassion is “Panic”; the refrain is unusually clear above its Eastern melody. “I fear something’s wrong/Panic is on,” sings a voice breaking through the static.
But Compassion is often as hopeful as it is paranoid, a first for Barnes. “I’ve struggled to see any kind of light at the end of the tunnel,” Barnes has said, reflecting on the political moment. “I realized there’s some sort of power in trying to create our own instead.” The stately “Exalter” is a standout, using clipped samples, rattling percussion, and looped motifs that coalesce in a powerful denouement. By track’s end, it’s as if rays of sunlight have broken through stormy clouds. Compassion also contains hints at the freeform experimentalism of Oren Ambarchi and Ryuichi Sakamoto; “Arms Out” feels like an actual embrace, enveloping the listener in a new age blanket of crystal-clear vocals.
While Forest Swords has always hidden hooks in his music that reveal themselves upon repeat listens, Compassion is by far his most approachable album at first pass. “The Highest Flood” and “Raw Language” use opaque vocal samples that become irresistible earworms, though not the type you’d necessarily sing along to. They recall spirituals, bringing a warmth to even the chilliest synths. “Raw Language” ends with a bright melody somewhere between Pentecostal gospel and occult chant. Time and again, Forest Swords compositions begin fractured and end ecstatic.
Compassion’s cover depicts a man underneath a boulder, doing his best not to be crushed. It’s as if Sisyphus had somehow tripped and gotten himself into an even worse pickle. But in this dire situation, our hero hasn’t given up. Forest Swords music does the same; even as melodies are swallowed by the void, optimism remains. If you’re wondering which side is winning out, just look to the title. | 2017-05-06T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-05-06T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Experimental | Ninja Tune | May 6, 2017 | 7.8 | d93ceb84-6f2a-42fb-a120-3284e59c515f | Nathan Reese | https://pitchfork.com/staff/nathan-reese/ | null |
Kanye West’s executive-produced gospel album is the most realized music to come from this era of his career. The production and the choir’s dynamic power creates an almost hallucinatory effect. | Kanye West’s executive-produced gospel album is the most realized music to come from this era of his career. The production and the choir’s dynamic power creates an almost hallucinatory effect. | Kanye West / Sunday Service Choir: Jesus Is Born | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/kanye-west-sunday-service-choir-jesus-is-born/ | Jesus Is Born | Last October, Kanye West got into the booth with Zane Lowe and in a prophetic voice, he spoke: “Ye cannot die. Ye cannot be buried.” Since the genesis of his career, Kanye has had an outsized obsession with everlasting life: in art, in life, in Christ. For someone who built his earliest songs out of extracting vocal loops from obscure, sometimes decades-old songs, Kanye has seen the way musicians can be resurrected and given new life. Unearthing the voices of the dead almost makes time travelers of forgotten artists. They are rediscovered, fed through the sampler, chopped and warped and given new life in a new song, then spill anew from speakers into cars and arenas.
Part of Kanye’s process is the meticulousness with which he works to flip samples by tweaking the speed, pitch, and phrasing to become something totally new. From songs like “Through the Wire,” where he flipped Chaka Khan’s “Through the Fire,” and on his breakout hit, “Jesus Walks,” where he sampled the Arc Choir and gave us the first real taste of the way he fuses two seemingly disparate venues: the club and the church.
To be clear, there is very little club to be found on Jesus Is Born—it is a pure gospel album. One of the most radical elements of the album is what’s absent: Kanye’s voice. Instead, he’s assembled a massive choir to channel his Christian message in a joyous, all-consuming wave of sound. Although there are no samples here, per se, it’s as if Kanye is using the choir as a living, breathing sampler. He’s still selecting old songs, whether they’re traditional hymns or late-’90s R&B hits, and recontextualizing them. The voices almost seem to warp in real-time as though Kanye were at the sampler tweaking speed and pitch. The effect can be hallucinatory, like on the opening track, “Count Your Blessings”—a rendition of Rev. Timothy Wright’s original—when the choir climbs scales that reach notes so high it makes you feel like you’re staring directly into the sun.
The album is at times minimal, just voice and piano, and at other times erupts into maximal textures of trombones, drums, and fluctuating voices that are all in the service of praise and joy. And even though there is something almost psychedelic about the production, Jesus Is Born has less in common with the slick, radio-friendly textures of 21st-century gospel music. It’s more of a descendent of more traditional singers like Mahalia Jackson, Sister Rosetta Tharpe, and the Clark Sisters. The Sunday Service Choir as a whole also seems to be taking cues from groups with no real lead singer like the Fisk Jubilee Singers, the Dixie Hummingbirds, and the Blind Boys of Alabama. They are collectives working in tandem to praise God. Some of these acts have existed for almost a century; perhaps Kanye hopes his Sunday Service will outlast him, as well.
As is the case with many creative types, West has described himself as an artist with synesthesia—he sees sound as color. As such, light plays a major role in his artistic endeavors from stage to song. He chose Roden Crater—an extinct volcano in Arizona that the visual artist James Turrell has been transforming into a naked-eye observatory for the last 40 years—to create what would become the IMAX film to accompany his first overtly devotional album from 2019, Jesus Is King. The Sunday Service Choir features prominently in the film, as though they were shooting their voices through a giant telescope into the sky as light moves through them.
And there is an impermeable quality of light in the DNA of Jesus Is Born. Even when Satan is mentioned toward the end of the record, on Pastor Shirley Caesar’s “Satan, We’re Gonna Tear Your Kingdom Down.” The song exudes a clear, white, blue shimmer, just like the album cover: a bright sun suspended over blue water, framed in dark blue. The voices actually sound like they are trying to tear a hole in the sky to conquer darkness. This, of course, is the point of Jesus Is Born. Aside from spreading the gospel, it’s a way to bottle extreme light and joy.
Take the album’s final song: “Total Praise.” Like many Kanye songs, a singer begins vocalizing one line, just once, from the original source (Richard Smallwood’s 1990 song of the same name). Then, just like Kanye chopping up a sample, he extracts the most affecting bit of the original song, and has the entire choir circle around the word “amen,” as tenors, sopranos, and altos pile on in sections, until the song crescendos. It’s trance-like.
The best artists continue to redefine the work that defined them. Whether Kanye’s rebirth has been endearing or distancing, he is still manipulating the human voice in new and, at the very least, interesting ways. Gone is the isolated, severed, screaming head that served as his Twitter avatar for years, replaced with a view of the globe centered over Africa. Both of these versions of Kanye seem like different ways of striving for life eternal—or ways in which to speak to something greater than himself. | 2020-01-08T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2020-01-08T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rap | self-released | January 8, 2020 | 7.4 | d93fa944-7328-4f40-8f3c-5c3b13b5b728 | Shane Cashman | https://pitchfork.com/staff/shane-cashman/ | |
Montreal-based singer-songwriter Laurel Sprengelmeyer, recording with members of Arcade Fire and the National, steps out with an assured debut. | Montreal-based singer-songwriter Laurel Sprengelmeyer, recording with members of Arcade Fire and the National, steps out with an assured debut. | Little Scream: The Golden Record | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/15338-the-golden-record/ | The Golden Record | "Oh, I don't know who I am, and I don't know what I'll be," coos Laurel Sprengelmeyer of Little Scream, above acoustic guitars that run like rivulets. Sprengelmeyer sings her self-doubt at the start of the second verse of "The Heron and the Fox", the quietly reflective, sadly nostalgic centerpiece of her stellar debut, The Golden Record. An Iowa native now living in Montreal and recording there with members of Arcade Fire, the National, and A Silver Mt. Zion, Sprengelmeyer sounds both worn from experience and inspired by something she can't yet imagine, the peripatetic sort who's old enough to be wise but young enough to be adventurous. That's the great thread that runs through this album, a perfectly mixed bag of graceful folk, coiled pop, and expansive art rock. Lyrically, Sprengelmeyer seems to yearn for the past; stylistically, though, she presses for a bold polyglot future of twisted contexts. Here, she gets both.
It'd be easy to separate The Golden Record's 10 songs into a few orders: There are the mostly still drifters, like the gently swollen "Black Cloud" and the reverb-washed break-up of "People is Place". There are songs that rock and lurch, like the violin-trilling stomp "Boatman" and the snarling-and-smiling "Cannons". There are those experiments, like "Guyegaros", that fit neither. Segregating the songs, though, means selling Sprengelmeyer short as some manic amateur unable to unify or control her ideas. But most every move she makes as Little Scream is a good one: "Cannons" is as incisive and propulsive as the best of St. Vincent, an oft-occurring but fairly inadequate comparison. She sculpts guitar noise and synthesizer squiggles into a perfectly odd pop song that's as aggressive as it is endearing. The same goes for "Red Hunting Jacket", a somehow cheerful cavalcade of handclaps and guitar abrasion punctuated by a vamp of boogie-woogie piano and spiraling flute lines. The song itself is an excavation of forgotten memories from a relationship built on the run-- "What can we communicate that won't just turn to dust?" Sprengelmeyer sings, her band twisting deliriously beneath. A kick drum thunders through a scrim of noise and samples at the start of "Your Radio". It's the resolute beginning to a charged electric track that eventually rises to arena sizes, with tiered harmonies and a band whose trust in repetition pays off in a coda that suggests the Dead C scoring a battlefield scene. She brings the same sort of control to "People Is Place", one of those gentle tracks that builds over its four minutes to a gorgeous instrumental groan, glowing long tones breaking against a piano like waves against a shoreline. Each look is as convincing as the next.
The Golden Record is a wide-open exploration of Sprengelmeyer's sensibilities, the introduction on which she's able to explore both her most spare and extravagantly orchestrated impulses. It's easy to imagine a scenario where, after a year or two of touring these songs, watching audiences respond, and feeling herself grow tired of certain tracks and maybe not others, Sprengelmeyer circumscribes herself as a writer, favoring a handful of styles versus the horde she delivers here. That's not necessarily a bad thing, either, as every approach sounds assured and evolved. There's no stylistic filler, no dilettante drivel badly in need of an editor. An album of Sprengelmeyer's quiet songs would be as welcome as a full-length of her quakes. For the time being, though, The Golden Record is the document of a real-life wanderer who sings about drift and regret, dreams and reality, in songs that know enough not to sit still. The Golden Record is an infinitely approachable and enjoyable welcome by an artist who sounds like she's here now, for the duration. | 2011-04-20T02:00:03.000-04:00 | 2011-04-20T02:00:03.000-04:00 | Folk/Country | Secretly Canadian | April 20, 2011 | 8.1 | d94d2ca6-fb6b-4945-95cc-c6055e29d5fc | Grayson Haver Currin | https://pitchfork.com/staff/grayson-haver currin/ | null |
Though the upstart British songwriter is a capable storyteller when he zeroes on a single topic, his debut is only intermittently transcendent. | Though the upstart British songwriter is a capable storyteller when he zeroes on a single topic, his debut is only intermittently transcendent. | Sam Fender: Hypersonic Missiles | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/sam-fender-hypersonic-missiles/ | Hypersonic Missiles | Raised on a council estate in North Shields, England from the age of 10, Sam Fender took solace in the music of Bruce Springsteen, finding common ground between Springsteen’s Asbury Park and hardship in his own hometown. Now 25 and a songwriter himself, Fender landed a deal with Polydor and won the Critics’ Choice award at this year’s BRITs before he’d released his first album. When he takes a swing at “pop machine” artifice, or milquetoast peers like James Bay or Ed Sheeran, it’s not just outsider posturing—except that Fender now finds himself on the inside. Label executives have heralded Hypersonic Missiles, his debut album, as the second coming of Bruce. But though Fender’s commitment to addressing serious social issues sets him apart, the well-intentioned Missiles is only intermittently transcendent.
The album’s best songs come from the most honest, intimate places. Fender wrote “Dead Boys” in response to friends’ suicides, and the words are terse and direct: “We close our eyes/Learn our pain/No one ever could explain/All the dead boys in our hometown.” It has the fewest lyrics of any song on the record, a restraint that underscores the stigma surrounding male mental health. “The Borders” initially sounds like a stiffer War on Drugs, but its lyrics about the pain of dysfunctional family life are more grounded than Adam Granduciel’s soul-searching. The song ends with some legitimately chilling final lines (“You pinned me to the wall and smashed a bottle/Your eyes the door to hell and all within”), proving Fender is a capable storyteller when he zeroes on a single topic. It’s the kind of intimate, emotional writing that may resonate with other young men questioning their assumptions about masculinity and vulnerability.
Fender runs into trouble when he tries to tackle everything at once. The title track climaxes in a thrilling Boss homage (complete with Clarence Clemons-y saxophone solo), but stumbles on the way there as Fender’s protagonist groans, “The tensions of the world are rising higher/We’re probably due another war with all this ire.” The lowest moment is a folk ballad called “White Privilege.” Taking a different approach than the Macklemore songs of the same name, “Privilege” pairs dense harmonies with an onslaught of societal grievances: Brexit, social media, liberal arrogance, political correctness. The critiques are often shallow and, unlike the better songs here, devoid of empathy. Fender says the song was written as a series of characters, but the lyrics are so muddled it’s hard to tell when the perspective shifts.
“Privilege” at least represents a risk, while Hypersonic Missiles eventually retreats into previously released singles and songs Fender wrote as a teenager. In his own estimation, the album has “a couple of stinkers” on it, including Hozier pastiche “Call Me Lover.” That song’s peaks and valleys actually help to set it apart: Elsewhere, Fender treats surveillance states (solid 2017 debut single “Play God”), one-night stands (Strokesian romp “Will We Talk?”), and landlord gripes (misbegotten gospel exercise “Saturday”) with identical shouty intensity. The only real non-single highlight from the back half is closer “Use,” which enters intriguing, Nina Simone-inspired territory when Fender dips his voice.
Fender may yet live up to the praise he’s received, but the lack of focus and mostly formulaic arrangements on this record won’t get him there. Snow Patrol collaborator Rich Costey’s antiseptic, airless mixes don’t help, robbing even the flourishes (strings, backing choirs, more saxophones) of their potential. In the blandly apolitical landscape of modern rock, Fender’s blend of social commentary and huge choruses offer the suggestion of real conviction. When he tells stories about human beings rather than philosophizing about the human condition, he sounds like he’s on his way to greatness. But Hypersonic Missiles on its own is unsatisfying, and the overconfident presentation risks stifling his voice before he’s found it.
Buy: Rough Trade
(Pitchfork may earn a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.) | 2019-09-13T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-09-13T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Interscope | September 13, 2019 | 6.1 | d94f9cdf-e07a-479b-8484-c9095b761882 | Hannah Jocelyn | https://pitchfork.com/staff/hannah-jocelyn/ | |
Created during a residency at Gainesville’s Pulp Arts studio, Nandi Rose’s latest album as Half Waif is complex, daring, and emotionally unsettled. | Created during a residency at Gainesville’s Pulp Arts studio, Nandi Rose’s latest album as Half Waif is complex, daring, and emotionally unsettled. | Half Waif: Mythopoetics | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/half-waif-mythopoetics/ | Mythopoetics | At first, Nandi Rose intended her fifth album as Half Waif to be a return to the basics. With her longtime collaborator and producer Zubin Hensler, she embarked on a recording residency at Gainesville’s Pulp Arts studio. The idea was to let her songs ring plainly in space, rendered on piano instead of her usual synth pop settings. Mythopoetics retains traces of that original conceit, like the brief opener “Fabric,” a spacious, serene track that’s easy to imagine Rose playing on piano in an otherwise empty room. But that simple, congruous arrangement of the songwriter and her instrument soon fractures under the stress of her lyrics, scattering off into daring, swirling electronic arrangements that better suit Rose’s ruminations on love, aging, loss, and time’s impenetrable sweep.
Throughout Half Waif’s discography, Rose has excelled at staging intimate, escalating conflict laced with rich sensory detail. Burning lavender, unfolded laundry, cooling coffee, and other objects caught in states of change accentuate Rose’s own reckoning with entropy. She projects an uncertain gaze onto the relationships that sustain her—familial, romantic, platonic, creative—studying and testing the tethers in her web. Often, when the inquiry becomes overheated, her voice splits off from itself, chasing down a countermelody on a secondary track or merging into the electroacoustic instrumentation. Her subjectivity is polyphonous, unstable. She sings with conviction about the possibility that her certainty might shatter at any time.
Mythopoetics advances Half Waif’s tendency toward plurality of voice. More than ever, the distinction between Rose’s vocals and their environment seems called into question. “Horse Racing” punctuates her overlapping lines with synthesizers whose timbre approaches that of the human throat, shadowing her voice with an opaque, wordless register. On “Sodium and Cigarettes,” reverb-heavy backing vocals envelop and absorb similarly processed keyboard riffs. The voice expands to fill the surrounding vacuum, then swallows its accessories, a porous membrane rather than a steady, singular figure.
Many of Rose’s lyrics yearn for solitude while also reckoning with its impossibility. “Have I forgotten how to be alone? I blame you,” she sings against spare piano in the album’s first moments. On “Sourdough,” she flees from a “you” whose pronoun she sings with an accusatory grain, just after imagining bleeding herself dry to feed the ones she loves. She is, as everyone is, entangled with others, and, like many of us are, ambivalent about that entanglement. She pulses in and out of aloneness and communion, finding both to be constraining. On the highlight “Orange Blossoms,” Rose cries out from isolation for an ambiguous “somebody” who might help her weather the humiliations of existence: having to wake up, check email, move through time. “Somebody just give me the damn highlights/I don’t wanna be here,” she sings. “Everybody goes home/And the way there is not clear.”
Could the lostness itself be the way? When Rose is adrift, she seeks foundation; when she’s grounded, she sings herself loose. The constant, desirous shifts that mark her work suggest that the murk doesn’t obscure the map—it is the map. Dissatisfaction stirs our movement rather than stalling it. If Rose is restless, itching even amid a life that she has wrenched toward harmony, it doesn’t mark failure or a lapse from her path. It means the path keeps opening, beckoning her to fill its space.
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. | 2021-07-14T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2021-07-14T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | Anti- | July 14, 2021 | 7.5 | d961106c-3222-4e7c-895c-e9bf509e89e1 | Sasha Geffen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sasha-geffen/ | |
Compiled by Nick Cave and founding member Mick Harvey, the massive Bad Seeds retrospective paints a dark, awe-inspiring portrait of all the sex, drugs, love, and death that fill the band's catalogue. | Compiled by Nick Cave and founding member Mick Harvey, the massive Bad Seeds retrospective paints a dark, awe-inspiring portrait of all the sex, drugs, love, and death that fill the band's catalogue. | Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds: Lovely Creatures: The Best of Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds 1984-2014 | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/23236-lovely-creatures-the-best-of-nick-cave-the-bad-seeds-1984-2014/ | Lovely Creatures: The Best of Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds 1984-2014 | The saga of Nick Cave didn’t begin with the Bad Seeds or the Birthday Party–not even with the man himself. Its genesis lies instead in the first chapter of Vladimir Nabokov’s 1955 novel Lolita, which Cave’s father, a high school English teacher, read aloud to him shortly after his 12th birthday inside their house in a small town in Victoria, Australia. Cave later recalled his father transforming with every recited syllable, a mortal under the spell of the written word. “I felt like I was being initiated into this secret world,” he said, “The world of sex and adulthood and art.” Cave’s naturally didn’t grasp the intricacies of Nabokov’s masterpiece at his tender age, but the young man’s encounter with Lolita’s sordid romanticism and melodic prose constituted his coming-of-age and his artistic awakening.
Cave’s new box set Lovely Creatures: The Best Of Nick Cave And The Bad Seeds is a testament to the literary soul of his music. The deluxe edition assumes the form of a case-bound, 36-page book of essays and photos (256 pages in the super deluxe edition, packaged separately), bundled alongside 3 CDs and a DVD comprising concert footage and band interviews. While technically a compilation, it’s easier to think of the release as a novel in three parts, detailing Cave’s evolution from obscure goth-rocker, to Americana deconstructor, to rock’s very own Nabokov, all while honoring the Seeds who joined him for the long, slow march to the pantheon.
Disc one details the band’s early years in the mid-’80s and early ’90s and the growing pains therein. The seething title track to 1984’s From Her To Eternity is the perfect opening chapter; the vestiges of Birthday Party’s post-punk in its arrangement (the dread-laden piano plunks, the spooky poetry, the incessant dissonance) show that Cave and company had yet to come into their own. In time, they moved to Berlin, drifting away from rudimentary din to gothic grandeur over the span of their next five albums, whose contents comprise the bulk of the disc. Ironically, the first of these Berlin-brewed albums, The Firstborn Is Dead (1985), marked the beginnings of Cave’s love affair with Southern blues. The romance was inevitable: Howlin’ Wolf, John Lee Hooker, et al. were the original murder balladeers, tragedians strumming similar tales of blood, sweat, and sin. Accordingly, 1986’s covers album Kicking Against The Pricks (represented here by the Seeds’ take on Hooker’s “I’m Gonna Kill That Woman”) found the Seeds honoring their thematic forebears.
A few months after the tribute, Cave’s creative loci shifted yet again. Frequently regarded as the band’s opus, Your Funeral, My Trial found the Seeds welding the blues to the pre-existing, cabaret-tinged balladry of his debut, recasting the aloof artist as a funhouse-mirror version of the everyman. Consider “Scum,” the album’s seething indictment of “a miserable shit-wringing turd.” The climactic highlight is typically regarded as Cave’s clap-back at his former roommate, journalist Mat Snow (according to the Snow's account, a disgruntled Cave revealed him as the song's subject during a tense conversation following Snow’s pre-emptive criticism of The Firstborn Is Dead). Upon closer examination, however, the purported autobiography reveals itself as a condemnation of the traitor immemorial, fueled through historical allusion (“Judas, Brutus, Vitus”) and grotesque imagery (“He said that I looked pale and thin/I told him he looked fat/His lips were red and lickin’ wet/His house was roastin’ hot/In fact it was a fuckin’ slum”). With the fluid, genre-blurring, Your Funeral, My Trial, and its follow-up Tender Prey (1988), Cave challenged our notions of the blues as a static art form; its modern incarnation called for innovation, not just appropriation.
Lovely Creatures proceeds on to the band’s halcyon days in the mid ’90s—a period that saw Cave’s apotheosis as a world-renowned auteur. Let Love In (1994) and The Boatman’s Call (1997) are the most well-represented here with four tracks apiece, and for good reason. Along with 1996’s Murder Ballads, these three albums provide the most compelling evidence for Cave’s storied reputation. Here, we observe Cave coming into his own as a storyteller, an echo of the awakening he experienced as a child. His formalistic shift from poetry to prose positions “Do You Love Me?” “Stagger Lee,” and “Red Right Hand” as metaphysical novels rather than songs, where the forces of sex and death grapple for supremacy. The spirit of the old Romantics is alive and well, too: namely, their ceaseless search for sublime love, the only solace in a world of pain. “There’s a man who spoke wonders/Though I’ve never met him,” he groans on “(Are You) The One I've Been Waiting For?” invoking Christ’s chaste wisdom as he anticipates his lovers’ arrival. Two tracks apiece from No More Shall We Part (2001) and Nocturama (2003) round out the proceedings, but their overblown drama pales in comparison to the preceding panorama, the apex of Cave’s compilation, and arguably, his entire career.
By the time their 20th anniversary rolled around in 2004, Cave and company’s primordial madness had long since cooled, earning them a heretofore unimaginable reputation among critics as a beacon of gothic melodrama. In fact, during this interim—2004 to 2013, chronicled on the final disc—the old Seeds ceased to exist. The departure of original keyboardist/guitarist Blixa Bargeld one year prior to 2004’s double album Abattoir Blues/The Lyre of Orpheus left behind an unmistakable void, particularly on the LP’s intimate latter half (“Breathless,” “Babe, You Turn Me On,” “O Children”). The void deepens with five selections from 2007’s Americana doomsday spell Dig, Lazarus, Dig!!!, Harvey’s final outing with the band. It’s somewhat of an underwhelming swan song for him, considering the frequency with which Warren Ellis’ violins take center stage (most spectacularly on the LP’s haunting, hymnal eight-minute closer, “More News From Nowhere”).
Four highlights from 2013’s Push The Sky Away ("We No Who U R," "Jubilee Street," "Higgs Boson Blues," and the title track) provide a fitting conclusion to Lovely Creatures’ majestic arc: the polar opposite of “From Her To Eternity,” a profound juxtaposition. And yet, however satisfying the collection’s finale, listeners who’ve kept up with Cave in the four years following Push The Sky Away will undoubtedly walk away from the experience a bit unsettled: not because the music itself is engineered to do so, but because Cave omits Skeleton Tree—his most powerful monument to death and grief—from the Seeds saga. Perhaps, this absence is owed to timing (Lovely Creatures was in progress when Cave’s son Arthur died). Consider Skeleton Tree, then, an epilogue to Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds’ triumphant journey.
All chronologies are stories by definition, but when it comes to Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, such a descriptor proves laughably insufficient. Their trajectory encompasses not just a band’s career, but a perversion of the monomyth that resides in all of our brains. Instead of King Arthur or Odysseus, we have Cave, a chain-smoking, gunslinging poet who sees God in the eyes of a woman and bowls of soup; who stalks through Berlin boudoirs with heroin in his veins, daring the devil to take him by the Red Right Hand only to dodge his scythe like a stuntman; who sifts through puddles of blood and piles of money in search of meaning, only to be greeted by the void. “The spiritual quest has many faces–religion, art, drugs, work, money, sex,” he mused, addressing 1998 Vienna Poetry Festival, “but rarely does the search serve God so directly, and rarely are the rewards so great in doing.” Lovely Creatures presents the definitive display of these anguished labors and sweet fruits they bore over twenty years—an unmovable feast, immortalized. | 2017-05-13T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-05-13T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Mute / BMG | May 13, 2017 | 8.1 | d9615198-1e73-4c98-a190-88e021d72cb3 | Zoe Camp | https://pitchfork.com/staff/zoe-camp/ | null |
The Los Angeles musician, formerly of Barn Owl, fuses synthesizers and processed guitar into ominous, inky atmospheres that bridge experimental music and ambient dub. | The Los Angeles musician, formerly of Barn Owl, fuses synthesizers and processed guitar into ominous, inky atmospheres that bridge experimental music and ambient dub. | Evan Caminiti: Varispeed Hydra | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/evan-caminiti-varispeed-hydra/ | Varispeed Hydra | Until the early 2010s, Evan Caminiti recorded towering drones in the Thrill Jockey duo Barn Owl with Jon Porras, conjuring images of grim skies over endless plains using a spartan two-guitar setup. In recent years, he’s broadened his instrumental palette and shifted his focus to urban landscapes. After Meridian’s focus on modular synthesizer, 2017’s Toxic City Music reintroduced guitar, often processed beyond recognizability, to create an oil-slick reflection of New York. That album felt like a breakthrough, balancing smog-belching industrial textures with hypnotic grooves that were threatening yet seductive. That grayscale sonic metropolis expands on Varispeed Hydra, where new stylistic alleyways lead Caminiti to fading remnants of the natural world.
Some of the first sounds you hear on opener “Hand in Flame” are the cries of birds fluttering distantly above the murky low-end churn. They’re a consistent natural presence throughout Varispeed Hydra, but Caminiti uses these and other natural accents, like the water rushing through “Holo Dove,” to amplify his polluted electroacoustic atmospheres. Like the dense assemblages of Tim Hecker or Jefre-Cantu Ledesma (who appeared on Toxic City Music), Caminiti’s sounds are impossible to pick apart, but as his melted-together blend envelops the listener, inky patterns begin to appear. Some arrive in torrents, such as “Plume,” where a heavy ringing guitar tone rises and crashes in increasingly distorted waves. Others offer an eerie calm, like the bruised synth delicately looping through “Russian Palm”; “For Mika” opens with a jangling insect-like trill before revealing the ghostly echo of a club track buried under mountains of delay. That track in particular offers a pathway into Varispeed Hydra’s most exciting qualities.
Caminiti’s first experiments with techno and dub music go back to the final Barn Owl albums, and Varispeed Hydra reconnects with club music in surprising ways. The grim “Radio Rome” and the laser-dappled “Morphogenesis” recall the icy experimental dub of UK producers like Parris. And much like Helm’s similarly nature-defiling Chemical Flowers, Caminiti’s album loops textures in ways that generate absorbing rhythms without necessarily creating beats. The album was inspired by performances at both the Tokyo nightclub Dommune and New York’s Issue Project Room, a haven for experimental music, and its ability to bridge those very different environments is one of its biggest strengths.
Part of what makes Varispeed Hydra so potent is its relative brevity. Both the dramatic shifts and recurring sounds gain power over the album’s 35-minute span, but they stop short of overwhelming the listener. Caminiti seems aware of the momentum he’s creating as each track pulls you to the next; like a good improviser, he knows when to set up an ending. The closer, “Carnation,” reaches a surreal equilibrium: The synths flare like jazz horns, and the birds circle back. It’s an elegant finish, right down to the abrupt, plug-pulling cut to silence. Caminiti has developed a labyrinthine sound, and navigating it makes Varispeed Hydra a mysterious and enticing listen. | 2020-04-17T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-04-17T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Experimental | Dust Editions | April 17, 2020 | 7.2 | d961fbf6-1fd7-4728-92ff-695846313150 | Miles Bowe | https://pitchfork.com/staff/miles-bowe/ | |
Rhino offers an extensive repackaging of this divisive and, in some circles, much-derided band's six albums, each complemented by a bonus disc of DVD footage and Surround Sound mixes. | Rhino offers an extensive repackaging of this divisive and, in some circles, much-derided band's six albums, each complemented by a bonus disc of DVD footage and Surround Sound mixes. | The Doors: Perception | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/9691-perception/ | Perception | The Doors aren't so much a band as a phase you go through, rarely to be visited again, like so much of the high-school-notebook poetry that Jim Morrison's lyrics inspired. Though their songs could be as transgressive as the Velvet Underground's, the Doors are denied the same name-drop cachet, their legend reduced to a punchline-- no thanks to a 1991 Oliver Stone biopic more self-indulgent than the band itself, and recent efforts by Ray Manzarek and Robby Krieger to revive the band with Ian Astbury as the Doors of the 21st century, like some reality-TV-show experiment minus the TV-show part.
Amid these sorry attempts to update the Doors' legacy, it's easy to forget that without Morrison's brooding baritone, there'd be no Iggy, no Ian Curtis, and it's safe to say that Morrison taught Bono more about rocking a Jesus Christ pose than JC himself. So Perception's extensive repackaging of the Doors' six albums (each complemented by a bonus disc of DVD footage and Surround Sound mixes) arrives at a fortuitous time-- not because it coincides with the band's 40th anniversary, but because it helps contemporize a band tethered to a 1960s hippie ideal to which, spiritually, it often stood in opposition.
For all the mythology surrounding the band, the Doors-- like so many 60s garage-rockers-- arguably peaked with their first single. "Break on Through (To the Other Side)" is a taunt and a dare, drawing the line between who was down and who was out. But the 1967 debut album that the song introduced wasn't your typical Nuggets-variety noise, looking to the Weill/Brecht songbook for "Alabama Song (Whisky Bar)" and beyond pop structure entirely for "The End". The 11-minute closer set the standard for the Doors' long songs: Morrison dropping stream-of-consciousness prose in the place where most bands would put the guitar solo, his words gradually wearing down the players' accompaniment before summoning them back for the climax. "The End" is also the song that helped define the Morrison caricature as pabulum-spouting narcissist, but the song's ominous drift-- guided by Krieger's sinister riff and disrupted by Morrison's Oedipal intimations-- remains eerily compelling, and established the sex/death dichotomy that would play out in so many Doors songs. (Also: the song is actually shorter than you remembered: The Doors was originally mastered at a slightly slower speed, due to technical error that's been corrected by Perception's new version-- so you'll get a few seconds of your life back.)
Strange Days* (1967) closely adheres to the debut's winning formula: short songs about love and one long song about apocalypse ("When the Music's Over"). But 1968's Waiting for the Sun shows the first signs of fatigue, opening with the weakest of the Doors' hit singles (the Kinks-nicked "Hello, I Love You"), and weighed down by start/stop multi-sectional three-minute songs ("Spanish Caravan", "The Unknown Solider") that feel more meandering than the band's longest pieces. But it could've been worse: Among Perception's featured outtakes is the 17-minute free-form tone poem "The Celebration of the Lizard", amusing as an anti-pop gesture from a top 40 act, but so portentous that, even at the height of their chemical ingestion, the band still thought it better to edit down its most coherent passage into the pulsating acid-rock throbber "Not to Touch the Earth".
History has relegated 1969's The Soft Parade to the same Spectacular Failure file as the Stones' Their Satanic Majesties Request; the problem, however, isn't the opulent TV talk-show orchestra arrangements (which lend "Touch Me" a schmaltzy charm) but the bloodless, Fat Elvis performances. A DVD performance clip of the title-track suite makes for a fitting summation of the Doors' half-hearted dalliance with symphonic psychedelia and their subsequent abandonment of it: John Densmore and Krieger look bored and embarrassed performing the song's poncey opening passages, before the game-saving swamp-funk finale allows a bloated, bearded Morrison to reconnect with his younger, more dynamic self.
Like so many of their peers, the Doors responded to the post-hippie hangover with a back-to-basics approach (read: the blues, man) that informed their last two albums, 1970's Morrison Hotel and 71's L.A. Woman-- though the significance of this move is overstated by Perception's inclusion of eight (mostly incomplete) consecutive session takes of "Roadhouse Blues" that merely chart the song's evolution from sloppy bar-band jam to somewhat less sloppy bar-band jam (though the between-song banter is amusing). L.A. Woman is also marred by its share of blooze snoozes ("Crawling King Snake") but finds the band effectively shaping up for the hard-rock 70s with the hypno-grooved title track and "The Wasp (Texas Radio and the Big Beat)", the most successful union of the band's bluesy tendencies and Morrison's beat-poet babble. But even if his death was still months away, on "Riders on the Storm" Morrison has already turned into a ghost, lending the song an eternally haunted quality that even the band's detractors can't deny.
When Morrison first urged his fans to break on through, he wasn't asking for their money, he was asking for a commitment. At $120 and 12 discs, Perception is asking for both, but the audiophile end of the fanbase will be pleased by the new masters (as well as engineer Bruce Botnick's gearhead-oriented liner notes). In contrast to the multi-tracked splendor of much 60s psychedelic rock, the Doors made great use of space, a virtue highlighted by the new masters' foregrounding of the two most overlooked Doors: guitarist Krieger, whose finger-picked leads so often took a backseat to Manzarek's organ arpeggios; and drummer Densmore, whose playing hits harder the lighter his touch.
The band's prolific album output means Perception offers little in the way of essential leftovers, but that's more of a relief than anything. The lasting perception of Perception: Had the Doors' six albums been condensed to three-- cherry-picking the best material from The Doors/Strange Days, Waiting for the Sun/The Soft Parade and Morrison Hotel/L.A. Woman-- the band would've had a discography as airtight as Jimi Hendrix's. Instead, each ensuing album-- drawn from increasingly depleted sources of inspired material and an increasingly intoxicated frontman-- put greater stress on the band's internal contradictions: A proto-punk band with baroque-classical aspirations, fronted by a California-dreamy pop idol who really wanted to be a reclusive fat beardo poet in Paris-- a would-be idealist who made a more convincing nihilist.
The singer's decline is laid bare in Perception's DVD clips: While an entrancing 1967 Canadian television performance of "The End" (incest rant excised) focuses on the young Morrison's face to the point of denying the other band members' existence, a grainy 1970 Australian live taping of "Crawling King Snake" seems to be deliberately avoiding his burly figure. By placing these images alongside the erratic artistic trajectory that plays out on Perception's six discs, we see that Morrison was not just a victim of his own excess, but also an early victim of a burgeoning music-business machine that demanded quantity over quality, regardless of the personal or creative toll. | 2006-12-05T01:00:01.000-05:00 | 2006-12-05T01:00:01.000-05:00 | Rock | Elektra / Rhino | December 5, 2006 | 6.5 | d968dd86-b4c9-49bf-a815-f21f795fa56c | Stuart Berman | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stuart-berman/ | null |
After drifting into ambient drone on his last album, Stephen Wilkins returns to his chill, bucolic stomping grounds. | After drifting into ambient drone on his last album, Stephen Wilkins returns to his chill, bucolic stomping grounds. | Bibio: Ribbons | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/bibio-ribbons/ | Ribbons | For a dude whose music is so unflappably chill, Bibio, the British producer Stephen Wilkinson, remains a restless musician. Over the past 14 years his path has zig-zagged between acoustic and digital extremes; it’s only fitting that his landmark album was called Ambivalence Avenue, since Wilkinson cheerfully refuses to stay in any one lane for long. His signature mixture of acoustic folk, hip-hop beats, and easy-listening soul might seem tailor-made for the era of mood-based playlists and legal marijuana, but there’s genuine weirdness to his warbly patina, wildlife field recordings, and fingerpicked six-string, all of which recalls oxidized cassette tapes curling in the heat. With the ambient drone of 2017’s Phantom Brickworks, he drifted into uncharted waters, but Ribbons returns him to his habitual stomping grounds.
Much like 2016’s A Mineral Love, the new album is a light, often carefree listen, the document of a musician firmly in control of his talents and happy to tweak familiar formulas rather than tear up the rulebook altogether. But Ribbons still carves out a new corner of Bibio’s catalog. Interweaving acoustic nylon- and steel-string guitars, mandolin, violin, harp, and banjo with electric piano, sitar, Mellotron, and clavinet, it is the folkiest album he has recorded yet, largely shifting the balance from contemporary collage techniques to old-timey jigs and reels.
Acoustic instrumentals and featherweight pop dominate; breakbeats and sampled loops cede center stage to fingerstyle melodies whose gently worn surfaces suggest old 78s rescued from a country-house attic. He hasn’t entirely turned his back on the 21st century; after the classical guitar opener “Beret Girl,” he quickly cycles through a folk-soul fusion ballad (“The Art of Living”) and a laid-back groover in the style of Silver Wilkinson’s “À tout à l’heure” (“Before”). But the excellent “Old Graffiti,” a sleek romp with the Doobie Brothers written all over it, is the only song here to emphasize the funk instincts so central to 2011’s Mind Bokeh; the majority of Ribbons is less yacht rock than Ren faire.
There are many who have called Bibio’s music pastoral, and Wilkinson earns the description here. He sings of sunbeams and feathers, summer seeds and autumn leaves; in “The Art of Living,” he offers, with no apparent irony, “To view the grass up close/Feels deeper than the most/Well-read story.” But he’s got a sense of humor, too: He packages such Whole Earth Catalog chestnuts with pleas to consider “the wisdom of the cow,” complete with a faint, sampled moo. His playing and his production still frequently outstrip his skills as a lyricist, but occasionally he turns up with a verse of surprising depth: “Write me a note/And fold it in quarters/There’s so little time/We’re safe in the garden,” he sings on the melancholy “Quarters,” an affecting song about forgiveness and acceptance.
Bibio has sometimes run the risk of sounding too safe, simply by virtue of the overwhelming prettiness of his music. While his pitch may wobble and his atmospheres grow cobwebbed, there’s little in his catalog that’s noisy or jarring or confrontational—at least, aside from a one-time stab at power pop that, wisely, he hasn’t attempted again. But on Ribbons, he turns familiarity into a virtue: In channeling sounds of the distant past, he brings something new to his customary swirl of birdsong, babbling brooks, Fairport Convention 8-tracks, and other rural accoutrements. The results are as reassuring as the memory of your favorite counselor picking up a weather-beaten acoustic guitar by the light of the campfire. | 2019-04-12T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-04-11T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Warp | April 12, 2019 | 7.5 | d96dfdab-41bf-404f-a7a5-cebb2eb84d8d | Philip Sherburne | https://pitchfork.com/staff/philip-sherburne/ | |
This collection of 7"s and compilation tracks documents the band’s formative years, in which frenzied hardcore and proto-screamo was rapidly churning toward more radical strains of noise. | This collection of 7"s and compilation tracks documents the band’s formative years, in which frenzied hardcore and proto-screamo was rapidly churning toward more radical strains of noise. | Black Dice: Natty Light | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/black-dice-natty-light/ | Natty Light | Black Dice started out as a malfunctioning hardcore band. Formed by RISD students in 1997, their earliest incarnation bore all the markings of the era’s DIY punk scene but churned with an itchy, art-school weirdness that set them apart. In just a few years the band would be completely unrecognizable from its original state, but between 1998 and 2000 the group operated within the conventions of punk while simultaneously clawing at its prescribed norms. Natty Light compiles their recorded output from that inchoate phase, documenting Black Dice’s crude interpretation of hardcore and illustrating how quickly it unspooled.
Originally released as one-off comp tracks and 7"s on revered labels Gravity and Vermin Scum, the first half of Natty Light finds some aesthetic common ground with the frenzied proto-screamo of labelmates like Antioch Arrow or Angel Hair. Blown-out practice-space recordings sound rushed and garbled; minute-long songs with grindcore tempos fall apart more than they finish, and a whine of impatient guitar feedback floods any open space in the assault. The second half is made up of material from a self-titled EP released on Troubleman Records in 2000, sometimes known as Number 3. Recorded just months after the sessions that yielded the first batch of 7"s, Number 3 gave in completely to chaos. “Long Arm” abandons rhythm entirely, dismantling the anger and frustration of the band’s composed songs into stuttered bursts of freeform drums, feedback, and feral howling. “Pinsteaks” disintegrates from raging, Void-like brutality into a duet of chirping electronics and drums. “Reps” lasts all of 49 seconds but still overstays its welcome with the same riff repeating in nauseous chunks. When working within the confines of songs, Black Dice were volatile. When form and structure boiled away they sounded utterly inhuman.
With a creative metabolism hungry for the next idea before the first one was fully formed, these 18 songs devolve from blast beats and doomy breakdowns into circuit-bent scrapyard noise in under half an hour. In the months surrounding the recording of Number 3, Black Dice relocated to Brooklyn, shifted their lineup, and quickly diverged from their early sound. They never returned to their punk roots, but the dread and alienation that writhes on Natty Light would sink into the cracks of everything that followed. Even as their records took turns toward trance meditations or demented cartoon electronics, the caustic energy of their early years lurked somewhere below the surface.
Through all their changes, Black Dice have stayed consistently about five years ahead of the curve, exploring the raw materials other artists would eventually find success refining. Close contemporaries Animal Collective came up working in the same queasy electro-organic territory as Black Dice’s 2002 masterstroke, Beaches & Canyons, and would rise to worldwide acclaim by adding pop structure to the primal freakout. The refractions that rippled out from that direct influence would later inform the wave of tie-dyed punks that included No Age, Fuck Buttons, HEALTH, and basically any indie band using a sampler at the end of the aughts. To a lesser degree, the fried trash techno emerging as early as 2005’s Broken Ear Record predicted the claustrophobic zones of producers like Container and Oneohtrix Point Never. In the phase showcased on Natty Light, Black Dice collaged the impenetrable harshness of noise with the unhinged aggression of a punk show. The ugliness of these early recordings would help set the pace for the darkest sectors of the noise and extreme-music scenes as they mutated over the next decade.
Part of the legacy of this era is the confrontational live shows, which could see the band physically attacking the audience and each other as they thrashed through 15-minute sets. While plenty of hardcore bands expressed themselves with anger and aggression, Black Dice were intent on bloodshed. The band’s early gigs threatened to explode into violence at any moment, and on record, that antagonism translates into music that still feels legitimately scary. | 2019-05-18T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-05-18T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Experimental / Rock | JABS | May 18, 2019 | 7.9 | d96ee6fe-2736-4e85-9da0-747955d8feb9 | Fred Thomas | https://pitchfork.com/staff/fred-thomas/ | |
During the three years since their last release, the Portuguese trio have built a soundworld of peculiar synths, drum machines, and samples, all in pursuit of hard-to-define moods. | During the three years since their last release, the Portuguese trio have built a soundworld of peculiar synths, drum machines, and samples, all in pursuit of hard-to-define moods. | Niagara: Apologia | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/niagara-apologia/ | Apologia | Over the past seven years, Lisbon label Príncipe has become closely aligned with the dynamic style known as batida, a homegrown hybrid of Afro-Lusophone diasporic sounds like kuduro, tarraxinha, and kizomba. A little like Chicago footwork, it has gained a global foothold despite marginalized origins, turning producers like DJ Marfox, Nídia, and DJ Nigga Fox into artists of worldwide renown. But Príncipe’s remit extends beyond batida: The label’s second release, issued the same year as DJ Marfox’s debut, came from Photonz, a techno producer with a soft spot for early-’90s trance. The Portuguese electronic trio Niagara soon stepped up with five tracks of wonky, lo-fi house music steeped in Italo disco.
Niagara put out another EP, Ímpar, in 2015—virtually the only non-batida release to appear on Príncipe in the years after the their label debut—and now they are back with their first full-length album. But something has changed in the past three years. Where the toe-scuffing Ímpar tipped its hat to Metro Area and DFA, Apologia finds them building out their own soundworld, one that has less to do with established categories than chasing hard-to-define moods.
As is the case with a lot of questing, imaginative electronic music from recent years—Jan Jelinek, Andrew Pekler, Visible Cloaks—it’s not always easy to tell if this stuff is old or new, or even its hemisphere of origin. Zigzagging synth arpeggios drizzle over rudimentary drum-machine grooves, and conga taps arrive with the slow, steady drip of a leaky faucet; out-of-phase patterns circle each other like a dog chasing its own tail. It’s rickety but beautiful, janky keyboards and intercepted radio signals shot through with stumbling thumb piano and graceful synth pads. With instrumentation heavy on hand percussion, harp-like glissandi, and other new-age trappings, a tropical vibe prevails.
Despite the relatively high humidity, Niagara don’t seem interested in standard-issue chillout. Unease lurks below the surface of their blissfully lopsided machine jams. In the opening “França,” a manic, distorted voice—like Donald Duck on a bender—cuts against placid chimes and rippling ride cymbals. On “6:30,” mismatched synth loops and a dully repetitive groove spin in wobbly circles, while pastel chords flare up in the background, cartoonish and wistful.
Niagara find a certain strength in withholding. Many tracks feel like they could kick off at any moment; throw in a heavy bass drum, and you could confuse them for nightclub barnstormers. But the trio seems to realize that to lean too hard on the drums would be to overwhelm the music’s intricate architecture of interconnected loops. Take “Momento Braga,” in which screen-door squeak, pinball ping, R2-D2 chirps, and earthy marimba weave together seamlessly and glisten in midair, like a spiderweb. An echoing voice bobs at the center of it all, something caught within the song’s sticky matrix.
The most captivating material verges upon pure ambient. That goes for the beat-less “Senhora do Cabo,” just two synth chords drifting above vaporous tones, and the pulse-heavy “Damasco,” where a lilting synth lead trips over leathery congas. It has rhythm but no real forward motion, spinning in place like a mobile. “Via Garibaldi,” a bonus cut not included on the vinyl edition, pairs the tape-delayed synths of Aphex Twin’s Selected Ambient Works Vol. II with a ring-modulated voice that sounds like a garbled radio transmission snagged straight from space. (There are four such bonus tracks, and they are among the best here; choose your format wisely.) “O Astro,” another bonus, might be a field recording played back on a malfunctioning reel-to-reel deck.
Niagara’s resourcefulness suggests a castaway’s ingenuity, using unconventional techniques to unlock new territories. Cobbled together out of ethnographic recordings, distant shortwave signals, and idiosyncratic synths, Apologia sets its sights on an elusive state of transcendence. Consider it an escape vehicle to spirit listeners away from the failures of what more efficient, more expensive methods of music-making have wrought. | 2018-09-21T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-09-21T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Príncipe Discos | September 21, 2018 | 7.7 | d97cdf6c-33c6-4351-808d-275cd463af59 | Philip Sherburne | https://pitchfork.com/staff/philip-sherburne/ | |
The Chilean rapper and singer’s unbreakable optimism and political conviction power an album animated by fresh explorations of pop ballads, reggaeton, and Afrobeats. | The Chilean rapper and singer’s unbreakable optimism and political conviction power an album animated by fresh explorations of pop ballads, reggaeton, and Afrobeats. | Ana Tijoux: Vida | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/ana-tijoux-vida/ | Vida | Chilean artist Ana Tijoux cites this motto as inspiration for Vida: “Our best revenge against death is life.” Her first album in a decade is a joyous look at grief in all its forms, and Tijoux’s unflinching optimism remains one of the most refreshing parts of her work. Working with longtime producer Andres Celis, Tijoux returns with an effervescent blend of thumping hip-hop and Latin American rhythms, leaning into pop balladry alongside her deft rapping.
After starting her career with Chilean rap group Makiza, Tijoux found international success as a solo artist. The title of her album 1977, released in 2010, marked the year that she was born in France to Chilean parents who’d fled the Pinochet dictatorship. Its introspective songs explored her family’s eventual return to Chile with a calm, decisive flow and jazzy production rooted in ’90s New York hip-hop. On 2011’s La Bala, Tijoux turned her focus outward, decrying economic inequality and referencing contemporary political movements including Chilean student protests, the Arab Spring, and Occupy Wall Street. On 2014’s Vengo, Tijoux brought Indigenous pride to the forefront. prominently featuring Andean flutes and making space for collaboration with other artists from the Global South, notably Palestinian rapper Shadia Mansour on the solidaric “Somos Sur.” With Vida, Tijoux continues to extend the invitation to fight injustice alongside her.
While recording Vida in her new home city of Barcelona, Tijoux said, she spent time with a friend who’d worked as a clown to comfort people living in refugee camps across the Middle East. His ability to sustain hope inspired the slogan at the heart of the album. Though Vida is hardly rose-tinted, Tijoux is attuned to the promise of resilience and camaraderie. She champions this mentality on “Tania,” an ode to her late sister. What starts as a sentimental exploration of words left unsaid opens up into an electric cumbia celebration. Tijoux sings of channeling her sister’s warmth into her own daily life, whether planting a sunflower or dancing until dawn. She understands how a party can be a sanctuary—a place to exhale.
Tijoux’s unwavering earnestness can sometimes take her into well-trodden territory. Empowerment pop like “Bailando Sola Aquí” (“Dancing Alone Here”) is a stale look at self-acceptance, depicting familiar images of searching for a partner to fill the void without the cheeky fun of a song like “Yo Perreo Sola,” Bad Bunny’s ode to twerking solo. “Millonaria” (“Millionaire”) reminds us that money doesn’t buy happiness—not a message that inspires the same fervor as the cries for class solidarity in 2020’s “Antifa Dance.” Despite a few duller moments, Tijoux keeps it interesting with a new embrace of reggaeton and Afrobeats on songs like “Cora” and “Dime Qué.” She can save the occasional clunky lyric with her effortless delivery.
Tijoux’s collaboration with iLe of Puerto Rican hip-hop group Calle 13 on “Busco Mi Nombre” (“I Search for My Name”) is an affecting highlight. The duo commemorates the people “disappeared” by the dictatorship in Argentina in the late ’70s and early ’80s with a powerful preface from a member of the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo, a group of women who founded a longstanding resistance movement. The song’s power lies in its specificity, conjuring images of undercover government agents breaking door locks to pull citizens away. Atop a soaring orchestral arrangement, Tijoux sings of carrying their collective memories with her. While the pain lingers, she insists it isn’t a burden: She’s ready to outrun the darkness. | 2024-02-15T00:00:00.000-05:00 | 2024-02-15T00:00:00.000-05:00 | Pop/R&B | Victoria Producciones | February 15, 2024 | 7.3 | d97ee402-d27b-4c3b-a5dd-ddaf655c7749 | Maria Eberhart | https://pitchfork.com/staff/maria-eberhart/ | |
A gathering of jazz avant-gardists and a new generation of players produces a tossed-off album with a spirit of celebratory tradition. | A gathering of jazz avant-gardists and a new generation of players produces a tossed-off album with a spirit of celebratory tradition. | Dopolarians: Garden Party | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/dopolarians-garden-party/ | Garden Party | Several months after a group of inveterate, predominantly southern jazz musicians—Alvin Fielder, Kidd Jordan, Kelley Hurt, Christopher Parker, Chad Fowler, and the sole northerner, William Parker—gathered in New Orleans to record Garden Party, the drummer died. At 83, Alvin Fielder was a legend, neither entirely unsung nor given enough due for his conversational, free jazz-inflected style. Fielder left some of his most indelible marks in Chicago, as a founding member of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians and a collaborator with Roscoe Mitchell and Sun Ra. Yet it’s fitting that his career ended in the Louisiana bayou, the birthplace of jazz, with a group that does not stray as far from the genre’s roots as the improvisational pedigrees of its most notable musicians might lead one to expect.
Like Fielder, tenor saxophonist Jordan and bassist William Parker are avant-gardists—Jordan carries the torch for improvisation in New Orleans, a city that has largely eschewed the more chaotic developments in 20th-century improvisation for a continued embrace of the big-band sounds of its past. A longtime denizen of downtown Manhattan, Parker is famous for his adventurousness, which led him into the loft scene of the 1970s, through an accessible, revelatory series of recording sessions with the William Parker Quartet at the turn of the last century, and most recently to tour and record with the AquaSonic waterphone, a multifaceted, “mystic” instrument designed by artist Richard Waters. Garden Party is the latest result of his relentless touring and recording, a tossed-off album with a spirit of celebratory tradition that befits its name.
Like most parties, this one is best when the attendees are spontaneous. Opener “C Melody” is a soup of muted improvisation, filled with toms and based around pianist Christopher Parker’s impromptu ostinato. Along with “Dopolaria,” “Father Dies; Son Dies,” and the title track, it forms a suite of songs sequenced to lead the listener from the loose interplay of instruments at its start toward the tautness of the human voice. Kelley Hurt’s lightly dissonant, Donald Byrd-esque vocals elevate the harmonies of “Dopolaria,” while alto saxophonist Chad Fowler’s “Father Dies; Son Dies” showcases the band at its most clamorous. All of this is a prelude, though, to “Garden Party,” in which Hurt’s spoken lyrics serve as the album’s guiding philosophy. “The bunnies would come out. And they’d chase the birds and the squirrels. And they’d all run around playing tag with each other,” she says, describing a wildness that Dopolarians allude to, but never quite reach.
Sometimes the repetitive fragments that center Garden Party’s improvisations seem like a crutch, but if the band never achieves the same freedom that some of its most formidable members achieved in the past, perhaps that’s beside the point. Five of the six tracks are credited to Fowler, Hurt, and Christopher Parker, younger musicians who locate their ability as soloists not within free jazz, but within a decidedly NOLA-bred sense of structure. “Dopolarians” is derived from the Italian dopo l’aria (after the aria), a reference to the moment in an opera when the singer bows, the applause ends, and the plot goes on. Recorded before an enduringly influential percussionist took his final bow, Garden Party plays like an album of afters. Half of the players in Dopolarians already changed jazz. Now the younger generation throws them a party—one more placid, beautiful gathering down home.
Buy: Rough Trade
(Pitchfork may earn a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.) | 2020-01-13T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2020-01-13T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Jazz | Mahakala | January 13, 2020 | 7.2 | d982a5bb-8d57-4752-b509-f78229777a0e | Daniel Felsenthal | https://pitchfork.com/staff/daniel-felsenthal/ | |
On his latest record, Aaron Maine explores the feelings of confusion and numbness that follow the end of a relationship. It’s an ambitious record that can get a little lost in itself. | On his latest record, Aaron Maine explores the feelings of confusion and numbness that follow the end of a relationship. It’s an ambitious record that can get a little lost in itself. | Porches: Ricky Music | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/porches-ricky-music/ | Ricky Music | Aaron Maine’s debut as Porches, 2013’s Slow Dance in the Cosmos, was perfect if you were young and falling in love for the first time. The album was an indie-rock dream sequence where Maine imagined himself kissing his best friends and going down on his girlfriend before she headed off to therapy. It was funny, earnest, and sweet; it felt like the start of a promising career helmed by a doe-eyed musician who knew a thing or two about writing scrappy rock songs. Porches’ latest, Ricky Music, is in some ways a return to those early days, albeit not through the lens of indie rock. Dealing largely with the idea of being in love at the very end of a relationship, the record is the most human piece of music Maine has released in years. He’s also never sounded so lost.
The hardest part of ending things with someone is never the actual breakup. It’s what follows: Your bed suddenly feels too big, and you no longer have someone to blow off work and drink cheap beer on the roof with. This is the universe that Ricky Music evokes. As though meant to capture that sense of a world suddenly made strange, Maine’s arrangements here are his riskiest to date. He dabbles in Auto-Tune, turning his mopey tenor into something more chromatic, and he fleshes out his synths and drum machines with jarring patches of dissonance. At their best, 2016’s Pool and 2018’s The House were dance records; at their worst, they felt anonymous. Ricky Music is more diaristic, like it was written alone and in the dead of night. It’s also more ambitious, not sticking to any specific sound or mood. It dabbles in ballads, slap bass, house beats, and new-wave synths and guitars. But in reinventing himself as a songwriter, Maine hasn’t really fleshed out what he wants to say or what he wants to sound like.
Opener “Patience” reads like a letter you write to an ex but then toss before putting in the mail. “I don’t think anything is fine/But I want you to know/I’ve been thinking about you now,” he bleats, heaping on the feelings. Lynchian synths balloon in the background, and Maine hides behind a layer of gauzy Auto-Tune and disorienting tempo changes. “Lipstick Song” feels equally monotonous. Maine looks back on the early days of his relationship. “Thought of you and your friends/Thought of the apartment/Thought of the make-up kit,” he sings, taking mental inventory of how things felt before it all went bad. It’s an evocative line that is washed out by its scenery. Sluggish and repetitive, the song’s chintzy bassline weighs down Maine’s vocals.
That glacial pace characterizes the whole album: Its 26 minutes feel twice that. And where Maine aims for melodrama, too often the effect comes off as merely humdrum. Ricky Music borders on voyeuristic, like peeking into someone’s notebook and finding endless doodling in place of emotional revelation. “Hair” might be the album’s most straight-up beautiful moment, but the lyrics—“Loosen up/You’re always so fucking high-strung/Can you take me back”—are at odds with the sweetness of the melody.
The only time Maine manages to rouse himself from his funk is “Madonna,” which dazzles like a night out on the town. Mitski sings hushed backing vocals, and synthesizers fan out like a royal flush. It’s too bad the rest of the record can’t match its energy. Still, even as a series of sketches and fragments, Ricky Music captures the essence of a breakup album. As he sings in “PFB,” “It’s looking bad/It’s looking bad/It’s looking pretty fucking bad.” After “Madonna,” it’s the album’s most upbeat song, and it cuts off after just 33 seconds. As anyone who has endured a broken heart can attest, sometimes there’s nothing else to be said. | 2020-03-19T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-03-19T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Domino | March 19, 2020 | 6.3 | d983330f-4374-4256-853d-626bb1148bf6 | Sophie Kemp | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sophie-kemp/ | |
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 Prince’s best album of the ’90s, a funked-out opus mired in extra-musical drama. | 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 Prince’s best album of the ’90s, a funked-out opus mired in extra-musical drama. | Prince: The Gold Experience | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/prince-the-gold-experience/ | The Gold Experience | The first half of the 1990s was a frantically productive time for Prince. After stumbling out of the gate with the disastrous Graffiti Bridge movie, over the next five years he released five albums, toured extensively, opened (and frequently performed at) his own chain of nightclubs, closed one record label and created another, issued a groundbreaking interactive CD-ROM and a longform home video, launched two self-published magazines, worked with the Joffrey Ballet on a piece set to his music, and claimed his first-ever No. 1 single in the UK.
But no one remembers any of this. What they remember is when Prince changed his name.
On June 7, 1993—his 35th birthday—Prince informed the world that he was now to be known as an unpronounceable symbol that, in one form or another, had entered his iconography in recent years. (It was the title of his previous album, generally referred to as the “Love Symbol” album and he had been signing autographs with the mark for some time.) People went nuts: Was it a joke? A scam? How could he have a name that no one could say? Hadn’t he gone far enough already with all those silly “2”s and “U”s instead of real words in his titles? The greatest artist of his generation immediately became a punchline.
With the announcement came a proclamation that The Artist Formerly Known as Prince (the nomenclature that many settled on) would no longer be performing any of his old songs, as they belonged to the old name. Having already asserted, about six weeks earlier, that he was retiring from studio recording, many speculated that the name change was an attempt to finesse his way out of his contract with Warner Bros.—a deal he had signed less than a year earlier, with a potential payout of $100 million that was trumpeted as the biggest in history. And largely lost in all of this confusion was The Gold Experience—Prince’s finest album of the decade, an imperfect but rewarding record that became a casualty of extra-musical drama.
I had a front-row view of this dizzying era in Prince’s career. In early 1993, I reviewed the opening of the Act I tour for Rolling Stone and received word that he wanted to meet me. We spent the next year getting together off-and-on—in San Francisco, New York, at Paisley Park—before he agreed to an interview for Vibe magazine (where I was then working), his first time going on the record in print in almost five years.
We convened in Monte Carlo in May 1994; he was parked there for several days to receive honors at the World Music Awards. He spoke at length about his frustration at not being able to release music when and how he wanted to, how Warner Bros. couldn’t keep up with his output; soon he would be writing the word “slave” on his cheek in more provocative protest. He was also surprisingly thoughtful and serious regarding the name change.
“It’s fun to draw a line in the sand and say, ‘Things change here,’” he said during rehearsal, backstage at the Monte Carlo Sporting Club. “I don’t mind if people are cynical or make jokes—that’s part of it, but this is what I choose to be called. You find out quickly who respects and who disrespects you. It took Muhammad Ali years before people stopped calling him Cassius Clay.”
Back in his room at the historic Hotel de Paris, overlooking the Mediterranean Sea, Prince played me portions of two albums in progress—one, titled Come, would carry the old name, and the other, then called The Gold Album, would be released under the new moniker. At the time, Come struck me as a solid, unsurprising Prince record (whatever that means), while The Gold Album felt looser, more exciting and experimental, which he was visibly more enthusiastic about.
Come was released a few months later—with a cover shot at a cemetery and emblazoned with the words “Prince 1958-1993”—to general disinterest. But it would be almost a year and a half until the other record, eventually renamed The Gold Experience, finally surfaced.
The truth is, The Gold Experience never had a chance. Prince held the album hostage in his negotiations with Warner Bros., telling the press that “it’s the best album I’ve ever made, but it probably won’t come out” and projecting the cover image behind him at live shows with the words “Release: Never.” Though he was playing much of the material in concert, by the time the record came out in September 1995, the myth around it had created impossible expectations.
Listening with some distance from the narrative—or for the first time—reveals a musician rediscovering his extraordinary power, his unparalleled ability to synthesize genres and styles and then flawlessly execute his musical vision. The album displays range from slow-jam ballads (“Shhh,” which he had previously given to young singer Tevin Campbell, who had a Top 10 R&B hit with it, and “Eye Hate U”) to the glam-rock kick of “Endorphinmachine” and shimmering power pop of “Dolphin.” No one else had the tools that Prince commanded, but it had been a while since he put them to good use.
One anchor is the featherlight, Philly-soul-style “The Most Beautiful Girl in the World”—which had been a Top 5 hit in early 1994 when Prince released it on the independent Bellmark label—but the album is otherwise heavy on the funk: The swinging horns on “Billy Jack Bitch” and the loopy groove of “Now” offer some of the set’s finer, under-appreciated highlights. (Most of the material was recorded in late 1993 and early 1994, and the song selection changed many times; the version I heard in Monaco contained the loping, bass-heavy live favorite “Days of Wild” and the extremely raunchy reggae jam “Ripopgodazippa,” which would have made things even funkier.)
Prince also reconnects with the guitar on the album after a few years of wilful restraint. He flashes his Eddie Van Halen-level chops on “Endorphinmachine” and the concluding “Gold,” a big swing of a power ballad that’s a bit too corny and obvious to reach the peaks of “Purple Rain.” Clocking in at over an hour, The Gold Experience starts to drag in spots, but moments like the carnal, metallic punch of “319” (first heard in the notorious so-terrible-it’s-delicious movie Showgirls!) stand with his best.
After reconfiguring the rock-based Revolution on Sign o’ the Times in 1987, Prince expanded his touring band to bring in horns and additional musicians on the magnificent Lovesexy shows. Since introducing the New Power Generation (NPG) on Diamonds and Pearls (1991), he had maintained the larger arrangements but skewed more toward groove. On this album and the live shows that led to it, the sound was stripped back to a harder-edged slam.
“The Lovesexy band was about musicality, a willingness to take risks,” Prince told me in Monaco. “Since then I’ve been thinking too much. This band is about funk, so I’ve learned to get out of the way and let that be the sound, the look, the style, everything.” (When we first met and he brought me onstage during soundcheck, he said, “I love this band, I just wish they were all girls.”)
Prince wasn’t only fighting with his label during the ’90s; he was battling hip-hop, the new, dominant form of Black pop music. For someone raised with such a strong commitment to musicianship, and so superhuman in both talent and discipline, the move away from instrumentation, chords, and melody was clearly confusing: He worked with such giants as Chuck D and Ice Cube (and toward the end of his life was in communication with Kendrick Lamar) but most of his attempts to bring hip-hop into his own music involved grafting the pedestrian Tony M onto the NPG for nonsense like “Jughead.”
On The Gold Experience, Prince finally reaches some kind of peace with hip-hop. In Rolling Stone, Carol Cooper perceptively noted that “as usual, the attempts at rap come off as part satire and part celebration of the form.” But the spoken word flow on “P. Control” and the (admittedly already dated) new jack swing-y beat of “We March” are examples of actually integrating the new form, using it for a purpose rather than just out of some sense of obligation to a young audience.
Speaking of new forms, The Gold Experience is presented as a mock virtual reality trip, with keyboard clicks and a robotic female voice introducing some of the songs (“This experience will cover courtship, sex, commitment, fetishes, loneliness, vindication, love, and hate”). It’s awkward but ahead of its time, and illustrates how Prince’s love/hate relationship with technology—like his battles with his record company—could be prophetic. “Once the Internet is a reality, the music business is finished,” he told London’s Evening Standard in 1995, four years before Napster.
Not surprisingly, the unifying theme that lurks within the lyrics of The Gold Experience is freedom. Sexual freedom, of course, had always been present for him, but other expressions of liberation appear throughout: creative control (“You can cut off all my fins/But to your ways I will not bend/I’ll die before I let you tell me how to swim” in “Dolphin”), political protest (“We March”), even feminism. “P. Control”—“Pussy Control,” until Prince was told stores wouldn’t stock a record printed with that title—is clunky and easily misread; one review called it the album’s “weakest, most juvenile and most sexist track.” But the subject is a successful businesswoman who turns down a rapper when he asks her to sing on his track, saying “You could go platinum four times/Still couldn’t make what I make in a week.”
The story of Prince’s career—well, a story, at least—is the tension between his desires for the freedom of a cult artist and the popularity of a rock star. “The thing the public has to understand is he’s done the big thing, the ‘Purple Rain’ thing,” NPG guitarist Levi Seacer said in 1993. “He’s seen those big sales and been on top of the world. But an artist has to be able to grow, feel like they’re moving forward. You have to let the artist keep going or they’ll die.”
The Gold Experience feels like the last time Prince, or The Artist Formally Known as Prince, tried to walk that tightrope, doing weird stuff like “Shy,” a dreamy tale of a female gang member, or the unhinged vocal on “Now,” while still assuming the pop audience would follow him. Soon, these directions would bifurcate: on the one side, the cynical, Santana-style all-star-guest strategy of Rave Un2 the Joy Fantastic or the calculated throwback sound of Musicology, and on the other, five-CD box sets and instrumental or religious-themed albums.
So even though The Gold Experience was the first release under a new name, it was really the end of an era. By the time the album came out, almost two years after recording began, The Artist Formerly Known as Prince seemed bored with it and didn’t do much to promote its success. It climbed to No. 6 on the charts anyway, and picked up its gold certification. Prince found his way out of his Warner Bros. contract and moved on to other matters.
But in the middle of the maelstrom, there was a time when the fate of The Gold Experience felt critical. “People think that this is all some scheme,” he told me back in 1994, while people were losing their minds over the notion that he had lost his mind. “I don’t have a master plan; maybe somebody does.”
That didn’t make his intentions any less serious, though. “There’s no reason for me to be playing around now,” the once and future Prince said with a laugh. “Now we’re just doing things for the funk of it.” | 2023-03-05T00:00:00.000-05:00 | 2023-03-05T00:00:00.000-05:00 | Pop/R&B / Rock | NPG / Warner Bros. | March 5, 2023 | 8.1 | d9879a8e-bd74-4029-a945-74074538e882 | Alan Light | https://pitchfork.com/staff/alan-light/ | |
On this mini-album, the K-pop girl group struggle to maintain the audacious energy that first put them in the spotlight. | On this mini-album, the K-pop girl group struggle to maintain the audacious energy that first put them in the spotlight. | Itzy: Guess Who | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/itzy-guess-who/ | Guess Who | The K-pop girl group ITZY debuted two years ago with the brazen and lively “DALLA DALLA.” The song bore a resemblance to their forebears and contemporaries—2NE1’s domineering vocals, TWICE’s group chants, Momoland’s triplet-rapped breakdowns—while establishing the quintet as a massive new force in the industry. Their cute yet fiery electropop put dubstep wobbles against bright synths and trap drums against cheerleader chants. More memorable was the message, with lyrics full of self-love and explicit, endearing encouragement: “Keep your chin up! We got your back!” The chorus’ anthemic cries of “I love myself!” were directed both to you and themselves; it was instructive pomp.
ITZY have always matched a contagious confidence with audacious songwriting; singles like “ICY” and “WANNABE” have prismatic beats that make them runway-ready pop spectacles (it’s fitting that they’re the sole K-pop group with production credits from SOPHIE). Disappointingly, their latest mini-album, Guess Who, often strays from the formula, eschewing genre-blending panache for the tediously straight-ahead. Lead single “Mafia in the Morning” is the biggest offender: There’s a Cardi B lilt in the verses, but it otherwise feels like BLACKPINK without the stadium-sized grandeur. ITZY’s labelmates Stray Kids have aimed for bombastic hip-hop too, but the results have never been as stilted and one-dimensional. Whenever K-pop borrows ideas from Black music and whiffs this hard, the results are cringeworthy—there’s no empowerment here, just secondhand embarrassment.
Guess Who exposes ITZY’s kitchen-sink approach as a necessity; without it, their songs fail to dazzle. Their rapping, for example, is rarely impressive, so it’s best when it’s included as a minor element. “KIDDING ME” makes this exceedingly clear: Built on murky bass lurches, the song has a brain-rattling chorus drop and the album’s very worst rap verse, both technically and lyrically. Still, by diversifying its individual parts, the song redeems itself: The pre-chorus is all EDM balladry and build-up, and its last 15 seconds find wonky electronics adorning the beat, like a final blitz onto the dancefloor. It’s a much more convincing hip-hop track than “Mafia in the Morning,” largely because it refuses to be just that.
Most deserving of lead-single status is “Sorry Not Sorry.” It’s built on a country-rock guitar riff that exudes the braggadocio of the lyrics. Such brashness is offset by dreamy pre-choruses: “I’ll show you, are you ready for me?” they sing. It’s a vulnerable moment—an announcement that they’ve quietly been waiting to show themselves off. They do just that on the chorus: With brass blazing, their sung and rapped vocals strut along to rapid-fire kick drums—they sound like shrapnel when howling “I-T-Z-Y.”
Guess Who’s other tracks are paltry and bloodless. “SHOOT!” is Travis Scott meets “Hotline Bling,” and while a perfectly fine mood piece, it’s too short to feel like anything but an odd curio. Given Scott’s influence on Korean music for the past half-decade, “SHOOT!” ends up feeling both unadventurous compared to other idols’ songs and less catchy than Korean rappers’ more faithful reproductions. “Wild Wild West” has a country veneer but is limp, corny, and unconvincing in its tepid handclaps and “bang, bang, bang” shouts. “TENNIS (0:0)” is even more frivolous: an acoustic guitar-driven love song with a gliding bassline that fails to inject any verve—think Korean superstar IU without the charm. ITZY built themselves up as one of the most exciting groups in K-pop, but they’ve somehow become more uncomfortable being themselves in the process.
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-05-06T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2021-05-06T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | JYP | May 6, 2021 | 5.5 | d987cc94-3e5a-47db-b8bb-51ea13a97eda | Joshua Minsoo Kim | https://pitchfork.com/staff/joshua-minsoo kim/ | |
From synth pop to new wave to disco, the shapeshifting rock band goes all in on its keyboard album. | From synth pop to new wave to disco, the shapeshifting rock band goes all in on its keyboard album. | Osees: Intercepted Message | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/osees-intercepted-message/ | Intercepted Message | It’s always a toss-up which style of guitar music John Dwyer and his rotating cast of Osees collaborators will lean into with each new album. Last time it was hardcore, but sometimes it’s prog or krautrock or metal. Dwyer has vowed to make music at a prolific clip for as long as possible, taking inspiration from old punks who claimed they wanted to die onstage. Perpetual engagement with Osees (or Oh Sees, Thee Oh Sees, OCS, or however else he decides to spell it) means weaving with the ever-shifting tide of Dwyer and his collaborators. His primary co-conspirator on Intercepted Message is “keyboards guru” Tom Dolas, whose taste and style defined the album’s overall vibe. “This record should have Tom’s fucking face on the cover,” Dwyer recently underlined. The songs vacillate between synth pop, new wave, disco, garage rock, and post-punk; synths and keys take the opening hook of the first three songs. Put snappily, it’s the band’s keyboards album.
The essential Osees elements are still very much accounted for: the assertive hammering rhythm guitar riffs, the scrambling chaotic lead guitar solos, and the seemingly instinctive “ow”’s and “woo”’s that Dwyer yelps before a big drop. This lineup’s two drummers, Dan Rincon and Paul Quattrone, propel these songs into the stratosphere, creating a monolithic attack when they play in unison and a chaotic landscape when they drift apart. At its best, Intercepted Message harnesses all that adrenaline with exacting precision. “Blank Chems” opens with a rigid, driving synth that provides an underlying current to rapidly climbing guitars that amplify anxiety. What makes the song, however, are the swaths of open space. Guitar chords are left to ring out; big open mouth staccato breaths become prominent percussive textures. The gulfs between the action emphasize some of the best reasons to listen to this band—to delight in every jolt, every thrash, every “ow, ow.”
Osees’ other secret weapon is their proficiency at locking into a groove, and “Die Laughing” showcases one of their best. On paper it shouldn’t work: this L.A. band fresh off a punk album making a grimy dance song that sounds like a late ’70s New York City melting pot of punk, disco, funk, and no wave. The rhythm’s danceable enough on its own, and it’s an ideal canvas for both drummers to spread out. Dwyer’s voice is muffled to oblivion as he rattles off fever dream dance instructions beneath scuzzy guitar stabs and outer space electronic chirps. “Submerged Building,” while substantially less ramshackle and more of an Oh Sees-circa-2012 rock song, follows that essential formula—a solid rhythmic foundation that lays the groundwork for synth experimentation.
Intercepted Message has flashes of the band at its best, and it also has a song where Dwyer uses his trademark goblin voice to sing about gooning. It’s repetitive and has some lazy rhymes, but “Goon”’s key sin is that it sounds like some Zappa shit when Dwyer boasts about being a “Main Street ’bater” who uses a baseball bat to get off. Lyrics aren’t generally the album’s strong point: Dwyer’s vocals come across as vibes-first impulses, broad gestures to the general emotions he’s trying to convey like the “tears on your face” brokenheartedness of “Always at Night.” The edginess often feels like a tossed off non-sequitur: Why exactly is the king a “cunt” in the title track’s chorus, and for that matter, who is he?
The disparate vibes don’t always gel, either. “Unusual & Cruel,” glossy ’80s synthpop worship peppered with Dwyer’s trademark abrasiveness, is sandwiched between “Die Laughing” and a skronky (plus frankly corny and unnecessary) cover of Blurt’s 1981 post-punk jam “The Fish Needs a Bike.” The closing moment is a rendition of the vaporwave telephone hold banger “Opus No. 1.” The best songs will be welcome additions to their live repertoire; it’s already riveting to watch them play these songs at full dual drummer power. But the threads that bind these songs are loose and inconsistent, which might be a given for a band that moves fast and jumps from one subgenre micro-era to the next. | 2023-08-29T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2023-08-29T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | In the Red | August 29, 2023 | 6.9 | d98a6f8a-65b5-462a-89d2-58fe14deba1c | Evan Minsker | https://pitchfork.com/staff/evan-minsker/ | |
The extended monologue of addiction and plummet contained on this CD is so wall-to-wall tragic that I reckoned it could ... | The extended monologue of addiction and plummet contained on this CD is so wall-to-wall tragic that I reckoned it could ... | Her Space Holiday: The Young Machines | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/3826-the-young-machines/ | The Young Machines | The extended monologue of addiction and plummet contained on this CD is so wall-to-wall tragic that I reckoned it could only be assessed via method acting. But after countless listens, I realized that drinking four Clearchannels (one-third organic apple juice, one-third expensive gin, one-third cheap saki-- the kind with an "intended for cooking" sticker) wasn't enough. To truly pull a Clinton on this album's pain, I would have had to freebase suppositories, disown my circle, and score some fabric softener so the noose wouldn't burn as much.
The good folks at Texas Instruments helped to determine the rating above, based on an average calculation of the 9.9 this release deserved for its conception and off-putting bravery, and the 3.9 it earns due to par loops and too-precious delivery. The Young Machines will rank among your favorite albums if you're someone's mortifyingly jaded ex, but if you come to it craving electronic vocal-pop keeping pace with anything north of Jimmy Tamborello's shoulders, you'll end up frustrated by the simple and repetitive violin bits that drive the big retro beats of "Tech Romance", "Girl Problem" and "My Girlfriend's Boyfriend". These stately, neutered forays into gangsta's paradise don't do enough with their chamber-hop, though "Boyfriend"'s choral punk-out at least adds variety. Lest you think any kind of rap reference is a sad stretch when discussing Her Space Holiday: the album was not just released on the primarily underground hip-hop label Mush, but its liner notes' brief shoutouts additionally thank Aesop Rock, Atmosphere, The Streets, cLOUDDEAD, and The Neptunes. This ain't your father's digital shoegaze.
Mark Bianchi's life was in the shitter, if his lyrics can be trusted, yet his blippy backing tracks, despite their limitations (his own songs sound like his remixes of others' songs, etc) remain oddly ascendant in tone-- some of these could serve as Muzak for a tourist-town's rainforest or seahorse exhibit. The title track (and what a title, awesome in its own right, and suggesting such triumphs as the Young Fresh Fellows, Marble Giants, Gods, People, legend Neil, TV on the Radio's Liars, The Constantines' "Lions", and Pavement's Gary) is a stunner, a kind of IDM take on The Ice Storm's score, with anime musicboxery, and are those voices saying "let go" and "save me?" Avant-guardians will ruin my fun by crying Moby, but dig the layered reprise on "The Luxury of Loneliness".
"Meet the Pressure" is a bitchslap to Bianchi's negative reviews and reviewers. I sympathize with the man's point: the de-evolution of labor involved in blurbiage and its reception is disheartening.
1. An artist labors to fashion an album.
2. A critic half-labors to fashion a review about how the album wasn't messianic.
3. A webboarder calls the critic a bald ugly fag.
4. A lurker misregurges the webboarder in an IM to his cousin: "Don't download that band; their junk'll be stoops."
Bianchi's song is about meanness, revenge and lyric-misquoting. He includes a sample from an answering machine about his "Internet press" after he says some crits are "hoping that their viciousness will boost traffic on their site." But then he ruins his complicated rumination on the indie "media" with a fantasy (?) about the critic being cuckolded. I had to think of some of the disses my inbox has weathered (from artists I like, such as Ween and Cex) and the sensitivity expressed by other artists (Aereogramme and Songs: Ohia, who asked for my address-- I cling every night to my crossbow, Molina, with a Cape Fear tripwire around my lhasa apso).
So if you're up to hearing what Kurtis Blow would sound like on Saddle Creek, or if you love cinematic self-vigilantism, or cover artwork that places engine gears in women's wombs, or if you've been waiting for a breakdown album since Kramer's The Guilt Trip, or if you can dig how "Japanese Gum" conjures a mood by suggesting Black Black brand (Engrish fans know their slogan "Hi-Technical Taste and Flavor!"), buy The Young Machines. Few albums about druggies dealing with the death of a grandmother are as stark. Bianchi even admits to missing his mom at one intermittently moving point. But when his liner notes claim he doesn't deserve any of his fans, he's being way too hard on himself. Hopefully his devotees know their suicide watch etiquette. | 2004-01-15T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2004-01-15T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Electronic / Rock | Mush | January 15, 2004 | 6.9 | d995e1d7-5150-4692-ac0d-1fd7cdb5ad3f | William Bowers | https://pitchfork.com/staff/william-bowers/ | null |
With new collaborators and a little psychedelic aid, the sculpted rhythms and dark-hued instrumentation of Angus Andrew’s long-running art-rock project feel like a summation and a fresh start. | With new collaborators and a little psychedelic aid, the sculpted rhythms and dark-hued instrumentation of Angus Andrew’s long-running art-rock project feel like a summation and a fresh start. | Liars: The Apple Drop | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/liars-the-apple-drop/ | The Apple Drop | For most of Liars’ 20-year career, Angus Andrew, the blur of moody charisma that holds the chameleonic electro-rock band together, avoided listening to contemporary music lest it contaminate his vision. At their best, Liars sounded like aliens who’d heard some rock, classical, and whale songs shot into space on a gold NASA record and discovered they had a weird knack for Earth music. In this light, their tenth album, The Apple Drop, is striking in its normalcy. It could often pass for Nick Cave as produced by John Carpenter, which is the sort of gloss these Mute lifers usually repel, yet it’s striated with layers of their past and their characteristic strangeness. It’s the best thing Andrew has done in at least a decade.
Liars began as part of indie rock’s storied class of 2001, when Brooklyn’s Bedford Avenue was briefly the center of the known world. There was Andrew, a very tall Australian walking arm in arm with Karen O, in the mascot couple of Williamsburg lofts. “All he knew was I was the other dude around who was into ESG,” the Rapture’s Luke Jenner recalls in Meet Me in the Bathroom, Lizzy Goodman’s essential oral history. That affinity fueled Liars’ debut, They Threw Us All in a Trench and Stuck a Monument on Top. A lump of furious noise-funk coal, it was one of the earliest significant recordings from its Brooklyn demimonde, and it got out in front of the national dance-punk fad that ensued when a new generation discovered the agitprop style and sprechgesang of Gang of Four and Wire.
Though Liars were too odd and shifty to reach the popular heights of Yeah Yeah Yeahs, the Strokes, or Interpol, they’ve had a longer or more consistent history than their peers, even after squandering goodwill with 2004’s They Were Wrong So We Drowned, which sounded like Trench had been balled up wet and then left somewhere cold to dry. (“Unlistenable,” SPIN. “[D]isturbingly rooted in the what-the-fuck? tradition of Lou Reed’s Metal Machine Music,” Rolling Stone.) In 2006, they rallied with Drum’s Not Dead, on which Andrew, with bandmates Aaron Hemphill and Julian Gross, forged effects-laden ceremonial drums and coldly rapturous falsetto chants into something ancient, ahistorical, and sublime.
That drum-forward production and tortoise-brained bass looms over The Apple Drop, as do the sounds of Liars’ other two arguable masterpieces, 2007’s garage-rocking self-titled record and 2010’s cinematic Sisterworld. But the creative partnership of Andrew, Hemphill, and Gross, which bore the self-appointed strain of constant reinvention, started to show wear in the spartan electronics of WIXIW before falling flat in the dance-pop of Mess. The band amicably split, leaving Andrew—now living in a remote part of Australia—the last Liar standing. It took him two lost and lonely solo albums to grieve the partnership, the fruits of which are so lucidly digested on The Apple Drop that it feels like both a summation and a fresh start.
“Star Search,” where Andrew’s voice and plunking piano are repeatedly engulfed in firestorms of electronic harmony, is said to relate to the opaque thematic concept at the center of Drum’s Not Dead, though who could tell? And Andrew has said that “King of the Crooks” is a song he never quite cracked in that era. The standout track, “Sekwar,” sounds like what Mess could have been, boiling down EDM until only big drums, volatile bass, and sheer frills of guitar remain. “The Start” is like a chilled-out Nine Inch Nails, with an avuncular alt-rock vibe that also floats through songs like “Big Appetite.” While the moods range from atmospheric to aggressive, sculpted rhythms and dark-hued instrumentation lead this suave tour of Liars’ history and offer a glimpse of its revitalized future.
The music was refined and clarified by some recent realizations for Andrew, turning points the laconic musician has been relatively voluble about. In 2019, he served as a judge for the Australian Music Prize, and having to hear new music changed his mind about his monomaniacal process. Longing for a musical community, he enlisted jazz drummer Laurence Pike and multi-instrumentalist Cameron Deyell to play studio material that he could recompose on the computer. Mary Pearson Andrew, his wife, helped to refine his quicksand lyrics, which appear meaningless on the page but somehow fill with meaning when Andrew sings them, whether in a deep, slow croon, a diffident bark, or a fragile pleading. The collaborators seem to corral and contain his chaotic energy into uncommonly orderly songs, though one more thing also helped: the newfound benefits of replacing anxiety medication with psilocybin, which Andrew described as a key to making this album. That’s right: He made his least trippy album by tripping. How Liars is that?
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. | 2021-08-10T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2021-08-10T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Mute | August 10, 2021 | 7.6 | d996ccae-1d30-4b07-9d6d-3d93dd344e9b | Brian Howe | https://pitchfork.com/staff/brian-howe/ | |
Collaborating with noise musician Lasse Marhaug, the Welsh producer doubles down on both the spirituality and the mechanical ferocity of her work. It feels both like a left turn and a culmination. | Collaborating with noise musician Lasse Marhaug, the Welsh producer doubles down on both the spirituality and the mechanical ferocity of her work. It feels both like a left turn and a culmination. | Kelly Lee Owens: LP.8 | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/kelly-lee-owens-lp8/ | LP.8 | Kelly Lee Owens has apparently elected to skip making her third through seventh albums and proceed directly to number eight. The post-physical era of the music industry inspires gambits like this, from retail mixtapes to 20-minute albums, and Owens’ might be the most outlandish since A. G. Cook dropped two “debut” albums, one after the other. But it works for LP.8, an imagined dispatch from the future of the Welsh artist’s career that feels both like a left turn and a culmination. It’s easy to imagine a sequence of albums in which Owens—unguarded and facing the camera on her self-titled debut, haunted and hair-hidden on 2020’s Inner Song—slowly abstracts into the silver blur on the cover of this one.
Owens’ work can be cold and steely, yet it throbs with an undercurrent of spirituality. LP.8 doubles down on both of these aspects and finds ways they can work in tandem. The low end is exaggerated until every kick drum or sub-bass tone blurs and shakes the entire track, and at times the album approaches such a high-volume, high-pressure extreme that it sounds like she was trying to make the new-age Yeezus or Daytona. (Her co-producer was Lasse Marhaug, whose work on Jenny Hval’s The Practice of Love attempted a similar mind-body unison.) The most awe-inspiring track is “Anadlu,” where Owens conducts a breathing exercise over the meanest kick drum of the year. “Breathe,” she commands in Welsh, filling the margins with inhales and exhales as if to set an example, as the kick pounds away with mechanical ferocity. It’s like the reverse of the life-sucking machine from The Princess Bride, a system of great weights and pulleys working, in this case, to heal the listener.
Inner Song was Owens’ most complete integration of her sound’s techno and pop poles. Of the nine tracks here, only “One” has anything like a hook, and even that song dissolves into repetitions of cryptic phrases halfway through. Instead, Owens prefers to use her voice as a rhythmic element, as on opener “Release,” or as a running commentary of sighs and whispers that sound like plumes of smoke drifting between Brutalist beams and pillars. Talkier tracks like “Quickening” and “Sonic 8” are halfway between guided meditations and the brainy techno-missives of AGF or Marie Davidson. “Divide and conquer,” she repeats on the latter, stretching the last syllable with playful vocal fry, as if wondering what it’d be like to flex a little power for a change.
The fearsome symmetry and formidable concision Owens attempts here is a high-risk, high-reward strategy, and while the first half of the album comes on strong, the second half is a little more prone to interrupting itself. “One” is sequenced second to last as the album’s pop climax, but with its clipped repetitions of short melodic phrases, it’s nowhere near as developed as similar cuts like “Re-Wild” on Inner Song. The energy craters at the album’s midpoint, where the tough synths and atmospheric vocal layering of “Olga” are followed by “Nana Piano,” a nearly six-minute improvisation on an out-of-tune piano where every flaw and creak is emphasized. It feels like an unnecessary diversion, something you might expect to find on a low-stakes Bandcamp release rather than a bold, futuristic statement such as this. But Owens course-corrects with “Quickening,” which sounds for all the world like a video-game boss-battle cutscene. A bell rings through a vast space; a disembodied whisper haunts the landscape; we hear what sounds like the wet uncoiling of some great beast; and for a second, we can see Owens emerge in her frightening final form. | 2022-05-04T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2022-05-04T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Smalltown Supersound | May 4, 2022 | 6.9 | d9a01797-e2e9-4d3c-8808-4516475276b0 | Daniel Bromfield | https://pitchfork.com/staff/daniel-bromfield/ | |
Once again fusing R&B and retro synth pop, the Toronto duo’s third album revels in the impermanence of intimacy. The production and singing dazzle, even when the emotions feel hollow. | Once again fusing R&B and retro synth pop, the Toronto duo’s third album revels in the impermanence of intimacy. The production and singing dazzle, even when the emotions feel hollow. | Majid Jordan: Wildest Dreams | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/majid-jordan-wildest-dreams/ | Wildest Dreams | For Majid Jordan, love lives in a neon-lit nightclub. In their world, you close your eyes and move your hips and fall for someone with one kiss, a life’s worth of passion unfurling in a burst of MDMA-like euphoria. Meshing new-wave R&B and retro synth pop, the Toronto duo’s excellent 2017 sophomore album, The Space Between, located the sweet spot between romantic abandonment and woozy heartache, a nexus well suited to their genre-hybrid sensibilities. But on their third record, Wildest Dreams, Majid Jordan are all abandonment, all the time. Even when they leave the party, they long for the thrill of sweaty bodies and shimmering lights, reveling in the impermanence of intimacy without experiencing any of the consequences.
It’s easy to forgive Wildest Dreams for repeatedly hitting the same note, because the songs here are consistently flawless. The slightest turn of the knob might jeopardize their mathematical quest for pop perfection. Jordan Ullman’s spacious, atmospheric, expertly crafted production creates glitzy, synth-oriented spotlights for singer Majid Al Maskati to shine. As ever, his vocals are understated yet evocative, nimble enough to switch registers at precisely the right moment. On lead single “Waves of Blue,” spacy riffs and up-tempo drums lay the foundation for Al Maskati to croon one of the album’s most addictive hooks: “I’m in love with the thought of being in love, in love with you.” Two other standouts, “Been Through That” and “Life Worth Living,” boast gorgeous vocal runs, propulsive basslines, and grooves designed to make practically anyone, anywhere, bob their head and hum along.
Even the duo’s more traditional R&B songs have a sunnier palette than on records past. Despite blatantly lifting the melody of Usher’s “Climax,” the title track is a sultry and sensitive sex jam that advises a nice-and-slow approach. Guitar ballad “Forget About the Party” dazzles, too, but it exposes a weakness in Al Maskati’s songwriting: He tends to reach for the nearest platitude rather than explore what’s under the hood of a feeling. “I’ll give myself to you like it’s a habit,” he sings, distancing himself from further introspection. On the Drake-assisted “Stars Align,” a hollow yearning to “last through the night” and “get the job done” mutes the song’s already minuscule stakes. The hues may be brighter but the image is fuzzier, substance and specificity sacrificed for good vibes and catchy one-liners.
But let’s not ask too much of Majid Jordan. It’s cleansing to spend time with a record as resplendent and sensuous as Wildest Dreams, where the only demands are that you dance the night away and have endless, carefree sex with your (maybe?) soulmate. Still, nearly 40 minutes of impeccably engineered synth pop can feel like having a conversation with an artificially intelligent love interest; they’re saying all the right things and making you feel pretty good, but then you remember you’re talking to a robot.
When Majid Jordan co-wrote and produced Drake’s 2013 single “Hold On, We’re Going Home,” the ’80s revival in contemporary pop was just taking off. It’s hard to remember how radical the song sounded at the time—aerodynamic and timeless, like it had always been there, waiting. Majid Jordan have a bone-deep understanding of pop and R&B, and they’ve succeeded in subverting, and sometimes innovating, within these spaces. Wildest Dreams doesn’t break new ground as much as it activates familiar pleasure centers, tapping into whatever hardwired circuits convince us to dance long after the party ends.
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2022-01-05T00:00:00.000-05:00 | 2022-01-05T00:00:00.000-05:00 | Pop/R&B | OVO Sound | January 5, 2022 | 6.7 | d9a499d1-3590-427f-963c-86aab06099fb | Brady Brickner-Wood | https://pitchfork.com/staff/brady-brickner-wood/ | |
The Buffalo rapper sticks largely to hard-boiled genre conventions, while German beatmaker Wun Two leans toward the abstract and atmospheric. | The Buffalo rapper sticks largely to hard-boiled genre conventions, while German beatmaker Wun Two leans toward the abstract and atmospheric. | Conway the Machine / Wun Two: Palermo | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/conway-the-machine-wun-two-palermo/ | Palermo | It’s tempting, in the aftermath of Westside Gunn’s purported swan song And Then You Pray for Me, to consider Griselda’s dissolution. Gunn is now, by his own account, more interested in fashion and moguldom than recording or performing—the Art Basel crowd, it happens, has little use for Trap-A-Holics tributes. His half-brother Conway the Machine, meanwhile, is still rapping like the rent’s due. The group’s most accomplished and pragmatic technician, Conway offsets sleek major-label outings with austere works for hire, his sprawling solo catalog eschewing a neat trajectory. He cuts hard-boiled tapes with neighbors, unsung DJs, and streetwear brands, a master sculptor insisting upon the bluntest of tools.
Conway sticks largely to genre conventions on Palermo, although producer Wun Two makes a valiant effort to break the mold. A German beatmaker best known for his lo-fi instrumental projects, Wun Two conjures an assured, hypnotic mood reminiscent of DJ Muggs. Where past collaborators Big Ghost Limited and the Alchemist outfitted Conway with ornate samples, Wun Two foregrounds distinctive percussion, washing his drum patterns with isolated chords and hazy stereo effects. On “Carduni,” ambient cymbals approximate uncanny static; a delicate melody sneaks in around the halfway point of “Mind Tricks,” propelling the track forward while maintaining its creeping tension.
A series of interludes embellishes the ambience with a transatlantic drug trafficking theme, but Wun Two’s cues are lost in translation. Conway stays close to home, his tales of ascendance—I used to do X, now I do Y—often confined to individual couplets. The anecdotes range from amusing (“Look, we was baggin’ all day to serve in the spot/We had shit jumpin’ like Shawn Kemp’s vertical hops”) to obligatory (“Used to bag ounces up in twenties, I would scrape the plate/Chop until the razor break, look, they say he great”), his rhyme patterns rigid and monosyllabic. The performance is buoyed by Conway’s instincts, which are, as ever, exceptional. He stretches his limbs in whitespace, lounging in the drawn-out chorus of “Carduni,” extending the outros of “Mind Tricks” and “Bianca” into ad-libbed monologues.
There’s precious little rapping on Palermo—most tracks feature a single verse with padding on either side—and Wun Two relishes the lack of structure, his unhurried tempos blooming into roomy instrumental breaks. In lieu of quotables, he centers the performers’ expressive quirks: Conway’s Heath Ledger-as-Joker cackle does as much lifting as the sinewy rhymes. Fellow Buffalo native Goosebytheway is an invaluable supporting player, warbling raspy hooks like a grizzled 50 Cent. Still, the tasting-course format imposes a low ceiling. The diffuse jazz-club instrumentals on “Cold Dish” are among the album’s most evocative, yet Conway seems to lose interest midway through a sparse 16 bars. Goose bookends the verse with a loose chorus, but it plays like a reference track, more of a teaser than a song.
Having fulfilled his contracts with Gunn’s and Eminem’s record labels, this might be a liberating moment for Conway, a chance to be a working artist instead of someone else’s idea of a rap star. Restoring that hunger—while maintaining some semblance of quality control—is a separate needle to thread. Palermo is aimed at an existing audience, but paradoxically, it takes that audience for granted. | 2024-01-12T00:01:00.000-05:00 | 2024-01-12T00:01:00.000-05:00 | Rap / Electronic | Vinyl Digital | January 12, 2024 | 6.6 | d9a6d98a-c95b-4137-b54b-69e8af3e6f19 | Pete Tosiello | https://pitchfork.com/staff/pete-tosiello/ | |
Though he’s still got style on the mic, Ferg’s latest is a regression into the gleeful ignorance that colored his earlier work. | Though he’s still got style on the mic, Ferg’s latest is a regression into the gleeful ignorance that colored his earlier work. | A$AP Ferg: Still Striving | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/adollarap-ferg-still-striving/ | Still Striving | A$AP Ferg’s last LP, Always Strive and Prosper, was a portrait of the artist in a state of reflection, considering his life and work in the wake of his friend’s death and his own success. In some ways, it represented the New York rapper Ferg’s maturation—the wizened perspective of an ascendant rapper with a little bit of work under his belt. In that sense at least, his latest LP Still Striving is a regression into the gleeful ignorance that colored his earlier work.
The line between “mixtape” and a proper “album” has long been inexorably blurred, with the distinction lying mostly in how the artist chooses to refer to it. For Ferg, it appears to be an indictment of the record’s quality, or perhaps how much time he spent on it. Like Ferg Forever, his latest tape feels light and loose, a collection of mostly throw-away verses and guest features that serve more to flex Ferg’s network than anything else. Of the 14 tracks on Still Striving, only three are without guest verses, and with few exceptions (Cam’ron, Busta Rhymes), most of the guests are lyrical lightweights that avoid showing him up. More than anything else, the crowded real estate takes some of the pressure off of him as a writer; he rarely contributes more than a single verse and a hook.
This is Still Striving (and Ferg’s) biggest strength, and most glaring weakness: His style is his substance. He attended an arts high school (NYC’s High School of Art & Design), and is an unabashed student of visual art and fashion. His father, Darold Ferguson, owned a Harlem boutique, and even designed the iconic Bad Boy logo; Ferg briefly followed in his footsteps, selling custom belts before his rap career took off. To this day he’s still got one foot in the trap and one on the runway and fits well within an A$AP aesthetic that embraces influences from Atlanta and Miami as much as it does those from NYC. But as he synthesizes these myriad references, any distinct identity gets lost in the shuffle. On “Plain Jane,” Ferg tips his cap to Juicy J’s ode to misogynoir, “Slob on My Knob,” which almost 20 years later has lost its shock value; On the Migos collabo “Nasty (Who Dat),” he awkwardly flips JT Money’s rowdy singalong “Who Dat” with a darker, digitized drone.
While much of the tape is forgettable, Still Striving is not without its standout moments. “East Coast Remix”—a one-off single turned posse cut that regrettably drops original collaborator Remy Ma—benefits from a competitive fire stoked by stacking big name rappers (Busta Rhymes, A$AP Rocky, Snoop Dogg) atop a filthy DJ Khalil & Tariq Beats beat. But Ferg is at his most interesting when he drops his guard and gets personal, like when he laments his grandma’s arthritis (“Plain Jane”), or the various contraband family members have stored in their mattresses (“The Mattress Remix”). And on album closer “Tango”—the best Frankie P production on a tape chock full of them—Ferg is at his strongest, reflecting on his life and losses. Free of guest verses and tough-guy posturing, the twinkling ballad offers a rare glimpse of Ferg’s narrative skills:
Speak to Yams’ mom on the daily, beautiful lady
Feelin’ of her losing her baby drivin’ her crazy
She say that I remind her of her son
She make arroz con pollo and cook every time I come
I get the ’itis, she tell me to go sleep in his bed
And maybe some of Yams’ visions come to your head
It’s a touching moment from an MC that rarely offers a peek behind the curtain—and perhaps, a hint at what could be in store once the bright lights fade and the swag subsides. | 2017-08-21T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-08-21T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | A$AP Worldwide / Polo Grounds Music / RCA | August 21, 2017 | 6.1 | d9b4e0b8-7302-4101-8d20-dfc964c94a11 | Matthew Ismael Ruiz | https://pitchfork.com/staff/matthew-ismael ruiz/ | null |
Dylan's latest installment in his long-running Bootleg series is one of the shortest, the highlight of which is his collaboration with Johnny Cash. | Dylan's latest installment in his long-running Bootleg series is one of the shortest, the highlight of which is his collaboration with Johnny Cash. | Bob Dylan: Travelin’ Thru, Featuring Johnny Cash: The Bootleg Series Vol. 15 | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/bob-dylan-travelin-thru-featuring-johnny-cash-the-bootleg-series-vol-15/ | Travelin’ Thru, Featuring Johnny Cash: The Bootleg Series Vol. 15 | Weighing in at a mere three discs—last year’s More Blood, MoreTracks was twice that size—Travelin' Thru is a relatively trim installment in Bob Dylan’s ongoing Bootleg Series. Instead of opening a door onto a secret history, it adds color and texture to an already well-known story: Dylan's late-’60s sojourn in Nashville, the period in which he recorded John Wesley Harding and Nashville Skyline, capped off by his performance on The Johnny Cash Show in 1969—his first television appearance in nearly five years.
Dylan knew precisely what he wanted for the Harding sessions: just his guitar, bass, and drums. Producer Bob Johnston brought bassist Charlie McCoy and drummer Kenneth Buttrey into the studio, persuaded Bob to add steel guitarist Pete Drake to a couple of tracks, and the entire thing was finished within nine hours. The swift session means there were only a handful of outtakes left behind. Just seven alternate takes made the cut for Travelin’ Thru and apart from Dylan fussing with a few words, these aren’t far removed in form or feel from the versions that made the final album. The outtakes from Nashville Skyline—which includes the unheard song “Western Road,” a loose-limbed blues that happily plays with some well-worn tropes—also aren’t markedly different than what made the cut on the finished LP. The differences here are subtle—”Lay, Lady, Lay” seems a bit muted without its busy percussion and sighing steel—but it’s fun to hear Dylan groove along with these Nashville pros, working up a head of country-funk steam on “Country Pie” with the help of guitarist Charlie Daniels. Unfortunately, there aren't many of these Nashville Skyline outtakes. A bunch of masters were lost when CBS Records Nashville neglected to pay the fees for a storage facility, and while Sony recovered some tapes in a 2008 auction, many reels are still missing, which means the eight cuts on Travelin’ Thru are all that could be salvaged for official release.
All this means that the heart of Travelin’ Thru lies in the session Dylan held with Johnny Cash on February 18, 1969, just after he finished work on Nashville Skyline. The pair tested the waters the day before, stumbling through a version of Cash’s “I Still Miss Someone” and playing Dylan’s “Don’t Think Twice, It’s Alright” simultaneously with Johnny’s “Understand Your Man,” a song that lifted the melody from “Don’t Think Twice.” It’s a clever idea, albeit slightly confusing in practice—at one point, Dylan messes up his lyrics and slyly suggests he should be singing Cash’s words instead—but the mash-up illustrates how the two icons were operating on a similar wavelength. More than that, they were on equal footing in 1969. Each had spent the past decade changing the sound of American music by deviating from conventions, each building an image that verged on mythic. What's appealing about their duet session is how it deflates those myths: it’s merely two mutual admirers figuring out how to play music together.
Raised on old folk, country, and blues tunes, not to mention rock & roll, Dylan and Cash shared a similar vernacular, but speaking it in a sympathetic fashion took some effort. Although a version of “Girl from the North Country” wound up opening up Nashville Skyline, the duo generally avoided Dylan’s songbook. They also attempted “One Too Many Mornings” and Bob unveiled “Wanted Man,” a tune he wrote specifically for Johnny that played upon Cash’s Man In Black mythos. This tentative, good-humored read-through is the only known recording of Dylan singing the song, and it arrives fairly close to the end of the session, after the pair realized Bob didn't know how the country standard “The Wreck of the Old 97” went and that he couldn’t remember the words to Cash’s “Guess Things Happen That Way.” Discovering such gaps was part of the process, as was Cash feeding lyrics to Dylan: on the old Appalachian folk tune “Mountain Dew,” he instructs Bob how to deliver a line so it has the impact of a punchline.
Hearing Cash and Dylan attack the same lyric from different angles provides a striking insight regarding the pair's vocal styles. Cash barrels forth, commanding attention with his booming baritone, while Dylan sounds slippier, as if he’s suppressing a laugh. These two join together on the chorus but they don't harmonize, exactly: they’re fellow travelers on the same road, headed to the same destination but getting there at different speeds. This scenario repeats itself throughout the session, as the pair trade lines and graciously make space for their partner, yet neither willing to abandon their own stylistic quirks. Where they find common ground is on a selection of spirituals, standards, and Jimmie Rodgers tunes, plus a lively reading of “Matchbox” featuring Carl Perkins, who wrote the song back in 1957. None of this amounts to a cohesive session, so it's not a surprise that it was largely shelved in 1969. Yet its genial raggedness is the very reason to listen to it decades later; it feels bracingly human.
Dylan and Cash reunited a few months later when Bob stopped by The Johnny Cash Show.. Dylan was plugging Nashville Skyline, singing “I Threw It Away” and reprising his “Girl From The North Country” duet with Johnny, and it’s remarkable to hear how at ease he is here.. The same crew supported Dylan a couple of days after this May 1, 1969 taping, playing “Ring Of Fire” and “Folsom Prison Blues” with a similar gusto and bonhomie, a vibe that carried Dylan through to the clutch of 1970 recordings with bluegrass banjoist Earl Scruggs that close off this set.
Comparing the Scruggs cuts and the funky, swampy Cash covers with the austere John Wesley Harding outtakes that begin Travelin’ Thru is illuminating. When Dylan began his Nashville years, he was cautious, a sentiment befitting an artist who purposely withdrew from the spotlight, but the singer on the 1970 sessions is playful and alive, clearly enjoying the company of other musicians. Dylan may not have returned to Nashville to record—as the title suggests, he was just passing through the town—but he kept that communal spirit close at hand in the music that he’s made over the years.
Buy: Rough Trade
(Pitchfork may earn a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.) | 2019-11-08T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2019-11-08T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Columbia / Legacy | November 8, 2019 | 8 | d9b9898e-ceb4-48a1-b851-4a1035fdfbe6 | Stephen Thomas Erlewine | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stephen-thomas erlewine/ | |
Following the recent turn toward acoustic instruments in his soundtrack work, the UK electronic polymath investigates neoclassical modes on an album inspired by climate change. | Following the recent turn toward acoustic instruments in his soundtrack work, the UK electronic polymath investigates neoclassical modes on an album inspired by climate change. | Clark: Playground in a Lake | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/clark-playground-in-a-lake/ | Playground in a Lake | Twenty years is a long time to do anything, no matter how well you do it. Even for an artist as restless as English electronic polymath Chris Clark, 20 years of poking and prodding at his hybridized sound might lose its zest. Connecting the dots of Clark’s sizable discography, almost entirely released by Warp Records, is like clocking an earthquake tremor. Where the stylistic variances between early records Clarence Park and Empty the Bones of You are slight, the seven albums from 2006 masterwork Body Riddle to 2017’s Death Peak are all over the map. Noodling modular sequences, heavily processed rap samples, deconstructed live drums, bucolic acoustic guitars, haunted piano themes, loungey jazz vocals, blippy chiptune synths—Clark seemingly never had an idea that wasn’t worth trying at least once. In recent years, however, the pings on his seismograph have been landing much closer together.
There’s at least one reason for the increasing cohesion in Clark’s output. In 2015, the producer landed his first soundtrack gig scoring the grim crime-thriller series The Last Panthers. He was, perhaps unsurprisingly, very good at it. Besides his track record conjuring complex emotional heft from bleak atmospheres, Clark has always told elaborate, if inscrutable, stories across his albums. The Last Panthers OST was no different, and stood on its own as a winding musical narrative evoking thick fog, scorched earth, and brief clearings in the murk. Clark continued his film work with the 2018 drama series Kiri and the 2019 horror film Daniel Isn’t There, whose soundtracks hewed closer to their sources’ narratives. They were also increasingly reliant on classical instrumentation, a fascination of Clark’s that soon colored more of his personal music.
“Harpsichords are the original rave hoovers,” he said about 2018’s E.C.S.T. T.R.A.X., a frenetic two-song dance record featuring harpsichord and piano, respectively. Apparently, traditional film-score arrangements were reinvigorating this seasoned producer’s creativity. But where “Piano E.C.S.T” found new possibilities in familiar sounds, the classical experiments on 2019’s Kiri Variations tapped out somewhere around wobbly dissonance. Playground in a Lake—Clark’s first non-soundtrack album since 2017, which he calls “a story about real climate change, but told in mythological terms”—takes the next logical step in his relationship with classical music: reverence. Opening track “Lovelock” is essentially a cello solo by frequent collaborator Oliver Coates; then comes “Lambent Rag,” a spritely piano suite given wings by subtle, uplifting synths.
Clark’s repositioning as a neoclassical composer is not entirely unexpected. Piano has appeared on Clark albums from the beginning, albeit in short flourishes. And the IDM musician’s unconventional musicality and innovative sound design share affinities with composers like Nils Frahm and Max Richter. Playground in a Lake sounds most natural to Clark when it’s a mutual exchange of old and new ideas. The synth-driven “More Islands” uses wavering, detuned tones that date back to Clarence Park, now arranged like the doomed symphony on a sinking ship. When actual strings appear in the coda, they might as well be lush pads and rolling basslines. On “Entropy Polychord,” what sounds like a generative music system made from orchestral tape loops becomes dense, synthetic, and controlled—clear skies consumed by grim thunder clouds. Clark has always excelled at making his electronics feel tactile and gritty, and it’s equally satisfying to hear his live instruments sound ethereal and illusory.
Whether on cellos, clarinets, pianos, or keyboards, Clark’s fingerprints are largely recognizable throughout Playground in a Lake, allowing him to swap out instrumental palettes mid-piece for a striking tonal effect. The best tracks, like the apocalyptic “Earth Systems” and soft-spoken “Citrus,” merge these sounds to varying degrees. More importantly, they push their ideas toward the fringes. Less successful are the straight putts. There’s a toothless austerity to the way the strings in “Forever Chemicals” roll along unadorned and uninterrupted, which can also describe “Suspension Reservoir.” Its piano sounds automatic, indifferent, as if pulled from a generic film cue library. “Emissary” feels detached as well, albeit for different reasons. Clark sets the violin melody slightly askew from the piano notes, and it’s not so much disorienting as cold and unappealing. Not necessarily a bad approach, if only it had been used as punctuation in a more dynamic composition.
The whole of Playground in a Lake suffers from the flatness of its instrumentation and emotional range. Some of that seems intentional—such as the robotic vocals, self-playing pianos, and dusty strings—yet it’s no less at odds with an existentially themed body of music. “I’m like an animal trapped in a flood,” sings a choirboy near the end of “Emissary,” which on paper reads like the emotional low point for an album about the inheritors of global warming. In practice, he might as well be reciting lines fed to him by a hypnotist. The moment of palpable dread does eventually come—not in the dry follow-up “Comfort and Fear,” but its counterpart “Shut You Down.” Synths growl as much as they tremble, kick drums plummet like meteors, and the tumult underneath threatens to rip a chasm into the earth. On an album that struggles with effective articulation, this is where Clark bellows the loudest, and in an unmistakable voice.
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. | 2021-03-25T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2021-03-25T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Deutsche Grammophon | March 25, 2021 | 6.1 | d9c77f27-6706-4003-8b65-81d0d0a2de07 | Patric Fallon | https://pitchfork.com/staff/patric-fallon/ | |
With frank lyricism and clean production, the Australian songwriter and guitarist channels the confidence and immediacy of 2000s pop-rock. | With frank lyricism and clean production, the Australian songwriter and guitarist channels the confidence and immediacy of 2000s pop-rock. | Ali Barter: Hello, I’m Doing My Best | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/ali-barter-hello-im-doing-my-best/ | Hello, I’m Doing My Best | Though happily married and sober, Melbourne songwriter and guitarist Ali Barter wouldn’t dare write about anything so peaceful. Barter’s muse is the thrilling turbulence of young adulthood, and the lasting resonance of the bad decisions one makes in their early 20s. On her new record Hello, I’m Doing My Best, these themes coalesce with the confidence and immediacy of 2000s pop-rock. The result is an emotionally nuanced album that never takes itself too seriously.
Barter’s debut, 2017’s A Suitable Girl, was a lovably slapdash collection of, in the words of one beloved teen film, “angry girl music of the indie-rock persuasion”—feminist pop-rock that angled for everywoman relatability. That formula worked well for Barter, with the singles “Girlie Bits” and “Cigarette” achieving modest success in her home country. Many of the songs on A Suitable Girl, though, suffered from a certain anonymity. Her bid for universality resulted in lines like “What’s a woman made of?/Something glorious”—well-intentioned but nevertheless a little hackneyed.
Hello, I’m Doing My Best makes no such attempts, instead leaning full-tilt into Barter’s loose-cannon instincts. She draws herself as an indie rock Fleabag, a self-deprecating and hard-drinking flirt who texts her crushes at 3 a.m. and listens to “Malibu” to get through the hangover the next morning. From its earliest moments—the Hole reference comes in the very first line—Hello, I’m Doing My Best is appealingly frank. “Ur a Piece of Shit,” the second track, is a bombastic love letter to a friend in crisis: “You got your daddy issues,” Barter sings. “It made you real suspicious/That’s why you hacked in his account.” She wastes no time with poetics, and while it’s a risky move—she ends up rhyming “drugs” with “drugs”—it displays a kind of gonzo commitment to the album’s messy, diaristic heart.
With loud and unadorned production, Hello, I’m Doing My Best taps into a current of emotive, candid pop-rock typified by the Josie and the Pussycats soundtrack and currently practiced by the likes of Charly Bliss and Bully. There’s not an ounce of crunch or grit here, just clean, sanded-down edges and lacquered finishes. The production—handled by Barter’s husband, Oscar Dawson of the band Holy Holy—adds an early-2000s patina, giving the record the pleasing accessibility of teen classics like Avril Lavigne’s Let Go.
Hello, I’m Doing My Best often reads as a guidebook for young adults learning to navigate the world, and in that light, Barter’s no-bullshit lyricism is punkish and endearing. On “Ur a Piece of Shit,” for example, she gleefully calls on listeners to “put your hands up” for various messed-up teenage experiences, like “eating disorders,” “if a doctor touched you,” and “if it felt good to cut yourself.” In moments like these, Barter resembles a young Liz Phair, writing with a shamelessness that few songwriters since have really relished. Lines like, “I heard you like Tool, yeah/And you got really cool hair/And I think that you should be my boyfriend” feel directly indebted to Phair, and the chorus of “History of Boys” (“I used to get drunk and blackout/I used to get drunk and tell you I need you”), while hewing closer to pop than anything Phair wrote in her early days, owes its gutsiness to her.
It helps that Barter never lets a linear personal narrative define these songs. The only time she writes about her now-husband, on “Backseat,” she revisits a time before they met, hinting at the future by declaring that “we’d be perrrrrfect” alongside a grandiose Guitar Hero-style solo. “January,” a dejected highlight on an otherwise frenetic album, stops in at one of life’s Sisyphean checkpoints: the hope of magically becoming a better person come New Year’s Day. “I made it through the year again with Diet Coke and cigarettes,” she sings. It could be any year; life, Barter seems to say, runs on a loop, and despite all we think we’ve learned, no amount of personal growth is certain to prevent mistakes. Even hindsight rarely makes everything clear. At least Hello, I’m Doing My Best makes it sound like a blast.
Buy: Rough Trade
(Pitchfork may earn a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.) | 2019-10-28T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-10-28T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | Inertia | October 28, 2019 | 7.2 | d9cbe3a0-7b0e-40d9-9b2e-e44207df664c | Shaad D’Souza | https://pitchfork.com/staff/shaad-d’souza/ | |
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 lo-fi acoustic recordings of Roky Erickson, a rare glimpse at his stark and fragile songwriting. | 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 lo-fi acoustic recordings of Roky Erickson, a rare glimpse at his stark and fragile songwriting. | Roky Erickson: Never Say Goodbye | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/roky-erickson-never-say-goodbye/ | Never Say Goodbye | The 13th Floor Elevators viewed their music as a healing force. If you weren’t consuming vast quantities of LSD, as the pioneering Texas band frequently did, their hallucinatory rock’n’roll, and Roky Erickson’s masterful performances still conspired to take the listener to a higher plane. A kind of spirituality existed in their music—escapist but communal. “We were known as the first psychedelic band, the first one to be able to play music that would make you see things if you wanted to, and then lay back and envision things like Dylan does,” Erickson said in 1975. “We were responsible for loosening up a lot of people.” His remarks were offered in one of the most lucid interviews of his lifetime, the first after his release from the Rusk Hospital for the Criminally Insane (since renamed Rusk State Hospital) in East Texas.
In 1969, near the end of the band’s brief but monumental run, Erickson was arrested atop Mount Bonnell in Austin for felony possession of a marijuana joint. To avoid 10 years in prison under Texas’ draconian drug laws, Erickson would later say he had feigned insanity. He was institutionalized for three years. “There’s injustice in justice,” Erickson said of his time in Rusk Hospital. “By the end of one day, you’ve already thought up ages of thinking. You’ve thought everything you could think in a million years.”
In his Elevators years, Erickson believed dropping acid was an art, a way to surround yourself with positivity. At Rusk, he was embedded in a world of the negative, given electroshock therapy and heavy sedatives. His fellow patients included convicted murderers; he started a band, the Missing Links, with some of them, and tried to overcome the daily nightmare of his situation. “Most of the time, Roky would have a yellow legal pad, and he’d be sitting in the hallway somewhere writing music, real weak and slumped down,” Rusk psychiatrist Bob Priest remembers in the 2005 documentary You’re Gonna Miss Me.
Erickson’s wife Dana brought him cigarettes, a television, and a 12-string guitar. At Rusk, he later reckoned, he’d written close to a hundred new songs. “It seems like I’ve broken through that,” he said when asked whether it was possible to surpass the Elevators in their prime. “I have 85 songs written, and as I write, I find out that I’m getting better instead of just writing something.” His mother, Evelyn, a talented singer who’d given her oldest son his first guitar lessons, pressed play on the recorder. Sitting across from her, he played her quiet, hymnlike compositions and some of the starkest, purest love songs he’d ever written, songs that would for the most part go unheard for nearly 30 more years, until the 1999 release of a lesser-known collection, called Never Say Goodbye, resurrected from these tapes and other home recordings from 1971 to 1985.
For Erickson, whose diagnosis of schizophrenia and early affinity for psychedelics too often overshadows readings of his songs, the question of where his music comes from tends to shortchange what it is. Dwell instead on what his art can do—the Elevators offered escapism, at Rusk music offered survival, and in the mid-’70s through the mid-’80s, it would be a catharsis. But in periods when music was not at the center of Erickson’s daily living, and when his schizophrenia went untreated, particularly during the late-’80s and ’90s, it became painfully clear to close friends and family that his well-being was in trouble. Over the course of his lifetime, which ended May 31 at the age of 71, the songs he wrote summoned equal parts deliverance and salvation, something he enacted in his music, perhaps more so for his listeners than he did for himself.
After Rusk, Doug Sahm got Erickson into the studio to record a single, “Starry Eyes,” a perfect jangling love song where Roky’s “you-hoo-hoo-hoo” echoes Buddy Holly’s “Peggy Sue-ooh-ooh.” “The very best ones are sent from heaven by Buddy Holly,” Erickson once said of his songs. “The rest take the better part of an afternoon to rip off.”
Sahm’s recording injected renewed vitality into Erickson’s career with his band the Aliens, with whom he recorded The Evil One in 1981, and two solo albums Don’t Slander Me, and Gremlins Have Pictures, both released in 1986. He called it his “horror rock” era—the period that yielded his great rockers of monsters and ghosts—“Night of the Vampires,” “I Walked With a Zombie,” “Creature with the Atom Brain.” Throughout the ’80s, he continued to write other new songs whose only recordings remained on the cassettes he made at home to remember them.
But by the early ’90s, when Casey Monahan—who later directed the Texas Music Office, a state-run agency to promote the industry—found his way into Roky’s orbit, Erickson was in poor health and bad financial straits. Through a series of raw deals typical of the recording industry for musicians of his generation, he was earning little to no money from his music. Monahan chanced to photograph Erickson in 1987 for The Austin-American Statesman in one of his last performances for some time. “My first encounter with him was oblique,” he emphasized to me recently. Sometime after, he became one of a series of people who helped resuscitate Erickson financially and spiritually, and became a key figure in the making of Never Say Goodbye.
By the mid-’90s, Roky was living on disability checks doled out in $20 increments by Evelyn and taking up residence in a partially subsidized apartment 10 miles south of Austin among a dozen radios and TVs tuned to various and conflicting stations and channels set to piercing volume. It was as if he’d recreated the cacophony of Rusk, minus the salve of music at its core. Covering the floor were more electronics and impulse purchases from home-shopping channels. The stillest point in the midst of this storm of noise was Roky.
One day, driving around town, Monahan asked Erickson if he might like to go back in the studio again. Roky was game. “Sure!” Erickson said genuinely, in what Monahan describes as a “high-pitched, nasally, not-yet-a-scream-yet-still-heard-three-aisles-over voice.” “Long as it’s fun!” Monahan gathered musicians Speedy Sparks, Paul Leary, Lou Ann Barton, and Charlie Sexton for the stellar 1995 album All That May Do My Rhyme, released by King Coffey’s Trance Syndicate label, which also put out another acoustic Erickson demo, the B-side “Please Judge.” “He was why I was even in this position in the first place,” Coffey, longtime drummer of the Butthole Surfers, wrote on Facebook, the night of Erickson’s death. “He invented Texas punk.”
In another effort to help restore Roky’s songwriting credits, Monahan gathered dozens of tapes and handwritten pages that had accumulated over Roky’s career, transcribing all of his lyrics for a collection eventually published, by Henry Rollins, as Openers II. Evelyn Erickson delivered some 40 songs, including her own recordings of her eldest son at Rusk.
For Monahan, these were a revelation, and they inspired the making of Never Say Goodbye. “I had a little cassette recorder with pitch control, and I hit play and I stopped, and played it again, and again, slowing it down, listening,” Monahan told me. He played the cassettes for Coffey’s longtime partner, now husband, Craig Stewart, who ran the label Emperor Jones. It was Stewart who heard an album in Roky’s rough cuts and lo-fi, deteriorating tapes. These artifacts were scattered over Stewart’s kitchen table for months, and with the help of Monahan, he pored over the music and assembled a collection of 14 songs recorded in the years 1971 to 1985—just Erickson and a guitar in a room, quiet and stirring and haunting and deceptively plain constructions.
What emerges as Never Say Goodbye feels like the record of a vast and deep wandering, a pilgrim embarking on a meandering search for connection. Erickson repeats and wrangles emotion out of the simplest lyrics (“I’ve never known this till now”) and turns out extraordinary phrases—a desire for “unforced peace,” what a concept. “The crescent silver moon is mine,” he sings on the title song, playing so tenderly you hear the guitar as rippling dark water. All his songs harbor gnomic, vivid truths, but “Be and Bring Me Home” is the album’s apex, with lyrics both enigmatic (“Her jewelry drops all its grime”) and weirdly astute (“I won’t jump on you though we are all rubber”) organized around a heartbreaking plea:
Suddenly my fireplace is friendly
Bringing me home
Suddenly I may control
Take little things meaning big so’s I’m not alone
Suddenly I’m not sick
Won’t you be and bring me home
“Someone is missing love,” Erickson sings, “and now that someone is going home.”
Absent on Never Say Goodbye is Erickson’s incandescent wolverine scream, the one he perfected on “You’re Gonna Miss Me,” the Elevators’ lone entry onto the pop charts. You could imagine a scream emerging on another version of say, his song “Birds’d Crashed,” in its driving and resolute affirmation: “We’re here, I’m here,” but it’s a gift to hear these in their original expression. The songs on Never Say Goodbye possess a faraway sound that feels deliberately metaphoric, as if they were issued from deep inside a tunnel, amplifying the loner quality of the seeker at the heart of it all. When tape hiss enters it feels like a welcome presence too, perhaps a validation of one of Erickson’s other indelible lyrics: “When you have ghosts, you have everything.”
On Scott Newton’s cover photograph of Erickson, he’s winsome and scruffy, wearing a corduroy jacket with a dog wandering at his heels and a guitar in hand. But the Roky Erickson who recorded most of these songs at Rusk was newly shorn and lost: “They cut my hair completely bald, just as mean as they could, and they put me in khakis,” he recalled after his release. “When I got there it was like, ‘Here comes this guy with long hair and a top hat.’ And they said, ‘Oh, boy. We got him. If I had been wearing a tuxedo it would have been just as bad.’” Listening, you envision a person not just piecing himself back together again, but shoring himself up against the world that would always tend to view his lyrics as outlandish. He knew he was an alien.
Never Say Goodbye’s impact was felt in tiny waves, reviewed by a handful of writers, including a much younger me, writing for a tiny zine in North Carolina, where a core of friends replayed “Pushing and Pulling” and “You’re an Unidentified Flying Object” and “Be and Bring Me Home” incessantly. When I moved to Austin not long after its release, it still felt to me like a city small enough where you might encounter your heroes. Idly, I paged through the phone book, looking up names. To my surprise, Roky Erickson was listed. Now I wish I’d torn out the page. I drove past the address, curious but too shy to call or to attempt to knock on the door.
The album itself is a survivor of strange and remarkable accidents. “The fact that he could make art like this—these beautiful, vulnerable love songs—when he’s inside a psychiatric hospital, to me that’s incredible,” Coffey told me recently. The fact the songs were recorded at all is a feat, too; that they were saved for years and salvaged and made known at all makes it even more impossible and rare. The fact that the youthfulness and the fragility of Roky’s voice is preserved here is astonishing. “Ten years later, when he had more management and was thinking about recording again, I don’t know if a record like this would have happened,” Coffey said. “At the time it was released, we thought he might never record again.”
For at least a decade, Erickson steadfastly refused to see a doctor or dentist. Eventually, in 2001, his youngest brother Sumner, managed to intervene and get him into medical care for the first time in at least a decade. Henry Rollins paid for Erickson’s new teeth. In the decade of Erickson’s final renaissance, he recorded an album with Okkervil River, including new versions of “Be and Bring Me Home,” “Think Of As One,” and “Birds’d Crash” from Never Say Goodbye.
“He was a pioneer,” Monahan told me, as if dictating an epitaph over the phone. “He stayed true to his music. He never compromised. He survived.” More importantly, he emphasized, Erickson was far more self-aware than people realized. “People projected their insanity onto him. A lot of people lived through Roky. They could feel a little less crazy because Roky was there.” And they could, one surmises, draw calmness from the visionary music of a person who wandered the edges of the world they didn’t dare explore themselves.
People close to Erickson do speak of how hard it was to help him when he was at his most troubled, but mainly of the innate goodheartedness he transmitted. “He occasionally seemed psychic, attuned to some dimension of the present that the rest of us weren’t seeing,” Will Sheff of Okkervil River wrote recently. Perhaps that is the condition of being truly psychedelic. “Special and magical music,” Erickson sings on “Be and Bring Me Home,” “these are feelings from one to another.”
In the ’90s, Monahan and other friends were part of a de-facto Roky Erickson supper club, taking him out to eat twice a week. One evening, when Monahan showed up, Erickson waved him away. “He was cheerful about it,” Monahan said. “He told us, ‘You know what, I’m not gonna go today, you guys go on without me. I’ll just be here relaxing for you!’ I mean, right? What a sweetheart, Roky. ‘I’ll be relaxing for you.’” | 2019-06-09T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-06-09T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic / Rock | Emperor Jones | June 9, 2019 | 9 | d9d2b812-7eac-479b-b848-3fb4a6f21c89 | Rebecca Bengal | https://pitchfork.com/staff/rebecca-bengal/ | |
When Sigur R\xF3s' second full-length record, Agetis Byrjun, landed stateside in 2001, its extraterrestrial oozing was so unfamiliar (and ... | When Sigur R\xF3s' second full-length record, Agetis Byrjun, landed stateside in 2001, its extraterrestrial oozing was so unfamiliar (and ... | Sigur Rós: Takk | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/7155-takk/ | Takk | When Sigur Rós' second full-length record, Agetis Byrjun, landed stateside in 2001, its extraterrestrial oozing was so unfamiliar (and, subsequently, unnerving) to American ears that it managed to finagle a staggering number of meticulously rendered comparisons to glaciers and fjords and icebergs: By year-end, it seemed oddly plausible to presume that Sigur Rós' songs were actually being mouthed by giant mounds of snow. Something about Agetis Byrjun-- its celestial groping, its shimmers, its weird vastness-- seemed handcuffed to the landscape from which it was born. Thus, the mythology of Iceland-- of staggering literacy and longevity, of Björk, of Reykjavik, of volcanoes and fisheries and giant slabs of ice-- became the mythology of Sigur Rós. Unsurprisingly, domestic intrigue peaked almost immediately: The record's liner notes and cover-- a silver alien-baby hybrid boasting angel wings-- revealed precious little about its creation, and vocalist Jonsi Birgisson openly admitted to howling in an entirely self-fabricated language. In 2001, Sigur Rós were deliciously strange, the only sensible soundtrack to post-millennial comedowns, all future and faith, bones and blood and ice and sun, culled gently from an island far, far away.
In the years that followed, Sigur Rós released three EPs, reissued their debut, and popped out another full-length, the ever-contentious, unspeakable ( ). With each new record, the band dutifully maintained their trademark swells, bowing consistently before the altar of ebb and flow, until Sigur Rós began to sound less like an icecap melting and more like Sigur Rós. The mystery melted, the fascination faltered, and the animated, barstool retellings of The Sigur Rós Story died down. Still, Sigur Rós are more than just a conversation piece, meatier than their reputation, better than the otherworldly blubbers they're so casually accused of: With Takk, the songcraft that once made Agetis Byrjun everyone's favorite sunrise record re-emerges intact. Melodies stick, songs coalesce, and Sigur Rós lay off the grim theatrics, reminding listeners everywhere that they intend to play theaters, not funeral homes.
Ultimately, Takk is a warmer, more orchestral take on the band's defining sound, and easily their most instantly accessible record to date (shockingly, over a third of the album's songs clock in at under five minutes each.) The cheerless drones of ( ) are replaced by more bass, drums, piano, horns, and samples, strings are more prominent than ever before, and Birgisson's lyrics are especially incidental, all barely-audible squeals and sighs. Mostly, Takk is ecstatic, constantly erupting in funny little waves of joy. Dissenters who rejected Sigur Rós as the soundtrack to wrist-slittings everywhere might be temporarily perplexed by the band's new, wide-eyed giggles-- but mostly, Takk just sounds like Sunday morning Sigur Rós, all yawns and sleepy grins and quick yanks at the curtains.
"Glosoli" is the record's shining center, a rapturous, tinkling swirl, with Birgisson's high, squeaky howls (sounding perfectly thin and kitten-y) shooting through a thick, stomping mess of chimes and echoing guitar. The song builds slowly, finally bursting in a deafening explosion of heavily-distorted guitar slams (think, oddly, of Coldplay-- particularly the end of A Rush of Blood to the Head's "Politik"). "Glosoli" manages to be both ethereal and concrete at the same time, which is Sigur Rós most effective trick: "Glosoli" tempers its fRóst with curls of hot human breath, a tongue on an icicle, frozen and warm all at once. "Gong" is all antsy drums and careering guitar, while the steamy "Saeglopur" tiptoes from piano and tinny glockenspiel to a breathtaking vocal harmony, and, finally, an ominous swell of full-band noise, just deep enough to inspire some vicious head-nods, if not full-hip dancing. Elsewhere, the band falters. "Se Lest" and "Milano", the record's longest cuts, are both vaguely hollow-- "Se Lest" is too preoccupied with its own atmospherics, while "Milano" meanders without meaning.
Takk proves that Sigur Rós can, in fact, transcend their own legend: The tendency to descend into new age goo is still present, and Takk, like all of Sigur Rós' discography, is not for the viscerally-minded. Regardless, the record is more than just meaningless wisps. Crank it in the late summer heat and see if it melts. | 2005-09-11T02:01:40.000-04:00 | 2005-09-11T02:01:40.000-04:00 | Rock | Geffen | September 11, 2005 | 7.8 | d9d47699-36c3-48e3-9374-ea20a2813808 | Amanda Petrusich | https://pitchfork.com/staff/amanda-petrusich/ | null |
The latest from prolific Danish producer Natal Zaks is a short album of blissed-out, ambient textures, but is no less immersive thanks to his deft sense of world-building. | The latest from prolific Danish producer Natal Zaks is a short album of blissed-out, ambient textures, but is no less immersive thanks to his deft sense of world-building. | Palta: Universel | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/palta-universel/ | Universel | With his debut album as DJ Sports, Milán Zaks was the first in Aarhus, Denmark’s Regelbau collective to make a splash beyond the crew’s homegrown network of DIY labels. But his brother Natal Zaks, best known as DJ Central, is right behind him. Together, the two producers have smudged Regelbau’s odd footprint while teasing out the intricacies of their 1990s house fixation, and on his own, Natal has been even more active than his brother. In addition to three EPs on Amsterdam’s influential Dekmantel label, he’s also been responsible for three of the best records to come from the collective to date, including the dreamy Basil EP for Help Recordings and the ambient breakbeats of “Drive,” with the Danish singer Erika Casier, on Regelbau itself—and that’s just a smattering of what he’s been up to.
With a new record for Jonny Nash’s Melody as Truth label, this time under his Palta alias, Natal Zaks reveals yet another side to his sound. Until now, his music has tended to be rooted in ’90s dance dialects like West Coast deep house or flickering electro/freestyle hybrids, but here he moves away from the dancefloor entirely, putting pulse over rhythm and atmosphere over melody. Just five tracks and 31 minutes long, Universel is essentially a mini-LP (a favorite format of Melody as Truth’s founder), but it’s still immersive and enveloping despite its brevity.
Universel’s opener is as far out as Zaks has ventured yet. With his synth tuned to an organ-like patch, a fistful of chords provides the watery backdrop to free-flowing drumming on deep, boomy toms; raindrop-like synth blips and the flicker of a ticking sprinkler lend to the misty air. There’s no discernible meter or tempo, just a wide arc of glistening pitter-patter scattered through the track. The freeform approach calls to mind the New York group Georgia’s “Ama Yes Uzume”; shorn of context, it would be easy to imagine it as something off a no-name new-age cassette thrifted from some remote town in the California redwoods.
With “Tabt Optagelse” (“Lost Recording”), Zaks locks into a steady, mid-tempo groove, loosely weaving shakers and hand percussion into a rippling approximation of a barefoot drum circle. This is as driving as the record will get, yet it still feels ambient: The synths are drifting and diffuse, and there’s no real separation between foreground and background. The percussion stretches out across the stereo field in such a way that it feels like you’re standing in the middle of a forest clearing, ringed by crickets and birdsong and gentle rainfall.
“På Gensyn” (“See You Again”) veers off piste once again, with brushed cymbals and bubbling arpeggios churning away while gravelly bass tones dive almost too low to register as actual notes. There’s no evidence of MIDI clock or any other kind of electronic timekeeping; in its accidental rumbling, it sounds like the collision of a weather system and a drum closet. “At Ville,” a gelatinous moiré of pulse and ping, is more rhythmic but similarly abstract; it sounds a little like a dubbed-out take on the ambient house Zaks records as Olo, with all the beats muted and the analog delay unit submerged in a bucket of soap bubbles. Only with the closing “Optagelse 16A” does Zaks return to the land of groove. It doesn’t take long for it to say pretty much everything it has to say, yet it keeps on rolling for nine and a half minutes, dubby and deeply tranquil; it’s less a song than an invitation to dissolve into Zaks’ fantasy world-building. He’s made other records that are more complex, more tuneful, and even more immediately satisfying, but when it comes to blissed-out, absent-minded reverie, Universel marks the sweet spot. | 2017-12-12T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2017-12-12T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Experimental | Melody As Truth | December 12, 2017 | 7.3 | d9dcf245-03ae-4781-ba16-c28aee0d2272 | Philip Sherburne | https://pitchfork.com/staff/philip-sherburne/ | |
The rap supergroup meditates on the passage of time on their new LP. It possesses all the intimacy and nostalgia of a ’90s parking lot cypher between friends. | The rap supergroup meditates on the passage of time on their new LP. It possesses all the intimacy and nostalgia of a ’90s parking lot cypher between friends. | Previous Industries: Service Merchandise | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/previous-industries-service-merchandise/ | Service Merchandise | One day, you’ll wake up aching for some undefined reason, perhaps a little hungover from the one glass of wine you had with dinner, and solemnly think to yourself, “Fuck, I’m old.” There is new stiffness in your hips from standing too long in less-than-sensible shoes, or driving around town and pointing out that a new business used to be a different one. Aging is weird and often painful, but it’s also fascinating, even hilarious. The years speed up exponentially until months pass in a blink, the time between sunrise and sunset shrinking down to nothing.
Open Mike Eagle, Video Dave, and STILL RIFT feel the passage of time in their bones. The Los Angeles via Chicago emcees who make up the new trio Previous Industries named their debut after a retail catalog that went bankrupt in 1999. Thumbing through it provided a specific kind of dopamine rush now lost to the ages. References to it abound throughout Service Merchandise—“I would not feel sad at all/If I could buy everything in the catalog,” sings Video Dave during the chorus of “Roebuck.” Most of the songs bear the name of a store you’d see in every mall in the United States before they became sad ghost towns, air conditioning and smooth jazz blasting in the emptied, echoing caverns of capitalism. But this isn’t just an album about how Gen Xers and elder millennials get misty-eyed when they think about Blockbuster. The trio uses nostalgia as a tool of examination, ruminating on the not-too-distant past in order to process the funny and sometimes heartbreaking process of getting older together.
The three rappers have such effortless chemistry that it’s hard to believe that Service Merchandise is their first group outing. They’ve been in each other’s orbit for a lifetime: Eagle and RIFT (originally Rift Napalm) met at Whitney M. Young Magnet High School, forming the group PDX with fellow Chicago rapper Psalm One, which eventually absorbed into the legendary Nacrobats crew. Video Dave and Eagle first met in college at Southern Illinois University, forging a friendship and artistic bond that led to many collaborations and tours together (including work on Eagle’s TV series The New Negroes). During the pandemic lockdown, the three would gather at Eagle’s apartment for whiskey-fueled gaming and recording sessions, eventually compiling what would become Service Merchandise.
The album doesn’t stray too far from the hazy, inviting sound Eagle has mined for his last couple of releases. There’s a focus on street corner battle-tested rapping, the kind that places emphasis on the malleability of language and construction of unexpected wordplay; you can easily imagine them in a semi-circle, bobbing along to the beat, jumping in when it feels natural. Kenny Segal’s mixing keeps the vocals up front and mostly dry, giving the songs an immediate, inner monologue intimacy.
The rappers are all in top form, operating in specific but complementary lanes. All three rap with a singsongy lilt, channeling the thoughtful whimsy you’d find on early De La Soul or Jungle Brothers records. Eagle is a master of unpredictable, multisyllabic rhyme schemes, peppered with sly, offbeat humor; RIFT deconstructs concepts and rearranges them into a series of interconnected reference points (his four-bar riff about Wesley Snipes on “White Hen” is especially dazzling). Video Dave exudes a happy melancholy, his verses often digging through his memories to excavate personal truths. Most songs forgo hooks in favor of mic-passing, making the album feel like a loving homage to the nearly lost art of parking lot cyphers after the rap show.
Despite the deep influence of ’90s hip-hop culture, Service Merchandise isn’t hollow or throwback pastiche. Frequent OME collaborator Child Actor provides the lion’s share of the lush, trippy production, but Quelle Chris and Smoke Bonito’s beats are just as blurry. It’s as though they’re trying to recreate golden-era sounds armed with only the fog of memory and a faulty four-track. That loose, shaggy comfort allows the rappers to stumble upon moments of profound honesty and self-reflection. On the vaporous psychedelia of “Pliers,” RIFT issues a quick, devastating line about his drinking habits: “My vices love it when I grip them, and I know because they hold me back.” Dave gets wistful over a minor-key flute loop on “Fotomat,” turning a story of lying to his mother into a sober look at his conflict-avoidant tendencies. Eagle spends most of his closing verse on “White Hen”—an airy but lumbering boom-bap jam—questioning reality through a serpentine flow before declaring that he’s “the captain of a ship about to run in the ground.”
Listening to Service Merchandise often feels like being let in on a fast-moving group chat, the kind where inside jokes and grinning shit talk sit comfortably next to heartfelt vulnerability. Previous Industries is a group forged from genuine camaraderie; these guys really trust each other, letting their shared memories of campy ’80s movies and afternoons spent watching Nickelodeon lead into deep conversations about the nature of existence. It’s a record shaped by the joy of rapping with your friends, spitting lines that evoke some good-natured jealousy. But most of all, this music could only be made after acknowledging there are fewer years in front of you than behind. | 2024-07-08T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2024-07-08T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Merge | July 8, 2024 | 7.8 | d9e38eea-b6ed-47f2-8e3f-78608354e3c3 | Dash Lewis | https://pitchfork.com/staff/dash-lewis/ | |
J Dilla’s younger brother, Illa J, follows his 2008 Yancey Boys collection with Sunset Blvd., a record that features old Dilla associate Frank Nitt, a whole gang of Dilla-ites (Common, Talib Kweli), and another bumper crop of previously unreleased Dilla beats. It's the most joyous record we’ve seen from Dilla’s disciples since the producer’s death in 2006. | J Dilla’s younger brother, Illa J, follows his 2008 Yancey Boys collection with Sunset Blvd., a record that features old Dilla associate Frank Nitt, a whole gang of Dilla-ites (Common, Talib Kweli), and another bumper crop of previously unreleased Dilla beats. It's the most joyous record we’ve seen from Dilla’s disciples since the producer’s death in 2006. | Yancey Boys: Sunset Blvd. | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/18685-yancey-boys-sunset-blvd/ | Sunset Blvd. | There’s a real irony in J Dilla’s legacy as a musician. The multitudes of producers influenced by the Detroit beatmaker’s sample chopping, drum-slicing ways have gone on to make some of the more progressive music out right now, to the point where Donuts, in its influence, can be seen as a beat record analogue to the influence of The Velvet Underground & Nico. At the same time, those who have control over the Detroit producer’s actual trove of beats have burrowed further into themselves, making, for the most part, conservative, reactionary rap music. The majority of posthumous releases featuring Dilla’s name have been stuffy at best, and at worst, stunted by a paralysis-inducing reverence that makes it impossible for the featured rappers to explore new territory.
One of the exceptions to that rule was the album Yancey Boys from Dilla’s younger brother, who goes by the name Illa J. The album worked, mostly because it was powered by a primo selection of early Dilla beats, but also due to Illa’s understated approach to lyrics. The key to the success of the Slum Village records that Dilla produced was T3 and Baatin’s willingness to let the beats carry the weight, keeping their rhymes light and fluffy. Illa J with typical younger sibling reverence, adhered to the same philosophy in 2008, and does so again on his new release Sunset Blvd., this time with old Dilla associate Frank Nitt representing as another member of the Yancey Boys and a whole gang of Dilla-ites along for the ride.
That the record features another bumper crop of previously unreleased Dilla beats goes a long way towards explaining its success. “Fisherman”, the first song on the album, is a wonderful example, turning on a beautiful loop which finds Dilla operating in California soul-tinged boom-bap. The beats here are mostly in that mold, warm counterpoints to the Fantastic-era Detroit beats, on which Dilla is subtly breaking out of the rigid boom-bap template in ways that hint at his unique ability to maintain control while working with a vast array of dynamic sounds. (Check, for instance, the way that the sampled cover of “Let the Sun Shine Is” is melded into different beats on “Jeep Volume.”)
Backpack rap like that featured on Sunset Blvd. is often stigmatized as rappity-rap, lyricism for lyricism’s sake that is often exhausting in its density. To the contrary, most of the verses featured on the record are golden-age throwbacks, the raps serving as little more than additional structure through which the loops reverberate. Dilla’s beats need space: the rappers here, most prominently Illa J (a much better rhymer than his brother was) are aware of that.
Then too, there are star turns from veterans sometimes thought to be over the hill: Talib Kweli has a beautiful feature on “Flowers”, and even in self-aggrandizing mode, Common delivers a verse that’s a reminder of the rapper he once was. The worst part of the record though comes from a third veteran, albeit one without the resume of those first two. Frank Nitt has trouble even blending into the background, so cringe-worthy are some of his rhymes and because he's an honorific Yancey Boy, he gets plenty screen time here. The worst attempt at simile on the record belongs to him (“spot you like you Spotify”) but there are plenty of candidates to choose from, and his instincts are still to pile on Dilla beatification which most of the other featured rappers thankfully avoid. The beats, after all, say everything that needs to be said.
Illa J has shown a penchant for straightforward soul in the past, and the slower tracks on the album sparkle. The handclap-happy “Rock My World” has the energy of early aughts B. Rich while Eric Roberson’s turn on the early cut “Lovin’ U” is an early indication of this project’s ambition in comparison to other recent Dilla projects. We get so used to hearing Dilla’s rap beats (there was a five-year time period when every rapper on the come-up would freestyle over “Lightworks”) that we sometimes take for granted the immensity of the musician we lost. Hearing how good his beats sound when turned to soul and R&B makes for a fresh reminder of Dilla’s immense talent, and the ways that it could have been shaped to all kinds of genres, how much he had to contribute to the wider world of music.
But Sunset Blvd. refuses to let itself be colored by regret. This is the most joyous record that we’ve seen from Dilla’s disciples since the producer’s death in 2006. By avoiding the tendency to wallow in the past or to define itself in opposition to contemporary rap, it joins the ranks of albums from Camp Lo and Black Milk, two other former backpack acts who updated their formula successfully this year, breaking free of the cliches that had held them back and making genuinely engaging hip-hop music. | 2013-10-31T02:00:03.000-04:00 | 2013-10-31T02:00:03.000-04:00 | null | Delicious Vinyl | October 31, 2013 | 7.3 | d9e52a43-1d8b-4f0d-9715-0fe50f8bc8f5 | Jonah Bromwich | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jonah-bromwich/ | null |
The Los Angeles producer sticks to his habitual turf, crafting lo-fi drum workouts rooted in vintage house. | The Los Angeles producer sticks to his habitual turf, crafting lo-fi drum workouts rooted in vintage house. | Delroy Edwards: Slap Happy | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/delroy-edwards-slap-happy/ | Slap Happy | Brandon Perlman is one of dance music’s most enigmatic characters. With an attitude that’s equal parts punk rock and gangster rap, the L.A. lo-fi producer better known as Delroy Edwards has often proven to be a cagey (and occasionally combative) figure, happy to take public potshots at his doubters. His aesthetics are heavily informed by classic Chicago house and vintage rap tropes; his alias’ namesake may or may not be a notorious Brooklyn gangster. That he is the son of veteran Hollywood actor Ron Perlman—a fact he didn’t publicly acknowledge until 2016—has only deepened the sense of mystery. His music hasn’t typically been much more forthcoming: Running from chopped-and-screwed rap to murky house and techno, it wears its tape hiss like a defensive shield.
Slap Happy doesn’t shed any new light on the Delroy Edwards persona. At its core, it’s a showcase of Perlman doing what he does best: making raw, stripped-down house tracks that strongly recall late-’80s/early-’90s Chicago house. For fans of his early output, such as his 2012 debut EP, 4 Club Use Only—a record that still stands as one of the defining releases of the L.I.E.S. label’s decade-long run—this will be fantastic news. Slap Happy incorporates a bit more R&B swing than we’ve come to expect from Perlman, but its eight tracks are linear, functional dancefloor cuts that lean heavily on vintage drum machines and classic house formulas. It’s easily one of the most functional and DJ-focused records he’s ever done.
But Slap Happy is also one of Perlman’s least innovative releases in quite some time. That’s not necessarily a bad thing—DJs need their tools—but it does represent a change for Perlman, who’s done all sorts of stylistic zig-zagging in recent years. Back in 2016, he released his long-awaited debut album, Hangin’ at the Beach, an ambitious 30-track odyssey through lo-fi rhythms and West Coast psychedelia. Since then, he’s dropped two more solo full-lengths (Rio Grande and Aftershock) and a couple of EPs, plus a desert-inspired experimental synth album with Dean Blunt, a collaborative EP of breezily funky house with fellow Angeleno Benedek (under the name Trackstars) and another collaborative record, Earth to Mickey, where he crafted synth pop alongside vocalist Mickey van Seenus.
Slap Happy doesn’t offer any intriguing collaborations, and half of its songs are essentially just drum tracks, yet the album has its charms. “Nitemare House” lives up to its title, its spooky synth line rising and falling over a sturdy (if unpolished) house rhythm as an ominous vocal sample (“You die”) repeatedly pops in and out of the mix. Much bubblier is “Rock This Beat,” a jaunty piano-house cut with a strutting bassline and enough canned horn and string sounds to give the whole thing a little symphonic flair. Album closer “I Am the One” might be one of Perlman’s goofiest tracks yet, although its rubbery, almost cartoonish bassline is held in check by the song’s insistently stamping beat.
If Slap Happy has one defining trait, it’s that the rhythms feel noticeably loose. While Perlman has never been the sort of producer who rigidly adheres to the grid, a lot of his past work has been strident, even aggressive. Here, however, the music feels more relaxed; even when the drums are hitting, there’s a laid-back sense of cool at work, most notably on the LP’s title track. On “Slap Happy,” Perlman does his best Jimmy Jam & Terry Lewis impression, nodding to Janet Jackson’s 1986 hit “When I Think of You.” It’s still a house cut, but those silky synths and sweeping horn stabs just might constitute Perlman’s most pop moment yet.
Like many Delroy Edwards releases, Slap Happy is light on narrative, which likely limits its potential appeal, at least for those who don’t have a keen interest in gritty drum workouts. Depending on your perspective, it might be a slapped-together collection of underdeveloped sketches or an unedited creative burst from an artist ruled by instinct. What’s clear is that Perlman is in the midst of arguably the most prolific streak of his entire career, and seems content to simply follow his muse. For the rest of us, there’s pleasure to be found in sitting back and watching him work. | 2020-02-26T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2020-02-26T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Electronic | L.I.E.S. | February 26, 2020 | 6.4 | d9e5b2e0-0e2b-462e-a694-0e500714fd2e | Shawn Reynaldo | https://pitchfork.com/staff/shawn-reynaldo/ | |
The much-loved Liverpool band has its brief career stretched to four CDs by including singles, B-sides, demos, radio sessions, and live stuff. | The much-loved Liverpool band has its brief career stretched to four CDs by including singles, B-sides, demos, radio sessions, and live stuff. | The La’s: Callin' All | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/14319-callin-all/ | Callin' All | Do the La's really need a box set? This is a band that produced one self-titled LP in 1990 before their melodically gifted but cantankerous leader Lee Mavers declared he'd never release another record. Nevertheless, a few La's reunite live every couple of years, sparking rumors about new material...that never materializes. If nothing else, the optimistically titled and lavishly packaged Callin' All suggests that their record company has finally accepted what fans realized at least a decade ago: The cow’s run dry.
Supposedly, Mavers has squirreled away songs in the intervening years, but he doesn't share his stash here. In fact, the band didn't cooperate in any way on Callin' All. How then does Polydor/Universal fill four CDs? There's about a disc and a half worth of material fans might legitimately want, including all of the band's singles and B-sides and some decent demos that never made it into the studio. Then there are six versions of the La's one big cross-border hit. With its hooks, jangle, and now-iconic guitar intro, "There She Goes" is an undeniable classic. The La's render it with such gentle, genuine wonder (about a girl or smack, to name the best-supported theories), that 20 years on the song still gets play whenever an evocation of non-specific longing is needed. And, admittedly, the overproduced album track has aged badly, making a demo or two welcome. But six? "Timeless Melody", the band's truest statement of purpose, appears eight times, "Son of a Gun" six, "I.O.U." four, and so on.
The La's were a superb live act, and two of the set's discs round up concert and radio recordings. This might be cool if the same or similar material hadn't been available online for years for free or if the record company hadn't already released the definitive La's live collection, BBC in Session, in 2006. "Never before or since the La's has there been so much fascination and reverence for a band with so slender an output," journalist Will Hodgkinson opines hyperbolically in a glossy booklet padded with oversized photos and a month-by-month timeline of the band's active run. If this sounds like the bottom of the barrel being scraped, it is.
But even a disingenuous cash-grab can provide an opportunity for historical reflection. The La's one album is a near-perfect synthesis of scouse skiffle, early American rock'n'roll, and British Invasion sounds. Mavers had a genuine talent for earworms and economical song construction, and if he'd tried harder to play well with others instead of pissing them off, bassist John Power might have contributed more like the exceptional jangle-stomper "Alright" (two live versions of which make the box set).
Great art, the prevailing theory on the subject goes, forces the artists who follow it to think differently. By that definition, the La's aren't great, or even very good; Britpop, for example, would have happened regardless, in much the same way. For record companies, of course, great=profitable, and Universal would have consumers believe that the short-lived La's were the greatest band that never really was if it means they can sell the same material over and over. But you know what? Fuck greatness. It never adequately quantifies the intense relationship fans have with certain songs or the way they make them feel. On these terms, the La's own a small, glorious pop legacy. Bypass the bloated $60 set and buy their $12 album. | 2010-06-03T02:00:02.000-04:00 | 2010-06-03T02:00:02.000-04:00 | Rock | Interscope / Polydor | June 3, 2010 | 4.9 | d9ebe2e8-2f35-4537-98b0-0fca4091241d | Amy Granzin | https://pitchfork.com/staff/amy-granzin/ | null |
null | It's rare that a pop history footnote looms as large as the figures she's meant to support, but then again, Betty Davis is one hell of a footnote.
Malcolm Gladwell groupies can tell you all about "connectors," roaming person-to-person hubs that link disparate corners of society. Well, in the late 1960s, Betty Davis-- then Betty Mabry-- was the link connecting such luminaries as Jimi Hendrix, Sly Stone and Miles Davis, the latter ultimately contributing his last name through a relatively short but tumultuous marriage. His 1968 album *Filles de Kilimanjaro* features then-model Betty on the cover; the track "Mademoiselle Mabry" was | Betty Davis: Betty Davis / They Say I'm Different | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/11903-betty-davis-they-say-im-different/ | Betty Davis / They Say I'm Different | It's rare that a pop history footnote looms as large as the figures she's meant to support, but then again, Betty Davis is one hell of a footnote.
Malcolm Gladwell groupies can tell you all about "connectors," roaming person-to-person hubs that link disparate corners of society. Well, in the late 1960s, Betty Davis-- then Betty Mabry-- was the link connecting such luminaries as Jimi Hendrix, Sly Stone and Miles Davis, the latter ultimately contributing his last name through a relatively short but tumultuous marriage. His 1968 album Filles de Kilimanjaro features then-model Betty on the cover; the track "Mademoiselle Mabry" was inspired by her.
As legend has it, Miles grew jealous of Betty's friendship with Hendrix (which Miles allegedly suspected may have been more than that), but Betty's place in the middle of this intersection of geniuses apparently resulted in more than just divorce filings. By popular account, it was Betty who turned Miles on to Sly and Jimi, which in turn may have been the catalyst for Miles' most radical musical evolution: the still awe-inspiring Bitches Brew, released in 1970, a year after his separation from Betty.
Betty Davis' own response was her self-titled 1973 debut, a groundbreaking slab of funk that featured a huge hunk of the Family Stone (it was produced by drummer Greg Errico) and fused soul, sex, and hard rock like the best Sly or Funkadelic disc, albeit from a female perspective. But if George Clinton waved his freak flag proudly, Betty Davis wore it as underwear then rubbed your face in it. An oft-quoted passage in Miles Davis' autobiography gets it just right: "If Betty were singing today she be something like Madonna, something like Prince, only as a woman," wrote Davis back in 1989. "She was the beginning of all that when she was singing as Betty Davis."
No doubt. Betty Davis never gives up in its aim to seduce and destroy; songs like "If I'm In Luck I Might Get Picked Up", "Ooh Yeah", and "Game is My Middle Name" are raw and relentless in their intent. Then-Afrophile nympho Brian Eno might have called it Music for Fucking, though the semi-classic "Anti Love Song" is music for fucking with, specifically fucking with a former lover many suspect is Miles, but who might as well be any man stupid enough to do Betty wrong (in every sense).
Davis' part banshee/part Amazon shriek isn't the smoothest delivery system for seduction, but it does get the point across. Supposedly it was Marc Bolan who encouraged Davis to write her own songs, and there's no question Davis understood the best way for her to perform them was to wail like she was about to bite someone's head off.
As underscored by Oliver Wang's informative liner notes (drawn in part from one of the only interviews Davis has consented to in the last several decades), Davis' ever-growing sense of empowerment played a part in her decision to self-produce her 1974 record, They Say I'm Different. While the self-titled disc's band (which also included Neal Schon on guitar and future disco queen Sylvester on backing vocals) was dissolved, the sound remained mostly the same, and Davis' outré sexuality just as out there.
On "He Was a Big Freak", she essentially spars with a lover over who is freakier: the whipped or the whip-wielder. "Git In There" is house party in progress. The defensive title track finds Davis casting herself against her grandfather's more traditional blues favorites, while "Don't Call Her No Tramp" makes a distinction between an "elegant hustler" and a hooker (according to Wang, the song drew the ire of the NAACP for its "demeaning" depiction of black women). It's a slightly slicker album than its predecessor, but no less unreserved.
Yet despite the fact that these albums drip with personality, Betty Davis remains something of an enigma. Her catalog (including a short but confusing and uneven string of follow-ups to They Say I'm Different) have gone in and out of print over the years, while the singer herself is reportedly living in Pittsburgh, broke, bemused but largely ignoring the attention her brief career continues to garner.
And no wonder: Light in the Attic claims Davis never received any royalties from previous releases. Without steady checks coming in, what's cult fame even worth? Better to just keep on keeping on and let other folks parse out the legacy, but hopefully these reissues will remedy the situation. Anyone whose albums sound as electric as ever over 30 years late deserves more than Davis has received. | 2007-05-22T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2007-05-22T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | null | May 22, 2007 | 8.9 | d9f176ad-3d09-48cc-a1e6-42d3b8de76a8 | Joshua Klein | https://pitchfork.com/staff/joshua-klein/ | null |
The Perth punks are more interested in recording immediate, energetic punk rock than becoming experimentalists, and they’ve certainly nailed the former. | The Perth punks are more interested in recording immediate, energetic punk rock than becoming experimentalists, and they’ve certainly nailed the former. | Cold Meat: Hot and Flustered | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/cold-meat-hot-and-flustered/ | Hot and Flustered | The short catalog of Australian punks Cold Meat reads like a series of dirty little jokes. There’s the band name, which brings to mind damp bologna slices; their equally unappetizing 2018 EP Pork Sword Fever; and their 2016 7" Jimmy’s Lipstick—Jimmy being drummer Charlotte Thorne’s dog, and his lipstick being… well, you can probably figure that out. But the Perth four-piece are advocates of rage as much as lewd humor. The band’s debut LP Hot and Flustered is 23 caustic minutes of punk rock so corrosive it threatens to melt your AirPods.
Across 10 clipped tracks, lead screamer Ashley Ramsey takes aim at star signs, ZZ Top, and music industry execs—perhaps the kind that self-isolate on their superyachts. Backed by a simple triad of guitar, bass, and drums, Ramsey spares none of them. On “Women’s Work,” she weaponizes the fed-up housewife: “Morning tea and lunch is packed/Her husband is a lazy prat,” she shouts, spitting in his food for good measure. “She’s got better things to do than cook and clean up after you!” It’s as if Betty Draper had bulldozed her house and recorded a punk song standing atop the rubble.
Ramsey has many bones to pick throughout Hot and Flustered, but on opening track “Piscies Crisies” her beef is with the astrology revival. She recalls being “lost in a fog” and weeping at the supermarket, wishing she had answers. When she cries “blame it on Mercury!/blame it on Jupiter!” she’s being sarcastic, mocking those who do put faith in the stars—yet she seems envious, too, of the calm that faith might offer. You just can picture her kicking over an entire rack of Cosmo in frustration.
Cold Meat’s sense of humor is what saves them from the trappings of self-serious street punk, but it’s Ramsey’s outrage that keeps their blood pumping. Her voice—sometimes shrill and squeaky, otherwise coarse and phlegm-flecked—sets Cold Meat apart from the swarm of punk revivalists. It’s not that she’s pioneered a new style of singing (we might credit Ari Up and Crass’ Eve Libertine), but her fierce conviction makes it fresh. Cold Meat’s musical arrangement, however, doesn’t do much to rejuvenate the genre. Guitarist Kyle Gleadell and bassist Tim Guthrie deliver the requisite distortion and feedback in a capacity that doesn’t outshine Ramsey, but doesn’t exactly push the envelope, either. Cold Meat appear more interested in recording immediate, energetic punk rock than becoming experimentalists, and they’ve certainly nailed the former.
Oddly enough, Hot and Flustered’s standout track is its most melodic and least expected. “Beach Photography” drags climate deniers and their bogus evidence: “If you have some time to browse my beach photography you’ll see the water levels aren’t on the rise,” Ramsey shouts, as if unveiling Exhibit A, her Instagram account. We’ve all met these people, whether online or at Thanksgiving, and Ramsey’s ability to personify an opposing political standpoint helps her steer clear of cheesy punk protest territory. It’s a surprising display of restraint from the band who recorded “Meat Joy”—but Cold Meat have much more than shock value on their mind. | 2020-04-08T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-04-08T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Static Shock | April 8, 2020 | 7.2 | da029025-3b1d-4a03-b592-398409658d29 | Madison Bloom | https://pitchfork.com/staff/madison-bloom/ | |
The pop survivor shows off her powerhouse voice, dabbles in try-hard slang, and takes tentative steps toward creative rebirth on her first album since 2012. | The pop survivor shows off her powerhouse voice, dabbles in try-hard slang, and takes tentative steps toward creative rebirth on her first album since 2012. | Christina Aguilera: Liberation | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/christina-aguilera-liberation/ | Liberation | The 2010s have been an uncertain decade for Christina Aguilera. The first ten years of her career saw her shapeshift from Delia’s catalog realness to her provocative “Xtina” persona to drama-club queen bee and back. But she kicked off the current decade by covering Marilyn Monroe and reinterpreting Marilyn Manson for Burlesque, one of the campiest pop-star vehicles this side of Glitter. Her most recent album, 2012’s Lotus, was a non-starter featuring two of her fellow coaches of “The Voice,” Cee-Lo Green (pre-date rape allegations) and Blake Shelton. (She’d already reached No. 1 with the fourth member of their inaugural cohort, Adam Levine, thanks to her guest appearance on Maroon 5’s 2010 hit “Moves Like Jagger.”) Lotus was supposed to be a rebirth, but it faltered. Entertainment Weekly called its first-week sales “the sad trombone at the end of [Aguilera’s] comeback.”
The rollout of her eighth album, Liberation, suggests she’s done selling anything that doesn’t fit into her true vision of herself: She posed without makeup on the cover of Paper magazine, and her cover art is similarly stripped down. And the album is, at the very least, a reminder that—holy shit—she can sing. As contemporary radio continues to favor lighter vocal performances from artists like Halsey and Charlie Puth, Aguilera’s powerhouse voice remains the nucleus of her sound, even when she’s tinkering with trap tropes and try-hard slang.
Are those moments a total bummer? Absolutely. “Pipe” includes lyrics like, “I just left a lituation popping by the High Line/Walked in, no list, fuck a go sign,” and, “Got a couple secrets that I'd really love to see if you could keep/Damn, boy, you remind me of my Jeep.” In 2018, “lituation” is a word for children and the cast of “Jersey Shore,” and R. Kelly references belong only in a trash compactor. The album’s Kanye West-produced lead single, “Accelerate,” is equally unconvincing; crackly vocals from the usually hefty-voiced Ty Dolla $ign do it no favors.
Aguilera’s 2010 album, Bionic, featured cutting-edge singles like “Woohoo”—an ode to oral sex featuring Nicki Minaj—and “Elastic Love,” which was co-written by guest vocalist M.I.A. (And this was nearly two years before Madonna enlisted both Minaj and Maya for “Gimme All Your Luvin’.”) The sound of Bionic was perhaps too forward-thinking, a risk that could have reaped the rewards of poptimism if the album had only been released a few years later. Liberation isn’t completely devoid of progressive moments: “Like I Do” is one spot where contemporary pop fare suits Aguilera. D.C. rapper GoldLink, who had his first real crossover hit with last year’s “Crew,” delivers a verse that confirms her continued relevance in hip-hop; his reference to her 1999 debut single, “Genie in a Bottle,” is a tidy hat-tip to the double meaning of Aguilera singing a can’t-do-it-like-me track.
And most people can’t. The ballad “Deserve” is confessional and explicit—“Sometimes I don't think I deserve you/So I say some fucked-up shit just to hurt you,” she sings—resulting in one of her strongest showings on the album. Early interlude “Searching for Maria” finds Aguilera singing operatic a cappella while invoking “How Do You Solve a Problem Like Maria?” from The Sound of Music, followed by a full track called “Maria” (produced by West and Hudson Mohawke) that Aguilera says is about finding her true self. “[It’s] about feeling as if I've gotten really far removed from myself and unable to feel good about looking in the mirror, because I don't feel like I'm connected with my truth,” she told Paper.
“Maria” also marks the beginning of a triptych of album highlights. “Sick of Sittin’” has writing and production credits from Anderson .Paak and wouldn’t be out of place in his personal catalog (save for the lyric, “It’s good pay, but it’s slavery,” which sounds a little tone-deaf in context). “Fall in Line,” a duet with Demi Lovato, is a confidence booster without melodrama. The singers proclaim their refusal to be silenced while screwed chants from an ersatz drill sergeant instruct them, “Left two, three, right, two, three/Shut your mouth, stick your ass out for me.” These are sturdy moments on an album that feels less like an end in itself than a promising first step toward a genuine pop rebirth—moments that are strong enough to inspire hope for Aguilera’s own The Velvet Rope or, at least, My Love Is Your Love. She has certainly still got the range. | 2018-06-20T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-06-20T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | RCA | June 20, 2018 | 6.7 | da0f281d-bba5-459d-a4da-cdfd19cc7606 | Claire Lobenfeld | https://pitchfork.com/staff/claire-lobenfeld/ | |
Another relatively stripped-down album featuring the titanic voice of Florence Welch is troubled by its overwhelmingly beige production. | Another relatively stripped-down album featuring the titanic voice of Florence Welch is troubled by its overwhelmingly beige production. | Florence and the Machine: High as Hope | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/florence-and-the-machine-high-as-hope/ | High as Hope | In 2011, The Guardian coined the phrase “the New Boring” to describe the creeping malaise the UK charts led by Adele and Ed Sheeran and their ballads and sales. Like quicksand, the New Boring devoured promising vocalists like Jessie Ware, post-“Latch” Sam Smith, and Katy B into the adult-contemporary drears. By then, Florence and the Machine had released one album (2009’s Lungs) and were gearing up for another (Ceremonials). But despite working with Britain’s finest purveyors of boring, such as “Rolling in the Deep”’s Paul Epworth, they seemed immune.
Say what you will about the gale-force drama of Lungs or the Pre-Raphaelite witching of Ceremonials: they were never boring. Florence Welch’s vocals—the oft-maligned but best part of her band—make that difficult. In Welch’s voice, “Shake It Out” or “Drumming Song” really do sound like cosmic destruction is afoot due to, respectively, a hangover or a crush shifting his feet slightly. Hers is a massively influential voice, too; almost all the so-called “indie voice” affectations of today’s pop stars either come from Sia or Florence Welch at small scale. Even her dance phase with Calvin Harris worked: Who better to convey EDM’s big, unsubtle emotions than the high priestess of big, unsubtle emotions herself?
Where there’s EDM excess, there’ll probably be a sedate comedown one album later—or, in Florence and the Machine’s case, two of them. High as Hope, like predecessor How Big, How Blue, How Beautiful and the group’s MTV Unplugged stint, is supposed to be Welch’s requisite stripped-down, personal album. Unlike How Big, How Blue, How Beautiful, it actually has a claim. She’s credited as a producer for the first time. The rafter-shaking anthems still exist, but they’re less often belted but delivered conversationally, like a frank chat with a friend who just happens to chat at top decibel. A couple songs attempt to be piano ballads before the big gospel choruses claw their way out of the arrangements. It’s a Florence and the Machine album with a track called “No Choir,” which says it all.
It’s also a Florence and the Machine album with every song produced with Emile Haynie, which also says it all. Like Jeff Bhasker or Alex da Kid, Haynie has a signature style: enormous ballads made of dusty air, like the dregs of Lana Del Rey’s Born to Die or multiple Eminem ballads. It’s boring as bombast. Some artists can make that work, like FKA twigs, who knows how to work with space, or Kanye West’s “Runaway,” which is meant to sound empty. But Florence and the Machine are a terrible fit.
“South London Forever” shows how the two producers are at odds. Welch is relatively sprightly for someone with her vocal heft, surveying her old drinking grounds with the wry eye of early Laura Marling. Haynie, characteristically, tries to turn the track into an anthem, piano and percussion chugging along as if on uphill roller-coaster rails. Nobody wins: Welch provides no anthem while Haynie unendingly hurries her along toward one.
Attempted anthems abound. “Grace,” an apology for the mess Welch left her little sister, begins with the Rachel Getting Married-esque “I’m sorry I ruined your birthday” and reflects amid jazzy restraint—but then, in come the choirs, because of course they do. The same for Patti Smith tribute “Patricia;” the same for “100 Years,” or “June,” a glum song about a high. Even when the swells work, they feel overly familiar and formulaic—particularly on an album with a smaller lyrical scale. Welch’s songwriting falls from the clouds of heady, sumptuous myth to the mundanities of being a big-name musician: performing (it’s lonely), fame (it’s hollow), and, too frequently, songwriting itself (it’s hard). But for every bracing moment like, “At 17, I started to starve myself”—the opening line of single “Hunger,” which Welch considered deleting for too much candor—there’s an abstraction like, “I felt nervous in a way that can’t be named” or a faux-profundity like, “I don’t know anything except that green is so green.”
The less allegorical Welch gets, the less she gets away with airiness. And while her subject matter is more direct, her melodies are more meandering, unmoored from structure. This wandering works for a memory piece like “South London Forever,” but elsewhere, verses stumble aimlessly around choruses to the point where three-and-a-half-minute songs like “Hunger” feel twice their length. At times they don’t seem like songs, perhaps since some weren’t supposed to be: “Hunger,” according to Welch, was conceived as a poem, perhaps one meant for her forthcoming Useless Magic collection. This explains a lot.
There are tracks to like here. The first half of “Grace” is coolly understated and could be affecting if only it continued in this vein. “Big God” brings in Jamie xx on writing, and the difference is immediately obvious. The song’s ominous piano line, storm-cloud strings, and smoldering sax from Kamasi Washington (who plays throughout) provide tumult worthy of Florence and the Machine’s highest drama. The track sounds like it comes from a more ambitious album, where Florence and the Machine still do what they still do best: blowing little everyday feelings to the scale of the Book of Revelation. More often, though, Welch sounds content and resigned, recollecting the stormy Saturdays of the past with a Sunday-morning penitent’s shrug and a born-again sigh. How small, how beige, how disappointing. | 2018-07-04T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-07-04T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | Republic | July 4, 2018 | 5.7 | da1644dd-b5d8-4a6f-95d4-e401c719eadc | Katherine St. Asaph | https://pitchfork.com/staff/katherine-st. asaph/ | |
On his latest, the drill legend stays true to his core: tales of trauma and paranoia that feel like watching him argue with a therapist through a crack in the door. | On his latest, the drill legend stays true to his core: tales of trauma and paranoia that feel like watching him argue with a therapist through a crack in the door. | G Herbo: PTSD | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/g-herbo-ptsd/ | PTSD | G Herbo lives two lives. To some, the 24-year-old is simply a famous ex-boyfriend, an inescapable figure in the culture surrounding the Instagram-based rumor mill The Shade Room, which has closely documented his messy and complicated relationship with the IG-famous influencer Ari Fletcher (he pleaded guilty to misdemeanor battery earlier this year). At this point, I’m sure VH1’s Love & Hip-Hop would write Herb a blank check to let cameras into his life. But G Herbo doesn’t need reality television—at least, not right now—because he also happens to be a rapper that has helped shape the last decade of hip-hop.
In 2012, a 16-year-old Herb released “Kill Shit” alongside Lil Bibby, a breathless marathon about trauma, pain, and Chicago life that helped lay the foundation for drill, arguably rap’s premier subgenre of the 2010s. By the time Herb was 18 years old, he had a classic Chicago mixtape and multiple street-level hits—his 2012 single “Gangway” has become timeless, so much so that Lil Uzi Vert flipped it into his comeback track “Free Uzi” last year. If Herb didn’t release another song past his teenage years, his legacy would remain, but his transition into the major-label rap cycle has been seamless.
PTSD, G Herbo’s latest album, is proof that of his two lives, his rap half still takes precedent. Over glossier, high-budget production than usual and alongside a handful of rap’s biggest names, PTSD stays true to Herb’s core: first-hand tales of living with trauma and paranoia and failing to overcome that trauma and paranoia with drugs and success. He tells his stories in a fiery, deep voice, emphasized by a chilling album cover, which replaces the American flag’s 50 stars with faces of friends that he’s lost.
From the Don Cannon-produced intro, which samples JAY-Z’s classic (and basement freestyle standard) intro to The Dynasty, Herb learns that the hardest battle is with himself. “Ain’t no lil bitty pill just gon’ heal a man/He can’t chill, he need a pill, guess he too militant/Oh, you just like us, they robbed you of your innocence, huh?” he raps, in a rapid-fire delivery that could be air-dropped into ’00s Harlem. Listening to Herb on the intro (and for much of the album) is like watching him argue with a therapist through a crack in the door.
But Herb’s stories come to life when he has a partner to bounce off of. On “Party in Heaven,” alongside fellow former drill staple Lil Durk, the pair reflect over a beat chilly enough for a Drake time-and-location track. On “Lawyer Fees,” his rapping is so passionate he begins to swerve offbeat, interrupted only by Polo G’s grim hook: “Demons in my head, and I trip every time them voices speak.” Eeriest of all is the Juice WRLD-assisted “PTSD”: “I made it on my own, they said I’d be in jail or dead/I’ve seen my brothers fall over and over again/Don’t stand too close to me, I got PTSD,” wails Juice. It’s a bleak song made even more so by Juice WRLD’s recent death, but there’s still a world where you can imagine it being catchy enough to fit within Hot 97’s daily rotation.
PTSD’s missteps arrive when the album jettisons Herb’s rawness and begins to feel like any other album with access to major-label pockets. “Shooter” doesn’t sound like a G Herbo song; it’s like a record executive pieced together his vocals and tacked on a Jacquees chorus without Herb’s knowledge. The same could be said for the BJ the Chicago Kid-featuring “Gangstas Cry,” which is sappy, a tone Herb normally avoids.
“Feelings” feels like the unification of Herb’s two worlds. He balances his demons (“I got diagnosed but I don’t want no crazy pills,” he admits) with reflections on his highly publicized relationship. “Talked to my kid mom today, that was kinda hard/Sick of all the drama in my life, we ain’t gotta start,” says Herb. It’s the type of honest and thoughtful song that directly connects PTSD to his early raps like “Kill Shit,” as Herb refuses to become yet another artist known more for headlines than their music. | 2020-03-05T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2020-03-05T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rap | Machine Entertainment Group / Epic | March 5, 2020 | 7.3 | da16d4da-3e74-4ab2-b812-4c5753bfb7ad | Alphonse Pierre | https://pitchfork.com/staff/alphonse-pierre/ | |
On his latest album, the Massachusetts rapper recognizes the value of sticking to a formula and gently retooling what works instead of drawing attention to what doesn’t. | On his latest album, the Massachusetts rapper recognizes the value of sticking to a formula and gently retooling what works instead of drawing attention to what doesn’t. | Cousin Stizz: Just for You | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/cousin-stizz-just-for-you/ | Just for You | Cousin Stizz can hardly believe he’s made it this far. The Massachusetts rapper’s songs exist within a strict binary, bouncing between party anthems and clear-eyed reflections on his scrappy Dorchester upbringing. No matter what story he’s telling, it’s sold with a preternatural cool, like that fun-loving relative you spend an extra half-hour smoking gas with before Thanksgiving dinner. “Shoutout,” the breakout single from Stizz’s 2015 debut Suffolk County, helped him land a deal with RCA Records in 2016. And though he’s never produced a chart-topping single, his unassuming demeanor has cemented his status as a hometown hero for one of rap’s most underrepresented regions.
Stizz has since parted ways with RCA and reclaimed his independence. Just for You could’ve been an excuse for him to push boundaries as a result. But after some ill-advised experiments on 2017’s One Night Only, he’s self-aware enough to recognize the value in gently retooling what works instead of drawing attention to what doesn’t. So the formula goes unchanged here. “When shit get real, from the pavement to roof/Summer showers, winter snows; count fans at the shows,” he raps on opener “Save the Day,” his disbelief shining just bright enough to briefly betray his slick persona.
At their best, Stizz’s raps create the illusion of intimacy without giving the plot away. On early single “Blessings,” he raps a quick aside about moving drugs to buy cars before the story ends abruptly. He can get specific—namedropping Boston streets like Talbot Avenue on “Save the Day” and neighborhoods like Savin Hill on “Guts & Glory”—while also establishing boundaries on what he’s willing to reveal: the subjects and tales of brothers-in-arms songs like “Look Both Ways” and “RIP Bro” remain nameless. These moments are very “if you know, you know,” amplifying the intrigue of his story but being just removed enough for a listener to graft their own experiences onto it.
This calculated remove backfires when there’s less personality in the writing. Bars like “I came from nothin’, I mean that/I got their neck where my feet at/That shit was all for the mean bag,” from “After the Buzzer,” land because of their choppy delivery, not for their clever wordplay. “Stone” and “MIA” are full of bland flexing that could’ve come from any rapper with a YouTube account, the lyrics outshined by the Kal Banx beats that propel them. Stizz’s charisma—his sheer commitment to gliding over all others with a diamond-encrusted Dreamworks smirk— saves these songs, which is a testament to his skills as a performer.
Stizz’s production ear keeps Just for You bouncing along. He’s comfortable over a range of beats, including the shimmering drums and vocal sample on “Blessings,” produced by Tee-WaTT and M. Ali, and the gloomy sonics of “LBS,” co-produced by Stizz’s longtime collaborator Snapz. Boston rapper-producer Latrell James bends ticking 808s around neon-drenched synths that give the rags-to-riches tale of “Guts & Glory” a sleek nightlife glamour. Stizz’s toasts to the homies and career aspirations hit harder thanks to the album’s handsome production.
Though he has yet to break through the industry’s glass ceiling, Stizz has built himself a respectable independent career. He’s philosophically aligned with a kindred spirit like New Orleans stalwart Curren$y, who happens to be Just for You’s only guest. On closing track “Star Power,” they address paranoia and sudden failure from opposing perspectives, with Stizz’s fears temporarily getting the best of his good fortune: “The glass ain’t half-full here, it’s half-broken.” He’s used to good things disappearing suddenly and refuses to rest on his laurels, but that doesn’t mean he’s above giving his base exactly what they want. | 2022-02-16T00:00:00.000-05:00 | 2022-02-16T00:00:00.000-05:00 | Rap | self-released | February 16, 2022 | 7 | da25e322-6da9-45ea-a55f-dabe2c2616a8 | Dylan Green | https://pitchfork.com/staff/dylan-green/ | |
Efficient and impersonal, the rock band’s latest album is filled with sunny-side platitudes and peppy tempos that scan as forced fun. | Efficient and impersonal, the rock band’s latest album is filled with sunny-side platitudes and peppy tempos that scan as forced fun. | Two Door Cinema Club: Keep On Smiling | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/two-door-cinema-club-keep-on-smiling/ | Keep On Smiling | Two Door Cinema Club haven’t been shy about changing with the times. On their 2010 debut, Tourist History, the Northern Ireland trio embodied a transitional era of indie rock, packaging the youthful pluck of Vampire Weekend and Arctic Monkeys with the tightly wound post-punk guitars that ran through so much UK indie during the ’00s. Over subsequent albums, however, their sound has evolved in tandem with the tastes of alt-rock radio programmers. They’ve ironed away the rumpled edges of their debut in favor of polished dance-rock, following in the footsteps of acts like Glass Animals by leaning into synthesizers and putting a slick, contemporized spin on ’80s pop influences. Consider them, if you will, farm-system indie: a band that presents as indie while positioning themselves for something greater, in hopes that with the right break or a licensable-enough song they might get called up to the alt-rock majors.
So far that hasn’t happened for Two Door Cinema Club—the group’s steady streams have never translated into real radio support—but they’re close enough to the piñata that you understand why they keep swinging. Recorded with assistance from the Killers/Bloc Party producer Jacknife Lee, a studio pro as synced to alt-radio’s wavelength as any, the band’s fifth album, Keep On Smiling, revels in the sounds of the moment, even as it ostensibly calls back to the New Wave funk of Talking Heads and INXS. It’s a record as efficient and impersonal as a frozen yogurt shop on the street level of a mixed-use condo development.
True to its title, Keep On Smiling keeps its chin up, with songs about the good old times and the even better ones that lay ahead. “We say it all of the time, the time is now, it’s now or never,” singer Alex Trimble cheers on “Wonderful Life.” The Portugal. The Man-flavored bounce of “Lucky” is similarly fit for pool playlists. But as fixated as these songs are on the bright side, they’re never all that convincing. While the group comes through as usual with hooks, Keep On Smiling’s sunny-side platitudes and peppy tempos scan as forced fun.
This mix doesn’t do these songs any favors, either. They’re imbalanced, too heavy on chirping guitars and reedy synthesizers, which along with Trimble’s falsetto tips them toward the shrill side. They beg for some thicker low end to cut through the treacle, and maybe just a hint of darkness to temper their artificial sweetness. Trimble’s cadence, meanwhile, borrows heavily from David Byrne, especially on the “Burning Down the House”-esque “Everybody’s Cool.” But those echoes of Talking Heads only underscore how desperately he lacks Byrne’s wild edge or cutting view of the world. If anything, these songs tout living the very unexamined life that Byrne’s used to mock. Keep On Smiling’s glossy veneer never disguises its particle-board center. | 2022-09-02T00:02:00.000-04:00 | 2022-09-02T00:02:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Glassnote | September 2, 2022 | 4.7 | da266196-cc53-44bf-863c-4c5e6589f15b | Evan Rytlewski | https://pitchfork.com/staff/evan-rytlewski/ | |
A composer and singer/songwriter who joined Dirty Projectors for the tour behind 2012's Swing Lo Magellan, Bell moved to Alaska from the Soviet Union when she was younger. Край (Krai) is a dizzy collision of her past and her present, occupying a middle ground between Russian folk song, chamber music, and avant-garde rock music. | A composer and singer/songwriter who joined Dirty Projectors for the tour behind 2012's Swing Lo Magellan, Bell moved to Alaska from the Soviet Union when she was younger. Край (Krai) is a dizzy collision of her past and her present, occupying a middle ground between Russian folk song, chamber music, and avant-garde rock music. | Olga Bell: Край (Krai) | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/19166-olga-bell-krai/ | Край (Krai) | Край (Krai) is Olga Bell's fond tribute to backwaters, to half-forgotten towns. In Russian, the album title means "edge" or "limit", referring to the areas away from cities and cultural centers where you can walk into a kitchen and find your grandparents' culture still very much alive. Bell's album, written entirely in Russian, evokes crowded rooms where the air is thick with unfamiliar food smells, where heated conversations you can't quite follow take place in a language you no longer quite remember.
A composer and singer/songwriter who joined the ranks of Dirty Projectors for the tour behind 2012's Swing Lo Magellan, Bell moved to Alaska from the Soviet Union when she was younger. Край (Krai) is a dizzy collision of her past and her present, a meeting space where the oldest sounds she knows haunt the music she makes now. The result occupies some gnarly middle ground between Russian folk song, chamber music, and avant-garde rock music.
The album is a stirring collection of strange, thrilling noises where it's difficult to know, exactly, what is going on at any given moment. Vibraphones and glockenspiel melt into synthesizers, and Bell's vocals dip, moan, and smear into lower registers with the help of pitch-shifting software. You can imagine you're hearing some of the Knife's last album in the blur, Holly Herndon's work with the sound of human breath caught in a digital blender, or an artfully curdled, Cubist take on Bell's current band.
Bell scored the album for a colorful menagerie of instruments; cello, mallet percussion, guitar, electric bass, and more sample and more crawl across its surface. The instruments sound suspended on some steep dunking line between past and present that Bell's located—new sounds plunge into the deep and come up old, and old sounds become freshly strange. The synth on "Stavropol Krai" strongly resembles a wailing clarinet; on "Krasnoyarsk Krai", the vibes and glockenspiel tinkle in a minor key above a throbbing cello and Bell's ghostly, pitched-down vocals. A chiming electric guitar picks up the figure the vibes were playing and carries them around, dropping them all over the surface of the music like pulverized glass.
Bell's voice, spread across in various octaves, plays the role of every single townsperson of every krai in her memory. Her multitracked vocals spread out to every corner of the mix. Many of the lyrics, translated into English, probe the feeling of being forgotten or left behind: "God's too high for us/Moscow's far too distant," she laments on "Primorsky Krai". "Kransnador Krai" tells the story of a Cossack warrior riding home on an old path: "Ancestral glory is gone/ New people are here/ Not a pleasant thought." The "blinking township lights" on "Krasnoyarsk Krai" are, implicitly, seen from a distance—and distance is what Bell is working to close on Край (Krai). Her mesmerizing, eventful, and strange album brings these remote voices close enough to feel their breath in our ears. | 2014-04-28T02:00:02.000-04:00 | 2014-04-28T02:00:02.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | New Amsterdam | April 28, 2014 | 8 | da354e84-a41d-4dfb-ae60-d7862816537f | Jayson Greene | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jayson-greene/ | null |
On his Polow Da Don-produced King of Hearts, the endearlngly romantic vocalist makes a bid for a higher level of R&B-world recognition. | On his Polow Da Don-produced King of Hearts, the endearlngly romantic vocalist makes a bid for a higher level of R&B-world recognition. | Lloyd: King of Hearts | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/15658-king-of-hearts/ | King of Hearts | No contemporary R&B singers approximate the elusive stomach-butterfly rush of infatuation as consistently as Lloyd. "Lay It Down", King of Hearts' peak moment and a lead single that predates the record by nearly a year, is an exemplar: Its innocent, almost naïve earnestness is married to a preternatural sense for R&B vocal acrobatics, giving dimension and believability to his devotion. A distinctive talent, Lloyd often let his vocals dance around the periphery of a song, giving his best tracks a spacey, removed quality. As a whole, the LP takes a major step toward streamlining his sound, pushing Lloyd's voice to the center and making a bid for a higher level of recognition in the R&B world. Despite a few missteps, it is a major success, in large part due to the chemistry of Lloyd with producer Polow Da Don.
Lloyd's knack for endearing romanticism is a vehicle for great music, and when the record falters, it feels like a misunderstanding of how his talent operates. The superfluous intro track can be forgiven thanks to its brevity and a surprisingly clunker-free verse from the Game. But "Dedication to My Ex (Miss That)", the first full song on the album, is bizarre and clumsy. The generic, faux-Motown beat frames the track as a joke, along the lines of Cee Lo's "Fuck You". Perhaps the right performance could have saved lyrics that fetishize the vagina as a relationship's vestigial remnant, but it's hard to buy the tongue-in-cheek self-deprecation of a line like "I'm about to kill this bitch!" from an artist typically so wrapped up in enthusiastic sincerity. Aside from this misstep and a platitudinous track aptly titled "World Cry", King of Hearts seems perfectly matched to fit Lloyd's strengths.
Polow clearly understands those strengths. Outside the occasional producer's flourish-- like the grinding bass break that opens Young Jeezy's verse on "Be the One"-- his work is primarily devoted to underlining Lloyd's vocals for maximum impact. On "Naked", Lloyd's performance has a dreamy distance from the physical reality of sexuality; instead, his vocals are draped in softly descending washes of guitar and muted trumpet lines, giving a sensuous texture to this awestruck ode to beauty. Single "Cupid"'s exuberant chorus baits cynical listeners: It works so well as a radio single because, through mild repetition, the hook's infectious idealism overwhelms any resistance.
The heart of the record, though, are tracks like the euphoric headrush "Jigsaw", where Lloyd's sense of rhythm lets his vocals dance confidently in the subdivisions of the groove, balancing sugary enthusiasm with deft physicality. Many of the album's best songs seem to inspire comparisons with dancing: There is a connection to the idea of dance as liberation here, as Lloyd's blushing sincerity builds up potential energy, the nimble performance acts as a release valve. In an echo of Aaliyah's "Loose Rap", album highlight "Shake It 4 Daddy" finds Lloyd dancing atop a vocal shadow; somehow, in his hands, even strip club storytelling comes across as boyish flirtation. Although the lyrics imply he's in the audience, the song's excitement suggests Lloyd is the one performing. | 2011-08-05T02:00:02.000-04:00 | 2011-08-05T02:00:02.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | Interscope / Zone 4 Inc. | August 5, 2011 | 7.9 | da4237ba-7b1c-41ec-8ad8-b2657f18e274 | David Drake | https://pitchfork.com/staff/david-drake/ | null |
Led by singer-songwriter Blair Howerton, the debut from the sun-baked indie band sounds cozy but yearns for open spaces. | Led by singer-songwriter Blair Howerton, the debut from the sun-baked indie band sounds cozy but yearns for open spaces. | Why Bonnie: 90 in November | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/why-bonnie-90-in-november/ | 90 in November | Nothing underscored the value of space like the pandemic. This must have been tough for recent city transplants like Blair Howerton of the indie rock quartet Why Bonnie, who’d left Texas for New York City right before the pandemic. The world’s cultural capital loses much of its allure when suddenly the world has shrunk to the size of your modest walk-up.
It’s no wonder why so much of Why Bonnie’s debut album 90 in November, which Howerton wrote in her Brooklyn apartment, pines for blues skies, blanketing heat, and aimless road trips of her youth in Texas. On “Galveston,” she revisits a childhood vacation attraction barely touched by time: “Candyland beaches/Water too salty to swim/Passed all of the dance halls and dive-ins/Looks just the same as it did back then.” On the sun-baked title track, she recalls cruising, “pressing my luck with a $2 fill up.” That same luck runs out on “Nowhere LA,” where a road trip goes awry: “Louisiana in a broken car,” she narrates, “at the whim of a kind stranger with a crowbar.” The relationship she documents in that song doesn’t fare any better than the car.
Howerton’s an economical lyricist who can paint vivid scenes with just a few strokes, and the melancholy pangs of her voice cut through the music’s dreamy haze just enough without disrupting the bliss. With their fractured guitars, bleary vocals, and on-and-off twang, Why Bonnie join the growing cluster of bands fusing the raggedy guitars of ‘90s indie rock with the dusky sensibilities of country. There are shades of the lilac-gilded grace of Waxahatchee’s Saint Cloud in the sweetly understated roots of quieter tracks like “Silsbee” and “Superhero,” while the guitar fits of “Sharp Turn” and “Lot’s Wife” conjure the more turbulent stretches of Wednesday’s Twin Plagues, an album that similarly picks at childhood memories through the weary lens of adulthood.
To the extent they do differentiate themselves from every other band that’s somehow landed on the once-improbable combination of Sheryl Crow by way of Pavement, it’s through sheer warmth: Why Bonnie bank on easy vibes over originality. Guitarist Sam Houdek and keyboardist Kendall Powell blanket these tracks in soft, pillowy tones. The album’s mellow mix, meanwhile, tempers the intensity of these songs’ loud/soft fluctuations. Any harsh edges are more implied than felt.
Despite the pensive lean of Howerton’s lyrics, 90 in November is decidedly a pleasure listen. Why Bonnie recorded it in a small town just off the Gulf Coast, which probably helped lend to its spacious but cozy feel. These songs were born of yearning for the open expanses and leisurely pace of rural Texas. It’s only fitting, then, that Why Bonnie turned them into a record that satiates that craving. | 2022-08-23T00:01:00.000-04:00 | 2022-08-23T00:01:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Keeled Scales | August 23, 2022 | 6.9 | da48a11c-055b-4a53-99fd-ffa60ac6cf9c | Evan Rytlewski | https://pitchfork.com/staff/evan-rytlewski/ | |
On his first album in nearly a decade, the absurdist rapper uses his enormous vocabulary to riff on race, class, and becoming a parent—but he still hasn’t outgrown of fart jokes. | On his first album in nearly a decade, the absurdist rapper uses his enormous vocabulary to riff on race, class, and becoming a parent—but he still hasn’t outgrown of fart jokes. | MC Paul Barman: (((echo chamber))) | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/mc-paul-barman-echo-chamber/ | (((echo chamber))) | MC Paul Barman is back—and, yes, he still raps like that. It’s been more than 15 years since the esoteric New York rapper worked his way into the Napster download folders (if not always the hearts) of alternative hip-hop fans with his wry pileups of five-dollar words and cameos on Masta Ace and Deltron records. “It’s abundantly clear there’s profundity here,” he bragged on his 2002 album Paullelujah!, though that profundity was in the eye of the beholder. His shtick was virtuosic in certain respects—he’s probably never met a crossword puzzle he couldn’t solve—and stupid in others. Critics grew tired of him pretty quickly, but among a certain subset of hip-hop fans who use the word “quotable” as a noun, he remains a cult favorite.
Now 43, Barman is a relic of a far sillier alternative hip-hop era, the days of Dr. Octagon, Quasimoto, and Handsome Boy Modeling School. A few stray singles and features aside, he retreated from music after his 2009 album Thought Balloon Mushroom Cloud, in part to focus on raising a family that he raps about quite often on his comeback effort, (((echo chamber)))—a significantly more grown-up outing than his early-’00s records. He continues to smash words together for the sheer absurdity of it, but he’s also rapping about what a picky eater his kid is and the toll having a three-year-old takes on your sex life.
Although Barman is further removed from the hip-hop vanguard than ever, “the crested bird of nested words” still has some tastemakers in his corner. Questlove produced a good chunk of the record, and his minimalist beats and distinctive drums cleverly play on the lighthearted spirit of ’80s rap. MF DOOM provides a pair of beats, including the wonderfully loony “(((believe that)))”—one of two songs featuring Open Mike Eagle, who is perhaps Barman’s most relevant kindred spirit at the moment. Mark Ronson offers a knowingly obnoxious interpolation of the Christmas standard “Sleigh Ride” on “(((happy holidays))),” while Barman’s onetime mentor Prince Paul produces “YOUNGMAN Speaks on (((race))).”
That track, which is the album’s centerpiece, finds Barman attempting a feat at which few white rappers have ever succeeded: He tries to say something insightful about whiteness. And he comes closer than most, even if the song sometimes feels like a flood of loosely connected thoughts in search of a thesis. “Race is a lie/It just makes poor whites never taste of the pie,” he raps. “‘I’m not white, I’m Italian’ harkens back to when swarthy was almost as unworthy as black men.” Reflecting on his own heritage, he points out that, “Jews speak the language of both privilege and genocide/We've only recently been invited to dress up in their tennis whites.” Messy as they are, Barman’s musings on race, class, and parental responsibility give the record some weight and structure. His M.O. is no longer just wordplay for wordplay’s sake; he’s finally trying to mine meaningful ideas from his enormous vocabulary.
Too often, though, he stops short when it counts. Asked to explain the provocative title (((echo chamber))) in a recent interview, Barman gave a vague answer about how echo chambers represent the groupthink that’s “pushing us backwards towards tribalism and false divisions.” That response doesn’t remotely pass the smell test. As any Jew with an online presence—including Barman, surely—is aware, those triple parentheses are an anti-Semitic symbol used by white supremacists to single out Jews for harassment. (“It’s closed captioning for the Jew-blind,” as one since-suspended Twitter account put it.)
If you’re going to co-opt such a loaded symbol, you’ve got to at least explain your rationale or demonstrate how you (like some Jews on Twitter) are trying to reclaim it. But Barman ducks that responsibility, and that evasiveness is part of a pattern on (((echo chamber))). Whenever he begins to touch on anything too personal, controversial, or difficult, Barman retreats, defaulting to his usual irreverent word salad. “With each heartbeat repeated and fart meat excreted, I spark offense against the dark arts’ heat, neat!” he raps on the title track. Promising as the maturity he shows elsewhere on the album may be, it’s probably for the best that this guy never tried to pass himself off as the voice of a generation. | 2018-05-25T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-05-25T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Mello Music Group | May 25, 2018 | 6 | da4f433e-8bd9-4a39-a47f-89176c498c23 | Evan Rytlewski | https://pitchfork.com/staff/evan-rytlewski/ | |
The Irish musician’s solo debut draws on the aesthetics of field recordings for understated, slow-burning experimental pop that prompts its own meditation on the creative process. | The Irish musician’s solo debut draws on the aesthetics of field recordings for understated, slow-burning experimental pop that prompts its own meditation on the creative process. | Elaine Howley: The Distance Between Heart and Mouth | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/elaine-howley-the-distance-between-heart-and-mouth/ | The Distance Between Heart and Mouth | As a founding member of Cork band the Altered Hours and a collaborator in projects like Crevice, Howlbux, and Morning Veils, Elaine Howley has spanned impressive territory in the Irish musical underground. On her solo debut, The Distance Between Heart and Mouth, the singer and musician turns to twilit experimental pop as she muses on closeness and in-between worlds. Recorded on a 4-track cassette machine and released by Belfast label Touch Sensitive, it’s an ad hoc collection of songs that draw their muted power from everyday ritual—a testament to the magic of not making plans.
The idea for the album originated with a 2018 series on Cosmosis, Howley’s fortnightly show on Dublin Digital Radio, where she invited listeners to submit unfinished material for broadcast and aired her own spacey moodboard of field recordings and drone. With this, a door swung open. Relinquishing end goals and self-judgment, the Tipperary artist committed to recording each day in the spare room of her Cork home. Across nine lamp-lit tracks, she casts a shadow play that feels like a spiritual sequel to the lo-fi avant-pop of Crevice’s 2017 debut In Heart. Opener “Silent Talk” packs a thrifty glow via cozy Omnichord shapes and widescreen analog synth; “Autumn Speak” builds on the almost diaristic energy. Beneath a web of whirling ambience, overdubbed toms, and scorched lead guitar, elliptical refrains (“I won’t ever be nice again/You won’t ever ask twice again”) zig-zag between transfixing and foreboding.
Howley’s songwriting voice has long felt autonomous to the point of defiance. A refrain in the Altered Hours’ song “Thistle” doubles as a warning: “I’m not your snowdrop/I’m a thistle.” Here, that spirit is pared down to a cosmic swoon that plays with closeness and distance in the realm of revelation. Originally featured on Touch Sensitive’s 2019 compilation Wacker That, “Song for Mary Black” is a looped paean to the eponymous Irish folk singer that holds space for the overlap between womanhood and childhood memory. A soulful peak driven by a submerged Latin shuffle, “To the Test” feels more akin to a cosmic tête-à-tête than an open letter. “Silent Talk” is more transparent: “It took me 16 weeks to look you in the eye,” Howley murmurs. The subtle tension between specificity and obscurity feels like a real payoff.
For all their dusky charm, these songs were not born of the night. In a recent interview, Howley cited the example of Irish novelist Kevin Barry, who treats writing as “a first-thing-in-the-morning practice.” Likewise, Howley said, she made it her daily mission to “play a little bit, even if it’s a small bit.” It accounts for the album’s heavy hypnopompic glow, a mood that’s astral to the point of being analgesic. Like a dream half-sketched upon waking, the pitched-down vocals and spliced drum machines of “Archeological Longing” dovetail with “Buried Way Out,” where arachnoid guitar shapes and Julia Holter-like spoken word summon a sphere far beyond Howley’s spare room. Conjuring Leslie Winer, the skeletal dub of “See Saw Seen” goes further yet, oscillating tape delay until it stretches into a trance. Summoned each morning before the world had any chance of weighing in, The Distance Between Heart and Mouth is a spectral slow burn that refuses to trip over itself to get anywhere in particular. By absorbing the wisdom of the process, Howley permits her craft to resound deeper than ever. | 2022-08-16T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2022-08-16T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Experimental / Pop/R&B | Touch Sensitive | August 16, 2022 | 7.6 | da512035-95e2-4f6a-af46-ec82c2dd761d | Brian Coney | https://pitchfork.com/staff/brian-coney/ | |
The name of this Austin trio has changed, but their delayed-gratification summer vibes have only become more refined and elemental on this welcome debut LP. | The name of this Austin trio has changed, but their delayed-gratification summer vibes have only become more refined and elemental on this welcome debut LP. | Pure X: Pleasure | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/15575-pleasure/ | Pleasure | After a few scattered 7"s, Pure Ecstasy decided to up and change their name to Pure X for their debut full-length. But Pure X are hardly suffering from a personality crisis-- a San Francisco cover band already had the former handle copyrighted, so the abbreviation occurred out of necessity. For those of us who heard something special in loose, wandering tracks like 2009 B-side "You're in It Now" or "Voices" a year later, nearly everything on Pleasure will feel like a welcome distillation of the elements that made those songs sound promising. In turn, the band's new moniker should seem completely fitting: No longer just a kick-around project from three Austin dudes, Pure X have become the refined and elemental version of their former selves.
Fans of those early singles don't need to worry too much. Pure X remain very much attached to their singular style. Jesse Jenkins' bass still sounds peanut-butter sticky, while Nate Grace's guitars showcase pond-ripple textures and Mideast-tinged tones one moment and hemorrhage syrupy feedback the next. Like grunge for beachcombers or shoegaze for people happy to be alive, Pleasure is all about texture and patience, stretched to ensure maximum zoneage. Anything MDMA-related about the moniker is a total misnomer-- this sounds like music made by people who mainline Benadryl.
Sure, the album's blown-out guitars, dusky shoreline vibes, and drug-sick crawl can seem awfully familiar. But Pure X aren't just coasting on shaggy fumes. For one, this is a terrific-sounding record, built for headphones and high volume. Recorded live with no overdubs, everything emulsifies beatifically while a disorienting quality still looms, like riding in a four-door on the freeway with only the back left window down.
Pure X also set themselves apart by both honoring their influences and recombining them in interesting ways. Opener "Heavy Air" sounds like a chopped 'n' screwed Real Estate, while the new version of "Voices" suggests My Bloody Valentine channeling the Everly Brothers. After all, these songs owe a lot to the starry-eyed romantic ballads of the late 1950s and early 60s. Instead of harnessing the rebel cool of that era, Pure X get lost in the simplicity and slow-burn daydreaminess, stoking these characteristics with uniquely visceral reverb and a zonked tunefulness that impart a vaporous sensuality.
But the most defining and pleasurable thing about Pleasure is the guitars-- impressive for a record that doesn't care about show-off guitar shit at all. Grace lets his pedals do most of the talking, gracefully sussing out emotional detail with subtle melody while still creating memorable moments, like the cheap firework burnout at the end of "Half Here". Pure X may not be breaking new ground, but as far as deadbeat summer vibes done right go, Pleasure is one killer drag. | 2011-07-06T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2011-07-06T02:00:01.000-04:00 | Rock | Acéphale | July 6, 2011 | 7.6 | da5611e8-baf7-4569-b3b1-9856be6d767a | Zach Kelly | https://pitchfork.com/staff/zach-kelly/ | null |
The California producer/singer Anderson .Paak worked extensively with Dr. Dre on Compton, but has achieved only marginal success as a solo artist. His new EP arrives shortly after his work with Dre, to capitalize. His raspy, sensuous voice recalls Bilal, and the songs explore mostly light fare—blowing weed, the highs of personal freedom, the captivating first moments of new love. | The California producer/singer Anderson .Paak worked extensively with Dr. Dre on Compton, but has achieved only marginal success as a solo artist. His new EP arrives shortly after his work with Dre, to capitalize. His raspy, sensuous voice recalls Bilal, and the songs explore mostly light fare—blowing weed, the highs of personal freedom, the captivating first moments of new love. | Anderson .Paak: The Anderson .Paak EP | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21049-the-anderson-paak-ep/ | The Anderson .Paak EP | Read the liner notes of Dr. Dre’s Compton and you’ll see the name Anderson .Paak appear six times: He produced or sang on songs "All in a Day’s Work", "Issues", "Deep Water", "For the Love of Money", "Animals", and "Medicine Man". It's the biggest look of Anderson’s career so far by a million miles, one that seemingly came from a chance encounter with the iconic producer. According to Mass Appeal, Anderson attended a studio session when his recent song, "Suede", caught Dre’s attention. "He comes in, and I’m just sitting in the room, and I saw him play it over and over again," Anderson told the publication. "At the third time, he was ready to work."
Until now, though, the California singer/producer had achieved marginal success: Following his 2012 debut under the name Breezy Lovejoy, Anderson’s follow-up—Venice—showed his promise as a storyteller, but the album was largely undercooked and whizzed by without much impact. Anderson has released a few singles and projects on Bandcamp, and he’s the vocal half of NxWorries with producer Knxwledge, a prolific composer who landed this great beat on Kendrick Lamar’s To Pimp a Butterfly.
The Anderson .Paak EP is the artist’s first release since Venice, and it's appearance is timely. Running just four tracks and less than 20 minutes, The Anderson .Paak EP is a quick listen, but it demonstrates Anderson’s talent and charisma. His raspy inflection evokes Bilal’s sensuous tenor and the lyrics explore mostly light fare—blowing weed, the highs of personal freedom ("Drifter II"), the captivating first moments of new love ("Make it Work").
Even when he discusses serious topics, like on the two-part "Cheap Whiskey.70’s Reisling", Anderson does so in the smoothest way possible. "Wish I had a chance to write ya," he croons, presumably talking about an absent father figure. "I wish I didn’t look just like ya." Produced entirely by Los Angeles/Chicago duo Blended Babies, who have worked with the Cool Kids and Ab-Soul and credit OutKast and Eric Clapton as influences, the music is laidback, spacious funk polished in a bright, psychedelic sheen. A longer release would've been ideal, but it's a worthy precursor to something greater. | 2015-09-28T02:00:04.000-04:00 | 2015-09-28T02:00:04.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | BBMG | September 28, 2015 | 7 | da605b61-23f0-41e6-b5a8-7f5239989dbe | Marcus J. Moore | https://pitchfork.com/staff/marcus-j. moore/ | null |
On his shape-shifting second album, the 18-year-old Vietnamese artist wrings beauty out of chaos with fractured, vignette-like compositions. | On his shape-shifting second album, the 18-year-old Vietnamese artist wrings beauty out of chaos with fractured, vignette-like compositions. | Tran Uy Duc: Came | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/tran-uy-duc-came/ | Came | The artists at the forefront of Vietnam’s experimental music scene are guided by boundless exploration. With Ngủ Ngày Ngay Ngày Tận Thế, the Rắn Cạp Đuôi collective conjured fantasias via deconstructed club. On Anna Agenda, the duo Pilgrim Raid mutated dance music to construct an apocalyptic song cycle. Another artist from this cohort, the 18-year-old Tran Uy Duc, has a similar penchant for fractured sound collages, but he doubles down on texture and shapelessness to emphasize atmosphere. Came, his beguiling sophomore album, can be described as a collection of contradictions: greyscale and prismatic, deadening and exuberant, baleful and inviting.
Based in Hanoi, Tran began making music in 2018. While not musically trained, he notes the importance of his father’s metal sculpture art, as it led him to “make friends with raw metallic noise every day.” You can hear his embrace of raucous sounds right out the gate: Came’s title track, which lasts 30-something seconds, erupts with abrasive howling. Tran incorporates rhythmic pulses and processed vocals in the following track, “Three,” and if you tilt your head just right, it’s essentially a pop song. Underneath the murky production, Tran relays scattered thoughts in a robotic voice, describing a craving for sexual pleasure and the fear of coming out as queer as two competing, compounding sources of loneliness.
Sequencing his songs like vignettes, Tran bolsters the wide range of emotions on Came. Much like his debut album, 100 BROKEN DREAMS, these 19 songs—interludes included—are loose, dynamic, and often short. As disparate as these tracks are, they’re shrouded in a cloud of anxiety and elation, capturing life as both a series of granular events and a monolithic fog. The cycloning assault of “got” feels far from the emotive guitar meanderings of “Louche,” but placed side by side, it’s clear that these differing expressions of despair and frustration are both pathways for catharsis. Sometimes, individual tracks are self-contained shape-shifters. Album highlight “Banal” launches with the retro-psychedelia of Yves Tumor before tumbling through riotous clanging, spoken-word hypnagogic pop, hyperpop’s embrace of AutoTune as brattish shrapnel, and a guitar melody lifted from jazz guitarist George Barnes’ “Ana.”
While it’s easy to trace the influences on Tran’s music—he cites Arca, Mica Levi, and Björk’s “Declare Independence” as having informed the album—Came consistently manages to surprise. “Catwalk” could soundtrack runways, sure, but its gloomy and acerbic production freely moves into more nebulous territories. When it concludes with 10 seconds of a straightforward dance beat, it’s both a sly wink and a reminder of how much he’s toyed with the titular conceit in the preceding three minutes. “Interlude A - Laura” is a sparse, diaristic reflection on a breakup, although the name in the title refers not to an ex but to the nail polish he wears, personifying the object as a source of comfort. And “Coop,” which features Phạm Thế Vũ of Rắn Cạp Đuôi, unleashes the album’s most exhilarating wall of noise before ending with quiet, intimate singing. Whatever sound or mood he’s exploring, Tran keeps things visceral; he wrings beauty and strangeness out of chaos, sometimes both at the same time.
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2022-01-11T00:00:00.000-05:00 | 2022-01-11T00:00:00.000-05:00 | Experimental | self-released | January 11, 2022 | 7.5 | da670300-1e53-4ebe-9ffb-5d2a246a0ea5 | Joshua Minsoo Kim | https://pitchfork.com/staff/joshua-minsoo kim/ | |
The Colombian superstar’s first Spanish-only album in 19 years is a brutally honest look at her breakup that overflows with vengeance and still-got-it sex appeal. | The Colombian superstar’s first Spanish-only album in 19 years is a brutally honest look at her breakup that overflows with vengeance and still-got-it sex appeal. | Shakira: Las Mujeres Ya No Lloran | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/shakira-las-mujeres-ya-no-lloran/ | Las Mujeres Ya No Lloran | With Las Mujeres Ya No Lloran, her first album almost entirely in Spanish since 2005, Shakira signals a deliberate and timely return to her roots. When the Barranquilla native catapulted into the Anglophone pop scene with Laundry Service in 2001, she modeled a version of bilingual international stardom that opened doors for other Latine singers. Today, a new generation of Spanish-speaking stars like Bad Bunny, Rosalía, and Karol G have helped loosen the English language’s long-held grip on commercial pop. And while Shakira has always preached that music transcends language, her new album—saturated with bold-name cameos and dabbling in trending sounds—is poised to ride the latest wave.
But you’re probably here to hear about her divorce. Las Mujeres Ya No Lloran obsesses over the demise of Shakira’s 11-year relationship with Gerard Piqué, the former Spanish soccer player she now calls “Voldemort.” The album title originates from a lyric in the standout “Bzrp Music Sessions, Vol.53,” the diss track originally recorded for Argentine DJ Bizarrap’s popular video series, and Shakira’s first all-Spanish song to reach the Hot 100. More than a year later, her digs still sting, from belittling her ex as a rookie to comparing his new girlfriend to a Twingo. Even when she’s not saying Piqué’s name, she kind of is: Imaginative, shady wordplay like “Yo solo hago música, perdón que te salpique” (roughly, “I only make music, sorry if it bothers you”) turned the song into a viral sensation. Then there’s the Kill Bill moment when Shakira reveals her intentions for this track, and perhaps to some extent, this album: “Esto es pa’ que te mortifique’/Mastique’ y trague’, trague’ y mastique’” (“This is for you to be mortified/To chew and swallow, swallow and chew”). Beneath her visceral rage is the heartbroken lover who simply wants to hurt her ex like he hurt her, to guarantee this record follows him forever.
Breakups are hard, and the balance of the album offers a brutally honest glimpse into the aftermath. With her personal business already in the press, Shakira sings through the stages of grief, notably focusing on acceptance—as defined by vengeance and still-got-it sex appeal. The saga begins as a fantasy on flirty nu-disco opener “Puntería,” with Cardi B, where women are goddesses and men are horny centaurs with washboard abs. Bizarrap appears again on the squelchy electro-pop track “La Fuerte,” which pulses with 2 a.m. club heat as a post-breakup Shaki seeks refuge on the dancefloor. But as the chorus swells and the tempo quickens, it sounds as if she’s on the brink of calling her ex. “Dime dónde, cuándo y cómo,” she repeats (“Tell me where, when, and how”), her voice breaking into the high-pitched plea of romantic anguish that first defined Shakira’s music—good thing she deleted his number.
At its core, Las Mujeres Ya No Lloran is a pop album for a mainstream audience, a colorful concoction of EDM-infused dance tracks, generic disco beats, and the occasional rap that’s practically designed to be edited into glossy TikToks. Under its plasticky umbrella, Shakira also flexes her chameleonic powers, fusing Afrobeats with Dominican bachata, ska with northern cumbia, and electropop with reggaetón. Angsty alt-rock songs like “Tiempo Sin Verte” and “Cómo Dónde y Cuándo” harken back to her Alanis Morissette-esque 1998 album ¿Dónde Están los Ladrones? The latter song has a scrappy, start-stop guitar riff reminiscent of “Where Is My Mind?,” recalling her affinity for Aerosmith and the Cure. But if the hunger to assert her dominance across genres—to prove that no one can replace Shakira—feels genuine, the production choices seem more interested in proving her range than in locating each song’s most authentic expression.
Along the way, Shakira assembles a star-studded lineup that includes Manuel Turizo, Ozuna, and two Rauw Alejandro features. Her duet with Karol G (who’s experienced a public breakup of her own) delivers a tantalizing sorry-not-sorry vibe reminiscent of “Beautiful Liar.” As regional Mexican music continues to command the global pop scene, Shakira’s contralto tones, raspy cadence, and penchant for romantic storytelling find a match in the bajo quinto and accordion-powered canción “(Entre Paréntesis),” with Groupo Frontera, and the tololoche-tinged sierreño urbano song “El Jefe,” with Fuerza Regida. Some features, though, feel out of place. Did we really need a Tiësto remix of “Pa’ tipos como tú”? Cardi B’s punny “Puntería” verse seems like it could have been substituted with almost anything. Describing the origins of their collaboration, Shakira said, “I thought, ‘How cool would it be to have a woman rapper here?’ The only person who came to my mind was Cardi B. I had just met her in Paris and she seemed so nice.” This is also what comes to mind when I think of “Puntería”—nice.
Act one closes with “Última,” perhaps the most vulnerable moment on the album. It’s a piano ballad that feels like Shakira’s final attempt at closure: the first time she thanks Piqué for the time they shared, while also acknowledging their incompatibility as she sings, “Más fácil era mezclar el agua y el aceite”—easier to mix oil and water. The album’s second half undergoes a transformation akin to a post-breakup makeover, yet it can’t help but revisit the anger stage. Armed with lines like, “Dicen por ahí que no hay mal que más de cien años dura pero ahí sigue mi ex-suegro que no pisa sepultura” (“They say that there is no evil that lasts more than 100 years, but my ex father-in-law is still around and doesn’t have a foot in the grave”), she holds nothing back.
There’s a fan for every era of Shakira—some who expect her to adhere to Anglophone pop molds, some who pine for her rockera past. Since her debut, she has inspired debate about Latine stereotypes and the nature of cultural authenticity, but in this decade, her blend of styles is no longer perceived to be so foreign as it once was. It’s fascinating to watch Shakira take big swings and extend her dominance, but there’s a little piece that’s missing: some small token to show what made her such an icon in the first place. | 2024-04-04T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2024-04-04T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | Sony Music Latin | April 4, 2024 | 7 | da6a01aa-8a9e-405f-9075-2e69643ff27e | Boutayna Chokrane | https://pitchfork.com/staff/boutayna-chokrane/ | |
The newly discovered, unreleased album from 1963 featuring the “classic quartet” finds the jazz giant thrillingly caught between shoring up and surging forth. | The newly discovered, unreleased album from 1963 featuring the “classic quartet” finds the jazz giant thrillingly caught between shoring up and surging forth. | John Coltrane: Both Directions at Once: The Lost Album | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/john-coltrane-both-directions-at-once-the-lost-album/ | Both Directions at Once: The Lost Album | From April 1962 to September 1965, while under contract to the record label Impulse!, John Coltrane led a more or less consistent working group with the same four musicians. After his death in 1967, this group—Coltrane on tenor and soprano saxophone, McCoy Tyner on piano, Jimmy Garrison on bass, Elvin Jones on drums—became known as Coltrane’s “classic quartet.” The group was powerful, elegant, and scarily deep. It was also a well-proportioned framing device. It made an artist with great ambitions easier to understand.
It is possible to hear conviction and morality in some of the classic quartet’s best-known music—like the devotional A Love Supreme, recorded in late 1964—as clearly as you can hear melody or rhythm. As a consequence, all of it can appear set on one venerable plane. As it moves inexorably from ballads, blues, and folk songs into abstraction, the classic-quartet corpus can seem an index not only for the range of acoustic jazz but for possibly how to live, gathered and contained, as if it were always there. But the corpus is only what we have been given to hear. And then one day a closet door flies open, a stack of tapes fall out, and a dilemma begins.
A fair amount of Coltrane’s music has been released after the fact, but nothing that would seem, from a distance, quite so canonical as Both Directions At Once, which is 90 minutes worth of (mostly) previously unheard recordings made at Rudy Van Gelder’s studio on March 6, 1963—the middle of the classic-quartet period. The Van Gelder studio, in Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey, can be considered part of the framing device. It was where the group did nearly all its studio work. For reasons of acoustics, it had a 39-foot-high, cathedral-like, vaulted wooden ceiling, fabricated by the same Oregon lumber company that made blimp hangars during World War II. Coltrane’s music during that period, possibly encouraged by the cathedral-like room, became blimpier and churchier.
Why have we not heard these tapes before? It’s hard to imagine that they could have been blithely ignored or forgotten. The 2018 answer is that mono audition reels of the session were only recently found in the possession of the family of Coltrane’s first wife, Juanita Naima Coltrane. (Impulse! didn’t have the music; the label’s master tapes may have been lost in a company move from New York to Los Angeles.) The 1963 answer is unknown, and probably more complicated.
Coltrane’s contract with Impulse! called for two records a year. Whether that day’s work in March was to be conceived at the time as a whole album, or most of one, is uncertain. The extent to which you believe the record’s subtitle—The Lost Album—might be the extent to which you are excited by the news of Both Directions. I can’t quite do it, but there are other reasons to be excited.
It may be hard to hear as a coherent album for back then, though it is easy to hear it as one for now, in our current, expanded notion of what an album is. The music does not seem, in its context, to be a full step forward. It’s a little caught between shoring up and surging forth. (The after-the-fact title—alluding to a conversation Coltrane had with Wayne Shorter about the possibility of improvising as if starting a sentence in the middle, moving backward and forward simultaneously—helps turn a possible liability into a strength.) It can give you new respect for the rigor, compression, and balance of some of his other albums from the period. It is at times, as Coltrane’s son Ravi pointed out, surprisingly like a live session in a studio; parts of the music sound geared toward a captive audience. That may be the best thing about it.
Included on the album—which comes either as a single-disc version or a double-disc with alternate takes, both including extensive liner notes by historian Ashley Kahn—is a sunny, bright-tempo melody (the theme from “Vilia,” written by the Hungarian composer Franz Lehár for the operetta The Merry Widow); a downtempo, minor-key, semi-standard (“Nature Boy,” from the book of eden ahbez, the California proto-hippie songwriter); one of Coltrane’s best original lines, in four different takes (“Impressions,” which he’d been working out in concert for several years); a couple of pieces for soprano saxophone which are representative but not stunning (“Untitled Original 11383,” minor-key and modal, and “Untitled Original 11386,” with a pentatonic melody); “One Up, One Down,” a short, wily theme as a pretext for eight minutes of hard-and-fast jamming; and “Slow Blues,” about which more in a minute.
Coltrane was already building albums from disparate sessions, a practice that would soon yield 1963’s Impressions and Live at Birdland, two records that set live and studio tracks side by side. He may have been stockpiling without a clear purpose; he also had to consider what would sell. Since his recording of “My Favorite Things” in 1961—a hit by jazz terms—Coltrane had become recognizable. His subsequent working relationship with Bob Thiele, the head of Impulse!, was based on the notion that he could expand that audience, not shrink it. Six months before the Both Directions session, he’d made a record with Duke Ellington; the day after it, he’d make another with the singer Johnny Hartman. He was entering the popular artist’s paradox of striving to repeat a past success and trying not to run aground on retreads.
The sense of strength and inevitability we associate with Coltrane’s music didn’t just tumble out. It was likely a byproduct of diligence, restlessness, exhausted possibilities, obsession and counter-obsession. He thought about progress. He passed through serial phases of exploring harmonic sequences, modes, and multiple rhythms; when he acknowledged one phase in an interview, he was generally looking for the next. At the height of the classic quartet, he often didn’t have the time or psychic space for study and practice. “I’m always walking around trying to keep my ear open for another ‘Favorite Things’ or something,” he told the writer Ralph Gleason in May, 1961. “I can’t get in the woodshed like I used to. I’m commercial, man.” More: “I didn’t have to worry about it, you know, making a good record, because that wasn’t important. Maybe I should just go back in the woodshed and just forget it.” At the time, a record like Both Directions might have seemed an open admission that he could have used less worry and more woodshed.
What he meant by “another ‘Favorite Things’” might have been a similar act of counterintuition: a sweet, sentimental tune made paranormal, a curiosity that could break out beyond the normal jazz audience and anchor a hit record. If “Vilia” was intended for that role, it isn’t strong enough. “Impressions,” on Both Directions, in its first known studio recording—especially take 3—sounds sublimely focused. But I’m not sure Coltrane plays it here any better than he did sixteen months earlier at the Village Vanguard, the live version he’d choose later in 1963 when finally issuing the tune, on the record of that name. (It’s complicated, I know.)
“Slow Blues” is the one. There is no narrative here, as there sometimes was with Coltrane’s originals; it is not expressly about love or hardship or religious joy. But Coltrane turns himself inside-out. First, he phrases in bare, hesitant strokes, using negative space; then he begins to whip phrases around, repeating them up and down the horn in rapid, shinnying patterns, reaching for inexpressible sounds, getting ugly. (McCoy Tyner’s solo, directly following Coltrane’s, is tidy and elegant, thorough in its own radically contrasting way.) There is the idea of the “new,” and then there is something like this track, which transcends the burden of newness.
I imagine three possible problems someone might have had with putting “Slow Blues” on a record in 1963. One is that, at 11 and a half minutes, it would have taken up a third of the record. Two is that a long blues probably wouldn’t be properly commercial unless there was some sort of story attached to it. And three is that, as was the case with “Impressions,” “Slow Blues” doesn’t explicitly show progress. Hear Coltrane on the long, slow “Vierd Blues” from the Sutherland Hotel in Chicago in 1961. It’s not great sound quality, but it is great in every other way. “Slow Blues” grows from the same root. It’s no “better,” really, but it’s better to have more of it, and better recorded. It is possible to take in Both Directions At Once, some of it middling by Coltrane’s standards and some of it extraordinary by anyone’s, without much thought about sellability or progress. In an ideal case, both qualities are overrated anyway. This is an ideal case. | 2018-06-30T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-06-30T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Jazz | Impulse! | June 30, 2018 | 8.6 | da6ddc4d-b215-4453-9fd3-729db2fa2996 | Ben Ratliff | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ben-ratliff/ | |
Fusing hip-hop and punk, the third solo record from this Minneapolis-based rapper and member of the Doomtree collective is his tightest album yet. | Fusing hip-hop and punk, the third solo record from this Minneapolis-based rapper and member of the Doomtree collective is his tightest album yet. | P.O.S: Never Better | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/12636-never-better/ | Never Better | Punk rock is a genre that was largely formed on the mindset that anyone should be able to express themselves musically, regardless of talent. Hip-hop traditionally lives and dies by skills, and it widely rejects the idea that anyone can pick up a mic and rock a stage without putting in hard work and sweat and dedication to their craft. Any artist that tries to fuse those two worlds has to be more than aware of how tricky a dichotomy that has to be; Minneapolis punk-rap artist P.O.S. alludes to this by claiming that his performing name stands for both "Promise of Skill" and "Piece of Shit." If that's too confusing, "Pissed Off Stef" works fine; it's Stefon Alexander's biggest unifying factor.
It could also be the biggest barrier to enjoying his work, even though Never Better-- the third solo album from the member of the nine-person Doomtree collective-- is P.O.S.' tightest album yet. Everybody's supposed to be high on hope right now, however guarded and pragmatic a hope that it is. But with a lead-off track ("Let It Rattle") that scoffs via repurposed Nas lyrics that "They out for presidents to represent them/ You think a president could represent you?", Never Better sets a confrontational tone that makes the album a potentially rough listen. But that bristling anger is subtly infused with a smart-assed insight and a thing for folding pop culture touchstones into unrecognizable shapes.
P.O.S.' lyrics have more in common with allusive free-spitters like Aesop Rock and Rob Sonic than, say, Gym Class Heroes-- giving you the gist of an idea while leaving you to try and calculate the deeper meaning in all the supposedly disjointed phrases ricocheting off each other. Some of the more intense lyrical moments, like "Grave Shovel Let's Go" ("They turning in they grave/ We dig 'em up and rearrange, aim/ Take 'em out the way they came") and "The Brave and the Snake" ("Slip through the sidewalk/ Skip to the hard part/ Tip to the card shark/ Rip through the rampart"), seem to run almost entirely on the fumes of some random-thought anxiety, threatening to drown out any first-listen comprehension with a barrage of aggressive internal rhymes and his meter-defying flow.
But the further you sink into it, the more sense it makes, and you're able to more clearly pick out the themes-- the recession rhetoric of "Low Light Low Life"; the post-trauma love story of "Been Afraid"; the fuck-what-they-think defiance in "Purexed". Worn ground, maybe, but the language makes it spark. And all that abstraction makes the matter-of-fact details in the autobiographical "Out of Category"-- which takes its titular hook from Lil Wayne's verse on Birdman's "Neck of the Woods"-- stand out a lot more starkly. When P.O.S. reminisces over his coming of age as a black punk rock kid, he captures the identity crisis vividly: "Found his kin, brothers at school think he tryin' to rewrite skin/ Others are fools, never seen some shit like him."
As far as the aforementioned punk/rap contradictions, you might wind up forgetting that there are any in the first place. There's still some nods to punk rock, lyrically (a quote of Fugazi's "Five Corporations" in "Savion Glover") as well as in the guest personnel (None More Black's Jason Shevchuk shows up to yowl all over the end of "Terrorish"). And "Drumroll (We're All Thirsty)", the most immediate, throat-grabbing track on the album, is some straight-up hardcore get-in-the-pit business that lives up to its percussive title. But the majority of the album fits a wider array of rockish hip-hop beats and hip-hop-influenced rock rhythms: "Savion Glover" rides on an uptempo combination of minimalist electronic percussion, splintered guitar chords, and rapidfire scratching, and there's a slick, borderline-pop sound to lead single "Goodbye" and deep cut "Low Light Low Life"-- produced by Doomtree members Lazerbeak and Paper Tiger, respectively-- that pushes it to the level of college radio's most crowd-pleasing indie-rap offerings.
From front to back, the album's an acquired taste, and even if it's not the big paradox that an album mixing punk ethics with rap virtuosity might risk becoming, it doesn't have a universal appeal, especially for heads leery of anything that might approach the misnomer of "emo rap." But P.O.S. knows this, and he's apparently come to terms with it: "We make our own and if they don't feel it, then we are not for them," he sings in "Optimist (We Are Not For Them)". And then, almost as an aside, he adds: "And that's cool." He could be all things to all people, but he succeeds when he remembers who he is to himself. | 2009-02-04T01:00:02.000-05:00 | 2009-02-04T01:00:02.000-05:00 | Rap | Rhymesayers | February 4, 2009 | 7 | da6e2c0d-3928-4df5-9b2d-522b287c4ede | Nate Patrin | https://pitchfork.com/staff/nate-patrin/ | null |
Sarah Assbring's global influences bring her to bright new places with inspiring albeit uneven results. | Sarah Assbring's global influences bring her to bright new places with inspiring albeit uneven results. | El Perro Del Mar: KoKoro | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22306-kokoro/ | KoKoro | KoKoro, the latest album by El Perro Del Mar, takes its title from the Japanese word meaning heart or feeling, and from there you get a hint of what’s to come on: new musical terrain informed by an exotic “Far East” sensibility, couched in familiar El Perro Del Mar territory of melancholy and vulnerability. Almost 12 years into her career as El Perro Del Mar, founder Sarah Assbring’s appetite for reinvention remains strong. On KoKoro, the Swedish singer’s fifth album, her global wanderings bring her to unfamiliar places with inspiring albeit uneven results that showcase an artist who could easily make a turn for pop stardom.
Assbring has said that she’d been listening heavily to Japanese, Chinese, and Cambodian ’60s pop prior to the making of the album, but the influences of these sources on KoKoro are so overt and jumbled with modern pop and world music sensibilities, it comes off as a hodgepodge of cultural tourism. Throughout the album, Assbring utilizes classical Asian and Middle Eastern instruments such as the Chinese stringed guzheng, the Japanese shakuhachi, and various other flutes and strings—all played by a cast of Swedish musicians—and features rhythms and melodies casually identifiable with all of the above backgrounds along with Ethiopia, Egypt, and Indonesia.
Coordinated or not, Assbring does a remarkably good job taking all of these sounds and fusing them into vibrant, bouncy pop songs that are miles away from the ’60s-inspired tunes of her early career. It wasn’t until 2012’s Pale Fire that Assbring first attempted to seriously change up the El Perro Del Mar sound, but while it was evident that her voice and talents could translate to more radio-friendly dance-pop, the album frequently played like feathery nostalgia for late ’90s lounge house and trip-hop. On KoKoro, however, Assbring seems to have figured out the transition, and its strongest cuts are her best arguments yet for shifting the El Perro Del Mar paradigm.
“Kouign-Amman” (a type of French pastry) blends Assbring’s pan-Asian fetish with spunky futurist pop. Exploding from the speakers with a sunny and reverbed vocals, Assbring weaves in a guzheng string melody in a way that feels organic and enmeshed rather than simply appended. Title track “KoKoro” comes the closest to true 21st-century world music, with a huge, echoing “kinda Middle Eastern” chiftetelli beat and bleating flutes. Assbring’s voice is also loud and present, living in the fabric of the song in a way that it never did on Pale Fire. It’s music for smiling under the late afternoon sun on a party boat on the Bosphorus with a crew of happy hedonists.
Best of all, if not quite as archly pop as the others, is the stunning baroque opener “Endless Ways.” Featuring delicately embedded strings and backing vocals that moan and tug, “Endless Ways” is a perfect synthesis of all of El Perro Del Mar’s developments as an artist. Lyrically it also represents an important touchpoint for Assbring’s transformation, outlining her sense of self-reflection in figuring out how to become a better artist: “I think I was too softly defined/I wish I was all pure/The goal I have is carved in my mind/Perfection is hard.” It sure is, but as pop songs go, “Endless Ways” certainly gets close.
Because of Assbring’s attempts at drawing from these ethnocultural traditions without a sense of clear rhyme or reason, its weaker compositions sound more “White Euro-Woman Does ‘The Far East’” rather than the breezily blended post-globalization culture mashes of M.I.A. Tracks like “Ging Ging” and lead singles “Breadandbutter” and “Ding Sum” don’t just feature the aforementioned guzheng for flair but spotlight it as a conspicuous driver of sound to a degree that feels fetishized rather than borrowed. KoKoro isn’t perfect, but Assbring’s knack for creating well-written, catchy melodies carries the record it even in its slightest moments and a huge step forward from Pale Fire, positioning El Perro Del Mar well for an interesting Act II as a modern world pop purveyor. | 2016-09-14T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-09-14T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Control Group | September 14, 2016 | 7.1 | da712867-8a49-43c7-b9f6-03a39bcbf284 | Benjamin Scheim | https://pitchfork.com/staff/benjamin-scheim/ | null |
The singer-songwriter, fiddle player, and Highwoman’s latest solo album dwells in the space between grand pop balladry and Memphis soul. | The singer-songwriter, fiddle player, and Highwoman’s latest solo album dwells in the space between grand pop balladry and Memphis soul. | Amanda Shires: Take It Like a Man | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/amanda-shires-take-it-like-a-man/ | Take It Like a Man | A songwriter with killer opening lines has her shit together: “I’m well aware of what the night’s made of/And I’m comin’ for you like a hawk for the dove.” Evocative, well-stressed, and horny, “Hawk for the Dove” is the kind of song Amanda Shires writes all the time, whether for herself or for her country supergroup the Highwomen. The scruffier, rangy approach of her seventh album Take It Like a Man complements the Texan’s flexible burr, plus the fiddle she has lavished on everyone from husband Jason Isbell’s 400 Unit to the late John Prine’s final recordings. Needy but not apt to grovel, willing to misbehave so long as they keep their cool, Shires’ characters exemplify the healthy tensions in country music.
Take It Like a Man dwells in the space between grand pop balladry and Memphis soul. Shires settles into a whispery talk-sing reminiscent of Stevie Nicks; why belt when she has room for an Isbell solo of characteristic pungency? His rhythm licks and twangy embellishments on “Stupid Love” and “Bad Behavior,” respectively, demonstrate the meticulousness of a player who practiced hours a day at the height of the pandemic. Multi-instrumentalist and producer Lawrence Rothman adds solid contributions on additional piano and guitar, but the standout is keyboardist Peter Levin, who (among many moments) locks in with drummer Julian Dorio on “Fault Lines” for the easiest of grooves.
On first listen Take It Like a Man may not offer material comparable to My Piece of Land’s “The Way It Dimmed,” To the Sunset’s “Wasn’t I Paying Attention,” or “If She Ever Leaves Me,” the Shires-Isbell-Chris Tomkins plaint sung by Highwoman Brandi Carlisle that ranks among the decade’s most shattering depictions of same-sex despair, but Shires marries hooks and narrative with a new assurance. Blessed with a gooey tune, “Bad Behavior” has Shires, eyes a-roll and smirk afixed, extolling the awesomeness of hookups. “Maybe it’s my nature/Maybe I like strangers,” she offers while Brittney Spencer and Maren Morris add “ya, bitch!” on backup. Refreshing her appetites as a means of replenishing her imagination is an essential component of Shires’ self-definition. She and Levin are at their best on “Empty Cups,” a lament for a relationship in which she fails “to keep the newness from wearing off.” Only “Everything Has Its Time,” a co-write with fellow Highwoman Natalie Hemby, offers the rote maxims that the rest of Take It Like a Man avoids.
An echoey mix sometimes makes Shires and the players sound as if they’re performing at the bottom of a well—a drier mix would’ve drawn these tales of lust and abandon in sharper colors. But as producer Rothman has the correct instincts: They foreground Shires’ big voice. And she and her band are more than simpatico on “Here He Comes,” a sly, slinky uptempo seduce-a-rama about bedding another stranger. Writing good drama is hard; writing comedy is work. Grace only looks easy. | 2022-08-03T00:03:00.000-04:00 | 2022-08-03T00:03:00.000-04:00 | Folk/Country | ATO | August 3, 2022 | 7.5 | da73c6d9-7812-45f1-93fd-8ffddcf10ca2 | Alfred Soto | https://pitchfork.com/staff/alfred-soto/ | |
Detroit indie rocker Stef Chura's lowlit, burnished debut Messes showcases her way with setting a twilit mood and her magnetic, mutable voice. | Detroit indie rocker Stef Chura's lowlit, burnished debut Messes showcases her way with setting a twilit mood and her magnetic, mutable voice. | Stef Chura: Messes | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22786-messes/ | Messes | Detroit indie rocker Stef Chura has the kind of magnetic voice that music writers fall into ditches attempting to describe. Froggy, trembling, and full of unexpected catches, it sits in the forefront of her debut album Messes, and she often uses her finger-picked guitars behind it to trace and echo her vocal melody, framing for maximum scrutiny. She seems confident with her instrument and to grasp how it works, the same way a good character actor knows how to use their pointy chin, their waggling nose, or their thick eyebrows. Breath to breath, note to note, she evokes different singers: On “Faded Heart” she sounds like Stevie Nicks impersonating Dan Bejar. On “Slow Motion,” she recalls Television’s Tom Verlaine, while on “You” she channels the velvety longeurs of Chrissie Hynde.
Nevertheless, she retains complete control of this unruly, coltish instrument, even as it tramples over small stuff like enunciation and diction. On paper, her lyrics are poetic and sharply rendered (“Thin like the skin on a lottery ticket”) but the journey from the page through her larynx is a rough one, and a line as simple as “You can do that” (the hollered chorus from “Spotted Gold”) can turn into an eleven-syllable phonetic rollercoaster with no discernible entry or exit point. The lyrics suggest the album’s title refers to the sorts of messes we make of each other (“Putting in overtime/To get my revenge on you/I can see in your eyes/There’s nothing left to lose”) while her voice itself shows what can happen when a perfectly clear-seeming thought gets garbled by its expression. It’s a metaphor for the gulf separating what we mean to say and what others hear, maybe.
Or maybe just an odd voice. In any case, Messes is alluring largely because of it, and the band surrounding her reinforces that allure. They play a simple style—roughshod, lowlit indie rock, with guitars and voice all flickering around the same burnished midrange—with quiet style and intuitive command. The music mostly stays at a mid-tempo simmer, only boiling over for a few moments of yelped catharsis, the guitars squealing as if kicked. The drumming has just the right hairs’-breadth hesitation holding back the downbeat, keeping the music loose and full of air. The album falls just right, like a stretched-out sweater with holes in the collar.
Messes, true to its title, feels inchoate, a few sloppy first strokes down on a big white page that catches the eye. It would be nice if she wrote some sharper songs; while her delicate and echoey fingerpicking tangles sound nice, she maybe gets a little too lost in them. A couple drowsier songs stretch out so languorously they start to lose shape—“Human Being,” a pleasant tangle of fingerpicking and Chura’s moan, is more mood than song. But it's a rich mood, sumptuous enough that the blurry contours don't matter much. It’s easy to indulge a reverie when it’s a vivid one, and Messes invites you to lose track of time for awhile with it. | 2017-02-11T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2017-02-11T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Urinal Cake | February 11, 2017 | 7.2 | da828746-dcb8-4e3c-b772-ccbafe1ca4d6 | Jayson Greene | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jayson-greene/ | null |
Leaving the grand maximalism of his previous releases behind, the UK producer focuses more on the comedown of heartbreak creating an altogether cathartic dancefloor experience. | Leaving the grand maximalism of his previous releases behind, the UK producer focuses more on the comedown of heartbreak creating an altogether cathartic dancefloor experience. | Florentino : Fragmentos EP | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/florentino-fragmentos-ep/ | Fragmentos EP | Latin America’s rising presence in the global electronic scene has rerouted the way dancefloors operate. Hovering around a hip-swaying 100BPM and boosting the key rhythmic elements that makes people move, such drum-driven music preserves the human touch despite its computer-generated origins. Mixpak Records’ newest signee Florentino (aka Yeshe Beesley) typifies this careful cross-section. The artist’s appetite for club-savvy productions reflects his base in Manchester, England (a northern city well-reputed for its rollicking DIY nightlife), but the influence of his Colombian heritage sculpts his sound into visceral dimensions. Consider Florentino’s sophomore release “Bloodline” on his hometown label Swing Ting. Led by blaring sirens the reggaeton march swaggers under martial percussion, glass shatters, and quivering vocal distortions. The sonic bricolage commands your attention, but, more importantly, conveys a singular diasporic sound.
Florentino has always worn the title of “El más romántico de los románticos” over his chest and his heart on his sleeve. His penchant for roses all over his album covers and lip-smacking kissing samples recall the “she loves me, she loves me not” flower game played by a smitten daydreamer. Where his previous work simulated the dopamine rush of fresh infatuation, his newest EP Fragmentos evokes the introspective comedown as he tears off the last “she loves me not” petal. The opening track “Nadie Se Muere De Amor” (No one dies of love) is beatless; the heart clearly needs resuscitating. Here, trickles of water and portly synths accent a plaintive melody line, but the fervent Florentino—the one responsible for those spirited, foot-stomping earworms—sneaks in on the follow up “Por Ti” with Catalan dancehall artist Bad Gyal. “Y entre los dos volamos/Como lo haces tu, te lo juro,” (You touch me/And between the two we fly/As you do, I swear to you”) she sings. Her glossy Auto-Tuned vocals, skipping over stripped kick snares and hi-hats, are a sweet reminder of the promises once made.
On Fragmentos, Florentino leaves behind the maximalism found in his previous work. The showman has traded his literal bells and whistles, and all those hurried snare lines, for a more streamlined approach. Gone are those aggressive sound collages, replaced with a renewed focus on vocal snippets and body percussion rhythms. If heartache is so distinctly human, what better way to convey the whirlwind than to sample each clap, kiss, gasp, fingersnap, and exclamation during the recovery process? Where most club-functional productions remain coldly cybernetic, Florentino manages to unravel the entire swathe of involuntary emotions with unusual panache, creating an altogether cathartic dancefloor experience.
“2 Late (Don’t Call Me)” opens with our protagonist drunk-dialing his ex, played by the Spanish reggaetoneras Ms. Nina. The song is the heartbreak counterpart to Cassie’s come-hither croon “Me & You,” icy synthesizers and all. “Ya me he ido y ya es demasiado tarde/Te di otra opportunidad, y no la supiste valorar” (“I’ve already gone and it's too late/I gave you another opportunity and you didn’t know how to value it”) she whispers in hushed tones. The voicemail greeting, “Hi,” becomes spliced and incessant throughout the strain. You can feel Florentino disparaging himself for his lack of willpower. Bitter laughter punctuates the production, both anguished and obsessive, as the phone continues to ring.
Fragmentos aligns with the passions of lovers scorned rather than with withdrawn despondency. Take “Mentirosa,” the album’s climactic track. Florentino borrows the quick elastic snaps of volume riddim typically found in Flex Dance Music (FDM) to sustain dramatic intensity at a slower BPM. Outraged accusations of “Mentirosa” (liar) rattle the composition until the maelstrom finally passes with a tinny flourish. In the final chapter, “Seductora” reminds us that heartbreak isn’t all about brooding, but the debauched flings and freedom that come with it. Grunts and cheers interspersed among flute trills, metallic triangles, and infectious airhorns signal a long-awaited rebound. With a wet kissing noise slapped dead-center in the dembow beat, Florentino is back on his bullshit. Just as there are plenty of fishes in the sea; more roses will bloom from their stems, waiting to be plucked. If Fragmentos resulted from only one thorn prick, Florentino has us anticipating another. | 2018-04-16T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-04-16T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Mixpak | April 16, 2018 | 7.3 | da830a0c-3669-495b-bae3-bfda8700fa0b | Whitney Wei | https://pitchfork.com/staff/whitney- wei/ |
Subsets and Splits