alternativeHeadline
stringlengths 2
551
⌀ | description
stringlengths 2
700
⌀ | itemReviewed
stringlengths 6
199
| url
stringlengths 41
209
| headline
stringlengths 1
176
⌀ | reviewBody
stringlengths 1.29k
31.4k
| dateModified
stringlengths 29
29
| datePublished
stringlengths 29
29
| Genre
stringclasses 116
values | Label
stringlengths 1
64
⌀ | Reviewed
stringlengths 11
18
| score
float64 0
10
| id
stringlengths 36
36
| author_name
stringclasses 603
values | author_url
stringclasses 604
values | thumbnailUrl
stringlengths 90
347
⌀ |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
The wonderful second album from James Brooks’ project uses breakbeats, samples, and beautiful rave-pop motifs to tell stories about the bruising power of memory. | The wonderful second album from James Brooks’ project uses breakbeats, samples, and beautiful rave-pop motifs to tell stories about the bruising power of memory. | Default Genders: Main Pop Girl 2019 | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/default-genders-main-pop-girl-2019/ | Main Pop Girl 2019 | Over the past decade, James Brooks basically built a new sound from scratch. As one half of the duo Elite Gymnastics, he submerged jungle rhythms and delicate vocal melodies into shoegaze-y distortion. In 2014, after the duo split, he released Magical Pessimism 2014, his first solo record under the name Default Genders. The project showed promise, even though Brooks raised hackles with “On Fraternity,” a song about sexual assault that many considered in poor taste (the fact that Brooks initially used the moniker Dead Girlfriends—in reference to feminist theorist Andrea Dworkin—didn’t help). Five years later, Brooks has emerged with his second album, Main Pop Girl 2019, an astonishing leap forward that uses distinct rave-pop motifs to tell stories about the bruising power of memory.
Brooks spent several years in Minneapolis, Minn. and has written many songs about the lives of the city’s young down-and-outs. At times, he chafes against the cultural boundaries of a city that “hates us more than it loves Prince, white rap, black tar, and the Replacements.” But you can tell he’s enraptured with the rhythms and textures of the Midwest. His characters take drugs, fight, and fall in love in dive bars and chain stores. The effect recalls the romantic blue-collar narratives of the Hold Steady, or Billy Joel if he grew up with serious opinions about JRPGs. On “reverse chronological order (part 2),” which borrows its protagonists Brenda and Eddie from Joel’s classic “Scenes From An Italian Restaurant,” Brooks shows a remarkable eye for detail; he zeroes in on Eddie passed out on the couch, with “a flickering light that persists through the night, and an audible hum/‘Ocarina of Time’ droning endlessly on from the dusk until dawn.” But the tragic couple isn’t drowning their sorrows in bottles of red wine, they’re using heroin laced with Fentanyl.
Brooks zooms in even further on “Christmas Card From a Scammer in Minneapolis,” which nods to a Tom Waits song using a different kind of laborer. Brooks enjoys taking a scalpel to the sad-sack classic rock canon. Over plangent keys and a loping break, he wrings pathos from a character who we first encounter as they cut the tags off stolen clothes in order to sell them at a thrift store. This mundane life offers us a window into something larger. The protagonist remembers a text they got from an old roommate on the day of the 35W bridge collapse, which killed 13 people in downtown Minneapolis in 2007: “Not trying to make it a thing, just want to know that no one I know is buried underneath/That giant pile of debris they keep showing on TV.” By dialing in on small moments, Brooks captures the widescreen panorama of a city dealing with tragedy.
There’s little precedent for this kind of songwriting happening over jungle rhythms. In the late ’90s, breakbeats shifted so quickly from their dark, underground origins to a soulless, advertiser-friendly boondoggle that there wasn’t much time for anyone to explore a middle ground. Today, breakbeat revivalists like Special Request and Skee Mask typically focus on summoning the rough-and-ready sounds of jungle pioneers Metalheadz and their ilk. Brooks, instead, summons an alternate timeline where breaks became an established part of the pop toolbox, a conduit to music that’s as fragile and intimate as it is danceable.
Case in point: “Secret Garden .NUXX,” a Bruce Springsteen cover in the same ecstatic-melancholy register as Elite Gymnastics’ inspired remix of Korallreven’s “Sa Sa Samoa.” Brooks recently described his approach as similar to fanfiction: If he likes two things, he’s not afraid to write a crossover. In terms of emotional horsepower, what could more affecting than peak ’90s rave and the Boss' lyrics. This isn’t empty kitsch, though. There’s a deeper idea about the freedom of information running through the veins of this record. In a recent Q&A, Brooks wrote, “a lot of my favorite art came out of spaces where gifted artists fearlessly operated in direct violation of copyright law,” citing “early hip-hop, jungle, UK hardcore, Burial, mashups, [and] rap mixtapes” as examples. He’s also describing the renegade currents of the filesharing era, a time when he says “the internet could feel like one big pirate radio station.” It was a short-lived period of profound creative autonomy.
As these things become increasingly impossible to pull off online, we end up with artifacts like Memories...Do Not Open, the Chainsmokers album “about” nostalgia that doesn’t actually point to anything specific about the past. Brooks fights the sanitizing influence of copyright law by filling his records—released for free on Bandcamp—with references and covers. He wields nostalgia like a humming live wire rather than a sepia Instagram filter.
It all comes together on “Black Pill Skyline,” another spin on a chestnut from the classic rock canon. Brooks described the song as something “[Bob] Dylan would make if he was an extremely online millennial who’s really into the Beastie Boys.” He sings, “We don’t live on borrowed time, we stole it,” as both the chorus of the song and the thesis of the record: The past is constructed. One of Brooks’ core concerns is the way nostalgia crystallizes around memory like an oyster with a grain of sand, transforming people and places into twisted personal sculptures. “Family is like the air we breathe,” Brooks sings. “You can see that it’s inside you/All you have to do is bleed.”
All this pop theory powers the beating heart at the center of Main Pop Girl 2019 about how alternate histories are inseparable from our identity. “Sophie”—a revamped version of a song from Magical Pessimism 2014—is a song that Brooks has said is about gender identity. “Today somebody told me they want the old me back,” he sings on the chorus, “Somebody had to hold me back.” Brooks connects a transformation with the mutability of memory. “I had a dream that I was 15 and I could see everything that was about to happen/And I could stop it,” he sings. The memories we treasure are samples lifted from the archive of the objective past, and they can be manipulated and rearranged. The exes, dead friends, and old selves that populate Brooks’ songs are fluid and alive, like Springsteen transformed into a rave diva. | 2019-02-13T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2019-02-13T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Electronic | self-released | February 13, 2019 | 8 | da855aaf-e374-4c55-9d82-5eda1a845adb | Ezra Marcus | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ezra-marcus/ | |
Despite popular perception, !!! never quite fit with the dance-punk explosion of the early-to-mid-'00s. As If, !!!'s sixth studio album, is very much a reaction to that crisis of identity, an attempt at re-establishing themselves as the premier suppliers of fun, kinetic, sprawling indie disco. | Despite popular perception, !!! never quite fit with the dance-punk explosion of the early-to-mid-'00s. As If, !!!'s sixth studio album, is very much a reaction to that crisis of identity, an attempt at re-establishing themselves as the premier suppliers of fun, kinetic, sprawling indie disco. | !!!: As If | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21182-as-if/ | As If | Despite popular perception, !!! never quite fit with the dance-punk explosion of the early-to-mid-'00s. While an endless procession of angular Gang of Four imitators came and went, !!! carved out a space for themselves as disco true believers, foregoing the calculated dourness of the '80s for the joyous excesses of the decade prior. Few of their peers were releasing epic singles that stretched for almost 10 minutes (2003's now-classic "Me and Giuliani Down by the School Yard (A True Story)"), or essentially trolling fans with something as simple as their name ("It's pronounced 'Chk chk chk'," "Actually, it's any three monosyllabic sounds in rapid succession," etc.). And no other group had a frontman as gleefully irreverent as Nic Offer, who is not opposed to busting out a dutty whine onstage in board shorts and a midriff-baring T-shirt. Making the uncool cool became second nature for !!!, yet another quality that separated them from the pack.
But !!! have repeatedly suffered from bad timing—they're unable to distance themselves from that one, fairly brief moment midway through their career where they found themselves part of something bigger, and that lens distorts the way their music in received. As If, !!!'s sixth studio album, is very much a reaction to that crisis of identity, a mostly successful attempt at re-establishing themselves as the premier suppliers of fun, kinetic, sprawling indie disco.
!!!'s secret weapon has always been their sense of humor—from their beginnings in the late '90s, when Offer basically had the wardrobe of an off-duty American Gladiator, to the tongue-in-cheek career highlight "Pardon My Freedom" from their politically-charged second LP Louden Up Now, whose chorus of "Like I give a fuck about that motherfuckin' shit" serves as a mini manifesto for !!!'s entire ethos.
There's nothing quite as special as "Pardon My Freedom" on As If, but opening track "All U Writers" delivers the album's first chuckle amidst it's pounding dance beat: "I knew I shouldn't have kissed him in a Chevrolet," sings a plaintive female voice, as Offer's distorted and stuttering vocals provide the song's structure. There's immediately a sense that !!! aren't necessarily trying to recreate past greatness but are pushing their sound and style in a new direction. The clearest example of this—and subsequently the best, if strangest, track on the album—is "Every Little Bit Counts", a straightforward rock-pop party song that would fit snugly on a Haircut 100 record circa 1983. The track has a big, broad, singalong chorus, a fist-pumping drumbeat and Orange Juice-like jumpy guitars, and it's unlike anything !!! have put forth up to date. "Freedom! '15" serves as a spiritual sequel of sorts to Louden Up Now: "Freedom!/ How's that working for you, baby?" sings Offer and his band of sarcastic backing singers, condensing the last decade of American political apathy into six minutes of funk.
Speaking of which, As *If * leans a little too heavily on the groove in the middle, with moments like "Funk (I Got This)" fading into the background, but it's reinvigorated towards the end by the riveting "Lucy Mongoosey", which uses another singalong chorus as an anchor, an introspective pause among all the dancing. The final track, "I Feel So Free (Citation Needed)", features Offer's slowed-down, slurred vocals narrating the construction of the song itself: “It's quiet around here without a kick drum” he states, before said drum comes into the mix and transforms it into a heady, weirdo, funny, controlled mess, much like !!! themselves. With a little luck, As If will be the turning point !!! are looking for, the beginning of a new path without the dance-punk baggage they've been toting around for the last decade. | 2015-10-21T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2015-10-21T02:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Warp | October 21, 2015 | 6.9 | da86367c-dc0b-4f60-8ef1-271d2a418159 | Cameron Cook | https://pitchfork.com/staff/cameron-cook/ | null |
The eight-track Water EP collects preliminary sketches from Aaron Maine’s best album, the spring release Pool. These rudimentary demos are filled with their own attractions and surprises. | The eight-track Water EP collects preliminary sketches from Aaron Maine’s best album, the spring release Pool. These rudimentary demos are filled with their own attractions and surprises. | Porches: Water EP | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22328-water-ep/ | Water EP | The New Yorker cartoonist Adrian Tomine was 17 when he started writing the comic “Optic Nerve.” Its early issues were later collected in a book called “32 Stories,” and for fans who had come to admire Tomine’s sharply written dialogue and distinctive style, those first works may have come as a surprise. Almost laughably amateurish, they gave lie to the idea that he had sprung from nowhere, a fully-formed comics genius. Instead they offered a chart tracking his artistic growth, and served as an inspiration to young artists despairing at their own sloppy work.
There is a distinct pleasure in getting a glimpse at the scratchpad of a favorite artist, recognizing go-to techniques and little creative experiments in a less presentable guise. That’s the idea animating Water, a new release from Aaron Maine’s band Porches that collects six of the demos for songs from the winter 2016 release Pool. The record represented a transition for Maine, from the digitally enhanced rock and folk of his earlier Bandcamp releases to mournful indie pop powered by synths and drum machines. The demos on the cleverly-named Water, though impressive by the standards of most song sketches, lack the sophistication of the mixes on Pool, allowing committed fans a look at the sinew between the more bare-bones Porches projects and the muscle of the newer record.
Maine has expressed enthusiasm about his recently developed production ability and the songs on Water suggest that his pride is well earned, demonstrating how he edited and improved his creations. Water’s version of the song “Pool” lacks the kick of the final cut, which is better paced, bringing in discreet instrumental flourishes one after the other. “Car,” on Pool, derives its power from the emotion built into its awed refrain, “Oh, what a machine.” The song is subdued on Water, its chorus less of a standout.
But even as the songs on Water emphasize the relative strength of Pool, they carry listeners down a road not taken, one filled with its own attractions and surprises. The Water version of “Shaver” may not include the final version’s killer saxophone solo, but it almost makes up for it with a lovely organ progression reminiscent of some of the sounds on the 2011 Porches record Summer of Ten. And of course, it’s not always so clear-cut which version of a song is “better.” For instance, the production on Pool’s version of “Mood” is crisper, but the verses on the Water version seem to be sung more sweetly. There are plenty of other examples where the rough version of a particular song includes an element that I wish had made it to the final cut.
Water also features two new unreleased tracks, “Black Dress” and “Black Budweiser T-Shirt.” Neither feels anywhere close to finished; if anything, they feel less fully realized than the six demos. The video for “Black Dress,” however, features choreography from Emma Portner and Devonté Hynes, and is worth watching.
When he was doing press for Pool, Maine said that he had worked hard to make the demos sound as good as he possibly could, and that work is obvious. The versions of the songs on Water have enough depth to make for a solid record in their own right. That Maine realized there was a whole separate layer of work still to be done on each song allowed him to make the best album of his career. This is an instructive example of artistic maturity in process, one which makes Water more than just a vanity project. Instead, it’s a demonstration of what it takes to tweak a song, upgrading an intriguing idea to the point where it’s nearly irresistible, where an artist comes into his own. | 2016-08-30T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-08-30T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Domino | August 30, 2016 | 7.5 | da8d390a-c39c-43b8-846f-9e11f98330ea | Jonah Bromwich | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jonah-bromwich/ | null |
The electronic composer’s first album in 33 years is also her final one—she passed away in December. The synthesizer pieces here are the lightest and most playful of her career, like beacons of hope and change. | The electronic composer’s first album in 33 years is also her final one—she passed away in December. The synthesizer pieces here are the lightest and most playful of her career, like beacons of hope and change. | Pauline Anna Strom: Angel Tears in Sunlight | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/pauline-anna-strom-angel-tears-in-sunlight/ | Angel Tears in Sunlight | 2021 was supposed to cement the renaissance of Pauline Anna Strom. The electronic music composer originally self-released her music in the early 1980s, though it never resonated far outside the New Age cottage industry. Her music wasn’t enough to cover her rent in the San Francisco Tenderloin District, so Strom sold off all of her equipment by decade’s end, becoming a Reiki master instead. In the intervening years, the blind-since birth composer’s idiosyncratic approach to synthesizer-based music—intuitive, asymmetrical, destabilizing—resonated with a new generation of explorers. Thanks in part to her inclusion on 2017’s much needed compendium Trans-Millenia Music, Strom realized she had fans ranging from MGMT and Caroline Polachek to Avalon Emerson. Buoyed by so many new listeners, she returned to music-making and was set to perform as part of the home-listening live concert series Oda (programmed alongside the likes of Madlib and Arca) and release her first album in 33 years.
Instead, Angel Tears in Sunlight arrives posthumously, as Strom passed away in December of last year. Perhaps she knew that her work might make sense in a future era, right down to the name she originally chose to release music under—Trans-Millenia Consort—which literally translates as “crossing time companion,” suggesting that the composer's perception of that concept was vaster and deeper than most. “If I made music now, I’d be something else,” she stated in the liner notes to Trans-Millenia Music, as much a prophecy as her prior recorded work. Rather than sounding like an epitaph, though, Angel Tears arrives as a beacon of hope and change. The lightest and most playful of Strom’s recorded work, it signals new vistas ahead, ones that sadly will now have to be explored by others.
“Tropical Convergence” teems with chimes and gurgling layers, suggesting sunlight reflecting on water. Strom’s work was often evocative, at times suggesting the more turbid mind states of the human experience (she titled some songs “Freebasing” and “Mushroom Trip” despite never dabbling in anything stronger than alcohol), but there’s a distinct lightness here, as if unburdening the worldly concerns of the past few years. The moving, minor-key “I Still Hope” ascends steadily towards its titular aspiration in two brief minutes.
Rather than track down the analog gear and tape machines from her past, Strom acquired new synthesizers for the new album. The unfamiliarity gives the album an exploratory feel, freeing Strom to dive down every rabbit hole, even adding in recordings of her two pet iguanas. “Marking Time”—with its dizzying un-gendered voice samples– isn’t far removed from Oneohtrix Point Never’s “He She” or SOPHIE’s bubblegum choirs. “The Pulsation” foregrounds her previously buried rhythmic experimentations: slippery drum patterns and polyrhythms arise from all corners of the track, full of struck metallic tones and synths acting like wild bird calls, the track dense as jungle foliage. “Equatorial Sunrise” explores similar rhythms with a glowing synth patch.
Only on “The Eighteen Beautiful Memories” does Strom recall the dark ambient contours of her early work. Against a slow-evolving sine wave, a poignant synth line emerges, offering a glint of brightness before receding away. “I dream in color,” she told one interviewer. “I’ve always seen things in my mind. I don’t know how else to interpret it.” Her song titles often reflected whatever her mind was on, be it impressions of far-off lands or Gothic horror. From the titles to the music itself, Angel Tears in Sunlight captures Strom turning her mind’s eye towards something warmer and more radiant than her prior work suggested, which might be as simple as the heat lamp for her iguanas or something more cosmic. Lamentably for us, she then moved fully towards that light.
Buy: Rough Trade
(Pitchfork earns a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.)
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-02-19T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2021-02-19T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Electronic | Rvng Intl. | February 19, 2021 | 7.9 | da908360-58c7-4f00-8764-8027a6e65752 | Andy Beta | https://pitchfork.com/staff/andy-beta/ | |
Over 40 years after its initial release, the composer’s pioneering work pairing computers with live players feels not only prescient but also refreshingly optimistic. | Over 40 years after its initial release, the composer’s pioneering work pairing computers with live players feels not only prescient but also refreshingly optimistic. | David Behrman: On the Other Ocean | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/david-behrman-on-the-other-ocean/ | On the Other Ocean | A New York Times article recently explored a spate of violence against robots, from people attacking driverless cars in Arizona and beating robots with bats in Russia to taking down one security bot in Silicon Valley with a tarp and barbecue sauce. Beyond dystopian depictions of HAL-9000 and Skynet, there’s plenty to fear from automation, be it decimating entire industries to hijacking our thought processes. But those menacing portrayals implicate humans and automatons alike: “We see ourselves in the mirror of the machines that we can build,” Frédéric Kaplan wrote in his essay “Who is afraid of the humanoid?”
“As far as machines being the enemy, I’m convinced that technology is amoral,” composer David Behrman told Perfect Sound Forever back in 1997. “Whether it’s a force for good or evil or neither depends on who is doing what with it and for what reason.” In the late 1960s, he began to experiment with how such inanimate objects—from battery-powered devices and synth modules to light sensors and the earliest microcomputers—might thoughtfully engage with human beings, be they classically trained musicians or modern dancers. Starting with 1967-68’s bracing “Runthrough,” Behrman began to tinker with his machines and inch towards equilibrium.
To call Behrman a composer might make him bristle, though. In a Village Voice review, critic Tom Johnson wrote, “Behrman doesn’t make pieces exactly. He assembles electronic equipment [that] is capable of doing certain things. These things change quite a bit… because he keeps tinkering with the machinery and adjusting his musical goals.” When Behrman encountered the Kim-1, an early and relatively inexpensive microcomputer that became available in 1976, he quickly adopted it for his live performances. Behrman could now program the computer to “hear” pitches and respond by sending harmonies to two of Behrman’s handmade synthesizers. It could also give chord changes to the players and alter the rhythm of the piece. In small steps, the computer could accompany and interact with the musicians. Two of these performances comprise On the Other Ocean.
“On the Other Ocean” and “Figure in a Clearing” date to 1977 and feature Kim-1 engaging with woodwinds in the former, cello on the latter. While computers are now integral to modern music-making, from Pro Tools for editing to the alien ribbons of Auto-Tune that festoon pop radio, On the Other Ocean suggests a parallel world, a path not taken. Behrman and his machine don’t seek to attain the impossible or superhuman, much less strive for perfection. There’s something peculiar about how the two sides interact, like Short Circuit’s Johnny 5 auditioning for the Philharmonic.
“On the Other Ocean” puts Arthur Stidfole’s bassoon and composer Maggi Payne’s flute into play with Kim-1. They unhurriedly hover around a set of pitches; the first time Kim-1 attempts to harmonize and swoops up to a new tone, it’s like a kid cannonballing into a pool, clunky yet elegant. Soon a slow-motion game of tag is on, the humans holding tones for a delectably long duration until the computer catches up. The composition’s 24 minutes seem to draw down in an instant. “Ocean” is slippery, yet it lingers for an exceptionally long time. It’s composed but diaphanous. It makes sense that during this era, Behrman also made a piece wherein clouds passing overhead trigger the computer.
The performance that yielded “Figure in a Clearing” predates “Ocean” by about three months, revealing the fiddling Behrman did in the intervening time, which led the Times’ critic John Rockwell to put him in “the great American tradition of the garage tinkerer.” The liner notes say that there are 33 electronic generators and the computer chooses chords made by 16 triangle wave generators. But the music’s dreaminess precludes any attempts at counting. Against David Gibson’s carefully bowed cello, Kim-1 is like a satellite in elliptical orbit, or a leashed dog in the park: now pushing the pace, now slowing it down. It may feel a bit busier than its counterpart, but, ever so slowly, stasis is achieved.
Over 40 years after its initial release on the Lovely Music label, an early, awkward exchange between a primitive computer and human improvisers may scan as quaint: Today, we all walk around with computers in our back pockets, and machine learning replaces more skilled jobs every day. But, while abstract electronics might not be for everyone, the end results remain not just lovely but even, perhaps, liberating.
At a time when giant streaming platforms deploy algorithms to lead millions to listen to playlists of ambient music from fake artists, the entire apparatus of the music industry has come to seem insidious, as though the machines themselves—and not simply their corporate overlords—were out to deceive us. So in hearing Behrman, his players, and a computer work in harmony, we can hear a better future. As he explained to Rockwell, while such work “has a very private feeling for me, and yet I don’t see why 83 million people couldn’t enjoy that private feeling. Solitude could be a universal treasure in a crowded world.” | 2019-02-04T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2019-02-04T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Electronic | Lovely | February 4, 2019 | 9 | da946988-b2c7-4411-a702-c7f84ebe8483 | Andy Beta | https://pitchfork.com/staff/andy-beta/ | |
Rick Ross' new mixtape, possibly his best full-length, finds the Teflon Don moving out of his comfort zone and entering a world where it feels like something is at stake. | Rick Ross' new mixtape, possibly his best full-length, finds the Teflon Don moving out of his comfort zone and entering a world where it feels like something is at stake. | Rick Ross: Rich Forever | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/16172-rich-forever/ | Rich Forever | With both Rick Ross and star producer du jour Lex Luger at the top of the rap game, it's easy to forget how much of the former's career is now owed to the latter. Ross was a successful artist before he ever hooked up with Luger, but his stunning transition from begrudgingly accepted popular rapper to one of the genre's most respected artists can basically be traced directly back to Luger's beat for "B.M.F. (Blowin' Money Fast)", the song that will go down as the indelible single of Ross' career. The beat was so titanic that Ross-- who had gone to great pains to protect the self-constructed image of himself as an opulent drug kingpin-- shouted a chorus where he imagined himself as genuine, real-life drug kingpins Big Meech and Larry Hoover. In one fell swoop, Ross tore down his carefully assembled existence while simultaneously building up the one that paved the way for the career surge he's riding, which has culminated in Rich Forever, the new mixtape that now stands as his artistic pinnacle.
"B.M.F." is genius for many reasons, but there is one crucial aspect of the song that makes Rich Forever tick: It was the first time that Ross ever really got mean. It's almost incredible to consider, but despite his stature and physical presence, "B.M.F." was the first intimidating Ross track since his debut single "Hustlin'", the first since then that pumped a dangerous amount of adrenaline into your veins. In the four years between those songs, Ross kept everything but wealth and women at a distance. He chose cinematic, orchestral beats that colored that image perfectly, and while it was no doubt an effective strategy, songs like "Maybach Music 2" are the equivalent of a living room in a mansion where you'd be afraid to touch any of the furniture. "B.M.F." was Rick Ross as Dave Chappelle as Rick James yelling "fuck yo' couch," except the couch was actually his own. It was exactly what his career needed.
Luger produces only one song on Rich Forever, but his fingerprints are all over the mixtape, and its roots are firmly in "B.M.F.". It's the first Rick Ross full-length with an attitude, and the result is a record where it finally feels like something's at stake for the Teflon Don. The aggrieved sneer of "…these motherfuckers mad that I'm icy!" permeates the album, and the energy derived from Ross' contempt adds an important dimension to his character, one that was missing when he got too comfortable making 1,000-thread-count music. The best beats here-- the ones that act as the backbone of the album-- are appropriately sinister, and actually improve on the Luger template that has dominated street rap for the past 18 months. There's the grinding churn of "MMG Untouchable", the haunted house bombast of "King of Diamonds", and the appropriately glistening keys of "Yella Diamonds", beats so good they render Luger's lone actual production ("Off the Boat") totally unnecessary.
The opening quarter of Rich Forever especially drips with disdain, and though deviations into radio pop and the lush instrumentation he's long cultivated do pop up, Ross sets a tone for the record early that courses through every track that follows. "B.M.F." did happen to crest with his marked improvement as a writer, but it also magnified Ross' ability to pen spectacularly outlandish and vivid boasts, and he stuffs a vast number of them into the first four or five tracks here. Ross calling his chain "the ghetto's guillotine" on "High Definition" or his Corvette "so clean you'll think Bruce Springsteen rent that" on "Fuck 'Em" or conveying his hunger for money by hilariously seething that he "likes his nachos hot" on "MMG Untouchable" is the mark of the Don at work, not content to merely build verses around the names of luxury sunglasses brands. And when he does retreat back to the throne for a regal track like "Keys to the Crib" later on the album, there's an undeniably spiteful glee in his voice that's missing from his earlier albums.
Ross has jarred himself out of his comfort zone and gotten his hands dirty, and in doing so he's also fleshed out an image of the boss as paranoid and constantly peeking over his shoulder. "Last Breath", which smartly tabs Meek Mill (Ross' top underling) and Birdman (the bossest of all rap bosses) for guest verses, undercuts images of ringside seats and all-white Beamers with a feeling of queasy desperation and lurking mistrust. Then there's "Stay Schemin'" which perfectly deploys a zonked-out French Montana to mumble-sing a hook about staying one step ahead of plotting enemies. Montana sounds so stoned that it brings to mind the image of Tony Montana lurching his head up from a pile of cocaine, and it's a fascinating, if not bizarre, end to an album that starts with Ross at his absolute meanest.
"God forgives, I don't," is a phrase that pops up from time to time on Rich Forever, and fittingly it's slated to serve as the title of Ross' upcoming album. He'd been batting around the slogan long before this mixtape existed, but Rich Forever adds vindictive muscle to a motto that at one point might have come off as a hollow attempt at branding. It's a record that uses nastiness to cement the character "Rick Ross" as three-dimensional, and uses a barrage of bangers to cement the rapper Rick Ross as an undeniable force. | 2012-01-13T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2012-01-13T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rap | null | January 13, 2012 | 8.2 | dab6d0c0-6c47-4d1b-be91-92e316a2afa4 | Jordan Sargent | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jordan-sargent/ | null |
Though the shadow of Wand’s mentor Ty Segall still hovers over Wand’s blown-out garage sound, the band's own flickering light is shining through. Here they add some folk rock to the mix, bringing beautiful, honeyed melodies to dark, bleak songs about curdled dreams. | Though the shadow of Wand’s mentor Ty Segall still hovers over Wand’s blown-out garage sound, the band's own flickering light is shining through. Here they add some folk rock to the mix, bringing beautiful, honeyed melodies to dark, bleak songs about curdled dreams. | Wand: 1000 Days | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/20995-1000-days/ | 1000 Days | On their third album, Los Angeles’ Wand gracefully sidestep the potential pitfalls of psychedelic songwriting—meandering guitars, rambling lyrics, directionless tracks. They ground the blurry, bizarre visions established on their previous efforts, Ganglion Reef and Golem, in colorful imagery, so that the faces of the monsters they’ve written about on past records come into full focus.
While the shadow of Wand’s mentor Ty Segall still hovers over Wand’s blown-out garage sound, the band’s own flickering light is beginning to shine through more often. They have added some progressive folk rock to the mix, fondly recalling unique and memorable records like Mellow Candle’s Swaddling Songs and Comus’ classic First Utterance without sounding like a carbon copy. Cory Hanson’s voice shimmers against the acoustic palette of songs like the beautiful closer "Morning Rainbow", the song that also contains 1000 Days’ key lyrical thesis: "We will see this world together in its terror."
Paralysis, paranoia, disappearance, erasure, pure fear, and curdling dreams are all themes that reappear in Hanson’s lyrics for 1000 Days; even the titular song, a concise bit of folky garage pop with a sunny-sweet choral melody, seems like it might be a love song at first but quickly turns into the nightmare of relationship stasis, depression, and ennui ("I don’t need a thing ‘cause I’ve had every dream"). The mingling of beautiful, honeyed melodies with dark, bleak lyrical content is nothing new, but Wand do it especially well, and they have a precision in their songwriting that keeps their music from spinning off into glazed burnout territory.
Though one worries that with such a prolific release schedule that Wand will run out of ideas, 1000 Days is a heartening record, a record that sees a young band picking up steam, playing with their influences more deftly than on their prior LPs, and bringing a thoughtful approach to old and well-traveled sounds. There’s enough interesting moments on 1000 Days to hold onto these songs, go back to them, and explore within them. That’s more than many of their cohorts within the cluttered and long-trendy field of psychedelic garage—there are hundreds of disposable tape-label bands with little to say out there, and it’s wearying to search through all that crud for the occasional gem, which does exist—have to offer. | 2015-09-29T02:00:02.000-04:00 | 2015-09-29T02:00:02.000-04:00 | Rock | Drag City | September 29, 2015 | 7 | dabd954c-7baa-425c-bd05-15fa04eb7fbd | JJ Skolnik | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jj-skolnik/ | null |
The indie rockers pay tribute to their heroes with a love and abandon that can only come from living with these songs for decades. | The indie rockers pay tribute to their heroes with a love and abandon that can only come from living with these songs for decades. | The Feelies: Some Kinda Love: Performing the Music of the Velvet Underground | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/the-feelies-some-kinda-love-performing-the-music-of-the-velvet-underground/ | Some Kinda Love: Performing the Music of the Velvet Underground | The Feelies may not be the Velvet Underground’s first disciples—Jonathan Richman was there at the inception, tailing the band with the fervor of a Deadhead. But it could be argued that the New Jersey institution, led by Glenn Mercer and Bill Million, is responsible for much of the indie rock that flowed downstream from the Velvets. Crazy Rhythms, the Feelies’ 1980 debut, bristled with a confined nervous energy as the band brought the downtown innovations of the Velvet Underground to the suburbs, an aesthetic that became part of the lingua franca of guitar-pop for the ensuing decades.
The Feelies’ new album, Some Kinda Love: Performing the Music of the Velvet Underground, captures a performance held in conjunction with the touring exhibition “The Velvet Underground Experience” during its New York City run in 2018. Setting up shop at the White Eagle Hall in Jersey City, the Feelies invited fellow Velvets fanatics Richard Barone and James Maestro of the Bongos to hop on stage, then proceeded to tear through a set that sidelined the avant garde escapades of the Velvet Underground to focus squarely on their strengths as a rock’n’roll band.
Rightly celebrated as a key act in the birth of transgressive rock, the Velvet Underground also had a sweet undercurrent flowing through their occasionally abrasive music. Some of this can be chalked up to Lou Reed’s enduring love of doo-wop and R&B, an affection that grounded the group even as they floated far afield on waves of noise and ambience. As a band, the Feelies don’t quite share the same R&B affinity, yet they hone in on that warmth, deliberately sidestepping the ominous dread of “Heroin,” the cacophony of “Sister Ray,” and the poignant sadness of “Pale Blue Eyes” so they can play songs that collectively sound like a celebration.
The Feelies favor no particular era of the Velvet Underground on Some Kinda Love, balancing selections from the group’s early years with John Cale with songs originally sung by Doug Yule, Cale’s replacement in the Velvets. It’s a holistic view of the band that places an emphasis on songs that sound great within the confines of a club. The most telling selection may be “Head Held High,” a rocker that opens the second side of Loaded—the last album Reed made with the group—and the moment where Some Kinda Love kicks into high gear: It’s a song with no higher meaning than being a real good time, which is precisely what the Feelies intend to deliver.
The Feelies play this music with the kind of love and abandon that can only come from living with the songs for decades. They don’t treat the original Velvet Underground recordings as sacred texts: They shape their arrangements to suit their own strengths, choosing to snip off the snappy instrumental coda to “Who Loves the Sun” and streamlining “I Heard Her Call My Name” so it feels like a garage rocker. It’s evident in this performance, as on so much of Some Kinda Love, that drummer Stan Demeski swings more than Maureen Tucker, the drummer that gave Velvet Underground their potent, primitive thrust. Without her almost militant beat, “I’m Waiting for the Man” and “Run Run Run” seem lighter, but that isn’t to say Demeski plays conventionally. He propels the music with a playful sense of rhythm, giving Mercer, Million, and bassist Brenda Sauter plenty of room to roam, sliding in and out of grooves and barreling into breakneck rave-ups.
Listeners with a deep knowledge of both bands may be able to appreciate such moments as the conclusion of “White Light/White Heat," which ends with a flurry of noise that feels cathartic, not cataclysmic. (Similarly, they may be the only people amused by the fact that Some Kinda Love is named after a Velvet Underground song not heard on this record.) But even with no prerequisites, Some Kinda Love works as a roaring rock’n’roll record because the Feelies play with such enthusiasm. Their tribute feels like a communion. It’s not a revival—it’s a celebration of their lifeblood. | 2023-10-21T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2023-10-21T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Bar/None | October 21, 2023 | 7.7 | dac0d614-f394-469a-8ab6-29a6a1bb1f85 | Stephen Thomas Erlewine | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stephen-thomas erlewine/ | |
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 Judy Garland’s mythical 1961 live album, a late-career triumph that helped to outline the shape of queer fandom for decades to come. | 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 Judy Garland’s mythical 1961 live album, a late-career triumph that helped to outline the shape of queer fandom for decades to come. | Judy Garland: Judy at Carnegie Hall | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/judy-garland-judy-at-carnegie-hall/ | Judy at Carnegie Hall | In a photograph snapped on the evening of April 23, 1961, a line of disembodied hands reach out to grasp for Judy Garland onstage at Carnegie Hall. They belonged to a group of men whose allegiance to the star was as passionate as it was fraught; as bound up in their identification with her strength and humor as with the many troubles of her life. Their cohort could only be spoken about in code, and in time, a whole vocabulary emerged to describe them: friends of Dorothy, the boys in the band, Best Judys. To journalists and outsiders they were objects of amusement, if not outright scorn: “the boys in tight trousers,” “ever-present bluebirds,” or as one writer bluntly called them, “a flutter of fags.”
What’s most striking about this image is Garland’s responsiveness to the people connected to those flailing limbs. Her eyes are cast downward, reciprocating their gaze, engaging them as individuals rather than an undifferentiated mass. Most accounts of that evening are of a restless and animated audience, leaping out of their seats and swarming the footlights to be closer to the singer. According to one review, the fervor was so intense “you could not tell whether the crowd was clapping, shouting, screaming, laughing, or crying. The sound suddenly had no character. It was just an expression of total approval and acceptance.”
“It was, even by the strictest definition, perfect,” Gerald Clarke, Garland’s biographer, wrote of her series of performances at the storied New York concert hall. But strict perfection is at odds with Garland’s enduring appeal. The expressiveness of her voice outpaced its technical merits. Her genius was using a flawed human instrument to communicate something far more complicated than a lovely song sung straight. She approached show tunes and pop standards with such unguarded emotion that they came to seem disarmingly personal, no matter how well-known or widely performed. Despite her music’s theatricality, the scrim separating the person from the performer was unusually thin: the draw of a Garland concert had as much to do with her glamorous presence as her unbridled singing.
The mystique of Carnegie Hall was only enhanced by the success of its recording. Judy at Carnegie Hall spent 95 weeks on the charts and 13 of them at the No. 1 spot. It won several top awards at the 1962 Grammy Awards, including Album of the Year, the first ever awarded to a woman. It was a record that lived up to the hyperbole of its liner notes and soon was widely known as “the greatest night in show business history.” After a sometimes rocky 1950s, it once again reaffirmed the star power Garland had always possessed, marking the moment when the singer and her audience were in perfect sync with one another; when the peak of her powers as an artist was met with the kind of sustained and unconditional recognition she’d always sought.
Though beloved by her audience, Garland was also the subject of decades of ridicule and gossip about her romantic failure, substance abuse, and professional unpredictability. If she didn't have an enduring romantic partnership, she often found love through applause, forming a complex circuit of affection between herself and the public. This was especially true among pre-Stonewall gay fans, who heard reflections of their own perilous lives in the resilience she embodied. To listen to Judy Garland was not only to feel “total approval and acceptance,” but to be recognized for one’s difference and embraced for it too.
Born Frances Ethel Gumm in Grand Rapids, Minnesota, the yet-to-be-christened Garland was marked for success at an early age. Thrust into a performing group with her only modestly talented sisters, “Baby” Gumm was quickly singled out by her legendarily awful stage mother, Ethel, as the most likely potential star. The family relocated to Lancaster, California, where Ethel dedicated her weekends to hauling her youngest to auditions. Her efforts paid off when, in 1935, Garland was signed to MGM. Judy’s voice was so outsized and affecting that it could cow bullies into submission; it could telegraph feelings so beyond her years that executives were unsure how to make use of her. She was considered too old to be a child star, too plain to be a glamor girl, and too “fat” to be a sex symbol. MGM’s dedication to policing the young actress’ weight was notorious: hiring spies to catch her eating, pushing unhealthy fad diets, comparing her to an overweight mannequin, and most crucially, putting her on a pharmacy’s worth of pills.
From early on, shame defined Garland’s persona. Where the stars of the late 1950s and ’60s would go on to make unguarded teenage emotion central to pop, Garland disclosed feelings that seemed more related to early adolescence. The spur that sets a given track into motion often isn’t angst but embarrassment. It’s present in her earliest numbers like “You Made Me Love You,” which she originally sang from the perspective of a moony-eyed young fan longing for the impossible embrace of her idol, and reaches its pinnacle with “Somewhere Over the Rainbow,” a song so naked in its yearning that it feels almost intrusive to listen to. By the time Garland stepped onstage at Carnegie Hall to perform both numbers, she’d grown into her powers but preserved their signature tension. The “triumph” of so much of Garland’s music is of conquering self-consciousness with talent, and in doing so, attaining a freedom unfettered from shame.
In 1950, after years of being drugged by the studio and overworked to the brink of psychosis, Garland was effectively kicked out of the film industry. At the behest of her husband, Sid Luft, she pivoted to live performances and reminded everyone what MGM had long exploited her for: the sheer power of her voice. The tour’s success reinstated her in Hollywood, but by the end of the decade, she was in a rough way. Her marriage to Luft was falling apart due to his colossal mismanagement of her fortune, and her health was rapidly deteriorating. Doctors told her that hepatitis would likely leave her incapacitated for the rest of her life. Tellingly, it was news that she initially seemed to greet with some relief, as though it would finally allow her to have a moment’s rest. But after she got wise to the extent of her financial troubles, it became clear that rest was not an option. After a period of convalescence, Garland was able to partially re-generate her liver, hire new management, and get back on the road.
Unlike her extravagant shows from the 1950s, Carnegie Hall was envisioned as a straightforward engagement. No circus acts, no cheap thrills, just Judy backed by a 40-piece orchestra. The setlist was a series of highs drawn from every era of her discography, from breakthrough hits (“You Made Me Love You,” “Zing! Went the Strings of My Heart”) to film performances (“The Trolley Song,” “The Man That Got Away”) to mature standards (“Do It Again”) and classics from the American songbook (“Swanee,” “I Can’t Give You Anything But Love”). These were songs that she had lived with and performed over and over again, that had developed a universe of popular recognition and quiet personal subtext. You don’t need to know, for instance, that Garland’s original performance of “You Made Me Love You” prompted Mayer to finally recognize her star power to hear the emotional economy of her delivery at Carnegie Hall, the ease with which she can shade reminiscence with regret. At 13 years old, she was told to sing “Zing!” at her very best because her dying father would be listening over the radio. But understanding that history isn’t necessary for grasping the heaviness beneath the song’s light heart.
After basking in the applause, the first sound that Garland makes on the record is a flattered but self-deprecating “oh!” Then she kicks off into “When You’re Smiling (The Whole World Smiles With You).” Self-effacement and self-empowerment go hand in hand for Garland: the song is a call to optimism in the face of personal ruin that’s paced like a stand-up comedy routine. Between warbling verses, Garland rattles off a list of troubles that run from petty slights to outright devastation, practically inviting the listener to map the song’s catalog of misfortune onto the gossip cycle surrounding her own personal life. After being deceived, told she looks stout, handed a subpoena, and having her groom get cold feet, Garland sings a mantra for survival: “Forget your troubles/C’mon get happy!”
Though that motto may be saccharine, Garland makes its positivity sound like a kind of faith. The attitude of unyielding cheer in the face of collapse, reflective of the musical theater tradition in which she cut her teeth, is like an inversion of rock’s detached cool or punk’s ferocious snarl. But it can be just as defiant of a rejection: a refusal to be diminished by life in the face of mundanity or outright ruin. Garland sums it up multiple times throughout the evening, like in “San Francisco,” where she plays up the melodrama of the original number before the arrangement quickens and she flips it from a dirge into a brassy homecoming. “That’s Entertainment!” elevates the idea to cosmic scale, paraphrasing Shakespeare to sum up theater’s ability to elevate everyday mediocrity into a vast human comedy: “The world is a stage/The stage is a world of entertainment!”
From Dorothy’s implacable longing to Esther’s hometown pride in Meet Me In St. Louis, Garland’s appeal was thoroughly rooted in nostalgia. Judy at Carnegie Hall was composed primarily of numbers that dated back to the 1920s and 1930s, which she managed to keep relatively fresh by accommodating elements of jazz and swing into her arrangements. The nostalgia she inspired in the early ’60s was two-pronged: for the Golden Age of Hollywood and the long-lost world of vaudeville, where the Gumm family had gotten its start. That nostalgia was not entirely benign: When critics needed a point of comparison for the young Garland, many reached for vaudeville star Al Jolson, America’s most famous blackface performer.
Garland covers two songs popularized by Jolson on Carnegie Hall: George Gershwin’s “Swanee,” which she had also performed in 1954’s A Star Is Born, and “Rock-a-Bye Your Baby with a Dixie Melody.” In both cases, her pleas to return home to “mammy” have aged as poorly as the blackface she once donned for 1939’s Babes In Arms. But these are the only wrinkles in an otherwise flawless evening, and reminders that the feigned, backward-looking innocence of the American songbook is far more dated than the worldliness of Garland’s singing.
After a lifetime of stewing underneath a veneer of perfect poise, Garland developed a razor-sharp wit and self-deprecating sense of humor that would make her a talk show favorite toward the end of her life, even as she was left slurring and glassy-eyed in her seat. Her stories between numbers are genuinely funny, as when she recalls using a safety pin to affix an ill-fitting evening dress for a seated performance at a piano: “I sat down and the pin came undone and into my derrière. I’ve never sung so high or so fast.”
On the other hand, the anecdote she tells of a journalist flattering her all night only to publish an article about how fat she’s gotten is hard to laugh off, even as it’s played for comedy. “I’ve spent years and years and years trying to please through singing or acting,” Garland once raged on tape recordings for a memoir that never materialized, “and yet I’ve constantly been written or talked about as an unfit person.” Those tapes reveal the flipside to the concert’s circuit of affection, the life largely not captured on record: of lonely, inebriated nights in far-flung hotel rooms, stone broke and many miles from her children, years of anger surfacing as her battle-honed sharpness dissolves into chemical slush.
The most affecting numbers on Judy at Carnegie Hall are the ones where she communicates pain and loss, like the aching way she phrases “The man who won you/Has run off and undone you” on “The Man That Got Away,” or her powerful belting as the song blazes to a climax. In that number and “Stormy Weather,” Garland’s use of dynamics demonstrates her tight rapport with her backing band, allowing the music to swell and recede so that almost pitifully small levels of woundedness eventually culminate into pyrotechnic displays of emotion.
“Come Rain or Come Shine” rides a breakneck drum line that becomes increasingly frantic as it’s accompanied by strings, horns, and a relentless ride cymbal, with Garland’s voice growing more ragged with desire the more aggressive the music becomes. By the end of the song, her ferocity is matched by a crowd that won’t stop screaming. “Alone Together” dramatizes its deep weariness and devotion with a pitch-black vortex of woodwinds and strings. Wielding the powerful lower end of her contralto for all of its resolve, and the corroded edge of her vibrato for all of its turbulent emotion, Garland encircles the audience with her passion while conveying a fear it might not be enough to protect them.
Later, after flubbing a verse in “You Go to My Head” and gamely carrying on, she hedges her performance of “If Love Were All” by bringing the lyrics sheet onstage for a performance backed only by piano. Garland more than makes up for her caution by how totally she occupies the loneliness at the song’s heart and the despair of its final lament: “But I believe that since my life began/The most I’ve had is just a talent to amuse.” Though their music is quite different, Garland’s appeal is not entirely dissimilar to that of later performers like Elliott Smith or Kurt Cobain, although her scorching honesty is complicated by her need to express herself through the veil of other people’s songs. If those performers gained part of their power from raw disclosures of pain, what animates Garland is an almost unbearable dose of dramatic irony.
This capacity to read Garland beyond face value—to sense, for instance, as she breaks down over the hopelessness of her partner’s addiction in A Star Is Born, that she was also talking about herself—also placed her at the forefront of camp. The “failed seriousness,” as Susan Sontag later put it, of a child star who developed a lifetime of trademark tics to cope with the spotlight, has been a boon to generations of drag queens and actresses in want of an award-winning biopic.
Though the lexicon of contemporary gay culture is unthinkable without “Judy, Judy, Judy,” the audience who clamored for Judy at Carnegie Hall inhabited a vastly more hostile world than the modern listener. Apart from the brutal policing and social ostracization, the 1950s and early 1960s was a heyday of Freudianism in America, and the profile that emerged of homosexuals as effeminate, repressed, and grotesquely sentimental elicited both patronizing sympathy and flagrant contempt. In a very homophobic article for Esquire in 1969, William Goldman managed to sum up both: “First, if [gays] have an enemy, it is age. And Garland is youth, perennially, over the rainbow. And second, the lady has suffered. Homosexuals tend to identify with suffering.”
Though Garland’s death in 1969 on the day of the Stonewall Riots is mythically invoked by some as a driving factor for the rebellion, it actually marked a decisive break between generations. Gay liberation was, to a large extent, about materializing a self out of the shadows. The defiant, often hard-bodied new homosexual that emerged in its wake had no need for Garland as a conduit to express itself or to articulate its political demands. In turn, loving Judy became not only passé but slightly shameful, an activity associated with the most pathetic kind of closetedness: evocative of mothballs, jazz hands, and a deferred life of masochistic yearning.
But even as the cult of Garland dipped, it laid the seeds for powerful new affinities to develop between performers and their audiences. In Judy at Carnegie Hall, one can hear the genesis of contemporary queer fandom, in all of its relatability and complicated emotional grappling. Judy’s precipitous highs and lows have gradually been given a cleaner shape by the artists who succeeded her, smoothing out the turbulence in favor of a much more manageable approach to pop as a way of life, whether that be narrativizing a fully-rounded approach to sex and romance (Madonna), sharing moments of shattering vulnerability (Janet Jackson), or performing jazz standards while taking on A Star Is Born (Lady Gaga). Even when the going is rougher, she remains the benchmark for preternaturally gifted performers who persevere despite unthinkable odds: just look at how often her name comes up in discussions of Amy Winehouse, Whitney Houston, or Britney Spears.
However satisfying it is to see “The Trolley Song” come full circle and get meme’d into oblivion, it’s difficult to imagine a singer today occupying quite the same status for their fans as Judy did for hers. The identification that accumulated gradually around her over decades is now recreated on an industrial scale, virtually overnight, with billions of dollars at stake. It’s no longer just Judy: You can now take your pick of queer singers to stan, or choose from an even larger pool of flamboyant pop girls, gaybaiting boys, and industry-backed “outsiders.” Psychological subtext has given way to a ready-made therapeutic language of overcoming trauma. No public controversy or tabloid trouble is too minor or damaging to create a new album cycle over. This has all contributed to deep cracks in a once iron-clad relationship. Artists are in the awkward position of having to give profuse thanks to fans while also trying to claw back their autonomy from them. Fan service has increasingly become fan deference. At times, it feels like the tail is now wagging the dog: that the purchasing power of gay money—and the sense of entitlement over artists that comes with it—not only dictates the sound of pop music but the character and affect of its performers.
That’s part of what makes Judy at Carnegie Hall so moving. The singer’s capacity for openness was met with a proportionate show of gratitude by an audience who could appreciate it for the act of generosity that it was. Her struggles were not their struggles, although both knew the pain of being unable to reconcile the roles foisted upon them with their deeply inconvenient yearning for basic happiness. This is also what makes “Over the Rainbow” such a powerful anthem. The song was talismanic for Garland, and she treated it with a protectiveness that she did not extend to anything else in her repertoire. The lives of Dorothy Gale and Judy Garland were equally fantastic, but time had frozen the former in a fairytale while the latter was left to square her longing with an adult understanding of just how pitiless the world could be. On the record, Garland does not burst into quiet sobs while singing like she did in the 1950s, but she does approach the song’s central emotion with an almost holy reverence. The mature grain in her voice makes its final question feel all the more poignant and heartbreaking: “If happy little bluebirds fly/Beyond the rainbow/Why, oh whyyyy, can’t I-I-I?”
Ultimately, Garland could not resolve her unhappiness, but struggled against her limits, yielding a hard-won truth that she bore out in her art. Like Dorothy at the end of The Wizard of Oz, Judy at Carnegie Hall found home: among an audience who loved and accepted her, applauding her for all that she was rather than defining her by all that she lacked. | 2024-05-19T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2024-05-19T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | Capitol | May 19, 2024 | 10 | dac4972a-9f40-44dd-83a3-2c56590d0125 | Harry Tafoya | https://pitchfork.com/staff/harry-tafoya/ | |
One of the most beloved, bewitching, misunderstood, and eventually disappointing bands in recent history, Belle & Sebastian did the near-impossible in ... | One of the most beloved, bewitching, misunderstood, and eventually disappointing bands in recent history, Belle & Sebastian did the near-impossible in ... | Belle and Sebastian: Dear Catastrophe Waitress | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/633-dear-catastrophe-waitress/ | Dear Catastrophe Waitress | One of the most beloved, bewitching, misunderstood, and eventually disappointing bands in recent history, Belle & Sebastian did the near-impossible in the Internet era: They seemed to appear out of nowhere. Admittedly, there was also a time (recently, in fact) when I'd wished they'd have mysteriously vanished as well, exorcising the dark spots of their post-1998 output in order to keep their reputation-- or at least Stuart Murdoch's-- in respectable shape.
From their inauspicious beginnings in 1995, the collective emerged from Scotland with wistful, nostalgia-laden indie pop that examined sexual frustration, shiftlessness, loneliness, and isolation. Murdoch's songs-- often punctuated by proper and place names-- painted expressionist, detail-oriented worlds that, when they connected with a listener, often left an indelible, deep impression. What went wrong is typically chalked up to a split in songwriting duties, a practice that made their third and fourth albums, The Boy With the Arab Strap and Fold Your Hands Child, You Walk Like a Peasant, disjointed, frustrating listens. The band's choice to democratize, allowing a fair number of songs from each band member, negated the singularity of Murdoch's vision, often at the cost of his wit and charm. This all-inclusive measure also resulted in the band drifting toward a pastiche of too-familiar touchstones: 60s baroque pop, Northern Soul/Motown, and folk-rock.
On their fifth proper album, Dear Catastrophe Waitress, Belle & Sebastian continue their exploration of pastiche, diversifying their sonic palate to include 70s soft-rock, the irreverent pop of 10cc and Squeeze, and bubblegum. Here, the band's once-misguided ambition is tailored and cut by famed producer (and founder of notorious 1980s art-pop groups The Buggles and The Art of Noise), Trevor Horn, who aids the band in making a complete 180-degree turn from wry, wistful folk-pop to sophisticated, tight, sometimes-complex arrangements with a keen attention to detail. Horn's touch is most effective on "Stay Loose" and "I'm a Cuckoo", two ambitious classic AM pop gems that-- like the best of his past production work-- threaten to spill over into the absurd but instead remain delightfully audacious.
Ironically, with a new-found ability to rectify their once at-odds musical interests, Belle & Sebastian have emerged as shiny happy people, becoming that of which they were always falsely accused: t*ee. That label was always more appropriate to the infantilism-obsessed, Sanrio-loving element in their fanbase, while the band itself traded in innuendo, sinisterism, anxiety, and sketches of unfulfilled childhoods. But here, songs such as "Roy Walker", "You Don't Send Me", and the semi-creepy Godspellian "If You Find Yourself Caught in Love" are so bubblegum they could have been staples of any number of early 70s TV families, from the Bradys to the Osmonds to the Partridges.
That may sound dreadful but Belle & Sebastian manage to do a lot of things right-- including "You Don't Send Me", whose strength lies in its effective application of aesthetic. "Piazza, New York Catcher" manages to come off like a woozy, drunken version of the Murdoch demo "Rhoda", and it's his most lyrically complex work here, reminiscent of highlights from the past couple of albums such as "Sleep the Clock Around", "The Boy With the Arab Strap", "The Model", and "There's Too Much Love". Certain tracks do flirt with reminders of Belle & Sebastian Mk I-- namely "Lord Anthony", finally given a proper release years after it was written, and "Wrapped Up in Books"-- but these throwbacks are temporary, bones tossed to diehards unable to cope with the band's decision to trade their bedsit infamy for bouncy, pogo-pop.
On one hand, Dear Catastrophe Waitress ranks as one of the most delightful surprises of the year, although that's primarily because I'd completely given up on them. On the other hand, it's a very flawed record that at its quirky worst features harmonies so brow-furringly cheery they'd be comfortable amidst a cruise-ship revue or one of Up With People's halftime routines. It's not at all what one might call a "return to form"; rather, it's a large step toward a new, more appealing direction than the band had otherwise been heading. At present, they're almost a new entity entirely, which makes this the Belle & Sebastian album for people who never really liked Belle & Sebastian.
I realize that for a large portion of Belle & Sebastian fans-- most of them young and American-- lots of elements of the band's past matter little. The myth, the shambolic performances, the radio sessions, the dubbed cassettes of Tigermilk, the band's refusal to talk to the press, releasing only non-LP tracks as singles, not featuring the band on its sleeves, Murdoch's place in a songwriting lineage that includes early Orange Juice, The Smiths, and Felt-- it's now all ancient history. If that's indicative to you of what's become problematic with the band, you may want to approach this album with caution. If, however, "Legal Man" is among your favorite Belle & Sebastian songs, buy this immediately. | 2003-10-05T01:00:03.000-04:00 | 2003-10-05T01:00:03.000-04:00 | Rock | Rough Trade | October 5, 2003 | 7.5 | dac7e1b9-f651-476a-b510-2119fac3b376 | Scott Plagenhoef | https://pitchfork.com/staff/scott-plagenhoef/ | null |
Cruising at her habitual 160 beats per minute, the rising London DJ mixes old-school jungle techno, acid rave, breakbeat hardcore, and footwork into an exhilarating 75-minute set. | Cruising at her habitual 160 beats per minute, the rising London DJ mixes old-school jungle techno, acid rave, breakbeat hardcore, and footwork into an exhilarating 75-minute set. | SHERELLE: fabric presents SHERELLE | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/sherelle-fabric-presents-sherelle/ | fabric presents SHERELLE | When running on a treadmill, it’s advised to slow the thing down in stages before you get off. If you don’t—if, instead, you hop off and go from full tilt to a standstill—there’s a good chance the floor will still feel like it’s moving, your brain and legs won’t communicate quickly enough, and your teeth will meet the carpet. Breakneck London DJ Sherelle Thomas is the personal trainer who stands next to the machine, edging the speed dial up, grinning as your legs burn into a blur. Jump off if you dare.
It was a raucous, viral Boiler Room set in 2019 that put a rocket up SHERELLE’s career. She’s made plenty of the limelight since, beaming out from magazine covers, launching two labels (one solo, one alongside fellow Reprezent Radio alum Naina), and working on her own productions—one of which, piano banger “JUNGLE TEKNAH,” crops up on this mix. When lockdown hit in 2020 and the UK’s clubs closed for the foreseeable future, she ended up on the BBC’s flagship news show arguing in favor of more support for the sector. Recording a mix for Fabric, the London meat store-turned-clubbing institution, could be just another notch on a well-worn belt, but SHERELLE takes it as an opportunity to hammer time into a flat circle, fusing her own dance music history (she’s described Caspa & Rusko’s foundational FabricLive.37 as her entry point into clubbing) with elements of hardcore rave from the early ’90s up to the present day.
SHERELLE’s contribution to the series, which was relaunched as fabric presents in 2019, arrives at a moment when, in the UK (and on TikTok), breakbeats are back in vogue. It’s a stretch to credit SHERELLE alone with this resurgence, but her teeming enthusiasm has certainly been a factor, and it’s on unbridled display here. She kicks off with Cloud 9’s already-speedy slice of classic 1993 hardcore, “You Got Me Burnin’,” but, this being SHERELLE, the tempo has been upped a couple notches. It feels like a statement; she’s said in the past that she favors “anything at or above 160 [beats per minute],” and clearly won’t settle for less here. But there’s no time to ponder. She’s already into the rapid patter of fellow breaks wizard Tim Reaper’s “Globex Corp, Vol 1. A1” collab with Darlington junglist Dwarde, and the set continues thus. She blisters through 27 songs in 75 minutes, compressing decades of dancing to tightly woven two- and three-minute segments. There’s jungle techno, acid rave, hardcore, and lots of warped footwork repping old- and new-schoolers alike, from Rashad and RP Boo to AceMo and Kush Jones.
fabric presents SHERELLE is a survey of fast music past and (mostly) present that’s as exhilarating (and, sometimes, exhausting) as the Boiler Room show that shot the North Londoner to acclaim. It catalogs a moment in which a new generation is grasping and reshaping a raving past that’s too distant for them to remember. It is not, however, for the delicate of heart, pummelling away beyond 160 BPM for all but the briefest of moments. Some might desire more respite—there’s little calm beyond LCY’s trippy “Bite Off The Hand That Feeds You,” the splash of X-Files pads joining Response’s “Sanity Melting” with Tim Reaper and Worldwide Epidemic’s “Losing Control—but you don’t hire SHERELLE if you don’t like the taste of sweat. Lace up.
Buy: Rough Trade
(Pitchfork earns a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.)
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-12-08T00:00:00.000-05:00 | 2021-12-08T00:00:00.000-05:00 | Electronic | Fabric | December 8, 2021 | 7.4 | dacc0e77-1023-4421-8be6-5a114d7a26c7 | Will Pritchard | https://pitchfork.com/staff/will-pritchard/ | |
French artist Cécile Schott wrote her new LP as Colleen—an electronic reflection on mortality—in the wake of the 2015 Paris terrorist attacks. Despite the heavy themes, her sound is lighter than ever. | French artist Cécile Schott wrote her new LP as Colleen—an electronic reflection on mortality—in the wake of the 2015 Paris terrorist attacks. Despite the heavy themes, her sound is lighter than ever. | Colleen: A flame my love, a frequency | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/colleen-a-flame-my-love-a-frequency/ | A flame my love, a frequency | “The world had nearly ended yet the sky was blue, and I came home with a fistful of fear,” remembers electronic composer Cécile Schott on “Winter Dawn,” a line that captures all the weighty preoccupations of her seventh album as Colleen. Written in the aftermath of the 2015 terror attack in Paris, “Winter Dawn” is cold and hard as a snowglobe, a compact container of chaos. It’s also the explanatory anchor of A flame my love, a frequency, a quietly devastating album defined by Schott’s enviable economy of expression.
Since her earliest release in 2002, the French multi-instrumentalist and singer has sounded more like herself with each new project, despite continual efforts to disrupt her own working process. In the first act of her career, Schott’s albums on the Leaf label manufactured ethereal loopscapes from old music boxes and 19th-century glass harmonicons, reinventing forgotten instruments and charging them with a percussive energy rooted in minimalism, gamelan, and other non-Western musical traditions. Shortly before her lengthy hiatus in 2007, Schott fell in love with another obscure instrument: the viola da gamba, a 15th century antecedent of the cello, which allows players to perform both chord and melody, handy for a solitary composer. By sloughing off historical context, Schott has been able to perceive all her instruments as generators of raw sound, opening up unexpected possibilities in genre and mood; it’s an approach that aligns her with her musical hero, Arthur Russell, whose disregard for classical tradition turned his cello into a spartan rhythm section.
Schott was in Paris on the day of the terror attack in 2015; she’d decided to stay a night in her former home to take her viola bow for repair, and had spent the afternoon strolling past the busy cafés that would be devastated a few hours later. A flame my love, a frequency emerged in the weeks after the attack as she considered “the inescapable fact that life and death always walk hand in hand.” Yet despite the heavy themes, Schott’s music sounds lighter than ever. A flame my love, a frequency is her first wholly electronic album, leaving behind the viola da gamba—but while the instrument is gone, its delicate, softly percussive timbre echoes through the album’s undulating textures.
After submerging herself in watery echo and dubbed out basslines on 2015’s Captain of None, bass is virtually absent here, as if her foundations have crumbled beneath her; melodies bubble and bob, airborne and untethered. Without an acoustic instrument, Schott instead locates her essential Colleen-ness in a range of small Critter & Guitari synths: colorful, wood-trimmed instruments with a fluttering, mercurial quality that feels distinctly organic. With these and a few Moog pedals, Schott achieves lift-off; everything is air and light. Again, Arthur Russell feels like a spirit guide.
Hinging on “Winter Dawn,” the album is a meditation on death from the vantage point of someone who’s more comfortable surrounded by birds and bats than boulevards and banlieues. “Be like the bat that nearly flew into my room,” she pleads on “Summer Night (Bat Song).” “You’re hunting so close I hear your wings beating.” In a whisper-quiet voice, she contemplates her proximity to the hunt—and to violent death—with the understanding that death is an inevitable part of life. On “The Stars Vs Creatures,” she steps back to consider her own mortality on a cosmic scale: “The stars will have the last word and outshine us."
Though looping arpeggios form the backbone of Schott's technique, it’s hard to feel like these knobbled surfaces were created with electronics; her undulating landscapes seem naturally occurring, as if they were simply breathed into being when she flicked a switch. It’s an effect that’s compounded by her recording method, capturing live takes with minimal edits and no vocal overdubs. Several tracks are just synth instrumentals, but they teem with life; the watery “Another World” could be the perfect soundtrack to one of Jacques Cousteau’s underwater documentaries, or some time-lapse recording of bacteria multiplying under a microscope. By feeding her perceptions of a vast, uncaring universe through these tiny, delicate sounds, Schott comes closer than most to capturing our vulnerability as living creatures—animal or human—and the senselessness of suffering. | 2017-10-27T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-10-27T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Thrill Jockey | October 27, 2017 | 7.8 | dad239ea-d321-42d5-99b4-a1c29988d680 | Chal Ravens | https://pitchfork.com/staff/chal-ravens/ | |
A decade after their last album together, the Norwegian space-disco producers pick up where they left off, bringing new emphasis on structure and rhythm to their heady, atmospheric vibes. | A decade after their last album together, the Norwegian space-disco producers pick up where they left off, bringing new emphasis on structure and rhythm to their heady, atmospheric vibes. | Lindstrøm & Prins Thomas: III | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/lindstrom-and-prins-thomas-iii/ | III | In the decade since Lindstrøm & Prins Thomas released their last album, the revelatory space-disco voyage II, electronic dance music underwent several shape-shifting transformations: the explosion and fizzle of mass-market EDM, a U-turn toward classic house and cerebral techno, and fusions of ambient and jazz with global rhythms. It’s a testament to the Norwegian pair’s steadfast, forward-thinking style that their third album, III, picks up right where II left off and still sounds remarkably current. It’s as if Hans-Peter Lindstrøm and Thomas Moen Hermansen had been waiting for the perfect moment to re-enter the conversation and found it inside 2020’s strange collective pause.
A joyride of heady, prog-infused atmospheres and downtempo house music, the album curves, twists, and undulates like a slow-moving river. Drifting through a series of mood-based sketches—French space pop, beach-gazing Balearia, and winding, loungey kosmische—it’s easy to lose yourself in syncopated melodies and swirling polyrhythms that, in another context, could easily have sounded like chaos. Instead, there are moments when III might double as a mood record—soothing, silky, perfectly synthetic—with infectious rhythms and enveloping arrangements that bely its compositional complexity. This is where the duo really shines; in their skilled hands, cosmic disco isn’t so much a gimmick or a goal but a technique, a way to prioritize atmosphere without sacrificing musicality. Their music doesn’t demand close listening, but it sure rewards it. It can take four or five spins to hear everything that’s going on in a song.
These tracks are less kaleidoscopic than the duo’s prior joint releases, with fewer improvisational excursions and a stricter adherence to structure and rhythm. But what’s lacking in funky, free-wheeling jamming is made up in concrete, beat-driven vibe. These are grooves you’re meant to lock into. Even “Oranges”—easily the project’s most far-out number, with coiling synths and skewed melodies that whiz and whirl past like space debris—has a steady, laid-back beat that brings it back down to earth. “The tracks that Lindstrøm sent me were almost like standard house tracks,” Prins Thomas has said, alluding to the project’s club roots. “I already had an idea of what I wanted to do, so I forced those tracks into new shoes and dresses.”
In the end, nothing about these songs is standard, from their dizzying, kitschy synths to their warped minor-major oscillations. Most of the album’s tracks push the bounds of what is considered dance music, a space that neither producer has ever fully committed to. “Martin 5000” has the most forward momentum—if there’s one track you might someday hear at a smoky after-hours, it’s this one—but retreats into meandering electric guitar and soft, tinkering piano that give it a floaty, aimless feel. “Harmonia” turns a gentle pendulum bassline into a serious, physical groove, but resists the urge to build past the half-way point. Occasionally, this hesitation can feel like a cop-out; you get the sense that there’s a little more to be explored. But there’s something psychedelic about the way these tracks avoid propulsion or release, opting instead to get lost inside themselves. Playful but intense, bite-sized yet jammy, these are inner-expedition songs best absorbed through a pair of thick headphones.
As is typical when Lindstrøm and Prins Thomas join forces, some of the project’s most exciting moments are snuck in the back door, laced into a dazzling breakdown or deep, hypnotic groove. The many jazzy layers of “Small Stream” come together so patiently and fluidly that it’s easy to miss the intricately cascading synth arpeggios. On “Birdstrik,” they transform a lighthearted, free-form piano solo into a dense and probing spell with muffled future-garage beats that shuffle underneath. It’s one of the only songs that briefly departs from its core rhythm, as the shuffle suddenly dissolves into chords, arpeggios, and air. When it does, it’s exquisite—a brief, gorgeous inhalation that feels physical and relieving, and that would surely get lost in the action of a dance floor. Seconds later, the synths return and the drumbeat reconnects, and the song spins back into orbit.
Buy: Rough Trade
(Pitchfork earns a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.)
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2020-12-01T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2020-12-01T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Pop/R&B | Smalltown Supersound | December 1, 2020 | 7.3 | dad9496f-6161-4982-bbe4-2c810697d152 | Megan Buerger | https://pitchfork.com/staff/megan-buerger/ | |
Perhaps I'm missing something. The sixth LP from Lambchop, everyone's favorite Nashville-based quatuordectet (fourteen members-- look it up ... | Perhaps I'm missing something. The sixth LP from Lambchop, everyone's favorite Nashville-based quatuordectet (fourteen members-- look it up ... | Lambchop: Is a Woman | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/4659-is-a-woman/ | Is a Woman | Perhaps I'm missing something. The sixth LP from Lambchop, everyone's favorite Nashville-based quatuordectet (fourteen members-- look it up!), has been released to generally positive murmuring from the bespectacled intelli-rock crowd. To me, this indicates that Kurt Wagner and his Nashville friends have joined that exclusive herd of sacred musical cows, alongside their pals in Yo La Tengo. In the eyes of critics the world over, they seem to have been deemed untouchable.
Which is why I feel like I'm going to have my Music Critics Union (Local #462) card revoked when I say Is a Woman is a disappointment. But before you lay down your harsh punishment, oh wise union magistrates, allow me to present the evidence for the album's underwhelming effect upon your humble supplicant.
I generally like Lambchop quite a bit. Their last two albums of new stuff, 2000's Nixon and 1998's What Another Man Spills, collected genres like baseball cards and created an easy listening sound that soothed the soul without triggering the gag reflex. As the band's makeshift orchestra performed horn and string swoops worthy of a Vegas-style lounge revue, Wagner's lyrics and off-kilter vocals provided just enough of a wink to indicate we were all in on the joke, and that it was okay to enjoy the music of our grandmothers. (Hey, remember irony?)
But from the Vince Guaraldi-like instrumental intro of Is a Women's opening track, "The Daily Growl," it's apparent that the keyword for this outing is "sparse." Fourteen people (twenty, if you count guests) have never sounded so quiet; throughout the album, Lambchop sounds less like the orchestra from "Name That Tune," and more like a piano jazz group whose drummer took the night off. Gone, for the most part, is the genre-hopping, the falsetto, the lushness, and the cornet. Dear God, why the cornet?!
Dangerously, the new sound would indicate that Wagner is taking himself a whole lot more seriously this time around, to less entertaining effect. While his lyrics still have the ability to provoke many a double-take (by the second song, he's already name-dropped Chicken of the Sea, Intel, and Sherwin-Williams), the delivery is considerably more straightforward: less faux-crooner than actual crooner. Wagner's aspirations to being the Dean Martin or Bing Crosby of indie rock have never been more obvious, and it's further made clear by the disturbingly high prominence of his voice in the mix (think Mark Kozelek on Old Ramon or Bridge).
The rest of the band, meanwhile, is largely relegated to the background or the occasional flourish, with the exception of Tony Crow's frequently front-and-center piano. Admittedly, the sparing use of Lambchop's formerly characteristic orchestral sound is often striking: the honking baritone sax sprinkled into portions of "The New Cobweb Summer," the softly resonating vibes and quivering Moog of "Caterpillar." Also nice is the variously filtered angelic chorus answering Wagner's na-na's on "I Can Hardly Spell My Name," and the sudden drop into lite-reggae halfway through the album-closing title track.
But the listener has to work through a great deal of less stimulating material before reaching these worthwhile moments, with most of the eleven tracks running at least five minutes. Furthermore, the almost complete absence of significant drumming or percussion until the album's eighth track stretches the prolonged lull of "My Blue Wave" and "The Old Matchbook Trick" even longer. With little rhythm to anchor songs of such epic length, they much too easily float off into the atmosphere.
Most tragic, though, is the startling uniformity of the album. Save the stop/start strut of "D. Scott Parsley," Lambchop has stripped away much of the country and soul influence that made previous work so hard to categorize. What's left is a polished and subtle jazz-based sound that's hardly bad, but hardly good for more than intense bedroom headphone sessions or wine-and-cheese parties.
A small ass-covering caveat: Is a Woman sounds threateningly like a "grower" album, the kind that suddenly clicks on the 108th listen as genius on the par of Pet Sounds, Loveless, or apparently, that new Trail of Dead album. If this is indeed the case, I'm sure I'll soon be run out of Criticsville by a torch-bearing mob, this embarrassingly short-sighted review preserved for all eternity in the Pitchfork archives. Until that day, however, I throw myself upon the mercy of the court. | 2002-03-03T01:00:01.000-05:00 | 2002-03-03T01:00:01.000-05:00 | Rock | Merge | March 3, 2002 | 5.8 | daea4c94-fc47-4fba-bb70-6269888f680e | Rob Mitchum | https://pitchfork.com/staff/rob- mitchum/ | null |
Featuring several collaborations with the Weeknd, the superproducer’s latest solo album explores the ways humanity may prevail over technology—too bad it’s drab and soulless. | Featuring several collaborations with the Weeknd, the superproducer’s latest solo album explores the ways humanity may prevail over technology—too bad it’s drab and soulless. | Mike Dean: 4:23 | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/mike-dean-423/ | 4:23 | “Once Upon a Time,” the intro track to Mike Dean’s latest album, 4:23, addresses the raging debate over artificial intelligence’s place in music with all the urgency of the first draft of an abandoned Tron sequel. In a story narrated by a disembodied voice somewhere between Laurel Dann’s interludes from A Tribe Called Quest’s Midnight Marauders and Cortana from Halo, we learn that AI has evolved to create art “just as well as humans.” In response, humans organize a contest to prove that the machines can’t and won’t replace them. Mankind prevails in the exact way you’d expect: “While A.I. may be able to create perfect works of art and music/It will never be able to capture the spirit of what makes those creations unquestionably great: the human touch.” That epic scale and narrative window dressing, however, don’t do the music any favors because most of 4:23 is as drab and soulless as a wall of code.
This is a strange disappointment, considering the trajectory of the self-proclaimed Synth God’s solo career, not to mention his collaborative work for rap legends like Scarface and superstars like Beyoncé. Dean’s 2020 instrumental album, 4:20, and its sequel, 4:22, were spaces for him to veer away from his characteristic role as a producer and lean fully into groovy, drugged-out synths for the sake of it—neither album had a single guest feature. 4:23 sets its sights a bit higher: The album is co-executive produced by longtime collaborator the Weeknd, who appears on four songs that were recorded over the course of the week following their appearances at this year’s Coachella. “No throw aways,” Dean recently promised a fan on Twitter.
But for all the pomp and circumstance of the intro, it’s often difficult to pinpoint the human touch behind either the lyrics or the production. Take “Defame Moi,” which is all vague gestures at haters lacking the passion and vitriol of even the Weeknd’s most numbed out ballads. On “More Coke!!,” his voice doesn’t even sound like his. Suffice it to say, the six repeated words (“The cocaine fluctuates my weight/Scarface”) don’t make a case for the pinnacle of human creativity, instead dissolving into a silly Super Duper Flow digitally altered into anonymity. If the point was for his voice to become another instrument in Dean’s synthetic sea, they did their job too well. “Artificial Intelligence” is the closest the duo comes to the promise of their Instagram Live sessions, the Weeknd’s cries for a paramour he left behind on tour elevating Dean’s generic synths and drums with a shot of melodrama.
Left to his own devices, Dean futzes with sounds that trail and flicker on the most basic and boring ideas imaginable. That’s fine when you’re making a project that’s being sold as a low-stakes idea dump for hardcore fans, but less so on a project with a narrative throughline, never mind one executive produced by one of the biggest pop stars on the planet. There are droning synth marches (“Music for the Future”) and bids for the brand of minimal atmospheric flair that dots the scores for Blade Runner and Stranger Things. The two-song suite of “Goodbye Earth” and “Hello Space” is supposed to play up the contrast of leaving behind the old for the new but melts together into a mass of indistinguishable keyboard runs. Closing track “Electric Sheep,” an homage to the short story that inspired Blade Runner, is nothing more than two minutes of grating white noise, aiming for a sweeping and thoughtful sci-fi climax he hasn’t earned. Instead, 4:23 just feels adrift in space. | 2023-05-05T00:02:00.000-04:00 | 2023-05-05T00:02:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | MWA Music | May 5, 2023 | 5 | daf65816-34b6-4b82-9dff-1400c012bb70 | Dylan Green | https://pitchfork.com/staff/dylan-green/ | |
This urgent instrumental album welds the power of black metal, sludge metal, and grindcore to the structures and orders of post-rock and post-punk. | This urgent instrumental album welds the power of black metal, sludge metal, and grindcore to the structures and orders of post-rock and post-punk. | Sannhet: Known Flood | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/17633-sannhet-known-flood/ | Known Flood | Sannhet isn’t looking to get famous. In a February interview with the cannily named blog The Sludgelord, the Brooklyn trio’s guitarist, John Refano, confessed that he and his bandmates were all working stiffs, using music as an aggressive outlet but not as an alternate income inlet. “I don’t have any real aspirations to make a living off Sannhet,” he said, “simply to spread our vision to as many like-minded people as possible.” Chances are, most musicians issuing debut albums this year-- as Sannhet has done with the excellent nine-song browbeater, Known Flood-- won’t turn their music into money, either, whether or not that’s a stated goal. Making music a sustainable profession has long been a high-stakes, low-chances gamble, dependent on variables generally beyond prediction, much less control. Saying that your new band isn’t intended to be your new job, then, borders on redundancy.
But Refano’s admission is an important one, because that attitude seems directly related to Known Flood’s twin senses of purpose and economy. This is an urgent instrumental album that welds the power of black metal, sludge metal, and grindcore to the structures and orders of post-rock and post-punk. That might sound tedious, but Sannhet bypasses the extravagance and indulgence that such a blend has largely come to imply. Instead, they operate with a workmanlike efficiency that gets these pieces to and around the point with thrilling dependability. Refano and company don’t show off or linger. Though Sannhet comprises strong instrumentalists, none of them deserve to be feted individually here. Rather, the guitar, drums, bass and a litany of samples cooperate constantly. They play this stuff hard and fast, like dudes with jobs to do and families to tend to when practice is over. Known Flood lasts for about 47 minutes, but unless you’re watching the clock, it’ll take some repeats for you to notice. It seems to flash by in half that time.
To that end, variability serves Sannhet well. Their gambit, “Absecon Isle”, rips open with black metal menace and streaks by in white-hot arcs. Its chaser, “Safe Passage”, lessens the rumble into a chug that’s heavy like Bastro or even Shellac, phosphorescence emerging from electric wallop. “Moral” uses its front half to ratchet tension with a riff that wraps back into itself; for the piece’s back half, though, Sannhet obliterates that tension, each member slashing at the them as though they’re trying to tenderize it. Each of these songs clock in at less than four minutes, a testament to Sannhet’s Cincinnatian interest in making one statement and summarily moving to the next one. That quality recalls last year’s excellent debut EP from New Hampshire’s Vattnet Viskar, a band that delivers similarly melodramatic metal with punk-like concision.
Sannhet doesn’t merely feign concision simply by writing short pieces. No, nearly half of these tracks break the five-minute mark. But each of the longer numbers roll several themes and transitions into a relatively compact framework, again avoiding boredom by a bustle of activity. “Slow Ruin,” one of two that makes it past seven minutes, volleys from field recordings to Touch and Go throb, from post-millennial blackened grandeur to an expansive noise fadeaway. These swivels don’t sound restless, as though Sannhet can’t decide what to do with itself or how it would like to be perceived. Instead, they just sound like the work of a band that understands that a job well done is its own reward, so why wait around for something more? | 2013-03-15T02:00:04.000-04:00 | 2013-03-15T02:00:04.000-04:00 | Metal | Sacrament Music | March 15, 2013 | 7.4 | daf84961-73cd-4930-a22a-fc8ec9732102 | Grayson Haver Currin | https://pitchfork.com/staff/grayson-haver currin/ | null |
Pearl Jam on record have essentially been reduced to the rock ‘n’ roll version of wearing sweatpants: they’ve given up trying to impress anyone, so they may as well be comfortable. Their first studio album in four years continues the trend. | Pearl Jam on record have essentially been reduced to the rock ‘n’ roll version of wearing sweatpants: they’ve given up trying to impress anyone, so they may as well be comfortable. Their first studio album in four years continues the trend. | Pearl Jam: Lightning Bolt | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/18645-pearl-jam-lightning-bolt/ | Lightning Bolt | It’s been four years since the release of Pearl Jam’s last studio record, but it’s not like they’ve been far from view. In the interim, we’ve seen reissues of their two best albums (1993’s Vs. and 1994’s Vitalogy), three live collections, a slew of side-project activity, and a 20th-anniversary world tour capped by the release of Cameron Crowe’s documentary Pearl Jam Twenty. As that film illustrated, this band has much to be proud of, having survived sudden success and the attendant media scrutiny, a risky (at the time) rejection of MTV, grueling court battles with Ticketmaster over fair practices, fan backlash over the band’s more politicized gestures, horrible tragedies, and the overall collapse of the music industry with their arena-filling acumen intact.
And yet, even an exhaustive documentary produced by a super-fan like Crowe doesn’t have much to say about the band’s post-millennial output—because there’s really not a lot to say. Pearl Jam ceased long ago to be a band that makes records with any sense of occasion to them: no intriguing backstory, no conceptual constructs to shape the album’s identity, no new contemporary influences that might push them in an unexpected direction. You just get another nine to 13 Pearl Jam songs that—as per the quiet/loud division of 2004 anthology *Rearviewmirror—*can be easily slotted into one of two categories. (Even the tracklist sequences are invariably similar: the second song will be a no-fuss rocker that serves as the single, and the album will inevitably close with a wistfully earnest ballad.) Pearl Jam are arguably the only modern rock band of note that consciously moved away from its formative, hit-making sound—in the period spanning Vitalogy through to 2000’s *Binaural—*but came out the other side an even more traditional, predictable band.
So if you’ve been paying any attention to Pearl Jam’s activities over the past decade, you already know what to expect from Lightning Bolt (and it’s certainly not a tribute to the Rhode Island avant-metal duo of the same name; heck, even the Pink Floyd comparisons bandied about in pre-release interviews seem offbase, unless your conception of Pink Floyd begins and ends with “Mother”). Like 2009’s Backspacer before it (and 2006’s Pearl Jam before it, and 2002’s Riot Act before it), Lightning Bolt begins with a spirited sprint before sputtering out and winding up in dullsville. The feeling of déjà vu is compounded by the strip-mined subject matter, as Eddie Vedder explores familiar themes of family strife and domestic unrest while once again celebrating the therapeutic powers of surfing and listening to music on vinyl.
If Pearl Jam can no longer recapture the sort of hot-wired intensity that once had Vedder stage-diving off festival scaffolding, they can at least still raise an inspired ruckus when the mood strikes: “Mind Your Manners”—a.k.a. “Spin the Black Circle Some More”—reformulates the original grunge cocktail recipe of mid-1970s hard rock and early 80s hardcore, with a chooglin’ intro reminiscent of early KISS deep cut “Parasite” that gets mowed down by a boot-stomping blitzkrieg, which in turn is blindsided by a sublimely melodic middle-eight. And “My Father’s Son” is the rare latter-day Pearl Jam rave-up to put the spotlight on bassist Jeff Ament, whose sense of groove—once the cornerstone of the band’s sound—has been deemphasized by band’s ever-growing propensity for straight-ahead, chug-a-lug rockers.
Despite their punk-schooled principles, Pearl Jam have never been shy about their debt to classic rock, but it’s usually good classic rock: The Who, Crazy Horse, the Stones. And while the upward-arced anthemery of the title track and “Swallowed Whole” continue to dutifully honor this holy trinity, Lightning Bolt also betrays the long-term diluting effects of spending too much time hanging on the right of the dial. “Let the Records Play” is boilerplate, bad-to-the-bone blooze, while the album’s centerpiece ballads tread on odious Lite-FM territory and forcefully tip the scales from poignant to maudlin, whether it’s the Goo Goo Dolls sheen of “Sirens” or the Hornsby-esque piano rolls of the closing “Future Days” (definitely not a Can cover) that made the song a natural fit for the closing sequence of last week’s "Grey’s Anatomy". (By contrast, the countrified lament “Sleeping By Myself” benefits from a lighter touch, thanks to a gleaming George Harrison-style guitar refrain that draws the cheekiness out of the song’s woe-is-me sentiments.) The Pearl Jam mythos as it exists today is undeniably wrapped up in their notoriously epic live shows, wherein the band is famous for loosening up and stretching out, but for whatever reason, that adventurous ethos rarely translates to their increasingly mannered albums. Pearl Jam on record have essentially been reduced to the rock ‘n’ roll version of wearing sweatpants: they’ve given up trying to impress anyone, so they may as well be comfortable. | 2013-10-15T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2013-10-15T02:00:01.000-04:00 | Rock | Monkeywrench | October 15, 2013 | 5 | dafa61a1-40a1-467b-9983-c970e887e5df | Stuart Berman | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stuart-berman/ | null |
The Austin band aims to rectify indie backlash and mainstream indifference with this elaborately orchestrated and structured new album. | The Austin band aims to rectify indie backlash and mainstream indifference with this elaborately orchestrated and structured new album. | ...And You Will Know Us by the Trail of Dead: So Divided | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/9630-so-divided/ | So Divided | In the four years since the release of their monumental Source Tags and Codes, …And You Will Know Us By the Trail of Dead have suffered both indie backlash and mainstream indifference. On their follow-up to Source Tags, 2004's rightfully panned Worlds Apart, the unflinching confidence and frenetic energy that made the band's previous albums so convincing suddenly disappeared, leaving little more than a batch of subpar radio-ready modern rock songs. Worlds Apart's slick, overcompressed sound brought forth all the cries of "sellout" that Source Tags had effectively stifled.
As was the case with its predecessor, the aesthetic faux-pas on So Divided can be cringe-inducing. It's not pretty. But there's a much bigger problem at hand: Trail of Dead don't even sound like a rock band any more. So Divided is even more elaborately orchestrated and structured than Source Tags and Codes, but its complexity seems inorganic and clumsy, revealing the weakness of the source material rather than elevating and enhancing it. There's certainly nothing wrong with forgoing traditional rock instrumentation in favor of lavish arrangements and studio trickery, but the bells and whistles here don't even begin to fill the void created by a complete dissipation of the group's energy. Even when the dizzyingly disparate pieces of the album do fall into place, it seems like the work of some external hand; the band achieves crystalline structural vistas, but it's never quite clear how they got there, or why.
Indeed, the least sophisticated parts of So Divided are often its most memorable. Opener "Stand in Silence" could be easily written off as mallpunk, but at the very least it sounds forceful and passionate. It would be easy to accuse the band of pandering to radio and MTV, but even their commercial instincts seen to be faltering here, as punchy two-minute pop songs are needlessly stretched into disjointed epics. This kind of misdirection plagues So Divided: "Naked Sun" begins as an embarrassing "Bad to the Bone" pastiche and segues incongruously into yet another two-minute orchestral swell, and closer "Sunken Dreams" can't seem to figure out whether it's vintage Peter Gabriel or a late-90s cell phone commercial.
There are a few moments when such disunity works to the band's advantage. The percussion-heavy "Wasted State of Mind" buzzes and shakes nervously through a handful of memorable hooks. A cover of Guided by Voices' "The Gold Heart Mountaintop Queen Directory" fulfills the imaginary grandeur of Robert Pollard's original, but lands a bit on the syrupy side. The opening bars of "Life" effectively incorporate the album's sonic fragmentation into the fabric of the song itself, but it quickly separates out into a subpar tune and unnecessary embellishment.
This kind of separation prevents So Divided from building any momentum over its deceptively brief 46 minutes. While the band once pushed forward with a strength that seemed to surprise even them, So Divided ultimately feels scattered and flaccid. Throughout the last two Trail of Dead albums, singer Conrad Keely has obsessed over themes of distance and division. Whether it's a matter of unfortunate irony or frustrated artistic self-awareness, these are the very issues preventing the band from making good records. For the time being, Trail of Dead can't even seem to capture the fervor of their own ambivalence. | 2006-11-15T01:00:01.000-05:00 | 2006-11-15T01:00:01.000-05:00 | Rock | Interscope | November 15, 2006 | 5.5 | dafaabe9-ed51-4327-b428-45e56c7d5b67 | Matt LeMay | https://pitchfork.com/staff/matt-lemay/ | null |
Stuttgart's Danilo Plessow gathers three 12"'s (and three exclusives) that often sound like dance created by and for people who love dusty, 1990s hip-hop. | Stuttgart's Danilo Plessow gathers three 12"'s (and three exclusives) that often sound like dance created by and for people who love dusty, 1990s hip-hop. | Motor City Drum Ensemble: Raw Cuts, Vol. 1 | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/14053-raw-cuts-vol-1/ | Raw Cuts, Vol. 1 | Everyone more or less agrees on the basic building blocks of house music-- soul-pop vocals, R&B keyboards, disco rhythms-- but it seems the genre's leading lights practice it in the abstract: DJ Sprinkles' dubby ambience, Omar-S's solar funk, Moodymann's jazz loops. It's in this context that Motor City Drum Ensemble's Raw Cuts, Vol. 1 sounds so refreshing: It is straightforward, effusive dance music spun from the most basic of elements, and done very, very well.
A showcase for MCDE's eponymous label, Raw Cuts, Vol. 1 compiles three Raw Cuts 12"'s, labelmate Jayson Brothers' debut single, and three exclusive tracks. Clearly indebted to the dance music developed in Chicago and Detroit since the mid-1980s, MCDE (Danilo Plessow, from Stuttgart, Germany) aligns himself with electronic musicians deadly serious about placing music before image. Fortunately, Plessow's music isn't concerned with evasion. Open and melodic, Raw Cuts overflows with warm electric keys and cracking rhythms. Tension is massed then resolved with big, descending chords and wily guitar. Looped vocals roam in and out of the mix like shouts from the other side of the floor.
Plessow, though, isn't just toying with 1980s dance nostalgia. Raw Cuts often sounds like dance music constructed by and for people who grew up listening to dusty, 1990s hip-hop. His sliced-up funk and interlocking slogans make "Raw Cuts #3" sound like a dissertation-length exploration of a J Dilla beat. "Raw Cuts #2" could be a clear-headed, taking-their-medicine Avalanches jam. We associate madcap samplers like those with a certain skittishness, but Plessow's sounds are thrillingly, ingenuously focused.
Brothers' contributions nearly split the album in two, both through their placement and their lingering funk. "Monster Box" is still electronic music, but its brawny shuffle sounds like it could be the product of a particularly amped backing band. "All My Life"'s sunken steps provide a base for the symphonic-soul strings.
The source material ensures that Raw Cuts never veers into giddy, Technicolor party music, and there are times when these tracks feel like a really great party viewed in sepia tones. Take that as you will, but a slightly muted great party is still a great party. Raw Cuts is your first opportunity to hear the young, ultra-talented Plessow on disc. His warm, everyman house music is as sturdy and lived-in as his adopted hometown. | 2010-03-23T02:00:02.000-04:00 | 2010-03-23T02:00:02.000-04:00 | Electronic | Faces | March 23, 2010 | 8.3 | daff3a5d-0e4b-4b2f-957c-2c280a3cd6c0 | Andrew Gaerig | https://pitchfork.com/staff/andrew-gaerig/ | null |
Australia’s Bob Nekrasov fuses black metal’s gravelly aesthetic with heavy riffs and gloriously over-the-top imagery; it’s a celebration of the very contradictions that make metal so thrilling. | Australia’s Bob Nekrasov fuses black metal’s gravelly aesthetic with heavy riffs and gloriously over-the-top imagery; it’s a celebration of the very contradictions that make metal so thrilling. | Rebel Wizard: Voluptuous Worship of Rapture and Response | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/rebel-wizard-voluptuous-worship-of-rapture-and-response/ | Voluptuous Worship of Rapture and Response | The Australian musician Bob Nekrasov’s work as Nekrasov exists on black metal’s fringes, noisy and frayed. His other project, Rebel Wizard, gives that black metal a heavily NWOBHM bent. The combination of influences seems simple—make black metal more palatable by adding traditional (discernible, even) riffs and melodies—yet through this project, he’s unlocked a deeper wisdom. He connects the deliberate solitude of one-man black metal with metal’s own status as mass music for alienated loners. Rebel Wizard invokes both complementary spirits—the antisocial isolationist and the eternal teenage loner who finds solace in a crowd of like-minded outcasts—on his second full length, Voluptuous Worship of Rapture and Response.
Nekrasov has said he “would rather shove a watermelon into the eye of my penis” than increase the fidelity of his records. Though he is a devotee of second-wave buzz, his songcraft, informed by metal’s formative texts, aspires beyond the subterranean sound. Such high treble lends well to Nekrasov’s lead work, which veers from piercing shredding to candlelit tenderness and thrashy gallops with a mutant, shapeshifting ease. “High Mastery of the Woeful Arts” blazes through all those modes, like if Frank Frazetta had control over 2001: A Space Odyssey’s solitary cosmic voyage. Though rooted in tradition, he’s versatile, dizzying without flash.
The intro to “Exhaustive Glory” sounds like Iron Maiden from the nosebleeds, tinny and distant without extinguishing triumph. Maiden’s “Hallowed Be Thy Name,” a grim tale of awaiting execution that’s become one of their most popular songs, proves to be a template for Nekrasov here, as many of his songs feel plucked from any number of “Hallowed”’s passages. “The Poor and Ridiculous Alchemy of Christ and Lucifer and Us All” would be a straight-up heavy-metal song were it not for Nekrasov howling in static. It begins like Thin Lizzy kicking a couple out and ends like Viking-era Bathory, a spiritual influence on the way that Rebel Wizard’s might transcends its raw sound. Nekrasov’s appreciation for metal’s timeless foundational qualities is how he’s able to wring such liveliness out of a cold, unforgiving tone; in lesser hands, his fusion would be novelty. He’s got riffs that, even with a black-metal aesthetic, a mainstream metal audience would obsess over—Tobias Forge should be sliding in his DMs begging for a collab.
Back in February, Rebel Wizard put out the EP Great Addictions to a Blindingly Dark, Worldly Life, which pushed the blistering black-metal aspects and melancholic extremes of his sound. While it was a huge leap in his songwriting, considering how prolific he’s been since Rebel Wizard’s first demo, in 2013, it didn’t have the same jubilance as his other records. Some of Addictions’ Gary Moore necromancy still finds a place here: “Glory” and “Mother Nature, Oh My Sweet Mistress, Showed Me the Other Worlds and It Was Just Fallacy” are centered on mid-paced stomps and drawn out, sorrowful leads. Solo black metal is often in the depressive vein—take Xasthur, Leviathan, and pre-prison Burzum, for example—yet even though he terms his music “negative wizard metal,” Rebel Wizard is downright exhilarating. Voluptuous is the discipline of Addictions with the crooked smirk that’s always been present, the smile of damning humanity to another night in with Angel Witch’s self-titled.
Rebel Wizard finds seduction in NWOBHM’s more romantic ends, and that is no more evident than in “Drunk on the Wizdom of Unicorn Semen.” Hang on—it’s really a beautiful song, a black metal take on a brooding, Melissa-esque ballad. Should you take a song called “Drunk on the Wizdom of Unicorn Semen” seriously? Absolutely: Metal is serious music rife with the ridiculous, the two don’t cancel each other out. You have to embrace, or at least respect, Manowar’s loincloths, King Diamond’s falsetto, Venom making a 20-minute track about battling Satan—anything that is deliberately over the top and unintentionally comical (yet totally ruling)—to really appreciate metal. Rebel Wizard made a song with the words “Unicorn Semen” and still ended up with one of the year’s best metal records, because in reveling in the absurdity at metal’s core, he embraces what’s great about it. His work as Nekrasov has gone on for longer, but it's clear that Rebel Wizard is how he will carve his identity. | 2018-08-20T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-08-20T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Metal | Prosthetic | August 20, 2018 | 7.8 | daff9d5c-6288-4a80-8313-4913f3624a3a | Andy O'Connor | https://pitchfork.com/staff/andy-o'connor/ | |
The Brooklyn-based rock quartet’s mild, uptempo debut coasts on good vibes but won’t convince anyone they’re living dangerously. | The Brooklyn-based rock quartet’s mild, uptempo debut coasts on good vibes but won’t convince anyone they’re living dangerously. | The Muckers: Endeavor | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/the-muckers-endeavor/ | Endeavor | There’s rock that does whippets on its lunch break and rock that hasn’t called out sick in two years, and the line between a blasphemous song and one that’ll sell a car is thinner than it might seem. It’s a boundary defined by the pretense of danger. The Muckers, a Brooklyn outfit fronted by Iranian émigré Emir Mohseni, fall on the buttoned-up end of that spectrum. Endeavor, the group’s debut, is a wide-eyed paean to the comforts of ’80s radio rock, a mild and uptempo album that revels in Quaalude choruses and room-temperature licks.
Each of these 10 sunny songs plays clean, save for a bit of fuzz. “Roll the Dice” has the sheen and charm of “Jesse’s Girl,” with insistent guitars and a melody that begs for an arm out the window on the turnpike, a smokestack spewing in the background. Anthony Azarmgin’s bass rumbles underneath “Suspended” like a fist pumping to a Springsteen song. “Thunderstorm” and “That’s All I Want” showcase the group’s nimble guitar work, swerving seamlessly between structure and embellishment to flesh out what would otherwise be a series of plodding power chords. Like a Budweiser ad on an old VHS tape, the whole thing has a sense of winsome, all-American nostalgia.
In terms of delivery, it’s hard not to draw comparisons to New York proto-retro-rockers the Strokes, whose lyrics are barely more incisive but worlds more convincing. The words on Endeavor are magnetic poetry collages of feelings, classic rock motifs so universal as to be anonymous. “Daydreams are over/Now I must find my way/My days are numbered/I’m running out of time,” Mohseni sings on standout track “Suspended,” without any palpable sense of urgency. The song’s amiable, anthemic chorus would make an excellent jukebox selection (“Take it as a sign, take it as a sign/Something good will happen soon”), not unlike Big Star’s “In the Street,” but a close read comes up empty. Chic-lite disco outlier “So Far Away” suffers from a similiar excitement deficit, even when it explicitly mentions sex and weed, and while the less funky tracks can coast on good vibes and riffs, this bassline feels limp.
Not every rock record needs to cause liver damage, but instruments of debauchery—electric guitars, snares that hit like water on a hot stove—feel oddly matched against the Muckers’ tame affect, a not-quite-saturated imitation of passion. Where’s the beef? The composite parts are sometimes remarkable, but in aggregate, Endeavor fades as easily as an oldies station on the far edge of town.
Buy: Rough Trade
(Pitchfork earns a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.)
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-02-26T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2021-02-26T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Greenway | February 26, 2021 | 5.3 | db01d7d3-965a-4393-b19d-e67ecb2b3deb | Linnie Greene | https://pitchfork.com/staff/linnie-greene/ | |
Dev Hynes’ new mixtape feels light and loose, a pre-production sketchbook presented as a charmingly finished product with the help of several key guests. | Dev Hynes’ new mixtape feels light and loose, a pre-production sketchbook presented as a charmingly finished product with the help of several key guests. | Blood Orange: Angel’s Pulse | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/blood-orange-angels-pulse/ | Angel’s Pulse | Recording a perfect cassette mixtape from the radio requires careful tuning, commercial dodging, and the technical dexterity of leaping to your radio’s speaker to catch a beloved song midair. The playback of this now dated practice can be disarming by today’s standards, each song carrying the specific atmosphere of the room it was recorded in, songs cut off or captured in media res, wrenched from their contexts, an incohesive whole. On his new Blood Orange release, Angel’s Pulse, British singer, songwriter, producer, and composer Dev Hynes returns to the snapshot aesthetics of the cassette mixtape age, presenting his sketchbook as the product itself.
On previous albums, Hynes used the disarming, suggestive power of abrupt transitions to join together contrasting musical textures and moods. But while 2016’s Freetown Sound and 2018’s Negro Swan are cinematic both in their production and overarching themes, Angel’s Pulse, Blood Orange’s shortest collection of songs, feels like scanning radio stations in a lovingly nostalgic memory straight from the ’90s and early ’00s. The synth and drum machine-driven minimalism of “Baby Florence (Figure)” juts up against gauzy low-fi Southern hip-hop track “Gold Teeth” featuring Memphis legends Project Pat and Gangsta Boo. Low-key dance song “Dark and Handsome” featuring Toro Y Moi, turns chopped and screwed before giving way to the ’80s pop-tinted “Benzo.” There’s a joyful lightness to it all, helped in part by the fact Angel’s Pulse comes less than a year after the heavy but bracing survey of black queer alienation on Negro Swan.
In a statement about Angel’s Pulse, Hynes explained that he has a habit of collecting random songs and material from album recording sessions and giving them informally to friends and strangers, if he shares them at all. Angel’s Pulse, one of those collections that he instead chose to release widely, is an exercise in testing the weight labels, listeners, and artists in particular put on what they choose to share with the world. Is art only worthwhile when honed and ordered in service to a monumental statement or purpose? Hynes makes a convincing argument for the preciousness of fragments, one-offs, leftovers, and what they evoke when arrayed with care and passion.
Angel’s Pulse shimmers like a soundtrack to a fun if slightly melancholy summer day, but the anxieties, insights, and political convictions that Hynes has explored on previous albums still shine through. Gospel snippet “Birmingham” featuring singers Kelsey Lu and Ian Isiah lifting their voices heavenward on a stirring verse and outro, seems to center a mother whose daughter died in the 1963 Birmingham church bombings, a white supremacist terrorist act that killed four black girls. Meanwhile, “Tuesday Feeling (Choose to Stay)” is a sultry R&B lament for someone sucked into a destructive lifestyle, circling a similar theme that runs through Freetown Sound with the haunting leitmotif, “You chose to fade away with him.” Though the tracks explore the reaches of Hynes’ musical influences, they are united by his belief in what builds his communities up and tears them down. Artistic intentions aren’t conceived in a vacuum but rather run through everything that the artist creates.
Even in its moodboard looseness and nostalgia, Angel’s Pulse has all the charm and careful attention to detail of Blood Orange’s last two magnum opuses. Whereas most of the songs are precisely sliced to end before reaching silence, the last guitar strum on “Good for You” merges seamlessly with the sirens and revving sounds opening the following song, “Baby Florence (Figure).” Throughout, Hynes shows off his penchant for unexpected collaborations, pairing Isiah with electropop project Porches or Skye with producer Arca and BROCKHAMPTON’s Joba. Though it doesn’ carry a central message, the mixtape acts as a rare artifact that captures a particular place, time, and moment of wonder in the eyes of its creator. | 2019-07-17T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-07-17T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | Domino | July 17, 2019 | 8 | db0e1acc-7b7e-4d98-997e-6ddb3e79a2ed | Ann-Derrick Gaillot | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ann-derrick-gaillot/ | |
You know what I miss? I miss political rock music. Probably it's out there and I'm looking in ... | You know what I miss? I miss political rock music. Probably it's out there and I'm looking in ... | Godspeed You! Black Emperor: Yanqui U.X.O. | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/3487-yanqui-uxo/ | Yanqui U.X.O. | You know what I miss? I miss political rock music. Probably it's out there and I'm looking in all the wrong places. But I know this: Indie rock, always one of the great dissenting voices of American (and British) underground media, has gone virtually silent. In the 1980s, this music was rife with anti-government sentiment, from Black Flag to The Minutemen to Gang of Four to The Dead Kennedys to Elvis Costello. But with the ushering in of ambivalent slacker-rock, political messages became passé and we grew steadily more tolerant of Washington's silent plots. Conspiracy theories soon became kitsch, and now, in the aftermath of X-Files geekdom and September 11th pacifism, there are few better ways to get hipster eyes rolling than by questioning authority. What perfect timing: We've lethargically accepted that Washington is brutally malevolent just as our most wicked administration yet has come to power.
Yay, the most political rock band going right now is Canadian! Thanks, America. Granted, their message is pretty ham-fisted, what with those didactic, overbearing manifestos and ominous woodcuts of skull-faced forefathers chopping off peoples' hands. But Godspeed is at least putting forth some kind of an effort, which is more than can be said for most. I mean, I dig a lot of music, and songs about our girlfriends and our scenes and hating our parents are fine-- sometimes great, even transcendent. But when that's all there is, we have a problem.
So, upfront, that's why I respect Godspeed You! Black Emperor. I just wish their approach was more effective. For one, they're an instrumental band whose political message is carried out through vague and overwrought packaging which merely hints at a greater "something." And their latest offering, Yanqui U.X.O., is vague as ever. We're told that "09-15-00", one of the album's song titles, "is ariel sharon surrounded by 1,000 israeli soldiers marching on al-haram ash-sharif& provoking another intifada." How? The music is simple atmospheric orchestration with no agenda of its own, and as easily reflects a DMV waitroom as Palestinian uprising. And on the back of the sleeve, we're treated to a six-degrees-of-bomb-makers, where Tomahawk cruise missile manufacturers Raytheon Industries are traced, through a twisted labyrinth of corporations to the recording industry's major labels. Briefly: Just because you have a friend who knows an auto mechanic who worked on a car owned by a guy who was the gaffer on the set of She's Having a Baby does not mean you know Kevin Bacon.
Unfortunately, Yanqui's tenebrous finger-pointing isn't its only shortcoming. The band has taken its naysayers' gripes to heart and done away with those moody vocal snippets that not only hinted at deeper protest, but also jolted you awake just as your mind began to wander. And where the hell is the undercurrent? The two discs of 2000's Lift Your Skinny Fists used Godspeed's sweeping, emotional übersuites as a basic centerpiece to the bizarre ambient textures and noise projects which backed them. Meanwhile, Yanqui U.X.O. strips the group to their essentials which, as it just so happens, are not quite essential enough. Ideas are scarce, too-- where Skinny Fists would erupt without warning into a scorching Satriani-esque solo ("Cancer Towers on Holy Road Hi-Way"), the tracks on Yanqui are content to continue building to bored, satiated endings we can see coming 20 minutes in advance. Couldn't we have some venting? Are we frustrated or just dramatic?
Worse: The record is consumed by a painfully glacial pace. Each song plods endlessly onward toward an inevitable conclusion with no revelation in store for the poor listener, who can only endure these disc-filling five tracks in the hopes that, maybe, just maybe, that one glorious moment will arrive and redeem the interminable wait with a display of power so towering and majestic that it in itself will be a $12 experience. It doesn't. Once, at the end of "Rockets Fall on Rocket Falls," the band comes close with a triumphant burst of cinematic melody and Efrim's wailing screwdriver'd guitar. The quarter-hour denouement that precedes it is a long road to travel, though, and with this record's production difficulties, you're slogging through the mud every step of the way.
See, the importance of strong production on a record like this cannot be exaggerated, and I place much of the blame for Yanqui failure to impact on Steve Albini's shoulders. Last year, he turned Mogwai's similar-minded My Father, My King into a raging, five-headed superbeast with precision micing and mixing that brought the music's strongest elements to the fore, resulting in a speaker-rattling detonation of pristine strength. Yanqui is no recreation, or even approximation, of that tunneling force. Here, perhaps because of the number of instruments at hand, or maybe because of the insane over-reverbing, all of the instruments (save the ever-present martial drums) blend together into a kind of murky concordance, often making distinguishing the guitars from the violins an impossibility.
What we're left with, then, is the skeleton of an incredibly original band whose once-driving conviction and determination has been sapped by sluggishness and a lack of invention. It doesn't help that they've spawned countless imitators and saturated the market with uniform side projects. Or that their radical politics, which could be such a defining attribute, are relegated to cardboard inserts. Or that they just keep doing the same thing over and over and over and over again, hoping for a different result. Someone tell Godspeed that orchestras play all kinds of music and that uprising can take other forms in music than apexes conveying abandonment, loss or apocalypse. Revolt, as I see it, is a beautiful thing, but not this beautiful. | 2002-10-27T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2002-10-27T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock / Experimental | Constellation | October 27, 2002 | 5.6 | db115d1b-0e2d-457e-9fcf-4a6468ef9175 | Ryan Schreiber | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ryan-schreiber/ | null |
This six-track debut album from the Brooklyn-based producer Bryce Hackford might look like an EP on the surface, but it explores the trancey side of house music at great length, creatively mixing in rock dynamics along the way. | This six-track debut album from the Brooklyn-based producer Bryce Hackford might look like an EP on the surface, but it explores the trancey side of house music at great length, creatively mixing in rock dynamics along the way. | Bryce Hackford: Fair | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/18789-bryce-hackford-fair/ | Fair | Bryce Hackford likes to stretch out. This six-track debut album from the Brooklyn-based producer may look more like an extended EP on the surface, but the one-hour-17-minute runtime puts it far in excess of most standard LPs. Hackford is naturally drawn to the trancey side of house music, where repeating motifs circle across vast dimensions of time. He's also interested in rock dynamics, sometimes veering toward krautrock and the blissful velocity of Spacemen 3's landmark Playing with Fire. Some of the material on Fair orbits various paths taken by artists on the L.I.E.S. label, especially as Hackford roots his sound in house traditions, noise, and choppy production values. Dusting the overall sound with a grainy texture is a wise move, creating a sense of unity in an album that fractures in many directions.
Something Hackford doesn't lack is ambition, even if it is executed in a manner that makes his music feel purposefully small. On "Slow Emotion" he channels the kind of wide open spaces Panda Bear likes to cover, although the general tone is closely aligned to the fuzzy haze-pop of Flying Saucer Attack. Still, Fair has the same air of exploration as Person Pitch, matching the way it can grind the life out of three-second loops without losing any intensity. Hackford isn’t as stylistically cohesive as Noah Lennox, instead dropping low-rent club bangers with a debt to the initial IDM boom ("Another Fantasy") then taking a wayward turn into the twilight feel of Nite Jewel's Good Evening ("Heart to Beat"). It makes sense that Hackford has played with Arp and Delia Gonzalez, who have both taken a similarly zoned-out approach to electronics.
The structurally sound work in the first half of Fair is let go in its back end, with Hackford ending the album via two songs in excess of 20 minutes per piece. It's here that Hackford loosens his brain, with the 22-minute "Run-On Cirrus" approaching the masterful build his former charge Gonzalez worked out with Gavin Russom on the minor DFA classic "El Monte". The difference here is that "Run-On Cirrus" digs deeper into an ambient tradition, drifting into sheets of synth that resemble Vangelis channeling the Orb's U.F.Orb. He takes a step further into the calm on the following 27-minute piece "Modern Propeller Music", almost losing all sense of self entirely in its echoing guitar figures. Here, Hackford demonstrates a knack for knowing when not to play, removing the compression from his work but retaining the mesmeric force from his more compact structures.
Fair latches onto sounds that are emerging elsewhere at present, including traces of the ultra-compact work of the the Black Dog's Bytes on Laurel Halo's excellent Chance of Rain, the lingering influence of vintage sci-fi soundtracks, and the loosening of borders between noise and techno. Hackford's inevitably going to be aligned with the mini boom in scruffy house, but there's enough scope here to suggest he can survive when the walls come tumbling down, especially as he's been at this since 2007 and has branched out to work on projects such as Rhys Chatham's A Crimson Grail. That recording, as part of 200-strong guitar orchestra assembled by Chatham, taps into the same kind of audacity Hackford gets caught up in as he goes deeper into Fair. There are strict limitations and open-ended thinking here, on a work that's more interested in the constant process of evolution than finding a place to comfortably land. | 2013-12-13T01:00:03.000-05:00 | 2013-12-13T01:00:03.000-05:00 | null | Prah | December 13, 2013 | 7 | db121082-f8e8-44fe-a1da-2b4845f8d74f | Nick Neyland | https://pitchfork.com/staff/nick-neyland/ | null |
Celestial Shore singer-guitarist Sam Owens puts his own actions and desires under a microscope on a gentle, sunny, yet boldly honest solo album. | Celestial Shore singer-guitarist Sam Owens puts his own actions and desires under a microscope on a gentle, sunny, yet boldly honest solo album. | Sam Evian: You, Forever | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/sam-evian-you-forever/ | You, Forever | The term “soft-rock” has pejorative connotations. It brings to mind purgatorial waiting rooms and melodies that are almost offensive in their calculated inoffensiveness. On You, Forever, his second record as Sam Evian, Celestial Shore singer and guitarist Sam Owens offers rock songs about vulnerability and desire that are gentle and sweet but avoid the most saccharine tendencies of soft rock. It’s a delicate balancing act, and one he pulls off with aplomb.
A balmy spirit unites the 11 songs on the album. The silky, electric-guitar-driven instrumentation is consistently sunny, beginning with opener “IDGAF,” which burbles along on a bed of punchy bass and scritchy shaker. Its refrain, “I don’t care, I don’t have to care anymore,” isn’t a kiss-off so much as a celebration of being relieved of a burden.
Owens keeps his simple songs interesting by adding occasional adornments. He wears his 1960s influences unabashedly, stirring in flecks of light psychedelia. A squealing saxophone and chugging guitars at the end of “Health Machine” imbue the song with energy. Similar fanfares mark the closing passages of “Now I Feel It” and the record’s groovy title track.
But the real appeal of You, Forever lies in Owens’ pensive lyrics and gentle vocals. He spends much of the record investigating his own worries and insecurities. “Who will look out for me? Who knows my name? Is there anyone out there who knows my kind of pain in this country?” he wonders on “Anybody.” “Next to You” finds him reckoning with a codependent urge to stick close to a person who makes him feel safe: “I don’t feel so fucked up as long as I’m next to you,” he confesses. Owen chases that track with “Summer Day,” an appreciation of small moments (“Sometimes I forget the beautiful things/You show me figures strange and sweet”) that also finds him taking stock of his personal growth.
Only “Country” interrupts the record’s charming languor. Its backbone is a goofy, giddy-up bassline and a percussive guitar effect that recalls the patter of horse hooves. Those quirky touches are more cloying than cute, derailing an otherwise lovely song about figuring out where you fit in the world and finding your way home.
Despite the vulnerability Owens displays in his lyrics, he rarely sounds as though he’s reaching for outside validation of his feelings or seeking catharsis for its own sake. Instead, his songs come across as earnest attempts to connect with listeners. They’re invitations to introspection, not sounding boards for issues better dissected in the privacy of a therapist’s office.
A guiding principle behind the album was Owens’ determination to accept responsibility for his actions and understand how they affect his own life and the people around him. In doing so, he creates intimacy within what could have been a bloodless manifesto, bathing his blunt self-appraisal in the warm glow of human connection. There’s bravery in that willingness to make yourself vulnerable. You, Forever isn’t a soft-rock record, but it is a record that reframes a certain kind of softness as strength. | 2018-06-06T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-06-06T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Saddle Creek | June 6, 2018 | 6.8 | db127ec5-7291-4294-aa27-4659f71d4044 | Allison Hussey | https://pitchfork.com/staff/allison-hussey/ | |
Though the project oozes affection for Biggie, it’s yet another gangly, recycled posthumous album of verses we’ve all heard before—a painful tour through rap’s emptiest vault. | Though the project oozes affection for Biggie, it’s yet another gangly, recycled posthumous album of verses we’ve all heard before—a painful tour through rap’s emptiest vault. | Faith Evans / The Notorious B.I.G.: The King & I | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/23279-the-king-i/ | The King & I | If nothing else, The King & I isn’t as cynical as the posthumous Notorious B.I.G. albums that came before it. Granted, that’s a low bar: 1999’s stingy Born Again stretched a hambone of unreleased material into an album’s worth of split-pea soup, while 2005’s Duets: The Final Chapter resorted to even more shameful recycling tactics. The world didn’t need another tour of rap’s emptiest vault, but at least this one’s guided by his widow, singer Faith Evans, whose intentions are ostensibly beyond reproach. Compared to its Diddy-helmed predecessors, The King & I oozes affection for its subject, celebrating him not as an icon or a cash cow, but as a loved one. Instead of packing the album with of-the-moment features designed to move units, Evans limits the guest list to Big’s pals and peers. No Korn collaborations here; this is a family tribute.
But good intentions aren’t enough to salvage bad ideas, and King & I commits to a truly awful one: an entire 72-minute album of duets between Evans and her long-dead husband, with barely a scrap of unheard audio to justify the endeavor. Never mind how distracting it is to hear some of these verses for a third time—and it’s never not distracting—the project was doomed from a purely technical level. Recording fidelity has evolved considerably in the 20 years since Biggie’s death, making it even harder than before to pass off his leftover audio scraps as new; it’s like trying to splice grainy ’80s VHS footage into an HD broadcast and hoping nobody notices. No matter how hard you squint, there’s never any illusion these two were in the same studio together. Even at its best, The King & I sounds like Evans is dueting with a Notorious B.I.G. soundboard app.
The King & I is simultaneously too stingy and too indiscriminate with its star attraction, denying fans new verses yet projecting his hologram raps over every song until the reflexive thrill of hearing one of rap’s greatest voices is extinguished. Each verse becomes a reminder of his absence—he’s never sounded more like a relic of the distant past than when “Tryna Get By” rehashes his 20-year-old “Sky’s the Limit” boast about owning a mobile phone. This is the last way anybody wants to remember him.
It’s doubly cruel that Evans committed so fully to the album’s misguided premise since, reused Biggie footage aside, this is some of her strongest work in years. Her voice has a lived grit and she radiates passion as she works through decades-old grief. She agonizes over the mystery of his murder on “Somebody Knows”—one of several sharp boom-bap/New Jack Swing throwbacks produced with Salaam Remi—then laments that her husband never had the chance to watch their son grow up on “One in the Same.” “I tried my best to explain/Why did you go/But the child don’t understand,” she sings, her voice flushed with anguish. Songs about Biggie’s death have become a kind of subgenre unto themselves, but few have felt this personal.
The muse is solid, and there’s something sweet about the idea that after all these years, Biggie still brings out the best in Evans. Now if only his reconstituted raps weren’t plastered over every inch of the record. Here’s a compromise that might have worked: a Biggie-inspired album, one that honors her late husband and maybe even samples him periodically, but frees itself from the burden of slotting his old recordings onto every song. Sometimes less is more, and that’s especially true when so little remains. | 2017-05-23T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-05-23T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B / Rap | Rhino | May 23, 2017 | 4.5 | db1da996-39ea-47b2-9fd0-7bea880e90c6 | Evan Rytlewski | https://pitchfork.com/staff/evan-rytlewski/ | null |
All-acoustic interpretations of pieces by Aphex Twin. | All-acoustic interpretations of pieces by Aphex Twin. | Alarm Will Sound: Acoustica | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/481-acoustica/ | Acoustica | It's tempting to look for an angle when ostensibly "traditional" artists re-interpret music originally conceived for an entirely different context. You wonder if they're making a statement first and thinking about the music second. It can seem as though the artist with a stronger connection to high culture is either extending a hand down to welcome the other half into the club. Or, perhaps they're just having a laugh. A string quartet is playing Metallica songs, see, because Metallica are actually interesting composers. See also Sebastian Cabot, Actor/Bob Dylan, Poet.
New music ensemble Alarm Will Sound decided to follow its album of Steve Reich compositions with a record of all-acoustic interpretations of pieces by the Aphex Twin, but nothing about the project suggests condescension. Based on the music and presentation this seems more like an ambitious collective on the hunt for challenging projects, and the idea of scoring and arranging pieces that have lived their entire lives inside a computer was too tempting to pass up. In a sense Richard D. James seems the natural choice for such a tribute, both because of his surpassing melodic sense and that he's already penetrated the serious world through collaboration with Philip Glass. A large assortment of hoses, whistles, shop hardware, and piano treatments were gathered for timbral approximations, after the tracks were selected (curiously, most are from most from Drukqs) and notated, and this is the result.
Though it never sounds to me like a gimmick, Acoustica remains oddly distant and difficult to inhabit. This music, often geared toward atmosphere and sound for sound's sake, is difficult to absorb when scored for traditional instruments and easily slips into the background. Generally, the better and more exciting the original track, the more the Alarm Will Sound version pales by comparison. On tracks like "Meltphace 6" where the distinctive rolling drums serve as the lead instrument, Alarm Will Sound sounds overly restrained, with its conservatory roots at the Eastman School of Music in full view. That they would even attempt to record something like "Cock/Ver 10" live with acoustic instruments is impressive, certainly, but the music itself doesn't quite survive the translation and loses its sense of purpose.
Better are the tracks that were in their initial form more open-ended. The short industrial percussion ditty "Prep Gwarlek 3B" finds new life with live instrumentation, and its unusual rhythm and texture easier becomes easier to digest. The digital gamelan "Jynweythek Ylow" loses a pang of longing without the sound of James's music box, but Alarm Will Sound find the melodic core at the piece's center. Still, though Acoustica is an interesting album and not unpleasant to listen to, but nowhere does it capture James's energy or musical wit. It reminds me of when Derrick May did an Invisible Jukebox session for the UK experimental music magazine The Wire and the interviewer played him a brass band version of "Strings of Life". His strong initial excitement quickly dissipated and he groaned, "Oh, I wish it were better." | 2005-08-18T02:00:05.000-04:00 | 2005-08-18T02:00:05.000-04:00 | Experimental | Cantaloupe | August 18, 2005 | 5.9 | db20a9aa-c179-4d63-8f9f-d31b30f05fd8 | Mark Richardson | https://pitchfork.com/staff/mark-richardson/ | null |
null | null | Tangerine Dream: Electronic Meditation/Alpha Centauri | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/11847-electronic-meditationalpha-centauri/ | Electronic Meditation/Alpha Centauri | Psychedelic music spawned so many fragmented genres of rock in the late 60s, it's easy to forget that at one point, most of the bands were trying to accomplish the same, basic thing: To change the world with music. Failing that, they might have settled for freaking themselves out, but exploration into the unknown was the key. Peace and love? Sure, sometimes. Surreal visions of the beyond? Check. Crazy backwards guitar solos? Extra nice. This kind of faith in a better tomorrow through experimentation (or at least the aping of experimentation, in the hopes of stumbling over a little second-hand wisdom) is one of the aspects of late-60s music culture that makes it so unique, and consequently why, in many ways, it was the last time rock was free of its own self-conscious ambition.
American and British bands were quick to establish national schools of psychedelia, but continental European bands evolved differently. Countries like Germany and Sweden, far from the epicenters of pop and rock flourish, got their news via weekend radio shows and imported LPs. German guitarist Edgar Froese, playing with a beat combo The Ones, had already formed a long-distance attachment to Jimi Hendrix when he met Salvador Dali, and was inspired to form the earliest version of Tangerine Dream (named after a lyric in The Beatles' "Lucy In the Sky With Diamonds") in 1967. Froese met Berlin club owner Conrad Schnitzler, himself a student of avant-garde sculpture and music (via his former teacher Karlheinz Stockhausen), and later, drummer Klaus Schulze. Along with organist Jimmy Jackson, they formed the version of TD that produced their first LP, Electronic Meditation.
TD oozes their way out of the gate with the primordial muck of "Genesis": A short, but telling introduction to a world apart from your mom's wholesome rock and roll. Fuzzy guitar flutter and Schulze's rin-tin-tinny cymbal rattle the stage clear for Schnitzler's basso profundo cello moan. That moan, for better or for worse, is the "melody" here, and I suppose that makes the quivering electro-effects a counterpoint. Flautist Thomas Keyserling (uncredited on the original release) bubbles here and offers a glissando there; at the height of synergetic convergence, Shulze drops a caveman stomp on the toms. If this was hippie music, it was borne of the most sincerely gone magick available.
The two epics (a compositional preference Froese never abandoned) are "Cold Smoke" and "Journey Through A Burning Brain", both of which sound much more in tune with music Shulze and Schnitzler would go on to create than anything TD became famous for. In fact, parts of "Journey" remind me of each of Schnitzler's Kluster LPs, with unidentified sound effects and a hard-line approach to free improvisation: Any melodies are purely coincidental, and should not detract from the generally horrific vibe. The band does lapse into prototypical krautrock beat-mantra midway through, but makes sure to mix in sufficiently atonal flute soloing, and Froese's boundless, rhythmless guitar stylings. "Cold Smoke" begins with a different strategy, one much closer to what most folks think of when TD is mentioned: Keyboard-dominated atmospherics. That strategy lasts for exactly one minute before Shulze's cymbals rip apart the solemn organ chords; the organ tries to come back, and Shulze destroys it again. In the end, things end up fairly similar to the previous tune, though the seeds of a gentler TD have been planted.
"Ashes to Ashes" takes the organ from "Cold Smoke" and adds some Doors-ish cocktail-rock drumming, and of course, more free guitar and flute. On Electronic Meditation, this tune is as close to rock as the group played, and in places is not unlike concurrent Grateful Dead (or more accurately, Amon Duul II). "Resurrection" tidies up the biblical concept with church organ and a backwards sermon (devilish!), and a return of the gooey acid-ballet of the opening song (hereby allowing TD to corner the market on psychedelic, freeform biblical concept albums from Germany). It was a far cry from the mystical impressionism of their mid-70s LPs (with only Froese remaining from this trio), and anyone who thinks the band is good for little more than New Age background moods will be surprised by this music.
Shulze left the band before Electronic Meditation was released, and Schnitzler stayed on only long enough to see the induction of 16-year old drummer Chris Franke into the band. Schnitzler's replacement was the rambunctious organist Steve Shroyder (himself a member for only one album). The trio of Froese, Franke and Shroyder (along with two guest musicians) recorded TD's second record, Alpha Centauri, and had little difficulty living up to the freaky promise of the Dream's debut. Pieces like "Sunrise In the Third System" (an organ-led mystic processional) and the single (!) "Ultima Thule Part 1" (with a very non-TD rock thud) proved the band were learning how to pour maximum mood into more compact structures.
That said, the centerpiece is the massive title-track: Not only does this piece take up the bulk of Alpha Centauri, it's an almost perfect summation of everything they'd accomplished up to that point. Beginning with distant flute, and gigantic cymbal swells, the track (like many before) takes a while to get off the ground, but when Froese's brand new VCS3 synthesizer makes with the siren calls, the outer limits are within reach. Even at this early point, Froese was fascinated with the possibility of the synthesizer, though he hadn't quite mastered its range. Flautist Udo Dennebourg plays a starring role for much of the piece, adding melodic, if flighty, direction to an otherwise malleable form. Dennebourg begins announcing something at the close of the piece, and wordless, choral backing vocals deliver the dark finale.
Each of these records (as well as 1972's Zeit and 1973's Atem) were originally released on Ralf-Ulrich Kaiser's legendary Ohr imprint, also home to the first recordings of Ash Ra Temple, Popol Vuh and Amon Duul. Over the years, Tangerine Dream has undergone a number of personnel changes, and Froese gradually transformed the chaotic Technicolor of his band's first recordings into an altogether different trip. However, as products of the psychedelic era (and the budding German experimental rock scene later dubbed "krautrock"), these albums are fine nuggets indeed, even if the best was yet to come. | 2003-02-06T01:00:01.000-05:00 | 2003-02-06T01:00:01.000-05:00 | Electronic | null | February 6, 2003 | 7.6 | db2626d3-1645-4e55-b7e6-8ba40ef50d74 | Dominique Leone | https://pitchfork.com/staff/dominique-leone/ | null |
While fitting comfortably into their discography of slinky slow jams, Living finds the Los Angeles R&B duo unsure of how to connect to the vital essence of the genre. | While fitting comfortably into their discography of slinky slow jams, Living finds the Los Angeles R&B duo unsure of how to connect to the vital essence of the genre. | inc. no world: Living EP | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/inc-no-world-living-ep/ | Living EP | When the Los Angeles-based brothers Andrew and Daniel Aged first started making chill R&B together, they went by the name Teen Inc., then simply inc., and finally inc. no world. It’s not unusual for a band to change its name as its aesthetic evolves, but it’s interesting to note that only two albums and two EPs into their career, the Ageds have so frequently felt the need to rebrand. While their newest release, the five-song EP Living, fits comfortably into their discography of slinky slow jams, a sense of self-doubt is threaded throughout. It probably doesn’t help that we are currently in the midst of a pop-R&B boom to rival that of the mid-1990s, making it all the more difficult for groups like inc. no world to carve out their own niche. After building upon their sound with last year’s solid As Light as Light, Living ends up tempering that momentum with tracks that sometimes verge upon the monotone.
Former session and touring musicians for the likes of John Legend, Raphael Saadiq, and Kelela, inc. no world boast undeniable chops. These are not kids playing at some hipster version of blue-eyed soul—their playing demonstrates a true understanding of the inner workings of R&B. The EP’s eponymous opening track sends electric piano tumbling slowly over a simple breakbeat before Andrew’s restrained lead vocals cut through, conveying the understated cool that’s essential to the duo’s laid-back brand of downtempo. Andrew’s voice is right at home within the song’s grooves—particularly in the chorus, where he coasts across gentle guitar licks and Daniel’s supporting harmonies.
Capable of flitting from a dewy falsetto to a lush, vibrato baritone, his voice sounds more powerful and more confident than on previous records, making the group’s claim to the contemporary American R&B scene more than credible. But in an era where Frank Ocean, Solange, Childish Gambino, and countless others are turning out nu-funk masterpieces faster than we can roll joints to them, is there space for inc. no world’s super-focused minimalism, or does it get lost in the fray?
There is an air of soul-searching on Living, a sense that the brothers are trying to hit a mark while staying true to the sound that has gotten them this far. A part of them—perhaps the part that has spent so much time playing with extremely famous musicians in front of crowds of thousands—clearly wants to create something popular and enduring. You can imagine a blissed-out festival crowd singing along to a song like “Complete,” vibing along with the wah-wah guitars and echoing snares. But inc. no world also push against their pop tendencies, with mixed results. The instrumental “Sent” is a good example of excellent musicianship (when was the last time anyone successfully utilized a jazz flute?), but it does little to help tie the EP together.
In the end, Living might have fared better as an album, where it could have given the band space to work out these disparate ideas. It’s clear that inc. no world are trying to sustain a mood throughout the record, but sometimes “ambient” can quickly become “background,” and the EP consistently wavers between the two. At its peaks, you’ll find sketches of songs on par with the fantastic R&B on the airwaves right now; at its lows, it skims across the surface of a sound that runs much deeper. For all its potential, Living strives to connect to the genre’s soul. | 2017-08-18T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-08-18T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | No World / Quality Time / Handsome Dad / Big Oil | August 18, 2017 | 6.5 | db277d3c-69e2-4c34-b1eb-46e183fcac71 | Cameron Cook | https://pitchfork.com/staff/cameron-cook/ | null |
The minimalist composer-performer’s slow, patient works demand and reward close attention; give them time, and their secrets will rise slowly to the surface. | The minimalist composer-performer’s slow, patient works demand and reward close attention; give them time, and their secrets will rise slowly to the surface. | Sarah Davachi: Cantus, Descant | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/sarah-davachi-cantus-descant/ | Cantus, Descant | In the December 1960 issue of Arts and Architecture, the critic Dore Ashton described the peculiar experience of encountering Ad Reinhardt’s “black paintings”—a series of 60 x 60” canvases that appear monochrome, but that reveal subtle, multicolored geometries upon close inspection. She suggested that they actively slowed the process of interpretation; you have to stare, hard, to find hints of color in the black. “How singular color can be when so proposed!” wrote Ashton. “How much more inexplicably moving the hue when it is magically coaxed out after long contemplation.”
The same could be said for the minimal drones of Sarah Davachi’s new album Cantus, Descant, which, on first blush, scans as her most imposing work to date. Clocking in at 81 minutes and 17 tracks, it’s the first release from Davachi’s new label, Late Music (a partner of Warp), and features recordings from no less than six different organs scattered across North America and Europe. These are long, sinewy pieces, carved from just a few components. They favor slow chord changes and arcane tonalities, and unlike Reinhardt’s paintings, they’re fundamentally durational; like it or not, they demand a fixed amount of time. But there are also secrets lurking just under the surface, and a degree of complexity that’s part and parcel of the music’s stark appearance, like colors coaxed from the black.
The entry points shift across the album, but there’s always a way in. The chug of the reed organ on tracks like “Oldgrowth” and “Badlands” generates a persistent background rumble, evoking gentle motion, and the wispy “Passing Bell” folds in faint bells; “Ruminant,” one of the album’s most plainly inviting pieces, puts swells of violin at the fore, which offer an early reprieve. The pipe organ played on the “Stations” series uses meantone temperament, a tuning system typically associated with Renaissance music, lending it a veneer of familiarity, and conjuring images of sprawling, imagined cathedrals. “I like to think of sounds as these worlds that you enter into,” said Davachi in a 2015 interview. “Not as a form of escapism, but rather as an act of emotional or aesthetic disclosure.” Her brand of slow-moving minimalism is still mostly inscrutable, but these sorts of textural variations can feel like a form of disclosure—the vaguest suggestions, guiding us through—and make Cantus, Descant a deceptively generous project.
Davachi opens up even further on “Play The Ghost” and “Canyon Walls,” both of which feature her own vocals. In their delicate constitution and emphasis on individual syllables (they can feel like ASMR, at times), they’re reminiscent of Julia Holter, another LA-based composer with a soft spot for Renaissance music. And though her lyrics aren’t quite as finely wrought as Holter’s, Davachi has a knack for simple evocative language. There’s a lovely line on “Canyon Walls” about “a longing to keep those birds/in their deep ruin green”; the meaning is elusive, but the undertones reverberate.
Davachi has been putting out music in this vein for the past few years, insisting on slowness and careful rumination across a range of instruments and electroacoustic modes. She’s scarily prolific (she’s released three EPs already this year), but with Cantus, Descant, Davachi has arrived at maybe her purest distillation of those ideals. The attention to detail is itself a kind of time warp; in its patient hold, the music becomes something entirely new.
Buy: Rough Trade
(Pitchfork earns a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.)
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2020-09-18T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-09-18T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Late Music | September 18, 2020 | 7.5 | db2c6fc1-a862-4a8e-8b34-3a5238e69dda | Will Gottsegen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/will-gottsegen/ | |
This Barsuk reissue features some ho-hum selections from Death Cab's first live show and a Smiths cover, but its real draw is the chance to re-evaluate a band that for many is still considered a dealbreaker. | This Barsuk reissue features some ho-hum selections from Death Cab's first live show and a Smiths cover, but its real draw is the chance to re-evaluate a band that for many is still considered a dealbreaker. | Death Cab for Cutie: Something About Airplanes | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/12466-something-about-airplanes/ | Something About Airplanes | It took six albums, three EPs, countless singles, four or five record labels, a much-loved side project, numerous guest productions, and a thoroughly boring solo LP to get to this point, but Death Cab for Cutie will end 2008 as a big-font festival band. And yet, though their sound has grown increasingly muscular, and their outdoor sets tend to only reach as far back as "We Laugh Indoors", they still seem ill-suited to wide-open spaces. As I watched two high-out-of-their mind, shirtless, thirtysomething acid casualties make out during Coachella while a rickety version of "Soul Meets Body" played in the distance, it just seemed to go against everything Death Cab has come to stand for. In other words, they still manage to carry themselves like a small band from a tiny Washington college town.
Upon re-release, the most striking aspects about Death Cab's debut, Something About Airplanes, were how modest it sounded and how removed it was from the Modest Mouse/Built to Spill template of the Pacific Northwest. If there was any resemblance to their regional forefathers, it was in their ability to create a sonic blueprint that's subtly innovative. Few were writing lyrics-- formed almost as complete sentences and melodically structured the same-- like Death Cab's Ben Gibbard at the time. The bridge of "President of What?" sounds like it's taking the wrong step with each chord turn, moving in an opposite direction to the melody, but the resolution makes complete sense: "Nothing hurts like nothing at all/ When imagination takes full control."
In a strikingly candid interview with Paste magazine, Gibbard admitted that he goes back to this record and rarely has any idea what he was talking about. While it's typical for a lyricist to embrace straightforwardness in his later years, recent tracks like "You Can Do Better Than Me" are no more rewarding for their directness. Something About Airplanes instead sounds like a private affair, which is one reason it's so treasured amongst diehards. Like so many other fledgling songwriters, Gibbard cloaked his voice in reverb and occasional distortion (even on the sweet and sour harmonies of "Pictures in an Exhibition") and danced around sentiment. For a band inextricably linked with heart-on-sleeve emoting, Death Cab could be delectably difficult to parse.
You can also hear how naturally and incrementally the group progressed from a fully formed blueprint. Regardless of Narrow Stairs' heavy-handed addition of new textures, you can trace a straight line to that point from the carefully considered guitar lattices of Airplanes' "Your Bruise". "Sleep Spent" is a direct descendent of mid-90s slowcore with better hooks. "Amputations", the most full-bodied track, features rumbling and almost mockingly chiming guitar hooks that sugarcoat the lyric "he's unresponsive 'cause you're irresponsible"-- a stronger precursor to their more recent theater sing-along lines like "you are beautiful, but you don't mean a thing to me."
While the deluxe package does include selections from their nervous first live show in Seattle and a cover of the Smiths' "Sweet and Tender Hooligan" featuring Harvey Danger's Sean Nelson, the real draw here is the chance to re-evaluate the band itself, often underrated or deemed as a group people "used to like" before getting into harder and more challenging music. And yet, while most of the indie crowd now embraces pop music in all its forms, something about dudes like Death Cab, who hit a little close to home but aren't considered "cool," is still considered a dealbreaker.
Certainly, Something About Airplanes isn't Death Cab's best album-- in retrospect, it sounds like a dry run for 2000's We Have the Facts and We're Voting Yes, where the lyrics got more pointed, the hooks more emphatic, and the dirges more steely and purposeful. The studio tricks would become more sympathetic as well: In addition to the dated samples that adorn "President of What?", "Amputations" closes with a snippet of a motivational record called "You Can Better Your Best" that proclaims "if everybody's making fun of you or criticizing, you know you're on the right track." Granted, the song itself is about the futility of becoming someone you're not to win someone over, but the line unwittingly serves as a mission statement for a band that went Gold while rarely answering to anyone but itself. | 2008-11-26T01:00:01.000-05:00 | 2008-11-26T01:00:01.000-05:00 | Rock | Barsuk | November 26, 2008 | 8.1 | db3a44cf-a579-4d39-82e6-20bfc5bb66d3 | Ian Cohen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ian-cohen/ | null |
Southern Lord gathers together the tapes from the drone metal band's aborted first album, recorded in 1990, which include a contribution from Kurt Cobain. | Southern Lord gathers together the tapes from the drone metal band's aborted first album, recorded in 1990, which include a contribution from Kurt Cobain. | Earth: A Bureaucratic Desire for Extra-Capsular Extraction | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/14804-a-bureaucratic-desire-for-extra-capsular-extraction/ | A Bureaucratic Desire for Extra-Capsular Extraction | A Bureaucratic Desire for Extra-Capsular Extraction gathers all of the music drone metal progenitors Earth recorded in October 1990, during their earliest sessions at Portland's Smegma Studios. Earth, featuring soon-to-be Melvin Joe Preston in its second lineup, intended for those seven tracks to serve as its debut. Record label decisions interfered. Three of those tracks were released a year later via Sub Pop, on the out-of-print EP Extra-Capsular Extraction; four more were released a decade later via No Quarter, as an addendum to the also out-of-print reissue of the live disc Sunn Amps and Smashed Guitars. Aside from message board bootlegs, this new Southern Lord collection marks the debut of this material as an uninterrupted whole, as it was originally intended. Not limited to riffs stretched like steel over minimal, militant percussion, A Bureaucratic Desire-- Earth's first EP plus two grueling mid-tempo blasts, a quasi-ballad featuring Kurt Cobain, and an oppressive closer-- now showcases the breadth of Dylan Carlson's vision from the start.
Doubtlessly, 1993's Earth 2: Special Low Frequency Version will forever remain a sea change moment for both Earth as a band and heavy metal as a form. Over three colossal tracks, Carlson and Dave Harwell treated riff and tone like mutual life forces, using one to explore the other. Earth 2 is an unapologetic, overpowering statement. Even almost 20 years later, even after inspiring legions of better-selling followers and spawning the bulk of a genre, that album still feels utterly vibrant and odd. Without booming drums, lacerated vocals, or dark-side imagery, opener "Seven Angels" is as suffocating as the best black metal, as moving as Carlson's idols in Black Sabbath.
But A Bureaucratic Desire persuasively argues for a reconsideration of what Earth accomplished-- or, more specifically, just how early: It took Justin Broadrick's Godflesh the better [#script:http://pitchfork.com/media/backend/js/tiny_mce/themes/advanced/langs/en.js]|||||| part of another decade to make industrial metal with a drum machine that's as compelling as "Geometry of Murder" and "German Dental Work". Though loud and lumbering, both tracks maneuver with finesse and agility, two basses and a guitar sliding through the big beats. Especially at the start, "Divine and Bright" displays an undercurrent of prettiness and radiance. Earth would touch upon the idea again with 1995's Phase 3: Thrones and Dominions and finally explore fully a decade later when Carlson reformed the band as an elegant tortoise-like vehicle for slow blues. Even as Kurt Cobain hums and Kelly Canary howls above the mid-tempo riff, there's a certain redemption to the music, as if this all this doom eventually lifts like a fog. That feeling won't last too long, though: Closer "Dissolution 1" is a sluggish, grim march that grinds through one riff over and over again, the drum machine beating against the changes like a whip. It's quintessential nihilistic doom metal-- no hope except an end.
Those wary of investing again in music they already own should pay special attention to the credits here. Mell Dettmer remastered these tapes, which got little such attention the first time they were released. Dettmer has worked not only on recent Southern Lord albums by Sunn O))) and Wolves in the Throne Room, but also on music by Sleep, Zoroaster, and Eyvind Kang. Her mastering job here is warm, loud and careful, adding a glow to the massive tidal sweeps of "Ouroboros Is Broken" and emphasizing the drone that hums beneath the whole thing (something also emphasized by the reformed Earth in 2006, thanks to Steve Moore's organ work on Hibernaculum.) "A Bureaucratic Desire for Revenge, Parts 1 and 2" clamp down harder, too, the percussion pushing through the guitars with more gusto, every edge of every riff feeling more like a new rupture. If it's been years since you've listened to these songs, as it had been for me when this reissue arrived, you might believe you're hearing them for the first time. And if you've never heard Earth this early, get ready to change your conceptions: The fountainheads of drone metal have been surprisingly versatile from the start. | 2010-11-03T02:00:02.000-04:00 | 2010-11-03T02:00:02.000-04:00 | Metal | Southern Lord | November 3, 2010 | 8 | db3afe7e-9325-4afd-b041-ee95d3fb3ef0 | Grayson Haver Currin | https://pitchfork.com/staff/grayson-haver currin/ | null |
The duo of Khaela Maricich and Melissa Dyne venture into modular synthesis for the latest the Blow album. The change is not entirely positive, but it glimmers with some promising moments. | The duo of Khaela Maricich and Melissa Dyne venture into modular synthesis for the latest the Blow album. The change is not entirely positive, but it glimmers with some promising moments. | The Blow: Brand New Abyss | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/the-blow-brand-new-abyss/ | Brand New Abyss | The Blow has always bundled electro-pop, twee-punk, and performance art into spindly confessionals, but it has done so in three distinct incarnations. First, as the millennium turned, it was Khaela Maricich’s solo project, lo-fi and artsy-cuddly in the K Records tradition. Second, in the mid-2000s, it was a sleeker collaboration between Maricich and YACHT’s Jona Bechtolt, like mussed up Metric for northwestern punk kids. And third, since around 2007, the Brooklyn via Oregon band has been the combined effort of Maricich and Melissa Dyne, a conceptual installation artist who initially enhanced the Blow’s concerts and then began to work with Maricich on the music.
This iteration of the Blow is behind its first new album in four years, Brand New Abyss, in which Maricich’s spiky sensitivity comes in a redesigned container. Moving away from digital composition, the duo ventures into modular synthesis, patching together a rig of analog oscillators and filters and then half teaching it to speak, half learning its language. It makes a huge difference that the music is grounded more in space and time. Unfortunately, it’s not an entirely positive change. It seems that bouncy samples mutate into loquacious indie pop more readily than rudimentary analog synthesis does. Maricich doesn’t always adapt her grid-forged singing style to fit these blurrier compositions, and two odd cover choices cast long, puzzling shadows.
When it comes to covers, intention—as expressed through the rendition—matters. We need to feel there’s an idea beyond the wan rush of hearing a familiar song in a new context. But it’s hard to fathom what the Blow intended with their out-of-focus cover of Eagles chestnut “Peaceful Easy Feeling.” The production is thin and simplistic. The vocal melody is tentative, as if Maricich hadn’t completely decided how to phrase it before recording. One wants to read something subversive into her take on lyrics about “what a woman can do to your soul,” but the arch, quizzical tone doesn’t feel subversive. This isn’t an errant deep cut; it’s the album’s first song, and it sets an emotionally inscrutable frame around everything that follows.
“Dark Cold Magic” is much more appealing and legible, though the vocal line still can’t help but feel a little desultory with such sparse harmonic and rhythmic material to work with. This is an ongoing issue; the compositions are too often limited to a big bass plodding out a slow, simple melody under a thin scrim of atmospheric effects. But “Dark Cold Magic” and “Think About Me” are affecting performances of intimacy, sure to cast a starry mood at concerts. They showcase Maricich’s insightful, ambitious lyrics about obsession, heartbreak, and reconciliation, in which, through protracted puns, rhetorical overreach is transmuted into relatable vulnerability.
A cover of “The Greatest Love of All,” popularized by Whitney Houston, sits in the center of the album like a stone. The vocal arrangement, again, seems listless and haphazard. The approach to the material betrays neither joy nor relish; the song is neither met on its glorious terms nor stripped down to reveal something hidden inside it. You’d almost think the Blow were just mocking a cheesy pop song, relying on a twinge of ironic recognition, but that can’t be right (punk and indie bands have been covering pop songs for decades). Still, the decision to emotionally cauterize an anthem that connects with millions is truly confusing.
But then, at the halfway point, the record starts to find its stride, divulging exciting glimmers of a fully formed new direction. The Laurie Anderson-like sprechgesang of “The Woman You Want Her to Be” makes so much more sense with the sparse sonic palette than strained R&B vocals do; it’s like Maricich stops fighting against the music and feeds it the texture and language it’s starved for. Full of acute emotional shades and vivid social scenes, it’s also genuinely funny. The same is true of “Get Up,” which nudges into rap, and the album starts to inflate with a confidence and ease that is scarce on the first half.
If the Blow were to retire right now, Maricich could make a claim few can—she wrote a perfect song. “True Affection,” with that unforgettable lift in the vocal line during the chorus, was a flawless example of the burbling warmth and immediacy of Postal Service-era electro-pop. This was 2006, when Bechtolt’s suave electronics aided Maricich in toying with pop idioms from bounce rap to soft rock with a lot of musicality and a minimum of winking. Brand New Abyss, by its exploratory nature, doesn’t aspire to such great heights. But this valiant yet flawed endeavor feels more like a false start than a dead end, if the Blow keeps watering the ideas seeding the back half and stays away from karaoke. | 2017-09-21T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-09-21T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | self-released | September 21, 2017 | 5.8 | db431f1d-6587-4986-a9f4-3be5ef9982ef | Brian Howe | https://pitchfork.com/staff/brian-howe/ | |
The Ecuador-born songwriter’s second album is a study in time, examining aging as a continuum of death and regeneration with a light, whimsical touch. | The Ecuador-born songwriter’s second album is a study in time, examining aging as a continuum of death and regeneration with a light, whimsical touch. | Maria Usbeck: Envejeciendo | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/maria-usbeck-envejeciendo/ | Envejeciendo | Maria Usbeck wrote her second album in response to finding her first grey hairs. If her 2016 debut Amparo was a study in place, Envejeciendo is a study in time, examining aging as a continuum of death and regeneration with a light, whimsical touch. On Amparo, the former Selebrities singer returned to her native Ecuador (and a number of other places over three years of travel) to sing in Spanish and indigenous languages including Quichua, Rapa Nui, and Bribri. She pieced together ambient recordings from three years of travel, new-wave production, and instruments like the Andean quena flute, harp, and tumba drum to recover a native language.
On Envejeciendo, Usbeck uses these same tools to cultivate a richer emotional terrain. She treats the concept of aging as if it had no endpoint, observing the process in real time. Each sound bleeds into the next. On “Obscuro Obituario,” it’s a layering of human sighs that gives way to a haunting refrain in the voice of one losing their memory: “Recuerda que yo te puedo ver” (“Remember that I can see you”).
The examinations of aging on Envejeciendo run the spectrum from heartbreaking to ascetic. On “Amor Anciano,” a forest of synths breaks into an interlude of wind instruments and crickets as Usbeck’s grandmother recalls a bygone romance: “Le queda a una el recuerdo, el recuerdo lindo, de esos años preciosos de la ilusión….” she trails off. (“One is left with the memory, the beautiful memory, of those precious years of infatuation.”) “Retirement Home” imagines the fun retirement homes of the future, and “Secret in Japan” ponders the traditional laundry list of a healthy life: eating well, exercising, getting enough rest. “I think the secret to our longevity is….” Usbeck begins, naming several of these items before finally admitting: “I actually don’t know.”
Most of the album is similarly detached, with a lyrical economy that allows for a variety of readings. It opens with “Adios a Mi Memoria,” a goodbye to memory as blithe as a wave from a passing ship. The five-line song moves from Spanish to simple English, the voice of a bilingual brain no longer policing the language of its thought.
Usbeck also uses the mundane—like the dissociation that comes with learning a new technology—to encapsulate more existential displacement. On “The Machine,” she speaks as an elder learning to use a computer, the voice chopped and stretched as if downloaded over a bad connection. Pulsing synths and heavy reverb recall the aesthetics of the primitive internet, juxtaposed with the disembodied voice of a virtual assistant explaining artificial intelligence—the past and the future meeting in a conflicted present.
Usbeck’s quiet can inspire moods that range from casual observation to painful flashback. The album seems meant as exactly that: a slip in self-consciousness brought on, as Usbeck explains on the final track, by the active and passive mind: “Será que es nostalgia/Talvez es la vejez” (“Maybe it is nostalgia/Perhaps it is old age”). Both states cause memories to embalm and deteriorate without our permission. Yet Envejeciendo provides the distance necessary to think of aging as an old map navigated with intention. With eight concise tracks, Usbeck invites the listener into the kind of brief, dissociative fugue that lets you see all these selves at once. | 2019-08-22T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-08-21T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | Cascine | August 22, 2019 | 7.8 | db48a741-23e7-4008-a36a-dc182c55e1d6 | Stefanie Fernández | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stefanie-fernández/ | |
Nearly a decade into their reunion, the shoegaze titans refuse to pander to fans clamoring for their classic sound. Their stubbornness is admirable—if occasionally frustrating. | Nearly a decade into their reunion, the shoegaze titans refuse to pander to fans clamoring for their classic sound. Their stubbornness is admirable—if occasionally frustrating. | Ride: Interplay | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/ride-interplay/ | Interplay | Nine years and three albums into their reunion, Ride refuse to pander to their classic sound. Their stance is frustratingly laudable—a creative obstinacy to be admired with a slightly heavy heart. The Oxford band may not have invented the shoegaze palette of swirling guitars and dreamy vocals, but in the early 1990s, when the genre first started to take hold, Ride were the shoegaze poster boys, their sharp songs and good looks taking the Thames Valley sound to the upper reaches of the UK charts. And if Slowdive have surpassed them in popularity post-reformation, you can still hear the vaporous drive of Ride’s debut album, Nowhere, in the music of nu-gaze bands from Hotline TNT to For Tracy Hyde.
Ironically, the shoegaze revivalists often sound considerably more attached to classic Ride than Ride themselves do these days. The band’s first post-reunion album, Weather Diaries, bore distinctly modern production touches, while 2019’s This Is Not a Safe Place was a broad-ranging church that encompassed electro pop and acoustic jangle in its eclectic sweep. The group has framed Interplay as the album that brings it all together, uniting the different sides of the Ride narrative. But it’s not really Ride enough for that—more the sound of a band trying on different styles to see what fits, hindered by some mediocre songwriting.
Ride, at their classic best, married haunting vocal harmonies to pillowing walls of guitar, like the Byrds via My Bloody Valentine. But distorted guitar is missing from most of Interplay, and its absence is felt more keenly than at any point since the group’s reunion. Instead, the unexpected sound that hangs heavily over the opening half of the album is that of New Order. “Last Frontier” is the spitting image of Manchester’s favorite sons in their rocking mode—Peter Hook-style I’m-in-control-here-lads bassline and all—while the chiming guitar and simple synth chords on “Monaco” (which even shares a name with a Hook side project) hold a mirror up to New Order at their ’90s glossiest.
Interplay is not, then, the work of a group unduly concerned with fan service. Instead, the album continues in the liberated lineage of This Is Not a Safe Place, where a reunited band free of the crushing strain of legend status gets on with doing whatever the hell it likes—see also the Jesus and Mary Chain’s happily all-over-the-place 2024 album Glasgow Eyes. As on Weather Effect, the odd modern production effect sneaks through, such as the filtered fusion of French touch and shoegaze on “Peace Sign,” along with the psychedelic guitar whimsy (the charming “Last Night I Went Somewhere To Dream”) and dreamy acoustic strum (“Stay Free”) that their two previous albums did well.
The album also goes way further out into the weeds. “Sunrise Chaser” is a glittery wink away from being a disco record, with its funk bassline and what sounds like a Nile Rodgers-style guitar chuck; “I Came to See the Wreck” is kindergarten Depeche Mode with none of Dave Gahan’s pervy intensity; and the shuffling breakbeat and cinematic guitar effects of “Essaouira” suggest the trip-hop acts that followed Ride into the charts three decades ago.
Ride’s willingness to try all of this is admirable. That they do it competently is no surprise for a band driven by two excellent guitarists (Andy Bell and Mark Gardener) and one of the best rhythm sections in ’90s indie (Loz Colbert and Steve Queralt). But New Order themselves have been doing New Order perfectly well since reforming in 2011, while Rodgers has hardly been shy about lending his guitar skills to contemporary records. What’s more, nobody quite does yearning Nowhere-style shoegaze like Ride do yearning Nowhere-style shoegaze, an impression underlined by the excellent “Portland Rocks,” the album’s only classically Ride skyscraper, all soaring guitars and soul-soothing drum thrash, a song that could close their gigs from now until eternity.
Interplay does just about enough to keep everyone happy: Shoegaze fans get a sonic-cathedral finale, while Ride follow their creative whims. Without many truly great songs, though, Ride might have been wise to play to their strengths, rather than coveting someone else’s. | 2024-04-05T00:01:00.000-04:00 | 2024-04-05T00:01:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Wichita | April 5, 2024 | 6.2 | db5138ff-35c5-4a9e-b6a9-3134eb36cdc7 | Ben Cardew | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ben-cardew/ | |
The veteran UK band continues to re-locate itself on this, its second album since the departure of three of its original six members. | The veteran UK band continues to re-locate itself on this, its second album since the departure of three of its original six members. | Tindersticks: Falling Down a Mountain | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/13849-falling-down-a-mountain/ | Falling Down a Mountain | On the Tindersticks website recently, there was a video splash page announcing the new album that featured footage of the band playing its title track and introducing them one at a time. The first member mentioned was keyboardist and co-founder David Boulter. He's one of the architects of the band's sound, and his piano and organ have been signatures of the band for almost 20 years. And in the video he was playing... tambourine. His big moment on camera didn't show him doing what he does best. There is something perversely appropriate about this-- Tindersticks have always made music that thrives on their lack of egos, and here Boulter was just doing what the song asks for.
The track in question is an odd one, opening the band's eighth album (not counting soundtracks), and in terms of vocals it's more of a mantra than a song. There are three lines of lyrics, sung over and over in different combinations by smoky-voiced Stuart Staples and bassist Dan McKinna as the band provides jazzy drumming and wiry guitar figures. Longtime collaborator and satellite band member Terry Edwards plays sputtering trumpet, and the word is that he wasn't allowed to listen to it while playing-- they just told him what it sounded like. That kind of creative process-- encouraging the happy accident-- and the overall dialogue-ish approach to building a song that marks Falling Down a Mountain as an attempt to re-energize the veteran band.
This is their second album since half of the original sextet quit. Its predecessor, 2008's The Hungry Saw, exhibited some of the same tentativeness. They are, in a sense, a new band living in the long shadow of an old one. Their first three albums were difficult masterpieces, their next few strange explorations of soul music, their sixth a summary and a farewell. Albums seven and eight have been relaxed and seemingly unconcerned with besting the old stuff. That's probably for the best, as it lets them crank out the kind of simple pleasures that seem to flow naturally from them. On this album, that's evident on low-volume lullaby "Keep You Beautiful", which is like a Willie Mitchell production stripped to its barest, topped by a guy with molasses for vocal chords. Elsewhere, "Factory Girls" is a simple but lush piano-led ballad that lets Staples play around in his upper register as he licks romantic wounds and ruminates on aging. It stays sparse until its final minute, when the whole band comes in to lift him up.
McKinna and the other new members, drummer Earl Harvin and guitarist David Kitt, provide Tindersticks with something they've never had before: a backing vocal section that can go call-and-response with Staples. They do it best on "Black Smoke", a Velvet Underground-type groove that features plenty of backing harmonies and a crazy sax part that sounds like it wandered off from a Roxy Music session. The Latin-flavored "She Rode Me Down" is another standout, pulling the band together into a rhythmic juggernaut. At the complete opposite end of things is "Peanuts", a spartan duet between Staples and singer/actress Mary Margaret O'Hara that never gets anywhere-- it's sparse to the point of boring, and next to past duet highlights like "Travelling Light" it pales completely.
Especially during its quietest moments, this album is almost more like the memory of a song than the song itself. It leaves a very hazy, almost spectral impression when it ends. But it's also warm and in some ways comforting, and it improves the more you listen to it and tease out the details in the songs. Tindersticks Mk II seems to be hitting its stride and discovering where its real creative chemistry lies. | 2010-02-15T01:00:01.000-05:00 | 2010-02-15T01:00:01.000-05:00 | Rock | 4AD / Constellation | February 15, 2010 | 7 | db516e83-a752-4b28-bbdb-75e3e7093541 | Joe Tangari | https://pitchfork.com/staff/joe-tangari/ | null |
The Nigerian singer has the writing and vocal chops to best most of the leading men of Afropop. But his self-proclaimed transformation feels like a talented artist simply conforming to trends. | The Nigerian singer has the writing and vocal chops to best most of the leading men of Afropop. But his self-proclaimed transformation feels like a talented artist simply conforming to trends. | Adekunle Gold: Catch Me If You Can | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/adekunle-gold-catch-me-if-you-can/ | Catch Me If You Can | Even before he cemented his transformation from urban highlife to Afropop, Adekunle Gold was conscious of how his audience perceived him. With his first two albums, Gold and About 30, the Nigerian singer-songwriter earned recognition in the culturally specific niche of highlife, but it was clear he had grander ambitions. Those deliberate steps toward the mainstream coalesced on 2021’s Afropop Vol. 1, where he completed the makeover. Gone was the specificity of Yoruba highlife—the prominence of the talking drum, the language, those distinct vocal strains, and adire fabric. In its place: a new nickname (AG Baby), digital production, silk shirts, and lyrics sung in English.
With Catch Me If You Can, AG refines the pop formula he introduced last year, closing the chapter on his past self. The result sounds less like a creative transformation than a talented artist simply conforming to trends. In 2016, WizKid made a star turn alongside Drake on “One Dance,” the most-streamed song on Spotify that year. Burna Boy—the first of his generation of Afropop stars to win a Grammy—reached new levels of visibility with his hit single “Pree Me,” and Davido crowned himself the “Coolest Kid in Africa.” In this lineage, AG’s self-proclaimed transformation feels like the comfortable, unimaginative end-point of a well-tread path.
Even when working with familiar templates, AG has the writing and vocal chops to make better music than most of the leading men of Afropop. On the God-praising “Mase Mi,” his voice shines without the help of audible digital tuning. “More Than Enough” pleasantly nods to the highlife of his past in the lilt of its simple melodies, call-and-response vocals, horns, and soft guitar. “Selah” is a tale of toxic love, with almost every aspect of the production muted, and it reaches higher levels of emotional depth than any track here. When everything clicks, these songs feel like welcome additions to the pantheon of Afropop hits.
An overemphasis on efficiency and restraint, however, makes the bulk of this record feel more like a completed to-do list of Afropop trends than a cohesive album. Romance, check. Sex, check. Hustle, check. Amapiano, check. The otherwise enjoyable “One Woman” is a blatant TikTok play: When Ty Dolla $ign breaks mid-song to intone, “Wait… she’s really hot,” you can practically see the before-and-after jump-cut of a TikTok user’s visual transformation from bare face to full makeup.
There are two sides to African popular music that breaks internationally. On one end are artists like Youssou N’Dour, the Kuti sons, and Angélique Kidjo, who capture old-guard music critics and concert halls; on the other are those like WizKid, Davido, and Amaarae, who light up the clubs and social media. The gap between the two often feels unbridgeable, and yet it’s not impossible to cross: Burna Boy triumphed with his last two albums. But few other artists have the range to attract both audiences. What’s frustrating about Catch Me If You Can is this missed opportunity. Rather than bringing himself closer to pop, AG could have brought pop closer to highlife, broadening the scope of the genres and, in effect, transforming them. | 2022-02-09T00:00:00.000-05:00 | 2022-02-08T00:00:00.000-05:00 | Pop/R&B | Afro Urban | February 9, 2022 | 6.8 | db6ca575-6a41-43ff-96e6-444b06918295 | Jessica Kariisa | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jessica-kariisa/ | |
With heavy electronic textures, Brooklyn noise trio White Suns add a fresh wrinkle to their catalog on the vertiginous Psychic Drift. | With heavy electronic textures, Brooklyn noise trio White Suns add a fresh wrinkle to their catalog on the vertiginous Psychic Drift. | White Suns: Psychic Drift | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/white-suns-psychic-drift/ | White Suns | Existential despair is the core currency of Brooklyn noise trio White Suns. It informs every jaundiced note this group mangles or ruptures, regardless of whether or not lead vocalist Kevin Barry happens to supply a narrative anchor. It’s there among distorted swells on “Flesh Vault,” from 2012’s Sinews, an interior monologue resolved thusly: “The way is unmarked/But the map is in me.” It’s in the naked burst of jealousy igniting “Voyeur,” off 2011’s Waking in the Reservoir, and in the clamorous attempt at self-actualization that is “Cathexis” from 2014’s Totem. But it’s also present in the post-hardcore holler of early rager “Don Mattingly,” and in the swampy electronic jams on 2012’s inchoate HQ Tape Series Vol. 5. Uncertainty is their specialty.
What guitarist/singer Barry, drummer Dana Matthiessen, and guitarist Rick Visser—who all chip in with electronics—establish is an ignominious sub-industrial alchemy. It’s a doomed space where doubt reigns, where it becomes difficult to separate instrumental components. White Suns’ initial embraces of scum rock and scuzz punk gave way, over time, to a heavier, more chaotic crunch, as the band moved from cassette imprints to labels (Load, ugEXPLODE, the Flesner) for its LP and CD releases. It’s the band’s earnestness—its self-reflexive sincerity—that’s remained steadfast throughout.
Psychic Drift adds a fresh wrinkle to the catalog, limiting proceedings to just four extended meditations and swapping out guitars for tangles of synths, samples, and field recordings. The results feel overwhelmingly claustrophobic at moments and misleadingly thin at others; any time a song seems poised to peter out, a dark surge is almost inevitably en route. This vertiginous feeling fits the album’s loose lyrical theme: a modern societal apocalypse, nearly normalized. While Barry has shuttled between spoken word and screaming before, he leans harder on the former here—even as the surrounding sludge threatens to drown him out.
Groaning drones and electrical crackles open “A Year Without Summer,” as though a massive machine is rumbling back to life. Keening streaks of noise pierce the spectral din, as Barry’s vocals grind the distorted churn or strain to escape turning gears. These are evocative scraps, pieces to a puzzle for us to assemble: “I am listening, I am listening,” “lay your head down,” “...of transferred energy.” The blunt and desolate “Pilgrim” juxtaposes the deafening bustle of tugboat horns and railroad crossings with a profound, suffocating emptiness. A noisy squeal swells within the sonic frame, summoning the line, “Washed up on the shore of civilization/Waves break across my chest/I’ve brought nothing to an empty place,” which yields to “beaches iced over” and “no echoes here.” Closer “Medicine Walk” suggests incidental warehouse sounds remixed into a sloshing, sinister raga, punctuated by muffled vocals. The starkest of these—“My voice dies 10 feet from my mouth”—is the most direct sentiment Psychic Drift has to offer.
Opener “Korea” is the clincher—nearly 15 impenetrable minutes spent under what sounds like a highway overpass. The song feels cramped, a crush of atonal scales, sampled voices, and howling feedback throbbing relentlessly. What we hear matches what is sung: “Wandering under a foreign highway, searching for a place to sleep/...Static roar of cars overhead.” And then Barry adds, “His face is like a fear mask, with nothing behind.” Shortly thereafter, the aural avalanche gives way to what sounds like dozens of backyard trampolines being simultaneously struck far beyond their safety limits. “Korea” seems destined to shake itself into pieces. In all its cluttered information overload, it sounds like the end of the world. | 2017-07-01T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-07-01T01:00:00.000-04:00 | null | The Flenser | July 1, 2017 | 7.4 | db990c3d-d44c-47fb-bfce-24febfba8cf4 | Raymond Cummings | https://pitchfork.com/staff/raymond-cummings/ | null |
Simian Mobile Disco perform with a series of analogue synths, a 909 drum machine, and effects pedals, and their live show exhibits a deep understanding of tension and release. Live is a one-take, unedited recording of their gig at the Philadelphia show of their summer 2012 U.S. tour. | Simian Mobile Disco perform with a series of analogue synths, a 909 drum machine, and effects pedals, and their live show exhibits a deep understanding of tension and release. Live is a one-take, unedited recording of their gig at the Philadelphia show of their summer 2012 U.S. tour. | Simian Mobile Disco: Live | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/17877-simian-mobile-disco-live/ | Live | At the end of last summer Deadmau5 wrote a now infamous post on his Tumblr titled "we all hit play". His gleeful reveal was that the live performance of EDM was not about talent; he and his contemporaries in the EDM world were simply “button pushers”. So what if his off-the-peg, risk-free “live” shows were a pantomime? The real magic, as he saw it, happened in the studio and that’s what drew his fans to the show. There’s an interesting point in there somewhere about the tension between the creation and presentation of electronic music, which was picked up and eloquently dissected by Elite Gymnastics’ James Brooks on his own Tumblr; noting: “all of the really interesting things about my creative process are happening inside my head, there’s no way for me to show you that the way that a rock musician can.”
While Brooks identified the escapist value in occasionally being “bullshitted” by mainstream music, Deadmau5’s post was ultimately born of a frustration with deception: “But to stand up and say youre doing something special outside of a studio environment, when youre not, just plain fuckin annoys me.” Again, it’s a fair point and one that brings semantics into play: what does “live” electronic music mean today? Is it simply the act of being present and hitting that button? Is it a straight recreation of the album in a public arena? Is it a translation of computer compositions for a live context? Or is it an extension of the music, seeing the tracks as a loose framework within which to experiment and give birth to new versions?
It’s a question that, while perhaps not intentionally, long-serving UK techno duo Simian Mobile Disco provide their own answer to with their new album. Live is a one-take, unedited recording of their gig on the Philadelphia leg of their summer 2012 US tour. SMD are big gear heads-- they perform with a series of analogue synths, 909 drum machine, and effects pedals-- and see their live process as a route to freedom: “On this tour, the setlist was pretty much the same each night, but the way we played the tracks varied. Because of the way we have everything set up, we can easily jam out individual tracks depending on how the we and the crowd are feeling,” they recently explained.
The result, as with any live album, is not one you can really dip into at random, admittedly a tall order for today’s skip-attuned instincts. But commit to the flux and flow of this 68-minute journey and the reward of riding it is great. Featuring select tracks from across their back catalogue of studio albums-- Attack Decay Sustain Release, Temporary Pleasure, Delicacies and Unpatterns-- Live is a deft exhibition of SMD’s deep understanding of tension and release. They build and stoke steadily throughout the first 15 or so minutes of tough techno rhythms, an immersion that serves to tease impassioned response to the delicate, soaring melody of “Cerulean”. There are audible crowd cheers at the decaying close of their Beastie Boys-evoking number “It’s The Beat” and the bleepy-bloopy beginning of “Skin Cracker” that provide their own joyful reminder of the album’s context.
“Wooden” has some gorgeous cascading keys that evoke the spirit of the UK’s second summer of love and the birth of rave culture a quarter of a century ago. But it’s the segueing of “Seraphim” into “Cruel Intentions” that provides the seductive heart of the record, a sensual reminder of ecstatic possibilities of a half-time beat and a pure house vocal. As with any live set there are points in which you fully inhabit the music and others where your body is so caught up in its motion that your mind wanders. That’s no bad thing. It’s all about context with Live: each moment is a build to and release from the next. However electronic music continues to evolve and grow, for Simian Mobile Disco the clue’s in their name: the studio might be the starting point but their music is most alive on the road and in the live moment. | 2013-04-18T02:00:02.000-04:00 | 2013-04-18T02:00:02.000-04:00 | Electronic | Delicacies | April 18, 2013 | 7.5 | db9b61ce-cf08-4f21-b63d-a7e3164ef9e4 | Ruth Saxelby | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ruth-saxelby/ | null |
Wild Beasts' Boy King replaces the ornate detail of its predecessors with machine-tooled funk and pitch-shifted gasps. It's by no means a disaster, but it is a disappointment. | Wild Beasts' Boy King replaces the ornate detail of its predecessors with machine-tooled funk and pitch-shifted gasps. It's by no means a disaster, but it is a disappointment. | Wild Beasts: Boy King | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22139-boy-king/ | Boy King | Over four albums, Wild Beasts’ snaky percussion, kaleidoscopic guitar lines, and equally comic and self-lacerating regard for masculinity gave them a unique standing in the British indie scene: just as beloved by beery gig-goers chanting their riffs as by those who wouldn’t usually touch a four-piece guitar band with a big stick. So it’s odd that their fifth album arrives with co-frontman Hayden Thorpe telling reporters, “We’ve become the band we objected to being”: The swaggering American rockers that they rebelled against in their schooldays. During a period of heartbreak, Thorpe realized that he’s just as bad as the macho beefcakes they’ve often lampooned, and saw two possible paths stemming from the electronic intricacy of their last record: lab-coat music, or to “don the leather jackets and embrace the chaos and carnal force of rock‘n’roll,” he said. “And it was always going to be the leather jackets route.”
Boy King was made in Dallas with John Congleton (St. Vincent, Swans), and replaces the ornate detail of its predecessors with machine-tooled funk and pitch-shifted gasps, aiming to marry Justin Timberlake’s groove with Nine Inch Nails’ aggression. Whereas 2014’s Present Tense extolled the spiritual fulfillment that can come from sex and love, their sole lyrical concern here is destruction at the hands of desire. The need to keep things fresh five albums in is understandable, and Wild Beasts should be smart enough to adapt.
But Boy King is their first misfire, bringing a sledgehammer to a nut-cracking party. Their outlook is facile and incurious: Sex is always deadly transgression; men tremble before the dominant women they idolize, like the “Alpha Female” who Thorpe would not hold back, “simple as that, yeah,... ooh-ooh-ooh.” In the past they often counterbalanced sincerity by warning of the evil inside, a relatable nod to the nastier tendencies that linger within most normal people. Here, their motives are one-dimensionally “evil.” “Do I dare to disturb the universe?/Lest I crush the softest among us?” Thorpe wonders on “He the Colossus,” as he contemplates an illicit shag. Wild Beasts’ wordiness has always been part of their charm, recasting beery street scenes as Hieronymus Bosch paintings and heartache as opulent palaces, but on Boy King, the overstatement is mostly facade, stripped of the subtlety and emotion that made their absurdity so appealing.
There’s something to be said for switching sides to know your enemy—even the enemy within—but references to a “virgin killer, ”a woman fluttering her “come-to-bed eyes,” and Tom Fleming seeing “death up the skirts of the world” are weak. Wild Beasts’ records until now had followed a linear trajectory from horny youths to confident men: Limbo, Panto’s firecracker libido matured into Two Dancers’ debonair lotharios, who had their hearts broken on Smother. After the adult intimacies of Present Tense, Boy King feels like a middle-aged man buying a motorbike to prove that he’s still virile, grunting lustily and making “ooh matron” double entendres about sex and commerce. Is “Big Cat” a criticism of untouchable corrupt businessmen like Donald Trump and Philip Green, or an admission of dominant sexual tendencies? (“Won’t be your house cat, are you okay with that?”) Is “Get My Bang” about rampant Black Friday consumerism or getting your kicks at any cost? Either way, the orgiastic gasping and hammy outrage doesn’t constitute “a sense of threat,” as Thorpe has described it, but a turn-off. The gimmickery only magnifies their palpable fear of becoming repetitive or predictable.
Now and then, Wild Beasts break beyond the surface to offer a few sharper observations. “Now I’m all fucked up and I can’t stand up so I better suck it up like a tough guy would,” Thorpe oozes on “Tough Guy,” illuminating the toxic expectations of machismo: “the old path to a new hell.” That song references Steinbeck’s observation that “all of men’s vices are a shortcut to love,” a predicament that traps Fleming on “Ponytail,” where he pleads for love in a moment of lust. It’s Boy King’s best song: a pitch-shifted, barely decipherable cry of “hold me by my, hold me by my” hovers like a mosquito whine; a ringing cash register punctuates the transactional nature of the experience; Fleming’s baritone steers its soft, perilous desperation. That forlorn quality also animates “2BU,” Fleming racing an arpeggiated synth as he warns a girl, “When I come calling, let’s hope that I don’t find you first.” Even if the lyrics are underwhelming, the band and Congleton match the moods well—the restraint of “Big Cat” and “Get My Bang” reinforces the trap of desire that imprisons them, and “Tough Guy” struts convincingly—though too many of the songs pound the same phrase into oblivion and rely on suspense rather than hooky payoffs.
Boy King is by no means a disaster, but it is a disappointment. It’s hard to think of a guitar band better at singing about sex than Wild Beasts were on their first four albums—sex as caper, as competition, lust, ritual, sadness, redemption. For every extreme, a nuanced undercurrent: the sweetly silly dance moves that accompanied the sincerity of “A Simple Beautiful Truth;” the sense of being so overpowered by romance that comparing your love to Shelley and Frankenstein seems perfectly logical. Here, they’ve inhabited their concept so fully that it disappears and becomes a single dimension. Their version of oversexed, rutting sleaze is better than a lot of bands who pull that trick—and it’s refreshing to hear men singing about being wrong without resorting to Drake-ian self-effacement—but that doesn’t stop the record from sounding thin. Perhaps it works on a meta level: On Boy King, Wild Beasts’ attempt to sing about being consumed by desire consumes them in turn. | 2016-08-08T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-08-08T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Domino | August 8, 2016 | 6.8 | db9c2106-5626-4b3d-8c4c-a2b538879bc4 | Laura Snapes | https://pitchfork.com/staff/laura-snapes/ | null |
On their second major outing for a label other than their own, the eternally enigmatic producer uses frantic EBM and lurid synths to cast a shadow as dark and deep as their reputation. | On their second major outing for a label other than their own, the eternally enigmatic producer uses frantic EBM and lurid synths to cast a shadow as dark and deep as their reputation. | Pom Pom: Untitled II | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/pom-pom-untitled-ii/ | Untitled II | Before Burial stepped out of the rain-slicked darkness or Redshape donned his corny red plastic mask, Pom Pom anonymously churned out brute, functionalist techno for their eponymous label, one untitled, unmarked, all-black 12" at a time. Since 2001, long before mystery artists were a fetishized entity and favored marketing strategy in electronic music, Pom Pom have issued 50-plus releases. The facelessness of the operation—along with the outward interchangeability of the releases themselves, without cover art, titles, or even center stickers—has made Pom Pom feel like a metonym for techno itself. The onomatopoeic alias doesn’t hurt.
There was a lull in Pom Pom’s output during the middle of this decade, but things picked up again in 2017. Last year, in their first major outing on a label other than their own, Pom Pom turned up on Berlin’s A-Ton—a fitting place, given that A-Ton’s parent company, the iconic nightclub Berghain, is itself synonymous with techno. The new Untitled II, their return to A-Ton, picks up the general palette of last year’s five-track EP Untitled, in which analog drum machines and unvarnished synths swam in chilly reverb and skin-chapping distortion. Though clearly intended as a companion to the preceding EP (Untitled II’s sequentially numbered tracks begin with “Untitled 6”), these eight tracks are moodier and more diverse. Where Untitled was largely geared toward pummeling, peak-time play, Untitled II skulks around dance music’s edges.
Instead of the digital precision of much contemporary dance music, Pom Pom’s beats lumber and lurch, elephantine and unsteady, ungainly and strange. The clubbiest track here, the only one that feels like a boom-ticking DJ tool, doesn’t last three minutes. The lengthiest cut, “Untitled 10,” is also the most unfocused: seven minutes of drainpipe clank, black-metal drone, and the tentative thud of drums untethered from their timekeeping role. In between those, Pom Pom explore John Carpenter-esque synth arpeggios, electronically generated cricket buzz, and glowering ambient.
For all the wintry sonics, this isn’t a curl-up-on-the-couch listen: “Untitled 9” is a whirling barrage of double-time EBM, a real post-punk nail-biter. The major-key chords and icy melody of “Untitled 11” create a queasy sense of contrast with the somber surroundings. Despite the omnipresent gloom, Untitled II isn’t averse to allowing the occasional manic grin, so that what can look monochromatic reveals an oily iridescence.
As for Pom Pom themselves, their mystery abides. The music offers few fingerprints that might be traced back to other artists. There are scads of people out there making shadowy, post-punk techno with a similar grimness. Untitled II almost deliberately seems to eschew auteurism, though, preferring to fall back on the hallmarks of genre itself—tweaking the proportions of a carefully rounded kick drum, say, or offering teasing throwbacks to the vintage bleep techno of Warp Records’ early years. That’s ultimately the album’s chief pleasure: Like techno at its most visceral, it requires no justification and no explanation. This is dark music for dark rooms and dark moods. While its effects may not linger, when the record’s on the platter, it casts an impressively deep shadow. | 2019-01-15T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2019-01-15T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Electronic | a-ton | January 15, 2019 | 6.8 | dba31bfd-0dc2-4ecb-9297-04b68f6e4eb1 | Philip Sherburne | https://pitchfork.com/staff/philip-sherburne/ | |
There’s more than meets the eye on Richard D. James’ first new EP in five years, a slim collection of percussive bruisers with a woozy, inscrutable mood. | There’s more than meets the eye on Richard D. James’ first new EP in five years, a slim collection of percussive bruisers with a woozy, inscrutable mood. | Aphex Twin: Blackbox Life Recorder 21f / in a room7 F760 EP | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/aphex-twin-blackbox-life-recorder-21f-in-a-room7-f760-ep/ | Blackbox Life Recorder 21f / In a Room7 F760 EP | To the casual observer, Aphex Twin’s Richard D. James might appear miserly with his output. Since 2014’s Syro, which marked the veteran electronic trickster’s return after 13 years of (near) silence, he had until now put out only six official releases, all EPs, and three of them essentially marginalia: One gathered sketch-like experiments with drumming robots, while another compiled unreleased club tracks, and a third dusted off a 1995 Peel Session. Whole electronic subgenres have flourished and cratered in the five years since the latest of his post-Syro EPs, 2018’s Collapse.
But to the legions of fans who obsessively follow James’ every move, we’re in a wildly fecund era of Aphexeana. Since Syro, visitors to the Aphex shop have been treated to Drukqs outtakes, archival rarities, and even a cryptic set of ambient-adjacent etudes. Most enticingly, he’s dangled occasional tour-only drops for showgoers in Japan, Houston, London, Manchester, and Barcelona. Some of those, like the scintillating Field Day album, eventually made it to the online store; others remain vinyl- or cassette-only, and rare as hen’s teeth. Through it all, he’s kept up an irregular stream of SoundCloud releases from his bottomless vaults. Three more tracks went up just last week, right around the release of the new Blackbox Life Recorder 21f / in a room7 F760 EP. (This ridiculously meticulous chart on Reddit details James’ gray-market output since Collapse: 37 new or remastered tracks, plus anywhere between 14 and 41 live debuts. That’s pretty prolific for someone who gives the impression of lying low.)
How does James decide when a given set of tracks will receive a wide release? For his first major output in half a decade, Blackbox Life Recorder appears a little thin at just four tracks long, especially since one of those, “Blackbox Life Recorder 22 [Parallax Mix],” is an alternate take. It’s more than just a question of quantity. There was a clear sense of purpose to other recent EPs of new material: Cheetah was an egghead’s love letter to a notoriously arcane synthesizer, Collapse a tour de force of drum programming. But it’s hard to find a comparable organizing principle for this one.
In general, these tracks are big, bruising, and percussion-forward. Whatever gear he’s used this time—internet sleuths have noted that the sleeve of the new EP features graphics from the Sequentix Cirklon, a hardware sequencer that he cited in two Cheetah titles and a previous interview—the drums have unusual oomph. He leans heavily on vintage-sounding drum machines: dampened snares, scratchy hi-hats, flammy toms, a rimshot worthy of Prince. His programming is as knotty as ever, but it’s the treatment of his drums that stands out. On “zin2 test5” and “in a room7 F760,” the hits are dry and unvarnished, as though recorded in a studio lined with blankets. “Blackbox Life Recorder 21f” is more complex: Some beats are muffled, others trail off into shimmery reverb tails. One kit simultaneously seems to occupy two very different positions in space, to subtly dizzying effect.
What the tracks share, mainly, is a certain inscrutable mood. The synths are woozy and watery, soaked in rapid-fire vibrato and prodded by occasional tritones. “Blackbox Life Recorder 21f” boasts a lovely melody that wends its way through the background, a beguiling ghost in glowing robes. In “zin2 test5,” softly sighing chords temper the surly bassline and nervous drum fills. And “in a room7 F760” starts with the kind of melancholy chiming synth lead that James canonized with Selected Ambient Works 85-92, then blows everything wide open: weird stereo panning, flayed hi-hats, “I need more cowbell” levels of cowbell. No matter how hectic the going gets, he suffuses it in miasmatic synths that sound like a much sadder version of New Order’s Power, Corruption and Lies. If that weren’t affecting enough, “Blackbox Life Recorder 22 [Parallax Mix]” swaps out beefier drum sounds for hissing, rollicking cymbals in a classic “Xtal”/“Pulsewidth” vein, playing up the song’s spooky, phantasmal properties.
This being Aphex Twin circa 2023, the story doesn’t quite end there. On his web shop, the digital release of Blackbox Life Recorder contains four extra tracks. The bonus material turns out to be the same four tracks, just mastered differently by James himself “with specialist analog” hardware. (“Neither is better,” James explained, not entirely helpfully, in a comment on SoundCloud: “The louder ones are fuller, bigger but the quiet ones are way more punchy and cleaner if you turn the volume knob up high.”) Only very keen ears may be able to tell the difference, but “blackbox life recorder 20 ambient 760” is another matter entirely: That’s a mostly beatless version of the song that intrepid Redditors armed with Aphex Twin’s augmented-reality app YXBoZXh0d2lu and a facility for Python code located lurking on a Google Drive alongside a selection of promotional material. (Given that the enclosing folder is titled “WHILE STOCKS LAST,” it was presumably meant to be found.) It’s tempting to speculate that there are more versions like that out there, just waiting to be discovered. Blackbox Life Recorder, the EP, might seem relatively modest, but the black box that is Aphex Twin’s extended universe remains delightfully unfathomable. | 2023-08-01T00:02:00.000-04:00 | 2023-08-01T00:02:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Warp | August 1, 2023 | 7.4 | dba5569d-c0bc-46a4-b2a1-346cef6d70d4 | Philip Sherburne | https://pitchfork.com/staff/philip-sherburne/ | |
Gorguts' first record since 2001 features founding member Luc Lemay surrounded by members of Krallice, Dysrhythmia, and Origin. Colored Sands, an album of breathtaking detail and scope, contains some of the thorniest, most aggressive death metal ever issued under the classic Quebec band's name, as well as moments of stunning textural beauty. | Gorguts' first record since 2001 features founding member Luc Lemay surrounded by members of Krallice, Dysrhythmia, and Origin. Colored Sands, an album of breathtaking detail and scope, contains some of the thorniest, most aggressive death metal ever issued under the classic Quebec band's name, as well as moments of stunning textural beauty. | Gorguts: Colored Sands | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/18346-gorguts-colored-sands/ | Colored Sands | Like any respected underground band staging a comeback, Gorguts have a lot to live up to. In order to understand why expectations are unusually high for Colored Sands-- the first new LP since 2001 from this Quebec death-metal institution-- you have to look back to 1998's Obscura, one of the most pungently progressive albums ever made, in or out of metal. Obscura didn't just register as technical; it sounded downright excruciating, as if its shuddering blastbeats, doleful bellows, and deliriously inventive guitarwork were being torn straight from the chests of its makers.
But as brilliant as Obscura was, and as wide as its influence has spread-- it holds a hallowed place not just among discerning death-metalheads, but in open-eared jazz circles as well-- it wasn't exactly a definitive Gorguts release. The band made their name playing in a very different style. Their first two LPs, 1991's Considered Dead and 1993's The Erosion of Sanity, demonstrated impressive tightness and a flair for involved composition, but they were very much of their time-- unrelentingly intense dispatches descended from the bulging-vein aggression of 80s thrash. Conceived as early as 93, but not issued until 98, Obscura shocked longtime listeners, who couldn't believe the madness the band's lengthy gestation had birthed.
That chapter of Gorguts was short-lived, though, as guitarist/vocalist Steeve Hurdle-- a key co-architect of Obscura, who died tragically last year at age 41-- left the band in 1999. On the next Gorguts LP, 2001's sorely underrated From Wisdom to Hate, founder and sole constant member Luc Lemay streamlined Obscura's demented sprawl, yielding a less outlandish yet equally distinguished statement. This was a wise move; there would've been no way to out-weird Obscura.
Fans have known for a while that the next Gorguts record was shaping up to be another fresh start. When Lemay revived the group in 2009, after a suggestion from Hurdle that he commemorate Gorguts' 20th anniversary, he took a new approach to bandbuilding. Gorguts had always been a locally sourced project, staffed by musicians from Lemay's Quebec home base-- including Hurdle, bassist Steve Cloutier and current Voivod guitarist Daniel Mongrain-- but this time, he set about assembling a North American progressive-metal all-star team. This band, which appears on Colored Sands, includes two NYC luminaries: bassist Colin Marston, of Krallice and Behold… the Arctopus, and guitarist Kevin Hufnagel, Marston's bandmate in Dysrhythmia. The drummer is John Longstreth, best known for his work in Kansas's hypertechnical Origin. It would be reductive to peg any of these players as members of a post-Gorguts generation, but their work during the past decade embodies the same spirit that drove Obscura: a conception of metal as art music, not in the Sunn O))) sense-- where the genre commingles with drone, noise and other abstracted forms-- but in the sense of a creatively restless pursuit, a union of unfettered imagination and rigorous virtuosity. Like Luc Lemay, Marston, Hufnagel, and Longstreth have each established themselves as master players driven to expand their idiom without assailing its core tenets.
The highest compliment you could pay Colored Sands would be a simple description of what it is: a fully formed outing from an outstandingly pedigreed new incarnation of an already legendary band. Thanks to Lemay's trademark anguished roar and dark-prog riff savvy, Colored Sands feels unmistakably like a Gorguts record, but the compositions-- most by Lemay, with Marston and Hufnagel each contributing a single song-- don't mimic any particular chapter of the band's past. The record's greatest strength is its vast dynamic range. On one hand, it contains some of the thorniest, most aggressive death metal ever issued under the Gorguts name; on the other, it includes moments of stunning textural beauty. That duality is a perfect fit for the album's surprisingly specific lyrical theme: the way Tibetan culture encompasses both ancient majesty and modern despair.
It seems odd to praise a Gorguts record for its prettiness, but some of the most memorable passages on Colored Sands are also the subtlest-- transitional sections that punctuate the band's signature gritted-teeth shred. Opening track "Le Toit du Monde" orbits a hypnotic, clean-toned motif-- a waltz-time riff marked by chiming harmonics-- and Hufnagel seasons his extraordinary "Absconders" with a dreamy interlude, an oasis of eerie calm in the middle of a churning epic. Other pieces thrive on adrenaline. Marston's "Forgotten Arrows" features a thrillingly complex central theme, which seems descended both from Dysrhythmia's intricate chiaroscuro riffs and the blastbeat-driven turbo-prog of Behold… the Arctopus. On the other hand, Lemay's title track-- a doomy plod that trades math-metal daredevilry for hard-grooving 4/4-- is one of the most straightforwardly headbangable tracks in the Gorguts discography.
Diverse approaches aside, all the songs here share a rare coherence: they're as info-packed as the pieces on Obscura or From Wisdom to Hate, but their construction feels especially logical. While not the most extreme compositions Gorguts have issued, they might be the richest and most memorable; the patiently unfolding arrangements-- complemented by a spacious, full-bodied production job that contrasts sharply with the harsh, brittle sound of Obscura and From Wisdom-- give each idea room to really sink in.
There's also a strong band unity at work here, honed onstage over the past several years. No Gorguts album has grooved harder than Colored Sands, a fact that has a lot to with John Longstreth, who excels at making dauntingly proggy riffs feel sprightly and pliable. His rapid-fire snare/hi-hat stutter on the verse sections of "Ember's Voice" and the chopsy yet remarkably relaxed post-fusion fills he busts out during the "Absconders" outro exemplify how technical flourishes can enhance a song's momentum rather than hinder it. During moments when the full quartet digs into a meaty pattern-- the sci-fi thrash episode in the middle of "Forgotten Arrows," the lurching slam breakdown in "Enemies of Compassion"-- you're hearing four expert players uniting with Voltron-like purpose: not just a provisional assemblage but a real band at work.
At the same time, Colored Sands is, like each of the four Gorguts albums that precedes it, a personal statement from Luc Lemay. For those inclined to read liner notes and follow a lyric sheet, there's a hefty amount of thematic data in the margins of this record that gives it a very different feel than any of the band's prior efforts. The first two Gorguts albums dealt with standard-issue death-metal topics (disease, corruption, madness); Obscura turned inward, tackling depression and spiritual crisis; From Wisdom to Hate was a topical grab-bag, covering religious delusion, political megalomania, and the fascination of antiquity. Here, simply put, Lemay has Tibet on the brain. An admitted outsider to the culture, he nevertheless taps into some profound emotions, touching on the deep spirituality of Tibetan Buddhist tradition, as well as the region's purgatorial struggle with Chinese rule.
The idea of a death-metal vocalist howling about sand mandalas and snow lions might look iffy on paper, but the concept sticks, thanks to the dynamism of the music and the conviction Lemay brings to every line. The frontman isn't holding Tibetan culture at arm's length; his seething bellows on tracks such as "Reduced to Silence" come off as a kind of rigorous method acting, as though he were revisiting personal trauma in an effort to comprehend the Sisyphean ordeal of the culture he's depicting. It's admirable that just as Lemay has regularly renovated the Gorguts sound, moving ever further from death-metal orthodoxy, he's also worked to find fresh thematic approaches like the one that unifies Colored Sands.
Lemay also shows off his creative breadth on "The Battle of Chamdo", an instrumental piece for string ensemble. Previous Gorguts albums have featured classical-style intros and interludes, cluing fans in to Lemay's training as a violinist and composer, but "Chamdo" is the first full-length stand-alone track of this type issued under the band's name. The composition's strident, martial rhythms and mournful melodies give it a distinct soundtracky quality, as though Lemay were narrating rather than simply evoking China's 1950 invasion of Tibet. "Chamdo" appears at the album's midpoint, and while the piece isn't as arresting as the metal-oriented material that surrounds it, it serves as a smart palate cleanser.
Obscura found Gorguts reemerging in bizarrely mutated form; Colored Sands represents a subtler yet similarly striking evolution. Just as he did on Obscura and From Wisdom to Hate, Luc Lemay has chosen expert collaborators here and given them the freedom to leave their mark on the band's legacy. With Colored Sands-- an album of breathtaking detail and scope-- he, Marston, Hufnagel and Longstreth pay fitting tribute to Gorguts' remarkable history. Instead of reclaiming the past, they've pooled their resources to create a new present. | 2013-08-26T02:00:02.000-04:00 | 2013-08-26T02:00:02.000-04:00 | null | Season of Mist | August 26, 2013 | 8.2 | dbaf4994-6db9-4c55-abae-87818ce4ac5b | Hank Shteamer | https://pitchfork.com/staff/hank-shteamer/ | null |
null | The logic of this release escapes me completely. For those unfamiliar with Gang of Four's discography, let me first explain: This reissue compiles the band's second and fourth albums onto one disc, in reverse chronological order. I wish I could say its failings were predominantly linear, but the cruelty of this juxtaposition runs much, much deeper.
Gang of Four's initial artistic trajectory (pre-reunions) can best be defined as tragic. They announced themselves to the world in 1979 with *Entertainment!*, one of the best debut albums ever released, and a powerful statement, encapsulating radical politics in a supreme assembly of accessible, Spartan | Gang of Four: Hard/Solid Gold | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/3387-hardsolid-gold/ | Hard/Solid Gold | The logic of this release escapes me completely. For those unfamiliar with Gang of Four's discography, let me first explain: This reissue compiles the band's second and fourth albums onto one disc, in reverse chronological order. I wish I could say its failings were predominantly linear, but the cruelty of this juxtaposition runs much, much deeper.
Gang of Four's initial artistic trajectory (pre-reunions) can best be defined as tragic. They announced themselves to the world in 1979 with Entertainment!, one of the best debut albums ever released, and a powerful statement, encapsulating radical politics in a supreme assembly of accessible, Spartan punk-funk; it almost single-handedly gave birth to the post-punk aesthetic still widely mined today. The original lineup went on to record Solid Gold and the Another Day/Another Dollar EP, which both count as towering releases in their own right.
Unfortunately, the band's material suffered as their lineup shifted; the departure of bassist Dave Allen, who went on to form Shriekback with former XTC keyboardist Barry Andrews, fundamentally changed Gang of Four's dynamic on their third LP, Songs of the Free. That album still has some classic moments, but it's far less incisive than either of their first two albums, and the rhythmic intensity that drove the band early on was all but lost. No disrespect to ace bassist Sara Lee, but she was no replacement for Allen, whose style was far more direct. Next to go was drummer Hugo Burnham, which left only Jon King and Andy Gill to create the band's final studio album in their first wave of work, Hard, which relied heavily on drum programming.
In light of where the band started out, Hard wasn't just a letdown, it was an outright travesty. The would-be ironic title wound up a joke King and Gill played on themselves; in execution and content, the album is anything but its namesake. The female backing vocalists who open the album chanting, "Is it love?" are so overproduced, they sound practically synthesized, and the drum programming is straight-up Oingo Boingo. But the really sad thing about Hard is that it seems a blatant attempt to sell out.
Hard does offer one or two decent moments, mostly hip-swinging grooves and Gill's guitar parts; Andy Gill was such a unique guitarist to begin with, it's no surprise his contributions are still fresh, even as he backed away from the slashing, confrontational style he made his name on. King doesn't fare nearly as well: He comes off sounding utterly disinterested at almost every turn, the urgency of his old, oft-imitated declamatory style completely lost, as he allows himself to become a conventional singer.
About the only thing I can say for the folks at Wounded Bird is they at least distinctly separated the two albums, making it easy to skip straight to Solid Gold. Listening to the whole disc straight through, the transition between these records couldn't be more jarring, as the ultraslick pop of "Independence" is wiped clear aside by "Paralyzed", with its sputtering slow-motion funk and eerie spoken vocals. The intense grind of "What We All Want", the sheer propulsive force of "Outside the Trains Don't Run on Time", and the wry, anti-consumerist humor of "Cheeseburger" paint a vastly different picture of the band that went on to record Hard.
Ultimately, it's extremely difficult to recommend a disc like this, but I can't give it a full thumbs down: Solid Gold is a canonical record, and for anyone with even a passing interest in the post-punk era, it's a must-own. Unfortunately, the comprehensive Infinite Zero reissue from 1995-- which appended the classic (and concurrent) Another Day/Another Dollar EP-- is out of print and uncommon in used bins (I won't be selling my copy anytime soon). Why that disc couldn't have been reissued intact is beyond me.
Regardless, there's no real reason a disaster like Hard needs to be on the market while the band's definining moment, Entertainment!, remains out of print; presumedly, Wounded Bird couldn't afford the rights to issue that record, or chose to stretch the return on Hard by affixing it to one worth buying. It would have made more sense to pair Hard with Songs of the Free-- they're more stylistically similar, and the latter is also out of print-- but obviously that would hurt sales. If this is your only means of owning Solid Gold, you have to buy it, but exhaust other possibilities first, as Hard is nothing more than a grotesque exhibition of a once-great band on its last legs. | 2003-02-09T01:00:01.000-05:00 | 2003-02-09T01:00:01.000-05:00 | Rock | null | February 9, 2003 | 3.8 | dbb2657f-b134-4272-ac2a-da89dc018d9a | Joe Tangari | https://pitchfork.com/staff/joe-tangari/ | null |
On an alternately deliberate and exploratory new record, the guitarist and composer finds flashes of beauty at the heart of each instrumental tale. | On an alternately deliberate and exploratory new record, the guitarist and composer finds flashes of beauty at the heart of each instrumental tale. | Marisa Anderson: Still, Here | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/marisa-anderson-still-here/ | Still Here | There are, broadly speaking, two types of pieces on Still, Here, Marisa Anderson’s latest album of guitar instrumentals. One half of the album consists of traditional songs, so to speak, though they have no words. The likes of “Waking” and “The Crack Where the Light Gets In” are compact and deliberate, with clear trajectories of melody and form. Some are uplifting, others melancholy; their commonality lies not in any one emotional tenor but in the feeling of purposeful motion. The other pieces are more like exploratory missions, not motivated by the promise of a destination, but instead by the impulse to simply see and hear what’s out there. They are evocative rather than declamatory; setting scenes rather than plotting courses. Listening to “The Low Country” or “Night Air,” you get the sense of Anderson working out her ideas as she records them, trying out phrases and then refining them or putting them aside.
As on past releases, Anderson makes use of a wide array of styles, and of instruments with which to execute them: layering electric, acoustic, and pedal steel guitars; mixing steel strings and nylon; and augmenting several pieces with piano and electronic keyboards. Her fingerpicking is alternately reminiscent of Piedmont blues and Spanish flamenco. “In Dark Water,” the transfixing opener, has gradually expanding and contracting arpeggios that recall the early music of Philip Glass, and occasional interjections of rawboned slide guitar that sound more like Mississippi Fred McDowell. Though the album’s prevailing influences are from folk and classical music, “The Crack Where the Light Gets In” makes room for the sun-drenched hooks of 1960s California pop. Each track has its own sonic identity, but the album isn’t a smorgasbord, in large part due to Anderson’s distinct tone as a player, which shines through no matter the instrument or setting. She articulates each note with delicate command, knowing when to dig in and when to back off, never applying more force than she needs. Even the simplest chords, in her hands, carry a mysterious glow.
Anderson is also a gifted composer, equally adept with the thorny intricacy of “In Dark Water” and the spacious tunefulness of “The Crack Where the Light Gets In.” This makes the balance and sequencing of Still, Here’s deliberate and exploratory modes faintly puzzling. Why, after the masterfully shaped opening number, do we get three consecutive tracks that come across like solitary jam sessions? “The Fire This Time,” “The Low Country,” and “Night Air” all share the same essential arrangement conceit, with one guitar outlining two or three chords in ostinato while another couple of overdubbed instruments trade unresolved fragments of melody atop. All three pieces are somber and meditative; their open-ended approach, at its best, edges toward something ineffable, a grief too big to be named. Taking them in all at once, so near to the top of the album, can be tough going. Anderson finds flashes of beauty even when she seems to be casting about for something to say; were she a less graceful guitarist, this stretch might derail Still, Here’s momentum entirely.
The album finds its form again with the elliptical “Waking” and the exuberant “The Crack Where the Light Gets In,” which even in their titles convey the sense of emergence from a long darkness. After that warm respite, it closes with Anderson’s instrumental arrangements of “La Llorona” and “Beat the Drum Slowly,” two folk songs, one Mexican and one American, both about flawed characters who meet untimely deaths and the people who love them despite their failings. Anderson’s exquisite playing on this final pair of tunes reminds me of Ahmad Jamal’s dictum that musicians should know and feel deeply the lyrics to any ballad they’re playing, even in instrumental renditions. Her clear and straightforward lines, her warm and sympathetic tone, carry the dignity, regret, and faintly glimmering hope of redemption at the center of each tale. Without a word, she sings. | 2022-09-26T00:02:00.000-04:00 | 2022-09-26T00:02:00.000-04:00 | Folk/Country | Thrill Jockey | September 26, 2022 | 7 | dbc3560b-511c-4cd4-b142-30d09732f1f4 | Andy Cush | https://pitchfork.com/staff/andy-cush/ | |
null | The dirty little secret about Chan Marshall is that she may actually have her shit together. As a recent *Harp* magazine interview pointed out (in between Marshall's musings on interest rates, real estate, and finances), she's spent the past decade building a successful career without even employing a manager. It's a feat that few, if any, of her contemporaries have been able to pull off-- and given that, at this very moment, a significant portion of the indie music world is salivating for tomorrow's release of the seventh Cat Power record, it would seem she's pulled it off quite well.
Of | Cat Power: The Greatest | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/1346-the-greatest/ | The Greatest | The dirty little secret about Chan Marshall is that she may actually have her shit together. As a recent Harp magazine interview pointed out (in between Marshall's musings on interest rates, real estate, and finances), she's spent the past decade building a successful career without even employing a manager. It's a feat that few, if any, of her contemporaries have been able to pull off-- and given that, at this very moment, a significant portion of the indie music world is salivating for tomorrow's release of the seventh Cat Power record, it would seem she's pulled it off quite well.
Of course, the Cat Power allure has always been tied up in Marshall's notoriously seasick live performances. In 2001, the woman who jumped into the audience mid-performance and shoved me aside while tearfully fleeing the Irving Plaza stage certainly didn't seem capable of balancing a checkbook, let alone single-handedly negotiating a more generous contract with her record label (as the Harp article alleges). But then, the public-vs.-private tightrope-walk is as old as marketing itself: Johnny Cash never shot a man in Reno, either. Still, it's impossible to ignore the pull of the Beautifully Tortured stereotype, no matter what reality lies behind it. But if we didn't want Beautifully Tortured, we'd be obsessing over Norah Jones.
That brings us to The Greatest. Not to knock Norah, but she isn't tortured-- and neither is this album, which, if Nic Harcourt or VH1 get their hands on it, could be battling "Don't Know Why" for airplay supremacy on Mom's car stereo in the coming months. Like all Cat Power records, The Greatest is a mostly sad, heartbroken, hopeless, rainy-day affair; it just isn't damaged. For that reason, it's also going to gain her a lot of new fans.
The Greatest was recorded in Memphis, with several of that city's veteran studio musicians serving as her backing band, including Mabon "Teenie" Hodges on guitar, his brother Leroy "Flick" Hodges on bass, and Steve Potts on drums. These soul legends have played with Al Green, Booker T. and the MG's, Aretha Franklin, Neil Young, and more; in other words, they don't seem like the kind of dudes who'd stand much tortured diva bullshit from some no-name white girl off Matador Records. These are first-rate professionals, and their contributions-- a far cry from those of Steve Shelley and Dirty Three, or even Eddie Vedder and Dave Grohl-- add as much to the album as they detract.
The title song opens the album with the same halting, thick-fingered piano style Marshall has relied on since 2000's The Covers Record, but here it's swathed in Henry Mancini strings, teary delay effects, gently nudging drums, and Marshall's own multi-tracked voice echoing her lead vocals like Mary and Flo on the Supremes' loveliest ballads. "The Greatest", with its evocative lyrics of nostalgia and regret is, like "Colors and the Kids" and "Good Woman" before it, bleakness at its most pristine.
But Marshall doesn't wallow long, following the track with "Living Proof", Cat Power's most conventionally sexy song yet. As it swaggers on lazy horns and careening "Like a Rolling Stone" organ, you can almost picture Marshall in a pair of tight jeans, swinging her hips in front of a jukebox. "Lived in Bars" retains that Southern-fried sensuality in its back half: After beginning as a late-night smoky bar lament, the song lifts off on shoo-ba-doo harmonies and a bouncy beat; all of a sudden, it's getting hot and heavy in a pickup truck.
The marriage of Marshall's offbeat musical sensibility to her new backing band's in-the-pocket playing bears its most successful fruit on those three songs. At heart, they're smooth, accessible lite-R&B; tracks-- as close to Chan in Memphis as the album gets. Still, if that's what adult-alternative sounds like in 2006, sign me up for the AARP.
But the middle chunk of The Greatest just feels old. It's beyond "adult": These songs seem musty and outdated, like stuff my grandparents might have danced to during The War. "Could We", "Empty Shell", "Islands", and "After It All" are all finger snaps and jazz hands, Marshall twirling her umbrella in the park as Fred Astaire woos her with clicked heels and a top hat. "Thank you/ It was great/ Let's make/ Another date/ Real soon/ In the afternoon," Marshall purrs over call-and-response horns and hotel bar piano. "After It All" even features whistling and the kind of cabaret melody Nellie McKay drops into a song right before she threatens to kill you.
Worse is "Where Is My Love", the album's rock-bottom low. Marshall moans the title ad infinitum (interspersed with "bring him to me" and stuff about horses galloping and running free) in some sort of high school musical approximation of Nina Simone. She's accompanied only by Cheez Whiz piano scales and those same heart-tugging strings from "The Greatest", only this time they sound creepily manipulative, not heartbreaking or beautiful. I envision Marshall in a fluffy white gown with a plunging neckline singing this song out of a balcony window. At the end, a dove lands on her outstretched finger. This is not what I want from Cat Power. It's not what I want from anybody, not even Norah Jones.
The Greatest regains its composure as it nears the finish line, ending with a pair of songs that wouldn't have seemed out of place on any Cat Power album since What Would the Community Think. "Hate", the only track that might scare off newcomers while delighting her original fanbase, is Marshall alone with her guitar, playing stark, cutting riffs, and murmuring "I hate myself and I want to die." "Love and Communication" is the album's first three tracks as viewed through a fun-house mirror: Instead of the Memphis crew welcoming Marshall into their world, the closing track sees Marshall luring the studio vets down her dark, claustrophobic alley. The strings, horns, and organs press forward in deliberate staccato stabs, advancing on the ear as if programmed by Dr. Dre.
The biggest challenge of this album isn't going to be commercial success; just stick "Could We" on the soundtrack to a hip romantic comedy, and it'll take off on its own. The difficult part will be proving to longtime fans that Chan Marshall is the one in control here. She's made an album that, for the most part, is polished and accessible. For better or worse, she's stretched her musical horizons far beyond the close-knit indie rock world-- a world that likely doesn't want her to change. | 2006-01-22T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2006-01-22T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Matador | January 22, 2006 | 7.9 | dbcfa4e4-36fc-4b84-b60c-ca9298f4c921 | Amy Phillips | https://pitchfork.com/staff/amy-phillips/ | null |
Assembled in a year-long process of file-swapping between Berlin and L.A., this hazy, collage-like album takes the form of a wordless conversation. It’s uncanny, familiar, and warmly evocative. | Assembled in a year-long process of file-swapping between Berlin and L.A., this hazy, collage-like album takes the form of a wordless conversation. It’s uncanny, familiar, and warmly evocative. | Tim Koh / Sun An: Salt and Sugar Look the Same | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/tim-koh-sun-an-salt-and-sugar-look-the-same/ | Salt and Sugar Look the Same | When the multi-instrumentalist and visual artist Tim Koh was three or four years old, Elvis Presley’s 1973 concert from Hawaii played regularly on the family’s newly acquired color television. “I had a fuzzy, round pillow that I’d stand on as a stage and pretend to perform [on],” he told the Talkhouse. Eventually, he found actual stages to play on and spent some two decades working with fellow travelers including Animal Collective, Hieroglyphic Being, DJ Harvey, and No Age. Now based in Berlin, Koh recently began a kind of email-based game of exquisite corpse with L.A.-based graphic and sound designer Sun An, who’d been releasing his own music for over a decade.
Salt and Sugar Look the Same unfolds the results of their back-and-forth across some 18 miniatures that sound like half-overheard conversations only half-remembered. Sine waves ripple and snap; warm whooshes of melody float tropically in the mist; voices sing at uncanny speeds. All this is nothing exactly new—deja vu put to disc has a legacy going back at least to Erik Satie, passing through the eternal Éliane Radigue hum and still unparalleled otherworldliness of early Boards of Canada records. But part of the point of this kind of communication is the generous recognition of the familiar. Friendship sprouts from common ground.
Opener “Bye Bye Betty” sends a voice message, made mechanically variable in pitch and speed, over wires of acoustic guitars; by “Besafe Airtel,” the wires tangle into brambles. Tracks like “Old Plates and Desirable Traits” and “Drawing to Relax and Pass the Time” build little worlds of acoustic and electric sources, the former with a bit of new-wave froideur and the latter so warm and wet you could get bitten by all the little buzzing things flying around. It’s a rare bit of muchness on an otherwise restrained record: “The Maybes Are Endless” distills everything to two chords strummed on an electric guitar, a rocking chair blues.
There are also synesthetic aims. “Yume-No-Yume” curls in the air like its namesake incense, often a combination of plum and cherry blossoms and lavender designed to help the sniffer remember dreams. “Incense Holder,” with its glinting glitches, also plays as it’s named, a faceted structure to hold ineffable sound. And the golden plumes of “Lemongrass Citronella” are powerful enough to keep those biters at bay.
It’s not all bliss, though. “Today Only Happens Once” approaches a kind of industrial unease that seems equally nostalgic for Throbbing Gristle and the occult grooviness of Scooby Doo soundtracks. Some tracks plank—the drone of “Somewhere in Time,” for example, suspends itself with rickety strength and the echo of sweat—and others, like “Twice” ache like the memory of exertion. A high-pitched whistle cuts through foggy closer “Expected to Fade” like a tea kettle—time to wake up—before a thick blanket of hiss drags you under. This is music more for giving in than letting go.
Across these 38 minutes, Koh and An are talking to each other, talking to themselves, and listening in. I heard ghosts from my own past and saw projections of what I imagine their lives might be, to the point where I felt like I could draw my own notes into the folds. Contained within are noises of pleasure and of pain; of wrapping an arm around the warm shoulder of a lover and letting go of a friend hypnotized by their rage; of stoned teenage pals and hallucinating adult companions and the comedown of middle age; and, above all, the curious grief of childhood, when being a kid seems to only mean finding out how big the world is and how little say you have in it. For me, it’s all in “Can’t Stand in the Past,” which shifts unsteadily on drums so epically slowed that their skins become fuzzy, round pillows, little islands, miniature ersatz stages for us to perform our own remembering and becoming. | 2024-06-24T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2024-06-24T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Music From Memory | June 24, 2024 | 7.4 | dbe8693d-b992-4384-927b-c8298a7dfe1e | Jesse Dorris | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jesse-dorris/ | |
This overdue anthology of Seger’s earliest recordings preserves a handful of singles by a young Detroit garage-rock band that blended rock’n’roll and R&B, party music and passion. | This overdue anthology of Seger’s earliest recordings preserves a handful of singles by a young Detroit garage-rock band that blended rock’n’roll and R&B, party music and passion. | Bob Seger & The Last Heard: Heavy Music: The Complete Cameo Recordings 1966-1967 | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/bob-seger-and-the-last-heard-heavy-music-the-complete-cameo-recordings-1966-1967/ | Heavy Music: The Complete Cameo Recordings 1966-1967 | In the 1960s, the land was littered with bands like Detroit’s Bob Seger & the Last Heard: industrious combos that worked their local circuit with dreams of making it as big as the Beatles, or at least the Beau Brummels. History has tagged these groups “garage rock,” a label embraced by keepers of the flame like Little Steven Van Zandt, who has an entire SiriusXM station devoted to the stuff. But garage connotes the primitive, pounding, aggressive strain of rock’n’roll made by somebody who just picked up a guitar and still isn't sure how to fret a third chord.
Bob Seger & the Last Heard could hit hard, but they grew up in the shadow of Motown, so they could also swing—a rarity among garage rockers on the whole, but not those from Southeastern Michigan. Working in the same scene as MC5 and ? & the Mysterians, the Last Heard needed to play R&B as if it were rock’n’roll (or perhaps vice versa) because they needed to get the teens on their feet. Bands were expected to make the audience dance, especially at the Hideout, a series of clubs scattered throughout the metro Detroit area that garage rockers called home. The Hideout was Seger’s stomping ground long before the Last Heard, back when he was playing in Doug Brown & the Omens, one of the better groups on the Ann Arbor and Detroit circuit in the mid-’60s.
Almost nobody outside of Michigan knows much about Doug Brown & the Omens, but they’re central to Bob Seger's rise, providing him with his first released record and catalyzing his first meeting with Punch Andrews, the Hideout impresario who would become the singer’s manager. In addition to running the club with partner Dave Leone, Andrews was behind Hideout Records. He set up the winking subsidiary Are You Kidding Me? Records in 1966 to release “Ballad of the Yellow Beret,” a send-up of Staff Sgt. Barry Sadler’s “Ballad of the Green Berets” written by one “D. Dodger” and performed by the Omens under the pseudonym the Beach Bums, with Seger on lead vocals.
“Yellow Beret” didn’t make it onto Heavy Music: The Complete Cameo Recordings 1966-1967, an overdue anthology of Seger’s earliest recordings (though it can be found on the massive set ...Next Stop Is Vietnam: The War on Record 1961-2008, not to mention YouTube. Its absence is due to a technicality—it never appeared on a Cameo 45—but it seems safe to assume no one was too broken up about omitting this mildly embarrassing novelty with questionable politics. The song’s silliness and snide attitude toward hippies were not out of character for the Last Heard. “Persecution Smith,” a raving rip of Bob Dylan’s thin, wild mercury sound, sneers at a Vietnam protester. This wasn’t standard for rockers in 1967, but the politics don’t feel considered as much as reactive, even mocking: They come from the same instincts that made the Last Heard spoof the Beach Boys with jokey spring-break anthem “Florida Time” and parody James Brown on the giddy holiday single “Sock It to Me Santa.”
Such irreverence, which also surfaces on the grooving “Chain Smokin’,” underscores why the Last Heard trafficked in singles, not LPs. They were a hard-working band that remained firmly planted within their own backyard, where the 45 was their best route to regional radio and larger clubs. It was music for a moment, but Seger also showed flashes of the insight and songwriting talent that would propel him to stardom in the late ’70s: He wrote “East Side Story,” the 1966 song that moved him from songwriter to performer, for the Underdogs, another act on Hideout, but the label thought he’d do a better version. While Underdogs’ recording has since been lost, Seger’s rendition is a wonder, a mini-melodrama of inner-city troubles set to a wailing organ.
The rare garage single that sounds multidimensional, “East Side Story” nearly finds an equal in “Vagrant Winter,” a ferocious, coiled two minutes of bargain-basement psychedelia. But Seger and his band weren’t interested in expanding the mind; they were aiming for the gut, which is precisely where “Heavy Music” lands. A high-octane R&B number that blends a Motown beat with a proto-punk attack as vicious as early MC5, it was the pivotal early Seger, the place where he blended passion with party music.
Primed to be a career-making single, “Heavy Music” rocketed to the top of the Detroit charts and was poised to enter the Billboard Top 100 when Cameo/Parkway went under. Seger would soon sign to Capitol Records, where he recorded Ramblin’ Gamblin’ Man with his new outfit the Bob Seger System, then toiled away for seven years before finally breaking into the mainstream with the double-live album “Live” Bullet in 1976. Recorded at Detroit’s Cobo Hall, it found him playing “Heavy Music” to an appreciative hometown crowd. The song may have survived that long, but Seger never again looked back to the singles he made with the Last Heard. (He also consigned his first seven albums to the dustheap of history, leaving many terrific records out of print.)
He had no say in the release of Heavy Music, but this isn’t juvenilia that tarnishes his reputation. The Last Heard were a vibrant, funny, invigorating rock’n’roll band, and their ephemeral nature is key to their appeal. They weren’t playing with posterity in mind; they just knocked out single after single, riding and bucking trends in equal measure, all with the hope of winning just a few more fans.
This mentality means that Heavy Music doesn’t quite play as an album, even by the loose standards of compilations: The B-sides for “Heavy Music” and “East Side Story” were both extensions of their respective flips (the former reiterates its A side, adding some vocals, while the latter is a straight instrumental), and if you skip them, the total runtime is only about 20 minutes. That may not be a lot of music in terms of time, but in terms of impact, these tracks still pack a wallop, delivering more thrills than many ’60s LPs that were twice as long. | 2018-09-14T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-09-14T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | ABKCO | September 14, 2018 | 8.2 | dbe872de-badb-4672-8a1e-394f41da2aa8 | Stephen Thomas Erlewine | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stephen-thomas erlewine/ | |
Building on the legacy of ’90s riot grrrl and queercore, the Massachusetts punks’ debut album is a galvanizing thrill that insists on naming what some would ignore. | Building on the legacy of ’90s riot grrrl and queercore, the Massachusetts punks’ debut album is a galvanizing thrill that insists on naming what some would ignore. | DUMP HIM: Dykes to Watch Out For | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/dump-him-dykes-to-watch-out-for/ | Dykes to Watch Out For | The easiest analog to DUMP HIM’s debut LP, Dykes to Watch Out For, is ’90s riot grrrl and queercore—the Massachusetts punk quartet named their label after a Team Dresch song. But easiest doesn’t mean exact, and while DUMP HIM borrow from and build on a legacy, DTWOF traffics in internet-age subjects: climate anxiety, Alison Bechdel (the album shares its title with her long-running comic strip), and self-preservation in the face of disenfranchisement. Earnest and referential, it’s a 23-minute elegy for past selves, a fuzzy, distorted paean to loss and regeneration.
DTWOF is built on the same four(ish) chord progressions that have powered many a power-pop anthem, but the lyrics are as sharp as touching a bruise. These are songs to scream with, and their elegant expressions of rage sound like arguments rehearsed for weeks in the shower. “Vilify, refuse to contemplate possible mistakes,” Jac Walsh sings coolly on “Ache,” “but keep making your own, it’s okay.” Terms like trauma, detachment, and embodiment might sound like pop-psych jargon in less capable hands, but the band weaves them seamlessly into depictions of angst and pain. This is heavier than pedestrian heartbreak.
Like Gauche, another queer outfit addressing the junctures of the personal and political, DUMP HIM blend contemporary omens with private dramas. “Panic over now-pointless archives/The fragility of our ability to thrive/Doomsday prepping in my bedroom/Breaking down over what we can’t do,” Walsh sings on “Judi Bari Almost Died for Our Sins,” an homage to the Earth First! activist who narrowly survived a 1990 car bombing that was never solved. It’s easy to lose these lyrical pearls in the musical fury, but all the more rewarding to excavate them over multiple listens. Matched with the songs’ furious pace, the references urge a confrontation with history: Who do you remember? Who forms your canon?
Though the majority of tracks burst with a similar fervor, closer “Don’t Kiss Me, I’m in Training” is a sweet, refreshing exception. Backed by harmonist Briar Lake, Walsh and Mattie Hamer’s duet sounds like a ’50s ballad at a radical prom. “It isn’t easy to be around people/When people have caused all the hell that you’ve been through,” Hamer sings. The tempo picks up as Walsh and Hamer consider the ways trauma—yes, that word—warps our ability to love the people trying their best to love us back.
The individual songs on DTWOF might not sear quite as hot as they do together. But each is a galvanizing thrill, insisting on naming what some would ignore. DUMP HIM offer recognition, a sound and voice for the ways the world shapes and silences those of us on the margins. | 2019-09-04T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-09-04T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | Get Better / Musical Fanzine | September 4, 2019 | 7.6 | dbf20ba2-54e0-4837-8b69-a95bd9616e7f | Linnie Greene | https://pitchfork.com/staff/linnie-greene/ | |
The sequel to the Memphis rapper’s 2020 tape embodies the spirit of Southern rap without trading in nostalgic aesthetics or noticeable samples. | The sequel to the Memphis rapper’s 2020 tape embodies the spirit of Southern rap without trading in nostalgic aesthetics or noticeable samples. | Key Glock: Yellow Tape 2 | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/key-glock-yellow-tape-2/ | Yellow Tape 2 | Key Glock’s Yellow Tape 2 doesn’t have a single feature. In fact, featurelessness has become a defining trait of the 24-year-old South Memphis rapper’s work; aside from a supporting turn by fellow Paper Route Empire upstart Jay Fizzle on 2017’s Glock Season, none of Glock’s solo releases for the independent label owned by Young Dolph have included other voices—just the effortlessly confident Glizock all by his lonesome. He’s hesitant to offer his own services to other artists too, occasionally showing up on releases from Gucci Mane’s New 1017 but otherwise keeping his circle tight. As he explains on this album’s “Eve,” “They like, “Why you don’t do features?” ’Cause I don’t like meetin’ new n****s.”
Glock seems almost uniquely disinterested in playing games, kissing rings, or otherwise seeking approval, and defines himself as “in the streets, not industry.” Songs like “Ambition for Cash” lyrically reflect that emphasis on self-reliance and standing on one’s own. That’s not to say he’s allergic to collaboration: He’s proven his mettle as a tag-team specialist alongside his mentor, Dolph. The pair are more equal partners than teacher and student, their smooth flows interweaving with ease. If Dolph is the self-proclaimed King of Memphis, then Key Glock is somewhere between Merlin and Rasputin, a mysterious man of influence who keeps a low profile but pulls more strings than you’d think.
Without trading in nostalgic aesthetics or noticeable samples, Key Glock embodies the spirit of Southern rap more easily than any of the countless contemporary rappers who cite Three 6 Mafia as a formative influence. With a tiptoeing piano line and a little soul sample in the mix, the Juicy J-produced “Gangsta” is right out of the classic Hypnotize Minds songbook; it sounds like it could have been an unused beat from Project Pat’s Mista Don’t Play. Bandplay comes through with church organ swells on “Juicemane” that, befitting the title, sound straight out of a late-2000s OJ da Juiceman mixtape.
The drum patterns frequently follow a standard Memphis formula—a series of clean and sturdy kicks and claps, with a dash of trap hi-hat—but Glock’s beats are deceptively complicated, almost baroque, as liable to feature a harp or flute as an 808 cowbell or lighter click. There’s a sense of unease to the piano line 808 Mafia affiliate Pyrex builds “Da Truth” around, a scattered rhythm with sudden pitch shifts. “Can’t Switch” adds dubby drums and a little bit of reggae echo on the keys, not entirely switching up the genre but experimenting with the flavor. When guitars infrequently show up, like on “Luv a Thug” or “Quarterback,” they add a sultry, sensual flavor—a much-needed reminder that the history of Memphis rap is just as much soul music as it is horrorcore. It’s on a song like “Quarterback” where Key Glock demonstrates his greatest strength, not as a pure MC or lyricist but something close to a bandleader, slickly flowing over a clean bass guitar and traces of flute. The Dun Deal-led instrumental feels more like a studio session than a Logic project file.
Where another rapper might use a guest feature to effect a vibe change—an R&B singer on the hook of a slow jam, or an out-of-state MC to switch up the flow—Key Glock can encompass multiple moods with his voice alone. In some moments he’s overflowing with sensuality, while his flow on “Bill Gates” is slower and blunted, almost vocal fried. On more menacing numbers like “Ya Feel Me” he draws you in closer with a 21 Savage-esque croon, hardly speaking above a whisper, quietly walking us through the weights on his back and the voices in his head. Glock’s bars are seamless and looping in a way that is literally repetitive but doesn’t sound like it; they’re intricate without being dense, complex without drawing attention to themselves. If the metaphors and lyrical imagery aren’t always the most imaginative, Glock overcomes them with the kind of gritty aura that can only be earned through experience.
More than sound or delivery alone, it’s Key Glock’s palpable confidence that distinguishes him. But look closely and you’ll see faint cracks in the stone-faced persona, where brief but frank bars about family trauma and codeine dependency slip between the boasts and bold determination: “All these dead presidents, I hope that shit don’t haunt me.” There’s enough confessional honesty to make the music feel real, but Glock still keeps his guard up, simultaneously enigmatic and unabashed.
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-11-12T00:00:00.000-05:00 | 2021-11-12T00:00:00.000-05:00 | Rap | Paper Route Empire | November 12, 2021 | 7.4 | dbf24c04-8c44-4887-9a03-97a2b3a692c7 | Nadine Smith | https://pitchfork.com/staff/nadine-smith/ | |
Singer-songwriter Paco Cathcart taps into mysticism on his newest release as the Cradle, something fantastical, folky, and intensely imaginative. | Singer-songwriter Paco Cathcart taps into mysticism on his newest release as the Cradle, something fantastical, folky, and intensely imaginative. | The Cradle: Bag of Holding | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/the-cradle-bag-of-holding/ | Bag of Holding | Bag of Holding tells a hundred stories, like the loving little scraps that make up the whole of a quilt. It feels, by design, both small and large, crafted by the intensely imaginative Brooklyn native Paco Cathcart who works under the name the Cradle. Across 30 Bandcamp releases (some of which are incognito poetry collections), the Cradle has shapeshifted many times—from scuzzy tape disturbances to serene, skeletal folk songs, each often grounded by a guitar—resulting in a vast and disparate self-recorded collection. If diving into such an output seems too daunting, have no fear: Bag of Holding, is his most ambitious, accessible, and accomplished songwriting yet. It is not a patchwork in the sense that sounds or styles are fused together but in that it weaves together many lives and observations into one cohesive whole.
Cathcart’s poetic ruminations do not adhere to traditional song structures and there’s nary a proper chorus here. His songs are tugged along by a faithful acoustic guitar undercurrent and a voice that offers the gentle security of a weighted blanket. Cathcart spins sprawling, meticulous stories with recurring motifs (uncertain futures, miscommunication, our increasingly unrecognizable world) while inspecting small, everyday details. It’s an approach that neatly coheres to the record’s title, which is a reference to a Dungeons & Dragons accessory that magically expands to hold items larger than itself; the grand and the miniature can take up the same space and be appreciated equally. It’s not as if Cathcart is a nitty-gritty obsessive like Balzac, but when he picks apart, say, a seemingly mundane encounter at the 7-Eleven as he does on “A Thought That Deletes,” he allows the potential for transcendence. Rather than brushing off a “case of mistaken identity,” the clerk is truly distressed by the encounter. Though Cathcart delivers the saga in the same steady tone as usual, the orchestration turns just slightly darker, and occurrence is transformed into a situation that will keep you up at night.
Bag of Holding’s greatest shift from earlier Cradle releases is its focus on guest contributions. Here, string and woodwind arrangements composed by longtime Cradle collaborator Sammy Weissberg compliment Cathcart’s intricate fingerpicking, and the three members of experimental punk band Palberta (whose records he has engineered) provide delicate backing vocals. Like Phil Elverum as the Microphones, pairing lush instrumentation with the humble imperfections of an analog recorder can give even the most humdrum of happenings cosmic degrees of emotional significance. On the glorious “Cell Games and Beyond,” Cathcart’s romantic anxieties are punctuated by sudden surges of clarinet and swooning harmonies. As a minor D&D infraction spirals into the decision to join a priesthood in Peru on the title track, a cello and violin saw away in the background creating a well-intentioned but ominous scene. On as Cathcart sings about losing control of his mind and body on “Rememerer’s Heaven” as bulbous strings rudely interrupting his idyllic guitar.
The tendency to attribute power to fate floats through the Cradle’s work, most notably in a series called “The Opposite Way,” which began on 2017’s Little Missionaries. On “The Opposite Way Pt. 3,” the protagonist traverses classic American landscapes dotted with rundown silos and gas station signs. It’s the type of image typical of folk music, but the saga sounds rich with the addition of violins. Closing track “St. Pete Station” contains the hallucinatory drama typical of a Safdie brothers film: a chance meeting with a stranger turns into a story of synthetic drugs, incarceration, and ends with an odd proverb: “What can’t you buy a kid online? Her first fish.” Such is the mysticism of the Cradle: folksy, vaguely fantastical, and so dedicated to the hidden potential of the ordinary that at times it feels surreal. | 2018-07-30T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-07-30T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Experimental | NNA Tapes | July 30, 2018 | 8 | dbf43d0e-2677-4008-8273-6746a5561e18 | Quinn Moreland | https://pitchfork.com/staff/quinn-moreland/ | |
Electronic beats and dub effects put a heady, psychedelic spin on traditional Ugandan Royal Court music. | Electronic beats and dub effects put a heady, psychedelic spin on traditional Ugandan Royal Court music. | Ennanga Vision: Ennanga Vision | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/ennanga-vision-ennanga-vision/ | Ennanga Vision | In the early 1980s, the meeting of African music with electronics often made for thrilling hybrids, like Cameroonian singer Francis Bebey’s New Track and Zazou/Bikaye/Cy 1’s visionary Congolese-Belgian masterpiece Noir Et Blanc. Today, there’s no shortage of such exchanges. In the past year alone, a number of heady synergetic blends have cropped up across the African diaspora: Mikael Seifu and the 1432 R label’s Ethiopian-laced dance music; the LA musician Sudan Archives' digitally enhanced fiddle; Malian singer Oumou Sangaré's merger of ngoni with synth-pop; Luka Productions' West African-inflected New Age; and various recordings on Uganda's Nyege Nyege Tapes label.
One of that label’s most electrifying releases comes from that country’s legendary electro acholi singer Otim Alpha, and he is also part of the group Ennanga Vision, alongside former Ugandan royal musician and multi-instrumentalist Albert Ssempeke and London producer Jesse Hackett. Hackett is no stranger to border-crossing ensembles, having brought together Kenyan players and British beats as a member of the Owiny Sigoma Band. This album posits the project as “deconstructed Royal Court music from the forgotten kingdoms of Buganda,” though it takes a while for the participants to settle on an identity and get to the music’s most fruitful moments.
Ssempeke’s talents on a wide array of traditional instrumentation stand out across turns on the ngindidi (fiddle), amadinada (xylophone), kiganda harp, and endere flute. He brings bounce and nimble melodic turns to the electro blips of “Otim’s War” and elegance to “Abbanna Kange (Children of My Father).” The album’s trickiest beat comes on “Kampala Auto Chase,” in which Alpha’s voice is slurred and stretched out as Ssempeke’s instrumentation weaves in and out of the programmed drums; “New Sunshine” pairs an agitated bowed ngindidi with slow, bucolic electronic organ chords, pulling in two directions at once.
The album’s most overtly pop moments also wind up sounding like the chintziest. The hyperactive arpeggios and claps that power “Like a Football” resemble Nozinja’s dizzying Shangaan electro productions, but the sticky-sweet synth sounds lack the South African artist's force. When Ennanga Vision drifts towards the slower, stranger end of the sound spectrum, the results drastically improve. Alpha’s growls are digitally garbled and set against arcade bleeps on “Amadinda Eyeball,” while Ssempeke adds a graceful counterpoint to Hackett’s electronic noises with garlands of xylophone and harp. “Killing Ghosts” again draws on the sound of the ngindidi, though Hackett now slathers on spacious dub effects as it bounces around a gurgling hand drum pattern, and the dubby, distorted processing of the voices makes for a satisfying, gooey sound. While “All This Blue” has a similar timbral palette, the overall effect feels decidedly more ethereal even if it’s more uptempo.
Most beguiling of all is the album’s closer, “Jaja (Grandmother).” While some of the album’s other lyrical moments fall flat, there’s a sense of restraint here on this beatless track, the vocals cloaked in echo. It’s suggestive of a sublime space that pays tribute both to our elders and—thanks to an effective use of children’s laughter—also anticipates the future. | 2017-06-30T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-06-30T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Soundway | June 30, 2017 | 7.2 | dbfb43ac-96d1-4b72-b983-855be6ba7292 | Andy Beta | https://pitchfork.com/staff/andy-beta/ | null |
Bounce queen Big Freedia is teetering on the brink of reaching a mainstream audience, and Just Be Free is her attempt to bring her music to that level. With help from producer Thomas McElroy (Madonna, En Vogue), Freedia and longtime producer BlaqNMilD reworked her trademark sound to make it cleaner, fuller, more nuanced, and more befitting a pop diva. | Bounce queen Big Freedia is teetering on the brink of reaching a mainstream audience, and Just Be Free is her attempt to bring her music to that level. With help from producer Thomas McElroy (Madonna, En Vogue), Freedia and longtime producer BlaqNMilD reworked her trademark sound to make it cleaner, fuller, more nuanced, and more befitting a pop diva. | Big Freedia: Just Be Free | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/19461-big-freedia-just-be-free/ | Just Be Free | When Big Freedia began getting booked on the rock club circuit outside of New Orleans a few years ago, her then largely white, hip-focused audience lacked a specific context for the aggressively glitchy lo-fi electronic music she rapped over—never mind the fact that it was a six-foot-tall, regally poised black person of indeterminate gender who was doing the rapping. To those in the know, there was legitimate concern that her new fan base might have been motivated by the novelty of the latter aspects, but Freedia's powerful, indelible charisma nonetheless transformed rooms full of normally staid indie rockers into a mob of sweaty, ass-shaking maniacs. With a seemingly never-ending series of tour dates and a reality show now entering its second season, it’s clear that Freedia's natural star power, rather than any identity-based quirks, drive her popularity. She’s teetering on the brink of reaching a mainstream audience, and Just Be Free is her attempt to bring her music to that level.
Freedia’s earlier material possessed a redlined sonic aesthetic that matched its manic energy, resembling a drum machine on the verge of a speed-driven breakdown through a maxed-out PA. Its raw, frenetic charge was a good match for her outsider status, but as they’ve charted a course for crossover success, she and longtime producer BlaqNmilD have changed their approach appropriately. With help from producer Thomas McElroy (Madonna, En Vogue), they’ve reworked Freedia’s trademark sound to make it cleaner, fuller, more nuanced, and more befitting a pop diva.
Much of Just Be Free is aimed squarely at an EDM audience that so far has somehow eluded Freedia, despite the fact that bounce has steadily grown in that world's presence—largely thanks to Diplo and Nicky Da B's “Express Yourself”. “Turn Da Beat Up” expands Freedia’s sonic vocabulary to include Prodigy-style breakbeats, precipitous bass drops, blatting low brass, and a four-on-the-floor breakdown that invokes both house music and arena-rock. “Dangerous” is festooned with filter sweeps, dubsteppy synth bubbles, and sub bass tuned for a large-scale sound systems. “Lift Dat Leg Up” has the epically scaled melody suited for the apex of a big-room DJ set. Most notably, the album’s lead single “Explode” is a riot of overclocked drum machines and Freedia’s joyously hollered commands to lose yourself in her music. Just the idea of hearing it in a DJ set is enough to make you sweat.
As much as Just Be Free is intended to facilitate Freedia’s big break, it doesn’t neglect the fans who’ve followed her up to this point. While she makes some big strides here as an artist, she’s also made sure to keep one foot planted firmly in the style that some of us consider nearly perfect. | 2014-06-18T02:00:03.000-04:00 | 2014-06-18T02:00:03.000-04:00 | Rap | Queen Diva Music | June 18, 2014 | 7.8 | dbfd4310-f70b-4005-b22f-3d576cd2a43c | Miles Raymer | https://pitchfork.com/staff/miles-raymer/ | null |
This L.A. collective boasting 20 notable Latin-folk and Afro-groove musicians and vocalists constructs a monster antiwar opus. | This L.A. collective boasting 20 notable Latin-folk and Afro-groove musicians and vocalists constructs a monster antiwar opus. | Build an Ark: Peace With Every Step | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/1148-peace-with-every-step/ | Peace With Every Step | This is a record best played in near-fatal situations. New Year's Eve 2004: I skittered down to Elk Grove, Calif., on Highway 99 with rain boiling my windshield; obscuring my view save for suburban neons, crimson taillights, and scant highlights of freeway signs only legible from 10 feet away. I was concentrating not on the road but on an office door that I forgot to lock before I left for the weekend; my mind was so focused that I felt I was standing by that door waiting for myself to show up.
During that drive, Build an Ark's mantra of "You gotta have peace and love" seemed poetic and meaningful-- not that it was ever shallow before.
The Ark recorded their antiwar opus, Peace with Every Step, during Operation Iraqi Freedom. The L.A. collective boasts 20 Latin-folk and Afro-groove musicians and singers, all rotating duties on songs that range from duets to drum-circles to all-hands-on-deck jams. Among the ranks are 1970s Black Liberation-jazz vets like percussionist Derf Reklaw (the Pharaohs), ex-Motown trombonist Phil Ranelin (Tribe), and vocalist Dwight Trible (Pan Afrikan Peoples Arkestra). Together, Build an Ark emulate the pantheistic awe of Sun Ra and John Coltrane. Leftfield hip-hop producer Carlos Nino (Ammoncontact) helms the street fair that only ends when the National Guardsman come.
The music mainly dwells on the psych-groove tip: Rhodes chords bathe the skies in indigos and golds, brass sections introduce the gospel in veteran's hospitals, and congas and trapkits keep the dance-circle going through dawn and dusk. Hell, they made my New Year's predicament of facing certain death seem like a swinging time.
Opener "You've Gotta Have Freedom" would make any agrophobe shake hands with everyone who enters a subway station. The tune grooves in a steady bebop cadence with Nate Morgan's Rhodes telling everyone that better days are ahead, ecstatic chants of "You gotta have peace and love," and Joshua Spiegelman's bass clarinet stands in a corner, sees the Light, and then speaks in tongues. "Vibes From the Tribe" paints a Latin-groove in pure Technicolor with Ranelin and Spiegelman quipping "you outta know something" phrases on trombone and flute. "Conversations" and "Precious, Priceless" perform a fine, wartime blues as Morgan shimmers his Rhodes like two-second news-clips of butcher's bills in Iraq. "Don't you feel our wailing?/ Can't you see our cries?/ Our glass is empty/ Oh, please be wise," Trible croons to the self-proclaimed guardians of the Free World.
"Love Is Our Nationality" could be the Ark's most polarizing trac: Peter Harris delivers a pacifist proclamation, ordering soldiers to "strip off your uniform/ Salute your equal...put down your gun and pick up your baby." He then declares, "We are sweet-talking freedom fighters/ We are literary to curious children." Many people could dismiss Harris and the rest of the Ark as hippies who'd answer an enemy attack by blowing bubbles at them. But there is strength in his voice that cannot be denied-- it's a conviction that can cause warrior societies to fear for their children as their parents view peacetime as dead-time. Baba Alade then picks up a guitar to give a soulful rendition of Willy Wonka's "Pure Imagination"-- where utopia now goes beyond all edible materialism. It's a great power. | 2005-01-16T01:00:02.000-05:00 | 2005-01-16T01:00:02.000-05:00 | Electronic / Jazz | Plug Research | January 16, 2005 | 8.7 | dc11b1f2-3224-4539-89a1-1bef4690923c | Cameron Macdonald | https://pitchfork.com/staff/cameron-macdonald/ | null |
On Building A Beginning, Jamie Lidell unplugs his laptop for the most conventional R&B album of his career. | On Building A Beginning, Jamie Lidell unplugs his laptop for the most conventional R&B album of his career. | Jamie Lidell: Building a Beginning | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22494-building-a-beginning/ | Building a Beginning | Even as he came into his own as a soul singer, Jamie Lidell never seemed ready to completely let go of his identity as a laptop experimentalist. At times over the last decade Lidell has seemed torn over the kind of artist he’s wanted to be, a prestige IDM producer or a mass-appeal blue-eyed soul act, and on recent albums those two visions have seemed increasingly irreconcilable. Rather than building a reputation as a shapeshifter in the vein of his sometime-collaborator Beck, he began to come across as just kind of erratic—especially on the misguided, Morris Day-by-way-of-Squarepusher fusion of his 2013 self-titled effort, a peanut butter-and-olive-sandwich of a record that tried to play to both of his skillsets but flattered neither. On Building A Beginning, though, Lidell stops trying to have it both ways, unplugging his laptop for the most conventional R&B album of his career.
The album’s title could refer to a number of fresh starts. It’s Lidell’s first since splitting from Warp Records, the label he’s called home since his solo debut and whose cache gave him cover to crossover without alienating his old electronic audience, and it’s filled with ruminations on his rekindled romance with his wife (who co-wrote the album’s lyrics) and, even more significantly, the birth of his first son. The album’s most direct tribute to his newborn, “Julian” is one of the most unabashedly jubilant songs he’s ever written, equal parts Jackson 5 and Maroon 5. “There’s no way to un-see the harshest things I’ve ever seen, but now you’re here and life’s a dream,” Lidell sings like a man born again. “Now my life’s worth living.”
So Lidell’s in a good place these days, and he spends the album in awe of his good fortune, high off of familial bliss. Never shy about borrowing from Stevie Wonder, he pens his own “I Was Made to Love Her” for his son with “I Live to Make You Smile.” Elsewhere he looks to other soul greats. The title track swoons with the weightless grace of Al Green’s heyday records, introducing the distinctly Hi Records-esque backup singers who support him throughout the record, while “Find It Hard to Say” looks to the afterhours quiet storm of Smokey Robinson. There are flashes of more modern R&B, too. “Don’t Let Me Let You Go” lifts the blissed-out piano plinks of the-Dream’s early singles, and the album highlight “Walk Right Back” offers a tighter, more tasteful take on the ’80s electro-R&B that came across so jumbled on Lidell’s self-titled record. That track is suave enough to be an Anthony Hamilton song, and really, Hamilton is probably the best possible model for Lidell when he's working in this lane, since nobody else is making records that span so many eras of soul quite so effortlessly.
But game as he is, Lidell isn’t nearly the singer Hamilton is, and his performances usually revert to the same two notes, either mawkish sentimentalism or overeager gleefulness. He attacks many of these songs with the unflappable cheer that other artists reserve for Target-exclusive Christmas albums, and while there’s some pleasure in satisfaction in Lidell’s joy, beyond that Beginning doesn’t offer many thrills. If this is his new beginning, it’s an unambitious one: Lidell has never sounded like more of a traditionalist than he does on this amiable but uncomplicated record. | 2016-10-17T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-10-17T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | Jajulin | October 17, 2016 | 6.2 | dc1ad531-6a2c-4f48-aa15-6107f2f5893b | Evan Rytlewski | https://pitchfork.com/staff/evan-rytlewski/ | null |
Cory Hanson and his SoCal cohorts continue their transformation from manic garage rockers to shape-shifting innovators on an EP as eclectic as White Light/White Heat. | Cory Hanson and his SoCal cohorts continue their transformation from manic garage rockers to shape-shifting innovators on an EP as eclectic as White Light/White Heat. | Wand: Perfume EP | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/wand-perfume-ep/ | Perfume EP | Last year, Wand pulled off a magic trick. For their fourth album, Plum, founder Cory Hanson disappeared the manic band responsible for three raucous LPs in two years—a creative clip familiar to some of their SoCal garage-rock associates—and summoned in its place apparitions of several different bands. Adding two permanent members, guitarist Robbie Cody and Sofia Arreguin, on keyboards and vocals, provided them with new sonic bulk and flexibility. But Plum was more remarkable for demonstrating that Wand could shape-shift in a snap of their fingers.
It seemed as though they’d benefitted from taking an extra year to design a more thoughtful work. But Hanson didn’t rest for a moment, following their Plum tour, before announcing that Wand’s next release was already in the bag. On their EP Perfume, they return to their original bustling pace without losing any of their new-found ingenuity.
The band sounds filthy and pristine in equal measure, just as it did on Plum. Again, multiple Wands show up, bearing songs varied enough to have come from several discrete seasons of writing. It’s rare to find transitions this agile on a single album, or even across the same career: Perfume resembles a retrospective compilation from an act that’s been around for 20 years—not five—and has spent significant chunks of that time workshopping different sounds. Whether gritty or pretty, each song could pass for the work of a genre specialist.
It’s Hanson’s lyrics that bind the tracks together, detailing the inebriating effects of romance. Closer “I Will Keep You Up” spins Primal Scream’s love-as-addiction ballad “Damaged” into a mutually supportive duet, with Hanson and Arreguin enumerating the small joys of spending time together: “Telling tales to pass along the things we can’t keep/From the things we can’t forget.” “Pure Romance” takes a sledgehammer to the creeping dread built up by the twitchy, skronking “Town Meeting.” “Lost in timeless pure romance,” Hanson repeats in the chorus, but Wand have never sounded less lost—or more uplifting. With its blunt power chords and spotless production, the track comes practically gift-wrapped for playlists.
But that blissful vibe can’t last. “Train Whistle,” the screeching instrumental that follows “Pure Romance,” makes for a jarring transition reminiscent of the violence with which “I Heard Her Call My Name” elbows its way into the Velvet Underground’s White Light/White Heat, on the heels of comedown ballad “There She Comes Now.” That wildly eclectic album seems to be a reference point for the new Wand. (Perfume even has a track called “The Gift,” although instead of drowsy spoken word, it showcases fervent guitars that glimmer and swell.) A proud devotee of classic rock, Hanson has also cited the Beatles’ White Album as his “favorite record ever.” That choice may be common, but it doesn’t seem so basic in light of Plum and Perfume—two releases that confirm the enduring appeal of bands with the vision, talent, and confidence to keep transforming into something new. | 2018-05-25T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-05-25T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Drag City | May 25, 2018 | 7.7 | dc21a503-8b6c-4b86-bbcb-71a4e50cf161 | Steven Arroyo | https://pitchfork.com/staff/steven-arroyo/ | |
The Los Angeles-via-Toronto singer offers a finely wrought EP that showcases her oceanic voice and her austere songwriting. | The Los Angeles-via-Toronto singer offers a finely wrought EP that showcases her oceanic voice and her austere songwriting. | Elissa Mielke: Finally EP | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/elissa-mielke-finally-ep/ | Finally EP | In the summer of 2015, in the back of a tiny bar in Toronto, I heard Elissa Mielke sing for the first time. An opener for an opener, she stood before a crowd of perhaps 20 people and played three unadorned songs on an electric keyboard. It’s a testament to her voice—an immense ocean of an instrument, as complex in its sweetness as raw honey—that I still think of that performance six years later. The title of this EP, Finally, is apt.
The production on Finally is almost monastic. Apart from “Palace,” which includes just a gossamer wisp of a synthesizer, the only instruments on the record are Mielke’s piano and a guitar. It’s as though her accompaniment is nothing more than a dry riverbed for her astonishing voice to roll through. Any more intricate production would only get in the way, as it did on her 2015 EP, which she released as Mieke. She sounded just fine on that record, but nothing like she does on Finally: uncontainable, spilling out of herself, flooding cities.
“Kind of Thing” opens with a rolling piano to wipe clean Mielke’s romantic slate. “You’re the kind of thing I used to sing about,” she sings, dismissing someone intent on saving her from her “sinful way of living.” Prior knowledge of her catalogue and its break-up songs isn’t necessary; she wears her heart and her history on her sleeve. She sometimes blurs simple phrases—“It doesn’t, and it won’t, and I’m great”—into long, painterly smears, the impression of her feeling more powerful than the literal meaning of the words she’s singing. She delivers the next song, “Homesick,” like a bow drawing itself slowly across strings. Her voice is flowery and ornamental, but her lyrics couldn’t be more frank or direct: “I’m still angry, but I’m homesick for you.” Though her lyrics can stray to clichés—“God, these walls I built/Think they could cave”—their simplicity can serve as an anchor in the intense, wide-open sea she creates with her singing.
The additional production touches on “Palace” are an honest jolt after the aggressively acoustic first three songs, but not an entirely welcome one. Her voice is still the main attraction, and her observations on love and relationships are as fierce and pointed as ever. “Trying,” however, is a rare thing, an ode to regression. She sings of “feeling old in [her] twenties,” growing weary of chasing love and friendship. “Why are you always giving up on me?” she sings, her voice growing huge, indomitable, as she pleads at the chorus: “Can’t you see I’m trying?” As with Mitski’s “Geyser,” she could be singing to a lover or to the very institution of the music business.
Mielke previously worked as a fashion model, and, in 2013, signed with a major label that sought to make her a pop star à la Katy Perry or Ellie Goulding. Scouring the internet, it’s possible to see vestiges of this past life of hers, like her appearance in full glam in the Weeknd’s 2012 video for “The Zone.” But Mielke had no desire to become a pop star. Instead, she chose her own path and made her goals clear: to create beautiful, affecting music, with only her voice and her simple instruments. No bells, no whistles, no buzz. There is a defiance in the record’s simplicity, and an incredible confidence, that takes me right back to that incredible gig six years ago. Finally, indeed.
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-06-14T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2021-06-14T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Folk/Country | slashie / Mom+Pop | June 14, 2021 | 7.2 | dc2f7cf8-def7-4be9-a634-be99bc6097aa | Peyton Thomas | https://pitchfork.com/staff/peyton-thomas/ | |
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 Waterboys’ definitive statement, a sweeping rock album from 1985 that pours its heart out from start to finish. | 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 Waterboys’ definitive statement, a sweeping rock album from 1985 that pours its heart out from start to finish. | The Waterboys: This Is the Sea | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/the-waterboys-this-is-the-sea/ | This Is the Sea | When the Waterboys founder Mike Scott was a teenager living in Edinburgh, he published a fanzine called Jungleland. The sixth issue, which came out at the end of 1977, had Richard Hell on the cover and teased articles about the Sex Pistols and Graham Parker. That Scott named his zine after the final song on Bruce Springsteen’s album Born to Run suggested that the angry energy of punk—a force that exerts an outsized pull on the young—was tempered by a yearning spirituality. For Scott, music offered a portal into a new way of seeing the world, one charged with romance, something you could get swept up in, where life seems so full of excitement and possibility it’s like a swelling container just about to burst.
Another coverline for “Jungleland” No. 6 is Patti Smith. When the Patti Smith Group came to London while touring Easter in 1978, Scott, on a hunch, called the hotel where he thought the singer might be staying and asked to speak with her, and the front desk patched him through. He asked if she’d received a package of zines he’d sent (she hadn’t), and after a brief chat she invited him down to London to cover the show. He took the train down, met his hero, hung out with her band, befriended her guitarist, Lenny Kaye, and stayed in a room in the fancy hotel she had arranged. Five years later, when Scott placed an advertisement in the NME classifieds seeking bandmates, he described what he was looking for:
THE WATERBOYS REQUIRE LEAD/RHYTHM GUITAR PLAYER. 18-24. Ability, own style, and appreciation of Patti Smith essential.
A few additional data points to help us understand Scott: When on holiday with his mother to London at age 16, he popped into a studio advertised in Melody Maker and recorded a version of Bob Dylan’s “Like a Rolling Stone,” playing most of the instruments himself. He wanted to see how records were made. Scott’s first band was called White Heat, named after Lou Reed’s song, and the name of the Waterboys was taken from a line in Reed’s “The Kids,” from Berlin. Other fixations during his youth were David Bowie and Van Morrison.
So that’s Dylan, Patti, Bruce, Van, Lou, Bowie, and punk rock—inspirations that all seemed in conversation with one another. Springsteen was once the New Dylan, and Patti was taking rock’n’roll poetics into strange places; Bruce and Patti had met each other in song on “Because the Night”; Springsteen’s second LP was deeply indebted to Van Morrison, and Patti had of course had transformed “Gloria,” the signature tune of Van’s early days, on her album Horses; Bowie had covered Reed and Springsteen both, and was, like the latter, punk rock royalty; Springsteen had shown up on Reed’s “Street Hassle.”
Borrow from Born to Run, Horses, “Like a Rolling Stone,” Astral Weeks, throw in the repetition and dirty grandeur of “Heroin” and the piss and vinegar of punk. What would you get? Perhaps “Big Music,” which was the title of a track on the Waterboys’ second album, 1984’s A Pagan Place. It was the rare case of a band inadvertently naming its own approach while describing the small scene springing up around them. Scott’s song, an appropriately widescreen epic with horns and crashing drums, describes a sound-fueled epiphany: “I have heard the big music/And I’ll never be the same/Something so pure/Just called my name.”
Big music is the chill down your spine and the sudden eruption of gooseflesh. It’s a feeling one usually encounters when young, describing that moment when you hear a song for the first time and it’s so overwhelming you feel like a changed person after it ends. For many musicians, an early experience with such an epiphany meant they could no longer imagine a future in the straight world—going to school, getting a job, settling down were out the window. All that mattered now was making a life in a band. Those who have had the experience but don’t perform themselves might subsequently spend their lives building a social scene around shows, collecting records, or reading and writing long essays about the power of music.
For a time, journalists looking for a hook used Big Music to describe a clutch of earnest young bands from Ireland and the UK who borrowed from the murky rumble and artful dissonance of post-punk while writing spiritually minded and cathartic songs about hope, endurance, and redemption. U2, Big Country, Simple Minds, the Alarm, and the Waterboys themselves were ambitious acts that emerged during the first half of the ’80s, groups that grappled with the period’s grim economy and frightened turn to conservatism by searching for spiritual transcendence. George Orwell’s nightmare vision seemed as if it might come true. “It was 1984, after all,” Scott wrote in the notes for the band’s recently released box set, 1985. “Fifteen years after a golden age, Kev and I were underground-literate post-punk adventurers, lingering in gray 1980s London, hanging on to the last vestiges of the counterculture.”
The music of the Waterboys and their cohorts was anguished, but it never veered toward nihilism—these acts never gave up on the ’60s ideal that music could usher in a better world. The bleak street-level reality was an essential part of their work, but they also had their eyes trained on the stars. “Because I was young and the world stood open before me,” he writes, setting the scene in the opening notes for the 1985 box, “it seems to me now to have taken place in an endless springtime.”
By the time Scott gathered the Waterboys to cut their third album, This Is the Sea, in early 1985, he was ready, alongside co-producer Mick Glossop, to take his already enormous aesthetic someplace even more grand. Other members at the time included multi-instrumentalists Anthony Thistlethwaite, whose piercing sax playing sounds something like his last name, and Karl Wallinger, who would soon depart to form the psych-pop band World Party.
While visiting New York City in January, Scott had purchased a large black book from an occult shop—the owner had said it was intended for witches to record their spells—and, brimming with confidence, filled its blank pages with lyrics for his next record. The Black Book, a volume designed to aid in channeling forces from beyond, became an important totem of the Waterboys’ mythology. It’s almost too perfect: At this point in his young life, Scott’s lyrics and music were hell-bent on capturing the hidden magic that seemed to exist all around him, the stuff that was so clear to him but so elusive to everyone else.
The opening “Don’t Bang the Drum” is our first experience of Scott’s dark magic. It’s a song about the animalistic side of human nature, about reverting to primal impulses. Streaks of Thistlethwaite’s sax give the track its color. It’s not a jazz saxophone, nor is it directly connected to the R&B sax that took root in the United States in the ’40s and led to rock bands of a certain bearing—like those that played on the Jersey Shore—to include the instruments alongside guitar and organ. The sax on This Is the Sea doesn’t carry or embellish the melody—it intensifies it. When you deploy a saxophone like this, any notion of “cool” is out of the question.
An artist growing in confidence wants to know just how good they are, whether this surge of ideas and new way of seeing things carries as much power as they suspect. A songwriter in the throes of such a moment might indulge composer’s version of a heat-check, to challenge themselves to do something great. Around the time This Is the Sea was coming together, Johnny Marr of the Smiths engaged in such a test. He had been reading praise in the music press of his and Morrissey’s songwriting genius and he thought to himself, “Right, if you’re so great, first thing in the morning, sit down and write a great song.” And so he did—the next day, the music for “Cemetry Gates” was complete. It’s a perfect song.
Scott’s challenge to write something great came from a girlfriend as the pair were walking in Manhattan. She asked him if writing songs was easy. To impress his new partner, he pulled a pen and a scrap of paper from his pocket and instantly scribbled the title and the chorus—“I saw the crescent, you saw the whole of the moon.” Back in London, he returned to the fragment and fleshed it out, eventually laying it down on a demo at the piano. It’s another perfect song.
Everything about the finished version of “The Whole of the Moon,” from lyric to melody to harmonic structure to arrangement, reinforces its essential expression. It’s a bright production, the track closest to the sound of mainstream British pop from the time, with a synthesizer sparkle from Wallinger that would have fit on a Thompson Twins or Eurythmics record. And as the dozens of the song’s covers show, Scott’s tune invites a stadium singalong while being flexible enough to support a melancholic reading or one pocked with the rage that follows loss.
As often happens with an evocative song written about a character with sensitivity and specificity, people have long wondered who “The Whole of the Moon” might be about. Scott’s friend Nikki Sudden of Swell Maps wondered if he might be the subject, and others speculated it was written about C.S. Lewis, whom Scott had read voraciously since childhood. But the beauty of “The Whole of the Moon” is in how it maps so easily onto all our lives. It’s about an archetypical person so many of us encounter when young, the figure a few steps ahead of where we are now, who seems unafraid and inspires us to overcome our fears and take in life’s full measure, all the beauty and the horror. And in a characteristically romantic turn, the song suggests that access to such insights comes with a price.
“The Whole of the Moon” zeroes in on a single person, but the canvas for much of This Is the Sea is considerably larger. These are songs about mystical revelation powered by fire and wind, set on mountaintops. The brief fragment “Spirit” is a perfectly lovely coda to “The Whole of the Moon,” with couplets like “Man is tethered/Spirit is free” (we’ll hear more about this duality later). “The Pan Within” is about sex, but Scott frames the act in holy terms, positing the pleasure of the body as a path to a parallel universe. And the crashing “Medicine Bow” is about leaving the mundane behind to take in the mad world in one huge gulp: “I’m gonna burn all the words and letters and cards that I ever wrote/And you can sail with me where the current flows.”
When Scott turns a clear eye to life outside in sober moments, he doesn’t always like what he sees. “Old England” has a circular progression on piano that frames Scott’s rumination on the sorry state of the political landscape he inhabits, imagining the country as a broken-down old man whose best days are behind him. The melody and arrangement are gorgeous, but the view is ugly, filled with imperial hubris and forgotten children. Thistlethwaite’s sax cuts through the song like an alarm, or a whistle blown after a long day of brutal work. The winds that carried the life force on “Medicine Bow” now cut right through you.
The world-outside blues continue with “Be My Enemy,” a direct homage to a mid-’60s Dylan with a rollicking 12-bar blues progression that’s about being hated by God and hating Him right back. “I keep on findin’ hate mail/In the pockets of my coat,” goes one of many choice lines, suggesting no escape from these malevolent forces. But “Trumpets,” a love song that unfolds in front of a backdrop of churches and the ocean during high summer, puts us back in the album’s special place.
By this point in This Is the Sea, we have to ask what’s real—is it the electric romance of Scott’s dreams or the dreary bad vibes of “Old England” and “Be My Enemy”? The closing title track takes it all in and suggests a third path. It’s a simple song, just two chords, the first two, in fact, that you learned the day you first picked up a guitar. But in the early Waterboys, Scott made those two simple chords sound massive, layering multiple 12-string instruments into a symphony of wood and steel.
Two chords that sway back and forth—the perfect harmonic expression of contemplating the past and the present simultaneously. To borrow words that Dylan uttered in another context, one chord says, “It used to go like that” while the next replies with, “Now it goes like this.” Scott uses these two chords to suspend us in the moment of this album’s creation, that place where he shows us a way of looking at life and now realizes its limitations. The saxophone has moved down in the mix, and Scott transposes its reed-splitting pressure to his own vocal cords. The result sounds like “Street Hassle” played by buskers on a cobblestone street in Galway, a drone-powered expression of a new idea zooming toward the horizon.
“This Is the Sea” freezes and then amplifies the moment where romantic swallow-the-world energy, the force that powers the record and Scott’s life to this point—smashes into reality. It’s a paradox because freedom comes from releasing your connection to that youthful verve rather than wallowing in it. “Once you were tethered, now you are free,” Scott sings in the first verse, and he’s not talking about what your family or government has handed you but the limitations you’ve constructed in your own mind. “You’re tryin’ to remember how fine your life used to be/Banging a drum like it’s 1973,” he sings, connecting us not only to “Don’t Bang the Drum” but to a year when he would have been 13, a year or two away from his zine and dreaming of his own future in music. It’s not that those visions from childhood didn’t matter—they opened his eyes, now it was time to do something with them.
In a 2002 interview with Spin, Leonard Cohen, relaying a thought shared by his Buddhist teacher, said that one eventually reaches a point of spiritual crisis where the “hero that you’re trying to maintain as the central figure in the drama of your life—this hero is not enjoying the life of a hero.” The only way out, according to Cohen, is to let this hero die. “From there,” he said, “you just live your life as if it’s real—as if you have to make decisions even though you have absolutely no guarantee of any of the consequences of your decisions.”
This Is the Sea is filled with such characters, those burning with youth trying to walk like the heroes they thought they had to be. Both he and his label had grand designs for the record, thinking it might boost the band to the upper echelon of the rock scene. But Scott was a bit too restless to make that happen. Reaction in the States was enthusiastic, but unlike U2 and Simple Minds, the Waterboys would remain there in the realm of college radio. Which was OK, because Scott himself was ready to move on.
“I’d taken the rock sound of the first three Waterboys albums as far as I could,” he wrote in his memoir. “After This Is the Sea—the song itself, with nine acoustic guitars simulating an ocean and an accompanying soundscape of brass and string orchestrations—I stood on top of the sonic mountain with nowhere else to climb.” Scott’s next epiphany arrived when he realized that the greatest possible experience with music just might involve banging out ancient traditional numbers with a few strangers in the corner of a small-town pub, a revelation that would lead him over the next three years to the equally great Fisherman’s Blues. So This Is the Sea, the final product of Scott’s early musical obsessions, was both a new beginning and an ending, the kind of beautiful dream you don’t mind waking up from. | 2024-04-14T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2024-04-14T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Ensign | April 14, 2024 | 9.3 | dc36819f-8dce-40a2-b4b6-559b786806d4 | Mark Richardson | https://pitchfork.com/staff/mark-richardson/ | |
The deluge of material from the long-dormant electronic experimentalist continues with a 2xCD set that builds on the new sound unveiled on his Oh EP. | The deluge of material from the long-dormant electronic experimentalist continues with a 2xCD set that builds on the new sound unveiled on his Oh EP. | Oval: O | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/14592-o/ | O | It's hard to talk about Oval's recordings without using phrases like "raises questions." In the 1990s, Markus Popp used the Oval name to make contemporary art that took sound as its form and the relationship between music and technology as its subject, which is to say music scrubbed (partially) clean of the bourgeois idea of the "musician." It was interesting to hear, sometimes even pleasant or dreamy or emotionally affecting, but that always seemed like a side effect rather than a goal. The records he made in that era supposedly made use of generative sound; the idea was that he set up the software and let it rip, and at some point the pieces that ended up on the albums came out of the machine like so many punch-cards.
Popp's role, of course, also included selecting, editing, and sequencing the material the software generated, which of course raised various questions. And the recordings themselves prominently featured the sounds of technology hitting its limits: digital distortion, glitchy microsecond-long tones and, more than anything else, skipping-CD noise. (For years, the standard joke when any CD skipped was "I didn't know Oval had done a remix of this!")
Popp took the better part of the past decade off from recording, and now he's returned with a deluge of new material. Oval's various 2010 releases-- the Oh EP, the two "Ringtone" EPs that have turned up as free downloads, and now O-- are built around digitally manipulated sounds that sound very much like they were originally made with human hands and metal strings. Possibly even bits of a guitar, if such an archaic device existed here in the future. The even-numbered tracks on the new album's first disc go one step further: they've got drumming on them, created by Popp using computer software.
However he's making it, Oval's new music is functionally much closer to his older music than to anything else, if a bit more skeletal-- nicely harmonized blips and smears of abstracted noise (with some relationship to plucked-string timbres a lot of the time), rhythms that sometimes splatter freely and sometimes snap to a regular pulse. It's lovely, it's pleasantly unsettling, and there's a hell of a lot of it. The "songs"-with-drumming on the first disc alternate with briefer sketches, and the second disc is 50 "ringtones" that are just a minute or so long and explore a single texture or cluster of notes. So "abundance" is a concept in play too, along with "acoustic sound," "modern listening span," and "hope you like our new direction!"
Popp has noted that "riff" is another one of the ideas he's engaging these days, although he apparently has an unusual definition of "riff"; most of the tone patterns here could easily pass for an automatic sewing machine with a corrupted programming chip let loose on a hammer dulcimer. (About the only riff here that inspires "oh, this one!" reactions on a third or fourth listen belongs to the singsongy second-disc ringtone "Jank"). But the O/Oh/Ringtone cluster of releases genuinely is a stretch from an artist who'd previously seemed like he'd worked himself into a corner. It takes a very different route from his earlier work. If it ends up in a very similar place, that just suggests his musical sensibilities have been asserting themselves all along. | 2010-09-07T02:00:03.000-04:00 | 2010-09-07T02:00:03.000-04:00 | Electronic / Experimental | Thrill Jockey | September 7, 2010 | 6.8 | dc3689c5-2391-49fb-985f-c2bacf5e45b4 | Douglas Wolk | https://pitchfork.com/staff/douglas-wolk/ | null |
They existed for less than two years, but the Chris Knox-fronted post-punk band Toy Love are immeasurably important to New Zealand music. Goner's Live at the Gluepot is a ripping double LP of recordings from their final shows. And, as part of its reissue program with Flying Nun, Captured Tracks has compiled two discs’ worth of singles and demos. | They existed for less than two years, but the Chris Knox-fronted post-punk band Toy Love are immeasurably important to New Zealand music. Goner's Live at the Gluepot is a ripping double LP of recordings from their final shows. And, as part of its reissue program with Flying Nun, Captured Tracks has compiled two discs’ worth of singles and demos. | Toy Love: Toy Love | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/17724-toy-love-toy-love/ | Toy Love | Though they existed for less than two years, Toy Love are immeasurably important to the history of New Zealand music. They helped inspire the creation of Flying Nun-- perhaps the most important independent label in the country’s history-- and last year their influence was recognized via induction into the New Zealand Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. It’s odd, then, that for decades after their 1980 demise, their music was represented primarily by a record they didn’t even like. That’s because the production on their sole, self-titled album (issued on major label WEA) buffed the edges off their melodic but raucous post-punk.
Flying Nun rectified that a bit in 2005 by reissuing a newly-mixed version of Toy Love, adding singles and demos in a 2xCD package called Cuts. But for anyone curious about the band’s reputation as a vital, high-wire garage act, now is truly the time to dive in. A few months ago, Goner issued Live at the Gluepot, a ripping double LP of recordings from the band’s final shows. And now Captured Tracks, as part of its new reissue program with Flying Nun, has compiled two discs’ worth of singles and demos under the name Toy Love (a slightly confusing move, since the original self-titled album is not included).
Of the two, Live at the Gluepot is more immediately impressive, just in terms of sheer speed and momentum. Amazingly, Toy Love played nearly 500 shows in their brief existence, and here that experience is loudly obvious. Each of the record’s 25 short, sharp songs flies by so quickly you might find have trouble remembering any single one. But that’s likely the point--- Toy Love doesn’t sound interested in finding perfectly-crafted melodies, but in cranking out tightly-wound tunes with as much snarling energy and coursing blood as possible. That head-down approach is reflected in the between-song banter of singer Chris Knox. His wry intros-- “this next one we found on a back of a chewing gum wrapper in 1939”-- suggest the music should be taken just seriously enough to enjoy the hell out of it.
Toy Love did bury some memorable gems inside their quick-shot post-punk, and that’s clearer on Captured Tracks’ compilation. Punchy tunes like the winding “Squeeze”, the rising stomp “Sheep”, and the swaying “Swimming Pool” (in which Knox oddly parodies Bob Dylan’s nasal croon) all rival the best of contemporaries like the Buzzcocks and the Undertones. I’m most partial to “Amputee Song”, an anthem for the limbless that predicts both the organ-driven garage of the Clean and the weird monster tales of Tall Dwarfs, the equally-vital act that Knox and guitarist Alec Bathgate went on to form. It also highlights Toy Love’s unique combination of bold enthusiasm and dark humor-- it’s hard to imagine anyone besides Knox making a nihilistic chorus like “We don’t exist!” sound so exultant.
Enthused humor has been a Knox/Bathgate trademark since the days of their first group the Enemy, from which Toy Love was spawned. And Knox has valiantly maintained that attitude since suffering a stroke in 2009. Many artists rallied around him after that tragic event, creating a tribute compilation and rekindling interest in his great body of work. Hopefully this pair of Toy Love releases will do the same, but you don’t have to know who Chris Knox is to appreciate Toy Love and Live at the Gluepot. All you really need is a pair of working ears.__
__ | 2013-03-11T02:00:05.000-04:00 | 2013-03-11T02:00:05.000-04:00 | null | null | March 11, 2013 | 7.7 | dc45495f-fab5-443b-9618-b641af73018a | Marc Masters | https://pitchfork.com/staff/marc-masters/ | null |
On its first album in 12 years, the veteran instrumental trio discovers a newfound spontaneity, summoning some of the most beautiful and emotional work of the group’s career. | On its first album in 12 years, the veteran instrumental trio discovers a newfound spontaneity, summoning some of the most beautiful and emotional work of the group’s career. | Dirty Three: Love Changes Everything | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/dirty-three-love-changes-everything/ | Love Changes Everything | At their best, Dirty Three can sound like they might fall apart in an instant. Listen to the way “Ember,” from 2005’s expansive Cinder, seems forever to wobble, as if Warren Ellis’ violin were about to stumble into the canyon created by Jim White’s loping drums. Or ponder how Ellis and guitarist Mick Turner skirt the void while upbraiding their strings during “Red,” from 1996’s breakthrough Horse Stories. An unusually expressive instrumental trio, these three longtime Melbourne chums have always used the tension between their respective playing to foster collective feelings of annoyance or ecstasy, boredom or wonder, anxiety or amusement. In doing so, they have often suggested some ornate mobile hanging from an art museum’s ceiling, its three bejeweled pieces bound together only by rusted wire, perpetually at risk of clattering to the ground. The thrill has been hearing them hold it together.
On Love Changes Everything, Dirty Three’s first album in a dozen years, those corroded wires finally snap, leaving the pieces to smash to the floor and reorient themselves in new relationships. And they do: Ellis, White, and Turner have never sounded so alternately tight and loose, so unified and amorphous, capturing an emotional ambiguity that drifts between hope and despair. Forgoing their usual evocative song titles in favor of a suite of numbered pieces that often flow into and out of one another, Dirty Three have made not only their most absorbing album but also the one that’s most open to interpretation. It is a convincing case study in how a veteran band, each member now nearing or beyond 60, can evolve—letting go, once and for all, of preconceptions and self-perceptions and simply meeting where they are.
Dirty Three emerged in the early ’90s from exuberant youthful squalor, playing long hours in Australian bars for crowds that found them perplexing or polarizing. But international attention, especially in the United States, became their passport. They toured doggedly and collaborated promiscuously. White and Turner joined Cat Power for 1998’s Moon Pix. Ellis partnered with another expat, Nick Cave, in a prolific ongoing relationship. As the years passed, Dirty Three themselves became more focused, as if the band were a repository for a specific subset of sounds and ideas for musicians who were otherwise busy doing lots of things—painting and making exquisite solo records, playing with Bill Callahan and dozens of others, becoming a score-writing Bad Seed.
These days, Ellis, Turner, and White are scattered across continents and hemispheres—Turner in Melbourne, White in Brooklyn, Ellis in Paris. Their separate careers and lives have made them less subservient to outstanding notions of what the Dirty Three are meant to be. “We sat down and played, which is what we used to do in the early days,” as Ellis told The Guardian of the 2022 session that rendered Love Changes Everything, “informed by the sort of Impulse! records where they just got in and blew, you know?”
This looseness is Love Changes Everything’s new boon, as if the Dirty Three have finally obtained permission to be whatever they want. Ellis actually sings on the second piece. His looped sighs and plaintive piano chords serve as the soft canvas for a kind of fragmented duet between White and Turner. Bandmates since the mid-’80s, the two size one another up after reuniting in a cozy Melbourne studio, as if nodding their greetings. It feels like a bittersweet hymn for aging and surviving. Its successor suggests a group hug or a lazy late-night conversation after a long day of work, each member of the trio contributing a bit that interlaces with the rest of the band. In the last minute, especially, Ellis’ pizzicato plucks casually slip into perfect lockstep with the slow sway shared between Turner and White.
But the key to Dirty Three remains unchanged: the way each member can somehow play something that seems largely unrelated to the rest of the band, yet still works within the whole. Zoom in on an individual part or zoom out for the gestalt of it all: Dirty Three’s music suits either perspective. It’s like staring at a Clyfford Still painting, as mesmerized by each discrete block of color as the entire enormous piece.
During the opener, you can follow Turner’s clinched guitar part from its beginning amplifier groan to its introductory coiled riff to its final splenetic variation. White first taps in as if to take the group’s temperature, mostly disappears for the better part of a minute, and then rumbles back in with Keith Moon-sized might. The whole track is a demented and joyous leap into kosmische oblivion, each player pushing the others deeper into a trance. With Dirty Three, and especially on Love Changes Everything, the whole is not necessarily greater than the sum of its parts; it’s just perplexingly different, the quality that makes this music feel like a discovery every time you listen.
Love Changes Everything ends with two interconnected pieces that, together, constitute 16 of Dirty Three’s most beautiful and emotional minutes in 32 years. At the start, they steadily ratchet the intensity, Ellis’ violin wailing like a mourner over drum-and-guitar interplay that conjures the devotional tizzy of Gnaoua music. Just when it becomes feverish, though, the spell breaks, pieces falling again to the floor. Ellis is the first to return for the finale, his call-and-response violin pulling the rest of the band toward the center. By the track’s end, his piano flurries, White’s circular drums, and Turner’s guitar shards coil into one, moving as a peristaltic wave. Dirty Three have rarely sounded as triumphant as they do here, locked into the pure communion of making music together. They steadily rise, stretching back toward the ceiling until, without warning, they collapse one more time. | 2024-07-03T00:01:00.000-04:00 | 2024-07-03T00:01:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Drag City | July 3, 2024 | 8 | dc4fd6a2-590d-4835-a1a5-66bbdeeec0d4 | Grayson Haver Currin | https://pitchfork.com/staff/grayson-haver currin/ | |
The group’s fourth record is a pummeling collection of mosh-pit conductors, crowded songs, and fleeting moments of delicacy. | The group’s fourth record is a pummeling collection of mosh-pit conductors, crowded songs, and fleeting moments of delicacy. | BROCKHAMPTON: iridescence | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/brockhampton-iridescence/ | iridescence | The working title of this record was the best year of our lives. This sunny appellation was announced less than a month after the group ousted founding member Ameer Vann for lying about details related to allegations of sexual misconduct—an occurrence about which frontman Kevin Abstract said “fucking hurts and sucks.” The original name could have been an attempt at twisted irony or simply a spotlight toward the positive: Until Vann’s departure, the group was experiencing a period of massive success, signing a $15 million record contract with RCA, booking a year-long world tour, and landing a 10-day recording session at London’s historic Abbey Road Studios to make their new album. By all accounts, the young DIYers, who had handled the heavy lifting behind their first three records themselves, were finally reaping the fruits of their hard labor.
But the band, known for their unharnessed energy and unchecked emotion, could only stifle a smile for so long. The renamed project, iridescence, is their most pummeling album, a collection of mosh-pit conductors, crowded songs, and fleeting moments of delicacy. Outside of the clear-eyed admissions of Abstract, the vocalists often get swallowed in the heavy mix, making the absence of Vann, their sharpest MC on past releases, noticeable. The balance BROCKHAMPTON had carefully calibrated by the final installment of its Saturation trilogy is out of whack here, with its rappers and producers biting off more than they can chew. It’s as if the group tries to drown transcendent moments in noise for fear of slowing down.
The band’s music has always been categorically loud—Saturation III standout single “BOOGIE” was built around a cop-car siren loop—but here it feels less purposeful and grooving. “NEW ORLEANS” is an endless grinder built on dissonant hums and a similar distorted bass kick like those used by Travis Scott on Astroworld standout “Sicko Mode.” Whereas Scott balances the tension of his sonics with a light keyboard melody and a little bit of Drake, producers bearface and Jabari Manwa construct an airtight wall of sound that stretches on for far too long. By the song’s fourth verse, with Merlyn Wood in his Ghanaian-tinged dancehall delivery, the track miserably tries to keep punching you in the solar plexus.
Close to half of iridescence’s 15 tracks follow this blueprint of auditory brutalism; “DISTRICT” blends together pitch-shifted vocals, a woozy siren synth line, airy guitar licks, and verses by six of the group’s members to create a morass of sound. Single “J’OUVERT” is equally ambitious, a mishmash of distorted bass pounds, robotic squeaks, and horn wails that engulf the song’s mad-at-the-world vocals. It’s like this often with BROCKHAMPTON: They happily present a mosaic of ideas that do not reveal a larger picture.
Even on the album’s quieter and more melodic moments, when the band momentarily veers into the still eye of the hurricane, the vocalists fail to make an impression. On “THUG LIFE,” the pretty, piano-driven relief from the pressure cooker energy of “NEW ORLEANS,” MC Dom McLennon squeaks out faux sad-boy deepness like, “They put my head in the water and it’s so beautiful under,” in a shaky delivery. Elsewhere, on the ballad “SAN MARCOS,” which is undoubtedly meant to inspire cell phones to sway at shows with its chorus-heavy guitar melody and London Community Gospel Choir outro, the group’s MCs pass cardboard confessions back and forth like, “Could be stronger than vibranium/Don’t mean that I ain’t fragile” by McLennon, and, “Suicidal thoughts, but I know I won’t do it,” by rapper and engineer JOBA.
BROCKHAMPTON’s work has always had a scatterbrain feel, the result of having 14 creative minds in the same studio. On each successive album, the band had become more economical in their movements. They figured out when to stop adding instrumental layers, like on the III highlight “JOHNNY,” built on a simple jazz loop, or made sure their writing was tight as possible, like on the confessional “JUNKY.” They can still sew in small pockets of delights, most clearly demonstrated on iridescence when the stage is given to Abstract, whose songwriting has grown from being shockingly honest to emotionally moving.
His opening verse on “WEIGHT” is the stirring centerpiece of the album, a candid examination of guilt and insecurity. “And she was mad cause I never wanna show her off/And every time she took her bra off my dick would get soft,” he raps in a sincere croak. The way he writes about and colors his shame—one of the least-examined feelings in hip-hop—is profound. “WEIGHT” also happens to be the album’s most complete composition, as a glittery string section gives Abstract’s vocals room to breathe before a reverb-drenched breakdown bursts the song open. At that point, a trip-hop drum break barges in under thick piano chords and chaotic turntable scratches. Against all odds, it coheres into something sublime and beautiful. The rest of the album is just not that lucky. | 2018-09-26T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-09-26T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Question Everything / RCA | September 26, 2018 | 6.6 | dc54033f-0fbb-470b-a812-f5cb07c1ed43 | Reed Jackson | https://pitchfork.com/staff/reed-jackson/ | |
Despite being-- along with Beyonce and Rihanna-- one of the most charismatic and accomplished modern r&b singers, Amerie's latest album still is somehow unreleased in the U.S. | Despite being-- along with Beyonce and Rihanna-- one of the most charismatic and accomplished modern r&b singers, Amerie's latest album still is somehow unreleased in the U.S. | Amerie: Because I Love It | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/10590-because-i-love-it/ | Because I Love It | Amerie's 2002 debut album All I Have was so startlingly, sparklingly perfect that it was difficult to imagine that she could even make another album. All I Have simply didn't sound like the beginning of a particular artist's story: The album's irresistibility resided in its consummately generic take on r&b at all levels, writer/producer Rich Harrison constructing familiar-sounding but astonishingly voluptuous soul-loop grooves, and lyrically wresting the most exquisite sensations from clichés and universalist platitudes, while Amerie's equivocations between sweet clarity and ragged soul conveyed an idealist snapshot of an entire genre's arsenal of affects.
Despite containing her breakout hit "1 Thing", 2005's follow-up Touch was a weaker affair: A handful of stunners and an ill-advised Lil' Jon collaboration aside, it felt like a retread of her debut in broader, less nuanced brushstrokes. Having now parted ways from Harrison, on the more successful Because I Love It Amerie attempts to fashion for herself an individual persona, a quest that carries her further away from the attractions of her debut. *Because I Love It'*s big, risky strategic manoeuvre is a plush, post-coital riposte to Ciara's recent electro-pop revivalism, with many of the songs here investing in a deliberately frothy eighties sound that smears together Prince, Jam & Lewis, and the SOS Band.
As with Ciara, Amerie's tying herself so resolutely to the retro mast pays mixed dividends. She pulls off this gloriously inconsequential sound on "Crush" and "Crazy Wonderful", combining sugar-rush explosions of fizzy synth clouds with charmingly twee vocals. The danger for her is that in trying so hard to clinch this new style she leaves little room to assert her own individual qualities: most worryingly, the self-consciously fun "Some Like It" is a gruesome pastiche, assembling dozens of hooks and reference points, but with no heart to pump life into them.
This sense of making staged set-pieces rather than songs carries over into more familiar territory. The enjoyable but overrated "Gotta Work", an energetic funk number that liberally samples Sam & Dave's "Hold On I'm Coming", verges on empty formalism: one senses that its signifiers have been pressed into service primarily to remind listeners of how much they enjoyed "1 Thing" or J Lo's "Get Right", and coalesce into a song only as an afterthought. She does better when she doesn't try so hard: The more clipped disco-funk of "Take Control" might be closer to "anonymous" r&b (one could just as easily imagine it coming from Nicole Scherzinger or Christina Milian) but it's also a much better song; the enjoyment comes from listening to how Amerie still makes it her own, the song's own excitement strained through her expressive, almost hesitant phrasing.
Perhaps the secret ingredient which enlivens Amerie's best work is her quality of earnestness: The best songs here are a trio of dead-serious ballads in the second half, all of which relinquish the urge to score points with savvy listeners. "When Loving U Was Easy" verges on Idol material, its sobbing accusations culminating in a gloriously indiscreet, almost painful climax worthy of Fantasia or Kelly Hudson. Meanwhile "All Roads" is garishly coloured, widescreen utopian wonder, somewhere between Mariah Carey and Journey's "Don't Stop Believin'".
Best of all is the fragile, frustrated "Paint Me Over", a contender for Amerie's finest track to date, and a timely reminder of her longstanding secret weapons: the interplay between the breathy delicacy of her solo lines and the accusatory perfection and strength of the multi-tracked chorus lines. "Chorus" in both senses of the word: Amerie's finest moments flow seamlessly between the lost and befuddled Amerie singing alone, overwhelmed by the mysteries of love, and the righteous auto-harmonizing Ameries, whose clarity of vision is accompanied by exuberance or vengefulness. I prefer the vengeful moments: no r&b singer can make the listener feel as judged as Amerie can, like the world itself has risen up in anger against your uncaring ways.
All three of these songs extend the album's dominant palatial 80s sound, but in a subtler and less self-conscious fashion, more focused on being vehicles for Amerie's emoting. Sonic revivalism in r&b usually works best when it sounds breezy and incidental-- think of the gorgeous effervescence of Cassie's sweet mid-tempo numbers, or Teedra Moses's own, less self-conscious evocations of Prince and Jam & Lewis. Perhaps it's simply that you have to believe in these songs to take them into your heart, believe that the riotous drum breaks or frosty synthesisers being deployed are a true extension of the singer's own feelings. The balance between success and failure rests on the tension between the style, the singer and the song: Amerie is at her best when the three levels become indistinguishable. | 2007-08-28T02:00:02.000-04:00 | 2007-08-28T02:00:02.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | Columbia | August 28, 2007 | 7.3 | dc578299-2962-4a96-96dc-d7145a867be4 | Tim Finney | https://pitchfork.com/staff/tim-finney/ | null |
On the young singer’s second major label album, PnB struggles to push past the boundaries of his previous work, but with a few solid tunes, it shows him finding his way in the major-label apparatus. | On the young singer’s second major label album, PnB struggles to push past the boundaries of his previous work, but with a few solid tunes, it shows him finding his way in the major-label apparatus. | PnB Rock: Catch These Vibes | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/pnb-rock-catch-these-vibes/ | Catch These Vibes | This summer, PnB Rock’s rendition of French Montana’s “Unforgettable” infiltrated radio giving the 25-year-old Philidelphia singer a prime spot on one of hip-hop’s hottest songs of the year. Just off the heels of his feature on YFN Lucci’s ”Everyday We Lit,” the 2017 XXL Freshman just wants to be the soundtrack to your complicated relationship on his second major label album, Catch These Vibes. Although his knack for melody is notable, it’s less daring than the work of Ty Dolla $ign and dangerously teeters along the monotony of Fetty Wap. It’s an album of symmetry bouncing between hip-hop and R&B, and while PnB struggles to push past the boundaries of his previous work, it shows a young singer slowly finding his way in the major-label apparatus.
At the start, PnB doesn’t want to confuse you with his intentions. Opener “Friends” reads as a text thread from a “Where is this going?” conversation gone wrong. “I wish I could cuff you but I can’t/I wish I could love you but I can’t,” he sings. A relationship is the furthest thing from his mind, and fame is too potent to be sobered by monogamy. PnB’s honesty is admirable and could serve as a comprehensive guide to the conversations you’ve avoided well into your twentysomethings. Towards the end, “You know you my ride or die” is repeated in a distorted loop, somehow undoing all of the transparency he professed for much of the song. Catch These Vibes sits in that warped space of emotion, engulfed in lust, infatuation, and remorse.
PnB Rock is a bit heavy-handed with 10 guest features on an 18-track album, many of which add little to the overall project. Buried nine songs deep is PnB’s melody against the Diplo-inspired track crafted by NGHTMRE. The LA producer challenges PnB, stretching him across his version of EDM, juxtaposing jaded lyrics about an ex who “talks too much.” On “1Day,” PnB sounds as if he’s floating, reverberating over the loops and dips of the production. He remembers the days he received the harshest criticism from someone closest to him: “Mama told me that I wouldn’t be shit/Told her one day, I’ma be rich.” He and Ugly God channel the cadence of Gucci Mane, down to the adlibs, a formula that creates a larger-than-life energy for the usually mellow singer.
Of the eight songs that PnB rides solo, “Pressure” and “Rewind” offer some introspection amid the salaciousness that purveys Catch These Vibes. “Pressure” reflects on the friends he’s lost to the streets, whether it be to death or in jail. “Thinking ’bout my brother, man, I miss that nigga/When he got killed that night I wish that I was with that nigga/Swear I wish heaven was like jail and I could visit niggas.” On the hook, he’s pushing past the pain, trying not to acknowledge it at all: “I gotta stay strong through it all, and act like I ain’t going through it all, through this pressure.” Here, PnB takes a page out of his old notebooks, recounting events like the stories he used to tell during his 33-month prison stint, a moment of honest sentimentality in a way that has been distorted by PnB’s quick rise to fame.
As a closer, “Rewind” feels like the perfect complement to “Friends.” PnB croons over a guitar as he reminisces about the girl who got away. On much of Catch These Vibes, PnB leans on repetition in his songwriting, which at times is underwhelming and a little lazy. This works only on “Rewind,” where repeating elements of the song reinforces the notion of looking at relationships in reverse. He interpolates Usher’s “Confessions” an appropriate melody for the amount of transparency he offers on the record. In his better moments, it’s obvious that PnB Rock could tap into a candid, cohesive project. But the range of emotions Catch These Vibes takes you on feels a little like a Sunday morning hangover—the kind where you promise you’ll never drink again, but are back at the bar next Saturday. | 2017-12-07T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2017-12-07T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rap | Atlantic | December 7, 2017 | 6.5 | dc6af931-a5c2-4e9c-8813-accd5d7ede76 | Kristin Corry | https://pitchfork.com/staff/kristin-corry/ | |
The 19-year-old singer-songwriter’s dual EP branches out from bedroom pop in a set of songs that consider the nuanced ways acting is tucked into our everyday lives. | The 19-year-old singer-songwriter’s dual EP branches out from bedroom pop in a set of songs that consider the nuanced ways acting is tucked into our everyday lives. | Hana Vu: Nicole Kidman / Anne Hathaway | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/hana-vu-nicole-kidman-anne-hathaway/ | Nicole Kidman / Anne Hathaway | Hana Vu wrote the songs for her dual EP, Nicole Kidman/Anne Hathaway by watching episodes of The Hollywood Reporter’s “The Actress Roundtable” and then conjuring backstories for the women on screen. For Vu, the project’s premise is an entry point for her to do what she does best: crystalize a wisp of an emotion, until the sentiment feels so tactile it could break.
Vu’s first EP, the perfectly titled Crying on the Subway, was rooted in bedroom pop, but these EPs explore other genres. She layers and reverbs her vocals on “Worm” until they sound like a hymn, while “Order” descends into full-on, guitar-thrashing rock. Each track feels like a contained performance, and the lyrics consider the nuanced ways in which acting is tucked into our everyday lives.
These aren’t necessarily love songs, and it’s hard to map a narrative onto any track in particular. She wishes someone would cry about her. She croons about “disguises.” “Outside,” which could be a Paramore or Lorde track, comes the closest to feeling personal: “If I look at my phone all day, does it really help my chances?” she asks, waiting for a text that never comes.
Vu produced the record herself, and the muted, minimalist fizz matches the distant monotone of her voice. Each track builds around a wrenching line that dissolves into the soundscape. “I’ll never be good enough,” ends the first song, “At the Party,” as a synth sputters and fades. “I wanna be a hero/I want to save you, I wanna save me,” she sings on “Fighter,” with all traces of actual desire drained from her voice.
No track on the compact, 10-song project feels unnecessary, but most blend into each other without sounding distinct. (The glaring exception is her cover of “Reflection,” from the Disney movie Mulan, which is thematically relevant but still seems out of place.) That’s not the worst quality in an album that is equally sparse and lush, simple and shimmering, but it shows a space Vu can grow into. | 2019-10-25T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-10-25T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | Luminelle | October 25, 2019 | 7.2 | dc6e7c51-c1aa-4186-a197-e5c7e5f79712 | Dani Blum | https://pitchfork.com/staff/dani-blum/ | |
The latest album from the Dallas trio is a trove of middle-class rap flexes. It sounds like a dark realm all to itself, the full-on encapsulation of their long-running operation. | The latest album from the Dallas trio is a trove of middle-class rap flexes. It sounds like a dark realm all to itself, the full-on encapsulation of their long-running operation. | The Outfit, TX: Little World | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/the-outfit-tx-little-world/ | Little World | The Outfit, TX have been warping the sounds of Texas rap for almost a decade now, their music varying from smooth, split-screen introspection to deep, dank ghost whispers to “cooly fooly space-age funk.” The Dallas trio, consisting of Jayhawk, Mel, and Dorian, reinterprets the legacy sounds of Third Coast hip-hop through a wide range of tints. Their new album, Little World, a trove of middle-class rap flexes, sounds like a dark realm all to itself, the full-on encapsulation of their operation.
Their last album, 2017’s Fuel City, an homage to an off-kilter Dallas staple, was trunk-rattling rap with a hometown bent. Little World retrofits Fuel City’s firing pistons onto gnarled synth patches to power ominous crawlers, channeling the energy of 2015’s foreboding Down by the Trinity, a sound influenced by the heaviness of Deftones and the murkiness of Scarface—but entirely its own. This is still slab music, robust and booming, but instead of candy-painted, it’s matte black. Little World is an anomaly from previous TOTX projects in that it can be strobing and trance-inducing one minute and boisterous and disorienting the next. But there’s always a strong through-line facilitated by the disparate but complementary modes of its frontmen.
Dorian mixed and mastered the record, but he rarely appears as a performer. Though he is missed, Jayhawk and Mel have found a wonky sort of balance in their contrasting styles, performing in tandem from opposite ends of the spectrum. Jayhawk’s raps are in-your-face and combustible, so loud that, when the group was recording Down by the Trinity at Mel’s grandmother’s house, they’d have to cut sessions early for fear that he might disturb her. He chews up the scenery, always foregrounding himself in the mix, and his natural inclination is to be caustic. Mel is more withdrawn, quietly sinister, a mischievous tenor he’s characterized as “the purple devil emoji.” He lurches through like a prowler. So much of TOTX’s allure, and Little World specifically, is wrapped up in this disparity of sound: how they knife through beats at different angles, the ways their almost peculiar voice-work supplements their flows.
Whether going it alone or performing as a tag-team, the members of TOTX leave indelible marks on everything they touch; even as their words leave the mind, their voices linger. On “Name on the Wall,” Jayhawk rumbles through his raps, each utterance bounding between seismic ripples of the 808 drum kit. Mel seems to faze through the translucent synths on “Big Bet,” every syllable implying a certain intangibility. Often, phrases are merely a function of fluidity, waves ridden through the troughs of their immense productions. But even when setting up a specific moment, words ebb and flow, as on this casual Jayhawk scene from “The Woah”: “Lil baby booted up/On god, lil baby cute as fuck/I walked up rude as fuck/I said, ‘Is this your dude, or what?’” There is an immediacy to the writing, but the sensation of it lingers like an afterimage.
Thunderous, abnormal, and sublime, Little World is emblematic of The Outfit, TX as a group. Despite a stellar track record, they’re still fighting for bandwidth in rap conversations, but they will themselves forth with undeniable music, vowing to secure a spot for themselves and the Dallas scene they claim. “Looked straight at my nigga, told him we gon’ make it/Looked straight at my nigga, told him if not, we gon’ take it,” Mel declares on “Conviction,” a song about staying the course. With Little World, The Outfit, TX continue to expand their small but no less significant domain, existing proudly on the outer edges of Texas rap as they always have. | 2018-08-31T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-08-31T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | POW | August 31, 2018 | 7.4 | dc732f09-63d3-480a-a8b3-982d6d6c8720 | Sheldon Pearce | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sheldon-pearce/ | |
The outstanding Chicago-based drummer incorporates ideas from the city’s iconic forebears and ever-evolving jazz scene into his own fluid style. | The outstanding Chicago-based drummer incorporates ideas from the city’s iconic forebears and ever-evolving jazz scene into his own fluid style. | Quin Kirchner: The Shadows and the Light | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/quin-kirchner-the-shadows-and-the-light/ | The Shadows and the Light | Drummer Quin Kirchner revels in contrasts and juxtapositions. These qualities are deeply embedded in the music of his new album, The Shadows and the Light, which jumps between numerous strains of exploratory jazz with an impressive fluency. There are many playful moments, as well as passages of mystery and melancholy, and it unfolds with an ease that suggests an eager journey through disparate terrains. The album’s wild stylistic range squashes time while giving the illusion of being infinite in scope. Kirchner acts as both instigator and agitator as he slides into an elastic swing or propels his group through the whirling syncopation of Afro-Cuban rhythms. Regardless of style, his playing always feels fluid, constantly in flux.
That sense of flow is crucial to the structure of The Shadows and the Light. Several pieces cascade into one another while others are punctuated by transitory percussive palate-cleansers. At the album’s center are two suites, both of which establish an air of formless drift before coalescing into groove and motion. “Pathways” plays out against a backdrop of a kalimba fed through delay, with bassist Matt Ulery channeling Charlie Haden for a solo of contemplative modal runs up and down his instrument before being joined by Nate Lepine’s searching flute. As the metallic chime of the kalimba loops, the piece seamlessly transforms into a version of Kelan Phil Cohran’s “Sahara,” its ostinato bass line passed around the ensemble as Kirchner dances around his kit. Similarly, “Star Cluster,” a gooey mess of sax, trombone, and bass clarinet, morphs into “Moon Vision,” a steady, backbeat-heavy piece with lush horn hits. For an album that travels in so many directions at once, these moments provide a cohesion that points to a definitive arc.
Though Kirchner cut his teeth in New Orleans and spent time in New York, he grew up in Chicago and the majority of his career has been centered around that city’s multi-faceted, ever-evolving jazz scene. He sits comfortably alongside contemporaries like Damon Locks, Jeff Parker, and Ben Lamar Gay, as well as labelmates Chicago Underground Quartet and Charles Rumback. What sets Kirchner’s music apart from that of his peers is his focus on incorporating the music and ideas of the iconic forebears of that community into his own individualistic style. In addition to Cohran, his group covers Sun Ra’s late-’50s composition “Planet Earth,” and his use of a more fleshed out horn section—at times ballooning to an octet—allows him to approximate the kind of large-ensemble cosmic swing that defined that early Ra era, with additional touches of Charles Mingus’ outré arrangements for big band shining through.
Though deep debts are owed to those mid-century jazz touchpoints, Kirchner puts various traditions into conversation with each other in a way that feels postmodern, almost collaged, rooting the music firmly in the now. Throughout The Shadows and the Light there’s a sense that anything could happen next—a drum and electronics free for all, a poignant ballad, fusion infused with free improvisation, a polyrhythmic blur of Latin percussion and wurlitzer—but nothing feels out of place. Kirchner’s compositions are built around tight grooves but flourish in moments of spontaneity and uninhibited fervency. A big part of this is due to his band, which features alto player Nick Mazzarella and bass clarinetist Jason Stein of Hearts & Minds, among others from the Chicago jazz underground. They are nimble ensemble players, but also powerful improvisers on their own, capable of wild melodic tangents and expressive outbursts, and Kirchner’s compositions demand full command of both of these modes.
The Shadows and The Light, along with recent albums by Makaya McCraven, Junius Paul, Dustin Laurenzi, and Tomeka Reid, serve to document a true renaissance in Chicago jazz and improvisation. More than just an overview of different experimental idioms, Kirchner is able to rewrite the rules of a wide swath of traditions in his own language, drawing on the grammar of ever-shifting groove and dynamic rhythmic interplay as the basis for his interpretations. There is equal parts joy and reverence in this music, and while listening to Kirchner rejoice in those passions it is hard not to experience them as well. | 2020-06-29T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-06-29T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Jazz | Astral Spirits | June 29, 2020 | 8 | dc7c1c71-67b3-4c58-97e3-2a009ba47ac1 | Jonathan Williger | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jonathan-williger/ | |
Joyful, euphoric, and free, these new songs from the Miami party-starters are all produced by SOPHIE and are full of potential energy and the excitement of exploration. | Joyful, euphoric, and free, these new songs from the Miami party-starters are all produced by SOPHIE and are full of potential energy and the excitement of exploration. | Basside: Fuck It Up EP | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/basside-fuck-it-up-ep/ | Fuck It Up EP | After the tragic death of SOPHIE earlier this year, the Miami duo Basside wrote in memoriam that the artist “wasn’t from this planet.” They were far from the first to observe the galactic magic of SOPHIE’s music, but the phrasing hints at something that was always at its core. No matter how close SOPHIE songs approached the mainstream—whether on elastic tracks with Madonna or gleaming trap refractions with experimental rappers—the music had an otherworldly perspective, as if SOPHIE was hearing the sounds of pop’s past through interstellar radiation. SOPHIE’s catalog presented passage to new realms, where the music was a little more uncanny, more staticky, more absurd. Through SOPHIE’s music, as one of the songs implied, listeners could access a whole new world.
Basside—the duo of South Florida party-starters Que Linda and Caro Loka—got to experience this approach firsthand. SOPHIE caught one of their performances at a Miami music festival in 2016 and, taken by the way they channeled the vibrant histories of Miami Bass, freestyle, and East Coast club music, invited them out to Los Angeles, where they made the six songs that eventually ended up on the new EP Fuck It Up.
Over the years, the songs became staples of SOPHIE’s DJ sets, the sorts of elusive tracks that fans obsess over. But due to a miscommunication between the artists, the music never officially saw the light of day until after SOPHIE’s passing. Basside said in an interview they’re finally sharing Fuck It Up as “a gift to everyone that’s heartbroken,” and, at its best, it really does feel like one. Joyful, euphoric, and free, these new songs feel like a lot of SOPHIE’s best beats over the years, full of potential energy and the excitement of exploration.
Que Linda and Caro Loka’s work as Basside is charismatic and playful, full of hilarious come-ons and delirious sloganeering inspired by their city’s unapologetically horny musical history. (One memorable cheerleader chant from Basside’s debut EP goes, simply, “I like bass cause it has ass in it.”) They largely bring the same energy to Fuck It Up, but when paired with SOPHIE’s mystical production, it has a different effect. Opening track “NYC2MIA,” the EP’s easy standout, uses a hopscotching kick drum as the skeleton for a collection of surreal gulps and clangs and squeaks. As Que Linda and Caro Loka repeat one of their credos (“New York to Miami/No bras, no panties”), SOPHIE nods to the rhythmic histories of Jersey and Baltimore club while looking deep into the future, scribbling gnarled new sounds in all the margins.
Across the rest of the EP, they apply a similar approach to other sounds, like the boisterous party-trap of “Swipe” and the Auto-Tuned R&B balladry of “Girl.” Que Linda and Caro Loka’s bars are full of easy confidence and memorable one-liners, but they occasionally run into the problem that a lot of people do over SOPHIE beats. When something is as unearthly as the club mutations of “Crazy Expensive,” it’s hard for anyone, even rappers as magnetic as Basside, to keep up, they just become tiny human figures lost in an alien landscape. On the whole, Basside hold their own. It’s a tragedy they won’t be able to do more with SOPHIE at their side because together, all three artists feel in their element. Feet on the dancefloor, head in the clouds, together they dream of a world where the club is a little more wondrous, a little more strange.
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-04-08T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2021-04-08T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Sorry | April 8, 2021 | 6.9 | dc809345-f8ee-4939-81e1-04fe4fa53317 | Colin Joyce | https://pitchfork.com/staff/colin-joyce/ | |
The third LP from San Francisco garage-poppers came to be after main man Sonny Smith and his girlfriend of a decade parted ways. But where most breakup albums aim for the rawest nerve, Smith keeps a characteristically cool head. | The third LP from San Francisco garage-poppers came to be after main man Sonny Smith and his girlfriend of a decade parted ways. But where most breakup albums aim for the rawest nerve, Smith keeps a characteristically cool head. | Sonny and the Sunsets: Longtime Companion | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/16753-longtime-companion/ | Longtime Companion | Longtime Companion, the third LP from San Francisco garage-poppers Sonny and the Sunsets, came to be after main man Sonny Smith and his girlfriend of a decade parted ways. Breakup records tend toward the the maudlin and the oversharey, a place to air out all that dark-night-of-the-soul stuff over a couple of heartbroken chords. It's a loose template, to be sure, but it's all a far cry from the eternally bemused Smith's perma-grin. For Longtime Companion, Smith and his Sunsets have upended their warm, worn-in oldies-nodding pop for an expansive, lightly psychedelic spin on 1970s country-rock, while whittling away much of the charmingly goofy eccentric uncle humor that peppered 2010's Tomorrow Is Alright and last year's Hit After Hit. But where most breakup albums aim directly for the rawest nerve, throughout Longtime, Smith keeps a characteristically cool head.
Smith's best songs often take the form of wily character studies or bizarro Vonnegutian inventions, like the murderous unguent at the heart of "Death Cream". Delving directly into affairs of the heart for Longtime Companion is quite a leap for the often one-step-removed Smith, and it's one he gamely sidesteps. Whether it's the (slightly randy) zoological metaphors of "Year of the Cock" or the "funny kind of sad joy" expressed amidst the blank shuffle of "I See the Void", Smith seems to be keeping most of the hows and whys to himself, dodging confession with emotional fence-sitting and silly stuff about roosters.
Oh, sure, there are at least a couple of clues as to what happened: His ex-baby's a divorcee, and Smith's the one who made her that way, and when they see each other around town, he's going to pretend that they're still together. But the more pointed stuff is outmatched by a well-worn, broadly drawn malaise that, in this age of Harvey Levin, doesn't give much away. This is where Longtime gets frustrating; a Blood on the Tracks-style bile-spew might be asking too much from a laidback character like Smith, but he's leaving more out of provocatively titled songs like "Dried Blood" or "My Mind Messed Up" than he's keeping in, holding the listener at just enough distance to make it easy to sympathize but next to impossible to truly relate.
Still, taken as a set of would-be sad-sack standards, Longtime perks up considerably. The record's sound is warm and lush; with its gorgeous swaths of flute and halo-encircled backup vocals, "Pretend You Love Me"-- having first appeared in tauter form on last year's Hit-- is the kind of song you want to float around in for a while. The Sunsets are, as ever, a subtly dazzling musical unit, and there's nary a wasted note throughout Longtime's half hour and change. And, though Smith's cool demeanor and apparent aversion to letting it all hang out keep Longtime Companion from feeling particularly personal, it just makes the few moments where his voice breaks all the more affecting. The record's easygoing pace, sturdy songwriting, and sunbaked production make it the third solid effort from the Sunsets. Still, it's the least of the three, retreating from Smith's stellar story-songs for an album that seems somewhat reluctant to tell its own tale. | 2012-06-28T02:00:02.000-04:00 | 2012-06-28T02:00:02.000-04:00 | Rock | Polyvinyl | June 28, 2012 | 6.5 | dc8114b7-ad6e-4ae8-a165-0fcf335e1aa6 | Paul Thompson | https://pitchfork.com/staff/paul-thompson/ | null |
The UK psych-pop band stretches out to embrace hip-hop production and personal biography. It comes across like a guy trying to tell you his life story in a packed Coachella tent. | The UK psych-pop band stretches out to embrace hip-hop production and personal biography. It comes across like a guy trying to tell you his life story in a packed Coachella tent. | Glass Animals: Dreamland | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/glass-animals-dreamland/ | Dreamland | Glass Animals have achieved an enviable and increasingly unusual form of modern success: They’re both wildly ubiquitous and anonymous. The Oxford band’s streaming numbers can be measured in billions, and they’ve popped up on every late-night show and festival fairground without revealing anything that might immediately distinguish them from, say, Electric Guest or Neon Trees. But Dave Bayley intends to fix that on Dreamland, describing the creation of the band’s third LP on the opening track and later referring to himself as “Wavey Davey.” In place of the sci-fi leanings and character studies of 2016’s How to Be a Human Being, Bayley makes his own humanity the story: a global citizen born to Welsh and Israeli parents, raised in Massachusetts and Texas before moving to the UK at 14, equally transfixed by the reclusive studio geniuses behind Pet Sounds and The Chronic 2001. But Glass Animals albums were never an ideal place to bare one’s soul, and Dreamland comes across like a guy trying to tell you his life story in a packed Coachella tent.
Though it’s as steeped in late-Clinton referentiality as any vaporwave record—witness Glass Animals’ ingenious Windows 98-styled website—Dreamland lives in a near future that will never happen. Less than two months ago, Glass Animals were still set to debut Dreamland at Bonnaroo 2020, the kind of environment that’s been very kind to bands like them: the ones who can filter more distinct variants of indie-leaning hip-hop, pop, and electronic music into a smooth, white caulk filling in the gaps between a Live Nation or Goldenvoice-financed lineup headlined by some permutation of Run the Jewels, Tame Impala, Chance the Rapper, and the Strokes.
Glass Animals have wisely updated their approach by wringing out the more waterlogged psych-pop elements of breakthrough hit “Gooey,” revealing a band more conversant with rap, more American than proudly British nerdlinger polymaths like alt-J and Everything Everything. After putting in behind-the-scenes work with Joey Bada$$, 6lack, and Wale, Bayley flaunts his connections in moments that provide jarring contrast with Glass Animals’ reliably sync-able synth-pop. Denzel Curry brings his fire-breathing energy to a guest verse on “Tokyo Drifting” that sounds beamed in from a completely different festival stage. The inclusion of Top Dawg engineer Derek Ali almost justifies a Dr. Dre namedrop on “Space Ghost Coast to Coast,” though I’m sure Bayley would justify rhyming “big dicks and big ol’ titties on the sly” with “bonafide Aquemini” (from “Waterfalls Coming Out of Your Mouth”) in any case.
For the most part, Dreamland’s use of hip-hop production is less obtrusive and off-putting, taking advantage of a particular memory loophole that causes 2016 to feel more distant than 1999. The rippling, Malibu-scented beat on “Tangerine” is blatant “Hotline Bling” homage, while the gelatinous guitars on “Heat Wave” could be plucked from any number of “wavy hip-hop” sample packs meant to emulate Frank Ocean’s “Ivy” on a bedroom producer’s budget. Two years ago, such sounds would’ve had the foul smell of something just beyond its use-by date. Now, they’re basically public domain.
None of the musical choices really align with Bayley’s attempts at world-building: The lyric sheet is densely packed with references to Scooby-Doo, “The Price Is Right,” Dunkaroos, Capri Sun, Pokémon, kickball, GoldenEye 007, Hot Pockets, Mr. Miyagi, hologram glasses, and Doom, like so many “only ’90s kids will remember this” memes. A more generous take is that Dreamland’s comprehensive survey of late-2010s algorithmic pop is Bayley’s strategy to become a Matty Healy or Frank Ocean-style double agent: a guy whose music frequently soundtracks the boutique-hotel pool parties, VIP pop-up lounges, and upscale clothing stores populated by the targets of his social critique. He chides someone for “posting aerial photos of you and your smoothie,” while confiding that “sometimes B-sides are the best songs,” calling back to more insightful singles by the 1975 and Frank Ocean. Meanwhile, Bayley’s own “too much quinoa and online shopping” feels plucked out of an iPhone 5S note full of manbun and cronut jokes.
Made by people too young to remember a pre-internet society, Dreamland instead indulges in that relatable and ultimately feeble longing for a time where we were just less online and more present in our personal relationships. But what’s the difference between scrolling through your Instagram feed and watching Bayley get lost in his memory bank? His sense of alienation isn’t particularly original or all that contemporary, and worse, Dreamland falls prey to the unfortunate mode of modern branding that conflates personal nostalgia with making a point. Glass Animals want to talk about The Way We Live, when it’s really just Let’s Remember Some Stuff.
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here.
Buy: Rough Trade
(Pitchfork earns a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.) | 2020-08-10T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-08-10T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Polydor | August 10, 2020 | 5.7 | dc81ccd6-6904-49b5-a5cd-e2f257631022 | Ian Cohen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ian-cohen/ | |
When you first hear this album, you'll be transported into the Martin Sheen role in Apocalypse Calvin,\n\ surrounded ... | When you first hear this album, you'll be transported into the Martin Sheen role in Apocalypse Calvin,\n\ surrounded ... | Calvin Johnson: What Was Me | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/4277-what-was-me/ | What Was Me | When you first hear this album, you'll be transported into the Martin Sheen role in Apocalypse Calvin, surrounded by affable brass and a CIA spook at a meeting so classified it doesn't even exist. A young Harrison Ford will be playing this album's a capella paean to dispassionate mobility, "Nothing to Hold Us Here," on a reel-to-reel, sweating and dreaming of making out with Kate Capshaw years later in Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom. When the album finishes, the older guy across the table from you will utter some you-had-to-be-there blarney about the human heart and some vicissitudes he noticed it had. Then he'll say, "We think it is quite clear that Calvin Johnson has... gone insane," an assessment you'll be obliged to affirm. Then you will be told that you should "terminate his command... with extreme prejudice," and then there's some strippers in a helicopter, and then Larry Fishburne dies, etc etc.
During all the jinx on the boat, you'll read Calvin's dossier and sustain an intriguing inner dialogue: "This guy was in Beat Happening back in the day. He's a beacon of the unpindownable punk spirit. He's seminal. He opened for Black Flag. He's got the last chapter in Our Band Could Be Your Life: Scenes from the American Indie Underground, 1981-1991. He launched the Halo Benders and Dub Narcotic Sound System. Criminy-shanks, man, DubNarcSS released 'Booty Run,' as randily pragmatic a seven-inch to come out on this planet. Johnson's an institution, like marriage and Astroglide. His fingerprints pock the legacies of a stable including artists as diverse as Beck and Modest Mouse. He has his own respected label. So why the hell would he go back into the fray, alone, with just an acoustic guitar and his acquired-taste throatations?"
When you arrive at Johnson's bizarre Olympia compound, you'll find a zonked Phil Elvrum waving his hands around, welcoming you, calming but also alarming you, explaining that he was Calvin's 'engineer,' though he sounds more like a hagiographer. He will compare Calvin to poets and legends, and shudder when extolling the debilitating oomph of Calvin's voice. When you finally meet Calvin, he'll have been expecting you. He knew you were sent to nix him. In fact, he'd already started marketing his new album as 'posthumous.' He will sit in the dark, rubbing his head and explaining to you via a 4\xBD-minute (ahem) a capella song, how "The Past Comes Back to Haunt." By Calvin's side are the mysterious women Mirah and the Gossip's Beth Ditto. They join him in the also (cough) a capella "Ode to St. Valentine" and "Lightnin Rod for Jesus," respectively, which are gorgeous and grating, respectively.
Hi! Thanks for reading! You know, we've had a lot of fun here today, but sometimes a feller ort to shoot straight: the above was an attempt to disqualify myself from having to deduct whether or not this album is an achievement or embarrassment. I can't figure it out. The album sounds as tossed-off as it does deliberate. The songs are as preposterously conceived as they are straightforwardly delivered, as jokey as they are sincere. Did you catch my drift re: the perplexing amount of a capella stuff? Even as a fan of "the voice," I can't wholeheartedly recommend that you purchase this disc, which at points suggests that Johnson is eager to join Irwin Chusid's freak collection and become, like Daniel Johnston, someone whose work is better when covered (which is as good a tangent as any on which to propose that the seeds of the greatest Chris Isaak or Anonymous Crooner album ever are resting here).
But see: one point on this here CD, which is largely a 'love' project, provides a satisfying bellow of desire reminiscent of the first Smiths album. It comes right after the three-minute mark on "Can We Kiss?" which is otherwise essentially a remake of a similarly themed but more imperative Halo Benders song. Suddenly, Johnson emits an "ohohhhhohhhh" followed by an "uhooohhohhhowwwohh," that redeems the status of commingling foodholes; the kitsch is automatically baptized out of celebrating an old-fashion liptangle. "Love Will Come Back Again," despite offering the popular redundancy of back-againness, is equally convincing, especially when Johnson booms subtle hints to his intended such as "unbuckle that Gingham dress." The aforementioned "Valentine" will melt the sentimental lobe of anyone lingering in love's potential orbit when both vocalists collide to plead, "Ooooh, give me a sign."
Despite some increments during which the vocal loudness is poorly modulated, What Was Me is easily Johnson's best harnessing of his divisive foghorn. If I'd heard the avant-Guthrie of the scrappy, miss-me-when-I'm-gone title track on Internet radio, I'd run out to buy this album, being sure to topple several senior citizens en route to the store where the jaded hippie half-mans the register. Same goes for "Lies Goodbye," an exercise in the elasticity of enunciation (e.g. "rage" becomes "rayeeyayeeyage"). The individual songs may be more than the sum of their aggravatingly drumless parts, but this album as a whole is less than that sum. Choruses are repeated ad comatosium, and one is left to wonder what even a provisional backing band could have offered material like the six-minute, no-key-change, basic-chord "Palriga." Many of us are so pathetic that we want the album playing in our car after the club closes to be cool and gregarious-- What Was Me's sweet bloviations might get you snickered at.
Still, these songs have bullied my head for weeks. The island-strum of "Warm Days" has soundtracked my fascination with a hyper-gesticulating woman in the opposite lane who flips her cellphone the bird. "The Past Comes Back to Haunt," for some reason, was my mantra as I stared at an SUV sporting a Jason Voorhees glow-in-the-dark hockey mask hanging from its rear-view, with two pine-shaped air-fresheners in the eyeholes. Even "Lightnin Rod for Jesus" colonized my brain as I watched crows eat fries out of a McBin. Which brings me back to wondering if this occasionally-acoustic-only album is just a nominee for the time capsule labeled "Crazy Shit We Did With Our Freedom," or the masterwork of an aimless Cupid. | 2002-07-30T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2002-07-30T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | K | July 30, 2002 | 6.9 | dc8aafd5-e538-4901-86f1-d1eccc2e0997 | William Bowers | https://pitchfork.com/staff/william-bowers/ | null |
On his first album in nine years, the zen party master uses his operatically excessive music to challenge you to give in to positivity and get over yourself. | On his first album in nine years, the zen party master uses his operatically excessive music to challenge you to give in to positivity and get over yourself. | Andrew W.K.: You’re Not Alone | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/andrew-wk-youre-not-alone/ | You’re Not Alone | Andrew W.K. hasn’t changed. He insists he has, and is typically earnest in his belief that he’s endured great tribulations and gained new wisdom to share. But by all outward appearances, he has been trapped in amber since 2001, still shouting feel-good, or feel-better, homilies over hyper-driven synth-metal riffage in his uniform of white T-shirt and white jeans. This is no slight—his bumper-sticker affirmations are perfectly suited to the current bleakness and uncertainty, and this is a good moment to seize for any enterprising guru with unblinking optimism to spare. He’s a cartoon, but a useful, benevolent, familiar one; the motor-mouthed genie in the lamp you didn’t mean to rub, but fuck it, now that you ask.
So much of Andrew W.K.’s career has been marked by trying to gauge whether he’s for real, whether he’s some pop concoction packaged by some unseen svengali, whether his happy hedonist routine is a joke or merely schtick. Tired: Cracking wise about how many Andrew W.K. songs have the word “party” in the title. Wired: Wishing you could be a little more like Andrew W.K.
You’re Not Alone, his first album in nine years, sounds the way getting bludgeoned to death with a pillowcase full of hardcover Tony Robbins books feels. The self-help angle, honed by years of motivational speaking and advice-column side-hustle, is made explicit via three-minute spoken-word interludes—pep talks to help get you through your day, or maybe just the album itself. It is the Gronk of listening experiences and loathes subtlety with as much holy fervor as it loathes negativity.
W.K. writes, performs, and produces in an operatically excessive style that makes Mutt Lange seem like Steve Albini. Compared to the frenetic industrial-lite 2001 breakthrough “Party Hard,” the tempo here is generally more leaden; every song sounds like it’s trying to put “The Final Countdown” out of work. There are a few standouts among the crowded field of aspiring forever-anthems: “I Don’t Know Anything” is a raucous, aggressively cheery Springsteen-on-MDMA fist-pumper about learning to accept and overcome self-doubt, and “Total Freedom” aims for group-sing-along nirvana, a nostalgia-driven lament that’s an “All My Friends” for the rest of the world. “You’re Not Alone,” the big finish, manages to wring poignancy out of the most obvious and obviously stated sentiment.
In Andrew W.K.’s dojo, pain and adversity aren’t to be avoided or feared, they are to be embraced, and regardless of what you think of the delivery method, that’s… not unhelpful advice. You don’t need to be told what an Andrew W.K. song called “Music Is Worth Living For” sounds like or is about; its mantra is cheesier than anything you might say out loud, but not necessarily cheesier than anything you might think to yourself.
And therein is the closest an album like this gets to subtext: He’s challenging you to make peace with the bad times and celebrate good times come on, but he’s also challenging you to give in to these resolutely simple pleasures and get over yourself. Being shouted at for 53 minutes to find some agency in the midst of chaos may not make for highly nuanced music, but it would be hard to argue that you couldn’t use it. This is kitchen-sink maximalism as refuge—just throw everything in there, there’s no time.
As such, the album is slyly backlash-proof; calling the platitudes banal just makes you part of the problem. Are you too cool for this? Are you above needing a little encouragement or zoning out to some mindless 1988-ass arena pablum? Do you think you’re in on the joke and just get a kick out of his power of positive winking? Well, sounds like you have some shit you need to work out. The message wouldn’t hit any harder if the music and lyrics were more understated or artful; the bluntness is the point, the medium is the message. Party on. | 2018-03-08T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2018-03-08T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Sony / Red | March 8, 2018 | 6.6 | dc9458ab-8619-47b3-b183-dc8cce313de0 | Steve Kandell | https://pitchfork.com/staff/steve-kandell/ | |
The singer, reality star, and social-media icon is joyous and defiant, projecting realness and flaunting considerable vocal chops. | The singer, reality star, and social-media icon is joyous and defiant, projecting realness and flaunting considerable vocal chops. | K. Michelle: KIMBERLY: The People I Used to Know | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/kimberly-the-people-i-used-to-know/ | KIMBERLY: The People I Used to Know | Not long after K. Michelle released Anybody Wanna Buy a Heart in 2014, I got into a spat with a student who threw shade at the singer. “She’s Kmart,” he said, wrinkling his nose. Of course she is, I said, but that’s description, not criticism. The star of “Love & Hip Hop Atlanta” and “K. Michelle: My Life,” whose R&B career has thrived despite the absence of pop crossovers, has no pretensions toward high culture. She’s your older sis or youngest aunt, laughing her ass off at Thanksgiving over a glass of wine.
Even as the Billboard Hot 100 becomes, thanks to Cardi B and Camila Cabello, more receptive to women of color who aren’t cooing support on a rapper’s tuff-love track, KIMBERLY: The People I Used to Know won’t get Michelle into the singles Top 10. Hell, at this point it won’t make many year-end top 10s either; a 21-track album may leave listeners winded. But she gives fewer fucks than she ever did, which results in a vocal commitment that makes her three previous albums look like warm-ups.
Vituperative but joyous in its command, “Kim K” is the album’s centerpiece. Besides her considerable vocal chops, a large part of her appeal is the projection of realness. “Black girl who’s angry/Media can’t stand me,” she sings over chopped-up piano chords and a sample of DeBarge’s “A Dream,” “I get to be in my feelings.” And it’s for those feelings that black women like Michelle are dismissed while, in her reckoning, black men pull the same shit yet are awarded Grammys. As usual with Michelle, she eschews psychobabble for blunt talk; there’s little trace of Mary J. Blige’s influence on this Memphis native, whose cadences evince a deeper affinity for hip-hop. Keyed to a beat mimicking submarine sonar, opening track “Alert” makes those affinities clear, with “clarity” always her lodestar. In a call-out to “HUMBLE.,” Michelle even gives Kendrick Lamar what-for. “Fuck them rappers who mumble,” she spits, perhaps scowling at fellow Georgians Future and Migos.
Whatever else, Michelle’s her own person, free to revel in her often splendid bad taste. No doubt some listeners will recoil from the thought of Michelle working with Chris Brown—I did, especially on a track called “Either Way” dedicated to thumbing its nose at haters. As we learned in “Kim K,” she relishes her independence. If a Chris Brown collaboration will get her streams and urban radio play, then she’ll do it: “I may never get this Grammy/But I’mma feed my family.” And she enjoys the perks, which include “Sleeping good at night, in the morning eating eggs and steak.” Producer Lil Ronnie’s stuttering beat hammers in every boast.
Included in this projection of realness is a submission to lust, even if she ends up looking abject; Michelle may have recorded “Talk to God,” but her desires are of the toned legs and hot butt variety. As she admits on another track, “Heaven couldn’t save me.” Finger snaps and gospel piano chords color Eric Hudson’s “Brain on Love,” a valentine to a lover who insists on his pound of flesh: “I know I’m a handful/That’s why you’ve got two hands.”
Bawdy, courting foolishness, K. Michelle is a throwback to an earlier era of R&B and an ideal social media personality. Her voice is the unguent. KIMBERLY: The People I Used to Know may lack a thumper like “V.S.O.P.” or a slow jam as urgent as “Drake Would Love Me,” still her greatest performance, but it continues a remarkable four-album streak. And we need her as much as she needs us. | 2017-12-08T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2017-12-08T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Pop/R&B | Atlantic | December 8, 2017 | 7 | dc981318-da39-4443-baed-c49ef6e13950 | Alfred Soto | https://pitchfork.com/staff/alfred-soto/ | |
The Scottish band is on familiar ground, patiently building mountainous songs suffused in nameless sadness, but they sound energized by the darkness—and refreshingly resistant to self-seriousness. | The Scottish band is on familiar ground, patiently building mountainous songs suffused in nameless sadness, but they sound energized by the darkness—and refreshingly resistant to self-seriousness. | Mogwai: As the Love Continues | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/mogwai-as-the-love-continues/ | As the Love Continues | A Mogwai melody always sounds like a eulogy for someone you’ve never met. Whether played on a hushed piano or pushed through Stuart Braithwaite and Barry Burns’ guitars, their writing is sad in a way that’s not personal: full of familiar emotions, but still opaque about the specifics. After 25 years, 10 studio albums, a dozen or so EPs, and plentiful film scores, Mogwai’s fingerprints have become easy to recognize. As they’ve aged into elder statesmen of post-rock—two terms they would undoubtedly hate—they’ve become like a football team running the Air Raid offense: They only call a handful of plays, but when they run them well, they’re basically impossible to stop.
While they do spring a few new tricks, Mogwai are hard at work in their usual mode on As the Love Continues, patiently building mountainous songs and willing themselves into scaling them. These steady climbs have long made them a go-to name for directors looking to add a little spooky gravitas to their films, and while they’ve mastered the ability to reshape the Mogwai sound to fit the needs of someone else’s creative project, at times that seemed to come at the expense of their own. Thankfully, As the Love Continues builds on the work of 2017’s strong Every Country’s Sun, retaining that album’s energy and expansiveness while deepening their investment in the undefined sadness that has long been their emotional hallmark. There’s so much saudade dripping off the rainy edifices of this album, it’s practically Glaswegian bossa nova.
Mogwai’s fascination with the gnawing, nameless gulf drives As the Love Continues. Whether because of the conditions of its creation—with the band locked down in Worcestershire, England, and producer Dave Fridmann working by remote from the U.S.—or the conditions of its release, 11 months into quarantine, the dull ache at the album’s center is potent; the music seems more personal, sweatier, hot with breath. In “Midnight Fit,” the band twists slowly around a single chord, wrapping it with wigged-out keys and scuds of guitar, while Atticus Ross’ string arrangement faints repeatedly in the foreground. The beat—skipping slightly, as if it’s nearly lost its footing—never changes, and as a result, it never quite steadies itself, keeping the song from ever feeling totally grounded. It’s an achievement that stands with their best work, and the song’s shrieking drama, taunted by chords and drums that refuse to alter their courses, gives it a sense of tragic inevitability. It’s like watching someone stumble unknowingly toward an open pit.
While cruel fate and thwarted spirit have long been Mogwai’s bread and butter, it’s refreshing to hear them so engaged with and energized by their particular darkness. When Braithwaite’s voice emerges from a field of distorted guitars and bass in “Ritchie Sacramento,” he sounds like he’s reporting from the end of the world after having done his best to stave off the inevitable; in “Dry Fantasy,” the persistent suck of the backing track erodes away at YMO-like keyboard tones and flashes of New Order’s romanticism. Even opener “To the Bin, My Friend, Tonight We Vacate Earth” surges beyond its inauspicious opening, becoming stadium-sized and suffused with valedictory grace in a way that suggests Nick Cave’s Ghosteen, all while keeping its hollow core intact.
This dedication to beautiful ennui would be insufferable if Mogwai felt like it made them special, but they’ve long delighted in seeming not to take this very-serious-sounding music very seriously. Mogwai have long known that the nature of what they do—sweeping, dramatic, and ultimately blank—makes a brilliant screen for their listeners’ projections, and to their immense credit, they’ve always made a point of shitting on any attempt to turn their music into something precious; they’re practically daring you to form an emotional connection to a song called “I’m Jim Morrison, I’m Dead.” When it works, this general insouciance deflates the grandeur and mythos, and ultimately makes the music itself feel more honest, even when it’s at its most irreverent.
To that end, a goofy ringtone beat kicks off “Here, Here We, Here We Go Forever,” eventually giving way to cement-thick distortion and what sounds like a guitar run through a talkbox, the vocals technically indecipherable but, emotionally speaking, easy to understand. They blast their way out of a soggy mid-album stretch with the uncharacteristically cheery rocker “Ceiling Granny,” whose tonal richness and triumphant crescendos make it feel like a distant cousin to Smashing Pumpkins’ “Rocket.” On “Supposedly, We Were Nightmares” they even play with the arpeggiated technicolors of Dan Deacon or Glassworks-era Philip Glass, and while it’s not necessarily an artistic success, it’s still charming to hear them write a song you could conceivably dance to.
Less effective is the pummeling “Drive the Nail,” the rare Mogwai song whose title accurately describes how it sounds; though they build toward relentless heaviness, the band doesn’t seem to know what to do with it, and ends up cycling through verses and choruses for seven minutes, their hammering never quite brutal enough to justify the repetition. Elsewhere, they set shrieking synths in the outer bands of “Fuck Off Money,” but the song’s lack of direction makes it feel like a hurricane in need of a path, and it ultimately spins out to nothing. Most disappointingly, Fridmann’s production buries a guest spot from saxophonist Colin Stetson, whose wild playing behind the Come on Die Young chording of “Pat Stains” provides a level of notational chaos that Mogwai, for all their love of volume and texture, simply don’t do on their own. Foregrounding order while a song builds to bursting in the background is one of the band’s best moves, but by never allowing Stetson to overtake them in the mix, they waste one of their most interesting collaborations.
Still, these are mostly problems of excess, all of them solvable by simply trimming the hour-long runtime, and Mogwai are always more interesting as maximalists. When it’s at its best, this album proves they’re becoming more certain of what their ambitions should be—and, crucially, who they are as a band. As the Love Continues comes off as a reminder of the emptiness of all things and the importance of finding meaning anyway. It’s a hymn to melancholy, and a strike against infinite sadness.
Buy: Rough Trade
(Pitchfork earns a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.)
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-02-22T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2021-02-22T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Temporary Residence Ltd. | February 22, 2021 | 6.9 | dcafdaad-0c03-4092-89ad-538dd6bda8da | Sadie Sartini Garner | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sadie-sartini garner/ | |
The sleek Baltimore synth-pop band's latest might be their most explicitly political and theoretical work, tackling nothing less than the socio-psychological ravages of capitalism. | The sleek Baltimore synth-pop band's latest might be their most explicitly political and theoretical work, tackling nothing less than the socio-psychological ravages of capitalism. | Lower Dens: The Competition | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/lower-dens-the-competition/ | The Competition | The Baltimore band Lower Dens are no strangers to fitting sophisticated political thinking into pop songs. 2015’s Escape From Evil imagined a queer utopia built from the sounds of the past, and frontperson Jana Hunter’s rich voice made that future sound both vivid and elusive, an inspired marriage of sound and message. Their latest record The Competition might be their most explicitly political and theoretical yet, which is to say it is also their most didactic.
It’s called The Competition because, according to Hunter, the album considers the “socio-psychological” impact generated by the aggressions of capitalism and the free market. Conceptually, it’s almost an extension of Escape From Evil: Where that album mined pop history to track a course toward a queer future, The Competition is mired in the muck of the present, finding beauty and horror in the everyday. Sonically, it shares a lot with Escape From Evil, steeped in the sounds of the ’70s and ’80s, evoking at once the heat of Throbbing Gristle and the sheen of Roxy Music.
It’s a lot for one album to take on, and while Lower Dens tackle their themes with commendable ambition and skill, they run into some rough spots. Forced through the sieve of the overarching concept, some of the songs, both in sound and content, come off as overwrought and obvious. Take “Empire Sundown,” the closest the album comes to a call to arms. Hunter sings about the urgent need for revolution—“They take everything but they/Can’t tell us how to defend ourselves/The tide is gonna turn”—but the robotic drawl of their voice and chug of the drum machine denudes the effect. Amidst a frenzy of flashing synths on “Simple Life,” Hunter reflects on the the class divide, a little clumsily: “Chain ourselves to circumstances/I needa/Gotta know/If we ever had a chance.”
There are moments where the beauty of the music matches the seriousness of the writing. In “I Drive,” featuring the singer :3LON, Hunter spins a tale about the hegemony of heterosexuality wrapped up in the pure pleasure of retro pop. And on “Young Republicans,” which is about the death drive of the right wing, Hunter delivers the album’s sharpest line (“Born without souls or blood or skin/We’re young republicans”) with elan.
The strongest songs are the simplest: The Competition’s highlight is “Real Thing,” which came out three years before the album was even announced. It’s a heartbreaking track, made to sound like a sock-hop standard, redolent of the Boomer ennui of The Big Chill. Using all those symbols, Hunter tells the album’s best story: of the love one goes searching for outside the confines of traditional marriage. “I’m married to a terrific guy/I’ll never leave until I die/But I just love to get out and get it on/I don’t wanna live possessed by a memory,” Hunter sings at the start, before a beautiful tangle of guitar synth joins them.
What makes this song so effective—so affecting, maybe—is pretty basic: The power of Hunter’s voice, the clarity of the writing, and the richness of the sound stick in the way the album’s more labored songs can’t. It’s a political song, in so much as it inverts expectations, it hijacks tropes and makes them something new. But it’s exceptional for a whole other reason, too. It’s a great love song—one that just cracks you open.
Buy: Rough Trade
(Pitchfork may earn a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.) | 2019-09-11T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-09-11T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Ribbon Music | September 11, 2019 | 6.7 | dcb98f86-1f8e-42af-bfb3-aac716fdccdc | Kevin Lozano | https://pitchfork.com/staff/kevin-lozano/ | |
Formed in 1996 and over and done within four years, Laddio Bolocko was the strangest, most slept-on New York band of its time. This set of live takes and rarities adds to the group’s unfairly thin catalog, allowing a peek into the communal jamming and weeded-out home studio experimentation that drove their creative process. | Formed in 1996 and over and done within four years, Laddio Bolocko was the strangest, most slept-on New York band of its time. This set of live takes and rarities adds to the group’s unfairly thin catalog, allowing a peek into the communal jamming and weeded-out home studio experimentation that drove their creative process. | Laddio Bolocko: Live and Unreleased: 1997-2000 | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21283-live-and-unreleased-1997-2000/ | Live and Unreleased: 1997-2000 | Formed in 1996 and over and done within four years, Laddio Bolocko was the strangest, most slept-on New York band of its time. They had some precedent in far-out outfits like Faust and This Heat, who used studio technology, isolation, and willful primitivism to push their music to into extreme places. And, because they blended '70s experimentalism with elements of American underground punk music, they had distant cousins in post-rock groups, like Tortoise and Trans Am (with whom they toured). Their vibe was very different, though. Tortoise was serene and vibey. Trans Am had a sense of humor. Laddio plowed down a different path altogether -- following common influences toward dark psychedelia and the occult.
Live and Unreleased collects odds and ends pulled from Laddio Bolocko's archives, including rehearsal tapes, concert recordings, and a DVD's worth of grainy concert footage. These are hardly throwaways or fans-only ephemera, though. The set—which spans two CDs or three LPs—adds depth and dimension to the group's unfairly thin catalog, allowing a peek into the communal jamming and weeded-out home studio experimentation that drove the band's creative process.
Liner notes by Oneida drummer Kid Millions give insight into the quartet's brief, grubby existence. After relocating to Brooklyn from southern Illinois during the mid '90s, drummer Blake Fleming, guitarist Drew St. Ivany, and bassist Ben Armstrong found a low-rent practice/living space in then-blighted Dumbo that offered no shower, but allowed no-complaints all-hours music-making.
The 20-minute "43 Minutes of (Excerpt)" is drawn from this time and captures the trio finding its stylistic footing. They trance out big-time here, with Armstrong and St. Ivany plugging away at car alarm-style riffs on bass and keyboard while Fleming goes wild on the kit. The tape marked the emergence of an idea that would drive the band's later work—mainly, the skewing of the senses through high-volume repetition—and also possibly helped to win over saxophonist Marcus DeGrazia, who engineered the session and who would join the band full-time shortly thereafter.
Looking for a change in scene, Laddio later decamped to an abandoned ski lodge in upstate New York. This period accounts for the collection's darker, more abstract material— where the band moved off the grid and completely into its own territory. Tracks like "Catskills # 3" and "Catskills #5" are full of alien melodies, haunting found sounds, and phantom piano tones. The music has an eerie energy to it, as if it wasn't so much being consciously written as channeled into existence. It's as if the quartet slipped down some strange Lovecraftian wormhole -- not so much in these sense that the music evokes horror, but that the band's druggy transcendence brings only disquiet and distance. After plotting out the material for their second record, In Real Time, Laddio ended its stay in the countryside and returned to Dumbo, where they landed in an even filthier crash pad. Not long after, the group called it quits. Armstrong and St. Ivany would go on to form the excellent trio, the Psychic Paramount while Fleming would do a few off-and-on stints in the Mars Volta and perform in the band Electric Turn to Me, along with DeGrazia.
Awesome as they were, it's hard to say that Laddio Bolocko has spawned many imitators. They were just too obscure. Millions' band, Oneida, embraced similar ideas and sounds, but the drummer admits that during Laddio's lifetime, even he had never heard of the band. But it would be hard to replicate the quartet's magic, anyway.
Laddio toured extensively throughout its existence and the live recordings included here—six songs taped during a performance in Slovenia—provide the some of the set's most compelling material. On stage, the band's strange and diverse ideas gel together perfectly. The songs are otherworldly, but visceral. The quartet performs with intensity and shared purpose that seems somehow paranormal, nudging out of their regular songs into unknown territory, searching out an ecstatic state. | 2015-12-07T01:00:03.000-05:00 | 2015-12-07T01:00:03.000-05:00 | Experimental | No Quarter | December 7, 2015 | 7.8 | dcc18ce5-fcf3-4c85-98bc-e76286c21c05 | Aaron Leitko | https://pitchfork.com/staff/aaron-leitko/ | null |
On his first solo LP in 27 years, house producer Mike Dunn celebrates the old school: Acid lines squirm, vintage drum machines knock and thrash, and Dunn holds court with his commanding baritone. | On his first solo LP in 27 years, house producer Mike Dunn celebrates the old school: Acid lines squirm, vintage drum machines knock and thrash, and Dunn holds court with his commanding baritone. | Mike Dunn: My House From All Angles | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/mike-dunn-my-house-from-all-angles/ | My House From All Angles | Mike Dunn has been making house music for about as long as the style has existed. The Chicago native started producing in the early 1980s and came up DJing at house parties, where he’d flesh out his sets with drum machines and reel-to-reel tapes. The driving nature of early anthems like 1987’s “Dance You Mutha” comes, in part, from his improvising tunes in clubs, then going home and recreating more polished versions in his studio. Never too polished, though: Mike Dunn classics like “Dance You Mutha” and “Magic Feet” are prized for their raw, urgent feel, with unvarnished drum machines wreathed in gnarly acid basslines and his signature crowd-stoking vocals.
Dunn never stopped working. In the 2000s, he produced R&B singers like Syleena Johnson, and a deal with Diddy’s Bad Boy label had him making rap tracks like True Enuff’s “On My Momma.” Lately, alongside fellow Chicago veteran Terry Hunter, he’s been turning out sumptuous soulful house under the name House N’HD; his recent solo work is in the swinging, percussive style known as Afro house. But his glory days were the late ’80s and early 1990s, so it makes sense that he returns to those sounds on My House From All Angles. His first solo full-length in 27 years is essentially a celebration of the old school: Acid lines squirm, vintage drum machines (or their contemporary plug-in equivalents) knock and thrash, and throughout it all, Dunn holds court with his commanding baritone, alternately glowering and effervescent.
On the one hand, it’s an auspicious moment for musicians like Dunn who have been at it for decades: The raw machine sounds of ’80s and ’90s house are as hot as they’ve ever been, and there’s a hunger for fresh material that sounds old. (Much of Dunn’s most visible output of the past few years has entailed dusting off old tapes and collaborating with newer artists on explicitly retro-flavored songs; one of those, Jax Jones’ “House Work,” featuring Dunn and MNEK, has racked up 11 million YouTube streams in the past year and a half.) The risk veterans face is that there’s little incentive to push themselves past the sounds that first defined them. That’s the downfall of My House From All Angles: It’s full of capable floor-fillers, but it rarely offers listeners much they haven’t heard many times before.
My House is best when it aims for classic, rather than expressly retro. “Have It for You Babe” sounds like the kind of loopy disco-house cut that sent Daft Punk down their own filter-happy rabbit holes; “Modulation” is a slowly building acid cut with cavernous synth stabs reminiscent of big-room New York house. On “DJ Beat That Shhh,” the album’s highlight, luminous pads underscore Dunn’s most playful vocal performance, where his gravelly interjections function as pure texture. For the most part, My House sticks to the hip-house wheelhouse. There are chilly acid tracks overlaid with heavy-breathing vocals more spoken than sung: invocations of “that acid rush,” commands to “move it,” rapturous tributes to “that body music/That keeps you in a trance.” Too many of these tracks fall flat. The beats, basslines, and vocals all suffer from over-familiarity. It doesn’t help that two different songs rhyme “soul” with “lose control.” You get the sense that the well is running dry here.
Early in “DJ Beat That Shhh,” Dunn purrs, “Let’s take it back to the ’90s.” Ironically, it’s one of the few tracks on the album that doesn’t sound like his ’90s recordings. Its bright keys and vivacious vocal style are more in keeping with “This Here Is House Muzik” and “Na Na Na Na (I Walks With God),” a pair of bubbly songs Dunn put out in 2008. Where his early tunes are gritty as a basement’s concrete floor, those two are crystalline and soaring, and his voice bounces and skips in the same way that it does on “DJ Beat That Shhh,” like a perpetual-motion machine driven by chuckles. Like them, “DJ Beat That Shhh” offers the tantalizing suggestion that the real secret to house veterans’ longevity might not lie in reliving old glories after all. | 2017-12-14T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2017-12-14T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Electronic | MoreAboutMusic / Blackball Muzik | December 14, 2017 | 6 | dcc690a3-6c8b-480e-9d39-19d4e4c09d45 | Philip Sherburne | https://pitchfork.com/staff/philip-sherburne/ | |
On their first album in over a decade, the Swedish garage-rock mainstays refuse to evolve or age—they are here for a good time and absolutely nothing else. | On their first album in over a decade, the Swedish garage-rock mainstays refuse to evolve or age—they are here for a good time and absolutely nothing else. | The Hives: The Death of Randy Fitzsimmons | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/the-hives-the-death-of-randy-fitzsimmons/ | The Death of Randy Fitzsimmons | The Hives are the first to admit that all their songs sound the same. “We’re sharks,” lead singer Howlin’ Pelle Almqvist told Rolling Stone. “Sharks have been the same for billions of years, and they still rule. You have no need for development if you’re a shark. You don’t evolve since nothing kills you.” The band’s latest album, The Death of Randy Fitzsimmons, is shot through with this sort of galaxy-brained tween-boy logic. Their formula is both stupid and sublime: sledgehammer guitars, drums that sound like they’re being punctured as they’re being played, obtuse lyrics delivered at a steady Scandinavian scream. Look elsewhere for maturity and subtlety. The Hives have only one goal: a bloody good time.
The gory fantasia on display has been in place from day one. Legend has it, in 1993, the five original Hives, then adolescents, were plucked from small-town Swedish obscurity by an elusive Svengali named Randy Fitzsimmons. Guitarist Nicholaus Arson once described Fitzsimmons as “the brain of the band,” “the sixth member,” and the writer of all of their songs. When he died under mysterious circumstances, the Hives went on hiatus—that is until unanswered questions about his death led the band to excavate his supposed grave. Rather than a corpse, the casket held an album’s worth of music and lyrics.
Of course, none of this is true. Randy Fitzsimmons is Arson’s songwriting pseudonym and the Hives’ long hiatus was a result of health problems. Mundane mortality, sickness, and surgery collided with the band’s fantasy world, and this bolt of urgency may account for the sheer rage of their new album. Filmmaker Aube Perrie’s music video for this album’s opening track, “Bogus Operandi,” features the Hives being picked off one by one, then zombified, in a campy play on Stieg Larsson’s Scandi-noirs. Beneath the goofy horror parody is an air of genuine threat: getting older, getting sick. Randy Fitzsimmons may be a fantasy, but The Death of is all too real.
Even as life interferes, you can imagine the album as a flight of whiskey: subtle variations on one recipe, pure fun to consume, liable to intensify one’s desire to punch cops. Very occasionally, the production is countryfied to achieve a spaghetti western vibe, or larded with Halloween pedal effects. Hand claps, gang vocals, and call-and-response choruses fill out the band’s bag of tricks. The one true outlier is the break-up ballad “What Did I Ever Do to You?” The sultry, slow-burning torch song is a poor fit for the lead singer’s strengths, and a real vibe-killer to boot.
Far better are the tracks where the Hives marry a sense of righteous outrage with the just-plain-outrageous. “Two Kinds of Trouble” draws hard ethical lines—“Enemies! Friends!”—that get fuzzier—“Cops! Police!”—and further from legibility—“Boats! Planes! Norwegians! And Danes!”—as the song goes on. Howlin’ Pelle delivers the anti-capitalist anthem “Countdown to Shutdown,” interspersing dead-serious commentary on economic inequality with call-outs to “my guy Ponzi,” who “had a scheme.” (In a press release, Howlin’ Pelle called this song “37 percent more effective than the closest competitor and sure to help your Q2 and Q3 results.”) The band even brushes self-parody, to delightful effect, in “The Bomb,” stretching the call-and-response chorus to its furthest limit:
What do you wanna do? Get down!
What don’t you wanna do? Get up!
What don’t you wanna not don’t do? Not get down!
What don’t you wanna not don’t wanna do? Not get up!
None of the Hives’ brethren in the garage revival would ever risk sounding this stupid. Most of them have long since stopped serving up thick slabs of rock beef, opting instead for brainy blues, à la Jack White, or yearning paeans to a bygone scene, à la the Strokes. By contrast, the Hives cling sincerely to all things cornball, refusing to die or even to age. Nobody ever said sharks had good taste. | 2023-08-15T00:02:00.000-04:00 | 2023-08-15T00:02:00.000-04:00 | Rock | FUGA | August 15, 2023 | 6.9 | dcca9992-3211-4bbd-8732-5f9060b6cdc3 | Peyton Thomas | https://pitchfork.com/staff/peyton-thomas/ | |
Kimbra's L.A.-recorded second album The Golden Echo is the Gotye collaborator's latest wager for staying power, but too often it overstays its welcome. The album's overlong, overdone nature suggests that she doesn't know how to refine her ideas beyond adding to them until they sound overstuffed. | Kimbra's L.A.-recorded second album The Golden Echo is the Gotye collaborator's latest wager for staying power, but too often it overstays its welcome. The album's overlong, overdone nature suggests that she doesn't know how to refine her ideas beyond adding to them until they sound overstuffed. | Kimbra: The Golden Echo | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/19635-kimbra-the-golden-echo/ | The Golden Echo | Following a boost in visibility from Gotye's mega-hit "Somebody That I Used to Know", Kimbra's L.A.-recorded second album The Golden Echo is her wager for staying power, but too often it overstays its welcome. The Los Angeles-via-Melbourne-via-Hamilton singer reportedly cut the already-overlong album down to 12 tracks from 70, leaving cherished collaborations with Dave Longstreth and Flying Lotus to languish in a negative zone; while those ostensibly difficult decisions might suggest a ruthless approach to editing, the resulting album suggests that she's either a poor pick, leaving out some of her choicest shit, or doesn't know how to refine her ideas beyond adding to them until they sound overstuffed.
Gone is the alt-pop piper of "Settle Down" which had her lining up next to the Regina Spektorites; in its place, Kimbra attempts to sub a sprawling, clamorous vision where pop music is all things at all times. Bold and vulnerable, naked and swaddled, topical and timeless; the desire to reconcile these contradictions is everywhere on The Golden Echo, but it's a struggle to untangle them. Polarizing first single "90s Music" acts as a mission statement for the rest of the album, milking yester-yesteryear's R&B and flavoring it with kawaii affectation and a trap beat. "90s Music" sounds like it came from the temporal singularity, and if the other 11 tracks on The Golden Echo matched its coherence, it'd be an unmitigated success.
This potentially alienating take on pop places her as a contemporary of Janelle Monáe, except where Monáe's explicitly performative nature served as a rallying point for reconciling post-modern dehumanization and globalization, Kimbra seems too infatuated with the attendant spectacle to offer any comment. As an eclectic producer, Kimbra places herself to the left of the mainstream, but only just so: more straightforward tracks like "As You Are" and "Nobody But You", as well as the disco slink of "Miracle", alternate between lazy and capitulating modes. "Miracle" is perhaps the most egregious example of this occurrence: luscious, punchy, and faithful to the genre, "Miracle" could've been the strongest track on the album if it didn't drag on for a minute and a half too long. If "90s Music" is emblematic of The Golden Echo's squandered potential for success, "Miracle" is emblematic of all its shortcomings.
In spite of all that, amongst this interminable mess are enough moments that show Kimbra to be one of the most adventurous pop artists going. She nearly one-ups Passion Pit at their own game on the breezy, gluco-sick "Carolina", while the languid, lovelorn "Rescue Him" casts a distorted shadow of Justin Timberlake. For now, though, Kimbra's status as "That singer from the Gotye song" woefully underserves her full potential, but so does The Golden Echo. | 2014-08-14T02:00:03.000-04:00 | 2014-08-14T02:00:03.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | Warner Bros. | August 14, 2014 | 4.3 | dcd28e30-0cf2-4ad6-8cd3-9738dd1410ef | Jake Cleland | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jake-cleland/ | null |
Leaning into both his songwriting and his studio experimentation, the Texas guitarist proves his eagerness to move beyond the confines of modern blues. | Leaning into both his songwriting and his studio experimentation, the Texas guitarist proves his eagerness to move beyond the confines of modern blues. | Gary Clark Jr.: This Land | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/gary-clark-jr-this-land/ | This Land | It’s startling to hear Gary Clark Jr. begin This Land by spitting out a chorus of “Run, nigger, run”—the words he hears spit at him “right in the middle of Trump country.” Two years into the Donald J. Trump administration, anti-Trump songs aren’t exactly uncommon, but very few take dead aim at the openly racist politics surrounding the MAGA movement. That alone makes “This Land” bracing, but having these sentiments sung by Gary Clark Jr.—an artist who has until now studiously avoided making grand statements—is all the more powerful: It feels like the times have pushed the blues guitarist to take a stand.
According to Clark, it wasn’t merely the overall political climate that pushed him to write “This Land,” it was a specific incident with a new neighbor—one who couldn’t believe a young black man could own a sprawling ranch just outside of Austin. Gary Clark Jr. channeled his anger over this casual racism into a dose of fury so controlled, its origin becomes obscured—it becomes a proper blues song, in other words, where the specific is turned into something universal.
Ironically, “This Land” isn’t necessarily a harbinger for the rest of This Land, the Texas bluesman’s third studio album. Apart from “Feed the Babies,” which offers a vague plea for growth and understanding, there isn’t another song that directly confronts a societal woe, nor is there much anger flowing through its other 15 songs. What “This Land” does indicate is how Clark no longer feels restricted by the confining dictates of modern blues.
Even before the 2012 release of his debut, Blak and Blu, Clark called the blues world his home, cutting his teeth at the legendary Austin club Antone’s—the same place where Stevie Ray Vaughan began his rise to stardom. Often, it seemed as if Clark had stepped into SRV’s shoes: They shared an idol in Jimi Hendrix, a preternatural gift for mimicry (both guitarists could emulate their heroes at a drop of a hat), and an instinct to crank amplifiers to their limits. Clark’s tendency to release live albums after a studio set was a tacit admission that what his audience really wanted to hear was solo after solo—an acknowledgment that many modern blues fans prize pyrotechnics over songs.
There is plenty of guitar on This Land—“Highway 71” is nothing but an extended solo—but six-string prowess seems a secondary concern for Clark this time around; he’s happy to use the instrument for texture, not shredding. Blues also takes a backseat on This Land. It’s there on the fringes, informing the chord changes and coloring the arrangements, happily existing as coda on the finger-picked “Dirty Dishes Blues” and on the boozy stumble “The Governor,” but it’s not at the forefront. Instead, Clark draws deeply from the legacies of Prince and Curtis Mayfield, punctuating his slow-burning ballads, densely colored soul, and churning psychedelia with elongated reggae jams (“Feeling Like a Million”) and blasts of burning rock’n’roll (“Gotta Get Into Something”). Hints of these sounds could be heard on Clark’s previous album, The Story of Sonny Boy Slim—opening track “The Healing” and “Wings” were built upon drum loops, and “Star” and “Can’t Sleep” feigned funk—but on This Land, these interests don’t play as accoutrements: They’re the entire reason the album exists.
Usually, Clark works these lush, layered sounds into a sharply executed piece of roots-pop, enlivening retro cliches through keen hooks and imaginative juxtapositions: “When I’m Gone” melds an easy Windy City groove to a touch of Latin rumble, “Don’t Wait Til Tomorrow” threads drum loops and samples through its soulful plea. Sometimes Clark and co-producer Jacob Sciba rely on sound over song—it’s possible to envision “Got to Get Up” as an anthem designed to revive flagging audience interest at the tail end of a long set—yet that’s ultimately to the album’s benefit, since their studio concoctions feel more kinetic than a Clark concert. Even better, This Land is the first place where Gary Clark Jr. doesn’t appear hemmed in by the past. The album may be informed by old sounds and forms, yet these familiar tropes feel fresh thanks to Clark’s idiosyncratic splicing—a cross-cultural, pan-genre sensibility that speaks to the modern world as a whole, just as “This Land” speaks to this individual moment. | 2019-03-02T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2019-03-02T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Warner Bros. | March 2, 2019 | 7.9 | dcda2f4d-b2d2-4cb0-a2ac-9a5934225960 | Stephen Thomas Erlewine | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stephen-thomas erlewine/ | |
On her second solo EP in two years, the rising UK producer leans into her fusion of jungle breaks and irresistible melodies. Her emotional acuity reveals the makings of a uniquely talented pop writer. | On her second solo EP in two years, the rising UK producer leans into her fusion of jungle breaks and irresistible melodies. Her emotional acuity reveals the makings of a uniquely talented pop writer. | Nia Archives: Sunrise Bang Ur Head Against tha Wall EP | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/nia-archives-sunrise-bang-ur-head-against-tha-wall-ep/ | Sunrise Bang Ur Head Against tha Wall EP | If Nia Archives is shouldering the weight of expectations, then she’s not letting it show. Over the past 18 months, the Bradford-born, London-based producer has scooped up pretty much every UK industry accolade available to her (including a MOBO win, NME nod, and spots on BBC and BRIT polls) and seemingly been bridled with the responsibility of resurrecting jungle music for an entire new generation—all on the back of just a handful of tracks, along with many electrifying DJ sets. Yet she moves with the lightness of someone who’s just floated out of the club and into a cab, grinning for whatever’s next.
She seems, rightfully, thrilled by the whole thing, and it’s arguably this unfettered, joyous touch that has brought so many flocking to her flurried breakbeats. On Sunrise Bang Ur Head Against tha Wall, her second six-track solo EP, she pulls her jazzy vocals to the fore and dispenses with some of the more meticulous production tricks that so impressively peppered last year’s Forbidden Feelingz. This puts her knack for documenting the minutiae of party life, and all the emotional tangles that trail it, front and center—and reveals the makings of a uniquely talented pop writer.
But first: “Baianá.” The opener here, built around an accelerated, dissected sample of Brazilian body-music troupe Barbatuques, is fun with a capital Fuck Yes. Voices are repurposed as rave sirens, no drum is too many, and the only sign of a let-up comes in the brief blips when she lets her bass and shattered snares rumble on alone and unaccosted. After peak time, there are moves to be made at the afters. “That’s tha Way Life Goes” offers bittersweet rave gear as Nia Archives’ pirouettes towards a revelation: “Cos if it ain’t you, then it’s nobody/I gave you my soul, my mind, and body.” It's that most binding of vapid modern idioms—“it is what it is”—injected with the potent surprise of life and love. Plumped on marshmallow basslines and cooing chorus vocals, accepting your fate never sounded so lush.
The strings that glisten over the bridge of “So Tell Me…”, meanwhile, are reminiscent, with all the same tender feeling, of the soundtrack to Mike Skinner drying his eyes back in 2004. Like Skinner, though with less affectation, Nia Archives has the ability to depict life’s sordid, perhaps even regretful, kitchen-sink situations with unguarded honesty, empathy, and understanding. When it’s not Nia singing, she turns her obsessive break-splicing skills to give Maverick Sabre’s roll-neck vocals an injection of funk in a classic lovers’ back-and-forth on “No Need 2 Be Sorry, Call Me?”
If only there were more of all this. For the most part, these tracks offer snapshots and fragments that might otherwise unfurl into more fleshed-out stories. Then again, maybe that’s the point: This is an EP about dragging out the night’s short end, and making well-intentioned plans for life’s daylight hours. It’s party music for people beginning to feel the tug of seeing a full Sunday for the first time in a while. | 2023-03-14T00:01:00.000-04:00 | 2023-03-14T00:01:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Hijinxx / Island | March 14, 2023 | 7.4 | dced8703-07e5-4ccf-9805-2fe9ad8b0639 | Will Pritchard | https://pitchfork.com/staff/will-pritchard/ | |
Chromatics set their surprise “seventh” album at the witching hour, telling a sometimes-muddled tale of heartbroken lovers reaching out to the spirit realm. | Chromatics set their surprise “seventh” album at the witching hour, telling a sometimes-muddled tale of heartbroken lovers reaching out to the spirit realm. | Chromatics: Closer to Grey | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/chromatics-closer-to-grey/ | Closer to Grey | Across nearly 200 releases, L.A.-based producer Johnny Jewel’s Italians Do It Better label has perfected an unmistakable aesthetic. While the music ranges from abstract instrumentals to sugary synth-pop, the design of each record envisions its creators as would-be movie stars and their music as the cult classics we ought to remember them for. Few of the label’s many acts play so directly into the conceit as Chromatics. Since Jewel reinvented his band in the mid-2000s as a dark pop group with a taste for oblique theatrics, Chromatics have imagined their albums as soundtracks, imageless films in the language of music.
It’s impossible to discern clear plots or specific characters from a given record, but that’s not the point. Jewel and his band—singer Ruth Radelet, drummer Nat Walker, and guitarist Adam Miller—excel at constructing settings and engulfing them in dramatic atmosphere. For 2007’s Night Drive, it was a meditative, lamplit film noir viewed through a car windshield. Kill for Love, released in 2012, played like a tumultuous, naive romance in the solitude of a Lynchian suburb. That Chromatics can conjure such elaborate moods with little more than a synth, drum machine, and guitar to accompany Radelet’s uncommonly restrained voice is testament to the strength of their vision.
It may also explain why these albums take so long to finish. Jewel once said that his writing process involves recording multiple ideas at once, waiting for months, and then revisiting them to bring their meanings into focus. Given this circuitous approach, as well as Jewel’s numerous solo records and film scores, a seven-year gap between Chromatics albums is perhaps to be expected. Closer to Grey was announced only a day in advance, and its arrival wasn’t the only surprise: After teasing the now-mythic 21-track opus Dear Tommy for the past five years, Chromatics had instead put out their most modest record to date. Think of Closer to Grey as an auteur’s niche art project—satisfying to the superfans, though not necessarily winning over new ones.
But like clever illusionists, Jewel and his assistants are no less enchanting for their sleight of hand. The subtlest gesture can feel hypnotic or horrific depending on the light. Echoing Kill for Love’s opening cover of Neil Young, Closer to Grey begins with a spooky, stripped-down version of Simon & Garfunkel’s “The Sound of Silence.” The sound of a match strike or a record-needle drop opens the song like the final motion in a séance ritual, before Radelet begins her quiet commune: “Hello darkness, my old friend.” It’s a dead-simple rendition—mostly organ drones, distant synth arpeggios, and a soft drum machine kick—yet it sets the tone for an album set at the witching hour, a sometimes-muddled tale of heartbroken lovers reaching out to the spirit realm.
Closer to Grey is most captivating when it indulges these supernatural fascinations. Standout “Light as a Feather,” with its weightless harmonies and shuffling drum groove, feels like a musical ghost story. “I hear a voice, she whispers secrets from the dead,” Radelet sings in her usual demure tone, calling out to herself from beyond: “Nothing lasts forever.” The sense of otherworldly convergence returns on “Whispers in the Hall,” with enough dissonance and tense, Halloween-esque synth loops to qualify as the most ominous song in Chromatics’ catalog. The smoky “Touch Red” lingers beneath wakefulness, slipping into nightmares with the introduction of a distorted guitar. At its most striking moments, Closer to Grey recognizes the importance of pushing at the edges of a tried-and-true sound.
When Jewel’s arrangements become too austere and his songwriting falls back on the overly familiar, the album loses some of its charm. The basic synth melodies and deadpan vocal hooks of “Twist the Knife” are more anemic than even this terminally cool band can pull off. The title track is paint-by-numbers Chromatics—understandably so, since it’s at least four years old. Its palm-muted guitar plucks, 4/4 drum beat, and melancholic melodies don’t sound bad, or even past their prime—but they have little to offer an album that shines when experimenting. The glockenspiel and sweeping strings on lovelorn ballad “Move a Mountain” might feel slightly out of place, but at least they’re unexpected.
As with much of Jewel’s work, Closer to Grey’s ultimate enemy is time itself. He’s not attempting to outrun it so much as wrestle it, trying to bend bygone eras to his will. The five years between Night Drive and Kill for Love resulted in music that transcended an already exemplary blueprint for chilly disco-pop; the next seven were building slowly towards a monumental statement. Then, out of the blue, Closer to Grey arrived with a note explaining that it represents the seventh Chromatics album, effectively turning Dear Tommy (the would-be sixth) into a “lost” record. The switch-up adds a fascinating page to the band’s ongoing mythology, but it also robs Closer to Grey of its own narrative. By the band’s own telling, the best Chromatics record is the one you’ve never heard. | 2019-10-12T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-10-12T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic / Rock | Italians Do It Better | October 12, 2019 | 7.1 | dcf83b17-7e33-4057-a541-2200dd189460 | Patric Fallon | https://pitchfork.com/staff/patric-fallon/ | |
Playing fast and loose with his samples, the Austin, Texas, producer seems to ask: Why stick to any one genre or era when you can submit to the decadence of pure vibes? | Playing fast and loose with his samples, the Austin, Texas, producer seems to ask: Why stick to any one genre or era when you can submit to the decadence of pure vibes? | Fennec: a couple of good days | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/fennec-a-couple-of-good-days/ | a couple of good days | Mai tais, hippie speedballs, and landlocked exotica are but three of the many opulent visions that Fennec conjures on his latest LP, a couple of good days. “We want a few laughs, a few joints, and a few drinks among those we love,” wrote the Austin-based ex-lawyer-turned-DJ on his Bandcamp page, promising the soundtrack to “a couple of good days” to be enshrined in future reminiscences. You might thus expect the album to be weighed down by nostalgia. Mercifully, Fennec falls prey to no such regressive impulse: His bossa nova-driven, sample-drenched four-to-the-floor grooves impressively balance between languor and anticipation. Eschewing the self-seriousness that tends to pervade memory lane, good days flips J Dilla-esque samples over frothy beats, inducing a margarita haze in lieu of handkerchief-waving morosity. Why devoutly adhere to any one genre or era, the record seems to ask, when you can submit to the decadence of pure vibes?
Fennec’s previous records were never this much fun. His 2014 debut, Let Your Heart Break, suffered from Odesza-core milquetoastery. His last single, 2020’s “Finding Rest In a Weary World,” was impressive but relatively subdued, tinged with ambient melancholia even as the beat hit its stride. And while his previous LP, 2020’s free us of this feeling, fleshed out some of the elements that make good days such a joy to listen to, it never quite committed to them. The new album doubles down with the glorious, winking panache of a proud pornstache-haver. “Girl, don’t let it get you down,” the album opens, as a drum roll leads us into a thick, humid beat. On good days, the lyrics are all that lean generic; “girl” is a fittingly tongue-in-cheek introduction to an album that revels in a knowing sort of escapism, in the impermanent thrill of fun for fun’s sake.
Fennec’s bolder instrumental choices shine throughout, and while saxophones, pianos, strings, and woodwinds might seem more suited to a concert hall, good days luxuriates in making their presence known on the dancefloor. The richness of “fonzi”’s guitar makes the entire song, even as its beat throbs furiously. Album standout “a lil more conversation” includes a guitar solo so pronounced it’s almost absurd amid six-string twang, relentless percussion, and a Rhodes warbling for dear life above it all. Still, it’s this light-heartedness that carries the track; its energy never wanes, and even the vocal sample (“Let’s just wine, dine, and have a good time”) comes off more mischievous than corny. Even the shorter songs brim with delirium; the brief “partyhop”’s eponymous sample–“Let’s party hop!”—comes to life over one of the album’s crunchier basslines as it slides and sputters, before a fake-out ending at the 45-second mark. And let’s not forget the hi-hat triumph “honda with my bb,” good days’ equivalent of a slow jam, where the sheer ’90s-ness of the beat and angelic violins somehow wax romantic; the sampled “H-h-h-h-honda” sounds downright aching.
The album’s hazy cohesion admittedly hits a wall at points. The jaunty, clown-shoed bounce of “russian dressing” threatens to become unpleasantly cartoonish at a moment’s notice, and while the choral sample somewhat grounds the song, its juxtaposition against the rest of good days feels more like an acid trip gone south than a well-executed foray into a different style. “bnb” suffers the opposite problem by not taking nearly as many risks as the rest of the album does. While it’s perfectly nice, it isn’t very interesting, and by the time its six minutes are up, you just kind of wish “honda with my bb” had played a few more times instead.
All good things do come to an end, though, good vibes included, and Fennec makes sure to crank up the joy to its full potential before good days’ inevitable conclusion. “marijuanita” is so short yet so exultant that you almost start feeling a creeping dread, realizing how easily that forty-eight minute daze just slipped through your fingers. Whatever anxieties may arise, though, does it really matter when the music pulsates this hedonistically? Not really. Fennec’s a couple of good days is an album for ironic pool floats, silly straws in frozen beverages, squinting through aviators in Diazepam heat, enjoying the slow roast before the sunburn. | 2022-03-18T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2022-03-18T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | null | March 18, 2022 | 7 | dcfcc2ea-6df2-4eb8-9074-5ffd32830280 | Sue Park | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sue-park/ | |
This is a long-overdue gift for fans of acoustic guitar music; Blackshaw-- growing into his prodigious own at the startling age of 25-- has finessed his abilities and 12-string acoustic guitar into a veritable solo symphony, schooled equally in complex 20th century composition and uncommon beauty. | This is a long-overdue gift for fans of acoustic guitar music; Blackshaw-- growing into his prodigious own at the startling age of 25-- has finessed his abilities and 12-string acoustic guitar into a veritable solo symphony, schooled equally in complex 20th century composition and uncommon beauty. | James Blackshaw: The Cloud of Unknowing | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/10287-the-cloud-of-unknowing/ | The Cloud of Unknowing | For fans of acoustic guitar music, James Blackshaw's The Cloud of Unknowing is a gift that's long overdue. Blackshaw's fourth album gracefully glides over the same sonic ground that his contemporaries generally tread with reverential obedience or dilettante tactics. Growing into his prodigious own at the relatively young age of 25, Blackshaw has finessed his 12-string acoustic guitar into a veritable solo symphony that's as schooled in uncommon beauty as it is in complex 20th century composition. But don't fear the esoterics: For everyone else, The Cloud of Unknowing is the gem no one expected to find. Blackshaw writes high drama into instrumental music with subtlety and charm, speaking on sentiments and stories without requiring a single lyric (or, most of the time, any accompaniment at all). A rare intersection of genre advancement and general accessibility, The Cloud of Unknowing is one of the true masterpieces of its own heralded realm.
The title The Cloud of Unknowing is lifted from an anonymous 14th century text that articulated a mystical view of Christianity which asserts that God can be better met through a continuum of experience and love than through absolute knowledge. Fittingly, the five pieces here capitalize on dramatic push and pull, alternately joyous and foreboding 12-string figures that are constantly reabsorbed into a web of sheer movement and energy. Despite his age, Blackshaw accomplishes this through profound musical erudition: Closer "Stained Glass Windows" nods to microtonality, climbing up and down an arch in the tiniest intervals, much like Rhys Chatham's gorgeous, glacial work with 400 electric guitars on A Crimson Grail.During "The Mirror Speaks", disparate melodies collide, interlock and crisscross, bending and pushing one another up or down. In his final years, Claude Debussy could pin such lines against one another with a piano in much the same way, but Blackshaw is an Englishman born nearly a decade after Bert Jansch left Pentangle and thriving in a time during which folk has found renewed currency. So here, he assimilates those past masters and, prospering from what he's learned from them, laces one technique to another.
Part of Blackshaw's success stems from his confidence. He's a beneficent host to one of the few non-technical ideals that united the great early minimalists: He fully inhabits an idea, allows it to build, and expires only when it is ready. The Cloud of Unknowing opens and closes with 11 and 15 minutes pieces, yet these long forms are as approachable as the best four-minute pop songs. Their complex frames bear lucid motifs through brisk movement, guiding the listener through thousands of notes from 10 fingers and 12 strings with purpose.
Such perfect commitment is new to this album. Earlier non-guitar excursions embedded in Blackshaw's work felt slightly apologetic or indecisive. An excessive tampoura-and-cymbala drone overran the best bits of last year's O True Believer, and a disc-closing track with heavy percussion and organ provided a simple, sour end. Blackshaw was tempering his extremist tendencies then. On The Cloud, though, Blackshaw seems fully settled, engaging his pieces and ideas with the unflinching belief of Tony Conrad in 1964 or Steve Reich in 1965. "Running to the Ghost" augments guitar with violin and glockenspiel, but those auxiliary parts are mere bells and strings highlighting how much sound Blackshaw can fit in one lithe motion. Indeed, it's his rumbling bass line (his tuning for this track starts in B) supporting a nimble, mid-range melody and the strings that weave between its notes. The glockenspiel teases from above. The only non-guitar piece is a wandering four-minute electronic token. It's long enough to serve as an intermission but short enough to feel more like a pause than a distraction.
And that's a good thing. On an album where movement, experience, and persistence mean everything, it's best to let Blackshaw's 12-string momentum have as much space as it wants. The Cloud of Unknowing carves out a new, peerless space altogether-- one that puts Blackshaw at the top of his class. | 2007-07-02T01:00:01.000-04:00 | 2007-07-02T01:00:01.000-04:00 | Folk/Country | Tompkins Square | July 2, 2007 | 8.7 | dcfe809e-cc72-454d-b0d9-9cd19e44390d | Grayson Haver Currin | https://pitchfork.com/staff/grayson-haver currin/ | null |
The Swedish minimalist composer David Wenngren specializes in soft, evocative miniatures. The songs on his latest album pass by quickly, like fortuitous weather that can hold for just so long. | The Swedish minimalist composer David Wenngren specializes in soft, evocative miniatures. The songs on his latest album pass by quickly, like fortuitous weather that can hold for just so long. | Library Tapes: The Quiet City | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/library-tapes-the-quiet-city/ | The Quiet City | The Swedish pianist, violinist, and composer David Wenngren seems to regard minimalism less as a classical tradition than as an ascetic dare. In Library Tapes, which has been his solo project with a host of revolving collaborators since the early 2000s, Wenngren paces up to the minimum threshold where groups of tones pass into music, and not a step farther. His compositions hover and linger, straitened but far from severe, wrenching maximum feeling from one idea at a time. Once a melody has been stated in full, it’s gone.
Across dozens of releases, Wenngren’s miniatures have gained depth but not mass, from the solo piano and field recordings of his earlier work to his collaborations with cellist Danny Norbury, multi-instrumentalist Peter Broderick, and ambient musician Christopher Bissonette. Wenngren doesn’t shy from titles likeSketches, Fragment, and Patterns (Repeat); he seems leery of hanging conceptual baggage on his music.
If the modestly evocative title The Quiet City gives the impression of something a bit heftier, it’s apt. Wenngren is deconstructing the piano trio—a form consisting of piano, violin, and cello—and strewing its parts into musical haiku. But these are still sketches, fragments and patterns, and Wenngren still declines to elaborate on anything once it’s been said. Often, the songs fall short of two minutes, and almost never cross three, as if they were fortuitous weather that could hold for just so long. This, as the naturalistic titles suggest, is more or less what they are—10 walks in the woods, largely but never exactly the same, each already settling into irretrievable stillness.
But it’s rare for Wenngren to have this many musicians on one album. His usual piano tone is offset by pianist Olivia Belli, who plays on bookends “Entering” and “Leaving.” The latter, with Julia Kent’s roving cello, is the highlight, a bright and propulsive take on Library Tapes’ sleepy drift. And pianist Akira Kosemura’s consummately innocent voice is right at home on “Brighter Lights.”
As the cast grows, the material they play remains exceedingly stark and simple. Some of it would be fit for a baby’s mobile if not for the sustain and processing, a Library Tapes hallmark, that extends each touch of a string or a key into clouds of ambiguous chords and drones. In “The First Signs,” Kent and violinist Hoshiko Yamane play keening lines that leave pulsing afterimages on the silence that follows, and it’s here, between each moment and its reverberation into memory, where Wenngren cultivates his poignant sense of weightless time.
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2020-09-05T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-09-05T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic / Rock | 1631 | September 5, 2020 | 7 | dd0046f5-b673-4628-9cd7-22fdc8854282 | Brian Howe | https://pitchfork.com/staff/brian-howe/ | |
For his latest LP, Pedro the Lion’s David Bazan formed a new band and returned to straight-ahead guitar rock. It’s got some of his most aerodynamic songs in over a decade, but suffers from redundancy. | For his latest LP, Pedro the Lion’s David Bazan formed a new band and returned to straight-ahead guitar rock. It’s got some of his most aerodynamic songs in over a decade, but suffers from redundancy. | Lo Tom: Lo Tom | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/lo-tom-lo-tom/ | Lo Tom | It’s actually super easy for David Bazan to find a friend these days. While he cemented his legacy in Pedro the Lion by casting doubt on the sustainability of marriage, democracy, sobriety, religion, and just about every other bedrock of society, Bazan’s most prolific phase yet is owing to how he’s become an irrepressible people person at age 40 and beyond. Whether conducting Q&As at his live gigs, touring Control and Headphones by popular demand, offering new songs through a subscription service, or routing house show tours, it’s all in the name of fan service. But he’s maybe become too good at identifying his target market—turning out solid releases that have held great appeal to Bazan, his diehards, and few outside of those two groups. For the mere fact that his new band Lo Tom is actually a band, it’s perhaps the first album he’s done since his solo debut, 2009’s Curse Your Branches, that comes with any kind of relative sizzle or mystery.
Lo Tom consists of Bazan’s ever-trustworthy pal T.W. Walsh on guitar, as well as Trey Many and Jason Martin of Tooth & Nail mainstays Starflyer 59, whose overlap with Pedro the Lion’s fanbase might be total. After all, both spent the late 1990s and early 2000s straddling the line between secular indie and Christian audiences, and it stands to reason that Lo Tom will doubly excite the same people rather than spread its potential draw. And while Lo Tom isn’t being presented as much more than a couple of friends kicking back, it’s only lighthearted relatively speaking as well. “Covered Wagon” is one of Bazan’s most surreal and spirited views of American cultural decline, while “Bad Luck Charm” reduces the complicated narrative of his masterwork Control into a single snapshot. A loveless couple sits in a hotel room with champagne and a joint, wondering where everything went wrong but unwilling to say a word to each other.
Yet, still, the stakes don’t feel especially high. “Covered Wagon” is a smirk at our collective regression, not an impending apocalypse. “Bad Luck Charm” isn’t claiming the entire institution of marriage as futile, it’s just a shitty night for people who don’t seem to know anything different. Befitting such ambivalence, Bazan’s new band isn’t attempting to create the same tension or portent as Pedro the Lion, but Lo Tom nonetheless signals his return to straightforward guitar rock after the electronic bedroom-pop of Blanco and Care. “Overboard” and “Covered Wagon” hold true to Lo Tom’s bashed-out creative process, two of Bazan’s most aerodynamic and hooky rock songs since 2004’s Achilles Heel. But as it turns out, the rudimentary drum machines and synth washes of Care and Blanco have mostly been swapped out for equally simple grunge riffs and rigid, slow-and-steady rhythms. Even at less than a half hour, Lo Tom suffers from redundancy, not surprising when you’ve made more than one song reminiscent of “Dirty Deeds Done Dirt Cheap” and you’re not actually AC/DC.
Lo Tom isn’t Bazan’s cock-rock album, though. It’s just one that seemingly abides by a first-thought, best-thought process, whether it’s riffs, concepts, or double entendres. Bazan’s sociopolitical takes on “Covered Wagon” and “Another Mistake” are stuck somewhere between the devastating authority of Winners Never Quit and the wit and incision of Bazan’s Twitter account, whereas the cleverness of “Bubblegum”’s metaphor lasts about as long as a wad of Big League Chew. Maybe if there’s any disappointment in Lo Tom, it’s in the dissonance between what the band set out to accomplish and a lingering desire to see Bazan have success similar to former slowcore warblers-turned-solo sages Mark Kozelek or Bill Callahan. To get to his Benji or Apocalypse would probably require him to plumb the depths as he did with Curse Your Branches, but the closing “Lower Down” ironically suggests the opposite: “Man, you don’t need to chase the sound/If it comes from lower down,” he sings, justifying the existence of Lo Tom in the process. Perhaps he’ll change his mind when the next project comes around, but as Bazan once said, it’s good to have options. | 2017-07-22T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-07-22T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Barsuk | July 22, 2017 | 6.2 | dd0250cd-0464-4606-9c13-e8fc78e39104 | Ian Cohen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ian-cohen/ | null |
On his laid-back and locked-in new EP, the Atlanta singer-rapper sounds more subtle and assured than ever. | On his laid-back and locked-in new EP, the Atlanta singer-rapper sounds more subtle and assured than ever. | 6LACK: 6pc Hot EP | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/6lack-6pc-hot-ep/ | 6pc Hot EP | He may not be the genre’s biggest star, but few R&B singers have demonstrated a better understanding of the genre’s commercial winds than 6lack. On his 6pc Hot EP, he name-checks Usher and T-Pain, touchstones of popular ’00s R&B, but his own style mines more of-the-moment inspiration, from the late-night melancholy of Drake to the art-house soul of Frank Ocean, both of which he shades with the atmospheric trap of his native Atlanta, the longtime gravitational center of rap and R&B radio. He prides himself on his ties to the city. 6pc Hot, which opens with a cruise through the Atlanta of his youth, is titled after his favorite neighborhood wing spot (he’s marketing the EP with his own hot sauce). Even his stage name, cumbersome as it is, is a nod to the Zone 6 district where he was raised.
Like most Atlantans on the charts right now, 6lack’s talents lie somewhere between rapping and singing, and on his first two albums, he sometimes seemed to resent being boxed in as a singer. Even on his smoothest songs, he adopted the jaded detachment of a rapper. “Fuck me like you about to lose your place to the girl next store,” he sang on 2018's East Atlanta Love Letter, where he leaned hard on The Weeknd's tropes of toxic men and hateful sex. That's not a great look for anyone, and it was especially ill-fitting for an everyman like 6lack, who’s always been more convincing playing a wounded soul than an asshole.
6pc Hot shows what a pleasure he can be when he loses that sour edge. These six songs wallow less and luxuriate more. Soothing and sumptuous, more bittersweet than outright sad, the after-hours dispatches “Long Nights” and “Float” pair the coziness of an overstuffed couch with the sleek angles of an Eames chair. “I just followed the emotions of quarantine,” 6lack has explained of his process for the EP, and his lyrics periodically touch on the crisis—the isolation, the longing for out-of-reach comforts, the sense of being locked in an inescapable cycle—yet the music is too nimble, too free for lockdown. We should be so lucky if our quarantine felt like this.
Even when 6lack is kicking around dopey boasts just for the fun of it on “ATL Freestyle,” he's gotten so improbably good at pairing together free associations that even lines that read like groaners on paper (“My life is VVS, I practice clarity”) breeze by like sweet nothings. And where 6lack's nonchalant delivery could previously scan as too cold, too removed, he’s gotten bolder at playing up the yearning and fragile beauty in his voice. The wait-until-quarantine-is-over ballad “Outside” is his most unabashedly sentimental song yet, and he sells the sweetness and romance.
There’s just one feature on the EP, and it illustrates how delicate of a balance 6lack strikes between laidback and locked in. Lil Baby, who may be on the hottest streak of any rapper on the radio right now, attempts a quick lap on “Know My Rights,” yet he’s unable to find his footing amid the track's vaporous bump. His verse isn't so bad that it derails things—four tracks in and the EP’s mood is too established to be upended by one miscalculated verse—but his flow is too hurried, too frantic. He's doing too much, racing against the music instead of making it work for him. 6lack’s great instinct is knowing when to do a little less, and on 6pc Hot it pays off sublimely. He no longer sounds like a replacement-level R&B singer. He's starting to sound like a master.
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2020-07-03T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-07-03T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | LVRN / Interscope | July 3, 2020 | 7.5 | dd0d5326-fe6e-4f3f-b56a-2a6622d18aba | Evan Rytlewski | https://pitchfork.com/staff/evan-rytlewski/ | |
On Mikal Cronin's first album for Merge, the Ty Segall collaborator balances the "power" and "pop" elements of his sound with aplomb, while sounding utterly out of sync internally. It's pop poetry for the aloof, and Cronin's most fully realized, beautifully arranged, well-crafted work to date. | On Mikal Cronin's first album for Merge, the Ty Segall collaborator balances the "power" and "pop" elements of his sound with aplomb, while sounding utterly out of sync internally. It's pop poetry for the aloof, and Cronin's most fully realized, beautifully arranged, well-crafted work to date. | Mikal Cronin: MCII | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/17959-mikal-cronin-mcii/ | MCII | "Do I shout it out?/ Do I let it go?/ Do I even know what I'm waiting for?/ No, I want it now/ Do I need it, though?" Throughout MCII, Mikal Cronin gets in these ruts. His lyrics are delivered as someone who's never fully sure of his next move and who's completely unclear about his ambitions. He's sure that he's in love, but he keeps letting it slip away. Somehow, he keeps mucking up his day-to-day communication. It never used to be like this. He keeps talking about how time is getting away from him, which might be his way of acknowledging a crisis about getting older, though it's just as likely that he's accidentally spending hours clicking on YouTube videos. He wonders if he's wrong. (He doesn't think so.) He consistently has good intentions, but he's inadvertently prone to choking on the follow-through. He sums up his turmoil pretty well in "See It My Way": "I hear the song-- I wanna sing along with you/ But when I try I’m out of tune/ I turn and walk away." It's a sweet and snappy sentiment from someone who's ultimately out of sync. This is Cronin's pop poetry for the aloof.
So it's somewhat ironic that MCII is also his most fully realized, beautifully arranged, and well-crafted work to date. Since he's spent the past year shredding for the masses in the Ty Segall Band, it's easy to forget that he recently earned his B.F.A. in Music and learned how to compose for different instruments. He rightly noted that his education came in handy for his Merge debut, which subs out some of the psych freakouts from his first album for string arrangements. K. Dylan Edrich, who recently contributed strings to Thee Oh Sees' most recent two albums, lends her talents to a handful of songs, from the plaintive violin solo on "Peace of Mind" to the frantic viola on "Change".
One of the most impressive things about MCII is how Cronin balances "power" and "pop". He makes the "pop" part of the equation look effortless-- in 10 songs, he offers 10 solid, catchy melodies. When it comes to "power," he's much more conservative than he's ever been before-- especially when you consider Slaughterhouse. There are entirely acoustic songs here that pretty well prove that he doesn't need to rely on punk rock sludge. So when the tender stuff is over and he steps on the fuzz pedal, the effects are extremely satisfying.
Album closer "Piano Mantra", for example, begins with a particularly fragile-sounding Cronin singing "I’m tired, I’m sick, I’m broke up." Edrich's strings are quietly introduced, then an acoustic guitar and some drums, and finally at the end, a feedback screech ushers in a distorted electric guitar. It doesn't even take center stage or threaten to become the main attraction-- it just adds a sturdy, noisy spine to Cronin's formerly delicate ballad. Everything-- strings, fuzz, slide guitar, etc.-- is purposefully and carefully implemented. He uses the more muscular sounds to offset his bubblegum jangle, and while he did ask Ty Segall to lend a hand on the album, he only brought him on board for two guitar solos. Neither are very flashy-- they're well-placed bursts of power that complement the melody.
There's one moment in particular that puts to rest any notion that Cronin is just a glorified garage sideman: "Don't Let Me Go", the only track Cronin recorded entirely by himself at home. It's just him, his acoustic guitar, and his voice singing both the melody and harmony. With that skeletal structure, he loses the "I'm not sure what's next or why I act like this" tone and gets straight to the point. He pleads for the person he loves to give him another shot. "You're all I know," he sings in his falsetto. It's the most direct, vulnerable statement he's ever made, and in an album otherwise packed with uncertainty, it's powerful.
Cronin has said that his first favorite album was Nirvana's In Utero-- a record noisily recorded with Steve Albini before the band went to R.E.M./Katrina and the Waves producer Scott Litt to soften a couple of the album's songs. There's a loose analogy at play here-- Cronin recorded MCII with Eric "King Riff" Bauer at his Bay Area shred factory, Bauer Mansion. Later, he had the album mixed and mastered at Berkeley's hallowed Fantasy Studios. (Cronin has admitted that he got the idea from Segall, who worked in those same two studios for Twins.) The outcome is a great sounding album that sits nicely between the poles of "fuzz war" and "cooing balladeer." Cronin has proved with this album that, like Cobain before him, he's so much more than a longhair with a fuzz pedal. He's an excellent pop craftsman who knows how to turn the power up for maximum effect. | 2013-05-02T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2013-05-02T02:00:01.000-04:00 | Rock | Merge | May 2, 2013 | 8.4 | dd0eb4fd-0618-4181-9901-3cb2f7d252f3 | Evan Minsker | https://pitchfork.com/staff/evan-minsker/ | null |
This 1992 meeting of Moritz von Oswald, Thomas Fehlmann, and Juan Atkins is a monument to the improbable transatlantic alliance that techno forged between Detroit and Berlin. | This 1992 meeting of Moritz von Oswald, Thomas Fehlmann, and Juan Atkins is a monument to the improbable transatlantic alliance that techno forged between Detroit and Berlin. | 3MB feat. Magic Juan Atkins: 3MB feat. Magic Juan Atkins | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/3mb-feat-magic-juan-atkins-3mb-feat-magic-juan-atkins/ | 3MB feat. Magic Juan Atkins | 3MB feat. Magic Juan Atkins is a story of a musical friendship being forged, of techno spreading its steely tentacles, and of Berlin’s musical rebirth. To understand 3MB—Berlin producers Moritz von Oswald and Thomas Fehlmann, joined here by Detroit techno originator Juan Atkins—you need to know about Tresor, the Berlin club turned label, which imported the tough, metallic sound of second-wave Detroit techno to a city still rocking on its heels from the fall of the Berlin Wall. The music of Black Detroit found a second home in Berlin, a German city whose desolate, lawless edge and abandoned spaces mirrored Detroit’s own history of industrial decline.
Both club and label launched in 1991, with X101 (the heavyweight trio of Jeff Mills, Mike Banks, and Robert Hood) providing the label’s first release, followed by an album by Detroit’s Blake Baxter. But it was record number three, 3MB featuring Eddie Flashin’ Fowlkes, that really ushered in Tresor’s spirit of cross-Atlantic collaboration. The record paired von Oswald—who would later form influential dub-techno duo Basic Channel with Mark Ernestus—and Swiss producer Fehlmann, later of the Orb, with Fowlkes, a pioneering Detroit DJ whose 1986 record “Goodbye Kiss” was a landmark of techno’s early years.
3MB feat. Magic Juan Atkins, which is being re-released as part of Tresor’s 30th anniversary celebrations, was the pinnacle of the Berlin label’s early collaborative force. The combination of Atkins’ peerless synth melodies, as heard on his groundbreaking electro records as Cybotron and Model 500; von Oswald’s love of bass pressure and the artful echoes of dub; and Fehlmann’s ambient textures, all barrelling along at Tresor’s pacey tempo, marks the exact meeting point between three distinct visions of the electronic music sound. Across dueling mixes of three different tracks, the record presents a cosmopolitan view of techno as a receptacle for diverse influences—an open-minded philosophy that’s far from the retrenched business-techno model that holds sway today.
The von Oswald and Fehlmann mix of “Die Kosmischen Kuriere,” for example, combines echoing synth lines, astral pads, a bumping Detroit drum-machine beat, and a sternum-thumping bassline, a mixture both elegant and fierce. The Magic Juan edit of “Bassmental” plots a similar course from Detroit to Berlin via downtown Kingston, with delicate shreds of electronic melody bobbing around on shuddering waves of sub-bass like paper boats in a storm. The elements themselves are familiar; the juxtaposition unique and magical, only failing on the album’s cumbersome closing track, “The 4th Quarter,” where the awkward rhythmic mesh of bass and treble suggests two incompatible records blending in a DJ’s headphone.
For such an important moment in techno’s global creep, relatively little has been said about the record’s origins. Atkins has spoken of meeting von Oswald in the early ’90s when the latter came to Detroit to buy musical gear; Fehlmann has said the album was produced in von Oswald’s Berlin studio, “all hands-on jamming, with no real plan.” We can presume that the Magic Juan edits of “Bassmental” and “Jazz Is the Teacher” see Atkins take the lead, while the von Oswald and Fehlmann mixes of “Die Kosmischen Kuriere” and “Jazz Is the Teacher” were overseen by the Berlin producers. Such close analysis may not be entirely in the spirit of the album’s wonderfully simpatico meeting of minds. But having two alternative mixes of “Jazz Is the Teacher” offers a fascinating insight into how one musical idea—the incorporation of jazz into techno—can play out in two very different ways. The Berlin producers’ mix of the track is literal, layering a sample of live jazz drumming over a rudimentary electronic thump; Atkins’ take is more figurative, his drum machine itself swinging with all the chaotic precision of improv. That the song also features the album’s best synth melody, a kind of cosmic lament, is the icing on this particular space cake.
The reissue, 29 years after the fact, drives home that this historical artifact still retains its power. Like many great, important records, 3MB feat. Magic Juan Atkins is both a history lesson you can dance to and a corporeal joy you can study. It portrays the nightclub as a place for wild abandon and cultural exchange, with unlikely music partners finding freedom in improbable reciprocity.
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-06-01T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2021-06-01T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Tresor | June 1, 2021 | 8 | dd1a3312-f0c1-460d-a12d-f580b9871fc4 | Ben Cardew | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ben-cardew/ | |
The solo debut from Wye Oak member Andy Stack threads kinetic dream-pop and electronic textures into a hypnotic break-up record. | The solo debut from Wye Oak member Andy Stack threads kinetic dream-pop and electronic textures into a hypnotic break-up record. | Joyero: Release the Dogs | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/joyero-release-the-dogs/ | Release the Dogs | You would expect a solo record by Andy Stack to sound good—making records sound good is what he’s all about. Even in his own band, the Baltimore-bred duo Wye Oak, he is an elusive presence. His chattering drumming and engineering finesse, though integral to the uncanny sound, can seem almost incidental, backlighting the larger-than-life silhouette of singer-guitarist Jenn Wasner. Stack has been even more secret-saucy in other projects, from his studio and tour work with Helado Negro and Lambchop to the structures he helped build under the visionary pop-classical song cycle Spiritual America, with Wasner and composer William Brittelle. He is a maestro of marginalia, a technician who minimizes himself to maximize the song.
So of course, Release the Dogs, Stack’s first solo record as Joyero, sounds good. Threading kinetic dream-pop with latent strands of electronic music, it has something of the rubbery minimalism of Arthur Russell’s early disco and the pointillism of Animal Collective, the tangled understory of Caribou and the skyscraping canopy of M83. The production is lush yet astringent, all lemony glares and purpley shadows. The arrangements are usually restrained to a few limber strands, so that every decision stands to account. But there’s a difference between sounding good and being good.
Stack lands on the right side of that difference, filling in his margins with a presence, a small but warm and agile voice, and a knack for melody. “Alight” is an invigorating start, weaving propulsive bass and fingertip percussion into a net that keeps hauling up great, shining organ chords. The vocal melody on “Dogs” burrows through a dreamy, locomotive arrangement for guitar and electronic pads and slips into your ear, where it lodges fast. He places words as carefully as filters and fills, nestling in syllables so they add a layer of rhythmic definition. The overall impression is of gentle vigilance, soft tension, a certain insomniac energy.
Outside of its most nocturnal passages, Release the Dogs feels optimistic. It takes a little while to notice that it’s actually a breakup record. Recorded in Marfa, Texas between Wye Oak records, fixed addresses, and relationships, the record uses a central canine metaphor to outline a flickering state of transition, somewhere between tame and feral. It develops through second-person address and elliptical vignettes, such as the domestic scenes softly humming and crackling in “Starts.” On “After You,” Stack sends his lamentation traveling farther than ever, laddering from his lowest vocal register to his airiest and back again, as if he’s trying to get away from himself. As is always the case with records cast for a me and a you, the listener sometimes wonders, then where am I? But look, it’s a breakup record. Everybody gets one, and it’s the only embryonic thing about this markedly long-steeped debut. | 2019-08-26T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-08-24T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Merge | August 26, 2019 | 7.3 | dd1bedd1-9364-486e-a488-e118de77d6c5 | Brian Howe | https://pitchfork.com/staff/brian-howe/ | |
A collection of spartan demos, false-starts, and practice runs of early Beach Boys songs recorded in 1961-62 amounts to a curious, often campy origin story for hardcore fans only. | A collection of spartan demos, false-starts, and practice runs of early Beach Boys songs recorded in 1961-62 amounts to a curious, often campy origin story for hardcore fans only. | The Beach Boys: Becoming the Beach Boys: The Complete Hite & Dorinda Morgan Sessions | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22331-becoming-the-beach-boys-the-complete-hite-dorinda-morgan-sessions/ | Becoming the Beach Boys: The Complete Hite & Dorinda Morgan Sessions | Brian Wilson wasn’t born a pop Zeus, suffused with orchestral grandeur and full “teenage symphonies to God” in his head—he was once a gawky, deferential teen who sang a terrible song about a doll. It helps temper the decades-long fetishization of his genius and makes Becoming the Beach Boys: The Complete Hite & Dorinda Morgan Sessions, the rough audio of their earliest studio hours, a refreshing listen. It acknowledges how very far Wilson and his bandmates began from the gorgeous harmonies and slick pop songwriting that made their fame, and serves as a reminder that even if we admire artists who seem youthfully irrepressible, we’re often coming in at their 10,001st hour.
The Morgan sessions, recorded in 1961-62, find the young Beach Boys (ages 15 to 20) floating their first material in the Hollywood home of producers Hite and Dorinda Morgan. Instead of whirling around the studio playing maestro and directing orders, in a take of his sonorous ballad “Surfer Girl,” Wilson meekly asks to overdub his bass (Hite Morgan barks back, “No,” and the matter is closed). The rest of Becoming the Beach Boys falls in line with this moment, a minutely parceled collection of occasionally insightful false starts and hesitancies. Its nine songs span 63 tracks, many under a minute and punctuated by tape skips, giggles, even the odd admission of burping. (The culprit is never identified but sounds like it could be Dennis Wilson, undersung singer/songwriter behind the group’s gorgeous “Forever.”) Forty-five of these pre-Capitol Records cuts were previously unissued; the rest appearing on such long-forgotten cobblings as The Beach Boys’ Biggest Beach Hits, released in 1969, and Lost & Found 1961-62*, *released in 1991.
Remarkably, for the first material the Beach Boys ever attempted, three of these tracks would become huge hits—the chipper “Surfin’” and “Surfin’ Safari,” then, a year later, “Surfer Girl.” The first stabs of these are boisterous: “Surfin’” lurches out of the gate, its demo skittish with those now-familiar doo-wop bass vocals. Carl, Dennis, and Brian Wilson’s harmonies are tinnier with a twinge of stuck-chin bravado, even through the rather unconvincing insistence that “We’ll do the Surfer Stomp/It’s the latest dance craze.” (The cloddish move was a real, short-lived trend in the Boys' native Hawthorne.)
Two years before Wilson’s production debut on “Surfer Girl,” in which he nurtured its luxurious harmonies and added the iconic falsetto top note, the song makes a halting introduction here in chord progressions more minor and morose. “Surfin’ Safari” is led confidently by Mike Love, with shades of the nasal tones he would later refine and popularize, even while his noncommittal placeholder mumbling veers towards “Flight of the Conchords” in the third and fourth takes.
Six songs here never made the Boys’ studio output, and rightfully so. They range from “Beach Boy Stomp (aka Karate),” a surf-rock instrumental à la Dick Dale and the Surfaris, which sounds like a sandy spoof on the Champs’ hit “Tequila,” to the swingy pop ditty “Judy.” The master version of the latter features some of the most indicative hints of the band’s vocal promise, liquid tenor topping a sturdy bass. The song’s namesake was Judy Bowles, Brian Wilson’s first serious girlfriend. In his forthcoming memoir, I Am Brian Wilson, he recalls her fondly but also unearths an old vendetta with Mike Love for trying to dance with her. This would not be the last time Love would encroach on his turf.
“Barbie,” a schmaltzy teenybopper ballad, rings as it was: writer Dorinda Morgan’s attempt to capitalize on a trendy new plastic doll. Even the Scotch 111 tape it’s recorded on seems to disdain this slavish, sluggish praise of “Barbie, Barbie, queen of the prom/Turned down dates with Eddie and Tom”—two of the takes are thwarted by skipping and scrambling effects. The unsettling ragtime piano jaunt “What Is a Young Girl Made Of” sounds like the soundtrack to a Woody Allen fever dream; incongruous in its tetchy delivery by Brian Wilson, it scarcely improves over seven more attempts.
The Beach Boys have varied in lineup over the past 20 years—sporadically with Brian Wilson, usually under the pallid and reliably dickish thumb of Mike Love—but their camp has been constant in its steady stream of ‘60s material reissues and compilations, ranging from seismic to “at least Dad’s Christmas present is sorted.” Becoming the Beach Boys is, true to the name of the label that dispatched it, a curio for those who have heard the band’s full works and wish to gorge further on the scant unexplored crumbs of their history—or for those who collect Barbies. | 2016-08-31T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-08-31T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Omnivore | August 31, 2016 | 5.3 | dd23646c-a673-499e-8db3-23b420b6d0d9 | Stacey Anderson | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stacey-anderson/ | null |
After a decade, the Icelandic band returns with an album of minimal music performed maximally, along with a 41-piece orchestra, climate despair, and Jónsi’s inimitable vocals. | After a decade, the Icelandic band returns with an album of minimal music performed maximally, along with a 41-piece orchestra, climate despair, and Jónsi’s inimitable vocals. | Sigur Rós: Átta | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/sigur-ros-atta/ | Átta | Does Jónsi ever wish his voice weren’t so pretty? While he’s never made the same album twice, either as a solo artist or a collaborator or the frontman of Sigur Rós, he’s also never made an album that turned out anything other than exquisitely beautiful, no matter how much he’s fought against it. Sigur Rós responded to their international breakthrough by going full-on hauntology with ( ), but if the movie syncs were any indication, they were still seen as friendly ghosts. They made an album whose title translated to “steamroller,” but the music itself consumed the listener like a bubble bath. Even beyond the legal and interpersonal turmoil, the past decade has been inhospitable to Sigur Rós’ creative process—if Jónsi expressed his anger towards a world of “climate change, doom-scrolling and going to hell” on a Sigur Rós album, as he does here, would their English-speaking audience even be able to tell? ÁTTA proves that Sigur Rós are physically capable of making angry music—but they aim for the softer, more poignant variants: despair, depression, and dejection.
Three months earlier, Sigur Rós announced an upcoming tour with a 41-piece orchestra—a perfectly sensible endeavor if they were still engaging in the brand stewardship that took up much of the past decade. It turns out that they were tipping their hand in the direction of ÁTTA. The introductory “Glóð” misleads with its electronic crackle and backmasked vocals, suggesting a continuation of the purely textural work of Valtari or Riceboy Sleeps. And since ÁTTA is almost entirely absent of guitars and percussion—their disgraced former drummer has not been replaced—it’s likely to be described as “ambient.”
But throughout, Sigur Rós make the distinction between ambient and classical for people who might not otherwise listen to either of these forms. This is minimal music often performed maximally; without access to the frothy distortion and cymbal clatter that typically brought Sigur Rós songs to a crescendo, the strings on “Skel” slowly accrue a concussive force that draws as much attention to the mixing as Jónsi’s vocal dynamics. He dips into his lower register often throughout ÁTTA and allows himself to rise triumphantly alongside even the loudest orchestral blares, performing like a first-chair soloist more than the frontman of a rock band.
Advance copies of ÁTTA were delivered as a single 56-minute track, a strong suggestion that its narrow range of tempo and texture is an intentional choice and that its optimal listening experience replicates what most people probably expect of a 41-piece orchestra: fully seated, no bathroom breaks, withholding the temptation to seek a moment worthy of a standing ovation until it’s done. (The official release is split into 10 tracks like any other Sigur Rós album.) Regardless of its more refined presentation, this is not an album of passages or movements or suites. It’s best understood and appreciated as a collection of songs, of which there are clear highlights.
“Klettur” might be the most conventional display of heft on ÁTTA, but it’s also the most satisfying, the only establishment of continuity from their previous album of original material, 2013’s underappreciated Kveikur. After 15 minutes of somber swells, it emerges from a shivering riff that could conceivably be bowed on Jónsi’s guitar as a crowd-pleasing reward for their patience. The other track to feature any kind of percussion ( an understated, pulsing kick drum in both cases), “Gold” is in the mold of “Avalon” or “Untitled 8,” but recast as windswept folk sung by the last man on earth. As much as “Klettur” and “Gold” supply immediate pleasures, they also call the overall concept into question—are they payoffs for their sedate surroundings or just glimpses of an album where Sigur Rós makes more daring use of an orchestra while working outside of rock’s strictures? While ÁTTA is always engaging, it’s engaging through a familiarity that feels like a missed opportunity during the stretches where the London Symphony Orchestra mostly sounds like they’ve been tasked with playing Ágætis byrjun stems.
Still, even Sigur Rós seem to admit that ÁTTA is intended as a multimedia experience. Though “cinematic” has been the default tag for Sigur Rós’ music on its own, they’ve long relied upon visuals to get the point across. Witness lead single “Blóðberg,” whose title alone encompasses their tendency to spring forth in beauty—it’s a wild thyme plant native to Iceland whose name translates to the way more badass “blood stone.” On its own terms, it’s one of Sigur Rós’ most desolate arrangements, but the despair is recognizable; without the anchor of any low end, Jónsi sighs and howls as the strings surge and recede. The video extends “Blóðberg” to a full 10 minutes of little more than drone shots of a barren wasteland—either desert or tundra—where twisted mannequin remains are indistinguishable from gnarled branches.
It’s not surprising that Jónsi has noted climate crisis as a primary prompt for ÁTTA’s nihilism; it’s also hardly coincidental that Sigur Rós teamed up with Johan Renck, a director best known for his work on the Chernobyl miniseries, even if the landscape might actually be on loan from Renck’s current project, a lunar sci-fi drama starring Adam Sandler. If “Blóðberg” is any indication, Jónsi has carefully assessed our impending environmental apocalypse as inevitable and a matter of incremental decline rather than an extinction-level event more suited for the climax of “Ný Batterí.” Even given its inspiration, ÁTTA never feels dishonest in its expression or its ambition to provide Hopelandic for hopeless times. | 2023-06-20T00:03:00.000-04:00 | 2023-06-20T00:03:00.000-04:00 | Rock | BMG | June 20, 2023 | 7.2 | dd261c63-6868-444b-9781-7c74331aa914 | Ian Cohen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ian-cohen/ | |
The rising London rapper flexes his versatility with a musically diverse set that feels more like a major studio debut than the mixtape it’s billed as. | The rising London rapper flexes his versatility with a musically diverse set that feels more like a major studio debut than the mixtape it’s billed as. | Octavian : Endorphins | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/octavian-endorphins/ | Endorphins | In the crowded and competitive world of UK rap, Octavian Godji is doing everything he can to stand out. The 23-year-old South Londoner arrived on the scene with a gripping backstory: He left France for Britain at an early age, attended the prestigious BRIT School, endured homelessness at age 15, and slipped into drug dealing. But it was last year’s debut mixtape Spaceman—an elegant suite of woozy beats, deft poetics, open-book confessionals, and the spirit of Noah “40” Shebib—that lifted him out of the pack. Follow-up Endorphins goes in a new direction—or rather several. Octavian is having fun, pulling at different stylistic threads to see what’s at the other end. And with high-profile guests matched by a crisp collection of beats, Endorphins feels more like a major studio debut than the mixtape it’s billed as.
How diverse is this set? Well, consider the following: Octavian doing a dead-on 21 Savage impression alongside Skepta on the creeping “Bet”; matching A$AP Ferg’s boasts on a track called “Lit”; enlisting Abra for the Lil Peep pastiche “My Head”; underpinning the Theophilus London-featuring dancefloor jam “Feel It” with 1980s-style pop drums; linking up with Jessie Ware amid the thumping drum machines and grinding synths of “Walking Alone.” Yet these swerves rarely feel jarring. With forceful presence, Octavian establishes himself everywhere he goes and never sounds out of his depth.
While Spaceman’s downtempo ambience was punctuated by flashes of naked fragility, this new tape finds Octavian—deploying slang originating everywhere from London to Lawrenceville—mostly interested in drugs, money, and girls. Opening track “Gangster Love” is an ultralight beam of gospel choirs, piano chords, and half-rapped croons doused in Auto-Tune. Except Octavian isn’t reaching for a higher power, unless you consider hooking up a holy moment. “Skrrt away from them man like a ’Rari,” he wills a potential sweetheart from the other side of the room. The unlikely combination of music and lyrics works, if only for its audacity.
Still, there can be a captivating precision to Octavian’s performance. “Molly Go Down” plays like a druggy lurch around an empty house at 4 a.m., slowing time as he slurs out lines like, “I take molly to slow down.” It’s in these instances that Octavian shows his voice—raspy, heavily accented—to be his most potent weapon.
Some missteps remain. The tail end of “Walking Alone,” where he croons formlessly over an electric guitar, could have been nixed. The light dancehall beat of “World” is too translucent to leave much of an impression. But there’s enough here to affirm what we already knew: Octavian has carved out his own distinct corner of British rap. On Endorphins, he asserts his artistic flexibility without diluting his natural gifts. | 2019-06-20T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-06-20T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Black Butter | June 20, 2019 | 7.8 | dd347860-c6c8-4996-8103-43066dcf3674 | Dean Van Nguyen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/dean-van nguyen/ | |
Foals' debut, like many British records, trails clouds of homeland hyperbole. The press is calling them "math rock" and the band members have cited Gwen Stefani and Steve Reich, but Foals are squarely in a more recent and less exotic tradition: the hi-gloss end of the post-punk revival. | Foals' debut, like many British records, trails clouds of homeland hyperbole. The press is calling them "math rock" and the band members have cited Gwen Stefani and Steve Reich, but Foals are squarely in a more recent and less exotic tradition: the hi-gloss end of the post-punk revival. | Foals: Antidotes | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/11372-antidotes/ | Antidotes | Foals' debut, like many British records, trails clouds of homeland hyperbole, but it's harder than usual to cut through and get a fix on what exactly they do. Reviews have offered afropop, math rock, and techno as reference; the band members themselves cite Gwen Stefani and Steve Reich. Antidotes suggests these are mostly red herrings. Foals are squarely in a more recent and less exotic tradition-- the hi-gloss end of the post-punk revival: Think a more playful Bloc Party, a more measured Futureheads, a less heartfelt Maxïmo Park.
That's not to say they lack their own sound. If some of the UK press have seized on "math rock" as a way to describe the largely 4/4 Foals it's less because they fit the genre and more that their best tracks sound like they were plotted on grid paper: oblique instrumental vectors crossing, rotating and transforming. In concert videos the guitarists face each other, instruments high and tight against their chests, reflecting one another on an invisible y-axis, shutting the audience out. The stances fit the songwriting: Foals are a band who offer their listeners little in the way of graspable emotion or explanation, but sometimes make up for that with momentum and intrigue.
Take "Cassius", for instance: Breathless, contorted ska-pop, built around high, nervy guitar lines and stuttering brass, with Yannis Philippakis' plummy yelping prominent in the mix. Repeat listens make sense of the sound, reveal the excitement in the muddle-- but the content? It might be about Muhammad Ali. It might be about the Roman Senate. You may as well flip a coin, since it doesn't remotely matter which-- you can thrill to "Cassius", you can dance to it, you can admire its construction, but there's something chilly about its aggressive abstraction.
So what? Aren't thrills and admiration enough? On tracks as propulsive as "Cassius" and its fellow single "Balloons" the answer's yes. "Balloons" actually has one of the album's stickier lines-- "We fly balloons on this fuel called love"-- but is still driven by how its syllables dance and swing, not how they connect. Both singles also use the Antibalas horns-- intermittent guests throughout the album-- to excellent effect, enlivening and widening a slightly arid sound. The brass takes Foals into the tense, mournful spaces the English Beat once explored, and they feel at home there.
When the tempo drops, the problems begin. As tracks like "Red Socks Pugie" and "Heavy Water" slow down, the band loses its crispness and instead of weaving around one another the instruments tread on each others toes, with good hooks lost in a murky coagulate. Worse, Philippakis' voice feels more exposed. It's a blunt tool at best, a kind of blank bark: each word given the same pained heft. On the album's longest track, "Big Big Love (Fig. 2)", he's repeats the dramatic line "Oh! Electric shocks! No!" again and again as the band wind down. He's demanding our attention but, without any discernible emotional context, doing nothing to earn it. The effect is excruciating.
These moments of misplaced weight make Antidotes hard to recommend, but there are good ideas and moments all over the record. The delicate "Olympic Airways" makes a wistful virtue of the drones and echoes that bog the band down elsewhere, and even finds a prettier register to Philippakis' vocals. "Two Steps, Twice" and "Tron" aren't as memorable as the singles but share their appealing intensity.
And it's likely Foals know their strengths and potential. They ditched Dave Sitek's original mix of Antidotes for an overuse of reverb, and they left their first buzz-building singles off the record, preferring to look forward. They've also taken pains in interviews to disassociate themselves from the moribund main current of British indie. That's a wise and admirable stance, but it's not showing up in their music quite yet. | 2008-04-10T02:00:02.000-04:00 | 2008-04-10T02:00:02.000-04:00 | Rock | Sub Pop / Transgressive | April 10, 2008 | 5.9 | dd395559-de99-4500-9f7c-451a6a2357e5 | Tom Ewing | https://pitchfork.com/staff/tom-ewing/ | 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 Laura Jane Grace’s 2002 folk-punk salvo, an album that yearns for an escape from and through rock’n’roll. | 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 Laura Jane Grace’s 2002 folk-punk salvo, an album that yearns for an escape from and through rock’n’roll. | Against Me!: Reinventing Axl Rose | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/against-me-reinventing-axl-rose/ | Reinventing Axl Rose | When you’re especially young, pop music opens a world where things actually happen. Behind the brittle plastic of a jewel case or the curved glass of a TV console, a gleaming reality promises a life outside the walls of your parents’ home. As a young Army brat flung between cities and continents, Laura Jane Grace clung to the image of Axl Rose as it came to her through MTV. The flash, bang, and squeal of Guns N’ Roses electrified her imagination. “Their music appealed to me because it felt dangerous. I was afraid of my parents seeing the liner note artwork,” she wrote in her 2016 memoir. “The look of the band, particularly that of wiry lead singer Axl Rose, excited me most because it was androgynous. Hair was big, clothes were tight, lines were blurred. I often couldn’t tell if band members were boys or girls, and I liked that.”
That was third grade. By age 21, Grace had changed her tune. “It’s obvious Axl Rose is a jerk,” she said then. She was explaining the title of her band’s debut album, Reinventing Axl Rose, to a newspaper reporter. The record’s cover featured a black and white stencil of the Guns N’ Roses singer with his arms flung wide, in seeming ecstasy before an adoring crowd. The band’s name, Against Me!, slammed against the back of his head with the bluntness of a midcentury propaganda poster, and red stars rained down over his shoulders. “In a way I’m pleading not so much for a new rock star, because a rock star is still a rock star, but for how music should be,” Grace said.
In the years between her grade school adulation and the jaded frustrations of her early twenties, the cracks in the adult world yawned open for Grace. The shine of a music video no longer offered a portal to a better plane; pop music lost its season, like tinsel spilling from a dumpster sometime in late February. Grace’s parents split while she was in middle school, and her mother moved the kids from Italy to Naples, Florida, a sleepy, wealthy enclave across the state from Miami where their grandmother lived. Grace bristled at her bleached, manicured surroundings. She grew out her hair and went punk, spiking her mohawk with food-grade gelatin and stitching patches onto her jeans as armor. By 15 she’d been convicted of two felonies after a cop brutalized her for standing around on a boardwalk; she spat in his face and he hog-tied her in the back of his car. By 16, she’d dropped out of high school and discovered the Minneapolis-based anarcho-punk collective Profane Existence, which put out releases with high contrast, xeroxed covers from scrappy hardcore bands like State of Fear and Civil Disobedience. These DIY factions proved music could open up into a current that ran deeper than the glitz of MTV. It could incubate politics more fervent and fertile than the adulation of the already wealthy. It could tether maladapted kids to each other with electrified wire, and carry them forward through the days of a world that seemed to want them dead.
Against Me! coalesced around Grace when she was in her late teens. She dubbed her first tapes in her bedroom and printed the inserts at Kinko’s. She played her first show under that name at a vegan restaurant in Fort Myers, in the middle of the day, to two dozen bored Floridians. In 1998, at 18, Grace recorded the band’s second tape, Vivida-Vis!, this time with friends: Kevin Mahon hammered away on a rudimentary drum kit while Dustin Fridkin scratched out bass. Through the hiss and crackle of the format, the warmth of Grace’s songwriting had already started to radiate; already, she had learned to cut wistful melodies and intricate lyricism with fevered aggression, to layer the overtones of acoustic instruments under the bite of electric ones. Folk delicacy and punk bluntness melted down into the same choked gutter, a combination that would prove fertile for decades of DIY music to come. The words she sang dissolved in her rasp, but could be recovered more or less in full on the photocopied inserts included with every tape. The band mailed copies of the cassette around the country to friends Grace had made through the punk zine networks of the late ’90s. The spring after putting out Vivida-Vis!, in early 1999, Against Me! set off on its first tour, playing punk houses, garages, and open mic nights further up the East Coast and in the Midwest. They slept outside and made no money, subsisting largely off dumpster diving and the reluctant sympathy of underpaid fast food workers.
Touring only deepened Grace’s disgust for Naples. After Against Me! pressed its vinyl debut, a self-titled 12" EP, on pen pal Jordan Kleeman’s label Crasshole, the band made its way north to the college town of Gainesville. In journal entries written shortly after the move, reprinted in her memoir, Grace detailed the gender rituals she would carry out in private. Dysphoria had followed her since early childhood when she saw Madonna perform on television and felt her inner self reflected in the pop star. She started trying on her mother’s stockings in secret on Sundays after her parents dragged her to church. Believing he had two sons, her father kiboshed any expressions of femininity he picked up on in Grace, chiding her when he noticed her playing with a neighbor’s Barbie dolls. Grace quickly learned to keep her longing private. In grade school, she read about the trans pro tennis player Renée Richards and learned that the gender stamped on a birth certificate need not be a lifelong sentence. Fed up with God’s silence on the issue, she inked a plea to Satan in her own blood asking to wake up a fully grown woman. Satan, too, failed to deliver. With no one left to ask, she kept ritualizing her submerged identity by putting on women’s clothes in secret: first her mother’s, then garments she shoplifted and salvaged from the trash. “The door to my bedroom is shut and locked. I have double and triple-checked,” Grace wrote in her journal in 2000, at age 19. “I light a cigarette and suddenly become real. I become her.”
“Who was ‘her’? She was the person I imagined myself to be, in another dimension, in a past life, in some dream,” Grace wrote years later in her memoir. She quarantined the desire to become herself inside the safety of the third person. Oblique references to dysphoria slipped into her lyrics. Against Me!’s 2002 EP The Disco Before the Breakdown contains pained lines about the rough edges of embodiment on the title track, questions forced through gritted teeth on “Tonight We’re Gonna Give It 35%.” “Can you live with what you know about yourself/When you’re all alone, behind closed doors?”
For their debut LP, Against Me! signed to No Idea, a Gainesville-based imprint that had built a dedicated following throughout the ’90s with releases from local punk bands like Less Than Jake and Hot Water Music. In retrospective interviews, Grace has said that the band recorded the album in two days, back to back. The CD insert lists four, but the point remains: These were loose, rowdy, largely live sessions where friends from the scene dropped in to track backing vocals after spending their mornings drinking. Save for “Baby, I’m an Anarchist!” a group effort originally intended for a separate band, the songwriting on Reinventing is all Grace. The energy, though, is communal. Gone is the nervous hush blanketing the growls on Grace’s early bedroom tapes. The band’s debut LP finds her in full-throated camaraderie with a roomful of other punks, scraping out tracks on the limited studio time they could afford, moving fast and sloshing over the minutia. What Grace sings on record often departs from what she’s written in the album’s liner notes, which are studded with parenthetical clarifications. After the elongated “Mary” on the chorus to “We Laugh at Danger (And Break All the Rules),” Grace writes, “as in ’the virgin,’” though she would later also mention that Mary is the name of her paternal grandmother. Song titles differ between the insert and the back cover; what’s called “Jamaican Me Crazy” inside the booklet got (thankfully) renamed to “Scream It Until You’re Coughing Up Blood” by the time the track listing was finalized. This was a roughshod and explosive debut, the sound of bottled teen angst barrelling over into the bitter deflations of young adulthood.
Two big, interrelated questions hang over Reinventing Axl Rose: What’s in the membrane that keeps you from death, and what’s the most that music can really do? The album begins with “Pints of Guinness Make You Strong,” a rumination on Grace’s maternal grandmother, Evelyn, who had been lodged deep in mourning ever since her husband, James, died 16 years before Grace was born. “Grandma Evelyn, who never remarried after her husband died of a heart attack in 1964, would slip into depression and not get out of bed for days. We would admit her to the hospital for treatment, and she’d spend a month here, get released, and six months later, need to be admitted again. I felt like I understood her hopelessness,” Grace wrote in her memoir. On “Pints,” Grace flexes her knack for tangible illustration in her lyrics. Evelyn’s passage through time snags on objects like her late husband’s AA card, still in his wallet, which still rests on their bedside table. She waits by the elevator as though he might someday step out of it. She drifts through decades in the same haze. Grace fears both her grandmother’s defection from progressive time and her grandfather’s self-obliteration. “Just like James, I’ll be drinking Irish tonight/And the memory of this last work week will be gone forever,” she sings at the chorus, her voice throwing sparks. The threat of eternal repetition and eternal amnesia galvanizes her. So does a love for her grandparents that stretches past death.
Terror of being stuck permeates Reinventing Axl Rose: stuck in Florida, stuck in America, stuck in poverty, stuck in patriarchy, stuck in a life closed off to reprieve or escape. The whole album howls against the quicksand of capitalist compulsion. “If Florida takes us/We’re taking everyone down with us/Where we’re coming from will be the death of us,” Grace promises in the group bark-along on “We Laugh at Danger.” Where she’s going feels murkier. What kind of world can you raise from the negative space of your dissatisfaction? Reinventing sketches the edges of that place with equal parts humor and rage. The satirical barbs of “Baby, I’m an Anarchist!” make a worthy sequel to Phil Ochs’ 1966 evisceration “Love Me I’m a Liberal,” its sights trained on the same immutable target 36 years later. “Those Anarcho Punks Are Mysterious…” traces the gulf between the longing for utopia as you see it and the messiness of trying to put it in practice. “It’s so much less confusing when lines are drawn like that/When people are either consumers or revolutionaries, enemies or friends,” Grace sings. An us-versus-them framework makes for great fun in a campfire singalong, but it flattens the world and the people who comprise it. How do we speak to each other beyond locating a common enemy? How do you build something new while the world around you collapses? On the snarling “Walking Is Still Honest,” a brisk and wrenching cut that, alongside “Pints,” still makes most Against Me! setlists two decades later, Grace finds a springboard in the ruins. “You can reach but you’ll never have it/We are untouchable/Untouchable is something to be,” she concludes in the last verse. There is freedom in accepting you’ll never win the game as it’s laid out for you. Sometimes the holes in your life grow so big they become doors.
Grace’s belief that music could drive communion rings out from every note of this album, even as she actively questions the extent of what music can do. She invokes Axl Rose not just as a symbol of the pop world’s excesses, but as a reminder of the way Guns N’ Roses made her feel as a kid: tapped into a secret power, lit up with the blaze of a great hook. “Maybe somehow this scam will still save us all,” she posits, dragging out the last three syllables, on “I Still Love You Julie.” On the record’s title track, Grace dreams of a band that plays with no hope of fame or wealth, a band that plays loud enough to fuse its listeners together: “Let’s make everybody sing that they are the beginning and ending of everything/That we are all stronger than everything they taught us that we should fear.”
A more perfect life lurks behind each of these songs, but it glows across the slow, mournful album closer “8 Full Hours of Sleep.” Here, Grace sings of a world just beyond this one: “Without classes, without nations,” without loneliness or scarcity or cold. She sings out to an unnamed “her,” someone who embraces the dreamer unceasingly, someone whose presence is so unbounded and mythological I can’t help but suspect Grace is singing to the potential self she also referred to in the third person in her most private writings. Here, she digs out the truth that fighting a war with yourself does the work of your enemies for them. It keeps you from plunging wholeheartedly into your own work: You have to live inside your own hands to really get them dirty. For a moment, against a melancholic Moog bassline, Grace dreams herself into a world she’s made real. It’s all there, the partitions melted away, one continuous experience. And then the sun burns through the haze and the dream evaporates; you wake up on someone’s floor in a rancid state and spend another day clawing toward yourself all the same. It’s slow, but you get there like you get anywhere. You scream it to yourself until it’s true.
Correction: A previous version of this review featured an incorrect timeline regarding the band’s early career and the labels that were interested in it. This has since been corrected. | 2022-10-16T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2022-10-16T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | No Idea | October 16, 2022 | 8.6 | dd3c7d30-8620-4db7-84ba-9b704c6fc04c | Sasha Geffen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sasha-geffen/ | |
Taiwanese artist Pon blends traditional mythology and instruments with electronic beats and cacophonous samples on a release inspired by life in—and the urge to escape from—her home city of Taipei. | Taiwanese artist Pon blends traditional mythology and instruments with electronic beats and cacophonous samples on a release inspired by life in—and the urge to escape from—her home city of Taipei. | Meuko! Meuko!: 鬼島 Ghost Island EP | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/meuko-meuko-ghost-island-ep/ | 鬼島 Ghost Island EP | Life in a modern metropolis shapes the experimental music of Meuko! Meuko! The Taipei artist behind the project, Pon, cites “Taiwan’s irregular view/architectures and buildings, muggy, emissions-filled air, and hectic streetscapes” as influences on a sound constructed from an array of samples and synthesizer notes. The songs on her latest release, 鬼島 Ghost Island, frequently come off as claustrophobic, with noises tumbling over one another to form a cacophony reminiscent of daily city noise. But rather than just recreating the constricted experience of urban living, the album finds Pon incorporating traditional mythology and instruments to craft fantastical escapes—albeit with quotidian grime seeping in throughout.
This is just the latest aesthetic leap from an artist who’s fond of leaning into new styles. Pon first gained attention as a vocalist and synth player in indie-pop group the Shine & Shine & Shine & Shine (閃閃閃閃), an outfit whose melancholy jogs are a world away from the fractured beats she’s gone on to create. Although Meuko! Meuko! dates back to 2007, it really took off in 2015, when Pon arrived at a sound whose shadowy atmosphere undercut glitchy dance tracks loaded up with samples and toy noises and, at live shows, complemented by a whirlwind of images. Pon gravitated toward juke on last year’s About Time EP, approaching the genre with the same oddball flourishes as her frequent collaborator Foodman, but establishing a pervasive sense of unease that contrasted with the Japanese producer’s more joyful bounce.
On 鬼島 Ghost Island, Meuko! Meuko! shifts toward the overwhelming, evoking a constant flux that sounds closest to the work of Arca and Danse Noire founder Aïsha Devi. “都市念佛法會Metropolitan Sutra Gathering” opens the record with faint chanting, but samples and percussion jabs quickly drown out those vocals. Pon gradually consolidates this noise into one final burst, filled out by warped echoes of the original prayer. “狗戰 Dog War” uses barking to complement the drum machine rumbles that propel the song forward, resulting in the album’s most intimidating track. Pon has always constructed her compositions out of disjointed sounds, but now she’s adding even more of them to songs stuffed with ever-mutating details. The two remixes at the end of this collection heighten this maximalist sensibility, with producers GIL and Dutch E Germ retaining the restless feel of Meuko! Meuko!’s originals while introducing their own high-definition dollops to the tracks.
Pon’s approach to vocals has also changed. In the past, she often delivered short stories in speak-sing. Now, she treats her voice as another instrument to stir into the stews of noise she concocts. On closer “希卡公主 Princes Sika,” she nearly whispers, her voice lurking beneath chopped-up beats and periodically dashing out. It’s here that Pon best captures the tension simmering across 鬼島 Ghost Island, in a track that feels like hot breath on the back of your neck.
The album’s beats could populate any number of 2018’s dissected club tracks, but Pon incorporates additional touches that tie her songs to a specific place and culture. “Ghost Island” is slang used in Taiwan to describe the grim economic conditions facing the country’s young people (although Pon has said she used it as a creative springboard more than as a statement). “眾神廟 The Temple” loops Chinese horns to create a sweltering drone that reappears throughout the record, helping to unite the songs. There’s nothing particularly nostalgic about these instruments or the chanting, however. Modern constantly electronics grind up against these traditional sounds, a reminder that reality always finds a way to sneak into Pon’s escapist fantasies.
A short but focused release, 鬼島 Ghost Island showcases the broad potential of Meuko! Meuko! It’s also the latest export from a burgeoning community of musicians in East Asia—including Foodman, Sonia Calico of Taiwan, Korea’s Neon Bunny, and everyone in the orbit of China’s Do Hits label—who merge traditional sounds from their cultures with contemporary electronic music. Meuko! Meuko! brings new purpose to this juxtaposition, using the harsh sounds of modern life to give her music a distinctly 21st-century tension. | 2018-07-17T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-07-17T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Experimental | Danse Noire | July 17, 2018 | 7 | dd4b1ea1-42dc-4e65-a13b-fce707876e89 | Patrick St. Michel | https://pitchfork.com/staff/patrick-st. michel/ | |
After the morbid nostalgia of 2011’s Build a Rocket Boys!, there’s a softer, rounder, lighter obviousness to Elbow's sixth full-length The Take Off and Landing of Everything. | After the morbid nostalgia of 2011’s Build a Rocket Boys!, there’s a softer, rounder, lighter obviousness to Elbow's sixth full-length The Take Off and Landing of Everything. | Elbow: The Take Off and Landing of Everything | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/19108-elbow-the-take-off-and-landing-of-everything/ | The Take Off and Landing of Everything | Elbow frontman Guy Garvey has been splitting his time lately between Brooklyn and his native England. Accordingly, there’s an atmosphere of perpetual suspension and too many transatlantic flights to the band’s sixth full-length The Take Off and Landing of Everything. Not that Garvey, from the album’s title on down, seems to be trying to encrypt that theme. After the morbid nostalgia of 2011’s Build a Rocket Boys!, there’s a softer, rounder, lighter obviousness to Take Off. The arrangements are even more porous; the melodies less terrestrial. But where Build a Rocket Boys! meditated on youth, the new album dwells on, well, take offs and landings as analogs of life and death like that parallel is the most clever thing anyone’s ever thought of.
Yes, Garvey’s symbology has gotten that much more sodden and heavy-handed, even as Take Off steadfastly sheds mass. On “Fly Boy Blue/ Lunette”, he’s traded in his rockets for the drudgery of commercial flight with all its degradation of wonder. Garvey’s in-flight movie may have been Up in the Air one too many times. Singing “I’m reaching the age where decisions are made on the life and the liver," he falls back on the bottle as a totem of existential boredom. His voice itself—numb, null, narcotic—spreads its warmth around that imagistic mixology. “So bring your faces/ Home to my sweet trampoline/ And acres of crash site love," he waxes later in “Fly Boy Blue/ Lunette”, and only the song’s bittersweet orchestral swells save it from falling out of the sky.
Moments of greatness come, just not often enough. The contorted syncopation and signature-twiddling of “Charge”—as well as its thick keys and dehydrated guitar—establish some real counterpoint and tension, elements the album otherwise mostly lacks. And Garvey’s in-character narrative summons pathos, tangible rage, and the entitled bitterness of old age and memory. He bites off words, chews them, spits; Roger Waters circa The Final Cut might have been proud. It complements Take Off’s other standout, its title track, a wash of throbbing, “Tomorrow Never Knows”-esque psychedelia that also channels Garvey’s most open inspiration of late, Peter Gabriel.
Those gains are almost entirely erased by lusterless lumps like “Honey Sun”, a song that begins promisingly with a clip of off-the-cuff studio hijinks before devolving into Elbow’s longtime default setting: a discrete if uninentional reimagining of Blur’s “Tender,” in all its crowd-baiting, platitudinous blankness. “Can I jump in the gun/ And fly/ Over the ocean” goes Garvey’s obligatory air-travel reference as he lands his 747-sized sentimentalism right on the nose. Perhaps it’s deliberate that throughout The Take Off and Landing of Everything, hardly anything truly takes off. Instead the album dangles there, an effortlessly leaden exhibition of glum triumphalism—and an example of what makes Elbow, at its least potent, so subtly unsubtle. | 2014-03-13T02:00:02.000-04:00 | 2014-03-13T02:00:02.000-04:00 | Rock | Fiction / Concord | March 13, 2014 | 6.2 | dd5209d2-540b-41dc-97b8-0fa7692352df | Jason Heller | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jason-heller/ | null |
Will Wiesenfeld’s second collection of odds and ends revamps old sketches with new lyrics, revealing a deepening interest in pop songcraft. | Will Wiesenfeld’s second collection of odds and ends revamps old sketches with new lyrics, revealing a deepening interest in pop songcraft. | Baths: Pop Music / False B-Sides II | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/baths-pop-music-false-b-sides-ii/ | Pop Music / False B-Sides II | When Will Wiesenfeld released his first Pop Music/False B-Sides collection in 2011, the two halves of its title seemed to cancel each other out. He hadn’t released any actual Baths singles, for starters, and the songs, which came from the sessions that birthed his remarkable debut Cerulean, certainly didn’t feel like lesser offerings. But the word “pop” hinted at ambitions outside the Los Angeles beatmakers' community that had been Baths’ home up to that point. The ensuing years haven’t dimmed Wiesenfeld’s enthusiasm for percussive arrhythmia, but pure songcraft has slowly taken priority in his work. By 2017, his ear for hooks had grown so sharp that he could literally write a theme song (for a “dad dating simulator,” natch) and it didn’t feel all that out of character. Now, as Baths ushers in its second decade, the title of Pop Music/False B-Sides II comes to feel oddly appropriate: it’s an assemblage of scattered instrumentals turned into pop songs might as well pass for the actual fourth Baths album.
The coherence of Pop Music/False B-Sides II is all the more remarkable given how it draws from a much deeper hard drive than its predecessor. The source material dates as far back as 2013, some of it initially intended for Baths, others for Wiesenfeld’s ambient-leaning Geotic project. Wiesenfeld only recently added lyrics to these “renewed ideas and sketches,” and so without any kind of chronological ordering or thematic ties to serve as clues to their origins, Pop Music/False B-Sides II functions as a sort of alternate-history glimpse into his evolution.
The metallic undertow of “Veranda Shove” suggests a timestamp around 2013’s Obsidian, as does the oblong lurch and silvery, filtered percussion on “Be That” and “Sex.” If so, Wiesenfeld is revisiting them in a much healthier place, eschewing Obsidian’s graphic accounts of body horror and romantic dysfunction for tempered sensuality. The propulsive skittering of “Tropic Laurel” (an ostensible update of 2011’s “Nordic Laurel”) and “Immerse” are cast in the image of Romaplasm’s RPG fantasias and reframed as something more immediate and emotionally legible. “Wistful (Fata Morgana)” scales the IMAX-scoped “Ocean Death” down into a portrait of seaside longing, and the handful of instrumentals cast Geotic’s increasing path towards sylvan dream-pop converging with that of Baths.
Pop Music/False B-Sides also presents a case for Baths’ role in the greater trajectory of what used to be called “lap-pop.” There are still hints of Cerulean’s formative influences—the dreamy IDM of Dntel, Four Tet’s early folktronica phase, Fennesz at his friendliest, the lopsided bump and grind of Donuts. But Baths has existed long enough to influence on others, honing qualities that have become immediately identifiable: The acoustic guitars or keyboards processed to sound like player pianos, Wiesenfeld’s telltale usage of ripe verbiage like “anoint,” “evergreen,” “appendices.” Even at his most pop-focused, Wiesenfeld continues to work outside of a percussive grid, mimicking the occasional grace of human movement, at other times, its more common gangly gait; in the case “Be That,” the ex post facto songwriting process shows its limitations, as Wiesenfeld can’t keep pace with its cumbersome, staggering cadences.
“Be That” is immediately followed by “The Stones,” the lengthiest and warmest Baths song to date—“I still trust that men can be lovely/do what you like but do it to me,” Wiesenfeld sings on the final line, a sentiment that feels accessed after years of struggle. A pity that Pop Music/False B-Sides II waits until its final two songs to start trying new things, as what precedes it piles onto Baths’ existing catalog rather than exploring new depths or vistas. It’s a testament to Wiesenfeld’s artistry that the difference between the “almosts” featured here and his most beloved songs isn’t always immediately perceptible, but on a “heads only” type of release, it might be more revelatory to hear the ideas that were too outre for a Baths album; does he have another “Dream Daddy” lying around? But it’s worth noting that on the same day Wiesenfeld released Pop Music/False B-Sides II as the inaugural title on his new label Basement’s Basement, he reissued the first collection as well—before Wiesenfeld embarks on a new beginning, he wanted to show us how far he’s come. | 2020-06-02T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-06-02T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | self-released | June 2, 2020 | 7 | dd582c71-a390-485d-bd8b-b6ded966a588 | Ian Cohen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ian-cohen/ | |
Respecting folk music’s past while uprooting it from the pastoral, the UK group’s politically minded album mixes acoustic and electronic instruments across original songs and traditionals. | Respecting folk music’s past while uprooting it from the pastoral, the UK group’s politically minded album mixes acoustic and electronic instruments across original songs and traditionals. | Stick in the Wheel: Follow Them True | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/stick-in-the-wheel-follow-them-true/ | Follow Them True | London’s Stick in the Wheel live up to their name: For the past few years they’ve been jabbing at the spokes of the English folk scene in their attempt to upend the system. With their 2015 full-length debut, From Here, they conceived of English folk music as something rooted in the past but not in the pastoral; the songs were urban instead of rural, social realist, often abrasive, and defiantly outside the folk mainstream. On traditional tunes dating back centuries as well as originals about the London riots and contemporary land-rights laws, Nicola Kearey sings in a voice that has more in common with Joe Strummer than with Shirley Collins. Co-founder Ian Carter eschews the jazzy improvisations that have defined UK folk guitar since the days of Davey Graham and Bert Jansch. Instead, he plays intricate looped rhythms that sound like he’s mimicking the beats he once created with the XL Recordings-signed electronic group Various Production.
They followed up From Here with a 7” single based on 17th-century ballads, a split with the Irish band Lynched, and a collection of mostly a cappella performances recorded in the living rooms and kitchens of some of the country’s biggest folk artists. With their second album, Follow Them True, Stick in the Wheel continue their attack. About half of the album refines the acoustic folk sound of their debut, with lyrics emphasizing the pride of craftsmen and laborers as well as the desperation driving the poor. As Stick in the Wheel dig through the vast catalog of British folk music, they gravitate toward tales from the fringes of society: the destitute, the hopeless, the wronged, and the forgotten.
“Weaving Song” is a spare tune based on a traditional Scottish ballad, and Kearey navigates the intricate melody as she describes the ins and outs of the lost profession. Another traditional, “White Copper Alley,” dates back to the 19th century and finds Kearey singing in the voice of a woman driven to prostitution. As she outwits a john and steals his watch and wallet, the band settles into a complex groove as though running through the back alleys of 19th-century London. But it’s the last line and the band’s abrupt halt that stick in your wheel: “I need the money/To save my poor sonny/For without the doctor/Me boy he’d be dead.” Listening to the song in a country where healthcare is not considered a basic human right, the woman’s desperation sounds all the more powerful—and deeply relatable.
The other half of Follow Them True mixes the old with the new and pushes at the boundaries of acoustic folk. “Witch Bottle” floats on an accordion drone as though mimicking the synthesizers of a 4AD record from the 1980s. The title track is even more jarring: Not only does it have electric instruments, but Kearey’s voice is distorted and manipulated, her consonants sheared away so that it becomes pure sound against Carter’s pendulum-like guitar figures. Auto-Tune may be the least folk thing imaginable, but the way the effect is put to use on “Follow Them True” sounds uprooted from time, lending the song a strange majesty.
What’s most remarkable about Stick in the Wheel’s experiments with the contemporary and the historical is how naturally the group melds these two opposing forces. Rather than grind against each other, each benefits from the contrast. That’s especially true as the album winds down, where they move from an a cappella sing-along of the traditional “Poor Old Horse” to the reverb-drenched original “Red Carnation” and finally to the electronic pulses of “As I Roved Out,” another traditional. The sequencing only plays up the commonalities inherent in these disparate songs; it’s a reminder that we’re still singing about the same things for centuries now. | 2018-02-01T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2018-02-01T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Folk/Country | From Here | February 1, 2018 | 7.7 | dd58e926-5960-4459-98fa-a6d33a93e3ce | Stephen M. Deusner | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stephen-m. deusner/ | |
Black Flag’s debut LP is a living document of hardcore, a mutable album of anger, empathy, and politics. Its raw power is still felt today, and its influence on the genre is incalculable. | Black Flag’s debut LP is a living document of hardcore, a mutable album of anger, empathy, and politics. Its raw power is still felt today, and its influence on the genre is incalculable. | Black Flag: Damaged | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/23077-black-flag-damaged/ | Damaged | As the last song on Damaged begins, Henry Rollins introduces himself. “My name’s Henry and you’re here with me now,” he says. Then he growls, as he does on and off throughout the rest of the song. “I don’t even care about self-destruction anymore.” The song ends, and he’s nearly breathless. “Damaged, my damage!” He sounds like he’s gone through several lifetimes of torture. “No one comes in. Stay out!” It’s 1981 and he is 20 years old.
Rollins joined Black Flag less than a year earlier when he was just a fan who viewed them as hardcore punk godheads. In his memoir, Get in the Van, Rollins wrote of watching the band perform: “It was one of the most powerful things I’ve ever seen,” he said. “All the songs were abrupt and crushing. Short bursts of unbelievable intensity. It was like they were trying to break themselves into pieces with the music.” At that point, Dez Cadena was the vocalist, with bassist Chuck Dukowski and guitarist Greg Ginn handling the songwriting. When Cadena decided to move to rhythm guitar, Rollins was recruited to try out. Offered the spot, he accepted, and quit his day job managing a D.C. Häagen-Dazs store to move to California to be the new lead singer of Black Flag.
In the trifecta of early ’80s hardcore, alongside Minor Threat and Bad Brains, Black Flag crystallized what hardcore could do at its most crowd-pleasing. Minor Threat was more existential, and Bad Brains more romantic. Black Flag took the ethos of fast and loud and made it into a lifestyle. Though they’d achieved success as a band before Rollins, it’s the tone of his voice, simultaneously conveying anger and empathy, that elevates Damaged to its rightful position as a cornerstone document in the history of punk.
Thirty-five years on, Damaged still sounds absolutely berserk. Though made up of what is easily identifiable as “songs,” the record is at its most formidable when it becomes chaotic. Chuck Dukowski’s bass sounds like rubbing two giant sticks together to start a fire. His playing often feels like the way a Cro-Magnon man might approach rhythm, harsh and mean. Guitarist Greg Ginn is a wizard, playing his guitar like it’s a dental drill. With Cadena keeping some semblance of structure, Ginn shreds riffs apart, extending them into mini-solos across half a verse. He’s closer in spirit to Jerry Garcia or Sonny Sharrock than other hardcore guitarists. His playing is violently virtuosic, sliding between wild, fuzzed-out abandon and the immaculate conception of the chug that makes hardcore so exciting. While Cadena and Black Flag’s parochial drummer Robo establish a basic lifeline of stability, Ginn throws paint on the canvas straight from the bucket.
Damaged does have its semi-traditional moments, and they all suffer from the band trying too hard. Consider the fairly crappy pogoing punk number “TV Party,” something of a cult classic for its singalong chorus. It’s perfectly banal, this dumb little song taking potshots at normies who want to “watch TV and have a couple of brews,” which may or may not have posed a threat to the way of life of Black Flag and their fans. But on an album that is otherwise adventurous, sarcastically shouting out “The Jeffersons” and “Hill Street Blues” is an unnecessary tug back to earth. These are bad details. The more they seem like feral animals, the better.
They’re at their scuzzy best on songs like “Spray Paint,” which is just 32 seconds long. It begins with a second or two of feedback, like an engine revving, before taking off. “It feels good to say what I want/It feels good to knock things down/It feels good to see the disgust in their eyes,” Rollins sings. When the chorus hits, Robo stomps the crash cymbal, and the band screams the refrain: “Spray paint the walls!” They’re the kids of Lord of the Flies with guitars instead of spears.
So thank god for Henry Rollins, a beacon. Previous singers of Black Flag are cult favorites, but none could penetrate through the wall of sound like him. His desperation is the centerpiece of the album, pleading with you—with himself—for release from pain song after song. His clarity of tone balances out Ginn and Dukowski, and he acts as a sort of ringleader pulling in tentative listeners and converting them into fans. On songs when he’s hurting, particularly “Damaged I,” he can be hard to listen to, but he is always impossible to ignore, like an actor dying in convincingly dramatic fashion on screen.
It’s the album’s inherent violence—both self-inflicted (as suggested by the cover image of Rollins punching out his reflection in a mirror), and that which is brought to bear upon well-deserving abusers—that makes the album’s hate and danger so attractive. Hardcore has continued to evolve, and the adrenaline offered by Damaged has been absorbed wholesale by hundreds of other groups. Straight edge hardcore groups utilized Black Flag’s scorched-earth approach, abandoning subtlety for unadorned aggression. Grindcore and thrash bands traded heaviness for speed; listening to them is like cheering on a car race. From Los Crudos to G.L.O.S.S., bands have narrowed the rage present in the lyrics of Damaged and used them to motivate political action, where Black Flag just kind of seemed to be bothered by unfairness.
When Damaged emerged, though, it was an anomaly. In the 1981 LA Times review of the album, Robert Hilburn compared the band to melodic punk rock group X five separate times. Though he loved the album, he noted, “The group’s grinding guitar attack … still lacks the brightness of X’s often rockabilly-accented arrangements.” That may seem like an absurd comparison now, but in 1981, the cultural and sonic space between a poppy band like X and one like Black Flag was not so large. The many shades of grey in between had yet to be defined in detail. Damaged was such a leap forward for punk, the only point of reference was miles behind.
That’s changed. Hardcore was just beginning in the early ’80s, evolving out of punk rock. This was a time before the genre splintered in a million fractions, and they were essentially all contained with Damaged: trash, grindcore, youth crew. None of those really existed in ’81, whereas now they all have a deep canon of often absolutely brutal-sounding records. We’re not yet at the place where a record like Damaged sounds quaint, but Black Flag have a lot more competition in their bid for catharsis through intensity now. And even forgetting hardcore entirely, rap is often the place wild teens look for thrills.
I first heard Damaged in the mid-’90s, when I was 12 or 13. Every song was an anthem. Black Flag railed against “them”; for me, that equaled teachers, parents, jocks. Authority is authority is authority—smash it all. Now, as an adult, would I find it as remarkable as I did then? Listening to Damaged now sometimes feels as much an anthropological experience as much as a visceral one. There is a certain pleasure in reverse engineering the album’s controlled chaos. Over time, Black Flag has achieved a mythological status, and searching for the source of their timeless potency can lead to a wormhole of ephemera. Their music alone may not have sustained such fervid devotion.
In a sense, then, Damaged has survived more as a historical living document than as a piece of art. Should it be considered as it was written in the early Reagan years on the cusp of a technological revolution? Just like a well-armed militia has a very different meaning now than in 1776, perhaps the way we heard Damaged has, and should, change. Hardcore, at its most potent, has always dealt with problems pertinent to the time and place we live now. Most of the hatred expressed on Damaged is vague, “They hate us/We hate them.” The utility of that unspecificity may have run its course. We don’t live in forever, we live in a very volatile now.
Perhaps the best way to experience Black Flag was as Rollins once did: in concert, something Damaged can only imitate. Head to YouTube for a show in Hartford in 1982 and watch a shirtless, scruffy, and jacked Rollins roll around on the floor, arching his back like getting he’s getting zapped back from the dead. Dukowski smacks the bass strings more than he plays them. It’s basically impossible to see what Ginn is actually doing, his hands up and down on the strings, back and forth on his guitar neck, like he’s playing some kind of demented game of catch. The audience sings the words, comes up on stage, hangs out there. No one in the band minds. Or maybe they don’t even notice, zoned out on their own planet. Watch them play in Philadelphia in 1982. Rollins keeps getting punched by a member of the crowd. He leans into it. After a few rounds of getting hit, Rollins clocks the daylights out of him. It’s a real baptism by fire. For the wrong listener, Damaged may be just noise. But for the right one, perhaps it is too. | 2017-04-16T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-04-16T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | SST | April 16, 2017 | 9.2 | dd5f702b-3bf8-436a-8416-f12942257c8e | Matthew Schnipper | https://pitchfork.com/staff/matthew-schnipper/ | null |
Subsets and Splits